Movie Nation

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

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.