Movie Nation

No film buff could walk by the promise of a new Larry McMurtry biography, remember “Hud,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Brokeback Mountain” and not at least stop to thumb through the book’s photos. But if you love movies, and modern and period piece Westerns, you need to do more than browse.

Tracy Daugherty’s “Larry McMurtry: A Life” is a detailed appreciation of the writer who read and wrote his way out of Archer City, Texas — his struggles, his loves, his stumbles and the successes that piled-up once Hollywood figured out that he did a better job creating novels that could become great films than just about anybody in fiction.

He could have been a third generation West Texas rancher, and did his share of riding and fence-mending and cattle work growing up. But Larry McMurtry came along just after that cattle era had passed, living not just on a ranch but with men and women worn down by the work, wondering where their way of life had gone. McMurtry made his reputation on stories about that soon to vanish or vanished world, from “Horseman Pass By,” which became “Hud,” to “The Last Picture Show,” set basically in his hometown on its death bed, all the way to a real cattle drive Western, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.”

As Daughterty quotes McMurtry as recognizing, his gift for characters, colorful, natural dialogue and settings set him apart from the pack and brought producers, screenwriters and directors to his door, time and again over his long life and career, which ended with his death in 2021 at age 84.

Daugherty psychoanalyzes McMurtry’s love-hate relationship with Texas, Texans, Hollywood and the American literary heirarchy.

With book after book and film after film showing a great sensitivity and appreciation for female characters, Daugherty details the writer’s lifetime of love affairs, crushes and creative collaborations with women — among them Polly Platt, wife and under-credited collaborator with her husband Peter Bogdanovich, who ditched Platt when Peter B. took up with model-starlet Cybil Shepherd while filming “The Last Picture Show” in desolate Archer City and environs.

We’re treated to large samples from McMurtry’s correspondence. He was an early pal and somewhat friendly competitor with Ken Kesey before “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” an open-hearted love letter writer, with his long missives breaking down his first marriage, his crush on his first agent, and Kesey’s wife, whom he later married, among his extensive archive.

And Daugherty recalls this most bookish of writer’s quiet, observant and sometimes curmudgeonly persona, a serious novelist of popular fiction that often transcended its genre and became true literary fiction — taught in the same academia he labored in, against his will, between books until Hollywood started paying his bills.

L.A. was “like working in a city filled with immensely attractive children,” McMurtry opined. “The people, who have all the power and the all the money and a portion of the charm, also have the patience spans of two-year-olds.”

McMurtry leaned into the “Texan” thing as his brand, even as he moved from coast to coast and acquired a true Man of Letters reputation, not just an academic but as a book-hound who found an outlet for his mania, opening book stores and collecting and selling rare titles, erotica and even historical pornography. He rose to great popularity, and when he accepted that Oscar for co-writing “Brokeback Mountain,” he made damned sure he took the stage wearing Levis and boots.

This is the nuttiest promotion for a movie since a studio sent out boxes of plastic tomatoes to create buzz for “Fried Green Tomatoes.”

But it’s different. Check it out. There’s a LOT of Jack Black in this and no, it’s not all “ohms” and chakras. Don’t let the yoga cultists have all the chill!

Excellent production values and solid special effects were squandered on the Korean blockbuster “The Moon,” maybe the dumbest space flight picture since we learned, for certain, that the Moon isn’t made of cheese.

It’s a space disaster movie of the “Apollo 13” “Gravity” variety, and it’s as dumb as a bag of Hyundais.

A few geopolitical points about how the moon might be the subject of conflict over mineral exploitation in the future, prompting a different sort of “space race” are lost in a blur of bad science, melodramatic calamities and performances that drift from xenophobia to jingoism and settle into sentimental slop with the occasional blast of hysteria.

It’s the very embodiment of The Wrong Stuff.

Korea’s second attempt to put men on the moon, one not-sanctioned by an International Space Consortium and condemned by NASA thanks to a launch disaster years before — meets with a similar fate as it approaches the moon.

Solar flares cause system failures, things blow up and an idiotically ill-advised spacewalk kills two of the three astronauts on board.

Wide-eyed, panic-prone, hapless and under-qualified Hwang Seon-woo (Do Kyung-soo) might be stranded in space. As he’s the son of a command module designer who killed himself in shame after that failed previous mission, getting him home to save national and political face is imperative.

He speaks enough English to have a shot at salvation.

“Mayday mayday! Please rescue Me!”

But let’s bring in the previous Cap Com (Sol Kyung-gu), also a command module “architect,” to bring him home. Captain Kim Jae-guk tries to call in favors from his ex, Moon Young, who runs the “Lunar Gateway” space station circling the moon for NASA.

A country of 50 million+ and everybody in this space mess is not just related, but closely related.

Moon, who goes by Jennifer (Kim Hee-ae) amongst her American colleagues, won’t break protocols, even if the endangered astronaut is the son of the designer who killed himself and thus Kim Jae-guk’s late partner.

There’s plenty here that could be taken for comedy — Kim Jae-guk’s comically aborted snowy boar hunt precedes his summons (“I forgot the bullets!” — in Korean with English subtitles), for starters.

But it wasn’t meant to be a comedy, no matter how much Buzz Aldrin laughs.

Rating: unrated, violent deaths in space

Cast: Do Kyung-soo, Sol Kyung-gu and Kim Hee-ae

Credits: Scripted and directed by Yong-hwa Kim. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:10

Seems to me I’ve started watching “The Entertainer” several times over the years, got one look at Lord Olivier in greasepant and gloves, tap dancing and singing, and thought “Well, not tonight.”

A melancholy tale of a dying art form in a Britain on 1950s life support, a film adaptation of a play that heralded the rise of “kitchen sink realism” in British theater and cinema, the movie that introduced Joan Plowright to the movies (and to Laurence Olivier, who married her), early performances by Alan Bates and Albert Finney, there are scores of reasons to see “The Entertainer.” But it does have that “You have to be in the right mood” vibe about it.

Olivier is brilliant, the very embodiment of a hustling, bullying, bantering “music hall comic,” from his painted eyebrows to his “MY” “show must go on” ethos. Archie Rice is both a villain and a figure of pity, an aged performer and womanizer, liar and exaggerator, a conservative forever bitching about “the INcome tax” he hasn’t paid and that he’s sure will put him in jail if he ever stops sprinting.

But as one punter in the peanut gallery notes to her mum watching his latest show, “Does he think he’s funny?”

John Osborne’s play, which he and Nigel Kneale adapted for the screen — with stage director Tony Richardson moving behind the camera as he filmed the show in seedy, seaside and stodgy Morecambe — depicts a Britain in the very pit of its postwar despair. The Suez Crisis is part of the backdrop, a blunt reminder that “The Empire” was finished.

And every young person seen here — Archie’s daughter Jean (Plowright), his adoring, stage-managing son Frank (Bates), his second wife Phoebe (Brenda de Banzie, in her greatest screen performance) and even his fatalistic soldier-son Mick (Finney) — knows the game is up, the doors have closed to them and that resigned acceptance of their fate or fleeing are their only options.

“You want a bit of life before it’s all over,” Phoebe wails, on hearing that Archie won’t let his latest failing show be his last failing show. Work until “they put you in the box” is all that awaits any of them.

Jean is a frustrated artist turned inner city London school teacher, contending with boorish kids, proto-punk “Teddy Boys” and a posh lover (Daniel Massey) with a roadster, a career and a chance for transfer to a posting in Africa. But Jean, who takes him home to bed, isn’t getting married and moving abroad.

Her family is a mess. Grandpa (Roger Livesay, grand) is her reminder that the Rices have been in show business for generations. But it’s the end of the road, and Archie’s the only one who won’t see it.

He MC’s a beauty pageant, and one of the judges mutters “Where did they dig HIM up?”

The owner of a popular theater wonders, “Why don’t you leave it alone, Archie? We’ve had our laughs together all this time. Let’s leave it at that.”

But an ambitious pageant contestant (Shirley Anne Field) with showbiz dreams lets us see her calculating how a cringey come-on from Archie could launch her. With her Dad’s money, Archie might get that “next” show up and running, with a juicy ingenue part for Miss Runner-Up.

Maybe he’ll be able to juggle all the women, the creditors, back-pay-owed show people and his family and the show will go, after all.

Olivier talked Osborne into writing the play for him, and the playwright’s toxic narcissist “hero” bears some resemblance to Olivier’s own reputation.

But Archie is still one of the great stretches of Olivier’s career, a tragic and loathesome figure whose desperation and mean-spiritedness seems to peek out from under the makeup. I’ve interviewed a lot of venerable comics doing “The Blue Hair Circuit” of Florida venues, and one can see and hear all of them in Archie’s clawing, accusatory, “Blimey, that went better in the FIRST house” crack at a dust covered joke that doesn’t land.

To an old comic, when the material doesn’t work, it’s the fault of “audiences today” not measuring up.

The act is so old it creaks, even if Archie doesn’t as he gives us “a little song … called ‘The Old Church Bell Won’t Ring Tonight Because the Bishop’s got the Clapper.'”

Osborne’s script shows us a lot of out-with-the old, in-with-the-uncertain. The Suez updates, with son Mick in peril, don’t rattle Archie as much as they should. Grandpa gripes about the end of imperialism, Mick promises to “bring a fuzzy-wuzzy home” as a souvenir and Archie, who jokes about “the colored fellow” (dancer) who lives downstairs, lets us glimpse his recognition of the pure art of a “negress” singing “about Jesus” in an American club that he heard once.

That’s his clue, he suggests, that we’re all equal and that another of Britain’s “old ways” — racism and “white man’s burden” supremacy — is going to have to die out, too.

Like Osborne’s breakout play, “Look Back in Anger” and other films and plays of the era, “The Entertainer” is a serious, somber eulogy for a dying way of life, and an entire civilization about to give way to teenager-ruled pop culture and a more diverse Britain. But Archie still isn’t accepting the guitar band on the bill of his revue.

They’re about to take over, mate. The ’60s are coming.

Film buffs will spy future “Bullitt” and “Breaking Away” director Peter Yates’ name in the credits as an assistant director. He’d work with Finney on another famous stage adaptation decades later — “The Dresser.” As Harry Saltzman, co-producer of the early years of the James Bond franchise, was a backer, it’s hardly a shock to see the estimable character actor Charles Gray as a TV reporter. He was in several Bond films as first an agent, and then as Bond villain Blofeld.

Director Richardson would go on to dazzle throughout the ’60s, winning Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for “Tom Jones,” bringing home “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and getting many a play filmed on the big screen, from “Hamlet” to “A Delicate Balance.”

Richardson ensures that every performance in “The Entertainer” is spot-on, sharp and only occasionally more theatrical than “real.” Livesay, de Banzie, Plowright and Bates dazzle. But Olivier is the real revelation, for once not attempting to tower over the production, a self-absorbed bully but subtly vulnerable because he, too sees the end.

It’s hard not to think of Lord Larry’s later film appearances through the lens of Archie Rice, just an old ham slinging a French accent in “A Little Romance,” a Zeus seeing the end in “Last of the Titans,” or an old pro smiling at the little limelight left as Lear or Lord Marchmain in “Brideshead Revisited.”

Whatever honors the grand old man of the theater and cinema collected — and he did relish status — maybe that’s how he’d best be remembered — a trouper treading the boards, a professional willing to change with the “kitchen sink realism” times, but hanging on to a hint of the ham, willing to put it all out there even if singing, dancing and joke-telling were never quite his thing.

That’s entertainment.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, dated racial remarks

Cast: Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Brenda de Banzie, Roger Livesay, Albert Finney, Charles Gray and Alan Bates

Credits: Directed by Tony Richardson, scripted by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale, adapted from Osborne’s play. A British Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:45

Minimalist, paranoid, journalistic, an actor’s opportunity for a tour de force.

“Land of Bad” is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

It’s got Oscar winner Russell Crowe as an Air Force drone pilot guiding commandos played by Luke and Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia and Ricky Whittle out of a jungle jam — a special ops “extraction” that goes wrong.

There’s something like a “remote control/video game warfare” vs. the “barbaric” intimacy of hand to band combat debate in this William Eubank actioner, as we see men tortured and fighting to the death as a drone pilot shops for “artisinal” cheeses and the like in an upscale market in Las Vegas after he clocks out.

But as Avenue Pictures has gotten into the Russ business — Crowe’s “Sleeping Dogs” is coming up later this spring — they indulge their no-longer-fighting-trim star in ways that hobble the picture at times, especially in the anti-climaxes that follow the finale.

Four commandos led by Lt. Sugar (Ventimiglia of TV’s “This is Us”) are sent into Southeast Asia to extract a kidnapped CIA asset. Three, played by Ventimiglia, Luke Hemsworth and Whittle, are hardened veterans. But “the kid,” Kinney (Liam Hemsworth) is a green Air Force specialist who isn’t HALO qualified, brought along as the JTAC, the guy who communicates with the drone crew.

Crowe is the Reaper pilot aptly-nicknamed “Reaper,” a long-in-the-tooth, couch-potato-bod captain whose real name, we can see on the Air Force tunic he wears over his shorts and Hawaian shirt, is “E. Grimm.”

Don’t fear “The Grimm Reaper,” you say? Wait until you get him on the radio.

“I am your eyes in the sky and bringer of doom,” he growls.

And when the mission goes wrong and the odds against them rise, all the never-miss-sniping in the world (gotta love combat film fantasies) won’t save our quartet. Mr. Surgical Strike (a higher tech fantasy), sitting in a chair in an air conditioned room at a Vegas Air Force base with a hula skirted dashboard doll for luck and a Ping golf glove on his trigger hand, just might.

The fights are furious and the explosions –staged in the jungles of Queensland, Australia, with power line towers plainly visible in the distance and our “super villain’s lair” “compound” a hydro-electric dam and its surroundings — are epic.

Our commandos are convincingly grizzled, and Hemsworth the Younger makes his character properly frazzled and out of his depth.

But director Eubank (“The Signal,””Underwater”) knows where the real money is, and the camera is never far from Crowe, who isn’t so much playing a character as a collection of “traits,” signifiers and accessories.

His clothes merit explanation, as does his age if not his gone-to-seed physique. Reaper is on-the-spectrum nerdy about his organized coffee pods, “my chair,” the phoneline that needs to be kept open in case his pregnant fourth wife (!?) calls — who is, he reminds us and his JTAC in the field, a vegan.

“How do you know when someone’s a vegan?” We give up. “They will TELL you.”

Crowe doesn’t hijack the film, because as a combat saga it crosses from predictably dire to amusingly far-fetched. Suffice it to say that in this war Western, “the cavalry” is always coming, be it a Hellfire missle fired from a drone, an evac chopper or other hardware or a character you underestimate or otherwise lose track of.

But Crowe’s swagger and showboating here is a double-edged sword, and not really the icing on the cake which he seems to believe it is.

Rating: R, violence and lots of it, profanity

Cast: Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia, Chika Ikogwe, Ricky Whittle, Luke Hemsworth and Robert Rabiah.

Credits: Directed by William Eubank, scripted by William Eubank and David Frigerio. An Avenue release.

Running time: 1:50

Netflix International’s economy of scale scheme that sees the streamer financing remakes of films that were a success in one culture in another country continues with the new Polish comedy, “Kill Me If You Dare.”

“Zabij mnie, kochanie,” as it is titled in Polish (you can watch the film dubbed or in Polish with English subtittles) may be no better than the Turkish Netflix tale titled “Öldür Beni Sevgilim” when it was released in 2019. But hey, no new money had to be spent on a story they already owned.

It’s about a quarreling couple who win the Lotto and when their dreams of what to do with the money collide, they conspire to murder each other in the middle of a resort vacation.

No, that idea doesn’t sound like cinematic “gold,” and user reviews of the Turkish film trended negative. But maybe the Poles figured out how to make it work.

Long Netflix movie review short, they don’t.

Piotr (Mateusz Banasiuk of “Furioza”) proposes to Natalia (Weronika Ksiazkiewicz, also of “Furioza”) in a big romantic gesture at the train station. But five years later, his stinginess is getting on her nerves and her jealousy over him working for a gorgeous ex (Paulina Galazka) have run their marriage into a wall.

Each bitches to her or his bestie — Agata (Agnieszka Wiedlocha) and Lukasz (Piotr Rogucki) respectively. Can this marraige be saved?

Then a Lotto ticket he buys but which she paid for comes up a winner. They have a $million, which solves all their problems, right?

Nope. He has conservative investment plans. She dreams of opening a business, traveling and shopping.

There’s nothing for it but for each to plot to rub the other out. That’s almost how abruptly this idea enters the narrative, which has Agata and Lukasz driving suspicions over this or that “accident” each has at the other’s hands, egging their respective friends into taking “action.”

Piotr’s working vacation to a survivalist/adventure resort gives each her or his chances. What will it be, a sabotaged bit of skydiving, rock climbing, poison at a meal, cooked to death in a sauna?

Our stars don’t have much of a flair for dark comedy, but this heartless, humorless, joyless screenplay is the murder weapon here. It kills this lame idea for a movie.

Still, I can hardly wait for the Spanish language and North American versions of this Netflix is sure to commission. Because who needs to hire clever writers when you already own a “can’t miss” “intellectual property?”

Rating: TV-14, murderous situations, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Weronika Ksiazkiewicz, Mateusz Banasiuk, Agnieszka Wiedlocha, Piotr Rogucki, Paulina Galazka and Miroslaw Baka

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Hanna Węsiersk, based on the 2019 Turkish film scripted by Murat Disli. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

There’s a laugh-out-loud meltdown in the third act of “Five Blind Dates” that makes up for some of the tedium that’s come before and almost atones for all that doesn’t amuse or charm about the finale to come.

It’s a tirade over tea, and like the movie surrounding it, it’s much ado about very little.

“Five Blind Dates” is a rigidly fomulaic, stunningly dull rom-com with nary a whiff of “rom” and barely a nod towards “com.”

But it’s about the Chinese diaspora in Australia, about Chinese engagement and wedding and tea traditions, all of which are novel enough to at least warrant a glance.

Lia, played by co-writer Shuang Hu, is a Townsville girl trying to make a go of it with a Sydney tea shop she named for her beloved granny.

It’s a place to “explain our culture” to their Aussie neighbors, showing how “the ballet” of preparing Chinese tea fits within that culture. It is NOT where you want to try and get a “to go” cup of the sacrilege called bubble tea.

Lia has a gay bestie (Ilai Swindells) just dying to do that “gay bestie makeover” of the self-serious Lia and her too-serious-to-be-saved tea shop. But gay Mason will just have to wait until he’s asked.

That ask won’t be long in coming as he’s accompanying Lia to her younger sister Alice’s (Tiffany Wong) engagement party back in her hometown, where she can lie to teacher Mom (Renee Lim of “The Invisible Man”) and divorced, money-obsessed Dad (the terrific character actor Tzi Ma, of “The Farewell,””Mulan” and TV’s “Kung Fu” reboot) about how well her shop is doing.

But she can’t lie to the fortune teller, who we’re told is a traditional guest at Chinese engagements.

Lia is advised, in front of the entire wedding-to-be party, that her love life and career are intertwined, and that things won’t work out for her until she marries one of the next five men she dates. She must meet and date them BEFORE the wedding.

Rather than be shamed by her handsome but dull hometown ex Richard (Yoson An) at “the Lonely Hearts table” at the upcoming wedding, she resolves to let Dad, Mom, Sister and others fix her up in a mad scramble to be attached to somebody at that sibling’s wedding.

The blind dates barely register, although touchy-feely guru-vibe of Curtis (Rob Collins) kind of tickles.

The tea-making allegory barely merits a mention, much less a subtext.

The dialogue ranges from inane to insipid, and the direction (by Shawn Seet) just underscores that.

Example — Lia changes blouses for the engagement lunch and somehow packed a puffy/frilly shirt. In case we miss that limp joke, gay Mason pipes up “You look like a crew member from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.'”

The visual was the gag, Mason. Your punchline didn’t help.

A shot opens on a bouncing, dancing and drinking fiesta, the engagement party that Lia traveled home to attend. But “ENGAGEMENT PARTY” is slapped up as a big, remedial graphic for the elderly in the viewing audience. I guess.

The fortune teller is a stereotype, others lean into Chinese cinematic tropes — money-obsessed, gauche, practical-not-emotional, quick to change languages to insult the non-Chinese. And then there’s Mason.

“You know me, Boo, I don’t KINK-shame. But straight people? Are wild!“

This entire enterprise is so familiar as to be “one from column A), two from column B)” predictable, a cut-and-paste job assembled according to a Screenwriting 101 textbook.

There’s no guesswork to any of it, not in its “viral” climax or its inevitable Mr. Right.

But maybe people who’ve never seen a rom-com will get something out of it.

Rating: TV-13+, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Shuang Hu, Ilai Swindells, Tiffany Wong, Yoson An, Renee Lim, Rob Collins and Tzi Ma.

Credits: Directed by Shawn Seet, scripted by Shuang Hu and Nathan Ramos-Park. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:24

Oscar contender Bening is the wife and mom who goes missing from her country club set family, alarming the adult kids and casting suspicion on her husband (Neill).

It’s based on a novel by Liane Moriarty of “Big Little Lies,” so this drew a big name cAt for a reason.

March 14, on Peacock.

A hitman with brain cancer, “like a curtain coming down.” Unfinished business, threats, and blowback.

The usual stuff you face when you murder people for a living.

James Marsden and Joanna Kulig are also in the cast of this thriller, due out March 15.