Movie Nation

Here’s a ferocious little gangland thriller with a Persian twist.

“The Persian Connection” is a gangster picture set among Iranian ex-pats living, loving and dallying in the dark side of LA as they grapple with their tortured past.

Reza Sixo Safai, in a career-making performance, is Behrouz, a hustler/junkie/fixer struggling to “go clean” by moving into real estate in Los Angeles.

But his past won’t let him. Behrouz was once a Basiji, an Iranian boy conned into becoming a child soldier/martyr by the Ayatollah and his minions. They ran an elaborate con on kids recruited to fight and die in the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s, dressing up actors in Medieval armor, plumes and scimitar to convince them an ancient warrior had returned from the grave to lead them to victory over the Iraqi apostates.

Decades later, Behrouz still smokes black tar opium, takes care of the spawn of an Iranian crime boss, Cirrus-jar (Parfiz Sayyad), sleeps with a Russian hooker (Helena Mattson) and dreams of taking her and her young son Sacha away from all this violence and depravity.

Of course, Cirrus-jar isn’t having that. He’s going to deal with Sacha’s competing dealer-dad (Nikolai Kinski) by making it Behrouz’s lethal business to take care of the guy. 

It’s all about blackmail, competing drug regimes and competing loyalties, as Behrouz tries to skate over the mayhem bubbling beneath him and escape his bloody past.

If you understand the phrase “genre picture,” you know just how impossible that will be.

Women (Laura Harring among them) throw themselves at our hero, who is “fighting for a place in the sun…Or do you prefer the shadows?”

Men (Dominic Rains among them) knew Behrouz back when he was a child warrior for Allah, which is how he developed his taste for opium, his skills at poker and his ability to swing both ways, sexually.

“How many men did we bury together?”

Somehow, events have to transpire to park Behrouz, Oksana his love and the killer Persians (Cirrus-ray) and Russians (Julian Sands, remember him?) in a place where all this confusion, menace and murder can be settled, once and for all.

Safai is a Persian Clive Owen in this part, a long and lean villain trying to go clean by fighting, stabbing, shooting and double-crossing his way out of his various entanglements, all for the love of a Belorussian hooker and the son Behrouz’s actions left fatherless.

“The Persian Connection” is a movie of lurid, neon-colored set-pieces (clubs, motels, etc.) where violence is meted out to the unjust by the just. If you don’t know how this will play out, this must be your first gangland thriller.

A stand-out moment — a gun slinging newcomer from Persia (David Diaan), so fresh that he doesn’t speak the language, empties a clip at Berhouz in a fit of rage. His employer demands, “Where do you think you ARE?”

“In America,” he fires back, where any nut or terrorist or gangster can get a gun and use it with little threat of repercussions.

It’s a B-movie, start to finish, a film noir with Americo-Persian flourishes, but a formula picture in any event. “The Persian Connection” still manages scenes that pop, violence that shocks (and satisfies) and performances that remind us that in the United States, movie stars come from all races and classes. Eventually.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, drug abuse, explicit sexual content

Cast: Reza Sixo Safai, Helena Mattsson, Parviz Sayyad, Julian Sands, Laura Harring, Dominic Rains

Credits: Written and directed by Daniel Grove. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:40

The mean, miserly curmudgeon whom arthritic Maudie has come to work for lays down the law in the cruelest terms.

“Let me tell you how it is around here,” Everett bellows. “There’s ME. There’s them dogs. Them chickens. Then YOU.”

It speaks volumes about the crippled Maudie’s desperation that she chooses to stay on as live-in housekeeper in a weathered fish peddler’s cottage in 1930s Nova Scotia. She’s suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since childhood. Her family has hidden her away with a callous, disapproving aunt. She smokes, drinks, walks with a doubled-over limp and tries to not let the fact that kids throw rocks at her when he passes.

“Some people don’t like it if you’re different.”

The inarticulate brute she’s to work for abuses her. And as she’s played by “Happy Go Lucky” Sally Hawkins, we fret that we’ll never see that shy but electric smile that literally lights up the screen.

“Maudie” is a conventionally unconventional “life of an artist” film biography. We see the obstacles, ranging from the gnarled fists she uses to hold a brush to family dismissal to local disdain for her work. She’s a town character. “My six year-old could paint as well.”

But he doesn’t, and couldn’t. Maudie Lewis was one of the great Canadian primitive artists of the twentieth century. And Hawkins shoulders her burdens without complaint in this simple, sedate romance with art.

Because as mean as Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) is — the movie takes some liberties — the relationship these two actors recreate from Sherry White’s simple script is a slow-motion marvel.

Maudie is desperate to escape a family that has deemed her a burden and an embarrassment. Everett, the village crank, has advertised for a maid.

“Lookin’ for a woman.”
“What d’ye think I am?”

From that unpromising beginning, through every insult, rude rejection of her food, cleaning skills or feminine wiles and every public humiliation, Aisling Walsh’s film lets us see the tiniest degrees of softening. The moment Everett finally lets Maudie ride in the push-cart he makes his deliveries in pops off the screen like a “You had me at ‘Hello'” kiss.

Hawkins easily slips into this character like the other eccentrics and downtrodden women in her repertoire. Hawke does the real stretching here, dressing down, roughing up and achieving “utterly detestable” — at first.

“I don’t like most people,” Everett grumbles.

“Well, they don’t like you.”

Whatever life hurls at Maudie, she still has her paintings. She does seasonal scenes of the life she sees around her, Christmas cards. It takes a New York vacationer (Kari Matchett) to see talent — “Show me how you see the world!” — and exploit it. Maudie is paid a pittance for her paintings, even as her fame grows.

The best way to progress through a story whose arc is this familiar might be to deal with the well-worn touchstones in such a life in brisk strokes. Director Walsh and screenwriter White focus, instead, on the slow-boil romance, two outsiders who almost grudgingly make that love connection.

This is more “Iris” than “Frida” or “Seraphine,” though anyone who has ever seen the screen story of an artist — “Basquiat,” “Pollock,” etc. — will ease into the well-established rhythms of such films.

Its nearly two-hours on the screen can be a bit of a trudge, at times. Even though “Maudie” limits itself these two characters packed into this tiny house, it never feels as if anything’s been left out.

We see their world and their relationship through their eyes, not the outside world’s. Hawkings and Hawke turn that myopic view into lives as dark, rich and full as “Mr. Turner” with performances that bite, bend and breathe.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some thematic content and brief sexuality.

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett

Credits:Directed by Aisling Walsh, script by Sherry White. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:55

A little mid-summer horror is headed our way this weekend. Curious to see this one, and if it has more suspense and harrowing emotions than the indie Aussie thriller “Killing Ground.”

I tend to roll my eyes at supernatural horror pics. But this looks creepy.

Harry Dean Stanton has classed up many a small role, from “The Rose” to “Alien,” “Escape from New York,” and “Paris, Texas” to “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”

Remember his famous line from “Red Dawn?”

“AaaahhhhhhVENGE me, boys!”

“Lucky” is a tour de old OLD age gives us Harry in his comically weathered, desert Southwest dotage, with support from David Lynch, Beth Grant, and Tom Skerritt, Ed Begley Jr.  and James Darren.

James DARREN!

Stanton has long been the acting profession’s version of Keith Richards — aging, living on, surviving, smoking the whole way. And cool for just hanging on.

Remember, director John Carroll Lynch is NO relation to weird agent David Lynch. J.C. Lynch was the probable Zodiac killer in “Zodiac,” and the stressed-out McDonald brother in “The Founder” (Nick Offerman’s the other brother).

This looks and feels like a fall film, so thank heavens we won’t see it until the blockbuster dust has cleared the air.

Style points to the makers of “The Sabbatical” for puncturing, once and for all, the stereotype of “nice” Canadians for all of us below the 49th parallel.

The film’s perpetually dyspeptic “hero” is cranky enough to put that “They’re just so much NICER than us” image to rest.

James Whittingham, sort of a grumpy Dan Aykroyd, plays Professor James Pittman, a photography professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. He’s the kind of guy who reads the student evaluations at the end of the semester and vows revenge upon the worst of them. Nasty “customer comments” card remarks at the offending student’s coffee shop is about as clever as that gets.

James is about to go on sabbatical, the one thing, after tenure (job security) that non-academics hate about academia more than most anything — aside from the informed liberal politics that dominate the world of the educated “elite.”

And James underscores that year-off-with-pay resentment by planning on taking it easy, getting over his burn-out. That’s when his dean hits him with “We’re all looking forward to seeing the BOOK you bring back.” He wants a “magnum opus” of photography, with an implied “publish or perish” threat in his plea. He wants proof that “someone likes your work well enough to kill trees for it.”

Damn. So much for leaning back, recharging the old batteries. James, given to withering comments to his publisher and complaints to his academic wife (Bernadette Mullen), who tunes him out, is stuck with this ax hanging over his head. The fact that this “street photographer” is as harsh on his own work as he is on everybody else in his field isn’t a help.

But that’s how he meets his muse.

Lucy (Laura Abramsen) weeps at art shows, picks at her guitar in the park and flirts — just a bit — with this crank with a camera. She’s a painter, a student and when James loses his license (don’t ask), the free spirited/reckless driving/romantically-complicated Lucy agrees to drive him around so that he can take pictures.

The movie’s limited landscape — in and around Regina — suggests James’s do-the-bare-minimum approach to this project. Whatever he’s photographing, it won’t require travel.

Its charms lie in the grumpy way James deals with the world, a culture overrun with junk art and the lazy thinking that cannot grasp the difference between real “depth” and emotional connection to a picture, a real book (not a comic one) or film that aims just over our heads, and pandering piffle.

In one giggle of a scene, James offends a young woman by taking her picture. She demands he “delete it,” even as he tries to explain celluloid film cameras don’t work that way. The generation of “idiots” all around him can’t even grasp the difference between digital and analog, or so it seems to him.

“Sabbatical” is an “Educating Rita” of slighter-than-slight charms, too short and close to the surface to achieve much more than vasectomy gags, a pot-bellied academic’s first acid trip and the joys of ridiculing a “fraud” of a “blind photographer” (Paul Crépeau). 

But Whittingham, an actor unknown on this side of the border, is onto something with this grump, a misunderstood EveryMan just talented enough to fear his own lack of talent, just smart enough to see the limits of his intelligence, and the horrific shortcomings of the next generation’s.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual references and brief drug use

Cast: James Whittingham, Laura Abramsen,  Bernadette Mullen, Mike Gill, Paul Crépeau

Credits:Directed by Brian Stockston, script by James Whittingham and Brian Stockton. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:22

It’s not a fatal failing in “The Big Sick” that its star, co-writer and inspiration, Pakistani-American comic Kumail Nanjiani, isn’t the funniest thing in it.

He almost is, right up until Holly Hunter and Ray Romano arrive, delivering the seemingly effortless laughs that Nanjiani’s strained deadpan can’t quite manage. As consolation, he was the big laugh in “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” so somebody owed him an upstaging or two.

But this Judd Apatow production, culled from Nanjiani’s life, career and love, isn’t really about the laughs. It’s a culture-clash farce with dramatic overtones, a romantic dramedy about arrested development and how the intensity of a life-threatening illness focuses the mind, sets priorities and makes the timid brave and Peter Pans (most stand-ups) into men.

Nanjiani plays Kumail, a struggling Chicago stand-up whose act underlines why he’s struggling. Yes, he’s got cute Pakistani “fish out of water” jokes, history lessons and the like. His family of ex-pats have moved to America determined to keep Pakistan and Islam in their hearts and traditions, and are good for some material.

But he’s not truly “exposing” himself up there. He’s a little too content to “Didya ever notice?” He’s happy to diss his fellow wannabes and trot out a pen and a napkin, writing out “This is your name in Urdu” to any woman in the club whose attention he fancies.

Emily, played by the big-eyed and adorable Zoe Kazan, gives him a “Does this move work?” And an “I’m not really dating right now.” But still, they connect. No, the chemistry isn’t setting-off-sparks stuff. Kazan makes it plausible, even if Nanjiani is low-heat and the obstacles set up for them are strictly Culture Clash Comedy 101.

As in his family (Zenobia Shroff plays his mother, Anupam Kher his mother, Adeel Akhtar his married, judgmental brother) would NEVER approve of this romance. They are Muslims, and the only coupling Kumail should be thinking about is with whatever young Pakistani woman his mother trots in front of him at family dinners to pave the way for an arranged marriage. 

And truthfully, Kumail is at a make-or-break point in his showbiz dream. The real Nanjiani is 39, and on stage his middling act is no distraction from how much older he looks than most of his “peers” (Aidy Bryant of “Saturday Night Live” among them). It’s Montreal Comedy Festival showcase or bust, or as Mom would have it, now or never, in the form of “LSATS,” so that he can get into law school and stop “shaming the family” with his career and lifestyle choices.

Not standing up to his family doesn’t bode well for a budding romance. It’s what kills it. But that’s where “The Big Sick” turns, on a dime, into a moving melodrama. Emily gets sick, and even though they’ve broken up Kumail is summoned to her bedside.

The medical emergency, which has her comatose, forces him to make decisions on her behalf and inform her parents (Hunter and Romano), who aren’t all that keen on having him around.

The meat of the movie isn’t so much in the awkward moments of romance in the making, it’s in the adult fears and power struggles over decisions about someone who might die, and might die thinking Kumail is the same indecisive, gutless bust of a stand-up (and Uber driver) she broke up with.

Nanjiani inserts a hint of immigrant judgement, daring to question why his family would come to America for “opportunities” for themselves and for him, and yet cling to the backwardness they were allegedly leaving behind. He addresses the “cliche” of men of color coming to America and pursuing the “white woman” ideal. But still succumbs to it himself.

The pressure, to find someone and “relax” once that life hurdle is cleared, is cleverly expressed and viewed from a totally alien (to Westerners) point of view. Arranged marriage or not, we all feel it.

Left unsaid is the patriarchal idiocy of a system that hurls a string of women — with varying degrees of beauty, wit, ambition and prospects — at a guy limited  in all those regards, and HE gets to choose.

The Oscar-winning Hunter is still a spitfire on screen, generating pathos, fury and big laughs in the space of a few moments. We know Romano’s impeccable comic timing, the slow goofy drawl that makes the simplest punchlines pay off. What’s shocking is how perfect he is at playing serious, a fragile, flawed and forgiving man who is willing to accept help from a guy his daughter told him broke her heart.

Nanjiani is a generally pleasant and somewhat believable center to all this, and his flat acting (“Silicon Valley” did nothing but encourage this) is only thrown into sharp relief by the dazzling turns around him. Any reviewer who calls this “effortless” isn’t seeing him sweat, or squirming in the seat at scenes such as the stretch of playing the umpteenth movie comedy “meltdown in the drive-thru” moment, a scene worth editing out, one of several.

Because the picture also suffers from Apatow-itis — it outstays its welcome, reaches a “conclusion” a couple of times before the actual finale, which feels tacked on. Whatever you get when Judd signs on as a producer to your film, tough-love editing is never part of the deal.

But “The Big Sick” makes good use of some vintage Nanjiani 9/11 comebacks, some winning (if not new) backstage backbiting comedy club observations and marvelous, heartfelt work by three great actors who carry their leading man and his overlong, not-a-million-laughs “personal” story across the finish line.

MPAA Rating:R for language including some sexual references

Cast:  Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano

Credits:Directed by  Michael Showalter, script by  Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani. An Amazon Studios/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:00

Lean and relentless, patient and pitiless, “Killing Ground” is the sort of thriller that gives horror movies a good name.

It’s a reminder that the scariest things we see on the screen aren’t necessarily supernatural — they’re dangers we face from the human predators among us.

It’s an Australian version of the “Camping Trip to Hell” genre. A young couple (Harriet Dyer, Ian Meadows) head into the wilds of New South Wales to set up a tent near Gungilee Falls.

Fans of this genre will recognize the conventions — the “no cell service,” guy fumbling with a folding map (practically unheard of in the digital age), the stop at a convenience store where they encounter…THE THREAT.

That would be German, played by Aaron Pedersen, born to be a heavy. Bearded, glowering, with a gun-racked pick-up and a menacing pit bull caged in back, he suggests Ian and Sam go somewhere other than the falls, as their Mazda 3 lacks 4 wheel drive.

German, of course, has a running mate, a homely, sniggering creep (Aaron Glenane) who loves guns and the woods as much as he does.

There’s another car and tent at Sam and Ian’s preferred riverside beach. A family of four is there. No worries, plenty of room.

But the creeps, we’ve seen, have marked the teenage girl (Tiarnie Coupland) in that clan, pushing a stroller with her toddler/brother in it.

Then writer-director Damien Peters breaks formula in increasingly surprising and merciless ways. Time isn’t linear. We’re seeing two separate events. Something bad happened here, and something worse is about to.

Peters don’t pussyfoot around with his foreshadowing. We see a cell phone kept as a souvenir and destroyed “because what happens in the woods STAYS in the woods.”

Ian, we learn, is a doctor, and takes the time to explain the various tools on the Swiss Army knife he gives to Sam. And Sam? She’s the one who proposes to Ian.

Peters takes his time setting everything up, feeds us a diet of dread and then hits us with a genuinely hair-raising image — the couple, walking back to their car, concerned about what might be happening, and in the background, the toddler following them and toppling to the ground.

Suspense rises with each excruciating fork in the story’s path, each brutal encounter with rural rubes with guns. Peters loses points for the formula, mercilessly mocked in “Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil,” and with every banal “It’ll be OK” bit of dialogue, but gains points back with with every sinister variation he slaps into it.

After “A Cry in the Dark,” you’d think Aussies would be leery of packing a tent off into the bush. “Killing Ground” should remind them, and us, that there are greater dangers than dingoes eating your baby.

MPAA Rating:  unrated, with graphic violence, sexual assault

Cast: Harriet Dyer, Ian Meadows, Maya Stange, Aaron Pedersen, Aaron Glenane

Credits:Written and directed by Damien Power. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:30

Huge opening weekend for the umpteenth “Spider-Man” movie, “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” Thursday night and Friday numbers point to a $125 opening, per Deadline.com. 

A $50 million Friday for the film, adding the webslinger to the Marvel/Avengers universe, points to an opening surpassing the $100-110 predicted opening.

“Baby Driver” is holding over half its audience, still, $13 million  is less than the $15 million predicted, but no worries.

“Transformers: The Last Knight” is plummeting. “Despicable Me 3″ is already past “Cars 3” in the summer animation sweepstakes.  Pixar should take this as a warning. 

“47 Meters Down” will clear $40 million by next weekend. “The Beguiled” will be out of the top ten by next weekend.

And “The Big Sick” cracked the top ten despite only being on under 400 screens nationwide.

I’ve read enough performing arts memoirs to build a two story house, with a wall of books to fence in the dogs in the back yard.

But I can’t recall one that was as laugh-out-loud hilarious as Jimmy Webb’s. Then again, the dude wrote “MacArthur Park,” and stood in a studio control room while famed drunk and non-singer Richard Harris did take after take, unable to NOT sing “MacArthur’s Park.” So I should have expected it.

Webb had a great burst of a run in pop music (adult contemporary/country) songwriting, from about 1965-71. His “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Didn’t We,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Up Up and Away” were fixtures in the ’60s.

And ask any DJ (me included, college jobs) who worked in country, pop, disco, oldies or “lite rock” radio which tune to slap on when one is having a digestive tract emergency, and “MacArthur Park” will come up. Right up there with “American Pie” among radio-friendly epics whose running time (over seven minutes for “Park”) can cover bathroom breaks of any length.

Webb doesn’t over-explain the song, with its obscure lyrical bombast, but it’s in here — the high school crush who worked, as an adult, in an office building across from LA’s MacArthur Park, the sheet cake they bought that got rained on, literary antecedents and poetic image-memories rolled into one ambitious overkill of a pop single.

Harris made it a hit. Then Waylon Jennings. Then Donna Summer did a fierce disco version. Waylon again.

Webb weaves this tale of his salad (and drugs, sex and rock’n roll) days with short chapters recounting his preacher-daddy childhood, abortive college career, first attempts at arrangements and songwriting. And there are all these anecdotes — with the odd zinger slipped in.

The guy who came up with the original Monterrey Pop Festival, the precursor to Woodstock, Glastonbury, Altamonte, Live Aid, was brutally screwed out of his planned event by John Philips of The Mamas and Papas, and Papa John’s record label owner/promoter Lou Adler. Poor Benny Shapiro’s house burned down when he refused to turn the show over to those two. And history records a little karmic payback — the Mamas and Papas closed the concert, after Otis, after Jimi — and bombed. Webb was there, playing piano and a single “chime” (tubular bell) with Johnny Rivers.

A member of the Mamas, a close friend of Webb’s, claimed to him and a couple of other intimates that she was the first person to come upon the Manson Family’s massacre at Sharon Tate’s house.

John Lennon, during his “lost weekend” debauch with Harry Nilsson, was a drug-addled, entitled jerk who needed Webb’s help out of assorted jams, and couldn’t be bothered to thank him. And he was merely the SECOND biggest jerk among the Fabs.

All along the way, through the high-end cars, the married women as lovers, the drugs and the humiliations, Webb confides in and takes advice from The Devil, his running partner in those years, an actual character in the book.

Webb owns up to the crummy stuff he did, and the impact drugs had on his life and his work. And then he makes his exit just as the days of songwriters who weren’t great singer songwriters (James Taylor & Co.) fell out of fashion.

“The Cake and the Rain” is a “naming names” stitch, and Webb imitates the voices of his famous pal-turned-resentful “I want more of the money” collaborator Richard Harris, all Irish bluster and “Come, we’ll make a great record, Jimmywebb!” to Elvis, Sinatra and Louis Armstrong. Webb argues for a re-evaluation of Webb’s fellow “square” (not a word he uses, but the way he and other young artists who bought into the ancient hierarchy of show business pre-“Summer of Love”), Johnny Rivers, the guy who gave Webb his big break. Maybe someday Rivers, and Webb himself, will be “cool” again.

A terrific short remembrance of The Good Life/The High Life as one lived it in the ’60s. Why review the book on MovieNation? This would make a helluva-fun bio-pic, sillier and bubblier than the Brian Wilson one, “Love and Mercy.”

It’s a proven brand, which is why Sony and Marvel keep coming back to “Spider-Man.” Three different incarnations of the franchise in 15 years? He’s Wolverine, with a paper-boy-next-door appeal, no matter who is playing the spider-bitten webslinger this time around.

Reviews have been generally good. It earned a 73 on the nuanced, fine-graded metacritic scale, and “Citizen Kane” marks on the “rotten or not” simpler Rottentomatoes system. I’m not much of a fan, but I’m in the minority, though not as small a minority as the fanboys would like.

But how much will the Tom Holland/no-name-director “Spider-Man: Homecoming” earn on this, it’s opening weekend? Hitting 4400 screens at once, not so long that it’ll limit the number of screenings each day (though 2:22 is pushing it).

Box Office Mojo is predicting a robust post-July 4 $110 million opening.

The Box Office Guru is figuring $102 million, when the last showing Sunday night has been tallied. Word of mouth probably won’t hurt it, as audiences are being given something a little different — no “origin” story this time. And as summer movies are calculated thrill rides, the big effect scenes should play — even if most of them are just like every other comic book movie’s action beats.

But with most of the summer’s other over-sequeled franchises under-performing, one does wonder if these predictions aren’t setting the bar too high. Is there pent up demand for more Robert Downey Jr., a new Spidey (again) and Michael Keaton as a genuinely scary small-business owner/arms dealer/Vulture bad guy? We’ll see.

“Baby Driver” is figure will hold a lot of audience, even if “Homecoming” sucks most of the oxygen out of the cinemas.
“Beguiled” could call out of the top ten. “The Big Sick” is opening somewhat wider and could cash in as alternative programming.