Movie Nation

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.

Wow. SO dumb.

Who wants to see Jennifer Lopez get married? Again? In a “Shotgun Wedding,” no less?

Kind of tasteless, too, right? I mean, who thinks a tropical wedding party taken hostage at a Filipino resort is promising fodder for comedy? Maybe my memory’s too long. At least they aren’t terrorists. Terrorists with bombs.

But watch the stars’ eyes, the exertion, how Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel throw themselves at this action rom-com nonsense. The running, the brawling, the shooting, the ziplining (with stunt assistance, no doubt), the motor-boating — get your MIND outta the gutter — almost make us buy in because THEY buy in.

Whatever our maybe-they-will/maybe-they-want couple decide on their nuptials, which seem on the rocks before the first grenade of “Shotgun” comes out, these two COMMIT to this comedy and put on a show for the folks. And they set the tone for the rest of the cast that gives this slicky, junky movie a shot.

Golden Globes MILF and “White Lotus” viper Jennifer Coolidge leading a wedding reception sing-along of Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be?” Lopez, playing a lawyer who faints at the sight of blood in a “comedy” with more than a little blood in it? Screaming at a pirate that her fiance has just killed, “Sir, SIR! Are you DEAD?”

Yeah, it’s dopey, but fun enough you’ll want to stay with it through the credits.

Lopez is perfectly-put-together Darcy, about to marry never-quite-a-big-league baseballer Tom in a resort wedding done on a budget, with Tom doing the table settings himself and Darcy forced to wear Tom’s pushy mom’s (Coolidge) “lucky dress.” It’s a “big wedding” she didn’t want but he railroaded her into.

Her mother (screen legend Sonia Braga) is sniping about everything, including the presence of Darcy’s ran-off-with-the-yoga-instructor father (Cheech Marin). Dad was gauche enough to insist they invite Darcy’s dashing Peace Corps-era beau, Sean (Lenny Kravitz).

“He looks like he’s leading a PORN safari!” Darcy’s sister (Callie Hernandez) gushes.

It’s no wonder the couple-to-be is at loggerheads right before the ceremony. Perfect time for pirates dressed like road warriors to pull up in a commandeered dive boat and take everybody — except the bride and groom — hostage.

All Diane Keaton and William H. Macy need to justify an assignation, cheating on Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, is a cheap motel, a bucket of chicken, a six pack, cable porn and no “Bible” in the room.

Cheaters have to have standards, after all — ground rules.

Gere and Sarandon, playing their spouses, met under other circumstances and started their own affair. And that was months ago.

Is it any wonder that these two couples, who don’t know each other as couples, raised a daughter who dreams of fairytale love that lasts forever and a son who hurls himself between his beloved and the bouquet she is certain to catch rather than face up to the Big Question? His and her parents are still wrestling with that, decades into their marriages.

“Maybe I Do” — the question mark is implied — is a beautifully cast and performed trifle of a rom-com. It’s about marriage and commitment, boredom and unhappiness, straying and guilt. But mainly it’s about a nagging doubt that the blush of new romance hides, but which might never go away.

“Are we living our best lives?”

The AARP-qualified leads — two Oscar winners among them — deliver snorts and cackles from the bitter, biting and cynical exchanges, rejoinders and petty humiliations they lightly fling at one another.

And then the young people these two unwittingly-connected-by-infidelity couples gave birth to, Michelle (Emma Roberts) and Allen (Luke Bracey) — quarreling, splitting up and yet still hoping for a Hail Mary — resurrect the face-flushing warmth of a dream worth clinging to, idealized love shared for a lifetime.

Writer-director Michael Jacobs, adapting his own stage play, has produced a clockwork rom-com, ticking over with a precision born of dialogue, situations and blocking polished on the stage.

It’s too on-the-nose, too tidy and entirely lacking an edge. But this cast delivering that dialogue? That’s worth checking out.

Compassionate Grace (Keaton) meets weepy Sam (Macy) at a showing of a melancholy subtitled Scandinavian romance about old age.

“I can’t satisfy my wife,” is his sad admission, when the fried chicken and sixpack fail to set the mood. They spend a night walking and talking instead.

The bloom has gone off the rose of the affair Howard and Monica (Gere and Sarandon) started. They’ve checked into a much nicer hotel. She’s in a silk robe and ready for some action.

“I’m naked under this,” she purrs.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” he grumps.

Her “I exist, and you hurt me” leads to a seething threat of “killing you” just when Howard least expects it.

“Nobody has to kill anyone. Time is doing a fine job of that.”

And just as these mismatched, timeworn couples are taking stock of the “taking stock” that made them want to stray, Monica and Sam’s son Allen dives for that bridal bouquet and humiliates “perfect” Michelle, daughter of Grace and Howard.

“It was the most awful moment in the whole history of women being stuck with you idiots!”

Can any of these relationships be saved? Should they?

“Life Upside Down” is a pleasant enough and appropriately downbeat “COVID Lockdown Comedy” of no particular consequence.

As there have been so many rom-coms set during the height of the “shelter in place” era, it’s difficult to find something fresh to say about the strain of being apart/being thrown together that someone else hasn’t put into release before, and that dogs Cecilia Miniucchi’s film, start to finish.

The presence of a first-rate cast, headlined by Bob Odenkirk, Radha Mitchell and Danny Huston, is a saving grace, and if not quite the only one, it might as well have been.

The director of the parking cops comedy “Expired” takes us into a sort of Woody Allen Lite scenario, a couple of cultured couples and a well-educated single woman/college professor cope with isolation and the strains it puts on relationships, legally-bonded or illicit.

Its setting — houses ranging from nice to tastefully swank — underscores how the Allenesque, casually affluent world managed to get by with work and income shut down but fine food delivered to their doors and Zoom calls anchoring their socializing and canoodling.

Odenkirk is Jonathan, an abstract artist quite hot for the lovely blonde academic Clarissa (Mitchell), and not just because she’s hooked him up with an avid, well-heeled buyer, Paul (Huston).

But Jonathan is married, something we only figure out AFTER he and Clarissa have ducked into an gallery office for a chocolate-covered-strawberry quicky the afternoon of his latest opening. Jeanie Lim plays his unsuspecting wife, mother of “the twins,” who are grown and off at college.

Paul, a colleague of Clarissa’s, is married to a much younger woman (Rosie Fellner), something Clarissa teases him about.

“Life Upside Down” puts these two couples, and lonely Clarissa, through the major disruption of masks, gloves, isolation and enforced “social distancing,” which Paul labels “this strange moment, this forced ‘domesticity.'”