Movie Nation

How does this Nov. 22 Mouse House offering sound to you, look to you?

“Bland beyond belief” was my first take on it, seeing this trailer in front of “The Creator” last night.
“Cutesy” Happy Meal toy characters.

Generic story elements, flat, direct-to-video animation.

And does this voice cast light up the marquee?

• Angelique Cabral as Queen Amaya, the wife and sounding board of King Magnifico;
• Victor Garber as Asha’s grandfather, Sabino, who—at 100 years old—is patiently waiting for his wish to be granted;
• and Natasha Rothwell as Asha’s loving and supportive mom, Sakina.

Plus, Asha’s tight-knit group of confidants, protectors and forever friends:

• Jennifer Kumiyama as Asha’s dearest friend, Dahlia, who’s an accomplished baker and unofficial leader of their group; 
• Evan Peters as the strong guy with a big heart and bigger yawn, Simon; 
• Harvey Guillén as Gabo, who may be cynical, but he has a heart of gold; 
• Ramy Youseff as Safi, who’s plagued by allergies;
• Niko Vargas as Asha’s joyful, always smiling buddy, Hal; 
• Della Saba as the seemingly shy teenager, Bazeema, who’s full of surprises; 
• and Jon Rudnitsky as Asha’s rosy-cheeked, wiggly-eared pal, Dario

The timing could not be more perfect for a thriller flipping the current AI debate on its head, an updating of everything “Blade Runner,””A.I.” and “The Terminator” wrestled with in action epic form.

“The Creator” is derivative, but inventively so, a dazzling platform for state-of-the-art sci-fi tech impressively parked in a post-nuclear Los Angeles, or the terraces, future cities and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

The director, Gareth Edwards, did my favorite of the recent “Star Wars” installments, “Rogue One.” And co-screenwriter Chris Weitz once wrote “About a Boy.”

But somewhere around the time we see metallic robotic refugees from the “Star Wars” design studio warming their articulated metal, wire and gears “fingers” over a campfire, I muttered my first “WTF?”

Why...never mind.

Right about the moment when one of these two-legged vacuum cleaners talks through pointlessly flanged and hinged lips covering an equally pointless machine-tooled mouth, “The Creator” started to feel like the dumbest AI movie since “Short Circuit.”

The humans have no trouble tracking, chasing down and surprising their AI foes on the battlefield. It’s as if the machines are all operating on Windows 95.

In an alternate future set up with a vintage “robots and you” styled newsreel opening (robots on the Space Shuttle, etc.), America is leading the West in the fight against artificial intelligence which the East has embraced, and apparently allowed to nuke Los Angeles.

John David Washington plays Joshua, a man whose seemingly idyllic life with his very pregnant wife (Gemma Chan) is interrupted by an attack from the NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Air Defense) combat platform on their corner of New Asia (Southeast Asia, judging from the Thai islands and Vietnamese fields and rice paddies).

It turns out Joshua is a sergeant working undercover in search of the Nirmata, the brilliant Asian creator of much of the new AI that’s coming out. They’re packaged as “Simulants,” sentient robots with human features and skulls with visible holes through them (For…ventilation?). The US Army in the persons of Gen. Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and Col. Howell (Oscar winner Allison Janney) want this creator dead.

The raid is premature and a debacle, leaving Joshua embittered and widowed. But years and many fruitless debriefings later, he is ordered on a new mission to find this Nimrata, the creator’s new superweapon, and perhaps the missing wife Joshua was sure was dead.

A new team is NOMAD delivered to a new strike zone because the East is helpless against the giant, IUD-shaped “Avengers” aircraft carrier in the sky. All that AI tech and the robots and Simulants living in harmony amongst the simple, happy natives can’t even spot armed commando teams marching down ridgelines, lit up with flashlights and assorted mobile assault vehicles in the pitch dark.

You’ve seen the trailers to the film. You know that the “secret weapon” is a Simulant in the form of an adorable, seemingly omnipotent child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles Alphie), and that Joshua finds himself trying to smuggle her to his bosses, to get her to lead him to his long-lost wife, or to a future where “robots can be free.”

It’s kind of clever, putting the ultimate threat to human civilization in the form of a little girl. Awww, who’d want to hurt her? She’s harmless and helpless and cute. I guess making her a cocker spaniel would have been too on-the-nose.

But among the script’s many lapses in logic, her omnipotence has its limits. And even so, it’s hard to feel for her, identify with her and root for her despite how cute this “Alpha O” (“Alphie” for short) is.

Joshua is stuck babysitting this “Little Sim,” explaining “death” and its electronic equivalent (“On,” “Off” and “Standby”) to a computerized child who wonders about heaven and if robots can be free there?

It’s all just too precious. Throw in hilariously illogical (talking suicide robots shaped like oil drums) bomb-delivery systems and tech, the undermotivated expectation that we’ll “root” for AI, and the under-explained heedless Asian embrace of this tech future.

OK, maybe that last one makes sense in a racially stereotypical way.

Director Edwards imagines this as a clumsy Vietnam War analogy, with armed and murderously heavy-handed America imposing its bloody will on foreigners who don’t “look like us.” There are hints of “Apocalypse Now” in a few sequences.

But the nonsensical nature of much of this took me right out of the movie. It’s one thing for “Star Wars” to see the need for gold-played British butler robots that look like walking Oscar statuettes. It’s another to think computered-assisted efficient design wouldn’t see the need for moving lips (there are no “eyes” on the metallic ones), for hand-held radios (comms would be built in) or hand-held laser rifles (ditto).

As the picture careens around towards its anti-climactic climax, one really does wonder about the point of it all.

If you aren’t reading the words “John David Washington” with an involuntary “Uh oh” on your lips these days, you haven’t been paying attention to the parade of piffle this most famous of “nepo babies” has turned up in since “BlackKklansman.” He’s not a bad actor, no matter how little training he got. He’s just a consistently uninteresting one, no matter how handsome he might be.

If he’s starring in the movie, it means they couldn’t get anybody better to take the lead.

And here he is, giving another colorless leading man turn in a movie that desperately could use a big dose of charisma, which only mean-Ms. Janney and noble-but-underwritten “Sim” leader Ken Watanabe provide.

Clumsy efforts like make one wonder if AI editing software wouldn’t have asked a lot of questions and demanded better results than this screenplay delivers.

Rating: PG-13 (Strong Language|Some Bloody Images|Violence)

Cast: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Madeleine Yuna Voyles Alphie, Ken Watanabe and Allison Janney.

Credits: Directed by Gareth Edwards, scripted by  Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:13

Matthew Vaughn’s latest is a “Kingsman” styled spy good/spoof with Bryce Dallas Howard as a novelist whose latest hits assorted spies and spy agencies where they live.

Sam Rockwell and Samuel L., Catherine O’Hara and Bryan Cranston and Henry Cavill, mayhem and bombshells and a digital kitty cat. Looks fun.

Feb.

As thrillers go, “Accused” is simplicity itself. It’s just a guy, hunted, identified, harassed, threatened and tracked-down online, trapped in his parents’ house, waiting to be doxed, swatted or worse.

The clever touches in the script to this new British thriller, now streaming on the free TV streamer Tubi, include having our victim Harri see the disaster that his life becomes unfold in near real time, in the most toxic chat rooms and comment boards of the Internet.

Writers Barnaby Boulton and James Cummings show our protagonist, a 20something middle class Brit (Chaniel Kular of Netflix’s “Sex Education”) of undefined Middle Eastern heritage stare, slack-jawed, as he first is told by his girlfriend (Lauryn Ajufo) that he “looks just like” this “person of interest” in the morning’s train station bombing. Next thing he knows, others are talking up “I think I know that guy” in chat threads. They’re egged on into naming their hunches.

Harri’s name gets out. Crowd-sourcing and facial recognition software outs his girlfriend, Chloe, his address, his parents and eventually his parents’ address.

“Nothing like a good foxhunt,” one of the anonymous accusers chortles, Internet brave because of that anonymity,” certain they have their quarry — as are many — because of his or her mad Google Search skillz.

Best of all, we know little of Harri’s work life or experience of the world. He’s got no “particular skills.” Calling the police isn’t wholly futile, but it’s close. And this is Britain. The house isn’t stuffed with guns or even all that secure.

He’s just a fearful young man, house-sitting the family dog as his parents take a vacation, waiting for the ever-escalating online rhetoric to inflame someone enough to come looking for him with intent to harm.

Actor turned director Philip Barantani (“Boiling Point”) parks us in this world, showing Harri’s reluctance to even go public with his “secret” girlfriend, but helpless to avoid popping up in strangers’ selfies as he boards a train in that very station the very morning of the attack.

“Privacy” is a myth.

The film limits its point of view to what Harri knows, and what we see and he can guess about his racist, quick-to-judge online accusers. As we’ve learned time and again in recent years, online crowd-sourcing can be quick to ID a mass shooter or a domestic terrorist attacking the U.S. capital. Sometimes the crowd even gets it right.

The plot plays out in seriously conventional thriller ways. It’s a wonder anybody bothers with foreshadowing any more, but good screenwriters still add it by force of habit.

“Accused” and its star do an excellent job of capturing Harri’s helplessness, his fear that the police won’t be bothered, or might instead come for him, that his parents’ neighbors might not be as tolerant as they seem, that no one will save him and he’s too panicked to save himself.

And the viewer is reminded that none of us are ever more than an anonymous slander away from a “piling on” by people quick to judge, eager to escalate and impossible to get to apologize.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Chaniel Kular, Nila Aalia, Nitin Ganatra, Frances Tomelty and Lauryn Ajufo

Credits: Directed by Philip Barantani, scripted by Barnaby Boulton and James Cummings. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:27

The full trailer to this “world’s greatest spy” thriller drops tomorrow.

Why all the fuss? Sam Rockwell, Bryce Dallas Howard, Samuel L., a digital cat, with Dua Lipa, Henry Cavill, Sofia Boutella, CAtherine O’Hara, Rob Delaney and many others.

But it’s being released in the Dog Days of Feb. So…expectations dampened.

An outstanding cast overcomes a tendency by the filmmakers to try too hard in wrestling with arcane financial maneouvering in “Dumb Money,” a sort of “Big Short Lite” about the Gamestop stock manipulation war of a couple of years back.

Director Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya” and TV’s “Physical”) uses a colorful cast of often loathsome characters and a lot of sass, profanity and lowdown-and-dirty hip-hop to give this Davids vs. Goliaths take the feel of a generational rebellion. What he botches is setting this fight up, giving his hero the background that made investors trust him and properly explaining the machinations, methodology and market meaning of instigating a “short squeeze.”

It’s a movie with the speed and funny fury of “The Big Short,” but that demands we root against this or that figure simply because he’s a “type” being played by Vincent D’Onofrio, Seth Rogen and Nick Offerman. And the script relies on a flurry of acronyms, profane tirades and web-nerd slang of the “stonk” variety to bluff its way past its shortcomings and seem hip.

“Dumb Money” is about the hilarious recent tug of war over fading video game retailer GameStop, villains who have bet a fortune on its stock market collapse, and a plucky band of nerds, coeds, and working class Gen Zers who decide to follow a youtube stock-tipper over a cliff to try and stop them.

Paul Dano plays Keith Gill, married (Shailene Woodley), with a new baby and a steady job at Mass Mutual in some sort of financial analysis gig. But by night, he dons his samurai headscarf and kitten-covered t-shirt, sits at his computer, shows off his (underwhelming) financials and as Roaring Kitty, passes on stock tips and investment advice via his vlog and connection to Reddit’sWallStreetBets feed.

Reddit is an anarchic safe space for the politically-incorrect and ulfiltered name-callers, with WallStreeBets having something of a “Burn it Down” credo (not really gotten into here) in the face of cynical, conservative corporate America’s assault on the middle class and the gamesmanship they’ve used to destroy the American Dream for everybody under 40.

Keith? He’s just a guy who looks at all the “short” bets on GameStop by assorted big hedge funds, and via a combination of nostalgia for the company and obviously stupid over-exposure by those betting it will fail, draws his own conclusion.

“I like the stock.”

Next thing he and we know, a generation dabbling in the market via small-time “retail” investor platform Robinhood goes full tsunami/all-in on GameStop. As the stock soars, COVID-stressed nurse Jenny (America Ferrara), Texas coeds Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold), dying mall GameStop store employee Marcus (Anthony Ramos) and Keith himself make a killing.

“Holy s–t!” they exclaim in glee.

Those hedge fund managers betting GameStop is going extinct, sneering fat-cats like Steve Cohen (D’Onofrio), who keeps a pet boar in his mansion, Gabe Plotkin (Rogen), who has bought a neighbor’s house just to knock it down so he can build a tennis court and play during the pandemic, and the richest of them all, the inscrutable, unflappable Ken Griffin (Offerman) find themselves exclaiming “Oh s—!” And not in glee.

Gillespie and the screenwriters set up the stakes for Keith with his trusting wife and confidante, and let the doubts be underlined by his can’t-hold-a-real-job brother. Every word out of this jerk Kevin’s mouth is filthy, funny, and dead wrong.

“This ass—e thinks he’s Jimmy Buffett!” You don’t have to be smarter than brother Kevin to know that he means “Warren Buffett.” But you have to give the devil his due here. This mouthy dope of a loser was tailor-made for Pete Davidson, and he’s hilarious in the part.

As the “movement” gains momentum and the insiders stop cracking jokes about the “dumb money” getting thrown around by “retail” investors, who “always lose,” the “system” and those who know how to game it fights back.

I like the way Gillespie uses his younger players — Dano, Ferrara, Ryder and Davidson, et al — and their taste in music to show a generational fault line in this battle. We hear snippets of the filthiest hip hop available — Cardi B singing “WAP,” works made famous by Darko and Kay Ro$e — to set the tone on “furious” and “foul-mouthed” in depicting young, Internet-empowered, Reddit-organized outsiders seeking “revenge” on the economy-manipulating, business-destroying “ass—–s” who’ve done so much to limit their futures, and who are the first to squeal like stuck pigs when student loan forgiveness is mentioned.

The film suffers from a surfeit of sinister figures, including the real life jawboning jokers of financial TV and those “rob from the rich, broker for the poor” “heroes,” the guys who founded Robinhood. Sebastian Stan plays co-founder Vlad Tenev as so cowardly and dishonest even Elon Musk is dismayed by him. Dane DeHaan plays the clueless Gamestop Store manager still following the company Bible in hopes he can make the store/chain profitable, if only Marcus would do the same.

There’s so much going on around these people (we never meet the main cheerleaders of WallStreetBets) in this time (COVID is a backdrop trying to move to the foreground) that “Dumb Money” never seems to develop the flow that would really put it over.

It’s an amusing but choppy affair, with Congressional hearings, sibling rivalry, bad guys winning and good guys fighting the good fight, often to their own detriment.

Portaying a figure beloved enough to inspire “If he’s in, I’m in” financial followers without a backstory explaining that loyalty (it isn’t just Trump Cult seniors who are “gullible” these days) is a big burden to lay on Dano. But his open-faced earnestness encourages us to let that slide.

The movie doesn’t make us smarter or more wary about “the system,” or set up false prophets the way “The Big Short” did. Let’s face it. There are aspects of that film’s point of view that aren’t aging well.

But for a Quixotic, quick turn-around comic thriller about stock market winners, losers and supervillains, “Dumb Money” isn’t half bad.

Rating: R, profanity and lots of it.

Cast: Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson, America Ferrara, Olivia Thirlby, Talia Ryder, Anthony Ramos, Myha’la Herrold, Sebastian Stan, Dane DeHaan, Nick Offerman and Vincent D’Onofrio

Credits: Directed by Craig Gillespie, scripted by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum, based on a book by Ben Mezrich. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:45

Two Oscar winners face off in a tale of a notorious romance from 20 years before — Portman interviewing and getting to know Julianne Moore, a woman who once had an affair with a “seventh grader.”

Charles Melton and Kelvin Han Yee also star in this awards season potboiler from the director of “Far From Heaven” and “Carol.”

Dec. 1 on Netflix.

Classic American small city in the Midwest — more diverse and tolerant than you expect, “safe” to those who move there.

And then Donald Trump gets elected and the racist goons come out from under the rocks they’d been hiding under.

Oct 10, this Bob Hurster (“The Listener”) take on the division that exploded in America once folks who saw themselves in Donald Trump felt empowered to act on their darkest prejudices comes out.

One early assertion in Nick Broomfield’s new documentary appreciation “The Stones and Brian Jones” will stand out to many a Rolling Stones fan, the idea that “I don’t think many people remember who (Jones) was.”

Even someone coming to the Stones as a babe, late in the game, can hear the difference between the recordings the blues and blues-rock band the Stones made in the Brian Jones ’60s and the sound of the ’70s-onward stadium tour mainstays “The World’s Greatest Rock’n Roll Band” became.

Jones formed the band via classified ad, dove deep into the blues with them and was a big part of why they became wildly popular before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever wrote a pop hit with them. A stunningly-adept multi-instrumentalist, Stones fans recognize his musical coloration of “Ruby Tuesday” (recorder, flutes), “Street Fighting Man” and “Paint it Black” (sitar), “Under My Thumb” (marimba), “She’s a Rainbow” (Mellotron) and harmonica on many of their early blues releases as the hooks that made the songs distinct, memorable, and unlike anything the band released after his dismissal from the group.

But Broomfield, one of Britain’s great documentary filmmakers and no slouch at musical biographies (“Biggie & Tupac,””Kurt & Courtney”), delivers merely glancing assertions of Jones’ musical prowess — a jam session friend of Hendrix, pal of Dylan’s, sax man on a Beatles session and so forth. The Stones’ longtime bassist and curator of their history (a packrat who saw all and saved all) Bill Wyman is here, wide-eyed and delighted at playing back to Broomfield snippets of Jones’ genius and why he’s worth remembering.

Broomfield instead leans into his own specialty, charting Jones’ psychic path from glory to self destruction. His interview subjects note Jones’ sensitivity about his looks, his height, his “insecurities” which played out in legions of love affairs, including a long string of young British women the rocker hooked up with, whose families welcomed him in and became his support system after his estrangement from his own, five of them abandoned after he impregnated them and moved on.

The filmmaker interviews many of them, the most famous being the model/singer Zouzou and the legendary singer and Stones retinue queen Marianne Faithfull. And Broomfield has archival interviews with others, including the singularly-gorgeous and magnetically destructive Anita Pallenberg, whose betrayal came at the perfect moment to trigger Jones’ final descent into dysfunction — fired from the band — and his untimely death three weeks later back in 1969.

Broomfield tracks the erosion of Jones’ influence and “power” in the band and the way his bandmates noted how none of them handled their ascent into fame worse, or lost himself in drugs as deeply as Jones.

German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff “(The Tin Drum), who filmed “A Degree of Murder,” starring Pallenberg and featuring a score composed and performed by Brian Jones, observes that “drugs destroyed his discipline,” and that “you can’t be an artist without discipline.”

Events certainly bore that out, as Jones became too unreliable for the band, and without the band’s demands, died within days of his not-unexpected dismissal.

Broomfield approaches this subject as a fan and an observer remembering the era he grew up in. He narrates the story, recalls meeting Jones on a train ride when Broomfield was just an impressionable 14 year-old. And a few years later, Broomfield was in Hyde Park, London, for the “farewell” concert the Stones gave just days after Brian’s death.

The film features extensive readings (by actor Freddie Fox) of Jones’ letters — to family, lovers, and his scores of revealing personal responses to band fan mail from those early years. The way he saw the band as “two bands,” the joy he got at exposing his blues heroes to the big wide (British) world bubbles through in these short hand-written notes.

Still, “The Stones and Brian Jones” doesn’t lend itself to the air of sadness and tragedy that hangs over Broomfield’s best known biographies — the musical ones, and his sympathetic portrait of serial killer Aieleen Wuornos. But it is essential viewing for any fan of ’60s music history and The Rolling Stones’ place in it, even for those of us who haven’t forgotten Brian Jones and his place in it.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Zouzou, Marianne Faithfull, Lewis Jones, Michael Lindsay Hogg, Volker Schlöndorff, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Burden, Charlie Watts and Nick Broomfield.

Credits: Directed by Nick Broomfield, scripted by Nick Broomfield and Marc Hoeferlin. A BBC Films/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:37

How’s this for a romantic “meet cute?”

He spies her outside the flat of a mate, a tracksuited young woman with bangs to die for and a willingness to sprint and parkour her getaway. He’s a combat soldier, apparently just gone AWOL, so by God he’s giving chase.

Eve (Carli Fish) wasn’t just outside that friend’s apartment. She was in it. He wasn’t just a mate, he was Ash’s (Oliver Lee) former sergeant (Clint Dyer). And Sgt. Sparxs, paralyzed in combat, abandoned by his wife, had just taken his life.

Eve, Ash comes to find out as he falls completely in love with ths reckless and sexy free spirit, was there to witness the act. She was Sparx’s “Ferryman,” someone to to ensure that things go off as planned and that the authorities (one assumes) realize it was a planned suicide.

“Ferryman” is writer-director Darren Bender’s sympathetic dive into assisted suicide, its pros and cons presented to lovesick Ash as he pokes his nose into Eve’s “club,” its rules and her reason for being in it.

If you haven’t guessed from her seeming good health and manic pixie dream girl lust for life, Eve is as doomed as anybody else in this underground club of the hopeless and despairing, those looking for a little instruction, sympathy and hands-off assistance in ending their lives.

Ash is in love with somebody not long for this world. That has him searching her phone, rummaging through her computer and stumbling into her parents (Raquel Cassidy of “Downton Abbey,” and Jay Simpson of “Small Axe”) and meeting other “ferrymen,” not something they’re expecting.

“I can’t break the chain,” they explain to him, in almost horror movie terms. But as they’re someone planning their own demise, who better to witness others see it through?

Fish (“Mother & Wild”) and Lee (“The Knife that Killed Me”) bring a youthful heedlessness to their characters — hers in a form of accepted denial, determined to go through with things no matter the romance that’s just dropped on her doorstep, his in becoming an active dissuader/disruptor of the club, or an ally with Eve against her parents’ weeping resistence.

It’s all kind of sadly formulaic and dispassionately passionate, but also adult and occasionally surprising in where it takes our assisted suicide sympathies. It’s not a simple decision, and often not one arrived at in haste. Once one has made it, there’s something to be said for having someone who knows exactly what you’re going through there at the end.

Rating: unrated, suicide subject matter, violence, sex

Cast: Carli Fish, Oliver Lee, Clint Dyer, Jay Simpson and Raquel Cassidy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Darren Bender. A Random Media release.

Running time: 1:30