Category Archives: Crime

Queenpins

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Queenpins          3 stars

This week I found a rather silly comedy called Queenpins that is certainly worth a few laughs. While it’s based on a true story about a pair of suburban women who seek to make some money from couponing, it is not above creating some ridiculous situations and the use of bathroom humor to get some laughs. Kristen Bell stars as the cheerful Connie Kaminski and Kirby Howell-Baptiste is her partner JoJo who love to save money by clipping coupons and buying in bulk. The pair decide to expand their enterprise by selling coupons through the mail which is not illegal. The problem comes when they decide to expand further by “procuring” the coupons from a printing company through a couple working on the inside of a plant in Mexico. That would be the illegal part. Soon they realize they are in over their heads so they seek the help of a computer hacker named Tempe Tina (Bebe Rexha) who advises them how to set up fake businesses and use false identities to cover their tracks. While Connie and JoJo are making millions, their activities are soon noticed by a hapless loss prevention manager of the local food store, Ken (played perfectly as a bumbling fool by Paul Walter Hauser of I, Tonya and Cruella). Ken eventually gets the attention of a Postal Inspector (Vince Vaughn) and the hunt is on. Ken is along for the ride and must constantly be reminded that he is not a law enforcement officer. Vaughn with his serious tone and Hauser as the clueless schmuck play off well against each other.  The caper is reminiscent of the McMillions documentary about the real scheme to steal Monopoly games pieces, but Queenpins is strictly for laughs and is never to be taken too seriously. It is a super light comedy that is a bit of fun to start the fall off with.

Collective

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Collective            4 ½ stars

The Romanian documentary Collective is a rare achievement in filmmaking, the filming of an investigation into a scandal while the investigation is unfolding. The film starts with a tragic fire at a night club in Bucharest in 2015 where 27 young people were killed. The scandal occurs later though when it is discovered that the burn victims being treated in the hospitals are dying from bacterial infections at an alarming rate. The investigation being run by a sports magazine called The Sports Gazette, finds that the disinfectant being used in operating rooms has been diluted by a factor of ten rendering it ineffective at killing bacteria. The publication and the journalist, Catalin Tolontan create a sensation when they reveal the company supplying the diluted disinfectant, and the fact that the company supplies the disinfectant used in hospitals throughout Romania. This well constructed documentary goes on to show the extreme levels of corruption that has infested the Romanian government and the health care industry. This is an industry that rewards people connected to the ruling political party with management positions in the hospitals, where they are free to line their pockets at the expense of public safety and abuse the health system employees. We even see the Romanian Health Minister giving a news conference where he assures the press that everything is fine with the disinfectant and that tests show that it is effective, a story that the press is not buying. The Minister is soon forced to resign. It’s an amazing story about a little sports magazine willing to take on a story that the larger media organizations stayed away from, even under threat of retaliation from a group of mobsters. The movie was nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film and it is well worth your while to check out.

Emilia Pérez

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Emilia Pérez       4 ½ stars

Emilia Pérez by director Jacques Audiard is a movie that defies genre. It’s part crime thriller, part opera and part melodrama. Perhaps most of all it’s about trans identity and redemption of the past. It certainly goes against any expectations I may have had. Early on we meet, Rita (Zoe Saldana), a lawyer who defends criminals in the courts of Mexico City. She is good at her job, but also very alone. She is “called on” by a cartel leader named Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascón in a career defining role) who wants to hire her for a most unusual job. Manitas wants to change his life and become the woman that he feels he was meant to be. Rita accepts the offer which entails her finding a doctor to perform the transformation, move Manitas’s family out of Mexico and to help fake his death. Years later, while working in London, Rita meets a woman at a gathering named Emilia Pérez. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that Emilia is the transformed Manitas and that she is not finished with Rita yet. Emilia misses her children and wants to have Rita reunite the family, but with Emilia posing as a long-lost aunt so that even her own family does not know the truth. Even Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) does not recognize her. To relieve her guilt, Emilia establishes a foundation to find the tens of thousands of victims of the drug wars so that relatives can know the truth of what happened to their loved ones, many of whose deaths she was responsible for. Thus, the movie brings the tragedies of the drug wars out into the open showing what has happened to a society that has lost so much. Mexico has lost more than 100,000 people this way. And all of this is done in performances of song and dance, making the movie an opera with a tragic story to tell. Zoe Saldana is especially talented as a dancer as she condemns the evildoers she has been acquainted as she moves from one tabletop to another. But it is Sofia Gascón especially who gives the greatest performance as both parts of her role. The actress is herself a transgender making her well suited to the role, in addition to her acting ability. Selena Gomez also puts in a convincing performance as the wife in a part that is miles from her Disney girl roles of the past and allows her to connect with her Mexican roots. The movie is probably not for everyone, but if the idea of a crime thriller set to music piques your interest you should give it a try.

Better Days

Better Days         4 stars

The movie Better Days, released in 2019 is a representation of the high stress levels on high school students in China combined with the prevalence of bullying among peers in the schools. Based on actual events it follows the life of Chen Nian, a high school girl going through final exams which determine the fate of millions of Chinese every year. Nian is from an impoverished home where she lives with her mother and where they are being hounded by creditors. As if this isn’t enough Nian is being bullied by some of the girls at her school, but the level of bullying is much more extreme than what kids experience here in America. It rises to the level of criminal behavior, and for poor Nian the police and her teachers are completely ineffective in dealing with the problem, so she turns to Xiao Bei, a local street punk who himself is constantly beaten by local gangs. Bei vows to protect her from the abusive classmates. It is then that the movie turns into more of a doomed romance story between the two main characters. There are more aspects of the story including a police investigation and deaths of some students that I won’t go into, but it is a very compelling story with some good performances. The story does get a little confusing as some of the editing is done with flashbacks and because of the unfamiliar Chinese names the characters have. It helps to be able to do a little rewinding to follow the plot. The movie is significant as the real events led Chinese authorities to examine the problem of bullying in their schools that resulted in reforms that successfully reduced the problem. Be warned that the level of violence toward these kids is more than we would expect in a story concerning high school students. Better Days was nominated for Best International Feature Film in 2021.

House of Gucci

House of Gucci                  4 stars

The movie to see this week is the true crime drama House of Gucci, Ridley Scott’s take on the treachery and backstabbing that went on in the family handbag business of Gucci from the seventies to the nineties. Much of the movie is about the squabbles and double crosses over the differences of opinion on how to run the family business. But the thing that really makes the movie is Lady Gaga’s performance as Patrizia Reggiani, the daughter of a middle-class business owner who married Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) and then forces her own ideas of running the business on others with dire consequences for everyone involved. The story develops slowly but gets progressively more interesting with each move turning one family member against another. Al Pacino is his usual convincing self as Aldo Gucci, one of the two brothers that are the primary owners of Gucci. Jared Leto is unrecognizable as Paolo Gucci, the clueless cousin of Maurizio who falls victim to Patrizia’s schemes. I was not familiar with the story of the Gucci empire and you will probably be better off not knowing the background before seeing the movie. With every scene she is in, Lady Gaga proves that she deserves the title of movie star as she determines the mood of the film throughout. She proves that her performance in A Star is Born from four years ago was no fluke.

West Side Story

West Side Story                5 stars

We’ve had a few movie musicals hit the theaters in the past year to great acclaim such as In the Heights and Tick Tick Boom. But December brought us the big one, Steven Spielberg’s remake of the classic 1961 West Side Story. This updated version has all the same memorable musical numbers of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim performed to perfection. Add to it the free flowing dance numbers done by ethnically correct actors and an updated take on the racial tensions between the white gang called the Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks and you have a sure hit on your hands. The Romeo and Juliet story brought to the blighted streets of New York requires a young cast and it was filled out with very talented actors. They include Rachel Zegler as the love struck Maria and Ansel Elgort (of Baby Driver) as her lover Tony who have some great chemistry between them. The gang leaders, Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist) bring their race hating contempt to reality in their roles. Ariana DeBose as Anita, the girlfriend of Bernardo has some very energetic performances in “America” and her preaching to Maria about the dangerous path she is taking. Of course the presence of Rita Moreno cannot be missed with the specially created role of Valentina made for her. She was the original Anita in the 1961 version sixty years ago. At the age of 90 she shows that she has still got it. Other than the music I could not remember that much of the original movie (based on the Broadway musical), but the story of the doomed lovers in the setting of a racially tinged gang war is something that is relevant across multiple eras. I hope it is finding a wide audience.

Alice

Alice                                      4 suns

An imaginative film that I thoroughly enjoyed was Alice. Alice (Keke Palmer) is a house slave on a southern plantation where she is owned by a cruel white man who maintains discipline through pitiless beatings. One day Alice has had all she can take and makes a run for freedom, only to find herself in modern 1973 America where she meets a kind truck driver named Frank (Common). This blending of time periods is not a case of time travel but represents a southern plantation that kept its slavey practice in place for more than 100 years. In this story Alice quickly catches on to the changes made in America transforming herself in the style of Pam Greer of the blaxploitation films of the seventies. What a cultural statement! The film is an excellent portrayal of the struggle of Black Americans against oppression across eras of American history. During the Q&A, the filmmakers talked about how there have been actual cases of people kept in slavery up to the 1960’s but they did not go into details about how this happened. It would be interesting to learn more about it.

892

892                                         4 suns

892 was the winner of the U.S. Dramatic Ensemble Cast Special Jury Award. It is a fairly straightforward story concerning a desperate former U.S. marine who has decided to hold employees of a bank hostage so that he can receive what is owed to him by the VA. I thought it seemed a little slow moving for a hostage taking drama. There were few action scenes and most of the film dealt with the negotiations between the marine and the police negotiator. But by the end I realized that this was a representation of an actual event which explains a lot, especially why such a subject was chosen. The acting performances were especially superb including John Boyega of Star Wars as Brian, the marine and Michael Kenneth Williams as the negotiator in what would be his final film role. This film is very unlike one from last year called Prime Time, also about a hostage situation, but was more dramatic and tension filled. Of course that one was a fictional story. 892 serves as a reminder about how our obligations to those who serve often go unfilled.

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley                                                4 ½ stars

Four years after creating the weirdly romantic film about a woman and her fish man lover, The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro brings us a gritty, lurid film based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham that shares the same name, Nightmare Alley. When you see the famed Mexican director’s name associated with a film, you know you are in for something unusual and disturbing. We can sense that this is a story of betrayal and doom. We first meet Stanton Carlisle, a man down on his luck in 1939 as he is burning a body inside an old house. The mysterious Stanton played by Bradley Cooper in one of his best roles to date manages to get hired at a carnival by the boss (Willem Dafoe). The carnival features a very seedy collection of freaks and sideshow performers in scenes that capture the feel of the depression. Stanton is immediately drawn to the carnival’s mentalists Zeena (Toni Collette) and Pete (David Strathairn) and finds he has a gift for reading people, eventually leaving and creating his own act, teaming up with another of the performers, Molly (Rooney Mara), whose beauty makes her stand out from the carnival freaks. As the pair perform their craft in high end clubs, Stanton encounters Lilith Ritter, a wealthy psychoanalyst whose clientele includes politicians, judges and business tycoons. Cate Blanchett plays the role expertly as her very presence commands our attention. She was born to play roles like this. Soon enough this pair devises a plan to separate the elite from their money with an elaborate scheme that is bound to lead to ruin, (though I won’t say whose). The film gets the feel of forties film noir movies that is aided by an astounding collection of gifted A list actors. Nightmare Alley was previously made into a movie in 1947 starring Tyrone Power, but I am sure del Toro did it with a much bigger budget. I am expecting it will receive a few Academy Award nominations later this week.

Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile             3 stars

In Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh makes his second outing as the famous detective, Hercule Poirot, having previously solved a killing in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express. This time the Agatha Christie hero is isolated on another means of transportation, a river boat on the Nile River in 1937 Egypt, where while on vacation a dead body is discovered among the many passengers on board. But before all this we first are introduced to some of Poirot’s backstory where we learn of his experiences in battle in the Great War and how he came to wear that unmistakably large mustache. This is followed by his encounters with many of the characters at a London night club that include Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), a masculine playboy who steams up the dance floor with his fiancé Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey). He meets ultra-rich heiress Linett Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) there who is also Jacqueline’s best friend. Fast forward to the previously mentioned scene in Egypt at a high class hotel, we find that Simon has ditched his girlfriend and is now on his honeymoon with his new love, Linett. There are many other associated individuals at the hotel all with connections to Linett, but the shocker is when Jacqueline shows up to the party, uninvited. It is in these circumstances that our detective, Poirot, must interrupt his vacation and join the guests on the Nile riverboat, in order to keep the newlywed couple safe. It is only then that the first of the dead bodies appears, against the backdrop of the spectacular desert scenery of Egypt that could be from a movie of the forties or fifties. This being a movie based on an Agatha Christie novel, there are many suspects all with a possible motive for murder that must be investigated. Most of them are destined to stand around a lot until they are interrogated by Poirot while the viewer puzzles over who the killer could be, or yet another murder happens. While the production quality is high and we are treated to some very interesting cast members (including Annette Bening and Russel Brand) some of the social interactions seem more appropriate to our present than the 1930’s that the movie is set in. Of the two Poirot movies of Branagh, I liked this one better than Murder on the Orient Express. But for a superb murder mystery, you would do even better with 2019’s Knives Out.