Movie Nation

Let’s assume everybody who’ll stream this — or read a review of it — isn’t a card-carrying musical theater hater.

None of that tired “People break into song, that doesn’t happen in ‘real life'” argument that Jerry Seinfeld wore out decades ago, and which Keegan-Michael Key’s character Josh parrots in episode one of “Schmigadoon!” Because Cecily Strong’s Melissa has the perfect comeback.

“You seem OK with magic hammers that come when you call them.”

This “Lorne Michaels Presents…” limited series plays like an absurdly ambitious “Saturday Night Live” recurring sketch, or a much less ambitious musical spoof created expressly for the small screen. The songs are lightly-amusing parodies of tunes from “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “The Sound of Music” and other classics, including — you guessed it — “Brigadoon.” And the intentionally old-fashioned choreography and camera shots are composed on a TV screen scale — compact.

The “Brigadoon” plot is an unhappy unmarried couple (Key and Strong) who stumble across a foggy bridge on a backpacking trip and find themselves in idyllic Schmigadoon, where the 167 “color blind casting” natives sing and dance and “always strive for peace and happiness.”

But is it really “the most beautiful, wonderful, magical place of all?”

“It’s like if ‘The Walking Dead’ was also ‘Glee!'”

Because it turns out, they cannot just walk out the way they walked in. And “We’re smart. We found our way out of IKEA” is no help.

It seems these two doctors, who met “cute” at the hospital where they work, cannot get out of Schmigadoon until they’ve found “true love.” That’s according to the leprechaun (Martin Short) who explains the bridge they cannot cross back over.

For cynical, always letting-her-down Josh, “It’s important to me that we hate things together.” But the more romantic Melissa kind of goes with it. “Holy s—, am I about to get a song, my OWN song?” And this hunky carny named Danny (Aaron Tveit) is giving her the “Tunnel of Love” come-on.

If they’re not truly in love, where will they find “true love” so that they can escape “Schmigadoon?”

Nothing here is going to give Lin-Manuel Miranda the cold shakes. A little tap dancing, parody songs by series co-creator (with Ken Daurio) Cinco Paul that sound more workshopped than Broadway-bound.

The stakes are lower than low. Because “Nobody gets killed in a musical. Except ‘Oklahoma!’ And ‘Carousel.’ And ‘South Pacific.’ And, oh HELLO. ‘West Side Story!'”

The leads have decent chemistry, with Strong having more to play with. Melissa debates morality and ethics with the natives and the hunky Hispanic doctor (Jaime Cahill) she goes to work for. And she explains to Josh (and the viewer) “how musicals work,” ticks off the ones they’re living through (“Music Man,””King and I,” etc.). Key’s tempted by the “school marm” (“What’s a ‘marm’ again?”) played by “Hamilton” veteran Ariana DeBose, and by a waitress flirt (Disney Channel alumna Dove Cameron).

Musical theater royalty Kristin Chenoweth plays the town’s puritanical head of Mothers Against the Future and preacher’s (Fred Armisen) wife, and equally royal Alan Cumming is the confused, Mayor Aloyius Menlove. He gets a number or three, and Ann Harada playing his wife lilts through an “oh, honey” number, as the last to get a clue.

“He’s a queer one, that man’o mine.”

Subtle. But damned if that isn’t that a cue for another Cumming number (delivered in a florid pre-“Showboat” style).

Her entire “SNL” career has prepped Strong for that moment when OB-GYN Melissa picks up a guitar and explains the facts of life to an incredibly naive pregnant couple with a “Sing with me” send-up of that song that began by naming a female deer.

“Vagina…is where the penis goes. Ovaries…make eggs for you and me! Testes…are where the sperm repose, CERVIX is where they can swim free!”

Each episode begins with a sweetly-deflating flashback that shows how much trouble our unhappy couple is in.

It’s all kind of cute, kind of snarky and just sweet enough to come off. Well, come off just enough to keep you watching to see if they finally get Keegan-Michael Key to sing and dance.

“I’m. Not. Singing.”

MPA Rating: A little profanity, a lot of innuendo

Cast: Cecily Strong, Keenan-Michael Key, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Dove Cameron, Ann Harada, Jaime Cahill, Aaron Tveit, Fred Armisen, Ariana DeBose, Martin Short and Jane Krakowski.

Credits: Created by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Six episodes @:30 each.

“Sublet” is an American in Tel Aviv story, a laid-back travelogue about a travel writer who visits the city for a “five days in” article, and gets more than he bargained — or embracing the local custom — haggled for.

John Benjamin Hickey (“The Good Wife,” “Mapplethorpe”) gives a not-quite-fussbudget air to Michael, a veteran traveler who takes a sublet rather than checking into a hotel, because that’s the quickest way to immerse yourself in a place. He instantly regrets the decision.

Tomer (Israeli newcomer Niv Nissim) gets the days he’s renting the place wrong. He’s a student, a filmmaker and a slovenly housekeeper. But he begs Michael to keep the bargain, and here we are — a gay, middle-aged and married travel writer tucked into a “hip, hot” neighborhood, with a young, gay horror movie maker as his tour guide.

Tomer reflects the way director and co-writer Eytan Fox wants Tel Aviv to come off — ever so laid back. He shows off the beach, the cafes, treelined streets filled with student-age kids and the occasional tourist. Tomer takes Michael to a nightclub and on a train ride “home” to visit his mother (Miki Kim) in a kibbutz.

We never see any IDF (Israeli Defense Force) soldiers. It’s easy to be “laid back” when that part of Israeli life is erased from the story. The only stresses are of a minor melodramatic nature — a dancer friend (Lihi Kornowksi) has love life troubles, Tomer has commitment issues and darn it all, his bike is stolen. Again.

His reaction to the stolen bike, which turns up exactly where he expects — a local Palestinian-run second-hand bike shop — sets the tone. He won’t rat them out to the police “because the cops around here are racist,” and would put the man out of business. He’s young and tolerant and given to making patronizing, ageist cracks at Michael’s expense, almost from the start.

“It’s very unoriginal to be a gay man who loves musicals!”

Tomer makes “artistic horror” movies, which he shares with Michael, dreams, like many of his young countrymen, of moving to Berlin, which surprises Michael, it being “a place that symbolizes Jewish tragedy.” Tomer and dancer Daria have a good laugh at that. They’re not listening to the Middle Aged American who says “I hate to be the guy who says, ‘When I was your age…'”

The handsome student is the very embodiment of how he describes the average Israeli’s attitude towards Western tourists. “They just want you to like them…We’re in the Middle East, but want to be a part of the West.”

“Sublet” has an easy-going charm right up to the moments when a little “edge” is finally jammed in. A brutally off-key introduction to “Israel’s version of Grindr” is as abrupt as the as the third act turns in the story are utterly predictable and eye rolling.

If this was a heterosexual romance playing this game it’d be hooted right off the screen.

Yet the light and lightly-unsettling charms of “Sublet” win you over, even if you suspect that Fox has merely added a sexual edge to atone for the political and ethnic strife he’s taken care to avoid.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: John Benjamin Hickey, Niv Nissim, Lihi Kornowski and Miki Kim

Credits: Directed by Eytan Fox, script by Eytan Fox and Itay Segal. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:27

This Oct. 1 release looks like a sort of history lesson in Christian popular music. Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith et al, lots of veterans of the scene speak out here.

Interesting timing, considering the way polling and demographic trends are pointing for Christianity, institutionally and politically and in general these days.

Yes, the title over-sells it. “A Classic Horror Story.” WE’LL be the judge of that, thank you.

But imagine Sam Raimi taking a shot at an Italian “Midsommar,” and watching a lot of Spaghetti Westerns before starting production. That’s a pretty fair description of this gimmicky, bloody torture porn tale from Roberto De Feo and Paulo Strippoli.

Five strangers hop in an RV for a ride-share jaunt across the less populated spine of Italy. Something goes wrong. They’re stranded, injured and at each other’s throats.

“How can there be no SIGNAL?” sounds the same, in Italian or dubbed into English.

As they take stock, panic is slow to set in. They’re stuck in front of a bizarrely creepy farmhouse, surrounded by woods where these strange stick-and-twig sculptures and antler masks suggest something cultish is going on, and you can’t have a “cult” without “ritual sacrifice.” And where’s the fun in that without torture?

“We crash a few feet from the road,” RV-owner Fabrizio (Francesco Russo) mutters, “and we wake up in front of the House of Sam Raimi!”

The first two acts of “A Classic Horror Story” play out in standard random torture porn strokes, strung along by the pitiless, motiveless murders that are not so much horror tropes as the building blocks of too many movies like this to count. There are five characters to begin with. Who dies (horribly) first?

But insightful viewers will pick up on things, or think that they’re picking up on things as our five strangers establish themselves in the story. Elisa (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) is pregnant and on her way home to an abortion her mother’s urged her into, Dr. Riccardo (Peppino Mazzotta) a short-tempered physician stuck in a ride share “with a bunch of idiots.”

Odessa-born Sofia (Yuliia Sobol) and Bristol ginger Mark (Will Merrick) are young and in love.

Fabrizio? He’s a classic film school horror nerd, thus his “Sam Raimi” reference.

The deaths are Medieval or Dark Ages in nature, the movie expands in scale and the story grows more clockwork weird the longer the picture progresses. Look

The first two acts aren’t necessarily made “better” by the twists and resolutions of the far more involving third act. But it’s not a spoiler to say that “Classic” comes a tad closer to that label thanks to a boffo and fun finish.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, drinking and driving

Cast: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Francesco Russo, Yuliia Sobol, Will Merrick and Peppino Mazzotta

Credits: Roberto De Feo, Paolo Strippoli, script by Lucio Besana, Robert De Feo and Paolo Strippoli. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Anthony Bourdain liked to say he “lucked” his way from “a dead-end dish washing job” in a restaurant “to cook to chef,” and from there to memoirist and TV host.

It looked like a charmed life, a bookish wordsmith and on TV, “this unmuscled James Bond who could swan into a scene” and rakishly master it with a laid-back cool and world-weary savvy.

He left cooking Behind to become “a traveler,” in the way novelist Paul Bowles defined it. Not a tourist, but someone who drifted in, observed, ate and conversed and in the end absorbed the essence of wherever he went.

Bourdain had “the best job in the world,” and knew it — hosting travel and food series after series, his fame growing with each passing show. His dry, casual pose and Raymond Chandler/Joseph Conrad/Hunter S. Thompson narration, intentionally conjuring up memories of a favorite film, “Apocalypse Now,” underscored his mystique and amplified his cool.

And then he killed himself on June 8, 2018.

Maybe we’d noticed his “thousand yard stare,” or fretted over his drug history and self-described “addictive” personality and how that fit into his infatuation with a damaged and beautiful Italian filmmaker/film star. Bourdain talked about death on the shows, and even more in the outtakes, because, as he relates in “Roadrunner,” the new documentary about him, “It’s considered useful, enlightening and therapeutic to think about death for a few minutes a day.”

When it came, it was still a shock.

With “Roadrunnner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”) gives Bourdain the cinematic wake he deserves. That’s the only good thing we take from suddenly losing someone close, or someone we think we know. We get together and take account, give a reckoning of who they were through anecdotes, share kfond memories and sometimes bitter or telling reminiscences. That’s what “Roadrunner” does.

Neville talks to ex-wives and old friends, culinary colleagues and Bourdain’s assorted TV producers, directors and production staff. And he calls on decades of archived TV footage — chat shows and “Bourdain at work and at home” TV feature stories, his many travel series and generously sampled outtakes — to paint a portrait of the artist as a young cook and later as a mature, graying traveler, falling in love with Vietnam, embracing the dangers of the Congo and wrestling with his own “Heart of Darkness” all along the way.

We hear from the publisher, the wife of a close friend, who discovered him and talked him into writing “Kitchen Confidential,” which he called his “obnoxious but wildly-successful memoir.” We learn how a couple of prescient TV producers, Lydia Tenaglia and her husband Christopher Collins, heard about a follow up book that would send the almost untraveled Bourdain abroad, and convinced him that could be a TV show.

And we hear the moment where the shy, obsessive craftsman in him figured this TV thing out. He’d “fix it in the edit,” take over the writing of the voice-over narration on these travelogues, and do his best Philip Marlowe or Captain Willard of “Apocalypse Now,” mimicking novelist Raymond Chandler or screenwriter John Milius with a smoky, worldwise growl.

“I’m the ugly American, the Quiet American, the hungry ghost” who walks Saigon, looking for a new culinary or cultural experience.

It’s a terrific and affectionate film, much more reflective than the tributes CNN whipped together right after Bourdain’s death. Bourdain’s many artist and musician friends (John Lurie, David Choe, Alison Mosshart, Josh Homme) point towards his real ambition, to be one of them. It also helps explain the way he gave up cooking and his first marriage shortly after “Kitchen Confidential” blew up.

“I cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety,” he admitted. “He was reborn,” producer Collins explains.

We get a sampling of what it was like to work with someone this mercurial, and his friends can be blunt in discussing his failings. But his silly feuds with other TV chefs are barely brushed upon, his cooking and food philosophy isn’t critiqued by impartial observers and his frequent plugs for the international eateries of his “friends” (some he might have just met) aren’t touched.

I once ate at a Bourdain endorsed restaurant “of my good friend” in Dublin, and gave serious thought to how much of a TV fraud the guy really was.

Still, he wore his pose with grace and ease. “The Simpsons” gave him the best self-mocking self-description of all, or at least the best that he didn’t write himself.

“I’m food ‘bad boy’ Tony Bourdain. There’s nowhere I won’t go and nothing I won’t eat…as long as I’m paid in emeralds, and my hotel room has a bidet that shoots champagne.”

And while “Roadrunner” — it takes its title from a Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers tune — doesn’t speak to Asia Argento, the much-vilified last love of Bourdain’s life, it gives us plenty to consider in why he ended it. That level of TV fame can make the world which he so reveled in exploring “close in” around him.

Through it all, our tour guide gave off the sincerest vibe that he was at home everywhere, that money and fame were things he could take or toss aside, and that while he was taking it all in, he never took himself all that seriously.

MPA Rating: R, for language (profanity) throughout (smoking).

Cast: Anthony Bourdain, Ottavia Bourdain, Eric Petit, Lydia Tenaglia, Christopher Collins, Tom Vitale, John Lurie, Alison Mosshart, David Chang, Josh Homme, Philippe Lajaunie and Helen M. Cho.

Credits: Directed by Morgan Neville. A Focus Features (CNN Films) release.

Running time: 1:58

So this is what pulling out all the stops looks like.

“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is a candy-colored, image-crammed B-ball bauble for the bambinos, children of the kids who flocked to the 1996 hit, which paired-up the Looney Tunes with Michael “His Airness” Jordan.

It’s a people-and-cartoon-critters-trapped in a video game comedy, visually dazzling if narratively vapid. There are a few hearty laughs and a lot of smiles and smirks of recognition as six screenwriters threw everything in their Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers memories at the screen to keep the kiddies happy, or at least distracted.

This is, front and center, a Lebron James star vehicle, built on his brand — “King” James — and that of the studio that’s been “the stuff that dreams are made of” since 1923. So we hear everybody call James “the King,” see his LJ crown logo (and Nike, of course) and get a heaping helping of his personal “brand” — doting dad, basketball workaholic, stand-up guy, not afraid to speak up on social issues — and a LOT Of jokes at his expense. Yeah, he’s changed teams…a lot. Yes he’s got a towering ego and yeah he can be touchy about that.

What adults dragged into “Jam” might take away from this harmless kid-centric ‘toon is a lifetime — several lifetimes — of Warner Brothers references, from their Looney legacy to lesser Saturday Morning cartoon characters, King Kong and “The Matrix,” “Casablanca” (Another “Sam,” this one with a big’ol red mustache, is at the piano.) to Harry Potter and “Game of Thrones.”

“Winter, I say WINTER is comin’!”

If you’ve ever watched a Looney Tune, you’ll get that and laugh. It’s a JOKE son. JOKE, that is.

The story is pure piffle — Don Cheadle is “Al G Rithm,” a thinks-for-himself computer program that sucks Lebron and his video gamer son Dom (Cedric Joe) into the “serververse” and blackmails them into competing in basketball with “video game rules” (erp) and Bugs Bunny physics. The various Looneys, scattered across the Warner Brothers spectrum (Potterworld, “Casablanca,” “GOT” etc.) are summoned for a do-or-be-deleted “Let’s settle this on the court” showdown.

They play against Al G’s unfortunately named “Goon Squad,” which includes bizarre, digitized and supernatural versions of “The Brow” (Lebron’s teammate, Anthony Davis), WNBA star Diana Taurasi, Klay Thompson and “Dame” (Damien Lillard).

No, it’s no more “logical” or less easily-labeled “mindless” than the original “Space Jam.” But it’s for kids, remember?

James is, if nothing else, a better actor than Jordan ever was. He’s no DeNiro, but he mugs on cue and stays in the spirit of this thing.

And the messaging is simplistic, but always positive. “You can’t be great (at anything) without putting in the work.” “Family is everything” and “There’s a short cut for EVERYthing in the serververse,” which isn’t necessarily a virtue.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “The Best Man”) and the credited screenwriters try to wring a little fun out of all this, and miss as often as they hit. But younger kids will eat up the eye candy and get a tiny taste of what The Looney Tunes were all about, even if this big budget monstrosity never comes close to the anarchy created by Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the team at Warner Brothers’ “Termite Terrace.”

MPA Rating: PG, for some cartoon violence and language (profanity)

Cast: Lebron James, Don Cheadle, Cedric Joe, Sonequa Martin-Green, Ernie Johynson, Lil Rel Howery and the voices of Anthony Davis, Diana Taurasi, Damian Lillard and Zendaya.

Credits: Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, script by Juel Taylor, Jesse Gordon, Tony Rettenmaier, Terrance Nance, Keenan Coogler and Celeste Ballard. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:55

Ryan Reynolds’ gin? Check. #AMCovercharges4g&t.

“Here After” is a a romance premised on the idea that you can’t get into “heaven” without having a “soul mate.”

It is terrible on a lot of levels, a godawful script that was drably-cast and indifferently-directed and passes before the eyes, deathly-dull scene after leaden scene.

Almost everything about it screams “CUT this,” and not with a scalpel either. This two hour indulgent wank needs to be chainsawed. They changed the title from “Faraway Eyes,” but that was no help at all.

Broadway and “SVU” star Andy Karl is Michael, a New Yorker who dies in a car crash after his drunken girlfriend breaks up with him rather than put down the drink and get on a plane to go meet his parents.

Ouch.

This plot-launching moment is drawn out, ad nauseum, in a monologue our hero utters from the gurney as he’s being worked over going into the hospital. Michael relates this long, almost-interesting story from his teens about a redhead and handcuffs. That goes on and on before we realize he’s telling this story to a counselor (Christina Ricci) of some sort. She’s having a hard time getting him “focused” and on topic.

“Can you recall exactly how it was you died?”

She’s in “admissions,” I guess you’d call it. “Heaven” — the director and star (both Jewish) avoid that word — requires that you enter paired-up, with your “soulmate,” and no, don’t ask about “What about if you’re a kid?” or whatever. Michael tries to, and no, the movie makes no sense right from the get-go, so why belabor things?

Michael is given “one last second chance” to wander the Earth — New York — cruise the streets and bars and find “the one.” The whole world is his oyster, but he limits himself to Manhattan. Other souls/ghosts wander there as well. They just don’t want to answer his questions.

“It’s New York. Even when you’re alive, nobody talks to you.”

Michael’s often-drunken approaches to women bring out his “misogyny,” or “woman hating douche” side. The one dead pal (Michael Rispoli) he remembers and consults has a few answers, but no suggestions about sorting out their problem. Angelo’s already given up. At least there’s booze in their shared afterlife.

“This ain’t Hell. But it’s sure doing its best impression.”

Michael and the movie about him fritter away minutes and more minutes, and then he meets somebody (Nora Arnezeder of “The Words”) in a bar. They chat, and however bored their banter might make the viewer, destiny and the screenplay dictate that they “click.”

One problem? She’s not dead.

Writer-director Harry Greenberger did a film called “Staring at the Sun,” which played a few festivals, never got a proper release and isn’t even listed on Rotten Tomatoes. “Here After” should be so lucky.

The most charitable view is that it’s an overreach for something romantic and profound that was a misfire pretty much at conception.

Karl, of Broadway’s “Groundhog Day” adaptation, knows his way around a joke. None scripted here work and he comes off like dead weight trying to make them play. Making his character an actor with dreams of a one-man show just underlines what Karl doesn’t accomplish here — lighting up the screen, or even holding our interest.

Ricci has nothing funny or interesting to play and is absent from much of this interminable, dreamy dramedy. She got off easy.

Arnezeder might be well-cast as a romantic ideal if there was anything to play, and she was better at being more than just a beautiful face. “Honey Bee” is the character’s name, and that’s the most intriguing thing about her.

I don’t know what they were here after but I do know what I was here after. And “Here After” isn’t it.

MPA Rating: unrated, lots of alcohol consumption, profanity

Cast: Andy Karl, Christina Ricci, Nora Arnezeder and Michael Rispoli.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Harry Greenberger. A Vertical release.

Running time:

Ryan Reynolds should just do trailers and TV commercials.

At this point, the “content” is irrelevant. He’s funny mocking pretty much anything, especially his own movies. He’s “meta” incarnate.

The shot at “Cruella,” jokes about Disney+, cracking about the late arrival of “Free Guy,” which finally comes out next month.

Taika Waititi is…KORG.

“Looks fun in a kind of ‘last days of Fox’ firesale way…”

This one looks good. Bizarre. Offbeat. Very…Ell-aaaaa.

August 6 it opens.