Movie Nation

Lisa Kudrow and Jemaine Clement’s presence notwithstanding, I’m going to take a wild guess and say this summer’s Taika Waititi Version of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy classic “Time Bandits” could be the 2024 equivalent of George Clooney’s attempted “Catch-22.”

The delirious mayhem, the diminutive cast of trouble-makers, the visionary surrealism, the darkness of it all, the texture of the history visited, the lack of whimsical Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Ian Holm, Ralph Richardson, David Warner, Katherine Helmond, John Cleese and Michael Palin and lots of funny little people, all are missing in what looks like a cheap knock-off with a trailer set to the B-52s’ upbeat “Roam.”

It’s “Voyagers!” in other words, a little-remembered ’82-83 NBC series that borrowed plot elements from “Time Bandits.” As fondly as some fanboys might remember that, I’d suggest…watching it anew, if you can find it, and repent.

“The Champion” is a formulaic Spanish sports melodrama about an athlete with “issues” finding his way back to public favor and his place within “the beautiful game.”

It’s not subtle, featuring a rageaholic soccer star whose tantrums are over the top and can be triggered by just about anything. It’s clumsy, suggesting an introverted academic expert on “genius” and not a therapist is the best person to “help” Atletico Madrid superstar Diego grow up.

But it has a moment, here and there. There’s an insight or two that slips in around the edges. And the Big Game finale even manages a surprise that summons a tiny lump in the throat.

Screen newcomer Marcel Serrano is Diego, the small-town boy whose drive — and pushy father (Pablo Chiapella) have taken him to soccer stardom in his teens. Now pushing 20, he’s rich, with 20 people on the payroll, a mansion filled with hangers-on, and his beautiful childhood sweetheart (Cintia García) on his arm.

But we meet Diego in crisis. Losing a match sets off a tantrum that ends with him cursing one and all and head-butting the team captain, all captured on TV.

A lot of threats about how he should “represent the club’s values” and “There’s no room on the team for a hooligan (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) lead to a press conference and a stumbling attempt at reading an apology.

Diego doesn’t realize it, but his agent Juanma (Luis Fernández) has bribed his on-the-spectrum academic brother (Dani Rovira) to come, observe, coach and “help” the star improve his behavior during a multi-game suspension leading up to the season-ending match for the league title.

Academic Alex is a loner, about to lose the house he inherited, a guy with issues traceable back to his and Juanma’s emotionally unavailable, soccer-obsessed father. He’s not a therapist, licensed or otherwise. But he can be bought and perhaps manipulated. And as an observer, he picks up on Diego’s first big problem at that press conference.

“I’m not an idiot, you know,” the kid hisses.

“You have dyslexia.”

With Diego impulsive, mercurial and prone to “do whatever I want,” and with social media and mass media publicity to do about this “intensive education” session to help Diego “tackle” his problems, Alex is instantly in over his head and neither man seems all that keen to get on with much of anything, much less grappling with the issues at hand.

A simple “add words to your vocabulary” regimen, praising Diego’s native “genius” at recognizing patterns in space — on the soccer pitch or on a Rubik’s Cube — and getting away from the paparazzi in Alex’s hometown, and Diego’s own, should be enough to “fix” him. Right?

The film’s simplistic cause and effect won’t be to many tastes, nor will its tried-and-trite march-to-the-big-game/remember-why-you-love-it plot.

But it a few moments. Serrano blows up with conviction, and Rovira’s not bad at a sort of “Monk” soccer whisperer. Chiapella is very convincing as the bullying, success-at-all-costs control freak father, and García makes the most of a tiny supporting role which, considering her character’s love and concern for Diego, should have been larger and more integral to the story.

“The Champion” isn’t a winner, but formulaic or not, it’s never quite a total write-off either.

Rating: TV-MA, some violence, profanity

Cast: Marcel Serrano, Dani Rovira, Pablo Chiapella, Cintia García and Luis Fernández

Credits: Directed by Carlos Therón, scripted by Joan Gual and Joaquín Oristrell. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Yes, it’s another weekend of animation domination of the summer box office, with a mediocre “Despicable Me” sequel — “Despicable Me 4” — clearing another $44 6 million, according to Deadline.com.

But the year-long absent horror film audience is the story of the weekend, delivering another hit to workaholic Nicolas Cage’s long resume and giving tony distributor Neon (the poor man’s A24) its biggest opening weekend ever.

“Longlegs” opened at $22.4 million. That’s good enough to come in second place,  with “Inside Out 2” third,  clearing $20 million itself.

“A Quiet Place 3,” aka “A Quiet Place: Day One,” is still bringing home the bacon, pulling in another $11 million as it marches beyond the $100 million domestic take mark ($200 million worldwide).

Apple/Sony’s ill-considered “Fly Me to the Moon” wasn’t the best reviewed new release of the weekend, but that isn’t keeping it from making a not-quite-respectable $10 million or so and a top five finish. Apple spent $100 million on it, filming some sequences at Kennedy Space Center. So…it’ll be streaming soon enough.

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” ($4+) plunging “MaXXXine,”($2.9) “Horizon” and “The Story of Possum Trot” and other hangers-on will finish the week in the bottom half of the top ten, if in it at all. “The Bikeriders,” “Kinds of Kindness” and “The Fall Guy” are the likely candidates for tumbling out of contention, with older releases losing screens and “Kinds of Kindness” never quite catching on.

The later films of David Lean are works of such visual ambition and scale that they can let the viewer lose track of the connective thread, the relationships and characters that make “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “A Passage to India” so compelling.

We see the editor-turned director, the craftsman and painter of grand cinematic landscapes, but forget the emotional triangles that are the building blocks of even his literary adaptations or biographical epics.

“The Passionate Friends” (1949) is a simple love triangle, another “Brief Encounter” (1945) melodrama about infidelity that here isn’t just considered, but consummated. This time, the third party in the love triangle is much more present.

It’s not “wartime rationing” prosaic, sad and drably middle class like “Encounter,” but posh, even if it feels very much hemmed-in and soundstage-bound until it opens up in an extravagant, lavishly-photographed (in black and white) third act, set and shot largely in the French Alps.

Following Lean’s classic Dickens adaptations “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist,” this return to melodrama was a box office flop and tempted Lean into imitating Hitchcock (“Madeleine”), even trying his hand at period piece domestic comedy (“Hobson’s Choice”) as he slowly re-acquired the prestige and box office success that allowed him to make motion picture “events” from “Kwai” until the end of his days.

“Passionate Friends,” based on a novel by “free love” sci-fi pioneer H.G. Wells, is a post-war tale consumed by a long flashback to how our lovers were connected before World War II, and otherwise barely mentions the conflict, loss and privation that Britain was still crawling out of in the late ’40s.

Ann Todd is our heroine and narrator, Mary, a great beauty with an idea of “the sort of life” she wants — rich and privileged. When we meet her, she’s narrating her way on her first post-war holiday, flying to Switzerland (Haute-Savoie, France, actually) to the lakeside Hotel Splendide for a little pampering.

Her husband is stuck in London on business, but his secretary (Betty Ann Davies) accompanies her and makes everything go effortlessly as she awaits the man who pays for all this comfort and high-fashion.

But an old flame checks into the room next door. And speaking from the fictive present — after she’s realized who is staying there — she recalls her great pre-war love affair with academic biologist Steven (Trevor Howard of “Brief Encounter”), the man she told “I shall never love anyone as much as I love you.”

The lengthy flashback isn’t the most graceful one Lean ever offered, but basically Mary and Steven stumble into each other on New Year’s Eve, 1939, after they’d broken up and she’d gone on to marry money. They begin to see each other as “friends,” which her older husband, Howard, tolerates. Howard is played by forever-cuckolded Claude Raines, who made more than one film where he’s the rich, older spouse whose wife is tempted away.

The “passionate friends” revert to being more than friends over the course of this long flashback, and even decide to tell Howard and make a go out of being together. But that didn’t work out, and now nine years later, they’re spouse-free in Switzerland and about to renew their acquaintance in one of the most striking settings on Earth.

Todd is the heart and soul of the picture, and her performance lets us see the inner turmoil of a woman who wants to have her Chanel and Switzerland, and her great love, too. She is at her best in scenes where Mary recognizes the dilemma she’s put all involved in and grows frantic — in that reserved and ever-so-English way — about what to do.

Rains makes Howard dashing, deliberate and distracted enough to let all this play out, but determined to bring down the wrath of Howard when it all blows up.

Trevor Howard is as passive here as he seemed in “Brief Encounter,” a near innocent who can’t quite resist whatever Mary is pulling him back into or see the risks of following one’s heart…or impulses.

The picture’s three-hander structure limits its scope, with much of its running time consumed with drawing room conversations, close-ups of each character in her or his emotional distress, and the clumsy way Mary and Steven handle their indiscretion and keeping it secret.

A rich man, humiliated, can be a dangerous thing.

Lean gets things moving and scenic in the third act, seamlessly blending location exteriors with Pinewood Studios sets, rear-projections and the like.

And the finale manages some suspense, even if it feels like the cop-out many a melodrama of that era leaned into for its ressolution.

But Lean completists will take pleasure in the connective tissue that binds “The Passionate Friends,” a lesser Lean film, with his other work, get a sense of his first serious dalliance into an epic setting and enjoy one last passive romantic turn by Trevor Howard, before a career of grumpy authority figures and military men would all but erase the romantic Lean first saw in him.

Rating: TV-PG, infidelity, smoking

Cast: Ann Todd, Trevor Howard and Claude Rains, with Betty Ann Davies, Isabel Dean and Wilfred Hyde-White.

Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by Eric Ambler and David Lean, based on the novel by H.G. Wells. A Univeral/General Film Distributors release, a J. Arthur Rank production restored and now on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:35

Oh no, not a superheroine movie. A cheated, abused woman tracks down her most violent childhood friend for…an offer.

“We need a proper plan.” “Are you sure you want him actually dead?”

Aug 30. UK and US?

Asking for a friend.

Endless variations on these adorable teasers, tie-ins and trailers. Too many? Getting there.

Takes a pair of plastic unicorn testicles to make a movie like this, title it like that, and release it Aug. 16.

Just saying…mate.

Kelly Slater and some surfer dudes and Luke Hemsworth provide the voices.

“MaXXXine” is horror auteur Ti West’s Big Statement on horror, censorship, the hypocrisy in American conservatism and the dog-devour-dog ethos of the struggling classes in Hollywood.

A lurid send-up of exploitation cinema of the ’70s (split screens, neon-tinted lighting and blood blood blood), the third film in West’s Mia Goth Gore is the New Shock horror franchise is a scary movie that forgot the scares. Among other things.

The sequel to “X” is a sort of “The Stunt Man” riff on Maxine Minx’s (Goth) final push to become “a f—–g movie star” so that “the whole world’s gonna know my name!”

Maxine, we remember from “X,” was brought up on the ethos “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” She’s shed her fundamentalist roots, fled west and plunged into porn.

But thanks to a take-no-prisoners agent (Giancarlo Esposito) and a mercenary director (Elizabeth Debicki) who needs a fresh face for her horror sequel, “The Puritan II,” Maxine, now driving a Mercedes convertible with “MAXXXINE” vanity plates, is about to land her big break.

But L.A. is being terrorized by the butchering serial killer called “The Night Stalker,” who decorates corpses with zodiac carvings. People associated with Maxine in her prior line of work (porn) are dying, and the cops (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) want to know what Maxine might know about this, and what she’s doing to protect herself.

Hollywood is roiled by anti-porn, anti-horror and anti Hollywood protests by Reagan-Falwell emboldened fanatics, and Maxine could be in their sights.

And Maxine’s bloodstained “X” past has caught up with her through menacing, blackmailing sleazeball detective from New Orleans, overplayed with ketchup, mustard AND relish by Kevin Bacon.

Maxine’s monomaniacal “Stunt Man” lite director Liz Bender (Debicki, of “The Great Gatsby,” “Tenet” and “Widows”) won’t have a tardy, distracted and harassed wannabe star as her leading lady.

“Whatever’s going on in your life that’s interfering with this picture… Squash it.“

We know better than to think Maxine won’t take this advice to heart, to her agent, and to extremes.

The first thing that leaps out off the screen here is that after three movies, pretty much back-to-back-to-back with West, one of which (the prequel “Pearl”) she co-wrote, is that Mia Goth has become a worse actress and less interesting screen presence in the process.

A consequence of her limited palette of roles, the need to be constantly pandering to horror fanboys, or the limitations of working with the same director — who is no Alfred Hitchcock — too much?

West is still taking shots at the people who started and fan the flames of “the culture wars.” But he’s never used a sniper-rifle on his targets. Here, he’s resorted to a blunderbuss. The shots are indiscriminate and the targets are broad lampoons of the real villains.

The pastiche of ’70s cinema styles comes off as Ti West imitating Tarantino imitating the real thing.

The murders seem more random and the gore less shocking.

Bacon and Esposito stand out in the cast, with Debicki — a tall, model-beautiful/model-thin dominatrix towering over poor Goth in their scenes together — rewriting her screen persona with this turn.

Cannavale’s a cop with that ex-pretty boy’s Hollywood mantra, “I wanted to be an actor” never far from his lips. The singer Halsey is merely a very good looking murder victim here.

And the finale’s over-the-top and underwhelming and set pretty much exactly where you’d expect, given the film’s focus on Hollywood as the root of all evil, at least in the minds of the narrow-minded.

The shock has worn off and the transition to slasher porn to “thriller” proves to be a bit of a stretch for West. But maybe, now that all this “Pearl,” “Maxine” period piece business is out of his system, he’ll try something fresh.

Goth? She’s moved on to Del Toro (“Frankenstein”) and a “Blade” reboot, and none too soon, from the looks of things.

Rating: R for strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and drug use.

Cast: Mia Goth, Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Debicki, Giancarlo Esposito, Halsey, Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ti West. An A24 release

Running time: 1:43

“Touch” is a lovely, patient romantic melodrama about remembering and pursuing that woman whose gentle caress a man remembers from the first time they met, long ago.

This search will take Kristófer from Iceland to London and beyond. Kristófer is in his 70s, with hints of failing health and “unfinished business” in his quest.

He undertakes this task just as COVID lockdowns are spreading, like the virus, across the globe, a time when human contact turned fraught, sharpening the connection of that most memorable “Touch” from long ago.

This Icelandic saga, spoen in English, Icelandic and Japanese, will be told by the Icelandic action producer and director best known for the Mark Wahlberg smuggling thriller “Contraband” and “Two Guns,” with Denzel and Wahlberg, and “Everest,” of all people. And it will co-star that director’s son.

How do they say “Nepo Baby” in Icelandic?

Amazingly, Baltasar Kormákur’s film comes together in a tale told with great sensitivity and patience, probably owing to the novelist who wrote this story participating in the adaptation.

Kristófer, played with quiet sensitivity by veteran Icelandic actor Egill Ólafsson, lives in a small town, sings in the local men’s choir and runs a restaurant, which keeps him focused on the present. But he’s a widower facing an MRI over signs of some brain malady and is keenly aware time is running out.

Even with COVID just rearing its head around the world, he gets on a plane for London. That “unfinished business” his doctor suggested he settle is on his mind.

In the tumultuous late ’60s, Kristófer (played as a young man by Palmi Kormákur) was a leftist/anarchist, in step with his generation and out of place as a student at the London School of Economics. One day, after a protest, he shocks his friends with the rash decision to apply for a job at the Nippon Japanese restaurant.

The owner (Masahiro Motoki, terrific) is a little put-out at the applicant. His eatery caters largely to Japanese expats seeking an “authentic” taste of home, and the entire staff is Japanese. But he’s open-minded enough to stop fathering the kid (no dad, Japanese or otherwise, would endorse a kid giving up a prestigious education) and bring him on.

He might want to do something with all that stringy, greasy ’60s hair the 20something keeps running his fingers to.

What closes the deal for future-dishwasher Kristófer is encountering the young woman (model, songwriter and novice actress Kôki) who turns out to be the owner’s daughter, a student and a waitress at Nippon. The mere touch by Miko, gently making her way past him, seals their fate.

They work together, and even though she is a student herself, involved with a more ambitious Japanese classmate, even though her father is stern about her love life, as he studies Japanese language and Japanese cooking and she studies him with curiosity mixed with growing infatuation, they fall in love.

Something tore them apart, and our sense of the elderly Kristófer, who revisits this romantic past in flashbacks, is that he wants answers for what split them apart almost as much as he craves one last caress from his first great love.

“Touch” enfolds memories of a great love lost, learning Japanese history and cuisine, travel, the COVID crisis and old age in telling this slow-moving, emotionally-muted romance.

Young Kristófer learns from Miko that Hiroshima brought her and her father to London. The rest of the colorful restaurant staff (Meg Kubota, Charles Nishikawa and Tatsuya Tagawa) teaches him the seriousness of the business of welcoming, feeding and serving people and helps him with his Japanese.

Through him, we learn about the culture that would go on to produce “Iron Chef,” its history and the Japanese word “hibakusha” in all its darker shadings.

Ólafsson makes a mild-mannered lead, just avuncular enough to charm, worldly but still a fish-out-of-water on this quest. The younger leads show their inexperience in performances that are very much skin-deep. If we don’t feel a great passion emerging between Miko and Kristófer, that’s on them and the director for casting a relative and somebody more cute than experienced.

But emotional shortcomings aside, “Touch” still pulls you in, an immersive story of alien worlds — the 1960s, Iceland and Japan — sympathetically and patiently told, a lovely two hour break from the world and the fresh waves of bad news that stain even the best of times.

Rating: R, sex, gruesome images of Hiroshima, smoking

Cast: Egill Ólafsson, Kôki, Masahiro Motoki, Palmi Kormákur, Yôko Narahashi, Meg Kubota, Charles Nishikawa, Tatsuya Tagawa and Ruth Sheen

Credits: Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, scripted by Olaf Olafsson and Baltasar Kormákur, based on a novel by Olaf Olafsson. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:02

So what the hell is THIS supposed to be about?

“Fly Me to the Moon” is a pointless, humorless goof on the old “They faked the moon landings” conspiracy theory treasured by the Flat Earthers among us.

Ill-timed for an America fighting and losing its endless battle with reality and “facts,” “Moon” is glib, dull and ahistorical.

Not a romance, kind of comic and too stupid to be satire, it wastes leads Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum on a screenplay by Rose Gilroy, whose sole qualification for getting the assignment seems to have been that she’s the daughter of screenwriter Dan Gilroy and actress Rene Russo.

Nepo babies can be a menace to society. Or cinema.

Johansson plays a cracker jack Madison Ave. Mad-woman summoned by shady a Nixon administration operator (Woody Harrelson, not quite funny) to burnish NASA’s image, popularity with the public and Congressional budget through a little good, old-fashioned salesmanship.

What she winds up doing — per the movie’s fantasy take on the Apollo program — is teaming up with Tang and Omega watches as sponsors, “casting” actors to play NASA officials who’ll be more telegenic and skilled at interviews, and conspiring to “fake” a moon landing in a warehouse just in case America and accident-prone NASA seem to be on the verge of failing.

Tatum plays the launch director presiding over the flights leading up to and including Apollo 11, furious at this fakery and hapless in the face of resisting it. Because Kelly Jones is played by Scarlett Johansson, I guess.

It’s “The Right Stuff” without the swagger, wit or myth-making, “Apollo 13 without the gravitas, “I Dream of Jeannie” without the punchlines or bare bellies.

Kelly Jones is trying to sell the “magic” of the first-ever image of “Earthrise,” the Earth photographed by an astronaut circling the moon in Apollo 8 and the romance of the odyssey in the divided country and planet of 1968-69.

“Nobody disagrees about the moon,” is the ethos there. And all the NASA nerds with pocket protectors and slide rules led by Cole Davis (Tatum) and Henry Smalls (Ray Romano) will just have to embrace the message.

The faked moon landing and walk? They won’t know about that. Kelly hires “the Stanley Kubrick of commercials” (Jim Rash at his swishiest) to do the casting and filming and Tab drinking.

Time stands still as this inane and charmless codswollop unfolds for two hours and 12 minutes. As it is being shuttled over to Apple TV, and quickly, they figure nobody’ll mind what an endless drag it is.

Director Greg Berlanti directed “Love, Simon,” which was a way of living down producing “The Green Lantern,” and his production team here manages a tepid recreation of rowdy Space Race Era Cocoa Beach, Florida that, like almost everything else in this, is less interesting than the real history they’re bastardizing.

Space Coast filming locations have been used by “Transformers” movies, but damned if I can figure out why NASA let somebody on property to make a movie mocking Apollo and giving oxygen to “faked” moon landings, lumping all the many “comical” accidents of the first decade of space flight in with the tragic Apollo 1 launchpad fire.

What tin-eared hack thought that would play? Oh. Right.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Strong Language|Smoking

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Ray Romano, Anna Garcia and Woody Harrelson

Credits: Directed by Greg Berlanti, scripted by Rose Gilroy. A Columbia/Apple Films release.

Running time: 2:12