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      ‘Zappa’ Review: Portrait of a Rock Star and a Nation’s Hero

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      This documentary directed by Alex Winter opens with a portrait of the ostensibly outrageous musician Frank Zappa in a moment of nobility. It is footage shot in Prague in 1991, two years before Zappa’s death from cancer at the age of 52.Zappa, whose work was one of the cultural inspirations for the future Czech Republic’s Velvet Revolution, became a latter-day national hero there. So on this occasion, which would be the last time he played guitar in public, the perfectionist musician consented to perform with an unrehearsed pickup band, to celebrate the withdrawal of Russian troops from the region. Of the new country his audience will bring into being, Zappa says, “Keep it unique.”[embedded content]“Zappa” foregrounds the laudable and often astonishing aspects of the man’s work and personality. A self-taught musician with a near-maniacal work ethic, over the years he came to regard his efforts in rock ’n’ roll as a day gig, necessary to support his more ambitious composing efforts. Despite his personal aloofness, he continues to inspire the musicians who worked with him; in interviews, the guitarist Steve Vai and the pianist and percussionist Ruth Underwood get very emotional when contemplating his loss.The movie doesn’t ignore the sexism of Zappa’s lyrics, or his occasional smugness in dealing with the press (among others). But it places these features in contexts that give them a certain coherence, while not entirely excusing them. Zappa mavens might be disappointed that some of the man’s bands get short shrift in the linear narrative (the amazing combo that toured behind “The Grand Wazoo” receives no play, for instance). But they’ll be heartened by those details that do get included, and by the sincere tribute paid. And non-Zappa people may be illuminated and eventually moved.ZappaNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Stardust’ Review: A Week With David Bowie, Unaccompanied by His Music

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      This motion picture, in which an unusually coiffed performer, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, sings some Jacques Brel songs, purports to be a story about David Bowie.It’s called “Stardust,” and the director, Gabriel Range, who wrote the movie with Christopher Bell, opted to press on, even after he was denied permission to use Bowie’s songs. They might not have helped much, however.The movie expands on an interesting anecdote from Bowie’s career: his first trip to the United States in the early ’70s, a radio and print publicity jaunt with a publicist, whose family briefly entertained Bowie as a houseguest.[embedded content]Here, the publicist, Ron Oberman, played by Marc Maron, is the only Yankee believer in Bowie’s otherworldly talent. He drops, clumsily, several aperçus which, in this movie’s world, prove key to Bowie’s future superstar personae. (Inspirational dialogue: “A rock star or somebody impersonating a rock star, what’s the difference?”)Bowie is portrayed by Johnny Flynn, a real-life musician who appears capable. But he resembles Bowie — in James Thurber’s phrase — about as much as the MGM lion resembles Calvin Coolidge.The most bearable scenes of this road-trip-plus-flashbacks resemble “The End of the Tour” refracted through an episode of the podcast “WTF With Marc Maron.” The portrayal of Bowie is trying to the viewer. His character is either a stumbling, fumbling, fawn-eyed space cadet or an articulate, erudite conversationalist, depending on Range’s whim.In a scene depicting a marital spat, his wife, Angie Bowie, (Jena Malone) yells, “We were supposed to be king and queen!” (anticipating “Heroes,” a song that was years away). You can’t make this stuff up.StardustNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Superintelligence’ Review: Melissa McCarthy Has to Save the World

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      In this new Melissa McCarthy comedy, directed by her husband and frequent collaborator Ben Falcone (who has a supporting role), she plays Carol, described by another character as “the most average person on earth.” This pronouncement catches the ear of a roving artificial intelligence — one that travels from smartphone to TV to rice cooker at will — which decides on Carol, a former Silicon Valley star turned do-gooder, as its test subject.Taking on the voice of Carol’s favorite celeb, James Corden (who stars as his own voice), the “superintelligence,” a.k.a. the A.I., gives Carol a big bank account, a self-driving car and a snazzy apartment. In return, she must teach it about humanity. If it doesn’t like what it learns, it will end the human race.[embedded content]“Jexi” meets “The Day the Earth Stood Still” it is, then. Carol’s task is to revive her failed romance with George, a good-natured academic played good-naturedly by Bobby Cannavale. The countdown to extinction hooks up with what film scholars call the “comedy of remarriage.” (That is, the happy relitigation of a stalled alliance.) And the movie saunters between these two modes with minimal rhyme or reason. The couple is placed, to visual advantage, in many attractive Seattle locations — the city has never looked more sparkly than it does here.This is a movie of bits, enacted by varied comic luminaries. McCarthy’s “who me?” winsomeness, running neck and neck with her quick-witted cheekiness, is familiar. A new dynamic is added by the inspired Brian Tyree Henry, who, as Carol’s best friend and digital guru, hilariously crushes on the movie’s American president (Jean Smart).“This is nice — they’re nice people,” Falcone’s character, an F.B.I. agent tailing Carol, says while observing Carol and George at play. That is about the best recommendation one can give “Superintelligence.”SuperintelligenceRated PG for impending apocalypse and language. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Mosul’ Review: In Iraq, This Time It’s Personal

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      “Mosul” dramatizes a 2017 story in The New Yorker that chronicled a self-directed Iraqi SWAT team’s efforts to fight the Islamic State. Counting both Condé Nast and the “Avengers: Endgame” directors Anthony and Joe Russo among its producers, this Netflix movie balances admirable ambition (it’s an American film, but the characters speak Arabic) with the cruder goosing strategies and red-meat dialogue of a revenge picture.The film, the directing debut of the screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (Peter Berg’s “The Kingdom”), begins mid-shootout. Kawa (Adam Bessa), a newly minted Iraqi police officer, is nearby when his uncle is killed by Islamic State fighters. The Nineveh SWAT team, headed by Major Jassem (Suhail Dabbach), shows up and kills them, then, after a tense interrogation, extends Kawa an offer to join. The team only takes men who have been wounded by the Islamic State or lost family to them, and Kawa now qualifies.[embedded content]“Mosul” follows the group as it navigates violence-torn Mosul on a mysterious mission. (It involves more than simply driving the Islamic State out of the city, though no one is quick to tell Kawa the specifics.) Along the way, the men enjoy a brief respite watching a Kuwaiti soap opera; find safety for one of two young boys whose parents were killed; and engage in an uneasy barter with a Shiite militia force, trading cigarettes for bullets.Instant death lurks around every corner, and the movie doesn’t shy from killing off major characters. But it does play like an odd match of form and content: a story of single-minded humanitarianism framed as a relentless action spectacular.MosulNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘My Psychedelic Love Story’ Review: On the Run With Timothy Leary

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      To induce dread in a paranoiac, one need only invoke two acronyms: C.I.A. and LSD Along with a third and a fourth — U.F.O. and J.F.K. — these were key ingredients in the alphabet soup of conspiracy theory for more than half a century.But. You don’t have to be a paranoiac, because sometimes dread-inducing combinations and schemes do yield horrific results. The 2017 Errol Morris-directed mini-series, “Wormwood,” to which “My Psychedelic Love Story” is a sequel of sorts, went into detail about the C.I.A. and LSD. It showed that the cloak-and-dagger organization and the hallucinogenic drug met up earlier than most might have guessed.The agency’s early experimentation with acid culminated in 1952 with the tragic, infuriating death of the C.I.A.-employed scientist Frank Olson, officially deemed a suicide. “Wormwood” mixed Morris’s astute documentary style — a blend of acute interviews, archival footage and graphics — with dramatic re-enactments to suggest that it might have been murder.[embedded content]The mini-series caught the attention of Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who in the early ’70s was the consort and psychic soul mate of Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor turned LSD Johnny Appleseed. Harcourt-Smith was in Afghanistan with Leary, who had escaped from prison in the United States, when he was returned to U.S. custody.At a subsequent rally for Leary, the poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, in a piece called “44 Questions About Timothy Leary,” asked, with not a little anger, whether Harcourt-Smith was a “C.I.A. sex provocateur” who entrapped Leary.Harcourt-Smith’s question for Morris is: “Was I?”“My Psychedelic Love Story” also draws on her 2013 memoir “Tripping the Bardo With Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story.” The narrative Morris and Harcourt-Smith recount is rollicking, globe-trotting and packed with characters, including the shady Hungarian banker Arpad Plesch — who managed to make himself Harcourt-Smith’s step-grandfather and stepfather — and the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Implausible but nevertheless actual names such as Donald Strange are dropped. If you ever wondered, “How does Thomas Pynchon come up with that stuff?” this movie will assure you that the world just hands a lot of it to him.Throughout the movie, Harcourt-Smith, a handsome woman sitting comfortably on an aqua love seat in an airy, earth-toned living room, recounts tales of free love interspersed with recollections of childhood sexual abuse. She likens herself to Mata Hari (and Morris frequently intercuts Greta Garbo, in a 1931 film, vamping it up as the famous spy). She shares wisdom from her bohemian upbringing with observations such as “You can never tell how rich rich people are.”Morris asks her point blank, “When did you first realize you could control men?” and she takes the question at face value. But her story reveals that idea of control, as Morris frames it, is a false one.It is true, though, that for a long period Leary was in thrall to Harcourt-Smith, and that Harcourt-Smith worshiped him. This heady, fascinating movie never definitively establishes that she was manipulated to get Leary back into the United States, where he eventually became an informant.And as is the case so many times in life, the relationship between Leary and Harcourt-Smith ended, after all the convolutions and mystifications, not with a bang or even a whimper, but a simple betrayal. One night, while living in witness protection in Santa Fe, N.M. (“I wasn’t used to camping,” Harcourt-Smith says of their raw living quarters; “I was a Parisian!”) the couple had a loud argument. The next morning Leary was gone from the house, and from her life forever.My Psychedelic Love StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms beginning Nov. 29. More

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      ‘Kill It and Leave This Town’ Review: Grotesque, Bleak and Endless

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      It’s difficult to describe the Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s debut film, “Kill It and Leave This Town,” because the animated feature — plotless, gloomy and surreal — is more a direct translation of feelings and sensations than a traditional work of storytelling.There is truly nothing traditional about “Kill It,” in which the filmmaker reflects on his grief, mortality and isolation in his working-class industrial town. The grim film feels excavated from the subconscious: The coarse illustration style, with its frazzled, stray lines, emphasizes the bleakness of the images.[embedded content]The first third of the film is especially brutal. A child needlessly berated by his mother; flies plucked off flypaper; a dying woman in a hospital bed saying, “I’m all alone here, lonely as an owl,” as her son, an analog of the filmmaker, brusquely brushes her off: Wilczynski makes a feast of the obscene, but it is, by nature, hard to digest.The film does have the capacity for beauty — scenes of snowfall and rainfall and light streaming from buildings reveal an elegance that he works hard to negate. He’d rather we stare at a nurse carefully maneuvering a frayed thread through a needle to stitch not cloth, but the belly and genitals of an old woman’s corpse, while severed heads roll down the streets and humans defecate on the sidewalks.Tadeusz Nalepa’s surprisingly energetic rock-heavy score, however, is a satisfying companion to the film’s swift shifts in scale and perspective. After a while, Wilczynski seems to tire of his violent approach, and though the film maintains its dark dreaminess, his images soften, but a sense of listlessness persists that rejects resolution.Because “Kill It” is more than anything an emotional experience, it feels long and taxing. Wilczynski might consider “Kill It” a success — but I don’t want to encounter it again.Kill It and Leave This TownNot rated. In Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      Jamie Dornan Gets 'Freaky' Fan Letter Claiming He Fathered a Child With Dakota Johnson

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      WENN/Oscar Gonzalez

      Aside from dealing with obsessed fans of the books and movies, the Christian Grey of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ reveals how he learned to laugh off the worst reviews of his career.

      Nov 26, 2020
      AceShowbiz – Jamie Dornan was freaked out by one fan’s bizarre attempt to convince him that he and his “Fifty Shades of Grey” co-star, Dakota Johnson, were the parents to a lovechild.
      The actor, who played Christian Grey in the film series, admits he received a lot of fan mail from obsessed fans of the books and movies, but one correspondence was particularly strange.
      “It was a collage of photographs of a kid,” he tells Variety. “Someone saying that it was my kid, and my wife should know that I have this kid who’s seven years old.”

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      The 38-year-old hunk, who is also known for his portrayal of serial killer Paul Spector on the crime drama series “The Fall”, continues, “I think they were trying to say that the kid was mine and Dakota Johnson’s, and we’d had this baby while we made the first ‘Fifty Shades’ movie. It piqued our interest, let’s say. It was a bit freaky.”
      If he wasn’t dealing with odd fans, Jamie was having to contend with the worst reviews of his career, confessing he learned to laugh them off because some were just awful.
      “I went through a bad stage with ‘Fifty Shades’ of reading a couple of really bad ones, but then just finding them funny and letting them drive me,” he recalls. “One of them was: ‘Jamie Dornan has the charisma of oatmeal…’ Some people like oatmeal, so I thought it was kind of harsh. I remember that stuck with me, and I don’t entirely disagree with it either.”

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      'Godzilla vs. Kong' Fans Furious Over Possible Streaming Debut

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      Warner Bros.

      The follow-up to ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ may skip theatrical release in favor of going to a streamer, with Netflix reportedly already making a $200M offer for the movie.

      Nov 26, 2020
      AceShowbiz – The wait is perhaps too long for Legendary Pictures until the time is right to release “Godzilla vs. Kong” in cinemas. After postponing it release date from November 2020 to May 21, 2021, the studio is reportedly considering to skip the planned theatrical release in favor of heading to a streamer.
      Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Netflix is one of the streaming services interested in acquiring the rights to distribute the film. It reportedly has made an offer of more than $200 million for the film.
      While it sounds like a lucrative deal, Legendary Pictures may not be sold that easily. Warner Bros., which currently holds the worldwide distribution rights for the movie except for in Japan, reportedly has blocked the deal and intends to bring it to its own streamer, HBO Max.
      However, as of Wednesday night, November 25, Warner Bros. denied that there’s a plan for the movie to skip the theatrical release and head straight to streaming service. “We plan to release ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ theatrically next year as scheduled,” said a spokesperson for the studio.
      Despite the unconfirmed reports, fans couldn’t help feeling disappointed should the sequel to 2019’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island really head to a streamer. Reacting to the news on Twitter, they expressed their disagreement with the alleged plan for streaming debut.

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      “I hate this so much. #GodzillaVsKong deserves to be seen on the biggest movie screen possible. Don’t do this, @wbpictures,” one fan warned the studio. Another echoed the sentiment, “#GodzillavsKong is Made For IMAX and the big screen. Going to streaming is a big mistake!!!”
      “Jesus… the theater industry is taking hit after hit over these moves to streaming. I can’t see this being good for any of them in the long run. This news makes me sad,” a third person lamented the movie industry amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
      Another said that he’d rather wait longer to see it in theater rather than having the film released earlier on a streaming service. “@Legendary @wbpictures I’ll gladly wait another year to see Godzilla vs. Kong on the big screen, as intended. Please, please don’t skip the theatrical release!” the said person pleaded.
      Someone else expressed her/his opinion, “Omg this is super big bruh moment if I don’t get to see Godzilla vs Kong the climatic rematch of the century on IMAX I’m a cry. I really wanted to see Godzilla and Kong again on the movie screen super badly!”
      “Godzilla vs. Kong” wrapped filming in April 2019 with Adam Wingard serving behind the lens. Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown and Rebecca Hall among others, it will pit Godzilla against King Kong, the two most powerful forces of nature, in a spectacular battle for the ages.

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      Chrissy Teigen Is Still in ‘Grief Depression Hole’ After Miscarriage

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