Movie Nation

What kind of lowlife would bet on Little League baseball games?

Not the Little League World Series. Surely Vegas has action on that. I’m talking local sandlot ball, small town, setting “the line” and all that?

If you’ve seen any movies about the kids’ version of America’s Pastime, your first thought would be “Buttermaker,” the drunken kid-hating ex-ballplayer and very bad influence on “The Bad News Bears.”

But it takes a special kind of lowlife to think of the idea, set the line and make book on Little League games in a town where everybody knows everybody else.

That’ John Zbikowswki, “Zibs,” the small time bookie in suburban Baltimore who’s just trying to get “All Square.” 

“All Square” is a surprising, sentimental without sentimentality. cynical but with surprising dollops of heart, conventional in how it drifts on past its climax, but managing twists all along the way.

Michael Kelly of “House of Cards” lacks the natural, nasty crackle that Walter Matthau and Billy Bob Thornton brought to the various “Bad News Bears” movies. So he makes Zibs a loser without the “lovable” part, a one-time big league prospect sentenced, for life, to making book where he grew up, in Dundalk, looking after his inform dad (the great Harris Yulin), basically taking over the old man’s bookmaking business.

He narrates his story like a seen-it-all tough guy, defining “the line” and “the vig” and the bookie/gambler “code of honor.”

But he’s not tough. He rides up on one “deadbeat” (Tom Everett Scott) who owes him cash, and ends up helping him move a new curved-screen TV into the guy’s house. Zibs dodges confrontations.

Breaking in later is his play. It’s how he ended up with one deadbeat’s dog.

He figures he’s a genius for finding one thing that will get everybody in town who owes him money to pay him back — taking bets on their kids’ baseball games. It’s one place the lonely sports bookie doesn’t have to compete with Internet gambling.

“How’d I see it, when nobody else did?”

Here’s how. There’s this blowsy classmate (Pamela Adlon, bringing her high-mileage edge) who takes him from “Buy me a drink” to she’s not there when he wakes up in the morning in her bed.

There’s a kid watching TV. Brian (Jesse Ray Sheps) has nobody taking care of him during the day, and Zibs has no idea what he promised to do the day before. So he drags him around for ride along and a “get even/”All Square” break in.

The boy is so desperate for male attention that he invites this stragner, this foul-mouthed chain-smoker who never met a razor he liked, to see him pitch.

Fox? Welcome to the henhouse.

Director John Hyams — yeah, he’s Peter Hyams’ son — doesn’t have comedy chops. He’s produced TV shows like “NYPD Blue” and directed “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.” What he knows is milieu, and that’s where “All Square” lives.

It’s the bars where laid-off, burnt-out, “degenerate gamblers” hang out, the working class neighborhoods where everybody knows everybody and nobody has alarm systems, the personal connections that drift in and out of favor for decades because everybody’s stuck here. Adlon’s Debbie and Zibs hooked up in high school. Why not again?

The comp here is “Tree’s Lounge,” with Kelly’s performance reminiscent of Steve Buscemi’s limited, unschooled and amoral man trapped in the world he was born into. Zibs is full of worldwise (bad) advice for the bullied Brian, buying the kid his first beer, teaching him about fighting back.

“What are you afraid of?”

“Getting my teeth knocked out.”

“They’re baby teeth. They come back. It’s like playing with house money.”

The bully is 12 years old, “so how hard can punch, anyway?” Don’t worry about his parents calling the cops because “you’re under 18.”

Ironically, it’s advice Zibs himself never took. Another guy owes him money, but Zibs is the one who gets the black eye. He collects his own markers, and a hurt look (He managed that on “House of Cards,” too.) is no incentive for most guys to settle up.

But he knows sports gambling, and figures out Little League in a heartbeat.

“Big kids beat up little kids,” so bet on the team with the bulkiest, tallest pitchers and hitters. “And if his dad is coaching, he’s probably good…He’s learning fundamentals.”

The “Let it Ride” setting includes a bartender, Beaches (Yeardley Smith of “The Simpsons”) who acts as his banker and secretary, and barfly/gambler pals who include Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.

Josh Lucas is the always-smiling, glad-handing clean-cut league commissioner, the fellow who notices a lot of drunks and others with no kids in the games showing up with a KEEN interest in the final score. The commissioner is running for city council.

“You should vote for me.”

“I don’t vote. ”

“Everybody should vote. ”

“You convinced me.”

The funny stuff isn’t sidesplitting, it’s rye-flavored wry. The plot drifts into melodramatic twists as well as the occasional clever one.

I didn’t expect to like it, and Timothy Brady’s script never quite hits that “sleeper” sweet spot. But “All Square” rides its spot-on casting, sharply defined performances and beer-stained sense of place well past second base, if not all the way home.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, under-age drinking, gambling

Cast: Michael Kelly, Jesse Ray Sheps, Pamela Adlon, Josh Lucas, Tom Everett Scott, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., Yeardley Smith

Credits:Directed by John Hyams, script by Timothy Brady A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

Veronica, “Ronnie” to her friends, sees dead people.

But that’s OK. Everybody does. Ever since “The Event.”

And in “a world where the dead walk among the living,” there are rules. “They can’t alter their imagery…They can’t affect our natural world.”

That’s what the experts tell us. But why is there “a panic room in every house” if the dead can’t hurt us? If they can’t “affect our natural world,” why does a ghost, a “remnant,” keep showing up in Veronica’s shower, writing “RUN” on her bathroom mirror?

Aside from the fact Veronica is played by Bella Thorne, I mean?

“I Still See You” is a middling mystery thriller in which the supernatural is explained and over-explained by long bursts of exposition, “rules” and scientific gobbledygoop delivered by the smartest science teacher in Jewel City, Illinois (Dermot Mulroney), as well as a science nerd who’s been paying attention in class, and the obsessive “James Dean type,” the brooding and quiet Kirk Lane (Richard Harmon).

Guess which one Ronnie believes?

Ten years after “The Event,” life goes on in much of the country. “Ground Zero” was Chicago, now a “No Go Zone.” But in Jewel City, people like Veronica stare at dead people — like her dad, sitting, sipping ghostly coffee and reading the newspaper at breakfast every day — then vanishing in a puff of ashy smoke.

It’s a morbid, bittersweet existence, not helped when a long-dead woman pops up in science class, or an old man goes through the motions of leaf-blowing his lawn even though its covered in snow. At first, they thought it was just people killed in “The Event.” Now, Veronica and others are becoming “truthers,” like Kirk. They don’t know what to buy into. The “remnants” seem to be growing in number.

Ronnie is being stalked by this underwear model with murder in his eyes every day in the shower gets her attention. Who is he, why is he in her bathroom and does he mean her harm?

The overriding explanation for all this is a Hiroshima/Nagasaki comparison. Whatever happened in Chicago turned people into shadows of themselves, some trapped in a “loop” capturing the moment of their death, others intentionally drawn to some place and time very special to them.

It’s a bit like religious teaching, isn’t it? Damned to hell, or somehow “sentenced” to heaven — a pleasant memory.

But Ronnie starts to see her stalker everywhere. An effective moment — Thorne’s Veronica lunging through the gym in the middle of a basketball game, touching people to see if they’re real. She brings the game to a dead silent halt.

There are ice skating reveries and falling-through-the-ice nightmares, a murdered young woman whose birthday matches Ronnie’s and an imaginary clock ticking towards Ronnie’s doom. Apparently.

Thorne is a real “gather ye rosebuds” movie (and music and TV and what have you) star, not the most selective in what she does, just getting while the getting’s good. She works constantly and not every film she takes on has the edge of “Assassination Nation” or camp of “You Get Me” (stalker girl) or the action beats to deliver real thrills of “Big Sky.”

She tries to bring a little flippancy to her line readings, going for throw-away laughs when she bats her eyes at the science nerd “obsessed with me since seventh grade” for help.

“Still got it.”

Her “Midnight Sun” director Scott Speer doesn’t do much with the potential romance here, letting the ripple effects that we see when somebody gently touches a ghostly image, and the ashes caught in the SFX wind when you storm through a “rem” (remnant) do the heavy lifting. Pretty, as are the underwater sequences.

While “I Still See You” has a nice wintry gloom, some creepy settings, it never manages more than a few minor thrills and a couple of chills.

Nobody registers fright, which I guess is to be expected if ghosts have become as commonplace as Kardashians — just something we live with.

But if Thorne wants to become the new “Scream Queen” (Who’s to say?), she’s going to have to give us more than this — anxiety, terror, panic, URGENCY. It’s not part of her repertoire yet, and considering how much we STILL see her — online, in movie after movie, music videos of her own creation and TV shows — she should have picked that skill set up somewhere along the way.

She may be the hardest working woman in show business. But it’s not just working a lot or working hard that counts. Being picky wouldn’t kill her.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence, terror, partial nudity, and thematic material

Cast: Bella Thorne, Dermot Mulroney, Sara Thompson, Richard Harmon

Credits:Directed by Scott Speer, script by Jason Fuchs, based on the novel by Daniel Waters. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:44

Storyteller Gcina Mhlophe coaches orphan schoolchildren in Swaziland to create their own adventure story, which becomes the basis for “Liyana,” a marvelous blend of kids telling a story they’re making up and artist Shofela Coker rendering their words into images.

“You are the ones who are making it happen,” she tells them, in English and sisWati with English subtitles.

The kids — the films lets the boys in the elementary school classroom do most of the talking/storytelling — dream up a young girl their age, Liyana. They put her in a thatched hut in a township, with an abusive father who drinks and sleeps around at the bars and dies of AIDS.

They give Liyani two brothers, and a mother who dies of AIDS, too.

“So many of these children’s real life experiences are going to show up on this fictional character,” Mhlophe explains. Their lives have been bleak. The story they tell, with hunger and hardship, robbers and monsters, will reflect that.

“What is Liyana scared of? YOU will decide.”

The kids from the Children’s Home are seen playing, swimming, herding cattle and making toys out of junk. Swaziland, we are told, has a staggering HIV infection rate and hundreds of thousands of orphans to show for it. We even see the kids taking their blood tests.

The story of Liyana will be dark, a quest with magical realism qualities. She is chased by crocodiles, scorched by the desert and aided by a friendly bull, who is here ride and her protector.

All the while, Mhlophe cajoles, encourages, takes votes on plot directions and inspires with the plummiest accent this side of Jamaica.

“There is no RRrrrrrright answer, or wrrrrrrrrrong answer!”

The children admit to putting their own experiences in, from a desire to see the sea to a sense of hopelessness that makes you wonder if their tale will have a happy ending.

“I was too small…didn’t even know anything, when my father died.”

“In your own life, maybe there is no hope. But sometimes you need to keep pushing.”

It’s not literally correct to call Coker’s drawings animation, zooms and pans across vibrant, photo real still (CGI) images give the impression of action of movement, and that’s enough.

I found myself seeing girls in the classroom, but wondering why we weren’t hearing them pitch in on this epic girl’s story. One or two are included near the end, almost as an afterthought by the filmmakers. Pushy boys hogging all the camera time!

But “Liyana” is still a wonder, and the story the kids cook up themselves every bit as epic as the one Disney plagiarized for “The Lion King.” This effort turns out so delightful that somebody should hire these children as focus group consultants the next time Hollywood wants to tell a tale of Africa.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Gcina Mhlophe

Credits:Directed by Amanda Kopp, Aaron Kopp. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:16

Demonic possession, you say?

“I’ve seen MANY things,” says the priest.

So much for white picket fences, settling down and starting a family.

“Isabelle” looks B-movie creepy and has a not-quite-set 2019 release on tap.

That’s the image we all have of Stan Lee, Mr. Marvel, jaunty self-nicknamed “Stan the Man,” the grinning, self-mocking mascot of the comic book universe he presided over, cameo good lock charm in the legions of blockbuster films that come out of Marvel Studios, still his baby in soul if not Disney bean-counter reality.

The image doesn’t take too much of a ding in Bob Batchelor’s workmanlike new biography of Stanley Lieber, “The Kid” who got into comic book publishing in his teens, surfed the ups and downs of the business for decades, and became every bit as famous as his many creations.

Or co-creations.

Because whatever credit Lee deserved (and it’s a LOT) for the Comic Book Renaissance of the 1960s, which continues to this day, his self-mythologizing and endless self-promotion have tended to inflate his role in some ways and his versions of the “luck” and “hard work” and genius that brought him riches and glory have some holes in them.

Family connections, not “luck” and “pluck” got him his job at Timely Comics just before the war. His uncle married the daughter of Martin Goodman, the guy who owned Timely.

He stabbed fellow employees in the back — “Captain America” co-creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, most infamously — to take over the comic book division of Goodman’s publishing empire.

This isn’t a hagiography, and Batchelor, to his credit, doesn’t take Stan’s word for everything. Or anything. Having only read Stan’s autobiography as prep for a couple of interviews I did with him over the years, I was a little surprised to see some of the “cuddly” Stan rubbed off in this way.

But here’s what Stan DID do. After years of well-compensated struggle, Lee and Jack Kirby hit upon “Fantastic Four,” though their contentious relationship gets in the way of getting the real scoop of who was more important to making  that the breakthrough comic that launched the Age of Marvel. Lee probably deserves most of the credit, though he was very generous at crediting Kirby’s rock’em/sock’em drawing style for making the comic come off.

“Spider-Man” gave teen angst its own superhero. “The Hulk” showed us a troubled, sensitive monster.

Lee hit upon what Marvel fans, even those who only know the work through the movies, experience as The Never Ending Story. Serials, cliffhangers, have worked since Dickens, roped in fans for weekly trips to the movies when Stan was a boy and still work their magic today.

Hell, I was at “Venom,” a bit of a dog, the other night at fully a third of the house got suckered into waiting through the credits to see what would be teased for the “NEXT exciting installment in the Adventures of Venom!” (A terrible let-down, like the movie itself).

The other thing Stan Lee did was pick up on the first real fan letters creators ever got, and start interacting with fans in the back of the magazines, answering letters, using readers as market research on what he and his team should do next, but also wising off and engaging in a little self-mockery with them.

You’re over 40 and writing teen slang? Reading a lot of letters from comic book fans helps with that.

He became the face of his industry in the process, created generations of LIFEtime fans (fanboys, fangirls) and set the stage for the Comic Book Takeover of the Cinema and to a lesser degree TV.

Fans really into the history of Marvel, Lee or comics in general won’t find a lot to surprise them here. I’ve read a few books on the early history (not Sean Howe’s Marvel book, but Larry Tye’s recent “Superman: The High Flying History” for instance) and found “The Man Behind Marvel” a brisk overview of Lee’s life and Marvel’s history, not officially sanctioned (the author got his photo taken with Stan at some signing, haven’t we all?) but a good, quick dissection of what made Lee tick and what made Marvel hit.

Love these guys, love Queen (another trailer with Freddie and Friends), love old British “motors.”

What’s not to love in this trailer to the limited series “Good Omens” coming to Amazon Prime in the spring, hmm?

Michael Sheen is an angel, David Tennant is a demon, Armageddon is coming (Oh yes it is) and they have to friend-up to save us all.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett team up for “Good Omens,”  behind the camera.

No, I don’t recognize Mickey Rourke in his current guise. But then again, Burgess Meredith had acquired the cauliflowered features by the time he was “Mick,” in his “Hit’em, ROCK. Give’m the LEFT!” years.

Mickey Rourke is entering that phase of his career.

But this is a movie about civil rights and boxing and the discrimination Sikhs face in America, and the trailer pushes all the right buttons.

Nov. 2 we will see if it does. 

Early projections had “Venom” rolling in with a decent $46 million opening, with nobody really wanting to go as far as thinking $70 million might be within reach for a Sony comic book franchise-starter with piss-poor reviews and weak buzz.

We/They/Everybody was wrong. There’s no such thing as a comic book flop.

It looked like a $77 million hit Sat. AM. Now, everybody’s all-in on the Tom Hardy picture pulling in $80 million. 

Pre-sake sell-outs of “A Star is Born” had pushed the predicted $42 million take for that one up to $44 on Saturday AM. But the sell-out showings have passed, and $42 it is.

So much Gaga’s Little Monsters sabotaging “Venom” at the BO.

If “Venom” falls off a cliff its second weekend, and it will, “Star” will move ahead of it in next week’s race, perhaps doing well enough to take first place. Perhaps not. But it’ll stick around as long as the hype doesn’t fade too fast.

“A Simple Favor” still has legs, “Smallfoot” is still owning “Night School” (a 63% plunge on its second weekend).

“Crazy Rich Asians” is still in the top ten for another week, maybe two. It will clear $175, maybe $180 before it loses most of its screens.

The character actors who burn into the memory are most often the colorful kind, the Christopher Walken/Wilford Brimley/Harry Dean Stanton school, Ed Harris-Giancarlo Esposito intense, Margo Martindale-Jenifer Lewis colorful and quirky.

Scott Wilson gave us more by showing off less. From “In Cold Blood” to “Hostiles,” Wilson seemed to speak volumes with just a line, a soulful look, a crinkle of pain. He died Saturday at 76. 

He was a recurring on “The Walking Dead,” working right up to the end.

Robert Blake got all the attention from “In Cold Blood,” but you remember Wilson. Colder, less sympathetic.

He’s the sober, sane, long-suffering father and husband in “Junebug,” Scott Crossfield, the test-pilot-of-even-fewer words than Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) in “The Right Stuff,” the victim that lets us see Aileen Wuornos has no trace of humanity left when his Good Samaritan instinct puts him in her path in “Monster.”
I once spent a day riding all over Kennedy Space Center with members of the cast of “The Right Stuff,” there to commemorate the movie for a DVD re-release. Wilson, even then, was the unassuming one. Shy, in the background, taking it all in and remembering the movie (all his scenes were set at Edwards AFB.).

But I sidled up to him and we chatted, about “The Right Stuff,” about making “Junebug,” written by my friend Angus MacLachlan and shot in Winston-Salem, where I got to know Angus and director Phil Morrison, and about “Monster.”

He said he had gotten in the habit of looking for roles with few lines, trying to do more with less. He’d done that most of his career, but his moments in “Junebug” and “Monster,” which I covered as it was filmed in Greater Orlando, have the power of a character who picks his spots, uses words sparingly and when he has something to may, makes them count.

You see a little of that in “Hostiles,” bigger than many he played — but making his words count.

Not every character actor chews the scenery. Some put their effort into coloring the edges, drawing attention when it’s called for, inhabiting the space.

Scott Wilson was great at it.