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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND Feb. 1, 2019 - MISS BALA

It’s Super Bowl weekend, and you know what means, right? No, I don’t either, but normally, the Super Bowl has an effect on Sunday box office as people will go to Super Bowl parties or watch it with friends which makes it less of a necessity to go to the movies, so anything opening needs to make sure to do well on Friday and Saturday. Into that market comes a female-driven action thriller that might benefit from having a weekend to itself.

MISS BALA (Sony)

Directed by Catherine Hardwick (Twilight, Thirteen, The Nativity, Red Riding Hood) Written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Anthony Mackie, Ismael Cruz Cordova MPAA Rating: PG-13

The only wide release this weekend is this female-driven revenge thriller starring the beloved Gina Rodriguez from Jane the Virgin, which is based on a 2011 Mexican film that was Mexico’s Oscar submission that year. (It didn’t even get nominated.) The film was popular enough that the producers found a studio interested in a remake starring one of the more beloved LatinX actors from recent years.

Although Gina Rodriguez has never received an Emmy nomination, she’s received three Golden Globe nominations, all for Jane the Virgin, winning with her first nod in 2015. She hasn’t quite made a name for herself in the movie realm, mostly voicing roles in animated films and having small roles in last year’s Annihilation and Deepwater Horizon. (I hate to say this, but I still sometimes get her mixed up with Fast and Furious star Michelle Rodriguez, but they are indeed two different people.)

It also stars Anthony Mackie, who was last seen in Fox’s The Hate U Give, but who has really exploded as a star after being cast as The Falcon for Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier, appearing in a couple Marvel movies since then.

Miss Bala is following in the same general genre realm as 2018’s Proud Mary, starring Taraji P. Henson, which opened with just under $10 million on MLK Jr. weekend and grossed $20.9 million, or Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint, which grossed $35.5 million after opening with $13.4 million. Oddly, both those movies opened on weekend with much stronger competition – Liam Neeson’s The Commuter and The Nun – which is not something Miss Bala has to worry about.

Although I’m not sure Miss Bala can make huge waves, it should do well among urban audiences and maybe more among women than the typical action thriller might, although this is usually a male-driven genre. Unfortunately, Sony is only opening it in roughly 2,000 theaters, probably focused on those urban markets, maybe hoping to get in some of the LatinX audience who make up a good percentage of moviegoers these days. Much of the recent marketing is focusing on the amount of LatinX people involved with making the movie, so they’re clearly hoping to get some of the business of Pantelion’s bigger releases.

Mind you, last weekend, The Kid Who Would Be King opened much MUCH lower than expected, and I expect this sort of ennui to affect Miss Bala as well. An opening in the $7 to 8 million range should probably be expected, which might allow Glass to remain #1 for a third weekend despite the Sunday competition from the Super Bowl.

Mini-Review:

It’s been so long since I saw the Mexican movie Miss Bala, all I really remember of it is that it’s about a beauty contest winner who gets caught up in the war on drugs between the DEA and Mexican gangsters, and with the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. so much in the news, it makes sense that a studio would want to remake it for American audiences.

In this case, it’s Gina Rodriguez’s Gloria, an L.A. make-up artist who travels down to Tijuana to support her friend Suzu, who has entered the Miss Baja competition – again, Gloria is there just to support her friend -- and yet, when they go out to a nightclub, Gloria witnesses the Estrella gang showing up to shoot up the place and kill the police chief. Suzu gets lost in the melee, and next thing Gloria knows, she’s taken by the gang, whose leader Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova) takes a liking to her. Trying to escape, she ends up encountering the DEA who wants to use Gloria to keep the Estrella gang in their sights.

That’s probably all you need to know as Gloria is passed around and put to work by both Lino and his gang, the DEA and other factions, all who see her as a way to end the ongoing war.

There’s no question that Rodriguez is a talented actress, something she shows off repeatedly, as she acts scared, acts upset and basically acts her way out of any bad situation into which she’s put. In fact, she’s so much better than every other actor around her, that makes it obvious how bad the other actors are.

Similarly, Catherine Hardwicke has enough experience as a filmmaker to make this work, but she’s clearly working from a script that just doesn’t have enough meat to keep it going, so the film’s pace is all over the place. We get a big shoot-out one minute, then Gloria and Lino are out on a quiet but out-of-place date the next. Over an hour later, we’re BACK at the beauty competition, which you keep thinking has been taken out of the story equation, because it seems like such a non-entity at that point. Not that the beauty contest ever seemed like that big an aspect of the original, but at least it was used as the set-up for the lead character’s journey rather than a plot device shoehorned into her story.

There’s so much that could have been said about this piece in terms of the way women are used as objects for trading and trafficking, but that aspect of the movie gets lost in the interest of making it a cool gangster flick that doesn’t lose the LatinX women watching it… but probably will anyway.

Miss Bala has guns, explosions, a decent guideline to work from and Gina Rodriguez, so why is it still so frickin’ boring?

Rating: 6/10

With that in mind, this week’s Top 10 should look something like below, and it’s likely to be one of the worst weekends of the year with the Top 10 grossing less than $50 million….

UPDATE: A couple minor changes due to actual theater counts being a little different from my earlier estimates, although the most significance addition is Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, which is re-opening into 735 theaters across the country this weekend. Interest and demand should still be good enough for it to get into the top 10 without around $3 million or so. We’ll have to see how the Super Bowl affects anything on Sunday, especially the L.A. Rams playing the New England Patriots, affecting two important movie markets.

1. Glass (Universal) - $9.5 million -50%

2. The Upside (STX) – $8 million-33%

3. Miss Bala (Sony) - $7.5 million N/A

4. The Kid Who Would Be King (20thCentury Fox) - $4.4 million -38%

5. Aquaman (Warner Bros.) - $4.2 million -43%

6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (Sony) - $4.0 million -35% (up .2 million)

7. Green Book (Universal) - $3.8 million -31% (up .3 million)

8. A Dog’s Way Home (Sony) – $3.2 million -37% (up .3 million

9. They Shall Not Grow Old (Warner Bros.) - $2.9 million N/A

10. Escape Room (Sony) - $2.3 million -45%

LIMITED RELEASES

Apparently, Peter Jackson’s THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (Warner Bros.) will be opening for a limited release into about 500 theaters this weekend after three successful “one-day only” screenings of his 3D colorized WWI footage, grossing more than $8 million. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, I highly recommend it, and who knows? Maybe it will place somewhere in the top 15 for the weekend. You can read more about this fascinating doc in my earlier column.

Just a week after the debut of his Netflix film Polar, Mads Mikkelson returns in the very different survival thriller ARCTIC (Bleecker Street), written and directed by Joe Penna. In this one, he plays Overgard, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the arctic wasteland whose drive to survive is further motivated by a young woman he ends up dragging across the tundra in hopes of saving her. I generally love survival movies like this one and the likes of Touching the Void, 127 Hours and the Kate Winslet-Idris Elba survival movie The Mountain Between Us. This one is particularly special, because Mikkelson is such an amazing actor, and he’s really able to carry this story, often with almost zero dialogue. Penna also shows quite a bit of skill as a first-time director, filming in less-than-desirable conditions to really raise the stakes on what Overgard needs to overcome to survive. I recommend this tense survival film highly if you live in one of the select cities where it will be playing on Friday.

Although his upcoming horror remake Grudge has been shifted back to Jan. 2020, Nicholas (The Eyes of My Mother) Pesce’s second feature PIERCING (Universal Pictures Content Group), based on Ryû Murakami’s novel, stars Christopher Abbott as a man with a disturbing past who hires an equally disturbed escort, played by Mia Wasikowska, for an S&M session that turns into a grisly and deadly game. It’s an extremely disturbing but brilliantly stylish film that throws back to Dario Argento and De Palma – it even uses one of Goblin’s tracks from Argento’s Tenebre – but also pays homage to American Psycho and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. It will open in select theaters, On Demand and Digital HD this Friday

Opening Wednesday at New York’s Film Forum is Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree (Cinema Guild), the new film from the Turkish director of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a family drama about a dysfunctional father-son relationship who are pitted against one another. Turkey’s official submission for the Oscars will open exclusively at New York’s Film Forum on Wednesday.

Rooney frontman Robert Schwartzman returns behind the camera with his second feature as a director, The Unicorn (The Orchard), starring Lauren Lapkus (Orange is the New Black) and Nick Rutherford play an engaged couple visiting Palm Springs to celebrate her parents’ 25thwedding vow renewal, when they discover the magic of “threesomes” which they set out to discover for themselves. Having premiered at SXSW last year, it will open in select cities including New York’s Cinema Village, L.A.’s Laemmle Noho and more.

Fresh off its premiere at the 1stever Iranian Film Festival New York, Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi’s Pig (Khook) (IFC Center) has its U.S. theatrical premiere with its story of blacklisted director named Hasan, who hasn’t been allowed to make a film in years (something fairly common in Iran, apparently), so his favorite actress is moving on, his wife has fallen out of love with him and their daughter is moving out. Oh, and also (and I’m putting this in verbatim) “Hasan is upset that he is being inexplicably ignored by the serial killer who has been decapitating the country’s best filmmakers.” Oh, Iran.. you so crazy! It opens at the IFC Center on Friday and in L.A. at the Lammle’s Music Hall and Town Center on Feb. 15.

From Bollywood comes Shelly Chopra Dhar’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (FIP), translated as “How I Felt When I Saw That Girl,” starring Sonam Kapoor (Sanju, Neerja) as Sweety, who has to deal with a family a little too excited about marrying her off, although she’s in love with a young writer, hoping her family will accept him. It will open in select cities in roughly 175 theaters, and I’m excited to say that I plan on seeing this Friday.

In that same vein, Rising Star Entertainment Ltd. Releases The Gandhi Murder, directed by Karim Traidia and Pankaj Sehgal, a conspiracy theory period film based on true events leading up to the assassination of Mahatma Ghandi. The film actually has a bunch of Western talent including Stephen Lang from the Avatar movies and Vinnie Jones, and it opens on Thursday, presumably focusing more on its VOD.

Asa Butterfield, Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones and Nina Dobrev star in Peter Hutching’s rom-com THEN CAME YOU (Shout! Studios) with Williams playing Skye, a teen suffering from a terminal illness who befriends 19-year-old hypochondriac Calvin (Butterfield) who helps her with her eccentric bucket list, and she helps him make a play for Nina Dobrev’s Izzy. So kind of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, only with Nina Dobrev instead of Earl. In theaters and On Demand Friday.

Opening in New York, L.A. as well as On Demand (this time for real!) is St. Bernard Syndicate (Uncork’d Entertainment), the new mockumentary from Klown director Mads Brügger – who also has a new documentary at Sundance this week! It’s about two entrepreneurs who try to find their fortune in the Chinese pet industry by creating a breeding center for Saint Bernard dogs that goes off course.

An intriguing on VOD this week is John Potash’s Drugs as Weapons Against Us (Gravitas Ventures), about the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra and how it was used to manipulate musicians and activists to promote drugs for social control. I haven’t seen it but if Potash can offer proof, this will be one not to miss.

There are also a couple Fathom Events on Thursday, the Anime A Silent Voice and the Graham Staines biopic The Least of These, and you’d probably learn just as much about these by clicking on the respective links.

STREAMING

Having just premiered at Sundance, Dan Gilroy’s reunion with his Nightcrawler star Jake Gyllenhaal for VELVET BUZZSAW premieres on Netflix Friday. Gilroys’ horror-thriller takes place in the contemporary art world of Los Angeles, exploring the idea that “artists invest their souls in their work and that, in an ideal world, that work should not be considered a mere commodity.” Sounds like pretty heady stuff, and though I won’t be able to see it until later today, Jake Gyllenhaal is in it, so I should enjoy it. I’ll post some thoughts sometime Thursday. (Note: The movie also opens in New York at the Landmark at 57, and presumably in L.A., too, if you want to see it with an audience.)

Mini-Review: The snooty and pretentious LA. art world is probably rife for humor, and it’s also rife for a horror movie in which some of those snooty and pretentious people within are killed off in gory and fantastical fashion. While the third movie from Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) tries its best to mix the two sides of the horror-comedy genre, it constantly runs into trouble trying to keep them together.

Velvet Buzzsaw reunites Gilroy with his Nightcrawler star Jake Gyllenhaal as L.A. art critic Morf Vandewalt, who can make or break a budding artist’s career with one of his reviews. His girlfriend Josephina (Zawe Ashton) works at one of L.A.’s ritziest galleries but she isn’t faring well with her boss Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo, also from Nightcrawler). One night, Josephina finds a dead neighbor and learns that his apartment is teeming with his undiscovered artwork, dark and gloomy and perfect for selling to the L.A. art cognoscenti. Everyone wants to get their hands on the priceless “Dease” artwork, but as Morf finds out more about the artist’s dark past, the people in his circles start dying.

If you’ve seen a lot of horror movies, you’ll probably already recognize the horror sub-genre of an item haunted by a dead man that proceeds to kill those who come into contact with it. This is basically where Gilroy’s latest film is coming from, though the premise of art that can literally kill is just a bit on-the-nose for a movie that’s set-up as a comedy about the art world.

The way Gilroy introduces the cast of characters is almost Altman-ess, as it pokes fun at all the different types vying for the priciest artwork by the mystery painter. Gyllenhaal’s Morf is particularly funny as he transitions from confidence to full-on neuroses, but no one gets more laughs than Natalia Dyer as a young assistant who keeps being passed around from one employer to another, and her reaction to each of their deaths gets funnier each time.

There are a few clever and gory kills and a few less-than-clever kills, but it always feels like it’s never going far enough to appease horror fans, even with a seeming nod to the Phantasm franchise. (Incidentally, the title of the film comes from Rene Russo’s former punk band, incidentally, something which isn’t particularly significant to anything.)

I’m sure it would be a lot more fun watching Velvet Buzzsaw with an audience than it would sitting at home watching it on Netflix by yourself, but you’re either going to be fully on board with what Gilroy and his cast are doing or you won’t. There probably won’t be much in-between.

While there are certainly some merits to Dan Gilroy’s first (and hopefully last) foray into horror, the humor often plays better than the horror elements, and they rarely feel like they’re meshed-together particularly well.

Rating: 6/10

The Taiwanese drama Dear Ex from co-directors Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu stars Ying-Xuan Hsieh as a woman named Sanlian, whose late husband has cut their son out of their will in favorite a man named Jay, played by Roy Chiu, which gets more interesting when her son moves in with Jay.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Late Nites at Metrograph continues with Diao Yi’Nan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), an excellent Chinese crime-thriller that I can’t recommend enough, having seen it a number of times since it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. This weekend’s Playtime: Family Matinees is Jean Cocteau’s 1946 classic Beauty and the Beast and then Produced by David O. Selznick continues with screenings of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) on Saturday and Sunday and then continuing into February.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Weds. and Thurs’ double features are Edward J. Lasko’s Smash Up Alley: 43 The Richard Petty Story (1972) with Jeff Bridges’ The Last American Hero (1973); Friday and Saturday are double features of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) with The Deep (1977) and the weekend’s 2pm Matinee is Norman Tokar’s The Happiest Millionaire (1967). Monday’s Matinee is F. Gary Gray’s 1996 drama Set It Off.

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN (NYC):

Janus Films’ new 4k Restorations of Jackie Chan’s Police Story and Police Story 2 will be running once a day for the next week at New York’s first Alamo Drafthouse.

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

Continuing the Film Society’s tribute to filmmakers who recently brought their Oscar-nominated films to the New York Film Festival, there will be a four-day Yorgos Lanthimos retrospective, including his latest film The Favourite, as well as earlier Greek films Dogtooth, Kinetta, Alps and English language films The Lobster (also an Oscar nomimee) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

In conjunction with the world premiere of Shudder TV’s Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, the Egyptian will have a FREE screening Blacula (1971) on Friday night, and a double feature of Tales from the Hood with Tales from the Crypt: Demon Night (both from 1995) on Saturday night.

AERO (LA):

Brad Bird will be appearing in person on Friday to screen his first film The Iron Giant (1999) as part of “Bird Watching: the Animation of Brad Bird,” which continues on Saturday, again with Bird in person, for a double feature of The Incredibles (2004) and its 2018 sequel The Incredibles II.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad presents two new retrospective series to coincide with the new 4k release of Emmanuelle: Beyond Emmanuelle: Just Jaeckin, a retrospective of the director’s erotic films,and Erotic Journeys: The Many Faces of Em(m)anuelle, which shows the entire series of erotic classics that paved the way for Cinemax.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Waverly Midnights: The Feds will show the late Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991) on Friday and Saturday night, Weekend Classics: Early Godard will screen Contempt (1963), while Late Night Favorites goes with Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining (1980).

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

The Nuart’s Friday night midnight selection is Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider from 1969.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

The amazing four-week series Far Out in the 70s: A New Wave of Comedy, 1969 - 1979 continues this week with Paul Mazurksy’s 1969 comedy Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice on Wednesday, as well as the French comedies The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973) and The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972), plus John Waters’Female Trouble (1974). The Alan Arkin-directed Little Murders, starring Elliot Gould,screens on Thursday and Friday with Richard Pryor’s Car Wash on Thursday and Robert Altman’s California Split (also starring Gould) on Friday. Saturday the series continues with three similarly-titled but very different films in the 1979 coming-of-age drama Breaking Away, Hal Ashby and Peter Sellers’ Being There (1979) and Milos Forman’s Taking Off (1971). Sunday you can watch a Woody Allen double feature of his Oscar-winning Annie Hall (1977) and Oscar-nominated Manhattan (1979), in which Allen co-stars with Meryl Streep and Mariel Hemingway. On Monday is a double feature of Melvyn Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man (1970) with the 1973 film Five on the Black Hand Side, both starring Godfrey Cambridge. Tuesday is a screening of La Cage Aux Folles (1978) along with the Elaine May-adapted and Mike Nichols’ directed The Birdcage (1996), starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, plus the Elaine May-written Warren Beatty remake of Heaven Can Wait (1978). This weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is the 1979 family film The Muppet Movie, screening Saturday and Sunday at 11AM.

MOMA (NYC):

Modern Matinees: Sir Sidney Poitiercontinues with the Sidney Poitier-directed Stir Crazy (1980), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, on Thursday, 1962’s Paris Blueson Thursday and Sneakers (1992) on Friday. MOMA is also kicking off Cinema of Trauma: The Films of Lee Chang-dong on Friday, looking at the previous films of the Korean director of Burning, including Green Fish (1997), Poetry (2010) and Oasis (2002).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

This weekend’s Family Matinee and Sensory Friendly Screening is the foreign animated film Zarafa (2012), plus the museum is running its 2019 Cinema Tropical Festival, which includes films from Latin and South America from the past few years.

That’s it for this weekend, and things are currently in development for a few changes next week, so standby!

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