Movie Nation

The Death of Stalin opens in some cities Friday, in Orlando (at the Enzian) Mar. 23 and expanding Mar. 30.

Steve Buscemi as Kruschev, Michael Palin, the folks who made “In the Loop.” We could use a few laughs at Russia’s expense. Considering the joke they’ve played on us.

“Nostalgia” is a multi-actor/actress “mosaic” of characters and how they relate to the people, places and things of their past. Jon Hamm is the biggest name in it, nostalgic for the days when “Mad Men” put him at the top of every movie maker’s short list. Indie icon Catherine Keener (“Get Out”) also stars.

Very curious to see “Gringo,” which “previews” (opens early) tonight, a comic piece that its studio didn’t choose to preview. STX occasionally previews its films, Disney showed “A Wrinkle in Time” and it didn’t earn anything remotely like universal acclaim. The other three movies opening wide tonight did not DARE screen their films — even the one starring Charlize, Amanda, Joel, David Oyelowo and Sharlto.

After that, it being a Thursday with three films opening wide that were not previewed, I figure I’ll get to “The Hurricane Heist,” which smells like a “storm” of a different type.

Entertainment Studios, a start-up owned by the major theater chains, somehow figured cheap effects C-list cast action pictures directed by Rob Cohen, who hasn’t had a hit since the first “Fast and Furious” film, was something the “major” studios weren’t filling their theaters with. Their real agenda appears to be in the politically charged history “Chappaquiddick,” that arch conservative nostalgia for ancient Democratic scandals that keeps Fox News on the air. At least one of those two should bring in an audience that doesn’t go to the movies any more.

There’s an audience for “The Strangers: Prey at Night” sequel, and another “Mad Men” refugee (Christina Hendricks) as its star. But I don’t know if I’ll get to it tonight. Maybe some other time.

Hyped up to 12 on the “Black Panther” anticipation scale and as high-minded as “A Very Special ‘Oprah,'” “A Wrinkle in Time” arrives in theaters as an exquisite waxwork rendition of  Madeleine L’Engle‘s Newbery Medal-winning novel.

It’s lovely to look at — occasionally. And director Ava DuVernay lets the camera linger over those gossamer effects — as if the natural beauty of New Zealand could be improved by digital crescent moons and fantastical additions to the Hobbitscapes. She also dwells on the circus aerialist makeup of her version of L’Engles “Three Witches” (“Three Mrs.”), the startlingly dolled-up Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and queen of them all, Oprah, as if they’re special effects unto themselves.

The child actors cast are just as gorgeous as the children of a coupling of Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Chris Pine would be.

And the story? A lost father chased through the cosmos by his intrepid daughter (Storm Reid), “brilliant” son (Deric McCabe) and the classmate who’s sweet on the daughter (Levi Miller) holds promise, even if the movie can’t find its actual excitement, suspense, coherence or narrative drive.
Which is a big build-up to essentially saying, “This movie’s a stiff — ‘Still Life with Oprah.'”

Mbatha-Raw and Pine are married scientists who have discovered an interstellar Tesseract, a fifth dimension which connects places and people throughout the universe. Their peers have laughed, but NASA researcher dad disappeared into it years ago.

And his smart and intrepid daughter Meg (Reid) and too-clever-chatterbox son Charles Wallace (McCabe) pay the price for his absence — bullied at school, gossiped about by teachers.

Until Charles Wallace invites this Bjork-attired weirdo (Witherspoon) in for a visit. She’s “Mrs. Whatsit,” she insists. The boy is a genius, she declares. The girl, even if she clings to Dad’s “Love is always there, even if you don’t feel it” credo, is more troubled. Whatsit can help. But not on her own. She summons her sisters in galactic stewardship.

Mrs. Who (Kaling) is given to quoting the wisdom of the ages — “‘The feet feels the foot when if feels the ground,’ Buddha.” She’s a veritable inspirational calendar of aphorisms — “Loves sees not with the eyes, but with the mind,’ Shakespeare!”

Mrs. Which (Winfrey) lords over them all, warns of “the darkness” spreading over the universe and onto Earth and directs their journey.

Whatsit? “Wild nights are my glory!”

They somewhat aimlessly and cryptically point the kids in the direction Dad went, seeking help from The Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis, blessed comic relief) and an intergalactic dream merchant (Michael Peña, dolled up like Rip Taylor selling ice cream on the beach).

All the while, this more or less threatening ink blotch of “darkness” spreads.

DuVernay (“Selma”) fails utterly in her search for urgency in this story and cannot concoct a threat any more palpable than the “darkness” of which Mrs. Which speaks. The director loses herself in static conversation scenes and extreme close-ups of her beautiful players. That’s soap opera/TV movie camera work and no, that’s not a compliment.

The “Hero’s (heroine’s) Journey” quest takes a back seat, when it’s given any seat at all. The heroine? Meh. Jake Lloyd with curls.

The performances are as flat as the static, generally dull conversations (exposition without wit) the script makes the actors play. The story provides no highs or lows, just changes of costume and (digitally enhanced) setting.

“Selma” had built in goals, tension, heroes and villains. DuVernay is at a loss to provide them or do justice to the ones L’Engle’s novel provided.

The eye candy is, I have to say, somewhat underwhelming. This is the sort of movie that screams for a visionary director with proven chops in the genre, or at least producers with those credits. Time passes so slowly in “Wrinkle” that one can lose oneself in imagining what a Terry Gilliam in his free-spending prime, a Tim Burton or Kathryn Bigelow could have done with this.

Memo to Frances McDormand. “Inclusion riders” are a great way to bring overdue diversity to film sets, in front of and behind the camera. Read DuVernay’s IMDb page to see just how many different jobs the future “Selma” director had on film sets and in movie studios before she finally made her own breaks.

But using that as an end unto itself is how one arrives at movies of mendacious mediocrity,  echo chamber productions where “feeling” and message (“Love trumps hate.”) and checkbox “This is what America looks like — EVERYbody is represented” casting takes precedence. No consideration for their acting chops, they’re just here to fill a checkbox. Nobody on set has the wherewithal to state the obvious — this director isn’t suitable for this material.

And NOBODY remembers “Hey, we’ve got to find charismatic actors and make a riveting, witty, exciting or at least ambulatory movie out of this classic novel.” Because here, nobody did.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and some peril

Cast: Storm Reid, Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey, Chris Pine, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Zach Galifianakis, Deric McCabe,  Michael Peña, Levi Miller

Credits:Directed by Ava DuVernay, script by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:47

We’ve already had a perfectly serviceable film biography of A.A. Milne and the little boy who inspired his Winnie the Pooh books, “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

That one starred the omni-present Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie and came out a year or so ago.

“The Disney Version” features Ewan McGregor as the older, soured by business Christopher, Hayley Atwell and a talking bear who sounds exactly like Sterling Holloway, who voiced Pooh way back in the original cartoons in the ’60s.

It isn’t, of course, it’s legendary Holloway impersonator Jim Cummings. This “Robin” is due out in August.

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?