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The Weekend Warrior 8/27/21 - CANDYMAN, LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD, TOGETHER, VACATION FRIENDS, NO MAN OF GOD, and More

There’s only one new wide release this week, and I’m so happy about that, that I’m gonna say the name of that movie FIVE TIMES!

Candyman

CANDYMAN (Universal)

Well, you get the idea. Jordan Peele seems to have done it again with this sequel the 1992 movie from Bernard Rose, although in this case he’s just co-writing and producing along with the film’s actual director, Nia DaCosta, who directed a small indie called Little Woods, which not that many people saw but that played at the Tribeca Film Festival a bunch of years back.

Of course, the movie is really being sold on the basis of Peele’s involvement, because he had such success with two horror movies as a director, the Oscar-winning Get Out in 2017 and Us two years later. Both of those movies grossed over $175 million domestically and another $75 to 82 million overseas. Get Out opened with just $33 million, which is fairly impressive for an R-rated horror comedy, but Us opened with over $70 million based on the popularity and success of Get Out.

Peele and DaCosta have another decent cast with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, possibly best known for playing Black Manta in James Wan’s Aquaman, playing the lead, an artist named Anthony Mccoy, who learns about the myths of the Candyman at the Chicago projects, Cabrini-Green. He also starred in Peele’s Us right after that, and also appeared in The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman, another huge domestic hit. Later this year, he’ll appear (presumably as the younger Morpheus) in The Matrix Resurrections. HIs girlfriend and art curator Brianna is played by Teyonah Parris, who might be best known for her role as Monica Rambeau in the Disney+ series, WandaVision, a role she’ll reprise in next year’s The Marvels, which will reunite her with director DaCosta, as she becomes a full-fledged superhero with the film’s star, Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel. The movie also stars Colman Domingo, who had a big breakout by starring in HBO’s Euphoria, the AMC spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, and well-received movies (at least critically) like Zola and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. That’s a pretty amazing trio right there for the movie, and they’ll help the movie get the hoped-for African-American moviegoers but also the young people who enjoy horror.

Horror has generally done okay during the pandemic, although obviously, there’s been a lot of sequels with John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s A Quiet Place Part II doing the best of all of them. More recent sequels like Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Don’t Breathe 2 haven’t done as well. And there’s no way around the fact that Candyman is a sequel, but it’s a sequel to a movie that came out nearly 30 years ago, which doesn’t mean that young people will have that close a connection to it.

Maybe it’s no surprise that reviews for the movie have been stellar, similar to Peele’s other two movies, although some definitely have issues with the movie. (My review of Candyman can be found over at Below the Line.)

Candyman seems good for an opening somewhere in the low-to-mid $20 millions, although the anticipation for the movie, and its strong draw within the Black community could give it a nice bump ala the movies Peele has directed. Expect the movie to do especially well on Thursday and Friday, but I think anticipation will make it fairly front-loaded as would be the case with most horror movies released in the summer. (I also expect a massive 55%+ drop next week when Marvel opens Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.)

But in the meantime, this is where I see this week’s top 10.

1. Candyman (Universal) - $22.7 million N/A

2. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $11.5 million -38%

3. Paw Patrol: The Movie (Paramount) - $7.5 million -43%

4. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $3.9 million -40%

5. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $2.5 million -50%

6. Respect (MGM) - $2 million -47%

7. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $1.6 million -52%

8. The Night House (Searchlight) - $1.5 million -48%

9. The Protégé (Lionsgate) - $1.4 million -52%

10. Reminiscence (Warner Bros.) - $900k -54%

A great film I saw at SXSW earlier this year that’s finally coming out and is therefore, this week’s “THE CHOSEN ONE” is the doc LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD (Discovery+) from director Jeremy Workman, which follows the amazing life of 20-year-old domino artist and YouTube sensation Lily Hevesh, who has built up a following due to her amazing domino constructions.

The movie works as a documentary on so many levels, first in terms of relaying Lily’s history as a Chinese orphan adopted at the age of one by non-Asian parents and how that affected her life and her interest in discovery, which ultimately led her to this passion. But building and toppling domino art is much more than a hobby as Ms. Hevesh has been able to monetize her passion with a thriving YouTube channel and also being hired by big corporations to create domino art for commercials and such. I’m not sure how long Workman was following her around but we do get to see Lily in all sorts of environments. We mostly get to see her as entrepreneur as she’s designing and developing her own line of dominoes that would be ideal for the work she does.

Lily Hevesh is just so inspirational and watching this amazing woman go through her life and the wonder she creates in others makes this one of my favorite docs of the year. It will stream on Discovery+ starting Thursday but you can also catch it in NYC at the IFC Center starting Friday.

Over the weekend, I caught a movie that I missed when it got a platform release in New York and L.A. on August 6, as well as when it played at the Tribeca Film Festival back in March. David Gutnik’s Materna (Utopia), an anthology of sorts about four very different women, played by the wonderful Kate Lyn Sheil,Jade Shete, Lindsay Burdge, and Assol Abudllina (the second and fourth of those who co-wrote the script with Gutnik). It’s an interesting anthology that deals with four women who are on the same New York subway when an incident happens, but it never really goes too far into the incident, or even resolves it, since it’s more about the individual women and their lives. I was really only familiar with Sheil and Burdge, although I like the former’s segment more than the latter, though they’re both strange looks at motherhood. I’ll freely admit that there were aspects to all the stories I didn’t get, but I think I ultimately enjoyed the final Assol Abudllina segment the best, even though that’s the only one not in English. I don’t think Materna (which is now available digitally on TVOD) will be for everyone, but it’s certainly an intriguing and somewhat enigmatic film from Gutnik and his collaborators.

Premiering on Hulu Friday is Clay Tarver’s comedy VACATION FRIENDS (Hulu), starring John Cena and Lil Rel Howery as two guys who meet while on vacation with their partners Kyla (Meredith Hagner) and Emily (Yvonne Orji), and they become friends! Okay, there’s a lot more to the movie than that, but I’m embargoed until Friday at midnight so there’s not much more I can say. I do think it’s interesting that this was originally announced in 2005 with Nicholas Cage and Will Smith in the lead roles, and at one point, Chris Pratt and his ex-wife Anna Faris were attached, as well as Ice Cube. It certainly would have been interesting to see any of those pairings, and maybe this would have gotten a theatrical release rather than just streaming.

Mini-Review: A high-concept movie like this could definitely be very funny or absolutely horrible, because it is basically a buddy comedy that relies so much on whether the leads can be funny on screen together. I generally like Lil Rel Howery (even though he’s literally been everywhere this year and is in danger of getting into a James Corden level of annoying) as well as John Cena, who I’ve been a fan of from his wrestling days.

Like I said, the premise is really simple, Howery’s Marcus and his girlfriend Emily are vacationing in Mexico where he plans to propose when they encounter Cena’s Ron and his girlfriend Kyla, who are clearly having the time of their lives, but they’re also the kind of people you don’t want to spend too much time with since they’re VERY LOUD. They end up spending a lot of time together and when they go their separate ways, Marcus thinks that’s it. He and Emily continue to plan their wedding with Marcus trying to prove himself to Emily’s military father Larry (Chuck Cooper). Of course, Ron and Kyla show up and make everyone uncomfortable as they “do their thing” to ruin Marcus’ wedding.

Comedy is a tough thing to critique and gauge how people will receive it, because everyone finds different things funny, and I’m sure that most actual critics will find many reasons to hate this, because it’s incredibly inappropriate and quite low brow. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t rely merely on Ron and Kyla making Marcus uncomfortable as when the movie transitions into a wedding comedy, there’s lots of family dynamics to add to the humor.

Although The Suicide Squad is still Cena’s best and funniest movie of the summer, this is another example of how he’s really trying to mix things up with his acting roles, and even though he’s still way behind Dwayne Johnson in terms of getting to the A-List. Howery is definitely better in this than in some of his other recent movies (koffSPACE JAMkoff), and he continues to be a really strong comic actor that does well with the right material.

Hagner is hilarious and I’m sure I’ve seen her being just as funny elsewhere but some of the best laughs are when she’s faking out Marcus and Emily, but she’s also a great counter to Cena. Unfortunately, that means Orji almost always has to play the straight-person to the other three, but there’s a lot of great set-ups for laughs around her. There are some things that feel played and overdone like the gag of Marcus and Ron getting high and what happens with that, but then there are more original yucks as well.

Ultimately, Vacation Friends does what it’s intended to do. As far as vacation/destination comedies go, this one could have been a hell of a lot worse, but the combination of cast and Tarver’s direction makes this a consistently funny movie that probably would have done okay with audiences in theaters.

Rating: 7/10

I haven’t had a chance to see the Pen15 Animation Special, which also debuts on Hulu this Friday, but I’m looking forward to it for sure, as I love this show.

The pandemic dramedy TOGETHER (Bleecker Street), directed by the great Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, is the definition of a two-hander as it stars James McAvoy and Sharon Morgan (from last year’s Military Wives) as a couple who end up quarantined together during the COVID pandemic even though they clearly loathe each other and probably shouldn’t be together.

This is a movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, but it’s very dark and can’t necessarily be called a comedy and definitely not a romantic comedy, but is something akin to last year’s Malcolm and Marie, although in this case it’s very much meant to be taking place in the here and now. At first, the movie does seem to be fairly funny because of the jabs the two actors take at each other, but then it gets quite dramatic as it deals with her Mum dying in the hospital on her own.

In many ways, Together seems like something that would have worked just as well as a fast-paced play, since writer Dennis Kelly doesn’t make it anything that couldn’t be put on stage, although Daldry and Martin do find ways to keep it interesting as the two actors are moved around their flat. What’s particularly interesting is the pace which starts out quite quickly but then it slows down and gets quite dramatic as each actor goes off to do their own monologue.

It also deals with the seriousness of how badly England was struck by Covid, and it even gets into the mad rush to get the vaccine and the crazy things people would do in order to get it as soon as possible. Much of the question surrounding the duo is how they possibly could have at one time loved each other but now hate each other as their young son is seen in the background during their fiercest arguments. You spend much of the movie wondering whether they can reconcile and get back together, but more importantly, whether they should.

Listen, I’ve long been a fan of McAvoy, and I’ve always known what he could do as an actor but Horgan is a nice surprise, and it’s amazing to see two actors really push each other to get this amazing dual performance that drives the film.

Together covers a lot of ground, and its combination of an amazing script and two actors who can clearly dig in and really get the most out of it makes it a completely riveting film. Everyone involved with this movie has created a really brilliant piece of cinematic drama that can probably withstand multiple viewings to really appreciate what they’ve done, but especially for those two massive performances.

A movie that also debuted at Tribeca is Amber Sealey's NO MAN OF GOD (RLJFilms), another two hander of sorts with Elijah Wood playing Special Agent Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby playing notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy. The movie takes place in the mid-80s as Bundy is on death row at the Florida State Prison and Bill is trying out the FBI’s new methods of profiling serial killers in order to find them before they kill more people.

This is another movie that didn’t really click with me when I saw it at Tribeca, but I wanted to watch it again and give it another chance. This is definitely my kind of movie, and you can definitely see how the interviews between Hagmaier and Bundy could have led to things like the novels by Thomas Harris or David Fincher’s Mindhunter series on Netflix.

It’s well-written by Kit Lesser and the performance by Kirby is particularly strong, as he has a method of speaking that lulls you into a false sense of security, but overall, the delivery and pace of the film just isn’t as compelling as it could and should have been. The whole thing feels kind of stiff and staid, and while I like the idea behind the movie.

The movie also has a pretty amazing score, which does add a lot when things just aren’t very interesting, but as much as this is meant to be dark and creepy ala Silence of the Lambs, it just never fully delivers on the promising concept.

Premiering on Apple TV+ this Friday is the second season of the fantasy series, See, starring Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, but I still haven’t seen the first season, so nothing more to add here.

Other movies out this week include:

BEHEMOTH (Level 33 Entertainment)

DEFINING MOMENTS (VMI Worldwide)

THE COLONY (Lionsgate)

Next week, Marvel Studios is back with a brand new hero in its MCU, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

#The Weekend Warrior #Movies #Reviews #Candyman #Together #No Man of God #Vacation Friends #Lily Topples the World #Box Office

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