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The Weekend Warrior 6/4/2021 - THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT, SPIRIT UNTAMED, CHANGING THE GAME, ALL LIGHT EVERYWHERE, GULLY and More

So yeah, I can happily say that the Weekend Warrior is back to where it began and where I like it to be, which is primarily a weekend preview about box office. I’ll still do a number of reviews each week, but that was never the plan when I started this column… are you sitting down? Nearly twenty years ago, this coming October, in fact.

Anyway, this past weekend, the extended Memorial Day one, ended up being quite a boon for the box office, which had been struggling ever since theaters slowly reopened last Fall, joined by New York City and Los Angeles this past March.There had been a couple strong weekends, but it took the might of the sequel, A Quiet Place II, and Disney’s prequel, Cruella, to really kick things into overdrive and mark the start of a real summer movie season where we finally had a box office where the top 10 grossed more than $100 million for the first time since March 2020.

With that in mind, we come into June with two new wide releases, both of them franchises, but one of them a much bigger and more lasting one. THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT (New Line) is the third movie following the case files of supernatural investigators Ed and Larraine Warren, as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The first two movies were directed by James Wan before the series branched off into a number of spin-offs, including three movies about the haunted doll, Annabelle. This is the first movie with “The Conjuring” in the title in five years after The Conjuring 2 also opened with over $40 million and grossed $100 million total domestic.

The third movie in the initial franchise branch follows another case of Ed and Larraine Warren, this one involving a young man in Brookfield, CT named Arne Johnson (Ruairi O'Connor) who becomes possessed by a demonic presence while helping the Warrens with an exorcism on the 8-year-old brother of his girlfriend. When he brutally murders a friend, he’s sentenced to the death penalty, and the Warrens need to find out how he got possessed and prove this to the court to spare his life.

This one is directed by Michael Chaves, who also directed The Curse of La Llorona (which was sort of tangentially connected to the series), and I’ll write more about the movie in my review below, but if you like exorcism movies and the Conjuring movies, then this is a good one.

There are a couple things in play with the latest “Conjuring” movie, the first one being the fact that it’s opening on the second weekend of the super-strong A Quiet Place Part II. While John Krasinski’s horror sequel should continue to do strong business with probably $25 million or more, the question is whether strong word-of-mouth might take away from potential business for the new “Conjuring” movie. At this time, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t enough theaters and screens to handle two big horror sequels, although people who finally got out of their house to see A Quiet Place Part II might feel more comfortable about returning to theaters, and a “Conjuring” sequel is a good follow-up.

On the other hand, the “Conjuring” is a franchise that has started to peter out with only 2018’s The Nun, which tied directly into the events from The Conjuring 2, actually opening even better than the original two movies with $53.8 million. It was followed by the less-connected The Curse of Llarona and Annabelle Comes Home, both which grossed less than $100 million domestic. And those were both in the “before times.” Although A Quiet Place Part II should still be going strong, it’s likely to drop from the people rushing out to see it last weekend. Another problem this Conjuring faces is that it is available to watch on HBO Max, which to many, could be the way to see it, essentially cutting into its opening weekend potential.

I think The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It should be able to capitalize on the return of theaters and the popularity of other movies about demonic possession in general to make just a little over $26 million this weekend, although it’s likely to be a very close race for the top spot at the box office against A Quiet Place’s second weekend, depending on how far it falls.

Mini-Review: I have to admit something before getting into this review. I actually lived not too far from where the original true story on which this movie was based took place when I was 16. Being quite an impressionable teen at the time, I was fairly familiar with the actual case. Because of that, this Conjuring probably connected with me in more ways than the others, but also, I think that having had experience directing the first two movies allowed James Wan to step back and just act as producer (and co-plotter) in order for Chaves to really shine as a director.

The movie starts with the Warrens in the midst of an exorcism for 8-year-old David Glatzel (Jullian Hillard), who has been possessed and is violently tearing up the house before Ed and Larraine do their thing. David’s older sister Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook) is dating Arne, who bravely calls for the demon to take him instead. In the midst of being attacked by the possessed David, Ed has a heart attack that puts him in a coma, so he’s the only one who realizes that Arne has been possessed. Days later, Arne repeatedly stabs and kills a friend of his.

I don’t want to go too much further into where the movie goes from there, other than it’s almost like a procedural mystery movie where the Warrens end up investigating another case of a missing girl that might tie into what’s happening with Arne. The film cuts between Arne in prison and the Warrens trying to solve that other mystery.

Wilson and Farmiga are great as always but they really up the game of everyone around them including 8-year-old Hilliard, who is already a genre superstar, but really creates a lot of the terror in the opening sequence, which ties closer into the overall story than other prologues in the previous movies. I especially liked how the Warrens are clearly older now and much more vulnerable to the demons they’re trying to beat. Farmiga even gives Larraine an older woman’s hairstyle, more akin to a woman of her age in the ‘80s.

But the real selling point for this new “Conjuring” movie is that it once again uses everything possible to create some insanely great scares, and not just the hokey jump scares we see in far too many horror films. As with Wan on the first two movies, director Chaves and his team brilliantly use sound and lighting to create the eeriest situations for the Warrens to enter, and boy, is it effective at making you wonder when the next scare is coming.

As much as I enjoyed the first two “Conjuring” movies and appreciated them for the amazing work Wan and his team did in creating scares, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It offers new layers and levels to what Ed and Larraine do, including a particularly apropos nemesis that makes me that there might be a lot more cases to be explored in such a manner.

Rating: 8.5/10

The animated SPIRIT UNTAMED (DreamWorks/Universal) is more of an anomaly, because it’s a new movie in a series that began with the early DreamWorks Animation movie, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron from way back in 2002 (back in my first year doing this column!). It opened over Memorial Day weekend against the second weekend of Star Wars Episode II and the fourth weekend of Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man, and yeah, it got demolished. The movie opened with $17 million, which isn’t really bad for 2002, but it also went on to gross $73 million domestic, which is great. In 2017, DreamWorks Animation brought the animated horse back for the Netflix animated series, Spirit Riding Free, and obviously, that did well enough that they wanted to return Spirit to theaters.

I’m not going to review Spirit Untamed, because honestly, it’s not really my kind of movie, but I did enjoy it, and I think a lot of younger girls who dream of having their own ponies will love it as well. It’s just a very well crafted film, directed by Elaine Bogan that goes into a lot of nice places while staying away from some of the typical animated movie tropes -- i.e pratfalls and body humor for the youngest of kids. It’s just a sweet and exciting young person’s adventure that I would recommend to parents for sure.

This is an extremely hard movie to gauge in terms of the interest that might bring families out to theaters. Presumably, the Netflix series is popular enough, but people are learning that movies like this will eventually be on VOD and streaming. In fact, DreamWorks Animation’s NEXT movie, a sequel to the hit The Boss Baby will be both in theaters AND on Comcast streamer Peacock at the same time. Spirit Untamed will probably be available on VOD in 18 days as is the case with most Universal films post-pandemic.

I’m not sure how many theaters this will get (maybe 2,000?), so I think Spirit Untamed might still be able to pull in $4 million this weekend, but maybe it’ll surprise me and do better. Even though little girls still love horses, I’m not sure it’s enough for their parents to buy tickets rather than wait until this is on streaming.

Oh, you know what? It’s a new month, and that means that I might as well bring back a section that has lapsed in the past year …

REPERTORY!

Yes, a lot more movie theaters in New York and L.A. have now reopened, so I’ll see if I can fit in some repertory offerings in the column each week.

Exciting news at my own local theater, the Metrograph, as they’ve just announced a Metrograph TV APP, available on Fire TV, Apple TV and others. This means that you can now become a Digital member ($5/month; $50/year) and you can digitally stream Metrograph programming directly to your TV set. (Me, I’ve been using mirroring from my computer for the past year.) If you’re a member you can watch Lisa Rovner’s fantastic doc, Sisters with Transistors, which I wrote about before. If you get on board now, you’ll be able to watch the Metrograph’s upcoming “Whole Lotta Herzog” series, which features two months of the German filmmaker’s work including some quite obscure little-seen offerings as well as a number of true classics like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Nosferatu The Vampyr . If you’ve missed some of Herzog’s great work, now’s a great time to be a Metrograph member. Oh, yeah, and the theater will be reopening its theaters to in-person audiences in September!

Uptown at Film at Lincoln Center, they’re finishing off “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2021” and showing JIa Zhangke’s latest film, Swimming Out Til The Sea Turns Blue, in its theater. Okay, fine, neither is repertory but we’re glad to have FilmLinc back!

Back downtown, Film Forum is showing Jacque Deray’s 1969 thriller La Piscine, starring Alain Delon & Romy Schneider, and Fellini’s 8 ½ only in its theaters, and similarly cool stuff streaming, so yeah, nice to have them back as well. Also, a new 4k restoration of The Ladykillers, starring Alec Guinness will open at Film Forum this Friday.

A few blocks away, the IFC Center continues to show George Romero’s long-lost 1973 film, The Amusement Park, which is also available this week on Shudder.

Okay, I think that’s enough repertory. Let’s get back to the new movies.

This week’s “Chosen One” is Michael Barnett’s documentary CHANGING THE GAME, which is now playing on Hulu, a full two years after it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019. This is an amazing and quite timely film about a trio of teen student athletes. First up is Mack Beggs, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Dallas, who by Texas rules or law has to compete in the girls’ wrestling division, because he was born female. Part of his transition involves taking steroids, so he quickly becomes the state champion, beating all the teen girls he takes on, although he’d much rather be wrestling boys, because he is a boy. Living in Connecticut, transgender runner Andraya Yearwood is allowed to compete against other girls, but even that is deemed unfair (mostly by the parents of other girls) since Andraya is much bigger and stronger than her competition. Lastly, there’s transgender skier Sarah Rose Huckman whose state of New Hampshire requires student athletes to get gender confirmation surgery in order to compete in the class of her choosing. The catch is that one has to be 18 to get said surgery.

These are three really interesting entries into the ongoing debate about whether transgender youth should be allowed to play sports. Beggs is a particularly interesting case because he WANTS to wrestle against boys but isn’t allowed to. Sarah Huckman doesn’t have quite the challenge of Andraya, because she is diminutive and better at passing as female. She’s also pretty amazing as an activist, fighting against the discriminatory laws of her state, in such a way that she really creates some inspirational moments even if Beggs gets a lot of the attention in Barnett’s film.

But the way Barnett tells these three stories is what makes it such an important one about a very complex issue, including interviews with the three kids’ parents and immediate families, all of whom are quite supportive even as their kids garner ridiculous amounts of hate from other parents.

This is the thing. Transgender boys and girls should have equal rights with their peers, and that includes playing sports. They’re already forced to go through a lot due to their gender dysphoria, so to have to, on top of that, deal with scorn and derision from jealous over-competitive parents whose own kids aren’t able to achieve the same level of competition, I mean it’s just bullshit. This movie really hit me hard in the gut, because I have close friends who have transitioned who are constantly dealing with hatred and scorn and to have politicians in states like Texas and Florida and other places making their situation worse, it just kills me. THESE ARE KIDS, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

I’m quite shocked that it took so long for someone to release Barnett’s film, but this also couldn’t be better timing to add to a conversation where there’s just too many people in this country who do not or will not try to understand what trans kids are contending with on a daily basis. Changing the Game is the perfect conversation starter, and a great way for people unable (or unwilling) to understand the trans struggle to see it from a fresh, new perspective.

One of the fairly high profile docs out of this year's Sundance Film Festival was Theo Anthony’s ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (Super, LTD), a really intriguing movie that seems like science fiction at first but actually is an in-depth look into surveillance cameras, taking a particularly detailed look at the Axon body camera system used by many police, cameras triggered by the use of officer’s weapons.

It takes a little time to understand what Anthony is trying to achieve with what is essentially a thesis paper done via cinema verité-style documentary (not my favorite), but it pulls you in with its look at the history of surveillance and footage that might seem disparate at first but comes together as the movie comes along.

I found this to be a particularly compelling film, especially with the music, which is a bit of a musical cacophony, though it seems to work with the robotic female voice-over that tells us what we’re watching. (Something that tends to lack in most cinema verité films.) As you can tell from the image above, the film is fairly avant garde with a lot of gorgeous images that might not necessarily fit in with the subject, but it does add to the overall narrative about surveillance and vision. I thought it was funny that my first reaction to this was similar to my reaction to last year's Oscar-nominated Time, because I went into both movies not realizing they were documentaries.

Ultimately, the film does become kind of scary because we have heard so much about the importance of body cams on police, but Anthony’s film shows how unreliable that footage is as evidence in a case. While All Light, Everywhere is a very different movie from what I was expecting, it shines a focused light (sorry for the pun) on a piece of technology that we’ve become so reliant on to achieve justice but is still clearly quite flawed.

A couple other docs that I wasn’t able to find the time to watch, both involving sports, are Graham Shelby’s CITY OF ALI (Abramorama) and Chase Ogden’s SUPER FRENCHIE (Greenwich). The first one is pretty obviously about boxing great Muhammad Ali, but it deals specifically with the week after his death when the people of his Kentucky hometown and the rest of the world came together to celebrate the greatest boxer of all time. Super Frenchie is about professional skier and base jumper Matthias Giraud, who takes on bigger challengers and more dangerous stunts just as he is about to start a family. These both sound great, and I’ll do my best to watch and write about them once I do.

Actually, I watched Super Frenchie just as I was finishing up this column, and it’s pretty great if you love amazing footage of fantastic skiing stunts. I’ve seen quite a few great docs in this vein -- Free Solo comes to mind -- and I generally liked this one, too, especially since it covers quite a long span in Giraud's life and gets into him becoming a father. I actually would have loved to see this in a movie theater, but you can, since it’s opening in theaters Friday as well as Virtual Cinema and TVOD, so lots of opportunities to watch it.

Next up is Nabil Elderkin’s GULLY (Paramount Home Entertainment), which hits theaters on Friday but then will be on Digital and VOD on Tuesday, June 8. This one also premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019, oddly enough, and it ALSO follows a trio of teenagers, but this is a narrative film, not a doc, but it very well could be a doc with the honesty it handles its subjecet.

It follows three young L.A. friends -- Kelvin Harrison’s mute Jesse, Jacob Latimore’s Calvin and Charlie Plummer’s Nicky -- kids who are constantly getting into serious trouble and in danger of ending up in the system. As we watch them committing crime and complete chaos, it’s counterbalanced by Jonathan Majors’ Greg, a longtime friend of the boys’ families, who himself is being released from jail and trying to stay out of the life that put him there. There’s also Terrence Howard as an enigmatic street poet, who doesn’t seem to serve much purpose until the end, while Amber Heard plays Nicky’s mother, who seems to be a stripper or prostitute of some kind, I couldn’t really figure it out.

I can definitely tell why critics might not like Elderkin’s work, because he comes from the world of music video and has a kinetic style of filmmaking that keeps things moving, which might not be the case in normal indie dramas, which might involve a lot of dialogue vs. just showing these three kids and their lives. These are all kids that have been damaged by familial relationships and society as a whole, who have pretty much been left to fend for themselves. The thing is, and this might be another issue that other critics had with the film, is that Calvin and Nicky are especially unlikable due to the violent crimes they get up to, and at one point, the movie reminded me a bit of a modern-day real world A Clockwork Orange. By the way, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is one of my top 5 favorite movies of all time.

What Elderkin has going for him is this amazing cat. This is earlier work by Harrison, an actor who is quickly becoming the dramatic actor to keep an eye on, and the same can be said for Jonathan Major. I’ve long been a fan of Plummer and this is a very different role from the nice guys he’s played in the past. Latimore also gives a really exciting performance, as well, and the only one who disappointed me a little was Heard, who at times gets a bit out of control with her performance.

Gully is a tough and challenging film, but it’s one with such a strong message delivered so well by Elderkin and his cast, that it bums me a little this might not be seen by a very big audience, competing with so much other content right now. Maybe it’s not quite as strong narratively as other films of its ilk -- Monsters and Men comes to mind as an improved version of this -- but it’s a compelling character study that ultimately delivers what’s intended.

Hitting Shudder on Thursday is Damien McCarthy’s Irish horror film CAVEAT (Shudder), starring Jonathan French as Isaac, a drifter who is hired to look after a psychologically troubled woman whose husband committed suicide in an abandoned house on an island. Once he gets there, he learns that he’s forced to wear a chain securely fastened to the basement floor to prevent him from going into certain rooms, but he soon finds out that there’s a lot more to that one simple “caveat.”

I’m always excited for a new weekly Shudder movie, and this one looks quite fantastic with a tone that makes it feel sort of period while in fact being quite modern. The way the premise is set-up is certainly quite compelling, and I wanted to see where things go, especially after the opening where we see a sullen woman walking through the house with a toy rabbit that bangs on its drum mysteriously. For some reason, I assumed that this movie would involve ghosts or spirits or something similarly scary, but no, it’s just a guy chained to the basement trying to solve some mystery of the house’s dead inhabitants. This ended up being quite disappointing even though it started from such a good premise, but it’s one that never goes quite far enough in terms of scares.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Dominic Cooper star in Michael Haussman’s EDGE OF THE WORLD (Samuel Goldwyn Films), a period drama set in 1839 with Rhys-Meyers playing Sir James Brooke, whose adventures in 19th century Borneo were the inspiration for films Lord Jim and The Man Who Would Be King. When Brooke’s ship is attacked by pirates, he teams with local princes to seize a rebel fort, agreeing to be crowned Rajah, as he joins his new allies.

I’m not going to review Haussman’s film at this time, because I wasn’t able to give it the full attention that it deserves, but it’s a pretty gripping film on par with James Gray’s The Lost City of Z and other films about explorers. It’s a beautiful film with some great action and an amazing score, and honestly, I wish I had more time to give it the attention it deserves, but that’s what happens when you’re trying to run a site full-time and continue to write reviews for this column. Some things just slip past me or don’t get the time they deserve.

It will be available on Digital and On Demand starting Friday, but honestly? This would be a great visual movie to see in theaters.

Other movies (and new series) out this week, include:

UNDER THE STADIUM LIGHTS (Saban Films/Paramount) FLASHBACK (EONE) BAD TALES (Strand Releasing) MONUMENT UPHEAVAL (Abramorama) SWEET TOOTH (Netflix)

That’s it for this week. Next week… In the Heights and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway!

#The Weekend Warrior #The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It #Spirit Untamed #Movies #Reviews #Changing the Game #Gully #All Light Everywhere #Streaming

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