I’ve read in several places that The Nun is poised to be the big film this week. I thought it might be Peppermint with Jennifer Garner seeking vengeance. Too bad if either one comes out on top. There’s better stuff to see. Read on.
Peppermint: 2 stars
The Nun: 2 ½
My Generation: 3 ½
Tulipani, Love, Honor and a Bicycle: 2 ½
Minding the Gap: 3
God Bless the Broken Road: --
The Little Stranger: -
PEPPERMINT: Jennifer Garner says there’s a lot of humanity in this one. I don’t see it. There’s revenge galore, killings, gun shots to the head, beatings and intimidation. But humanity? Maybe if she supplied some study notes we’d see it.
Garner was a TV action star early in her career but she’s way beyond that here. She’s like Charles Bronson in his five Death Wish movies. She turns tough to avenge the killing of her family and becomes a folk hero for it. On TV there’s a debate about vigilante ethics and in a run-down-part of town where she hides out, she’s revered as an avenging angel. There’s a fascist undertone to all this, especially since her targets are Mexican thugs and drug dealers so vicious you could imagine Donald Trump wrote the script. They killed her husband and daughter; the courts rejected her testimony, let the murderers go and five years later, after apparently training and bulking up, she’s back to get them. Plus their boss, his entire gang and the judge too.
Early on the film takes great pains to show that she’s a young mother with a good heart. She refuses to dress down a snide other mother at school because that would make you “just as bad as they are.” By the end she gets this compliment: “You killed a lot of bad people.” After that, there’s an obvious set up for a sequel. Oh dear. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 2 out of 5
THE NUN: Fans of the movies in the Conjuring series (this is the fifth) may have a good time working out how this one fits into the larger story that’s being told. For most of us though, this one is a puzzle. It’s so different from the haunted-house films that came before. It plays as a gothic creepie set in a nunnery in a castle in Romania back in 1952. That’s many years before the other films, although there’s a demon at work who may have spread some evil in them and there’s a demonic nun who appeared briefly in the second of the films. How all this fits together is not clear at all, and may require another film to be revealed.
Meanwhile we have a haunted castle like old Hammer Films used to take us to. In fact the director, Corin Hardy, is also English, although his main work has been in music videos before this. The story has a portal to hell aparently having been re-opened in wartime, a young nun committing suicide and a no nonsense priest (Demián Bichir) sent by the Vatican to find out what’s going on. For some reason he takes along a nun-in-training from London, possibly because she’ll be better at being scared while creeping through dark hallways and catacombs. She’s played by Taissa Farmiga, whose sister, Vera, plays one of the regulars in these films. No connection is made though. There’s a young man (Jonas Bloquet) who says repeatedly that he’s a French-Canadian (who knows why), lots of eerie atmosphere, much prowling in dark spaces and five very good jump scares. But it’s all ridiculously short of answers. (5th Avenue, Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
MY GENERATION: Michael Caine was there during the swinging 60s in London so even though this is not a personal memoir he makes it real. His story telling takes you to everything that the decade had, the music of course, the clothes, mini skirts sure, and the more substantial changes, the rise of the youth culture and the assaults on the class system. He was probably the first Cockney to be a leading man in the movies, although in his breakout role, he had to speak in a very toff accent. Incidentally, he tells us how he happened to choose Caine as his professional name.
Beside him we get the key personalities of the time. In old and sometimes new talk clips, Paul McCartney, Twiggy, David Bailey, Marianne Faithful, Roger Daltrey, Mary Quant, Vidal Sasoon and many others describe the life they saw and lived. “Suddenly people saw the working class had talents among them,” says McCartney. “Anyone with talent could be a part of it,” says Lulu. The film documents liberation on several fronts and then admits to the damage that excess and drugs caused in the scene. It’s not the definitive document, but it is wonderful as an overview and a recall. Terrific film clips from back then are beautifully and vibrantly edited to flow right along with the new interviews. And also in there is a great batch of the hits, from The Animals to Donovan, the Stones to the Zombies. (VanCity Theatre, starting Monday) 3 ½ out of 5
MINDING THE GAP: About half way through this fascinating documentary, both the director, Bing Liu, and one of his subjects realize that making it is a form of therapy. They have a lot of stuff to work their way through, some of it normal, like one pal’s “anxiety about not feeling like a grown up.” Some of it more troubling.
Liu videotaped his skateboarding friends in Rockford, Illinois, and himself, when they were young cruising brazenly down the streets, jumping over hydrants, violating no trespassing rules and then again 10 years later to see how they’ve progressed. They open up to him both times. “It’s a family thing,” one says about their group skateboarding. “No one else is looking out for us.” It’s also an escape at times, from abuse at home, strict or gone-away fathers, sometimes just loud arguments between parents. “Really unnerving,“ one says. “Almost scarring.” One of the three is now a father himself and constantly arguing with his girlfriend about sharing responsibility. “We have to fully grow up and it sucks,” he says. She says he hits her, which may be another example of problems drifting down through the generations. What’s he passing on to his child? The film raises thoughts like that repeatedly. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be representative of youth in general these days but it is an intimate reading of the life of these guys. (VanCity Theatre also starting Monday) 3 out of 5
TULIPANI: It bears the subtitle “Love, honor and a bicycle”. That pretty well sums up much of the plotline and suggests how charming and lightly entertaining the film might be. It is all that but too bad that they had to spoil it all at the very end. More on that below.
The story is intriguing to follow because it’s told in several levels of flashback. A young woman in Montreal (Ksenia Solo) starts it when her mother dies and she sets off to take her ashes to southern Italy where she was from. She’s told that’s not her real mother. Another woman picks up the story when a police inspector (veteran Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini) comes to investigate an old disappearance. The connection is pretty murky but it starts with a young man (Gijs Naber) fed up with the rain in Holland bicycling to Italy and starting a tulip farm. A woman he got pregnant before he left shows up too and suddenly there are two women in his life. Worse, the local Mafia boss demands money. The farmer won’t pay and proclaims that only if you’re afraid of him, can he control you. Instead of doing more with that concept, the film, believe it or not, gets off the world’s biggest fart joke. Until then it was rich with the feel of rural Italy and had me entirely engrossed. Suddenly it undercut everything. This is an international co-production with Canadian and Dutch money, filmed mostly in Italy, but also in Lithuania and Hamilton, Ont. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5
And two that weren’t previewed here but have opened:
THE LITTLE STRANGER: There was great anticipation for this one as a prestige horror movie based on a celebrated novel and starring good people like Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson and Charlotte Rampling. Gleeson’s character had to visit the crumbling manor where Rampling and Wilson live and be beset by old secrets. Polite and subtle say the positive reviews. Boring and not scary says the negative ones. The Seattle Times identified “An atmosphere of lingering, musty dread.”
GOD BLESS THE BROKEN ROAD: Religion, grief, country music and stock car racing come together in this story of a young war widow who struggles financially to raise her daughter and then gets help when she meets a rowdy race car driver. It’s a faith-based movie directed by Harold Cronk, who made both God is Not Dead movies. And it’s a film version (a loose one apparently) of a 20-year-old hit song by Rascal Flatts. “A narrative hodgepodge” says a Los Angeles Times review.