Movie Nation

And we can, right? Just based on the trailer. The scent of Courtney Love practically wafts off the screen in this performance.

Hats off to Moss, who is having the most challenging and daring post “Mad Men” career of anybody in that cast. “Her Smell” opens in limited release Friday.

“Stuck” is a high concept musical that doesn’t have, on paper, much more going for it than that.

Passengers trapped on a subway car, breaking into song, lamenting their woes, expressing their hopes, bickering over race, poverty, immigration, “privilege” and abortion?

Happens every day in the divided, karaoke-crazy USA, right?

But a game cast of players not known for their singing skills, a couple of touching situations and a winning comic moment — half a dozen actually — and “Stuck,” based on a stage musical by Riley Thomas, comes off.

Our host is the first character we meet, a genuine New York character, a seemingly homeless beggar making a survival-level living on the MTA. He is played by the man, the Spike Lee favorite and the force of nature we know as Giancarlo Esposito. And he ensures this slight slice of magical realism gets off on the right foot.

“In the city’s underground, there’s a symphony of sound, a sonic chaos for the lost before they’re found,” he rhymes. He greets passengers, who recoil — just a bit.

He sings softly to himself. Not softly enough.

And he scares people off, what with his shopping cart equipped with a plastic trash can for storage, his over-familiarity with one and all.

And the singing thing.

He busks a little Shakespeare, holding out the empty coffee cup for any spare change. Caleb (Gerard Canonico) offers the man we come to know as “Lloyd the Sayer” cash money “to not do that.”

There’s the dancer (Arden Cho) we’ve seen Caleb watching and drawing — stalking. And the construction worker (Omar Chaparro) whose flashbacks show us the family he’s trying to keep together, the dancer-daughter they’re trying to support, with his job.

The sad, fearful older woman (Amy Madigan) we’ve seen give up an engagement at the piano over grief is here, too. And the testy woman (Ashanti) whose anger won’t be explained until later.

That comes after the train is “Stuck” waiting on the tracks to be cleared ahead.

The songs are a generally forgettable lot, in that modern Not “Hamilton” musical sort of way. Characters sing about their longing, their hopes, their grief, their fears.

Or they “own” what others say about them in a number. Esposito (“Do the Right Thing,” “Mo’Better Blues,” TV’s “Better Call Saul,” “Once Upon a Time,” etc.) sings “CRAZY…you say it like a BAD word,” and finds a laugh.

But don’t judge Lloyd the Sayer for what he does to feed himself.

“I bring a measure of grace to the world.” That could be the man’s epitaph, or that of the actor playing him.

The tunes can be big production numbers or intimate, five part a cappella moments — scat singing to cover somebody’s embarrassed trip to the toilet, when there is no toilet.

The best moments have no backing track, though the singing here was looped in, which spoils some of the in situ New York subway grit of the piece.

It’s a fantasy, remember, one where race and class and beauty and privilege are fodder for songs.

Our construction worker finishes a Spanglish (Spanish mostly) lament for the life he’s trying to give his family with a rejoinder at the white people on the train  “This country wasn’t made for people like me. It was made for people like you.”

The stalker-kid gets a lesson in “You need to stop listening with your ears, boy,” after singing about his disabled comic book heroine, “Magnificent Maggie.”

The lights go out and “every little phobia suddenly appears.”

Madigan hits her solo number out of the park, and the film’s most touching moment — in Spanish — follows it.

Ashanti and Cho give the acting its share of fire.

And Esposito lends the enterprise his grace.

Not great, not a picture that will change the shape of musical theater. But the playful, sweet, pointed and sometimes poignant “Stuck” is certainly worth the 85 minutes it’ll take you to watch it.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some mature thematic material including images of a sexual assault, and brief strong language

Cast: Ashanti, Amy Madigan, Arden Cho, Giancarlo Esposito, Omar Chaparro, Gerard Canonico

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Berry, based on the Riley Thomas stage musical. An Eamon Films release.

Running time: 1:23

A subway musical with Ashanti and Amy Madigan and Giancarlo Esposito?

I’ve been curious about this since I first posted the trailer a year ago. And now “Stuck” is hitting theaters April 19, limited release. Stay tuned for a review.

I have been asking around. It’s not just the Big O — Orlando — that you’re not previewing this comic book adaptation, reboot of a franchise, and promising spring actioner with a funny trailer.

Is anybody getting to see it in advance? Not even the cultists at SXSW?

You know what they, ok WE say — we of the reviewing, critiquing classes. “They never hide a movie with pride.” As in, nothing a studio is proud of is released without fanfare or reviews from opinion leaders. Like me and several others I could name.

Bummer. Sorry to hear that you have no confidence in it. Looked and sounded fun.

Again with the bunnies?

As if Jordan Peele’s “Us” wasn’t the Easter present nobody asked for.

“Rottentail” is a wisecracking C-movie creature feature that lets us in on the joke. The jokes. All of them.

It’s an under-funded, gory goofball romp about a meek science nerd transformed into an avenging bunny monster, getting even with the military man who oversees his experiments, and the military man’s minions, on his town and on the bully who murdered Peter Cotten’s bunny long long ago.

Yes, it’s based on a graphic novel. No, I’ve never heard of it either.

Co-writer/director Brian Skiba may have had to cut corners on the rubber rabbit monster suit, the military hardware and uniforms he needed for his age-inappropriate extras, on the explosions and fight choreography. But danged if he doesn’t wring some fun out of a very bad movie that was never meant to be very good.

“Rottentail” is a midnight movie that midnight movie audiences (a little drunk, a bit forgiving and in love with on-screen cheese) can get behind.

The coup might have been landing veteran character actor Corin Nemec as Peter Cotten, his lead, and feeding the guy goofy lines to go along with all the goofy faces this dork gives us before and after he’s bitten by the MR experiment Dr. Serius Stanley (Gianni Capaldi, over the top and funny) created in the labs the military runs inside what is supposed to be a Star Chewing Gum factory.

Cotten was bullied as a child, and he’s bullied now — by Dr. Stanley, whose MR (Monster Rabbit?) bites him, by Jake Mulligan (William McNamara), who bullied him as a child and pushes everybody around as a crooked, immoral TV preacher now, and by General Phelps (Tank Jones), the “mother-f—–g” general who wants him to “Get with the gettin’ while the gettin’s good” and get with the program.

But Peter Cotten’s “condition” is evolving. A trip to the toilet gave him a clue, and no, we’re not talking pellets. They come later.

He takes on Jekyll and Hyde tendencies at Mel’s Diner, where they want you to “Come in and Bang us for our Angus.”

“More AGUA, Grammy! I’m GOBI DESERT parched!”

His hands follow his genitalia in transforming — into clawed paws. And then there’s that bellow that wholly replaces his ordinarily meek voice the minute his ears reach full flower.

“Cotten is gone! It’s ROTTENTAIL now!”

He is “Bunny STRONG!” And lightning fast. You’d better not cross him, even if you’re armed and warn him to “put’em up.”

“Raise my hands? Like raise the ROOF? I DO like to boogie!”

He goes on a rampage, pausing to light up with stoners in a van, or hit the local roadhouse for a drink. Or three.

“I need two Slippery Nipples in my mouth, right now. Sex on the Beach would be nice…”

Etc.

Nemec treats the whole enterprise as a lark, chomping his veggies like a rabbit, bellowing like a drunken thug with Tourette’s.

The dialogue is colorfully off-color when Skiba and David C. Hayes’ script isn’t trotting out the tropes of many a creature feature.

“This is the work of a MADMAN!”

“I am a genius!”

“You’ll NEVER GET AWAY with this!”

“Kill the rabbit! Bring me his BRAINS!”

Throw in comical sound effects for every whisker that pops out, a rubber rabbit suit that’s plainly a rubber rabbit suit, a nudity-bondage gag and a preacher’s hot tub orgy — “Baptism! BAPTISM!”

And you’ve just made yourself a C-movie, which is, by definition (I’m making this up on the fly.) a D-movie with laughs. It’s not much, but what it is can be funny.

Just make sure you don’t watch it before midnight, and don’t watch it sober.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gruesome bloody horror film violence

Cast: Corin Nemec, Dominique Swain, Brian Skiba, Vincent De Paul, Gianni Capaldi, Tank Jones

Credits: Directed by Brian Skiba, written by David C. Hayes and Brian Skiba. based on the graphic novel. An Ammo Content release.

Running time: 1:46

A cop buddy comedy, where the scary hulk with a badge (Dave Bautista) basically takes an Uber driver (Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick”) hostage.

A few one-liners, some gunplay and ultra-violence, and a couple of laughs — just in the trailer.

Wonder if they’ll find any laughs in stereotypes in “Stuber?”

July 12.

Full disclosure, stop-motion animation is my favorite form of animated entertainment.

Yes, “Isle of Dogs” was the best animated film of 2018, I don’t care who they gave the Oscar to (the blurry “Spider-Verse,” how soon we forget). The tactile, hand-made look of plasticine clay, molded and put into “motion” by human hands (with some digital assistance) never fails to delight. Such movies — think “Wallace & Gromit,” “Coraline,” “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” — come to life by way of a grand visual whimsy that no other animation can match.

“Missing Link,” from the studio that gave us the glorious “Kubo and the Two Strings” and writer-director Chris Butler’s “ParaNorman,” has the story,acclaimed and game voice cast and that “grand visual whimsy” going for it. All this comedy, an “Around the World in 80s with Sasquatch” variation, needs is about 25 or 30 more jokes to wholly come off.

It’s cute, but joke-starved.

“Link” is a story-driven kid’s film that holds the attention even as you wish they’d work-shopped more laughs into Butler’s script, spent the money on managing a few more sight gags.

Hugh Jackman voices the intrepid, very proper and very English Sir Lionel Frost,  “renowned seeker of mythical beasts.” We meet him as he’s endangering another assistant on the fool’s errand of seeking the Loch Ness Monster.

How does Sir Lionel lure Nessie to the surface? By playing bagpipes underwater, of course!

But Sir Lionel never seems to land conclusive proof for his exploits and discoveries, and is thus always on the outside looking in at London’s stuffy Optimates Club, where starchy Lord Piggot-Dunceb (Stephen Fry) presides.

They’re all about exploring, conquering and colonizing there, “spreading good British table manners to savages the world over.” No place for a tweedy crank like Sir Lionel.

But Frost has received a letter, a suggestion he visit Washington State and meet a Sasquatch, whom he declares is “the Missing Link between man and ape.” And he bets Lord Piggot-Dunceb that this time, he’ll bring proof to prove he “belongs.”

Frost makes the trip and finds the letter-writer, and it turns out to be a fellow nobody is yet calling “BigFoot.” He’s a chatty literalist who speaks and writes English in the voice of Zach Galifianakis. And he’s lonely. Humans are encroaching on his territory so that there are none of his kind left.

“Your world grows bigger and mine is eaten away.”

They reach a bargain, even if there’s a bit of a literal language barrier. Sir Lionel will take the Sasquatch, “Mr. Link” they’ll call him, to the Himalayas where the Yeti (Abominable Snowmen) will welcome him like a long lost cousin.

“I give you my word!”

“Great! What is it?”

First, Frost must smuggle our friend into a lumber town to arrange passage.

“I imagine everyone there has hairy knuckles and poor hygiene. You’ll fit right in!”

Then they must visit the widow of a dead colleague, Adelina (Zoe Saldana) to purloin one of the late explorer’s Yeti maps.

The fact that Lord Piggot-Dunceb has hired an assassin and “rare creature killer,” Stenk (Timothy Olyphant, sporting a perfectly vile drawl) to prevent them from completing their mission means that Adelina has her Marion Ravenswood in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” moment. She’s coming along because she’s too valuable to the quest not to.

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The camera lingers over each hand-made creation, from the lumber town saloon to the Himalayan world of the Yeti, soaking up detail but generally slowing down the movie. Comedy — and that’s what this is, story-driven or not — is quick, the more brisk the better. “Missing Link” is not.

We can set the time frame as 1886, as we see the Statue of Liberty being assembled in New York harbor. Shots of a ship at sea, snowy mountains and rustic forests impress. But aside from that opening bagpipe piped underwater bit, there’s not much in the line of sight-gags here.

The best joke among the snowmen and women is the putdown their leader (Emma Thompson) lays on the country cousin, the furry rube who’s just shown up at their snowy door. “Redneck,” is how she describes him.

The paucity of jokes and sight-gags aside, the story and whimsical animation here should keep the kids locked in. The message, about “finding where you fit in,” is not that far removed from Butler’s “ParaNorman,” which gave us the first gay character in animation as part of its “fit in” messaging.

But without the gags to enliven the travelogue, without more funny lines to lighten the load and impart that message, “Missing Link” feels like a missed opportunity. It’s the second animated stab at making comedy out of Big Foot and never much more than second best on the subject.

MPAA Rating: PG for action/peril and some mild rude humor

Cast: The voices of Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, Stephen Fry and Zach Galifianakis

Credits: Written and directed by Chris Butler. An Annapurna release of a Studio Laika film.

Running time: 1:35

A touchy, liberal-guilt-ridden riff on Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” this stars Ashton Sanders as the young man hired by an affluent family to serve as chauffeur.

Bill Camp is the “NAACP supporter” patriarch, and Margaret Qualley pegs the townhouse rich girl vocal fry meter to the wall as the faintly patronizing employer who acts like your friend, disapproving daughter to daddy’s do-gooderism.

Here’s a brittle early moment from Rashid Johnson’s film

“Native Son” premieres Wed. night at 8.

“Ash is the Purest White” is a sweeping Chinese crime saga that’s more interesting for what it shows than what it’s about.

The story is a routine mob moll melodrama, a devoted woman’s life of tests once she’s taken up with a boss in the jianghu, the Chinese underworld. The acting can feel static, the compositions formal and the camera pretty much planted in place.

But the China writer-director Zhangke Jia (“A Touch of Sin,” “Mountains May Part”) isn’t the China of legend, or even the China of travelogues. These are the cities Westerners never hear about on the news, with crumbling People’s Republic housing apartment blocs, labor strife, mining towns emptying out as the coal economy peters out, with mahjong parlors filled with chain-smoking gamblers whiling away their days with their “brothers.”

It’s the China of petty criminals, implied corruption, crooks going “legit” to land government contracts, where the complicit cops are more than happy to keep the peace when it means hunting down young gang bangers who are attacking the established gangs and their “order.”

Zhangke Jia is wrestling with his favorite subtext in this setting and this story covering the first decades of the New Millennium, the beginning of The Chinese Century.

Bin (Fan Liao) is the boss of his gang of “brothers,” the arbiter of petty disputes among the rank and file. But his longtime girlfriend, Qiao (Tao Zhao), always at his side, who is the real keeper of the flame. The daughter of a miner and labor agitator, she’s the one who proposes the toast to tradition and “brotherhood.”

Tao Zhao, the director’s wife, has a quiet ordinariness about her that is deceptive. She lets us sense Qiao’s understanding of her situation, the bargain she’s made with Bin. She can’t pick and choose which parts of this life she’ll engage with.

“For people like us,” Bin growls (in Mandarin, with English subtitles), it’s always kill or be killed.”

She’s all-in, even when he’s trying to teach her how to handle an illegal (in China) firearm.

That pistol will loom large in the film’s inciting act, a mid-city, mid-street motorcycle ambush that is about to end with Bin’s death by beating — fists, feet and shovels — when Qiao fatefully intervenes. Merely brandishing the pistol means she’s arrested. Merely adhering to the code she’s bought into — loyalty above all — means prison time.

She will be tested by fire, and as she and Bin have discussed in the shadow of a volcano, the hottest place on Earth produces the finest, whitest ash. Metaphor 101.

The performances have a TV close-up  quality, a lot of nothing to see with the viewer able to read much into what the players’ faces are not betraying. Rare is the emotion given away by the leads, with only supporting players blowing up or wising off.

Zhangke Jia is most at home depicting the ritual fealty of mob life — presents given to the boss, Cohiba cigars “which don’t cause cancer,” he’s assured — and depicting China’s formal, overburdened and crumbling prison system.

A lovely bit of garnish, one of Bin’s fellow gangsters has made sponsoring a ballroom dance team his passion. That’s how the mob mate’s funeral is celebrated, outdoors in a dusty backlot, competition-dressed dancers paying tribute over his ashes.

A river journey upon Qiao’s release takes her on a ferry cruise up river through the Three Gorges in the year or so before a great dam would flood much of the countryside and lower sections of sections  of cities — poorer, disenfranchised — without the locals having any say.

Jia packs a lot of travel shots amidst the melodrama of the two hour and 16 minutes of “Ash is the Purest White.” The idea isn’t to tie things up neatly or even give the viewer great satisfaction at the resolution.

As with China itself, reality is messier, satisfaction harder to come by and “justice” a purely Western concept that hasn’t caught on, the way Western autos and Western pop music and discos (Still dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”) have.

And perhaps they never will.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic gang violence

Cast: Tao Zhao, Fan Liao

Credits: Written and directed by Zhangke Jia. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 2:16

If there had been an Internet and fangirls and fanboys back in Stephen King’s film and TV adaptation heyday — the 80s to early 90s — he never would have had the chance to fall out of favor.

Over-exposed, with every month, it seemed, hosting a new King “Lawnmower Man,” Maximum Overdrive,” “The Stand” or “Christine,” Hollywood managed to wring every ounce of value out of his brand by the 90s.

The movies generally weren’t very good, and most were of the “Pet Sematary” (1989) variety — killer concept, cheap cast, indifferent script and direction.

But with a remake of “It!” blowing up, “Mr. Mercedes” hitting TV and all things King back in vogue, The Modern Master of Horror is having another moment, long past “Misery” and “Dolores Claiborne.” And to judge by the  nerdgasmic raves coming out of the gathering of the tribes called South by Southwest last month, the remake of “Pet Sematary” was supposed to be just more kindling on the bonfire.

But it’s not. Neither good nor terrible, it’s an inert remake, just “different” enough to warrant online dissection in the labs where horror films are put under the microscope.

It’s not frightening, so the co-directors rely on cheap jolts — a quick cut, LOUD music or sound effect, all designed to pin us back in our seats. The cheap frights are necessary because real suspense is missing. The script gives away the game too early, has ZERO room for pathos and relies on the reliably dull Jason Clarke to carry it off.

He doesn’t.

All I remember about the original was the horror hook — the “sour ground” where pets and if need be humans are buried by eccentric Mainers who want them to return to life — and that Fred Gwynne was the only Big Name in the cast.

John Lithgow has that part in the remake, playing the elderly, sage and kindly neighbor who wises the new family, The Creeds (Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence and twin boys named Lavoie who combine to play the toddler, Gage) about that old graveyard behind their new home in rural Ludlow.

The local kids, and occasionally adults, make ritualistic trips there to bury their pets, wearing homemade masks as they do.

It has a sign, scrawled and misspelled, “Pet Sematary.”

Even eight year old Ellie (Laurence) knows, “They spelled it wrong.”

But when the family cat Churchill is run over by a mean Maine driver, neighbor Jud has a better place to bury it — BEHIND the pet cemetery. He doesn’t warn Louis Creed, a man of science (doctor) and thus a skeptic, about what happens next.

Louis has been having visions, warnings from a dead patient he lost on the gurney in the college clinic where he now works.

“The barrier is not MEANT to be broken!”

And the cat coming back to life (nice makeup) is just the beginning of his problems.

This “Sematary” is two minutes shorter and plays much longer than the 1989 version, with a stately pace that feels like “gravitas” but is nothing of the sort. It’s just slow.

The script touches on Louis and wife Rachel’s diverging views of what to tell their two kids about mortality, death and dying. She’s pushing “heaven,” he doesn’t want to lie. But David’s answer to little Ellie’s question about death is reason enough to NOT want to tell her the cat is dead.

Death “might seem scary, but it’s not” can’t be Stephen King’s own words, can it? Terrible line for a doctor dad who doesn’t want to “lie” to his children. Death is terrifying at that age, and the less said about it the better if you can’t manage anything better than that.

The production design looks backlot heavy, with every fog machine in the tri-state area engaged for night shots.

But “foreshadowing” to directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer means pounding home the menacing tractor trailers hurtling down the two lane road in front of the house. “Character arc” means the Dr. David gives up his core beliefs without fuss or fight.

And “climax” means “Let’s drag this thing out well beyond the point there is a point, and beyond any fright or fun we can wring out of it.

Fun? That’s the word this production’s team never learned. But again, getting the dead cat makeup (it rarely looks digital, if indeed it was) right seems like the top priority.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence, bloody images, and some language

Cast: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence , Obssa Ahmed and John Lithgow

Credits:Directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, script by Jeff Buhler based on the Stephen King novel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:41