#thetriptogreece

After a rather drab weekend with not too many new releases and fewer that I was very excited about, we’re getting a few semi-decent films that hopefully will find an audience at the drive-ins, including some newly reopened ones.

But first… SPAGHETTIMAN!!!!

I’m pretty excited to hear that the virtual Oxford Film Festival is doing a special one-day screening of the HeckssBender’s hilarious superhero comedy, which I saw at the festival way back in 2016, where it became a bit of a sensation. You can get tickets to watch the movie and attend a special commemorative QnA, moderated by yours truly, right here! As you can imagine, I’m a huge fan of this indie superhero movie set in L.A. where a slacker named Clark, played by Benjamin Crutcher (who I think will be a huge comedy star someday), ends up getting superpowers… um… to produce spaghetti. When his roommate and best friend Dale (Winston Carter) finds out, he prompts Clark to use his powers to fight crime, but Clark has a better idea… he can fight crime for MONEY! It’s a very funny and sometimes silly premise but man, I love what these guys did with that premise. If you’re a fan of Broken Lizard and other comedy collectives, you should use Spaghettiman as your entry into the wonderful and wacky world of HeckBender! (They made a second feature since then called Cop Chronicles: Loose Cannons: the Legend of the Haj-Mirage and they have a YouTube channel, if you want more laughs.)

Oxford also adds more things to its Virtual Cinema this weekend, including a block of “Black Lens Narrative Shorts,” the documentary Queen of Lapa and the third “Fest Forward” block, all of which you can order at Eventive (including a few that will end on Thursday).

Also, the second Film Festival Day will take place this Saturday through the Film Festival Alliance with a virtual screening of Angela Pinaglia’s documentary, Life in Synchro, which is all about synchronized ice skating. About 34 regional film festivals, including the Oxford Film Festival, are taking part in the program which takes place this Saturday, May 23, and you can learn more about it at the Film Festival Day site.

Now that we’ve gotten some of the festival news over with, let’s begin this week’s column with a trip to England… well, not quite. The movie I’ve been most excited about is Michael Winterbottom’s THE TRIP TO GREECE (IFC Films), the fourth (and sadly, final) movie in the series of mockumentaries, starring best frenemies Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who have really turned these movies into quite an art and science.

As the title will attest, this time they’re in Greece, basically doing the same things they did in Italy and Spain, visiting restaurants, eating food, squabbling with each other while also trying to one-up each other with a choice of selection of impressions. There’s a lot of Bee Gees and John Travolta references, as well as the duo recreating scenes from movies like Marathon Man and Midnight Cowboy. When that’s not happening, Rob is teasing Steve for his roving eye for women, while Steve gets him back since he’s found more fame and success in his career. 

These aren’t documentaries, though, and Winterbottom includes a few scripted scenes to tie things together. We even get an arty black and white dream sequence dealing with Steve’s dying father, and these all offer good opportunities for Coogan and Brydon to show off their dramatic acting chops, which is another topic of dissension.

What’s nice is that The Trip to Greece works well as a standalone film even if you haven’t seen the previous three films. If you have seen the previous “Trip” movies, you may already know what to expect. If you’re a fan, you’ll already know that spending time with these two hilarious guys is a perfectly fine alternative for being able to go on trips yourself.

The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo’s new movie, MILITARY WIVES (Bleecker Street), is another movie I saw right before the NYC movie theater lockdown, when it was supposed to be released in mid-March. Bleecker Street has finally decided to give the movie a digital release, although maybe it’ll get into some of those newly-opened drive ins where it would play beautifully. As the title suggests, it takes place on a British military base where a group of wives, including Kristin Scott Thomas’ Kate, come together to form a recreational chorus to have fun and get their minds off their spouses at war. Kate is a type-A control freak, so she is immediately at odds with Sharon Horgan’s Lisa, who is more popular among the wives.

Going into this movie knowing that it’s based on a real story about wives who formed a singing group and knowing that this is directed by the guy behind The Full Monty may be all you need to know about what is generally a cutesie dramedy where a wide variety of group of women get together to support each other with all sorts of ups and downs. Listen, this isn’t exactly redefining the wheel other than this being a younger group of women than, say, Calendar Girls, but it’s in the same vein. This is basically a feel-good movie with a last act that gets a little corny, but it’s otherwise a wonderful story and Thomas leads a strong cast of women, joined by Greg Wise as her husband and Jason Flemyng as the officer in charge of the base.

This isn’t a terrible movie, and even though the last act starts to get corny as the women prepare for an Albert Hall performance, the film is otherwise a wonderful film full of emotions that only true curmudgeons would feel like their time was wasted by watching it. Bleecker Street will now release Military Wives on Hulu and digital just in time for Memorial Day weekend, which actually may have been more appropriate than its original March date.

The suspense thriller INHERITANCE (Vertical), directed by Vaughn Stein (Terminal) revolves around a wealthy and powerful Monroe family whose patriarch suddenly dies, leaving his daughter Lauren (Lily Collins) and wife (Connie Nielsen) with a shocking secret inheritance that could unravel their lives. I won’t say much about the secret, but it involves an almost unrecognizable Simon Pegg, spending much of his time in the dark with an American accent and giving a very different performance than we’ve seen from him.

I’m a big fan of Lily Collins as an actor, and I’m all for actors trying to stretch out a bit with their roles, but I’m not sure she was well-suited to play District Attorney Lauren Monroe, which may have worked better with an older actor. Although Collins is in her early ‘30s, she still looks very young, and because of that, it’s hard to believe her already being the D.A. (something which would generally take a dozen or more years as an attorney, one would expect). Pegg isn’t much better, and maybe because he too is trying something different from the norm. Since the majority of the movie is just the two actors, it involves as lot of over-emoting to creating dramatic fireworks that never fully arrive. Collins in particular tends to go over with every emotion in a performance that desperately needed to be scaled back. The rest of the cast is just okay with Nielsen having an even smaller part than Patrick Warburton -- an odd casting choice as Lauren’s father -- who dies as the film begins. Chace Crawford plays Lauren’s brother who is running for office, a subplot that add so little to the mix, except to try and create more tension.

I haven’t gotten around to seeing HBO’s Succession to know if there are any similarities in terms of its exploration of dark family secrets, but Inheritance is just not very good or interesting.  The writing (by Matthew Kennedy) is weak, a bit like a bad television drama, in fact, and the severe miscasting just makes it harder for anyone to deliver on the material. Realizing this, Stein overpowers every scene with overdramatic score that makes it even harder to appreciate the actors’ efforts. In some ways, Inheritance reminded me of the recent Human Capital, which was generally a better film with a stronger story, but Stein’s inspiration clearly comes from all those ‘80s and ‘90s thrillers that try to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats. Like David Tennant’s Bad Samaritan a few years back, this one fails to get the viewer even remotely excited. (The movie was also valid proof of why I hate watching movies on my computer since most of the scenes are so dark, it’s hard to really get much out of it.) Inheritance has been playing on DirecTV since April 23, but it will be available On Demand and Digitally this Friday.

Paramount Players is the latest studio to go the VOD route with the found footage supernatural thriller, BODY CAM (Paramount Players), directed by Malik Vitthal (Netflix’s Imperial Dreams) and starring Mary J. Blige, Nat Wolff, Theo Rossi and more. It involves a routine traffic stop by police officers that leads to the grisly death of one of them, and the surviving officer (Mary J. Blige) realizing that the victim’s body cam footage may be able to show what really happened as she tries to understand the supernatural force behind a series of murders. Sadly, Paramount Players wouldn’t supply critics with early screeners to watch and review, so I may have to wait for one of my colleagues to shell out the bucks.

A movie I saw at least year’s Tribeca that will be available digitally this week is Sasie Sealy’s LUCKY GRANDMA (Good Deeds Entertainment), starring Tsai Chin as a recently-widowed and quite ornery 80-year-old Chinatown resident who goes to see a fortune teller who tells her she is going to have a very lucky day. Of course, she takes that as advice to go to Atlantic City where she wins big, but it’s her trip on the bus back where she gets lucky when a man with a bag full of cash dies. Grandma’s newfound bag of cash ends up attracting the attention of local gangsters, so to protect herself, she hires a rival gangster as her bodyguard. This is a really fun movie that I probably before I saw my #1 movie of 2019, The Farewell, and it’s only similar in that it involves a lovable Chinese grandma, and it mostly takes place in and around Chinatown in New York, but Sealy has a filmmaking style more in the vein of a Tarantino or even the Safdie Brothers where it really pushes the genre aspects of the story with the music choices, which are particularly fantastic. But really, it’s the amazing character created by Sealy with Tsai Chin that makes the movie so entertaining. I’m so glad that this is finally being released so more people can see it since it was such a popular but underseen movie at Tribeca last year.

Another film to look out for this weekend is Benjamin Ree’s documentary THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF (NEON), which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s the story of Czech artist Barbara Kysilkova, who has two paintings stolen by Karl-Bertil Nordland, but when she seeks out the thief, she ends up befriending him and asking him to sit for a portrait as a bond is formed between these unlikely people. It will also be available on Hulu, VOD, on various Virtual Cinema platforms AND at select drive-ins starting this Friday.

Also on digital this week is Philip (Boiling Point) Barantini’s action-thriller VILLAIN (Saban Films), starring Craig Fairbrass as ex-con Eddie Franks, who is trying to start a new life after leaving prison. He soon finds that impossible when he learns his brother owes a large amount of money to a dangerous drug lord, so Eddie has to return to that life of crime in order to help him.

FilmLinc’s Virtual series continues this week with a combination of new and repertory films, including Bruno Dumont’s Joan of Arc/Jeanne (KimStim), a sequel to Dumont’s 2017 musical, Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc. This one, which premiered as a selection in this year’s cut-short “Rendezvous with French Cinema,” stars ten-year-old Leplat Prudhomme, and it will get a one-week exclusive rental with 50% of its $10 rental to go to FilmLinc. Also this week, the venue’s Virtual series will include Raúl Ruiz’s 2010 film Mysteries of Lisbon, an HD premiere that includes new footage.

As mentioned last month, the docuseries, Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time (Quiver Distribution), will continue this week with Volume 2: Horror and Sci-Fi, which is available right now on digital, On Demand, and while I haven’t watched this episode yet, if it’s even remotely as good as Vol. 1, this will be a must-see.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Paramount has another planned release going to streaming, and in this case, it’s Michael Showalter’s THE LOVEBIRDS, reuniting him with The Big Sick co-writer/star Kumail Nanjiani and pairing him with Issa Rae from HBO’s Insecure.  Despite the title, the googly-eyed love between Nanjiani’s Jibran and Rae’s Leilani only lasts a few minutes before the film cuts forward after they’d been together for a few years, and things aren’t as copacetic. They are close to breaking up, but on a trip to their last party together, the couple’s car is hijacked by someone who claims to be a cop and is chasing a guy on a bicycle. When the carjacker kills said cyclist, Jibran and Leilani realize that they may not have been helping the good guy. They’re soon sent on a trip through an underground world of crime and conspiracy to clear their names since they feel as if they’re the primary suspects in the murder.

I actually was looking forward to The Lovebirds after seeing its first trailer at CinemaCon last year. I generally like Nanjiani and really wanted him to bounce back from last year’s Stuber, which was pretty disappointing. Teaming him Rae seems to have done the trick since they’re both funny in their own right, but then they have former “The State” and “Stella” member Showalter at the helm, and he’s proven with his growing filmography as a director that he’s good at mixing laughs and even going fully R-rated when necessary.  While the trip the duo takes isn’t particularly enlightening or different from other “buddy action comedies” (other than bringing together their own comic sensibilities), it all leads up to quite an amusing Eyes Wide Shut parody before its semi-obvious climax and endings.

Sure, some of the funniest bits of The Lovebirds were in the trailer, and some moments are downright corny, because you generally can figure out where it’s going. I did prefer this more comedic take on the premise that was slightly similar to last year’s Queen and Slim, and the combination of Showalter, Nanjiani and Rae allows the movie to go to newer comedic territory than we’ve seen from any of them.

In other words, this is still far better than Stuber and a lot of the Adam Sandler comedies produced by Netflix, so the streaming network kind of lucked out by having the opportunity to stream this semi-decent comedy, which more people are likely to see on the streaming service than they would have in theaters.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!