Movie Nation

At one point, before his health issues, Val Kilmer would’ve been the perfect choice to star in a picture like “Waltzing with Brando.” He knew the guy, is a gifted mimic, and has the same air of self-seriousness and disdain for the pose of “acting” as Mr. Method.

But Billy Zane brings a “Handsome Movie Star Gone to Seed but Still Striking to Look At” vibe to this “character,” at least in this first shot from the set.

“Waltzing With Brando” is about the Oscar winner’s “eco-experiment” living compound set up on an “uninhabitable” island in Tahiti. Late career Marlon Brando, not late life Brando.

Zane’s quixotic, keep-working-after-stardom-fades career gives him insight into the star, and going a bit barrel chested if not bloated gives him a chance to show off the last years of Brando’s sex appeal, a big part of his star power, which was driven by intensity, looks and brooding charisma.

“Tapeheads” and “My Dinner with Jimi” director and co-writer Bill Fishman isn’t a household name, so the entire affair may be cut-rate enough to never merit much of a release. But I am intrigued.

Action-packed, cloying and, considering the subject matter, kind of stupid, at least we can take comfort in the fact that Jennifer Lopez throws herself into the exoskeleton/AI sci-fi thriller “Atlas.” And not just because she’s the title character.

OK, maybe that explains her commitment — professionalism, an actress who always seems to be the first or second call start-up film distributors make (CBS Films, etc.) recognizing her good fortune and making the best of a middling project.

But why does every J Lo picture seem like a vanity project? She’s over 50 and playing “39,” coiffed and made up to the max, so much so that Smith, her AI in-armor “assistant” as she hunts for a rogue robot who led an Earth-wide AI “rebellion,” feels compelled to take note of it.

“Vanity is in fact one of your defining flaws,” Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan) declares as our heroine tries to get the handle of this fighting-inside-a-robot-costume thing.

The script she’s stuck with is sort of an “Aliens” meets “Robocop” combat tale, with one of the world’s formost AI experts, daughter of the expert (Lana Parilla) whose theories and tinkering got Earth INTO this mess decades earlier, hurled into combat with a cocky assault team led by a Colonel played by Sterling K. Brown, with Mark Strong overseeing this deep space hunt for that rogue robot, Harlan (Simi Liu).

Atlas Shepherd “WARNED them,” in classic Ripley in “Aliens” style, about what they were up against. “They wouldn’t listen.” They effed around. They found out.

That leaves her all but alone on a distant planet, hounded by humanoid AI (Abraham Popoola is their supersoldier bot), trying to stop Harlan from making a return to Earth “to finish what I started,” the machine/AI rebellion of 28 years before.

Lopez tumbles and bristles, vents and rages, mostly strapped into a seat inside a roboskeleton animated by CGI. Atlas flashes back to her mother’s early reassurances about the “neural link” technology that drove AI to figure humans were just in the way, bristles at being “scanned” and refuses help time after time, only to change her mind at the last second.

After a generic “world in chaos” montage opening, and an explosive action sequence once the “team” makes its beleaguered landing, the picture settles into Smith the robotic AI “explaining” this and that and Atlas arguing with him as they try to accomplish their mission against incredible odds.

Capture, AI interrogation, wisecracks, AI profanity, escape and final confrontation rub against Atlas’s inability to work well with others and mommy issues.

Director Brad Peyton goes for a flippant PG-13 tone, which is a blessing, considering how silly the action (not the AI warning messaging) is. But in the end, that just makes “Atlas” easier to dismiss.

I’ve always liked Lopez. Like Brown. Have enjoyed Liu’s recent turns and I’ve always been on Team Mark Strong. But this is pretty bad, and can’t have been any fun to film, either.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown, Simi Liu, Lana Parilla,
Abraham Popoola and Mark Strong

Credits: Directed by Brad Peyton, scripted by Aron Eli Coleite and Leo Sardarian. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58

Sylvia Hoeks of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” and “Bladerunner 2049” plays the cult leader who lures “Stranger Things” alum Sink’s character into the darkness.

This looks solid, and Bana is experiencing a bit of a career rebound. June 28. Hope it’s good.

I am putting on a hat just so I can doff it in tribute to the informed and dedicated curators of the “Classics” that the free streamer Tubi acquires, enterprising film buffs who allow fellow film fans the chance to survey the lesser known works of Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Lupino and Lang and others from the cinema’s star-studded history.

“I Know Where I’m Going!” (1945) is a far less famous film from the famed team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, filmmakers who gave us almost nothing but classics — “The 49th Parallel” to “The Red Shoes,” with “Black Narcissus” and others — some 24 films spanning decades of one of the great collaborations in cinema history.

“I Know Where I’m Going!” is a whimsical, formulaic and lightly romantic WWII production filmed after the conflict’s outcome was no longer in doubt, a late-war piece set amongst the eccentric locals of Scotland’s Hebrides Islands, who also could see The World War’s end on the horizon.

Its heroine is a headstrong golddigger, our hero a cash-poor member of the landed gentry doing his “bit” in the Royal Navy, and the stakes are decidely lighter and slighter than in the team’s “49th Parallel” or “One of Our Aircraft is Missing.”

Before stumbling across it, I had no idea this one existed. And it’s a delight.

Wendy Hiller of “Pygmalian” stars as Joan Webster, a willful young woman whose taste for the finer things and the good life was formed as a child. When we meet her at 25, her modest banker father (George Carney) is shocked to discover she has a “usual” drink at her favorite nightclub, many of the British Rail porters on the Scotland-bound lines seem to know her by name and that she’s engaged to one of the richest men in Britain.

Robert “Bellinger must be almost as old as I am,” “darling” father sputters of the chemical tycoon she’s picked out to make “my dreams come true.”

Daddy is given the bum’s rush as she’s off to Scotland, to Glasgow and then The Hebrides near the island of Kilora, where Bellinger, we gather, has suffered through the war in style and comfort.

But once she’s reached a tiny port where she can motor over to the island, the weather turns. The wizened ferry skipper (Finlay Currie of “Great Expectations”) won’t be making that passage, no ma’am. The charming Royal Navy officer (Roger Livesey) home on leave offers advice and assistance. It takes some doing for headstrong Joan, her eyes-on-the-prize, to be dissauded from camping out on the foggy, then rainy and windswept dock.

The weather “never stays fine for long in the isles,” the locals say. Aye.

Through the local known as Torquil (Livesey, of “The Life and Death of Col. Blimp”), Joan meets the plucky, self-possessed Catriona (Pamela Brown), whose husband is serving in the Middle East, and assorted local characters who lapse into Gaelic by habit and as a means of not saying what they mean in front of the bride-to-be.

We and she are treated to Scottish eccentricity, bagpipers, dancers, “clans” and the “compromise” of sticking the village phone booth at the base of a noisy waterfall.

Torquil is more than he seems, she learns. And as she prays before bedtime that the weather will break and she can meet her monied destiny at the altar, she fears she might be falling for the broke but noble officer’s chivalry and charm.

“People around here are quite poor, I take it?”

“Not poor. They just don’t have any money.”

The research trip for this picture, shot on locations in Mull, Argyll and Bute, must have been great fun and informative. The screenplay is littered with delightful local lore, curses, family rivalries, Viking legends of the whirlpool offshore and the life. And then there’s the language.

“Rum stuff, this Gaelic.” “May your pulse beat as your heart would wish” and lines just like it pass by like screwball comedy banter.

The golddigging nature of Joan’s nuptials earns raised eyebrows before she starts picking up on all the ways the idle rich are merely an earlier incarnation of the “upper class twits” of Monty Python comedy.

The film is a melodrama, labeled “perfect” in its day for the ways it sets up our reluctant couple, tests and throws them together and bends towards a wholly satisfying finale. The time capsule nature of the locations captured add to its charm, with cinematographer Erwin Hillier (“A Boy Ten Feet Tall”) showing a painter’s eye for black and white composition and a documentarian’s grasp of what made these old “great” houses, ruined castles and seascapes so special.

Livesey makes Torquil a tad forward and Hiller does a fine job of a keeping “appearances” proper as Joan, even as she lets us see the attraction.

The musical “Ceilidh” anniversary scene is a singular delight, with romantic longing, thwarted hopes, tradition and lovely singing taking us into a Scotland that even in the 1940s, was vanishing.

The humor is quirky and droll, with a local retired Col. (Duncan MacKenchie) polishing his falconry skills, but perhaps overreaching when he tries to train a golden eagle, prompting deadpan local shepherds to load their shotguns for an eagle hunt when a bunch of their lambs are lost.

Compared to the gravitas of “The 49th Parallel” and “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and the strained metaphors of “A Canterbury Tale,” “I Know Where I’m Going” is downright fluffy, feather light, despite a harrowing peril-at-sea sequence that is as polished as anything from the filming tank/rear projection era in black and white film.

If you haven’t started your own survey of Powell and Pressburger films, “I Know Where I’m Going” is a grand place to start, at least until Tubi brings “The 49th Parallel” back to streaming.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG

Cast: Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey, Pamela Brown, Duncan MacKechnie and Finlay Currie.

Credits: Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. An Archers (The Archers) release on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:32

There have been other documentaries about “America’s Band,” The Beach Boys. There have been books aplenty, especially about the mercurial, unstable musical genius of the group, Brian Wilson.

And there was “Love & Mercy” that got deep into Brian’s later life struggles with mental illness and his controlling, perhaps predatory therapist Eugene Landy.

But here’s what the new documentary “The Beach Boys,” aka “The Disney Version” of their history gets at that I — at least — found fresh and different.

There’s a lot about their pre-history, not just earlier names of the band, but little known earlier members of the band itself. This is rarely highlighted, but with surviving member Al Jardine around to have his say, a lot of that history is plumbed. Jardine’s pre-Beach Boys story is more musically interesting than you’d expect, and more pivotal to their formation and folk harmony sound than one might have gathered.

Late brothers Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson are seen and heard in archival interviews that reveals more about the sibling relationships and each brother’s musical strengths. Drummer Dennis took up the drums just to make them a performing, touring vocal group/band. Carl’s top flight musicianship is praised. Dennis, famously “the only surfer” in the band, got in and got heard in that sibling dynamic “because I could beat Carl up.”

We see them rise from Hawthorne, California to fame, their enshrinement as “the most articulate spokespeople for ‘The California Dream,'” and their abrupt turn towards musical irrelevance and its reasons.

And Mike Love, the lead singer who developed a reputation as one of the biggest jerks in pop music and explains some of his abrasiveness and pushiness, the lawsuit he filed when the Wilson brothers’ dad Murry sold the rights to their songs (Love did a LOT of the lyrics on their earliest hits). It’s a little shocking seeing Love mellow into someone this reflective and human, getting his due from Brian and others as one of the great lead singing “frontmen” of his era.

The rest of the film is notable for what it skims through — their creative process, the birth of their “different keys on a keyboard” harmonies, the creation of their most famous records, their “rivalry” with The Beatles — and for what it leaves out.

There’s little about Brian’s struggles, no mention of the Landy years, and a seriously short-changed treatment of their “playing their hits” oldies act half-century. The death of Dennis and Carl is not even mentioned.

The film that emerges feels sanitized, much like the band’s overall reputation over the decades, Nancy Reagan-approved California kids who harmonized like angels.

“The Beach Boys” thus makes for a family-friendly biographical overview, endorsed by Janelle Monae, musician-producer Don Was, Lindsay Buckingham and other peers, all of whom back up what made them special and earned them the title “America’s Band,” even though “California’s Band” would have been more apt.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, discussions of drug abuse

Cast: Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford, Bruce Johnston, Paul McCartney, Janelle Monae, Lindsey Buckingham, Don Was

Credits: Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, scripted by Mark Monroe. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:53

Ronald Reagan’s first biographer expressed exasperation that there “was no ‘there,’ there.” He found Reagan a kind of empty vessel, an actor playing a part.

Lionized by the Right and “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” remembered by the rest of the country for crimes and indictments and reactionary incitements that set the country back decades — he symbolically took solar reflectors off the White House roof and brought outdated World War II battleships out of mothballs, with predictable results on both counts — becomes an indie film starring Dennis Quaid this Aug. 30.

The last weekend of August is traditionally a dumping ground for movies too limited in appeal for summer release, not smart enough for Oscar contention in the fall.

Seems about right. AIDS to Iran Contra, attacking unions, assaulting the middle class and transferring wealth from the middle and working classes to the rich, that senile poseur has a lot to answer for and as a TV mini series some years ago was bullied into not showing the dark side, blunders and historical calamity his administration was, why should a feature film pandering to his fanbase be any different?

But Dennis Quaid and Penelope Anne Miller (as Nancy) class this up considerably, and that could pull in the faithful and those who aged out of moviegoing about the time Miss Daisy acquired a chauffeur.

Mena Suvari as Jane Wyman? Jon Voight as a mysterious Russian influencer/”expert?”

Might be worth a look.

Horror films have consistently under-performed this year. And more than one “popcorn” blockbuster has gone bust.

If it ain’t “Dune,” it isn’t “fresh.” Apparently.

That may have a lot to do with why the fifth “Mad Max” movie, “Furiosa:” A Mad Max Saga,” is such a bust on its opening weekend. Something’s gojng on, because this is turning into the worst box office Memorial Day in this millennium.

No Charlize Theron, with only Chris Hemsworth as a proven “box office” star in the cast, over-praised but repetitive, slow and a franchise seriously showing its age, I’m not surprised it’s under-performing. But it’s not like everybody’s reading my review and staying home.

Has Hollywood priced itself out of impulse purchase or cheap destination entertainment? Maybe.

I don’t root for any movie to fail, even exhausted horror franchises and the lesser lights of the endless parade of comic book adaptations. OK, maybe a few of those. But “Mad Max V” had me pissed by the time the anticlimax arrives and the closing credits rolled.

Projections for “Furiosa” weren’t through the roof, but $40 million was right on the bottom edge of expectations. Based on Thursday night and all-day Friday ticket sales, Deadline.com is saying $34 million, tops, with $31 million more likely at this point.

That’s for a FOUR DAY weekend. Wow. It’s opening at $25.55 for Thurs.-Sun. Ouch.

That sets up as one of the Worst Memorial Day weekends in recent history, with no blocks to bust, nobody’s tentpole pic launching the summer with well over $100 million dollars.

Surely it will pack them in Sunday and/or Monday, just out of curiosity. Surely it’ll surpass the opening of a Chris Pratt-voiced “Garfield” live-action/animated hybrid. But the family-friendly cat picture is on track to manage $32 over four days, and barely lost the three-day race with a $24.78 million take. Heck, a big Monday and the Fat Cat could win it all.

“Furiosa” is doing small-studio/far-lower-budget A24 “Civil War” sized numbers over three days, which officially introduces the word “BOMB” to the conversation. This is Warner Bros. big tentpole pic for the summer, and it’ll be bologna sandwiches all over Beverly Hills after this miscalculation.

The Big-Eyed fury Anya Taylor-Joy may make critics swoon, but she isn’t box office. And this “Fast Slow and Furiosa” movie takes an hour to put her on screen. A few critics pointed out the obvious about the film’s inability to show us anything new, but we are the few, the proud. Potential North American ticket buyers have seen the trailers. They know it’s not showing us anything fresh.

It cost $170 million or so, and overseas box office isn’t overwhelming, either ($33, per @thenumbers). But this is what George Miller gets for making this “Death Race 3000” franchise his entire career (almost).

“IF” opened decently and is only falling off 50% percent, and should manage another $21 million through Monday night. It’ll be over $63 million starting the week, but I doubt if it will hit $100 million.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” has cleared $100 million and will manage 16 million and change by midnight Memorial Day. That’s every bit as unoriginal and popcorn pointless as “Furiosa,” but that franchise is holding up.

“The Fall Guy,” the first BIG SUMMER MOVIE and the canary in the coal mine in terms of lowering expectations for summer cinema hits, is adding another $7 million and won’t make it to $100 million.

Angel Studios’ not-really-faith-based/not-that-compelling “Sight” is opening poorly, $3.5 million over four days. It may have legs, though.

As always, I’ll update these figures as the weekend progresses and more data pops out. Not looking good, though. Not good at all.

A couple of killer brawls and a finale that pulls out all the stops doesn’t drag the martial arts actioner “Blind War” out of the dark.

It’s an Andy On (“Ride On,” “Blackhat”) star vehicle, sort of a modern riff on the ancient “Blind Swordsman” plot that translated into films all over Asia, especially Japan. This Chinese thriller is about a cop blinded in the line of duty, tormented by a criminal quarry, and determined to free his kidnapped daughter from people he crossed in an earlier dust up.

The director of “The Imortal Stone of Nirvana” kicks things off with an over-the-top escape attempt launched at the end of a criminal boss’s trial. One of his lawyers (Yang Zing, who pretty much steals the picture) is in on the caper, which has the boss howling wit delight at the mayhem. But with cops surrounding the courthouse, awaiting the verdict and/or trouble, it seems doomed from the start.

With so many minions recruited to assault the court and with the SWAT teams outside slow to act, maybe they have a shot.

But one cop, Dong Gu (On) jumps the gun because he smells a rat. The assault really set up as the jailed mob boss’s assassination. And the lawyer/femme fatale/assassin Xing Na (Yang Zing) is in love with the cockiest of the killers, a punk who plays it cool disguised as a murderous priest, but who overplays his hand when he injures Dong Gu’s partner and fails to kill that one cop who will seal his fate.

Xing Na is sent to prison, hissing “From this moment on, every breath you take is a gift from me (in Chinese with subtitles). Dong Gu, blinded by a flash grenade, must develop his keen hearing to be able to function and raise his daughter. He’s kicked out of the police for being too gung ho during that caper.

And when that violinist daughter (Yaqi Zhang) is grabbed and trafficked as revenge for his work, Dong Gu must call on those reflexes, that hearing and his special martial arts skills to pursue and battle those who took her.

Xing Na? She busts out of jail during a failed attempt on her life, passes herself off as a fellow cop to the man she’s sworn to take her vengeance on and proceeds to seemingly “help” the father in his mad pursuit up a mobster food chain to the top.

There’s a lot of vengeance going round.

“Blind War” has comically inept cops and veiled Chinese shots at the fictional city of “Manulla,” where human trafficking tracks through every trope of that battered and weary genre — live streaming “auctions” of girls, the rich of non-Chinese Asia bidding away, etc. It’s impossible to place the film in reality, with Caucasian “British” judges and police chiefs and “foreigners” who could be Filipino, old school Hong Kong or Singaporean.

Female characters vie for the title “Dragon King” of this underworld (Not “Queen?”). The blind cop gets into jam after jam, including capture by the local police, but always finds a way out, often with Xing Na’s help.

The plot is teeters between nonsensical and outlandish, with graphic violence and epic shootouts and punchouts punctuating the action beats.

One humorous touch has guns supplied by an Afro-wearing Chinese hustler named “Uncle Harlem.” Kind of racist, but whatever.

The fights are over-the-top and manic, often shot with a hand-held camera and edited into a furious blur. But there’s a video game quality to the body count, the ways our hero dispatches legions of bad guys, the injuries he and his allies survive and the ways he ducks bullets and blow.

The funny bits underscore the silliness of much of what we’re seeing unfold, but the violence brings it all back to “reality.” Not that this is a good thing, not in a thriller this absurdly plotted.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, child trafficking

Cast: Andy On,Yang Zing, Hank Qi,
Zhang Ya Qi and Jane Wu

Credits: Directed by Suiqiang Huo, scripted by A Hi-Yah!/Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:43

It’s been 36 years since Michael Keaton, Tim Burton, Winona & Co. learned why we should NEVER say “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”

So naturally, this update features horror comedy pixie Jenna Ortega.

Keaton is back as the title character, and Ryder, the “trixter-demon” curious teen in the original film is all grown up — allegedly.

Willem Dafoe, Catherine O’Hara, Monica Bellucci, Justin Theroux and Danny DeVito are the newer faces or old Friends of Tim coming round for another laugh or two.

Looks like vintage Burton, even if Michael K. has lost some of the antic fun of his youth.

Sept. 6? We’ll see.

Always surprised that HBO is still releasing movies. They barely promote anything, and in this universe of “choices” you can’t coast on the arrogant memory of “The Sopranos.”

This might have been slated for theatrical release and then pulled for streaming only.

Oscar winner Lange plays “The First Lady of the American Theatre” staring down the end, lost in hallucinations and memories, supported by friends played by Oscar winner Kathy Bates and Pierce Brosnan, with Jesse Williams and Lily Rabe also in the cast.

May 31 on HBO Max.