Movie Nation

Imagine a “West Side Story” where the gang-bangers are unisex toughs and the squares are forced to confront their own unspoken gender identity issues, all set on neon-soaked sound-stages dressed with 1950s props and “Cabaret” decadence.

That’s “Please Baby Please,” a fascinating but frustrating overreach that is never more fun than when it’s most over the top, but never really gets a handle on what it’s supposed to be about.

Andrea Riseborough produced and stars in this vamp, playing a wild-haired, wild-eyed ’50s hepcat, co-hosting jazz record parties in their under-furnished tenement flat with husband Arthur (Harry Melling), making the scene at all the cool beat poetry readings.

But when the finger-snapping, “Wild One” leathered, gender-blurring Young Gents murder a mother and her child on the street in front of their apartment, the curtain is opened on their marriage and the gloves come off.

Arthur is fey and nebbishy and can’t be goaded into intervening, or for that matter defending the shocked and awed Suze.

“I won’t be terrorized into acting like a savage.”

In their crowd, Ida (Alissa Torres) and Les (Yedoye Travis) and others, that stance is an excuse to dive into what is “expected” of a man and a woman in their era. Men have the burden of masculinity, which can entail violence at times. Women?

“Ida, tell me, how does a woman get respect?” “Easy. Be BORING,” because let’s face it, “We ARE the fantasy.”

Suze is bowled over by the life lessons of their rich new (In a tenement?) neighbor (Demi Moore, even further “out there” than Riseborough) and our heroine finds herself sifting through a lot of 1950s gender “rules” that don’t fit her reality.

“Men are the executors of history,” so her being a lot brassier than Arthur won’t matter. That’s not how anyone will remember these Eisenhower “Happy Days.”

Arthur finds himself drawn to a pretty-boy/murderer (Karl Glusman) in the gang. Suze takes a lot of abuse from the gang’s tough-guys and transgender punks. Yeah, she hears the Dutch word for wall that keeps the sea from flooding in — a lot.

Director and co-writer Amanda Kramer (“Ladyworld”) isn’t content with just one or even two points of view. Still, the narrative does settle on a tone and style, as does the production design — lurid on a budget, with a leather bar and porn theater settings and obvious “prop” versions of the appliances that so delighted Americans of the I-like-Ike age.

It’s the sort of stage-show fantasy that cries out for song and dance, and gets just a taste of each — a transgender woman crying through “Since I Don’t Have You” (a hit for The Flamingoes and the The Skyliners), Riseborough and Melling swirling a sort of interpretive dance to the doo-wop and rockabilly for the film’s “Well, this is all I could come up with” finale.

I didn’t dislike this. But it isn’t exactly satire, never quite nails parody and Kramer seems to fumble around groping for one or the other.

Sure, I’ll watch anything Riseborough does, and she was the best thing in “Amsterdam.” But “Please Baby Please” had me begging for more…something.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity, adult themes

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling, Demi Moore, Karl Glusman, Ryan Simpkins, Jaz Sinclair, Alisa Torres, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Dana Ashbrook.

Credits: Directed by Amanda Kramer, scripted by Amanda Kramer and Noel David Taylor. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:36

A healthier than expected Saturday pushed Warners’ comic book adaptation “Black Adam” to the edges of blockbuster territory. It had been looking like a “disappointing” $60 million weekend on Friday, with the $70-73 projected well beyond reach. But Dwayne Johnson delivered and the fans showed up, rallying this $195 million plotless ego trip over $67 million.

“Ticket to Paradise” proved a healthy bit of counter programming, pulling in $16.3 from an older less fanboyish crowd.

“Halloween Ends” fell off a disastrous 80% on its second weekend, tumbling behind “Smile,” which is still clearing $8 million a weekend ($8.3) while David Gordon Green’s reviled finale to his trilogy may have hit $8 after clearing $40 when it premiered.

The milieu is more interesting than anyone in it and anything they do or have happen to them in “Ragged Heart,” an earthy dive into the underbelly of a “music scene that was” — Athens, Ga.

It’s the college town where The B-52s, R.E.M., Matthew Sweet and Widespread Panic got their start, a folk-artsy enclave in the Red State that Georgia is outside of Atlanta and Savannah. In writer-director Evan McNary’s film, that distant musical afterglow is the background noise of a story of a retired musician whose semi-famous singer-songwriter daughter came “home” from Berlin to kill herself.

So, Cracker Gothic? Little bit.

Wyatt (Eddie Craddock) is a Dickie Betts-looking old-timer, a guitar player who doesn’t play anymore but keeps his hair and sideburns in some sort of Allman Brothers tribute style. He spends his days rustling up junk for a folk artist friend and others, taking his brain pills and playing out life’s string.

He is “runnin’ outta carrots to tie to th’end of the stick,” he deadpans. “I fairly sizzle with zeal and enthusiasm.”

Daughter Miranda (Willow Avalon) has made something of a name for herself, singing in a sort of Southern-fried Amy Winehouse style. She comes “home” for her birthday, answers one of her dad’s voice mails and passes out — mid-call — while inner tubing down a lonesome river.

The last thing she left behind is some lyrics she was working on, the sort of legacy coveted by her dad and by her former lover, the embattled local record producer Declan (Joshua Mikel). Maybe something can be done with those words that would heal Dad and save Declan’s bacon.

“Ragged Heart” is an odd visual blend of rusty, trashy, “local color” backgrounds, snippets of musical performance and extreme close-ups of Miranda and “the New Miranda,” a singer Declan is grooming for stardom.

The performances have an amateurish monotone that matches the flat emotional pitch of the film.

Things kind of go wrong with Miranda’s death and funeral, neither of which merits so much as an onscreen tear. Where’s the grief?

McNary pays documentary-level single-scene attention to this or that artist or musician who hangs around the edges of the story. But the story itself suffers from a lack of novelty or much of anything interesting, just a few music biz tropes trotted out for melodramatic effect.

Compelling performances sometimes can compensate for those sorts of shortcomings. Not here.

McNary found an under-filmed setting and a curious world for all this to take place in. But the tale he wants to tell is too trite to hold our attention without larger-than-life characters telling it, without performers who know how to play larger-than-life.

Rating: unrated, suicide, smoking

Cast: Eddie Craddock, Willow Avalon, Joshua Mikel.

Credits: Directed by Evan McNary, scripted by Evan and Debrah McNary. An Unfilmable Productions release on Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 1:27

“Next Exit” is about a cross-country drive in pursuit of a supervised “research study” suicide, and as such, it’s more a road comedy than an existential quest. Not that first-time feature writer-director Mali Elfman doesn’t try to have it both ways.

Two strangers decide to drive rather than fly cross country to their date with death. They “meet cute” and set off angry sparks that turn even angrier as their reasons for wanting to end it all become clear. But as they encounter other people along the way and make detours into their pasts, we and they come to understand how they came to this place in their lives that makes them want to end them.

That’s classic “road picture” formula, and it’s about as predictable as the film’s finale, which we guess the moment Rose cranks up their rented Jeep Grand Cherokee in NYC for the drive to San Francisco. But it’s not the journey, it’s the destination, right?

A clever opening has a little boy talking to his newly-ajar bedroom closet door, and then we see the camera set up in his room and the card game little Rio is playing with his recently-deceased father. This “irrefutable evidence” of “life beyond” death is “world changing” and “culture shifting.” And after the researcher (Karen Gillan) who made this discovery woodenly lectures a TV camera about what her Life Beyond research study is doing, we get a glimpse of what she means.

News coverage about a world in economic decline and the mass depression and suicide spike that accompanies it tells us that this “irrefutable proof” has people literally dying to find out what comes next. And Dr. Stevenson (Gillan) is helping, doing research that is “ushering us into the next era in human existence.” Kind of makes it hard for anybody to plan anything, though. And don’t even think about what a mass exodus would do to the global economy.

One person who’s had enough of this life are Rose (Katie Parker of “The Haunting of Bly Manor”), who goes by her middle name because what adult would want to be called “Blossom” in this day and age? As that’s what’s on her driving license, she’s irked every time someone makes that mistake. Rose is irked by default. And she trots out her resting bitch face to the rental car agent who has a problem with her reservation, and the hapless Brit expat Teddy (Rahul Kohli, also of “Haunting of Bly Manor”) fated to share this drive to The End with her.

The Life Beyond Institute has accepted them as “participants,” test subjects for this ongoing research. That entails assisted suicide, with these two having appointments five and seven days from now.

Rose is in a fury — testy and rude, with enough self-loathing to want to kill herself, but enough loathing left over to take in her new road buddy Teddy. She’s so hostile no jokes can defuse the ticking time bomb in her soul.

“If you mind me dead in the morning,” Teddy helpfully tells a motel clerk, “SHE did it.”

Their road trip will lightly sample some of the consequences of an unhappy nation deciding “F— it, I’m done.” A depressed stranger throws himself in front of the Jeep. An obsolete priest can’t get his mind around this eagerness to exit. A sad barfly tells of the people he’s killed before shooting up the roadhouse TV.

But Teddy, a binge eater and fan of fried meat and junk food in its many forms, resolves that they should “try and have some fun” along the way. So scratch “shoplifting Pabst Blue Ribbon from a Texas convenience store” off your bucket lists, kids. Let the good times roll.

The novelty in this is the whole “existence beyond death thing” and Elfman — yes, she’s Danny’s daughter — spends some time and production money on visually imagining that “beyond.” There’s even a hint of what this knowledge does to some people’s psyches, butjust a hint. Mainly, this is a dark — very dark — romantic comedy and mystery. The mystery is whether their fated romance is enough to mend people broken enough to want to kill themselves.

Parker and Kohli have a nice, mismatched chemistry and their banter lightens the film, which has stretches where we worry it’ll be content to be just gloomy and depressing. Gillan gives off her usual metallic vibe, here in service of a sort of Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos “new science” hustler.

Like life itself, “Next Exit” is very much a mixed bag — tiny triumphs weighed down by a lifetime of tragedies, guilt, blame and regret in a film that works as a road comedy and kind of works as an exploration of existential crisis, just not as well.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, violence, profanity

Cast: Katie Parker, Rahul Kohli and Karen Gillan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mali Elfman, A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:46

The running tally from Friday has now firmed up at $26.8 million, including Thursday’s previews.

So now the ceiling on Dwayne Johnson’s supervillain/superhero project “Black Adam” looks like $62 million. Earlier predictions were well north of $70.

Indifferent to angry reviews didn’t boost it, but word of mouth seems OK, so it should hit this new lower mark without a problem. At least the theaters are full. Ish.

The George Clooney/Julia Roberts rom com “Ticket to Paradise” is pulling in an older audience to the tune of $16 million.

“Halloween Ends” is streaming and it is falling off over 70% in box office take on its second weekend — under $9. “Smile” will end up doing better in theaters, overall.

The things some people will go to avoid watching the damned Yankees.

Stumbling across “Eight Men Out” last night brought back memories of the film, what it represented — a turn towards mainstream by indie film icon John Sayles — and how it came off in an era when “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural” put America’s game on the screen as a backdrop for all manner of screen stories.

I remember thinking at the time that the play of the cast was about two thirds to three-quarters the speed of “real” big leaguers. It’s generally a mistake to assume athletes of the past were wholly inferior — conditioning standards notwithstanding — to their modern counterparts. But that seems to matter less, seeing it now.

Sayles found an excellent “Shoeless Joe” Jackson for this account of the 1919 World Series-fixed by gamblers crime that came to be called “The Black Sox Scandal.“D.B. Sweeney played more than one jock in his prime, and he hit left-handed (unlike the “other” Shoeless Joe in “Field of Dreams”) and carried himself like a baller. Acting workshop kids like John Cusack or Martin Sheen’s son Charlie Sheen (who’d go on to do the “Major League” comedies) and future Broadway clown/mime Bill Irwin did a decent enough job of faking it, with a little editing help.

The director was coming off a celebrated period piece, the mining town drama “Matewan,” that turned him in an “I can hire established actors now” direction. James Earl Jones was in that one, and the former TV star, Kevin Tighe (“Emergency!”) was in it, and he and Sayles’ muse David Strathairn would appear in “Eight Men Out.”

Sayles, working from an authoritative book account of the scandal, shows the “greatest team” of its era embittered by its stingy owner, Charles Comiskey (Bond “Sheriff” Clifton James), who cheated them out of promised bonuses for wiping the floor with the rest of the American League that season, and screwed-over star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (Strathairn) in particular.

Enter some gamblers with different financiers and the same agenda (Tighe, and Christopher Lloyd and Richard Edson). All they needed was the backing of gangster Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner) and the ear of one disgruntled player, first baseman Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), who’d bring on a few other players, a couple of all-important pitchers included, and the fix was on.

Sayles treats the story as a “loss of innocence” parable, with cynical, predatory owners, predatory gangsters, cynical sports journalists (historian Studs Terkel played Hugh Fullerton, and Sayles himself was the legendary Ring Lardner) and naive but corruptible players misused by one and all.

A couple of the White Sox — (Cusack’s third baseman Buck Weaver) and illiterate outfielder Shoeless Joe– were wise to the scheme and even considered part of it, but played their guts out instead of dogging it in the best-of-nine World Series with the Cincinnati Reds. As reporter Fullerton makes his suspicions known and baseball decides to get to the bottom of it, the “Eight Men Out” and part of the scheme wind up in court, a trial that tramples all over the simple ballplayers’ rights thanks to baseball’s first “commissioner,” the power-drunk Kennesaw Mountain Landis (legendary character actor John Anderson).

Sayles made a modern old fashioned baseball movie that may have lacked the gloss and grandeur of “The Natural,” but still found glory in the historical game, and tugged at the heartstrings by reviving the corniest bit of Black Sox lore, a devoted newsboy fan catching Jackson’s eye as he left the courthouse and uttering the immortal line, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The film holds up beautifully largely because of that cast. John Mahoney, later a star on “Frasier,” is the perfect pick for “Kid” Gleason, the manager who has his suspicions and is at a loss about what to do. Strathairn makes Cicotte a villain with motivations — his career was winding down, his style of pitching (spitballs and “shiners” would be banned) and the “dead ball” era was about to end, so he needed his promised bonuses.

Sweeney’s forlorn presence as Shoeless Joe anchors the picture in pathos. Cusack and Sheen show the sparks of stars in the making and Irwin and Rooker make great contrasts as an aloof “college boy” star (Eddie Collins) and a working class mug ready to pocket easy money.

Sayles makes the most of his screen time here, even crooning a made-up version of the period hit “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” with the lyrics “I’m forever blowing BALL-games.”

One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema, Sayles still turns out the occasional screenplay, but hasn’t directed a movie in nearly a decade. “Matewan” and “Eight Men Out” started a run that included such gems as “The Secret of Roan Inish,” “Lonestar,” “City of Hope” and “Men With Guns.” His more recent films include a few that didn’t work and didn’t find an audience, and “Honeydripper,” which did but which came out 15 years ago.

Watching this account of one of baseball’s darkest hours is –with a few historical quibbles — almost as good as seeing an authoritative documentary on the subject. “Eight Men Out” still stands out as one of the best baseball movies ever, and watching it again beats watching the damned Yankees or cheating Astros any day.

Rating: PG, some profanity

Cast: John Cusack, David Strathairn, D.B. Sweeney, Charlie Sheen, Michael Rooker, Bill Irwin, Studs Terkel, Christopher Lloyd, Nancy Travis, John Sayles, Maggie Renzi, John Anderson, Michael Lerner, Clifton James and John Mahoney.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Sayles, based on a book by Eliot Anisof. An Orion release now streaming and showing on various sites, PositiTV, etc.

Running time: 1:59

Interesting stunt, pairing Hoffman and his son and Spacek with her daughter for a comically curmudgeon romance.

Vertical has this one.

It’s only when you spend five minutes on your favorite search engine that it becomes obvious how much of what we in the West believe or known about the Buddhist offshoot, meditation-oriented religion Falun Gong is what the Paranoid People’s Republicans want us to believe.

They’re hellbent on labeling this newish faith-“practice” a “cult,” and hoping like Hell the outside world will conflate it with the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo “doomsday” cult that attacked Japan’s subways with a nerve agent in the mid-90s. Because, I guess, most Westerners won’t know the difference.

So pervasive is China’s communist party’s anti-Falun Gong propaganda and well-publicized efforts to wipe Falun Gong out that you barely here about China’s Uyghur genocide or policy of crushing Tibetan Buddhism and bad-mouthing the Dalai Lama.

All of which I bring up as a preamble to reviewing the terrific animated documentary “Eternal Spring,” about the brutal and sometimes fatal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, which reached a peak after some members of the religion decided to fight back against Chinese propaganda about their worldwide religious movement.

This Jason Loftus film is a part straightforward documentary, following Falun Gong member and Chinese expat Daxiong as he travels from Toronto to New York to Seoul to talk to co-religionists from his hometown, the Chinese city of Chang Chun. But Daxiong is a famous comic book illustrator and artist. So using his storyboards and drawings, the film recreates landmark events from China’s crackdown and takes us back to the late ’90s and early 2000s, letting us meet the people and in some cases hear their accounts and stories, with animated illustration.

What triggered the even-tougher crackdown, mass arrests, beatings and deaths in custody was a caper that the film recreates. Some Falun Gong adherents in Chang Chun decided they’d push back against the relentless state-controlled TV criticism and “hijack” the signal to broadcast the “news” to Chinese people that this condemned and persecuted “cult,” born in China, was Buddhism-based, and had spread all around the world.

Residents watching their evening newscast got treated to the shocking sight of people meditating and doing proscribed exercises in front of the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere. When this event is animated, we see people at home and in restaurants slack-jawed in awe at what they’re watching, the mere idea that some religious minority could fight the totalitarian state and get its message out.

That would make a feel-good caper comedy in the right hands, you’d figure. But s Daxiong and others who fled China relate in the film, they paid a staggering price for fighting back.

“They’d kill a thousand people just to catch one,” one survivor says.

The small group that pulled off this stunt helps Daxiong and Loftus recreate the labor camp “indoctrination,” the police beatings, escape attempts and the like.

And through Daxiong’s vivid and realistic drawings, rendered into mid-grade animation in assistance of a gripping story, we get to know not only persecuted Falun Gong survivors, but those who perished opposing the one-party dictatorship.

The film can be accused of imparting martyrdom on those arrested and killed because of their faith. But those doing the accusing would either being CCP mouthpieces or their online trolls and trollbot supporters.

In any event, “Eternal Spring” makes for an informative and riveting addition to the ranks of animated documentaries, films that have included “Waltz with Bashir” and “Chicago 10.” It’s an engaging way to tell a compelling story that, as Daxiong puts it, makes “art based on shared memory” when live action footage is simply not an option.

Rating: unrated, animated depictions of violence

Cast: Daxiong

Credits: Scripted by and directed by Jason Loftus. A Lofty Sky release.

Running time: 1:26

Director and co-writer Dina Amer’s film festival favorite just finished a year and a half long festival run and reaches US theaters in Nov.

This New Year’s Eve, revered screen star, Oscar winner, Knight Bachelor of the British Empire and CBE Anthony Hopkins will turn 85. So one always checks to see how many films he has in the can awaiting release when one reviews his latest.

You never know when he’ll hang it up and which film will be his last. But he has three more due out, as of this writing.

That’s worth noting in writing about “Where Are You,” his latest, just now going into limited release. Because even at this late stage of the game, Hopkins is still managing to break new ground on screen, and we’d hate for this fiasco to be his last.

“Where Are You,” a comically-pretentious, artless and yet self-consciously arty dream drama than bends into an inane missing person mystery, is the worst film of Anthony Hopkins’ career.

He’s not barely in it, more of a featured player with what I counted were three scenes or so. He gets top billing, because whatever else filmmakers Valentina De Amicis and Riccardo Spinotti don’t know, they’re not stupid enough to think that having Georgian hunk Irakli Kvirikadze, a bunch of runway beauties and Jack Nicholson’s son Ray topping the credits would sell one ticket.

Hopkins plays the mysterious “Thomas” who narrates as he scribbles away in the opening, pondering how “all the loves dance and completely disappear.”

He serves no discernable function in the narrative.

The film is about smoldering fashion photographer Nicolas (Kvirikadze) who has a new book of art photography out and sits down for a bizarre TV interview that is intercut with scenes of him in his idyllic, privileged life with his “muse,” the gorgeous and willowy Matilda (Camille Rowe).

They make love, frolic and caress each other in their seaside villa, but Matilda narrates in voice-over the trouble on the horizon. “We’ve always been a team, but the artist is nothing without his muse.”

Of course he had other loves before her. He’s even pondering temptations while they’re together, giving credence to the old saying “No matter how gorgeous she is, there’s always some dude tired of waking up next to ‘that.'”

The interviewer (Christopher Ashman) rudely challenges him with “Is this the last gasp of a dying artist?” and “Don’t you see how empty all of this is?” questions. But Nicolas has it all and can’t see it.

Then his BFF the surfer (Ray Nicholson) dies. And Matilda disappears with a “Don’t call, don’t look for me, forget me” note. Nicolas is led to believe that she’s been kidnapped. His search for her takes him to the ends of the Earth — which as U2 taught is, Joshua Tree, California.

“Where Are You” is largely a collection of beautiful people doing beautiful things in beautiful places, gorgeous women and stunning flowers, gorgeous women framed by stunning flowers. It’s all beauty without dramatic form right up to that mid-point, when melodrama — badly-written and acted melodrama — takes over. Think I’m exaggerating?

“The greatest sadness is being unable to kiss an invisible woman.”

I’m not familiar with the works of the co-writers/directors, but checking their IMDb page, this appears to be a reworking of a movie they couldn’t get released three years ago under the title “Now is Everything.” Unlike fine wines, films don’t improve simply by leaving them in a dark, cool place for a few years. And whatever they did to make this sellable didn’t “fix” it.

As for two-time Oscar-winner Sir Tony, one holds out hope for “The Son,” “Zero Contact” or “Armageddon Time,” which are rolling out over the new few weeks and months. Because nobody wants to, as Sean Connery put it, “exit with a stinker, which was “The League of Extraordinary Gentleman” in his case.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity, off-camera violence

Cast: Irakli Kvirikadze, Camille Rowe, Madeline Brewer, Angela Sarafyan, Ray Nicholson, Mickey Sumner and Anthony Hopkins.

Credits: Directed by Valentina De Amicis and Riccardo Spinotti, scripted by Valentina De Amicis, Matt Handy and Riccardo Spinotti. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35