Righteous of Curry to put himself out there for this production. He produced the docu-drama about the Charleston church massacre and he’s determined to get people to watch it as well.
The sort of thing Tiger Woods would never do. No wonder Trump likes him.
There are more promising — if conventional — directions to take “The Perfection,” a horror tale that twists back on itself so often that the gimmick gives away the game and spoils the fun.
Director and co-writer Richard Shepard did “The Matador” and “Dom Hemingway,” bloody-minded dark comedies that were fine vehicles for Pierce Brosnan and Jude Law. Here, he pairs up Logan Browning (TV’s “Dear White People”) and Allison Williams of “Get Out” and TV’s “Girls” as cellists who find they have a lot more in common than their love of the instrument.
Like say, a lust for each other, a competitive fire and ambition to burn. As good as both are in some moments of “The Perfection,” I found myself longing for a story less self-consciously tricky. They’re both a tad scary, and the picture — at times — is erotic as all get out.
We meet Charlotte (Williams, daughter of NBC anchor Brian, remember) as she is whispered about, “such a good daughter” caring for her dying mother. Once, she was a star cellist at the exclusive Backham Academy.
Does she have designs on getting that back? Her callous “My mother finally died” to Anton (Steven Weber), who runs the place, answers that.
She and we can see the billboards touting Anton’s latest protege, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Wells.
Pairing them up to judge the next generation of recruits — Chinese — in Shanghai throws them together, with much eye contact (closeups) and gushing of compliments.
Nose-ringed Lizzie, “my most prized protege,” and Charlotte, when together, comprise Anton’s “two most perfect students.” They barely hear him. The ladies are busy sizing each other up.
“I downloaded every video of you…”
“You were 14, and everything I wanted to be.”
Lizzie is five years Charlotte’s junior, and she puts a stop to all this one-upmanship complimenting.
“You have been, and always will be, the person who makes my heart skip a beat when you play.”
That takes Charlotte’s breath away, so as they bond while judging, swap snark about the players and their parents, the attraction is overwhelming. They act on it.
Lizzie wants a break from “”this special work…It’s what’s expected of us.” A “rough and tumble” Chinese vacation is in order.
“You should come!”
That “hemorrhagic fever” that they’ve seen people succumbing to? It’s “happening down south.” Not to worry. But of course, they and we should.
The best scenes in “The Perfection” are of that flirtation — Williams’ eyes absolutely devour Browning — and of the illness that almost instantly overtakes one cellist and her absolute freak-out — on a bus in the middle of nowhere.
Lizzie — “I’m dying...I’m scared! What is happening, what is HAPPENING to me?”
Charlotte — “I took care of my mom…for years. I can handle this.”
What happens next we see coming, because we’ve seen versions of this sort of story before. Hallucinations, horrific violence. It feels, for all the world, like the climax to the tale. But we’re not even halfway done.
Shepard’s film has inter-titled chapters — “1. Mission,” “2. Detour” — delineating the direction things are headed in, if not the final destination.
We’re treated to both the climactic moments, and then “rewind” flashbacks explaining how such moments play out, the way came to pass.
That is gimmicky and stops the movie cold, and Shepard repeats it a couple of times in a cheesy “Oh, THAT’S what she was plotting/that’s how THIS was carried out” fashion.
Eye. Roll.
The performances and close-ups have an element of poker game “tells” to them. Williams makes us remember her ulterior motives in “Get Out,” while Browning is more poker-faced about what is happening and what is coming.
Weber delightfully channels Stanley Tucci, his airs and aloof accent. Nobody plays a snob like Tucci, except for — now — Steven Weber.
The story turns into a veritable soap opera of cliffhangers, surprise motives, revenge and revenge on the avenger, some of which the players foreshadow rather obviously.
And for every major surprise, Shepard helpfully rewinds (literally) the cast and the scene, taking us back to the beginning of a sequence and spoon-feeding what is REALLY going on and why we shouldn’t be that surprised at what went down.
With each rewind, the picture locks-up and we disconnect with what’s going on, and more importantly, with the characters.
Which renders the minimalist promise of “The Perfection” a promise largely unfulfilled.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity
Cast: Logan Browning, Allison Williams, Steven Weber
Credits: Directed by Richard Shepard, script by Eric C. Charmelo, Richard Shepard, Nicole Snyder. A Miramax/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:30
Samara Weaving stars in this late-August dark comedy, the bride marrying into a family of board game moguls, forced to play this game-of-your-life (crossbows) version of “Hide and Seek,” “Ready or Not” here I come.
Oh yeah, this is redband. Not suitable for work without headphones.
Richard T. Jones is a marvelous character actor of long standing. You have seen him most recently in TV series, from “Hawaii Five-O” (he was the governor, early on) to “Teachers” and the still-running “The Rookie.”
He brings his easy authority and warmth to a “tough love” coach in “Round of Your Life,” a tale of golf, family legacy, grief and faith.
Jones’s character has to ride herd on cocky, unfocused young Taylor Collins (Evan Hara), a 15 year-old son of a PGA veteran (Boo Arnold), brother a tour rookie (Tim Olgetree, also the screenwriter, not bad as an actor).
But every time the kid opens his mouth, I wished Jones was his acting coach instead. Hara, whom the credits identify as a young writer and director, may be reaching for something of a teenager’s slouch, affecting a “too cool to care” that suits the character.
It’s just that every rushed, slurred line reading screams “AMATEUR” and “Give the kid some COACHING, and another take!”
“LooktrustmeIgotthis.” “IhateyouSOmuch.”
Whatever his golf game, whatever the failings of the predictable but functional script, Hara’s performance is representative of how “Round of Your Life” never had a chance. It’s not all his fault, but this melodrama only manages a couple of light moments and one fairly touching one. And time and again, when a scene depends on the leading man to make it and the movie works, he duffs it.
We meet Taylor as the video-game distracted kid is blowing his chance at making the San Antonio Christian school golf team.
“There’s too many golfers in this family already,” he mutters to his older brother, Tucker, a touring pro who admits he paid off golf announcer Jim Nance so that he’d be nicknamed “the green whisperer.”
Dad is so irked he takes away the boy’s phone.
“Whydon’tyouWATERboardme?”
This argument ends with that standby of lazy melodramas — a car accident. Dad’s in a coma, but only Mom (Katherine Willis, solid) seems torn up about it in the hospital. The doctor’s words “a life threatening brain injury….induced coma” don’t phase Taylor.
He’s supposed to be feeling guilt, supposed to be shaken. These aren’t just the expected human reactions, the script underlines them. The kid isn’t very good at remorse, or snark.
A classmate asks (Alexandria DeBerry) asks about his father, and Taylor answers “He’s still on life support or whatever” in a classic teen monotone. So maybe this is an acting choice, just a dull one.
Brother Tucker uses his visits to his comatose father for confessions (a cliche of coma movies) and to hit on Dad’s nurse (Katie LeClerc).
Nobody save for Mom lets us see the gravity of the situation.
Life outside the hospital scenes goes on as before, oblivious. Except Taylor gets coached on how to change coach’s mind about getting on the team by cute blonde Bailey (DeBerry), who happens to be dating the team captain, “Connor, the power tool.”
“We’re just talking…I don’t believe in labels!”
The bulk of “Round of Your Life” is what Taylor does with this opportunity, playing in team tourneys (a little cute golf razzing from the gallery), occasionally dropping back in on the hospital when he’s not trying to steal Connor’s “just talking” girl Bailey.
Coach Wilson nicknames Taylor “Gameboy,” and Jones makes even trite lines sound like real human conversation. “D’you even want to MAKE this team? Make Pops proud? You’re not entitled here.”
A hooked shot off the tee?
“Are you sure your last name’s Collins?”
The faith-based elements are scattered throughout the script — a family prayer here, a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting there.
But I kept wincing at the inappropriate coma-side banter, an absurdly underplayed and glib “officially dead” debate that may be the worst end-of-life decision discussion ever filmed.
Hara’s low energy performance isn’t the only problem with such scenes, just the most pronounced — deflated, disinterested, exhausted-seeming.
It’s not the only double-bogey that hampers “Round of Your Life,” but it is the most obvious “Round” killer.
MPAA Rating: unrated, mild profanity
Cast: Evan Hara, Alexandria DeBerry, Boo Arnold, Tim Ogletree, Richard T. Jones
Credits: Directed by Dylan Thomas Ellis, script by Tim Ogletree. An Ammo Content release.
Running time: 1:33
From the first, Toni Morrison had endure attempts to “ghetto-ize” her fiction, books about the African American experience — from slavery to the trials of African American girl and womanhood, then and now.
Even “sympathetic liberal reviews” from the likes of the New York Times dismissed her as “only a marvelous recorder of the provincial black side of life.”
That was about an early novel, “Sula.”
And only Toni Morrison could get the news that she’s been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, only to wake up the morning after with a blistering collection of bitter, withering put-downs from her “peers” in a Washington Post story about the honor.
All of that, the childhood move north as part of the African American “Great Migration,” marriage and divorce, raising two sons with the help of her parents as she took on teaching and then editing jobs on her way to getting published, makes up “The Pieces I Am,” Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ straight-no-chaser documentary about the Nobel laureate.
He captures the grande dame of American fiction at her regal, imperious best — darling of Oprah, popularized by “Oprah’s Book Club,” beloved for “Beloved,” adding an opera libretto (“Margaret Garner”) to her accomplishments but honored with a Pulitzer, American Book Award and scores of other prizes for “Sula,””Jazz,””The Bluest Eye,” “Tar Baby,” “God Help the Child” and other classics of American literature.
“The Pieces I Am” has the writer, simply addressing the camera, with clips of readings, interviews from the past and shots of her at work — yellow legal pad and pen in hand, outlining her stories, drawing floorplans of settings (as in “Beloved”).
We see a photocopy of the 19th century Cincinnati newspaper clipping of the escaped slave who killed her children rather than returning to bondage with them after her re-capture, which inspired “Beloved” and later the opera, “Margaret Garner.”
Oprah Winfrey recalls the fangirlish enthusiasm that led her to track down Morrison and champion her on her TV show. The radical memoirist Angela Davis (an early editing project) zeroes in on what Morrison was up against. Friend Fran Lebowitz has a funny anecdote about hearing her pal Morrison had won the Nobel. And critics, academics and peers such as Russell Banks sing the writer’s praises in this glossy, two-hour generally superficial treatment of her life.
The real value in Greenfield-Sanders’ film, which goes into limited theatrical release this weekend before coming to PBS in 2020, is in Morrison’s struggles with the white patriarchy of American letters.
She wanted to ignore the implicit “white male gaze” of publishing and American readership.
“I didn’t want to speak FOR black people,” she declares. “I wanted to speak TO them.”
That’s a head-snappingly obvious revelation, that publishing — like American culture in general — defaults to what white people want to read, hear or see on the screen. Publishing is built around that given — that readers are white.
She played around with style, “laying out the whole plot” of “The Bluest Eye” on the first page, showing us “characters and situations never seen before.”
She taught, and when the chance came to take on book editing, she made that work even if it meant her mother was doing much of the child-rearing after her own divorce. She figured out something pretty quickly in the halls of American publishing.
“I was more interesting than they were.” And “I’m very, very smart.”
Yes she is. But as “The Pieces I Am” makes clear, a few recognized this early, but most of us — including the literati and America’s literary critics — had to soak up the phrase “Nobel laureate” to finally have that sink in.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some disturbing images/thematic material.
Cast: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Hilton Als, Angela Davis, Russell Banks, Fran Lebowitz
Credits: Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. A Magnolia/PBS “American Masters” release.
Running time: 1:59
Here they are, Spielberg’s dancing miscreants, from Fox.
Egomaniac and Little Man in a Box are back. Or will be when “”The Trip to Greece” is in the can. What WILL they drive through the birth place of Western Civilization?
It looked as if “Men in Black: International” might rank with a take of $23 million on its opening week, after weak predictions of $33 just before opening.
You can’t call $28 a “win,” just a lesser disaster.
“Shaft” on the other hand is a flop, an $8 million “Who cares?” opening.
“Late Night” cleared $5, which is better than predicted, so that is almost a win.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/
“The Dead Don’t Die” got a wide release, pitiful reviews, and well under $3 million on its opening weekend.
A wonderful actress with far too work takes on a high profile comedy. Win win. https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/sigourney-weaver-returns-for-ghostbusters-sequel-and-more-movie-news/
“Murder Mystery” is a comedy as inventive as its name, as witty as Adam Sandler‘s mustache and a darned good use of Netflix’s billions.
Send the Sandman and Jennifer Aniston to Monaco and Italy for a wacky riff on Agatha Christie, “Clue” and every other “The Butler Did It!” in the history of stage, screen and cheap paperbacks.
No, really. Reunite the “Just Go With It” stars — because that really worked out — as a married couple caught up in one percent intrigues, murder and inheritance issues on the sunny Riviera and the George Clooney (Lake Como) District of Italy.
How bad could it be? I mean, no worse than “Just Go With It,” right?
The geography may be fresh, and Sandler may have to get by without his make-work support group of ageing SNL comics (Colin Quinn, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider) and sports hangers-on (Dan Patrick).
But the weaknesses are basically standard-issue Sandler movie faults. Start with how dull the star is and the “common touch” gaucherie he embraces in the most pandering manner possible and throw those “strengths” at a script where the plot is everything.
That’s what murder mysteries are — plot exercises full of false clues (“red herrings”), twists, and “I never guessed He/SHE did it!”
It was a worn out, mockable genre long before Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery” — with Neil Simon serving up “Murder by Death” way back in the ’70s.
Sandler is Nick Spitz, a New York cop who can’t pass his detective exam, not that he ever tells his wife of 15 years, Audrey (Aniston). He’s a lump and a cheapskate, and a favorite subject of complaints in the beauty shop where Audrey works.
Where’s that European vacation you promised when we got married? OK, that’d be cheaper than admitting he’s not detective material.
The flight over is where she meets the dashing Viscount (Luke Evans) in the first class lounge. That gets them invited to the shipboard wedding of the Viscount’s billionaire uncle (Terence Stamp) to a woman who once was the Viscount’s intended (Shioli Kutsuna).
And it’s on that yacht that rich uncle goes on a rant and is just about to write all the “leeches” on board out of his will. The lights go out, and the Dagger of Quince, a knife given to their ancestors by Marco Parlo, is jabbed into Uncle Walter.
Who did it? Was it the sexy movie starlet relative (Gemma Arterton), tha Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), the African Col. (John Kani), the colonel’s Russia bodyguard (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), the Italian racing driver (Luis Gerardo Méndez), the gay son (David Walliams)?
Or was it the American cop who isn’t really a detective and his “silly mystery novel” loving wife?
The others on board and the French Interpol cop (Dany Boon) who arrives to investigate, ALL of them assume it’s the Americans.
Let’s give the Spitz’s 45 minutes or so — the preliminaries eat up WAY too much of this movie — to solve the case themselves and clear their names.
Aniston spends much of the movie asking people like the Viscount and the Maharajah “How do you get into something like that?”
Sandler trots out his usual collection of lazy crudities, from F-bombs to “boat sex.”
“I just lay here and the boat does the work!”
Their predicaments include getting shot at in various locales.
“This is just like ‘Death in the Library!'”
“What happened in ‘Death in the Library?'”
“They died!”
Adeel Akhtar of “Victoria & Abdul,” “Swimming With Men” and “The Big Sick” gets off the best zinger, vamping up the whole serene stereotype of an Indian maharajah — bowing inscrutably.
“When a brown person bows, WHITE people bow back!”
He loves how that works.
The movie isn’t awful, just a charmless non-starter where the leads can’t find enough funny business in the screenplay from the guy who wrote “Zodiac.” Wait, really?
Everybody does their job, and nothing extra, in a movie that screams for “Give me some business here, some shtick. Make up something!”
Nobody does, not even Sandler, who was never that good at juicing up joke-starved scripts in the first place.
Slack direction just makes “Murder Mystery” groan along when a little pacing, as ALWAYS, would have covered up some of the other shortcomings.
The banter is tepid, the action beats (and car chase) kind of fun and Aniston gives fair value. She must have thought the Clooneys were watching every take.
But Sandman sleepwalks through this one, not that he’s exactly been hamming like his career depended on it in any of these Netflix movies that he makes instead of big screen features.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence/bloody images, crude sexual content, and language
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, Luke Evans, Gemma Arterton, Shioli Kutsuna, Dany Boon, Adeel Akhtar and Terence Stamp
Credits: Directed by Kyle Nowacheck, scripted by James Vanderbilt. A Netflix Original.
Running time:
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