Arts

The Fabulous Four
Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Southpaw Entertainment
In Theaters: 07.26

November 8, 2017 – the day that Donald Trump was elected – was among the worst of my life, comparable to the deaths of my parents. The reason that I mention this is that, while Susan Sarandon used to be a favorite of mine, I put some degree of blame for that nightmare upon her and other extremists who strongly encouraged liberals to boycott the election. The only reason I mention any of this is to give full context to the statement that, for me, The Fabulous Four is still the most unforgivable thing that Sarandon has ever been involved in. 

The Fabulous Four is the story of a quartet of old friends reuniting for a wedding in Florida. Lou (Sarandon, Thelma and Louise, Dead Man Walking) is a successful heart surgeon who lives alone with her cats, having never married after the love of her life eloped with her best friend Marilyn (Bette Midler, Hocus Pocus, Beaches). After the death of Marilyn’s husband, she is lost and lonely, and quickly becomes engaged, planning a lavish ceremony in Key West. Alice (Megan Mullally, Will & Grace, Dicks: The Musical), a singer who once toured with the Rolling Stones, and Kitty (Sheryl Lee Ralph, Abbott Elementary, The Young Wife), a cannabis farmer who has a strained relationship with her hyper-religious daughter, are determined to get Lou to come to the wedding and finally bury the hatchet with Marilyn. To get Lou to come to Key West, they concoct an elaborate story about winning a raffle to become the owner of a polydactyl cat from Ernest Hemingway’s estate, and soon the women are reunited. While tension runs high between Lou and Marilyn, Kitty and Alice spend a lot of time getting drunk and high. Lou finally starts to loosen up when she meets a suave man named Ted (Bruce Greenwood, Thirteen Days, Star Trek), and things appear to be working out for a little while until further complications ensue.

Despite starring a group of highly talented performers, The Fabulous Four has a lot of elements working against it, chief among them the abysmal screenplay by Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly (You’re Dating a Narcissist!), which is a feeble collection of cardboard characters, stupid situations, and raunchy routines. The crazy contrivances include the aforementioned feline-oriented sub-plot, constant variations on the same marijuana joke, an attempted robbery foiled by using a Kegel ball as a projectile weapon, and a wild bachelorette party at strip club wherein one of these four women inevitably has a shocking discovery you can see coming from at least 20 miles away. The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired: when Kitty’s born again daughter, Leslie (Brandee Evans, Rolling Into Christmas, Unprisoned) wants to put her into a Christian retirement home called Heaven’s Gate, Kitty quips “Heaven’s Gate? More like hell on earth!” and constitutes one of the wittier moments in the film’s poorly conceived jokes about topics ranging from slavery to date rape make for some seriously cringe-inducing moments. 

Sarandon fairs best of the cast, and for all of the negativity I cast at her in the opening paragraph, this movie stands as proof that she’s incapable of giving a truly bad performance. This is more than can be said for the campy and constantly mugging Midler, who is only slightly less over the top than she is as the buck-toothed crone Winnifred Sanderson in Hocus Pocus. Ralph is almost as bad, transitioning poorly from the more presentational acting style of a broad sitcom to what should be a more grounded characterization in a feature film, and all that can be said for Mullally is that she’s only asked to portray three states of being: drunk, stoned, and horny, and she convinced me on at least two out of three. A cast of venerated stars giving such sloppy performances and so unable to find convincing chemistry has to be put at the foot of the director, and Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, How To Make an American Quilt, The Dressmaker) approaches the material with all of the subtlety and grace of an incontinent sheepdog, and it’s a bit of a surprise that a movie this amateur and slapdash comes from such an industry veteran.

The Fabulous Four is an utter misfire from beginning to end, and the only positive thing I can say about it is that, given the fact that it’s getting minimal publicity and opening opposite the most anticipated Marvel release in a couple of years, this film going to meet a mercifully quick demise at the box office before it goes on to punishing streaming viewers. By far the person who comes off looking best here is Diane Keaton, because her mediocre vehicles such as The Book Club and Summer Camp look quite solid in comparison. –Patrick Gibbs

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Film Review: Longlegs 

Martin Phillips, whose band the Chills was a mainstay of the 1980s New Zealand indie-rock scene that served as a formative influence on the likes of R.E.M. and Pavement, has died. He was 61.

His death was announced in a statement posted Sunday on the Chills’ social media accounts. The statement didn’t say when or where Phillips died or specify a cause but noted that he’d died “unexpectedly.” A 2019 documentary about Phillips and the Chills chronicled the musician’s struggles with hepatitis C; New Zealand’s Otago Daily Times reported that Phillips had been admitted recently to Dunedin Hospital with liver problems.

A proponent of the so-called Dunedin sound associated with New Zealand’s Flying Nun record label, the Chills played jangly yet propulsive guitar pop that set wistful melodies against arrangements drawing on punk and psychedelia. Phillips, who wrote with a poetic flair about art, death and romance, was the band’s only constant member in a career that attracted a devoted cult following across four decades.

In a statement Sunday, Neil Finn of Crowded House — a fellow New Zealander whose early band Split Enz once enlisted the Chills as an opening act — called Phillips “one of NZ’s greatest songwriters” and described him as having been “fascinated by and devoted to the magic and mystery of music.”

After playing in a short-lived group called the Same, Phillips formed the Chills in 1980 with a lineup that included his sister Rachel; in 1982, the band signed to Flying Nun — whose other other tightly connected acts were the Clean, the Bats and the Verlaines — and proceeded to make a string of scrappy yet tuneful singles including the stomping “I Love My Leather Jacket” and “Pink Frost,” which became perhaps the band’s best-known song.

“I want to stop my crying / But she’s lying there dying,” Phillips sang over an oddly buoyant bass line — a striking juxtaposition that led Spin magazine to advise readers to “imagine Paul McCartney attempting Joy Division.”

Having already cycled through more than half a dozen lineups, the Chills dropped their first studio LP, “Brave Words,” in 1987; for their follow-up, 1990’s “Submarine Bells,” they signed in the U.S. to Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash Records, which helped drive the knowingly titled “Heavenly Pop Hit” to No. 17 on Billboard’s modern rock chart.

Eager to capitalize on that success, Slash brought the Chills to Los Angeles to record the band’s next album, 1992’s “Soft Bomb.” Peter Holsapple, who’d played with R.E.M. on its smash “Out of Time” LP, contributed keyboards in the studio, while Van Dyke Parks devised a characteristically whimsical orchestral arrangement for the song “Water Wolves.”

Parks, the veteran pop eccentric known for his work in the ’60s with Randy Newman and the Beach Boys, invited the Chills to Capitol Studios to watch him oversee the recording session, Phillips told KCRW in 2022. Yet the band showed up late: “We took a wrong turn, so we missed the speech that Van Dyke gave the orchestra about what they were doing,” Phillips said. “But it was beautiful being there and hearing it come to life.”

The Chills broke up after touring “Soft Bomb” but later reunited (with yet another lineup); the band’s most recent album, “Scatterbrain,” came out in 2021.

Information about Phillips’ survivors wasn’t immediately available.

Phillips spoke candidly about the challenges of surviving the music industry, as in a 1992 interview with The Times in which he admitted that the “single biggest problem so far has been just trying to keep bands together when we can’t afford to pay ourselves anything.”

Yet the Chills’ music put across an abiding belief in the power of a great song.

“So I stand and the sound goes straight through my body / I’m so bloated up, happy, I can throw things around me,” Phillips sang in “Heavenly Pop Hit.” “I’m growing in stages and have been for ages / Just singing and floating and free.”

The Last Breath is the latest killer shark movie to swim into view, but can it do something fresh with one of cinema’s most tired sub-genres?

As someone with an unflinching interest in shark movies, I’m never sure what I find more frustrating. The godawful try-nothing movies that don’t put all that much cash into any one aspect of the production? Or is it the ones that get one point well and whiff the others so bad a shark wouldn’t eat it?

The Last Breath is in the latter camp. There’s a very commendable understanding of underwater cinematography at play here. But that focus seems to mean sense and logic have been largely drained from the narrative’s oxygen tank.

Before we get into that, the story: A group of college friends is increasingly distant seven years after their initial time together. Their latest reunion comes two whole years after the last. So that dynamic drives a certain desperation to have a moment together.

Noah (Jack Parr – The Limehouse Golem) is working with the seasoned ocean-farer and scuba tour owner Levi (Julian Sands in what is seemingly his last role before his tragic demise) to find a long-lost WWII battleship. They finally chance upon the wreck after storms unearth it from the sands of the deep. Financial strains are alluded to and then explicitly stated. That presents an opportunity when Noah’s rich prick pal Brett (Alexander Arnold) offers a princely sum to show his Instagram fans that he’s got first dibs on exploring a historic wreck. So, the reunion of the college pals is set to culminate in a landmark dive before the authorities get their hands on it.

The Last Breath trailer

Soon, the foursome find themselves trapped in the wreck. Running out of air, and hunted by some seriously tetchy Great White sharks.

The good stuff. The underwater scenes generally look great. Although using a different cinematographer this time, director Joachim Hedén showed that this is his realm with 2020’s Breaking Surface. At its best, it conveys a sense of claustrophobia and panic as things get hairer. If it had been more of a pocket disaster movie about them getting trapped down there without the shark stuff, it might have fared better. Because the underwater scenes instill a believability that the CG sharks do not help maintain.

There are also some decent gore effects with close-ups of ragged flesh and lacerations. Again though, they aren’t exactly delicately blended with digital effects all that well.

The other performances are nothing special in general. They’re downright awful in some instances. This will hardly go down in the annals of great Julian Sands performances, but it’s hard not to think of his recent passing when watching him in a new film for what is likely the last time. With that knowledge in mind, an emotional weight is attached to his sad old boat captain. Yet still, this film finds a way to undermine that with a frankly illogical and downright terrible last scene for his character.

Deep Sea Blues

And that leads us to the bad. The Last Breath has all this underwater expertise, but seems to be lacking elsewhere. Every character is a glib cliche stereotype largely performed with a gusto reserved for redwood trees. Decision-making is beyond idiotic. Especially considering how much knowledge there had to be about what does and doesn’t work underwater. Some really, really baffling choices that defy logic.

I think we should be at a point where if you’re going to do a killer shark you need to pick a lane. Are you a Deep Blue Sea where your sharks have superpowers that allow you to break conventions? Or are you going for something a bit more grounded? So many of these movies get stuck on the rocks between the two and become annoying. We know so much more about sharks now than we did when Jaws came out. Making things up about sharks is fine in the right narrative context, but do it with some consistency.

In The Last Breath, one minute, they’re using logical facts about what a shark can or cannot do; the next, they’re treating them like a fishy Ghostface capable of dramatic entrances and coordinated planning. Coupled with the wonky CGI, it makes it hard to have any fear of these toothy killers of the deep.

Inconsistency is the keyword for this film. At one point, a big deal is made about how little air one character has in their oxygen tank and how it would be nearly impossible to get to the surface. Later, a character free-dives for an absurd amount of time whilst being pursued by a shark. Again, with so much knowledge of underwater filming available, it seems at odds with that.

Then we have the ending, which doesn’t really give a proper payoff and then closes on a tone-deaf ending for characters that have been tough to care for in the preceding 90 minutes.

The Last Breath is a waste of some great potential. There are the bones for an intense shark survival thriller here that is sunk by so many poor decisions. There are many worse shark movies out there, but few are as frustratingly bad as this one.

Score: 3/10

As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 3 equates to ”Bad”. Due to significant issues, this media feels like a chore to take in.