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    What’s Playing Oscar Weekend?

    You have just this weekend to catch up on Oscar nominees! If you’re already caught up, or you do not care in the least, there are also other options on big screens and small.

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    Champions

    In theaters

    by Matt Weiner

    A team of ragtag misfits has to come together to win the big game, but not before they teach their washed up coach a thing or two about the power of teamwork in the process.

    Yes, Champions is a remake of an older film, but it’s somehow not The Bad News Bears. In this case, it’s the 2018 Spanish hit Campeones. The kids are just as foul-mouthed, but this time the twist is that disgraced professional coach Marcus Markovich (Woody Harrelson, delivering a solid replacement-level version of classic Prickly Harrelson) has to work with a rec basketball team of payers with intellectual disabilities as his court-ordered community service.

    With a regional championship game looming in Canada for the Special Olympics, Marcus needs to juggle getting his own life and career back on track, dating new love interest Alex (Kaitlin Olson) and showing up for his team. The outcome of the game might be up in the air, but you can rest easy knowing that lessons are learned, love is found and use of the R-word is kept to a minimum and only to show personal growth. Neat.

    While they might deserve a less stale vehicle to show off their skills, the performances from the actors with disabilities all rise above the cliched story (especially foul-mouthed Cosentino, played by Madison Tevlin, and Kevin Iannucci as Johnny, who gets caught in the middle of Marcus and Alex’s not-so-casual fling).

    The team’s interactions with Marcus and one another make for the few genuinely earned emotions in a story that otherwise seems to exist to remind viewers in 2023 that people with intellectual disabilities also deserve to be treated with respect.

    Olson is another acting standout. Her sharp comic timing wasn’t in doubt thanks to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but it’s surprising to see how much she shines in this kind of role. That is, surprising in the sense that she’s such a natural, refreshing fit that it seems impossible she hasn’t led more romantic comedies.

    With Bobby Farrelly as director, it’s hard not to compare Champions to elements of past Farrelly Brothers work. We’re a long way from There’s Something About Mary – and let’s not speak of the inexorable Shallow Hal – but this film exists firmly and bizarrely in an era not so removed from that time. (A heartwarming sports comedy about Special Olympics athletes isn’t even new ground for the Farrellys – 2005’s The Ringer mixes up the beats but its basic dignity message about people with disabilities is the same.)

    That Champions is appearing now feels less an indictment of Hollywood feet-dragging than a not-so-gentle suggestion that perhaps we’ve moved beyond needing generic sports movies with entry-level calls for respect to move the needle for any holdouts.

    Champions does itself no favors by substituting coarseness for meanness. That’s preferable to what this movie might have looked like a few decades ago, but it manages to neuter the comic touch of Farrelly and writer Mark Rizzo while dulling any interesting edges at the same time. (For example, an ongoing plot about a manipulative employer taking advantage of discount labor gets reduced to deus ex machina to set up the final game.) It’s an odd twist that Peter Farrelly’s recent solo effort Green Book won the Academy Award for Best Picture. And yet Bobby’s Champions might be the film that traffics in fewer broad stereotypes. That’s a win worth celebrating on its own. Just don’t expect the taste of victory to linger longer than the closing credits.

    Grade: C

    The Quiet Girl

    At Drexel Theatre and Gateway Film Center

    by George Wolf

    This has been a fan-fecking-tastic awards season for the Emerald Isle. Multiple Oscar nominee The Banshees of Inisherin has racked up plenty of other noms and wins these last few weeks, and the sublime short feature An Irish Goodbye is a recent BAFTA winner and leading Oscar contender ahead of Sunday’s ceremony.

    But the hometown favorite might well be The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), up for a Best International Film Oscar after wining seven of its ten nominations at the recent Irish Film Awards.

    So yes, it’s feckin’ good, and it’s so exquisitely, heartbreakingly Irish.

    In fact, the feature debut from writer/director Colm Bairéad is the first Irish language film to be nominated for an Oscar, but it begins speaking through the subtle foreshadowing of a cuckoo’s song – the bird known for laying its eggs in the nests of others.

    And in rural Ireland circa 1981, young Cáit (an astonishing debut from Catherine Clinch) is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with “her mother’s people” for the summer. Middle-aged couple Seán (Andrew Bennett) and Eibhlín (a marvelous Carrie Crowley) have never met the shy and introspective Cáit, but they welcome her into their home.

    Seán spends most days working the farm, so Eibhlín tends to Cáit with an unconditional affection she has never known, and the young girl begins to blossom. But after Eibhlín declares “if there are secrets, there is shame,” Cáit discovers a secret that permeates the farmhouse.

    Like Belgium’s Close (also up for Best International Feature), The Quiet Girl features a terrific debut from a child actor and is draped in a tender stillness that gently cradles the building of its central relationship. Clinch and Crowley are absolutely wonderful together, rendering it nearly impossible not the care whether this wide-eyed young girl and her wounded mother figure will feel safe enough to open their hearts.

    In adapting Claire Keegan’s novella, Bairéad’s storytelling is confidently restrained and overflowing with compassion, as it builds to one of the most quietly devastating final shots in years. The Quiet Girl is an intimate, beautifully realized take on finding what we need to heal our pain – and knowing when to rise up and meet it.

    Grade: A-

    Unwelcome

    At Gateway Film Center

    by Hope Madden

    There’s never a bad time for an Irish horror movie, but there are better times for them. Like March.

    Hey! It’s March! Well, I guess it’s lucky that Grabbers director Jon Wright is back with the new tale of bloodthirsty little people, Unwelcome. Wright’s yarn follows Londoners Maya (Hannah John-Kamen, Ant-Man and the Wasp) and Jamie (Douglas Booth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). We meet as the two 1) confirm they are pregnant, and 2) barely survive a brutal break in.

    Act 1 is grim, humorless and traumatizing, capitalizing on the very Brit-horror anxiety around roving young thugs and the pointless violence they will do. Act 2 ushers us into the lush, quaint Irish countryside where Jamie and Maya relocate, thanks to a timely inheritance. Jamie’s aunt passed on more than a cottage, though. There are rules.

    But Maya doesn’t take the rules very seriously. And besides, she’s due any minute, there’s a hole in her roof, the clan of handymen they hired to fix it is somewhat terrifying, and she and Jamie are still suffering from the trauma of the break in back in London. So, yes, she forgot to leave the raw meat out on the back fence for the “red caps” roaming the forest beyond.

    What could go wrong?

    Let’s start with what goes right. Wright’s pivot to very Irish horror, with its humor, color and creatures of old creates a fascinating shift from the gritty British tone. The Whelan family (Colm Meaney, Kristian Nairn, Chris Walley and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), hired to patch and repair the cottage, deliver uncomfortable tension from their introduction. Set design is gorgeous and the creatures are pretty cool.

    Unfortunately, that’s not enough. Maya and Jamie make ridiculous decisions, many of them running counter to the characters’ own (sometimes verbalized) natures. The film doesn’t lean into humor nearly enough, and the conclusion leaves much to be desired.

    Irish horror so often incorporates folktales of malevolent tricksters. You Are Not My Mother  (2021)The Hallow (2015) and The Hole in the Ground (2019) all tread similarly magical ground and all do a better job of it. Unwelcome can’t begin to stand up to comparisons to Wright’s creature-feature Grabbers –the best Irish horror film you could hope for.

    It’s not without its charm. Meaney and his crew turn in excellent performances and generate some honest laughs. But the film itself is a mess.

    Grade: C

    Therapy Dogs

    At Gateway Film Center

    by Rachel Willis

    Writer/director Ethan Eng (along with co-writer Justin Morrice) crafts a slice-of-life look at adolescence with his debut feature, Therapy Dogs. Eng and Morrice also play fictionalized versions of themselves, two friends seeking to document the truth about high school as they embark on their senior year.   

    Your enjoyment of Therapy Dogs will likely rest entirely on whether or not you find the antics of adolescent boys annoying. There are the things that seem typical: drinking and parties and pot. Then, perhaps, the not so typical: exploring abandoned buildings and making dumb decisions like jumping off a railroad bridge into the water (which may or may not be deep enough for such a drop).

    One thing the film highlights is that boys in 2019 are very much like the boys with whom I went to school in the mid- to late-1990s. And as the ’90s have come back around in fashion, if not for the presence of cell phones, I might have thought I was watching something from my own adolescence.

    The film runs the gauntlet of found footage style adventuring but at times appears more adept. The naturalism will occasionally give way to something more subtle. These are the moments when it’s unclear who’s behind the camera. Is this still part of the boys’ senior film, or does it represent the presence of an omniscient narrator? Regardless, it works to help hold together the disjointed segments.

    The success of the film lies in its accuracy around the portrayal of teenagers, particularly boys, as they ponder the future and wonder what lies ahead. Though the film jumps around and never seems to settle on a plot, you come to realize that there is a commentary on growing up and how baffling it is that so many boys survive such bad choices.

    Teenage boys are essentially teenage boys. Though teenagers today have different pressures than those of past generations, they still make stupid decisions, crack each other up with bad jokes, tell “epic” stories, fight, and eventually – if they survive their poor decision making – grow up. Eng captures it all in a way that feels as familiar as it does unique.

    There are some filmmaking choices that are just as likely to be off-putting as they are to be engaging, but there’s no denying that the movie’s realism is what makes it relevant. This is an ageless tale of youthful exuberance that brings its own distinct perspective.

    Grade: B

    Unicorn Wars

    At Gateway Film Center

    by Daniel Baldwin

    Blood. Steel. Pain. Cuddles.

    That’s the motto constantly being pummeled into the minds of the teddy bear soldiers by their theocratic, fascistic leaders. Their enemy? The unicorns, a seemingly peaceful race that resides within a natural wooded paradise called the Magic Forest. The bears want what the unicorns have and they aim to take it with deadly brute force. Emphasis on brute.

    Albert Vazquez’s animated Spanish-language war satire is, simply put, a sight to behold. Vazquez takes all of the hallmarks and horrors of Vietnam War cinema and wraps them in a lusciously cartoonish new skin, rendering incredibly grisly terrors all the more potent. Too often, societies send their children off to fight their wars and what is more child-like than a teddy bear? Instead of putting guns in the hands of human teens, Vazquez arms impressionable teddies with bows, arrows, knives and grenades, sending them off to destroy the natural world around them for its resources.

    If that sounds like a scathing indictment of human behavior for the entirety of our history, that’s because that is exactly what this is. Man’s inhumanity to man is on full display here in numerous ways, both in a war between two vastly different cultures and in how the bears treat one another. Nearly all the film’s main characters are vicious miserable lot, despite their Care Bear-ish looks. Every punch, stab, shot, bludgeoning and impalement packs a wallop as it lays the horror of war bare for all to see. Pun intended.

    If Unicorn Wars has any major failings, it’s that its crude sexual humor sometimes undercuts its deathly serious satirical message. The unicorns are also underdeveloped. The film cannot decide whether to showcase their side of all of this or just leave them as an enigmatic (and largely peaceful) race. As a result, an early subplot involving a few unicorns peters out by the midpoint of the film and never really resolves in any meaningful way.

    Vazquez is aiming for something as potent as Watership Down and The Plague Dogs here. While his reach ultimately exceeds his grasp, he still manages to conjure up a very striking and occasionally moving piece of adult animation – right down to an absolutely haunting final sequence. That Unicorn Wars is only his second feature makes it all the more impressive. Keep your eyes on this filmmaker, folks.

    Grade: B-

    Punch

    On VOD

    by Christie Robb

    If Tim Roth is attached to a project, I’m intrigued. In Punch, he’s playing Stan, the alcoholic father of 17-year old up-and-coming boxer Jim (Jordan Oosterhof). Stan’s been training Jim since elementary school. It’s a familiar story—small town kid hoping to get out by nurturing his athletic talent. 

    In this case, the small town is located in picturesque New Zealand and what the town has going for it in terms of rolling grassland and beaches is more than ruined by the small-minded racism and rampant homophobia of its residents. 

    One day, while blowing off his training to pursue his true passion of shooting footage for music videos, young Jim is stung by a jellyfish and is rescued by Whetu (a resplendent Conan Hayes). Whetu is both Maori in what appears to be a majority white town and openly gay.

    Jim will have to navigate his growing feelings for Whetu, the pressure of his dad’s dreams for his future, and the demands of all the various folks around town who want to define the man he will become.

    The first feature written and directed by Welby Ings, Punch‘s story and timeline feel a bit uneven. Most of the film has a meandering, dreamy pace that is an appropriate touch for the organic way the boys’ relationship develops. But, this is set in contrast to the ticking clock established at the beginning of the film with an upcoming crucial boxing match and, later on, by Stan’s growing ill health.

    Some of the character development is uneven as well, and sadly Roth is a let down here as Stan veers dramatically from a tyrannical figure to an empathetic shoulder for Jim to cry on without earning that moment. Similarly, the ending seems abrupt and also, perhaps, not quite earned. 

    Matt Henley’s cinematography, though, is atmospheric and gorgeous and elevates the film, especially in the scenes Whetu and Jim spend together. They are a delight to watch.

    Grade: B-

    I Got a Monster

    On VOD

    by Tori Haines

    An unrelenting look at the prescriptive police corruption plaguing Baltimore’s system, I Got A Monster stares the repeatedly topical topic straight down the barrel.

    Director Kevin Abrams follows dogmatic defense attorney Ivan Bates’ journey of taking down the city’s most prolific group of badged criminals: Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force, headed by Sgt. Wayne Jenkins. Navigating the audience through the twists of the cold judicial system while Jenkins’ victims ride shotgun, I Got A Monster succeeds as a deeply educational piece.

    The documentary’s strength is also its weakness. In its need to present information, the doc often loses sight of the angry, desperate and necessary call-to-arms at the center of its message. The moments of true emotional catharsis come in the form of first-person testimonies from the lives Jenkins ruined at random. Devastated and infuriated, the victims recount their traumatic experiences with Baltimore PD’s racial profiling and corruption. These vignettes are the soul of the piece – where the film finds moments of true nuance, ethos and bravery.

    However, the balance of testimony offers scattershot cold legal expertise, with advisors desperate to spell out each step of Jenkins’ downfall.

    The stark difference between the two testimonial styles feels left-footed, almost like audiences need to fully switch sections of the brain to properly interpret the speaker on screen.

    I Got A Monster is not a documentary playing in the sandbox of multiple, shifting perspectives of opinion. To an extent, fans of documentaries expect and enjoy the feeling of whiplash. This piece is tough, in a way, because nary a soul alive would be able to justify the cruelty and corruption of Jenkins. However, the complete unity of ideologies is what causes the awkward back and forth of ethos versus facts. Finding some middle ground that gives audiences the touch of a differing perspective (for example, I would’ve loved to hear Jenkins’ legal defense team’s moral justifications) could’ve helped unify the important message as opposed to dissecting it.

    I Got A Monster gives a voice to the handful of the men and women who had their agencies, freedoms, and, in some cases, beliefs of a just world ripped from them. The platform Abrams created for them is, in and of itself, worthy of praise and viewing. 

    While I Got A Monster often feels like a disjunct narrative, the people behind the Monster make it worthwhile.

    Grade: B+

    Listen to George, Hope and Schlocketeer Daniel Baldwin run through all of this week’s reviews plus new movie news on THE SCREENING ROOM PODCAST.

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    George Wolf
    George Wolf
    George Wolf is a member of the Columbus Film Critics Assoc. and a freelance contributor for Columbus Underground covering film. George can also be heard on Columbus radio stations Rewind 103.5, Sunny 95, QFM96 and Mix 107.9.
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