Movie Nation

If there’s one myth that dies the hardest about the comedian, writer, dancer, banjo virtuoso and art collector Steve Martin, it’s that he’s “unknowable.”

Shy, “very private,” soft-spoken and guarded in interviews that aren’t chat show performances, he’s let that “philosophy major who does comedy” persona give him an inscrutable air.

But he’s written lots of books and essays, a play that touched on his touchy relationship with his realtor/frustrated actor father, been burned by at least one ex girlfriend (the late Anne Heche) in her memoir, and written his own memoirs — the most recent, a lovely comic book about his hit-and-miss and now-officially “ended” movie career.

So maybe we know what there is to know.

I’ve interviewed the man three or four times, read most of his books and reviewed most of his films and plays and had started to believe that along with being very smart, with an academic ability to dissect comedy, he’s basically just “The Lonely Guy” who may have finally found happiness and contentment with a second marriage and a “comeback” TV series and sold-out series of tours with his pal Martin Short, all coming along after he hit “retirement” age.

That’s what Oscar winning docmentarian Morgan Neville (“Twenty feet from Stardom,” and the Anthony Bourdain doc “Roadrunner”) was up against with his three hours+/two-part film “Steve! (Martin)” for Apple TV.

It’s a dry undertaking, but pointillistic in its attention to detail, more fascinating as history than entertaining as “a million laughs and how I generated them” story. And in it, Martin is never less than utterly charming.

“Ever think you’d be so bored?” by this subject, he asks his off-camera interogator (Neville) at one point.

But Neville, like we and indeed Martin himself, can still marvel at “What an odd life” it’s been, the unlikely stardom that exploded into a cultural phenomenon, overnight, fifteen years into his career and mere days before his “I’ll give this until I’m” thirtieth birthday deadline for “making it.” A half-century in the public eye, and a sudden third act “comeback” that startled everyone, himself included, show us a man at long last at ease with himself and happy in life.

The second half of the series/film is “Now,” catching Martin at 75-76 (he turns 79 in August), biking with his pal and co-star Short through the LA of their careers, testing out material for their act, Martin keeping his late-life child out of the picture as we see the very face of contentment, a very famous man with nothing else to prove who is more likely to stop and chat with strangers if they’re walking their dog.

He calls every dog “buddy.” He tells Jerry Seinfeld that he’s never spoken ill of “other artists,” unlike most of the folks in his profession. He lets us see the adorably funny form letters he long sent to every correspondant. If “Steve!” adds one thing to his rep and his public life resume, it’s that Martin takes pains to be kind.

The first half of the film shows us the “anxious” childhood disconnect from his embittered father, Glenn, landing that first job, as a child, as Disneyland, getting into magic in his tweens and realizing “Oh! They love it when the tricks don’t work!”

He went from being a Carl Ballantine fan from TV to stealing shtick from a Disneyland comic who used balloon animals in his act, to the first urges to try his hand at “conceptual” comedy such as what he’d seen Ernie Kovacs do on late ’50s TV.

Martin studied philosophy at a couple of colleges, learned to dissect jokes and the “tension” behind generating laughter, and eventually settled on gags and jokes where he left out the “release” of the “indicator,” the punch line.

Writing for “The Smothers Brothers” TV show, touring as an opening act for lots of bands, most famously The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, learning ways to get the attention of arena crowds despite how “weird” his act was, and then — August of 1975, it happens. By the time he first hosts “Saturday Night Live,” one year later, he had a hit record, was selling out arenas as a headliner, and had become America’s favorite comic.

He became “the most idolized comedian ever,” Seinfeld marvels, and lets us get just a hint of competitive resentment at that fact. Seinfeld is rich, supremely successful and apparently mellow in his 60s, but is still a great appreciator of The Great Ones, those even he might still envy.

Martin gives Neville access to hours and hours of performance cassettes and written post-mortems where Martin critiqued his work, lamented his years and years of failure and yet kept making discoveries, testing wild notions — taking his early, devoted and still-“small” “audiences out of the club and into McDonald’s, etc.

He’d sit in on call-in shows for wee hours college radio stations, and come off as witty, flirty and hilarious.

Listen to the sound effects — all the bones and cartilege cracking and crunching and what not.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is entirely too old for this s—. Perhaps there’s money in pairing him up with Liam Neeson at some point in the near future.

Shannon Doherty, Emerson Min, STicky Fingaz and Kristanna Loken also star in this May 21 release.

The preview to this June 7 release is enough to make one ponder just what ends a career, or signals the beginning of the end.

Martin Lawrence was old news 20 years ago, infamous on my side of the industry (entertainment journalism) for being one of the bigger wastes of time — rude, self-destructive, an arrogant SOB of limited talent who was the last to get the memo.

Will Smith was always a nice, compliant, press-and-public friendly persona who put the effort into being liked. Until his little performative tirade at the Oscars. As indulged as he was during his many years “owning” summer, and his years chasing an Oscar that always seemed to be just beyond his talents and reach, you had to wonder if the public and the good press would come back.

Kevin Costner’s post “Dances with Wolves” divorce chased off fans. Russell Crowe throwing a phone (isn’t that quaint) caused him to jump the shark long before he let himself go to seed.

Add the public’s fickle attitudes towards stars to the fact that “Bad Boys” seems so…late 80s/90s — and we should be looking at a blockbuster that busts.

And yet this is almost sure to be a smash of the summer. Go figure.

One shouldn’t read too much into the turnout of a late matinee “preview” showing of a potential weekend blockbuster.

But if a movie is showing to roughly three times as many folks as I normally see at a Thursday afternoon “opening” showing in rural Va. (missed the Orlando preview — traveling), that tells me something.

Deadline.com is projecting, based on $10 million in Thursday previews — roughly three times the “solid” opening “norm” for a Thursday — folding into a whopping $31 million Friday, that “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” will manage at least $75 million when the last dime is counted by midnight Easter Monday.

It’s a “cheerfully stupid” and stunning dull affair, and I wasn’t the only one saying so. But kids of all ages love their kaiju. Godzilla sleeping in the Roman Colosseum? That’s adorbs.

The Warner Brothers/Legendary release, another “monsterverse” uniting of the great Hollywood-made monster King Kong and Japan’s lizard king Godzilla, isn’t setting any all time records. But considering how much theaters need customers to tide them over until a post-strike summer season settles in, it’s a godsend.

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” is quickly displaced from the top spot, falling off a box office cliff (65-70%) on its second weekend — $14-16 million. Easter Sat., Sunday and Monday could give it a boost, unless word is out how lifeless the damned thing is. At least Bill Murray and Annie Potts’ checks cleared, right?

But whatever. One “Empire” replaced by the next “Empire,” and all that. It’ll be in the low $70s, all-in, by midnight Monday, with a solid chance of grinding its way over $100 million.

“Kung Fu Panda 4” should pull in another $10 million+, pushing it over the $150 million mark domestically by Easter night.

That $10-11 million may let it remain ahead of “Dune Part 2,” which should clear $10-11 and thus have tallied over $250 million by the same end of Easter finish line. That’s the blockbuster of the year, so far, but that race for third is by no means decided as of Sat. afternoon, the big day for family movie going with the kids.

Sydney Sweeney as an “Immaculate” nun is still underwhelming, but may make it into the black for Neon, which didn’t spend all that on the “It” girl’s latest. It is “holding” respectably from its middling opening weekend take — another $3 million, maybe less. With a new “Omen” movie slated for release next weekend, that’ll be all she wrote for this one.

As always, I’ll update these figures as more data comes in over the long holiday weekend.

It’s blowing up overseas, too.

The nonsense slides by like lava on a wintry day in “Godzilla v. Kong: The New Empire,” a cheerfully stupid “kaiju” movie that isn’t as interesting as the licensing agreements that put a Hollywood creature feature creation on screen with a Pokemon collection of Japanese ones.

Dan Stevens completes the journey from “Downton Abbey” heartthrob to digital King Kong dentist. BAFTA winner Rebecca Hall classes up the joint as “the Serious Scientist.” And Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominee Brian Tyree Henry makes his first on-screen appearance since “Causeway” (he does voice-over work in the “Spiderverse”) in a movie that’s all about the digital “Titans,” digital titan brawls and a “plot” that isn’t worthy of that label.

“I’m worried about Kong!”

And well you should all should be. The 300 foot fall digital beast is getting white-haired and battle-scarred, holed up in the “Hollow Earth.” There are new challengers among his own kind down below, a scarred ape leading a titanic ape tribe, that scarred ape’s murderously pesky cub lieutenant, and the frosty reptile beast below that they’ve tamed and turned to their Kong-toppling purposes.

Godzilla? He’s above ground, trashing cities — but only by accident, now — as he attacks and neutralizes (Kills? “Absorbs?”) other titans who have crossed-over from Hollow Earth to human dominated Mother Earth.

The big worry is that Kong will return to the surface through a portal — Skull Island or wherever — and that will enrage Godzilla and “Oh no, there goes Tokyo” “again. Or Rome (Godzilla sleeps in the even-more-ruined Colosseum). Or Rio. Or wherever the kaiju roam.

“You can’t be serious,” might be the funniest line among many uttered by the scientist turned single-mom (she adopted the deaf Hollow Earth tribal child Jia — Kaylee Hottle), the conspiracy buff podcaster (Henry) and the surfer dude/kaiju expert and dentist.

The film is the least Japanese “Godzilla” movie ever, which is fine, since an Oscar-winning incarnation of that creature came out at the end of last year. The lizard king is a supporting player in this Kong-centric big critter combat film.

There’s fan service (pandering) in the jokey tone, the parade of classic pop/rock hits decorating the score — “I Was Made for Loving You” (Kiss), “Twilight Zone” (Golden Earring), “Turn Me Loose” (Loverboy) and of course, the obligatory bit of Badfinger.

But is there a movie in all of this Godzilla, Kong and kaiju-on-parade business? Not much of one.

It’s a lighthearted spectacle, but so disconnected from reality, narrative and human emotions that there’s almost nothing to it.

The effects are decent but not Oscar worthy, the way they were in “Godzilla Minus One.” And the only thing we’re expected to care about is whether Kong can survive retirement, which has to be on his mind every time he looks into a lake and sees the wrinkles, scars and white whiskers that should tell him he’s getting too old for this s—.

Rating: PG-13, “creature violence”

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, Brian Tyree Henry, Alex Ferns and Kaylee Hottle

Credits: Adam Wingard, scripted by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:55

Cedric? Maria Bakalova? Christian Slater? Dan Levy? Bill Burr? Fred Armisen? James Marsden? HUGH GRANT?

Jerry Seinfeld directs this giggling star farce about the breakfast wars between Post, Kellog’s and um, “Quaker Oats,” which premieres on Netflix May 3.

The timing, the deadpan absurdism. VERY “Seinfeld.”

Vicky Krieps co-stars in this French-flavored Civil War-era vengeance Western.

Garrett Dillahunt and Danny Huston also star in this May 31 release. Looks gritty, and has lots of film fest hype juicing it.

Maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray was well on his way to “Johnny Guitar,” “Rebel Without A Cause”and “Bigger than Life” when he followed up his big Bogart break “A Lonely Place” with “On Dangerous Ground,” an intense troubled cop thriller with jarring action and sentimentality mixed with sadism and masochism.

You can know film noir, be immersed in the genre, its tropes and familiar milieus, and this Robert Ryan/Ida Lupino classic will still hit you like a cold, wet slap. Beautifully composed, lit and shot by George E. Diskant (“Kansas City Confidential”), with nervous hand-held footage of chases on foot and by car, edited into three brisk and immersive acts, shot through with psycho-sexual flourishes, including Ryan at his most sadistic, it’s a black and white classic that feels so modern now it had to land with a bit of a shock in 1951.

Ryan plays ex-footballer turned hard-boiled big city cop Jim Wilson. Ray and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides (“They Drive by Night”) did “ride alongs” with Boston P.D. and their “research” shows as the first act is one long flourish of police proceedures circa 1950 — shift briefing (led by “Captain” Ed Begley Sr.) to three-cops-in-a-car patrols, listening for tips, calls and leads on their police radio as they hunt for a couple of cop killers.

Nobody ever flashes a badge or even says “Police” as they “rough up” a man whose only crime is running in the vicinity of a robbery, make their rounds of bars and collect tips from news vendors and alcoholics.

More than one of these underworld “types” has a nervous, addict edge. And the cops? They act like everybody knows them and everybody knows they mean business as Wilson hassles a bartender for serving an underage girl, barges in on a woman (Cleo Moore) who knows somebody who knows somebody and generally throw their weight around with a kind of impunity that was supposed to have been legislated or legally ruled-out of police work in the decades since.

“Next time you hit a guy,” Wilson advises an older, sore-shouldered colleague (Charles Kemper), “don’t throw it all in one punch.”

Wilson’s so rough his partners (played by Anthony Ross and Kemper) start to question him in “job is gettin’ to you” ways.

When he corners an associate of a suspect, Wilson and his “Go on, HIT me” quarry (Richard Irving) step right up to the edge of sado-masochism in their little dance, and then cross it.

“Why do you make me do it? You know you’re gonna talk! I’m gonna make you talk! I always make you punks talk! Why do you do it? Why?”

That earns Wilson a warning that becomes a threat and evolves into a “go upstate” and pitch in on a manhunt re-assignment. A teen girl was abducted and killed. The aged sheriff (Ian Wolfe) could use the help. The furiously mistrusting father of the victim (Ward Bond at his most belligerent) is hellbent on shooting the guy when they catch him.

Wilson sees his own cop-judge-jury-executioner shortcomings in this raging father, as they are thrown together in a mad, wintry pursuit that leaves the rest of the posse behind.

That’s when they meet the blind woman (Lupino, in a subtle and vulnerable turn) who might take them in, and may be harboring the fugitive on her remote, snow-covered farm.

Ray artfully blends long takes with close-ups, fluid tracking shots with jumpy, hand-held chase sequences. Scene after scene is composed in depth, with simple actions, character traits and plot points packed into foreground and background action, with action always taking precedence over dialogue.

But the dialogue, when the picture leans on that, just sizzles.

“I like to stink myself up,” Cleo Moore’s “known associate” of a hoodlum purrs, after Wilson and his partners barge in on her and notice her vast perfume collection. She picks out a favorite. “‘Noo-it duh Joy.’ (Nuit de joie) It means ‘Night of Joy.'”

The acting pops, with hardened colleagues lecturing Wilson out of concern, and the boss, gorging himself at lunch, crossing over into stark warnings about lawsuits and a firing that could follow if this teetering-on-psychotic loner doesn’t “settle down,” in more ways than one.

Ryan handles the transition from hardboiled “Nobody likes a cop” o compassion inspired by a sympathetic and pretty woman as well as any actor of his day could have.

“On Dangerous Ground” never transcends its genre because Ray & Co. never lose track of what it’s meant to be. It sprints by until pausing for tense interludes in the third act, before barreling into a finale that it borrows from 167 Westerns that preceded it.

The whole enterprise is of a piece — soundstage interiors to backlot street scenes to chases through the snowy, remote outdoors. Future director Lupino stepped behind the camera to keep the show on the road when Ray fell ill during production and the filming and throughline of the fact-paced narrative never missed a beat.

The urgent Bernard Hermann score sounds so much like his later “North by Northwest” music that it’s hardly a shock to learn he recycled some of the instantly-recognizable incidental music from this one for that Hitchcock classic.

A “meet the screenwriter” cameo here features A.I. Bezzerides playing an owlish, greasy lowlife who offers our cruel but incorruptible cop a bribe in an early scene in a smoky bar. Ray makes great use of the character actors of the day in a film he made on the tail end of “The Studio System.” Begley, Wolfe, Bond, Olive Carrey and Frank Ferguson are among the familiar faces available to an RKO shoot in 1951.

“On Dangerous Ground” has its “wow” shots, character twists and moments. But what stands out about this early Ray gem is how surefooted Ray’s cinematic storytelling already is. It’s fluid and confident in the headlong way it plays, a noir thriller that immerses us in a world, presents its problems and sets out to solve them through a morality tale with a whiff of the creepy and the kinky about it.

Rating: approved, TV-PG

Cast: Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Charles Kemper, Ed Begley and Ward Bond.

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Ray, scripted byA.I. Bezzerides and Nicholas Ray, based on the novel by Gerald Butler. An RKO release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:22

“Poor Things” and “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos has found a rep company that works, so Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe are back for this next outing, joined by Margaret Qualley and Jesse Plemons, Hong Chou.

I heartily approve of him continuing to cast Willem Dafoe until the man gets the Oscar he so richly deserves, year in and year out.

Emma dances and drives a Dodge Challenger? Wrecklessly?

June 21.

It often seems, on a personal as well as cultural level, that the F-bomb has lost all power to shock.

And then a comedy comes along to remind us of the colorful ugliness and delicacy of language and how it can be deployed and censored to jolt, judge and control society. And where there’s judgement and control, there are insiders and designated outsiders, those who get the short end of the stick.

“Wicked Little Letters” is foul-mouthed farce based on a true “scandal” about a small town terrorized by vulgar, cruelly personal and utterly anonymous letters. In the hands of director Thea Sharrock, screenwriter Jonny Sweet and a sparkling cast, it becomes a parable on shifting social mores, sexism, morality confused with legality and women’s suffrage.

It’s a vulgar hoot.

Oscar winner Olivia Colman stars as Edith Swan, a smug, self-righteous spinster who starts many a remark with “If I were without sin” or “We’re all God’s creatures” and “It is in the pardoning that we are pardoned.” That’s usually followed by a moment of bringing the hammer down.

A lot of her blushing disapproval is aimed at her unfiltered, blowsy and blue-streak swearing Irish neighbor, Rose Gooding, played by brassy Jessie Buckley of “Wild Rose,” “Doolittle” and who co-starred with Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”

Rose is a widow, a single mum with a live-in lover (Malachi Kirby) given to singing and closing the pub down, a woman who swears like she breathes.

“You mangey old titless turnip!” is the most printable outpouring to emanate from her Irish-accented mouth.

Edith is sweet to her face, but behind her back she holds nothing back.

“She’s heinous!”

The furor really begins in 1920s Littlehampton when Edith gets her blush-inducing 19th letter from an anonymous critic. The obscenity has a studied, insulting air and a colorful variety and unfamiliarity with the form that suggests it was researched from a Roget’s Thesaurus of Vulgarity.

“You f—–g a-s old whore!”

Edith is wounded, her mother (Gemma Jones) takes the vapors. But her officious, ever-so-proper father (Timothy Spall) is apoplectic. He’s the one who goes to the police over this “prison offense!” And he’s the one who convinces the boy’s club of coppers (Paul Cahidi and Hugh Skinner) that these must come from their next-rowhouse-door neighbor, Rose.

Just like that, poor, powerless Rose, a “war widow” with a tween daughter (Alisha Weir), is arrested, charged and tossed in jail because she can’t make bail.

The cops ignore the fact that it’s a tad too-on-the-nose for the professionally-profane Rose to be the author of such screeds, that the letters continue and spread to the entire community, and that “Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss” (Anjana Vasan) has serious doubts about authorship and Rose’s guilt.

Director Sharrock (“Me Before You”) gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast between “Wicked Little Letters” and the “Downton Abbey” world she’s documenting, filling her supporting cast with screen veterans like Spall, Jones and Eileen Atkins, who have all appeared in their share of Dickens, Austen and Gilbert & Sullivan period pieces.

Some Brit journalist with a notebook in hand counted “120 outbursts” of colorful invective (Well done, you.) in “Wicked Little Letters,” readings from letters and insults delivered in the heat of the moment. That underscores the movie’s “We’ve kind of become numbed to it all” subtext.

Color-blind casting is applied to clever effect, emphasizing the hidebound, myopic Old Order challenged by the new, limited horizons broadened by taking women cops and characters with differing racial, cultural and social backgrounds’ views into account.

Women Police Officer Moss adorably enlists “friends” of Edith’s (Lolly Adefope, Atkins and Joanna Scanlan) in her investigation, even though she’s warned “women constables don’t sleuth.”

Buckley, a bracing breath of fresh air in many roles, gives Rose a resignation about all this that seems out of character but is a nice twist. Yes, she’s potty-mouthed and outspoken. But busted for it? “It’s a fair cop,” she seems to shrug, even as she insists she didn’t do the letter writing.

The “national” nature of the “scandal” is briefly touched-on, and we’re allowed just enough time to fret over whether justice will be done to keep things interesting.

And if the tale drifts into cute and finds a finish that’s a tad too pat, at least we have the satisfaction of muttering “About f—–g time.”

R: nudity, profanity

Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Lolly Adefope, Gemma Jones, Eileen Atkins, Joanna Scanlan, Hugh Skinner and Timothy Spall.

Credits: Directed by Thea Sharrock, scripted by Jonny Sweet. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40