Movie Nation

Molly Shannon is among the co stars in this sentimental dramedy from an actor/director a long way from his “Garden State” breakout film.

This looks sweet. Interesting to see Pugh in this guise.

March.

“God’s Crooked Lines” is a modestly complex hybrid thriller, a blend of “Who is telling the truth, who is gaslighting whom?” and “Is this real or is this in my head?” stories, naturally set in a mental institution.

A good measure of such a movie is how often it makes us guess wrong and how invested we remain in it to the very end. Clocking in at a mini-series length two and a half hours, this Spanish production falls short of the mark in both regards.

But Spanish director and co-writer Oriol Paulo, who gave us “Mirage” and the Netflix series “Inocente,” stages some fine set-pieces and creates a properly gloomy tone for this Around the World with Netflix mystery about a woman who claims she’s gone undercover to investigate a crime at a mental hospital, an asylum whose doctors dismiss that as the ravings of a rich woman who poisoned her husband.

As we meet Alice Gould (Bárbara Lennie of “Petra”), she’s riding to the Our Lady of the Fountains Hospital at the behest of the man driving her. He lost a son there, she later says. And she’s an experienced investigator who has agreed to go inside, find out what the saner inmates are saying, and poke around in the archives to see if the staff is covering something up.

That’s her story, that she’s “voluntarily” committed herself here to that end. But the hospital doctors maintain that she tried to poison her husband, that she’s “very dangerous” and “unstable” and a “masterful liar” (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

There’s no argument over whether she’s beautiful, which she is, or that she’s a natural redhead, which she isn’t. We see her roots growing out within days of her arrival.

Another fact left dangling as “Alicia,” as the informal staff insists she go by, is rich. So, she’s a…gentleWOMAN detective, like Benoit Blanc of the “Knives Out” mysteries?

That’s Netflix, beating a clever idea to death.

It’s about 1980, and we see Alice investigate, ask questions and try to befriend the more sentient inmates like the special privileges oddball Ignacio (Pablo Derqui) and keep at least some of the staff in the loop, or out of it until she can meet with the director of the place, Dr. Alvar, who is privy to her investigation.

But when he (Eduard Fernández) finally shows up, he contradicts her, punches holes in her story and makes us question if she’s a reliable narrator of her own life. Has she been “legally kidnapped,” sent here by a greedy husband out to steal all her assets, with perhaps inside help from the hospital? Or is she the “masterful liar” Dr. Alvar bluntly claims she is.

There are deaths inside the hospital in this story, a tale told out of order in some places to throw us off the scent. An escape attempt leans on that almost fool-proof “How to get yourself out of a hostage situation” trick — fire.

The cops are involved, and skeptical. The staff seems divided. And the inmates are either helpful or chillingly out to molest or murder her. So she says. So she might think.

A few scenes pop, but the entire enterprise played as low-heat to me, with little suggestion this woman is crazy, or alarmed that she might wind up trapped inside an insane asylum by a plot that’s tripped her up.

The stakes are neither high nor low, as we don’t know what is real and what isn’t and Alicia’s part in that.

The shuffled order of the storytelling robs the picture of pacing and urgency. The only reason to make this a period piece, aside from a few jabs at Freud and sexist Spain circa 1980, are to deny our heroine cell phone access, I guess.

The plot may meander a bit, following “God’s Crooked Lines” as it does. But in this hemisphere, at least, we see this handsomely mounted but tepid tale’s finish line an hour or more before everyone in the cast.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Bárbara Lennie, Eduard Fernández, Loreto Mauleón, Pablo Derqui and Antonio Buíl

Credits: Directed by Oriol Paulo, scripted by Oriol Paulo and Guillem Clua. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:34

A documentary, five years in the making, about the slow-footed race-against-time to finish an epic “three volume” biography of Lyndon Johnson’s fifth and final volume before the researcher/author and his editor pass away from very old age is nobody’s idea of an easy sale — not to a film distributor, nor to most filmgoers.

Even the title — “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” — seems ironic, if not oxymoronic. “Turn every page” and “adventures?”

But filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb (“Romeo Romeo” was hers), daughter of 90something editor Robert Gottlieb, has produced a filmed appreciation not just of her father and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Caro and their epic final collaboration. It’s a film about a decades-long deep dive into “power” in America and a monument to a sort of life-long collaboration we will never see again.

“Turn every page” was a discipline passed on to Caro, he recalls in the film, by his New York Newsday (newspaper) editor Alan Hathaway. As Hathaway promoted Caro to investigative reporter, the trait he noticed in Caro’s research was his thoroughness. “Turn every page” when you’re digging into something, Hathaway preached.

This process, this degree of care and determination to nail down facts and expand a story as much as need be in order to write something unimpeachable and definitive is what “Turn Every Page” celebrates.

When we see a recent Caro visit to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, later in the film, he notes that when he first started researching the life, rise to power, triumphs and failings of Johnson, there were “thirty-two million pages” of documents, letters, telegrams and records there. “Now, it’s forty-five million.”

And if you’re as dogged and exacting as Caro, that’s a reading challenge you have to accept, even as he passes his 87th birthday. Because if you want to answer conclusively whether or not Johnson stole the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas, you have dig just that deep.

Lizzie Gottlieb, who interviews the two men — although, at Caro’s insistence always separately — takes care to present their achievements together and as individuals.

Caro is known for his LBJ books and the massive tome that preceded them, 1974’s “The Power Broker,” about New York toll road authority chief Robert Moses.

An opening montage of many pundits, experts and politicos appearing on Zoom call TV appearances, shows this book on the bookshelves in the background of their home offices, “a credential,” Lizzie Gottlieb narrates, not unlike a diploma hanging on the wall. If you want to understand “power” in America, this thousand-plus page tome is essential reading to this very day.

It’s a book that shows how Moses, “never elected” to any political office, wielded power in New York city and environs, “rebuilt” and re-imagined the city, both for convenience and as an aid to future growth and quality of living. And as Moses, whose toll roads/toll bridges position gave him staggering sums to work with, repaid favors and curried favor with politicians and real estate and construction tycoons, he literally bulldozed communities and those who lived in them.

Caro learned his mission wasn’t just to study power, how it was obtained and exercised, but to understand and impart to readers “the effects of power on the powerless.” And that’s one reason this book endures and sits on so many book shelves of those who observe American politics and policy. It speaks to generations far beyond its publication date because some things never change.

For instance, I’m writing this review of “Turn Every Page” in Florida, which — whatever its other idiosyncrasies, quirks and right wing politics — leads the nation in the number of miles of toll roads, run by the same sort of authority that made Robert Moses all-powerful. Who does that authority actually work for? Caro gave us the answer.

Gottlieb’s Dad is “the Dumbledore of publishing,” who turned his assertion that he is “a better reader than anybody else” into a career that saw him guiding the works of Caro, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and legions of others to press, zeroing in on details, from punctuation and character development to plot.

At one point, we see him touring a bookstore with his grandson, pointing out books that he edited. He picks up Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and tells the kid and us of how he talked Heller out of “Catch-18” as a title.

The two contemporaries, Jewish New Yorkers, are giants of their professions, “Turn Every Page” reminds us. How they manage to work together, their debates over what to edit out, what to change and when or when not to use “semicolons” make for a fascinating dive into that process for any reader who sees this film.

We see Caro note how many words he writes or rewrites every day, the old fashioned “carbon copy” he makes of every typed page and his not-wholly-haphazard way of storing these backups. We learn that he and his actress and research back-up wife, Tony-nominated actress Maria Tucci, moved to Texas for three years. That’s how Caro made great progress in researching Lyndon Baines Johnson, learning about the hard Hill Country childhood that shaped the president who passed Medicare, Medicaid, The Voting Rights Act and landmark civil rights legislation as part of his “Great Society” agenda. It’s where Caro got a handle on a giant figure so “insecure” that he stumbled into Vietnam, and the many other traits and missteps that mar Johnson’s “ends justify the means” legacy.

Gottlieb, who has done quite a bit of writing of lighter (shorter) non-fiction and biographies, who ran The New Yorker for a spell, and had time to be heavily involved in the running of The New York City Ballet, comes off as more whimsical, acknowledging and mocking his ego and accommodating his filmmaker-daughter, cracking that “I was a good Dad” as they sit for another interview.

What emerges is an affectionate portrait of these two and their collaboration, perhaps with some of the rougher edges rubbed off, perhaps not as deep a dive as Lizzie Gottlieb herself would have liked. It’s still an amazed appreciation of what they’re attempting to finish, late in life, a fifth Johnson book that will, like the Moses volume, be the last word on a seminal figure in American history, another manipulator of American political power and the things a better-informed-electorate will learn about this country just by reading these books.

Rating: PG

Cast: Robert Caro, Robert Gottlieb, Ina Gottlieb, Maria Tucci, Bill Clinton, Conan O’Brian and Lizzie Gottlieb

Credits: Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

Wise and honorable is the action filmmaker who credits her or his fight choreographer right up front in the opening credits.

That’s true in Hollywood, Seoul, Hong Kong or Jakarta, as today’s Around the World with Netflix offering proves.

Director and co-writer Timo Tjahjanto (“The Night Comes for Us”) knows who butters his Roti Gambang. Muhammad Irfan did stunts in the martial arts cops-vs-mobsters epics, “The Raid” movies, two of the most violent films ever made. If brawls with fists, feet, machetes and machine guns are ballet, Irfan is their Balanchine.

“The Big 4” is a jokey, insanely-bloody Indonesian action pic worth watching for the jokes — which translate well enough — and some epic throwdowns. The plot is over-the-top and borderline nonsensical, and the body count is staggering — with too many minions slaughtered by gunfire, the lazy way out even in the “John Wick” movies, for my taste.

But the mayhem this potential Indonesian action franchise serves up between the slow stretches is first rate and well worth a look.

The opening gambit is a raid on an orphanage run by a charitable foundation. A nun drops off a little boy, who is shocked to see orphans in cages, penned up for something nefarious. The mouthy teenager Pelor is about to fill him in when he’s grabbed, taken off and slapped on an operating table.

But just before Pelor’s total-organ-donation begins, a couple of badasses who have infiltrated the place open up on organ thieves and legions of billy-club-wielding henchmen. Pelor (Kristo Immanuel) was the “bait” who got in first, and when his older accomplices Topan (Abiman Aryasatya) and Alpha (Lutesha) arrive, #timesup.

Jenggo (Arie Kriting), the meditating sniper, serves as their reinforcement. And “Pops” (Budi Ros) is their leader and getaway van driver. He runs The Big 4, Jakarta’s most deadly vigilantes. He recruited this quartet as children and trained them to be the very best.

There’s got to be a child welfare law or two against that, and the old man’s new cop daughter Dina (Putri Murano) could probably cite it, chapter and verse. But on the day she becomes a cop, “Pops” Petrus is murdered. She starts hunting for clues about Dad’s secret life as his now-leaderless gang flees to the island of Bersi.

That’s where Dina finds them, and is herself pursued to the island by the hired guns of the sadistic Antonio (Mathrino Lio) and his bazooka-toting bombshell sidekick, Ale (Michelle Tahalea).

The funniest set piece of this gory romp comes right away, because Topan is now a slovenly desk clerk at the hotel Petrus always told his real kid — and his adopted hit squad — would be the perfect place to retire.

Topan has to book the annoying, hectoring Dina in a room — against his will — and play the meek stoner to the goons who show up trying to track her down. They notice him fumbling to turn the radio up, but they don’t get it.

He’s covering the sounds of the brawl and slaughter to come. He’s going to kill the goons. But he’d like to keep hotel guest Dina from being disturbed.

Dina slowly gets a clue about who the “real” villains are as Topan takes her to a jungle hut ashram where guru Jenggo is jovially cheating tourists, and to the village where Alpha is arms dealing as a one-woman “songstress,” portable karaoke slung over one shoulder, and the punk Pelor has acquired his first gun, a gold-plated pistol.

The fights, and I’m guessing there are half a dozen or so here, are brutal. But too many of them are kill-count shootouts, which have become so generic that if you can’t do better than “John Wick,” you’d best stick to other weapons — a blowgun, a bow and arrow, etc.

We come to such movies for the brilliant fight choreography, the ingenious ways the heroes find to get the best of the bad guys, one, two or twelve at a time. And we come for the cheesy trash talk (in subtitled Indonesian, or dubbed into English).

“Are you ready to DIE?”

“Let’s go HAND to hand, it you DARE!”

“The Big 4” never goes far wrong when action is the reason for the season. Tjahjanto and his team know how to frame, film and edit a good brawl, and a decent shoot-out, too. Having characters bicker and try to explain the illogical, getting all dewy-eyed over “family” and the film’s bungling, post-climactic finale — the filler that makes this 90 minute thriller clock in at 2:21 — are what hold “The Big 4” back.

Give fight choreographer Irfan the time to cook up more interesting ways to fight off the heavily armed and this would be a winner.

Rating: TV-MA, copious amounts of gory violence, profanity, more violence

Cast: Abimana Aryasatya, Putri Murano, Lutesha, Arie Kriting, Kristo Immanuel, Budi Ros, Mathrino Lio and Michelle Tahalea

Credits: Directed by Timo Tjahjanto, scripted by Timo Tjahjanto and Johanna Wattimena. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:21

Opens in January, VOD and DVD in Feb.

Well, at least they give away their big spoiler in the trailer.

Future ordnance unleashed against T Rex?

This is a rare straight up action pic for Driver, and looks very “Chariots of the Gods,” for those who remember the books of Mr. “Ancient Astronauts.”

March 10

I was inspired to pick this up after seeing Sully’s copy in his van in the cannibalism romantic thriller “Bones and All.”

What’s the meaning of this short story collection being something a roving diner on human flesh would keep at his fingertips on his murderous odyssey? A detail from the Camille DeAngelis novel? A favorite of the Kentish Oscar winner, Rylance?

It’s the collection that has the long short story “The Dead” in it, which became an acclaimed curtain call film for the great filmmaker and sometime member of the Irish gentry, John Huston.

Reading “Dubliners”, I had an epiphany. Its inclusion in “Bones and All” is a comment on academia and its determination to force-feed Joyce’s magnum opus, the 730 page “Bloom’s Day” epic of style “Ulysses” on students of English lit. Plainly, Sully’s choice of reading matter is suggesting that approaching Joyce via the shorter novel “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” or better still, the short story collection, “Dubliners,” would be preferable.

Introduce Joyce to readers via, um, bite size chunks, in other words.

Hallmark of a Hallmark style holiday romance? The pretty single woman/divorced mom always falls for a guy who moisturizes and uses more makeup than her.

Sometimes they shave. Sometimes they’re fashion mag cover-model “rugged.” And sometimes they’re a bit older and relying on hair dye and Clinique to hold back Father Time.

As Netflix has made “OutHallmarking Hallmark” a core tenet of its business model, you can see this scenario play out a half dozen times in any given year’s Netflix Christmas movies.

John Ducey, a veteran supporting player whose TV credits go back nearly 30 years, wrote and co-stars in “I Believe in Santa,” a mirthless and generally unromantic goof on a couple mismatched because Tom, a lawyer, is seriously into “Christmas magic,” and Lisa, the jaded online columnist, is “famously” not into Christmas. Oh no, not at all.

Christina Moore plays Lisa, and she’s Mrs. John Ducey in real life. Ducey plays Tom.

They “meet cute” when she loses track of her little girl Ella (Violet McGraw) at a July 4 fair, and he’s the nice not-at-all-“creepy” lawyer who has her sit in his “Free Legal Advice” booth until self-involved Mom realizes she’s missing.

Once the near-accusations have been abandoned, they watch the fireworks together, and a couple, plus Ella, is born.

But when the year’s biggest “holiday appreciation” column assignment comes around, this loving couple is put to its severest test. To Lisa, Santa is “the poster child for spending money at Christmas,” so no way the corporate overlords will let him fade away. Ella’s just getting old enough to ask questions about the fat man with this very busy Dec. 24 lined up. Tom?

“I believe in Santa!”

He blocks out the entire month of December to attend caroling concerts (beat-boxing holiday tunes), tree lighting ceremonies, visits to department store Santas and the like. And Lisa grits her teeth through it. None pf these “events” is anything other than set-designed pretty. It’s not funny, illuminating, nor do most of them lead to anything like a debate on “Santa’s real” that anyone needs to hear.

Their debates see Tom launch into QAnon level craziness about “Santa time” and other “explanations” for Christmas miracles.

“It’s not about logic. It’s about the Christmas spirit! It’s about the magic!”

Yeah, it’s all a tad insipid, which is another trait these “Hallmark style” pictures all share. And Lisa’s general contempt for “commercialized” Christmas is given no explanation. Just “she’s a journalist” and that’s on brand for us, I guess. Just a bunch of “Killjoy to the Worlds.”

Ducey cooked up an oddly sterile script, making it a point to have Tom separate the “religious” Christmas from of his belief system. The guy’s all in on Santa, debunking the idea that there’s a “global conspiracy” that billions of people around the world believe in. Nonsense like that.

There’s barely a chuckle in this thing, despite giving Lisa the “funny Black BFF from work” (Lateefah Holder) and Tom the funny gay Muslim pal (Sacheen Bhatt) who is either from his work (unclear) or Tom has an even bigger secret he’s keeping from Lisa.

The biggest “name” in the film is the delightful character actress Missi Pyle (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”)who pops in as Missi Toe, one of the singers in the assorted pageants, tree-lightings, etc., that Tom drags Lisa and the viewer to.

“I Believe in Santa” fails to warm the heart, wrap us in romance, salve us with sentiment or tickle the funny bone, the things we typically crave in a Christmas comedy or dramedy. Like too many of these mass production holiday pictures, it’s just filler, something for Netflix to plug in as a place holder and time suck, because Santa forbid Hallmark should have more quick-and-cheap holiday offerings than the world’s dominant streaming service.

Rating: PG

Cast Christina Moore, John Ducey, Lateefah Holder, Violet McGraw, Sacheen Bhatt and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Alex Ranarivelo, scripted by John Ducey. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

I just wasted more time than I should have trying to pin down whether Nora Kaye and Whitney Uland were real life friends since childhood, which is what they play in their new comedy, “The Cosmos Sisters.”

As I’ve seen another film recently made by two actual lifelong BFFs, and which includes home movie proof that this is the case, I thought I onto what could be a movie “trend.” No such luck with these two. And I can’t remember the title of the earlier film either, it turns out.

But Uland and Kaye, who co-wrote, co-directed and co-star in this feather-light indie comedy, are that convincing as super 30ish tight-since-childhood friends who reunite when one has slipped into a funk after her mother’s death.

They finish each other’s sentences, chant catchphrases that were part of their “act” back during “Homecoming Halftime,” share pot brownies and they burst into songs that they used to perform together as “The Cosmos Sisters,” each in a wig the color of a different brand of ice-packs — frozen corpse metallic blue or chemical spill purple.

From the shorthand they converse in to the way they fight — biting, bitter, personal and yet never terminal — you’d swear they’d been doing this for decades.

“That is sooooo 2007.”

That’s the cute thing about “The Cosmos Sisters,” and “cute” will have to do. Because it’s not deep, not insightful and not all that funny outside of the dynamic these two set up on screen.

Nora’s hiding under the covers these days. So influencer/skin-care vlogger Whitney stages a one-woman intervention, at the behest of Nora’s boyfriend (Jake Swain), or so she says.

Th truth is, Nora went through something awful and Brooklynite Whitney was just too busy to show up and be supportive. The fact that Nora subscribes to Whitney’s inane product-review “channel” just makes it sadder.

But now Whitney is prepared to blow in their small town, “take a break from Insta (gram)” and help Nora get through this grief, and maybe help her sort out her late mother’s barn full of “stuff.” That seems suspicious. We and Nora are looking for an “ulterior motive.”

Whitney’s strategy changes when they do a little mini-revival of their “act” from way back when for her Instagram channel, and somebody requests that they do a benefit show for her son, who has cancer.

Whitney’s all “Let’s get the band back together,” Nora’s breaking out her guitar, her boyfriend just wishes she’d clean out her Mom’s barn and Whitney insists on working in time to flirt with a hottie (Madeleine Grey DeFreece), now a pizza deliverer, whom she didn’t give a second look in high school.

“The Cosmos Sisters” tries to surf on the rapport between the leads and their random, seemingly riffed banter.

“You’re going to age sooooo badly!”

“That’s RUDE. But if the Russian filters taught me anything, it’s that it’s probably true.”

Very little here merits more than a smirk, with the lone exception being their visit to a former classmate (Alexander Manuel) whom Whitney dissed way back when, but who’s become a successful musician/producer now. Manuel brings the glower, smirk and comical pop to his single scene that the rest of the movie lacks.

Other than that, it looks like the ladies had fun making this not-quite-funny comedy in Florence, Massachusetts. That, and my hearty congratulations that they got their film distributed it about all the holiday cheer I can offer.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Whitney Uland, Nora Kaye, Madeline Grey DeFreece, Jake Swain and Alexander Manuel

Credits Scripted and directed by Nora Kaye and Whitney Uland. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:18

March 10, the masked murderer takes the subway.