Movie Nation

For those who haven’t noticed, big parts of the U.S. have proven to be major export markets for Indian cinema. A couple of Indian films go into wide release every month, and places like Orlando — where I live — and Raleigh-Durham, where I have family — are booking these titles with great success.

The inequities of The Most Populous Nation on Earth demands a hero, a figure of legend to defend the poor and helpless from the powerful.

Dev Patel directs and stars as the two-fisted badass who bills himself as a reincarnation of “The White Monkey” demon in “Monkey Man.”

From Universal, no less. This one opens April 5 and I can almost guarantee it’s going to be huge.

The Hollywood Reporter suggests that with feature film buff Scott Stuber leaving his position at the head of Netflix that the streamer will be shifting focus from prestige feature films and buzzed big budget series to “middle of the road” series.

That’s a pity. Because while “blank check” filmmaking at Netflix and other streamers has become a Hollywood punchline, overspending for David Fincher, Scorsese, Cuaron and others, these operations are all leaving money on the table by not putting anything they spend big money on in theaters, at least for a week of two.

As I noted the empty parking lots I’ve been hitting on recent January trips to the cinema and chat with my favorite theater managers, it’s obvious that they’re starved for content, and this post strike year is going to make the problem worse.

Bringing Oscar nominees back for another run isn’t the answer.

Why am I seeing “Miller’s Girl” when Netflix, for instance, could have rolled out Kevin Hart’s pricey “Lift” and pocketed $20-30 million, their share from a movie with star power enough to guarantee a decent two week run?

MGM/Amazon could have shuffled out “The Underdoggs” and made bank for a week or two as well. Snoop would bring fans in.

Amazon picks up international features that don’t get US theatrical distribution. Netflix finances hundreds of Spanish language thrillers, comedies and romances. Throw a few in theaters and see what happens.

“Argylle,” which opens next weekend under a Universal distribution, is an Apple TV/Apple Films product. Theaters need a lot more of that.

Indian cinema is enjoying a boom as there’s always Bollywood fare to fill on the gaps in bookings.

Streamers know their business models better than I do, but propping up theatrical is in their best interest, and low digital costs of getting these features into theaters would, without big promotional budgets, leave them room to make a profit and give theaters a lift through slow January, April and August.

Putting big holiday pix, animated included, in theaters in November for a short run seems like a no brainer.

What a salacious and silly miscalculation “Miller’s Girl” turns out to be.

It’s neither ridiculous enough to be a fiasco, nor laugh-out loud off-key. But “off” it most certainly is — off-the-wall and off-putting.

First-time writer-director Jade Halley Bartlett’s script sounds like a grad student’s attempt to imitate Tennessee Williams trying to adapt Henry Miller’s version of David Mamet’s “Lolita.”

Sorry. English Major’s joke.

The florid, literary fiction turns of phrase that come out of teenager’s mouthes here would fill an issue of “The Southern Review.” But in many states, they’d have to sell it behind the counter in a brown paper wrapper — like “Penthouse” in the porn-leery ’80s. It’s a bit “blue” as we used to say. Not titillating. Just dirty-talked to death.

And Jenna Ortega, “It” girl of TV’s “Wednesday” and horror icon of the recent “Scream” revival, finds herself reduced to a hyper-sexualized child, because apparently she wanted to get that off her bucket list before she was too old to pull it off.

Raw, luridly risible lines ripple out teenager Cairo (Ortega), which her favorite lit/creative writing teacher Mr. Miller (Martin Freeman, who should know better) just eats up.Even her insults.

“No one will pay more thought to you than they would an unread fortune cookie.”

He’s a failed writer in “BFE” Tennessee, trying to convince his “trust fund baby” star student to apply to Vanderbilt when she has Yale where Miller insists they “eat pot brownies and read Joan Didion” on the radar. But college entrance essays about “major accomplishments” in her teen life have her troubled.

Artist wild-child pal Winnie (nepo baby Gideon Adlon) suggests losing their virginity using an older “man to take me to pleasure town.” She has her eye on the Coach Filmore (Bashir Salahuddin). After all, “Older men have been harvesting virginity since the dawn of time.”

And by the way, Winnie’s “never seen (Mr. Miller) look at a student the way he looks at you.”

Whatever Winnie’s “sexual ambivalence,” Cairo is intrigued by this “major accomplishment” possibility as a writer’s milepost, if not something she’d write about on an admissions exam. As she has the wardrobe, bedroom eyes and mature vocabulary to make this happen, she sets events in motion.

Jon Miller is a failed writer whose “fallback” career is in public education. At least the kids and his pal, Coach Filmore (Who also teaches physics!) are sweet enough to nickname him “Professor.”

Miller’s married to a tipsy, Tennessee Williams cliche. Bea (Dagmara Dominczyk) staggered straight off the set of “Night of the Iguana,” a voluptuous alcoholic who writes and lounges about in black bras and negligees.

She is not shy about her needs, and unfiltered if not unkind about the disappointment Jon turned out to be.

“You chose to be a teacher,” she offers. “You married a writer,” he snaps.

When Cairo turns on the eye contact and violates his personal space, he notices. When she chooses as her final exam writing project an R-rated homage to “Tropic of Cancer” novelist Henry Miller that barely disguises her lust for her teacher, he blushes.

“If it’s not controversial, it’s not interesting,” she purrs.

Is it too late to back out before he’s trapped and fired and book-banning Tennessee has him burned at the stake?

First-time writer-director Bartlett has her production designer overdecorate Mr. Miller’s classroom and a Victorian Village (Memphis) poetry slam with gaudy lamps that look like props from an antique store production of “The Glass Menagerie.”

She dresses Ortega in miniskirts and leggings or boots, or tony/sexy evening wear more appropriate for a magazine cover than a high school kid’s wardrobe.

Her script has Cairo deconstruct her own work with every literary criticism cliche in the book, and launch into a long, purple passage from Mr. Miller’s lone published novel. quoted from memory. And Mr. Miller quotes one of Cairo’s short stories back to her via eidetic memory in a mix of awe, envy and sexual heat.

As even the diminutive Freeman towers over the petite Ortega, their “sexual” tension moments peg the “ick” needle. He’s a high-mileage, white-haired late 40something and she’s not looked this young in years. We don’t buy in. And not just because his attempted accent comes and goes and she never bothers with one.

Adlon, daughter of Pamela, gives us the story’s youthful vulnerability. Any sexual predation Winnie talks up is plainly a pose, part of Winnie’s ongoing search for her sexual self. But call her bluff and she’s the one true child here.

Domincyk of TV’s “Succession” devours her scenes and her co-stars, pretty much channeling Ava Gardner as she does. It’s the film’s most over-the-top turn, suggesting she’s the only one in on the joke.

As Lionsgate didn’t so much “release” this unsettling misfire as allow it to sneak out the back door in the dumping ground of January, hopefully one and all can put it behind them and pray no one remembers it a year from now.

But bad decisions are telling, and while Freeman is in a take-what-I-can-get stage of his career, it is Ortega who should be second-guessing the entire process that put someone as in-demand as she is in this picture with this green and misguided writer-director.

Whatever Ortega thought playing “Miller’s Girl” might do for her post “Wednesday” and “Scream” image, nothing good came from it. Just embarrassment for her.

Rating: R, sexual situations, teen drinking and smoking, profanity

Cast: Martin Freeman, Jenna Ortega, Dagmara Dominczyk, Bashir Salahuddin and Gideon Adlon

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:33

Lionsgate didn’t pitch this one. Lionsgate pitched “Scrambled” and has yet to deliver, so maybe they’ve laid off everybody I deal with there.

A January that was on life support is close to flat lining, unless people come out to see the Oscar nominees they’ve missed. Are they?

Early reviews haven’t been kind to this Martin Freeman/Jenna Ortega student-teacher assignationa drama “Miller’s Girl.” But what the hell? Any movie Beats staying in Thursday night.

(Update? Here’s my review.)

It’s always worth remembering that almost everything that on the screen in a feature film was put there on purpose, especially when reviewing a movie that seems to have competing agendas.

Khalid Fahad’s Saudia drama “From the Ashes” was “inspired” by a notorious true story about a girl’s school fire. There was hand-wringing within “The Kingdom” and outcry from around the world about what caused the fire’s death toll, and the role that country’s Islamic fundamentalist “religious police” had in hampering rescue.

As a Washington Post headline at the time put it, “They Died for Lack of a Head Scarf.”

Fahad’s film — his feature debut was “Valley Road” a couple of years back — opens with a family overhearing chat on the radio about the people and the country being their own worst enemies, at times, and a cleric debating how much of “a woman’s arm” (in Arabic, with subtitles, or dubbed into English) should be exposed in public.

Every time the teen students enter th secondary school, much is made of them shedding the full hijabs that pose a burden, it is suggested, to young women. One is flirted-with by catcalling men, whom she tries to ignore.

And every day, at start of school, they are padlocked-in — not from the inside, protected from the outside world, but from the outside. The message “Women tempt men” is repeated a couple of times in the script.

When the fire happens, the school has to call the “educational authority” for “permission to evacuate.” This is done in a panic. Nothing happens quickly. When the firefighters and police arrive, they must confront dogmatic Islamic men — “religious police” is never uttered — who have to be debated before the gate will open.

Girls die. And when the police investigate the blaze, none of that those problems are questioned. The cops want to know how one student was locked in a storage room, this or that detail of who might have started it.

There’s not a word about the patriarchical, backward and oppressive practices that this tragedy exposed. Here’s the “story” Fahad’s film is allegedly telling.

There were bad feelings in the school, girls backbiting at “The Ideal Student,” the shorthaired (“presents” as a lesbian) Heba and her crony Mona, making trouble and ID’d as suspects by the martinet principal (Shaima Al Tayeb), who rides her student daughter Rana extra hard as she tries to take the teen’s dad to court.

The school is presented as strict adherents to sharia law — banning smoking, nail-polish, makeup and chewing gum. The custodian is a paid matchmaker, as these teenagers are all marriage age. Classes include “How to shroud the deceased” and other Islamic homemaker women’s “duties.”

One acting-out teen is ordered to “respect the curriculum AND the religion.”

The rebels are presented as perhaps having a point, or scapegoats for what is to come.

So it’s a bit hard to figure out what side of the fence Fahad is leaning over — women are oppressed, or women who get out of line are punished by fire and its consequences as “God’s will.”

Sleepy-eyed stoner Snoop Dogg takes his shot at a “Bad News Bear” kiddie comedy with “The Underdoggs,” a sometimes funny and always-foul-mouthed romp about PeeWee/Pop Warner Football.

Playing an ex-NFL star wideout and something of a burnout, Dogg wears shades and drops shade — and F-bombs and N-bombs — all in a kids’ movie in which the players have their profane and N-word moments as well.

“You know as well as I do that kids who aren’t supposed to be watching this s–t curse more than the rest of us mother—–s,” Snoop writes in the film’s opening “disclaimer” credit. True enough.

“Drumline” director Charles Stone III, Snoop and a couple of screenwriters cobble together a story of an arrogant has-been who is sentenced to do community service in his native Long Beach after he carelessly piles-up his Lambo.

In his day, Jaycen “Two Js” Jennings was one of the greats. Just ask him. A high school and college star, he lived up to his draft hype with a string of poster-worthy catches during his playing days.

“I’m the pick that got picked before all the other picks!”

Now he’s been left out of a “greatest wideouts ever” list and is feuding with fans and provocative sports talkers like Chip Collins (Andrew Schulz).

“I know they say ‘Black don’t crack,’ but I’m seeing FRACTURES” his nemesis taunts.

Jayecen’s “Harold and Kumar-looking mother—-er” agent (Kal Penn) won’t return his calls.

There’s nothing for it but to do his time, rehab his image by working with kids, aka “dirty-ass booger eaters,” and posting about it on social media. Because no good deed is worth doing if you don’t brag about it online.

The kids? They aren’t impressed with the guy whose sunglasses don’t hide his narcotic daze. This “hip hop pirate” in the gold-plated G-wagon is just another “fake-ass coach.”

Jaycen will have to commit if he wants to impress his hot ex (Tika Sumpter) who has a son (Jonigan Booth) on the team.

“Let me do the math,” he flirts when he meets her again. “NAAaaaaaah, he ain’t mine!”

The Florida Keys setting is apt, the crisis facing the titular Road House is common, and Jake is an ex MMA fighter not walking away from the latest challenge.

Doug Liman directed “Road House,” which comes out March 21.

The daughter’s British, the bird is a shape shifting talking parrot and the effect is uplifting in a tale that’s downbeat and mournful by design.

A24 has this Daina Oniunas-Pusic film, and it looks lovely.

“Masters of the Air” is an overarching, sometimes over-reaching portrayal of America’s part in the Air War in Europe from the same production team that told the historical World War II stories “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

Like those series, “Air” focuses on a couple of groups of real-life pilots — survivors and victims of the war — and goes to painstaking detail to recreate the horror these men faced, especially in the early months of daylight “precision” bombing carried out by American B-17s which were too vulnerable, it turned out, to be named “Flying Fortresses.”

Over a third of these big-for-their-day bombers put into action were lost in combat. From the start, crews had to serve a minimum of 25 combat missions in order to earn the right to go home. And very few did.

The everyday horrors included sudden death or wounding by anti-aircraft shrapnel or air-to-air rockets, planes and bodies riddled by fighter-plane bullets, air-to-air collisions and mortally wounded aircraft tumbling and disintegrating out of the sky, not often in the graceful, smoke-trailing arcs of “Did you see any (para) chutes?” most often depicted in the movies.

The men of the 100th Bomb Group, “The Bloody Hundredth,” flying out of England, saw friends and comrades killed in front of them almost every time they flew. They’d wait on the ground, scanning the skies for stragglers that might not make it back. And then, they’d have to climb back in their tough but vulnerable Boeing bombers and face the terror again.

Some 70,000 were killed or wounded in this service. The best American museum to these warriors and their work might be The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum just south of Savannah, Georgia on I-95. I highly recommend it.

The series is built around a handful of characters — friends  Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven, given a Clark Gablesque swagger by Austin Butler (“Elvis”), and the loyal and headstrong Major John “Bucky” Egan, played by Callum Turner of “The Boys and the Boat,” Fantastic Beasts” and in the headlines these days for dating pop starlet Dua Lipa.

“Masters of the Air” is “overarching” in the ways it synthesizes many movies about the war in its episodic stories, the action depicted, theaters of combat and consequences and stakes of the war discussed.

It’s got “Memphis Belle” and “Twelve O’Clock High” elements, “Stalag 17” in the P.O.W. experience, “The Holocaust” is touched on and “Red Tails” — Black pilots serving in World War II — are celebrated.

There’s also a hint of war service romance between the Yanks and the local ladies, with Bel Powley playing the uniformed Every Servicewoman, the very embodiment of British pluck.

“Don’t you sleep?”

“After we’ve WON!”

We follow the first 1942 air crews to shuttle their bombers from America to Greenland and then to Britain, with airsick-every-time-he-goes-up navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) almost directing his crew straight into occupied France.

We take off and head into the unknown with them as they fly their first missions and first experience flak and fighters, which pass by in a blur rarely depicted in WWII air combat films. A 250 miles per hour bomber was little match for 400 mph+ fighters.

Missions go right, and men die. Missions go very wrong, and more men die. Unlike “Band of Brothers,” there’s no in-our-ranks villain here. Over-complicated missions and blunders in command aren’t laid at the feet of the kutzes in charge. There’s a bit of debate between Brits and Yanks over the costly, idealistic American daytime “military targets only” approach, and the British nighttime “proximity” bombing, which later research suggests was what came closest to speeding the end of the war.

The dames just melt in the presence of Paul Newman’s laconic title character in “Harper,” a serio-comic detective thriller filmed when Newman was at his peak, but a film never regarded as one of his best. Because it isn’t.

“Dames” as an expression had gone out of fashion by the time this William Goldman adaptation of a Ross MacDonald book came out. It’s still something of a throwback picture — smart-assed and half “hip,” but old-fashioned touches abound.

Rear-projection was passe, and day-for-night filming was fading from use, which didn’t keep director Jack Smight from clumsily trotting it out (It’s “night” and no car lights are on.). He was a “Twilight Zone” veteran who’d make lots of TV, and bloated ’70s actioners like “Airport ’75” and “Midway” before retiring well short of ever achieving critic Andrew Sarris’s vaunted “pantheon.”

But watching Newman hardboil his way through a sea of swans, tough but fearful, physically overmatched (he rarely came off “shorter” on the screen) but quick on the uptake, quicker on the comeback, is pure Newmanesque pleasure.

Lew Harper is a gumshoe cliche, a not-that-successful PI who lives in a two room flat, dozing off with the TV on. He drives a half-primered ’55 Porsche 356 convertible and before we meet the almost-ex (Janet Leigh) we’ve guessed he’s going through a divorce.

But thanks to an old pal Albert (Arthur Hill), he catches a break. A rich paraplegic (Lauren Bacall) wants him to track down her oft-wandering husband. Her husband’s private pilot (Robert Wagner) might be a help. Her stepdaughter, the vivacious Miranda (Pamela Tiffin) probably won’t. She’s smitten with the pilot and might be interested in Mr. Bright Blue Eyes just enough to make the flyboy jealous.

Harper’s hunt will take him to a lot of bars, one where a faded screen starlet (Shelley Winters) will need to be flirted with and plyed with drinks, another where a junky singer (Julie Harris) presides at the piano.

There’s also a cult leader (“Cool Hand Luke’s” tormentor, Strother Martin!) and the “fat” starlet’s menacing gay husband (Robert Webber) to contend with, as well as cops (Newman’s “The Sting” co star Harold Gould) to insult.

“I used to be a sheriff, till I pass my literacy test.”

Harper’s got a mouth on him, and considering he’s dealing with possible kidnapping, murder, human trafficking, cult leaders and goons, that’s always going to get him into trouble.

“You gotta way of starting conversations that end conversation.”