Movie Nation

“Everything to Me” is a coming-of-age dramedy so inconsequential as to make one question how it ever got financed and shot.

Skipping past the still rarish nature of such tales told from the point of view of girls and young women, it’s still ninety minutes of nothing, and that should matter.

Writer-director Kayci Lacob frames her debut feature with the dullest author’s public book reading ever, and trots through an utterly conventional collection of genre cliches as she tries to make the story of a child-teen-coed obsessed with becoming Steve Jobs interesting. She fails.

Our heroine (Victoria Pedretti) strolls, uncertainly, into a San Francisco book store where the crowd for her reading from her memoir “The Book of Jobs” is around the block. The tech corridor/Silicon Valley proximity might explain the line. Or the author’s runway model-looks on the back cover might be a lure.

But once Claudia Lerner begins to read, Pedretti — who must have more expressions in her actor’s bag of tricks than this colorless deadpan — and the screenplay bore us so close to death that paramedics and an electronic defibrillilator should be standing by anybody watching.

The “book” all the film’s voice-over narration that follows is taken from is lifeless, drab — lacking the music of narrative, a compelling story or even a gift for the language.

Little Claudia (Eliza Donaghy, then Abigail Donaghy) grew up in this corner of the world determined to be Steve Jobs. Not “the next Steve Jobs.” Jobs was a visionary so focused and driven that she quotes his “wisdom” from her tweens onward, a kid determined to copy Jobs right down to his famous/infamous “reality distortion field,” which helped him badger his underlings to achieve the impossible and create a future no one else could conceive.

Claudia makes friends (Lola Flanery) in spite of this monomaniacal drive. She’s got a plan — excel, achieve, check off all the boxes that will get her into Stanford, which she figures is her ticket into Silicon Valley, fame, wealth and glory.

She won’t let her stop-and-live-a-balanced-life preaching biology teacher (Utkarsh Ambudkar, not bad), her parents’ (Judy Greer and Rich Sommer) failing marriage or Mom’s cancer diagnosis get in the way.

The script hints a couple of times that it will be about something actually substantial. Does adult Claudia have tales to tell of the toxic sexism of Silicon Valley? Mom’s abandoned engineering career is another indicator that something consequential is to come.

But as we oh-so-slowly drift through Claudia’s clciched account of her school years — with pauses for benchmarks such as first menstruation (played “cute,” but kind of cringy) — chapters with inane titles from “Black Smoke” to “Contagion” to “Dumbledore” pointlessly break the tedious story up.

And never for one moment does the dialogue rise above Daily Inspiration Calendar quips.

“Life is not a means to an end…Vulnerability is a gift. It makes us better.”

Lacob got her movie made, somehow. But all she has to show for her efforts — let’s hope they didn’t actually spend money to take this picture to Italy to film this insipid “class trip” sequence — is to make the only film Judy Greer ever appeared in that has nothing other than her to recommend it.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Abigail Donaghy, Eliza Donaghy, Victoria Pedretti, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Lola Flanery, Rich Sommer and Judy Greer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kayci Lacob. A Bullseye release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:30

A dynamic and charismatic action heroine gets lost in “Revolver Lily,” a ponderous and repetitive period piece about a lady assassin indirectly trying to head off WWII by protecting a kid who has documents incriminating the Japanese Army in an illegal fund-raising-for-war scheme.

It’s something of an action fantasy, with a ghostly shaman/healer woman and a villain (Hiroya Shimizu) who seems unkillable. There’s a little rewriting history, and more myth-building about naval genius Admiral Yamamoto (Sadao Abe), who is a mere high-ranking captain in the film’s between-the-world-wars setting.

And our bloodied heroine (Haruka Ayase) has more lives than a Looney Tunes animated cat.

But as the plot is basically this kid (Jinsei Hamura) gets caught by army goons time and again, only to have veteran assasin Yuri Ozone (Ayase) rescue him, time and again, “repetitive” speaks for itself. And with the action consisting of Ozone slicing, stabbing and shooting a few companies of 1920s Japanese infantry, director and co-writer Isao Yukisada’s picture struggles to escape that repetition.

Even strikingly-staged shootouts — Oh look, they’re blindly blazing away at each other in dense Tokyo fog! — play as static set-pieces that make us question how many times our 111 pound heroine can be shot and stabbed before she bleeds out.

Goons bust in on a “connected” Chichibu family and when they don’t find the patriarch there, they massacre the women and children.

Young teen Shinta (Jinsei Hamura) survives, holding his tongue as blood drips through the floorboards onto him in his hiding place. His instructions from dad were to find this lady detective and accomplished killer, Yuri Ozone.

She’s been laying low. “I’ve stopped killing people,” she insists, when asked. But when straw-boater-hatted dandies swoop down on the kid on a train, she finds him. She can’t help but note that — matching Gatsby shirt, trousers, vests and hats aside — their weapons are army issued.

Those “documents” the kid has detail money-raising through stock fraud, and the army is hellbent on keeping them from the public and maybe from the navy, as well.

Yuri has a life partner geisha (Kavka Shishido) and a younger sex-worker-district ally (Kotone Furukawa). And where would any of them be without the crusading lawyer Iwami (Hiroki Hasegawa) on their side? He’s pretty handy to have around in a fight, too.

There are lots of those, seeing as how the boy Shinta keeps getting grabbed — on the train, on the street, in the hills and by the lakes.

The fight choreography has its moments, and others where we see the easily-dodged stage-punches.

The shootouts sound like the effects team settled on nail-gun noises to use instead of anything resembling a pistol shot.

But the period detail is OK, with the occasional anachronism (two-way military radios showing up a decade early) to keep us on our toes.

The entire affair has too many characters three or four top villains — to track and too many longueurs between the action beats to sustain interest.

Still, as lady assassin stories are all the rage, especially in Asian cinema, we trust that all those Yuri Ozone action figures Ayase supposedly posed for will get better use in other films.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Haruka Ayase, Hiroki Hasegawa, Jesse, Hiroya Shimizu,
Jinsei Hamura, Itsushi Toyokawa,
Kavka Shishido and Sadao Abe.

Credits: Directed by Isao Yukisada, scripted by Tatsuo Kobayashi, Kyô Nagaura and Isai Yukisada. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:19

It’s hard to recreate the cold slap and jolt of adrenalin the German thriller “Run Lola Run” delivered when it sprinted into theaters back in 1998.

Primal right down to its blunt-instrument title — “Lola Rennt” in German — the film’s mashup of animation and live action, a simple narrative repeated by its heroine “until she gets it right.” was pin-you-to-your-seat bracing way back in 1998.

Edited into a heedless blur by writer-director Tom Tykwer in a style that Paul Greengrass would perfect in “Bloody Sunday” and his installments in the “Bourne” series, “Lola’s” influence extended far beyond Tykwer, whose career never delivered anything else remotely as captivating and cinema-shifting.

Viewed anew, it still packs a visceral punch and visual wit, even if the breathlessness with which this 80 minute marvel seems a little winded now. The gimmicks stand out as “gimmicks,” the techno-infected soundtrack seems both just-right but dated and the ever-sprinting Franka Potente never works up a pant or a sweat. Only a blushing hint of glistening, flushed exertion ever breaks through the makeup.

I mean, you or I try running through the streets of Berlin in 20 minute bursts and we’d be shvitzing and gasping, “Wo geht es zur Bierhalle?”

All it takes is a phone call — from a phone booth, in those pre-cell days — for Lola to spring into action.

“I’m done for,” her boyfriend Mannie (Moritz Bleibtreu) whimpers. Thanks to Lola’s bad luck and tardiness he’s botched a diamond smuggling payoff to the mobster who financed his deal. And yes, Mannie’s a little more butch sounding in German than the English-dubbed version.

Lola had her moped — the bane of Europe back then — stolen. She missed picking up Mannie and he lost the sack of cash on the subway. He’s sure to get killed if he can’t deliver.

“I’ll think of something!” Lola blurts as Mannie vows to rob a grocery store right behind the phone booth if she isn’t there in 20.

What she thinks of is hitting up her banker-dad (Herbert Knaup) for the cash. But she bursts in on him as his affair with a bank associate (Nina Petri) is about to go public and end his marriage.

That slows her up enough that she can’t stop Mannie from making a bad situation worse by pulling out a pistol and robbing that store.

So she’ll have to try again. That’s the conceit here, that this magenta-haired icon of European youth Lola runs through scenarios of how this day might go.

She repeats the quest, if only in her head. Maybe this time she won’t almost get hit by a car, she’ll grab that ride from an ambulance, it will or it won’t crash through a long pane of glass that installers walk across the street and Mannie and she will be “saved.”

Bystanders whom she offends or bumps into are hit or avoided, with various flash forward montages showing how these characters’ lives worked out — a Lotto win, wealth and happiness, or an embrace of fundamentalism, an accident that puts a woman in a wheelchair vs. a happy marriage with or without S & M, etc.

Tywker slows the pace to give Lola 360 degree pans as she makes her choices — the bank again, or a casino? Running through a herd of nuns, or around them? He keeps the action on the move with split screens showing Lola and Mannie’s moves and counter moves.

The techno-pop score — that’s Potente singing much of the time, with Tykwer (her then lover/partner) pitching in on the compositon and sythnesized performance — is most interesting when the movie takes a breather from it.

“What a Difference a Day Makes,” Dinah Washington sings, prefiguring the plot of this Eurothriller decades before it came out.

What holds up best over the nearly three decades since “Run Lola Run” came out is the sense of pluck and play. Lola is not to be denied. By hook or by crook she will sprint to the rescue her of man. And Tykwer’s giddy montages, transforming bit players into characters as we see how various fated versions of their lives turn out, is as deliriously fun as it ever was.

Potente never made much of a mark in Hollywood. But fittingly she was in a couple of “Bourne” films, playing Matt Damon’s love interest.

Tykwer’s best post-“Lola” work was for German TV, and the gaudy, sensory-overload big screen period piece “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.”

But every time any movie hurtles by us in a mad rush and madder mashup of styles, genres, comical asides with pace pace pace, “Run Lola Run” lives on, its influence much grander than its box office take or critical acclaim would have you expect.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu,
Nina Petri, Armin Rohde and Herbert Knaup

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tom Tykwer. A Sony Pictures Classics release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:20

“Mango” is a tepid Hispano-Danish romance set in and in the hills above the resort city of Málaga on Spain’s celebrated Costa del Sol.

Rigidly formulaic and strictly low-heat as far as romances go, I’m guessing you can guess every turn the plot takes just by my listing the pertinent plot points.

Our heroine, Lærke (Josephine Park) is a workaholic deal-closer and detail-oriented re-designer for a big Danish hotel chain. Her boss (Paprika Steen) insists she go to Málaga, “get close to” the owner of this failed mango farm and get him to sell so that they can build on the property.

The boss’s biggest motivation? “I want a seat on the (corporation’s) board!”

That kills a planned vacation Lærke was to take with her neglected teen daughter Agnes (Josephine Højbjerg). As Agnes just failed to get into architecture school, she might as well come along and get something resembling a vacation out of it.

The owner of the scenic hilltop “mango plantation,” Alex (Dar Salim) is doggedly determined not to sell, debt be damned He has his reasons, and they might include his assistant, Paula (Sara Jiménez), who calls him “Bro” and is “family.”

Can Lærke please everyone? And if she can’t, guess who is destined to get the short end of the stick?

The “meet cute” happens on the jet from Copehagen to Málaga, a not-quite-funny bit of business involving the mother of a toddler who wants Lærke and her daughter to give up their window seats and a stranger who gives up his so that “both children” can be mollified.

The romantic leads are “rude” to each other at every opportunity. But “rude” by Danish standards.

The plantation’s shop and cantina features “mangolade,” “mangonade” and “mango vinegar,” amongst other products featuring their crop. Cute. Ish.

Park does a decent job of making Lærke a trained critic of all things “hospitality,” including “mangonade.” Salim’s Alex character barely registers, and the “girls” bonding scenes are perfunctory.

The funniest role is that of the imperious, vaping and demanding boss, whom we root against instinctively.

The dialogue — in Danish and Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed into English — doesn’t offer much zing.

Our director and screenwriter don’t show any flair for writing or executing comedy.

But the scenery is spectacular, and the fact that Lærke and Agnes — whose dad begs Lærke to “never let her drive” — traverse this landscape is a Mini Cooper had me pricing Mini rentals on the Costa del Sol.

So that’s something, anyway.

Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, profanity, smoking

Cast: Josephine Park, Dar Salim, Josephine Højbjerg, Paprika Steen and Sara Jiménez

Credits:Directed by Mehdi Amaz, scripted by Milad
Schwartz Amaz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36