Movie Nation

One of the most formative books from my movie fanatic youth was Theodore Gershuny’s “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture: The Anatomy of an All-Star, Big-Budget Multi-Million Dollar Disaster.”

Gershuny’s on-set/in-the-studio observation of the making of Otto Preminger’s greatest debacle, “Rosebud,” remains — I dare say — a definitive eye-opener and an insightful foray into how movies are made and how they can go as wrong as they often do.

Whole epochs in technology, the shape and demographics of the audience and the very business model of making movies have evolved and devolved since 1975. But Gershuny’s all-access account of what it’s like when money, locations, stars and crew are on board the Major Motion Picture train when a production leaves the station with a very bad but “We’ll fix it” script in hand remains a cautionary tale as informative as any investigation of the disaster that was “Heaven’s Gate” or the triumph against the odds that “Apocalypse Now” turned out to be.

Egos, agendas, one hard-drinking “action” star (Robert Mitchum) quits and another (Peter O’Toole) is cast in his place, contempuous sexism and Zionism and retrograde attitudes that play as stunningly tone-deaf today, it’s a “miracle” “Rosebud” ever got the green light. The film was already hard to get one’s hands on in 1980, when the book came out. And despite being a Peter O’Toole fanatic and a (director) Otto Preminger appreciator, I could never make myself watch it when “Rosebud” aired on cable or streamed. Until now.

The film, based on a novel by Joan Hemingway (Ernest’s granddaughter) and Paul Bonnecarrère, came out during a peak era of Middle East unrest, when Palestinians used terrorist acts such as hijackings and the Munich Olympics mass-kidnapping and massacre to call attention to their plight.

They were being displaced and “erased” from their homeland while the whole world looked away.

American foreign policy was very much bent to Israel’s will — even then (something addressed in the film). But there were countries and public figures (Vanessa Redgrave, for one) who had Palestinian sympathies, even then, something John Le Carre’s 1983 thriller “The Little Drummer Girl” touched on.

That’s the climate that Preminger — a directing legend who had given us “Laura,” “Anatomy of a Murder,” “Advise & Consent” and perhaps most tellingly, “Exodus” — made one of his most topical movies, “Rosebud” in.

The global elite would be the target of the film’s smiling, swaggering but generally colorless terrorists. We see them plan and prep their plot when they gather in Corsica. Meanwhile, the daughters of Greek, British, American and other super-rich are gathering on a yacht named after the sled in “Citizen Kane.”

Sabine (Brigitte Ariel) may have taken a leftist French school teacher lover who ruffles her superrich father’s (Claude Dauphin) feathers. But she’s blithely unaware that her money only insulates her from daddy’s fury. There are others watching, waiting and planning their undoing.

The very young Isabelle Huppert and Kim Cattrall are among Sabine’s Rolls Royce chauffeured quintet (Lalla Ward and Debra Berger also co-star), the daughters of an English lord (Peter Lawford) and American senator (ex-New York majoy John Lindsay) among them.

When they’re set-up and nabbed and the yacht’s crew are killed, everybody involved knows the worst has happened. That’s why the (secretly Jewish) shipping tycoon Fargeau (Dauphin) grasps for private help.

Larry Martin (O’Toole) is a Paris-based correspondent for Newsweek, a Brit who’s also a covert hired “fixer” for the CIA. He’s at home in this world, used to tracking down terrorists, dealing with Mossad and mitigating one bad outcome for another. He’s cocky, charming and competent, an expert in getting the answers and results he wants.

Meanwhile, the terrorists make films for The Media, and everybody around the world cooperates to “save these girls,” save for the U.S., which is most easily coerced into doing Israel’s bidding.

As the chase begins and the hunt for the terrorist mastermind (Richard Attenborough, in one of the great casting miscalculations ever) takes our louche anti-hero all over Europe and the Med.

What could go wrong with either side’s best-laid plans, or the movie? Gosh, where does one begin?

He can see it all more clearly in his mind, dissecting every detail, stopping the flow of past events to analyze what might have happened or what he might have done about it.

A tragedy of his youth, a covert meeting he didn’t attend, a body hanging from a light fixture, a brawl that might have distracted lesser minds and confused less magical memories all are subject to the total recall of one Sherlock Holmes, even before he settled in on Baker Street.

Amazon gets in on the extended Holmes family business with “Young Sherlock,” because why should “Enola Holmes” on Netflix or the Spielberg production of “Young Sherlock Holmes” back in the ’80s have all the glory? To say nothing of the British Benedict Cumberbatch TV series aired on PBS a few years back.

The new series is based on Andrew Lanes’ novels about the teen years of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dapper, dogged detective in the making. And as the director of the Robert Downey Jr. bi screen “Sherlocks” Guy Ritchie developed this project and directed a bit of it, the series has its share of Guy Ritchie sizzle and flash.

They spent their period piece money on actors, costumes, rented Victorian settings, editing and effects. Their narrative diverges just enough from the Holmes of lore and other adaptations to at least appear new and novel, with Hero Fiennes Tiffin taking us through the troubled late teens of our detective in a tale that’s dark, but often jaunty.

Natasha McElhone (“Ronin”), Hero’s uncle Joseph Fiennes (“Shakespeare in Love”), Max Irons (son of Jeremy) and Oscar winner Colin Firth co-star.

The big twist? There’ll be no fated meeting with a future “Doctor Watson” here. This “disgraced” Holmes is fresh out of prison and willing to befriend any Oxford swell who takes an interest, even the brilliant, profane Jewish outsider in the student ranks, James Moriarty. Dónal Finn of TV’s “The Wheel of Time” gives our “Ashkenazi” anti-hero an Irish brogue and swagger, making him Holmes’ intellectual equal — “I’m no sidekick!” — and a young man far better at the bareknuckle brawling and fights to the death they face together.

Because someone is killing Oxford dons. Someone has tried to kidnap a Chinese princess (Zine Tseng), whose martial arts and horsewomanship skills wouldn’t allow that. And somehow, that might tie into Holmes’ family history — his absentee scientist father (Joseph Fiennes) and his mentally institutionalized mother (McElhone).

“The game’s afoot” over eight episodes of chases, shootouts, beatings and bodies, with Holmes trotting out that magical Eidetic memory and walking through scenes and events, picking at details from half-glimpsed, half-burned notes in a fireplace, clues from the work brother Mycroft (Irons) is doing for a rich, vain and ruthless industrialist (Firth), always one step ahead of the not-wholly-hapless Constable Lestrade (Scott Reid).

Holmes speaks fluent Mandarin, which comes in handy as events back in China that entangle our student princess tie into all this.

The 19th century settings are a tad pristine and unlived in for my taste. Digital cityscapes — Oxford, London, Paris and Constantinople — were worth investing in. Gadgets (Mr. Edison’s phonograph) are unveiled and turned to evil purpose. But no money or screen time is wasted on trains to the Orient or steamship passages across the Channel.

The eight episodes clip along, with somewitty banter, some repetition and the odd clever shot or editing touch and more and more pondering of the childhood tragedy that shaped Holmes. The back-engineering of this prequel is merely adequate. The fictive 1880s “present day” story is muddled and turns muddier the deeper we get into it.

And I’d swear I heard a character talk about “King and country,” which is a curious blunder for a Victorian Era story filmed in the UK to make.

Label this one a streaming page-turner, not quite up to a cliff-hanger, episode by episode, just engrossing enough to keep us engaged.

Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity

Cast: Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Dónal Finn, Natasha McElhone, Zine Tseng, Max Irons, Holly Cattle, Numan Acar, Ravi Aujla, Scott Reid, Joseph Fiennes and Colin Firth.

Credits: Created and developed by Peter Harness, Matthew Parkhill and Guy Ritchie, inspired by Andrew Lanes’ “Young Sherlock Holmes” novels. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 8 episodes :52-55 minutes each

Perhaps the reason Keanu Reeves doesn’t quite grasp the tone in Jonah Hill’s Hollywood star in crisis over a scandal “comedy” “Outcome” is that director, co-writer and co-star Hill didn’t make what he was going for clear.

Maybe Hill didn’t quite know himself what notes to hit in a not-quite-funny romp through extortion, taking stock and making amends for the selfish lives stars must live to become movie stars. It doesn’t help that Reeves is a frustratingly awkward actor in any film that doesn’t have fight choreography, comedies and sensitive dramas or dramedies especially.

There are a couple of laughs in this picture, and a few poignant, almost “honest” moments provided by Martin Scorsese, who plays the talent manager who “discovered” the former child star Reef Hawk (Reeves), abandoned as Reef ascended to the pinnacle of Hollywood success,by Susan Lucci, as Reef’s estranged “Real Housewives” mother and Cameron Diaz as one of two high school friends (Matt Bomer is the other) who stuck with their 56 year old pal and got a posh free ride for their trouble.

But the picture doesn’t play, doesn’t send much of a message and most certainly never “lands.”

The title “Outcome” is a sophmoric pun, and in Hill’s antic “crisis lawyer” co-starring performance there are traces of every over-the-top comedy of his foul-mouthed cherub youth. As a bald, bearded David Cross-on-uppers lawyer who decorates his office with “client” photos of Kanye, the Clintons and Kevin Spacey, Hill’s Ira is forever trying misread-the-room “jokes” that he freely admits don’t “land.”

“I gotta go. Adam Driver bought a pet chimp and it ate some lady’s face off at the mall!”

Even the ones Ira doesn’t apologize for play as strained, with only Hill’s toothy, tasteless/tactless energy to put them over.

Reef, a former addict and all-around Hollywood “nice guy” is just about to end a five year hiatus from acting, kicking his heroin addiction and keeping much of that and a legion of people who apparently “hate” him — with cause — out of the public eye and unattached to his pristine image.

But the new landscape for celebrity has made him paranoid. “You’re always being watched, observed,” he fearfully grouses to Kyle (Diaz) and Xander (Bomer).

And now somebody has a video they’re threatening to release, something that could ruin Reef and his image. He compulsively Googles “Is Reef Hawk an ass—e,” “Reef Hawk scandal” and “Reef Hawk video,” waiting for a shoe to drop — which shoe, he has no idea.

Which is why fast-talking Ira sends him on an apology tour through his past — that first manager, his mother — who only meets with him in an interview for her “Housewives” show. Mom’s sense of victimhood, living through her wildly popular son’s rise having “sacrificed” and groomed him for stardom since childhood, is genuine and almost touching if not genuinely funny.

“Just because it’s performative doesn’t mean it’s not the TRUTH!”

Hill can’t find laughs in a meeting Ira stages with his crisis-management “team” — an Allred-ish abused women lawyer, a Rev. Al-ish civil rights pastor, an Asian rights advocate.

What? No Jewish anti-semitism minimizer?

“We ran the numbers. It turns out hating Jews doesn’t negatively impact a person’s career.”

David Spade pops up as a new Malibu neighbor whose very young, very pregnant wife (Kaia Gerber) lands the movie’s funniest line.

“I know you. You used to date my grandmother!”

Van Jones plays himself, an interviewer willing to be arm-twisted by the star insisting he be introduced as a (two time) “Oscar winner.” Drew Barrymore plays herself as an interviewer you maybe don’t want to screw with.

Soaking up the one-liners and Hill’s antic but comically winded patter makes one wonder if even recasting the lead would have helped.

But watching Reeves struggle with his alternately serious or faux dismayed reactions, a damaged soul with remorse for those he’s wronged but a human void that potential laughs spiral into to die is a burden this lightweight goof on the devolving nature of “fame” never overcomes.

Rating: R, profanity, a sexual situation

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, Jonah Hill, Susan Lucci, Matt Bomer, Ivy Wolf, David Spade, Martin Scorsese and Drew Barrymore

Credits: Directed by Jonah Hill, scripted by Jonah Hill and Exra Woods. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:24

“You, Me & Tuscany” is a featherweight romance with a pretty cast, lovely scenery, fabulous food and just a hint of charm under all the cliches.

It’s a Hallmark Lite rom-com built around live-action “Little Mermaid” star Halle Bailey, who struggles to sparkle in a drab script and a role that demands screen presence and vulnerability more than singing.

She is turned-out, made-up and perfectly coiffed in every shot “Under the Tuscan Sun.” And damned if everybody else in the cast doesn’t upstage her in scene after sunny scene.

Director Kat Coiro’s barely PG (It’s rated PG-13) romance concludes with outtakes of bit players cast as tourists scoring the movie’s only laughs. They riff lines about the fine hunk (“Bridgerton’s” Regé-Jean Page) our heroine has gotten soaked with in an irrigated vineyard.

“You can Diane Lane ME ‘Under the Tuscan Sun,’ if you get my drift.'” “You can ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ me anytime, Baby!”

Cute. And not exactly a vote of confidence in your star.

Bailey stars as Brianna, an aspiring chef who gets by house-sitting in New York, “borrowing” the clothes, jewelry, designer pets and lifestyle of her clients. Nia Vardalos of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” plays the one client who blows up when she catches her in the act.

Brianna’s obligagory sassy-mouthed bestie Claire (Aziza Scott, funny) orders her to “Stop borrowing other people’s lives and start living your own.” She underscores every bit of life advice with “Bitch!” Because of course she does.

Broke, still mourning her late mother — a chef — but into high living, Brianna treats herself to a drink and burger at the bar in the hotel where Claire is concierge. That’s where the handsome globetroter Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) meets her, charms her and invites her up to his room.

Him dozing off pre coitus isn’t a complete waste, she figures, as she reasons that he “Pretty much invited me to stay” in his empty villa in his hometown of San Conessa. A flat-broke fish out of water, naturally she tries on a wedding ring she finds in a dresser once she gets there. That’s how Matteo’s family, estranged from him since he took off to make his fortune in real estate, decides she’s his fiance and that he’s coming home for a wedding.

“Anna” lies just enough to encourage this.

Mama (Isabella Ferrari), cranky granny (Stefania Cassini) and ribald cousin Francesca (Stella Pecollo) spring into wedding planning, gushing over and bowling over the bride-to-be, who speaks Italian and knows Italian cuisine, which could come in handy at the family ristorante. You think?

And then the “other” son in the famiglia, vineyard owner Michael (Page) has his “meet cute” with the American, and things get complicated in the most trite and predictable ways.

The film’s setting is the Italy and the Tuscany of Italian cliche — vineyards and postcard-perfect villages and fine food and laughing, friendly locals, a place where a romantic gal .awakens each day to the groundskeeper’s perfectly passable rendition of “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici.”

Its script is packed with lazy devices, worn-out plot contrivances and dialogue crutches. “In EEEEtaly, we have a saying…Those who know food, know life.” and “In vino veritas.” And so on.

Bailey struggles to give “Anna” in Italy a personality to go along with the lovely wardrobe, Rapunzel-length braids, lush settings and spritely co-stars. But when even her taxi-driver/confidante Lorenzo (Marco Calvani) has more personality, you start to grasp the film’s central failing.

Our star is content to be the pretty ornament whom all the funny and often more fleshed-out characters spin around. And she doesn’t have the screen presence for that.

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. I hate to say this, given the nonsense she went through when she was cast as “The Little Mermaid,” but Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

When she finally breaks into song near this bland tale’s bland finale, you can sense her relief and ponder the muttering her director must have done behind the camera.

“Why didn’t we have her sing from the start?”

Rating: PG-13, profanity

Cast: Halle Bailey, Regé-Jean Page, Lorenzo de Moor, Marco Calvani, Isabella Ferrari, Stella Pecollo, and Aziza Scott

Credits: Directed by Kat Coiro, scripted by Ryan Engle and Kristen Engle. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:4

The hard-luck brawler of the Aussie mixed-martial arts thriller “Beast” finds himself working for next to nothing on a Sydney harbor trawler at his low point in the movie.

He’s a “Jonah,” his jerk skipper insists. Bad luck. No “fish” in their traps.

And I couldn’t wait to get home to see what “fish” those Aussies catch in what look like your average crab trap. Hey, I did a year in Kodiak, Alaska. That makes me an expert.

But yes, they do catch “fish” in such traps down under. So much for making fun of the screenwriters not doing their homework.

Ah, but not so fast. Russell Crowe and David Frigerio co-wrote this generic to the point of tears “fight picture.” And for the life of me, I can’t find much that passes for “homework” in it.

Crowe plays the bulky, crutches-using old trainer who teaches his charges one credo.

“If I am breathing, I can think. If I can think, I can WIN.”

The “Cinderella Man” veteran wrote himself (I’m guessing) a couple of pithy lines. Time is “moments and memories,” his grizled trainer Sammy philosophizes. “If you don’t take the moment, you don’t get the memory.”

That doesn’t compensate for a movie whose Big Third Act Fight sees the Oscar winner watching the brawl on a TV set, muttering “He’s GOT him!” at the screen several times, earning his writing and acting credits the easiest way possible.

It’s difficult to do much new with a fight picture — be it boxing, wrestling, kung fu or MMA — as the genre grinds through its third century on the screen. And the Australian MMA milieu of “Beast” is about all that sets it apart from the hundreds of fight films that preceded it.

There’s a pregnant wife (Kelly Gale) who cries “You PROMISED” when her long-in-the-tooth and retired fighter Patton (Daniel MacPherson) elects to take off his shoes and put on the tiny gloves and strut into the octagon again.

There’s the kid brother (Mojean Aria) who followed Patton into the sport, and pays a high price. An unscrupulous promoter (Luke Hemsworth) sleazes our broke trawler deck hand into fighting aagin.

The foe, the Warrior Xavier Grau (Bren Foster) is a dirty eye-gouger/late hit thug seemingly two weight classes above our hero, and several classes more above his skinnier kid brother.

And Crowe plays the old trainer whom Patton once let down, the guy who won’t train him because “He’s not no engine. He’s got no urgency. You can’t coach heart.”

Which is why the trainer’s scrappy, tattooed ex-fighter daughter (Amy Shark) takes the job.

The fights are savage enough. But if you’ve ever seen one or two ring or octagon movies, there’s nothing at all new here. I don’t know how to be more blunt than director Tyler Atkins and crew don’t show us anything that might hold ones’ intellectual or empathetic interest.

You can count the roundhouse swings-and-misses in the fight choreography, because that’s what the brawlers do — “One, two, three, four, NOW I hit YOU, right?”

MacPherson, Crowe’s co-star in “Poker Face” and “Land of Bad,” has the right look and sound, but lacks the presence to carry a movie, at least the way this one is plotted and characterized.

I thought I was settling in for something fresh, but the working class poverty is well-furnished and familial and entirely too tidy compared to “Rocky,” the underdog reaching for revenge and/or glory underwhelms and the darkest moments don’t move or touch the viewer in any meaningful way.

But Crowe’s here, and he got the film made. Frankly, he’s more interesting as an epicurean exorcist on a Vespa than he is lurching into and out of scenes here.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Daniel MacPherson, Bren Foster, Kelly Gale, Mojean Aria, Luke Hemsworth and Russell Crowe.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Atkins, scripted by David Frigerio and Russell Crowe. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:53

There was critical blowback that rather spoiled the welcome of George Roy Hill’s last classic of the ’70s. Then again, the director of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting” and “Slap Shot” was never what we’d call “a critics’ darling.”

Audiences? The Academy? They loved the guy, an Oscar winner for directing “The Sting,” a crowd-delighting filmmaker who made plenty of hits, and was willing to take a shot at Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Irving’s “The World According to Garp.”

“A Little Romance” saw Hill at his best and most full of himself, making a young teen (13 year-olds) romantic comedy set in Paris, Verona and Venice, a movie about a smart American girl and the movie-loving French kid who particularly loves the movies of…George Roy Hill.

This adorable 1979 travelogue features Laurence Olivier, whose hamminess simply twinkles off the screen, introduced the world to the talented child who’d become an Oscar nominated adult, Diane Lane, and lets Broderick Crawford be Broderick Crawford one last time.

Whatever its reception in 1979 — mixed reviews, not a blockbuster — the picture shimmers in the memory. For me it’s a benchmark movie, one of the gold standards for Hollywood to fall short of as it rarely attempts cute, innocent and moist-eyed romances like this these days.

The kids act like kids — smart kids, smart-ass kids, and young people too inexperienced to consider the consequences of their actions. Dumb adults miss this. The smarter adults meet them on their own level; not insulting their intelligence, not demanding that they grow up too fast, giving them the benefit of doubt thanks to their innocence.

Throwing two mature-but-not-THAT-mature-for their age tweens together in Paris makes for an achingly sweet and idealistic teen-wish-fulfillment fantasy and travelogue.

Lane plays posh American private schoolgirl Lauren, stuck on a Paris movie set because that’s where her vivacious but self-absorbed and shallow Mom (Sally Kellerman, perfect) wants to be, idolizing a filmmaker (David Dukes, terrific) who is her latest crush — she’s on her third marriage — and the glamor of filmmaking at Versailles and in the Louvre.

Crawford plays an irrascible version of himself as the star of his “hack” actioner.

Screen newcomer Thelonius Bernard is a streetwise son of a Paris cabbie, a kid who — with his sketchy pal Londet (Graham Fletcher-Cook) — cuts class to see any Redford film he can get into. He spies the gangly girl his age off camera, reading Heidegger no less, who could not be more bored by something that fascinates him — making movies.

Lauren’s her name? “Call me Bogie,” he insists. He’s forced to explain the joke to the non-cinephile.

Daniel (his real name) learned a little English from school and a lot from the movies, “Shweeheart.” His Belmondo-lite swagger impresses her. They meet up and flirt and have little cinematic adventures (ducking into a porn theater is treated as cringey as you’d hope) and run afoul of her mother.

The charming old boulevardier Julius (Olivier) makes their acquaintance and regales them with tales of his life and a great love and Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, the best place to share the kiss that bonds a couple for life.

With her rich and understanding but “what’s best for Lauren” obsessed stepfather (Arthur Hill) — “my third,”Lauren cracks — determined to move the family back to the States, the first-loves plot their escape — temporary or not — to that Venetian bridge.

As they’ll need an adult to accompany them to the racetrack and later across the border, yarnspinner Julius is recruited. And they’re off.

There’s humor in mistranslations, in Crawford’s curmudgeonliness, in Olivier’s florid fluttering, in the kids’ precocious fascination with the philosopher Heidegger and in Lauren’s leg-pulling wisecracks about her sexual experience with her dorky school friend Natalie (Ashby Semple, who only made one movie and was hilarious in it).

Natalie knows all about first crushes.

“You don’t know what love is like until you’ve fallen for your cousin!“

Daniel? He knows all about movies, and when Lauren’s mom’s would-be director-beau makes a crude remark about what these kids have been up to, he does what Bogie would have done — punches the pig in the stomach.

The script treats money issues with feather-light wish-fulfillment fantasy twists (gambling on the horses, Julius’s “real” profession, etc.). The sights are spectacular, but skimmed past, gauche American tourist cliches abound and never for a moment do we doubt our lovers’ quest or its outcome.

All of which adds to the delight of it all.

The French kid spoke no English before Hill took him on and helped him learn it for the movie. Young Mnsr. Bernard scowls daggers at Julius for charming his girl and summons up testy outbursts about “Damn rich American girls…keep you waiting.”

His character plays like the tween years between the anti-heroes of “The 400 Blows” and “Blowup.” But his chivalry — he is properly embarassed by exposing his new crush to a porn cinema — and his gallantry are never in doubt.

And Lane, bursting on the screen with impossibly long “Marcia Marcia Marcia” hair, is a natural. Whatever direction Hill gave her, she sits, sprawled, like a child who hasn’t learned any better and takes charge with agency and ideas and smarts because the world hasn’t had the chance to smother that out of her. It’s a dazzling debut and a tribute to her dad, an acting coach, who taught how even a sophisticated child might act her age.

Composer Georges Delerue won an Oscar for adapting Antonio Vivaldi’s 18th century masterpiece, the “Concerto for Lute, Violins and Basso Continuo,” into a simple plucked melody of such romantic longing it turned up in every other wedding one attended in the ’80s. For those of us of a certain age, hearing it is still downright triggering.

But that’s what we want at weddings, and from romances, from the innocent to the most “mature.” And if you can’t take delight in being moved to tears or be tickled by the sight of aged trouper Larry Olivier hopping on a bicycle for a dash through Verona — yeah, he really DID that — more’s the pity.

Nearly 50 years after its release, Hollywood could still go to school on “A Little Romance,” a reach for romantic innocence in a jaded, coarse “adult” age back then, and even moreso now.

Rating: PG, mild profanity

Cast: Diane Lane, Thelonius Bernard, Laurence Olivier, with Sally Kellerman, David Dukes, Arthur Hill and Broderick Crawford.

Credits: Directed by George Roy Hill, scripted by Allen Burns, adapted from the novel by Patrick Cauvin. An Orion Pictures release available on Youtube, Apple TV, other streamers.

Running time: 1:50

“It Takes a Village” is a frustrating Polish farce that opens its arms to a world of comic possibilities only to let them all slip through its fingers, one by one.

Titled “Podlasie” in Polish, after the region the village of Bodzki is set in, it’s a romantic comedy about pride, last chance romance, country rubes having one over on gullible city slickers and “alien” crop circles.

Every character “type” introduced is a lot less than she or he should be. Every “wacky” twist in the “Let’s pretends aliens are landing” plot falls about six whacks shy of wacky and the few one-liners attempted lose something or nearly everything in translation (in Polish, or dubbed into English, Spanish, etc.).

A lame fake-out-the-audience wedding opens the film, as the young couple that everybody in the village, including the brass band imported for the occasion, rushes to see “the young couple” exchange their vows only to have Oliwka (Anna Szymanczyk) and Kuba (Matuesz Janicki) stand aside as widowed Halina (Anna Seniuk, whose credits date back to the Soviet Empire) and Jan (Artus Barcis) almost take their vows.

The “almost” arrives when Halina gets cold feet. But we don’t buy “I’m about to abandon my widowhood” as her excuse. Something about her pleas to her granddaughter and others — “Help me get OUT of this!” — tell us there’s more going on.

There is. She’s another dupe in the vast Bitcoin pyramid scheme and she’s too embarassed to admit she lost all her money.

After Halina lies to and humiliates Jan at the altar, she scrambles to get cash out of her goat cheese business and farmland, and when her artist-daughter (Joanna Trzepiecinska) shows up, Jan figures out the real reason all this happened and a scheme is hatched.

They’ll pretend aliens are making crop circles, and the notoriety will help Halina sell her cheese and everybody else sell whatever to the gullible “believers” who show up to raise the money to cover her losses.

A teensy little bit of fun is had by the faction we see making the crop circles, Wojkek (Flip Gurlacz) creating the viral “I don’t want to get ABDUCTED by aliens!” videos for his “What the SHOCK?” Youtube channel, the cop (Angelika Cegielska-Swiatek) out to expose “the hoaxers” and the priest who tolerates all this scamming and distracting from his Holy Mother Visitation (long ago) Shrine.

But there’s no edge to any of this. The stakes are low and treated as no big deal. It’s not cultural differences that hold the film back, as there have been Polish comedies on Netflix that translate to laughs west of the former Iron Curtain.

The performances are broad, but not remotely broad enough. The “colorful” local characters are colorless.

Worst of all, if a lot of people watch this debacle, you know Netflix will turn that intellectual property into Italian, Spanish and Filipino versions of “It Takes a Village.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Anna Seniuk, Artur Barcis, Joanna Trzepiecinska,
Filip Gurlacz, Mateusz Janicki and
Angelika Cegielska-Swiatek

Credits: Directed by
Lukasz Kosmicki, scripted by Katarzyna Frankowska and Katarzyna Golenia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

An impending wedding reels towards going terribly wrong and right off a cliff in “The Drama,” a dry and ever-so-dark romantic comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.

The latest from the writer-director of “Dream Scenario” begins awkward, with a “meet cute” right on the cusp of cringey, and staggers into one even more uncomfortable situation/turn-of-events after another.

You want to know why marriages rates continue to fall in the Western World, here’s a worst-case-scenario comedy that kind of explains it and makes you squirm and sneak peeks at your watch as you do.

“Man,” I muttered to myself more than once. “I cannot wait for this to be over.” And in this case, that’s not a bad thing.

Robert Pattinson is our leading man, a tossle-haired and awkward museum curator who takes a fancy to a pretty woman (Zendaya) sitting by herself in a coffee shop. She’s reading, in her own world.

When she steps away from her seat, he snaps a photo of her book. By the time she’s sat back down, he’s researched it just enough to attempt to strike up a conversation. But when he attempts to apologize for his attempted pick-up, he finds out she’s deaf in the ear he was talking to.

“Let’s start over,” she offers.

He laughs. Awkwardly. But a date is made and a relationship begins. And we know that whatever happens, we’re in capable hands. R. Patts has always done tossle-haired and awkward well. And Zendaya is the physical embodiment of smart and beautiful but possibly approachable.

Getting past his not-apologetic-enough admission that he hasn’t actually read Harper Ellison’s “The Damage” (a non-existent novel) and her lightly-caustic comeback to that confession, they seem well-matched. It’s no shock that we pick up their story as he is composing his wedding speech and she is putting off doing hers.

But Sartre’s famous observation that “Hell is other people” could be this couple’s credo. A tipsy night of sharing “the worst thing I’ve ever done” with the married couple Rachel (Alanna Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who are their maid of honor and best man, respectively, is where it really goes wrong.

Because whatever awful admissions Rachel, Mike and Charles make, sweet and sweet-faced Emma’s announcement that she put serious thought into planning and practicing for her own mass shooting at the Louisiana high school that made her miserable is downright triggering.

Mike is taken a bit aback and Rachel flips out. “Emma, what the F—!” Charles, who “obsesses over things,” responds as much to their mania over this psychological “tell” as the actual thing-that-didn’t-happen as related by the woman he loves.

Emma and he might endure the pushy choreographer’s dance lessons for their “first dance” at the wedding as a team and support one another over the meal selection and wines. But every other detail the Brit and the American have to take care of is downright fraught from here until the finish line.

If there is to BE a finish line.

Trouble at work, issues with the DJ, a disheartened follow-up with the florist, a painfully wounded meeting with the wedding photographer because the camera-doesn’t-lie and dire warnings masked as “support” by Rachel and Mike — total DISASTERS as maid of honor and best man, BTW — all point to a fiasco waiting to happen, and catered, to boot.

“I love you so much it hurts” has never seemed more literal.

Writer-director Borgli has some chilling takes on what inspires school shooters. As his hero won’t let this go and as his heroine recounts her past (illustrated in flashbacks), we get confirmation of what many of us suspect.

“I liked the aesthetic” of being a school shooter, “the character I was playing,” Emma blurts out at one point. It’s the camo, the military rifle with its big ammo clip, the scowl for the computer camera as her teen self (played by Jordyn Curet) dresses up menacingly and tries to record her “message to the world” before doing the deed.

But she’s 15 and she has trouble. The PC wants to “update” rather than record. And a blue screen of death provides that punchline. Windows, am I right?

It’s all lightly or terribly dark — the weeping jags (his), her fury at others’ interfering even as she revisits that grim teen period and its comically-twisted aftermath.

The leads are terrific, the bit players biting and distinctly believable “types.” Athie (of “Jurassic World” Dominion,” “The Burial” and TV’s “The Get Down”) is convincingly unsteady at being “steady” and Haim (“Licorice Pizza” and “One Battle After Another”) has made fingernails-on-a-blackboard “grating” her brand.

They and their director build “The Drama” as you squirm in your seat and count the minutes and scenes to come, desperate for the nearly perfect finale because you’ve figured out that Borgli’s kink is making you uncomfortable.

Which he does. The smug bastard.

Rating: R, a bit of violence sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson,
Mamoudou Athie, Alana Haim and Hailey Gates.

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Kristoffer Borgli. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:45

An imposing and impressive lead performance somewhat atones for an awkwardly structured script and a charisma-starved supporting cast in “A Great Awakening,” the new film biography of the 18th century English preacher who lent The American Revolution some of his values and forward-thinking turns of phrase like — the film suggests — like “All men are created equal.”

Jonathan Blair of “Found on South Street” has the vocal and physical presence to put over the rock star appeal of Anglical pastor turned ardent revivalist George Whitefield, who founded the evangelical Christian movement during his British and American preaching tours that popularized “The Great Awakening” of the 1700s.

He is remembered by the aged Benjamin Franklin (John Paul Sneed, who was “Covenant Rider” back in the ’90s) as he and his printer/grandson Benjy (JT Schaefer, making his film debut) rummage through old copies of Franklin’s “Pennsylvania Gazette” during a break in the fractious and quarrelsome Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.

Seeing Whitefield’s name and writings and sermons among Franklin’s mementos, Benjy is told “George Whitefield WAS the Revolution!”

The story then flashes back to working poor Whitefield’s childhood interest in acting, his work study arrangements that got him into Oxford and his meet up with men of faith who put the idea in his head that with his voice, he’d make a fine pastor and an even better “preacher.”

We see his rising zeal, his attempts to fast his way to Godliness in the manner of Christ (“It almost killed me.”), his soaring popularity as a preacher who attacked not just sins but injustice and a hidebound, dull Anglican liturgy.

He was an Anglican outcast and star before he ever came to America. When he arrived, his tour was as heralded as the later British Invasion pop stars, with the not-remotely-Anglican Franklin becoming his “partner” in publicity, selling thousands of newspapers, a shrewd journalist and marketer hyping the preacher’s vast crowds (We see Franklin calculting an educated guess, one that’s larger than the population of Philadelphia).

But the film does a middling job at tying this religious figure to The Revolution and revolutionary thought.

I can find no reference to Whitefield using the “created equal” phrase, which predated him and Thomas Jefferson, who made it famous in the Declaration of Indepedence.

The clumsily-organized script (no opening credits or “title” to reassure you that you’re in the right theater) hints at a complicated life of protest against the “dead preachers” of the Anglican Church hierarchy, of a man who chastised the American South for its rationalization of “slavery” and who then owned slaves to run a Georgia orphanage he founded and financed, but also — the movie leaves this out — later lobbied Georgia to legalize, accept and embrace slavery.

The film’s squishy agenda thus feels like an attempt to shoehorn in a religious figure as a spiritual “founding father” amongst all those landed gentry humanists like Jefferson and outspoken deists like Benjamin Franklin. The movie implies that evangelical zeal both inspired the revolt and — thanks to Franklin — motivated the later Constitutional Covention.

Divine intervention created the Electoral College?

As a preacher who plunged into ministering to the poor, the incarcerated and the enslaved Whitefield would open his sermons with thunder and brimstone.

“AWAKE, oh sleeper! The Son has Arisen!”

That’s about as “woke” as a preacher gets, for those looking to rationalize Christian nationalism.

Blair stands out in the cast, but this is a pretty inexperienced lot in front of the camera, and it shows.

Director Joshua Enck (“I Heard the Bells”) and his crew give the film a polished look — Whitefield “crossing” to America in a period-correct sailing ship, and convincing streets, prisons and what later came to be called “Independence Hall,” where the state representatives bickered over small-state/big state, free-state/slave state issues add to the film’s credibility.

But seeing Franklin take Whitefield out kite-flying in a thunder storm is trite, and it’s not the only scene that plays that way.

Accounts of “The Great Awakening” may focus on the man and his works and contradictions. But series like “The American Revolution” barely touch on that phenomena setting the stage for revolt. Perhaps that’ll change. But it will take a better movie than “A Great Awakening” — perhaps also starring Blair — to make that case, back it up with facts and make it stick.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: John Paul Sneeds, Jonathan Blair, Alana Gerlach, JT Schaefer and Russell Dean Schultz.

Credits: Directed by Joshua Enck, scripted by Jeff Bender, Jonathan Blair and Joshua Enck. A Sight & Sound Production released by Roadside Attractions.

Running time: 2:09

The Chinese thriller “731” is a wildly ambitious attempt to get a heroic horror movie out of an infamous crime against humanity.

By turns macabre and moving, historical and fantastically, spectacularly over-the-top, it can’t be dismissed as simple anti-Japanese “propaganda” even if the clumsy structure underscores just how far writer-director Zhao Linshan (“Empress Wu,” “The Assassins”) — with the help of a dozen co-writers — overreaches.

The narrative jumbles and stumbles back and forth through the end game years of the Sino-Japanese War that had morphed into WWII. Zhao — with the help of a dozen co-writers — buries us under characters, and dips into the Japanese point of view via the Emperor’s most monstrous war criminal, Gen. Shiro Ishii, played here by Yasuyuki Hirata.

Yes, the script reminds us the U.S. granted Ishii immunity for help with its own post-war biological warfare experiments.

And Zhao’s film reaches a climax, then another and then grasps at postscript after postscript, suggesting a movie made by People’s Republican committee or a director who napped through a few important classes in film school.

Our protagonist is a Chinese “businessman” hustler (Wu Jiang) scrambling to make deals with all sides in the world war and the Chinese civil war that Japan interrupted by invading. He takes the name of a famous Chinese anti-fascist, which may be why the Japanese authorities nab him. Attempts to correct the “error” — “No no, I’m Wang Zhingyuan!” — can’t save him from arrest, being hooded and loaded onto a train to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, occupied Manchuria.

Wang’s facility with languages and eagerness to appease his captors makes him “useful” enough to be made a trusty — translating Chinese and Russian into Japanese, and vice versa, for the many prisoners.

Being crafty and eager to save his own skin, he observes this white-tiled (with entirely too modern lighting and tech) “hospital” which thousands have been sent to. Despite the best Japanese efforts, he memorizes the rabbit warren of halls. He endures beatings from his captors and fellow prisoners, who regard him as a traitor. And he pays attention.

“The Emperor is benevolent,” Ishii’s tween twin daughters chirp over the public address system (the film is in Chinese and Japanese with English subtitles). “Food is precious. Once you’re cured you’ll be free.”

Wang is the first inmate in Unit 731 to figure out that “cured” and “free” are the most Orwellian lies in the fascists’ playbook.

We’re treated to an encyclopedia of “medical” human depravity as legions of hazmat-suited or white-coated “doctors” mistreat, torture and dissect “patients,” breeding rats and fleas for the Japanese Empire’s last throw of the dice, Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night.

Balloon bombs will float over America, dumping Bubonic plague-infected fleas on the country. As no one involved knows the war is fated to end with atomic bombs, they all proceed with this years-long monstrous plan and the human carnage their “experiments” create right to the bitter end.

There’s a worthy subject here and moments of pathos intrude on all the sadism — Wenjuan Feng plays a particularly barbaric female Japanese officer — and humanity (children are included in the experiments, and many of the guards are very young Japanese) and inhumanity we see.

But the film is needlessly hard to follow, pointlessly drawn-out and nakedly propagandistic when it deviates from histoty. The latter is somewhat excused, as Japan has been reluctant to accept the crimes against humanity its leaders, starting with the untried war criminal emperor, and their countrymen carried out amidst their wars of imperial aggression.

We see many European prisoners, but only the Russians get to speak. Japan was not at war with Russia. China’s using cinema to cozy up to their longtime Axis of Evil partners.

Yet it’s the “hard to follow” that’s less excusable.

At one point, a gathering of Japanese war criminals is framed like Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” Why? Production design flourishes — the film looks anachronistically modern — include a scene in a vast, towering herb library storage silo that comes straight from “The Wizarding World” or “Brazil.”

Its myriad flaws and dramatic shortcomings mean I can’t recommend “731.” But the history is worth looking into, even it doesn’t render itself suitable to horror/history mashup this botched film attempts.

Rating: unrated, graphic, gruesome violence, nudity

Cast: Wu Jiang, Irene Wan, Zhiwen Wang, Qian Sun, Wenjuan Feng, Zun Wang and Yasuyuki Hirata

Credits: Directed by Zhao Linshan, scripted by Zhao Linshan and 12 “assistant writers.” A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:05