Movie Nation

Colin Farrell’s found a home with the folks who gave us “The Lobster.”

Here’s a horror tale without ghosts, zombies, vampires or the supernatural.

“The Killing of a Sacred Deer” smacks of malpractice — or malpractice practiced on a medico. Farrell’s the surgeon with a “sinister” teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) problem, with Alicia Silverstone playing the kid’s mother.Nicole Kidman is caught up in the spiraling events toward horror. Cryptic? Did you SEE “The Lobster”? Oct. 27 is when we’ll decipher the mystery.

The box office has fallen, and it won’t be getting up before the holidays. Yes, last year was a stellar one in terms of ticket sales. But this year, driven by a summer where the rich got “Wonder Woman” fat, “Spider-Man” stuffed — and a whole lot of movies underperformed — is down — 2% for the summer, 10% or more overall.

So down that a cheesy horror sequel is set to own another weekend because Hollywood doesn’t have much to get people out of the house.

How bad is it? Well, Hollywood is hanging its hopes on a Stephen King remake, “IT,” pulling in $60 million on Sept. 8-10 to right the listing ship.

If swooning reviews were driving this train, another weekend of at least one or two grossly over-rated “instant classics” would be filling theaters. But audiences have shrugged their shoulders at another digital “Apes” epic, and won’t be lining up for “Logan Lucky” either. Reviews for Steven Soderbergh’s “comeback” picture were laughably out-of-proportion — a clumsily plotted caper comedy in the “Ocean’s Eleven” vein with a lot of AWFUL Southern accents and assorted Southern stereotypes. The “new” generation of critics swamping Rotten Tomatoes laughed their hipster heads off. Just as they took the vapors over “Alien” and “Spider-Man” and “War for the Digital Apes” and so on.

But everybody involved in making “Logan” knew this wasn’t much. Daniel Craig signing on to do another Bond picture just before it comes out? That’s a touch of career panic. It didn’t do much Thursday night in paid “previews” — “Hitman” tripled its business. The Samuel L. effect.

Sneaking the director-produced and financed cur into the dog days of summer gives it a chance to make coin. They’d only need $15-20 to have a shot at breaking even. Box Office Mojo says no way.

Box Office Guru raises an eyebrow at Mojo’s $10 million prediction and laughs, “Yeah, right.” $8 million says he. 

The other wide release is also flawed, and offensive in a totally different way. The comic body count for “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” the groan-worthy inclusion of romantic banter into the faux “Pulp Fiction” pairing of Samuel L. and Ryan R., left me a little cool.

But hell, the action beats are epic, the chases right up there with mid-level Bond stunts. And Reynolds and Jackson do make a decent pair of “buddies.” Got to hope Ryan R. ad-libbed that “ruined Mother-f—er for EVERYbody” line about Jackson — er, Jackson’s character. Weak reviews for this one, but it could earn between $11 and $15. Deadline.com projects closer to $20, based on what “Atomic Blonde” and its ilk–guy-oriented action pics.

That latter wide release is the only film with a prayer of unseating “Annabelle: Creation.”

A direct-to-video prison picture starring a “Game of Thrones” hunk — “Shot Caller” — opens in a few cinemas. I got some of the most shocking hate comments I’ve gotten in years over this not-even-good-enough-to-warrant-a-real-release dog.

The summer’s biggest hit was “Wonder Woman,” finally fading and losing most of its theaters as fall creeps up on us. “Girls Trip” (which just cleared $100 million yesterday) was the sleeper hit, “Dunkirk” the lone Oscar contender (and I’m including animation, because every cartoon of the season sucked). “Dunkirk” is still sitting at #2 during the week, with only each weekend’s new releases pushing it down — temporarily — before it pops back up weekdays.

“Apes” loses most of its screens this weekend, “Valerian” stands tall at the biggest bomb of summer, though “Mummy” and “Alien: Covenant” didn’t come out smelling like roses, either.

There’s at least one more iffy animated picture due out next weekend, and assorted limited-release or un-previewed major studio pictures figure into the last two weekends of August.

But basically, that’s all she wrote for Summer Cinema 2017. Let’s hope fall has more going for it.

A woman bedding both a father and a son has long been a staple of romantic melodramas, and even romantic comedies.

So is there any edge left to it, anything new Hollywood can bring to the table on this subject?

Not really.

“The Only Living Boy in New York” takes its title from a Simon & Garfunkel song, its director from “(500) Days of Summer” and its screenwriter from “Just Go With It.”

Sure, Marc Webb’s two takes on “Spider-Man” — the Andrew Garfield ones — were middling. But the real problem is Allan Loeb’s at-least-its-not-another-Adam-Sandler-comedy script.

Throw a cast that includes Oscar-winner Jeff Bridges, Kate Beckinsale in full temptress mode, Cynthia Nixon doing “damaged” and Pierce Brosnan cast for his dash at a screenplay with the odd pithy truth about life and love and at its best moments, it has the feel of Woody Allen-lite.

The rest of the time? It barely fits the description of the leading character’s writing talents, a description which suits the leading man himself (Callum Turner of “Queen & Country”).

“Serviceable.”

Jeff Bridges narrates the thing, and plays a world-wise/world-weary alcoholic neighbor to our young hero, a man with artistic ambitions, artistic connections and no direction.

The chatty, inquisitive neighbor meets Thomas Webb at low ebb.

“I’m having a bad day.”

“What’s her name?”

That would be the winsome artist Mimi (“It” girl Kiersey Clemons of “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” and TV’s “Transparent”). She’s sentenced gawky, rich, didn’t-finish-college Thomas to “the friend zone.” And the older man would love to help.

But Thomas has many issues. He’s “boring,” by how own admission. And there’s his fragile, broken mother (Cynthia Nixon).

“Dinner parties are how Mom medicates,” which means she, her husband (Pierce Brosnan) and son are surrounded by arty wits (Wallace Shawn, Debbie Mazar, Tate Donovan) who, like our narrator, lament the “safe” New York of today, the “new New York,” where CBGBs and the porn shops and other legendary corners of seediness have been scrubbed and upscaled. Thomas and his not-a-girlfriend appear to have missed “the good ol’days.”

Dad’s in publishing, and he’s decided that the way to recapture the past is with an affair. Thomas stalks the mistress (Beckinsale) and things turn a lot less “boring” as they do.

Characters spout daily affirmationisms like “The farthest distance in the world is between how it is, and how it was going to be.” “Let life take over.”

It’s all rather like the literary-minded lyrics Paul Simon labored over in his youth. That music, with a touch of Dylan, fills the soundtrack under the crusty observations that “It’s safe here, now. Urban decay migrated to dinner parties.”

It can be maddening, like the portentous pap Loeb churned out for ” The Space Between Us.”  And Turner, a sort of gawky, younger version of the angularly asexual Eddie Redmayne, seems more  a pity date/copulate than the object of awkward desire he’s presented as here.

Beckinsale never makes us believe she’d be remotely tempted by this annoying boy who catches her in mid-affair with his dad.

But all that said, Bridges gives a magnificently rumpled reading to his character, Nixon has the second-best lines and does brittle ever-so-well.

And Webb captures the essence of why New York movies set in the fall seem so right. Slightly overcast, melancholy, wistful, it’s a cinema season for affairs. And that makes “The Only Living Boy in New York” feel right, even when it isn’t.

It’s not Woody Allen. But then Woody Allen hasn’t been Woody Allen in 20 years.

“Serviceable,” the stinging critique of a young man’s potential by his publisher/father, fits.

MPAA Rating: R, profanity, sexual situations, drinking and pot use

Cast: Callum Turner, Kate Beckinsale, Jef Bridges, Pierce Brosnan, Kiely, Cynthia Nixon

Credits:Directed by Marc Webb, script by Allen Loeb. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:28

Smith-Coronas had this delicate touch. Rush your words and the keys would clump like gravy going wrong in the pan.

Underwoods, Royals? You could pound those behemoths with passion, forcing out angry words that threatened to punch through the page.

And IBM Selectrics would sit there, humming impatiently, waiting for you to get on with the business of creating at the keyboard.

Some people, like avid note and memo-writer turned typewriter collector Tom Hanks relish the “tactile” feel of putting fingers to keys and hearing the pop as a letter magically appears on a page of paper.

The late playwright, actor and one-time drummer Sam Shepard spoke of the “percussion” of the process.

And pop singer and hipster John Mayer refers to footage of Bob Dylan typing as Bob “sitting at the altar” of this “confessional,” recalls a visit to the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame and seeing pages of scribbled, jotted and typed first drafts of rock classics and realizing he’s never written on anything but a computer, and no — NOBODY is parking old hard drives on display at the Hall of Fame.

“California Typewriter” is a most engaging documentary about the latest wrinkle in the Return of Analog. After “Slow Food” and the revival of vinyl LPs and turntables, it’s typewriters that hipsters have taken to hunting down in flea markets, thrift stores and the shrinking number of shops that service and sell them.

Not that John Mayer will admit to that.

Doug Nichols’ film takes its title from a Berkeley (of course) family business that’s been fixing Royals, Voss, Underwoods, Smith-Coronas and the like since 1949. But as the film begins, Herb Permillion III, his daughter Carmen and his employee Ken Alexander are staring down the barrel of obsolescence. They don’t even have a website (they do now), an analog storefront in an eBay world.

Owner Herb and sculptor Jeremy Mayer prowl flea markets together — Herb, hoping to find instruments worth saving, fixing and reselling, Jeremy looking for the write-offs — typewriters Herb can’t fix, but that Jeremy can scavenge parts from for his typewriter sculptures.

Sam Shepard did all his writing on his Swiss Hermes, Hanks sings the praises of the lovely, lightweight Smith-Coronas in his 250 typewriter collection.

And serious collector Martin Howard pursues his Great White Whale — a model of the first successful typewriters marketed, a Sholes and Glidden, from the 1870s or ’80s. Howard tells the history, runs his hands across “spectacular” design and “build quality” and marvels, like John Mayer and others, than this seemingly “perfect” gadget ever went out of fashion.

Shepard and others wax philosophical about the changing relationship between humans and machines. Composer/writer Mason Williams remembers the famous 1967 art-book project he wrote for Edward Ruscha’s photographs of a Royal typewriter they tossed out of a car going 90 miles an hour — “Royal Road Test.”

And historian David McCullough relishes the sense of “making something with your own hands” that no iPad can give you. Poet Silvi Alcivar sees the entire act of typing an art form.

It’s all a little too much — the film is too long, for starters — and those of us who don’t miss the jams, ribbon changes and typos (the smell of Whiteout/Liquid Paper) aren’t likely to go back to the way words were written in Olden Days and the vast forests sacrificed for “art.” I did my earliest writing on an Underwood, using teletype rolls of paper like Jack Kerouac to punch out radio and TV news copy and essays. But typos don’t turn up on the radio.

“California Typewriter” still makes some fascinating observations about our connection to technology, about what is sometimes sacrificed in the name of efficiency and speed. And if Brother (newer models) and Smith-Coronas start turning up in every hip dorm or hipster apartment, at least they’ll keep the flea markets busy, and businesses like California Typewriter going.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, PG-worthy

Cast: Sam Shepard, Silvi Alcivar, Tom Hanks, John Mayer, David McCullough, Jeremy Mayer, Mason Williams

Credits: Directed by Doug Nichol. An American Buffalo release.

Running time: 1:43

Here’s what I remember, sitting poolside at the Hotel Intercontinental in Toronto, trying to get through an interview with the breakout “new” star of the movie “The Station Agent” during the Toronto Film Festival some years back.

And we kept getting interrupted — all these gorgeous women kept coming up, giggling, touching Peter Dinklage, flattering him, complimenting his work and well…

It was a scene, man.

I was tickled to see the stardom that came from “Game of Thrones,” even if I never warmed to the series. And I’m quite impressed with the trailer to what could have been another gimmicky “gadget plumbs your memories” thriller, about a scientist (Martin Donovan) whose research helped Dinklage’s character. So when the scientist is murdered, Peter D. is on the case on behalf of the widow (Julia Ormond)  — hunting the killer through memory research.

It’s the last time most of us will see Anton Yelchin on the big screen. He died in June of 2016 and this appears to be the last performance he had in the can at the time of his tragic accident.

“Rememory” is “An August movie,” meaning they don’t have high box office hopes for it, but are willing to try jump starting the fall by unleashing a serious picture (still a touch of summer sci-fi) early. It’s from Lionsgate and opens Aug. 24.

Kudos to Kyle Mooney, who used his “Saturday Night Live” fame to make a movie that’s nothing like your typical “Saturday Night Live” movie.

“Brigsby Bear” may be slight and gimmicky, but it’s nothing like the goofball character contraptions that Lorne Michaels has long produced for his revolving door of comic sketch artists. Mooney called in favors, brings on board SNL castmates and other big names. And they made a movie about an adult, raised in isolation with only his parents, math, animatronic animals and this cheesy ’80s-style children’s TV show for company.

An underground desert home was all James (Mooney) ever knew. The locks kept out the world, the geodesic domed observatory didn’t let in “the poison air.” So James just obsessed about the show — a sci-fi fantasy with actors in bear and duck costumes, cheap effects and unsubtle life lessons (don’t litter) shoved in, produced a video blog with plot summaries, and occasionally tackled an unsolvable math equation.

But all this was because those “parents” (Mark Hamill, Jane Adams) kidnapped him as a baby and raised him that way. The day the cops come and free him, James is sent back to his birth family and faces a world that is utterly alien to him, a world that has never heard of this fake TV show, “Brigsby Bear.”

“It’s a different reality,” he tells a reporter. “Everything’s very big!”

The novelty of a 30ish guy experiencing his first Coca-Cola, his first movie, his first party (with much younger sister Aubrey–Ryan Simpkins), his first beer, bong-hit and sexual encounter, isn’t that novel or hilarious.

“Thank you for what you’re doing! It feels very good!”

Still, the character and the film’s naive charm carries it along. Greg Kinnear plays the detective and one-time actor who befriends James and tries to help with the adjustment. Claire Danes shows up as a shrink, with Matt Pope and Michaela Watkins playing the indulgent but traumatized parents who take this stranger back in.

They all want James to acclimate, adjust and move into this new life. But all he can talk about is that damned bear and his TV show. His obsession comes off as kitschy, and that’s why Spencer (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) is drawn to him. He’s a high school classmate of Aubrey, and he convinces James to make Youtube videos about the bear, and to make a movie to “finish” his adventure.

No, there’s not a lot of novelty to DIY moviemaking movies either — see “Be Kind, Rewind” or “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” If you want true originality in this arrested development vein, check out “Dave Made a Maze.” Now THAT’s out there.

Mooney’s scruffy, weathered looks serve the character well, and the odd fish-out-of-water line adds goodwill to a picture that skates by on that far too often.

“My parents stole me when I was a baby, but I still think they’re pretty cool.”

The third act has moments of tenderness and warmth that belie the featherweight film they’re tucked into. And any movie that lets Hamill show off his malleable voice-over skills, and play a human being, is to be treasured.

It’s not as odd as it’s advertising suggests, and it’s a comedy where the laughs aren’t big, with unironic irony delivering more grins than chuckles. The overkill casting doesn’t add much, either. It just shows that Mooney (as co-writer and producer) has a solid contacts list.

But as slight as it is, “Brigsby Bear” still adds up to “pleasantly diverting,” which is more than too many of its SNL alumni comedy predecessors can manage.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, brief sexuality, drug material and teen partying

Cast: Kyle Mooney, Mark Hamill, Greg Kinnear, Jane Adams, Ryan Simpkins

Credits:Directed by Dave McCrary, script by Kevin Costello, Kyle Mooney. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:35

“The Hitman’s Bodyguard” is a buddy action comedy that passes chemistry, masters physics — the chases and fights are epic — and then stumbles into all these off-the-curriculum potholes.

It’s morally indefensible — glibly dispatching hundreds of killers, cops and innocent bystanders in Britain and and The Netherlands. Characters boast of their kill-counts, mathletes of murder and mayhem. And add to all this singing and heartfelt discussions of love, relationships and commitment.

Is it fun? Well, yeah — dumb summer action fun, our last real dose of it this season

Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Salma Hayek serve up a symphony of profanity as a hitman/trial-witness, his “AAA-rated executive protective agent” (bodyguard) and the imprisoned wife of the hitman.

Hayek in particular curses a blue (azul) streak in English and Spanish, threatening one and all and giving our mass-murderer-for-hire his best nickname — “cucaracha,” “cockroach.” As in “un-killable.:

To Reynolds’ Michael Bryce, Darius Kincaid is “a coffin magnet,” not to mention the guy who ruined “mother-f—er for EVERYbody” (true enough).

Gary Oldman plays a murderous Belarusian dictator — And how many actors would polish their Russian to this degree for a role this small? — on trial at The Hague. The hitman is the one witness who can put him away for crimes against humanity.

The Belarusian’s many minions don’t want Interpol to deliver this witness from Manchester to the courtroom in The Netherlands.

Bryce comes in because Interpol has a mole and Bryce’s ex (Elodie Yung) summons him so that he can get back his AAA rating, which he lost, along with her, after failing to protect a polygamous Japanese arms dealer years before.

Bryce is a meticulous planner — “Prepare for a test and there are NO surprises.” Darius Kincaid is a cackling crack shot, an impulsive improviser who is philosophical as a mother-f—er.

“You can’t prepare for EVERYthing. Life is going to bloody us up.”

Screenwriter Tom O’Connor was going for “Pulp Fiction” meets “Grosse Pointe Blank.” The murderous enmity/respect of the leading characters, the flippant insertion of discussions of the heart in between shootouts and in the middle of chases, is cute, but not cleverly-scripted enough to not take us out of the picture more than once.

Because the basic business at hand is action. Jackson is 68, and moves like it in a few unguarded/stuntman-free moments. But the action beats, and his facial reactions to them, are a sight to see.

Stunt co-coordinator Kevin Beard and “Expendables 3” director Patrick Hughes stage a breathless sprint through Amsterdam that would put James Bond to shame. There’s the odd digital explosion/tire on fire shot that shows the fakery. But the brawls are believable, even if Jackson’s “bullet-proof” character’s survival of every hail of bullets he dodges are not.

But what puts it over — when it works — is that chemistry, and nobody is better at the annoyed double-take than Reynolds, and Jackson — singing at every opportunity, here — can be downright delightful, when he’s not doing the “game face” lean, mean killing machine thing.

A sing-along with a busload of singing Italian nuns may be the funniest scene Samuel L. has ever chewed up.

Laugh-out-loud funny? Yes. It’s just a pity that the “more is better” bodycount sours the picture long before its drawn-out ending spoils the punchline.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Gary Oldman, Elodie Yung

Credits:Directed by Patrick Hughes, script by Tom O’Connor. A Summit/Millennium  release.

Running time: 1:58

I love Spain and love these guys — Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and director Michael Winterbottom.

If anyone’s going to get a kick out of two master mimics and comic improvisers eating, driving, bickering and trying out their Roger Moore impressions all over Spain it’s going to be me.

But with “The Trip to Spain,” what started as a lark (“The Trip”) and progressed into a franchise (“The Trip to Italy”) now feels like, “Are you going to squander your years in film on this?”

Winterbottom, a once-promising director with flair and edge (“The Trip to Sarejevo,” “24 Hour Party People,” “The Claim”) doesn’t seem to be able to get much else in front of the cameras these days.

Brydon never quite broke through in Hollywood. And Coogan, whatever pleasure he takes in playing a less successful version of himself in these movies (He drops “Philomena” and “Oscar nominations” into every conversation, in desperation.) surely doesn’t need an all-expense-paid trip to another corner of Europe when the clock is ticking on his own marketability as a funnyman/leading man.

All that said, “The Trip to Spain” is on a hilarity par with the other “Trip” pictures. The impersonation contests are testy, funny and interrupt the tranquility of the finest restaurants in España. Dueling Caines, dueling Sean Connerys and Anthony Hopkins, Mick Jagger AS Michael Caine, “The Stones do SHAKESPEARE!” This is comic gold!

The “characters” are set. Brydon is the British TV star who peaked decades ago, but here has everything Coogan does not; wife, family, and just enough notoriety to be Coogan’s sidekick and comic foil (and conscience).

As the Brits say, he’s just here to “take the piss” out of Coogan.

And there’s Coogan, after the glory of “Philomena,” losing his agent, told his latest script needs a rewrite by “an up-and-comer.”

“But I HAVE come! I have arrived!”

So they’re consigned to another travel story, dressing up like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, two insecure funnymen recalling their glory days (Alan Partridge, Brydon’s “Small Man in a Box”), pushing 50 and name-dropping and falling into Brando (He was in “1492”) trapped in Monty Python’s “Spanish Inquisition” sketch.

“You’re not ENUNCIATING, Nuncio!”

Coogan struggles with his latest ill-fated romance (with a married woman) and ponders his missed chance to play “Hamlet.” He WAS in “Hamlet 2,” remember.

“Olivier played him when he was 44.”

“Olivier was a better actor than you.”

So even though these movies are almost wholly — if not quite totally — useless as travelogues — no restaurants are identified, no hotels or paradors, and you often have to concentrate just to figure out which city they’re in (I know Spain and I found it pretty disorienting.)…

Even though it can feel repetitious, with a running time not justified by the lack of novelty in the script…

And even if the most promising direction to take it is in the tacked-on finale, “The Trip to Spain” is still worth it for that stamp on your passport and the giggles these two fussing, mismatched friends generate — two cynics abroad, making each other miserable and us amused.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild language

Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Marta Barrio

Credits:Directed by Michael Winterbottom, script by Michael Winterbottom, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon . An IFC release.

Running time:1:48

Sean Baker did the hilarious, street-wise and super cheap (shot on cell phones) “Tangerine,” and now that he’s got fame and enough money to shoot a “proper” film — with a real movie star in his cast (as if anybody could improve on the discoveries of “Tangerine”), what does he do?

He’s going to DISNEY WORLD. Or its environs. The exteriors — second unit stuff — captures a chunk of Central Florida at its Kissimmee Corridor tackiest, the seedy outskirts of Disney World. Not sure if they shot most of this a child stuck in a motel with a wayward young mom and Willem Dafoe as the clerk/manager here or not. But it sure as shooting feels like Florida’s theme park hell.

A minor classic of childhood? The on-the-edge experts at A24 films have it, so I’m guessing, YES.

Brooklynn Prince starts her career as a critics’ darling, Dafoe shows his humanity and “The Florida Project” reaches theaters in limited release Oct. 6.