Movie Nation

Wonder how infamously xenophobic Japan took to the idea of a tale of a public toilets cleaner directed by a German became Japan’s official Best International Feature entry and now Oscar nominee?

I dare say there was some grumbling.

Neon slipped this into theaters, and today I get to it. Love that Wim W.

One of the great stand- ups of his era, Richard Lewis, a professional neurotic who amusingly took credit for the comic use of the phrase “from Hell” during his many years of appearances on Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” has died.

He died from a heart attack, and after recently disclosing that he had Parkinson’s. He was 76.

His Twitter feed the past year or so had a “love life” sentimental edge, suggesting he knew the end was nigh. But It could be hard to tell. He built his career on self examining, self pitying and self loathing observations about himself.

Analysis, romance and head scratching self doubt were trademarks, as was that mane of hair he maintained long past an age when anybody not a rock star typically keeps it.

The King of Kvetching was just that, a rock star comic with a few movies, a few sitcoms and thousands of live sets to his credit over a fifty year career.

I saw him live a couple of times, interviewed him a few more, and always found him loose and blunt and funny, even on bad days where you could detect his self doubt mania. 

My favorite memory of him was catching up with Lewis as he got back on the road shortly after 9/11, talking about how honored he was to go out and try to make a despondent, worried country laugh, and how touched he was that fans were still showing up.

He was one of the great ones, and if nothing else, Larry David deserves our heartfelt thanks for giving a very smart, very funny man a great career curtain call. 

This June release has mystery, the threat of sudden gruesome death and a trip to the woods. 

Very M. Night Shyamalan.

Every time one interviewed Oscar winner Kevin Costner about Westerns, he’d speak of the life changing experience seeing the epic “How the West was Won” was as a boy.

Now that he’s reestablished his Western primacy thanks to a wildly popular (especially among older viewers), he’s ready to make one more big statement on the subject.

This epic, which might go as far as four planned installments, has an all-star cast of a “Lonesome Dove” size.

Sienna Miller, Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Sam Worthington, Michael Rooker, Michael Anagarano, Tatanka Means, Dale Dickey, Giovanni Ribisi, Glynn Turman, Angus Macfadyen, Kathleen Quinlan, Like Wilson and Thomas Haden Church are among the stars.

If he’s going to make his Big Statement on the West, I’d hope there’d be less white washing of the era that included Buffalo Soldiers, a Mexican diaspora, Black cowboys and lots more interaction with Native Americans.

Still not nuts about the title, embracing the American “Western” creation myth should be easy to get across without such vagaries.

Lots of proclaiming its themes from Danny Huston and others in this trailer.

But it’ll be something to see, in theaters in two parts this June and August.

Why keep coming back to a series of popular but dreadful “horny teen melodramas” from Spain, which have ranged from “vapid but titillating” to “Are you just here for the nudity?“

That rhetorical question can be aimed at the audience for this series, a trilogy which seemingly concludes with “Through My Window: Looking at You.” But that query can be turned back on any critic reviewing all three as well.

Am I just here for the cold-day-in-Catalonia nudity, the sex scenes that break up the monotonous soap opera between them? Nah. I’m back for the same reason I checked back on the films of Cheech and Chong, Tyler Perry, Dakota Johnson or Adam Sandler.

I’m wondering if they get better.

The answer, nailed shut on the third film of this sappy, prolonged romance, is “Alas! No!”

The acting isn’t awful, but the writing has degenerated from insipid to eye-rolling. It’s as if no effort is being made to keep the viewer engaged with what they’re watching on their streaming device between the sex scenes.

To catch us up, Raquel (Clara Galle) is no longer joined-at-the-groin with her rich neighbor, Ares Hidalgo (Julio Peña), an entitled med student (in school in Stockholm in the second film) who steals Raquel’s wifi every time he comes home to Barcelona to his family of pretentiously-named siblings, younger Apolo (Hugo Arbues) and older Artemis (Eric Masip), now in the family business.

But Raquel has been in love with Ares since staring him down “Through My Window.” The fact that she’s with Gregory (Ivan Lapadula) and Ares has married money — Vera (Andrea Chaparro) — can’t stop the love, or sexual assignations.

Apolo may be “with” Daniela (Natalia Azahara), but he’s scratching a different itch on the side.

And bitter Anne (Carla Taus) still hasn’t gotten over the tragedy at the end of “Through My Window: Across the Sea.” Yes, somebody died. If you haven’t seen the second film, I shan’t spoil it for you whilst you catch up.

Raquel has turned her stolen wi-fi romance into a novel that’s coming out, with another book on the way. Hilariously, she’s still got to work part time, dressed as an elf, wrapping gifts in a Barcelona gift shop at Christmas.

Everybody, it seems here, has “an unforgettable ex” and no separation or involvement and even matrimony with anybody else can shake that unfightable urge to climb back “Through My Window.”

And no matter what is going on in everyone’s life, there’s always time for clubbing, Christmas parties and New Year’s Eve blasts.

It’s all a little confusing to drop in on, even if you’ve seen the first two films. But as uncertain as I sometimes was about how this ended up as that and where she/he/they come into this, the ones we should be feeling sorry for here are director Marçal Forés and screenwriter Eduard Sola.

They’re the ones charged with keeping this all straight on an official basis. Do they? Only in a “keep the story going until the next sex scene arrives” sense.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, alcohol and drug abuse

Cast: Clara Galle, Julio Peña, Natalia Azahara, Hugo Arbues, Eric Masip, Andrea Chaparro, Ivan Lapadula and Carla Taus.

Credits: Directed by Marçal Forés, scripted by Eduard Sola, based on the novel by Ariana Godoy. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

“From Italy with Amore” is like pasta your local Olive Garden left standing in water overnight.

It’s shapeless, tasteless, inedible goo, and about as Italian as Chico Marx.

The “Italy” here is a “we make our own pasta for our ‘authentic’ cuisine” eatery, apparently a novelty in Edmonton, Alberta.

That’s the unnamed setting, a city that presents itself as too lovely to deserve hosting the blandest romance ever filmed on that side of the border.

Ariel (Rebecca Dalton) is a features writer for a magazine/website named “Glow,” a career woman who is lovelorn but who has her ideal in mind.

“Six feet tall, strong build, chiseled” features, with “good eyes, a radiant smile.” And he should “drive a yellow sports car.”

That’s what Mr. Must-Be-Right pulls up in the moment she mentions this list to bestie Jules (Kara Duncan), who kidnapped her from the office for lunch on her birthday.

So the hunk with model good looks (Brendan Morgan) has to be made for her. And the good looking co-owner of Vicky’s Bistro, Daniel (Marcus Rosner) barely merits a second glance.

Jules notices him, but Ariel mermaids right past the guy serving them to the guy he’s giving an espresso. To put herself in yellow sports car Jamie’s field of vision, she’ll have to show up at Vicky’s Bistro, day after day, as it soft-reopens before Daniel and his chef brother Tony (Stafford Perry), gay and finally close to adopting a baby with his husband, stage their grand re-opening.

Maybe if she pitches an “Italian comfort food” feature to her “mst popular wellness magazine in the country” editor, she’ll kill two birds with one stone, and get the big promotion at work to boot.

That throws our blonde reporter together with the cuisine-championing, market-visiting, family business man Daniel, who is smitten but whom Ariel needs to shy away from because Jules is interested, and besides, Ariel’s ideal has that yellow sports car.

I mean, she “manifested” her “ideal man.” Who is she to argue with the universe?

The cooking is de-emphasized, so the “Italy” come-on in the film’s title is pretty much a total bait and switch. The cuisine we glimpse is underwhelming.

The leads are bland, the “chemistry” has no heat to it and the situations, all the way down to the gay couple who needs Tony and Daniel’s restaurant to succeed over the chain joint across the way (“The Olive Branch,” cute) in order to be able to adopt, are tepid.

This clunker is about as appetizing as a can of Chef Boyardee, and just as sexy as it is appetizing.

Maybe next time you’re making a movie in under-filmed Edmonton, you make something out of it, give it a little local color. Edmunton deserves better.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rebecca Dalton, Marcus Rosner, Kara Duncan, Stafford Perry, Brendan Morgan and Dawn Ford

Credits: Directed by Dylan Pearce, scripted by Katy Breier and Erica Deutschman. A Freevee/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:24

The French director of “Johnny Mad Dog”  puts Penn, Sheridan, Katherine Waterston, Mike Tyson and Michael Pitt through their paces for this March 29 release.

Looks like a solid genre drama.

This looks like a step away from the blockbusters she’s typically associated with on the big screen (“Greatest Showman,” “Spider-Man,” “Dune”).

Let’s see how a pixie-pretty leading lady holds the picture together in a dramedy about tennis and love matches and what not.

Funny “white boy” joke, a phrase that almost always lands a laugh.

April 26.

“The Peasants” is a film based on a village life melodrama of the same title written by the Pole Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont in four massive volumes in the 1920s.

Even the fact that Reymont won the Nobel Prize for literature for it isn’t much of a justification for giving it a second thought, as in those early years, the Nobel literary prizes were doled out to a string of forgotten figures, while giants such as Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, Edith Wharton, Conrad and Ibsen went to their graves without such honors. Maxim Gorky, Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy were Reymont’s esteemed competition in 1924.

But this potboiler of a book has been filmed and then those film frames painted to life in the same rotoscoping animating style deployed by the filmmakers who made the gorgeous Van Gogh biography “Loving Vincent” a few years back. After casting, rehearsing, acting and shooting the film, another five years were needed for 100 painters to get Poland’s official entry as Best International Feature for this year’s Oscars painted and ready for the public.

And even though it didn’t make that Oscar cut, this detailed look at the life in Lipce, the struggles, ambitions, greed, jealousies and transgressions of its often venaly inhabitants, is too beautiful to pass over.

Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is the most beautiful teen in the village, 19 and blonde and pony-tailed, she is indulged by her widowed mother (Ewa Kasprzyk), who spares her heavy labor so that she has time to be pretty, make artful cutouts and necklaces and such. All the men and boys notice her, and when she’s quizzed about her prospects, this or that “wealthy widower,” she lets one and all know that she won’t be “rocking someone else’s cradle.”

When the richest farmer in town, Maciej Boryna (Miroslav Baka of the “Squared Love” movies) is talked into taking this prize and clumsily flirts, she lets him know just how much trouble she’d be.

“I wouldn’t work in the fields,” she tells him (in Polish with English subtitles). She might not do much around the house, either. I mean, just look at her.

Unknown to the miserly patriarch, his resentful oldest son Antek ( Robert Gulaczyk of “Loving Vincent”) has noticed Jagna, too. Handsome and rugged and headstrong, his attentions are reciprocated.

The fact that he has a wife (Sonia Mietielica) and child doesn’t deter Jagna. When you’re that pretty, you get used to getting what you want.

But their trysts can’t stop the wheels of tradition, as matchmaking is underway. One courtship ritual in this place at this time (late 19th century) holds that when a man sends vodka over, things are about to turn serious and legally so. Boryna sends the vodka through a proxie.

A bit of haggling over acreage between Jagna’s mother and Boryna sets Jagna on the path to matrimony, and multiple families on the road to collision. Jagna practically weeps through her seranaded, danced-to-death wedding. This is destined to end badly.

Animated gimmick or no gimmick,”The Peasants” is gorgeous to look at, with almost every frame its own work of art.

This technique is put to great use on scenes of festive dancing and lurid moments of passion, with our trysting couple caught in a haystack and almost burned to death over their transgressions.

One doesn’t have to know the recent history of Polish art to appreciate the images even if we can’t place the direct influences on this scene or sequence, or that one. We see peasants harvesting cabbages, herding sheep, slaughtering a cow and at every turn, we hear them gossiping about the girl, the old husband, the lover, money and the land.

The melodramatic story touches on familiar themes, situations, conflicts and resolutions of conflict as we follow the rivals for old Boryna’s fortune and land.

But there’s no escaping the realization that melodrama is a perjorative description of any narrative, that many situations seem contrived, that characters act unnaturally, driven by passions or simple plot necessities as they do.

This isn’t the masterpiece that “Loving Vincent” was and remains, the definitive Van Gogh biography told by painters honoring his works, visual subject matter and style. But “The Peasants” is an engaging way of taking us back to a simpler time when the people are just as petty, inconsiderate and greedy as people have always been and always will be.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Kamila Urzedowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Miroslaw Baka, Mateusz Rusin, Ewa Kasprzyk and Sonia Mietielica

Credits: Scripted and directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, based on the novel by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:55

The cinema of Stanley Kramer is marked by movies that touched, directly or indirectly, matters of great social import and social justice.

Race and racism messages were carried in “The Defiant Ones” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” The perils of the nuclear arms were laid out in the forlorn “On the Beach,” anti-science conservative no-nothingism sent-up in “Inherit the Wind” and World War II’s most important subtext — The Holocaust — informed “Judgement at Nuremberg,” “The Juggler” (which he produced) and perhaps his weakest “message” movie, 1965’s “Ship of Fools.”

An all-star melodrama in the “Grand Hotel/Airport” model, it’s a slow-moving disaster about a slow-moving disaster. The film is set in 1933. The “ship” in question is German, heading home to its newly-fascist German home port . And the characters, one by one, answer the question posed by a complacent German Jew (played by Heinz Rühmann) in their midst.

“Do you zink zis boat is a cross-section of ze German people?”

Yes it is.

Based on a Katherine Anne Porter best-seller, this sailing-into-fascism allegory is heavy-handed, even if you ignore the opening and closing remarks to the camera made by the canny dwarf passenger (Michael Dunn, most famous for his turn on TV’s “The Wild Wild West”).

“Oh I can just hear you saying, ‘What has all this to do with us?'” he chuckles to the viewer as the passengers disembark in Swastika-bedecked Deutschland. “Nothing.”

But audiences, who even-then needed reminding that the great sacrifice of World War II was worth it, that totalitarianism, racism and eugenics were evils to constantly be on guard against, ate it up. Kramer made many a movie contrived to make the viewer feel good about standing up, buying a ticket and being counted, that one was considering the issues tackled in that film in their daily and public lives.

No, you don’t tolerate, support or vote for racists, militarists, the willfully ignorant or the nationalist. Nazis are Nazis, Communists are Communists and human rights, like human life, aren’t just :liberal” values, they are to be supported and preached by one and all.

The message took priority over the narrative, in this case. But as soundstage-bound as this Oscar-nominated sea voyage was, as clumsily-unsubtle as it could be, there are riches in its sometimes tedious two and a half hours.

Vivien Leigh gives one last haughty, faded-rose turn as an aged American divorcee trying to pass for 46 and keep some dignity in her bitter loneliness.

Elizabeth Ashley, the last surviving member of the cast, is utterly captivating as an American artist trapped in a love-lust-hate relationship with leftist fellow artist George Segal. She dances the flamenco, flirts, fights and falls back into her beloved’s arms.

Oskar Werner, a draft-dodging WWII veteran, gives one of his best “conscience of a nation” performances as a ship’s doctor miserable about his lot in life and the country he must return to.

Simone Signoret (“Les Diaboliques”) underplays an addict who falls for the doctor.

For all his hamminess and showboating bluster, José Ferrer is never less than fascinating to watch as Rieber, a eugenics-preaching Nazi sympathizer, disturbing many with his anti-Semitism, but ardent in his pursuit of a golddigging German blonde (Christiane Schmidtmer), who dances with him and duets with him in German song.

And Dunn, deftly playing the self-aware conscience of the piece, delivers plain truths about who the inhumane hate — dwarves, Gypsies and Jews, etc. — and where that hate is headed.

“Fifty percent of the people who produced a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Bach voted for Rieber’s party last week!

The narrative follows the unnamed passenger liner from Veracruz, where Lee Marvin’s failed baseball player turned coach was “trying to teach the greasers how to play ball.” Why he should be taking a slow boat to Germany is anybody’s guess.

The captain (Charles Korvin) is disappointed that his ship’s doctor (Werner) has abruptly announced this is his last voyage. The charming but racist purser (Werner Klemperer, most infamous for TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes”) won’t be quitting. Like the skipper, he’s a “Good German,” going along to get along. The captain denies admission to the captain’s dinner table to the lone dwarf on board and the Jewish “religious trinkets” salesman (Rühmann).

The young painters (Ashley and Segal) paint and bicker. The aged “Condesa” (Signoret) is an addict facing prison in Tenerife, another stop on the long voyage home, for her drug abuse.

For 26 days, Rieber (Ferrer), the ardent German Nationalist, has a captive audience for his sermons on all things grand and German.

The troupe of Spanish dancers returning home are headed by Pepe (the flamenco legend José Greco), who leads them in formal and informal dances all through the voyage. And after the dancing, he pimps out the women in his ensemble.

Characters discuss their worries, their ennui and their wants in promenades along the (soundstage) upper decks on in private in their staterooms. A lad is under the thumb of a stingy rich relative. A German couple let their English bulldog dine at the table with them. Some deny their bigotry. Some are in denial over it.

And when the ship stops in Cuba, it takes on some 600 Spanish laborers freshly-deported back to Spain. The deck and steerage are crowded with bodies which the purser sniffs over but whom the doctor treats and insists get hose-downs in lieu of baths.