Mafia Mamma: Insert You Own Corny Mobster Cliché Here

Allegedly, this film is a mafia comedy, but as any successful gangster will tell you, allegations have to be proven. In this case, good luck with that. To be fair, you can certainly see it trying to be funny. Oh boy, can you ever. It is also probably supposed to be another half-baked story of “family,” when Kristin Balbano Jordan inherits two family businesses from the grandfather she never really knew. One is a terrible winery, but it doesn’t have to be very good, because it is really a front for the down-on-their-luck Balbano crime syndicate. Being a soon-to-be-divorced empty nester, she has the time to turn both around in Catherine Hardwicke’s Mafia Mamma, which opens today in theaters.

Jordan always put her son and husband first, but after the coddled little brat leaves for college, she catches her not-nearly-as-cool-as-he-thinks-he-is husband with another woman. It is the perfect time to claim her inheritance from her recently departed grandfather. As Bianca, the consigliere, explains, old man Balbano picked her to succeed him as the don, or whatever. Of course, that does not sit well with the presumed heir apparent. Frankly, he is welcomed to it, as far as Jordan is concerned. She just wants an Italian fling that will live up to her bestie’s “Eat, Pray, F***” mantra. Yes, the comedy of Michael J. Feldman & Debbie Jhoon’s screenplay is largely built around a cringy Eat, Pray, Love reference. You’ve been warned.

Of course, through incredibly dumb slapstick, Jordan manages to foil the rival crime family’s assassination attempts. She even turns round the Balbano syndicate’s fortunes with a feel-good, totally ethical, if not 100% legal generic drug importation scheme, but then the stupid husband and son show up.

Knives Out: Daniel Craig Investigates Famous Suspects

If a suspicious character is not played by someone famous, chances are that person is not the murderer. That is why Agatha Christie movies used to have little pictures of the cast running along the bottom of their lobby posters. It showed off how many suspects there were. Winking homage is paid to those films in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which opens today nationwide.

Johnson’s screenplay is all about its twists, so some caginess is in order, to prevent spoilers. It is safe to say Harlan Thrombey, a celebrated mystery novelist and patriarch of a wildly dysfunctional and elitist family is about to die a premature death. Marta Cabrera, his private nurse is probably the only one who truly mourns him. The cops assume it is an open-and-shut case, but Benoit Blanc, an eccentric Southern gentleman private detective has reason to suspect otherwise. An unknown client hired his services to investigate, which is rather suspicious in itself.

Much to her surprise, Cabrera finds herself pressed into service as Blanc’s Watson. Of course, it becomes increasingly awkward for her, because she harbors her own secrets. Needless to say, everything is not as it seems.

There is quite a bit of clever misdirection going on throughout the film. It would be no fair telling, but rest assured the big reveals are all quite satisfying. The knowing humor is also mostly rather sly, but there are times when the scoldy class warfare messaging should have been throttled down. This is supposed to be larky fun, not a Theodore Dreiser adaptation.

Fortunately, Daniel Craig always keeps things snappy when he is on-screen, delighting viewers with Blanc’s impossibly lazy drawl. Honestly, that accent deserves some kind of award. It is also great fun watching him effortless shift from genteel charm to gleeful cunning.

Frankly, it is rather impressive that Ana de Armas can keep up Craig and the rest of the colorful ensemble as the almost fatally nice Cabrera. Of course, only Blanc can withstand the withering attitude Jamie Lee Curtis projects as the tartly cynical eldest daughter, Linda Drysdale. She is a totally believable chip off the block that is Christopher Plummer’s uber-yankee Thrombey (and really ought to have more screen time, but she makes the most of what she gets). Likewise, Plummer has the appropriate lordly presence, but he has some surprisingly engaging humanizing moments with De Armas.

Yet, Don Johnson might just score the biggest laughs as the venal and pretentious son-in-law, Richard Drysdale. Honestly, Johnson has yet to get the credit he deserves for his comedic chops (check out his razor-sharp cornpone turn in Cold in July, if you doubt it).

Sundance ’19: Velvet Buzzsaw

The oeuvre of late, undiscovered outsider artist Ventril Dease could be considered the Necronomicon of oil paintings. They have a rather odd effect on those who view them. It is even worse for those who try to profit from them. The exploitative sharks of the fine art world are in for some EC Comics-style karma in Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Ventril Dease is dead and nobody really noticed, until it was time to clear out the hundreds of tormented paintings he left behind. Then they came to the attention of his neighbor, Josephine, an aspiring gallerist, who immediately recognizes the collection as a potential blockbuster. Around that time, she conveniently starts sleeping with pompous art critic Morf Vandewalt, who is even more struck by Dease’s twisted vision. Soon, the entire art world is desperate to get their hands on Dease’s work, especially Josephine’s former boss (and Vandewalt’s bestie), Rhodora Haze, who once played in a punk band called “Velvet Buzzsaw” during her wild youth, thereby explaining the cryptic title, as well as her fiercest rival, Ricky Blaine.

Of course, the various grasping players start dropping like flies, under decidedly sinister circumstances. Vandewalt, who negotiated himself gigs as Dease’s official biographer and author of the exhibit catalogue, starts having weird visions worthy of a twisted Dease painting. Although his paranoia is definitely galloping unfettered, the critic is not necessarily wrong when he warns the paintings are exerting a malevolent, uncanny influence on their beholders.

Arguably, Buzzsaw is a contemporary cousin to Roger Corman’s classic Bucket of Blood, chronicling the rise and fall of artist Walter Paisley, whose sculptures look so realistic, because he embeds dead people inside them. Surprisingly, Buzzsaw is nearly as campy. It also has a roughly comparable body count.

It is not exactly what we would have expected from the director and two leads of Nightcrawler, but it is still fun the watch the game, scenery-chewing cast preen about the Miami Beach Art Basel. This is a case of beautiful people absolutely skewering beautiful people of an even more rarified strata.

Of course, when it comes to acidic snark, nobody can top Toni Collette as Gretchen, a spectacularly ruthless museum agent. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Vandewalt is an utterly un-self-aware uber-twit who puts Bertie Wooster to shame. He is a self-important dolt, but he has his principles, which makes him strangely interesting. Rene Russo is flamboyantly charismatic as Haze, the cynical game-player. John Malkovich adds his usual sly élan as Piers, a superstar artist, but this time around, he can’t match Collette’s caustic energy.

Buzzsaw is a minor work of cinema, but it is undeniably fun. Let’s be honest, any film that leads us to invoke Corman’s Bucket of Blood cannot be all bad. Recommended as a goofy, slightly horror-ish distraction after a frustrating day at work, Velvet Buzzsaw screens again this Saturday (2/2) in Park City and Sunday (2/3) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Yellow Birds

In recent years, the military has sanitized their marching cadences. Now the “yellow bird” gets his “little head” smashed, rather than his “f’ing head.” Surely, this has caused great relief among ornithologists everywhere. Unfortunately, they have not been able to prettify the nature of warfare itself. Incidents from the Iraq War will haunt survivors in Alexandre Moors’ Yellow Birds (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Brandon Bartle is twenty-one, making him a veritable gray beard compared to eighteen-year-old Daniel Murphy, but they are both from rural Virginia, so they bond during basic training. Sergeant Sterling also recognizes their reliability, so he takes them under his wing, at least to an extent. This is mostly a good thing, especially when they first arrive in-country.

We can tell from the flashback structure something profoundly unfortunate happened during their deployment, but Bartle clearly survived, since we watch the film through his remorseful POV. It is not long before we realize Murph’s fate remains unresolved, because a good deal of the third act involves his mother Maureen Murphy’s crusade for the truth. She is the one played by executive producer Jennifer Aniston (that’s right, Rachel from Friends is playing the mother of an eighteen-year-old).

Reportedly, Yellow Birds was recut after its Sundance premiere, which makes sense considering there are cast-members listed on its imdb page we’re at a loss to remember. The current cut is pretty tight and the temporal shifts mostly work, which is saying something. However, the current cut is probably not sufficiently scathing to satisfy to the anti-war left (which includes our current president), nor is it sympathetic enough to appeal to military families and supporters. Instead, it feels like it walks a carefully calibrated line down the middle, like one would more expect from a TV movie.

Alden Ehrenreich (who has had a tough summer with Solo) is very good as Bartle. He does his share of brooding, but it is a more complex performance than just that. Toni Collette also elevates the largely stereotypical role of his mother Amy (between this and Hereditary, she gives quite a composite portrait of motherhood). Aniston is fine as Mother Murphy, but it is a very safe role. However, Jack Huston is terrific as the increasingly unstable, but still formidable Sgt. Sterling. Most disappointingly, Jason Patric is largely squandered as CID Captain Anderson.

David Lowery’s screenplay, subsequently worked over by R.F.I. Porto, represents a good faith effort to adapt Kevin Powers’ novel. The film exhibits genuine empathy for Bartle and Murphy, which is to its credit. There are also some relatively convincing scenes of warfighting, but it never reaches the level of classical tragedy that it clearly aspires to. Indeed, it feels rather narrow in scope, especially compared to Patric’s classic war movie, The Beast. Yellow Birds is not a scandal, but it still doesn’t justify Manhattan ticket prices when it opens tomorrow (6/15), at the Village East.

Sundance ’18: Hereditary

Like the saying goes, emotional problems do not run in Annie Graham’s family, they gallop. She always blamed her mother, perhaps with good reason. However, she starts to feel guilty about her long simmering resentments when the semi-estranged matriarch finally passes away. Yet, the full toxicity of Grandma’s legacy soon becomes apparent as the Graham family tragedies compound in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, which screens during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Annie Graham lives with her family in a remote chalet-style home, where she works as a scale-model artist, thereby establishing a creepy locale and décor for Aster to build off. Their teen son Peter can’t even fit in with his stoner friends, but his younger sister Charlie is the real odd duck. Maybe not so coincidentally, Annie and her husband Steve allowed Grandma more access to Charlie, but they totally froze her out during Peter’s early years.

Graham was already unsettled, but further family tragedy sends her hurtling down to some dark emotional places. In some ways, Hereditary evokes the spirit of The Babadook as Graham’s relationship with her son becomes increasingly poisoned. Yet, there is also plenty of The Conjuring, including some seance business, which always works out so well in horror movies, right?

Hereditary is getting a lot of buzz, because its depiction of family dysfunction is nearly as harrowing as its supernatural horrors. As Annie Graham, Toni Collette gets frantic and feverish beyond on all reason. It is sort of a cross between Isabelle Adjani in Possession and a dramatically less shticky Meryl Streep in Ossage County. In a straight domestic drama, she would be excessively over-the-top, but in a claustrophobic horror film like this, she is just what the mad doctor ordered.

Aster’s narrative takes some shockingly dark and insidious turns, but it all seems believable, thanks to his masterful control of atmosphere. Each time he drops a revelation, it raises the hair on your arms. His horror movie mechanics are spot-on, especially in his use of Graham’s diorama models. Plus, there is an attic to the Graham house that you really wouldn’t want to rummage through.

Gabriel Byrne nicely counterbalances Collette as the painfully reserved Steve Graham. Milly Shapiro (one of four young actresses who originated the role of Roald Dahl’s Matilda on Broadway) gives a remarkably weird performance as Charlie, making the more conventional teen angst of Alex Wolff’s Peter, pale in comparison. Of course, Ann Dowd is rock solid as Joan, Graham’s séance buddy, in scenes reviewers will want to revisit after the fact.

Hereditary is an unusually good-looking horror film, thanks to Pawel Pogorzelski’s eerie cinematography and the richly-detailed, award-worthy work of production designer Grace Yun, art director Richard T. Olson, and the rest of the design team. This is a deeply scary film that fans of James Wan ought to flip over. Highly recommended, Hereditary screens again this afternoon (1/27) in Park City, as part of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Michael Apted’s Unlocked

During the Cold War, there were a number of traitors who did indeed betray America and the UK for ideological or pecuniary reasons. In the current War on Terror era, the prospect of living large as a hero of the Caliphate has thus far been far less tempting. Yet, cynical thrillers need turncoats, so now we have the highly placed official who is so disgusted with Western softness, he or she secretly pulls strings to help the Islamists detonate a nuke in the Earth’s core that will send the remaining fragments of our planet hurtling into the sun, all for the sake of waking us up to the dangers of terrorism. This is one of those. It is a shame Peter O’Brien’s CIA-disparaging screenplay bends over backwards to equate Western intelligence services with Islamist terrorism, because it wastes some jolly nice supporting performances in Michael Apted’s Unlocked (trailer here), which releases today on DVD.

Alice Racine is a highly trained CIA interrogator, but she has been slumming in a low-level cover position after she “unlocked” her last subject slightly too late to prevent a terrorist attack in Paris. However, when a courier is intercepted ferrying a verbal message to a major U.S.-born terrorist from his London-based spiritual advisor, she reluctantly swings back into action. However, halfway through the unlocking process, she gets a call from her Langley handler, telling her to sit tight, because they have this courier they need her to unlock.

Obviously, there is a high-placed traitor in the agency, but with eye-rolling predictability, Racine is assumed to be in league with the shadowy squad that intercepted the now deceased courier. Racine goes on the run to ferret out the traitor with the wink-wink encouragement of her MI5 colleague Emily Knowles and back-up provided by Jack Alcott, an ex-military cat burglar, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (or should that be the right time?).

Aside from the moral equivalency, O’Brien’s screenplay is also ridiculously predictable. If someone looks like they have a treasonous haircut, you can bet they will be doing some third act back-stabbing. However, there are two reasons to possibly consider soldiering through Unlocked, should all your other entertainment options fail: John Malkovich and Toni Collette. Malkovich is laugh-out-loud hilarious as the wickedly snide CIA operations director Bob Hunter. We can only hope there is someone with that kind of take-no-prisoners attitude protecting our country. However, Collette totally hangs with him as the incisive and sophisticated Knowles. When they spar, the film becomes a thing of beauty. In contrast, Noomi Rapace basically punches the clock as Racine, while Orlando Bloom telegraphs his character’s secrets from a mile away.

Still, Apted keeps it all chugging along smoothly enough. As a director, he is hard to classify, landing somewhere on the spectrum between journeyman and auteur. Besides the Up series of documentaries, Apted has helmed a Narnia film, episodes of Showtime’s Masters of Sex, a Bond movie, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Sting’s “I Burn for You” video, so it is safe to say nearly everyone has seen his work. Unfortunately, Unlocked is no Gorky Park, but it is not really Apted’s fault—and Malkovich and Collette certainly are not to blame. The fundamental premise is simply too unlikely and too stilted. Not recommended, Unlocked is now available on DVD.

Tribeca ’14: Lucky Them

Matthew Sweet is the Grunge version of Eddie Wilson from Eddie and the Cruisers. He only cut one classic album, but many fans still believe he faked his own death to avoid the onslaught of fame. After all, no corpse was ever recovered from his misadventure on that fateful bridge. His former girlfriend has sort of moved on, in a wounded, self-destructive kind of way. However, she will have to seek some closure whether she wants to or not in Megan Griffiths’ Lucky Them (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Music critic-journalist Ellie Klug has a bad reputation for sleeping with musicians and blowing off deadlines. She has managed to get by on her street cred as the woman who was there when the Seattle scene exploded, but the editor of Stax is finally ready to cut her loose (really, an alt rock magazine named after one of the all time great soul record labels?). She has one last chance. Her assignment (that she must accept) will be to follow-up on a new lead on Sweet’s whereabouts and hopefully score a reunion for her readers. Reluctantly partnering up with a wealthy old flame who now fancies himself a documentary filmmaker, Klug sets off in search of Sweet.

Lucky Them largely follows the conventions of road movies, but it has a good handle on the witty and insightful people who practice music criticism. Tough and earthy, yet also vulnerable, Toni Collette’s work as Klug follows vaguely in the tradition of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. She also develops some appealing comedic chemistry with Thomas Haden Church, whose trademark deadpan delivers consistently scores solid laughs. Lucky Them also features a surprise cameo from a genuinely big name who typically commands a pay check greater than the film’s presumed budget. Even more impressively, Joanne Woodward (real Hollywood royalty) served as an executive producer, which probably explains the mystery guest’s participation. You do not say no to Ms. Woodward if you have any understanding of the history of your craft.

To its considerable credit, Lucky Them is much smarter and funnier than skeptical viewers will expect. Griffiths keeps it snappy, but also recognizes when to give a moment time to breathe. Recommended for general audience and jaded music journalists alike, Lucky Them screens Monday (4/21), Wednesday (4/23), and Saturday (4/26) as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.