It is too damn hot to leave the house. You got your Cheetos or Pop Tarts and your beverage of choice – what to watch? Brand-spankin’ zombie movie? Captain America melting hearts? ScarJo’s conflicted cyborg? Glen Baby Glen Ross? We have the answers!
Click the title for a full review. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.
by Hope Madden
We were starting to think we had new pets. We had one already – a cat named Zappa. She’d been with us forever, rescued from Cat Welfare years ago when we were apartment dwellers and couldn’t have a dog. At the time, we felt like our 2-year-old son Riley needed a buddy.
A million years later, we still didn’t have a dog because Zappa was a 16-year old deaf, toothless cat who refused to eat anything but scrambled eggs and lunchmeat and really wasn’t adaptable enough for a sibling.
Since she was allergic to fleas, however, Zappa never went outdoors, so an outside pet or two would be OK.
But the heartbreak of outdoor pets, especially those that choose you rather than those you purchase, is that sometimes they waddle around in your pool and eat your store-bought feed and then fly away, never to return.
Like our ducks.
A mallard couple began hanging around our street in Grandview one spring.
They’d show up in the morning, loiter all afternoon, then fly away at night. There were sightings all over the neighborhood, and then, little by little, the waddling twosome zeroed in on a single yard for passing their daylight hours. Ours.
We have a small front yard far from any known body of water, so we hadn’t a clue s to why the ducks kept returning. We tried not to disturb them too much – made sure we entered and exited by way of the back door, scattered some birdseed for them. They seemed to appreciate it day after day, week after week, and we got used to seeing them.
The female would hide between two little bushes, and the male would sit in the middle of our front yard. We took it that he was guarding her, and we hoped she was making a nest.
We had become too attached. In fact, my husband, George, went the wild bird store to find out what was the best kind of feed for Gary and Fiona.
Yes, our son gave them names.
Once you name them, you’re doomed.
They seemed to like us, too. I think their favorite was George, who would approach them gently, shaking his jug of wild duck feed, and Gary would waddle right up to him.
George was utterly smitten.
In fact, I came home from work once to find a blue Scooby-Doo wading pool in my small front yard. Some might consider it unusual for a grown man whose only child was in high school to buy a toddler’s pool; others might find the thing an eyesore.
Nonetheless, there it was, and Fiona seemed pleased. So much so, the couple threw a few pool parties. We began to see a second female, Simone, who would show up to splash around.
We became mildly famous in the neighborhood- like those people who string too many Christmas lights, causing mild traffic jams.
We occasionally found children in our front yard trying to pet or catch Gary. We shooed them away, sometimes unpleasantly. As it turns out, we liked Gary and Fiona better than the neighbor kids.
I came home one day to find a teenage girl sitting in my front lawn, trying to coax Gary onto her lap. Her embarrassed boyfriend waited on the sidewalk. When he saw me, he said nervously, “My girlfriend likes your ducks.”
I told him thanks, but they weren’t my ducks. They just hung out in my yard. Like his girlfriend.
Shockingly oblivious and absorbed in her commune with nature, she asked me where I’d gotten them. I said again that they weren’t mine, to which she replied, “So I could just take on?”
“Get out of my yard, kids.”
I was nicer than George, though, who found this menacing neighbor boy chasing Gary around the yard. George shouted and then chased him down the street. It was outstanding.
We even received a complaint from a concerned citizen who told us we had no business keeping wild animals. Of course, we weren’t keeping them at all. They didn’t live with us; they were just well-liked squatters.
Then, they flew off one evening never to return.
For weeks George would listen for their quacking in the morning when he got up for work, but all we had left was a half-empty Scooby-Doo pool in the front yard and a half-full jug of duck feed on the back porch – and the memory of the heartbreakers who decided suburban life was not for them.
But we’re keeping an eye on this possum we’ve seen hanging around the garbage cans.
Maybe he could love us.
We’re thinking of calling him Craig.
Click HERE and join us in The Screening Room this week to break down Dunkirk, Valerian, Fist Kill, The Little Hours, Killing Ground and what’s new on home video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3uNlE7ejO0
by Hope Madden
Given the recent, tragic passing of filmmaking icon George A. Romero, you may find yourself nostalgic for the walking dead. Not just any hungry, re-animated cadaver, but the kind that serve as a parable or vehicle for self-awareness. The slow moving kind. The kind you don’t know whether to fear, pity or admire.
It Stains the Sands Red is here for you.
Director/co-writer Colin Minihan, with co-writer Stuart Ortiz (formerly known collectively as The Vicious Brothers), tests your patience, but the effort mostly pays off.
We open with some impressive aerial shots of the smoking, neon ruin of the Las Vegas strip. Cut to another gorgeous aerial of a sports car zipping up a desert highway. In it, a couple of coked-up strip club lowlifes, Molly (Brittany Allen) and Nick (Merwin Mondesir), are escaping to an airfield where they’ll meet with other lowlifes and head to an island off Mexico.
Naturally, this isn’t going to work out. But what Minihan has in store will surprise you.
He’s made a couple of fine choices with his film. The point of view character is not only an unlikely protagonist – an unpleasant thug with a drug habit – but she’s also female.
Soon the car goes off the road and one meathead catches her scent, and suddenly Molly’s stripper shoes are not her biggest problem as she faces a 30-mile trek across the desert to the airfield.
Molly names her zombie pursuer Smalls, but she may as well call him Wilson.
What develops is an often fascinating, slow moving but relentless chase as well as a character study. With a protagonist on a perilous journey toward redemption, It Stains the Sands Red takes a structure generally reserved for the man who needs to rediscover his inner manhood and tells a very female story.
Very female. Menstruation and everything.
Credit to the formerly Vicious for investing in a female’s perspective, and for doing it some level of justice.
Allen makes a great anti-heroine. Convincingly hard-knock and difficult to like, she never becomes the would-be lunch meat you root against.
As is too often the case in film – horror, thriller or otherwise – the only way a female can tap that survival instinct is by way of the maternal one. This picture becomes too predictable and too sentimental once it embraces this cliché, but that’s not reason enough to condemn it.
by George Wolf
Two nuns lead a wandering donkey back home to their convent in the 1600s. The groundskeeper offers them a quiet, respectful good morrow. In response, the sisters promptly unleash a torrent of f-bomb filled abuse his way, with an aggressive command to keep his perverted eyes to himself.
Welcome to the The Little Hours, a desert-dry sendup of one of the classic tales in The Decameron, a 14th century Italian novel.
This update from writer/director Jeff Baena (Life After Beth, script for I Heart Huckabees) keeps the original text’s basic premise. Servant Massetto (Dave Franco) is running for his life after being caught canoodling Francesca (Lauren Weedman), the wife of Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman). Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) offers Massetto refuge as the new groundskeeper at the convent, but only if he pretends to be a deaf/mute.
Deal.
The handsome Massetto is fresh meat to the ladies of the convent, many of whom are not there from a Godly calling. In short order, Massetto is juggling the sweet Alessandra (Alison Brie), the crazy Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza, also one of the film’s producers) and the sexually confused Ginerva (Kate Micucci).
The Holy Grail scene with Sir Galahad in Castle Anthrax will come to mind, and not just for the lustful young ladies. The entire affair has the feel of a Monty Python setup that just never turns a silly corner. The extremely talented ensemble (which also includes Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen and more) plays it nearly stone-faced all the way, just daring you to think there is anything humorous about their anachronistic sex farce.
Some of it is screamingly funny, and other times the film falls flat. Through it all, though, there runs a sly comment on the treatment of women (specifically in the Church) that’s smart and well-played.
It’s never a consistent gut-buster, but The Little Hours is inspired, ambitious lunacy that is always entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meGfRXMSW9c
by Hope Madden
There is a pleasantly madcap quality to the environments filmmaker Luc Besson creates. His best work combines that untamed world – whether earthbound and criminal or colorfully intergalactic – with unusual characters performing slickly choreographed action.
His lesser efforts don’t. On that note, meet Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Based on France’s beloved comic series about a pair of time and space-hopping agents, Besson’s film looks pretty cool.
Not as good as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, or Matt Reeves’s War for the Planet of the Apes, or Spider-Man: Homecoming or Baby Driver or about one out of every three movies released so far this summer.
At this point in cinematic history, you have to bring more to the screen than visual flair.
What else you got, Luc?
Because it’s not acting.
Dane DeHaan plays Valerian. Poorly. Wildly miscast as the scoundrel flyboy who might find love with his partner, the often reliable actor cannot make his way through Besson’s stilted, lifeless banter.
DeHaan has a better time of it than Cara Delevingne as Valerian’s strong-willed partner Laureline – perhaps because Delevingne has no discernible talent.
Still, the writing is awful and she’d be in a tough spot even if she did have talent. Just ask Clive Owen. He has talent galore and even he embarrasses himself with this garbage.
To be fair, Valerian is basically a kids’ movie. Except for that extended and utterly needless stripper sequence showcasing Rihanna. But if you cut that out (if only we could – along with at least another 15 minutes, because damn this movie is long!), then you basically have a kids’ movie.
Not a good one. So just don’t set your standards too high. Go in looking for an overly long, addle-brained extra-terrestrial romp that looks great and you’ll be fine.
Unless you really want quality acting. Valerian an’t help you there.
by George Wolf
The big doin’s in Granville, Ohio a few months back come to the big screen this weekend with the Central Ohio premiere of First Kill, a thriller about …big doin’s in Granville.
Sheriff Howell (Bruce Willis) calls a recent bank heist, “the biggest crime to hit Granville in decades,” and he warns old acquaintance Will Beamon (Hayden Christensen) to keep alert while he’s in town as there’s some dangerous fugitives on the run.
Will’s a hometown boy who made good in New York as a slick Wall St. broker with a hot big city wife (Megan Leonard). But, with their young son Danny (Ty Shelton) having bully problems in school, Will figures the best medicine is a family deer hunting trip back to his old stomping grounds.
Things go awry when father and son see something they shouldn’t, and suddenly Will must recover the stolen bank loot before Chief Howell does and use it as ransom for Danny’s safe return.
Principal shooting on the film was done in Granville last year, with a few additional scenes completed in downtown Columbus. After Travolta’s I Am Wrath and Schwarzeneggar’s Aftermath, First Kill marks the third big screen icon to film in Central Ohio in just the last few years.
Chris Hamel, Board President of the Greater Columbus Film Commission, says that’s more than a coincidence.
“There is a lot of interest in making movies here and I think more and more productions will be choosing Ohio in the coming years. We are pleased that First Kill could be shot in central Ohio and excited to host the Columbus premiere at the Gateway Film Center.”
Director Steven C. Miller, who’s been prolific with these B-movie thrillers, gives a nice shine to the cliche-heavy script from writer Nick Gordon (Girl House). The “hunter will become the prey” foreshadowing is a bit thick in the early going, the setup leans on contrivance, and few if any of the plot turns will surprise, but once First Kill gets rolling into Miller’s well-paced groove, it’s not a bad ride.
Though Christensen is still struggling to carry a film, Willis supplies his natural gravitas and Ohioan Shelton makes an impressive big screen debut. As young Danny, Shelton’s easy rapport with Gethin Anthony (as kidnapper Levi) is a constant highlight.
First Kill can’t hit the Hell or High Water heights it aspires to, but hey, few can. Can it dust off some well-worn genre tropes and entertain? Ten-four.
First Kill makes its Central Ohio premiere July 21st, 7:30 at Gateway Film Center.
by Hope Madden
Christopher Nolan, one of the biggest imaginations in film, takes on a WWII epic – the truly amazing evacuation of 400,000 British troops from certain death on the beaches of Dunkirk, France.
Nolan = epic, yes. His career is marked by complicated ideas, phenomenal visual style and inventiveness, ever-increasing running times and head-trippery. So, if you’re prepared for a long, bombastic, serpentine, heady adventure, you are not prepared for Dunkirk.
Though the word epic still fits.
Nolan’s storytelling is simultaneously grand and intimate. To do the story justice, he approaches it from three different perspectives and creates, with a disjointed chronology, a lasting impression of the rescue that a more traditional structure might have missed.
The great Mark Rylance brings in the perspective of the courageous Brits who manned their pleasure boats and headed toward the beleaguered troops to ferry them to safety.
From the air, Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden offer the view (literally and figuratively) of the RAF, undermanned and outgunned, maneuvering to end as much of the carnage as possible while the evac takes place.
And on the ground amongst those desperate for removal is young Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), the actor with the most screen time and quite possibly the fewest lines. He’s the reminder that these soldiers were heroes – flawed, brave, terrified and young.
The cast is appropriately huge, including a surprisingly restrained Kenneth Branagh as well as James D’Arcy, Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Tom Glynn-Carney and, of course, One Direction’s Harry Styles (who commits himself respectably).
Solid performances abound without a single genuine flaw to point out, but the real star of Dunkirk is Nolan.
Talk about restraint. He dials back the score – Hans Zimmer suggesting the constant tick of a time bomb or the incessant roar of a distant plane engine – to emphasize the urgency and peril, and generating almost unbearable tension.
Visually, Nolan’s scope is breathtaking, oscillating between the gorgeous but terrifying open air of the RAF and the claustrophobic confines of a boat’s hull, with the threat of capsize and a watery grave constant.
What the filmmaker has done with Dunkirk – and has not done with any of his previous efforts, however brilliant or flawed – is create a spare, quick and simple film that is equally epic.
by Hope Madden
If art imitates life, then can the discarded art of a period tell us an insightful story of a forgotten time and place? Documentarian Bill Morrison thinks so, or his latest, Dawson City: Frozen Time, suggests as much.
A pastor and part-time backhoe operator in Dawson – a small town in the Yukon – unearthed a trove of nitrate film reels from the silent era while digging up the land behind Diamond Tooth Gertie’s gambling hall in 1978.
Adding a minimum of spoken explanation or context, all of which is quarantined to the opening and closing of his film, Morrison pieces together footage from the find with sometimes startlingly gorgeous photos and other craftily placed film bits, as well as onscreen type, to weave his tale.
His film tells of Dawson’s fascinating history – the romantic, dangerous kind usually reserved for Wild West legends. (Maybe something worthy of the name Diamond Tooth Gertie?)
Dawson was the last stop for a film, a location so remote and far flung, distributors refused to pay the postage to have their movies returned. Theater managers disposed of most of it in the same way the townspeople disposed of everything at the time – down river during the thaw.
But one crafty bank manager – because it was in the bank that many reels were held – decided to use it as landfill beneath the town’s ice rink. The permafrost kept the reels from deteriorating entirely, and their water damage only adds to the odd and dreamy style Morrison uses to sketch out this history.
Immersed in Alex Somers’s often hypnotic score, the film is a meticulously crafted near-silent film itself – a work full of insight on history and art. Perhaps too meticulous. Feeling every minute of its 2-hour run time, Frozen Time is often so bogged down in minutia that the bigger, more fascinating picture can get lost.
Though his documentary does share insights into Dawson’s labor, expansion, culture, science and the displacement of native peoples, Morrison is interested in more than the progression of the town.
His doc is also about film as art, and the ways that art can be manipulated to tell a compelling story. The filmmaker, relying heavily though not exclusively on reels uncovered by Frank Barrett’s backhoe, edits together images from wildly varying movies having nothing to do with Dawson. He uses these to articulate, in clever and sometimes wryly funny fashion, the history unfolding.
by Hope Madden
Here’s my guess: The first time you saw the trailer for Girls Trip you thought, didn’t I just see this movie? Isn’t Rough Night this same movie, only whiter?
Yes.
Well…Girls Trip is a bit raunchier, a bit schmaltzier, with characters a bit more broadly drawn.
You will laugh, though.
Regina Hall stars as Ryan Pierce, an Oprah-style life coach whose perfect marriage is a beacon of “having it all” to her throngs of fans and book buyers. Invited to keynote at Essence Magazine’s New Orleans conference, she sees a chance to reconnect with her three college besties – the Flossy Posse.
Uptight single mom Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), trashy Dina (Tiffany Haddish) and true friend in a bad spot, Sasha (Queen Latifah) join Ryan for their first wild weekend together in years. Give this mostly veteran cast credit – they take underwritten characters and make them feel like flesh and bone.
Girls Trip bears the glossy look and feel of a Malcolm D. Lee film – enough camaraderie to keep you interested, enough syrup to make you want to brush your teeth. But Lee takes some chances and allows his cast some leeway with this film, and it pays off.
Despite its already tired premise, Lee’s movie takes some of its antics in extreme directions to draw shocked laughter and genuine entertainment.
I don’t mean polite chuckle funny, either. It’s “is that an old man dick?” funny.
Not a single plot point will surprise, and the film is too damn long. Way too long – 30 minutes too long at least. But, between the natural chemistry among the quartet of leads and wild scene stealing from the comically gifted Haddish, Girls Trip offers some fun.
It’s too bad the lessons learned have to be delivered with a sledge hammer blow, but if you’ve ever said, “This place smells like Hennessy and bootie sweat. We’ve found our tribe,” then Girls Trip may be your film.
