Movie Nation

Four white guys in glasses, jeans or khakis, “They looked more like nerds than punks.”

But “punks” don’t come from Kansas, even Wichita, Kansas. “Art punks,” maybe?

The Embarrassment were a band in a bubble, almost the only kids their age in their town to latch onto Alice Cooper, move on to the Velvet Underground, The Sex Pistols, Jonathan Richman and Bowie and take their place among the “art punk” nerds like Talking Heads.

They came out of Wichita and toured the country on bills with The Ramones, The Del Fuegos, The Replacements, hitting CBGBs and all the hot spots of the early ’80s too-cool-to-be-New-Wave scene.

With guitar-bass-drums driven “blister pop” tunes like “Elizabeth Montgomery’s Face,” “Jazz Face,” “Dino in the Jungle” and “Sex Drive,” they sound as representative of their era as any of their contemporaries, “So much better than R.E.M., Hüsker Dü,” enthuses Freedy Johnson.

But as the title of a documentary about them reminds us, “We Were Famous, You Don’t Remember: The Embarrassment.” They were (almost) famous, earning the attention accolades and assistance of musicians like John Cale and music-loving filmmaker Jonathan Demme (“Silence of the Lambs”), who committedTalking Heads to film in “Stop Making Sense” and knew The Next Big Thing when he saw and heard it.

As filmmakers Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach’s interviews and history makes clear, The Embarrassment was never quite were that “next big thing.” But Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, Grant Hart of their midwestern contemporaries, Hüsker Dü and others, including best-selling political historian (“What’s the Matter with Kansas?”) Thomas Frank come in to sing their praises.

And they, the band’s manager, three original band members (Brent Giessmann,John Nichols, Bill Goffrier), journalists and fans speculate on how a band that came from “a part of the country not at all culturally significant” could emerge, make some noise (especially in the hipper college town of Lawrence, Kansas), take their shot and gracefully if dispiritedly give up when it didn’t happen despite four years of touring and recording.

The film can’t make high drama out of a story that’s been echoed hundreds of times with scores of white boy/guitar rock bands over the decades. Maybe they could have been the “next R.E.M,” in a sort of “make it big” best-case-scenario. Or they could have labored on, respected, with a devoted following, and endured on a lower tier of fame and financial reward like The Replacements, as another devotee suggests.

Four guys “determined to play music and make art,” they never really left Wichita, setting up shop in a railroad-side Flatiron Building there between station-wagon-with-a-UHaul-trailer tours.

But as other docs about bands that didn’t quite get over make plain, that’s a wearing, limiting and deflating way to live. It’s no wonder most DIY/be-their-own-road-crew ensembles, even with the help of famous and influential fans, throw in the towel.

The “how we got together” interviews are conventional “met in the the sandbox in my backyard.” Of course aspiring “art punks” were bullied in a shitkicker “cowboy town” like Wichita. Nothing unique about their getting into music, “learning while we played,” forming a band under this name or that one, finally finding their tribe, (50 hipster” kids in Wichita) then catching on in Lawrence story arc either.

The film never gets past the superficial. The most “personal” bit concerns a rental house that they threw a “house wrecking party” concert in and trashed, making their local newspaper as they did.

The musical education of the first two guys to meet, drummer Brett and guitarist Bill, was augmented when Brent’s older brother shot himself and Brent inherited a vast record collection. Wait, what?

Original bassist Ronnie Klaus “disappeared,” and while the reasons for the band breakup — exhaustion, futility — are mentioned, no discussion of efforts to find Klaus for their reunions are gotten into. Where’d he go and why did they not talk about trying to track him down? Is he still on the lam for wrecking his rental house?

Most band-that-didn’t-make-it histories aren’t as romantic or melodramatic as “Almost Famous.” You’ve got to work with what you’ve got, but make the most of the drama that’s here.

Still, it’s always nice when musicians who mattered to their fans are memorialized in movies like this. As most of us mark the waypoints of our early lives with songs, the attachments are real and last a lifetime.

They weren’t “famous. But thanks to this film, we will “remember” The Embarrassment, maybe even dig for a tune or two on Youtube, like this one.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Brent Giessmann, John Nichols, Bill Goffrier, Ron Klaus (archival footage), Evan Dando, Grant Hart, Freedy Johnson, Thomas Frank

Credits: Directed by Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach. A Factory25 release.

Running time: 1:36

A fight club for girls, pushed around and bullied and reaching that point where yeah, “Let’s go f—up some football players!”

Bad girl Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Marshawn Lynch, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Dagmara Dominczyk and Ruby Cruz are the stars.

From MGM this August, a Back to School romp.

I think it took me maybe 10 minutes — OK possibly 15 –– before I figured out that “Bodega,” a film about an Instagram-obsessed/Instagram-famous bodega-owner and drug dealer, is a mockumentary and not a DOCumentary.

There’s nothing all that far-fetched about a Dominican immigrant running a bodega in the South Bronx. Yeah, J.R.’s lost his accent and yes, he’s a bit blinged-out to be a simple shop owner in a rough neighborhood. But looking at some of the folks who’re Instagram “stars” in our attention economy/performative culture, it’s not a stretch to believe some DJ Khalid-styled attention whore could break out.

Even if he’s really just using the shop as a front for drug dealing, even if it’s more of a money-laundering operation than a place the locals duck into buy soda, canned tuna, condoms and plantains — “platanos,” as they say down in the D.R.

Because that’s how J.R. (Andrew Mojica) sells his cocaine, “best product in the five boroughs,” baggies stuffed inside electrical-tape re-sealed plantains. That, and inside boxes of Quaker Oats and such.

Clever.

“Bodega” is a dopey, druggy and funny midnight movie about one young guy’s need for social media affirmation to go along with the drug money that supports his modest New York lifestyle.

His Insta-live posts have gotten the attention of a documentary crew who want to hear all about the “three times” he got shot — once by a friend, once by a brother, and once by a cop.

J.R. is chasing that “American Dream” until he grabs it and can afford a place for his sister…and her “15 kids.”

He “supports the neighborhood by providing local gangs with guns.” He works for an unseen drug lord named “Manuelito,” and basically runs the Los Nietos (The Grandsons) bodega for his absentee ex-con Uncle Concho (Richard Velzaquez) who lives in LA.

Every time the film crew catches up with Tio Concho, he’s shopping on Rodeo drive, for himself and his lady love. Should he get her something from Yves St. Laurent, he wonders, stopping at the store window?

“That’s anal,” he tells the filmmakers. “You want anal? YSL.”

“Bodega” begins with a vintage PSA starring the late Danny Aiello from the “just say no” era of the drug trade, the “Moonstruck” and “Do the Right Thing” star standing in his old neighborhood, “Fort Apache: The Bronx,” and telling kids about friends he lost to drugs.

But the mockery doesn’t turn serious until we meet J.R.’s supplier and “best friend,” “Puerto Rico” (Pedro Montoya). P.R. is not happy that J.R. has a film crew with him. He makes threats, and doesn’t even know about the Instagram thing.

A competing shop-owner/dealer-on-the-side, “African King” (Prince Sunny) is furious about the Instagram buffonery, and about losing customers to the “popular” dealer and social media star. He’s all about the voudou and “give you Ebola” or “COVID” threats.

When he finds out, Tio Concho won’t be happy either.

“Have you ever seen a successful drug dealer who ADVERTISES?”

The joke here is how shallow, needy and clueless J.R. is. Money from drugs he cuts with powdered grits using two women named Ebony and Ivory to do the cutting IN HIS APARTMENT means nothing next to his goal of reaching 100K Instagram followers.

It’s a comical Portrait of a Pendejo, a dunce whose camera crew captures him committing crime after crime, and cops (Stacey Griffin) trying to shake him down — “Would you guys describe yourselves as ‘dirty cops?'”

“It’s all relative.”

J.R. is so stupid he can’t see the Dominican Sophia (Jennifer Figuereo) for the cash-and-Green-Card coveting golddigger that she is. He’s got no notion of what will happen when African King’s COVID curse hits, or what might become of him if and when his Big Boss finds out about his “social.”

Hey, it’s all about the Insta, baby.

And “Bodega” is funny enough that in the right setting — midnight showings — this scruffy, dopey, pendejo-packed farce could find its audience and deliver some campy culture and generation-skewering laughs.

Rating: unrated, violence, drugs, profanity

Cast: Andrew Mojica, Jennifer Figuereo, Richard Velazquez, Pedro Montoya, Stacey Griffin, Prince Sunny and Danny Aiello.

Credits: Directed by Joseph Ruzer, scripted by Andrew Mojica, Joseph Ruzer and Sean Slater. A Ruzerpictures release.

Running time: 1:21

We know she can be flip and funny and make sex and sexuality amusing, just from her chat show appearances and little radio stunts for YouTube.

Playing a woman willing to do anything to get out of debt? Well, almost anything? Hired by Matthew Broderick to romance and educate and seduce his kid? The trailers have looked hilarious.

“No Hard Feelings” opens Thursday night.

L

A demon makes mischief in an Indonesian village and the result is a bloodbath, with feuding locals under that demon’s influence and a little cannibalism thrown in for um, flavor.

That’s “Para Betina Pengikut Iblis,” whose title appears to translate to “Devil’s Disciples” in English, if Google is to be believed.

Say this for Rako Prijanto’s demented slaughterhouse of a movie. It’s out there.

Mawar Eva de Johgh stars as Sumi, a downtrodden daughter of a sickly, sole-breadwinner father (Derry Oktami). When that infected leg of his has to come off, Sumi is unduly interested in assisting the Catholic Dr. Freedman (Hans de Kraker).

She’s also fascinating by goat gutting that’s going on at the home of the richest boss of their village. But no, he won’t “lend” her a goat to butcher and sell in her father’s gulai stall. Whatever her cooking skills, boss Mimin (Agus Mahesa) more lecherous things on his mind.

She’s missed her window to flee this place with boyfriend Saber (Ravil Prasetya). So she’ll probably never get to the city to look for her mother and brother, who fled years before.

Trapped with a one-legged man who is sure their family/house is cursed and insists she bury his sawn-off leg, unable to feed him with no money coming in, Sumi is in despair and ripe for believing in hallucinations.

A pale demon (Adipati Dolken) appears, with long fingernails and answers. “The only way out of your troubles,” he assures her (in Indonesian, with subtitles), is to listen to her new “friend.”

Let’s start with “Feed your father his LEG,” and let the carnage begin.

But she’s not the only one with the Devil in her ear. Witchy Aish (Sara Fajira) and just-lost-her-sister-and-furious Sari (Hanggini) also seem to have blood in their eyes and demonic intent. And considering the recent deaths, they may have other rivals.

Saber realizes, too late, that “too many strange things happen in this village.” They can’t escape what’s coming.

Ms. de Jongh works up a fine lather as a bitter, bloody-minded young woman who doesn’t take much of a push to turn cannibal, grave-robber and murderer. Hanggini and Fajira are similarly convincingly demented.

The slaughter scenes are as bloody as I’ve ever seen in an Indonesian film — not “House of a Thousand Corpses” gory, but gruesome enough.

The simple plot takes some ugly, semi-interesting third act turns, which explain the high bodycount and perhaps this village’s eagerness to listen to demons.

It’s not really my genre, not a thrill-a-minute thriller, and there’s a disappointing “To Be Continued” finale, just when things have turned towards inescapably dire.

But for those who like their blood rare and their red meat flesh, this dance with the “Iblis” might fill the bill.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, lots of blood and body parts.

Cast: Adipati Dolken, Mawar Eva de Jongh, Hanggini, Hans de Kraker,
Sara Fajira, Ravil Presetya and Derry Oktami.

Credits: Directed by Rako Prijanto, scripted by Anggoro Saronto and Rako Prijanto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

I have never seen a “last party” teen romp as violent at “The Crusades,” a would-be coming-of-age comedy that drowns in a hot tub of toxic testosterone.

It opens with a teen-planned/teen-featured cage fight and climaxes wtih a gang brawl that should have put victims in the hospital. And that’s after the parade of punchouts that preceded it.

Hard to get happy watching this one. The throwback “Catholic schoolboys fighting rival Catholic schoolboys” story feels like a how-gangsters-are-made drama from an earlier era.

The lusting for the “hot teacher” and clumsy scheming to seduce the all-girls-school coeds are straight out of “Porky’s” and its “Lampoon” era contemporaries.

The amusingly bluff adults — veteran tough guy Mike Starr as a poop-bag-fire on the porch prank victim and Nicholas Turturro as the macho dope of a coach — get most of the few funny lines.

“I just got my PERIOD hearing that!”

But even though the action is well-handled, the Big Party chaotic and cut with brio, “The Crusades” is a singularly joyless affair where the guys fight their way to “manhood” and the girls can’t bully them out of their myopia.

Our Lady of the Crusades is one of two Catholic boys’ schools in town. St. Matthew’s is the other. They are blood rivals, not just in sports.

Pals Leo (Rudy Pankow of “Outer Banks”), Sean (Khalil Everage of “Cobra Kai”) and “extreme senior” Jack (Ryan Ashton of TV’s “School for Boys”) aren’t the toughest, smartest or most popular lads in their “Lord of the Flies” high. They’re just bonded for life to survive.

If the two-fisted nonsense and more mature but bullying Mean Girls from the local Catholic girls school aren’t enough to contend with, encounters with the most savage kids of St. Matthews never end well.

Jack, nicknamed “the Bull,” is a lunkhead always on the verge of getting kicked-out, egged on into violent tests that he delusionally figures he can win. Because of his “bull” headedness.

Leo takes Italian tutoring from the hottest teacher (Anna Maiche) in “The Crusades.” He crushes on her, and on the almost-as-unattainable Ryan (Ashley Nicole Williams of TV’s “Motherland”).

Sean has a serious girlfriend (Indiana Massara), who is seriously peaved at his immature “bros before ‘hos” attitudes. He’s always hanging with the boys, hopeful about “that first time” with Jess, just as long as his bros don’t have something planned instead.

Our Lady of the Crusades is financially strapped, so they” have to merge with the equally hard-up St. Matthews. More competition for dates, more violence, and Jack’s probably facing expulsion over that cage fight that opened the movie.

There’s nothing for it but to put everything they have into this weekend’s school “social” dance with the girls from their sister academy, and then in the drinking and hooking-up makeout “last party” afterwards.

Blaine May makes a perfect “psycho ex boyfriend” looking to bust up Leo over what he imagines is happening with Ryan. Vince doesn’t travel alone. He’s got his own “wrecking crew.”

Over the course of that long night into next day, “The drink will flow and blood will spill,” as the song goes, as The Wrecking Crew keeps pursuing Leo and his mates.

The acting isn’t bad. But no, nobody here is the most convincing “high schooler.” The direction is solid, punchy. Yet the picture isn’t so much plotted as given a time frame to squeeze a lot of fistfights into. The pranks are ancient, the girl characters barely given a function and the laughs few and far between.

It’s as if “The Crusades,” directed by one guy and scripted by him and two other guys, suffers from the same affliction as its characters — “testosterone poisoning.” There was nobody involved in the production to tell them how uninteresting this “story” is and that a “comedy” this angry and violent, and not in a funny way, was never going to play.

Rating: unrated, very violent, teen drinking, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Rudy Pankow, Khalil Everage, Ryan Ashton, Indiana Massara, Blaine May, Ashley Nicole Williams, Anna Maiche, Nicholas Turturro and Mike Starr.

Credits: Directed by Leo Milano, scripted by Shawn Early, Jack Hussar and Leo Milano. A VMI Release.

Running time: 1:41

The movies used to be more fearless when it came to breaking children’s hearts.

Films like “Bambi” and “Old Yeller” weren’t bent on shielding a child from the knowledge that the world is an impermanent place, that pets and parents and even siblings and playmates die.  Once you learn that, you might be inclined to grow up a little, embrace and treasure those close to you a little more.

But that became a rare thing. A “My Girl” or “My Dog Skip” might come along every so often. But they create an uproar, as often as not, simply by being honest tearjerkers.

These days, whole websites are devoted to protecting children and adults of the arrested development variety from cinematic heartbreak. If you’ve ever visited “Doesthedogdie.com,” I hope you’re blushing.

Whatever reason our infantilized culture uses to spare the very young from unpleasant realities, what we’re really doing is sparing ourselves from that “adult” conversation, or ourselves from an adult response to life’s grim but cathartic moments.

“The Yearling” is a classic tearjerker, a coming-of-age tale set in America’s hardscrabble, survival-is-a-struggle past. It’s sentimental, but a depiction of an unforgiving place and time where just living into adulthood was not guaranteed and just surviving in a hot, insect, snake, gator and disease-ridden Florida was a struggle.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a non-native who moved to Cross Creek, Florida to become the Sunshine State’s greatest writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for this 1930s book set in rustic “cracker” Florida of the 1870s. It’s about a critter-obsessed kid, his doting dad and lost-her-sense-of-lightness mother and their struggle to make a home in the barely-farmable, buggy/snakey center of the state, in the swampy pinelands where Rawlings came to live and write half a century later.

And yes, the title character dies. And the deer isn’t the only living thing that perishes in this story and the 1946 Technicolor classic that director Clarence Brown filmed from it.

It’s a beautiful film, poetically-scripted, tenderly directed and perfectly cast, seamlessly blending north central Florida locations (Hawthorne, Silver Springs and environs), the oft-filmed Big Bear Lake corner of Southern California and MGM soundstages to recreate a still little-settled part of the country just after the Civil War.

The archaic dialect practically requires subtitles.

“Now, tell th’truth and shame the Devil, wa’rnt that bee tree a fine excuse to go ramblin’ to?”

MGM landed young Gregory Peck for doting dad Penny Baxter, and his brooding romantic mental patient of Hitchock’s “Spellbound” disappeared in this affable, good-natured turn.

The formidable Jane Wyman plays Orry, the local gal of limited horizons Penny found when he moved south after the war spent “fightin’ the Yankees.” Orry is dour and humorless, more an authority figure than a loving mother. What the movie doesn’t tell us is that they’d had six children who didn’t survive infancy before young Jody was born.

Eleven year-old only child Jody sparkles onto the screen in the person of newcomer Claude Jarman Jr. In the almost 80 years since “The Yearling” premiered, this is still recognized as one of the great child performances, up there with Jackie Cooper in “The Champ,” Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon,” Anna Paquin in “The Piano” or Keke Palmer in “Akeela and the Bee.”

Penny Baxter’s carved out a subsitence farm just north of Cross Creek. They grow all that they eat, which is as much as the limited land Penny’s back and their draft horse will allow him to clear. Their livestock is constantly imperiled by the bear, Ol’ Slewfoot,” and by pig-rustling rednecks — their neighbors, the Forresters.

Jody fears his mother but idolizes his father. And at Dad’s side, over the course of a year, the boy will experience the terrors and glories of nature, the thin thread of subsistence their family lives on and the pleasures of travel — to The Forresters’ roadhouse, to “Volusia” (the county where Daytona Beach is located, and the steamboat lumber town of Deerfoot Landing/Deland, which may be where they visit).

Jody pines for a pet he can call his own. Pa’s got the dogs, which are working animals and game to fight the bear they set off to track after he slaughers their chickens. A Forrester kid, Fodderwing (Donn Gift) shows off his pet raccoon.

When Pa is bitten by a rattlesnake and kills a deer to use its internal organs to “draw out th’poison,” Jody gets his wish. The deer was a doe, and to make up for its sacrifice, Jody convinces his reluctant parents to let him take the doe’s fawn in and raise it.

Love and devotion and hard life lessons will follow as both of them grow up during Jody’s eleventh year.

Jarman lights up every scene he’s in, and Peck brings a light touch to folksy Penny, nicknamed that by the brutish, hulking Forrester (Forrest Tucker as the heavy) that he cons into swapping a “no good dawg” for a shotgun.

Henry Travers of “It’s a Wonderful Life” plays a kind-hearted storekeeper.

But the heart of the picture, almost tucked into the background, is Wyman as Orry. Like Peck, she was nominated for an Oscar for this performance. Orry tries to tell “a tale” by the fireplace, blank-faced relating a story with no moral, message or punchline. Deadpan. She makes Orry stoic and plainly fearful of investing her whole heart in this world, this life, this husband and this little boy. Any or all of them could be taken away in a heartbeat, she’s learned.

Early in my career, I worked in Knoxville, Tennessee, where director Clarence Brown attended college and endowed his alma mater with cash for a theater at the University of Tennessee, and left his papers and a long oral history interview on tape for them to archive. Writing a story about him on the 100th anniversary of his birth, I went through his papers — which included old screenplays with the letters “GG” and five digits scribbled on the margins. That was Greta Garbo’s Hollywood phone number. Brown might have been her favorite director, with the silent classic “Flesh and the Devil,” “Anna Christie,” the film where “Garbo Speaks!” among their collaborations.

In the oral history recorded during a late life commemoration in the ’60s, you can hear Brown talk about what flirty “child” Liz Taylor was when she filmed “National Velvet” with him, his reasons for the ahead-of-its-time race drama “Intruder in the Dust,” and his difficulties filming “The Yearling,” getting all those locations and sound stage sequences to fit together.

It wasn’t until a few year later, when I interviewed Gregory Peck for one of those “An Evening With” movie star tours that I got an earful of how much trouble “Yearling” was.

“It was the poor little deer,” Peck explained. Shooting in Technicolor required every light on the lot, and the fawns playing the yearling would get hot in an instant and wander off the set. You can see by the way young Jarman has to grab him and hug him and pick him up in shot after shot what the deer had in mind. ESCAPE.

“Clarence finally called over a grip and sent him off to get a block of ice,” Peck recalled. “He got that, had it covered in straw and ferns or whatever they had in the forest bed scene, and sat the fawn on that. He stayed still long enough for a couple of takes.”

“GENIUS,” Peck laughed.

A couple of years after that, I tracked down Jarman for an anniverary story about “The Yearling” and Rawlings and he confirmed that whatever the glories of his performance, his real job was” keeping the deer” content or contained enough to get a take every time the camera rolled.

The bear/dog fight scene in this movie still has the power to disturb, and whatever the American Humane Society agreed to sign off on, you have to wonder what they didn’t see or weren’t in Florida to observe in situations like that. Nothing here looks faked.

But that’s one of the reasons “The Yearling” endures. Jody’s lessons about the harsh realities of life come from nature and human nature. Learning to look at loss, accept it and embrace grief is a big part of what he learns, and what movies like this one pass on to children on those rare occasions a film has the nerve to challenge kids this way this one still does.

Your film doesn’t become a childrens’s classic and remain one by avoiding the truth, as sad as it sometimes is.

Rating: approved, animal violence, fistfights

Cast: Gregory Peck, Claude Jarman Jr., Jane Wyman, Henry Travers, Chill Wills and Forrest Tucker.

Credits: Directed by Clarence Brown, scripted by Paul Osborn and John Lee Mahin, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. An MGM release on Amazon, Tubi, Movies!, Youtube etc.

Running time: 2:08

“Honey, Baby Mine” is a not-really-a memoir that reads like a podcast someone passed along to a printer.

That’s kind of what you get when turn a long series of transcibed conversations into a book. And that’s what Oscar-winner Laura Dern and her Oscar-nominated mother Diane Ladd did, using conversations taken on daily walks meant to restore Ladd’s health after a (misdiagnosed) medical death sentence. It might be their last chance, Laura reminds her and us often in these chats, for her to learn things from her mother, details of her life, loves, career and relationship with dad Bruce Dern and others.

The talks were a heartfelt effort to add years to her stricken, 80something mother’s life. We read of the struggles it was to get Ladd up and moving, taking a few steps more -on oxygen, then off it — getting her lungs back to something like full capacity. Diane Ladd had a dire “six months to live” prognosis from her latest doctor, brought on, Ladd says, by some “poison” a farmer-neighbor sprayed on his property.

So Laura would make her walk and make her talk and they’d tidy up some blank spots about family history and maybe clear the air between them in the process.

That’s just lovely, especially considering how this book could have turned out to be more of an epitaph than a little love letter of chats, family photos and recipes. It’s as well-intentioned and warm as their relationship often comes off in these converations gathered under chapter headings like “The Angel’s Fault,” “Bent Spoons” “Mary & Preston” (Diane’s parents) and “What We Leave Behind.”

But if you’ve ever turned an interiew conversation into a “Q & A” in print like this, you know the shortcomings of the form. It’s the easiest, some would say laziest way to turn around an interview into a “story.” Still, you have to condense long passages into shorter ones, have to focus on the pithy quote, the nugget of insight that gets across the flavor of the person answering the question and even the one asking it. That doesn’t seem to have happened to a large enough degree here.

There’s a lot of artifice that shows, little bursts of exposition and back story that even couched in Laura’s best “Remember when” prompts, reads as stage-managed or postscripted. One can imagine a sound crew — boom mike, etc. — accompanying them on these strolls in Santa Monica and environs, places where Laura’s kids with ex-husband Ben Harper used to frolic.

Names are dropped, and with no explanation, context or the like, one must turn to IMDb to figure our who they’re talking about, although they circle back and properly ID some of them in end-of-chapter essays each writes rather than speaks.

But there are pearls scattered throughout the book. Laura’s pal, frequent collaborator and like Diane Ladd, fellow Southerner Reese Witherspoon drawls Laura’s last name as her nickname for her — “Dern.”

The most heated the chats get is when Laura laments how often her mother was gone during her childhood. Her Dad, Bruce Dern, and Ladd married and divorced, and Laura was “raised by my grandmother,” something she mentioned in interviews just often enough to hurt her mother’s feelings.

Ladd professes an eagerness to “protect” Laura from her savage, body-image-focused and predatory business. But she let Laura start auditioning at 11, and let her take a role in sex-obsessed filmmaker Adriane Lyne’s “Foxes” when she was ELEVEN.

“Laura, you were fourteen, but we told him you were seventeen!”

“No, I was eleven and I said I was fourteen for the role of a seventeen year-old!”

“Oh my God, what was I thinking?”

The reader’s allowed to wonder that as well. A lot of that stuff about what Laura dove into, what Diane “allowed” and what Laura resented about her absent-and-working mom is rationalized and normalized, but we get the feeling Dern didn’t want to raise her kids that way. Did she? Hard to say. The book doesn’t get into that.

We hear about Ladd’s brassy, assertive way of plunging into her profession in her teens, her first meeting with Bruce Dern (literally on stage), his to-the-manner-born background and the baby they conceived on their first night spent together.

I hadn’t realized their first child died at 18 months, something you have to piece together from a tidbit in the book and a deeper dive into Wikipedia.

There’s a of that in in this chatty but skips-over-a-LOT mother-daughter memoir.

Skimming Ladd’s love life, and skipping past Laura’s colorful Hollywood dating history ENTIRELY (Goldbum to Billy Bob, Kyle MacLachlan, Nic Cage, an NBA player here, Common and singer-husband of five years Harper) says more than perhaps going into detail would have.

Ladd owns up to “woo-woo” moments in her reasoning, thinking, dogma and opinions, and that jibes with her talk show appearance persona. She’s a bit “woo woo.” One of the people she’d send to “protect” Laura on teen film shoots while Diane was location was guru to the Left Coasters Marianne Williamson.

That’s about as “woo woo” as you get.

But there’s warmth in even their amusingly testy moments, even in the filler. And every so often, Laura summons up a memory they’ve shared that both regard as magical, a touchstone moment, such as when Diane “dragged” seven year-old Laura to the set of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and Laura can “pinpoint the exact moment when I truly fell in love with acting.”

Director Martin Scorsese took an interest, and Dern noticed the specificity of his directions to her mother (who co-starred as “Flo” opposite Ellen Burstyn in the film), the way her mother processed that and made magic with his suggestions. Scorsese let Dern watch — close-up — a bathroom scene from his vantage point, through a crack in a barely open door.

Dern even got to be an extra. But that wasn’t the first time. She just didn’t make the final cut of the Burt Reynolds/Diane Ladd action comedy “White Lightning.”

“Remember when Matt Clark’s character menaced yours with a gun and I ran and grabbed your leg, wrecking the shot?”

If you’re a movie fan you probably already love these two grandes dames of the cinema. I’ve interviewed Dern a few times, never had the pleasure of talking with her mother and sometime co-star (“Rambling Rose” is their best collaboration).

Dern pal Witherspoon wrote the sweet, fun and flippant forward to the book.

Not crazy about the book, although I love the sentiment that created it. Now that Mom’s recovered, if you want to do this right, ladies, check out the way Ron and Clint Howard structured their book, “The Boys.”

Or better yet, do a podcast, maybe with a producer who eggs you on into getting to everything you kind of skirt in the book you named for your shared term of endermeant. As it’s a line from Woody Guthrie’s “Crawdad Song,” which you’d sing together on phone chats at bedtime during Laura’s childhood, “Honey, Baby Mine,” there’s your podcast theme song.

“Honey, Baby Mine, A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding),” by Laura Dern & Diane Ladd. 236 pages with scores of photos and a few recipes. Grand Central Publishing. $30.

Gal G is a secret agent chasing a master hacker endangering global stability in this Aug. 11 Netflix actioner.

Jamie Dornan also stars.

Looks slick.

Michihito Fujii’s “Village,” inexplicably retitled “The Village” by some typist at Netflix, is a murky melodrama with Noh Theatre and other distinctly Japanese cultural traditions and attitudes folded into what plays as a slow-simmer thriller.

The untranslated Noh scenes and a story that points to inescapable fate and troubles passed generation to generation mean it can be frustrating for a western cinema fans, where we believe we determine our own fate, we like our heroes proactive and even vengeful and the pace of cinema is ususally the pace of life — a bit more brisk than this.

The village of Kamon sits at the base of a mountain, with a local shrine partway up the slope. At the top, a big ugly recycling plant sits, something the locals were sure would “save” the village years ago.

Now, the young people who haven’t fled — and plenty of lifers — work at the vast garbage dump outside of the village, sorting out recyclables under the smiles of the mayor (Arata Furata), the usually-absent owner and the mayor’s beefy, loutish son Toru (Wataru Ichinose) who manages the dump.

Toru runs a dictatorship of bullying, staging wagered-brawls between the workers and pitilessly bullying shy, downcast Yuu (Ryûsei Yokohama).

Yuu is burdened with an alcoholic mother (Naomi Nishida) who burns through his cash so that he will never be able to save money and escape this place. And he’s haunted by what probably drove his mother to drink, a long ago act of violence committed by his father, an act that climaxed with a deadly fire.

He is shunned by the villagers, who figure he won’t be around (in Japanese with English subtitles) “for long.” Toru is more cutting. Yuu is “unnecessary” for this job and this town.

Yet Yuu is at Toru’s disposal at all hours. Who else would they rely on to bury toxic waste, after hours in the dump?

Yuu’s life changes when an old crush returns. Misaki (Haru Kuroki) will do PR for the plant, which was controversial when it opened and remains so now, what with the after-hours mob waste, water quality impacts and plans to devour more of the village mountain with that ever-growing dump.

But bullies don’t give up easily, and Toru wants Misaki for his own. The company hasn’t covers its mob-waste dumping tracks. And the mayor’s younger brother (Shidô Nakamura), one guy who “got out,” is now a policeman in the adjacent city. He may be interested in what they’re burying in once-scenic Kamon.

Fujii — he directed “The Journalist” — had a lean enough thriller on his hands here. But he’s hellbent on getting his “Noh” allegory into it. Misaki is depicted as an enthusiast trying to explain its appeal to Yuu and the viewer. “Noh is mostly about your inner self,” she expllains. What you bring to the allegorical, myth-and-folktale-based plays are what you get out of them.

But Yuu’s recent past and his family history are what he takes to the masked, torchlight procession annual Noh shows. Whatever shell he came out of, Toru and the other locals aren’t keen on allowing him to escape.

Yokohama, barely aged out of boyish roles, makes Yuu a stoic and a martyr who lets himself get pushed around a lot more than your average Hollywood lead. Kuroki gives Misaki a “You don’t know how good I am for you” pluck and maturity, something helped along by the fact that she is older.

Ichinose, jacked up and tattooed here, probably has a steady diet of Yakuza movies in his future, if not his past.

The violence, when it comes, is brutal and expected. The complications surrounding it have all been contrived along obvious plot lines.

For me, that traps this “Village” firmly in the grasp of melodrama, where the story and situations are predictably manipulated to wring expected jolts and tears, if we’ve bothered to invest in it.

The cultural differences the film touches on are outweighed by the universalities of the story. Most every small town facing a new garbage dump, cut-rate distrubition center, casino, prison or Cop City is going to be riven by people screaming “JOBS” and those looking at the mountain about to be defaced and the ugly or low paying nature of those jobs.

I found “Village” easy enough to follow, if frustrating in how slowly its events unfold and indeed how they unfold. The Noh Theatre parallel either needed expanding or shrinking, as its allegorical “dream” doesn’t fit with what’s going on here at all.

Play up Yuu’s “fate,” show how hard it is to escape the trap your provincial village puts you in (alluded to, but under-developed). And above all else get ON with it. There’s not enough here — milieu, characters and situations — to justify 120 minutes of screen time.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex

Cast: Ryûsei Yokohama, Haru Kuroki, Wataru Ichinose, Shidô Nakamura and Arata Furata

Credits:Scripted and directed by Michihito Fujii. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00