Movie Nation

I cackled a couple of times at this Gravitas Ventures trailer for “Apartment 212.” Penelope Mitchell is the newly-divorced (abusive marriage) tenant whose “some kind of rash” in no rash at all. “Those aren’t bedbugs.”

One-time Oscar nominee Sally Kirkland also stars in this Mar. 16 release.

It seems as if we’ve all been hearing about this YA/sci-fi novel being turned into a movie since the Kennedy Administration.

Which we sort of have.

I don’t recall the Disney TV movie based on it, and never got around to the Newbery Medal winning book as a kid. Not a huge sci-fi buff back then, though I got around to John Christopher’s page-turning, violent actionish (boy hero, too), “Tripods” novels “Tripods” novels. Sexism. Must have been.

This one arrives in theaters with a huge helping of hype, and a marketing strategy that I am quite curious to watch to see how it pays off. Young unknown female lead, diversity and the feminine leads (Oprah, Reese, Mindy) featuring most prominently in the promotion. Will it declaw “Black Panther”?

In other words, will boys go see it, too, and in huge numbers? Fanboys as well?

Lot of money riding on it, and I don’t have a firm grasp from the trailers what to expect. So hoping for the best, guarded optimism and all that.

Let’s see what you’ve got. This much we know for sure. Disney, unlike the creators of “Gringo” (opening Friday), “The Hurricane Heist” (ditto) and “The Strangers: Prey at Night” is showing its wares to the reviewing press before release. How bad must those three March movies be to inspire that much fear?

You will never look at Lily Collins the same way after seeing her “To the Bone.”

She plays an upper middle class art student tumbling towards death. She’s ballerina-with-cancer thin, and by choice. Our first peek at the pretty “Mirror, Mirror” star is sure to make your jaw drop. She’s a stick.

And even though this is acting, and she worked with a nutritionist to make this indie film on eating disorders, this is something she’s actually lived with in real life. It’s not so much a raw performance — the dainty, pale beauty of “Love, Rosie” is still recognizable, barely — as a committed one.

Every time her character declares, “I’ve got it under control,” we know better. The rare smile is parked on a pile of ribs, visible hip and sternum bones.

As Ellen, she provides a solid foundation to build a film that follows a conventional path towards an inconclusive resolution.

It’s a California tale, with an absentee dad, a carping step mother (Carrie Preston), a birth mother whose “coming out” and a sort of Internet art “fame” and its dark side, no one of which one and all toss out to “explain” her mania for starving herself.

Everybody is worried sick about her, even the sister (Liana Liberato) she impresses with her ability to accurately count the number of calories on every plate put in front of her, plates Ellen simply will not eat.

“It’s like you have caloric Asperger’s!”

But step-mom’s last throw-money-at-this hope is Dr. Beckham (Keanu Reeves). He’s the handsome near-beard with the foul-mouthed, kind-hearted tough-love that could save her.

“You’re not thin,” he says, sizing her up, examining the bruises for the sit-ups she insists on doing, despite not eating. “You scare people. You like that.”

Threshold it is, then, Dr. Beckham’s treatment halfway house for eating disorders. Producer-turned-writer/director Marti Noxon’s film takes pains to put an overweight girl (“I’ve got the BINGE part down,” not the purging.) and a British guy (Alex Sharp) in the mix. Because Bulimia and Anorexia Nervosa still have that “rich white American girl/woman” stigma.

The sarcastic eye-roller Ellen doesn’t quite fit in, and the dorky, flirtatious ballet dancer Luke (Sharp, a Tony winner) pays her unwanted attention in such a disarming way that she lets down her guard.

Or might.

“To the Bone” is filled with the gallows humor of cancer ward or mental ward dramedies, with one-liners and telling snippets of jargon that one might hear from a person whose illness has become their career.

“I’m about to get the tube and he doesn’t even care.”

“Typical of us Rexies!”

There’s one big laugh, a restaurant prank that’s part of Luke’s pretentious intent to hit the “can’t miss” eateries of his favorite food critic.

But I appreciated the filmmaker’s determination — Noxon is a “Buffy” vet — to take this seriously, even if she’s following a formula well-worn long before TV invented “Disease of the Week” movies.

We stopped making drinking and driving jokes, quite abruptly, over 25 years ago.

“Gay” jokes all but disappeared from polite public discourse somewhere between “The Hangover” (“That’s so…gay.”) and “The Hangover Part 3.”

Eating disorders? Acceptance and understanding have been a little slower coming. George Carlin’s furious assault on this mostly-American, overwhelmingly white and often affluent condition impacting (mostly) young women was 25 years ago, and there’s still a lingering “Just get over it” clinging to the culture.

“To the Bone” doesn’t quite bury that diatribe and its after-effects. But Noxon passes on some new theories about what is going on and what the latest treatments look like.

And Collins, an actress we’ve come to know via her roles over a period of years, so shocks us with just her appearance that it gives one pause. If that pause leads to a softening of attitudes and greater sympathy for those who are suffering, then “To the Bone” has achieved its higher calling.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult themes, profanity, smoking

Cast: Lily Collins, Keanu Reeves, Lili Taylor, Alex Sharp, Liana Liberato, Carrie Preston, Leslie Bibb

Credits: Written and directed by Marti Noxon. A Mockingbird/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

A UCLA film school production with an omnibus cast, “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards” summoned some big-names and character actors in a sort of “Short Cuts” for the stories of Robert Boswell.

The pieces are of a biting, depressing nature — long-ago traumas, broken lives often illustrated by the moment that broke them.

Most notable in its cast — James Franco, star of its first story — “A Walk in Winter.” He’s a glum young man who has returned to the horrors of the hometown where his father murdered his mother and considered murdering him. The too-casual, understaffed PD thinks it has found her body. But first, they need him to pitch in, “cover” the phones, etc.

Franco’s understated turn is undercut by the whole UCLA origins of the project. His predatory reputation and yen for academic environments in which he played his sexual power trips on much younger women makes something like this icky on a whole different level.

In story two, “Guests,” the bullied son of a dying father (Matthew Modine)  struggles at home and at school, with his father assuming his fights are due to worry over death’s illness. “This disease,” the old man says, “is like an uninvited guest.”

But “His fight was also mine,” the adult kid narrates. Sticking up for himself is a touchstone moment of his life.

For the third story, “Almost Not Beautiful” we meet drunken, broken Amanda (Amber Tamblyn), an aspiring “monologist” who “twice tried to kill herself,” a story related by her sister (Kate Mara). The “good” sister returns to check in with the disaster she left behind.

  Kristen Wiig stars in “Miss Famous,” as a maid who services the rich and perhaps not famous. It’s an interior monologue driven piece about an aspiring writer who fantasizes that clean-freak employer Tony Cox (the elf in “Bad Santa”) is fantasizing about her. As she scrubs his toilets, she stumbles across a note that triggers a daydream of nightclubs, autographs, wedding proposals and men fighting over her.

  Jimmy Kimmel shows up, playing “a banker type.” Natalie Portman is a “girl I left behind,” Thomas Mann is the disturbed, horny teen of a doctor who lost his license giving abortions.

And so on.

Snippets of home movies introduce each voice-over-narrated piece. With this many credited directors, it’s the occasional flash of editing and the settings (rural, mostly) that stand out. Some lines land and linger, “flair for the near-overdose,” and the like.

“That’s a good story, man,” one character tells another, after the long conversations/stories that dominate each mini-narrative. That would be true, if any of the stories had something resembling a conclusion. Or if the stories weren’t self-indulgent to the point of onanism.

And if this is one of the last films we see Franco in, another “indie” no budget thing with student filmmakers attached, we’ll recognize what caused his downfall and the Oscar he threw away over chasing age inappropriate young women.

“Insensitive Bastards” have their poster child.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: James Franco, Natalie Portman, Kristen Wiig, Mathew Modine, Rico Rodriguez, Jimmy Kimmel

Credits:Directed by Mark Columbus, Lauren Hoekstra, Sarah Kruchowski, Ryan Moody, Simon Savelyev, Vanita Shastry, Shadae Lamar Smith, Jeremy David White, Jonathan King, , script based on the Robert Boswell book. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

No movie with “F*&%” in its title is suitable for tweens.

So no, whatever intern writes the “guidance” blurb on Netflix films. “F*&% the Prom,” the Bully Boys/Mean Girls/Meaner Gays comedy by Benny Fine isn’t pre-teen appropriate. Take it from somebody who has written syndicated “parents guide” columns for some of the nation’s biggest newspaper wire services.

It doesn’t matter how many movies and cable TV shows feature parents freely cursing, sexually teasing and taunting their kids (“Every Day,” TV’s “Divorce” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “Big Little Lies,” for instance) you’ve seen. That’s a Hollywood Cali-normification of something that most of us still find coarse and not optimal parenting.

That said, “Prom” isn’t hateful. It’s a half-funny “Mean Girls” revenge comedy about outcasts brought together to nuke the signal event that defines the kids “who win high school,” and those they teased, taunted and tormented — senior prom. And it’s a half-serious “High School Popularity Doesn’t Matter” lecture in the form of farce.

So yeah, like most of us in high school, it has its moments — just not enough of them.

Maddie (Danielle Campbell of TV’s “Starstruck,” “Alive in Denver”) and Cole (Joel Courtney of “Super 8”) grew up next to each other, the best of friends. We see them race their bikes together on that first day of high school.

And then Cole gets pantsed by a jock on his way in the door, an unshakable nickname (“Tidy,” for obvious reasons) is born and he is outcast for life. Maddie? She grows up to be sex symbol of the cheerleading squad, sharing the school’s attention with her cruel redheaded “M & M” sister, Marissa (Madelaine Petsch).

Maddie has nothing to do with Cole. The “Emo” girl “City” (Meg DeLacy, a highlight of the movie) is the only one who pals around with him and appreciates his art.

In Charles Adams (“Home of The Legals”) High, even the teachers gossip and follow the popular “On Fleek” or “pidg” (“preening pigeon”) kids on Instagram, indulging their cell-phone addiction in class. The principal (one-time child star Nicholle Tom) is a vapid tart whose daily video announcements push prom as the ultimate validation of “the cool kids,” rubbing the noses of everybody else in school, demanding conformity.

When Maddie gets a taste of how cruel she and her clique are, Cole is there for a little comfort, and thanks to City, a plot is hatched. They’re going to “Carrie” the school’s prom, sabotage everything from limos to tanning beds, social media to the prom punch.

It’ll be a “night to remember,” all right.

A clever touch — reminding the kids that this poisonous form of peer-pressure goes back generations. Maddie’s folks (Cheri Oteri and Richard Karn) had a wildly different high school experience from Cole’s jock-dad (“90210” and “Sharknado” legend Ian Ziering).

Co-writer/director Fine (“Sing It!”) cooks up some smart flashbacks — montages of bad proms of the past, and the ugly ways the gang of misfits Cole and Maddie pull together got their stigmatizing class nicknames. “Sweats” may be obvious, “Strings,” for the Orthodox Jewish kid (Brendan Calton) almost as obvious.

For a film aimed at teens, this one leans pretty heavily on ethnic and gender stereotypes, and as in most movies with high school settings — the school here is awash in hormones and seriously revealing teen (girls only) outfits.

I did get a kick out of the banter, the slang the kids use to deliver put-downs and the subjects — movies, selfie-obsession — they poke each other with.

“D’you ever see ‘Boyhood’?”

“God NO.”

“Are you high?”

“A little, but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean what I say!”

“You’ve never taken a selfie? You’re a selfie virgin? A SERGIN?”

“F*&% the Prom” isn’t terrible. But it’s never quite mean enough, never quite as clever as its creators figure it is, not remotely as edgy/vampy and over-the-top as it would have been as an R-rated feature (High school is R-rated these days.), not cute enough to be a Disney-ish high school spoof.

And it’s certainly not what Netflix wants to pitch it as — entertainment for “11 and 12 year olds.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity, sex toys, sexual situations

Cast: Danielle , Joel Courtney, Meg DeLacy, Cheri Oteri, Richard Karn, Nicholle Tom

Credits:Directed by Benny Fine script by and Rafi Fine, Benny Fine, Molly Prather. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:30

Debuted during the Oscars, kind of lacks the sparks one wants from a “Mary Poppins” trailer. Love Emily Blunt, Ben Whishaw, Dick Van Dyke, Emily Mortimer, Lin Manuel-Miranda — oh, and Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury and David Warner.

So Rob Marshall has a lot to work with. The director of “Chicago” and “Into the Woods” better have some tunes, though. Sherman Brothers quality tunes.

Christmas.

The past decade or so, the Academy Awards have felt like pre-ordained train arrivals, with early honors and buzz making that train depart the Toronto Film Festival, make its stops at the various Guild Awards, the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards showing up right on time at the station — pretty much predictable down to (but not including) Best Documentary.

So why watch? It’s frustrating, hoping against hope that there’ll be a surprise or for that matter that the “right” film will win instead or different actors from those who won the Indie Spirit Awards the night before will be making speeches.  Electric moments? Aside from last year’s Best Pic snafu? You have to go back over a decade to think of one.

Not a Jimmy Kimmel fan. Not interested in seeing Del Toro’s middling genre pic (“Shape of Water”) beat a better, sharper genre pic (“Get Out”) or a masterpiece genre pic (“Dunkirk”), irked that “The Florida Project” wasn’t even deemed worth a nomination. It’s the same pretty much every year, so I’ve given up on the Oscars.

And I’m not alone. The audience, steadily sliding in recent years, plummeted 20% from the sag of last year. It’s down a whopping 40% since 2001. 

Lots of folks sampled the telecast via the Interwebs today, I am sure. It’s like watching a football or (to a lesser extent) baseball or basketball games. Catch the highlights in the AM, spend your Sunday evening doing something else.

The political storm that killed James Franco’s Oscar shot probably dampened enthusiasm. Weinstein and Toback and Spacey are monstrous pigs, Franco fits right in with them. But who wants to be hectored by a bunch of spoiled movie folk? #NotMe.

The pre-shows just make the entire evening look like made-for-cable piffle.

Kimmel? His late night audience is thin, and he’s nothing worth tuning into in prime time. I caught his opening, and that’s about it. Not interested? #MeNeither.

Expanding the best picture field and moving the date to try and take the Golden Globes “bandwagon” effect out of the mix? Has not worked. They didn’t nominate a full ten films, when hits like “The Greatest Showman” could have drawn viewers.  Not a great film, but as good as the sex-with-a-squid parable.  Adding genuine contenders like “The Florida Project” could have created a real dark horse or two (“Wind River,” “Only the Brave,” even “Logan”).

“Moonlight” was a worthy but, let’s be frank “Indie Spirit Award winner” — with such limited audience appeal that anybody who tuned in last year — even WITH the debacle at the end — can be excused for shrugging it off. “Shape of Water” is a bigger hit, but aside from fanboys, who loved that? Seriously?

This felt like the year the Indie Spirit Awards lost their reason to exist. It also feels like the first foot on the banana peel for the Oscars, which fell below — WELL below — 30 million viewers for the first time ever, with no bottom in sight. Worst audience numbers ever.

Hire Tiffany Haddish and Ricky Gervais. Serve drinks. Do. Something. Otherwise, the event dubbed “The Gay Superbowl” is almost at the point where moving it to Bravo makes sense. Who else is still watching?

The sour taste Eli Roth’s new “Death Wish” left in my mouth has me scouring the genre picture lists on Netflix, looking for a suitable palette cleanser.

Vengeance thrillers are a B-movie staple, C or D movie when they don’t execute the genre tropes well. But even when they do, it’s rare that you run across one that manages much in the line of surprise.

So consider “Acts of Vengeance,” an Antonio Banderas thriller that sets up a nice counter argument to the gory gun-crazy/bored Bruce Willis bomb that is “Death Wish.” It’s got a high-minded hook, a committed cast, righteous brawls and beatdowns. Yeah, it leans heavily on those aforementioned tropes, but that comes with the turf.

It’s about a criminal defense lawyer forced to consider what he does and how he lives his life when his wife and child are murdered. He wasn’t there, “working late” yet again. The cops seem under-motivated to find the killer or killers. Counselor Frank Valera (Banderas) is their enemy, after all.

But Frank has seen a vengeance picture or three, he knows the arc his story must follow. He gets a good telling-off at the funeral by his father in law (the great Robert Forster). “Some slick-tongued defense attorney like you” will get the killers off, even if they’re caught. “You’re all talk…spinning words…to exonerate the scum of the Earth.”

That’s the hook screenwriter Matt Venne came up with. A lawyer talks and talks and talks. “The average person speaks 20,000 words a day,” our anti-hero narrates. “Men? 17,000.”

Attorney Frank Valera? “Maybe 80,000.”

After he’s gone through his grief binge cliche, his flirtation with cage fighting (Hah!), his martial arts classes, Frank injects himself into an argument between a pimp and a 13 year old hooker. That’ll get you stabbed, make you tumble through a bookstore window.

And what can stop the bleeding like no other book on the shelves? “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. Frank will become a Stoic. He will not speak until he has absorbed all the Roman lessons Marcus has to teach.

“Punish only he who has committed the crime.” “Action is the only truth.” “The best revenge is to be unlike your enemy.”

Frank eschews guns. All promising revenge tales do. He takes to driving the “car with character,” a cliche of thrillers, detective films and TV shows — a late model Mustang.

And he gets a bulletin board. Where else can he post the cliched news clippings, post-it note “leads” and suspects photos? Frank is going to investigate this case himself, now that he’s a badass.

Stoicism is a very clever trait to give a character. Men (and women) of few words are a staple of the genre, from Eastwood and Bronson to Neeson and Statham. If nothing else about “Acts of Vengeance” seems “inspired,” at least this does.

The not-talking thing is introduced right at the start, Frank silently stepping into a diner and director Isaac Florentine and his sound-designers letting us catch all the things you can hear when you’re not yapping, texting or muttering — snatches of conversations, sounds in the kitchen, suspicious noises down the street.

The story is told out of order, with Tarantino-esque chapters — “Part IV” is the first.

Frank’s narration lures us in.

“Do I look crazy to you?” Banderas purrs. That’s a great way to use a good actor you’ve managed to land for your B (if you’re lucky) movie. Let the sexiest voice in the movies play a role.

That “crazy” moment, “Part IV?” We’ll circle back around to that via Part I, Part II and Part III.

There’s an angelic nurse (Paz Vega) who saves a bleeding Frank on the street, and a smartly-shot scene in which Frank wordlessly lets her see his…bulletin board.

I’m bringing up these positives before the inevitable hammer falls. For all the promise the picture shows, it’s those trite tropes that drag it down to the level of most vengeance pictures.

Even a casual viewer is three steps of the filmmakers in solving this “mystery,” in guessing the next story point and action beat.

  Karl Urban is the “one cop who cares,” the “Russian Mafia” is implicated (the safest villains in the movies), we get the obligatory “evidence cache” scene where the villain’s stash is revealed, removing all our doubt and help slower members of the audience catch up.

Yawn.

But the longer I do this film reviewing thing, the more respect I have for the action actors and actresses who never check out, never phone it in.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger let us see the fatigue. Willis cannot hide his boredom.

Cage? Banderas? Statham? Butler? Still engaging with the character, the situation, the physical requirements and the truth of the piece. Vega (“Sex and Lucia,” “Spanglish”) is in that Angela Basset/Glenn Close/Holly Hunter/Halle Berry mold — never letting on that the material or the role in beneath her.

“Acts of Vengeance” has great fights, solid performances and a smart story hook. Not a great movie, but as vengeance pictures go, an efficient one and a film that doesn’t grate on the viewer or humiliate its star and gore-obsessed director, unlike SOME movies of the genre one could name.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Paz Vega, Karl Urban, Robert Forster

Credits:Directed by Isaac Florentine , script by Matt Venne. A Millennium release.

Running time: 1:26

I am seriously bummed that “The Florida Project” didn’t take home a single big prize at the Independent Spirit Awards last night.

Bummed enough to question how they do things in what was once truly the “Indie” niche honoring fare not turned out by a major studio.

“Get Out,” which I’d be perfectly happy to see take home the Best Picture Oscar (a long shot, but not the longest) won best director and best feature honors.

It was a Universal (Blumhouse, horror division) release that earned $175 million. There’s nothing “indie” about it. It didn’t cost a huge amount, it had Catherine Keener in a supporting role (Grand Dame of Indie), but still, it had a huge release, a major studio pushing it and a director with box office oomph, and is a genre film in the most popular non-comic-book movie genre there is.

It’s about as “indie” as the Independent Film Channel, which shows endless reruns of “Con Air.” But there you go.

It could collect an honor or two Oscar night as well, yet another reason to not consider it indie. There’s a sense that “This movie deserves SOMETHING,” thanks to its timing, the phenomenon it became, the sharp satire it presented. Yes, and “Wonder Woman” was a movie of its moment (female empowerment, pre-“#Metoo), and “Black Panther” is a movie of its moment. Neither of them particularly Oscar worthy.

That’s the rub. “Get Out” NOT the “best picture” of 2017. Not the best “indie” film (“The Florida Project”), not the best studio picture (“Dunkirk”), not…the…best. It’ll be remembered by horror film fans as the most highbrow entry in their genre in many years, but will anybody else be looking at reruns of this on cable in three years? No.

Jordan Peele best director. Greta Gerwig  (“Lady Bird”) got best screenplay honors.

Sam Rockwell took another best supporting actor award away from Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand collected another best actress prize, Allison Janney won here and will win the Oscar too.

Indie Spirit looks an awful lot like Oscar night on a year like this, and that kind of kills the whole idea behind Indie Spirit.

“Mudbound” won the Robert Altman “whole family of the production” prize (Over-rated film, middling director, but sure, why not?), “A Fantastic Woman” took best international (foreign language) feature (good call), “Ingrid Goes West” and “Life and nothing more” — truly INDIE films — took prizes.

A lot of minor prizes at the bottom of the bill also went to true no-budget/no studio backing “Indie” fare.

But seriously, if you’re not going to set yourself apart from the Oscars, honoring films according to your original mission, why bother?

Some of this is the Academy seeing quality in boutique nameplate (A24, Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics) releases, thanks to Indie Spirit Awards of the past. But some of it is this organization refusing to rule out the Jordan Peeles and Martin McDonaghs, the people who line up Margot Robbie to star in their “indie” feature.