Movie Nation

Sleep Paralysis, a sort of paralyzing nightmare, is a real phenomenon that affects a very large portion of the population, a graphic at the beginning of “Mara” tells us.

And historically, people in various cultures over the ages have thought it was caused by demons. That was given a visual manifestation when Henry Fuseli painted “The Nightmare.”

So “Mara,” a new horror thriller in the vein of “The Ring,” is parked on firmer footing than most boogeyman horror tales. It’s got cool-enough effects and moderately gloomy Savannah locations. For a genre picture, it’s not awful, which in horror is saying something.

Olga Kurylenko of “A Quantum of Solace” stars as Kate Fuller, a police psychologist called to a crime scene to A) because “You need to understand the reality of what we’re dealing with,” and B) talk a frightened little girl (Mackenzie Imsand) into saying who she saw do it. The cops are sure Mommy  Helena (Rosie Fellner) is the one who twisted Daddy’s neck.

Helena is alternately catatonic and hysterical. Sophie has her own answer to “Who hurt Daddy?”

“Mara!”

The detective (Lance E. Nichols, good) may want to label Helena a “certifiable fruit loop.” But Dr. Fuller hears her out.

“There was something EVIL in the room! And then I heard this awful music. And then I saw her, as real as you’re sitting there. MARA. I KNOW how this sounds!”

Kate immerses herself in sleep paralysis — talking to experts, sitting in on a support group. And that’s when she starts hearing noises in her house, seeing things in her tub, wondering how that glass of red wine shattered.

Supernatural thrillers like this require an “explainer,” and than man is a suspect. “Dougie” is British, lives like a hermit, “off the grid” and takes over the support group AND the movie as horror veteran Craig Conway (“Doomsday,” Estranged”) goes full-tilt crazy on everybody.

“She’s a DEMON! Whatever you do, do NOT sleep! Mara is REAL!”

Dougie pulls his eyelid down to show a blood blotch on the hidden part of the eyeball.

“Once you’re marked, that’s it. It’s over.”

“Mara” stumbles along between loving closeups of Kurylenko sleeping, extreme closeups of her waking in a start, stalked by this hairy skinny/bendy wraith that crawls through sheets and shower curtains.

The puzzle of the plot is far more interesting than frightening. Dougie has been taking the “Beautiful Mind” approach to “finding the connection.” He’s the one who gives us the etymology of this “demon,” the one who brings up this painting, now at the Detroit Institute of Art.

Director Clive Tonge, who also came up with the story, was onto something. The picture has a clever hook.

The deaths are grisly and flashes of closed-circuit TV footage deliver flickers of fright.

But there’s a reason those “Ring” and “Grudge” and many similar pictures make the demon zip into and across the frame. It’s a lot scarier than having this thing walk/stagger via insectoid joints, even if that’s the whole idea behind a nightmare that paralyzes — we see what’s coming, and we’re powerless to flee.

But when you slow everything to sleepwalk pacing, you deflate the frights and strip away the urgency that we and the characters should feel, the sense that something terrible is coming, that time is running out.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing violent images, and language

Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Lance E. Nichols, Craig Conway

Credits:Directed by Clive Tonge, script by Jonathan Frank. A Saban Films release.

Running time:1:39

The silly, chaste musicals of Bollywood could not be further removed from “Garbage,” a tedious, tawdry and torturous take on India’s gender wars from the director who bills himself as “Q.”

Qaushiq Mukherjee has written and directed a gruesome and explicit tale of sex slavery, religious fanaticism, torture and revenge. It lives on the cusp of excruciating as Q tries to make us his mind what unpleasantness he’s going to show us next.

“At the peak of India’s gender wars,” an opening title informs us, the “battleground is the vagina.”

What does this have to do with Phanishwar (Tanmay Dhanania), a Goa taxi driver whose main job is taking tourists to the red light district?

He listens to sermons by a blind ultra-conservative Hindu cleric (Satchit Puranik) and puts out a seriously pervy vibe, even to the coked-up foreigners who ride with him. If they only knew. What’s he keep a pickax in his trunk for?

Phanishwar has a woman (Satarupa Das) chained up at home. He doesn’t speak to her, and she doesn’t speak at all. Semi-nude, feral, she is held by a simple snap shackle which makes one question the psychological bonds of slavery, as well as her intelligence.

Rami (Trimala Adhikari) is a young woman on the run. There’s a viral video of her in a threesome flooding over India’s internet. At the very least, we’re seeing her intoxicated and taken advantage of, at worst — assaulted.

She has fled to Goa to hide. Phanishwar picks her up, delivers her to a rental house and lets her lean on him in her time of need. But he’s seen the video. Phanishwar’s favorite hobbies are online porn and posting hateful, judgmental comments on posts by others on social media. A classic fanatic, he’s a flaming hypocrite.

“Flaming” is what he feels when he urinates, as well. It isn’t just misguided religious devotion that makes him what he is. He’s sick, and in a man’s eyes, sick where it counts.

Rami’s odyssey sees her endure harassment every time she goes out. Once, he is rescued from piggishly persistent men by the lesbian Simone (Gitanjali Dang), who before she takes her home for some alone time, motorbikes them to the vast dump.

“Garbage knows garbage,” she says. “I know what I am.”

Rami stares at ceiling fans, as if wonder if they’d hold her weight should she tie a noose She confronts video harassers. And she buys a cage.

Q suggests Rami is being victimized for being modern, sexually active, curious and prone to bad decisions. She is contrasted with Phanishwar, superstitious, patriarchal Old India, a man who relies on faith and absurd (and graphically sexual) folk cures.

We get it. Obvious. We don’t need to return to the toilet, see fresh versions of debasement. We get the message in the parable.

This self-consciously “arty” take on gender roles, sexuality, torture and revenge features a voice of Big Sister a few times in the film. She rails against perfume and judgement, menstruation and masturbation.

A bit more effort on streamlining the plot and adhering to logic would have been a blessing. Q would rather reach for the next cheap, gross shock. As the lady says, “Garbage” knows what it is.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic sexual and violent content, drug abuse

Cast: Tanmay Dhanania,Trimala Adhikari, Satchit Puranik, Satarupa Das, Gitanjali Dang

Credits: Written and directed by Qaushiq Mukherjee . An Artsploiation/Netflix- release.

Running time: 1:48

This nerdy doc from Cristina Constantini and Darren Foster opens in limited release Sept. 14.

Perfect time for something like this, I must say.

It happened Saturday. It’s keeping “Kin” out of the top ten. Still pulling in viewers on a fraction of the screens it held when it opened. In June.

In art, the story of the artist, their “journey,” trials and narrative can often overwhelm the work itself.

That was never going to happen to Yayoi Kusama.

She might be an art product of wartime Japan, a publicity hungry provocateur of the New York of the ’60s whose failure to break through led to suicide attempts.

She might have been “rediscovered” in a Japanese mental institution — still drawing, painting, sculpting, collaging and polka-dotting away.

But the scale of the works, the innovations, the stark originality, no matter how many Oldenbergs and Warhols stole her Big Ideas, was never going to drown in “The Artist as Tragic Figure,” “The Creator as Brand.”

Almost. But not quite.

Kusama is an artist of rare obsession,, a woman “traumatized” by something which happened in a poppy field in her youth in Matsumoto, scarred for life by stumbling upon her wealthy father, in flagrante delicto with one of his many paramours. idolizing George O’Keefe, craving attention, recognition and fame so much she risked infamy and humiliation.

“Kusama: Infinity” captures the most famous female artist of the day at her peak — right now. And it remembers the 89 year-old’s half century of struggle, her artistic journey from watercolors to “infinity nets” — vast paintings of dots that challenge the viewer to decide where to look and wonder why may lie beyond. She created mirror rooms to display her soft sculptures (a cloth “accumulation” sofa now at MOMA, white-cloth-covered rowboat), matrices of flashing lights to further her explorations of the visual infinite, human bodies covered in polka dots. We see how she is ending her career as well, with large scale ceramics and the coiled fury of her anti-war collages, created in her twilight years.

At long last, when galleries from Japan to New York long refused to give her the time of day, when the only way she could get into MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) or the Venice Biennale was to crash the show with 1500 mirror balls which she rolled around in wearing first a kimono, then a leotard, when her nude art “happenings” once only got her arrested in New York, her work is selling for staggering numbers — millions.

Heather Lenz’s documentary relies mostly on Kusama, in her own words, speaking mostly Japanese about her life and the trials of her career. Experts, key friends and eyewitnesses to her slow rise recount the desperation, the many stunts she pulled to get her art — gimmicky in size and scope– noticed.

For much of her career, she has been Miró on a Christo scale, at least in ambition.

And while the psychoanalysis of an obsessive-compulsive creative’s mania and outlets for those obsessions is interesting, it’s that primer on “How to become a famous modern artist” that’s most fascinating.

Asexual in the extreme, she shamelessly courted potential patrons, playing up her exotic foreignness — kimonos, Geisha hairstyles — carried on a generally chaste affair with reclusive much-older artist Joseph Cornell for the attention and, in increasing desperation to “break through,” dabbled in nudity and publicity stunts that irritated the power structure she was hoping would embrace her.

She says that “everything is a gamble, a great leap into the unknown.” But her contemporaries — even her champions, recall how “blatant” she was at grabbing notoriety, how “aggressive” she was in pursuing patrons. Still, these are soft-gloved smackdowns, as the film entirely takes her point of view. More contrary voices would have enlivened it.

Visuals vividly demonstrate how the Modern Art Game is played. Whatever medium you work in, you are your greatest creation — hair, costume, trademark “look,” brand and pose, all vital ingredients in getting noticed and getting famous. From Gauguin to Picasso, Pollack to Schnabel, titanic ego, along with obsession and talent, is a fundamental requirement of a career.

So does having a story. Being poor, somewhat unpolished and dying young did it for Basquiat. Being prolific, ironic and an albino marked Warhol for stardom. Genius figured in, of course. But what’s marketable is “story,” and the perception of value, the art world’s embrace of your originality.

With Kusama, the older she gets, the more interesting her “story” becomes. But what makes that story connect is the art itself — dazzling, overwhelming, mesmerizing and playful. All the obsession and depression, brazenness and brass in the world wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t had the goods, all along.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Yayoi Kusama

Credits:Directed by Heather Lenz, script by Heather Lenz, Keita Ideno . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:17

More clever than funny, “The Laws of Thermodynamics” is a feature length Spanish language (Catalan?) “Big Bang Theory,” without the punchlines, rimshots and rhythms of a sitcom.

A lovelorn astrophysics grad student falls for an “It” girl model in Barcelona, and the orbits, entropy, and inevitabilities of their relationship, and those of a handful of friends, are explained by a score of scientists who run through the assorted “laws that nothing and nobody can escape.”

Vito Sanz is Manel, who is working on his thesis and “star” and director of this documentary about all he’s learned and been through, “The Laws of Thermodynamics.”

He puzzles over these laws and how they work on our own emotional behavior, and stands outside the calamity of pursuing and winning — briefly — the fair Elena (Berta Vázquez). She is a model, and here’s how they meet.

Every man on a city square in Barcelona is distracted by the stunning vision of her on a digital billboard. Several notice the real Elena walking, smoking and staring into her phone beneath that billboard. A whole collection of people, including lawyer Eva (Vicky Luengo) and his rival-pal, the hunky womanizing ad-man Pablo (Chino Darín) literally crash into each other and Elena — the men distracted, poor Eva trapped in their collision.

Shockingly, Elena responds to Manel’s average looks and above average brains, and they connect. He bails out of a previous relationship, lured into her “orbit.” Every hetersexual man in that corner of Catalunya is drawn, by gravity, to her.

A clever moment — a special effect/graphic representation pf orbits around Elena on the dance floor of a vast, crowded Barcelona club.

It’s a movie peppered with explanations of the numbered laws of thermodynamics, the Law of Quantum Entanglement by scientists from the University of Cambride, University of Madrid, University of Durham, astrophysicists from the big Canary Islands telescope, etc.

The scientists speak English, Elena, Manel and those in their orbit speak Spanish with English subtitles.

Manel is a teaching assistant in a college thermodynamics course and working on his thesis. Pablo is working on sleeping with a lot of beautiful women.

And Elena chooses Manel, even as we learn that “”energy transforms” in atoms, the universe and love, that “the quality of the energy” changes if not the actual amount of it (quantity), that “inertia” and “entropy” set in as love turns into indifference.

“This bunch of organized atoms has decided it needs to go to the bathroom,” she says.

Einstein and Kepler, Copernicus and Newton are quoted and Elena submits to Manel’s charms, his analysis of the state and position in the energy-cycle of their relationship, until she gets offered first a short film, and then a feature.

We hear about “the degradation of good energy into a form of heat” and see how it plays out in relationships — Pablo and Eva tapping intosexual “heat,” even though it is “random, inefficient” and winds up in “entropy …useless, wasted energy.”

In other words, “Maybe we should try a threesome.”

Writer-director Mateo Sanz exhausts us with all these academics, shortchanging the development of on-screen relationships thanks to endless voice-over (and on-camera) analysis.

Maybe on paper, these scientists playing it straight and explaining to the layman this corner of physics while Manel, Elena, Pablo, Eva and Raquel collide, separate, entangle and explode (a nuclear bomb that goes off in the heart, consumes a cafe, then a quarter of the city) was hilarious.

“You’re going a little fast for me. Come up with some laws of physics to explain to me how I am supposed to react.” Elena gets spooked by his second law of thermodynamics theory suggests they’ve reached “peak energy,” and that all that follows will be entropy.

The performances, game as most of them are, cannot overcome this. All this science laid over a romantic comedy is a bit of a bore. There’s too little of Manel’s manic efforts, trying too hard to cook for and keep entertained a girlfriend whose different priorities, narcissism and shallowness mean she is certain to be lured away by another man trapped in her orbit, one as good looking and shallow as she is, one who could help her career.

One winning moment that isn’t followed through rt payoff is Elena, beautiful and thus living a life without consequences, introduces “entropy”into Manel’s ordered, orderly apartment — chaos and disorder ensue.

Another has Pablo dancing on a double decker bus and taking a fall, with graphics illustrating the physics of how various onlookers (his girlfriend, his lover) see his plummet (straight down, or in an arc).

Aside from that, there’s nothing here that takes “Laws” to “peak energy,” even as “Entropy” has prematurely settled in making all that follows just tedious.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Vito Sanz, Berta Vázquez, Chino Darín |

Credits: Written and directed by Mateo Sanz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

She’s played a prima ballerina fated to be “The Black Swan,” why not a pop star of the Gaga/Xtina variety?

“Vox Lux” hasn’t got a lot of info floating around about it. Just Portman replacing Rooney Mara in the lead role, with Jude and Jennifer Ehle in support.

A  film festival movie probably looking for a real distributor, Venice/Toronto etc.

Amandla Stenberg is the biracial/looks black teen trapped in Hitler Youth era Germany in this drama, also starring Abbie Cornish.

“Where Hands Touch” would have to be a true story or inspired by one, right? Germany’s official hatred of anybody who resembled Jesse Owens in the least.

I’ve always wondered about this, historically, and a quick search turns up suggestions of “thousands of black people” living in Germany when Hitler came to power.

So, true story or not, “It could have happened” backs this one up. It’s headed for the Toronto Film Festival and general release.

Those “Crazy Rich Asians” keep pulling in the audience, losing virtually no momentum, weekend to weekend, heading towards a $150-175 million total take at this rate.

Labor Day Weekend is no different from the previous two weekends, barely a 5-6% drop off, $23.7 million Deadline.com is projecting, based on Friday and pre-sales for the weekend ahead.

Add in Labor Day Monday and it could reach as high as $30 million. It’s officially a phenomenon. Pity the movie’s not funnier, “crazier.” 

“Operation Finale,” the Israelis Get Their Man thriller about the Eichmann kidnapping, had a middling mid-week opening but seems on track to do $8 million+ over four days, close to $10 since Wednesday. A pretty good thriller, great leads, good that filmgoers are finding it.

“Searching,” a big break for “Harold and Kumar/Mr. Sulu-“Star Trek” star John Cho, is managing a respectable but nothing special $4500 per screen for the three day weekend, $5.4 million over three days, $6.7 over four. A bit over-praised, I thought — a lack of building suspense and urgency, a middling lead performance and a cheat of an ending. I still say this would should have opened the week they threw all their hype at it, LAST weekend. Or move the hype to THIS weekend.

The kid-and-his-new-gun picture “Kin” is bombing, not even cracking the top ten — $3 million or so is all it is in the process of earning. James Franco as the villain isn’t exactly a draw.

“The Little Stranger” is opening to barely passable reviews and in too few theaters this weekend to register in the top ten, and we won’t know until later Saturday if it’s making any money at all. 

Maybe it’s the #MeToo eruption that Ronan Farrow kicked off with his Harvey Weinstein expose, the suction from that pulling Woody Allen down with Ronan’s ongoing accusations about a one-time father figure who can’t keep his hands (says Ronan) off children.

Maybe it’s the pervy and not exactly novel (for Woody) plotline about a leading man pursuing a sexual relationship with a girl he thinks is 15, a central feature of his latest film.

Or maybe Amazon has seen the finished film, and thought “Release this, or eat the $25 million that it cost,” and decided to chow down.

Allen’s 2018 film, “A Rainy Day in New York” won’t come out in theaters this year, may not see the light of day (not right away) on Amazon.com. And will there be future Allen/Amazon projects?

Allen already has a film allegedly in pre-production, that won’t film in time for release next year. 

An 82 going on 83-year old man with lingering accusations of sexual impropriety with a child — Allen may not get another film in the can. Toback? Polanski? Weinstein? They may all be done.

As somebody who interviewed him several times over the years, after he was forced to do press again thanks to the Mia scandal/Soon Yi marriage, and hoped against hope that the accusations were exaggerated (A lot of people did at that time, and reading Mia’s book tended to paint her as a nut.), it took me a while to get my mind around (to use an Allenism) what we were being told.

But the jig certainly seems to be up, and seriously, with all this floating around him he chooses to insert a “Manhattan II” storyline into a film? He’s begging to be banned from ever making another movie.