Movie Nation

Franz Kafka was born in Prague and died in a sanitarium outside of Vienna.

But his Kafkaesque nightmare of maddening bureaucracy run by heartless, buck-passing functionaries lives on just to the south, in the courts, hospitals and government offices of Italy.

Italian police brutality and legal, ethical and moral lassitude gave the world “The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi.”

The film about Cucchi’s arrest and death in custody, “On My Skin,” is a slowly unfolding horror of callous Italian indolence. A man is arrested for drugs, charged with intent to distribute and then beaten — off camera. The evidence of that beating is all over his face, his inability to stand up straight or stay awake.

No judge asks about it. No prosecutor is appalled and confrontational with the cops, the Carabinieri. Every police official down the line sees his condition, some sheepishly ask concerned questions. Many use the phrase “a very serious charge” when Cucchi finally starts telling people he was beaten, but officialdom’s first worried question in every phone call is aimed at whatever the Italian acronym for “CYA” might be.

Tell me again how SURE you are “Amanda Knox Did It!” I wouldn’t trust these Pagliaccis to prosecute a jaywalker.

And the ass-covering extends to doctors, nurses and paramedics, not helped by the beaten man’s fear, and a kind of stubborn rage that sets in with his worsening physical and mental condition. He is enfeebled, missing his medication, afraid things will only get worse if he tells. Denied his own legal counsel, his family not allowed to see him via an ever-changing carousel of bureaucratese excuses, he goes into cardiac arrest in the first scene in “On My Skin.”

The movie that follows is a somber, slow-walk to doom, death by official Italian indolence.

In October of 2009, Stefano, “Ste'” to his family (Alessandro Borghi, very good),  is shown working for his surveyor-father, working out at the gym, attending mass, chatting with his brother-in-law and eating dinner with his parents. He won’t be spending the night with them, he says.

At his place, he’s got this thin slab of chocolate colored hashish he has to carve up.

But there’s little alarm when he’s sitting, talking in his car about eggplant parmesan with a friend, when the cops show up. There’s nothing in the car. No money was changing hands. They were smoking — cigarettes.

“Being funny, huh?” the cops bark (in Italian, with English subtitles).

“No.”

“Shut up. Nobody asked you.”

Rousting them, the cops find drugs on him, just a little dab of this and that. Illegal, but “possession” sized amounts. Oh no, they’ve nabbed a DEALER. The detectives who roll up afterwards are sure of it.

Stefano doesn’t know it, but his life clock just started ticking down its final week.

We see the humiliation of booking — yes, he had drugs on him — hear his pleas to the police not to wake his parents with all this. Good luck with that, pal.

And then, a gap. We see him hustled out of a cell and into court. One of his eyes is swelling shut. His back is killing him, he says. He needs his epilepsy medicine, needs to call his lawyer.

Oh no. Some bottom ten percent of his law school class public defender has been assigned him. He doesn’t need to call anybody. Really he doesn’t. He finds this out in the courtroom. The nightmare which began with an over-eager arrest and mounted with whatever happened with those detectives off-camera now becomes life and liberty threatening.

Writer-director Alessio Cremonini tells this story in the most deliberative way — patiently, layer upon layer of bureaucracy added on. Yes, this guy had drug problems and perhaps he was selling on the side. Maybe not.

But the viewer cannot escape the growing outrage at his treatment, the growing dread at what’s coming and the sadness of Stefano’s plight.

He is sick, with serious back and almost certainly internal injuries. He is not getting even the most superficial treatment — endless agonies of X-rays, transport from this hospital to the next.

He faces this alarming death spiral alone. Officious peons doggedly refuse to let anyone who cares about him see him. Callousness surrounds him in his direst moments.

And every taker of the Hippocratic Oath he meets is either put off by his understandable paranoia and defensiveness, or content to let the system take the hit. Lots of Italian medical professionals give the broad “My hands are tied” gesture, or brusquely wear it on their faces.

Yes, the world knows that if you travel to Italy, don’t do anything to get you in trouble with the Carabinieri. God knows if they do something to you the locals won’t want to hear about it. Surely they have a “Carabinieri Lives Matter” movement to go with their infamous record of prisoners dying in their custody.

But as this slow but damning drama makes clear, you don’t want to get sick over there either. Forms to fill out, procedures to be followed — rigidly. Don’t make a fuss. Just accept their “Not my patient/not my responsibility/you’re being ‘difficult’/sign this” indifference and take it like every other Italian. If you die, it’s on somebody else’s hands. Always.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:  Alessandro Borghi, Massimiliano Tortora, Milvia Marigliano

Credits:Directed by Alessio Cremonini, , script by Alessio Cremonini, Lisa Nur Sultan. A  Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

It’s not a new movie trope, but seriously — how do you make “Hot for teacher” an acceptable subject for a movie nowadays?

“My Teacher, My Obsession” whistles past the #Notlegal graveyard with horror.  Well, with a stalker/thriller, anyway.

That’s what the prologue promises, a school janitor walking in on what looks like a sexual assault, a bloodied eyewitness yelling “RUN.”

But then comes the flashback, the hour long drift into exploitation, titillation and prurient bumping and grinding. Having it both ways, we call that.

Riley (Laura Bilgeri) is braced for another school year and another high school for English teacher dad Chris (Rusty Joiner).

But the girls at Frost High might have other ideas. Tricia (Alexandria DeBerry), blonde Queen Bee and her popular pretty girl classmates purr that they’ll have him “wrapped around” their fingers.

Kyla (Lucy Loken) is the one to watch out for. She’s kind of quiet, an 18 year-old yearbook photographer who has polished the bedroom eyes and vocal fry of the teen temptress.

After a couple of scenes where Chris establishes his “hip young teacher” bonafides (checking his students’ cellphone playlists) — “I remember what it’s like to be young and pretend not to care.” — Kyla’s plot is set in motion.

Befriend Riley, poor-mouth the other girls who might get in the way, sabotage her mother’s hopes for a “normal” relationship with the single teacher, plant photos, etc.

It’s laugh out loud ludicrous, almost from start to end.

“I’m 18. I’m free to do what and who I want.”

The adults are gullible and somewhat hapless when faced with this potentially lethal Lolita.

Teacher Chris? He walks — or drives — right into this. This is what happens, educators, when you don’t remember Sting singing “Don’t stand so close to me.”

Loken, of TV’s “Teen Wolf,” does her damnedest to measure up to the gold standard of dangerously obsessed high school girls — Erika Christenson’s oversexed/lethally libidinous “Swimfan.”

A very wooden (no pun intended) Joiner has to play a grown man helpless trapped in her web of aggressive come-ons and one-liners.

“Consider that my thesis statement!”

“Pick up that jar, sugar. I’m legal!”

The most generous way to look at this sort of film USED to be middle-aged male wish fulfillment fantasy. And that is generously creepy. It’s always doubly unsavory when a man scripts it.

But even without the “ick” factor, “My Obsession” gives away the game too easily, makes the seemingly-nerdy girl who still shoots on film too obviously a predator, wastes too much time in the middle acts with us knowing what is coming.

And if you’re going for “over the top,” Ms. Loken, there’s no value in going halfway.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast:Lucy Loken, Laura Bilgeri, Rusty Joiner, Alexandria DeBerry

Credits:Directed by Damián Romay, script by Patrick Robert Young . A MarVista.Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

The guys who gave us Schwarzenegger turn up in this film about the weightlifter/bodybuilder Joe Weider, whose ads graced the inside back covers of many a classic comic book, back in the day.

Julianne Hough, Tyler Hoechlin, Steve Guttenberg  Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Tom Arnold, Victoria Justice and Kevin Durand are the big names in the cast.

But the characters portrayed in the spotlight — LaLanne, Weider and Arnold Schwarzenegger — are what “Bigger” (Oct 12) is about. 

Might’ve had a little to do with Hurricane Florence worrying film fans from Va to Ga.

Maybe not.

But the projected $29 million opening for “The Predator” reboot at the hands of Shane Black was a $24 million bust.

“A Simple Favor” should have earned $18, didn’t clear $16 by much.

“White Boy Rick” didn’t even reach $9 million.

And the widely distributed sequel “Unbroken: The Billy Graham Crusade Years” didn’t do half of the $5 million it was slated to take in.

Only “The Nun” matched expectations, $18 million on its second weekend of release — on the button.

“The Children Act” had decent pre-screen numbers (it’s on Direct TV too).

“Science Fair” did quite well on its single screen, still not enough to warrant wider release.

Jimmy Buffet as viewed through the Harmony Korine dark side of drunken beach poet as a lifestyle, that is.

Yes, the director of “Spring Breakers,” who let us know that hell yeah, he “gets” Florida, is back with a dark comedy starring Matthew M., Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Zac Effron, Jonah Hill and James Delaney aka “Jimmy” Buffett.

Damn. “The Beach Bum” (2019 release date TBD) needs more boats. Sailboats. “Boat Drinks” they have in copious quantities.

If you want a thorough documentary accounting of your legendary life in music, leave the job to your adoring daughter.

Rashida Jones of “Tag” and TV’s “Angie Tribeca,” didn’t have to arrange interviews for “Quincy,” the film she co-directed about her Emmy, Oscar, Tony and multiple Grammy Award winning Dad, Quincy Jones. She had the one she needed right at her feet.

Just following Dad around — sometimes in a wheelchair, often on his feet, enthusing, persuading, flattering, accepting the endless accolades as well as responsibilities a “legend” carries with him — made a great framework for a survey and appreciation of Q’s 80 plus years of life, 70 of them in music.

Jones the daughter has co-directed (with veteran jazz documentarian Alan Hicks) an adoring, broad but not particularly deep screen biography built around Quincy doing what he does best — even in his 80s, even after repeated health scares — producing, arranging and masterminding the televised star-studded opening gala of Washington’s Museum of African American History.

There’s no sense being modest at this phase in his Oscar-winning/Oscar producing career, but even as he’s feted, from Montreux to Stockholm, New York to Washington, there’s a refreshing lack of pretense to the sharp-dressed octogenarian at the center of all this fuss.

“I’m too old to be full of it.”

Rashida, his daughter with then-wife Peggy Lipton, is around him at all hours (glimpsed, herself, out of makeup) in all sorts of scenarios — in the hospital, backstage here, traveling there. She’s concerned when he’s at his sickest, emerging from a diabetic coma, encouraging the “26 hour day” workaholic and night owl to finally give up drinking. And she’s amused enough by his Energizer Bunny schedule to set the many MANY traveling sequences to Quincy’s themes to the comedies “Austin Powers” and “Sanford & Son.”

Rather than round up legions of admirers to sing his praise on camera, she and the crew shadow Quincy for a recording of Dr. Dre’s podcast, listen in as he sweetly arm-twists Colin Powell to be on his TV African American Museum tribute, watch him chat with Tom Hanks at rehearsal for that special (“I quit drinking 19 months ago!” “Wow! Great! How’re you sleeping?”).

Tapes of Sinatra singing his praises accompany clips of Ol’Blue Eyes introducing his arranger conductor on TV specials.

“I began to realize he was a giant!”

Ray Charles, who was there the night Jones was awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, talks, also in voice-over, of Jones’s gift for hip and swinging arrangements.

His daughter also gets Jones to sketch his own story — rough upbringing in Chicago, mentally ill mother committed when he was just a boy, tempted by the piano, taken in by the trumpet at 14.

We’re all heroes of our own stories, and the owlish Jones (and his daughter) can be forgiven for boosting the “miracle” of his breaking out and skipping over his Berklee College of Music year (formative, most say), ignoring his years of drug abuse, skimming through his compulsive womanizing.

“I had messed that marriage up” he says, about this or that union. Of course, he covered a lot of this ground in a lot more detail in his 2001 autobiography

The always-outspoken Jones is considerably less so here. Rashida asks him “Dad, how do you deal with your ego and your art?” No, he’s got no clever quip at the ready, there. His little girl let him off the hook, let him give his killer “news quotes” to GQ and others. 

But Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry, Dinah Washington to Armstrong to Dizzy to Ray and Basie, Sinatra and Michael — almost anybody who was anybody in music worked with Quincy Jones or wanted to. The wall of Grammys, the vast collection of framed photos with the famous, the gold albums, Samuel L. Jackson accolades backstage at the African American Museum gala (“Damn, Q.” is the quotable part), all underscore his place in music and entertainment history.

Whatever Rashida accomplishes on her own as the most famous daughter of this giant of music, with “Quincy” (premiering Sept. 21 on Netflix) she’s taken control of her father’s legacy, given it a light polishing, and chiseled it in stone. The man worked harder than anybody else in show business (Sorry, James Brown), encouraged and championed generations of performers and kept himself in the game long past the point others were calling him “a legend.”

“Quincy” hints at how that came to be, and maybe that’s enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol, smoking

Cast: Quincy Jones, Rashida Jones, and everybody who’s anybody in popular music

Credits:Directed by, script by  Alan Hicks, Rashida Jones. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05

In Hollywood they call it “runaway production.”

But here in the “Rest of the States” we call it making movies that look like America, on location, movies with a hint of “local color.”

“Strange Nature” is a not-at-all-terrible low-budget horror pick about pesticide-driven mutations popping up in the Great Lakes, in Duluth, Minnesota.

We almost never see thrillers, or films of any sort, set in “Doo-LOOT.”

This ripped-from-the-headlines nightmare was written and directed by Duluth native James “Jim” Ojala, a sometime director/widely-credited makeup artist and effects specialist who has worked on scads of TV shows (“True Blood,” “The Core”) and movies such as “Hellboy II” and “John Dies at the End.”

So we know to expect the effects to be pretty good — gurgling bleed-outs after animal attacks, spurting blood from shotgun blasts and stabbings.

The six-legged frogs are passable, the two-headed/four-faced wolves a bit less so. Both  crop up after “American Patriot” chemicals starts selling its “organic” fertilizer to the simple happy natives.

The hole in the middle of “Strange Nature” is the hour in the middle of the thing that doesn’t require effects. It’s pretty boring.

Lisa Sheridan (TV’s “Invasion”) is Kim Sweet, the hometown girl who left to become a pop star, only to not have that work out so well. She’s coming back to the town she once mocked to take care of her ailing Dad (Bruce Bohne). She’s still got her looks, her blue hair and her collection of shorts and fishnet stockings. She’s also got a tweenage son (Jonah Beres).

“If we hate it we will find a way to leave,” she reassures young Brody. Sure she will.

But upon arrival at the end of summer, teens are disappearing — on nature hikes, swimming.

And the one hike that doesn’t lose any kids comes back with six-legged frogs. Kim, having a kid and a sick father, all of them living on a lake, is concerned.

Her kid’s science teacher (Faust Checho) has the beginnings of an explanation. “Frogs literally soak up their environment.”

It’s just that Kim’s the wrong person to sound the alarm. The town feels used by her and up where the winters are long the grudges are longer.

“We’re not giving you any attention,” the local newspaper grumps. The mayor (Stephen Tobolowsky) is of the same mind, and not prone to causing “a premature panic.”

“You’ve found some deformed frogs, that’s it?”

Kim, whose language tends toward LA colorful, loses it.

“God, you’re like some MOVIE mayor!”

But as devoured deer and missing people pile up, as deformed frogs prefigure deformed puppies and then birth defects among the local babies, panic sets in. And who do they focus on? The disfigured father across the lake and his Elephant Man forehead daughter.

The superstitious rednecks don’t suspect anything chemical, especially with the name “American Patriot” on the front of it. Wrestler/actor John Hennigan plays their ringleader.

“Let’s put them out of their misery. Some things aren’t meant to be!”

As TV news finally wises up to the threat and gawking tourists show up with “Minnesota — Land of 10,000 Freaks” t-shirts (Man, I’ve got to get me one of those.), the blood starts to flow and this slow-footed creature-feature finally finds its footing.

Ojala opens his film with clips of news reports (“Nightline” with Ted Koppel vintage) about frogs as “canaries in the coal mine” of our environment, and makes no secret of who his villains are — corrupt, shortsighted chemical companies and the unthinking, short-cut taking farmers and small town Red State types who trust them.

Sheridan makes a feisty, if not quite fiery enough heroine. Tobolowsky’s here for comic effect. And Henningan underscores the point that more wrestlers should look for work as heavies — bad guys.

It’s a C-movie, pretty much start to finish. And once Ojala gets his sermons about the environment out of the way and gets down to business, he’s got a movie gore goofballs TROMA Films would be proud to distribute.

It’s just that middle hour that hamstrings “Strange Nature” and mutes whatever novelty a move about mutations in Minnesota might have had.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Lisa Sheridan, Stephen Tobolowsky, John Hennigan, , Tiffany Shepis

Credits: Written and directed by James Ojala. An ITN release.

Running time: 1:39

A bit late for a “teaser” for a movie opening Sept. 29. And it’s a lulu.

Moss plays a chatterbox, strung out punk rocker, with a camera crew in tow, surrounded by all those folks, plus Amber Heard, Ashley Benson and Dan Stevens.

Several of them turn up in this long, rambling backstage take. “Her Smell” played in Toronto and the U.S. distributor is unclear. So? Not many screens, wait for Netflix?

“The Nun” is managing another $18 million or so on its second weekend, putting the fall’s first sleeper in the range of $85 million by midnight Sunday. 

And it’s not even “fall” yet. Not by the calendar.

But Fox throwing a huge bag of extra cash, Shane Black, Olivia Munn, Keenan Michael Key, Thomas Jane and Boyd Holbrook at “The Predator” reboot isn’t proving to be cash well spent. Deadline.com is now projecting the $88 million recycling of the “Alien Whoopi Goldberg invasion” thriller — sixth in the series — to do $26 million, enough to “win” this weekend. It did OK Thursday night, OK ($10 million+) Friday.

It had that whole stink of Shane Black hiring a perv pal for a bit part and Olivia Munn calling him on it, and reviews had an over-it quality. 

With ancillary markets not being what they were, that’s going to wind up in the red. Controversy didn’t help, probably didn’t hurt, either. It was never going to reach a fresh audience. We know what we’re getting, and most of us are over it.

Lionsgate spent the smart money this weekend, with the $20-30 million “A Simple Favor” rolling up $17-18 million, and the chance to stick around to make more. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick have HUGE social media presences, so if tweets and click-through rates deliver, this femme-centric thriller– great reviews are helping — could make money on into October.

The uneven but well-acted and entertaining “White Boy Rick” doesn’t have a brand, Matthew McConaughey isn’t a big draw on his own and nobody in it has the social media connection to amplify the marketing. The trailers were funny/cool, reviews have been good enough. It’s still only pulling in $9 million by midnight Sunday.

The faith-based “Unbroken: Path to Redemption” sequel is still on track to hit $5 million, poor reviews trumping any pulpit push for this one.

This is intriguing — a little adventure, a bit of danger, some special gifts and a hint of, as the trailer puts it, “whimsy.”

“Big Blue Sea” opens in Hong Kong in January. Maybe it’ll get US distribution, maybe Netflix will grab it.