Movie Nation

Awww, SOMEbody’s got a girl crush.

Well, it’s on “Saturday Night Live” MVP Kate McKinnon, so I certainly get it.

Every time McKinnon takes a breath and launches into a “bit” in the “Bridesmaids with a Dead Body” comedy “Rough Night,” director Lucia Aniello singles her out in the frame, gives her isolation and says “Have at it. BRING the funny, GIRL.”

Well, maybe it’s not a crush. Maybe it’s from desperation. A tin-eared women-talk-dirty farce with blood and a seriously unfunny “Weekend at Bernie’s” body to dispose of, “Rough Night” needs some laughs. And Scarlett Johannson isn’t going to provide them, and the overbearing Jillian Bell (“Fist Fight,””Office Christmas Party”) wears out her Melissa-McCarthy-meets-Amy-Schumer welcome pretty fast.

“I got my IUD for MIAMI!”

The wildly uneven affair is set during a bachelorette weekend in Miami where four George Washington U. party girls we’ve seen dominating beer pong back in the day gather to celebrate state senate candidate Jess’s impending nuptials.

Jess (Johansson), as a candidate, is a seriously gorgeous stiff. Alice (Bell) is a seriously needy and possessive elementary school teacher.

Then, there’s the professional protester Frankie (Glazer, of TV’s “Broad City”) and the gorgeous, rich, about-to-be-single mom, Blair (Kravitz) Frankie used to have a thing with, back in college.

So nothing like a weekend in Sin City to renew their friendship and party like they’re not trying too hard to relive their college hedonism. But of course they are. “Shot SHOT SHOT SHOT” leads to booze, weed, blow, bickering and bantering.

And then there’s Pippa (McKinnon), Jess’s “new” friend from Down Under. McKinnon trots out catch-phrases — “Bu-MA-zing” — and the worst “shrimp on the barbie” accent this side of “Dumb and Dumber.”

When a stripper shows up and gets killed, by accident, due to their over-enthusiasm? Par for the course. And not funnier than anything that’s come before it.

The stars, playing caricatures, have their moments — save for Johansson, who, like McKinnon, is funnier on SNL than she’s ever been on the big screen. The laughs in this Aniello and Paul W. Downs (“Broad City”) romp live around the edges. The pervy/swinger neighbors (Ty Burrell and Demi Moore) who live next door to the house the party girls are staying in, the parallel metrosexual bore of a bachelor party, with the wimpy-bore of a fiance (co-writer Downs) and Peter the fiance’s mad drive to save a marriage he thinks will never come off are far and away the funniest sequences in the picture.

A confusing phone call sends Peter packing — South, from DC to Miami. Can’t go by plane, or train. He’s got to go “Sad Astronaut.” A bachelor party (wine tasting) bro tells him the story of Lisa Nowak, the crazed astronaut in the adult diapers, hurtling cross country to kidnap a romantic rival in Orlando — doing a “Sad Astronaut.” The picture is peppered with Florida cop jokes and references to Florida gun laws.

But truthfully, even though it rallies in its last third to manage something like comic momentum, “Rough Night” never recovers from the bloody death and the mess that ensues. And all the attempted McKinnon moments and omnivorous Demi and Ty come-ons to Kravitz (playing it straight, and killing it) cannot save it.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language throughout, drug use and brief bloody images

Cast: Scarlett Johannson, Kate McKinnon, Zo  Kravitz, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer, Paul W. Downs, Ty Burrell, Demi Moore, Dean Winter

Credits:Directed by Lucia Aniello, script by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:41

The movie I’m most looking forward to this summer, as I’ve written on several occasions, is Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” an epic of survival during the darkest moments of World War II.

But that’s just me. As this movie has no comic book tie-in, Warner Brothers has to figure it’s going to be a hard sell. Getting the word out in a culture awash in capes and crusaders, superheroes and superheroines, and getting audiences jazzed up about a vivid piece of history barely beyond living memory is tough.

Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh? Not names to justify the cost of recreating the British evacuation of Europe, a defeat spun into victory, even if the director of “Inception” is behind it.

So WB is touring this “DUNKIRK Prologue Cinetransformer Movie Theater experience,” a mobile cinema with optimum projection, bone-rattling sound and a five minute stunner of a sequence from the film. It’s in Orlando Wed and Thursday at 5421 International Drive, in the parking lot of DXL Men’s Clothing. It’s due in Atlanta, next.

They give you a little “Dunkirk” swag — including a copy of the propaganda the Nazis (Germans) dropped on the trapped British Expeditionary Force and its French allies.

And then you see a breathless, dazzlingly intercut sequence — two corpsmen toting a wounded friend through the chaos of the evac beaches, a businessman played by Oscar winner Mark Rylance, doffing his tweed jacket, overseeing two teens offloading plates ad other non-essentials from his pleasure boat, Royal Navy officers leaving a boatload of life jackets for them to take on.

Tom Hardy takes to the skies, dogfighting in a Spitfire, trying to keep the Germans from strafing the men on the beach.

Rylance, gripped with concern, overwhelmed when his tiny boat passes a destroyer, packed to the railings with evacuated troops — explosions and music and tight closeups and Kenneth Branagh, as the Naval officer in charge of planning, his collar turned up so that he can look cool under pressure.

It’s stunning stuff, and I can hardly wait to see the finished film.

Meanwhile, this Big Trailer with the 60 seat surround sound/floor shaking dazzler of a sequence to the movie may be coming to a city near you. Atlanta by the weekend, and so on, up to opening day. 

Do I look excited to see it? No? Orlando. Too darned hot for that.

That opening day is July 21, and kudos to Warners for indulging Nolan and making this effort to get the word out. “Wonder Woman” may pay the bills, but if there’s an Oscar contender from them this summer, it’s going to be a WWII movie with a top-drawer cast and a great history lesson tucked into the stunning effects.

Two movies I’m looking forward to this summer, and not just because of their killer trailers — I’m a history buff — “Dunkirk” and “Detroit.”

A WWII epic about a Britain that never tires of hearing about it’s “finest hour.”

And “Detroit,” from the “Hurt Locker” team, because America isn’t shy about recalling its darkest days.

Have you seen the comically horrific “Alien Raiders” — you know, the one about a motley collection of folks trapped in a supermarket when the Aliens Attack?

You should.

How about “Killers” (Ashton K. and Katherine Heigl) or “The Air I Breathe?” Worth Netflixing, for sure.

The creators of the web horror/comedy series “20 Seconds to Live” directed and wrote those pictures, respectively.

And they’ve developed the knock for creating get-in/get-out horror jokes, short one-idea films with great production values and funny payoffs.

Here’s a sample of their first season’s work — a gag piece the length of a movie trailer.

They’re hunting for funding for season two, a worthy wagon to get on board, horror fans.

A great wrong — Ok, a minor wrong — is righted with the belated theatrical release of “47 Meters Down,” a trapped-in-a-shark-cage thriller whose production values suggest it deserves better than a direct-to-video fate.

The film’s star, Mandy Moore, has experienced a career re-boot, thanks to TV’s hit weeper, “This is Us.” Claire Holt (“Pretty Little Liars,” “H2): Just Add Water”) has always looked great in a swimsuit.

And the murky blue void that co-writer/director Johannes Roberts and underwater camera specialist Mark Silk present has menace enough without the not-noticeably-digital sharks that menace our protagonists.

What’s summer without an “Open Water” or “The Shallows”? Sharks are still scary, even if Asia is devouring them like the potato chips of the sea.

So never mind the blips of logic in the script, the fact that it requires Mandy Moore to shriek into her mask — “We’re gonna DIE down here!” — too many times, to narrate everything she (and um, we) see her do.

“Get the spear gun!”

Moore and Holt plays sisters vacationing in sunny Mexico, where the drinks have umbrellas and the rules for dive charters are, we’re told, pretty lax.

Lisa (Moore) is just getting over a breakup. Sister Kate (Holt) is her replacement companion on this holiday, somebody to help her shake the funk that being dull and predictable has gotten Lisa into.

Why not an impulse trip into the Gulf on a low-rent shark experience charter with two local hunks they’ve just met?

Nothing to worry about. The boat may look like it’s seen better days, and the actual shark cage they’ll sit in when they’re lowered five meters down appears to be held together by rust. But the corners-cutting captain (Matthew Modine) is American, the actual gear is top drawer — full-face masks with radio links.

Lisa’s never dived in her life, but they don’t need to know that. “Is this even safe?” is replaced with “Think of the (social media) pictures!” Her ex will have to rethink his whole “boring Lisa” complaint.

Then, the crane breaks and they’re dropped to the bottom, out of radio range. They’re running out of air, and will get the bends if they ascend too quickly.

And the fact that the boat crew has filled the water with crimson chum, luring Great White Sharks — actually quite rare in the too-warm/too BP-polluted waters of the Gulf? That’s just another, grislier way to die.

The plot presents the sisters with some awful dilemmas and the viewer with plenty of “Oh come on” moments.

But any thriller set in the blue-grey isolation of the domain of sharks is fraught with possibilities for frights. And Roberts, a horror vet (“The Other Side of the Door”) knows the when, where and how to place his shocks.

Silly as it sounds, “47 Meters Down” is downright intense. And it manages the odd surprise twist, too.

It still has a hint of “Just Wait for Netflix” about it, but that denies you the fun of sitting in the dark, laughing and muttering at the characters on the screen, with a hundred other fans of cheap thrills and summer cinema shark cheese.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense peril, bloody images, and brief strong language
Cast: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine
Credits: Directed by Johannes Roberts, script by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera. An Entertainment Studios release.
Running time: 1:29

Brett Haley has described “The Hero” as “a love letter” not only to Sam Elliott, but to a particular breed of Hollywood icon.

Elliott plays an aging Western hero, getting by on voice-over work in commercials, facing mortality and hoping for that one last big role before heading for that last roundup.

I’d suggest it’s a movie about the sort of icon the throwback Elliott never quite got to become in a Hollywood that rarely makes Westerns.

Lovely movie, and I’m talking with Haley, who grew up in the Florida Keys, about it today.

And as always, I’m looking for suggested questions. Got anything in mind? Post it as a comment below, and thanks for the input.

The Holocaust has been so exhaustively covered as a movie subject as to become a Hollywood punch-line.

But the Israeli drama “Past Life” finds a new angle, a new corner of collective guilt. Avi Nesher’s “What Dad did during the Holocaust” mystery may not have the most satisfying resolution, but that’s part of the point.

Sephi (Joy Rieger, introspective and demure) is a star soprano with her college choir, an aspiring composer willing — even in 1977 — to go to West Berlin to perform — if it can further her career.

Meeting the famous choral composer Thomas Zielinski (Rafael Stachowiak) could pay dividends, too. But Zielinski’s aunt has come with him to the concert. And she recognizes Sephi’s last name, and her face. That leads to a “Marathon Man” moment. The old woman has to be dragged, shrieking (in German), “Murderer! Daughter of a murderer!”

Yes, she knew Sephi’s father. And since Sephi’s sister, Nana (Nelly Tagar), a feisty Tel Aviv magazine writer who argues about Israel’s faults and “the Holocaust excuse” Israelis have historically made for any territorial grabs or “re-settlement” schemes, Sephi has someone willing and eager to unravel this mystery.

Dad (Doron Tavory) is a respected Jerusalem gynecologist, humorless, touchy. But in flashbacks, we get a hint about why his two daughters think this guy could be a murderer. He never talks about how he, a Polish Jew, survived when millions didn’t. And he used to slap the girls around, and worse, growing up.

“You can’t understand the world ‘back there,'” he explains. Not so fast, Dad, they decide.

Nesher doesn’t do a great job of hiding her cards when it comes to the mystery in this “inspired by a true story.” We know what’s up, more or less, from the first moment father Bruno hears that his girls have talked to people who knew him “back there.” His wife (Evgenia Dodina) gets a stress-induced nosebleed.

“Here we go again,” she mutters, in Hebrew with English subtitles.

The story takes on melodramatic children-suffer for the sins-of-their-parents tones, or as on old kibbutz-dweller puts it, “Parents ate sour grapes, and now their children have rotten teeth.”

But the larger idea, that in order for people, the world, Israel and Israelis to live on, there has to be an emotional statute of limitations on what people did in the distant past  — to survive, following orders, etc. — has weight.

Nesher’s re-creation of the Israel and Europe of the Cold War ’70s is vivid and biting. Sephi suffers under a sexist, bunker-mentality culture at home, and feels the burden of a some-crimes-cannot-be-forgiven or forgotten mentality abroad.

“Past Life” is best appreciated as an attempt to finally give permission, at the source of the grievance (Israel), not to forget, but to at least forgive.  Not every horror was committed by gentiles, not every sin was mortal, Catholic or Protestant in nature.

At some point, the past is passed.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with nudity, smoking.
Cast: Joy Rieger, Nelly Tagar, Doron Tavory, Rafael Stachowiak
Credits: Written and directed by Avi Nesher. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:48

As Mandy Moore grew up in Orlando, learned her acting and musical chops here, and since her mom used to work at the newspaper where I used to work, I have interviewed her many times over the years.

She always saw her future, the post teen-pop starlet/child star years, as being rebooted by Broadway. She can sing, she can act, it seemed like a natural transition. She did “Nobody Loves You” off-Broadway a few years back.

But it was TV and “This is Us” that gave her a career second wind. And that’s why she’s got a movie coming out. A little deep sea horror, anyone? “47 Meters Down” pairs up a couple of divers and traps them in a shark cage.

Talk about claustrophobic. I don’t think Disney’s “Rapunzel” will be doing any singing, at that depth.

One thing you notice, going out this weekend, is the feminine tenor (soprano?) of the chatter at your neighborhood multiplex.

That’s because “Wonder Woman” is playing. That’s because women don’t need no stinking “Women only” screenings to show up the comic book blockbuster. Art D’Allesandro at Deadline.com breaks down some of the box office stats for the film, which has dropped omly 45% from its opening weekend blowout, leading to a $57-58 million take by midnight tonight (Sunday). Groups of women showing up to watch and revel in the movie in which Princess Buttercup teaches an ex-Israeli soldier and model with some fairly jingoistic attitudes her native land and how it treats non-Jews to fight.

An “honorary UN ambassador” (another controversy) and “not American enough” (per Fox News), “Wonder Woman is ginning up the controversy only a hit movie can create.

Meanwhile, there’s little to no controversy over “It Comes at Night.” Great reviews (I thought it was good, downbeat and just cryptic enough — but nothing to stand in line for). But it’s only managing $5.7 million. Why? “Bad word of mouth,” Deadline reports, citing poor audience exit polling (Cinema Score). So, not giving people hope or uplift or a happy ending is killing it.

“The Mummy” is tracking steady, an underwhelming $32 million opening seems just beyond reach. Will this end the whole “Dark Universe” dream? Maybe. The idea of tying a string of horror franchises together seems dubious. “Mummy” leaves the door open to sequels, but bad reviews had to tamp down turn out. That, and a bigger chunk of the public has bailed on Tom Cruise than it has Russell Crowe. And they’re both in the same movie.

Of all the named causes of California’s ongoing water shortages, and the water wars of the state’s agricultural heartland, the Central Valley — here’s one you never thought of. It’s all the fault of naive environmentalists who apparently hate farmers.

It’s got nothing to do with rain patterns shifting as the planet warms, thanks to burning fossil fuels. Let’s not talk about runaway development that fills the state with new residents, new homes for those residents and lawns and golf courses that help make Californians twice as thirsty as any other state in the U.S. And the farmers can’t be to blame for the allegedly wasteful sweetheart deals made decades ago that give them so much water to that they can grow broccoli in a damned desert.

No, environmentalists and their love of endangered species and their apparently unscrupulous funders have created this “fake” crisis.

That’s the utter horse-hockey premise of the drama “Pray for Rain,” a laughably ludicrous bit of right wing Big Oil agitprop from oil billionaire Forrest Lucas’s production company.

It’s about Emma, a New York fashion journalist (Annabelle Stephens) who comes home to the Central Valley after her farmer dad (John Heard, glimpsed in a farewell video) dies. She’s stuck dealing with her estranged mother (Jane Seymour), never without a drink in her hand and all too happy to ditch this farm and finally live somewhere fun, and perhaps not so dry.

“I’ve forgiven you,” Emma says through gritted teeth.’

“You’ve forgiven ME?” Mom growls back.

But the water wars in the county have brought in Hispanic gangsters, muscling farmers into selling out. Emma’s old high school buddy sheriff (Nicholas Gonzalez) seems helpless, even though his almond orchard owning dad (Paul Rodriguez) is one of those being threatened.

And there’s something fishy about Emma’s dad’s death. So she’ll blow off her fashion magazine boss (Missy Pyle, oh honey, why?) and root around to get to the bottom of this.

And at every point, as Emma sneaks up on covert meetings, flees from bad guys on her old dirt bike and wonders if the reason she hates her mother (she cheated) connects with all this, the fingers are pointed at those snooty, elite, environmental activists.

Director Alex Ranarivelo gives us about half as much action as it would take to hide the way the script (by actress turned writer Christina Moore and Gloria Musca) doesn’t massage or hide its mystery. This aspires to late night Hallmark Channel production values and entertainment level.

Because entertainment value isn’t what Ranarivelo is about. He makes movies with a message. He’s filmmaking’s Marco Rubio, a feckless puppet who lives off the largess of his puppet master, right wing billionaire Forrest Lucas, of Lucas Oil.

Their first film together, as financier and filmmaker, was “The Dog Lover,” an expose of animal rights activism geared towards defending Lucas’s love of puppy mills.

Just so we know what we’re dealing with.

The caricatured environmentalists here are backed by a clueless little old lady, and are given to callously telling the failing farmers, “Challenge leads to opportunity.”

Government officials are lazy nap-taking do-nothings.

Hell, where’s the heroic oil man to offer to save the farmers through the miracle of fracking? Yeah, it’s that ridiculous, and all concerned — especially the Summer’s Eve who wrote the checks — should be embarrassed.

Seymour gives the most interesting performance, and even it comes off like a pulled-punch.

No doubt most of those involved are praying for this to disappear as fast as Lucas’s movie money cash. That’s one thing Hollywood folks are good at — taking money from suckers with agendas.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements and some violence

Cast: Annabelle Stephens, Jane Seymour, Nicholas Gonzalez, Paul Rodriguez, John Heard

Credits:Directed by Alex Ranarivelo , script by Christina Moore, Gloria Musca. An ESX release release.

Running time 1:35