Movie Nation

As I type this, I can see the Kennedy Space Center from where my live-aboard sailboat is moored.

Jimmy Buffett CDs are what make it a “home.” And the makings of “boat drinks” are never more than an arm’s length away, right below the chart table.

So there is nobody on Planet Earth better qualified to review Harmony Korine’s “The Beach Bum” than me — nobody.

A drunken, stoned fantasia on a lifestyle espoused by Buffett during his “wasting away again in Margaritaville” years, Korine’s film is like a Cheech & Chong version of “Cannery Row,” its “yacht rock” soundtrack provided by Mr. Buffett himself.

A gathering of colorful, gin-soaked and weed-addled “types” played by everyone from Zac Efron to Martin Lawrence, it’s a logical extension of Matthew McConaughey’s “JK Livin'” naked bongo player image, had an Oscar and a whole lot of Lincoln commercials not gotten in the way.

Matthew M plays Moondog, a dazed Key West poet with a gift for off-color verse (“Key Zest” is the title of one collection), an eye for women’s beach and cabana-wear and a nose for the nearest blow, weed or life-sustaining PBR until he can find some more coke or pot.

“Ah’m a BOTTOM feeder,” he drawls. “Ah gotta go LOW to get high!”

He can be found on a beaten-up dive boat where he can giggle without care, drink without drying-out and indulge in his love of Buffett music, living that “Pirate Looks at 40” line that we hear playing on the sound system. “I go for younger women, lived with several a while — though I ran’em away, they’d come back one day, and still could manage a smile. Just takes a while…just takes a while.”

But any possibility of dissipated charm in that, a sun-and-salt drenched down-and-out baccanale — orgies included — in the Key West of legend (pre-cruise ship tourist trap), is pretty much wiped out the moment we learn just who Moondog is admitting that “bottom feeder” ethos to.

It’s his filthy-rich, just as self-indulgent Miami wife, played by Isla Fisher. It’s not the character — who cheats on Moondog with their weed-dealing music-living friend Loungerie (Snoop Dogg) — or Fisher’s engagingly dipsomanical performance of her that deflates “The Beach Bum.”

It’s the knowledge that this “legend,” this “local character,” this barfly’s barfly revered for his poetry, drinking and company, is rich. And because of that, much of the rest of “The Beach Bum” takes place in Miami, which has the requisite beaches the “bum” requires, but also a seaside mansion, McClaren supercar and boats far more luxurious than the fishing skiff he somehow drunkenly steers from Key West to Key Biscayne (170 miles, but when you’re loaded, who cares?).

Their daughter (Stefania LaVie Owen) is 22 and getting married to a real stiff. Moondog has to keep it together and not wander off until AFTER the ceremony.

This is, of course, impossible.

He’s not writing enough to keep his drawling agent (Jonah Hill, impersonating Tennessee Williams during his Key West period) interested.

He’s not sober or faithful, both of which he admits to with the “I’m moist. I’m lubricated” declarations.

The public drunkenness and public fornication tolerated in Old Key West aren’t as acceptable in Rich Wife World.

McConaughey, as I mentioned, has an Oscar. But this “performance” seems so unerringly stoned and slack-jawed that you can’t believe it’s not filmed reality. His Moondog swoons as he skateboards, staggers as he strolls and cackles as he slouches at the tiller of the battered runabout he steers in circles around whatever bay or beach he is motoring to.

His drunken plunge into the mansion’s pool, a stunt that requires McConaughey to leap over a floating sun-bather and narrowly miss a concrete dolphin fountain, is the only big laugh I got out of “The Beach Bum.” Because I was imagining the heart attack it gave the completion bond company that insured this fiasco, and the agent who probably realizes how close his meal ticket came to a concussion, or worse.

The real Jimmy Buffett appears as himself here, a background figure providing background music like the retiring choir director of the Church of Buffett-Orthodox he founded, decades ago. The director of “Spring Breakers” has created an alcohol-fueled fever dream of Buffett’s Margaritaville of the mind — a place where over-the-hill white guys with money can take on a beach bum’s aimlessness, and drink and indulge to their heart’s content.

Maybe even share a J and swap lyrics with Snoop Dogg, a fellow-traveler in the laid-back luxury of a life in herb.

Buffett long ago passed from a parody of his musician/”God’s Own Drunk” lifestyle guru into a sell-out peddling Margaritaville Retirement communities all over Florida.

But whatever insults to narrative drive, coherence, cleverness or cinematic necessity Harmony Korine offers here, he’s shown Buffett — to his face — the real Margaritaville, or its closest dissolute approximation. The “charm” went out the door the moment the money came in.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive drug and alcohol use, language throughout, nudity and some strong sexual content

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Stefania LaVie Owen, Zac Efron, Martin Lawrence and Jonah Hill

Credits: Written and directed by Harmony Korine. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:35

They got the tone right. “Shazam!”, the latest DC comic book superhero to arrive on the big screen, is an appropriately goofy, childish affair.

Because they stole borrowed from the right “origin story” in adapting this, the “other” Captain Marvel, for the big screen. It’s “Big” in tights, with a very fancy cape.

They cast it well, with Zachary Levi of TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and earlier, “Chuck” managing to be childlike, unsophisticated and ungainly when it counts. He’s no Tom Hanks, but he gets across the novelty of a boy of 14 transformed into a buff, cut, cod-pieced do-gooder, a kid who can now buy beer (“YUCK!”) and get into strip clubs.

This is a comic book movie with all the DC Darkness washed out of it, pointed at a younger audience (in most ways) and content to make any fanboy/fangirl pandering so obvious as to be laughable.

Of course it’s a 75 minute picture, with maybe 30 minutes of good one-liners and sight gags, drowning in two hours and twelve minutes of Comic Book Event Picture excess. There’s nothing to justify that, but it’ll still be a big hit, so whatever.

They cast EveryVillain Mark Strong of the Robert Downey “Sherlock Holmes” and “Kick-Ass,” as the heavy — and gave him nothing to play, nothing to amusing to say — just a bald guy with a bright blue right eye to show us he’s got “the magic” and he’s not afraid to use it on “The Champion,” chosen by the last of the Seven Wizards (Djimon Hounsou, of course) to battle darkness, evil, what have you.

It’s a movie about two kids, one who was “interviewed” for the job of “Champion” back in 1974, and found wanting. He couldn’t resist the powers that the wizard, searching for “one soul who is worthy,” was tempting him with.

The other? He’s Billy Batson (Asher Angel), orphaned since the day he lost his mother at the fair even though he’d just won a compass “so you can find your way.”

Billy’s latest foster home is a kind-hearted house filled with kids, with the smart aleck Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) the one who shows him the ropes at home and in junior high.

Freddy uses a crutch, and that gets him bullied. When Billy stands up to the bullies, he becomes the wizard’s last, best hope to pass on what The Council of Wizards always wanted, “a champion to inherit my magic.”

Billy only has to say the wizard’s name and he’ll absorb “the wisdom of Solomon (S), the strength of Hercules (H), the stamina of Atlas (A), the power of Zeus (Z), the courage of Achilles (A),” the money-making power of Marvel (M).

Billy finds himself in a red suit with a cape, and “Big.”

Freddy is all “up on the supes” (super heroes), “the caped crusader stuff.” He’ll make the perfect sidekick.

The “other” boy, the one who didn’t pass muster, has grown up to be a scientist/oligarch, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Strong). And he’s out to corral Shazam’s powers for himself.

A great running gag — Freddy puts Billy through a series of “Super Hero” tests. Can he fly? Can he become invisible? How handy is it that they stumble into a convenience store robbery?

“Bullet proof? Let’s SEE!” Freddy records these experiments on his cell phone.

Another running gag, what to “call” our superhero — “Thunder Crack?” “Sounds like a butt joke.” “Mr Philadelphia” (the setting)? “Sounds like cream cheese.” “Maximum Voltage? “Sparkle Fingers?”

Yes, we see lightning shoot out of his fingers, a la “Captain Marvel” and others. The best effect might be the people/wizards/gargoyle villains turning to ashes, which also seems familiar. The effects are not that novel nor are the epic brawls, and the sight gags (“YOUR cell-phone is charged! And YOUR cell-phone is charged!”), on the nose and not surprising.

The director did an “Annabelle” horror movie and the screenwriter’s most famous credit is the limp kiddie sci-fi “Earth to Echo.” So if this was as good as some folks have been saying, that would be the surprise of surprises.

It’s not. The script and direction range from pedestrian to passable. Limp takes on bullying, a rehashed fight at the fair, under-developed side stories on “family” and Shazam assembling his “team.” Yawners, for fans only.

So as the only movies to compare superhero pictures to are other superhero pictures, let’s park “Shazam!” in its proper place. It’s a little more fun than “Aquaman,” not quite up to “Captain Marvel.” Like “Fantastic Four,” it’s a gateway drug comic book adaptation, a superhero movie on training wheels, best suitable for young kids (save for the insane and unsustainable running time) about to embark on a lifetime of fandom.

Or people who think “Thunder Crack” is the equivalent of Algonquin Round Table wit.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action, language, and suggestive material

Cast: Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Multon, Meagan Good, Djimon Hounsou

Credits:Directed by David F. Sandberg, script by Henry Gayden, based on the DC comic book. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 2:12

My LAST sailboat was bought from a dealership in Moneta Va., on Smith Mountain Lake in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The dealer showed me a couple of boats, including one he swore was used in the movie “What about Bob?” He provided the boat used in a famous scene in that Richard Dreyfuss/Bill Murray comedy, filmed in Roanoke and on Smith Mountain Lake.

I didn’t buy that one, and have kicked myself about that ever since. But you know, a Hunter 23.5 had water ballast, was easier to trailer and a more easily stepped mast.

Anyhoo, today the Florida Film Festival announced its lineup for the 28th edition of the Festival’s special events.

They’re bringing in the Oscar winner, Dreyfuss, and the most successful home grown filmmakers Orlando has ever known — the collective known as Haxan Films, colloquially called “The Blair Witch Boys” by one and all.

They’ll show “The Goodbye Girl,” scripted by the late Neil Simon. And “The Blair Witch Project,” conjured up by committee. Below, the press release.

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“Nobody ever said abortion was pretty,” the cynical, corporate Planned Parenthood director (Robia Scott) tells her protege, Abby Johnson (Ashley Bratcher) in “Unplanned.”

Indeed. “Unplanned” shows you everything from the ultrasounds necessary to properly carry out the medical procedure, to the actual “vacuuming” of the uterus — with as much blood and gore and violence as its fevered creators can imagine.

If ever a subject deserved an R-rating in an explicit film treatment, it’s this.

It’s more pure propaganda from Pure Flix, this time about the subject that has roiled America for the better part of a century — for 50 years of Catholic backed illegality as women’s rights groups fought them, and for 50 years after the famous Supreme Court case, Roe vs. Wade, that took abortion out of back alleys and into medical practices across America.

It’s a heavy-handed sermon pitting clear-eyed, clear-skinned and perfectly “reasonable” protesters against those profiteering, murderous “corporate” butchers at Planned Parenthood.

Sure, the faithful bring up George Soros, the favorite rich whipping boy (with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, also mentioned) of the Sold Our Souls to Foreigner-Founded Fox News set.

Women are its villains, including the hypocritical opportunist whose book it is based on — Abby Johnson. In incessant voice over narration she (Bratcher) insists “This could change everything.”

It already has. Abortion has so divided the country as to make the allegedly God-fearing endorse a criminal, pathological liar and whoremonger into the White House, where his Kentucky and South Carolina Senate minions can steal Supreme Court seats and at long last return control of women’s bodies to a theocratic leaning State and the Red State pinheads who back them.

Like-minded judges have lied their way into the courts, railroaded there by the most cynical politicians the country has ever produced — men who are not men in any meaningful sense of the word.

You did this. Take a bow.

So yes, “Unplanned,” about a Planned Parenthood clinic director (Johnson, played by Batchner) who “saw the light” after having two abortions herself, and facilitating thousands at Ground Zero for careless sex (apparently), Houston, Texas, has the feel of a victory lap for the myopically self-righteous.

Filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon pound their points home like Madison Avenue vets, worried if they don’t use a ham for a cudgel, their audience might miss their meaning.

Medical professionals and birth control counselors are to a one, callous, unfeeling beasts. The scowling, money-grubbing doctor who oversees abortions in the film’s Texas clinic has a wisecrack at the ready when he turns on the pump that sucks a fetus out of woman experiencing a “crisis pregnancy.”

“Beam me up, Scotty!”

The screaming, name-calling, poster-waving protestors — the ones who make the evening news — are lightly glossed over and passed over in lieu of fresh-faced “40 Days for Life” preachers, who range in shrillness from passive aggressive to aggressive, smug in the assured rightness of their cause, dealing from a stacked deck in every argument the movie deigns to depict.

At this stage of the debate, nobody is going to have his or her mind changed by a lop-sided screed on the Big Screen, or a lopsided review ridiculing their dull, uncharismatic and colorless actors (save for Scott), pedestrian direction and script that is more rhetoric than dialogue. Voice-over narration is the laziest, most-heavy-handed cinematic storytelling device there is, and “Unplanned” is wallpapered with it.

Plainly, they were worried about being too subtle.

The fact that the movie is unintentionally patriarchal, showing a clinic run by and for women, with even the fanatical men baying at the fences surrounding it depicted as at least being “right,” is worth a laugh.

I used to visit an allergy clinic located next to a women’s health care provider in one state where I lived. The scary cranks shrieking at everybody coming in the door there were far enough down the rabbit hole that I was never able to hear of a doctor’s murder or the motives of an Atlanta Olympics bomber after that without saying, “Yeah, nobody saw THAT coming.”

Pure Flix, the Scottsdale studio that released the angry Christian victimhood Jeremiads “God’s Not Dead I and II,” is behind this one. They weren’t satisfied showing the women escaping problem pregnancies as weeping, the people who do the work as saleswomen meeting “quotas.” They use the rhetoric and images of violence to encourage violence. And they will be the first to go “Who, us?” when violence results.

For the sentient, the film’s “truth” in depicting Abby (a real person, her widely challenged –OK, debunked — book was the basis for this) suggests the holes one can most easily drive a truck through in her “true story.” The Texas-sized cow-patty of contradiction and hypocrisy doesn’t end with “I had two abortions, you can’t have any.” Abby, we’re led to believe, a middle class white Texan in a two-income home (her husband is, laughably, anti-abortion and stridently so) is helped to find another job by the zealots protesting outside her clinic’s fences.

Black and brown women? You’re on your own, kids. The abortion debate was racist long before Pat Robertson made that nakedly obvious.

For the blinded by faith? I just hope Pure Flix hasn’t gone out and actually made a violent, self-righteous propaganda film that incites its fans to violence. It’s not like there’s no precedent for that concern.

There’s blood all over the screen, here. Don’t be surprised if it spills off that screen.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing/bloody images

Cast: Ashley Bratcher, Brooks Ryan, Robia Scott, Jared Lotz

Credits: Written and directed by Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon . A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:46

Out of town much of last week and all weekend, aged parent issues.

But I’m back, baby. So let’s see what we momiss. *Unplanned,” “Hotel Mumbai, “Aftermath” and “Beach Bum.”

All before, or after “Shazam,” which previews here tonight.

Some of these I am looking forward to. All will get at least a fair shake. Here we go.

Netflix has this French comic comes to America comedy series, a couple of laughs in the trailer. Not sure how many episodes it merits (seems 80 minute feature length comedy material), but “Huge in France” streams April 12.

Between this and “Pet Sematary,” we’re getting a mini-John Lithgow Renaissance.

Blythe Danner always works.

A semi-crank survivalist, no doubt stocked up with Glenn Beck bullion, meets a woman broken by the past — grief. Looks lovely. But as “The Tomorrow Man” is slated for May 22 release, the height of summer blockbuster season, and Bleecker Street (most incompetent movie studio marketing), nobody will see it.

Come for the introduction to Bollywood, stay for the dancing.

That’s the selling point of “His Father’s Voice,” a Westernized “Bollywood Lite” treatment of a middling musical melodrama in that distinct Indian style.

“Voice” has the basic Bollywood elements — a plot of pure hokum, a chaste romance, lots of singing and dancing. But it’s mostly in English. And the songs have an organic, intimate and diegetic feel. They’re not big production numbers. The same goes for the dancing, which is generally performed solo, or in duets as part of rehearsals for a dance recital that tells the Ramayana, the ancient epic of the mythic Indian figures Rama and Sita.

A young man, Kris (Christopher Gurusamy) shows up at a remote Indian ashram, looking for his father. The young woman, Valli (Sudharma Vaithiyanathan) recognizes him. So does her mother (Ashwini Pratap Pawar). He brushes their warm welcome off. “I’m looking for my father.”

But his father, a Westerner named Jon, is away. And Kris is touchy about waiting for him to come back. Still, the women and their fond memories of him convince him to stay.

Kris finds himself watching this performing arts ashram debate and rehearse their planned take on the classic Indian tale, the Ramayana, written “in Sanskrit, the language of the gods!” The debate is over whether to update the sexist story and their traditional symbolic dance (India’s version of ballet, opera and Noh theater) or to give the people what they want.

The story of “His Father’s Voice” is told in three time frames — 17 years ago, when Kris and his parents Jon and Clara (Jeremy Roske and Julia Koch) settled into this life of music and contemplation, mostly at Jon’s insistence.

Jon’s a post-hippy blonde European with a little guitar, a lot of songs in his heart as he makes a sort of spiritual quest. His Indo-Austrian wife puts on a brave face, but this isn’t her idea of an exciting life.

Valli’s parents Pavarthi (Pawar) and Nagarajan (Narendran Pangathody), must be of independent means to have such a lovely place to practice their art, make music and dance.

The West meets East dynamic comes together with Jon, a hippie minstrel singer-songwriter who bends Western traditions to fit Eastern musical modes and models as he croons “I’ll fly without wings, with only truth to change my shape.”

Some of the best scenes in “His Father’s Voice” demonstrate this with jam sessions, Jon playing along to whatever rehearsal music the dancers (mainly Pawar, sometimes Pangathody and others) are mastering.

But the way to engage the film on its own terms is through the dance, stunningly disciplined stylized movement, poses and gestures, as demanding as the any the world offers.

You’ve guessed the “plot,” even though the movie takes its sweet time to get around to it. Kris is estranged from his dance, and has lost his desire to dance– almost. Something happened long ago with the parents, and you can guess that, too.

In all honesty, I found the story and the timid Valli/Kris “romance” tiresome. “His Father’s Voice” lacks the bubbly sense of fun Bollywood musicals deliver, and the performances are, almost to a one, stagey, theatrical and flat.

But the dancing dazzles as we watch the story of Rama and Sita pieced together by gestures, perfectly-struck poses and elaborately refined movement.

MPAA Rating: unrated, PG-ish.

Cast: Christopher Gurusamy, Ashwini Pratap Pawar, Sudharma Vaithiyanathan, Jeremy Roske , Julia Koch

Credits: Written and directed by Kaarthikeyan Kirubhakaran. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:45

The idea is a clever one, and IMDb and Amazon.com aren’t the first to think of it.

Put vintage titles that are no longer Netflix draws — films, TV shows etc. — and not exactly “classics” — available on a streaming service.

Sony’s takeover of Crackle pioneered doing this, and other streaming websites are doing this with classic movies.

Sites you’d expect do it, like Turner Classic Movies, and even Open Culture.

The catch, of course, is that you have to watch movies broken up by commercials, like all those HDTV channels (Movies!, Grit, Get TV, This, etc.) that broadcast TV stations put on their subcarriers. or Tubi and Pluto and Roku.

Unlike the TV channels, though, the online streaming services are using machines to edit in the commercials and commercial breaks — popping algorithm-based breaks right in the middle of action, or at odd breaks in the action.

The ads have the potential to be cookie-based customized for your personal viewing pleasure, as in based on your recent searches for used cars, marine varnish etc.

So yeah, there’s still money to be made off “Tootsie,” “Groundhog Day” and thousands of other 60s-90s titles.

IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, as the Internet’s most popular movie research website, has been trying to morph into an entertainment company in its own right, lots of video components (video ads pay more), lots of stuff hosted by Kevin Smith, of all people.

IMDb Free Dive is their venture into streaming. And coming from the last word on film credits and bulk data and trivia on movies, a research and movie review site visited by millions, you’d expect it to be the best. It’s not. It’s awful. When I visit my Luddite mother who refuses to get or allow cable to be installed in her home (not high speed internet, although Century Link, her provider, advertises speeds it cannot achieve), I test out these streaming services so that the HDTV I gave her doesn’t go to waste.

I have no trouble getting films and TV shows to stream, or watching screener links provided by studios whose movies are about to come out. But IMDb’s software, chopping whole chunks of movies, the payoffs and punchlines to comic scenes of “1941” (a guilty pleasure) for instance, with every abrupt, jarring “commercial break,” is a joke.

Crackle has the same arbitrary commercial placement, but they don’t delete content.

Content is removed from the film on FreeDive, quite arbitrarily and seemingly by accident. The flow of the picture isn’t just interrupted, it is gutted.

Considering who you are, you’d think you’d treat movies more seriously, with more care and respect. Oh. Right. You hired Kevin Smith.

IMDb FreeDive sucks. Make it better.

Let’s open with this caveat. Deadline.com always always ALWAYS underestimates the performance of kids’ movies, based on their Thursday night-Friday box office take.

Saturday is the make or break day for any cartoon or live action “family” flick, and Deadline doesn’t have a magic formula (nor do the studios which provide them this data) for guessing Saturday based on what Friday looks like.

Why do I keep referencing their numbers when looking at the box office? Because they’re the only ones to update their prognostication based on Friday’s take. And what they’re saying, based on Friday, is that “Dumbo” is falling right into the mid-range of what Tim Burton’s live action/CGI remake of a Disney cartoon classic was going to make, with estimates ranging from a disastrous $26 million to a face-saving (still not great) $57 million.

It is on track to earn $44 million, per Deadline. Take that with a grain of salt. They lowballed “Us” all last weekend, too, so maybe they need to have better sources (as do I, but again, they’re the only ones to update Sat. predictions.).

“Dumbo” had very little online search for the title data, and limited pre-sales and poor reviews to boot. Burton strips most of the songs out of it, uses the guy with no real big screen comedy or kiddie movie experience to script it — no, “Arlington Heights” wasn’t a “family” movie — and delivers a glum, depressing circus and Disneyland-bashing version of the story. It’s a depressing pre-Great Depression weeper that doesn’t draw tears or elicit laughs.

Bummer.

“Us” had a huge first weekend, but you had to feel, based on the nature of the reviews (most tracked lukewarm, like mine) and audience Cinema Score exit polling (B-) that this thing wasn’t going to do repeat business or great word of mouth.

A $33 million second weekend for “Us,” even if it’s dragging in a lot of “Let’s see what everybody was talking about,” is still a 65% plummet from its opening weekend. That’s the real verdict for a hyped beyond measure picture. Did “A Quiet Place” or “Get Out” ever fall that far, weekend to weekend? No, they did not.

The Pure Flix abortion drama “Unplanned” is doing a robust $6 million from the faithful. Funny thing, Pure Flix is now a major player in Hollywood. And their movies, ostensibly faith-based, are the most political pictures to come out of Hollywood — “God’s Not Dead,” etc. They’re making money playing on Christian victimhood and raging about it. Want to know why churchgoing is falling faster than the second weekend take of “Us?” Politics. Thanks, Billy Graham (his real legacy). Thanks, Pure Flix.

Neon’s “The Beach Bum” is the sort of movie Matthew McConaughey used to make before he won an Academy Award and started driving Lincolns. It’s one of those “JK Livin'” laid back character comedies that plays up his hedonist/Texas surfer side. And it’s bombing, a $1.8 million opening weekend, barely cracking the top ten.