The Weekend Warrior March 25, 2022
THE LOST CITY, RRR, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, MOTHERING SUNDAY, APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE ODYSSEY, INFINITE STORM, 7 DAYS, YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER, and More
We’re onto the second week of this new experiment, and guess what, kids? It’s springtime!! Although it’s officially the start of spring this past week, we really only get one month in movie terms, since the first weekend of May is already considered the summer, so it’s basically a month-long season (which you can learn more about at my new monthly Gold Derby column). This weekend only has one new major wide release from a studio, but it’s also the Oscars on Sunday (finally!) and we’ll have to see if that affects movie going towards the latter part of the weekend.
Also, this weekend is the last one as part of this year’s International Women’s Month, so (probably coincidentally) we get a number of films featuring daring performances by some great older women actors, beginning with Sandra Bullock, going into Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, and also another new film from Naomi Watts. Read on!
THE LOST CITY (Paramount) - Rated PG-13
Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum team up for this high-concept action rom-com with a bit of Brad Pitt thrown in for good measure. It’s the first studio movie for the Brothers Nee (Aaron and Adam) working from a story by Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses), and yeah, it’s probably one of the comedies with the most potential released in quite some time.
In the movie, Bullock plays romance novelist Loretta Sage, who is urged to go on a book tour with Alan, the cover model of her popular series (played by Tatum) but instead, she gets kidnapped and Alan is left to save her. Like I said, pretty high-concept.
This is going to be Tatum’s second movie in theaters nationwide and in the top 10 as his previous movie (and directorial debut) Dog is still doing decent business, having crossed $50 million last weekend. Bullock has been absent from theaters for almost four years, her last theatrically-released film being Ocean’s 8 in June 2019, but she’s had two movies on Netflix, the hugely successful Bird Box later that same year and the drama Unforgivable this past December. Bullock is still a hugely popular actor who has had a couple huge blockbuster hits in the last 15 years, teaming with Ryan Reynolds for The Proposal ($164m domestic gross!), the football drama The Blind Side (for which she won her first Oscar), another buddy comedy with Melissa McCarthy in The Heat, and then Alfonso Cuaron’s outer space epic Gravity (for which *he* won his first Oscar). Oh, and she also voiced a role in the hit comedy Minions in 2015. Those five movies combined have made over a billion just domestically. In other words, Bullock’s return to movie theaters should be a VERY big deal indeed.
Teaming Bullock with Tatum is also a smart move, which will probably help him more than her, but the cast is packed with Daniel Radcliffe playing a bad guy and comediennes Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Dolemite is My Name) and Patti Harrison (Together Together) adding to the humor. (It also features smaller roles for Oscar Nuñez from The Office and Saturday Night Live’s hugely popular Bowen Yang.) Oh, and it also features a fairly large “cameo” from one Brad Pitt, who is a hugely popular star in his own right, and he hasn’t been in a movie since 2019’s Ad Astra! Pitt is being featured quite prominently in the ads and trailer, which can only help the movie reach its potential mostly-female audience. That makes it pretty decent counter-programming both to The Batman AND next week’s Morbius.
Probably don’t need to waste too much time analyzing the movie’s potential since it’s already gotten great reviews – 88% at Rotten Tomatoes at this writing – and it’s probably going to get the most interest from women, being a rom-com, but it’s not a movie that might offend male partners dragged to it on date night.
The Lost City may be facing the fourth weekend of The Batman with the Oscars on Sunday also likely to affect it due to crossover with its potential audience, but it still should be good for somewhere between $20 and 25 million this weekend.
You can read my review of The Lost City here.
RRR (Sarigama) - Unrated
This historic action-adventure from India, directed by S.S. Rajamouli, is being released in both Hindi and Telugu, and it was previously supposed to be released in January before being sidelined and delayed due to the Omicron outbreak from its planned release in January. This is a 3-hour action-adventure that looks like it could be a huge blockbuster for the thriving Bollywood movie market, which I honestly know very little about, but the trailer looked interesting enough (see it below) that I bought a ticket to see it on Friday. RRR is likely to be opening in roughly 1,000 theaters this weekend, and it’s likely to do well enough to break into the top 10, probably with somewhere in the $3 to 5 million range.
THE CHART:
Updated predictions on 3/24 4:30pm based on theater counts. Bleecker Street is releasing Infinite Storm into 1,525 theaters this weekend, so that could be good for around $1.4 million, enough to get into the Top 10 as well.
1. The Lost City (Paramount) - $25 million N/A (up 2.6 million)
2. The Batman (Warner Bros.) - $20 million -46%
3. Jujutsu Kaizen 0 (Cruchyroll) - $8.3 million -53%
4. Uncharted (Sony) - $5.8 million -26%
5. RRR (Sarigama) - $5.6 million N/A (up 1.2 million)
6. Dog (MGM) - $2.9 million -27%
7. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony) - $2.5 million -20%
8. X (A24) - $2.1 million -54%
9. Infinite Storm (Bleecker Street) - $1.4 million N/A
10. Death on the Nile (20th Century/Disney) - $1.2 million -29%
This week’s “Chosen One” (yup, still doing that) is…
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (A24)
Opening in select cities this weekend is the new movie from Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as The Daniels and best known for their music videos and previous irrelevant comedy Swiss Army Man.This one stars Michelle Yeoh, and that alone makes it one of the best movies of the year. I’m just (half) kidding, but Ms. Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a woman who runs a laundromat with her husband, who wants a divorce, plus they’re being audited by the IRS, but things really get crazy when Evelyn is informed that she’s part of a greater multiverse that she can tap into alternate versions of herself, and yeah, “crazy” may be the understatement of the century. Evelyn has also had trouble connecting to her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), a situation exacerbated with Evelyn’s new-found knowledge of the war going on in the metaverse.
I’m not sure how much I want to say about this movie, because it’s the definition of a movie that is just more enjoyable going into not knowing too many of the beats or plot twists, of which there are many. I will say that if you’re a fan of Ms. Yeoh’s martial arts work or martial arts movies in general, there’s lots of that, but there’s also just all-around craziness and weirdness. Like having Jamie Lee Curtis playing a dowdy IRS agent with whom Yeoh fights. Also, the movie marks the triumphant return of Ke Huy Quan, who you may remember as Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Data from The Goonies, but he has returned to acting with this only being his second movie in the past 20 years! He is great in this film as Evelyn’s husband – I spent most of the movie thinking, “That guy looks familiar!” – and I was also impressed by Stephanie Hsu, whose work I wasn’t as familiar with.
What more can I say about this without spoiling too many of the surprises? I will say that if you’re into comics that have explored things like alternate dimensions and realities, something that’s been brought into the MCU and will soon be in the DCEU with next year’s The Flash, then you should be able to appreciate this quirky comedy. But the idea of the multiverse is handled quite uniquely by the Daniels, because Evelyn and the others aware of the megaverse are able to tap into the skills of their other versions across it, so for instance, that’s how Evelyn can do martial arts and such. What’s interesting is how the movie is broken up into three distinct sections, the first one with Evelyn discovering this megaverse, the second part learning more about Jobu Bupaki, the villain trying to destroy the whole shebang, and then the third act just takes all the ideas introduced earlier to another place as Evelyn us trying to fix her own life.
There are parts of this film that reminded me of the movies of Stephen Chow (who I absolutely love) and then other parts that feel a bit Adult Swim (which I’m not too crazy about), but it’s all about the casting, with Yeoh giving another career-defining performance that’s elevated by those around her. Honestly, I didn’t even recognize Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre, the IRS agent auditing the Wangs, but as Evelyn learns more about the megaverse, it leads to a pretty fantastic battle between the two women. And that’s just part of a movie that continually gets weirder and crazier without ever looking back, nor apologizing for maybe going to uncomfortable places.
I’ll admit that Everything Everywhere All at Once won’t be for everyone – don’t worry, that title is much easier to remember after seeing the movie – but I loved this so much it’s almost guaranteed a place in my Top 10 at the end of the year. To be able to accomplish that, the movie would need to balance all that mind-blowing craziness with a very large amount of heart, and it does just that. This is going to be a movie to top, especially since I’ll be seeing it two or three more times.
Rating: 9/10
Everything Everywhere All At Once will open in select cities this Friday and then expand nationwide on April 8.
In fact, this really is a “mother” of a weekend as you’ll see from a couple of the other limited releases…
MOTHERING SUNDAY (Sony Pictures Classics)
A fantastic film that premiered at Toronto last year is this drama from Eva Husson, starring Odessa Young as Jane, who works as a maid for the Nevins, a wealthy family in 1918 rural England. Unbeknownst to anyone, Jane has been having a romantic tryst with Josh O’Connor’s Paul, a high society law student at another local and equally wealthy family. He’s also slated to be married off to the Nevins’ daughter, Eva, so that could be a problem.
This film is actually based on a novel by Graham Swift, and it definitely feels rather literary, especially in the way it covers a good deal of Jane’s life, though the majority of the story takes place in post-WWI England, an era that’s been covered quite a bit in recent films. First and foremost, this is a showcase for the talented Ms. Young, an Australian actor I probably knew best from her starring role in The Stand, though she’s appeared in a lot of films, including a few eclectic ones like Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation. She also spends a lot of this movie wearing no clothes, if that’s a factor in whether you might watch the movie.
Although Mothering Sunday focuses on Jane’s time with the Nevins, the adults played by Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, in smaller supporting roles, it does this strange thing where it bounces around in time, going back to Paul’s childhood even, which does make it quite hard to follow at times. In fact, Husson deciding to tell the story non-linearly (possibly in line with the novel?) may be one of its biggest hindrances, because it’s only when it all comes together later when one might be able to understand what we’d been watching. There’s also a concern about a lot of the characters around Jane being so stodgy and British that some may have trouble connecting with them, although there are some very dramatic moments that really help make Jane the person we see later when she works in a bookshop and has a new boyfriend, played by Sope Dirisu from His House.
Although the movie doesn’t feature Firth or Colman in some of their best performances, they do have some solid dramatic scenes with Young that are fairly worthwhile, and O’Connor plays a far sweeter romantic lead than the one he played in Emma. Eventually, we do learn that the story is meant to show the unlikely origins of an author and how love and loss affects her writing. That is what eventually sold me on the movie which seemed to be treading a similar coming-of-age journey we’ve seen before.
Mothering Sunday is an absolutely gorgeous film, ably carried by the talents of Odessa Young, and like something like Little Women, you can fully understand why artistic women especially might be invested in Jane’s journey.
Rating: 8/10
Mothering Sunday will open in New York at the AMC Lincoln Square, the Regal Union Square, and Cinema 123, as well as in L.A. at The Landmark and AMC at The Grove.
YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER (Magnet)
Written and directed by Kate Dolan, her feature debut, this horror-thriller also premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, though I only saw it more recently. It stars Hazel Doupe as Char, a teenager in a North Dublin council estate, whose mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) vanishes mysteriously, but then returns, only acting very strangely. Char has been having troubles with a bunch of bullies, but her mother’s return just adds more problems for Char and her grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie).
I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get into this movie, mainly because it takes its good sweet time getting into any of the supernatural elements many will be expecting. Don’t worry – they do come – but that slow crawl pacing is a major hindrance to a film that already has to overcome its predictability and a few over-abundant clichés we’ve seen in other coming-of-age dramas. Hazel Doupe is decent as Char, although her general demeanor doesn’t help the audience really feel much for the character. Ingrid Craigie is almost a more interesting character as Char’s mother is only more interesting in that she seems to know more about what is happening
As Char’s mother starts acting stranger and stranger, the film also gets more into the supernatural elements, as well as starts getting into some terrific make-up effects, and Carolyn Bracken’s performance is
Although it starts as a rather dreary coming-of-age drama, You Are Not My Mother does eventually get more into the supernatural elements, and ultimately, it ends up as a fairly satisfying horror film.
Rating: 6.5/10
This will mostly be available at home, but also at a few select theaters around the country.
APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE ODYSSEY (Netflix)
Imagine my surprise when I learned that Richard Linklater’s latest movie – his first in three years since Where’d You Go, Bernadette – was getting a one-week theatrical release in select cities before hitting Netflix next week. This is actually one of the high-profile movies that premiered at a recent film festival I refuse to mention by name since they refused to accredit me as press, but it’s also Linklater’s return to animation, although not the rotoscoping that he used for 2001’s Waking Life and 2006’s A Scanner Darkly.
This semi-autobiographical tale covers the famous Apollo 11 moon landing from 1969, but mainly through the eyes of a young boy growing up in Houston. Linklater mostly used new unknown actors, although it also includes Zachary Levi, Glenn Powell, and Jack Black as narrator, the latter two who have worked with Linklater a few times before.
I really enjoyed this, because it does seem to be a stronger effort by the fact it’s based on Linklater’s own memories of growing up in Houston, not too far from NASA. Other than Boyhood (and maybe Bad News Bears), Linklater hasn’t really done much about kids this age, and maybe since I’m only a few years younger than him, I can relate very much to his childhood growing up in the ‘70s. (I’m actually surprised he could get the rights to things like Looney Tunes, The Sound of Music and the themes from various TV shows for this movie.) Eventually, the movie does get to the moon launch, which has a bit of a fantasy element to it, but definitely has a unique take on it than the doc, Apollo 11.
This was a movie that was so much fun to watch – a bit nostalgic in its humor ala A Christmas Story – and I was especially impressed with the way Linklater is once again mainly working with lesser-known actors.
This is just a true return to greatness for Linklater, using animation better than in some of his other efforts, but also creating a highly vivid portrait of his own childhood – a bit like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma or the recent Belfast – which just makes this a far more interesting bit of filmmaking, especially to longtime fans of Linklater’s vast filmography.
Rating: 8.5/10
INFINITE STORM (Bleecker Street)
Naomi Watts stars in this survival thriller, directed by Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska, who oddly, I’m not familiar with at ALL, even though she’s been making movies for more than 20 years! In this one, Watts plays Pam Bales, a climber and rescue worker (as well as a real person), who gets caught in a blizzard while climbing Mt Washington, New Hampshire when she runs into a stranded stranger (Billy Howle from On Chesil Beach), so she has to try to get them both off the mountain safely before nightfall.
This “based on a true story” movie is an interesting one in the way that it reminded me a little of the Reese Witherspoon vehicle, Wild, although there’s another level to this movie, which falls into a category of film that I like to call “survival porn.” Yeah, I’m a fan of the genre for sure, and Infinite Storm has the requisite amount of horrifying conditions and situations that
Pam Bales is a bit of an enigma, a loner who we really don’t learn much about before watching her journey up Mt. Washington. In fact, there isn’t that much dialogue either, as she only interacts briefly with Dennis O’Hare and a couple hikers. Eventually, she starts her climb, and the weather gets bad, putting Pam into a few sticky situations, though knowing that her journey really begins when she meets the stranger she refers to as “John,” we’re not too worried about her. When she finds him, he’s just sitting on a mountain peak in the freezing cold and isn’t particularly communicative. Oddly, the next half hour of the movie ends up being the least interesting, since it’s mostly about her trying to save him.
Throughout Pam’s journey, we see what seems to be dream-like flashbacks to her childhood, and it’s part of what makes the movie needlessly confusing, since it detracts from the moment and the situation she’s in.
Thankfully, everything finally comes together in the final act once Pam gets back home and tries to recover from her journey. That’s also when we finally learn what happened to her that made her behave so oddly as the film progresses. In other words, Infinite Storm may start out as another “survival porn” movie, but it turns into a seriously moving drama about depression and loss that’s quite inspirational, and maybe it will make people think twice before taking their own life, or we should hope so.
Rating: 7.5/10
7 DAYS (Cinedigm)
Produced by the Duplass Brothers, this wonderful comedy from Roshan Sethi premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last June and won an Independent Spirit for Best First Feature a few weeks back. It stars the great Geraldine Viswanathan and Karan Soni (from the Deadpool movies) as Rita and Ravi, a couple young Indo-Americans who go on a date that goes horribly wrong, and then they end up quarantined with each other when the pandemic hits. Oops.
As with the work of the Duplasses – I’m definitely a fan – this is a very funny indie movie that ably plays upon the reality that many or most of us experienced over the past two years. It’s a little amusing that it’s getting a release now that we’re seemingly kind of out of the pandemic, at least until the next big wave.
We’ve seen Visnawathan do some very funny things on TV (Miracle Workers) and in movies like Blockers, but this is a better break for Soni, who hasn’t really been able to lead a movie or show like she has. Soni plays an appropriately nerdy guy who wants to follow his parents’ desire for him to meet a nice Indian girl and have three kids, but Rita definitely has some issues in that she’s more like a typical American woman her age. The results are a really fun indie rom-com with great chemistry between Soni and Viswanathan that plays upon Indian customs and traditions and where they fall in the modern age.
As much as the film plays on the laughs of this odd couple stuck together, it then transforms into something more dramatic and kinda sweet as Rita gets COVID and has to go to the hospital, leaving Ravi to have to convey her condition to her family and others.
7 Days comes across a bit like a modern-day When Harry Met Sally but taking a very specific look at traditional Indian values and mixing them with modern American ones.
Rating: 8/10
7 Days opens in New York at the Village East and AMC, as well as in L.A. at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown and MAC, as well as in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar and other markets.
WOOD AND WATER (KimStim)
Opening at MOMA in New York and then eventually in L.A. and other places is Jonas Bak’s award-winning film, a family drama involving a German woman named Anke (played by Bak’s mother) who has just retired and hopes to spend time with her grown children, although her son Max is stuck in Hong Kong and unable to get back to Germany due to the pro-democracy protests so she decides to travel to Hong Kong instead.
A few odds and ends…
Hitting VOD on Tuesday is HAVANA LIBRE (1091 Pictures), Corey McLean’s documentary about the efforts to legitimize surfing in Cuba. It’s an okay doc but nothing I felt the need to see on the big screen or anything.
There are two medium-sized film festivals starting this week on Thursday, one that I’ve been to many times (and love) and one I’ve been hoping to get to someday but just haven’t yet. The latter is the Boston Underground Film Festival, which will include a number of genre festival favorites, such as You Won’t Be Alone (which I reviewed out of Sundance), another Sundance horror film, Hatching, The Innocents from IFC, as well as two recent Gaspar Noé films, Vortex and Lux Æterna!
OXFilm (formerly the Oxford Film Festival) is much more of a discovery fest, but it’s probably one of the best fests south of the border… of Tennessee anyway. The Oxford is the one in Mississippi, not the one in the England – let’s get that out of the way. It’s kicking off with a pre-fest screening of Lisa Hurwitz’s doc The Automat, which I reviewed a few weeks back. You can see the full schedule here, but some of the highlights include the opening night film, Soul Kids, and others. This has always been a terrific discovery festival for me whenever I’ve attended, but it also continues to offer a virtual option and many (if not most) of the offerings, you can watch outside Mississippi.
I missed Sam Green’s performance of 32 Sounds as part of Sundance when it went virtual, but if you’re in New York, you can catch it for 6 performances only at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), which will screen the movie with the live music composed and performed by JD Samson. I’ll be going to see it on Thursday night.
Repertory stuff….
On Friday night, you can see Lucio Fulci’s A Cat in the Brain and Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive as part of the “Staff’s Picks: Kim’s Video” series. (I’ll be at the latter, but it’s likely to sell out!) This week’s “Late Night” is Delta Space Mission (1984) but there are also screenings of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue (1998), the latter a regular at the Metrograph. This weekend’s “Play Time” movie is The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) on Saturday. “Metrograph Presents A to Z” is showing Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) starring the inimitable Marilyn Monroe on Friday and Saturday, as well as Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) from Saturday through Tuesday. The “Left Bank Cinema” continues with another screening of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face on Thursday, Alain Resnais’ Stavisky (1974) on Friday and Monday, as well as films from Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy and Resnais all through the weekend.
Premiering at Film Forum is a new restoration of Barney Platts-Mills’ 1970 film, BRONCO BULLFROG, which I had never heard of before, but it stars Del Walker as 17-year-old Del, a petty thief in London’s East End slums who gets involved with a 15-year-old (Anne Gooding), much to her mother’s (rightful) concern. Del gets into more trouble when he reconnects with his pal “Bronco Bullfrog” (Sam Shepherd), who has just been released from jail. This was a pretty interesting time capsule about the late ‘60s, and I was a little surprised that I had never even heard of this movie before seeing it here.
On Sunday, you can take the kids to see Walt Disney’s masterpiece Fantasia (1940) as part of Film Forum Jr, and later that day, you can catch a double feature of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925) and Hard Luck (1921) with live piano accompaniment.
FilmLinc’s “Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective” runs through the weekend, and you can see that schedule here.
ETC…
BISPING: THE MICHAEL BISPING STORY (Universal Content Group)
DREAMING HOLLYWOOD (Cleopatra Entertainment)
TOPSIDE (Vertical)
Next week, it’s April 1, and I’m NEVER WRITING ANOTHER WEEKEND WARRIOR AGAIN! That’s a preemptive April Fool’s Joke, cause actually, I’ll be doubling up on the columns… Oo… mysterious… almost as mysterious as… Jared Leto playing MORBIUS!