Movie Nation

A “Flutter,” the opening credits of the film of that title tell us, is Brit-slang for “a small wager.”

That sets us up for a movie in the sordid world of betting on sports — Cockney gambling addicts who rarely take the time to shave and clean up before dashing off to the track — a sort of Guy Ritchie-lite thriller.

And that’s what we get, with a Mephistophelian twist. This punter (Joe Anderson) gets himself mixed up with a bookie (Anna Anissmova) who pushes him into deeper and darker bets, seemingly bent on his destruction.

John (Anderson) has made gambling a career. Not that he’s great at it. His idea of “work” is hitting the dog track with his mates (Luke Evans, Max Brown). And somehow, he’s managed to marry a solicitor (Laura Fraser) who is OK with that. The one spoiler I’ll allow here is that this becomes reasonable when we see that the lawyer-wife is the daughter of a gambler.

Like any gambler, John’s eager to act on any tip that comes his way, even from his American dentist (Billy Zane, creepy as you’d expect). When he acts on this, he goes to his on-track bookie, Stan. But “fat, bald” Stan is gone. The new Stan is the overripe Ms. Anissmova, of “The Whistleblower.” Yes, the new Stan is trouble.

John, Wagner (Brown) and Adrian (Evans) aren’t above making the odd bet on each other. Who can eat a “ghost” chili without spitting it out?  But Stan, being an American, is looking for more IN-teresting wagers.

John’s bum tooth? She’s puts big money on whether he’ll have the guts to pull it out himself. There’s a school hostage situation on TV, and she’s got bets in on how many kids the villain will murder.

“That’s sick, Stan.”

“It’s a sick world, John.”

Thus does John, who narrates, spiral down a hole of Stan’s creation. The only bets that feel like “sure things” are whether he can spend a week, in his bathroom, without telling his wife why, and worse.

I like the world director Giles Borg and writer Stephen Leslie conjure up for this  2011 film, finally getting U.S. distribution/VOD play. The differences between American horse and dog tracks and British ones are interesting.

The cast, especially Evans (“Furious 7,” “Dracula Untold”), is why this didn’t stay on the shelf. Anderson (“The Grey,” “The Crazies,” Across the Universe”) makes a properly ratty gambling addict.  But the script and his performance of it never approach desperation. The voice-over narration undercuts the doom that’s supposed to hang over the picture.

The darkly comic premise lacks the lighter touch it needs to be the least bit comic. Stan insists all her bets be “secret,” and has an enforcer (Anton Lesser) to keep things honest. So even as the three pals notice that this one has a shaved head and that one other signs of “extreme wagering,” they don’t talk.

But nobody does enough to take this into the realm of “Faust.” There’s no urgency, and even when a lot’s at stake, you don’t always feel that.

Still, a thriller with this setting and this cast can never go too far wrong. “Flutter” doesn’t hit the jackpot, but at least it’s a decent even-money bet.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, some of it graphic — profanity, gambling

Cast: Joe Anderson, Anna Anissmova, Luke Evans, Laura Fraser, Max Brown and Bill Zane
Credits: Directed by Giles Borg, script by Stephen Leslie. An XLRator release.

Running time: 1:26

Finally got around to Judd Apatow’s comic memoir, “Sick in the Head,” an autobiographically revealing series of Q & A’s he’s done with people in the business of funny over the decades.

Decades? He started as a precocious teen, setting up tape recorded for radio chats with people like Leno and Seinfeld in the early ’80s, at a time when they were up and coming and he was able to trick their publicists into thinking he was a real reporter from a real radio station.

He was really taking notes on how one writes jokes, builds an act and constructs a career in stand up and what comes after — sitcoms, movies, screenwriting, joke-writing.

It’s a fascinating mixed bag of a book. His editor chose to let him flesh it out with way too many current comics (plus, oh, Eddie Vedder, Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann, directors like Mike Nichols and James L. Brooks). The dynamic of the modern conversations with Louis C. K. and Amy Schumer et al is totally different and far less interesting. Yeah, maybe it makes the book more sellable. But when you’re speaking to these people as equals, or transcribing a joint appearance on “Charlie Rose” with former roommate and longtime pal Adam Sandler, the conversation is more muted, more guarded and less fascinating.

He worked for Roseanne, and their reminiscence is sort of a career retrospective on her, a chance for her to even the score about the “difficult” reputation she was saddled with thanks to her TV hit.

Harry Anderson in 1983, right before “Night Court”? That’s gold. A hard life of hustling turned into a magic act with laughs.

I like his Leno chat and memories of the many kindnesses Leno extended him over the years. Kind of anti-Kimmel. Nothing revealing in the Jon Stewart stuff. Lena Dunham? A comic?

Seth Rogen? Another chat with Chris Rock? Jeff Garlin and Colbert, Marc Maron? Key & Peele? The balance of power in these chats is all wrong, more of An Audience with Judd Apatow.

Love that he worshiped Harold Ramis, whose films Apatow’s best movies most resemble. His joint interview with his wife Leslie Mann tells us nothing.  Interviewed Judd several times over the years, Leslie always bailed out of interviews — at the last minute.

A mixed bag of chats, but there’s enough here to hang onto, rather like “This is 40” or “Funny People.” Not quite there, but with some meat on the funny bones.

James Bonds, like great athletes, rarely exit the stage gracefully. Bonds always seem to go out on stinkers, like Michael Jordan playing for the Wizards.

“Spectre,” set up to be the Daniel Craig finale as Bond, isn’t a terrible installment in the franchise. It’s the lightest of the Craig Bonds — no sin in that. But like the end of Connery, the exit of Roger Moore and the layoff notice given Pierce Brosnan, it’s a tired, trite “greatest hits” re-packaging of stunts, chases and fights from earlier, better Bonds.

It’s terrible only in that it’s a terrible fall off from “Skyfall.”

The new M (Ralph Fiennes) may not approve of Bond’s epic shoot-out/blow-up/chopper chase in the middle of Mexico City’s Dia de la Muerta (Day of the Dead), one of the most heavily populated set pieces (with a doozy of a long-take tracking shot) in Bond history.

But his old boss, the last M (Judi Dench) would approve. She’s sent him after one last foe, of a conspiracy of foes.

“Kill him,” she says on her video after death. “And don’t miss the funeral.”

That sends Bond after The Pale King, and his daughter (Lea Seydoux), from Rome to Austria, London to Morocco. The context here is “global security,” a vast intelligence gathering collective that will be the end of privacy as we know it.

And since you’ve heard about the casting you know who the villain is — Christoph Waltz, a stretch. You have heard who he plays, and what his character likes in a pet.

Cliches abound, from the “From Russia With Love” heavy (Dave Bautista of “Guardians of the Galaxy”) battled in exactly the same set piece that Sean Connery battled Robert Shaw in that film, to the villain’s Nehru jacket and loafers without socks.

If you’re not laughing at the hero and the “Bond Girl” unpacking their evening wear for dinner on board an overnight train through Morocco, it’s only because you’re not in on the joke.

Waltz is introduced, and disappears for two thirds of the movie. For the first time ever, he simply phones it in when he’s on screen.

Monica Bellucci turns up as the bed-able widow MILF (Moll I”d like to…) Bond entices early on.

Most of the weaker Bond films are the ones that make a little too much use of the quizzically comical Q, played to amusing effect by Ben Whishaw in this series. He doesn’t hurt the movie so much as indicate that six credited screenwriters couldn’t think of anything else for their McQueen-ish tough guy Bond (who wears his suits and vests a size too small) to do.

The best lines are given to peripheral characters, which must have irked Waltz no end.

“You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.”

Director Sam Mendes cut corners on sound effects, which kills the joy of an Aston Martin DB-10 being chased by a Jaguar C-X75 through the empty streets of Rome, two hulking behemoths tearing through narrow alleys in near silence.

At least the ingrate Craig, rightfully dismissing this role in some recent interviews, learned to drive a stick shift doing this.

A brawl that ends with the damsel in distress asking, “What do we do NOW?” may be the biggest howler in the script. Post near-death coitus is the answer.

Epic explosions that aren’t (epic), big set-pieces that don’t dazzle and attempts at wrapping this entire series into one neat, limp package aren’t assets.

Even the Sam whathisname theme song just hangs there over the arty/erotic opening credits, instantly forgettable.

You can’t say that about the Craig-Bond years. The action amped up, and the tough-guy seriousness worked, even if he never quite had the Connery-Brosnan blend of sadism-plus-silly that makes the character work.

But “Spectre” doesn’t make us long for Craig taking another shot at Bond (he is contracted to do a fifth, should he so desire), or puzzle over who might get the World’s Greatest Secret Agent Role next. It just makes you wish you had those last two and a half hours back, so you could watch “Thunderball” and “Live and Let Die” and “Goldeneye” again, and at least enjoy the theme song.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, some disturbing images, sensuality and language

Cast: Daniel Craig, Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Davve Bautista
Credits: Directed by Sam Mendes, script by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth. A Sony/MGM release.

Running time: 2:28

In the best picture of 2015, Carey Mulligan is the stoic, long-suffering sweatshop worker radicalized into action. Helena Bonham-Carter the pharmacist who would have been a doctor had women in Britain been allowed into that profession. Brendan Gleeson is the police inspector tasked with keeping women in their place.

And Meryl Streep is the regal, fugitive icon of the movement in “Suffragette,” a long-overdue film treatment about the early 20th century tipping point struggle to win women the right to vote, and through it, the chance to control their own bodies, their own lives and their own destiny.

“Long overdue?” Think of the scores of films about the American civil rights movement, the long catalog of gay rights films. Even India and “Gandhi” earned film treatment before a serious movie about the global movement to emancipate and grant suffrage (the political franchise-right to vote) to “the fairer sex.”

“Women do not have the balance of mind” to deal with complex and important tasks like voting, the argument went. So in 1912 Britain, the government might pay lip service and hold hearings on women’s plight — horrific work conditions, inferior pay, “controlled” by husbands through repeated pregnancies, beatings and the like. But nothing would come of it, and a compliant British press either ignored or was censored from covering the women’s suffrage movement.

Mrs. Pankhurst (Streep) might make the occasional headline, an elusive agitator on the lam from the law, making pronouncements about the “50 year struggle,” firing up the faithful with secretive, rare public speeches to women.

But to women like the fictional Maud Watts (Mulligan) and Violet Miller (Ann-Marie Duff), whose world was a daily struggle of grueling labor in a laundry (“women’s work”), abusive sexism in the workplace, sometimes abusive spouses and the exponential increase in hardship caused by every unplanned pregnancy, “suffrage” was just an idea. Suffering was what they had to deal with.

Violet has already figured this out and is sneaking out to meetings, taking part in civil disobedience. The female flash-mobs of their day would congregate on crowded streets and start hurling rocks through shop windows. Newspapers and government ignoring us? Let’s see if interrupting commerce will get their attention.

Even though she has a somewhat sympathetic if dull husband (Ben Whishaw) to come home to, and a little extra responsibility at the laundry thanks to her submissive good looks, Maud is curious about this secretive movement.

Maud is reluctantly drawn in, impressed by women like Edith Ellyn (Bonham Carter), smart, in liberated marriages, and determined to do whatever it takes to get the government to take action for equal rights for women. “Whatever it takes” included bombing mailboxes, cutting telegraph and telephone lines — crimes against property, not against people.

Director Sarah Gavron (“Brick Lane”) and screenwriter Abi Morgan (“The Iron Lady”) keep emotions close to the surface here. A profound sadness hangs over “Suffragette,” thanks to the seeming hopelessness of the cause and the violence hurled at the women in it.

Gleeson puts aside his Irish cuddliness as the police inspector charged with infiltrating, turning and subduing this rebellion. His quiet menace is in the powers at his disposal. Mass arrests, night-stick mass beatings on the street (police riots, in essence) and arbitrary jail sentences are his threats. Will Maud buckle?

Mulligan’s ability to suggest flinty nerve underneath a willowy frame is of great service, here. Maud is a doting mother of a little boy, plainly loves her husband and is stricken when he is bullied into doing what the men folk encouraged each other to do — “keep your woman in her place.” Maud won’t have that, and Mulligan lets her growing boldness show in tiny increments. She’s absorbing the suffragette message.

“If you want me to respect the law, then make the law respectable!”

Streep’s presence here is limited, and electric.

If you know the rough outlines of history — the signature act of civil disobedience in this movement — you cannot help but shrink from the suffering and injustice hurled at them, and we viewers, here. Sensitive souls will find themselves on the verge of tears from start to finish in “Suffragette.”

History and film buffs may find themselves puzzled over the late arrival of this screen story, 100 years after the events that inspired it. And ponder the idiotic “outrage” over the film’s tag-line, “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave,” as if slavery’s definition has so narrowed that it’s owned by anyone.

“Suffragette” is an important story, handled with sensitivity and brio, performed with a distinctly British reserve that cannot contain the feminist outrage and moral courage so evident in its characters. In a reasonable “Downton Abbey” era, they only became real when they stopped being reasonable.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some intense violence, thematic elements, brief strong language and partial nudity

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw, Meryl Streep
Credits: Directed by Sarah Gavron, script by Abi Morgan. A Focus release.

Running time: 1:46

The Commandant is carefully tutoring his boy soldier, Agu. He teaches him discipline. He inflames the child’s rage at the government troops who summarily executed his father and gunned down his fleeing brother.

Final test? Draw blood.

“Agu,” the silky-sinister Idris Elba tells little Agu (Abraham Attah), “you are going to kill this man.” He caresses a machete, and passes it over. Hack away, boy.

“Like chopping wood.”

“Beasts of No Nation” is a justly-celebrated boys-eye-view of civil wars of Africa, where children are taught to hate and kill, and ruthlessly do what they’re told by warlords like Joseph Kony and Abubakar Shekau. Writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga, working from a novel by Uzodinma Iweala, does for Africa’s failed state conflicts what he did for North America’s migrant crisis in “Sin Nombre” — he puts human faces on it.

In an unnamed country (it was filmed in Ghana), Agu narrates his tale. War has torn his country, so “We are having no more school.” He and his mates — most look to be 10 or so — goof around, have burping contests, try to palm off a gutted TV to the indulgent Nigerian peace keepers.

“3D — Imagination TV” they shout, acting out music videos and fight scenes for the amused soldiers.

But then the factional government (NRC) troops storm in, the peacekeepers are gone. And even though the unarmed “buffer zone” folks want to resist, they are helpless against men with guns. Shockingly, the soldiers massacre the menfolk who haven’t fled.

Agu escapes. Until he’s captured by by the NDF, a leading rebel group.

The Commandant is in charge, but he’s leading children — a colorfully attired (or nearly naked) crew of kids, Agu’s age to upper teens. Traumatized by war, many of them orphans, they are open to Commandant’s sermons. And he is wise to their impressionable usefulness.

“The boy has hands to strangle…and fingers to pull the trigger. The BOY is very dangerous.”

Agu will learn. And he will tell us his story as he does.

“God, I have killed a man. It is the worst sin!”

The firefights are visceral experiences, the African settings beautiful, the situations almost beyond The most chilling thing about Fukunaga‘s film is how little it surprises us, how muted the shocks are. We’ve heard all about child soldiers, the mass kidnappings, the bitter blood feud nature of the wars. Joseph Kony became Africa’s most wanted man. For a while.

With subject matter this familiar, brisker pacing was called for. “Beasts” has more back story than it needs, more movie after its dramatic climax than is necessary. “African Civil War Fatigue” isn’t just a problem for TV news.

The kid is terrific, but from the moment he shows up, the movie is Elba’s. His easy charisma fits neatly with Commandant’s manner. He is fearless, perhaps a little stoned. Bullets whiz by but he stands tall, sizing up the situation, directing the action. He willingly sacrifices chunks of his battalion for his objectives, and he hides his true motives with ease.

“Beasts on No Nation” makes a terrific vehicle for Elba and a grim reminder that even if we’re tired of hearing of it, the Third World is in turmoil. States failing, refugees sweeping across borders.

And the cynical leaders of many a revolution are turning a generation of children into warriors, or cannon fodder.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexual violence, profanity

Cast: Abraham Attah, Idris Elba, Francis Weddey
Credits: Written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, based on the novel by  Uzodinma Iweala. A Participant Media/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:17