Movie Nation

Mark Mothersbaugh, of Devo and “The LEGO Movie” and scores of other film scores, did the fine electronic-flavored score for the new series “Time Bandits.”

But while the opening credits are passable, in a sort of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” way, he should have considered the jaunty tune, “Dream Away,” that the 1981 movie “Time Bandits” rolled under the closing credits.

Sure, licensing a George Harrison song, even an obscure one, isn’t free. But a new cover of this would send viewers off on a higher note. I remember staying through the credits, trying to ID it when the original Handmade Films movie came out. And then having no luck tracking it down at the record store.

But Youtube is where all recorded music lives on.

It’s worth noting, right up top, that the many actors who turn up in “Deadpool & Wolverine” let us know — in big moments and small ones — that they’re better than this movie, this genre and this universe.

And not just the always-Oscar-eligible thunder from down under. The high-voiced chatterbox who thinks it’s all “aboot” him may be paid by the word — many of them four letters long — but he’s damned funny in the role he was born to play.

Bringing in Emma Corrin from “The Crown” as a villainess pays dividends, and classes up the joint. And Matthew Macfadyen leaves “Succession” and a lifetime of “Pride & Prejudice” and “Operation Mincemeat” period pieces to vamp up a villain who could not be funnier if he’d played the cad in culottes.

The players are fun and have fun in what a few of them, plied with enough glasses of Aviation Gin, would admit is a pretty entertaining bad movie.

Five credited screenwriters filled the soundtrack with jokes and sight gags about Disney buying Fox and “Hugh’s divorce” and whatever happened to Daredevil and Elektra and how ridiculous the concept of “multiverses” is and how hilarious it is that comic books and comic book movies are the only places they’re taken seriously.

No, Einstein didn’t sign off on them but Stephen Hawking was um, multi-curious.

Having your characters break the fourth, fifth and sixth walls commenting on a coming “third act flashback,” and the endless pauses for repeated slo-mo musical montages set to AC/DC, Madonna, et al, how “the nerds” are being fan-serviced to orgasm with this character’s revival, that “epic” meeting/confrontation and the like doesn’t let you off the hook. By anyobjective measure, this is a cut-and-paste “assembly” — not a screenplay with a coherent plot and anything like a point.

Mocking “Mad Max” and “Furiosa” is funny, and only flirts with “I.P. infringement.”

“Pegging” might not new “new” for Deadpool, “but it is for Disney.”

When the masked visage of Reynolds looks at the camera 446 times, you can hear the wink, even if you can’t see it.

I laughed and laughed at the jokes, and looked and looked at my watch long before “Marvel Jesus” turned to the camera to assure fans that “we’re almost there” — that the finale was beginning.

When you’re not really going anywhere, time stands still. And when all involved are telling you they’re all out of ideas, you should listen.

Take away the Easter Eggs and cameos and fun performances and there’s no “there” here. And they’re totally OK with it, because no matter what new Captain America trailer is slapped on before the opening credits, the idea is something along the lines of “let’s burn this bitch down and giggle at the flames.”

Four brassy broads roll up their sleeves and do the heavy lifting in “The Fabulous Four,” an old friends reunite for a Key West wedding comedy from the director of “How to Make An American Quilt.”

Their efforts are largely for naught as this turns out to be yet another underscripted comedy for players who have their AARP cards, aimed at an audience that also has theirs.

If you can’t get laughs out of Bette Midler, Megan Mullally, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Susan Sarandon, that’s on you, Anne Marie Allison and Jenna Milly (they wrote “Golden Arm” together).

But director Moorhouse, who first gained notice as a producer on her husband’s “Muriel’s Wedding,” finds some heart and room for tunes in this story of strained friendships, bad behavior and last chance romance set in Key West, but largely shot in Georgia.

And if you don’t grin at the sight and sound of Midler, Ralph (a “Sister Act 2” veteran now seen on TV’s “Abbott Elementary) and Mullally singing Jimmy Cliff’s “I Can See Clearly Now” while parasailing above the Hawk Channel, that’s on you.

Marilyn and Lou (Midler and Sarandon) were roomies in college and afterwards in New York City, where Kitty (Ralph) and Alice (Mullally) were their neighbors.

Decades have passed, with Lou becoming a hyper-focused and still-single surgeon, Alice a backup singer who never grew up, Kitty a widowed organic pot farmer and Marilyn a newly-widowed housewife of means.

Moving from Atlanta to Key West after her husband’s death did Marilyn more good than she’d expected. Now, she’s summoning her posse from way backwhen to her hastily-arranged wedding.

Free spirits Alice and Kitty are happy to oblige. But there’s been bad blood between Marilyn and Lou. So the other two have to trick her into making the trip by telling cat lady Lou she’s won a Hemingway polydactyl (six-toed) kitty, one of the descendents of Hemingway’s own cats from the Hemingway House, now a museum in Key West.

Once there, fences can be mended as they’ll all stay at Marilyn’s beachside mansion and the two feuders will be forced to make nice for dress-fittings, dinners and entertainment Marilyn has lined up.

The script’s logic flies out the window with all this as Lou simply ignores — or seems to — the fact that her friends lied to her and Marilyn was the offending party and isn’t apologizing for her offense. Still. Marilyn is all “Everything’s fine, now” even though she only planned for two guests, and that leaves Lou as odd-woman out in things like “three person parasailing.”

Count me among the legion of skeptics who guffawed at the idea of Kiwi cut-ups Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi — with Brit “Inbetweeners” writer Iain Morris — making a TV series based on Terry Gilliam’s post-Python classic film “Time Bandits.”

They might borrow the ingenious 1981 concept — a child drawn through time portals, accompanying mischievous thieves who use a four dimensional map of time which they stole from The Supreme Being to rob famous treasures of history, looting Napoleon, Robin Hood and King Agamemnon and evading the Supreme Being and his counterpart, Evil Genius, who want that map.

They might even mimic the Pythonesque whimsy and way with a droll line.

But we’ve already had an attempt in that direction, a “Bandits” in everything but name ripoff titled “Voyagers!” back in the ’80s, which grabbed hold of the fooling-kids-into-learning-history hook half-hidden in “Bandits'” Biblical allegory/fantasy mashup.

Even with the “Lord of the Rings” artists at WETA doing effects, the glories of New Zealand locations and the best character actors Australia and New Zealand have to offer, how could a new “version” match the chaos, the manic energy, the baroque, muddy and mud-stained Gilliam eye for the primitive periods they’d be perusing?

The answer is, of course they couldn’t.

The latest incarnation of “Doctor Jekyll” isn’t scary enough or campy/weird enough to come off.

The former is no great surprise, as the Robert Louis Stevenson novella has been filmed to death and is too overfamiliar to offer much in the way of shock and awe.

As it stars trans comic Eddie Izzard as Dr. Nina Jekyll and her dragon lady guise by night, Rachel Hyde, the latter judgement comes as a disappointment. Eddie in drag, vamping up the cerebral scientist and her more murderous nocturnal alter ego? How could that not be over-the-top?

In fairness, director Joe Stephenson finally finds something like the right tone for the bloody, pull-out-the-overacting-stops finale. But as this is a production of the venerated horror label Hammer Films, even that’s something of a less-gory-than-you’d-think letdown.

Scott Chambers, who starred in Stephenson’s acclaimed feature debut “Chicken,” is Rob, freshly out of prison but “clean” and in need of work. His brother (Jonathan Hyde, LOL) gets him an interview for a job in “care,” looking after a rich “celeb” doctor recovering from a broken leg on her estate in the country.

Uneducated, unsophisticated Rob has to get past the doctor’s uncompromsing aide, Sandra (Lindsay Duncan), who only agrees to take him on for an unpaid “trial” period, which she is sure he will fail.

Doctor Jekyll? She’s more compassionate, especially when she hears Rob’s got a sick baby daughter he will only be allowed to see if he walks the line and keeps a job during his probation.

Rob has lots of rules and routines to adhere to — medication to administer, meals to deliver, hedges to trim. Nina is forgiving of mistakes, but every now and then lets slip a hint a temper. Still, she’s lonely and interested enough in Rob’s company that she summons him for chess.

“Tonight, I’m going to introduce you to something,” she teases.

What?

“A reason for living.”

But Rob’s ex (Robyn Cara) has other plans. She’s still an addict and determined to wring cash out of “one last job.” Can she force Rob to agree and help burgle his new employer?

Stephenson tries to treat this as a character study in murderously bipolar extremes, which may have medical diagnosis credibility, but doesn’t leave room for any fun.

The pacing is funereal, with too many scenes too inert to move the narrative forward.

Izzard gives Nina a world-weariness at her plight and has the timing and posh accent to make that play when neurologist Nina is relating her family history.

“That don’t make you a bad person,” Rob “Stevenson” assures her.

“Rob, that’s exactly what it does.”

For a 90 minute film, this one takes forever to get to its point, with little of its buildup delivering suspense and nothing in the grimly entertaining finale that we don’t see coming.

Stephenson has a Beatles’ Brian Epstein bio “Midas Man” starring Izzard, Emily Watson, Eddie Marsan and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd in the can. So don’t worry about him.

As for “Jekyll,” Eddie Izzard fans who showed up for decades of stand-up tours and have followed Eddie through some decent film roles, a midlife obsession with running marathons and her evolving description of her sexuality may want to see what she can do with a role that requires evening gowns and a touch of murderous madness.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Eddie Izzard, Scott Chambers, Lindsay Duncan, Robyn Cara, Jonathan Hyde and Simon Callow

Credits: Directed by Joe Stephenson, scripted by Daniel Kelly-Mulhern, based on the novella by Robert Louis Stevenson. A Hammer Films release.

Running time: 1:29

That’s not the object of the plot of this (limited) August 16 release. It’s something our hero has to do to face down the guys who have his kids.

I mean, I think that’s what it’s about.

Freeman may be behind bars, but he’s still twinkling and grandfatherly

Hart, in particular, has been on a run of late —shyte shoveled on top of shyte, with the little man standing on top of the piles tailor-made for him.

But slap him in an antic sci-fi action comedy with two Oscar winners and a “Firefly/Serenity” vibe?

Sure, could be more of the same. And it’s “an August movie,” with all that portends. But still…fingers crossed until Aug. 9.

There was the famous relative in the music business — Art Garfunkel — whose name he never tired of dropping, the airline that had no actual planes, the blimp business whose German-built airships kept crashing and then the boy band idea that he cribbed from somebody else, whose entire “production line” he studied and stole.

And even when the bands hit it big, where did the money go?

Lou Pearlman was a bubbly, cheerful impressario behind Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, LFO and the lads of O-Town, selected and groomed for stardom on his TV series “Making the Band.”

A New Yorker who set up shop and made Orlando — “O-Town” — the pop capital of the world in the ’90s, Pearlman spent millions making these groups into stars, spent millions maintaining the aura of success and millions more fighting to maintain his status as “the Sixth Backstreet Boy,” trying to keep them from collecting all the money they actually earned from their endless tours and staggering record sales.

The “real” money? It all came from “investors,” those scores upon scores of bankers, high-to-medium rollers and mom and pop retirees Pearlman would invite backstage and order his kids to “sing for them,” a capella. Which they did.

He “schmoozed” the rich and the well-connected. He got a band out of New York on a private flight “cleared” by the Bush administration hours after 9-11, and allegedly avoided Florida justice by being pals with the attorney general, then governor. That wouldn’t stop the Feds. Eventually.

Pearlman spent like a drunken sailor, so who knows if he actually stashed some of the hundreds of millions that passed through his hands? The investors lost everythng.

Pearlman ran, a new Netflix documentary about him declares, “the longest running Ponzi scheme in history,” as if the similarities to Mr. Bankruptcy and Sketchy Bank Loans are My Business, Donald Trump, wasn’t still on the clock. But Pearlman “created” something — glorious pop sung by precision-dancing pretty boys. He made unknown kids rich and famous and dominated world pop for about a decade before it all came crashing down around his ears.

“Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam” is a quick-and-dirty “true crime” series that interviews as many principals as would agree to sit on camera, a brisk overview of Pearlman’s rise and fall that leaves much out and that never misses the chance to show us the “wrong” courthouse when detailing the suits filed by his various bands to get out of their contracts.

But what’s here is pretty juicy. Filmmaker David David Terry Fine “(Salaam Dunk”) got A.J.McLean and Howie Dorough (Backstreet Boys), Erik-Michael Estrada (O-Town), Michael Johnson (Natural) and Chris Kirkpatrick (*NSYNC) to talk, on camera, along with Pearlman employees, his nurse “girlfriend,” an FBI agent and state investigator who came after Pearlman after his business model began to unravel, and a reporter (Helen Huntley) who documented Pearlman’s schemes and whose blog helped track him down when he went on the lam from justice in the mid-2000s.

How could nobody have known it was all for show, all a big-spending sham designed to “break” bands by making them appear big before they were?

“When you have a deal with the Devil, he’s not going to show up as the Devil,” Kirkpatrick surmises, now wise to the shenanigans of the man he and his proteges all called “Big Poppa,” the guy who put them up in a mansion — his, or one he bought for the band — showered them with gifts, “totally spoiling” them even before they were successes, and yet seemed to never share the millions he collected from their tours and epic record sales.

My first day as entertainment reporter the Orlando Sentinel, I was ordered to the Federal Courthouse (which I had to find) to cover the *NYSNC suit to break their contract with Pearlman.

As a journalist, I interviewed guys from *NSYNC at their posh lakeside Windermere mansion and stared, slack-jawed, at Justin Timberlake’s IRS W-2 form, submitted as evidence in the band’s suit to break their Pearlman/Trans Continental contract. They were the best selling band in the world, and Timberlake’s “income” from Pearlman? $20,000

Covering that trial, I joined a press scrum which included Chris Cuomo, who looked to “the local guy” (me) as the “expert” on all this. I wasn’t. But as we waited for the folks involved to make their statement at the conclusion of the proceedings, we mulled over this whole “airplane rental” to “blimp biz” to music megamogul, eyeballing the way Pearlman surrounded himself with wannabes (his driver was Timberlake-pretty, and not yet in a band), and how it didn’t seem to add up as being on the up-and-up.

A “billionaire” dabbling in TCBY yogurt franchises, trying to launch an NYPD Pizza chain and Pearl Steakhouse biz made as little nickel-and-dime sense as what real billionaire Mark Cuban once said of the guy who ran casinos, mail order steak and a fake “university” out of business.

“Real billionaires don’t mess with stuff like that.”

For Pearlman, it was all about “momentum,” his confidantes suggest in “Dirty Pop,” that “a shark’s got to keep moving” ethos. He spent money to make money, raised loans to pay off loans and juggled as fast as he could as banks enabled his fraud as surely as they have other “rich” huxters whose pose is “I’m rich and I keep getting richer.”

The series isn’t definitive, but it isn’t exactly “bad” either. Experts or band devotees or even random Orlandoans will spot all the facts that weren’t checked, the interviews not landed and the key figures left out altogether.

Cheney Mason, Pearlman’s folksy, blustering lawyer, either misremembers or gilds his credentials when he says he was “already famous” in Orlando as Casey Anthony’s lawyer” (one of them) when Pearlman summoned him to defend him against the bands that wanted out of their contracts in the late ’90s. The Anthony case was over a decade AFTER that.

Leaving out Pearlman’s leeching off New Edition/New Kids on the Block wizard Maurice Starr, a starmaker who was a real showman and a real musician, is a major omission. Without Pearlman, there are no Backstreet Boys. Without cozying up to Starr, learning his formula, there would have been no Pearlman.

Dipping into the allegations that Pearlman was “inappropriate” with some of the young men and boys in his stable of talent, without anyone actually admitting he did something to them, is understandable, but classic “we don’t have it but we mention it” quick-and-dirty “reporting.”

Considering how few of Pearlman’s insiders will actually admit that he was doing anything financially wrong, or that they realized it, that “molester” angle always going to be a dead end.

And using AI to mimic Pearlman’s voice (narrating from his autobiography) and CGI to animate Pearlman’s lips from a promotional video to let him relate his business “family” philosophy is just cheesy, a shoot-your-film-in-the-foot stunt that adds nothing.

With Backstreet managing a sort of oldies tour comeback, and Timberlake one or two traffic tickets shy of needing that *NYSNC reunion cash, “quick and dirty” may be all this sordid story of salacious bookkeeping merits. But you’d like to think that that lightning in a bottle success, the backstabbing Backstreet intrigues, that since people went broke and at least one person died — not due to Pearlman’s barely-airworthy (“insurance scam” is suggested) blimps — it would be nice if somebody took the time and money and shoe leather to do this “scam” justice.

Pearlman wrote that it was all about living “a life you can look back on and feel good about.” One band member marvels that he was able to meet you, “identify your dream, and within minutes, he’ll be selling your dream back to you.”

For the singer/dancers — Aaron Carter included — who started out anonymous and broke, that must have seemed like a kind of genius with Pearlman a sort of Wizard of Oz.

Looking at how he did it may be terribly unsavory, in terms of those suckered into “investing.” But some sucker had to put up the money to buy a “million dollar bus” and hire bodyguards for totally anonymous nobodies for their unknown “band” tour of Germany. That’s humbug even P.T. Barnum would appreciate.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Lou Pearlman, Michael Johnson, AJ McLean, Helen Huntley, Melissa Maylen, Howie Dorough, Erik-Michael Estrada, Andy Gross, Jerry Rosen and Chris Kirkpatrick

Credits: Directed by David Terry Fine. A Time Studios production, a Netflix release.

Running time: 3 episodes @:41 minutes each

Props for doing his own singing and growing his own hair into a Dylanesque mop.

Scoot McNairy is the dying legend Woody Guthrie, Elle Fanning is Sylvie (renamed version of Suze Rotolo), Monica Barbaro is Baez, Boyd Holbrook takes a shot at playing Johnny Cash, the picture does its damnedest to flesh out everybody who was anybody in early Bob’s breakout years.

This may work out better than anybody had dreamed. “Coming soon.”

Nicholas Tse stars in and choreographs the fights of “Customs Frontline,” a big budget Chinese shoot-em-up that features arms smuggling, a submarine, air raids and an African war fought over fishing rights.

The only people who stand in the way of these escalating hostilities are the intrepid and heroic customs cops of Hong Kong, chasing down unflagged merchant ships, intercepting weapons shipments and hunting for the elusive Westernized Asian supervillain, Dr. Raw.

The fights are impressive, the set pieces — involving that sub for sale, a V-22 Osprey used to grab a coveted navigation device, a ship crashing into seaside condos and chases, carjackings and running gun battles, have a James Bond movie sheen, as well as plot points borrowed from Bond and a lot of other generic action pics.

But in between the action beats, director Herman Yau’s (“Moscow Mission,” the “Shock Wave” movies) gives us a sluggish soap opera of intrigues, “a traitor in Hong Kong Customs,” illness, office romances and customs cop funerals. It’s enough to make one question how and why this picture was financed.

Tse, a sometime singer, often a supporting player and too-often cast in middling thrillers (“Raging Fire”), is Chow Ching-lai, a loyal “respect the uniform” HK Customs superstar.

Sure, he’s never gotten over the colleague (Michelle Wai) who ditched him. But when he and his customs boat team run up on a grounded, unflagged freighter in the vast Hong Kong anchorage, washed up by a storm, everybody stands aside as Lai dives into a racing inflatable to bring the lone survivor of that arms smuggling vessel to heel. His fellow officers literally (and comically) gawk at his bravado all the way through the long-fight with the murderous, pistol-packing young skipper of the rogue vessel.

With war errupting in East Africa between two fictional states, arms theft (out of Thailand) and arms smuggling are a new priority of the Customs crew. Lai’s mercurial, highly-strung boss Nam (Jacky Cheung) is adamant they interdict and arrest. Nam’s angling for a promotion, anything to please his new lady love (Karena Lam), who outranks him in the department. Oh, and he’s sick.

Dr. Raw (Amanda Strang) and her minions — chiefly Leo (Brahim Chab) — stage brazen heists right from Customs’ dangerous materials storage facility (they have access to an American Osprey), show their wares at Persian Gulf arms shows and supply both sides in the African war.

A Thai Interpol agent (Cya Liu) joins Lai undercover as they pose as reporters in Africa — “NO one’s trustworthy in a war zone!” — and talk the hulking strongman (Solomon Cutler) in charge of one of the warring states into revealing his blood diamonds and ivory for arms deals with Dr. Raw.

“Traitor” in the ranks, shady Hong Kong shipping interests, car-jackings and “suicides” meant to hide the truth, or point to it, further muddy the plot.

There isn’t a stand-out performance in this Chinese-and-English language production, which considering all the troubled, dating-each-other customs cops, the African blowhard and Parisian dragon lady, is both a surprise and a disappointment.

As Tse is more an adequate action lead than a charismatic star presence, and hasn’t anchored a hit, near as I can tell from his resume, how’d this picture get financing?

China has a LOT of interest in Africa, especially East Africa. The film’s opening scene is of the beginning of that fishing war. Two African nations come to blows over fishing rights. There are no real causes of fishing squabbles, the huge Asian (Chinese, Korean, etc.) floating fish factories vacuuming up vast catches, impoverishing the locals. Here, it’s those violent Africans who can’t work such matters out.

The arms that supply this war are stolen from Western-backed Thailand, and the smugglers, smuggling ship crews and armed mercenaries are all of European ancestry.

The Chinese? Why, they’re fighting for peace, justice and free trade.

Yes, Western and Indian and Japanense and Korean films often fall in line with their national image, points-of-view and foreign policy. But whatever this noisy, clunky dog cost, I hope getting that People’s Republican “We’re above it all and we’re your FRIENDS” message out was worth it.

Rating: unrated, violence, a high body count

Cast: Nicholas Tse, Jacky Cheung, Karena Lam, Yase (Cya) Liu, Brahim Chab, Amanda Strang and Francis Ng

Credits: Directed by Herman Yau, scripted by Erica Li. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:55