Movie Nation

There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t give at least a moment or two’s thoughts to one of the landmark projects in the history of TV and film, the “7 Up” series. That’s the power of film to burrow into your brain and influence your thinking.

A former high school classmate is forever Facebook posting vintage photos from the hometown newspapers of the Southern town where I grew up. I glance at these wholly-segregated accounts of life in that rural county and can’t help but see the same entitled surnames and faces, for generations, always worthy of a newspaper’s attention. And I note how these “whitewashed” Facebook history posts are indirectly making the point of the “7 Up” series of TV programs — following 14 kids of various social and demographic strata in Britain for decades, catching up with them every seven years — which was intended as a test of Aristotle’s maxim “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

The kids, the series suggested as its class conscious thesis, would rise to rule or be ruled largely based on the affluence and class they were raised in. Orphans “in care,” Cockney working class “East Enders” who inspired their own soap opera and rural farm kids were born at a disadvantage to Latin-reciting (and singing) posh private school city girls and boys, their uniforms and accents and confident privilege ensuring their later success in life.

Director Michael Apted and assorted collaborators with Granada TV/ ITV started this intimate series, which began brilliantly and evolved into something psychologically and socially revealing and profoundly moving as England’s version of “Baby Boomers” aged and were tested by life as they grew up in the public eye.

In every episode clips from the first installment and earlier films are used to illustrate how they age, how their attitudes evolved or didn’t change over the course of their lives.

The movies, beautifully and evocatively boiled down from the TV episodes every seven years, could make you weep. I got pretty teary when Apted, one of the cinema’s most politically empathetic filmmakers, who brought humanity and social justice concerns to almost every film he made — Bond movies to “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Thunderheart” etc — died in 2021.

The films first gained notice on this side of the Atlantic with “28 Up,” a mid-80s point in time where the series’ brilliant conceit and probing execution truly started bearing fruit. “Siskel & Ebert” raved it up, and the documentaries based on the every-seven-years TV series became must-see pictures for cinephiles.

But that still means most people aren’t acquainted with the project or even its abortive American incarnation, which ended less than 20 years in.

I was delighted to find most of the TV series, and several of the films (including the most recent, “63 Up”) on not just streamers like Britbox, but on Youtube.

Here’s the first TV film.

My fiance hadn’t seen any of these films, and we binged a lot of them on a rainy day recently, and I was shocked at how moving they still are.

Yes, it’s Boomer Nostalgia. But here’s the thing, Generation X, Millennials, etc. The American version of this series was launched among Gen X kids raised to believe there was no “class war” in the “Land of Opportunity,” when the basic thesis of the series was under attack from conservative elites who didn’t want the proles to know they were getting screwed.

The series requires thinking long-term, delayed rewards not instant gratification. Such series require time and cash and sacrifice, something I was made keenly aware of whenever I interviewed Apted about another film project he was promoting. American filmmaker and Spielberg protege Phil Joanou was supposed to be the one committed to seeing this American “Up” series through. Not sure why it died — lack of generational interest, thus making it unsellable, Joanou’s own shortening attention span.

But it’s startling to look on the Apted films, from 1964-2019, and see the definition of “success”
and a “happy life” broaden, right before your eyes. A plucky Cockney jockey becomes a cabbie, a terminally depressed wanderer tranforms from homeless to politician, married-too-young girls struggle, posh kid becomes college prepped barrister and then there’s the librarian with no college degree whose life expanded around her until she is mistress of all she surveys at a British university.

Some are happy, some bitter and some go through periods where “broken” is the only word that fits. But most aren’t, and life — its ups and downs — progresses, sometimes happily, sometimes grudingly updated every seven years as we note which among them was the most fully-formed at Aristotle’s magical age “Seven.”

This is heartbreaking but hopeful bucket list cinema for film buffs, for aspiring sociologists and politicians and anybody who ponders the role “class” still plays in our lives. And if you haven’t seen it, Youtube just made that as easy as can be.

One of the great stand- ups of his era, Richard Lewis, a professional neurotic who amusingly took credit for the comic use of the phrase “from Hell” during his many years of appearances on Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” has died.

He died from a heart attack, and after recently disclosing that he had Parkinson’s. He was 76.

His Twitter feed the past year or so had a “love life” sentimental edge, suggesting he knew the end was nigh. But It could be hard to tell. He built his career on self examining, self pitying and self loathing observations about himself.

Analysis, romance and head scratching self doubt were trademarks, as was that mane of hair he maintained long past an age when anybody not a rock star typically keeps it.

The King of Kvetching was just that, a rock star comic with a few movies, a few sitcoms and thousands of live sets to his credit over a fifty year career.

I saw him live a couple of times, interviewed him a few more, and always found him loose and blunt and funny, even on bad days where you could detect his self doubt mania. 

My favorite memory of him was catching up with Lewis as he got back on the road shortly after 9/11, talking about how honored he was to go out and try to make a despondent, worried country laugh, and how touched he was that fans were still showing up.

He was one of the great ones, and if nothing else, Larry David deserves our heartfelt thanks for giving a very smart, very funny man a great career curtain call. 

Why keep coming back to a series of popular but dreadful “horny teen melodramas” from Spain, which have ranged from “vapid but titillating” to “Are you just here for the nudity?“

That rhetorical question can be aimed at the audience for this series, a trilogy which seemingly concludes with “Through My Window: Looking at You.” But that query can be turned back on any critic reviewing all three as well.

Am I just here for the cold-day-in-Catalonia nudity, the sex scenes that break up the monotonous soap opera between them? Nah. I’m back for the same reason I checked back on the films of Cheech and Chong, Tyler Perry, Dakota Johnson or Adam Sandler.

I’m wondering if they get better.

The answer, nailed shut on the third film of this sappy, prolonged romance, is “Alas! No!”

The acting isn’t awful, but the writing has degenerated from insipid to eye-rolling. It’s as if no effort is being made to keep the viewer engaged with what they’re watching on their streaming device between the sex scenes.

To catch us up, Raquel (Clara Galle) is no longer joined-at-the-groin with her rich neighbor, Ares Hidalgo (Julio Peña), an entitled med student (in school in Stockholm in the second film) who steals Raquel’s wifi every time he comes home to Barcelona to his family of pretentiously-named siblings, younger Apolo (Hugo Arbues) and older Artemis (Eric Masip), now in the family business.

But Raquel has been in love with Ares since staring him down “Through My Window.” The fact that she’s with Gregory (Ivan Lapadula) and Ares has married money — Vera (Andrea Chaparro) — can’t stop the love, or sexual assignations.

Apolo may be “with” Daniela (Natalia Azahara), but he’s scratching a different itch on the side.

And bitter Anne (Carla Taus) still hasn’t gotten over the tragedy at the end of “Through My Window: Across the Sea.” Yes, somebody died. If you haven’t seen the second film, I shan’t spoil it for you whilst you catch up.

Raquel has turned her stolen wi-fi romance into a novel that’s coming out, with another book on the way. Hilariously, she’s still got to work part time, dressed as an elf, wrapping gifts in a Barcelona gift shop at Christmas.

Everybody, it seems here, has “an unforgettable ex” and no separation or involvement and even matrimony with anybody else can shake that unfightable urge to climb back “Through My Window.”

And no matter what is going on in everyone’s life, there’s always time for clubbing, Christmas parties and New Year’s Eve blasts.

It’s all a little confusing to drop in on, even if you’ve seen the first two films. But as uncertain as I sometimes was about how this ended up as that and where she/he/they come into this, the ones we should be feeling sorry for here are director Marçal Forés and screenwriter Eduard Sola.

They’re the ones charged with keeping this all straight on an official basis. Do they? Only in a “keep the story going until the next sex scene arrives” sense.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, alcohol and drug abuse

Cast: Clara Galle, Julio Peña, Natalia Azahara, Hugo Arbues, Eric Masip, Andrea Chaparro, Ivan Lapadula and Carla Taus.

Credits: Directed by Marçal Forés, scripted by Eduard Sola, based on the novel by Ariana Godoy. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

“From Italy with Amore” is like pasta your local Olive Garden left standing in water overnight.

It’s shapeless, tasteless, inedible goo, and about as Italian as Chico Marx.

The “Italy” here is a “we make our own pasta for our ‘authentic’ cuisine” eatery, apparently a novelty in Edmonton, Alberta.

That’s the unnamed setting, a city that presents itself as too lovely to deserve hosting the blandest romance ever filmed on that side of the border.

Ariel (Rebecca Dalton) is a features writer for a magazine/website named “Glow,” a career woman who is lovelorn but who has her ideal in mind.

“Six feet tall, strong build, chiseled” features, with “good eyes, a radiant smile.” And he should “drive a yellow sports car.”

That’s what Mr. Must-Be-Right pulls up in the moment she mentions this list to bestie Jules (Kara Duncan), who kidnapped her from the office for lunch on her birthday.

So the hunk with model good looks (Brendan Morgan) has to be made for her. And the good looking co-owner of Vicky’s Bistro, Daniel (Marcus Rosner) barely merits a second glance.

Jules notices him, but Ariel mermaids right past the guy serving them to the guy he’s giving an espresso. To put herself in yellow sports car Jamie’s field of vision, she’ll have to show up at Vicky’s Bistro, day after day, as it soft-reopens before Daniel and his chef brother Tony (Stafford Perry), gay and finally close to adopting a baby with his husband, stage their grand re-opening.

Maybe if she pitches an “Italian comfort food” feature to her “mst popular wellness magazine in the country” editor, she’ll kill two birds with one stone, and get the big promotion at work to boot.

That throws our blonde reporter together with the cuisine-championing, market-visiting, family business man Daniel, who is smitten but whom Ariel needs to shy away from because Jules is interested, and besides, Ariel’s ideal has that yellow sports car.

I mean, she “manifested” her “ideal man.” Who is she to argue with the universe?

The cooking is de-emphasized, so the “Italy” come-on in the film’s title is pretty much a total bait and switch. The cuisine we glimpse is underwhelming.

The leads are bland, the “chemistry” has no heat to it and the situations, all the way down to the gay couple who needs Tony and Daniel’s restaurant to succeed over the chain joint across the way (“The Olive Branch,” cute) in order to be able to adopt, are tepid.

This clunker is about as appetizing as a can of Chef Boyardee, and just as sexy as it is appetizing.

Maybe next time you’re making a movie in under-filmed Edmonton, you make something out of it, give it a little local color. Edmunton deserves better.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rebecca Dalton, Marcus Rosner, Kara Duncan, Stafford Perry, Brendan Morgan and Dawn Ford

Credits: Directed by Dylan Pearce, scripted by Katy Breier and Erica Deutschman. A Freevee/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:24

“The Peasants” is a film based on a village life melodrama of the same title written by the Pole Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont in four massive volumes in the 1920s.

Even the fact that Reymont won the Nobel Prize for literature for it isn’t much of a justification for giving it a second thought, as in those early years, the Nobel literary prizes were doled out to a string of forgotten figures, while giants such as Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, Edith Wharton, Conrad and Ibsen went to their graves without such honors. Maxim Gorky, Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy were Reymont’s esteemed competition in 1924.

But this potboiler of a book has been filmed and then those film frames painted to life in the same rotoscoping animating style deployed by the filmmakers who made the gorgeous Van Gogh biography “Loving Vincent” a few years back. After casting, rehearsing, acting and shooting the film, another five years were needed for 100 painters to get Poland’s official entry as Best International Feature for this year’s Oscars painted and ready for the public.

And even though it didn’t make that Oscar cut, this detailed look at the life in Lipce, the struggles, ambitions, greed, jealousies and transgressions of its often venaly inhabitants, is too beautiful to pass over.

Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is the most beautiful teen in the village, 19 and blonde and pony-tailed, she is indulged by her widowed mother (Ewa Kasprzyk), who spares her heavy labor so that she has time to be pretty, make artful cutouts and necklaces and such. All the men and boys notice her, and when she’s quizzed about her prospects, this or that “wealthy widower,” she lets one and all know that she won’t be “rocking someone else’s cradle.”

When the richest farmer in town, Maciej Boryna (Miroslav Baka of the “Squared Love” movies) is talked into taking this prize and clumsily flirts, she lets him know just how much trouble she’d be.

“I wouldn’t work in the fields,” she tells him (in Polish with English subtitles). She might not do much around the house, either. I mean, just look at her.

Unknown to the miserly patriarch, his resentful oldest son Antek ( Robert Gulaczyk of “Loving Vincent”) has noticed Jagna, too. Handsome and rugged and headstrong, his attentions are reciprocated.

The fact that he has a wife (Sonia Mietielica) and child doesn’t deter Jagna. When you’re that pretty, you get used to getting what you want.

But their trysts can’t stop the wheels of tradition, as matchmaking is underway. One courtship ritual in this place at this time (late 19th century) holds that when a man sends vodka over, things are about to turn serious and legally so. Boryna sends the vodka through a proxie.

A bit of haggling over acreage between Jagna’s mother and Boryna sets Jagna on the path to matrimony, and multiple families on the road to collision. Jagna practically weeps through her seranaded, danced-to-death wedding. This is destined to end badly.

Animated gimmick or no gimmick,”The Peasants” is gorgeous to look at, with almost every frame its own work of art.

This technique is put to great use on scenes of festive dancing and lurid moments of passion, with our trysting couple caught in a haystack and almost burned to death over their transgressions.

One doesn’t have to know the recent history of Polish art to appreciate the images even if we can’t place the direct influences on this scene or sequence, or that one. We see peasants harvesting cabbages, herding sheep, slaughtering a cow and at every turn, we hear them gossiping about the girl, the old husband, the lover, money and the land.

The melodramatic story touches on familiar themes, situations, conflicts and resolutions of conflict as we follow the rivals for old Boryna’s fortune and land.

But there’s no escaping the realization that melodrama is a perjorative description of any narrative, that many situations seem contrived, that characters act unnaturally, driven by passions or simple plot necessities as they do.

This isn’t the masterpiece that “Loving Vincent” was and remains, the definitive Van Gogh biography told by painters honoring his works, visual subject matter and style. But “The Peasants” is an engaging way of taking us back to a simpler time when the people are just as petty, inconsiderate and greedy as people have always been and always will be.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Kamila Urzedowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Miroslaw Baka, Mateusz Rusin, Ewa Kasprzyk and Sonia Mietielica

Credits: Scripted and directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, based on the novel by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:55

The cinema of Stanley Kramer is marked by movies that touched, directly or indirectly, matters of great social import and social justice.

Race and racism messages were carried in “The Defiant Ones” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” The perils of the nuclear arms were laid out in the forlorn “On the Beach,” anti-science conservative no-nothingism sent-up in “Inherit the Wind” and World War II’s most important subtext — The Holocaust — informed “Judgement at Nuremberg,” “The Juggler” (which he produced) and perhaps his weakest “message” movie, 1965’s “Ship of Fools.”

An all-star melodrama in the “Grand Hotel/Airport” model, it’s a slow-moving disaster about a slow-moving disaster. The film is set in 1933. The “ship” in question is German, heading home to its newly-fascist German home port . And the characters, one by one, answer the question posed by a complacent German Jew (played by Heinz Rühmann) in their midst.

“Do you zink zis boat is a cross-section of ze German people?”

Yes it is.

Based on a Katherine Anne Porter best-seller, this sailing-into-fascism allegory is heavy-handed, even if you ignore the opening and closing remarks to the camera made by the canny dwarf passenger (Michael Dunn, most famous for his turn on TV’s “The Wild Wild West”).

“Oh I can just hear you saying, ‘What has all this to do with us?'” he chuckles to the viewer as the passengers disembark in Swastika-bedecked Deutschland. “Nothing.”

But audiences, who even-then needed reminding that the great sacrifice of World War II was worth it, that totalitarianism, racism and eugenics were evils to constantly be on guard against, ate it up. Kramer made many a movie contrived to make the viewer feel good about standing up, buying a ticket and being counted, that one was considering the issues tackled in that film in their daily and public lives.

No, you don’t tolerate, support or vote for racists, militarists, the willfully ignorant or the nationalist. Nazis are Nazis, Communists are Communists and human rights, like human life, aren’t just :liberal” values, they are to be supported and preached by one and all.

The message took priority over the narrative, in this case. But as soundstage-bound as this Oscar-nominated sea voyage was, as clumsily-unsubtle as it could be, there are riches in its sometimes tedious two and a half hours.

Vivien Leigh gives one last haughty, faded-rose turn as an aged American divorcee trying to pass for 46 and keep some dignity in her bitter loneliness.

Elizabeth Ashley, the last surviving member of the cast, is utterly captivating as an American artist trapped in a love-lust-hate relationship with leftist fellow artist George Segal. She dances the flamenco, flirts, fights and falls back into her beloved’s arms.

Oskar Werner, a draft-dodging WWII veteran, gives one of his best “conscience of a nation” performances as a ship’s doctor miserable about his lot in life and the country he must return to.

Simone Signoret (“Les Diaboliques”) underplays an addict who falls for the doctor.

For all his hamminess and showboating bluster, José Ferrer is never less than fascinating to watch as Rieber, a eugenics-preaching Nazi sympathizer, disturbing many with his anti-Semitism, but ardent in his pursuit of a golddigging German blonde (Christiane Schmidtmer), who dances with him and duets with him in German song.

And Dunn, deftly playing the self-aware conscience of the piece, delivers plain truths about who the inhumane hate — dwarves, Gypsies and Jews, etc. — and where that hate is headed.

“Fifty percent of the people who produced a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Bach voted for Rieber’s party last week!

The narrative follows the unnamed passenger liner from Veracruz, where Lee Marvin’s failed baseball player turned coach was “trying to teach the greasers how to play ball.” Why he should be taking a slow boat to Germany is anybody’s guess.

The captain (Charles Korvin) is disappointed that his ship’s doctor (Werner) has abruptly announced this is his last voyage. The charming but racist purser (Werner Klemperer, most infamous for TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes”) won’t be quitting. Like the skipper, he’s a “Good German,” going along to get along. The captain denies admission to the captain’s dinner table to the lone dwarf on board and the Jewish “religious trinkets” salesman (Rühmann).

The young painters (Ashley and Segal) paint and bicker. The aged “Condesa” (Signoret) is an addict facing prison in Tenerife, another stop on the long voyage home, for her drug abuse.

For 26 days, Rieber (Ferrer), the ardent German Nationalist, has a captive audience for his sermons on all things grand and German.

The troupe of Spanish dancers returning home are headed by Pepe (the flamenco legend José Greco), who leads them in formal and informal dances all through the voyage. And after the dancing, he pimps out the women in his ensemble.

Characters discuss their worries, their ennui and their wants in promenades along the (soundstage) upper decks on in private in their staterooms. A lad is under the thumb of a stingy rich relative. A German couple let their English bulldog dine at the table with them. Some deny their bigotry. Some are in denial over it.

And when the ship stops in Cuba, it takes on some 600 Spanish laborers freshly-deported back to Spain. The deck and steerage are crowded with bodies which the purser sniffs over but whom the doctor treats and insists get hose-downs in lieu of baths.

Mother Frances Cabrini was an Italian born nun whose advocacy of charity through her Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which built schools, hospitals and orphanages all over the world and led to her being canonized as the “First American Saint.”

In “Cabrini,” she earns a stately, somewhat stodgy screen biography from the filmmakers who gave us the controversial human trafficking blockbuster “Sound of Freedom” last summer. So as you might expect, they’ve made a faith-based film with a conservative agenda.

But while “Freedom” has fallen into discredit because of all that the filmmakers didn’t know or chose to ignore about their dodgy “hero,” Mother Cabrini was vetted by the Catholic Church in the 1940s. Granted, that nature of their research might not wholly pass modern muster, and a many-decades-long -pedophile scandal has stripped the institution of the benefit of the doubt on such matters. Still, Cabrini’s story suggests a life of purpose, ambition and faith pretty much beyond reproach.

It’s a handsomely-mounted period piece with some impressive talent in the cast. And if it’s a bit vague about the passage of time, fictionalized incidents and the mission creeping “real estate” focus of her work, it tells her story with few embellishments.

Cristiana Dell’Anna of “Toscana” and “The King of Laughter” has the title role, a gaunt 19th century nun whom we meet as an adult with a tubercular cough and a determination to build “an empire of hope” out of orphanages, missions and hospitals the world over.

But in 1889, Mother Cabrini is finishing up an orphanage and school in Lombardy, just a pest to a pope (Giancarlo Giannini) whose lieutenants wish she would “stay in her place.”

Pope Leo XIII won’t grant her wish to become the first woman to head a Catholic mission abroad in China. But with Catholics struggling and children living on the streets in New York’s slums, she’s welcome to take over an orphanage there and do what she — still a “first woman to head a mission abroad” — can with it.

Cabrini and half a dozen sisters show up, disembark and hear their first ethnic slurs. With the help of a former street child turned prostitute (Romana Maggiora Vergano), they’ll learn the ropes and do battle with Five Points poverty, a cynical priest whose orphanage they’re taking over, the local archbishop (David Morse) and an anti-immigrant Mayor Gould (John Lithgow).

People on the street call and her sisters “dagos” and “guineas.” The mayor himself labels the entire 19th century Italian diaspora “brown-skinned filth.” Their Irish Catholic archbishop tries to prevent their fundraising. The police are used to oppress and harass their efforts and Italians goons and pimps menace their orphans and recruited help.

Mother Cabrini resorts to shaming “the greatest nation on Earth” for allowing the newest wave of immigrants to live worse than “rats.” And when mobsters threaten her, she’s not shy about playing the “wrath of God” card.

“Mea Culpa” is the most over-the-top, lurid and hyper-sexualized soap opera Tyler Perry has ever served up.

Sure, it’s a thriller, and by the pull-out-all-the-stops finale, it acts like it. But soapy, turgid trash is one of the guy’s brands — when he isn’t playing Madea. And this eye-roller is on-brand, first scene to last.

It’s another tale set amid African American affluence, this time in Chicago. The cast is populated by beautiful people in beautiful clothes in striking, upscale settings, another Perry trademark.

And it’s got laughably clear-cut villains, ludicrous situations and a season’s worth of daytime TV soap “twists” that have to be seen to be believed. But “seeing” doesn’t really help.

Singer/actress Kelly Rowland (“Think Like a Man”) stars as Mea Harper, an in-demand Chicago criminal defense attorney pursued by an artist (Trevante Rhodes of “Moonlight” and “Bird Box”) accused of killing his girlfriend and splattering her blood and skull fragmants all over a painting.

Zyair Malloy has a James Harden beard and a 50cent menace about him. He’s smooth, a womanizer and one “arrogant mutha” shut your mouth.

Could he be guilty? He’s too touchy to answer tough questions, too picky about where he lets her intereview him, as if the court will let him testify from his artist’s loft and sex den. And he’s too intent on bedding Mea to take all of this seriously.

Mea’s tempted because her loser husband (Sean Sagar) has substance-abused himself out of a career, cheated with another woman and found a new addiction — online video games.

The ADA prosecuting the case (Nick Sagar) is husband Kal’s brother. And their tyrannical, sickly mother (Kerry O’Malley) “forbids” Mea from taking the case. ADA Ray is running for higher office. That’s the play. When ADA Ray joins Mom in “I FORBID it” that just seals the deal. Defiant Mea is on-board and all-in for the defense, no “culpas” about it.

Perry makes Mea laughably passive for a high powered attorney. He scripts some odd scenes in which Mea allows her trusty, all-seeing/all-knowing private eye (RonReaco Lee) to do the name-calling and harsh questioning, and plunges Mea into a covered-in-paint sexual dalliance after her “arrogant” client lets her watch him getting felatio from a compliant neighbor.

Quite the turn on. As I said, “Lurid.” Some will take guilty pleasure out of watching that. The dears.

One Coen Brother is either not enough, or one too many. If it’s the wrong Coen. Oh brother.

That’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” a crude, clunky and carnal romp that runs bits and pieces of “Raising Arizona,” “Fargo” and “Burn Before Reading” through a lesbian bar tour of the southeast, and can manage barely a laugh in the process.

Left to his own devices, Ethan Coen — sans brother Joel — is just a generic vulgarian grasping for laughs out of an ill-considered cartoon of a cultural commentary comedy.

Margaret Qualley of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” and Geraldine Viswanathan of “The Beanie Bubble” and the best of the COVID lockdown rom-coms “7 Days” co-star as gay women of 1999 Philly who take on a one-way drive car delivert to Tallahassee just to get out of town.

Cocky womanizer Jamie (Qualley) just got caught cheating, and buttoned-down and uptight Marian (Viswanathan) was going to the corner of Florida aptly nicknamed “Florabama,” and not because of its enlightenment and tolerance.

“Why would anybody go to Tallahassee, Florida?”

“My Aunt lives there!”

“Can’t she MOVE?”

Good one. No. Seriously. Sentencing DeSantis there seems like fitting punishment.

But the guy who arranges such drive-and-deliveries, Curlie (deadpan Bill Camp) has these mobsters shipping a 1980s drug dealer (aluminum case) briefcase there he’s working for. He mistakenly assigns the Sapphic sisters to that beat-up Dodge Aries by mistake.

We know what our travelers don’t, that the guy who owned the case (Pedro Pascal) was murdered by corkscrew to acquire that case. And whatever is in it, somebody wants it real bad.

Jamie doesn’t know, and taking out an old-fashioned fold-out map and marking up the Southeast’s finest selection of lesbian (rhymes with “bike”) bars, she plots their trek. They’re in no rush. “Dismantling the patriarchy” takes time. And Marian...has needs.

The disappointed mob lieutenant (Colman Domingo) and his goons (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) will just have to find a way to track them in this pre-cellular phone (almost) era. Questioning Jamie’s ex (Beanie Feldstein) is just the beginning of their problems.

Marian’s planned ahead. She’s got a copy of Henry James’ “The Europeans” to polish off. The head mobster is reading James’ “The Golden Bowl.” To which the viewer can sigh and titter, “Better them than me.”

Qualley trots out Mama Andie Macdowell’s drawl, Viswanathan does her best tight-ass turn, Feldstein goes tough-broad to limited effect, and none of the big names in glorified cameos can stop the bleeding.

Bar pick-ups and a spirited encounter with the “very committed lesbians” of a woman’s college soccer team, what passes for a resort hotel in Tallahassee, intrigues involving a certain “family values” Senator (Matt Damon) and a hump-anything chihuahua give one an appreciation of how low this Coen will go, letting us figure that the Coen married to Frances McDormand is the classy one, the guy who got Denzel to make “Macbeth.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But suffice it to say, Ethan’s movie-making without Joel is lacking the sounding board that made even their worst excesses (“Hail, Caesar!”) marginally better than this.

Rating: R,  R, Full Nudity, Crude Sexual Content, violence and profanity

Cast: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon

Credits: Directed by Ethan Coen, scripted by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:24

“Ordinary Angels” is a kind-hearted weeper that gets by on good vibes and the talents of the Unsinkable Hilary Swank.

Based on a true story, it’s a faith-based film about what people can do when they act out of compassion, not self-interest or hate, and a reminder that “miracles” aren’t supernatural. They’re the work of good people doing good deeds, out of character and against the odds.

Swank plays a blowsy, honky-tonkin’ Louisville hairdresser who isn’t shy about giving her denim skirts and fringed leather jackets a twirl from the top of the bar, drinking until she can “make just one’a these guys look my age.”

Sharon Stevens has a problem, but it’s only obvious the morning after. That’s when he colleague Rose (Tamala Jones, quite good) tries to intervene and get this drunk to a meeting. Whatever Sharon’s drinking to forget, her problems pale compared to some folks.

Take the Schmitt family. Ed (Alan Ritchson, terrific) is a roofer barely scraping by, a guy who buries his wife and doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for a liver transplant for his five year old daughter, Michelle (Emily Mitchell, adorable).

Because Ed’s buried under the bills he couldn’t pay when medical science failed to save his wife. Sharon reads about their problems in the newspaper, shows up at the funeral and makes that “If there’s ever anything I can do” offer.

She’s muttered what a “stupid” idea it is of her to just show up, a long time between “meetings,” a six pack in the car. But whatever her failings, she’s got a big heart and the pluck to turn her focus from addiction to “saving” this one little girl.

It begins with an unbidden “Shear-a-Thon” hair-cutting fundraiser. Next thing Ed and his mother (Nancy Travis) know, Sharon’s dressing up his work portfolio, diving into his stack of unpaid bills and strategizing, fundraising and “negotiating” her way through them.

“I’m good at plenty’o things,” she drawls. “Takin’ ‘No’ for an answer ain’t one of’em.”

Obstacles will arise, and Sharon’s “Say yes” until “you can figure things out” ethos comes in handy. But it can only take one so far. Tornados and blizzards will intervene. They’ll face the impossible odds of the national liver transplant registry. Sharon’s personal demons and a lot of phone calls and legwork dominate this 1990s story of Ms. “Can Do” trying to gin up a miracle.