The Weekend Warrior August 18, 2023
BLUE BEETLE, STRAYS, BIRTH/REBIRTH, LANDSCAPE WITH INVISIBLE HAND, THE ADULTS, BAD THINGS
Another week, another Weekend Warrior. We’ll see how long I can keep this up with TIFF just a few weeks away.
I already reviewed BLUE BEETLE (Warner Bros.), which you can read here, and have written about its box office potential, most recently at Gold Derby, so we’ll get into some reviews for other movies. The reason this is being posted so late on Thursday is that one of the movies had a review embargo for (I thought) this afternoon but ended up being earlier. Oh, well.
STRAYS (Universal)
This comedy is one I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time, maybe because the Red Band trailer has been in front of just about every R-rated movie I saw in theaters going back to February. The premise is simple enough: Will Ferrell voices puppy Reggie, who has been abandoned by his horrible master, Doug (Will Forte). Along with a group of strays, voiced by Jamie Foxx, Randall Park, and Isla Fischer, they conspire to get revenge on Doug. (If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know how.)
I have to admit that I was a little worried about this one, only because Universal seemed to completely botch the release. Surely, they must have known the chances of an actors’ strike might derail any junket, but still, they delayed it until August and the movie able to get Ferrell or Foxx or Forte on the now-defunct late night talk shows which could have helped the movie greatly.
Directed by Josh Greenbaum (Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and produced by the ubiquitous Lord and Miller, there’s a danger of Strays having used up all its best jokes in the trailer. Sure, if you’ve seen those trailers, there aren’t nearly as many surprises though there are still lots of rather raunchy laughs as things are taken much further than anything the MPA would approve to show in a trailer.
Written by Dan Perrault, there are many jokes beyond what it’s in the trailer, but more than anything, it’s enjoyable to just watch these four adorable doggies getting into all sorts of adventures, and swearing up a storm, especially Foxx’s Bug, a feisty smaller dog always yapping at larger dogs. Park plays Hunter, a large bloodhound (I think, I don’t really know dog breeds) who has a crush on Fisher’s Maggie, a beautiful collie with an acute sense of smell. There are quite a few recurring jokes that actually work when they’re made again, but many of them have to do with the size of dog penises, balls, shit, and such. This is not Tolstoy, but it earns its R-rating every minute.
More than anything, it’s pretty obvious that the people who made this movie really love dogs, but also have observed a lot of silliness from their mutts, all of which is brought into Strays. Dog lovers should get a kick out of what these lovable dogs get up to, even if some of the jokes are given away in the trailer.
Rating: 7.5/10
BACK ON THE STRIP (GVN Releasing/Luminosity Entertainment)
I guess in theory, I could have gotten a screener for this, but Chris Spencer’s comedy didn’t look like something I would enjoy with its high concept premise of a young guy (Spence Moore II) who goes to Las Vegas in hopes of being a magician but instead ends up working as a male stripper. Spencer has gotten a pretty impressive supporting cast that includes Tiffany Haddish, J.B. Smoove, Wesley Snipes, Faizon Love, and even Kevin Hart (presumably in a small role). I have no idea how many theaters this will be in, but I can’t imagine it making more than $2 million or maybe slightly more, but that won’t be enough to get into the Top 10.
Speaking of which…
THE BOX OFFICE CHART
This will be an interesting weekend, because Barbie is likely going to get knocked out of the top spot, but will it hold second place or will Strays, which has a trailer that’s played so well, manage to eke out a win with more than $20 million? It’s going to be pretty tight but I’ll go with Barbie taking second place.
1. Blue Beetle (Warner Bros.) - $31.5 million N/A
2. Barbie (Warner Bros.) - $21.2 million -37%
3. Strays (Universal) - $18.3 million N/A
4. Oppenheimer (Universal) - $12 million -36%
5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Paramount) - $8.4 million -45%
6. Meg 2: The Trench (Warner Bros.) - $6.5 million -49%
7. Talk to Me (A24) - $3.3 million -36%
8. Haunted Mansion (Disney) - $3 million -48%
9. Sound of Freedom (Angel Studios) - $4.6 million -40%
10. The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Universal) - $2.5 million -62%
BIRTH/REBIRTH (IFC Films)
This feature directorial debut from Laura Moss debuted at Sundance, where I had a chance to see it virtually, and it’s another movie in the rare baby-related horror that might make some feel uncomfortable, ala Paul Solet’s Grace that had people fainting at screenings in 2009.
It stars Marin Ireland as Rose a morgue pathologist who is obsessed with animating the dead whose relationship with maternity nurse Celie (Judy Reyes from Smile and Scrubs) changes when the latter’s 6-year-old daughter Lila dies and Rose decides to use her as a test subject for her experiments. She eventually reveals her plan to Celie and the two very different women care for Lila, who is now very zombie-like.
Ireland is such an underrated actress who generally gets smaller supporting roles in movies (like the recent The Bogeyman), but she’s terrific in this, playing quite a cold character with a terrible bedside matter, which probably doesn’t matter if you’re a pathologist. And yet, Ireland’s deadpan delivery actually ends up being kind of funny, which helps with the grim subject matter.
Rose’s attempts to revive Celia comes to a head when she meets a mother played by Breeda Woo, who has the proper stem cells to help save Celia’s daughter, getting further and further into questionable medical practices.
Birth/Rebirth is a distinctly original horror film with particularly creepy moments that might make your skin crawl even as you appreciate Moss’ contribution to the horror genre.
Rating: 7.5/10
This is one of many movies opening this week at the IFC Center this weekend, and Moss herself will be doing a QnA after the Friday night 7:40pm screening
BAD THINGS (Shudder)
A semi-related horror movie that’s hitting Shudder and AMC+ on Friday is this movie from Stewart Thorndike starring the terrific Gayle Rankin from Glow and lots of cool indies, Hari Nef, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, and even (checks glasses) Molly Ringwald. It involves a group of friends who decide to spend a weekend at an abandoned hotel that Ruthie (Rankin) has inherited from her grandmother that her partner Cal (Hari Nef) hopes to renovate.
LANDSCAPE WITH INVISIBLE HAND (MGM)
I kind of dug Corey Finley’s 2017 debut, Thoroughbreds, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, and the late Anton Yelchin, so I was curious to see what he would do with M.T. Anderson’s novel, which I wasn’t familiar with, but it seemed very much like a young adult sci-fi novel, but also something quite satirical like the work of Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). It’s that last part that got me the most interested, but also the fact that it includes this romance between teens Adam (Asante Blackk) and Chloe (Kylie Rogers) that starts out as something to make money by livestreaming their every moment to the aliens, who watch with rapt attention. Tiffany Haddish plays Adam’s Mom who gets involved with an alien to help get her son out of debt when the aliens insist on getting all the money they spent on the fake relationship repaid to them.
There are some interesting ideas here, and as a fan of Douglas Adams, I can get behind Anderson’s attempt at creating a story about a dystopian future that still offers some hope, and I can totally see why it might have interested Finley as a filmmaker. The problem is that it doesn’t really work as a movie, at least not at whatever budget Finley had to make it. (I’m not sure if MGM picked this up after it played at Sundance or was always involved.)
At a certain point, the movie loses sight of what was making it so enjoyable, the romance between the two teens. In fact, both of them disappear for a good third of the movie as it instead focuses on Haddish’s character, which isn’t nearly as interesting.
Although I didn’t review last week’s Jules, the alien in that one looks like amazing compared to the aliens in Landscape, who just look silly as fuck and not even remotely intimidating. They look like you could just pick them up and boot them across the room, so who knows why humans in this future put up with so much crap from them. I was surprised that the VFX in this one were handled by an Oscar winning VFX supervision
In my opinion, the only part of the movie that truly stands out is the score by Michael Abels (Nope), which maintains a certain tone throughout that’s not matched by anything else on screen.
Landscape isn’t terrible, but it starts out so promisingly with this young romance (something that often tends to be awful in most Y.A. movies) and then it devolves into something that leaves you scratching your head and not necessarily leaving the viewer with much in the way of satisfaction.
Rating: 5.5/10
In a somewhat similar vein…
ALIENS ABDUCTED MY PARENTS AND NOW I FEEL LEFT OUT (Vertical/Visit Films)
I somehow missed this at Sundance, but it’s a drama about a teen named Itsy Levan (Emma Tremblay), whose parents leave the city for a fixer upper, where she meets her new neighbor Calvin (Jacob Buster), who is obsessed with the idea that his parents were abducted by aliens. Directed by Jake Van Wagoner and written by Austin Everett, it opens in select cities Friday, but it’s mainly going to be on VOD.
THE ADULTS (Variance)
A movie I saw at Tribeca (which previously premiered at Berlin) is the new film from Dustin Guy Defa (Person to Person), which unfortunately, was also the WORST movie I saw at Tribeca, and there’s absolutely no way I’d sit through it again.
It stars Michael Cera (having a great year other than this movie), Hannah Gross, and Sophia Lillis as three siblings who return home for their mother’s funeral. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been the plot for hundreds of indie movies going even further back than Garden State, obviously the best movie in that indie sub-genre.
The Adults follows a similar path as those other movies, except that the three main characters just aren’t particularly interesting, and at a certain point, they get so annoying that people will probably want to leave, as I would have. It’s a shame because I have liked Cera in other things but not necessarily in his work with Defa.
Ultimately, this is one of those movies that’s intended as a comedy but often spirals so far down a well of melodrama that you’re never sure whether to laugh or not. Not that there’s anything particularly funny about anything the three siblings are saying or doing.
Honestly, the best part of this movie is Lillis’ adorable pixie haircut, and if she were the only returning child, maybe this movie would have been more palatable. As it is, it’s just redactive and redundant in the story it’s trying to tell, with very little in terms of actual entertainment value. (As a laugh, I checked out the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes page, and the amount of positive reviews makes me think that film criticism is officially fucked.)
Rating: 4.5/10
MUTT (Strand Releasing)
I somehow missed this movie opening at the Film Forum on Friday, but Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s drama follows Feña, a recently transitioned trans man, played by trans actor Lío Mehiel, who spends 24 hours going through many emotions as people from his (her?) past return to life.
MADELEINE COLLINS (Greenwich)
Opening in NYC at the IFC Center and in L.A. at the Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Town Center is this movie directed by Antoine Barraud that won the Giornate degli Autori Award at Venice in 2021. It stars Belgian-French actress Virginie Efira (Benedetta) who leads a secret double life going between two households in two different countries, Switzerland and France. The film shows how she tries to balance these two families while trying to keep them secret from each other.
Before we get to all the NYC repertory stuff, you might want to know that Park Chan-wook’s revenge film classic, OLDBOY (NEON), will be getting a remastered 4K rerelease to mark its 20th Anniversary, which is in theaters now, a mix of theater chains and arthouses like New York’s IFC Center. I’ve seen the 4k remaster, and I have to say that it looks and sounds AMAZING, and the movie is no less shocking and jarring then it was when I first saw it, and it’s exciting to think that newer and younger audiences might be able to feel the same.
By the way, if you want to see the other two movies in Director Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” you’re in luck, because both Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance are playing on the Metrograph At Home digital platform (you gotta scroll down a bit), and that costs just $5 a month or $50 a year, an amazing deal how much great stuff is on there.
And speaking of which…
Starting on Friday is the self-explanatory “Christian Slater: Outsider,” which this weekend will include screenings of Pump Up the Volume (1990) and Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993), both great movies.
“F. Gary Gray in Action” continues with Be Cool (2005), The Italian Job (2003), and Straight Outta Compton (just on Sunday).
The great “The Color of Black and White” will feature Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (2012) on Friday and Saturday, Michael Hazenivicius’ Oscar-winning Best Picture The Artist (2011), Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (2012) on Friday and Monday, as well as a single screening of Alexander Payne’s Nebrasca on Friday. There will be one last screening of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night on Monday, as well as a couple more screenings of Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, starring Greta Gerwig.
“Back to School with Kirsten Dunst” concludes this weekend with screenings all weekend of Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999). (If you read this early enough there’s an early evening screening of Drop Dead Gorgeous, the last screening of this hilarious comedy about beauty pageants.)
There are still a couple more screenings of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as part of “Also Starring… Yaphet Koto.”
“Brunch at Metrograph” wll screen Charlie Kaufman’s animated Anomalisa (2015) all weekend, as well as a couple more screenings of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004), written by Kaufman.
Beginning Friday, Film Forum will be showing William Richert’s 1979 film, Winter Kills (Rialto), starring Jeff Bridges, John Houston, and Elizabeth Taylor, presented by Quentin Tarantino, and then a couple Billy Wilder movies over the weekend: Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, plus the 3D film series, “A Deeper Look,” will show John Wayne’s Hondo in 3D (1953) on Monday. It will continue to show Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) as well as the 4k restoration of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991).
Besides Park Chanwook’s Old Boy, as mentioned above, this week’s “The Red Eye” offering is Paul WS Anderson’s sci-fi horror film, Event Horizon from 1997. You can also see Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972) similarly late night on Friday and Saturday. The new 4k of Alejandro Amenábar’s The Other (2001), starring Nicole Kidman, will also continue to run through the weekend.
The 1991 concert doc, Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) will screen throughout the weekend, as well as thrillers, Body of Evidence and Dangerous Game on Thursday night. Jon Favreau’s Swingers (1996) will screen on Friday and Saturday as part of the Roxy’s Hell or Las Vegas.
“Real Rap: Hip Hop Star Power on Screen will screen the Outkast musical, Idlewild, on Saturday afternoon, while the museum’s ongoing “See It Big: 70mm!” series screens Christopher Nolan’s Inception on Thursday evening (tonight), Airport on Saturday, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X on Sunday.
A few things I didn’t get to…
HAUNTING OF THE QUEEN MARY (Vertical)
Next week, Sony releases Gran Turismo, Liam Neeson gets some Retribution, Dame Helen Mirren plays Golda, and a few other things.