Movie Nation

It’s entirely-too-tempting to try and psychoanalyze the Perversity of Polanski when dipping into the cinema of the Franco-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski.

After all, we’re welcome to interpret his gory “Macbeth” as a reaction to the Manson Family’s murders of his wife Sharon Tate, and others. So it’s hard to not take the hints of his earliest films and earliest on-screen obsessions as “clues.”

“Cul-de-sac,” his third feature, revisits the dynamics of his debut, “Knife in the Water.” It’s a darkly comic thriller about what appears to be an “open marriage” and what happens when a guy with guns shows up to test it.

It’s a movie about masculinity and feminine manipulation of it, this time filtered through a Brit who doesn’t mind donning lady’s clothes and who can’t take offense when the guy with a gun refers to him as a “little fairy.”

The “darkly comic” interpretation stems from casting the fresh-off-the-Hollywood-Blacklist mug Lionel Stander as a mobster, on the run and stranded in the cliffside castle of George (Donald Pleasance, already “Blofeld” and “Night of the Generals” bald) and his younger “Continental” wife Teresa (Françoise Dorléac of “Billion Dollar Brain” and “Where the Spies Are”).

It was impossible for Stander to open his mouth and not get a laugh. From “Mr. Dees Goes to Town” to “Hart to Hart,” the guy sent up the “growling tough guy” who might be a pussycat “type.”

We meet the wounded mobster Richard or “Dickie” as he’s pushing his gut-shot partner (Jack McGowran) in their stolen driving school Morris Minor. Whatever “job” they were on went wrong. Now, they’re stranded on the North Sea coast. A search for help reveals a small, semi-restored and inhabited cliffside castle (Lindisfarne Island, Northumberland), and that the lady of the house enjoys a good nude roll in the sand dunes with a younger “friend of the family” (Iaian Quarrier).

Richard scavenges for food and drink, and hides out until the visitors motorboat away. He calls whoever hired him and Albie, and when that awakens the role-playing “lord” and lady of the house, he takes them hostage.

“One doesn’t choose the time one gets into trouble.”

The “not exactly Anglo-Saxon” Richard grates up against the effete, “snotty” old money George and insults George’s provocative “Let’s you and him fight” wife. She might be cunning enough to figure out a way out of this, but her “bravery” is almost entirely limited to trying to goad George into action.

Time and again we see escape routes — not literally, as the island’s causeway is under water for long stretches — or at least moments when they might get the better of their oafish captor. They end up cowering instead.

Polanski plays up the class conflict and plays down the sexual tension, despite having Dorléac nude in a few scenes. Veteran character actor Stander, with his boxer’s mug and foghorn-through-gravel voice, is good at suggesting native cunning in a man who can’t really get himself and his partner out of this fix without help from higher ups, and maybe a little divine intervention.

The stark, grey (black and white) sun-washed location can feel like the set for a Beckett play, moved out of doors.

The dynamics may be as simply laid-out as in “Knife in the Water,” two men, a woman seemingly manipulating and shifting allegiances as the power struggle plays out. But there’s little power struggle to this. It’s just “The Desperate Hours” in a northern English location, with visitors (including a very young Jacqueline Bisset) to chase off via insults and incidents as Richard poses as the rudest cook/”gardener” ever.

As a thriller, the film is at its most nerve-wracking in its score. Frequent Polanski collaborator Krzysztof Komeda serves up jazz-pop with a keening screech (Theremin? Synthesizer?) as the lead instrument. It gave me chest pains.

The setting lends “Cul-de-sac” a timelessness that holds up better than the plot or sexual trappings that decorate it. The “comedy” is dry, but dated.

And psychologically, all one can say about this, “Knife in the Water” and “Repulsion,” the movies that led up to “Fearless Vampire Killers” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” is that there was something decidedly off in the insecurities Polanski put on screen. It might have given direction to whatever therapy he got into, before or after the Manson murders — as in “not just strange” but “warrants keeping an eye on.”

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander, Jack McGowran, Iain Quarrier, Marie Kean, Robert Dorning and Jaqueline Bisset

Credits: Directed by Roman Polanski, scripted by Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach. An MGM release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:52

“Killer Whales” is “true crime” mockumentary about the making of a documentary whose aim it to find the killer of a “bad boy” artist from among the four likeliest suspects.

It pokes fun at not just the genre, but the nature of “reality” on such “gotcha” enterprises and the sorts of people who often make them.

Not every investigative documentarian is Errol Morris or Alex Gibney. But everyone in Hollywood is a “type” which this picture sets out to lampoon.

Why was this artist murdered? For his apartment, of course. L.A’s housing crisis is the bizarre organizing principle of what I hesitate to label “the narrative,” because that a Screenwriting 101 disaster for the ages.

What it plays as is a movie about making a movie which recreates — half-assed “Rashomon” style — the events of the night of the murder with “the real suspects,” save for a couple who are played by the naive creator and producer of the doc, who dons dresses and makeup to portray them.

For the artist hilariously (cough cough) named Daveed Hackney, “I wanted Richard Dreyfuss,” turtle-necked doofus Donny Wunder (Wyatt Bunce, who also scripted this) complains. “I got his son, Harry.”

That’s the last thing we can accept as fact in this stumbling, clumsy struggle to not come off as the efforts of rank amateurs. Except again, Harry Dreyfuss is playing the artist in the “recreations” of “real” artist, who is played by Niel Kennedy.

The whole movie is this maddening jumble of players, players playing players, “found footage” and “new” interviews, NONE of which adds a single laugh to the picture.

A snide producer/money man (Neal Bledsoe of “Shameless” and “Ugly Betty”) won’t let Donny Wunder direct the documentary he’s dreamed up, even though Donny assures us that “I watched Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos.’ How hard could it be?”

So they hire Francis Falconi (Greg Vrotos), an ulfiltered, lazy rageaholic who doesn’t even bother to read the pitch before he takes the meeting. He doesn’t try to hide his contempt for documentaries or the “f—–g joke” Donny in his profane rages to his agent and anybody else within earshot.

Perfect guy to “grill” suspects, trip them up with his cleverly-conceived questions. Francis asks “I blade for Christ” roller-blading preacher T-Blade (Michael Cognata) “If you did it, if T-Blade DID murder somebody, what would T-Blade do?”

The stunningly-convoluted “frame” for this “story” is that the film was abandoned a couple of years before, and Donny, screaming Francis and others are interviewed in the fictive present to show the footage, talk about why it was abandoned and take one last stab at finding the real killer. Donny won’t let the project go. Francis supposedly “found Jesus” in the intervening years.

That’s not funny. That goes for almost the entire film, pretty much every scene — from the “splatter test” where Donny and Francis try to determine what real blood looks like and how it sprays about in a gory murder — to the screwy characters, like D & D-playing suspect Squire Naljaimon (Anthony Carrigan of TV’s “Barry”) or the spirit -guide Klara (Kristin Couture) lands like a rotten cantaloupe dropped from a great height.

Splat.

All this incompetently-handled “complexity” in the way the story is told is just a disastrous distraction for how inept the entire enterprise is.

Shockingly, a movie about a movie that was abandoned, mid-production, turns out to be a movie that should have been abandoned mid-production.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Wyatt Bunce, Greg Vrotsos, Kristin Couture, Michael Cognata, Anthony Carrigan and Harry Dreyfuss.

Credits: Directed by Willow Hamilton, scripted by Wyatt Bunce. Magpie Productions — self-distributed

Running time: 1: 24

From the folks who brought us “The Father.” No. I’m serious. Florian Zeller, who wrote the source plays both films are based on, and directed both films, and Christopher Hampton, who adapted them both and Sir Anthony Hopkins carry over from “The Father.”

Oscar bait for the holidays?

A little bloodshed, a few laughs, a bit of swearing.

Malin Akerman and Abigail Breslin star in this Oct. 21 release.

Ok, that’s a little pushy, “Stop what you’re doing” and all.

But I laughed at a couple of the silly conceits of this Daniel Radcliffe star vehicle.

Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento? I’m totally there.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But Nov. 4, Roku let’s us find out.

Here’s a creepy indie snapshot of America at this moment — performative, attention-grabbing, impulsive and child-exploitation obsessed.

“Low Life” is a jittery, nerve-wracking thriller, a peek behind the “gotcha” cell phone camera of a confrontational stalker-of-stalkers. It’s also a commentary of the golden age of “projection,” a picture that asks what some of the people who are so obsessed with this subject — the quickest to scream “PEDOPHILE” at others — might have on their Internet search history.

Director Tyler Michael James and screenwriters Hunter Milano and Noah Rotter take us into the life of a Youtube exposer of pedophiles, an amped-up catfisher-for-“justice” who goes by Creep Dunk.

And even as it sometimes lapses into melodrama and goes off the deep end, it’s a seriously unsettling ride.

Benny Jansen, given Big Fanatic Energy by Wes Dunlap — is scoring page-view fame and getting the attention of the local PD in his corner of suburban Nevada. As Creep Dunk, he takes tips from fans and sets out to entrap men into approaching underage girls on the Internet. He walks viewers through the icky online conversations — the genital photos — and then videos the moment he meets and confronts these pervs.

Benny is brazen and unafraid. Benny is also a drama queen, primping and rehearsing his bits, lapsing into his best Travis Bickle tough-guy-who-might-be-psycho speech to get his game face on. He’s deep down the Holden Caulfield rabbit hole, “saving” girls from “predators,” a catcher in the wi-fi.

He self-righteously claps-back at a TV reporter who ambushes the ambusher, expressing “the sheriff’s” concerns about the “vigilante” illegality of what he’s doing.

But things chance when we see him light into the subject of an “investigation,” only to have the guy “make” him — “We went to high school together. You’re Benny Jansen, aren’t you?”

As Benny freaks out at this exposing of the exposer, he web searches for gun shops and buys “protection.” But a peek inside Benny’s life tells us why he never took that step before now.

A trip back to his old high school summons up formative memories. He used to be the star basketball player, used to be the biggest guy on the court. Benny used to be a bully. It’s not like he changed all that much.

But he has this equally-obsessed teen fan-girl (Lucy Urbano) passing on tips and siccing him on a friend’s “creeper” dad. She’s even more impulsive, less mature and less filtered. Benny’s desperate to please her, or at least not let “the fans” down.

“Low Life” takes us through Benny’s dark night of the soul, full of revelations, confrontations, violence and ugly self-discovery as he sucks a couple of old pals (Hunter Milano and Jake Dvorsky) into his obsession and his world.

James’s debut feature has its “Oh, come on” moments. But even with the occasional far-fetched turn, it’s always a bracing film, skating by on Dunlap’s nervous energy and Urbano’s heedless, never-consider-consequences high school kid.

“Low Life” is edited to the beat of a pulsating synthesizer score by Zach Michel — quick cuts, extreme close-ups, “glasses camera” shots and cell-phone video and snaps. The point-of-view wanders, like a “found footage” venture that abandons that weary conceit early on.

But they’re onto something here, a story very much of its moment. “Low Life” taps into the ugly, child-abusing zeitgeist. It toys with the “cops haven’t figured out which side they’re on” paranoia, and insane “Pizzagate” endgame of crazed vigilantism.

It’s never shy about turning the camera around on the self-righteous and suggesting “Let he who is without a sketchy side cast the first stone.”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, pedophilia subject, profanity

Cast: Wes Dunlap, Lucas Neff, Lucy Urbano, Hunter Milano and Jake Dvorsky

Credits: Directed by Tyler Michael James, scripted by Hunter Milano and Noah Rotter. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:44

A tattooed, pink-haired punk scrambles onto an inter-city bus, still bleeding from his latest piercing — a bullet wound to the gut.

It’ll be all right, Freddy assures his fevered pal JJ. Meet me at the bus station in Lake City. He’s got the drugs. He’s got the cash. He has a pistol.

But the low-heat panic in both their voices rises an octave when they figure out that Mac, their third musketeer, has been grabbed by the gangster Vic. Freddy fills the night with frantic phone calls from his two phones — to JJ, to buck him up, dodging incoming threats from Vic, begging for help from his baby mama and his ex-con Dad.

Whatever JJ’s prospects, Freddy is in a panic that this bus ticket from (I guess) Jacksonville to Lake City to Valdosta and Cairo (Ga.) is only going “One Way.”

A lean, somewhat tense going-into-shock blur of a film noir, “One Way” is measurably simpler and better than director Andrew Baird’s previous outing behind the camera, a cheesy “Blade Runner” impersonation titled “Zone 414.”

The entire story’s basically on a bus, with hazy flashbacks, Freddy (Colson Baker) bleeding and calling his nurse/ex Christine (Meagan Holder) who takes his calls while racing down hospital corridors pushing a gurney to an O.R., calming biz partner JJ (Luis Da Silva Jr.) down as he chases the bus in his Camaro for this planned meet-up/pick-up, or that one.

The calls to a beat-up trailer in BFE, Georgia aren’t getting Freddy anywhere. His old man (Kevin Bacon) is a drawling ex-con with no driving privileges and just enough knowledge of the nature of Freddy’s trouble to be worthy of his nickname — “Ass—e.”

And then there’s the deadly Vic (Drea de Matteo), closing in on them all, torturing JJ and Freddy’s third partner and hellbent on getting her drugs and her money back.

But things aren’t nearly so cut-and-dried on the bus. There’s this pesky girl (Storm Reid) who seems to have her own phone, but who keeps begging to borrow one of Freddy’s to call some guy she’s traveling to meet.

“How OLD are you?” gets a lot of different answer from her every time she opens her mouth.

At one stop, a stranger gets on (Travis Fimmel) and gets in Freddy’s business. As Freddy drifts in and out of shock, he keeps muttering this mantra, sometimes on the phone to his ex, sometimes to himself.

“I’m doin’ this for Lily.”

Baird, working from a Ben Conway screenplay, keeps things basic and still manages to struggle with coherence and clarity. Mumbled dialogue, hallucinations of characters we can’t quite identify, the torrent of phone calls and the “complications” presented by the shifting dynamics on board the bus make this movie more “lean” than “clean.”

Baker, aka “Machine Gun Kelly,” has basically two notes to play all the way through this, which renders the performance “authentic” without being all that compelling. Yeah, we know Freddy “took something that doesn’t belong to me.” We kind of want more than that, more than him getting involved in the drama the girl who keeps borrowing his phone generates.

“One Way” takes on the tenor of a droning bus trip, with little flashes of fear, dreamed accounts of how he got here and long, fuzzy and dull interludes between them.

Yes, it’s better than “Zone 414.” Baird, and his sometimes muse Fimmel, are heading in the right direction. But this more tight if a tad tedious thriller doesn’t quite finish the trip or seal the deal.

Rating: R, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Colson Baker, Drea de Matteo, Storm Reid, Meagan Holder, Travis Fimmel and Kevin Bacon

Credits: Directed by Andrew Baird, scripted by Ben Conway. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

It begins with a surprisingly touching tragedy, morphs into a cute story of hope and then hurls itself headlong into a nasty take on one corner of the animal rights debate.

“Gigi & Nate” is what happens when you round up a good cast and a pretty polished director for a screenplay that turns away from its strengths, takes a swing at “important,” and misses.

British actor Charlie Rowe of the recent “Vanity Fair” adaptation for TV stars as Nate, a Nashville teen who takes that one fateful dive into a sink hole pond near the family’s N.C. mountains vacation rental. He didn’t hit the water wrong, or hit rocks once he went in. A virus in the water has him sick and feverish within hours, diagnosed with encephalitis leading to quadriplegia within days.

His mother (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden), father (Jim Belushi), sisters (Josephine Langford, Hannah Riley) and grandma (Diane Ladd) are distraught. College, “a normal life,” it’s all off the table, now. Nate, weepy and wailing in pain in a wheelchair, takes a shot at ending things by the means at hand — the family koi pond.

“I don’t want to be more of a burden to everyone than I already am,” he says later.

“Hope” comes from rehab and physical therapy. And “help” arrives in the form of a service animal, skittish and very smart Gigi, a capuchin monkey whom we saw rescued from a neglectful traveling petting zoo near Joshua Tree, California in the film’s opening scene. Years of training later, she’s here to be a companion, be a responsibility, be a friend and fetch the paintbrush for Nate’s paint-with-his-teeth art or grab something off the supermarket shelf.

And that’s where the new problems begin. Nate and Gigi are already social media darlings and the subject of debate. That supermarket visit turns everything ugly and public as an animal rights activist (Tara Summers) rallies her troops against the guy stuck in a wheelchair for life.

I’ve liked other films by Northern Irish director Nick Hamm. “The Journey” was good, “Killing Bono” wasn’t terrible even if “Godsend” was. But a quick online search reveals how divisive this issue is, with the countries where capuchin live in the wild banning their capture and being kept as pets, and other cities, states and countries banning primate pets for health, safety and moral reasons.

A lot of diseases make the leap from primate to primate from monkeys and apes.

Any movie that takes a stand on this issue as a major subtext is wading into a no-win scenario.

Producer turned screenwriter David Hudgens and Hamm leave all subtlety out of their depictions of shrill, fanatical activists (In Nashville?), and undercut their take on this issue in the process.

What savvy animal rights organization would go public attacking the service animal of a kid in a wheelchair? The optics are terrible, and other targets would be an easier sell to the public.

Harden, Rowe and Belushi are excellent, with Zoe Margaret Colletti doing the best she can with the cute but wholly illogical (We meet her as a local in rural NC, and she turns up in Nashville.) and under-scripted love interest part. Langford has a nice scene that underscores the weight such a calamity puts on an entire family and its future.

And Ladd cranks up another drawling, no-nonsense granny turn.

But all that goes for naught as the third act stumbles into a trap of the myopic screenwriter’s own making.

Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and language.

Cast: Charlie Rowe, Marcia Gay Harden, Zoe Margaret Colletti,
Josephine Langford, Hannah Riley, Tara Summers, Jim Belushi and Diane Ladd.

Credits: Directed by Nick Hamm, scripted by David Hudgens. A Roadside Attractions/Hulu release.

Running time: 1:54

“Simchas & Sorrows” is a New York dramedy built around a Catholic-Jewish relationship, an unfortunately drab little movie entirely too tentative for its own good.

Its “edge” is the call for one member of the couple to “convert,” something the movie pokes at with trigger phrases like “chosen people,” “Palestine,” “tribal unity” and “fear of diluting our heritage,” which, any way you say it, can’t help but sound racist.

But writer-director Genevieve Adams’ script backs away from that edge when it counts, and can’t find a laugh to save its or her life.

Throw in the fact that veteran bit player Adams makes herself the lead, and probably realizes only now that she’s too inexpressive and bland to carry a picture, even her own.

Yes, that photo above aptly captures her performance.

She plays Agnes, who even as a child, pondered the difference between Catholicism and Judaism when she figured out that hey, Jesus was a Jew, after all.

As an adult, aspiring actress/aspiring playwright/elementary school drama teacher and sometime Zumba instructor Agnes finds out she’s pregnant the day her beau, Levi (Thomas McDonnell) throws a “surprise” proposal party, with his family pouring onto their roof-patio, all “Mazel tovs” and “Oy veys.”

“Simcha & Sorrows” leans into the Hebrew and Yiddish exclamations and Jewish kvetching and kvelling stereotypes. A few of the attempted laughs come from pregnant actress Agnes trying to “fit in” and deploy such words like a pro to her fiance, her Jewish agents, her husband and in-laws and the rabbi (Hari Nef) who leads their “Journey into Judaism” conversion class.

Those jokes, like too much of this sad-mouthed rom-com, fall flat.

The potential for real conflict is introduced and basically abandoned as the script struggles to figure out what it wants to say. The problem is, one suspects, that figuring out what one CANNOT say ate up a lot of time in the writing and financing as well.

Testy debates in their “Journey” class cut off with invocations of “anti-Semitism” and “The Holocaust.” This is promising ground for a debate between an atheist, in Agnes’ case, or others “marrying into” the faith, and “the tribe,” almost uniformly depicted as dogmatic, uncompromising and thin-skinned.

John Cullum charms in a couple of scenes as Agnes’ aged ex-Broadway hoofer granddad. He even sings.

Nefi, who has played her share of rabbis, almost makes this one funny.

And Annelise Cepero sets off a few sparks as an obnoxious influencer/brand ambassador and “healer,” converting so that she’s allowed to marry Levi’s equally obnoxious brother.

The “Simcha” in the title translates to “joy” or “joys.” It was also the name of the late Jewish screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s production company.

But “Simchas & Sorrows” doesn’t have much of either.

The conflict is watered-down, the picture has no urgency or pacing, the “sparks” are in short supply, and Adams’ deadpan take on Agnes may play to her strengths, or be the only note she knows and we can’t tell the difference.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Genevieve Adams, Thomas McDonnell, Hari Nef, Luke Forbes, Annalise Cepero, Chip Zien and Johyn Cullum.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Genevieve Adams. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:57

This trailer shows off a seriously funny, and “experienced” cast — Judy Greer, Johnny Knoxville, Paul Reiser and Keegan-Michael Key — and a borderline edgy premise, a sort of “Full House” hit of the past re-launched with the same players, and a nasty, sexual, always-do-the-wrong-thing-THIS-time ethos.

Sept. 20. Color me intrigued.