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Houston-backed movie Drunk Bus revs up return of the buddy comedy

Charlie Tahan and Pineapple Tangaroa in Drunk Bus

Houston-backed buddy comedy Drunk Bus premieres Friday, May 21.

Photo courtesy of FilmRise

When John Carlucci and his family moved from a small town in New York to Houston in the late ’80s, he thought the city was gonna be all tumbleweeds and cowboy hats. Little did he know it would eventually influence him to become the filmmaker he is today.

“Houston was very integral in kind of building my creative world, when I started to kind of go into all things art-related,” the Brooklyn-based Carlucci, 46, tells CultureMap via phone. “And especially with cinema, because I now had a movie theater within five minutes from my house, and I would go constantly.”

He was even impressed with how movie tickets were distributed around these parts, like that time he caught a screening of the 1989 adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary. “Prior to that, going to the movies — your ticket was like one of those carnival tickets that comes on a roll, you know,” he remembers. “It says ‘admit one’ and you rip it in half. This is the first time I ever got a movie ticket stub that had the name of the movie printed on it, the time, the date, the location. I thought it was the coolest thing, and I saved it.”

He ended up saving a lot of his H-Town movie stubs. “I have them all in an album, from Willowbrook Mall to all over Houston,” he says. Carlucci attended high school at Strake Jesuit, where he met Michael Carroll, who would start a Houston-based entertainment financing company, Vanitas Entertainment with fraternity brother Tom Gordon, co-founder of Slim Chickens.

The meeting would prove fruitful, as Carroll, reached out to fellow Houstonians, Jay Fields of private investment firm Bear Dean Capital and Josh Oren, to help bankroll the new film alongside another Carlucci high school friend, Ed Nash.

About that film: This Friday, May 21 audiences around the country can get a ticket to Drunk Bus, the debut film Carlucci co-directed with longtime filmmaking partner Brandon LaGanke. Locals can catch it on-demand on all digital platforms, including Amazon Prime.

The low-budget comedy, which has won several awards and is South by Southwest selection, stars Charlie Tahan (Ozark) as a heartbroken, virginal bus driver who spends his nights shuttling around drunk, obnoxious college students from the same college he graduated from. He gets snapped out of his rut when he meets a large, facially tattooed Samoan (Austin actor Pineapple Tangaroa) who’s been hired as the bus’s security guard.

The two eventually become partners-in-mischief, with this burly eccentric pushing our boy to take some long-overdue chances. (Most of this actually happened to LaGanke, who drove a college bus in the aughts.)

After years of he and LaGanke directing commercials, music videos, and experimental short videos (including this R-rated short that went viral), Carlucci had his mind set on doing a feature. But he did learn putting a film together can be complicated and messy as hell.

“It sounds derivative, but always stay true to the vision that you’re trying to make,” he says. “Because it can become difficult to sort of keep a vision consistent from when you conceive a story and write it versus when you've broken up your entire narrative over days and nights — and days and weekends. And you’ve taken the puzzle apart and you’ve dumped all the pieces on the ground. And, now, you kind of have to retain what it looks like, because that could become confusing. And holding true to that vision is important.”

As arduous as the journey may have been, Carlucci is proud of what he has accomplished— and he’s ready to go again. “I went to film school 20 years ago with this goal in mind, and I had a long and sort of circuitous path to get here,” he says. “But I never wanted to give up on accomplishing this. And I think a lot of people can lose faith. And I think that’s important too. If it’s really what you want, just stay on the path — because it might take a while.”

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Drunk Bus premieres on Friday, May 21 on digital platforms including Amazon Prime.

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Movie Review

Avatar: Fire and Ash returns to Pandora with big action and bold visuals

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Oona Chaplin in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

For a series whose first two films made over $5 billion combined worldwide, Avatar has a curious lack of widespread cultural impact. The films seem to exist in a sort of vacuum, popping up for their run in theaters and then almost as quickly disappearing from the larger movie landscape. The third of five planned movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is finally being released three years after its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The new film finds the main duo, human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his native Na’vi wife, Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), still living with the water-loving Metkayina clan led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). While Jake and Neytiri still play a big part, the focus shifts significantly to their two surviving children, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as two they’ve essentially adopted, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Spider (Jack Champion).

Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who lives on in a fabricated Na’vi body, is still looking for revenge on Jake, and he finds help in the form of the Mangkwan Clan (aka the Ash People), led by Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch’s access to human weapons and the Mangkwan’s desire for more power on the moon known as Pandora make them a nice match, and they team up to try to dominate the other tribes.

Aside from the story, the main point of making the films for writer/director James Cameron is showing off his considerable technical filmmaking prowess, and that is on full display right from the start. The characters zoom around both the air and sea on various creatures with which they’ve bonded, providing Cameron and his team with plenty of opportunities to put the audience right there with them. Cameron’s preferred viewing method of 3D makes the experience even more immersive, even if the high frame rate he uses makes some scenes look too realistic for their own good.

The story, as it has been in the first two films, is a mixed bag. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver start off well, having Jake, Neytiri, and their kids continue mourning the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in the previous film. The struggle for power provides an interesting setup, but Cameron and his team seem to drag out the conflict for much too long. This is the longest Avatar film yet, and you really start to feel it in the back half as the filmmakers add on a bunch of unnecessary elements.

Worse than the elongated story, though, is the hackneyed dialogue that Cameron, Jaffa, and Silver have come up with. Almost every main character is forced to spout lines that diminish the importance of the events around them. The writers seemingly couldn’t resist trying to throw in jokes despite them clashing with the tone of the scenes in which they’re said. Combined with the somewhat goofy nature of the Na’vi themselves (not to mention talking whales), the eye-rolling words detract from any excitement or emotion the story builds up.

A pre-movie behind-the-scenes short film shows how the actors act out every scene in performance capture suits, lending an authenticity to their performances. Still, some performers are better than others, with Saldaña, Worthington, and Lang standing out. It’s more than a little weird having Weaver play a 14-year-old girl, but it works relatively well. Those who actually get to show their real faces are collectively fine, but none of them elevate the film overall.

There are undoubtedly some Avatar superfans for which Fire and Ash will move the larger story forward in significant ways. For anyone else, though, the film is a demonstration of both the good and bad sides of Cameron. As he’s proven for 40 years, his visuals are (almost) beyond reproach, but the lack of a story that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater keeps the film from being truly memorable.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19.

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