Movie Nation

I mean, come on. That’s a transformation.

No, you shouldn’t play winners off. The show is unhurried, Kimmel wasted a bit too much time on the opening. Let it run as long as it runs. It’s the youtube snippets of Big Moments that’ll put it in the black.

James Friend wins for the most striking real world photography in the Oscar field this year. Not a good speech, not his thing. But the work speaks for itself.

“Fire of Love” was a lot of people’s favorite. Mine too, probably. Very “Grizzly Man.”

But “Navalny” was the most topical film in this field, although others were just as important, thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the fact that Putin has this film’s subject, Alexi Navalny, in prison on trumped up charges, was poisoned on orders from Russia’s Nazi runt.

And the acceptance speech for the Oscar winning live action short short “An Irish Goodbye” made time for an emotional kick, too. Well done.

It seemed like Angela Bassett’s Oscar to lose. “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” was one of the more middling films to earn nominations, but she’s regal in it.

Wonder if Jamie Lee’s lovely, loopy SAG acceptance speech and other Awards Season moments altered that trajectory? She has refused to take herself too seriously, and milked every appearance like it was Comic Con and they were coronating her. Again.

“WE just won an Oscar,” to an entire team. “To all of the people who have supported my genre films over the years, WE JUST WON AN OSCAR TOGETHER!”

Beautiful moment for Jamie Lee Curtis, scream queen, ’80s sex symbol and “Trading Places” heroine, as teary as Mr. Quan’s.

Now, somebody call Angela Bassett for a role that will get her nominated next year. She’s way past due.

A stacked category, with Brendan and Brian Tyree Henry my faint hopes for long shot wins. Pity they put Gleeson in the same category as Barry Keoghan, but them’s the breaks.

Ke Huy Quan is the sentimental favorite, the fanboy darling and was the odds-on favorite. He wasn’t all in that film, didn’t disappear and come back to the cinema as a better actor 30 years after his kiddie heyday. But he did go to film school, got into stuntwork. And stick around.

The tears are real, and bless him. He has, as Oprah taught us, “a compelling (personal) story.” So there it is. The supporting categories have long tilted towards novelty nominations and wins.

I was hoping for a long shot, “Puss in Boots.” But this stop-motion marvel was one of the very best pictures of last year.

Score one for Netflix, and another one for Guillermo del Toro.

“Keep animation in the conversation,” he says. Amen.

So they moved this up to the first award given out so that it’d fit next to a Disney at 100 commercial?

My first name is of French origin and originally meant “fame” and “spear,” which…fits.

But “Roger” has so many other meanings, fun and more fun. It’s radio parlance for “affirmative,” which has an interesting WWII etymology. Then there’s the slangy, sexual organ/sex-act twists the Brits gave it.

Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” title opens by letting the world know what it can mean in Nigeria. A “roger” is a bribe, which inspires the obvious piratical title “Jolly Roger.”

The film is something of a non-starter, a tepid domestic melodrama married to a hostage thriller involving bribe-happy cops and one guy who plots his revenge. But it’s a short trip to a distant culture, even if that culture is barely sampled here.

Our narrator tells us that the human “brain functions for 15 minutes — maybe it was 50 — after death.” So that’s how much time he has to tell this 88 minute tale.

We’re treated to the shakedowns that two corrupt Nigerian policemen (Toyin Oshinaike and Frank Donga) run, traffic stops where they climb into the car with you for threats, a search for signs the driver is an “internet fraudster.” They don’t ask for ID. They go straight for “Where is your LAPTOP?”

And you thought everybody was in on the Nigerian prince email scam.

As is the way of things, the nicer the car, the bigger the bribe.

Flashbacks show us a love affair between Brume (Daniel Etim Effiong) and Najite (Toni Tones). It began six years before, and as events in the present progress towards one shakedown that ends up with the cops in cages, we see how that romance and marriage was impacted by these goons with badges.

Officer Felix and Officer Yaw wake up stripped, tased and taunted by two captors, one of whom is particularly enraged and on task. That’s Brume.

“Your chickens have come home to roost,” he crows. But there is no delight in this. This is about revenge.

His accomplice (Deyemi Okanlawon) may be “the weak link,” according to older officer Yaw (Donga). But how can they parlay that into a get away, a turning of the tables?

The acting has a stiff, starchy nature which is a characteristic of a lot of Nollywood films in English. That adds to the general lackluster pacing, characters carefully choosing and enunciating words in scene after scene, too many of those scenes dramatically flat.

The hostage situation has an inherent tension, but it’s never less than predictable, never more than lukewarm. The domestic scenes — mother-in-law problems and efforts to get pregnant — are soap operatic in the extreme.

There’s nothing here most of the world hasn’t seen before, and done better. But “Jolly Roger” gives us a tiny taste of Nigerian life, a culture in which even its affluent professionals are at the mercy of armed, state-sponsored shakedown artists with badges.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Daniel Etim Effiong, Toni Tones, Deyemi Okanlawon, Toyin Oshinaike and Frank Donga.

Credits Directed by Walter Waltbanger” Taylaur scripted by Tunde Apalowo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

The hallmarks of a D-movie are many, but often include the following.

They’re usually horror films. And there’re always a couple of horror “names” in the cast, people whose credits include low-to-no-budget slasher, spatter and “dead teenager” movie credibility.

In “Ash and Bone,” those include Jimmy Doom (“Blood Immortal”), Mel Novak (“Game of Death”) and Jamie Bernadette (TV’s “Midnight, Texas”).

Do they help win financing, get distribution (not in this case) or entice downloads? That’s the bet, anyway.

The dialogue’s littered with cliches and grammatical abominations. Lines like “You’re not from around here, are you?” are a given.

The plot is so old it qualifies for Social Security, the characters simple archetypes. Gun nuts? Cannibals? Corrupt sheriff? Insolent Goth Girl?

And occasionally you’ll see a shot, a scene composition so inept that a character sitting on a sofa looks like a head on a bearskin body, or a cop wears his sunglasses on top of his head so that we see the production lighting inside that bar.

These films have picked up a new nickname. Anytime the free-with-ads streamer “Tubi” is trending, you can bet some self-financed delusion where you can hear “Action!” in the incompetent editing, bad effects and idiotic makeup has just popped up there.

“Ash and Bone” isn’t on Tubi. Yet.

A father (director Harley Wallen) takes his new wife (Kaiti Wallen, ahem) and troubled daughter from an earlier marriage (Angelina Danielle Cama) from Detroit, where Goth girl Cassie was getting into trouble, to rural Hadley Lake, Michigan.

Things’ll be fine. Or things will be better. After she takes her earbuds out and listens to parent and other people instead of death metal. After Dad finally lays down the law. Until that day happens, she grabs the keys to Dad’s van and cruises for a bar, flashes a fake ID and asks the locals (Bernadette and Mason Heidger) where she might find “a haunted house.”

There aren’t any. But maybe the creepy McKinley place’ll do. It’s not haunted. When they break in, it’s obvious it’s not even empty. But that wall covered with missing persons fliers at the bar is thought to be connected to it.

“What is that SMELL?”

Maybe the video camera in that basement torture chamber they’ve stumbled into will state the obvious.

As “everybody knows” the owners and most suspect something awful going on, we don’t need to be told that “something’s up with this town and this family.” That “smell” might be corruption. Or it might just be what the title of this tale foretells — “Ash and Bone,” and maybe a little burnt flesh.

Even by the more forgiving standards of no-budget horror, this isn’t any good. There’s no pace. Scenes lie flat, not so much progressing as standing and waiting around to see if they ever end.

Getting your movie scripted, financed, cast, produced and finished is a series of small to major miracles any indie filmmaker can testify to. But some of them simply aren’t worth that herculean effort. Perhaps the most valuable talent any filmmaker can have is the ability to recognize that before that first casting call.

It’s a pity they don’t teach that in film school, or add that to any web page on “how to make a movie.” It’s not just about “Can we get this movie made?” It’s “Should we?”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Angelina Danielle Cama, Jamie Bernadette, Harley Wallen, Kaiti Wallen, Mason Heidger, Mel Novak, with Erika Hoveland and Jimmy Doom.

Credits: Directed by Harley Wallen, scripted by Bret Miller. A Cama Productions release.

Running time: 1:37

The topicality, the writing, the Edward Hopper Stuck at Waffle House production design, the mayhem in pantomime.

And the acting. Jenna Ortega’s most touching moment.

The academic turned Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Richard Russo’s college-set comedy “Straight Man” becomes the latest Bob Oedenkirk AMC+ series, casting him as a writer/English dept. chair in mid-midlife crisis — “Lucky Hank.”

It’s a droll comedy about witty, petty, self-absorbed academics, snowflake students and the low-stakes turf wars of academia, a dryer-than-dry comic cocktail in the ballpark of Netflix’s “The Chair.” Watching it one can both raise one’s hopes, and understand why Netflix cancelled that Sandra Oh series after just a season. I got the distinct impression that AMC saw that, too, and budgeted “Lucky Hank” accordingly.

Oedenkirk plays William Henry Deveraux, Jr., the chairman of Railton College’s fractious, back-biting eight member English department. He is married, apparently happily, to the college’s queen of smoothing troubled waters (Mireille Enos of TV’s “The Killing” and “Hanna”), crisis counselor for the college. He published one novel, decades ago. He’s the estranged son of a just-retired famous literary critic.

And now he’s teaching a fiction-writing workshop, a never-quite-has-been listening to delusional students try their hand at what they’re sure will make them famous.

Our story begins the day Hank is challenged, mid-daydream, by a rich kid (Jackson Kelly) who figures he’s the next Don DeLillo. One sneer too many, a personal attack on “your only novel” and where Hank ended up, sets him off.

His meanest comeback? “You’re HERE! The reason you’re here really shows that you didn’t try very hard in high school.”

Queue the campus-wide outrage, the demands for his firing start high (Oscar Nuñez from “The Office” is the harassed Dean of Faculty) that spill over into a “de-chairing” effort in his department. And the kid expects an apology.

Hank copes with this amidst his years-long writer’s block, fresh problems involving his over-achiever dad, the constant mooching of his married daughter (Olivia Scott-Welch), and threatened budget cuts that he may be facing even if he’s deposed as department chair.

In the second episode, a longtime friend (Brian Huskey) who was first-published at the same time as Hank, triggers more angst when he comes for a richly-compensated public Q & A that his old pal Hank is expected to moderate. The department revolt — Suzanne Cryer, Cedric Yarbrough, Shannon DeVido, Arthur Keng, Nancy Robertson, Haig Sutherland and Alvina August — climaxes just as many faculty “types” turn on each other and bigger issues settle onto the horizon.

AMC only provided the first two episodes for review, so the famous cover-illustration hook for this pre-Pulitzer outing by the author of “Empire Falls” — which involves the department budget, tenure and a threat against the on-campus geese — is down the road.

Can one tell if this is going to be worth the viewer’s time from the first two installments? There’s a bit of “Office” style promise in the predictable gender politics, chosen discipline hierarchy and sexual history nature of the department infighting, somewhat less in the students who aren’t likely to forget Hank labeled them “mediocrities” at “this middling college” in a “forgotten town.” Or that he dismissed that smug rich kid who compared his blundering style to Chaucer and dashed his expectations of winning a Pulitzer for literature.

“I’ll bet a KIDNEY that you don’t!”