Gravitas Ventures has this horror tale, a whodunit with a supernatural twist.
Somebody killed him. He’s a ghost — sort of — traveling body-to-body in search of a killer.
A great conceit. Creepy looking. Little known names in the cast, Drew Fonteiro among them.
Aug. 9, we’ll see if we have a sleeper here.
A lot of Orson Welles’ ill will in Hollywood started when he tried to angle ex newspaperman, veteran screenwriter and legendary raconteur and drunk Herman Mankiewicz out of a screenwriting credit for Welles’ debut film, “Citizen Kane.”
Welles’ contributions to the script are well-documented to have been far greater, or at least more important, but no matter.
Nobody likes a credit thief. Ask Jason Reitman.
This David Fincher (“Zodiac,” etc.) biopic is now set up at Netflix, and will star Oscar winner Gary Oldman, who has some of Mank’s history in his own background.
Smells like a contender.
A fart joke. But we’ll see…
Aug. 9.
Timothy Spall continues his survey of the great artists of Britain with this character study of L.S. Lowry, who lived with his mother until her death.
With her discouraging his art all the way home. Pity they couldn’t release it Mother’s Day. You know, a little pushback?
Anyway, “Mrs. Lowry & Son” looks melancholy and detailed, a tad like “Mr. Turner,” and opens at August’s end in the UK.
Oh, to be a “liberal” Christian in Oklahoma, where, as the song almost says, “the dogma’s as high as an elephant’s eye,” and because its believers envision a life in the sky.
“American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel” finds isolated outposts there, where courageous preachers can’t help but take the argument that God isn’t a Republican right to its most fervent believers.
Filmmakers Jeanine Butler and Catherine Butler visit a couple of urban congregations in this mostly rural “reddest of red states,” talk to pastors, a theologian, a state representative and others, all in an effort to define what “politics” attach themselves to the founders of Christianity, and how that differs from the Evangelicals who have defined Christianity as a patriarchal, hierarchical “parental and punitive” religion, which it wasn’t as related in the stories of the Bible.
As the film’s theologian, Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott says, quoting Luke 12:57 — “Why do you not judge for yourself what is right?”
The movie is framed by events at one of the most “liberal” congregations in the state, Mayflower Congregational (UCC) Church in Oklahoma City.
When Rev. Robin R. Meyers, who later was the author of “Why the Christian Right is Wrong,” arrived, he ran into trouble right off. Merely referring to the church as “liberal” was verboten.
“Liberal” means “tolerant” and “open minded” to him, he explained to irate congregants. It means “The Hated Other” to much of Fundamentalist America, especially in The Sooner State.
“In Oklahoma, you can be a Democrat, or you can be a Christian,” he jokes that he learned. “But you can’t be both.”
“American Heretics” profiles several folks you might describe as Next Generation Fundamentalists. They’re willing to go back into the historical record, parse the Bible for ways it is out of date (“Slavery was totally OK in the Bible.”) and ways it has been twisted by the schismatic Southern Baptists, still, in their eyes, re-fighting the Civil War in modern America.
“Nobody has the absolute truth,” Rev. Meyers says. “That would be idolatry…If you say you’re certain, then you need no faith.”
Robert P. Jones, author of “The End of White Christian America,” serves up a history of Evangelic political activism, how “17% of the population, 26% of voters in the last election” were energized by the Bob Jones University inter-racial dating ban lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982. Jerry Falwell, who had been sharply critical of preachers using the pulpit for politics when it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urging a “march to the ballot box,” dove in head first.
This population is “over-represented at the ballot box” Jones notes, and in state legislatures, where states such as Oklahoma have long standing “chaplain’s opening prayer” policies designed to exclude other religions, and have become even narrower in giving that forum to conservative Evangelicals in many states.
One of the “Heretics” profiled here is Lori Walke, and we see her struggle — she’s a co-pastor at Mayflower and married to a Democratic legislator — to get equal time before Oklahoma’s legislators, where she offers up her prayer for tolerance, help for the underprivileged, urging votes that will create a Biblical “city upon a hill” to people who have cut education and social services funding and stymied efforts to raise the minimum wage.
The most chilling footage in “American Heretics” isn’t still shots from the infamous “Tulsa Race Riots” of 1921, which was actually a white lynch mob that destroyed the city’s black business district and killed many of its residents.
No, after hearing that this is a “family values” state that is at war with families, seeing the capital rotunda, where the names of inhuman giant companies are carved into its walls — Halliburton, Phillips Petroleum, Hobby Lobby Stores — simply hurts the heart, and makes one wonder “WTF, OK?”
Walke, a one-time college basketball player, remembers the day she knew she had to find a new church, hearing a preacher blistering New Orleans by saying Hurricane Katrina was “punishment from God” for the city’s sins.
We hear disgraced former attorney general Jeff Sessions quoting St. Paul that “God has ordained the government for His purposes,” urging obedience to a system that has rendered America’s divide between rich and poor the greatest in its history, see samples of the fire-and-brimstone rage of vintage sermons at the birth of The Moral Majority and the snide, crude jokes of its current leading light, Jerry Falwell Jr.
The natural reaction for most would be despair. What if all of America turns into Oklahoma?
Then Bishop Carlton Pearson of All Souls Unitarian in Tulsa tells his story. He was first lieutenant to Pentecostal populist Oral Roberts, preaching and leading the choir on national telecasts, moving out to his own church but still all but the anointed successor to Roberts.
Roberts, he says, was an “underdog who rooted for the underdog.” Little of this cozying up to the cynical, rich and powerful of the Falwells and Robertsons. Roberts wasn’t determined to be a kingmaker like those two most famous of his peers.
And then we hear how Pearson got into trouble. He dared tell his Tulsa congregation that “Hell does not exist.”
We’ve already heard Dr. Scott takes us back to that hot button issue for Christian fundamentalists, the Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea, where whole books of the then-new Bible were tossed out. The absence of the Book of Mary helped erase centuries of female involvement and leadership — documented in crypt and catacomb painting — from the newly, more patriarchal Church.
Scott has made the case that this council and the “Nicene Creed” that came from it “invented Christianity,” shifting the Jewish teachings of Jesus, a religion of “”praxis,” your belief is what you do, your actions, to a Christianity of “belief” — what you say you believe is what matters.
And as Pearson and Scott point out, the Hell of Fundamentalism, with its fear and retribution, pretty much doesn’t exist in the Bible in any form.
There is a “Politics of the Gospel,” everybody here argues. And it’s not the one that’s holding the stage and the media’s attention via white Evangelical Protestants and their adoration of a “vengeful god figure,” Donald Trump.
That’s a lot of ground to cover in a 90 minute documentary, and “American Heretics” leaves much merely uncovered, not wholly explored. The filmmakers say they reached out to Oral Roberts U. and others for balance, but nobody from the comswrvstove doce took them up on their offer. A few detours turn into blind alleys, though the sermons and music served up here are uplifting and entertaining.
An interesting device is using the debate in Mayflower over whether to become a “sanctuary church” for immigrants to frame the last half of “Heretics.”
The Butlers’ film deserves a place in the growing national conversation about what has happened in America with the cultish connection between white Evangelicals and the most godless person ever to hold high office in the U.S., the damage they’re doing to society, the economy, the environment and their own faith with their slavish desire to simply “own the libs” via their embrace or tolerance of treachery, bigotry, intimidation and treason.
“American Heretics” shines a light on those who would be a candle in the midst of the Medieval darkness of modern, white Southern American Christianity.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Jeanine Butler, Catherine Butler.
An Abramorama release
Running time: 1:27
OK, maybe the better description is “real world settings” “Lion King.”
Because truthfully, it’s still animated. Just digitally, and the animals look real.
They premiered the film in LA last night. And today critics outside of La La Land get to see it.
Curious to see if it’s just a straight remake, with people less funny than Nathan Lane voicing critters, or a major reinvention of the story.
“The Lion King” opens July 19.
Rip Torn was funny and scary, regal and homespun, folksy and urbane and damned good every time out, on the big screen and the small one.
And “quite the character” doesn’t sum up his offscreen life. Robbery, an infamous (amusingly so) “knife fight,” alcoholism. In a later era, #MeToo would have been the least of his problems.
“Payday,” “Men in Black,” “Nadine,” “Defending Your Life,” more movies than you can count (almost). And all that TV. Man.
Emmys and Oscar nominations (for “Cross Creek”), acclaimed in “The Larry Sanders Show” and “30 Rock,” to me he can be perfectly summed up in one performance, and a single line from it.
In Alan Rudolph’s serio-comic country music saga “Songwriter,” Torn played the much maligned manager for singers Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Everybody on the tour cheats with the manager, Dino’s wife, and nobody thinks he knows about it.
Umtil the day the Texan, in a classic Torn move, pulls out a pistol and makes his feelings known.
Kris and Willie stare, slackjawed, until Willie says,”Damn Dino, we underESTIMATED you!”
And Torn, letting the molasses set on his Texas drawl, growls “AAAaaaaaal you sumbitches do.”
Rip Torn, an actor and character you never underestimate. RIP
Her obituary’s already written. Bethany Hamilton will always be “the surfer who lost an arm to a shark, and got back on the board.”
But her story didn’t end when she did that, losing that left arm to a tiger shark in Hawaii in 2003. It didn’t so much as pause when she got back in the water seemingly overnight. It didn’t conclude with a flourish, when her guts and joy for the sport were celebrated in “Soul Surfer,” a warm and winning faith-based drama about her triumph against the odds.
“Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable” picks up the story since then, a classic surf documentary with lots of waves, curls and rides coupled with the personal story of a professional surfer, struggling to compete, but already “one of the most famous surfers on the planet” thanks to what that shark did, and how she responded.
Using old home movies and years of following Hamilton, interviewing family and her peers, surf doc director Aaron Lieber paints a glossy portrait of a woman who’s multi-tasked her way through “The Amazing Race,” pro-surfing competitions the world over, marriage and motherhood to become an inspiration to a generation and an icon of her sport.
There is dazzling in-the-water/under-the-water footage, plenty of competitions to choose from, lots of hard training and physical therapy just to get her back up on that board and into the surf where the waves are.
Think about it. How would YOU lie on your belly and paddle out, through towering waves, to get to the launch zone — with one arm?
A telling home movie moment from her past came in the hospital after the shark attack. She was surfing with her just-as-blonde best bud Alana Blanchard, a future pro — both of them just 13 on that day in 2003 when the shark struck.
“I would just rather it be me than Alana, because I love her so much.”
There’s also pre-attack footage of the girls chatting with Bethany’s mother Cheri about sharks, what precautions they take — “Just pray.”
Both were traumatized, with Blanchard confessing “I would have nightmares” after the attack. Hamilton, near tears a few times in the hospital, would have the greater trauma to overcome. She did.
Truth be told, “Unstoppable” doesn’t do much that a hundred other surfing docs haven’t done — sometimes better — visually. It’s the personal story that has to sell it.
I interviewed Hamilton when she toured plugging “Soul Surfer,” and here she is, all these years later — still with a passion for the sport, still sporting that nasal surfer-girl vocal fry as she recalls “gnarly days” which still “felt so crazy-good.”
The film’s relentlessly upbeat take on her life has room for a few tears, when she’s battered and her chin bloodied after a wipeout, struggling to get back in form.
We meet her husband, Adam Dirks, and recognize the potential strain in the dynamics of that relationship, his “jumping on the Bethany bandwagon,” even if the filmmaker and his subjects don’t bring it up.
Her casual, “not ready for that” take on her pregnancy may be refreshing. But as she continues to compete through it, nursing her baby on the beach in between surfing heats, the viewer might wonder, “Who is keeping to whose schedule” — mother or son?”
This “I can have it all” ethos is underscored by the adjustments to her life she had to make, much the same as the adjustments she had to make to her surfing. Working/competing moms have to be super-organized. Check out the time-lapse of her elaborate packing routine for a big competition.
We see snippets of Bethany the celebrity — doing a cooking show, “The Amazing Race” and other sports-reality programming, and remember that she turned down an Espy (ESPN award) for “best athlete with a disability” because she didn’t like the label.
And then we see the competitions, with TV anchors saying her participation is “bigger than sports” and commentators at the competitions calling her “one of the most famous surfers on the planet.”
As surfing is judged subjectively, not unlike gymnastics, you’re allowed to wonder, as good as she is, if her fame and struggle aren’t giving her an edge with the judges.
Still, we’ve seen, beginning of the film to the end, that she’s still got the talent and drive, and she’s made her skills adapt to keep herself in the mix among the best in the world.
And if you can appreciate the irony, in “Unstoppable’s” opening moments, of Bethany Hamilton taking on the legendarily tough North Shore of Maui wave at Peʻahi, which surfers nicknamed “Jaws,” you can bet Hamilton has, too.
If a shark couldn’t stop her, no nickname, no menacing surf that is “mesmerizing, the most beautiful wave to see in person — but big, scary” was going to stop her either.
MPAA Rating: PG (for some thematic elements)
Cast: Bethany Hamilton, Adam Dirks, Kelly Slater, Timmy Hamilton, Cheri Hamilton, Shane Dorian, Thomas Hamilton, Noah Hamilton, Alana Blanchard, Coco Ho, Carissa Moore
Credits: Directed by Aaron Lieber, script by Aaron Lieber and Carol Martori. An Entertainment Studios release.
Running time: 1:38
“Saving Zoë” deserves praise for the business savvy of its stars and producers, Vanessa Marano and her younger sister Laura Marano.
They had the foresight to get the rights to an Alyson Noel novel about a younger sibling trying to figure out what happened to her dead sister. Even if they were years away from graduating from kiddie TV — “Austin & Ally” and Netflix’s “The Perfect Date” for Laura, “Boys are Stupid: Girls are Mean,” “Switched at Birth” and “The Dead Girls Detective Agency” for Vanessa — this R-rated project had the potential to help them move on from kids’ roles into more adult fare.
And if it doesn’t quite achieve “moving,” even if they’re not quite up to carrying it, TV acting habits being hard to break and all, even if they’re upstaged by the actress with the showiest role — Giorgia Whigham plays a broken, guilt-ridden party girl and friend of the deceased — “Saving Zoë” has a hint of the risk they figured was worth taking with it.
Younger sister Echo (Laura Marano) is the one left behind, no big sister to guide her through that first day at Lincoln/Carter High in suburban Ohio (actually, Augusta, Georgia).
But actually, big sister is, assuring her “Everything’s going to be OK” as they share a makeup mirror.
Mom (Whitney Goin) is a wreck on her “zombie meds.” Dad’s practically living at the office.
And everybody on the bus hits Echo with that pinched embarrassed “You poor thing” look, as if she’s just punched them.
It doesn’t matter that she sees big sis is on the bus a few rows in front of her, or striding confidently down the halls with her. Nobody else sees Zoë, because she’s dead.
“I just want to say how sorry I am, about Zoe.”
As Echo tells her BFF (Annie Jacob), “There’s awkward, and then there’s this.”
Hearing that “Eventually, everybody’s going to move on,” is cold comfort.
Marc (Chris Tavarez), the dead girl’s boyfriend, was cleared of her murder. Even though Zoë’s body was found in his car, even though he was the last one to see her alive.
The family shrink (Ken Jeong) isn’t helping Mom or Dad (Jason Davis), and his questions about how Echo felt “stuck in Zoë’s shadow” don’t do Echo any good at all.
The one classmate who treats her openly and emotionally is the dead sister’s friend, Carly (Whigham), who calls her “Baby Sister” when she’s not so plastered she confuses Echo for her sister. And when she’s confused, all she does is apologize to her.
Echo gets her hands on Zoë’s diary and cozies up to Carly, because whatever the trial of her confessed killer told her about her sister’s death, she’s starting to figure out she didn’t know her sister, and that Carly knows more than she told the cops.
Veteran TV camera operator turned director Jeffrey G. Hunt and the screenwriters tell this story in that conventional “dead girl tale” way. Vanessa Marano narrates Zoë’s last months of life, and acts out the romance, pitfalls, hopes and dreams of a pretty girl who expected her looks to take her far, “modeling, or acting, anything to get me out of this dump.”
“Someday, everybody’s going to know my name!”
“Saving Zoë” lumbers through the narrative conventions of such stories, hitting the occasional lurid note — Echo’s first trip with “Molly,” Zoë’s sex life, and the dark sexual pitfalls she stumbled into in pursuit of “everybody’s going to know my name!”
But the picture has a stolid competence about it that it never rises above, with Netflix-ready teen titillation written all over it. Netflix is the Lifetime Network of teen sex comedies and dramas.
The sibling leads are professionals, but don’t have the chops to make us ache for Zoë’s fate or fear for Echo’s.
Only Whigham, bleary-eyed and lurching from high-to-grief-stricken, makes much of an impression. She’s good enough to make you wish she had a younger sister (she’s the daughter of top drawer character actor Shea Whigham) to pair up with for this.
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence/rape, nudity, language, drug use, drinking, and brief sexuality – all involving teens
Cast: Laura Marano, Giorgia Whigham, Vanessa Marano, Ken Jeong
Credits: Directed by Jeffrey G. Hunt, script by Brian J. Adams and LeeAnne H. Adams, based on the Alyson Noel novel. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:35
“Lying and Stealing” is a caper comedy that works.
It’s just clever enough, passably witty, with a very cinematic milieu — high end “gray market” art theft — and ably carried off by Theo James, Emily Ratajkowski, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Fred Melamed.
No, none of them are household names — save for Ratajkowski, who is not known for her acting. But they share the load and make this “Thomas Crown Affair Lite” a pleasant ride.
James, of the “Divergent” series, shows off tall, cool handsome elegance thing he brings to your movie with good effect as Ivan, an art-savvy art thief who can pull off the five day stubble with a tuxedo look that makes him look like he “belongs.”
Fits right in with the gay art collecting couple’s cocktail party in honor of their favorite poet, in other words. Ivan makes his living “robbing the wealthy — cavalier, entitled and unsuspecting.”
We see him unplugging security cameras downstairs, swiping from the hosts’ (LA) wine cellar and pass it off as his “gift” to the party that he plainly was invited to. Only not.
Wait, there’s a Jeff Koons stainless steel rabbit statue! Out come the gloves, the inflatable rabbit replacement, and “Russell” gets to work.
That’s one of the minor glories of director/co-writer Matt Aselton’s film. He gets the heists right. And they’re always of “name” artists — “The Nose” by Alberto Giacometti is considered, Modigliani is left on the wall, Egon Schiele is just too, too tempting. But portable?
Smart thrillers always reward the viewer who knows a little something about the subject area they’re immersed in.
But that’s the party where Russell, as he calls himself, runs into Marguerite (Ratajkowski). They “meet cute” (not really).
“Is that your real name?”
“Of course.”
“Really?”
“Noooo.”
She’s sexy, salty, “an actress” given to asking a lot of questions and showing just enough skin. She’s sizing him up, but he and we are in the dark as to what her deal is.
Ivan has a Mr. Big, Dmitri, who commissions the thefts and explains his relationship with Ivan in a single sentence.
“Your father was into me for quite a bit.”
Melamed, used to great effect in comedies such as “A Serious Man,” “Hail, Caesar!” and “In a World…” brings a warm, urbane touch to this obese, sophisticated thug.
“You have to make hay while the sun shines!” Pity they made him Greek, as he’s the perfect actor (a voice-over veteran) to recite the Yiddish proverb that opens “Lying and Stealing.”
“When a thief kisses you, count your teeth.”
Isiah Whitlock Jr. is an amusing “shaking farts out of sheets” deadpan F.B.I. agent sniffing around these thefts, and Ebon Moss-Brachrach plays Ivan’s bipolar/addict brother, perhaps one character/plot-device too many, but he has his function here.
“Lying” is mostly watching Ivan pose as limo drivers, “art consulants” and “boyfriends” as he scoots around High End LA, and into the Sierra Nevadas and Santa Anita racetrack in his ’80s Buick Grand National (black, of course), planning or carrying out his next burglary.
We and Ivan puzzle out Elyse (Ratajkowski) and what game she’s up to, popping on a new wig, primping for the next party where she’ll stumble into Ivan as they rub shoulders with the folks he’s about to rob.
Ivan doesn’t see Elyse taking pains to hide the price tag on the new party dress inside the zipper, with the camera ogling her form — in slow motion — as she checks out her appearance and slips into the ancient diesel Mercedes she drives to these soirees.
Yeah, filmmakers can be a bit sexist that way. But give the people what they want, right?
The banter waxes and wanes a tad more than I’d like. And yes, “Lying and Stealing,” being a genre picture, is the 14,764th “one last job” movie.
But somewhere around the time Ivan shows us how to spirit a Philip Guston painting off the security-alarmed wall, out of its frame and into the lining of his tux jacket, I just went with it.
I think you will, too.
MPAA Rating:R for language, some sexual content/nudity, violence and drug use
Cast: Theo James, Emily Ratajkowski, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Fred Melamed
Credits: Directed by Matt Aselton, script by Matt Aselton and Adam Nagata. A Vertical Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:40
Movie Nation 