Movie Nation

Since time immemorial, or at least since 1978’s “The Driver,” getaway drivers in the movies have been portrayed one way — stoic, silent, professional, guys with a “code.”

Often, they don’t have real names. They’re just “The Driver” or “Baby Driver” or “Wheelman.”

That much is standard issue in the new Netflix thriller, “Wheelman.” That’s the only name anybody calls our wheelman (Frank Grillo). You’re a bank robbing “crew” getting into his car and want to talk on the way to the job?

“I don’t chit-chat unless it’s about the job.”

One hood is black, his partner hood (Shea Whigham) is mighty hard, and a little long in the tooth.

“That’s Clint Eastwood up there behind the wheel. Brothers into Clint Eastwood?”

But when a job goes “sideways,” this Wheelman is anything but calm. He doesn’t know the crew. He doesn’t know who this unknown “handler” is who keeps calling him, jazz playing in the background, making threats and changing arrangements. He didn’t pick out the BMW he’s tearing through the mean streets in.

“Where’s the drop?”

“You’re not headed for the drop.”

And hell, he’s got a 13 year-old daughter at home who has invited a 17 year-old boy over, against Dad’s wishes. His only control over any situation he’s in is by phone.

“”Ryan, I want to talk to you about being in my home alone with my daughter.”

Our driver hurtles around town (Lawrence, Massachusetts and environs), through tunnels, chased by motorcycles and “the Philly mob,” with the haul of ill-gotten cash in the trunk, increasingly frantic as he tries to get the people he knows — the ones who set this up — to help him extricate himself from a life-threatening crisis mostly of their creation.

I first sat up and paid attention to Grillo, a TV and bit parts in film veteran, in “Warrior.” He’s got a gritty, edgy presence put to good use here.

Writer-director Jeremy Rush and his crew mix the usual wheelwell’s eye-view shots of chases, feet jumping from brake to clutch pedal and backseat over-the-shoulder shots with endless close-ups of Grillo, claustrophobically trapped in this increasingly shot-up car, growing more manic by the minute, angrier by the second.

I love this sub-genre of crime pictures, and while this isn’t on a par with the true classics of the type, it’s in the conversation. A little of Tom Hardy’s cellphone in the car myopia “Locke,” a little of Gosling’s “Drive,” and a lot of Grillo goes a long way.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Frank Grillo, Caitlin Carmichael, Garret Dillahunt, Shea Whigham

Credits:Written and directed by Jeremy Rush. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

I take no pleasure, none, in tracking the downward spiral of the Great John Cusack‘s big screen career. Nicolas Cage either.

Katherine Heigl and Steven Seagal? Sure. I mean, I’m human.

But Cusack’s decline to “black baseball cap” roles in a string of C-D grade thrillers is fascinating, nevertheless. You can’t point in any serious way to him being wholly responsible for his own fate. Still, here he is, playing the heavy — a runaway extortionist who purses a trio of trio of river rafters who have gotten their hands on his haul — in “Blood Money.”

“Hey, I LIKE Metallica!”

And I’m betting the leading lady (Willa Fitzgerald of TV’s “Little Women”) was contractually obligated to recite this line.

“Kinda sexy, for an older guy.”

Needy, pathetic.

Three high school friends — Fitzgerald, Ellar Coltrane (“Boyhood”) and Jacob Artist — with little in common save for collective sexual history, reunite for a river trip through Deliverance Country, Georgia.

Dude in black bails out of an airplane with black bags full of loot. The rafters find it. And two of them, especially the emotional, shrill, scheming and occasionally ruthless Lynn (Fitzgerald) vow to keep it. A track star nicknamed Cheetah, she once had a thing with stuck-in-his-hometown Victor (Coltrane), and may be having a thing with Jeff (Artist, of TV’s “Quantico”).

“It’s MY money!” she says after finding it. One of the guys is too righteous to take it, one bends to her will. And when the bad guy gets on their trail, a chase begins.

Wikipedia conveniently describes “A melodrama  as a dramatic work in which the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Characters are often simply drawn, and may appear stereotyped.”

That’s what we have here. The villain isn’t the sharpest at woodlore, isn’t really a killer or a crack shot or anything like that. He seems shocked when somebody gets hurt/killed. The stereotypical sadism of such characters only emerges later.

The chase pauses for characters to work out their issues, or explain themselves. The whole “Treasure of the Sierra Madre/Trespass” of what people, even friends, do to each other when big money is involved is handled perfunctorily.

Structurally, director Lucky McKee (Hah!) chooses to tell this story in flashback so we know the scope of the final conflict. The finale is unsatisfying in the extreme — suggesting nobody here actually watched “Sierra Madre.”

Fitzgerald’s hysteria/mania here adds a little to her “reel,” and Coltrane should probably find a series — like Artist.

And there’s Cusack, the man in (dyed hair) black, there to judge, to improv a one-liner, here and there — “Man, you are a…TERRIBLE person.” “You really LEANED into it, didn’t you?”

I wish he’d get better offers, wish he had the option of turning down crap like this. I wish he’d stop supervising his own wardrobe and stop dying his hair and transition to 50somethings of greater variety.

Not holding my breath, though.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including sexual references, and for some violence

Cast: Willa Fitzgerald, Ellar Coltrane, Jacob Artist, John Cusack

Credits:Directed by Lucky McKee, script by Jared Butler, Lars Norberg. A Saban Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

So, is every critic in the world seeing this controversial and supposedly smart sci-fi thriller tonight? Or at least this afternoon?

Nah. Showed it in NYC last night, or earlier, apparently.

A few reviews on Metacritic or RT. 

Withholding access from all but a cherry-picked few suggests maybe they’re afraid of the backlash facing Natalie Portman over the “whitewashing” (her character was Asian in the source material) of her being cast, as a scientist whose soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) went missing in this alien “shimmer” fog, with her out to find him.

That’s of no consequence to me. Not sure how much outrage is due a casting call that was made to give the picture the best, most commercial actress available (Hollywood is making the movie, not the People’s Republic) to give it a chance of becoming a hit.

Color blind casting cuts both ways, as I always say. Name an Asian actress who is a top box office draw. In the Western Hemisphere. Maybe those protesting buy into cultural stereotypes. “She’s supposed to be very smart. Has to be Chinese.” Maybe they’re anti-Semitic, anti-Natalie or something else and they just don’t want to admit it.

Anyway, let’s hope its as good as its talented star can make it.

Burt Reynolds plays a more humble version of himself in this A24 release, playing a past-retirement-age fossil who once owned the box office and the public’s heart reduced to showing up at a film festival (Ariel Winter plays his handler, Clark Duke runs the fest) in Nashville. Chevy Chase plays his aged manager, and to be honest, I’d never have given this the time of day had not A24 picked it up.

It seems worth ignoring because writer-director Adam Rifkin has never scripted or directed anything worth a moment’s notice. Well, he did script “Mouse Hunt,” which was more about the production design, casting and delirious direction of rising star Gore Verbinski.

Nobody was a bigger diva back in the day than Burt. And I’m not saying that to be kind.

“The Last Movie Star” opens in limited release March 30, too early in the year for “awards consideration” for next year. One more indignity.

First of all, do NOT try this at home. If somebody suggests “Let’s kick ‘Game Night’ UP a notch,” change the subject. Maybe suggest a nice sophomoric drinking game instead.

And at the first mention of “You know what I hear the super rich do? ‘Fight Club’ with homeless guys!’ — run. Go home and break out Scrabble and be glad you did.

“Game Night” is “Date Night” with blood and bullet wounds and beatings and blood stains that you will never ever get out of the rug, the white Maltese or what have you on the day AFTER “Game Night.”

It’s a gonzo spin on what happens when SOMEbody suggests “kicking things up a notch,” when Jenga isn’t enough anymore.

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams strike comic gold — or at least silver plate — as a hyper-competitive game-crazy couple whose suburban couples gaming party goes way off the rails when an equally competitive globe-trotting/high rolling brother to the husband (Kyle Chandler, cast against type) comes home, initiates a murder/kidnapping mystery game that is in turn hijacked by real hoodlums who play for keeps.

Only the couples — McAdams/Bateman, Kylie Bunbury (“Under the Dome”) and Lamorne Morris (“New Girl”), and Sharon Horgan (“Catastrophe”) and Billy Magnussen (“The Big Short”) don’t know things have turned real. Not at first.

What screenwriter Mark Perez (“Herbie Fully Loaded”) and co-directors John Francis Daley (“Vacation”) and  Jonathan Goldstein (“Horrible Bosses”) put them through is an absurdly complicated, violent and self-aware farce — a night-long chase through the mean streets, often in conflict with real bad guys whom they don’t realize aren’t just “actors” with Murder We Wrote, the mystery staging party company.

  Jeffrey Wright does his version of “bad dinner theater” as the Murder We Wrote “FBI Agent,” Danny Huston and Michael C. Hall (“Dexter”) are “real” villains and Jesse Plemons just slays as the lonely, newly-divorced creepy cop neighbor who cares too much, observes too much and is never asked to come to game night any more because he’s a serious stiff.

Characters have varying skills at charades and Pictionary and “Never Have I Ever.” And they’re ALL good at nailing comic movie quotes. None is funnier than McAdams, who gets to hilariously act out the hostages in the diner opening to “Pulp Fiction,” never realizing she’s waving a real gun at real bad guys who really need to be taken hostage.

“And the Independent Spirit Award goes to…”

The banter crackles, here and there, with Bateman’s Max toting around resentment of his better looking, more successful brother Brooks (Chandler), and everybody else knowing it.

“He’s like the Mark Wahlberg to Max’s Donnie!”

A clever running gag — establishing shots, street scenes and traffic scenes and cul de sacs are illustrated in detailed models which dissolve into the photo-real scenes the action takes place in. Another? The woman are the bright ones, the guys seem to stumble through clues and strategies.

Ryan (Magnussen) has a thing for dopey models. “Where’d you find her? TED Talk?”

And Kevin and Michelle (Morris and Bunbury) have let Denzel come between them. Maybe.

There’s even a game of “hot potato” that involves a chase through a mansion, frantically passing off a prop, one character to another, managed in one sweeping, breathless take.

Way too much of “Game Night” is given away in the trailer, the violence is a bit much and truth be told — the folding in on itself plot gets in its own way, especially in the third act. But Bateman makes the big bucks for being the best put-upon “hero” in comedy.

And McAdams, doing an epic Amanda Plummer (“Pulp You Know What,” remember?) absolutely steals the picture. At gunpoint.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual references and some violence

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Kylie Bunbury, Danny Huston, Jesse Plemons

Credits:Directed by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, script by Mark Perez. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:40

Movies in the streaming era have to meet one very basic requirement for a film buff. Are they worth sitting through, start to finish?

All this choice among services, all those titles on inventory. Why waste more than 15 minutes on anything that doesn’t grab you?

“A Perfect Day,” a flawed, even faintly-sexist tale of aid workers in the Balkan war zone, passes that threshold. It’s got a fascinating setting, a tunnel vision story — trying to get a body out of a rural well so that the water won’t be poisoned. A good cast, a retro-hipster soundtrack (Velvet Underground, Buzzcocks, Marlene Dietrich) and striking scenery.

No, they didn’t actually drag Benicio del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko and Melanie Thierry into the open-sore of Bosnia, Serbia and associated war-turn states. The south of Spain was exotic enough.

Oscar winner del Toro is Mambru, a veteran fixer for Aid Across Borders. He’s not a bureaucrat, a fund-raiser or motivational speaker. He’s a roll up his sleeves and get a dirty job done guy. And he is in need of a rope strong enough to lift a bloated corpse out of a well.

Thierry (“Babylon A.D.”) is Sophie, an idealistic water quality expert new to all this war zone “respect protocol” stuff. Dealing with war-weary and combat zone-wise locals, superstitions and age-old feuds, competing agendas with predatory water capitalists is new to her. They have their orders. Wind this mission down.

“What about the fat guy?”

“Fat guy stays, we leave.”

Tim Robbins is B, another old hand at NGO work in war zones. He’s a little gonzo, something of a hippy who keeps his own hand written notebook of survival tips — which side of the road mines are typically planted by the militias that drag dead cows to block the road and kill anybody who tries to get around it.

“Intuitive, maybe. But not crazy.”

Damir (Fedja Stukan) is their translator in this land known for “its yogurt and its sense of humor.”

And Katya (Olga Kurylenko) is the assessment officer assigned to see if their work here, negotiating with UN Peacekeepers and murderous local checkpoints, grinding out a day of tracking down a rope from suspicious Bosnians of this side or that one, wondering what version of the truth about why they need it will score them something too many people want to use for hangings, flagpoles and restraining scary war-refugee dogs.

They pick up a little kid who tips them off to a rope in the pidgen English of all war zone kids in the movies.

“Rope ees there. Dog is your problem. Not Nikola’s. Nikola is leetle boy.”

The picture settles into its long, frustrating metaphor for getting ANYthing done in a place where the enmity stretches back hundreds of years. But the script cannot let that happen without a heaping helping of melodrama.

Katya and Mambru have history — sexual history. And Sophie? She completes the cliche, freaking out as an aid worker in a WAR ZONE. Where there are corpses everywhere.

“It’s an important memory, your first corpse,” B cracks.

So we have two women, insisting that reality conform to their sense of justice, right and compassion, and two grizzled old Oscar winners shaking their heads and trying to keep them all alive until they muster out.

Co-writer/director Fernando Leon de Aronoa doesn’t make much of the movie’s opportunities for suspense. This is closer in tone to Richard Gere’s “The Hunting Party” than “Welcome to Sarajevo.” We get a sense of the stakes, the grim thankless nature of the work, chuckle here and there at the oddballs drawn to this Quixotic cause.

It’s never less than watchable, but I can’t say it’s particularly memorable (save for that soundtrack). Perfectly Netfixable adventure in a minor key.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast:  Benicio del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko, Melanie Thierry

Credits:Directed by  Fernando León de Aranoa, cript by  Fernando León de Aranoa, Diego Farias. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:46

Meant to post this a few days ago, but in any event…

Pixar’s mining one of its richest veins by returning to this franchise. Listen for the voices of Samuel L. and Bob Oedenkirk in this one.

And Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson. And of course, John Ratzenerger!

Sophia Bush, Isabella Rosellini, Catherine Keener — so many big female names in the cast of “Incredibles 2,” which turns dad loose on raising baby while Mom goes out and gets the job done.

Warners has been previewing this for a few weeks. Not sure if they’ve been showing it to critics in other markets earlier, but there were no posted reviews on “Game Night” last time I checked Metacritic and RT.

From the first trailer to this, the most recent one, it looks hilarious. Jason Baseman, Rachel McAdams for the comic heavy lifting, Kyle Chandler and Jesse Plemons (“The Post”) and Danny Huston. Another “wild night” run off the rails comedy, with a great blood on the poodle gag. Team “Horrible Bosses” made it, so we will see what we see. Who could use a good laugh right about now? Aside from “Fifty Shades Freed?”

The statistics are damning. Nobody locks up more people, keeps more of its citizens in prison, than the United States, home to “the largest prison population in the world.”

The videos, of police, from coast to coast, engaging in what can only be described as “wilding,” flipping out on would-be suspects, bystanders and citizen journalists video recording their tirades, pummeling anybody who crosses them or dares to question what they’re doing.

And if you think you’re immune, that you or your children or a relative is never going to run into “an out of control police officer,” that these high school graduates with guns are never going to mistake your call for an ambulance as some sort of excuse to arrest you, that prosecutors won’t try to intimidate you into admitting some form of guilt just to stave off a lawsuit, that you couldn’t be hurled into America’s prison industrial complex, you’ve got another thing coming.

That’s the message of “Survivors Guide to Prison,” a California-centric documentary built around a couple of heartbreaking cases of innocent people serving decades before exoneration, and a veritable tidal wave of others similarly seized by a broken system without the resources to prove their innocence in the face of a State and compliant public that has reversed the credo, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

Filmmaker Matthew Cooke, undercut somewhat by his own credits (he directed “How to Make Money Selling Drugs”) and a legion of Hollywood stars, victim advocates, journalists and academics make the case that with 13 million Americans having served time, with over a million in jail or prison at any given moment, the average citizen needs survival tactics for dealing with the possibility you will run afoul of a seriously twisted system. Over-burdened at every step, and broken, featuring poorly-vetted and oversight-free cops and no-consequences-for-their-mistakes prosecutors and a rising mountain of laws, racist politics focusing on arrested and imprisoning minor offenses by the poor, we have built a monstrous bureaucracy in which no one is immune from its abuses.

Cooke has a vast cast of actors (Susan Sarandon, Patricia Arquette, Ice-T, George Lopez) download mountains of stats and scores of cases where the innocent have been railroaded into jail in their narration.

The most credible of these narrators is, of course, Danny Trejo, the ex-con turned iconic screen heavy (“xXx,” “Machete,” “Heat”). Cooke doesn’t have Trejo tell his own story, which depersonalizes some of what he narrates. But Trejo reading the hard, blunt lessons of this “How to” guide has instant credibility, thanks to his persona.

“How to Survive an Out of Control Police Officer” has him telling viewers and potential victims of the legal system to “be polite,” to remember this all-important phrase.

“Am I being detained or am I free to go?” Cops abuse their authority by leaning on suspects, bystanders, those videoing their behavior, even accident or crime victims, just by keeping you there until they figure out something they can charge you with. Talk too much, you invite a search of yourself or your car, further questioning on how this or that happened to you or someone you called the ambulance for.

“The police can legally lie to you,” so don’t take their accusations, suggestions as gospel. Keep your cool and ask for a lawyer.

That extends into “How to Survive a Police Interrogation.” “Never talk without an attorney present.”

And keeping your mouth shut if you haven’t learned it by then follows you as a rule into incarceration. Jail, holding cell or prison, you have no friends there, one and all remind you. They’re out to incriminate you, lessen their own sentence, what have you.

“Mind your own business and be respectful” at every step of the way.

We hear parents of a child with schizophrenia call 911 to get help dealing with him, because we’ve made the police — again, high school educated men and women, for the most part, not elite thinkers known for their powers of reason — the default intervention in all manner societal ill. The cops tased the boy to death.

We see another man lose nine years and eight months of his life “because he had a bad lawyer.” The tendency of a “brainwashed” public to believe “If you’re been arrested, you MUST be guilty” (the fatal flaw in the knee-jerk and often racist “Blue Lives Matter” backlash) works against you at every step of the way, especially in court, where juries of third-rate thinkers are all-too-willing to bend to whatever authority — the “infallible police,” prosecutors looking to inflate their conviction rates rather than actually seeking justice, “judges, draped in robes and put on a pedestal,” most of them political hacks, overwhelmed and under-motivated to sweat the details of every single case — tells them.

The actual “How to Survive Prison” section is too depressing to contemplate — innocent women losing years of their lives, innocent men trapped in a kill-or-be-killed environment where guards have little control or desire to control a murderous, survival-of-the-fittest Big House culture.

The narrators stress how difficult the work of those within the system is, and suggest that it’s no wonder they snap, no wonder that there are many, many incompetent cops, racist roid-raging police and police at the wrong end of the learning curve. Two of the innocent folks profiled here were busted by the same peer-pressured rookie officer who threw them into the system just to save face among her peers.

Cooke’s film clips along, using famous prison and courtroom movie scenes (“Cool Hand Luke,” “O Brother Where Art Thou,” “The Verdict”) to illustrate its points, or at times to just enliven the narrative. The movie wanders into reform ideas, recidivism cures and the like. Too often, it feels glib thanks to the lighter touches and the tag-team narration, acted-out by those narrators.

It would have been better to interview famous people who have dealt with the system about their first-hand experience of it. Rapper Busta Rhymes breaks into tears at the memory of a woman he knows who was jailed, too poor to effectively fight for her rights, losing years of her life to venal, incompetent police and prosecutors. Trejo, I know from first-hand experience, has stories to tell that are off-script.

But “Survivors Guide to Prison” still manages to overwhelm the viewer with alarm at how far things have gone wrong since “Tough on crime” became  Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan’s ticket to power, turning the “Land of the Free” into the “Nation of the Incarcerated.” It’s an alarming indictment of the way we’ve been taught to think, and where that warped thinking has put millions of our fellow citizens.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence, blood, profanity.

Cast: Danny Trejo, Susan Sarandon, Ice-T, Busta Rhymes, RZA, George Lopez, Patricia Arquette, Matthew Cooke, Van Jones

Credits:Written and directed by Matthew Cooke. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:43

Allison Janney portrays LaVona Golden in I, Tonya.

Sure, they were displaying a little “Home Isles” bias, giving Martin McDonaugh’s film five top prizes. But the British Academy of Film and Television honored “Three Billboards” at the expense of the grossly over-rated “Shape of Water” in a big way, letting Guillermo del Toro take home the best directing prize and two others.

McDormand, Rockwell, Best Picture, etc. for “Three Billboards.”

They gave extremely short shrift to Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece, “Dunkirk.” Five years from now, “Dunkirk” and “Three Billboards” will still be drawing streaming and TV audiences. “Best Adapted Screenplay” winner James Ivory’s take on “Call Me By Your Name?” The gay audience will still connect with it, at least.

Twenty years from now, “Dunkirk” will still dominate Veterans Day/Memorial Day and “Movies for Guys Who Love Movies” programming.

Janney winning again for “I, Tonya” makes her a foregone Oscar conclusion. Gary Oldman’s “Darkest Hour” win should be as well (but you never know).

I still think Willem Dafoe, overdue for a CAREER award, has a shot at best supporting actor. Rockwell’s great and all, but, I mean come on.