Movie Nation

Virginie Efira, Benoît Magimel and Nastya Golubeva star in the latest from Alice Winocour (“Disorder,” “Proxima,” “Augustine”) film.

Yes, this looks very good.

June 23.

Tilda co-stars as a New York art maven — maybe a bit of a “monster” — who sponsors the character played by director and star Julio Torres — as he seeks a chance to live the American Dream.

Not magical realism. But likely magical. “Problemista” opens in August.

The title of the new documentary, “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me,” is almost a play on words. Anybody who remembers Smith in her time — the ’90s and early 2000s — figures “Oh, I KNOW her all right.”

But Ursula Macfarlane’s film, sort of a post mortem version of the recent Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears docs, spends much of its running time interviewing people who puncture that “golddigger,” “fame whore” famous-for-being-famous image.

“How dumb is Anna Nicole?” a tabloid headline from back then wondered. Cagey enough to bet on her best assets, play the angles, work the paparazzi, seize her chances and get famous and turn that into great wealth.

Golddigging? Yes, she turned on the Betty Boop (phone) voice for doddering, wheelchair-bound J. Howard Marshall, the rich old fool four times her age who pursued her, “protected” and financed her rise to fame and whose riches she sought a share of after his death. But “there was love there” witnesses interviewed here declare.

No real talent? Well, she mastered the stripper pole in a hurry, landed a laugh in her few big screen appearances (“The Hudsucker Proxy,” for one) and made the “reality” of her life as comical as it needed to be for chat show appearances and the reality TV series she starred in.

But as this portrait, painted by friends, confidantes, relatives, colleagues, tabloid journalists and a doctor seems finished and settled on the easel, just waiting for the pigment to dry, Macfarlane — who directed films on the “Charlie Hebdo” French magazine massacre and the fall of Harvey Weinstein — smears that paint to allow the viewer to return to a more manipulative, calculating and dishonest view of Smith.

We’ve picked up on the fact that the woman born Vicky Lynn Hogan “loved being the center of attention,” craved fame and wealth and reinvented herself more than once in the pursuit of her goals.

Some of the relatives who helped raise her — her late law-enforcement officer single mom Virgie is heard and seen in archival footage — talk about her impulsiveness, her pursuit of older men even as a teen, and her eagerness to use her libido and her looks to get out of Mexia, Texas.

Marrying a fry cook at the fried chicken joint where she worked at 17, having a son shortly after, gives credence to that impulsive reputation. Bailing on that marriage (that husband is missing from the interviews here) and becoming a stripper verifies her “I want lotsa money and didn’t-care-how-she-got-it reputation.

But as her origin story brings her into a Houston strip club, as her “flat chested” complaint becomes a goal that she works to pay for, as the newly-curvaceous bombshell finds herself summoned to be in front of Playboy cameras (like Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe before her), a Guess Jeans honcho signs her up and “my dreams” all start coming true, the viewer can become swept up in how swiftly these things can happen to a beautiful woman in our Attention Economy Culture.

Smith was not just an inspiration to all things Kardashian. Look at TikTok and Facebook “Reels” and witness the explosion of attractive young women, in particular, doing anything and everything to get their faces out there and be “discovered,” just like Anna Nicole.

We’re no longer surpised this can happen, thanks to Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. But it’s still possible to be bowled-over in revisiting the way Smith bombshelled her way into Playboy, and she and a Guess honcho changed her name and her billboards and magazine ads made her LA famous, then world famous, “adored by millions” but “loved by few,” her “life lived out in the tabloids.”

A close-friend-turned-lover from her stripping days talks about her “sweetness” and bisexuality.

An early lawyer of Smith’s turns herself into a pretzel, trying to describe Smith’s using and marrying aged, frail J. Howard Marshall as anything but predatory.

We see the day she met her biological father, having tracked him down and flown him and a stepbrother out to LA, greeting them with a limo, a trip to Disneyland and an evening at the Playboy mansion with — of course — a camera crew in tow.

Macfarlane doesn’t get as close to the litigious inner circle leeches clinging to Smith in her last years as you would like — a sister of the lawyer-turned-lover/advisor Howard K. Stern is here, and people who knew the tabloid photographer who fathered her second child are as close as the film gets to Larry Birkhead.

But we hear from the attorney whom the Marshall family hired to fight her in court, who let the delusional, egomaniacal and somewhat dim Smith dig herself into a hole no jury would let her out of.

And we learn about the diet drugs and pain meds she got addicted to that made her seem stoned most of the last decade of her life, even as she put on and lost weight and attempted a “comeback.”

It’s a sad story, of course, with overdoses and deaths and sort of classical American “price of fame” arc. But it’s also revealing, and only rarely judgemental — even handed, I thought.

No, “You Don’t Know Me” isn’t high art or even fair in the way it baits us into thinking “That title is right” only to pull us back towards “Maybe we knew her all along.”

In prepping this review, I noted that the NY Times published a critique that suggests Smith “deserves better than this.” Actually, a film that’s revealing, humanizing and an honest depiction of the course of her life, meeting some of the people she loved and who loved her, recalling the isolation and joys she experienced as well as the sordid and dishonest sides of her is exactly the sort of documentary biography Smith deserved.

Unfortunately, it’s only those who survive their deal with the Devil who get the Britney/Pamela “lived through it and this is who I really am now” treatment.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, discussion of rape and sexual abuse, drugs

Cast: Anna Nicole Smith, Marilyn Grabowski, “Missy,” Donald Hogan, George Beall, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, Marcus J. Fox

Credits: Directed by Ursula Macfarlane. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

The Wayans family made bank with the spoofy-goofy “Scary Movies” franchise and the “Haunted House” spoofs that bubbled up when those ran their course.

Jordan Peele and “Get Out” came along and raised the bar, embracing some horror conventions but turning race and racism into the driver of the narrative.

Shudder released a documentary about African American characters, traditions and tropes in horror movie a few years back, “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror.” Shudder should post-that title back on its streaming site.

“The Blackening” seems both part of that tradition and a lampooning of it, pitched perhaps midway between “Scary Movie” and “Get Out.” The trailers have been a trip. This opens in mid June, but tonight, we check it out for review.

This looks handsomely mounted, inventively cast.

It was, in hindsight, probably a mistake to try and send off “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also a mistake for Lucasfilm to migrate the entirety of this franchise from Paramount to Disney, but nobody asked me.

Film festivals, like studio movie junkets (inviting critics to fly in, review a film and interview the cast), are a boiling cauldron of “group think.” And Cannes, famous for going all-in on the artsy, the pretentious and the “single minded vision” of this or that celebrated filmmaker, is rarely friendly to straight-up Hollywood popcorn pictures. That’s been the case with “Dial of Destiny.” The earliest reviews are, to put it charitably, mixed.

Fine. Harrison Ford is very old, and this franchise has been flogged to death. I look at the trailers and know to expect a lot of repetition, and a protracted effort to wring emotion out of our sentimental attachment to the character.

You know going in that this might feel gassed, and that winning over viewers, new ones especially, will be an uphill battle for its distributor. I mean, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” sucked, after all.

Having a very old leading man — de-aged for flashbacks — means that more of the movie’s action will be in the hands of his “goddaughter” sidekick, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Cool. Women have played big roles in this saga, with Karen Allen‘s Marion Ravenwood setting the too-tough-to-be-a-damsel-in-distress standard, and Mrs. Spielberg being a sort of lone exception to that rule. Sorry, Kate.

But conservatives, smelling a movie that’s going to struggle, a DISNEY movie at that, have decided that “the worst reviewed Indiana Jones movie” is “bad” because it’s “woke.”

That whole “blood in the water,” “take credit for killing something” for political points thing. Maybe prop up Florida’s would-be dictator governor and would-be presidential candidate in his public spat with a publicly-traded company.

It’s all over the interwebs. The wingnutoisie are foaming at the mouth for a Disney flop. Not just the usual suspects. Or the most cynical opportunists. And not just the North American wingnuts. Oh noooo.

The label was applied even before the damned movie was shown to anybody, which has more to do with DeSantis-loving Disney bashers than anything Waller-Bridge has ever said or any film director James Mangold has ever made.

If this sounds like the pushback that’s been going on ever since Disney announced that a Black woman would be starring in the live-action fairytale “The Little Mermaid,” it is. Same crowd. Same “issues.”

One of the most defensible reasons for carrying the Indiana Jones franchise on for over 40 years –on film and on TV — is watching the character do what humans have ALWAYS done — EVOLVE. From his regressive, post “white man’s burden” racial regard for Arabs in “Raiders” and somewhat patronizing treatment of Asians in the early films, he, like most of the world, has been enlightened and changed with the times.

He is, after all, an academic and a scientist. But wait, modern conservatism hates those folks, too. Ask the guy in the white lab coat named Fauci about that, or for that matter the tsunami of scientists who predicted and are now documenting the ever-worsening impact of climate change, which is what they had to re-label “Global Warming” because conservative billionaires smeared that simpler, more direct and bluntly-correct name for it.

By the way, most of these folks buying into the cynical “anti-wokism” trolling of opportunists are just further examples of know how easily led the reactionary are. Even Trump figured that out. This crowd is just looking for someone to validate the narrow-mindedness they refuse to let go of. They stopped going out to movies before Clinton left the White House. So they’re all worked-up about something they don’t have a stake in other than letting us know something else they just “hate.”

If there’s one thing that all these “very fine people, ” none of whom seem very good at defining “woke,” have in common, it’s a hatred for “the other” races and a soul-sucking desire to keep women in their place.

Remember that the next time some Eva Braun blonde on Fox denies she’s a racist, or some middle aged white rabble rouser declares “There’s no such THING as a Republican/Conservative war on Blacks/Asians/Latinos/Gays or Women.”

The actual negative reviews of “Dial of Destiny” don’t typically fault the movie for broadening its canvas or widening its demographic appeal. “Woke” is being attached to those reviews to score political points. I’ve had run-ins with some of the folks doing the sh-t-stirring, and have run into and/or read some of the critics beating this drum about this “element” of this movie. And there’s not a one of them I’d follow over a cliff like Glen Beck’s lemmings.

Deeper into June, other reviews will come out, mine included (updated, linked here). And June 30, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is released. I dare say if it’s got shortcomings, they won’t have a damned thing to do with politics.

And here’s a news flash. Indiana Jones has ALWAYS been “woke.” He hates Nazis, which is modern western conservatism’s REAL beef with the old man with the whip.

Nazis HATE Indiana Jones, too. As if we needed more proof.

Low stakes, low key, low lighting and generally low energy, there’s not much to recommend the Indonesian Around the World with Netflix offering “Arini by Love, inc.”

Yes it’s quite short, by Western feature film standards. But not a lot happens and none of what does amounts to anything that would hold a viewer’s interest.

We meet Arini (Della Dartyan) as she’s scrambling, with her suitcase, trying to dodge a uniformed guard and street toughs and escape. Something.

But when she stops a cab and climbs in, the sinister woman whose face we don’t see knows her by name.

A flashback to “three years ago” shows us what led up to that escape attempt. Arini enrolls in some sort of total immersion personality-makeover “dating” service, “Love, inc.”

“I want to be happy,” she admits (in Indonesian with English subtitles) upon acceptance.

In a closed campus compound with only unnatural (low) lighting, Arini and other women and men dressed in colorless, shapeless clothes with be put through lessons on everything from table settings (to maximize “emotional intimacy”) to salsa dancing.

The stern Ms. Diana (Marissa Anita) presides over all this, each inmate locked in her or his dorm room, every meal finishing with a (drugged) dessert designed to sedate them for more indoctrination, every lesson aiming to help those there “convince the client that the you role you play is YOU.”

But memories and real identity are what you risk, something Arini picks up from another Love, inc. “customer” inmate, Tiara (Kelly Tandiono). She keeps a book of “memories” that are being erased.

Shades of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Well, except for the romance, the heartache, the humor and the pathos.

This all sounds more like a brainwashing school for spies or (like TV’s “The Prisoner”) ex-spies. But no. This is all about remaking yourself into the most attractive mate possible.

Or so Diana says, insisting that they will merely “feed your mind with happiness.”

Taken at its word, this movie is a laugh-out-loud comment on Islamic Indonesia’s dating scene. Are the Arini/Tiara attempts to get at the truth, to figure out if the guy Arini seems to be set up with is someone he’s met before, and to escape (Let’s crawl into the AIR DUCTS!) an allegory for escaping the trap of the culture and its dating mores?

Possibly. In any event, parable or simple, unlayered linear narrative, the flatlining plot and flat performances of this movie never makes one feel anything save for boredom.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Della Dartyan, Kelly Tandiono, Farish Nahdi and Marissa Anita

Credits: Directed by Adrianto Sinaga, scripted by Adrianto Sinagao and Widya Arifianti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:12

“There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead.

 “When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid.”

But giving her a sequel, the original she won’t equal, wasn’t the cleverest plan.

Where “Becky” was fresh, when ripping bloodied flesh, her “Wrath” I simply must pan.

We all remember “Becky,” the rare villainous turn by Kevin James, the bloodbath unleashed when Becky’s Dad (Kevin McHale) is murdered by Nazi home invaders in search of a mysterious key.

“The Wrath of Becky,” the sequel to that “gonzo” 13-year-old avenging angel thriller, still has Lulu Wilson in the title role, and summons Seann William Scott as the new Nazi, an “insurrectionist” leader of the Noblemen (he’s too buff to be a Proud Boy) and an injured and stolen pet mastiff-looking dog that Becky is hellbent on retrieving.

The filmmakers have changed, if not the star and the movie’s anti-MAGA/Nazi “fake patriotic f—-rs” politics. And expecting to catch lightning in a bottle twice was mostly wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

Not Scott. He just seems almost embarassed to be here.

Becky is 16, having fled the foster care system to room with a crusty, kindly old woman (Denise Burse), paying the rent by working at the local diner.

That’s where she runs afoul of three redneck racists of the not-exactly-rocket-scientist persuasion (Michael Sirow, Aaron Dalla Villa and co-director Matt Angel). They mouth off to her, she dumps coffee on Dear Leader (Sirow).

Next thing you know, they follow her home, beat her dog and murder her landlady.

Becky didn’t anticipate this? Oh. Right. “Sixteen.” “Consequences” never crossed her mind.

There’s nothing for it but to DIY gear up, recollect clues to figure out where these female Congresswoman-hating goons were going, fetch her dog and commence to killing.

“To be honest, guns kinda bore me.”

To be honest, this movie kind of bored me. Becky narrates too much. The situations, traps and what not seem obvious or ludicrous. There’s little of the sense of inventively murderous fun of “Becky.”

Perhaps the cleverest line of the gathered Noblemen is one they use to size up the “little girl” they’re facing.

“She definitely still shops at Hot Topic.“

I cackled at a killing, here and there. But the writer/co-directors don’t show any flair for creating moments of jeopardy and logically reasoning/killing one’s way of them. Becky problem-solves like she’s a 16 year-old screenwriter.

(Note to writer/co-director Angel and other director Suzanne Coote, the CIA wouldn’t be involved in domestic terrorism. That’s against the law.).

To further paraphrase the “There Was a Little Girl” poet Becky quotes, Henry Wadsworth, when “Becky” was was good, she was at least funny. But when she made a sequel, she wasn’t.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast:Lulu Wilson, Denise Burse, Michael Sirow, Matt Angel, Aaron Dalla Villa, Courtney Gains and Seann William Scott

Credits: Directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, scripted by Matt Angel, based on the character created by Nick Morris, Lane Skye and Ruckus Skye. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:24

This one opens June 2, and will be wrestling for the horror title with “The Blackening” for much of its run.

Iconic novel, mutli-Oscar-nominated film by Spielberg, Whoopi and Danny Glover and Oprah and yet not widely-accepted Alice Walker adaptation when it came out back in the ’80s.

So let’s take another shot. Is that the new Little Mermaid in this Oprah-Spielberg-Quincy Jones produced remake? Why yes it is Halle Bailey.

Taraji and Coleman Domingo and Louis Gossett Jr. and singer/bandleader Jon Batiste and David Alan Grier are the biggest names in the cast. But then, I don’t know H.E.R.

More musical? More magical realism? Directed by Ghanese filmmaker?

Christmas Day.