Movie Nation

Oh, to be a snickering 13 year-old boy again, sneaking into the multiplex with other snickering 13 year-old boys to catch “The Happytime Murders” when our parents aren’t paying attention to what we see.

We could hunch down in the seats and watch puppets — Muppets in all but name — have sex, do drugs, get kinky and curse like Samuel L. And we’d laugh and laugh, at the Silly String ejaculate, the “Basic Instinct” puppet leg crossing, at violence — puppets heads exploding in a cloud of fluff, puppets yanked to pieces by dogs.

“Nobody turns my brother into a CHEW toy!”

Because truth be told, sophomoric raunch isn’t funny when you’re older than a sophomore.

Brian Henson, the late Jim Henson’s fiftysomething son, directed this and should have known better, should have been a little classier, should have realized that he didn’t hire a single funny voice to do any of the puppets and that the script didn’t have many laughs, and none that weren’t based on hoped-for shock value.

Not that what we see is all that shocking. Did you see “Scary Movie?” Remember “Fritz the Cat?” Nothing new here, nothing for people (some critics) to “take the vapors” over, anyway.

Melissa McCarthy co-stars as an LAPD detective whose former partner, Phil, a blue puppet voiced and acted by “Muppets” veteran Bill Barretta, has stumbled into a series of puppet killings, former cast members on a beloved old TV show “Happytime.”

Yes, McCarthy co-stars, as this is mostly about the fluff. It’s a world where humans and puppets co-exist, with puppets the objects of endless contempt and rank discrimination.

“All the little dummies wanna do is sing and dance,” the “meatbags” (humans) say. They’re mostly over-sexed, some try to “pass” by having nose-jobs and “bleaching.” Yes, racial stereotyping is the Big Analogy the script clumsily tries to get across. Seriously.

“I have puppet servants at home, and when they get uppity...”

Phil Phillips used to be a cop, kicked off the force for failing to shoot somebody holding Det. Edwards at gunpoint. “He missed on purpose…Puppets won’t shoot other puppets!”

As puppets, who are supposed to be “all fluffy and good on the inside” prove otherwise — addicted to Pixy Stix sugar-fixes, deep into puppet porn, freaky in their sexual practices — die off, Edwards has to re-team with Phil to save the surviving cast members, including their human co-star (Elizabeth Banks, who is game for anything).

Phil has another case he’s working, hired by the pathologically promiscuous puppet Sandra (Dorien Davies). His adoring secretary (Maya Rudolph, playing the funniest character in the picture) cannot quite turn a deaf ear when Phil submits to Sandra’s full-court press.

“I like a little cushion for my cushion!”

I laughed a couple of times, not really at the most outrageous scenes, but at the vintage “Muppets” style sight gags. One puppet has drowned and everybody at the murder scene is advised to look away as “This won’t be pretty.” They wring him out.

It’s not that the concept is too crude, sacrilegious or a blasphemy to Muppet-style puppets. Admit it, when you saw the first “Happytime” trailer or commercial, you laughed.

The actual funny people on the set do their best, especially Banks and Rudolph, wringing laughs out of playing it straight or slinging a funny voice. McCarthy, outrageous as she usually is, isn’t on her game here.

It’s the execution that lets this dog down. Not enough funny lines and even the cheap, dirty laughs are in short supply. They might have broken themselves up on the set, puppeteers finally getting down and dirty and snickering like 13-year-olds themselves. But they’re not funny as these characters, not loose or broad enough in playing these film noir detective thriller archetypes.

There isn’t a Frank Oz or talented, first generation Henson, in the lot.

MPAA Rating: R for strong crude and sexual content and language throughout, and some drug material

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Elizabeth Banks, Maya Rudolph, Leslie David Baker, Joel McHale and the voices of Bill Barretta, Dorien Davies

Credits:Directed by Brian Henson, script by Todd Berger. An STX  release.

Running time:

You don’t expect a movie about The Holocaust to be flippant, glib almost.

But Chris Weitz’s “Operation Finale,” based on a Matthew Orton script about the Israeli abduction of Nazi “Architect of the Final Solution” Adolph Eichmann from Argentina back in 1960, leans more towards “Argo” than “Munich” on the true-stories-about-secret missions scale.

It manages a few jokes, Mossad agents cracking themselves up about the “International Jewish Conspiracy” they’re participating in, and a general jauntiness that comes from casting the newly-swashbuckling Oscar Isaac as the lead, Sir Ben Kingsley as the droll face of evil and funnyman Nick Kroll in a supporting role.

It opens as serious as a heart attack, though, a failed attempt to bring Eichmann to justice that led Peter Malkin (Isaac) and his team to nab and then murder the wrong man in Austria in 1954. That’s a sober reminder of how difficult this sort of manhunt was before DNA testing, computers and the Internet. It underscores how the then-new state of Israel let a desire for revenge and clumsiness cause it to surrender the moral high ground when the whole world was ceding it to them.

A few years later, a new tip comes in from a blind Argentinian Jew (Peter Strauss) whose daughter (Haley Lu Richardson) brought home a boy named Eichmann (Joe Alwyn) for dinner one night in Buenos Aires.

Could it be? It could. He may be a “family man” working at the local Mercedes factory, but this Ricardo Clement seems a lot more German than Argentine. If only the Israelis  knew the many exclusive German clubs and conservative, Anti-Semitic political gatherings where Eichmann told his story, little lectures about how he was “fighting for my country,” “following orders in a war,” “merely a cog in a machine, digging its way to Hell.”

Tripping the doting Dad up is left up to the girl Sylvia (Richardson), raised Catholic to protect her by a father who remembers the world’s worst just a few years before.

At least he remembers. A dozen years after the Nuremberg trials, the world has wanted to forget. That’s why Mossad leader Isser Hare (Lior Raz), reluctant to waste time on a possible wild goose chase, relents. That’s why Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale, spot on) endorses the effort to catch a Nazi and bring him to justice. “We will try our executioners,” he declares. They will remind the world and tell the story of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Malkin is brought late to into the game by Rafi Eitan (Kroll), and with good reason. He screwed up, and in a few brushstrokes, the script lets us see how. Peter is a smart ass. He doesn’t read his homework. He goes with his gut. Who knows how “guilty” the Austrian his earlier team murdered in front of his little boy actually was?

Peter has history with the doctor (Mélanie Laurent) the team needs to sedate their prisoner, and since her last mission ended up with a dead patient-prisoner, she’s not happy to get back into this, either.

But she joins, and all told eight people are flown, with fake identities, wildly different flight itineraries and U.S. dollars to Argentina to stalk, catch and spirit the ever-suspicious fugitive out of a country loaded with Germans, unrepentant fascists and raving anti-Semites in politics, the priesthood and every walk of life. 

You don’t need to recall the story of the Eichmann kidnapping or have seen other films on this to know how much of it will play out. Things go wrong, there’s a lot of time for captors and prisoner to interact, plenty of scenes for the formidable Kingsley to add charismatic snap and crackle to what Hannah Arendt famously labeled “the banality of evil.”

Isaac turns his back on the “Star Wars” paychecks for a role he can sink his teeth into, a chance to go toe-to-toe not with a special effects green screen, but with one of the greatest screen actors ever. Isaac ably suggests a man haunted by nightmares of how his sister and her children might have died in German hands, of his own failures and the competing agendas on his “team.”

Capture Eichmann? Hothead Moshe (Greg Hill) says “We should be putting him down, like a mad dog,” while patient interrogator Zvi (Michael Aranov) is, like the others, waiting for Peter to screw up again.

The “glib” I mentioned surfaces every time the Mossad guys almost admiringly compare notes with how the Russians and Nazis torture, when Kroll’s Eitan answers an obvious question with, “Is the Pope Catholic?”

That joking around won’t be to every taste, but I think this piece of Holocaust history merits the ticking clock thriller/light touches mixed with horror treatment Weitz aims for. The odd laugh doesn’t lessen the gravitas, Kingsley’s compelling performance doesn’t exonerate the guilty and the history the world was already forgetting merited a “show  trial,” a teachable moment, its first worldwide wake-up call — “Never Forget.”

Worth remembering when Nazis are being normalized into “very good people” by those who never learned or hope the rest of us have forgotten.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content and related violent images, and for some language

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Melanie Laurent, Lior Raz, Michael Aronov, Nick Kroll, Greta Scacchi

Credits:Directed by Chris Weitz, script by Matthew Orton. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:55

When a movie has long-established its rhythm and basically admitted it has none and then bursts to life — even briefly — it’s worth noting that at the top a review.

“The After Party” manages a random laugh, here and there, telling the story of aspiring high school rapper Owen (Kyle Harvey) and his pushy true-believer manager-wannabe Jeffrey (Harrison Holzer) who knows he can “make it” and not have leave to join the Marines in the AM.

But it only lights up when the lads realize their last shot on this last night is rounding up hot women who can get them into “The After Party.” Because after herding a mob of Bat Mitzvah “b—-es” (13 year-olds) and being denied, they get desperate — strippers.

And it’s only after mouthy, sassy superstar Bl’asia (Teyana Taylor, who steals the movie) and her pals have piled into Jeffrey’s dad’s vintage Rolls Royce Phantom that they realize her jealous boyfriend is PSYCHO-KILLER jealous.

“After Party” sputters up to that point, and flails pretty much all the way to the ending that follows. But as predictable as even that chased-by-the-jealous-psycho moment is, it’s the movie that might have been, an odd promising idea or flash of wit lost in a regurgitation of recycled ideas, plot retreads and character cliches.

The kid’s had his shots in showcases and talent shows. Owen blew his biggest chance by taking a pull off a Wiz Khalifa joint before spitting his rhymes to a crowd. He ends up spitting up all over the audience and Wiz, then going into a seizure.

“Seizure Boy” goes viral, shutting down any chance of getting signed and proving, once and for all, that nobody smokes stronger kush than Wiz.

“He’s washed,” “deader than dub step” one and all agree on the Youtube. Even aged hip hop fan Michael Rappaport says so. Owen faces reality, and decides to follow in the footsteps of his father (Blair Underwood). He’ll join the Marines at the end of the week.

Which gives crazed, pushy Jeffrey just a couple of days to beg, nag, badger and plead his boy’s case to every record label, every intern, every assistant and every rapper he can get in front of.  All of which points them to one all-or-nothing “After Party” for a French Montana show.

The big gimmick in “Puerto Ricans in Paris” writer-director Ian Edelman’s bag is all the real-life hip hop stars he landed for cameos, from Charlamagne tha God to DJ Khaled, DMX and Jadakiss.

Doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t often help either.

There’s a bracing hip hop political incorrectness to the script, with “Jew boy” this and “Jew up in midtown managing me” cracks amidst the blizzard of folks being labeled or just addressed as “niggas” or “bitches.”

At this point in the national conservation over slurs, all that’s left is pairing those last two words up. But nobody, least of all these folks, would dare go there and thus make the audience and the characters on screen catch on — “Oh, yeah, when you put it THAT way, that’s offensive.”

Owen lusts after Scarsdale rich-boy Jeffrey’s older sister (Shelley Hennig) and she becomes his all-night pursuit on this most important “Ferris Bueller” adventure evening. Rich-and-beautiful-and-she-knows-it Alicia even gets dragged on stage to be rapped to.

“I just got objectified by a rapper and I love it!”

Jeffrey? He’s so white and Jewish that he’s “Chad” to every person of color he meets.

Harvey, who goes by the stage name Kyle as a rapper, isn’t a polished screen actor which makes him a more believable novice-rapper, but doesn’t do much for his screen appeal He’s truly only funny when others are making fun of him — “You look like Klay Thompson (NBA’s Warriors) with Down’s Syndrome!”

Holzer, of “My Friend Dahmer” and “Sex Tape,” positions himself as a younger Adam Devine, hitting the occasional funny line entirely too hard.

But the “Seizure Boy” jokes kind of work, beginning to end. And those strippers and that would-be manager, chased and beaten and watching this lovely Roller they’re rolling in get trashed?

That’s the high point, one of too few to make “The After Party” worth the hangover it leaves you with.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug use, nudity, profanity

Cast: Harrison Holzer, Kyle Harvey, Jordan Rock, Shelley Hennig, Blair Underwood, Wiz Khalifa, Teyana Taylor

Credits: Written and directed by Ian Edelman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

A real-life British war correspondent’s biography provided the basis for “A Private War.”

As Marie Colvin, the “Gone Girl” star wears an eye patch and “rides to the sound of the guns,” even after the incident that causes her to need that eye patch.

“A Private War” co-stars Jamie Dornan, Stanley Tucci and Tom Hollander, and makes its way to the USA on Nov. 16.

There have been other films about the 1960 Israeli kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann.

But none have featured Sir Ben Kingsley as the WWII “Final Solution” mastermind, pursued, grabbed and smuggled out of Argentina by Oscar Isaac.

Labor Day Weekend is traditionally the end of the summer movie going season and always very light on films that have any prayer of finding an audience.

But perhaps this period piece, “Operation Finale,” directed by Chris Weitz, is a helpful reminder about the last time the world took Nazis lightly.

The Great Man of Letters is waiting for the call. The wife is waiting with him.

When he gets it, she is on the line to share his glory. When he speaks — to friends, the press — he showers her with accolades and declarations of affection.

He leans on her, she “protects” him, tidies him up, grins through the funny anecdotes she’s heard a thousand times, points to his lip to warn him of the crumb that’s clung to the beard.

Because he’s always eating.

But as the accolades for the novelist, the Nobel laureate, pour in and she makes her dutiful appearances alongside as “The Wife” of Joe Castleman, the patronizing grinds at her, the facade she shows wears on her.

And as “The Wife” is played by Glenn Close, one of the greatest actresses to never win an Oscar, we watch her closely, carefully, waiting for some hint that she’s about to boil a rabbit.

“The Wife” is a lively, chatty and somewhat obvious drama about a woman who stands in the shadows, doing “the decent First Lady” thing, barely letting us see the resentment, the deflating sense of the life not wholly or righteously lived, her potential not realized.

It’s a movie decorated with glittering performances, and not just by its leading lady and leading man.

It’s 1992, and Joe (Jonathan Pryce, alternately dotty and smug) has been waiting for this call from Sweden, expecting it, figuring he’s earned it. And when it comes, he tries not to seem insufferable about it,  declaring “It’s about getting up the gumption to write the next book.” But as he’s complaining about the cheap champagne his lawyer “always sends” and wondering, to his agent, if he will warrant “Avedon shots” for the cover story that’ll be done for “The New York Times Sunday Magazine,” you see that he is — insufferable.

But Joan (Close) dotes on him, tries to muzzle his criticism of his “finding his voice” son (Max Irons), a writer just starting out. “I’m not a pronoun, Dad. I’m standing right here.”

She’s a grandmother in waiting, but she’s used to that — waiting.

And when a pushy would-be biographer (Christian Slater, never better) hints that she’s “never gotten enough credit,” and that he’s got a theory that goes even further than that, Joan drifts into flashbacks that show how she and Joe met back in 1958, the changing dynamics of the relationship as he leaves his first wife and child and takes up with a student “with promise…talent.”

Swedish director Björn Runge (“Happy End”), working from a script by Jane Anderson based on the  Meg Wolitzer novel, cannot make more of a mystery out of this than it is. But he finds the telling anecdotes in the flashbacks, the guilt young Joan (played by Close’s daughter Annie Starke) feels at falling for her professor and the “moves” her husband still makes on star-struck young women.

He’s always been nuts for for walnuts (the title of his first novel), and he always trots out his never-fails pickup line, quoting Joyce — “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.”

It worked on her.

To this day, he gushes and bursts into tears about how marrying Joan “was my greatest accomplishment.” But when he lets out, “My wife doesn’t write, thank God. Otherwise I’d suffer from permanent writer’s block,” that rabbit-boiling look bubbles up.

Elizabeth McGovern sparkles as an established, famous writer who advises Joan “Don’t do it,” in those flashbacks. It’s a man’s world — critics, publishers, book-buyers — she insists. It’ll never be your own.

Slater is smarmy, smart and flirtatious as a former student who now stalks them to Sweden, insistent on getting their cooperation on a book he already has a deal to write, but which Joe is hellbent on preventing.

But “The Wife” is at its most darkly, ironically funny when Runge reveals to the world the quaint Swedish rituals of the Nobel — from the solicitous, read-a-flattering-press-release early AM call, to the photographer assigned to shadow The Laureate all throughout his stay (Karin Franz Körloff), to the rehearsals — how to bow to royalty — the competitive cocktail parties with fellow laureates, topped by a costumed choir, led by a young woman dressed as “Santa Lucia,” who burst into their room, candlelit, singing “Santa Lucia” and serving them breakfast.

Did they put Bob Dylan through this? I’d pay to see a movie about that.

And through it all, Close, at her most stoic, lets us see her flee to her “happy place” in her eyes, seeking serenity when all she wants to do is seethe.

It’s a great performance, merely her latest. But heaven forbid they nominate the poor woman again and then hand the Oscar to somebody younger or Streep-ier. We all know the look, the one that says “I will not be IGNORED,” that there’s something on the stove and it isn’t Swedish meatballs.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christina Slater, Alex Wilton Regan, Max Irons, Elizabeth McGovern, Karin Franz Körloff

Credits:Directed by  Björn Runge, script by  Jane Anderson based on the  Meg Wolitzer novel. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

Doc Simon’s gone.

Of course stage comedy’s most prolific modern playwright made it into his 90s (91). George Burns (“The Sunshine Boys”) would have demanded no less.
There was a stretch when you couldn’t review theater (60s-early 90s) in any town in America and not run across the sitcom-rimshot stylings of Neil “Doc” Simon. I got to the point, very quickly, where I dreaded each late spring’s announcement of this or that local company’s upcoming season — endless repeats of Neil’s greatest hits — “Barefoot” through “Biloxi,” “Star Spangled Girl” to “They’re Playing Our Song.”

Theater companies knew what the public liked, even if the public wasn’t seeing “California Suit/The Odd Couple/Last of the Red Hot Lovers” (once, I reviewed a touring production of that one with Don Knotts and Barbara Eden) for the tenth, fifteenth time.
But I watched him workshop “Jake’s Women” (starring Alan Alda and Tracy Pollan, among others) into shape and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” as he tried them out “out of town” in North Carolina, and got a kick out of his craftsmanship, his quick way with a “fix” — another funnier line to replace a less funny one.

A master of the one-liner, not terrible at plotting, and a man who never gave up on what he thought was a good idea — reworking failed shows into plays that made it to Broadway. Tony, Emmy, Golden Globe and Mark Twain and Pulitzer Prize recognition came his way. He was a man of his moment and of a lot of Broadway moments.

Not generally to my taste, but maybe he just wore me (and a lot of critics) out. Still, a funny guy to fly-on-the-wall and watch work. And “God’s Favorite,” about a modern day Job, is still a hoot, my favorite of all his plays. 

A little bit of research — sampling a summer’s worth of mostly made-for-Netflix teen comedies — reveals that “raunchy” has new goal posts, “frank sexuality” is something the ratings board is no longer holding the line on in movies for 16-and-under.

And that we’re not singing “Sixteen Candles” any more.

“F#%@ the Prom,” “The Kissing Booth,” “Adventures in Public School,” “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” “The Outcasts,” “#Realityhigh,””Alex Strangelove” and “SPF 18” — not all made for Netflix, but top trending titles that are “what the kids are watching these days” point to a sea change in a genre Hollywood only pays attention to in fits and spurts.

What rounds up an audience, streaming, is a movie with Joey King planning on giving her first BJ — maybe to a Catholic priest in training.

Blue Fox filmed “Summer of ’03,” a woman wrote and directed it (another trend in teen rom-coms) and even if this doesn’t do business in theaters. it’s going to dominate Netflix before Christmas.

One thing the many versions of the big screen apocalypse leave out? How the arrival of that other survivor, the “I’m not alone after all” moment kind of spoils blessed solitude.

Elle Fanning and Peter Dinklage figure that out in “I Think We’re Alone Now,” bleak world-emptying sci-fi coming out Sept. 21.

It’s a bit maddening, but I guess that’s how a movie about abortion should be — shout at the screen infuriating.

“Invisible” is a patient, quiet drama about a pregnant teenager in a country where abortion is illegal, but the Internet is not — Argentina.

So when Ely (Mora Arenillas) has one backseat sexual fling too many with a veterinarian she works for, part time, she’s got a pal to stand by her in their high school restroom, reading her smart phone.

It’s all there, what medication you need “in countries where abortion is illegal,” what strategy to use to procure them, lies to tell, getting “a man to pick up the medication.” black market suggestions and warnings.

Because that’s what the world is like for a woman in patriarchy where the Catholic Church controls basic human rights usually protected by government.

Ely is 17, close-mouthed and a bit of a longer, just another bored high school kid with unruly hair and a nose ring. And now there’s a fetus to be considered.

Hers isn’t the happiest life. Her mother (Mara Bestelli) is housebound, overwhelmed by depression. The father of the fetus (Diego Cremonesi) isn’t exactly somebody she can talk to, either. His dad, the veterinarian who owns the practice, seems kind. But no.

When she first visits a government clinic, the unseen counselor/nurse gives her the bum’s rush, pushing the frightened girl into scheduling an ultrasound, OB-GYN visits…

“I’m not going to have it,” is an assertion this nurse is prepared for

“Think it over. Talk with your parents. The father… Abortion is illegal in Argentina.”

So?

“Your only choice is to put the child up for adoption,” she adds (in Spanish with English subtitles) before suggesting a psychologist.

Ely isn’t telling anyone about this — not her bother, who has become a burden, or Raul the veterinarian who got her pregnant. Like girls the world over, she turns to a peer.

I apologize for not naming the sympathetic actress who plays that sounding board/classmate, but director Pablo Giorgelli, who co-wrote the script, never has anyone address her by name and doesn’t even seem to have her in the credits. Every other actress listed seems entirely too old.

If you know who the redhead is to Ely’s left, or you’re the forgetful Pablo Giorgelli and know she is, feel free to comment below. I’ve been doing this for decades and never come across a lapse in a film’s credits this boneheaded, one I couldn’t get an answer to.

We follow Ely, poker-faced but forlorn, lost in her thoughts, struggling to make a decision she’s ill-equipped to handle.

Sad and maybe a little in shock, she tunes out her classes, but we never see her weep. Ely hides her dismay, if not her despair.

An adoption agency offers to pay her for the chance to place her offspring with a paying family. She tries to power through it, a little denial (clubbing, a bar pick up), a little unload on mom time.

And then the shouting at the screen starts.

Arenillas so underplays Ely that she’s hard to get a handle on, even if our instinct is to sympathize with her plight. She is “Invisible” and a movie about someone invisible is sure to test one’s patience.

Giorgelli shoots for something less conclusive, more vague. The larger object is here showing the Byzantine steps a single woman in a country where women’s rights are circumscribed in the most basic sense.

Because Ely has nobody giving her life advice that works, no one she can rely on to transcend sexism, religious propaganda and tell her what she needs to know before deciding yea or nay on this pregnancy.

Aside from that one friend, whom Giorgelli neglects to name on screen or in the credits.

MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity, adult content

Cast: Mora Arenillas, Diego Cremonesi, Mara Bestelli

Credits:Directed by Pablo Giorgelli, script by María Laura Gargarella, Pablo Giorgelli. A FilmFactory release.

Running time: 1:27