Movie Nation

Good actors making their living in the nether regions of the cinematic mainstream are an ongoing fascination for me.

Nicolas Cage, Oscar winner and C-movie mainstay, John Cusack donning and endless selection of baseball caps to hide the inevitabilities of time, filming in BFE Australia or Argentina, Wesley Snipes in exile, any actress over 40 who finds a way to put off a cable series or endless “Blue Bloods” “recurrings — take on the characteristics of the characters they play.

Drifting, staying employed, working in the less fashionable corners of South Africa, Australia or Romania, cashing Chinese production company checks just to keep going.

Ethan Hawke‘s a drunken, grieving hit-man who loses a gunfight on the job and gets a second lease on life via science in “24 Hours to Live,” a Chinese-financed/South African  thriller.

We meet him on the beach in the Florida Keys — one of those Coast of Namibia locales that looks nothing like the Florida Keys. He’s drunk with an old pal (Rutger Hauer), a sage who counsels, “You have no SOUL,” and “All rivers run into the sea, if the sea is not full.”

Travis (Hawke) has to pour his wife and son’s ashes into the aptly-named Hawk Channel, or what passes for it, and get back to work — “Wet Work.”

So much for feeling sorry for him. He’s a high-priced hitman sent to silence a witness (Tyrone Keogh) in the custody of an Interpol agent (Xu Qing) in Africa. The mercenary contracting firm “Red Mountain” (Blackwater?) needs this done to cover up its crimes in Africa.

That’s how Travis “dies,” seducing and then getting shot by Agent Lin (Qing). Until Dr. Helen (Nathalie Boltt of “Riverdale”) brings him back. With a catch. The drug and surgery cocktail wh administered “has a built-in fail-safe.”

He’s only got “24 Hours to Live.”

Hawke has to shoot, stab and otherwise mayhem his way out of the the Red Mountain “treatment” center and make some use of his last 24 hours. He hallucinates visions of his dead wife and son, stare at the handy 24 hour digital clock stitched into his arm and right some of the wrongs of his life.

So it’s “D.O.A.” or “Crank” or any movie about the doomed trying to get even, get some peace or get some more time and maybe a little redemption for their past sins in the process.

Travis races the hired killers who have taken over his contract through South Africa, lawless South African traffic and the same green 1999 Jeep Cherokee that shows up in background shot after background shot.

He has flashbacks of every killing he’s ever carried out, every memory of his late lady love. And he’s going to “save” the man he was hired to kill and the woman who “killed” him.

For a few hours, at least.

“We need to get you to a hospital.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

Paul Anderson plays Jim the rival hit man with a posh South African office with a view (which he trashes) on their trail. A cute touch? The phone password each man uses to check in with their employers.

Travis? “Yankees Suck.”

Jim? “Red Sox Suck.”

Yeah, they’re both right.

It’s strictly C-movie stuff, all shootouts and chases and hallucinations. It brings to mind a couple of later films starring the late Paul Walker, “Hours” and “Vehicle 19.”

Hawke manages a few grace notes, Qing, first seen in The West in “Life on a String,” best-known for “Looper,” handles the action scenes well, and speaks in a Hong Kong British accent that seems dubbed, but may not be. Nigerian actor Hakeem Kae-Kazim makes a wonderful impression as a South African underworld figure who knows where the bodies are buried. Formidable Irish character actor Liam Cunningham is the perfectly-bearded Mr. Big villain in charge.

Townships, slo-mo shootouts, Afrikaans’ accented mercenaries and “evidence” transported in a succession of SUV convoys , a kidnapping and absurd coincidences, the action movie cliches are folded into some pretty decent local color and some of the more obvious “obligatory Chinese content” you’ll see.

Can’t say it’s all that because it isn’t. But for fans of the very narrow subgenre I outlined in the opening paragraph, it’s a tolerable Hawke time-killer.

MPAA Rating:R for strong bloody violence throughout, language and some drug use

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Xu Qing, Paul Anderson, Rutger Hauer

Credits:Directed by Brian Smrz , script by on Mita, Jim McClain, Zach Dean.. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

Clancy Brown is getting a lot of off-Hollywood work these days. The “Shawshank” star’s long been a favorite of mine.

In “SuperCon” he plays a beloved but hateful genre-picture star — think Ron Perlman/Bruce Campbell/Shatner — whose bounty for autographs becomes the target of a group of convention-goers planning a heist.

John Malkovich, Russell Peters, Mike Epps and Maggie Grace — as the Fanboy’s Fantasy — star in this farce, which of course has to fall all over itself to avoid copyright infringement.

“Supercon” opens April 27 in “select cities.

Vera Farmiga’s a single-mom — some sort of therapist, I gather from the trailer — whose aged father (Christopher Plummer) is a stoner/pot dealer/true believer from way back.

She and her son get re-acquainted, “Road Trip” style, when they have to take the whimsical, blissed out old Buddhist in by driving his ancient Roller (Rolls-Royce) cross country. Bobby Cannavale is her ex, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Fonda are  dad’s old pot-growing/loving/distributing pals.

Looks too cute for its own good, but elderly folks on road trips is totally a thing. At the movies, anyway. “Boundaries” comes our way in limited release in June.

The passe comic pair who gave us “Never Been Kissed” tamp down Amy Schumer’s go-to coarseness into PG-13 territory for “I Feel Pretty,” an almost-empowering, never-quite-hilarious farce that gets by on charm.

That’s right. Schumer comes off as shockingly sweet–Drew Barrymore sweet — in this film about a plus-size woman who discovers her sexual mojo, her confidence and herself when brain trauma makes her think she’s Fashion Week material.

Co-writer/directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein pack a lot of body image/self-confidence/skinny-sexy classism into this one. And if it’s not exactly the rawdog confessional “Trainwreck” was, it’s measurably more palatable than “Snatched,” even if Schumer has to dial back the Big and Sexy, Get Used to It vulgarian that’s been Schumer’s bread and butter.

She plays Rene Bennett, mild-mannered website worker for famed fashion line Lily LeClaire.  She works in a Chinatown storefront with tech troll Mason (Adrian Martinez, always good for laughs) and dreams of making it into the home office up on Fifth Avenue.

She is, like her besties (Busy Philips and Aidy Bryant), aspirational. All she wants is clothes that fit, attention-getting makeup, a fun job, a little respect and a beau. But if you don’t look like say, Emily Ratajkowski or Naomi Campbell, you’re invisible — on dating websites, in New York bars and at Lily LeClaire, whose offices are populated with a vast selection of the world’s skinniest and most put-together runway ready bombshells.

“No one even reads the profiles” on those dating sites, she gripes. And she’s right. A culture that worships the superficial doesn’t even see her. But she tries. She’s downmarket fashionable, and thick-featured or not, she’s fit. She never misses a Soul Cycle class.

But that’s where everything changes fo her, a transformation that’s wholly within her head because she’s had it bashed pretty good by getting it caught in those Soul Cycle pedals. This is where Schumer shines, utterly selling the narcissism that sweeps over Rene when she looks in the mirror and sees someone like Emily Ratajkowski (“Blurred Lines”), who happens to be on the cycle next to her.

“I’m BEAUTIFUL!”

Just having confidence in her appearance transforms her life. She’s instantly entitled. Every guy is whistling at HER, every door is being held open for HER. And that cute dorky CNN editor (Rory Scovel) in line behind her at the dry cleaners? He’s hitting on HER.

Actually, he isn’t, and that’s the best running gag in the picture. He’s a bit scared, thrown on his heels by her chutzpah, like everybody she meets. Rene, presentable enough to not scare the horses, is still the ONLY one who thinks, “Guys, I’m a KARDASHIAN! One of the JENNER ones!”

Oscar winner Michelle Williams trots out a Kardashian Era mousy voice (with vocal fry) as Avery, the heir to the Lily LeClaire thrown her grandmother (Lauren Hutton) still sits upon. She latches onto Rene as her conduit to the sort of down-market (Target) customer the “elitist bitches” makeup company now wants to “pivot” to embrace.

“Regular girls put on their makeup in the rearview,” Rene reports. And Lily LeClaire listens.

There’s a giggle of a scene where Rene brazenly interviews for the front desk receptionist job at the company, a job held by a succession of would-be models. “Yes, modeling IS an option for me,” she brags — to the CFO (Supermodel Naomi Campbell) and CEO (Williams).

A beachside bar bikini contest brings out Rene’s “Flashdancer” delusions. In such scenes, riffing, dancing and dousing herself, Schumer lays it all out there.

The picture stops almost dead in its tracks at the 90 minute mark as we see Rene almost become the sort of dismissive “normal” beauty we’ve seen put her down. Tom Hopper is the other LeClaire heir, a louche hunk who, like many others, finds Rene refreshing and charming.

Of course too much of the edge the picture needs to truly make a comment on the objectification of women, body shaming and the class wars that we’re all subjected to by Beautiful People is rubbed off.

But Bryant, Philips (married to co-director Silverstein), Schumer and Williams all score points on these subjects, just not slam dunks.

And Schumer comes off downright demure at times, no mean feat for a woman who gained fame via a TV series whose title wasn’t so much an innuendo as a come-on — “Inside Amy Schumer.”

Maybe its by design, as she’s one of the most divisive comics working today, no matter what the box office take of “Trainwreck” was. But even with much of her edge smoothed over, Schumer is still reasonably funny. Who knew she could be charming, too?

(So is Amy Schumer in trouble?)

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sexual content, some partial nudity, and language

Cast: AMy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Lauren Hutton, Rory Scovel, Tom Hopper, Busy Phillips, Aidy Bryant, Naomi Campbell

Credits: Written and directed by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein An STX release.

Running time: 1:46

Step right up, friends, for a dose of good ol’fashioned self-indulgent rock star movie making.

Yessiree Bob, if Dylan could make “Reynoldo & Clara” and Morrison “HWY: An American Pastoral,” and John Mellancamp and others have taken their shots, why shouldn’t Neil Young get around to one? Get his movie-savvy new lady love Daryl Hannah to “write” and direct it.

Jonathan Demme’s dead, so Young’s number one fan, the fellow who made something like 47 documentaries about the iconoclastic Canadian country rocker, wasn’t available.

“Paradox” is sort of a cinematic flip book companion piece to Young’s “Paradox” album. And it’s mess, son.

Even getting into the whole mismatched film stocks, impressionistic vibe Hannah tries to weave out of the footage, this fails.

Random close-ups of sheep, caterpillars and crickets, improvised recitations and some pretty representative Young music, when they drop the pretense of this “Outlaws on the mountain, mining for gold” in a steam-punk plugged-in version of the New Old West.

Lovely cinematography — time-lapse sunsets, sunrises, Neil loaded down like a highwayman who’s lost his horse, trudging through snow, geese on the river and colts nuzzling each other in the corral, steam engines and busted telephones.

The Nelson Brothers (Willie’s boys, in Neil’s “Paradox” band) exchange witticisms, dolled up as the desperadoes “Jailtime” and “The Particle Kid,” in an outhouse where sandpaper passes for Charmin.

“Law and order? ANARCHY rules!”

“That’s an oxymoron!”

“What’d you CALL me?”

Other members of the band, basically Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real recruited for this project, play cowpokes and camp cooks.

None of it makes so much as a lick of sense, though the lived-in looking Old West town looks right, and Willie shows up for a cameo (He voices-over the opening narration, too.). Willie’s kid singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” by the campfire is magical.

When we get to the recording session set up in a tent, with all the comforts of Sound City or Nashville, and on into concert scenes,  you’d hope that Neil would lose the brand-new gunbelt and six-shooters and the dreams of bank holdups with Willie. Nope.

But as the man says, “Sometimes things gotta go south a’fore they go north.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, guns, scatological humor

Cast: Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Lucas Nelson, Micah Nelson, Tato Melgar

Credits: Written and directed by Daryl Hannah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18

Danes is the concerned mother, Parsons is the more “accept whatever comes” father, a tolerant couple in the Big City looking at pricy private schools for a boy who likes to dress up like a ballerina, or princess.

Parsons runs up against his deeply-burned-in TV persona and the very out public gay one in playing this father who might be inclined to blame his ever-more-concerned-wife (Danes) for their boy’s effeminate behavior.

Octavia Spencer and Ann Dowd and Priyanka Chopra also star in this June 1 release, based on Daniel Pearle’s play.

A little rude, a lot crude and heaping helping of Steve Coogan winces and Paul Rudd double-takes are what this trailer promises. Will “Ideal Home” pass the Alison Pill “Child Services” test? We’ll find out June 21.

Here’s a peek inside the Nobel Prizes folded into a marital melodrama that pairs up Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce.

He’s the “Great Writer,” she’s the former student who married her teacher, but who was probably a talented writer in her own right — until the wedding.

Christian Slater is the reporter unpeeling the layers of their lives, and the nature of the relationship. Elizabeth McGovern is the mentor “The Wife” then “The Student” didn’t listen to.

“The Wife” goes into limited release Aug. 3, on the cusp of Awards Season.

Here’s a pet peeve about the acting one typically sees in horror movies.

Few performers take things far enough to give us a sense of what it would be like to confront the truly unexplainable. An encounter with some supernatural threat, one might think, would induce shaking, gasping, gulping, pants-wetting terror. Eyes wide, almost immobilized by shock, jaw-agape, Danny-in-“The Shining,” the works.

The British import “Ghost Stories” is one of the few films since “Blair Witch” to truly get it. A collection of chilling run-ins with ghosts and maybe the supernatural are remembered by the people whose psyches were gutted by the experience. It’s a quiet, hair-raising thriller that fills one with dread and makes you appreciate how destructive just such event would be in a person’s life, even if the rest of us don’t believe them, especially if we don’t believe them.

Andy Nyman plays a professional TV debunker of the supernatural, exposing fraudulent psychics, explaining away phenomena “experienced” by those who often turn out to have manufactured it for personal gain or fame.

Professor Goodman’s “Psychic Cheats” career began with his father’s fanatical (Jewish) religious beliefs “which destroyed our family.” Life experiences that followed solidified Goodman’s conviction that “We have to be very careful in what we believe” because “The brain sees what it wants to see.”

His idol, the one who pointed him in the direction his life would take, was a Scottish TV presenter/debunker named Cameron, a man who disappeared years ago, never to be found.

Until a tape arrives on Goodman’s desk, a hoarse whisper asking to see him, directing him to a tatty travel trailer (caravan) on the Scottish coast. That’s where he meets the gnomish recluse, Cameron.

“I just presumed you were dead,” Goodman offers.

“‘Ow d’ye knooo that I’m NOT?”

Goodman gushes over the legend who coined the phrase “existential terror,” but Cameron insults him back, for his “arrogance,” his “disrespect” for the people who say they’ve experienced something unexplainable.

He shoves a battered binder in Goodman’s hands, three cases he himself could never explain. “The supernatural…is REAL. I need you to tell me I’m wrong!”

Co-writers/directors Jeremy Dyson and Nyman, working from their play, rely more on atmosphere and mood than startling effects to get their frights. It’s the dark dread of that first case, a former night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) at an abandoned women’s mental hospital (why such a place needs a watchman is anybody’s guess), that raises the hair on the back of your neck.

Glimpses of a patient in yellow through the gathering gloom, skittering, scampering noises, low moans and pounding at the door of the watchman’s guard office might be enough. Anything beyond that, a taste of the terror of “The Ring” and its imitators, is icy icing on the cake.

Whitehouse plays this Tony Matthews as a man absolutely broken by this “event,” devastated and embittered by personal loss, a devastation compounded by what he says he’s seen.  Goodman’s interrogation with the man’s credulous priest (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) does nothing to convince him that what Matthews described really happened.

But he and we are shaken to our bones by Case #2, Simon Rifkin. Alex Lawther of “The Imitation Game” and “Goodbye, Christopher Robin,” is a quivering pile of tics, winces and paranoid nerves. He’s a very young man who hit something with the family car on a lonely forest road late one night, and now he’s holed up in an over-heated basement room, fortified against the chill he feels almost constantly, staring at every convincing, affirming Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell and the Devil he’s been able to print out from the Internet and paste on the walls.

He weeps. He stammers. He can barely get through his account of what he saw, the car breaking down and the confrontation with “evil” he is dead certain he had.

This is “Blair Witch/Insidious” level terror and Lawther’s performance of it becomes a new yardstick to measure horror genre acting against.

The third “case,” involving a high finance whiz (Martin Freeman), he and his wife’s desperate attempts to have a baby and the terrors that come with that, is the least convincing, even as it leads Goodman into examining the life of debunking he’s pursued and his own darker motives.

The film Nyman and Dyson have cooked up has healthy dollops of foreshadowing, and even a rare “flash forward” (as opposed to flashback) when we’re teased with terrors to come.

The settings –day and night — are uniformly spooky and forlorn, and Nyman ably suggests a doubter who, like John Cusack in “1408,” comes to doubt his doubting.

Freeman has fun with the showiest role, glibly observing that “You’re supposed to feel safe in your own home,” even as he beats back the madness that must be gripping him to accept seeing what he’s seen, experiencing what he say he’s experienced.

Few horror movies hold up under close-examination and dissection. But “Ghost Stories” has the goods to occasionally creep out even the most jaded gene viewer, something each year’s cinematic bumper crop of “Boo” rarely achieves.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, frightening images, profanity

Cast: Martin Freeman, Andy Nyman, Alex Lawther, Paul Whitehouse

Credits:Written and directed by Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman, based on their play. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:38

The human computers of “Hidden Figures” aren’t the only “forgotten women” of the early days of America’s space program.

While the names of the Mercury Seven, the crack fighter-jocks/test pilots turned astronauts are chiseled into history, with monuments for them prominent on America’s “Space Coast” (Titusville, Cocoa Beach, Fla.), the “Mercury 13” were a shadow group, not utterly unknown at the time, but almost erased from history as the space program’s story has been told.

“Mercury 13” is an inspiring, brisk remembrance of this group, the best female pilots America could muster in the late 1950s, women summoned for testing by the same physician/scientist NASA put in charge of drawing up physical and mental tests to see which male pilots would be best suited for space travel.

Dr. Randy Lovelace’s Lovelace Clinic, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recruited women like Sarah Ratley, “Wally” Funk, Jerrie Cobb and Janie Hart to come in, and without NASA knowing about it, go through the same rigorous regimen that John Glenn, Gordon Cooper and the Mercury Seven endured.

Co-directors Heather Walsh and David Sington trace this story from the brassy, older and outspoken Jacqueline Cochran, a Florida born airplane racer who went on to run the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II. She’s the Chuck Yeager of this version of “The Right Stuff,” the best of the best. And the moment we hear one of the pilots she inspired describe first hearing her over her airplane radio, we know why she never got to space. An overheard conversation between an Ohio air traffic control tower and Cochran leads to an attempt to re-direct her to the runway she is supposed to land on.

“‘I’ll land on any goddamned runaway I like,” she drawls back. No, not NASA material.

But the women whom she inspired earned their wings, endured the “image” America was comfortable with as far as women in the cockpit were concerned (a dress, pearls, high heels, dabbing makeup on before take-off) and prejudice and discovered that they were every bit as good as their male counterparts in many regards, superior in others.

If you remember NASA history, or “The Right Stuff” version of it, you’ll recall the isolation tank endurance contests the Mercury Seven faced. The women rode out their time alone in a breeze.

As Janie Hart, a Senator’s wife and the only mother in the Mercury 13 cracked, “With eight kids at home, you’d want to go to the moon, too.”

Sexism is the easy answer about why we haven’t heard much about these women. When NASA got wind of Good Dr. Lovelace’s experiments, they kiboshed the whole thing. But the 13 got a Congressional hearing (a Senator’s wife can make that happen), TV interviews and a lot of attention when the brakes were put on this project in 1961.

And then the Russians put a female skydiver into orbit in 1963, and made us look like chauvinist boobs. Gordon Cooper’s crack that “We could have sent a woman” on an earlier test flight, one “flown” by a test chimp, is so cringe-worthy as to actually be hilarious, if not in the way he intended.

The film’s shortcomings stem from its narrow point of view. We hear from the surviving pilots, or their widow or children. No outside historian, no expert on the era is here to correct the “Looking at the past through the values of the present” error in the thinking. No woman at the time was allowed to be a military pilot, few if any women had flight hours in jets, NASA didn’t need the funding-drawing distraction of a “battle of the sexes” PR game playing out while it was focused on beating the Russians to the Moon. “Limited opportunities” worked against them. But less so on those who followed.

What’s inspiring is what these women did with their frustration. They got certified to fly jets. They took jobs with major aviation companies. One went on to co-found the National Organization for Women.

And decades later, the “Mercury 13” started getting their due in the ’90s, when the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle took off. This illuminating, artful and inspiring film completes that process.

A gender is a terrible thing to waste. Especially in space.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild profanity

Cast: Wally Funk, Gene Nora Jessen, Sarah Ratley, Myrtle Cagle, Eileen Collins

Credits:Directed by David Sington, Heather Walsh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18