Movie Nation

Interesting analysis of the changing economics of blockbusters and the shifting calendar of the comic book movie era.

https://www.thewrap.com/why-the-memorial-day-box-office-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/

It’s all just man/boy sex with peaches to some folks.

https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/114916965.html

Some days — or nights — present you with a dilemma.

Tonight, for instance, Warners’ “Godzilla” with Millie Bobby et al is previewing.

But so is Universal’s “Ma.”

Two studios who like to camp their films on the Tuesday night before opening, and won’t budge from there. Not for me, anyway.

I am more interested in “Ma,” so I will catch that now and “Godzilla” later. Maybe I’ve seen too many bloody “Godzilla” movies already, and no — covering Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” song over the closing credits can’t change that. Could be good, but I will find out about that later.

“Ma” it is.

She didn’t want to have her picture taken next to the Gateway to India monument like a tourist or pilgrim to Mumbai. But something about his pitch, about how she’d “look back, see the sun on your face” and have a memory she’d never forget worked.

She didn’t mean to stiff him and not pay for it, but that’s just what she did when friends called her away.

It’s just that the photo left him transfixed.

Maybe she’s feeling guilty, as her friends are all stunned at how flattering the shot turned out as well.

And in one of the most crowded cities on Earth, all they’ve got to do it, you know, run into each other again.

That’s the twitter-length set-up of “Photograph,” Ritesh Batra’s colorful but tepid and utterly inconsequential follow-up to the chaste romance of “The Lunchbox.”

Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a dark-skinned provincial, 30ish and still hustling up money to pay off an old family debt back in Balia. Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) is a painfully timid college coed, studying to be a chartered accountant.

Whatever Rafi doesn’t have in his life, sharing a railside attic with four friends, at least he can call himself a photographer, at least he can send money home to buy back the family home for the grandmother (“Dadi”) who raised him.

Miloni? We’re told she was a student actress, but that dream is as unlikely as Malhotra’s interpretation of Miloni. She is meek as a mouse, bending to whatever her family’s will might be, rarely speaking at all and never speaking in anything above a timid monotone.

“Actress?” Far-fetched.

The first act has them meet-but-not-meet, and sets up an amusing community support system of cousins, uncles and anybody who relocated to Mumbai from Balia, ALL of whom know way too much of Rafi’s business.

Specifically, the taxi driver, the street cart kulfi seller, the shop stall owner, the roommates, each and every one repeats his dadi’s demand that he “find a wife.” Dadi, they tell him, has stopped taking her medication, such is her woe at his lack of urgency in providing her with a great-grandchild.

He sends her a terse note to knock that off, as he’s met someone in the city. Noorie, he says, has “eyes full of questions, but also full of answers.” He sends along the unclaimed photograph of Miloni (he doesn’t know her name) as “proof.”

That’s all Dadi (Farrukh Jaffa) needs. Next thing he knows, the pushy old crone is on a train, coming to meet them, withholding her approval until she does.

Other versions of this old “fake fiance” trope are filled with panic and urgency as the liar (Rafi, in this case) must secure the cooperation of the young woman he’s only met once and whose name he doesn’t know set against the ticking clock of Dadi’s impending arrival.

Batra’s solution to this fraught situation is to skip over it, pretty much, finesse it with some cultural quirks that serve as shortcuts. It’s not the first time he cheats us of “the good parts.”

The second is Miloni’s acquiesence. A lovely moment on a bus, a boldly proffered seat next to her, seemingly wholly out of character for the mousie Miloni.

Batra’s film, in English, Gujarati and Hindi with English subtitles, takes some pointed jabs and Indian pigment prejudice. Every friend, cousin or working slob on the street feels he has the license to question why fairskinned, cosmopolitan Miloni is hanging with a “raisin…your face is black as doomsday.”

Miloni is, conversely, “too delicate” for the street-life and street cuisine he can offer her. “Delhi Belly” isn’t confined to New Delhi. “Ice Candy,” basically a snow cone? You’re asking for intestinal issues, dear.

I love Indian cinema that gives us a sense of the ecosystems of the street, Rafi’s world. That’s the best element of “Photograph.”

But I puzzled and puzzled over the connection between the two. All they seem to share is the sad eyes of resignation. The tiny droplets of empathy that pass between them feel almost meaningless, simply not consequential enough to merit her hiding this play-acting she’s doing with the village guy from her family. What is she playing at, here? Is it nostalgia, a longing for the righteous ruralism of Gandhi?

So much is undeveloped or under-developed. Miloni’s guide to this peasant world might have been her family’s village-born servant. Rafi’s ambition is fired by their meetings, and that has potential, too, only to be dispensed with in cryptic, unsatisfying way.

Only the fiery nuisance Dadi pays off as a character, unschooled and untraveled with wise to the ways of her family.

“Why should I be a bone in your kebab?”

It’s unfair to impose Western standards of screen “chemistry” on movie couples on the Subcontinent, but we’ve got to buy in to the relationship, root for the couple to find common group and hunt for the character arc that will let each grow in the direction of the other.

This couple and this “Photograph” remain undeveloped.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material

Cast: Sanya Malhotra, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Farrukh Jaffa, Jim Sarbh

Credits: Written and directed by Ritesh Batra. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:50

Late getting to this Amazon Studios release, as Amazon is something of the “Witness Protection Program” among film distributors. And they’re not alone.

A “here’s today in a photograph” romance — strangers who take on something like a relationship thanks to a photo.

From the folks who gave us the sublime “The Lunchbox.”

Traditionally, and by long-established cultural cliche, it’s cats that “little old ladies” hoard. Or dogs.

But it can be pigs. And in extreme, but seemingly more readily “diagnosed” cases, it can be tigers — large cats kept, by and large by rural, disabled hoarders.

“For the Birds” is about an Upstate New Yorker who developed a passion for living with farm fowl — turkeys, and as the song goes, “chicks and ducks and geese better scurry” when visitors to Kathy Murphy’s trailer and mini-farm in Wawarsing, N.Y.

But “visitors” are plainly rare in Kathy’s world. We may meet her and husband Gary in old home videos in the film’s opening scene, cooing over a lost duckling they’d had to take in. Ten years later, the place is overrun with animals that she’s bought and hatched, adopted or picked up — hundreds of them.

“Found a little duck in the yard one day, and that was all she wrote,” Kathy grins.

She loves her birds, gives each a name and picks up and hugs this duck or that rooster to underscore that affection. But she’s “overwhelmed,” others note. The county has taken notice. Husband Gary Murphy is scheming behind her back to get the birds moved elsewhere — some of them, ANY of them.

Richard Miron’s film doesn’t pretend to psychoanalyze Kathy’s mania for mallards, wood ducks, geese and the rest. She’s caring for them, but not all that expertly. She’s doing better by the fowl than she is for herself. Her teeth are a wreck. She’s estranged from their daughter over this, and Gary’s got to know where Kathy’s priorities are, and resent them.

“He knows that I would chose them over him!”

It is the way of such documentaries that things start out looking cute, quaint, eccentric and sweet, even if we see the words of the police report that underscores the trouble on the horizon.

Reasonable, patient, well-intentioned people from the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary pay a visit and ever-so-gently persuade Kathy to let them take some of the more malnourished or eye-infected ducks and chickens to their big farm. Ulster County leaves this “problem” up to them. For now.

But something in Kathy’s cooperative, sympathetic yet increasingly manic manner tells us this is the easiest it’s going to be, relocating some 150 fowl from a place that might more comfortably hold a dozen.

Miron’s film sets up our characters, Kathy with her “Who cares?” what other people think attitude, Gary with his indulgent, “indifferent” and remote attitude towards the whole thing, a guy whose fondest “wish is that they was a little…bit further away.”

Her “hobby,” the reason she gets up in the morning, “It’s interesting, to say the least.”

We meet Scottish Sheila from the Sanctuary, and Elana and other volunteers, delicately negotiating the release of two turkeys, finding Kathy increasingly difficult to deal with, calling Gary inside the trailer (by phone) begging for him to intervene.

She gets angrier and angier, Gary turns more and more remote — “You think you’re going to grow old with someone…” and then a heavy handed SPCA coordinator with the county shows up, barks “I own this property right now. OFF the property!” and the film crew are chased off, a folksy but tactless “old country lawyer” named Bill brags about how she “takes better care of those chickens than Col. Sanders, or Tyson” and a boy prosecutor who hasn’t shaved yet face off in court.

The closest this charming films gets to “revelatory” is when the lawyers bicker over the label “hoarder.” Is there not one person who can point to what’s really going on here? Kathy seems reasonable enough, sane enough. Is this, pardon the pun, a dark turn in an “empty nest” syndrome situation?

Of course, there are no pat answers in a single-case/single person profile film like this. Films I’ve reviewed about Big Cat collecting visit scores of people, almost all on disability, filling some “control” and “strength and power” hole in their lives by keeping tigers and lions.

Maybe it’s as Kathy says, she just fell in love with them and had to have lots and lots of each species. But as “For the Birds” unfolds its increasingly bittersweet story and we see the problem and the destructive nature of the solution to it, one can’t help but wish there’d been a tad more attention paid to “What’s going through the bird lady’s head?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Kathy Murphy, Gary Murphy

Credits: Directed by Richard Miron. A Dogwoof release.

Running time: 1:32

The actual tally was $112.7.

Big news. Bigger news? The busts that “Booksmart” and “Brightburn” turned out to be.

“Brightburn” was critically dismissed and only managed $9.5.

“Booksmart” earned effusive praise from critics, but under $9 million from paying patrons. $8.5. Maybe it’ll stick around and do well enough, maybe it should have been platformed. I saw it a second time over the weekend in a small town cinema, sparse turnout and it didn’t play for that crowd. So that might be l she wrote. No “Superbad” momentum.

https://t.co/O5KCH9VqhW https://twitter.com/THR/status/1133368083010265088?s=17

An overnight shift in professions, outmoded or newly in demand, the power of agents and the simple metrics of what constitutes cinematic success is about to roil Hollywood, on top of the changes already on progress.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/05/hollywood-changing-fast-can-film-industry-lifers-change-too-1202145060/

Like most early but not “earliest” adapters — I found Jackie Chan’s action comedies at the insistence of friends into Asian cinema.

A top tier stunt man, martial artist and Keaton-esque clown, it took a while, a few tries and then some, for him to break out in the West. But once he did, Asia’s biggest action star became the world’s darling, an impish dynamo who wore his working class roots with pride, and never palmed off a stunt on others he wasn’t gutsy enough to do himself.

The outtakes at the end of every Jackie Chan movie showed just how often those stunts could go wrong.

He lists the major injuries he’s suffered to every part of his body in “Never Grow Up,” his second autobiography (the first was “My Life in Action.). From his back to his neck, cheekbones to teeth and all points in between, Jackie Chan has broken, wrenched, concussed and dislocated them all.

The new book is an “as told to” autobiography, built around his decades of anecdotes, the mealtime/drinks-after-work conversations he has with his large entourage and overheard by his longtime publicist, Zhu Mo.

So “Never Grow Up” isn’t a researched and verified biography, but more a “How I remembered it/What I learned in life” recounting of his upbringing, his harsh martial arts schooling, rough and tumble crawl to stardom and how he used and misused that stardom over the decades.

The former Chan Kong-Sang is 65 now, sanguine about his shortcomings and forthcoming in ways aimed at a “Learn from my mistakes, kids” narrative.

I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, and always found him to be a star seeking to come off humble, but prone to bragging (with cause), relentlessly cheerful but not shy about the hard life and hard falls he took to get where he is.

Not bitter, but still a guy with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, which he freely admits in this new autobiography.

“Never Grow Up” has him questioning, again, his lack of enthusiasm for elementary school, which landed him in a martial arts/acting-tumbling China Drama Academy for ten years.

He was functionally illiterate for much of his life, and even now says he freezes up at autograph sessions in China (tougher write than English).

He was scared to death at many of the stunts he and his team cooked up for him, and once he had control of his screen projects, would put off dangerous falls and the like for days and days, working up the nerve.

He’s always loved gambling and drink, and wasn’t always the nicest guy to date, and owns up to it all freely, though one suspects he’s protesting a bit too much here.

He mistrusted his Taiwanese movie starlet wife, the mother of his son. But he was the one caught cheating.

He spent money freely, and confesses to being petty and greedy and acquisitive in the extreme for much of his life — holding grudges against shops that wouldn’t serve him when he was poor, lavishing presents on friends, family and colleagues, building schools in China with his charity foundation.

There’s a bit of star worship in reverse here and there — Stallone confessing “Whenever we run out of (action beat) ideas, we watch one of your movies,” reciting, at length, his honorary Oscar presentation (Tom Hanks honored him that afternoon).

He doesn’t name names much — avoids insulting those who treated him badly in his early years, when Hong Kong was hellbent on making this smiling joker “The New Bruce Lee.” He skims past his biggest global hits, so no fun or digging Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson anecdotes.
He befriended Stallone, visited Cameron and Spielberg on the sets of their blockbusters, but continued to do his work with lesser lights, cashing the checks as he did.

There are blurbs on the back of “Never Grow Up” with those directors and producers, and those co-stars singing his praises.

That’s where Zhu Mo’s book of “listening” to Jackie Chan shows us how it falls short. Too much of a tough life is handled with kid gloves, there’s too little about working out the stunts, etc., taking a shot at working with very young John Woo EARLY on (some of it covered in “My Life in Action”).

There are too few confirming or contradictory voices laying out the “real” Jackie Chan — insecure, driven, brave and canny (Chinese filmmakers always have to worry about how their words will play back home, and with the overlords in charge).

At least he doesn’t trot out his weariest anecdotes — the one about how he was supposed to be filming, hanging off the side of the World Trade Center as a window washer on 9/11, etc.

“Never Grow Up” (Simon & Schuster, $26) is thus a pretty good book, but more a stepping stone for a better book which somebody not quite in awe of their subject will be the one to write.

An all star cast featuring The Best of Britain (men, anyway) — Cumberbatch, Firth and Mark Strong are among those on board for this Spielberg production directed by Bond very Sam Mendes.

Bit late to be getting in on all the Great War hooplah, but we are intrigued.

https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/filming-begin-spielberg-blockbuster-being-16337531