Movie Nation

The parties, the rush, the Rush Parties — so much alcohol, so many hazing rituals.

What would college life be without fraternities and their hellish homoerotic hazing?

“College guys, amIright?”

Jan. 11, college gets…HORRIFIC with “Pledge.”

Josh Lucas and Topher Grace are the big names in this Fox release.

But Chrissy Metz is the star, a mother whose son ignores the “Don’t do anything stupid” foreshadowing and falls through an ice-covered lake. It’s a true story with a faith-based kicker as its message.

“Breakthrough” opens April 17.“

We all have trouble managing that post-“Time to join AARP” card in the mail transition. The problem is magnified if you’re a  brand name action star. “Aging gracefully” is rarely in the (AARP) cards.

At 72, no amount of Human Growth Hormone is going to render Sylvester Stallone a convincing “I still got it” boxer, or police detective. Aged vigilante like Bruce Willis in “Death Wish?” Sure. Police chief or police captain, any number of authority figure roles? Give him the same shot at those that you’re giving Schwarzenegger.

He’s finally let go of Rocky Balboa, but there’s no reason he should quit work if he doesn’t want to. It’s just a question of how you bill him, where you cast him and how much he can still command in salary.

All of which come to a head in “Backtrace,” a Georgia tax breaks film project that has two big names — Stallone and Matthew Modine — and a hunky TV star (Ryan Guzman) in a supporting role, but top billed in the credits.

It’s basically a Matthew Modine movie, casting the white-haired 50something star of “Full Metal Jacket” and recently, “Stranger Things,” as the lone survivor of a big bank job, kidnapped from prison to recover his loot, chased by Stallone’s long-in-the-tooth Savannah police detective.

But how can you sell that to viewers under 60? So, Guzman’s film it is.

“Backtrace” opens with a heist gone wrong — murderous double crosses, a shootout in the coastal swamp forest outside of town. Mac (Modine) is a LOT older than the other hoodlums in his gang, but he’s the only survivor — with a catch. He took a shot to the head and has lost all his memory.

“If I have to go to prison, I’d like to know why.”

Too bad. To prison he goes, and seven years later, Det. Sykes (Stallone) and Savannah PD are no closer to “solving” the case (double-crossers made off with some of the money, murdering Mac’s gang to get it) or recovering the missing millions.

That’s when Lucas (Guzman) sidles up to Mac in the hospital cafeteria and offers to get him out. As Mac will never see freedom, thanks to his sentence, he grabs the deal even though he doesn’t remember anything that would be of use to his “rescuers.”

Not to worry. Lucas and Erin (Meadow Williams) and Farren (Tyler Jon Olson) got their hands on some new memory-jogging truth serum. A few treatments and Mac will remember all, right?

Christopher McDonald shows up as a Fed ready to take over the case (which the Feds would have managed the day the original bank robbery happened) with a “Captain…I’ll expect full cooperation from your department.”

It’s not the first trite screenwriting cliche here. That might be “Nobody GETS HURT. THAT was the deal!” which came right after the opening credits. And it’s not the last.

There are laughs aplenty in the dialogue, which has several characters spout nonsensical lines — “You told me the title was clear,” Lucas says to Erin when the cops snoop around the repossessed “safe house” where they have Mac stashed.

A car has a title, Mr. Guzman. A house requires a deed. Guzman has so many of these boners you wonder if the screenwriter hated him.

A police dispatcher speaks of Savannah’s Deep South Interstates in LA Traffic Reporter terms.

“He just turned onto ‘The 95!'”

Technically, the memory-jogging sequences — tortuous injections followed by first person POV flashbacks — hazy, the way memory is always treated in the movies — are professionally rendered.

But the crooks trying to get to that loot are only marginally more interesting than the cops pursuing them. And neither half of the story has any urgency to it.

Stallone scowls, delivers a little gravitas and spars with the interloping Feds. But he can’t hide the fact that he’s biding his time for the final shootout.

Modine has the most to play and does what he can with this conflicted guy whose bad man past is a memory he maybe doesn’t want back.

Guzman? Well, he looks good in a beard.

So what DO you do with a 72 year old action star who has lost a step or two, if not his growl? Not this.

MPAA Rating:  R for violence and some language

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Matthew Modine, Ryan Guzman, Meadow Williams, Christopher McDonald

Credits: Directed by Brian A. Miller, script by Mike Maples. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:28

Dame Judi, Sir Ian…

I do believe I am taking the vapors.

“All is True” looks like a 2019 release that no Bard fan, casual or hardcore, will want to miss.

Branagh has never looked more like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. I dare say that isn’t what he was going for, but who knows?

The Oscars-Golden Globes correlation isn’t what it used to be. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences spent decades trying to break the “Globes predict and thus make superfluous the Oscars” stranglehold, and they pretty much have succeeded.

But with all manner of early awards season honors going off on their own, critics groups picking this or that, not worrying about second-guessing the still-to-come Academy Awards nominations and in the case of virtually all of them, not honoring the films the Academy singles out, the Globes are as good a place to start as any.

So are “First Man,” “The Front Runner,” “Widows” and “First Reformed” and “Leave No Trace” out of contention? Some of them, sure. “Front Runner” almost certainly. The overheated hype for “Widows” has disappeared.

“Mary Queen of Scots?” Anyone? Anyone? I guess Margot Robbie-mania is over.

“Vice” has the most Globes nominations (6), with “Green Book” and “The Favourite” and “A Star is Born”right behind it (5).

Today’s Globes nominations  for strike a blow for several films that may not figure in the Oscar conversation, and if nothing else, have a diversity streak to them that is anything but “#Oscarsowhite.”

Best dramatic film, for instance —

“BlacKkKlansman”

“Black Panther”

“Bohemian Rhapsody”

If Beale Street Could Talk

Breaking the acting honors into two categories means we’ll probably cull Oscar’s Best Five from that drama group and these five, nominated for best actress in a musical or comedy. Blunt seems like a sure thing, Colman is in a supporting role and could be honored there by Oscar. Fisher is an Indie Spirit winner, Theron? Not on your life. Same with Wu. Puhleeze.

Emily Blunt, Mary Poppins Returns

Olivia Colman, “The Favourite”

Elsie Fisher, “Eighth Grade”

Charlize Theron, “Tully”

Constance Wu, “Crazy Rich Asians”

I’d love for this best dramatic actor list to be close to the Oscar mark. The Globes give Willem Dafoe a little overdue love.

Supporting actor? Impressive list. Rockwell is almost certainly the favorite. He looks hilarious as “W.” Loved Richard E. Grant, nice bone to toss his way for supporting Melissa McCarthy. Ali is imperious and regal. Driver? OK.

Mahershala Ali, “Green Book” ”

Timothee Chalamet, “Beautiful Boy”

Adam Driver, “BlacKkKlansman”

Richard E. Grant, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

Sam Rockwell, Vice

Best director is where Alfonso Cuaron gets to compete with “Roma.” But was he better than Spike? McKay? And swooning fans have been calling this Bradley Cooper’s awards season to lose since September. So we will see about that. I’d give it to Spike if it was up to me.

Bradley Cooper, “A Star Is Born”

Alfonso Cuaron, “Roma” 

Peter Farrelly, “Green Book”

Spike Lee, “BlacKkKlansman”

Adam McKay, Vice

“Roma” looks like the best foreign language film to beat this year, and the Globes’ list (which won’t look anything like Oscar’s) underscores that. I LOVED “Shoplifters” (pictured below) and hope it has a shot, and I’ve seen most of these. But Oscar goes his own way in foreign language film lauding.

Capernaum

Girl

Never Look Away

Roma

Shoplifters

Best screenplay? Let me say again, “Roma” isn’t in this league. “Favourite” and “Vice” seem like better bets.

Alfonso Cuaron, Roma

Deborah Davis & Tony McNamara, The Favourite

Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk

Adam McKay, Vice

Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly & Nick Vallelonga, Green Book

Best Animated film should go to “Isle of Dogs.”

“Incredibles 2”
“Isle of Dogs”
“Mirai”
“Ralph Breaks the Internet”
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”

“The Favourite” is a Monty Python sketch without the cross dressing. A daft and broad historic farce played out over two hours, it is sumptuous in its period detail, bawdy and rude and laugh-out-loud funny in its sexualized, slapstick riff on an actual historic feminine power struggle during the reign of Britain’s Queen Anne.

Yorgos Lanthimos, director of the more twisted and cryptic “The Lobster” has conjured up a “Moll Flanders” or “Tom Jones” for a feminist age — nasty and brutal, slapstick that draws blood.

Queen Anne (Olivia Colman, dazzling) is a ditzy, lonely soul battered by a life of illness and personal tragedy. Let’s leave out how she took part in the overthrow of her father, King James, by the Dutch couple, William and Mary, the cunning it took to see herself as possible queen down the road.

Our story begins years after that, after she has lost her husband, after seventeen miscarriages and dead toddlers. She’s in her dotage, obsessed with her seventeen pet rabbits and her only true friend, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Oscar winner Rachel Weisz).

They’re closer than close, with Sarah and her always-absent husband the Duke — he was Britain’s greatest general and always fighting on The Continent — the power behind the throne. The women had pet names for each other, with Sarah, a friend since childhood, addressing the queen as “Anne” or “Mrs. Marley.”

She’s the one who keeps the court in line. She’s the one straining to keep the sickly, dotty Anne from embarrassing herself at court, helping her outmaneuver the toxic Tory fop Lord Harley (Nicholas Hoult, perfect), protecting her from makeup fiascoes.

“You look like a badger!”

Enter Abigail (Oscar winner Emma Stone), Sarah’s once-wealthy cousin, brought low by financial disasters beyond her control. She seeks employment, which Sarah provides — scullery maid duties. She seeks status, angling to get close to the Queen via country poultice treatments for Anne’s ulcers, gout, etc. Sarah resists this.

“She is to receive SIX from the birch!”

Thus begins a struggle for access to Her Majesty, a battle of wits and poison and fowling pieces to curry favor, to become “The Favourite.”

Weisz as Sarah describes both women when she disparages Abigail as “a viper.” Stone’s Abigail suggests native cunning learned from hard knocks and the brutal beat-downs of life. Desperation even. Weisz? With every cutting look, every veiled and unveiled threat — many involving firearms — you believe this courtier, who cuts a dashing figure in men’s sports and men’s trousers, is more a killing cousin than kissing cousin to Abigail.

As Abigail is chased by a would-be seducer and plays the angles to fend off her cousin, Stone lets us see both the deadly stakes of their “game,” and how much fun she’s having. She’s Eric Idle in a dress.

“Have you come to seduce me or rape me?”

“I am a GENTLEMAN!”

“So. Rape.”

Weisz? She’s cold-blooded, lethally witty, a poker-faced John Cleese with pistols.

And not to belabor the Python analogy, Colman’s Anne is the queen Terry Jones, in his prime, was aiming for — dizzy, but not always so, vulnerable and quick to clear a room (even Parliament) or end an argument with “I have SPOKEN!”

Flippant “chapter” titles such as “I: This Mud Stinks” and “XX: I Dreamt I Stabbed You in the Eye” merely hammer home the silly point of it all, obvious as it is.

It’s not history, stunning palace locations and lush costumes aside. “The Favourite” is just fun, “something completely different,” though it does tend to drag as it takes us where we are sure it must go.

And it makes a great, droll tour de force for the likes of Weisz, Stone, Colman and even Hoult, finally given the wig and mascara he was born to wear, the bitchy venality he was born to play.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity and language.

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, Nicholas Hoult

Credits: Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos,  script by Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:59

“That house…up in Napa?”

Meagan Good and Michael Ealy are the loving couple that want to buy it. Dennis Quaid’s the previous owner.

We all know how THOSE dudes can be.

“The Intruder” is an April thriller, April 26 to be exact. Good month for thrillers.

This is one of a handful of year-end movies that I have been looking forward to the most, a period piece with fun actresses and the twisted dude who made “The Lobster” behind the camera.

“The Favourite” — mind that spelling, now — British, not American — is in limited release opening wider at Christmas.

Usually, the exorcism comes at the climax of your typical demonic possession thriller.

So kudos for to screenwriter Brian Sieve of TV’s “Scream” series for jamming his into the opening of “The Possession of Hannah Grace.”

But “Possession” is, as its title implies, not about the exorcism. It’s about the demon who will not die.

So Hannah’s monstrous assault on her exorcist priests and suffocation by her devoted dad isn’t the end. “Possession” is short, but not THAT short. No, it’s just the prologue for a tale set in one of those movie set/production designed-to-death movie morgues.

Because that’s where Hannah ends up “Three Months Later,” as the inter-title tells us.

It’s Megan’s first night on the literal “graveyard shift” at Boston Metropolitan Hospital. She’s to log, photograph and “intake” corpses after hours, because the city never sleeps and the dying never stops.

She seems seriously unqualified, but pal Lisa (Stana Katic), a nurse, put in a good word for her. Lisa, it turns out, is Megan’s sponsor. Because Megan, played by Shay Mitchell of TV’s “Pretty Little Liars,” is an ex-cop who had “issues,” but she has put those behind her, she assures us.

“Gotta be the right kind to stomach a job like this,” she’s warned. She is.

If she can just get through those first and second nights…

If the creeper/nerd security guard Dave (Max McNamara) will stop sneaking up on her.

If those motion-sensor lights in the cavernous halls and the odd cross-shaped florescent lights in the morgue itself don’t creep her out.

If that homeless guy who threatens her to try to gain entry to that morgue can be fended off.

If that mutilated corpse that’s dropped off, a corpse we recognize as the young woman smothered with a pillow embroidered with “By His hand are we healed” from the Book of  the prophet Isaiah, will just give her a little peace.

Because three months after her “death,” Hannah’s in the morgue and making trouble.

“Possession of Hannah Grace” is a movie of grisly deaths but not much in the line of frights.

There’s little suspense as we see that morgue vault door shut, and then pop back open, many many times.

We see Megan try to cop-reason her way through this supernatural predicament. Mitchell is more interested in playing Megan’s inner reserves of strength than any mortifying fear, and that makes her a tough heroine, if not necessarily the vulnerable one the script intended.

We see Hannah skitter like an insect across darkened floors and see Megan reach for the Xanax. No, it’s not hers. But if you were seeing what she’s seeing, or thinks she’s seeing, you’d be inclined to self-medicate, too. The effects are first-rate, eye-averting gross and creepy.

And we can guess the climax once we’re shown the layout of that mortuary. It’s just a question of who will still be around to solve this little possession problem.

But the production design is top drawer. It’s just that if I’m mentioning that, there’s little else in the movie to recommend it.

The best one can say for this “Possession” is, well, I’ve seen worse.

MPAA Rating: R for gruesome images and terror throughout

Cast: Shay Mitchell, Kirby Mitchell, Nick Thune, Louis Herthum, Stana Katic, Max McNamara

Credits: Diederik Van Rooijen,  script by Brian Sieve. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:26

The outrage that human trafficking, essentially a modern day slave trade, exists in the 21st century has inspired scores of films, from the “Taken” movies and “Eastern Promises” to the more modest “Priceless,” “Trafficked” and “Trade.”

And that’s not even counting documentaries such as last month’s “Invisible Hands” (child labor is often carried out by enslaved children).

“Nona” takes a stab at taking a new tack, showing the enticement, the entrapment of a young Honduran woman lured to her doom by a good-looking stranger with a derby hat, a motorbike and a way of playing hard to get that is difficult to resist.

Michael Polish of the filmmaking Polish Brothers (“Northfork,” “The Smell of Success”) wrote and directed a film that plays like an homage to road picture romances, until his wife, the film’s producer, Kate Bosworth shows up as a cop trying to get the lovesick victim of this kidnapping to tell her story.

It makes for an oddly unsettling filmgoing experience — a director overly fond of Honduran, Mexican and Central American scenery, endless shots of “local color,” a good looking young couple traveling, carefree, by bus, foot, boat and even a sailing yacht — all just to sentence the title character to a bordertown brothel on the U.S. side of the river.

As a business model that seems a tad…unsustainable.

Screen newcomer Sulem Calderon impresses as the lead, a young woman who narrates her life story (in Spanish, with English subtitles). She had dreams of being a beautician. Instead, she takes what work she can get. In her corner of Honduras, that means “I paint the dead.”

She does funeral makeup for Funerales Tadeo, and the pay is enough to keep her in a tiny hovel in the city’s slums.

“Death is a big business here.”

Her father was gunned down. Her brother was stabbed to death. Her mother? She fled to Norte America.

The handsome Hecho (Jesy McKinney) flirts with her as she passes by. But just a little. There’s a dash about him, with his stubble and long, curly locks, motorbike and derby. He locks eyes with her just enough to show he’s interested, and lets her do the rest.

He wants to know if this all she wanted out of life.

“I am comfortable with the rules of survival. I am not afraid of death.”

He’s a wandering sort. Doesn’t she want to leave? Well, she would like to see her mother.

No specifics about how he can make this happen. No visible means of support. Maybe he’ll sell his motorbike.

But our heroine has no sooner taken one last piece of advice from her aunt — “The things we don’t like now will be the things we miss the most.” — than she’s off, hitting the road with this guy she barely knows.

They ride in buses,and on top of buses, cross rivers in tiny boats and bigger bodies of water by sail. They share stories of their lives. He was married, he says, the son of a dry cleaner, he says.

She grew up thinking “it was normal to see a murdered body on the street.”

It’s all terribly romantic, picturesque and adventurous right up to the moment she asks Hecho, point blank, “Have you done this before?”

“No.”

“Nona” wouldn’t be much of a movie about human trafficking if we believed him, even though she does.

The fact that over two-thirds of the film is this rosy, romantic prologue suggests that Polish figured on ambushing the viewer the way Nona is ambushed by Hecho. That was never going to happen.

All he manages, with this seriously-delayed but always-expected revelation, is leave entirely too much ground to cover in a scant twenty or so final minutes. Nona is handed off, taken to her brutal new life with girls just like her, from all over, enslaved as prostitutes, their only “escape” the odd moment of singing along to a Spanish cover of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off.”

The madam who runs the place (Lilly Melgar) is a mercurial brute, the girls all terrified and resigned to their fates, too intimidated and English-deficient and certain that they’ll be deported to seek help from the gringo cops. Every detail of this death sentence is worth more screen time than Polish allows.

“Nona” never has much in the line of suspense, but that long tease of an opening act robs the film of the grim and gritty drama Polish skims over in the brothel passages. It doesn’t strip the story of its pathos. But the imbalance here is patience-testing and maddening, in addition to seeming teen girl fantasy romance unrealistic.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex-trade setting, profanity

Cast: Sulem Calderon, Jesy McKinney, Giancarlo Ruiz, and Kate Bosworth

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Polish. A North of Two release.

Running time: 1:30