Movie Nation

Doc Simon’s gone.

Of course stage comedy’s most prolific modern playwright made it into his 90s (91). George Burns (“The Sunshine Boys”) would have demanded no less.
There was a stretch when you couldn’t review theater (60s-early 90s) in any town in America and not run across the sitcom-rimshot stylings of Neil “Doc” Simon. I got to the point, very quickly, where I dreaded each late spring’s announcement of this or that local company’s upcoming season — endless repeats of Neil’s greatest hits — “Barefoot” through “Biloxi,” “Star Spangled Girl” to “They’re Playing Our Song.”

Theater companies knew what the public liked, even if the public wasn’t seeing “California Suit/The Odd Couple/Last of the Red Hot Lovers” (once, I reviewed a touring production of that one with Don Knotts and Barbara Eden) for the tenth, fifteenth time.
But I watched him workshop “Jake’s Women” (starring Alan Alda and Tracy Pollan, among others) into shape and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” as he tried them out “out of town” in North Carolina, and got a kick out of his craftsmanship, his quick way with a “fix” — another funnier line to replace a less funny one.

A master of the one-liner, not terrible at plotting, and a man who never gave up on what he thought was a good idea — reworking failed shows into plays that made it to Broadway. Tony, Emmy, Golden Globe and Mark Twain and Pulitzer Prize recognition came his way. He was a man of his moment and of a lot of Broadway moments.

Not generally to my taste, but maybe he just wore me (and a lot of critics) out. Still, a funny guy to fly-on-the-wall and watch work. And “God’s Favorite,” about a modern day Job, is still a hoot, my favorite of all his plays. 

A little bit of research — sampling a summer’s worth of mostly made-for-Netflix teen comedies — reveals that “raunchy” has new goal posts, “frank sexuality” is something the ratings board is no longer holding the line on in movies for 16-and-under.

And that we’re not singing “Sixteen Candles” any more.

“F#%@ the Prom,” “The Kissing Booth,” “Adventures in Public School,” “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” “The Outcasts,” “#Realityhigh,””Alex Strangelove” and “SPF 18” — not all made for Netflix, but top trending titles that are “what the kids are watching these days” point to a sea change in a genre Hollywood only pays attention to in fits and spurts.

What rounds up an audience, streaming, is a movie with Joey King planning on giving her first BJ — maybe to a Catholic priest in training.

Blue Fox filmed “Summer of ’03,” a woman wrote and directed it (another trend in teen rom-coms) and even if this doesn’t do business in theaters. it’s going to dominate Netflix before Christmas.

One thing the many versions of the big screen apocalypse leave out? How the arrival of that other survivor, the “I’m not alone after all” moment kind of spoils blessed solitude.

Elle Fanning and Peter Dinklage figure that out in “I Think We’re Alone Now,” bleak world-emptying sci-fi coming out Sept. 21.

It’s a bit maddening, but I guess that’s how a movie about abortion should be — shout at the screen infuriating.

“Invisible” is a patient, quiet drama about a pregnant teenager in a country where abortion is illegal, but the Internet is not — Argentina.

So when Ely (Mora Arenillas) has one backseat sexual fling too many with a veterinarian she works for, part time, she’s got a pal to stand by her in their high school restroom, reading her smart phone.

It’s all there, what medication you need “in countries where abortion is illegal,” what strategy to use to procure them, lies to tell, getting “a man to pick up the medication.” black market suggestions and warnings.

Because that’s what the world is like for a woman in patriarchy where the Catholic Church controls basic human rights usually protected by government.

Ely is 17, close-mouthed and a bit of a longer, just another bored high school kid with unruly hair and a nose ring. And now there’s a fetus to be considered.

Hers isn’t the happiest life. Her mother (Mara Bestelli) is housebound, overwhelmed by depression. The father of the fetus (Diego Cremonesi) isn’t exactly somebody she can talk to, either. His dad, the veterinarian who owns the practice, seems kind. But no.

When she first visits a government clinic, the unseen counselor/nurse gives her the bum’s rush, pushing the frightened girl into scheduling an ultrasound, OB-GYN visits…

“I’m not going to have it,” is an assertion this nurse is prepared for

“Think it over. Talk with your parents. The father… Abortion is illegal in Argentina.”

So?

“Your only choice is to put the child up for adoption,” she adds (in Spanish with English subtitles) before suggesting a psychologist.

Ely isn’t telling anyone about this — not her bother, who has become a burden, or Raul the veterinarian who got her pregnant. Like girls the world over, she turns to a peer.

I apologize for not naming the sympathetic actress who plays that sounding board/classmate, but director Pablo Giorgelli, who co-wrote the script, never has anyone address her by name and doesn’t even seem to have her in the credits. Every other actress listed seems entirely too old.

If you know who the redhead is to Ely’s left, or you’re the forgetful Pablo Giorgelli and know she is, feel free to comment below. I’ve been doing this for decades and never come across a lapse in a film’s credits this boneheaded, one I couldn’t get an answer to.

We follow Ely, poker-faced but forlorn, lost in her thoughts, struggling to make a decision she’s ill-equipped to handle.

Sad and maybe a little in shock, she tunes out her classes, but we never see her weep. Ely hides her dismay, if not her despair.

An adoption agency offers to pay her for the chance to place her offspring with a paying family. She tries to power through it, a little denial (clubbing, a bar pick up), a little unload on mom time.

And then the shouting at the screen starts.

Arenillas so underplays Ely that she’s hard to get a handle on, even if our instinct is to sympathize with her plight. She is “Invisible” and a movie about someone invisible is sure to test one’s patience.

Giorgelli shoots for something less conclusive, more vague. The larger object is here showing the Byzantine steps a single woman in a country where women’s rights are circumscribed in the most basic sense.

Because Ely has nobody giving her life advice that works, no one she can rely on to transcend sexism, religious propaganda and tell her what she needs to know before deciding yea or nay on this pregnancy.

Aside from that one friend, whom Giorgelli neglects to name on screen or in the credits.

MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity, adult content

Cast: Mora Arenillas, Diego Cremonesi, Mara Bestelli

Credits:Directed by Pablo Giorgelli, script by María Laura Gargarella, Pablo Giorgelli. A FilmFactory release.

Running time: 1:27

Just a little walk in the woods — Mother, son, Mom’s best friend. Summer, a like, a little peace and quiet. What could go wrong?

You don’t know much about “Desolation” in the movies, do you?

A grieving wife (Jaime Paige), her just-turned-teen son (Toby Nichols) and her best friend (Alyshia Ochse) figure a camping trip will help one and all cope with death.

Sam is 13, looking 11, and picks this moment to start his teenage rebellion.

Abbey and BFF Jen? They share wine, smoke a little weed after the boy goes to sleep, giggle through the tears and cry their way “up the mountain.”

The kid saw someone — “The Hiker,” across the lake earlier. Dark hoodie, beard, rose-colored glasses. Kevin Smith?

Nooo. Scarier.

And he’s watching them.

The women are spooked, the lad? “He looks like a wizard.”

“You know what, let’s go — leave this guy in the dust.”

Every time they see him, he’s a bit closer. Yelling, “How’s it going?” doesn’t defuse the tension. Jen wants to confront him. Abbey doesn’t. “Because he’s weird.”

They try to outrun him, duck him. And fail. Every so often, he disappears.

The kid wants to know if they’re scared and doesn’t believe their answers.

“Should I start a fire?”

“No, not tonight sweetie.”

Late night, they’re treated to tape-recorded ’50s ballad serenades. Weird and weirder.

It’s only when they become separated, facing their terrors in the dark alone, that we get glimpses of the villain’s knife, bottles of chemicals, his shades. Hell, it IS Kevin Smith! (Claude Duhamel, actually).

A 76 minute movie has to be efficient, and “Desolation” only feels that way on occasion. It takes 20 minutes to get up and going, lots of foreshadowing — the mother packed “bear spray,” the boy has his late father’s Swiss Army knife and a yen for carving sharp sticks.

The adults are fine, the kid (“Trumbo,” TV’s “Iron Fist” and “Underground”) is on-the-money, pouty and out of his depth, eager to lose “victim” and take on “aggressor” in this dilemma.

But there’s nothing surprising in this backwoods (upstate New York) variation on a torture porn theme. The stalker doesn’t speak, the prey doesn’t shut up. They’ll never lose this guy in the woods, these noisy chatterboxes.

Even the climax has a savage predictability to it — everyone but the characters on screen can see it coming.

Netflixable? Not so much.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Alyshia Ochse, Claude Duhamel, Toby Nichols, Jaimi Paige

Credits:Directed by Sam Patton, script by Matt Anderson, Michael Larson-Kangas. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:16

Cary Grant spent the last years of his box office stardom acting in ensemble pictures, top billed, but playing second banana to the likes of Tony Curtis, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn.

When it was time to take a backseat to Jim Hutton (“Walk, Don’t Run”), Grant wasn’t stupid. He hung it up, “closed the door” as Garbo said — preserved his image for the future by not devaluing the brand with bit parts, old men who didn’t save the day or “get the girl.”

Bruce Willis is top-billed in “Reprisal,” even though he spends much of the film waiting for Frank Grillo, who plays his neighbor, to show up asking for his help. And much of the rest of the time he’s listening in, by phone, as neighbor Jacob (Grillo) chases down the bad guy who murdered people at the bank where he worked, traumatized him and made his employer and the F.B.I. wonder if he had something to do with what looked like “an inside job.”

In this, the “Death Wish” stage of the Willis career, entering his mid-60s and looking it, with more ill-conceived action pictures in the can and three more (another “Die Hard?”) in the planning, pre-production stages, you have to wonder how he’s missing the obvious.

He doesn’t have a third act in him. He stopped being funny 25 years ago, he’s never warmed to villainy, doesn’t have the grandpa/wise old man of the West, the War or The Business in his quiver.

Go ahead and prove me wrong, Bruno. But I’m looking at what you’ve done lately and what you have lined up, and I’m wondering why you’re putting yourself through it.

“Reprisal” is a dull, low-heat genre thriller presenting the formidable Grillo (Netflix “Wheelman”) as an Everyman Banker, struggling to make ends meet (Stop laughing.), trying to take care of the runway-ready wife half-his-age (Oliva Culpo) and diabetic daughter.

They’re living well, but struggling to maintain the standard of living. And Jacob? He’s showing up to work in the usual Frank Grillo stubble. Promotion material? Not hardly.

Then a ruthless robber strikes. We’ve seen him (Johnathan Schaech, who’s been hitting the gym) call in a bomb threat in the opening moments of “Reprisal.”

“There’s a bomb under the bridge, set to go off at 9 am. Which bridge is it?”

Then he plays dress-up, covered in tactical gear and mask, and storms into Cincinnati bank — shooting a guard, handing out note cards with instructions –“Open the safe,” is one, and if they hesitate, “Open the f—–g safe” is the second.

The robbery has a little juice to it, some of it shot with a GoPro gun-sight First Person Shooter POV, the robber firing off rounds and pounding on metal doors, desks, etc., to keep the hostages rattled.

Jacob is as rattled as they get. Then the FBI interrogators seem both sympathetic and suspicious. He’s put on unpaid leave.

“I should’ve DONE something” is his survivor’s guilt. But the Feds and maybe his employers think he might have had something to do with the planning, so that’s his other nightmare.

Lucky thing he’s got a retired cop (Willis) for a neighbor. They talk through Jacob’s memories of the robbery, fix on details and start their own “investigation.”

There’s a little PD slang — “BOLO” (Be on the Lookout/APB) — a little background to “motivate” the trigger-happy shooter/robber (We see him visit his Silver Star honored Marine Corps vet father, half-demented in a nursing home).

And there’s a cute montage, set to music, of Jacob and neighbor James obsessively reasoning out clues, looking for patterns in this guy’s robberies, as Schaech’s shooter diagrams a future heist, marking out doorways, walls, etc on a warehouse floor, putting targets where there would be human “obstacles.” He does a live-fire rehearsal of all the folks he might have to shoot, next time. As I said, “cute.”

Jacob’s sniffing around gets BadGuy attention, and not remembering he’s the murderous instigator of all this, BadGuy vows “an eye for an eye.”

There’s virtually nothing to distinguish “Reprisal” from a thousand other cop-vs-robber B pictures, except for the violence. Schaech stands out from the cast, a wound-up psychopath who won’t brook “disrespect” for his old man in the home, but manhandles and murders the rest of humanity as if by entitlement.

Grillo isn’t bad, but he gives us nothing much to hang onto here. We see his dilemma, but not his angst. As I said, Netflix “Wheelman.” Fiftysomething Frank gets it done in that one, even without a 26 year-old wife.

And Willis? Don’t be fooled by the action image above. He’s a bystander, here. and if he’s not careful, it’s these last five years of bad-and-worse movies, the “diva” gossip which won’t go away, which he’ll be remembered for, and not “Yippee ki yay” after all.

An Action Diva in Winter isn’t pretty.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Bruce Willis, Frank Grillo, Olivia Culpo, Natali Yura, Johnathan Schaech

Credits:Directed by Brian A. Miller, script by Bryce Hammons. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Last year this weekend, the last full weekend in August, represented an historic box office low with the top dozen titles drawing filmgoers at a rate not seen in decades.

It’s always one of the weakest moviegoing weekends of the year.

This year, “Crazy Rich Asians” is here to stanch the bleeding, heading towards a second weekend scarcely missing a beat from its opening frame. The upbeat family rom-com with an all-Asian cast and Chinese diaspora setting did $26 million and change last weekend, and is doing over $25 million in business this weekend, per Deadline.com. That’s a 4% falloff, at this point.

Perhaps every Hollywood exec should cancel that Labor Day vacation, or come back to work early (a safer bet) and push the whole studio system into beating the bushes looking for the next “Asians.” Yeah, that will produce sequels (Kevin Kwan wrote a trilogy of books, and is about to get J.K. Rowling rich, or close to it).

Deadline calls “Crazy Rich” the “Black Panther” for the Asian community. I still say it’s a “Big Fat Greek Wedding” for that corner of the audience, a picture with general interest amusement as well as cultural significance to its subject audience.

The Chinese-financed robot dog movie “A.X.L.” suggests that the Exotic East’s financiers need protection from Hollywood hustlers when it comes to picking material. The fact this is earning over $2 million is something of a miracle, a real “Dog of August.” Who talked
Global Road into this? Suckers.

Keeping with a theme, the other big Warner-distributed/Chinese financed hit of the month, “The Meg,” is maintaining audience and will clear $100 million Sunday –– another $11 million this weekend. This pic is a real triumph of marketing. It’s not as funny as its trailers, not that entertaining. But people are very slow to catch on when TV commercials stretch the truth.

Which brings us to August’s new nickname — “STX month.” A newish distributor whose biggest hit was “Bad Moms,” Chinese-backed Hollywood operation that produced “Edge of Seventeen” and “Adrift” and a lot of fare virtually nobody saw, now has “Mile 22,” a Mark Wahlberg bomb, and “The Happytime Murders,” a Melissa McCarthy bomb, in theaters at the same time.

“Happytime” cost $40, a lot when you consider its a dirty Muppet movie. It was projected to do $13-15 this weekend, and will barely clear $10. 

But STX has a deal with Jason Statham, and “The Meg” just boosted his stock again. So stay tuned.

Screen Gems has what might be another Asian-influenced winner on its hands with “Searching,” good reviews, a career kick for John Cho? But platforming the opening, 9 theaters in a couple of cities, is proving to be a bust with a $4,000 per screen average for the weekend. Keep it out of the way of “Crazy Rich” and even “Happytime” might pay off. Or maybe this was going to be an impossible sell — father searching for his daughter, discovering her online “life” — at this time of year.

Bleecker Street was right to abandon “Papillon” in late August. Not on a huge number of screens, this misfire could have cracked the top ten on the weakest weekend of the year, and won’t.

He’s got a face made for horror films, the voice, too. This Brit thriller (They ‘ave no possums in Jolly Olde, guvnah!) looks perverse.

“Possum” opens in the UK in time for Halloween. Alun Armstrong also stars.

The toughest action pic ever filmed in Cincinnati? VOD and limited theatrical next weekend.

Peter Hedges is that rare screenwriter and director whose movies are about character and emotion and family, old grievances and new hope, a sense of place.

He scripted “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” based on his novel, and wrote and directed “Pieces of April” and “Dan in Real Life,” and hasn’t had a big screen project since the resonant but unsuccessful, honestly-titled “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.”

Look at his emotionally-available movies and it’s easy to see how Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges is a chip off the old block.

And when your son is Lucas, fresh off the Oscar-nominated breakout turn in “Manchester by the Sea,” and “LadyBird” and everything he touches gets noticed, Dad can get his calls returned and land Julia Roberts, who is rumored to be behind the awards-season push of this prodigal son tale — “Ben is Back.”

The trailer doesn’t give away much, but pedigree speaks volumes, here. A good cry? Put money on it.

Look for “Ben is Back” Dec. 7.