Not Quite the Usual Weekend Warrior 11/4
DOC-NYC, ONE PIECE FILM: RED, ARMAGEDDON TIME, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, WEIRD, SOMETHING IN THE DIRT, NEXT EXIT, BARDO, and More
You may have noticed that this column has been on hiatus for most of the past month with no new reviews from me either. I’ve been using that time to try to catch up on other things, a plan that only partially worked.
I’m going to put a couple of limitations on myself for writing this column, which will include a two-hour time limit to write it and maybe I’ll try to limit the word count to 3,000 words tops. (And believe me, I can write 3,000 words in two hours with no problem, whatsoever.) I also think this will be a little more ad hoc, not stream of consciousness so much, but definitely less formatted than I’ve been doing. I feel like you can get a pretty good idea of my weekly predictions by reading by Box Office Breakdown over at AboveTheLine.com and Gold Derby, so I’m not going to spend that much time doing more of that here, and will try to focus more on the movies coming out that you should try to watch or avoid.
But before we get to this week, I want to talk about one of my favorite annual New York festivals, and that’s DOC-NYC, which is pretty much what it sounds like, but it is probably one of the top doc festivals in the world, at this point, premiering many new docs but also screening some of the best docs from earlier in the year. This year’s festival is extra-special, because it’s going out as a hybrid festival where you can watch movies at in-person premieres, but also see many of the festival’s offerings via its digital platform. The festival begins next Wednesday, November 9, and runs through November 27, but I’m going to talk about it a bit here, just because I’m not sure if next week’s column will hit before Wednesday. (That’s something I’m generally not sure about anymore.)
DOC-NYC launched next Wednesday with the US premiere of Stephanie Johnses’ Maya and the Wave, an amazing portrait of Brazilian big-wave surfer Maya Gabeira, following her dream to set a Guinness world record for the biggest wave ever surfed. Facing many challenges, including being one of the few women big-wave riders, but also facing a serious injury during one attempt to tackle the enormous waves at Nazeré in Portugal. Gabeira is quite an inspiration, not just to young girls, but pretty much to anyone who wants to see how a dedicated athlete like her can take on such a daunting task in order to be recognized. (And seriously, this is one movie that really needs to be seen on the big screen to get the full awe of the tiny Gabeira riding her board in those gigantic waves.)
This year’s Doc-NYC also has the World Premieres of Maxim Pozdorovkind’s The Conspiracy and Gumbo Coalition, the new doc from two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple, who will be honored by my own group, the Critics Choice Association at this year’s Critics Choice Documentary Awards on November 13. Incidentally, the great Werner Herzog will be on hand to receive a Lifetime Achievement award at Doc-NYC, as will Geralyn White Dreyfous. Ondi Timoner, whose brilliant Last Flight Out will screen, is another one of the festival’s honorees, as is Sonya Childress. Dawn Porter’s Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net will also get a World Premiere.
Two sections to keep an eye on at Doc-NYC are “Winner’s Circle” and “The Short List,” which feature some of the best documentaries of the year from a number of festivals. One film I caught, which premiered at SXSW, was David Siev’s Bad Axe, an amazing cinema verité portrait of his Cambodian-Mexican family living in Bad Axe, Michigan, running a restaurant that faces all sorts of hurdles due to COVID and just the state of our country (and that very red area of the state) in 2020. The way Siev tells this story is nothing short of brilliant, and it will be released by IFC Films on November 18, so I hope to have more to say about it soon. (I also interviewed Siev for CinemaDailyUS, so will share that soon, as well.)
There are a lot more docs to talk about but I still have to get to the rest of this week’s column before I run out of time or words.
For those not in New York, there are a bunch of other things for you to see…
ONE PIECE FILM: RED (Crunchyroll)
I really don’t know much about this anime series from Japan other than this is the 15th feature film in the series, and there are over 200 episodes of the cartoon series, and yeah, I’m not going to be catching up on all of that in order to talk about this new film, which has already grossed $144 million before Crunchyroll releases it into 2,500 theaters this Friday. Either way, I haven’t seen it, nor do I plan to, so I probably won’t have much more to say about it here.
ARMAGEDDON TIME (Focus)
James Gray’s semi-autobiographical film premiered all the way back in May at Cannes, but it also has played a number of other festivals, including this year’s New York Film Festival, and I only caught it far more recently. Gray’s stand-in for this story is Banks Repeta’s Paul Graff, a Jewish teen in Queens, whose parents (played by Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) want to send him to a prestigious private school. Paul has made friends with an African-American kid named Johnny (played by Jaylin Webb, who was also great in Till), but he soon learns that his parents don’t approve of his friendship. Paul’s grandfather, played by Anthony Hopkins, tries to instill wisdom into his grandson about sticking up for those like Johnny, who are constantly struggling with the system, but Paul kind of throws Johnny under the bus.
Although I think Focus has put together a great trailer for this movie – which will be expanding into about 800 theaters this Friday – I didn’t really like the movie very much. This is probably not something too surprising, as I’ve always been a bit hot-cold on Gray’s movies. I loved his earlier movies with Joaquin Phoenix like Little Odessa, The Yards, and We Own the Night, I feel he’s gotten somewhat hit-or-miss since then. Armageddon Time is further proof of this as it continues a long line of filmmakers making personal, semi-autobiographical films like next week’s The Fabelmans from Steven Spielberg (which is currently in my top 10 for the year). And, of course, there’s Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast last year and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma a few years before that. It’s a veritable trend.
I just didn’t think this was a particularly interesting story, and though Hopkins’ performance is great and the Emmy-winning Strong has some fine moments, I did not care for Banks Repeta as an actor or his character at all. He just didn’t deliver a performance that made his character particularly relatable, and it’s clear that Webb is just a far superior young actor. I’m not sure how much more I want to say about this – the fact that I didn’t like the story made it hard to appreciate many other aspects of the film, and frankly, I was just glad when it was over – and yet, I was also disappointed by how it just ended, really not leaving me with anything to remember it by. So yeah, I would say this is a good movie to skip this weekend.
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Seachlight)
A movie I enjoyed much more, and one that I’m sure will be all over the Oscar nominations when they’re announced (and all sorts of other awards before and after) is the newest one from playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh, whose earlier films In Bruges and 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, have been heaped with lavish and much-deserved praise. This one reunites the In Bruges duo of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for a story set on a remote Irish island roughly 100 years ago during the country’s Civil War (which I didn’t know about until speaking with McDonagh for Above The Line). Farrell plays Pádraic, who has had a falling out with his best friend, Gleeson’s Colm, but he doesn’t know why, and as he tries to figure that out, Colm just starts taking drastic measures to keep his former friend away from him.
This is a marvelously dark comedy that has Farrell and Gleeson doing something very different than they did In Bruges. It features McDonagh’s sharp and witty writing brought to life by two of Ireland’s top actors, as well as a great supporting performance by Kerry Condon as Padraic’s sister, Siobhan, who has had about enough of both of them. Besides the great writing and performances, McDonagh has put together an amazing below-the-line team, reuniting with DP Ben Davis and composer Carter Burwell, to really create a lush landscape and setting in which to tell this rather amusing tale. I hope I’ll have a chance to see it again to really appreciate all that was involved, but between you, me, and the wall? I enjoyed this far more than last year’s Belfast, despite it being so dark.
WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY (Roku Channel)
Before we get to other theatrical releases, I want to mention that director Jeff Appel’s biopic parody of “Weird Al” Yankovic will hit the Roku Channel on Friday. If you haven’t heard about this, but you are familiar with Yankovic’s music and satiric M.O., then you’ll be in for a treat. First of all, it has Daniel Radcliffe playing Yankovic in what is a biopic that is not even loosely based on Yankovic’s real story, but it follows him as he discovers the accordion and then figures out how to write new lyrics for other songs in order to achieve instant fame. At a certain point, the movie starts to go off the rails, maybe when Evan Rachel Wood shows up, playing Madonna – impeccably, mind you – and trying to woo Al into writing a parody of one of her songs. She also gets him into alcohol and drugs (with the help of Rainn Wilson’s Dr. Demento), and things just go haywire from there.
I saw this movie at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September, and it was just an absolute hoot, even though at first, I had no idea that it wasn’t meant to be a factual biopic based on Yankovic’s real life and career. No, instead, Yankovic and Appel co-wrote the most outrageous parody of a biopic possible, which is just funnier if you’ve seen things like Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody or other musical biopics that seem to tread some of the same beats.
Honestly, this is one of the funniest things I’ve seen this year – and the cameos are all quite brilliant! – and if there’s one good reason to get the Roku Channel, this is it! (The second good reason is to watch the hilarious Chrissy’s Court, which was ported over from my much-missed Quibi.)
(You can read my interview with Appel over at Above The Line sometime this week, hopefully, too.)
SOMETHING IN THE DIRT (XYZ Films)
A movie I actually saw twice at the virtual Sundance in January and then again recently is the latest indie genre film from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who most will either know for Synchronic or for their work on Marvel’s Moon Knight series, of which they directed a couple episodes. I actually reviewed this movie out of Sundance, but I also rewatched it at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (more on that below), and I’ve generally enjoyed it more and more as I’m able to figure more things out as it goes along. The filmmaking duo play neighbors in an L.A. apartment complex (as I learned, it’s where they live, too) who start experiencing paranormal activities and decide to try to document them, as things become more and more dangerous. That’s pretty much the Cliff Notes version of the plot, pretty much just the surface story of a film that gets into as many complexities as their previous films like The Endless and Synchronic. Chances are you’ll already know their films, but if not, this isn’t a bad entry point to see what these guys can get up to, doing almost everything themselves. (I will have an interview with Benson and Moorhead over at Above The Line very soon, as well.)
NOCEBO (RLJEfilms)
The opening night film of this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival – which I got to spend a lot more time at this year than in the past, and it was quite a fun time – is this new movie from Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium), from a script by Garret Shanley (who wrote Vivarium). This will hit select theaters on Friday, but then be On Demand on Nov. 22. It stars the amazing Eva Green as fashion designer Christine, who has been having some health issues, so she hires a Filipina maid and nanny Diana (Chai Fonacier) to watch her young son. (Green’s husband is played by Mark Strong, one of my favorite actors, so bonus points there!) Although doctors are confounded by Christine’s condition, things just get worse as Diana seems to be practicing all sorts of supernatural mambo-jumbo that just makes things worse.
I generally enjoyed this more than Vivarium, and it has aspects of a couple other decent movies out this year, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and the upcoming Nanny, although for different reasons. Like Triangle of Sadness, this has a great performance by a great Pinay actress, but it also involves an immigrant dealing with the class system, similar to Nanny. Eva Green is a fantastic actor, and I love how she’s paired with Chai Fonacier to create a genre/horror film that just gets crazier and crazier as it goes along. (That’s also the general theme of this year’s genre films with the likes of Barbarian, X/Pearl, and many more.)
NEXT EXIT (Magnet)
I’m pretty happy to see a movie, written and directed by someone I know, Mali Elfman, get a theatrical release, this one being a film I saw and enjoyed at Tribeca back in June. It’s definitely a genre film that involves a reality where a doctor (played by Karen Gillan) has figured out a way to track people in the afterlife. This leads to a rash of people travelling to visit her institute in order to get (for lack of a better term) assisted suicides so that they can see their loved ones again. Two such people making the road trip are Katie Parker’s Rose and Rahul Kohli’s Teddy, strangers who become unlikely travel mates as they drive across country to see if this doctor can help them solve their problems. While Elfman’s directorial debut definitely has genre elements, it’s really more of a road dramedy with really strong characterizations and performances by the main duo, which I hope will find an audience despite the trailer focusing a lot on Gillan (who to be honest, is barely in the film). Oh, guess what? This ALSO played the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, just to give you some idea of the quality of the films at this year’s festival.
CAUSEWAY (A24/Apple TV+)
We just continue with the great movies by women filmmakers with the directorial debut by Lila Neugebauer, which will hit select theaters and Apple TV+ on Friday, following its debut at TIFF. This one actually has something in common with Next Exit, as it’s about unlikely friendships, in this case one between Jennifer Lawrence’s Lynsey, who is trying to get back on her feet after returning from Afghanistan after sustaining a brain injury when her jeep hits a mine, and Brian Tyree Henry’s James, a mechanic, who has suffered with his own share of troubles. This is a terrific character drama that features two fantastic performances by Lawrence and Henry, both who deserve awards love, but especially Henry, who may be one of the more underrated actors working today. Ms. Neugebauer does a great job getting the best out of them, making a movie that might normally debut at Sundance, but one that just has generally better production values than your normal indie about this sort of thing.
SALVATORE: SHOEMAKER OF DREAMS (Sony Pictures Classics)
Before we get the Bones and All, the new narrative film from Luca Guadagnino, later this month, we get a new documentary from the Italian auteur about shoemaker and cobbler Salvatore Ferragamo, who came to America from Naples and set-up shop in the early days of silent movies in Hollywood, becoming the go-to shoemaker for the stars and for the cinema productions. It’s an intriguing movie that includes the likes of Martin Scorsese talking about the history of film and Ferragamo’s place in it, plus it’s narrated by Guadagnino regular Michael Stuhlbarg. I can’t say this is my favorite doc of the year – anyone who knows me, knows that I’m really not into fashion – but I did enjoy it, and was amazed to learn that Guadagnino has made many documentaries in Italy, many of which never have gotten over here. I’ll have an interview with Guadagnino maybe next week or the week after, again over at Above the Line.
GOOD NIGHT OPPY (Prime Video)
Another doc opening in theaters this Friday before going to Prime Video on November 23 is Ryan White’s film about NASA’s Mars Exploration program that involved sending two rovers, one being called Opportunity (or “Oppy” for short), to Mars, and though Oppy was only expected to survive for 90 days in those conditions, she ended up being active for 15 years, sending all sorts of information back to the NASA crew. Normally, I might like something like this since I’m generally interested in space travel, but I found this film to be a combination of manipulative and just plain annoying, as we listen to all these super-excited scientists (yawn) going on and on about this mission and how fabulous it all is, and sorry, but there’s nothing I find more boring than listening to a bunch of scientists prattle on about all the great stuff they’re doing.
I’m kind of surprised by how much I disliked this movie, but not as much as…
BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS (Netflix)
It was bound to happen after being a fan of Alejandro G. Iñarritu for most of his career, he finally has made a movie that has completely lost me. This one opens Friday at the Paris Theater and at the Village East Cinema (both in 70mm, no less) in New York and other select cities, and it won’t be streaming on Netflix until… actually I’m not sure when. It stars Daniel Giménez Cacho as filmmaker and journalist Silverio Gacho, who returns to Mexico after being in America for a number of decades, and deals with all sorts of conflicts. I wish I could remember what some of them were but there’s a certain point into this movie (which has been cut down for a 3-hour version that played at Venice and Telluride) that my eyes just started glazing over, because it seemed like Iñarritu had finally taken all the good will and karma he had accumulated from making so many great movies, and threw it into this “personal film” (uh oh) that honestly, I’m not sure who might appreciate it, other than those who like watching a great filmmaker masturbate all over the screen with some beautiful cinematography by Darius Khondji (who really must give credit to his camera operators on this one) and score that Iñarritu co-wrote with Bryce Dessner of The National. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you what I disliked so much about the movie except that it expects viewers to know something about Mexican politics and other things that clearly interest Iñarritu, but I honestly have no idea who else might care. (Okay, to be fair, there are a couple really impressive setpieces in the movie, but they just don’t gel when brought together.)
Maybe I’ll give it another try once it hits Netflix… I just checked, and it won’t be on Netflix until Dec. 16, and I highly doubt it will be kept on theater’s screens for that long. Remember how I mentioned above in regards to Armageddon Time that all these filmmakers are making movies sort of based on their own lives? I’m not sure if Bardo is meant to be semi-autobiographical or what, but as of now, it’s the absolute worst movie I’ve seen from Iñarritu and probably among the worst movies I’ve seen this year, too.
Those who read this column regularly know how much I love my repertory theaters here in New York City, particularly the Metrograph, which is in my hood. This Friday, the Metrograph is beginning two series: “Love Meetings: Pasolini & Contemporary Cinema,” featuring the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and his contemporaries to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday as well as the release of a new book from Fireflies Press, who curates the series. (Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini and Tomasso are also available via the Metrograph’s digital platform – see below.) This runs over the course of the month and gives cinephiles another chance to see some of these movies, which have played previous at Metrograph. The other new series is “Satyajit Ray X6,” which features six films from the Bengali auteur, who I’m about as familiar with as I am Pasolini. (What can I say? There’s a portion of international film snobbery that I just never was able to get into – maybe I’ll try to check out some of their work time-permitting.) I mention this all the time, but the Metrograph also has a fantastic and robust digital platform for $5 a month with a lot of new exclusive streaming additions and series this month. This month it’s adding five films from Jean-Luc Goddard, Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance, Ana Lily Amarpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Buster Keaton’s College (1927), the 1937 A Star is Born, and much, much more.
On Sunday, my other favorite repertory theater, the Film Forum, will be showing High Society, starring Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Grace Kelly, as part of its “Film Forum, Jr.” series. It’s fantastic Isabelle Huppert series, which I completely missed, ends today. Waugh waugh. :(
And for those who read this column to learn my predictions for this weekend’s top 10, here ya go:
1. Black Adam (Warner Bros) - $14.3 million -48%
2. One Piece Film: Red (Cruncyroll) - $11.5 million N/A
3. Ticket to Paradise (Universal) - $6.5 million -35%
4. Prey for the Devil (Lionsgate) - $3.2 million -56%
5. Smile (Paramount) - $3 million -45%
6. The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight) - $2.2 million
7. Armageddon Time (Focus Features) - $1.9 million
8. Till (UA Releasing) - $1.8 million -35%
9. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (Sony) - $1.8 million -36%
10. Halloween Ends (Universal) - $1.7 million -58%
Other movies I just didn’t have time to get to…
ENOLA HOLMES 2 (Netflix)
THE BOX (Cinema Tropical)
I’M TOTALLY FINE (Decal)
ON THE LINE (Saban Films/Paramount)