An oddly structured Kafka biopic

 

  Director Agnieszka Holland subverts traditional biopic structure in Franz, a fragmented look at the life of Franz Kafka, the Czech author who died in 1924.

  Holland (Green Border) blends Kafka’s personal and aesthetic sensibilities with the quotidian aspects of a life that included a domineering father, loving relationships with his mother and one of his three sisters, and nondescript employment at an insurance company.

 Disregarding chronological order, Holland leaps about in time, offering ample references to Kafka's work. At various points, Holland shows Kafka imagining that his hands are webbed, a conceit he used in his fiction.

 These references sometimes feel forced, and it helps to be familiar with Kafka’s work if you want to catch them all.

   In one such unmistakable effort, Kafka’s father crushes a cockroach that has wandered onto the dining room table, a brash joke that points to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novel in which a man becomes a giant insect. 

   Raised in a German-Jewish family, Kafka’s imagination far surpassed the measured quality of his life.  Kafka's relationship with his father becomes important but isn't offered as the sole explanation for his inward-looking personality.

   In a sequence involving the young Kafka (Daniel Dongres), his beefy father (Peter Kurth) tosses his son into a river, a move designed to teach the boy to swim. Was Kafka scarred for life? Evidently not. We later learn that Kafka enjoyed swimming and swam throughout his life.

   German-Israeli actor Idan Weiss plays the adult Kafka as a strange man who inspired a wave of kitsch in contemporary Prague. Holland shows us burger joints with Kafka's name. A kaleidoscope is one thing, but Holland’s present-day scenes, which include a guided tour of Kafka-related sights, are more disruptive than illuminating, self-conscious attempts to let us know that the misfit has been mainstreamed.

    Kafka’s love life isn’t exactly scintillating, either. At one point, Kafka becomes engaged to Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), a woman in whom he shows little romantic interest. After falling for Bauer's best friend, the lively Greta Bloch (Gesa Schermuly), Kafka broke off his engagement to Bauer in embarrassing fashion.

    Writing evidently didn't come easily for Kafka. Holland creates early scenes in which Kafka, while still living at home, tried to write amid household bustle and intrusions by a father who wanted his son to pay more attention to the family business. Kafka longs for silence.

     Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924. He was 40, and his death preceded the Third Reich, which Holland points to in a late scene in which Kafka's confidant 

Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) and his wife nervously deal with a Nazi soldier as they flee Prague. Brod had all of Kafka’s work with him. Without Brod, Kafka’s writing might never have been discovered.

     Holland’s approach puts a considerable burden on Weis, who sometimes has the sly look of someone who’s protecting secrets no one else knows. Thin and prone to engaging in strange physical exercises, Kafka is tender with a prostitute but abandons the pursuit of pleasure when his attention suddenly shifts.

   It’s possible to take this sudden shift as a metaphor for a movie that frequently shifts its attentions, sometimes in scenes in which characters -- notably one of Kafka's sisters -- break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera.

     Working from a screenplay by Marek Epstein, Holland conveys the contradictions between Kafka’s interior life and bourgeois life in Prague, making  room for information that can seem almost incidental.

      We learn that Kafka wrote only in German and had no use for typewriters. He wrote by hand. At one point, Kafka checks into a sanitarium where the men march around nude and play games of tug of war in the nude. He seems to be having a good time.

      Perhaps to give the uninitiated a sense of Kafka’s work, Holland presents a scene in which Kafka does a public reading of In the Penal Colony. Holland presents a bizarre reenactment of the story, which centers on a brutal but meaningless punishment.

    At its best, Franz gives us a feeling for this odd, elusive fellow who saw the absurdity of institutions in a world of ungraspable rules.

   The word "Kafkaesque" has become an overused cliche for anything that appears to be off-kilter. Holland works more slyly, but if Kafka’s life was a riddle, Holland’s movie, though sometimes vividly realized, doesn't solve it.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 'The Rivals of Amziah King' and 'Learning to Fly'

The Rivals of Amziah King

 The Rivals of Amziah King stars Matthew McConaughey as a country singer and beekeeper who turns a Native American woman into a devoted protege. As a foster child, Kateri (Angelina Looking Glass) shared a home with Amziah. When she re-enters his life as an adult, she's exposed to a beekeeping world she learns to love. 

  In an overextended dramatic section, Kateri tries to save Amziah’s business after his hives are stolen.

 The movie emerges as a bit of a hodgepodge: a celebration of down-home virtues (the kind you’d find at a weekly potluck at the local church), a lively music film, and a labored drama in which Kateri searches for Amziah’s bees.  

  Too long at 130 minutes, Amziah King gets only so far with applications of rural Oklahoma color. I enjoyed director Andrew Patterson's presentation of toe-tapping music, and McConaughey seems to be having fun, but this foray into country virtues can’t sustain the infectious rhythms of its early going. Perhaps because of a surfeit of plot, what begins promisingly loses its way.

Learning to Fly

Scattered and teetering on the edge of becoming an advertisement for HOKA running shoes, the documentary Learning to Fly tells a story about ultra-distance running. The movie introduces Aisha McAdams, a photographer who made her mark chronicling the efforts of long-distant competitors. The movie includes a variety of runners, principally Jim Walmsley, a top runner whom McAdams follows to several races. 

   A runner herself, McAdams reveals details of her difficult upbringing as she tries to understand why people participate in such a grueling sport. 

    Torn between McAdams and the depiction of various races, the movie could have done more to develop both.

  You may not realize that MacAdams, who offers narration throughout the film, isn't the movie's director. That job falls to Max Lowe, who skillfully shows the teamwork required to support a 100-mile run. Race scenes can be impressive, although the athletes are more defined by the intensity of their efforts than by anything revealed in interviews. 

 So, a mixed review of Learning to Fly, a less-than-triumphant documentary that earns points for opening a world that may be unfamiliar to many viewers.

A shipping magnate throws a party

   Willem Dafoe plays a Greek shipping magnate in The Birthday Party, another barbed critique of life among the obscenely rich.

   Basing his movie on a 2007 novel by Panos Karnezis, writer/director Miguel Angel Jimenez creates a fictionalized view of a character who resembles Aristotle Onassis. 

   Aways adventurous, Dafoe plays Marcos Timoleon, a calculating boss who’s accustomed to controlling everything but who has difficulty corralling his strong-willed daughter, Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne). 

   Sofia’s latest challenge to her father centers on her plan to marry Ian Forster (Joe Cole), a writer who's working on a biography of Marcos.  

   To further complicate matters, Sofia is pregnant with a child Marcos insists she'll never have. The movie eventually shows the twisted lengths to which Marcos will go to ensure that he prevails.

     The story begins with a more conventional attempt at persuasion. Marcos arranges an elaborate 25th for Sofia that’s designed to coax her back into the family fold.

   Hangers-on and those wishing to curry favor with Marcos have gathered for the event. To him, they’re like extras in a show meant to protect his legacy.

    The cast includes Emma Suarez as Olivia, the wife Marcos is divorcing. Estrangement aside, he wants her help with wild-child Sofia. Sofia’s fate became even more important to Marcos after his beloved son died in a seaplane crash.

    A steady Christos Stergioglou plays Patrikios, a doctor who’s also Marcos's closest friend and confidant. The movie could have used more of him.

   We’ve already seen too much wealth porn to be overwhelmed by the luxe surroundings of Marcos’ private island, and the drama that unfolds proves more dispiriting than illuminating, a dip into a toxic pool full of characters, none especially admirable.

Regan and Gorbachev talk nukes

 

  Put Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, and J.K. Simmons in the same movie, and you’ve created interest - at least among those who value capable acting. In The Brink of War, Daniels plays Ronald Reagan; Harris appears as  Mikhail Gorbachev, and Simmons portrays George Shultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State. 

   In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik for a summit meant to tackle issues of nuclear disarmament. 

   The Brink of War offers a dry, sometimes prosaic account of a meeting disrupted by Reagan's insistence on including  a human rights discussion Gorbachev had no interest in having.

    Gorbachev also objected to Reagan’s plan to build a Star Wars defense system for the US., even after  Reagan suggested that Gorbachev could use US technology to build his own missile shield.

    The summit failed, but a year later it produced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. That means the  movie must focus less on a triumphant outcome than on the back-and-forth between the two leaders. 

     Aside from Simmons Shultz, who cautions Reagan, not to miss an unprecedented opportunity, the supporting cast doesn’t have much to do.

     Nancy Reagan (Hope Davis) remained at home, staying in phone contact with the president. Branka Katic portrays Raisa Gorbacheva. She accompanied her husband, but mostly remained on board the ship that brought Gorbachev to Iceland. Occasionally, she came ashore for photo ops.

     Rather than playing like a momentous historical moment, the film, written and directed by Michael Russell Gunn, unfolds like a determined recreation. 

     As for Daniels, make-up can’t quite turn him into a Reagan lookalike, but he masters Reagan’s delivery and offers moments of hard-headed conviction and easy wit.

    In all, the movie's style feels musty and dated, as if it has been shackled to the need for period authenticity and seriousness, which is understandable but less than exciting.

A horror movie with sex on its mind

  Remember the horror series Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? The original starred Billy Preston, an actress who has vanished from public view. Obligatory sequels followed, establishing the Camp Miasma movies as a horror staple that wore out its welcome.

  Stop scanning your memory. There never was a Camp Miasma series, but director Jane Schoenbrun bases her movie -- Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma -- on a meta-conceit. An indie filmmaker, Hannah Einbinder's Kris wants to remake the original Camp Miasma movie, retooling it for contemporary audiences.

    To prepare, Kris travels to an abandoned camp where the movie's former star (Gillian Anderson) lives in isolation. Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) makes movies that have garnered a following, partly because Schoenbrun's films deal with (wait, let me try to calculate the number of themes) movie madness, trans issues, pop culture, female eroticism, and campy asides, this time evidenced in the search for the perfect Jolly Rancher.

     The horror element of Schoenbrun's movie involves a character called Little Death that lives at the bottom of a lake near the abandoned camp, emerging occasionally to spear people to death or, in the case of Anderson's Billy, to deliver the world's best orgasm. 

    Little Death wears a box over his head that resembles a repurposed air vent that might have been salvaged from the bottom of the lake. His look is more last-gasp Halloween costume than one calculated for terror.

     The screenplay makes comparisons between Billy and Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard. Kris wants to convince Billy to appear in the remake. A studio wants a version that's more woke, less transphobic.

     Less a character than a collection of intellectualized tropes and inhibited sexuality, Kris makes an argument for the remake that sails over Billy's head. Billy understands that Kris' over-intellectualization masks the link fundamental between fear and desire that she's been avoiding.

      Transparent artifice from production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly makes it clear that Camp Miasma, which includes a segment from the original movie, needn't be taken with Kris' cinematic seriousness.

     That's not to say that Schoenbrun doesn't indulge in gushing sprays of plasma as Billy slowly coaxes Kris into accepting her libidinous desires, no matter how strange they may seem to others. 

      Mostly a two-hander, the movie includes supporting performances from Jasmin Savoy Brown as Mari, Kris's bisexual partner, and Aren Buchholz as Thor, Mari's male lover.

      Appearing as a studio exec who's baffled when Kris calls him to pitch her latest version of Camp Miasma, Dylan Baker lands the movie’s funniest scene, a send-up of the mismatch between studio preoccupations and auteur ambitions.

      Wild and amusing as all of this may sound, Camp Miasma misses an essential horror ingredient: scares. Moreover, its amusements seem aimed at an audience that, like Kris, is fluent in the language of horror. It pays to know something about split diopters and how they’re used in horror films.

      Speaking with a southern accent, Anderson's Billy is more intent on liberating Kris's sexuality than on making another movie. Anderson's's vampy, campy performance constitutes the movie’s main attraction, enriched as it is by the humanity Anderson* conveys.

      Camp Miasma, which is less morose than I Saw the TV Glow, lives in its own world and seems aimed at those who want to be part of Schoenbrun's inside joking and gender explorations. Me? I kept waiting for the movie to break through its own self-involvement.

*Thanks to reader who pointed out name mistake. Now fixed.

Hungry dinos trample the burbs

 Advanced publicity for The End of Oak Street blames a mysterious cosmic event for transporting a  typical American suburban neighborhood to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. 

  Anne Hathaway, who seems to be everywhere this summer, and Ewan McGregor, who lately has  been working in TV series, star as husband and wife in a high-concept job that keeps them on the run. 

  Director David Robert Mitchell can’t muster the suburban charm that Spielberg has mastered, but his movie begs for comparison with Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, which did a better job of providing a reason for why humans must struggle to keep from becoming dinosaur food, a fate not all Oak Street residents can escape.

   The movie's involuntary time travel involves a large bubble that intermittently appears and serves as a portal through time. As an explanation, it proves laughably feeble. Maybe that was the point.

    Mitchell leans heavily on two young performers — Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. They play the Platt children, who dodge dinosaurs without their parents when Convery's Brian sets out to find his beloved dog Starbuck. His sister follows, and another youngster (Jordan Alexa Davis) eventually joins them.

   The End of Oak Street seems to be turning pages in a give-em-what-they-came-for playbook, offering a series of dinosaur attacks and relying heavily on CGI to keep the film monster heavy and to ensure that these destructive behemoths prove reasonably disgusting.

   A giant snake invading a house makes for one of the best-assembled set pieces and there is (wait for it) a scene of dinosaur copulation), a stab at genre-mocking amusement in the midst of survival terror.

   Watching McGregor's character try to defend himself with a sledgehammer looks a bit silly. Hathaway wields a rifle. But the movie emphasizes flight more than fight.

    Modest attempts are made to deepen the characters. Aspiring to be more than a homemaker,  Hathaway’s Denise is writing a novel; McGregor’s Greg tipples from a hidden bottle; he has been reduced to delivering pizzas to earn extra cash. Husband and wife often argue.

   Best taken as a love letter to ‘80s cinema, End of Oak Street might have done well to lean more heavily into its goofier aspects and tried for full-out comedy. 

  As it stands, a formulaic End of Oak Street offers many views of Hathaway running, Hathaway screaming, and Hathaway expressing fear. 

  It’s not easy to spoof shlock movies without becoming one, a trap that End of Oak Street can’t entirely avoid, but credit Mitchell with moving rapidly until he reaches the film's unfortunately muddled copout of an ending.

 

Coming of age in Las Cruces

  

 It's not unusual for a family to go through a crisis. But what if every day presented a crisis of some sort? I ask the question by way of introducing Olmo, a movie about a Mexican-American family living in Las Cruces, N.M. in 1979. Aivan Uttapa plays the title character, a young man who is often called upon to care for his quadriplegic father (Gustavo Sánchez Parra). Burdened by the need to work, Mom (Andrea Suárez Paz) relies on Olmo and his sister (Rosa Armendariz) for help around the house. Olmo does help, but typical teenage impulses and needs often conflict with his familial role. Olmo focuses his hormonal attentions on Nina (Melanie Frometa), a girl who lives across the street. Director Fernando Eimbcke mostly adopts Olmo's point-of-view, developing the story around attempts by Olmo and best friend Miguel (Diego Olmeda) to attend a party Nina has told them about. They're welcome -- providing they bring a stereo. A scene in which Dad gives Olmo a lesson in stereo repair becomes a mini-study of father/son tensions. All the performances are good, and young Olmeda is perfect as a kid who supports his friend, tries to learn how to dance, and follows Olmo when he mistakes a home where a funeral is being held for the location of the party they hope to crash. Olmo has serious moments, but Eimbcke's affection for the characters is palpable, and we feel it too.

When sex happens once a year

  Boasting a blatantly contrived high-concept premise, One Night Only is better than it ought to be. At the same time, the movie — which rides on  agreeable performances from Monica Barbaro and Collum Tower — isn’t the winning charmer it might have been.

  The contrivance: One Night Only, directed by Will Gluck and written by Travis Baum, creates a world in which unmarried people are subject to an oppressive government mandate: They’re allowed to have sex on only one night a year. 

  Don't expect a hard satirical punch; the movie delivers more of a powder-puff pat. The sex mandate stems from a fascistic government that wants to promote marriage and restrain what it regards as profligacy. 

   Gluck surrounds this implausible premise with a spiffed-up version of New York City, where Tower’s Owen operates a pizza restaurant and Barbaro’s Allie sings for a living. 

    Afflicted by stage fright, Allie is relegated to recording songs for commercials, in this case for a drug that’s supposed to help with psoriasis. Is there a compelling reason that psoriasis maintains its cliched status as joke material? 

   After an initial flop of a meet-cute, Allie and Owen try to find someone with whom to have sex while the clock ticks its way towards celibacy. 

    A romantic at heart, Allie gives up on any hope of finding love after an ill-fated foray to a bar with a pal.  She heads home, but her gay roommate (Quintessa Swindell) gives her a sexy dress and pushes her out again.

    For his part, Owen is stranded by his girlfriend (Maya Hawke). Over an expensive omakase dinner, she announces that she doesn’t plan to sleep with him. She's after a new experience. 

   Allie and Owen keep encountering each other as the movie works its way through a variety of contrivances, notably a search for condoms in a market where they seem to have sold out.

   Eventually we meet Owen’s mom (Molly Ringwald). She has planned a sexual evening with her partner (LeVar Burton). Still, the movie mostly wanders through a Gen Z world, introducing a set piece involving a hip private party. Allie easily gains admission. Owen is shut out.

    At the party, Allie meets a rock star (Charlie Gillespie) who pushes her to sing in public. He charms her until their encounter goes bad with a bit that lands an unneeded sour note.

    A determined socialite (a sharp Ella Loudon) gets Owen into the club, but that relationship also goes awry in another scene that hovers on the border of tastelessness.

     Look, we know that Owen and Allie are destined to be together. Some of the dialogue is amusing, as is a precocious kid (Mateo Ray) who boldly presents himself as a possible sex partner for Allie.

     So back to the beginning. Gluck (Easy A and Anyone But You) gets good work from his cast, but can't liberate enough laughs from this gimmicky fable. 

     

       

       

'Ice Cream Man' offers gore galore

Eli Roth has directed notable horror movies, among them  Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005). He's also produced such helpings of horror as Clown (2014) and Haunt (2019). Now, Roth arrives with Ice Cream Man, a horror movie that tries to cut the heart out of idyllic, small-town life when a smiling ice cream man (Ari Millen) turns the town's kids into killers. Ice Cream Man tries to walk the line between sadistically funny and sickeningly gory. Roth knows how to do that, but once you see a sweet little girl saw off her mother's head with a hacksaw, you've pretty much got the bloody drift. I'm not going to describe all of  Roth's bloody inventions, but if Roth was looking for a satirical edge, he misses. Roth can't squeeze much thematic juice out this gory kiddie revolt against adult authority. The plot centers on Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), youngster who remains immune to the killing urge because he's lactose intolerant and didn't eat the tainted ice cream. Before the movie ends, Roth serves up a silly, tortured explanation for all the kiddie carnage. For the record, Roth plays Jared's father in a serving of horror that melts away while we await the next serving of gore, such delicacies as brains scooped from the head of a school principal. Gross? Yes. Up to the best standards of horror wit? Hardly.