By Anne Brodie China’s spectacular Enter The Forbidden City available on Blu-ray, DVD and Streaming August 18 is a culturally important film, with a majestic, timeless vibe and in style, reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s work. It has authority, power and movement, attention to atmospheric and artistic detail, multiple levels of action and depth of focus. It’s complex and stimulating and unusual to the Western eye; ancient Chinese culture beautifully distilled. It’s set between the city and nature, 250 years ago, as the Peking Opera started to take shape. In an elaborate theatre, a superstar performs an edgy opera for an audience of men. In the street, he sees a beautiful young woman, follows her, and kidnaps her to the bamboo forest to declare his love. She accepts, but they’re arrested and returned to the city. The opera troupe prepares for the Emperor’s 80th birthday as drama and adventure unfold. Epic, elegant, severe, and beautiful, a romance and origins story from female director Mei Hu pays tribute to centuries of Chinese culture, morality and social history and its beauty. A little payback propaganda in the wake of China detractors south of our border. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk5-aB15N3M
I’m in love with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run. Life’s been tough for a few months, and this wacky, subversive, and ultra-fun cartoon is just what the doctor ordered. SpongeBob met Gary the Snail years earlier at Camp Coral and they are closerthanthis. But some villain sail-naps him one crummy day and so SpongeBob and his loyal pal Patrick must find him even if it means traveling to Sin City, that “cesspool of moral depravity”, The Lost City of Atlantic City. King Poseidon stole Gary because he’s an extraordinarily vain man and snail juice keeps his wrinkles at bay. SpongeBob and Patrick enter uncharted territory, full of danger, lures, and snares of the most glittering kind. Good thing they have Keanu Reeves in a rolling Tumbleweed to guide them on their mission. Marvelous flights of fancy, strains of the Barry Lyndon theme music, a recreation of a scene from Ben-Hur, threats of an execution floor show, and high energy hijinks make this daffy nuttiness an instant mood lifter. Director Tim Hill with the voices of Tom Kenny, Awkwafina, Snoop Dogg, Danny Trejo. UK comedy star Matt Berry, Clancy Brown, Rodger Bumpass, and Bill Fagerbakke.
Have you ever been followed while driving by a big, honking truck and angry driver? Me too. Unhinged stars Russell Crowe as the angry driver – which is an understatement, he’s just killed his wife and new man and burned their house to the ground, and now he’s on the road. Rachel (Caren Pistorius), and her teenage son (Gabriel Bateman) are late and make a few bad driving moves to beat the traffic jam, and soon enough, Crowe and his motorized beast loom. He asks for an apology, she refuses and talks back, setting the course for a day she’ll never forget. Crowe’s Man says he’ll teach her a lesson. What follows is sustained terror, an extraordinary body count, cars and buildings wiped out and, well, proofs of a mind and reason gone, and a beast loosed. If you’re squeamish, steer clear. If you’re into schadenfreude, and mass destruction, don’t miss it. No one’s free from responsibility, just as in life. Directed by Derrick Borte.
Paula Van Der Oest’s psychological thriller The Bay of Silence with Claes Bang, Olga Kurylenko, and Brian Cox and co-starring writer and producer Caroline Goodall explores the impact of mental illness on a new family in crisis. Will and Rosalind are pregnant newlyweds, living in a scenic seaside town in northern Italy with her two young daughters. Rosalind suffers hallucinations and paranoid episodes after the birth of her son. Will’s world falls apart when he returns home one day to find them missing, the word Liar painted on the window. He enlists her father’s help to find her when a young man shows up with a story to tell. He’s seen them in a decaying estate in France, a place Will saw in her childhood photos. And the man tells Will his son is dead. This atmospheric and sinister universe is ironically sun-dappled and gorgeous, as its quiet power gets under the skin.
Never Too Late, a Golden Girls for mature men available on VOD August 18, finds four hardened “chainbreakers” i.e. habitual nursing home escapees, looking to go on the lam for good. James Cromwell, Dennis Waterman, Roy Billing, and Jack Thompson are decorated Vietnam War veterans, each having acquired hero status. They find the home demoralizing; they’re sharp with only occasional memory losses, but the mission is now is clear – get the hell out. They enlist a nurse’s son to hack the home’s computer system to launch their fool-proof escape plan. Then they plan to kill the Vietnamese General who tortured them, who lives in a nursing home across town. An even older fellow who was in the real WWII Great Escape cheers them on. They reckon everyone deserves a happy ending and for Cromwell’s character, that means re-establishing romance with a new resident he last saw fifty years ago as he shipped off to war. Its sentimental, untidy, and predictable and heart-warming and at times, really funny.
The Brits do TV better than anyone including game shows. The brilliant, long-running QI is a must-see original, finally available in North America on BritBox. If you like your chatter bawdy, whip-smart, and educational this is for you. Hosted by notable smarty pantses Alan Davies and Sandi Toksvig who you know from The Great British Bake-Off, the aim is to be “quite rude”.
The QI hosts and guests will say anything, announcing lists of words not allowed on BBC TV, looking at the problems of pubic hair, the mating and battling habits of peculiar animals and birds, the Retching Scale, discovering why prostitutes are called Winchester geese, as they dress up or play random badminton game. Interestingly, some pandemic episodes shot without a studio audience lose nothing, they’re outstanding. Something you’d never hear here – Toksvig shouting out “I’m gonna sh*t myself if I don’t get this right!” unbleeped and ending the episode with a quote from Dostoyevsky.
Rod Lurie’s The Outpost is now available on DVD. Based on Jake Tapper’s book of the same name, it’s a military thriller covering events of The Battle of Kamdesh in Afghanistan in 2009 when US soldiers were trapped in a geographically hazardous valley, easy prey for well-armed Taliban forces. The American lives lost, the constant state of high alert and diminishing fortunes are countered by the stalwart mindset of the soldiers and their leaders. They were trained to carry on. The Bravo Troop 3-61 CAV was one of the most decorated units of the 19-year conflict, but not without devastating loss. Lurie’s superior gift for storytelling coupled with his mastery of the medium makes this the best war movie in recent memory, intimate and expansive, grim realism and teamwork are inspiring. Top-notch performances, particularly Caleb Landry Jones as a young soldier out of his depth and Scott Eastwood and Orlando Bloom as leaders, bring it home in this heart-wrenching film. Lurie is a West Point graduate and soldier turned film critic turned filmmaker and has turned out quality political thrillers; this is his best yet. You can feel his passion.
My interview with Rod Lurie