'Shangri-La Suite' Film Review

Two young lovers go on a killing spree with Elvis (played by Ron Livingston) as their final target in Eddie O'Keefe's debut.

Two hot young lovers on the run take up arms against an uncomprehending grown-up world in Shangri-La Suite, and if that sounds familiar, well, that's probably the idea: Eddie O'Keefe's debut feature overflows with so many references large and small to other sex-and-guns romances that even the element that might set it apart — these killers are crossing the country to slay Elvis Presley — looks like a twisted ripoff of Elvis obsessions in Wild at Heart and True Romance. A pastiche that never really breathes life into its faux-exploitation-flick construct, the pic gets a surprisingly strong cast to play along, but will struggle to attract attention even on small screens.

Luke Grimes and Emily Browning play Jack and Karen, who meet in a rehab center. Using a voiceover by Burt Reynolds and a series of quick-cut flashbacks to their troubled childhoods, O'Keefe seems to be nodding to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers while using characters drawn equally from Badlands. But the movie's tone soon settles into a straighter evocation of 1970s grindhouse cinema, one that explains an intentionally wooden performance by Alan Tudyk as the psychologist whose groping of Karen initiates the couple's violent escape and road trip.

Jack reveals that the ghost of his mother appeared to him during a mescaline trip, ordering him to kill his hero — Presley, who by the time of this 1974 story is a bloated and drugged-out shadow of himself. So the two embark on a predictable picaresque in the direction of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the film displays sympathy for the fallen King by showing Presley's hazy attempts to get himself together for his latest tour. As Elvis, Ron Livingston steers clear of caricature and doesn't lay the drawl on too thick, but he finds it hard to conjure the icon's personality; joined by John Carroll Lynch's similarly restrained Colonel Tom Parker, he seems to be trusting that the script's meager ingredients will somehow be transmogrified by the filmmakers into something greater. Despite some seemingly sincere efforts, that never really happens.

Production companies: Bow and Arrow Entertainment, Haven Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Bona Fide
Cast: Emily Browning, Luke Grimes, Ron Livingston, Alan Tudyk, Burt Reynolds, John Carroll Lynch, Avan Jogia, Ashley Greene
Director: Eddie O'Keefe
Screenwriters: Chris Hutton, Eddie O'Keefe
Producers: Tariq Merhab, Matthew Perniciaro, Michael Sherman
Executive producers: Mauricio Betancur, Kevin Mann, Giulio Marantonio, Phil Stephenson, Temple Williams
Director of photography: Delaney Teichler
Production designer: Maya Sigel
Costume designer: Alysia Raycraft
Editor: Franklin Peterson
Composer: Mondo Boys
Casting directors: Angela Demo, Barbara J. McCarthy

‘Chief Zabu’ Film Review

Decades after it was shot, and just in time for the presidential election, a comedy about a real estate entrepreneur with vague political aspirations is being released.

Using his birth name, Howard Zuker, as a directorial nom de cinema, actor-producer Zack Norman partnered with Neil Cohen for their helming debut in 1986. Thirty years later, they’ve rescued the shelved project, a comic riff on money and politics, from not-quite-completion, and, with an eye on election-year relevance, dusted it off for a theatrical spin in Los Angeles before its East Coast debut at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.

Chief Zabu, which received its R rating in 1988, is being promoted with the tagline “A New York real estate developer dreams of respect and political influence.” The seemingly prescient Trumpian parallels are no coincidence; one of Norman’s inspirations was New York hospital signage announcing the philanthropy of the candidate’s father.

But the movie has more on its mind than one man’s ambition. Though its mix of the loopy, the broad and the deadpan is uneven, its story of American business designs on a tiny Polynesian nation still has satirical bite.

As the status-seeking developer Ben Sydney, a terrific Allen Garfield leads the ensemble of well-known character actors and less familiar faces. Ben’s particularly Jewish brand of neurotic social climbing often tips into hysteria. When he’s lured into the deal of a lifetime by a smooth swindler named George Dankworth (the late Allan Arbus), he’s sure that he’ll finally have the wealth-induced peace of mind, not to mention the clout, to feel like a real American.

The deal targets Tiburaku, a newly independent island nation whose president, Chief Henri Zabu (Manu Tupou), has traveled to the Big Apple with a delegation in a bid to secure UN membership. The Tiburaku Tourist Bureau’s investor-friendly animated promotional film (created by Mary Cybulski and Barbara Lehman) opens the movie and introduces the fictional country in parody-perfect fashion.

Tupou, who died in 2004, imbues Zabu with a flair for lofty oratory and a soulful gaze, wary and wounded. The movie could have benefited from more interactions between him and the scheming New Yorkers, but the screenplay, credited to the two directors and Nancy Zuker, is concerned mainly with the aspirations and machinations of the story’s ridiculous white guys (and gals), beginning with the half-dozen middle-aged business leaders who gather in a Plaza Hotel suite for Dankworth’s pitch. Having already sold Zabu a bill of goods, he plants sugar-plum visions of road, soft drink and fishing rights in the entrepreneurs’ profit-seeking heads.

Norman (Romancing the Stone) plays Ben’s employee and friend Sammy Brooks, a 46-year-old struggling comedian who’s tired of trying to pass off cramped hovels as “river-view” apartments. Charged with researching Tiburaku for Ben, Sammy spends hours in the pre-internet public library, reading news clippings in which nuclear fallout is a running theme; France, Tiburaku’s former colonizer, has been conducting weapons tests nearby.

But Ben is too dazzled to take Sammy’s findings seriously and instead focuses on charming cash out of the deep pockets of turnpike heir Skip Keisel (Ed Lauter). Ineffectual but not clueless, Skip is eager to shake off his particularly WASP brand of neurosis. He’s still under the thumb of his old man (Joseph Warren), his butler (Ferdinand Mayne) hates him and his wife (Lucianne Buchanan) is wackadoodle and adulterous beneath her suburban propriety.

In the pastel fashions and big hair of the female characters, the movie offers further evidence, not that we needed it, that the politically divisive ’80s was also, hands down, the most horrendous modern decade in American women’s fashion. Those female characters include a vacuously self-involved Hollywood actress (Marianna Hill). The title of her claim-to-fame feature, The Deluded Chimp, could apply to most of the Americans in Chief Zabu. As a colleague of fraudster Dankworth, the mighty Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers) harbors her own hopeful delusions. Least deluded but most enraged is Sammy’s co-worker Linda (Betty Karlen), who feels discriminated against and sidelined by Ben, and hates him even more than the real estate racket.

With their dueling frenzy, Garfield and Norman generate a thoroughly convincing chemistry of agitation, culminating in a jazzy shtick about the percentages of their assumed profits on the Tiburaku deal. His self-importance rising with the heady figures, Garfield’s vocabulary-challenged Ben segues righteously into lip service about the “underpoverished” and, not least, his determination to have “public opinions.”

The humble brags eventually give way to empty blather about democracy, with absurdist digs at the moneyed classes in showbiz and politics hitting a crescendo in a gathering of Beverly Hills grotesques.

Production: Zabu Company

Cast: Allen Garfield, Zack Norman, Allan Arbus, Lucianne Buchanan, Marianna Hill, Betty Karlen, Manu Tupou, Ed Lauter, Joseph Warren, Shirley Stoler, Ferdinand Mayne, Harsh Nayyar, Charles Siegal, Tom Nardini
Directors: Howard Zuker, Neil Cohen
Screenwriters: Neil Cohen, Nancy Zuker, Howard Zuker
Producer: Norman Leigh
Director of photography: Frank Prinzi
Production designers: John Loggia, Tom Surgal
Costume designer: Hali Breindel
Editor: Fima Noveck
Composer: Andrew Asch
Casting: Jessica Parfrey

‘Heaven Will Wait’ (‘Le Ciel attendra’) Film Review

Writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar (‘Once in a Lifetime’) follows two French teenage girls who voluntarily join the ranks of radical Islam.

With the spate of terrorist attacks occurring in Paris and other French cities over the last few years, and with many of those attacks perpetrated by local residents, the recruitment of homegrown Jihadi fighters has recently become a popular subject on both the big and small screen. In films like Made in France, Les Cowboys, Road to Istanbul and the TV movie La Desintegration, filmmakers have tried to explore how young French men and women from all walks of life find themselves indoctrinated by radical Islam, leaving their families in ruin and occasional victims in their wake.

In the femme-centric drama Heaven Will Wait (Le Ciel Attendra), writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar doesn’t so much touch upon this hot-button topic as whack it over the head with a sledgehammer in a film that makes some salient points about why teenage girls could be drawn into the clutches of ISIS recruiters, but does so with little thematic depth or cinematic nuance. Still, it’s effective enough as a sort of middlebrow wake-up call that will definitely impact some viewers — especially parents wondering what their children are doing behind their bedroom doors. (The film’s answer: They’re praying to Mecca!) After a well-received theatrical release in France and stints at Locarno, Toronto and Tokyo, Heaven should see continued attention abroad, with Gaumont already racking up a string of sales in foreign lands.

Crosscutting between three storylines that come together in the final act, Mention-Schaar and co-writer Emilie Freche (The Jews) follow two young protagonists who experience the call to Jihad in mirroring narrative strands. On one side we follow Sonia (Noemie Merlant), a born-again Muslim arrested for trying to pull off an attack in France, after which she goes through a long detox process that slowly transforms her into the girl she once was. And on the other hand there’s Melanie (Naomi Amarger), a studious cello player who meets a recruiter online and gradually falls into his clutches. (There’s a third strand involving a mother (Clotilde Courau) suffering from the absence of her daughter, with the director deliberately holding back key information despite the obvious connection she has to one of the main characters.)

While there is a documentary-style approach to certain sequences — particularly those involving therapy sessions led by real-life indoctrination expert Dounia Bouzar — the way that Mention-Schaar dramatizes these young girls’ lives often comes across as grossly deliberate and borderline ridiculous. In one scene, the highly susceptible Melanie sends texts to her Muslim “prince,” as she calls the unseen Islamist recruiter, while her teacher reads aloud an anti-religious diatribe by Guy de Maupassant. And in a series of over-the-top domestic spats, Sonia, who is on house arrest and at the mercy of her helpless parents (Sandrine Bonnaire, Zinedine Soualem), is seen going through severe Jihadi withdrawal, murmuring prayers, wandering about comatose, turning her sheet into a headscarf, screaming, crying, clutching at the walls and cursing. It feels like at any second, her head will do a 360 like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. 

Mention-Schaar may be the least subtle French filmmaker currently working in this semi-art house vein, relying primarily on close-ups because she has no real sense of staging, and capturing ripped-from-the-headlines tales in ways that both jolt and comfort the audience. (Her last film, the breakout hit Once in a Lifetime, dealt with banlieue kids learning important lessons from the Holocaust, including a scene where they hear the horror stories of an actual survivor.) As a concerned citizen, she deserves credit for tackling subjects that are constantly in the news and on everyone’s mind, but as a helmer her faux-realist methods seem inherently flawed, substituting easy narrative clichés — in this case, different lives thrown together, then reconciled, by the evil doings of ISIS — for something more ambiguous and provocative.

Certainly, there’s truth to be found in the kind of events depicted in Heaven Will Wait, with reports stating that over the last five or so years, thousands of young French adults have fled their homes to join radical Islamic forces fighting in Syria and elsewhere. But transforming such events into credible fiction is another matter, and despite hard-hitting performances — especially from leads Merlant and Amarger, who throw themselves full-throttle into difficult roles — the filmmakers ultimately turn a deeply complex phenomenon into what feels like a gratifying movie-of-the-week.

Production companies: Willow Films, UGS Images, France 2 Cinema
Cast: Noemie Merlant, Naomi Amarger, Sandrine Bonnaire, Clotilde Courau, Zinedine Soualem, Dounia Bouzar
Director-producer: Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar
Screenwriters: Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, Emilie Freche
Executive producer: Philippe Saal
Director of photography: Myriam Vinocour
Production designer: Valerie Faynot
Costume designer: Virginie Alba
Editor: Benoit Quinon
Casting directors: Marie France Michel, Christophe Istier
Sales: Gaumont

In French