drama Archives – Page 62 of 84

Review: ‘Minari,’ starring Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han, Noel Cho and Will Patton

February 12, 2021

by Carla Hay

Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han and Noel Cho in “Minari” (Photo by Josh Ethan Johnson/A24)

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Korean and English with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in the 1980s, in an unnamed part of rural Arkansas, the drama “Minari’ features a cast of Asians and white people portraying the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A Korean American family moves from California to Alabama, so the patriarch can start a farm, but the family experiences culture shock and unexpected hardships.

Culture Audience: “Minari” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in well-acted dramas about family struggles and the American Dream.

Will Patton and Steven Yeun in “Minari” (Photo by Melissa Lukenbaugh/A24)

The standout drama “Minari” makes an emotional impact in moments of quiet desperation and anxiety during a family’s quest to achieve the American Dream. It’s not a movie packed with fast-paced action, nor does it fall into predictable clichés of how immigrant families in America are often portrayed on screen. It’s an intimate “slice of life” portrait of a pivotal time in a Korean American family’s history, with impressive performances from the movie’s cast.

Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, “Minari” won the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award in the U.S. dramatic category (the festival’s top prize) and the Audience Award in the same category. And it’s an arthouse film that’s also a crowd-pleaser. There isn’t a false note in the entire movie, although the deliberate pacing of “Minari” might not be to everyone’s taste, especially if a viewer is expecting more melodramatic antics in this story.

Set in the 1980s, “Minari” centers on the Yee family, who have recently moved from California to rural Arkansas. Jacob (played by Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (played by Yeri Han) are in their 30s and have opposite feelings from each other about this relocation. Jacob is excited and optimistic about this new chapter in the family’s life, while Monica is skeptical and worried. When they drive up to their new home, which is a trailer, Monica expresses her disappointment to Jacob: “This isn’t what you promised.”

Jacob and Monica’s children are daughter Anne (played by Noel Cho) and son David (played by Alan S. Kim), who are aware that their mother isn’t thrilled about moving to rural Arkansas, where the family doesn’t know anyone. But the children have no choice but to go along and see what happens. Anne, who is about 11 or 12 years old, is an obedient and unfussy child. David is 7 years old, very precocious, and a little bit rebellious. David also has a heart murmur, so he’s often reminded by his parents that he can’t run or do any physical activity that could over-exert his heart.

It’s mentioned in the movie that Jacob and Monica are Korean immigrants who moved to the United States after they became a couple, while Anne and David were born in the U.S. It’s why Jacob and Monica usually speak to each other in Korean. Anne and David are also bilingual, but they prefer to speak English.

There are other signs that Anne and David are more open to assimilating with Americans than Jacob and Monica are. The children (especially David) want to make new friends in their new hometown, while Jacob and Monica prefer to keep to themselves and feel more comfortable around the few other Korean immigrants in the area. (“Minari” was actually filmed in Tulsa, Oklahoma.)

In California, Jacob was a very skilled farm worker whose specialty is being a chicken sexer: someone who identifies baby chickens by their sex, so that the males can be separated from the females. Female chickens are considered more valuable than male chickens because females can produce eggs. When the Yee family arrives in Arkansas, Jacob gets a chicken sexer job at a place called Wilkinson Hatcheries, which employs mostly Korean immigrants. Anne works there too, doing the same thing, but she’s new at learning this skill.

There’s been tension brewing between Jacob and Monica. When she first sees that they’ll be living in a trailer, instead of a house, she mutters to herself, “It just gets worse and worse.” And several times during the movie, Monica expresses regret about moving to Arkansas, and pines for what she says was the better life that the family had in California.

But Jacob has other ideas. The property they own in Arkansas comes with about one acre of land that’s ideal for farming. One of the first things that Jacob does is scoop up some of the grassy soil in his hands. He marvels, “This is the best dirt in America.”

Monica is dismayed that Jacob’s plans to have a backyard garden as a hobby quickly turns into plans to start a small farm. It’s a lot to handle for Jacob, who also needs to keep his day job at the hatchery company. Monica reluctantly goes along with Jacob’s decision for her and Jacob get a bank loan to start the farming business. Jacob’s plan is to sell his farm produce to places that carry Korean food. Jacob immediately begins teaching David some aspects of farm life, no doubt because Jacob thinks that David might want to inherit the farm someday.

Jacob determines that there’s enough water flow on the land to build a well and irrigation system. He then buys a tractor from a local, scruffy eccentric named Paul (played by Will Patton), who offers to work for Jacob on the farm. Paul is a Christian who’s a religious fanatic. One of the first things Paul does during the tractor sale is pray in tongues over the land. This behavior makes Jacob uncomfortable, so he declines Paul’s offer to work on the farm.

However, it soon becomes clear that Jacob has no one else to turn to in this sparsely populated area. Paul ends up working for Jacob, who learns to tolerate Paul’s religious quirks. For example, Jacob is a smoker, and the first time that he lights up a cigarette in front of Paul, the reaction from Paul is as if he’s near the fire of hell. In his free time, Paul has a habit of walking down the area’s dirt roads with a large, heavy wooden cross on his shoulder, to recreate the biblical story of Jesus doing the same thing.

Throughout the movie, it’s made every clear that the Yee family is very isolated. Monica suggests to Jacob that they move to a bigger city called Rogers in Arkansas, but he brushes off that suggestion and says they’ve invested too much in the property that they have now. Anne and David are homeschooled, but since Monica and Jacob have to spend their weekdays at the hatchery, they need someone to help take care of the kids during the day.

And that’s why Anne’s feisty mother Soonja (played by Yuh-jung Youn) comes to live with the family. She travels from Korea to Arkansas, but her immigration situation is never explained in the movie. Due to visa restrictions and how quickly that Soonja was able to get to Arkansas, it’s implied that her stay in Arkansas will be temporary. Jacob wants to make enough money through the farm so that eventually, he and Monica don’t have to work at the hatchery anymore and will be able to work from home while the kids are there.

However long Soonja plans to stay, “Minari” takes place over the course of about five or six months, with Soonja coming into the picture during the last couple of months that the story take place. In the movie, Anne mentions that she’s the only living relative for Soonja, who lost her husband in the Korean War. When Soonja arrives with food from Korea, such as chili powder and anchovies, Anne gets so emotional that she cries.

Soonja doesn’t get a very warm welcome from David though. It doesn’t help that David has to share his room with Soonja, even though she sleeps on the floor. David tells Soonja and his other family members why he doesn’t trust Soonja: David thinks she doesn’t act like a “real grandmother,” because she can’t read, she often curses, and she wears men’s underwear. Soonja tries to bond with David by cracking open a nut with her mouth and then telling him to eat it what she just spit out. Naturally, David refuses.

Soonja also tries to be friendly to David by giving him a pack of playing cards. Monica asks Soonja if that’s an appropriate gift for a 7-year-old. Soonja replies: “Start him young to beat these other bastards!”

David has a bed-wetting problem, and when Soonja finds out, she teases David by saying to him in Korean: “Penis is broken.” David replies, “It’s not called a penis! It’s called a ding-dong!” In an act of impish revenge, David plays a prank on Soonja that won’t be described in this review, but it’s enough to say that the prank can be considered amusing, nauseating or both.

Soonja and her minor clashes with David are the movie’s main comic relief, as the stress continues to build in the family because of problems with the farm. Starting the business has been a major financial drain on the family’s funds and there are some setbacks which make it questionable when or if the farm will be profitable. The more that it looks like the business will fail, the more that Monica wants to leave Arkansas.

Jacob refuses to quit, and he tells an increasingly frustrated Monica that it’s about more than the money. It’s about a sense of accomplishment and setting an example for their children: “They need to see me succeed at something,” Jacob says.

More than once, Jacob tells Monica that if the farm fails, she can do whatever she wants, including leaving him and taking the children with her. In other words, the stakes are pretty high for this family, which also has the added worries of some health problems that happen later in the story. Except for the bank loan and Paul’s assistance, Jacob doesn’t ask for much help. Part of it is because of his pride, but part of it could also be Korean culture, which teaches that families should try to keep their problems to themselves so that they won’t burden society.

Because the Yee family lives on a fairly isolated farm and the children are homeschooled, they don’t come in contact with a lot of the local people in their part of Arkansas. Therefore, “Minari” doesn’t have any scenarios where the Yees experience any blatant racial discrimination. Shortly after Soonja arrives, the Yee family attends a local church service, where the Yees are the only non-white parishioners. The white churchgoers are friendly and occasionally culturally ignorant, but they do not deliberately exclude the Yees.

The title of the movie comes from a noteworthy scene when Soonja and David are in the woods and she notices that a nearby creek would be ideal to grow minari. Soonja mentions that minari is the type of herb that can be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of their ethnicity or socioeconomic status. The minari becomes a metaphor not just for following a dream but also for persistence when there’s an obstacle to that dream.

Chung’s writing and direction for “Minari” are uncluttered but rich with emotions that are relatable to people who have close-knit families. There are some arguments and hard decisions that have to be made in how this family will move forward, but these scenes of conflict never look gimmicky just for the sake of bringing more drama to the story. The movie’s production design, cinematography and production design are assets in bringing authenticity to this family tale.

Yeun, Kim and Han deliver the movie’s most memorable performances. There’s an underlying power dynamic between their three characters in the movie that are the catalysts for the biggest developments in the story. Soonja’s arrival puts added pressure on Jacob to be the family’s chief provider, because he doesn’t want to look like he’s incapable of taking care of his family.

David and Jacob also know that Soonja is a reminder of Korea, a country that Jacob and Monica left to seek a better life in America. At one point, David comments about Soonja in a disdainful tone of voice that she “smells like Korea.” Even at this young age, David is aware that his parents think that they’re better off in America than in Korea. However, Soonja’s vibrant presence, even in her unsophisticated glory, is a reminder of how people shouldn’t be dismissive of their family heritage and the value of wisdom that comes with age.

“Minari” takes its time to get to the most dramatic part of the story. But viewers who like to immerse themselves in the everyday lives of a very specific family will find a lot to admire about this film. The movie takes place in the 1980s, but there are lessons learned in the story that are timeless.

A24 released “Minari” in select U.S. cinemas on February 11, 2021, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on February 12, 2021. The movie’s VOD release date is February 26, 2021.

Review: ‘Land’ (2021), starring Robin Wright and Demián Bichir

February 9, 2021

by Carla Hay

Robin Wright in “Land” (Photo by Daniel Power/Focus Features)

“Land” (2021)

Directed by Robin Wright

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in rural Wyoming, the dramatic film “Land” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with one Latino and some Native American) representing the middle-class and working-class.

Culture Clash: A depressed, middle-aged widow, who is grieving over the loss of her husband and son, decides to isolate herself in a remote mountain cabin without knowing a lot of basic survival skills.

Culture Audience: “Land” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in a movie about coping with grief where the acting is better than some of the plot developments.

Demián Bichir and Robin Wright in “Land” (Photo by Daniel Power/Focus Features)

The dramatic film “Land” is a lot like the rural mountainous area that serves as the backdrop of this story. There are peaks and valleys and a lot of spaces to fill in between, with some parts handled in a rougher way than others. “Land” is the feature-film directorial debut of actress Robin Wright, who also stars in the movie, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

“Land” features a lot of scenes of her Edee Holzer character in solitude and sometimes dealing with dangerous elements of the terrain. The performances of Wright and co-star Demián Bichir (the two actors who have the most screen time in the film) elevate “Land” to make it easier to watch this mostly grim and sometimes uplifting movie. It’s a solid directorial debut from Wright, who manages to bring emotional gravitas to a character who remains an enigma for almost the entire movie.

“Land” is supposed to take place mostly in Wyoming, but the movie was actually filmed primarily in Moose Mountain in the Canadian province of Alberta. As a director, Wright displays talent in how striking and immersive she can make the movie’s scenes look, physically and emotionally. (Bobby Bukowski was the cinematographer for “Land.”)

Where the movie needed improvement most was in the screenplay written by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam. The story dips a little too much into some formulaic “life in the wilderness” tropes before trying to throw in some tearjerking sentimentality during a certain part of the movie where it’s expected. Still, there’s enough to hold people’s interest for anyone curious to see how the movie ends.

The beginning of “Land” shows Edee (whose name is pronounced “ee-dee”) in a therapy session. The therapist asks Edee, “How are you feeling right now?” Edee replies, “I’m feeling like it’s really difficult to be around people because they just want me to get better. Why would anybody want to share it that? They can’t anyway.” The therapist says, “But that means you’re alone with your pain.”

Edee is about to be “alone with her pain” for a lot of this story. The next thing you know, she’s packed up a U-Haul, thrown away her cell phone, and headed to a run-down remote cabin in the mountains. The previous owner was an elderly man who passed away years ago. The person renting out the property is a man named Colt (played by Brad Leland), who meets her at the cabin to make sure that Edee has what she needs to move into the place.

Edee knows that the house hasn’t been cleaned or repaired in a long time, but she tells Colt that she doesn’t care. She also asks Colt to have someone pick up the rental car with the U-Haul. Colt expresses concern that Edee would be in this isolated area without a car, but she assures him that this is how she wants to live. Colt also asks Edee if she knows how to take care of herself in this rural environment, but she shrugs off his doubts. Edee also makes it clear to him that she wants to be left alone.

It turns out that Edee is woefully unprepared for what she experiences in this mountain area. Cleaning up the cabin (which has no indoor plumbing or electricity) is easy compared to dealing with freezing temperatures, finding fresh food, and being on the alert for the occasional wild bear. (You can easily predict how the bear scenario goes.) Edee doesn’t even know how to chop wood or go fishing when she starts living at the cabin, but she learns how through trial and error.

During her period of complete isolation, Edee has flashbacks to three very important people in her life: Her husband Adam (played by Warren Christie), their son Drew (played by Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) and Edee’s sister Emma (played by Kim Dickens), who’s close to Edee’s age. Emma was the one who recommended the therapist whom Edee was seeing before Edee decided to leave her old life behind and go “off the grid” to live in solitude.

As soon as the flashbacks start about Adam and Drew (who’s about 7 or 8 years old in the flashbacks), it’s obvious that they have died and that’s why Edee is so depressed. The flashbacks show that Edee and Emma had a very close relationship, but their closeness wasn’t enough for Edee to overcome her depression. An incident is shown that indicates that at one point, Emma was afraid that Edee might harm herself.

Why was Edee so unprepared to be in this rural environment? It turns out she kind of has a death wish that’s not really suicidal, but more like “I’m going to rough it in the wilderness, and if I can’t handle it, oh well …” But there are moments, such as when she has a bear encounter and some other near-disasters, where she does show a will to survive.

Edee is very aware that she’s ill-prepared to last long in this environment unless she knows how to catch her own food. During the harsh winter, there are no plants or fruit to eat. And through a series of circumstances, all the non-perishable food that was in the cabin is now gone.

Therefore, during a brutal winter, Edee begins to starve and almost freeze to death. She eventually collapses from hunger and hypothermia in the living room of her house, and she wakes up at night to find that a man and a woman have come to her rescue. The man’s name is Miguel Borras (played by Bichir) and the woman is a nurse named Alawa Crowe (played by Sarah Dawn Pledge), who gives Edee the necessary medical treatment because Edee refuses to be taken to a hospital.

It’s revealed later in the movie that Edee was found because Miguel had passed by the house when he had gone hunting earlier that day and noticed that smoke was coming out of the house’s chimney. When he passed by later that evening after his hunting trip, he noticed that there was no smoke coming from the chimney, so he went to investigate. When Miguel saw an unconscious Edee in the house, he called Alawa. Miguel and Alawa know each other because as part of his job, he delivers water to the Native American reservation where she lives.

Alawa voices her suspicions to Edee in asking her why Edee is avoiding being around people. Edee assures Alawa and Miguel that she’s not an outlaw or someone who’s trying to hide for shady reasons. Alawa still looks skeptical, but Miguel is more compassionate and understanding. He offers to help Edee recover at home instead of taking her to a hospital. Alawa reluctantly agrees.

After Edee recovers from her near-death experience, Miguel comes back to her house (against her wishes) and tells her that he wants to teach her how to hunt and trap animals for food. (This is not a good movie to watch if you’re a hardcore vegan or vegetarian, although nothing gets too graphic in the hunting scenes.) Miguel tells Edee that after she’s learned these skills, he will leave her alone.

And it should come as no surprise that Edee and Miguel end up becoming close, and she lets him hang out with her longer than she originally expected. There are many scenes of them forming a gradual friendship while Miguel teaches Edee how to catch her own food. Miguel has a German Shepherd named Potter as his constant companion, and Edee grows fond of the dog too, even though she told Miguel that she’s more of a cat person.

Eventually, Miguel opens up to Edee and tells her that he’s a widower whose wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. Edee remains vague about her past when she interacts with Miguel, and she will only say with pain in her eyes, “I had a family once.” Toward the end of the movie, it’s revealed how Edee’s husband and son died.

Miguel is the type of person who offers sage advice in the way that people do in movies like this one, where the right person comes along at the right time. He’s a true gentleman who doesn’t try to take advantage of someone who’s living in isolation. Some of his dialogue can be on the corny side, such as when he lectures Edee about her starvation collapse: “Only a person who’s never been hungry would think starvation is a good way to die.”

But there are some whimsical moments that lighten the mood, such as a running joke that Miguel and Edee have over how off-key he is when he sings Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which seems to be one of his favorite songs. Edee also affectionately gives Miguel the nickname Yoda, in a nod to the wise and prophetic “Star Wars” character. She’s shocked when Miguel tells her that he’s never seen a “Star Wars” movie.

To its credit, “Land” does not fall into a “romance novel” cliché trap of having a woman being “rescued” by a handsome stranger, and then they fall in love and live happily ever after. That’s not to say that Edee and Miguel don’t have a deep emotional connection. But having them go down a “romance novel” route wouldn’t ring true, since Edee has a lot of self-healing to do and isn’t ready to jump into another serious relationship.

However, some details of “Land” also needed more authenticity. Throughout the movie, Edee is dressed a little too much like a catalogue model for outdoorsy clothing when she’s supposed to be someone who’s given up on life and wants to be alone. Why bother dressing up if she doesn’t want to be seen by anyone? Edee’s “no makeup” look and unfussy hair look realistic, but her clothing sometimes does not.

Those are minor flaws though, because the rapport between Edee and Miguel is what makes this movie worth watching. Because it takes a while to get to that point, some viewers might find “Land” to be a little too slow-paced in the first third of the movie. There’s not much about Edee’s background that is revealed, although it’s implied that Emma is Edee’s closest living relative.

The blanks aren’t completely filled in, and that’s probably because scenes were cut from the film. The Internet Movie Database page for “Land” lists several cast members playing characters who weren’t in the movie. It appears that there were more flashback scenes that didn’t make the final cut. Overall, “Land” is more of a somber character study of grief than a tension-filled wilderness saga, with enough glimmers of hope and empathetic performances that prevent the movie from being completely depressing.

Focus Features will release “Land” in U.S. cinemas on February 12, 2021. The movie’s VOD release date is March 5, 2021.

Review: ‘PVT CHAT,’ starring Julia Fox and Peter Vack

February 9, 2021

by Carla Hay

“PVT CHAT”

Directed by Ben Hozie

Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City, the erotic drama “PVT CHAT” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some African Americans and Asians in small speaking roles) representing the middle-class and working class.

Culture Clash: An online gambler becomes obsessed with a webcam dominatrix, and she resists his attempts to meet her in real life.

Culture Audience: “PVT CHAT” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in a cheap sexploitation movie with a badly written plot and self-absorbed characters who act irrationally.

Julia Fox in “PVT CHAT” (Photo courtesy of Dark Star Pictures)

“PVT CHAT” desperately tries to be the type of edgy New York City movie that writer/director Vincent Gallo used to make in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Gallo’s gimmick of being provocative just for the sake of being provocative eventually turned off movie audiences because of his lazy screenwriting. If people want to watch softcore porn, they can watch softcore porn in any number of places that offer it. They don’t need to be misled by softcore porn trying to masquerade as creative “auteur” work.

For a movie that’s supposed to be a mainstream (in other words, non-porn) independent film, audiences expect a compelling story that’s unconstrained by the type of restrictions that a major studio film would have. Instead, “PVT CHAT” has a very flimsy plot that’s just an excuse to make the movie’s lead actors masturbate and simulate other sex acts on camera to distract from this time-wasting story. The unoriginal concept of “PVT CHAT” is that it’s about a guy who becomes obsessed with a woman he met on the Internet. Yawn.

Written and directed by Ben Hozie, “PVT CHAT” squanders the talent of Julia Fox, who was a standout in the award-winning 2019 drama “Uncut Gems,” where she portrayed the much-younger mistress of Adam Sandler’s gambling-addict character. In “PVT CHAT,” Fox plays another woman who’s the love interest of another gambling addict. Her “PVT CHAT” character is a webcam dominatrix in her 20s who uses the alias Scarlet. Her online persona is someone who’s like a modern-day BDSM version of a black-haired vixen from a Russ Meyer movie, such as 1965’s “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”

One of Scarlet’s regular customers is a guy around her age named Jack (played by Peter Vack), who eventually becomes fixated on meeting Scarlet in person. To go from “Uncut Gems” to “PVT CHAT” is a big step down for Fox, who has a charismatic on-screen presence. She should probably re-evaluate whoever advised her to do this lowbrow, trashy movie that makes everyone in it look like an idiot.

Jack makes his living as an online gambler, playing mostly blackjack. The movie takes place in New York City, where Jack is barely getting by financially. As a small-time gambler, his income fluctuates. Before this movie takes place, Jack’s roommate died of a drug overdose, and Jack hasn’t found someone else to move in to help pay the bills. Jack is very late with his rent, and his landlord Henry (played by Atticus Cain) has just informed Jack that he’s not renewing Jack’s lease.

The only thing Jack looks forward to in his life is connecting online with his favorite “cam girl” Scarlet, who indulges in his fetish for Jack to masturbate while she simulates tapping ash from a cigarette on his tongue. This fetish for cigarette ash on a tongue is shown repeatedly during the movie. And it’s the first scene in “PVT CHAT.” This movie tries to pass itself off as “daring,” just because it has multiple sex scenes with full-frontal male nudity.

Scarlet has told Jack that she lives in San Francisco. Anyone watching this movie can tell that she’s lying, no doubt for her own protection against creeps like Jack. Meanwhile, Jack does some lying of his own, by telling Scarlet that he works as a tech developer. He says that he’s working on an app called C-Stream that will allow users to directly access other people’s thoughts through an Internet cloud. He explains that people would need to have their brains implanted with a chip in order to use this app.

Although this technology could exist in the future, “PVT CHAT” is not a science-fiction film and is supposed to take place when this technology doesn’t exist. But Scarlet believes Jack, who promises that she’ll be one of the first people he’ll give a discount to when this C-Stream app goes on sale. The people in this movie are so dimwitted that even if the C-Stream app existed, they would need the app to get other people’s brain power. When Jack later confesses to Scarlet that he lied about the C-Stream app, Scarlet is surprised, but viewers of this nonsensical movie shouldn’t be.

As time goes on, Scarlet opens up a little bit about her real career passion: painting abstract art. Eventually, Scarlet shows Jack some of her paintings during their online chats. Of course, he raves about her work and gives her effusive compliments about how talented she is. Scarlet tells Jack that he’s only saying that so he can have sex with her. Jack doesn’t deny it.

“PVT CHAT” then goes into an unnecessary detour to show Jack attending an avant-garde visual arts exhibit showcasing the work of his ex-girlfriend Emma KaVas (played by Nikki Belfiglio), who apparently still has feelings for Jack. At one point, Jack stays at Emma’s place, although it’s never really made clear why, because this movie so shoddily written.

Emma says to Jack as she looks around at her messy bedroom, “What did you do to my room?” She then tries to give a Jack a massage, but he’s not into it, and he brushes her off. It’s hard to see why Emma wants to get back together with Jack, because he’s got a sleazy, untrustworthy personality.

Jack’s only friend seems to be a goofy guy named Larry (played by Buddy Duress), and when they get together, they have a “frat bro” mentality. For example, at Emma’s pretentious art exhibit, Jack and Larry horse around and have a scuffle on the floor, as if they’re 10-year-olds on a playground. There are plenty of other scenes where Jack acts very immature and quite empty-headed.

One day, Jack wakes up to find that his landlord has hired a painter to repaint the walls of Jack’s apartment because the apartment’s next tenant will be moving there in the near future. At this point, Jack is in such dire straits that he has only a few weeks to move out, he’s almost broke, and he hasn’t found a new place to live. The painter is a middle-aged man named William, who also goes by the name Will (played by Kevin Moccia), and they strike up a friendly conversation.

Jack tells Will that he makes money through online gambling. Will is intrigued and asks Jack to show him how it’s done. So one night, Jack, Will and Larry meet up at Jack’s place to smoke some marijuana and gamble. Jack happens to have a winning streak where he wins a few thousand dollars.

Will is so impressed that he asks Jack to help him get $20,000 through gambling, because Will says he needs the money for his son’s college tuition. Jack says that he can probably do it if Will can come up with at least $10,000 to start. They agree to the deal. But of course, in a movie like this one, you just know something’s going to go wrong with that money.

Meanwhile, one night while Jack is walking through the streets of Chinatown in downtown Manhattan, he’s shocked to see Scarlet walking in front of him. She’s by herself, so he follows her into a deli and watches her as she buys some beer. He then follows her back to a building where she apparently lives. She has no idea that Jack saw her and was stalking her.

However, when Jack gets home, he logs on to his laptop computer and asks Scarlet this creepy question: “How’s the beer? Are you available for a session?” Scarlet ignores him but eventually connects with him again.

When they talk again, Jack tells Scarlet that he saw her in Chinatown and vividly describes what he saw her do in the deli. But she denies that Jack saw her and says that she’s never even been to New York. She insists that Jack must’ve seen someone who looks exactly like her.

Jack doesn’t really believe Scarlet, so he makes a bet with her: Jack says that if he can take a picture or video of her in person, she’ll have to agree to go on a trip to Paris with him. And he’s up front in telling her that he wants to have sex with her at some point when they meet in person. Jack tries to make it sound like the trip to Paris will be romantic, but any adult with a brain can see what his main motive is.

Scarlet’s real life is eventually shown in the movie. Not all of her secrets will be revealed in this review, but it’s enough to say that she has a shady boyfriend named Duke (played by Will Poulson), who knows about Scarlet’s webcam work. Duke not only knows about it, he expects Scarlet to financially support him, and he takes most of the money she earns so that he can open an off-Broadway theater. Jack finds out more about Scarlet’s personal life, and it leads to Jack doing some more lurid stalking.

“PVT CHAT” tries to make Jack look like a “good guy” by having him try to help Will with the college tuition money, but that generous gesture is overshadowed by how much of an obsessive scumbag Jack is when it comes to dealing with Scarlet. She’s no angel either. And between the two of them, there’s enough lying, cheating and stealing that it’s almost laughable that the “PVT CHAT” filmmakers want viewers of this movie to root for Jack and Scarlet to get together.

It’s all so pointless because Jack and Scarlet are the type of people who gravitate toward toxic relationships filled with dishonesty and manipulation. The movie by no means had to be romantic, but it tries to play into romantic sensibilities toward the end, and it all just comes across as very phony. Even without the issues of sex and relationships, “PVT CHAT” isn’t even an intriguing thriller. There’s an unconvincing plot development that’s sloppily presented in the last 20 minutes of the film.

As the mysterious character of Scarlet, Fox seems to be doing the best she can with a woefully inept script, while Vack is stuck with playing a very unsympathetic and annoying character. The sex scenes are joyless, boring and not sexy at all. And “PVT CHAT” doesn’t deserve extra praise, just because it goes against the norm by having the male actor in the sex scenes have more nudity (full-frontal) than the female actor.

In fact, the movie has a misogynistic tone to it because the only women with significant speaking roles in the movie are those who play a character who does webcam porn (like Scarlet) or has some other sexual connection to Jack, such as his ex-girlfriend Anna. Far from being a sexually liberating film, it’s actually very unimaginative and narrow-minded that “PVT CHAT” writer/director Hozie chose to not put any women in this movie in any other context, except to be sexually in service to a thoughtless lowlife like Jack. But then again, self-respecting people would want to steer clear of a dishonest creep like Jack in the real world. People looking for a quality movie should steer clear of “PVT CHAT” too.

Dark Star Pictures released “PVT CHAT” in select U.S. cinemas on February 5, 2021, and on digital and VOD on February 9, 2021.

Review: ‘Two of Us’ (2020), starring Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier

February 7, 2021

by Carla Hay

Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa in “Two of Us” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

“Two of Us” (2020)

Directed by Filippo Meneghetti

French with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in France, the dramatic film “Two of Us” features an all-white cast of characters representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two elderly women who have been longtime secret lovers have different ideas on when to make their romance public, and then one of them has a stroke that takes the relationship in another direction.

Culture Audience: “Two of Us” will appeal primarily to people are interested in compelling dramas that deal with issues of LGBTQ people who are afraid to reveal their sexual identities and issues about health care for elderly people.

Léa Drucker and Martine Chevallier in “Two of Us” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

The French dramatic film “Two of Us” shines an emotionally powerful light on an issue that’s almost never covered in mainstream films: What happens when LGBTQ partners have a health crisis that needs caregiver aid, but one partner has no legal right to care for the other? The issue becomes more complicated when the couple’s romance has been kept a secret and the ailing partner wants to keep the relationship “in the closet.”

“Two of Us” is the first feature film from writer/director Filippo Meneghetti, who shows a knack for telling this story in an artful and respectful way. There are a few unexpected twists and turns in the movie, but it’s also a film that is entirely believable. Thanks to an intriguing screenplay and convincing performances from the cast members, “Two of Us” touches on universal themes about the freedom to love openly and how that freedom is often restricted by bigotry and fear. It’s no wonder that “Two of Us” was France’s entry for the 2021 Academy Awards.

“Two of Us” tells the story of retirees Nina Dorn (played by Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine Girard (played by Martine Chevallier), who live across the hall from each other in an apartment building in an unnamed city in France. To the people they know, Nina and Madeleine seem to be platonic neighbors. But in reality, Nina and Madeleine (whom Nina has affectionately nicknamed Mado) have been secret lovers for about 20 years.

Madeleine is a native of France, while Nina is originally from Germany. It’s revealed later in the story that Nina used to be a tour guide in various countries, and it’s implied that Nina met Madeleine this way. Madeleine is a widow whose husband has been dead for a few years, so Madeleine is now the only owner of her apartment.

It’s mentioned more than once in the film that Madeleine’s marriage was an unhappy one, and her late husband was abusive to her emotionally and possibly physically. But now that Madeleine’s husband is dead, she and Nina are free to have sleepovers at each other’s place. They have keys to each other’s apartment.

Nina is the one who usually goes to Madeleine’s apartment, where in one of the early scenes of the movie, they have a lovers’ tryst that shows their passion for each other hasn’t dwindled. In another scene, Madeleine and Nina slow dance closely to the love song “Chariot (Sul Mio Curro),” which is their favorite song as a couple. It’s a song that they like to play to get in a good mood.

Madeleine and her late husband have two children, who are now in their 30s: daughter Anne (played by Léa Drucker) and son Frédéric (played by Jérôme Varanfrain), who visit Madeleine on a regular basis. Anne has a son named Théo (played by Augustin Reynes), who’s about 10 or 11 years old. Madeleine is much closer to Anne than she is to Frédéric, who seems to resent Madeleine because he suspects that Madeleine was unfaithful in her marriage.

Anne is a stylist at a hair salon, and so she’s naturally her mother’s hair stylist too. When Ann does her mother’s hair, it’s their time to catch up on “girl talk.” Anne thinks that she and her mother have the type of relationship where they can tell each other anything. But it won’t be long before Anne finds out that there’s a lot she didn’t know about her mother.

In the beginning of “Two of Us,” Madeleine and Nina are blissfully happy but have reached a crossroads in their relationship. Nina has been bringing up the idea for them to move to Rome and get a place together. Madeleine is more cautious about that idea, but she has agreed to sell the apartment and to finally tell her family about the true nature of her relationship with Nina.

There is very little revealed about Nina’s background. She doesn’t mention having any family members or former lovers. It’s implied that Nina left everything behind in Germany to move to France. Nina is a lot more comfortable with the idea of living openly as a lesbian, but Madeleine is the one who’s resistant to “come out of the closet” because Madeleine is afraid that her children will be upset and reject her.

One day, Madeleine has a prospective buyer come over to look at the apartment. (Apparently, Madeleine is acting as her own real-estate agent, since no agent is seen or mentioned every time she discusses selling the apartment with anyone.) The prospective buyer is a professional-looking man in his 30s named Mr. Brémond (played by Hervé Sogne), who makes an offer of €250,000 to buy the apartment.

Nina plays the part of a nosy neighbor who invites herself over when Madeleine is showing the apartment to Mr. Brémond. Nina’s tells Mr. Brémond that she and Madeleine are friends and her apartment layout and size are identical to Madeleine’s apartment, so Nina says she’s curious about what a prospective buyer would think. Privately, Nina has told Madeleine that she’s saved up enough money for it to be realistic for them to move Rome. Nina’s dream is to live near the Tiber River.

While all of these plans are going on, Madeleine has a small birthday celebration in her home with just her children Anne and Frédéric and grandson Théo. It’s here that Madeleine plans to tell her family that she and Nina are lovers and that they plan to move to another country together. But Madeleine can’t bring herself to tell them. The celebration hits a sour note when the subject turns to Madeleine’s late husband, and Frédéric angrily tells Madeleine that she couldn’t wait until her husband died.

The next day, Nina asks Madeleine with anticipation how Madeleine’s family took the news. “They agreed,” Madeleine tells Nina. It’s a lie of course. And Nina inevitably finds out when she happens to see Mr. Brémond outside the apartment building, and he tells her that Madeleine changed her mind about selling the apartment.

Just at that moment, Madeleine is looking out her apartment window and sees Nina talking to Mr. Brémond. She quickly goes outside to try to diffuse the emotional explosion that’s about to happen. But it’s too late.

Nina furiously confronts Madeleine about her lies and says she can’t take hiding their relationship anymore. Nina then asks Mr. Brémond if he has a problem with two “old lesbians.” A flustered and embarrassed Mr. Brémond says no. Nina then rips into Madeleine some more and ends the argument by calling Madeleine “pathetic” before Nina storms off.

The next day, Nina is over at Madeleine’s place when she notices an unattended frying pan that’s lit on the stove. She senses that something is wrong and looks for Madeleine in the apartment. The next thing you know, an ambulance is called to take Madeleine to a hospital.

Nina and Anne go to the hospital, but since Nina isn’t considered a family member, she can only wait to find out what happened from Anne. In the waiting area, Anne tells Nina that Madeleine had a stroke and the prognosis isn’t good. Although Madeleine is in stable condition, the doctors say it’s unlikely that Madeleine will be able to speak again.

It’s devastating news. And Nina gets even more distraught when she finds out that Anne and Peter have hired a live-in caretaker named Muriel (played by Muriel Bénazéraf), who firmly declines Nina’s offers to help Muriel look after Madeleine. Muriel is also very strict about when Nina can come over to visit Madeleine, by limiting the visiting hours only to during the day. At this point, Muriel and Anne have no idea that Nina has a key to Madeleine’s apartment.

The first time that Nina tries to visit Madeleine when she comes from from the hospital, Muriel tells Nina to come back at 8:30 the next morning. Nina can’t wait that long though, so she sneaks into the apartment while Muriel is asleep. Nina rushes to Madeleine’s side and tells her that she’s sorry for the insulting argument that she had with Madeleine. Unfortunately, Madeleine stares ahead and gives no indication that she’s aware of what Nina is saying or even knows who Nina is.

The movie then shows a forlorn Nina sitting in her apartment the next morning and waiting for the clock to get to 8:30. Nina is careful about appearing too over-eager because Muriel and later Anne begin to show signs that they’re suspicious of Nina. They think it’s odd that Nina shows a little too much interest in being around Madeleine.

Now that Nina can no longer come and go whenever she wants into Madeleine’s apartment, Nina has to decide how she’s going to handle being able to see Madeleine on a daily basis. Nina’s comes up with two options in her plan: win over Muriel or try to get Muriel fired. In the limited time that Nina now spends with Madeleine, she notices that Madeleine seems to be aware of her presence and her physical abilities seem to improve.

Aside from the pressing matter of how much Madeleine can be rehabilitated, there’s the lingering question of how much longer Nina and Madeleine’s relationship can be kept a secret. Nina knows that Madeleine wasn’t ready to tell her family, but should Nina make the decision for her, now that Madeleine can’t speak? And would the family negatively react if they found out the truth?

Madeleine has her stroke about 25 minutes into this 95-minute film, so the rest of the movie really shifts to Nina’s perspective. Her turmoil is compounded by the fact that she has no one she can turn to for help, since Nina and Madeleine really kept their secret love affair only to themselves. It’s enough to drive anyone a little crazy. And there are some things that Nina does that indicate she might be slipping close to that edge.

“Two of Us” has a some melodrama, but not enough to take away from the emotional sincerity of the film. It’s a somber meditation that shows how homophobia can often affect LGBTQ partners from living openly and legally being able to take care of each other if someone in the relationship needs round-the-clock caregiving. From Nina’s perspective, her heartbreak also comes from wondering if the woman she loves is gone forever, because Madeleine can no longer speak and no longer has the personality she used to have.

Sukowa anchors the film with a quiet intensity that takes viewers through Nina’s emotional nightmare and increasing desperation. And although Chevallier’s Madeleine character is a stroke patient for most of the movie, she delivers an impressive performance where she must act primarily with her eyes when Madeleine becomes otherwise physically incapacitated. Before the stroke, Nina seemed to be more the more mysterious one in the relationship since her personal history is very vague. But by the end of the movie, Nina is the character that viewers will end up feeling like they know better, for obvious reasons.

“Two of Us” writer/director Meneghetti doesn’t make any preachy judgments on what happens in the movie. Anne and Nina end up clashing with each other over decisions on how to handle Madeleine’s rehabilitation, but the movie doesn’t try to be heavy-handed about who’s right and who’s wrong. People can see both sides of the argument and find reasons to see why each woman believes strongly that she knows what’s best for Madeleine. In its own heartbreaking way, “Two of Us” is an example of how true love can endure, but it’s better when that love can be expressed openly and honestly.

Magnolia Pictures released “Two of Us” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and on VOD on February 5, 2021. The movie was released in France and other countries in 2020.

Review: ‘Mass’ (2021), starring Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs, Ann Dowd and Reed Birney

February 6, 2021

by Carla Hay

“Mass”

Directed by Fran Kanz

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the dramatic film “Mass” features an almost all-white cast (with one African American) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two men and two women, who have a tragedy in common, gather in a church meeting room to air out their differences.

Culture Audience: “Mass” will appeal primarily to people interested in dialogue-heavy movies about grief, mental illness and coping with the violent death of a loved one.

Ann Dowd and Reed Birney in “Mass” (Photo by Ryan Jackson-Healy)

The title of the movie “Mass” can have a double meeting. On the one hand, the movie, which takes entirely at or near an Episcopal church, can refer to the religious ceremony called a mass. On the other hand, it could refer to the deadly mass shooting that has directly affected two men and two women, who have gathered at an Episcopal church in an unnamed U.S. city to have a difficult meeting about this tragedy. (The movie was actually filmed in Hailey, Idaho, but almost all of the movie’s scenes take place indoors.) Fran Kanz, who is known as an actor in the 2012 horror flick “The Cabin in the Woods” and the sci-fi TV series “JourneyQuest,” makes an impressive debut as a feature-film director in “Mass,” a movie which he also wrote. “Mass” had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

“Mass” is a very well-written and intense film that relies entirely on the actors to make or break the authenticity in this gripping story. The movie centers on four people who have a painful discussion about a tragedy that has left them emotionally broken and damaged. Before these four people meet at the church, the story unfolds in layers, as viewers see a church office manager named Judy (played by Breeda Wool) nervously preparing for these visitors to gather in a room that has been reserved specifically for this meeting.

Judy asks a college-age assistant named Anthony (played by Kagen Albright) to help her get the room ready. Soon, a woman named Kendra (played by Michelle N. Carter) arrives to inspect the room and make sure that it’s appropriate for the meeting. Kendra seems to have been the one to choose the church as a meeting place. Judy is eager to please Kendra, who looks over the room in a business-like and no-nonsense manner.

The first clue that this meeting is about a traumatic, violent incident is when Kendra notices some stained-glass hanging decorations on the windows. Red is one of the decorations’ main colors. And from a distance, the red could look like bloodstains. Judy notices it too, and anxiously explains to Kendra that these stained-class decorations were made by some of the church kids. Judy says that the decorations could be removed before the visitors for the meeting get there. Kendra says it isn’t necessary.

Kendra is obviously the meeting’s facilitator, but she tells Judy that she will not be in the room during the meeting, in order to give the people in the meeting their privacy. It’s another clue that the meeting is of a very sensitive and confidential nature. Is Kendra a social worker? A counselor? Someone else? It’s never really made clear what her occupation is, but in the brief time that she’s on screen, Kendra seems to have the role of someone who is supposed to remain neutral in something that seems to be controversial.

Who are the people who will be participating in this tension-filled meeting? The married couple that viewers see first are Gail and Jay Perry, who drove down from an unnamed city for this gathering. Gail (played by Martha Plimpton) and Jay (played by Jason Isaacs), who are in their 50s, drive up to the church and park their car outside. However, Gail gets nervous and tells Jay to drive away so she can have more time to brace herself for this meeting.

They park near a fenced field that has a red ribbon tied to the fence. The camera lingers on the ribbon. It’s an obvious sign that this was the site of a makeshift memorial. Who died and why are these four people meeting? All the clues are there: A violent death, a makeshift memorial, two couples having an emotional discussion together for the very first time.

Gail feels ready to go back to the church. And when Gail and Jay go back to the church, they are greeted warmly by Judy and Kendra. Based on Judy’s comments, she’s not so eager to meet the other two people who arrive next, although when they do arrive she has a forced, polite smile. The other two visitors are a divorced couple in their 60s. It’s obvious that they’re no longer together when they arrive separately and aren’t seen wearing wedding rings.

Former spouses Richard (played by Reed Birney) and Linda (played by Ann Dowd) haven’t seen each other in a while. Richard no longer lives in the area, because he said that he traveled by plane for this somber occasion. Later, he says he won’t be staying in the area for the rest of the day. Richard gives the impression that he’s a busy businessman, while the career backgrounds of Gail, Jay and Linda are never revealed. At one point in the story, Richard says that he isn’t religious, so meeting in a church is outside of his comfort zone.

Linda has brought a bouquet of wild flowers, which she offers to Gail as a gift. Gail declines to take the flowers but later changes her mind in order to not create any further tension. It’s another clue about where the hard feelings are between these four people. After some awkward small talk is exchanged, Kendra and Judy show Gail, Jay, Linda and Richard to the meeting room and leave the four visitors there to talk. Kendra says before she leaves them together, “I’m hopeful that we think this was a good thing to do by the time we leave here today.”

And that’s when the movie starts to peel back the layers of turmoil and trauma that have led to this excruciating meeting. It won’t be revealed in this review who died and who committed the mass murder. But it’s enough to say that those details come out in bits and pieces. And then the floodgates open with the blame, anger, sadness and confusion over how the murders could have been prevented.

What makes “Mass” so outstanding is that there isn’t a single line of dialogue or action that looks or sounds phony. Because 80% of the movie takes place in this one room, “Mass” could very much be a play. It’s not an easy film to watch for anyone who is very sensitive to the topic of mass murder. However, “Mass” presents an excellent story that looks at this type of tragedy from various perspectives of loved ones who are left behind.

All four of the main actors give stellar performances. However, Plimpton and Dowd shine the most because their characters Gail and Linda express their emotions more freely than the men do. “Mass” is also a raw look at different ways that people grieve and try to make sense of a senseless crime. And it’s also a realistic portrayal of survivor guilt and how people who didn’t cause the crime can still feel responsible for it.

Kanz’s directing style is as minimalist as his writing style is rich with naturalistic language. It’s a combination that works for the movie’s setting. And the movie greatly benefits from being well-cast with actors who never strike a false note with their characters. “Mass” is a movie that will linger in people’s memories long after they watch it. And it will be a story that will come to mind when people think about how mass murders cause untold traumas that don’t necessarily make headlines.

UPDATE: Bleecker Street will release “Mass” in select U.S. cinemas on October 8, 2021.

Review: ‘Supernova’ (2021), starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci

February 5, 2021

by Carla Hay

“Supernova”

Directed by Harry Macqueen

Culture Representation: Taking place in unnamed locations in England, the dramatic film “Supernova” features an all-white cast representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two middle-aged men (one British, one American), who have been love partners for about 20 years, have very different ways of coping when one of them gets early-onset dementia.

Culture Audience: “Supernova” will appeal primarily to people who like well-acted and understated dramas about how loved ones cope with a health crisis.

Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in “Supernova” (Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street)

The dramatic film “Supernova” deftly and admirably avoids a cloying and melodramatic tone that “disease of the week” TV-movies tend to have. Instead, this thoughtfully made movie (written and directed by Harry Macqueen) dispenses with syrupy sentimentality and realistically captures the gradual heartbreak of two love partners who must come to terms with one of the partner’s early-onset dementia. Thanks to emotionally authentic performances from Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, “Supernova” doesn’t have a lot of flash but it has a lot of heart.

“Supernova,” which takes place in unnamed locations in England, features a road trip during a large section of the movie. However, don’t expect this road trip be a madcap adventure. The trip is somewhat tense, occasionally somber and peppered with occasional jokes that come as a distraction for the two middle-aged lovers who are on this trek. Therefore, the pace of “Supernova” might be a little to slow for some viewers, but there’s a reason for a lot of the emotional weight that these two partners are feeling.

In the beginning of the movie, Sam (played by Firth) and Tusker (played by Tucci) are shown in their Autotrail Cheyenne RV camper, as they drive in scenic areas of England. They have some mild bickering that’s not unusual for couples who’ve been together for a long time. Tusker wants Sam to drive faster, while Sam thinks his driving is just fine.

Tusker wants to change the music that’s playing in the car. And later, Tusker gripes that the female voice on the GPS “sounds like Margaret fucking Thatcher.” If Tusker seems cranky, he has good reason to be: He has dementia, and this trip is a vacation to help ease the stress of this medical problem.

It’s never stated if Sam and Tusker are officially married, but they wear wedding rings. Sam is British and a classical pianist, while Tusker is American and a novelist. They’ve been together for about 20 years. It’s revealed later in the movie that Tusker moved to England to be with Sam, but it’s not clear how they met. Tusker and Sam have their dog Ruby with them on this road trip.

During the course of the movie, it’s clear that Tusker and Sam love each other deeply, but they have different ways of coping with Tusker’s dementia. Sam, who is more of a serious-minded introvert, tends to keep his feelings to himself and plans to retire so that he can become Tusker’s full-time caretaker. Tusker, who is more of a fun-loving extrovert, hates the idea of Sam retiring because Tusker doesn’t want to think of himself as a burden. However, Tusker is more realistic about how much his personality will change from the dementia, while Sam is in denial and tries to fool himself into thinking that Tusker’s personality won’t change.

Sam and Tusker also disagree on how Tusker should medically treat his dementia. Sam is more open to using prescribed medication, while Tusker doesn’t want to take any medication at all. During their road trip, Sam finds out that Tusker had secretly removed Tusker’s pills that Sam had packed for the trip and deliberately left the pills at their home.

Sam is upset about Tusker not having the pills, but Tusker adamantly says: “I don’t want them … They remind me that I’m ill. And I don’t want that. Not right now.” Meanwhile, Sam worries that Tusker refusing to take the medication will make the dementia worse at a faster rate. Tusker wants to block out those concerns and just live his life the best way that he can.

It’s not stated how long it’s been since Tusker got his diagnosis, but he mentions more than once that in about six months, it’s very likely that he won’t remember the identities of the people in his life. It terrifies Tusker, but he’s more willing than Sam to talk openly about this mental deterioration. Sam wants to change the subject every time Tusker wants to talk about it.

There are also signs that Tusker is already becoming forgetful. In an early road trip scene, Sam wakes up in bed to find that Tusker isn’t there. Sam frantically drives until he finds Tusker calmly out standing near a road with their dog Ruby and seemingly unaware of the panic he’s caused. Sam hugs Tusker in a way that they both know that Tusker is losing his faculties and they feel powerless to stop it.

Despite this depressing health problem, Tusker tries to keep his sense of humor intact. While he and Sam are at a diner during their road trip, Tusker plays a harmless prank on the waitress by telling her different ways that she can get Sam’s autograph. The waitress doesn’t know who Sam is or why he might be “famous,” but she doesn’t want to be rude. She’s perplexed and doesn’t quite know how to respond, so she just nods her head vaguely.

As the waitress walks away, Sam mildly scolds Tusker for confusing the waitress and tells Tusker that it’s time to retire the prank because it doesn’t work half of the time. Tusker chuckles and says he likes this prank precisely because it does work half of the time. This back-and-forth banter is affectionate and shows that despite these minor irritations, this couple has a loving relationship.

During their road trip, Sam and Tusker visit Sam’s sister Lilly (played by Pippa Haywood), Lilly’s husband Clive (played by Peter Macqueen) and Lilly and Clive’s daughter Charlotte (played by Nina Marlin), who’s about 7 or 8 years old. Lilly and Clive apparently live in the house where Lilly and Sam grew up.

In another realistic “slice of life” couples scene, Sam and Tusker briefly disagree about where they’re going to sleep while visiting. Lilly says that they can sleep in the bedroom that Sam had as a child, while Sam doesn’t like that idea and offers to sleep in the camper. Tusker doesn’t want to sleep in the camper and convinces Sam that they should sleep in the bedroom, which is decorated in the same way that Sam had it before he moved away from home. The bed is barely big enough for two people, and Sam accidentally has a mild fall out of the cramped bed. It’s played for laughs.

Sam and Tusker keep each other amused by making tape recordings of each other’s conversations. They role play as if they’re doing an interview for a radio broadcast. Tusker says during one of these taping sessions: “Welcoming to Dementia Hour on BBC Four.” Tusker asks Sam, “How has it been for you?”

Sam replies, “It has its moments.” Tusker then says, “If you had one wish in the world, what would it be.” Sam responds, “I wish this holiday wouldn’t end. And you?” Tusker says in an affectionately exasperated voice, “I wish I didn’t have this thing [dementia], idiot!”

Unbeknownst to Sam and Tusker, Lilly and Clive have planned a surprise dinner party for them with several of Sam’s and Tusker’s friends. It’s at this dinner party that Sam sees more uncomfortable signs that Tusker’s condition has worsened. Tusker is about to read a speech, but he can’t do it because of the dementia. Instead, he asks Sam to read it.

It’s one of the best scenes in the movie because it shows Sam trying not to lose control of his emotions while he reads Tusker’s words of love and loyalty, while Tusker is trying not to look embarrassed that he couldn’t read his own speech. In the beautifully written speech, Tusker says about Sam: “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

Outside during this evening party, Tusker shares his knowledge of astronomy with Charlotte. He points to the stars in the sky and tells her about the life span of a star: “When the body gets really old, it runs out of fuel, and it explodes like a firework. And when that star has died, it becomes really, really bright and shoots out all this stuff … And eventually, all that stuff travels over years and years … and it’s eventually what makes us.”

This supernova description, which obviously inspired the movie’s title, is a metaphor for how Tusker wants to live out his last days and what he hopes his legacy will be. Earlier in the movie, there’s another scene where Tusker and Sam look at a celestial map on their camper ceiling and Tusker points out the stars on the map. It’s one of many glimpses into how this couple had been living a relatively quiet and stable life together until the dementia diagnosis changed everything, but Sam and Tusker are still trying to hold on to a sense of normalcy.

When Lilly and Tusker have a private conversation together at the party, he tells her how the dementia is affecting his relationship with Sam. “You know what the hard part is?” Tusker comments. “You’re not supposed to mourn someone while they’re still alive.” Lilly replies, “You’re still you, Tusker. You’re still the guy he fell in love with.” Tusker says ruefully, “No, I’m not. I just look like him.”

During the party, one of the friends named Tim (played by James Dreyfus) tells Sam privately that Tusker confided in Tim that Tusker can no longer write with a pen and paper. Later, when Sam and Tusker get home, Sam discovers that it’s true: Sam looks through Tusker’s journals and finds that the most recent journal entries are illegible scribbles.

And later, Sam finds something else that is heartbreaking and devastating. It leads to Sam and Tusker having a reckoning and being forced to confront each other on how they’re going to prepare for Tusker’s worsening dementia. And that includes having the difficult conversation over what to do if Tusker has to be put in an assisted care facility.

“Supernova” could easily have been a stage play because of how the dialogue is written, but the story benefits from being a cinematic version. Cinematographer Dick Pope perfectly captures the scenic outdoor locations during the road trip. These wooded areas and mountain-surrounded lakes provide a great counterbalance of tranquility to the slowly building storm in Sam and Tusker’s relationship.

Writer/director Macqueen brings a simple intimacy to the movie that might disappoint people looking for showboat-ish dramatic scenes, but it actually works better that this movie isn’t so heavy-handed with its difficult subject matter. And unlike a lot of movies about someone facing a medical crises, “Supernova” doesn’t have any scenes in a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. It’s another reason why the movie isn’t as weepy as it could have been, although there are some definite tearjerking moments.

Firth and Tucci, who are longtime friends in real life, have a natural and easy chemistry with each other that suits the respectful nature of Sam and Tusker’s relationship. Sam and Tusker are affectionate with each other, but their romance is relatively reserved and doesn’t have a lot of over-the-top passion. Tusker might want to go out in a blaze of glory like a supernova, but he and Sam have the type of enduring love that’s more like the steady light of the sun.

Bleecker Street released “Supernova” in select U.S. cinemas on January 29, 2021. The movie’s digital/VOD release date is February 16, 2021.

Review: ‘Judas and the Black Messiah,’ starring Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield

February 1, 2021

by Carla Hay

“Judas and the Black Messiah”

Directed by Shaka King

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Chicago in 1968 and 1969, the drama “Judas and the Black Messiah” features a predominately African American cast (with some white people and Latinos) representing people involved in the civil rights movement and law enforcement.

Culture Clash: The Black Panther Party, including Illinois chapter chairman Fred Hampton, was the target of FBI investigations that included hiring an African American paid informant named Bill O’Neal to infiltrate the Black Panther Party to help the FBI bring down Hampton and his colleagues.

Culture Audience: “Judas and the Black Messiah” will appeal primarily to people interested in movies about the civil rights movement for African Americans.

LaKeith Stanfield and Jesse Plemons in “Judas and the Black Messiah” (Photo by Glenn Wilson/Warner Bros. Pictures)

“Judas and the Black Messiah,” which is based on true events, mostly succeeds as presenting a rousing and riveting depiction of a troubling side of the U.S. civil rights movement that is rarely seen as the central plot of a movie: How African Americans were used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to betray African American civil rights leaders who were labeled as “troublemakers” by the FBI. It’s a necessary and sometimes uncomfortable examination of specific people in the late 1960s history of the civil rights movement, even though “Judas and the Black Messiah” has some awards-bait dramatics that were obviously manufactured for the movie.

Directed by Shaka King (who co-wrote the screenplay with Will Berson), “Judas and the Black Messiah” shows two very different sides of the African American experience with the civil rights movement. On the one side is the urgent activism embodied by Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. On the other side, is the passive political apathy of William “Bill” O’Neal, a car thief who was lured into betraying the Black Panthers by being a paid confidential informant for the FBI, in exchange for the FBI keeping O’Neal out of prison for his past crimes, such as car theft and impersonating a FBI agent.

“Judas and the Black Messiah,” which takes place primarily in Chicago, is told from perspective of O’Neal (played by LaKeith Stanfield), but Hampton (played by Daniel Kaluuya) is most definitely portrayed as the heroic soul of the movie. In real life, Hampton and O’Neal were in their early 20s when this movie takes place from late 1968 to late 1969. Thankfully, the filmmakers chose “Judas and the Black Messiah” as the movie’s title, instead of the movie’s original and very misleading title “Jesus Was My Homeboy.” Jesus is not a major theme in this movie at all.

The term “black messiah” refers to then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s fear that the civil rights movement would gain momentum under a powerful and charismatic leader. For a while, that leader was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), until he was brutally assassinated on April 4, 1968. “Judas and the Black Messiah” starts off in late 1968, when the civil rights movement became increasingly fractured by ideological divides between those who wanted to follow MLK’s non-violence philosophy and those such as the Black Panthers, who wanted to follow a more left-wing-leaning “any means necessary” philosophy, even if those means included violence.

Hoover has been depicted in various ways in movies and television, but in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” there’s no doubt that Hoover (played by Martin Sheen, in prosthetic makeup) is the movie’s chief villain. In an early scene in the movie, Hoover is presumably at FBI headquarters as he addresses an auditorium full of FBI agents (all white men, as Hoover reportedly preferred), with an oversized projection screen that looks a little too ahead of its time, as if he’s giving a TED Talk. This is supposed to be 1968, not 2018. It’s one of a few details that don’t ring true in the movie.

During this FBI assembly, Hoover sneers, “The Black Panthers are the single greatest threat to our national security. Our counterintelligence program must prevent the rise of a black messiah among their midst, one with the potential to unite Communists, the anti-war and the new left movements.” A photo of Hampton then appears on the giant projection screen, to make it clear that Hampton is now one of the FBI’s main targets.

Meanwhile, O’Neal is shown being a small-time car thief with an unusual method of operation: He impersonates a FBI agent (including having a fake badge) and pretends to arrest someone for having a stolen car. He looks for potential victims, by at least finding out their names and what kind of car they have, so the fake arrest can look real. And he chooses people who are probably into illegal activities and aren’t likely to go to the police when the theft victims find out they’ve been tricked. It’s implied that all of O’Neal’s theft victims are black, since he knows he’d have very little chance of getting away with this FBi impersonation stunt if he tried it on white people.

What usually happens during this fake FBI arrest is that O’Neal gets the handcuffed person’s car keys and steals that person’s car. Except when viewers first see O’Neal in this movie, that plan backfires in a bad way. O’Neal walks into a bar while some men are playing pool and tries to arrest one of them, but this stranger resists being handcuffed. The “arrestee” has a few friends who also try to stop the detainment. They’re all immediately suspicious of this “arrest” and chase after O’Neal in the car.

One of the friends jumps on the car roof with a knife and starts stabbing through the roof and ends up stabbing O’Neal. The injuries aren’t serious, but they’re enough for this car theft to be completely botched. O’Neal barely manages to get away from the angry group when he’s pulled over by police.

The movie then fast-forwards to O’Neal in a meeting with the FBI special agent who will be the one to lure O’Neal into the FBI sting: Roy Mitchell (played by Jesse Plemons), an ambitious smooth talker who asks O’Neal why he impersonated a FBI agent for a car theft. O’Neal replies, “A badge is scarier than a gun.”

Mitchell then asks O’Neal how he felt about the assassinations of MLK and Malcolm X. O’Neal replies that he was a “little bit” upset over MLK’s murder and he didn’t give much thought to Malcolm X’s murder. It’s at this point that Mitchell knows that O’Neal doesn’t care much about politics or the civil rights movement, and therefore O’Neal can be easily manipulated into being an informant.

First, Mitchell says that the only way that O’Neal can avoid prison is to work as an informant for the FBI. Whenever O’Neal starts to express doubts about being an informant (and this happens several times throughout the story), Mitchell tells O’Neal that the Black Panthers aren’t much different from the Ku Klux Klan, because Mitchell says both are radical, unpatriotic groups that want to divide people by their races and overthrow the U.S. government.

It doesn’t take long for O’Neal to infiltrate the Black Panther Party in Chicago and gain the trust of Hampton, who makes O’Neal the head of security. Hampton is a smart and magnetic leader who is respected by other party members because he often shows through words and deeds that the cause he’s fighting for isn’t about his ego but is about the people and future generations. Unlike other Black Power leaders, who wanted to keep black people separate from people of other races, Hampton embraced alliances with like-minded people of other races.

Hampton is credited with creating the Rainbow Coalition in 1969, which aimed to unite other anti-establishment groups for shared causes. It was a concept that was met with some resistance from the separatist Black Panthers, but because this is a movie, the Rainbow Coalition’s origins are a little too oversimplified and streamlined. One minute, Hampton and some other Black Panthers are showing up uninvited to meetings by the Young Patriots (a group of working-class white people) and the Young Lords (a group of Puerto Ricans) and making themselves known as unexpected allies. The next minute, Hampton is leading a Rainbow Coalition rally with members of the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots and the Young Lords in attendance.

The movie also shows how Hampton spearheaded the alignment of the Black Panthers with a Chicago-based African American gang called the Crowns, in order for the Black Panthers to have access to weapons and armed security backup. And what do you know, one of the Crowns just happens to be someone who was in that group that chased after O’Neal in that botched car theft. There’s a very “movie moment” when O’Neal is sure this guy is going to remember him, thereby making O’Neal more paranoid that his cover will be blown.

Some of the other Black Panther Party members who are featured in the movie include Jimmy Palmer (played by Ashton Sanders), Jake Winters (played by Algee Smith), Judy Harmon (played by Dominique Thorn) and Deborah Johnson (played by Dominique Fishback), a wide-eyed student who is in awe of Hampton and ends up becoming his girlfriend. In real life, Johnson is now known as Akua Njeri, and she gave birth to Fred Hampton Jr. in December 1969. Njeri and Hampton Jr. both were consultants on “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

Of course, in any movie that involves spying, there are double crosses and constant questions about loyalty, honesty and who can be trusted. The movie ramps up the tension not only outside the Black Panther Party but also within it. “Judas and the Black Messiah” also raises thought-provoking questions that will make people wonder about the prices that people pay for freedom, however freedom might be defined by individuals. And when there are informants or spies who are paid to betray, to what extent should they be branded as the “enemy”?

“Judas and the Black Messiah” has undoubtedly powerful performances by Kaluuya as Hampton and Stanfield as O’Neal. Kaluuya has the flashier role that will get more attention, mainly because there’s no ambiguity about his purpose in the film: depicting Hampton as a civil rights hero. In the few times Hampton was depicted in scripted projects before “Judas and the Black Messiah” was made, Hampton was usually a marginal character who didn’t have much depth, such as in the Netflix 2020 movie “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

In “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Hampton is a larger-than-life personality who gets the big speeches, the leadership position at rallies, and the martyrdom when he lands in prison at the height of his power. Hampton’s biggest showcase speech scene comes after he’s released from prison and gets a hero’s welcome during a Black Panther rally in Chicago. After leading the crowd to chant, “I am a revolutionary!” several times in the speech, he declares poetically: “You can murder a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation! You can murder a revolutionary, but you can’t murder a revolution! You can murder a freedom fighter, but you can’t murder freedom!”

Stanfield has the more difficult and nuanced role as the conflicted and duplicitous O’Neal. On the one hand, O’Neal knows he’s a traitor. On the other hand, O’Neal is portrayed as someone who genuinely became friends with many people in the Black Panther Party, but he felt powerless to stop the informant deal that he made with the FBI. There are times when O’Neal shows so much loyalty to the Black Panthers that FBI agent Mitchell doubts whose side O’Neal is really on.

“Judas and the Black Messiah” doesn’t let O’Neal completely off the hook for his betrayal, but the movie gives the impression that his decisions were not about the money but about his fear of going to prison if he didn’t comply with what the FBI wanted. In real life, O’Neal gave only one TV interview about his Black Panther/FBI informant experience. It was in 1989, in an interview for the PBS show “Eyes on the Prize 2,” which aired the interview on January 15, 1990. Clips of this interview are recreated in the movie.

The performances in “Judas and the Black Messiah” are impactful and deserving of high praise. Where the movie falters is in some of the scenarios depicting the interactions between O’Neal and his FBI contact Mitchell. In the movie, Mitchell deliberately kept O’Neal’s identity a secret from most his FBI colleagues. (Hoover knew though.) Therefore, it doesn’t make sense that the movie shows O’Neal and Mitchell openly meeting several times in upscale restaurants, where O’Neal is obviously the only black person there as a dining patron. It wouldn’t have been hard for the movie’s screenwriters to keep all of the meetings between O’Neal and Mitchell in less public places.

O’Neal’s wardrobe gets a little more stylish as he starts to make more money from the FBI. But in the beginning, O’Neal definitely stands out in these restaurants because he’s dressed inappropriately (too casual) for these kinds of dining establishments. If you were to believe this movie, in 1969 Chicago, a black man in “street clothes” can walk into an upscale restaurant where all the other patrons are white, sit down, have dinner with a white man in a suit, and no one notices, stares or questions why this inappropriately dressed black man is there. Things like that would’ve definitely gotten noticed in the real world. And this scenario is not exactly O’Neal and Mitchell keeping their relationship undercover or incognito.

Another “only in a movie” contrivance is in a scene where a despondent O’Neal ends up in a bar, where a woman shows a romantic interest in him after she rejects a fur-coat-wearing motormouth at a nearby barstool. The rejected man (played by Lil Rel Howery), who is identified only as Wayne in the movie’s end credits, is a stranger to O’Neal, but Wayne drops hints that he knows that O’Neal is working for the FBI.

O’Neal, who is already feeling very uneasy, follows Wayne out to Wayne’s car and demands to know who he is. The movie, with anxiety-filled music building to a crescendo, then has Wayne reveal something that’s meant to shock O’Neal and the audience. It’s highly doubtful this confrontation ever happened in real life, but fans of the Oscar-winning 2017 horror movie “Get Out” will be happy to see “Get Out” co-stars Kaluuya, Stanfield and Howery reunited as cast members for “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

As the only women with significant speaking roles in the movie, Fishback (as Hampton’s girlfriend Johnson) and Thorne (as Black Panther member Harmon) show considerable talent, although this is definitely a male-dominated film. Johnson’s character evolves from being a star-stuck fangirl of Hampton to being a loyal romantic partner to being a strong-willed expectant mother, who can’t help but feel impending heartbreak and doom when she hears Hampton give a speech saying that he will probably die for his people. Thorne’s Harmon is a badass who can get down and dirty in fight scenes just like the men do, such as in a tension-filled shootout between the Chicago Police Department and the Black Panthers.

The flaws in the movie’s screenplay are outweighed by the significant talent of the cast members and the ability of director King to maintain a suspenseful edge. Even though many people watching this movie might already know what happened to Hampton and O’Neal in real life, “Judas and the Black Messiah” triumphs in capturing the essence of this era of the civil rights movement in America. There might be fabricated “only in a movie” moments, but the film authentically conveys the passion and necessity for civil rights.

Warner Bros. Pictures will release “Judas and the Black Messiah” in U.S. cinemas and on HBO Max on February 12, 2021.

Review: ‘Brothers by Blood,’ starring Matthias Schoenaerts, Joel Kinnaman, Maika Monroe, Paul Schneider and Ryan Phillippe

January 31, 2021

by Carla Hay

“Brothers by Blood”

Directed by Jérémie Guez

Culture Representation: Taking place in Philadelphia, the crime drama “Brothers by Blood” features an almost all-white cast (with a few Latinos) representing the working-class, the middle-class and the criminal underground.

Culture Clash: Two cousins who work for the Irish mobsters in Philadelphia have their loyalties tested due to family secrets and involvement with Italian mobsters.

Culture Audience: “Brothers by Blood” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching generic and tedious movies about “thug life.”

Ryan Phillippe and Felix Scott in “Brothers by Blood” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

“Brothers by Blood” makes a half-hearted attempt to be a compelling crime drama, but the movie still ends up being formulaic and forgettable. It’s one of those mobster movies where two family members have an up-and-down relationship that propels much of what happens in the story. The problem is that all of the characters in the movie are derivative of other characters in much-better mafia films. “Brothers by Blood” is essentially a cheap wannabe Martin Scorsese gangster film.

Written and directed by Jérémie Guez, “Brothers by Blood” is based on Peter Dexter’s novel “Brotherly Love.” The original title of the movie was “The Sound of Philadelphia” (the city where the movie is based), and it’s easy to see why the title was changed, because “The Sound of Philadelphia” could mislead people into thinking it’s a music-oriented movie. Philadelphia is nicknamed the City of Brotherly Love, but the only love in this movie is tainted by brutal crimes and paranoia about betrayal.

The two main characters in “Brothers by Blood” are cousins Peter (played by Matthias Schoenaerts) and Michael (played by Joel Kinnaman), who own a small construction business that’s really a money-laundering front for the illegal work that the cousins do for the Irish mafia in Philadelphia. Peter is the introverted, level-headed cousin, while Michael is the extroverted, hot-headed cousin. Crime dramas often have a cliché of opposite personalities who have to work together and often clash with each other. “Blood Brothers” leans into this cliché hard enough to the point of over-reliance and stifling any depth for other parts of the story.

It’s very easy to see where this movie is going to go, once it’s established that Michael has a tendency to make impulsive and dumb decisions. About 70% of “Brothers by Blood” is a monotonous plot repetition of Michael doing idiotic things, while Peter tries to smooth things over and clean up Michael’s mess. Most of the movie takes place in 2016, but there are several flashbacks to Peter’s and Michael’s childhood, shown from Peter’s perspective.

Michael is impulsive and erratic, but Peter isn’t exactly mentally stable either. The opening scene shows that Peter has suicidal tendencies. In this nighttime scene, Michael and Peter are on the rooftop of one of their construction sites and listening to a friend drone on about a proctology exam that he recently had. (Yes, it’s that kind of movie.)

Peter steps onto the edge of the roof and suddenly jumps. Michael and the friend race to the street and see that Peter has landed in a very large pile of garbage and hasn’t been physically hurt. While their buddy is freaking out, Peter offers no explanation for why he jumped, while Michael says nonchalantly about Peter’s disturbing jump: “He does that all the time.”

It’s shown early in the movie that Michael and Peter have shady dealings with a local councilman named Taylor (played by Tim Ahern), who tells the cousins that he’s under ethical scrutiny for hiring six of his relatives, so he had to cut these family members loose from his employment. Taylor asks Michael and Peter to find jobs for these relatives at Michael and Peter’s construction company, even if these relatives aren’t qualified. During this office meeting with Taylor, a Republican presidential debate is shown on TV, and Michael predicts that Donald Trump is going to win the election.

One night, Peter and Michael end up drinking at a restaurant/bar owned by their friend Jimmy (played by Paul Schneider), who confides in Peter that he borrowed a lot of money from Michael to keep Jimmy’s business afloat. Peter tells Jimmy it’s a mistake to be in debt to Michael, but Jimmy is too drunk at the moment to heed any warnings. It’s later revealed that Michael has his own money problems that will get the cousins into trouble.

While they’re at the bar, Jimmy introduces his younger sister Grace (played by Maika Monroe) to Peter and Michael. She’s recently arrived from out of town, and Jimmy has given her a job as a bartender. Michael immediately flirts with Grace. However, Peter and Grace eye each other in a way that it’s obvious that these two will end up together in some way later in the movie.

“Brothers by Blood” also has poorly written subplots about Peter’s and Michael’s business interests aside from their construction company and thugging around with mobsters. Peter wants to possibly invest in boxing. He goes to a local boxing gym, where his acquaintance Carlos (played by Carlos Schram) is training a promising young boxer named Ryan (played by Tarek Hamite), who is living with Carlos because Ryan’s father is a “crackhead,” according to Carlos.

Michael is more interested in investing in horse racing. He’s bought a horse for $80,000, with the hope that the horse can be trained into becoming a champion. But something happens with Michael’s horse-racing investment, and how he handles it shows how much he’s an out-of-control loose cannon. In another scene in the movie, Michael can’t stand the thought of Peter being successful at anything without him, so Michael makes their hanger-on friend Leonard, nicknamed Lenny (played by James Nelson-Joyce), box Ryan in the ring. Lenny quickly and soundly gets beaten by Ryan, and that defeat aggravates Michael, who holds grudges.

Because of some debts and double-crossing, Michael has managed to anger the Italian mafia in Philadelphia. And so, a goon named Bono (played by Antoni Corone) from the Italian mafia has a threatening meeting with Peter and warns him that the Italian mafia will come after the cousins unless Peter kills Michael. Peter tells Bono that he won’t kill Michael. The rest of the story is about how much danger these two cousins get themselves into, as Michael continues with his screw-ups and some people inevitably get hurt or killed.

“Brothers by Blood” has frequent flashbacks to Peter’s childhood. It’s revealed that his seemingly happy life went on a downward spiral when he was 8 years old (Nicholas Crovetti portrays Peter as a boy) and witnessed his younger sister (played by Grace Bilik) accidentally get killed when she ran out into the street and was hit by a car. The car’s driver was a cop named Victor Kopec (played by Michael McFadden), who lives nearby. And Peter’s ill-tempered father Charley (played by Ryan Philippe) vows revenge.

A childhood flashback shows that Peter’s life gets even worse when his grieving mother has a nervous breakdown and she’s put in a psychiatric hospital, which is talked about but not shown in the movie. Peter’s father Charley is obsessed with getting revenge on Victor. Michael’s father Phil (played by Felix Scott), who is Charley’s brother, vehemently disagrees with Charley’s plan to murder Victor, because Charley and Phil are already involved with the Irish mafia. If Charley becomes a cop killer, it could cause problems for the brothers, not only with the police but also with the mafia.

Like a lot of derivative mobster flicks, “Brothers by Blood” limits the female characters in very sexist and shallow ways. Grace is the only female character with a significant speaking role in the film, and she’s really just there to be a potential love interest for Peter. Writer/director Guez has such little regard for Peter’s sister (whose death is the catalyst for a lot of the family drama) that he didn’t even give her a name in the story. In the end credits, she’s only labeled “Little Girl.” And Peter’s mother is reduced to being a nameless, background character who’s briefly shown sobbing over the death of her daughter.

Despite solid performances from Schoenaerts and Phillippe, “Brothers by Blood” could be called “Brothers by Boredom,” since this so-called gangster film has a lot of dull talk and not much action. Too much of the movie is about Michael being a swaggering fool and pulling guns on people, while Peter just stands around looking embarrassed and occasionally steps in to stop Michael from making things worse. We get it. These cousins are dysfunctionally co-dependent.

Peter’s childhood flashbacks are more interesting than the storyline with the adult Peter and adult Michael, because the flashbacks give some insight into how and why Michael and Peter ended up being so close. Their family experienced more tragedy besides the death of Peter’s sister. But this backstory isn’t enough to save “Brothers by Blood” from being a hollow and drab movie with a completely predictable ending.

Vertical Entertainment released “Brothers by Blood” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on January 22, 2021.

Review: ‘The Little Things’ (2021), starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto

January 29, 2021

by Carla Hay

“The Little Things”

Directed by John Lee Hancock

Culture Representation: Taking place in California in 1990, the crime drama “The Little Things” features a predominantly white cast (with some African Americans, Latinos and Asians) representing the middle-class and the working-class.

Culture Clash: Two police detectives with contrasting backgrounds team up to find a serial killer.

Culture Audience: “The Little Things” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching slow-paced and dull crime movies that waste the considerable talent of the starring cast members.

Denzel Washington and Rami Malek in “The Little Things” (Photo by Nicola Goode/Warner Bros. Pictures)

Take three Oscar-winning actors and put them in a crime thriller written and directed by filmmaker who has a solid track record of making crowd-pleasers. What could possibly go wrong? When it comes to the disappointing crime drama “The Little Things,” it’s not so much what went wrong but what should have gone right. Written and directed by John Lee Hancock (whose best-known movie is 2009’s “The Blind Side”), “The Little Things” ultimately fails to be exciting or innovative, considering that it stars the very talented Academy Award winners Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto.

Almost everything about “The Little Things” has been done before in other movies and done much better. There are key parts of the movie that will definitely get comparisons to director David Fincher’s 1995 classic “Seven,” written by Andrew Kevin Walker and starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey. The irony is that “The Little Things” was written by Hancock back in the early 1990s, before “Seven” (a far superior film) was released.

There are some noticeable similarities in both movies. “Seven” and “The Little Things” are about two cops (one middle-aged, one younger) who team up to hunt down a serial killer. The prime suspect is a mysterious creep who leads them in a cat-and-mouse styled investigation where he keeps them guessing about crucial aspects of the killing spree. (Freeman and Pitt were the cops in “Seven,” while Spacey was the suspected serial killer.)

In “The Little Things,” which takes place over a few days in October 1990, Washington plays the more experienced and older cop named Joe “Deke” Deacon, while Malek is the younger cop named Jim “Jimmy” Baxter. Leto has the role of a sleazy loner named Albert Sparma, who becomes the prime suspect in a string of murders of young women in Southern California. Unfortunately, there’s so much about the story that’s unimaginative and sluggishly paced that there’s very little suspense throughout the story.

The opening scene of “The Little Things” looks like something out of a formulaic horror movie: A young woman is driving by herself at night on a deserted road somewhere in the Los Angeles area. She gets tailgated and then chased by a mysterious driver. She panics and drives off of the road to a diner, whose outside lights are on, but she finds out too late that the diner is closed and no one is there. She runs off into a desert area, and the mystery stalker gives chase on foot. Luckily, she’s able to run back out onto the road and flags down a passing truck in order to get rescued.

Viewers later find out that her name is Tina Salvatore (played by Sofia Vassilieva), and police think that she narrowly escaped from a serial killer who has been targeting young women and stabbing them to death. However, most of the murder victims have been prostitutes, and Tina doesn’t fit that profile. She didn’t even get a good look at the guy who tried to kill her and never heard him talk, so the chances are slim to none that Tina can identify this criminal. Tina, just like most of the female characters in this film, is essentially sidelined. Except for a brief scene later in the movie, this key witness is never seen again.

The women with speaking roles in this movie only serve one of three purposes: to be a crime victim; a current or former love interest; or someone who is subservient to men. These one-dimensional characters include Jimmy’s dutiful and adoring wife Ana (played by Isabel Arraiza); Deke’s ex-wife Marsha (played by Judith Scott), who works as a medical examiner and does whatever Deke asks her to do; and Los Angeles police detective Jamie Estrada (played by Natalie Morales), who follows the lead of her male colleagues and has a very thankless role in the investigation.

Deke is a deputy who works in the Kern County Sheriff Department, which is about 133 miles north of Los Angeles. It’s a much more rural area than Los Angeles, where Deke used to work as a sergeant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide department until he left under a cloud of bad circumstances. While investigating this serial killer, Deke was suspended and had what’s described by a former colleague as a dangerous, stress-related emotional “meltdown.” He also had a heart attack.

Deke’s abrupt departure from the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department caused some hard feelings from his former co-workers there. One of them is Deke’s former boss Carl Farris (played by Terry Kinney), the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s homicide captain who ended up replacing Deke with Jimmy. Carl describes Deke’s exit from the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department as Deke being “run out” of the department, while Deke describes it as choosing to leave on his own.

It just so happens that Deke has to go back to the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department to pick up evidence for a robbery case that he’s working on in Kern County. And what do you know, one of the first people Deke meets when he goes back to the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department is Jimmy, who’s annoyed that Deke’s truck is blocking Jimmy’s parking space. It’s not exactly a “meet cute” moment, but people who won’t know anything about this movie before watching it can immediately tell from this scene that Deke and Jimmy will end up spending a lot of time together.

Deke finds out there’s going to be a delay in getting the evidence he needs, so his former boss Carl sarcastically tells Deke he can kill some time by catching up with his former colleagues. One of the few people in the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department who’s still willing to be cordial to Deke is a detective named Sal Rizoli (played by Chris Bauer), who tells Deke over a meal at a diner that things just aren’t the same since Deke left the department. Sal says that the current department employees are “a bunch of nancies” who’ve “got no soul” and the department head honchos have “weeded all the heart out of the place.” Sal describes Jimmy as a “good cop, a college boy, a bit of a holy roller.”

Jimmy and Deke couldn’t have more different lifestyles. Deke is a divorced father of two adult daughters, and he lives by himself in a small, ramshackle house out in the desert. Jimmy is happily married with two young daughters, and he lives in a comfortably middle-class and well-kept home. Deke is not religious and is very jaded about life. Jimmy is supposedly religious and “by the book,” but this shoddily written movie doesn’t really show proof of that, because Jimmy ends up breaking all kinds of laws in his obsessive quest to solve the murders and arrest Albert.

Through a series of implausible circumstances, Jimmy invites Deke to help him investigate the murders, even though Deke is only supposed to be in town for a few days and the cases are out of Deke’s jurisdiction. The evidence that Deke is supposed to bring back to Kern County for an upcoming court case ends up being completely ignored in the rest of the story. That’s how bad this movie is.

Albert becomes a prime suspect because he works for a small-business appliance store that was called to repair a refrigerator in a young woman’s apartment. She ended up getting slaughtered on the day that Albert was supposed to be there for the repair appointment. And so, Deke and Jimmy immediately zero in on oddball Albert after some snooping around at his seedy apartment building. He’s also on their radar because eight years ago, Albert confessed to one of the murders and knew certain details that the killer would know, but he wasn’t held responsible for the murder because he had an alibi when the crime happened.

“The Little Things” wants to keep viewers guessing over whether Albert is the serial killer or if he’s just a mentally ill person who wants the police to think that he’s the culprit. There are too many plot holes to mention, including how the movie never explains how in a large urban area such as Los Angeles, the police are so sure that all of these murders are being done by the same person. In “Seven,” the serial killer left very specific clues so that law enforcement knew the same person was committing the murders. In “The Little Things,” there is no such proof.

Instead, the movie is more concerned about showing the over-used crime movie trope of the “world-weary cop” partnered with the “eager-beaver cop” and how their personalities clash before they learn to work together for the same cause. What Jimmy and Deke have in common is that they’re both obsessed with finding the killer. Getting back on this serial killer case also seems to trigger something disturbing in Deke, because he starts to hallucinate seeing the dead women come to life in his dumpy motel room and in other places. And Deke talks to the corpses. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

Washington does a passable job of playing Deke as a cynical and emotionally wounded cop who’s haunted by his past, but “The Little Things” is a very forgettable entry to his impressive body of work. Malek is stuck playing a generic character who makes an implausible switch from being stringent and uptight to being a rogue cop who breaks the law with Deke. Among other law violations, Jimmy acts as a lookout/getaway driver when Deke intrudes in Albert’s apartment, while Albert is away, to look for and possibly steal evidence. Any cop or good screenwriter would know that this illegal break-in would make the evidence inadmissible in court, but it’s in this ludicrous movie anyway.

Leto makes the most effort to bring some unpredictability and nuance to his Albert character, but his performance is hindered by the substandard screenplay that doesn’t give Albert much to do except act like a weird scumbag and annoy Deke and Jimmy. And if these “detectives” are so great, why haven’t they investigated Albert’s activities over time to possibly tie him to the murders? Doing a couple of stakeouts just wouldn’t pass muster in the real world of homicide detective work.

“The Little Things” wants viewers to believe that these murders can be solved at lightning-fast speed during the few days that Deke is in Los Angeles. But ironically, the film moves at a sluggish and mind-numbing pace. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is often cringeworthy too. At one point, Jimmy tells Deke when they have one of their personality clashes: “If you piss on my leg and call it rain, we’re through.”

The movie gets its title because Deke has a mantra that “the little things” count in an investigation, and criminals often get caught because of “the little things” they do when they make mistakes. In other words, Deke is one of those cops who believes in the old saying, “The devil is in the details.” Unfortunately, “The Little Things” is very careless with details, and a more appropriate title for the movie is “The Big Plot Holes.”

Warner Bros. Pictures released “The Little Things” in U.S. cinemas and on HBO Max on January 29, 2021.

Review: ‘CODA,’ starring Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin, Daniel Durant, Eugenio Derbez, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Amy Forsyth

January 28, 2021

by Carla Hay

“CODA”

Directed by Siân Heder

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Massachusetts cities of Gloucester and Boston, the comedy/drama “CODA” features a predominantly white cast (with some Latinos, Asians and African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A teenage girl, who has the ability to hear, while her immediate family members (mother, father and brother) are deaf, has to decide if she will stay in the family fishing business or go to Berklee College of Music to pursue a singing career.

Culture Audience: “CODA” will appeal primarily to people who like heartwarming movies about families and pursuing dreams while realistically addressing the challenges and prejudices faced by people in the disabled community.

Amy Forsyth, Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur in “*CODA” (Photo c*ourtesy of Sundance Institute)

“CODA” is an acronym for “child of deaf adult(s)”, but the word could have a double meaning if it applies to the musical term “coda,” which means a passage that brings a composition to an end. It’s a fitting analogy, because music and the rite of passage of deciding what to do with one’s life after high school are major themes in this well-acted and memorable film about a teenager and her deaf family. Capably written and directed by Siân Heder, “CODA” is an American remake of the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” which translates to “The Bélier Family” in English. “CODA” had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and should prove to be a notable milestone in American cinema in representation of deaf people, as well as a breakout role for star Emilia Jones.

In “CODA,” Jones plays the central character, Ruby Rossi, a teenager in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who’s in her last year of high school and has spent almost her entire life being a translator for her deaf family members: father Frank (played by Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (played by Marlee Matlin) and older bother Leo (played by Daniel Durant), who appears to be in his early 20s. Deafness is a genetic trait in the family, except for Ruby, who was born with hearing abilities.

Fishing is the Rossi family business, and Ruby usually accompanies Frank and Leo on the family boat Angela + Rose for their fishing expeditions. Frank is a laid-back hippie type, while Leo is a generally good guy but he can be quick-tempered. Jackie is the type of woman who doesn’t want to be a frumpy matron. She still wants to be vibrant and sexy, and she likes to remind her family that she once won the Yankee Miss Pageant. Because they all depend on Ruby for interactions with hearing people, they all have a co-dependent relationship with each that will reach a crossroads during this story.

The movie opens with Ruby, Frank and Leo on one of their fishing excursions. And it’s here that viewers see from the beginning that Ruby loves singing and music. She’s belting out Etta James’ “Something’s Got a Hold Me” as it plays on a tiny transistor radio. Ruby isn’t shy about singing in front of her family, but she’s definitely self-conscious about people who can hear her sing and possibly judge her singing abilities.

Because Ruby is a translator for her family to communicate with the hearing world, she knows the prejudice that her deaf loved ones can get from bigoted people who think deaf people are automatically less intelligent than hearing people. Therefore, Ruby is very protective and assertive in negotiating prices when the family has to sell fish. Their biggest customer is a local business called Salgado’s Seafood Company, whose owner Tony Salgado (played by John Fiore) and his employees often try to lowball the Rossi family when negotiating purchase prices for the Rossi’s fish. Ruby isn’t afraid to speak up and demand high prices so people won’t take advantage of the family.

At Gloucester High School, Ruby isn’t as self-confident. She’s quiet and keeps mostly to herself. And Ruby is perceived as a misfit, who gets taunted by some of the school’s “mean girls” for not conforming to what their idea of “cool” is. For example, when Ruby is in the school hallway near her locker, a group of these snobs walk by her and one of them snipes in a disgusted tone of voice, “Do you smell fish?” Later, when Ruby’s parents pick her up from school, she’s mortified that her father is loudly playing rap music, because the other kids react by smirking and laughing at Ruby and her parents.

Ruby’s only real friend at school is a brash flirt named Gertie (played by Amy Forsyth), who cares more about dating guys (usually much older men) than she cares about being part of a stuck-up girls’ clique. While waiting in line to sign up for after-school activities, Gertie is surprised that Ruby has chosen the school choir. “You’re already socially challenged enough around here,” Gertie says sarcastically. Ruby is undeterred and tells Gertie nonchalantly, “I sing all the time.”

During auditions for the school choir, the choir leader Bernardo Villalobos (played by Eugenio Derbez), who likes his students to call him Mr. V, lets it be know that he’s a fussy yet sassy taskmaster who won’t tolerate anything less than excellence. He plays the piano to accompany the singers during choir rehearsals.

To determine their singing range, he quips, “Let’s see if you’re a soprano, an alto or watched too many episodes of ‘Glee.'” The students audition by each singing “Happy Birthday.” But when it’s Ruby’s turn, she panics and runs out of the room.

On another day, a sheepish Ruby returns to the classroom when Mr. V is alone. She wants another chance to audition, but he’s skeptical that she has what it takes to sing in front of an audience. She opens up to him about how she was scared during the first audition because she’s self-conscious about her voice. She tells him that when she was younger, she was teased a lot for her speaking voice, because she sounded like a deaf person.

Mr. V seems to show a glimmer of empathy when he realizes that Ruby is the student with the deaf family who’s apparently talked about a lot in school. He sees that Ruby has a passion for singing, but she doesn’t quite know how to express it yet. Mr. V tells Ruby, “There are plenty of pretty voices with nothing to say. Do you have something to say?”

When Ruby says “yes,” Mr. V then tells her “I’ll see you in class.” The odd thing about this scene is that Ruby never actually sings anything before Mr. V tells her she can be in the class. She could’ve been a horrible singer, and he just gave her easy acceptance into the choir that he takes very seriously. But there would be no “CODA” movie if Ruby had no singing talent.

And there’s another reason why Ruby wants to be in this singing group: She has a crush on a fellow classmate named Miles Patterson (played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), who’s also in the choir. Miles has the type of pleasant pretty-boy persona that gives the impression that he’s a sensitive and romantic type. Ruby is too shy to do anything about her crush on Miles, so she has to settle for furtive glances at Miles when she sees him at school.

The next time that Ruby sings in front of the choir, the students are rehearsing Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Mr. V also has them do breathing exercises where the students have to inhale and exhale as if they’re various-sized dogs. These unorthodox exercises seem to boost Ruby’s confidence, so when it comes time for her to do a solo, she belts out “Let’s Get It On” as if she’s a soulful R&B singer.

Mr. V and the other students are impressed with Ruby’s singing talent. And because Miles sees this other side to Ruby, a spark of admiration for her starts to become evident. And you know what that means for a movie like this one.

And what do you know, Mr. V just happens to select Ruby and Miles to perform what’s supposed to be a show-stopping duet at the choir’s big recital, which will be shown later in the story. He tells them that they have to sing Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “You’re All I Need to Get By,” so that means that Ruby and Miles have to spend time together rehearsing their duet. How convenient.

During one of those rehearsals at Ruby’s home, she’s mortified when she and Miles hear the sounds of Ruby’s parents having sex in a nearby room. It’s one of the funnier scenes in the movie. Her parents stop what they’re doing and try to be cool about it by forcing a “let’s be mature about this and talk about what happened” moment with Ruby and Miles in their living room. It just makes Ruby even more embarrassed.

Frank and Jackie have a happy marriage, but it’s come under strain due to financial problems in the family business. In one scene, Ruby eavesdrops on an argument that Frank and Jackie have because one of Jackie’s credit cards was declined. Jackie suggests that Frank sell their boat to pay off their debts, but he’s vehemently against the idea because fishing has been in his family for generations, and he says he doesn’t know how to do anything else with his life.

Meanwhile, there’s a subplot about Gertie being attracted to Leo. When Gertie tells Ruby about it, Ruby tells Gertie that Leo is off-limits because Ruby hates the idea of her best friend dating her brother. When Gertie asks Ruby how to tell someone in sign language that she wants to hook up for sex, Ruby instead shows her how to to sign the words, “I have herpes.” Gertie doesn’t know that though, so Leo gets quite a surprise when Gertie tells him that in sign language.

“CODA” has several comedic moments, but there’s also some emotional drama too. The Rossi family business goes through a big change where Ruby is needed more than ever to help out with the business. And then, Mr. V offers to privately tutor Ruby. He also wants to recommend her for the prestigious Berklee College of Music, his alma mater. It should come as no surprise that these demands on her time eventually cause conflicts.

The more Ruby starts to feel her confidence and identity blossoming because of her singing talent, the more she’s pulled back into family obligations. Jackie gives Ruby more of a guilt trip about it than Frank does, while Leo thinks that Ruby should pursue her singing dreams. And, of course, Ruby must eventually make a choice.

“CODA” benefits from impressive performances from the main cast members, with Jones excelling in her very authentic portrayal of a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Kotsur, Matlin and Durant give fine portrayals of family members who often feel like “outsiders” in the hearing world. But in their own family, this trio’s deafness gives them a bond that unintentionally makes Ruby feel like an outsider.

Derbez and his often-flamboyant Mr. V character isn’t a one-note clown, since the character shows some emotional depth when he mentions how being a Mexican immigrant shaped his outlook on life. He also has a snappy comeback during an argument with Ruby when she suggests that he’s a failure because he’s a teacher instead of a professional musician. Forsyth is also quite good in her portrayal of Gertie, but Gertie’s confident character isn’t given much screen time, other than to just show up as a counterpoint to Ruby’s more hesitant personality.

“CODA” tends to rely a bit too much on “TV-movie-of-the-week” type of montages to further the story. And there are a few too-cutesy moments when Mr. V. gives Ruby some kind of pep talk, and Ruby just suddenly transforms from wishy-washy and insecure to someone who sings like a seasoned pro. This effect that Mr. V has on Ruby is played almost like he’s a hypnotist who can snap his fingers and make Ruby believe what he tells her, and then she can sing right on cue in the way he wants her to sing. It’s a little too much of a “movie moment” and should have been filmed in a more natural way.

The “CODA” song soundtrack will delight fans of pop, rock and R&B music from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Some of the other songs that are prominently in the movie that are sung by cast members include Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” the Kiki Dee Band’s “I’ve Got the Music in Me” and David Bowie’s “Starman.” There’s also a rousing sequence set to the Clash’s version of “I Fought the Law.”

This is not a movie that wants to be trendy, but instead it leans heavily toward trying to look and sound classic. In other words, “CODA” won’t look embarrassingly dated a few years after the movie is released. With breezy charm and some unabashed sentimentality, “CODA” also gives a valuable perspective of a family affected by deafness. However, this movies speaks to universal truths that self-doubt, not a physical disability, is often the biggest obstacle that people have to overcome in pursuing a dream.

UPDATE: Apple TV+ will release “CODA” in U.S. cinemas and on Apple TV+ on August 13, 2021. The film will get a limited re-release of free screenings in U.S. and London cinemas from February 25 to February 27, 2022.