Movie Nation

“The Big Bend” is a classic “film festival movie.”

That’s a quirky indie with several elements that land it in lots of film festivals, where audiences who are down for anything new and novel might find and embrace it. Such movies often lack “name” stars, and generally find it hard to get the public’s attention outside of the rarefied air of Festival World. Many can’t even find distribution. But within their natural environment, word of mouth about their novelty gets around.

Brett Wagner’s movie has an arresting setting, the titular “Big Bend” region of Texas, a bucket list National Park for those of us into nature, scenic vistas and quiet. Into that gorgeous, forbidding and dangerous world, our writer-director tosses two families, each with their own “crisis,” and an escaped convict.

What Wagner finds to do with all this can be predictable and almost too-patiently presented, or surprising enough to make you go, “Wait, THAT’S an interesting turn. Where IS this headed now?”

Jason Butler Harner and Virginia Kull play Cory and Melanie, the “city” parents of two little girls, driving to the Big Bend to meet up with old college friends, Georgia (Erica Ash) and Mac (David Sullivan).

They’re all in their 30s, with Cory and Mel parenting two little girls and Mac and Georgia trying to tame two little boys.

Mac has fixed up a remote homestead in the park-adjacent middle of nowhere, with big dreams of renting it out, buying more land and duplicating that “off the grid” vacation experience “for Austin hipsters.” Mac has a lot of “big dreams,” we gather.

Cory and Melanie have a secret or two they’ve decided not to share as it might spoil this pleasant visit. Georgia and Mac might have a secret as well.

Unbeknownst to them all, a bearded convict (Nick Masciangelo) has escaped from prison, wounded and on the run, or on a canoe, which is where we first see him. There’s a region-wide manhunt underway.

Foreshadowing? Well, this very nice remodel is hobbled by an ancient, thumping water heater. There’s “no cell” out here, which is why when they venture out, walkie talkies are the comms of choice.

“Is there a gun in the house?” Melanie asks, a tad too obviously thanks to the screenplay.

And then there’s the list of all the things to “watch out for” in the desert. “Snakes and cacti,” Mac’s list begins. “Scorpions,” a child pipes up. “Mountain lions” another adds. “Black bears!”

This screenplay is textbook — create characters, flesh them out, set up a smorgasbord of jeopardies facing them, then picking and choosing which ticking time bombs to set off.

Not every idea pans out and not every scene reaches a payoff that we see on camera.

But this film’s slow, deliberate opening acts immerse us in this beautiful place and the somewhat troubled people in it, and then finds a way to throw into crisis and conflicts that can be surprising, or at least narratively defensible and somewhat satisfying.

Not bad. And now you don’t even have to go to a film festival to visit “The Big Bend.”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jason Butler Harner, Virginia Kull, Erica Ash, David Sullivan and Nick Masciangelo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brett Wagner. An Eammon Films release.

Running time: 1:43

Guy Ritchie’s “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a jaunty burlesque of the conventions of the combat commando film.

Peopled with genuine characters, in every meaning of that phrase, and a piece of the real history that inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond, it’s a light, bloody-minded vamp of 007, and maybe the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Henry Cavill, at his dashing, flippant best, in a James Bond film.

The history is, well, close enough to get by. The militaria is just off enough for ordnance and tactics buffs to turn the anachronisms and far-fetched derring do into a drinking game.

Think of it has a more lighthearted “Dirty Dozen,” a “Navarone” tale with laughs, a “Kelly’s Heroes” with a character who likes to carve the hearts out of his Nazi prey.

Set in early (but never wintry) 1942, the last year the outcome of the war was really in doubt, it’s about a Churchill (Rory Kinnear) backed acknowledgement that “Hitler does not play by the rules, so neither are we.”

Over the objections of defeatists in his war cabinet (?), he pushes Brigadier Gubbins, aka the first “M” (Cary Elwes) to form a team to disrupt the Germans’ plans to resupply their U-Boats and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

There’s this Spanish possession off West Africa, Fernando Po, where a merchant ship, the Duchesa, and two tugboats are stocking up to head out to resupply wolf packs of submarines. “M” figures he has just the man for the job…in prison.

Captain Gus March-Philips (Cavill) is a bearded rogue and a charmer, who cadges cigars and good whisky and the privilege of hand-picking his team from M and M’s assistant, young Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox, of “Black 47,” son of famed British actor Edward Fox of “Day of the Jackal”).

He’ll need an arsonist-turned-underwater-demo expert (Henry Golding), an Irishman with sea experience (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and a hulking sadistic brute of a Swede (Alan Ritchson, who all but steals the picture).

That guy with inside knowledge of U-Boat ops and this resupply mission (Alex Pettyfer)? They’ll have to break him out of a German jail on the Canary Islands on their way, sailing a two-masted schooner south to the equatorial island.

March-Philips is so persuasive he has but to note “I’ve got to get a coat like that” for it to magically turn up in his possession. Friend or foe are helpless to his persuasion, whatever form it takes.

Eiza González of “Baby Driver” is a female spy of allure and nerve, and Babs Olusanmokun of the first “Dune” movie and TV’s “Star Trek” Strange New Worlds” is the African casino/club owner who works with her on the island to pave the way for the commandos.

Til Schweiger is the particularly sadistic German in charge of the resupply base.

“The only thing worse than a Nazi is him.”

This crew must shoot, with silenced Bren guns and bow and arrow, and punch and kick and stab-stab-stab their way through a lot of Nazis. Somebody’s going to sultrily croon “Mack the Knife” to entertain the “sausage and sauerkraut and black bread” eaters. And somebody’s on the lookout for a Gestapo overcoat in just his size.

Here we are and here we go. Review to post by 11 Eastern if I’m lucky.

(The review is now live, posted here).

“Deadly Justice” is a C or D movie thriller so badly scripted, amateurishly-acted and stridently-scored that you wonder where the money to make it, or make it all better, went?

It was shot and set in Biloxi. Didn’t the state pitch in on it? Did Brett Favre steal that cash, too?

There are a couple of pseudo Southern accents, all of them from the locals brought on board as supporting cast in a tale of a judge in jail, “revenge” on the prosecutor and police chief who put him there and who might be behind it.

Actor Corin Nemec scripted this story about Deep South “justice” and a true crime TV interview series whose host tries to “gotcha” his way into getting that case reopened. It’s riddled with ludicrous plot twists, hilariously tone-deaf reactions to crimes and lunk-headed attempts at humor.

The players, even the professionals in the cast, can’t fix it. The amateurish bit players? They didn’t have a prayer.

Kelly Sullivan plays Holly, the former DA now entering private practice who makes the mistake of showing up on Dale Jones’ (Brian Krause) “Real Crimes” expose show. A judge went to prison for stalking and murdering his wife, a case so notorious a TV movie (sampled here, a film even worse than the “real” movie) was made from it.

“Real Crime” seems to think Holly and her retired police chief Dad (Marco St. John) railroaded that judge.

The show doesn’t go well, and as a bonus, the creep host asks Holly out afterwards. Worse still, when she gets home, somebody tases her and leaves a note telling her it’s “Your turn to lose someone.”

Holly, the ex-DA, doesn’t report this assault to the police. “Logic” goes out the window, never to return, as we’re treated to a mad taserer who comes for Holly’s assistant (Christiana Leucas), her Dad and others.

That new guy in town, the second man to hit on Holly the first time he meets her? Maybe over-concerned Theo (screenwriter and “Stargate” veteran Nemec) is involved. Maybe the “Duck Dynasty” looking judge (Billy Miller) is pulling strings from inside the penitentiary.

As more things happen to Holly, we kind of hope she eventually calls the cops, or that Dad does. Not that we expect that to help.

Penn’s not box office any more, if he ever was. Wildly unpopular with a certain political fringe, not all that popular with any other political fringes.

Dakota Johnson is a much-abused and rightly-so nepo baby star without a whole lot in the tool bag.

So, this is a redemption story…for the actors?

Aaron Eckhart throws himself and some mid-fight grace notes at “The Bricklayer,” another CIA agent brought back in to “fix” a screw-up run amok within and without The Agency.

It’s not “The Beekeeper,” but Eckhart commits to the part and he and the fights in it are some compensation for a pretty silly plot and clumsy “Will this never end?” story structure.

It’s the latest B-movie by Renny Harlin, who once filmed a “Die Hard” sequel way back in the last millenium.

Eckhart plays a meticulous retired agent who brought his detail-oriented skills back to his pre-CIA profession — bricklaying. But somebody agent Steve Vail used to “run” when he was stationed in Greece has gone rogue. His former boss (Tim Blake Nelson) and the agent (Nina Dobrev) who discovered that the assassin Victor Radek isn’t dead are the ones who track Vail down.

“This is your f–k-up,” bossman barks. “And you need to fix it.”

Clifton Collins, Jr. plays the most conspicuous professional assassin in screen history as Radek — black outfits, black turtleneck, Homberg hat. He’s an aged hipster hitman, standing out in every crowd in sunny, touristy Greece.

These days, Radek is luring journalists with some sort of “doomsday file” that could expose decades of CIA misbehavior. He then kills them and makes it look like The Agency did it.

But back in the day, Vail and Radek were pals. Flashbacks show us a family, sailing vacations along the Greek coast, the promise of identity-changed “retirement” in Pine-something-or-other Montana.

Now, Radek wants blackmail money or he’ll keep killing journalists and creating anti-CIA/anti-American headlines all over Europe.

There’s nothing for it but for Vail to go back to Greece, dragging Agent Bannon (Dobrev) along as he reconnects with his “outfitter” (Oliver Trevena), his CIA station-chief ex-girlfriend (Ilfenesh Hadera) and invents a new “cover” as he tracks his old friend.

Bannon will pretend to be “my wife.” “You’re too old to be my girlfriend,” he explains.

He quotes Miles Davis whenever she catches him in contradictions.

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

And Balkan men?

“They never really die. They just smell that way.”

“Sting” is a solid no-big-stars B-picture thriller about an itsy bitsy spider who gets chatty, then awfully big as it tears through a New York apartment building in the middle of a blizzard.

Naturally, it was filmed in Australia. The magic of the movies, amIright?

A meteor shower that coincides with a storm is our “How this happened.” A child obsessed with sneaking through the airvents into other apartments has a thing for tiny arachnids. But one that doubles in size, night by night?

Bugger that.

Alya Browne plays Charlotte, a tween living with her architect mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell of “Star Trek: Picard” and the recent “Hellboy” remake) and trying to bond with her comic book illustrator stepdad (Ryan Corr of “The Water Diviner” and “Ladies in Black”).

They’re sort-of collaborating on a spidery comic that is set to go into production. But he’s got to draw that in his spare time. Stepdad Ethan is also the building super in an old apartment house owned by the two elderly sisters upstairs (Noni Hazelhurst and Robyn Nevin), with the one suffering from dementia Heather’s grandmother.

They have a new baby in the house and a lot of things tugging the adults in different directions. No wonder young Charlotte is out crawling through the air ducts, finding things and that unusual spider.

She loves “The Hobbit,” so “Sting” shall be the spider’s new name. Not “Shelob?” Maybe she hasn’t gotten to “The Lord of the Rings” yet.

Feeding Sting roaches helps the spider grow big and fast and strong. The clicking noises Sting makes tell Charlotte she’s hungry, or that she sees her in the room.

It isn’t until Charlotte tries to buy an extra aquarium out of the experiments-obsessed biology student (Danny Kim) upstairs that she gets a clue.

“Charlotte, spiders don’t have vocal chords.”

The opening scene has us watching a hapless exterminator (Jermaine Fowler of “Sorry to Bother You” and “Coming 2 America”) staring death in the face upon first encountering Sting. We know how bad things will get. The movie is about getting us there.

One rarely channel surfs past “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when it pops up on broadcast or cable TV. Renewing your acquiantance with the funniest movie of 1975 and probably the silliest movie ever made is a guilty pleasure few fans turn down.

I hadn’t seen it in a theater since what I think was its last “anniversary” or “new DVD/BluRay” re-release back around 2004. With an “Evening with John Cleese” and “The Holy Grail” rolling round, I relished the chance to see it on the big screen again.

Some sight gags and wacky-phonetic/Saxon English opening credits jokes you expect to play better in a theater, and with an audience. But what struck me the most this time around is how cheap it doesn’t look.

Sure, the film stock isn’t the best, the effects primitive enough to point out as a punch line.

“It’s only a model!”

But Hazel Pethig’s costumes seem period perfect, even if the “chain mail” was loops of wool. And Roy Forge Smith’s production design, with input from Python cartoonist turned co-director Terry Gilliam, looks positively archeological.

I don’t know if it’s the nearly perpetually gray skies over the primitive Scottish locations, the fake fog or the very real mud that permeates many a scene, especially early ones. But the entire affair looks like a documentary-real absurdist farce by Samuel Beckett acted-out by the greatest British clowns of their day.

If you know the film you’ve heard the stories — repeated by Cleese at that screening — of the way it was filmed for a pittance, that the “coconuts” were an exceptionally clever way of avoiding the expense of renting horses, teaching the cast to ride them and the like.

But by the time Tim the Enchanter (one of several characters played by Cleese) is pointing his fire-breathing staff and setting off explosions late in the third act, I was muttering “Wow, this is something to see.”

Cliffs and caves and castles and mud-mired villages and sylvan forests ruined by assorted rival “knights” who challenge King Arthur and his motley crew at every turn are so inviting — save for the mud — that they impact Scottish tourism and one particular castle location to this very day.

The story — Arthur, played by Graham Chapman at his straight-man sternest, and his faithful servant/coconut-clacking pack mule Patsy (Gilliam, REALLY into the part) make their way across this corner of Britain, trying to convince the locals that A) he really is king, B) they really are Britons and C) that his authority was ordained by God and “The Lady in the Lake” who handed him the sword Excalibur.

“Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

Knights such as Sir Bedevere (Co-director Terry Jones), Sir Lancelot (Cleese again), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin, of course) and the “not so brave” Sir Robin (Eric Idle) join the traveling retinue, which avoids Camelot and its Round Table as “a silly place,” as Arthur accepts a quest from the Almighty, that he and they seek the Holy Grail.

The many set-pieces here, sketches built around Arthur or this or that knight’s encounters with figures prosaic and mythic, still induce giggles — from the randy sisters of Castle Anthrax, led by twins Zoot and Dingo (Python’s go-to laugh lady Carol Cleveland) who long to corrupt “pure” Sir Galahad, the quest for “shrubbery,” the hilariously dim-witted witch trial featuring Cleese’s then-wife and future “Fawlty Towers” collaborator Connie Booth to a “damsel” rescue Lancelot slaughters his way to, only to realize a sissy Prince Herbert (Jones again) is the one who requires rescuing.

Cleese’s glorious bit of French-accented taunting from castle battlements may offer the most quotable lines in this most quotably hilarious cult comedy.

“You don’t frighten us, English peeg-dogs. Go and boil yourrrrr bottoms, you sons of a seeelly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called ‘Arthur King,’ you and all your silly English Kuh-niggets!”

Cleese’s many comic creations — the stubborn Black Knight who will not yield, calling each limb lost in a duel with Arthur “a flesh wound,” Tim the wild-eyed wizard — make him the stand-out in the picture, amusing in every guise.

But from the first time I saw it until now, it’s been obvious to me that Chapman carries it. His self-serious Arthur, under-reacting, reacting and over-reacting to the “silly” going on all around him, was pitch perfect here, and in the later “Life of Brian.”

Chapman’s Arthur is a version of his conservative man/military man stentorian figures who’d march into a sketch or a shot with an officious, “Right. Damned silly. That’ll be enough of that” variations, the serious man taken aback by the lunacy going on around him on the TV series.

The gay member of the troupe was its best straight man. He is the contrast to the absurdism, arguing about how coconuts could have journeyed to Britain, trying to get the attention of a “French” castle, in England over 100 years before the Norman Conquest.

“Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail!”

The production design is the buy-in. Cleese, Palin, and to a lesser degree Jones and Idle, bring the surrealism. But Chapman, with the perfect voice for a stern, schoolmaster lecture on the Dark Ages, pre-history Britain and the Arthurian legend, is the credibility.

Add them together and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” remains one of the great see-it-with-an-audience cult comedies, riotously funny at times, grimly goofy at others, and muddy and bloody almost all the way through.

And sparrows to catapults, coconuts to killer rabbits, “Bring out yer dead” to “Run away!” the “Grail” almost never looks like the comic-thrills-made-on-the-cheap classic that it is.

Rating: PG, a little innuendo, comically bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, with Carol Cleveland, Connie Booth, John Young, Rita Davies, Bee Duffell and Neil Innes.

Credits: Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, scripted by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

Running time: 1:31

Eighty-four years old, sharp as a tack and still damned funny, John Cleese charmed, tickled and regaled a packed house at Greater Orlando’s Enzian Theater last night as a special event for this year’s Florida Film Festival.

He talked about “creativity,” the subject of his latest book, as it relates to comedy and screenwriting, reminded everyone of the low budget and discomfort one and all — especially he — suffered making “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in soggy early ’70s Scotland.

He griped about “uncreative” executives — calling out ex-Disney boss Nina Jacobson by name for trying to dumb down a script Cleese co-wrote based on a Roald Dahl book. Cleese broke down the particular talents of his assorted Python-mates — with Michael Palin “gifted at creating unforgottable characters,” his late writing partner Graham Chapman “our best litmus test” as to whether something was funny or not and Eric Idle’s clever way with lyrics.

And he expressed amusement with the American right’s obsession with “drag,” something “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was pivotal (along with Uncle Milty and Flip “Geraldine” Wilson) in bringing into the nation’s living rooms via TV. He laid the blame for it at the foot of America lacking “our long history of pantos (Pantomime Shows),” where generation after English generation has been delighted by plays put on with women playing men and boys and men playing women.

Maybe conservatives wouldn’t feel so threatened if they’d grown up with something like that, Cleese suggested.

He talked about his fond friendship with Steve Martin, with America’s comic philosopher an unerring sounding board for “A Fish Called Wanda,” his amused frustration at Michael Palin’s decades of “boring” travel documentary series, his appreciation for “the two Terrys,” Jones and Gilliam, who co-directed “Holy Grail” and who made it look so muddily authentic, despite the presence of coconuts.

The evening’s best joke might have been a question from the audience, about where “It’s true” that Cleese didn’t accept a knighthood because “the Queen didn’t know how to (or refused to) pronounce k-nigget?”

And another member of the audience asked about the big moment that changed his relationship with his pathologically depressed mother — making a threatening joke (as an adult, on the phone) about knowing somebody who could come over and “help” grant her wish to just end it all. Cracked her up every time he brought it up from then onwards.

Aside from some vertigo and hearing loss, one of the funniest men alive was none the worst for wear and tear, quick to run with an idea or jokingly ridicule a rambling question, try his hand at a fake pratful or grouse about “cancel culture” and its impact on creativity and creative freedom.

Lovely man. I’ve been a fan since the records of their live performances came out @1979-80, catching the second wave of Python mania that blew up around the time “Life of Brian” became a global phenomenon.

That gives one the pleasure of bingeing on their many series, including the pre Python ones featuring the sextet before they teamed up, and catching up on their movies and later work.

If you get a chance to catch JC on the other dates of his years-long North America and elsewhere tour, don’t miss that opportunity.

Thanks to Cameron Meier for the two-shot, here. With all one has to keep up with re: introductions, questions, audience moderation and the like, I didn’t get around to getting a selfie or two-shot with Our Lord J.C. The venue didn’t photograph the event, at Mr. Cleese’s request.

Anybody else among the scores of folks who I saw snapping away get a decent shot or two-shot? Feel free to send my way. I’ll give you credit.

Decades of co-starring human actors with CGI animated ones in kiddie comedies haven’t exactly produced a new golden age for children’s entertainment. A hit here and there, but nothing you can imagine kids embracing, generation after generation, has been the result.

Efforts starring Scooby-Doo and Marmaduke and Sonic the Hedgehog are joined by “Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp,” a lackluster revival of the 1940s vintage intellectual property cartoon character.

The title tells you everything that’s important about this picture. The rascal Woody is in it. He needs to go to “camp” to learn “teamwork” instead of being the self-serving, pileated and pecking menace he’s always been.

Struggling “STEAM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) Camp Woo-hoo is where Woody seeks a “teamwork” badge to get back into the national forest he was expelled from. It’s run by Mary-Louise Parker, and the funniest thing about the film must have been the conversation between the “Weeds” star and the agent who talked her into this.

There’s a rival Camp Hoo-Rah, all dressed in camo and run by and for bullies (Josh Lawson plays the camp chief). An ex-con buzzard helps the bad guys (not all that bad) compete with Camp Woo-hoo in The Wilderness Games, which are officiated by a park ranger, played by a CGI walrus.

It’s childish and slapshticky, with Woody commenting on everything and anything, including a flashback to the old prospector who bought the land that it was founded on.

“Too bad this flashback wasn’t in color,” Woody quips. “It could’ve popped.”

The jokes are feeble, even the puns. Toss Woody in the camp kitchen freezer to “chill out.” He’ll “be the coolest kid in camp! NAILED it!”

“You KNOW those weren’t funny!”

No, Woody’s trademark laugh isn’t as amusing as it once once. And no, Woody’s promise back in the first act is never fulfilled.

“Never mind. Come back to me. I’ll think of something funnier.”

It’s all harmless enough, with its diverse cast of nerd “types” and “mean girls” and the like.

The messaging is Kid Comedy Screenwriting 101 worthy.

“You can’t hide from the bullies of this world your whole life.”

But there’s barely enough going on here to distract children into sticking with Woody all the way to the finish. The anarchy is mild-mannered, the sight gags limp and the human interactions produce no laughs and little in the way of charm, either.

Still, I would’ve loved to hear that agent’s call to Emmy-winner Mary-Louise P. Provided it didn’t smack of desperation on either end of the line.

Rating: TV-PG, cartoon mayhem

Cast: The voices of Eric Bauza, Tom Kenny and Kevin Michael Richardson, with Chloe De Los Santos, Savannah La Rain, Esther Son, Josh Lawson and Mary Louis Parker.

Credits: Directed by Jonathan A. Rosenbaum, scripted by Cory Edwards, Jim Martin and Stephen Mazur. A Universal release on Netflix

Running time: 1:40