Movie Nation

Artists who make their mark on the world are the ones who dare to experiment, who take big chances in the belief that they can show us something new.

Werner Herzog’s “Heart of Glass” was such an experiment, a hypnotic Bavarian period piece about prophecy, class, tradition, lost knowledge and the fragility of existence. Herzog, at the peak of his art cinema early career, took a shot at having most of his cast hypnotized for their scenes, which gives the film a disorienting, mesmerizing quality thanks to the achingly slow, sometimes random, off-center nature of the performances.

It doesn’t really work. At its worst, it’s like a period parody of the art cinema of the day, “Pythonesque” without the laughs. Herzog prefigures David Lynch’s filmed invitations to enter his dreams. But whatever message this brooding sleepwalk is sending, it’s simply unsatisfying as a narrative. “Glass” is indulgent in ways that make one wonder about the artist’s own state of consciousness at the time.

A stoner period piece nightmare? Something like that. As striking as some scenes and images are, how was this ever supposed to “work” as cinema?

A lonely prophet (Joseph Bierbichler) speaks his truths to whoever will listen in the late 18th century village he has settled in.

Hias is a doomsayer. “I look into the distance to the end of the world,” he narrates (in German, subtitled). “Before the day is over, the end will come.”

He makes his pronouncements to any who ask, or any who will listen. “They come to pass,” he insists, no matter what the listener believes.

This Alpine town is full of believers. A crisis is upon them. Their only industry is imperiled. The foreman at the glassworks has died, and with him, the secret to making the town’s famous “ruby red glass.”

Some become manic at Hias’ pronouncements about their gloomy fate. Others are resigned to drinking their fears away. But the baron who owns the glassworks (Stefan Güttler) is obsessed with finding the formula. He puts glassblowers to work experimenting, badgers the dead man’s widow and even sends off for her sofa when he becomes convinced that foreman scribbled the recipe down and hid it inside the cushions.

Hias, who takes the time to dispell local fears that “giants” will awaken and reconquer the Earth, wades through this madness, observes some of it from afar and continues to prophesy doom. As if that’ll help.

Herzog opens the film in fog and hits us with striking images of the waterfalls and gorges of the Swiss borderlands with Bavaria. He stages forlorn arguments over beer — with a stein slowly broken over a drinking partner’s head. The baron’s high-handed obsession turns murderous.

And still the glassblowers blow and work their glass as if the end isn’t nigh. These scenes are the film’s most visually arresting, a veritable ballroom dance of blowers and globs of molten glass weaving amongst each other as they approach the furnace and ply their trade.

It’s a real relief to know that these real-life artisans — like Bierbichler, playing the prophet — were not hypnotized while making the movie. Other scenes involving drunks, corpses and a dog goaded into waking the “dead” with a pitchfork, were.

The dazed, surreal and slow-walking performances of the hypnotized reminded me of Hitchcock’s “Rope,” an experiment in storytelling with long takes without edits. The Master of Suspense realized, only afterwards, that editing is the essence of cinema, the way suspense is created and heightened. He never did it again.

Herzog almost certainly learned to never try hypnotizing his actors again. Klaus Kinski, for one, would have disemboweled him for trying. Whatever he learned from this experiment he internalized in his own persona.

The bold adventurer who made “Aguirre” and “Fitzcarraldo” became a mesmerizing screen presence, voice-over narrator and interview subject. He was and remains a fascinating character, a philospher of film and the human condition. If he needed to try something “out there” to get where he was going, “Heart of Glass” was worth the gamble. Without that gimmick, it’s questionable whether this folk parable oddity would merit mention in the long course of his career.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel, Wilhelm Friedrich and Sonja Skiba.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog, based on a story by  Herbert Achternbusch. A New Yorker Films (US) release on Tubi, Mubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:35

Every year or so I am moved — by WordPress’s lack of movement to fix glitches or eagerness to make an almost unending series of changes for the worse — to point out this Automatic blog provider’s unsuitability, if you’re new to blogging, vlogging or what have you and shopping for a site.

I’ve been dealing with WordPress, via newspaper-anchored blogs and private ones, almost since its inception. Years and years. And the take-away from those many years of experience is that owner Mark Wullenweg’s operation has grown more automated, less accountable and more cumbersome to use by the year.

Recently, I’ve had to restore broken connections that cross-publish this blog onto social media, an occasional aggravation that comes without warning and is almost always due to a bungle or botched “upgrade” at Wullenweg World HQ.

At present, I am ten days FIFTEEN DAYS into a glitch that knocked the hilariously inequitable and unjust (“a class action suit waiting to happen”) Wordads-provided advertising from this site.

This may have to do with WordPress’s demand that customers now much use their EXTORTIONATE and data stealing/losing “Stripes” payment plan. I have gotten repeated pitches for this instead of replies from “Happiness Engineers” about the status of my increasingly profane and furious demands that they FIX WHAT THEY BROKE.

As I deal with an array of chatbots that do nothing and are named “Happiness Engineers” with the bot-ish/bot-built? names Rhys Marine (LOL) and Mohammed Something Arabic, I can’t help but feel extorted. “Service” supposedly improves with every up-purchase this shit-show site provider rolls out and pitches to “customers.” I seriously doubt that.

Does that mean a human being gets involved? Might there even be a PHONE NUMBER to call? Probably not, because this “company’s” business model is all chatbox/AI.

Users have been complaining about WordPress forever, and nothing changes.

The company was ahead of the curve in its dealings with customers. A hallmark of Trump era interactions with all manner of service providers is a “Try and make me” do what they contracted and used to be legally obligated to do.

A simple matter like a refund for service not provided is taken right off the table when you’re this unaccountable. Basically, you pay them money, they take it and irritate the hell out of you with everything that they do rather than PROVIDE that service and accountability for NOT providing it.

Again FIFTEEN DAYS without them fixing what THEY broke. It’s like dealing with a Mickey Mouse version of Big Cable and Big Telco from days of yore. “Bad Service is our Brand,” but let’s call them “Happiness Engineers” because we’re sure they haven’t read “1984.”

Years of highhanded “improvements” that glitch and add workflow-killing keystrokes and drop menus and prompts and “features” (photo publishing is an ongoing death-march to oblivion) to what is still a simple cut-and-dried write and publish process come to mind every time some new affront of this nature happens.

The fact that migrating all my years of work — which WordPress swears it will preserve “forever” when they are actually deleting reviews from years and years of archived and supposedly “live” content, with no apology, explanation or compensation– to a more complex site-provider seems too onerous to consider.

So I am in the process of demanding a refund for the two years of stewardship these bots are supposed to be providing, as the month since I paid for that “service” into the future now has made this endless parade of cut-rate, short-changed workarounds more than I can stomach.

If you see fewer posts here, I’m just givng up. Zuckerberg Lite Wullenweg has just about killed the experience for me. Two weeks of no service is deliberate, a “business model” choice and a “What are you gonna do about it?” middle finger to customers.

And if you’re thinking about blogging, Bluehost, Wix or Square seem like the less extortionate, more user/customer-friendly options. WordPress has engineered “happiness” out of the picture.

Whatever is going on around her and whoever else is in the overripe Netflix murder mystery “His & Hers,” Marin Ireland is the one who gets it.

The latest project from the director of the feature film “Lady Macbeth” is straight-up trash. Ireland, who dresses down as fearlessly (“Dope Thief,” “Hell or High Water”) as any of her peers, is the foul-mouthed bug-eyed fury of this grisly “Mean Girls Grow up Meaner” series — nowhere near top-billed, but lowdown and “out there” in ways that more than do justice to the pulpy source material.

She doesn’t just play trashy, she revels in it.

Based on a novel by Alice Feeney and well-acted by a cast headed by Tessa Thompson, Jon Bernthal, Sunita Mani (“GLOW,” “Death of a Unicorn” and “The Roses”) and Pablo Schreiber, this is an infectious page-turner of a six-part series. Red herrings abound. “Oh no she/he DIDN’T” moments are tucked into laughably far-fetched plot twists and a sixth episode that so over-explains the last of those twists (clumsily given away earlier) that it waters down the impact of everything that came before.

Ireland sets it off every time her character, Zoe, appears. Thompson transforms into a TV anchor-beauty with cunning and “issues.” And Bernthal drawls through his turn as a north Georgia sheriff’s department detective whose true expertise isn’t really crime solving. His Jack Harper is a poster boy for Southern sheriff department policing, a man who like many of his peers truly expert in one thing — knowing just how much a compromised cop can get away with.

Thompson is a “leave of absence” Atlanta TV anchor who returns to her tony hometown of Dahlonega just in time to spy her not-ex-husband Jack cheating, with that cheating preceding the murder of his sex-in-a-truck-in-the-woods paramour. Ex-anchor Anna knows things, so many things that the “story” that erupts around her seems to be manipulated by her.

Her “There are at least two sides to every story” voice-over narration underscores this.

Jack’s enthusiastic sex partner (Jamie Tisdale) is a former private school classmate of Anna’s. Twenty years ago, Rachel was queen bee — the meanest and prettiest of the mean girls. She married money, settled into an “open marriage” and never had to give up her mean girl games.

As Det. Harper gasps at not just the murder of someone he was having a fling with, but a crime whose crime scene is covered with his DNA, he finds himself endlessly swatting away leads, queries and theories of the fresh-out-of-school partner Priya, (Mani) whom he nicknames “Boston.”

But is his not-quite-ex setting him up? The way she side-eyes him, smirks and ignores his many demands to “not report” this or that detail that she seems to know before him sets us up to believe that.

We know that in pulp fiction murder mysteries, it’s never the “obvious” first suspect we’re presented with, is it?

We meet the blonde anchor-woman (Rebecca Rittenhouse) who angled her way into the chair in Anna’s absence, and that bitter, cutthroat rivalry is renewed. Anchor-lady Lexy’s news videographer husband (Schreiber) is lured into that.

We hear of what sent Anna into her spiral and probably contributed to her husband losing an Atlanta PD job. We meet his boozy, broke, single-mom sister (Ireland) and Anna’s neglected, dementia-suffering mom (Crystal Fox).

And flashbacks take us back to St. Hilary’s School, where the rich girls and Anna mingled and Rachel’s corps included future school headmistress Helen Wang (Poppy Liu).

“His & Hers” is basically a slow-walked/series-length variation of “Out of Time,” the Carl Franklin-directed Denzel Washington/Eva Mendes thriller about a corrupt but not murderously dirty cop covering his tracks and his ass in a similar (enough) situation in South Florida, not North Georgia.

The sordid goings on, intimate connections and dirty secrets of a town where everybody knows everybody else make an inbred, over-the-top backdrop for a thriller that often shortchanges the stakes, the ticking clock element and “clues” that might come from the victim’s phone, the detective’s history, the reporter’s seeming manipulations and a junior detective who may at some point put a lot of pieces together.

Ireland, Chris Bauer as the less-than-grieving rich widowed husband and a few others take this script at its over-the-top face value. Bernthal is deliciously desperate and despicable as another unaccountable cop who assaults persons-of-interest and blurts accusations at others when where’s no one there to rein him in or correct his over-reaching lies.

The drawl grows more pronounced the more desperate Jack gets. Ireland gets her Cracker Dander Up. But most characters in this world would shed the accent — especially those in TV — and that’s the case here.

Thompson does a decent job of suggesting sinister and cunning in a character we’re ordered to misjudge and convict, based on the script.

Creator, writer and (in some episodes) director William Oldroyd works in “Twin Peaks” and “Chinatown” needle drops or overt references which underscore the lethal, blood-spattered playfulness he was going for.The lone “Southernism” in the dialogue also hints at the tone he was reaching for, a line uttered by a sheriff’s deputy to the detective.

She was “smilin’ like she got the last parkin’ spot at Cracker Barrel.”

But as a series, “His & Hers” is best at luring us in. The payoffs are consistently disappointing and the final episode basically an eye-roller, start-to-finish — all filler and “explanations” and “You didn’t see THAT coming” when we most certainly did and a long time before.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic bloody violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Tessa Thompson, Jon Bernthal, Marin Ireland, Sunita Mani, Pablo Schreiber, Crystal Fox and Rebecca Rittenhouse

Credits: Created by William Oldroyd, based on a novel by Alice Feeney. A Netflix release.

Running time: Six episodes @ 40-47 minutes each

If you see enough movies, attend enough plays and make it through enough literature, you earn the license to say you’ve “seen’em all.” There are only so many basic plots, with a vast but still finite number of variations on the many themes, after all.

But that can be a curse. I could see where the German thriller “The Tank” was heading within minutes of its opening titles. Chances are, many of you will as well. I won’t spoil it for you but I will throw a few names out there that the savvy will recognize and nod their heads at the drift of it all — Serling, Hitchcock, Bierce, Tim Robbins and Danny Aiello.

Classic plots get to be classics because they’re clever, poignant and even surprising the first few times you see versions of them. So its no sin to try your own variation of one. But for the viewer who picks up on where it’s going too soon, well…

“Der Tiger” as it was titled in German is a sometimes suspenseful, only occasionally far-fetched fascist “Fury” tank crew at war tale that’s pretty much wholly undone by not just driving down a plot path many have traveled before, most notably the short story author who was the subject of “Old Gringo.” The filmmakers feel the need to explain the hell out the finale, so whatever anti-war war film novelty they were going for is spoiled if not exactly undone.

We meet our Tiger tank crew on a bridge over the Dneiper River in the fall of ’43, a few months after Stalingrad, when the German army has tumbled into a terminal retreat.

The last of their infantry has crossed, but as Russian tanks and troops close in, tank commander Lt. Gerkens (David Schütter of Netflix’s German “Barbarians” series) keeps ignoring pleas (in German or dubbed) to fall back before the bridge is blown up.

His driver (Leonard Kunz) and gunner/second-in-command (Laurence Rupp) shout and plead and fire as the dutiful radio-man/machine-gunner (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and boyish cannon-loader (Yoran Leicher) fight back the panic and follow orders.

But they survive for Gerkens to get new orders, a “secret mission” to rescue a Colonel trapped behind Russian lines. The crew will “obey” and drive “the greatest tank ever built” in their own “Saving Col. von Hardenburg” quest through the hell of the Eastern front no man’s land.

They will witness war crimes that remind them that “The Reich has developed such an appetite for killing.” They will overhear Catholic mass in Latin on their two-way radio. They will face dire odds, fire and flood and superstitions as they do the bidding of “Our friend Adolf, the Austrian.”

Above all else, they will “follow orders.”

Director and co-writer Dennis Gansel wrings a bit of pathos about the moral quandary and cost of such misguided loyalty. But the picture’s heavy-handed way with allegory make it about as realistic as a “Sisu” thriller.

The trek is hardly hidden from view, but we only see Russian (CGI) fighter bombers at night, not in the daylight when anybody with one good eye could spy the cloud of smoke and road dust these V-12 behemoths churned out. The crew stops for a campfire, muses on family and girlfriends and their lives “before the war.” The front lines are largely depopulated, with set-piece confrontations and genre tropes nakedly borrowed from “Fury” (and other tank tales).

Watches stop ticking and surreality pokes its nose around the edges before elbowing its way to center stage.

But the tracks and the wheels underneath them truly come off in a “What was it all for?” finale, a real teeth-grinder of unreality, illogic, cliches and German soul-searching about what they once went through which the rest of the world seems to have forgotten.

“The Tank” isn’t inherently terrible. The actors are game, the allegory timely and the action sequences — including one straight out of a hundren U-Boat movies — play. And helpfully, the cinema usually goes a few decades between versions of the story that was its framework and inspiration — early ’60s, early ’90s — allowing new generations to experience it.

But the execution of this well-worn plot device begs for mystery, not over-explanation. The finale isn’t just obvious, it’s obtuse. If you’re going to explain your movie’s ending, it’s usually a good idea not to botch the explanation so badly that anyone who’s ever seen a variation on this plot is given license to shout at the screen.

Ratng: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: David Schütter, Laurence Rupp, Leonard Kunz, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Yoran Leicher and Tilman Strauss.

Credits: Directed by Dennis Gansel, scripted by Dennis Gansel and Colin Teevan. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:56

clumsy arrival

One of the pleasures of youth is experiencing the stages and phases and Big Moments of life for the first time. And one of the indulgences of being pre-“thirtysomething” is the feeling that you’re “discovering” or reinventing things earlier generations got to before you.

Netflix has had pretty good luck on teen and collegiate romances — rom-coms, mostly. Hollywood lost its way in that genre and the streaming service has had such films all to itself.

But “People We Meet on Vacation” is confirmation that as much as they’d like to exploit the dirth of (somewhat) more adult romances and rom-coms from theatrical studios, their magic touch doesn’t translate.

“People” is a Sony production without the star power, spark, wit or edge to draw viewers to a cinema. It’s so humorless its “meet cute” is a “meet bored.” The dull narrative meanders through “When Harry Met Sally” imitation flashbacks-through-a-friendship-that-becomes-a-romance structure. It slow walks us through genre cliches towards a finale with a climax confessional — cue the rain — followed by four anti-climaxes because three anticlimaxes weren’t enough.

The leads — Emily Bader (“Fresh Kills” and TV’s “My Lady Jane”) and Tom Blyth (TV’s “Billy the Kid”) — are pretty but stunningly bland, with a director (Brett Haley did “The Hero” and hit a personal best with “Hearts Beat Loud”) who can’t steer them or this lumbering beast clear of the schmaltz that often trips him up.

So whatever the “It’s a MOVIE. Let’s LOVE IT” fankids over at Pubescent Tomatoes say, it’s a drag. That’s also a handicap of youth. The little dears haven’t seen enough good romances to know what works.

The script, based on an Emily Henry novel of a couple of years back, follows small-town Ohio girl Poppy through her years-long connection to hometown boy Alex.

A present day “destination wedding” in Barcelona which travel-writer Poppy may skip because she’ll run into Alex prompts a parade of voice-over-narrated flashbacks that tell of their connections and trips together as “just friends.”

They meet cute (not in the least) when she’s late for the ride-sharing trip home from Boston while both are in college. Half a dozen sitcoms and the late Rob Reiner’s “The Sure Thing” got more heart and humor out of that trapped-in-a-Subaru-together situation.

A college kid of the mid 2010s is into…Paula Abdul?

Somehow, they overcome their disconnection — she’s free spirited and ditzy in an inconsiderate way, he’s predictable and “small town” in the usual uninteresting ways.

As her dream is to travel, she becomes a travel journalist — jetting hither and yon and writing advertiser/destination friendly prose tantalizaing enough to make the reader envious and want to go there herself/himself.

His dream is “home” and “family.”

Over the years, they reconnect and we catch up with their annual friend-trip travels to Canada (Alex is that boring), New Orleans, Prague and elsewhere. We re-meet them and their potential mates. And we ponder why these two good-looking Boston College buckeyes can’t make a love connection.

The overarching theme of the story, postulated by Poppy, is that people “vacation to get away from their lives,” that “Vacation Alex” is thus a lot more interesting — skinny dipping, posing as a married couple, etc. — than “real life” Alex.

Except he isn’t. His declaration that he “doesn’t do stupid s—” ever, much less on vacation, can be taken to heart as the skinny dipping is Hallmark Movie with a hint of Nudity tepid.

Poppy is on a journey to overcome the boredom of perpetually traveling. And another generation discovers that making something you love and dream about your vocation strips some of the joy out of it.

Alex needs to get out of himself and won’t, because tiny Linfield, Ohio beckons, with or without the PhD he works his way into. Poppy? She needs to park her luggage and take care of “life” outside of the jetway.

Haley and three screenwriters neglect the “best friend/sounding board” roles — Alex doesn’t get one at all, basically — overdo the motherly, hip and concerned “fan” travel mag editor/boss role (Jameela Jamil) and leave her promisingly adorable, annoying and sexually hip parents (Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck) behind too soon.

It all feels and plays recycled and watered-down — the longing, the testy edge that’s supposed to signal “sparks,” the heartache of indecision.

The writerly narration is travel-blog bland, and nothing in Poppy’s “written” words tell us she’s the new Hemingway, Bourdain or Pico Iyer.

Maybe Poppy’s got a point, resisting being attracted to this unsurprising, “reliable” and unsophisticated, untraveled potential beau. The fact that the script simply isn’t having it is no reason to sit through this if you’ve ever seen another screen romance.

But if you’re young enough that you haven’t viewed the “modern” benchmark movies of the genre — “The Sure Thing,” “French Kiss” and “When Harry Met Sally” for starters — and you think “Anyone But You” is your high bar, by all means have a go.

Rating: PG-13, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Emily Bader, Tom Blyth, Sarah Catherine Hook and Lucien Laviscount, with Alan Ruck and Molly Shannon.

Credits: Directed by Brett Haley, scripted by Yulin Kuang, Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo, based on the novel by Emily Henry. A Sony release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:58

Filmgoers looking for a little escape from the more-horrific-than-fiction daily news out of America will be hard pressed to find it in a movie with “Greenland” and “Migration” in its title.

The sequel to the surprise post-apocalyptic Gerard Butler hit “Greenland 2: Migration” has impressive renditions of flooded cities, a half-melted Eiffel Tower and the canyons of the now-high-and-dry English Channel. But the plot is a perfunctory parade of fresh woes heaped upon our American family with its working class Scot (Butler) husband and father as they’re forced to venture through this hellscape.

Earthquakes and comet-debris meteor bombarment, volcanic rifts and superstorms and a tsunami and “marauders” from Eastern Europe menace the Garrity family in this ruined and irradiated Future Earth.

Even with life-death-of-a-family-and-civilization-itself-stakes director Ric Roman Waugh can’t squeeze urgency or suspense out of a single moment.

The “Migration” is just a succession of landscapes and seascapes turned catastrophic, with nothing that most dramaturges would describe as real “drama” about it.

Five years after Comet Clarke tore a big hole in the South of France and ended what passed for human civilization, the Garritys — scientist wife Allison (Morena Baccarin of “Deadpool”), now-teen-son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) and blue collar-competent dad John (Butler) are still holed up with elite scientists and a few military folk in a post-apocalypse-bunker on the remains of Thune Airbase in Greenland.

John’s a whiz with anything that pumps, cranks-up or closes a circuit. That hazmat suit he dons is just for scavenger hunts around the ruins of the base and the Greenland beach where all sorts of handy things wash up — a destroyer, assorted lifeboats, etc.

The ruling council has no sooner decided that rescuing folks close enough by to have sent a distress signal is the humane thing to do when an earthquake causes the bunker complex to collapse.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me” aside, the Garritys vow to fight on even if the “Slowly dying is still DYING” faction of the bunker has a point.

Rumors of an Edenic “promised land” bursting with new life, breathable air and drinkable water in the comet’s gigantic crater make that the family’s next quest.

Butler is more stoic than action-heroic here, and no additions to the cast have enough screen time to make more than a modest impression.

There’s little emotion to anything that comes at them and us here as the screenwriters cut and paste one disaster movie cliche after another on the screen and the effects crew does their damnedest to at least make it all look real. Butler’s go-to director Waugh returns from the first “Greenland,” the “Has Fallen” films and “Kandahar,” and appears to have rushed through this shoot to get the picture away from the actors and into the hands of the effects folks ASAP. Big mistake.

The lone joke from an epoch when humor is dead is how quickly humanity forgets the difference between “classical rock” and yacht rock.

What’s left is “2012/Day After Tomorrow” disastrous and impressively so, with British and Icelandic locations turned into a world without civilization. Human interactions, human conflict (dog eat dog Darwinism), human intellect and human resolve never made it into the finished film.

If I want something this disastrous and heartless centered around Greenland, I’ll log onto the news feed at Bluesky.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Amber Rose Rivah, Roman Griffin Davis and Sophie Thompson.

Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, scripted by Mitch LaFortune and Chris Sparling, based on characters created by Chris Sparling. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:38

Wonder if they take refugees fleeing Nazis?

“Band on the Run” is a sweet little nothing of a roadtrip comedy where the “nothing” overwhelms the “sweet.”

It has its moments. Just not that many.

Writer-director Jeff Hupp set this tale at the end of the golden age of “indie,” when a band could dream of wrangling an invite to Austin, Texas and the chance to play for an audience that might deliver the prize that could change their fates and lives forever — a record deal.

Back in 1999, before it outgrew its original appeal, the South by Southwest Festival could deliver on those dreams.

Jesse (Matthew Perl) is such a dreamer. A downtrodden low-level functionary at a Detroit ad agency, Jesse’s watching his parents’ marriage come apart as his disabled, wheelchair bound dad (Larry Bagby) is half way to just giving up.

Jesse and his two Hot Freaks bandmates (Dylan Randazzo and Daniel Blair) fear they’ll “NEVER get out of here” if they don’t get that “South By” invite.

“Every band that matters will be there!”

That includes their nemesis, Bull Roar, a “gimmicky” two-piece hipster rock ensemble whose douche bro lead singer (Landon Tavernier) likes to drop snatches of Spanglish into his speech and who plays the “Do I know you?” card every chance he gets.

Both bands get invitations, with only one invited to “headline.” Both will drive South/Southwest to the festival in vans — one in a rented beater with a grump in a wheelchair onboard, the other in a lot more style, with their logo on it and everything.

Let the road trip hijinks begin.

There are mishaps, misadventures, moments of truth with Dad and pranks along the way — nothing that you’d figure was worthy of “going viral,” but that’s what the script ordains.

There’s barely a laugh in it, and even the bawdy ones provided by a stolen “magic” mike stand (the microphone spins turning vocals into a DIY special effect) and a hooker isn’t much.

The performances never quite lapse into “colorless,” but never rise above that, either.

With no comic edge and no music rights to anything anybody would care to hear twice, the “sweet” payoffs feel like cheats that nobody involved has earned.

Like the bands and indie films booked for South By, “Band on the Run” banks on potential. But it never lives up to it.

Rating: 16+, profanity, vulgarity

Cast: Matthew Perl, Larry Bagby, Landon Tavernier, Jessie Pettit, Dylan Randazzo, Jake Eberle and Daniel Blair.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeff Hupp, co-directed by Brian Cusac and Merritt Fritchie. A Freestyle release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:28

France’s great re-invention of cinema, pioneered by the “New Wave” of French filmmakers who started writing and directing in the 1950s, is charmingly remembered in Richard Linklater’s affectionate homage “Nouvelle Vague.”

The director of “Boyhood” and more tellingly “Me and Orson Welles” takes us back to the age of Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais, movie makers who “broke the rules” of filmmaking, cemented the power of the director as “auteur” (author) of a film and brought new life to the cinema amid the rising tide of television.

The focus is on the New Wave’s “bad boy,” Jean-Luc Godard, like many of his contemporaries, a musing, passionate critic from the influencial magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Others from there had made movies because, as Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) quips — quoting Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) in “Nouvelle Vague” — “The best way to critique a film is to make one!”

But when Godard made “Breathless,” the cinematic world was rattled. All these “rules” for how you tell a story on film are made to be broken.

“Nouvelle Vague” follows Godard, opinionating, preaching, hustling and smoking-smoking-smoking his way to making his feature film debut.

“All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun,” he preaches (in French with subtitles) behind his omnipresent — day or night, indoors or out — sunglasses. And by God he’s going to prove it.

He’ll need a producer (Bruno Dreyfürst) gullible enough to give him the pittance it’ll take to make his movie. He’ll need a combat-tested cameraman (Matthieu Penchinat) who can shoot, in black and white and on the fly with sound to be added later. He’ll need a script supervisor (Pauline Belle) to keep the story straight and ensure the shots match up in continuity terms when the film is edited, even though he is determined not to have a script, but a mere “outline.”

And for any of those elements to fall into place, he’ll need “the girl.” Luckily, the American starlet of “Saint Joan” and “Bonjour Tritesse” is in France with her new French husband
François (Paolo Luka-Noé). The arrogant, cool poseur Godard crashes a celebrity party, angles up to Seberg and before you know it, he’s got his movie.

It was the great coup of Godard’s career, landing an international star who woud ensure his movie got made and seen the world over. And the coup of Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” came from casting Zoey Deutch (“Set It Up,” “Not Okay,” “Buffaloed”) as Seberg.

This isn’t the brooding, paranoid (with reason) rebel Seberg of the Kristen Stewart bio-pic. Deutch and the screenwriters give us a starlet who quickly picked up on Hollywood’s heirarchy and the boundaries and barriers she’d face, who just as quickly clues in on Godard as something of a fraud.

But she’ll do the film “if the big bad wolves (of Hollywood) will let me.” Just watch yourself, Monsieur Godard. His amateur theatrics and unprofessionalism — no script, no sound-on-film (all the dialgue etc. will be added in post-production) — No “direction” other than “No performance!” — short shooting days because “I’ve run out of ideas” and the like bring out her blunt threat, delivered in French.

I just might quit your film,” you silly sunglassed French wannabe.

Deutch makes Seberg savvy, sassy and fun. Her Seberg clicks with her acting novice “boxer” co-star, screen newcomer and Godard pal Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin). “Nouvelle Vague” takes off when she shows up and slows down every time she and Dullin aren’t in a scene.

I’d call the title “Relentless” truth in advertising, althought “Pitiless,” “Endless” and “Senseless” work just as well.

This new thriller from the sarcastically surnamed writer-director Tom Botchii (real name Tom Botchii Skowronski of “Artik” fame) begins in uninteresting mystery, strains to become a revenge thriller “about something” and never gets out of its own way.

So bloody that everything else — logic, reason, rationale and “Who do we root for?” quandary is throughly botched — its 93 minutes pass by like bleeding out from screwdriver puncture wounds — excruciatingly.

But hey, they shot it in Lewiston, Idaho, so good on them for not filming overfilmed Greater LA, even if the locations are as generically North American as one could imagine.

Career bit player and Lewiston native Jeffrey Decker stars as a homeless man we meet in his car, bearded, shivering and listening over and over again to a voice mail from his significant other.

He has no enthusiasm for the sign-spinning work he does to feed himself and gas up his ’80s Chevy. But if woman, man or child among us ever relishes anything as much as this character loves his cigarettes — long, theatrical, stair-at-the-stars drags of ecstacy — we can count ourselves blessed.

There’s this Asian techie (Shuhei Kinoshita) pounding away at his laptop, doing something we assume is sketchy just by the “ACCESS DENIED” screens he keeps bumping into and the frantic calls he takes suggesting urgency of some sort or other.

That man-bunned stranger, seen in smoky silhoutte through the opaque window on his door, ringing the bell of his designer McMansion makes him wary. And not just because the guy’s smoking and seems to be making up his “How we can help cut your energy bill” pitch on the fly.

Next thing our techie knows, shotgun blasts are knocking out the lock (Not the, uh GLASS) and a crazed, dirty beardo homeless guy has stormed in, firing away at him as he flees and cries “STOP! Why are you doing this?”

Jun, as the credits name him, fights for his PC and his life. He wins one and loses the other. But tracking his laptop and homeless thug “Teddy” with his phone turns out to be a mistake.

He’s caught, beaten and bloodied some more. And that’s how Jun learns the beef this crazed, wronged man has with him — identity theft, financial fraud, etc.

Threats and torture over access to that laptop ensue, along with one man listing the wrongs he’s been done as he puts his hostage through all this.

Wait’ll you get a load of what the writer-director thinks is the card our hostage would play.

The dialogue isn’t much, and the logic — fleeing a fight you’ve just won with a killer rather than finishing him off or calling the cops, etc. — doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.

The set-piece fights, which involve Kinoshita screaming and charging his tormentor and the tormentor played by Decker stalking him with wounded, bloody-minded resolve are visceral enough to come off. Decker and Kinoshita are better than the screenplay.

A throw-down at a gas-station climaxes with a brutal brawl on the hood of a bystander’s car going through an automatic car wash. Amusingly, the car-wash owners feel the need to do an Idaho do-si-do video (“Roggers (sic) Car Wash”) that plays in front of the car being washed and behind all the mayhem the antagonists and the bystander/car owner go through. Not bad.

The rest? Not good.

Perhaps the good folks at Rogers Motors and Car Wash read the script and opted to get their name misspelled. Smart move.

Rating: R, graphic violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Jeffrey Decker, Shuhei Kinoshita

Credits:Scripted and directed by Tom Botchii.. A Saban Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:34