The Weekend Warrior July 28, 2023
HAUNTED MANSION, TALK TO ME, THE BEASTS, WAR PONY, THE FIRST SLAM DUNK, JAPAN CUTS, and more
And… we’re back!
I don’t want to get anyone too excited… or any more excited than I am, which is not a lot, but I’ve been hoping to bring back this column for many, many weeks, but have been sidelined by travelling, health issues, and a record I’m working on. There just aren’t enough hours in the day, especially when so many of them are spent in absolute pain or in need of a nap. I won’t go into the gory details, but as much as I love promoting the smaller movies that really need the help (and a few studio movies as well), it’s much harder to find time to watch them, especially since they tend to only be offered on screeners. You might think that would make things easier, but nope. I need to find the time to watch everything, and it’s easier when something is scheduled at a screening room. Because of that, I have only reviewed the movies I actually had a chance to watch at screenings.
Before we get to this week’s nationwide and other releases, there are a few New York-based film series going on right now.
In any other year, I’d be all over the NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL, running through Sunday with the Closing Night film being Netflix’s animated, The Monkey King. There was a time when it was closely linked to the JAPAN CUTS program at the Japan Society, once seen as almost a subseries to NYAFF, but as a separate entity, it’s equally appealing in its own right, and it does look like a pretty amazing line-up this year, running from July 26 through August 6.
I haven’t had the time to really check out the line-up or watch many of the movies, although I did get to watch the 1985 doc Tokyo Melody: A Film About Ryuichi Sakamoto by director Elizabeth Lennard, which unfortunately is also sold out, but I have an interview with Lennard to run over at Below the Line soon. The movie is a fantastic portrait of the musician/composer just as he was achieving worldwide fame after scoring, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and a few years before he’d win the Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor with David Byrne.
Another music-related movie that looks interesting is Daisuke Miyazaki’s Plastic about a couple of music fans who obsess over their favorite ‘70s glam rock band, Exne Kedy and the Poltergeists, who broke up decades earlier. Already sold out is the North American theatrical premiere of Keishi Otomo’s Legend and Butterfly, as well as both showings of Kentaro’s Under the Turquoise Sky, Japan Cuts’ centerpiece. On Wednesday, Japan Cuts premiered The First Slam Dunk (which opens on Friday), which was also sold out, but you can read more about that below. This is a great exploration series, and there are other great recent releases from Japan that may only be shown in New York (and even the States) via Japan Cuts.
Let’s get to some of the theatrical releases coming (mostly) to a theater near you.
HAUNTED MANSION (Disney)
Justin Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair) directs his first big studio movie to get a wide a theatrical release, and it’s a big one at that, involving one of Disney’s most popular theme park attractions that was introduced at the Magic Kingdom (formerly Disney World) all the way back in 1971. Simien has put together an absolutely stacked cast, even if it doesn’t quite compare to the casts for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie or Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer last week. You can read more about its box office prospects over at Gold Derby.
Before getting to my review, I should say that I have such a strange relationship with the Haunted Mansion. When I was ten years old, that was the first and only time I have ever been to the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, and I immediately fell in love with the Haunted Mansion, going on that ride three times in the course of two days. And then I haven’t been back since. (It’s a little odd for a middle-aged-man to go to a Disney park on his own.)
Lakeith Stanfield, who I was a fan of long before Knives Out and Judas and the Black Messiah, plays Ben Matthias, an astrophysicist who is working as a ghost tour guide in New Orleans and hating every minute of it. Shortly after meeting him, Ben is approached by a priest, played by Owen Wilson, who tells him about an opportunity which will allow Ben to use his interests in ghost photography to help a single mother (Rosario Dawson) who has been experiencing supernatural incidents in her new home (and yes, if you immediately think that this was the same plot as The Pope’s Exorcist, you’d be partially right).
I wasn’t expecting much, but I was also quite worried, as soon as I realized one of the central characters was gonna be a kid played by Chase Dillon, who is being bullied for being quite nerdy, plus he also lives in that creepy house. Fortunately, he is surrounded by a great cast of comic actors, soon joined by Danny De Vito as Bruce, a professor on haunted houses, and Tiffany Haddish as a medium, who all gather in the house (they can’t really leave) to figure out how to put an end to the hauntings. It often involves séances and such, but even the scariest ghosts are still generally fun and not meant to terrify the kiddies.
After his cast, Simien’s secret weapon is the screenplay by Katie Dippold from “Parks and Rec” and Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, which I didn’t love but I also didn’t hate. She’s great at coming up with funny bits, and then it’s the likes of Haddish, De Vito, and Wilson, who really sell the gags and their characters. The big bad for this piece is the Hatbox Ghost played (quite oddly) by Jared Leto, which I’m not sure I could have guessed if his name wasn’t in the opening credits. I didn’t think Jamie Lee Curtis’ turn as Madame Leota was quite as bad a decision as Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar follow-up to voice a robot in the recent Transformers.
Even so, there are some great set pieces that keep things interesting, even as the ghost cameos tend to feel a little forced. Some people might wonder if this is appropriate for their kids, and it’s good to know that this is rated PG-13, but I also think it’s fine for kids over 7 or 8 that don’t scare or get freaked out so easily.
Like a cross between Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion movie does a much better job incorporating characters and ideas from the theme park attraction than the Eddie Murphy movie. It’s flawed but quite funny.
Rating: 7.5/10
TALK TO ME (A24)
This horror movie from the Philippou brothers, Danny and Michael, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January following a premiere at the Australian-based Adelaide Film Festival last year. It was one of the better horror movies that premiered at Sundance in recent years.
Again, I’ve spoken about its box office potential over at Above the Line and Gold Derby, so I guess I can get right into a short review, even though I realize now that it was included in my Sundance recap.
After a suitably terrifying prologue, we meet Sophie Wilde’s Mia, whose mother died under odd circumstances, but she has made herself a new family with her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen), her younger brother Riley (Joe Bird), and their mother (Miranda Otto). As high school kids often do at parties, they’ve discovered a new party game involving a petrified hand that the person grasping it can have the dead talk to them (hence the title), but it often involves that one person seeing some absolutely horrifying spirits with all the effects of their deaths still visible. Mia’s motivation is to make contact with her mother, but instead, it leads to Riley being trapped in that world. Mia’s involvement in Riley’s predicament ultimately puts her at odd with her best friend.
I wasn’t really familiar with the Philippous’ RackaRacka YouTube channel or video shorts, but they’re much more humorous than Talk to Me, which is (pardon the pun) deathly serious with more elements of a character drama, but also plenty of really eerie and outright frightening moments, helped by terrific makeup effects.
The movie looks fantastic but it’s also accompanied by some incredible sound design and music that’s fairly fluid in terms of not ever being one or the other. I was impressed that the Philipous managed to find such a great crew of crafts people in Australia without many of the more familiar names from horror.
Personally, I liked this much more than last year’s Smile, despite it having some of the same DNA in terms of the type of horror and the darker dramatic elements. It’s just a much better movie, and the character work and acting by their mostly young cast just makes you much more invested in everything that happens. Hopefully it will do well enough to warrant a sequel, because it does end in a bit of a cliffhanger, leaving you want to know more about what happens next.
Having another great horror film from Australia is not too surprising since that continent seems to have so much angst that makes for great horror, but the Philippous show that if they can master one film genre, they may be able to tackle others just as well.
Rating: 8/10
Look for my interview with the Brothers Philippou over at Above the Line soon, but it’s opening in roughly 2,300 to 2,400 theaters, and it should be able to get into the top 10 but probably with $5 to 7 million.
THE FIRST SLAM DUNK (GKIDS)
This is a movie I know less about, since I haven’t seen it, but essentially, Takehiko Inoue brings his manga comics from the ‘90s to American theaters after making four movies based on them in the ‘90s. It’s a movie set in the world of basketball, apparently, but I don’t know enough about the series to know how this connects with them. It was a huge blockbuster hit in Japan though, and word of anime hits over there tend to get to these shores, which should help this make a few million depending on how many theaters it gets.
THE WEEKEND CHART:
Definitely will be interesting to see how well “Barbenheimer” does in its second weekend, but when you have so much of your opening in Thursday previews, it’s hard to hold up, even though Sound of Freedom has defied all expectations as it nears $150 million domestic this weekend.
1. Barbie (Warner Bros.) - $70 million -57%
2. Oppenheimer (Universal) - $37.5 million -55%
3. Haunted Mansion (Disney) - $32.4 million N/A
4. Sound of Freedom (Angel Studios) - $15 million -24%
5. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 (Paramount) - $10.5 million -46%
6. Talk to Me (A24) - $7 million N/A
7. Elemental (Disney-Pixar) - $4 million -30%
8. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney) - $3.7 million -45%
9. Insidious: The Red Door (Sony) - $3.3 million -50%
10. The First Slam Dunk (GKIDS) - $2.6 million N/A
This week’s “Chosen One” and possibly one of the best movies I’ve seen this past month is…
THE BEASTS (Greenwich)
Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s drama, set in the Galician part of rural Spain, won nine Spanish Goya awards earlier this year, having premiered at Cannes 2022 and opened in much of Europe in 2022, but opening at the Film Forum this Friday and then at the Laemmle Royal in L.A. on Aug. 4 with more locations to come.
Co-written by Sorogoyen with Isabel Peña, the film involves a French couple, Antoine and Olga (Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs), who have moved to the Spanish farming village for a number of specific plans, one to become farmers themselves, but also to renovate (i.e. flip) a number of old worn-down and decaying houses to bring others to the area. This village is generally poor, but the farmers have an opportunity to sell their land to foreign interests who want to set up a wind farm, but Antoine and Olga refuse to sign, putting them at odds with two neighboring brothers, Xan and Lorenzo (Luis Zahera, Diego Anido), whose taunting of Antoine turn to threats and much worse.
I went into The Beasts not really knowing what to expect other than the general plot, and that ended up being the right way to watch it, since I got to see this story unfold in the way Sorogoyen intended, learning more about the feud between Antoine and his neighbors as things escalate. The relationship between Antoine and Olga is particularly loving, but it’s really put to the test by the pressure Antoine feels every time he goes to the local pub and gets called “Frenchie” by Xan, whose younger brother Lorenzo seems somewhat dim. (There is reference to Lorenzo being in some sort of accident that makes him that way, which is intended to, and succeeds, at getting us to sympathize with him more.)
In fact, the way the film begins with a bunch of men wrestling with a horse is quite a compelling way to pull the audience in, that scene being revisited maybe 45 minutes to the end, when something quite dramatic and unexpected happens that changes the entire dynamics of the film. That is where I really was sold on it, because it’s not something we might normally expect in an American indie. All four of the main actors are also fantastic, really making you believe you’re a fly on the wall watching real-life events.
The Beasts is more than just a fantastic character study, looking at the lives of people who might not normally have that much awareness Stateside, but Sorogoyen and his cast have created a compelling take on the classic idea of a feud between locals that goes into all sorts of unexpected areas.
Rating: 8.5/10
WAR PONY (Momentum)
This intriguing drama set amongst the Oglala Lakota community on the Pine Ridge Reservation follows one young man – 23-year-old Bill played by Jojo Bapteise Whiting and 12-year-old Matho, played by LaDainian Crazy Thunder – as they go through their day-to-day, which often involves criminal activities. I went into this not knowing a lot about it, but I was pretty shocked when I got to the end of this film and saw that it was co-directed by Riley Keough with Gina Gammell. Oddly, this also first played at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival like The Beasts but is finally being released here.
Not knowing much about it, I found myself really captivated by how the film follows these two characters and the troubles they get into, Bill actually trying to get out of the rut of drugs and crime that plagues many of his fellow Lakotans. He ends up working for a rather sleazy white guy named Tim who is constantly cheating on his very young and sweet wife with young women from the reservation, using Bill to take them home after their trysts. He also gives Bill a job, which helps Bill explore his decision to buy a poodle and breed her to make even more money.
Matho is even more troubled, constantly getting into trouble with his friends, but when his father dies, he ends up nearly homeless, living in their boarded home and trying to get hospitality from others. But he is a really troubled kid already, so that just leads him further and further into horrible situations.
I’m not going to spoil how Bill and Matho’s problems are resolved, but this is a terrific debut from Gammelll and Keough – I’d love to know their connections to this Lakotan community and how they found all the actors, because Whiting and Crazy Thunder are absolutely terrific in what I believe are their first roles.
War Pony allows you into this world and a way of life that’s far removed from at least my city life, and that is one of the reasons I go to the movies. A decent indie worth seeking out.
Rating: 7.5/10
THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY (Music Box Films)
Semi-related is this indie drama, the directorial debut of Morrisa Maltz, starring critically beloved Native American actor Lilly Gladstone (who co-wrote the script with Maltz) as Tana, as a young woman who goes on a road trip across the American Midwest towards the border between Texas and Mexico.
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (RLJEfilms)
Nicolas Cage stars in the Yuval Adler-directed thriller, co-starring Joel Kinnaman, another road trip movie, this one involving a cat-and-mouse game between two men, as Cage’s character holds Kinnaman at gunpoint. I haven’t had a chance to see this, but I believe it’s getting a limited release on Friday.
TIGER WITHIN (Menemsha Films)
The late Ed Asner’s final performance is in Rafal Zielinski’s indie drama about a friendship between a homeless teen and a Holocaust survivor. It’s getting a limited release as well be available via VOD and on digital platforms.
More than anything, I’ve really wanted to get back into the repertory stuff in New York, because the city really has been knocking it out of the park in terms of repertory stuff since theaters reopened post-pandemic.
So much great stuff going on at my local arthouse and coming up in August. This weekend, it’s showing the buddy comedy classic, Midnight Run (1988), starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, as part of its “Also Starring… Yaphet Koto” series, which has been great.
This weekend, the “Dynamic Dino: Select Films from DeLaurentiis” continues with multiple screenings of John Milus’ Conan the Barbarian (1982), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and starting Friday, you’ll have four chances to see David Lynch’s Dune (1984), which my pal Max Evry wrote a book about calls “A Masterpiece in Disarray” that you can pick up in early September… so watch the movie, first!
The ongoing “My Trip to Italy” features Diane Lane’s Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), adapted by Audrey Wells from Frances Mayes’s 1996 memoir, Fellini’s 1953 film, I Vitelloni, and Daniel Craig’s first James Bond movie, Casino Royale (2006), over the weekend. I’ll be at the latter on Saturday afternoon. Heck, I might see Under the Tuscan Sun just for Sandra Oh, who graces the Metrograph’s promo reel for the series.
The excellent “Neo Noir” series continues this weekend with screenings of Amos Poe’s Alphabet City (1985), Ghost in the Shell, Long Day’s Journey into Night (a Metrograph staple), Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and on Monday, one more screening of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels from 1995.
This weekend’s “Brunch at Metrograph” is the original 1978 musical, Grease!
The terrific “Written and Directed by Billy Wilder” series runs through next Thursday, Aug. 3, with screenings this weekend of Irma La Douce, Some Like It Hot (of course), Kiss Me Stupid, The Apartment, The Seven Year Itch, and much more. The 60th Anniversary 4k restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) continues to run.
The current series running through August 3 is “When the Lights Go Down: The Sex Scene” with Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and many more this weekend. You can figure out what they have in common to be a part of this series. National Treasure is playing this weekend as part of “Nicolas Cage Midnights,” which sadly ends this weekend… just as I’m trying to bring this column back!
Some good stuff going on here this weekend including a 35mm showing of Desperately Seeking Susan, The Gambler (1974) screening as part of its “Hell or Las Vegas” series, Speed 2: Cruise Control, plus my pals at the Film Stage are showing The Rain People (1969) and Rio Bravo (1959), the latter in 35mm. Next week, starting on Monday, is the Roxy’s “Summer of Sequels” series with Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).
Starting on Friday is the new series “Real Rap: Hip-Hop Star Power on Screen,” which will run all the way to November 3. This weekend, they’ll be showing Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1991) – with a video introduction from Van Peebles – and Hype Williams’ Belly (1998).
That’s it for this week. Will there be a Weekend Warrior next week? G-d only knows, and he’s not telling. But Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Mayhem is taking on Meg 2: The Trench, starring Jason Statham. I’ve seen one of them already.