Movie Nation

We were prepped for Robert Duvall’s Big Moment for a decade before it happened.

From “The Godfather” (1972) through “Network” (1976), “The Great Santini” (1979), “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “True Confessions” (1981), people who knew acting and film scholars with an eye for the long game were in lockstep.

“WATCH” this guy, they all said. This is how it’s done.

Then “Tender Mercies,” the validation of an Academy Award, and everything that came to DeNiro in a blinding blur — the acclaim, the Oscars and Oscar nominations, “legend” status — finally came to Robert Duvall just as he entered his 50s.

Glory and the decades of acclaim-as-his-due that followed arrived on the back of a small, intimate film from the Aussie director of “Breaker Morant” and the playwright and screenwriting legend who adapted “To Kill a Mockingbird” and wrote all versions of “The Trip to Bountiful” — play and screenplay.

The memory has been conditioned to recall only what became the signature scene of this film, the clip that ran when Siskel & Ebert praised it on their view show, wherever Duvall showed up on TV to promote it and which remains its iconic moment to this day.

He plays Mac Sledge, a country music has-been, a Willie Nelson singer/songwriter type who let the bottle and heartbreak get the better of him, but who sobers up for a good woman (Tess Harper), a widow, and her little boy. Duvall as Sledge gets across the gift, art and craft of songwriting as he strums out the bones of a tune to the kid, Sonny (Allan Hubbard) as Mom watches on, a homey scene set in a rural Texas kitchen with just actors, a simple melody and heart.

Two-time Oscar winner Horton Foote’s screenplay has a few grace notes like that, and some hard-won Texas working class country music suffering simmering beneath the surface as Sledge begins his unlikely path to redemption. He gets left behind by a friend, post-bender, at the tiny Texas filling station/store and motor hotel run by Rosa Lee (Harper), widowed by the Vietnam War some ten years before.

Foote, who also had a Pulitzer Prize attached to his reverent obituaries back in 2009, gets at the heart of Texas, rural folks of a certain generation, and at the despairing working class soul of country music with this simple redemption story.

Mac finds himself singing in church, watching over Sonny as Rosa Lee sings in the choir, trusted to run errands and expected to do the right thing — stop drinking — without her having to ask.

That he does, with no judgement coming from her, is as country music as it gets, “Good hearted woman lovin’ a good timin’ man” and all.

Betty Buckley plays the bitter country star ex that Mac finds himself trying to reconnect with, if only to get her manager (the great Wilford Brimley) to show his new songs around Nashville.

Mac isn’t looking for notoriety, a “comeback.” Otherwise he wouldn’t blow off the reporter (Paul Gleason of “The Breakfast Club”) twisting his arm for a “star now pumping gas” story. Whatever he’s doing — sobering up, walking the line, trying to make some real cash — is for “her” and “the boy.”

Ellen Barkin was just a babe in the biz playing the sad, needy daughter Mac never got to know. Buckley brings her Broadway voice to a country chanteuse who has started to feel the miles.

And Harper, making her big screen splash in this 1983 classic, dazzles by doing as little as possible — an understated performance of dignity, pragmatism and love that isn’t gushed or even admitted out loud.

The film’s quiet authenticity made it something of a watershed, and most everybody in it went on to do great work — Foote turning his play “The Trip to Bountiful” into an Oscar winning movie, Beresford helming “Driving Miss Daisy,” Harper enjoying a long, widely-admired career than included “No Country for Old Men,” “Crimes of the Heart” and indie films and more episodic TV than a body can recall.

Duvall? He took his new status and made indie films with Oscar potential (“The Apostle”), showy turns in the odd blockbuster, and work that ensured Billy Bob Thorton’s “Sling Blade” was Oscar worthy, that Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart”) got an Oscar, too, and that Bill Murray (“Get Low”) at least had a shot at one.

“Tender Mercies” became something of a landmark in all their careers, and you can see Duvall’s considered introspection in every film he’s done since, from TV’s “Lonesome Dove” to “Open Range,” to films he’s directed himself — “Wild Horses,” “Assassination Tango” and “The Apostle” among them.

But the best thing about this classic is you can watch it now and wonder, even all these years later, what took Hollywood so long to realize that the best among them was the one player who never called attention to himself. He let you find him, and feel all the richer for it.

Rating: PG

Cast: Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Allan Hubbard, Paul Gleason and Betty Buckley

Credits: Directed by Bruce Beresford, scripted by Horton Foote. A Universal (EMI) release on Youtube, PosiTV, etc.

Running time: 1:32

If a “twee” falls in the woods, would anyone hear it?

“Asteroid City” is the latest from the Tsar of Twee, Wes Anderson. It’s an all-star, pull-out-all-the-stops “comedy” that wrestles existentialism, Group Theatre, “The Twilight Zone,” 1950s paranoia and 1950s sci-fi, Theatre of the Absurd, Scarlett Johansson and uh, “The Big Bang Theory” into one movie.

Love Wes Anderson movies? This is as Wes Anderson as they get. Well, if Wes Anderson was outsourcing his screenwriting, production design and casting to AI.

It is all style over substance, casting over acting, immaculate screen compositions with the odd strained sight gag and the occasional flash of wit over heart.

A newly-widowed photographer (Jason Schwartzman) with the surname of the editing table used back when movies were made on celluloid (Steenbeck) breaks down midway between Arid Plains and Parched Gulch.

It’s 1955, and Asteroid City — pop. 87 — is host to a teen “brainiacs” science honors ceremony. Fittingly enough, the mesas and flatlands there are within sight of the explosions of an atomic bomb testing grounds.

Asteroid City and its science fair is where Augie Steenbeck was taking teen son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), anyway. Maybe Augie will work up the guts to tell Woodrow and his three tiny-terror little sisters, Pandora, Andromeda and Cassiopia, that their mother died...three weeks ago.

He’d better get that out of the way before his pistol-packing father-in-law (Tom Hanks) Cadillacs over to take them to his golf-community-in-the-desert home.

Other parents here for their kids to show off their science wizardry include the glamorous actress with the stage-makeup black eye (Johansson), a no-nonsense, patent-protecting dad (Liev Schreiber) and a supportive mom (Hope Davis) and a similarly supportive dad (Steve Park).

A Christian elementary school teacher (Maya Hawke) will show up with her field-tripping, prayerful brood, who will deliver the picture’s biggest laugh.

A posse of cowboys (including Rupert Friend and Jarvis Cocker) are sidetracked there and act folksy and play a little music.

A general (Jeffrey Wright) and his aide (Tony Revolori) will present the prizes. An astronomer at the local observatory (Tilda Swinton) is also present for Asteroid Day, a celebration of the meteorite that crashed and created the crater there.

The kids will bond over nerdy science and nerdy wordplay, and maybe flirt. The newly-widowed Augie will unemotionally flirt with the actress, who won’t break character to acknowledge the flirtation.

An alien will show up to snatch the town’s coveted asteroid, forcing everybody to stay there under quarantine.

And none of it is real because none of it is meant to be real. The opening scene is a framing device in which a Rod Serlingesque TV show host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to the artifice, and the artificialist who created it — the playwright (Edward Norton).

A celebrated stage director (Adrien Brody) bucks up the performers.

A famous acting teacher (Willem Dafoe) will instruct the actors who later appear in the (tele) play. Augie and the actor cast to play him deconstruct the character he’s about to play, and makes out with the playwright.

Yes, we have all the characteristics of a Wes Anderson film, and then some — eccentrics played by a Who’s Who of Hollywood, everybody speaking in a staccato deadpan.

“If you wanted to live a quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born.”

Characters like the motel clerk (Steve Carell) and others pointlessly say “I understand,” a lot, another Anderson trope.

But here’s the thing. It’s so airless no oxygen gets in. The laughs are few, and as dry as the fake desert this is meant to be.

Anderson serves up so many stars he barely uses some (Dafoe, Matt Dillon) and ill-uses others. The great character actor Bob Balaban is reduced to a simple silent sight gag. Not a funny one.

Some viewers will get the many cultural references, the Anderson rep company cameos, and maybe grin. Some will enthuse over the rigidly-enforced style, the totality of WesWorld.

Yet there’s no getting around that two tiered canon of Anderson’s filmography. There are films like “The Royal Tennenbaums” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and maybe his breakout cult film, “Rushmore,” that you can watch and revel in over and over, and that list includes his two animated hits “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Isle of Dogs.” And then there’s “Darjeeling Limited, “Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” maybe “The French Dispatch” and almost certainly “Asteroid City,” movies that don’t beckon one to “enjoy” them again.

“Asteroid City” is like a stop-motion animated Anderson film, in which he uses real actors in stop-motion. How is indulging oneself in that reductive, self-defeating cleverness a good idea?

Whatever the twee-tempted target audience hopes to get out of Anderson’s latest, this Easter-egg-packed still-life doesn’t play.

Rating: PG-13 on appeal for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Adrien Brody, Matt Dillon, Sophia Lillis, Jake Ryan, Maya Hawke, Grace Edwards, Steve Park, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe and Bryan Cranston.

Credits: Directed by Wes Anderson, scripted by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. A Focus Features release.

Running time:

Dreamworks cleverly timed the release of “Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken,” to follow Disney’s live action “Little Mermaid” remake into theaters and into the hearts of parents and children everywhere.

OK, maybe not. A movie in which mermaids are vain, murderously power-mad villains of the deep, and the “protectors” of the oceans are the sea “monsters” known as kraken? Who’ve been the victims of bad PR?

Shiver me Hans Christian Andersen!

Maybe the racists who ranted about “The Little Mermaid” will be tempted — North American bigots, Southern white supremacists and, you know, China.

But the diverse high school and girls asking other girls to the prom and affirming don’t-let-others-define-who-you-are and “You can never outswim your destiny” messages are sure to trigger the snowflakes and Moms for Liberty book-banners who never go to movies, anyway.

The movie’s “Shrek” inspired “Ogres get a bad rap” conceit is clever enough, and some smart decisions in voice casting give “Ruby Gillman” a swimmer’s chance. It’s the candy-colored gloom of the production design (dark undersea sequences, etc.), stumbling comedy-by-committee script and general joylessness that let it down.

Ruby, voiced by Lana Condor, the Vietname-American starlet of Netflix’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” romances, is a kraken kid raised on dry land by her similarly assimilating parents.

She wears turtlenecks to hide her gills (“Gillman,” get it?), hangs with her high school mathlete “squad” and hasn’t a clue about what realtor mom Agatha (Toni Collette) and ships-in-a-bottle builder and online instructor Arthur (“Walking Dead” alumnus Colman Domingo) haven’t told her.

Anybody asks, they’re Canadian, eh? By the way, what human parent wouldn’t want a kraken real estate agent on their side when the knives come out?

They may live in scenic Oceanside, but Mom’s imparted a mortal fear of the sea to Ruby. And even though the prom’s coming up and Ruby would love to ask-or-be-asked by Connor (Jaboukie Young-White), the skateboarding hottie boy she’s tutoring in Algebra, that may be a non-starter.

He’s the “Alge-bae” of her dreams, “Alge-bro” if “bae” gives away too much. But the prom is being held on an excursion yacht, and “Mom would kill me” if the sea didn’t get to Ruby first.

One clumsy teen prom-posal later and Ruby has to ignore a lifetime of advice, plunge in and save Connor. The problem with that is that A) “The New Girl,” a confident, cocky redhead named Chelsea van der Zee (Annie Murphy) steals credit. B), In the water, Ruby transforms into this giant thing with three tentacles and a tendency to glow in the dark. And C), Mom’s hints that she’s estranged from her family as well as the sea bear fruit as a dorky uncle kraken (Sam Richardson) suddenly shows up.

Ruby’s puberty includes salt-water transformations into “the Monster” that her human friends and neighbors — especially the peg-legged old salt (Will Forte, the standout in the cast) who leads sea monster tours around town — warned her about.

“You’re not a monster, not even close” is no consolation. There’s nothing for it but to swim out and find grandma, our story’s narrator (Jane Fonda), the queen of the Kraken matriarchy, and realize “You’re meant for bigger things,” literally.

The high school humor here is seriously slight. Ruby’s “squad” includes a “catastrophist” Goth girl and a bestie (Liza Koshy) prone to bubbling “GASP of exclamation,” because a mere gasp of exclamation isn’t enough.

That new girl? She’s a mermaid, and her reaching out has a hint of “Mean Girl” about it.Something about the way she tosses “rando” around.

And there’s this trident weapon that the creatures of the deep covet, especially the mermaids.

There’s nothing tone-deaf or inherently-flawed about any of this. Forte brings his “Aaaaarrrrr” game to the seafarer who suspects those “Gillmans” aren’t as “Canadian” as they sound.

But there’s little wit to this, and not enough spark to the story to overcome the tepid jokes.

The animation is good, but underwhelming.

You want to like “Ruby Gillman.” But if you’re having to elbow the kids to keep them awake, maybe this trip “under the sea” will work better as something you stream for them at bedtime.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Lana Condor, Will Forte, Liza Koshy, Toni Collette, Sam Richardson, Annie Murphy, Blue Chapman, Colman Domingo and Jane Fonda.

Credits: Directed by Kirk DeMicco and Faryn Pear, scripted by Pam Brady, Kirk DeMicco, Elliott DiGuiseppi and Brian C. Brown. A Dreamworks/Universal release.

Running time: 1:30

Ask anybody appearing in this violent Ethan Coen road picture romp and they’ll tell you.

Things go to hell in a hurry when you’re Tallahassee bound.

Sept. 23 is this comedy drops.

Aliens pay to watch Humans be human and fall in love.

Sounds like pretty much half the Internet. Only Fans etc.

This oddity, based on a YA novel I don’t know, features Tiffany Haddish as the adult in the room.

August.

You know what they used to say Katzenberg was King (OK, dauphin) of Burbank.

“If you don’t come in Saturday don’t bother showing up for work Sunday.”

Not a huge turnout for this kiddie preview of “Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken.” But with real kids fare in short supply in this summer of “Elemental,” let’s hope DreamWorks delivers.

“Ruby” swims into theaters next weekend.

“The Flash” lost his flash Wednesday of its first week of release, falling behind the Pixar bomb “Elemental” in tickets sold for the day.

That was but a harbinger of things to come, as a weak second Friday points to “Across the Spider-Verse” and “Elemental” passing “Flash” in its second weekend.

Those two films are projected by Deadline.com to duke it out for first place, with “Spider-Man” clearing $19 and Pixar’s under-performer managing $18 and change.

Big Thursday and Friday numbers from the raunchy Jennifer Lawrence farce, “No Hard Feelings,” drive it to a $15.1 million opening weekend. Not bad.

Warner’s/DC’s latest comic book movie may manage that — just a tad over $15.2 — a shocking plunge from a big but disappointing opening weekend in the mid-50s. A 60-75% falloff? That’s what we used to call a “Tyler Perry Plunge,” after his movies proved to be one weekend phenomena, back when he was making movies for the big screen.

“Transformers” have one more weekend in the top five, as Focus Features has Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” $9) doesn’t have the appeal to reach middle America and Focus couldn’t market Perrier to the parched.

The underwater and surface of the sea images here are quite impressive and beautiful.

Yes, that’s Jane Fonda’s voice you hear in the mix.

Not sure how a riff on kraken vs mermaids high school feud will play, but I’m seeing it with a theater full of kids. So we’ll soon find out.

Opens June 30.

What was the last thing you watched on Youtube?

I use it to browse for movie trailers, to track down “lost” concert performances, archived moments of history, condensed versions of college basketball games, famous bits of sports history.

An obscure song I’ve caught a snippet of in a movie? To Youtube I go.

But every now and then Youtube makes news. Sometimes it’s for some “Youtuber” who got rich making funny videos, pulling pranks or showing off a particularly telegenic child or dog.

More often, though, it’s because of some unpleasant, unfair and even democracy/public-health threatening policy of Youtube and its behemoth parent company, Alphabet, the umbrella name for all the tentacles in Google’s omnipotent presence on the Internet.

Some of us can regard the streaming video archive as home to a “community” or two that we might consider ourselves a part of. Most of us don’t think of Youtube as a primary source for “news,” and might fret about the millions of those Millennial-age-and-younger who do.

But you might be kept up at nights worrying about just that statistical fact after watching “The Youtube Effect,” a deep dive documentary that covers the history of its birth, its utility and value in entertainment and news-spreading terms. The latest film from Alex Winter (“The Panama Papers,” “Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain” and “Zappa“) also exposes the downside to letting so much of what we know, believe and value be determined by blind, amoral algorithms and the unresponsive and mostly unaccountable corporate behemoth that imposes them on us.

A Youtube founder, a former CEO, journalists, academics, “Youtubers” and victims of the policies of this valuable, wildly popular and profitable website/digital archive sing its praises and herald its possibilities. And most of them also point to excesses, inhumane policies and the fearsome power of this prone-to-abuse near-monopoly.

It began in the mid-2000s as a modest enterprise and a place one could go to find Chinese college kids lip-synching to The Backstreet Boys or cats and dogs and kids doing cute things.

The former CEO, Susan Wojcicki, marveled at the realization that “people want to see other people like them” would be the key to the site’s explosive growth, and championed Google purchasing Youtube for $1.65 billion within a year of its 2005 launch.

In those heady days of social media companies evolving into Media Companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest quickly figured out the business model — offering your service for “free,” “extracting data” from you every time you use their site, and “selling ads” to you as they did, notes U-C Berkeley’s Hany Farid.

Youtubers such as the the early-adapters at Smosh and Contrapoints transgender activist, interviewer and entertainer Natalie Wynn marvel at becoming overnight successes, wealthy Youtube entrepreneurs.

And then Caleb Cain, onetime Youtube fanatic, tells his story of how Youtube’s algorithm-driven “rabbit holes” radicalized him and “could radicalize anyone” thanks to machine-learning that has the site feed devotees more and more arresting “echo chamber” videos that reinforce via a downward spiral of twisted misinformation that feed a viewer’s darkest prejudices and urges.

It’s alarming. Youtube, as Winter’s film points out, played a big role in protests such as Occupy Wall Street and the Egyptian uprising during The Arab Spring. Youtube made the George Floyd murder-by-cop story an international cause.

But it also fed the delusions of mass shooters in America, New Zealand and elsewhere, many of them posting videos about what they aimed to do and where on Youtube they were inspired to do it.

Youtube was also linked to performative violence aimed at a Q-Anon targeted pizza parlour and played a major role in helping like-minded fascists organize and carry out the January 6 assault on the United States Capital.

It is, Profossor Farid notes, ground zero of a “misinformation apocalypse,” something that came to a head during the Trump administration and its war on objective truth and reality, which blew up in everyone’s faces when the COVID pandemic exploded and actual medical and science profesionals found themselves under assault from screaming clickbait tantrum tossers and self-appointed “experts” on Youtube.

Winter, best known as “Bill” from the “Bill and Ted” movies, has become a documentary filmmaker of great repute, quite adept at explaining complex scandals (“The Panama Papers”), economic tech (“The Story of Blockchain”) and people (“Zappa”). This is his best doc yet.

He first lays out the miracle that is Youtube, getting at its appeal via montages of K-Pop, puppies and protests. His interview subjects then ennumerate the problems that have come with a seriously under-regulated media near-monopoly, and some of those intervewees even dare to state the obvious.

“Corporations don’t do the right thing unil they’re forced to,” and with Google spending NRA money to buy influence in Congress, their all-profit/no-accountability business model isn’t going anywhere.

And then we meet Andy Parker, the father of a Roanoke, Va. TV reporter murdered, with her videographer, live on air. Parker started a one-person crusade to try and force Google/Youtube to take down the scores of copies of that live feed, replaying his daughter’s murder ad nauseum for the curious, the callous and the perverse. For profit, complete with ads.

No, one person can’t jar an insensate media empire into changing its ways. But millions of them, voting for legislators just as alarmed as the rest of us by how much undeserved and poorly-policed power has been concentrated in a few hands, just might.

Rating: unrated, scenes of street violence, some profanity

Cast: Susan Wojcicki, Caleb Cain, Natalie Wynn, Steve Chen, Talia Lavin, Jillian C. York, Briana Wu and Andy Parker

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Winter. A Drafthouse Films release.

Running time: 1:39

Now that Netflix has turned its popular “horny teens” melodrama “Through My Window” into a franchise, only one question remains. Will the the filmmakers have the cojones to bust these two lovebirds up? For good?

“Through My Window: Across the Sea” takes Raquel (Clara Galle) into Barcelona to study writing at the university there. Her story, inspired by the love affair than began as a crush on the rich boy she spied “através de mi ventana” — “Through My Window” — is finished, she figures. Her teacher thinks this, too.

But Raquel is still shy about sharing it with a publisher, no matter how much her lifelong pal Yoshi (Guillermo Lasheras) urges her on. And she is also distracted by longing for her far-off crush-turned rich-boy lover Ares (Julio Peña), who went off to med school in Stockholm “across the sea.”

But he’s got that “longing” thing too, which is why he dashes home for the Noche de San Juan holiday. Let’s pick up right where the hot sex left off, eh?

Yes, titillation was a selling point of the first film, which gave us a Spanish spin on the Netflix summer teen sex/romance formula. The sequel is a tad more explicit in that regard, as skinny bespectacled and hair-dyeing Yoshi (short for Yoshua) stops pining for Raquel long enough to be bowled over by go-for-it-Anna (Carla Tous) and Raquel’s other BFF Daniela (Natalia Azahara) interrupts her plans to split Raquel and Mr. Rich/Mr. Right up by pursuing an “open relationship” with Raquel’s beau’s younger brother Apolo (Hugo Arbues).

As this corner of the Costa Brava college kids clubbing/partying scene includes a young Frenchman, Daniella’s all about introducing Apolo to the French phrase “menage a trois.”

Meanwhile, Ares’ older brother Artemis (Eric Masip) is pursuing an affair with the daughter of a family servant (Emilia Lazo) who has gone into service herself.

Yes, the three hermanos are still named Ares, Apolo and Artemis, as if Wattpad fiction writer Ariana Godoy giving them “Hidalgo” (nobleman) as a surname wasn’t pretentious enough.

The sex scenes are more frequent and more explicit. Yes, the Mediterranean must be, uh, chilly at the time of year they filmed this.

But “Across the Sea” manages a couple of seriously touching moments, which is more than “Through My Window” could boast. Alas, none of them are related to romance or the “longing” of our pretty but bland romantic leads.

Cheating, bullying, tragedy and “the long distance romance thing” all play into the absurdly arbitrary and predictable plot.

Mostly, though, this film is a “placeholder” in what I guess will be a trilogy, a film that exists to arbitrarily test our two lovers before whatever comes our way in the third film, after “To Be Continued.”

Are they fated to be together or not? Will the third script in this girly wish-fulfillment-fantasy (marry a handsome rich guy) finally grow a pair, or will they take the predictable way out?

And are you just here for the nudity?

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Clara Galle, Julio Peña, Guillermo Lasheras, Natalia Azahara, Emilia Lazo, Andrea Chaparro, Hugo Arbues, Eric Masip and Ivan Lapadula

Credits: Directed by Marçal Forés, scripted by Ariana Godoy and Eduard Sola A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50