Movie Nation

You know, you don’t need to take two and a half hours to do a funny, modern riff on Lina Wertmüller’s class-warfare-among-castaways classic “Swept Away (1974).” Even if you’re that Swedish slice of wry, Ruben Östlund.

But if cutting “Triangle of Sadness” means snipping off one second of a glorious, drunken mid-storm-at-sea debate about planned political economies between a tipsy Russian capitalist (Zaltko Buric) and a blitzed American Marxist (Woody Harrelson), well forget my pacing or excessive length complaints. Just pretend I never brought them up.

This mid-movie face-off, held aboard a small, exclusive and obscenely-expensive luxury cruise ship, begins with a Russian who made his money in “sh-t,” aka “aneeemal FERRRRtilizer,” quoting Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ship’s American alcoholic captain firing back with Eugene V. Debs and Mark Twain.

“‘Never argue with an idiot,” the Captain says, quoting Twain. “They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

This tirade goes on, at length, as the Ship of Rich Fools is foundering in a storm, everyone on board too seasick to protest and the crew in total dereliction of duty — nobody’s on the bridge. And these two finish their debate locked in the cabin where the PA system to the ship is at their disposal and no crew member able to interrupt.

The director of the somewhat inscrutable “The Square” and the droll and dark “Force Majeure” (remade as “Downhill” with Julia Louis Dreyfuss and Will Ferrell) has filmed an amusingly heavy-handed smackdown of modern economic justice in a satire that, like “Swept Away,” is all about what happens when the social order is upended.

“While you’re swimming in abundance,” Captain Woody opines, “the rest of the world is drowning in misery.” That’s messed up. The rich folk, including the Russian “King of S–t,” are about to find out.

Our avatars in this comical riff on haves and have-nots are two beautiful people — together, it would seem, because of that one thing they have in common.

We meet British pretty boy Carl (Harrison Dickinson of “Trust” and “The King’s Man”) as he’s going through the shirtless and degrading audition for a fashion shoot, which a wag with a video crew sums up as “smiley brands,” aka cheaper products that sell you on the illusion of happiness that accompanies wearing them, vs. “grumpy brands,” in which the models must look sullen, aloof, too beautiful, expensive and unattainable, like the clothes they’re hawking.

The trick, one of the ad men says, is mastering control of “your triangle of sadness,” the space between your eyes and nose.

Carl reads and he thinks, which leads to quite a row with his model/influencer girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean of “Don’t Sleep” and TV’s “Black Lightning”) over money, dinner, who’s picking up the check and “gender role stereotypes.”

But when they find themselves with a free trip on this luxury superyacht, with a wait staff of 15, a cleaning crew of five, armed security guards and a regular ship’s crew catering to maybe 25 guests, egalitarian Carl is the one who gets a crew member fired for almost flirting with Yaya.

Butch blonde Paula (Vicki Berlin) runs this operation and keeps everybody mindful of the crew’s job — “Say YES” to everything. But she hasn’t planned on the idle rich abusing that.

And nobody can get the damned captain out of his cabin for this one night-only “dinner with the captain” gourmet meal. He keeps drunkenly shouting them off through the door over the sounds of “The Internationale” on repeat on his stereo.

It’ll all come to tears, we just know it.

The passengers are a quirky collection of aged British arms dealers, rich men and their trophy women and the German couple whose wife (Iris Berben) has had a stroke. The only thing she can blurt out is “In den WOLKEN,” “in the clouds.” She shouts this a lot.

Östlund sets the clueless, entitled clowns up, and then knocks them down with one of the great seasickness vomit-offs in screen history. And as they exit the dining room and the ship rolls in the battered seas, the skipper and the amusing oligarch have their little good-natured drinking-game/debate.

Few of the characters are painted with anything resembling “broad, comic strokes,” and Östlund doesn’t fill in much background detail before the shipwreck, because we don’t know who’ll make it and who won’t.

That tends to undercut the “just desserts” nature of the satire. How can we relish the upending of the social norm if we can’t ID the most egregiously Musken/Bezos-ish of the entitled? Who among the working stiffs in the crew should we root for?

And how will this inform our beauty-is-fleeting model couple, who are just smart enough to know their earning window is closing and their relationship may have to find something else to lean on to survive?

I liked the whole first-season-of-TV’s “Survivor” turn things take, when the simple skills to survive are something no passenger in the lot has any clue about. Very “Swept Away.”

And I loved the long Woody and Zaltko (he was in “2012,” and the Danish “Pusher” trilogy of movies) face-off over the winner-take-all economy’s fascist tendencies.

The rest is entirely too obvious for its own good, something we’ve never been able to say about a Ruben Östlund before, and hopefully won’t ever say again.

Rating:  R for language and some sexual content, and that’s leaving out a scene of violence against an animal

Cast: Harrison Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Vicki Berlin, Dolly De Leon, Alicia Eriksson, Iris Berben, Zaltko Buric and Woody Harrelson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ruben Östlund. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:27

Nothing ever “ends” any more. Everything is drawn out, from film and TV franchises to criminal investigations.

But 45 years or so after “Halloween,” which launched Jamie Leigh Curtis as a star, she says goodbye to the story that made her.

Let’s see How The Indian Trailer looks, shall we?

“Till” is a period piece that reminds us of a time when an image could shock the conscience of a nation. It’s an object lesson that chills when we realize this isn’t ancient history, that this happened within living memory, that had he lived, young Emmett Till would’ve been 81 this year.

And the law that made his murder at long last illegal nationwide, a law named The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, only passed in March of this year.

Chinonye Cukwu, who directed the very fine “Clemency,” brings us the same sort of spare, narrowly-focused drama here, a story of a Chicago mother who worried about what might happen when her child visited relatives in Mississippi, and had her worst worries come true.

Danielle Deadwyler, electrifying in the indie thriller “The Devil to Pay,” gives a breakout performance as Mamie Till-Mobley, a doting widowed mom utterly charmed by her outgoing, irrepressible 14 year-old son, Emmitt (Jalyn Hall of “The House with a Clock in Its Walls”).

But like Black mothers in 1955 Chicago, and today, she had to give him “the talk” before sending him South to visit his country cousins back in her native Mississippi.

“They have a different set of rules” down there, she begins. “Be extra careful,” something that does not seem to sink in to the 14 year-old. Emmett would rather dance along to the record player, which reminds us, “What 14 year-old wouldn’t?”

Her last warning gives us pause, and might even get through to her bubbly son.

“Be small down there.”

But once in Money, Mississippi, Emmett cuts up with his cousins when he’s supposed to be picking cotton. And when they all gather at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, Emmett forgets himself and forgets where he is. The owner (Haley Bennett of “The Girl on the Train”) looks “like a movie star,” and he has the temerity to tell her.

And when he has the gall to whistle, worlds collide, Emmett Till’s fate is sealed and America is shocked at the horrible price this child pays for stepping out of line in the racist South.

We see the first crime committed against him — kidnapping — and hear the second. We don’t see the half-hearted “search” by local law enforcement. From here on out, this is Mamie’s story — her grief, her doggedness, her fateful decision that “everybody” needs to see her son’s mutilated corpse once he’s fiund.

Racism’s ugly violence would be exposed on a Jet Magazine cover, in newspapers and on TV. And a country that had treated this open sore with a shrug would be forced to confront it.

Chukwu turns this much-told story into an intimate film of extreme closeups of faces bearing up under racism or cowering from its worst consequences, of fear and defiance and paroxysms of grief.

We don’t need to hear about J. Edgar Hoover’s dismissal, at first, of requests for help, of the Eisenhower administration’s slowness to act. We see Mamie make decisions that shock her mother (Whoopi Goldberg, who produced “Till”), her divorced and remarried father (Frankie Faison) and her barber-beau (Sean Patrick Thomas).

We see the first requests for assistance from the politically-connected local NAACP (figures played by Kevin Carroll and Keith Allen Bolden), and the steps Mississippi locals, led by a genteel but fiery local doctor and activist (Roger Guenveur Smith) and civil rights icon Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole) take to keep Mamie safe when she travels South to testify in the trial of those who killed her son. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/emmett-till-murderers-make-magazine-confession

Chukwu keeps the scale small and the story deeply personal, a family riven by grief and in the case of the uncle, “Preacher,” (John Douglas Thompson) who wasn’t able to protect Emmett in Mississippi, gut-wrenching guilt.

“Till” tells an epic story in simple, unfussy strokes, an important film more concerned with building a feeling of dread than in dazzling us with fireworks. It hews close to a single point of view — Mamie’s — and avoids the pitfalls of many a story set in this era by the simple fact that there was no “white savior” figure who was a part of this narrative.

The mostly-unnamed, pink-faced and murderously racist white Mississippians circle their wagons around the still-living Carolyn Bryant’s lies, and Bennett takes care to let us see nothing but the “banality of evil” in her.

It’s an actor’s picture. Hall lets us understand a child “brought up without fear” in a relatively progressive midwestern city, utterly unequipped for the “rules” of a violently racist patriarchy. Deadwyler internalizes the bravery that changed a middle class working mom to a civil rights warrior whose blunt “I want them to see” what they did to her child, shocked the world and changed
America. Our star makes sure her character breaks your heart.

And as Chukwu keeps her camera on Mamie, she turns a blow against racism into a history lesson with human faces — good, poisonous, and so mutilated that we have to be forced to see it to understand our culture’s ugliest truth.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs.

Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Haley Bennett, Frankie Faison, Roger Guenveur Smith and Whoopi Goldberg.

Credits: Directed by Chinonye Chukwu, scripted by Michel Reilly, Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu. An Orion/MGM release.

Running time: 2:10

A combat vet comes home after suffering a brain injury in this intimate drama. A nice change for Lawrence, who seemed to be settling into all star epics or attempted blockbusters.

Stephen McKinley Henderson also stars. Nov. 4. https://youtu.be/j307q8zMD3Y

Been dying to see this bad boy, opening wide Friday.

Satire of the “Swept Away” school?

She has a chip on her shoulder. We can see it in her eyes and hear it in her sarcasm when dealing with a case worker at the welfare office.

And there’s something about that child at her feet that isn’t quite right. The kid doesn’t speak, with a long mop of unkempt hair hiding the eyes in the middle of manic moments of acting-out. Mom seems barely interested in keeping the child under control.

She drives a forklift at work and brings men home to her latchkey 8-9 year-old.

“My dad is going to f— you up when he sees you,” the kid warns tonight’s “date.” Later, Mom is warned to “speak loudly to” a teacher because “he’s going deaf,” we come to appreciate the child’s wit and mean streak.

But it’s not until “Tom” is expelled from school that we figure out that this is “The Other Tom,” that he’s a boy and that he’s the boy whom this film is about.

And what’s more, “The Other Tom” isn’t about gender dysphoria, no matter how feminine Tom (Israel Rodriguez) looks and sounds, no matter who the teacher mistakes him for in class.

Is that an unintentional bit of misdirection from co-writers/directors Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo? n This movie trips-up expectations more than once as we see this story of a troubled (ADHD) child and the struggling mother who tries to figure out the medication the school system suggests, or if it is “changing” Tom for the worse.

Which Tom might mother Elena (Julia Chavez) figure is the “real” Tom, and which “The Other Tom?”

The quiet, immersive film is largely seen from Elena’s point of view, not the warmest single mom, a woman with a short temper and no patience for a child constantly testing her.

She barely reacts to his many torrents of “I HATE yous.”

Tom lashes out, time and again, and her neglect/reward style of childrearing isn’t cutting it. The school intervenes after he hits a teacher in fury over something he’s sure his mother forgot to pack for him for class. Tom’s “impulsive, aggressive, abnormal behavior” is disrupting school and causing Tom to fail.

His chilly mother can only mollify him. The system can’t deal with him and teachers and administrators are pretty blunt with Elena about what he needs, and in what doses.

“The Other Tom” struggles to stay on the fence about what is best for the child, who is plainly out of control and miserable “before,” and troubled but “manageable” and seemingly happier “after.”

The school system in this film is portrayed as officious and inflexible, almost hellbent on medicating this kid “for his own good.” His mother comes off as the queen of bad decisions — about men, about who she takes advice from about her son, about the promises she makes Tom that she can’t or won’t keep.

But the disorienting nature of “The Other Tom” is one of its strengths. Even parents with access to all the information (and sometimes disinformation) have an impossible time wrestling with this decision, the fear of its consequences and the alarm and outrage any parent would feel if it seems “the system” is forcing something on her kid that she can’t fully understand.

When Elena reels from one side of the debate to the other, we reel with her. Every time she makes a choice the film seems to agree it’s the right one, although we’re allowed to we ponder consequences Elena doesn’t grasp, and we wonder if Mom’s rashness is just a milder form of Tom’s problem.

Even as the film wanders about and the emotional bond between mother and child is seriously lacking i this story and these performances, there’s still something engrossing about seeing a mother’s journey through the trials and errors of ensuring her child has an opportunity to learn and at least a shot at a normal, healthy and happy life — with or without pills.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Julia Chavez, Israel Rodriguez

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo. An Outsider release.

Running time: 1:51

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, revisited.

Nov. 13. Looks good. Looks like Oscar bait. From A24.

A little J-Horror…JANUARY horror from Universal and Blumhouse.

The “evil doll” trope goes digital., Jan 13.

Tony winning actress, writer and director Sarah Jones turns her “Sell/Buy/Date” sex work show into a 100 minute “teachable moment” movie. She uses “protests” against the just-announced “film version” of the play as an impetus to exploring the subject further via professionals involved in the work, porn actors to pole dancers to prostitutes.

Jones’ noble intentions lead to some informative interactions and confessions kind of buried in a mockumentary that starts humorous and talks its subject to death long before “That’s a wrap.”

It’s a laudable effort packed with facts and eye-opening perspectives. But the glib packaging makes for a mostly humor-starved, clinical and tedious film. If nothing else, she underscores the point that this can of worms promises to open. “It’s a complex” subject.

Jones begins by introducing us to characters from her play — Lorraine, her “Jewish bubbe” mascot and conscience, Bella a “sex work studies” coed, Nereida, a Dominican/Puerto Rican civil rights activist and Rashid, a young Uber driver whose guise she assumes to have somebody “street” to bounce a lot of these ideas off and get “KnowwhutI’msayin’?” takes.

The announcement that her long-running show might become a movie earns her Internet blowback, which elderly Lorraine sums up as almost fitting for someone who was “so busy trying to be ‘the wokest,'” and got lost in this subject she still doesn’t know everything about.

So Sarah and her entourage visit a “sex positive pole dancing class” and hear from Tish Roberts, a human rights activist “still walking in that life” as a prostitute.

She meets with Lotus Lain, a porn actress and sex worker advocate, who warns Sarah “You’re about to get yourself canceled!” A quick Instagram pose with Lotus can fix that.

We and Sarah take a tour of Nevada’s famed “Chicken Ranch” legal brothel, led by Alice Little, a prostitute and (BDSM) “educator.”

We hear from a transgender sex worker, and from porn actor/”Adult Media Monetizer” and former Biohazzard rock star Evan Seinfeld. Sarah sits down with Indigenous women activists who point to the “man camps” of the labor intensive oil and construction industries being a magnet and impetus for sex work, especially in nearby Native American reservations.

Jones, like the viewer, gets a bit of whiplash from the “their business is them” self-exploitation view of women selling their looks and bodies, and the opposing view that those profiting the most and suffering the fewest consequences are the men who run the brothels and the “johns” who are barely punished for soliciting sex workers.

Transgender sex worker and activist Esperanza von Secca lectures our playwright, actress and filmmaker about what a “violent business this is for women to be in.”

It’s a lot to “unpack,” Sarah says as herself. And her various guises from the play react differently to each new piece of information, each shift in point of view from “empowering” and giving women “agency” to what an “exploitive” “trap” this work often is.

Also muddying the waters is the ever shifting language of this subject, and the vaguely less pejorative euphemisms thrown about here are enough to make some worry about”doing the work” to keep up with the latest terminology or vex the hell out of anyone fretting about “weasel words” taking over the conversation.

“Still walking in that life?” Give me a break.

A couple of film stars — Rosario Dawson and Bryan Crantson — show up for “advice to Sarah/support Sarah” cameos.

Taken as a whole and received as a film, “Sell/Buy/Date” isn’t a particularly graceful vehicle to disseminate all this new-to-most-of-us information and perspectives. The connecting scenes with Sarah in disguise as Rashid or Bella, etc. feel clumsy and grow less amusing the longer “Sell/Buy/Date” goes on.

The documentary material is informative and mind-opening. The mockumentary surrounding it is a bit of a drag, and lets the movie down.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, profanity

Credits: Sarah Jones, Rosario Dawson, Evan Seinfeld, Alice Little, Amy Bond, Esperanza Fonseca and Bryan Cranston.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah Jones. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:38

The latest from Peter Hedges (“Pieces of April,” “Dan in Real Life”) opens Friday.

It’s sure to give us the “feels.”