Dark Horse

First Hit:  This is a very sweet film about a group of Welsh people from a small town having a once in a lifetime adventure.

There is a small Welsh mining town that has lost their major employer, the mining operations. Most of the people are poor and have little education. However, they’ve got desire, grit, and determination.

One such person Jan Vokes who works as a cleaner of a supermarket and wants more in her life. She comes up with an idea to own and train a horse, a thoroughbred. She finds a mare that has been put to pasture and convinces 30 other town members to be part of a syndicate to own a horse for a small monthly fee.

From this fee they buy the mare, find a stud, and after the birth of the colt house the horse at a training stable. At first no one thinks this young horse will amount to anything (it’s all legs), but over time the horse begins to show some progress.

They enter the horse in a few races and before they know it, it actually starts placing and winning a few of them. On the lead up to the second most important race in England the horse gets hurt. What will the consortium do? You’ll have to see the film.

Jan Vokes, Brian Vokes, Howard Davies, and Angela Davies are just four of the consortium and they bring out so much about the personality of the whole group and how one horse brought them together. Louise Osmond both wrote and directed this film and in its sweetness it is just a really enjoyable experience.

Overall:  This was such a wonderful experience to see real people engage with such love of purpose.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

First Hit:  This very funny musical parody gives a glimpse of how young pop stars (like the Beastie Boys or One Direction) might respond to immediate fame.

The Style Boyz are three lifelong friends who are musically talented separately but together they are great. Their first album sells like hotcakes and they even have their own dance; “The Donkey Roll.”

Enough people single out Conner (Andy Samberg), the lead singer, to do something on his own which he decides to do leaving his band mates Owen (Jorma Taccone) and Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer) to fend for themselves.

Owen joins Connor’s touring support team as a DJ and eventually gets masked during performances. Lawrence is put out to pasture, literally, by becoming a farmer and also dong wood carvings. Conner’s first album is a success and he becomes a big star.

The film uses real music stars to validate Conner’s success by giving them the opportunity to sing their praises of Conner’s work. They even have Justin Timberlake as Conner’s chef. There is also a parody of the television program TMZ with CMZ and how they cover famous artists.

Conner sets out to do his second album and when it drops, it fails miserably and Conner scrambles to put his career back together. This film is about putting his career back together. The songs that truly stand out are:  I’m Not Gay and F#^$ Bin Laden.

Samberg is excellent as Conner the leader of Style Boyz and as Conner4Real, the single act. Taccone and Schaffer are wonderful as his bandmates. They show a level of reverence and their own strength in appropriate levels. Tim Meadows as their manager Harry was wonderful. Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer wrote a wonderful inventive funny script. Schaffer and Taccone did a great job of directing by creating wonderfully funny musical scenes.

Overall:  It was a good laugh and enjoyable.

X-Men: Apocalypse

First Hit:  Much better than the other Marvel (Comic) film “Captain America…” but it felt worn and reaching.

The beginning is a set up based on some past historical idea about a demonic force called En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) wanting to finish his evolvement which will give him total world domination. But to complete this task he has to usurp the powers owned and inherent in Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), the leader of the X-Men (and women). By obtaining this power he can rule the world.

The film fails to make this important task engaging enough thereby making the film uninteresting, let alone believable by any stretch of the imagination. The other story is that Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) has distanced himself from the other X-Men(women) and Professor Xavier.

In this distancing, Magneto has joined with Apocalypse and will execute his commands to rearrange the planet by removing the metal structures of the earth thereby making earth’s inhabitants helpless. The interplay between the X-Men is good and does make this film interesting in ways that has some depth.

The most fun part of the film has to do with Quicksilver/Peter Maximoff (Evan Peters) because his scenes are lighthearted, well-conceived, and simply fun to watch. He brings a humorous element to the whole film and when he’s on the screen, I was engaged.

What seemed pressed were scenes with Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) as it seemed she really didn’t want to be in this role and is done with the X-Men series of films. I’d be surprised to see her in another, unless she needs the money.

Isaac created a good enough demonic Apocalypse character, and the makeup helped a lot. Fassbender was OK as the aloof, isolated Magneto. McAvoy was strong as Professor Xavier. Peters was fantastic and the best part of the film. His tongue-in-cheek and cavalier representation of the character was appropriately in-line with my view of what Marvel Comics were originally about. The rest of it has become too serious and seems only there to extract more money out of the public. Lawrence seemed done with the whole thing and her performance and character lacked inspiration. Simon Kinberg wrote the sometimes witty and sometimes labored screen play. Bryan Singer brought some interesting visual scenes to the screen but the attempt to make this story real falls on deaf eyes (yes I mean deaf eyes).

Overall:  Although fun enough, this franchise has to make more and more unrealistic set-ups to attempt to make the stories continue to work into the future.

Weiner

First Hit:  After seeing two films that were dogs, seeing such a full, interesting, insightful, and dynamic film like this one supports my faith in the ability of film to tell a great story.

This film is so real and dynamically interesting that I walked out of the theater thinking; WOW, how amazing to see something this genuine and how brave of them to share their life so fully and intimately. I was in awe.

A good documentary can and will hold the audience’s attention as good or better than any other type of film because it is factual. This film does it in spades. Witnessing Anthony Weiner give amazing speeches as a U.S. Congressmen from New York for the support of 9-11 responders was powerful.

You see that he's a fighter and takes no prisoners in his beliefs. He's got guts and commitment. His weakness is technology and using that technology to send text message pictures of his hardened (covered and uncovered) penis to women. This obsession forces him to quit congress.

After he supposedly went to rehab and got this behavior under control, the film follows him as he runs for mayor of New York City. He takes a lot of heat for his past behavior and he’s harassed at every stop he makes on the campaign trail.

The documentary shoots him, at home, with his wife Huma Abedin (top aide to Hillary Clinton), and their child. Watching Huma go through her feelings and emotions about what her husband did was so difficult and real.

What also made this film work is that Weiner continued to let them film as he was once again he's rightfully accused on continuing his bad-boy behavior of sending explicit text messages and having phone sex (up to 5 times a day) with Sydney Leathers. Allowing the filmmakers to continue to film him as these second accusations became public was astounding.

Just prior to the latest set of admitted transgressions, he was ahead in the polls, but then slid badly to the bottom of the list. All this time the camera continues to roll and we see the dynamic difficulty in his life, Huma’s life, and the lives of all the people who worked for and supported him.

Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg co-directed this documentary and I have to applaud them for being able to keep the film flowing, while we watch Weiner and Abedin deal with his ego, political drive and transgressions. The editing of this film was fantastic.

Overall:  This was an amazing story to watch and very revealing about how human character can be amazingly varied and different.

A Bigger Splash

First Hit:  This film lacked clarity of purpose partially because the actors and characters weren't well mixed in this uninteresting story.

The film starts with the illusion that Tilda Swinton (as Marianne Lane) is a middle age rock star still able to bring in stadium full audiences.

Attempting to convince the audience through brief clips of a stadium filled with rock fans, the band on the stage, and Lane, with a black wig, comes out to the microphone was inadequate. We don’t hear her sing nor do we hear her music.

This lacked credibility, and Swinton’s look and presence didn’t carry the energy of a stadium filling rock star. The audience is asked to take this at face value, what makes this worse is that we do not get to hear her speak because she’s just had throat surgery and isn’t supposed to speak so her character's story is limited.

Because she has these two strikes against her, it is like the old saying, "two wrongs to make a right". She’s vacationing with her husband Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) at some unknown rural (possibly Mediterranean) location where the village is small and population sparse.

Unbeknownst to Paul and Marianne, her old boyfriend and former music producer Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) is coming to visit them. Harry talks all the time and he’s full of hyper energy, takes over every conversation, and makes a big scene everywhere he is.

Although Marianne is more interested in seeing Hawkes, Paul,  even though he and Harry are lifelong friends, doesn't. Overall, it appears they’d rather not have him as a guest, but no one stops the madness. The madness begins at one of the first scenes when they pick him up at the airport by surprising them by bringing his underage unknown daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson).

The rest of the film attempts to extrapolate each of their personalities given their restricted behavior. However, I never felt that their relationships with themselves were real or flushed out, nor were their connections with each other valid. One of the few good scenes was Harry’s lip-syncing and dancing to the Rolling Stones' classic song “Emotional Rescue”.

One of the more painful scenes was the horrible karaoke singing and dancing by Harry and Marianne in a local bar.

Swinton was miscast in this role because there is just no way she resembled or acted as a stadium rock and roll star. Adding to this that she wasn’t supposed to speak, which added to the difficulty in making her believable. Fiennes was also miscast as there is no way he could pull off being this obnoxious, unthinking, arrogant, producer. He carries too much integrity and therefore it didn’t work. Schoenaerts was good and the best part of the film. His character was believable as a brooding, somewhat depressive, friend and mate of Harry and Marianne respectively. Johnson was mediocre as the young girl who was manipulative and questioning of her father and his friends. She didn’t make me believe her as a seductress – it was way to obvious. David Kajganich wrote a very mediocre screenplay that didn’t really dive into the characters and their history. Every setup of the character's history seemed too overt and lacking curiosity. A film audience needs to be curious about the characters. Luca Guadagnino directed this and probably made the most of the story as written. The casting was, for the most part, poor.

Overall:  I was bored by the story, actors, and the way this film unfolded.