Movie Nation

Before the words “cultural appropriation” and Western filters through which to view the “exotic East” fell out of fashion, the TV version of James Clavell’s epic novel “Shogun” was a major mini-series event of the TV of 1980.

Mini series romantic lead Richard Chamberlain starred alongside the iconic Toshirô Mifune. Yôko Shimada, Michael Hordern, Vladek Sheybal and the larger than life John Rhys-Davies were also stars of that nine hour TV event.

Hulu is taking a fresh look at the material, using Clavell’s novel for only part of the story (per IMDb), some of the main characters, etc. This Feb. streaming event — 10 episodes long — is built around the formidable Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis — a more recognizable Japanese cast this time, with the colorful Portugeuse Captain Rodrigues turned into a Jesuit priest this time — there really is no John Rhys-Davies replacement floating around the profession these days.

Karen Dionne’s Crimson Scribe-award winning, best-selling novel “The Marsh King’s Daughter” earns a sturdy, suspenseful big screen treatment by the director of “The Illusionist” and “The Upside.”

Neil Burger benefits from having a compelling lead — Daisy Ridley — and one of the Best Villains of Our Time, Ben Mendelsohn, as her antagonist teacher/father, a back-to-the-woods murderer and kidnapper.

If the story feels cinematically familiar, perhaps you’re thinking of “Where the Crawdads Sing” when you’re also remembering “Leave No Trace.” A child, brought up Davey Crockett style, “raised in the woods so’s (she) knew every tree,” finds herself calling on that knowledge when tested by a life-and-death situation that also reveals much about the woodsman who raised her.

We meet Helena when she’s ten, growing up off the grid in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena, played by Brooklynn Prince (“The Florida Project”) at this age, is an impressionable Daddy’s girl who skips homeschooling and housework with mom (Caren Pistorious) for any chance to wander the woods with Dad.

Father Jacob is a gentle but unsentimental teacher and taskmaster.

“If you were afraid, running for your life, where would you go?” “Where no one could see me.”

Giving her the shot at a deer they’ve been stalking makes her ask, “What if I miss?” “Then we go hungry tonight.”

A hungry mother wolf eyes her as the meal she might very well be and earns Father’s sternest lesson.

“You must always protect your family.”

These often wordless reveries in the woods come with a lesson, and often with a test. Pass or fail, “Little Shadow” earns a Native style tattoo about the experience from her dad.

And then the day comes when she might start to figure things out, why her mother is so unhappy and distressed, why her father gets rough with her. A stranger sees them and that triggers a getaway. Mom has to blurt out “I was kidnapped” and incapicate the confused and furious child to escape the marksman/monster who has held them both captive.

Years pass, and Helena (Ridley) has a little girl of her own, a college professor husband (Garrett Hedlund), a Jeep XJ, cinematically appropriate transportation for a U.P. college professor’s family and an anonymous life in the same corner of the world where she grew up.

Even her husband doesn’t realize she’s the notorious “Marsh King’s Daughter.” And then the Marsh King busts out of prison.

Burger and screenwriters Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith abandon some of Dionne’s novelistic devices, giving “Him” and “The Daughter” names straight away, etc.

The story’s contortions to avoid being predictable often come to naught in the film, as there’s only path this tale can take and still deliver something like “The Hollywood Version.” But Burger & Co. maintain suspense and make us guess at how far they’ll take things, as a coyote who chews off his own leg is laid out as allegorical foreshadowing and the ultimate endorsement of the father’s “There’s nothing more pure than the instinct to survive” lesson.

Ridley is properly alarmed, brave and stoic as Helena. The accent may not be “U.P.” if there is such a thing. But she’s credibly American and properly rawboned, woodlore competent and understandably secretive. Gil Birmingham stands out as the sheriff who had a hand in “rescuing” Helena and her mother, and became a big part of her life. Hedlund makes do with a largely thankless role, a husband with no “agency” in his wife’s severest trial.

But this is Mendelsohn’s movie. Whenever he goes a stretch without playing a big screen heavy, it just underscores how good he is at it when he returns to the Dark Side. Here, his father-figure is a man of mystery. We don’t know how he came to be the woodlands incel who kidnapped a woman and raised a daughter to be just like him.

Mendelsohn makes us believe in this roughhewn Jacob every second he’s on the screen. We don’t need to know his back story. He just “is.” Never over-the-top, always cold-blooded and rational, this is a role all but novelized with Mendelsohn in mind.

The predictability of much of what we see unfold here isn’t an asset. “Marsh King’s Daughter” can feel perfunctory, lacking the interior life that a novel gives characters. But the settings, the striking cinematography, sharp, suspense-heightening editing of the action beats and the stars lead this Marsh King’s Daughter out of the swamp.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Ben Mendelsohn, Gil Birmingham, Brooklynn Prince, Caren Pistorious and Garrett Hedlund.

Credits: Directed by Neil Burger, scripted by Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith, based on the novel by Karen Dionne. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:48

I HATE Bon Jovi. Just...hate.

But there’s something kinda right about using a Pop Hair Metal (shudder) Hall of Famers’ tune to score this action comedy reboot of the ’80s TV series about a stunt man who hustles a little “fixer” and retrieval and detective work on the side.

Cheese on cheese, amIright?

It looks and sounds big and stupid. And that damned Emily Blunt has chemistry with EVERYbody.

March 1.

“Fingernails” is a romantic curiosity with a touch of sci-fi, a film that puts The Observer Effect in a human relationships context. That’s the physics phenomenon/theory that you change something merely by the act of studying or “observing” it.

This Christos Nikou tale imagines a not-really-alternate reality in which loneliness has reached the “crisis” stage, science has allegedly discovered a chemical compatibility test that requires a full, yanked-out fingernail to be processed and two co-workers at a counseling “Love Institute” start to wonder if they’re with Mr. or Ms. Right, thanks to mutual attraction, no matter what science tells them.

Can “true love” be tested by yanking and cooking fingernails? Can any romance stand up to cold, hard scientific or pseudo scientific scrutiny?

It’s the sort of movie you get when an off-center Greek filmmaker co-writes and shoots an Anglo-American produced romance in the overcast fall of Ontario. It’s just a tad…off.

Only the players give it any hint of warmth or heart, because this dry-to-the-point-of-parched “love story” is hellbent on avoiding that.

Jessie Buckley stars as Anna, a school teacher who some while back “tested positive” with her longtime beau, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White). But as their relationship has settled into routine, he feels the freedom to unemotionally note anything he doesn’t like. And when he’s not around, she’s free to admit that she’s “sacrificing” little things about herself to indulge him.

They mix and mingle with other couples, the “tested” and the untested. Although the movie limits this alternate reality by leaving out all of the reasons for our global epidemic of loneliness and romantic ennui — “media” is limited to nature documentaries and old movies, “social” media apparently doesn’t exist — Nikou immerses us in a world of brittle relationships and the fragile people trapped in them, or struggling to find one that “tests positive.”

Anna’s journey truly begins when she abandons her chosen profession for a job at The Love Institute, whose founder (Luke Wilson) wants to go beyond the breakthrough fingernail-testing that takes “the risk out of love” and do therapy and exercises with couples that “make the bond of love stronger.”

The “tests” would be amusing bits of comic quackery in another filmmaker’s hands. The “smell” test has couples urged not to bathe for a day or two, show up, strip to their underwear and wear a blindfold to discover if they can work the room, and sense their beloved through smell.

Underwater “one minute of eye contact” while holding one’s breath in a pool? Measuring partners’ reactions to “Notting Hill” in a local cinema (with Our Founder wanting to amp that up by staging a fake fire in the theater to gauge reactions and whether or not partners put their lovers ahead of themselves) is another.

Tandem skydiving? Sure

But Anna is paired-up with the cynical, wry trainer Amir, who seems to see through the crackpottery of it all. He notes precautions to take with the underwater exercise.

“Don’t want anyone dying on us...again.”

As Anna loves to ask people about their romances, their “how you met” stories, Amir invents a corny one about how he met his Natasha, and admits the joke. Because that’s what cynics do.

We can see Anna break out in Buckley’s adorable crooked smile, the spark between them as they work with inspiringly-devoted young lovers and worrisome, untested other couples. And that’s contrasted with the drab, incurious love life Anna faces at home at the end of every day.

She even tries to trick Ryan into taking this or that test, a trite sitcom plot device, but at least one that promises something lighter.

But Nikou — you just knew a “Dogtooth” trained Greek whose quirky first film was titled “Apples” was going to make a movie for Apple — isn’t having it. There’ll be little lightness here, and when there is, it’s as if he resents having to include it.

The entire production feels a tad stiff, as if he’s scientifically market-tested how he can approach this (a LATE third act single moment inclusion of a same-sex couple) and just checking off boxes along the way, making a movie that feels like a product of the alternate reality he’s presenting.

But Buckley, of “Lost Child” and “Wild Rose,” and Ahmed (“Sound of Metal,” “Nightcrawler”) make the characters more interesting than the scripted story they appear in. There is a hint of romantic warmth here, and it all comes from them.

Rating: R, a bit of violence, profanity

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White and Luke Wilson

Credits: Directed by Christos Nikou, scripted by Christos Nikou, Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:53

That critic’s rule that you’ve got to meet every film on something resembling its own terms in order to give it a fair shot gets a severe test with “Love Virtually,” an indie action rom/com that’s part live-action, part CGI simulated “VR” avatars and their lives of digital desperation.

With a narrative, characters and dialogue that lurch between “inside gaming” jokes and jargon and flippant “old folks” reactions and responses to it, it never congeals into anything one would care to embrace, even if we could find something to grab hold of. But “Love Virtually” — the title’s a pun on “Love, Actually” — is an interesting indie cinema exercise, a failure that might have a natural audience in midnight showings at online gaming conventions, or streamed at “virtual” versions of such things.

As the pandemic rumbles on, this obsessed gamer who goes by “Roddy Danger” (Peter Gilroy) is too distracted to hang onto his virtual and real-life girlfriend Kimberly (Paige Mobley) and finds himself frantic to win her back in VR.

His cheat code to that might be via her just-“canceled” “Beverly Hills Bitches” influencer/cousin Clarissa (Nikki Howard), who has her own problems thanks to posting a paid endorsement of a “mud mask” beauty product the day the rest of America was posting the same black square to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter as the George Floyd murder protests were ramping up.

Clarissa’s therapist (Cheri Oteri) might have words of advice. But she’s also distracted, having a virtual affair with some avatar who could very well be her therapist husband (Stephen Tobolowsky) in disguise.

Then there’s the V-ball (virtual hoops) star La Monte (Vincent Washington) who got canceled for cavalierly infecting half the NBA by mocking the virus as he touched a bunch of microphones (Helllooo Rudy Gobert) whose agent Barry (Ryan O’Flanagan) is dealing with that, Daddy issues and a neglected girlfriend (Ksenia Valenti) who takes up with an AI “Chatbot” Paul F. Tompkins) in revenge.

Hapless Roddy has one last shot at winning Kimberly back from his nemesis, successful gamer Kalvin Kluck (director and co-writer L.E, Staiman). That will have to happen at the exclusive virtual Club Kaboom, where all our characters are headed as this picture makes that its destination where every storyline is to be resolved.

A kid gaming savant, murderous Russian hackers, assorted single scene nerds and other subplots clutter this 85 minute movie’s script and make it all too easy to say “Who cares about ANY of them/ANY of this?”

The film’s obvious issue is its budget, but that relates to how hackneyed the situations are and how thinly drawn the character “types” turn out to be.

Throw a lot of money at this and you’d get bigger name actors. But as they’re mostly seen in VR, what would be the point? Sell the script to a big distributor and they’d rewrite it completely to try and excise the most trite elements.

But the sight gags and joke-packed dialogue have their moments.

“The Dark Web? Is that a Black Lives Matter thing?”

“Stop being such a little girl!” agent Barry’s macho/closeted dad (Tom Virtue) barks. “You’re like Timothee Chalamet in ‘Little Women!'”

Roddy met Kimberly as he virtually rescued her from a virtual slip-and-fall accident at the virtual “Hole Foods” supermarket.

Etc.

Generously meeting this mess on its “own terms” leads to the judgment that there’s an idea or two here that might find a better home in a better script with a bigger budget.

Rating: unrated, VR/CGI simulated violence, date rape, sex, gunplay

Cast: Peter Gilroy, Cheri Oteri, Paige Mobley, Vincent Washington, L.E. Staiman, Ryan O’Flanagan, Harper Frawley and Stephen Tobolowsky.

Credits: Directed by L.E. Staiman, scripted by Cheston Mizel and L.E. Staiman. A Premiere Digital release.

Running time: 1:24

There’s something disturbing about the way Eisenberg bulks up and does a whole testonery turn — like his alter ego Mark Zuckerberg — in this part.

Zuck, the “Social Network” inventor, went through that and took walking potatocake Elon Musk’s offer to brawl for…Charity, was it? Nah. That doesn’t sound “on brand” for either of those two.

In any event, it’s like Eisenberg is channeling a broke and expectant father version of Zuckerberg in this “Fight Club” ish riff.

Now here’s Eisenberg as we’ve never seen him before, emasculated and kind of given some of that back by a very cultish Oscar winner, Adrien Brody.

Nov. 17, Lionsgate unleashes “Manodrome.”

As it closes in on 100 years since the Spanish Civil War, Spanish cinema is still debating the conflict, its lasting scars and the Catholic Church’s role in it — as victim of “leftist” reprisals, or as an authoritarian religion aligned with other authoritarians — fascists, monarchists and the like.

“Sister Death” is an interesting Civil War-related attempt at back-engineering a prequel to the teen-haunted-by-a-nun thriller, Paco Plaza’s “Veronica.”

That 2017 film, set in 1991, was about a spectral “Hermana Muerte” (“Sister Death”) who pursued the title character after a seance. The new film tells us what a nun who came to teach at Veronica’s school went through after the Spanish Civil War, and what she finds out happened at a convent school during that cataclysm.

“Sister Death” is a mash-up of horror tropes trotted out in many other films — a triggering solar ecclipse, scary nuns, an over-matched noviciate, symbolic game of “hangman” and a child tormented by “the girl,” with the student’s hair as a singular source of vulnerability.

As a stand-alone film, it’s moody and spooky, if a bit hard to follow. It’s ambitious in the way it wades into the Civil War and its violence, and clumsy in its attempts to tie itself into “Veronica.”

But those recycled tropes have a little less sting than they might. The frights are too often of the “It was only a nightmare” variety.

An extraordinary event near the end of the Civil War turns a little girl in a remote mountain village into a “miracle child,” one with visions of the Virgin Mary. Ten years later (1949ish), the child is the 20ish Sister Narcissa (Aria Bedmar), a novice clothed in white ready to teach the students at a convent school with a troubled past.

The girls boarded there labor in the convent’s laundry, a Catholic scandal in some countries, and are easily rattled by the callous Sister Julia (Maru Valdivielso), a martinet singularly unimpressed by Narcissa’s “Miracle Girl” past.

But Mother Superior (Luisa Merelas) is a fan. So Narcissa has a job and her work cut out for her, winning over and teaching her students in the face of strange, supernatural goings-on and a climate of fear that the girls develop over “The Girl,” an apparition they’ve heard of and start seeing for themselves.

Little Rosa (Sara Roch) becomes the spectre’s target.

Sister Narcissa starts to piece together a dark secret the place is keeping, one about a long dead Sister Socorro, and how that might (supernaturally) “explain” what’s happening.

Spanish TV actress Bedmar does a decent job of suggesting realistic human reactions to experiencing the extraordinary. It’s a more nuanced performance than is common in horror, partly explained by Sister Narcissa’s past. As a child, she was exposed to “miracles.” So the supernatural threat here is terrifying, but taken at face value.

The effects are modest and get the job done — characters “floating” on a dolly into a shot, a simple novice’s veil and habit that attack the young nun wearing them.

But it’s all too familiar to be very frightening in the wake of so many “Scary Nun” stories. And the Spanish Civil War flashbacks, which Narcissa “experiences” in dreams or hallucinations, are both graphic and murky in who caused what and why that created a Monster Nun Ghost seeking vengeance.

Connecting all of it to “Veronica” seems more cute than necessary or useful.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sexual assault, suicide

Cast: Aria Bedmar, Maru Valdivielso, Luisa Merelas, Sara Roch,
Chelo Vivares and Sandra Escacena.

Credits: Directed by Paco Plaza, scripted by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Paco Plaza. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

This opens Friday and could go either way, but it’s got a good cast. Brit taking on a Southern accent?

Two of my favorite Brits are in it, both “Star Wars” alumni.

The easiest “tell” when you’re trying to figure out if what you’re watching is a B-movie or something further down the action budget alphabet is in the effects.

How do the gunshots look and sound? How realistic is the bloody makeup? How convincing are the bullets to the head/skull explosions?

Lots of filmmakers know they can get their film financed if they line up a couple of B-list or lower stars, actors years past their peak popularity. But few are able to follow through and scrounge up good makeup and effects cash as well.

Heads burst and pistol barrels are pushed against craniums for a self-administered head-shots in “Black Noise,” a C-movie starring Alex Pettyfer (“Magic Mike,” the “Endless Love” remake) and Jackson Rathbone (“Twilight”). And the results are second-year-in-film-school bad.

The players make the best of this “Havana Syndrome” thriller about private commandos sent to save rich folks from an exclusive resort island where something or someone is putting deafening noises in their ears and triggering memories in their minds to gruesome effect.

Everybody in the five person “team” (Pettyfer, Rathbone, Eve Mauro, Wayne Gordon and Sadie Newman) is troubled and ripe for sonic attack and flashbacks to some earlier trauma.

It’s a good thing the island’s collection of rich folks who were the first assaulted seem to have been all but wiped out, as this C-Team Six Five is pretty wrapped-up in their own issues, start to finish.

Rathbone rolls out a Southern drawl as the team’s tech guy. Pettyfer and others put in the time to look like they know what they’re doing with firearms.

But there’s no urgency, no sense the narrative is propelling us forward and no real surprises as we watch the team endure shattering memories that mess with their heads and Our Hero tries to explode-the-heads of the terrorists/personal demons/aliens or whoever is pulling the strings.

With cardboard characters and lines like “No one is safe. No one,” it’s hard for anybody to work up much enthusiasm for their performances, relying on simple professionalism to carry the day. The script isn’t utter trash, but it’s close.

And then the post-production effects are layered in, and any effort made on set makes one hope that all involved at least got a nice paid working vacation to St. Kitts and St. Nevis out of it. From reading the trades, other actors were going to take some of these roles, and thought better of it.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, Jackson Rathbone, Eve Mauro, Wayne Gordon and Sadie Newman

Credits: Directed by Philippe Martinez, scripted by Sean-Michael Argo, Philippe Martinez and Leigh Scott. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:26

I think it’s safe to lay credit…or blame for this kid-friendly comedy at the feet of Keke Palmer.

She hosted “SNL” and if memory serves, she not only inspired the sketch below, she’s the one who pushed for a little reunion of the early Nickelodeon stars Kenan Thompson (longtime “Saturday Night Life” cast member) and Kel Mitchell.

It had been a series, turned into a movie. Decades ago. It became a self-mocking and edgy (ish) riff in the “SNL” tradition.

That was, what, a year or so ago?

Now there’s a sequel with Kenan and Kel and Jillian Bell and Lil Rel, lots of cameos and…no Keke? Dudes…

Kenan and Kel are being “Good Burger” replaced by robots, something White Castle and other fast food chains are doing right this very moment.

Paramount+ will stream “Good Burger 2” to anyone ready for a little PG nostalgia.