Movie Nation

There’s always movie money to be made by pandering to a particular audience, be it comic book and sci-fi fanboys and fangirls, foodies, this under-represented race or that disrespected cult.

Back when it was called 20th Century Fox, somebody thought a movie about that obsession the far right has with child trafficking conspiracies might make some money. They may not have fathomed that they’d be pretty much target-marketing to a cult, validating and normalizing thinking that sent one nut looking for kid-smuggling tunnels beneath a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor.

Cast it with Mel Gibson’s “Jesus” from “The Passion of the Christ,” get the director of a passionately anti-abortion drama to direct it, base it on whatever one former government agent turned vigilante says he experienced fighting this monstrous crime says he witnessed and stopped, and that’s money in the bank, right?

Disney bought out Fox studios and didn’t think much of that “red meat to Q-Anon” cynicism, and this 2018-2019 film sat on the shelf until Angel Studios took it over.

“Sound of Freedom” came out July 4, reaching an audience of the curious, but pre-sold to a whole subculture of child sex-trafficking obsessed fanatics, the people who throw “groomer” and “pedo” around like they have first hand experience of it. And it’s a surprise hit. It’ll have cleared $80 million at the box office by the end of the weekend, if not sooner. It’s reaching its audience.

With Caviezel asking viewers to “buy more tickets”in the closing credits, actual attendance for this thing is hard to gauge. This crowd is largely made up of folks sending regular cash payments to the former grifter in chief.

But that’s not enough for the faithful. The conspiracy-minded have seen conspiracies behind everything about this movie, its middling reception from critics, to the number of screens it’s showing on and the frequency of its showings.

Angel Studios and AMC Theaters had to issue a denial that they were manipulating showtimes, disrupting schedules and dropping screens showing the film in an effort to suppress the Q-Anon crowd’s first excuse to go to a movie since the first Bush administration.

Have you heard the one about nanobots? AMC and Snopes had to smack that one down, too. Not every ticket buyer to this movie is a crackpot, but an awful lot of QAnon morons are in every showing, it would seem.

Almost everything about this movie is wrapped in controversy and crackpottery. Angel Studios started life as a Mormon movie operation that would edit all the naughty words out of your DVDs. I guess they’re learning what happens when you pander to cranks living in their fake news hysteria bubble.

I guess AMC also figured out, a bit late, that when you pander to the ignorant, base instincts of the conspiratorial fringe audience, this is your reward.

The “Operation Underground Railroad” “hero” of the film, Tim Ballard, exposed to the harsh light of day for a heavily fictionalized (lies) version of his life and his career, has had to “step away” from his own organization. He’s a Glenn Beck-backed self-mythologizer, kids. He exaggerates his exploits, and the extent of the “global child-trafficking pedophile conspiracy” to sucker people into giving money. He’s just been sued for child abuse.

Yes, it’s really happening and yes, those CCTV videos of Third World (mostly) abductions seen in the movie are real. Yes, it’s an awful thing that should be stopped. No, it’s not blown up to become this massive, pandemic-level tragedy. They exaggerate to feed on the hysteria ginned up by OAN and Fox hype.

Star Jim Caviezel’s fringe beliefs and Q-Anon conspiracy-backing activities have been aired and discussed.

And on and on it goes.

Actors and filmmakers are tale-tellers by profession, and quite aside from his A-to-B acting range, Caviezel is no different from any other person who takes on guises for a living. I covered his speech at a megachurch in Orlando some years back, when he stood at the altar and wept about how playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s hit, and controversial (anti-Semitic tropes) movie had “cost me my career.”

It was quite the performance. But Caviezel knew, as we all did the following week, that ABC was picking up the pilot to a new series by the hottest producer in Hollywood. Everything J.J. Abrams wanted to make he got to make back then, and “Person of Interest” was a sure thing the moment Caviezel was cast and Abrams & Co. put it in the can. Caviezel’s career wasn’t “cost” a damned thing. He lied, playing to his compliant (gullible) megachurch audience, selling them videos and his martyrdom.

Those of us who had the temerity to point out the movie’s shortcomings — leaving out the controversy and limiting our ridicule to the acting, the failed manipulations of what seems like an easy layup of a story — were immediately buried under hate mail and “pedo” comments from the deplorably unhinged.

I went back into my review and added links to a lot of the things mentioned here, just to make the review a “teachable moment.”

This movie’s box office take has been “gamed” by the fact that Caviezel urges viewers to leave the theater and buy more tickets to it. It’s a cheap “astro turf” way to make it appear its more popular than it is. I witnessed this first hand at a Danville, Va. cinema where I was about to watch “The Meg 2.” Elderly couple came out of “Freedom,” got back in line and bought more tickets. For nobody.

The dirt surrounding this picture keeps piling up. An actual sex trafficker of children was an “Angel” investor in it? Not at all surprised.

So no, I won’t be taking comments on this piece. I don’t have any interest in explaining what a movie review is to people who don’t know “opinion” writing when they see it because they’ve had that brainwashed out of them by the opinionated “news” liars (convicted, forced to pay out a $billion, and counting) at Fox.

All the”projecting” from confused, deranged people all worked up over what their Pied Pipers tell them to be worked-up over, while voting for actual pedophiles, groomers and traffickers (Trump, Roy Moore, Gym Jordan, Gaetz) and their enablers, all this fury over “Think of the children” when God forbid anybody suggest the sick, twisted gun-fetishists should be reined in to stop school shootings, who needs it?

If you’re gullible enough to believe the billboard I just saw, heralding “Sound of Freedom” as “The #1 Movie in America” on the weekend “Mission: Impossible” opened, the weekend after “Insidious: The Red Door” opened, etc., why waste keystrokes arguing with you?

There’s too much explaining of the basics to cranks who have no interest in learning anything.

My motto? Never try to reason with toddlers, drunks or conservative cranks. They’re irrational, quick to anger and in the end just wet their pants in fury.

“War Pony” is a compelling, wholly-lived-in drama that tracks the dead-end lives of two aimless young males of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska. We follow immature-even-for-19 Bill and tweenage Matho as they navigate their opportunity-deprived world of poverty, drugs and no parental guidance, each seemingly-destined to repeat the cycle that created them.

It’s moving and immersive experience with hints of “Trainspotting” in how it feeds our growing fear for who will pay the consequences for these awful decisions, and a taste of “Smoke Signals” and “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” in its depiction of life “as it is” “on t”he Rez.”

The film’s narrative aimlessness is in keeping with the life-paths of multiple baby-mamas Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) and just-starting-to-go-wrong Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and its humorlessness keeps the viewer at a sort of clinical remove from the characters.

Left with a depiction of reactive, impulsive and immature decision-making by young people almost wholly on their own in the midst of a culture that has collapsed — with only pow wows for show and a nice school most of the boys check out of — the overriding feeling this film feeds is despair.

One of Bill’s toddler-sons is with him in his mother’s house. Mom is a new grandmother who wears the mileage of a great-grandmother, and hearing his “I ain’t got time for this s–t” when he hears why Carly, the child’s mother, isn’t around annoys us almost as much as his mother.

“You ain’t got time for what ‘s–t?’ Your baby mama, or me?”

Carly’s been arrested. Her threatening “man-the-f–k-up” calls to her ex all on deaf ears. Bill doesn’t have any cash. He’s already moved on to Echo (Jesse Schmockel) and has a little boy with her, too. Not that she wants anything to do with him. That ancient Chevy Caprice he drives? Stolen from her, we gather.

Matho is a distracted boy of eleven or twelve who’s hanging with three other free-range tweens, smoking, pilfering, hitting on girls and scavenging each others’ houses and single-wides for food.

His occasional stumble into his druggy/maybe-dealing dad has the kid shrugging off “the last time you ate” questions. Not that we figure the two-fisted father-figure gives a damn.

Stealing Dad’s stash and making those first meth-pills sales earns Matho and his boys junk food to get them through another day. School? That’s for passing notes to girls and maybe acquiring that one sure-thing meal a day at lunch.

Bill’s job-hunting is half-assed, his eye for “opportunity” a bit juvenile. He finds a woman’s “poodle with papers,” returns her and resolves to raise the cash to (overpay) for the dog and breed it. Because poodles are a favorite accessory of the 17,000 or so Oglala Lakota Sioux who live there?

It’s while raising cash for the dog that he helps a white Nebraska rancher (Sprague Hollander) and haggles his way into a dubious “help around the place” job that includes drinking wine with Tim and his lonely wife (Ashley Shelton) hustling turkey-farmer/processor Tim’s assorted “girls” back to the Reservation after he’s enjoyed their company.

The poodle is impregnated, he has cash to “help out” Echo and their baby, and his mother and the baby he had with the still-jailed/still fuming Carly. Bill’s making it, he figures.

Matho just gets drunk and stoned and beaten and kicked-out of the house when his father figures out he’s been stealing. Matho’s lifeline is a woman who takes in boys, a woman who turns out to be a drug dealer who oddly demands that he “keep your drama out of my teepee.” With Matho trying like hell to grow up too fast and bravado his way into “manhood,” fat chance that’ll happen.

Each guy’s tenuous chance of beating Pine Ridge’s nationally scandalized low-life-expectancy is sure to be tested.

Co-directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough let the narrative drift from one lad to the other as they’re more interested in immersing us in the feel of this world and the logistics of this life. Their one artsy touch is having Bill stare down what we can guess is his spirit animal, a bison, a few times when he’s losing his way.

The hooting and hollering funeral caravan that makes up one scene is a Sioux spin on your standard American funeral, overloaded pickups weaving all over the highway in their procession. A bit more local color like that would have been appreciated.

The movie’s narrative and entertainment value attitudes seem summed up by Carly when she gets out of jail and Bill hits her with the “Mad at me?” baby-daddy puppy dog eyes that always seem to work for these dudes.

“Didn’t expect much from you.”

Whiting has a magnetic, young James Franco screen presence here, a bit dopey and lazy but somehow dangerous. Crazy Thunder’s Matho doesn’t meet Bill until the third act. But everything the younger kid does seems designed to emulate the older one and make Matho The Next Bill.

Its lack of star-power and depressingly downbeat story may limit this film’s prospects, even if Elvis’s granddaughter did have a hand in making it.

But the two Native actors-turned-screenwriters — Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy — whom Keough met while filming “American Honey” give “War Pony” an authenticity that is hard to beat. If it hurts a little and leaves you a tad hollowed-out by then end, that just means they got the details right.

Rating: R for drug and alcohol use involving minors throughout, pervasive language and some violence

Cast: Jojo Bapteise Whiting, LaDainian Crazy Thunder, Jesse Schmockel, Ashley Shelton, Sprague Hollander, Iona Red Bear

Credits: Directed by Gina Gammell and Riley Keough, scripted by Franklin Sioux Bob, Bill Reddy, Riley Keough and Gina Gammell. An eOne/Momentum Pictures release.

Running time: 1:55

“The Lesson” is a writerly thriller that spends the better part of its first hour trying to convince you it’s not “Deathtrap Lite,” no matter how many times its author-antagonist insists “Good writers ‘borrow,’ great writers STEAL.”

And then the final 15 minutes kind of undo all that effort in the most contrived ways imaginable.

But it makes a grand showcase for the snobby, aloof villainy of Richard E. Grant, who devours his best role in decades like a starving man who breaks his fast with caviar and canapes.

Britain’s “most revered writer” needs an Ox-Bridge pedigreed tutor to prep his teen son for an entrance examination, and that’s what brings Liam Somers (Daryl McCormack, the sex-worker in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”) into the home of novelist J. M. Sinclair (Grant). Not that he meets his idol. Not right away, anyway.

Art dealer/curator wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) handles that hiring and moves our would-be writer/hero into the guest apartment in their posh country home. Liam will drill, coach and counsel nervous, touchy Bertie (Stephen McMillian) through this all-important admissions process.

The son of the testy, five-years-“blocked” novelist will be “reading” for a class place in literature, of all things, and father’s too busy and as we gather, entirely too judgmental and lacking in Oxford/Cambridge experience to manage that prep himself.

A tragedy hangs over this house, an older son Felix who died. Liam must navigate not just the whims of the upper class — some nights, he’s invited to eat with them at their classical-music-underscored dinners presided over by the imperious workaholic Sinclair, some nights he isn’t — but the “rules,” which Hélène lays out.

“We don’t talk about his work,” she says. “And we don’t talk about Felix.”

But as Liam has been led to understand that Sinclair has, from time to time, “used” members of the family and short-term employees as his muse, clerk, proofreader and “amanuensis,” the fellow who made sure to pack his own handwritten manuscript when he moved in has hope.

A framing “prologue” shows Liam as a writer sitting down for a public Q&A about his work, and a “prologue” guarantees an “epilogue,” unless the screenwriter’s forgetful or prone to cheat.

So we know Liam is going to get something out of this, no matter how long it takes for the imperious, rude (“Close the door on your way out.”) and dismissive Sinclair to invite the young man into his writing sanctum and routine, no matter how challenging teaching his stressed, striving kid turns out to be, no matter what he learns about the death of the other son and no matter how much of a MILF the lady of the house might seem to be.

That’s a flaw this screenplay never quite papers over. By the third act, narrative problem-solving is abandoned altogether for a goofily ghoulish finale.

But Grant shimmers and seethes as the “revered” yet resentfully-pressured author who demands fealty and brushes off praise and criticism the instant he sizes up the stature and status of his new “helper.”

McCormack is rather blandly inscrutable as Liam, a character given the sort of prodigious memory one only sees in movies or lazy sitcoms where there’s a need for someone with a British Library-sized capacity for quoting the Bard and every-bloody-body-else who ever published a poem or book in the Mother Tongue.

Good scenes establish Liam’s hard-won ability to “pass” in this world of letters, Lizst and Rachmaninoff. A question about his taste in music is treated like another quiz this working class (Dad was in “IT”) lad must pass with his “betters.”

Bad scenes have him recovering an entire “lost” manuscript, which he’s read once, from memory.

The middle act manipulations leave one hoping the efforts of British TV director Alice Troughton and screenwriter Alex MacKeith (“Chubby Funny”) will amount to something worthy of Grant’s grandiose performance. “Good writers borrow, great writers steal” and all that.

What do you say about a script that doesn’t manage either, despite luring an ace-cast with a few well-drawn characters and couple of sharp scenes that stand out from the melodrama surrounding them?

“Close the door on your way out?”

Rating: R — violence, suicide, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Richard E. Grant, Daryl McCormack, Stephen McMillian, Crispin Letts and Julie Delpy.

Credits: Directed by Alice Troughton, scripted by Alex MacKeith. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:43

“The Miracle Club” is a downbeat Irish Catholic character study in a minor key, a period piece about the tragedy, desperation and simple superstition that sends the faithful to the French shrine at Lourdes in search of “the cure.”

What recommends the film is the sadness of it all, as it isn’t just physical maladies that motivates these characters to seek the salvation of “Our Lady.” Grief, guilt and regrets bond these women on their 1967 pilgrimage. And the fact that their ranks include Oscar winners Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith and Oscar nominee Laura Linney makes it an acting showcase for legends of the silver screen.

An old woman has died in Ballygar. Her estranged daughter Chrissie (Linney) has come all the way from Boston, but just missed the viewing and church service. Father Dermot (Mark O’Halloran) is full of reassurances that her mother was loved and will be missed, but Chrissie seems disconnected from that. She just wants to know who paid for the flowers, so she can pay them back.

Her mother had been organizing a church talent show/fundraiser, whose top prize is tickets to the church-sponsored bus tour/pilgrimage to Lourdes. Mother Maureen had a ticket to go, but her niece Eileen (Bates) and oldest friend Lily (Smith) formed a singing trio in the hopes of winning their way their way onto the bus.

Their third singer, Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) has a 4 year-old boy who hasn’t spoken yet, and Lily isn’t singing to seek a “miracle” for the club foot she was born with. She wants to help Dolly. That’s Eileen’s motivation, too. That, and this worrisome lump in her breast.

They all have disapproving, doubting and absurdly-needy husbands (Mark McKenna, Niall Bugger and Oscar nominee Stephen Rea) they could use a break from. Eileen’s big, clingy Catholic family and all their problems are another motivation for her to flee.

And then there’s the stark and secret connection the older women share, hinted at by the seawall shrine Lily visits almost daily to a son who drowned there 40 years before. Something still has Eileen carrying an ugly grudge, Lily wracked by grief and Chrissie hardened to loss and regret.

Veteran Irish director Thaddeus O’Sullivan (“Nothing Personal”) does well by his leading ladies, showcasing Bates in a role that calls for mercurial turns of temperament — testy, sarcastic, tender and vulnerable. Eileen’s to-her-face insults to Chrissie are jaw-droppingly cruel and Bates’ accent easily passes the ear-test. Smith’s Lily is the most devout and seemingly the most magnimous. But her magnanimity can flash its nasty edge when it comes to Chrissie.

Linney’s Chrissie is harder to pin down, a woman who almost regrets showing up for her mother’s funeral because she can trace a lifetime of hurt and damage to this town and these people. Her decision to join the pilgrimage is the most abrupt and contrived.

O’Sullivan gets a little out of the lighter moments, and the film’s budget precludes making the bus tour anything but digitally-augmented perfunctory. We see the same bus and same set-dressing Mini and Citroen in scene after scene.

But they all do justice to Lourdes as an experience that’s holy, and wholly commercialized ballyhoo. Some of the best-written scenes have the ladies’ illusions stripped away, cynicism almost overwhelming them and the priest hastening to explain that you don’t come to Lourdes for a “miracle,” but for the strength to “carry on” when no miracle is forthcoming.

I also liked the way the characters address the burdens of being a woman in a country and a time where the Church dictated a ban on not just abortion, but birth control, and staked an unholy claim on unwed mothers and their babies. Shared tales of attempted miscarriages are have a hint of desperation, and an almost comical resignation about them.

But this uneven and often unsatisfying dramedy’s saving grace might be the sadness that permeates the sunny settings, the sunny bus ride and the beatific awe they feel upon reaching that holy grotto and giving themselves over to the water “cure” machinery the nuns there run.

“The heartbreak of the world is upon us,” Lily declares, and so it is. And no “miracles” will alleviate it. Only a tiny dollop of closure delivered with compassion helps, and even that’s never really enough. Evolving, liberating “change” is the subtext this “Club” hints at but never really grapples.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and some language

Cast: Kathy Bates, Maggie Smith, Laura Linney, Agnes O’Casey, Mark O’Halloran and Stephen Rea.

Credits: Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, scripted by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:31

Friend, if you can’t get an entertaining documentary built around defiant, defensive, sassy and verbose Black transgender sex-workers, you’re talking to the WRONG Black transgender sex workers.

Transgender filmmaker D. Smith finds a fascinating subjects to profile in New York, Miami and Atlanta — almost everywhere BUT Kokomo, Indiana — for “Kokomo City,” a raw and rough, blunt and bold look at the people doing this work, the “community” they come from and the men from that community attracted to them.

If you don’t think this is a touchy subject, you must not have been paying attention to Black comics like Kevin Hart or Tracy Morgan or the long history of open homophobia in that community.

Smith is canny enough to remind the viewer that age-old numbers like “Sissy Man Blues” point to a whole other side of Black life, one not often openly acknowledged.

Assorted trans sex workers talk about men, “the trade,” “biologicaal women” and “getting work done” and what one does if not enough “work” has been “done.”

“We be broken down, but we NEED to stand out!”

The film’s a series of interviews edited into monologues in the often-vulgar but occasionally-insightful street argot of their corner of the Black world.

When transgender prostitutes get beaten up is a hard and fast truth to these hookers.

“Violence don’t happen before the orgasm. It happen after,” a form of “acting out” on one’s “embarassed masculinity,” Dominique Silver explains.

Smith, a singer who transition, gives us an intimate portrait of this segment of the transgender sex worker workforce, catching prostitutes as they primp to go out, groom their facial hair and lie in the tub ruminating the meaning of their existence, their ongoing beefs with society, the system, men and women and their struggle for “acceptance.”

There’s a lot here to offend the easily-and-not-so-easily offended, so if the “B” word and “N” word and “C” word sprayed about life confetti bother you, or the very idea of transgender triggers you, “Kokomo City” isn’t a stop for you.

But these generally uninterviewed sex-workers will give you an earful if you give them the chance. They tell tales from “the life” and dream of moving out of it. Because they all know the lyrics to the Randy Crawford/Crusaders tune that opens the film — “Street Life.”

“Street life, but you’d better not get old, street life, or you’re gonna feel the cold.”

But the film’s more unusual interviews come with from “trans-attracted,” men who have formed relationships with former sex workers, book night clubs with trans revues and who address the “fetishes” some of the sex workers have observed in their attraction.

“It depends on what state I’m in,” one music promoter shrugs. “If somebody’s attractive, they’re attractive.”

Some of the psychological and sociological opinions delivered are more colorful than peer-reviewed and proven. And some of the pontificating is wearing in that particularly gay trans narcissist way.

But “Kokomo City” is eye-and-ear-opening and mind-expanding and easily the most colorful black and white documentary you’re going to see this year. Guaranteed.

Rating: R (Strong Sexual Content|Drug Use|Language Throughout|Graphic Nudity)

Cast: Koko Da Doll, Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell, Michael Carlos Jones, Dominique Silver, Lexx Pharoah, Rich-Paris and Xotommy

Credits: Directed by D. Smith. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:13

Shades of “Point Break,” mate.

Looks solid and salty. July 28.

Leon talks a good game.

He’s come to the summer house of a friend, in the forest set back from the sea, to “work.” He has “a manuscript” and a “deadline.”

The friend — Felix — wants to dash off for a swim, fix a leaking roof on his mother’s cottage, socialize. He too has a “deadline,” a photography portfolio to finish for an art school application.

But Leon is the one who says “work” all the time. “I need to work alone.” “I have to go. Work.”

Noises — from the woods, planes and helicopters overhead, the other woman staying in this house in the words having sex — distract and alarm him. He’s always dozing off and rarely really zeroing in on the task at hand. What’s up with that?

At least his intense focus on the “work” that he’s not really doing, the deadline he’s probably going to miss, keeps his head down. All around him, people are recreating, chatting, enjoying their time off as if they also have limited time.

A cataclysm is coming. Those planes and helicopters? They’re hauling water. Just down the way, the forest is “Afire” and getting closer all the time.

The latest from writer-director Christian Petzold– “Undine” and “Phoenix” were his — isn’t a disaster movie. It’s another character study in Germanic stereotypes and a romance that never quite becomes romantic.

He has Felix (Landston Uibel) drag his friend Leon (Thomas Schubert) away for a long weekend at his mother’s hutte by the sea. And once there, Felix and we wonder why in the hell he would bother.

Leon is pedantic, sullen, dull and humorless, an all “work” wet blanket. Even the fetching young “seasonal worker” (Paula Beer) also staying at Felix’s mother’s place can’t drag him out of his funk.

Leon won’t go swimming. He’s constantly trying to get Felix on task — either finishing his portfolio, getting the Mercedes that broke down on the way fixed, or fetching groceries. He’s tactless to Nadja about her noisy love-making, and about her job. She can’t even bribe him into being human with an offer of a free ice cream cone from her resort town cart.

“I’m not a big fan of ice cream.”

As romance and hurt feelings and short tempers and increasingly alarming signs of the fire-to-come swirl around him, Leon will have to break out of his existential funk if he wants to survive and if he wants his “work” to be readable.

Schubert, an award-winning young Austrian actor, makes Leon on-the-spectrum unlikable pretty much start to finish. Leon’s self-seriousness crosses into insufferability. So there’s no sense confessing his love to the pretty woman he can’t have a conversation with without insulting her.

Uibel’s Felix is more carefree, open to experience and distraction. Uibel doesn’t have much to play in a light character with a casual disregard for deadlines and risk. Even though he never becomes a sweetness and light “type,” we never stop wondering why he brought this stick in the mud with him.

Beer, who played “Undine,” leans into guarded but beguiling here, a free spirit who keeps her secrets even as she’s reaching out to this hapless, tuned-out narcissist who seems to live his life by the rules and a discipline he professes but rarely practices.

“Afire” is a dry, downbeat character study for the first two acts and a film that turns to melodrama — the fire upon them — for the third.

It’s likeable and engrossing, with Petzold not shy about spending the time to let a wild card character, lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs), tell an anecdotal joke that only a German would find funny, or to bring in Leon’s publisher/editor late in the story to sort of “explain” why Leon’s the way he is.

The film, titled “Roter Himmel” (Red Sky) in Germany, makes an intriguing journey from irritating to melancholy and sad thanks largely to an engaging cast and a filmmaker brave enough to bore and annoy us before belatedly getting to his point, which we’ve known it all along.

Rating: unrated, animal peril, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Petzold. A Janus release.

Running time: 1:44

I really enjoyed this moody Chinese film noir about an inmate remembering why he’s in prison.

“Spare, dark and gritty,” an award winner at Cannes, this Film Movement release deserves a bigger audience.

Now the good folks of Maitland, Florida can enjoy a movie with subtitles added to their library’s collection.

MovieNation, spreading fine foreign language cinema all over the Southeast, no matter how much their George Wallace wannabe governors may hate the idea of minds being broadened by movies.

The first time I heard that Britishism disguised by the clever British acronym “Cee YoU Next Tuesday” was right around the first of October, 1980.

And because it came out of the plummy, posh Oscar-winning mouth of the late Glenda Jackson, it went right by me.

I can pinpoint this date because she said it in the movie “Hopscotch,” a jaunty little spy comedy starring her and set up as a star vehicle for Walter Matthau. Last night I spat out my Guinness in comic surprise at having missed the joke, the first time around.

Jackson wasn’t the first person I heard use the Yiddishism “feygeleh,” probably the origin of the gay slur, something her character drops into a description her character is passing onto Kendig, played by the Yiddish-mad Matthau. Mel Brooks slipped it into “Blazing Saddles” and maybe elsewhere, if memory serves. It too, is kind of an out-of-nowhere gag that trots by without notice.

The first time I interviewed Matthau was about the movie “I.Q.,” in which he played The tallest Einstein Ever. As he and the great scientist were contemporaneous enough to have possibly met, I asked him when he’d have said to Albert E. if he had the chance.

Matthau said “I’d have probably have told him a joke in Yiddish. Einstein LOVED Yiddish!”

Then Matthau, who got his start in New York’s Yiddish theater, launched into an off-color comic anecdote/joke about three men, in Yiddish. It took a minute of two to get to the punchline, in Yiddish. Which he then breathlessly translated. HILARIOUSLY.

Matthau was mad for Yiddish, relished a joke well-told, adored Mozart and loved the high life he both worked his way into with his acting, and that he married into by tying the knot with the famous playwright William Saroyan’s ex-wife, the celebrated socialite Carol Marcus.

“Hopscotch” was thus tailor-made for the then-60 year-old Matthau, a comic actor having a grand second wind in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He’d play a globe-trotting spy who doesn’t take being put out to pasture well.

Using his spycraft, and with a little help from a retired Brit lady spook and lover (Jackson), Kendig” would “Hopscotch” around Europe and America, teasing his amoral CIA boss (Ned Beatty) and his Old World Charm Soviet nemesis (Herbert Lom) with a tell-all “tell-the-truth” memoir about spy-shenanigans with dictators like Somoza and Papa Doc and the “mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjold.”

In a post-Watergate age of growing government mistrust and government agency misbehavior, the rival spy agencies would do anything to silence this rogue agent who was telling all their secrets. Kendig? He’d travel from Salzburg to Switzerland, London to Marseilles and even Savannah, skipping along, using old contacts and everything he knew about his hunters to evade them and vex them no end, sending them one scandalized chapter at a time.

“Hopscotch” thus becomes a comic thriller and travelogue, with Matthau in assorted Homberg hats, safari jackets and trenchcoats, merrily plotting this trick, that escape and the occasional humiliation, singing along, humming and on occasion conducting the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart every step of the way.

British cinematographer/producer/director Ronald Neame, who got his start shooting the films of David Lean in the ’40s, wasn’t known for comedy. “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Prime of Miss Jean Brody” were his most famous films. But Mozart turns this bon bon of a movie into a bouncy little gambol of a Grand Tour.

How much did Matthau love Mozart? On his one visit to “Saturday Night Live,” he threw his weight around (a lot, according to the cast) and made cast-member Garrett Morris the night’s musical guest, singing a Mozart aria.

The film is a case study in effortlessness. It’s never hilarious, but the laughs stick with you and there are chuckles scattered throughout this picture. Matthau is playing at playing a spy, and he makes damned sure you know he isn’t trying too hard.

In one scene, recognized as a blown take that got in the movie, he’s typing away at his book in the vacation home of his hateful, violent (and foul-mouthed) boss, “C U Next Tuesday Meyerson (Beatty)” outside of Savannah when Kendig returns his typewriter carriage a bit clumsily and knocks over his just-opened bottle of Michelob.

Not in the script. Matthau, unrattled, stays in character, picks up the beer the way every one of us would in such a mishap and drinks it to stop it from foaming all over everything.

The whole movie is like that, with Jackson lending her equally effortless “touch of class” to the proceedings right from her “meet cute” introduction.

“Oh where have you BEEEEEN you old GOAT?”

I hadn’t watched “Hopscotch” all the way through in decades, but the scenes that stick still stick, and the charm just twinkles off scene after scene. Matthau and Jackson, who had clicked in “House Calls” a couple of years earlier, have a laid-back chemistry that’s hard to top. Beatty makes a perfectly vile autocratic villain. Lom, the “Pink Panther” series veteran, stands out among the supporting cast, and look for Matthau’s son and stepdaughter in cute bit parts.

Munich, Salzburg and Savannah and environs make it feel Bond-lite, a well-traveled caper comedy as spy thriller with laughs instead of bloodshed and stakes so low you never for a moment fear for the safety of our “Barber of Seville” singing hero.

It’s as watchable as ever, so See it Next Tuesday or at your convenience.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom and Sam Waterston.

Credits: Directed by Ronald Neame, scripted by Brian Garfield and Bryan Forbes, based on the novel by Brian Garfield. An AVCO Embassy release on Movies!, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:46

“My veins no longer pump the blood of life,” Gus purrs to Irene, when he finally gets her to agree to go out with him. “We NEED you to nurture me back to life, Irene. An ETERNITY awaits us!”

Irene? She’s hearing those alarm bells go off, the ones that might have been dinging the first few times this gorgeous, foreign-accented Adonis hit on her as he was jogging. But then Irene (Jamie Bernadette) didn’t know women named Iris and Ireland and Ivy and Irerce and Ira have been getting killed all over metro Atlanta, apparently by a serial killer who can’t spell worth a damn.

There’s something about this Augustus “Gus” fellow (Luca Della Valle) who’s haunted her dreams, something from Catholic mythology, something about a saint pierced by a bunch of arrows, as if that excused this weirdo going around town gutting women with an ancient spearhead.

“Sebastian,” this ridiculous, almost-not-quite-amateurish picture’s title, is our clue.

The slickest thing in this no-budget indie is writer-director Mann Robinson’s animated production logo. But hats off to anybody who gets his or her script written, talks just enough “name recognition” talent to sign on to get it financed, filmed and released…to Tubi.

That Mr. Mann must be damned persuasive. I lost count of how many grown-ass-actresses he talked into taking their tops off for this fiasco.

The acting isn’t awful, although if I see one more student-film-level flop with veteran character player Clifton Powell‘s name in the credits, I’m taking that as a warning.

The story — cops (Torrei Hart and Darius McCrary) slow-walking and stumble-footing their way through disappearances that turn into murder cases, poor Irene abused by her cheating bro beau (Michael Emery), then courted by the tall, dark stranger “Gus” — has zero forward momentum. It’s a still-life.

And the dialogue?

“This s–t is SERIOUS,” the captain (Powell) says.

“That serious, Captain?”

“SERIOUS.”

Me? I’m getting too old for this s–t.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity, profanity.

Cast: Jamie Bernadette, Luca Della Valle, Torrei Hart, Darius McCrary and Clifton Powell.

Credits: Directed by Mann Robinson, scripted by Ken King and Mann Robinson. A Mann Robinson Production on Tubi.

Running time: 1:30