Movie Nation

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

A fin de sicle Western,, with horses and murder and snow and Tin Lizzies? Dinklage is a bounty hunter?

Juliettte Lewis and Arliss Howard also star in this Tarantinoesque stomp through snow and violence, due out from Samuel Goldwyn Sept. 6.

The Woke Wars are far from over. Ask any white-wellies Nazi runt in Florida about that.

But if the defiantly queer, teasingly trans indie drama “National Anthem” accomplishes nothing else, it seizes “patriotic” iconography from the pick-up truck decoratin’ rednecks of Vanilla ISIS.

The film’s LGBTQ performers expertly parade the stars and stripes around New Mexico rodeos on horseback, along with the rainbow flag, of course. They compete in many of the same rodeo contests. They show the diehards in red caps a trick or two when it comes to flag-themed cowboy-cowgirl-cowpronoun wear.

And trans performer D’Angelo Lacy delivers what might be the definitive rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” to start one of those rodeos. No Beyonce/Underwood/Reba flourishes. Just a pure voice delivering those learned-by-rote lyrics with feeling we haven’t heard in ages.

Luke Gifford’s film is yet another “You just haven’t met your people” coming-out tale, this one set in the desert southwest . A lonely twentysomething day laborer (Charlie Plummer) escapes the trap of his life when he falls in with a sort of you-should-pardon-the-expression “dude” ranch for gay and transgender folks somewhere in more-tolerant-than-you-think New Mexico.

Dylan has a little brother (Joey DeLeon) to look after, no steady job, no benefits, no wheels and a dream — to buy an RV and travel the country. Accepting that “two weeks of work” offer from Pepe (Rene Rosada) may not get him any closer to that dream, seeing as how his self-absorbed beautician mom (“Karate Kid” and “9-1-1 Lone Star” vet Robyn Lively) cadges his cash, even when she swears she’s quit drinking.

Digging fence post holes, hauling hay and the like for a gaggle of gays with no visible means of support can’t help but seem attractive. The aggressively flirtatious horse-lover Sky (Eve Lindley) all but closes the deal.

“Just not really my scene, you know,” Dylan mumbles at this or that invitation to hang with the gang, party and what-not.

But when “the gang” raids the local discount store and grabs him for a little wig and eye shadow makeover, Dylan doesn’t fight it. Maybe he’s found his “people” after all.

Music video veteran turned first-time feature director Luke Gilford’s film breaks new ground only in the novelty of its setting, in the tropes and “truisms” of gay life as it’s depicted it leans into, and the ones it eschews.

Yes, there’s promiscuity and even when the “beach” is only on a drought-shallowed river, that’s an excuse for a polyamorous romp by the dozen or so House of Splendor ranchers to skinny dip and pair up or thruple up.

The only intolerance Dylan’s problematic mother displays is when she warns him off this job and “scene” because “They have one of those flags, you know.” A mother who knows she hasn’t done all she can for her kid and feels guilty about it isn’t likely to judge what he figures out about himself the first time he dons mascara.

Because Dylan realizes, at 21, what they’re showing him that he’s never been able to figure out.

Rare is the vintage French history-of-champagne romance that winds up in the loving hands of tiny distributor Vertical Releasing. So when a “Widow Clicquot” comes along, one simply must pop a cork and indulge. One must.

Director Thomas Napper earned his period-piece bones as second unit director on Keira Knightley’s “Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement,” and he gives American Haley Bennett (“Swallow,” “The Girl on the Train”) the full Keira treatment in this melodramatic story of undying love, fine wine, property and madness during the Napoleonic Wars.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin fell madly in love in her arranged marriage with the mercurial vintner and heir François Clicquot (Tom Sturridge, magnetic and disturbed) in this story’s telling, a woman swept up in her manic husband’s experiments to select and nurture the right vines, and bottle the perfect the wines from his Champagne region winery.

For reasons not made completely clear, he wants to call her “Emily.” But then, he sings to the grapes on the vine, strolls about barefoot and his mop of unruly hair always seems ’80s-album-cover soaking wet.

Perhaps he died of pneumonia or “consumption.” Ah, there lies a tale.

So the story of their love and is told in flashbacks in this film, which follows his widow through her trials — figurative and literal — trying to keep the vineyards and winery because “François lives through his vines.”

It’s the early 1800s, and women simply did not run businesses in Napoleon’s Imperial France. But Barbe-Nicole was there, tasting and testing wines with her husband, offering opinions and absorbing some of his “radical” liberated ideas of how to produce great wine and to manage a successful business, and bringing her own to the table, once she has the chance.

She does this over the objections of her huffing father-in-law (Ben Miles at his prickliest), who has designs on selling the vineyards to the Champagne-dominating tycoon Moët (Nicholas Farrell of “Chariots of Fire”).

Besides, a broker snipes, with other snippy men present, “It’s not your place” to do this work.

But she will not surrender her rights to what her husband promised her was “the most beautiful vineyard in all of Champagne.” With a little help from her former nurse, now maid (Natasha O’Keeffe, luminescent) and her husband’s confidante, his wine broker pal Louis (Sam Riley, giving the man dash, sensuality and edge), she will get around Napoleonic sexism, Napoleonic trade embargoes and Napoleon’s destiny to blend, bottle and market the finest wines in all of Champagne, famous all over the world.

A terminally ill American in search of a phantom massacre of WWII.

Josh Hutcherson and Danny Huston are among the co stars. A much delayed drama finally making it our way.

Willa Fitzgerald finds a one night stand that goes ever so wrong in this demonic serial killer thriller.

Kyle Gallner is “The Demon.” With Barbara Hershey and Ed Bagley Jr in support.

Aug. 23.

Does this older  Durham, NC audience know what this movie is about?

About to find out.

Sophia Loren has been a screen and fashion icon so long, famous as one of the most voluptuous women ever to grace the screen, that it’s easy to forget how brilliant an actress she’s been.

Earthy in Italian dramas, regal in costume epics and aloof and amusing in Hollywood romantic comedies, from “Scandal in Sorrento” to “The Millionairess” to “Man of La Mancha” and even “Grumpier Old Men,” Loren effortlessly wears the label her “El Cid” co-star Charlton Heston gave her to this very day — “a force of nature.”

She was never better than in her Oscar-winning turn in her frequent collaborator Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece, “Two Women.” Playing a widowed mother fleeing the air raids on Rome during the Allied invasion of 1944, she inhabits the role so throughly that one can barely see a “performance” in there.

Through her, the viewer experiences a WWII odyssey as her character, Cesira, and her daughter take to the rails and the road in a country about to undergo a coup, unleashing lawlessness and reprisals aheading of invading forces that took forever to march up the boot of Italy.

Titled “La ciociara” or “Woman of Ciociara” in Italian — named for the impoverished, mountainous region southeast of Rome — this gorgeous black and white classic exists in its original Italian or expertly dubbed by the multi-lingual Loren herself when it was released in the U.S. and Britain in 1960-61.

Cesira dotes on her tween daughter Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), who survives an air raid, causing her mother to vow to leave the Eternal City for the village where she remembers “sleeping in the chicken house…eating one meal a day.” Rosetta, she tells the neighbors, has a “weak heart.” But anything would be better than staying in a Rome under siege.

She talks the handsome Giovanni (Raf Vallone) into watching her store and apartment while they’re gone. She barely notices, as she lays out her reasons and plans, as Giovanni closes the doors and then the windows and curtains of his coal and firewood business, one by one, to seduce her.

Independent and contemptuous of mere male lust, the woman who married an older man simply to escape the poverty of the countryside eventually submits to Giovanni. But we can see the calculations beneath the desire in her eyes.

At least he’ll be inspired to guard her property, and escort her and Rosetta to the train the next day.

Their train ride is interrupted by bombing. She teaches Rosetta how to carry loads on her head, the way Italian women have for millenia, and they continue on, surviving an Allied fighter plane’s strafing, through the town of Fondi, where they’re hustled by the locals and threatened by fascist militia hunting for “deserters.”

And then they arrive at her home village of Sant Eufemia, and the dangers that hung over their picturesque and even picaresque journey subside. Or so we think.

Because although they’re among family and old friends — the “idealist” student Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) pines for her — the war is still just down the boot of Italy, as the Allies landed “too far south” to make quick work of the crumbled Italian army and the Germans who supplanted them.

“I love you, Cesira!”

“With the troubles we have, you say THAT?”

We know what she knows, that civilians or ex-combatants in a now “occupied” country, Mussolini in or out, the war is coming for them, and a reckoning with it.

Veteran cinematographer Gábor Pogány (“Valdez is Coming”) frames such lovely images that “Two Women” can play like an “Italy as it Once Was” travelogue, with Loren our earthy, sensual tour guide. Mountain vistas, haystacks piled to the sky, every building old, bathed in shadows or stark sunlight, it’s as inviting a depiction of a war zone as the cinema has ever presented.

The simple struggle to buy food for herself and her daughter among understandably-hoarding neighbors in a collapsing economy is a daily grind. But as the seasons change and the debates about politics (Michele in a nascent communist, who just doesn’t know it), the just-ended fascist “empire” and chess matches, wine-drinking and Michele’s story-reading among his illiterate friends and relatives move indoors, the menace makes its way back into their lives.

“Anzio” is never mentioned by name, but referred to. British commandos ask for their help and hear every Italian excuse for not giving it. A German anti-aircraft officer (Curt Lowens) lectures any Italian within earshot about unmanly “Italian cowardice” and the injustices borne by a country that still has “peasants.”

And then the worst happens, a sequence still shocking over 60 years later, still poignant even if you don’t buy into Italian victimhood, still realistic and historically-defensible even if the modern viewer’s first instinct is to wonder if Italy’s infamous racism plays into its depiction.

Through it all Loren is defiant but human, always nurturing, pragmatic, canny and wary yet capable of letting her guard down, a strong woman with one maternal priority and yet a simple helpless refugee swept up in the tides of war.

Thanks to his long collaborative friendship with Loren, De Sica, already a legend for “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.,” added a third classic to his Holy Trinity of Italian masterpieces. Hers is a great performance anchoring one of the true masterpieces of the filmmaker who made “neo realism” the benchmark of all dramatic cinema.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Sophia Loren, Eleonora Brown, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Curt Lowens and Raf Vallone

Credits: Directed by Vittorio de Sica, scripted by Cesare Zavattini, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. An Embassy Pictures/MGM release on Tubi, Mubi, etc.

Running time: 1:41