Movie Nation

Horror movies are, as John Carpenter once broke down for me, a teachable series of practical effects and learnable basic knowledge of human psychology.

So sure, somebody who is the child of a famous director who is still a big deal, but who jumped the shark, aesthetically, during Obama’s first term, can master the “skills” to make a scary creature feature.

The jolts and effects are pro forma, so this could work.

This should give hope to Dakota Johnson and all the other Dakotas out there, hoping for another chance at a hit. Someday, a nepo baby movie maker will give you a big break, too.

June 14.

The chief appeal of a “Calendar Girls,” “Poms,” or “80 for Brady” movie is the chance to see venerable and venerated film stars taking themselves on a trip down memory lane, and us along with them.

Such movies are an outreach to older audiences, who rightfully feel left out of the movie-going conversation as Hollywood has, at least recently, been all about the youth movie market with little time for anything else.

If only “The Magic of Belle Isle” or “And So It Goes” or that Oscar winners chasing Tom Brady ego trip were any good, maybe that audience could be lured back, if only out of nostalgia. They showed up for “Brady,” at least.

“Queen Bees” is another missed opportunity. An almost laughless “Mean Girls in a Retirement Community” comedy built around Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn, Emmy winner Jane Curtin and screen icons James Caan, Ann-Margret and Loretta Devine, it has possibilities baked into it, and little to show for them.

Burstyn plays Helen, an elderly widow whose latest kitchen “accident” gets her booked into Pine Groves Senior Living community, run by Ken DeNardo (French Stewart) but “ruled” by the “Mean Girls with Medic-Alert bracelets.”

That would be snippy, bossy martinet Janet (Curtin), with her running mates Sally (Devine) and Margot (Ann-Margret) by her side.

They save seats in the cafeteria, stick their noses in other people’s business and generally get their way in every way. Helen resists them with a “What is this, high school?” But soon she’s fallen in with them.

And then the complication of a man (Caan) enters her life, and she and we wonder if she’ll ever get out of here and back into her home?

Christopher Lloyd plays a leering local “character in the community. Just add his name to the talents pretty much wasted on this enterprise, apparently inspired by a producer’s mother’s retirement community.

As with most films in this sort, the big mistake is assuming that putting good, proven actors into that setting is enough to get a movie out of it. There’s got to be more to the tale than “cute old folks in a quirky old folks home.”

It doesn’t have to be “Cocoon” or “The Comeback Trail” or “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” but there has to be more to the STORY than this, more to the movie than just little pearls of wisdom from those who have lived long enough to acquire that wisdom.

“Life is 10 percent what happens to you, and 90 percent how you react to it.”

Indeed it is. And?

Rating: PG-13, innuendo, profanity

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin, Ann-Margret, Loretta Devine, Alec Malpa, French Stewart, Christopher Lloyd and James Caan.

Credits: Directed by Michael Lembeck, scripted by A Gravitas Ventures release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:40

“Blueberry” is a drab indie “film festival movie” about a young gay woman who meets someone who might get her out of BFE, Indiana, and the conflict this creates with her sister, who sees the newcomer as a bad influence.

A low-stakes tale filmed in that vast swath of the country (Iowa, actually) where the local grain elevator is the only landmark of note, it is boredom incarnate, stale in execution and acted with a hint of empathy, but only a hint.

Maya Danzig and Kristen Abate play sisters who have inherited their mother’s home. Molly (Abate) is older, hooked up with aspiring rural rapper Gavin (Daniel Slottje) and seriously disapproving of sister Maya’s infatuation with the new Latina (Amina Nieves) in town.

Elsa is a stripper down at Dave’s Ranch, the local bar, exotic in every way to the frumpy, mopey Maya. No, she won’t be taking Elsa’s “amateur night” “fake it till you make it” advice about taking up pole dancing. Probably just as well.

The situations have little drama and no energy to them, the performances are generally lifeless and the title is taken from “Blueberry” lip gloss that somebody fancies. Exciting stuff.

I’ll not “spoil” the movie by revealing who that is.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Maya Danzig, Amina Nieves, Kristen Abate and Daniel Slottje.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stefanie Kay Sparks. A Leomark release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:11

Sterling Brown and Mark Strong are among the co-stars in this topical, FX-laden but possibly empty-headed actioner slated for release on Netflix May 24.

It looks slick and really dumb.

“Boy Kills World” is a gonzo, video-game-violent/splatter-film-bloody “Hunger Games” for fanboys.

It is “Oldboy” meets “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” pandering and slaughtering in equal measure, a movie with jaunty, genre-spoofing possibilities that descend into into lethargy and wind-up in stomach-turning savagery before all is said and done.

And star Bill Skarsgård’s character and leading man turn is just similar enough to brother Alexander Skarsgård’s work in Netflix’s “Mute” to be worth mentioning.

Skarsgård (“It”) plays the titular Boy, raised since childhood by a martial arts shaman (Yayan Ruhian of “The Raid” movies and “John Wick 3”) who trained him in all the martial arts movie cliche ways.

The deaf-mute boy lost his family. And the fascist oligarchs who run this dystopia, , the Van Der Koys, are the reasons for his training, his motivation to succeed.

He is “an intrument built to kill Hilda Van Der Koy,” he narrates. That would be the ruthless matriarch played by Famke Janssen.

After reaching adulthood, Boy will have to kill his way through other members of the family, played by Sharlto Copley, Michelle Dockery and others, if he’s to have any prayer of fulfilling his “mission.”

The gimmick here is that our anti-hero can’t remember what his voice, when he had one, sounded like. So in his head, he narrates the story in the voice of his favorite video game hero (H. Jon Benjamin), who also happens to be a voice-over mainstay and the heart of animated series from “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist” to “Archer,” “Family Guy” to “Bob’s Burgers.”

His intererior monologues dominate the first half of the picture, telling us bits of Boy’s back story, imagining conversations with the kid sister (Quinn Copland) he lost, a child apparition who is both his guide and his conscience.

He likes to finish his fights with a “Player One WINS.” Except when this or that “Player Two” fights back, or won’t “die.”

Copley plays a dye-jobbed blowhard, perfect as the in Face of the Family on TV. Dockery is the schemer who props him up, Bret Gelman is the violent fixer who fancies himself the screenwriter of all the TV appearances.

And fanboy fave Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”)? Well, you’ll see.

The fights, with fighter, stunt-man and sometime stunt coordinator Ruhian on set and “District 9” stunt director Grant Hulley in charge, are mayhem incarnate — head-butts, fists and knives and other sharp objects thrown in with the pistol and assault rifle fusillades.

First-time feature director Moritz Mohr tries to keep this beast on its feet and fighting with its feet and hands and head and anything else. But the action falls off steeply as we drift into the middle acts, and a “team” (Andrew Koji and Isaiah Mustafa) is comically drawn in.

And the finale is so violent and drawn-out as to be excruciating, enough to make you forget the genre-spoofing whimsy of having H. Jon Benjamin ironically voice-over a sadistic and gory vengeance fantasy.

There are clever ideas and casting flourishes at the heart of “Boy Kills World.” But in execution, one keeps coming back to the phrase “Less is more,” even in a hyper-violent action comedy where the excess is kind of the point.

Rating: R, graphic violence and lots and lots of it.

Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Michelle Dockery, Sharlto Copley, Yayan Ruhian, Andrew Koji, Isaiah Mustafa, Jessica Rothe and Famke Janssen, featuring the voice of H. Jon Benjamin.

Credits: Directed by Moritz Mohr, scripted by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, based on a short film by Mohr and Remmers. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:51

Tatum stars as a tech tycoon with his own private island, Naomie Ackie is a cocktail waitress with gold digging on the brain. Oscar winner Geena Davis, Kyle MacLachlan, Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osmebt also star.

This MGM/Amazon comic thriller is being tucked into the tail end of August, a traditional dumping ground for movies with limited prospects.

It’ll be on Amazon soon enough, because “Blink Twice” and it’ll be here (Aug. 29) and gone from theaters.

Looks cute. Ish.

Neon has this one, which means it opens May 31, closes June 1. Or maybe June 2.

July 26, as surefire a hit as any comic book movie to ever come down the pike hits theaters.

Shawn Levy directs our heroes teaming up to “fight a common enemy.” “Superfriends” eat your hearts out.

“We Grown Now,” the third feature of writer-director Minhal Baig, is a sentimental coming-of-age tale, a period piece nostalgic for Chicago’s stigmatized and long-gone Cabrini Green high-rise housing project.

That’s just the first way this lovely and intimate film upends expectations and challenges the viewer to see the world differently.

The two tweens who grow up in “the projects” — Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) — are not overtly victims of their circumstances. Each lives in a single-parent household, but Malik’s mom (a radiant Jurnee Smollett) and grandmom (S. Epatha Merkerson, earthy and nurturing) and Eric’s dad (Lil Rel Howery, wholly serious for once) are wholly engaged in their lives and invested in their futures.

Mother Dolores may just be “trying to hold onto to the little we’ve got.” Dad Jason might be struggling to make ends meet with a pizza joint job and teach his Eric the math of home economics — how much it takes them to just get by.

But these kids are well-cared for, curious about the world to the point of being idealized “screenwriter” creations. Middle schoolers of any race and any locale aren’t known for skipping school to check out Walter Ellison paintings and a Georges Seurat exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

There’s little of the street argot and pervasive cultural rot often depicted in stories in such settings. When violence intrudes on their world, it may be a part of a trend that is politicized as it is presented on TV — drugs, guns and the random, murderous violence that connects them.

So Malik and Eric have room to dream, to pile old mattresses in the playground to “jump” and bounce into the sky with, DIY trampolines aimed at the heavens and a better future.

They swap jokes — “How do you make a tissue dance? You put a little ‘boogie’ into it.” They imagine the cosmos in a water-stained ceiling. They revel in a rare ride on The El. And they tell each other of their pasts, and a little about their hopes for the future.

Malik’s grandma reminds him he is one generation removed from Tupelo, Mississippi, and the racism his mother and grandparents fled. Eric’s dad passes on sage advice about grudges and the “life’s too short” reasons for letting go of them.

Baig — “Hala” was her break-out film — tests these lives and this friendship in a lot of conventional ways, a random shooting death, a police crackdown that upends ordinary, working class lives. The story’s turn towards a climax is yet another way it gives in to the tried-and-true of tales in this setting.

Everything’s a tad neat and scrubbed — including the child actors, their characters’ spotless Adidas and Chuck Taylors, and their dialogue. But the sweetness, the lived-in feeling of the characters and their world lift this gentle drama and recommend it.

It’s not a gritty recreation of a pretty grim place that was knocked-down for a reason. “We Grown Now” lets us see Cabrini Green and its people through the rose-colored glasses of memory, and reminds us of how universal that sentimentalizing process is. It wasn’t the buildings and the politics that created them and knocked them down that’s worth recalling. It’s the lives lived there, their hopes and dreams — realized or deferred — that matter.

Rating: PG, adult themes

Cast: Blake Cameron James, Jurnee Smollett, S. Epatha Merkerson, Gian Knight Ramirez and Lil Rel Howery

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Minhal Baig. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:34

South African writer-director Brad Katzen puts extra effort into trying to make his stoner comedy “Soweto Blaze” look and sound new and “fresh.”

The setting is a post-Apartheid Soweto, more affluent and generally unrest-free, with nicer homes and just a scattering of ruins.

The dialogue is mostly the local patois, some blend of Zulu and Sotho, some of it given the International Accent of Cannabis — “Rastafarian.”

Katzen uses split screens, simulated phone screens and jump cuts so often that when the film stops cold — freezes up — you wonder if that’s a stylistic choice, or a technical glitch via Netflix (the likely culprit).

And the closing credits are Indian cinema-inventive — still shots of the crowded set ID’ing every member of the crew and their job, as well as the mostly-unknown cast.

But all our intrepid filmmaker has done is revisit what one might assume are the American films of his 1990s childhood — “Friday,” the Urtext of modern stoner comedies, and the Alicia Silverstone kidnapping comedy “Excess Baggage.”

There are a couple of laughs in this one, mostly from the inept gunplay, the loopy situations, the characters and the stoner philosophy espoused by He who is the Most-stoned — “What if time is just an artificial construct?”

Yet the best praise one can summon for this South African stoner comedy is “Hope you do better next time.”

Mo (Matli Mohapeloa) is a low-rent pot dealer beloved for his wide and exotic selection of smokables — Dutch Treat, Skunk, etc.

Dill (Sydney Ndlovu) and his gal Pickle (Nyeleti Khoza) might be his most reliable customers. Aside from the local Rastafarian. But they never seem to pay.

That is an issue for the corrupt cop (Nhlanhla Mayisa) who has been shaking Mo down for years. The payoffs cut into Mo’s efforts to save up for his dream business, a mellow, maybe even cannabis-infused smoothie-dispensing food truck.

When he and Dill and Pickle lament their cash-poor status, and watch an interaction involving mobster Lebo the Lion (Sello Sebotsane), his albino henchwoman (Palesa Mosia) and his rebellious hottie of a daughter Thandi (Dimpho More), they joke about a ransom that could solve all their problems.

Next thing poor Mo knows, he comes home to find the two short-attention-span potheads have gone through with a kidnapping and stashed rash and furious Thandi in his house. As her daddy is a murderous thug, and as she’s stolen money from him in an effort to escape that life, Mo is in over his head, and we don’t have to ask “Deep what?” as to the substance he’s buried under.

Katzen tries to bedazzle this simple-enough set-up with interludes where Dill and Pickle put ads on TikTok that they’re looking for a short term rental (to stash Thandi), split screens that show us text messages but which never add up to an “LOL” and the point of view shifts as the dirty cop and the mobster’s apprentice hunt one and all down.

Dill & Pickle are the heart of the picture, but even together they don’t add up to one Chris Tucker, to use the “Friday” comparison.

The third act violence is (supposedly) non-lethal, and involves pistols and an AK 47 and “accidents.” Kind of funny.

I like the idea behind “Soweto Blaze,” and the attempts to give it all a little pizazz. And the setting and characters are novel. There just isn’t enough here that’s funny enough to carry this cannabis caper comedy across the finish line.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Matli Mohapeloa, Dimpho More, Sydney Ndlovu, Nyeleti Khoza, Palesa Mosia, Nhlanhla Mayisa and Sello Sebotsane

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brad Katzen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35