Ordinary Angels: Sweet and heavenly

Ordinary Angels (2024) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG, for dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.23.24

Given how polarized our country has become, it’s refreshing to see a story that involves community members selflessly coming together for a common purpose.

 

Faced with stacks of overdue notices, Sharon (Hilary Swank) helps Ed (Alan Ritchson)
separate them into three piles, from "it can wait" to "extremely urgent."

The fact that director Jon Gunn’s heartwarming film is based on actual events — astonishing actual events, at that — is icing on the cake.

Scripters Kelly Fremon Craig and Meg Tilly haven’t strayed far from what went down in Louisville, KY, in late 1993 and early ’94: a winter still remembered for a massive storm that dumped almost 16 inches of snow in a single night, killed at least five people, and left much of the city without power.

 

Ed Schmitt remembers it for an entirely different reason ... but that’s getting ahead of things.

 

Gunn opens his film on tragedy, as Ed (Alan Ritchson) loses his wife Theresa (Amy Acker, seen only fleetingly) to Wegener’s disease, a rare and horrific condition that leads to organ failure. He’s left to function as a single parent to young daughters Ashley (Skywalker Hughes) and Michelle (Emily Mitchell).

 

His wife’s loss isn’t the end of Ed’s anguish; Michelle was born with liver disease, which has worsened to the point that the little girl desperately needs a transplant. But that’s expensive, and dealing with Theresa’s illness and death left Ed with nothing but bills and overdue notices; he’s a blue-collar roofer with no means of quickly raising the necessary cash.

 

Elsewhere in the city, hard-living hairdresser Sharon Stevens (Hilary Swank) is on the fast track to alcoholic extinction. Her adult son wants nothing to do with her, and best friend Rose (Tamala Jones) can’t get her to acknowledge the drinking problem.

 

Then — proving anew that sometimes the best way to help yourself, is to help somebody else — Sharon spots a newspaper article that describes the Schmitt family’s plight, and appeals for help.

 

She impulsively decides to provide some.

 

But that’s an uphill sell, particularly after she crashes Theresa’s funeral service (a teeth-grindingly embarrassing sequence that’s almost impossible to endure, due to Swank’s performance). Even so, Sharon’s self-destructive tendencies are matched by an equally strong stubborn streak; she’s not one to take “no” for an answer.

 

She therefore turns into a ferociously persistent, one-woman public relations machine ... albeit after a rocky start. (Political campaign managers should be so doggedly tenacious.)

The Good Mother: Relentlessly bad

The Good Mother (2023) • View trailer

NO STARS. Rated R, for profanity, violence and drug content

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

I cannot imagine why someone of Hilary Swank’s stature signed on to something this dreadful.

 

This isn’t merely a bad film; it’s also badly made. Bizarre camera placement. (Who frames a two-shot so that half of one person is cut off?) Wildly inappropriate choices of music, at bewilderingly wrong moments. Frequent night-time and deserted building set-ups so poorly illuminated that it’s impossible to tell what’s happening.

 

After her son is killed in what appears to be a drug deal gone bad, Marissa (Hilary Swank,
right) reluctantly teams up with his pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke), in order
to figure out what actually went down.

That said, I wish cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby had just left the cap on her camera lens, and fully spared us 90 minutes of misery.

Somebody should rip up Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s Directors Guild card; he shouldn’t be let near another film shoot. But his feeble efforts at helming this misfire pale when compared to the script he co-wrote with Madison Harrison: absolutely the most ridiculous, atrociously contrived bit of nonsense I’ve seen in years.

 

None of these characters feels genuine. Not even Swank can breathe life into her starring role. The so-called plot lurches forward only because every key character behaves like an imbecile at all times. 

 

The result is nothing but a string of “jump the shark” moments. On top of which, the plot’s supposed “surprise reveal” is blindingly obvious from the start.

 

Marissa (Swank) is a newspaper journalist in Albany, NY, whose career has stalled in the wake of her husband’s death a few years back. (One wonders why she continues to mourn, given that she later admits he was an abusive jerk: merely one of many details this misbegotten script can’t justify.) As the film begins, she’s shattered by the news that her estranged younger son — Michael (Harrison, in a fleeting acting cameo), a drug addict — has just been shot dead.

 

This comes as no real surprise to Marisa’s other son, Toby (Jack Reynor), a police officer who has been tracking the local distribution of fentanyl-laced heroin, and believes that Michael and longtime friend Ducky (Hopper Penn) were involved. When Michael’s seven-months-pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke) shows up at the funeral, Marissa loses control, believing her to be the “bad influence” in Michael’s life.

 

The two women subsequently reach an uneasy alliance — a moment that neither actress can sell — when Paige insists that Ducky couldn’t possibly have killed his best friend; it simply doesn’t make sense.

 

That evening, Paige goes through Michael’s things and finds a suitcase containing two large baggies of heroin. Just as she’s absorbing the implications, two men break into her apartment; she barely escapes with the suitcase. With nowhere else to go, Paige shows up at Marissa’s house, first hiding the suitcase in the front porch crawlspace; she removes oneof the bags (!) and hands it to Marissa and Toby.

 

To Toby’s obvious concern, the two women decide to play Nancy Drew, in order to a) find Ducky; b) determine if he did or didn’t kill Michael; c) find possible witnesses to the young man’s slaying; and d) figure out who broke into Paige’s place.

 

All while everybody mostly ignores the elephant in the room: Marissa’s return slide into alcoholism. (We cringe every time she gets behind the wheel of a car.)

The Hunt: Deplorably tasteless

The Hunt (2020) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for relentless profanity, gore and strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang

To coin a phrase — quite aptly, since a little porker figures in this grisly exercise in sadism — you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

The only thing worse than a gratuitously brutal horror flick, is one that attempts to “justify” its mayhem with a clunky political subtext.

Kidnapped and dumped in the wilderness for no apparent reason, a group of strangers —
from left, "Staten Island" (Ike Barinholz, back to camera), "Trucker" (Justin Hartley),
"Big Red" (Kate Nowlin), "Yoga Pants" (Emma Roberts) and Don (Wayne Duvall) —
wonder what they're supposed to do with an armory of weapons.

Rubbish is rubbish, no matter how it’s dressed.

In a better film, scripter Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s jabs at “elites” versus “deplorables” could have been suspenseful and uneasily relevant: a cheeky update of Richard Connell’s classic 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” most famously filmed in 1932 with Joel McCrea and Leslie Banks.

But director Craig Zobel’s horror-porn sensibilities are so gratuitously low-rent, that any semblance of social commentary is lost amid gore-laden blood, guts and entrails. Most of the so-called “characters” are too one-dimensional; the intended-to-be-astute remarks are too lame, obvious and random. This is filmmaking by arrested adolescents who enjoy pulling the wings off flies, and who delight in sharing the experience with us.

Let’s plunge in:

Eleven people, all with their mouths painfully collared, regain consciousness in random spots of a forest that surrounds an open meadow. They gradually assemble around a huge crate which, when opened, proves to contain a piglet in a T-shirt (don’t ask) and a weapons rack (a rather blatant swipe from The Hunger Games).

Alas, these hapless victims barely have time to contemplate whether they even know how to use such artillery, when they start getting picked off by explosive, high-powered rifle fire from a distant, well-stocked duck blind.

Not exactly sporting. Less “The Hunt,” and more “The Slaughter.”

Zobel and his scripters obviously enjoy toying with us, because in veryshort order, cinematographer Darran Tiernan’s systematic designation of such a film’s traditional survivors — the cute girl, the stalwart guy, etc. — is rent asunder. Within minutes, the group has been whittled down to just a few.

No surprise, since these poor souls aren’t even granted names, and instead are designated (but only in the press notes) as “Yoga Pants” (Emma Roberts), “Trucker” (Justin Hartley), “Big Red” (Kate Nowlin), “Vanilla Nice”(Sturgill Simpson) “Staten Island” (Ike Barinholtz) and “Dead Sexy” (Sylvia Grace Crim).

Considering what happens to the latter, her label is beyond offensive.

Logan Lucky: Misfit heist comedy beats the odds

Logan Lucky (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and somewhat harshly, for brief profanity and crude language
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.25.17

Director Steven Soderbergh appears to have been bitten by the Fargo bug.

The droll, slow-burn Logan Lucky could be described as a cross between Soderbergh’s Oceans 11 and that iconic 1996 crime thriller — and its more recent, and ongoing, television adaptation — with additional regional absurdity supplied by an impudent original script credited to “Rebecca Blunt.”

Jimmy (Channing Tatum, right) employs a cardboard diorama to explain his "perfect
scheme" for robbing the heavily guarded underground vault at the Charlotte Motor
Speedway, as his brother Clyde (Adam Driver) reacts with mounting disbelief.

The quotes are intentional, because no such person exists. As yet, this film’s writer hasn’t been identified, although sources have suggested Soderbergh, or his wife Jules Asner, or several other possibilities. Certainly Soderbergh is no stranger to pseudonyms; indeed, he employs two for Logan Lucky, having supplemented his director’s duties as both cinematographer (under the name Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard).

The narrative here certainly displays Soderbergh’s long-established dry wit and arch sense of humor, and the film is guaranteed to delight viewers who appreciate the methodical build-up and eccentric characters that more frequently populate British quasi-comedies.

The storyline takes its time while bringing the primary characters to the stage. The setting is small-town West Virginia, where divorced, down-on-his-luck Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) never gets to spend enough time with doting young daughter Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie, cute as a button). Jimmy’s intentions are good, but circumstances always interfere, much to the displeasure of ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes), now married to the insufferably wealthy — and insufferably smug — Moody (David Denman).

Jimmy spends considerable time commiserating with his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), who lost an arm during war service in Iraq, and now tends bar at a local dive rather oddly dubbed the Duck Tape. Clyde is convinced that every member of their clan is doomed by a longstanding “family curse,” hence his missing arm, and Jimmy’s injury-related limp, with similar misfortune stretching back generations.

Their sister Mellie (Riley Keough) sniffs at such nonsense, and well she should; there’s certainly nothing amiss in her life. Far from it: Aside from being a talented and popular hairdresser, Mellie is obsessed by cars to a degree that extends way beyond being able to quote make and model stats like a baseball fan; she also can hot-wire anything — and always carries the necessary supplies for such endeavors — and knows local traffic patterns, night and day, with the facility demonstrated by taxi-driving Stan Murch, in Donald Westlake’s marvelous Dortmunder novels.

Conviction: Fascinating legal drama anchored by strong acting

Conviction (2010) • View trailer for Conviction
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity and violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.28.10

Autumn seems to be the season of docu-dramas, whether the family-friendly triumph of Secretariat or the deliciously snarky profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network .

In terms of tone and execution, Conviction slots somewhere between these two, and director Tony Goldwyn's compelling legal drama offers the same high-caliber acting that made The Social Network such a pleasure to watch.

While Betty Ann Waters (Hilary Swank) watches in disbelief and
consternation, her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) is led away
 after having been found guilty of a heinous murder. Kenny insists
on his innocence, and Betty Ann believes him ... but what can an
under-educated high school dropout do to help her only sibling?

Conviction is a grittier narrative about less palatable characters, given a finished polish of coarse authenticity by Pamela Gray's straightforward script. This is a story of uncompromising love and stubborn determination: an empowerment saga that would feel much happier under better circumstances ... but Goldwyn and Gray wisely eschew the Hollywood gloss that could have turned their film into a manipulative, tear-jerking fairy tale.

And although the events here are as factual and historically significant as those depicted in Secretariat and The Social Network, very few people will recognize the names of Betty Ann Waters and her older brother, Kenny. More than likely, then, this saga's outcome — although a matter of public record — will come as a surprise to most viewers.


Goldwyn and Gray pepper their first act with a series of flashbacks that allow us to develop a sense of Betty Ann (Bailee Madison) and Kenny (Tobias Campbell) as adolescents in the 1960s: wild children unsupervised by their absentee mother (Karen Young) and with only each other for support, and therefore frequently in trouble with the law in their small-town Massachusetts community.

Amelia: Stalled flight

Amelia (2009) • View trailer for Amelia
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.29.09
Buy DVD: Amelia• Buy Blu-Ray: Amelia [Blu-ray]


As long as this film is in the air, it positively soars.

Hilary Swank delivers an all-embracing performance, playing the legendary pilot in director Mira Nair's crisply paced but oddly flat Amelia. With her tousled and "mannish" hair cut, not to mention an eerily similar frame, Swank looks for all the world like the actual Amelia Earhart.

Immediately prior to beginning her ambitious, around-the-world trip, Amelia
Earhart (Hilary Swank) poses for photographers along with husband George P.
Putnam (Richard Gere, center) and navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher
Eccleston).

She also captures Earhart's polite but feisty manner, her eyes flashing at the very suggestion that a woman might not be capable of anything a man could do. It was a rare attitude in the 1930s, and it got Earhart into trouble more than once; Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan's script — based on two Earhart biographies — touches on this vexing aspect of the aviator's public image.

One might argue that Earhart was born 50 years too soon, but that's wrong; if not placed firmly in her own era, her accomplishments — both as a woman, and also as a flier — wouldn't have been nearly as impressive.

The trouble is, Nair's film stalls every time it returns to earth, as we spend considerable time with Earhart's unconventional relationship with promoter and publishing magnate George P. Putnam, played with his usual wooden anti-acting by Richard Gere. Given Earhart's free-spirited, wild and untamable nature — so well captured by Swank — it's simply impossible to imagine her falling for the sort of one-dimensional stick portrayed here by Gere.

Mind you, Earhart and Putnam were quite the item in real life, and I've no doubt that the actual gentleman must've been one helluva persuasive charmer. But Gere can't sell that act; given that his entire thespic range revolves around his signature smirk, he never makes Putnam look anything but insufferably smug.

Nothing would have turned Earhart off faster.

So we go with the flow, grind our teeth every time Gere pops up, and wait for the next transcendent flying sequence, when Swank once again conveys, with such sparkling, wide-eyed wonder, the sense of oneness Earhart must've felt every time she was in the air.