Movie Nation

Yeah, I’m late getting to this. And maybe it’s the memory of “Thanksgiving” that has me pondering the state of this particular horror project.

Anybody get “This is another ‘fake’ trailer from ‘Grindhouse'” vibe from this one?

Goldie and Kurt’s kid Wyatt is among the stars. and I guess Amélie Hoeferle is the prime “victim” we’re seeing in the trailer.

Think they can get an 84 minute movie out of this? How about (per IMDb) a 116 minute one?

It’s the director’s feature filmmaking debut. So…

“Tropic” is tale of brotherly bonds sorely tested by an “accident,” set against their schooling for a competition to see who is fittest to be among France’s long-mission space colonists.

The latest by director and co-writer Edouard Salier (“Cabeza Madre”) is an incomplete allegory told in the fashion of the late period French New Wave. Think “Last Year in Marienbad” meets “THX-1138” — obscurant, with detours, puzzling character digressions, needless “chapter” headings and a Big Idea that maybe isn’t as big as everyone thought going in.

Tristan and Làzaro are twins and also friendly rivals in their Euro Space Camp/University, prepping to be among the elite chosen for the decades-long “Eternity” missions France and Europe have planned to compete with China, Russia and the US in space colonization.

They undergo a rigorous education in science and philosophy. The physical tests are straight out of “The Right Stuff” era NASA — including epic who-can-hold-his/her-breath-the-longest trials in the school pool.

“They’ll pick us both,” the cocky, outgoing Tristan (Louis Peres) declares (n French with English subtitles). Smart but bullied Làzaro (Pablo Cobo) isn’t as sure.

When their cruelest challenge faces them, it won’t come from the thuggish rival Louis (Marvin Dubart). A midnight swim at an off-campus lake coincides with some sort of meteor/space junk “event” that crashes in the water. Tristan, testing his shocking skills at holding his breath, is injured physically — boil-like scars and tumors — and cognitively. He’s “not the same” as before.

Their crushed Spanish single mom (Marta Nieto) endures andTristan moves from the space academy to the “special needs” school next door. Làzaro must soldier on. But even out of his brother’s shadow and missing his gravitational pull, he struggles.

Everything in a movie is invented for the story and supposedly included for a reason. But a lot of what Salier contrives for this five act drama sits on the fence between puzzling and pointless.

Documentary filmmaker Tylor Norwood embedded himself with California firefighters battling the million acre “Dixie Fire” of 2021 for “Fireline,” a new documentary about the dangerous work and ever-worsening fire situation in California and around the world in a warming, drying climate.

Norwood got access to the leaders in “Fire Incident” HQ for a top-down look at the “strategy,” “resource allocation” and other considerations political appointees face when battling a parade of calamitous wildfires every “fire season.”

“It’s a chessboard of resources and priorities,” with decision makers acting as generals, running the battle from behind the lines, says California Office of Emergency Services chief Mark Ghilarducci.”

And Norwood — the Robin Williams doc “Robin’s Wish” was his — got in the trucks and out on the lines with the young men and women rolling up to Janesville, Susanville and environs, trying to protect lives and property from “a 200 foot wall of flame” bearing down on them as they deployed.

Some 6,000 fire fighters were summoned to battle this blaze, “adrenalin junky” young folks who risk their necks in deadly, wearying work that is as intensely dangerous as any job in the world.

The firefighters talk about their fatigue, the homes they have to go back to, the “thousand hours of overtime” one says he collected that year because of the worsening fire climate.

Their work on the line is all about “doing the right thing in the right place at the right time for the right reasons,” one of their chiefs exhorts them.

The units speak in a mix of military lingo mixed with fire jargon all their own. The “battle” is a game of showing up, make sure people have evacuated, prepping the ground and “reading” the fire — its clouds, its shifts in direction and intensity.

And as they wait “for the fire to come to us,” they weight “risk vs. gain” scenarios, all the ways this coming fight could turn out. Their priorities? Protect lives, protect property and when it comes down to it, protect firefighters, because a house is “just a house,” and not worth anybody dying for.

The film is a little repetitive, and for all the “embedded” access Norwood was granted, striking shots of firefighters silhouetted against an orange inferno was the main payoff.

We don’t gain many insights about where to make your stand, how to prep a defensive line (cutting dead trees) or how to attack the blaze once it’s there, tracking your limited water as you drain the tanks on your truck hosing down this or that spot.

Neither the top-down nor bottom-up points of view give us a taste of the “strategy” everyone seen here — a few leaders at the top, three firefighters in the line — talks about so much.

Like many a documentary on such a subject, what we’re treated to is something lacking in drama and characters and suspense and a sense of the stakes. A victim is briefly chatted up here, a home is defended there, with a lot of tedious but necessary routine eating up time on the line awaiting the blaze.

“Fireline” is worthwhile mainly as the background research for a more coherent, tense and nuts and bolts (fictional) feature film that recreates much of what we see here in more easily grasped recreations and better organized storytelling.

Rating: unrated, profanity, graphic descriptions of burns

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tylor Norwood. A Quotable Pictures release.

Running time: 1:21

“Frybread Face and Me” is a sweet, downbeat and somewhat melancholy coming-of-age tale about a Navajo “city Indian” sent to spend the summer of 1990 in the reservation where his mother grew up.

Writer-director Billy Luther, who is of Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo heritage, tells us a not-wholly-autobiographical story of broken families, heritage, family history and gender identity on a tiny sheep ranch near Pinon, Arizona.

Benny (Keir Tallman) is 11, and uneasily settled in San Diego with parents whose marriage is on shaky ground. He’s saving up to see his favorite band that summer, and expecting Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac to rock his world.

But wayward dad and unhappy mom bus him to her aged mother’s (Sarah Natani) ranch as they sort out their coming divorce.

Not that Benny knows this. He’s just trapped in a place he has no experience of, where he doesn’t speak Grandma’s language. A kid who likes Fleetwood Mac and playing with “action figures” is sure to be bullied by his bitter, broke sheepherding uncle (Martin Senmeier).

“You a cowboy or a cowgirl?”

Uncle Marvin won’t have the kid wearing his mom’s cowboy hat, or doing anything else “cowboy” until he proves himself. We get the feeling that’s not going to happen.

Help might have come from slacker/jewelry seller Aunt Lucy (Kahara Hodges), his mom’s free spirit sister. But she’s into her own thing. It takes the arrival of another dropped-off-for-the-summer cousin for Benny to meet his tour guide through this alien world.

She is roughly the same age, a big girl named “Dawn” but nicknamed “Frybread Face” pretty much for good. She speaks Navajo and has nothing but contempt for this “city Indian” cousin from San Diego.

“Have you met Shamu?”

Over the course of the summer, the family will be tested, granny will weave woolen rugs and dispense wisdom Benny can’t understand and Benny will plot his escape in lieu of developing a taste for mutton — sheep’s head included.

But the cousins will bond, playing dress up, dancing in makeup, skirts and scarves just like Stevie Nicks, and watching and rewatching the only video in their generator-powered single-wide, the sci-fi epic “Starman,” whose climax is set in nearby Meteor Crater.

Luther doesn’t hit the story’s discovering-one’s-sexuality elements hard, and serves up little dollops of tribal wisdom that play as weary bromides. Benny should be hunting for “hózhǫ́,” a life that will make him happy and content.

“If you go too far on the white man’s road, you lose your way.”

“Frybread and Me” succeeds by immersing us in this myopic world of laborious poverty. Marvin is resigned to being the “last in the bloodline” sheep farmer in the family, with hardscrabble “Indian Rodeo” fame a fleeting dream. Wandering fathers, beater trucks and barely-running cars with no windshields and life offering you little more than subsistence stares the viewer in the face.

The kids must figure out their own worth and consider what paths their futures hold, which parts of their traditions they will embrace and which they will flee. Their dysfunctional families must reckon with them and their choices.

And our filmmaker/narrator — Luther made “Miss Navajo,” and comes from a documentary background — will observe it all from the warm distance of memory. He’s given us a film that lets us assume that however close to his own story it is, we can be sure the filmmaker has achieved something like “hózhǫ” about his place within this world and how life worked out.

Rating: unrated, gay slur

Cast: Keir Tallman, Charley Hogan, Martin Sensmeier, Kahara Hodges and Sarah H. Natani.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Billy Luther. An Array release.

Running time: 1:23

Silly me, I kept thinking about David Fincher’s dry and somewhat overpraised hitman film “The Killer” during sequences of the French comic thriller “Nouveaux riches,” retitled “All-Time High” and dubbed — if you prefer — for English speaking consumption.

The biggest point of praise in “The Killer,” adapted from a French comic book, is an epic fight-to-the-death between our hired assassin and a hulking “Florida Man.”

You like fights? “All-Time High” has a couple of all-time winners, bone-snapping brawls shot in long, beautifully-choreographed takes. But here, no matter how much blood is spilled and debilitating injuries or even death meted out, it’s mostly played for laughs.

Seriously, “John Wick” stuntman and stuntman/fight-choreographer (here) Amedéo Cazzella, take a bow. The gambling club, gymnasium, apartment and inside-a-kidnapping-van fights here are epic in their own right, damned funny and help make this one of the most entertaining films on Netflix.

Nassim Lyes of “Mayhem!” stars as Youssef, a hunky street hustler with a manic patter that wears out most everyone he encounters. He’s unfiltered, and physically fit enough to get away with being boorish to even a celebrity boxer in a nightclub. Because Algerian-born Youssef used to box back in Belgium.

He lies like he breathes — constantly, rapid-fire patter about this Hermes handbag scheme or that Birkin hustle. He crosses lines and ignores “Where’s your dignity?” insults, because he has none.

Youssef is wearing out his rich live-in girlfriend Yael (Yovel Lewkowski), so much so that all it takes is the wrong joke at her mother’s birthday dinner to sink that. Sure, he’s convinced her his real name is Mikael and that he works for Hermes. But every now and then, “unfiltered” and gauche gets him in trouble

“All you talk about is money,” Yael’s mother gripes to her crypto-crazed son and her second husband (Guillaume Canet). “What will Mikael think of us?”

“That you’re Jews?” he offers. Dude, read the room. And you know, global anti-Semitism coverage.

That’s just who this guy is, a big mouth who can’t get into a poker club without creating a scene. Losing his shirt to a woman he doesn’t find attractive, whom he insults about her “forehead” and “buckteeth” puts him in a mood.

Little does he know that when Yael makes the right decision and dumps him, this equally uncouth “ugly” woman who hustled him at poker will be his nightclub hookup.

Stephanie (French nepo baby Zoé Marchal, who was in “Overdose” with Lyes) is boorish, tomboyish and unconcerned with appearances, including her attire. She “pees with the bathroom door open,” and having an Olympic wrestling (and cheating at it) background is the perfect match for the cheating ex-boxer Youssef.

Not that he’d see that. Not right away. Not that he’d admit it. Hell, he won’t even tell her his real name.

“All-Time High” is about all the trouble that swirls in around them when they start their affair — his financial troubles, lying and “loser” status, her issues with the switchblade-wielding thug Papillion (“Butterfly,” played by Adrien Essamir) who owned that small but high-end gambling club and who has goons at his beck and call.

Some people are going to want to hurt one or both of them, maybe at the same time.

Director and co-writer Julien Hollande — Lyes co-wrote the script — serves up a lively underworld of hustlers and and outcasts, including a pal who rents crummy “kit” cars that look like Ferraris and GT-40s, and drive like worn-out Toyotas. Hollande decided to shoot the over-the-top fights in long takes, a daring choice as when you film in a gym, there are mirrors everywhere. He keeps the tone light, which the joke-littered script ensures with laugh-out loud one-liners and more than a few sight gags.

“I’m such a f—–g moron,” Yael complains at discovering the extent of Youssef’s lies.

“Honey, DON’T say that! You went to fashion school!”

Lyes is hilarious in a part that calls for Vince Vaughn/”Swingers” fast patter, with the added bonus of being an actor who can handle fight choreography with ease.

Marchal gets even bigger laughs simply by being a woman whose looks are insulted and whose liberty and life are physically threatened repeatedly, only for her to unleash headlocks, Japanese arm drags and back body drops (Yeah, I looked them up.) to the viewer’s unexpected delight.

The stunts in this picture are both funny and realistic enough to impress, no mean feat.

Essamir makes a vile villain, with Youssef Ramal standing out as the cousin-henchman who finds that getting his ass kicked is starting to hurt his feelings, but who has limits — unlike cousin “Papillon.”

“Why you keep putting holes in people? You think they’re cheese, or something?”

It’s an action comedy, so for all the violence and actual bones-breaking the film shows us, it’s never as serious as all that and coincidences and classic bits of “that awning/sofa/dumpster just happened to be there” to break this or that death-or-paralyzed fall intervene.

And as this or that unlikely twist in the story or each wild-and-wooly fight makes your eyes roll, there’s always Lyes and Marchal and their great two-fisted, old school feminist chemistry to ensure that “All-Time High” never loses its buzz.

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

Cast: Nassim Lyes, Zoé Marchal, Adrien Essamir and Youssef Ramal

Credits: Directed by Julien Hollande, scripted by Julien Hollande and Nassim Lyes. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

The first thing that leaps out at you from “Mercy Road” is the loud, insistent string-heavy “thriller” music, a score that’s reminiscent of “Psycho” in its aural urgency. It’s not an over-the-top miscalculation, as it was scored by its director and co-writer, John Curran.

The film is a claustrophic thriller that’s basically one paranoid and increasingly frantic father dashing hither and yon in rural Australia, trying to escape “consequences” for something he’s done, desperate to “save” his daughter, who’s gone missing in the aftermath of a crime.

With a camera right in oil field welder Tom’s sweaty, bug-eyed, gasping for breath face, the music and pace and pitch of Luke Bracey’s performance is all of a piece. “Mercy Road” is meant to wrong-foot us, rattle us and make us nevous-to-the-point-of-panic, just like Tom.

More often than not, that works in this, the latest film from the director of “Painted Veil,” “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Chappaquidick.”

We meet Tom in the aftermath of something, dodging calls from his oil patch job, his ex-wife Terri (Alex Malone) and a couple of strangers.

Something’s happened, and Tom, prone to frantic impulses, is running from it. The “strangers” hint at it, and Tom gives away some of the details.

His ex remarried. Her “insurance” business husband has caused some trouble. There’s a “picture.”

Now 12 year-old Ruby (Martha Kate Morgan) is missing, a hostage negotiator is on the phone as there is someone or some corpse in Tom’s back seat, and the mysterious stranger (Toby Jones at his most sinister) is ringing in and trying to take control, as there was a “negotiation” Tom interrupted with his rash act.

“I’m a mediator of sorts,” the stranger purrs. “I deal only in action and consequences.“

Wait. What?

Tom, given a manic, sometimes over-the-the-top screaming edge by Bracey (“Hacksaw Ridge,” “Point Break,” TV’s “Little Fires Everywhere”), sets the tone here. His state of mind is the one we’re struggling to understand, his “crime” or attempt at redemption act has set him off, and no “professional calm” as expressed by a negotiator or a “mediator” is going to cool him off.

He’s given tasks, help in dodging the pursuiing police (heard in sirens, seen in the reflection off flashing lights) and forced to reckon with what’s happened and his role in it, all as he takes calls and makes calls and drives drives drives in an effort to “save” his pre-teen girl in this real-time thriller.

There are hackneyed conventions in the script, but most are given at least a taste of a twist — Ruby’s “boyfriend” is “older” (13) and thus wiser in the ways of the world. He frets that he might be in trouble, “dating” a 12 year-old. But he tries to help.

“I’ve listened to a lot of ‘true crime’ podcasts!”

Jones’ persistent, droning menace makes us and Tom fear for Ruby’s life.

“In my experience, no daughter was ever ‘saved’ by a father’s rage.”

The somewhat cryptic (easy to figure out) ending is seriously deflating, rather spoiling some of what’s come before.

But cinematographer Ross Giardina’s camera is so tight on Bracey (fisheye lenses in a couple of shots/scenes) that it’s unnerving.

Bracey’s presence has hints of Red Bull consumption between takes — antic and loud. And Curran’s in our-ears-and-in-our-face score ratchets up the manufactured tension more than enough to make this trip down “Mercy Road” something of a panic.

Rating: unrated, suggested violence, sex crime, profanity

Cast: Luke Bracey, Alex Malone, Martha Kate Morgan and Toby Jones.

Credits: Directed by John Curran, scripted by John Curran, Jesse Heffring and Christopher Lee Pelletier.. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:2

“Teddy’s Christmas” is a holiday fantasy for children that’s long on charm and light — to the point of “slight” — in entertainment value.

It’s a Norwegian film (“Teddybjørnens jul”) dubbed for the English-speaking market, and now featuring the voice of Shazam himself, Zachary Levi, as a teddy bear determined to see and experience the world, and thus deadset on going home with somebody “loaded.”

But a little girl who sees and hears magical things figures out he’s special and could foil his sugar daddy search.

“This fellow here was sewn for something much bigger and much greater” than going home with a child.

Mariann (Marte Klerck-Nilssen) keeps getting into trouble for imagining trolls and talking snowmen in her corner of Norway. But when she takes a spin at a carny’s “Wheel of Fate” game, she can’t be sure what she’s seeing. She hit the lucky number. Did that rascally classist and golddigging Teddy change the number?

Maybe his pals, the spinning top and toy pig saw him pull that stunt.

As she scrambles to correct this Teddy altering of fate, the bear goes off to a “rich” guy, which is how he finds himself stuck in a chilly barn with a singing, dancing and questioning hedgehog Bolla (Marianne Graffam) who pauses between attempts to get him to join her in a dancing toys production number to check his grooming?

“So soft and fluffy! Do you use conditioner?”

There’s very little here that will hold the attention of anyone older than six. Lots of snow, a little taste of Norway and its holiday traditions. Rice pudding with dinner, but which lucky family member will get “the almond” in their serving?

Santa is discussed, in a childish existential sense (“Is he real?”) and family problems are addressed in comforting, behavior-correcting ways.

But Levi tones down his shtick for this vocal performance (he’s done a lot of voice work in “Tangled,” “Robot Chicken,” “Family Guy,” etc) and thus denies us anything clever or cute to hang onto.

The CGI talking toys are well-done. There’s a little dancing and a bit of ziplining for your tiny tot’s amusement.

But slim pickings at the “family” holiday box office or not, “Teddy’s Christmas” isn’t really the answer to the quality holiday film shortage this season.

Rating: G

Cast: Marte Klerck-Nilssen, Vegard Strand Eide, Mariann Hole, Jan Gunnar Røise and the voices of Marianne Graffam and Zachary Levi.

Credits: Directed by Andrea Eckerbom, scripted by Lars Gudmestad and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:17

Novelists and screenwriters talk of the same problem, facing ethnic expectations that the white entertainment infrastructure lays on them to “write Black” characters who are cultural stereotypes and who “sound Black” to white ears.

“Look at what they publish. Loon at what they expect us to write!”

So, a dramedy with Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae that gives that racial pigeonholing a smack? No wonder this was the darling of the Toronto Film Fest.

It opens soon, very soon, a legitimate awards contender.

Based on a hit novel, coming to Netflix Jan 11.

It takes a few minutes to settle in and figure out just what the hell is going on in “Dark Journey,” a twisty and handsomely-mounted romantic thriller of the espionage variety produced on the eve of World War II.

The somewhat melodramatic World War I story is framed within a stop-and-search episode involving a Dutch coastal freighter/passenger ship and a suspiously-knowing German U-Boat crew. They’re looking for Allied spies living under cover in Sweden, one spy in particular. It’s 1918, and the German officer running the show wants to see more than just the lady’s passport.

As the tale flips back and forth, filling us in on how we got here, we see the intrigues, the wartime “neutral” trips to Paris, the cleverly-disguised maps and secret plans woven into the fabrics of French high fashion, the laborious means of decoding that and signaling, via semaphore, to offshore German agents just what the pretty “Swiss” agent has found out about French war plans.

The German aristocrat, new to Stockholm, appears to be disgraced, a “traitor to the Fatherland” but obviously on some playboy mission to Sweden to figure out the loyalties of Germany’s most beautiful agent.

Can Baron Karl Von Marwitz sell his womanizing reputation to such a degree that he will seem smitten with the fair Madeleine Goddard, dress-seller to the well-dressed and double agent extraordinaire? He’ll have to find a lot of excuses to visit Madeleine’s shop, buying dresses for his increasingly suspicious paramour (Joan Gardner).

“It used to be all girls with no clothes,” his valet gripes. “Now, it’s all clothes and no girls. Pity.”

Vivien Leigh — born Vivian Hartly in British India — was all of 24, a mercurial beauty and heartbreaker at the beginning of her big-screen career. “Gone With the Wind” wasn’t yet on her horizon. Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was 44, a screen legend immortalized in the silent classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” who’d emigrated to Britain as the Nazis came to power. He’d already made Germanic villains a specialty, and World War II would see Hollywood call for him to play a role in a “talkies” classic that rivals “Gone with the Wind” as among the most beloved films of all time — “Casablanca.”

World War I veteran Victor Saville, who’d go on to direct “Green Dolphin Street” and a late-career Errol Flynn epic “Kim,” and his British team conjure up intrigues in tony clubs and boutiques of Stockholm and Paris, in German and British intelligence headquarters, give us a glimpse of the French battlefield and settle into a confrontation on the Baltic Sea, all filmed in and around the soundstages of Buckinghamshire, UK.

Soundstaginess notwithstanding, this British production is damned impressive all around, even as we ponder the anachronistic fashions, jazzier-than-it-should-be 1918 nightclub and the peculiar pairing of Leigh with Veidt, who was twenty years her senior.

“So our pretty little dressmaker is a spy! What will people say, an officer of the Kaiser like me and a woman like you, Madeline?”

“They’ll say, the poor girl couldn’t help herself!”

The romance never really clicks for me, but it’s easy to see why this pairing was packaged. Leigh was the very embodiment of a spirited “slip of a girl,” as Madeleine is described here. And British cinema was just a couple of years past that “Women fight for Conrad Veidt” marketing campaign for the expat with the Teutonic accent and a flair for wearing monocles.

Leigh is good at suggesting the fear that’s creeping into Madeleine’s thinking as, even though we never see those who procure the “intelligence” for her elaborate double-agent schemes, we hear of their fates.

There’s a wit, sophistication and edge to this 1937 production that’s largely missing from the Hollywood fare of the early Production Code era. Even the storytelling style, that present-day sea confrontation framework, the way the narrative bounces back and forth from that, the murky ethics of it all and the daring idea of whipping up a love story involving a German spy and an Anglo-French one as the world teetered towards another world war, seems “out there” for its age.

Leigh is radiant and subtle, and Veidt suggests a softening of his Fatherland Uber Alles soldier in his performance that makes this credulous tale credible. And the script, by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis, has all this inventive spycraft — dress pattern maps, semaphore communications to an anchored sailing yacht with a wireless set for signaling Berlin — that adds to the film’s air of knowing sophistication.

Hard to follow or not, strained “relationship” to sell and all, “Dark Journey” is a still a classic whose appeal reaches beyond the cult of “Vivien Leigh completists,” an espionage thriller that might have benefited from The Hitchcock Touch but manages to have its moments even without the Master of Suspense’s input.

Rating: approved

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Conrad Veidt, Joan Gardner, Anthony Bushell, Robert Newton, Philip Ray and Henry Oscar.

Credits: Directed by Victor Saville, scripted by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis. A London Films production, on Roku, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:17