Movie Nation

Trying to build a lockdown drama around “What we learned” during the Pandemic — about outselves, our racial divide, our “privilege” and our empathy — would be a daunting task for anybody.

As yet, virtually no one’s quite gotten their arms all the way around it. “The Same Storm” came the closest, a film by one of our most’s empathetic filmmakers, Peter Hedges.

So there’s no shame in trying and failing. But Daniel Holland’s “Moon Students” opens its arms wider and wider…and trips, stumbles and exasperates as it does.

A bitter college professor (Nicholas Thurkettle) takes out his utterly-exhausted patience on two disorganized, unprepared students who botch their presentation on what turns out to be the last day of classes at L.A. Coastal College before COVID shuts the school down.

Ethan Cole dismisses Lita (Sydney Carvill) and Antonio (Eddie Navaro) with extreme prejudice. Antonio doesn’t take it well, and seems to go all punk on Cole’s “My first name is either Mister or Professor” attitude

A dean (Rachanee Lumayno) tries to make peace. As an assault was involved, the fact that she doesn’t toss the kid and/or call the cops says something.

Antonio is encouraged to drop out, the struggling professor teaches the remaining students remotely, and Antonio’s relationship with Lita deteriorates as he drinks and breaks quarantine, drives them to San Diego to “hang with my homies” and basically makes us wonder what Lita sees in him.

It’s a movie of long and somewhat inane monologues, starting with the bookish pal D’Andre’s (B.A. Tobin) San Diego soliloquy mashing up “Hamlet” with Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.”

Professor Cole’s obsession with the near-run thing that was the Apollo 11 Moon landing is his anaology for what he’s hoping for from his students, “American exceptionalism” of a sort, overcoming long odds to achieve greatness.

We’re a long way from that peak moment, the movie suggests. And maybe the white folks who mythologize should get a clue.

Lita is of the opinion that students’ struggle and back-stories are worth considering in how you treat them. What really happened in that office that last day of class?

Everybody deals with loss, before and during COVID. And everybody’s kind of asking for “one true thing” out of their human connections.

“Moon Students” has a couple of nice locations and a few theatrical scenes and moments in scenes. It’s collected awards from some lesser known festivals.

The players don’t embarrass themselves, but don’t really move us when they’re supposed to. The script? Kind of a collage of impressions and feelings about America at its peak — July, 1969 — and during the pandemic and after.

I found it pretentious in those moments where it wasn’t subjecting the viewer to some banality being passed off as insight, or some racial epiphany about John Sayles’ labor movement classic film, “Matewan,” with one of them mispronouncing the title.

These “Moon Students” missed their Moon shot, and not by a little. By a lot.

Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, some profanity

Cast: Sydney Carvill, Nicholas Thurkettle, Eddie Navarro, Nicholas Heard, Rachanee Lumayno and B.A. Tobin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Holland. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:49

Kim Seon-Ho stars in this Park Hoon-Jung action pic from KPop Land

June 30 is when we see it in theaters.

Cage at his Cagiest, a “Collateral” plot, a July 28 release.

It’s not just the title that makes “One Night Stand” the raciest, most sexual Indonesian film to ever make it to Netflix.

It opens with a fevered road-side in-the-car hook-up — in broad daylight on the access road to an airport, no less — and ends with a bit of a bender that climaxes in the clenches.

But this being conservative Indonesia, it still earns a TV-14 rating — no nudity, nothing graphic and no profane come-ons or pillow talk.

Don’t let that smiley/flirty photograph posted above fool you. This is from late in the third act of what might be the slowest movie since that holiday favorite, the Yule Log-on-fire video.

The moment “they” meet inertia sets in. Ra (Jourdy Pranata), whom we’ve seen in the throes in that sex-before-flying prologue set one year earlier (?) has just landed in Yogyakarta for the funeral of his mentor’s wife. Lea (Putri Marino) was sent to pick him up.

And as the fetching assistant and the hunky young painter walk and talk through the airport at one third the normal speed, one first gets the feeling one is watching paint dry. In the humid, forever-to-dry tropics, no less. It’s as if the camera operator had a bum leg, or nobody involved wanted to leave the air conditioned indoors. SLOW walking.

There’s a lot of walking and talking and driving and talking in this film, with these two cute but dull characters sizing each other up and Ra not very coy about dodging the calls from some other woman back home. Was she the hook-up at the airport the year before? I think that’s implied, but their brief phone chats give NO clues, and do nothing to spice up the plot, or advance it.

He’s plainly interested in Lea, and after the funeral, makes his play. Would she accompany him to the wedding of an old friend?

The sole Around the World with Netflix value in this Adriyanto Dewo film — in Indonesian with subtitles — is in its depictions of Indonesian funeral rites and wedding traditions.

Agreeing to accompany a guy she just met doesn’t mean Lea won’t be subject to immersion in wedding prep rituals — made-up, hair-done and loaned a dress and welcomed as a member of the wedding party, even as a stranger.

It’s only after these two tentative, fairly tedious people get drunk on the beach that they “get real,” as the kids used to say. And get busy. But even that’s pretty tame.

Tedium itself, this “romance” has little point, and takes an absurd amount of slow-walking time getting to it.

Rating: TV-14, sex, drinking

Cast: Jourdy Pranata, Putri Marino

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adriyanto Dewo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

“Anonymous Sister” is one filmmaker’s effort to tell the story of America’s “man-made”/Purdue Pharma engineered opioid epidemic simply by the impact on her family.

Writer-director Jamie Boyle tells the story of growing up during the birth of the opioid crisis and how it almost consumed her sister and her mother and the toll that took on a tightnit group, a toll that they’re still feeling today.

Boyle profiles and interviews her sister Jordan, siblings so tight that Jordan describes younger sister Jamie as “the other piece of my heart” pretty from birth. She intereviews her mother Julie and details their lives before, during and after her and Jordan’s addiction to Oxycontin, Vicadin and the opium-based pain pills America’s doctors were mad to prescribe from the ’90s to very recently.

She interviews other addicts, a Purdue Pharma rep, and a doctor who is one of the leading experts on this “epidemic,” its cause and its effects. She uses archival news coverage, old home movies and the years of family video about this struggle, including snippets from a student film about her mother and sister, to paint a personal portrait of a national tragedy created by marketing so pervasive it changed our notion of “pain tolerance” and “pain management” to suit the needs of Purdue and the Sackler family that controls it.

The film is both touching and infuriating as Boyle shows us as direct a cause-and-effect in an addiction case as any documentary ever.

Home movies capture pre-school Jamie begging her dad to let her do the video recording, the girls’ early fascination with figure skating after seeing Kristi Yamaguchi win Olympic gold in 1996, and Jordan’s body-and-soul commitment to the sport, with her parents detailing the staggering cost of training, equipping and supporting her. Mother Julie took on a cleaning job just to cover that.

Driven and perhaps guilt-ridden over the cost of her obsession, Jordan skates until she gets nerve damage in her feet. That pain leads her down the road to Oxy, in ever-growing doses.

“I will never be able to stop this,” Jordan recalls thinking as her elevated, “happy” state set in. The drug made her “so much better at my life.” What could be the harm?

Her mother travels her own chronic pain to Oxy/Vicadin path. And her husband and especially Jamie are witnesses to and eventual interveners in a years-unfolding family disaster brought on by drugs whose maker insisted were “not addictive.”

Julie Boyle notes that the “drugs alter your reality,” that “it didn’t feel like a ‘high.’ I’ve been high.”

This was an expensive, destructive new “normal” that grew more dangerous as tolerances built up and higher doses were required.

“Anonymous Sister” recounts the Oxy scandal that blew up just as the Bush Recession set in, and how little changed despite the admissions of lying, manipulation of public opinion and government complicity in this lax oversight of “prescription heroin.”

The Boyles are straight-up middle-class suburbanites, so there’s no “Hillbilly Heroin” labeling as “something poor fall into” here. This could happen to just about anybody.

The inclusion of extensive home movies and deep-embedded background that Jamie Boyle’s direct witnessing of all this lends “Anonymous Sister” an authenticity and personal investment that few films on this subject could match.

And the presence of experts and decades of news coverage — first hailing this “breakthrough” on “pain,” then decrying the rampant profiteering that turned whole states into mass-death Oxy Zones, the greed and cynicism that that made the Sacklers rich and almost consequence free — make one hope that “Anonymous Sister” will not simply be lost in a video market flooded with documentaries.

It should play on cable news network as a first person account of a major story, and programming that’s a lot less embarassing and repetitive than the standard fare on most of those services.

Are you listening, CNN?

Rating: drug abuse subject matter, some profanity

Cast: Jordan Boyle, Jamie Boyle, Julie Boyle, John Boyle and Dr. Andrew Kolodny

Credits: Directed by Jamie Boyle. A Long Shot Factory release.

Running time: 1:33

This 1981 French election-year period piece has Charlotte Gainsbourg as a newly-divorced woman with two kids, who takes on a radio gig and takes in a troubled teen she meets on the street.

“The Passengers of the Night” — very evocative radio audience title — opens June 30.

Irene is young, dancing along the fine line between those French labels “gamine” and “coquette” as she dreams of glory as an actress.

She’s in her late teens, eager to be accepted in a Paris conservatory, supported by her widowed father, her fellow actors and her audition partner Jo. She is a woman-child who attracts attention, and gives it whenever a handsome young man crosses her path.

But “A Radiant Girl” can still have problems, even if she’s loathe to let on. She faints a lot, and it might be due to stress, low blood sugar or something else going on.

It’s 1942, Paris is occupied by the Nazis. And Irene, played to the coquettish hilt by Rebecca Marder of “Someone, Somewhere,” is Jewish. What on Earth could have her “stressed?”

“We’ve become the topic of conversation….It’s unfashionable to be Jewish,” her father shrugs. Irene shrugs as well. She’s got her scene from a play by Maivaux to memorize, rehearse and polished to a talent-that-will-not-be-denied gleam. Ever tightening Nazi “rules?” No concern of hers.

Writer-director Sandrine Kiberlain’s Holocaust Era drama is something of a curiosity, a film that takes us into Irene’s denial, the focus of a committed actress and the flightiness of an indulged child who isn’t letting the never-seen Germans step on her dream.

But as her widowed father (André Marcon) grows increasingly alarmed that his “just follow their rules” won’t save them, as her audition partner Jo (Ben Attal) disappears, perhaps having fled the country, as the red rubber stamp that identifies her as “Juive” on her “papers” is supplanted with a yellow star-of-David badge, as her musician brother (Anthony Bajon) loses his girlfriend and the “no radios” and “no Jews admitted to the Conservatory” rules pile up, maybe Irene will get a clue that the lure of the limelight is a fatal attraction and perhaps a deadly distraction.

“A Radiant Girl,” titled “Une jeune fille qui va bien” doesn’t just keep the Germans out of sight. It lulls Irene and us to the danger she’d rather not consider. There’s a boy ardent for her affection, a handsome doctor’s assistant that makes her heart flutter and the missing Jo, whom we figure she’s also had a crush on.

Irene’s delusion is underscored, in a couple of sequences, by what sounds like four-piece-band 1960s pop, in English no less. That’s a rather ham-fisted way of making the point that at any other time, Irene’s talent would steer her towards stardom and not arrest, transportation and her part in The Final Solution.

Marder has a Shailene Woodley look and vibe that suits her free-spirited character. But our concern for her never crosses the line into alarm or compassion, even if we can explain our puzzlement over how she can’t see what’s coming as historical hindsight. Many of the millions murdered must have harbored “That doesn’t concern me” delusions.

It’s a drama with no action or violence, just keeping-up-appearances and a girl whose family just wants her to be allowed to “dream just a little bit longer.”

As stories of the Occupation and impending Holocaust go, “A Radiant Girl” never overcomes its artistic emotional detachment, even if we know from history that the Nazis didn’t spare coquettish dreamers and would-be actresses, no matter how talented they were.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Rebecca Marder, André Marcon, Françoise Widhoff, Anthony Bajon, Cyril Metzger, India Hair and Ben Attal.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sandrine Kiberlain. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:38

Scenic Greece, Laure Calamy, Olivia Côte and Kristen Scott Thomas is in it, speaking French?

July 14.

Today’s journey Around the World with Netflix takes us to Peru, land of the Incas, the Plains of Nazca and these doggoned “¡Asu Mare!” comedies by comic, writer, actor and now director Carlos Alcántara.

The films began ten years ago with a comical autobiography of how Alcántara became the most famous funnyman in Peru. But over four films, “¡Asu Mare!” — that’s a Peruvian exclamation of surprise — has evolved into accounts of the misadventures of four hapless “friends” who appeared in some of those films.

“¡Asu Mare! Los amigos” has Alcántara stepping behind the camera for the first time for a comic tale of eviction, cuisine, politics and dirty money as those four friends — inept businessman Poroto (Emilram Cossío), divorced musican Jaime Culicich (Andrés Salas), street-vendor/clothier Chato (Miguel Vergara) and perpetual hothead Lechuga (Franco Cabrera) — try to start a restaurant in a long-abandoned urban villa.

Long review short, it’s not very good, although the players are game and the direction competent, despite having no flair for turning a laugh-starved script into something funny.

A prologue shows us the guys as tweens frightened after running into Poroto’s uncle’s long-abandoned McMansion as they flee the police, who aren’t keen on their pranks.

Decades later, when Poroto’s latest hair-growing gadget goes bust, when Chato’s motortrike clothing store — complete with shower curtain “changing room — is impounded (he’s been living in it, on the streets), when Culi’s ex-wife takes his kid to Miami and Lechuga is fired for getting into a tussle with a rich racist who calls him “Sambo” on the job — this house could be their salvation.

Throw a barbecue to finance fixing it up, fix it up to open a restaurant.

The comedy comes from a little slapstick, some energetic but not that creative pratfalls, a chase, and limp jokes — in Spanish with English subtitles — some of them self-referential.

“Cachín (Alcántara’s character in some of the earlier films) said this will be the last ‘¡Asu Mare!’ movie! He’s full of crap!”

They freely acknowledge they’re stealing from themselves, if not in plots, then in situations.

“You’re acting like Cachín in the second movie!”

Character names can be Spanish jokes (Lechuga means “lettuce”) or Peruvian slang (“Culi” means “butt”). Not exactly hilarious.

Some of the pratfalls almost find a laugh, but any time the cast and the filmmakers lead the extras in a closing credits sing-along and you’re not Gurinder Chadha, we can tell you’re out of ideas.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, a drug abuse scene, nudity in silhouette

Cast: Franco Cabrera, Andrés Salas, Emilram Cossío, Miguel Vergara, Ximena Palomino, Fiorella Luna and Sandro Calderon.

Credits: Directed by Carlos Alcántara, scripted by Rasec Barrigan, Marco Rubina and Renato Fernandez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

“Make Me Famous” is a playful documentary about the New York Lower East Side art scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, structured as a biography and appreciation of one of the signature characters of that era.

Filmmaker Brian Vincent, a peripheral part of this “New Wave” era, tells us the story of Edward Brezinski via archival footage and a parade of anecdotes from his contemporaries, the famous and the less famous. Thanks to their differing appreciations of the man, the film is both celebratory and bitchy, championing Brezinski at one moment, dismissing him as a narcissistic “boob” and worse in others.

The man doesn’t even merit his own Wikipedia page, but here he is, the embodiment not only of his “scene” but of the “neo expressionist” art of his day.

Vincent and co-writer/filmmaker Heather Spore give us a biography firmly-anchored in its context, a mostly-ruined East (Greenwich) Village of flops, tenements and dumpy, “low-rent storefront galleries” which was the anti-Soho of its day.

Keith Haring and (neo-expressionist) Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel were the art stars of that era. But down in the East Village, Brezinski and “shadow” artist Richard Hambleton and James Romberger, David McDermott and others were “living in garbage,” making art and holding openings, “manic” to “make it,” and pooling their efforts in group shows in the hope of surfing a self-branded “New Wave” in art that might mimic the New Wave in music.

Through interviews with the survivors of that scene — a model, art critics, “gallerists,” artists and collectors, Vincent takes us back to those days and the poses of the poseurs who made it, most of them 70ish dandies and artsy fashion statements to this day.

The milieu — struggle and poverty and AIDS and deaths by overdose or suicide — is summoned back to life, as is the role of villains of that time — Ronald and Nancy Reagan — skewered by satiric portraits by Brezinski and others because of the not-so-benign neglect they brought to AIDS.

Poverty made Brezinski and the rest “pure, just by default,” one of them remembers. We see it for ourselves in short films, home videos and the like of gallery openings, parties, clubs and artist-in-his (almost entirely men) element footage of Brezinski himself.

The mercurial, faddish nature of art trends is mocked — “What’s next? Oh, minimalism again?” — as dealers and collectors collectively abandoned painting, came back for “stencils” (pre-dating Banksy by a decade), embraced the realistic “replacement” art installations of Robert Gober, only to have painting come back with a vengeance in Soho and further south, in the East Village.

 Brzezinski, who fiddled with the spelling of his name (of course), made the scene by making “a scene,” infamously eating one of Gober’s “Realistic” donut sculpltures as a stunt, only to realize how toxic the damned things were. It was an incident destined, perhaps even calculated, to make it into the man’s obituary.

Vincent lets interview subjects dig themselves into pretentious holes, allows them to skewer each other and this or that critic or gallery owner only to let the gallery owner give her side of a feud or his take on who didn’t “make it” and why.

And Vincent’s film turns into a sizzle reel for a Netflix series or feature film remake as he and Spore investigate the mysterious circumstances of the struggling artist’s death. Yes, they all dream of “faking” their deaths to drive up their asking prices.

Even though they’re older, now, and dressed to the nines for their appearances on camera (most of them), even though that Capote-esque pixie McDermott lives in a manor house in rural Ireland, there’s still something punk rock about this crowd, with more than a hint of the punks who sold out. We called them “New Wave,” too.

It makes for a fun if sometimes shambolic (a few anecdotes ramble on) remembrance of a time and an artist who symbolized it. And if the filmmakers didn’t buy up a few Brezinskis before releasing this, that’s on them.

Rating: unrated, drug and sexual content

Cast: Edward Brezinski, Duncan Hannah, Peter McGough, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, David McDermott, Eric Bogosian, Richard Hambleton, Marcus Leatherdale, Patti Astor, Kenny Scharf, Annina Nosei, Claudia Summers, Walter Robinson

Credits: Directed by Brian Vincent, scripted by Heather Spore and Brian Vincent. A Red Splat release.

Running time: 1:32