Movie Nation

It’s often hard to gauge whether or not a comedy is going to land judging by the trailer. Cut together as a punchy highlight reel of zingers, pratfalls and eyerolls, most any editor can make any movie with just a few laughs play as a “Greatest Hits” package.

Here’s a scene from this rom-com, which opens Friday. Better indicator of whether old pals George Clooney and Julia Roberts click?

Veteran German documentarian Heinz Emigolz’s “The Last City” is an interlocking series of conversations with actor/characters taking us from Israel and Serbia to Greece, China and Brazil in a quintet of vignettes that seem to have only the loosest connections.

It’s an experiment in narrative, with far-ranging conversations the take in old age, dream interpretation, revisiting one’s personal history by meeting a younger version of oneself, national/racial guilt and morality. The film’s all-one-big-family/all0one-city messaging doesn’t quite come off. And at times, it seems like the sort of movie you get from a series of grant-financed vacations in which you drag actors along.

The acting is varying degrees of stiff, the line readings arch and stilted as not everyone speaks English as a first language, although it’s the language Emigholz (“Streetscapes”) chose to film in. Still, it is unusual enough to be worth a look.

A former filmmaker/now-archaeologist (John Erdman) has a long, philosophical talk with a former psychologist (Jonathan Perel) who might have been his psychologist but is now an Israeli weapons theorist/designer across several archeological digs and street corners in Israel.

“A war can’t be fought within the realm of design” is this conversation’s thesis, near as I can make out. And the psychologist’s rationale for changing careers is “At one point, listening became not enough for me.”

The one-time filmmaker turns nostalgic as he next has an intimate chat with someone meant to be his younger self (played by Young Sun Han).

“That was beautiful, like that scene in a film by (Carl) Dreyer” is all the younger man needs to say to get the older one on the same page. The viewer? Even when we’re told the film in question, it’s seriously unclear as to how that connects them to the 30 year-old man or his 70ish counterpart.

Then the young man is seen wrestling naked with a fellow (Laurean Wagner) who turns out to be a cop, and his brother. That’s OK, the cop can confess to a priest. That’s what his brother happens to be.

“My lover’s my brother.”

Good thing Mom (Dorothy Ko) isn’t flipped out by what’s going on under her roof. She has her own agenda, a lengthy catalog of evidence of Japanese society-wide racism and WWII era sadism that she relates to a woman (Susanne Sachße) whose taped “slanted” eyes and jet-black bowl-cut wig and German accent don’t fool us, but somehow convince the incest brothers’ mother that she’s lecturing someone Japanese. No harm, no foul, right?

“Are we Japanese not the Germans of the Pacific?”

The Chinese woman’s shaming of the disguised German has a goal, an end game in mind, and you can probably guess what that might be.

That segment is by far the most coherent and focused of the various conversations, which are augmented with a car crash, a gruesome dream visualized in ’80s video game graphics and whatever it is the Chinese woman wants the unrepentant, unreformed Japanese to consider as the only “honorable” thing they could do as penance.

Emigholz wrote a lot of words for his actors to say, without getting that close to a clarity of message. Documentarians often go for “natural” under-rehearsed performances when they make the leap to fiction features, and that’s evident here. Many a line-reading sounds metallic, not so much “acted” as read.

The settings are often striking as “The Last City” never lets you forget you’re dabbling in the avant garde, so it’s got that going for it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: John Erdman, Dorothy Ko, Susanne Sachße, Jonathan Perel, Young Sun Han, Laurean Wagner.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Heinz Emigholz. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:40

Let’s resist the urge to judge a new Japanese religious movement with the label we slap on every faith new enough to invite ridicule — “cult.”

Instead, let Happy Science explain itself via a movie it has released, although maybe explaining its philosophy through a comical, campy and patently ridiculous action picture isn’t the smartest move.

It’s about ordinary folks taking pro-active measures to address the problems in their lives.

A schoolgirl (Saya Fukunaga) is haunted, fainting at school with strangulation bruises on her neck?

A young salaryman wants to marry, but is drowning in the pressures of work?

A grandmother falls victim to a COVID-free nursing home scam?

A man is beating his wife?

Must be…DEMONS.

And what do the simple Happy Scientists do when that’s the diagnosis? They draw a pentagram in chalk, write their complaint on paper, and summon “The Divine Protector.”

Merely making this gesture, a sulfurous summons of the ancient soul named Master Salt (Rin Kijima) can be liberating. And entertaining. She has her very own walk-music (in Japanese, with English subtitles).

“She is coming coming COMING…She is here, here HERE.”

No, that doesn’t make her, the religion or the movie seem less ridiculous.

Rin Kijima plays Shioko Kamono, aka “Master Salt,” an eight hundred year old “protector” who can “never fall in love” because her mission is to drag demonic curses to hell (perfect place for phone scammers) and deliver justice.

She speaks in head-slappingly obvious aphorisms. The “three poisons of the mind (dubbed into English)?”

“Greed is desire.” Yeah, we know. “Anger is rage.” You don’t say. “Ignorance is foolishness.”

Oh noooose. THIS movie is “foolishness.”

As with any religion rendered into action cinema form, a little profundity goes a long way. “A selfish mind that keeps seeking what it wants even as the cost of other’s happiness, that’s a curse,” is worth emulating. Just be leery of any anti-materialist “faith” that wants you to transfer that material wealth its way.

“The Divine Protector” opens with a visit to a shrine in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and as the schoolgirls are tested, we keep seeing them in religion class, a not-too-subtle way of connecting Happy Science to Buddhism and Shintoism.

There’s a lot here anybody who’s had a comparative religion course will recognize — a plea for selflessness, self-reflection, non-violence and being considerate of others. But what makes “The Divine Protector” flirt with being campy fun is the scary lady’s walk-on music. Justice is on its way, we figure.

“She is coming, coming COMING.”

And the way this two hour walk on the cultish side is structured — the dubbed insipid dialogue and the song, in Japanese, turning up again and again — makes one wonder Happy Science’s stance on alcohol.

Because I know a movie with a built-in drinking game when I see one. And hell’s bells, “Master Salt Begins” implies there’ll be a sequel.

Rating:  PG-13 for thematic content and some violence

Cast: Rin Kijima, Saya Fukunaga, Donpei Tsuchihira

Credits: Directed by Hiroshi Akabane, scripted by Sayaka Okawa. A Happy Science release.

Running time: 2:01

Next time you’re in Orlando, Planet Earth’s Vacationland, drop the name “Billy Flanigan.” Just don’t try to find somebody with anything bad to say about him. That’s an exercise in futility that would eat up your whole visit.

“Mr. Disney,” “The Happiest Man on Earth,” Flanigan is the embodiment, the exemplar of live entertainment at Walt Disney World — an ebullient song and dance man whose smile has been his signature for over 40 years of musical revues at the Park that Walt Built.

“Billy Flanigan: The Happiest Man on Earth” is a documentary celebration of a 60something who’s been lauded by People Magazine and the subject of scores of TV feature stories, locally and globally. Cullen Douglas’s film digs into the magic that is Billy, expanding on what turned out to be Flanigan’s Finest Hour — his morale-boosting bike-rides to deliver singing, dancing “Billy Flanigrams” to every isolated, locked-down “cast member” of the park he could think of during the COVID lockdown.

Using Disney-flavored graphics, a long interview with Billy and lots and lots of his fellow Disney World cast members, relatives and friends, and sampling generously from a one-man “Dear Diary” show Flanigan’s performed locally, Cullem gives us an almost relentlessly upbeat portrait of the performer behind Disney World’s most celebrated smile.

He’s so adored that his friends even laugh through the cliched spotlight-craving foibles endemic to song-and-dance folk. “He’s a legend here,” sure. But “Billy will tell you how great he is.” There are amusing showbiz stories of auditions or rehearsals where he’d be the last to figure out that the performer playing Nemo or his Dad Marlin or Dory were the headliners of a revue based “Finding Nemo,” and not whoever Billy was cast to play.

“But...I’m the star, always the star,” this colleague or that one giggles. “I wondered if he’s being serious, or just being kitschy.” On no. Yes, he “shines a light on others” in every show he’s in, but “He gets a nosebleed if he’s not” center stage, center of attention.

I mean, how else are you gonna get a “Mousecar” for being the most magical Magic Kingdom performer of them all?

Flanigan talks of his bullied childhood, discovering his true passions and finding his tribe in college. The once-married workaholic father of four who always had “The Wizard of Oz” playing at home when he wasn’t performing or rehearsing, Flanigan heard the “You’re married, to a woman?” remarks over the years, before falling in love with a man and coming out — at 45. He weeps over the “hurt” he caused and the wife he left “alone.”

The film shows how Flanigan’s positivity was most severely tested by the COVID shutdown, and the layoffs (something Disney periodically does as a cost-cutting move) of live performers. And it ends before Florida’s homophobic governor went to war with Disney Corp and Walt Disney World, so don’t expect anything in the way of “edge” to this generally fluffy profile, which plays like an unusually long, slick surface-gloss of a TV news feature story.

But “Happiest Man” gets at what makes Flanigan the perfect brand ambassador for the theme park, the “Happiest Place on Earth” that’s smart enough to employ “The Happiest Man on Earth” for decade after decade, a guy who isn’t shy about going above and beyond to “bring the magic” to everyone who visits, every single day.

Rating: unrated, PGish

Cast: Billy Flanigan, and a whole lot of people who love him

Credits: Scripted and directed by Cullen Douglas. A Good Deeds Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:24

Nov. 1, this film from the director of “Cocains

e Cowboys” comes to Hulu.

The pool boy, the rich and entitled rich religious hustlers, the New York con artist, all here. And Tom Arnold. Remember how he helped expose this?

Tricks and traps and poison and old friends and high stakes.

This one features RZA and Liam Hemsworth in support and hits theaters Nov. 16, streaming shortly thereafter.

My review of “Poker Face” is linked here.

The simple pleasure of seeing Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor paired-up as brothers by different mothers does the heavy lifting of “Raymond & Ray,” a downbeat dramedy about their dead father’s last wish.

It starts out as an estranged-sibling melodrama, drifts into road picture territory and grows more contrived the closer we get to that “last wish.”

But “contrived” is kind of the brand of the creator of TV’s “In Treatment” and such films as the all-star cast “Mother and Child.” Rodrigo García likes to mix things up, add characters and obstacles and plot twists, and he squeezes a TV season’s worth of those into the second and especially the third act of this picture, which sets out to touch you and satisfies itself with a string of “Didn’t see THAT comings.”

Raymond (McGregor) shows up at Ray’s cabin door just as his latest bedmate is making her exit. They aren’t close, and they were even more removed from their father. But at least Raymond got word that he has died.

“His last wish was that his sons attend his funeral,” Raymond relates. But the other son that their father named Raymond, Ray, isn’t sentimental enough to consider that. The fact that their “monster” of a dad gave them the same names speaks to how he “messed with” them. And now he’s demanding a little control, post mortem. But Raymond insists.

“I want to know what it looks like to put him under ground.”

“It’s gonna take a lot more than a hole in the ground to get the old man outta your head.”

They drive to Richmond, and bits of background come out. Raymond’s just lost his third marriage. Ray is a recovering addict, a jazz trumpeter a long time between gigs. Neither is flush with cash, and the damned funeral home wants “embalming” and “makeup” fees “because that’s what your father wanted.”

The half-brothers find themselves dealing with a string of funeral home folks expressing “Sorry for your loss,” a lawyer pal (John Ortiz) of their dad’s with yet more “conditions” their father left them, and the landlady (Maribel Verdú of “Pan’s Labyrinth”) who apparently was the old man’s last lover.

Everybody they meet seems to know the late Benjamin Harrison, from the funeral director (Todd Louiso) who put him in a coffin in accordance with his “Jewish heritage,” to Dad’s last nurse (Sophie Okonedo, quite good), whom ladykiller Ray seems to identify as his “type,” to the preacher (Vondie Curtis-Hall, terrific) who helped with Ben’s arrangements and will preside over his service.

Because “Our father wasn’t Jewish. He converted for 30 minutes once.”

Everybody has a warmer, more forgiving picture of the old man than the sons who refused to see him for years and years. And every demand that he makes in his will tells them that he’s still the manipulative bastard they distanced themselves from all those years ago.

“What was he like as a father?” “The worst.”

As Raymond and by extension Ray shrug and go along with this, we see the sad adults their father made of them, “two grown-ass men whose lives didn’t pan out.”

That movie is actually pretty interesting. The acting is quite good and the family dynamic solid, if a tad predictable. But the manipulations and complications that García layers on top of that story, at the long, graveside second half of “Raymond & Ray” are not. They start out cute and transition to cutesie, and “Raymond & Ray” goes right off the rails.

Rating: R for language and some sexual material.

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ethan Hawke, Maribel Verdú, Sophie Okonedo and Vondie Curtis-Hall.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rodrigo García. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:45

The first four or five times one hears a snippet of the story of how 1920s and ’30s singing, dancing and acting sensation Josephine Baker was a French spy of great repute during World War II, the only rational reaction is “Say what now?”

An African-American starlet, perhaps the most famous performer in Europe between the wars next to Marlene Dietrich, infamous for her daring states of undress on the stage, the Madonna of her Age, a spy? For the her adopted France against the racist, ruthless, torture-first/murder later Nazis? How could it be? It’s not like she blended in…anywhere.

It’s always been hinted at in various Baker biographies, and became a hook for such books as more and more facts and secret files of the Brits, Americans and French became open. But the details were still as scanty as Baker’s notorious “banana dance” costume and the like. She was honored and lauded by the French, but they only gave so much information about what she did and Baker herself, a St. Louis girl, frustrated New York chorine who remade herself as a sensation in Paris.

She loved France and tried to give something back to the country that liberated her from Jim Crow and made her a global sensation. Baker modestly accepted the accolades and let us wonder what earned her the Legion d’Honneur recognition.

Reading the latest book, “Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy,” by Damien Lewis, with fresh details of what she accomplished, crossing paths with Brits, traveling in the same world as British spy Ian Fleming, taking the same and even greater risks, it’s hard not to see a movie begging to be filmed and every young Black actress on every continent salivating at the chance to play the superstar, sex symbol and spy.

I mean, damn. She was a pilot who flew food aid to the Low Countries, an actress who sold out operas, stage revues and one-woman shows, who made films in France and was one of the world’s most famous faces — and bodies — from the Jazz Age on into the age of TV. Her various returns to America were often fraught, as the same racism that she’d fled was slow to change and as a big star, she deserved better than she ever got at home.

So she made France one of her “Two Loves” (“J’ai Deux Amours”) as her signature song put it. And she worked for both the intelligence agencies of both loves — France and her native United States, as well as Britain during the war.

As Lewis, who has published many books on WWII espionage, makes clear, Baker was a quick study who, thanks to her access to the well-heeled and politically-connected all over Europe, hit the ground running as an “Honourable Correspondent” for the Deuxieme Bureau, the French secret service of the interwar-to-WWII years.

She accepted no pay, and for her first assignment, gave the French and the Brits a heads-up that Mussolini was certain to join in if Hitler invaded France. The exotic Baker could score gossip and real intel from Italians, Spaniards and Moroccan officials thrilled to be in her presence.

When the worst happened and Germany overran France in 1940, she elected to stay behind. Need French intel about German agents and German plans for North Africa, Spain’s possible joining the Axis, etc? Baker was the one who suggested this or that “concert tour” where she’d be expected to perform, and travel with so much luggage that mountains of secrets — some written in invisible ink over her musical arrangement sheets — would slip by any “inspector” who had the audacity to check.

“I’m the last person they’d suspect,” she said, more than once. Even though she swore not to sing in France until the Nazis were ousted, even though she remained outspokenly antifa, even if she and her French control-agent and later lover were watched, Baker risked her neck, time and again for la belle France.

The book is heavy on context and facts, with a little speculation filling in around the edges. Being a veteran of this corner of non-fiction, Lewis treats as routine moments, bits of drama and intelligence coups that could play as electric scenes in the hands of a good screenwriter, an accomplished director and the right starlet.

I’ve read other Baker books. This one has more the most thorough accounting of her war exploits, but lacks much in the way of feeling for its heroine/subject. We don’t feel we know the woman behind the icon. Lewis lets Baker sit on the periphery of this story for long stretches as he pieces together where she was and what she did.

A long hospitalization that turned her room into a safe meeting spot for spies, a plane crash as she was being flown back into France, gathering Intel, entertaining the troops and singing for concentration camp survivors, Baker cut a wide swath through the war.

France loved Baker, and her work to free the country was always going to be lauded. I figured they’d overstated the case just to honor their favorite adopted daughter. Not so. Baker got into it, sweet-talked the fascist Franco’s diplomat brother, this connected Italian or that Portuguese, Frenchman, Moroccan or whoever and made great contributions to the fight to liberate France.

She did it, sometimes over the prissy turf-war tantrum-tosser DeGaulle, who wanted control of everything and everyone fighting to evict the Germans in his or her own way. Baker came up with work-arounds when higher-ups made light of her aid, turned tours into intel-gathering exercises, and kept a menagerie of exotic pets with her the whole time, from Paris to her Chateau Milande (home of a museum to Baker’s life and exploits) to Casablanca and Marrakesh and beyond, on through VE Day.

That’s a life unlike any other, and a movie waiting to happen. There was a decent TV movie about her entire life made in the ’90s, and friends in France tell me there’s quite the Josephine Baker revival going on right now.

SOMEbody is going to make this film about the diva-spy, in Hollywood, France or elsewhere. I dare say there are actresses who already own the rights to this book or earlier ones. C’mon, Hollywood. Don’t let the French beat us to it.

The title is right there in the research. “The Honourable Correspondent.”

“Agent Josephine:;American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy,” by Damien Lewis. BBS Public Affairs publishers, 466 pages. $32.

The only reasons to call “Halloween Ends,” the third and final film in director David Gordon Green’s reboot of the franchise a bust are A) reviews, which have been bad and Even audience scores acknowledge that Team Green botched the direction they took it in, and B) the lofty projections for how much it was supposed to earn.

The second film in the trilogy — “Halloween Kills” — opened at near $50, and $55 was projected for this one. But streaming it on Peacock and the negative impact of reviews (audiences may have been leery and weary of the franchise, which hasn’t been dazzling of late) have dampened enthusiasm a little.

A big Thursday night followed by a solid Friday and Sat make it a $41.2 million or so blockbuster. I hope they gave Jamie Lee points.

With “Smile” still raking it in — another $12.4 million — and “Barbarian” still in the millions and well within the top ten, and with the limited release “Terrifier 2” edging out “Top Gun” for 9th place, four horror titles totalling almost $60 million are dominating the box box office right before Halloween.

The best hold over for the weekend was “Lyle Lyle Crocodile” which is managing $7.4 in its second weekend. Take the tiny tykes. It’s charming.

“The Woman King” has turned into a decent sized hit, adding another $3.7 million this weekend.

“Amsterdam,” like “Don’t Worry, Darling,” is not. Another $2.8 for “Amsterdam,” quite a bit less for “Darling.”

“Till” is doing decent business per screen in very limited release. Atlanta loves it.

The climbing footage is striking and the Alpine settings breathtaking in “Summit Fever,” a mountaineering thriller that also boasts some of the most stark and startling deaths the genre has ever seen.

Sure, there are formulaic touches and in its more melodramatic moments, lapses into pure cinematic popcorn. I could’ve done without the veteran climber screaming “Give us a f—–g chance!” at a storm raging around him and his battered mates in one sequence.

It all gets to be a bit much, to be honest. The film’s final act drags on as we — and the climbing characters — are battered with every predicament in the book, from a sudden storm and plunging temperatures to hypothermic hallucinations and violent conflict among the climbers.

But hand it to writer-director and climbing enthusiast Julian Gilbey. He shows us the good, the bad and the unendurable in this one, a movie that questions the “died doing what he/she loved” ethos of the sport and illustrates just how ugly a body looks, broken from a fall and frozen in the snow.

Freddie Thorp of Netflix’s “Fate: The Winx Saga” heads a cast of great screen beauties as Michael, a recent graduate heading to work in Dad’s Big Insurance firm in London, but tempted into the Alps by his even-hunkier climbing buddy/trainer Jean Paul, aka “JP” (Michel Biel of “Dunkirk” and TV’s “Baptiste”).

“You can worry about next year NEXT YEAR.” Come on, “one mountain, one week.” They’ll do the Matterhorn, the Eiger and Mont Blanc in the same summer.

Once he arrives in Chamonix, Michael falls in with JP and the grand old man of their crew, California-born climbing guide Leo (Ryan Phillippe), as well as Leo’s climbing girlfriend Natascha (Hannah New) and the skiing non-climber who used to be JP’s girlfriend, the fetching Isabel (Mathilde Warnier).

They’re pressed for time, and in the season of the year when snow melts and ice walls give way with thunderous cracks. And climbing has turned into an extreme sport with TV coverage, “speed records” and sponsors amping up the energy, the stakes and the danger level.

“Safety always” might be Leo’s motto. But times have changed. “Vanity is a deadly thing to bring into these mountains.”

We get a hint of what drives Michael’s “Summit Fever” as Leo treats him to some nasty “You need a fresh diaper?” hazing and JP seems hellbent on realizing his dream.

“I’m not sharing my headstone with some mountain, JP.” Or is he?

I liked a lot of what goes on here, the camaraderie, the depictions of mountaineering technique, even the deluded, over-compensating pub “wakes” for the many who fall in this killing season. Whoops and drinks all around, and on to the next peak.

“They died doing what they loved,” they convince themselves.

“They died screaming,” Michael mutters, bringing everybody down, but everybody back to Earth as well.

Gilbey goes to some pains of showing us the different peaks and their challenges, mixing that in with the budding romance between Michael and Isabel, and the death that haunts the kid-climber with every swing of his ice-axe.

It all gets to be a bit much and goes on too long, but the acting’s decent, the melodrama manageable and the climbing on a par with the best sequences ever filmed. Meet it on its own level and “Summit Fever” isn’t bad, and certainly not as bad as most couch-potato critics have been saying.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Freddie Thorp, Mathilde Warnier, Michel Biel, Hannah Ne, and Ryan Phillippe.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Julian Gilbey. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:55