The Weekend Warrior Feb. 17, 2023
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA, MARLOWE, WINNIE THE POOH, OF AN AGE, RETURN TO SEOUL, and More!
I’m going to try to do something different this week, and that’s by not starting this week’s column with a lot of complaining and kvetching about my lack of time to watch and write about stuff. Nope, I’m just gonna get right into it.
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA (Marvel/Disney)
This is the big movie of the Presidents Day weekend, though I already reviewed it, plus you can read my box office analysis over at Above the Line and Gold Derby, so I probably don’t have much to say about it beyond that. I liked it more than some and less than others, but I think it will do very well this well regardless of reviews and then crash next weekend (not helped by its opening being a four-day holiday).
MARLOWE (Briarcliff)
Opening Wednesday (that’s today!) is this reunion between Liam Neeson and Oscar-winning filmmaker Neil Jordan that takes Raymond Chandler’s beloved noir detective Philip Marlowe and adapts a more recent novel written by John Banville called “The Black Eyed Blonde,” released 2014. Now, I’ve been rather down on Neeson’s last few movies with Briarcliff, mainly because he’s been working from weaker scripts and with weaker directors.
This book is adapted by Oscar winner William Monahan, so Neeson has a better script to work from, plus he also has a great supporting cast around him, so clearly, having a director on the caliber of Jordan certainly improves this movie’s chances.
In the movie, set in 1930s Hollywood, Neeson plays Philip Marlowe (duh), who is approached by Diane Kruger’s Claire Cavendish, a rich heiress, whose lover, an actor named Nico Peterson, has gone missing, but when he turns up dead, Marlowe is suspicious and seeks out the truth.
This is an interesting departure from Neeson from his recent string of action movies, although this has a bit of hand-to-hand combat and such, but really, it’s about Monahan and Jordan’s ability to really channel the classic Chandlerisms that helped define the noir genre, as well as a ton of salty dialogue. It’s also about that cast that includes fantastic turns by Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Colm Meany, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Daniella Melchior, and even Danny Huston (a regular sparring partner of this critic, because I just don’t think he’s a very good actor – talk about a nepo baby!).
It’s even a little strange how Neeson is clearly the lead, appearing in every single frame of the movie, but for a while, he’s just interacting with different characters and almost playing a supporting role to fantastic performances by Lange and Cumming especially. If you haven’t read the book – I mean, I haven’t – I’m not going to spoil all the twists and turns, but this managed to maintain my interest throughout with all the characters as they’re introduced. (As a big fan of Akinnuoye-Agbaje going back to Oz, I loved seeing him play a very different role, but also one that’s integral to the story and the action.)
Maybe one of my biggest complaints about the movie is that it looks rather low-budget with the crafts not being as strong as they should be to really pull off this sort of intensive period piece, but it’s also one of Jordan’s stronger films in quite some time.
A generally decent noir drama with a fantastic cast, Marlowe probably suffers the most from clearly having a lower budget than it needed to really stand up with everything else in theaters.
Rating: 7/10
WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY (Blood Disgusting/Fathom Events)
Also opening Wednesday through Fathom Events is this slasher film that reimagines A.A. Milne’s beloved Pooh Bear (who I’ve loved through most of my life) as he goes on a rampage with his pal Piglet. Written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, this is the results of Pooh entering the public domain, or at least Milne’s very first book. Much of the lore around the characters still is owned by Disney thanks to the various animated movies, but anything that appeared in Milne’s book is fair game… until Disney realizes this is happening and lawyers up. (Let’s face it. There’s probably an entire wing of the Disney lot just for its lawyers, right?)
Anyway, I haven’t seen it and being a Fathom Event, I can’t use AMC A-list and don’t think I want to pay $22 or whatever it is to see it. It’s only really getting a single screening each night, and here in New York, it’s playing at a lot of theaters on Weds and fewer theaters over the weekend, so it’s really gonna have to break out like Terrifier 2 or Skinamarink go get into the top 10.
Also, Sony Pictures is re-releasing a 4K version of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on Friday into an unknown number of theaters, though I think it’s an odd decision with such a big movie taking up so many screens. I’ll be surprised if this gets into the top 10 despite it only really needing
This is what the Top 10 should look like, and it might be good to note that Warners is expanding Magic Mike’s Last Dance into 2,800 theaters this weekend, almost twice as many theaters as when it opened, so it should hold up 2nd place decently as counter-programming to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Bear in mind that a lot of the movies that have been in theaters for three or four weeks are probably gonna lose a ton of theaters despite the bump from this being a four-day weekend.
And yes, all the below are four-day predictions:
1. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Disney/Marvel) - $122 million N/A
2. Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Warner Bros.) - $6.6 million -21%
3. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (DWA/Universal) - $5.4 million -2%
4. Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century/Disney) - $5 million -31%
5. 80 for Brady (Paramount) - $4.5 million -22%
6. Titanic 25th Anniversary (Paramount) - $4.3 million -36%
7. Marlow (Briarcliff) - $3.4 million N/A
8. Knock at the Cabin (Universal) - $3 million -45%
9. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (Bloody Disgusting/Fathom Events) - $2.4 million N/A
10. A Man Called Otto (Sony) - $1.7 million -35%
This week there are two movies worth seeking out, because they won’t be playing everywhere like the movies above:
OF AN AGE (Focus Features)
Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski (You Won’t Be Alone) returns with a movie that’s at least a little bit more mainstream than his previous film, being a comic-of-age drama starring Elias Anton as Col, a 17-year-old Serbian-Australian dancer who falls for his dance partner’s older brother Adam (Thom Green), and the two of them fall into a 24-hour romance.
This is a great example of going into a movie without knowing too much about it in advance, which definitely allowed me to enjoy where it ends up going. It begins with Col getting a call from his dance partner, Ebony, played by Hattie Hook. (And yes, she’s a white chick named “Ebony”... hey, this is 1999 Australia, so don’t yell at me!) She has woken up in the middle of nowhere not knowing what happened to her after she met some boys, but Col calls on her brother Adam to drive him out to where she is, because they are due for the dance finals at their school that afternoon.
That whole opening is a bit of a misdirect, because this isn’t about finding out what happened to Ebony and finding the guys who may have drugged and assaulted her. No, this is about Col bonding with her brother Adam, and finding out he’s gay which leads to them having a tryst, which doesn’t last particularly long.
There have been a lot of great first queer love stories like Call Me By Your Name and Weekend, and lesser so, in my opinion, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight – yeah, I know it won Best Picture. Shut up. Stolevski’s film is one of the better ones, for sure, because it focuses so much on the two actors, and it’s interesting to see where things go from that opening.
I’m not sure I have a ton more to say about the movie, since it’s been a few months since I saw it, but I was able to connect more with Stolevski’s newer film than his previous one, and the two main actors are both terrific. Possibly my biggest issue with the film is that I’m not sure if American audiences will care for this, especially considering how they mostly ignored last year’s Spoiler Alert, which had a bigger name star and filmmaker. Being set in Australia (with those accents) is going to put off any queer Americans, and then the fact it’s a gay love story means that it’s likely to appeal to a very select audience, who has proven not to be very reliable in terms of going to the movies. (Anyone remember what happened with Billy Eichner’s Bros last year after it received so many rave reviews, including my own?)
Of an Age may be targeting a very select and specific audience, but as with some of the movies mentioned earlier, this is a quality drama that really explores a lot of emotions that we rarely get to see in a non-heteronormative* way. (*Yeah, you just know I’ve been wanting to use that term so that I can feel like one of the kids, rather than an old dog so long past his due that I fully expect someone to take me out back and shoot me any days now.)
Rating: 8/10
RETURN TO SEOUL (Sony Classics)
Opening in New York and L.A. is this film that was shortlisted for the International Feature Oscar and which I saw at the New York Film Festival last year, so my memory may be a little too faulty to write a full review. (I have a screener here and if I had any time – oops [puts a quarter into the “kvetch jar”] – I would have rewatched it in order to review.) Directed by Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou, this was submitted by Cambodia for the Oscars, and though it got shortlisted, it didn’t make the cut for the nominations.
It stars Park Ji-min as Freddie, a young French woman who travels to Korea to try to find her birth parents, having been given up for adoption very early in her life. It ends up being quite an emotional journey as she deals with the paperwork and red tape involved with trying to meet your birth parents after over two decades. This is a great companion film to Koreeda’s Broker, which was released late last year, and I do hope that despite the lack of an Oscar nomination, American audiences will look out for this one.
OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORTS (ShortsTV)
Hitting 500 theaters in 75+ markets (including New York’s IFC Center) is this annual tradition of releasing all of the Oscar-nominated shorts into theaters. If you’re an Oscar enthusiast and regularly participate in an office pool or even Gold Derby’s predictions, then actually watching the shorts is a great way to be one step ahead of everyone else. That said, I have not found the time to watch all the shorts yet, but as usual, the doc shorts will be split into two programs, and then there’s the animated and live action shorts, each with their own programs. (So yeah, you’ll have to buy four movie tickets to see all 15 shorts. Still, it’s usually worth it, especially if you’re in an office pool where getting the three shorts categories right can be a major difference maker.)
EMILY (Bleecker Street)
Emma Mackey stars in the directorial debut by actress Frances O’Connor, which looks at the early life of Emily Brontë and her equally famous sisters, and I don’t have a lot to say about this, because I found it to be absolutely boring as hell. So sorry, no review for this one, but hey, if you’re a fan of Wuthering Heights (the book or the movie adaptations), maybe you’ll enjoy it more than I did.
DEVIL’S PEAK (Screen Media)
The new film from House of Love director Ben Young (Dogs of Love), based on David Joy’s novel All Light Tends to Go has an amazing cast that includes Billy Bob Thornton, Robin Wright (also a producer), Hopper Jack Penn, Katelyn Nacon, and Jackie Earle Haley. It’s a thriller set in the Appalachian Mountains and a family dominated by a crime lord (Thornton) that’s disrupted when his son (Penn) meets the girl of his dreams (Nacon), making him want to escape from the tight grip of his father and family.
HIDDEN BLADE (Well Go USA)
From China comes this film from Er Cheng – not to be confused with the brilliant samura film from Yoji Yamada – starring the brilliant Tony Leung, who you may know from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It’s a story about underground workers who “risk their lives to send intelligence and defend the motherland.” It’s set after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and it could be an intriguing spy thriller, though I have yet to find time to watch my screener.
A RADIANT GIRL (Film Movement)
Opening at the Quad Cinema in New York on Friday is Sandrine Kiberlain’s Fernch drama set in Paris, during the summer of ‘42, and starring Rebecca Marder as Irene, a 19-year-old aspiring actress who discovers her passion for theater, this coming-of-age drama taking place in Nazi-occupied France. So yeah, that’s two period coming-of-age films this weekend and two set in and around World War II.
PACIFICTION (Grasshopper Films)
The new film from Albert Serra (The Death of Louis XIV) stars Benoît Magimel (The Piano Teacher) as a Frenchgovernment official in Tahiti, who navigates the various communities in order the rumored existence of a submarine that could point to French nuclear testing. I just didn’t have any interest in this one, although Grasshopper tends to release decent foreign language films.
Might as well do some repertory stuff, because honestly, that’s mostly what I’m watching on the weekends…
Starting this weekend is “Yvonne Rainer: A Retrospective,” showing seven of the films directed by the dancer/choreographer over the next two weeks with Rainer herself appearning in person on Friday night for a QnA after Lives of Performers (1972) and for an intro to Film About a Woman Who… from 1974.
The terrific “Live by the Sword, Die by the Gun” series continues with one final screening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). This weekend’s new additions include Kenji Misumi’s The Legend of Zatoichi (1962), the first film in that samurai series that’s a fave of mine, and Masaki Kobayashi’s film Harakiri from the same year.
There’s one more screening of The Quay Brothers shorts on Thursday in the “Handmade Horror” series, and then Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s stop-motion animated The Wolf House (2018) plays through the weekend.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 film Memoria finally comes to the Metrograph as part of its “Folktales, Ghosts & Parallel Realities” series, while there’s one final screening of Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1965) on Thursday.
Playing as part of Brandon Harris’ “Strange Fruit” on Friday and Sunday is Pierre Chenal’s 1951 film, Native Son.
The ongoing “Metrograph Presents A to Z” takes the weekend off after one final screening of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) on Thursday evening.
You can still catch a 35mm screening of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) tonight and on Friday and one last time on Sunday, and then starting Thurday, it will be showing a 35mm print of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001), starring Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz. On Friday, you can see the John Singleton classic, Poetic Justice (1993), starring Tupac Shakur, Janet Jackson, and a very young Regina King! Sunday is another screening in 35mm of Todd Solonz’s Happiness (1998) and the horror film Kuroneko (1968). (Seriously, if the Roxy were as close to me as the Metrograph and they had some sort of membership with cheaper tickets, I might be there more.)
This weekend, as part of its “Snubbed: Great Movies, No Nominations” series, you can see Scorsese’s classic, The King of Comedy (1982); as well as Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990), starring Danny Glover; and Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988). Friday afternoon, there will be a screening of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal (1982), and while you’re there, you totally should check out the year-round Jim Henson Exhibition.
Starting this Friday is a new 4k restoration of Lou Ye’s 2000 film Suzhou River via Strand Releasing, while Dino Rita’s Una Vita Difficile (1961) continues. This Sunday’s Film Forum Jr. is Marcel Camus’ 1959 film, Black Orpheus.
On Friday, the Japan Society’s monthly anime selection is Yoshifumi Kondo’s 1995 film, Whisper of the Heart, shown in 35mm.
This weekend’s “Late Night Favorites” selection is Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House from 1977.
That’s it for this week. I guess I was able to do touch on just about everything even if I didn’t get to watch it all. Next week, it’s Cocaine Bear vs. Jesus Revolution. Take a wild guess which one I’m rooting for.