Movie Nation

Tom Shales, the witty and biting longtime TV critic for The Washington Post and puckish NPR film critic for a stretch has died.

He was 79. And he will be missed, as many of us have missed his cutting, Pulitzer Prize-winning TV criticism since his retirement.

In critic as entertainer terms NPR, if one is honest, hasn’t heard the likes of him since he hung up his headphones many years back. His dry, droll sing-songy delivery — reminiscent of CBS TV’s fey and funny Dennis Cunningham — was unforgettable in its time, ascerbic reviews performed like iambic pentameter — repetitive for effect — on “Morning Edition” with Bob Edwards.

I swapped a few emails with him in the years after he put away his fangs, and never ceased to be tickled at how he he’d prioritized entertainment value — sometimes in cudgeling tones — over stuffy authority and the perfectly buttressed argument.

As a film critic, he was a bit out of his depth — in the bag for trash that had TV or TV stars as its origin. But he wanted to do film reviews for NPR because he knew that TV, and TV criticism, has far less of a shelf life.

I’ll never forget sitting on the phone with his “Morning Edition” editor (I worked in public radio during the peak Shales NPR years) explaining that Tom’s nationally broadcast evisceration of rocker/actress Debby Harry’s performance in “Copland” was way out of bounds. Because she wasn’t in the movie. He was criticizing the wonderful Cathy Moriarty, “wrong on both counts,” I laughed.

Shales chuckled at being reminded of that. We all screw up, and few opinions, like few movies or TV shows, truly stand the test of time, in any event.

But rare was the Friday AM when I didn’t laugh out loud at something Shales said, even when he was unfairly abusing his nemesis, Alan Alda, or giving Woody Allen a harder time than most were because in this medium, in his prime, he was as funny as Allen’s most pretentious pontificator.

RIP, Mr. T.

Here’s an NPR rebroadcast of Shales’ “Star Wars” review. Enjoy. Enjoy. Enjoy.

Let’s tick off a few names in this all-star B-Western, due out March 1 from Quiver.

Oscar winner Whoopi G., Edward James Olmos, Neal McDonough, Cedric the Entertainer, M. Emmet Walsh, D.C. Young Fly, Cam Gigandet, Allen Payne, Mario Van P. and a third-gen Van Peebles nepo baby, Tom Cruise’s cousin…

Mario Van Peebles also wrote and directed, and no, this isn’t his first Western (“Posse,” “Los Locos”).

Small town corruption, criminal family ties, firearm fetishizing and violence.

Andie Mac as a VILLAIN? Ooooo.

Feb. 23.

The beautiful young thing takes a moment, sailing a half million dollar sloop past a cliffside villa on coastal Portugal, to turn to the male model next to her, point out that villa and say “That’s my dream.”

We don’t know how Natalie (Mimi Keene) came by that pricey to buy/ruinous to keep yacht in Lisbon, where she apparently makes a living as a wedding dress…saleslady? We haven’t quite figured out why this lovely Brit — who moved to Portugal to “get away from herself” and maybe the sex video the womanizing creep-turned-hit-novelist Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) spilled onto the Internet — has forgiven hunky, alcoholic narcissist Hardin.

But in “After Everything: The Final Chapter,” the third fourth FIFTH film in this vapid “After” sex and money comes LOVE LOVE LOVE series of moon-eyed Millennial romances, we’ve learned not to ask “Why?” or “How?” or “What’s the attraction, here?”

They’re just young and thin and beautiful and monied, and that’ll have to do.

Somehow, Netflix and assorted directors, screenwriters and a rotating cast of supporting players have managed to get five films out of Anna Todd’s IA (Immature Adult) Fiction novel “Before” and make Andrew Garfield Lite, young Mr. Fiennes Tiffin, a romantic hearthrob for the ages.

Wonders never cease.

This time, our hero (ahem) is fighting writer’s block and the loss of his beloved Tessa (Josephine Langford) to the betrayal of turning their love affair into a hit novel. She’s barely acknowledging his texts, and he’s barely keeping it together — drinking, swinging into a menage a trois with his publishing house’s editor (Rosa Escoda), insulting his mother (Louise Lombard) and stepfather figure…I think (Stephen Moyer).

There’s nothing for it but to jet down to Lisbon to start the process of “making amends” with Natalie. But not before a little “Mile High Club” action with a stewardess. Well, that’s just a fantasy and well… baby steps, right?

The movie is one long mope around Portugal as Hardin dodges calls from his publisher, which may want his advance back if he can’t whip up a new draft, and from his old friend Landon.

Money and affluence and leisure are birthrights to this crew, even if you are slumming it in a tony wedding dress shop. Narcissism is a given. But, you guys, Hardin is suffering.

“Nothing matters in this world is she’s not in it,” Hardin declares between slugs of whisky and trips to the beach, the cliffs, the finest restaurants and bars Portugal has to offer.

The lazy affluence of this script by writer-director Castille Landon, means no real locations are identified, no scenic spot is appreciated and nobody depicted isn’t beach-body ready to peel off this or that article of clothing for some PG-13 grinding that barely merits an R-rating.

Maybe the “R” is for the hilarious fistfight/beat-down between the male models, whose gym visits and tattoos tell us how tough they are. Hardin’s hardcore enought to head-butt? Do tell?

“After Everything,” which follows “After Ever Happy,” “After We Fell,” “After We Collided” and just plain “After,” isn’t particularly hateful. But one does wonder what this piffle is doing to impressionable young minds.

If so many other generations have problems with Millennials’ work ethic, values etc., maybe it’s a steady diet of vacuous, shiny, unearned affluence like this that is messing with their heads.

Rating: R, bloody fistfight, alocohol abuse, sex, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Mimi Keene, Josephine Langford, Stephen Moyer, Rosa Escoda and Arielle Kebbell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Castille Landon, based on a novel by Anna Todd. A Netflix release.

Running time:

This fantastical immigration farce written, directed by and starring Torres, finally has a March theatrical and streaming release date.

A24 has been sitting on it for a bit, despite rapturous festival reviews.

March 1. Check it out.

“The Promised Land” is a “troubles on the farm” thriller, with a lone stoic battling the elements, greedy nobles and the sandy, infertile soil itself in an effort to tame the place and make his fortune.

It’s “Places in the Heart,” “The Southerner” and “Shane” in Danish, with iconic Danish star Mads Mikkelsen as the stubborn army captain who will not be uprooted, even if the land literally repels those roots.

Danish novelist Ida Jessen imagined uninhabited 18th century Jutland, a vast, sandy and under-inhabited heath in the western third of her homeland, as Denmark’s Old West for her historical novel “The Captain and Anna Barbara.”

Director Nikolaj Arcel recovers from the debacle of “The Dark Tower” to give us a beautiful but unsentimental genre picture with all the elements of the formula for such films served in their proper doses.

Mikkelsen plays Captain Ludvig von Kahlen, perhaps the bastard son of a nobleman who spent his life fighting for the German army. In the 1750s, he’s returned to Denmark after 25 years of service, seeking an audience with the king because he has some notion of making Frederik V’s fondest wish come true.

An army surveyor raised by a gardener, he will settle the infertile sandscape of Jutland, start a colony there of German farmers, and make it pay off.

“All soil can be cultivated,” he declares (in Danish with English subtitles). And he won’t listen to the huffing of bureaucrats and nobles who insist “better men than you have tried and failed.”

He rides out alone, takes core sample after core sample to try and find some patch that will support a crop. He then builds his “King’s House” on The King’s Land, and hires a couple of runaway serfs (Amanda Collin and Morten Hee Andersen) to make his start.

But there’s a sinister, titled fop who claims that land. And as he’s inherited not just an estate, but a judgeship in the region, Frederik de Schickel (Simon Bennebjerg) is ideally placed to stop the “bastard” son from succeeding.

The way de Schickel freely admits he added the “de” to his name to sound more royal and insults the poverty, uniform and everything else about the captain suggests the depth of his fear and resentment of this man who would be his social equal if he pulls this feat off.

Essentially, Bennebjerg has the Alan Rickman/Richard E. Grant role in this parable. He’s hatefully good in the part, playing a sadist who rapes servants and has been bribed to marry his Norwegian cousin (Kristine Kujath Thorp) to keep all the money in that gene line.

Denmarks’s official submission for Best International Feature in the 96th Academy Awards even gives us a “tater,” a “darkling,” the smart-mouthed Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg) who runs with the thieving bands who roam the moors as an outlaw class. The captain takes her in, reluctantly, after she leads him to her clan, which he hopes to turn into a workforce.

But being dark skinned, she is “bad luck” to the Germanic Danes he wants to help him colonize this forbidding land.

Mikkelsen is well-cast as the guarded man of few words single-mindedly-pursuing land and the “set for life” noble title that he feels are his due.

“God put man on Earth to make civilization,” he tells the local priest (Gustav Lindh), his only ally. With the king’s backing, he is sure of success. But de Schickel is the law here, and the unreachable, alcoholic (it is suggested) king has no idea he exists.

Still, Kahlen refuses to take Schickel’s bait, won’t be goaded into fighting Schickel’s hired army officer goon (Olaf Højgaard) and resists the temptations of the unhappy cousin who has no interest in marrying the sadistic Schickel, whom the captain refuses to address as “de Schickel.”

But as sabotage is added to the myriad other challenges our intrepid frontiersman/farmer faces, as blood is shed and indignities pile up, we know a reckoning is coming.

The narrative sticks closely enough to historical events to feel believable and realistic. The setting is striking and the period detail ensures that we’re immersed in this hardscrabble world where being sentimnental about a goat, a woman or a child is a luxury our grim hero can ill afford.

It won’t hold many surprises for anyone who’s ever seen a Western or a movie Alan Rickman sneered his way through. But “The Promised Land,” with its themes of futilely fighting a “rigged” system to change one’s status, with dubious rewards even if you win, makes a most worthy saga, even without the sagebrush.

Rating: R, bloody violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Amanda Collin, Gustav Lindh, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Melina Hagberg and
Simon Bennebjerg

Credits: Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, scripted by Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel, based on the novel by Ida Jessen. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:07

“Origin” is an important film, a movie that attempts to tie — in intellectual terms — the oppression and enslavement of Africans in the Americas with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the immobility of India’s “untouchable” “caste” system.

It’s a “writer’s journey” tale about a Pulitzer-prize-winning American journalist and non-fiction writer Isabel Wilkerson’s efforts to understand why “racism” is “the primary language to understand everything” about American racial inequality, and her realization that the term “racism” is “inadequate” in that role.

“Caste” was the key, she came to believe, and she turned that thesis and exploration into a best seller — “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” — which came out just as the 2020 presidential election was entering its crucial last weeks.

There’s no dishonor in writer-director Ava Duvernay’s reach exceeding her grasp with this big, broad and meaningful subject. Her movie meanders when it’s meant to sprawl and drifts between melodramatic — Wilkerson’s personal tragedies informing the book as she began it — and pedantic even when it’s at its most moving.

Duvernay, who has held most every position and job one can collect a check for on film and TV sets, and who directed “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time,” remains a better producer than director, even if what this picture sorely lacks is a producer who tells the director what to trim, tighten, streamline and emphasize.

But she’s made her “Malcolm X,” a quest story about the search for that curse that ties so much human misery together, the need to segregate, isolate, stigmatize and demonize in order to create a hierarchy to one group’s advantage and many others’ disadvantage.

We meet Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor of “King Richard” and “The Color Purple,” as she makes the social scene in Washington with her doting husband Brett (Jon Bernthal), celebrating her latest book on America’s “Great Migration” of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to opportunity and new challenges in the North and West.

But she’s buttonholed by a newspaper editor (Blair Underwood) who insists she needs to write something about the Trayvon Martin case, which has just happened. Even as she recognizes the legacy of lynching, the violence of police towards African Americans and “Nazi symbolism all over the place” in the U.S., Wilkerson resists this story.

“I don’t do assignments any more,” she says. She doesn’t want to merely “report” a story, but the “be inside the story.” That takes a book.

She mulls over the “connective tissue” she starts to see in racism, anti-Semitism and the “caste” system that sentenced one group, the “Dalit” “untouchables” of India, to permanent degradation and servitude.

As Wilkerson does, tragedy strikes her life and makes her ponder the weight of racism and undersclass status on her accomplished mother (Emily Yancy), an educated Black woman “married to a Tuskegee Airman” who can’t stop herself from fretting that young Trayvon Martin didn’t answer “that man right,” blaming an innocent young Black victim for his own death.

Wilkerson also marvels at the white husband who left his “caste” behind to marry her.

With her editor’s (Vera Farmiga) backing, Wilkerson travels to Germany and India, following in the footsteps of Black researchers Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker, Jasmine Cephas Jones), anthropologists doing research in Germany just as the Nazis took over.

The Nazis, Wilkerson and others note, studied American Jim Crow laws in order to make The Holocaust possible. Thus, the Davis’s book “Deep South” becomes one of the cornerstones of Wilkerson’s own work.

She travels to India to learn from academics following in the footsteps of B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit caste Indian who studied in Bombay, London and New York, an economist who wrote and agitated about the injustice of India’s caste system and who had a hand in writing India’s constitution.

Wilkerson takes lessons from her own family (Niecy Nash plays her closest cousin) about racial faultlines and “race-mixing” in marriages, and from a MAGA-capped plumber (Nick Offerman) whom she tries to establish a human connection with.

With only her fading cell phone and an emergency operator to save her.

Jan. 26, we’ll see how this turns out.

There are few things a working critic dreads more these days than the prospect of reviewing a two hour long+ movie on the Yugo of movie streaming providers, Indee.TV.

I have two movies to get through today, both falling on that blighted server’s tech, both of them failing to play. I change browers, Internet providers, resolution that the film is screened in, it’ll play a few minutes and then mysteriously quit.

I started the process last night, with dread. Because when you see it’s in Indee.tv, you know it’s going to eat up a whole day just trying to get them to get their end right.

Their many work-arounds — they’re used to all these complaints becauses it is the glitchiest, most unreliable service a film distributor can use to send previews of its movies — mean I have to re-log in on every site I use on a daily basis, trying to reset to this or that “mode” just to get Indee.tv to work.

So my apologies to Neon and Magnolia, but I’m not getting to two very promising, very LONG titles today because today, as always, Indee.TV sucks.

Chinese-Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen lets us in on his favorite films from film school with “The Breaking Ice,” a Chinese love triangle redolent in images, themes and situations of The French New Wave.

There are references to Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim” and Goddard’s “Bande à part” in this story of lost souls that find each other in a wintry corner of China with a unique place in Chinese life.

Korean culture, cinema and TV interest enough Chinese that there are tourists who flock to Yanji on the North Korean border, a Chinese-established prefecture for Koreans who have immigrated there. It was meant to be as Korean as China would allow.

Haofeng (Haoran Liu) is a sad introvert who has come there for a Korean wedding.

Nana (Dongyu Zhou) is a tour guide, leading the curious travelers around “traditional” Korean village recreations, into Korean restaurants and shops, all with an idea of introducing them to a (past) Korean culture that existed before Korea was divided, and without the necessity of isolationist North Korea opening its borders to tourism from its fellow authoritarian state.

And Han Xiao (Chuxiao Qu) is a cook at one of those Korean eateries. He’s sweet on the petite pixie Nana, but she’s a brittle soul, seemingly-resigned to this grueling work of standing and walking and grinning to strangers.

“Whether I like it or not, I have to do it” is how she sums that up, in Mandarin with English subtitles. She lightly mocks Xiao for his affection and puts him down to Haofeng by insulting his “mediocre” cooking.

Everybody has a secret or not so secret desire. Everyone is wallowing in quiet desperation. They are, in a way, as trapped as a local fugitive (Ruguang Wei), whose “wanted” poster is everywhere, thanks to a series of snatch-and-run thefts.

Haofeng loses his phone, the one he’s been mumbling “Wrong number” into every time his mental health clinic calls to try and reschedule his missed appointment. Haofeng tells strangers at the wedding and his two new acquaintances that he’s in “finance” and from “Shanghai.” The always-calling clinic is in Pujiang, a long way from Shanghai.

The three are brought together because she takes pity on the tourist with the lost phone (no access to money or the world without that) and introduces “handsome” but “always frowning” Haofeng to her not-quite-suitor Xiao. But they’re really drawn together the way lost souls always find their own in the movies, especially those from the French New Wave.

They chat and drink, sing karaoke and pub-crawl. But there’s something about the forlourn way she looks at skaters on a local lake, something in the way the cook describes never having “been anywhere,” and something in Haofeng’s despairing, clumsy courtship of Nana that suggests a world of hurt in which any one of the three could jump off a roof or cliff, wander off into the snow or drive into oncoming traffic.

Chen (“Wet Season” was his previous film) has made a movie of familiar themes and recognizable antecedents. But he offsets that by dropping us into an alien world so disorienting that little here neatly fits into a narrative box.

The characters can wander up to the Yalu River and shout across it at North Korea. They can pass checkpoints to go see a legendary lake in the bordering Changbai Mountains, a trio emotionally out of their depth soon literally out of their snow depth. And they can dare each other to see who can “steal the biggest book” from a bookstore they impulsively visit, “wanted” posters in a surveillance state be damned.

Chen adapts his characters from their New Wave or wherever origins to this world and lets the viewer peel away their mysteries, but he doesn’t give us pat answers about how they will face their respective fates.

“The Breaking Ice” thus becomes an obscure parable about belonging and connecting in a crowded, impersonal world, connections that are necessary for our well-being and are all the more difficult to make when we’re all uprooted from our past and rendered remote from human interaction right up to that moment we lose our all-important/all-demanding cell phones.

Rating: unrated, sex, some nudity

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu and Chuxiao Qu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anthony Chen. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:40