The Weekend Warrior June 17, 2022
LIGHTYEAR, CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH, SPIDERHEAD, FATHER OF THE BRIDE, OFFICIAL COMPETITION, GOOD LUCK TO YOU LEO GRANDE, and More
As you may already know, I’ve been slammed with the Tribeca Festival and Emmy-related interviews over this past week, which has made this column later than usual… again… and I’m honestly not sure how much I can write about the movies I have seen, let alone watch that many of the other movies coming out this week.
Still, there’s a lot of good stuff… and there’s a single wide release that I didn’t get around to seeing, which honestly is just cause I needed to see something else for an interview. My life is just one big snake eating its own tail as I try to finish all of this stuff.
Anyway, the single new wide release this weekend is….
LIGHTYEAR (Pixar Animation/Disney)
I won’t get into a lot of analysis on this, because I’m pretty happy with what I wrote over at Gold Derby about the latest movie from Pixar Animation, and the first one to play in theaters nationwide since Onward in March 2020. There’s a good chance you already know a lot about this semi-prequel to the Toy Story movies in that Chris Evans voices Buzz Lightyear, the astronautic space hero that was turned into a toy voiced by Tim Allen. I know. It’s a little confusing, especially for someone who hasn’t seen the movie yet… like me! No fault of Disney in this case. I just had to skip the press screening to catch Elvis for an interview, that’s all.
So what else can I say about Lightyear? I guess one of the interesting aspects of this movie and Pixar movies in general is that they do appeal to a wide range of audiences of different ages and genders. Sure, it’s first and foremost a kids’ movie, and that definitely will work in its favor since we haven’t had a bonafide family animated film since The Bad Guys opened in April, and both that and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 have benefitted greatly from the lack of family films in theaters. Lightyear will also benefit from COVID vaccines finally being available for kids under 5 as some parents have been cautious to take them to theaters, though not all based on the success of those other two movies mentioned. Besides Evans, who is pretty much an A-lister from his MCU movies, Lightyear also features the voice of Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, as well as others.
As far as the reviews for Lightyear, they’re nowhere even close to the high 90s percentage the previous two Toy Story managed to achieve. Instead, reviews are at 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the worst showing for a Pixar movie since Cars 3 in 2017. Fortunately, kids don’t read reviews, and neither do parents, when their kids want to see something, though some of the teen and 20-something Pixar fans who grew up on those movies might be hesitant to rush out to see it. Another thing that might affect Lightyear’s take is that it’s not getting IMAX screens exclusively but is instead sharing them with last week’s Jurassic World: Dominion. When you lower the average price for tickets in that way, as well as with the lower price for kids’ tickets, it seems like Lightyear is more likely to end up in the realm of something like Inside Out, which opened with $90.4 million.
Some have suggested that Lightyear would make over $100 million opening this weekend, on par with the previous two Toy Story movies in 2019 and 2010, respectively, but I think Lightyear (without having seen it yet) loses something by not being about living toys, which is the winning premise that has led to Pixar’s entire legacy starting back in 1995. I think Lightyear is more likely to make somewhere in the $80 to 90 million range for some of the reasons mentioned above.
THE CHART:
Although Lightyear will win the weekend with ease, other movies might get a bump from Father’s Day on Sunday, although it’s very likely that Jurassic World: Dominion will take a pretty major plunge in its second weekend with so many other stronger options in theaters.
1. Lightyear (Disney/Pixar) - $84.2 million N/A
2. Jurassic World: Dominion (Universal) - $50 million -65%
3. Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount) - $30.8 million -41%
4. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Marvel/Disney) - $2.6 million -50%
5. The Bad Guys (DreamWorks Animation/Universal) - $1.3 million -50%
6. The Bob’s Burgers (20th Century) - $1.2 million -51%
7. Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24) - $900k -31%
8. Downton Abbey: A New Era (Focus) - $900k -48%
This week’s “Chosen One” is…
CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH (Apple)
One of my favorite movies from this year’s Sundance Film Festival and in my top 10 for the year is the third movie from Cooper Raiff after 2020’s Shithouse (which I liked) and Madeline & Cooper (which I still haven’t seen). In this one, Raiff plays Andrew, who moonlights as a “party starter” at bar mitzvahs to get kids and adults on the dance floor. At one such bar mitzvah, he meets Dakota Johnson’s Domino, a single mother with an autistic daughter named Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) and the two become friends, although Andrew thinks that maybe the two of them might have something more, even though Domino is engaged (to Raúl Castillo).
You can read my glowing review here, but it’s just such a far more advanced film from Raiff, one that has a lot larger cast that includes Leslie Mann and Brad Garrett as Andrew’s mother and stepfather and Evan Assante as his impressionable younger brother David. I don’t really want to say too much more, especially not having seen the movie since Sundance in January, but this is just a wonderful dramedy that will be great to watch in theaters with an audience (which I’ve yet to be able to do since Sundance went virtual this year).
OFFICIAL COMPETITION (IFC Films)
I also saw this one quite some time ago even though it also played at Tribeca this week. It’s a Spanish-language film from Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, which reunites Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas for a dark comedy about a millionaire who decides to invest his money into making a movie, which will be directed by Cruz’s Lola Cuevas, a lesbian feminist filmmaker, while Banderas plays Félix, a hot younger superstar who has been cast opposite Iván, an older and much more serious dramatic actor, as played by Oscar Martínez.
I quite enjoyed this film, which is very funny, but especially since it allows Cruz to really break away from the more serious roles she’s been playing in Almodovar’s films. I really wasn’t very familiar with the filmmakers, but they’ve actually directed a lot in Spain, both narrative and docs and television, so I was quite impressed that they were put together this trio of actors. This is a great movie for those who like movies about making movies, but unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to write a full review of it.
POSER (Oscilloscope)
I’m kind of interested in this indie drama from filmmakers Noah Dixon and Ori Segev since it’s set in the underground music scene of Columbus, Ohio that I didn’t even know existed! It stars Sylvie Mix as Lennon Gates, who is trying to break into said music scene by starting a podcast to interview local artists, building a relationship with performer Bobbi Kitten, as her personality and identity begins to change so that she can explore her own musical ambitions. This will open in New York at the Quad Cinema (with filmmakers and cast present) and in L.A. on Friday after opening in Columbus, Ohio a couple weeks back.
Let’s get to some docs, many of which I have not had a chance to watch yet either. What can I say? I suck.
BITTERBRUSH (Magnolia)
Hitting theaters on Friday and VOD on June 24 is Emelie Mahdavian’s doc, which follows female range riders Hollyn Patterson and Colie Moline, spending their last summer herding cattle in Idaho with only their dogs as companions. The doc shows how they deal with all of the perilous working conditions and weathers in order to do their jobs.
END OF THE LINE (Gravitas Ventures)
Emmett Adler’s documentary, which is now available via digital and cable on demand, is a political doc about the New York City subway crisis and its need for restructuring. It follows as former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proclaims a state of emergency for the subway system after a number of disasters in 2017, hiring Toronto’s Andy Byford to salvage the city’s important transit system. I did get a chance to watch this doc, which was filmed between 2016 and 2021, because the NYC subway system is something very close to my heart, only because it’s really the only way to get around, and I’ve experienced many of the problems first-hand. I found Adler’s doc to be particularly interesting in the way it covers New York politics, although I’m not sure how many people outside New York will be that interested in any of this.
START PRAYED UP (Greenwich)
Hitting select theaters on Friday including the Quad Cinema in New York City, and then on VOD starting July 5 is D.L. Anderson and Matt Durning’s documentary which captures the recording of the first, fully live album by 82-year-old Lena Mae Perry and her North Carolina gospel group, The Branchettes.
CIVIL (Netflix)
Another doc that’s playing at the Tribeca Film Festival before hitting theaters this Friday and then Netflix on June 19 is this political doc about attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Winston Boogie Smith, Jacob Blake, the people of Flint, Michigan, and others in civil lawsuit in order to fight against anti-Black racism and violence.
LEAVE NO TRACE (Hulu)
Hitting the Hulu streamer and theaters in New York and L.A. on Friday (also after premiering at Tribeca) is this doc from Irene Taylor (Beware the Slenderman), which looks at the century-long cover up by the Boy Scouts of America to cover up the 82,000 men who have come forward with claims of sexual abuse within the group, which leads to the Boy Scouts filing for bankruptcy.
Streaming…
Less than a month after director Joseph Kosinski’s previous movie, Top Gun: Maverick with Tom Cruise, was released into theaters – and having just crossed the $400 million mark in theaters!! – Kosinski’s follow-up will hit Netflix this Friday, as well as in select theaters.
Spiderhead is adapted from a New Yorker short story by George Saunders that’s been adapted by Deadpool co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. It’s a strange science-fiction film set in the remote Spiderhead Penitentiary where Chris Hemsworth’s Steve Abnesti is testing various designer drugs on the inmates, who are given a lot more freedom than in normal state prison. One of the prisoners is Miles Teller’s Jeff, who got into a horrible accident after drinking, killing his best friend. Jeff is Steve’s prize pupil in that he’s game for anything thrown into his system, but he soon learns that Steve has been abusing his power and may not be forthright with the experiments he’s conducting.
This is a great example of going into a movie without knowing much about it and being genuinely surprised by how it takes a fairly strange premise and does something refreshingly unique with it. The movie starts out a bit like a dark comedy with Hemsworth playing one of his wackier characters, as we learn about how the prisoners at the Spiderhead Penitentiary have devices attached to them that allows Hemsworth’s character and his scientist (Mark Paguio) to implement drugs that can affect the inmates emotions – make them happy, make them afraid, or even manic. But the experiments also involve playing mind games by using these drugs to get inmates to be attracted to each other and do other worse things.
I’ve long been a fan of Miles Teller, and he’s quite great in this, stepping up to whatever is necessary, whether it’s the lighter moments of the movie or when things get seriously fucked up, which happens more than once. He’s well paired with Jurnee Smollett, who is sort of his “work wife” i.e. another inmate with whom he has a relationship with. Honestly, I found the idea of this sort of prison to be much more civilized than this country’s actual prisons, although clearly, Abnesti takes things way too far in terms of manipulating his subjects.
Honestly, if you’re judging this movie based on Kosinski’s work on Top Gun: Maverick, then you clearly have no idea how many people are involved with making a movie like that as good as it is. Spiderhead veers more into the realm of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina or Soderbergh’s Side Effects in terms of exploring the world of pharmaceuticals and some of the questionable experimentation that goes on behind the scenes. It’s a solid film that blends a number of different genres to create something quite riveting, even if it has a few flaws.
Rating: 7/10
Also on Netflix this week is the J-Lo doc HALFTIME, which just premiered as the opening night of the 2022 Tribeca Festival last week, and there’s also a new series called GOD’S FAVORITE IDIOT from Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone about a computer tech support person who becomes the messenger for God. (I’m assuming that’s McCarthy’s character, but I’m not sure.)
FATHER OF THE BRIDE (HBO MAX)
Maybe you heard about this streaming movie that tries to reenvision the 1991 comedy starring Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, as well as Martin’s long-time comedy partner, Steve Martin. This one stars Andy Garcia and Gloria Estefan (yes, the one from Miami Sound Machine) as Billy and Ingrid, the Cuban-American parents of Adria Arjona’s Sofia, who wants to marry her Mexican boyfriend Adan (Diego Boneta) much to the consternation of her father, who gets into conflict with Adan’s wealthy father Hernan (Pedro Damían), who is challenging him to take over the wedding planning.
I have absolutely nothing against taking the premise from the 1991 Father of the Bride and transforming it by making it about a LatinX family. I’m not one of these people who gets upset about something like this by considering it overly work or anything, but if you’re going to do something like this, at least make a good movie out of it, and the new Father of the Bride is just not very funny. And that’s just the first part of its many problems.
It starts with Garcia and Estefan in marriage counseling that leads to them deciding to divorce, but before thy can tell their kids, their daughter Sofia announces that she’s getting married and moving to Mexico. Of course, her father is quite upset, and he gets moreso as he meets the father of the groom, a billionaire with a wife less than half his age who insists on doing the wedding his own way.
I like Garcia just fine but I’ve seen him in far better movies and comedies, and Estefan just doesn’t have the acting chops to pull off his important counterpart. The rest of the cast is just fine but they’re relying on a screenplay that just isn’t very good and really could have used some help.
There’s also Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman as Natalie, a wedding planner who is clueless and mostly inappropriate, and who offers the closest thing the movie comes to laughs. And yet, even she tries to get all dramatic as things continue to go wrong for the couple, and it looks like their wedding might be a disaster.
This is a mess that is constantly trying too hard for laughs and tears by going for the most obvious saccharine emotions, setting up lots of conflicts between various characters than effortlessly resolving them before the big wedding. There were a few things I liked about this, but mostly, it was just grueling to watch director Gary Alazraki squander what must have been a pretty decent budget but didn’t have the needed writing and performances to win an audience over. (Oddly, I think this movie could have done better with a theatrical release, because LatinX audiences are known to regularly go to the movie theaters. I’m not sure how many LatinX families have HBO Max, though.)
Rating: 6/10
Also hitting Disney+ on Friday is the new series FAMILY REBOOT, which follows families that have become so busy with their individua; lives that they’ve lost touch with each other.
GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE (Searchlight/Hulu)
Another movie I reviewed out of Sundance was this film directed by Sophie Hyde (Animals), and like Cha Cha Real Smooth, I was hoping to see this again, hopefully in a theater (like at Tribeca, going on right now), but it wasn’t meant to be. You can read my review here, but it basically stars Emma Thompson as a middle-aged woman who hires a sex worker (Daryl McCormack) to help her overcome her apprehension about having a sex positive life. The film is fantastic, especially the two main actors, and I hope people will check this out, although it’s a bummer that it’s not getting a theatrical release, apparently.
Hey, you know what hits Paramount+ tomorrow? A movie called JERRY AND MARGE GO LARGE, starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening. Do you want to know how I found out? I was watching TV last night, and there was a commercial for it. You know why that’s amusing? Because I’m going to a press screening for the movie at Tribeca today, not realizing it would be streaming on Friday. Funny, huh?
Although I still haven’t seen Phil Tippett’s stop motion animated MAD GOD (Shudder), it will hit the horror streamer on Thursday, but it’s also still playing in a number of theaters around the country.
But you know what I’m looking forward to more than anything else? The return of CHRISSY’S COURT, one of my favorite shows on the unfortunately short-lived Quibi, which will debut on The Roku Channel this Friday!
Repertory stuff….
Playing this weekend at my favorite local arthouse…
“Late Night: Hong Kong Goes International” has two semi-classics from the ‘90s starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, John Woo’s Hard Target (1993) and Tsui Hark’s Knock Off (1998), co-starring Rob Schneider and featuring a fun Sparks song in the end credits. (Thursday night late you can also watch Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx and Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, which are much better classics than those other two IMO). This weekend’s “Playtime: Studio Ghibli” selection is Miyazaki’s 2010 movie, The Secret World of Arrietty, with subtitles on Saturday and dubbed on Sunday with more screenings next week. “Fantaterror Español” ends on Saturday with Carlos Aured’s Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1973) while Jesus Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) will end on the digital platform this Friday. “Cindy Sherman Selects” concludes on Thursday with screenings of The Bad Seed, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, and The Human Centipede (First Sequence). This weekend, there’s also “Dwoskino,” three movies by Stephen Dwoskin, who I know absolutely nothing about, but you can read more about it here.
The big retrospective happening at FilmLinc this weekend is “Beware of Dario Argento: a 20-film Retrospetive” which runs from this Friday through June 29, and it’s pretty comprehensive with new restorations of the horror great’s filmography. It will include the North American premiere of Argento’s latest movie, Dark Glasses, as well as a few movies that haven’t gotten many showings in New York City. To be honest, Metrograph had a decent retrospective of Argento a few years back (pre-COVID), but Argento wasn’t able to make it over to the city for it. He’ll be there this weekend for a few QnAs (mostly sold out but with standby possibilities) and a few intros. I’ve actually seen a lot of these movies (at the aforementioned Metrograph retrospective), and there are quite a few bad ones in the bunch (like Phenomena, starring Jennifer Connelly!) but there are so many great rarities, I think this will be a series that ANY horror fan into things like Malignant or Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho will want to see.
Michael Roehmer’s Vengeance is Mine ends tonight, but it will begin screening Luis García Berlanga's 1963 film, The Executioner. This Sunday’s Film Forum Jr. is the Gene Kelly-Debbie Reynolds musical, Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Jean-Jacques Beinex’s 1982 film, Diva, also screens through the weekend.
Screening tonight in 35mm is Michael Mann’s Ali and Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II, while Friday, there are screenings of Alexandre Rockwell’s 1992 film In the Soup with Rockwell in person, as well as 35mm screenings of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986).
The James Wong Howe retrospective continues this weekend with Sweet Smell of Success, Funny Lady, Transatlantic, and more.
Ooo…. on Monday, Werner Herzog will be at the IFC Center to do a QnA after the 6pm screening of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and doing an intro for Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and doing a signing of his new book, “The Twilight World.” (Of course, it’s already sold out. Waugh waugh…) John Waters’ PInk Flamingos also will screen through the weekend with late night screenings on Friday and Saturday. Some of the other ongoing movies including David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Dr. and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika and Perfect Blue continue to screen.
In conjunction with Spiderhead opening at the Paris, the theatr is also doing a Joseph Kosinski retrospective, showing Tron: Legacy on Thursday, Oblivion on Friday, and Only the Brave on Sunday. Exciting.
“Beyond Ozu: Hidden Gems of Shochiku Studios” continues through the weekend but horror fans will want to check back next week for a terrific series hitting MOMA through the rest of the summer.
ETC…
MID-CENTURY (Lionsgate)
ABANDONED (Vertical)
BLOWBACK (Saban Films/Paramount)
THE GOOD NEIGHBOR (Screen Media)
GUIDANCE (Good Deed Entertainment)
THE LOST GIRLS (Vertical)
NIKAMMA (Sony Pictures International Productions)
Next week… Baz Luhrmann is back with Elvis, while Scott Derrickson returns to horror with The Black Phone.
Box office data provided by The-Numbers.com.