#goated film murphy oscar coming

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Oppenheimer's cast goes so hard?? cillian murphy rdj matt damon rami malek emily blunt florence pugh like wow im seated

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The Weekend Warrior 12/4/20 – HALF BROTHERS, THE PROM, I’M YOUR WOMAN, BLACK BEAR, LUXOR, ANOTHER ROUND, ALL MY LIFE, NOMADLAND, MANK and Much More!

I hope everyone had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was relatively uneventful, and I only spent most of my time watching movies.  And holy shit, there are a LOT of movies out this week, but at least a few of them I’ve already seen and reviewed, and there are others that are actually pretty good, so I might as well get to it, hm?

First up is this week’s Focus Features theatrical release, HALF BROTHERS, a buddy road comedy directed by Luke Greenfield (Blue Streak, Let’s Be Cops) that’s fairly high concept but also with quite a bit more depth than the director’s previous movies. It stars Luis Gerardo Méndez as Renato Murguia, a wealthy Mexican businessman whose father left him to come to America when Renato was just a child. Just as Renato is about to get married while having issues connecting to his future stepson Emilio, he gets a call that his own father is dying, so he begrudgingly goes to see him. Once there, Renato’s dying father sends him on a scavenger hunt to find someone named “Eloise” with his annoying slacker half-brother Asher (Connor del Rio), because that will provide all the answers Renato is looking for on why his father never returned from America, remarried and had another son. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’ve seen any of the ads for Half Brothers, you may already presume that this is a fairly high-concept buddy road comedy that is constantly going for the zaniest and craziest of laughs. That probably would only be maybe 25% of the movie. Instead, this fairly mainstream comedy finds a way to take a very common comedy trope and throw in enough heartfelt moments that you can forgive the few times when it does go for low-hanging fruit. We’ve seen so many movies like this where two guys (or sometimes ladies, but not as often) are paired with one having zero patience or tolerance for the other, who is beyond aggravating to them. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of the better ones.) Obviously, Renato fits snugly into the first category, and Asher could not be more annoying, very early on stealing a goat for no particular reason.

The Mexican angle and the fact that a lot of the film is in Spanish – Focus getting into Pantelion territory here? – does add to make Half Brothers feel like more of a personal story than we might normally see in this kind of movie, touching upon the immigrant experience, from the viewpoint of a low-paid worker as well as a well-to-do industrialist. It also deals with things like fatherhood and brotherhood and what it means to be one or both, so everything ultimately connects far better in the end than some might expect. I also want to give the filmmakers credit for putting together a cast of mostly unknown or little-known actors and getting such great results out of them.

On the surface, Half Brothers seems like just another buddy comedy, but underneath, it’s a heartfelt and emotional journey that touches in so many ways and ends up being quite enjoyable.

Another movie opening nationwide this Friday is ALL MY LIFE (Universal), starring Jessica (Happy Death Day) Rothe as Jennifer Carter and Harry (Crazy Rich Asians) Shum Jr. as Solomon Chau, whose wedding plans are thrown off when he is diagnosed with liver cancer. They realize they have to get married sooner since he might not live to make their planned date, so their friends launch a fundraiser so that they can get married in two weeks. The movie is directed by Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer), who is a more than capable filmmaker with this being his third movie in the last two years.

Now that I’ve actually seen the movie… I’ll freely admit that this is not the kind of movie I usually have very high expectations for, and maybe that’s because I’ve already been burnt twice this year with real-life romantic dramas, first with the faith-based I Still Believe in March and then more recently with Two Hearts. In both cases, I could count the issues and why they failed to tug at the heart strings as they were meant to do.  Even though I’ve generally enjoyed Meyers’ past movies, I wasn’t even sure he could pull off this type of studio romance movie without having to cowtow to the corny clichés that always seem to slip in – or at least find a way to make them more palatable. (And let’s be realistic. This is the kind of movie that snobby film critics just LOVE to trash.)

First of all, Meyers already has two truly fantastic leads working in his movie’s favor.  I’ve been a true Jessica Rothe stan ever since seeing her kill it in Happy Death Day and its sequel. Shum is perfectly paired with her, and the two of them are so good from the moment they first meet and we meet them.  In every scene, you feel like you’re watching some of that rare on-screen romantic chemistry that’s so hard to fake. Their relationship is romantic and goofy, and you’re just rooting for them all the way through even if you do know what’s to come.

Eventually, Sol does fall ill, and it does lead to some more dramatic and tougher moments between the couple, but all of it is handled so tastefully, including their need to raise money so they can have their wedding rather than waiting. I am living proof that people really do come together to step up when they see someone in real need, so I couldn’t even tut tut at something like their fundraiser getting so many people to chip in. On top of his two leads, Meyers has assembled such a great cast around the duo, the most recognizable being Jay Pharaoh from Saturday Night Live, everyone around Jess and Sol handles the requisite emotions with nary a weak link.

There’s just so much other stuff that adds to the enjoyment of watching All My Life from the use of Oasis and Pat Benatar in the soundtrack just to the quality storytelling that makes it all feel quite believable. These sorts of movies tend to be rather corny and the diehard cynic who doesn’t have an ounce of romance or love in their body will find things to hate.

All My Life finds its way into your heart by being one of those rare studio romance movies that understands how human emotions truly work, and there’s nothing corny about that. It’s a beautiful movie that entertains but also elicits more than a few tears. Watch it with someone you love.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Chloe Zhao’s amazing film NOMADLAND (Searchlight), which I reviewed out of its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, but it’s (sort of) being released in theaters this week. It stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman living in her van as she moves from place to place taking odd jobs within a community of nomads. It’s another amazing film from the filmmaker behind The Rider, who will make her foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe next year with The Eternals, which I’m just as psyched about. There’s no denying that McDormand gives a performance that’s a knock-out, even better than the one in 3 Billboards if you ask me, and there’s also a great supporting role for David Strathairn, who I’ve been hoping would have another role as good as this one. Zhao is just a fantastic filmmaker, and I’m glad to see that The Rider was no fluke.

Unfortunately, Nomadland is only getting a one-week Oscar qualifying run, and I’m not even sure where it’s getting that run since theaters in New York and L.A. aren’t even open yet. Maybe Searchlight will do some drive-in screenings like they did for the New York Film Festival and Telluride? It will get a stronger theatrical release (hopefully) on February 21, just to make doubly sure it qualifies for Oscars.

Opening in theaters this week before streaming on Netflix December 11 is Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Broadway musical THE PROM, the first feature film he’s directed in ten years. The multiple Tony-nominated musical is about a high school girl named Emma (newcomer Jo Ellan Pellman) who wants to take her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose) to their senior prom, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) cancels the prom instead. The national outrage the situation creates gets the attention of a quintet of self-absorbed Broadway actors who decide to improve their PR by taking up Emma’s cause. Oh, yeah, and those actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and actual Broadway stars Andrew Rannells and Kevin Chamberlin. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve never had any sort of positive or negative gut reaction to Murphy’s work on television over the past few years, but I’ve definitely been mixed on the three movies he’s directed to date. I wasn’t a huge fan of his Eat Pray Love, though I vaguely remember enjoying his debut, Running with Scissors. Either way, he certainly has found his niche with musicals from Glee (a show I’ve never watched)  and finding a musical like The Promseems to be a perfect fit between filmmaker and material.

Having not seen The Prom on Broadway – surprise, surprise -- I was a little worried that it was going to go down the path of nudge-nudge wink-wink inside Broadway path that helped Mel Brooks’ The Producers become a Broadway hit. That I saw, and I didn’t hate the movie based on it, although I’m by no means a total movie-musical stan. There’s some obvious older ones I love, some newer ones that others love but I hated – Rob Marshall is about 50/50 for me -- and you might be surprised by which of them I liked best.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about The Prom is that Murphy manages to truly surprise everyone watching it, whether it’s in Kerry Washington’s single song – who knew she had such an amazing singing voice? – or how enjoyable Keegan-Michael Key is as the school’s Principal Hawkins, who not only loves musicals but actually admires Streep’s two-time Tony-award winning Dee Dee Allen. Considering my frequent disdain for Streep’s over-confidence, knowing full well that she’s one of the best living actors working today, she’s actually pretty amazing in the role of what many must assume Streep is like in real life, which makes her character more than a little META. In some ways, I can say the same for Corden, who is pretty fantastic as Dee Dee’s frequent stage co-star Barry Glickman, who has his own connections to Emma’s plight having been disowned by his mother (Tracey Ullman, who only shows up for one brief scene late in the movie) when he came out to her. Corden has one dramatic moment so powerful I was taken quite aback.

Even with those two actors and Kidman likely to get much of the attention, there’s no denying that the romance between Hellman and Debose, and the three or four numbers they have together, makes up the true heart and soul of The Prom. So here you have this amazing cast, and it’s a musical made-up of very fun and quite catchy songs, and that’s long before you get to Andrew Rannells as out-of-work actor Trent Oliver, who practically steals the whole movie with his showstopper of a number, “Love Thy Neighbor.” And then watching Key holding his own with Streep, both musically and dramatically, you might start wondering, “What is going on here?”

Like I said before, it’s pretty obvious that Murphy has fully poured his passion of movie-musicals into every second of The Prom, and it shows on the face of everyone joining him on this adventure. As much as the subject at the film’s core is fairly serious and a hurdle that many gay kids across the world every day, it’s also quite funny. Kudos must be given to Murphy for being able to emphasize those moments as well as the more dramatic ones. Besides that, Murphy really takes advantage of being able to go to different locations, including a sequence on Broadway that could have been done during the pandemic (it actually was built on a soundstage), another number at an actual mall and even at a monster truck rally. It also doesn’t hurt that Murphy hired Matthew Libatique, a god-like cinematographer in my book, to film the movie either.

Like most musicals, The Prom might lose a little as it goes along, since it gets to be too much that goes on for too long, but then there are more than enough great moments to pull you back. It’s by far one of the stronger movie musicals I’ve seen in a very long time, and just the right feel-good experience we all need right now.

I’ve already reviewed David Fincher’s MANK – a few times, in fact – but if you’re in one of the places where it opened theatrically in November, you can finally see it on Netflix starting this Friday. This is the general problem with the way things are these days because even though this only opened a few weeks ago, I already feel that it’s been discussed and forgotten before most people will have a chance to see it.  Anyway, if for some reason, you’ve managed to avoid things about the movie, it essentially stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who ended up co-writing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1940. The film follows Mankiewicz as he mingles with the Hollywood elite in the 30s, including billionaire William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his young ingenue girlfriend Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) who would be the influence for his Oscar-winning screenplay. I expect to be writing a lot about this movie as we get closer to Oscar season sometime next year.

Also on Netflix this week is Selena: The Series, starring Christian Serratos. It’s the kind of thing that I probably would never watch unless I have an excess of time, and as you’re about to learn from the rest of the column, that doesn’t happen frequently.

The third chapter of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe Anthology,” RED WHITE AND BLUE, will debut on Prime Video this Sunday, starring John Boyega as Leroy Logan, a young black man who joins the Metropolitan Police after seeing his father assaulted by police and wanting to make a difference in the racist attitudes from within. You might remember that I reviewed this out of the New York Film Festival a couple months back, so not much more to say there.

A week from Sunday, on December 13, McQueen’s fourth film, ALEX WHEATLE, will hit Amazon, and guess what? I’ve already seen it, so I will review it now. How about that? Alex Wheatle is also a true story, this one starring Sheyi Cole as the award-winning young adult writer when he was a younger and just learning the ropes as a drugdealer/DJ in Brixton before his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots gets him thrown in jail.

As with the other three movies in the “Small Axe Anthology” there are recurring elements and themes in Alex Wheatle, mostly about the way the immigrants to England from Jamaica and other islands are treated by “The Beast” aka what they call the Metropolitan Police. It does take a little time to get to that, as McQueen, working from a screenplay co-written by Mangrove’s Alaistar Siddons, takes a far more non-linear approach than the other three films. We first see Wheatle being taken into prison where he’s thrown into a cell with a constantly-shitting Rastafarian, but we then cut back to his schooling for a short sequence that reminded me of Alan Clarke’s Scum. Both in prison and in school, we see Alex being abused by classmates and head matron alike, and this portion of the film includes another one of arty moments of actor Cole laying on the ground eyes wide open staring for what seems to go on forever. In some ways, this sequence reminds me of McQueen’s fantastic early film Hunger, since it seems to be cut from similar cloth.

Eventually, Alex gets to Brixton and that’s where this chapter in “Small Axe” really takes off as we see how naïve and green he is while dealing with quite a tough crowd and trying to adjust to city life among the Rastafarian community.

As with the other “Small Axe” chapters, I love how McQueen and his team used reggae music to help set the tone and vibe for the episode, because like Baz Lurhman’s Netflix series The Get Down, the music is frequently a key to this biopic working so well. Of course, it’s also due to the performance by Cole and the actors around him that helps make you feel as if you’re seeing a real part of history.

As with Mangrove, this chapter culminates with an amazing recreation of the 1981 Brixton Riots, done in protest after a house party fire in New Cross that the police don’t bother investigating. The actual riots were a much bigger and scarier event going by Wikipedia which says that 279 police were injured and 56 police vehicles set fire, which makes it sound more like the ’92 L.A. Riots.

I’m not sure Alex Wheatle does as good a job explaining how the young man goes into prison as a DJ and comes out as an author, but like Red, White and Blue it’s still an important and inspirational story that adds quite a bit to the previous three “Small Axe” films.

And once again, here is my interview with McQueen from over at Below the Line.

Also, I should mention that Darius Marder’s excellent Sound of Metal movie, starring Riz Ahmed, hits Amazon Prime Video this Friday, too. Check out my review!

The magnificent Andrea Riseborough stars in Zeina Durra’s LUXOR (Samuel Goldwyn), playing British aid worker Hana who while spending time in the ancient city of Luxor, runs into her former lover Sultan (Karim Saleh), as she reflects on past decisions and her current uncertain situation.

I was quite interested in this one sight unseen, not only because it’s another great starring role for Riseborough. (Honestly, she is one of the best actors working today, and I strongly believe she is just one role away from being the next Olivia Colman, who had been amazing for years before everyone in America “discovered” her in The Favourite and then The Crown… which I still haven’t watched! ARGH!). I was a little anxious about the movie, having seen Rubba Nadda’s Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, which seemingly had the exact same plot.

Durra is a much more capable and confident filmmaker and there’s a lot more overall value in watching Riseborough exploring Egypt as Durra quietly allows Hana’s story to unfold through her interactions with others, as well as her time alone, often languishing in one luxurious hotel room or another.  Then there are the quiet and sometime awkward scenes between her and Saleh, the two of them having been lovers when they were both much younger. We also see Hana in far more vulnerable moments, so we know that she’s by no means actor, and it takes a great actor to really pull off such a dichotomy and bring such dimension to a character with so few words.

There’s something that’s almost comforting watching her dealing with emotions like loneliness in such a tranquil way. I’d even go so far to say that Luxor works in many ways similar to Nomadland, which obviously is getting the far more high-profile release with lots of festival love long before its actual release.  Like that movie, Durra’s film benefits from having masterful cinematography by Zelmira Gainza and an equally gorgeous score by Nascuy Linares, to boot.

Luxor is a quiet, beautifully-made film that really took me by surprise. It acts as much like a travelogue of the title city as it does a tourist’s map to what it must feel like being a woman very much on her own in a foreign land.

I also spoke with Luxor filmmaker Zeina Durra, an interview that will be up at Below the Line hopefully sometime later this week.

With all the talk about Aubrey Plaza in Happiest Season (now on Hulu!), this would be a great time to release another one of her indies that played at the Sundance Film Festival this year, right? What can possibly go wrong?

In Lawrence Michael Levine’s BLACK BEAR (Momentum Pictures), Plaza plays Allison, an actor/filmmaker who arrives at the remote lake house of Christopher Abbott’s Gabe and his pregnant partner Blair (Sarah Gadon), to relax and work on a screenplay, only for the night to turn into philosophical discussions that transform into angry and even violent squabbles. In the second part of the movie, Gabe is the director, and Allison his actor wife, who thinks he’s sleeping with Blair, who is also acting in Gabe’s film.

That plot might seem a little vague, and I can’t exactly tell you whether there is much connection between the two parts of the movie other than it features the same three characters. The first half turns from a drama into a thriller before ending abruptly, while the second part is equal parts comedy and drama as we see a larger part of the world around the trio. In fact, the second part of Black Bear reminded me somewhat of Olivier Assayas’Irma Vep, one of my favorite movies, and that might be one of the highest compliments I can pay a movie.

But first, you have to get through the more quizzical and dramatic first part, which easily could have been done as a three-handed stageplay as we see the changing dynamics between the three people as things get crazier and crazier with one “Holy shit!” moment after the next. (It reminded me a little of Mamet or the play “Gods of Carnage,” although I only saw that as the movie version Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski.)

The fact the connection between the two parts is never explained might confound some people who were otherwise enjoying what is a pretty decent three-hander, but the common theme involves jealousy between the two women. Plaza is a fine dramatic actor when she wants to be, and Gadon is absolutely fantastic, which makes Abbot almost literally the odd man out, but the three of them just have great scenes together.

Black Bear is certainly an enigma of a movie, as much a mystery about what must be going on inside Plaza’s head during some of her softer and crazier scenes, but if you want to talk about range, this gives her so much material for her demo reel that no one could possibly doubt her as an actor again.

Thomas Vinterberg’s new movie ANOTHER ROUND (Samuel Goldwyn) reteams him with his The Hunt star Mads Mikkelsen for a comedy…. Ish… about a group of four middle aged Danish teachers who decide to hold an experiment to prove a theory that people only reach their maximum effectiveness and creativity when they’re .05% drunk. It starts out innocently enough but soon, the men are drinking heavily at school, leading to horrible and unfortunate side effects. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Even knowing Vinterberg’s knack for strange and twisted “comedies,” Another Round is definitely on another level, opening with a scene of drunken kids playing a drinking game that gets them so out-of-control drunk and rowdy. We then meet Mikkelsen’s Martin, a history teacher, whose rowdy seniors are so bored by his classroom technique that Martin is put in front of an inquisition of parents who think he’s going to make their kids fail their final exams. Martin’s home life isn’t much better with his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) or his own teen sons. Although Martin says he won’t drink when he has to drive, his friend Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) convinces him by announcing his theory about how everyone needs to always maintain a certain percentage of alcohol in their system.  Over the course of the rest of the movie, we’re shown the alcohol level of our “heroes,” although most will see their behavior as some kind of synced-up middle life crisis. For Martin, it’s a breakthrough, as he starts feeling more confident and assertive towards his students, even trying to connect with them via their drinking activities, as seen in the opening montage.

Another Round is quite a different beast from The Hunt, because there’s a more humorous tone to the point where I could totally see an American studio trying to remake this with the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, which would probably lose a lot of the poignancy of what Vinberberg was trying to achieve here. At one point, he throws in a montage of seemingly drunk world leaders, which is kind of amusing even if it’s not quite so apparent why it’s there. There’s a lot of really bad white guy dancing, too, for anyone who is into that sort of thing.

There is definitely a good amount of grief and sadness to the way this story resolves, although Vinterberg still finds a way to leave Martin in a place of joy with a closing scene that may surprise a lot of people. Another Round is another tremendous feather in the cap of the Vinterberg/Mikkelsen collaboration, and it will be in select theaters this Friday before going to digital on December 18.

Another Round will be in select theaters this Friday and then on digital December 18.

Fast Color director Julia Hart returns with I’M YOUR WOMAN (Amazon), once again co-written with husband Jordan Horowitz. It stars Rachel Brosnahan from The Amazing Mrs. Maisel (which I haven’t seen) as Jean, a woman unable to have a baby with her small-time crook husband Eddie. One night, Eddie brings home a baby for Jean, but then he quickly vanishes and Jean finds herself on the run with a stolen baby and one of Eddie’s accomplices, Cal (Arinzé Kene), and there are bad men wanting to question Jean about her missing husband’s whereabouts.

This is another movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, and having not watched Brosnahan on her award-winning show, I was watching this movie trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.  It’s evident from the start that Hart/Horowitz were trying to make a ‘70s-set movie with all the trappings of ‘70s fashion and music, but when you throw in the crime element, it comes across a little too much like last year’s The Kitchen, which wasn’t very good but also wasn’t based on very good source material.

One would presume that the genre elements and a few scattered set pieces, like a shootout at a club, would be the main draw, but it’s almost 30 minutes before we even get any sort of plot, and that’s a big problem. An even bigger problem is that I’m Your Woman just drags for so much of the movie, and it’s pretty obvious that Hart-Horowitz were trying to create a ‘70s movie like some of the films by Scorsese and the movies John Cassavetes made with wife Gena Rowlands. By comparison, I’m Your Woman is stylized almost to a pretentious degree.  Brosnahan does show a few glimpses of there being a good actor in there, but the material just really isn’t quite up to snuff. It also doesn’t help the movie to have the baby crying almost non-stop throughout.

Jean eventually pairs up with Cal’s woman Teri (Martha Stephanie Blake), her son Paul and Cal’s father (played by Frankie Faison), and this is when she learns more about Eddie’s life that she doesn’t know about. Eventually, things start to pick up in the last act, but the multiple problems Hart has with maintaining a steady pace or tone only mildly is made up for by her terrific DP and whoever put together the musical score.  Essentially, the last 30 minutes of I’m Your Woman does make up for the previous 85 minutes, but it’s going to be very hard for many people to even get through how dull the movie is up until that point.

This is a week with some very fine docs, the first one being Weixi Chen and Hao Wu*’s cinema verité film 76 DAYS (MTV Documentary Films), which goes behind the doors of the Wuhan ICU Red Cross hospital over the first 76 days of the COVID pandemic after it hit the rural area of China. (*One of the film’s co-directors/cinematographers shot the film anonymously.)

Here I thought that Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control would be the best or maybe even only movie about the pandemic released this year, but here we have a fantastic documentary that captures what it was really like in one Wuhan hospital as it was nearly overrun months before COVID started to rear its ugly head in the States. The film begins in January 23, 2020 and follows a number of cases as we watch the personnel, all decked out in head-to-toe PPE, trying to save lives and keep people calm while trying to struggle with all the stresses that come their way. There’s actually a little bit of humor in a cranky elderly man (clearly with some form of dementia) who keeps wandering around the hospital, frustrating his tenders, but there’s also a very moving story of a young pregnant woman who has contracted COVID, who ends up being separated from her baby after a Cesarian section.

There are moments early in the movie where you can see panic starting to set in as we see how out of control things begin, but the anonymous health care workers soon get things underhand and manage to find a way to deal with the panic that’s setting in. There’s no question that these doctors and nurses – many whose faces we never even see -- are the definition of frontline workers, trying to deal with this unknown virus without all the answers and solutions that have been discovered over the past ten months.

76 Days will open via the Film Forum Virtual Cinema as well as other places presumably.

I’m glad I had Dana Nachman’s DEAR SANTA (IFC Films) to watch after 76 Days, because I don’t think I could have handled another dark or deep movie after that one. This doc is all about “Operation Santa,” the amazing group of volunteers and adopters who receive the letters young kids write to the North Pole and go out of their way to fulfill the kids’ wishes.

I was a big fan of Nachman’s Pick of the Litter, so I’m thrilled to say that Dear Santa is just as wonderful and joyous, starting with a bunch of kids explaining Santa Clause enthusiastically, because they really believe in Jolly Saint Nick. Over the course of the film, Nachman profiles a number of Adopter Elves, who look through the letters written to Santa by unfortunate kids and pick a few to fulfill their wishes. A lot of them are in New York and Chicago where the program has led to a number of non-profits, but Nachman also goes to Chico, California where many of the families from Paradise, the town destroyed by fires in 2018, ended up relocation. One story of an Adopter Elf named Damion is particularly wonderful, since he, like many of those who get involved in the program, are trying to give back and pay it forward.

Operation Santa is such a great program and Dear Santa is such a wonderful movie, I challenge anyone to watch it and not tear up from how big their heart will grow while watching it.

Julien Temple’s doc CROCK OF GOLD: A NIGHT WITH SHANE MACGOWAN (Magnolia Pictures) is pretty self-explanatory from its title, but as someone who was never really a Pogues fan, I was almost as entertained by Temple’s film as I was by Alex Winter’s Zappa about a musician who I actually was a fan of. Temple uses MacGowan’s own narration to tell his story from growing up in Ireland, the early days of punk that led to the Pogues and eventually, mainstream success.

My absolute adoration of well-made music docs is fairly well-known at this point, and you can’t really get much better in terms of music doc makers than Julien Temple, who had his cameras rolling in the early days of punk, captured one of David Bowie’s more interesting mainstream phases and also made a very cool movie about The Clash frontman, Joe Strummer.

Although I never really cared for The Pogues, that’s probably because I didn’t know them from their rowdier days and more from their mainstream success from “Fairytale of New York” but Temple’s movie rectifies that with some amazing footage from the band’s earlier days. Even more impressive is the footage and pictures of MacGowan during the late ‘70s dancing in the audience at Sex Pistols and other punk shows. (Temple even interviewed MacGowan during this period in the ‘70s, then put the footage in the movie.) As MacGowan tells his own story about growing up in Ireland, Temple frequently uses varied animation to recreate the stories being told, and that does a lot to embellish the cartoon nature of MacGowan’s storytelling.

I still think MacGowan is a bit of an asshole -- I’m sure he’d agree with that assessment -- but Temple has found a way into this very difficult musician, sometimes using close friends like Johnny Depp (a producer on the film) and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream to try to get MacGowan to open up about as much as he ever might. Crock of Gold is certainly an eye-opening portrait of the Pogues frontman that surprisingly offers something to enjoy even for those who never got into his music, but it also shows another dimension to his many fans. If nothing else, it’s a fine testament to why Temple is one of the best music doc filmmakers.

Magnolia held a bunch of one-night only theatrical screenings on Tuesday and will have more on Thursday, but if you miss those, you can catch it On Demand/digital this Friday. (I also have a really enjoyable interview with Julien Temple over at Below the Line that you should check out.)

A.J. and Jenny Tesler’s doc MAGNOLIA’S HOPE follows four years in the life of their young daughter Magnolia (aka Maggie), who has Rett Syndrome. Maggie’s filmmaking parents talk about noticing her strange behavior and finding out that she had a genetic disorder that makes it harder for children to retain what they’ve learned in terms of movement but also might led to far worse disorders. It makes it almost impossible for her to communicate with her parents, which makes it heartbreaking but also quite inspirational that the parents would allow us into their very own difficult journey to try to get their daughter to use and develop all of the skills she learns by making her practice them every single day. The movie will be available to watch for the month of December on the streaming platform Show and Tell, but it’s such a personal movie and another one where I think it will be hard for many to watch without getting a little teary but more out of joy than sadness.

Also out this week is David Osit’s MAYOR (Film Movement), which follows Musa  Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah during his second term of office and determined to make his city a beautiful and dignified place to lived despite being surrounded on all sides by soldiers and Israeli settlements. It will open today at the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema in New York after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

What there’s more? How about Braden R. Duemmler’s WHAT LIES BELOW (Vertical Entertainment), a thriller starring Ema Hovarth from Quibi’s Don’t Look Deeper as Liberty (aka Libby), a teen girl returning from camp only to learn her mother (Mena Suvari) has a hot younger boyfriend named John (Trey Tucker), who Libby soon begins to question whether he’s human. What could possibly go wrong?

I knew I was in trouble when Suvari is picking her daughter up from archeology camp (that’s a thing?) and I misheard her asking her daughter “Any nice digs?” (think about it), especially since Suvari is playing a stereotypically over-sexed cougar, something that becomes far more obvious once we meet her boyfriend that she’s been sexing up at her lake house. There’s certainly a danger of What Lies Below turning into a prequel to a Pornhub video, but thankfully, Duemmler gets away from the inappropriate sexuality inherent in John’s presence and into the weird behavior that gets Libby suspicious.

Sure, maybe calling the movie “My Stepfather is an Alien” would have been more apropos, and there’s elements of the movie that reminded me of the Tom Hanks’ movie The ‘burbs, and not in a good way. Even so, Hovarth, who really looks like Suvari’s daughter, does a fine job holding this together and keeping you invested in how things might pan out, as things get weirder and weirder and the movie eventually transforms itself into a halfway decent and creepy “body horror” flick.

Weird but well-done, What Lies Below is not even close to the worst thriller I’ve seen this year. That might seem like damning praise, but it’s the best I can do for this one.

Debuting on Shudder this Thursday is Justin G. Dyck’s ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (Shudder), a “reverse exorcism” movie in which a seemingly kindly couple, played by Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings, kidnap a pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos) in hopes of getting the spirit of their grandson Jackson, who died in a car crash, and put him into her baby… with the help of demons. What could possibly go wrong? (If you hadn’t guessed, this is the theme of this week’s Weekend Warrior.)

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the horror delivered by streamer Shudder this year, and Anything for Jackson is no exception. In fact, going over Dyck’s filmography, it’s kind of surprising how decent a horror filmmaker he is, because most of his other movies seem like Hallmark-style Christmas movies? Crazy. There are aspects of Anything for Jackson, written by Keith Cooper, who wrote some of those holiday movies for Dyck. I honestly can imagine the two of them making this movie just to be able to do something different, so they come into the horror realm with tons of fim making experience and easily transition into horror.

At the heart of this movie are McCarthy, Richings and Mantelos, who are all fine actors who do a great job selling the horrors but do just as well during the quieter dramatic moments.  Not that there are that many of them, as Dyck/Cooper throw so many absolutely horrific moments at the viewer so that diehard horror fans will not be disappointed. Things shift into another gear when Josh Cruddas joins in as a Satanic cult leader they bring in to help them when they realize they’re out of their league. The results are something akin to Insidiousin terms of the types of demons and ghosts thrown at the viewer.

At times, Anything for Jackson was a little hard to follow, maybe due to its non-linear storytelling, but at least it has a substantial amount of decent replay value, since the demons and kills are so gloriously gory.

Eric Schultz’s dark and trippy sci-fi thriller MINOR PREMISE (Utopia) stars Sathya Sridharan as neuroscientist Ethan, who gets caught up in his own risky experiment involving memory loss when he becomes trapped in his home with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook), and he doesn’t remember how they both got there.

For his directorial debut, Schultz has taken the cerebral indie sci-fi film route that we’ve seen in other filmmaking debuts like Shane Carruth’s Primer, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, and if you’re a fan of those movies, you’ll already know if this would be for you or not. This is also the kind of movie that really requires the closest attention and fullest focus, which is not something I’m great at right now. Because of that, I don’t have a ton to say about a film that does a good job pulling the viewer in with its intriguing premise.

Schultz is a pretty decent filmmaker and discovering Sridharan, who has done a lot of single-episode TV appearances but nothing major, is quite a coup since this is quite a solid showcase for the young actor. I wasn’t as crazy about Ashbrook, which makes it for a rather uneven two-hander.

Minor Premise is just fine, and I think some people will definitely like it more than I did. I definitely will have to watch it again when I’m not so distracted by ALL THOSE OTHER MOVIES ABOVE THAT I JUST FUCKING REVIEWED!

It will be in theaters, in virtual cinema, and digital/On Demand this Friday, so check it out for yourself.

And finally…

Director Dennis Dugan of Big Daddy and Happy Gilmore directs LOVE, WEDDINGS AND OTHER DISASTERS (Saban Films), a “Love American Style” rom-com anthology with a cast that includes Maggie Grace, Jeremy Irons, Diane Keaton and more. Grace plays Jessie, a fairly inexperienced wedding plan hired to orchestrate the high-profile wedding of Boston mayoral candidate (Dennis Staroselsky), and then… oh, you know what? I’ll leave the rest of the description to the review portion of our review.

We meet Grace’s character as she and her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend are skydiving, which goes horribly wrong as they end up fighting all the way down and crashing through an outdoor wedding, caught on a viral video that gets her dubbed the “Wedding Thrasher.” Imagine what a PR disaster that would be for mayoral candidate Rob Barton to have her planning his wedding, but Jessie quickly bonds with his fiancé Liz (Caroline Portu) and begins preparations. Meanwhile, Barton’s problematic brother Jimmy (Andy Goldenberg) has gone on a game show called “Crash Couples” (that’s hosted by no less than Dugan himself) and he allows himself to be chained to a Russian “lawyer” named Svetlana (Melinda Hill) who is actually a stripper. They’re willing to stick it out since the winner gets a million dollars.

Surely, that’s more than enough stories, right? Nope. Turns out that Jessie’s main competition to plan the wedding is a legendary caterer named Lawrence Phillips (Irons) who is set-up on a blind date with Diane Keaton, who is blind. Oy vey.  Also, there’s Andrew Bachelor as Captain Ritchie, who gives humorous sightseeing tours of Boston via the Charles River in an odd land/water vehicle, but one day, he encounters a young woman with a glass slipper tattoo, and he becomes quite smitten. We’ll get back to him. Maybe. In fact, Duggan spends so much time setting up different stories and relationships without much connection that you wonder whether he can tie things up in the oh-so-predictable way these things normally go.

Although the movie starts out fine, and it’s actually not a bad role for Grace, as soon as Duggan introduces the game show, then we learn that Svetlana (real name Olga) is a tripper connected to the mob and they get involved, things just start going downhill very fast. Also, the idea that Keaton -- who I haven’t seen in a good movie in almost two decades --  would not think twice about playing a klutzy blind person. As soon as she shows up and immediately knocks over one of Phillips’ signature champagne glass fountains, I knew we were in for a very long haul. I didn’t even mention the other storyline involving a musician named Mack (Diego Boneta) whose band Jessie is trying to get to play the wedding – one of the multiple meet-cutes in the movie -- although Mack is squabbling with his bandmate Lenny (Jesse McCartney) who has a new Asian girlfriend who is intruding in their friendship.  (I’m sure the fact her name is “Yoni” is meant as as Yoko Ono reference.)

Then on top of that, Dugan steals the gimmick from There’s Something About Mary, by constantly cutting back to Elle King and Keaton Simmons as they’re playing folksy songs in the park. Okay, the fact that Dugan wrote many of those pretty decent songs they perform is pretty impressive.

But the movie is very predictable, especially how it all comes together for the finale, which obviously has to take place at the wedding to which everything has been building up to.

Otherwise, Dugan’s film is maybe 20% an okay movie but the other 80%? Yeesh!! It’s about as romantic as a date with the Marquis de Sade, and it somehow manages to be an equal opportunity offender... in terms of offending blind people, Asians, Jews, Arabs, gay people and even strippers and Russian mafia. It took Dugan 14 years to get this passion project made, and it’s pretty obvious why.

As usual, there were a couple movies I didn’t have time to watch, but not quite as many as the ones I did make time to watch:

King of Knives (Gravitas Ventures) End of Sentence (Gravitas Venture) Billie (Greenwich) Godmothered (Disney+) Wander (Saban Films) Music Got Me Here (First Run Features) Stand! (Fathom Events, Imagination Worldwide) HAM: A Musical Memoir (Global Digital Releasing) In the Mood for Love (4k Restoration)

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!