Movie Nation

So, a fantasy parable about a world of earth, wind, fire and water, things do different as to be “Elemental,” living together, mixing and mingling and eventually getting along?

Hard to get much of a bead on it based on this trailer.

Steven Spielberg’s semi autobiographical ode to a childhood out of the ordinary is his gift to us for the holidays.

Curious to compare this sentimental and idealized — with a little edge — fantasia of a childhood making movies with James Gray’s similarly autobiographical “Armageddon Time,” another Jewish kid determined to make art running up against parental expectations.

Two films with an Oscar winner and a four time Oscar nominee playing Jewish mamas.

The actor’s first duty in a movie that is plainly nobody’s idea of a “good choice” is to not let us know it’s her or his “only choice” or offer at the moment. Don’t embarrass yourself by looking bored or annoyed at being here.

And “Burn Notice” veteran Jeffrey Donovan, as the only real “name” in the cast of “R.I.P.D. 2,” manages that, more or less.

It’s a sequel nobody wanted, another outing with heavenly law enforcement officers commissioned to deal with the undead as their lot in the afterlife.

The mind-bogglingly dumb original 2013 film threw Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Canadian national treasure Ryan Reynolds, Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon at this concept, pairing up an Old West lawman (Bridges) with a modern dead cop (Reynolds) in modern day Boston.

It was a low point on the resumes of all involved.

But the accountants at Universal saw “intellectual property” where others only noticed the red ink, and decided to revisit the comic book they own the rights to for a straight-up Western from Hell sequel. Or prequel.

Sheriff Roy (Donovan) is murdered in the line of duty, just as his daughter’s about to marry. But after heavenly processing, he’s sent back as a member of the Rest in Peace Police Dept.

His partner? She’s a Medieval Frenchwoman named Jean (Penelope Mitchell) who is handy with a sword and knows her Bible. Wonder what her last name is?

Some hapless gold miner (Richard Brake) has dug a tad too deep in Utah, where Hell is uncomfortably close to the surface (we guessed as much). He’s rounding up legions of “deados” as minions and talking “New World Order.”

A cute touch. Our team cannot appear as themselves to mortal man or woman. Their avatars are a pair of nicely turned out African-American women (Rachel Adedeji and Evlyne Oyedokun). That makes for some amusingly awkward encounters, and a testy take down of a “No Colored Allowed” sign in one establishment.

The one-liners are of the “You got looser lip’s than a jawless mule” and that knot is “tighter’n a bull’s ass in fly season.”

Pardner.

Perhaps the best gag in the piece is dressing Sheriff Roy (The same character that Bridges plays in the other film? Making this a prequel?) in a brown leather jacket from the Studio 54 collection, complete with cape.

Worst gag? The idea that heaven has an armory, filled with gold plated pistols and multi-barrel “deado” shootin’ irons. That’s a firearm fetishist’s wet dream.

Jake Choi finds a grin here and there as a deado prisoner the duo take with them on their quest. Brake growls in that Old West heavy manner but is no one’s idea of a top drawer bad guy.

This is no credit to anybody involved, dull and dumb, badly directed from a really bad script the director took a co-writing credit on.

Leave this corpse buried.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jeffrey Donovan, Rachel Adedeji, Penelope Mitchell, Jake Choi, Evlyne Oyedokun and Richard Brake.

Credits: Directed by Paul Leydon, scripted by Andrew Klein and Paul Leyden. based on the comic book. A Universal film release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

“Wakanda Forever” took a steep dive on its second weekend, but still racked up another $67 million and change. No it won’t match “Black Panther” numbers, not by quite a bit. But a blockbuster is a blockbuster, post pandemic. Disney and Marvel will take it.

The new foodie-skewering satire “The Menu” had a harder time finding an audience. But $9 million for a film that insults its target market and stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes,John Leguizamo and…Nicholas Hoult, isn’t bad.

Fathom Events, a theater-booking one-night or one-weekend operation is making bank on Biblical fare with “The Chosen: Season 3,” which they parked in theaters. They earned over $8 million. Not bad.

“She Said” will need some awards season buzz to put more butts in the seats. An Oscar contender starring Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Jennifer Ehle, Andre Brauer, Samantha Morton and Patricia Clarkson, it did well — $2.25 million — all things considered. The Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo aren’t big selling points, on their own. Give these women and Brauer a little Oscar buzz and that’ll change.

“Till” fell below $1 million and out of the top ten. “The Banshees of Inishirin” fell off quite a bit, and didn’t.

The cannibalism thriller “Bones & All” hit five screens, and opens wider Thanksgiving (That’s kinda sick.) and did $120K.

We’ve seen decades of boot camp movies over the decades, most taking their cue from 1957’s “The D.I.,” with Jack Webb playing the titular Marine Corps drill instructor. More recently, the bar was set by R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket,” another D.I. charged with changing recruits into soldiers, no matter what their background, disposition or fitness for the job.

But we’ve never seen a version of this coming-of-age/making-of-a-soldier tale as seen through the eyes of a not-wholly-closeted gay man. Writer-director Elegance Bratton makes his semi-autobiographical drama “The Inspection” both a classic underdog-in-boot-camp story, and a blunt and unblinking look at a gay man’s experience in the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, which ended in 2011.

Bratton and his alter ego, Newark recruit Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) lean into ugly tropes that opponents of gay enlistment trot out every time their bigotry gets the better of them. A just-effeminate-enough gay man putting himself in an all-male environment, living with and showering with his comrades in arms?

Let’s just say Bratton dares to put the “phobia” back in homophobia by some of what his protagonist experiences, does and dreams of doing in this world of testosterone and muscles.

Ellis is homeless when we meet him. He may have his gay “fam” as a support system, but they aren’t feeding, housing and caring for him or giving him options for taking care of himself.

At 25, he has to beg his estranged, disapproving prison guard mom (Gabrielle Union, wearing her mileage and her ferocity) for the paperwork that’ll let him join the military.

It’s 2005, near the post-9/11 peak of military activity, and lipstick-wearing Ellis wants to be a Marine.

Mom’s an embittered mess and cruelly-skeptical of how his “life style” will fit in the Corps.

“Come back” as “the son I gave BIRTH to,” she snaps, and that’s that.

Sure enough, the bullying starts on the bus ride to basic training. But Ellis shows his first hint of mettle when he sits next to a targeted recruit.

His on-base greeting (Parris Island is never named) is the cliched litany of yelling, spittle and intimidation from the two assistant drill instructors. Chief Gunnery Sgt. Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) is sparing in his shouting, but not in his threats.

“I will break you,” he promises one and all. “I HATE recruits. But I LOVE Marines.” He’s duty-bound and old school enough to do whatever it takes, above or below board, to weed out the weak from his Beloved Corps.

Woodbine gives Laws a temper that he controls, a cunning that he rarely gives away and a gaydar that is a little slow on the uptake. He praises the faintly fey “French” and his commitment, before finding his ready-made excuse for cutting him.

“The Inspection” thus sets up as the standard war-of-wills story, but with a generic boot camp “system” vs a culture willing to bend and modernize that system twist on that.

It’s fascinating, if perhaps a tad triggering for some old soldiers who can’t see how “this sort of thing” could happen, when of course it’s been happening all along.

Pope, of Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” mini series, pays dividends as an actor who is both believably gay and convincingly fit, flinty and tough enough to stand up to grueling training and savage bullying.

Raúl Castillo plays a D.I. who makes an intriguing argument for finding the Marine inside the man, picking up on French’s determination, focus, loyalty to his comrades and intelligence. If Laws is willing to do what it takes to make the “sissy” wash out, French and Sgt. Rosales are willing to call him out about crossed-lines and “psychopath” behavior.

Speaking of bullying out of control, McCaul Lombardi is just as realistic as the anointed squad leader in the class, willing to mete out peer-punishment at the D.I.’s instigation to force French out.

But “The Inspection” is best appreciated as a showcase for Woodbine and Union, each taking her or his best big screen dramatic role in years and bringing it home in scene after scene. She almost quivers with contempt for her own child. Woodbine gives Laws the cocksureness of his own prejudices, certain that this less butch recruit won’t pass his every test.

They make Bratton’s film a metaphor for American ignorance faced-down with first-hand experience. He sets up the character to fail, even taunts us with the obvious traps society long-expected recruits like Ellis French or Elegance Bratton to fall into. He then transforms them into further tests for a homeless, desperate gay man who wants to change his future and serve his country as he does.

Bratton makes it not just believable but acceptable for Ellis to be seen as among “The Few, the Proud.” Because gay men, as this Marine Corps vet realizes, know a little something about “pride,” too.

Rating:  R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and violence.
Eman Esfand

Cast: Jeremy Pope, Bokeem Woodbine, Raúl Castillo, McCaul Lombardi.
Eman Esfandi and Gabrielle Union.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Elegance Bratton. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:35

One of the best films ever made about the Armenian Genocide tells the story of one of the first survivors to make it to America. It’s titled “Aurora’s Sunrise,” and it uses different media, bending film genres to relate one of the great tragedies of the 20th century through one woman’s plight.

Arshaluys Mardiginian, renamed “Aurora” when she came to America in 1918, met an American newspaperman who helped publicize her ordeal and the mass murder being carried out by the Ottoman Turks under the cover of World War I. Reporter Henry Gates ghost-wrote a serialized memoir from her accounts, got the interest of Hollywood, and put Mardiginian in a William Selig-produced film epic, “Auction of Souls, (Ravished Armenia)” that traveled America, raising money for Armenian orphans and a hoped-for independent Armenian state.

Here’s what Armenian director Inna Sahakyan and her crew of filmmakers and animators drew from to tell Mardiginian’s tale. Sahakyan includes snippets of the 20 surviving minutes of the 80 minute 1919 biographical thriller sometimes called “Ravished Armenia.” As little of that film survives, a crew went out and recreated silent black and white scenes from it with an actress (Anzehelika Hakobyan) portraying Aurora, who played herself in the movie of her odyssey back in 1919.

There’s also documentary footage of the late Arshaluys Mardiginian, from a long oral history interview she sat for in 1984.

And there’s gorgeous animation — what appears to be rotoscoped actors under-animated in front of lush, water-colorish backgrounds of 1910s Armenia, present day Syria, and America. It is narrated by actress Arpi Petrossian, who speaks in Aurora’s voice in monologues from her memoir about her ordeal.

Take the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir,” throw in some of the multi-media technique of “Nuts!” and add a few more degrees of difficulty and you have an idea of what Sahakyan and her team have attempted and pulled off.

“Aurora’s Sunrise” is an often gorgeous and always extraordinary film relating one woman’s extraordinary ordeal.

In 1915, from the very start of the Ottoman Empire’s WWI alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, 13 year-old Arshaluys notes her family being warned by a Kurdish shepherd that the Turks were rounding up Armenians all over the empire.

Her family — she had seven siblings — lived in a small town (Chmshkadzag), provided for by a father who kept silkworms and made, dyed and sold silk. The kids put on plays and had happy lives, right up to the moment the round-up of conscripts began.

Armenian men, including her father and brother, were forced into the army, en masse. In her telling, that set the stage for the mass evictions, “death march” and mass murders carried out shortly afterward by the Ottoman army. The men were dead or gone. Women and children were easily evicted by the Ottoman Army, which was challenged all over the Middle East by Arabs and the British, crushed by the Russians to the north, an army in which discipline and the chain of command had broken down.

At night, Arshaluys recalled (in Armenian with English subtitles), the soldiers marched these women and children to their deaths and “got drunk and laid hands of the girls” — scenes recreated here with black and white silent footage more graphic than what might have been filmed in 1919.

Arshaluys and her siblings were hounded, robbed and raped by bandits and repeatedly assaulted by Turkish troops, who tossed children overboard as they barge-shipped refugees down the corpse-littered Euphrates River.

Turks kidnapped and sold Arshaluys, and she was exploited even by Kurds who took her in after she escaped a harem. But eventually, she found sanctuary and passage (via revolutionary St. Petersburg) to America to “tell our story.”

She had a brother who had immigrated here earlier. But once in America, in addition to telling her story, she found herself exploited in different ways by that unscrupulous reporter.

It all makes for a moving and utterly fascinating narrative that folds in a war, grim accounts of what one refugee endures to survive it, and American media and early motion picture history into a narrative of a horrific genocide, which the Turks refuse to acknowledge committing to this very day.

It’s a bit difficult to tell what’s archival footage from the recreations here. The mix of media makes “Aurora’s Sunrise” more challenging than your typical Best International Feature Oscar entry. But let’s hope the Academy embraces that challenge and recognizes this brilliant achievement with a nomination.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Arshaluys Mardiganian, Anzhelika Hakobyan, with the voices of Arpi Petrossian, Ervin Amiryan, Sara Anjargolian and others.

Credits: Directed by Inna Sahakyan, scripted by Peter Liakhov, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz and Inna Sahakyan. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:36

Seems like every time he reminds us of how good he is, Nic Cage goes right back to doing B-or-C pictures.

The wardrobe and (in one shot) fake mustache give this one away. Could be good. Maybe not. We’ll see.

(My review of the film, posted three months after this trailer, is here.)

Apologies to anyone at the roll-your-eyes “Here he goes again” stage of reading my familiar gripe, lament and rant about where too many thrillers come up short — pacing.

But here I go again.

“The Pay Day” is a a caper comedy of little action, low acting energy and almost non-existent wit. And every single one of those cringe-worthy shortcoming is connected to the snail’s pace which this indie outing commits to.

It’s disastrously slow — slow to start, slow to get down to business, with slow scenes, slow transitions to new scenes, slow line readings and indifferent editing that does nothing to correct the director’s timidity on the set.

Sam Bradford, mate, if you’ve never heard the phrase “Once again, but FASTER,” you should have. Pace is everything in a caper comedy. EVERYthing. And every single moment of this failure is like watching a fresco dry.

Kyla Frye and Sam Benjamin co-star and co-wrote this story of high stakes/zero-drama data theft. They plays characters who’re both after the same accounts from some firm that’s allegedly keeping the secret illegal stashes of Members of Parliament. She shoots him to prevent him from stealing the flash drive she’s just downloaded.

Could love be far behind?

It’s just that stupid, and never for one agonizing-as-it-plays-out minute lets you forget it.

We’ve seen Jennifer sacked from her office data management job because the boss can’t be asked for a raise. An anonymous phone call proposes a meeting with a cryptic “Anne Boleyn’s ruby slippers” recognition phrase.

Mr. Gates, played by the actor’s actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, has a new gig for her. Her take?

“One percent of $500 million.” Yes, she can do the math. Can you?

She has to don a wig and fake her way past the lax and annoyingly chatty staff of the London office building where this takes place. And then she’s interrupted by a talky, chummy, over-familiar employee who won’t stop flirting and won’t take a hint that she needs “PRIV-acy,” as the Brits say it, to finish her “clean the server” work.

She’s doing this in a purloined office-maid’s vest, which he notes but doesn’t question. That’s because he wants that data, too. That’s how he gets shot.

Scene after lead-footed scene, with cops coming into the building after the shot is fired, an evacuation, etc., lacks any sense of urgency at all. Then there’s the woman who has never fired a gun barely registering shock at what she’s done, and a guy who acts as if a bleeding (barely) shoulder wound is no big deal continuing their struggles over a flash drive, flirting and passing out for “sex dreams” of the other.

It’s stunningly dumb. The acting is weak, another failing that the hapless editor fails to hide. And every sequence, every scene and every line is so flat and plays out so slowly that the stupid just stands out more.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kyla Frye, Sam Benjamin and Simon Callow.

Credits: Directed by Sam Bradford, scripted by Sam Benjamin and Kyla Frye. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

This is a very gay-tolerant cinematic fall for Gabrielle Union.

She plays a mother who has to come around — a little — on her gay son, who wants to become a Marine in this drama.

And in Disney’s animated “Strange World” she voices a mother of a gay teen. Good on her.

Here are three things that aren’t explained in the movie that might help you get more out of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “oneiric,” Fellini-esqe, quasi-autobiographical magnum opus “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

“Oneiric,” a label applied by the filmmaker and/or the studio to the film, means “dream poem.”

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term for a “transitional” state between death and life, “purgatory” without the Catholic guilt. So our hero is either dreaming, or near death.

And the giant salamanders that show show up in a handful of scenes of this film about a Mexican journalist who gained fame after he relocated to the United States and turned to “docufiction” documentaries, are axolotls, named by the Aztecs — unique to Mexico City and thus a symbol of the city and the Mexican Republic.

In the film, they can be interpreted as the fragile pull of the hero’s heritage when deep down, he knows moving north expanded his possibilities and gave his children the chance to excel in ways that hierarchical, hidebound and constrained Mexico would not.

It’s a movie — pardon, film, as in “A film is a movie we don’t quite understand.” — of dreams and narrative shifts in time and the order of events, a tapestry of modern and ancient Mexico. Its money-scene is a debate between Silvario Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, an Iñárritu look-alike) and infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés (Ivan Massagué) at the top of a mountain of Native corpses in a Mexico City littered with the “disappeared” dead of the country’s recent history.

Not to worry, the “dead,” whom our protagonist, returned to the city from the U.S. to be feted before flying “home” to LA to receive a prestigious journalism honor, are but “extras” on a film shoot — his own.

Silvario as a character has seen them drop dead symbolically everywhere he turns his eyes to show the carnage of the drug wars, murderous corruption and the sea of humanity that has been fleeing north to the Rio Grande for 100 years, many of them dying along the way.

But before I go any further into this challenging satiric parable in an “8 1/2/All That Jazz” vein, what do we say about movies that don’t give us everything we need to interpret them between the opening and closing credits? That force us to look up obscure esoterica? We call such films cheats, the product of a pretentious, indulgent filmmaker who might actually be making this for a Mexican audience, not that you’d get a lot of traction with obscure Buddhist titling and 40 peso words for “dream narrative” in Ciudad Mexico either.

At some point, watching “Bardo,” I had to close up my notebook, give up on writing down the sometimes profound “handful of truths” in the hero’s conversations with his wife (Griselda Siciliani), kids (Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho), long-dead father (Luis Couturier), mother (Luz Jiménez) and Cortez.

At some point, there’s nothing for it but to lean forward, rest your head on your heads and try to figure out what this Oscar-winning (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”) pendejo is trying to say in two and a half hours of out time thanks to a big blank indulgent check from Netflix.

Silvario is determined to get an interview with a race-baiting/Mexican-hating US president. The news is filled with Amazon.com’s plans to buy “the Mexican state of Baja, California.”

Our documentarian is defensive about his homeland to anyone who bad-mouths the “Third World” basket-case state overrun with migrants fleeing north from Central and South America, narco-lords, corrupt cops and the corrupt politicians who enable them. But Silvario sees the classism that is so shocking to his kids, the affluence he has lived in and raised them in contrasted with the poverty that sends hundreds of thousands north when the crops fails and the struggle overwhelms them. He feels the resentment for leaving.

He drifts into encounters with ghosts, and truthfully, we aren’t sure in any given scene just what the reality of the moment is, if he’s really making love to his wife or sitting — mute — while an old comrade, now an embittered click-bait ambush chat show host (Francisco Rubio) who attacks him, smiling, on a live TV.

“Exposure at any price,” Silvario complains when the friend Luis complains about his silent evasions.
That’s what attention culture demands. Here he is, like every over-achiever who ever had to mix with the entitled, “seeking approval from people who despite me.”

Reality in “Bardo” is subjective, and capricious. Which is why we mutter Mexican profanities at the great Iñárritu. The pendejo isn’t playing fair.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie — long tracking shots through a big rental hall concert/dance party, through his spacious Mexico City house, over the desert as we see Silvario’s acclaimed and controversial migrant profile film recreated.

He lectures the American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) about a mythic moment in the disastrous (for Mexico) Mexican-American war, and it is recreated right in front of them, with Mexican actors in cheap blond wigs portraying the American troops.

Funny.

Silvario sees stigmata on his feet, more than once and watches them nailed to the floor at one point, and muses on the state of things and his state of mind in voice over-narration, which more than one character complains about. “Move your LIPS” when you talk (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Some of the profundities I jotted down before giving up and simply trying to decode what I was seeing — “A documentarian should not believe, or not believe. He only must know where to point the camera.” Old age isn’t summoned or expected, but when it arrives “It becomes a full time job.”

There’s a lot of that in the third act, which goes on forever and drags and drags, despite having the odd pithy observation about life and living it, guilt over “home” and the like.

I didn’t hate “Bardo,” something I can’t say about Iñárritu’s pal Alfonso Cuaron’s even more indulgent and hilariously over-rated “Roma.” But he’s made a film that challenges and infuriates and in equal measure.

And if the worst thing that comes from it is a few critic-fans calling him a “pendejo” for it, he’ll have gotten off lightly.

Rating: R for language throughout, strong sexual content and graphic nudity.

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho, Francisco Rubio and Jay O. Sanders.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, scripted by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:39