Movie Nation

Memorial Day weekend always means WWII movie marathons on all your favorite classic movie channels. But I thought I’d get a jump on that by tracking down a favorite of mine from the ’80s and watching it for the first time in forever.

Samuel Fuller was a genre director who fit neatly into the French auteur theory of directors as “authors” of their movies, with not just a style and repeated themes in their films, but a psychological through-line tying them all together.

He specialized in Westerns (“40 Guns”), noirish crime dramas (“The Naked Kiss,” “Underworld, Inc.”) and filmed, for what it’s worth, the very first “Vietnam War” movie — “China Gate” (1957).

But World War II movies were his bread and butter. He was already a screenwriter when he went into the Army. And when he got out, he dove into making gritty, often cynical grunts-eye-view pictures such as “The Steel Helmet,” “Fixed Bayonets” and “Merrill’s Marauders.”

It wasn’t until “The Big Red One (1980)” that we got a clear picture of what Fuller’s combat experience was like. He served with the Army’s First Infantry Division, came ashore in Algeria with the first waves when no one knew if they French they were facing would fight them or join them, survived the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, fought in Sicily and was on the beach on D-Day.

Fuller fought across Europe, and was present (and even filmed) the liberation of the Falkenau Contentration Camp. Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, the man had a helluva war.

All of which lend credence to the film many call his “masterpiece,” “The Big Red One,” named for the division’s shoulder insignia, a saga that skips through all that combat, from shipboard waiting to board the boats all the way through V-E Day.

With a budget that dwarfed most of his genre pictures and coming out in 1980, Fuller finally got his moment in the cinema spotlight with a movie that starred long-in-the-tooth Lee Marvin, “Star Wars” hot Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine of the acting Carradine clan and Bobby Di Cicco, fresh off the epic Spielberg flop “1941.”

It has gripping and believable small-unit combat set-pieces, a cynical “inner circle” of survivors who look on replacements as men they refuse to get to know, seeing as how they’re likely to get killed, and a serious foot-soldier’s eye-view of the war — limited, myopic, concerned first with survival, second with food and-or creature comforts.

The script includes almost magical “fog of war” interludes with a Sicilian boy who will only direct the squad to a German gun emplacement if they help him bury his killed-in-the-combat mother, an assault on a German-held insane asyllum, a baby that simply must be delivered inside of an abandoned German tank and a framing device that sees the WWI vet Sgt. played by Marvin involved in the killing of Germans after the end of hostilities in both “The Great War” and “The Big One,” as veterans referred to WWII.

The dialogue is classic hard-boiled Fuller.

“You’re going to live, even if I have to blow your brains out.”

But 40+ years on, the thing that stands out about the film now is how corny it all is — a combat Pilgrim’s Progress that travels through tropes and cliches that were a lot more familiar to audiences when it came out than maybe they play today.

“The Big Red One” came out after “Patton,” after “A Bridge too Far” and nearly 20 years after “The Longest Day,” its closest WWII combat analog, a movie a lot creakier and cornier than this one thanks to the showy star cameo-cluttered cast.

Fuller’s alter-ego on the screen was Carradine, a few years short of “Revenge of the Nerds.” Private Zab is a cigar-chomping cynic who mouths off at the replacements and voice-over narrates the poor picture to death, first scene to last.

“You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point.”

That’s a detective fiction device that Fuller knew all too well. The character, an already published novelist whose novel sells to Hollywood while he’s serving, is all-knowing and on-the-nose, chomping on a cigar like the WWII comic book version of Nick Fury.

What’s the first rule of cinema? “SHOW us, don’t TELL us.” It’s a visual medium. Zab is forever narrating plot points we’ve already picked up on.

“By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of their arms and legs. They came and went so fast and so regularly that sometimes we didn’t even learn their names. Truth is, after a while, we sort of avoided gettin’ to know them.”

But the film gives Marvin — 56 when it came out — one last chance for an actual WWII combat vet (Marines, in the Pacific) to shine in a combat role, and he growls through his patient but unsentimental treatment of the combat-timid Private Griff (Hamill, quite good).

Marvin’s flintiest moments come in this film’s version of the “bangalore torpedoes” on the beach on Omaha Beach on D-Day, basically a more personal reprise of a scene Robert Mitchum starred in back in “The Longest Day.” And his most sentimental scene is in that concentration camp, taking a dying child under his care for a day.

The episodic nature of the movie afforded Fuller the chance to find light moments in the darkness, grim humor in the murder-or-be-murdered world of German submachine guns, castrating mines (graphically illustrated) and close-quarters knife work.

It’s not Fuller’s fault that Spielberg would come along under twenty years later and deliver the last word in WWII infantry combat movies, “Saving Private Ryan.” Or that “Band of Brothers” would almost surprass that. But that’s one reason, no matter what “director’s cut” you see of “The Big Red One,” that it seems so old fashioned.

It’s as formulaic and 1940s fusty as Fuller itself, in structure, storytelling style, unfussy shot-framing and jokes.

That’s not to say that it won’t be one of your better options whenever these “World War II” movie marathons roll around. It’s better than much of what came before it — “The Longest Day,” any John Wayne movie that isn’t “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” “A Bridge Too Far,” but not “Patton.”

And even if it isn’t a masterpiece, it’s certainly Sam Fuller’s biggest and best, a fine big screen curtain call for a reliable genre workhorse from the peak years of Hollywood’s old studio system.

Rating: R for war violence and some language

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Eddie Di Cicco, Stéphane Audran, Kelly Ward, Perry Lang and Siegfried Rauch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Samuel Fuller. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:53

“Where the Tracks End” is an affectionate appreciation for the broke, small town schools that were the rule in much of Mexico much longer than they should have been, and the inspiring, intrepid women and men who made it their mission to teach the rural poor.

Based on a novel by Ángeles Doñate, this sentimental film — titled “El Último Vagón” in Spanish — follows four children as they form friendships and have adventures during one year at Malinalli Tepehpatl, a one-room escuela in a train car where the aged, devoted and compassionate Miss Georgina presides.

The great Mexican actress Adriana Barraza, of “Babel” and the Sam Raimi horror gem “Drag Me to Hell,” plays Miss Georgina, who meets little Ikal (Kaarlo Isaac) after he’s befriended some of her students. He’s 10, and hasn’t really been to school since his railroad laborer-dad (Jero Medina) moves the family to wherever tracks need to be replaced.

That’s kept the kid illiterate, if self-possessed enough to not take any guff from the older, taller and bullying Chico (Diego Montessoro) in their “gang.” Ikal is sweet on Valeria (Frida Sofía Cruz Salinas), and as his illeterate father doesn’t object and the kid has nothing better to do, so he agrees to join Miss Georgina’s class.

“Discipline!” she preaches. “Focus! Use that brain God gave you!” (in Spanish, with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

With a little help from her collection of comic books, the kid starts to learn to read.

Meanwhile, he and his mates (Ikal Paredes plays train-obsessed Tuerto) are pondering their futures, stumbling across corpses, raiding a local ranch for food and drink, adopting a dog — Quetzal, and dreaming of going to the a tiny traveling circus which has a lady magician, a clown, a tightrope walker and an exotic transgender knife-thrower.

But outside forces are staring at Mexico’s many under-funded rural schools, and deciding it’s time to “combine resources” by closing them. School inspector Hugo Valenzuela (Memo Villegas) is the guy with that thankless job, visiting schools small and packed, well-kept or worn out, and delivering the same news.

Director Ernesto Contreras (“Cosas Imposibles”) never quite lets this picture cross over into picaresque. The sweet tone is rarely due to laughs. It’s a tale with tragedies, big and small, and the sword of government funding cuts hangs over this piece of the recent past.

His movie may be entirely too sentimental, but it simply and beautifully summons up memories of other Mexican, Spanish and Italian tales of impoverished but plucky childhoods.

And Barraza makes a fine representative of that universal icon, the teacher who makes a difference. The kids are adorably real, facing lives whose horizons broaden every day they spend in this old railcar with the old woman with failing eyesight who lives in the back of that “vagón.”

Rating: TV-14, implied violence, teen smoking and drinking

Cast: Kaarlo Isaac, Adriana Barraza, Memo Villegas, Frida Sofía Cruz Salinas, Ikal Paredes, Diego Montessoro, Fátima Molina and Jero Medina.

Credits: Directed by Ernesto Contreras, scripted by Javier Peñalosa, based on a novel by Ángeles Doñate. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

“Blood & Gold” is a sadistically funny German Spaghetti Western set in the last days of World War II.

Suspenseful and violent, with brawls, booby traps, impalings and machine gunnings, it’s damned entertaining in the ways it finds to kill people, and in the ironic tunes that often accompany the violence — German pop of the war years by Marlene Dietrich and others, and melodies from real Westerns.

Stefan Barth’s script and director Peter Thorwarth (“Blood Red Sky”) fold in gold, greed, grief and guilt, the savagery of Naziism and the “blood rage” of combat as it mashes up “Kelly’s Heroes,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Inglourious Basterds” for what boils down to a simple story of revenge.

What’s not so simple is how many people want it — the gold and the revenge — in tiny Sonnenberg, Germany in May of 1945.

“Blood & Gold” begins with a chase, capture and hanging. Combat veteran Heinrich (Robert Maaser, “1917”) has deserted. “The war is lost,” Allied planes buzz overheard and the lines are collapsing all around them. Widowed, Heinrich just wants to go find his little girl.

But the SS Lt. Col. von Starnfeld (Alexander Scheer) , a facially-deformed monster straight out of comic books, isn’t having it. And his dogged second in command, Dorfler (Florian Schmidke) hunts down the “coward” and has his minions hang him.

As in the Old West, not every hanging “takes.” The intervention of the intrepid farmwoman Elsa (Marie Hacke of “Outlander”) saves Heinrich and takes him home. But when that same unit comes to her farm looking for edible livestock, she and her special needs brother (Simon Rupp) are dragged into a shameful, genocidal war’s ugly ending.

Because what the SS wants is Jewish gold allegedly buried in a house in tiny Sonnenberg. When they get it, the Col. and his crew can slip through the lines and into new lives, right?

Surely the mayor (Stephan Grossmann) knows where the gold is. But the go-along-to-get-along innkeeper, donning his Nazi burgermeister uniform, “knows nothing about that (in German with subtitles, or dubbed),” or so he says.

Bet you he’s lying. Bet you the whole town was in on their mini “pogrom.” But maybe not.

The narrative serves up several points of view and competing agendas — murderous SS goons, Heinrich, Elsa, and townsfolk factions.

But everybody’s greed, temper and rash rage gets the better of them as the murderous uniformed men who murder in Germany’s name, after all, think nothing of torturing their countrymen, taking them hostage and even killing their fellow Germans over this cache of ingots.

There are just enough soldiers left to provide fodder for many a shootout, stabbing, grenading and pitch-forking as lines are crossed and blood is spilled that must be avenged.

The story has clever fight-scene choreography and problem-solving, and all the rational logic and mathematical competence — far more minions are killed than we count in their first group scene — of a B-movie, married to the murderous glee of your typical Tarantino film.

Maaser and Hacke are terrific, letting us see their characters pushed to violence, and damned good at it when they are. Schmidke is relentlessly vile, and Scheer a classic black-leather-trenchcoated Nazi monster.

Thorwarth doesn’t know when to drop the mike. That’s why they call it an “anti-climax,” kamerad. But if you like war movies where Nazis get what’s coming to them, “Blood & Gold” fills the bill and then some.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence including sexual assault, profanity

Cast: Robert Maaser, Marie Hacke, Florian Schmidke, Alexander Scheer, Stephan Grossman

Credits: Directed by Peter Thorwarth, scripted by Stefan Barth. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

“Simulant,” the latest slice of cautionary sci-fi about “sexy replicants/androids/’simulants'” developing minds of their own points to one solution worth tossing into the current debate over the many forms and faces of AI — artificial intelligence.

Make a rule that the robots can’t be good looking. Sure, that’ll irk the sex toy industry. But with humanity’s fate in the balance, can we really afford increasingly “sentient” AI that looks like Sean Young, Rutger Hauer or Darryl Hannah in “Blade Runner,” Olivia Wilde in “Tron” or Alicia Sanz in “Simulant?”

This Canadian production may resemble a snowy, sunnier “Blade Runner” in almost every important regard. But they call their ever-improving, each model more “human” than the last androids “Simulants,” not “Replicants.” So there’s that.

This under-regulated corporation is rolling out its humanoid robot “servants” and assuring the world that its four “precepts” will save humanity from the great android uprising that we know is coming.

Nexxera’s simulants can’t “inflict harm on any human,” cannot “modify themselves,” must never “break the law” and simply have to “obey all commands from their masters.”

I feel safer already. The residents of unnamed FutureCity (Hamilton, Ontario) aren’t convinced.

Sam Worthington plays Kessler, an AI Code Enforement officer who tracks down “unregulated” simulants, wherever they may be. He’s got a pistol-shaped scanner to determine proof-of-life or “robot.” And when this one attractive quarry (Sanz, of “The Devil Below” and TV’s “El Cid” and “Now and Then”) knocks him around with superhuman ease, and then sprints off, he whips out his electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) rifle to disable every simulant within range so he can catch and detain her.

Something’s going on with these gadgets, which are showing “empathy” and as with the one that attacked Kessler, the ability to “assault a civilian with intent.”

Might it relate to that ex-Nexxara engineer who just happened to live across the hall from the sim that Kessler just collared? He’s played by Simu Liu of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings,” whose name could have inspired the new label for androids in this movie, but probably didn’t.

Meanwhile, there’s this very attractive couple (Jordana Brewster, Robbie Arnell) that’s gone through an accident, and now one partner is having nightmares of that crash and wondering if they’re real. We’re meant to wonder “Which one of them comes with a warranty?”

The plot is so “Blade Runner” reliant that it’s perfunctory. And that puts a damper on the performances. At least Liu plays around with charm-masking-self-serving-motives in his turn, but nobody else makes us feel or fear for their fate.

The production design is “futuristic minimalist,” as in there’s little here that doesn’t seem present day. No, this can’t have cost much, even in Canadian dollars.

That’s always a hook in thrillers like this, making us wonder who will turn out to be real and who will be a robot, and which robots won’t realize they’re not human.

Another plot element is the ways the fake humans “learn” to become human — reading Dostoyevsky and Kafka, music, painting, keeping a diary, becoming more self-aware and empathetic until that moment when — often as not — one of them SNAPS.

So the movies are getting at the problem. It’s easy to tell robot from human when we can see seams in the construction material and their “hair” looks like some plastic 3D printed version of Max Headroom’s coiffure.

But when the design team is cranking out new generations of androids and algorythmically selecting the sexiest physical traits, well…there’s your solution. Save us from our AI apocalypse. Stop making androids so doable.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content

Cast: Sam Worthington, Jordana Brewster, Simu Liu, Mayko Nguyen, Robbie Arnell and Alicia Sanz

Credits: Directed by April Mullen, scripted by Ryan Christopher Churchill. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:35

When “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” hit the road a few years back, two different women were cast to play the singing, dancing tyro from “Nutbush City Limits.” The producers weren’t stupid. What mere mortal could pull off what Turner did, night after night, on stages all over the world?

You hear that and remember the big knock against “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” when it came out in 1993. A well-cast musical bio-pic that earned Oscar nominations for stars Angela Bassett in the title role, and for Laurence Fishburne, magnificently loathsome as her controlling, abusive Svengali husband Ike Turner, “Love” never quite got past the feeling that Bassett somehow should have attempted to sing like Tina.

After all, if Gary Busey of all people could transform himself into Buddy Holly (1978) and Sissy Spacek could channel the Queen of Country Music, Loretta Lynn (1980), if you want your movie to become an Oscar-honored classic, that’s the extra effort you’ve got to make.

Turner, who just died this past week, had a distinct persona, dance style and voice. “Inimitable?” Maybe.

Remember, Jessica Lange didn’t dare do her own singing for the Oscar bait Patsy Cline biography, “Sweet Dreams” (1985). Remember too, that not nearly as many people remember “Sweet Dreams” as recall “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The Buddy Holly Story” or the new gold standard for musical bio-pics, “Ray.”

I rewatched “What’s Love” after some canny film packaging service re-sold the film to free streaming services when news of Turner’s turn for the worse came out a few months back. It’s a thoroughly entertaining, emotionally-involving story of obscurity turned into success thanks to the rock’n roll meritocracy and the American work ethic that saw the former Anna Mae Bullock leave it ALL on the stage, every night.

Bassett, on the short list of Best Actresses Never to Win an Oscar, is riveting in the title role. And rewatching it, I have to say Fishburne was even better. The fact that she seemed destined to lose the Oscar for not singing probably hurt Fish’s best shot at an Academy Award.

He gives Ike the silky, seductive charm that would have won Anna Mae over, the business savvy and drive of an R&B man who knew he’d have to work twice as hard just to break even much less break through, being Black, and the bitterness of an abusive husband who took out his frustration — violently — on his wife and others.

We’ve always talked-up Bassett’s step-perfect Tina impersonation. Fishburne, playing the uglier role and doing his own singing, knocks this Ike right out of the park. He’d turned the role down more than once, but when Bassett signed on, he did too, and the movie got made.

But at Oscar time, one couldn’t vote for “Ike” if Tina wasn’t going to get your vote as well, could one? What kind of message would that send?

“Tina Loses to Ike at the Oscars!”

Coming back to this 30 year-old bio-pic, you can see the signs that it wasn’t the prestige picture it might have been. Disney was famously tight-fisted back then, and Touchstone produced it. Director Brian Gibson was best-known for music videos before this outing, and nothing he made afterwards — Gibson died in 2004 — was on a par with his Tina pic.

Casting the comically-snide Jenifer Lewis as Anna Mae’s eyes-on-the-money-prize Mom paid off, but aside from Chi McBride and Khandi Alexander, the supporting cast showed more Disney penny pinching.

The narrative covers Tina’s childhood, belting out tunes at her suburban Memphis church, left to be raised by her grandmother, her discovery by Ike when she auditioned to be a new singer — he went through them — her early grasp of stage presence and the power in her performances, the hair-straightening accident that pointed her toward a lifetime of wigs.

The dialogue doesn’t have the humor of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the pop of “Ray.”

“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” is most moving when Tina, after years of abuse, escapes Ike’s clutches, embraces Buddhism and comes back as the Last Rock Star, a figure the entire world would mourn when she passed at 83.

Some criticized the production’s decision to use the “real” Tina, in performance, in the closing moments as disrespecting Bassett’s performance and perhaps costing her the Oscar.

I couldn’t help but notice that “Bohemian Rhapsody,” in which Rami Malek didn’t get to take his best shot at singing like Freddie Mercury, didn’t make the same “comparison” mistake. He and his movie went on to win Oscars.

Every musical bio-pic to come along since, especially the ones that had Oscar hopes but slim budgets, has gone to school on “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — “Respect,” “Get On Up,” “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” among them.

“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” manages to show us a classic rise/fall/comeback tale with a little flair and a lot of heat. Bassett lets us see Tina Turner’s complexity without taking us into her faux British accent — befitting a Queen — later years. Maybe when this story is retold, we’ll get a look at that chapter of the Tina Odyssey.

By the time this movie came out, Turner had gone MTV, dueted with Mick and Bowie and scored monster hits, evolving into the stadium show superstar and bucket list concert icon she was up to the day she died. Maybe we’ll see that remake some day. But until we do, this version will suffice, leaving us with a strong but suffering Tina and an Ike we won’t ever forget for reasons good and bad.

Rating:  R for domestic violence, strong language, drug use and some sexuality

Cast: Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Jenifer Lewis, Khandi Alexander, Rob Labelle and Chi McBride.

Credits: Directed by Brian Gibson, scripted by Kate Lanier, based on Tina Turner’s autobiography of the same name. A Touchstone release on Amazon, Tubi, Youtube, Movies! etc.

Running time: 1:58

Craftsmanship counts for a lot in the pristine, PG-13 frights of “The Boogeyman,” a polished and well-cast Stephen King adaptation.

As spine-tingling suspense is a reflexive human response that can generated by shot-selection, lighting, music that sets a tone and jolting sound effects and editing, almost irrespective of the performances, calling “Boogeyman” well-crafted isn’t a grand compliment, on its own.

But throw in sympathetic performances, actors framed in tight closeups and a child actress who knows how to play “The Boogeyman is REAL” and convince us and everybody else she believes it and you’ve got another example of Stephen King delivering the goods.

Granted, the title of the short story sold it. And it took three screenwriters and the efforts of the cast and director Rob Savage (“Host,” the Zoom meeting seance movie, and “Dashcam” were his) to flesh this out to feature film length. Because that story was thin, and truthfully, the plot to this thriller and the “rules” of this “monster” are vague, under-developed and not on a par with the master’s finest work.

But Savage keeps his camera tight on the members of this family that finds itself under assault when a walk-in client brings his “problem” to Dr. Will Harper, who runs his psychiatric practice from his big and baroque wood frame home.

Sophie Thatcher of “Prospect” and TV’s “Yellowjackets” is Sadie, our protagonist, a teen who was having enough trouble fitting in at school before her mother died. She’s just now going back, still grieving, her concern for her not-yet-adjusted little sister (Vivien Lyra Blair) her best distraction. Little Sawyer is having nightmares.

Their psychotherapist dad (Chris Messina) is back at work, solving Sawyer’s problem with strings of holiday lights hanging in her room and a glowing Moon ball for her to sleep with. No, you can’t tell where they put the batteries in that thing.

Sawyer and Sadie are in therapy (LisaGay Hamilton plays Dr. Weller), because Dad isn’t. He’s in denial. What’s he going to do when Sawyer asks him to look under the bed, or demands that he check out her closet, whose door keeps opening on its own, one more time?

“I TOLD you. It’s REAL.”

When that haunted stranger (David Dastmalchian of “Suicide Squad” and “Dune”) comes in, the good doctor can’t call the police fast enough to keep the guy from killing himself and bringing the film’s title character home to roost.

The stranger tries to warn them. This monster? It’s “the thing that comes for your kids when you’re not paying attention.”

And there’s your metaphor, an inattentive, perhaps guilt-ridden father doesn’t take the “real” monster going bump in the night seriously.

“Boogeyman” patiently dilineates characters, gives us a Sadie who “doesn’t WANT to move on” and hates dealing with classmate sympathy and mean girl “get over it” cruelty. It’s only been a month, we’re told.

Savage lets us take this journey from disbelief to shock via Thatcher’s face, captured in dimly-lit close-ups as she tries to rationalize what she’s heard, what she’s seeing, how that ties into the dead guy’s life and how her baby sister was right all along.

Blair is very good at getting across the horror of what she’s experiencing, even if the viewer is wondering how in the hell this kid isn’t leaving the lights on all the time and getting involve-the-older-sister-and-Dad LOUD about the thing skittering up her walls and charging the sofa where she’s playing video games.

I really like the one “rule” the movie seems to establish and the filmmakers find creative ways to illustrate. The Boogey, everybody knows, is afraid of the light. Sawyer fires a bright flashing weapon in her video game to light up the room and expose the beast.

The beast itself is a shrug, standard issue anteater-headed crab-beast with glowing eyes. The more we see of the monster, the less scary he is.

That almost goes for the more we learn of this mystery, too. Marin Ireland shows up as a properly-cracked “explainer” and battler with the boogeyman who is pretty sure a shotgun is all it’ll take to end this.

As I say, the story here didn’t do much for me and seems like a rickety, illogically-pieced-together structure to hang this narrative on.

But the players and the craftsmanship — the lighting, editing, silences and loud noise — make up for that and deliver those frights we ordered the moment we bought a ticket.

Rating: PG-13 for terror, violent content, teen drug use and some strong language

Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, David Dastmalchian, Vivien Lyra Blair,
LisaGay Hamilton and Marin Ireland

Credits: Directed by Rob Savage, scripted by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman, based on a short story by Stephen King. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 1:38

Be honest. It’s the alliterative, titillating headline that grabbed you, right?

Do yourself a favor. DON’T Google “movie with a talking penis.” There are a LOT more of those than you think, so no, it wasn’t invented with that “Pam & Tommy” series on Hulu.

“Hard Feelings” is an Around the World with Netflix teen sex comedy from Germany about a couple of kids not-really fretting about giving up their “v-cards” (they’re virgins) until a lightning strike allows their respective vulva and penis to start chatting, crudely lobbying for a little action — ANY action.

Whatever bestie/girl-next-door Paula (Cosima Henman) thinks about this turn of events, this is the LAST problem Charly (Tobias Schäfer) needs. He’s been nicknamed “Charly No D–k” since a middle school pantsing at the pool. He’s been traumatized ever since. Charly can barely stand to hit the water in swim class.

The taunting is relentless, and God forbid it cause some fresh mishap. That will go viral in a flash, furthering his descent into social outcast Hell.

But that lightning strike adds a new level of ostracizing. He’s now having shouting matches with his chatty, pushy penis, whose name is “Willy,” we learn. Willy, voiced by Tom Beck in the original German soundtrack (you can watch/listen to the film with subtitles, or dubbed) bullies the “boner loner” to act on his carnal urges, to talk to the prettiest and meannest girl in school (Samirah Breuer), or maybe the cute French exchange student (Vivien König).

Paula? Willy wouldn’t mind coming on to “little itty bitty t—ies.”

And Paula, in a pleasant screenwriterly equal-representation turn, is hearing the same patter from “Hoo ha,” aka “V,” her vagina.

“No, I’m your VULVA.”

Hoo ha is all about sexual release, about grooming “down there” and buying the right underwear for such an occasion. Willy’s passing on simular comically crude advice.

But events conspire to put these two into situations with unsuitable partners thanks to Charly’s reputation-changing viral moment and Paula’s too-public shopping for a way-too-sexy bustier. With final exams set to determine their whole future, Charly’s parents (Doris Golpashin and Alex Stein) about to break up and Paula taking sex advice from her wise-ass 10 year-old (Youtube trained) baby sister (Yuna Bennett), how will this all work out for the best?

The “view of another culture” material stuffed into this farce is fascinating, although one can easily read too much in a school that allows the brutal taunting Charly endures to go on, the parents who never ever knock on bathroom or bedroom doors and constantly interrupt whatever their kids are up to, and parents who require no “big conversation” before their child has her or his first sexual experience under their roof while the parents are at home.

The unequal treatment of each character’s new “reputation” is pretty much a global curse. He gets high fives as a playa, she is “slut” shamed.

“Hard Feelings” has a bit of nudity and a lot of vulgarisms packed around its sexual education content, and some of the Willy/Hoo-ha talk is damned funny, in German or in English.

“I would NEVER leave you hangin.’ Little penis joke, there!”

Cute gags including Marlene and her mean girls always chanting “No shaming” in unison after every instance where they’re laughing at shaming, or doing the shaming themselves.

The picture covers all the over-familiar teen sex comedy bases, with the only added bonus coming from wisecracking voice-over commentary from chatterbox genitalia (Monika Oschek is the ever-thirsty voice of “Hoo ha,” aka “V.”).

That over-familiarity is packaged in a film with a somewhat meandering pace, and the clumsy, obvious way everything is resolved is given away in the first act.

If they’re being honest, Netflix is trotting this title out in the US so it will be confused with the Jennifer Lawrence adult-with-a-young-guy sex farce, “No Hard Feelings,” due out in June.

But those reservations aside, “Hard Feelings” still manages to find a few outrageous laughs. So if your teens’ doors are locked and you hear laughter instead of, say, other incriminating sounds, it’s nothing to worry about. They’re just “watching a foreign film on Netflix,” folks.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity and lots of profane talk about both

Cast: Tobias Schäfer, Cosima Henman, Samirah Breuer, Alex Stein, Doris Golpashin, Louis Jérôme Wagenbrenner, Yuna Bennett, Vivien König and Jasmin Shakeri.

Credits: Directed by Granz Henman, scripted by Alexander Dydyna. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Considering the stiff and static new version of “The Little Mermaid” runs some 50 minutes LONGER than the classic it is remaking, the only reason to leave this out is…the violence.

If you’re giving us photo real (and emotionless) fish and crustaceans, I guess no one wants to see them hacked, filleted and fricasseed.

This scene’s omission illustrates my big complaints about the stiff live-action/FX-filled remake. This animation is fluid, it dances. The crab and the chef are emotive, all broad bouncy gestures easily registering with the viewer, especially the little kids for whom this masterpiece was made.

The new film lacks that riot of color and motion, scenes that literally dance, all overlapping, overlaying and stuffing the screen with fun and emotion.

As this review is publishing, Hollywood screenwriters are still on strike, hoping to acquire better compensation for all the platforms their work appears on and unionized protection from all the things that AI-generated writing could take away.

Watching a strictly-formula thriller like “Kandahar,” one can understand their alarm. It feels as if it was conceived, scripted and cast by machine.

It’s a quest/chase actioner that bounces through Middle East intrigues on the dusty roads of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

It stars Gerard Butler, a workaholic spy who’s just helped his CIA “black ops” unit sabotage and blow up an Iranian nuclear plant. Tom has an exit strategy, a wife waiting for him to “sign those papers” back in London and a daughter’s graduation to get to.

But as he’s about to dash home, “one more job” comes up. He takes it. He’s got his “reasons.”

He’s sent a translator/guide (Navid Negahban), an older man, an Afghan native now living in America with his own “reasons” for taking on this gig.

And when they’re compromised, they have to cover 400 miles by truck and luck to make it to an “extraction point,” the famous war-torn city of the title.

They will take help from friends and face double crosses as they’re pursued by Taliban warlords ISIS, Iranians and a matinee-idol Pakistani secret agent in a black jumpsuit on a black motorcycle.

The stakes have our man Tom/Gerry growling “You’ll last longer when they start pulling your fingernails off,” and an Iranian villain answering a hostage’s “You said I could GO HOME” pleas with “You WILL. As a MARTYR!”

Firefights, oddly-conceived battles, payoffs and secret grief and “noble sacrifice,” “Kandahar ” is just a grab bag of action pic cliches.

Tell me a machine couldn’t have conceived, negotiated, packaged/cast and scripted this utterly generic road picture. While another AI program filled in the blanks while generating a review. Ahem.

The multiple competing agendas/points of view give the film the veneer of complexity. We try to follow the Pakistani (Ali Fazal) as he works his sources, pays off warlords and hunts a quarry he wants to “sell on the open market.” The Iranians are led by a fanatical Revolutionary Guard Colonel (Bahador Foladi) whose “pawn” in this game is taking a journalist (Elnaaz Norouzi) who helped “expose” the CIA’s involvement, and is TV-reporter pretty, the perfect hostage.

Taliban and ISIS factions also figure, but no money was spent on casting “leaders” for them.

And naturally, generic CIA honchos are watching all this unfold via drone images with strict “rules of engagement” that don’t allow them to engage.

Characters are forgotten, story threads sort of left hanging and the Saudi locations are no more impressive than any other place substituting for Afghanistan, and make one wonder if Gerard Butler & Co. have gone Phil Mikkelson, cinema-washing a bloody regime by working with its entities to make a mediocre movie.

A few wowza sequences lift “Kandahar” — a spirited chase through city traffic in what is meant to be Herat, Afghanistan, a night pursuit uses that “Midnight Special” stunt of keeping the lights off driving with night-vision goggles, which help a little when they’re chased down and must shoot their way out of another jam.

I say “their way,” but really, the movie is strictly a Gerry Butler vehicle, and he does almost all the fighting, if not all the emoting.

But in surrounding him with an almost-faceless and limited-fame/little-screen-charisma supporting cast, the picture has no pop or pathos between the sometimes top drawer action beats.

Hitchcock said, “Good villains make good thrillers,” and that’s really “Kandahar’s” undoing. All these possibilities, and nobody wanted to spend a dime on a “name” heavy — in the CIA, in Iran, in Afghanistan?

Fazal is a well-known Indian actor, and he gives us a taste of contemptuous professionalism and stands out from the many other villains. But he’s not on the screen enough, thanks to the many groups/agendas the Mitchell LaFortune script (tell me that doesn’t sound like an AI-generated “action film writer’s name”) piles on.

Every checkbox trope about this movie feels familiar, like we’ve seen it multiple times before, not necessarily always starring Gerry Butler.

Yes he’s a credible, charismatic action star who always delivers the goods, even in middling fare like this.

But if you have the money to fake a nuclear explosion, you’d still better set some of it aside for colorful actors and maybe a rewrite or two. “Kandahar” may only feel like the emotionally-flat, generic action beats AI future. But as of now, the only movies that work have to let us see and feel the human touch.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Gerard Butler, Navid Negahban, Ali Fazal, Bahador Foladi and Elnaaz Norouzi

Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, scripted by Mitchell LaFortune. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:59

Sebastian Maniscalo is a bouncy, animated stand-up comic who uses his Italian-American background in his act. So when he whipped up a screenplay with some of that material as a star vehicle, who’s he get to play the title character in “About My Father?”

Oscar-winner Robert DeNiro is who, The Greatest Screen Actor of his Generation — untouchable in dramatic roles, and pretty damned funny in comical ones.

So Maniscalo, who was in “Green Book” and “Tag” and “The Irishman,” whose biggest screen role before this might have been his turn as the “smart” younger brother in the Ray Romano dramedy “Somewhere in Queens,” is sharing scene after scene — riffing and parenting and pleading and swapping complaints and insults — with The Greatest Screen Actor of His Generation.

And whatever else you or I think about this “Family, amIright?” culture-clashing comedy, know this. The kid holds his own. Robert Freakin’ DeNiro is staring back at him and they’re male-bonding and all of that, and Maniscalo gives as good as he’s gets.

The film is a meet-the-prospective in-laws/”Meet the Fockers” variation. A Chicago boutique hotel manager (Maniscalo) travels to the posh part of coastal Virginia to be with the woman he hopes to marry (Leslie Bibb, down to play), her Senator Mom (Kim Cattrall, fierce), born-to-money hotelier Dad (David Rasche) and their amped-up and entitled “bro” son (Anders Holm) and his flaky New Age flake sibling (Brett Dier).

The catch? Sebastian Maniscalo — yes, he uses his real name — can’t leave his widowed, cheap, Sicilian-immigrant hairdresser Dad (DeNiro) alone on the Fourth, “his favorite holiday…because you don’t have to buy presents.” Besides, the old man won’t pass on his grandmother’s ring to Sebastian to give to his intended Ellie until he’s “checked ‘them’ out.”

The rich and privileged, in their golf course-side McMansion, where peacocks walk the grounds, will host “a working guy” who has a permanent, generational case of “How much a place like this/a table like this/a yacht like this cost?”

So yeah, cultures will clash and put-downs will be delivered, almost entirely from son to father — about his tact, his clothes and his shoes.

“You look like the guy who killed John Wick’s dog!”

The script has some funny lines, one outrageous sight gag and a few less outrageous ones, and director Laura Terruso (“Good Girls Get High” and “Work It”) keeps the camera tight for the zingers and wide for the slapstick.

But the best scenes — all of them — are the father-son dynamic, arguing at home, in Dad’s murderously-maintained garden (he poisons any wildlife that comes for his veg), in Dad’s seriously Sicilian beauty salon, in the attic dormer where they room together in Virginia.

My favorite running gag is the father-passed-down-to-son affection for colognes, a bit of shtick borrowed from Maniscalco’s physically-demonstrative stage act. Each man has his “signature scent.” Each sprays his into the air, and each peacocks his way through the mist to achieve the perfect application. It’s freaking hilarious.

The rest of the movie? Frankly, that’s a bit on the “meh” side. Jokes and situations we’ve seen in lots of other comedies, and none them helped by the hack screenwriter’s laziest or in this cast most egocentric crutch — voice-over narration.

We don’t need to hear “I WORSHIPPED my father” or the other pages and pages of lines narrated. Just SHOW us, and if it’s funny enough, it’ll work. Maniscalco’s incessant narrating sounds like a desperate stand-up comic hitting material too hard to let it land.

The supporting cast has its moments, but this movie sinks or swims with this father-son dynamic. And their banter, not the constant “ba-da-BING” of would-be punchlines voiced-over by Maniscalco, is what’s funny.

The kid indeed does hold his own in his many scenes with the master. If only he’d known enough to shut his yap off camera…

Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material, (profanity) and partial nudity

Cast: Robert DeNiro, Sebastian Maniscalco, Leslie Bibb, Kim Cattrall, Brett Dier, Anders Holm and David Rasche

Credits: Directed by Laura Terruso, scripted by Austen Earl and Sebastian Maniscalco. A Lionsgate release.

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