Movie Nation

Looks goofy, size jokes, etc.

A lot will depend on the villain. A worthy foe of the insectoid duo.  July 6.

Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, M. Douglas, M. Pena, Fishburne and Walton Goggins?

The sports comedy formula doesn’t require that the movie come from Hollywood or be about baseball, football or hoops. All that’s necessary is a gang of plucky underdogs who somehow make it to “the Big Game.”

“Holy Goalie” (“Que Baje Dios y lo vea”) is a Spanish farce about an embattled seminary that forms a team to fight its way into “The Champions Clerum,” for a chance to play the unbeatable Vatican soccer squad in “The Pit,” which as everyone knows, is Vatican soccer’s home pitch.

The movie is comedy of the mostly low-hanging fruit variety, but it’s got laughs. Oh yeah.

Alain Hernández (“Project Rwanda”) is Father Salva, the idealistic Spanish priest who has been chased out of every war zone in Africa, where he’s been running schools, paying blackmail money (out of the Catholic Church’s coffers) to save his students from recruitment to this or that Revolutionary Front’s child soldier ranks. 

Karra Elejalde of “Timecrimes” is Father Munilla in charge of St. Theodosius, where aged priests teach novices theology, church history and how to be priests, and have since the Middle Ages.

But it’s on valuable property, the sort of magnificent stone ruin that developers would love to turn into a parador, a luxury hotel. The bishop (Tito Valverde) has a taste for the finer things and is all set to sell the seminary and move everybody into another one run by the venal and corrupt Cienfuegos (Antonio Durán ‘Morris,’ hilarious). 

It’s Father Salva who decides this is a teachable moment for the young would-be priests. They’ll form a team and win their way to Vatican City, making the case that St. Theodosius must be saved.

You know the drill from here — assemble the squad from “types,” the portly Mexican bumpkin goal keeper, the Brazilian who does “not need to practice, it’s in my blood!”

Brother Simon has some talent, but temptation in the form of a lovely paramedic (Macarena Garcia) has him questioning his commitment. No, the blind priest, the “comically” disabled Ramon (El Langui) and the other elders won’t play. They need ringers.

I chuckled at the “corrupting” influence of the game on the monastery, at the “ringer” named “Jesus” (Guillermo Furiase Gonzalez) who has to be recruited from an amusingly over-the-top American-style evangelical church, at the endless profanity and trash talk that the players and the priest in charge toss about like a futbol.

“All my life, fleeing from sin,” Munilla whines (in Spanish, with English subtitles), “and suddenly, it’s Hell, Excommunication and JAIL!”

The games get professional broadcast commentary (wisely, much of the action is off camera, we see reactions from priests and fans in the stands instead), there’s match-fixing, water-boarding, rules bending and the like.

And in Vatican City, jokes between the Swiss Guards, a brawl with casino bouncers and a guest appearance by the Popemobile.

It adds up to very little, but as time-killers that help you brush up on your Spanish go, it’s got enough laughs to get by. Almost.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, poop jokes, comic violence

Cast:Karra Elejalde, Alain Hernández, Macarena Garcia, Joel Bosqued, Tito Valverde, 

Credits:Directed by Curro Velázque, script by Mauricio Romero, Curro Velázquez. A DeAPlaneta/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Cute.

Rachel Dolezal is the white woman outed for pretending to be black, serving as president of the Spokane NAACP, an activist leading protests against shootings in the run up to the Black Lives Matter movement.

That’s the narrative we were fed by media outrage, “Daily Show” and comic sketch show mockery (Maya Rudolph, take a bow).

“The Rachel Divide” shows Dolezal’s life after the media circus, with her two smart, compassionate and thoughtful black sons and the price they all had to pay for her transgressions. Her career — in African American studies academia —  is over. Her community shuns her, and we see her drop her kids off at the airport or the barber shop because she can’t show her face in public, then have an angry black shop owner order her not to park in front.

The film then takes us back to the origins of the controversy, her NAACP leadership, accusations of racist threats in the mail, nooses, hate crimes, that appear to be bogus.

A local TV reporter outed her.

My first thought as all that blew up was I’ve seen this sort of hustle before. I covered Native American organizations in Alaska whose ethnic favoritism in hiring allowed people with laughably minor (and dubious) claims to tribal connections into lucrative Federal jobs that they had neither the competence nor the relationship to “their” community to be effective.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Maybe. Surely America’s drift towards “identity politics” had a little something to do with Dolezal being a sort of early adaptor in a culture headed toward a transgender, transracial future.

Filmmaker Laura Brownson follows Dolezal around in her life today, a town “that won’t let me be me,” and an African American community that still wants to keep her at arm’s length. She drives an old car with a cracked windshield, hunting for jobs with no offers coming.

A Spokane journalist admits that perhaps Dolezal made up the racist threats that spawned the expose and backlash. “Perhaps.” But he goes on to add that pretending that isn’t a widely held attitude on the fringe of White Nationalism’s Northwestern stronghold is laughable.

The Howard U. alumna, expert in African American studies and art, hasn’t changed her appearance, the frizzy or dreadlocked hair that was fairly blonde in her teens. She had avoided the media. The film captures her re-introduction to media via “The Real,” a very smart woman who gets schooled by more overtly ethnic TV hostesses of color, and admits she’s a white woman who identifies as black.

And being pregnant, she takes a ribbing over simply being a woman who prefers black men. She cringes.

The best scenes are between Dolezal and her sons Franklin and Izaiah, kids who are more philosophical about what she and by extension they have to endure.

Brownson delivers montages of the loud, colorful and heated debate about Dolezal on TV, which seem hilarious and quaint with the passage of time. I mean, it was three years ago, after all. Ancient history.

Then we see how she grew up. And we get it. This was a family at war with itself, not unlike the country that got so worked up by this. It is an ongoing war, both with her family (lots of adopted black children) and within the country.

“I know who I am. And my kids know who I am…Everybody else?”

Her art — colorful, intensely personal paintings and sculptures — is soulful, accomplished and vividly African and African American.

If you’ve made up your mind about her, it’s hard to see this intriguing documentary changing that made up mind. The movie turned my head, here and there.

But the questions about her honesty linger, along with the notoriety. How’d she get the skin tone, one wonders? The hair goes without explanation, but this still seems like an adaptation too far.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Rachel Dolezal, Franklin Dolezal, Izaiah Dolezal, Jeff Humphrey

Credits:Directed by Laura Brownson, script by Laura Brownson, Jeff Seymann Gilbert. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Even today, over 100 years after its release, you can’t call yourself a film buff if you haven’t seen “The Birth of a Nation.”

Yes, it is overtly racist with scenes to make all but the most virulent white supremacist cringe. But it also is the origin story of cinema itself, the motion picture as Ur text, the one that introduced the language of film. The shots, editing and storytelling techniques that director David Wark Griffith pioneered and that remain the foundations of how you tell a story with moving pictures.

But “Birth” isn’t just the starting point for modern film history. It gave birth to two movements on opposite sides of America’s racial schism. The movie revived the defunct, racist minority-oppressing Ku Klux Klan, brought it out into the open and set the stage for another half century of Jim Crow laws and lynchings. And protesting the movie unified Black America like nothing before it, setting the mission of the NAACP in stone and predicting the organized protests of the Civil Rights movement which began just over thirty years after the film became the cinema’s first blockbuster.

“Birth of a Movement: The Battle Against America’s First Blockbuster,” wonderfully sketches in the history leading up to the film’s 1915 release, its artistry and malign racial politics, and then tracks its impact, both as “inspiration” and justification for the spread of Jim Crow racial discrimination laws and the protests — “direct action” — that erupted as well.

It’s a documentary that provides “context,” as Spike Lee puts it, recalling the first time he was exposed to the movie at film school at NYU. Context was long missing from this movie, as it popped up in history of film classes, revival screenings and the like.

Filmmakers Bestor Cram and Susan Gray provide that, and history we’ve forgotten in their concise, smart and thorough film. Historians like Henry Louis Gates, film scholars from here and abroad, social scientists and filmmakers like Lee and Reginald Hudlin detail the film’s place in cinema lore, its problems and a hero who emerged from the battle over the movie in 1915 Boston.

The hero is crusading newspaperman William Monroe Trotter, whose Boston “Guardian” led the charge to get the film censored and suppressed. It was a hopeless cause, but a righteous one, spitting into the wind of long lines at the nation’s box offices (Blacks could not get tickets in many cities) and the endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson, who called the “Klan saves The South and the Nation from Miscegenation” drama “history written with lightning.”

A little-seen 1930 interview with director Griffith, and footage from the many movies he made leading up to “Birth” is sampled. The racist cinema that predated his masterpiece, short stereotype-building pictures by other filmmakers, is shown.

Most importantly, though, is that context, the flux that the nascent NAACP and state of “Black Leadership” was in before the film’s arrival, the larger conflict that pitted Trotter, his Harvard classmate W.E.B. Dubois against civil rights appeaser Booker T. Washington, before “Birth,” their unity in vilifying the movie after its release.

Scholars like Griffith chronicler Ira Gallen and Vincent Brown make the case that the movie still has value, as a “masterpiece,” as “the first film to have the word ‘propaganda’ attached to it,” and as “historically inaccurate, but an honest distillation of American racial thought at that time.”

I particularly enjoyed Gallen’s setting the record straight about Griffith’s real background (“white trash, poor”) and his romanticized view of that childhood and the racist myth-building he fostered through his sepia toned glasses.

With “Birth of a Movement” PBS has financed an essential cornerstone of any film “History of Film” high school or college course, one that you don’t have to go to class to absorb. It’s right here on Netflix right now.

MPAA Rating: unrated, historic depictions of racial violence

Cast: Narrated by Danny Glover, with Spike Lee, Dick Lehr, Henry Louis Gates, Vincent Brown, Dolita Cathcart and many others

Credits: Directed by Bestor Cram, Susan Gray, script by Kwyn Bader, Dick Lehr. A PBS Independent Lens/Netflix release.

Running time: :54

You can eat the sausage, but who really wants to see how it’s made?

The state of high school hoops in America — blue chip prospects ID’d as tweens, recruited to “high school” superteams that aren’t high schools at all, prepped for colleges that sell the myth of “student athlete,” all aimed at the slim chance of NBA millions — gets a dramatically satisfying airing in “Amateur,” the debut feature of Ryan Koo, now on Netflix.

“Amateur” shines a light on a seriously dysfunctional system. It’s a sell-out updating of “Hoop Dreams” for the viral video era, a sharp-edges-rubbed-off film that holds interest even as it loses some of its testy edge drifting towards a wish fulfillment fantasy conclusion.

Michael Rainey Jr. of TV’s “Power” has just enough game to be a convincing point guard whose promise, at 14, is such that the sharks are circling.

That would be the “recruiters” who follow middle school and high school teams and arrange the deals that get the most promising into prep school pipelines to the NCAA “power conference” teams, and potentially the NBA.

Terron (Rainey) is a dominant talent on a middling high school team, earning the attention of “Liberty Prep,” a basketball factory masquerading as high end academia for “trust fund babies.” Josh Charles brings a nurturing oiliness to Coach Gaines, a smooth-talking cynic who sells the big dream to a 14 year-old — NBA millions.

But Terron is a kid with problems. His father (Brian White, terrific) is a former jock wearing the symptoms of too many concussions — vanishing memory, blackouts, temper tantrums. And Terron has a learning disability, “dyscalculia,” numbers blindness.

Algebra is a mystery to him, but he’s smart enough to figure out work-arounds. And since he can’t even make out the scoreboard or clock in the gym, his coaches count down the shot clock to make him effective.

A clever effect — letting us see the garbled shot clock that only Terron sees.

Coach Gaines cons the kid’s mother (Sharon Leal, earthy and engaging), a teacher who values academics and pushes the college degree in case this sports thing doesn’t work out. And Terron joins glamorous Liberty Prep.

Only it’s not glamorous. The players aren’t really at the prestigious school they’re supposed to be attending. They’re crammed into a rundown house, given loaner bicycles to get to school and overwhelmed with workouts that eat up whatever academic time they’re supposed to put in.

The players who haze the “daycare team” recruit are a blend of blue chips, foreigners (some much older than they say) and others who either ignore the kid, or tip him off that classes and grades? They’re all taken care of.

“We too big too fail,” Eastern European Petrus (Stefan Frank) jokes.

As the kid starts to fit in, as such kids inevitably do in such movies, going all the way back to “One on One,” he starts to figure out the war of competing agendas at play here. His father has one, the coach has one, and each player has his own as well.

“We don’t play for coach, we don’t play for colleges, we don’t even play for the U.S.” a teammate (Ashlee Brian) clues him in. “We play for the (sporting goods) brands.”

Charles is quite adept at playing this coach with just enough compassion and understanding to charm the kid, just enough edge to let us question his agenda and true motives. He’s a talented tactician and mentor, but an outsider, a Jim Boeheim or Rick Pitino who never appeared to be clean enough to make the jump to the big time.

Forget the textbooks, “I want you to bury your nose in this playbook, like it’s a pillow made out of Rihanna’s” breasts,” Coach purrs.

But Koo, in reaching for an overall indictment of the system and possible solutions — think about how the rest of the world has no NCAA to appease, where athletes can sell their talents — robs his movie of a real villain in the process.

That breaks the formula, but also makes for a less satisfying viewing experience. Drama requires more conflict than “Amateur” delivers. “Everybody Wins” is not the way the world works.

In not letting the salty but engaging Charles fill that function, and lacking any version of the turn-a-blind-eye to its own corruption NCAA to park in that role, “Amateur” goes all squishy in the third act, just when the stakes should go up and the cost of failure should be its bitterest.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Michael Rainey Jr., Josh Charles, Sharon Leal, Brian White

Credits: Written and directed by Ryan Koo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Virtually every time I have interviewed Terry Gilliam, the conversation turns to “the unluckiest filmmaker in the movies.”

Take all of Orson Welles’ problems finding financing, twist them into constant studio interference leading to “The only movies I can make are ones I shouldn’t be making,” coupled with Heath Ledger, a co-star, dying before “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” was finished, and you’ve got a cinematic visionary who appears to be cursed.

Most famously, his “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” — co-starring Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, turned into a debacle worthy of a documentary of its own — “Lost in La Mancha.”

By God, he’s finished it. Finally. With Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce and Olga Kurylenko and Stellan Skarsgard and by cracky it looks crackers.

Let’s hope it actually makes it from Cannes to a theater near you and me.

Gott in himmel, vas ist los?

A gay German “Beguiled” spoof built on comically over-the-top womynist/leftist revolutionary rhetoric?

Oh, it’s from Bruce LaBruce, Ontario’s boundary-bending icon of the queer cinema. He’s made movies about a young into MUCH older men (in a nursing home) — “Gerontophilia” — and gay Goth zombie love (“Otto; or Up with Dead People.”

So over the top? Yeah.

“The Misandrists” is about a remote revolutionary indoctrination camp for the Feminist Liberation Army, German (mostly) lesbians training for a world without men, which takes in an injured young male revolutionary (Til Schindler) on the run from the authorities.

Big Mother (Susanne Sachße, a mainstay of LaBruce movies such as “The Raspberry Reich) doesn’t know about him. Nor do any of her “sisters,” the teachers at this “boarding school.”

Only Hilde (Olivia Kundisch) and Isolde (Kita Updike) do. They hide him in the basement, where Isolde takes to nursing young Volker.

The “school” is a hotbed of encouraged coupling, re-coupling and quasi-comic sexuality, all masterminded by the leather-clad, cane-walking Big Mother. 

“I can’t help if it’s kinky!”

They gather for group meals, sing womynist hymns — “Glory be to the Mother, and to the daughter.”

They give thanks for their gender — “Blessed be the Goddess of All Worlds that has not made me a man!”

They watch gay porn — “I don’t NEED to watch gay porn to be disgusted by men!”

And they plan the Revolution, women plotting a world without men.

Meanwhile, there’s all this flirting and nearly-nude pillow-fighting going on, with only Isolde opting out.

“Of course I like you…as a COMRADE.”

LaBruce toys with stereotypes, softcore porn tropes and ever-so-arch reminiscences of the Golden Age of German Leftist militancy. And who knew you could make “The Beguiled” more gay?

As the quoted lines above demonstrate, he’s got a way with canny, cutting and campy dialogue.

What he doesn’t manage well is comedy in general. The vamping isn’t in the “Rocky Horror” range, the camp characters are never campy enough to be funny. The one-liners just kind of lie there. The movie’s many make-out scenes do what they do in most exploitation films, they stop the movie cold.

And when he takes the story into his spin on a “Beguiled” revenge resolution, he crosses the last few lines available to him, and then anti-climaxes his way to the credits as if he ran out of money or ideas or both.

But he may know his audience, and he may have a point (sort of) when he excuses himself from criticism by having a character voice this apologia.

“There’s no point in trying to explain the right thing to the wrong people.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic surgery, explicit sexual content, nudity

Cast: Susanne Sachße, Kita Updike, Viva Ruiz, Til Schindler, Olivia Kundisch, Victoire Laly

Credits:Written and directed by Bruce LaBruce. A Cartilage release.

Running time: 1:31

I mean, “actuals” come in tomorrow, and although it does appear “Avengers: Infinity War” was cleared the $248 million or so “The Force Awakens” erupted with, the estimates could be a couple of million off.

But right now, $250 million is what it looks like the third Avengers movie — with everybody from Robert Downey Jr. to Elizabeth Olsen, Chris Evans to Chris Pratt, Don Cheadle to Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson to Samuel L. Jackson — hyped to Hell and back, has earned.

Wow.

“A Quiet Place” earned $10.65 million.  Pretty much the only other movie to make a mark.

“Rampage” fell off a cliff, “Super Troopers 2” fell off a steeper cliff.

A PETA approved horror film?

Just kidding. I kid. I mean, meat-eating tourists stop at the wrong diner, order the wrong meal, and next thing you know, THEY’RE on the menu.

Hans Stjernswärd directed this one. Not sure of release status of “The Farm.” Looks…rough.