Movie Nation

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.”

“Molli and Max in the Future” is exactly what it set out to be, an instant “cult” film, a zippy, low-budget sci-fi rom-com riff on “When Harry Met Sally” designed to play as a “midnight movie” at your favorite art film cineplex.

The brainchild and debut feature of self-described absurdist Michael Lukk Litwak, “Future” doesn’t reinvent the future so much as comically re-imagine it in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy/Futurama” fashion.

In characters, situations, structure and shot selection, it’s an overt homage to “When Harry Met Sally,” without the “I’ll have what she’s having” boffo laughs. But as it riffs through relationships, religion, right-wing populist politics, cyber-celebrity and futuresport, there’s a reasonably steady flow of chuckles even if it bogs down a bit before reaching for a bigger finish than it delivers.

They meet in an accident — not involving cars, but in deep-space coupes bouncing through the asteroid belt. Molli (Zosia Mamet, of “Girls,” daughter of you-know-her and you-know-who) is a bit of a flake — not exactly bubbly, but she’s out here “harvesting (magic) crystals,” a part of her religion. Max (Aristotle Athari, did a season of “Saturday Night Live”) is a realist, a tinkerer trying to avoid going into his father’s line of work.

She’s forced to give him a lift back to Megalopolis. But he’s actually from Oceanus.

“It’s really beautiful” she notes. “Really? You can’t spell ‘Oceanus’ without ‘anus.'”

Max hides the fact that he’s a genocide survivor, one of the fish people.

“You should be proud of your gills! They’re beautiful.”

“It’s like having two vaginas on your collarbone. NOT beautiful

Their fizzy, bantering on-and-off “relationship” traverses space and time in arbitrary chapters in which she joins a cult and has sex with the manipulative and tentacled cult leader Moebius (Okieriete Onaodowan).

“Are we in a cult?” Molli asks fellow cultist Walter (Arturo Castro). “Oh yeah,” he replies. “There was a documentary about us!”

Max invents his way into his favorite sport, exoskeleten robot brawling. Molli canvases for a hapless but humane and smart woman running for Galactic Emperor against a monstrously cruel, vulgar populist — Turboschmuck (Michael Chernus).

And every now and then, sometimes mid-relationship, sometimes between relationships, Molli reconnects with Max like Harry kept running into Sally.

The movie’s many sources for comedy are obvious, but subtly delivered. Cyber-dating and cyberspace notoriety, religious fads and sexual identity and technology — Max builds a “sentient robot” partner for himself (Erin Darke) at one point — all are subject to mockery.

The gender roles are reversed from “When Harry Met Sally,” as Molli is more pro-sex, and also impulsive and a little gullible. Max is cynical but a romantic at heart.

When this picture works, it skips by on a frothy jazz-scored tour of a lot of cool and we’re sure super inexpensive effects, models and sets, which have the soundstagey glow of “Barbarella” or the films of Canadian avant garde wit Guy Maddin (“The Saddest Music in the World”).

When “Molli and Max” doesn’t work, the reach for laughs is obvious and the satiric jabs feel strained.

But the players make it likeable and allow the jokes to whizz by. It’s also lovely-to-look-at and laughably weird enough to play, which is all we’ve ever wanted in a Midnight Movie.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Zosia Mamet, Aristotle Athari, Erin Darke, Okieriete Onaodowan, Arturo Castro, Paloma Garcia-Lee and Michael Chernus.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Lukk Litwak. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:34

Generations of WWII movies have served up endless repeats of the same old songs from the era — “In the Mood,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” a little Glen Miller, a bit of Artie Shaw, a touch of “We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When.”

But this new Apple TV air war in Europe series, which I will be reviewing in a day or two (premieres Friday), scrounged up an oddity. And you know me and musical oddities.

This is not an anarchonism, let me hasten to add. I may wonder when the acronym “MIA” came into use, or the phrase “wheels up” came to be used as a military departure time. But Our Man Woody wrote this little anti fascist ditty right in the middle of all that fuss and bother.

It’s an odd song to have a young woman sing to the Yanks and Brits in a party “over there” in “The War.” She sings it almost as a lament.

The message? Timeless.

No?

Me either. And I watched a LOT of docs this year. But what is out there and available to be seen never or at least rarely correlates with the Academy’s docs branch.

An occasional exception proves the rule, but these folks are in a bubble all their own. All five docs this year are from overseas, which is not an issue in and of itself. The documentary boom that cheap cameras (even cell phones) and the rise of video podcasts and streaming platforms to show them has heralded wasn’t limited to North America.

But there were docs with genuine pop appeal this year, moving and well-made films with a domestic and international audience.

Instead, here are the nominees.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM

“Bobi Wine: The People’s President”

“The Eternal Memory”

“Four Daughters”

“To Kill a Tiger”

“20 Days in Mariupol”

A couple of them I’ve heard of. But none of the 100+ docs that I reviewed — all of them with distribution — made this list.

From “The Hollywood Reporter.”

” No Oscar category was more surprising this year than best documentary feature. The two films that most experts believed would stand the best shot of winning, if nominated by the documentary branch and offered up to the full Academy, were Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony and Davis Guggenheim’s Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, and neither made the final five. This sort of thing has happened so many times in recent years — with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Jane, Life Itself, Three Identical Strangers, Apollo 11 and others — that it really needs to be addressed.“

The director of “Sound of Freedom” is behind the camera for this New York “Five Points” rathole 19th period piece.

John Lithgow and David Morse support Cristiana Dell’Anna in the title role, that of Francesca Cabrini.

Wonder if they’ll get into the fact that an infamous Chicago housing project, Cabrini-Green,” was named for her? Not that how it turned out is her fault.

March 8, we’ll find out.