Screening Room: Knock at the Cabin, 80 for Brady, Remember This, Little Dixie, Blood, Baby Ruby
Tag Archives: The Schlocketeer
Screening Room: Missing, The Son, Alice Darling & More
Aimless Butterflies and Deluded Bees
My Father Muhammad Ali: The Untold Story
by Daniel Baldwin
What becomes of the child of one of the most famous people in the world? What’s it like to have a father who you never really knew, because he was constantly on the road? What’s it like to have a mother that chose the fortune & glory of her husband’s life on the road over you? These are hard questions that this documentary is asking. Ones with very tough answers.
The title points toward a documentary focused on an untold side of Muhammad Ali’s life, but the actual film itself is almost entirely focused on the current life of one of his children, 50-year-old Muhammad Ali Jr. Junior has lived through decades of drug addiction, harassment, abandonment, financial issues, marital strife, etc. This is about him looking back at the trials, tribulations, and mistakes of his own life, in comparison to those of his iconic father.
Others are interviewed throughout – sometimes about Ali, sometimes about Junior – but Junior himself is the primary storyteller. He is an unreliable narrator; constantly dishing out his version of events and frequently dropping into unprompted impressions of his father as a defensive coping mechanism whenever his own faults are focused on too closely for his liking. It’s rather heartbreaking.
If that sounds compelling, it is, at least on paper. The filmmakers never seem to settle on any sort of thematic throughline for what they are showcasing, leaving the narrative (or lack thereof) being spun before us to just meander along in a highly segmented fashion. Because of this, the finished work feels less like a film and more like a miniseries that has been chopped down to feature-length.
The filmmakers know that Junior is often deceiving them, as well as himself, but outside of a few moments with a therapist, he is never called on it. Nor are enough witnesses to the contrary present to fully illustrate this. The sheer lack of voices from his early life leaves us with an unclear picture of his past. Context is key and this film is sorely lacking it.
There’s also the matter of his best friend/manager, who the filmmakers clearly do not entirely trust, but once again, they never bother to fully interrogate that. If they were intentionally leaving room for interpretation, they left too much. In the end, the final question is less “Are the sins of the father repeated by the son?” and more “Why does this film exist?”
Screening Room: M3GAN, Pale Blue Eye, Corsage, Old Way & More
Screening Room: Avatar: The Way of Water, If These Walls Could Sing, Utama, Onoda, High Heat
Trope-ic Thunder
Black Warrant
by Daniel Baldwin
What do you get when you make an action film that combines Tom Berenger, Cam Gigandet, the director of The Gate, and a story by actor Michael Pare? You get an undercooked terrorism-themed actioner. You get Black Warrant.
The story follows two leads: Nick (Berenger) and Anthony (Gigandet). Nick is a long-since-retired CIA assassin that’s been pulled back into the field to take out three high-profile targets in Tijuana, Mexico. Anthony is a seasoned DEA agent following a trail of breadcrumbs toward the same sinister folks in the wake of a bust gone bad.
If you’re thinking the two are eventually going to come together to take out their mutual enemies, you’re right. If you’re thinking that the film also holds a really big & silly twist, you’re also right. This is bog-standard, trope-filled stuff that is content to never rock the boat throughout on a narrative level. You’ve seen this before and you’ve seen it done better.
The good news is that, even after 20 years of working in DTV action, Tom Berenger still isn’t phoning it in. He gives Nick doses of humanity that you don’t often see in films of this type. He manages to be charming enough in the role that one doesn’t mind as much that he’s clearly too old to be playing it. One would assume that an earlier version of the project was meant to star the aforementioned Pare instead. Given that he’s a decade younger than Berenger, he might have been a better fit on an action level, although perhaps not a performance one.
Gigandet is equally engaging as Anthony, giving the film another performance that it doesn’t really deserve. The movie also gets an extra bit of swagger in the form of a cameoing Jeff Fahey. The cherry on top, however, is Helena Haro as female lead Mina. A chef pulled into the middle of all of this insanity, she is the shining beacon of light at the center of this otherwise lackluster affair. Haro is beaming with excitement and charm in almost every scene. She’s a breath of fresh air and her chemistry with Gigandet somehow manages to make their poorly-sketched romance work.
If it weren’t for the cast, the writing and pacing issues would utterly sink this. Black Warrant may not be a terrible film, but everyone involved has done better work elsewhere. DTV action die hards might find things to like, but all others should steer clear.
Deadpan on Arrival
The Loneliest Boy in the World
by Daniel Baldwin
Oliver has had a rough go of it. He’s lived in isolation for the bulk of his life. His father has long since passed away and his mother died recently in a freak accident. If that weren’t enough, he just got out of a stint in an asylum and is likely to be headed back there if he cannot prove to his caseworkers that he can function properly on his own. In short, Oliver needs to make new human connections. He needs a friend.
So he digs a few up. Literally. Against all odds, his newfound, freshly-deceased pals come to life and attempt to help the poor boy get his life in order. If there is an answer to the question “What do you get when you throw Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, and a pinch of John Waters into a blender?”, the answer is The Loneliest Boy in the World.
An intriguing list of ingredients, no? Unfortunately, the parts are far greater than their sum. The cast is largely comprised of British characters actors, and they do their darnedest to (pardon the pun) liven things up, but the premise is stretched too thin, even at 90 minutes. Gags that might have been funny in smaller doses often become interminable and there’s an unfortunate amount of repetition at play. In the end, it feels like a script for a 30-minute short that’s been padded to triple that length.
There are some positives, however. Max Harwood is charming as our quirky lead and Tallulah Haddon is adorable as his would-be first living friend. Alex Murphy and Hammed Animashaun make for a fun pair of oddball cemetery caretakers.
Of course, the film’s greatest feature is the flashback sequence revealing the accidental death of Oliver’s mother. The event is so sweetly dark in its humor that it makes one wish the rest of the film had kept to a similar tone.
Kudos to director Martin Owen and writer Piers Ashworth for trying a new recipe. The flavor profile didn’t quite come together, but that’s always the risk when one takes wild swings. If you like quirky genre-bending comedies where undead folks watch ALF together and have heart-to-hearts with their human pal, this might still do it for you. Otherwise, you might not want to exhume this one.
Screening Room: Don’t Worry Darling, Lou, Carmen, Infernal Machine, Bandit, Blank
Screening Room: The Woman King, Pearl, Moonage Daydream, Confess Fletch, See How They Run & More
Screening Room: Barbarian, Pinocchio, Saloum, House of Darkness, Tiny Cinema
