Category: Arts and Entertainment

This category is about arts and entertainment.

Review: ‘Endangered Species’ (2021), starring Rebecca Romijn, Philip Winchester and Jerry O’Connell

July 10, 2021

by Carla Hay

Philip Winchester, Michael Johnston, Chris Fisher, Isabel Bassett and Rebecca Romijn in “Endangered Species” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“Endangered Species” (2021)

Directed by MJ Bassett

Culture Representation: Taking place in Kenya, the dramatic film “Endangered Species” features a cast of white Americans and black Africans (with a few Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: An American family’s safari vacation in Kenya turns into a nightmare when they’re stranded in a deserted area and become the targets of wild animals and other dangers. 

Culture Audience: “Endangered Species” will appeal primarily to people who like watching moronic “family in peril” movies.

Jerry O’Connell (pictured in front) in “Endangered Species” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“Endangered Species” is an example of what not do when going on a safari and what not do when making a movie thriller about it. The film’s intended preachy message about poaching is overshadowed by the idiotic story. “Endangered Species” wants to have a social conscience about saving animals’ lives, but it makes the human characters so dimwitted, the humans put their own lives in danger and barely know how to save themselves. The movie makes a genuine effort to be suspenseful, but that effort is wasted on a poorly conceived plot, low-quality visual effects and subpar acting from some of the cast members.

“Endangered Species” was directed by MJ Bassett, who co-wrote the movie with her daughter Isabel Bassett, a co-star in “Endangered Species.” Isabel Bassett’s previous acting credits were two other films directed by MJ Bassett: 2009’s “Solomon Kane” and 2020’s “Rogue.” It’s proof that nepotism is alive and well but isn’t always beneficial. Isabel Bassett’s questionable acting skills in “Endangered Species” (including letting her British accent slip through when she’s supposed to have an American accent) lowers the quality of this already tacky film.

In “Endangered Species,” the Halsey family are Americans who are supposed to be having a fun-filled vacation in Kenya. They’ve arrived just outside of Amboseli National Park to take a safari. The people in the Halsey family tourist group are:

  • Jack Halsey (played by Philip Winchester), an arrogant “control freak” patriarch who always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room. Jack is a high-ranking executive at an unnamed oil company, which has recently put him on an unpaid leave of absence, pending an investigation into a major oil spill on the Dakota pipeline. The oil spill happened under Jack’s supervision.
  • Lauren Halsey (played by Rebecca Romijn), Jack’s wife of 16 years. She’s a diabetic who used to be a medical doctor, but she left her career behind to become a homemaker. She’s a lot more nurturing and more patient than Jack is. Jack and Lauren each has a child from a previous relationship. It’s implied that Jack’s and Lauren’s exes haven’t been involved in raising these children.
  • Zoe Halsey (played by Isabel Bassett), Lauren’s 18-year-old daughter/Jack’s stepdaughter. Much to Jack’s dismay, Zoe has recently dropped out of MIT and is now working at a vegan coffee shop. Lauren is more understanding about it and thinks Zoe has a right to find her own path in life and make her own decisions.
  • Noah Halsey (played by Michael Johnston), Jack’s son/Lauren’s stepson, who’s about 16 or 17 years old. Noah has recently come out as gay, which is something that Jack has a hard time accepting.
  • Billy Mason (played by Chris Fisher), Zoe’s hippie boyfriend, who’s about 10 years older than Zoe. This age difference bothers Jack, who disapproves of Billy because Jack thinks Billy is a bad influence on Zoe. Jack also didn’t really want Billy on the trip, but Zoe invited Billy without checking with Jack first.

When the Halsey party travels by a small private plane to Kenya, there’s some stereotypical family bickering. Jack would prefer to have a relaxing vacation, while Lauren wants a more activity-oriented trip. She tells Jack their previous vacations where they just sipped drinks by a beach were too boring for her. “We want an adventure,” she reminds Jack. He replies, “I don’t like how this family has become a democracy all of a sudden.” Lauren says, “It was a velvet coup, honey. You never noticed.”

It won’t be long before Lauren will have a real reason to be annoyed with with Jack. After they check into their hotel resort lodging in Kenya, she finds out about Jack being suspended from his job, when he should have told her earlier. Because he currently has no income, an embarrassed Jack tells Lauren that they can’t afford many of the things that he promised that they could do on this trip. He tries to convince her that they don’t need to worry about money, but Lauren doesn’t really believe him.

Meanwhile, Jack is the type of parent who is overly critical of his kids, who can never do enough to please him. Zoe is particularly resentful of Jack, and they clash with each other the most on this trip. Even though Jack has raised Zoe since she was a toddler, she has recently refused to acknowledge that he’s her father. She’s stopped calling him Dad and now calls him Jack. It’s a snub that really bothers Jack.

When the Halsey party members arrive at their lodging, they meet a fellow American who’s hanging out in the lobby area with some locals. The American’s name is Mitch Hanover (played by Jerry O’Connell, Romijn’s real-life husband), who is some type of park ranger. Mitch says that he patrols the area to be on the lookout for poachers.

And what do you know, just as the Halsey party arrives, they happen to see an all-female group of Kenyan law enforcement officials dressed in military fatigues drive up with a group of poachers who’ve been arrested. Mitch explains that the people responsible for busting poachers in this area all happen to be women. It’s the first clue that this movie is trying to pander to a certain political agenda, by going overboard with unrealistic scenarios, just so the movie can look politically liberal and “woke.”

Jack pre-paid for the vacation, but because he couldn’t afford the deluxe vacation package, he and the rest of the people in the Halsey party cannot go on the guided safari tour as part of the package. The safari leader tells Jack that he’s more than welcome to do a separate, self-guided tour with his family. It’s another huge unrealistic aspect of the movie, because no reputable hotel or safari company would allow a group of tourists to have an unguided safari in the wilds of Africa.

But there would be no “Endangered Species” movie if it didn’t have this ludicrous concept. Jack doesn’t tell his family the real reason why they can’t go on a safari with the rest of the tour group. Instead, he lies to them and says that he took the option for them to have a self-guided tour because it will give them more freedom. Although a few people in the family express doubts about how safe it would be to do a safari on their own, Jack dismisses any fears and says that they wouldn’t be allowed to do a self-guided tour if it weren’t safe.

Zoe has brought bottled water for this safari trip. Because she’s a hardcore environmentalist, she has refused to bring water in plastic bottles, so the water is in glass bottles. And it’s that this point in the movie that you know those glass bottles are going to get broken when the Halsey family inevitably gets stranded in the desert. Lauren’s blood sugar levels have been running high, so you know exactly what that means in the inevitable race against time to get help.

And so off the Halsey party goes to this doomed safari, with Jack driving their rented van. They go without looking at a map, and there’s no sense that they’ve gotten any training in survival skills. In fact, “no sense” are the operative words for this entire movie, as these irresponsible tourists make one bad decision after another when they get trapped in a deserted area.

When their van gets to a checkpoint to enter Amboseli National Park, the guard makes them wait because the Halsey party doesn’t have the approved paperwork to go on a safari. Jack is determined to go on this safari so he can look like a heroic adventurer to everyone. Jack starts arguing with the guard to let him and his group through the checkpoint.

Just then, the guard is distracted because another group of tourists is causing a ruckus. Jack uses that distraction as an opportunity to barrel through the checkpoint barrier and drive quickly into the park without getting caught. Although some of the security guards give chase in their cars, Jack manages to lose them by going off the beaten path into a deserted area.

And that’s why viewers won’t feel much sympathy for Jack when he gets lost and can’t find his way back to the main road. At first, no one panics over it because there are no dangerous animals in sight. There’s also plenty of food and water to keep them comfortable for the entire day.

And then, they see a mother rhino with a baby rhino. These tourists start “oohing” and “aahing,” as they take pictures from the van. But they’re too close for this mother rhino’s comfort, and she charges angrily at the van, and rams it hard several times, thereby tipping the car over on its side before running off with her baby. In the mayhem, Jack injures his leg, and Zoe dislocates her shoulder.

There’s enough damage that everything breakable in the van has been broken, including Lauren’s diabetic supplies and the glass bottles holding the water. The van is too damaged and won’t start. And, of course, their phones can’t get any signals. Meanwhile, these dumb tourists have a map, but they have no idea where they are in the park, since they drove off into a deserted area that isn’t near the main road.

There’s some back-and-forth arguing over whether or not they should stay in the car and wait for help or venture out and look for help before it gets dark. Jack is adamant that they stay in the car because he’s certain that other people will come along and eventually find them. He’s also concerned about being attacked by more wild animals and thinks the car will at least give them some protection. However, Lauren could go into a diabetic coma if she doesn’t get insulin soon, which gives more urgency to the idea of walking somewhere to get help.

While they’re trying to figure out what to do next, that’s when some hyenas appear. The rest of the movie goes exactly how you think it might go when people make more stupid decisions. There’s an inevitable part of the movie where some members of this tourist party get separated from the others. And there are more animal attacks in scenes where the visual effects don’t look convincing.

The wild animals aren’t the only dangers encountered in this trip from hell. There’s a plot twist in the last third of the film that is not surprising at all. (The trailer for “Endangered Species” reveals this plot twist.) It leads to a ridiculous, badly acted showdown where the movie, which was already terrible, goes off the rails to the point of mindless oblivion. Romijn and Johnston make attempts to portray believable characters, but all the other stars in the cast act like annoying caricatures.

The best things that can be said about “Endangered Species” are that there are some nice scenic outdoor shots of Kenya, and the movie tries to bring attention to the tragedies and injustices of poaching. It’s too bad that “Endangered Species,” which has a moralistic message about how humans should respect nature, is ruined by humans who don’t respect good filmmaking and don’t respect viewers’ intelligence.

Lionsgate released “Endangered Species” on digital and VOD on May 28, 2021, and on Blu-ray and DVD on June 1, 2021.

Review: ‘American Fighter,’ starring George Kosturos, Tommy Flanagan and Sean Patrick Flanery

July 10, 2021

by Carla Hay

Tommy Flanagan and George Kosturos in “American Fighter” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“American Fighter”

Directed by Shaun Paul Piccinino

Culture Representation: Taking place in 1981, primarily in California and briefly in Iran, the dramatic film “American Fighter” features a predominanlty white cast of characters (with some Middle Eastern and African American people) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A college wrestler, who has immigrated to California from Iran, gets involved in underground fighting to raise enough money to bring his ailing mother to the United States. 

Culture Audience: “American Fighter” will appeal primarily to people who like watching predictable fight movies.

George Kosturos and Sean Patrick Flanery in “American Fighter” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“American Fighter” uses every possible movie cliché about an “underdog” fighter who has to beat the odds and surpass people’s low expectations to reach a certain goal. There’s nothing creative or imaginative about this film. The only angle that makes “American Fighter” different from similar movies is that the protagonist is an Iranian immigrant in the United States. However, the fight scenes and the protagonist’s quest for a big payoff achievement is as formulaic and stereotypical as can be, regardless of the protagonist’s ethnicity.

Directed by Shaun Paul Piccinino, “American Fighter” takes place in 1981, when Iran was in political upheaval and numerous Iranians fled the country to seek asylum elsewhere. One family of refugees is the Jahani family: patriarch Farhad Jahani (played by Tony Panterra), his wife Goli Jahani (played by Salome Azizi) and their son Ali (played by George Kosturos, also known as George Thomas), who is about 18 or 19 years old. Ali has already been sent to the United States ahead of his parents, who plan to join Ali later. In the meantime, Ali is a college student who lives on campus when he’s not living with his uncle Hafez Tabad (played by Ali Afshar), who is Goli’s brother.

“American Fighter” is the sequel to the 2017 sports drama “American Wrestler: The Wizard,” with both movies starring Kosturos and produced by Ali Afshar, who plays Ali Jahani’s uncle Hafez in both movies. “American Wrestler: The Wizard,” which also had Ali Jahani as the protagonist, is based on Ali Afshar’s real-life experiences as an Iranian immigrant who was on his California high school’s wrestling team. “American Fighter” continues Ali Jahani’s story as a college student.

In the beginning of “American Fighter,” Ali is shown as a first-year student at the fictional North East Cal University in California. He’s on the school’s male wrestling team (called the Bulldogs), and he’s one of the more talented people on the team. However, Ali isn’t living up to his wrestler potential. And he experiences xenophobia and racism from people who are part of the team.

The Bulldogs’ Coach Jenkins (played by Kevin Porter) tells Ali, “I don’t want another foreign scholarship on my roster. You want to stay? You’ve got to show me something.” Meanwhile, in every movie about a student athlete involved in team sports, there always seems to be a jealous rival on the same team. In Ali’s case, it’s a bully named Chet Mueller (played by Vince Hill-Bedford), who frequently hurls racist insults at Ali during the team’s practice sessions. You can almost do a countdown to the inevitable fist fight that Chet and Ali will have.

When the day comes for Ali’s parents to travel to America, tragedy strikes. Before the plane takes off, a group of Iranian terrorists invade the plane where Ali’s parents are and take some hostages, including Ali’s parents. Ali’s father Farhad is shot and killed, while Ali’s mother Goli has gone missing. And making matters more stressful, Goli is sick with an unnamed ailment. She needs life-saving surgery and treatment, which is one of the main reasons why Ali’s parents wanted to immigrate to the United States.

Ali and his uncle Hafez are devastated by the news that Farhad is dead and Goli is missing. Ali and Hafez go to the local chapter of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services and are told that there’s nothing this government agency can do for them because it doesn’t get involved in terrorist kidnappings. However, Ali and Hafez find out about a mysterious Iranian operative named Mr. V (played by Parviz Sayyad), who lives nearby and who can give them “private” help.

Ali and Hafez meet with Mr. V, who tells them that Goli is probably being held hostage somewhere in Iran, but Mr. V’s team can find her and bring her to the United States, for a fee of $30,000. Hafez only has $5,000, while Ali sells many of his possessions (including his family jewelry and his car) and comes up with $9,000. Of course, that’s still not enough to pay the fee, and time is running out for Goli to get her life-saving surgery.

Ali’s best friend at school is Ryan Calder (played by Bryan Craig), who is on the same wrestling team. Ali confides in Ryan about his family and money problems. One night, Ryan takes Ali to an underground fight club, where Ali is shocked to see what’s going on. Ryan tells Ali that in the past, he sometimes participated in these underground fights to make extra money. Ryan stopped doing underground fights because he’s on the wrestling team and doesn’t want to risk getting expelled from the team.

Ryan introduces Ali to a Scottish man named McClellan (played by Tommy Flanagan), the tough and greedy chief of the fight club. McClellan’s right-hand man is Benjamin Duke (played by Sean Patrick Flanery), who goes by the name Duke and who mainly gives medical assistance to the fight club participants. Duke is a former boxing champ who’s now down on his luck and has a tragedy in his past because of his alcoholism. In other words, in a stereotypical movie like this one, Duke is going to end up training Ali to be an underground fighter.

During Ali’s first visit to the fight club, he has such culture shock that he ends up saying the wrong things. He asks McClellan about the possibility of participating in the fights: “So, you just pay us to beat each other up? Is that even legal?” Just as Ali is about to be thrown out for being an insulting dimwit, a thug assaults Ali, and they start brawling. Ali capably defends himself, and McClellan is so impressed with Ali’s fighting skills that he invites Ali to participate in the fight club.

Ryan warns Ali not to do it, but Ali is desperate for money, and he eagerly accepts McClellan’s invitation. Ali easily wins his first fight, of course. And the money he gets motivates him to continue participating in the fight club, with increasingly dangerous risks. Not everything goes smoothly for Ali, because a movie like this has to have a “major obstacle” that he has to overcome before the movie’s climactic scene.

Meanwhile, Ali ends up having a romance with a sorority member named Heidi (played by Allison Page), who made the first move on Ali by inviting him to a party thrown by her sorority. It should come as no surprise that Chet seems interested in Heidi, but she rejects Chet’s advances and makes it clear that she wants to be with Ali. And so, it’s another reason for racist Chet to hate Ali.

Ali doesn’t tell Heidi about his family problems or about being involved in an underground fight club. Ali and Heidi’s romance is presented in this movie as very chaste. They go to a skating rink on their first date. And although Heidi and Ali eventually kiss, there’s no sex in the movie. Ali is depicted as someone who’s very shy and inexperienced when it comes to dating, while Heidi is the confident, extroverted partner in the relationship.

“American Fighter” director Piccinino co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Brian Rudnick and Carl Morris. The entire movie borrows from many other movies about teenage athletes who are underestimated, who train for a “long shot” dream, and the training is supposed to teach them about life. The fight scenes have some level of suspense, but they look overly staged and aren’t that exciting, compared to other movies about underground fight clubs.

Ali’s refugee immigrant experiences are used as a gimmicky plot device rather than being organic to his character. The closest that the movie comes to showing Ali sharing his connection to Iranian culture with Heidi is when he brings Iranian food to a picnic date with Heidi. The movie tries to make it look like Ali and Heidi are falling in love, but their conversations are very superficial.

That’s because this movie is really about the fight scenes, which aren’t very special. Ali’s mother Goli is shown occasionally while she’s being held captive in a room, to remind people why Ali is going through with these risky fights. Ali finds a way to get a letter to her, which is supposed to be the movie’s first big tearjerking moment, but the way it’s written is very hokey and melodramatic.

“American Fighter” makes some effort to be an authentic period movie that takes place in 1981. At an on-campus party, someone is shown breakdancing. And the movie’s soundtrack includes Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” and the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat.” Ali and Hafez also anxiously follow the media’s news about what’s going on in Iran. However, these touches of realism aren’t enough to overcome the overall medicority of the film’s writing, directing and acting.

Kosturos does his best to show some emotional range, but it’s diluted by the hackneyed dialogue that he has to say in the movie. Flanagan and Flanery have played many characters involved in illegal activities, so they’re doing nothing new in this movie, while Craig’s Ryan character and Paige’s Heidi character are utterly generic. The appeal of underground fighting is how edgy and unpredictable it’s supposed to be, but there’s nothing edgy or unpredictable about “American Fighter.”

Lionsgate released “American Fighter” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on May 21, 2021, and on Blu-ray and DVD on May 25, 2021.

Review: ‘Holler,’ starring Jessica Barden

July 9, 2021

by Carla Hay

Jessica Barden in “Holler” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“Holler”

Directed by Nicole Riegel

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in southern Ohio, the dramatic film “Holler” has a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class.

Culture Clash: A teenager from a dysfunctional family with financial problems must decide what she wants to do after she graduates from high school, and she gets involved in illegal scrap metal sales.

Culture Audience: “Holler” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in realistic and sometimes gritty stories about American working-class life.

Jessica Barden and Gus Halper in “Holler” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“Holler” doesn’t break new ground for coming-of-age movies about a teenager who’s unsure of what to do after high school. However, the performances in the movie are well-acted and notable in their depiction of working-class life in southern Ohio. Jessica Barden carries “Holler” with the right mix of toughness and vulnerability. Written and directed by Nicole Riegel, and based on her short film of the same name, “Holler” was already an authentic-looking film, but Barden’s performance makes it a more compelling movie to watch.

Barden is such a talented actress that people who see “Holler” might be surprised to find out that she’s British in real life. She tends to portray Americans in her on-screen roles. (Barden also played a tough-but-tender working-class character in the 2020 dramatic film “Jungleland.”) In “Holler,” Barden’s character is Ruth Avery, a teenage loner, who’s in her last year of high school and facing major crossroads in her life.

Ruth and her older brother Blaze (played by Gus Halper), who is in his early 20s and is Ruth’s legal guardian, live in a house in an unnamed southern Ohio city with a depressed and shrinking manufacturing economy and where things have become quite unstable for Ruth and Blaze. They’re financially broke, and they have been served several eviction notices. Ruth is having problems keeping up with her school assignments, and she’s been punished for too missing too many classes.

Where are their parents? Ruth and Blaze’s mother Rhonda (played by Pamela Adlon) is an opioid addict who’s currently in jail and awaiting a court hearing on drug-related charges. Ruth and Blaze’s father is not seen or mentioned. It’s implied that he was not involved in raising Blaze and Ruth. Blaze, who dropped out of high school to take care of Ruth, works at the same factory where his mother worked before she was fired due to being under the influence of drugs while on the job.

To make extra money, Blaze and Ruth sell abandoned items at a local junkyard that is owned and operated by a scruffy and shady character namd Hark (played by Austin Amelio), who is in his 30s. In the movie’s opening scene, Blaze and Ruth are making a sale to Hark, but he drives a hard bargain and lowballs them on the purchase price. Because they need the money, they take Hark’s offer, although Ruth angrily tells Hark that she knows he’s ripping them off. Because of Ruth’s feisty spirit, it won’t be the last time that she and Hark will be at odds with each other.

Even though she’s having problems in school, Ruth is very intelligent, interested in learning, and a capable of getting good grades. In an early scene in the movie, she goes to the school library to steal a book because she’s been banned from borrowing books from the library due to her high absentee rate. Ruth immediately gets busted for the theft by a teacher named Mr. Porter (played by Joe Hemsley), who tells Ruth that if she doesn’t stop behaving badly, she could be expelled from school. Ruth acts like she doesn’t care, but viewers can see that deep down, she does care.

Meanwhile, Blaze frequently tells Ruth that she’s smart enough to go to college. He encourages her to pursue a college education because he thinks that Ruth is the person in their family who’s most likely to be able to accomplish things beyond their working-class upbringing. There are hints that Ruth thinks so too. In one scene, Ruth privately listens to a podcast where a celebrated female engineer (who’s unidentified in the movie) talks about how she got to where she is in her male-dominated field.

Although the movie never says what Ruth’s best academic subjects are and what she would want to study in college, she shows an aptitude for math and engineering when she and Blaze end up getting involved in Hark’s side business of illegally selling stolen scrap metal. Ruth and Blaze’s decision to get involved in this criminal activity comes after certain things happen that make Ruth and Blaze even more financially desperate than when the story began. Blaze and Ruth soon find out that the illegal scrap-metal hustle is a lot more dangerous than they thought it would be.

“Holler” has very few scenes of Ruth in high school, because her world ends up revolving around Hark’s junkyard and the illegal activities of stealing metal from abandoned buildings at night. There are a few tension-filled scenes of Ruth and Blaze visiting their mother Rhonda in jail. (Fun fact: Barden guest-starred on Adlon’s comedy series “Better Things” in 2020.) Ruth has a lot of resentment toward her mother, who tells Ruth, “We’re not college people,” when she finds out that Ruth has applied to go to college. Blaze usually tries to keep the peace when Ruth and Rhonda get into verbal arguments with each other, but he’s feeling the pressure of being the only parental figure in Ruth’s life.

The movie features a few supporting characters who are part of Ruth and Blaze’s lives. Linda (played by Becky Ann Baker) is a no-nonsense, respected senior employee at the factory. She also happens to be Rhonda’s best friend. When Ruth feels like she has no one else to turn to, Linda is sometimes a source of comfort.

By contrast, Ruth can barely tolerate Blaze’s girlfriend Tonya (played by Grace Kaiser), who also works at the factory. Ruth isn’t afraid to express that she thinks Tonya is too promiscuous and not good enough to be with Blaze. The relationship that Blaze and Tonya have isn’t really true love, but they have genuine affection for each other. In other words, Tonya isn’t Blaze’s Ms. Right. She’s Blaze’s Ms. Right Now.

One of the best things about “Holler” is how realistically it shows the complications of being a teenager who’s on the cusp of legal adulthood in contemporary America—being old enough to drive and work, but not old enough to drink alcohol. Being in your late teens is usually the age range when people feel the most pressure to figure out what they want to do with their lives. However, those choices can often restricted if they require a college degree that someone might not be old enough to have, might not be able to afford, or might have other responsibilities that prevent someone from getting a college education.

Ruth embodies this dichotomy of being an immature child and being a mature adult in her personality. She can be a tough-talking brat but also a good listener. She can sometimes act like a know-it-all, but she’s also a patient observer who’s willing to learn. She wants to grow up quickly and be independent, but she also likes the comfort of knowing that she can have someone to lean and and back her up when she needs it.

Ruth’s relationship with Blaze has a very genuine younger sister/older dynamic with real family love between them. The only thing that Ruth and Blaze argue about the most in the movie is whether or not she should go to college. Blaze is more enthusiastic about it than Ruth is. Look for big clues on how Ruth uses her red ski cap as a conscious or subconscious symbol of the life that Blaze thinks that Ruth should leave behind.

The interactions between Ruth and Hark are what really demonstrate Ruth’s feelings of confusion over wanting to be a child and wanting to be an adult. Ruth and Hark, despite their differences, end up being attracted to each other on an emotional level. He admires her assertiveness and quick thinking, while she admires his confidence and leadership abilities.

There’s a scene where Ruth, Hark, Blaze, Tonya and some of their co-workers are all hanging out at a roller skating rink, where Ruth shows some aloofness yet vulnerability. Hark asks Ruth to go on the skating rink with him, even though they both know they aren’t very good at roller skating. It’s the first sign that something more than a platonic relationship might happen between Ruth and Hark.

Later in the movie, Ruth gets an injury on her right leg, and Hark makes a move on her when he’s helping her with the bandages. As creepy as it might be for a man to make sexual advances on a teenager who’s half his age or young enough to be his daughter, it’s a reality that happens a lot. Ruth is an easy target of older sexual predators because she comes from a dysfunctional family with little or no parental supervision. And it would be easy to speculate that teenagers with “daddy issues” would be more vulnerable to seeking approval and attention from much-older men.

Blaze is very aware that Ruth being around Hark and Hark’s all-male crew of employees will have some risks, so Blaze warns them not to hurt or take advantage of his Ruth. Blaze is a protective brother who keeps a watchful eye on Ruth when they’re with each other. But will it be enough to keep her out of danger?

“Holler” has some twists and turns in the story that are not very predictable. The movie doesn’t make anyone an evil villain but instead presents a clear-sighted view of what happens when people make bad choices. Halper and Adlon give admirable performances, since they are entirely believable as Ruth’s family members who want the best for her but express it in different ways.

As good as the acting is by all of the cast members in “Holler,” this movie is really Ruth’s story, and Barden delivers a nuanced and meaningful performance. Riegel’s even-keeled direction is minimalist and observational, which fits the tone perfectly for a movie about people who don’t have a lot of material possessions, but their lives are complicated enough that they don’t have time for fussy judgment. “Holler” is an impressive feature-film debut for Riegel, who achieves the right balance of telling universal and relatable truths with a very specific story.

IFC Films released “Holler” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on June 11, 2021.

Review: ‘The Evil Next Door,’ starring Dilan Gwyn and Eddie Eriksson Dominguez

July 8, 2021

by Carla Hay

Eddie Eriksson Dominguez in “The Evil Next Door” (Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing)

“The Evil Next Door”

Directed by Oskar Mellender and Tord Danielsson

Swedish with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in Sweden in 2014, the horror film “The Evil Next Door” has an all-white cast of characters representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A widower, his live-in girlfriend and the widower’s young son move to a new house, where the boy seems to have found a mysterious friend with sinister intentions.

Culture Audience: “The Evil Next Door” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching a slow-paced and boring horror movie with a “haunted house” concept that has been done many times before and much better in other movies.

Dilan Gwyn in “The Evil Next Door” (Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing)

The epitome of dull and derivative, “The Evil Next Door” is a poorly made ripoff of higher-quality horror films about haunted houses where a child is the first person in the house to communicate with the evil spirit. And predictably, the evil spirit wants to kidnap the child. It’s a concept that was done well in movies such as 1982’s “Poltergeist” and 2014’s “The Babadook.” But “The Evil Next Door” brings nothing new or imaginative to this concept and wastes a lot of time with repetitive scenes, generic characters who act illogically, and scare set-ups that aren’t terrifying at all.

Written and directed by Oskar Mellender and Tord Danielsson, “The Evil Next Door” is the duo’s first feature film, after years of working in Swedish television. According to a statement that Danielsson makes in “The Evil Next Door” production notes, the movie is supposedly based on the real-life experience of “a family who claimed to have experienced something very scary and paranormal in 2014. According to them, some kind of entity had tried to take their child.” Danielsson says that he and Mellender “came in contact with” this family, which wants to remain anonymous. But apparently, this filmmaking duo learned nothing about what to put in a movie that would make this story interesting or convincing in what real people would do in this situation.

“The Evil Next Door” takes place in an unnamed city in Sweden in 2014. The opening scene is set in a stereotypically spooky-looking dark house. A mother—viewers find out later that her name is Jenny Lindvall (played by Karin Lithman)—frantically searches for her daughter Kim (played by Hilma Alm), who’s about 5 or 6 years old. There’s a brief flash of Kim being dragged screaming into another room, while Jenny runs into the room, only to find it empty.

The next scene shows a family of three driving to the place that will eventually become their new home. (It’s the same house.) In the car are widower Fredrik (played by Linus Wahlgren); his son Lucas (played by Eddie Eriksson Dominguez), who’s about 5 or 6 years old; and Fredrik’s girlfriend Shirin (played by Dilan Gwyn), who seems a little nervous. Shirin is feeling anxious because this move is a big step for her and Fredrik. Not only will it be the first time that the couple will be living together, but they will also be buying the house.

It’s such a big commitment that even Lucas is aware of it. While Fredrik is out of the car to get gas, Lucas asks Shirin if she will be his new mother if she and Fredrik move in together. Shirin uneasily replies no. And she feels even more ill at ease when Lucas asks her, “Will you die too?” It’s revealed later in the movie that Lucas’ mother (whose name is never mentioned) died of cancer, but the movie never says how long ago that happened.

After getting a brief tour of the house from a real-estate agent, Fredrik and Shirin decide to buy it. Their move-in date is September 26, 2014. “The Evil Next Door,” which has the pace of a snail, keeps showing the date for each of the movie’s sequences, so that viewers can eventually see that everything that happens in this story occurred within one month. In this story, it takes several days for them to get to the real horror. The movie is only 87 minutes long, but it feels like longer.

Throughout the movie, it’s shown that while Fredrik has a close and loving relationship with Lucas, Shirin still feels like an outsider in this family, when it comes to parenting Lucas. For example, there’s more than one scene where Shirin watches somewhat enviously when Fredrik sings a goodnight lullaby with Lucas before Lucas goes to sleep. When Shirin is alone with Lucas, she acts more like a slightly uncomfortable babysitter than a parental figure, although slowly (which is how this movie operates) Shirin begins to warm up to Lucas. Shirin and the rest of the characters in the movie still have nothing charismatic or memorable about their personalities.

“The Evil Next Door” is so badly written, there’s no backstory explaining how long Fredrik and Shirin have been together. Shirin doesn’t have a job, while Fredrik has a vague, unnamed job where he wears a building construction or maintenance jacket at a place that looks like a non-descript warehouse. It’s a new job for Fredrik that requires him to work weeknights “for a while,” as he tells Shirin, who encouraged Fredrik to take the job.

The movie has somewhat of a sexist implication that because a man won’t be in the house at night, that will put Shirin and Lucas in more danger. It doesn’t take long for Lucas to tell Shirin that he’s found a “friend” in the house. Lucas starts talking to this “friend,” who’s a boy whom Shirin can’t see, so she assumes that Lucas has an imaginary playmate.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of “The Evil Next Door” is a repetitive cycle of Lucas talking about or talking to this “friend,” and Shirin not believing that this “friend” is real. She finds out that Lucas has mentioned this “friend” to his schoolteacher and classmates. And predictably, Lucas draws a picture of himself with the “friend,” which looks like a sinister black stick figure. It’s what you do when you’re a kid with an unseen friend in a dumb haunted house movie.

“The Evil Next Door” also has unncessary scenes (which are all a red herring) to make it look like the evil spirit could be in the house next door. Lucas insists that this mystery boy who wants to be his friend lives next door. It’s all just time-wasting nonsense, because it’s easy to see that the evil spirit is inside the house where Lucas, Shirin and Fredrik live. Most of the movie is an irritating repeat loop of Lucas hearing a boy whispering to him in rooms, followed by brief glimpses of what looks like a boy running across the screen or lurking in rooms before disappearing.

Meanwhile, Lucas asks Shirin questions about the afterlife, such as if someone can come back from the dead to live on Earth again. She says no. Lucas doesn’t seem to like that answer because he wants to see his dead mother again. When Shirin tells Lucas that there is no boy next door, Lucas pouts and tells her, “You’re mean. You’re not my mother.”

There’s also a creepy attic in the house that Shirin only goes into and explores at night, because in idiotic horror movies like this one, people never go into a creepy attic during the day. As soon as viewers see that this house has an attic, you just know there’s going to be a scene where someone is going to get attacked in the attic. It’s just all so formulaic.

Eventually, Shirin has supernatural experiences herself. She knocks on a wall and hears someone or something inside the wall knocking in response. Then she sees a shadowy-looking boy running across the lawn outside. She’s so freaked out that she calls Fredrik and the police, who find nothing out of the ordinary. Fredrik starts to think that Shirin might be going crazy.

Meanwhile, Lucas warns Shirin that a bogeyman is out to get him and that it’s the bogeyman who did the knocking inside the walls—the same walls where Lucas could hear his mystery “friend” talk. Kid, make up your mind. Are you being haunted by a boy or a bogeyman? Cue the predictable scenes of Lucas being dragged out of bed by an unknown force, Shirin rushing into a room when she hears Lucas screaming, and then finding nothing there.

After a while, Fredrik begins to think Shirin might be abusing Lucas, because every time Fredrik comes home from work, he hears stories about Lucas being frightened and physically attacked by something unexplained. Shirin denies abusing Lucas, of course, but it puts a big strain on her relationship with Fredrik. She begs Lucas to confirm to Fredrik that she’s telling the truth, but the kid is no real help.

Apparently, dimwits Fredrik and Shirin bought the house without bothering to find out anything about the house’s previous owners and why the house was being sold. When strange things start happening in the house, Fredrik and Shirin still don’t bother to find out the house’s background story. It’s only when Shirin is at an outdoor neighborhood family event with Lucas that she hears from a local mother named Tilda (played by Kima Heibel) what happened to the house’s previous owners.

The house’s previous owners—a married couple named Peter Lindvall (played by Henrik Norlén) and Jenny Lindvall—sold the house, because shortly after they moved in, their daughter Kim disappeared. This information finally prompts Shirin to do an Internet search for more details. She finds a newspaper article online that confirms that the Lindvalls’ child Kim had disappeared.

This movie is so stupid, it has a subplot where Shirin thinks that Kim is a boy, and she thinks that he’s the same boy who is Lucas’ imaginary friend. Never mind that the movie clearly showed in the beginning that the Kim was a girl. And any newspaper article or media story about the child’s disappearance would also identify Kim as a girl.

One of the most annoying things about “The Evil Next Door”—besides being so tedious, unoriginal and badly written—is the terrible cinematography. For the horror scenes, everything is too dark inside, even in the daytime. It’s unrealistic and tries too hard to look scary, which results in it looking overly staged and not scary at all. Even the scenes inside the house at night are ridiculously dark. It will just make viewers think, “Don’t these people know how to turn on the lights in their own house?”

The screenwriting also has plot developments that go nowhere. For example, Shirin buys a hidden camera that she installs in Lucas’ room. The first time that Shirin monitors the room with the camera, she sees the mystery boy and gets scared. And then she never uses the camera again. If she wanted to prove that something eerie was going on in Lucas’ room, then apparently using the camera’s recording function was just too mentally hard for her.

And viewers should forget about finding out what happened to Kim, because that issue is never resolved in the movie. Why bother with that opening scene when it ends up being useless? It’s an example of the movie’s sloppy editing, that includes jump cut scenes that show Shirin in one area of a room and then one second later, she’s in another area of the room when it would’ve been physically impossible for her to get there so quickly. It’s very amateurish filmmaking.

It should come as no surprise that the creature haunting this house really is a bogeyman monster, which is played by Troy James, a contortionist who has done similar roles in the horror movies “Separation” and “Black Box.” All of the acting is nothing special, although Ericsson Dominguez’s portrayal of Lucas shows he has promise as an actor who’s capable of a convincing range of emotions. It’s too bad all of this movie’s cast members were limited by such a moronic screenplay.

The final showdown scene and how this movie ends are as bland and cliché as can be. Even people who don’t watch a lot of horror movies will be underwhelmed, because everything in “The Evil Next Door” was done already in other movies. There’s some familiarity in horror movies that can be effective if a movie brings some original scares. “The Evil Next Door” just lazily copies what too many other haunted house movies have done and makes it worse with stale and substandard writing and directing.

Magnet Releasing released “The Evil Next Door” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on June 25, 2021.

Review: ‘Lansky’ (2021) starring Harvey Keitel, Sam Worthington, AnnaSophia Robb, Minka Kelly and John Magaro

July 7, 2021

by Carla Hay

Sam Worthington and Harvey Keitel in “Lansky” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

“Lansky”

Directed by Eytan Rockaway

Culture Representation: Taking place in Miami, New York state, Israel and Switzerland, the dramatic film “Lansky” has a nearly all-white cast of characters (with one African American) representing the middle-class and criminal underground.

Culture Clash: Notorious gangster Meyer Lansky tells his life story to a journalist who wants to write Lansky’s official biography, while an ambitious FBI agent wants the journalist to breach confidentiality ethics to give information about Lansky to the FBI.

Culture Audience: “Lansky” will appeal primarily to people who like formulaic movies about famous American mobsters.

A scene from “Lansky” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese has mastered the art of making movies about American mobsters. “Lansky,” about real-life 20th century crime boss Meyer Lansky, is one of numerous cheap and trite imitations of a Scorsese gangster film. “Lansky” is not a terrible movie, but it’s so formulaic that it’s often quite dull.

“Lansky” (written and directed by Eytan Rockaway) makes a half-hearted attempt to appear neutral about how complicated Lansky was. But in the end, the movie glorifies his murderous mayhem and almost justifies it by putting a lot of emphasis on how his corrupt business dealings generated a lot of money for local economies. The entire tone of the film is, “Never mind how many people were slaughtered because of Lansky, because he was a godfather of the gambling industry that’s given people a lot of jobs and boosted tourism.”

The 1999 HBO film “Lansky,” directed by John McNaughton and starring Richard Dreyfuss as Meyer Lansky, was a more conventional biopic that focused on Lansky in his prime. Rockaway’s “Lansky” movie attempts to take more creative risks by having it be about Lansky (played by Harvey Keitel) toward the end of his life and telling his story for a possible biography that he wants published after his death. Lansky died of lung cancer in 1983, at the age of 80.

In the production notes for “Lansky,” Rockaway says that his father “had the opportunity to interview [Lansky] just before he died. Meyer was a husband, father, friend, killer, genius, criminal, patriot and the founder of the largest crime organization in American history … He is both the protagonist and antagonist of this story. This film is not about loving or hating this man, it is about understanding him.”

Rockaway also admits in the “Lansky” production notes: “Growing up with a father who was an historian with expertise in the history of crime and the underworld, I was always intrigued by the adventurous and dangerous lives of gangsters. That dark and elusive underworld, with its own rules and codes of conduct operating in the shadows of civilized society, was fascinating. As a young boy, it sounded more like a fantasy world rather than historical reality.”

The movie tends to over-glamorize Lansky’s life and shuts out any depiction of the long-term damage of his crimes, except for how it made his wife angry at him and ruined their marriage. There’s almost no thought given to his victims. Although there are scenes that depict the brutal violence of Lansky’s crimes, he’s rarely shown actually doing the dirty work because the movie mainly shows other people carrying out murders and assaults for him.

In order to work his way up to being a mob boss with that type of power, this “Lansky” movie glosses over all the brutal crimes he had to commit along the way when he was a henchman, not the boss. And the movie barely mentions Lansky’s legal problems. As an adult, he only spent a couple of months in jail, but he was still very entangled in the court system because of frequent accusations (assault and tax evasion, to name a few) against him.

The other protagonist of “Lansky” is a fictional character named David Stone (played by Sam Worthington), a down-on-his luck journalist who travels to Miami in 1981, because he has a chance to interview Lansky for a biographical book on Lansky. The movie switches back and forth between what happens in 1981 and what happens in Lansky’s storytelling version of his life prior to 1981. By 1981, Lansky already knew that he was dying of lung cancer.

Lansky also knows everything about Stone’s background, including his education (Stone is a Princeton graduate), his work history (including being a crime reporter of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel in Indiana) and his personal life. Stone is having financial problems and is currently separated from his wife Christina, nicknamed Chrissie. They have two underage children together: a daughter named Eva and a son named Jack. Stone’s family members are not seen in the movie, but Stone is shown having phone conversations with Christina and Eva.

When Stone and Lansky meet for the first time at a diner in Miami, Lansky is firm in telling Stone that everything that Lansky says in the interviews will be “off the record,” unless Lansky approves it. Lansky stipulates that he doesn’t want this biography to be published until after Lansky’s death. “Betray me and there will be consequences,” warns Lansky. “I hope our collaboration will be a successful one.”

Lansky’s life story in this movie begins in Lansky’s hometown of New York City in 1912, when Lansky was 10 years old and developed a fascination with numbers and dice games played on the street. The movie doesn’t mention that Lansky was born in the Russian Empire to a Polish Jewish family who immigrated to the United States, when he was 10 years old. As an example of how this movie tends to glorify Lansky, it completely skips over any heinous stories about how Lansky paid his dues as a henchman while working his way up the ranks in New York’s Italian mafia.

Instead, the movie goes straight to when a young Lansky (played by John Magaro) was already a trusted right-hand person for mob boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano (played by Shane McRae), who was Lansky’s mentor. In this flashback scene, the movie “Lansky” mistakenly puts the year as 1918, when Lansky was just 16 years old. In reality, Lansky didn’t reach this level of mafia authority until he was in his 20s. Luciano’s criminal activities were funded by operating gambling businesses, which is also how Lansky ended up making his fortune.

The friendship between Lansky and Benny “Bugsy” Siegel (played by David Cade) is also depicted in the movie. As Lansky explains to Stone, Lansky and Siegel were like brothers. Lansky handled the numbers, while Siegel was the enforcer in their mafioso activities. Predictably violent gangster scenes of torture and murder are in the movie, which includes Lansky’s influential involvement in the crime organizations Murder Inc. and National Crime Syndicate.

As an up-and-coming gangster, Lansky met a woman named Anne (played by AnnaSophia Robb), who would become his wife and the mother of his children. (In real life, her name was Anna Citron. She and Lansky eventually got divorced, but their divorce is not in this movie.) Their first meeting is depicted as an impromptu “double date” situation, when Lansky and Siegel were at a restaurant. Anne and her friend Elise happen to be at the same restaurant, are introduced to Lansky by Siegel, and join the two men for dinner.

When Anne and Elise ask Lansky and Siegel what they do for a living, Siegel and Lansky say they’re in the “truck rental business.” But as their conversation goes on, it becomes pretty obvious that Lansky and Siegel are involved in criminal activities. It makes Elise nervous, and she leaves, but Anne decides to stay because she tells Elise that these two strangers “seem nice.” It’s implied that Anne, who less than smart, is attracted to the “bad boy” type.

The next time that Anne and Lansky are seen together, they’re married parents to a disabled toddler son named Buddy, their eldest child, who was born with an impaired ability to walk. When a doctor tells Anne and Lansky that Buddy will have to wear a leg brace for the rest of his life, Lansky takes the news very hard. He sees it as a sign of weakness that Buddy was born disabled, but Lansky eventually accepts it and is depicted as someone who is devoted as he can be to his children. (The movie shows that Anne and Lansky eventually had two sons and a daughter.)

But things get worse for Anne, because she becomes miserable in the marriage, Most of the later scenes between Anne and Lansky show them getting into shouting matches and physical fights. She hurls insults at him for being a murderer, while he doesn’t want to hear this truth, and he gets angry. Lansky, who admits to Stone that he was often unfaithful to Anne because he it made him “feel good,” seems to think that Anne should just shut up and be happy with all the wealth that he’s been able to provide for their family.

The movie shows how Lansky’s wealth increased considerably when he got the opportunity to oversee the gambling industry in Cuba. And, according to Lansky, he was an unsung hero in fighting Nazis before and during World War II. There’s a very hokey scene in the movie of some of Lansky’s thugs breaking up a pro-Nazi, German-American Bund meeting in Yorkville, New York, in 1937, and getting into a bloody brawl that ends with the Nazis being defeated. It’s mentioned in the movie that Lansky was behind several disruptions of these types of Nazi rallies in New York in the 1930s and 1940s.

Not only is Lansky depicted as a great American patriot in the movie, he’s also portrayed as a Jew who takes pride in uplifting his family’s Israeli roots by getting involved in funding weapons for the Israeli military. It’s a movie that shows Lansky practically being an American diplomat to Israel. He has conversations with Israeli government leaders, such as Golda Meier, who is depicted as politician who allied herself with Lansky and later turned against him when his gangster reputation became too scandalous.

It can be argued that because Lansky is telling his life story in the movie, he’s naturally going to exaggerate or make himself look like a hero. But the movie lazily goes along with this concept. A more interesting approach to the movie would have been to put the fictional character of Stone to better use as a journalist—someone who would and should do his own independent investigation rather than just taking Lansky’s word for everything.

Instead, the “Lansky” movie has a useless subplot about Stone getting sexually involved with a woman named Maureen Duffy (played by Minka Kelly), who’s staying at the same motel in Miami. There’s a scene with Stone getting into a fist fight with Maureen’s jealous ex-boyfriend Ray Hutchinson (played by James Devoti), a drug dealer who’s convinced that Maureen was the snitch who set up him up to be arrested. It’s a giant clue/foreshadowing of what comes later in the movie about Maureen, who is never seen again soon after her secret is revealed.

In fact, “Lansky” is such a cliché American gangster movie that the only two female characters with significant speaking roles in the movie (Anne and Maureen) are only there to fulfill the role of wife or lover, which often translates to “nagging shrew” or “sexy temptress.” It’s all so hackneyed, boring and unimaginative. Robb and Kelly are perfectly adequate in their acting, but they don’t have much to do beyond the stereotypical roles that were written for them in this movie.

There’s another subplot, taking place in 1981, of an ambitious FBI agent named Frank Rivers (played by David James Elliott) who’s determined to find out if the rumor is true that Lansky has $300 million hidden away somewhere. And so, there’s a scene of Agent Rivers trying to convince his reluctant boss R.J. Campell (played by James Moses Black) to give him more budget money to investigate. And it should come as no surprise that the FBI finds out what Stone is doing in Miami. How it all plays out is very predictable.

The acting in “Lansky” isn’t particularly outstanding—Keitel has played a gangster so many times in movies, he can do it in his sleep—but Magaro as the young Lansky stands out as the one who’s best able to convey some character depth. Unfortunately, much of the dialogue falls into cornball territory, which lessens the impact of the violent scenes. And the movie’s pacing gets sluggish in the last third of the film.

The dialogue spewed by the elderly Lansky often makes him look less like a gangster reflecting on his sordid life and more like someone who’s trying to be a life coach/therapist for Stone. In one scene, Lansky tells Stone that they’ve both had lifelong insecurities about feeling like outsiders because their fathers rejected them. Lansky’s father never approved of his son’s criminal lifestyle, while Stone’s father abandoned his family when Stone was a child.

And then there are the preachy platitudes that Lansky imparts to Stone, as if Lansky is giving some kind of sermon. In one scene, Lansky lectures: “When you lose all your money, you lose nothing. When you lose your health, you lose something. When you lose your character, you lose everything.” Says the man responsible for an untold number of murders and other destruction of people’s lives.

“Lansky” was made for a certain audience that loves to see gangsters glorified on screen. However, the filmmakers missed an opportunity to go beyond the usual mobster biopic tropes, because there’s no one in the movie who challenges or investigates Lansky’s version of events. As much as writer/director Rockaway might say that this movie is not about “loving or hating” Lansky, the movie essentially puts Lansky up on a pedestal in a loving way, in an effort to give Lansky “legendary” status.

Vertical Entertainment released “Lansky” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on June 25, 2021.

Netflix debuts ‘Cat People’ series: See photos and videos

July 1, 2021

The following is a press release from Netflix:

Dogs may get credit for being humanity’s best friend, but to many people, cats are just as much our loyal partners — even though if you asked cats they might not admit it! “Cat People” explores our fascinating relationship with cats through the lens of some of the most remarkable and surprising “cat people” in the world, defying the negative stereotypes of what it means to be a cat person while revealing the fundamental truths of what it means to have deep bonds with these fiercely independent, mysterious creatures.

“Cat People” premieres on Netflix on July 7, 2021.

(All photos courtesy of Netflix)

Review: ‘Ballad of a White Cow,’ starring Maryam Moghadam, Alireza Sani Far, Avin Poor Raoufi, Farid Ghobadi, Lili Farhadpour and Pouria Rahimi

July 6, 2021

by Carla Hay

Avin Poor Raoufi and Maryam Moghadam in “Ballad of a White Cow” (Photo courtesy of Totem FIlms)

“Ballad of a White Cow”

Directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha

Persian (Farsi) with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in in Tehran, Iran, the dramatic film “Ballad of a White Cow” features an all-Middle-Eastern cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and upper-middle class.

Culture Clash: A widowed mother, whose wrongly imprisoned husband was executed for murder, gets unexpected financial help from a man whom the widow does not know was directly involved in the outcome of her husband’s murder case.

Culture Audience: “Ballad of a White Cow” will appeal primarily to people interested in movies about Iranian culture, injustice in a criminal court system and the toll that big secrets can take on a relationship.

Alireza Sani Far in “Ballad of a White Cow” (Photo courtesy of Totem FIlms)

“Ballad of a White Cow” delivers a quietly devastating portrait of what happens in the aftermath of a wrongly convicted prisoner’s execution and how good intentions can be poisonous if they’re based in deceit. Maryam Moghadam is the star, co-director and co-writer of this impactful drama that takes place in Iran, but its themes are universal and have no national boundaries. It’s far from an upbeat film, but it has glimmers of hope that the people in this tragic story might one day find a way to heal.

Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha directed “Ballad of a White Cow,” whose screenplay was written by Moghadam, Sanaeeha and Mehrdad Kouroshniya. The movie had its European premiere at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival and its North American premiere at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Viewers of this movie get glimpses into the Iranian criminal justice system and how it shrouds in secrecy from the public the identities of judges who decide the fates of defendants.

“Ballad of a White Cow” opens with a distraught Mina Parsa (played by Moghadam) spending time with her imprisoned husband Eghbali “Babak” Parsa for the last time before he’s executed for murdering a man during a fight. Babak confessed to the murder, but it was a false confession because, unbeknownst to Babak, the victim (whose name was Rashedi) was still alive when Barak ran away, and another man came along and murdered Rashedi. (There are no flashbacks to the crime.) Mina has always believed that Babak was innocent.

After the execution (which is not shown in the movie), Mina is so grief-stricken that she seems somewhat detached from reality. She still goes to her job working on an assembly line at a milk bottling factory, but her demeanor is of someone whose emotions are numb and her mind is elsewhere. She’s still able to take care of her loving 7-year-old daughter Bita (played by Avin Poor Raoufi), who happens to be deaf. But Mina doesn’t have the energy to do things (such as go to the movies) with her daughter that Mina used to have before Babak died.

Babak’s imprisonment and execution has brought such shame on Mina that she can’t bring herself to tell Bita the truth. Instead, Mina lies and tells Bita that Babak is on a trip somewhere far away and she doesn’t know when Babak will come back home. Bita can sense her mother’s sadness and asks her one day, “Why are you frowning?” Mina tells Bita, “I’m just tired.”

Meanwhile, Bita has been struggling in school. She tells her mother that she doesn’t like the people there, and Bita says that her teacher is mean to her. Bita doesn’t want to go back to school and doesn’t want to do any schoolwork. It’s later revealed that Bita’s problems in school mostly have to do with people at the school knowing what happened to her father, but Bita (because she was lied to) insists to everyone that her father is still alive and traveling somewhere.

A year after Babak’s death, Mina is in dire financial straits because Babak had no pension or life insurance, and her factory job doesn’t pay enough to cover all of her expenses. Mina applies for government assistance and is told that she’s entitled to 200,000 tomans a month (which is about $47.50 in 2021 U.S. dollars), including any benefits because Bita is a special-needs child. Mina’s apartment manager (played by Lili Farhadpour) is understanding about Mina being late with the rent, because she feels sympathy for Mina being a widow with a young child to raise on her own.

One person who doesn’t believe that Mina is financially struggling is Babak’s aggressive brother (played by Pouria Rahimi, also known as Pouria Rahimi Sam), who doesn’t have a name in the movie. Babak’s brother visits Mina one day and tells her that Babak’s father believes that Babak secretly left a stash of money for Mina and Bita. Mina vehemently denies it. Babak’s brother has power of attorney over his father, who is in ill health, and so Babak wants this imaginary stash of money to take control of it.

While Mina is grieving over the loss of her husband, something unexpected happens. The real murderer confesses to the crime, and it’s proven that he was the real culprit. A government official meets with Mina and makes a private apology to Mina about Babak’s execution. The government gives Mina a settlement of 270 million tomas (or a little more than $64,000 in 2021 U.S. dollars) for the execution mistake.

But that’s not enough for Mina. After she reacts with shock and horror that her husband was wrongfully executed, she gets angry. She tries to find a way to get the government to make a public apology, but she encounters many roadblocks. She also wants some type of justice for slander, because she believes the government ruined Babak’s reputation.

It’s during this time that Mina gets a surprise visit at home from a stranger, who identifies himself as Reza Esfandiari (played by Alireza Sani Far) and who says that he was a friend of Babak’s. Reza tells Mina that he owed 10 million tomans (or about $2,375 in 2021 U.S. dollars) to Babak. Mina says she doesn’t want the money, but Reza insists on writing her a check for that amount. Reza also tells Mina that if there’s anything else she might need, she shouldn’t hesitate to ask for his help.

Shortly after Reza’s visit, Mina’s apartment manager tells Mina that Mina has been evicted, because the manager saw this male stranger visit Reza in her home. In Muslim culture, it’s taboo for a single woman to have an unrelated man in her home. Mina has a limited amount of time to find a new place for herself and Bita to live before the eviction goes into effect. And it’s very difficult for Mina to find a new place to live because many apartment buildings will not rent to widows or other unmarried women.

Just when it looks like Mina and Bita will become homeless, Reza comes to the rescue. He happens to own an apartment that he isn’t using. And he offers to let Mina and Bita live there rent-free, as long as they keep the apartment in good shape. Why is Reza being so generous to Mina and Bita?

It’s because his real name is Reza Shallal, and he was on the judging panel that decided that Babak would be sentenced to death. It’s a panel of judges whose identities are kept secret from the public, out of concerns that the judges will be retaliated against. Reza feels an enormous amount of guilt over the wrongful execution of Babak, so he wants to make amends. However, Reza is afraid of telling Mina his true identity. Reza’s secret isn’t spoiler information to viewers, because it’s in the movie trailer for “Ballad of a White Cow.”

Reza’s first experience in judging a death-sentence case was Babak’s case. It’s revealed in the movie that Reza had previously worked in the civil courts system and had recently transferred to the criminal courts system when Babak’s case came his way. Reza deeply regrets becoming a criminal court judge, and he wants to quit. “Ballad of a White Cow” has tension-filled scenes of Reza discussing his disillusionment with a colleague (played by Farid Ghobadi), who advises Reza not to resign from his position.

Adding to Reza’s personal turmoil, he has a son in his late teens or early 20s (Reza’s only child) named Maysam, who despises Reza. Maysam has been living with Reza, who is either divorced or widowed. Reza and Maysam’s scenes together have a lot of unspoken backstory, but based on what they say to each other, it seems as if Maysam has a lot of resentment toward Reza because Maysam feels that Reza was a neglectful father. It’s implied that Reza was a workaholic for most of Maysam’s life, and now Reza regrets it, especially when Maysam abruptly tells Reza one day that he’s moving away to join the military.

There’s more tragedy in this story, which will keep viewers guessing on how long Reza can keep his secret from Mina and how long Mina can keep her secret from Bita. Over time, Reza befriends Mina, who thinks it’s a little odd that Reza is going out of her way to help her. She takes his word for it that Reza was a friend of Babak. When she asks Reza questions about Babak to see how how well Reza knew him, Reza is able to give vague answers that sound convincing.

Mina is also a little suspicious of Reza at first because she thinks he might have ulterior sexual motives for being so generous to her. But when she sees that he really wants nothing in return, she relaxes around him and even lets Reza get close to Bita, almost as if he’s a surrogate uncle to Bita. Because Mina trusts Reza to be around her child, it adds an extra layer of burden to Reza’s lies.

“Ballad of a White Cow” never really shakes the feeling of heartbreak, because even though Mina’s problem about her living situation has been resolved, it’s under deceptive circumstances on Reza’s part. Even though Reza seems to be a kind and caring new friend to Reza, at a time when she really needs a friend, he can never reveal his true identity to her or he would lose the friendship. And when Mina is dishonest to Bita about what happened to Babak, it’s another betrayal that might have had good intentions but is ultimately damaging.

All of the acting in “Ballad of a White Cow” is convincing and nuanced, but the movie’s biggest strength is in making viewers think about what they would do if they were Mina or Reza. There’s also a level of suspense over how or if Mina and Reza will be able to continue their deceptions. It might be easy to judge and say they made bad choices, but both Mina and Reza are both emotonally hurting in different ways that could certainly cloud their judgment.

The movie’s writing, acting and direction are solid for this type of movie, which makes good use of its low budget. As for why the movie is called “Ballad of a White Cow,” it has to do with a memorable image in the film of a white cow standing in the middle of a courtyard, as men stand on one side of the courtyard, and women stand on the other. Is this cow about to be milked or will it be slaughtered? The same question could be posed about the complicated friendship of the two lonely people at the center of this melancholy story.

UPDATE: MUBI will premiere “Ballad of a White Cow” on February 10, 2022.

Review: ‘I Carry You With Me,’ starring Armando Espitia, Christian Vázquez, Michelle Rodríguez, Ángeles Cruz, Arcelia Ramírez and Michelle González

July 5, 2021

by Carla Hay

Armando Espitia and Christian Vázquez in “I Carry You With Me” (Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

“I Carry You With Me”

Directed by Heidi Ewing

Spanish with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Mexico and New York City, the dramatic film “I Carry With You With Me” features a cast of predominantly Latino characters (with some white people) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two Mexican men in a gay love affair reach a crossroads in the relationship when one of the men wants to move to the United States to pursue his dream of becoming a chef.

Culture Audience: “I Carry You With Me” will appeal primarily to people interested in movies about Mexican culture, the LGBTQ community and immigrant experiences in the United States.

Michelle Rodríguez and Armando Espitia in “I Carry You With Me” (Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

The emotionally stirring drama “I Carry You With Me” tells a real-life epic love story between two Mexican men who have different struggles over their sexuality, immigration and what it means to follow a dream. It’s also a poignant story about what it means to sacrifice for love and for personal ambition. And it’s a tale of self-discovery and identity that tests the old adage, “Home is where the heart is.”

“I Carry You With Me” is the first narrative feature film from Heidi Ewing, a filmmaker who’s mostly known for her documentaries, such as the Oscar-nominated 2006 film “Jesus Camp” and the 2012 film “Detropia.” Ewing didn’t completely leave her non-fiction filmmaking behind for “I Carry You With Me,” because Iván Garcia and Gerardo Zabaletae—the real-life men who became a couple in this story—portray themselves as middle-aged men in the unscripted scenes, which are a small but important part of the movie. The majority of the movie’s scenes are scripted, with actors portraying Garcia and Zabaletae as their younger selves. “I Carry You With Me” takes place and was filmed in Mexico and in New York City.

Ewing co-wrote the “I Carry You With Me” screenplay with Alan Page Arriaga. And the idea for the movie came by chance, when Garcia and Zabaletae (who are longtime friends of Ewing) told Ewing their very personal story of how they met, fell in love, and faced immense challenges in their relationship. These difficulties included hiding their romance from homophobic family members, as well as the threat of being torn apart when Garcia moved from Mexico to New York City to pursue his dream of becoming a chef.

According to the “I Carry You With Me” production notes, Garcia and Zabaletae revealed the detailed history of their relationship to Ewing in 2012, when they were all at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Garcia and Zabaletae had no idea at the time that their story would be made into a movie. Ewing says in the production notes: “We had been friends for so long, since before any of our careers took off, but I just didn’t know the details of all they had experienced. So on the plane ride home from Sundance, I wrote everything down that I could remember and sent myself an email called ‘The Mexican Love Story.’ A seed had been planted in my head and I was like, ‘Uh oh, this isn’t going to leave me.'”

Although scenes in “I Carry You With Me” take place in multiple decades, most of the film takes place in the 1990s, during the first few years of Garcia and Zabaletae’s relationship, when they were in their 20s. They met in Puebla, Mexico, in 1994, when Iván (played by Armando Espitia) was a dishwasher at a local restaurant but dreaming of one day becoming a chef. Although this story is about a couple, it’s told mainly from Iván’s perspective.

At this point in his life, Iván is still mostly “in the closet” about his sexuality. He’s a single father to a son named Ricky (played by Paco Luna), who’s about 4 or 5 years old. Iván is a devoted and loving father to Ricky, but Iván is embarrassed that he can barely pay child support. Iván is also terrified that he would lose visitation rights if Ricky’s mother Paola (played by Michelle González) found out that Iván is gay. Paola already has a tense relationship with Iván because he doesn’t make enough money to buy the things that she wants for Ricky.

One of the few people in Iván’s life who knows about his true sexuality is his best friend Sandra (played by Michelle Rodríguez), who has been his closest confidant since they were children. There are flashbacks to their childhood, when Sandra (played by Alexia Morales) and Iván (played by Yael Tadeo), at about 9 or 10 years old, would play dress-up in women’s clothing and wear makeup. Iván’s mother Rosa Maria (played by Ángeles Cruz) is a dressmaker, so Iván has easy access to the gowns that she makes as part of her work.

The movie shows what happens when Iván’s father Marcos (played by Raúl Briones) comes home one day and sees Iván and Sandra during one of their “dress-up” play sessions. He’s surprised and disgusted at seeing his son in drag, but Marcos stops short of physically abusing Iván over it. As for Iván’s mother Rosa Maria, if she ever suspected that Iván was gay, she chooses to be in denial over it, because even into his adulthood, she believes Iván’s claims that he has been dating only women.

The movie doesn’t go into details about Iván and Paola’s failed relationship. But by the time that Iván meets Gerardo, it’s obvious that Iván and Paola will not be getting back together. Iván and Paola are only in each other’s lives because they’re co-parenting Ricky. Paola is portayed as someone who is constantly stressed-out over her finances and disappointed in Iván for not being a better provider for Ricky. However, Paola has a good relationship with Iván’s mother Rosa Maria, who is very present in her grandson Ricky’s life.

Iván and Gerardo meet at a gay nightclub, where Iván has gone with Sandra, and Gerardo is by himself. Gerardo and Iván lock eyes with each other, in the way that people do when they’re immediately attracted to each other. Gerardo makes it clear from the beginning that he’s very interested in Iván because he gets Iván’s attention by shining a red pen light on him.

It isn’t long before Iván and Gerardo make their way to each other and start having a flirtatious and easygoing conversation at the nightclub. The romantic sparks between them are immediate, and they end up kissing the first night that they meet. On the night that they meet, Gerardo is very open about being gay and says that he “escaped” from his hometown of Chiapas, thereby implying that he has a homophobic family too.

Iván isn’t as forthcoming about his own family background. For example, Iván doesn’t tell Gerardo right away that Iván is the father of a child. Gerardo finds out another way, which causes the first big conflict in Iván and Gerardo’s relationship. By this time, Iván and Gerardo have become lovers, and Gerardo is aware that Iván is “in the closet” to almost everyone, but Gerardo doesn’t know to the extent why Iván is so paranoid about it.

By contrast, Gerardo isn’t afraid to live openly as a gay man while he’s been in Puebla. One of Gerardo’s closest friends is a drag queen named Cucusa Minelly (played by Luis Alberti), who is concerned about Gerardo getting his heart broken by the closeted Iván. Gerardo goes to see Cucusa’s drag queen act in a nightclub, and he walks down the street with Cucusa while Cucusa wears heavy makeup. It’s something that Iván would never do at this point in his life.

Gerardo works as a teaching assistant at the University of Puebla. He owns an apartment. And it’s later revealed that he comes from a somewhat well-to-do rancher family in Chiapas. Gerardo’s mother Magda (played by Arcelia Ramírez) and Gerardo’s father César (played by Pascacio López) know that Gerardo is gay, but they don’t like to talk about it. It’s evident when Gerardo takes Iván home to Chiapas to meet his family (Gerardo’s parents, his two younger sisters and younger brother), during the family’s birthday celebration for Gerardo. Iván is described as Gerardo’s “best friend” to the family.

Over dinner in the family home, tensions begin to rise when Gerardo’s father César asks Iván what he does for a living. Gerardo lies and says that Iván is a chef. However, Iván corrects him and says that he’s a dishwasher in a restaurant, while César reacts with a disapproving look on his face. It’s the first time that Iván sees that his sexuality wouldn’t be the only reason why he wouldn’t be completely accepted by Gerardo’s family.

Although Iván hides his sexuality from most of the people he knows, he refuses to lie about his social class, whereas Gerardo seems self-conscious with his family about being close to someone who has a menial, working-class job. Because Gerardo wanted to lie to his family about what Iván does for a living, it hurts Iván’s feelings that Gerardo seems to be ashamed of Iván’s social class. It won’t be the last time their social class differences will cause tension in Gerardo and Iván’s relationship.

The movie also has a harrowing flashback scene of Gerardo at about 8 or 9 years old being bullied by his father, who yells at Gerardo to stop acting like a girl. César is so angry about it that he drives Gerardo to a deserted farm field at night, abandons a frightened Gerardo there, and orders Gerardo not to come home until he can act like a boy. Gerardo ends up walking home by himself at night, in tears. It’s a very traumatic experience that is an example of what Gerardo had to endure until he was old enough to move away from his family.

Iván has become increasingly frustrated with his restaurant job. He had been patiently waiting for a year to get a promotion to become a line cook. But when that job opening occurs, the manager ends up hiring a nephew instead. Iván’s boss also dismissively tells Iván that Iván is lucky to have the dishwasher job and that it sometimes takes years to be promoted to a cook position.

Observant viewers will notice that Iván’s American Dream ambition is largely fueled by wanting to get out of his working-class rut. Meanwhile, Gerardo is more used to being in a comfortable financial situation, so he doesn’t have the same motivation as Iván does to start over and re-invent himself in another country. Something happens later in the movie that hastens Ivan’s plan to go to America, where Iván believes that he will have better opportunities to become a chef.

Iván’s decision to move to the United States as an undocumented immigrant is a turning point in his relationship with Gerardo. Sandra decides to go with Iván (their border crossing is one of the most tension-filled parts of the movie), but will Gerardo go too? That question is answered in the movie, which shows what happened after Iván moved to New York City. Iván’s decision to leave his son Ricky is something that haunts Iván and gives him a lot of guilt.

“I Carry You With Me” inevitably has tearjearking moments, but the movie is also filled with a lot of hope and realistic portrayals of a romance that is far from a fairy tale. There are layers to the story that authentically address the fear, loneliness and resentment that result from decisions made by Iván and Gerardo. The movie is also a keen observation of the American Dream from two different perspectives: one that sees the American Dream as a worthy goal, and one that sees the American Dream as the reason why loved ones are torn apart. And the movie doesn’t shy away from depicting the harsh realities of bigotry experienced by undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who aren’t white and who don’t have English as their first language.

All of the main actors give convincing performances, but Espitia’s portrayal of Iván is the one that will stay with viewers the most. Espitia has a wonderfully expressive face that can convey so much without saying a word. Gerardo has also gone through his share of trials and tribulations in this relationship and as a gay man, but Iván’s journey is more complicated because he has a child who will be forever affected by his decisions. “I Carry You With Me” is one couple’s real-life love story, but it has an outstanding way of speaking to larger issues of what people will do in the name of love and to make better lives for themselves.

Sony Pictures Classics and Stage 6 Films released “I Carry You With Me” in select U.S. cinemas on June 25, 2021.

Review: ‘Undine’ (2020), starring Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski

July 4, 2021

by Carla Hay

Paula Beer in “Undine” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“Undine” (2020)

Directed by Christian Petzold

German with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Berlin, the dramatic film “Undine” features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A water sprite in human form is conflicted between two human lovers and how these romances will affect whether she will live happily ever after or if she will be doomed to a life that she doesn’t want.

Culture Audience: “Undine” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in artsy European films that are contemporary interpretations of fairy tales.

Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer in “Undine” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

Based on the fairy tale about a water sprite who takes on the form of a human, the dramatic film “Undine” unfolds like a fever dream rather than straightforward story. The movie’s visuals and acting are compelling, but might not be enough to hold the interest of people who aren’t already familiar with the Undine mythology. It’s a movie that requires patience and curiosity to see how everything is going to end, because the heroine of the story wants to defy her fate.

Written and directed by Christian Petzold, “Undine” takes place in Berlin and has some bold-risk-taking in this often-abstract version of the Undine fairytale. This movie’s title character is Undine Wibeau (played by Paula Beer), a historian who works at the Senate for Urban Development and Housing, where she gives guided tours to visitors. Much of her guided tours involves showing model replicas of what Berlin and plans fo the city’s development. Undine looks like a woman who’s in her 20s, but she’s really a water sprite who has this curse of having to kill any man who becomes her lover and betrays her.

The beginning of the movie is the break-up scene that sets in motion what follows for the rest of the story. At a cafe table directly outside the building where Undine works, she is having lunch with her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Johannes (played by Jacob Matschenz), who is trying to let her down easily as he ends the relationship. It’s later revealed in the story that Johannes is already romantically involved with someone else named Nora (played by Julia Franz Richter), and he doesn’t want to leave Nora to be with Undine.

As Johannes leaves the table to gets some coffee, Undine starts crying but quickly wipes away he tears when Johannes comes back to the table. She tells him ominously, “You said you love me forever. If you leave, I have to kill you. If you leave here, you have to die.”

Undine says that she has to go back to work because that she will return to the table in half and hour when she’s on her break. She tells Johannes that she expects him to be at the table when she gets back. And when she sees him again, Undine tells Johannes that he better declare his love for her. She even looks out of the building window to check and see if Johannes is still there.

If would be incorrect to assume that “Undine” is going to turn into a “Fatal Attraction” type of movie, with Undine as the jilted lover who spends most of the story stalking the man who dumped her. Instead, this artfully directed but quirky film goes in an entirely different direction. Shortly after this break-up with Johannes, Undine meets another man who becomes her next love. His name is Christoff (played by Franz Rogowski), an industrial diver with an introverted personality.

Whereas Johannes was cold and standoffish, Christoff is warm and romantic. After one of Undine’s guided tours, which had Christoff in the tour group, Christoff shyly approaches Undine, flatters her about her tour guide skills, and asks her out on a date. Undine is so distracted over her problems with Johannes that she just stares at Christoff and doesn’t give an answer.

Christoff nervously backs into a shelf, which causes the other furniture in the room to vibrate. This movement has a domino effect that ends with a very large aquarium in the room tipping over and smashing completely. The force of the water crashes over Christoff and Undine, who are both knocked to the ground.

It’s an awkward way to start a relationship, but somehow this bizarre accident quickly bonds Christoff and Undine together. They have a passionate romance, which includes their shared love of diving underwater. During one of their diving dates, Christoff demonstrates a romantic gesture by showing Undine a brick wall that has her name on it.

Christoff begins to suspect that there’s something unusual about Undine during this diving date, when she briefly disappears underwater. When Christoff sees Undine a minute or two later, she’s holding on to a dolphin, but she isn’t wearing her scuba gear. Undine suddenly passes out from lack of oxygen.

Christoff rescues Undine and gives her cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), while chanting the chorus to the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.” (It’s one of the movie’s many quirks.) Undine makes a quick recovery and asks Christoff to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her again. He’s reluctant to do so because he’s afraid someone might see them and think she’s really in distress. Christoff tells Undine that he can grant her wish when they get home.

“Undine” is filled with scenes like that, where not everything fits in a cohesive manner, but the the details of movie are presented like a jigsaw puzzle that viewers are expected to piece together on their own. Johannes isn’t completely out of the picture. There’s a pivotal scene on a bridge where Christoff and Undine are embracing each other as they walk past another couple, who are walking in the opposite direction.

The other couple are Johannes and Nora. Undine stares at Johannes, Christoff notices, and Christoff expresses some insecurity that Undine’s heart started to beat faster when she looked at the other man. Undine won’t tell Christoff about Johannes or her history with him, but this encounter plants some seeds of jealousy in Christoff. Meanwhile, Christoff has a co-worker named Monika (played by Maryam Zaree) who might have more than platonic feelings for Christoff.

Cinematically, “Undine” is a gorgeous and sometimes haunting film to watch. However, it’s not the type of movie that will be enjoyed by people who want to see more conventional ways of telling a love story. The movie’s greatest strengths are in how it presents thought-provoking themes about destiny versus free will, as well as forgiveness versus revenge, and how these themes fit into the overall concept of pursuing love that makes someone happy. Petzold’s direction and the cast members’ acting achieve a tricky balance of bringing a realistic emotional tone to a fairy tale that’s been told many times but never before in this idiosyncratic and memorable way.

IFC Films released “Undine” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on June 4, 2021. The movie was released in Germany and other countries in 2020.

Review: ‘Death in Texas,’ starring Ronnie Gene Blevins, Bruce Dern, Lara Flynn Boyle and Stephen Lang

July 4, 2021

by Carla Hay

Ronnie Gene Blevins in “Death in Texas” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

“Death in Texas”

Directed by Scott Windhauser

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in El Paso, Texas, the dramatic film “Death in Texas” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Latinos) representing the working-class, middle-class, wealthy and criminal underground.

Culture Clash: A recently released ex-con finds himself returning to a life of crime so that he can get enough money to pay for his mother’s life-or-death liver transplant. 

Culture Audience: “Death in Texas” will appeal primarily to people who like watching violent crime movies with badly written, unrealistic scenes.

Bruce Dern in “Death in Texas” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

“Death in Texas” has too many far-fetched scenarios to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, this dreadful crime drama takes itself way too seriously. There’s a lot of corny acting from experienced actors who embarrass themselves by being in this movie. And anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of organ transplants and hospitals will be cringing at the preposterous plot development in the last third of the movie.

Written and directed by Scott Windhauser, “Death in Texas” is also exceedingly tedious with its nonsensical murders that are nothing but excuses to fill this movie with violent and often-unrealistic fight scenes. The first clue that “Death in Texas” is a constant failure at realism is in the opening scene when 37-year-old prisoner Billy Walker (played by Ronnie Gene Blevins) is in a parole hearing and gets paroled in a very phony “only in a movie” moment. (“Death in Texas” takes place primarily in El Paso, Texas, but the movie was actually filmed in New Mexico.)

During the parole hearing, which has a parole board of only two people—one named Charles (played by Clark Harris) and one named Antonio (played by Daniel Steven Gonzalez)—Billy is being questioned about his rehabiltation while in prison. Billy is asked, “Do you take responsibility for your crime?” Billy replies, “As much as I can.” It’s not exactly a sign of remorse, which is a requirement to get paroled.

Billy says that he wants to be paroled so that he can take care of his mother. Charles and Antonio are not convinced that Billy has been fully rehabilitated and is ready for release. Just as they’re about to deny parole to Billy, a woman who is later revealed as parole officer Sarah Jensen (played by Veronica Burgess) suddenly appears and shows Charles and Antonio something in a file of papers. And just like that, Charles and Antonio change their minds and sign off on Billy getting parole.

Through flashbacks, the movie shows that Billy was in prison for manslaughter, and he served seven years in prison for this crime before being paroled. When his mother Grace Edwards (played by Lara Flynn Boyle) was a waitress at a diner, Billy witnessed a customer (played by Morgan Redmond) physically harassing Grace. And so, an enraged Billy beat up this man so badly that he died. The deadly assault took place in full view of other people at the diner, so there was no mystery over who committed the crime.

It’s shown many times throughout “Death in Texas” that Billy is so devoted to his mother that he will do anything for her. And yet, after Billy gets paroled, he’s shown walking by himself on a deserted highway, like a pitiful ex-con with no one who cares about him, and then showing up at Grace’s house unannounced. She seems elated and surprised to see him.

This homecoming scene doesn’t ring true, because Billy is such a mama’s boy that he would be the type to tell his mother that he was paroled, so she would be ready for him when he got released. After all, Billy has nowhere else to go but to live with his mother after getting out of prison. Considering all the extreme trouble that Billy goes through for his mother in this story, you’d think he’d tell her that he was paroled and that he needed a place to stay instead of just showing up without telling her in advance.

It’s one of many inconsistent and sloppily written scenes in the movie, which awkwardly tries to be gritty when it comes to all the criminal activities, but then attempts to be mawkishly sentimental when it comes to anything to do with Grace. Her backstory is revealed in bits and pieces of conversations in the movie. Grace gave birth to Billy when she was 15 years old, and her marriage to Billy’s father’s ended in divorce. She also got divorced from her second husband.

Soon after Billy is released from prison, Grace (who is currently a receptionist for a law firm) is having a small house party attended by her current boyfriend Todd (played by Craig Nigh), who brags to Billy about the four days that he spent incarcerated. It should come as no surprise that Billy and Todd clash immediately, and they end up having a fist fight. Grace admits to Billy that Todd is a jerk and that she has horrible taste in men. Todd is never seen again for the rest of the movie.

Grace has a much bigger problem than a tendency to get involved with losers. She needs a liver transplant, but she has rare type AB blood and can’t find a donor match. Her liver is failing not because she abused alcohol or drugs but because it might be a congenital conditon. If Grace doesn’t get the transplant, she’ll die. And what Billy does to try to solve this problem is more eye-rolling nonsense.

First, Billy goes to see Grace’s physician Dr. Perkins (played by Sam Daly) to find out what he can do to help Grace find a donor. Dr. Perkins says that he can’t reveal certain information about Grace’s condition because of doctor-patient confidentiality. And then, Dr. Perkins proceeds to violate that confidentiality and all sorts of other medical ethics by telling Billy everything private about Grace’s medical situation that Billy wants to know.

Dr. Perkins tells Billy that Grace has six months to one year to live. The doctor keeps changing this life-expectancy number to a shorter period of time the more this idiotic movie goes on, until Grace supposedly only has a few days left to live. Dr. Perkins also mentions that because Grace is so far down on a waiting list to find a donor, it’s impossible for her to get a liver in time, unless she can get a liver on the black market.

Dr. Perkins says that he knows someone in Guadalajara, Mexico, who can sell a liver for $160,000. And as a warning to Billy not to report any medical violations, the doctor tells Billy, “I’ll obviously deny that we had this conversation.” The $160,000 price tag is way beyond what Billy can afford, so it makes him desperate. Even if Billy had ever heard of legal ways to raise money for a health crisis, such as starting a crowdsourcing campaign on GoFundMe, there would be no “Death in Texas” movie if he did things legally to solve this problem.

Billy makes several attempts to find a legitimate job, but he’s rejected by every place he goes to find work because he’s an ex-con on parole. A friend of his named Kevin (played by Rocko Reyes) is a manager at a car dealership that’s owned by Kevin’s father. In a job interview, Kevin tells Billy that he would hire Billy, but Kevin’s father is the one who doesn’t want any felons working for the company.

And so, with time running out to get the money for the liver, it becomes inevitable that Billy turns to a life of crime. He decides he’ll get the money he wants by robbing other criminals. First, he targets a drug dealer named Tyler Griggs (played by Mike Foy), a former acquaintance of Billy’s, who looks and acts like a bad parody of a rapper, complete with gold teeth and a laughably horrible attempt to sound like he’s a white guy who grew up in a black ghetto.

An even bigger robbery target is a drug rehab guru named Richard Reynolds (played by Bruce Dern), a rich entrepreneur with a shady past. He currently owns a well-known drug rehab center called Reynolds Rehabilitation Ranch. Billy sees a TV news report that Reynolds Rehabilitation Ranch has received a large of amount of funding from a recent deal with El Paso General Hospital.

Through an Internet search, Billy finds out that several years ago, Reynolds was acquitted on marijuana drug smuggling charges. Billy also discovers that Reynolds has ties to a major drug cartel. And in a silly movie like “Death in Texas,” Billy decides that Reynolds will be a perfect person to rob. Never mind that Reynolds has a small squad of violent thugs who are his bodyguards and enforcers.

Meanwhile, Grace has ended up at El Paso General Hospital because her liver condition has gotten worse. One day, while she’s in her hospital room, she’s feeling so sick that she vomits on the floor. A hospital orderly comes into her room to check on her and clean up the mess. And that’s how she meets hospital orderly John Scofield (played by Stephen Lang)—their “meet cute” moment happens when he has to clean up her vomit.

Grace jokes to John that it’s “love at first sight.” He continues the flirtation, and there are romantic sparks between them. You know where this is going, of course. Just when Grace is dying, she meets someone who could be the love of her life. It’s not stated if John is divorced or widowed, but he’s definitely an available bachelor. Billy eventually meets John, and it leads to a very tacky soap opera moment that’s part of a big, heavy-handed plot twist in the movie.

Amid all the bloody carnage in the story, Billy meets a possible love interest too. Her name is Jennifer (played by Cheryl “Cher” Cosenza), who’s a street-smart bartender with a heart of gold. Tyler is also interested in her, but Jennifer thinks Tyler is a disgusting creep. Billy doesn’t have enough money to buy a liver on the black market, but he has enough money to become a regular customer at the bar where Jennifer works.

One of the worst things about “Death in Texas” is the movie’s pathetic depiction of law enforcement. Billy’s parole officer is Sarah Jensen, the same person who barged in his parole hearing to show a mystery file to the parole board. The information in that file is eventually revealed in the movie, but it’s definitely not surprising, considering what happens later in the story. The information in the file wouldn’t be enough in real life for a parole board to suddenly switch its decision to not parole someone.

Sarah’s first meeting with Billy after his release happens when she shows up at Grace’s house unannounced to interview Billy. Billy is outside, hosing down his car, because it has blood on it from a murder that he committed the night before. But this dimwitted parole officer doesn’t even notice the blood on the car when she’s talking to Billy. And throughout the story, she keeps showing up unannounced at the house, as if parole officers never make office appointments.

Even more incompetent is a homicide detective named John Wayne Asher (played by John Ashton), who is the lead investigator in the murders that Billy commits during his crime spree. Billy makes no attempt to cover his tracks, because he easily leaves his DNA and fingerprints all over his crime scenes. As a convicted felon, Billy would have his fingerprints on record and his DNA would be in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which is a nationwide DNA database for convicted offenders. And yet, the dumb cops in this movie have a hard time finding out that Billy committed these crimes.

In addition to all of this idiotic portrayal of how law enforcement works, “Death in Texas” also bungles depictions of how hospitals work and what certain hospital employees would be able to do while on duty. There’s a big plot development revolving around the liver transplant part of the story that will make people groan or laugh at the stupidity of how this plot twist is handled. There’s almost nothing realistic about “Death in Texas,” except for a few conversations in the blossoming romance between Grace and John.

All of the acting in this movie veers between hokey and robotic. It’s as if no one was giving the cast members any consistent direction. And if they were given any competent direction, they certainly weren’t paying attention. Not that better acting would’ve saved this terrible movie, because “Death in Texas” was dead on arrival with its horrendously awful screenplay.

Vertical Entertainment released “Death in Texas” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on June 4, 2021.

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