Movie Nation

It’s not cricket to talk about a film’s third act and finale in a review, because that could lead to “spoilers” and one mustn’t reveal those. One just mustn’t.

But as I’m breaking format here and using the poster to “Condor’s Nest” as there is no art out there on the Interwebs that truly does justice to the feast of character actors this C-movie serves up, here’s a taste.

The climax begins as “The Boys from Brazil,” finding high and low ranking Nazis holed up in postwar Nazi-friendly Bolivia, a “Condor’s Nest” ruled over by no less than former SS chief Heinrich Himmler, whom history reminds us died in Allied custody. Or DID he?

In a couple of campy scenes acted-out in full Nazi regalia, nerdy-quirky character actor James Urbaniak (“Henry Fool,” “Fay Grim” and “The Girl from Monday” came long before “The Fabelmans”) as Himmler and Bruce Davison (“Ben,” “The X-Men”) as his Nazi subordinate bicker and banter in “Cabaret” German about ancient Atlanteans in South America and their “big Aryan” skulls.

And then for its last trick, the movie leaps from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “The Wild Bunch.”

It’s nuts, not quite funny enough, but as daft as writer-director Phil Blattenberger could make it. With this movie and his disastrous stab at Vietnam (“Point Man”), Blattenberger’s ambitions become clear. “Daft” in this case is an accident. He wants to be the Uwe Boll of combat cinema.

The film starts out as a post World War II vengeance tale. A long opening sequence reveals how our hero witnessed the rest of his downed B-17 crew murdered, as prisoners, by a sneering, luger-lugging SS officer played by veteran heavy Arnold Visloo. Corporal-not-Captain Spaulding (Jacob Keohane) will go to the ends of the Earth — South America — to track that bastard down in the decade after the war.

Spalding reminds us all how simple politics can be.

“You sit at a table with Nazis, that makes you a Nazi!”

That logic is how he winds up in Argentina, kidnapping, torturing and murdering Nazis left and right, hunting down his quarry. That’s how he crosses paths with the Nazi A-bomb expert Vogel (Al Pagano) who promises to lead him to this Col. Bach. That’s also where he crosses swords and pistols with Israeli agent Leyna (Corinne Britti) who wants to kidnap Vogel back to Israel to stand trial.

There’s no point in complaining how bad Bach is, and invoking Himmler doesn’t move her. But this American pretending to be Swiss (don’t ask) is more determined than she is, which is how they all end up in the foothills of the Andes.

God, I have MISSED this version of Jonah Hill — the riffing, slanging, offending, hip-hop-quoting, “best joke in the room wins” Jonah.

“You People” is a comic throwback, an all-star Jonah and Lauren and Nia, Julia and Eddie, Mike Epps and David Duchovny singing John Legend off-key at the piano farce that begins with a sprint, gets gassed far too often and yet still produces a lot of laughs, all of them packed into its funniest stretches.

It starts with a clever conceit, a flip, hip and seriously funny podcast where Mo (“SNL” writer/performer Sam Jay) and E-Z (Hill) riff on pop culture and the intersection of the races, often hilariously, always crossing boundaries.

A disease that’s gotten too “popular?”

“ALS made more money than LEBRON that year!”

Southern white racists?

“I didn’t like that they took Confederate flags outta NASCAR. I was like. ‘Nah, let’em have that.’ You take too much too fast, they out lookin’ for MEAT.”

But “The Mo (Jay) and E-Z Show” is just a tone-setter for the romantic comedy to come. E-Z is actually Ezra Cohen, a stock broker who dreams of the day when that podcast can be his only “thing.” He’s a 35 year-old with game and wit who doesn’t seem to click with the Jewish ladies from temple his mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, in rare form) sets him up with.

Then comes the “meet cute.” He gets into what he thinks is a Mini Uber. Amira (Lauren London of TV’s “Games People Play”) freaks out. A misunderstanding leads to a date.

Things are all romantic-comedy-montage-sweet right up to that moment, six months later, when he’s ready to get serious and neither has met the other’s family.

His mom tries ever-so-hard to be current in fashion and slang, but is a classic “tone-deaf” and tolerant liberal who’d consider herself “woke” if it weren’t for the grammar issues. Dad (Duchovny) is one of those “You ever meet?” guys who will ask any Black person if they know Xzibit. Or Magic Johnson.

Amira’s folks are Nation of Islam Muslims. Dad (Eddie Murphy) once got to spend quality with the anti-Semitic “Brother Minister Louis Farrakhan,” and Mom (Nia Long) isn’t having ANY comparison between The Holocaust and slavery.

As feelings are hurt, arguments begun and abandoned, “get to know” afternoons are sabotaged and comic cameos (Anthony Anderson, Richard Benjamin, Elliott Gould, Dean Cole, Rhea Perlman and Omar Epps) roll by, a few of them scoring laughs, you think “This is about to get GOOD.”

Let us now praise screen legends, ladies of a certain age still donning the greasepaint, still saving their best for their closeups.

“80 for Brady” packs an entire generation of screen queens into the same movie for a comedy about little old ladies who are crazy for footballer Tom Brady.

But hell’s bells, Hollywood couldn’t find a better excuse, or at least a funnier script to showcase Oscar winners Jane Fonda and Sally Field, Oscar nominee and multiple Emmy winner Lily Tomlin and the Greatest Living EGOT Rita Moreno?

You don’t have to be a Tom Brady hater to pan this. But you are obligated to separate this wan script and feebly-fictionalized laugher from its stars, who have legendary comic chops that this movie treats like oversized false teeth.

This Million Dollar Quartet play longtime New England pals who accidentally bonded over an NFL game the day then-young Brady took over as quarterback for the Patriots. It’s now 2017, and they’ve been meeting on Gamedays ever since.

They’re just there to “enjoy men the way the Romans did, sweaty and piled on top of one another in tight PANTS,” Lou (Tomlin) crows. And so they do.

Widowed Maura (Moreno), retired college professor Betty (Field) and onetime TV-model turned “erotic fan fiction” novelist Trish (Fonda) gather, gab, don jersey and repeat their rituals (knocking over the chips) to “help” their team and their Tom win, week after week.

It must be working. The Patriots are going to another Super Bowl. Maybe, Lou suggests, its time they actually went to see their pushing-40 hero, “almost 80 in people years.” He won’t be under center that much longer for these “ladies over 80 who love Tom Brady.”

Most have their doubts, and some have obligations — Bob Balaban plays Betty’s hapless, nerdy professor husband, Sara Gilbert is Lou’s worried daughter and Glynn Turman is a nursing home gent with an eye for Maura. But there’s this Patriot fan radio contest (Rob Corddry and Kyle Mooney play the “chowdahead” hosts) offering four tickets, and Lou and the crew resolve to win it.

Next thing we know, they’re on the lam to Houston, with encounters with “Gronk,” the subject of Trish’s “fantasy” fiction, and other footballers, Mayor of Flavortown Guy Fieri and flirty ex-jock Harry Hamlin to speed them along, and daffy obstacles to get in the way of this wish fulfillment fantasy coming true.

Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is an amusing sight gag here, as is Fieri, whom the stoned Maura hallucinates as every face at a Super Bowl Party poker game. All part of “the fan experience” of “The Big Game.”

Brady, a credited producer, is featured in the third act, a Super Bowl which, if you don’t remember, I won’t spoil it for you. If there was a subtext here, it might come from that and it doesn’t really apply.

The further we get away from a war, the more vital it is that there be SOMEbody on a set who can keep the cast and crew from making fools of themselves when you’re making a combat film.

“Military consultant,” “technical advisor,” call them whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be R. Lee Ermey, but you put ex-military on your payroll so that your movie looks and sounds authentic, and not like Spike Lee’s combat movies. Or like Aaron Eckhart in “Ambush.”

It’s a movie set early (ish) in the Vietnam War, 1966. Eckhart plays a commander who sends his Special Forces subordinates to a new base in “Quang TRY province.” Ordering men into harm’s way, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce “Quaug Tri Province?” Like “TREE?”

Maybe it’s early enough in the war that he wouldn’t have heard it. Sure. But considering most everything that follows…

“Ambush” is a B-movie (maybe C) about a lost “secret dossier” that a rageaholic Green Beret (Gregory Sims) and others are sent to recover. Sims goes full R. Lee Ermey “Full Metal Jacket” in the middle of an undersized, remote outpost behind enemy lines, screaming at a subordinate so loud Uncle Ho could hear him in Hanoi.

“What the actual F— does that CHILD need with a gun?”

So, nobody trained the lads in the “This is my rifle, this is my ‘gun'” (penis) rhyme of boot camp?

The answer to that comes when the film’s ostensible star, Jonathan Rhys Myers shows up. He’s a “hunter,” with a tracking dog and a pistol grip pump shotgun. At least the chopper he lands in seems regulation and period correct.

Considering the opening scene is plainly a Jeep-drive through a military aircraft graveyard (a B-58, mixed in with 1980s vintage mothballed jets) meant to be Vietnam era airfield, that’s more than the movie leads us to expect.

“LEFTtenant Col. Mills, sir,” Rhys Myers drawls as he salutes CAPTAIN Mora. Hey, we’re in the jungle. No standing on ceremony. Or British pronunciations of “Lieutenant” from a Southerner.

He’s wearing shiny “Bird Col.” insignia. In the bush, for starters. Shiny target. And he should be wearing the oak cluster of a Lt. Col., right? Entirely too high up the chain of command and too old to be a jungle-savvy LRP (“lurp”). Whatever.

It’s all pretty much downhill from there. The shootouts are noisy and manic but non-military, starting with the “ambush” that opens the action. There’s no rhyme or reason to who we follow and what point of view is dominant.

The party of soldiers sent into the jungle to retrieve the “secret” stuff keeps breaking up into smaller and smaller units — one or two groups sniffing around above ground, another party that splits up when they discover that the Vietnamese dig tunnels and can pop up here, there, seemingly everywhere.

“We’re fah-tin a new enemy,” JRM drawls. “They don’t come from the sky. They don’t come across the sea. They don’t come from the land. They come from the EARTH!”

There’s a lot of tunnel tracking and tunnel fighting, with firearms, knives and a flamethrower. The booby traps show SOMEbody Googled “Vietnam War” to find “punji pits,” and a cute scorpion dump.

He was son of one of the great character actors, a member of John Ford’s repertory company.

He was brother of a TV icon, and brother to an original “Nerd.”

And the siblings worked on a favorite Western of mine, “The Long Riders.”

Here’s his big moment.

And here’s the “Nashville” movie moment that led to it.

There’s value in taking on a first-rate villain. Ask Michael Keaton about that.

And what villainy could be more personal and relatable than an obnoxious “tenant” with “rights” who simply refuses to leave, and cannot be easily evicted? Remember Keaton in “Pacific Heights?”

The great François Cluzet of the downbeat French buddy comedy “The Intouchables,” the recent charmer “The Kitchen Brigade” and “Tell No One” makes a seething, loathsome impression in the deed-or-no-deed thriller “The Man in the Basement.”

He plays an older, down on his luck ex-teacher who gets a break from the owner (Jérémie Renier) of an unused basement space in the apartment he inherited that the teacher wants to buy.

“We trust each other,” Simon chirps (in French with English subtitles). He’s happy to have this property off his books. “You’re doing me a favor,” the new owner, “cleaning out my late mother’s place” and thus needing storage, agrees.

But it turns out, the guy’s mother died years before. It turns out, the “teacher” was fired for cause, for teaching disinformation to his history students. It turns out, the guy’s a Holocaust Denier.

Simon is Jewish. And he doesn’t find out any of that until a neighbor tells him “The man who bought the cellar slept in it last night.”

Thus begins an ever-escalating war of wills and struggle over “legal rights,” threats, “Pacific Heights” harassment with a hint of “Cape Fear” as the “teacher” gets in the head of not just Simon’s neighbors, but of Simon’s impressionable teenaged daughter (Victoria Eber).

This looks hilarious. Feb. 24 on Netflix.

Credit Belgian director and co-writer Lukas Dhont for knowing the one “special effect” his drama “Close” has going for it. Every chance he gets, he makes the audience lose itself in the mystery of his star’s limpid, boyish eyes.

As 12 year-old Leo, Eden Dambrine lets us see curiosity about the world, take in the carpet of color that is ground zero in Belgium’s world famous “floriculture” (flowers) industry, and deep affection and connection for his “BFF,” Remi (Gustav De Waele)..

They spend their days, their meals and many of their nights together playing, working the flower fields and bicycling, often ending those days with sleepovers. They are inseparable and mutually supportive.

But when school starts, the notice of their classmates affects Leo a lot more than Remi.

“Are you a couple?” (in French and/or Dutch, with English subtitles) is as tactful as any of their classmates get. The girls are curious. The boys are quick to grab hold of a slur.

As Leo turns touchy about this, his eyes let us see the fear, the fury and then the guilt as he decides to distance himself from his best friend, who is confused and then deeply hurt over a bond that’s breaking and a love — however platonic — that’s been taken away.

Dhont, who also did the ballerina-with-gender-dysphoria drama “Girl,” keeps everything asexual and innocent in this tale of what might be that moment of sexual awakening. Both boys are sensitive, but Remi, a promising young oboist, is the more sensitive one.

As Leo doesn’t articulate what he’s doing — perhaps neither has the words yet to express their feelings — Remi is shattered and bereft. An attempt to sever the bond of sharing a bed during their sleepovers devolves into a wrestling, shoving match because Remi’s mom (Émilie Dequenne) isn’t there to do what parents do, in Flanders, Fife or Philadelphia.

“Boys, use your WORDS!”

But Remi can’t find the right way to protest and complain through the hurt. And slight, soulful Leo, who bristles at slurs flung their way, starts to hang with the jocks and takes on youth hockey. He can’t find a way to insist on “boundaries” with a friend whom he starts to question thanks to the cruelty of a few classmates.

And as tightlipped as kids are, parents and school counselors can only know so much before a situation gets out of hand and tragedy strikes.

It was an Oscar field that seemed, if not set in stone, at least more or less sketched-in, the way “awards seasons” go. But then expectations were upset when the favorite, a Best Actress winner in years past, took her bully pulpit acceptance speech in an earlier awards show to herald a little-seen turn by an actress no one had been talking about.

Another Oscar winning actress turned full-time influencer also weighe- in.

And then, surprise of surprises, Andrea Riseborough comes “out of nowhere,” as they say, to join the field of five nominees when the Academy Awards voting was done and the nominees were announced.

The striking, English actress’s actress, noticed back in “Birdman” and acclaimed in “Brighton Rock” and “W.E,” so in demand that she was in everything from “Amsterdam” to “Roald Dahls Matilda The Musical” just last year, was finally given recognition and the spotlight for playing a Lotto-winning/Lotto-squandering alcoholic in “To Leslie” thanks to the efforts of sister actresses Cate Blanchett and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Colleagues took it on themselves to see to it that a wonderful performance in a movie that barely cleared $20,000 at the box office in the U.S. was recognized, taking the decision out of the hands of the frauds at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the nobodies of the National Board of Review, and the ever-growing TV, radio and online American-Canadian Critics Association.

Good for them, you think. Every entertainment award should be more in the hands of the people who do the work and recognize what it takes to be great doing it and less about “For Your Consideration” campaigns and lobbying, more Screen Actors Guild Awards voting and less how much Netflix, Disney, Apple et al want to spend promoting the work.

Then you see “To Leslie,” now available via Amazon Prime. And maybe you have to take seriously the blowback and shade fans and peers and activists are throwing at this turn of events, many of them insisting that this action “robbed” Oscar winner Viola Davis of a nomination for “The Woman King,” or more poignantly, Danielle Deadwyler of her moment in the spotlight for her moving performance in the riveting, important, timely and also-little-seen “Till.”

As a longtime fan of Riseborough, I’m happy to see her finally a part of this annual, self-congratulatory conversation. As the title character in “To Leslie,” she is transformed, an impulse-control trainwreck whom we meet years after she drank and “partied” through $190,000 and burned every bridge to friends and family she ever had.

Riseborough, like most actresses, is a beautiful woman, and does the classic “dressing down” that earned Charlize Theron an Oscar for “Monster” and joins a long tradition of plunges into alcoholism that earned Oscar notice, from “The Lost Weekend” to “The Days of Wine and Roses,” “Tender Mercies” and “Leaving Las Vegas.”

Leslie, “Lee” to the one or two ex-biker friends (Allison Janney, fierce as ever, and Stephen Root at his scariest) who still acknowledge her, is a wreck, an emaciated walking liquid-diet stick aged far beyond her years thanks to decades of abuse.

It’s almost shocking to see Riseborough as Leslie, her often-blackened eyes hollow sockets and hair reduced to a stringy blonde dye job that “grew out” months before. We are stunned by her commitment to the part, an Englishwoman who morphed into rural Texas honkytonk trash forced to come “home” to a place that remembers her and the bar where she won her Lotto ticket just six years before because she’s betrayed her now 19-year-old son (Owen Teague, Riseborough’s “Bloodline” co-star) one last time.

It’s great work, a top drawer performance. The film? It doesn’t move the needle, doesn’t improve on the many “rock bottom looking to climb out” tales that came before it and seems pat and pre-ordained in many of its story beats.

We catch Leslie’s peak moment, hooting and hollering “Drinks on ME” as she’s interviewed for a local TV story on her “big win.” And then “six years later” we see her stagger out of a bar, onto a bus and off it as Leslie summons her son to pick her up at a bus stop. She long ago ran out of cash, and now cadges drinks and lives hand to mouth, kicked out of her last apartment — her sweet talking pleas for help shifting to a profane tirade when neighbors and the landlord she hit up finally turn her down.

Her son James picks her up off the bus, her few possessions stuffed into a worn pink suitcase. His furtive phone call with the people who raised him has him admitting “I can’t smell it on her breath” and that “She’s not gonna hurt me,” with “again” implied.

Of course that’s what she does. The script spares no time at all in showing Leslie’s manipulations and “act,” James heading off to work and Leslie’s pleading smile turned to stern purpose as she rifles through his flat and his roommate’s belongings for cash to hit the bar just as “the shakes” set in.

That’s how she ends up where she started, not with the parents she blames for how she turned out, but with pals from her bars and booze “good times.” It’s just that Dutch and Nancy (Root and Janney) are done with her nonsense, too. They try to make her work, try to turn her around. But even if they’re probably barely functioning alcoholics themselves, or people who just “know when to say when” as they push 60, they have no tolerance for the trap that’s become her life.

One night of stumbling around — drunk and homeless — later and she’s even lost the suitcase. But the two guys who find it, running a rundown dive of a motel, could be salvation. Royal, the owner (Andre Royo of “The Spectacular Now,” another alcoholic drama) may remember Leslie as bad news. But Sweeney (Marc Maron) has a little compassion left in the tank. He charmingly tricks her into accepting what could be her last lifeline.

Feb. 10, a streaming service does a sort of “Bachelor/Bachelorette” set-up “couples” romance by parking the young and relationship-hungry in Paris, City of Light, City of Loooooooooove.

Looks different.