The Weekend Warrior Jan. 13, 2023
A MAN CALLED OTTO, PLANE, HOUSE PARTY, THE DEVIL CONSPIRACY, SKINAMARINK, SAINT OMER
Well, something not so funny happened on the way to planning to writing this week’s (rather late) column. I tested positive for COVID last Friday, and while I’m fine now, I’m still holed up at home and been busy with other paid deadline stuff before I could even get to writing any sort of column this week. (What else is new? But this is an important week for the film industry with lots of awards and nominations.)
This week’s column is dedicated to the late Jeff Beck, whose music I listened to a lot in high school when I was playing in bands myself. His records “Wired” and “Blow by Blow” were two records I listened to constantly, as I was always somewhere between prog rock and jazz fusion in terms of the bands I played in. I definitely had lost track of him, and oddly, I never saw him live either, but I do hope to listen to some of his more recent musical output (including a 2022 album with Johnny Depp?!) and catch up on what I’ve missed.
This is MLK, Jr. weekend, and while this week’s offerings aren’t particularly great, at least we’re getting a few new wide releases, even if there’s nothing that really jumps out as something that could even remotely take down Avatar: The Way of Water and M3GAN or even Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, for that matter.
A MAN CALLED OTTO (Sony)
This weekend has a bit of an outlier in that it’s a new movie starring Tom Hanks, and almost only Tom Hanks, because it’s been some time since that was the case, at least for a fully theatrical release. It’s also one of two remakes this weekend, since it is indeed a remake of the Oscar-nominated Swedish film, A Man Called Ove, which I’m not sure I ever got around to seeing when it came out.
Hanks plays Otto Anderson, a curmudgeonly widower who is absolutely unpleasant and intolerable to everyone in his neighborhood, and yet, everyone he meets loves him. Go figure. I can definitely relate. (rimshot).
Although I’m not going to write a full review for this one, since I saw it over a month ago, I generally enjoyed it, as much for Hanks as some of his supporting cast, particularly Mariana Treviño as Marisol, a bubbly new neighbor who moves next door with her family, including two adorable girls, and they start chipping away at Otto’s crabbiness to get to his kinder, purer heart. (There’s a reason Otto is so grouchy, and it has a lot to do with the death of his wife.)
This is directed by Marc Forster, a filmmaker I’ve had a chance to interview a few times over the years, and who I quite like. (You may know him for World War Z or Finding Neverland, which was written by David Magee, who also did this adaptation.) This ends up being a simpler character dramedy with Hanks really turning on the charm even when confronted with things that aggravate Otto. It was a little strange seeing Hanks’ son Truman playing the younger Otto, because he looks just enough like his father to make you wonder, but he’s kind of a pokey actor, maybe because he’s only acted in two movies, working mostly in the camera dept. in various capacities.
I’ve written quite a bit about the movie’s box office potential, and it’s honestly about how much it can sustain its business after making $4.2 million last weekend in 635 theaters, enough to take fourth place. Adding over 3,000 more theaters would make it seem like it’s guaranteed to be the weekend’s big hit, and that’s probably going to be the case, although its per-theater average is probably going to drop dramatically with that big an expansion. It’s probably good for $11 to 13 million this weekend, putting it in a face-off against Puss in Boots: The Last Wish for third place.
PLANE (Lionsgate)
In any other reality, an action-thriller teaming Gerard Butler with Luke Cage’s Mike Colter would be a bonafide hit, but I’m not sure why this one seems to be getting released with very little fanfare. I did see Butler on a morning show this week, so there’s that. In it, Butler plays airplane pilot Captain Brodie Torrence, who is flying out of Singapore to go see his daughter in Hawaii. On his flight is a prisoner being sent for extradition back to the States, played by Colter, of course. When the flight hits a terrible storm, it goes down on a remote island in the Philippines, which is run by a number of armed rebels who see the passengers of the plane as potential hostages for which they can collect large ransoms.
This is another high-concept action-thriller as other ones we’ve seen from Butler. It’s directed by French filmmaker Jean-François Richet, who helmed a really bad Assault on Precinct 13 remake, but he also directed this amazing two-part biopic called Mesrine, starring Vincent Cassel, which was absolutely fantastic.
This one starts out quite rough, because as you meet Torrence, who oddly, has a Scottish accent. I mean, sure, Butler is Scottish, but there’s a reason why he hasn’t used it as much in his American movie career. Would you have believed him in Angel Has Fallen or its sequels if he was playing a Secret Service agent with a Scottish accent? No, probably not. Anyway, we meet Torrence and his co-pilot before Colter’s character is introduced, and we meet some of the other passengers, before the plane crashes. If you’ve seen the trailer (or just read my synopsis above) then you can pretty much guess what happens after that. This opening sequence is just such a standard set-up for this kind of movie, that I was playing “which passenger dies?” as each of them was introduced, though I was mostly wrong.
As Plane begins, you might be somewhat concerned that we have another entry in the “January dumping ground” that so many critics claim to be a real thing, but it does get better as it goes along, and most of that is due to Butler and Colter. The fact is that Gerard Butler is a good actor, and you can tell he gives his all, even for a high-concept action flick like Plane. Colter is also great, so this was a wise project to greenlight, but the problem is most of the other actors, because the cast generally comes across like a quick one-day roll through central casting. It’s not like the script is particularly good, but pretty soon after the conflict is introduced, it becomes far more fun, and that continues through the end.
In essence, the movie starts rough but generally gets better. The best thing that I can say about Plane is that it could have been much, much worse, but it turns out to be an okay action movie.
Rating: 6.5/10
I’ve written quite a bit about Plane’s box office chances in my other columns, and at one point, I wasn’t sure this could open to more than $7 million, but with Lionsgate releasing it into over 3,000 theaters and with the four-day holiday, I think it could maybe pull in $8 million over those four days.
HOUSE PARTY (New Line/WB)
In most normal circumstances, this Black comedy with a familiar title, i.e. the 1990 Kid ‘n’ Play music-driven comedy that started off a franchise, would be one of the bigger movies of the weekend. I’m not going to be reviewing this one for reasons I don’t feel like getting into, but it’s written by two of the writers of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, and it’s directed by music video director Calmatic making his feature debut.
This version is set in L.A., and it stars Jacob Latimore, who I know from Detroit, and Tosin Cole, who I really don’t know at all, but who was on Doctor Who, as two young party promoters who get the crazy idea to make money by throwing a house party in the mansion of basketball legend Lebron James. Oh, did I mention that this is produced by James, whose 2021 requel, Space Jam: A New Legacy – which was horrible in my book – opened with $31 million while still in the early days of theaters reopening post-COVID, but only made $70 million total cause Warner Bros. put it on the burgeoning HBO Max to drum up streaming business. House Party was supposed to go straight to HBO Max at one point, but then it was decided to give it a theatrical release.
New Line is only releasing the movie into somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 theaters with it only having to wait 17 days before it’s sent to VOD and 45 days before it’s on HBO Max, which is where it was meant to go in the first place. The thing is that this type of Black comedy was all the rage in the ‘00s, and even with such a moderate release, a comedy like this has a chance at finding audiences in the larger cities where James and some of the cameos from the world of music could bring in a decent audience over the MLK Jr. weekend where black comedies like Ride Along and Bad Boys For Life have thrived.
And now we get to a fun one…. (Yes, that’s sarcasm.)
THE DEVIL CONSPIRACY (Samuel Goldwyn)
Well, this is a strange one, because it’s a faith-based thriller directed by Nathan Frankowski – no, I don’t know him either – that is trying to create an epic battle between good and evil with art student Laura (Alice Orr-Ewing) caught in the middle and with a priest named Father Marconi (Joe Doyle) trying to save her after she’s kidnapped by a religious cult trying to bring Lucifer back to earth. Marconi is actually one of the cult’s early victims, but he calls upon Saint Michael to take his body and use it to fight against the evil, and that’s what happens. (Oh, the cult also steals the Shroud of Turin to get some of Jesus’ DNA to impregnate Laura with – I want to say it makes more sense when you watch the movie, but it doesn’t.)
I probably should get out of the way that I love horror movies like The Omen, The Exorcist, and Rosemary’s Baby, which deal with the existence of the devil as a real presence. The movie’s prelude makes it seem like it may be something more epic like The Lord of the Rings, but even the main character is dubious of the devil’s existence, and that’s something we learn right after we watch Lucifer being chained up in hell to set up the battle with the angel Michael.
Both Orr-Ewing and Doyle aren’t bad actors, she coming across a bit like a younger Vera Farmiga (or older Taisa Farmiga?), but it will surprise few that this is the first screenplay by the movie’s writer/producer Ed Alan, who clearly was inspired by things like The Da Vinci Code in trying to create some sort of overarching mystery with this cult, particularly their vague intentions. Sometime well into the movie, we learn that Laura lost her husband and baby, which is something that probably should have been set-up much earlier rather than just thrown out as an aside well into the story.
This movie looks like it cost a ton of money with some impressive visual effects and prosthetic make-up effects for Lucifer’s denizens, including a good deal of satisfying gore as well. It’s just not a typical horror movie involving possession or exorcism some might expect, as much as it’s someone trying to turn a biblical story into some kind of superhero movie. That stuff is counter-balanced by some awful overacting, particularly from Eveline Hall, who plays “Liz,” the head of the cult, a dreadful script and moments that make you laugh out loud, because they’re so ridiculous. By the time we’re fully into the story, things start to get more ridiculous, and yes, I realize I’m saying that even with the idea of a war between heaven and hell being pretty ridiculous to begin with.
It’s not that the movie is poorly-directed, because it’s not, as much as it just seems misguided and all over the place. I think back to how much better last year’s Prey for the Devil was, even though it didn’t get screened in advance for critics.
Like a cross between Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Blade: Trinity (yes, the bad one), The Devil Conspiracy is so confounding, it’s hard to imagine how someone managed to get financing for such an epic disaster.
Rating: 4/10
Honestly, I have no idea how many theaters this is going into and if anyone even knows this movie exists. I saw a trailer in front of something else last year, and I’m not sure if this is being targeted to the faith-based crowd or what, so maybe this can scrape together a million over the four-day weekend, but who knows? I’m shocked the movie is getting a theatrical release at all.
Anyway, here are my predictions for the weekend (these are all 4-day predictions):
1. Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century/Disney) - $36.5 million -20%
2. M3GAN (Universal) - $20 million -34%
3. A Man Called Otto (Sony) - $12.3 million +273%
4. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (DreamWorks Animation/Universal) - $11.4 million -15%
5. Plane (Lionsgate) - $8 million N/A
6. House Party (New Line/WB) - $6 million N/A
7. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Marvel/Disney) - $2.8 million -20%
8. I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Sony) - $1.8 million -25%
9. The Devil Conspiracy (Samuel Goldwyn) - $1.2 million N/A
10. The Whale (A24) - $1.1 million -30%
SKINAMARINK (IFC Films)
This strange microbudget horror film from Kyle Edward Ball is… well…. Strange. I first saw the trailer for this at the IFC Center in front of another movie, and I had no idea what I was watching. Maybe I did a little more reading about this before watching it, but that still didn’t help prepare me for what this was. Essentially, it takes place 1995, and it follows the Paranormal Activity model of being very low-fi and made on a microbudget, but it follows two young kids who wake up and find themselves along in their house with odd voices telling them to do things.
This movie isn’t just a slow burn that gets more interesting as it gets along. It’s just really slow as Ball tries to create the impression of what it must be like to be a young child whose parents suddenly vanish with the camera taking on the viewpoint of these children to try to show how scary that might be for young kids.
It was hard not to think of Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, while watching this, brecause, I tried to watch that at the virtual Sundance two years ago, and I just couldn’t get through it, even though I’ve heard from so many people since that love it, that maybe I should give that another chance.
Skinamarink is certainly an interesting experiment with haunting visuals and a disconcerting overall tone, but ultimately, it’s just not something I could recommend sitting in a theater to watch. I didn’t find it particularly scary, as much as it was disturbing and confusing to figure out what we’re supposed to take away from it.
Rating: 6/10
SAINT OMER (Super Ltd.)
Opening at the Film Forum and at Film at Lincoln Center (links below) is the new movie from French filmmaker Alice Diop, whose previous movie, Nous, played at New Directors/New Films a few years back, which is why she can get nominated by the DGA for this as her “first-time theatrical feature” even though Nous did get a theatrical release in France, so what gives, DGA? I’m not sure how much I want to say about this movie because I did not make it more than an hour into it, because it was so effin’ BORING! (even compared to Skinamarink). It involves a novelist named Rama (Kayije Kagame) who attends the trial of a woman accused of murdering her child, and after a long time getting through a very long and verbose sequence in the courtroom. It reminded me a lot of the 2008 French film The Class, which was also France’s selection for the Oscars and got nominated, but I found it so grueling to get through, and Saint Omer felt like more of the same, or at least the part of it I watched. Why can’t more French filmmakers make movies like Mesrine?
CHESS STORY (Film Movement)
I saw a trailer for this German drama at the Quad Cinema, where it opens on Friday, and it looked interesting enough that I hoped to get to it, but just didn’t get the chance. Philipp Stölzl (Young Goethe in Love) directs this movie adapted from Stefan Zweig’s novel about a lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis who tries to withstand his tortures by the Gestapo by taking up chess. Again, I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but it looks quite great.
Gonna have to keep the repertory stuff brief this week, too.
The series “Live by the Sword, Die by the Gun” continues with two movies from 1968, The Great Silence (1968) from Django director Sergia Corbucci and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, both which probably had some influence on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015), which is also playing in the series this weekend. “Also Starring… Joe Pesci” continues with one final screening of Scorsese’s Goodfellas this afternoon, but then screenings of Casino and Nicolas Roeg’s 1983 film, Eureka this weekend. On Friday, Hunter Harris – am I supposed to know who that is? – presents the great ‘70s heist thriller, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1975), and Spike Lee’s 2006 movie, The Inside Man, on Friday. “Metrograph Presents A to Z” continues with screenings of Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues and Japanese master Kore-Eda’s 1998 movie, Afterlife. (Which I’ve never seen but dying to see after watching his excellent new film, Broker.)
James Baldwin Abroad: A Program of 3 Films continues through the weekend, as does Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. This Sunday’s “Film Forum, Jr.” movie is The Muppet Movie from 1979.
The last two days of the Jordan Peele programmed “The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice” will be two screenings of the rarely-screened The Birthday from 2004 with filmmaker Eugenio Mira and star Corey Feldman doing a QnA after the first screening and an intro to the second on Friday… and then Nope plays again in 70mm on Saturday.
“Waverly Midnights: Midnights of the Living Dead” will screen the original 2003 Resident Evil movie!
Other stuff out this weekend:
THE SEVEN FACES OF JANE (Gravitas Ventures)
KUTTEY (Yash Raj Films)
NIGHT OF THE BASTARD (Dark Sky Films)
That’s it for this week. Next week? Well, I guess we’ll have to see what happens ‘cause I’m still trying to make up for time lost due to COVID. Wish me luck!