VOD/digital premiere for Milena Lurie's debut film, ENTANGLED

Early on in ENTANGLED, a film written and directed by newcomer Milena Lurie, our heroine/ narrator informs us that she used to be full but wanted to be empty, but now she is empty and wants to be full. Or maybe it was vice versa. Later she tells of a similar kind of situation in which she may be dreaming while awake, or awake while dreaming. By the point at which she informs us that, sometimes, she just wants to scream, you may be inclined to answer, "Honey, I know just how you feel."

Although it is being distributed via Samuel Goldwyn Films, Entangled has all the hallmarks of a vanity production -- Ms Lurie is writer, director and producer -- and I suspect from everything about this film that Lurie must be awfully young and untutored because she is telling us stuff we've seen and heard so many times before (told and shown much better) that she finally bores us silly.

For whatever reason, she has made her heroine a French ex-pat living in New York City (played by Ana Girardot, shown above, bathing) with an accent thick enough for us to need subtitles when she is speaking English). Ms Girardot is a good actress but she is lost here in the thicket of dreadful dialog she must intone.

The men in her life are played by Peter Mark Kendall (her current beau), Jonathan Cake (above, right: a pick-up at a local bar) and Grégory Fitoussi (below, right: her ex, who flies over from Paris for a one-night-stand). They all mutter dialog seemingly out of the discards of a class in Screenwriting 101. Oh, sure, miscarriage and abortions figure into things, but even they manage to seem about as shallow as all else. When miscarriage and abortion prove equal in importance to fashion, food and gossip, that, I suppose, is a very weird accomplishment.

I do hate dumping upon new filmmakers, but Ms Lurie should wait until she has something remotely worth saying that has not been said countless time previously before making another movie. It has been a long while since I felt that my time spent had been this wasted. Running 93 minutes, Entangled hit VOD and home video earlier this month. Your move....

Vanity, thy name is Lynne Alana Delaney and/or THE REMAKE. Take your pick.

Normally, TrustMovies does not mark a film with the term "vanity production." But when the movie in question is written, directed and produced by and has as its star the very same person (who also had a hand in the film's casting, production design, set decoration, and even the costume and wardrobe departments), one begins to suspect.

Now, I realize that some of that heavy work load may be due to a small budget, so I must give Lynne Alana Delaney (at left, above, and on poster, top) the benefit of that doubt. Otherwise, this woman must take responsibility for handing us THE REMAKE, one of the most obvious, by-the-numbers, what-a-surprise (not), senior-style rom-coms in a very long while. This is too bad for a couple of reasons: One, the movie will bore anyone who wants even the tiniest challenge and genuine surprise; two, its premise is really not bad. In other hands it might have been stylish fun.

That premise is this: A down-on-his-luck Hollywood director seeks to reunite the two actors who starred in his big hit a few decades ago. The problem is that, soon after this, the male actor (Ruben Roberto Gomez, at right in the two photos and poster, above) stood up his co-star at the altar, and the two have not seen nor spoken since.

In the meantime the woman married, raised a daughter (the lovely Tessa Munroe, above, right) and had a decent career, while the man went back to Italy and nursed his wounds. What really happened seems to take an eternity to unfurl here, though the film lasts only 97 minutes. Further it repeats itself unnecessarily (we get it, we get it) and its couple of big would-be surprises telegraph themselves a mile or two away.

So we're left with the writing and direction (perfunctory at best) and the performances, most of which are OK -- with the exception of Ms Delaney herself, who bugs her eyes, overdoes things and wears too much make-up. She is an attractive woman and is probably talented but perhaps has simply taken on way too much here.

In the supporting cast are old-timers like Sally Kellerman (the blond at far left, above, and always fun to watch), Patrika Darbo (near left, above), and especially June Lockhart (shown at bottom, left), who plays one of the nastiest and most clueless grandmothers to be seen in some time. (And, yes, the movie even includes a cameo by Larry King, below.)

And that's about it. Considering that this movie is supposed to be about the remake of an old film, we see almost nothing of that film itself, but spend most of our time on the same old boring romantic problems that seem so obviously fixable -- if only certain people would just talk to each other. Ah, well: How, then, would all these crummy roms-coms and situations comedies exist to reach their foregone conclusions?

Opening today, so far as we know, at a single theater in the Los Angeles area (Laemmle's Moncia Film Center), The Remake will maybe eventually make its way onto DVD or streaming, where, if you don't live in L.A. area, you can still see it and judge for yourself. 

MY WAY: Vanity, thy name is Rebekah Starr, abetted by Vinny Sisson & Dominique Mollee

"Everyone told me this was a stupid idea," notes Rebekah Starr, the producer and star of MY WAY, which, though 2015 be young, wins the up-to-now unnecessary vanity production of the year. "Everyone," it turns out, can sometimes be right. The 'stupid idea' of Ms Starr's that the movie tracks is the road trip from a small Pennsylvania town to Los Angeles, where the lady is bent on making a "kick-ass" video featuring one of her band's songs, which turns out to be the titular "My Way" -- as though the singer/songwriter has no idea that title had already been used, and rather well, by a certain Frank Sinatra, about whom perhaps our heroine knows very little.

Suffice it to say that Ms Starr's "way" doesn't hold a candle to the well-known song penned by France's Claude Francois (aka Cloclo) and made most famous by Mr. Sinatra. But Starr's offering (the performer is shown at right) is indeed the song we hear the most throughout this tiresome movie, by the end of which you're ready to throw up your hands and scream, "Please, not again!" The problem here, to get right to the point, would seem to be that Starr has a huge need to recognized and famous but not, perhaps, any real talent to underpin that need.

So instead we get a terribly slipshod, slapshot little movie that tosses in everyone from Ron Jeremy (above) -- who is identified as a "Sunset Strip aficionado" (with that last word misspelled, above) rather than the famous porn star that he is -- to Rikki Rocket (below), who informs us that "the world needs a kick-ass girl band." Maybe. But I'm not at all sure that it needs this one.

Along the way, Starr, who narrates and is almost always center stage, tells us of her family history and its coal mining business, and her own work experience at same. Here, she tosses in some ersatz feminism (it's actually narcissism passing as feminism), giving us conclusions but almost no details that might help us agree with those conclusions.

We meet her husband (above, and now ex-), who smartly wants no part of this trip, and we meet and spend time with her women friends/band members: Temea, below, who can't accompany Rebekah on her trip, and Annika, shown further below -- who does, and ends up becoming the most interesting of the women we meet, and who for a time, at least, puts up with Rebekah's shenanigans a lot better than would I.

Overall and over time Starr impresses most as the kind of self-absorbed, narcissistic woman who, as we later learn, will spend money having her hair cut and colored but doesn't have the funds for Annika to do the same. Is this unfair, she wonders? (She also might have invested in a proof-reader who could spell Albuquerque, which appears as Albequerque, on the map showing our heroine's progress across country.)

Once in L.A., the pair hooks up with friend and drummer Holly, below, who definitely seems to be the most grounded of the women we meet.

At no time does this band appear to be particularly original or witty or intelligent or talented. Rebekah rarely allows us to see them in performance, and then, when we do, it's very brief. Later, we supposedly watch her go surfing. Except that, again, we don't really see her surf. The defining word here is shallow.

On (and on and on) it goes, one dumb cliche after another, until the movie begins to seem like a mockumentary. Suddenly tempers flare: "I just want to get through with this video and be done with her!" When the girls do finally perform at a the Sunset Strip club, they do the song 'My Way.' And then do it and do it until we're blue in the face.

Finally we discover what our Ms Starr has learned from all this. "The world proved to me that the world wasn't worth pleasing." Not to worry, dear: You haven't come close.

According to the IMDB, My Way originally ran 120 minutes. It has now thankfully been cut down to only 92 and opens this Friday, February 20, at the Arena Cinema in Los Angeles and a week later on February 27 here in New York City at the Quad Cinema.

Angelica & Tony Torn's LUCKY DAYS proves anything but; Rip join in the family fun

What exactly makes a movie into what is rather unkindly known as a "vanity" production?  The question is a valid one, TrustMovies thinks, because an individual's writing, directing and then acting, all in the same film, does not necessarily make the movie one of these to-be-dreaded-above-all-else endeavors.  Orson Welles, anyone? Charlie Chaplin? (There are other examples of these triple threats, too -- but we might as well start at or near the top.) Unfortunately the Torn siblings, Angelica (shown below, who wrote, co-directed and stars in the film) and Tony (who co-directed), are not in this class, nor is their film LUCKY DAYS, which also features their father Rip Torn in the small role of the father-in-law-to-be of the character played by Angelica.

I don't believe that any movie starts out to be a "vanity" production.  No: There is always great hope among artists that their work will finally work. Will coalesce. Jell. Make sense. Generate caring and feeling in the audience -- particularly if said work is a drama (as I think Lucky Days wants, primarily, to be).  Unfortu-
nately, it also wants to be a kind of comedy, slice-of-(very odd)-life, moralistic, bring-home-the-bacon, feel-good, feel-bad film.  Well, you can't have it all, and with this movie, you can barely have anything that seems genuine -- starting with the weird collection of performances and continuing through the messy, unbelievable plot.

"I've been told I have a dramatic flair; I guess it runs in the family," notes our narrator Virginia (played by Ms Torn).  If that bit of blab doesn't ring all kind of warning bells --  Ooooh, no: don't say that! -- in the heads of film buffs, then nothing will.  From the beginning, the tone here wavers drastically from scene to scene and keeps it up throughout.  This is most exemplified by the bizarre scene between Virginia and her sister Nina (a feisty Tina Benko, above right) with a bathroom door between then, while one sis smokes either crack or freebase cocaine (sorry, I don't know the difference) and the other natters away at her sibling.  Are we to laugh, be shocked, care a little or get angry?  None of the above.  We just roll our eyes and wait for the movie to move along.

The performances are all over the place, too.  Marilyn Sokol (shown two photos above, at left), as the sister's mom overacts rather appallingly, while Mr Torn (shown above) -- unusually and thankfully -- plays everything down. In the rotten role of would-be saviour, Luke Zarzecki does what he can with the silliest, least believable part in the movie. Only two performers, one major, one minor, manage to inject the proper amount of energy and reality into their roles: Federico Castelluccio (below, center right), as Virginia's longtime beau, brings an ugly/appealing mix of stupidity, sexuality and sadism to his role, while Gary Wolf (below, center left) as his brother Felix, offers some off-the-wall charm and generosity to the proceedings.

For her part, Ms Torn has created such a stupid and unpleasant character to play that when she manages --rarely -- to bring us into her corner, her behavior loses us almost immediately.  (Her Brooklyn accent slips regularly, too, repeatedly growing ultra-strong and then weak to missing-in-action.)  It is difficult, on the basis of what we see here (we grow tired of her far too quickly) to determine whether she has the acting chops to tackle a role this large. Clearly, she should not be trying to write that role, or perhaps to direct herself, either. I'll be interested to see her again, if only to determine if there is actually something there.

In the somewhat semi-starry cast, look for the always dependable Will Patton (above), embarrassingly wasted in the role of a mental patient, and Anne Jackson (shown below, left, with Ms Torn) as Virginia's maybe future mother-in-law.

Lucky Days had a brief theatrical run last week in Manhattan, with earlier runs elsewhere.  (Click here to see where the movie has already been.)  Future dates, accoridng to the schedule, are all
"To Be Announced.") The DVD is supposedly available now for purchase.  Netflix notes that the film will eventually be available for rent, but as of now the company offers no concrete date.