Movie Nation

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

“I’ll Show You Mine” is a rather tedious two-hander in which a non-fiction author interviews her once-famous model and ground-breaking “pansexual” nephew for her next book.

As drinks are sipped and awkward truths are brought to light, we’re reminded of what sexuality expert Priya (Poorna Jagannathan) says when Nicky, now a pornographic cartoonist, finally sits down for their weekend-long chat. She is his “aunt” “only by marriage.”

Ahem. As Nicky is a self-confessed ex “slut,” and was once a guy notorious for being uninhibited and not living by “boundaries” society set for him, that should make things interesting. Only it almost never does.

Priya has made a decent career out of exploring her own trauma, the triggers from her abusive dad that remain to this day and how “The Patriarchy” scars women like her. Now, her estranged old man is in a nearby nursing home, his dementia no answer to her need for closure.

And Nicky? He was a model a dozen years ago, famous for coming out and for outrageous acts of public nudity, and infamous for an omnivorous sexual appetite.

To her, he is “the one person I consider to have no hangups.” But she wants to tie that to Nicky’s childhood abuse. And he’s distracted, deflecting, flirting and refusing to talk about his wife and two children or to give too much credence to her “trauma” ideas.

As she’s family (“by marriage”), they have history. She knows a bit and he has some very specific memories, too. Over the course of their long chat, there will be confessions, questions that reveal more about the questioner, constant shifts in the power dynamic and lots of judging.

She is “so tough on yourself,” says boundary-free Nicky.

And you’re “so EASY on yourself,” Priya spits back.

They treat each other with kid gloves, much of the time, because each is desperate for the “comeback” this book could deliver.

Director Megan Griffiths — “Lucky Them” was hers — has animators dress up this bland three-writer screenplay with little samples of Nick’s porno-toons, vulgar depictions of sex acts to enliven that favorite screenwriting crutch “chapter” headings.

Chapters are for novels or mini series. The only reason to include them in a shooting script is that you were too lazy to delete them or so in love with showing your “structure” process that you can’t give them up. They almost never add anything. But here, they’re illustrated/animated with sketched threesomes, sex organs and masturbation, often captioned with a punch line with no punch.

The Duplass Brothers produced this, and they’re fond of talkathons, “mumblecore” their genre used to be called. Adding actual porn (not particularly offensive, just not interesting) must have seemed like a no brainer. To them, at least.

I had hopes, here and there, for a good tantrum from the “expert” over the anything is “acceptable” consequences of a no “boundaries,” shame-free and indecisively “fluid” sexual culture. I mean, how many letters do that figure that acronym can extend to? That “COMMIT” to something tirade doesn’t quite happen.

This “sex, lies and audio recording” has no spark, little chemistry between competent but charisma-starved leads and only one late second act revelation that merits our attention, and a third act surprise that we saw set-up in the first.

Whatever the object, the result is a shrug, a long, often inane conversation about a serious subject that can be dismissed with a single word review.

“Meh.”

Rating: unrated, discussions of sexuality, graphic sexual cartoons, some profanity

Cast: Poorna Jagannathan and Casey Thomas Brown

Credits: Directed by Megan Griffiths, scripted by Tiffany Louquet, Elizabeth Searle and David Shields. A Gravitas Venture release.

Running time: 1:42

Were they a big deal? Drawing a blank on that era.

June 30, a slow-rolling release over the sleepy prairie states and their cities.

There was never anything subtle about Luc Besson’s “Leon: The Professional,” titled “Leon” overseas but “The Professional” here, and retitled both as it arrived on video.

A minimalist thriller with maximalist, pull out the stops exess, it’s an opera of violence with performances both understated and bombastic enough to blow the speakers out in the theater.

It’s the film that launched Besson in this hemisphere and set Jean Reno firmly on the path to action stardom. It was the screen debut of future Oscar winner Natalie Portman. And it was the last movie the great Gary Oldman made during his drug binge years, and it shows. He sobered-up from authentically “bleary” and went on to win an Oscar himself.

“Death is…whimsical, today.”

But Oldman’s diva turn as a volcanic, classical music-loving addict, a murderously corrupt D.E.A. agent, isn’t the only thing about this Little Italy epic that’s out of control. This picture is bracing and moving, flippant and cutesy, even.

Oh, and unsettling to the point of disturbing, borderline repellent. That’s just what’s on the screen, not even taking into account the accusations that hit Besson when #MeToo crossed the Atlantic that seem to fold onto the pervy tightrope this picture walks.

The story is a “Gloria” variation about a child taken in after her family is slaughtered by gangster law enforcement agents. She is protected from the mortal threat that comes with being a witness to mass murder. Here, the protector is a “cleaner,” a variation on a hitman character Reno played in “La Femme Nikita.”

Leon is simple, illiterate and all-business. But when the 12 year-old neighbor girl he’s noticed smoking, sporting a black eye and a foul mouth knocks on his door when she realizes four men have just murdered her father, stepmother, half sister and younger half-brother, the always-relocating killer-for-hire lets her in.

It’s the “relationship” that adds an edge beyond edgy and gives “Leon” a heaping helping of cringe. Look at the way Besson has Mathilda dressed — short-shorts, leggings, midriff-baring tops. Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver” comes to mind, sexualized costuming for a child obsessed with the “Transformers” cartoons.

With Leon being a tad simple, we’re allowed to ponder this connection, which isn’t quite fatherly and yet never crosses any finite line in a romantic regard. But damn, it comes close.

When Mathilda convinces her protector to play a dress-up game of “Who is she, now?” it’s damned creepy, but kind of apt that she trots out as Madonna in bra-baring “Material Girl” mode. But then, bizarely, she is “Seven Year Itch” subway grate “Happy birthday, Mister President” Marilyn Monroe.

Every parent in the audience must have squirmed at that. Did Portman’s?

I went to New York in ’94 to review and interview the stars of this film and Atom Egoyan’s middle-aged men trooping to a slutty schoolgirl-uniformed exotic dance club — “Exotica” –which previewed the same weekend. Between barely-beyond-a-tween Portman and “Exotica” teen Mia Kirshner one could get a seriously jaded take on stage parents, even though Portman’s escorted her to her interviews.

But the best argument against seeing this film through a narrow, creeper-behind-the-camera lens is the bravura movie-making that just bowls you over even as you fret about what lines Monsieur Luc might cross.

Heroes and villains are framed in tight, sweaty close-ups, action beats perfectly-assembled, characters built out of on-the-nose casting (Danny Aiello as Leon’s Italian restaurant “contractor” and banker) right down to Oldman. Who better to play an cultured, psychotic addict, someone whose every swallowed pill is an orgasmic experience,than an actual addict?

Besson limits how much of the city we see, concentrating on the old, iron-railing’d New York flophouse, the worn-out apartment and Leon’s spartan lifestyle.

The contract killer wears Windsor-rimmed sunglasses, even when he’s sleeping — upright, pistol-at-hand, in the comfiest chair in any hotel room or apartment he rents. His outdoor uniform is a stocking cap and trench coat which covers his leather weapons harness/vest.

He is a loner with only an ancient leather suitcase that carries his arsenal and a few clothes, a violin case and a houseplant, “My only friend…always happy.”

Mathilda weeps for her kid brother, not her abusive father, his latest wife or her jazzercise-obsessed half-sister. And when Leon bluntly tells her his line of work, she wants to know his price, and hearing that, if he can teach her to “clean.”

The film’s light treatment of this is seriously twisted, too. He teaches her his rules — “No women, no kids” — borrowed from the hitman thrillers of John Woo. He explains the levels of expertise killers-for-hire acquire. Sniping from afar, at first, with “the knife” being the close quarters weapon you master last, after you’ve grown hardened to murdering.

The training is chilling, but cute.

Mathilda wants to execute the men who killed her little brother. Leon doesn’t discourage this and goes as far to offer her a pistol. That lack of boundaries and push-back will bring the full weight of New York law enforcement down on them.

What sticks with you about the film is that first “hit,” an epic one-man assault on a territory-violating heavy surrounded by body guards.

“Somebody’s coming up. Somebody serious.”

Eric Serra’s score, romantically orchestral if a tad nervy, adds sleigh bells when violence is coming. That’s been copied in many a thriller score since.

Leon comes at his victims from above, and below, one at a time and then in a group. Bullets perforate the metal shutters to the mobster’s rental. We can guess what happened to the mugs on the balcony when the blinds were dropped, blocking our view.

“Leon” is a film that whips the viewer around, snaps us back in our seats and makes us cringe at the adorable business of teaching a child to “clean” and the relationship rendered inappropriate simply by virtue of Leon’s childishness and Mathilda’s immitations of maturity.

Besson launched the “Transporter” series, dabbled in sci-ci (“The Fifth Element”), and produced, wrote and/or directed films like “Lucy” and “Anna.” Very young, very skinny and girlish women have been a regular feature of his thrillers, either as objects of desire to be “transported” or petite young things who kill.

He even gave his then-much-younger wife Milla Jovovich her own epic, “The Messenger.”

Whatever eyebrows his “tendencies” used to raise were once dismissed as “That’s guys in the movie biz for you” and “Well, he’s FRENCH.” Now, post-Weinstein, not so much.

But in a way, that transgressive edge adds to the disquiet of “The Professional,” a movie that would be all flashy technique and Oldman without Mathilda, Portman and Reno’s “Leon” struggling to figure out what to do with her and how to take her.

For my money, it’s every bit the classic that its contemporary thriller, Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” is thought to be, a film that engages, thrills and repels in equal measure.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, a child smoking, innuendo

Cast: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Danny Aiello and Gary Oldman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luc Besson. A Columbia Pictures release on Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, etc.

Running time:

There’s a properly extravagant and epic-length long-take showacase moment in the first act of “Extraction 2,” a 21 minutes/no edits first-person-shooter video game-style plunge through a prison break that takes the viewer and our hero Rake (Chris Hemsworth) from tunnels underneath the Republic of Georgia prison, inside to extract his target — a woman and her two children — through crowded hallways, a brutal beat-your-way-through-the-exercise-yard, a vicious SUVs pursued by motorbikes, etc. chase onto an escape train hounded by helicopters.

It is something to see, more impressive than thrilling, although it does deliver “The Cool Parts,” with Hemsworth deftly ducking bullets and blows, turning his back on explosions he’s caused at just the perfect moment, man-handling a heavy machine gun needed to shoot down gangster helicopters and the like.

The 15 minutes or so opening that introduces the Georgian gangster family that must be contended with here, with scenes where we see our hero “recover” from the grievous wounds of “Extraction I,” sent into retirement in the Austrian hinterlands only to be commissioned by a nameless tough-guy/smartass (Idris Elba) and reassembling his “team?” Kind of dull, save for Elba.

“If it all goes well, you don’t get caught or shot in the face, I’ll meet you on the other side t’give you a kiss!”

Well, we’d sit through two hours waiting for that “prize,” right?

“Extraction 2” is more relentless than “Extraction,” as if that was possible, an almost endless succession of firefights as Tyler Rake and his team (Golshifteh Farahan and Adam Bessa plus cannon fodder extras) mow down more Georgians than a drunk driving Reese Witherspoon ever could. OK, the “other” Georgians.

Hearing the top lieutenant of the “Nagazi” gang tell his dear leader (Tornike Gogrichiani) undercount the death toll at “10” at one point may be the biggest laugh in this thing. How Putinesque of him. We’ve seen dozens dropped, and unless the Nagazi have really good insurance and maybe their own MASH units, they’re goners.

The set-up — a Georgian mobster is imprisoned for murder. A corrupt politician has allowed him to keep his wife (Tinatin Dalakishvili), teen son (Andro Japaridzem) and little girl inside with him. They’re all in jail together, with the husband (Tornike Bziava) only one psychotic killer among many.

A deep-pocketed somebody’s willing to pay to get the wife and kids out. By the way, she’s Rake’s ex sister-in-law. Go figure.

Rake, who barely clung to life after his Bangladeshi bloodbath, must survive another array of unsurvivable stabbings, explosions, brawls and falls to get them out and collect that kiss from his unnamed contractor.

Hemsworth, an amusingly self-aware Thor, is just a brawny piece of man-meat trained to handle fight choreography in most scenes here. Here Rake is, given the chance to “reach mindfulness” in retirement,” one of his sibling team cracks, and he’s going into action to save a mob moll and her brainwashed mobster-in-the-making son.

“These men are killers,” his rescued damsel tells him, stating the obvious.

“Yeah? So am I!”

The violence is extreme, but it has consequences. There are “stakes” in all this, formulaic though they are.

There’s a lot of money on the screen here, and one can understand the Netflix impulse to make a movie that makes a splash. But considering the scarcity of fresh English language dramas, thrillers, romances and rom-coms in their “film” queue, one does wonder if they’re spending that cash wisely.

If you’re like me, you go much of each month wondering why there’s so little that’s not a doc-series that’s “original,” so that I end up watching lots of Spanish language, Nigerian, Filipino and Indonesian films just because of how slim the pickings are otherwise.

In any event, “streaming” is a good place for this action overdose. It’s not interesting enough in between action beats to make you stay in the same room with it. Bathroom break? Need to make a sandwich? Just leaving it running. You’re not missing much.

Rating: R, lots of graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Golshifteh Farahani, Tornike Gogrichiani, Adam Bessa,Tinatin Dalakishvili, Andro Japaridzem and Idris Elba.

Credits: Directed by Sam Hargrave, scripted by Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, based on a graphic noel by Ande Parks. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

Warners’ long-awaited “The Flash” made its debut to paying customers last night and rounded up a robust if not world beating $9 million or so in “preview” Thursday ticket sales.

Reviews, including mine, have been on the fence, but audiences seem to be ready for this Ezra Miller star vehicle, with Deadline.comn projecting a $60 million opening (4 day) weekend, at this point.

It’s at $55 through Sunday, so maybe it’ll get a Juneteenth bounce Monday.

That’s more than double what “Elemental” is expected to garner. Pixar’s been off its game of late, and while kids’ cartoons don’t typically earn big bucks on Thursday night previews, the picture is doing measurably worse than “Lightyear,” and that’s not good.

“Lightyear” had a “Toy Story” pre-sold tie-in with viewers. “Elemental” is a hard sell and the reviews haven’t been kind.

Deadline had predicted $40 million, but after Friday lowered that to $33 million over three days, $36 million over four.

It might have to settle for third place after the latest “Spider-Verse” weekend. I doubt that, but we’ll see. The animated hit is on a pace to add another $29 over four days.

Here’s @BoxOfficePro’s tweeted weekend final total.

“Transformers” is fading a lot faster than “The Little Mermaid,” “Spider-Verse” is still drawing. Next weekend should look a lot like this one, as “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” doesn’t take over screens and the box office until Jiune 30.

As always, I’ll be updating these figures as the weekend progresses.

It’s not everything you could have hoped for, but for a fan, the final Indiana Jones movie tips the scale as “not bad, not bad at all.”

A film with exhillerating action beats, well-cast villains, fan service in the form of a “Greatest Hits” of the series and warm grace notes for returning members of the family, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is too long, which makes for mischief in the plotting and the pacing.

Paying homage to the earlier films just reminds of us how dazzling real stunts were before cinematic digitalis took over, and how much more expressive Harrison Ford was as a young man than he is as an old one — even an old one “de-aged” for the action-packed late WWII opening gambit of this film.

Indy is an old man when we meet him here, a set-for-retirement professor trying to pass on all he knows to indifferent flower children students in 1969. He’s even trying to teach on what turns out to be “Moon Day.” There’s a tickertape parade for the Apollo 11 Astronauts scheduled for downtown Manhattan, where Hunter College is located.

That’s when these mysterious “agents” working for this German physicist (Mads Mikkelsen) show up, chasing a woman (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who is anxious to meet Dr. Jones. She has something they want, and in short order, people are killed in pursuit of it.

Helena is the daughter of Indy’s WWII era British colleague, Basil (Toby Jones, seen in flashbacks). She’s finished her doctorate and taken up her father’s obsession, the mysterious Antikythera “dial” of this film’s title. She thinks her godfather, Indy, can help her find it.

Helena is a smart cookie, and a monomanical bruiser. She wants the “Dial” to sell it. The Nazi, vital to the U.S. space program’s current success, wants it to reset history. He, like Helena’s dad, believes the gadget, in its complete form, could direct the user to wormholes in time.

Indy figures out what she’s all about the first, second and third time she crosses him. He doesn’t need to figure out Nazis. They’re who you foil, vote against and when they threaten you, dispatch with extreme prejudice.

No wonder America’s wingnuts are up in arms over this movie.

Indy and Helena’s competing agendas and shared quest will take them to exotic Tangier, Sicilian Syracuse and Greece, trapped, facing death at the hands of Nazis both German and American (Boyd Holbrook, giving another vicious turn) time and again.

“You should have stayed in New York,” Indy is lectured.

“You should have stayed out of POLAND!”

Old friends (John Rhys-Davies) and new ones (Antonio Banderas) will be enlisted. Because that dial the headstrong Helena covets and that the unrepentant Nazi Voller craves could change the outcome of World War II.

“See you in the past, Doctor Jones!”

With Ford over 80, new director to the franchise James Mangold (“Logan,” “Walk the Line,” “3:10 to Yuma”) and the team of screenwriters pass along some of the punchouts to “Fleabag” alumna Waller-Bridge, whose Helena is a two-fisted, cunning and self-dealing addition to the franchise.

She even has a Short Round sidekick, the Spanish Moroccan Teddy (Ethann Isidore).

After throwing in big, digitally-assisted chases in Germany and mid-parade New York in the opening act and a late ’60s Tuk Tuk pursuit through Tangier to begin the second, “Dial of Destiny” slows down to a crawl. The bloated running time suggests they didn’t want to trim expensive sequences to make this picture fly by the way “Raiders” and “The Last Crusade” did.

Forty years-plus into this series, and the dialogue is no longer a flippant, cheesy homage to 1940s action serials. It’s an homage to earlier Indys.

Eels? “They look like SNAKES!”

“No they don’t!”

But for a fan, here’s your make or break point of interest. In that opening act, when a flashback takes Old Man Indy back to a bit of 1944 “Monuments Men” derring do, he and Helena’s English archeologist Dad are trapped on a Nazi train hauling stolen artifacts to some Bavarian hiding place. Among them are the “Antikythera,” the ingenius computer perhaps designed by the proteges of the brilliant ancient Greek scientist and engineer, Archidemes.

Yet there’s another piece that catches the eyes of Indy, his pal Basil and the Nazi physicist and V2 rocket team member Voller on board. It’s a spearhead, the Lance of Longinus, alleged to have been used by a Roman soldier to pierce the side of Jesus on the Cross to hasten his death.

Fans of Indy lore know that Philip Kaufman, who’d go on to film “The Right Stuff,” was obsessed with a book of Medieval lore that attached magical significance to this spear point, “The Spear of Destiny.” He convinced producer George Lucas to build a movie around this relic and the fact that Hitler made it a point of taking possession of it as soon as he came to power and annexed his native Austria, where the spearhead was housed.

Some of the legends “Raiders of the Lost Ark” attaches to the Ark of the Covenant, which has never been found, were also applied to The Lance of Longinus, that no army that possessed it could be defeated in battle.

Including the lance in “Dial of Destiny” completes the franchise’s circle and shows a reverence for all that spun off that unlikely blockbuster over 40 years ago. For a serious fan, that’s as cool as “Easter Eggs” get.

Ford is only allowed a few scenes to get across the weight of his years, what he’s experienced — “A few times in my life I’ve seen things…” — and those he’s lost.

Taking another swipe at what could have been a better finale to “The Last Crusade” seems just as futile as the first try. “Dial of Destiny” doesn’t so much end as drop the curtain.

But for a fan, there’s a warmth in “The Dial of Destiny” experience, a richness in seeing the devotion of old friends and loves, a sentiment not just built from nostalgia, but from a singular moment in popcorn movie history, the first film Siskel & Ebert described as an exhilerating “out of body experience” that reset the bar on summer action.

This one cannot match that. Few films have since.

Yet there’s still pleasure in the old War Horse, his leather jacket and decades out of date fedora. “Dial of Destiny” isn’t a particularly good movie. But it’s still a movie event you won’t want to miss.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking

Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Boyd Holbrook, Toby Jones, Thomas Kretschmann, Antonio Banderas and John Rhys-Davies.

Credits: Directed by James Mangold, scripted by Jez Butterworth, John Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and James Mangold. A Disney/Paramount release.

Running time: 2:34