Movie Nation

If you’re casting a movie about a business tycoon who basically launched a car company in a fit of pique, you could do worse than parking veteran screen heavy Frank Grillo in the title role.

Grillo can be menacing. Grillo can do slow burns. Grillo can fly off the handle, when the need arises.

And there might be a movie in the life of Ferruccio Lamboughini, the mechanic turned tractor builder who — insulted by the imperious Enzo Ferrari — bullheadedly set out to make “the most beautiful car in the world, and the fastest,” using a Spanish bull as his badge and the names of bulls or breeds for the cars’ model names.

But “Lambourghini: The Man Behind the Legend” doesn’t make that case.

It’s a truncated, somewhat sanitized bio pic of the “Tucker: A Man and his Dream” and “Ford v. Ferrari” school. Humorless and unexciting on every level, about the best you can say about it are you get to see a few cool cars.

Young Ferruccio (Romano Reggiani) returns to Cento, Italy, after World War II with his mechanic/driver pal Matteo (Matteo Leoni) and big plans.

He will marry the woman (Hannah van der Westhuysen) who waited for him and break the monopoly on tractor manufacturing in Italy, building a smaller, cheaper machine to cash in on the post-war “boom.” He and Matteo will modify an old car and win a big race to start the tractor concern with the prize money.

That doesn’t happen, and the script immediately sets the tone for the “biography” we’re to be served up. Events are conflated, chunks of history erased, details large and small bent and twisted and made to fit, much like the first car Lambourghini hastily pieced together for the Turin (not Geneva, as the film suggests) car show in the early ’60s.

The story is framed inside of an imaginary drag race between older Ferruccio (Grillo) and his nemesis, Old Enzo Ferrari (Gabriel Byrne) which Lambourghini imagines, sitting at his desk with toy cars. Kind of corny, but OK.

We’re dealing with a bit of balderdash, perhaps because the guy just wasn’t interesting enough to merit an American-made bio-pic featuring a trio of Hollywood stars. Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino plays the long-suffering, cheated-on second wife. She weeps a lot.

Maybe an Italian production that gets more into his childhood, his transformation from son of a grape-growing farm family into a mechanic for Mussolini’s air force who comes home from the war with big ideas and maybe a chip on his shoulder would have come off.

What we get instead is a fairly corny, utterly-conventional story of a proud, stubborn and womanizing business owner who succeeded with tractors, HVAC manufacturing and a luxury car marque, which is still around today, but owned by VW.

“You don’t believe in me,” Ferruccio complains at more than one point, at more than one age. “Life is short,” he says more than once, so why not build “the best cars in the world?”

He will develop a hand-built sports touring car “as strong as Hercules, as beautiful as Sophia (Loren).” He will do this because Ferraris are notoriously unreliable and he’s constantly burning through clutches on the ones he buys from Enzo’s motorworks.

But Italian cars in general and bespoke high-end Italian cars in particular are as famous for their looks as well as their fragility and stupidly expensive and laughably frequent repairs. Lambourghini did nothing to dispel that.

Casting the colorful Grillo (rent “Wheelman” or “Little Dixie” or even “Ida Red” to see him at his best) is probably the best thing that ever happened to the late Signor Lambourghini. But if you’ll recall, they didn’t put a lot of effort into depicting Enzo Ferrari in “Ford v. Ferrari,” and he was one of the villains of the piece. And by all accounts, he was much more of a character than his striving, bullheaded nemesis.

If Grillo can’t make the guy interesting to watch, and writer-director Bobby Moresco (he shared the screenwriting Oscar for “Crash”) can’t fudge Ferruccio’s life story into something more involving than this, I dare say that some suit at Lionsgate sat in a screening room at some point and wondered aloud, “Well, what was the point of THAT?”

Rating:  R for some language including a sexual reference

Cast: Frank Grillo, Mira Sorvino, Romano Reggiani, Patrick Brennan and Gabriel Byrne.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bobby Moresco. A Lionsgate release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:37

The age-old proviso about Bollywood films is that if the music and the choreography is good enough, you’ll excuse the slack storytelling of the inconsequential story.

“Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar” puts that to the test with dazzling choreography, fun music, sexy leads and posh settings complete with an even more posh interlude in Barcelona, Spain.

But we are so far ahead of this story that impatience to “Just get ON with it” overhwhelms this Ranbir Kapoor/Shraddha Kapoor (no relation) rom-com.

Dashing, dancing singing lead Ranbir Kapoor (“Sanju”) is Rohan, also called “Mickey” and once jokingly referred to as “Jitendra” (“One who has overwhelmed the senses”), the head of a service that — for a steep price — will break up your relationship for you.

A rich boy who must hit the gym a LOT ( not that we ever see it), he and his pal-since-childhood Manu (Anubhav Singh Bassi) will anonymously (business transacted via voice-disguising phone app) assemble a team that might include a fake ex-boyfriend to provoke a jealous rage, or a fake fortune teller taking “You can do better” instructions by radio. They will pound whatever message is necessary home (“You Deserve Better” digital street signs) to trick the unknowing partner-to-be-dismissed to cause the break-up and not realize she/he was manipulated.

Their company’s not rolling in cash, but Rohan and Manu have ethics. A married guy wants out?

“You have a CHILD,” Rohan snaps. “Be a MAN (in Hindi with subtitles)” Manu barks.

But Manu’s slow-marching to the altar with the adoring but smothering Kinchi (Monica Chaudhary). Can their business, their “art” of the break-up, save him?

Maybe. But not if motor-mouthed fashion plate Mickey gets distracted by “a goddess” who just happens to be Kinchi’s bestie. Tinni (Shraddha Kapoor) is — as advertised — a stunner. She throws the fellow she flirtatiously dismisses as an old money “spoiled brat” for a loop.

“You’re so gorgeous, I’m ashamed I am not a poet,” he gushes.

A whirlwind courtship ensues, Manu’s “Kinchi” problem is ignored and Rohan’s big, over-bearing family overwhelms the budding relationship with Tinni, with his eager participation.

Bringing the mother, grandmother, sister and niece along to a movie? Not a smart play, old chap.

As we’ve recognized the plot as borrowed from “The Breaker Upperers” and assorted Matthew McConaughey-and-or-Kate-Hudson rom-coms about trying to con someone into or out of a relationship, we know exactly where this is going.

So why does it take two hours and forty minutes to get there?

Yes, it’s a culture clash thing. Indian films have been long, for a variety of reasons, since the beginning. But one clue that this Luv Ranjan film provides is the ways the story is strung-out, contributing to the “dawdling” feeling.

It’s not the five or six production numbers, not really. Not even when one of them is set up by a character noting “The music will start…now. Next come the dancers…:”

This film seems engineered for an audience that is distracted, half-paying attention or headed out to the concession stand or restroom — a lot. The “overbearing family” gag is just one plot point among many that is introduced, underlined, beaten again and then beaten to death.

There’s little that’s novel about any of this, but even the simplest “twists” are handled and rehandled as if we’re not catching on.

What works are those sexy, energetic and fun song-and-dance scenes, choreographed by Bosco Martis and Caesar Gonsalves.

The leads click and set off just enough sparks, as co-equals, to “work” as a couple. And director and co-writer Luv Ranjan and Ranbir Kapoor turn his character into a Kevin Hart-paced motormouth, a fast-talker who can bowl over anybody with verbiage.

His courtship pitch to Tinni? He is “talented, handsome, good looking, rich, fit, virile, polite, loveable, humble, respectful, romantic and adorable,” even if he does say so himself.

Yes, fast is funny, but predictable is predictable, and this rom-com stumbles badly as it lurches towards the inevitable — she’s hired him to bust them up, he’s slow figuring this out.

When the title “Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar” translates as “You’re a Liar, I am Cunning,” you need to be more cunning at hiding where you’re going. Otherwise, we start rooting for the breakup to happen out of sheer impatience.

Rating: unrated, mild profanity

Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Monica Chaudhary and Anubhav Singh Bassi

Credits: Directed by Luv Ranjan, scripted by Rahul Mody and Luv Ranjan. A  Yash Raj Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:39

My first experience of the phenomenon instantly-labeled “Crackberry” was near its Canadian source, at the Toronto Film Festival shortly after the turn of the Millenium. You couldn’t watch a movie there without scanning a sea of little green screens all but rendering the big screen irrelevent.

Kind of felt like the End of Civilization as We Know It.

“Blackberry” is a crisp, crackling account — lightly-fictionalized — of that Canadian phenomenon that changed the world just as surely as Scots-born Canadian Alexander Graham Bell had changed it over a century before.

I used the word “guy” as a qualifier there for a reason, because this is prettty much a “guys” movie, capturing a nerdy male tech world at its most sexist, something the film has to jokingly acknowledge even if that isn’t exactly addressed. You can read the vanity, ego, machismo and nationalist pride that set the stage for Research in Motion’s rise and rapid fall as a study in male myopia, a monoculture that caught mononucleosis and pretty much died off because of it, it if you want to. Fair is fair.

But “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” veteran Glenn Howerton, playing the Big Business Bully who comes in, screams and breaks phones of every description as he all but takes over a Nerd Utopia — video-gaming slackers who had company Movie Nights built around “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “They Live” showings — and lets them play in the big leagues.

“Blackberry” tells the story of the company, the phone and the guys who made it and broke it in three acts.

Ballsy Balsillie was sure he could put a stop to that, even if he couldn’t wholly change this Waterloo, Ontario company’s culture.

At the Toronto Film Festival?

Johnson, his cast and his co-writer, loosely adapting a book about the rise and fall of Research in Motion, also tell the story through three distinct character arcs. One player in the saga starts out a villain, becomes a hero, and winds up back at villain. Another is an idealistic hero who turns towards the dark side. A third is just as idealistic, but childish, and maybe needs to grow up.

“Scanners” and “Starship Troopers” veteran Ironside plays a whip-cracking tyrant with another tech company whom Jim, recognizing a fellow shouter, head-hunts to whip their brilliant, loyal “family” workforce into global marketplace fighting trim.

Johnson, playing the designated goofball (headband, unruly hair), co-writing the amusing script, which sees Doug groping for ways to pitch their Big Idea about using the “network” that’s already out there — “It’s like The Force! Didya see ‘Star Wars?'” — keeps the tone light, even as he sets us up for a story that’s nothing less than momentous.

Baruchel, playing a Big Thinker whose hair went white in his 20s, makes a great, sober counter-balance to shrieking, impulsive Doug, who pleads for them to blow off this brute (Howerton’s Balsillie) who storms in to take over.

Parroting Balsillie’s observation of how clients and vendors they’re dealing with are looting their company without the courtesy of wearing an eyepatch or a pegleg, Mike gets it.

Scene after scene has just such confrontations, with flinty and just-right exchanges setting the direction of the company and the arc of the narrative.

“Are you familiar with the saying, ‘Perfection is the enemy of ‘good enough?‘”

From beginning to middle to the end, Johnson serves up the conflicts, the characters, the stakes and the human-failings inevitability of it all with broad strokes and punchy, cutting lines. And his players wear their archetypes with skill, allowing for the occasional grand flourish.

Rating: R, profanity and lots of it

Cast: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson, Martin Donovan, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Michael Ironside.

Credits: Directed by Matt Johnson, scripted by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, based on the book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:58

I’ve been reading Deadline.com’s reporting all week that has been shocked SHOCKED at steadily dropping expectations for the HUGE opening weekend for “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3.”

The summer’s debut blockbuster was sporting $135-150 million prognostications. Early. And then people started seeing it. By “people” I mean “critics.”

Granted, there isn’t really a reviewing consensus on this threequel. Some praised it to the moon, but a lot of people sitting in the dark taking notes mentioned the fact that it’s a bummer. Not much fun. Not deep, either, although an anti-animal-testing message is an attempt at making this meaningless fun adventure “about” something.

Could the fanboyouisie sense “not all that” from the trailers, or the reviews? Thursday night previews cleared the $17 million mark. Not bad. But exactly the same take — pretty much — as “Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania.” And that’s widely acknowledged as an underperformer, opening weekend on through the run, and a bit of a bummer to boot.

Friday’s take added to “Guardians'” Thursday and we’re looking at a good-not-epic $110 million opening weekend.

There’ll be no parking in the garage with the motor running over that. And remember the standard set by “Super Mario Bros.” Here’s the year’s biggest hit, and it is crap with half a billion bucks in the bank. Most critics panned it or were at best lukeworm for it, and it’s made a mint.

“Guardians” is doing great overseas, but maybe a sunnier send-off would have made Marvel happy and not looked like James Gunn leaving a not-quite-poison-pill behind as he leaves to give DC comic book adaptations a lift.

I’ll be updating these figures as more data pours in Sat., but right now, that’s where “Guardians” stands. Is the audience for these franchises reaching its saturation point?

“Super Mario Bros.” will rake in another $18 million and change.

“Evil Dead Rise” will collect another $5+. “Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret” will add a paultry $3 million or so.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” will add another $2 and change, and finish its run short of $200 million.

Sony rolled out a romance an unpreviewed unheralded romance, “Love Again,” as counter-programming, and it’ll clear $2 and finish in the top five, not bad counter-programming.

The results from Box Office Pro

Another tale of “When the aliens come knocking,” this one with a zombie/horror bent.

June 6, Uncork’d uncorks this B-movie.

Our Lord John Cleese is the last top billed voice — as an arrogant fat cat frog — in this Viva Kids animated pic that’s opening May 12.

J.K. Simmons doing a South of the Border accent? As a goat?

The question, tossed at Michael J. Fox from off-camera by the accomplished documentarian Davis Guggenheim, gets at a truth so blunt and self-evident that it doesn’t require an answer.

“Why do you want to tell this story right now?“

And Fox considers not answering it. He has Parkinson’s, and in “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” we’ve already seen how far the debilitating “incurable” illness has progressed. If he doesn’t sit for interviews and read from his autobiography and “host” this film about him now, he might never be able to.

But he doesn’t want that sort of “sad” and “pity” filled biography about an illness that “crushed him.”

“That’d be BORING” he blurts. Think of him as a “cockroach,” he insists. “You can’t KILL a cockroach.”

“Still” is exactly the sort of documentary you’d expect from Fox, whose control of its tone, if not its brisk pace, he seems to have exercised control over. It’s a brief summation of his early life and career, a breezy account of his burning-the-candle-at-both-ends peak, filming TV’s “Family Ties” during the day, knocking out “Back to the Future” and the other movies that made him after hours or when the TV show was on hiatus.

He takes us back to that first day — in a Miami hotel in 1990 — when he woke up, hungover and yet realizing something was wrong with his “auto-animated pinky” suddenly having developed a mind of its own. And he’s sanguine about the dream life he lived before that morning and the diagnosis that followed, and the “cosmic price” or even “karma” he can attach to the disease that arbitrarily and progressively took over his life and all but ended his career.

Fox lets himself get choked-up over his Canadian armed forces veteran turned police dispatcher dad, who didn’t discourage his quite-small-for-his-age son from getting into acting, and who “surprised me” by personally driving him to Hollywood to start the stretch of auditions that would lead — eventually — to his first big break, then the bigger ones that followed.

He puts the sweetest celebratory spin on meeting and insult-flirting with his future wife, Tracy Pollan, on the “Family Ties” set. She wasn’t impressed with his stardom and was nobody’s idea of a fair weather “Hollywood wife” when the chips were down.

“How’s Tracy?” his physical therapist asks at a session.

“Married to me…still.”

Parkinson’s may play havoc with an actor’s comic timing. Fox’s was and is so good it overwhelms his condition, which has him dealing with a succession of tumbles, bruises and broken bones over the course of filming “Still.”

We see him take such a fall while walking with a bodyguard-aid as he’s leaving their New York luxury flat. Captured in long-shot, a concerned passersby instinctively reaches down to help. “I’m OK,” he insists, and she recognizes him.

“Very nice to meet you,” she says.

“You knocked me off my feet!” he jokes, and charms her socks off.

“Still” has moments like that, interviews and therapy sessions and a running account of Fox’s career and Hollywood celebrity, many of them recollected from his memoirs. We glimpse him at his “Ferrari, Range Rover and Jeep Cherokee” peak, and on the night he came clean with his fans on a TV chat show about the hidden, heavily-medicated illness that had slowed him down, muzzled his performances and which at least partically explains the tide-turning bombs (sampled in “Siskel & Ebert” clips) that brought his film career to an end.

“Still” was what he could never be as a child, recalling the time he grabbed cash and dashed through the back door to the local candy store while his parents were distracted. The store owner called to alert them he was there with a wad of cash and a taste for sweets. They’d best come fetch him. Fox was two.

These days, thanks to his illness, being “Still” is even more impossible.

His small stature, we’re told, informed his early career. He could play “older, smarter” kids into his 20s, something his first Canadian collaborators tipped him about, “cute and elfin,” traits which sent him to Hollywood.

Fox takes pleasure in reminding the world how producer Gary David Goldberg and NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff resisted casting him in “Family Ties,” the “he’ll never be on a lunchbox” limitations that Tartikoff famously scoffed.

Then we see him improvise/invent his character’s middle initial — “Alex P. Keaton” — in a moment in the “Family Ties” pilot, hitting the letter perfectly, instinctively knowing that “Pee” coming out of a short, sweater-vested conservative was funny. Tartikoff got an autographed lunchbox from Fox for Christmas.

“I feel FOUR feet tall!” Fox crowed, upon winning an Emmy for the work.

That on-screen cockiness, delivered when the actor was down to his last Roosevelt dime, has informed our image of Michael J. Fox ever since and spills over into his and his foundation’s battle against his illness.

Fans, people who grew up with him, took the Parkinson’s news hard. But his pugnacious Canadian Cagney demeanor allowed us hope, and every Parkinson’s breatkthrough underwritten by the Michael J. Fox Foundation seems to validate that hope.

They may not name the illness after him, which could finish him before his time. But when the “tough son of a bitch” underwrites the research that ends Parkinson’s, you can be damned sure his name’ll be on the cure.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Michael J. Fox, Tracy Pollan, and the voice of Davis Guggenheim

Credits: Directed by Davis Guggenheim. An Apple TV+ (May 12) release.

Running time: 1:35

“Oh Belinda” is a dark and sometimes comic Turkish body-switch comedy, 97 minutes of giving a spoiled, indulgent actress a taste of the “real life” of a character she’s not-very-committed to playing.

It’s from a genre Hollywood revisits, occasionally, but kind of wore out in the ’80s, and not a lot of the laughs land. But this Around the World with Neflix offering is the raciest, most sexual Turkish film I’ve seen, and has a Westernized brazenness that one almost never sees in films from the Middle East.

It doesn’t begin with “Belinda,” the shampoo that Istanbul actress Dilari is loathe to promote, but with a big, somewhat underchoreographed production number. She’s sashaying her way down the streets and quays of the city to the theater where she’s the star.

Neslihan Atagül plays a thoroughly modern single woman of the arts, a famous beauty with a swank apartment, a new hit show and a regular spot at the bar where all the city’s actors hang out after the curtain drops. And Dilari’s carrying on a very public and sexual affair with her hunky fellow actor Serkan (Serkan Çayoglu).

But this lifestyle comes at a cost. Her overhead is such that she has to take commercials, even though she bitches about it to her agent. This new shampoo spot promises to be an agonizing day on set, a lot of it in a shower as a bell-pepper-stuffing housewife and mother who “washes away her day” with this new product.

Her on-set “kids” are child actors, with all that entails. Her “husband” (Necip Memili) is an attention-starved, unprofessional dope. Only her old pal Timo (Tim Ceyfi) the director can get her through the ordeal.

“BE Handan,” he begs of Dilari, hoping she’ll get into the housewife character. “Don’t just PRETEND.”

During one soapy take, that’s precisely what happens. She opens her eyes, and the shower isn’t on a set. It’s in a crowded apartment.

“Her” kids are playing and fighting loudly. And that fake-mustached boor on the set is now her “real” husband, almost as confused as she is about what has happened. His confusion is in the “What is WRONG with you, Handan?” vein.

The script spends a ridiculous amount of time with our confused thespian in denial over all this, but almost understandably so. Dilari was “Don’t you KNOW who I am?” famous, lording over her public and her acting colleagues. Now, they don’t know her. How could this be?

Serkan doesn’t recognize her when she taxis over to his place, and refuses to pay the cabbie. Her actor “friends” and rival (Beril Pozam has the “All About Eve” role) don’t admit they’re playing a prank on her.

Nothing she does can “end” this little object lesson is reality, humility and the grubby goings-on of “humanity.” Handan is forever fending off her amorous and increasingly upset husband, and apparently having an affair with her crooked bank-manager boss.

She keeps insisting who she really is so loudly that she finally winds up in a mental hospital, where the film’s lone funny line is delivered by a fellow lunatic, the only person to believe her alternate life tale.

“Multiverse.”

That’s funny in dubbed English, or in Turkish with subtitles.

The movie itself is more miss or hit, and in that order. Atagül overwhelms some of the script’s shortcomings with a loud, sexy and assertive performance.

The touchstone film for this tale might have been the already-remade “Overboard,” which produced laughs by having the fake-husband “in” on the misplaced heroine’s plight. But “Oh Belinda” is never that light, taking more of a “Christmas Carol/It’s a Wonderful Life” tone, without the gravitas to carry that off.

It’s still pretty far “out there” by Turkish cinema standards. And some of the set pieces, including a dance in the rain finale, have spark.

Call this one a swing-and-a-miss and “Better luck next time,” because I like the idea and the casting and the sexy tone, just not what they did with those elements.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity, smoking

Cast: Neslihan Atagül, Serkan Çayoglu, Tim Ceyfi, Beril Pozam and Necip Memili.

Credits: Directed by Deniz Yorulmazer, scripted by Hakan Bonomo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:3

The venerated Willie Nelson‘s 90th birthday and the celebrated character actress Melinda Dillon‘s recent passing lured me back to “Songwriter,” an ornery and always amusing country music comedy built around Nelson’s story, Nelson’s persona and Nelson’s attitudes about Nashville and the country music industry.

It didn’t make a lot of noise when it came out in 1984, earning an Oscar nomimation for the music Nelson and co-star and longtime running mate Kris Kristofferson wrote for it. And there’d already been a “What Willie’s REALLY like” country music tale, “Honeysuckle Rose” just a couple of years before. But it was well cast, representative of its milieu and its era, and it’s still damned funny almost 40 years later.

Willie plays Doc Jenkins, a prolific songwriter who sold the rights to his music to a Chicago-born hustler (director and sometime actor Richard Sarafian) who bought a hat and reinvented himself as Rodeo Rocky.

A whole other movie flickers through the montage of the film’s opening credits — Doc’s (cleanshaven) years of struggle, his marriage to his backup singer/muse Honey (Dillon) and subsequent divorce, idiotic “investments” (a German fried chicken restaurant), other women, glory days on the road touring with Blackie Buck (Kristofferson), all bringing us to Doc’s current dilemma.

He’s got a business — Cowbird Music — which represents Blackie, has a “supergroup” record he’s been recording, has a Nashville McMansion, a giant Cadillac convertible, alimony and debts up the yin yang.

How can a creative fellow with no financial sense create under such conditions? He makes his escape “back to Austin,” where he can reconnect with the music, not the business, dodge Rodeo Rocky, make money to try and buy back his publishing rights, catch up with the ever-touring Blackie and “discover” the sexy chanteuse (Lesley Anne Warren) who opens for Blackie, but is represented by the most unsavory promoter this side of Don King — Dino (Rip Torn).

There are a lot of relationships and threads that wove this picture together. Producer Sydney Pollack had discovered Willie’s on camera naturalism in “The Electric Horseman,” and built “Honeysuckle Rose” around him. Nelson’s friend, the Texas screenwriter Edwin “Bud” Shrake (“J.W. Coop,” “Tom Horn”) dreamed up this version of Nashville star Willie’s return to Texas tale.

Steve Rash, the director of the music bio-pic that set the star-does-her/his own singing standard of the era, “The Buddy Holly Story,” was behind the camera for a couple of weeks before Pollack brought in the Altman acolyte Alan Rudolph (“Roadie,” “Choose Me”) to take over. Rudolph gave the picture its loose, playful feel, a “Nashville” with more laughs.

And scene-stealer Torn had made his bones in the genre with the country music cult classic “Payday” a decade before.

Under Altman, Rudolph absorbed the bubbling life of a busy, noisy, chattering film set, something that informed some of his pictures, especially this one.

Nelson and Kristofferson cooked up a dozen songs, and the music — including the title tune — is distinctly theirs. Willie’s Doc picks out his ode to the Nashville music business, “Write Your Own Songs.”

“Mr. Purified Country don’t you know what the whole thing’s about?
Is your head up your ass so far that you can’t pull it out?
The world’s getting smaller and everyone in it belongs
And if you can’t see that Mr. Purified Country
Why don’t you just write your own songs?”

Kristofferson, no slouch as a songwriter himself, has Blackie wonder, ” Do you suppose a man’s got to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time, just to write a good song every now & then?”

These two scheme and kvetch and banter and recycle bits from old Western movies, with any long spiel earning a comical dare — “Say that again.” (from “Red River”).

Country music is depicted as lily white, dominated by non-performing hustlers and populated with drunks.

“The only reason I drink is so people won’t think I’m a dope fiend!”

Comical characters show up for a scene or two. Gailard Sartain plays the last s–tkicker you want managing your money. Sammy Allred is a DJ Doc wants to bribe to play his new singer Gilda’s first single.

“Payola ain’t dead around here,” the jock jokes. “It ain’t even sick.”

And then there’s the dangerous object of fun Dino, a small-timer destined to stay that way, but protecting what’s his and what he’s aimin’ to skim off the box office take with that there pistol he packs in his cowboy boot.

When a guitar player takes up with Dino’s road girlfriend — the movie is pretty damned sexist, any way you slice it — Dino marches him out of the motel room and to the pool in his underwear, makes him park Dino’s half-empty beer stein on his head, and takes a tipsy snub-nosed shot at shooting it off the cuckolder’s head.

“I underestimated you, Dino,” Doc marvels.
“Aaalllll you sumbitches do,” Dino growls, my favorite line in the movie and my favorite line in the Rip Torn canon.

“Songwriter” is dated and a bit disheveled. And some of the film’s and Willie’s outlaw reputation have softened over the decades as he’s become America’s loveable iconoclast, a great songwriter, socially out of touch with the ultra-conservative fanbase of his medium, and a bit of a mutt when it comes to his personal life and his inability to manage money.

But the film’s scruffy charms do not dim with age. If you’re in the mood for a musical roman a clef where the songs are sharp and the singing is effortlessly on key, don’t underestimate “Songwriter.”

Rating: R, nudity, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Lesley Anne Warren, Melinda Dillon and Rip Torn.

Credits: Directed by Alan Rudolph, scripted by Bud Shrake. A Tristar release on The Sony Movie Channel, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 1:34

“Pillow Party Massacre” is such a terrorizing tease.

You title your movie that, you’re promising three things. It won’t be unlike all the assorted “Slumber Party Massacre” C-movies that preceded it. There’ll be some titillation — frolicking in sleepwear, slapping and tickling with pillows, maybe even accompanied by nudity.

College coed underwear can be so flimsy these days.

And the slaughter will be gratuitous and creatively comical. That is the point of a slasher/splatter pic, right?

Writer-director Calvin Morie McCarthy and his cast and crew rarely deliver on those promises.

The premise is lame. A spring prom prank played on a pranks-prone sexually active member of their not-quite-mean-girl gang prompts a murder. Years later, that aggrieved prom queen escapes from a mental hospital and bodies start piling up even before the survivors (Laura Welsh, Jax Kellington, Chyna Rae Shurts, Allegra Sweeney and Nicolette Pullen) head toward that fancy “cabin” up on Burnt Chimney Lake.

As things start to look “sketchy,” one coed purrs “I’ve seen this horror movie,” and a park service cop cracks “What is this, the Washington (State) chainsaw massacre?”

Such wits.

The acting isn’t awful, but stupid reactions the characters are coached to deliver to this moment of peril or that friend’s imiment death are laughable. Butcherings are both graphic and comically fake.

The special effects are so amateurish as to look like continuity errors.

But yes, there is a pillow fight and yes, a top pops off. Since you asked.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Laura Welsh, Jax Kellington, Chyna Rae Shurts, Allegra Sweeney, Nicolette Pullen and
Savannah Raye Jones

Credits: Scripted and directed by Calvin Morie McCarthy A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:27