Movie Nation

Zoe Chao puts on a clinic on “the funny new BF of the leading lady” as a rom-com trope in “Your Place or Mine,” an exceptionally mild-mannered farce set up as a Reese Witherspoon/Ashton Kutcher vehicle.

Chao plays the pretty, narcissistic and rich neighbor-with-benefits to Kutcher’s character who barges in on his best friend (Witherspoon), who has done a housing swap for a week so that she can be in New York to take an accounting class.

“Accounting” does a lot of the heavy lifting in this comedy. No, that’s not a good thing.

But every time Chao’s minx Minka appears and imposes herself on Debbie, funny words tumble out of her unfiltered mouth in that ever-so-special Zoe Chao way. She snaps, crackles and pops around Witherspoon, no slouch at comedy herself, delivering “Mom wardrobe” putdowns with a New York edge and a hint of “Aww, honey” pity.

“I am not...” single mom/school accountant Debbie begins.

“Human! We know,” Minka blurts. “Don’t make me sing “I Am a Woman in Love” by Barbra Streisand, because I will. I sang it at my Nana’s retirement home!”

Listen to the six different single-syllable corrections Chao flings at her new friend about what she’s feeling and what she should do about this situation that Debbie’s meddling and snooping around her male friend’s penthouse created.

“NO! No. No? No. NO no…No!”

If Golden Globe winner Jennifer Coolidge’s brand is “MILF,” Chao’s ascended to “BILF,” no doubt about it. And for her to steal this movie from the leads, when the great Tig Notaro is also on the court is a straight-up baller move.

Witherspoon and Kutcher play friends who hooked-up in college. Once. She was going to be an editor. He was dreaming of life as a novelist.

“Twenty years later” they’re still connected, besties who “tell each other everything,” which becomes one of the film’s two running gags.

She’s settled into divorced motherhood in a house ever-practical Debbie bought in her 20s. Debbie gave up her dream, taking up accounting to support her now 13-year-old son (nepo baby Wesley Kimmel), micromanaging his life as well as hers because she’s invented “Saran Wrap parenting.”

That’s what her college pal Peter (Kutcher) labels it. But he’s given up his dream as well. He’s some sort of rich “consultant” (the lazy screenwriter’s best guess at what career would pay for a penthouse), “just a lonely guy with outstanding hair.”

They’re both in their ’40s, still tight. But events contrive to keep her from visiting him in NYC for a week while she takes a qualifying seminar and test to advance her accounting career prospects. He grabs the chance to perform the Big Gesture, tells her to keep her travel plans. He’ll fly to LA and babysit and “parent” her allergic-to-everything, sheltered and coddled kid.

Remember those “two running gags” mentioned above? The first is Peter’s lifelong obsession with The Cars. Their music fills his ringtones, his drive-to-work music, his life. The way the unsubtle writer-director withholds it, any casual Cars fan KNOWS which song is being saved for the Big Finale.

The second running gag is how “tell each other EVERYthing” Debbie finds all these things out about Peter’s life, that he wrote a novel, for instance. With instant pal Minka egging her on, Debbie decides to read it and get it to a publisher.

Peter? He’s finding out the degree of Debbie’s smothering of her son he only suspected, that she has some rich doofus neighbor (Steve Zahn, another scene-stealer) who has made her hillside garden his life’s work, thanks to his crush on the pretty Accountably Blonde.

To say writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna, who scripted “Morning Glory” (Meh.) and “The Devil Wears Prada,” never deviates from “the obvious” here is really an understatement. When we hear Zahn’s character run through some “how I have the time and money to garden for her” palaver, we might have a moment’s pause that he’s just BSing Peter and us. But that would imply complexity and nuance that no character in “Your Place” displays.

McKenna realized she hit the Netflix jackpot when she scored an Oscar winner and Kutcher for her leads, and phoned it in from there. They have just one scene together, and it shows what passes for heart and chemistry, and comes entirely too late to make a difference in the movie.

But Notaro, playing a character not even outlined, much less “sketched in,” makes middling lines funny. Zahn turns a sight gag into an amusing distraction.

And Chao cases the joint, procures something to pick the bicycle-lock of this simple scenario, and steals it. She had to know that on an all-star time-killer with such limited ambitions and laughs, nobody would make a fuss over petty theft.

Rating: PG-13 (Brief Strong Language|Suggestive Material)

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, Tig Notaro, Wesley Kimmel, Steve Zahn and Zoe Chao.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Aline Brosh McKenna. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

A wrap up for the “Fast and Furious” franchise?

May 19, they give our heroes a villain with some serious throw weight. And just for fun, Brie Larson, aka “Captain Marvel,” shows up to give Michelle Rodriguez someone to worry about.

By the way, with bits of Charlize, Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren already on board, that makes FOUR Oscar winners in this cast.

The car stuff looks epic, as we’d expect no less from the director of Statham’s breakout hit, “The Transporter,” Louis Leterrier.

For a movie set and shot in Wilmington, N.C., a romance that’s about making a movie in Wilmington, N.C., “Remember Yesterday” certainly gets a lot of movie-making basics wrong.

It’s an amateurish amble through pre-production on location, with a prodigal filmmaking son (Adrian Monte) and his “assistant” (the world’s only Fracaswell Hyman) sleepwalking through sleepy Wilmington, enjoying nightly piano bar get-togethers, all for a film about to shoot in “Hollywood East.”

The locals are interested, but as no one in this low-budget bore is capable of acting “excited,” they aren’t all worked up over a new film.

When our heroine, Jenny (Jana Allen), the returning filmaker’s “gal he left behind,” gripes that “North Carolina government doesn’t let us HAVE movies here, any more,” you’d think the townsfolk would be all atwitter at new opportunities rolling in.

Maybe they know what Jenny and the chap who wrote and directed this do not. Wilmington is still a major production hub. Film production is old hat there.

Jenny, a waitress down at the We Serve on Paper Plates diner, just dumped her cheating, alcoholic husband (Ron Fallica). That’s good timing, because John Raymond (Monte) is checking on and prepping, with a crack production team of...two, to make this “Remember Yesterday” picture.

Maybe there’s a part for frustrated singer/dancer/actress Jenny? Maybe there’s still some spark between them?

Nah. Not really.

Writer-director J.R. Rodriguez gives us a bland cast and a colorful setting rendered just as colorless as he can imagine, an instantly-forgettable film with little Wilmington flavor.

Perhaps these are the best locations they could manage on this budget.

The same goes for the players, none of whom sounds like the Southerners who still live in and around a town that’s still home to its share of film and TV production.

Scene after lifeless scene saunters by, with nothing and no one grabbing our interest as they do.

A limited collection of flashbacks show the childhoods and young love of Jenny and John, but fail to sentimentalize the past or warm up a tepid present.

How can we be expected to “Remember Yesterday” when the movie about it is as forgettable as this?

Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse

Cast: Jana Allen, Adrian Monte, Jenique Bennett, Rick Forrester, Ron Fallica, Mirla Criste and Fracaswell Hyman

Credits: Scripted and directed by J.R. Rodriguez. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:16

A summer release from Universal that stars the voices of Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Isla Fisher and Randall Park, with Will Forte as the dude who ditches his dog.

“R-rated,” with shades of “Ted” about it.

Grimsby seems to be a bit of a Brit laughing stock, as every mention of it in movies and TV use it as a punchline “Three Day Millionaire” makes it the city four lads try to save via robbery in this new release, due out week after next.

Looks like a laugh, Guy Ritchie/Danny Boyle lite.

“Lamya’s Poem” was pitched as an Oscar contender and did not make the cut.

It still has topicality, ambition and promise, and streams Feb. 21.

“Coven of Sisters” is a tight, tense Argentinian period piece set in witch-hunting, Inquisition Era Spain.

It’s clever enough to play around with the root reasons for witch-hunting — patriarchal control via terror — and so quick to make its exit that it feels incomplete. But what’s here is pretty harrowing and damned believable.

Sometime just before or after the Spanish Armada set sail, a traveling “judge” and his retinue of soldiers and aides reaches a coastal village in Basque country. They’re traveling from town to town, persecuting young women they can accuse, convict and burn for making demonically merry on a Witch’s Sabbath.

Prosecutor Salazar (Alex Brendemühl) and his advisor or “consejero” (Daniel Fanego) and sketch artist roll in and demand and receive the immediate cooperation of the local priest (Asier Oruesagasti) in their witch-hunting. Any strange behavior, young women carrying on, cavorting in the woods?

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dancing woman,” Salazar hisses (in Spanish, or dubbed into English).

Half a dozen friends and sisters are thus grabbed after merely being “seen” in the woods. They are shackled, tossed into a group cell and questioned one-by-one.

They’re in their teens, and once their initial terror fades a bit, they’re sure their innocence will be obvious and these strange men will recognize and admit their mistake. But as they’re interrogated and tortured one by one, coming back to the cell battered, punctured and shorn of their hair, Ana (Amaia Aberasturi) is the first to figure out they’re in a rigged game.

These men are hunting high and low for “signs” of corruption and wayward Christians, evidence of local “Satanic sects” and towns cursed — wells running dry, sheep giving no milk. And where there’s corruption there are sure to be wayward women causing it.

Ana is the one to figure out they’re timing these visits to phases of the moon, like the fishermen of each village, who depart and return on lunar tides. Damned if these theocratic creeps aren’t showing up when there are no men in town to protest and fight back.

But if the “sisters” tell the pervy prosecutor and his team what they want to hear, each acting out and stretching their tale out to last a day, they’ll run out the clock, the Basque fishermen will return and the Catholic Castilians won’t dare start burning local girls on suspicion of something they can’t prove.

I love that set-up, a “ticking clock thriller” conjured out of a witch-trial.

The meat on this script might have been the tales the girls tell, some of which are glimpsed here. More could have been done with this, showing us that the girls realize the stakes, even if some of them are reluctant to lie and blaspheme to save their necks.

The behavior of the inquisitors is monstrous and historically-defensible. They use soldiers as their muscle, cover their captives with hoods lest their eyes “bewitch” their accusers, and carry out interrogations that include nude physical examinations and flesh-rending “tests” that are nothing of the sort.

They’re superstitious sexists carrying out a war against women as a means of controlling the people.

The older women in the Basque village — an important distinction, as this is historical Spain’s most defiant and militant region — empathize with the girls and know this persecution for what it is.

“Men have always been afraid of fearless women.”

With sexism and misogyny basically a party platform of ultra conservative groups around the globe and across the religious spectrum, “Coven of Sisters” isn’t just another “bruja” (witch) tale set in witch-crazy Spain. It’s a horror story in which the real horror is but a metaphor for what women are up against, seemingly everywhere.

This tale ends somewhat unsatisfactorily. But the girls — Aberasturi, Yune Nogueiras, Garazi Urkola, Jone Laspiur, Irati Saez de Urabain and Lorea Ibarra — make compelling, believable figures running the gamut from defiant and laughing off the threat to terrified and cowed.

The men are so recognizable you see versions of them all over the evening news, no matter where you tune in.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual subject matter, profanity

Cast: Amaia Aberasturi, Yune Nogueiras, Garazi Urkola, Jone Laspiur, Irati Saez de Urabain, Lorea Ibarra, with Asier Oruesagasti, Alex Brendemühl, Daniel Fanego

Credits: Directed by Pablo Agüero, scripted by Katell Guillou and Pablo Agüero. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Seriously?

This is how you want to go out? A plotless, sexually-neutered piffle of a stripper movie, barely-scripted, with hardly enough “film” to fill a trailer, much less close to two hours of screen time?

No, I didn’t like it. No, it doesn’t appear that Steven Soderbergh was all that crazy about it, either. At least his lunkheaded “Logan Lucky” had a funny character or two, and was stupid enough that it dared to offend.

The third and final “Magic Mike” movie is just stupid. What “Staying Alive” is to “Saturday Night Fever,” “Last Dance” is to the gritty, sexy, hustling beefcake that was “Magic Mike.”

If Soderbergh was a musician, we’d call this a “contractual obligation album” and shake our heads about the money we just wasted supporting his “art.”

Even Channing Tatum seems a little embarrassed by all this by the time the third act rolls around.

It begins with Mike Lane, back to Miami bartender-for-hire gigs, his furniture business having bitten the dust, his dancing days behind him.

But the newly-separated and rich philanthropist, played by Salma Hayek and given the most idiotic name a tipsy screenwriter could type up — “Maxandra” — takes an interest. Somebody at her charity fundraiser mentions they recognize Mike as the dude, dressed as a cop, who rocked her world at a sorority party or some such.

“Max” wants some of that. Mike’s $60,000 quote (probably his debt) is a bit high, but $6k buys her a lapdance so erotically-charged they needed a stunt double to pull it off…and put it back on again.

Enjoy it. Revel in it. It’s the highlight of the movie, and it comes in the opening scene.

Next thing he knows she’s invited him to London to take over a show at an historic theater that will be a bone of contention in her divorce settlement. He’s to turn a stuffy period piece hilariously mistitled “Isabel Ascending” into a cutting edge beefcake dance revue, “revenge” against Max’s cheating ex.

The dancers — recruited from auditions, Youtube videos from Rome, parks and street corners — are given no names and no personalities. That points to how little Warner Brothers wanted to spend on a supporting cast.

The dance scenes aren’t bad…at first. Folding them all into a “show” for the finale is something of an unwatchable debacle.

The obstacles they must overcome — their feelings for one another, the colorless ex and his Very British way of cutting Max’s legs out from under her, the gods of dance who’re offended by all this — don’t amount to a hill of fava beans.

At one point, the screenplay decides to let Max’s aspiring novelist 14 year-old daughter — mentioning her by name constitutes child actress child abuse — voice-over narrate this tale as if it’s a novel she’s basing on the real life “phase” her adoptive mother is going through.

Thandiwie Newton was originally slated to play Hayek’s role, and while Salma is no slouch and comes away from this unbruised, you have to wonder what the testy and triggered Newton was thinking when she signed on in the first place, and what she saw that made her flee the way everyone else should have.

Feminist lip service in the finale? Sure. Hell, at one point Soderbergh tries to slap a little “case the joint” caper comedy “Ocean’s Eleven” in this, he’s that desperate.

When Mike makes a suggestion about one particular number he’s dreaming up for his dance event, that it needs to be “stripped, oiled-down and spanked,” the dude is talking about this movie, which buries a franchise so thoroughly you wonder if director and star will be able to crawl out of the grave they and this idiot screenwriter dug for themselves.

Rating: R for sexual material and language.

Cast Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek, nobody else you ever heard of.

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, scripted by Reid Carolin. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:50

Que horror!

March 10, GKids unleashes this Spanish language animated…thriller?

The distributing studio elected not to preview this anywhere in Florida outside of Miami. Even though the original story was set in TAMPA.

Smaller cheaper cinemas along the NC/Va border are fearful of what message a movie about dudes who do their situps sends. They aren’t booking it.

So here I am, in Chapel Hell amongst the Tarholes, paying premium Research Triangle Park prices to see this thing.

Impress me, Soderbergh, Tatum and Hayek.