Movie Nation

So you’ve got Samuel L. returning as the title character, and Bruce Willis from “Unbreakable,” James McAvoy from “Split,” and Sarah Paulson and Anya-Taylor Joy and a “facility” to tie this one through-line in M. Night Shyamalan’s interesting but wildly uneven career up in a neat three-fer bow.

The back engineering to these things is always impressive, thought “Split” was already grafted onto “Unbreakable.”

It’s all about creating “universes,” letting films mimic long-form cable TV shows, making connections that inspire deeper fan devotion and engagement. It’s smart business, though I find that the movies that are coming out of this Hollywood MBA fad a tape loop grind.

Universal wanted to do this with its classic horror title remakes, but that was never going to work.

With “Glass,” we are intrigued, even if we remember “Last Airbender” and “The Visit” and “The Happening” and “Lady in the Water” and…

Fangirls and fanboys and M. Night’s Knights should let “Glass” own a slow January (Jan. 18 is the release date.). That much seems certain.

Well, the folks at Lionsgate/Summit waited until tonight to “preview” their movie, which opens in less than 24 hours.

Many others have already reviewed the thing, so I will get to it later.

Instead, tonight presents one with a choice, and I choose to check out “Green Book” some weeks before its release.

I cannot recall the first place I ever heard of the famous green-covered guide to African American-friendly businesses — restaurants and hotels — compiled during the dark days when America was “great,” and discrimination/segregation was the rule and in many cases, the law of the land.

I think PBS did something on it (might have seen something on “The History Detectives”), but I had heard of it first hand from one late comer to the showbiz “chitlin’ circuit” of African American entertainment.

Bernie Mac brought it up, I think, in an interview we did shortly before he passed.

In any event, the subject is fascinating and damned timely, considering the direction of the country, “Back to the Confederacy!”

It’s a “Driving Miss Daisy” twist, a true story and  at around 2:10 in length, “Oscar level serious.” Even though Peter Farrelly directed it.

“Green Book” opens Nov. 21.

Something is coming for your  kids. “The creature!”

“PLEASE DON’T TAKE MY CHILDREN!”

Great Dane Susanne Bier directed this “Quiet Ones” with blindfolds instead of muzzled mouths muffled sounds.

John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Tom Hollander also star in this Dec. 21 Netflix release. 

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is framed perfectly — beginning and ending with Queen’s triumphant, show-stealing turn in the star-studded Live Aid benefit concert in 1985.

Director Bryan Singer trots us through the standard musical biopic “Moment When They Met” and “Moments of Creation” with brisk, efficient skill and wit.

The movie traverses the familiar, almost formulaic arc of such films with a fan’s brio — highlights, low-points, tests and triumph.

Everyone Singer cast, from star Rami Malek, who gives a break-out turn as the flamboyant, talented and lonely Freddie Mercury, to the lads hired as the rest of Queen is both a dead ringer for the person they’re playing and a fun performance.

Casting Mike Myers of “Wayne’s World” as a record company Doubting Thomas –“This will never sell…radio stations will never play this” — is an inside joke that works hilariously.

So let others quibble about the story’s hero, Mercury, not being portrayed as gay enough. It’s a movie about Queen, for Pete’s sake. There are a couple of baccanales, bar and truckstop pickups making overt what was ALWAYS known and accepted about Mercury in that Golden Age of Rock Androgyny (Bowie, Bolan, Elton, etc.).

And make whatever peace you can with the cloud that the director’s #MeToo reputation and lawsuit over an alleged rape casts over the film. Others appear to be reviewing “Bohemian” with that foremost in their minds.

I found “Bohemian Rhapsody” an unadulterated delight, a longish quick-brush-strokes depiction of the band, their times and the creation of the music that made them stadium rock staples, Classic Rock mainstays and idolized the world over.

That’s why picking that Live Aid peak to frame it is perfect. They could and should have been irrelevant in the mid-MTV mid-80s. But as Mercury played the Wembley Stadium crowd and the worldwide TV audience as just an extension of his concert grand piano, we all remembered that we knew the words he was demanding that we sing along to. And most of us, and generations that have followed, haven’t forgotten them.

We meet toothy Farrokh Bulsara (Malek), a Parsi Zoroastrian whose family was chased from Persia to Zanzibar (where he was born) to the United Kingdom, so that his fellow airport baggage handlers and others could ask, “‘Oi! Oo’s the Paki?,” rolling out their favorite slur.

The rock trio Smile finds itself in need of a new lead singer, and their most attentive, hopeful fan, Farrokh, offers his services (shyly arrogant) and auditions on the spot. Astrophysics major and guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer-studying-to-be-a-dentist Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) are gobsmacked. Not just that the guy knows their tunes and can instantly harmonize with them. It’s his range.

From the first, they’re in the thrall of the renamed “Freddie,” his singing voice, his ear for catchy melodies and clever lyrics, and his theatricality. His “exotic” look is played up by the shopgirl (Lynn Boynton) who is smitten by Freddie and becomes his lover and later wife.

The movie might have peaked too early, rushing through Queen’s name change, “Like her Royal Highness,” image building, feuds with record companies and the BBC, jumping almost straight into the conception and amusingly painstaking and analog construction of their most famous song.

We’ll give rock fans “A Night at the Opera,” Freddie tells the record company folks (Aiden Gillen, Tom  Hollander and Myers), dropping the needle on an aria from “Madame Butterfly.” And so they did.

What they went through to achieve this cryptic, genre mash-up epic — recording portions and recording them via speakers swung past the mike in the studio, etc. — could have taken up the entire film.

But other tunes — “We Will Rock You” and “Another One Bites the Dust” get similar “This is where that came from” treatment. Any fan will thrill to these moments.

Freddie’s double-life tests his devotion to Mary (Boynton) and Queen’s growing fame pressures the “family” the band members claim that they are. Freddie was a self-styled diva, taking his cues from Callas and Garland (always tardy, temperamental, credit hogging). It’s hard to be a band of brothers with that much ego in the room.

The money, fame, drugs, orgies, mansion and wealth cannot fill the loneliness Freddie carries around with him. One manipulative employee turned lover/manager (Allan Leech plays Paul Prenter) roils the waters and breaks the bonds.

And then…AIDS.

As I said, it’s a time-tested musical bio-pic story arc, with Singer taking a shot at structuring this in the style of “Bohemian Rhapsody” itself — overture, crescendo, and onward — “the scale of opera,” as Freddie says in the film, “the wit of Shakespeare,” rock as musical theater.

With two of the surviving band members signed on as producers, the picture never gets past the surface dynamics of that relationship — lightly mocking the foibles of this or that member, backing into fresh appreciations of their role in the group in creating their best songs.

As for their guardianship of Mercury, this is the way Freddie would want to be remembered.

Freddie’s family comes off as more of a hoary plot device than the font of his talent. But his every relationship has a sort of chill that stems from that, a marriage never shown to be particularly romantic, a gay life that connected with who he really was, but unfulfilling in a lot of “finding love when you’re already famous” pitfalls.

It is the performances that lift “Bohemian Rhapsody” above formula, with Malek’s on stage lip-syncing of Mercury’s singing showmanship eerily on the money and accurate. He wields a mike stand like a pro (we see the evolution of this) and Malek even copies Mercury’s stage-crossing skip-step, a memorable piece of his Live Aid turn.

Every concert moment (using live Queen recordings for sound) packs a thrill, every studio moment a fun realization of “Oh, THAT’s how they did that.”

Maybe it’s for fans only and whatever its relevance culturally, Queen is very much a product of the 70s’ and 80s. So Lady Gaga’s legions and Kendrick Lamar’s customers might not appreciate it on that level.

But “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Rami Malek cleverly and warmly distill an era and its music into a thoroughly entertaining piece of music history.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language

Cast: Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazello, Tom Hollander, Aiden Gillen, Allan Leech,  and Mike Myers

Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, script by Anthony McCarten. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:14

All actors, the old joke goes, want to play Jesus. It’s a Messiah complex that comes with the vocation.

Gay actors, the out ones anyway, want to play Oscar Wilde.

The greatest wit of his age, perhaps of any age, a brilliant playwright — “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “An Ideal Husband” — and homosexual martyr from an era when Britain jailed such men for “gross indecency,” Wilde was a worthy subject for the wonderful Stephen Frye 20 years ago (“Wilde”) and a grand challenge for Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and stars in “The Happy Prince.”

It’s a witty, sad film focusing on Wilde’s final years, after he “scandalized” London, sued the Marquess of Queensberr ( who outed him for his affair with Bosie Douglas, the louche son of the Marquess) and had that suit turn into a criminal trial and two years of hard labor for his sins.

Self-exiled to the continent — France mainly — this is Wilde at twilight, the man peddling “De Profundis,” his melancholy “Letter from Reading Gaol.”

A profligate wag out of cash, he is begging from old friends and longtime fans, one of whom (Anna Chancellor) spies him, tipsy and downcast on the streets of Paris.

“How kind of you to speak to me,” he says, humbled and hoarse, before asking for a fiver. “I am wedded to poverty,” he declares to an old friend, “and the marriage has not been a success.”

Everett’s Wilde has decided “There is no mystery as great as suffering,” that he himself is “a broken man…too cold to finish his play.” He drifts through his last days, renewing his practice of impromptu storytelling to children — once his own sons, now the street urchins of Paris. He tells them of The Happy Prince and the King of the Mountains of the Moon, “black as heaven,” and their rivalry and struggles.

Everett makes this Wilde a magnificent ruin, reveling in self-pity rather than wallowing in it. Spat upon in his home country, hounded by boorish British gay bashers on a holiday in Dieppe, Wilde takes one last lunge at love, begging forgiveness from his sickly, indulgent but humiliated wife (Emily Watson, soft and brittle), taking the attentions of his devoted former lover Robbie (Edwin Thomas) for granted, desperate for a reconciliation with the wastrel Bosie (Colin Morgan) who loved him, but also used and ruined him.

“I cannot live without the atmosphere of love. I must love and be loved!”

Everett gives these doomed years a wistful melancholy interrupted by moments where Wilde reminded everyone within earshot how he could still be the life of the party — affecting a girlish voice for flirtatious jokes, forever picking up the check, serenading rowdy French barflies with “The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery” and remembering  in flashbacks his many theatrical triumphs, addressing the audience with ready wit after every hit.

“Your appreciation has been MOST intelligent. I congratulate you on the success of YOUR performance…You think almost as highly of the play as I do myself!”

Everett brings genuine warmth as writer, director and star to Wilde’s moments with children — indulgent (to a fault) — and crushed resignation to his fate. He “dined on shame” in prison, where “in the cell, there is only God and man.” We see the humiliation of his head-shaving  and dunking upon admission to jail and his cowed misery at enduring how the hoi polloi turned on him.

But his wit, famously, never left him — paying off a rent boy with “Our purple hours are sullied by green notes,” commenting on decor, even on his death bed.

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

Colin Firth added his Oscar-winning name and prestige to “The Happy Prince,” helping Everett get it made (Watson and Tom Wilkinson, as a priest, give marquee value as well). Firth effortlessly plays Wilde’s loyal confidante, the novelist and gay wit Reggie Turner, here seen as one of Wilde’s go-to actors in his heyday.

Everett didn’t attempt a “complete” life of Oscar, focusing so narrowly on the end. But the once rakish star, novelist and chat show mainstay creates a performance with a post-vanity vanity about it, a man who remembers what youth and beauty and fame once gave him and yet cannot give himself wholly over to mourning what only he knows he’s lost.

He has given us a portrait of Wilde that revives his memory and his martyrdom, but that allows the endlessly quotable genius to be not the great man and icon, but just a man — a funny, charming one whose indulgences and foibles bring him to life.

And for that he deserves thanks in words Everett gives to Wilde as he responds to a small kindness.

“Thank you…for a moment’s harmony in a discordant fugue.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use

Cast: Rupert Everett, Colin  Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Tom Wilkinson

Credits: Written and directed by Rupert Everett. A Sony Classics/BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:45

A little Poe, a bit of Agatha Christie Rod Serling and a touch of Pirandello? Six characters in search of an…escape.”

Trapped, threatened with near certain death, reason it out, find the “clues” and get out of “Escape Room.”

This one opens in the Oscar-contender wasteland of early January (Jan. 4).

The model/”Blurred Lines” stripped object of desire is making her way through the B-movie ranks, and Aaron Paul is re-starting his leading man career about a few Big Studio fizzles, and taking a paid Italian vacation while he does it in “Welcome Home,” a Vertical Releasing thriller about a broken couple hoping to mend fences in Italy.

Their landlord has different ideas.

Limited release, Nov 16.

Don’t know about you, but I can barely contain myself. I wasn’t going to be able to wait until Nov. 2, anyway. Thank heavens Fox figures it’s got a contender on its hands.

You’re not going to confuse “Solis” with “Solaris” or “Sunshine,” but its effects are at least as good as in most of the space epics that involve somebody in some spaceship or other getting too close to the sun.

And the story — sole survivor of an asteroid mining accident struggles to stay alive until a rescue ship shows up — has promise.

But that absolute bottom-line must-have element to make your thriller work is somewhat lacking in writer-director Carl Strathie’s sci-fi tale — urgency. Everything else depends on that, and even though we hear the sounds of ticking (how analog) periodically on the soundtrack, this “time is running out” saga never picks up speed beyond “dawdling.”

Steven Ogg, best known as a voice-over and motion capture actor for video games like “Grand Theft Auto V,” is the star of this “one-hander.” His Troy Holloway is the only guy in the shot, first scene to last, in “Solis.”

No, we’re not counting the corpse of a colleague  strapped in next to him.

He’s in a tiny pod in the vastness of space, has a black eye and wakes up with a headache and the realization that surviving the accident that put him in this escape pod might not have been the best thing to happen today.

“This is Troy Holloway, in the blind. Does anyone copy? Harris is dead…Milton…”

Drifting in a capsule with flickering lights, steam, occasional showers of sparks, alarms going off here and there, with limited power and no control, he’s a goner.

Wait! Help is on the way and on the radio. She’s got a British accent (Alice Lowe). She’s filling in for “the commander,” and she’s not good at calming an irate and profanely panic-stricken Holloway down.

What are your coordinates?

“I don’t HAVE any coordinates!”

Tell me what you see.

“SPACE!”

Commander Roberts declares, “My orders are to keep you alive! Are you concussed? Yes or no? Do you feel nauseous?”

“No more than usual.”

Forget about the agony of burning up in the sun, which Holloway is drifting towards.

“The pain and comfort will get worse. You will be dead from hypothermia in no time. We’re coming from you. 75 minutes!”

And she means it. The clock is ticking down, even if the movie feels as if everything’s on pause until the BIG FINISH.

First-time feature director Strathie ensures that the ship has lived-in, functional looking interiors and a plausible outer shell. The digital sun here is most impressive, but his movie’s best effects might be the simplest — canting or tilting the camera in what filmmakers call “Dutch Angles,” disorienting the viewer with Holloway upside down.

Ogg has to play this guy as a man resigned to his fate, which really lessens that “urgency” thing. He’s got to be talked into taking every step to possibly save his neck.

There’s self-surgery and of course an EVA (spacewalk) and a lot of arguing with Commander Roberts on the radio.

The dramatic possibilities are severely limited. No “Gravity” flashbacks, just a somewhat murky series of motivations for living provided in confessional moments and bursts of repetitive action are all that drive “Solis.”

Like the pod Holloway is trapped in, the movie’s mostly just adrift — limited power, with time running out. Not fast enough, it turns out.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody injuries, profanity

Cast: Steven Ogg, Alice Lowe

Credits: Written and directed by Carl Strathie. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:30

It’s the screen actors who pursue the quixotic that I find the most interesting.

And nobody is more all-over-the-road than Stephen Dorff, the rugged, brooding star of half a dozen movies nobody sees in a given year, with just enough high profile work (“Somewhere,” “The Iceman,” “Leatherface”) to keep him in the public eye as “the younger Kiefer Sutherland.”

“Don’t Go” is an Irish ghost story, more moody than spooky, starring Dorff as a blocked American writer grieving for the daughter he lost months before.

When he’s not staring at the blank screen on his laptop, he’s drunkenly dozing on the beach below the Irish boutique hotel he and wife Hazel (Melissa George) are renovating. There’s this recurring dream he has there, a day when they built a sandcastle with wee Molly (Grace Farrell). He’s sure it means something.

Hearing the words “Seize the day” when he awakens cinches it.

Ben Slater had one well-received book,  “The Reality Delusion,” but they moved to Western Ireland, Hazel’s birthplace, to move into her family hotel and bring it back to life. He’ll teach, she’ll supervise the renovation.

It’s a big, old seaside hostel named “Carrig’s View House,” with halls that echo and views that give you Ireland’s coast in all its grey, overcast glory. And even though everybody says “Moving back home, then?” and “Surely you’ll not be staying here, after what happened in THAT house” at Molly’s funeral, that’s just what they do.

The locals are friendly enough, barmen, colleagues at the Catholic school (Simon Delaney plays the garrulous Father Sean), even contractors.

“A writer? Have I ever heard of ya?”

“Nope. That’s why I teach, now.”

But their dog knows something is up. And Ben, donning his writer’s uniform (turtleneck, tweed blazer) for his classes at Sacred Heart, starts to pick up on it himself.

That recurrent dream presages other clues –in the oddly ordered arrangement of magazine titles, the words scratched in the sand after a seaside nap. It wasn’t “Seize the Day” he heard, it was “Seas the Day.”

Ben instantly assumes these clues are from Molly, because she wasn’t much of a speller, and that there’s a reality where she still lives if only he can reason out the mystery.

Which deepens. Hazel has history here, old beaus. Her college pal, the messed up Serena (Aoibhinn McGinnity) shows up, drunk. 

And don’t expect Father Sean to be much psychological help. He’s not allowed to do exorcisms either, he jokes.

“I’m a contrary bollocks. So was He. That’s why they put Him on a cross.”

Limerick native co-writer/director David Gleeson (“Cowboys & Angels”) ensures we get lots of local color in the people, the scenery and the school and Irish pub life in this story.

And Dorff wears Ben’s grief and guilt like a tailor-made suit. He broods wonderfully, but he lets us see Ben break down as he starts to sense he can change the past and obsesses about how to manage it.

No, he never shaves — not for comedies, villainous turns or grieving fathers. It’s almost always the right look for the part. He landed next year’s “True Detective,” so his profile is about to blow up again.

The performances and setting combine to pull off “Don’t Go,” a film that eschews frights in favor of remorse, that never hurries even as Ben is realizing that the pun or “child’s spelling” of “seas the day” doesn’t change what he’s being asked to do.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse, pot, profanity

Cast: Stephen Dorff, Melissa George, Aoibhinn McGinnity, Grace Farrell

Credits:Directed by David Gleeson, script by Ronan Blaney, David Gleeson. An IFC Films release.

Running time: 1:32