Movie Nation

Bruce Willis is long in the tooth, but if there’s one thing Eastwood’s long career taught us, it’s that action stars can still get it done so long as the most physical thing they have to pull off is pulling a trigger.

Eli Roth was a celebrated star of horror cinema back when “Hostel” came out and “torture porn” was so-named. He’s sought his fortune by parlaying his fame in the 13 years since into producing other people’s ultra-violent horror pictures.

His credits as a writer and/or director over those years have been singularly underwhelming –– “The Green Inferno,” anyone? “Knock Knock?” At least he didn’t do a “Hostel 3” after “Hostel 2.” He’s seemed more concerned with creating a brand and slapping his name on it than making new movies.

So there’s actually a lot riding on this unpreviewed-for–critics remake of a Charles Bronson/Michael Winner picture that is a cultural touchstone, its very title becoming shorthand for any story of a non-violent  person turning violent and vengeful when “The Other” draws first blood.

Does Willis have a new franchise on his hands? Will Roth resuscitate his rep and break free of the horror trap? We shall see.

Not a new show, not the first time I’ve said this.

But in a sea of cable and streaming “reality TV,” where we go to Late Night Hosts for our news, when “fact” has been reduced to opinion thanks to a single TV network, one TV program stands above all others in giving us lower-than-low comedy built upon the Great Edifice of Fact.

Derek Waters’ genius conceit, feeding comics (and comic actors) drinks as they relate researched, footnote-able “history” about tragedies, towns, poets and “underdogs” in their own slurred and progressively drunker words, has hit the sweet spot.

Where else can you go on a weekly basis, giggle hysterically at a comic impersonating Ross Perot in high-voiced high-dudgeon over funding The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and get choked up and misty-eyed over the sweeping story of this maligned then feverishly embraced national monument and the woman who designed it?

Where else can you see Lin-Manuel Miranda give us the DRUNKEN version of the life of Alexander Hamilton? Between hiccups, and the occasional belch?

It’s no wonder that guest stars — from Colin Hanks (Playing ‘mister” Fred Rogers a year before his father takes on the children’s TV icon) to Mandy Moore, Will Ferrell and Jenny Slate to Bob Oedenkirk sign on to mime out the stories assorted stand-ups (Tiffany Haddish was a stand out stand-up) boozily recite/relate and find themselves relating to.

I’m a history buff, and in spite of decades of reading everything that comes out on Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, Ida Tarbell and Gloria Steinem, I find myself slack-jawed in awe at some of what the show’s research team digs up about them, or Baltimore and Poe, Coca-Cola and Atlanta.

It’s a program whose time has come, for a history-ignorant culture that will come for the drunken laughs and learn something, almost in spite of itself.

If you’ve forgotten its on Comedy Central, set the DVR and find your way back to the light. If you’ve never seen it, find it. See it sober and let it sink in.

This is TV’s finest half hour.

Maybe you were exposed to something your parents were watching, in a theater or on TV, that had subtitles which you weren’t yet old enough to read.

Possibly, you caught a late-night Italian, Spanish or French film dubbed into English, probably losing a lot in translation.

Or maybe, like me, you were lucky enough to catch the short film below on “The CBS Children’s Film Festival.” I recall pictures like “The Red Balloon” and others from around the hemisphere and around the world being featured in this series, basically filler that the network slapped on the air on winter Saturday afternoons. The movies I remember were shockingly effective as mind-expanding and cultural myopia-breaking fare, truly “educational” children’s TV, revealing a great wide world beyond “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.”

In that pre-cable “vast wasteland,” this was a TV series that pushed American kids into considering what other cultures were like, and how much we had in common with them.

And the one film that sticks out the most in my mind is linked below. I was thinking of my lifelong mania for Japanese cinema and stories set in Japan while watching “Oh Lucy!,” and traced the origins of it to this little dubbed parable from 1958 (Who knows when I saw it?), “Skinny and Fatty.”

It’s about friendship, fitting in and loyalty, what Erma Bombeck used to say that defined a friend.

“A friend is somebody who sees through you, and still enjoys the show.”

Watch it (It’s only 43 minutes long.) and you see all manner of outcasts at school bonding over being mismatched, from “If…” all the way to “School Ties” and the Harry Potter pictures. It’s not so much that it influenced films that came after it as showed something universal — two Japanese kids who could have been Indian girls or Minnesota boys or Italians, what have you — thrown together, tested, failing one test but eventually passing another. “Fat shaming?” A later construct, but sure, it’s here.

I can’t say why exactly it stuck with me, but there are half a dozen scenes that I didn’t need to re-watch to remember. Movies, one eventually learns, are a visual medium. Lines of dialogue may linger on the ear, but images burn themselves onto the brain.

And cultural curiosity can be awakened at an early age — through peer group dramas like this one, anime, martial arts epics or slapstick French farces.

Setsuko smokes so much that the Japanese mania for avoiding infection via publicly worn surgical masks seems pointless.

A lonely, sullen salarywoman, she endures the almost hourly gifts of candy “for your cough” from her inane co-workers and trudges home to an “efficiency” that is absolutely nothing more than that — a place to sleep, clothes racks in the few inches of free space.

It’s a life of quiet desperation, something she at long last recognizes when a strange man leans in her ear and whispers “Good-bye,” before hurling himself in front of a commuter train. That’s barely even “news” to her fellow office drones.

“I haven’t witnessed one yet,” is all one of them can say about this depressingly routine occurrence.

It’s no wonder that she lives vicariously through her niece. Mika is a bubbly flirt, always dolled up in a Sexy French Maid for her job as waitress at The Maid Cafe, always hurting for cash. “Auntie” is a soft touch. That’s how she agrees to buy out Mika’s fee and take over the English lessons she’s get from a dicey “school” run by a would-be gangster and street-walker attired transvestite.

But that class…

The teacher is an American, who greets her with an embrace and a “You look like you need a hug.” He gives his students “American English” names, and to help put them in the frame of mind that they’re embracing not just him, but another culture, wigs. Lucy’s is blonde, and she holds that hug as if she’s just broken a 30 day fast.

  “Oh Lucy!” is a slight comedy of offbeat, culture clash charms with a dark, flinty edge. It benefits from spot-on casting, testy-funny situations and cultural stereotypes that well up just below the surface, stereotypes popped almost the moment they’re exposed.

Shinobu Terajima, who starred in “Vibrator” (if you have to ask…), gives Setsuko a hard surface and broken interior life of angry resignation. There’s a reason she’s a sucker for Mika’s pleas. She and her sister, Mika’s mom, have a nasty history.

And when Mika (Shioli Kutsuna) and her English teacher John (Josh Hartnett, beguiling and bemused) run off to America, Setsuko impulsively decides to follow them. Mean Sister Ayako (veteran character actress Kaho Minabi) insists on coming, too. And that’s where the origins of their enmity come to the surface.

A mildly-hilarious plane ride, with a hapless American tourist (Megan Mullally) trapped between them and not understanding the nastiness (in Japanese, with English subtitles) they’re unloading on each other, is just the beginning.

Writer-director Atsuko Hirayanagi built this out of a short film she made, and it’s a production of the feminine branch of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Productions headed by Ferrell’s former assistant, Jessica Elbaum, and named Gloria Sanchez Productions. The emphasis is on feminine sensibilities and quirky surprises.

Some of those are cute — Setsuko’s barely-concealed lust-crush on John, John’s inability to resist the demands of these two cranky Japanese 40somethings who show up at his door in LA and demand that he take them to Mika.

And other surprises are dark, hitting you with a little ugly reality in the midst of Setsuko’s seemingly hopeless romantic fantasy.

It doesn’t all come off, but having the Gloria Sanchez banner over the film gives it Hollywood polish and pacing, even in the Japanese sequences, and helps the sibling rivalry cross the line from semi-polite bickering to catfights. The production also landed Koji Yakusho (“Shall We Dance”) as Tom, the lonely widower Setsuko meets and resists falling for in that infamous, single-session-with-hugs English class.

It’s a shame there weren’t more adorable scenes of “learning to speak American,” but that’s the low-hanging comic fruit here, a direction the short film emphasized but too predictable in Hirayanagi’s mind.

“Oh Lucy!” lets her and Terajima take a repressed cultural stereotype deep into the denial of living as if she’s in another culture, giving herself over to her dreams, pursuing the one man who shows her a world of pleasure and fulfillment she’s been missing out on with just one hug.

And Hartnett? He makes that hug feel life-changing, one for the ages, at least for this lonely salarywoman.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex, mild violence and cigarette smoking

Cast: Shinobu Terajima, Josh Hartnett, Shioli Kutsuna, Kaho Minami, Koji Yakusho

Credits:Directed by Atsuko Hirayanagi script by Atsuko Hirayanagi and Boris Frumin

. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:34

In 1980, Arab terrorists took over the Iranian Embassy in London and threatened to kill them if their comrades weren’t freed from The Islamic Republic’s prisons.

It was a situation fraught with tension and suspense, largely covered live on British TV. The latest movie about it, “6 Days,” lacks that suspense and much of that tension. It’s such a middling entry in a well-developed genre that one must cast about for elements that worked well enough to justify making yet another movie about it, and using some of our favorite character actors — Mark Strong, Jamie Bell and Abbie Cornish — as they did.

And this New Zealand production provides one. Here’s a fact-based account that gets one important thing that every “surgical strike” fantasy ignores right. Little goes according to plan, people get hurt, bad guys don’t act predictably and all the rehearsals in the world can’t ensure the split-second precision the movies convince us that units like Seal Team Six provide with the effortlessness of Superheroes.

Mark Strong plays the police hostage negotiator, trying to buy time — lying on the government’s behalf — coaxing, cajoling, hand-delivering food and always pushing back the “We start killing them!” deadline.

Jamie Bell portrays the SAS (Special Air Service) commando leader charged with giving the Thatcher government options for when things don’t pan out. Because Iran’s answer to the terrorist’s demands is that they “welcome all the hostages to be martyrs for the Islamic State.” If the embassy employees aren’t crazy about that, their visitors — including a British cop and a BBC reporter — are even less so.

Director Tao Fraser (“The Dead Lands”) gives the assault team the casual professionalism we’ve come to expect in movies about such folks. Gum snapping, their bosses quipping “Time to put theory into practice,” braced at the back door of the embassy, waiting to hear a shot that signals the bad guys have started shooting “Persians,” standing down every time the deadline gets pushed back.

We see the entire confrontation play out in government briefings, situation rooms where the negotiator bargains with the head terrorist (Ben Turner) who struggles to maintain discipline with his panicky comrades. The odd scene set inside the embassy does nothing to ratchet up tension and only reminds us how monocular this view of the crisis is.

Abbie Cornish plays a BBC reporter whose reputation was made covering this six day stand-off, but seems a token presence in the picture until its third act.

Bell long ago finished the job of butching up his screen persona — this isn’t his first soldier role —  but it is Strong who has the picture’s best moments. Helpless to control what the military is planning, he narrows his focus to that which he hopes he can do just with his voice on a phone.

“Right here, right now,” he tells Salim (Turner) on the other end of the phone, “You and I can stop violence.”

There’s something odd about this ongoing cinematic infatuation with 1970s era terrorism. A big screen and small screen version of the Getty kidnapping, an oddly self-serving new version of “Israel’s Finest Hour,” “Seven Day in Entebbe,” coming out and this (which came out in late 2017), it’s hard to tie them together as a trend or embrace of the zeitgeist — a “talk tough, act tougher” age when “collateral damage” was tolerated by the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, Brezhnev, et al.

In that climate, the desultory “6 Days” can be appreciated for at least having the guts to show us what can go wrong.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast:  Jamie Bell, Mark Strong, Abbie Cornish, Martin Shaw

Credits:Directed by Toa Fraser, script by Glenn Standring. A Transmission Films release.

Running time: 1:34

The definitive portrait of Pablo Escobar — monstrous, murderous “Robin Hood” of the Cocaine Wars — just might be one that stars the husband and wife Oscar winners Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

Throw in Peter Sarsgaard as the American drug agent chasing the bloody phantom, and you’ve got “Loving Pablo.” 

I just reviewed Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s last writing/directing job, “A Perfect Day.” “A Perfect Day.” He did “Barrio” too. Why is it in English? To make more money.

Still, it looks intense, with a larger-than-life villain played by a guy who specializes in those.

This fall — November to be closer to the mark — “Wreck it Ralph 2: Ralph Wrecks the Internet” promises to be a little more adult, a little less slapsticky, a lot less sentimental.

Cannot tell from this trailer if this was a sequel worth doing. But John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman can always use the work. And visualizing INSIDE the web is always interesting, visually. Check out eBay.

Isabelle Huppert enjoyed her decade as “French Screen Siren of the Moment” in the years between Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche.

A formidable dramatic actress, the definitive “Madame Bovary,” she was Oscar-nominated for “Elle,” should have been nominated for “Bovary” and “The Piano Teacher,” she’s been a brooding, thoughtful and sexy presence in films on both sides of the Atlantic, from “Heaven’s Gate” and “Entre Nous” to “I Heart Huckabees” and “Amour.”

But it’s her indifferent singing voice that stands front and center of “Souvenir,” a reminder that she’s starred in musicals (“8 Women”) and been called on to sultry chanteuse her way through a tune half a dozen times on the big screen.

“Souvenir” sees her not-quite-perfectly-cast as a one-almost-hit wonder, “like ABBA, but not so famous,” a performer who lost something like the Eurovision Song Contest (not called that here), which launched ABBA’s career in the same era.

Back then, she was Laura,” blonde, sexy chic and omnipresent. Now, as she smokes and drinks alone in her tiny apartment, she can see herself as a trivia question on TV game shows, hearing that she “sank into oblivion,” as if she didn’t know that.

These days, in her 60s, she is a garnisher — putting bay leaves and dried cranberries on the top of every one-kilo tub of paté that crosses her work station. She goes by her non-stage name, Liliane. And when her co-worker in the factory, an aspiring boxer named Jean Leloup (Kévin Azaïs) recognizes her, she denies her true identity.

But he persists, unintentionally wounding her with (in French, with English subtitles) “My dad thinks you’re great!” and other backhanded references to her age and her has-been status.

The best he can get is “I don’t sing anymore,” and “I’d rather not talk about it.”

So begins an awkward and unlikely affair. His parents don’t understand what he does “with her” and what they talk about. “Plenty,” he says.

“I’m done,” she says, of her career, her life, the works.

“No, you’re not.”

“You’re a nice boy,” she says, letting him down gently.

“No, I’m not.”

Bavo Defurne’s star vehicle for Huppert plays out in utterly conventional May-November romance ways, with a shot at a “comeback,” renewed interest from an ex-husband/manager (Johan Leysen) and the age gap blowing up in the most predictable ways.

But the leaps we’re asked to make as a viewer hamstring even these tried and true story beats. As absurd as it is to think of a one-time “star” entertainer and great beauty ending up on a liver-spread production line, that’s not as hard to swallow as Huppert’s silky, stiff (by design) stage performances.

It’s an uncertain, undistinguished voice, and the ballads she sings aren’t so much torch songs as failing flicks of a cigarette lighter. It’s Lilianne’s previous career that cannot be sold, here. The title tune doesn’t do her any favors, but it falls on the performer to put it over. Huppert cannot summon up Kim Carnes, Alicia Bridges or Debby Boone.

The love story we can buy into, because, as the aged orange sportscaster Tony Kornheiser likes to put it, Huppert at 65 is “still getting it done.” She’s a magnetic presence in any film.

But too much of this one is trite, tried and true. And the tunes? Not tone-deaf, but close.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex scenes, sexuality, boxing

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Kévin Azaïs, Johan Leysen

Credits:Directed by Bavo Defurne, script byBvo Defurne, Jacques Boon, Yves Verbraeken. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:30

  “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” presents the viewer with a dilemma.

Is Logan Lerman less convincing as yet another sensitive, smart high school romantic determined to be a writer, as that writer in his late 20s, in writerly glasses sitting at his vintage typewriter tapping out his “Voice of a Generation” masterpiece, or as that writer post-burnout, fake beard, riding the rails on the run from his past?

Tough call.

But this meandering, messy melodrama gives you plenty of time to consider your choices. It’s a classic example of why movies about writers and their inspiration can be a trap for promising filmmakers. For every “The End of the Tour,” there are a dozen examples too much like this — soapy, sudsy and sappy, pretentious twaddle ladled out between filler scenes of typing, typing typing at a darkened desk, a single lamp beside it, cigarette smoke curling over the keys.

Lerman, saddled with “Percy Jackson,” remembered for “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” or “Fury,” and hoping against hope that you’ll forget “Indignation,” is the title character in this absurdly cluttered film about the making and unmaking of a young writer.

Sidney is the unfiltered star columnist of his school newspaper, a put-it-all-out-there truth-teller in his English class essays, awing his classmates — some of them — and singled out by the one teacher (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who gets him.

Sidney gets fan mail from the pretty underclassman (Elle Fanning) who lives across the street, and grudging admiration from the bullying jock (Blake Jenner) who is desperate for him to realize that he’s more than he seems.

Future Sidney has a hit novel on his hands, a high-powered publisher (Nathan Lane), an impending divorce and fans who come to him at book-signings, reciting his own words back to him.  He’s troubled.

“Find yourself a muse,” the publisher implores. So he does.

And then there’s Sidney after the fall, a bearded hobo riding the rails with his hound Homer, bearded, wandering into libraries and bookstores, setting fire to books and fleeing before the cops  an catch him.

“The Searcher” (Kyle Chandler) is looking high and low for this Sidney.

High school Sidney is precocious, adult Sidney is by turns insipid and insufferable.

But he himself has suffered. There are clues to his makeup, the “autobiographical criticism” way we understand some writers — Hemingway, dressed in girl’s clothes by his mother WAY too far through childhood, B. Traven’s troubled labor activist history that led to “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.” “Vanishing,” via “The Searcher,” aims to resolve those.

His not-quite-right mother (Michelle Monaghan), almost silent disabled father, brooding jock “friend” (not really), super sensitive, forward yet shy Pacer-driving girlfriend (Fanning), other damaged women, a long-buried (literally) “Big Secret,” all must be explored.

You could never have convinced me that the writer/director of the Oscar winning short “Curfew,” who turned that into the horrifically funny suicide interrupted by babysitting duties feature “Before I Disappear” had a picture this windy, empty and bloated in his future.

“Vanishing” is ambitious, but in every trite, pat and melodramatic way you can think of.  There was promise here, which lured this top flight cast. Shawn Christensen used to be what we called “a writer/director to watch.”

But Lerman? It’s hard to think of a young actor who has had more promising roles thrust upon him, almost certainly as a second or third choice. He is an adequate actor of narrow range and limited screen spark, which partly explains why the franchise (“Percy Jackson and the Olympians”) and prestige pictures (“Indignation”) have never made it happen for him.

The dull headache that “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” induces can’t be laid wholly at his feet. A writer-director with an unshakable grasp of the cliches of “writers movies” — from vintage typewriter to freight car, deserves that hit. Lerman is just the charisma-starved black hole at the heart of this movie, which will disappear like its title character, with only a wince to remember it by.

MPAA Rating:R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Logan Lerman, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane, Kyle Chandler

Credits:Directed by Shawn Christensen, script by Shawn Christensen, Jason Dolan. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:00

Plump, dorky teenager has a dream, an impossible dream  — to fit in, be popular, be a cheerleader.

Don’t help her. Don’t get in her way. It doesn’t matter.  Just “Don’t Talk to Irene.”

Geena Davis is in this, and Anatastasia Phillips as the mom, with Michelle McLeod in the title role.

There is one laugh-out-loud joke in this trailer. See if you can spot it.