Movie Nation

“Seasons” is a tedious, tepid and inane romance about a woman who toys with her boy “friend” and reaps the consequences.

It’s meant to be a rom-com, but it isn’t the least bit funny. The leads are pretty, and Lovie Poe sings and co-wrote the screenplay. But it limps along from one improbable turn of events to the next, all of it meant to “test” a couple who give us no “spark” to make us root for them. Ever.

That’s something that might be missing from the long-term coupling of Charlie (Poe) and beau Kurt (Carlo Aquino). They look good together. He’s a 30something bar owner always coming to her rescue, propping up the part-time singer/full-time something in advertising — I think — always there for her at friend and family events.

But the “spark” was never there for this relationship to progress. Now good time Charlie is turning 32, concerned that her friends are well into marriages and child-rearing. So why doesn’t she feel more for “my best friend?”

If he’s got an issue, maybe that’s reflected in her quick-to-out-them-as-mismatched sex-partners at a group gathering. Maybe the ways she takes him for granted play into it as well.

Sure, she’s beautiful and fond of the bare-midriff look, which she always pulls off. But even Kurt knows that the gal-pal who calls him “Uggo” and who answers to him calling her “Uggo” is permanently in the “friend zone.”

As Charlie narrates the story (in Tagalog/Filipino/English, “Tanglish?” with subtitles, or dubbed), she made “the worst decision of my life three years ago.” That was when she taunted Kurt into trying online dating — with someone else — and she let him talk her into submitting to the entreaties of her lovesick co-worker, Hans (Jolo Estrada).

Charlie got stuck with a work “buddy” never destined to be a beau. And Charlie went out of her way to hook Kurt up with a cute cake-baker, Jane (Sarah Edwards) at a local restaurant.

As Charlie watches Kurt fall in love, she figures out her mistake. Only a desperate move — faking a pregnancy — can stop that Kurt-Jane trip to the altar, or so she thinks.

Poe’s a passable singer and perky leading lady, but this character is bland and there’s little she can do to fix that. Aquino has almost no screen presence. Yes, he used to be in a boy band.

There are situations here that have worked in other rom-coms. But you’ve got to get more “com” and at least a hint of “rom” in there if you want this to play.

Director Easy Ferrer lets this handsomely-mounted production just mope along until it slows to a crawl, never wringing a laugh or big romantic moment out of it.

“Seasons” isn’t as chaste as the romances we see from much of the rest of Asia. But there’s no edge to it, no stakes to the love affair and little for the viewer to invest in or root for. It settles on “insipid” and never manages to rise above it.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations and profanity

Cast: Lovie Poe, Carlo Aquino

Credits: Directed by Easy Ferrer, scripted by Dwein Baltazar and Lovi Poe. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

If you didn’t see “Glitter & Doom,” a wistful musical set to the songs of Indigo Girls, you should.

It’s damned adorable.

I saw it, but didn’t realize it was a harbinger of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers having ” a moment” this summer.

The ladies who rode into folk-rock immortality with this tune would see the song making another statement in a feminist “Barbie” movie that would become an unexpected blockbuster.

Having raised two girls who watched every cut-rate animated Barbie cartoon to come along, I’d never guess what Greta Gerwig would get out of A Doll’s Life.

But having interviewed the Indigos a few times over the years, I can say this couldn’t have happened to two cooler and nicer musicians.

Somebody re-release that single. Hey, it worked for Kate Bush.

“Closer to Fine” is even in the ads for “Barbie.”

Enjoy the ride, ladies. And take a bow.

The mere hint of the fights sampled here is “Old Boy” gonzo. Stuntman turned director Kensuke Sonomura (“Hydra”) really outdid himself this time.

“Bad City,” streams Aug. 1 and hits DVD Sept. 19 from our font of all fun films from Asia — Well Go USA.

“For a number of reasons, film buffs have long harbored the feeling that Orson Welles had a hand in directing some of — perhaps his own scenes — Carol Reed’s film noir masterpiece “The Third Man.”

The best arguments for that are Welles’ performance, his crackling good lines and big “cuckoo clock” speech, and the Wellesian camera placement and shot-framing of the inky-black post-war Viennese streets in that classic.

The best argument against Welles “co-directing” that film has to be “Odd Man Out,” made two years before “Third Man” by Reed, the first-ever BAFTA Best Picture winner and a film noir classic in its own right.

It’s another man-on-the-lam thriller and stars James Mason as a weary and wounded IRA section chief on the run after killing a clerk in a payroll robbery. Over the course of a day and a very long night, Johnny McQueen will drop in and out of consciousness, struggle to hide, meet a lot of folks on the fence about him and what he does, fans and friends hoping to help, bystanders fearful of IRA reprisals if they turn him in and those coveting the reward the authorities have slapped on his head to keep him from slipping out of Belfast.

Meanwhile his confederates, led by Denis (Robert Beatty) and egged on by Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), who loves Johnny, are trying to find him, debating how to manage that, arguing over what went wrong in the heist and how to get Johnny — already a wanted escaped convict — out of town.

Neither the “IRA” nor “Belfast” are mentioned, mainly to avoid U.K. censorship. John Ford’s “The Informer” had also skirted the murky-bloody politics of rebellion against British occupation and colonization. But Reed’s film has a definite Brit-centric bias, one that mirrors the F.L. Green novel it is based on, with even Johnny questioning his and his accomplices’ actions.

“I believe in everything we’re trying to do. But this violence isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Johnny’s mention of winning “at the ballot box” is a glib bit of British propaganda that ignores how they’d colonized the northern Irish counties with generations of loyal Scots to “pacify” the Irish, rendering such electoral hopes futile, something any IRA man would have known.

Johnny hides in a neighborhood air raid shelter, in a horse-drawn hansom cab, is taken in by strangers who think he’s been hit by a truck (he’s been shot in the arm and is bleeding out), holes up in a “snug” in a pub and falls under the control of a demented painter (Robert Newton) and his failed-surgeon (tumbledown) flatmate (Elwyn Brook-Jones).

All night, as the rain changes to snow and the police inspector (Denis O’Dea) turns the screws on Kathleen, she implores the IRA-friendly priest (W.G. Fay) and Dennis to get her to Johnny.

“Sooner or later, the police will get to him,” she pleads. “Let me have him until then!”

It is a beautiful black and white film of lovely, tight compositions, nervy hand-held shots mimicking Johnny’s frame of mind and gloomy, damply-lit and narrow West Belfast (and some London exteriors) streets, flats and factories.

No, it’s not as gorgeous as “The Third Man.”

The chases are well-handled even as Mason’s place in the film — he has few lines to start with, and recedes into the background in the middle acts — means that most of those chases will involve those in on the robbery with him — men played by Cyril Cusack, Dan O’Herlihy and Roy Irving — and his comrade Dennis.

Those scenes have a polished competence and brio to them, but the action beats of “The Third Man” are next-level thrilling.

Reed’s use of natural sound — streets, bar scenes, crowded tram, etc. — adds to the reality of it all, something replicated with “Third Man,” which also leaned on “The Third Man Theme,” that unforgettable piece of zither music, to place the film in its locale and heighten emotions.

But the “Odd Man” narrative loses much of its urgency in the melodramatic middle acts as Johnny slips into the background and assorted folks — two sisters (Fay Compton and Beryl Measer), the priest, the cabbie (Joseph Tomelty), and a barman (William Hartnell) ponder what to do with him or about him.

The most vivid characters in these scenes are the cynical brothel madam and “chancer” (Maureen Delaney) and greedy, broke barfly Shell (F.J. McCormick), the one fellow willing to admit he’d love to have the reward, IRA reprisals be damned.

But it’s Shell’s stumbling across Johnny that invites the mad painter and his never-quite-a-surgeon friend in. And Newton, raving and ranting, trashing a bar and wild about capturing on canvas “the eyes” of a “doomed man” before he perishes, ensures the finale is both action-packed and layered with pathos.

Mason, despite his fumbled efforts to tone down the posh Received Pronunciation accent to sound like an Irish Catholic ex-con, would call this his favorite role and go on to decades of greater glory as a great character actor and leading man.

Reed was already a veteran filmmaker with a dozen years of directing credits on his CV. He’d made some prestige pictures (“Night Train to Munich,” “The Young Mr. Pitt”) before, but “Odd Man Out” heralded his arrival on the pantheon of his generation of British directors.

“The Fallen Idol” would be his next film, followed by “The Third Man.” But after this brief peak, his work fell off until he got to make Graham Green’s “Our Man in Havana” in 1960, after which he took big checks for the epic “The Agony and the Ecstacy” and the blockbuster musical “Oliver!”

Watching “Odd Man Out” now, it’s easy to see that discounting Reed at his peak artistry is unfair, even as the superior writing, acting, pacing and production values of “The Third Man” still make it the best film Orson Welles didn’t direct. But pretending Welles didn’t make that movie what it’s become is just as incorrect.

Reed lifted his game and plainly took suggestions on set. Welles must have camera-blocked and scripted some of his scenes.

And “Odd Man Out,” if not Reed’s very best film, certainly shows us that “The Third Man,” “Fallen Idol,” Our Man in Havana” and the Technicolor glories of “Oliver!” were produced by a singular talent who only suffers when he’s compared to the greatest directors of his era — Welles, Ford and Lean among them.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: James Mason, Robert Newton, Kathleen Ryan, Cyril Cusack, Denis O’Dea, Dan O’Herlihy, Robert Beatty, W.G. Fay, F.J. McCormick, Kitty Kirwan, Ann Clery, Joseph Tomelty, William Hartnell and Elwyn Brook-Jones.

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by R.C. Sheriff. based on a novel by F.L. Green. A Two Cities/Univeral release available on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:56

A masterfully-marketed, cleverly conceived and brilliantly-acted SATIRE about a skinny “stereotypical” “perfect” plastic doll is melting down the late July box office with an opening weekend for the ages.

Warner Bros. was whispering “$75,” everybody else was saying “$125” but America’s women and girls and guys comfy in pink have MOBBED theaters since opening…afternoon.

Holy Plastic Pink and Pastel Mother of Gerwig, what hath Greta wrought?

I caught a packed “Barbie” (review here) showing Thursday at 3, a crowd deliriously applauding a movie in suburban Orlando before it ended, and left the theater at 830 with a lobby packed like a Pepto-Bismol meets Mary Kay sales meeting.

The film future is “pink.” Maybe there’s a political statement mixed in with this, too. You think? The usual conservative suspects are losing their cotton-candy minds over it.

“Biggest opening ever for a movie directed (and co-written) by a woman” probably drives them nuts, too.

The Hollywood Reporter is saying “$155,” Box Office Pro was hedging “$158+.” Deadline.com was saying “$150,” steamrollering a pre-pandemic level HUGE weekend, with over $308 million in tickets to all movies sold by midnight Sunday. That’s the biggest single-pic opening and biggest weekend of the moviegoing year.

It’s the fourth biggest movie weekend of all time, the biggest with no sequels or franchise, comic book movies in it. There’s life after Iron Man/Batman/Wonder Woman after all.

Deadline.com is reporting that the career-making Margot Robbie star-vehicle conceived and directed by Greta Gerwig as a FEMINIST manifesto did over over $1 million from a 500 theater Wed. opening, $22 million just Thursday afternoon and evening, all folding in to a Friday that pushed”Barbie” over $70 million by midnight Friday.

What did the playwright George S. Kauffman say? “Satire is what closes Saturday night.” Not this satire. Not this Saturday.

Overseas, it’s pulling in a $40 million+ weekend, creamy cocoanut frosting on a Dolly Parton cake, I tell you what.

Stunning. It’s not animated, not “Pixar” branded, not a comic book movie, sequel or otherwise, NOT A FRANCHISE. Yet. An original movie with wit and “womanist” messaging is remaking the summer cinema.

The three hour Epic-in-Every-Way “Oppenheimer” is rolling to a $80.2 million weekend after a $10 million Thursday added to a Friday “opening day” of $33 million.

All this despite limited showings because A) it’s NOT “Barbie,” B) it’s very long and B), it’s competing for IMAx screens with “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” ($$19.5 million), which is falling off well over 50% this weekend from last, and the weekday-popular (when all the retirees go to the movies) “Sound of Freedom,” which is falling off to a $20 million weekend after clearing the $100 million mark this week. It’ll be over $120 million by midnight Sunday, and will probably start losing screens — as will “Indy” and every other pre-July 4 movie, next week.

“Oppenheimer” is also on track to earn over $16 million from international markets on opening weekend.

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” has been in theaters since June and will pull in another $6.7 million for fifth place, over $160 by Midnight Sunday. It is winding up its run and shedding screens and that’s that.

Lionsgate’s unmarketed horror release “Cobweb” may crack the top ten, somewhere around “Insidious: The Red Door” on its third weekend.

If you look at the history of the suicide bombings as a weapon of Palestinian militants, you can see that it’s basically not happening anymore.

Sporadic rocket attacks and occasional shootings, yes.

So why release this movie when it feels somewhat out of date?

Maybe Israelis have bigger concerns that a movie like this might change the subject about.

Aug. 18, it opens in America.

We judge Mia, right from the start, because we’re invited to.

She’s very pregnant, pretty young and scrambling to get to her work, her classes and meeting her two children.

The classes are mandated by the state. There are drug tests to take. Her children are in foster care. And she’s late meeting them.

“I tried my best,” she says to her little boy, Tre. “This is not easy.”

Her daughter Shena isn’t speaking to her. Her child welfare case worker isn’t hearing it. Everything about Mia — starting with that instant-bad-impression neck tattoo, screams “impulsive” and “poor decisions.” We almost don’t need to learn that’s she’s a recovering addict.

“Earth Mama,” the debut feature of British born/Bay area filmmaker Savanah Leaf, is a “walk a mile in my shoes” drama of subdued emotions and intimate observations. She follows her heroine, played by rapper-turned-actress Tia Nomore, through the character Mia’s world — Oakland — struggling to keep a job, placate her religious, judgmental sister (Doechii), get her kids back from “the system” and bring her latest baby to term.

That sister isn’t dependable (I think she’s a sex worker, although that wasn’t made clear). There’s one friend, Mel (Keta Price) Mia can depend on. But with her mother and own family not in the picture, the baby daddies nowhere to be found, her support system is almost non-existent.

There’s one counselor’s she’s dealing with who might have be helpful. Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander) wants to help the single-mothers class of women who lost custody “get your kids back. But I can’t if you keep multiplying the household.”

It’s not just staying clean that will help her help them. She needs these women to stop having more babies while struggling with everything else life is throwing at them. And she’s the one who gently pushes Mia to giving up her unborn child for adoption.

“Earth Mama” is about Mia struggling with that decision, meeting prospective adoptive parents (Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Bokeem Woodine), keeping up with her classes and group counseling, hanging on to her portrait photography studio part time job and keeping appointments with the children she’s already brought into this world, kids who need “stability” more than anything else, the case workers and counselors insist.

Mia and we learn about the “anxiety” in addicts that “triggers” their need to use, and how job-one for every single one of these women is to “grow up.” That’s a big part of the solution to their lifetimes of bad decisions, even if it’s no guarantee they’ll earn an easier life by achieving that simple first goal.

Leaf intercuts snippets of “sharing” with the group moments, where women talk about their struggles and what keeps them going, adding authenticity to this fictional experience.

Nomore gives a documentary-real performance in the title role, showing us a flawed woman who is still young enough to blame others for her problems, and open to unhelpful suggestions about what “they” are doing when “they” take her children from her.

Leaf lays out the stresses facing Mia, but Nomore is the one who makes us feel them.

“I just don’t want to let anybody down” — her kids, her counselor, herself, her “family” and/or the people she can’t decide whether or not to give her baby to.

We never meet a baby daddy, and Mia declares she’s planning on living single from now on. Is this another rash decision, or a first step towards getting her adult footing?

That allows us to judge this “Earth Mama,” first encounter to last. But by the end, we’re a lot more sympathetic because this movie and this performance let us live in her shoes, just for a little while, and feel her burdens, grief, guilt and panic as we do.

Rating: R, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Keta Price, Doechii, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Bokeem Woodbine.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Savanah Leaf. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:38

It plays like a rowdy, raunchy 1970s Blaxploitation period piece. Because aside from cell phones, what’s changed in “tha’hood” in the past 50 years?

Gang-bangers, pimps and “ho’s” riding around in Yank tank Buicks, aimless souls pumping iron, hitting the convenience store for a scratch-off and a forty.

But that’s the whole satiric point of “They Cloned Tyrone,” a noisy, funny and ever-so-quotable comedy about the vast white wing conspiracy to keep the brothers and sisters down. Nothing’s changed in 50+ years because “There’s something in the water.” Or the fried chicken. Or grape drink. Or hair-straightener. Or the music.

Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier’s script was Black Listed, deemed “one of the best unproduced scripts making the rounds in Hollywood” about five years ago. Netflix finally produced it, with Taylor behind the camera directing, and it’s hilarious.

It’s about low-tier drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) who clumsily injures a rival invading his turf, gets a bellyful of lead because he’s not smart enough to see a reprisal coming, and wakes up to the same life, the same routine — “Got Drank!” convenience store for a 40 and a scratch-off, a quick cruise in his ’77 Buick LeSabre to hit-up pimp Slick Charles (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) for the drug cash he owes, same “ho’s” providing him information (Tamberla Perry) and sass, especially Slick’s favorite, Yo-Yo (Teyonnah Parris of “Dear White People” and “Chi-Raq”).

As Slick and Yo-Yo remember Fontaine getting ventillated, he starts to wonder just what’s going on in “The Glen” (Atlanta)?

With Yo-Yo doing some “Nancy Drew s—,” Fontaine stomping around like a grilled-teeth bull in an Atlanta china shop and Slick Charles casting out words of warning, they start to put it all together — the inane hip hop on every radio, the fried chicken that has folks lined up around the block.

“They say curiosity killed the cat. We some cats. COOL cats, but we still cats!”

The screenplay sings a song of silliness and conspiracy, start to finish. Like most “Black Listed” scripts, it’s movie-savvy — references to “Nancy Drew,” “Book of Eli,” “Training Day,” “Sophie’s Choice” and especially the Kevin Bacon thriller “Hollow Man” abound.

Screenwriters love referencing earlier screenplays via characters who speak movie shorthand.

“They ‘Clockwork ORANGING ni–as!”

The rolling tide of jokes and references includes a “Coma” inspired “Dexter’s Lab” filled with “Bill Nye-the-Science-Guy-looking-mother-f—ers.”

The world they create here is “Do the Right Thing” lived-in, complete with an aged, drunken sage, Frog (Leon Lamar) who cadges drinks in front of the Got Drank! and lets drop “There’s something in the water” and other pearls of wisdom about what’s really going on.

David Alan Grier, in a FULL Frederick Douglass wig, goes OFF as a singing, testifying and (spiked with mind-control drugs) grape drink communion preacher, a single scene that calls for a whole spin-off movie.

And if you need a conspiracy explained by one of the conspirators, you can’t cast better than Kiefer Sutherland. Maybe let the Canadian do a Southern drawl if he likes.

But Foxx, who had his “medical emergency” just before this production wrapped, is the life of the party, the pimp’s pimp and funnyman to Boyega’s stoic straight-up gangster straight-man. Foxx is on-fire, and you have to wonder how many of his one-liners he improvised, because as almost all of his lines land laughs, surely not not all of them can have been scripted.

“Just regale me the latest indignity suffered upon my ace boon coon.”

Our “Nancy Drew/Scooby-Doo” trio goes underground to the lab to find answers?

“We don’t spelunk! WHITE people spelunkers!”

Let’s hope Foxx gets his health, his voice and his wit back to full strength, because it’s impossible to imagine anybody else as funny in this role. And let’s hope the Writer’s Guild gets what it wants from Hollywood’s producers and studio execs. Writing this sharp deserves compensation and protection.

But once again Netflix giving a filmmaker final cut without sweetly-worded “notes” on pacing drags a movie down. Even the Oscar-nominated pictures from the streamer, from “Roma” and “Mank” on down to comedies, “Extraction” thrillers, the works, almost all play as long, as if “It’s on Netflix, nobody cares about ‘pacing'” when viewers are wandering into the kitchen, playing on their phones or taking toilet breaks.

The haste in rushing this out — supposedly, there were scenes Foxx didn’t finish before his health scare in April — may explain some of that. A little more editing time and maybe the filmmakers could have been convinced to tighten “Tyrone” and abandon a pointless anti-climax.

What we’ve got though, is a very funny movie with socially relevant bite, and the best “Get Well Soon” card Jamie Foxx could ever want.

Rating: R, violence, drug content, constant profanity

Cast: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonnah Parris, David Alan Grier and Kiefer Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Juel Taylor, scripted by Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

“Cobweb” is a horror genre piece as simple and to the point as its title.

A child hears noises in the walls of the old house where he lives, and in trying to raise the alarm with his parents, comes to wonder what their true nature is and just what they’re capable of.

First-time feature director Samuel Bodin proves sure-handed in dealing with the basics and produces a few truly hair-raising joles from Chris Thomas Devlin’s script.

But the odd dissonant note in a performance and stumbles in the plotting and especially the finale point to failures in execution and, when the chips are down, a loss of nerve.

Woody Norman, another moppet with the “child actor hair cut” (long, unruly) plays Peter, a lad bullied in elementary school and rattled by noises in the walls of his room at night.

His mother (Lizzy Caplan) teases his “over-active imagination,” and while his Dad (Anthony Starr) might give credence to the racket, he’s passing it off as “rats.”

But “rats” don’t whisper in a girl’s voice. Rat’s don’t pass on warnings about his parents, who won’t even let Peter go trick-or-treating, and aren’t shy about telling him of a girl down the street who disappeared on Halloween a few year’s back. Rats don’t coach Peter how to deal with the bullies at school.

With the bruises piling up at school and Peter doing chilling drawings in class in which he pleads “Help Me,” it’s no wonder his new teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) takes it on herself to check out his living situation and worry about his safety.

Virtually everything that happens in the third act summons up dusty, cobwebbed memories of the movies this one borrows from — a skittering, hairy monster of “The Ring,” masked intruders, a bloody showdown.

Caplan is the stand-out in the cast, hitting just the right shrill notes of the “a little…off” variety. But the kid’s not bad, Coleman’s properly plucky and Starr has his moments.

For a modestly-ambitious genre pic, “Cobweb’s” not all that original. But not that bad, either.

Rating: R, for horror violence and profanity

Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Anthony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman and Woody Norman

Credits: Directed by Samuel Bodin, scripted by Chris Thomas Devlin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Regal Waterford Lakes, Orlando, 833pm Thursday July 21.

“Barbie” fans represent. My review is here.

The movie, as of Friday AM, is on track to $100 million+ on its opening weekend, just in North America. Huge overseas, too.