Movie Nation

I can’t remember a comedy that caused me more anxiety than “Quicksand,” a scruffy little “film festival indie” that leaves that sheltered environment to try its luck competing in the real world.

The lead characters are a couple goofballs who do the wrong thing, fail to ask the right question and refuse simply to “take a win” or cut-their-losses and run in every situation they face.

Every “misunderstanding” that piles up along the way is escalated, every injustice and humiliation is left un-redressed, every wrong left-unrighted.

The first two acts are so frustrating my stomach was in knots. I couldn’t decide if the characters Ray (Tanner Presswood, channeling “Napoleon Dynamite”) and thick-accented-Paul (Simón Elias) were worth rooting for, pitying or loathing.

But energy and quick pacing carry us through the leaky, ulcer-inducing early acts and get us to a “get me to the church on time” finale that mocks “Thin Blue Line” cop solidarity and Michigan “types,” the gun-nuttierr, the funnier.

I can’t say it all works or that I “highly” recommend it. But it kind of plays, and it pays off.

Ray is 23 and unemployed — he fears he’s unemployable. His bestie Paul may talk-up his first “grownup job,” but he’s about to discover it’s an unpaid internship.

And these two idiots are co-best men for their pal Josh’s upcoming wedding, which sets up the story’s two initial problems. Ray hopes to make time with the fair Claire, his “super crush,” at the wedding. That means Paul’s got to coach him about how to break up with long term girlfriend Maggie (Mia Hagerty), which he does, from UNDER the TABLE in the booth where Ray meets her.

Ray’s too slow to recognize HER breaking up with him, or to take seriously her statement of the obvious? “Paul controls you!”

These two losers also have Josh’s Norwegian granny’s valuable wedding ring to guard, which Ray manages to leave on a sofa he sells to a pawn shop because they’re that broke.

The film’s first maddening scene is their meeting with that pawn broker, never pointing out that the ring wasn’t his to steal and sell or coming over the counter to threaten this blithe jerk (AJ Guertin, infuriating). Ray even has to bribe him for the address of the receiving-stolen-property creep “400 miles away” who bought it.

They have to borrow a tent, pile into Paul’s Jeep XJ for a road trip and get the ring back BEFORE the wedding. Misunderstandings, mishaps, mayhem, run-ins with murderers, a corrupt sheriff (Tom Czarny), car chases with the stolen ring-buyer, a stand-off with an archer, oh and QUICKSAND — just another day or so’s “adventures” in Kid Rock’s Northern Michigan.

The leads have a dopey chemistry that is somewhat wasted on jokes that aren’t quite B-picture. They find a cell “with real buttons,” which might get them out of a jam.

“It’s like...a phone, where you can only use the PHONE app!”

Their predicaments are dopey and generic — quicksand here, tied-up by the bad guys there. But every now and then the “get them out of the jam” scripted problem-solving is clever enough.

And the “big finish” kind of/sort of works, in that pull-your-hair-out over more ANXIETY over what obvious steps are untaken, what obvious explanations left unspoken way.

But if you crave a comedy that’ll have you shouting at the screen — a LOT — friend I just one word for you — “QUICKSAND.”

Rating: unrated, violence, bloody but sometimes comical

Cast: Tanner Presswood, Simón Elias and Tom Czarny

Credits: Directed by JohnPaul Morris, scripted by JohnPaul Morris, Jake Burgess and Broderick Steele. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time:

“The Saint of Second Chances” is the “baseball” documentary you never knew you wanted.

Heartwarming, amusing, apalling and sad, this story of flawed baseball team owner, promoter/cheerleader Mike Veeck takes us through the ups and downs of a third generation “baseball guy,” and manages to be damned entertaining pretty much start to finish.

It’s a delighful bon bon to throw our way just as the Major League playoffs are about to begin.

Two great documentary filmmakers — Jeff Malmberg of “Won’t You Be By Neighbor,” and Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”) — team up to tell an intimate, self-effacing story of baseball promotions, “hustling” up attendance through the triumph and tragedy of Mike Veeck, whose cinematic biography is in the best “Everybody loves a comeback” tradition.

Two different “Bill” Veecks — grandfather William and peg-legged pirate of promotions father Bill — owned teams in Chicago over the decades. Bill, the younger, became one of baseball’s great innovators, changing the game during the years he owned Cleveland and St. Louis franchises, and the two times he took over the Chicago White Sox.

Mike Veeck was Bill’s rebellious, perhaps a tad overlooked son who came on board with his father when Bill bought the Sox back in 1975. The film, a docu-drama that has Mike interviewed on camera and agree on camera to “play” his dad in the story, casts Charlie Day as the young Mike, a garage band rocker who gives up that dream and shows up at “the office” in a ironic (symbolic) “Owner’s Son” t-shirt.

We see the kid do every menial job the shoestring operation demands and watch his father hold forth from his “office,” the Bard’s Room Bar inside old Comiskey Park, the home of the White Sox.

Former players like Tony LaRussa remember the legendary, larger than life Bill, who cast a giant shadow son Mike spent much of his life trying to escape.

Bill had “changed” baseball. Mike would, too. From his father, he picked up the principle that their games would be “street theater wrapped around a ball game.” And he’d excel at it.

But as a budding “hustler” and promoter, he’d preside over one of the most infamous “promotions” in baseball history — “Disco Demolition Night” — and spend decades living that down. The guy who invented The Luxury Box viewing experience as a means of raising fast cash to re-sign a free agent they were about to lose couldn’t get hired anywhere.

Malmberg and Neville got Jeff Daniels to deliver a droll, playful narration of the ups and downs of Veck the Younger’s life. After that that ugly “disco” night (a racist, homophobic crowd, brought their by a race-and-gay-baiting DJ, got out of control), we see the trials, the years-long drunk that the love of a good woman ended, the “comeback” that takes us in directions we never expect and the tragedies we don’t see coming.

Sentimental highs include Mike’s St. Paul, Minnesota minor-league team give recovering addict Darryl Strawberry the last of his many “last chances,” one that saw him flower thanks to a teammate/gimmick Mike introduced into the Darryl year with the St. Paul Saints.

The lows include Mike’s last blundered big league gimmick (indoor fireworks at Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field) and personal losses we don’t see coming.

Neville and Malmberg use their Netflix budget to buy song rights to turn many a sequence into a musical montage, which, along with Mike Veeck’s big laugh, gives “The Saint of Second Chances” a jaunty pace and tone to go with an adorably warm feeling.

Purists may sniff at the “Veeck as in ‘Wreck'” blasphemies committed in the name of jazzing/sexing up the game and the ballpark experience. And the film’s point of view is seriously one-sided, so those purists don’t really have a voice here.

But this “Saint” earns this “Second Chance” thanks to a film sure to warm all but the most horsehide-thick basefaull buff’s heart.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Mike Veeck, Charlie Day, Libby Veeck, Night Train Veeck, Darryl Strawberry, Tony LaRussa, narrated by Jeff Daniels.

Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Malmberg and Morgan Neville. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

“Dark Asset” is another “chip in his brain” supersoldier/super-agent “gone rogue” thriller — yeah, that’s pretty much a genre now — a movie that goes from bad to exponentially worse by giving itself over to what is passed-off as an all back-story, over-sharing bar-pickup conversation.

“So when I was escaping the doctor and his faciliity, but before I made it to the basement mainframe, I stumbled across something,” our anti-hero (Byron Mann) tells the vivacious blonde (Helena Mattsson) he’s hitting on. She is…all ears?

Yeah, some guys need to lead with “I have a Lamborghini in the parking lot.”

Much of this thriller, which opens with a generic “demonstration” of this “ex special forces” “guinea pig” that goes wrong (also “generic”), is back-filling back-story around that dull and perfunctory first act shoot-out.

Writer-director Michael Winnick stuffs all the back-story, back-filling and “twists” he can into the movie via the a momentum-killing monologue.

Such anecdotes can sparkle, sizzle, amuse and enthrall. Think of the “Your father’s watch” monologue from Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” Here, it’s just lazy, inert, a flat way of shoving a lot of faux complexity into a crap, formula thriller.

Casting Robert Patrick as the evil scientist behind this “microc chip super spy” program doesn’t show much effort. Naming his character Dr. Cain is downright lazy.

Mann an be an interesting actor (“The Big Short”) and is competent in the combat moments. He’s just monotonous background noise in this role.

The fact that “Dark Asset” is unsurprising and bad is itself unsurprising. With stinkers like “Deuces,” Malicious” and a Steven Seagal atrocity titled “Code of Honor” on his resume, “unsurprising” and “bad” are pretty much Michael Winnick’s brand.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Byron Mann, Helena Mattsson, Shani Rigsbee, Sabina Gadecki, Marc Winnick and Robert Patrick.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Winnick. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:31

The Glimmer Twins — Mick and Keith — were the faces of the band, the ones who became songwriters and who made them stars.

Charlie Watts was the little old grownup in the room, quiet, unassuming.

Bill Wyman, whom you’ll hear in this clip, was the archivist, the historian, the packrat.

And Brian Jones? He was the founder, the soul that gave them their start.

Magnolia has its hands on a BBC doc about “The Stones and Brian Jones,” coming out in November. Here’s a taste.

Every label from middling to just plain bad has been saddled to “The Expendables” franchise, almost from the start. So there’s little sense piling onto what probably will be the last one — to make it to theaters, at least.

Although “Expend4bles” (“Expendables 4”) attracted a couple of major martial arts cinema figures — Thai legend Tony Jaa, Indonesian action icon Iko Uwais — a simple glance down the cast list inspires barely a shrug.

Where the third film, which came out back in 2014, had Sly Stallone and Jason Statham joined by Harrison Ford, Jet Li, Antonio Banderas, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, Ronda Rousey and Schwarzenegger, “Expen4bles” can boast of Megan Fox, 50 Cent somebody named Jacob Scipio, along with series holdovers Dolph Lundrgren and Randy Couture.

Even throwing in Andy Garcia, that’s a STEEP discount.

The writing is similarly cut-rate. The action climax borrows from several films and mostly resembles a half-assed riff on “Tomorrow Nerver Dies.” There’s not a half-bad joke in it. Just bad ones.

“Take two Xanax and pretend you’re happy with your life!”

Yeah, no wonder the studio folk signing off on dreck like this are dreaming of an AI-generated script future. They can’t tell the difference.

The action beats have a nonsensical excitement to them. The chases are competently shot and edited and the fight scenes still play.

But it’s all so weary and overfamiliar, giving one the sense that many involved stopped trying on the first take or third rewrite. It’s just gassed.

The one thing that intrigued me was a piece of plot illogic the size of “Indiana Jones isn’t really necessary in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,'” a bit of script analysis by a “Big Bang Theory” screenwriter that got on the air and entered the cultural debate, driving fanboys and fangirls nuts.

The “solution” to the impending calamity in the long, drawn-out climax to “Expen4bles” is so nakedly obvious we expect everybody or somebody to stop dilly-dallying with a clock literally ticking down towards armageddon and take that the proper measures.

And they don’t.

Throw in the anti-climax of it all, the nonsensical twists, the sure knowledge that Fox, Lundgren, Jaa and especially 50 Cent have never become passable actors and dueling opening scenes — a murderous raid in Libya alternating with a heartlessly violent bar brawl to recover a ring lost fair and square in a bet — and “Expend4bles” becomes the most “Expendable” actionar of the lot.

Rating: R. strong/bloody violence throughout, language and sexual material.

Cast: Jason Statham, Megan Fox, Tony Jaa, Andy Garcia, 50 Cent, Iko Uwais. Randy Couture, Levy Tran, Dolph Lundgren, and Sylvester Stallone.

Credits: Directed by Scott Waugh, scripted by Kurt Wimmer, Tad Daggerhart and Max Adams. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:43

Danville VA. GTC Stadium Cinema.

The Stath, Megan Fox and the gang. On my.

Oscar winner Nic, a workaholic who makes a lot of bad movies just to keep on the road, in characters and out of his own head (he told me as much once) has a real plum, here.

He plays a “nobody” college professor who starts turning up in people’s dreams — lots and lots of people’s dreams.

Julianne Nicholson, Lily Bird, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows and Dylan Baker are just some of the faces we recognize in the supporting cast.

Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli convinced Cage to sign up, and A24 convinced him to make his English-language satire debut with this one.

Looks dark but kind of adorable.

This prequel is about the punative birth of The Hunger Games, and the last gasp of humanity of the infamous Snow who aged into Donald Sutherland decades later.

Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage and Jason Schwartzman join the Young and Beautiful leads — tormentors and victims.

Interesting city/rural dynamic being set up here, adding more persecution complex and moral grievance to the provinces/”districts” imposed upon them by the big city elites.

Thanksgiving.

Ben Burghart and Jacob Burghart’s “Head Count” has enough wit, smart thriller problem solving and action to make one pass along a hearty “Let’s keep an eye out for what they do next.”

The movie, an expansion of a short they did about a chain gang and a guy who makes his getaway when a beast starts pulling inmates chained together into the brush for devouring, one by one, is pretty much all over the place after that, recreated for the opening here.

It’s a lighthearted dark-underbelly thriller that wastes screen minutes jumping back and forth in time, feeding sometimes superfluous backstory, all the while under-explained scenes, random “gags” and oddly-motivated actions by our hero and others are carried out with a vengeance and often deadly consequences. It’s cluttered and confusing for a movie only a lean 80 minutes long.

But the Burgharts lucked out with their star. Aaron Jakubenko (“TV’s “Tidelands” and “Roman Empire”) would carry this ungainly beast if it could be carried. Charismatic, with a light touch, we can believe he’s done something to put him on a chain gang just as we can believe he’d be the one his ex never gets over.

Cat’s on the world’s only after-dark rural roadside chain gang (!?) when a beast growls, the shocked sheriff and almost-an-idiot deputy (Ryan Kwanten) can’t stop it and Cat ends up stealing a police cruiser and making his get-away into the empty Kansas night.

He’s got a brother (Kyle Dyck) who might help him make his ill-planned getaway, “Saskatoon, Yellow Knife, Alaska, Russia, Santa’s Workshop.” But first he needs to hit the Stockyard, as Jo (Melanie Zanetti) is sure to be there honky tonking. We can guess who she was to him.

But before THAT, the movie has Cat break into the house of a relative for a bath, change of clothes and what not, only to have a couple show up who are NOT related, only to have that couple not be THE married couple you’d expect to find there, the ones who bought the house, but a wife’s nooner interrupted by the angry, big and cuckolded husband.

Bonus points for having the convict trapped under the bed long enough for strangers’ sexual congress to begin over his head, and then joined under the bed by the frantic and dismayed cuckolder, who may wonder how many side pieces this woman has?

The narrative jumps back and forth from a gun-to-his-head moment of truth for Cat, an end result that the picture clumsily takes us to, but not without a clever bit of foreshadowing and a few just random instances of weirdness.

That humiliated deputy is bound to track him down. So are others. But who’s holding the gun?

That opening chain-yank sets us up for a creature feature. That house Cat findself trapped under the bed in has this ultra creepy child-being-punished-staring-into-a-corner statue, another hint of horror.

It’s just a joke, kids.

But all those things considered, and for all of Jakubenko’s roguish screen presence, “Head Count” is decidedly less than the sum of its parts.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Aaron Jakubenko, Melanie Zanetti, Kyle Dyck, Chris Bylsma and Ryan Kwanten.

Credits: Directed by Ben Burghart and Jacob Burghart, scripted by
Ben Burghart, Jacob Burghart and Josh Doke. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:21

An oddly-dated, obvious and overwrought melodrama about gender roles and the toxic masculinity of Wall Street hedge funders, “Fair Play” is practically a parody of decades of women in the workplace romantic thrillers.

It’s got Phoebe Dynevor of the sexy Shanda soap “Bridgerton” in the Dakota Johnson role, and this festival-hyped feature debut of veteran serial TV writer (“Ballers”) and TV director Chloe Domont (“Shooter”) arrives at a moment when its timeless” gender-role” and glass ceiling issues could have renewed urgency.

But there’s not a subtle or particularly original moment in it. It starts over-the-top, and trots out every “ill-advised” workplace relationship cliche in print or on film in a film of bigger and more epic in-the-office tantrums, eye-rolling HR/Federal EEO violations and theatrical “I’m Mrs. Norman Maine” era throw-it-all away with alcohol-fueled immaturity tropes.

If you don’t find it a little funny, you’re not seeing co-star Alden Ehrenreich give a Judy Garland turn in a non-musical Douglas Sirk slap at dated mores and attitudes about male insecurity measured by a paycheck, you must be Ms. Domont.

Two stock analyists with a longstanding relationship show us a little affection and a lot of carefully guarded efforts to keep their “against company policy” coupling secret in opening scenes that lower the stakes a lot earlier than intended.

Emily (Dynevor) and Luke (Ehrenreich, of “Solo” and “Cocaine Bear”) make moon-eyed ” I wish we could tell the whole world” pronouncements. But while we see a hint of “smitten” from her, the relationship is um “painted” in sex scene cliches as they go at it in yet another slammed-against-the-wall/sex-in-a-bar-bathroom moment in the middle of a wedding celebration for Luke’s brother.

The fact that a woman director conceives this as shorthand for “our great love” and not parody is funny in itself.

“Over the top” begins with the “time of the month” nature of this impulse, and can only have “You look like you slaughtered a chicken” punchline. That’s the film’s lone amusing moment. But as the story marches straight into their “first real test,” we feel little heat, and little of love and tenderness in all this. If there’s chemistry in the couple, its chilly. Maybe it’s their line or work.

That “test” comes in their high-pressure/high-end “boiler room” of a workplace, where lowly analysts like them slave for credit-thieving PMs (portfolio managers), all at the pleasure of the their One Great Capital boss, Campbell, given owlish inscrutability that turns reptillian ruthless by the great Eddie Marsan, in the film’s best performance.

We witness a post-firing meltdown for the ages, watched with morbid, unconcerned curiosity by the room full or predators and wannabe-predators. Emily hears office gossip that Luke must be the choice to replace the PM who melts down, but almost the moment she passes that hopeful news on to her just-gave-her-a-ring fiance, we know it’s wrong.

Emily is confident, at ease and sharp and has the boss’s eye. She gets the promotion. And as he hears the whispers about “what she must have done” to get it from the piggish pack that they work in, he wonders, too.

After all, no over-achiever in a skirt from Long Island ever gets ahead in Bro-World without that, their limited thinking dictates.

“Fair Play” is about Luke’s feigned support and instant sense of emasculation, crawling into the bottle as his wife-to-be hustles to be the “star” her boss expects, with her offering to help Luke get the promotion he has built his life around and trotting through a parade of cliches, from Luke’s “not into it” sexual withdrawal to her “make it rain at the strip club” just to fit in with “The Boys” coming out.

Honestly, there’s not an original thought here, although Domont finds a few shades on well-worn tropes — what Emily discovers about Luke’s office rep, for instance. What Luke’s mindset lets him think about Emily seems a “Greed is good” era Wall Street movie cliche. And the wan love story has laughable “A Star is Born” attitudes trotted out as a straw man for Domont to swat around, as if this cultural debate doesn’t date from “Desk Set” to “Working Girl” and she just “discovered” it.

There’s suspense in how ugly this will all get as Domont serves up bigger and bigger meltdowns, teases us with Emily’s wheels-turning machinations to sabotage rivals and assist her future husband to create peace in the marriage-to-be.

Dynevor does her best to humanize Emily’s response to this threat to what she sees as her “traditional” future happiness. But Domont is more interested in sex as shorthand for “love” that turns to “violence” than presenting a great romance “shattered” in ways these movies and TV have covered for decades and that we all see coming.

Every generation discovers anew the work/family balance struggle, so that’s fair ground to cover. In an America in the midst of a renewed “war against women,” it’s timely to revisit this workplace dynamic with a Gen Z eye. But you’re kind of obligated to let on you’ve done more than watch other movies and television dramas on the subject so you can recycle the most extreme moments moments in a bid to go further and further over the top with them.

There’s veiled moralizing about what repellent creatures these hedge fund folk are without a hint of judgment about the work they do, incorrigible gamblers who traffic in gossip as “inside information” to place their next economy-buffeting “bets.”

But any movie that parks a woman in their midsts and has her drinking and strip-clubbing to fit in, that has our over-the-moon Romeo switch off and crawl into the bottle in a flash, all because his not-yet-wife is making a lot more money than he is, and isn’t simply sending those weary cliches up isn’t worth the hype.

Any movie that dares to make sex in yet another public pub restroom “romantic,” at this late date, is laughable.

Any movie that doesn’t think casting an actual “Mad Men” man (Rich Sommer) as a cutthroat upper exec isn’t as unsurprising as everything else seems ill-considered.

And any movie where, to paraphrase Chris Rock, you think Alden Ehrenreich “is the answer,” well come on.

Rating: R for pervasive language, sexual content, some nudity, and sexual violence

Cast: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Sebastian de Souza, Rich Sommer and Eddie Marsan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chloe Domont. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53