Movie Nation

Yes, he was a real figure, the great composer, working in the shadows of Hollywood as others got the credit and students went on to become JOHN WILLIAMS and JERRY GOLDSMITH and HENRY MANCINI.

Yeah. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco really lived. He was a great concert guitarist, composing scores of classical pieces for the guitar. Then he fled Europe, settled in at MGM and scored 200 or so films. Almost never getting credit for them.

Xander Berkely plays him in “The Maestro,” a tale of a budding musician (Mackenzie Astin) who comes to study with him in the Beatnik ’50s.

“The Maestro” was slated to open in December, but is now opening Feb. 15.

Kind of a dizzy and dark riff on Matthew M’s “Awright awright awright, where’s my BONGOES?” past image, with a hint of “Spring Breakers” about it.

Korine landed Isla Fisher and Snoop Dogg and Jonah Hill and Zac Efron and…Martin Lawrence?

“The Beach Bum” opens March 22.

The impression that sticks with you is of carnage — animals slaughered on a wholesale scale.

“We shoot until we run outta shells,” one camo-clad local drawls from the cockpit of his flat bottomed swamp boat.

But they’re shooting at “Rodents of Unusual Size,” the destructive “swamp rat” named nutria. So any cringing at all this shooting, trapping, skinning and lopping off the tails of untold hundreds of thousands is minimized, or at least dulled by repetition.

Here’s a nature documentary set in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” country, the coastal wetlands of Louisiana, fast disappearing due to oil and gas exploration, drilling, pumping and canal digging, by Missisippi River mismanagement on a vast scale, and due to the incursions of a 20 pound beaver-toothed rodent imported from South America, the bane of coastal marshlands across the planet.

A whimsical animated opening (narrated by Wendell Pierce) recounts “a tale crazier’n Hell,” about nutria — how a few folks, encouraged by the state, imported the Argentinian rodents in the 1930s to broaden Louisiana’s fur industry.

The most famous importer, and the one who gets most of the blame (not all of it deserved), is E.A. McIllhenny, scion of the Tabasco Sauce empire. Nobody messing with nutria knew what they were dealing with, and keeping them penned up while they bred like their fellow rodents — rats and rabbits — was a challenge.

Which the nutria entrepreneurs abandoned, loosing their stock into the state’s marshes “to aid the state’s fur industry.”

As the fur is quite soft and pretty, that worked out — sort of. A LOT of people trapped and sold nutria for their fur. Until “Fur is Murder”  sea change of the 1980s. The market collapsed, and battered wetlands, broken by river-dredging, river traffic and the canals dug by the state’s rampant oil and gas exploration, were beseiged from below. Nutria love marsh greenery. And they dig burrows that flood and collapse the landscape they’ve denuded.

Generations of water folk who had used nutria trapping as a winter source of income were broke, and losing the land literally under their feet. So the state went after nutria with a vengeance — a $5 bounty on every nutria tail.

As much as this fifth generation Cajun or umpteenth generation Native American waterman (and the occasional woman) declare that they were taught “never to kill something unless you make something with it,” that’s just what they’re doing.

Tails cut off, fur-covered corpses with big orange teeth and a meat not unlike rodents we eat (rabbit) tossed back into the swamp.

If the carnage of “nutria skinning contests” doesn’t turn you off, the sheer waste just might.

But filmmakers Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer (they did “Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea”) and editor/co-director Quinn Costello turn this documentary about a necessary evil — Louisiana IS washing away, after all, and they’re NOT going after the oil and gas industries, so — into a serio-comic essay on the duality of man — redneck man, anyway.

But as wildlife officials lecture about the utter necessity of scaling back the nutria population (still in the millions), as a state employee who tries to trap nutria out of the canals of New Orleans itself (levees and bridge foundations are being undermined), as hunters efficiently take their .22s to their shoulders and pick off another quarry and old-timers tally their day’s count with the state tail-tally assessor, we sense their grudging admiration for the critters.

You’re not getting anybody in North America to eat the meat (again “rabbit”) without major rebranding (the filmmakers named their production company “Tilapia,” after a re-branded trash fish). But the fur has the “sustainable” cachet.

There’s a Fur Queen Beauty Pagent, the nutria is a newly-hip sports mascot down on the bayou and one hunter’s even taken a nutria as a cuddly “high maintenance” pet.

So whatever outsiders might think of the carnage, or the acceptable hatred of an “invasive species,” the locals seem to have reached their peace with the invader, even if they’re not keeping them as pets or adding them to their gumbo.

MPAA Rating: unrated, animal slaughter, mild profanity

Cast: Briefly narrated by Wendell Pierce.

Credits: Directed by Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer, Quinn Costello. A Tilapia Film?PBS release.

Running time: 1:11

“Crossed the Line” is a soapy, sloppily-plotted thriller that might have played better on the TV network that originally produced it. But thanks to its violence and language, this 2014 Ice-T versus four vengeful sisters tales earns its release on assorted video platforms.

Caryn Ward of TV’s “Grown Folks” and “Fame” is the LA sibling keeping her family and the family business running after their mother’s death.

Mom ran a flower shop, and that’s what Kyra does, with little help from her partying, short-tempered sister Lynn (La’Myia Good).  Kyra’s responsible enough to be legal guardian for pretty tennis player with college dreams Sherrie (Lauren Pennington) and mousy aspiring nurse Denita (Shanell Rene).

That flower shop gives them all a middle class life and the younger sisters the chance to dream bigger. But the shop is on the edge of South Central, and it’s a convenient “respectable” and above-board business, the perfect place for drug drops.’

Which is why Miguel (Ice-T) wants it. And when Kyra won’t sell for the right offer, Miguel’s boys stage a robbery and club Kyra as they do.

Whatever the streetwise Denita gets from this, Sherrie’s too-soft-to-be-a-thug secret beau, Twist (Sam Sarpong) sees enough to know who did it, and plot his revenge on their behalf.

That’s what “Crossed the Line” is about, a little lecture Miguel gives in the opening moments — “Revenge,” he says, “is how the world makes stuff right.”

Twist robs an underage aspiring gang-banger of a bag of drugs, hides them with Sherrie, and soon Miguel’s gang AND the cops are all over the sisters, landing Kyra in jail, with Lynn bellowing “We’ve gotta pack heat ourselves,” and “We want justice? We’re gon’ have to GET it ourselves!”

A cycle of vengeance ensues that swallows everybody we see here, pretty much.

Movies that don’t work share one thing in common, that first moment that takes you out of the story. Here, it’s the police raid on the sisters’ house. It’s a 65 second affair that gets them through the door, finding drugs in Sherrie’s room, Kyra accepting the blame, the cops cuffing her and all but sprinting out.

No search for more drugs. No questioning of the siblings. Nobody by Kyra summarily taken “downtown” and jailed.

Twist’s inept, under-motivated stalk and robbery were weak, but this scene needs a walker or a wheelchair.

Even as Kyra makes a prison buddy, Juicy (Vanessa Williams, top photo) and two sisters’ culpability in all this misery that’s visited on them all becomes clear, the movie’s little grace notes — Juicy’s sassy prison pose, Miguel’s “Thou shalt not steal” lecture to a little kid who needs to learn “revenge,” not petty theft — are overwhelmed by the mendacious mediocrity of the dialogue and plotting.

The cast is game enough, and the simple parable plotting of the story plays. The players deserved sharper characters, a more surprising narrative and better lines.

Because scene by contrived scene, loaded with lapses in logic and freighted with teppid dialogue, “Crossed the Line” stumbles forward towards an all-too-obvious conclusion which cannot get here soon enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with gun violence, drugs, profanity

Cast:  Caryn Ward, Shanell Rene, La’Myia Good, Ice-T, Lauren Pennington, Vanessa Williams, Sam Sarpong, Jack Guzman

Credits: Directed by Dennis Conrad, script by Dennis Conrad and Laura Scheiner.  A Gravitas Ventures/BET release.

Running time: 1:32

“Dead Ant” is a real “Give the Devil his due” B-movie.

And by “Devil” I mean that Trump-tanned comic neer-do-well Tom Arnold, who delivers laughs where few exist in this “drive-in” genre riff set where U2 took inspiration for “Joshua Tree.”

Arnold plays Danny, the ’80s relic manager of hair metal band Sonic Wave, formerly Time Warp, whom he wants to take inspiration from the most potent peyote available to “find your moment” and write a song that goes viral and wins the desert campout music fest, “Noachella.”

“I’m not creepy. Even PROVEN it in court,” Danny oozes to a couple of bikini-topped groupies.

Danny’s the guy who, when giant ants start chasing him and his band, bellows, “If this wasn’t so SCARY, it’d be AWESOME.”

It is Danny who, after a band member is devoured by said giant ants, notes “Not the FIRST band member we’ve had to replace…This s— happens every DAY in rock’n roll!”

This “Coachella/Them” inspired horror spoof by Ron Carlson is a sort of instant cult-film, or aspires to be.

A has-been band with one hit “power ballad” behind them — led by guitarist Pager (Rhys Coiro), featuring shrieking singer Merrick (Jake Busey), shag-topped drummer Stevie (Leisha Hailey) and bassist Art (Sean Astin, in wig, shades and “Sucks to Suck” hat) heads to the desert, pre-festival, for “inspiration.”

A medicine man named Bigfoot (Michael Horse, funny) and his diminutive sidekick Firecracker (Danny Woodburn of “Seinfeld” fame) warn and warn all who buy their “Blue Moon” or “Sunshine” peyote of “grave consequences if they don’t respect it and the “sacred site” where they’re to injest it at sundown.

They do disrepect it.

And Merrick has barely noted his irritation at the post-Cobain/Kanye changes in “rock” with “I MISS the makeup, man!” When they’re running for their lives.

Carlson finds scattered laughs in the cheesy effects — ant traps, towering blood geysers, a Hobbit mauled by fire ants — and the ironic zingers blurted out by the stoners seen here.

“There’s like 22000 species of ants, right?” doltish Merrick offers. “But none on Ant-
ARCTICA!”

The opening scene, a hippe chick who is the first to ignore the peyote warnings, has the full allotment of B-movie nudity (she disrobes as she’s chased).

And the picture never abandons its B-movie pretentions, kind of noble, generally a plus in movies like this.

It isn’t much, amusing junk at best. But “Dead Ant” lets Busey be a stoner-philosopher, Hailey be a rock-chick heroine (’80s style) and Coiro (“Entourage”) demonstrate the power of a “power chord” in a “power ballad,” especially where there are murderous insects concerned.

See it not-entirely-sober with a friend. And give the Devil his laughs. Arnold, this time out, earns them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody (comic) violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tom Arnold, Leisha Hailey, Jake Busey, Michael Horse, Cameron Richardson, Sean Astin, Rhys Coiro, Danny Woodburn

Credits: Written and directed by Ron Carlson. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:27

The documentary series “POV” airs at different times in different markets.

But this award-nominated documentary, “Minding the Gap,” about teens growing up in America’s Rust Belt, made for Hulu, will show up on that program before the Oscars are handed out.

Feb. 18 at 9pm is the national rollout day and time, but “check your local listings” as we used to say when we watched broadcast TV.

Nominations for the 91st Academy Awards rolled out this AM, live streamed in addition to televised.

And “Black Panther” kept coming up, alphabetically the first film named in category after category –costumes, score, sound mixing, sound editing. Seven nominations, including best picture. As this blockbuster picked up any script, acting or directing nominations.

So “Best picture long shot,” we’ll say. For now.

Not that Spike Lee‘s “BlackKklansman” didn’t make some noise, with nominations for score and best supporting actor. “BlackKklansman” collected six nominations in all, quite the haul for Spike Lee’s “Comeback” picture.

Similarly, nominations for Amy Adams and Christian Bale editing and makeup and Sam Rockwell made “Vice” an Oscar nominations winner, alphabetically turning up at the end of lists of nominees time and again. “Vice” landed six nominations, including Best Picture and best director, Adam McKay.

“Roma,” a pre-announcement Oscar favorite, cleaned up with ten nominations.

Surprisingly, for a movie widely noted to lack standout performances, using non-actors in many roles, it nailed down Supporting Actress (Marina de Tavira) and Best Actress (Yalitza Aparacio) nominations.

That’s what being in an “Oscar favorite” will do for you.

Glenn Close is still the Best Actress favorite, but she’s competing with Melissa McCarthy (“Can You Ever Forgive Me”), “Star is Born” lead Lady Gaga, pre-Oscar “Favourite” Olivia Colman and Yalitza Aparacio from “Roma.”

“The Favourite” earned eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Olivia Colman), Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos), Best Supporting Actress (Rachel Weisz AND Emma Stone, Oscar winners, will split the vote, there, giving the Oscar to somebody else — Regina King of “If Beale Street Could Talk,” probably. Again.).

“If Beale Street Could Talk” pulled in Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress nominations. No Best Picture nod for this one or “First Man.” Shame.

Those headline the “Oscar Snubs” — no love for “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” by the always problematic Best Documentary nominating committee, no nomination for screen legend Robert Redford for “The Old Man and the Gun,” no Bradley Cooper best director nomination, and so on.

“Green Book” has taken on the role of Oscar dark horse, “if not outright favorite or at least “safe choice,” thanks to Pre-Oscar wins with the Golden Globes and the Producers Guild and Critics Choice. A Best Picture, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen), Best Original Script nomination but again no BEST DIRECTOR for Peter Farrelly, so, a longer shot than it might have seemed last weekend.

Ah, but what about the MUSICALS most everybody saw?

“A Star is Born” earned eight Oscar nominations as well — Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Sam ELLIOTT), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Song but NOT a Best Director nomination. So it is set up to be a Big Oscar Night loser, based on that and the pre-Oscar losses.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” has a Best Picture nomination, and one for Rami Malek as Best Actor and for Best Editing.

“Mary Poppins Returns” picked up four nominations, including Best Song and Best Score.

Willem Dafoe pulled an upset nomination for best actor in the under-appreciated “At Eternity’s Gate,” Richard E. Grant lands a Best Supporting Actor nod for “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (no sure thing) and Spike Lee was nominated THREE times for director, co-scripting and co-producing Best Picture nominee “BlackKklansman.”  “Vice” writer-director Adam McKay pulled the same hat trick.

 Paul Schrader’s “comeback,” “First Reformed,” saw him pick up a screenplay (original) nomination, but nothing for Ethan Hawke’s stand-out work in the lead role.

If “Roma” doesn’t clean up Oscar night, there’s always a chance another Netflix film could perform. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” got best adapted screenplay, best original song and best costume nominations.

Makeup and Hair:

“Border”
“Mary Queen of Scots”
“Vice”

Costume Design:

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” Mary Zophres
“Black Panther,” Ruth E. Carter
“The Favourite,” Sandy Powell
“Mary Poppins Returns,” Sandy Powell
“Mary Queen of Scots,” Alexandra Byrne

Visual Effects:

“Avengers: Infinity War”
“Christopher Robin”
“First Man”
“Ready Player One”
“Solo: A Star Wars Story”

Seems like everyday’s Internet assault on the eyeballs is toploaded with speculation, “push polling” on behalf of “Black Panther” (ahem), how “Viola Davis could sneak in there for ‘Widows'” (maybe, a long shot), “Crazy Rich Asians” (Really?) or something else that has been insanely popular at the box office but actively dismissed during Awards Season.

The Lady Gaga/”Star is Born” crowd has quieted down a tad. They’re in shock over the Golden Globes, Critics Choice and PGA Awards.

But today, the book is written anew. Will “The Academy” (as it always calls itself, even on its Facebook page) go its own way this year?

Will “A Star is Born” gets its (Gaga fan) entitled “due?”

Will “Roma,” a picture with no stars, no nominatable performances and shown (but not watched) on streaming give Netflix an Oscar just as it raises its prices and starts to feel the heat from the competition that will break its stranglehold on Streaming? (Peak Netflix, all downhill from here?)?

Do forgotten films like “First Man” have a prayer of making a dent? Might deflated prestige pictures like “Vice,” “Mary Queen of Scots” or even “Widows” see some Oscar love?

This year’s “Green Book” and (earlier) “Bohemian Rhapsody” affection make one wonder. Sure, Christian Bale seems a lock, Mahershala Ali, maybe Glenn Close. Maybe Olivia Colman. Lady Gaga.

Will both of Colman’s co-stars earn “Favourite” supporting actress nominations? That’s how Regina King, in a subtle, doesn’t-show-much turn in “If Beale Street Could Talk” has become the supporting actress favorite. Maybe they’ll just nominate Oscar winner Rachel Weisz or Oscar winner Emma Stone, both of whom dazzled.

Will Amy Adams or Saoirse Ronan break through in one of those categories?

We just don’t know. This year has been all over the place.

You can live stream the Oscars wherever you are, via their Youtube page, or this year, their Facebook page. As I am in a cable free corner of NC at the moment, Youtube it is for me.

Anything to avoid ABC’s “Good Morning America” teases, tease outs and tedious “expert Oscar watchers.”

The Pre “Show” gets underway at 820.

The cast is far far FAR more impressive than the team of directors who bring this romantic travelogue to the screen.

Oscar winner Helen Mirren, Diego Luna, Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Hayden Panettiere, Jenna Dewan, Luke Wilson and Jim Sturgess are in it.

As is “Glee” veteran Dianna Agron. Who is also the first credited director.

But Til Schweigher and Peter Chelsom and “Berlin Nights” helmer Gabriela Tscherniak are also behind cameras for segments on the omnibus romance in the striking city formula that these movies hew to.

“Berlin, I Love You” tells ten stories in the city and doesn’t appear to have a US release date. Yet. They’d better hurry. “Shanghai, I Love You” (Romance in the Repressive People’s Republic? OK.) is in the pipeline to come out next.

Yeah, the Mickey Rourke sequence looks…icky.

Truthfully, this should be enough for a movie I view as cinematic comfort food, a “Driving Miss Daisy” for our racially (and sexually) roiled times. That’s all “Green Book” is.

I saw it a second time last week and zeroed in on its problematic moments — the “fried chicken scenes.” They grate, yes they do. But Mahershala Ali is even more impressive on second viewing, an utterly convincing piano virtuouso living a life of aloof isolation because that’s what it takes for him to get the dignity his talent, education and gentility deserve.

White America doesn’t give him that, Black America doesn’t. Not really.

The movie does something that none of the other talked-up nominees manage — it makes you feel something. “Feel good” is both an emotional response and a “We CAN find a way to get along” response. Knock it if you want, but feeling something is what movies are supposed to manage.

“Beale Street” and “Star is Born” are more ambitious, and “The Favourite.” So was “First Man,” but nobody is talking about that one. “Can You Ever Forgive Me,”  is a better picture, “Leave No Trace” will have to settle for an Indie Spirit Award or two.

None of them make you “feel” something the way “Green Book” does —  at the juke joint, in the jail cell, at Christmas dinner — two men changing their view of each other and the world, in tiny increments.

“Green Book” wins a Golden Globe? Now a PGA award? Probably enough for this picture. Considering the steady drumbeat of “We’re NOT giving this to ‘A Star is Born'” that is starting to drown out one significant competitor’s Gaga-loving backers, I’d hope Farelly & Co. would be happy with the accolades in hand.

“Roma” might still be the Best Picture favorite, but the Producers Guild, at least, knows the game is up when Hollywood/theatrical gives its top honor to a streaming service’s high-minded but kind of “meh” Oscar bait — a black and white fictionalized memoir.

The PGA also honors TV, and that is what sets apart the Oscars from the PGA, SAG, Globes, the BFCA, etc — “We’re about honoring FILMs,” features and shorts and docs, pictures that tell a story in one sitting.  If you’re going to keep the honor and the prestige of the Oscars and movies separate from “other media,” “Green Book” may be the safest Best Picture to vote for.

“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” won best animated feature, and seems more regrettably “inevitable” than ever. Pity.

But all other things matter little. Oscar nominations come Tuesday, and “Green Book” goes back into 1000 theaters Friday.