Movie Nation

  “Becks” is a gay romance so old fashioned it feels like a period piece, a film from the earliest days of what came to be called “queer cinema.”

It’s about a folk singer falling in love with a married woman, family disapproval with just a hint of titillation. It’s a more polished “Lianna” (1983) or “Go Fish,” with a light enough touch to pass for queer cinema comfort food.

The title character (Broadway star Lena Hall) plays guitar with a band in the Big City, where she’s deeply involved with the band’s younger, exotic lead singer (Hayley Koyiko of “Jem and the Holograms”). Lucy, however, is playing the field.

The shock of this sends Becks into enough of a tailspin that she goes home, to the Midwestern town where she grew up, to her somewhat tolerant mom (Christine Lahti). There’s an old pal, Dave (Dan Fogler) running a bar, Perfectos.

“Dave was the first guy I ever slept with,” she jokes, “and the last.” He remembers how she was outed in high school, nicknamed class “vale-DYKE-torian.”

But hey, she could play at the bar, for tips, if she wants — “lesbian folk rock.” And maybe she could give guitar lessons on the side. The bar is how she meets Elyse (Mena Suvari of “American Beauty”), and guitar lessons are how she connects with her.

Elyse being married puts the romance in “It’s complicated” territory. It takes the more old-fashioned mom to register stern disapproval. Busting up a marriage rarely gets the buster chewed out in such films. The hoary cliche is that Becks is “awakening” Elyse’s true sexuality, and “Becks” only narrowly avoids that.

What the three credited screenwriters, two credited directors and the cast get across is a sense of lived-in lives, acceptance decades removed from social shunning and a kind of flippant riff on such gay romance cliches. “Lesbian Folk Rock?” Totally a thing, predating The Indigo Girls by decades.  The romances here are melodramatic, as indeed romance can be.

Hall anchors the picture, at home on stage singing and playing, and a bit of an impulsive, arrested-development mess off it. Becks is 34 and making the mistakes of a 24 year-old, and Hall lets us see how infuriating it is to live that way and realize it.

She, the under-used Suvari and jovial Fogler, most recently of TV’s “The Goldbergs,” make “Becks,” comfort food familiar as it is, a likable movie with characters we don’t mind spending time with even if we know their mistakes long before they make them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Lena Hall, Mena Suvari, Christine Lahti, Dan Fogler, Hayley Kiyoko

Credits:Written and directed by Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, additional writing by Rebecca Drysdale. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:30

Mixed Martial Artist Ronda Rousey’s recently announced move to pro wrestling had to give Gina Carano pause. Rousey’s movie-star-pretty predecessor in the MMA spotlight may have made a splash in the movies with “Haywire,” and had her shot at playing a Marvel villain in “Deadpool.”

But the movies are starting to hit the “diminishing returns” side of the ledger for her, these days. A D-movie like “Scorched Earth” is enough to make one wonder if maybe Rousey isn’t making the smarter play.

Carano can still, at 35, deliver in the fight scenes. But this post-apocalyptic dog of a picture shows her racing into “over the hill so I’ll just use guns” territory, something Chuck and Jean Claude and Jackie only got around to when the stunts got to be too much.

She plays Atticus (HAH!) Gage, a bounty hunter in the post-climate collapse future who wanders the wastelands hunting down outlaws. Their biggest crime? “Fossil abuser.” As in, they’re rapists, kidnappers, murderers and slave traders in a world where the air is so foul everybody has to wear filter-masks, even the horses.

Until the star needs her close-up, of course.

“Belching” pollution in the few fossil fuel vehicles left is a no-no, punished by “the authorities,” who pay Gage her bounties. Reluctantly, it turns out. The only difference between her and the cretins she hunts? “I’m still above ground.”

Maybe she inadvertently frees hostages here and there, kills off a quarry up to no good. She’s not responsible for their safe-keeping, getting them to “civilization.”

“Not my problem.”

No wonder the “Doc” (John Hannah of “Four Weddings and a Funeral”) at New Montana (“Population, 24) is her only friend.

The never-ending search for powdered silver, useful in the post “Cloud Fall” atmospheric collapse filter masks, means she’s hellbent on catching the biggest outlaw of them all, Jackson ( Ryan Robbins). She’ll just steal the hat and scarf of the black-toothed harpy she just brought in (dead, not alive) and pass herself off as an ally to get close to Jackson, before grabbing him and taking him back to face rough justice and collect her silver bounty.

Jackson’s town has a silver mine which needs slaves and a saloon that needs a torch singer. That’s where Melanie (Stephanie Bennett) fits in, all slinky and sexy because otherwise, the locals would notice that’s not her voice coming out when she sings the blues. Worst. Lip. Sync. Ever.

Carano isn’t the only one whose presence here denotes hard times in the movie biz. Director Peter Howitt (“Johnny English,” “Sliding Doors”) has seen better days. So has his “Sliding Doors” star Hannah.

One and all are stuck with rehashed exchanges such as “Where you from?” “What do you care?” and lines like “I think perhaps I’m just an outlet for all this misplaced rage,” and “It’s a fine line between ignorance and arrogance.”

Say what now? Fighting words, in any event. They all are.

“Shall we begin?”

The performances are stock and unsurprising, with Carona showing a lot of teeth in an era when most everybody else’s are brown from the lack of Crest.

The locations are mostly Canadian deserts, quarries, ghost towns and the ruins of a marine (boat) wrecking yard. The color palette is “Deadwood” brown. There’s even a poker game in the saloon. I could swear they were playing for marshmallows.

Which, as everybody knows, will survive the apocalypse. But can this cast and crew survive the ignominy of “Scorched Earth?”

MPAA Rating:R for violence and some language

Cast: Gina Carano, John Hannah, Ryan Robbins, Stephanie Bennett

Credits:Directed by Peter Howitt, script by Kevin Leeson, Bobby Mort. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:36

A strained marriage, a tipsy New Year’s Eve party and a deadly road accident are but the opening gambit of “Midnighters,” a just-taut-enough thriller about ordinary people faced with extraordinary dilemmas.

It’s about secrets and betrayals, shifting loyalties and the grim, heartless calculus of death when it’s “either him or me.”

Lindsey (Alex Essoe of “Starry Eyes”) and Jeff (Dylan McTee of TV’s “Sweet/Vicious”) are renovating their house and struggling to make ends meet, as he can’t find work. The last thing either of them needs is hitting a pedestrian on a dark country road after having a few New Year’s Eve drinks.

To their credit, that’s not the first thing they think of. They try to save the guy, even though he’s got facial tattoos. But when they lose a pulse, it’s “We need some place where we can think about this” and even though “This isn’t ‘Goodfellas,'” that’s what they do.

When Lindsey’s trouble-in-mind younger sister (Perla Haney-Jardine) gets home from her own New Year’s Eve party, things get even more complicated — and deadly.

The cops are suspicious, especially this one detective (Ward Horton) who shows up, side-eyed in his oily-charm.

“You must be a Capricorn! So honest and…forthcoming.”

Veteran TV editor turned director Julius Ramsay, working from an Alston Ramsay (military speechwriter turned screenwriter) script, keeps the lights off and the mood menacing. The performers manage to make even the lapses in logic in that script skim past with barely a “Wait, nobody’s that naive/stupid” pause, though there are a few.

Some of the abrupt shifts in attitude seem like core beliefs abandoned simply to let the story move along, but the players let on that these characters have agendas that steel their inner resolve.

The twists become increasingly obvious as the layers of intrigue are peeled off. But the third act, with its stark choices and grisly cliffhanger of a brawl, pays off, even it that payoff feels a tad more conventional than is promised.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Alex Essoe, Dylan McTee, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ward Horton

Credits:Directed by Julius Ramsay, script by Alston Ramsay. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:34

Long been a big fan of A24 Films, the best of the arty boutique film distributors (“Ex Machina,” “Lady Bird,” “The Florida Project,” “The Disaster Artist,” etc.). Here’s the trailer to their upcoming horror tale, “Hereditary,” starring Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne, and involves a family legacy. June 8 is when we see it.

There’s not much to say about the enervated romance “The Boy Downstairs,” except that literally every character and actor playing that character is more interesting than the leads. Every last one of them, down to the accented waiter at the Italian restaurant where our would-be couple bickers over there being no lemons for their ice water.

“But…you have lemon risotto on the menu!”

“Lemons are for food, only!”

Zosia Mamet of TV’s “Girls” is Diana, newly moved in to the same apartment building as her ex, Ben (Matthew Shear of “Mistress America”).  Through her eyes we revisit their affair, the break-up precipitated by her two-year move to London, and the regrets that wash over her with every fresh flashback.

And with every rose-colored recollection, we scrunch up our noses and wonder, “Yeah, and?” Rarely has the big screen exhausted 91 minutes on a romance with less sexual heat, with leads who have compatibility — they’re equally dull — but little chemistry Seldom have we met an aspiring writer (Diana) and musician (Ben) who make meeting and falling in love in the Big City more boring, with less evidence that either has anything going on.

She has a prettier and funnier BFF (Diana Irvine) and he has a prettier and funnier new girlfriend (Sarah Ramos), actually the real estate agent who showed Diana the apartment. And they both have a landlady (Deirdre O’Connell) with a more interesting back story (a widowed one-time actress) than we suspect these two bores will ever achieve.

Few things are duller on the screen than the process of writing, and adding Apple product placement to it adds no pizzazz. There’s more promise in Diana’s day job — working in a bridal boutique. Ben? We see nothing of his life outside Diana. Mamet, yeah she’s HIS daughter (with Lindsay Crouse), has little animation to her acting, her voice a mousy “vocal fry,” her face a near blank beneath inexpressive jet-black eyebrows.

What first-time feature writer-director Sophie Brooks was going for is a meditation on longing and romantic regret, with Diana pining away even as she recalls the disapproval of her father (Arliss Howard) and the warm but cautious embrace of Ben’s parents, the ho-hum routines of her life with Ben and the abrupt but understandable end to the affair. The fictive present is filled with Diana finding ways to put herself back in Ben’s path, to the growing irritation of his new girlfriend, despite the blunt evidence that there’s nothing going on.

Which unfortunately makes an all-too-apt blurb describing “The Boy Downstairs” — the movie, the “boy” himself and the dull young woman who lives above.  Nothing but nothing goes on.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual material, brief strong language and drug references

Cast: Zosia Mamet, Matthew Shear, Deirdre O’Connell, Diana Irvine, Arliss Howard, Sarah Ramos

Credits:Written and directed by Sophie Brooks. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:31

Paul Rudd makes one of the more amusing superheroes, and if Evangeline Lilly isn’t forced to be the straight woman, this could be fun. It opens July 6, with Hannah John-Kamen, Walton Goggins, Laurence Fishburne and Michael Douglas in support.

As I was the first to tell you, as I’ve been telling you all along —  Disney is getting very rich by slowly bleeding enthusiasm for “Star Wars” to death. Courtesy of Box Office Mojo.

A hostage thriller/ethereal deep sea exploration romance, primal connections to the water, the womb and each other.

Deep stuff. Very Wim Wenders. The vibe of this trailer for the film based on the J.M. Ledgard novel has only the vaguest hints of plot elements of other movies, but a strong vibe of “The Abyss,” “The Big Blue” and other immersive, spiritual pictures plunging into the sea.

Looks and feels romantic, tragic and deep. May 18,

I had high hopes for the Gothic horror “based on a true story” tale “Winchester.” It’s not a Hammer Films release, but CBS is distributing it, like the late-winter Gothic hit “Woman  in Black” of a few years back.

It stars Helen Mirren, Oscar winner, “The Queen,” in more ways than one, as the ghost-believing widow Sarah Winchester who built a house she was then convinced was haunted by no end of ghosts.

Jason Clarke’s in it. And CBS Films has been promoting the hell out of it. For ages.

Imagine my shock when CBS chose not to preview their latest pre-Oscars horror come-on, a picture that had “Sleeper hit” written all over it.

Then again, the Spierig brothers directed it. Germans best known for the offbeat vampire thriller “Daybreakers” (2009) and last year’s less impressive “Jigsaw,” one gets the impression CBS, which never cracked the code for “What makes a major player in Hollywood films,” figure it’s a dog best hidden from one and all.

Either that, or Winchester firearms got them to suppress their marketing of it. Gun nuttery and blood money associations being what they are.

So I see it Thursday night like anybody else curious enough to figure out what Helen Mirren (doing a lot of no-budget stuff these days) saw in it.

My guess is, not much aside from a paycheck. And CBS? You want to play with the big boys, roll the dice, work with talent and market your movie like grownups. Let the press see your product unless you’re ashamed of it, because that’s what this looks like. Can’t be any worse than “Beastly,” and come to think of it, I liked that.

Stick with me a minute, as this is a peek at music through the lens of a movie critic and occasional concert goer and reviewer.

There was this telling on-camera moment back in the 2008 “Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert” documentary. Yeah, that. Miley, then just a Disney Channel star and daughter of a country music one-hit wonder was rehearsing. And Billy Ray Cyrus, her father was there, and his eyes got ridiculously wide when he checked out her band.

“Man, these guys are” the very best, he said, or something to that effect as he was shaking band-members’ hands like a star-struck fan. As in “Baby girl, you have NO idea.” But Daddy knew. It’s just that Young Miss Miley, like the rest of us, didn’t know the A-list players making her music magical enough to turn her into a star.

Almost every concert video sampled on youtube has them — men and women who play in the shadows along with Pink!, Alice Cooper, Kiss or Ozzy, Billy Joel or Hilary Duff or Elton or Rihanna or even Mandy Moore.   Because yeah, they love “the music, man,” but yeah, a musician’s got to eat.

Sometimes they’re left off of record credits. Often, they’re the touring version of the “band” one hears on the LP, or vice versa. They’re seriously unheralded. They’re underpaid and regarded as replaceable. Even their label within the industry has a negative connotation. This drummer, that guitarist/bassist, they’re not IN the band. They’re just a “Hired Gun.”

Fran Strine’s documentary is in “The Wrecking Crew/Twenty Feet from Stardom” tradition, just another generation down the line from those unknown ’60s music icons. It’s an affectionate metal and pop-centric take on the foot soldiers in modern rock and pop, the players who made Michael and Mellencamp, Billy and Miley and Mandy the stars they became.

We’re reminded that Michael Jackson hired the guys from Toto to record “Thriller,” that Justin Jerrico is the guitarist who gave rock cred to Pink!’s greatest hits, that for decades, every session or touring player’s goal was to “play with Steely Dan,” and that Billy Joel might be the biggest jerk in modern music history, but that he’s got a lot of competition.

Ray Parker Jr. was on the verge of quitting the business after years of playing for guitar for The Four Tops, Joe Cocker, Patti Labelle and Boz Scaggs and taking a brief shot at fame with Raydio. Then Ivan Reitman needs a hit song mere weeks before “Ghostbusters” was to come out, “and the rest is history.”

Session women and men step in when members of Kiss, Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osborne’s band retire, die or quit in a huff. Sometimes they stick, and sometimes they don’t.

“My friends from high school thinks I’m rich,” laughs Greg Upchurch, most recently of Three Doors Down. Half these people, they’re working odd jobs between tours, painting some more famous drummer’s house or delivering pizzas.

There’s Jason Hook, who went from guitarist for Hilary Duff to Alice Cooper to Five Finger Death Punch, and Chris Johnson, who’s played with Stevie Wonder and toured with Rihanna, Phil X and Eric Carr (replacement drumer for Kiss), Nita Strauss (Alice Cooper), David Foster, who figured out early on that the REAL money was in producing/composing and marrying somebody who could get him on “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” — briefly.

They tell stories, of being mistaken for Ted Nugent because you (Derek St. Holmes) sang and played rhythm guitar on his best tunes. They give frank accounts of run-ins with Trent Reznor over credit-hogging/under-paying for play in Nine Inch Nails, of getting a dream assignment to write a hit for George Benson, or being left out in the cold (literally) in Fargo by Billy Joel.

“You’re never fired. You’re just not asked to do the next thing,” says Liberty Devitto, once one of New York’s most famous drummers. He and his bandmates were with Joel for decades, until they weren’t.

Rob Zombie and Alice and Pink! talk about what they owe these players, but what’s implied in this arrangement is that the star is the star. And “reinvention” to keep yourself relevant is to be expected. Check out the number of people here with “Madonna” in their credits.

But if you’re moving on, don’t be a Billy Joel about it.

The anecdotes are, perhaps a bit less iconic (drummer Kenny Aronoff inventing the drum solo that “made” Mellencamp, in “Jack & Diane”), but they’re funnier and occasionally, more tragic than earlier docs in this genre have shared. One laid-off Joel  bandmate killed himself, and Ozzy had to replace Randy Rhoads in mid-tour because his guitarist chose the town Hank Williams died in for a little fun and games with a private plane.

And if you’ve ever wondered who it was who really turned “Thriller” into a smash or gave Kiss a new lease on life in their endless “Farewell tour,” this is the movie for you. ‘

MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity and toilet humor

Cast: Liberty Devitto, Alice Cooper, Pink, Billy Joel, Derek St. Holmes, Eric Carr, Kenny Aronoff, Rob Zombie

Credits:Directed by Fran Strine. A Vision Films/Sony Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:38