Latest news with #It'sDorothy!
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Tow' Review: Rose Byrne's Committed Performance Grounds a Compassionate Portrait of Homelessness
A phrase that Amanda Ogle, the no-nonsense protagonist played by Rose Byrne in Stephanie Laing's touching film Tow, hears a lot is 'people like you.' Strangers reach for it when referring to her situation as an unhoused woman in Seattle, Washington, living in her car. Social services workers — or anyone tasked with helping her — use it to preface their shock at her determination. Passers-by, assuming she is down on her luck, deploy it like a compliment, as if Amanda's intrepidness in the face of bureaucratic systems and run-of-the-mill social indifference is a testament to her personality rather than a necessary response to state failure. Amanda has a particularly hard time stomaching this phrase when her car — a 1991 Blue Toyota Camry — gets towed. Employees of this large auto company hauled her car, which was stolen while she was interviewing for a job at a high-end pet salon, without a second thought about its value. In addition to living in the vehicle, Amanda needs the car to get the gig. When asked if she could pick up clients' dogs, she, eager to get back on her feet and put her veterinary tech license to use, said yes. So it's more than an inconvenience when Amanda walks out of the salon to find her car missing. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Deep Cover' Review: Bryce Dallas Howard and Orlando Bloom Play Improv Actors Working an Undercover Police Sting in a Winningly Silly Comedy 'It's Dorothy!' Review: 'Wizard of Oz' Protagonist Gets a Deep-Dive Cultural Analysis in Wide-Ranging if Overstuffed Appreciation 'Surviving Ohio State' Review: HBO's Sexual Abuse Doc Is Thorough and Persuasive, but Lacks a New Smoking Gun Premiering at Tribeca, Tow follows Amanda as she spends more than a year trying to get her car back from a tow yard. The film is inspired by the real story of an unhoused Seattle woman who fought an impressive legal battle against a tow company in order to get her vehicle back and clear an outrageous bill. Laing's compassionate adaptation of the story details Amanda's life before the tow-company nightmare and chronicles how the Seattle resident survives the city while navigating this taxing clash. Similar to Harris Dickinson's stirring Cannes debut Urchin, Tow spotlights issues around homelessness and addiction with empathy, a grounded realism and a touch of humor. Working from a screenplay by Jonathan Keasey, Brant Boivin and Annie Weisman, Laing (Family Squares, Irreplaceable You) opens Tow with a statistic about vehicular residents across the country: The number of people who live in their cars falls somewhere between 1 and 3 million people. When we meet Amanda, she's floundering in an already bad job interview. When the employer asks why Amanda has a vet tech license but no college degree, she becomes deflated. The interview ends with no job. Laing steadily shepherds viewers through glimpses of Amanda's life: We see her charging her phone in various establishments, texting her teenage daughter Avery (Elsie Fisher) and figuring out where she can park her car and get a good night's rest. That last task proves to be the most challenging, and the scene of Amanda being harassed by neighborhood patrol reminded me of moments in Patrick Fealey's harrowing account of being unhoused in America, which the writer published last year in Esquire magazine. His and Amanda's experiences underscore how expensive it is to be poor in the U.S. After reporting her missing vehicle to the unhelpful officers at the local precinct, Amanda finally locates her Camry in a tow yard. She begs the attendant (Simon Rex) to release the vehicle, but he, with a touch of shame, admits he doesn't have the authority to do so. So Amanda, whom Byrne plays with a spunky persistence (think Frances McDormand in Nomadland with more perk), decides to go after the corporation that owns the tow yard. Her story adopts the contours, and possesses the easy-to-root for energy, of all David vs. Goliath stories. In a small claims court, Amanda decides to represent herself, and her stirring testimony — plus the failure of the tow company's legal counsel to show up — persuades the presiding judge to grant her a court order to retrieve the vehicle. The only problem is that her car is no longer in the yard; having been moved through the system, it is on its way to an auction and then likely a junkyard. Amanda doesn't give up, though. She finds a church shelter run by a steely woman named Barb (Octavia Spencer) and enlists the help of Kevin (The Holdovers' Dominic Sessa), a rookie lawyer propelled by an endearing if clumsy idealism. He takes over her case by helping her file claims with the superior courts. At the shelter, Amanda forms genuine friendships with other unhoused people like Nova (Demi Lovato), a pregnant mother, and Denise (Ariana DeBose), a recovering addict whose cutting remarks and humor mask the pain of losing custody of her children. They help Amanda navigate her own alcohol dependency as well as the challenges in her relationship with her daughter. Laing doesn't opt exclusively for documentary-style realism like Dickinson does in Urchin. Tow leans into the natural comedy that arises from elements of Amanda's situation without glamorizing the plight of the downtrodden. The score, composed by Este Haim (one third of the band Haim) and Nathan Barr (Salem's Lot, The Diplomat), highlights the more whimsical moments in Amanda's life, from coaxing the employees of the luxury grooming salon to give her a job to lightly mocking Kevin for all the ways he thinks he understands her. Vanja Cernjul's unfussy cinematography relies on tight shots to lend the film intimacy, though one is left yearning for more sweeping views of Seattle. That wider perspective could have underscored the stark differences between the wealthy tech entrepreneurs Amanda references at one point and everyone else just scraping by. Still, in its modest way, Tow sends a powerful message about how many of us have more in common with a person sleeping in a car than we do the billionaires we've been conditioned to admire. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Deep Cover' Review: Bryce Dallas Howard and Orlando Bloom Play Improv Actors Working an Undercover Police Sting in a Winningly Silly Comedy
The premise of Deep Cover is almost funny enough to carry the entire film: A trio of improv actors is recruited by the London police to go undercover on a low-level sting operation, on the theory that they can think on their feet. Fortunately, this comedy is more than its plot thanks to the hilariously straight-faced performances of Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed as the hapless actors who wind up embedded with dangerous London gangsters. The film approaches its action tropes with an effective sense of absurdity, but it's the stars' kinetic commitment to the bit that makes this relentlessly silly film work. Howard brings energy and conviction to her role as Kat, an American in London whose visa has almost run out, along with her luck as an actor. Now she teaches improv classes to play the bills, and faces the pitying looks of her old friends. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'It's Dorothy!' Review: 'Wizard of Oz' Protagonist Gets a Deep-Dive Cultural Analysis in Wide-Ranging if Overstuffed Appreciation 'Surviving Ohio State' Review: HBO's Sexual Abuse Doc Is Thorough and Persuasive, but Lacks a New Smoking Gun 'A Tree Fell in the Woods' Review: Josh Gad and Alexandra Daddario in an Uneven, Occasionally Insightful Relationship Dramedy Bloom is not exactly known for comedy (Pirates of the Caribbean aside) but is wonderfully cast here as one of Kat's students, Marlon, an ultra-Method actor who constructs elaborate, dramatic backstories for his characters even when auditioning for a television commercial. His biggest role so far is in cheesy Medieval costume as 'Pizza Knight' for a commercial, and his agent finally drops him after saying, 'You're from the Cotswolds, you're not Al Pacino.' Mohammed is known for comedy, notably as Nathan on Ted Lasso, and is a natural for the role of Hugh, a buttoned-up, socially inept IT guy so desperate for friends and connection he impulsively signs up for Kat's class, even though he has the shakiest grasp of what improv is. The scenes introducing those three are among the funniest, with the actors leaning into the earnest aspects of their characters even while reveling in their goofiness. Sean Bean soon turns up as Billings, a cop who recruits Kat and asks her to bring two colleagues along for the sting. He offers them £200 each simply for walking into a store and buying some illegal cigarettes. With her best students unavailable, she has to resort to Marlon and Hugh. The consequences ratchet up during that sting when their often misguided improv impulses take off. They just can't help themselves. Marlon takes on the guise of a thug named Roach and of course overplays the role. The clueless Hugh blurts out 'Yes, and' at inappropriate moments, as if it's a line of dialogue instead of the most basic improv rule. Kat is shrewder, and leaps in to try to save things, only to make them more complicated. Before long they are meeting with a mob boss, Fly, played by Paddy Considine, who makes the character as tough as they come until it turns out he might not be so perceptive. Kat convinces him she is Bonnie, the brains of the operation, and that they are drug dealers. Marlon is the muscle, who dubs Hugh 'The Squire,' the guy who tastes and authenticates the cocaine. With all that great mob access, Billings refuses to let them out of the gig, and when things go further awry they have to meet with the angry big boss (Ian McShane). Behind the scenes of the film there is a bit of a Jurassic World reunion. Trevorrow, who directed and co-wrote that mega-hit starring Howard, wrote a version of the Deep Cover screenplay along with his Jurassic writing partner Derek Connolly more than a decade ago. Eventually Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen were brought in to rewrite and transplant the story to London, and they also have substantial supporting roles as detectives on the trail of the improv trio. Those sleuths aren't so smart themselves, mistakenly thinking that Kat and her gang are the masterminds behind London's drug trafficking. In the detectives' defense, the three do accidentally knock off a notorious assassin. The director, Tom Kingsley, is known for the droll British television comedy Stath Lets Flats, but the tone of Deep Cover is more reminiscent of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost comedies like Hot Fuzz, with ridiculous plots and characters and consistently sharp but loose-limbed performances. Kingsley directs with confidence, even though the film sags a bit when the ever-escalating action starts to overtake the character comedy. The action is effective enough, full of chases. In the most ludicrous, the detectives drive through narrow streets chasing Kat, Marlon and Hugh, who are trying to outrun them on rental bikes. Those scenes aren't especially inventive, but because the film is referencing stock action tropes, they don't need to be. Deep Cover played at the SXSW London and Tribeca festivals shortly before dropping on Amazon Prime. Still, it arrives with relatively little hype considering its starry cast, which makes it a pleasant surprise, easy-to-watch breezy fun. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘It's Dorothy!' Review: ‘Wizard of Oz' Protagonist Gets a Deep-Dive Cultural Analysis in Wide-Ranging if Overstuffed Appreciation
A favorite nugget of Wizard of Oz lore for many of us is the sublimely funny TV guide blurb written for a 1998 TCM airing of the MGM classic: 'Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.' The inclusion of amusing oddities like that is what pulls It's Dorothy! back whenever it threatens to go from exhaustive to exhausting, from dissection to dissertation. Welcome humor comes also from new discoveries — at least to me — like the bizarrely kitsch spectacle of eliminated contestants on BBC talent search show Over the Rainbow removing their jeweled slippers and handing them to Andrew Lloyd Webber on a throne before being carried off the set on a cutout moon. WTF? The winner — or survivor — of that Brit reality TV horror, Danielle Hope, went on to star in London as Dorothy Gale in Lloyd Webber's 2011 stage musical adapted from the 1939 film that starred Judy Garland and the 1900 children's novel by L. Frank Baum, on which it was based. More from The Hollywood Reporter Harris Yulin, Actor in 'Scarface,' 'Training Day' and 'Ozark,' Dies at 87 LGBTQ Representation in Film Drops to Three-Year Low, Says GLAAD Report 'Surviving Ohio State' Review: HBO's Sexual Abuse Doc Is Thorough and Persuasive, but Lacks a New Smoking Gun Hope is one of five former Dorothys from film, TV and the stage who speak with disarming tenderness about the experience — the ways in which the character intersected with their own lives at the time; their connection to the search for home that was fundamentally a search for herself; and the influence the Kansas farm-girl runaway had on their place in the world. One interviewee notes of actors who have played Dorothy, whether in a school production or a big-budget movie: 'When they put on the slippers, there's some sense of self that gets cracked open that maybe they couldn't see before.' There's almost too much to savor in writer-director-editor Jeffrey McHale's archivally loaded Dorothy-pedia. But it's the emotional transparency of the women personally touched by the character at formative times in their lives that gives the doc its big-hearted infectiousness. I could have listened for hours to the captivating Shanice Shantay — cast as Dorothy in the 2015 NBC special, The Wiz Live! — talk with candor about the highs of that one-and-done performance and the plummet back to real life that followed. Nichelle Lewis, who made her Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of The Wiz, gives a touching account of the way Dorothy's escape into fantasy mirrored her own coping mechanisms when she lost her father at age 9. Lovely input also comes from Fairuza Balk, in an audio interview, looking back on her screen debut at age 11, playing Dorothy in 1985's unofficial sequel, Return to Oz, which explored a much darker side of Baum's fiction series. Despite the film's underwhelmed reception as a 'sad downer,' Balk has fond recollections of people approaching her for years afterwards to praise her performance and share how the film provided an escape from whatever bad things life had thrown at them. Comparable responses have met countless versions of the story in its extraordinarily durable 125-year lifespan, whether on the page, in illustrated editions, cartoons, features, television or musical theater. While the literary property had generated a 1902 Broadway musical and three silent films before Victor Fleming's canonical screen retelling, McHale devotes much of the first half to the MGM movie, particularly in terms of the blurred lines separating Garland from Dorothy. He also makes clever use of clips from across Garland's entire filmography to enhance key points, meaning the actress is as much the core of the film as her most iconic character. Gregory Maguire, author of the revisionist novel on which Wicked was based, says, 'L. Frank Baum gave us a foundational myth for America that I do believe won't die as long as America is a country. Dorothy still has a great deal of energy and power.' A wide range of commentators weigh in on the central theme of yearning for something just out of reach that made generation after generation identify so strongly with Dorothy. She is given no physical description in the novels, allowing readers to imprint themselves onto the character — whether that's young girls at a transitional moment in life or queer communities finding kinship in a character being denied some innate need. The yellow brick road itself is an essential part of the queer narrative. It encapsulates a journey to which many LGBTQ people at any given time can relate, the flight of the outsider away from small-town isolation to the big city in search of an identity. There are conflicting opinions about when 'friend of Dorothy' became a coded term to refer to gay men, just as there are debunked myths built around the close timeline proximity of Garland's death to the Stonewall riots, which marked a turning point for gay rights. But one commentator makes the valid point that it doesn't really matter what's true and what's not when it comes to Dorothy's significance in queer culture. Hilarious commentary from John Waters and Margaret Cho expands on that connection, while Lena Waithe eloquently straddles the queer perspective and that of a Black woman. The latter becomes more central once The Wiz fully enters the conversation, first as a Broadway hit that seemed doomed when it opened but went on to dominate the 1975 Tony Awards, and later in Sidney Lumet's critically reviled 1978 movie adaptation, which nonetheless became a cultural touchstone for multiple generations of Black Americans. Diana Ross, who controversially played Dorothy as an adult in that version, does not participate in the doc, but McHale makes effective use of relevant passages lifted from her audiobook memoir. The Luther Vandross song written for the show, 'Brand New Day,' is an anthem of freedom and liberation contextualized in the Black experience, which plugged into a transitional phase in Ross' career. She credits the movie with giving her strength as a woman and a performer. An uplifting illustration of that is footage of her storied 1983 Central Park concert, which shows her joyfully performing in pouring rain in an orange sequined bodysuit and billowing coat. Gorgeous archival interview clips with the young Stephanie Mills, Broadway's original Dorothy in The Wiz, underline the gulf between audiences' love for her and the unkind barbs of critics at the time. R&B star Ashanti, who played Dorothy first in the 2005 TV movie The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (always fun to see Miss Piggy throwing shade at a female co-star) and four years later in a limited New York run of The Wiz, also makes thoughtful contributions, recalling her first exposure to the Motown-produced Lumet film around age 7, and the huge inspiration she drew from Ross' performance. McHale clearly adores Garland, and there's so much here — both widely known and freshly insightful — that he could easily have made the entire doc about the Judy-Dorothy symbiosis, and the enduring resonance of the MGM star's signature song, 'Over the Rainbow.' Extending his insatiably curious gaze far beyond that brings many illuminating observations — not to mention fabulous clips from both well-known and obscure versions as well as pop-culture nods from Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park and Dora the Explorer, to name a few — but it also results in some elements feeling shoehorned in for the sake of comprehensiveness. The wrap-up section on Wicked seems almost an afterthought; glimpses of wacky merchandizing and commercial tie-ins are too quick to appreciate; and self-described 'Dorothy Gale enthusiast' Rufus Wainwright deserves more time, both singing 'Over the Rainbow' and addressing the current resurgence in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: 'We really are being pursued again by this dark force that wants us dead and wants to eliminate us and wants to steal our ruby slippers.' Perhaps the most rushed section is an account by Baum's great-granddaughter Gita Dorothy Morena, first of being introduced to the novels as a child, and later, traveling with her mother to different places where the author had lived. A stop in South Dakota, where Baum was editor of a Dakota Territories newspaper, yielded a shocking discovery for Morena. Her great-grandfather had penned an 1890 editorial stating that the only way to ensure the safety of Americans was to continue the wrongs done to the country's Indigenous people for centuries and wipe 'these untamed and untamable creatures' from the face of the earth. Morena and another descendant later returned to South Dakota to issue a formal apology to the Native population. Writer and academic Roxane Gay adds that such discoveries don't mean we can never watch our favorite movie again, but that contemporary audiences can benefit from some foregrounded context: 'That way people know a human being made this art, and human beings make mistakes all the time.' All of this is fascinating stuff, even if the material might seem more suited to a limited series that would allow the many distinct parts more breathing space and a few more song interludes that aren't just fragments (more of Lewis singing 'Home' on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, please). It's more reverential and consequently less playful than McHale's Showgirls reappraisal, You Don't Nomi. But it's smart, analytical and stacked with magical visuals, not least of them the enchanting transition from B&W to color in the Garland film. Now, time for therapy to address my childhood deprivation of the LEGO Wizard of Oz set. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
