Movie Nation

This is what I get for not catching “Garfield” weeks ago.

Missing out on an August 2 release trailer for this adaptation of a Crockett Johnson kiddie book.

Could be cute. Or not.

I didn’t really warm up to “Hit Man,” a glib comedy about a freelance police surveillance technician pressed into service as a fake murderer-for-hire to entrap people conspiring to have someone killed.

Its efforts to find “cute” and “charming” in a romance between this fake killer and a woman who wanted to hire him fall flat. The many disguises and guises trotted out by star and co-writer Glen Powell as a New Orleans assassin didn’t play as funny, even if the “acting” and predicaments his real-life character talked his way out of are amusing.

There’s lots of cloying voice-over narration giving away the interior life of a seriously boring guy, a thoughtful college philosphy professor who treats his moonlighting gig as “field research.” Gary is a philospher, student of human behavior, cat lover and bird feeder. He’s the sort of guy who says, in voice-over, that “hit men don’t exist” in real life.

Outside of the movies. Lots and lots and lots of movies. And, well, outside of the mob.

In better movies than this, and better performances, we “see” this in the character and situations. We don’t have to be “told that” Gary Johnson sees one alter ego, cool and “professional” Ron as “not a thinker. He was a doer.”

The leads — Adria Arjona plays a miserable but beautiful wife who tries to hire her way out of a bad marriage, and “falls” for “Ron” — are merely adequate, and the supporting cast mostly sketched-in, depicted in light but not terribly funny strokes, save for the odd cartoonish New Orleans local yokel.

The “sexy” bits here can’t hold a candle to the steamed heat of such similar films as say, Clooney and J. Lo’s “Out of Sight.”

But this is Powell’s breakout year, starting with “Anyone But You” and that first “New Brad Pitt” headline. And he shows us a little star quality — not a lot, just a little.

Director and co-writer Richard Linklater has done at least one better “true crime” comedy than this — “Bernie.” The director of “Boyhood” almost always gets criticism’s benefit of the doubt, but this is, frankly, a bit of a slog.

Watchable? Sure. Well, close enough. But maybe dial down the “next Brad Pitt” thing.

Rating: R, some violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta and Sanjay Rao.

Credits: Directed by Richard Linklater, scripted by Richard Linklater, and Glen Powell, based on a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

It’s usually only alluded to in TV news coverage of why China is so interested in “developing” Africa with roads and infrastructure and buying up swaths of America or Australia, what Saudi Arabia is up to purchasing land abroad or why Russia “really” covets Ukraine.

But every now and then a fictional feature film comes right out and says what governments won’t, and what journalists are often too timid or under-funded to get at.

If James Bond knows nefarious multinational actors are after arable land and water (“Quantum of Solace”), why isn’t anybody else talking about it?

For “The Grab,” filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite (“Blackfish”) checks in with reporter Nate Halverson and his team at the Center for Investigative Reporting, people who are following tips, digging through data dumps of leaked emails from notorious, shadowy figures, visiting Africa and China and connecting the dots about the great conflict of the “future” that is already joined today.

The world is just now getting past the malevolent oligarchy that was OPEC. Journalist Halverson says we’d better prepare outselves for “FARMPEC.”

“The Grab” is a dogged doc about a complex yet kind of plain-sight-simple subject. When Chinese interests buy much of La Paz County in Arizona, it’s not mere land speculation. They’re pumping water, raising crops on desert land, drying out locals’ wells and shipping their hay and whatever back to China.

When Russia is online recruiting genuine American cowboys to come to a climate-changing Siberia, it’s because Putin thinks they can be the meat provider to the world as the planet warms. When Ukraine responded to the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea by closing off river water to the canal that supplied the peninsula, the ruinous expense of his aggression pushed Putin to try and invade the rest of the country.

When Saudi Arabia and other rich oil states in the Middle East buy land in Africa and America, they’re using their climate-changing profits to insulate them from the next “wars over resources.”

“Whoever needs water and has guns is going to go get it,” a CIA analyst tells us.

Cowperthwaite’s film follows years of this team’s work, the ultimate “follow the money” project that chases down China’s motives for buying Smithfield (pork) Foods, taking ownership of “one in four pigs” in North America.

China loves pork, and the leaders there remember The Great Famine. And unlike American TV news talkers, Chinese communist leadership knows what “inspired” “The Arab Spring” — food shortages and inflation, hungry young people with “nothing to lose” taking to the streets and toppling regimes.

“The Grab” shows us Chinese, Russian, United Arab Emirates and American villains in this shadow war over “food security.” Nabbing mercenary mogul Erik Prince’s emails gives away the game that high profile right wing actors aren’t acting out of nationalist pride. They’re trans-state opportunists properly painted in Bond villain colors. Prince moved beyond his scandal-plagued Blackwater mercenary “contractor” company to run a Frontier Services Group, a Chinese-owned company setting up land acquisition and “security” for oligarchs, far and wide.

Halverson ties this vast rich state vs. poor country conspiracy up and guides Cowperthaite toward CIA, Army, Navy and State Dept. veterans, non-government organization experts, reporters working with him and Holly Irwin, a dismayed county supervisor in La Paz County, Arizona, where decades of “anti regulation” voting by the conservative locals have allowed the Chinese to come in and take all their water from them.

And we meet Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema of Zambia, home to the most coveted land and water in Africa. He’s a Georgetown-educated lawyer who returned to his homeland after graduation to help locals “fight back” against the corrupt officials that sell the land that they own and depend on, but whose ancient legal “deed” standing provides multi-nationals with the opening to vast transfers of land.

“The Grab” is more informative than polemical, and plays as a dry — sometimes suspenseful, often fact-packed — treatment of the subject.

But it isn’t just cautionary, it’s sounding the alarm. It’s not predicting the future, it’s reporting on the present.

And if you aren’t shocked at a turn of events where it has become obvious that “governments are working for corporations” that acquire “food and water security,” well you must know your Bond villains by heart.

Rating: unrated, scenes of street violence, profanity

Cast: Nate Halverson, Holly Irwin, Molly Jahn, Anuradha Mittal, Robert Mitchell, Robert Schoonover, Mara Hvistendahl and  Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

There are many good excuses for a film buff to not “get around to” the Powell & Pressburger production, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.”

It’s almost three hours long, is famous for its sentimentality and cinematic patience in getting round to those sentiments.

But the new David Hinton documentary “Made in England,” basically a filmed Martin Scorsese Master Class on why the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger stood out in their day and still matter now, talked me into at long last getting around to the one WWII Powell and Pressburger film I’d missed, all of them made as the war was raging.

“Blimp” is a mostly soundstage-bound Technicolor spectacle, offering Britons a few hours of escape just after The Blitz, just as the war in Europe was turning into an Allied offensive that would eventually crush if not exterminate fascism.

Inspired by a satiric newspaper comic strip character, a walrus-mustached old fart whose reactionary politics and out of date military acumen were the subject of fun, “Blimp” was a movie Powell and Pressburger made over the objections of much of official Britain at the time, especially Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

But the object of “The 49th Parallel,” “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” “A Canterbury Tale,” “
“A Matter of Life and Death” and “Blimp” was to remind Britain and the world of what “we” were fighting for. Nothing unpatriotic about that.

The debates between “Colonel Blimp” and his pre-war friend, dueling foe and German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff are about the dangers of militarism tied to political fanaticism — cult leader politicians goading the public with race-baiting nationalism, the masses rationalizing “any (murderous) means necessary” to achieve their efforts to dominate and rule. So yes, this 80+ year old saga has something to say to modern audiences.

The story, which has little to do with the comic, is framed in an embarrassing Colonel Blimp debacle.

An eager beaver Army officer (James McKechnie) uses his romantic connection to a female Army driver (Deborah Kerr) to start a war games assault on London six hours early.

It’s to be an Army attack with the WWII “home army,” recruited and armed militiamen — many of them older veterans — relied upon as a last line of defense in the event of an invasion. The war games are intended to simulate “the real thing,” but have a set start time.

“The war starts at midnight!”

Violating that rule allows this officer to storm into a London Turkish baths and seize the elderly officers in charge of the Home Guard, including “Blimp” plump Brigadier Clive “Sugar” Wynne-Candy.

A naked “Blimp” (Roger Livesey) bellows through his mustache at the “impudent” junior officer and drags him into the bathwater for a senior citizen thrashing.

“D’ye KNOW how many WARS I’ve been in?”

That sets up the flashback where we meet the young “Sugar” or “Suggie” Candy, a junior officer fresh out of South Africa’s Boer Wars, 40 years earlier. He’s won the Victoria’s Cross. And acting on his own newspaper-interview notoriety and a friend’s tip from a letter “niece’s governess’s sister,” a governess in Germany, he sets off for a place where “they HATE us” thanks to anti-British German propaganda ginned up by a spy who worked both-sides of that colonial conflict.

One in the Kaiser’s Germany, Candy meets the governess (Kerr, again), and sets out to trip up and taunt Kaunitz the spy (David Ward) in a very public restaurant. And the next thing he and the VERY disapproving local embassy know, he’s been challenged to a duel. He insulted the entire German Army, and German officers of “honor” won’t stand for it. They wear their sabre-cut dueling scars with pride in their increasingly militaristic imperial state.

A draw of lots pits Candy vs. Teutonic Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) through an elaborately explained, protocol-governed duel by “the rules.” And as the two convalesce from their wounds, they become lifelong friends.

That friendship is tested by World War I, and Kretschmar-Schuldorff’s blind patriotism, even in defeat, and by the coming of World War II, by which time one old man has become wise to the threats of military dictatorships even if another still regards war as something of a sport, where “right makes might” when the other side is constantly cheating, killing civilians, introducing poisonous gas and sinking unarmed merchant ships.

A big but not huge Thursday night folded into a robust Friday take and “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” proved there’s still fan interest in pairing 50somethings Will Smith and Martin Lawrence and that what the box office has needed all summer was silly, stupid action comfort food.

A $21 million opening day (plus previews) points towards a $56 million opening (updated via @Thenumbers) weekend for Columbia’s four decade-spanning Miami vice and violence franchise.

No, it’s not very good. Tired, “gassed,” not that funny and not subtle about being not all that funny. But give the people what they want and they show up. No “Chris Rock” jokes, little reference to Florida “politicians,” just two old guys with health problems shooting up South Florida to clear their dead captain’s name.

Porsche product placement pays off.

Warner Brothers senior staff are probably in counseling over this, but their big budget “Furiosa” is falling right off the map. Disney is probably kicking itself for waiting another week to release “Inside/Out 2.” Because a Chris Pratt “Garfield” movie is making bank and now sitting firmly in second place, holding audience in a desert cineplex landscape where it’s the only family film in play.

“Garfield” will clear another $10 million+, which should push it over $70 million at the domestic box office by midnight Sunday…Tuesday at the latest.

“Ride or Die,” which isn’t doing as well as the last “Bad Boys” installment, may cure some of what ails this year’s box office. But horror woes continue as a Dakota Fanning fright flick, “The Watchers,” is bombing. A $7 million weekend is further evidence that the the frights-centric thriller audience has all but vanished. Bad reviews and the unsavory M. Night’s daughter nepo-baby gossip can’t have helped.

When the reviews for your horror film are far worse on Rotten Tomatoes than Metacritic, that’s a sign younger reviewers are reacting to something beyond the novelty and quality of the production.

There was a time when every horror title could be relied on clearing $10, with the big franchises opening in the upper $20s. It’s not happening this year.

Ryan Reynolds’ and John Krasinski’s “IF” pulled a few extra ticket sales out of its hat on its FOURTH weekend to edge “Watchers” for third place. Another $8 million.

With the latest “Planet of the Apes” surpassing the previous “Planets of the Apes” at the box office this week, it’s possible “Furiosa” won’t crack the top five. Reviews don’t matter to an audience that has decided something is damaged goods. They never showed up.

Just as they never really did for “The Fall Guy” which seems headed out of the top ten.

So this summer’s dumb, gonzo shark movie is French, and is about endangered sharks “evolving” and taking their “swim-eat-procreate” act up the River Seine to Paris.

“Under Paris” lives down to that “dumb” label, with diver after diver suiting up, first scene to last, before our “expert” (Bérénice Bejo of “The Artist” and “A Knight’s Tale”) blurts out the obvious…in French or dubbed into English.

“There’s no point in diving and taking this RISK!”

Shark specialist Sophia blurts this long after she’s leapt in to save her husband and her “team” tracking a tagged mako shark in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The water is crimson, and littered with plastic. And she’s seen the freak-out on video when four divers are attacked. But in she goes, and without a tank.

Other divers will make this mistake again and again in this heartless, pitiless, gory and cautionary thriller. It’s got a couple of killer sequences of shark-attack mayhem in the Seine and the Catacombs beneath Paris, some arresting underwater shots — but little else to recommend it.

Characters are sketched-in, with villains in the usual places — officials in the River Brigade of the police force (Aurélia Petit), a “cover this up” mayor (Anne Marivin) who wants the big Paris triathlon to go on, sharks be damned.

And the picture’s pretty harsh on dreamy-eyed environmentalists, too. Activist Mika (Léa Léviant) and her peers, locally and internationally, are portrayed as misguided shark lovers.

“They won’t hurt anyone!”

Say what now? “She’s a SHARK, not a poodle!”

Sophia is shocked to see endangered sharks in an increasingly sickly ocean start to evolve, grow huge and adapt to their threatened world.

Traumatized by the loss of her lover and her team, she must join an intrepid river cop (Nassim Lyes) to try and prevent a tragedy. Ok, more tragedies. Well, let’s leave it at “Even BIGGER tragedies.” Because that’s a hallmark of this particular “cautionary” thriller. The body count is epic.

There’s nothing novel or new about “Edge of Everything.” But for half a century, every generation has needed its cinematic essay on growing up in a heedless rush.

Comedy or tragedy, cartoonish or cautionary, “Sixteen Candles” or “thirteen,” “Edge of Seventeen,” or “Kids,” film audiences are forever getting updates on “kids these days,” what they’re into and what might shock parents and those far removed from parenting about how “early” they’re “growing up.”

This Marin County coming-of-age drama is about a 14 year-old freshman, Abby, who loses her mother, comes to live with her Dad and his much-younger girlfriend and kind of goes off the rails as she falls under the influence of kids with less supervision, whose parents failed to warn them away from the dangerous pitfalls of that age.

It’s almost quaint in its genre conventionality, as nothing here has even a hint of “shocking” about it. It’s not timely or topical enough to wrestle with this generation’s gender fluidity fixation, for instance. But good performances by the teens, especially star Sierra McCormick, and a few good scenes about parenting in a “follow your bliss” self-absorbed era almost recommend it.

McCormick, of “The Vast of Night” and “VFW,” in her mid-20s and thus a bit mature to be playing fourteen-going-on-fifteen, is Abby, who has just lost her mother as we meet her. She’s safeguarding her Mom’s last voice mails, taking care as she moves her goldfish to her father’s house and soldiering through a Jewish funeral where the more outspoken relatives are muttering their contempt for her Dad (Jason Butler Harner of “Ozark”), who left her mom for a succession of younger women, the latest of whom, Leslie (Sabina Friedman-Seitz) lives with him.

Abby and Leslie engage in a simmering undeclared war of judgements, lies and insults. Abby starts acting-out by stealing from Leslie.

She’s trying to keep her distance from her dad, who we gather hasn’t been “there” for her in years. At least she’s got her classmates, Lena, Hannah and Sarah (Nadezhda Amé, Dominique Gayle and Emily Robinson), to keep her ninth grade moorings. Or so one would hope.

But Abby’s experiments begin with Youtubing how to make a bong out of an apple, buying pot and kind of nudging her still-kids besties to experiment with her. When they prove slow on the uptake, the wild child Caroline (Ryan Simpkins) grabs her attention in their favorite pizza joint. An unrestrained rebel who talks back to adults, she keeps clear liquor in a disposable water bottle and her eyes peeled for that next buzz, prank or boy to cross her field of view.

Abby is fascinated and more than willing to show how “cool” she is to her friends by taking up with out-of-control Caroline and joining in her partying, tipsy navel piercing or sex with older boys.

Actually, Abby is more on the sidelines for that last “You need to lose your virginity” benchmark. But everything else tangles up her emotions and misdirects her moral compass, wrecking relationships and causing her inexperienced-at-parenting father to resort to at-home drug-tests to rein her in.

Gassed, winded and showing its/their age, those “Bad Boys” are back — wise-cracking, trash-talking, gun-slinging and coping with their own mortality for “Bad Boys: Ride or Die.”

The franchise is almost 30 years old and its action stars are well into their AARP years. Closing in on 60, the phrase “I’m a grown-ass man” loses its comic sting.

Michael Bay’s no longer involved in this sassy Miami cops saga, although he’s got a cameo in their latest. Replacement directors Adil El Arbi and Billal Fallah handle the over-the-top shoot-outs and brawls well enough. “Ride or Die” features a few preliminary fights/shoot-outs, no chases, a helicopter hijacking and a closed gator theme park finale.

But the spark is gone, the amusement in Martin Lawrence’s strained mugging and eye-bugging is played. When he says “I GOT this,” we still don’t believe him. It’s just that it’s no longer funny.

The story this time starts with Detective Mike (Smith) getting married, a few moments of paying tribute to their late captain (Joe Pantoliano), a Marcus (Lawrence) heart attack and serio-comic dip into the after life.

He gets a warning from their late captain — killed in the last film — and a sense that “It’s not your time” means “You can’t kill me.”

That can’t be contributing to Mike’s sudden penchant for “panic attacks” that make him freeze in the clinches.

Eric Dane plays the new “cartel” enforcer who intends to test that “You can’t kill me” theory. Framing up the late captain is a start. Mike’s assassin son (Jacob Scipio), introduced in “Bad Boys For Life,” might be the one guy who can ID this new mob enforcer. And he’s in prison.

With a state’s attorney (Ioan Gruffud) now engaged to their new boss (Paola Núñez) and a scandal erupting over dead Captain Howard’s corruption, the FBI and U.S. Marshals involved and that dead captain sending them a video pointing towards who might be behind all this, things could get complicated.

Only they don’t.

The Chris Bremner script is cut-and-paste generic, the chemistry between our two stars is a tad forced and bringing in Tiffany Haddish as an unfiltered strip club owner doesn’t up the comic ante enough to make this pay off.

Any nostalgia that helped sell their last outing is gone baby gone.

Lawrence trying to lead Smith in one more verse of the title tune is just sad, although a scene where he slaps Smith several times to get over his latest panic attack has a “That’s for Chris Rock” vibe, which is about as edgy as this weary stumble down the mean streets (not the beaches) gets.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity, “sexual references”

Cast: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Joe Pantoliano, Jacob Scipio, Tiffany Haddish, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Ioan Gruffudd, Eric Dane and Paola Núñez.

Credits: Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, scripted by Chris Bremner. A Columbia Pictures release.

Running time: 1:55

I think there were trailers to three hit man movies in a row before my screening of “Bad Boys.”

This one stars Dave Bautista, serves up Sofia Boutella as the love interest who doesn’t have a clue what her man mountain does for a living.

Think a medical diagnosis will change his work ethic?

Terry Crews plays a guy sent to him. And so on.

“Coming soon.” Looks like a movie we’ve seen before. Several times.

It’s hard for any film buff to believe that the famed British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ever went out of fashion. The co-writers and producers, with Powell doing the directing and Pressburger taking the lead on the screenplays, produced a near twenty year run of classics that fill any cinephile’s bucket list.

“The Red Shoes” and “49th Parallel,” “Black Narcissus,” “I Know Where I Am Going” and “The Tales of Hoffmann” are merely the best-known titles in their ouevre, films that advanced the art and set the bar on what a World War II drama should be about (“What are we fighting for?”), filmmakers who produced the three most gorgeous films made in the lush, over-saturated heightened reality of Technicolor.

And yet the two two, making films as “The Archers,” had their flops, their tussles with production companies and their critical misses. Listen to actors heard here reading the brutal reviews of Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” or marvel at the kinky low-budget picture he ended his career with, “Age of Consent,” and you get it. “Ahead of their time” or “out of touch,” they all but disappeared for decades.

With “Made in England,” British documentarian David Hinton, who made the definitive doc on the making of “Gone With the Wind,” aimed his camera at Powell & Pressburger’s biggest fan, Martin Scorsese. And “presenter” Scorsese — narrating and appearing on camera — makes it both a personal essay on what their films meant to him, how he experienced them as a boy and student and the ways he’s incorporated their themes and styles into his own work, and a Master Class in understanding and appreciating the cinema of two of the medium’s greatest innovators.

Scorsese, who befriended his idol Powell as a young filmmaker, breezes through brief biographies of each man, devoting most of this two hour+ love letter into a dissection of their work — the films themselves, generously sampled from prints Scorsese himself had a hand in restoring to their former glory before putting them back before the public.

We see clips of Powell’s maturing early work — he got his start in movies working for a French studio where MGM’s Rex Ingram shot silent films in Europe — and note the “leap forward” from programmers like the striking “The Edge of the World” to perhaps the greatest “propaganda film” of World War II, the gloriously entertaining and nuanced “The 49th Parallel,” followed by “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and “A Canterbury Tale” once he teamed with Hungarian immigrant Pressburger.

After the war, they plunged into Technicolor for “Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes” and “The Tales of Hoffman.”

And when they filmed something in black and white, it still stood out from the crowd, a non-“noir” drama about alcoholism, “The Small Back Room” or the simple, scenic and evocative “anti-materialism” romance “I Know Where I’m Going,” which Scorsese labels “one of the most magnificent love stories ever told.”

Scorsese connects their films visually and thematically to his own, embraces Powell’s “All art is one” art ethos, which drove him to reinvent the ballet movie with “The Red Shoes” and do the same for opera with “The Tales of Hoffmann.”

In their trio of Technicolor masterpieces, Powell turned “each shot” into “a production unto istelf,” innovating the “total cinema” of acting, lighting, costuming, editing, music and dance into a new way of storytelling.