Movie Nation

One gimmick is about all your average 79 minute horror movie can manage, but at least that one trick is kind of promising in “Glorious.”

Fresh-off-a-breakup Wes (Ryan Kwanten) polishes off a long drive, a purge and an alcoholic binge with an encounter with a disembodied voice in a stall at a highway rest area. The voice claims to be a deity, and it sounds a lot like J.K. Simmons.

We’ve all seen “Whiplash.” We know that’s a voice you take seriously. Well, take is seriously after a “What’s a god like you doing in a place like this?” joke. Or two.

“The universe has a FAVOR to ask!” The God Simmons (not his real name) booms.

“What is it? Does the universe need help moving?”

Joking aside, Wes finds himself trapped in a toilet in BFE with something supernatural, as well as his own issues — grief, regret, guilt and loneliness among them. He’s not getting out of there without paying a price.

What sounds like a pretty good– if glib — student play (we see four characters, and hear a fifth) plays as a modestly interesting, sometimes artfully gory drama in this Rebekah McKendry film, a story whose allure lessens the longer that one “gimmick” takes to run its course.

If we’re thinking theological, and “Glorious” certainly aims for that, we’ve got Wes trying to get out, maybe hoping to exercise some free will or simply running from whatever demons he brought into that toilet with him.

Some of us can see what’s coming, which isn’t a deal-breaker as far as making “Glorious” watchable. What’s required here is that the characters keep us engaged until the payoff or twist or grim or happy resolution. What would be nice is if we feel something/anything for any given character.

I have to say this chatty, pseudo-existential screenplay didn’t get me there, with no performance —- Sylvia Grace Crim plays the girlfriend, seen in flashbacks — pulling me in and only one character coming close to being someone I could identify with. And he used to play Peter Parker’s boss.

Yeah, critics have “god complexes.” So sue me. But “Glorious?” I could take it or leave it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Ryan Kwanten, Sylvia Grace Crim, Tordy Clark, André Lamar and the voice of J.K. Simmons.

Credits: Directed by Rebekah McKendry, scripted by Joshua Hull, David Ian McKendry and Todd Rigney. A Shudder (ug. 18) release.

Running time: 1:19

Racy for its day, and still seriously ribald today, this 1976 classic from Brazil has been restored and re issued by Film Movement. Here’s my review of this comical “troubled marriage” farce.

Person County, N.C. and its library system win this donation from MovieNation, spreading fine cinema over the mostly rural Southeast, one film and one red county library at a time.

No they’re not showing us much. Yet. One year out from release, the hype continues apace.

The mid-60s into the early ’70s were the golden age of film satire, or so my grad school professors insisted. And Oscar-winner-to-be Jack Nicholson was right in the thick of it — “Easy Rider,” “Head,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Carnal Knowledge.”

So it shouldn’t be a shock that the man, a star on the rise, should take his first shot at directing a film during this “Lolita/Doctor Strangelove/Magic Christian/M*A*S*H/The Loved One” heyday.

The meanest take on “Drive, He Said,” a social-unrest-on-campus tale centered around college hoops, is that Jack made a deal with the devil to film it. All those decades of appearances at Lakers games? Atonement for the sh—y basketball the cinema’s favorite reprobate and most beloved hoops fan put on film here.

Jesus, Jack.

The premise is that a star playing for “Ohio” something-or-other university — actually “University of Oregon” because they filmed it in Eugene and used U-O colors — has a sort of existential crisis thanks to the Vietnam War, the “love the one you’re with” open marriage sexuality and the generational values clash he faces as he decides what to do with his life.

Hector (William Tepper) is tall, talented and Jewish, and an older Nicholson might have made some sort of “Great Hebrew Hope” joke about this, as NBA-bound Jewish players averaged about one a generation (aka Larry Brown), even back then.

Hector’s having an affair with a highly-strung faculty wife (Karen Black) whose half-clueless husband is played by a better writer than anybody else involved in this, Robert Towne (“Chinatown”).

And Hector’s got a radical roommate (Michael Margotta) making him question the values system he has to embrace to keep playing a game that could make him rich, sooner rather than later. Roomie Gabriel wears his hair in a headband, Army fatigues in solidarity with those deserting and stages the sort of Political Theatre stunts that would never fly in our mass-shooting-bloodied day and age.

In the opening sequence, Gabriel and his fellow revolutionaries pull a temporary armed and uniformed takeover of the gym, mid-game, and make their statement.

“Clawing your way to the top is but a myth. Also, it’s bad for your fingernails!”

Bruce Dern plays the wound-up, always-shouting coach who is trying to keep his star motivated and us from noticing that this rube’s never watched a game in his life. He might as well be speaking “minion” with the gibberish that comes out as instructions or play-calling that he maps out in the locker room.

“C’mon! This isn’t VIETNAM!”

Improvised? Good guess.

Nicholson, one of two credited screenwriters, can’t quite get this struggle-for-Hector’s-soul dichotomy to work, so he throws a lot of male full frontal nudity — and remember, Karen Black’s in this, so turnabout is fair play — and the odd killer set piece at us to keep us distracted.

“Streaking” was all the rage, back then, remember. Who knew male nudity would disappear from American cinema for generations?

Gabriel’s day at the draft board goes every bit as haywire (sometimes hilariously so) as you’d expect. And that faculty wife fling only has a couple of ways to end. Finding an alternative to those is one of “Drive, He Said’s” many non-starters.

Look for future “Hill Street” Blue Michael Warren as a teammate of the “rah rah game jive” dismissing sort, and a young David Ogden Stiers as an NBA or ABA owner leaning on Hector to sign and make them both some money. Young Cindy Williams is here, just around the time George Lucas was deciding she was “American Graffiti” incarnate.

Towne isn’t the only filmmaker playing a part on camera. Future indie magpie Henry Jaglom plays a student. And the guy playing a game’s broadcast announcer is named “Gittes.” Coincidence?

There’s a very-much-of-its-time gritty, grey vibe about “Drive, He Said” now — whose title has as much to do with driving a car or ambulance as it does with driving down the lane in basketball, a phrase that must have seemed like speaking in tongues to simple, happy, faking-it Bruce Dern. Viewed today, the picture feels off-the-cuff, an exercise in throwing this or that against a wall and seeing what sticks.

Satires of that day occasionally degenerated into that. See “Christian, Magic” or “Duck, Love Lord a.”

But the pieces of that period that endure all have a subtext and a sly cunning about them which this movie, no matter how many sets Nicholson had already been on by then, never manages.

Rating: sex, violence, full front nudity, profanity

Cast: William Tepper, Karen Black, Michael Margotta, Robert Towne, Michael Warren and Bruce Dern.

Credits: Directed by Jack Nicholson, scripted by Jeremy Larner, Jack Nicholson (and supposedly) Terrence Malick. A Columbia Pictures release now on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:35

Bobby Cannavale and Oscar winner Adrien Brody are among the co-stars in this Netflix take on MM’s later life.

Netflix? They wrote some big checks. Is the accent right, or close enough? Or has the shrinking streamer service thrown more good money after bad?

Sept. 28.

“Hansan: Rising Dragon” is a Korean naval war epic that takes us into the actions — before and during a series of sea battles in the 1590s — of Korea’s great naval genius, Admiral Yi Soon Shin.

It’s a sprawling and dense period piece with a fleet’s worth of characters moving from bases and fortresses, to land campaigns, shipyards, fractious war councils and battles on board armored galleys. Here, all that is boiled down to the bloody chess game and military innovations of competing admirals — the Japanese “Wae” invader Wakizaka (Byon Yo-han) and the “righteous” defender of Joseon (the Korean peninsula dynasty), Yi Soon Shin (Park Hae-il).

For a Westerner, think of it as being more “300: Rise of an Empire” than John Woo’s Chinese “Red Cliff” epic. It’s a CGI-assisted old-fashioned flag waver filled with chaotic combat in which the day is always saved by the sudden lifting of this fog, the shocking arrival of that surprise fleet or the out-of-nowhere cannon balls that forestall the certain doom ready to befall this or that brave, patriotic Korean.

The phrase “It’s a TRAP!” (in Korean, with English subtitles) erupts so often I half-expected “Star Wars” Admiral Ackbar to make his presence known. But he’s here in spirit.

Set during the most perilous phase of the Imjin War, we learn that the Wae — fresh from staging the largest seaborne invasion in history (to that point) are on the brink of total conquest of the Korean peninsula, with only cunning Admiral Yi Soon (sometimes spelled “Sun”) Shin and his fleet of galleys in the country’s southern region standing in their way.

The “secret weapons” of this conflict are the the Koreans‘ “turtle ships,” covered galleys called Geobukseon with bronze dragon head rams in their bows which terrorized the Japanese, whose smaller galleys — some of them armor plated, had enough to deal with in fighting the bigger, more heavily-built Panokseon galleys that were the main Korean combat vessels.

Much of the movie has this admiral strategizing with his subordinates to figure out the weaknesses of the other side. Covered “turtles” may have spikes on their backs to prevent boarding, but are blind to what they’re charging into. The Koreans didn’t try to rapidly reload their cannons. They used their superhuman rowers to spin the ship around to bring a fresh broadside of cannons to bear on the enemy after each volley. The Japanese schemed to exploit these weaknesses with their smaller, quicker, more lightly-armed and far more numerous galleys, which sought to board the enemy and win the fight with samurai wielding their katana swords.

There are spies and saboteurs, and the war councils threaten to dissolve into infighting blood feuds — especially among the hotheaded Japanese warlords.

All of which are just the preliminaries leading to an epic sea fight, an Asian version of the Greco-Persian Battle of Salamis with enemies in rowing galleys battling among the rocks and narrow passages of a strait littered with islets and islands.

Only those deep into naval history — or Korean history — will have heard much about these titanic struggles in the seas off Korea, or be all that interested in a movie about it. There’s a reason the West has never produced a proper epic about the Battle of Lepanto, Europe’s last great galley battle, which thwarted the Ottoman Turks from pouring into central Europe and Italy and happened over 20 years before the Battle of Hansan Island. This sort of overpopulated war picture is complex and expensive to put on the screen, makes for seriously cluttered storytelling and has limited appeal, being about mostly-forgotten pieces of history.

Leading up to its Big Action Finish, “Hansan: Rising Dragon” is an oft-unwieldy film, struggling to keep the many fields of conflict and layers of intrigue straight.

Technically, writer-director Kim Han-min shows off period-appropriate firearms, armor, tactics and hardware, and galleys scooting through the water like Jetskis. There was a lumbering, slow-motion nature to this two thousand year era in combat, with the ships too heavy to move without armies of enslaved (in the Middle East and West) rowers. The number of two-man oars dipping into the water here could never propel these vessels at those speeds, something “Hansan” ignores for the sake of fast action.

See “Ben-Hur” for examples of why that makes no sense. And remember, the Spanish Armada battles of just a few years before (1588) had already turned Europe away from labor-intensive rowed galley combat close to shore and to sailing galleons, caravels and later frigates and ships of the line fighting it out under sail.

But “Rising Dragon” still makes a fascinating film version of a “further reading” history lesson, a reminder of the historical enmity between Korean and its avaricious, warlike neighbor and why Koreans in the film and in the modern day regard this as a “battle of the righteous against the unrighteous.”

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Park Hae-il, Byon Yo-han

Credits: Written and directed by Kim Han-min, based on the graphic novel “Yi Soon Shin.” A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:09

MGM and Sly get into the unkillable superhero business with Sylvester Stallone in this “Death Wish” vengeance-driven thriller, Aug. 26.

Coming soon to Prime Video, a legal thriller with the highest stakes possible.

A big turn by John Boyega, with support from Nicole Beharie, Connie Britton and Michael K. Williams.

An African American Georgia-set “Dog Day Afternoon” is the pitch, and this looks very good.

Aug. 26, from Bleecker Street.

There are movies born of obvious inspiration and perspiration on the part of all involved, and then there is “content,” manufactured to maximize potential profits from a piece of intellectual property.

That’s what the comic book adaptation “DC League of Super-Pets” is. Warners owns the rights to everything in the DC Comic Book Universe, and if Marvel can make a mint over an animated “Spider-Man,” “Why not us?”

They rounded up a big-name voice cast for this dive into the younger-kids-skewing “Super-Pets” comics. They cooked up an origin story of how Superman’s dog, Krypto, came to Earth and how denizens of a rescue pet shop acquire similar super-powers and help Krypto help the Justice League out when Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Cyborg, Aquaman, Flash and Green Lantern get in a jam.

It’s formulaic, rarely funny and seriously cynical for a movie aimed at small kids. But a couple of moments have a lovely and quite-unexpected pathos to them, about the relationships people — even superheroes — develop with companion animals. That doesn’t atone for some of that milk-our-IP-for-every-cent-it-can-earn cynicism. Still, it’s something.

Dwayne Johnson voices Krypto, given his own cape and partnering duties with Superman (John Krasinski) as part of their normal “Wake up, it’s WALK o’clock!” dog-owner relationship. Krypto’s a classic side-kick, there to carry half the load when an explosion knocks out a link of elevated train tracks, which always happens in superhero movies.

Kevin Hart voices Ace, a bull-terrier mix and longtime inmate at a pet rescue store, waiting — like PB the pig (Vanessa Bayer), Chip (Diego Luna) the squirrel and Merton the sometimes potty-mouthed turtle (Natasha Lyonne) — “to feel the warm embrace of a middle-aged person who lives alone.”

They share their space with the hairless lab-experiment guinea pig Lulu (Kate McKinnon) who harbors delusions of supervillain grandeur.

When Lex Luthor (Marc Maron) comes up with yet another Kryptonite scheme to foil Superman, aka “Mister Outside Underpants,” Krypto has bigger problems than fretting over Lois Lane coming between him and his best buddy. And the rescue critters find themselves endowed with super powers.

The gags here come from TV coverage, which features jokey graphics underneath this or that extraordinary calamity suggesting a “wealthy person actually goes to jail” and the like. There’s a funny-at-first, progressively more lame as it is repeated “smooth jazz” riff, a few “dookie” jokes and the extremely nearsighted turtle voiced by Lyonne comes close, time and again, to actually swearing.

“I can’t see (bleep)!”

Krypto gets starchy, stentorian prerecorded advice from his Kryptonian dad (Keith David, quite funny), the only pets picked for adoption at the shelter are kittens (who are evil), and Lulu keeps shrieking her views on world domination, which humans only here as the irate squeaks of a petulant pet.

The heart-tugging bits spin out of how Krypto followed baby Kal-El from Krypton and how Ace came to be in a rescue shelter.

The big-name voices rarely pay dividends, as only Lyonne and McKinnon have much in the way of fun with the characters. Johnson always makes an effort, but Hart — saddled with even fewer laugh-lines — pretty much phones it in. And even he put more into this than Marc Maron, the dullest Lex Luthor ever.

Keanu Reeves brings his best brooding, deadpan take on Batman, muttering about how he doesn’t want a pet because “I work alone…except for Robin…and Alfred…and whoever that guy was that Morgan Freeman played.”

The CG-assisted animation’s good, if nothing special. The messaging?

“You don’t have to have superpowers to be a hero.” Words to live by, kids.

“Super-Pets” doesn’t add up to much, not for adults sitting through this with the kids, anyway. But eight-and-unders? They’re down for dookie jokes and the almost-saying-“a-bad-word” Merton the turtle. A little more of that might have above this one above “mediocre ‘content,’ with a smidgen of heart.”

Rating: PG, innuendo

Cast: The voices of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon, Diego Luna, Vanessa Bayer, Natasha Lyonne, Marc Maron, John Krasinski, Jemaine Clement, Daveed Diggs, Keith David and Keanu Reeves.

Credits: Directed by Jared Stern and Sam Levine, scripted by Jared Stern and John Whittington. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:46