Movie Nation

Of all the lies the movies sell us over and over again, the myth of “total recall” — flashbacks, interrogations, reminiscences — may be the most pernicious.

“Memory,” as the star of of “Memento,” Guy Pearce, says in “Spinning Man,” is the least reliable, most problematic area of understanding in the brain. Our mind plays tricks on us, our memories cannot be trusted.

As a college philosophy professor suspected of murder, that’s Evan Burch’s crutch and his defense, although even his wife (Minnie Driver) calls his “absent-minded professor act” played.

“Spinning Man” is an intriguing premise with a promising cast and a hint of sordid titillation about it. That the one-word review of it is “forgettable” is a shame. But when you don’t play fair and don’t build suspense as you don’t play fair, the whole thing unravels faster than the cop who can’t wait to show you the video of that lane change you’re sure you didn’t make.

Burch is teaches in a small college in a small town seemingly overrun with nubile young things with a thing for college professors, even ones with a family and the hard-living mileage Pearce wears on his face.

Cheerleaders where he does his jogging, flirtatious coeds in class, coquettes in the hardware store — what IS a smart guy whose business is parsing words like “truth” and “ethics” and “morality” to do?

When a high school kayak rental clerk at “the lake” disappears, Evan finds himself under suspicion. She’s played by Odeya Rush, aka “Mila Kunis: The Next Generation.” So she’s probably his “type.” She’s a lot of guys’ type.

The suspicion is expressed by Det. Malloy, played by Pierce Brosnan, a tad too old to be a mere detective, but a well-preserved 65 so why not? A Volvo was seen with a guy “watching” the missing girl. And even though you can’t shake a college campus parking lot without rattling a dozen professorial Volvos, Evan is the one they’re wondering about.

The film sets us up for a game of intellectual cat and mouse, one man interrogating the other, the suspect an expert in the exact meaning of words and the use of language.

“What does a philosopher do?”

“Is this relevant?”

Think of philosophy, the teacher says, “as a logical clarification of thought.”

No kidding says the cop. He’s in the business of the “logical clarification of evidence…We’re in the same racket.”

Try questioning a guy like this, though.

“Can I tell you the trust, or can I tell you what I perceive is the truth, what I interpret and remember as the truth?”

We’ve seen the professor buy the most humane mouse trap there is. But we’ve also seen him fantasize about the clerk who sold it to him. There’s a student (Alexandra Shipp of “Love, Simon”) who hints they may have history.

As the wife gets suspicious and pieces of Evan’s alibi chip off, we start to wonder. We do.

Evan’s dreams hint at some encounter with the missing girl. What happened?

Pearce doesn’t give this guy the desperation he needs. But he makes it easy to step into Evan’s shoes — an accusation, seemingly out of the blue. Or is it? Smart people are always leaning on language to extract them from a fix. Maybe he saw “Survivor’s Guide to Prison” (on Netflix). He knows when to stop talking, when to stop cooperating.

Not until he’s called his lawyer (Clark Gregg). He’s a smart cookie. The cops aren’t impressed. Cops even have specific traffic tickets they call “college professor tickets.”

Brosnan does his work by the book, but Driver brings fireworks to a wife and mother of two who doesn’t take much convincing to wonder, “Oh no, not again.”

There’s not a lot here we haven’t seen before, and any hope we’re heading towards another “Memento” shaped exploration of the trickiness of memory and its absolute necessity when you’re fighting for your life evaporates within minutes.

Still, “Spinning Man” keeps on spinning and keeps us interested, until that third act, when all this has to be resolved and the script tumbles all over itself ending, not ending and adding an epilogue that undoes the clumsy wrap-up concocted here.

And here we are, a couple of hundred words later, and “forgettable” is still the label that best fits.

MPAA Rating: R for some language including sexual references

Cast: Guy Pearce, Minnie Driver, Odeya Rush, Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Kennedy

Credits:Directed by Simon Kaijser, script by Matthew Aldrich, based on the George Harrar novel . A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:40

He’s a drop out who mastered the art of closing the sale, but who needs to start over in order to get a gig on Wall Street, where salesmen and women are masters of the universe.

She’s a teacher collecting a little extra pay — “None of y’all’s business” why — by teaching night school. That’s where the Little Man can get his GED on.

White folks “Talking black.” A punchline in this funny trailer. Black folks running through a repertoire of comic gestures common to African American stand-ups and TV and film funnywomen and men.

“Night School” also features Rob Riggle, and was directed by Malcolm D. Lee from a Kevin Hart & Team script. So a little “Girls’ Trip,” a little “Get Hard,” and a little late for what looks like it could have been a summer comedy. Sept.

It’s not over-selling the gritty Argentine crime drama “Beer, Pizza and Smokes” to suggest it has hints of Truffaut’s classic “The 400 Blows” about it. Or “Dead End Kids,” “Kids” or “Rebel Without a Cause.”

There’s an underworld that five miscreant, 20ish friends scuffle about in. They make their hand-to-mouth way by stealing, low-rent heists in corrupt, crime-riddled 1998 Buenos Aires.

Filmmakers Israel Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro underscore this improvised hardscrabble subsistence by keeping the lighting low and natural, their camera hand-held. 

It’s a film that gained little notice in North America when it was made, little more when it was released in the U.S. in 2005, seven years after it was filmed. But it’s a simple, over-familiar story told with nerve jangling verve.

Cordoba (Héctor Anglada) takes his name from the city where he was born. He’s the impulsive, hothead amongst this circle of friends, the one up for any job, any prank. But adulthood is staring him in the face. His girlfriend Sandra (Pamela Jordán) is pregnant.

He’s done one too many taxi holdups, in which he and a couple of his pals — usually the steady ut asthmatic Pablo (Jorge Sesán) and up-for-anything Frula (Walter Díaz) — duck into a cab which already has a “rich” fare, and proceed to rob the hapless customer.

Who never has the cash they’d figure he would.

The cab driver, “the boss,” is in on it. They rob a legless street musician to supplement their “income.” And yet none of these heists can afford them anything more than the movie’s title — “Pizza, Beer and Smokes.”

“We’re always working with morons, Dude,” Pablo complains. He’s not one given to looking in the mirror. They’re morons — clumsy, not that bright, given to impulsive stunts like breaking into the obelisk in a city square, climbing the inside of it and checking out how their fellow street people are surviving — porn and boxes of wine.

Sandra’s had enough, and in the words (in Spanish with English subtitles) we’ve heard in  a century of underworld pictures, she kisses him off.

“If you want me back, get a job. Like NORMAL people do!”

So the pressure’s on Cordoba to make that “one last score.” So he, Pablo, Frula and the hapless drunk Megabom (Alejandro Pous) who can’t even be relied on as a lookout, join the older Ruben (Adrián Yospe) for one of those heists where everything goes wrong. Or so they think, until the heist after that. 

Few movies have captured the Italianized Spanish and mannerisms of Argentina better than this one. The gestures, gritty texture of the cinematography and grimy streets filled with gutted cars, the driveable ones worn out, missing parts and covered in rust or primer, make this feel like an Italian neo-Realist thriller shot in New York in the ’70s.

Neither Caetano nor Stagnaro has ever made a film that made any splash north of the border. But they tap into a reckless energy that makes these lowlifes likable.

There’s no honor among these thieves as they swipe smokes and cash from each other, just enough to score that pizza or beer, which is all they can ever afford, which they have to consume standing up because street vendors offer no seating.

No wonder Sandra, heavily pregnant, wants out. A mom-to-be needs to sit.

The story may not hold many surprises. Idiot crooks do not get smarter by aiming higher, scoring guns and thinking — if that’s the word for it — big.

But “Pizza, Beer and Smokes” distills the essence of wayward youth like few Hollywood films of recent vintage, nervous with rebellion, even if they, like generations of North Americans, don’t really know what they’re rebelling against.

MPAA Rating: R (violence, alcohol abuse, profanity)

Cast: Héctor Anglada, Pamela Jordán, Jorge Sesán, Walter Díaz, Alejandro Pous

Credits: Written and directed by Israel Adrián Caetano, Bruno Stagnaro. An Art House release.
Running time: 1:27

“Una” lives in the house where she grew up, cares for her sickly mother and endures the lingering stares of the neighbors.

By night she prowls nightclubs in search of brusque, anonymous sex with strangers. At dawn she comes home, barefoot and unashamed of her ritual “walk of shame.”

But even a mere glimpse of a flashback tips us as to how she got here in her late 20s. She was a pretty tween. There was a man, perhaps the one scratched out of family photos? Something happened and we think we know what.

Rooney Mara has the title role in “Una,” an “I want…closure” drama that opens with sad resignation and builds towards something disturbingly pre-#MeToo. Because that thing which you can guess happened had not just consequences and repercussions, and it didn’t just scar the victim. It changed her and utterly altered her future.

Una is stuck in a present she doesn’t control. And she remembers the past. Young Ruby Stokes of British TV’s “DaVinci’s Demons” plays the child Una, recalling encounters, what she was wearing, her plaintive recorded video appearance in British court at the trial of her abuser.

“Would you give him a message?” her 13 year-old self wanted to know. That question is surprising, and the “message” isn’t what you expect.

EveryVillain Ben Mendelsohn is that man, a born creeper who has served his time when we meet him, and when Una tracks him down. He’s a manager at a warehouse, with a different name, a wife and a different life. He goes pale when she strolls into his place of business. No sense pretending he doesn’t recognize her all these years later.

“How many other 13 year-olds have you had sex with?”

There’s an unsettling sexuality to this hostile, threatening meeting, creepy “Lolita” intimations in the dynamic. She is the aggressor in this adult encounter, he is the one on his heels, taken aback, afraid. Her attire, her demeanor, the way Mara’s Una carries herself suggest someone who learned too early how she affected men, even if she never learned to control this power.

Una reduces Ray, who now goes by Peter, to a stammering, fearful 40something, with no control over this ugly past that has stormed into his workplace in what could be the worst day of his professional life. He can’t forgive the unforgivable, can’t explain away the transgression.

“I was never one of them,” he says at her read-between-the-lines queries about patterns of behavior. “I was NEVER one of them.”

This was something deeper, he insists. With an admittedly brash, physically precocious  13 year-old girl?

“What could I possibly have given you besides my body?”

His subordinate Scott (Riz Ahmed, Mendelsohn’s “Rogue One” co-star) is confused about who she is, but putty in the hands of the pretty young thing who has shown up at work. Peter has responsibilities this day, and he can’t run away from them or Scott even as she stalks him, invading his sight lines, rattling him.

Benedict Andrews’ claustrophobic film betrays its David Harrower stage-play origins, pinning us into whatever corner of this office and warehouse facility first Peter, then Una, flee to. The flashbacks feel like sketches of memory, with young Stokes suggesting the confusion of childhood, the misunderstanding of the naive about what was going on.

But like the even more disturbing “The Strange Ones,” about the unsettling dynamic between a young boy and the man we’re meant to see as his kidnapper/abuser, “Una” skirts the line between a situation she might have some power in and the sense that this is something simply awful, simply “happening to” her.

It’s daring enough to hint that there’s no way this story (the film was made in 2017) would be greenlit for filming, even in the UK, today.

Even though Mara’s subtle, bruised and confused performance suggests the damage this has done, even if Una still doesn’t realize the full extent of it, even if she still cannot articulate what she wants out of this long-awaited confrontation with her abuser. Because she’s so damaged she just doesn’t know.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity and language

Cast: Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed

Credits: Directed by Benedict Andrews, script by David Harrower, based on his play, “Blackbird  . A Film 4 release.

Running time: 1:33

“You should have finished the job” is the credo of many a “We thought we killed you” thriller.” Westerns like “Valdez is Coming” and “Hang’em High” honored this grim vengeance tradition.

“Revenge” is about a fellow who takes a mistress he probably intends to get rid of on a “guy’s retreat” somewhere in the coastal desert.

As it’s a French film with Belgian money, and no locations are listed on imdb, I wonder — South Africa, Morocco, Australia?

Madeleine Lutz is the victim, left for dead, hellbent on getting hers. Look for this in limited release May 11.

The only thing that might have tamped down the take for Steven Spielberg’s latest is its lack of a brand name title. Not Marvel, not “Indiana Jones” (in his case).

Otherwise, the impressive $53 million “Read Player One” pulled in this holiday weekend  (it opened Wed.) would have been greater. It’s earned $123 million abroad.

No such provisos are necessary for “Acrimony.” The Tyler Perry brand brought this soapy, melodramatic tale of female victimhood run amuk a solid $17 million.

“I Can Only Imagine” is the faith based hit of spring, holding audience weekend after weekend, over $10 million this past one for a $55 million running total. It came in just behind “Black Panther.” “Panther,” by the way, is finally losing screens to newcomers, so it’s fall-off should turn steeper, starting next weekend. $650 million and counting for that one.

“Isle of Dogs,” on just 165 screens, cleared $2.8 million, just outside of the top ten (right behind “Paul, the Apostle”).

The end of the “God’s Not Dead” franchise opened on ten times as many screens and did $2.6.

 “Tyler Perry’s ‘Acrimony'”

Let the record reflect that Taraji P. Henson is one scary broad, when she wants to be.

“Empire?” Hah. “Proud Mary?” Child’s play.

In “Tyler Perry’s Acrimony”  she’s all eaten-up with crazy, dripping with homicidal intent. She’s sitting there, pouring her enraged guts out to an unseen psychotherapist, and we just KNOW she’s about to cigarette burn-a-b—h if she interrupts her again.

Let the record also reflect that Tyler Perry is not the guy you go to for a showcase of murderously scary R-rated melodrama. Ms. Henson deserves better.

Perry has her narrate, start to almost the finish, this tortured tale of marital discord and misuse. And a veteran dramaturg like TP has to know, HAS TO, that voice-over narration is the laziest cinematic storytelling there is.

You almost never see it in the theater for that reason. Seriously, if this is how he wants to tell a story, there’s a career in romance novels awaiting him. Or a Madea wig.

Henson plays Melinda, enduring court-ordered anger management for stalking, harrassing her ex, Robert, played by Lyriq Bent of TV’s “She’s Gotta Have It”).

Melinda almost sucks in her teeth with every furious drag she takes off a cigarette as she tells the story of how Robert won her over in college, lived off her for nearly 20 years while he perfected his “battery,” only to strike it rich AFTER their divorce.

What’s he owe her?

“Every damn breath in his body.”

Perry is going back to his Black Woman Victimhood trope, the one that launched him with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” over a decade ago. He puts words into Melinda’s narrating mouth about how “Every time a black woman gets mad, she’s a stereotype.”

No dear, just in Tyler Perry movies.

The way this was probably supposed to work would be we’d hear her story, and question if she’s a reliable narrator, if she’s entitled to her suspicions of and opinion of the “con artist” who seduced her, promised her the penthouse and the yacht, and didn’t get that stuff until AFTER her suffering and support had ended.

Is she crazy, or not?

Henson and the endless narration leave no doubt.

He crosses her and she’s going to “introduce him to my bitch.”

Robert used the word “forever,” and keeps her hanging on with “a four letter word — love.”

Hackneyed? Yeah. Perry even helpfully defines words like “Acrimony” and “Sunder” (as in “Torn asunder”) with inter-titles, showing contempt for his audience as he does.

The stereotypes extend to the supporting cast, with Ptosha Storey channeling generations of African American character actresses playing siblings putting down their sister’s “no good man.”

Perry has never been his own best editor, and this flaccid drama, which has a lulu of an ending, could have shed 20 minutes of the nearly endless flashack, for starters. Plant more doubt about the sanity of Melinda’s point of view, maybe tell parts of the story from the ex’s vantage point.

As it is, about midway through this, we don’t know who we should be rooting for even though Perry’s MO is always take the woman’s side, always show male nudity if you’re going for an R-rating.

And telling your story with endless pages of sarcastic, venomous narration? It doesn’t work and even Henson was bored with it, judging from her line-readings.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content and some violence

Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Lyriq Bent, Ptosha Storey, Jazmyn Simon, Crystle Stewart

Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:53

The virtues of “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness,” are few. So let’s get them out of the way right out of the gate.

It’s replaced the generally hostile, defensive and political tone of the first two films with a veneer of “We have to learn to get along.” It’s still toxic, only less so.

So the parade of straw men this propaganda piece trots out are fewer in number and less testily-defined. No godless academic shrieking for the superstitious to prove their superstition is “the only Truth.” The preacher (David A.R. White) jailed for not surrendering the texts of his sermons (!?) in ARKANSAS (!#?) is at least out of jail in this third film in the series.

And John Corbett’s in it, the “Northern Exposure/Sex and the City/Big Fat Greek Wedding” veteran who makes most everything he turns up in a little more whimsical, a little better.

But here’s a tip. You want to see a pretty good, reasonably apolitical faith-based drama with Corbett in it? Redbox or Netflix “All Saints.” Much better.

Corbett plays the faithless older brother/lawyer who comes down from Chicago to represent his brother in the fight with Hadley College, a state school trying to evict St. James Church, whose presence on campus has been deemed unConstitutional and divisive by the women of the college’s board (among them, a martinet played Tatum O’Neal). The poor college president (Ted McGinley) has his hands tied.

The divisions on campus have consumed coed Keaton (Samantha Boscarino), her beau Adam (Mike C. Manning) and their outspoken pal, Mateo (Schwayze).

The church gets torched, causing even Pastor Dave (White) to lose his temper and question his faith. “Now, it’s just a crime scene.”

And one and all decry the “political agenda” that everybody seems to have…everybody on the “other side,” that is. Funny thing, there are all these talk shows depicted debating this conflict. Hosted by impartial voices like…shrill Fox News Judge Jeanine Pirro.

Corbett gets to make the counter arguments here, a preacher’s kid who gave up God as he got more educated. “The church has outlived its usefulness,” he says. But he sticks up for his brother, even if the preacher is “pretty quick to play the victim card.”

The protests have loaded imagery — Mateo taping a speech with his cell phone, which has an upside down photo negative image of a flag. But one young person sums up the Evangelical movement’s NASCAR (falling attendance, ratings, etc) problem in a flash. “We’ve spent years hearing what the church is AGAINST. What’s it FOR?”

Aside from anybody running for office calling themselves a “social conservative?”

But the logic-resisting pre-law kid who started all this on campus bickering (Shane Harper) is still tugging at Keaton’s soul and counseling everybody to act more like Jesus and get along.

This is far and away the worst of the three faith-based choices viewers have at the movies this Easter. The presence of Corbett only underlines how his charisma lets him act rings around the rest of the cast. Boscarino is sympathetic, nobody else in this blandly reactionary script stands out. Not even McGinley.

Tatum O’Neal should sue the cinematographer.

There’s one laugh in it, Preacher Dave seeking counsel from the African American minister (Gregory Alan Williams) across town, wallowing in his victimhood, telling him “You have no idea” how he’s being persecuted, and getting schooled.

“Brother, who d’you think you’re TALKING to?”

In America, churches that burn are almost always black. Torched by white men. Mass murdering a congregation is most famously a white racist-on-black crime. Religion was politicized by the intolerant far right, and that continues to this day, even as church-going shrinks within the American populace.

And all this “Get along” stuff? It’s what we see in Congress whenever one party has used disrespect, inflammatory lies and Russian money and influence to steal a Supreme Court seat and put a stealing, cheating, lying treasonous whoremonger in the White House.

“Come on, can’t you guys be NICE and not, um, DIVISIVE?”

The one comfort I take from this is that I saw it in the rural South, in a Red State cinema. As an audience of one. Nobody else is buying into this garbage.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements including some violence and suggestive material

Cast:  David A.R. White, John Corbett, Samantha Boscarino, Shane Harper, Benjamin A. Onyango, Tatum O’Neal, Shwayze, Gregory Alan Williams, Ted McGinley

Credits: Written and directed by Mason Williams. A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:48

Projections for how big “Ready Player One” were a bit fuzzy, with it having a Wed. night opening and then an entire Easter Weekend to make some coin.

The $40 million or so 3/day always seemed low, and a big Wed., very big Thursday and $15 million Friday seem to point toward something closer to $50 million than $40 million.

But Saturday will be telling. Deadline.come is still it’ll have over $40 over the weekend (excluding Monday), $53-55 since Wed by midnight Sunday.

They’ve been inching their predictions upward, but I still say they’re underestimating it. When I saw it with a mostly-college crowd pre-opening, about a third seemed REALLY into it (gamers, pop culture sponges of the “Family Guy” fanbase variety). It panders to that crowd for two hours and 20 minutes — endless inside jokes, pop culture references, game tricks, etc. Their talking it up will only carry so much water, but again, a Sat. as big or bigger than Friday will be the tell.

Tyler Perry’s days of opening Madea movies into the $25 million range may be over, but he’s still got enough of a brand to pull in $16 million for one of his tortured relationships in the African American community melodramas. “Acrimony” is managing that.

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” fell off a cliff, “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Tomb Raider” are both on track to fall well short of $100 million before they disappear from screens.

“Black Panther” is still pulling them in, #3 at the box office this weekend, but finally fading. It will have cleared $650 million in the U.S. by Sunday night. Stunning.

The best thing about the blase but soft-selling faith-based drama “I Can Only Imagine” and the weak-lead Biblical period piece “Paul, the Apostle,” is that they’ve killed off the angry, defiantly superstitious “God’s Not Dead” movies. That’s a proven brand, making money off Christian victimization in an increasingly secular (and educated) America.

And the third film in the franchise is on nearly 2,000 screens and can’t even crack the top ten. Deadline.com is notorious for under-estimating Sat and Sunday takes on most films, kiddie fare and faith-based movies especially. But right now this one is not set to clear $3 million. That could change, but in any event, the other two Easter movies in the genre have sucked all the air out of that house fire.

Wes Anderson’s charming, touching animated “Isle of Dogs” is only on 165 screens, and it may hit $3 million. Not in the top ten, but better “Dogs” than “Dead.”

The first thing that jumps out at from this trailer is the film’s tone  — melancholy, despairing. Ethan Hawke is a preacher at the end of his rope in this Paul Schrader drama.

The great thing about the existence of A24 as a film studio/distributor is that Schrader, one of the great screenwriters of the ’70s, director of “Cat People” and “Mishima” and “Light Sleeper” and “Affliction,” doesn’t have to beg Lindsay Lohan to show up so that he can get distribution for a movie.

With A24, one of the elder statesmen of cinema — he wrote “Taxi Driver” and “The Mosquito Coast” and “City Hall,” along with films he also directed — can make his kind of movie and land Amanda Seyfried, Ethan Hawke and Cedric Kyles.

It’s a drama. Cedric the Entertainer is using his real name for this one.

Look for “First Reformed,” a man of faith’s test of faith, in May.

me from this trailer is the name Cedric Kyles.