Shorts from The Screening Room – August 2020

From the Video Store Shelf:

An American Pickle (2020 / HBO MAX) – This comedy sees a humorously simple take on the fish out of water story that literally pickles a 1919 version of Seth Rogen only to wake him up 100 years later to meet and live with his identical Brooklyn-based great-grandson. Where, barring some ethics, the two will help each other learn about life, family, hard work, and honor.

It’s nice to see Seth Rogan do more than just swear and crack jokes about weed. In this he plays dual roles from very different eras and brings a quality of life and believability to both. These are characters that you can welcomingly root for and against at different times in the film.

“An American Pickle” is simple, short, and void of the extended Apatow-fat that generally fills these comedies out. I can’t really say whether that’s for ill or gain as far as the film goes, but the bottom line is that “An American Pickle” is largely what you’d expect from a Seth Rogan comedy, just shorter and a little less vulgar.

Note: Sarah Snook (“Succession”) appears in a brief but solid supporting role.

My Admission - $5.50
One Line Review – “Seth Rogen Gets Koshered”
MPAA Rating – PG-13 for some language and rude humor

The Go-Go’s (2020 / SHOWTIME) – This Rock & Roll documentary takes a deep and respectful dive into the punk/pop band’s history through current and historic interviews from the entire band, former members and managers, journalists, artists, and behind-the-scenes personnel. The film is thoroughly absorbing and does the band the service of being more about their work-related struggles and stories, than it is about the “Behind the Music”-style debauchery.

The Go Go’s are a band that have earned the right to be enthralled in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the documentary treats the band, their dramas, and their accomplishments in kind. It doesn’t shy away from the host of trials that any one of a thousand different bands have dealt with, but it doesn’t take advantage of the fact that the members are girls. Ultimately treating the material like any other documentary about any other band with their type of legacy; that’s Rock & Roll, Yo!

My Admission - $6.00
One Line Review – “Chicks Who Rock!”
MPAA Rating – Unrated for language, cigarette and alcohol use

Guns Akimbo (2019 / Amazon) – A trolling phone-app coder pisses off the wrong dark-web caricatures and finds himself thrust into a life & death game of Skizm (pronounced: Schism), a hit internet reality-game show where contestants aim to murder each other in extreme and over-the-top graphic novel-type violent ways; usually involving guns.

It may not sound like much, but in the hands of writer/director Jason Lei Howden (“Deathgasm”) “Guns Akimbo” becomes a hilarious and highly entertaining roller coaster ride. Thanks, in no small part, to the casting of both Daniel Radcliff and Samara Weaving as the principal pugilists. The pair deliver a winning combination of millennial slackerdom and awakened aptitude.

Choosing style over substance, audiences quickly deduce that the film is not taking itself too seriously, allowing them to relax into this witty and fun ride so easily that they probably won’t care so much about how trite and single-noted the film can be.

Note: The film gets a lively boost from actor Rhys Darby (“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” & “The Next Level”) as a homeless mentor.

Note 2: The finale track, “Never Surrender” by Stan Bush, originally appeared in the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film, “Kickboxer”.

Quotes of Note:

1. “I wasted all my bullets on Sid Dickless.”
2. “Murder is art; this one is a Jackson Pollack.”
3. “That look supposed to fucking explain something?”
4.  “Man, I can’t even remember the last time I walked outside without my face in my phone; everything looks so HD.”

My Admission - $7.00
One Line Review – “Entertaining Comic Book Absurdity”
MPAA Rating – R for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language, drug use, sexual references and brief graphic nudity.

Greyhound (2020 / Apple TV+) – Based on C.S. Forester’s 1955 novel, “The Good Shepherd”, the film sees Tom Hanks star as Captain Ernest Krause of the USS Keeling, call sign: Greyhound. Captain Krause is commanding four light warships, who are in turn escorting thirty-seven troop and supply ships, through the Black Pit, a veritable shooting gallery and pseudo-graveyard of sunken ships made by German U-boats in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1942.

The film, written by Tom Hanks, is short, fast, and void of almost any extraneous matter. Being only 90-minutes in length, the film wastes no time getting right to the point in serving up its tightly shot and intense sequences. This is not a Spielberg-type broad military epic though. Instead, this is a very grey, miserable, and cold-weathered film. I don’t get the impression that it’s trying to emotionally move the audience but rather deliver to them an example of the pressured intensity of battle-time decision making.

My Admission - $5.00
One Line Review – “The Pressure-Cooker Express”
MPAA Rating – PG-13 for war-related action/violence and brief strong language

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019 / DVD) – The French-language film, written and directed by Celine Sciamma (“Tomboy”, “Girlhood”) adeptly explores the fate of two young women, a painter and an arranged bride-to-be, in 18th century France.

The film parallels the Greek myth of the escape from Hades of Eurydice and Orpheus and feels in many ways like watching a writer write or a painter paint, draft by draft, until the final artwork emerges. The principals plainly shine as both women and metaphors of misunderstood and forgotten beings who bear universally common and idealistically independent fires that others around them refuse to recognize or to even acknowledge.

It’s evident that the film is lite on both emotionality and passion, but heavy on “the gaze”, which supports the film as a physically moving piece of work. The film is sparse and period-piece slow, but the way in which it eases up to its final and contemplative payoff is masterful and worth the wait. The film’s final shot is, to me at least, as squirm-ridden-ly effective as a Hicthcock moment, but this is no thriller. Instead, it’s a questionably romantic, though fully effective, arthouse commentary on “looking at” and “looking back”.

Note: The Cannes, BAFTA, and Golden Globe nominated film, rather surprisingly, missed out on an Oscar nod.

My Admission - $7.00
One Line Review – “…Of Poets and Lovers”
MPAA Rating – R for some nudity and sexuality

Project Power (2020 / NETFLIX) – Fast and blunt, this actioner delivers a somewhat-welcome spin on the supervillain thriller. The film posits that every person has an unknown and un-awakened superpower; an evolutionary genetic gift that must only be activated. For the film, that activation comes in the form of a drug that awakens one’s own personal superpower for a total of 5 minutes. The catch is that no one knows beforehand exactly what their superpower is, and how, or if, it might affect them.

Basically, the film pits three heroes from differing arenas: a high school drug dealer (Dominique Fishback), a cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and a man on the run (Jamie Fox), in a fight to stop the New Orleans-based superpower drug scourge.

The effects are well done, the script is taut, and the direction delivers some welcome surprises in the staging and shooting of its action scenes. The issues with the film are largely bound up in the fact that this is a twist on a typical drug-thriller. So, if either genre is your thing, you can do a whole lot worse.

My Admission - $6.00
One Line Review – “Fight the Power”
MPAA Rating – R for violence, bloody images, drug content and some language

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