Movie Nation

The days when the Rising Sun of the Japanese economy could make the world listen whenever an economic sage from Tokyo spoke are long gone.

Remember “Gung Ho” and “Rising Sun?” Those were the days before economic stagnation, population collapse and cultural ennui set in on the isles of Nippon.

But here’s a quirky indie that revisits that time when desperate Americans were sure the Japanese had the answers.

This looks cute and maybe a little retro. Purdie Distribution has it, so God knows how we’ll see it.

Truth be told, most of us figured we didn’t need another “origin story” take on The Day the Aliens Who Hear Dropped In on “A Quiet Place.” John Krasinski & Co. covered that in a small town urban and suburban setting in the franchise prequel “A Quiet Place: Part 2.”

But writer-director Michael Sarnoski pretty much acknowledges that in his entry on this franchise, “A Quiet Place: Day One.” Moving the horror and suspense of spidery, asteroid-transported aliens slaughtering everyone they hear (but cannot see) to New York is hardly a Big Idea. The film can seem perfunctory in the ways we don’t see people responding to the threat, learning, surviving and figuring out “they can’t swim” and the like.

The clever stroke to “Day One” is casting some of the most expressive actors in the biz in key roles, in creating a fatalism that lowers the stakes, sets up expectations and yet still delivers pathos.

The terror is as breathless as ever — suspense over the silence of a stifled-cough, the whispered-creaking of a suitcase on wheels, a squeaking wheelchair or a ripping shirt.

Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o dazzles as a jaded New Yorker whom we meet in a hospice, a Harlem poetess who has already drawn a death sentence and thus lives through Frodo, her pet who just happens to be the world’s quietest cat.

Nyong’o’s eyes capture the resignation of Sam’s fate and the fear of the unthinkable unknown, an invasion of alien predators who slaughter anything that makes a noise.

Djimon Hounsou, seen in “Part 2,” brings his blend of nobility and stoicism to the role of a father who meets Sam and others in her hospice at a marionette show “in the city,” a man who acts on instinct, makes a quick analysis of the threat and does his damnedest to keep everybody within reach safe until they can work out how to escape from a city cut off from the world thanks to precautionary Air Force strikes that knock down the bridges into Manhattan.

Alex Wolff nicely portrays the humanity of most everyone you ever meet who works with the dying in a hospice. Ruben is the one who promises Sam “a slice” “in the city,” a taste of real New York pizza, as a way to get her to join her fellow patients for that marionette show.

When all hell breaks loose and Sam is thrown together with British lawyer Eric (Joseph Quinn of “Stranger Things”), the importance of that “last slice” as “the world is ending” rises in her priorities, while Eric is clinging to the tough, cynical New Yorker as if he knows “survival” is a badge of honor among those who live in the Five Boroughs.

There isn’t much Sarnoski, who gave us the Nic Cage thriller-delight “Pig,” can show us that’s new — those who survive the initial onslaught, children included, realizing that they can talk during rainstorms or under the showering noise of fountains. So he sets out to give us vivid, under-explained characters hurled into a thin, nightmarish story, learning on the fly (seemingly) as they take what none of them can hope is their hero’s journey.

Nyong’o, Hounsou, Quinn and Wolff win our pity, our empathy and our respect as these New Yorkers face their fates at the beginning of a global nightmare which no one can see through, see past or realistically expect to survive. They make “Day One” both engrossing, and a great argument for why this “franchise” has said what it has to say and thus is ready to take its final bow.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Sarnoski, based on characters created by Bryan Wood and Scott Beck. A Paramount Pictures release.

Running time: 1:40

The stunning “Barbie” meets “Super Mario Bros” box office domination by “Inside Out 2” continues on this last weekend before July 4, as Pixar’s animated world-beater (Closing in on a $billion, maybe by July 6?) roared through Friday and looks to take in another $57.4 million this weekend.

Can the “Minions” slow its roll? Earlier predictions pointed to a $60 million take, so this sweet, smart but far less fun sequel does seem to be slacking off, just a tad, as “Minions” roll in July 3.

“A Quiet Place: Day One” back-engineers John Krasinski’s horror/creature feature blockbusters with a new cast and “origin story” of the Day the sound-sensitive monsters dropped in. Lupita Nyong’o stars, and the Oscar winner has a blockbuster on her hands — $53 million opening weekend, according to @thenumbers.com. Deadline.com had been projecting $48.

Good reviews are helping both of these smash hits. As I said in my review of “Quiet Place 3,” it seems unnecessary, and a bit unambitious because of that. There certainly is no need for another installment. But as it sets the FRANCHISE RECORD for opening weekends, you can bet Paramount is pipelining more sequels after this prequel. It opened to $99 million worldwide.

Which means? Bet on another Spiders from Space “Quiet Place” installment and soon.

Better reviews might have boosted Kevin Costner’s sprawling, over-titled “Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1.” It plays like a streaming series, three hours of Old West tropes, archetypes and cliches, served up in multiple episodes following four points of view — including, to some degree, the Native American one.

It’s appealing to the “Yellowstone” crowd, and enough of them (an older, whiter audience) are showing up — $11 million this weekend, per @thenumbers — to make it worth New Line’s while to put this into theaters. “Chapter 2″ will arrive in August. Deadline.com projected it’d earn $13 million because of its slow-to-get-out older audience. Sunday Costner/Western’Yellowstone” AARP member fans will be key as to whether it reaches that high.

Thirteen million for a non-sequel, older-audience-skewing three hour Western is “respectable.” Eleven million? Right on the cusp of “bomb” (See “Bikeriders.” Or don’t. Nobody else did.). Costner’s promised two more films in this franchise, which seems like a natural fit for a New Line to say HBO Max pipeline.

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” is still collecting Top Five cash, over $11 million this weekend, heading towards about $188 million in North America by the time its run winds down.

An Indian sci-fi thriller about a dystopian, class-divided future in which only a hero can save us from the oligarchs, “Kalki 2898 AD” is reaching the diaspora, engaging critics and the Indo-curious to the tune of $6.5 million.

“The Bikeriders” lost its place in the top five, tumbling to a mere $3.3 million, according to @TheNumbers. That’s a steep 66% drop from its opening weekend, almost a Tyler Perry Movie Swoon of a second weekend (70% or more).

Emma and Yorgos and Willem et al’s “Kinds of Kindness” cracked the Top Ten. Wouldya look at that.

The first Spanish film I remember seeing was “The Spirit of the Beehive” by Victor Erice.

Catching that 1973 gem at a college film society was an eye opening experience, as it was a movie about a child transformed by watching the ancient Universal classic “Frankenstein” in post Civil War Spain.

“Close Your Eyes” is about movies and memory and about a filmmaker) actor who disappeared decades before?

A fitting curtain call for Erice, who turns 84 June 30? We’ll see.

This is an end of August release from Film Movement.

Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace are the U.S.Marshal and key witness/prisoner trapped in a small plane with Markie Mark.

Their reaction is our reaction.

Good trailer.

http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx1g9d_trEDdCdY09SzEesUZX7DsgQFhq_?si=NBDujAb9ijlU8uno

Back before he made “Dances With Wolves” and in all the years since, Kevin Costner has spoken of his life-changing experience in the cinema, going to see “How the West Was Won” as a child in 1962, a Western in glorious Technicolor in the widest widesceen process of them all — Cinerama.

And while that elephantine, lumbering epic has informed many of his Westerns over the years — “Dances With Wolves,” “Open Range” and “Wyatt Earp” among them — he’s somehow managed to avoid making his own sprawling, star-studded “version” of that film. Until now.

And more’s the pity that he did.

“Horizon: An America Saga, Chapter 1” is a “How the West was Won” for the streaming era, a choppy, ponderous and episodic horse opera set just before, during and after the Civil War. As a big-screen experience — “Chapter 2” opens Aug. 16 — it has moments of grandeur and the occasional impressive action sequence, some bits of inspired casting and a lot of the Western tropes we’ve come to expect from the genre, both beloved and in some cases, worn out.

Costner himself plays a self-reliant Westerner who can be a man of violence, softened by saving a prostitute (Abbey Lee) and a child from murderously-vengeful thugs on a vendetta.

Sienna Miller plays a settler who survives an Indian massacre of her just-founded, ill-located “boom” town and falls in with a cavalry fort, where Sam Worthington serves as a lieutenant, Micheal Rooker is an Irish ethnic sergeant and Danny Huston is the world-weary but Big Picture-grasping officer in charge who gives the big speech about the sorts of people fleeing the East, their dull and limited “horizons” for “the last great open expanse on Earth.”

Luke Wilson leads a wagon train stalked by people the cavalry lieutenant takes pains to label “indigenous” and his commanding officer calls “aboriginals,” hostiles the other folks in Connestoga wagons only know as “Apache” because that’s already one of the most feared tribes on the new frontier.

Jeff Fahey and Scott Haze have competing agendas as “Injun hunters” determined to wipe out the band of Apache led by Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) who wiped out Horizon, an Indian Territory town that was illegally sold and settled by an unscrupulous “boomer” and speculator, played by Giovanni Ribisi in “Chapter 2.”

The film goes to some pains to show the West as a lot more diverse than John Ford, Howard Hawks or Henry Hathaway ever did — with exploited but kind and enterprising Chinese immigrants, plenty of seemingly-accepted Black settlers, discriminated-against Mexicans and Native Americans (Tatanka Means and others) who see their doom in these raids upon the numerous and undeterred “white eyes.”

Massacres beget massacres when the bloodshed is over who gains dominion over all this open space.

The history thrown in here includes the distant Civil War, which starts a couple of years after the film’s 1859 opening and draws off cavalry that could have been patrolling the Plains and beyond, the unscrupulous land hustles and delusional sales-pitch “science” that helped convince tens of thousands back East to pull up stakes and settle in a desert.

“Rain follows the plow,” the huxters parrot to those who know how stupid that “science” is and those gullible enough to buy it.

Costner, who co-wrote the script, folds in “West Was Won,” “The Searchers” and “Jeremiah Johnson” and snippets of John Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy” into this saga’s vendettas, violence, mining camps and wagon train, prostitutes and buffalo fur-clad “Sykes” clan, hellbent on avenging themselves for some great perceived wrong done them by a woman, of all creatures.

Truth be told, what comes out is less than wholly satisfying and ends clumsily and abruptly, teasing “Chapter 2” as “Chapter 1” comes to a series of limp anti-climaxes.

There’s little in the writing that has the sentimental pull of “My Darling Clementine” or the hardboiled, sometimes comical poetry of “Red River.”

“There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a good… Swiss watch?”

Truth be told, aside from the overly-curled, over-dressed and dolled up hooker Marigold’s (Lee) relentless pursuit of maybe three-times-her-age Hayes Ellison (Costner), there’s nothing lighthearted about this. The script is too archetypal for its own goodm the production a little too neat and color coordinated (Costner’s color-matched Western wear), the firearms perhaps less period-accurate than one would like.

But Costner delivers in his role, Rooker and Wilson, Dale Dickey (as a cruel frontier matriarch), Miller and Tim Guinee, playing the settler-husband who holds off the Apache in their fortified house as long as possible, Huston and Will Patton are perfectly cast, and nobody in this ensemble seems wholly out of place.

The big gunfight is brief, the big Horizon massacre beautiful, gripping and horrific in ways most of the movie, save for its grand, aspen-lined mountain or desert vistas, never manages.

Maybe “Chapter 2” will be better. I’m betting this ungainly epic will play best when it is streamed in the very near future, with lots of pauses for bathroom breaks. But even then, let’s face it, it’s no “Lonesome Dove.”

Rating: R, violence, nudity, sec, profanity

Cast: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson, Sam Worthington, Michael Rooker, Tatanka Means, Jena Malone, Michael Angarano, Dale Dickey, Owen Crow Shoe, Abbey Lee, Scott Haze, Ella Hunt, Will Patton, Tim Guinee and Danny Huston

Credits: Directed by Kevin Costner, scripted by Jon Baird, Kevin Costner and Mark Kasdan. A New Line release.

Running time: 3:01

“Mother, Couch!” is an allegorical drama cryptic enough to confuse, cringy enough to put-off but thanks to its cast, inviting enough to make you want to puzzle it out.

Based on a novel by the Swedish writer Jerker Virdborg, it’s about parents and children, families with issues, “tests” and stresses that build through life and come to a head as an adult dealing with a failing and failed parent.

And if you can’t grasp what it’s getting at straight away, lean on that old critic’s standby as your rationale for decoding it. Two Oscar winners, along with Ewan McGregor, Lake Bell, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle saw something in writer-director Niclas Larsson’s adaptation that drew them in. We should at least try to get what they got out of it.

McGregor plays frantic, struggling family man David, trapped in the Oakbeds Furniture warehouse with his unfocused, newly-married and still-on-the-make older brother Griff (Ifans). They’re stuck there because they stopped there, for some reason. Their aged mother (Ellen Burstyn) came in, found a sofa she liked, and parked herself on it.

“I’m not coming, David.”

She is uncommunicative and unbending. She won’t leave. So that birthday party for his daughter that David was taking them to? That’s off. His wife’s phone calls are exasperated, to say the least. She’s played by Lake Bell, so you can see why that would have David upset.

Griff is too busy flirting with the very young and cute sales clerk Bella (Taylor Russell) to get Mom motivated. Summoning older sister Linda (Boyle) just earns an abrupt “I’m calling 9-11” from her.

Mom is having a mental health crisis. Mom is at her most defiant and unreasonable. David’s the last one to try reasoning with her. And there’s this dresser she gives David the key to. Find that and maybe this will all be worth it, or at least we’ll have some answers.

“Mother, Couch!” is about a hellish couple of days David — with his less helpful siblings — spends trying to resolve this situation, persuade their mother to move, save his marriage, please his little girl and not get tempted by the coquettish store clerk or tricked or browbeaten into buying furniture from the store’s owner. “Owners.” Both are played by F. Murray Abraham.

Bella the clerk is naive, unfiltered and a tad over-familiar, commenting on people’s ages, psychoanalyzing one and all in a snap.

“You all seem so broken.”

That sparkle that McGregor is famous for here is more of a “glisten,” as he lets us see him sweat. Whatever anyone else is going through, David is drowning — drowning while juggling all the responsibilities a 48 year-old man can shoulder.

Testy, stubborn Mom is kind of a monster. And as we peel away the relationships of one and all, hear her confessions and weigh a proper response to them as we hear everyone else’s improper ones, “Mother, Couch!” tumbles toward a sort of purgatory in retail suburban (Charlotte, N.C.) furniture store hell.

The cast is first-rate on paper and in performance, here, with Abraham reminding us of how much we miss him between rare screen appearances. Burstyn summons up all the guilt and bile at her disposal for this mother, Boyle chain-smokes and bites-off dismissals, Russell beams, Ifans plays the lecherous slacker he’s perfected over the decades and Bell gives away the resignation of a wife who knows all that her husband is dealing with right now, and might no longer interested in sharing his burdens.

Writer-director Niclas Larsson bit off more than he can chew for his feature directing debut. His “Mother” has hints of other dark, cryptic “Mother” thrillers of recent years — from Hollywood to Korea and beyond. But something was lost in the adaptation, and the cost of that loss was in the story’s coherence.

Still, for anybody who relishes performance over “the puzzle,” who gets a charge out of seeing screen legends make Ewan McGregor sweat, “Mother, Couch!” is worth getting off the sofa for.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, partial nudity

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Rhys Ifans, Taylor Russell, Lara Flynn Boyle, Lake Bell and F. Murray Abraham.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Niclas Larsson, based on a novel by Jerker Virdborg. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:36

Robert Zemeckis was always a sort of sneaky effects innovator. “Back to the Future” to “Polar Express” “Cast Away” and “Forrest Gump” all had innovative approaches to practical effects, and digital ones.

Making his “Gump” co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright years younger for this time-lapse fantasy is his latest trick.

The cast, the presence of Yes music, the upbeat and hopeful “I’ve Seen All Good People” in the trailer give off a strong “boomer” vibe.

Paul Bettany, Michelle Dockery and Kelly Reilly also star in a story embracing the magic of a place for different families in widely different eras, people in love, present, in the moment, “Here.”

Nov. 15.

A new acquaintance picks up on Cora’s Achilles heel right off the bat. Or does he? Is her problem really just “You can’t read the room?”

Strangers and old friends alike cannot help but ask the obvious of singer-songwriter — “What is WRONG with you?”

As Cora makes every conversation antactless cringe, every introduction awkward and every awkward situation more awkward, as she carries herself with greater and greater confidence despite having a singing voice just shy of “unpleasant,” with dippy tunes that might have made the cut for “Phoebe Buffay’s Greatest Hits” on “Friends,” we — like everyone she meets, knows and loves — ponder the same question.

What the hell IS wrong with her?

“Cora Bora” is a laugh-out-loud indie comedy built around the deadpan swagger and musical stylings of Megan Stalter of TV’s “Hacks.”

It’s a tale of “Portlandia” transplanted, briefly, to LA, where Cora has dragged her guitar and her “talent” in search of her big break.

As she sings “What is so important about Portland,” we are puzzled, because she — formerly of Portland’s Maybe Nots — should know. She had her reasons for leaving, and watching her empty out open mike nights and mid-day cafe serenades with her music, “big fish in a small pond situation” isn’t one of those.

She’s in “an open relationship” with her girlfriend back home, which is why she’s always on the make in LA. One hook-up (Thomas Mann) wakes up in the morning, weeping, which tells us how that’s going.

Video calling home to her beloved Justine (Jojo T. Gibbs) just reveals another woman’s underwear, scattered around their house. There’s nothing for it but to go back and see if she can patch things up there. Justine is graduating from grad school, and “that only happens two or three times in a person’s life,” after all. In Portland.

Stalter, dressed-down, plump and proud, carries herself with cockiness about Cora’s allure, not that she’s not above using a fake photo on her Tinder profile.

Cora figuring out Justine has moved on, but not accepting it and never getting the new love Riley’s (Ayden Mayeri) name right doesn’t help. Losing their dog is just more evidence of her dizzy narcissism.

But with Justine, Riley, Cora’s parents (Carrie Armstrong and Darrell Hammond) treating her with kid gloves, and the handsome stranger (Manny Jacinto of “Top Gun: Maverick” and TV’s “The Good Place”) who keeps bumping into her and trying to “help,” we can guess something more than “tone deaf, ill-mannered egomaniac” is going on.

Director Hannah Pearl Utt’s second feature (“Before You Know It” was the first) and “Wonder Valley” screenwriter Rhianon Jones lift their games and are blessed with a cast that can wring every laugh out of the cringey situations and tactless responses, and a star who leans into “amusingly repellent.”

The material and Stalter’s presence in it was good enough to attract Jacinto, Mann, Chelsea Peretti (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), Heather Elizabeth Morris of “Glee,” “Saturday Night Live” alum Hammond, and as the most famous face and tattooed body at a Tinder orgy Cora signs up for, Margaret Cho.

They make the laughs land, and when things take a turn towards the sad, Stalter lets us buy into that, even if it is explained-to-the-point-of-overexplained.

You might not want to swipe right on Cora, probably wouldn’t stay for a second drink at any cafe or bar where she’s playing, and might not get past her overbearing bravado on first meeting. But Stalter & Co. make her a funny, infuriating and unpleasantly empathetic figure, “Portland” quirky no matter where you find her.

Rating: unrated, nudity, drug use, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Megan Stalter, Manny Jacinto, Jojo T. Gibbs, Ayden Mayeri, Thomas Mann, Chelsea Peretti, Darrell Hammond and Margaret Cho

Credits: Directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, scripted by Rhianon Jones. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:31

“Church of Jesus Christ,” maybe of “Latter Day Saints” or maybe not, door-knocking and handing out tracts.

But this dashing older chap might not be the open-to-religion-minded convert that he seems to be.

He will test them, “study” them.

This has “What a horrific hoot” potential. Set to one of the best-known tunes by The Hollies?