Movie Nation

The buzz around the Netflix comedy “Nappily Ever After” swirls around Sanaa Lathan shaving her head on camera. As it should be.

As an Atlanta ad exec, beauty accounts queen and physical appearance perfectionist, her drunken, broken-hearted tantrum with hair clippers is one of the most dazzling moments in her long (“Love & Basketball”) career.

It’s a minute or so of screen time full of tears, laughter, self-destructive anguish and resignation at what she’s done. Lathan plays the hell out of it.

Sadly, the movie surrounding it is a listless affair, starved of laughs if not utterly devoid of charm. Building an empowering romantic comedy around Lathan and Lathan alone was always going to be an iffy proposition. Sexy, vulnerable she can do. Vulnerably funny? Not really.

Maya Angelou called “hair a woman’s glory,” and Violet (Lathan) has taken that to heart. Her mother (Lynn Whitfield) would have it no other way. Even as a child, the kid was warned away from the pool. Being called “Chia Pet” left her frightened of the daily forecast. Rain means frizz.

“I had to be fixed,” she narrates. When we meet her grandmother, we get it. Hair and appearance obsession passed down, generation to generation.

A successful ad woman whose speciality is “perfect woman” campaigns, Violet’s expecting her live-in love (Ricky Whittle) to propose at her carefully-planned birthday party. She gets a chihuahua instead.

Seeing as how she lost a big chunk of her mane in a last minute hair salon accident (relaxer), got an emergency weave to maintain the aura of perfection, we can understand her pique.

The film, based on the Trisha R. Thomas novel, has “chapters” named after every phase of hair Violet experiences. “Weave” is one, “Bald” is the one that sticks, the one that comes right after “Blonde.” Yeah, she gets a dye job in “f— me blonde” to get herself back “out there” after the breakup, which only lasts for one ill-advised bar pickup.

Then comes the drunken self-pity, the tantrum and the movie’s money scene. Chase that one with the morning after (she did a half-assed job of it), her mother’s hysteria, the way she physically shrinks without her hair, her “glory.”

Only her dad (Ernie Hudson) makes light of it, calming down her mother (“She’s convinced you’re a lesbian, by the way. “) and bucking her up (“You’ve got the head for it.” ) sand seems supportive.

But then there’s the hair stylist (Lyriq Bent, playing a maddeningly under-developed character) whose salon, where his acting-out daughter (Darias Johns) caused the relaxer accident way back. He’s cool with her bald look, charming in  the way he jokes that “the sound of the clipper, Harriet Tubman calling you to freedom?”

The tug of war over Violet’s soul barely holds one’s interest. Will she submit to the demands of the veneer she used to maintain with the superficial man she maintained it for? Or will she fall for the working man who says he’s “trying to change the world, one head at a time?”

The dramatic moments play better, Whittle’s Clint griping that Violet’s perfection makes their relationship superficial, “like two years of first dates,” and a touching moment where this self-pitying success story stumbles across a cancer survivor’s support group and is forced to confess, lands hard.

“My boyfriend didn’t give me a ring so I shaved my hair off.”

The soul searching, stats quoted about African America’s obsession with hair and hair-altering products, were better covered in Chris Rock’s funny and revealing “Good Hair” documentary.

Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour lets the empowering message, Violet losing some of her vanity by losing her “good hair,” overwhelm every aspect of the movie, adding songs like “It’s a Woman’s World” and variations on that theme which fill the soundtrack.

But like Vi, a woman accused of “never taking chances,” “Nappily Ever After” never takes a chance, rarely exerts itself for a laugh or a moment of heart. Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) plays it safe.

We get the message. What we don’t get is “entertained.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Ricky Whittle, Kiley Casciano, Lynn Whitfield, Ernie Hudson

Credits:Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, script by Adam Brooks, Cee Marcellus, based on the  Trisha R Thomas novel.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

I found Eli Roth’s direction of the lifeless “House with a Clock in Its Walls” to be inept, “House with a Clock in Its Walls” to be inept, showing him to be out of his depth on a kiddie horror movie/fantasy.

The jokes are thing and disappear about 30 minutes in, the kid is dull and the menace “meh.”

And I wasn’t alone. Reviews overall aren’t setting the world on fire. The metacritic rating reflects a certain deference for Roth (The New York Times included there) that is head-scratching. The proof is on the screen. He lacks the light touch.

Why on Earth would you hire Jack Black, who has a certain currency with kids, and give him so little to play with?

Still, it’s the only wide release with any prayer of clearing $20 million on its opening weekend. Box Office Guru figures it’ll be lucky to even manage that.

Dropping by my favorite multi-plex Thursday I was one of like five people at the first showing “Fahrenheit 11/9.” Michael Moore’s Briarcliffe/State Run films release didn’t preview in much of the country, a start-up many of us couldn’t make contact with to get screenings of. Reviews have been good,Reviews have been good, not as dazzling as Moore’s cultural watershed pictures.

Its most audacious moment might be an epic Obama takedown, and while it is good, I was not dazzled or as moved by it as I have been by Moore’s earlier films. The novelty has worn off, and while pathos is there, it’s more a good film than one of his best. Will it open big in a Year of Trump Backlash? The Box Office Guru, The Box Office Guru, who has been late posting and seriously off his game in recent months, thinks it’ll manage $9 million this weekend. I don’t see it. An unproven distributor, middling awareness and Trump fatigue should suppress turnout to something closer to Box Office Mojo’s $6 million prediction.

I was an audience of one at the showing of “Life Itself” I attended. Amazon, very much a miss miss or “Manchester by the Sea” operation, previewed this thing all over the country in some misguided marketing effort to get word of mouth help.

Amusingly, I was banned from local screenings – several — as Amazon is one of the Three Blind Mice — Bleecker St. and Roadside Attractions being the others — who share marketing/PR from the same firm which has had a beef with me going back years.

They show the film, in a top 20 market, for free to more people than will end up buying tickets for it, and don’t let the local critic with a WWW audience in.

Even their good movies underperform, largely because of these petty idiots. Shocking that Jeff Bezos et al haven’t figured it out. Email me, Jeffy, I’ll give you a couple of names.

“Life Itself?” It’s a disaster.  Everybody says so. Classic Hollywood taking candy from a “New Money in Town” baby — Amazon. Giving that kind of cash to a TV writer/producer for a movie is almost always a bad idea.

Will it make $5 million? Box Office Mojo thinks so. Seven Million? No way in hell, Box Office Guru.

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There’s no North American release date for this impressive looking two-hander starring Steven Ogg.’

I have of course given away why that is with that name. But “Solis” still looks to be an interesting variation on “Sunshine” and other pictures that have pointed spacecraft at the sun.

Adding Gary Oldman, after winning the Oscar, to what seems on first glance a standard issue Gerry Saves the World actioner — with submarines — makes me give this last trailer a chance. The rest of the cast — Common, Linda Cardinelli, a bunch of European actors not that well-known in mainstream cinema — still makes this feel like a January movie.’

But Oct 26 we see it. 

The rush of researched and seemingly random elements of the Internet — spam, pop up ads, kitty videos and “Never Gonna Give You Up” — give the second trailer from “Ralph Breaks the Internet” (“Wreck it Ralph 2”) its sizzle.

It might be overly reliant on the whole car race game motif, but there’s an “Inside Out” attention to Internet detail that seems more impressive than even the eye-popping visualization of the WWW given away in the first trailer.

This one we get Nov. 21. 

He warned about the GOP War on Labor, years before the GOP “War on Women” was identified.

He sounded the alarm about the gun manufacturer’s terrorist organization the NRA had morphed into, years before Russian money covered their bottom line.

Health care meltdowns, the broken political system that lets a monied minority defy the Will of the People, Michael Moore’s covered a lot of ground over the decades. So who’s in the mood for Michael Moore’s Greatest Hits, a film which reminds us the cinema’s Jeremiah predicted the nativist backlash and Democratic Party drift that put Donald Trump in power?

Quick show of hands?

“Fahrenheit 11/9,” a non-sequel sequel to “Fahrenheit 911,” borrows too much from that earlier film, about the democratic institutional breakdown that put George W. Bush in the White House and had us fighting multiple wars, one unnecessary, and rebuilding the World Trade Center.

His new film revisits the 2016 election, returns to Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, as ground zero in the have-have/nots wars of the future (over water) and stands shoulder to shoulder with the gutsy students of Parkland, activists who are — to Moore — pointing the way to the future of the Democratic Party and perhaps even a return to majority rule.

Cynicism tends to overwhelm the picture at times, even as Moore is interviewing Congressional candidates, “outsiders,” like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York or Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, or Richard Ojeda, a union boosting Congressional hopeful from West Virginia.

He recounts the West Virginia Teacher’s Strike, which spread across the country, the “fearless kids” or Parkland, who organized a nationwide “March for Our Lives.”

And most chillingly, he dives deep into the manufactured public finance crisis that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder turned into public health water crisis in Flint, and even attempts a citizen’s arrest of Governor Snyder, who imposed “state of emergency” conditions on several predominantly African American Michigan cities, put his cronies in charge and in Flint, caused 100,000 mostly- black people to be poisoned, and over-charged for the water that was poisoning them.

The guy should go to jail, but no lump in a Detroit Tigers hat is going to put him there.

Moore manages a few “stunts” like that in this film, spends entirely too much time recounting his own cozying up to Trump and remembering that last election and only really gets his dander up at the outrage perpetrated on his native Flint.

His bigger themes, the ones allow him to revisit “Roger & Me” and “Sicko” and the first “Fahrenheit,” is that the busted, money-corrupted system is drifting into despotism, that the rich keep rigging things in more and more obvious ways to starve, poison, cripple and keep compliant the working people of America so they can rule us from their high rises, gated communities and private islands.

And the Democratic Party, by compromising with those with the take-no-prisoners scorched Earth politics of today’s conservatism, has let it happen. He points one angry finger at the Clintons, who dragged the party towards Big Money.

And if Moore does no other service, he sticks a sword into the balloon of Obama nostalgia — showing just how little the two-term president with the Netflix deal did to fight for the poor, the racially oppressed. Obama’s sell-out visit to Flint is, to Moore, right up there with Putin and Comey’s interference in the last election as a cause for Trump’s unexpected (especially to Trump, as Moore reminds us) victory.

The stunts are old hat and the recycling makes “Fahrenheit 11/9” longer and more of a drag than it needs to be. He doesn’t really have an ending, just a string of open-ended  warnings and uncanny resemblances to Germany in the 1930s.

Some of his “Democratic Establishment” shots land, Berner that he is. But if you want a more original take on the electorate the last election cycle, seek out “American Chaos.” James D. Stern took a different tack and made a film every bit as good as “Fahrenheit,” without Moore’s grandstanding.

Because rest assured that whatever happens in November, whatever happens with this latest Supreme Court fight, and whatever Robert Mueller does, America’s cinematic Jeremiah will be there, Detroit Tigers hat and all, to remind us we were warned, even if he won’t admit that none of his 30 years of warnings have ever been heeded. 

MPAA Rating: R for language and some disturbing material/images

Cast: Michael Moore, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Moore. A Briarcliff  release.

Running time: 2:03

When TV writer/producers are lured to the big screen by some more-money-than-sense studio — Amazon, say — they tend to fail and fail big in a couple of very predictable ways.

They try and cram in a TV season’s worth of story in a delicate 100 minute beginning-middle-end motion picture, like say, the fellow behind “The Sopranos” and the genius who got “Mad Men” on the air. No, they didn’t get to make second films.

Or they try to reinvent the medium, which is what the fellow who created “This Is Us” does, “freed” of the conventions of network TV and episodic storytelling and TV PG-language for “Life Itself,” one of the great cinematic boondoggles of our time.

Writer-director Dan Fogelman attempts an experiment in “unreliable narration,” when the storyteller is either mistaken or lies to the reader/filmgoer about what is happening, what has happened and for what reasons.

As if that doltish conceit wasn’t debacle enough, he also stumbles into the first pitfall, attempting to cram too many characters and too much story into an interconnected series of tragedies that befall loosely interconnected lives.

“This is Us” style, in other words.

The result is random, aimless and incoherent treacle — a movie which reaches for the heartstrings repeatedly, shows gruesome deaths that may or may not have happened, often from different angles.

But the creator of the weepy “This Is Us” only manages one moment that will tug at the heartstrings. And that involves a dog.

A false start gives us Samuel L. Jackson narrating and directing a script as an “unreliable narrator,” delivering the first of the film’s many misdirection plays. Oscar Isaac is the madman “hero” screenwriter behind that failed “script,” and he relates — to his shrink (Annette Bening) — the story of his great romance (Olivia Wilde).

The product of that romance, and the film’s stand-out performance, is by the angry punk singer daughter who is a product of that union, played by Olivia Cooke.

And then there’s the olive farm in Andalusia, Spain, where olive oil baron Antonio Banderas meddles in the life of his foreman and the foreman’s family and son.

The screenplay is filled with sequences where people say something, then we’re shown  “what they really said.”

Characters deliver long, personal history monologues — sometimes taking the person they’re telling their story to back to the day their met their great love, inserting themselves into the college library where they met, the accident they witnessed or caused, the day somebody died.

“I feel like my whole life is going to be marked by death and tragedy,” a little girl declares, except little girls of eight don’t talk like that, and the unreliable narrator at this point admits as much.

People talk of their world changing “at exactly that moment,” or another “completely random moment.”

Many — a great many — of those moments are mushy treacle. “Sometimes it scares me how much you feel.”

I am a fan of most every actor in this, and would never have bet they’d collectively collect checks in a movie as unwatchable as “Life Itself.”

Long takes drag us into a Halloween where our couple dress as Vincent and Mia in “Pulp Fiction,” another shows us Ms. Cooke (“Ouija,” “Ready Player One”) cover a song from Bob Dylan’s “Time out of Mind” “comeback” album. She relates how it was a favorite of her mother’s, fends off a “Lift your shirt!” heckler, tenderly applies herself to the tune on solo piano, and then thrashes through the rest of it, speed metal style.

Dylan shows up repeatedly on the soundtrack, singing or having that song cycle covered by characters.

And hell’s bells, none of it adds up to anything. “Life is the ultimate unreliable narrator,” with its randomness and endless mis-directions, isn’t a profound thought or theme to build a movie around.

It’s just something some gullible, poorly-read studio exec heard and thought, “I think I’ll spend Jeff Bezos’s millions on THAT.” The fool.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Cooke, Annette Bening, Laia Costa, Jean Smart

Credits: Written and directed by Dan Fogelman. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:58

The title “Where’s the Money” leans into the “plot” of this Andrew Bachelor comedy about trying to get cash from a bank robbery stashed in a flophouse that has been turned into a frat house.

Oldest “caper” comedy plot in the book.

Where the laughs lie are in its “fish out of water” gags — parking a black con man in a white frat house, “playing white guilt like Michael Jordan plays basketball.”

Bachelor, amusing but not the funniest guy in this thing, plays Del, a college age guy running his mom and dad’s gym, and going broke doing it.

Daddy (Mike Epps, antic and funny as ever) is in Folsom, stuck there after he and his brother (Terry Crews) got caught after carrying out a million dollar bank heist. Dad’s the one who sets his son’s plot in motion. And then he feels guilty about missing his kid growing up and reads him a bedtime story before sending Del on his way.

His MMA teacher pal (Kat Graham) and lowlife bud Juice (Allen Maldonado) are enlisted in the caper — get in the basement, dig out the cash.

But it is Del who, taking on the guise of Chet Buttersworth, must be kidnapped by frat guys who get lost invading the ‘hood in Klan robes to begin his initiation.

Klan robes? Well, as fraternities pre-date the Klan by decades, “the real question is, why is the KLAN wearing OUR robes?”

Del/Chet chases away other minority recruits to Kappa Alpha Chi (KAX) with a “token is broken” chant and proceeds to school assorted Partners in Privilege (Logan Paul, Josh Brener and Devon Werkheiser stand out) about how antiquated and racist frat rituals and nomenclature are.

Pledges are “slaves,” and “auctions” are how they fundraise? “TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING!”

A funny bit — Del becomes auctioneer for that fundraiser, “selling” people to rich white people outside of a “plantation house,” or as the frat boys re-label it, “It’s an AFFIRMATIVE auction!”

“My great great great granddaddies would LOVE to hear me say this, ‘Get your billfolds out, we’re buying WHITE people today!”

Less funny — Bachelor’s/Del’s attempts to teach the white boys how to do impressions of Denzel, Tyson and Cosby.

“The closest they’ve ever been to a black man is re-tweeting ‘Kanye.'”

Uncle (Crews) shows up, and having played cuddly the past several years, doesn’t have “Scary Terry” in him any more.

But the son of wealth Brock (Werkheiser) goes by “Barack” when he spits rhymes, and all the falling-over-themselves attempting to be PC or at least inoffensive, are amusing.

“Ghetto” is OK, because “I’m drawing an economic distinction, not a racial one.”

Trying to find Del/Chet’s house in that “ghetto” neighborhood — “Man, Chipotle’s got VALET now?” — forces the frat bros to avoid “all y’all look alike” racism, especially not to a car full of gang bangers (Method Man is their leader).

“His skin tone is right between you in the front and you in the back.”

Scott Zabielski, producer of Comedy Central’s “Tosh. 0” and “The Jim Jefferies Show,” and a couple of screenwriters whip up a few R-rated one-liners, a couple delivered by the trash-talking kids Del is supposed to be teaching how to “use your words” to avoid fights, in the MMA class his gym offers.

“Never thought I’d get this close to a vagina until I was at least 10.”

Plot? Ten different kinds of ridiculous. Finale? Every which sentimental Mexican standoff.

None of which is helped by hanging this contraption on the Canadian Bachelor (TV’s “King Bachelor’s Pad”), who isn’t the most deft at delivering a one-liner. He looks and comes off as a half-speed watered-down Chris Tucker 2.0.

Wait, can I say that?

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language throughout and some drug material
Cast: Andrew Bachelor, Logan Paul, Kat Graham, Retta, Terry Crews, Mike Epps, Method Man

Credits:Directed by Scott Zabielski , script by Ted Sperling,  Benjamin Sutor, Scott Zabielski. A Liosgate release.

Running time: 1:24

Nazi rage against the rest of the human race lives on after death in “The Hatred,” a leaden horror film that takes more than its sweet time getting to whatever “terrifying” point it wants to make.

A war criminal (Andrew Divoff)took up farming after slipping into America. He argues with his daughter Alice (Darby Walker) over her lack of freedom, holed up in the remote farmstead

“Keep to your own kind, your family.” stay away from “degenerate influences.”

Farmer Sears runs his house like a concentration camp, at least as far as Alice is concerned. He wears combat poison gas gear to apply pesticides to his crops, and unpacks a long-stored gift from his beloved Fuhrer. It’s an iron cross with strange symbols and writing on it.

And no sooner has he buried this treasure in a basement wall than one of his fights with Alice turns deadly. He’s lost control. His wife (Nina Siemaszko) does the same. She leaves a farm with two bodies buried on it, and an evil talisman concealed in the basement.

Decades later, a quartet of coeds — Sarah Davenport, Gabrielle Bourne, Bayley Corman, Alisha Wainwright — drop in to the about-to-open bed and breakfast and stumble across the “research” the new owner (“American Werewolf” veteran David Naughton) seems to have been compiling on the place.

Irene, his little girl (Shae Smolick) knows all about Alice, and not from reading up on her. Uh oh.

“The amulet was sent here to Siegfried from Brazil,” and seems to store the hatred it encounters.

Helluva thing to discover on a stormy night while in your nighties, ladies. And “hide and seek?” Not the best time for that, either.

“I need some wine. Should we be SMOKING now?”

Shadows move, ghoulish hands reach up from under the covers, a vintage radio crackles to life with German propaganda from You Know When.

Whatever you do, don’t split up, don’t go to sleep, don’t look in “there”and don’t stick your hand in that watering trough where Alice drowned. This is Beelzebub’s B & B, now. Alice is just the maid.

Writer-director Michael G. Kehoe burns through the viewer’s patience with a slow-footed 22 minute prologue that he could have whacked down to seven. He set out to make a cute coeds in crisis exploitation picture, and the longer he takes to get to them, the less exploitation there will be.

And as the object of the picture is “Save the little girl,” for the love of God — don’t leave her alone.

A truly horrific wraith, the old “yank the coed out of the frame” trick, and a lot of far less frightening shock effects dress up this dark and stormy night. You see some of them coming from a long way off, and the closer we get to look at them, the less scary they become.

Who will survive? Maybe the young ladies who paid attention in her history and German classes. Maybe not.

Making us care is real goal here, and none of the players help us make that leap. They never seem scared. Why should we?

MPAA Rating:R for some violence/horror images

Cast: Sarah Davenport, Gabrielle Bourne, Bayley Corman, Alisha Wainwright, Shae Smolik, Nina Siemaszko, Darby Walker, Andrew Divoff, David Naughton

Credits: Written and directed by Michael G. Kehoe. An Anchor Bay release.

Running time: 1:34

Jessica Barden writes a “sex column with no sex,” a hopeless romantic nostalgic for “romantic comedies of the ’90s” (Seriously?), picky, about to be unemployed.

Then she discovers the Sugardaddy/Sugarbaby phenomenon — a re-branding for the #MeToo era of young woman who let themselves be “kept” by well-off older men.

Eww. And yeah, it happens. Read what’s left of the classifieds of any surviving alt-weekly.

Carly Stone, a writer for TV’s “Kim’s Convenience,” co-wrote and directed this comedy about love in an age of “practicality.” “The New Romantic” is finishing it s circuit of film festivals and headed our way soon.