Movie Nation

Today’s Around the World with Netflix offering demonstrates that South Africans are just as capable of wasting money and effects on a sci fi comedy with barely a laugh in it.

And the phrase “lost in translation” isn’t limited to projects translated from another tongue. “Office Invasion” is an English-language romp that wouldn’t romp in any language.

An opening scene sets us up for a sci-fi “aliens invade and slaughter” action farce as a guard at this AMI mining corporation facility is lured through the fog of the company’s zolconoid depository — that’s a magical mineral, like vibranium or unobtanium — by a sexy Russian (Aimee Ntuli) in leather lingerie, and promptly killed and devoured.

“You know vot de call me beck on my plenet? ‘De Devourer.’ Sometink like dat.”

The movie then takes us back to “one month earlier,” and proceeds to bore the living crap out of viewers whilst we await the return of “De Devourer” and her comrades so that they can commence the “invasion” and “de devouring.”

An hour of backstory sets up the company’s inept, inherited ownership, ill-treated and unmotivated employees, its “foreign” takeover and the decision by a geologist (Rea Rangaka) who needs the health insurance the new owners take away, a lazy trust fund accountant (Kiroshan Raidoo) about to be cut off from his inheritance and a hapless security guard (Sechaba Ramphele) who just wants to be able to afford to kick out his white co-playing roomies to rob the place.

By the time they’ve bought ridiculous masks and accessed a clapped-out VW Beetle for the caper, we’ve practically forgotten the aliens who (Ntuli, Greg Viljoen and Stevel Marc) who have taken the joint over with for the mineral, but who eat humans in a pinch.

Game on? Not hardly.

Bodily function jokes and exploding bodies, alien “powers” gags, cos-playing nonsense and the only funny ting in de whole movie is de alien (Marc) who decided a Jamaican accent was de right way to go to “blend in,” mon.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations and bodily function jokes, profanity

Cast: Rea Rangaka, Kiroshan Raidoo, Sechaba Ramphele, Aimee Ntuli, Greg Viljoen and Stevel Marc

Credits: Directed by Gareth Croker and Fred Wolmarans and Gareth Crocker. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

Pixar’s “Turning Red,” Henry Selick’s “Wendell & Wild ,” DreamWorks’ “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “The Sea Beast” are destined to lose to Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” when the Annie Awards are handed out.

Unless the fact that three Netflix titles (“Wendell,” “Seabeast” and “Pinocchio”) somehow split the vote.

They had the grace to break out an indie category for films loke “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” to have a shot in.

The Oscar will almost certainly go to “Pinocchio,” but it’s nice that animators have their own means of recognizing all levels of work and a wide range of short and feature films and TV series.

A lot of good animation showed up on screen this year, so there were snubs. Here’s Variety’s roundup.

https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/annie-award-nominations-netflix-guillermo-del-toro-pinocchio-1235491353/

Alice meets two friends for drinks after work. But there’s a nervous edge to the evening, something about the repeated “ping” alerts from her cell phone that her friends exchange a resigned look over.

Is her job that essential, her work that demanding? No. It’s “Simon,” her longtime beau.

When she ducks into the restroom, it isn’t to powder her nose or return a call. It’s the rearrange her decolletage. A cleavage “selfie,” is it?

The friends gush over the hunky waiter they instantly insist is “obsessed with you.” Alice is flustered, but she doesn’t smile. And as one of their number is about to turn 30, they try to rope Alice into plans for a week at the other’s family cottage in the woods. Alice can’t commit to that.

“Simon needs me,” she begs off, adding that he’s “got a gallery opening” and that they’re invited.

When we see her go to great pains to destroy the waiter’s phone number when she gets home, our suspicions grow. When we see her fantasize about the sexy server, we wonder. And when we hear her rehearse a “You know that business trip to Minneapolis” lie, we guess ahead.

Is Alice deciding to have an affair?

“Alice, Darling” teases out what’s going on in in intimate, slow-burn drama that’s a reminder that not all abuse is physical. Anna Kendrick stars as our victim/co-dependent in what is often a point by portrait of the shame and self-loathing that batter the psyche in a toxic relationship.

We can see the clinginess. And over the course of that week in the woods with her friends and their “You’ve changed” accusations, through flashbacks that tell her and us the depths of “control” in play here, Alice is given the reasons to do something about it.

It’s a female empowerment story with a whiff of “Lifetime Original Movie” about it, a tad too on the nose, a drama that’s something of a tease that builds towards minor melodramatics, not major ones. But Kendrick is riveting in this simple, old fashioned “star vehicle” that focuses wholly on the star.

Wunmi Mosaku of TV’s “Lovecraft Country” and Canadian actress Kaniehtiio Horn — this was filmed in Ontario — play the BFFs sketched-in and then called upon to either make Alice see what they see, or make us question their motives in tossing jabs at what they view as her more limited life. We see the dynamic of their week together, Anna’s remoteness from their trio, and wait for the fireworks.

Simon, played by Charlie Carrick of TV’s “Departure,” is a tall, handsome, accented artist. He seems a success, a “catch.” But for all his dash, swagger and attentiveness he’s insecure enough to make us wonder if he’s taking that out on Alice, or simply annoyingly needy.

And then there’s the script’s heavy-handed allegory. The trio has arrived in this corner of the boondocks as a teenaged girl has gone missing. Alice overhears the worry and the judgmental local gossip, and even agrees to pitch in with the search parties, in between sessions of ignoring her friends and brooding over her own circumstances.

“Alice, Darling” has a compactness and narrowness of focus that gives this low-heat story the illusion of pace, even as we’re watching not-much-at-all happen. Alanna Francis’ script concentrates on Alice, and the power imbalance of the casting — Kendrick is the only “name” in this — contributes to our identifying with Alice and her plight. That’s all we have to focus on.

Fortunately for us, Kendrick delivers. She immerses us in Alice’s efforts to keep her secrets and avoid sorting anything out even if she suspects the status quo is everything her friends seem to suggest it is.

Alice as a character has the agency to do something about her situation. Or does she? Is there anything that can move her to act?

Director Nighy, the daughter of acclaimed British actor Bill Nighy and a reminder that the British practically invented “Nepo Babies,” allows us the luxury of guessing where this is going and what role the missing girl plays into all this in ways that underscore that word “tease” that I keep coming back to.

But when the third act arrives like a hard slap on a cold day, we identify with Alice, fear for her and cling to the hope that some sort of intervention will shake her, move her and deliver her, if she’s willing to accept it.

Rating: R for language and some sexual content.

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Wunmi Mosaku, Kaniehtiio Horn and Charlie Carrick

Credits: Directed by Mary Nighy, scripted by Alanna Francis. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Neil Jordan directs Liam, who performs William Monahan’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s most famous creation.

Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Ian Hart, Francois Arnaud, Daniela Melchior and Colm Meaney star in this Feb. 15 release.

My favorite scene in the heist thriller “Out of Exile” takes place in an arthouse cinema, supposedly in Dallas.

An FBI agent (Ryan Merriman) meets a biker-looking “CI” (confidential informant) played by Jake Roberts.

You think to yourself, “Hey, I don’t see his python, but isn’t that wrestler Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts? Never pictured him for a…silent cinema buff.”

Hand it to Oklahoma filmmaker Kyle Kauwika Harris. I have never ever seen an informant meet-up staged at a showing of a silent film. Sure, it makes no damned sense, if anybody else shows up for the movie. I mean, they’d hear every word these two mugs said.

On the other hand, getting Texans to show up for a silent film outside of The People’s Republic of Austin might be the point. Meet in a place nobody goes to? An art cinema!

That’s kind of par for the course for this uneven to barely-watchable “one last job” genre thriller. A couple of half-decent scenes pass — of an armored car robbery, an argument at a strip club, a session with a parole officer — and then something so clumsy invades your field of vision that you shake your head.

It’s bad. The plot is strictly formula. The dialogue averages a cringe every five minutes.

“Why are you referring to him for?” may be a blown line. But “Are we not the F.B.I.?” was bad on the page. Not as trite as “The man, the myth, the legend.” But close.

Our writer-director gives deep thoughts to bit players and terrible lines to weak actors or non-actors. But even the experienced pros oversell, overplay and ruin Southern fried fortune-cookie quotes.

“The past ain’t never where you think you left it, boy.“

The lead is almost a non-presence. Adam Hampton is big and bearded and intimidating. Until he opens his mouth. “Soft spoken” tough guys need a bit of a growl to work, there hoss.

He plays an ex-con leader of a crew of three. Kyle Jacob Henry plays his combat vet younger brother, the “hothead” new to this robbery business, and is so over the top that he just BLOWS UP at least once in almost every scene.

And the F.B.I. agents played by Merriman and Karrie Cox don’t have the presence to compensate for bad dialogue, stupid scenes stuffed with badly-handled exposition and the like.

Agent Solomon (Merriman) is hailed at the F.B.I. office by an older higher-up that he’s on a first-name basis with. They chat for a few seconds, before the older non-actor explains to THE AUDIENCE that “I was a friend of your father,” as if his pal Merriman forgot, and goes into some nonsense about “bitter lesson learned at Waco,” just long enough to make one wonder, “Is that dude one of the investors in this stupid movie?” He gets punched-out later, so maybe not.

Pointless scenes are scattered in with those that advance the plot, but even the ones designed to flesh out the characters via cliches — the abused daughter our gang leader lost track of in prison — just set one’s teeth on edge.

The most experienced actor of the lot is veteran heavy Peter Greene (“Pulp Fiction”) and he’s as oily and menacing as ever.

But truth be told, I started scratching my head right from the start of “Out of Exile,” when three gangsters with the showiest assault rifles this side of “Flash Gordon” rob an armored truck, get the drop on the guard with the bag coming out of the bank, load the bag into their getaway SUV ONLY to have the lowly-paid guard pull a small pistol out of his ankle holster on THREE GUYS WITH MACHINE GUNS.

Makes about as much sense as everything else. But hey, at least Jake “The Snake” got to see a silent movie.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Adam Hampton, Ryan Merriman, Kyle Jacob Henry, Karrie Cox, Hayley McFarland and Peter Greene.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kyle Kauwika Harris. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:47

Oh this looks good. Feb. 3.

The Australian dramatic fantasy “Blaze” is so unusual that there is no meeting it halfway. Either take it on director and co-writer Del Kathryn Barton’s terms, or move along.

It’s an extraordinary blend of fantasy and ugly reality folded into a story of a crime and the troubled child who witnessed it.

I’m almost at a loss as to think of analogies for it. “Birdy,” maybe? “The City of Lost Children?” “The Fisher King” might be the closest reference, a tale of madness, mental escape and a terrible crime that traps its title character, perhaps forever.

Just because Blaze is 12, neither we nor her single-dad can hold out much hope that the trauma she’s experienced is something she’ll just grow out of.

Blaze is played by Julia Savage, a gifted young Australian actress with a lot of access to her interior life and memories of tween fury. She is unforgettable as a middle school child who somehow fits in at school even though it’s obvious that she’s most comfortable tuning-out the world via her headphones. She loses herself in the fantastical reveries of her imagination, protected by “my dragon,” a vast creation spun out of the sort of feathers, tie-dye and wild fabrics of her Haight Asbury-ish bedroom.

Her father (Simon Baker, superb) indulges her collectibles and her flights of fancy. How much of her behavior he regards as quirks and how much he’s figured out is concerning is unclear. She’s going to private school, takes judo classes and has a free hand decorating and zoning out.

Then she stumbles into a reality that her headphones can’t block out. She witnesses an alley confrontation between former lovers that turns into a horrific rape and murder. The only thing that could make this awful crime worse is her knowledge that she didn’t scream, cry out for help or make herself known, actions which might have saved the victim.

Not that Blaze could know that. She is 12, after all. But the guilt is still there.

When her dad figures out there’s something wrong, the crime officially claims another victim. Blaze must be examined for evidence of sexual assault, and then persuaded to sit in court and face the murderer (Josh Lawson) and his “How do you SLEEP at night?” defense attorney.

Barton works in commentary on Australia’s justice system where it pertains to crimes against women as we see this curious child fall down the rabbit hole of Internet searches about the victim, the nature of this sort of crime and the country’s stumbling attempts to respond to it.

But “Blaze” takes its turn towards extraordinary through the interior life the film gives her. She fantasizes revenge, escaping to the moon (via step ladder), torching that defense attorney with a fire-breathing dragon figurine, one of many such dolls and toys she fantasizes are living in her stomach, ready to climb out and intervene in her life.

Her imagined giant patchwork plush-toy dragon is her true protector, and the one “friend” she can’t bear to part with, even when medication enters the picture and she and we can guess what that means. Stop-motion animated dolls, visions of descending a tunnel lined with cherries and trippy extreme closeups of her bird-eyed dragon’s eyeball lend a dreamy look to our heroine’s uncertain fugue state.

Sofia Hampson plays that middle school pal who is slightly more mature, and thus both stalwart in her support and not really qualified to talk about boys, sex and other things swirling around in this girl’s head. Not wholly a “bad influence,” but close.

I like the way the father figure is drawn here, and the fact that we and the filmmaker can see that keeping a child who’s witnessed the most brutal rape and murder in a coed JUDO class isn’t the smartest play.

Yes, maintaining routine is important. But even an idiot should fret about having to teach your kid what “triggered” means because you didn’t think that through. The idea that everybody here is kind of out of their depth, especially the father, feels like the most realistic thing in this often surrealistic film.

And that’s not destined to be his only wrong move. In this situation, every parental decision is fraught, and the consequences of something you can’t anticipate can be terminal.

“Blaze” is one of the roughest coming of age tales in memory, a movie that drags its heroine from fantasy to ugly reality time and again. Barton lets us see even those fantasies turn dark, bloody and menacing as a 12-year-old learns ugly truths about cruelty, crime and justice as it pertains to women in most of the world, even the supposedly “liberal” democracies.

And even though I think I’ve made the point in all those paragraphs above, let me reiterate. “Blaze” is really something, a riveting and challenging experience and an extraordinary film not to be missed.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Julia Savage, Simon Baker, Yael Stone, Josh Lawson and Sofia Hampson

Credits: Directed by Del Kathryn Barton, scripted by Huna Amweero, Del Kathryn Barton. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:37

Little-seen if occasionally revived, Jean-Denis Bonan’s “A Woman Kills” is an arch, experimental and titillating French thriller from that seminal year in modern French history, 1968.

It’s not particularly revolutionary, as one might expect from an era of demonstrations and riots in the streets. But it’s a fascinating artifact, almost a spoof of French “New Wave” (Nouvelle vague) cinema style that’s more Godard than Truffaut

A female serial killer has been executed, our narrator tells us. Helene Picard (a fictional figure) killed prostitutes, was apprehended and got the guillotine in March of 1968. She was 25 years old.

Then street walkers start dying again. Some “sadist of the Pigalle” is chasing and strangling victim after victim.

The Algerian war vet prosecutor (Claude Merlin) who became “society’s official killer” in bringing her to justice, was troubled and is getting threatening letters now. So is an assistant to the superintendent of police, Solange Lebas (Solange Pradel).

She frets so much she goes home to shower. And then turn that into a bath. Either that’s how “dirty” she feels, or this was Paris in the ’60s, and if there isn’t nudity, what’s the point of labeling your work “a French film?”

An unseen narrator sorts through the case, listing and showing us legions of leggy victims, presenting a very myopic view of how the authorities gather evidence and mull over crime scene films in the police department’s screening room.

An unseen singer accompanies himself on guitar lamenting the vision of “a girl whose throat is being slit,” which sounds more romantic in French, because everything does.

Sound effects, of a storm that we never see happening, or a cat supposedly in this or that apartment, seem almost randomly tossed into the mix.

Our narrator seems to be piecing together a profile of a killer as he speaks of an orphaned character “with a penchant for violence and homosexuality.”

That was something like accepted-wisdom in society of that era and earlier. Think of the Leopold and Loeb murder filmed as “Compulsion,” or the homicidal homosexuals in film after film, even the James Bond epic “Diamonds are Forever.”

So the psychology introduced here, with characters talking of the trauma of their upbringing or experience in the Algerian War, is dated and crosses the line into “That’s messed up.”

It’s no shock when this short feature (68 minutes) or long short (the specialty of writer-director Jean-Denis Bonan) has a character cross-dress in the third act and lets us think, if only for a minute, that this is part of the massive police effort to capture this serial killer.

The film, finally making it onto BluRay, has all these quirky/artsy touches and a finale that is bracing and bizarre and shockingly violent.

Morality is represented, and challenged, and many touches — that voice-of-news-authority narrator, the almost random sound effects and jumping from setting to setting, shifting points of view — seem designed to undercut what we or “justice” can know about a crime or a criminal.

But it’s a fascinating black and white snapshot of1968 f Paris and an engrossing if untidy tale of injustice and second guessing justice and policing those who police us.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Claude Merlin, Solange Pradel, Myriam Mézières, Jackie Raynal, Catherine Deville, Velly Beguard

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jean-Denis Bonan. A Radiance release.

Running time: 1:08

A petite, kitty-and-cat-video-obsessed pixie punches, slices, stabs and shoots well above her weight in “The Violence Action,” a candy-colored yakuza-killing comedy from Japan.

Based on a comic book, cast with mostly ex-child actors who look like the figures in Shin Sawada and Renji Asai’s manga, its a violently manic, cartoonish farce cluttered with gangs, characters and agendas. It bolts out of the opening credits and quickly bogs down in dull details and wild wire-work fight choreography that can’t help but turn repetitive.

Not worth the trouble? That sums it up. But for J-action manga junkies, here’s what it has to offer.

There’s the usual young, petite, sexy-but-desexualized heroine, Kei, played by Kann Hashimoto in a succession of shorts and wigs until she settles on peach being her favorite color.

Kei has her crew, here a “club” run out of a Hello Kitty-decorated noodle shop — closed to the public and presided over by Tencho (Fumika Baba). They are The Supple and Natural Gals Delivery Service, ostensibly a call-girl operation cover for hired hits.

Zura (Takashi Okamura) is Kei’s driver, older and bald and hiding that baldness under a (literally) bullet-proof Elvis pompadour.

Kei’s a “childish” college bookkeeping student by day, assassin the rest of the time. Dopey “bowl cut” nerd Watanabe (Oji Suzuka) crushes on her and finds himself drawn into her life.

And Kei and her crew are being drawn into a multi-gang yakuza war, spinning around a punk gang boss, Ayabe (Shunsuke Daitô) who is kidnapped at one point, and a mob accountant Terano (Yôsuke Sugino), with lots of missing yen and lots of mob intrigues about where it should go.

At some point, Kei will find herself face to face with Terano and give him the goo-goo eyes that “Bowl Cut” Watanabe gives her.

No, nothing will come of that, because there’s no romance or sex in this or most action manga adaptations or — judging by its plummeting birth rate — in Japan as a whole right now.

The deadliest and funniest foil for this “delivery service” is the mob fixer/killer/goon “Mister” Michitaka, played by the towering Japanese-Spanish pretty boy Yu Shirota. Made up like the comic book character, he’s a bespectacled metallic blonde who looks like Second City Canadians Harold Ramis and Rick Moranis had a love child.

He’s funny, and menacing every time he appears.

Too many of the characters are insipid caricatures, the story is a convoluted quagmire of agendas, alliances, gangs and big, modernist gang meetings in boardrooms and the dialogue better suited to an anime aimed at the arrested-development corner of animation’s fanbase.

The funniest scenes all involve Michitaka, who can’t handle the idea of a “woman” assassin, much less two of them when Kei’s crew calls in sniper Daria (Yûri Ota).

“Know the word ‘misogynist?” the shooter asks?

“What, is that some special, spicy messed-up miso (soup)?”

I liked the cartwheeling, wall-walking, bullet-dodging nonsense of the brawls. Note the fight choreography and blur of swirling cameras and edits designed to make us think an 85 pound pixie is dropping hulking gangsters by the metric ton in every fight. It’s all too glib about the blood-letting and entirely too childish and nonsensical for me to get into. But the world’s 40 year-old virgins need movies too, I guess.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence and lots of it.

Cast: Kann Hashimoto, Fumika Baba, Oji Suzuka, Yôsuke Sugino Ota and Yu Shirota.

Credits: Directed by Tôichirô Rutô, scripted by Tôichirô Rutô and Itaru Era, based on the comic book by Renji Esai and Shin Sawada. A Sony release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:51

Tom Sizemore is decades beyond his “Saving Private Ryan” glory. But he’s top billed in “Bermuda Island,” a plane crash thriller that in no way should be confused with “Plane.”

Spoiler alert — Sizemore, playing a flight attendant (Stop laughing!) doesn’t make it…through the first act. Spoiler alert, neither does the drug and gun dealer who is second billed.

As that character’s arrest and shoot-out was the focus of the movie’s drawn out first scene, feel free to shout “What the hell was the point of HIM?”

“Bermuda Island” is every bad thing about “Lost,” everything that “Plane” got right done wrong, every “performance” no one ever bought into on “Survivor.”

It’s “Airplane” without the (intentional) laughs, a disaster film in every meaning of the word. Bad writing, bad effects, bad acting, inept directing, the whole shooting, plane-crashing, character-devouring mess is just excruciating to sit through.

A plane loaded with aspiring-to-D-list players cast as “types” is headed for Puerto Rico when it goes down in a storm. Not before the murderer being extradited (Noel Gugliemi) breaks free of his four FBI guards and guns most of them down — mid-flight.

The jetliner is tiny, yet the passengers, once they wash ashore, keep speaking of “hundreds” of casualties.

The disorganized dunces declare “We need to start surviving!” But none knows how. They bicker over what their priorities should be.

“And who put YOU in charge?”

It’s not like the ditzy Ozzy Osborne meets Boy George rocker named Midnight (Greg Tally) has anointed himself leader. Or the pilot.

“One job! Couldn’t even keep the plane in the air!”

Wouldn’t you know it, they’re not alone. There are people there. And people in monster costumes, too.

This thriller goes from bad to worse without the good manners of providing any one element that could be latched on to as more hilariously bad than the next. I couldn’t even find the elements of a bad movie drinking game out of this.

But at least Sizemore got off lightly.

Rating: graphic violence

Cast: Tom Sizemore, Noel Gugliemi, John Wells, Sarah French, Sherri Davis, Greg Tally, Victor V. Gelsomino and Wesley Cannon.

Credits: Directed by Adam Werth, scripted by Robert Thompson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:26