Movie Nation

Adam Sandler voices an aged lizard who wants to escape to the Everglades but finds himself dispensing life advice to fifth graders in the classroom where he’s one of the resident pet reptiles in “Leo,” an animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

The life lessons “Call me Leo (not Leonardo), that’s less ‘Ninja Turtley” passes on — often in song — include “You’re not that great” and “Don’t cry, crying’s for weaklings,” which is what passes for “against the grain” parenting these days.

A missing lesson in this film packed with alumni of “Saturday Night Live” and Sandler offspring is that success is about being born to or friends with somebody famous, which is a lot more important than whatever else you learn in fifth grade.

But since one of Sandler’s kids is the stand-out voice performer here, we won’t dwell on the cronyism/nepotism/tribalism that has informed much of career, outside of the odd break from character.

This Netflix production follows Leo and his pal/fifth grade “pet” partner Squirtle the Turtle (Bill Burr) after Leo hears a parent mention the life expectancy of his sort of lizard — 75 years.

Leo’s been in Fort Myers Elementary for 74 years and counting, and he’s facing his mortality, the fact that he never got to see the Everglades and the fact that despite decades in the classroom, he never learned Fort Myers is in Southwest Fla, on the coast, not “Central Florida,” as he says.

He blinks slowly and walks slowly and lives for the bugs fed to him or that cross his tongue’s kill radius in the terrarium he calls home. But now, as a no-nonsense, computer-eschewing, dream-killing “substitute” (Cecily Strong) teacher takes over from the pregnant and popular Mrs. Salinas (Allison Strong), Leo feels his time running out.

The teacher’s determination to teach these kids “discipline” and “responsibility” by getting one to take a classroom animal home each weekend gives Leo his chance. He’ll make a break for it. Then that first self-absorbed chatterbox (Sadie Sandler, on the money) takes him home, accidentally discovers he can talk, and he’s handing out life advice.

Maybe stop talking so much, “ask a question” in conversation and show an interest in somebody else for one. You know, “listen.”

Other kids face “common sense” advice about vanity, insecurity about their looks (being as hairy as dad), their divorcing parents, their practice of bullying, which isn’t making them popular, all sorts of things kids today face.

Even the eyebrow-raising pearls of wisdom are pretty tame. Alas, so are the one-liners, the comic situations and complications and the perils of the “real” Everglades.

The film, with three credited directors and three credited screenwriters, begins with promise as Leo and Squirtle instantly size-up kids’ as “types” on the first day of school — “parents going through divorce,” “first child” in a family (spoiled), born bully, born mean girl, “cheese doodle kid” and the like.

But those insights turn out to be the comic highlights of the picture, with “Mother of Godzilla!” par for the course among the punchlines, and the animation only occasionally crossing the line from static to slapshticky.

Sandler fans will find more to cling to here than I did, as I long ago lost all patience for his lazy brand of “moron” comedy packed with cronies and relatives. Sandler trying on a funny voice that isn’t funny, and then singing in it isn’t exactly “new.” What’s novel about it is how he’s lost the knack for inventing amusing, offbeat characters and funny things for them to say (he co-wrote the script) or sing.

Rating: PG, innuendo, bits of “rude humor”

Cast: The voices of Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, Cecily Strong, Allison Strong, Jason Alexander, assorted Sandler children and that Schneider fellow.

Credits: Directed by Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel and David Wachtenheim, scripted by Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler and Paul Sado. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Medical experiments that are revealed just as World War II is ending, with a tortured humans and “creatures” as their results.

You could call this a series, seeing as how this 1945 Korean Dec. 22 and Jan. 5.

Let’s label it a movie in two parts. It looks intriguing, and looks to be another way of Korea reminding the world what the Japanese did to the people there.

This 2024 series looks like yet another variation on a “galaxy far away” theme, sort of a “Guardians” and “Firefly” riff — without laughs.

Jude Law leads a cast of…kids?

Too old, too tall, too American, too introverted and mumbly to be a mesmirizing leader of men and commanding presence at court, perhaps your first thoughts on hearing about a new big screen “Napoleon” were “Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte? LOL.”

I know mine were. The new Ridley Scott movie didn’t really disabuse me of that prejudice, either.

As a screen subject, “Napoleon” foiled Stanley Kubrick and sorely challenged anybody else who took a shot at rendering the emperor/conqueror in a big screen epic.

He’s been played by Brando and Rod Steiger, Herbert Lom, Claude Rains, Tom Burke, Daniel Auteuil and Armand Assante among others. Few register.

Ian Holm got two cracks at making Bonaparte an object of fun, as a whimsically grumpy commander who loved people (dwarves) shorter than himself in “Time Bandits” and an even grumpier exile in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Scott’s magnum opus is a collection of red letter dates in Bonaparte’s rise and fall, a couple of brilliantly realized set-piece battles, and the big love story that is a part of the man’s myth.

We see his cold-bloodedness, his cruel calculus and flashes of ego.

But do we learn anything about the man who brought public education, The Napoleonic Code and measurement standardization to Europe, used science to govern, a dictator whose arrival promised to end European nobility and the class structure that benefited from monarchies and winner-take-all economies? Do we glimpse the potential greatness which prompted Beethoven to compose his “Eroica” symphony for the young commoner who promised to bring down the kings?

No. We get instead a bit of a pot-bellied slob, with Phoenix’s costumes somewhat less custom-fit than most of his co-stars. We get the petulance and the ego.

“You think you’re so great because you have BOATS,” he bitches about the British.

What we’re treated to is very much an Englishman’s idea of Napoleon, gauche and common and bloodthirsty and callous, two and a half hours of that. Scott has announced that the film will be over four hours long when it transitions to Apple TV+. Yay.

“See You on Venus” is a swooning, sad-eyed romance in which our young-couple-to-be are buried under tragedy upon tragedy and every dire romantic complication under the sun.

Well, save for one. At least they don’t discover they’re long lost siblings.

The weight of those burdens and the coincidences that throw them together almost smother the film. But as they’re thrown together on an impromptu road trip by VW Microbus camper through Spain, at least we have the grand Spanish sights to draw us in.

Almost. As 18 year-old Mia and the suicidal Kyle she rescued and bullied into taking the trip with her make their way back and forth across Iberia, the film only bothers to identify a couple of locations — Madrid and Segovia. That’s got to be Valencia on the beach. Maybe the Costa Brava?

I recognize Toledo, and that mountainous city could be…Cuenca?

What a silly blunder, basically forgetting to ID the stunning sights that these two California teens visit on a quest that is, frankly, also blundered.

Kyle (composer/actor Alex Aiono of TV’s “Pretty Little Liars”) has been morose, a near recluse for months. There was an accident, and he can’t remember details and can barely summon up the will to go on, much less respond to those soccer scholarship offers or visit his pal Josh (Alex Astort-Fabra), who has been bedridden since the car crash that traumatized them both.

Another teen was killed in the car that Kyle was driving, and “Who can live with that?”

He’s about to take a leap into a canyon not far from Santa Rosa Bay High School, California (they shot the whole film in Spain, so the geography’s off) when foster-teen Mia (Virginia Gardner) spies him through her camera lens and intervenes.

She fakes a fainting spell, forcing Kyle to be chivalrous. She bargains and begs him not to go through with it, which is “none of your business.”

“If you jump, I’M gonna jump…Don’t you get it? You ARE my business?”

He barely has time to sulk home when Mia’s bluffed her way into his house, faked out his parents and summoned him for an “all expenses paid” trip to Spain with her. Yeah, there’s a fake relationship, the works.

Kyle’s folks are convinced. Kyle, on the other hand, has to be blackmailed.

But while we know some of Mia’s story, she has secrets. And more secrets. And secrets beyond the fact that she was besties with the boy who died, who was her planned companion on this epic trip that’s actually a quest to find her birth mother.

If failing to identify the glories of Spain that these two pass through — that looks like Pamplona’s bullfighting ring — isn’t sin enough, this Spanish co-production skims over Mia’s many encounters with the women who might be her mom.

And throwing in one more tragic subtext to all this might play to the teen audience this movie is meant for, but anybody over 21 will have been rolling her or his eyes long before that one last Big Secret is revealed.

Gardner has a girl next door charm that tamps down the “Manic Pixie Dreamgirl” nature of her character. A cute blonde who blackmails you into flying to Spain with her, at her expense? Who could fall for that?

Aiono manages the role’s brooding well enough.

But the artifice of their relationship, the inept and perfunctory ways the “secrets” are discovered and the would-be birth-moms passed-over as if the production was afraid of having to pay somone for saying a line and the inept way of shortchanging the travel nature of the trip — not naming cities, treating Segovia as if its famous Roman aquaduct is the only sight — rob “See You on Venus” of its can’t-miss qualities.

It’s a road trip romance that doesn’t so much charmingly play out as dully pass by through a VW camper’s windows.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Virginia Gardner, Alex Aiono, Rob Estes,
Alex Astort-Fabra and
Marjorie E. Glantz

Credits: Directed by Joaquín Llamas, scripted by
Victoria Vinuesa. VA Voltage release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:34

Honestly, this idea of a woman needing a fake fiance/husband/steady beau and “hiring” somebody to “play” the part has to be an invention of the movies. If there are real businesses that provide “The Boyfriend Experience” without the “gigolo” contract rider, they have to have been inspired by the movies, which have beaten the “profession” to death.

The concept seemed kind of old hat when “The Wedding Date” with Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney came out almost 20 years ago.

So here is “Rent-a-Groom,” a limp updating of the formula that was pushed to its most amusing extreme in “The Proposal,” with every variation from “Green Card” and “Pretty Woman” to “The Perfect Date” having preceded it.

Canadian Kylee Bush plays an account exect at a small publishing house whose star author happens to be her dying granny (Sherri Dahl), the widowed romance novelist who raised her. Grandma Maggie has a health scare over lunch and the only thing that revives her is the gushed-out news that Tracy has a beau and she’s about to get married.

“I’m ENGAGED!”

The curative power of something to look forward to revives Granny. And it upsets the applecart at the office, where news spreads and Tracy’s clingy/stalker bro-boss (Kelsey Flower) refuses to believe it.

Pushy “It isn’t how you die, it’s how you live” Granny insists on meeting the fellow. So Rob Humphries ( Stafford Perry, a veteran of episodic TV) is summoned from “Rent a Groom.” He’s an actor, naturally. Tracy gives him a bland backstory — accountant, etc. And the meeting comes off.

Being an actor, Rob-renamed-“Jones” for this “role improvises a “meet cute” story and other lies on the fly.

When Granny starts high-handedly pushing the couple into engagement parties and the like, he even handles the interrogation from Kylee’s HR disaster boss well enough.

And…well, you know how this goes. Everybody does. There’s little surprising even in the “secret” Rob has and the assorted complications thrown at the couple on their way from transactional to romantic relations.

One bizarre bit of business — Rob does a lot of commercials, but worked on some streaming series and is chased around the park, restuarants and the like by fans who want him to “come back” to the show.

It’s unaffecting, unamusing, with only the script ordaining that the leads have chemistry and only the “tests” they face in the third act differing from a hundred other variations of this weary formula.

Script, direction, wardrobe, there’s nothing that stands out from anybody involved here that merits going on one’s resume.

Rating: unrated, quite chaste.

Cast: Kylee Bush, Stafford Perry, Sherri Dahl, Chantelle Han and Kelsey Flower.

Credits: Directed by Jason Wan Lim, scripted by
Steve Goldsworthy. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:30

A bit of “true” history given a salacious two-part treatment by our friends at Starz (Remember them?).

Moore is Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, who raised/groomed her son George to be ready for a life at court, and in a position to be “Royal Favorite” to the Stuart/Scottish King James, a possibly bisexual monarch who presided over Britain for 22 years after the death of the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I.

Tony Curran plays the randy and gay King James in this production.

Niamh Algar, Simon Russell Beale and Nicola Walker also star.

Coming to Starz next year.

That venerable children’s classic “The Velveteen Rabbit” is the Ur Text of any entertainment meant for children that’s about toys and the love that it takes to make them “real,” even if does have a hint of “Pinocchio” about it.

There would be no “Toy Story” franchise without Margery Williams’ 1922 British novel and its lovely illustrations by William Nicholson.

Adapted for the screen many times, it earns a new treatment for Apple TV+ just in time for the holidays, one that passes on a fresh appreciation for a this always-affecting, quintessentially-English but universally-loved fairytale.

In the 1920s a little boy (Phoenix Laroche) moves with his parents (Samantha Colley and Leonard Buckley) to this big English country house of his grandmother, his Momo (Tilly Vosbrough).

He’s very young and shy, and making friends at his new school proves hard. But Father Christmas leaves him a stuffed plush-toy in a Christmas stocking, a velveteen (fabric) rabbit. They bond quickly, even if the newcomer (voiced by Alex Lawther) is resented by the toy car (Louis Chimimba), the wooden King doll (Paterson Joseph) and the wooden lion (Clive Rowe), his fellow inhabitants of the play room.

They’re sure that, being plush, the rabbit will be “picked to be the bedtime toy.” Which of course he is.

But the Wise Horse (renamed from “Skin Horse” in the book) consoles the rabbit.

“When children love you, they do it with all of their heart,” Wise Horse (Helena Bonham Carter) says. A toy becomes “real” “when a child loves you a long long time.”

As the rabbit has adventures with little William in the garden, “tunneling” under the sheets at bedtime and such, their growing bond will be put to the ultimate test.

The Jennifer Perrott and Rick Thiele film uses stop-motion animation to bring the toys in the playroom — rabbit included — to life. And when William and the rabbit are on their various treasure hunting digs or safaris, the live action footage morphs into traditional looking 2D animation.

This take on the tale offers little that’s new, but the sentimental draw of the story is as strong as ever.

From audio books and films narrated by everyone from Christopher Plummer to Meryl Streep, an award-winning live action film version from 1973 to TV versions of many eras and animation forms, this tale of a beloved stuffed rabbit who dares to love back never fails to touch the heart.

Rating: G

Cast: Phoenix Laroche, Samantha Colley, Leonard Buckley, Tilly Vosbrough, and the voices of Alex Lawther, Lois Chimimba, Paterson Joseph, Nicola Coughlan, Clive Rowe and Helena Bonham Carter

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Perrott and Rick Thiele, scripted by Tom Bidwell, based on the children’s book by Margery Williams. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: :45

How good was Joss Ackland at being bad? Most of us first noticed this British character actor in a couple of late ’80s films in which he stepped into the foreground — “White Mischief” and “Lethal Weapon 2.”

As one was set in Africa and “Lethal Weapon 2” had him slinging a spot-on Afrikaner accent, a lot of people just assumed a South African actor had come up out of nowhere to instantly make a menacing impression.

No, the Londoner had been working in bit roles on the screen since the late ’40s, did a lot of British TV (shows like “The Persuaders” were also exported to the US). But it wasn’t until he turned grey and started landing roles with gravitas and menace that his career blew up.

Ackland had a great run — period pieces (“Lady Jane”), Russians (“The Hunt for Red October, “K-19: The Widowmaker”), Shakespeare and the original “Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy” for TV, Matisse in “Surviving Picasso.”

And he made it to the ripe old age of 95, living long enough to rise from decades of relative obscurity to an in demand Brit villain for other decades. He passed away in the UK over the weekend. ROP, and well done.

Return we now to the subgenre of Gothic terror known as “folk horror,” a tale that is the spiritual kin of “The Wicker Man,” “Midsomer” and “The Blair Witch Project.”

“Lord of Misrule” is set in a quaint English country village — aren’t they all? It’s about the new vicar at the local church, her ten year-old daughter and the alarming rituals attached to the locals’ annual “harvest festival.”

The latest film from William Brent Bell (“Orphan: First Kill”) cleverly goes down that “which myth and which rituals take precedence” alley in a story that pits preacher against Golden Age of Witchcraft paganism in a war for for the souls of a place that threw in its lot with the Dark Side just after Shakespeare died.

Tuppence Middleton stars as Rachel Holland, mere months on the job in Burrow, trying to fit in but leery of this Harvest Festival that’s coming up. No, she won’t be showing up for that in her full church regalia.

But she and husband Henry (Matt Stokoe) will be there. Their daughter Grace (Evie Templeton) has been named “Harvest Angel,” and loves wearing the wings that come with that. But Grace, still young enough to refer to Mum’s clerical garments as a “costume,” is seeing strange cowled figures in animal head costumes. And she’s taken to torturing her bunny.

Uh oh.

The festival raises Rachel’s eyebrows with its scary, Medieval characters and “All is as was” ethos. And then little Grace disappears, lured into the woods by somebody in a costume.

The lax way the coppers (David Langham & Co.) treat this, the chilling warnings of the scary local man (Ralph Ineson, creepy as hell) who seems to know all about what this is, and who blurts out “There’ll be NO help from YOUR Lord” in church send Rachel into a panic and her husband into “Leave it to the police” mode.

The other locals? They seem varying degrees of concerned. But let’s not tie this unpleasantness to the festival.

“Just keepin a bit of local history alive, Mrs. Vicar!”

“Lord of Misrule” is derivative, which gives it that folk horror authenticity. All such films tap into the collective rituals of various cultures before more organized religions drowned out or just drowned (and burned) the “old ways” out.

The film is more creepy than scary, more interested in detailing the incantations and talisman’s of this “protect the harvest/village” faith. But the peril is palpable just often enough that we buy-in.

And Ineson (“The Witch,” “The Creator,” “The Green Knight”) is just the right guy to ponder as villain or frightening friend, just oozing menace, in or out of “costume,” faithfully following or merely explaining a world still ruled by a “Lord of Misrule.”

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Tuppence Middleton, Ralph Ineson, Matt Stokoe, Evie Templeton, Alexi Goodall and David Langham.

Credits: Directed by William Brent Bell, scripted by Tom de Ville. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:44