Movie Nation

Paul Fahrenkopf is a character actor/bit player who has kicked around in movies, TV and theater forever.

Or since the ’70s, when his first credit, as a “spectator,” was earned in the Super Bowl terrorism thriller “Black Sunday.” Read his IMDb credits and you’ll see a lot of roles that weren’t speaking parts.

But he makes the most of a starring role in “Nothing to Do,” playing a gruff 60ish DJ who has to take time off to care for his dying father.

It’s a sweet, gently-funny comedy with a hint of romance, and death as its backdrop, and Fahrenkopf, sort of a mustashioed version of British car show star Jeremy Clarkson, shines in pretty much every scene.

Kenny Shapiro had to dash down from Philly to stay with Irv (Philip Lawton). A grizzled classic rock radio vet, he is missing his last big chance at “making a mark” — a promotion to “morning drive” — to do the right thing.

But he’s OK with being there, repeating a favorite childhood phrase when asked about taking time off from “life” to do this. “It’s all good, Dad. I got nothing to do.”

Dad has been putting off late-life decisions, so Kenny’s in for a steep learning curve. “Power of Attorney?” “Hospice?”

The doctor may be “freaking” him out, but that’s nothing to what his sister Rachel (Connie Bowman, wound-tight and funny) puts him through. She’s frantic that “We are having the RIGHT test done,” meaning she wants Dad back in the hospital.

Kenny heard the doctor say it was “Let nature take its course,” time. Rachel isn’t hearing it. It’s only when she says “My mother just died last year. I can’t go through this again” that we get it.

As the siblings engage in a tug of war punctuated by their childhood put-downs for each other — “Idiot” — Kenny resolves to follow “Dad’s wishes,” and avail himself of the old man’s supply of opioids.

“You want some morphine? They really loaded us up, here…Wanna get high?”

Meanwhile, Kenny’s noticing the extra attentions of the age-appropriate neighbor-lady Patti (Patricia Talmadge), who has a touch of hippy Earth Mother about her. Soup, “hearty” organic veggie soup with edamame, that’ll fix what ails Irv.

“I didn’t know this was HOSPICE. I don’t think my soup’s gonna help.”

Writer-director Mike Kravinsky, using many of the same cast members from his 2013 comedy “The Nextnik,” finds touching moments here and there, mixed in with a few laughs. Mostly, he scripts and directs his familiar cast in ways that play to their strengths.

Fahrenkopf’s booming, chain-smoker’s baritone is perfect for an on-the-edge-of-over-the-hill DJ, and as he gets to know Patti, he shares radio station promo patter from the many cities he’s plied his trade — Miami, Charlotte, up and down the dial.

Bowman hits just the right brittle notes as a sister who always considered her brother too irresponsible to handle any of this, especially Power of Attorney over their father.

And that’s without seeing Kenny crush up Dad’s opioids and snort them.

It’s not a dazzler, not even a knee-slapper. But “Nothing to Do” sets its goals and meets them, and reminds us and every indie filmmaker out there that America is overrun with skilled, talented actors desperate for work.

Not all of them can be movie stars, but many of them are wholly capable of making characters come to life and your indie screenplay become a reality.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, profanity, lots of smoking

Cast: Paul Fahrenkopf, Philip Lawton, Connie Bowman, Patricia Talmadge

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Kravinsky. A Nextnik release.

Running time: 1:20

Here you go. See if your favorites are “dead” (Mark Ruffalo, “I’m not fired?”) or back for this general wrap up of a superhero storyline, sure to own the late spring and much of this summer at the box office.

Sentimental, “Sometimes the best we can do, is start over.” Pandering. “I like this one.”

A metaphor for America in the MAGA era?

Hollywood has such a hard time cooking up a decent romantic comedy that any indie filmmaker testing those waters earns my sympathy as a matter of course.

But sympathy is wasted if the picture lacks charm, wit or pacing, as Eden Marryshow‘s “Bruce!!!” demonstrates.

A sex-farce or character study in “heel,” it fits under the broadest interpretation of a rom-com — an aimless jerk seeks focus and purpose in his life while pursuing and bedding a cavalcade of women, each dumped just as another comes into the picture.

Only Bruce, played by director and co-writer Marryshow, isn’t “seeking” purpose or anything else. He’s like a “Seinfeld” character, where the ethos was “No GROWING.”

Still, there’s a sliver of promise in here, a 75 minute comedy suffocating in the 103 minute sack it’s stuffed in.

Take the words Bruce uses to break up with Theresa (Jean Goto) in the film’s opening scene.

“I’m not doing this TO you. In some ways I’m doing this FOR you.”

But, she protests, “You said I LOVE you!”

“I said ‘Me, too.'”

Bruce is King of the Clueless, a self-absorbed jerk or, in the words of more than one character in “Bruce!!!”, an “ass—le,” as in — someone whose head is so far up his rear end he can’t see past his rectum.

He launches into an MLK impersonation when breaking the news of his breakup to the NEXT woman he will break up with.

“Free at last, free at last…”

He’s constantly lying to his too-understanding, Tony Robbins-quoting law school roomie (Jason Tottenham) about the rent, exaggerating his job — “You don’t have a JOB…You walk one f—–g dog!” and talking up his years and years in gestation Big Idea screenplay, “Tales of a Dirty Badge.”

“It’s taking a little bit longer, because it’s me writing it.”

“Have you ever worked with a deadline?”

“That’s kind of a personal question.”

He cadges cash from his parents, only when dad (Gene Pope) is not in the room.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak ‘Old Man Hating on My Youth.'”

His “dream” woman is of the “Kelly LeBrock in ‘Weird Science’…Halle Berry in ‘Boomerang'” variety — unattainable, delusional fantasies.

“I can’t force myself to get into somebody if I’m not ELATED.”

He’s got the lines, even if the delivery isn’t all that snappy — “Now I know…why JESUS wept!” Not the best reaction to roomie Greg revealing his girlfriend Kerri (Jade Eshete) is pregnant.

Dragging pal Trevor (Christopher Gabriel Nuñez) into a bar requires coaching, delivered in jerk-speak.

“There are two B-/C+ chicks in there…to see me. I will give you the opportunity to speak to one of them. Are you listening to me? DON’T be weird.”

Even the women he charms, tricks and seduces get the occasional good line — post brush-off.

“I may NOT stalk you!”

Banter is EVERYthing in a comedy like this, and Marryshow and co-writer Jesse Wakeman (he plays Belafonte in the movie) turn out enough clever lines to make a shorter, sharper film with a more charismatic lead pay off.

Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned, the running time has plenty of room for slack stretches — LOTS of them. Some of the supporting actresses register, and Marryshow himself isn’t the worst comic lead I’ve seen in a movie.

But comedy is quick and close-up, and “Bruce!!!” is slow, with too many establishing shots. Even gimme sight gags like losing control of a pack of dogs you’re walking have a stumbling quality.

And while banter may be “EVERYthing,” pacing is PARAMOUNT in comedy. “Bruce!!!” and its star never get out of his own way.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Eden Marryshow, Mlé Chester, Jade Eshete, Jason Tottenham, Jean Goto, Christopher Gabriel Nuñez.

Credits:Directed by Eden Marryshow, script by Eden Marryshow and Jesse Wakeman. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:43

“Wonder Park” is easily the most beautifully animated film ever to come out under the Paramount Animation/Nickelodeon nameplate.

But this fanciful childs-eye-view of her “dream” theme park and all the rides and activities that might entail is so oddly devoid of magic, so starved for laughs or delights, as to make you question if those were even what the filmmakers were going for. Because unless it’s anime, as everybody but animation fangirls and fanboys know, pretty pictures aren’t enough.

It fails, in the current parlance, to “spark joy.”

The screenwriters of the recent “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboots wrote it, and big names from Mila Kunis and Jennifer Garner to Ken Jeong, Matthew Broderick and Kenan Thompson voiced the characters. As it’s built around a tweenage girl dealing with her mother’s life-threatening illness and interacting with the imaginary mascot critters of her imaginary theme park, you’d think laughs and sentiment and warm grins were the object here.

Still, as few to none are forthcoming…

June (Brianna Denski) always had a favorite story at bedtime. It was about the fun, mishaps and imaginative rides and attractions at a theme park the two of them dreamed up. “Wonderland” features “Clockwork Swings” and “Fireworks Falls, “Zero G-Land” and the like.

June has “Future Imagineer” written all over her, as she spends her days making mock-ups of the rides and theme park areas out of cardboard, drinking straws and the like.

As she gets older, she organizes the area kids into neighborhood-wrecking soap-box loop-the-loop courses out of whatever they can scavenge or break-off and “borrow.”

Then Mom (Garner) gets sick. Wonderland goes into the fireplace. Indulgent Dad (Broderick) isn’t listening to the advice the authorities are handing down — “Military school!” But he’s got to keep June occupied while her mother is in the hospital. “Math Camp” is the answer.

Her Milhouse-nerdy Indian-American pal (Oev Michael Urbas) is thrilled, because he has a crush on her, loves math and this means he won’t be her crash-test dummy any more.

“I’m ALIVE! Thank Krishna!”

But before they even get to Camp Awe+Sum, almost before the campers get through the delightful “Pi Song” (the never ending ratio) and June can blurt “Holy Hypotenuse!” she’s made a break for home.

This is a mistake, as Camp Awe+Sum is the cleverest conceit in the movie, worth a kids’ film all by itself.

In the woods, she stumbles across the magical remains of “the REAL Wonderland,” where the mascots she and mom made up — a wart hog (Mila Kunis), a “delayed hibernation disorder” big blue bear (Ken Hudson Campbell), beaver twins (Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong) and a porcupine — are running for their lives from licensed merchandise dolls gone wrong.

Peanut (Norbert Leo Butz) is the chimp who charms guests at the gate, whose literal “magic” marker invents the park’s crazy rides, but who now has gone missing as dolls made from his character, “chimpan-zombies,” are dismantling the park and chasing the mascots toward a swirling fireplace-smoke vortex — “The Darkness.”

June, whom they come to learn is their creator and perhaps the source of their doom, must sort this out and save Wonderland.

The sentimentality attached to a little girl, lashing out about having a sick mom and having to make right what her tossing Wonderland into the fireplace hath wrought, is lukewarm at best.

The action beats are colorful and dazzling theme-park rides run amok. Frenetic action substitutes for wit, here.

The laughs? They all come from that porcupine, voiced by HBO’s John Oliver (“Last Week Tonight”) in a performance shockingly free of F-bombs and koala chlamydia gags. Every line to burble out of his Limey mouth is a stitch, from his order to “Stand DOWN, I say” to his poetically expressed love for Greta the wart hog and her “come-hither tusks.”

Must be the voice. He was born to do cartoons.

As “Wonder Park” has gone through release dates and title changes, with plans for a spinoff TV series already in the works, the film’s general mirthlessness can be traced to a boardroom, not merely hack screenwriting.

It’s a commodity, intended to become a branded property, a “Jimmy Neutron” (which also became a TV series) without a proper, fun, buzzed-about cartoon film to launch it with.

And what do we know about commodities? They’re “produced,” just like “Wonder Park.” No wonder it has no credited director.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Brianna Denski, Jennifer Garner, Kenan Thompson, Mila Kunis, Matthew Broderick, Ken Jeong and yes, John Oliver

Credits:Directed by no one, apparently. Script by John Appelbaum and Andre Nemec. A Paramount/Nickelodeon release.

Running time: 1:25

Fiercely feral, dis-orientingly trippy and (for some folks at least) sure to inspire flashbacks, Gaspar Noé’s “Climax” is horror that hits you where you live.

It’s a waking nightmare, an erotic fantasy that twists into the sum of all paranoias. And even if I can’t say I’d care to ever see it again, there’s no denying its riveting/eyes-averting bloody-minded brilliance.

This is “Suspiria” without the cryptic supernatural nonsense, “Black Swan” without ballet, a tale of “the dance” that takes the stereotype that dancers — uninhibited hedonists and born sensualists — “live for the dance” and adds drugs to take away whatever inhibitions they might have left.

Noé, in the best Poe, Agatha Christie or “Friday the 13th” tradition, fills a remote school full of young, lithe and talented danseurs, showcases them as they celebrate the end of rehearsals with flexibility and skills most of us cannot imagine and then introduces LSD to their popping and locking, twisting and contorting bacchanal.

Sure, that’ll be fun. Until somebody gets hurt — everal somebodies. Until somebody grows paranoid — pretty much everybody.

Noé introduces us to the players “A Chorus Line” style — video “interviews” before casting, glimpsed on a TV set parked conspicuously between books on schizophrenia and a VHS copy of “Suspiria.” This happened in 1996 we’re told, and we meet Shirley and Cyborg, Rocco and Omar, revealing “my darkest fear,” and their utterly fanatical devotion to dance.

“It’s all I have,” says Lou (Souheila Yacoub). “I can’t be anywhere else,” adds Riley (Lakdhar Dridi).

Black and white, Gallic and Middle Eastern, gay, straight and all points in between, they’re primed for their “chance in a million” with choreographer/dancer/”boss lady” Selva, played by Sofia Boutellava for  of “Kingsman,” “Hotel Artemis” and the titular monster of “The Mummy.”

The party they throw to celebrate the end of three snowy days of rehearsal is a fluid, supercharged dance-off with dancers strutting their moves, showing off all manner of sexy dance wear — pausing only long enough to flatter the hell out of each other’s skills (in English, and French with English subtitles), flirt as they arrange their latest hook-up and partake in the evening’s libation.

“I made some sangria.”

It takes a while for what’s in the sangria to peak, a bit longer for Selva to hiss “What have you DONE?”

Chatterbox Emmanuelle (Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull) made the sangria. But she drank it, too. And she’s got her little boy with her for the weekend. Would she do that?

Omar (Adrien Sissoko) may have grown up in Muslim household, and still doesn’t drink. But joining a dance company isn’t exactly a Fundamentalist move and LSD seems way out of character.

Somebody else is pregnant, others are bitter over failed relationships, David (Romain Guillermic) may be “a ticket to an STD” after cutting a wide swath through the company, sexually. Might he have done it?

Doesn’t matter. Logic doesn’t apply when everybody shrieking accusations, screaming at this or that person accused, pounding and kicking them or tossing them out into the snow.

Noé (“Enter the Void”) parks his camera overhead, flips the image upside down, hurls light and darkness, dancers’ bodies and dancers’ blood at us as we watch a lot of healthy, perhaps not that well-adjusted young people dance until they go off their rockers.

But not before the longest music credits in screen history. He positioned those credits, and the film’s finale, in a final disorienting flip designed to look like a video editing “glitch.” They come at the beginning of “Climax.”

It’s unnerving at times, assaulting at others. “Disorienting” is the idea, and even if many of the tricks are simple and the plot unfolds along a generally predictable track, “Climax” achieves that goal. And how.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing content involving a combination of drug use, violent behavior and strong sexuality, and for language and some graphic nudity

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub, Taylor Kastle, Giselle Palmer, Thea Carla Schott and Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull

Credits: Written and directed by Gaspar Noé. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

Yes, “Aladdin” knows parkour.

And no, Will Smith is not Middle Eastern in any way, shape or form.

Funny? Yes he is. Not Robin Williams funny, but flip and the timing is there.

The leads are as bland as ever, animated or live action. Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott are the co-stars, because really, this is all about the genie.

If I was Disney, I wouldn’t be flinging “A Whole New World” away in the the first trailer. Already sick of it, it’s over-exposed in that “Let It Go” way. Why not keep it out of earshot until the movie opens?

May 24, we’ll see how this lush, action-packed Guy Ritchie version works out.

If we learned nothing else from “Suspiria” — either version — or “The Red Shoes” or “Black Swan” — we had to absorb this.

Dancers are obsessive hedonists, living only for…the dance.

Gaspar Noé’s French horror tale “Climax” parks such people in “a remote schoolhouse” to rehearse.

What could go wrong?

A former colleague from his days as a Goldman Sachs investment banker is chatting with Stephen K. Bannon near the end of the new documentary about him, “The Brink.”

“People who don’t know you,” he says, will find Bannon “disarming.”

Bannon can be funny, flippant. He’s given to moments of self-deprecation about his weight, his politics and views. He doesn’t seem to lose his cool, unlike his former employer, Donald Trump. We don’t even hear him swear.

That’s the Bannon at the beginning and middle of “The Brink.” He cracks jokes during public appearances, calls his audience “deplorables,” even though most of the crowds he’s seen speaking to in Alison Klayman’s film — post 20016 election — are the very “elites” he railed against, well-heeled “country club Republicans.”

But stick with “The Brink,” our Goldman Sachs man seems to suggest. We’ll see something more.

As Klayman tracks Bannon through the whirlwind of 2017-2018, basically kicking off after Bannon was forced out of the White House when the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. blew up and Bannon’s “own it” attitude towards white nationalism became a perceived Trump weakness, to his whirlwind media tour afterwards, his triumphant holding of audiences in Europe, “organizing” or at least meeting with the far right “nationalist” parties of Britain, France, Italy, Sweden and Belgium, we get a peek at the man behind the self-described “gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk.”

How much attention was Bannon getting in 2017? Royal Family/Meghan Markle coverage. His every stop, supporting Judge Roy Moore’s Senate campaign in Alabama, his meetings with the chief cheerleader for Brexit and other far right party operators, covered by major media outlets in the U.S. and abroad.

Hell, there were even two documentaries being shot about him, almost at the same time. So hats off to Klayman for getting “The Brink” into theaters before “American Dharma,” by Oscar winning documentarian Errol Morris, reaches the viewing public.

Bannon was magnanimous, quoting Lincoln at a time when that first Republican president was at his lowest ebb and the Republic was “on the brink,” as a coping mechanism when things start to turn against him.

But by the time November of 2018 rolls around and Bannon sees the storm coming, estranged from Trump or not, frantically rallying the faithful for embattled candidates we’ve seen him meeting with to get his endorsement in the film’s first act, we get the cursing, defensive micro-manager.

Yes, there’s a documentary crew following him around, so when he’s bluntly cut to pieces on “Good Morning, Britain” — Bannon will only grin and say, “She’s tough. Tough.”

What “she” said? “If you’re a ‘fine person,’ you wouldn’t march alongside a neo-Nazi.”

He doesn’t show any temper when his own words are thrown back at him, a Guardian reporter who has done his homework contradicting his use of “dog whistle” phrases, setting up enemies as (Jewish) “globalists” and the like.

Trump taught him a lesson, Bannon says, which one can imagine the credit-stealing Trump passing off as his own, even thought P.T. Barnum coined the phrase a century ago. “There’s no such thing as bad media.”

We meet him in a cringe-worthy moment, expressing admiration for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, which he’d visited in his previous life making a film. He’s in awe of “the German perfection” of this machine for “mass murder,” and what can only be described as frank admiration for the “people who totally detached themselves from any moral horror of it.”

“Humans can actually do this. Not devils. Humans that are just humans.”

You can see why Bannon spends so much of “The Brink” defending himself from charges of anti-Semitism, even as he works with Jewish Republicans running for Congress. The “racism” tag seems a harder sell as he cozies up to a Bannon Republican Senate candidate who happens to be black, or partners with the London chief of the Breitbart far right media site which was Bannon’s entry into Trump world.

Perhaps the film’s great moment of disconnect is when that Londoner, Brit-accented Raheem Kassam, sneers out the car window to Bannon in London — “Look around you. It is lit’rally ALL Arab stores.”

Bannon spends “lit’rally” the entire film denying that his “economic nationalism” is just old fashioned nationalism/fascism rebranded.

He makes sense when he talks about why 2016 happened, admitting that “hate” is a strong motivator when talking about the boogeymen he helped Trump identify to his “deplorables” — Clinton, and especially the Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

But Klayman, to her credit, doesn’t just observe and let him spout his worldview and “reality” of “alternate facts”. He ridicules Democrats for their black/brown/yellow/LGBT “identity politics,” and she suggests “the Deplorables” are his “identity politics” crutch.

“And your point is?”

The film glosses over Bannon’s suggestion, in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” that Trump’s arms-length-but-colluding involvement in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians was “treasonous.” We see Bannon meeting with old chum and Trump insider PRESENT at that meeting, mercenary firm Blackwater founder Erik Prince, as if nothing at all happened.

We hear him go out of his way to mention the “vibe” one gets from “a church, a mosque, a temple” and how that contrasts with the poisonous atmosphere of the White House he was just kicked out of.

We hear him pound his “not a racist, a populist” message time and again, even when he’s meeting with Big Money at the Republican Society Patriot Dinner crowd at that bastion of the Unreconstructed Confederate South, The Citadel. Then he poses for selfies with a couple of fans, bull-necked white South Carolina cops.

He never explains his assault on the European Union, and there’s no overt Russian connection made to Bannon in the film. Even the European reporters, who give him a harder time than the American ones (with the occasional exception) fail to highlight what’s really behind his efforts to “weaken Europe.”

Whatever else the Harvard man might be, he’s no idiot. His candidate reached his “people” because “the elites are content with ‘managing’ our decline,” with NAFTA, the EU, trade deals and Wall Street absorb and merge mania.

Perhaps its going to take two documentaries to plumb the depths of Bannon’s persona, what drives this frump who rails against elites even as he’s serving their purposes so well. Klayman’s has an incomplete yet polished feel to it. There’s too much we don’t find out.

But Morris is going to be hard pressed to come up with a better illustration of what a dangerous figure the subject he shares with Klayman is than Klayman’s eviscerating montage of Bannon making George Soros his favorite whipping boy, eager crowds asking “Why hasn’t George Soros been arrested?” and the mailing of bombs to Soros and others, and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

It may be all just a game to him, some late life rationalization that his “dedicated” core of unswayable Breitbart Media “deplorables” has made him matter. Getting the angry, the resentful and the armed and unhinged worked up will be his real legacy. Whatever the future of his “nationalist” wave holds, he’s already getting people killed.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Stephen K. Bannon

Credits:Directed by  Alison Klayman. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:31

This documentary makes its way to theaters at the end of March.

So I gave up a seemingly perfect Saturday last weekend to catch a late-scheduled preview screening of “Wonder Park,” a new animated kids’ film opening Friday, with Nickelodeon supposedly building a TV series out of it this fall.

It was an exceptionally untimely screening, in the middle of the day — 1130 am. Kids’ films previewed on Saturdays are usually at 10 or 1030. Anything later and you run into Unruly Audience Syndrome.

In any event, that’s a time that kills AM activities and severely cuts into PM ones.

Reviews of this latest Paramount Animation offering are embargoed until 9am Eastern Thursday. So, not a lot of time for an online audience for reviews, pro or con, to develop.

But as I type away here, I see no “directed by” credits in my notes. There’s no credited director on Rottentomatoes or IMDb for that matter.

Was it, like much episodic television (“director” credits or not), “produced” rather than directed?

I have a message in to Paramount, and a Google search turns up the name of a veteran TV writer/producer and show runner, without attribution. So we will get to the bottom of this. I hope. (Updated, “No directing credit” on “Wonder Park,” per Paramount).

Is Alan Smithee making cartoons, now?

I can’t remember ever reviewing a movie — and I’m a long time in the saddle, kids — with NOBODY credited as director. Did David Feiss, whose name turned up in random Google searches as “director” of “Wonder Park” have his name removed? Did he finish the movie, which changed titles, release dates, etc.?

Original director Dylan Brown was canned back when the title was “Amusement Park” over a year ago. Sexual harassment. Perhaps they should have retitled it #NotYouToo.

Sorry, I don’t usually go into the whole rigamarole of weekend screenings of kids movies, but had I known it had no director, I would have probably gone to a spring training baseball game. I want my Saturday back. But at least you know, now.

Anyway, my review of “Wonder Park” (embargo is over) is here.