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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior 9/3/21: SHANG-CHI, CINDERELLA, WORTH, MOGUL MOWGLI, YAKUZA PRINCESS, YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM, and More

There’s only one new wide release this week but I’m not gonna say this movie title five times, because it’s so freakin’ long, that I can only really say it once. But it’s a good one! There’s also so many limited releases that as always, I just couldn’t get to all of them. (Word of warning: This column was finished under the influence of Churches' excellent new record, Screen Violence.)

Marvel Studios’ second movie of 2021, SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS (Marvel/Disney) stars Simu Liu as the “Master of Kung-Fu” from the comics, making his very first appearance in any live-action form that I know of. I have to say that I loved the comics as a kid and was truly bummed when I sold my whole collection, knowing that a lot of the great run of the comics from the ‘70s and ‘80s that have never been reprinted. That being said, this is Marvel’s first solo character introduction going all the way back to Brie Larson as Captain Marvel back in March, 2019, and before that, you’d have to go back November, 2016 for Doctor Strange, since Black Panther was introduced in Captain America: Winter Soldier.

Shang-Chi is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who broke onto the scene with indie films like I Am Not a Hipster and the better-received Short Term 12, which also introduced much of the world to Larson, and then the two of them made an adaptation of The Glass House. Cretton then directed Michael B. Jordan, and again, Larson, in Just Mercy for Warner Bros., which grossed $36 million in early 2020 but never quite achieved the Oscar hopes some were expecting. Still, all that work with Larson paid off, because it got him a meeting with Kevin Feige and Marvel for him to pitch this.

Granted, Simu Liu is a bit of an unknown quantity, having not made too many movies and being best known for the sitcom, Kim’s Convenience. On the other hand, his co-star Awkwafina has been building quite an impressive career from her roles in the 2018 hits, Crazy Rich Asians and Ocean’s 8, plus her starring role in the indie, The Farewell, for which she won a Golden Globe (but really should have gotten an Oscar nomination). She’s taken that success to put it into her Comedy Central show, Nora from Queens, while also providing her voice for lots of animated movies, including this year’s Disney animated movie, Raya and the Last Dragon. Most who have seen the movie early have mentioned that her comic chemistry with Lu has stolen the movie and oddly, her “best friend” character Katy seems to be heading towards a larger part in the MCU.

If we look at movies based around characters who received solo films before appearing anywhere else in the MCU, we get the aforementioned Captain Marvel movie, which had an insane $153 million opening weekend, doing even better than the Distinguished Competition’s own solo female movie, Wonder Woman, even though the latter was definitely better known. Captain Marvel ended up grossing over $400 million domestic and over a billion worldwide. The Doctor Strange movie that preceded it, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, didn’t do quite well but still opened with $85 million and made $232 million domestic. A year earlier, Marvel Studios’ attempt to make Ant-Man a thing led to one of their bigger disappointments with that opening with “just” $57 million and grossing $180 million domestic. (That also cost $30 million less than Doctor Strange and $45 million less than Captain Marvel, but when you get to those budgets over $100 million, every dollar counts to making back that budget.)

As with many MCU movies, Shang-Chi has been receiving rave reviews with a strong 92% on Rotten Tomatoes from over 140 reviews (at this writing). My review of this is over at Below the Line, and I loved it, too. The big selling point for Shang-Chi is that like Black Panther was to African-Americans, this character is to Asian-Americans, being able to see the first Marvel movie starring an Asian-American, as well as a mostly Asian cast that includes the great Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh (who also starred in Crazy Rich Asians).

There are a few factors to bear in mind, and not just the COVID Delta variant one that we’ve been hearing so much about -- there’s no denying that things are getting worse, and hopefully this can be quelled before there’s another shutdown. This weekend is the four-day weekend with Labor Day on Monday, which has never been a great weekend at the movies, partially because schools have either started or are about to start and people just stop going to movies, despite there having been plenty of early September hits like Warner Bros’ It. September is definitely a new month for Marvel to release a movie, but with all the delays due to COVID, it’s a good (I’m not gonna use the term “experiment) to see if Marvel really can withstand the proverbial 12-month release calendar rather than their movies needing to be released over the summer or holidays or any other month.

Unlike the recent Black Widow, which had a substantial $80 million opening, Shang-Chi is not being released simultaneously on Disney+ via Premier Access, which presumably will mean more people will have to go see the movie in theaters during its 45-day run before heading home, but the question really is “Will they?” Besides Crazy Rich Asians, which did incredibly well among non-Asians, there haven’t been a ton of movies with Asian casts that have done well just due to the fact -- I mean, look at the recent Snake Eyes from Paramount Pictures. It didn’t get nearly as good reviews, but it’s another superhero movie with a mostly Asian cast, and that community didn’t get behind it at all. Maybe we can say the same about Raya but that also was released much earlier in the pandemic.

With that in mind, I do think Shang-Chi is good for a four-day opening between $53 million and $57 million, although I don’t think we can expect this to have the same impact as a Marvel movie with a well-known character or actor in the lead.

This weekend’s four-day box office should look something like this:

1. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Marvel/Disney) - $55.6 million N/A

2. Candyman (Universal) - $13.2 million -40%

3. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $11 million -16%

4. Paw Patrol: The Movie (Paramount) - $7 million +6%

5. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $4.5 million -10%

6. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $2 million -30%

7. Respect (MGM) - $1.8 million -20%

8. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $1.3 million -35%

9. The Protégé (Lionsgate) - $1.4 million -43%

10. The Night House (Searchlight) - $800k -39%

Hitting Amazon Prime Video on Friday (as well as select theaters in New York and L.A.) is Kay Cannon’s musical CINDERELLA (Amazon), which was originally going to be released theatrically by Sony Pictures in January, but it then became one of the first movies to have its production be shut down by COVID, so everything was delayed, and then Sony just decided to sell it off to Amazon, but considering everything going on, that may have been the wise choice, since I have a feeling more people will see this on Amazon then would have gone out to theaters with COVID, school starting, etc. Either way, you can read my interview with Kay Cannon over at Below the Line.

The movie stars pop star Camila Cabello In the title role of the musical was the brainchild of James Corden, who is no stranger to musicals. In fact, he seems to appear in almost every single one, or is that me? The nice thing is that you already know the story, as that hasn’t changed much, although Cannon definitely gives it a more modern spin in terms of Ella being far more feisty and a truly modern woman despite living in times where women aren’t allowed to do their own thing. Ella wants to be a designer, and she’s already making progress as she sews beautiful dresses in the basement where she’s kept by her stepmother (Idina Menzel) and taunted by her stepsisters (Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer). One day, she meets the Prince Robert (Nicholas Galzitine) in the woods and has such an effect on him that he decides to hold a ball and invite all the women in the land in order to find a princess.

Like I said, pretty much the same story that we’ve seen in so many adaptations and quite a few musicals, and really, what probably will stand out more than anything is how talented Cabello is, considering that this is her first acting role in a major feature, and she kills it. I wouldn’t say that I love all the song choices, but I did love most of the arrangements, and there are so many great standout moments like “Shining Star” performed by Billy Porter as Cinderella’s “Fab G” (replacing and gender-switching her Fairy Godmother) and Menzel’s performance of her own song she wrote for the movie is a definite showstopper.

Obviously, casting the likes of Menzel and Porter means you have a couple ringers, but Minnie Driver is also great and even Pierce Brosnan kind of makes up for his horrific singing performance in Mamma Mia! This time, he gets something more in his range. And James Corden is in it, but it's such a small role that even those who truly hate him don't have enough time to do so.

It’s probably a cliché to say that this Cinderella won’t be for everyone, and I’m sure many critics had their knives out for it sight unseen. Personally, I know tons of fans of musicals and movies like Into the Woods, and yes, the Pitch Perfect movies, who will really enjoy what Kay Cannon and her talented cast and crew have done with the story. Kay Cannon’s Cinderella is a movie that’s more about fun entertainment than anything particularly cerebral, and in days like these, maybe that’s all that is needed sometimes.

There's a ton of other interesting indie films out this week… some of them are even good!

A movie that many (hopefully) will view with interest is Bassam Tariq’s MOGUL MOWGLI (Strand Releasing), co-written by and starring Riz Ahmed, which premiered all the way back at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2020. Besides it being of interest due to Ahmed’s presence, Tariq is also rumored to be directing the new Blade movie for Marvel Studios, starring Mahershala Ali, so many will (hopefully) be checking out this movie for that reason alone. (It certainly grabbed my interest.)

In the movie, Ahmed plays Zaheer who raps under the pseudonym of Zed, but he’s a Pakistani living in London at odds with his parents and the Muslim traditions put upon him. Just as he’s about to go on a major tour that could give his career a much-needed push, he suddenly loses the ability to walk and is diagnosed with a muscular disease that will involve stem cell therapy.

Okay, yes, this is another movie involving Ahmed as a performer who is hit by a debilitating condition much like his Oscar-nominated turn in Sound of Metal, but this is a very different movie that also deals with culture and religion and other things that just had much of an impact on me. Zaheer is told by his doctor that after the procedure, he would be unable to have kids, so he should freeze his sperm, and there’s a scene that I personally experienced when I was told the same before my stem cell transplant.

As much as this is very much a family drama, there’s also an interesting almost horror element to Mogul Mowgli as Zameer is constantly being plagued by hallucinations and nightmares, but there’s also some light humor in the fact that his main competition, another Pakistani rapper named “RPG,” is a bit of an idiot. But this really is Ahmed’s show, and heck, I might go so far to say that I think Ahmed’s performance in this movie is even better than his performance in Sound of Metal if you can believe that.

Mogul Mowgli proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Riz Ahmed’s Oscar nomination was no fluke. He is clearly one of the best actors we have today, and he also shows that lacking the right material, he’s just going to write his own. It's opening at New York's Film Forum on Friday, and I'm not sure where else.

Brazilian filmmaker Vicente Amorim’s action-thriller YAKUZA PRINCESS (Magnet) -- which has played a couple recent genre festivals like Fantasia in Montreal -- really should be my kind of movie. Based on the Manga of the same name, it’s set in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I used to live as a kid, believe it or not, but it’s also one of the largest Japanese communities outside Japan. In this environment comes newcomer Masumi as Akemi, who was orphaned as a child and left in Sao Paulo, but she later learns she’s the heiress to the Yakuza crime syndicate. She ends up meeting a badly scarred-up stranger with amnesia (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who believes an ancient katana sword might bind their fates.

Like I said, this should be my kind of movie, because I love Yakuza films and crime films set in the world of Japanese crime, and as I said, I lived in Brazil, so that country still hold a place in my heart. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of amazing Yakuza films from the great Takashi Miike, and this one is just so erratic in terms of pacing and tone that it really took me quite some time to really get into it.

Unfortunately, this movie at its core feels like another Kill Bill wannabe where Amorim relies so much on being super-stylish and throwing in lots of fast editing to make up for the lack of originality or any real substance.

The writing in the movie isn’t great, at least at first, but it’s also far too obvious how new and green Masumi is as an actor, because she delivers her lines and swordplay with very little charisma, and Rhys Meyers isn’t much better. In fact, the film’s best parts are the ones in Japanese, but that’s in the second half where the movie slows down considerably. There is the expected amount of gory swordplay and people being shot in the head, but there’s also way too much unnecessary exposition, much of it in bad English.

There’s just no way around that this is a movie that tries to jump on a genre bandwagon that has been handled so much better by Japanese filmmakers, while this just fails to keep the viewer interested beyond its soundtrack and the score by Lucas Marcier and Fabiano Krieger, which is pretty fantastic. Sure, it’s pretty violent and gory, but at times, it relies too much on viewers really only being on board for that. Other times, it feels like a patchwork of elements that don’t necessarily work together but also feels so derivative of so many better films.

Essentially, Yakuza Princess is yet another overly stylish action movie that’s better when everyone is fighting rather than talking. I had a hard time staying interested, and I’m not sure if that would have been exacerbated if I saw this on the big screen vs. a screener. Unfortunately, you'll only get to see on the big screen in certain regions, because it's mainly being released VOD.

Hitting Netflix on Friday after a week at New York’s Paris Theater is Sara Colangelo’s drama WORTH (Netflix), starring Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci, and Amy Ryan, which premiered all the way back in January 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival. In the movie, Keaton plays Kenneth Feinberg, an opera loving lawyer and college professor who is commissioned to start the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, which has to come up with the amount of money that the families of those who died in the terrorist attacks will receive.

As you can probably expect, this movie is a laugh a minute… no, I’m kidding, this is a well-written and acted, but also often rather dry drama that’s about a serous topic, but it also feels like it comes so late after 9/11 that it doesn’t feel as relevant anymore, even with the anniversary coming up soon.

The movie is very much a spotlight for Keaton, who sports a heavy Massachusetts accent but still delivers a solid performance as the man with the unenviable task of trying to calculate the payouts for the people who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks. But Keaton doesn’t just deliver himself, he also brings out the best from everyone else in the cast, not too surprising from Ryan or Tucci, but there are also lots of pleasant surprises, including Shunori Ramathan and some of the actors playing the people who lost family members.

More than anything else, the movie is very much about the excellent script by Max Borenstein (who mostly has written a bunch of Godzilla and King Kong movies, oddly enough), and in that sense, it reminds me of Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight or the recent The Report, which are both solid movies but also very dialogue-driven ensemble dramas. Colangelo does a fine job with the film's pacing, which much have been a difficult task.

The only real problem with Worth is that it's so filled with crying and drama it's pretty hard to take for two hours straight. Basically, it’s one of those very good movies that you really have to be in the right headspace to get through it.

Michelle Civata's THE GATEWAY (Lionsgate) is a crime-thriller set in rural St. Louis with Shea Whigham playing Parker, a social worker who is trying to protect his client, a single mother (Olivia Munn) with a young daughter, whose husband was just paroled from jail with a drugdealer (Frank Grillo) trying to get him back on the payroll.

I wasn't sure about this one at least as it started, even with such a solid cast, which includes Bruce Dern as Park's estranged father, and it certainly started out a bit erratic with some scenes and characters working better than others. What works in the movie's favor is Whigham is such a good actor who rarely gets juicy roles like this one where he can be at the center of the story, and The Gateway shows that maybe this shouldn't be.

Despite a woman as director and co-writer, the whole thing comes off as fairly macho, clearly influenced by filmmakers like Scorses, but the fact that there's heart and real characters at the center of the movie that doesn't offer some degree of action -- gunfights, car chases and such -- does make The Gateway far better than it could have been.

Unfortunately, things start to fall a bit in the last act, although there are some great scenes between Whigham and Dern, and I generally like what the movie is trying to say about family. Because of that, The Gateway ends up being a decent indie crime thriller that doesn't veer too far from others but gives Wigham a long-deserved leading role to show his stuff.

The Gateway will open in select theaters, and be available via Apple TV and other digital platforms Friday and then be available on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, September 7.

Sean King O’Grady’s thriller WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING (IFC Midnight) stars Sierra McCormick as teenager Melissa, who ends up trapped with her family in a house after trying to shelter from a storm… and boy, did this movie remind me of this awful recent movie called John and the Hole that IFC released last month. And this one really isn’t much better, despite starring great actors like Vinessa Shaw and Pat Healy.

Honestly, I have no idea why anyone would read the script by Max Booth III (based on his own novella, no less) and think, “Boy, this would make an interesting movie,” but this is the age we live in where everyone is trying to make something cool and woke for the kiddies, and in this case that comes in the form of Melissa’s goth girlfriend Amy (Lisette Alexis) who shows up (in flashback) as so that they can do some incantations which may be causing all the weirdness. It’s as if the filmmakers thought that throwing in a bit of The Craft might save it.

I probably was most disappointed by Healy, since I’m such a fan of his work, but he isn’t given much to do except rant and rave and yell a lot, and he really comes off like an asshole, which is not a great look for him.

O’Grady throws all sorts of things at the family like a not particularly scary stupid looking rattlesnake that has them screaming horribly and some kind of… werewolf or something? (I don’t know ‘cause we never see it. We just see its tongue which Melissa rips out.) Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen worse acting, which just makes the family even more annoying.

With a really stupid premise that is barely able to carry a movie, if you’re gonna call your movie We Need to Do Something, then for EFF’s sake, DO SOMETHING! Man, this movie frustrated the hell out of me.

Also out on Friday is the anthology film, YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM (NEON), which features an amazing roster of filmmakers, including David Lowery, director of the recent The Green Knight, Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Laura Poitras (CITIZEN4), Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others, taking a semi-documentary approach to share their thoughts on living in a pandemic… I watched the Panahi and Chen segments but never got to the rest, but if I do, I'll add my thoughts on the film as a whole when I have a chance. The movie opens at the IFC Center in New York this Friday and then in Los Angeles at the Laemlle Royal next Friday.

I wasn’t able to get to Safy Nebbou’s WHO YOU THINK I AM (Cohen Media), based on the best-selling novel from Camille Laurens, but it stars the great Juliette Binoche, a single mom and middle-aged professor who is ghosted her 20-something lover so she creates a fake Facebook profile for 24-year-old avatar named “Clara” who is friended by her ex’s roommate. This opens at the Quad Cinema in New York on Friday as well as in L.A. at the Landmark, and I hope to get to watch it soon.

Another movie I’ve been looking forward to seeing since it premiered at Sundance but just haven’t found the time is Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s WILD INDIAN (Vertical), starring the great Michael Greyeyes as a native American man who decades earlier covered up a classmate's murder, but now has to deal with a man who wants vengeance for the secret he's trying to keep as he tries to protect his wife (Kate Bosworth) and boss (Jesse Eisenberg) from that secret. Sounds pretty amazing and man, I wish I could just fit in more movies with everything I have going on right now.

Chad Michael Murray plays the title role in Daniel Farrands' TED BUNDY: AMERICAN BOOGIEMAN (Voltage/Dark Star PIctures), which hits VOD and DVD this Friday, but unlike last week's No Man of God, which deals with Bundy already in prison, it deals with Bundy still on the prowl and the law enforcement agents who eventually brought him down including detective Kathleen McChesney (Holland Roden) and rookie FBI profiler Robert Ressler (Jake Hays). I haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but it would have been nice if they released the two movies in chronological order, no?

A great doc that played at the Tribeca Festival a couple months back and will hit Showtime this Friday is Sacha Jenkins’ BITCHIN’: THE SOUND AND FURY OF RICK JAMES (Showtime), an absolutely fascinating look at the controversial funk and soul star whose catchy dance music of the '70s led to drugs and worse offenses in subsequent years. This is a fantastic doc that I wish I could watch again, but I don't have Showtime. Waugh waugh...

Others that came out this week or weekend:

AFTERLIFE OF THE PARTY (Netflix)

STEEL SONG (Gravitas Ventures)

SAVING PARADISE (Vertical)

Next week, the new horror movie from James Wan, Malignant, as well as Paul Schrader's The Card Counter, which I think might be going wide next week, too.

#The Weekend Warrior #movies #reviews #cinderella #shang-chi #box office #yakuza princess #worth #mogul mowgli

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deadlinecom · 4 years ago

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don-lichterman · 3 years ago

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THE PROTÉGÉ Official Trailer (2021) Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson Movie HD

THE PROTÉGÉ Official Trailer (2021) Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson Movie HD © 2021 – Lionsgate Watch Full movie Free: Download THE PROTÉGÉ Official Trailer (2021) Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson Movie HD Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QoZGxmS-mU

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#2021 #Action #Cinema #Film #michael keaton #Movie #Official #rapid #rapid trailer #Samuel L Jackson #the protege #The Protege Trailer #Thriller #Trailer

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don-lichterman · 3 years ago

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The Protégé (2021 Movie) Official Clip “But I Like Mysteries” – Michael Keaton, Maggie Q

The Protégé – In Theaters August 20, 2021! Starring Michael Keaton, Maggie Q, and Samuel L. Jackson, with Robert Patrick Subscribe to the LIONSGATE YouTube Channel for the latest movie trailers, clips, and more: https://bit.ly/2Z6nfym #TheProtege https://protege.movie http://facebook.com/TheProtegeMovie https://twitter.com/TheProtegeMovie https://www.instagram.com/TheProtegeMovie…

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior 8/27/21 - CANDYMAN, LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD, TOGETHER, VACATION FRIENDS, NO MAN OF GOD, and More

There’s only one new wide release this week, and I’m so happy about that, that I’m gonna say the name of that movie FIVE TIMES!

Candyman

CANDYMAN (Universal)

Well, you get the idea. Jordan Peele seems to have done it again with this sequel the 1992 movie from Bernard Rose, although in this case he’s just co-writing and producing along with the film’s actual director, Nia DaCosta, who directed a small indie called Little Woods, which not that many people saw but that played at the Tribeca Film Festival a bunch of years back.

Of course, the movie is really being sold on the basis of Peele’s involvement, because he had such success with two horror movies as a director, the Oscar-winning Get Out in 2017 and Us two years later. Both of those movies grossed over $175 million domestically and another $75 to 82 million overseas. Get Out opened with just $33 million, which is fairly impressive for an R-rated horror comedy, but Us opened with over $70 million based on the popularity and success of Get Out.

Peele and DaCosta have another decent cast with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, possibly best known for playing Black Manta in James Wan’s Aquaman, playing the lead, an artist named Anthony Mccoy, who learns about the myths of the Candyman at the Chicago projects, Cabrini-Green. He also starred in Peele’s Us right after that, and also appeared in The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman, another huge domestic hit. Later this year, he’ll appear (presumably as the younger Morpheus) in The Matrix Resurrections. HIs girlfriend and art curator Brianna is played by Teyonah Parris, who might be best known for her role as Monica Rambeau in the Disney+ series, WandaVision, a role she’ll reprise in next year’s The Marvels, which will reunite her with director DaCosta, as she becomes a full-fledged superhero with the film’s star, Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel. The movie also stars Colman Domingo, who had a big breakout by starring in HBO’s Euphoria, the AMC spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, and well-received movies (at least critically) like Zola and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. That’s a pretty amazing trio right there for the movie, and they’ll help the movie get the hoped-for African-American moviegoers but also the young people who enjoy horror.

Horror has generally done okay during the pandemic, although obviously, there’s been a lot of sequels with John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s A Quiet Place Part II doing the best of all of them. More recent sequels like Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Don’t Breathe 2 haven’t done as well. And there’s no way around the fact that Candyman is a sequel, but it’s a sequel to a movie that came out nearly 30 years ago, which doesn’t mean that young people will have that close a connection to it.

Maybe it’s no surprise that reviews for the movie have been stellar, similar to Peele’s other two movies, although some definitely have issues with the movie. (My review of Candyman can be found over at Below the Line.)

Candyman seems good for an opening somewhere in the low-to-mid $20 millions, although the anticipation for the movie, and its strong draw within the Black community could give it a nice bump ala the movies Peele has directed. Expect the movie to do especially well on Thursday and Friday, but I think anticipation will make it fairly front-loaded as would be the case with most horror movies released in the summer. (I also expect a massive 55%+ drop next week when Marvel opens Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.)

But in the meantime, this is where I see this week’s top 10.

1. Candyman (Universal) - $22.7 million N/A

2. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $11.5 million -38%

3. Paw Patrol: The Movie (Paramount) - $7.5 million -43%

4. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $3.9 million -40%

5. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $2.5 million -50%

6. Respect (MGM) - $2 million -47%

7. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $1.6 million -52%

8. The Night House (Searchlight) - $1.5 million -48%

9. The Protégé (Lionsgate) - $1.4 million -52%

10. Reminiscence (Warner Bros.) - $900k -54%

A great film I saw at SXSW earlier this year that’s finally coming out and is therefore, this week’s “THE CHOSEN ONE” is the doc LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD (Discovery+) from director Jeremy Workman, which follows the amazing life of 20-year-old domino artist and YouTube sensation Lily Hevesh, who has built up a following due to her amazing domino constructions.

The movie works as a documentary on so many levels, first in terms of relaying Lily’s history as a Chinese orphan adopted at the age of one by non-Asian parents and how that affected her life and her interest in discovery, which ultimately led her to this passion. But building and toppling domino art is much more than a hobby as Ms. Hevesh has been able to monetize her passion with a thriving YouTube channel and also being hired by big corporations to create domino art for commercials and such. I’m not sure how long Workman was following her around but we do get to see Lily in all sorts of environments. We mostly get to see her as entrepreneur as she’s designing and developing her own line of dominoes that would be ideal for the work she does.

Lily Hevesh is just so inspirational and watching this amazing woman go through her life and the wonder she creates in others makes this one of my favorite docs of the year. It will stream on Discovery+ starting Thursday but you can also catch it in NYC at the IFC Center starting Friday.

Over the weekend, I caught a movie that I missed when it got a platform release in New York and L.A. on August 6, as well as when it played at the Tribeca Film Festival back in March. David Gutnik’s Materna (Utopia), an anthology of sorts about four very different women, played by the wonderful Kate Lyn Sheil,Jade Shete, Lindsay Burdge, and Assol Abudllina (the second and fourth of those who co-wrote the script with Gutnik). It’s an interesting anthology that deals with four women who are on the same New York subway when an incident happens, but it never really goes too far into the incident, or even resolves it, since it’s more about the individual women and their lives. I was really only familiar with Sheil and Burdge, although I like the former’s segment more than the latter, though they’re both strange looks at motherhood. I’ll freely admit that there were aspects to all the stories I didn’t get, but I think I ultimately enjoyed the final Assol Abudllina segment the best, even though that’s the only one not in English. I don’t think Materna (which is now available digitally on TVOD) will be for everyone, but it’s certainly an intriguing and somewhat enigmatic film from Gutnik and his collaborators.

Premiering on Hulu Friday is Clay Tarver’s comedy VACATION FRIENDS (Hulu), starring John Cena and Lil Rel Howery as two guys who meet while on vacation with their partners Kyla (Meredith Hagner) and Emily (Yvonne Orji), and they become friends! Okay, there’s a lot more to the movie than that, but I’m embargoed until Friday at midnight so there’s not much more I can say. I do think it’s interesting that this was originally announced in 2005 with Nicholas Cage and Will Smith in the lead roles, and at one point, Chris Pratt and his ex-wife Anna Faris were attached, as well as Ice Cube. It certainly would have been interesting to see any of those pairings, and maybe this would have gotten a theatrical release rather than just streaming.

Mini-Review: A high-concept movie like this could definitely be very funny or absolutely horrible, because it is basically a buddy comedy that relies so much on whether the leads can be funny on screen together. I generally like Lil Rel Howery (even though he’s literally been everywhere this year and is in danger of getting into a James Corden level of annoying) as well as John Cena, who I’ve been a fan of from his wrestling days.

Like I said, the premise is really simple, Howery’s Marcus and his girlfriend Emily are vacationing in Mexico where he plans to propose when they encounter Cena’s Ron and his girlfriend Kyla, who are clearly having the time of their lives, but they’re also the kind of people you don’t want to spend too much time with since they’re VERY LOUD. They end up spending a lot of time together and when they go their separate ways, Marcus thinks that’s it. He and Emily continue to plan their wedding with Marcus trying to prove himself to Emily’s military father Larry (Chuck Cooper). Of course, Ron and Kyla show up and make everyone uncomfortable as they “do their thing” to ruin Marcus’ wedding.

Comedy is a tough thing to critique and gauge how people will receive it, because everyone finds different things funny, and I’m sure that most actual critics will find many reasons to hate this, because it’s incredibly inappropriate and quite low brow. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t rely merely on Ron and Kyla making Marcus uncomfortable as when the movie transitions into a wedding comedy, there’s lots of family dynamics to add to the humor.

Although The Suicide Squad is still Cena’s best and funniest movie of the summer, this is another example of how he’s really trying to mix things up with his acting roles, and even though he’s still way behind Dwayne Johnson in terms of getting to the A-List. Howery is definitely better in this than in some of his other recent movies (koffSPACE JAMkoff), and he continues to be a really strong comic actor that does well with the right material.

Hagner is hilarious and I’m sure I’ve seen her being just as funny elsewhere but some of the best laughs are when she’s faking out Marcus and Emily, but she’s also a great counter to Cena. Unfortunately, that means Orji almost always has to play the straight-person to the other three, but there’s a lot of great set-ups for laughs around her. There are some things that feel played and overdone like the gag of Marcus and Ron getting high and what happens with that, but then there are more original yucks as well.

Ultimately, Vacation Friends does what it’s intended to do. As far as vacation/destination comedies go, this one could have been a hell of a lot worse, but the combination of cast and Tarver’s direction makes this a consistently funny movie that probably would have done okay with audiences in theaters.

Rating: 7/10

I haven’t had a chance to see the Pen15 Animation Special, which also debuts on Hulu this Friday, but I’m looking forward to it for sure, as I love this show.

The pandemic dramedy TOGETHER (Bleecker Street), directed by the great Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, is the definition of a two-hander as it stars James McAvoy and Sharon Morgan (from last year’s Military Wives) as a couple who end up quarantined together during the COVID pandemic even though they clearly loathe each other and probably shouldn’t be together.

This is a movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, but it’s very dark and can’t necessarily be called a comedy and definitely not a romantic comedy, but is something akin to last year’s Malcolm and Marie, although in this case it’s very much meant to be taking place in the here and now. At first, the movie does seem to be fairly funny because of the jabs the two actors take at each other, but then it gets quite dramatic as it deals with her Mum dying in the hospital on her own.

In many ways, Together seems like something that would have worked just as well as a fast-paced play, since writer Dennis Kelly doesn’t make it anything that couldn’t be put on stage, although Daldry and Martin do find ways to keep it interesting as the two actors are moved around their flat. What’s particularly interesting is the pace which starts out quite quickly but then it slows down and gets quite dramatic as each actor goes off to do their own monologue.

It also deals with the seriousness of how badly England was struck by Covid, and it even gets into the mad rush to get the vaccine and the crazy things people would do in order to get it as soon as possible. Much of the question surrounding the duo is how they possibly could have at one time loved each other but now hate each other as their young son is seen in the background during their fiercest arguments. You spend much of the movie wondering whether they can reconcile and get back together, but more importantly, whether they should.

Listen, I’ve long been a fan of McAvoy, and I’ve always known what he could do as an actor but Horgan is a nice surprise, and it’s amazing to see two actors really push each other to get this amazing dual performance that drives the film.

Together covers a lot of ground, and its combination of an amazing script and two actors who can clearly dig in and really get the most out of it makes it a completely riveting film. Everyone involved with this movie has created a really brilliant piece of cinematic drama that can probably withstand multiple viewings to really appreciate what they’ve done, but especially for those two massive performances.

A movie that also debuted at Tribeca is Amber Sealey's NO MAN OF GOD (RLJFilms), another two hander of sorts with Elijah Wood playing Special Agent Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby playing notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy. The movie takes place in the mid-80s as Bundy is on death row at the Florida State Prison and Bill is trying out the FBI’s new methods of profiling serial killers in order to find them before they kill more people.

This is another movie that didn’t really click with me when I saw it at Tribeca, but I wanted to watch it again and give it another chance. This is definitely my kind of movie, and you can definitely see how the interviews between Hagmaier and Bundy could have led to things like the novels by Thomas Harris or David Fincher’s Mindhunter series on Netflix.

It’s well-written by Kit Lesser and the performance by Kirby is particularly strong, as he has a method of speaking that lulls you into a false sense of security, but overall, the delivery and pace of the film just isn’t as compelling as it could and should have been. The whole thing feels kind of stiff and staid, and while I like the idea behind the movie.

The movie also has a pretty amazing score, which does add a lot when things just aren’t very interesting, but as much as this is meant to be dark and creepy ala Silence of the Lambs, it just never fully delivers on the promising concept.

Premiering on Apple TV+ this Friday is the second season of the fantasy series, See, starring Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, but I still haven’t seen the first season, so nothing more to add here.

Other movies out this week include:

BEHEMOTH (Level 33 Entertainment)

DEFINING MOMENTS (VMI Worldwide)

THE COLONY (Lionsgate)

Next week, Marvel Studios is back with a brand new hero in its MCU, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

#The Weekend Warrior #Movies #Reviews #Candyman #Together #No Man of God #Vacation Friends #Lily Topples the World #Box Office

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior 8/20/21 - REMINISCENCE, PAW PATROL: THE MOVIE, THE PROTÉGÉ, THE NIGHT HOUSE, FLAG DAY, DEMONIC and More

Ugh.

Apparently, we have four or five new wide releases this weekend, just as we get into what I always lovingly referred to as “The Dog Days of Summer.” Thanks to COVID, that could be referring to almost every weekend this summer, but it definitely becomes more true as we get to the end of summer as many kids are returning to school, some of them wearing masks, others social-distancing, some just getting us closer to the herd immunity we were always heading towards… ha ha… that’s one way to see if anyone is even reading this column. Get Political!!

Presumably, the widest release this weekend will be the sci-fi noir, REMINISCENCE (Warner Bros.), starring Hugh Jackman, Thandiwe Newton, and Rebecca Ferguson, which is the feature directorial debut by Lisa Joy, the co-creator of HBO’s popular series, Westworld. Like The Suicide Squad, In the Heights, and every other Warner Bros. movie this year, Reminiscence will be released concurrently on HBO Max this Friday. Unlike any of those other movies, I honestly don’t think anyone will give a shit about getting off their asses to risk COVID in order to see this. And I say that a.) without having seen it; b.) knowing almost nothing about it; c.) not believing the poppycock that movie theaters are the death traps some claim; and d.) I already have a ticket to see it on Friday.

In fact, I almost feel like I shouldn’t do a lot of research into what this movie is about, because despite having seen the trailer a few times, I still have no idea. All I know is that it stars Hugh Jackman, and it’s science-fiction, and that’s enough for me! (I haven’t even watched that much of Westworld beyond the first season for no other reason except that I haven’t.) The plot according to IMDB is, “A scientist discovers a way to relive your past and uses the technology to search for his long lost love.” Good enough for me.

Okay, then, so basically it sounds like a Christopher Nolan movie like Tenet or Inception from a lesser-known director -- who also happens to be Nolan’s sister-in-law, because she’s married to the other Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan. See how Hollywood works?

Because of all the Nolan connections, maybe we need to look at something like Transcendence, the 2014 sci-fi thriller directed by Nolan DP Wally Pfister, which starred Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall (coincidentally), and Paul Bettany. The movie opened in mid-April (a known dumping ground) to about $10.9 million in 3,455 theaters, and then tanked, making just $23 million domestically. (It made about $80 million overseas.) The fact that the title Reminiscence bears more similarity to Pfister’s movie brings another level of foreboding.

At the time, Depp hadn’t completely destroyed his career, and he still had a few bit hits under his belt, including Into the Woods and his final Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 2017, as well as Murder on the Orient Express. Jackman, on the other hand, is still in a better place career-wise, although he still owes much of his career to playing Wolverine in the X-Men movies for nearly two decades. He’s had one significant hit since Logan’s swan song, fittingly enough in 2017’s Logan, which grossed $226.3 million domestically. That was the PT Barnum musical, The Greatest Showman, which made $174.3 million over the holidays that same year, and that really centered around Jackman as a leading man. His next movie, the Gary Hart movie, The Front Runner, didn’t fare very well (less than $2 million gross), nor did the animated Missing Link, although the latter did get an Oscar nomination. The question is whether Jackman can do much to get moviegoers into an original science fiction movie with his mere presence.

Even the rest of the cast that includes Ferguson from Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies, Newton from… well, another one of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies, and Daniel Wu from the series Into the Badlands and the most recent Tomb Raider movie. Again, take these three out of a franchise and who knows if there’s really much left?

I’m not even sure how many theaters Warner Bros. is releasing… sorry, I hate spelling out the title of this movie… into, but I have a feeling it won’t be that much more than 3,000, especially with the movie being readily available on HBO Max and all the week’s other movies being theatrical only.

Because of that, I’m very dubious about this movie making $10 million this weekend. In fact, I’m not even sure it can make $8 million this weekend. No, I’m probably going to go closer to $6 to 7 million on this, and even that might be overly optimistic.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see Reminiscence in advance, so we'll just have to see what other critics who see it think about it. I’m not really expecting it to get too many good reviews, since it seems like the kind of movie that critics go to see begrudgingly, because they were assigned to see it, more than having any interest in it. And I was right.

On the other hand, I’ve already been seeing rave reviews about the animated PAW PATROL: THE MOVIE (Paramount), which I also haven’t seen, and in fact, I can guarantee that I will never see it. Why? Because I don’t have kids. Nor will I ever have kids. Nor do I know anything about this other than it’s about police dogs?

In fact, opening in 2,700 theaters, I wouldn’t be surprised if this rare G-rated movie ends up winning the weekend, or at least comes in second to Free Guy, despite many kids being back in school, kids being unvaccinated and more likely to get COVID by going to movie theaters, etc. etc.

If you can’t tell, I’m writing this while on a mini-vacation and I’m kind of in a “I just don’t give a shit” kind of mood right now, but as I said, I don’t have kids, and the only reason I know what “Paw Patrol” is because the people I know who have kids seem to know of the movie’s existence. Maybe even some of them will take their kids to see it or at least wait until it’s on Paramount+, which you know is coming.

I’m going with this making somewhere around $8 million this weekend, taking second place behind Free Guy, which should continue to do well with little other direct competition.

On the other, other hand (I have three arms, you know), I have had a chance to see the action flick, THE PROTÉGÉ (Lionsgate), directed by Martin Campbell of Casino Royale acclaim and Green Lantern… what’s the opposite of acclaim? That.

The movie stars Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton, but more importantly, it stars… the awesome Maggie Q from Mission: Impossible III! (See a pattern in this week’s Weekend Warrior?) Most will probably know Ms. Q from her run as Nikita on the show of the same name, and she’s definitely back in that mode for this action-thriller in which she plays an assassin looking for the killer of her mentor (Jackson) which puts her at odds with another assassin, played by Keaton. I loved the fact that Maggie appeared in three very different movies last year from Sony/Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island and two other movies that ended up going to VOD, but the former of these shamefully opened with just $12.3 million over Valentine’s weekend and then it quickly got destroyed, first by the release of Blumhouse’s The Invisible Man in its third weekend and then by COVID, because theaters shut down in its fourth weekend. It made less than $50 million worldwide, which is a shame, because I actually liked it.

This is another case where I don’t know how many theaters it’s getting, although I do know reviews are embargoed until sometime Thursday evening, which is never a good sign, and actually, I can’t even tell you if I liked it or hated it until then, so… I guess we’ll have to go blind on this one, assuming Lionsgate will dump it into around 2,300 theaters with very little promotion. Even though action has been faring well this year, I have a feeling this will struggle to make $3 million this weekend.

Mini-Review: As I’ve probably mentioned, I love Maggie Q whenever she’s in any movie, but she’s particularly good in this sort of action role that requires a little more of a dramatic touch than we’d normally get from a man in this type of role. Sure, we can be slightly worried when there’s a movie with a female lead both written and directed by men, and some of those worries are founded, but Ms. Q always finds a way to bring more to her roles, and that’s the case here as well.

The general plot is that her Anna is an assassin and when her mentor Moody (Jackson) is murdered, she sets out to find his killer or killers, which brings her back to Vietnam where she runs headlong into another known as Rembrandt, played by Michael Keaton. At the same time, Moody has set Anna on a mission to find a boy whose father was assassinated 30 years earlier, as she learns that the two things are connected.

Written by Richard Wenk, who has quite a bit of experience with this sort of action movie, having written Denzel’s The Equalizer movies, as well as a few of The Expendables movies, he gives the movie enough story and characterization to separate it from the normal trashy action movie where that stuff isn’t important. For instance, giving Maggie’s Anna a full backstory with Samuel L. Jackson’s Moody, her blues guitar-playing mentor, or having her be interested in books and running a bookstore.

Unfortunately, the movie is kind of erratic, comical sometimes but deadly serious for the most part and the flirtatious relationship between Anna and Keaton’s character leads to some super cringe-worthy moments. While the action and fight choreography is pretty solid, the fact that 69-year-old Keaton doesn’t seem to be doing much of the actual fighting is a little too obvious. (Is he trying to be Liam Neeson now?) The way the violent fighting leads the two of them into bed also feels problematic. I generally abhor any sort of violence against women, but at least Maggie Q makes her character look super-tough and able to handle anything.

I wasn’t as keen on the film’s multiple twists in the ending or the flashback to Anna’s past, which seems to come far too late in the movie. In general, women are going to HATE this movie and I know exactly why, but men will probably enjoy it for just as many obvious reasons. All-in-all, it’s not a terrible throwback action movie that only sometimes goes off the rails. Rating: 6.5/10

Next, we have another highly-acclaimed horror film that played back at the Sundance Film Festival back in 2020 (like the recent Nine Days) with David (The Ritual) Bruckner’s THE NIGHT HOUSE (Searchlight Pictures), starring Rebecca Hall as Beth, a teacher whose husband Owen shot himself but not after designing and building their house on the lake. Shortly afterwards, weird things start happening and Beth thinks the house is haunting, but then she discovers a mysterious mirror image on the other side of the lake, and things start getting even weirder.

Definitely don’t want to say too much about this, because whether you like it or not might rely on whether you like the twist(s) in the movie, and I’m not sure that average moviegoers will like them as much as the type of person that goes to the Sundance Film Festival.

Hall is one of my favorite actors, because I feel she can do anything but she’s also very underrated. I mean, she can play a role in Iron Man 3 (one of the best things about that movie) or a movie like Transcendence (mentioned above) or Godzilla vs. King Kong or do comedy like ...um… Holmes and Watson, if anyone would consider that “comedy.” What she hasn’t been able to do is really get people out to theaters with her presence, although one of her more successful non-Marvel movies was Joel Edgerton’s The Gift, and she’s done a couple other good thrillers.

On top of that, the movie is still sitting pretty with 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes one wonder if Sundance buzz is able to transcend the 20-month gap since a movie’s premiere, and Nine Days seems to say otherwise. Another thing going in The Night House’s favor is that there’s been quite a bit of horror movies in recent months, which means this trailer has played in front of a lot of them.

I’m not really sure why Searchlight didn’t put this concurrently on their streaming partner Hulu, but maybe they’re giving theatrical another chance even with COVID still being a concern to many, but maybe not the fan of horror who might want a little escapism. This is only opening in about 2,000 theaters, and I think that might make it tough for it to make more than $3 or 4 million.

Mini-Review: Like with Maggie Q above, Rebecca Hall is an actress who I honestly think can do no wrong. Therefore, David Bruckner’s thriller might already have a bit of an advantage, because I assumed (correctly) that this movie will feature a lot of the filmmaker’s camera trained on her at all times capturing her every emotion, every fear and facial twitch.

As mentioned above, I don’t want to say too much about the plot beyond what you can easily watch in the trailer, but this is only partially the movie you might be expecting. Sure, there’s a good amount of eerie creepiness as Hall’s character tries to find whatever is haunting her house after her husband’s suicide, as well as discovering the identical house that may or may not be in a dream. (It's that kind of movie.)

Much of the film is kind of slow and mopey, and even funny in a weird way, since Hall’s character seems to be going crazy and her behavior (and performance) is quite erratic because of it. Think of it a bit as if you can imagine Hall going into crazy Nicholas Cage moments over the course of the movie or acting that way towards her friends, including Sarah Goldberg’s Claire, who always seems to be saying the wrong thing around her BFF.

One of the things that tends to work about Bruckner’s film is that you’re never quite sure what exactly is happening, but it keeps you interested enough to want to know where it might be going. The other great thing that works even moreso is the film’s amazing score and sound design that helps to keep the viewer on edge through all of the film’s ups and downs.

As the film went along, I presumed correctly that there would probably be some sort of semi-inane M. Night Shyamalan twist, and in some ways, I was right. I certainly didn’t hate the twist when it showed up (or the second or third twist), but I know plenty of fans of more straight-ahead (translation: bad) horror that might be thrown off and even perturbed by so many twists.

The Night House may ultimately be too smart or clever for its own good, since it’s being sold as a straight-ahead ghost story with the twist of this mirror house, but that’s really something that’s very much only on the surface. Any problems with the movie are countered by the fact that Hall is just so good at selling its strange concept.

Rating: 7/10

Lastly, there’s Sean Penn’s film FLAG DAY (MGM), which may or may not get a wide release -- I'm going to guess not, but just in case it does, I might try to figure out how it might do. It tells the story of lifelong criminal and con-man Jon Vogel (Penn) as seen through the eyes of his journalist daughter Jessica (Penn's daughter, Dylan Penn). Based on Jessica Vogel's book "Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life,” the movie covers Jessica's entire life from when her father left her and her brother Nick (played later by Hopper Penn) and mother Patty (Kathryn Winnick) through her own troubled life to when she takes back her life to succeed as a journalist. Also starring Josh Brolin, Dale Dickey, Regina King (blink and you'll miss her), Eddie Marsan and more, it's opening on Friday.

Without knowing whether Flag Day actually is getting any sort of wide release or will just be put into a few hundred theaters, but as you'll read in my review below, it's a very strange movie for MGM (or rather, United Artists Releasing) to have picked up before it premiered at Cannes, because it's just not that great, and it certainly isn't something that might do well in a wide release. Even if somehow MGM gets this movie into 1,000 theaters this weekend, I’m not convinced it can make a million dollars, because I just don’t think many if any people really know about it. Maybe it didn’t turn out to be the awards contender MGM hoped to release it later in the year, but it’s also strange for it to be opening a week after Respect, which I expect to do quite well in its second weekend. I’m just going to assume this will be in a few hundred theaters, and that’s about it.

Mini-Review: I really didn't know much about this movie going into it, other than the fact that it was directed by Penn, co-starred his daughter Dylan, as well as his son, Hopper. (Okay, maybe I didn’t know that last part.) What I didn’t know was that it was about a notorious counterfeiter named Jon Vogel, as seen through the eyes of his journalist daughter Jessica, and as with most of these type of memoir adaptations, it’s only going to be as interesting as how the story is told.

Penn has proven himself to be a decent filmmaker and storyteller, but here, he’s going for something arty that’s almost Terrence Malick-like at times, but needlessly so, because it just feels like he’s trying to make up for the flaws in the story by throwing in things like shaky camera work, overusing voice-over narrative and frequently leans on its soundtrack to try to make up for the weak storytelling.

On the other hand, if Penn was trying to create a great showcase for his daughter Dylan, Flag Day does a great job doing just that, and when you first see her on screen, you might be thrown off by how much she looks like her mother Robin Wright when she was much younger. It’s somewhat interesting to note that Sean Penn has never appeared in a movie he directed, which is only odd because you would think that being in scenes with other actors would make it easier to direct them. (I learned that from Jason Bateman, oddly.) In fact, the very best moments in Flag Day are those between Penn and his daughter, although there's still a lot of overacting and melodrama.

Honestly, I’ve met people like Jon Vogel, who are just constantly trying to make money however they can without worrying about who they hurt with their dishonesty. Because of this, I couldn’t fully get behind the father-daughter aspect of the story vs. just being interested in Jessica’s own personal growth.

In other words, maybe Flag Day should have been prefaced by "Based on a Dull Story,” because it just never really connected with me even though there were a scattered few moments that worked.

Rating: 5/10

Presuming that Flag Day isn’t going nationwide into over 500 theaters (and even if it does, it won’t be in the Top 10), here’s what the Top 10 should look like.

1. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $15 million -47%

2. Paw Patrol: The Movie (Paramount) - $8.4 million N/A

3. Reminiscence (Warner Bros.) - $6.2 million N/A

4. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $5 million -45%

4. Respect (MGM) - $4.8 million -45%

5. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $4.6 million -57%

7. The Night House (Searchlight) - $3.3 million N/A

8. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $3.2 million -57%

9. The Protege (Lionsgate) - $2.6 million N/A

10. Old (Universal) - $1.4 million -41%

District 9 director Neil Blomkamp returns with the horror film, DEMONIC (IFC Midnight), in which Carly Pope plays Carly Spenser, who learns her estranged mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) who disappeared years earlier is now in a coma, although new technology has been created as therapy that will allow Carly to enter her mother's brain and communicate with her. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, read the title and take one effin’ guess.

I went into this one fairly hopeful that maybe Blomkamp had figured out a way of getting out of director’s jail after the last few duds by essentially going the M. Night Shyamalan route i.e. making a super low-budget horror movie without stars that can let him show people that District 9 wasn’t a fluke. But unfortunately, kids, Demonic does the exact opposite, because it’s one of those horrible high concept tech-driven horror movies (not unlike the Blumhouse model) that gets so bogged down in a premise that should thrive on its simplicity that it just fails to keep the viewer entertained, let alone scared.

As soon as Carly enters the mindscape that is her mother’s brain, you know you’re in trouble, because it looks like a scratched DVD or an old video game that’s gotten dirty and is now skipping or crashing just as you’re almost past the hardest level. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie, and after Carly’s first horrific experience in her mother’s brain -- I mean, just writing that and knowing my own mother makes this a scary idea -- you wonder why she’d go back and do it again.

On top of that, there’s just so much exposition with Carly talking about her mother’s disappearance, but before you can get bored, something weird happens like her best friend turns into some weird creature and gets pulled into the mix of whatever is possessing Carly’s mother. I won’t say too much more, because like with The Night House above, you shouldn’t know too much. Unlike that movie, as you learn more, you become more annoyed with the whole idea.

Then on top of that, Pope just isn’t a particularly dynamic actress, so she does little to elevate the weak material, and when her dumb-ass BFF shows up at 3 in the morning, the banter between them is so cringeworthy, you might wonder who wrote this crap. (Surprise: Blomkamp did, so he can’t even blame how bad this movie is on the script.) There’s also what looks like a scary chicken, which just makes the whole thing more laughable than scary.

Demonic is a truly awful movie, taking Blomkamp further down the spiral of a filmmaker that was obviously a one-trick pony and doesn’t seem to be able to prove otherwise.

Rating: 4/10

Now available on digital is Gracie Otto’s documentary, UNDER THE VOLCANO (Universal Pictures Content Group), which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March, and I absolutely loved it, though that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone who knows about my background working in recording studios. The doc is in fact about the Air Studios Montserrat that the late Sir George Martin built in the Caribbean in the ‘70s where some amazing artists like The Police, Duran Duran, Mark Knopfler and others recorded some of the classic rock records of the ‘80s. Of course, like the movie Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm about Rockfield Studios in Wales, I’m a complete suck for these movies about legendary recording studios where great music was recorded, because it feeds one of my primary interests in life: music and specifically the history of rock music. I’m actually going to have an interview with the filmmakers over at Below the Line sometime soon, so you can read a lot more about the movie then.

Because I was away this weekend, I wasn't able to get to any of these. Sorry, publicists!

ON BROADWAY (Kino Lorber) MA BELLE, MY BEAUTY (Good Deed Entertainment) BARBARA LEE: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER (Greenwich) CONFETTI (Dada Filims) CRYPTOZOO (Magnolia) COLLUSIONS (Vertical) Next week, we're back to just a single new wide release -- thank you, God! -- and it's the Universal/Blumhouse remake of the cult horror classic, CANDYMAN.

Incidentally, I couldn’t write this column weekly without the fantastic data found at The-Numbers.com. The site continues to maintain one of the best box office databases on the internet, and I appreciate that being available to us.

#The Weekend Warrior #Reminiscence #Paw Patrol #Flag Day #The Night House #Demonic #The Protege #Movies #Reviews #box office

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weekendwarriorblog · 7 years ago

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND – Uncle Drew, Sicario and More

June comes to an end with a couple smaller movies that probably could have been released any time during the year, but their respective studios feel there’s a place for them among all the bigger studio tentpoles and franchises taking up movie screens. Oddly, one of the movies is a sequel to a movie released by the other studio.

UNCLE DREW (Summit/Lionsgate)

The first offering trying to get some business away from the big boys is this PG-13 sports comedy directed by Charles Stone III, whose last movie Step Sisters streamed on Netflix without much of a theatrical release. Even so, Stone has had a number of hits in the early ‘00s including Drumline and Mr. 3000, a baseball comedy starring the late Bernie Mac, so he might be the perfect helmer for this movie.

This one brings together a varied cast of African-American talent including a number of actual basketball players wearing make-up and wigs to make them look like old baseball players. The title character is played by the Boston Celtics’ Kyrie Irving, who originated the character for the short on which this film is based, but a lot of the comedic focus for the movie is put on Lil Rel Howery from Get Out and Tiffany Haddish, who broke out in last summer’s Girls Trip. Lil Rel plays Dax, the coach of a street ball team preparing for the 50thRucker Park Classic, who loses the team to his lifelong enemy, played by Nick Kroll from The League. When Dax sees the elderly Uncle Drew schooling a bunch of kids, Dax enlists Drew who puts together that team.

That team includes former basketball star Shaquile O’Neal, who hasn’t been appearing in many movies in recent years, other than a voice role or two. O’Neal transitioned from the basketball court to the movie screen in the ‘90s with movies like Kazaam and Steel, so this is kind of a throwback to his older fans. Other basketball players (barely recognizable in old make-up) include Reggie Miller, Nate Robinson, Chris Webber, Aaron Gordon and Lisa Leslie, so one expects that basketball fans will be the main draw. Rounding out the comedic cast are vets Mike Epps and J.B. Smoove as a comedic Greek chorus. The results are kind of a cross between Johnny Knoxville’s Bad Grandpa and the Barbershop movies.

Other than maybe Haddish, it’s hard to see any of the cast being much of a draw to non-basketball fans, so it’s up to the marketing, which has done a good job selling this comedy even to those outside its expected target audience. This may be a tougher movie to gauge its box office prospects, not being the target audience i.e. I don’t watch basketball, but Lionsgate is giving it a wider-than-usual release for this type of movie into 2,600 theaters, similar to the Barbershop films, all of which opened over $20 million. (For more perspective, Stone’s earlier film Drumline opened with $12.6 million in less than 2,000 theaters, and Uncle Drew is likely to have a similarly regionalized appeal.)

The trailers and ads look amusing enough and the movie isn’t bad (see below), so presuming that the movie was advertised during the last few months through the NBA Championships means that the film’s target older male audience will likely give it a chance and maybe they’ll bring some younger b-ball fans. That should help Uncle Drew make around $15 or 16 million, possibly even more, which should put it just ahead of Sicario despite being in fewer theaters.

Mini-Review: While the movie is about as silly and predictable as one might expect from watching the trailers, there’s definitely something to be said for how funny and entertaining it is, even if you don’t really know the players beneath the make-up. It’s pretty great that Lil Rel Howery, who stole so many scenes in Get Out, has been given such a great vehicle, and some of the funniest moments are when he’s being picked on by the ball players or being bullied by Nick Kroll and Tiffany Haddish, as his ex-girlfriend. Not all of the movie works, and it’s a little hard to believe that a team of “old men” could perform the way that they do, but I guess if you’re a fan of their work on the courts, that can make up for the obvious lack of acting skills chops in Irving and the others. (Yes, even Shaq, who has been acting for decades now.) There probably isn’t that much more to say about the movie, but it’s more in the vein of the Barbershop movies with basketball players instead of comedians. Even having ringers like Mike Epps and J.B. Smoove show up randomly doesn’t fully use their talents, but hopefully the movie will do well so Howery will get more opportunities like this. There’s definitely a potential franchise to be had if they can figure out how to get past the feeling that this should be its own standalone comedy. Rating:7/10

SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO (Sony)

While the summer movie season regularly produces a number of sequels to hit franchises, this sequel being released by Sony is the follow-up to a smaller independently-made film that showcased a lot of brilliant talent and ended up creating a cult following while also receiving three Oscar nominations.

The original Sicario was directed by Dennis Villeneuve, who would go onto bigger hits like Arrival (for which he received an Oscar nod) and Blade Runner 2049. The movie was released by Lionsgate in select cities for two weeks, but when it expanded into 2,620 theaters, it made over $12 million on its way to $46.9 million domestic based on a $30 million budget. It also the first produced screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, who also went on to be nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for Hell or High Water.

Emily Blunt isn’t in this sequel, as it instead focuses on the characters played by Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro as a CIA fixer and the Colombian assassin he works with to help fight the Mexican cartels. In this case, they’re dealing with the cartels’ human trafficking across the border, which certainly is timely to what’s going on in the country today, which should make it of interest.

Brolin is already having a bang-up summer, having starred in two of the season’s biggest hits, playing Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Cable in Deadpool 2, and the original Sicario has been playing on Netflix to presumably build up anticipation for another movie in the franchise.

In a perfect world, the sequel to Sicario would have a similar bump as John Wick: Chapter 2 had over the original John Wick, opening with twice as much, but it’s hard to tell whether there’s nearly as much anticipation for this sequel. It certainly could do well among Latino males in North America, especially with little direct competition, but the subject might hit close to home to make this a choice for weekend entertainment.

At one point, I thought Sicario would be good for a third place showing, but I think it will fall just short of the far-stronger Uncle Drew, even though that’s in a few less theaters*, just because it’s a far stronger sell as a comedy. Sicario should end up in fourth place with between $12 and 15 million, not great but not awful either. (*Quick Correction: It seems like the estimated theater counts have been adjusted so that Sicario might be in fewer theaters than Uncle Drew, but I’ll know for sure on Thursday.)

Mini-Review: I deliberately didn’t rewatch the original Sicario before seeing this sequel, and it’s probably a good thing, because it would have just left me even more disappointed. I loved that film and it’s look at the government’s war on drugs, but this time, it’s more about the government’s war on terrorism and the Mexican drug cartels transporting people across the border. Sound familiar? Yeah, there are definite correlations with what’s going on in the country right now, but the fact that Oscar-nominated writer Taylor Sheridan probably wrote this movie before Trump was elected makes it ridiculous to even mention this fact (as I just did). Mind you, this isn’t the first movie to explore the Latin American immigrant experience, and there are far better instances, such as Jonas Cuaron’s Desierto and Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

Josh Brolins’ FBI agent Matt Graver is commissioned to do whatever it takes to take down the Mexican cartels, which are now being considered terrorists after a supermarket is bombed. The idea is to start a war between the cartels, and the way Matt does this is by kidnapping the young daughter of the top Mexican druglord, played by Isabela Moner from Transformers: The Last Knight (once again playing a character with her own name). What this does is allow Del Toro to have some great scenes with Moner, creating a relationship that almost makes up for the fact that Brolin seems to be phoning it in this time, not to mention there only being a few scenes with Brolin and Del Toro together. (The movie also keeps cutting back to this young man being recruited by the cartels, but it doesn’t make much sense to even have him in the movie until near the end.)

Italian director Stefano Sollima (Gomorrah) leans so heavily on the score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, the Icelandic protégé of the late Johann Johannsen, who scored the original film, that the music’s attempt to create tension instead wears out its welcome fairly quickly.

There’s probably room for another movie if this one does well, but it’s a shame that the movie only starts getting interesting in the last 20 minutes and then it just ends, leaving you wondering why they couldn’t cut something out from the dull first two-thirds of the movie.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is noticeably lacking due to the absence of so much of what made the first film so good, particularly Villaneuve, so it’s hard to imagine many people will be as into this as the first movie. Rating: 6/10

Of course, neither of these movies will have enough of an impact to knock the 1-2 punch of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Incredibles 2out of the top spots with the former having a bigger drop in its second weekend then the latter in its third. Another film to keep an eye on is the Bollywood biopic Sanju, starring Ranbir Kapoor as Sanjay Dutt, which is a highly-anticipated film being released by Fox International Productions (FIP) into around 350 theaters, which should be enough to get it into the top 10 as well. (It won’t have Thursday previews, so it might be hard to tell how it’s doing until Friday estimates on Saturday.)

So the Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Universal) - $63.6 million -57%

2. The Incredibles 2 (Disney-Pixar) - $44 million -45%

3. Uncle Drew (Lionsgate) - $15.6 million N/A

4. Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sony) - $12.6 million N/A

5. Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros.) - $7.6 million -35%

6. Tag (New Line/WB) – $4.5 million -45%

7. Deadpool 2 (20thCentury Fox) - $2.9 million -45%

8. Sanju (FIP) - $2.5 million N/A

9. Solo: A Star Wars Story (Lucasfilm/Disney) - $2.3 million -50%

10. Hereditary (A24) – $2 million -47%

LIMITED RELEASES, ETC.

I’m happy to say that there’s quite a lot of good stuff being released in select cities this weekend, including two of the bigger buzz films from Sundance.

Opening on Thursday at the Metrograph in NYC is Bobbito Garcia’s doc Rock Rubber 45s (Saboteur Media), which is basically an overview of his amazing life and career, starting as a street basketball prodigy, to his tenure working in A&R at Def Jam during its heyday, becoming a sought-after DJ, as well as a sneaker-designing pioneer. Garcia is a bit of a Zelig with his presence felt in so many different aspects of music, sports and fashion, and if you’re into streetball then you should definitely check out this movie either before or after seeing Uncle Drew. The Puerto Rican Garcia enlisted a number of celebrity friends/fans including Lin Manuel Miranda, Michael Rapaport and Rosie Perez to help tell his story, and yeah, it’s a little weird for Garcia to be directing a doc about himself, but hey, who else would know him better? (And there’s some really personal revelations made in the doc.)

Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik returns with Leave No Trace (Bleecker Street), starring Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin McKenzie as father Will and daughter “Tom” living in the wilds of Portland, basically wanting to live by their own rules instead of society. When they’re found by the authorities, they’re forced to change their ways, but it’s going to be tougher for Will, a former soldier, to adjust to a different life than the one they’ve created for themselves in the woods. This fantastic drama will open in select cities Friday.

Tim Wardle’s doc Three Identical Strangers (Neon), a hit out of the Sundance Film Festival, takes a look at the three young men who discovered at the age of 19 that they were one third of a triad of triplets. They spend the rest of their lives taking advantage of the fame they received from the amazing revelation only to discover a dark secret about why they were separated at birth. This is a great doc that I highly recommend if you’re looking for more of the genre to see after Won’t You Be My Neighbor and RBG. (What a GREAT year for docs we’re having!)

Jessica Chastain stars in the Susanna White-directed Western Woman Walks Ahead (A24) as New York painter Katherine Weldon who travels to North Dakota to paint a portrait of Chief Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes), who is contending with the government trying to get his people to agree to their land treaty. Also starring Sam Rockwell and Ciaran Hinds, this is a decent historical drama that includes a bit of romance but also offers an inherent timeliness with our current government treating immigrants as badly as the government did its natives back in the 19thCentury. I also had a chance to interview director Susanna White at Toronto, and you can read that interview and learn more about the film over at NextBestPicture.com.

If you’re looking for some alternatives to the wide releases, I can recommend all four movies above.

After that, there’s a few odds and ends, including Pasha Patriki’s undersea action-thriller Black Water (Saban Films/Lionsgate) starring ‘80s legends Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren – seriously? Have these two never been in a movie together?!? –with Van Damme playing an operative being kept as a prisoner by the CIA on a submarine until he joins forces with a fellow prisoner, played by Lundgren.

That movie is not to be confused with Dark River (Filmrise), Clio Barnard’s psychological drama starring Ruth Wilson as Alice, a woman who returns to her hometown after the death of her father to claim the family farm from her brother (Mark Stanley). It’ll play in select cities and be available On Demand after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival last year.

The Craft and Hamlet II director Andrew Fleming reunites with Steve Coogan for Ideal Home (Brainstorm Media), which co-stars Paul Rudd, the two of them playing a bickering gay couple whose life is changed when a ten-year-old shows up claiming to be one of their grandsons.

Kate Bosworth stars in Mike P. Nelson’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Domestics (Orion Classics) along with Tyler Hoechlin, which will be released in theaters Thursday, then On Demand Friday, so don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

I haven’t seen Xavier Legrand’s French drama Custody (Kino Lorber), which opens at the IFC Centerafter running the festival gauntlet, but it involves a couple getting divorced who get into a custody battle. The IFC Center is also playing a 4k restoration of Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup starring Steve Buscemi following its premiere at Tribeca a few months back.

Israeli filmmaker Ofir Raul Grazier’s The Cakemaker (Strand), the Centerpiece of the New York Jewish Film Festival is about Thomas, a gay German baker who begins an affair with a married Israeli businessman, but when he dies, Thomas travels to Jerusalem under a false identity and begins working with his lover’s widow. It will open at the Quadin New York on Friday. (The Quad is also starting an ambitious series called “The New York Woman” with female-centric films set in New York City. Lots of good stuff in there!)

Other stuff out this weekend include Matt Osterman’s sci-fi film Hover (Syfy Films), written and starring Aussie actor Cleopatra Coleman (The Last Man on Earth, Step Up Revolution); Oscar-winning filmmaker Louis Psihoyos’ new doc Gamechangers (Parade Deck Films) about UFC champ James Wilks’ road to recovery after being injured; Daniel McCabe’s doc This is Congo (Abramorama), which looks at the ongoing conflict in the African country (on the 58thAnniversary of its independence); and also the self-explanatory Larger than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story (The Orchard) will open in Chicago Friday, in L.A. on July 20, and then be On Demand and digital starting July 31.

If you’re in New York, you’ll probably already know about the New York Asian Film Festival, which kicks off its 17thyear this Friday with Tominaga Masanori’s Dynamite Graffiti and closing with Erik Matti’s Phillipine film BuyBust. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to see any of the movies in advance, but there are always some nice surprises.

But honestly, if you don’t feel like going out to the movies and just want to stay home and watch Season 2 of the Netflix lady wrestling show Glow, then I certainly won’t blame you.

That’s it for this week. Next week is the 4thof July (on Wednesday) with Blumhouse’s The First Purgetaking on Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp opening Friday. I hope to have the column up by Weds. morning.

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