Movie Reviews
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Carter’ on Netflix, A South Korean Action Squall That Keeps Hitting The “Continue” Button
![Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Carter’ on Netflix, A South Korean Action Squall That Keeps Hitting The “Continue” Button Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Carter’ on Netflix, A South Korean Action Squall That Keeps Hitting The “Continue” Button](https://decider.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CARTER-2022-NETFLIX-MOVIE-REVIEW.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200)
Carter (Netflix) can’t maintain nonetheless for quite a lot of seconds, and we observe him during this South Korean actioner’s single steady shot spectacle. It’s probably not that, in fact. However that’s a part of the enjoyable as Carter piles on the motion within the excessive. Author-director Jung Byung-gil additionally introduced us The Villainess in 2017, which itself was filled with outlandish fights and bloodlettings; Jung will quickly make his American motion debut with Afterburn, starring Gerard Butler.
CARTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: When Carter (Joo Received) wakes up with a gaggle of CIA weapons in his face, not solely does he not know why the brokers are there, he doesn’t know the place he’s and even his personal identify. However he does know there’s a mysterious voice in his ear, and he listens when the lady says “Please belief me if you wish to dwell.” South Korea has been overrun by a rabid virus generally known as DMZ after its unfold over the border from North Korea. These change into disoriented, violent, and possessed of irregular bodily power – primarily, they’re zombies on PCP. The voice tells Carter she’s North Korean, and secretly working with the South Koreans to create a DMZ antidote. The secret is the analysis of Dr. Jung Byung-ho (Jung Jae–younger), who cured his daughter Ha-Na (Kim Bo-min) of the virus. However Ha-Na is lacking, presumed kidnapped by components of the CIA. Will Carter discover Ha-Na and ferry her safely to North Korea? After all he’ll. If he doesn’t, his personal daughter can be killed. Oh, and there’s additionally the matter of his reminiscence being restored within the cut price, and the remote-activated bomb in his cranium.
As soon as Carter eludes these CIA brokers by crashing by way of two home windows and touchdown in a bathhouse the place he slashes, punches, and stabs his approach by way of roughly 85 attackers, it’s formally on. He pushes six guys out of one other window and rides their momentum to the floor, the place a frantic bike chase ensues. Some extra close-quarters motion, a quick meetup with some North Korean brokers to gear up, and Carter efficiently grabs Ha-Na, solely to be detained by an Company goon referred to as Smith (Mike Colter). The CIA needs to know who Carter’s working for. They even need to know if he works for them. (Are Carter and an operative named Mike Bane the identical man? Unclear.) However there’s no time for any of that, as a result of one other bike chase is on faucet.
Is it actually a bike chase if it doesn’t morph right into a three-way high-speed minivan crash door rumble? As Ha-Na turns into a pawn, pulled between the automobiles, Carter manages to kill everyone and escape to an airfield the place a airplane to the North awaits. Contained in the jet, the tense environment explodes when DMZ and double-crosses create chaos within the sky, and after a mid-air parachute fistfight turns into a gun battle with Ha-Na nonetheless because the pawn, Carter and his ward lastly land within the wilds of North Korea. They’re not secure but. Conniving military intelligence officer Kim Jong Hyuk (Lee Sung-jae) has Dr. Jung in his clutches and the means to revive Carter’s reminiscence, however a fair darker plan to weaponize DMZ for private achieve.
What Motion pictures Will It Remind You Of? Steady shot gimmickry apart, there are all kinds of references right here, from the frazzled motion hedonism of the Crank movies and the infinity loop “fights on conveyances” fashion of The Quick & the Livid universe, to left-field sci-fi motion like Hardcore Henry and Improve.
Efficiency Value Watching: Mike Colter of Luke Cage and Evil renown reveals up halfway by way of Carter to supply a hand break on its nonstop pound of motion and movement. As Smith, a CIA operative with questionable loyalties, he chews some surroundings and engages with the one take fashion of Carter to indicate off his character’s shifty and mercurial nature.
Memorable Dialogue: “Whenever you get your reminiscence again, who will you blame?” Carter’s dilemma is such that he’s inclined to belief the voice in his ear, even when it’s an enormous a part of the thriller that’s change into his life. As a result of the voice has additionally handed alongside one other morsel he’s inclined to consider. “A deadly bomb was positioned inside your mouth, with a blast radius of ten meters.”
Intercourse and Pores and skin: The primary motion setpiece of Carter takes place in a Korean bathhouse, and it’s shades of Jap Guarantees as a mass bare and near-naked melee ensues and karambits are plunged into a number of necks and chests.
Our Take: To not name the continual shot setup of Carter a gag, nevertheless it instantly and incessantly pokes so many holes within the conceit that it’s clearly only a handy mechanism for enacting the an increasing number of – and extra! – motion that consumes the movie’s bulk. An orgy of bathhouse blood begets a six physique pileup and midair leaps from bikes onto hoods of automobiles or the dangling quarter panel of a dashing minivan, and there’s all the time a pistol inside attain for Carter, although his adversaries can by no means appear to land a shot. (The throngs of besuited thugs with dangerous purpose in Carter, a lot the identical as these within the John Wick movies, change into a faceless mass of meat for butchering.) Typically, our hero stands nonetheless, in a form of pause mode as he downloads new directives from the voice in his ear earlier than starting to stroll. It’s not the continual shot trickery of filmmaking that these moments embody, however the pacing and path of online game prompts. This impact is just heightened by the non-player characters that populate the margins of Carter – principally, anybody who isn’t Carter, Ha-Na, or a CIA or Korean spy company thug is NPC filler.
It may be exhausting, this tiered fashion of hyper motion. However Carter can confuse, too, when it downshifts into muddled bits of exposition about the principle character’s previous. It doesn’t dwell on that stuff – certainly, a number of the plot appears like a seize bag, with components of different movies just like the current Kate and Carter writer-director Jung Byung-gil’s personal 2017 actioner The Villainess – however Carter may also have hassle finishing a few of its motion set items with out the addition of unconvincing computer-manipulated moments. The result’s primed for brief consideration span theater, by no means ready in any second for something aside from the impulse for one more motion blast to start.
Our Name: STREAM IT. A caterwaul of motion on prime of, inside, and to the aspect of different motion, Carter is usually as bewildering and exhausting as it’s riotously entertaining.
Johnny Loftus is an impartial author and editor residing at giant in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Information, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Comply with him on Twitter: @glennganges
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Movie Reviews
‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc
![‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc ‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Martha_00044009_01191620.jpg?w=1440&h=810&crop=1)
From teenage model to upper-crust caterer to domestic doyenne to media-spanning billionaire to scapegoated convict to octogenarian thirst trap enthusiast and Snoop Dogg chum, Martha Stewart has had a life that defies belief, or at least congruity.
It’s an unlikely journey that has been carried out largely in the public eye, which gives R.J. Cutler a particular challenge with his new Netflix documentary, Martha. Maybe there are young viewers who don’t know what Martha Stewart‘s life was before she hosted dinner parties with Snoop. Perhaps there are older audiences who thought that after spending time at the prison misleadingly known as Camp Cupcake, Martha Stewart slunk off into embarrassed obscurity.
Martha
The Bottom Line Makes for an entertaining but evasive star subject.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Distributor: Netflix
Director: R.J. Cutler
1 hour 55 minutes
Those are probably the 115-minute documentary’s target audiences — people impressed enough to be interested in Martha Stewart, but not curious enough to have traced her course actively. It’s a very, very straightforward and linear documentary in which the actual revelations are limited more by your awareness than anything else.
In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject. The prolific documentarian has done films on the likes of Anna Wintour and Dick Cheney, so he knows from prickly stars, and in Martha Stewart he has a heroine with enough power and well-earned don’t-give-a-f**k that she’ll only say exactly what she wants to say in the context that she wants to say it. Icy when she wants to be, selectively candid when it suits her purposes, Stewart makes Martha into almost a collaboration: half the story she wants to tell and half the degree to which Cutler buys that story. And the latter, much more than the completely bland biographical trappings and rote formal approach, is entertaining.
Cutler has pushed the spotlight exclusively onto Stewart. Although he’s conducted many new interviews for the documentary, with friends and co-workers and family and even a few adversaries, only Stewart gets the on-screen talking head treatment. Everybody else gets to give their feedback in audio-only conversations that have to take their place behind footage of Martha through the years, as well as the current access Stewart gave production to what seems to have been mostly her lavish Turkey Hill farmhouse.
Those “access” scenes, in which Stewart goes about her business without acknowledging the camera, illustrate her general approach to the documentary, which I could sum up as “I’m prepared to give you my time, but mostly as it’s convenient to me.”
At 83 and still busier than almost any human on the globe, Stewart needs this documentary less than the documentary needs her, and she absolutely knows it. Cutler tries to draw her out and includes himself pushing Stewart on certain points, like the difference between her husband’s affair, which still angers her, and her own contemporaneous infidelity. Whenever possible, Stewart tries to absent herself from being an active part of the stickier conversations by handing off correspondences and her diary from prison, letting Cutler do what he wants with those semi-revealing documents.
“Take it out of the letters,” she instructs him after the dead-ended chat about the end of her marriage, adding that she simply doesn’t revel in self-pity.
And Cutler tries, getting a voiceover actor to read those letters and diary entries and filling in visual gaps with unremarkable still illustrations.
Just as Stewart makes Cutler fill in certain gaps, the director makes viewers read between the lines frequently. In the back-and-forth about their affairs, he mentions speaking with Andy, her ex, but Andy is never heard in the documentary. Take it as you will. And take it as you will that she blames prducer Mark Burnett for not understanding her brand in her post-prison daytime show — which may or may not explain Burnett’s absence, as well as the decision to treat The Martha Stewart Show as a fleeting disaster (it actually ran 1,162 episodes over seven seasons) and to pretend that The Apprentice: Martha Stewart never existed. The gaps and exclusions are particularly visible in the post-prison part of her life, which can be summed up as, “Everything was bad and then she roasted Justin Bieber and everything was good.”
Occasionally, Stewart gives the impression that she’s let her protective veneer slip, like when she says of the New York Post reporter covering her trial: “She’s dead now, thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with that crap that she was writing.” But that’s not letting anything slip. It’s pure and calculated and utterly cutthroat. More frequently when Stewart wants to show contempt, she rolls her eyes or stares in Cutler’s direction waiting for him to move on. That’s evisceration enough.
Stewart isn’t a producer on Martha, and I’m sure there are things here she probably would have preferred not to bother with again at all. But at the same time, you can sense that either she’s steering the theme of the documentary or she’s giving Cutler what he needs for his own clear theme. Throughout the first half, her desire for perfection is mentioned over and over again and, by the end, she pauses and summarizes her life’s course with, “I think imperfection is something that you can deal with.”
Seeing her interact with Cutler and with her staff, there’s no indication that she has set aside her exacting standards. Instead, she’s found a calculatedly imperfect version of herself that people like, and she’s perfected that. It is, as she might put it, a good thing.
Movie Reviews
Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad
![Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/191/afd/c29a986144336e39edf1ea310d979113fd-reagan-review.1x.rsocial.w1200.jpg)
Dennis Quaid in Reagan.
Photo: Showbiz Direct/Everett Collection
Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice. The picture attempts to take in the full arc of the President’s life, following him from childhood right through to his 1994 announcement at the age of 83 that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. But you’d never guess that this man was at all complex, complicated, conflicted — in other words, human. He might as well be one of those animatronic robots at Disney World, mouthing lines from his famous speeches.
Dennis Quaid, a very good actor who can usually work hints of sadness into his manic machismo, is hamstrung here by the need to impersonate. He gets the voice down well (and he certainly says “Well” a lot) and he tries to do what he can with Reagan’s occasional political or career setbacks, but gone is that unpredictable glint in the actor’s eye. This Reagan doesn’t seem to have much of an interior life. Everything he thinks or feels, he says — which is maybe an admirable trait in a politician, but makes for boring art.
The film’s arc is wide and its focus is narrow. Reagan is mainly about its subject’s lifelong opposition to Communism, carrying him through his battles against labor organizers as president of the Screen Actors Guild and eventually to higher public office. The movie is narrated by a retired Soviet intelligence official (Jon Voight) in the present day, answering a younger counterpart’s questions about how the Russian empire was destroyed. He calls Reagan “the Crusader” and the moniker is meant to be both combative and respectful: He admires Reagan’s single-minded dedication to fighting the Soviets. They, after all, were single-minded in their dedication to fighting the U.S., and the agent has a ton of folders and films proving that the KGB had been watching Reagan for a long, long time.
By the way, you did read that correctly. Jon Voight plays a KGB officer in this picture, complete with a super-thick Russian accent. There’s a lot of dress-up going on — it’s like Basquiat for Republicans, even though the cast is certainly not all Republicans — and there’s some campy fun to be had here. Much has been made of Creed’s Scott Stapp doing a very flamboyant Frank Sinatra, though I regret to announce that he’s only onscreen for a few seconds. Robert Davi gets more screentime as Leonid Brezhnev, as does Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner. Xander Berkeley puts in fine work as George Schultz, and a game Mena Suvari shows up as an intriguingly pissy Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife. As Margaret Thatcher, Lesley-Anne Down gets to utter an orgasmic “Well done, cowboy!” when she sees Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech on TV. And my ’80s-kid brain is still processing C. Thomas Howell being cast as Caspar Weinberger.
To be fair, a lot of historians give Reagan credit for helping bring about both the Gorbachev revolution and the eventual downfall of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, so the film’s focus is not in and of itself a misguided one. There are stories to be told within that scope — interesting ones, controversial ones, the kind that could get audiences talking and arguing, and even ones that could help breathe life into the moribund state of conservative filmmaking. But without any lifelike characters, it’s hard to find oneself caring, and thus, Reagan’s dedication to such narrow themes proves limiting. We get little mention of his family life (aside from his non-stop devotion to Nancy, played by Penelope Ann Miller, and vice versa). Other issues of the day are breezed through with a couple of quick montages. All of this could have given some texture to the story and lent dimensionality to such an enormously consequential figure. But then again, if the only character flaw you could find in Ronald Reagan was that he was too honest, then maybe you weren’t very serious about depicting him as a human being to begin with.
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Movie Reviews
‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War
![‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Don-t-Let-s-Go-to-the-Dogs-Tonight_Still_01-H-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
Alexandra Fuller‘s bestselling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa is so cinematic, full of personal drama and political upheaval against a vivid landscape, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been turned into a film before. But it was worth waiting for Embeth Davidtz’s eloquent adaptation, which depicts a child’s-eye view of the civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia — a change the girl’s white colonial parents fiercely resisted.
Davidtz, known as an actress (Schindler’s List, among many others), directs and wrote the screenplay for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and stars as Fuller’s sad, alcoholic mother. Or, actually, co-stars, because the entire movie rests on the tiny shoulders and remarkably lifelike performance of Lexi Venter — just 7 when the picture, her first, was shot. It is a bold risk to put so much weight on a child’s work, but like so many of Davidtz’s choices here, it also turns out to be shrewd.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
The Bottom Line Near perfection.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Cast: Lexi Venter, Embeth Davidtz, Zikhona Bali, Fumani N Shilubana, Rob Van Vuuren, Anina Hope Reed
Director-screenwriter: Embeth Davidtz
1 hour 38 minutes
Another those smart calls is to focus intensely on one period of Fuller’s childhood. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is set in 1980, just before and during the election that would bring the country’s Black majority to power. Bobo, as Fuller was called, is a raggedy kid with a perpetually dirty face and uncombed hair, who’s seen at times riding a motorbike or sneaking cigarettes. She runs around the family farm, whose run-down look and dusty ground tell of a hardscrabble existence. The film was shot in South Africa, and Willie Nel’s cinematography, with glaring bright light, suggests the scorching feel of the sun.
Much of the story is told in Bobo’s voiceover, in Venter’s completely natural delivery, and in another daring and effective choice, all of it is told from her point of view. Davidtz’s screenplay deftly lets us hear and see the racism that surrounds the child, and the ideas that she has innocently taken in from her parents. And we recognize the emotional cost of the war, even when Bobo doesn’t. She often mentions terrorists, saying she is afraid to go into the bathroom alone at night in case there’s one waiting for her “with a knife or a gun or a spear.” She keeps an eye out for them while riding into town in the family car with an armed convoy. “Africans turned into terrorists and that’s how the war started,” she explains, parroting what she has heard.
At one point, the convoy glides past an affluent white neighborhood. That glimpse helps Davidtz situate the Fullers, putting their assumptions of privilege into context. Bobo has absorbed those notions without quite losing her innocence. Referring to the family’s servants, her voiceover says that Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and Jacob (Fumani N. Shilubana) live on the farm, and that “Africans don’t have last names.” Bobo adores Sarah and the stories she tells from her own culture, but Bobo also feels that she can boss Sarah around.
Venter is astonishing throughout. In close-up, she looks wide-eyed and aghast when visiting her grandfather, who has apparently had a stroke. At another point, she says of her mother, “Mum says she’d trade all of us for a horse and her dogs.” When she says, after the briefest pause, “But I know that’s not true,” her tone is not one of defiant disbelief or childlike belief, as might have been expected. It’s more nuanced, with a hint of sadness that suggests a realization just beyond her young grasp. Davidtz surely had a lot to do with that, and her editor, Nicholas Contaras, has cut all Bobo’s scenes into a sharply perfect length. Nonetheless, Venter’s work here brings to mind Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar as a child for her thoroughly believable role as a girl also who sees more than she knows in The Piano.
The largely South African cast displays the same naturalism as Venter, creating a consistent tone. Rob Van Vuuren plays Bobo’s father, who is at times away fighting, and Anina Hope Reed is her older sister. Bali and Shilubana are especially impressive as Sarah and Jacob, their portrayals suggesting a resistance to white rule that the characters can’t always speak out loud.
Davidtz has a showier role as Nicola Fuller. (The movie doesn’t explain its title, which hails from the early 20th century writer A.P Herbert’s line, “Don’t let’s go the dogs tonight, for mother will be there.”) Once, Nicola shoots a snake in the kitchen and calmly wanders off, ordering Jacob to bring her tea. More often, Bobo watches her mother drift around the house or sit on the porch in an alcoholic fog. But when her voiceover tells us about the little sister who drowned, we fathom the grief behind Nicola’s depression. And wrong-headed though she is, we understand her fury and distress when the election results make her feel that she is about to lose the country she thinks of as home. Davidtz gives herself a scene at a neighborhood dance that goes on a bit too long, but it’s the rare sequence that does.
There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.
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