Movie Nation

Don’t let the multiple anti-climaxes that parade across the screen in the finale of “Escape,” a new thriller from actor turned director Lee Jong-pil (“Born to Sing,” “Samjin Company English Class”) throw you off.

Up to then, it’s a crackling getaway picture about a Korean soldier’s ever-evolving effort to defect from the North to the South, a straight-up defector genre thriller complete with sadistic cat-and-mouse games, games given added edge thanks to the strong homoerotic overtones between our cat and mouse and others.

Sgt. Lim (Lee Je-hoon, just seen in “Noryang: Deadly Sea“) is an NCO with a North Korean DMZ patrol unit, a short-timer about to muster out of the army. But he’s not just demobbing when his service is up. He’s planning on jumping across the border and escaping “Supreme Leader” and his “People’s Republic.”

We meet Lim as he slips out of the barracks in the middle of the night, using his compass, map, watch and knives to work his way through the minefields that separate the two halves of the Korean peninsula. The watch is key, as he has been dry-running this getaway for a while, edging a trail through that no man’s land, marking mines and other obstacles as he does every night he makes these forays.

A treasured childhood book he keeps with him gives away his game. Sgt. Lim read Roald Amundsen: Tenacious Explorer” and took the Norwegian polar pioneer’s lessons to heart. Amundsen was famously methodical.

“Escape” is about everything that doesn’t go according to plan as Sgt. Lim’s last day in the service approaches. First, there’s a storm coming, one which might both obscure his dash, and wash out every carefully placed marker through the minefields. Then his subordinate Kim Dyong-huk (Hong Xa-bin) spills that he’s been watching him sneaking out and knows what he’s up to.

“If you wag your tongue, I’ll cut your head off” is a pointless warning. Private Kim wants out, too. “Take me with you! (in Korean, with subtitles).”

The cautious and methodical sergeant’s plan goes to crap when the kid jumpts the gun and flees on his own. Only Sgt. Lim knows what path he took as the rest of their unit scrambles about as “Deserter Alert!” claxons and PA announcements blare.

Sgt. Lim is captured with Kim, both are tortured, and only the intervention of Comrade Field Officer, Major Lee Hyong-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) can save Sgt. Lim and get him treated like a “hero,” feted and offered promotion.

The sgt. and the urbane, sadistic and mercurial piano-playing major have history. Lim suspects, as do we, that the major knows what was really going on and is offering him a life-saving lifeline. Not that Lim wants it.

“You know how to accept your fate.”

Major Lee tempts Kim with honors at an officer’s fete, that promotion and “stay in the army” suggestion, which doesn’t sound like a suggestion. But Lim has “decided on my own future.” And no promotion, veiled threat or bleak warning about what might await him in the South will dissuade him.

He must improvise his way out of this lifeline, bluff Kim out of his death-row cell because Kim didn’t squeal on him, and trick, scheme, lie and fight his way out of the security services’ grasp and across the border using the map that’s now “evidence” that the state is holding over Kim.

Director Lee and his screenwriters depict a nearly featureless North Korea, where paranoia is ordered by edit and everybody rats on everybody else. Or else.

The hypocrisy of the State is underscored by the officer class binge-drinking and dancing to Strauss waltzes, with the venomous Major Lee famous for his piano mastery, his cunning and his savagery. His “decadence” is wholly confirmed when we see his distress at meeting not just Lim, who knows his history, but another old flame of the same-sex.

As for Lim, sometimes all it takes to bluff your way past white uniformed security police is a good pair of Aviators, or affecting the right shade of rudeness to a man of not-quite-inferior rank.

The movie strays a bit from the central storyline to introduce details that illuminate our understanding of the state of the DMZ, and to suggest there are armed dissidents in the North, “nomads” who hae lost their home, their means of living or one relative too many to the Security State aparratus.

And the ending, as I suggested at the outset, is clumsily drawn-out in ways that blunt the narrative’s impact.

But the leads are compelling, the action furious and the suspense right on the edge of riveting, which is more than enough to make this “Escape” an odyssey we want to take with these people who want to decaide their own future, rather than having a failing totalitarian state do it for them.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lee Je-hoon, Koo Kyo-hwan and Hong Xa-bin.

Credits: Directed by Lee Jong-pil, scripted by Kwon Seong-hwi and
Kim Woo-geun. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:34

It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, deciphering one’s scribbled notes in the dark taken while watching a film.

But the words “DO NOT WANT” cover a page in the middle of what I noted about the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos. A critical darling since “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” he reverts to his pre-“The Favorite/Poor Things” form for his latest.

“Kinds of Kindness” is an obscurant, indulgent wank — two hours and forty-five minutes of cryptic cruelty, messianic fervor, cannibalism and perhaps a metaphoric peek at the futility of faith, the limits of dogma and the eagerness of the indoctrinated to be exploited.

Or not.

Emma Stone collected her second Oscar for her “fearless” and “courageous” — aka “sexually out there” turn in “Poor Things.” But perhaps this, her third turn for Lanthimos, will make her question that.

Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn and Mamadou Athie join her for three Lanthimos stories/vignettes (co-written with Efthimis Filippou) that dabble in belief, surrendering control of your life to others and the limits of what ordinary people will do, tolerate and fear from those pulling their strings.

In “The Death of R.M.F.,” Plemons plays Robert Fletcher, a caricature of a businessman whose entire life is run by his smiling, smothering boss (Dafoe), Raymond. Raymond helped scheme Robert into a marriage, and then ordered him not to have children with Sarah (Hong Chau).

Raymond limits Robert’s wardrobe, directs his weight — “Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing there ever is!” — and caters to his every need, “correcting” those needs at will.

“I didn’t pour you a vodka. I think a whisky is better here.”

Robert’s end of the bargain includes driving his Ford Bronco into a stranger’s blue BMW, at Raymond’s order. When Robert only hospitalizes that perhaps hapless stranger (Yorgos Stefanakos), he refuses to repeat the “accident” to greater effect. Raymond often re-directs Robert, making him repeat their “scenes” to a performance more to his liking, sometimes in front of his slinky, barefoot moll (Margaret Qualley).

This refusal to repeat that accident creates a rift that utterly derails Robert’s life. Perhaps a pretty, short-skirted stranger (Stone) can save him.

It’s not like the “R.M.F.” of the story’s title is “Robert M. Fletcher.” No, R.M.F. is the stranger Robert is meant to kill.

“R.M.F. is Flying” has Plemons playing an increasingly off-center cop whose marine biologist wife (Stone) disappeared in a research vessel shipwreck. His partner (Mamadou Athie) is concerned, and he and his wife (Qualley) try to comfort Daniel the cop by coming over to dinner and watching old home videos.

The videos are of the couples’ group sex activities.

When the missing “wife” Liz returns, Daniel starts to wonder if she is an imposter.

And in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are a team on the hunt for a woman, a surviving twin, who has the ability to bring the dead back to life. They select and “test” assorted women on behalf of their rich cult leader (Dafoe) and his minions.

Emily has a husband (Alwyn) and daughter she’s abandoned, but whose house she sometimes secretly visits, sprinkling her daughter’s bed in some sort of holy water, perhaps in the hopes of making her special, or insulating her from the cult her estranged mom is all-in on.

The stories overlap and tie-in together enough to make you wonder if there’s meaning to the meandering madness.  Perhaps not.

Some of the bit players cast as medical or police professionals and others are amateurs, not actors. No, you won’t have trouble spotting who they are. The inane dialogue that fills the script doesn’t just let down the pros and the Oscar winner. It exposes non actor’s colorless line readings.

“R.M.F.” doesn’t have any meaning, Lanthimos has admitted in interviews. Greater New Orleans is the setting, but isn’t named. Cannibalism is hinted at and ritualistic suicide underscores one story the way “swinging” does another.

The clever bits in the trailer — Stone recklessly driving a Hellcat Dodge Challenger and dancing with athletic abandon — don’t denote anything and thus provide none of their promised “off the wall” entertainment value.

Perhaps the most amusing thing about “Kinds of Kindness,” whose title is a lie, is in reading reviews of folks turning themselves into pretzels to find something to embrace about it. Lanthimos may very well be the person laughing the loudest at this.

As for me, I think “DO NOT WANT” pretty much covers it.

Rating: R, gruesome violence, explicit sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie.

Credits: Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, scripted by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:44

A staple of community theater holiday seasons for decades comes to the big screen.

I reviewed this in my theater critic days and always wondered, as middling as it is, why it was never picked up for the big screen.

This film, with production ties to the Biblical series “The Chosen,” will lean into the faith based side of the story and rolls into cinemas Nov. 8.

Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville and Romola Garai and Ben Hodges also star in this Brit thriller about a venomous critic “outed” and out for revenge.

This looks wicked fierce, and delicious.

Simu Liu is a heavy, with Sean William Scott and Machine Gun Kelly, now going by MgK (Whatever bottle blond Colson Baker) also star.

August 15 this MGM release pops up on Amazon Prime Video

The collective star power and screen charisma of Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates, Zac Efron and Joey King can’t pull the dull, unromantic and utterly predictible romanntic comedy “A Family Affair” out of the doldrums.

Scripted and directed by the usually reliable Oscar nominee Richard LaGravenese (“Behind the Candelabra,” “The Fisher King,” “Freedom Writers”), it pairs up Kidman as the mother of a Hollywood movie star’s assistant (King) with her daughter’s comically erratic, womanizer boss (Efron). And while King’s committed comical fireworks in reaction to this messiness lands a few exasperated laughs, the limited romantic chemistry of the leads and general humorlessness overwhelm the thin plot and everything else going on.

King is Zara, 24 and sentenced to do everything from script consulting to laundry, latte and kiss-this-latest-girlfriend-off gift work for Chris Cole (Efron), star of the Icarus Rush franchise, whose latest superheroics — “Icarus Rush 3” — are based on a script nobody likes, which scares him to death.

He’s a bit of a bully who promised her a path to “producer” duties and credits, but when we meet her, she’s stuck in traffic trying to deliver the diamond earrings he uses to break up with a woman as a prologue to him berating her for not getting there fast enough.

“I want a water and a LETTER of apology!”

That’s his thing. That, and telling her again and again that she’s fired, almost fired or about to get fired.

Efron has a little more luck finding a grin in the whole “I’m a movie star” shtick than he does in the bullying boss business. And it’s cute that LaGravenese named him “Chris,” like Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans and Chris Pine.

Yes, he turned down an Oscar winning role as as blind alcoholic — “My eyes are too pretty to not be on camera.” And he has a lot of overhead to fret over — private jet, security, staff, etc.

Zara’s mom is a wealthy magazine essayist and fiction writer and a widow with a seaside Malibu villa, Audi EV and writer’s block. Her mother in law/editor (Bates) is pleased that she might be finally coming out of that, if not out of her mourning for her long-dead husband.

Zara’s “I quit/You’re fired” hissy over the childish Chris Cole’s latest unreasonable demands sets up a visit by Chris to their house, where he meets her perfectly-preserved mother and takes a tumble for her.

Zara is anxious to get her aspiring playwright pal Stella (Sherry Cola from “Joy Ride”) the rewrite assignment for “Icarus Rush 3,” which will open the door for Stella’s indie “coming of queer” coming of age comedy being filmed.

Zara’s got to translate the French director’s “notes” for thin-skinned Chris on the set. She doesn’t hold back.

And now she’s got her mother rediscovering her sexual needs with her rich and famous and mercurial boss.

“He’s a movie star. It’s not real” everybody agrees — including consults with mother in law Leila, even Zara’s bestie Eugenie (Liza Koshy). But nobody listens to anybody else’s concerns and on we go — Mom swooning, Chris making Big Gestures, Zara having meltdowns.

Hilarity does not ensue. The romance has its barely believable moments. Kidman summons up mature, sexy and beguiling, but has a harder time faking “smitten.” Efron’s self-aware “I’m famous” take on Chris doesn’t have anything beyond that which makes the character funny. Bates is motherly and barely in the picture.

That leaves it to King, a Netflix and streaming rom-com veteran (“The Kissing Booth” movies, “The In-Between,” etc.) to carry the picture. And if effort and amusing meltdowns alone could manage it, she’d have pulled it off. But even she finds making this work or at least play light and amusing a struggle.

The strain to find laughs shows, and not just in her performance. That’s deadly in a rom-com.

Rating: PG-13, sex, partial nudity, profanity

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Joey King, Liza Koshy and Kathy Bates

Credits: Directed by Richard LaGravenese, scripted by Richard LaGravenese and Carrie Solomon. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

This looks funny, famous dude wakes up on an island to discover everybody’s gone save for a few survivors and assorted murderous threats.

And realizes just how little he has to contribute to society in this “New World.”

Donald Glover, aka “Childish Gambino” directs. Not a lot of info on this (IMDb doesn’t even have a page for it, yet. A movie excuse for promoting his new LP?).

From the RCA distribution title and “coming soon” “event” graphics, will this be a Fathom Events one or three night only “release?”

This Sept. 13 MGM release has a laugh-out-loud funny trailer, a cute and sentimental premise and the wisdom of “old” Aubrey Plaza — “Be nicer to Mom,” “The only thing you can’t get back is time.”

Plaza as a profane, worldly and cynically wise mentor and spirit guide for young women? Totally down with that. Pairing up Plaza with “Nashville” alumna Stella? Inspired.

This Alabama bio-drama is about gender discrimination in the workplace, and the harassment and cut-rate pay faced by Lilly Ledbetter at a Goodyear plant in the union-fearing American South.

Clarkson, 64, is a few years older than Ledbetter was when she brough suit against Goodyear and the American unequal pay workplace. But she’s got the necessary Steel Magnolia reserve and fury to pull off this story of battling a sexist system and a malevolent and sometimes violent culture and work environment.

John Benjamin Hickey co-stars.

Guessing “Lilly” is making the festival rounds now or in the very near future before finding its way to a theater or streamer near you.

In an earlier life, I used to produce and engineer (record and edit) radio programs at the University of North Dakota public radio stations. A great favorite was the weekly taping with historian and history teacher Robert Wilkins, host of a big band music show called “Out of the Past.”

On the air and off– as we were taping — Wilkins would regale listeners and sometimes just me with tales of his years in Chicago, playing “the brass bass” (a euphonium, a tuba without a bend in the horn) for assorted dance bands of the era.

He was a genuine character, avuncular, knowledgable beyond the point of “authoritative” and occasionally quite opinionated. The first time I ever heard of Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights was in an “Out of the Past” episode on what Wilkins called “Mickey Mouse Music.” Heidt led a popular swing band that produced “ditties,” cutesy little songs that seemed made for the radio of that era because they were.

And talking about Heidt, Wilkins brought up the radio show “Pot o’Gold,” and the movie it inspired, mentioning that Jimmy Stewart and Paulette Goddard starred in it, a “ditty” of a movie from 1941.

Darned if this Youtube staple didn’t turn up on Roku, and I’m always down for Jimmy Stewart and Paulette Goddard, especially in a film by George Marshall, who directed “Destry Rides Again,” Jerry Lewis comedies, musicals like “Pot’o Gold” and lots and lots of TV, a former silent film actor who directed into the 1970s.

There are hints of Stewart’s classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” — still five years away — in this sweet little nothing of a comedy, inspired by the Heidt radio show and co-starring Heidt and his band, featuring singing comedian Art Carney 14 years before “The Honeymooners.”

Our hero “Jimmy” is a small town character, beloved as the guy who inherited his father’s music shop, which has been “failing successfully for twenty-five years.”

Jimmy Haskell (Stewart) is content to let child prodigies practice at the shop’s piano, kid trombone virtuosos use a horn for a bit and teens listen to records over and over again rather than buying them.

His rich “healthy” breakfast food (cereal) tycoon uncle (Charles Winninger of “Destry Rides Again”) blusters that he’s “frittering his life away,” but this George Bailey of the B-flat harmonica (Jimmy’s chosen instrument) sees himself as a vital member of the community.

Only when his pal, the sheriff, serves him with unpaid debt papers does Jimmy accept the inevitable. But once ordered to the big city, he stumbles into his uncle’s sworn enemies –the McCorkles, because cute singer Molly (Goddard, Chaplin’s ex-wife and “Modern Times” and “The Great Dictator” co-star) mistakes him for somebody else and calls him “stupid.”

The McCorkles are letting a nascent big band (Heidt et al) live and rehearse in their boarding house just to irk Old Man Haskell. Falling for Molly seems like the last thing Jimmy would want to do, even if the band lets him join them on harmonica for “Pete the Piper,” adding him to their harmonica trio.

Did I mention Uncle Charlie hates “the infernal racket” and “dad-blasted bedlam” of big band music? He does. That he calls the cops on the band and the McCorkles? That he has a nationally broadcast radio show of homilies, geezer bromides and very low ratings?

“Sort of a stinker, isn’t he?” Jimmy admits.

It takes very little tomfoolery, a little japing, mistaken identity and a prank or two to throw Jimmy and the old man in jail, and then Mr. Haskell off to the remote, telephone-free wilds of Canada to recover, which is how a “Pot o’Gold” radio show is born.

There is nothing in this brisk, breezy and formulaic comedy that would challenge the great comic films and filmmakers of its era. It’s not Sturges sophisticated or laughably Lubitsch-esque.

But Stewart, leaning into the laconic Everyman and Anti-heroic hero that became a part of his image after “Destry,” is a laid-back delight. He fakes harmonica playing, sings “When Johnny Toots his Horn” and even acts out a Cyrano-esque “Romeo & Juliet” balcony scene (in a dream sequence) where better singer Larry Cotton croons his love for fair Molly as Jimmy lip-syncs.

Goddard’s singing was doubled by the velvet-voiced Vera Van. Future Emmy and Oscar winner Carney can be spied, in the raven-dark hair of youth and in his motion picture debut, in a few shots and has a line or two as the band’s radio announcer in the third act. Also notable is the fact that President Roosevelt’s son James produced this clever, tuneful quickie, which Stewart shot simultaneously with an MGM film “Ziegfield Girl,” where he had a featured role.

That’s how “demanding” the work was.

The cleverest things our director delivers in this production include Jimmy’s welcome-to-the-big-city scene, where he meets characters who burst into song — a trucker, a Chinese laundryman, Black shoeshines and others crooning and dancing “What’s a’ Cooking?” — and an a’capella “Musical Knights” hymn to Irish Mother McCorkle’s (Mary Gordon) cooking at dinner time.

“Pot o’Gold” is never much more than a musical ditty, and the music itself was so lightly regarded that the United Artists release fell into copyright’s public domain, like many movies of this era.

But you can see hints of Stewart’s “Wonderful Life” turn in this small town/small-timer comedy.

And as movie musical ditties go, this one plants an earworm or two and lets Stewart, Goddard & Co. crack wise, break into song or break out the old mouth harp in ways that must have tickled audiences then and still packs a few delights in a minor key all these many years later.

Rating: “approved,” G-worthy

Cast: Jimmy Stewart, Paulette Goddard, Horace Heidt, Mary Gordon and Charles Winninger, with Larry Cotton and Art Carney.

Credits: Directed by George Marshall, scripted by Walter DeLeon, inspired by the radio show created by Haydn Roth Evans and Robert Brilmayer. A United Artists release on Roku TV, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:26