On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: THE JESUS ROLLS (2020) and ARKANSAS (2020)

THE JESUS ROLLS
(US/France - 2020)

The Coen Bros. have made it clear that there's never going to be a sequel to their beloved 1998 cult classic THE BIG LEBOWSKI, but they did give John Turturro their blessing to move forward with his labor-of-love spinoff THE JESUS ROLLS. Turturro's Jesus Quintana, a trash-talking bowling rival of The Dude, Walter, and Donny and a convicted pederast ("Eight-year-olds, Dude"), only had a couple of scenes in THE BIG LEBOWSKI, but the actor turned a minor character into a fan favorite, complete with his teasing lick of the bowling ball, his triumphant strike dance, and his catchphrase "Nobody fucks with the Jesus!" Jesus was funny in those two very small doses, but is there enough there to carry his own movie? Turturro certainly thought so, and spent years writing this during his downtime between other projects before finally shooting it way back in 2016. The fact that it took this long to get a limited release followed by VOD is the big red flag that this is decidedly not THE BIG LEBOWSKI II: THE JESUS ROLLS. It is, however, a remake of Bertrand Blier's controversial 1974 French film GOING PLACES, about two road-tripping buddies and petty criminals (one of them a young Gerard Depardieu) and their sexual exploits, with the two of them eventually sharing a young hairdresser's assistant who tags along on their aimless journey.

In THE JESUS ROLLS, Jesus is paroled from Sing Sing (wasn't it Chino in LEBOWSKI?) after serving six months for indecent exposure, with a farewell conversation with the warden (Christopher Walken, dropping by for two minutes to play "Christopher Walken") revealing that the whole pederast charge was a misunderstanding when an eight-year-old kid two urinals over in a men's room caught a glimpse of Jesus' huge dick and asked him about it. Greeted by his ex-con buddy Petey (Bobby Cannavale), the two immediately steal the muscle car of obnoxious hairdresser Paul Dominique (Jon Hamm) and take his girlfriend Marie (Audrey Tautou) with them. So begins an episodic road movie, with homoerotic overtures between Jesus and Petey (Jesus tries to seduce him at one point, telling a reluctant Petey "Take it easy, man...it's OK between friends"), and the two eventually forming a throuple with Marie, who's slept with 374 men but has never experienced an orgasm (among those 374 is Jesus' bowling sidekick Liam, who's mentioned but never seen). They get separated on a few occasions--Jesus and Petey end up having an expensive dinner and a motel threesome with "767" (Susan Sarandon), who's just been released after a long stretch in a women's prison, and later touch base with her just-paroled son (Pete Davidson), who becomes the first man to bring Marie to orgasm.

THE JESUS ROLLS

GOING PLACES

You think Turturro showed this to Joel and Ethan Coen? Because I'd pay to see their reaction to it. Watching the Coens watch THE JESUS ROLLS has to be more entertaining than just watching THE JESUS ROLLS. There's just one moment in its seemingly endless 85 minutes that I found even remotely amusing (Petey looking at a porno mag and declaring "Vanessa Del Rio is underrated!"), and it's hard telling why Turturro thought dropping Jesus into a ponderous remake of GOING PLACES was a good idea. Did he really want to direct a remake of GOING PLACES but found that shoehorning Jesus Quintana into it was the only way he could secure funding? You think it's a bad sign that THE BIG LEBOWSKI, arguably the most quotable comedy since CADDYSHACK, gets a spinoff with a memorable character and still takes over three years to find a distributor? The closing credits still display a 2017 copyright. Turturro tries to placate the LEBOWSKI superfans, blowtorching through Jesus' greatest hits in the early-going with numerous references and callbacks to give everyone what they came for (there's the mention of Liam, and Jesus says "Nobody fucks with the Jesus" twice, threatens to stick a gun up someone's ass and "pull the fucking trigger till it goes 'click,'" and does his cunnilingual bowling ball tongue move). But once he fulfills those obligations, THE JESUS ROLLS just becomes a miserable slog and an utterly pointless Turturro vanity project. A little of the Jesus goes a long way, and even the always-charming Tautou grates in the worst performance of her career. Turturro called in some favors from actor friends (Sarandon, Walken, Hamm, JB Smoove as a mechanic, Sonia Braga as Jesus' prostitute mother, Gloria Reuben as a restaurant owner, Michael Badalucco as a store security guard, Tim Blake Nelson as a doctor), but the ill-advised THE JESUS ROLLS--which technically isn't a sequel but still deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other decades-late, legacy-defiling hosejobs like EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK and RAGING BULL II before its court-ordered title change to THE BRONX BULL--is a tedious, self-indulgent, borderline unwatchable disaster. Turturro shouldn't have fucked with the Jesus. (R, 85 mins)


ARKANSAS
(US/UK/Luxembourg - 2020)

Based on a 2009 novel by John Brandon, ARKANSAS belongs to that moody BLUE RUIN and BAD TURN WORSE subgenre of dark crime films. It wears its influences on its sleeve, with its Tarantino-inspired multiple narratives jumping between 1985, 1988, and the present day, and being a bleak Southern noir with doomed and frequently dim characters making bad decisions, it recalls the bleakly comedic crime sagas of the Coen Bros. It's also not the kind of film one would have expected to be the writing/directing debut of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE/late-period OFFICE co-star and hipster dweeb Clark Duke. A man-bunned Duke also co-stars as Swin who, along with Kyle (Liam Hemsworth), are two low-level drug couriers for Frog, a feared crime lord in the Dixie Mafia (described by Kyle as less an organized crime outfit and more "a loose affiliation of deadbeats and scumbags") who they've never even met. They're taking a shipment from Little Rock to Corpus Christi when they're intercepted by Bright (John Malkovich, who also starred with Hemsworth in the 2015 Coen riff CUT BANK), a Frog associate who uses his full-time job as a park ranger as cover. Under Frog's orders, Bright puts the two of them to work at the park, but a series of incidents--starting with the idiot grandson (Chandler Duke) of a Louisiana drug distributor (Barry Primus) deciding to follow Kyle and Swin back to Bright's house and retrieve the money they collected--sends things south. Complicating matters is that, despite being told to avoid socializing with the locals, the irritating Swin has taken up with cute nurse Johnna (Eden Brolin, Josh's daughter), after a meet-creepy in a Piggly Wiggly, in what co-writer Clark Duke and director Clark Duke no doubt thought was the perfect plot development for the character played by Clark Duke.

The early going is interesting enough, and Malkovich gets to Malkovich it up in his brief screen time, but ARKANSAS really comes alive when Duke goes for two long flashbacks to 1985 and 1988, showing the establishment of Frog's criminal empire. Frog is played by Vince Vaughn, who appears in the present day scenes a mystery man running a junky pawn shop, and though the viewer knows he's Frog, Kyle and Swin do not, and while Duke might've thought that would be a source of suspense, it's an aspect that sort-of fizzles. But it's the flashback sequences detailing Frog's origin story that are the best parts of ARKANSAS, showing his almost accidental rise from running a tiny pawn shop/flea market in West Memphis to becoming a major player in the Deep South drug trade under the tutelage of fireworks store owner Almond (Michael Kenneth Williams). Duke really establishes a hypnotic mood in these sequences, augmented by some hauntingly ethereal and strangely eerie Flaming Lips covers of Hank Williams Jr's "A Country Boy Can Survive" and "In the Arms of Cocaine," and The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The film's tone and style give it the same feel that a lot of movies have nowadays--that of an entire season of a cable series that's been whittled down to two hours--but Vaughn's character is so intriguing and his sections so well-executed (The Flaming Lips really need to release these songs on a covers album) that the rest of ARKANSAS can't help but pale in comparison when Duke returns to the comparatively ho-hum main plot involving Kyle and Swin. Some occasionally funny dialogue helps (Kentucky-born Swin complaining about how his many sisters are destined to be working in a strip joint and quipping "One's already named Cinnamon!"), but it's hard to watch this and not think a stronger film could've resulted had it just been about the rise of Frog, as Vaughn does a much better job of commanding the screen than either Hemsworth or Duke. Originally intended to screen at the 2020 SXSW before the festival was canceled over coronavirus concerns, ARKANSAS was ultimately relegated to a same-day VOD/DTV release by Lionsgate. It's a mixed bag when it's all over, and while it doesn't always work, it makes a much more credible case for itself than you'd expect from Clark Duke directing a downer crime saga more in line with a Jeremy Saulnier or a Macon Blair. (R, 117 mins)

On Blu-ray/DVD: THE LAST MOVIE STAR (2018) and I REMEMBER YOU (2017)

THE LAST MOVIE STAR
(US - 2018)

He's 82 and shockingly frail, but living legend Burt Reynolds shows he's still got it in THE LAST MOVIE STAR, which is getting an unusual rollout from A24: it premiered on DirecTV a month ago and is being released on Blu-ray three days before its limited theatrical run. In his first significant big-screen role in at least a decade, Reynolds is aging movie legend Vic Edwards, but let there be no misunderstanding: he's playing Burt Reynolds. Edwards was the biggest movie star in the world for six straight years starting in the late '70s, but his fortunes have waned as time and age have shown no mercy. He's been divorced five times. He still lives in a nice L.A. mansion that looks like a Vic Edwards museum, but he hasn't acted in years, he walks hunched over with a cane, is in constant physical pain, and from the opening scene where he's at the vet's office and makes the difficult decision to put down Squanto, his terminally-ill, 15-year-old dog, it's clear that Vic Edwards is ready to say goodbye. He gets invited to the International Nashville Film Festival to accept a lifetime achievement award that he's been told has previously been bestowed upon the likes of Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, and though he's hesitant and thinks it's bullshit, he decides to attend after being prodded by his buddy Sonny (Chevy Chase). Vic arrives in Nashville (after his first class tickets turn out to be coach) only to find that he's been put up in a cheap motel, the festival--which he confused with the Nashville International Film Festival--is being held in the backroom of a bar by local movie nerds Doug (Clark Duke) and Shane (BOYHOOD's Ellar Coltrane), and his promised assistant is Doug's loud, obnoxious, can't even, #whatever sister Lil (MODERN FAMILY's Ariel Winter). She's an aspiring artist whose work veers toward the disturbingly dark (Clive Barker, of all people, provided Lil's artwork), has no idea who Vic is and is too preoccupied with her cheating, douchebag boyfriend Bjorn (Juston Street) to care. Feeling he's been conned, Vic spends the first night of the festival getting drunk and insulting the attendees in Shatner/"Get a Life!" fashion (calling them "losers watching movies in your basement"). When Lil picks him up at the motel the next morning, he makes her drive him three hours away to Knoxville so he can visit his childhood home and try to find closure and meaning to his life and reconnect with the person he was once upon a time as these two unlikely travelers form an unexpected friendship on their impromptu road trip.

Burt is the whole show here, and it's a shame writer/director Adam Rifkin (THE DARK BACKWARD, THE CHASE, DETROIT ROCK CITY), a Reynolds superfan who wrote this specifically for his hero, didn't give him something more consistently substantive. Burt is terrific when Rifkin keeps the focus on him and lets the camera just take in his aged, craggy, cosmetically altered face and the sadness in his eyes. Reynolds is a guy who's burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood over his career. Movies that meant something to him were dismissed by critics and he ultimately stopped caring. He's been smeared by tabloids over his marriage to Loni Anderson and his mismanaged finances and bankruptcies, and was the subject of nasty AIDS rumors in the '80s after shattering his jaw in an on-set accident making 1984's CITY HEAT. He was shunned by industry insiders he thought were his friends, and it all left him with a seething bitterness that's affected his life and career to this day. Sometimes he's been his own worst enemy and just can't help himself, as when Paul Thomas Anderson gave him arguably the best role of his career (leading to his only Oscar nomination) in BOOGIE NIGHTS and Reynolds responded by shit-talking the movie before it was even released. Reynolds has fucked up a lot and he knows it, and he channels that anger and regret into Vic Edwards. Why then, does Rifkin spend so much time on a going-nowhere subplot about Lil being pissed at Bjorn for cheating on her? This is Burt Reynolds baring his soul--no offense to Ariel Winter, but no one cares about Lil. And no one cares about Doug's hurt feelings or Shane's unrequited love for Lil and how she doesn't even know he exists.

When THE LAST MOVIE STAR is about Vic, it's very good, and Reynolds rises to the occasion. For fans who have followed him for several decades, it's difficult seeing the Bandit taking slow baby steps and grunting with nearly every physical action, watching him mourn the loss of his dog and going grocery shopping alone, buying prune juice and Hungry Man TV dinners. There's a devastating scene late in the film where Vic visits his long-estranged, pre-fame first wife Claudia (Kathleen Nolan), who's in a Knoxville nursing home in the late stages of Alzheimer's. THE LAST MOVIE STAR needs more of these moments, or at least visually clever ones like Vic disappearing into his memories as present-day Reynolds is CGI'd into scenes from his old movies and converses with the Bandit during a SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT car chase or lounges in a canoe marveling at himself from DELIVERANCE ("Damn, you're good lookin'!" Vic tells his much-younger self). Since Burt is basically playing Burt, maybe a better film could've been made by dropping the film festival angle altogether and doing more things like that, like putting Burt into scenes from his old movies and reminiscing about them or what was going on in his life at that point, like a sort-of visual journey through Burt Reynolds' memories, guided by the man himself. THE LAST MOVIE STAR is filled with touching, heartfelt moments, but in the narrative constructed by Rifkin, the story is predictable and the dialogue too often trite, as when Burt is forced to say "I look in the mirror now, and I have no idea who that person is staring back at me." THE LAST MOVIE STAR is a real mixed-bag: there's enough good stuff here that Burt fans need to see it, but they'll probably walk away from it wishing it was something else. (R, 103 mins)




I REMEMBER YOU
(Iceland/Norway/Denmark - 2017)

There's some great chilly atmosphere in this very slow-burning Icelandic thriller based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurdardottir. The story, at least in director/co-writer Oskar Por Axelsson's adaptation, tries to juggle a few too many elements to reach a wholly satisfying conclusion, but the big twist is such that you'll be wanting to go back and take another look at seemingly minor details in the early scenes that end up having a major impact later on. Having said that, viewers well-versed in twisty mysteries and thrillers of this sort are almost certainly going to figure out one late-film reveal long before psychiatrist Freyr (Johannes Haukur Johannesson, best known to American audiences for his brief stint as Lem Lemoncloak on GAME OF THRONES) and his detective friend Dagny (Sara Dogg Asgeirdottir) overtly spell it out for them. Freyr is still grieving the loss of his son Benni, presumed dead after he went missing three years earlier, last seen in footage from a security camera outside a nearby gas station. Every lead and tip led to nothing and Benni's case has gone cold, with Freyr and his ex-wife Sara's (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir) marriage imploding in the traumatic aftermath. Dagny calls Freyr for a medical opinion on a suicide case where an elderly woman named Halla hanged herself in a room with crosses and the word "Ohreinn" ("filthy" in English) drawn on the walls, and crosses--both fresh and several years old--carved into her flesh. The crosses and the handwriting match the vandalizing of a church 60 years ago, where the child culprit--a persistently bullied boy named Bernodus--disappeared immediately after, never to be seen again. Why Dagny has called Freyr is that Halla is the seventh elderly person found dead in an inexplicable fashion, with a photo from 1956 showing that the seven were all classmates of Bernodus and all of their faces have been scratched out. One such classmate happens to be a schizophrenic and virtually catatonic patient of Freyr's who tells him, out of the blue, "Benni is at the bottom! Everything is green!"

Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline (yes, this is one of those where it's a waiting game to see how two completely unrelated plots converge), Gardar (Porvaldur David Kristjansson) and Katrin (Anna Gunndis Gudmundsdottir) are a married couple still picking up the pieces after their son was stillborn a year earlier. They and their third wheel friend Lif (Agusta Eva Erlendsdottir) have traveled to a seaside ghost town to renovate an abandoned house that's been empty for 60 years. It isn't long before a love triangle rears its ugly head, and erratic Katrin starts seeing spectral flashes of a little boy, followed by the discovery of a long-mummified corpse in the cellar, its fingers clutching an old black & white photograph. There's a lot of plot for I REMEMBER YOU to cover, and the clunky shift from procedural to the supernatural comes off as a little forced. Things head in a direction that's equal parts Shyamalan and THE ORPHANAGE and while it isn't an in-your-face, jump-scare chiller, its foreboding mood and relentlessly downbeat tone make it a flawed but generally effective mystery for fans of Scandinavian gloom. (Unrated, 105 mins)