Movie Nation

“Fame” doesn’t mean what it used to.

And that’s just hard for a “talented, really pretty” small-town girl named Katelyn (Meredith Hagner) to accept. I mean, she’s already got her conversation with “Ellen” worked out, the “recording” she has set up with Kanye, the love she has for her boyfriend, Ryan Gosling.

Her ticket out of tiny, backward Liberty, New York is “The Voice.” But she can’t get the cash together to record a demo and get an audition. And every time she turns around, a “Teen Mom” is riding homemade sex videos or her tantrum-tossing Dad (Matt Walsh) is becoming a semi-accidental viral video sensation and stealing the fame that is rightfully hers.

Comic actor and stand-up David Cross wrote-and-directed “Hits,” a hit-or-miss “Call in favors” comic commentary on the viral age, small town provincialism and the delusions the culture is feeding us in an era when “talent” won’t get you anywhere, but “attention,” any kind, will.

Katelyn is absolutely convinced of her due. But Dad’s endless Liberty Town Council tirades have given him what she can’t buy — even when she furiously trades sex for recording studio time with a stoner creep (Jason Ritter, perfect) who makes records out of the non-soundproof living room of his dump of a row house.

If you’ve never been to a small town government meeting, you have little idea what you’re missing. Movies and TV, and even closed circuit TV recordings just don’t do them justice.  There is always a local crank, a self-appointed gadfly, and Dave Stuben (Walsh) fills that bill, when he isn’t working for Liberty’s local recycling center.

“That pain in the ass,” is how one and all describe him.

Snow removal, potholes or changes to the local restaurant menu set him off, burning up his three allotted minutes speaking time before the council in weekly tirades.

“TIME, Mr. Stuben,” Council President Casserta (Amy Carlson) always barks. When he detours into threats and profanities, he gets arrested. That gets the attention of Casserta’s son (Michael Cera), making his way as a craft-weed dope dealer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

That’s how the DIY home business activist and hipster doofus Donovan (James Adomian) sees the council videos of Stuben, edits them into a hit montage — comparing him to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and drawing a Hitler mustache onto Casserta in “A Dave that Will Live in History.”

“The town of Liberty, New York, has become Berlin under Hitler!”

Even the nerdy would-be rapper Cory “C-to-the-Y” (Jake Cherry) who lusts after Katelyn has gone viral, picking a rap fight at a high school beer bust, losing and having a video mocking him posted. And “blowing up.”

“Hits,” as you might have gathered, is a comically cluttered mess of a movie. Donovan rounds up his “Think Tank” acolytes (Derek Waters of “Drunk History” and Wyatt Cenac of “The Daily Show”) to take Dave’s “story” to the world — only to be pre-empted by every other viral video marketing/advocacy organization, including CNN.

Erinn Hayes plays Donovan’s baby-obsessed and frustrated wife. We also get tastes of Julia Stiles, Russ Tamblyn and David Koechner, playing a redneck’s redneck, all about guns and talking guns and bitching about city idiots — “Cidiots.”

“We got ourselves a real Rosa Parks, here!”

Amy Sedaris plays Katelyn’s jaded bar manager boss, the one who asks the tough but slow-to-be-answered question — “Does she have any talent?”

Walsh, a veteran character actor (“Veep”) makes the most of his rare leading man turn, wholly embodying the screamers among us who have deep, dark beliefs of the Alex Jones “Infowars” variety, bigotry that rural echo chambers tolerate and foster.

Random bits are hilarious — the competition between viral “push” organizations, all based in Brooklyn (“Greenpoint?” “Bushwick.”), the inane euphemisms hipsters use for simple works like “toilet,””coffee” etc.

But the problem with rounding up every comic friend you can think of to make a movie is that virtually none of them see their characters properly served. Everybody — everybody funny anyway — gets short shrift.

Still, Cross made this 2014 movie, “A true story…that hasn’t happened yet.” And looking at the America of 2018, one year into the reality star presidency, you’d have to call the man a prophet. “Hits” isn’t a great comedy, but given all that’s come after it, it’s worth a second look.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Meredith Hagner, Matt Walsh, Amy Sedaris, Michael Cera, David Koechner, Julia Stiles, Derek Waters, Russ Tamblyn

Credits: Written and directed by David Cross. An Honora release.

Running time: 1:36

Two Indian-American filmmakers peel back the horrors of “arranged marriage” in their native culture in their incendiary new documentary, “A Suitable Girl.”

Not really.

Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra probably glanced over their shoulders back at the divorce-happy USA, which they call home, and took a sober, sympathetic view of the nuts and bolts of this practice, which lingers in India long after most of the rest of the world abandoned it as “unromantic” and rights-restricting and backward.

One “Suitable Girl” might kvetch about “our idiotic traditions we keep following and following.” But she’s bought in and accepted it.

Amrita is her name, a happy go lucky Delhi 20something with an education, a job and a lovely life of “complete freedom.” Except when it comes to the chance meeting, courtship rituals and sexual gamesmanship that most of the West accepts as “normal” for finding a mate. She’s scheduled to be married to Keshev, and we follow her through that wedding and the suddenly confining life (“Every day I have to wear a saree!”) of being an Indian wife — cooking, caring for in-laws, etc.

It’s no wonder we see her weep (above) on her wedding day. Tears of happiness? Or the acknowledgement of what she’s giving up thanks to “traditions?”

Dipti is a plump 25 year-old from a lower middle class family who is trying everything to close a deal. She goes over the personal ads, filled with appeals for husbands and wives. Her mom notices a particular word turning up in all the men’s “Seeking a suitable girl” ads — “beautiful.”

“In your next ad, say you’re beautiful!”

“Why would I do that?”

“A Suitable Girl” is largely about Dipti’s struggle, a young woman increasingly desperate to marry, suffering from depression when hope seems lost. She tries Indian speed dating, which is very polite, quite formal, and a bit like a job fair where everybody’s particulars are barked out for all to hear.

“Twice-divorced, monthly income of,” as each potential groom is introduced.

Then there’s Ritu. With her deep, confident voice, MBA and a mother who is a matchmaker (Seema), you’d think she’d be the catch among catches.

But Seema (below) is at a loss. She consults a “face reader” psychic who dismisses potential pairings with just a glance at their photo on a phone. Seema, all organized and efficient, running a business where marriages are “deals” with “$500,000, USD” or even “$1 million (USD)” are offered for the right “beautiful” bride, cannot figure out who would want her smart, successful, independent and pretty daughter.

The filmmakers give this entire process a serious, patiently immersive treatment (The film is a little slow.) that bottom-feeding American TV avoids with its sexed-up/hook-up competitions “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette.”

Their film was years in the making, but its “conclusion” seems premature. This whole “And they all lived…ever after” feels a bit off. We leave Amrita seemingly accepting the frustrations of her myopic new life and Ritu re-located to a far off land with her arranged-spouse.

Neither feels like we’ve seen the end of her story.

But “A Suitable Girl,” in English, Hindi and “Hinglish” with English subtitles, is still a fascinating look into a custom that the movies and TV have only touched on and mentioned with a raised eyebrow of mild dismissal. The phrase “A Suitable Girl” is so endemic to Indian culture — a famous novel of that title covers some of the same ground, the BBC has the male version of this, “A Suitable Boy” in production–  that you can’t even parse the sexism of the language.

Because maybe “they” are on to something. Because maybe a culture with an entire industry devoted to matchmaking, putting clients in front of vast numbers of potential mates isn’t as arbitrary as the random chance we in the West all romantically accept as the norm.

Leaving us on our own can lead to dating disasters, to “The Bachelor,” or worse. As if there’s anything worse.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Dipti Admane,  Amrita Soni, Ritu Taparia, Seema Taparia

Credits:Directed by Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:30

Mila Kunis is the half of that Mila/Ashton couple that still has a big screen career.

Kate McKinnon? She’s the star, the glue who holds “Saturday Night Live” together.” Lots of shots at movies, this one is the first that makes her a co-star and expects her to help carry it.

Mila plays a woman whose beau (Justin Theroux) is apparently a spy. That gets the wrong sorts of folks interested in her and her BFF (McKinnon) as they flee across Europe.

Check out the “Americans don’t know how to drive a stick shift any more” scene. It’s a winner.

The movie? August release, lowered expectations because it’s a LATE summer comedy. But it could hit. Got to be better than Kate the Ghostbuster, right?

As I said in my review of Universal’s “150 million worth of stupid,” it’s not really for the North American market.

Like Universal’s “Great Wall,” there’s a shift in the cultural locus of both “Pacific Rim” movies. Whoever the “name” stars are, the real performance/”hero” of the movie is “The Chinese Way” — efficient, cooperative, deferential to all knowing authority.

And that’s reflected in the box office take. Rim” rimmed out in the U.S., earning only $26 million. But in China? An exchange-rate thrilling $146 million, and that’s where the movie — Chinese financed — will turn a big profit.

For me, it was odd to hear an unprompted Jackie Chan or John Woo play up the “It’s important to be friends” idea of dealing with China, unprompted, to emphasize China’s need for “order” over civil liberties, representative democracy and a government accountable to its people. They could see, years ago, the way Hollywood would approach luring China onto their bottom lines.

No more Chinese villains, no hints at corruption, waste, an Army that runs everything and makes illicit billions at home and abroad, no more “Red Corner.” Just pandering to the Pandas.

We first noticed this in the Chinese component of “2012,” in which the world experiences a cataclysm, but authoritarian China gets the job of secretly building smokey, diesel powered (No EPA? No problem!) arks to save chunks of the human race. The all-wise/all-knowing State anticipates the disaster, and has the resources and know how to come up with a plan.

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” cedes the power and influence over the aforementioned Rim to China. As in, “We’re pushing our borders well into the China Sea, right up to the shores of Taiwan, Japan and especially the Philippines, because we know best.”

So they run the show, and Hollywood, craving Chinese chump change, flatters the Chinese market by accepting that.

We are seeing this more and more in action films, “Mission: Impossible” this or that.

We’ve seen our last Chinese bond villains, even though, in global terms, their spreading money and collecting natural resources by “helping” Africa and “removing” big chunks of S. America back to the Motherland has the stench of colonization and power grabs.

Besides, Russians make the best villains because they’ve had a century of practice and know no other way.

But as the Not-Exactly-a-PEOPLE’S-Republic struts and gets more deference from the same corner of American business that fretted first about losing European markets to Hitler, second about the slavery and mass murder that promised, the Chinese should watch “Contact.”

Way back in ancient history — the ’90s — Hollywood got a collective sore back bending over and kissing Japanese feet. “Rising Sun,” “Black Rain,” and in the sci-fi hit “Contact,” it’s an all wise Japanese oligarch who saves the day with a “secret” transport for Jodie Foster to make contact with aliens.

The only thing that’s permanent in any of this is Hollywood’s pursuit of production cash, fresh markets to sell their ways as the U.S. audience steadily declines.

India? You’re next.

A Westernized Amsterdam teen struggles with her Muslim identity in “Layla M.,” the Dutch submission for Oscar contention in 2016.

It’s a movie that squares off the pressure to assimilate with the teenage need to rebel as Layla, vividly portrayed by Nora El Koussour, wears a burqa, backtalks her “keep your head down and fit in” parents, curses like an American teen and shouts Koranic quotes at those parents to explain her actions.

A nose-ringed Muslim friend confronts her, mid-prayer, at high school — “Take that potato sack off!” — earning a blunt Koranic condemnation and a “You’re dead to me” brush off.

Layla watches radicalizing videos online, befriends a punk would-be Imam (Hassan Akkouch), rages at injustices and flips out and gets arrested when a ban on Muslim assemblies ends a soccer match by police helicopter.

“We spit on your democracy!” she says, repeating what she’s heard online. “Perverts” she curses the cops.

Dad (Mohammed Azaay), a native Moroccan who runs a shop, has had enough. Her soccer-crazed brother (Bilal Wahib) resents getting caught up in her protests. She needs a way out.

That would be Abdel (Ilias Addab), her fellow radical, the one she has eyes for. Her nightly Facetime with him is where they flirt, where she flings Koranic verses at him about equality of the sexes, and her insistent proposals get through.

They marry, she flees her family and they’re down the rabbit hole of what the authorities have been assaulting their rights over — jihadist training, and from there, to the Middle East.

Co-writer/director Mijke de Jong takes pains to show the role pressure to fit in plays in radicalization. Layla digs her heels in and doubles down, the way many a Trump, Hillary or Bernie voter does. She journeys from “I Chose How I Dress” selfie-videos to taking to falling for the fantasy of an Islamic Planet. 

Abdel romanticizes and sentimentalizes his former homeland, playing down the violence and repression that gutted his family and ran them out. “Layla M.” shows a genuine romance, an idealistic young people on the road East, very much in love, talking politics, Islam and their contribution to the struggle.

Of course, the sobering reality on the ground in the Middle East — a rigid patriarchy, put-up-or-shut-up involvement with groups that behead Westerners, the works — ends all that. Addab lets us see the lights go out in Abdel, and how quickly he accepts his new dictactes on how a Muslim man treats his wife.

Layla tries to live her life as before, but comes to the realization that she’s not in Holland any more. Mouthy, cursing, independent women have a place in this closed community, and that place is silently sticking to work in the kitchen.

“Layla M.,” in subtitled Arabic, Dutch and English, isn’t particularly revealing in it exploration of this subject. “Paradise Now” covered some of the same ground a dozen years ago.

What is new is the female point of view, the chilling contrast between the life her parents uprooted their family to give her and the process of her radicalization. There’s no chicken-egg cause-and-effect to this, no “THEY started it” sense of instigation.

Every grievance, every slur and instance of harassment is remembered, police raids just compound her resolve. Cops asking a group of women they’ve rounded up to remove their face-coverings earns a “We’re not asking you to remove your pants!”

The film goes to some pains to show a broader community where people like Layla are the minority. But if “The Arab Spring” taught us anything, it was that teens are going to rebel, no matter what the culture. Understanding that has to be the first step in any hoped-for intervention to keeping the Laylas of the world in school and not thinking Jihadist thoughts.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Nora El Koussour, Ilias Addab, Hassan Akkouch, Mohammed Azaay

Credits:Directed by Mijke de Jong, script by Jan Eilander, Mijke de Jong. A Topkapi/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

“Flock of Four” is a clumsily-titled but warm and likable amble through the 1950s LA jazz scene. Co-writer director Gregory Caruso conjures up a lightly amusing quest comedy that finds its edge in the subject of race, its warmth in the lost world of South Central and its novelty in a bunch of white Pasadena teenagers clinging to jazz when their peers, and most every black person they meet, is already talking about it in the past tense.

It’s 1959, and Joey Grover (Braeden Lemasters) has never given up the jazz his dad taught him at the piano. He’s the most talented guy in the little quartet that rehearses in his garage. Arch (Uriah Shelton) can never get his lungs around a winning sax solo, though the rhythm section, Bud (Isaac Jay) on bass and Louie (Dylan Riley Snyder) on drums, is solid.

Rock and roll is here to stay, but these guys are boats against the current, especially Joey. And a plug on the radio mentioning that legendary drummer Pope Davis is appearing that night at one of South Central’s last jazz clubs has Joey hellbent on dragging them all there to see The Pope “before it’s too late.”

Caruso treats us to scenes that have become pop culture tropes — the local diner, with its pop-hits-packed jukebox, the greasers — high school poseurs who all happen to be Italian American. It’s familiar, but try to remember the last time this “American Graffiti/Happy Days” cliche was trotted out in a feature film.

The lads dash off, even though South Central was scary to suburban kids, even back then. They go even though Joey’s older brother (Shane Harper) has forbidden it, and enlisted his girlfriend (Gatlin Kate James) and greaser Tony (Connor Paolo), who has a car, to track them down.

And the jazz quartet can’t be encouraged when the taxi dumps them off nowhere near where they want to be, and the first black kids they meet — Johnny Otis fans — laugh in their faces.

“These cats ain’t got any rhythm…OR blues.”

The night’s quest bounces from club to club, wending its way toward the famed Dunbar Hotel, historically the swankiest “colored” hotel in LA.

And we meet sibling jazz fans, friendly torch singer Ava (Coco Jones) and her testy, racially touchy brother Clifford (Nadji Jeter). Can they help? I mean, with Joey’s brother so determined to head them off?

“They’re trying to take us back to PASADENA!”

Clifford scowls, “Wow. That would be…so terrible.”

He’s the voice of Civil Rights era outrage, not all that happy to be helping out these guys who, 60 years later, would be assailed for “cultural appropriation.” He’s bent on exposing their unfitness to play the music.

You know how these stories play out. The kids end up on stage, tested. The racial tolerance of one and all is also tested, and some fail.

Inevitably, quests like this are let down when “the great man/woman” they’re seeking finally shows up. Either he’s a no show (“The Commitments”) or so poorly written and cast that one and all realize what a waste the quest has been.

Not here. Reg E. Cathey of “The Wire,” “House of Cards” and “St. Vincent,” a one-time jazz player, makes Pope Davis the weary, wary and grizzled survivor of jazz and racism in America that the movie absolutely needs him to be. His scenes bring weight to a movie that is otherwise light and inconsequential. Dude can even predict the future.

“Know what they’ll call the decade that killed jazz? The SIXTIES!”

Cathey’s little speech reminded me of something Michael Jai White noted when his cult blaxploitation spoof “Black Dynamite” came out. “Black people,” he opined, “when they’re over something, it’s DONE. Jazz, blues, blaxploitation movies.”

It’s these better-late-than-never suburbanites who “appropriate” the culture and keep it on life support.

“Flock of Four” never achieves the giddy highs of a “Diner” or the classics of this genre and period. But it varies the formula just enough to set up the finale. And then Cathey, maestro that he is, brings in on home with a killer solo.

MPAA Rating: unrated, racism, fisticuffs, mild profanity

Cast:Braeden Lemasters, Uriah Shelton, Coco Jones, Isaac Jay, Reg E. Cathey, Shane Harper

Credits:Directed by Gregory Caruso, script by Gregory Caruso, Michael Nader. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:20

A conventional coming-of-age-while-poor narrative serves up plenty of unconventional twists in “Lean on Pete,” a dusty, downbeat tale set on the margins of horse racing.

That’s a world 15 year-old Charley (Charlie Plummer) discovers one summer day while strolling past the local track. This isn’t “the sport of kings,” with Triple Crown winners and mint juleps. Portland, Oregon might be the highest profile stop on a circuit of fairgrounds and time-worn circuits that saw their best days pre-TV, tracks where quarterhorses race.

Charley’s dad (Travis Fimmel, terrific) may be good company and a reasonably attentive single parent. But he’s not a solid provider, drifting from woman to woman and job to job, and that does nothing for the kid’s well-being or his high school grades and high school sports ambitions.

Maybe Del, the sour old horse owner/trainer who offers Charley work — exercising horses, cleaning stables and transport trailer — would make a more promising father figure.

He’s played  by Steve Buscemi, and the string of expletives he unleashes as we meet him tell us, “Maybe not father figure material.” Del is an aged hustler running a handful of horses he drags from track to track, making stake money here and there, cheating when he has to.

This is what Charley learns from him, the “vitamins” slipped to horses, the illegal “buzzer” his jockey Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny) uses to goose her ride into contention. The ageing horse with the most promise in Del’s stable of losers? Lean on Pete, who takes to Charley as Charley, whose life hasn’t had room for pets, takes to him.

“You can’t get all attached to the horse,” Bonnie lectures. “They lose too much, they get sold.”

By “sold,” she means “to Mexico,” Del threatens. That’s where horses as meat is the most valuable.

This plot description has you thinking, “OK, I know where this is going,” as it did me. But writer-director Andrew Haigh, adapting Willy Vlautin’s novel, doesn’t take us there. Don’t get too attached to characters, because they leave Charley’s life as his odyssey takes a more depressing turn.

The greatest virtue of “Lean on Pete” is the world this kid inhabits, and not just the horse tracks gone to seed. This is how the working poor live, leases they can’t see through, under-furnished homes, a perpetually empty fridge and struggle. Violence is never far out of the norm.

Plummer’s performance is aptly matched to his appearance. He’s lanky, gawky and awkward, a kid who has moved too often to make lasting friendships. He’s shy to the point of standoffish. And he is absorbing lessons, about horses and life from Bonnie and Del, and about women from his Dad.

“The best women have all been waitresses, at some point.”

Buscemi, Sevigny and Steve Zahn (as a trailer-dwelling drunk) all give fair value in any film lucky enough to have them. The picture hangs on Plummer, and his blank face/blank-slate innocence haveto carry it.

“Lean on Pete” is a somber, quixotic trek through a modern West of limited horizons, finite opportunities and the sense that even the young are just playing out their string. It’s a long, unhurried drama with the odd flash of violence and tragedy.

Plummer, milieu and a fine supporting cast make it pay off, even as we keep our doubts about that right up to the finish line.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief violence

Cast: Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Zahn

Credits:Directed by Andrew Haigh, script by Andrew Haigh, Willy Vlautin . An A24 release.

Running time: 2:01

A “Jackass” take on the sort of old school Southern amusement park (not, um, OSHA compliant) with Johnny Knoxville in grandfatherly make up — at least for part of it.

No, it’s not “Bad Grandpa,” but it is slapstick of an R-rated “3 Stooges” variety. “Action Point” is due out June 1. 

Yes, there’s another “Black Panther” box office record, the one for highest domestic gross ever for a Marvel movie. It will have earned over $630 million by the time the totals are tallied Sunday night.

But “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” even though it’s a sequel nobody save for Universal asked for, pushed the Panther out of the way with a less than dazzling $26 million opening.

For a $150 million movie, that’s bad news. But remember, it wasn’t made for the U.S. market. It’s an international picture with a lot of China fluffing in it.

“Sherlock Gnomes,” not previewed for critics and a sequel to “Gnomeo & Juliet,” won’t bring Johnny Depp back into box office glory. A middling $9 million opening?

Likewise “Midnight Sun” isn’t going to ensure Bella Thorne of a future in the movies. That one, not terrible I thought, barely cracked the top ten with a $4 million weekend.

“Paul, Apostle of Christ” is an intimate Biblical epic launched right before Easter, but poor reviews aren’t helping it put a dent in that faith audience.

Because they’re still going to “I Can Only Imagine,” a lightweight bio-pic/drama that is managing 75% of its already-strong opening weekend audience. Not a great picture, but its giving its audience what they want and churches have been bulk-buying showings of it. A great Easter Weekend and it could hit $70 million by the time it’s chased off screens.

Steve Soderbergh’s quixotic journey from big box office director to explorer of the cinema’s fringe financing schemes (“Logan Lucky”) and smaller outfits that can’t market a movie to save their lives (“Unsane”) continues. Bleecker Street put his non-supernatural horror picture shot on an iPhone on 2000 screens, and created zero buzz for it. Little advance word that it was coming, almost no awareness in the general culture. Where did they advertise it? Why bother releasing them theatrically at all?

When the movie’s a picture from a popular genre, and gets good notices and nobody goes to see it, that’s incompetent marketing.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is creeping up over $70 million but will fall well below $100 by the time it loses screens.

“Ready Player One” figures to eat the box office for lunch Easter Weekend, but there’s not much buzz for that one, despite heavy advertising.

Apparently, in the future, getting your hands on good hot sauce is like having cigarettes in prison. The currency of the day. Even in Chinese future “Pacific Rim” films imagine and embrace.

Would never have recognized the stuff, as I avoid it. But the taste-buds-torched girlfriend has like a two year’s supply stocked up in the house.

No doubt a hoard stockpiled for the Chinese and kaiju takeover of global cuisine. “Pacific Rim: Uprising” was merely a warning.