Movie Nation

“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

Easy to see and hear Owen in this role, an iconic gumshoe transplanted to Europe after making his name in the States.

The folks who made “The Queen’s Gambit” cooked this up, so there’s promise in the premise.

Jan 14 on AMC. Remember them? Used to be American Movie Classics, then the “Mad Men” and finally “Walking Dead TV.”

Decades of “Munsters” reruns may have become Yvonne De Carlo‘s legacy in the public eye. But there was a lot more to her and her career than the comic timing and exotic, too-beautiful-for-this-lot pigeon-hole that television stuffed her into.

They lady was a bonafide triple threat. a singer and dancer who could act, “Salome, Where She Danced” on screen and the defiant lady of a certain age who introduced Sondheim’s defiant “I Am Still Here” (“Follies”) on Broadway.

Historians call her supporting role in “The Ten Commandments” her most celebrated film performance. Others may remember her for providing a sexy romantic rival to Maureen O’Hara in John Wayne’s “McLintock.”

But one of her best showcases has to be “Hotel Sahara,” a rare film venture overseas, a British WWII comedy she filmed in 1951.

De Carlo sings! De Carlo dances with the veils! De Carlo FLIRTS! With Germans, Brits, French and Italians!

The Hotel Sahara is a Libyan hostelry owned and operated by the rakish opportunist Emad (Peter Ustinov), who sees part of his duties as keeping the lady visitors “entertained” — even the married ones.

His fiance, Yasmin (De Carlo) barely puts up with this. But she’s got her mother (Mireille Perrey) with her, and a nice place for both of them to stay. Her fury at this philandering will have to wait.

The darkest day for the sandy oasis hotel comes in June of 1940. Italy joins the war, which causes the guests to flee in a panic and Emad to despair of losing all he has invested in this remote resort in Italian-annexed Libya.

He has no idea. OK, he has SOME idea. He is a native and a hotelier, after all.

First come Italian soldiers and their love of chianti, spaghetti bolognese, and their lust for Yasmin.

Then come the Brits, who at least share their yen for Yasmin with the Italians they’ve chased out. They’re followed by the Germans, officious but also smitten by the singing belly dancer in their midst. And on it goes.

The sound-stage-bound comedy — supposedly there was location shooting of cars and trucks and armored personnel carriers and camels indoors in Egypt — is all about switching the allegiances and decor and dining in the skeleton-staffed hotel for every new arrival.

The lobby photo is changed from Il duce to Der Fuhrer to Churchill, etc. A fresh flag is run up the flagpole. The menu and the nature of the flattery and music is tailored to each new conquereror.

Emad kvetches. He grumps at the turnabout that has fhis fiance coming on to the customers to save “the business.” That’s exactly what he told her way back when.

“We are hostages of fate!” he complains.

The Italian capitano (Guido Lorraine) explains the nature of war to the hotelier as that of dogs fighting over a bone.

“One snatches it. He does not want it, but he snatches it for fear the other will get it first.”

Emad has to defeat efforts to blow the place up when one occupier flees as another is seen on the horizon. And he has to try to maintain some semblence of a business. Every hasty departure sees him rushing up to the loaded-up commanders and their troops as they start to leave.

“Please, please!” He pauses for a dramatic beat, handing over a slip of paper. “The bill!”

The Brits (David Tomlinson, most famous for “Mary Poppins” and “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” and Roland Culver of “Thunderball”) and the Germans (Albert Lieven of “The Guns of Navarone”) scheme for advantage with the locals.

“Ze Arabs in zis part of ze desert, are they friendly?” the German asks the Arabic major domo Yusef (Ferdy Mayne, a hoot).

“Oh, very friendly” the Arabic Yusef effuses to the “effendi.” “They only kill Christians!”

The entire enterprise, bent on keeping the various warring parties from actually “meeting” at the hotel (and fighting over it and destroying it) descends into door-slamming, pistol-shooting, booby-trapping farce by the third act.

World War II was still fresh enough in the British mind to make “Hotel Sahara” almost daring (check out the opening credit, meant to allay anyone taking a offense) in its comic take on the North African campaign.

It’s a dated comedy, with the Arabs played by British actors in blackface and as trigger-happy stereotypes. But those extend to national/European “types” as well, in a sort of equal opportunity insult. Brits, Italians, German and French get backhanded a bit a well.

At some point, opposing sides will dress up in Arab garb (more Saudi than Sahara) to “reconnoiter” the other.

“Tell Emad NOT to use that washroom,” the various racists commanders insist as they flee The joyless Germans fuss that the sexy Yasmin wear a “more modest costume,” etc.

Each conqueror arrives to culturally appropriate music — “Ride of the Valkyries” for the Germans, “Funiculì, Funiculà” for the Italians, etc.

And each fresh intruder earns an “Ooo can they be this time?” lament from Emad, who frets over surviving with his hotel, his finances and his fiance intact.

The Germans, let it be noted, are the only “guests” to ASK for the bill. Not that they pay it with anything but a swastika rubber stamp. Nazi deadbeats. They never change.

And through it all, the Canadian-born De Carlo schemes and sings and swims (in the oasis, silly) and dances in a comedy that jauntily skips by, one of the first films to treat the deadliest conflict in history as “Just a spot of sport, old sport.”

Director Ken Annakin would go on to contribute direction to the D-Day epic “The Longest Day,” but is best remembered for the all star farces of the ’60s, “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” and “Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies.”

Ustinov would enjoy a grand career as stereotypical bon vivant in films from “Spartacus” and the 1970s Agatha Christie Poirot adaptations that predeced Sir Kenneth Branagh’s recent remakes.

And Yvonne De Carlo would work steadily on stage, screen and most famously, on the tube as Lily Munster, an exotic vamp finally given the fangs and the sense of fun that Golden Age Hollywood almost never would.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Yvonne De Carlo, Peter Ustinov, David Tomlinson, Albert Lieven, Mireille Perrey, Roland Culver, Bill Owen, Guido Lorraine, Anton Diffring and Ferdy Mayne.

Credits: Directed by Ken Annakin, scripted by Patrick Kirwn and George H Brown. A United Artists, GFD and J. Arthur Rank release, now with Cohen Media Group on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:27

David Oyelowo and Bill Nighy are the co-stars in this January Amazon release about the hottie you met and married (?) who turns out to be an assassin.

Kinda seems like a “Bazinga” to me.

Jan. 12, believe it or not.

No, I didn’t have the breakout star of “Boogie Nights” and the director of “Siesta” and the original “Pet Sematary” films on my “Most likely to make a holiday movie this Christmas” predictions list.

But here we are, with a Heather Graham and Brandy Norwood star vehicle that casts the dude from the “American Pie” movies in support, all directed by Mary Lambert, who came back from “Mega Python vs. Gatoroid” exile to direct “A Castle for Christmas” a couple of years back.

But is it the “Best. Christmas. Ever?” Don’t be ridiculous.

“Best.” is a tepid holiday tale that has little to do with Christmas save for skewering that humbragging tradition, the family “Christmas Letter,” in which we boast about our year and play up the achievements of our kids and try not to sound like we’re over-selling them and us.

“Father of the Bride” veteran Charles Shyer and a co-writing newcomer give us Graham and Jason Biggs as Charlotte and Rob Sanders, a struggling Arizona engineer and inventor and her house-flipping husband, with two cute but undisciplined kids (Abby Villasmil), one of whom (Wyatt Hunt) gets advice from his horrific-looking sock monkey. He’s the one who changes the destination on their GPS-directed drive to visit relatives to the home of the Jennings family, the kid not the doll.

Jackie Jennings (singer/actress Brandy N.) always sends these “smug,” glossy holiday letters extolling her business success, her “genius” ten year-old daughter (Madison Skye Validum), her hunky Latino husband (Matt Cedeno) and son who is “saving the world” over in Africa.

“Nobody’s life is that wonderful, that perfect,” Charlotte grumps. But Jackie’s mention of their mansion and their plans to circle the globe in a solar-powered hot air balloon convince the sock monkey to convince little Grant to send them to the Jennings’ house, instead.

Events (SNOW) then conspire to trap Charlotte & Co. with Jackie, who used to sing in a No Doubt cover band with Charlotte’s husband and is thus some sort of ex-girlfriend, for the holidays.

Hilarity ensues. Except of course it doesn’t.

Things get “real.” Except even the “Big Secret” at the heart of Jackie’s mania to succeed and advertise it isn’t realistic at all.

The obnoxious know-it-all ten year old “genius” is worth a laugh or two, and a jokey video Charlotte made for work re: her product-testing duties at a company that makes a Roomba that goes Boomba has a giggle in it.

Kids trying to “prove” or disprove the existence of Santa, adults fretting over the disappointments of life all might be standard fare for holiday pictures like this.

But the best you can say for this — aside from Netflix finding work for older writers and directors — is that it’s shiny, childish background noise that might keep a child distracted long enough for adults to get a turkey in the oven and a gift or two wrapped.

Rating: PG, bed-squeaking innuendo

Cast: Heather Graham, Brandy Norwood, Madison Skye Validum, Wyatt Hunt, Abby Villasmil, Matt Cedeno and Jason Biggs.

Credits: Directed by Mary Lambert, scripted by Todd Calgi Gallicano and Charles Shyer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27