Movie Nation

Late getting to this. Am I the first to say, “Are they KIDDING?”

No Noomie, no Rooney, no Stieg Larrson original novel, no reason to exist. November, this hits the fan. 

“Assassination Nation,” a little social media satire, generation gap satire, minority rule satire, what happens when the REST of the country gets guns satire.

Kind of where we’re headed. don’t ya think?

Sept. 21, we’ll see how politically loaded this mother is.

Mean headline, but after “Joe Dirt,” it’s no less than aged snarkling David Spade deserves.

Netflix’s ongoing “Saving Cinemas from Adam Sandler & Friends” project puts Spade in another “Joe Dirt” variation, as a bad dad in Deerfield, New Hampshire.

“Father of the Year” Wayne O’Malley is the Town Character (pronounced “cayeh-ac-TUH”) in a town of town characters, a drunk 40something who lives in a debris field of a trailer park, never shaves or cuts his hair, never has a job, “because of my disability.”

“Being color blind is not a disability,” his college graduate son (Joey Bragg of TV’s “Wet Hot American Summer”) Ben complains.

“I told a black joke to a black guy. It’s a disability.”

He’s Joe Dirt with a New England twang. Of course he’s named Wayne.

Ben’s home from school, ready to start a new life with a green energy company in New York. One last summer in New Hampshire can’t hurt.

But as we hang with his empty gene pool collection of high school buds, his reprobate Dad whose cleverest idea is making a pool out of a pickup truck bed (not his truck), where the Chinese restaurant changes its front door health code grade from C to D as you walk in, Ben starts to wonder. As do we.

We let these numbnuts decide who gets to run for president?

Ben and his bud Larry (Matt Shively) hit the local bar and commence to A) fail to impress that onetime high school hottie Meredith (Bridgit Mendler) and B) bicker about whose dad is tougher.

“Your dad looks like a big fifth grader.”

“YOUR dad gets startled by pop-up books!”

As Larry ‘s pop (Nat Faxon, almost funny) is a wimpy, smart provider, running his own test lab for Big Pharma, we think we know how that fight might go. The sons? Not so sure.

But Wayne? Realizing he’s an embarrassment to his kid and no longer his role model, and after a drunken night where he gets his son arrested and costs him his upcoming New York gig, Wayne is ALL about this “fight” — drunk dialing trash talk to poor Mardy (Faxon), who has enough grief, married to a harpy of a second wife with a teeny tween bullying terror of a step-son.

Dad can ask “Got any tuna on the hook?” of the son he’s nicknamed the “class clita-dic-torian,” but Ben has about as much chance with the fair Meredith as he does of finishing that pool he basically has to build for a little old lady whose patio he and dad trashed, which got them tossed in jail.

Old fashioned summer fun like skinny dipping, crashing the prom (Isn’t school out for the summer?) years after graduating, and sampling the local drug smorgasbord (Molly jokes are a regular fixture of Made for Netflix comedies) ensue.

Laughs? Hard to come by, rather like Spade’s take on the accent. A guys-piled-into-a-photo-booth gag, Postmates jokes, Dad put-downs based on driving a Miata — “Well, the body style in a Miata is not the MOST masculine. VERY unisex” don’t pay off.

One bit that would fit right in with the Sandler Happy Madison Productions house style? The “Deerfield Wife Carrying Competition,” an obstacle course run through a muddy mid-summer ski resort made even funnier by the presence of Dean Winters (Mr. Mayhem of the car insurance commercials).

That’s kind of a throw-away moment.

“Father of the Year?” A throw-away movie, and an utter waste of time, another make-work project for Sandler’s less and less funny stable of pals.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity, sexual humor

Cast: David Spade, Joey Bragg, Matt Spively, Bill Kottcamp, Bridgit Mendler, Nat Faxon 

Credits:Directed by Tyler Spindel, script by Brandon Cournoyer, Tyler Spindel. A Netflix/Happy Madison release.

Running time: 1:34

None of the three wide releases opening this weekend moved the Metacritic meter well into positive (over 60%) territory. “Mixed” reviews for “Equalizer 2,” “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again” (“Mamma Mia 2”) and “Unfriended: The Dark Web” (“Unfriended 2”)

But “Mamma Mia 2” at least sits at a dazzling grade of 61.

Yawn.

Of course, “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again” will dominate the box office. Lots of ABBA fans out there, young and old. And Cher fans. Old. Very old.

It should earn $35-40 million, even if it’s a B-side version of the original. “Not the hit.”

Judging from Thursday night’s turnout at the theater where I caught “Equalizer 2,” Denzel could give “Mamma” a run for her money. A lot more people showed up at one of the busiest theaters the vast Regal chain to see “EQ2” than were there to sing along with the lesser titles of the ABBA catalog.

Box Office Mojo figures “EQ” could clear $25 million. Established brand vs. Established brand. Not great reviews for this one, but Denzel is riveting. 

And then there’s “Unfriended: The Dark Web,” which didn’t quite clear the “fresh” mark on Rottentomatoes. Not awful, just kind of heartless. If it clears $5 million it’ll be lucky, “brand” or not.

“Hotel Transylvania 3” and “Ant-Man and The Wasp” will drop to third and fourth thanks to the new arrivals.

Denzel Washington may be in the Liam Neeson “man with particular skills” stage of his leading man carer, older, not so much “getting the girl” anymore as “getting his man.

But charisma and old-fashioned talent, what we glibly file under the label “chemistry” when actors click with every single co-star they share a movie with, carry him through in “The Equalizer 2,” a dawdling thriller that sacrifices thrills, surprises and at times coherence for the sake of character.

As Robert McCall, retired CIA agent and violent, all-knowing vigilante, Washington walks with his usual unhurried purpose, speaks with the sad wisdom of experience or righteous fury of the aggrieved and fixes one and all with a sizing-you-up stare that has been his trademark.

We meet McCall this time on a Turkish train disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, but really there to confront a Middle Eastern hood who kidnapped his daughter from her American mother. He warns his quarry, accompanied by armed henchmen, of the “two kinds of pain in the world; the pain that hurts, and the pain that alters.”

He’s giving the dude a choice, as he gives “everybody one last chance to do the right thing.” They never do. And that’s when the pain that hurts is administered. And the pain that alters.

Driving for Lyft in Boston, he sweetly undercharges the aged Holocaust survivor (Orson Bean, 90 years young and sharp) to the photocopy shop where he organizes more “evidence” for his endless case against those who stole a family portrait during World War II.

There’s the GI headed for his flight to Afghanistan, worried about his first deployment, whom McCall reassures during the ride.

“I’ll be right here to pick you up when you get back.”

The neighborhood hoodie-wearing teen, Miles (Ashton Sanders of “Moonlight”), is an unmotivated art student who acts awfully guilty at the gang graffiti covering the Muslim neighbor lady’s mural, the one on the wall overlooking her now-trashed vegetable garden.

Miles, who could go either way, the straight life or street corners selling drugs for gangs, is due a little “Fences” tough-love, some paid painting work by McCall to save him from bad influences.

“Money ain’t spelled ‘G.U.N., son. Stay off those corners!”

And there’s the former CIA boss (Oscar winner Melissa Leo) who still hooks McCall up with intel about this or that person of interest in his various do-gooding cases.

“I thought you were retired?”

“Oh, I am. Just like you’re dead!”

A piece of his past, “another life,” the one his faked death allowed him out of, is revealed. And that world sucks him back in to right a wrong, avenge a murder and give this downcast widower purpose.

Antoine Fuqua, Washington’s go-to action director, stages three top drawer shoot-outs/fights, one of them taking place in harrowing Lyft Ride from Hell. And there’s a bit of rough justice handed out to high-finance frat brothers who mistreat a hooker.

But more effort is put into McCall’s solitary life, the traits that give his character color. He buried his baker wife years ago. He’s plowing through “100 Books You Have to Read Before You Die,” and is up to Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”

He interacts with small children in a few scenes, and Washington takes delight in both those silly comic moments, and the dangerously comic one.

But if you can’t figure out who the bad guys are on first sight — hint, it’s NOT the 90 year old comic and game show veteran Orson Bean — you aren’t getting out enough.

If you can’t tell where this is going before Fuqua takes his sweet time getting us to the absurdly drawn-out Western-style finale (complete with a “Searchers” visual homage), you must have never seen another Fuqua picture (“Shooter,” “Training Day,” “Olympus Has Fallen”).

And if you can’t take enormous pleasure in seeing Washington, in fine, cool and man-of-purpose form and on his game, then you haven’t been paying attention these past 35 years.

MPAA Rating: R, violence

Cast: Denzel Washington, Melissa Leo, Pedro Pascal, Bill Pullman, Ashton Sanders, Orson Bean

Credits:Directed by Antoine Fuqua, script by Richard Wenk. A Columbia release.

Running time: 2:01

A tip of the top hat to Stephen Susco, writer-director of the squirm-inducing horror sequel “Unfriended: Dark Web.” 

He’s engineered a real-time Facebook-era tale of tech-savvy yet hapless young people hacked, tormented and terrorized when one of their number comes across a used computer with files, links and passwords that drag them all into “The Dark Web.”

Susco, who has “The Grudge” movies and “Texas Chainsaw 3D” in his writing credits, conjures up a thriller which we in essence follow as they type, link, etc. on a laptop screen, along with six friends whose Skype “game night” is hijacked when one of them shows up online with a new PC.

If it wasn’t such a pitiless mash-up of  horrors from other movies, if he’d let us feel something for any of them, Susco would have had something special.

Matias, played by Colin Woodell of Steven Soderbergh’s “Unsane,” is a guy we meet via screen. All we see is what we’d see on his screen. He’s trying to log into this “new” laptop he got…”off Craigslist.” Password after password attempt.

He needs a PC with enough computing power to run this app he’s developing to help people look up American Sign Language in mid video-call conversations so that they can talk to the deaf — like his girlfriend, Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras).

Matias is a multi-tasking fool, quick to get into the laptop, log into Facebook, chat up Amaya, who is frustrated by his unwillingness to learn ASL, and jump online with his assorted friends to play Cards Against Humanity online.

If only he wasn’t being bombarded with all these messages for “Erica,” these notes from “Charon,” or “Norah.C.IV,” flirtatious catfishing messages from young women asking for plane tickets and wondering where “she” has been. If only the computer’s hard drive wasn’t eaten up with encrypted files he can’t delete.

We smell a rat before he does. And even after he does, after the “owner” of the PC has made contact, made threats (“THIEF!”) and started swallowing data from his circle of friends and contacts, he doesn’t tell those online with him.

DJ Lexx (Savira Windyani) is no help with his computer problems, nor are the loving couple Serana (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Nari (Betty Gabriel). But paranoid web-master AJ (Connor Del Rio) and Brit wit Damon (Andrew Lees) talk him through a few tricks.

Which get him even deeper into trouble, which the women start to figure out.

“Dark Web” skates through every Internet pitfall from “phishing” (scamming data) to “wardrobing” (prowling neighborhoods, capturing wifi signals and passwords to break into computers) and “swatting” (faking a call to police to get a SWAT team, armed and trigger happy, to come to your door).

Tirades about “YOU’RE the product” websites like Facebook and Twitter, and “Cambridge Analytica” give the picture a topicality that sizzles.

Because whatever else is going wrong online, whoever this laptop belonged to was into sick, deadly and illegal stuff, pay-per-view perversions financed with Bitcoin payments.

Once the fascinating stuff about solving this or that problem with the screen and the incredibly boring split-screen “game night” nonsense is dispensed with, “Dark Web” takes on the same plot as the 2014 original “Unfriended.”

And as appealing, on the surface, as the various young “types” might be — that’s all they are, “types.” Computer dork, “smart” English accent, Indonesian dance music DJ, lesbians wrestling with “coming out” to difficult parents.

With all the cyber-nightmare elements Susco packs into the script and onto the split, data and image-filled computer screen we watch this on, everything from online, computer (and person) killing traps and sabotage, sign language, back doors and hacker lore, it’s a shame he didn’t care enough about the characters to make us care about them.

And it’s a wonder the horror masters at Blumhouse didn’t send him back for one last rewrite over this ending.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violence, language and sexual references.

Cast: Rebecca Rittenhouse, Chelsea Alden, Betty Gabriel, Colin Woodell, Andrew Lees, Savira Windyani

Credits: Written and directed by Stephen Susco. A Blumhouse/OTL release.

Running time: 1:28

What tea leaves is Jennifer Lopez reading that parked her in a “Working Girl” style comedy about “faking it until you make it?”

Answered my own question there, didn’t I?

“Second Act” is about people who missed out on education (or just skipped out) and about raising the value of life experience and “street smarts,” a working class fantasy about a WalMart (they don’t call it that) service sector name-tag wearing woman of ambition but no degree who fakes (with help) a background that lands her in high finance.

That part of the message will resonate with EVERYone. As “The Wolf of Wall Street” reminded us, that’s not a class of folks overloaded with rocket scientists. It’s “the art of the deal,” the willingness to lie and hustle in the “street” sense, and anybody can learn how to do it.

“Second Act” co-stars Leah Remini, Vanessa Hudgens, Milo Ventimiglia, Treat Williams Dave Foley and Charlene Yi and opens right before Thanksgiving.

The first trailer was cryptic, which is probably why traffic to my eight year old  review of the documentary that inspired it, “Marwen” exploded over the past month.

“Welcome to Marwen” is about an artist, badly hurt in a mugging, who poured his mental and physical anguish into these vast WWII dioramas he built on his property, photographing the vast “canvas” of an imaginary Belgian town and the fighting he imagined could have happened around it.

Ken and Barbie dolls, GI Joes by the score, all manner of toys were repurposed for this project. Read my review for more detail. 

Here’s the second trailer to “Welcome to Marwen,” and it’s a harsh reminder that yes, Robert Zemeckis directed Steve Carell, Leslie Mann and Co. Like “Forrest Gump,” this trailer explains EVERYthing as if he’s making it for a nine year old.

Or Newt Gingrich, a HUGE “Forrest Gump” fan, as he recognized in Forrest his ideal American, and perhaps his ideal voter. Simple values, removed from the anarchic hippiedom that many conservatives dodged in the ’60s and 70s.

I found Zemeckis’ penchant for pounding home the obvious obnoxious in “Gump.” “Where you goin’, JenNAY?” “San Francisco,” as the hippy anthem “If you’re goin’ to San Fran-cisco” wafts up on the soundtrack. “Where you goin,’ Forrest?” “RUNning,” as “It Keeps You Running” blubbers up from the score.

Like “Forrest,” “Marwen” has Oscar bait and potential mass appeal attached to it. But will film fans and Oscar voters go for “spoon fed” this time around? Will it have resonance for today, a plea for “decency” in indecent times? November, we find out.

Spanish filmmaker  José Díaz Martínez wanted some time to himself, to reflect on his long-dead brother Tino and get away from the modern world.

And his wife and two kids as well, he doesn’t hasten to add.

So he set out to emulate American philosopher Henry David Thoreau. He’d go to his family’s ancestral farm, high in the mountains of Austurias, northwestern Spain, between Portugal and the North Atlantic. He’d spend 100 days with no human contact, just him and nature, just like Thoreau at Walden Pond.

“I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself,” as Martínez quotes Thoreau (in Spanish, with English subtitles) putting it. It’ll be a “zen” existence, lonely but introspective, he adds.

He’d live simply, in an ancient stone hut, hiking, keeping an eye on the horse, Atila, growing and harvesting potatoes like “The Martian,” planting vegetables in a homemade hothouse, keeping the pine marten (weasel) out of the henhouse.

He’d bring a pack and hiking shorts and jackets. And he’d bring GoPro cameras, tripods and much heavier gear. And a drone. He’d talk to those cameras (as well as provide poetic voice over narration later). Like, um, “Survivorman.”

“100 Days of Solitude,” produced by the same company that gave us  “Cantábrico,” also shot in the Cantabrian Mountains, is a gorgeous nature film that reminds us that even if America “invented” national nature parks, Europe and the rest of the world grabbed the idea and saved a few wild spaces as well.

Martínez hikes into the the nearby  Redes Natural Park, gorgeously remote, with mountain goats and deer, wolves, boars, owls, all of which he captures. For 100 days, he hikes and films he craggy mountain vistas, forests, waterfalls and wildlife, shooting time-lapses of a spider spinning its web, improving close-ups of owls in their nest.

He is adept with a camera (selfie) stick, showing himself trekking up mountainsides and down into places like the Felguera Valley,  attaching a camera to Atila when he decides he’ll let the horse tote his stuff on such treks.

And he talks, a lot, about “the cold, the sky and the solitude.” Truth be told, this off-the-cuff chatter and even much of his later-added narration is filled with poetic banalities. We get it. You miss your family (he leaves video recording cards at a “drop,” where they leave food for him so he doesn’t starve), but not work (kind of a “thing” in a country where unemployment ranges from 16-26%, and has for decades), not civilization or the city.

There’s something about the talking that somewhat spoils his “100 días de soledad,” but talking to oneself is no longer limited to cranks, so you get used to it.

The best moments in his film, though, are just nature observed — no titles identifying Cantabrian chamois (goats), the stags, boars and other species. Just nature, in the moment and in its element.

The sole bit of “action” in all this is the pine marten that breaks into the henhouse. Martínez needs the eggs to live, so he can’t have this. Whatever his background and connection to this piece of land, he’s got to figure out how to trap it, get it away from the nonplussed chickens, and get on with his days. It’d be a challenge for any of us.

But there are limits to the format, and to the viewer’s patience, that “100 Days” presents that Martínez can’t overcome. As lovely and striking as this place is, worth web searching to see about vacationing there, the drama it provides is entirely scenic — fog and snow and rain, seasons changing. And that’s not going to be to every taste any more than the tedious “I’m cold, there’s some pain” on-camera confessions.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: José Díaz Martínez

Credits:Written and directed by José Díaz Martínez. A Netflix/Wanda Vision release.

Running time: 1:33

It’s got to be exhausting being Bobbito Garcia, the self-styled “cultural orchestrator” at the nexus of New York’s sneaker, hoops and hip hop culture. He’s probably hard on friends, too. He must wear them out, after a while.

Hell, I’m going to need a nap after sampling the sizzle reel of his life, “Rock Rubber 45s,” an autobiographical documentary in which he tells his story, and rounds up legions of folk famous and less famous to sing his praises. It’s a whirlwind tour of a life lived on the cusp of his corner of the subculture, brisk and information over-loading and entirely self-serving.

Garcia, 50, gained some measure of success in more fields than most of us can imagine, influenced many, met many more, basically anyone  who was anyone in those various fields in and around New York in the ’80s, 90s and early 2000s.

Relentlessly upbeat, a cheerleader, hustler, coach and “influencer” across multiple generations and multiple media platforms, and a shameless self-promoter all along the way, it’s only natural that when he wanted to start telling his version of the history of his era, he’d add documentary filmmaker to his resume. It’s an impulse he probably should have fought.

“Bobbito’s Basics to Boogie,” “Doin’ it in the Park: Pick up Basketball, NYC” and “Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives” were earlier chapters in a life that took him from Puerto Rico to New York, Wesleyan College to gigs with Def Jam, ESPN, Vibe Magazine and an on and on.

“Rock Rubber 45s” sort of wraps it all up into a somewhat more confessional essay in self-promotion.

Street ball in its pre-ESPN heyday? He was there, never quite fitting in with a college team, but able to play pro ball in his native Puerto Rico.

The birth of hip hop? He was a fan long before he got a job at Def Jam Records, starting as a messenger, working his way up to A & R guy, working radio stations, charming artists. He ventured into doing a New York college radio program, breaking scores of acts on the airwaves, took on columnist duties with Vibe Magazine, sitting down for listening session interviews with everyone from Chaka Khan to Michael Jordan. He’s still a club DJ of some note.

And after dabbling in self-designed sneakers, he became a consultant with Nike, hosted an ESPN series “It’s the Shoes,” was featured in a legendary showboating street ball Nike commercial,  ran a few NYC sneaker boutiques, “Foot Work,” and literally wrote the book on New York giving birth to sneaker-mania, “Where’d You Get Those? New York City’s Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987.”

You’ve got to love his motivational speech ethos. “Work incredibly hard, find what’s missing, fill the void.”

You cover all that ground, you make friends, and everyone from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Rosie Perez to Questlove, Chuck D, Chris Paul and actor/hop fan and filmmaker Michael Rappaport pitched in on his film, which is built on home movies, TV appearances,  athletic department tape, still photos, report cards and fan letters.

But there’s a telling moment early in film when Rappaport, who has made docs for ESPN, wishes aloud he’d gotten to make this movie. And it isn’t long before you start to agree with him.

It’s not that Garcia’s manic blur of visuals, testimonials and scrapbook items isn’t well shot, cut and somewhat entertaining. It’s the lack of that outside authority, that other voice to challenge his “version” of this Bobbito-centered history, that is sorely missed.

Aside from an older brother who pooh-poohs this bit of family lore or that one (Garcia’s father was a drunk, he was abused, etc.), where is that one person who will say, “You know, maybe you didn’t make the basketball team because you weren’t a good enough team player,” or “No, Foot Work wasn’t ‘ahead of its time’ as a sneaker boutique. Foot Locker beat it to the marketplace by 20 years,” or “The Nuyorican Poets Cafe was around for decades before you got involved in slam poetry promoting in the Big City.”

We live in the age of the self-made “star,” people who rewrite their own histories to create drama, wealth and fame — or seize the White House. So Garcia’s just doing what New Yorkers who succeed do — blowing his own horn, gilding the lily, etc.

Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg, who famously said “No credit you have to give yourself is worth having” would have starved to death under today’s rules.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that only a few will take issue with Garcia cherry-picking his interviews, calling in favors, telling his story his way, protecting his “brand.” In Instagram Nation, that works. Conversely, the glib put-down when you criticize such immodest blowhards,  “just a hater,” is laughable.

Google him. Most of the first page of Garcia’s search results are self-promoting, self-produced websites, accounts, etc. Read the IMDB descriptions of his movies. Self-penned, too, I dare say.

But if you want your place in history chiseled in stone, you can’t expect to be taken seriously if you buy the rock, carve the rock and peddle that rock wherever chiseled stones are sold. We can’t just take your word for it, whatever your impressive run of credits and however deep the Rolodex.

There are scores of documentaries about “big deal folks you’ve never heard of” (And outside of New York, how many have heard of Bobbito?). The memorable ones — “Supermensch,” “Tom Dowd and the Language of Music,” and “Who The F**k Is That Guy? The Fabulous Journey Of Michael Alago,” may have had the eager participation or even their genesis in their egocentric subjects. None of them dared go full onanism by directing themselves.

You need somebody else to say, “Yeah, he was a big deal and his story is worth the time and effort it would take me (not Garcia) to tell it.” Otherwise, it’s just “Says you.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, lots of profanity

Cast: Bobbito Garcia, Questlove, Rosie Perez, Patti LaBelle, Chris Paul, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Rappaport

Credits: Written and directed by Bobbito Garcia. A Saboteur release.

Running time:1:34