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'Searching' Review: John Cho Anchors a Clever Computer Thriller
The Austin Chronicle
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 00:14 (UTC)
 

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The latest release from the Remakes Nobody Asked For assembly line is this update of the 1972 blaxploitation classic Super Fly, which was directed by Gordon Parks Jr. (whose father helped launch the blaxploitation genre the year before with the direction of Shaft), and starred Ron O’Neal as the iconic Youngblood Priest, the Superfly of the title. The reboot moves the action from Harlem to Atlanta, and essentially hews to the original’s storyline and characters. Priest (Jackson) remains a successful cocaine dealer who wants to leave the business after one last big score, and although in this iteration Priest is more talkative, the character retains his cool demeanor and presentation, as well as his ethical decency. More bling accompanies this remake, however, and in the end, has the effect of diminishing the character’s exceptionality in the community. The original film highlighted the idea that drug-dealing was one of the only ways a black man could achieve financial success in white America. watch superfly 2018 out, the characters talk about wanting the American Dream, but all that term signifies here is a desire for cash and flash – the outward signs of prosperity, minus any ideals about equal opportunity and upward social mobility.

 

October movie review: The real winner here is writer Juhi Chaturvedi
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 00:14 (UTC)
 

October 2018


There are several things about October that demand appreciation, the chief of which is that this film has been written, not constructed. The real winner here, by miles, is the writer Juhi Chaturvedi.


Two hotel management trainees, Dan (Dhawan) and Shiuli (Sandhu) forge an unlikely bond in the most trying of circumstances. The film is a gentle unfolding of love and loss and longing, and takes its time getting to where it?s headed. Calling it slow would be to entirely miss the point, because the rhythms of life cannot be fast-forwarded.


In a Bollywood still all at sea when it comes to credible relationship dramas, it?s good to see attention being paid to life?s wholly unexpected stutters and halts, where background music is not used as a crutch, and whose young people interact with each pretty much the way the young do: the film is set in Delhi, a city director Shoojit Sircar is familiar with, and that adds to the feeling of welcome realism.


Equally crucial, the film tells us that romance doesn?t necessarily have to play out in the metric of song-and-dance-and-high-pitched-melodrama; that it can be low-key, and unusual, can be conducted through speaking glances, rather than words.


October reminds you strongly of last year?s The Big Sick whose two lead protagonists find themselves spending large chunks of their time in a hospital, she beset by a serious illness, and he trying to figure out stuff.


October has a young man trying to figure out stuff, too: this is Dhawan?s most life-like character till now (his last outing was Judwaa 2 in which he plays a version of himself, aping Salman Khan via Govinda). Dan is a fairly trying fellow, always reluctant to buckle down and do the back-breaking scutwork that comes with his territory, always trying to cut corners.


thanostv that he may have meant something more than just an irritating colleague to the limpid eyed Shiuli is a bit sudden, but we let it go, because we get drawn into the world of hospitals and artificial lights and life support systems, where the two are ably supported by solid performers. There are strong moments here, almost making us forget that we never quite know why Dan behaves in such a surly, entitled fashion, but that?s a crucial hole.


As Shiuli?s suffering yet stoic mother, Gitanjali Rao shows us the pain of a woman who doesn?t know what?s right, but also knows the power of love. She shares the film?s most moving scene with Dan?s mother (Rachica Oswal, in a terrific walk-on part) where the two women speak of children, growing up, and responsibility, and how it can mean different things to different people. There?s such a strong connection between these two women who?ve met for the first time, and may never meet again. Ironically, the thing between Dan and Shiuli, built up through the film, never has this much feeling.


Also Read | October movie release LIVE UPDATES: Review, audience reaction and more


Sandhu is lovely and tender. http://ow.ly/8XxB101nKXJ is a wonderful debut. And yet, despite all these astutely done bits and bobs, October doesn?t come as together as have the two earlier ventures of Sircar and Chaturvedi, Vicky Donor and Piku. That?s squarely down to Dhawan, whose stardom is clearly a double-edged sword: it is both an advantage and a weak link. From Badlapur on, it?s clear that Dhawan wants to stretch himself and do all kinds of roles. Which is great, because films like October will go out widely because of Dhawan, but it also leads to a kind of dilution.

 

?Superfly? Review: A Remake as Glossy, Slammed-Together Genre Flick ? Variety
dicksonhamrick0353 am 05.12.2018 um 12:42 (UTC)
 

SuperFly 2018


If you go back and watch a vintage blaxploitation film like ?Super Fly? (1972), it has a time-capsule quality that only enhances the low-rent documentary scuzziness of its atmosphere. The brightly littered Manhattan streets, the cozy squalor of the bars and drug dens, even the cruddiness of the apartments: All fuse into a bombed-out yet strangely liberated mood that lets you know why the hero would choose the life of a cocaine kingpin, because it?s the only way he has to leave behind the racist prison of ?a jive job with chump change, day after day.? The atmosphere told the story, and so did Curtis Mayfield?s music (?I?m a pusher man?), and so did Ron O?Neal?s suavely furious performance. In his flattened long hair and wide collars and designer sideburns, he may have looked like a coke-spoon version of D?Artagnan, but his need to claw his way out ? to use the drug game to defeat the man ? suffused http://ow.ly/Zr1J101nKYb .


The new ?Superfly? transplants the tale to the swank environs of contemporary upscale Atlanta, and it gives its hero the 21st-century equivalent of O?Neal?s processed-pimp look. As Priest, a coke dealer who has built a business while taking great care to remain under the police radar, Trevor Jackson, from ?Eureka? and ?American Crime,? sports a jutting abundance of luxurious inky silken flat hair, marked by an elegant slice of a part, plus a highly manicured beard, a pirate earring, and a pretty-boy scowl. If George Michael and Mr. T had a baby and dressed him in the sleekest of designer leather, he might look like this guy. Jackson is only 21 (O?Neal, when he played Priest, was 34), but he beats the holy crap out of people, fires pistols with gangsta heartlessness, and at one point even dodges a bullet, never losing his cool. Jackson does cool almost too well. He isn?t a bad actor, but it?s not like he finds many gradations within a young hustler?s survivalist pout.


His Priest is controlled and invincible, a leonine street king with two girlfriends, one African-American (Lex Scott Davis) and one Latina (Andrea Londo); when he takes a shower with both of them, it?s a misty porny daydream that ends as an erotic Piet�. The hero of ?Superfly? certainly has the right to be a stud, but the difference between the two movies is that the new version, directed by the Canadian-born hip-hop video veteran Julian Christian Lutz (who bills himself as Director X, a moniker that seems caught between black nationalism and ?What?s My Line??), has no resonance, no real atmosphere, and almost no social context. Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that?s less sensually stylish than you?d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.


Priest, whose real power is information (he?s got it on everyone), is surrounded by player-predators who are less cunning but more crudely violent than he is. In the opening sequence, set at a throbbing nightclub, he establishes his dominion by publicly humiliating a street-cred rapper who owes him money. He also has a run-in with the Snow Patrol, a rival crew of coke dealers who dress in white. They?re led by the roly-poly, hard-as-rusty-nails Q (Big Bank Black), the closest thing this movie has to an authentic hoodlum, but it?s when Priest is attacked by Q?s hothead-sociopath prot�g�, Juju (Kaalan ?KR? http://bit.ly/2Qbqxxh ), that he realizes the time has come for him to take the money and run. He needs one big score to do it.


To engineer that score, he screws over his mentor, Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams), the veteran dealer who discovered him on the streets. Scatter won?t give him a bigger cut of drugs to sell, so Priest, accompanied by his scampish partner, Eddie (played by the scene-stealing Jason Mitchell, who?s like Tracy Morgan?s amoral little brother), goes right over his head by driving down to Mexico and connecting with the cartel that?s the source of their product.


Priest spends the rest of the film dancing among a trio of forces who are out to put the screws on him: the cartel, led by the always lively actor Esai Morales; the thugs of Snow Patrol; and a pair of corrupt white officers, played by Brian F. Durkin and Jennifer Morrison, who shake him down for a million dollars. Within the recent wave of gender-flipped casting, it?s fascinating to see Morrison portray the sort of scum cop who is never, in the movies, a woman. She upends the stereotype by digging into the role with relish.


Most drug dramas are set in New York or L.A. (at this point, a dated cinematic reflex), but what matters is forging a vivid sense of place. The Atlanta locale of ?Superfly? seems like the perfect high-low setting, but though Director X exploits a number of colorful locations (a hair salon that turns into a drive-by slaughter, a mansion that looks as big as Versailles), the film has very little visual texture or sense of place. It treats Atlanta the way all those thrillers of the ?90s treated Toronto, as a big gleaming anonymous generi-city. We get almost no sense of the dailiness of Priest?s existence. When a scene takes place in the budget furniture store he uses as a legit front, it?s news to us, because the setting drops in out of nowhere.

 

Father of the Year Movie Review (2018)
dicksonhamrick0353 am 05.12.2018 um 07:10 (UTC)
 

Father of the Year 2018


The arrangement between Adam Sandler?s Happy Madison and Netflix keeps rolling, resulting in this week?s ?Father of the Year,? the kind of quickie comedy project that was clearly conceived, executed, and released in an incredibly small window of time. It?s not as abrasively awful as the worst of Netflix/Madison projects (?The Ridiculous Six? still holds thanostv ), it?s just forgettable. It?s akin to a mediocre sitcom you might catch on network TV on a Monday night. You won't hate the experience of watching it, but you?ll forget you saw it before it?s even over.


David Spade does what is basically a riff on his Joe Dirt character as a hard-drinking, not-too-bright guy named Wayne, father to a sweet kid named Ben (Joey Bragg). Ben has come home with his best buddy Larry (Matt Shively) and the two young men have one of those drunken conversations about whose dad would win in a fist fight. Larry?s dad Mardy (Nat Faxon) is the polar opposite of Wayne?he's a scientist who is so meek that he?s being bullied by his own eight-year-old. So it?s either the guy so dumb that he builds a makeshift pool in the flatbed of his neighbor?s truck or the one being owned by a third grader. When Wayne hears word that the guys think Mardy is the likely winner, he takes it as a personal affront and challenges the father of his son?s BFF to an actual fight. It doesn?t go well.


If you?re wondering how on Earth two dads maybe fighting each other could sustain the plot of a film, you're already asking more pertinent questions than the filmmakers. There are other subplots, of course, including a potential relationship between Ben and a girl from his past named Meredith (Bridget Mendler) and the fact that the fracas between Wayne and Mardy might cost Ben his future. For http://bit.ly/2Qdg1Wq , however, the plot here is just one of those Happy Madison skeletons on which to hang bits such as Wayne and Ben participating in a weird local ?Wife Race? and Mardy getting high and begging the dealer to take off his clothes (don?t ask ? it?s a really weird scene, even for Happy Madison).


To be fair, there are a few funny moments scattered throughout ?Father of the Year,? and some of the performers here are undeniably likable. The young actors, particularly Mendler and Shively, could easily work in better material, and I?ve always liked Faxon?the idea to contrast his more buttoned-up comic timing with Spade?s anything-for-a-joke aesthetic isn?t a bad one. It?s just that this is another one of those Happy Madison movies that doesn?t put any effort in after the clever idea was greenlit. You can always picture someone saying, ?Just put Faxon and Spade in the movie and it will write itself.? And that?s how you get to so many scenes that feel lazy and jokes that simply haven?t been punched up. It?s just too lazy to work.

 

What Will People Say Movie Review (2018)
dicksonhamrick0353 am 05.12.2018 um 07:05 (UTC)
 

What Will People Say 2017


This relentlessly upsetting film, written and directed by Iram Haq, begins by showing Nisha (Maria Mozdeh), the teen daughter of Pakistani immigrants, living a relatively Westernized teen life in Norway. https://www.thanostv.org/movie/what-will-people-say-2017 hangs out with pals, smokes a little weed, dates a red haired fellow named Daniel. Tasked with bringing a package to her dad?s shop, she?s instructed by her mom to cover up, and Nisha puts a jacket on, covering her navel-revealing midriff top.


The tensions between traditionalist parents (there?s also an older brother, who?s obedient and dutiful to the point of obsequiousness) and child seem genuine, but negotiable. That all changes when, one evening, Nisha and Daniel come into her bedroom via the fire escape of the family apartment. ?Have you asked my parent to marry me? Then what are you doing here?? Nisha jokes with Daniel. They indulge in mild kissing. There?s no indication much more than that is going to happen. But Nisha?s father Mirza (Adil Hussain) presumes everything?s already happened when he storms into the room, pummels the crap out of Daniel, and bellows accusations at Nisha.


Mirza?s brutality is sudden and implacable. Soon he?s escorting Nisha back to Pakistan, where?s she?s to stay with his mother and his sister. We don?t know the endgame Mirza has in mind: to make Nisha more devout? Or just fob her off permanently. The irony of her situation is brought into near-horrific focus on Nisha?s first night with her new family. Sleeping next to a younger cousin, that girl asks her, ?Who do you like best: Rihanna or Beyonc�?? The girls who?s supposed to be unlearning Westernization can?t get the hell away from it.


As bad as Mirza is?and before he takes leave of Nisha to go back to Norway, he tries to bribe a hug from her with chocolate chip cookies?her new family is rather worse. They act very kind and proper, but move on step out of line and they? thanostv . After one perceived misstep, Nisha?s uncle visits her late in the night. Do you want to be married off to a villager, he asks. ?You?ll be milking buffaloes for the rest of your life,? he says with something like glee. Then he burns Nisha?s passport. ?You?re our daughter now.?


I didn?t want to see any of the characters causing Nisha suffering to be shown the error of their ways. I wanted to see them defenestrated. When a friend of the Pakistani family, a nice young man named Amir, began showing interest in Nisha, I did not want to see that interest reciprocated. I wanted her to snub him hard. But at this point in the movie she is terribly lonesome and he does seem kind. And boom, their affinity leads to more trouble for Nisha. Terrible trouble.

 

There?s No Way Louis C.K.?s New Movie Can Happen Now
dicksonhamrick0353 am 05.12.2018 um 07:04 (UTC)
 

I Love You, Daddy 2017


Louis C.K.'s I Love You, Daddy was already the world's most terribly timed movie. It's a would-be provocative comedy about how a man's Woody Allen?esque hero starts pursuing his 17-year-old daughter ? and was, at the time of writing, still scheduled to open right in the middle of our current maelstrom of stories about decades of Hollywood predation. In the wake of Thursday's New York Times report on C.K.'s own long-rumored sexual misconduct, in which multiple women accuse the comedian of forcing them to watch or listen to him masturbate without their consent, The Orchard announced that it was canceling the release. It's a film, however, that should never have come out at all, unless it was going to be used as a primer for how conversations about power and consent get mishandled, muddied, and ultimately used to excuse or obscure abusive behavior. In the movie, C.K. plays a successful but no-longer-on-his-game television producer named Glen Topher. John Malkovich is Leslie Goodwin, a revered 68-year-old director, unapologetic luster after teenage girls, and rumored child molester. If that doesn't make clear that he's intended to be a Woody Allen stand-in, then the reverence with which C.K.'s character treats him should. "He's a great artist! Probably the best writer-filmmaker of the last 30 years or more," he yelps when his daughter, China (Chlo� Grace Moretz), brings up Goodwin's reputed pedophilia and known track record with much younger lovers. Then he scolds her for judging someone on the basis of what she's heard rather than what she can know for sure. "His private life, that's not anybody's business," Glen says, in a variation on a familiar, nauseating rationale that people have used to defend their problematic (right up through potentially criminal) faves for time eternal. It's a rationale C.K. has employed on his own behalf, dismissing talk of his own then-only-rumored misconduct in the New York Times in September by saying, "If you actually participate in a rumor, you make it bigger and you make it real." He went on to say, "The uncomfortable truth is, you never really know. ... To me, if there was one thing this movie is about, it?s that you don?t know anybody."


Given those "rumors" about C.K. ? and the "rumors" that also swirled around Weinstein and Brett Ratner and Kevin Spacey and others before victims recently came forward to confirm allegations to the press ? the astonishing convenience of this stance is galling. (As is the way the film coyly winks at the stories about C.K. by having a character mime jerking off in a room with his coworkers.) You "never really know" only if you're willing to consign accusations of sexual misconduct to the realm of gossip and hearsay, to pretend these stories get whispered about only because no one's sure if they're true, rather than because the consequences of speaking up can be so punitive. As the post-Weinstein fallout consumes Hollywood, spreads through other industries, and provides hope that we may be headed toward actual (maybe) systemic (maybe) change, I Love You, Daddy isn't just tone-deaf. It's stunningly hubristic, pushing an argument that's been used to silence people for decades. And it unfolds entirely within what now feels like a very telling blind spot for its writer, director, and star, in which the answer to questions about consent is inevitably an alarming "it's complicated.?


I Love You, Daddy is the first movie C.K. has directed since Pootie Tang in 2001. In the years since, he's built up a career as one of the most respected stand-ups in the business; created Louie, an acclaimed, uneven FX show that helped spark a slew of other raw, form-pushing dramedies like Atlanta and Master of None; and self-funded Horace and Pete, an impossible to describe play-as-TV-drama-as-web-series that featured some genuinely great writing and acting. C.K. casts himself in the role of an industry hack in I Love You, Daddy, but as a real-life creator, he's been self-funding his projects in order to make them without outside interference. All of which makes the film more enraging and disappointing, coming after so much work that's grappled with other risky subject matter with empathy and humanity.


But he's been dicey on the topics of sexual violence and coercion before. In Season 4 of Louie, his character pushes himself on a resistant Pamela, played by longtime collaborator Pamela Adlon (who also appears in the new movie). During the ensuing struggle she snaps, "This would be rape if you weren?t so stupid!& http://bit.ly/2PkrD4J ; And C.K. has talked about male violence against women in his stand-up, but when he's intentionally portrayed sexual coercion onscreen in the show, he's tended to role-reverse, allowing himself to get forced into oral sex by Melissa Leo or dressed in makeup and penetrated by Adlon. Given that he comes out of these encounters asking to see these women again, these scenes seem more intent on his character's humiliation than on showing any degree of understanding regarding consent. I Love You, Daddy doesn't just continue to muddy the waters around those issues. It is in itself an example of a powerful comedian proving himself incapable of confronting the transgressions of another man in the industry he admires. Which isn't remotely surprising ? in the Times article about C.K., estranged collaborator Tig Notaro goes on the record, but none of C.K.'s male colleagues do. Allen's a formative influence for many comedians, and he's clearly one for C.K., who's acted in one of Allen's movies and who includes multiple homages to Allen's Manhattan in I Love You, Daddy. But after raising the possibility of the sexual assault of a child, the film swerves to focus instead on the gray areas surrounding older men who try to sleep with teenage girls. It's a deflection that's crushing, not just because C.K. chooses not to confront the possible misdeeds of another powerful male comedian, but because he opts instead to pick and choose from the rumors, then argue that maybe some of these troubling choices aren't all that bad. To describe this as an unasked-for argument would be putting it lightly. Yet the film makes it nonetheless, by sidelining the rumors of Goodwin?s pedophilia (something that even the noncommittal Glen can't rationalize away) as a ?really personal story? Goodwin promises to explain over drinks. As Goodwin is shown grooming China, accompanying her as she tries on bikinis at a department store and taking her to Paris, Glen hovers indecisively, wanting to put a stop to what's happening but unwilling to put his foot down and confront either his doted-on child or the artist he so admires.


It's "As the Father of a Daughter": The Movie, but C.K. isn't interested in exploring and critiquing the mindset of men whose empathy for women seems entirely dependent on being a parent to one. In lieu of that, he makes a woman, his love interest Grace (Rose Byrne), present talking points about sexual maturity and why what he suspects is happening between Goodwin and his daughter might not be so bad. These are words C.K. clearly feels too uncomfortable having Glen speak; Grace shoulders the unmanageable burden of defending why teenagers should be able to have sex with adults while Glen halfheartedly recites reasons why it's wrong. She's positioned as the sophisticated third-wave feminist actor to his agency-denying rube, whom she scolds for describing the relationship she had as a teenager with a fiftysomething as rape. "So when a girl does feel lust and desire, then she's got to be with a fucking boy?" she snaps. It's a conversation the movie presents as reasonable, when it's actually queasy and dangerous. C.K. wants to present sex and attraction as things that are too messy for broad rules or generalizations. But it's impossible to do that if you're also going to willfully ignore or remain oblivious to the central issue ? how the massive power imbalance innate to this kind of relationship makes it ripe for abuse, the way power imbalances enabled and protected abuse in all of the stories currently spilling out of Hollywood at the moment. It's Adlon ? tasked as she so often is in C.K?s work with being the voice of reason and sanity ? who comes in as Glen's salty ex-girlfriend, socks him in the arm, and tells him he has to take action, even if it makes China hate him. In doing so, she provides C.K. with an escape hatch. He's able to turn the movie into one about his character's personal failings, rather than follow through on the incredibly troubling arguments he raises and then runs away from.


Woody Allen, like the character Leslie Goodwin, was accused but not charged of sexually abusing a child. His alleged victim was his then 7-year-old adopted daughter by then-partner Mia Farrow. Dylan Farrow reiterated the allegations in 2014, mincing no words in calling out those who continue to work with and support Allen, writing that "Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse." Allen has, of course, continued to work anyway, becoming an enduring symbol of Hollywood?s ability ? up to this point ? to treat sexual misconduct allegations as a mere inconvenience. He continued to work after marrying another of Mia Farrow's adopted children, a woman who is 35 years his junior, whom he met when he was dating Farrow (a relationship that caused a scandal, but wasn't illegal). The same can be said for the relationship between Allen?s 42-year-old character Isaac Davis and the 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan, traces of which ? from the New York City setting to the black-and-white cinematography down to the fact that China is the same age as Tracy ? are all over I Love You, Daddy. (Times have changed, but Allen's attempts to normalize these relationships continue with the film he just finished shooting, A Rainy Day in New York, which reportedly features a sexual relationship between characters played by Jude Law, 44, and 19-year-old Elle Fanning.)


Hemingway herself was 18 when Allen tried to whisk her off to Paris the way Goodwin (Malkovich) does with China (Moretz) in I Love You, Daddy. Unlike China, Hemingway chose not to go ? in her 2015 memoir, Hemingway described turning him down over uncertainty about the sleeping arrangement, saying, "I'm not going to get my own room, am I? I can?t go to Paris with you." Who knows if C.K. was aware of this anecdote when writing I Love You, Daddy (he declined to comment for this piece; C.K. responded to the allegations in the Times story with a written statement in which he says "These stories are true.") ? but it feels like something that could have informed his film, especially in the way Hemingway describes her parents reacting to Allen's offer. "I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn?t. They kept lightly encouraging me," she wrote. C.K.'s insistence, in his own movie, on keeping the focus on parental permissiveness rather than the predatory nature of a decades-older celebrity trying to erode a teenager's boundaries enough to fuck her, serves as its own kind of normalization. And so I Love You, Daddy ends up being a tribute to Allen in ways C.K. probably never intended. "We?re at the bleeding edge of 'That?s not OK to do now,' but those people are still around," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "That?s a very interesting line to be on." He doesn't just let Allen off the hook ? he lets himself off as well.


C.K. has described I Love You, Daddy, which he shot on the sly this summer, as a film he expected would piss some people off. But in light of C.K.'s alleged past behavior, and the fumbled apologies he reportedly made to some of his victims in the years since, the movie plays more like a stroke of self-immolation. It?s watch i love you, daddy 2017 of a man who's been expecting consequences to come calling, and who decided to lean into the coming anger with a have-to-hear-all-sides affront that inadvertently echoes so many of the excuses and denials that men adjacent to or accused of misconduct have offered up in the past few weeks.

 

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