Director Olivia Wilde declared war on Georgia’s cranky old men wanting control of women’s bodies bill, so one has to show one’s support. This looks rude and hilarious and is one summer movie I have been dying to see.
UPDATE And here’s my review of “Booksmart.”
“Kursk” was the original title of this submarine disaster thriller.
Thomas Vinterberg (“Far from the Madding Crowd,” “The Hunt”) directed it.
Something went amiss, which is why its release is so limited with this cast. Lea Seydoux is one of the wives on shore.
Americans don’t like movies about Russians? Outside of the White House and South Carolina, I mean?
“The Command” opens in limited release (June 21) and on Direct TV May 23.
The arc of your typical “Band that should’ve made it, but didn’t” documentary leans heavily on some outstanding conflict, some provoking incident, that got in their way.
Think “Anvil!: The Story of Anvil” or “The Best Band You’ve Never Heard” (about The Samples).
Filmmaker Matt Hinton, or maybe it was just the people marketing “Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury,” point to that one traumatic incident that kept this indie alt rock “Christian” band from Toccoa College in Georgia from breaking out.
It was a horrific van accident, and knowing what we all know about start-up bands, the hard travel and the road unworthiness of vans, we get it. It’s a wonder any performing ensemble survives the years before it can afford safer wheels.
But the band members healed, continued playing and taking a whack at cutting records. The actual break-up/drift apart was some time later.
The real hook to “Parallel Love” is the odd fact that three members of this quartet headed into the clergy after giving up their hopes that Luxury, their band, would ever break out. Even odder? They’re Eastern Orthodox, men who abandoned a post-Grunge punk rock ethos for the rituals and icons of a very conservative, tiny (85,000 members nationwide) Christian sect.
And I’m not sure the assorted band members adequately put into words why that happened, either.
Still, the film is a fascinating time capsule and account of the evolution of Luxury, which signed with a Christian music label and then set out, almost by design, to make records that Christian bookstores, where such LPs were sold, would ban.
Hinton secures testimonials from promoters, an NPR producer, music contemporaries and writers from Vice and Paste Magazine who marvel at this “explosive, stunning” quartet, with its handsome, gender-bending and soulful lead singer backed by close vocal harmonies, thrashing guitars and drums.
“Why didn’t Luxury make it?”
The bandmates all came off as “sensitive,” a word many use to describe this well-dressed, haircut-ahead-of-its-time mid-90s band from Northeastern Georgia, seemingly built to stand out from the post-Cobain white boy music of the day.
Members of rival bands from their era and their area noted that “pretty girls” showed up for their shows, which set them apart. Lead singer Lee Bozeman was a fan of The Smiths and fancied himself a new Morrissey.
He and his brother, the guitarist Jamey Bozeman, were sons of an evangelical pastor, which is a big reason they ended up at Christian Toccoa College, where they rolled their eyes at the squares they were surrounded by, and where Jamey would play his Fender until his fingers bled — literally.
Drummer Glenn Black fell for KISS, Alice Cooper and Queen, and found an escape from his traumatic childhood by pounding away at his kit.
And college newcomer Chris Foley decided in an instant that he just had to play bass with these guys.
Old footage reveals Lee Bozeman’s “high and tight” haircut, pretty voice and Michael Stipe-ish stage mannerisms that came off as feminine.
Contemporaries speak of his “ambiguous sexuality” as being part of the band’s appeal. And how a group with songs titled “Pink Revenge” and “Flaming Youth” ever agreed to sign with a Christian music label (Tooth & Nail) makes for interesting on-screen speculation.
But they did, and despite rocking local and regional clubs and a big Christian music festival, they pushed back at being categorized. A member of a rival band refers to Lee’s love of “taking the piss out of” the mores of the college and the Christian community they lived and performed in.
A big question around town? “Are they or aren’t they?”
For Lee, it wasn’t about sexuality or anything all that deep. It was just, “If I say that (in a song), that’ll be fun.” “Fun” being code for “provocative.”
Benefiting from the tensions built into that church/band conflict, and their guitar-rock sound fronted by Rick Astley: The Next Generation, Luxury was on the brink of something big. Maybe.
The sound, look, energetic performances and songs suggest that might very well have been the case, although no expert witness here was in a position to know that or help make it happen, for that matter.
The van wreck may have stopped them cold, or their self-imposed/self-regretting “Christian music” labeling might have limited their potential.
In any event, they never did “make it.” But their music’s good and Hinton gives us an interesting, if not particularly deep look at their lives and what led them to where each member is now.
“Why didn’t they make it?” is perhaps more interesting than “Why’d they become priests?” Perhaps not. I’m just not sure “Parallel Love” ever really answers either question.
MPAA Rating: unrated, squeaky clean
Cast: Lee Bozeman, Glenn Black, Chris Foley, Jamey Bozeman
Credits: Directed by Matt Hinton. An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:39
When I interviewed him, his arm was in a sling. Roger Moore got hurt a lot, too. Tough gig. https://brobible.com/culture/article/daniel-craig-injuries-james-bond/amp/
Documentaries are my form of continuing education.
Never heard of this Georgia band, subject of “Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury.” Now I have. A movie’s going to explain why they’re worth a documentary, right?
The phone rings, and horror of horrors, it’s a LAND LINE. What’s worse, she has no Caller ID
“Who is this?”
“It’s THE DEVIL!”
She’s been ducking his calls.
“Just leave me alone!”
“Not until I have your SOUL. Bwah-hah-hah-hah!”
The best Devils all sound like Satanic clowns, especially on crackly phone lines. Especially in cheesy demonic possession horror tales like “Possession Diaries.”
It’s an amateurish D-list thriller about a young woman (Katherine Munroe) who starts a vlog — a video diary to let the world know that “demonic possession is REAL.”
No, you guys. She says the room she’s vlogging from just got “SO COLD.” How could she be faking that? You guys? How?
Something’s going on with Satan. He’s spamming his way from phone to phone (Damned LAND LINES.), possessing people like Rebecca, driving her crazy.
She’s seen shrinks and priests, she tells her “fans.” Maybe this is all in her head, but if it is, we can guess how that happened.
If you’re having demon-in-the-forest nightmares (the cheesiest green screen this side of 1989 CNN), fearing for your mortal soul, maybe take all the HALLOWEEN decorations down in your apartment. Just saying.
Hearing icky noises from the Jack-O-Lantern you carved and keep INDOORS with you? Maybe don’t stick YOUR FACE right up against it. You know, take the most basic precautions.
It all started with a Ouija Board, not that we get to SEE how THAT happened. Too much trouble, too many…effects.
Rebecca gets comments, skeptical and supportive, on her live-feed. Not that we can read those in real time, like in a more polished picture like the John Cho thriller “Searching.” There’s no shame in not having the budget or know-how for that.
But wanting to maintain a consistent, computer screen camera POV, and not being able to figure out how to manage that? Come on.
“This is not a movie,” Rebecca (Munroe) complains. And she was on the set. “I am not an actress!” Don’t be so hard on yourself. “Everything you’re going to see is real!”
Not. Even. Close.
“Possession Diaries” follows our heroine through a few days of haphazard vlogging, looking increasingly haggard from the lack of sleep, wearing creepy veins makeup that wouldn’t pass muster in most movies and occasionally talking in the Devil’s voice, picking up a knife and threatening her boyfriend.
If gnarled, red hands were reaching up and grabbing you from under your bed, and a guy with Halloween party horns was raping you, you’d be stressed too!
“Is there anything I can do to fix this? Just go back to Hell where you belong!”
Satan isn’t having it.
Neither are the makers/distributors of “Possession Diaries.”
It’s never as easy as asking nicely, is it?
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Katherine Munroe, Johnny Ortiz, Monica Engesser, Eileen Dietz, Stephanie Kaczmarek, Noel Gugliemi, and James Russo
Credits: Directed by Juan J. Frausto, script by Juan J. Frausto, Rich Wealthy. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:27
“Poms” was critically eviscerated, so maybe Diane Keaton, who loves to work and still can get movies made with her name on them, will get a break with a UK comedy.
“Hampstead” (June 14) co-stars Brendan Gleeson as a man the pretty widow Keaton meets as he is about to be tossed off a valuable piece of land.
Looks very cute, and as it’s from IFC, it promises to have a bit more to offer than much of what the Oscar-winning Keaton’s filming these days.
A high school teen tries to cope with the death of her sister.
The fact that “He was the last person to see her alive,” and there’s uncertainty about how she died, that eats at her.
“You didn’t know my sister. My parents didn’t know my sister. I BARELY knew my sister!”
Seeing Zoe’s shrink? (Ken Jeoung, not in the IMDb credits)
Sister Echo (Laura Marano) is looking for answers, even if she wasn’t capable of “Saving Zoe.”
VOD in July.
They’re both as pretty as they can be, and the camera just loves Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton, so lots of swooning close-ups.
They play characters with inner conflict and drama built in to their “Meet Cute” moment, with a clock ticking towards a deadline that could break them up before they get started.
But if you’re waiting for that heartbeat-skipping moment that big screen romances have to deliver to come off, don’t bother your cardiologist. “The Sun is Also a Star” can’t deliver one.
Not with the luminous Shahidi of “Black-ish” paired up with Melton, of “American Horror Story” and “Riverdale.” You don’t have to deliver “You had me at ‘Hello,'” but if you’re doing that magical “We just have tonight/today” “Before Sunrise” thing, you’ve got to come up with something, ANYthing that makes us root for these two crazy kids.
If you look at director Ry-Russo Young’s credits, you can see why she was hired. “Before I Fall” was a genuinely touching “re-live your last day over and over again” teen drama/romance, the movie that made a star out of Zoey Deutsch.
But Nicola Yoon’s novel foils her and screenwriter Tracy Oliver (“Girls Trip”), pigeon-holing them into a not-quite-insipid romance about an immigrant about to be “self-deported” and a son of immigrants trying to be a poet and a romantic when his parents just want to get him into Dartmouth and into surgeon’s scrubs.
“Not quite insipid” doesn’t rule out insipid touches, like having our heroine, Natasha (Shahidi) narrate her love of “a city filled with humanity,” which she cannot bear to leave.
She’s been in the U.S. for nine years, has no trace of her parents’ Jamaican accent (a pity) and is a high school junior hoping she can find a reprieve her parents did not on this, the day before the family must go back where they came from.
“Accept destiny,” her dad (Gbenga Akinnagbe ) orders. “We g’wine home!”
Maybe a compassionate INS agent, perhaps a helpful lawyer?
It’s a big day for Daniel (Melton), too. He has his alumni interview, talking to a Dartmouth grad who will question him about why he must simply MUST go there and why he was born to be a doctor.
His Korean immigrant parents run an African American hair care store, and pin all their hopes on him and not his tattooed punk older brother (Jake Choi).
Daniel is obsessed with kismet, serendipity, destiny or fate — whatever it is that will change the course of his life. He’s looking for a deus ex machina, a miraculous coincidence to “save” him from a future he doesn’t embrace.
Seeing a very pretty girl on the street with “Deus ex Machina” embroidered on her jacket is exactly that. He stalks her until that moment when a Beemer almost runs her over at a crosswalk, and their fates are joined.
He’s ready for “their” destiny. She’s busy.
“I don’t believe in love,” she huffs. She’s all about chemistry, biology and “the scientific method.”
He wants a day to make her fall in love with him, she gives him…minutes.
The story that follows is meant to reinforce his insistence that “fate is real,” or at least get the aspiring astronomer Natasha to accept that there’s a multiverse where their lives and futures are intertwined.
As the camera lovingly closes in on Natasha’s flawless makeup and sexy haircut, we get it.
The movie, though, doesn’t. The distractions of their long day of missed appointments, “my favorite place” misadventures, etc., does nothing to create a real spark between these two or between them and the audience.
Coincidences alone do not a romance make. No, there’s virtually nothing funny here, so calling this a “romantic comedy” would be an even bigger mistake.
The most interesting scenes are flashbacks to how their parents met and then came to the United States, and Daniel’s clever explanation of how Koreans came to be such reliable makers and sellers of African American wigs and hair-care products.
The subtext of “The Sun is Also a Star,” brought to the fore as Natasha fights for the right to stay in the U.S., is out in the open but given the soft sell. Shahidi never gets across the desperation that would help Natasha make her case that America “these days” (Trumpism) isn’t treating people like her fairly.
The parent-child conflicts have a little crackle, NYC looks lovely and the leads are pleasant enough to spend time with.
But that “X-factor,” which Daniel throws in to his calculus about whether they should be together? The thing he insists, “Trust me, we have it” to Natasha?
Trust me. They don’t.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive content and language
Cast: Yara Shahidi, Charles Melton, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cathy Shim and John Leguizamo
Credits: Directed by Ry Russo-Young, script by Tracy Oliver, based on the novel by Nicola Yoon. A Warner Brothers/MGM release.
Running time: 1:40
“John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum” raises the bar on “relentless.”
The third film in this Keanu the Killer franchise is all fights, all chases, slaughter and mayhem and dollops of drollery delivered by a cast with a few new faces and one that’s wearing a perpetually scraggly beard to hide his middle age jowls.
Action-packed and production designed to death, ducking and parrying through an arcane hitman/hitwoman universe of its own creation, a world of “fealty” and “service” both “under the table” and from “The High Table.”
No kidding, who needs more “Matrix” when Keanu & Co., Laurence Fishburne included, are giving more than fair value in these stunt-man spectacles?
“Parabellum” — it’s Latin and it’s explained in the picture — takes place at the end of “John Wick Chapter 2,” and chases our “ex communicado” killer from the sanctuary of New York’s Hotel Continental, where he broke the rules and killed a foe under its consecrated roof, to Casablanca.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is pummeled, stabbed, shot at, kicked through glass and knocked off a roof.
“Over a dog? A car?”
That’s what all his foes want to know. And if you remember the first film, yeah, it’s like that and it was over a dog. He leaves the new pit bull he acquired in the last film to seek help from a Russian gypsy mobster who is a ruthlessly bloody ballet director (Oscar winner Anjelica Huston), and an old colleague whose secret weapons are attack dogs (Oscar winner Halle Berry).
Wick seeks some relief, a “parlay” perhaps, a negotiation out of this jam he was pulled into, murderously and reluctantly.
But hey, even the villains are, you know, fans. Especially the sushi chef and martial arts teacher/gang leader named “Zero,” a dazzling fighter given great charisma, wit and malice by Mark Dacascos (the new Wo Fat on the “new” “Hawaii Five-O”).
He’s my favorite new character, although Berry’s Sofia kicks major butt in her fights and shootouts. And if we learned nothing from John Wick himself, it’s don’t mess with an assassin’s dog(s).
Of course, the manager of the Continental (Ian McShane) is drolly following John’s exploits with perfunctory “Jonathan, Jonathan, where ARE you going?” for much of the movie.
In this game of assassin’s tag, with every hitman in New York chasing the $14 million+ now on Wick’s head, The Continental is “home base” and safe harbor. John may have to avail himself of it, and the peerless discrete assistance of the concierge Charon, turned into maybe the coolest character in the series by the steely and stoic Lance Reddick.
I nominate Charon for the character best-suited for a spin-off.
The script is all “Your ticket will be paid in blood!” and “Never seen a man fight so hard to wind up back where he started!”
Nothing like joking about the circular, repetitive nature of the “plots” of these shoot-em-up martial arts video game movies in the dialogue.
Martial artist and stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski always makes the fights in these films memorable, and does a decent job of keeping “Chapter 3” leaning into the frame, hurtling forward. There are pauses, which don’t so much allow us to catch our breath any more than they allay the weariness the endless mayhem creates.
There’s no hiding the stunt doubles in scenes shot in video-walled glass rooms with glass floors and glass display cases, any more than you can’t NOT see the padding Reeves himself wears for these epic fights, which grow more impressive as the picture goes on.
But back to that “raises the bar” business. During lulls I kept thinking of all the action movies this one bests, at least in its fights and chases (on motorcycles, on horseback). the next “Mission: Impossible” has its work cut out for it, James Bond may have his license revoked and the “bullet time” from “The Matrix” is nothing compared to what a bullet from a silenced automatic weapon does under water.
Reeves hasn’t really discovered Eastwood’s secret, that his best work is done without talking. He’s still a bit of a stiff, and God knows the wear and tear shows in Wick’s wounded sprints in “Chapter 3.” He runs like a middle aged man, which he is.
But “John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum” still gets a bloody job done, and still merits all the fan-murderer adulation our anti-hero gets every time he meets a new hunter hoping to cash in that reward money.
“Over a dog? A car? Really?”
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive strong violence, and some language
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Anjelica Huston, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Asia Kate Dillon and Lance Reddick
Credits: Directed by Chad Stahelski, script by Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins and Marc Abrams. A Summit/Lionsgate release.
Running time: 2:10
Movie Nation 