Movie Nation

Historically, “Machine Gun Kelly” is about as accurate as the proverbial “two dollar watch.”

The movie about the infamous 1930s Memphis gangster was shot on the cheap in Southern California, with nothing that looks like Tennessee, not a trace of any Southern accent and a lot more violence than was ever attributed to the real George Kelly Barnes.

But 1958’s “Machine Gun Kelly” captures filmmaker and “indie” icon Roger Corman at his breakthrough moment, a screen story told — at least in the early scenes — in brisk brush strokes, ominous shadows and bursts of violence, a film acted with real heat and a screenplay — by R. Wright Campbell (“Man of a Thousand Faces,” “The Night Fighters”) — that plays up the cowardly sadism of its hero and features some of the flintiest dialogue of its day.

“I’m gonna carve a map of Hell right across your kisser!”

“You know, Kitten. I’m gonna get you a nice little white mouse for you to play with.”

“He’s awfully cocky for a man who can’t even crack a hick town bank.”

“Tell your old lady to keep her wise cracks behind her teeth or she’s gonna be wearing false ones!”

“I already do, smart aleck!”

The jazz score by Gerald Fried (“Killer’s Kiss,” “The Killing,” TV’s “Roots”) swings and sizzles so insistently that it carries the picture right up to the point the movie bogs down with a fictionalized version of the kidnapping that put Kelly behind bars.

Charles Bronson pops off the screen in the title role, a star-to-be playing up the sadism and woman-slapping bullying of this character, built up in history thanks to the “machine gun” moniker he wore and F.B.I. chief hypeman J. Edgar Hoover’s exaggerations, a mobster turned in the movie into a craven coward who fears anything to do with death — coffins, floral arrangements, etc.

If there’s anything this “Untouchables” era gangster picture has to say to the modern viewer, it might be that it takes a special kind of warped fraidy cat to covet the no-skills “power” of a machine gun.

But I have to say the picture promises more than it delivers. A bravura dialogue-free five minute opening shows us an early heist in quick, sure strokes. The robberies here are perfunctory, but beautifully framed and shot — shadows of gunplay, etc. It is the getaways that are elaborate, with Kelly and gang (Wally Campo, Jack Lambert, etc.) breaking down his Thompson Submachine Gun, tossing clothes and pistols, handing off the loot, splitting up and swapping cars.

Susan Cabot is the sexy, malevolent manipulator Flo, who shames her beau’s phobias, nags him into jobs, builds his myth and can take a punch or slap herself, because she has to.

Frank DeKova plays Harry, a “big game hunter” accomplice who keeps a menagerie of dangerous critters at his gas station, including a mountain lion he’s trapped. The comic Morey Amsterdam, later to gain fame via “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” is the treacherous weasel Fandango, aka “Fanny,” a weakling Kelly pushes around, tortures and costs an arm.

But Bronson and Cabot set off the real sparks, and even as the story shifts from bank robbing to kidnapping, our anti-hero’s undoing, they keep it watchable as the action subsides and the settings become various interior hideouts, with cops and the parents of a kidnapped little girl (never happened) working with the Feds (Michael Fox) to ensure that the world closes in around Machine Gun Kelly & Co.

The future mentor to generations of film folk, Nicholson and Coppola among them, Corman was supposedly fascinated by the gutless way Kelly went down, and built this film’s psychological portrait around that. He learned that timeless lesson from “Destry Rides Again,” that bullying monsters look awfully small when trapped, stuck in court, trying to stay awake, lying and lying about their exploits until no one believes they’re anything but what they really are — cowards without an audience, a gang or a machine gun to compensate for all the toughness they lack.

Rating: “approved,” violence

Cast: Charles Bronson, Susan Cabot, Morey Amsterdam, Connie Gilchrist, Richard Devon, Frank DeKova, Jack Lambert. Wally Campo and Michael Fox.

Credits: Directed by Roger Corman, scripted by R. Wright Campbell. An American International Pictures release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:23

“Black Panther” star Leticia Wright turns off any hint of glamour or “extrovert” in “Aisha,” a sublimely-understated drama of a young woman struggling with her past, her family obligations and “the system” as she tries to obtain emergency “self protection” status so that she can stay in Ireland.

She is living in a refugee hostel, working as a sympathetic hairdresser’s assistant, hoping her solicitor (Lorcan Cranitch) can deliver some good news about her efforts to make her move to Ireland permanent.

Something happened back in Benin City, and her mother back in Nigeria needs money. But even with a job, a lawyer and an ever-changing community of fellow immigrants who are shuffled in and out of the hostel as support, she can’t get her hopes up. And the unit director (Stuart Graham) is a stickler for rules and who doesn’t like back-talk when others lose their appeal and Aisha sticks up for them as they’re deported.

That could be trouble. The fact that she doesn’t trust the hostel’s “Halaal” certified meats also could get her labeled a trouble-maker.

But the new security guard (Josh O’Connor of “Challengers”) takes pity on her and lets her use the kitchen, after hours, to prep meals that conform to the tenets of her religion. .

As Aisha’s prospects dim, their bond grows stronger, although it may all come to naught if her “status” is denied.

Writer-director Frank Berry (“I Used to Live Here”) shows us his “homework” in one sequence of this “inspired by true” cases story. We and Aisha hear testimonials in conversation form from others residing at her hostel. The film makes it easy to sympathize with migrating people and their plights, but also appreciative of the lengths the EU — at least — has gone to treat people humanely and legally, providing them with legal counsel, housing them and propping them up until they get the chance to plead their cases.

Berry gives Wright and O’Connor some quietly wrenching moments, long interludes where Aisha is silently fighting back the tears and the guy who is sweet on her despite being unable to make eye contact struggles to say or do something to comfort her.

The script lets Wright hide her cards, not revealing everything about Aisha and her situation at once, letting us see the comfort of a new routine in an alien land, even if that “routine” is mere weeks or months old.

O’Connor is likably humble in the presence of this beautiful woman who has been tested in ways Conor could never imagine. But Conor the security guard has his “story,” too. Is she interested enough to let him tell it?

The stakes could not be more intimate and personal here, but as reassured as we might be that something like “due process” and “common sense” will prevail, Wright and O’Connor do a good job of playing people who aren’t so sure, whose faith in people — not the state — to show compassion has its limits.

The journey “Aisha” takes after the more perilous one our heroine undertook doesn’t cover a lot of ground. But Wright makes us, Aisha’s lawyer and Conor the security guard invest in this story and hope for an outcome out of step with our xephobic. immigrant-bashing times.

Rating: unrated, discussion of rape, other violence, smoking

Cast: Leticia Wright, Josh O’Connor, Stuart Graham, Lorcan Cranitch and Denis Conway

Credits: Scripted and directed by Frank Berry. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:31

Critics use the term “film festival movie” to describe an indie title too narrow in appeal or twee in nature to ever thrive in the big bad world of studio-marketed, wide release cinema.

“East Bay” is such a movie, a Frisco film about a frustrated Korean American (writer-director Daniel Yoon) working out his “not a success” by 40 and Asian-but-maybe not-Asian-enough angst making film festival movies that at least some film festivals would accept, even if no studio deal is ever put on the table.

It features a few ironic laughs, a couple clever conceits, some fun amateur hockey action, and a pair of showcase roles for the female leads. But its mopey, meandering narrative isn’t helped by a choppy, navel-gazing nature, and its black-and-white-flashbacks and shifts in point of view slow its forward motion to a crawl.

Jack Lee’s biggest fear, he confesses in narration to a short-film-in-progress, is “failure.” He doesn’t want to let his Korean immigrant parents down. As they (Chung-Bin Yoon and Taek-Soon Yoon) are always dropping the “grandchildren would be nice” hint, he is reminded that he is not a “success” in their eyes.

Showing up for work in the “custodian” corner of computer programming, hanging with his similarly self-absorbed and at-a-dead-end colleagues — the stoner (Edmund Sim) and the tuned-out video game addict (Destry Miller) — underscores the extent of his “failure.”

But at least he makes his short films, about hockey or fake TV hunting show hosts, with a highlight an “ironic” zinger titled “Korean Comfort Man” that sends-up Japanese aggression and sexual predation during World War II. Such films sometimes get into festivals.

And at least he has a cute girlfriend (Melissa Pond) some slim hopes for the future. Then she gets pregnant. It’s not his. His new film may not make any sense.

If Jack isn’t going to resign himself to his fate — he fantasizes suicide — he’s got to reach out, aim higher with his feature length film, get into festivals, especially the Dim Sum Dance (Get it?) Film Festival, presided over by the fetching fangirl Sara (Constance Wu of “Crazy Rich Asians” and TV’s “Fresh off the Boat”).

And then there’s this distracting “guru” he’s been interviewing about happiness, success, “god” and the like, for a film. Vivacious Vivanti (Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier) bubbles over with affirmations, the kind of dizziness that passes for profound in your lesser known cults, especially ones led by self-help goddesses.

“She is not completely bonkers, unless you take everything she says 100% literally.”

“East Bay” pokes fun at racial and cultural stereotypes, and at how film festivals can seem to prefer films that reinforce those stereotypes.

It’s about family and professional expectations, with Yoon the very face of disappointment as Jack cannot see how he sabotages his possible paths to success in life and work. Wu sparkles, and Ladnier plays the hell of out “hot, dizzy, self-important mess.” Sim also stands out as a classic stoner — using a bear-shaped honey bottle as a bong, etc.

But a lot of what we’re taking in here is surface gloss — the unexplored lives of Jack’s ancestors, the cultural emnity that much of Asia holds against Japan, the cliched “nerds” who play hockey to escape that label, only to get bullied as they do, the shallow pursuit of the exotic when the more apt love connection that’s right there, championing your films in the face of public and selection committee disdain.

Whatever existential angst this slight, perhaps semi-autobiographical story — his first film, “Post Concussion,” hit festivals in 1999, “East Bay” is his second — beats around the bush addressing, “East Bay” never quite crosses that line between “I didn’t mind it” to “I liked it.”

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Daniel Yoon, Constance Wu, Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier, Destry Miller and Edmund Sim.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Yoon. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:31

If you have to ask “Which bay,” well this still may be the romantic dramedy for you, because geography lessons as they relate to the Korean, Chinese, India etc diaspora are a bonus in this new release, opening Friday.

Could be cute.

They figure this out a tad too late in this horror tale, releasing May 31.

Genre thriller, B movie all the way, unknown cast. It still could be fun.

I always got a kick seeing Bernard Hill on the screen.  A late bloomer, he brought gravitas and pathos to his most iconic performances, as the shocked and dumbfounded Captain Smith of the doomed “Titanic,” and as brooding, manipulated King Theoden in the “Lord of the Rings” movies.

He broke out on Euro TV with “Boys from the  Blackstuff” in the ’80s, acted for Clint Eastwood on “True Crime”and classed-up many a series and feature in his later years, “Forever Young” and “Wolf Hall” stand out.

He was a fun follow on Twitter, raging at Tory misdeeds and incompetence like Gandalf in a fury.

I got to interview Hill when The LOTR movies came out and remember him beaming with gratitude and pride at the big speeches slumbering, drugged Theoden makes to rally the troops, “Tolkien’s “Henry V” moment, he called it.

“That’s  the stuff,” I remember him saying. Aye, it was. Well done. Rest in peace.

 https://youtu.be/GgZ74npEqRM?si=k5flwLl2Q_ecgNff

And you and I thought “Dune” was sci fi eye candy of the first order.

I do not care that some studio execs were lukewarm on picking this up. I am trying to forget how meditative and obscurant Coppola’s last 20 years of movies have been.

This looks amazing.

Mr May the Fourth Be With You” suggests the SlDC press corps should be reminding voters of re Nov. Fifth.

The Scott Turow novel made for a pretty good Alan Pakula big screen thriller back in 1990, a rare villainous turn by Harrison Ford, with Greta Scachi and Raul Julia on board.

June 4, Apple TV+ gets a deeper dive into this murder mystery, whose mystery might be “Will he get away with it?”

One of the 231 arguments I got into on the outrage engine formerly known as “Twitter” Friday was in interpreting the $3 million or so that Universal’s hyped-all-to-heck “The Fall Guy” earned on its opening night.

“Soooo, good not great” I says, to which a wet-behind-the-ears wag countered with “No, that’s actually very good for a Thursday night preview.” The dear.

I posted a link that showed what REAL blockbusters have typically done, before and after COVID, and noted “You are incorrect” to junior box office interpreter.

A $3.15 million Thursday was probably met with genuine alarm at Universal. A high concept reboot starring the dizzyingly popular (or so we thought) Ryan Gosling, a big budget ($130 million?)  built-to-be-a-blockbuster co-starring Emily Blunt, big laughs, big explosions, big stunts? Surely this would open over $40, maybe $50 million?

No. Deadline.com reports that Friday was more underwhelming news for the latest from “Bullet Train” director David Leitch. Now $28 million is the projected take. Ouch. If A24 had rounded up that much cash for their far cheaper “Civil War,” they’d be popping champagne to this day. It earned $26 million on opening. But this is The Big U — Universal — a BIG pic on a LOT more screens, etc.

So consider…”swooned over” at the Fanboy/fangirl confab known as SXSW is not a guarantee of wide public acceptance. Fans at film festivals are susceptible to group think on a grand scale. I know. I’ve fallen into that at Toronto, New York, etc. The early reviews of “Fall Guy”  seemed over the top, until a larger sample of critics (moi, for instance) got around to seeing it.

The picture’s hype may have gotten out of hand. Maybe people feel they’ve already “seen” the movie thanks to the clips, trailers and Gosling and Blunt press appearances. Stuntmen faking out and out-fighting villains? “FX” is a dated titled, as are “The Stunt Man” and “Hooper” and other variations on that theme. But they’re in the collective memory.

“The Fall Guy” TV show skewed old, even when it was new in the ’80s. There’s been no afterlife for it on TV. Recent generations have no recollection/connection to it.

And maybe David Leitch, a stuntman turned producer and director, as perfect as he was for this material, wasn’t the guy to make this THE popcorn pic of the early summer.

“Bullet Train” and “Fast and Furious Present: Hobbs & Shaw,” “Deadpool 2” and “Atomic Blonde” are his big previous credits. Anybody thrilled to bits over anything other than “Ryan Reynolds” in any of those titles? Still talking up those movies? No.

I found “The Fall Guy” to be something considerably short of that “out of body experience” you want your big popcorn pic to be, and so it is. Lurching pacing, meandering narrative, Blunt seemingly immune to the charms of Mr. Gosling, obvious “stunt-men” performing Gosling’s stunts, lots of quibbles emerged watching it. There are attempts at representation mixed-in with all the macho stunt-man’s-code content. This should be reaching a wider audience, or so you’d think.

And then there’s the news that this weekend’s horror underwhelmer –– “Tarot” — could be pointing to a wider problem. Sure, the people who have reviewed it (Why bother?) panned it. But horror used to be critic proof, and no horror movie this year, from franchise reboots like “The First Omen” to Sydney Sweeney not wearing a bikini as a nun in “Immaculate” to the very amusing and bloody “Abigail” has made bank.

Horror used to open routinely in the $18-25 million range, $-12 even right after COVID. “Tarot” will barely clear $6 million. Has the horror audience “outgrown” the genre? Has the big screen audience in general slipped back into its post-COVID malaise?

This weekend is full of evil box office portents for the post-strike summer cinema to come.

The second weekend of “Challengers” will clear $8.5-9 million, pretty good, showing what a movie with larger female appeal and more modest intent can manage. It will be over $30 million by Monday or Tuesday of next week.

Re-releasing “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” the “episode one” prequel from a long time ago, in a galaxy pre-Luke Skywalker, has paid off by rolling up $8-8.5.

“Godzilla x King: A New Empire” is coming in at fifth for the weekend (after “Tarot”), with another $3-4 million taking it closer to the coveted $200 million mark, domestic take. At $187 million, it may not have the screens to get there once the next “Planet of the Apes” opens in a few days.

UPDATED figures from Box Office Pro…