Movie Nation

Brian De Palma was the undisputed king of thrillers in his heyday, with a run of hits, classics and near-misses that began with “Carrie” and ended when his take on Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” became one of the greatest flops of its era.

But “Carrie,” “The Fury” and “Dressed to Kill,” “Scarface,” “The Untouchables” and “Casualties of War” was a spectacular run of critically-acclaimed successes. A filmmaker who cultivated a “New Hitchhock” reputation by paying showy homage to the master had most film fans ready to name him the replacement “Master of Suspense.”

“Blow Out” (1981) was a rare box office failure in the middle of that run, with audiences perhaps not inclined to take star John Travolta that seriously — yet — and slow to connect to a movie with hints of The Kennedy Assassination, Chappaquiddick and Watergate in its plotting.

The nods to Hitchcock were still there. But here, he’s more directly borrowing from Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up,” a ’60s New Wave thriller about a photographer who accidentally captures a murder in the background of a snapshot in the park.

Reviews were decent at the time of release, but in recent years “Blow Out” — about a horror movie soundman who captures audio of a political assassination via a sniper shooting out a politician’s tire — has come to be regarded as perhaps De Palma’s masterpiece.

As I originally saw it as a college student all about public radio and “getting great nat (natural) analog sound,” it’s always been my favorite. Seen now, with its retro technology of celluloid “film” and audio recorded via NAGRA portable reel-to-reel recorders on quarter inch magnetic tape, which was then sliced with razor blades and spliced onto mix tapes for a sound track, it’s an adoring relic for a near forgotten craft.

I remember being dazzled back then. I don’t know if it tops “Dressed to Kill (1980)” or the cultishly adored “Scarface (1983).” But it’s decently-acted, tough, stylish and pitiless, and stands out for a lot more than its pioneering Steadicam (hand-held heavy 35mm film cameras) and famed two minute “360 degree pan” of an editing lab as Travolta’s character frantically searches for “evidence” that has been “magnetically” erased.

Travolta is Jack Terry, a soundman in the horror B-movie market in Philadelphia, a cynic who is sent in search of a more perfect “scream” by his longtime director, and for “fresh” sound effects of wind and the like.

That’s how he’s under that bridge late at night, with its riverside walkway, taping wind and owls and frogs and canoodling lovers. That’s where his all-hearing (exaggerated) “shotgun mike” picks up the sound of a rifle shot just before a sedan blows a tires and careens into the river.

Jack tries to rescue the driver, but finds only a woman (Nancy Allen), gasping for breath as the car sinks. Jack saves her. But in the hospital, this simple heroic act is overshadowed by the dead driver of the car.

“That stiff on the stretcher was probably the next president of the United States!”

Jack comforts the sedated Sally (Allen), and then finds himself strong-armed by the aid (John McMartin) of the dead governor and rival to an unpopular president. The girl “was never there.” Jack won’t “talk.” Etc.

But with her cloud of curls and kewpie doll voice, Sally is irrestible to Jack. As he tries to connect with her, their pact of silence comes under question. The cops and politicos might be willing to hush this all up. The shooter (John Lithgow at his most menacing)? He’s sure to be fretting over “loose ends.”

De Palma allegedly based this James Bond wannabe on Nixon’s aid G. Gordon Liddy, and Lithgow oozes menace and an almost mechanical, on-the-spectrum idea of tidiness. He will kill a few women (starting with the accidental murder of the wrong person), convince the media there’s a “Liberty Bell” serial killer on the loose, and get around to Sally. Eventually.

Jack? He’s smart enough to see the rising threat level and the dangers of anonymity and keeping the story quiet.

The twists are more conventional than Michael Caine in a dress (“Dressed to Kill”), with Dennis Franz as a sleazy private eye, John Aquino as a lazy, paid-to-be-disinterested cop. Jack’s flashback-told back story includes a stretch working — via secret recordings — to help catch crooked cops.

Travolta and Allen, who was married to De Palma at the time, reteam for the first time since “Carrie” to good effect, even if Allen’s character is pretty much a caricature of a “dim” Debby.

The set-pieces they’re hurled through, a Jeep chase through a parade, a mad dash to save a wired-for-sound Sally from the assassin, still pop.

But what blew young film fans away back in the day is the same thing cinephiles still embrace about this homage to Antonioni and Analog. The film’s technique is packed with sizzle, from those hand-held sequences and 360 pans to split screens and split focus (diopter lens) capturing an actor in the background or forground, and something caught in extreme close-up in the other half of the lens-captured image.

Film buffs are often techno nerds, diving into how Kubrick did this, Lucas did that or Hitchcock managed his effects in a simpler “in camera” or “practical” effects era. We went nuts over “Blow Out” when it came out, with or without the fun, inside-film-fandom “Blow Up” connection.

But rewatching it after many years, I had my own flashbacks about my initial reaction. The picture explodes out of the gate, starts to slow as the conspiracy becomes obvious, and peaks at the one hour mark, where that famous 360 degree circling pan turns up.

Everything between there and the Big Finish is relatively forgettable, low-heat “unraveling the plot” exposition and the like.

“Blow Out” is still great, still a classic and still has a bit of the sizzle it came into the world with. But as a pulse-pounding picture, De Palma lets the air out of that tire too soon, and takes a little too long to pump it back in.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz, John Aquino and John McMartin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brian De Palma. An MGM release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:47

Interesting subject for Angel Studios, those “Sound of Freedom” jackpot winners, to put out in an election year.

But remembering the politics of their fan base, they’ve timidly decided to release this AFTER the election, on Nov. 22.

There’ve been documentaries and even other feature films on Diedrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian hero martyred by the Third Reich.

That’s because Germans and the rest of the world remember a selfless preacher znd theologian who stood up to racism, xenophobia, genocide and other crimes against humanity.

We rarely remember the toadies who joined in the hate-mongering Nazis from the pulpit. There were plenty of those, then and now. Or cowardly film distributors who mute the message of an anti fascist preacher by holding their film’s release until after the mob has already voted.

Jonas Dassler has the title role in a film written and directed by the screenwriter of “The Professor and the Madman” and “Sully,” Todd Komarnicki.” This could be good. Holding it until after the election isn’t good.

I thought there was a newer trailer to this, as I saw one among the previews before catching “Summer  Camp.” When I find it I will replace this one.

Yeah, sure. I still say “Furiosa” is an over-rated, ponderous and repetitive action epic, barely original enough to be worth your time.

But are you REALLY waiting to see this spectacle on your teevee or “other mobile video device?”

That means that on this, the first weekend of June and the weekend after the Memorial Day opening of “Furiosa” and “Garfield,” that the latest iteration of the animated cat will BEAT “Furiosa” at the box office?

That’s how it’s shaping up (per deadline.com). A poor turnout Memorial Day is followed by a box office bottoming out this weekend, for movie theaters and for “Furiosa.” “Garfield,” voiced by Chris Pratt this time out, edged “Furiosa” Friday and is expected to best it Sat. and Sunday — a $14 million or so to $10.7 million humiliation for George Miller, and for Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth.

It’s a family film, kid-oriented. So it is sure to outperform “Furiosa” all the way through June. As “Furiosa” is on track to not finish second but THIRD at the box office (behind “IF”), the shame deepens.

This should not stand. If you’ve ever seen a “Mad Max” movie, have any curiosity at all about “Furiosa,” make your plans. Get out and go see the movie. Warners will lose its shirt over it, otherwise.

“IF” is sticking around, holding audience and may earn as much as $10 million this weekend (updated, $10.8).

“Furiosa” is on tap to pull in $10.7 million, third place. Nobody’s going is turning into “Nobody went.”

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is also holding onto screens and audience, another $8.8 million there.

“The Fall Guy” cleared $4 million plus and stayed in the Top Five.

“The Strangers: Chapter 1” cleared $3.3 and came in sixth

An anime outing, “Haikyu! The Dumpster Battle,” will earn $3 and will not crack the top five.

IFC’s wide (ish) release “In a Violent Nature” is doing pretty well, but won’t crack the top five ($2.2) either.

It’s no surprise that Ron Howard turns out to be the perfect filmmaker to conjure up an affectionate, admiring and moving documentary on the Man behind the Muppets, Jim Henson.

“Jim Henson: Idea Man,” gets at the creative mind, the work process and the work ethic of a Walt Disney level innovator and entertainer. This sweet, nostalgic and thorough documentary taps into Henson’s wide-ranging curiosity and lifetime of invention, new challenges and collaboration.

There’s a special emphasis on his wife Jane’s role in that Big Idea — the puppet/marionettes they named Muppets, and on Frank Oz, his employee and protege and work “other half.”

And Howard takes care to find just the right people to sing Henson’s praises — EGOT winner Rita Moreno, one of the most memorable “Muppet Show” guests, Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, who as a child actress co-starred in Henson’s film fantasy “Labyrinth,” and the great Orson Welles, a “genius” of his generation who interviewed Henson for a failed pilot for a TV chat show, and who might have been the first to label Henson a “genius.”

Welles also joked about Henson’s resemblence to “Rasputin,” which fits in with Howard’s other agenda for the film, playing up the sense of fun that drove everything Henson did. There are a lot of laughs in this documentary, all of them provided by Henson’s puppet creations.

What’s freshest about the film is exploring Henson’s determination to experiment, innovate and take big financial risks on his Next Big Thing. He made experimental films — animated and playful live action shorts — almost all of his life. He planned a wildly cinematic kaleidoscopic chain of ’60s discoteques before “Sesame Street” came calling. He did full-body puppet costume screen tests for a possible Broadway show.

“When you get an idea,” Henson narrated in one experimental short, “you have to look at it from every direction.” This, in turn “gives you other ideas.” Henson had a lot of ideas and, collaborating with others, took the time to explore them.

“His inner life must have been sparkling,”marvels Oz, who knew him better than most.

“Idea Man” skips through Henson’s Mississipi childhood (son of a Dept. of Agriculture agronomist) and his childhood fascination with this new gadget, television. As a college freshman (as the University of Maryland), a call went out for a puppeteer on a local Washington, D.C. TV station. Henson, fresh out of a puppetry class at university, grabbed the job.

Months later, he was dead at 53. “Idea Man” takes pains not to blame Henson’s Christian Science upbringing for his reluctance to see a doctor about the strep infection he neglected until it killed him.

That connects to the film’s real subtext. Real “geniuses” are often workaholics. Henson’s puppetry was grueling work, discussed in detail by Oz, who voiced and performed Miss Piggy and scores of other characters, and shown in rare behind the scenes footage of Henson crawling into a space underneath the hull of that flat-bottomed swamp rowboat that we see Kermit the Frog row in “The Muppet Movie” — a boat sitting in a real swamp.

Henson didn’t live long. But his restless mind and energy were devoted to sweet-natured and sometimes challenging entertainment — he never wanted to be a “children’s puppeteer” — that he produced with almost every waking second. “Idea Man” reminds us that the ideas he explored live on after him.

Rating: PG

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Fran Brill, Brian Henson, Lisa Henson, Cheryl Henson, Orson Welles, Bernie Brillstein, Rita Moreno and Jennifer Connelly.

Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, scripted by Mark Monroe. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:48

A flawed pop icon earns a flawed but serviceable bio-pic in “Back to Black,” an Amy Winehouse portrait built around a nuanced take on the star and uncanny vocal impersonation by Marisa Abela.

Abela, who was “Teen Talk Barbie” in last summer’s film phenomenon, looks more like Britney Spears (a shortish muscular dancer’s build) but matches Winehouse’s distinct tone and phrasing in song and in her unpolished, working class speech. She vamps up Winehouse’s blowsy personality and lets us see the vulnerability underneath a style icon who brought the “beehive” hairdo back and who transformed on the stage to a confessional, defiant street tough who shamelessly put all her business in her songs.

The film? It leaves a lot to be desired. Matt Greenhalgh’s script doesn’t utterly upend what the Oscar-winning 2015 documentary “Amy” suggested about her life and untimely end. But it does place the blame for her self-destruction at 27 on Winehouse herself, a mercurial personality and addict who never hid that fact, was hounded by the British press for it and paid the ultimate price.

Much respect to documentary filmmaker Asif Kapadia’s reasons for finger pointing at other “villains” in Winehouse’s life. Casting Britain’s best character actor, Eddie Marsan, as her villified father Mitch, pretty much removes the simplistic view of Winehouse’s chief “enabler” narrative and moves him more into a supportive working class dad guise, a character more in the background as she writes her own tragedy. Marsan, like Kapadia, has his reasons.

But “revisionism” aside, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film frustrates in other ways. Winehouse’s creative process is glimpsed in only a scene or so. We know how she composed “Rehab” and “Back to Black” by “living” them. But they’re introduced abuptly.

We see her transition from singer-songwriter, accompanying herself on guitar, to Billie Holiday of her day, an R-rated, addiction-admitting chanteuse fronting a big band, a singer whose greatest obsession was the addict Blake (Jack O’Connell) she fell for.

She was an alcoholic who boasted about it from the stage before achieving her greatest fame.

“LY-dies don’t SIP,” she cracks onstage at one point. “We GULP.”

And we meet her biggest influence, her ex-jazz singer “nan,” played with heart and great empathy by Lesley Manville.

“You’ve got an eye for ‘bad boys,'” her grandmother scolds. And so she did. Having Amy dismiss the offer of a line of cocaine from the cocky charmer Blake with “Class A drugs are for mugs” seems a reach.

But most of the other characters in Amy’s story — from record execs to managers and bandmates — the enablers of her myopic Camden Town (north London) world, are barely sketched in.

“Back to Black” manages to move us, showing us her triumph and leaning into her unmoored heartbreak at the end of a violent (she was the more violent one, here) marriage. But the biopic skips over much, letting Abela’s wondrous impersonation of Winehouse’s singing and stage presence do the heavy lifting.

There’s joy in these performances, and genuine charm in her “meet cute” with Blake. And the alterations to the accepted narrative of her downfall are challenging and illuminating, if a tad jarring.

But like a lot of musical bio-pics, from maudlin Whitney Houston stories to the overrated Oscar winners “La Vie En Rose” and the much more fun “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the filmmakers limit us to “the greatest hits.” And that’s a far from complete or wholly satisfying immersion in this life and her world.

Rating: R, some violence, drug and alcohol abuse, nudity, sex, smoking

Cast: Marisa Abela, Eddie Marsan, Jack O’Connell and Lesley Manville

Credits: Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, scripted by
Matt Greenhalgh. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:02

“Good will” is something an actor earns over the course of a long and storied career. It’s what makes a movie star, and what makes movie stars “bankable.”

And it’s the currency such stars spend when what they give their audience isn’t the film they might have hoped it would be.

Alfre Woodard, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Kathy Bates and Dennis Haysbert burn through some of their supply of good will on “Summer Camp,” an all-star comedy with AARP casting appeal and nothing else going for it.

We’ve loved Oscar winners Keaton and Bates, Oscar nominee Woodard, Emmy winner Levy and Golden Globe nominee Haysbert over decades of work. And as painful as this humorless-if-not-quite-heartless Castille Landon film is, we love them no less for signing on to do it.

OK, maybe a little less.

Perhaps writer-director Landon served Irish coffee at the pitch meetings. I don’t know. But this script is as dull as the direction is lifeless. She got her picture made with a winning “name” cast, but judging from the results, that’s the best you can say for her. The players deserved better.

Bates plays a “self-help guru” named Ginny Moon who apparently never got over being slightly older and wiser than the friends she made at Camp Pinnacle in Flat Rock, N.C., fifty years before.

Now she’s rounded up her two besties from those days, research scientist and entrepreneur Nora ( Keaton) and nurse, mother and grandmother Mary (Woodard), piled them into her book-and-lecture tour bus — Ginny’s books are the “Get Your S— Together” “boxed set” — and dragged them back to the place they all met.

The Camp Pinnacle reunion brings them and others their age back to N.C., where presumably they’ll all show how much they’ve matured, or how little they’ve changed.

“The Pretty Committee” of mean girls is still led by Jane (Beverly D.Angelo), with Judy and Evelyn (Maria Howell, Victoria Rowell) still in her posse.

“Whipsmart” camp hunk Stevie D. (Levy) still rolls with hunky Tommy (Haysbert), only now Stevie’s driving a 1960s Austin Healey and retired, and Tommy’s winding down a career as a globe-trotting surgeon.

Nothing and I mean NOTHING is done with the whole “mean girls” thing. The guys are here to present romantic possibilities for a couple of the ladies, and even that earns short shrift.

Bullying Ginny — who changed her name and got famous — micronamanages, criticizes and “fixes” one and all to such a degree that clothes-horse, widowed workaholic Nora and unhappily-married and put-upon Mary can’t make any headway with new flames.

The serious bits work better than the strained and depressing comical ones, and even they don’t entertain or enlighten. Woodard comes off the most “real,” her trademark. Levy is the least funny he’s ever been, thanks to a script his son should have taken a pass at. Describing someone as “still smells like patchoulie and lighter fluid” must be an improvised line, because it’s almost funny.

Bates grates and Keaton shows off her timeless beauty, fashion sense and favorite stunt doubles in a “camp” comedy where archery, river rafting, ziplining and pottery are played for “laughs.”

Nicole Richie is a camp counselor, blink and you’ll miss Arielle Kebbel. I did, but she’s in the closing credits. And Josh Peck is here as an ever-smiling hapless camp counselor who serves up most of the film’s pratfalls. Which aren’t funny.

The opening, featuring colorless voice-over narration by Bates, is tepid but competent. The finale is so abrupt that you’d think an irate studuio exec just shut off the lights. And nothing that comes between changes the sad “bad to worse” trajectory that “Summer Camp” was almost certainly fated to be.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, Alfre Woodard, Eugene Levy, Dennis Haysbert and Beverly D’Angelo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Castille Landon. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:31

Keaton is having a little renaissance thanks to the “Book Club” franchise.

Nobody in this picture will ever go out of style.

This “Summer Camp” reunion adds Oscar winner Kathy Bates and the luminous Alfre Woodard, along with Eugene Levy and the perpetually smiling Josh Peck and throws in a little white (ish) water kayaking.

I’m going just to ID whatever Levy’s character is driving into camp –a flat windscreen roadster. Ferrari? AC Cobra? Healey?

Two competing “cleaners” in the parlance of hit man movies — and those who tidy up bloody messes — are forced to work together in this dark Action comedy slated for Sept 20 release.

Great chemistry, as always, dry put downs and eye rolls.

And Amy Ryan co stars.

Writer director Jon Watts did “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” Considering Clooney as director has kind of lost the thread…

What’s not to love?

Some years back, there was a Hollywood dustup created when Clint Eastwood released a couple of films about the World War II Battle for Iwo Jima, one from the U.S. point of view, featuring scores of Marines who took part, and another seen through the eyes of the Japanese, most of whom died defending it.

“Where are the Black” participants in the battle, rival director Spike Lee wanted to know? Eastwood dismissed Lee’s complaint, saying “there were no Black soldiers” on Iwo Jima. Actually Clint, and your fellow whitewashing conservatives,  there were.

I was thinking of that dust-up when watching “Erased: WW2’s Heroes of Color,” an eye-opening new limited series from The National Geographic Channel. Lee was ahead of the curve, referring to what Eastwood did as “erasing” Black participation from his WWII epic.

As the series details sometimes years-long efforts to cover-up, minimize and dismiss heroic deeds like those of seaman Doris Miller, Major Akbar Khan, D-Day medic Waverly D. Woodson and others, the name of it was changed from “The Color of Victory” to “Erased.”

“More than eight million people of color” — Indians, Pakistanis, Asians, Africans and African Americans — “served with the Allies,” Elba narrates in the opening to every episode of this excellent series. “My grandfather was one of these men.”

Like every other World War II documentary and doc series, the producers treat us to newsreel footage, reenactments, archival interviews with the participants, all of whom have now passed away, experts — authors and academics — and maps. But a novel touch here is that we hear from descendants of these heroes, talking about family lore, what their father, uncle or grandfather told their families, with actors reading from letters, diaries and memoirs by the men whose story is little known.

Episodes of this series focus on British Royal Indian Army participants in the Battle of France, which ended with the evacuation of “Dunkirk,” Black U.S. Navy mess attendants (cooks, servants) who saved sailors and rose to the combat occasion at “Pearl Harbor,” Black soldiers who went ashore as barrage balloon deployers or medics on “D-Day,” June 6, 1944, and the original Black Panthers, The 761st Tank Battalion, the first Black tank battalion in the U.S. Army, which fought in (racist) Gen. Patton’s Third Army in “The Battle of the Bulge.”

Elba, also a producer in the series, weighs in with opinions in his narration, noting how rare film footage was of any of these men or their combat units — a parade of Black soldiers in a British town, still photos, men in the background of other shots — and that much of what is reported in this film had to be dug out of “forgotten” archives.

But some of the historians seen here, and the filmmakers, went to the effort of digging this up. And while we might know of the heroics of seaman Miller, who took over an anti-aircraft gun on the U.S.S. West Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941 — “Dorie” Miller was portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the 2001 epic “Pearl Harbor” — few of us realize the efforts to deny him and others the commendations they deserved for their actions.

Miller was the first Black sailor to earn The Navy Cross, but many military historians feel he was denied the Medal of Honor by a racist Navy and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. Miller wasn’t alone. And the Navy wasn’t the only racist arm of the armed forces during the war. Just getting into combat was a civil rights struggle all its own.

“They didn’t want to see Black soldiers (and sailors) have the same access to heroism,” Dartmouth historian Matthew Delmont reminds us. Service members of color earning medals in combat didn’t fit the British or American official “narrative” of the struggle, then and for decades afterwards.

Many of the American soldiers trained at bases in the segregated, white supremacist South. Guys like tanker Johnnie Stevens, “our Humphrey Bogart,” one historian, referencing Bogie’s tank battle movie “Sahara,” says — “tough guy” — had to weather that racism before ever boarding ship for Europe.

Stevens’ diary noted that “We’re treated better here” (in Europe) “than back home.”

As one descendent and a few historians questioned in the series note, the men enlisting in these services — in India (and future Pakistan) and the U.S. — weren’t just looking for work away so that they could send money back home. They were seeking acceptance and advancement. “By serving, they could help change things.”

They did. The World War II generation of men of color returned to India to lobby for and help win its independence, and came back to America to integrate the armed forces, end lynching and stake their claim to equal rights.

Focusing on three or four service members in each episode, the series beautifully personalizes their experience. They and their families are quite moving as we hear old audio tapes of these “Greatest Generation” veterans recall their service.

There’s also an entire separate National Geographic documentary about the famed “Real Red Tails,” the “Tuskegee Airmen” fighter pilots of the European theater of conflict.

“Erased” doesn’t reinvent the WWII combat documentary. Family members aren’t the most reliable and objective keepers of memory and an ancestor’s place in it.

But “Erased” more than makes its case that this corner of World War II history has been downplayed, ignored or buried. After this, there’s no excuse for being as uninformed as Clint Eastwood once was about the vast cross-section of society that took up arms against fascism the last time it reared its racist head.

Rating: unrated, combat footage

Cast: Narrated by Idris Elba, with Dr. Diya Gupta, Professor Leah Wright Riguer, Dr. Ghee Bowman, Jack Gill, Professor Marcus Cox, Abdul Sulaiman, Doreen Stevens, Professor Matthew Delmont, Kyle Reese Bell, Wayne Robinson, Professor Yohoru Williams, Joshua Riley and others.

Credits: Directed by Adeyemi Michael. Premieres on the National Geographic Channel June 3.

Running time: Four episodes, @46 minutes each, plus commercials

Dunno. Could be worse. Could be…mimes. French mimes.

David Earl, Natalie Palamides, Amy De Bhrún, Fionn Foley, Tadhg Murphy, Ivan Kaye and Shane is JAMES Joyce in the End Times farce from the Emerald Isle.

June 14.