Movie Nation

The post Chadwick Bozeman era begins.

Netflix has something that promises to generate a “Stranger Things” level buzz.

Aug. 5.

Oscar winner Helen Mirren and Djimon Hounsou try to class up the most childish and lighthearted superhero franchise’s second installment.

Yeah, cutting the trailer to an Eminem tune gives him “edge.” Not a bad niche to go for, kid friendliest comic book adaptations. Create a new generation of fans?

“Shazam! 2” comes out Christmas.

Wincott sounds like a lifetime of hard living and bad omens singing it in the movie. Here’s that hepcat Sheb Wooley showing us how it sounded originally.

March, 2023.

“Nobody can kill everyone. Not even you.”

Wanna bet? I think he’s still pissed about the dog. Just a theory.

Fishburne and Reddick and Donnie Yen and Bill Skarsgård and Clancy Brown and Rina Sawayama and Hiroyuki Sanada Get-a-Wash-and-Cut-Keanu star.

Westerner weighing in on this Around the World with Netflix thriller from Indonesia. Guys, maybe titling your picture, or letting Netflix retitle it “Ben & Jody” isn’t the most butch move you could have made.

It’s like titling a macho, male-centric North American thriller “Jamie & Todd.” Or, you know, “Roger.”

But if your heroes are an office-bound activist and a barista with just enough toughness to get by, I guess that works.

The third film in a martial arts/knife-fight series called “Filosofi Kopi,” it’s as topical as deforestation, as focused on a “Big Martial Arts” finish as any Thai “Ong Bok” movie.

Sure, it drags a bit in the middle acts, and even shifts point of view for a while, away from the barista Beni and his occasionally-weeping pal, Jody. But the Battle Royale finale is fun.

Beni (Chicco Jerikho) is a coffee grower in the jungle, formerly a famed barista in the big city (Jakarta). He’s come “home” to “The District” to help the locals fight Big Lumber takeover of their lands, to stop the widespread deforestation taking place everywhere unbridled capitalism has its way.

The barricades he and his fellow activists man are assaulted by club-wielding corporate goons. And before the night is out, Beni will be assaulted again, and taken hostage mid-call.

Jody (Rio Dewanto) leaves the comfort of the city for “the jungle,” where “We’re all alone here,” (in Indonesian with English subtitles). He has no sooner taken the advice to “Watch your back” when his nosing around leads to him being “taken” as well.

Next thing he knows, the “city boy” and the country barista have their reunion in a cage with over a dozen older men. Ben & Jody and a bunch of small village elders are now part of the slave workforce that Jakarta Pacific (I made that up) uses for its path-clearing, before coming in to clear cut.

They plot their escape. It involves Beni’s A-rated coffee, and “Their guard is down any time they watch a badminton game.” But getting out, being grievously wounded in the process, only leads them to a village where the archer-women (Hana Malasan, Aghiny Haque) are in charge, and hellbent on freeing their elders.

Veteran heavy and Javanese fight choreographer Yayan Ruhian is our jungle villain, a man who would kill — literally — for a good cuppa Joe. But will our pacifist, ethical protestors and the women determined to fight back “ethically” go that far?

Director and co-writer Angga Dwimas Sasongko, who directed the mini-series that started this franchise, seems impatient to get through the preliminaries and get to the Big Brawl. There are dead patches and much of what puts these two dangerous-if-they-escape-and-tell-the-world characters in slavery seems perfunctory and arbitrary.

Not only can they never be allowed to leave alive, they aren’t stripped of all of their possessions when they arrive. Each finds himself with a neat wristwatch, perhaps a bargaining chip for later?

I sense wirework in some of the action that makes up the Big Finish, an attempted rescue at the lumber camp. Characters isolate and pair-up with a foe, with daggers and fists and machetes the preferred weapons. Pistols and AK-47s are what you use when you’re sure you’ve lost.

The finish isn’t bad. But too much of what “Ben & Jody” go through to get there is seriously decaffeinated, I must say.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, gun violence, profanity

Cast: Chicco Jerikho, Rio Dewanto, Hana Malasan, Aghniny Haque and Yayan Ruhian.

Credits: Directed by Angga Dwimas Sasongko, scripted by Angga Dwimas Sasongko and M. Nurman Wardi, based on characters created by Dewi Lestari. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

I was chatting with a young blood/employee at the Florida marina where I live, and he started kvetching about his indifference to wearing Coppertone, Banana Boat or my choice in sunblock, Neutragena.

“Young blood,” says I. “Don’t forget the sunscreen.”

Young Blood asked Siri to play it, for I am an old salt, wise in the ways of the sea. And rays.

Yes, a generation or more has come up never hearing this Chicago columnist’s “graduation speech” turned into a 1999 pop hit by the director of “Moulin Rouge” and future director of “Elvis.”

It was fate that made me hear it and need it the first summer I went through on La Florida.

Mary Schmich wrote it. But Baz gave it a cultural moment via this slow jam.

This is the greatest public service our man Baz will ever perform. The damned thing ought to be played on every radio station, especially in the summer months (year round in Florida).

Never heard it? Here it is. Remember it? Share it with a young blood you know.

See “Elvis ” And don’t forget the sunscreen.

Sometimes you wonder if every over-40 white dude in America needs Lil Rel Howery as a confidante, the best friend willing to be the one to tell Your Average White Man “You’re outta your damned mind” when the need arises, the guy who points out the obvious.

“Chuck, this is creepy as f—!”

That last line makes him the surrogate for the audience, snappishly trying to set straight Patton Oswalt’s estranged-dad desperate to maintain contact with his son in “I Love My Dad.” Father Chuck crosses all SORTS of lines to make that happen in this cringe-worthy comedy about a Dad catfishing his own kid.

Let’s ignore the fact that co-worker Jimmy (Howery) is the one who suggested creating a fake social media profile so that Chuck can get around his depressed, once-suicidal son’s “blocking” him. Chuck takes that tip, cyber-stalks a cute, friendly waitress (Claudia Sulewski) he’s met — once — steals her photos and invents an irresistible “friend” request.

It’s what Chuck has to do to maintain the illusion that takes this dark James Morosini laugher into “creepy” as you-know-what territory.

An opening montage of voice mail messages serves up Chuck’s parade of beg-off excuses and lies for not being there for this, that or the other big moment in son Franklin’s (Morosini) life — birthdays, graduations, promised vacations. These have piled up into the biggest grievance imaginable.

However supportive his mom (Amy Landecker) is, 20something Franklin has struggled with a staggering depression. His absentee Dad makes a convenient target, and when Franklin “shares” his decision to cut off contact with him at his suicide survivors support group, there is no pushback.

Chuck, they and we take for granted, is toxic for his son, who recently tried to kill himself. Only Chuck, struggling to get by across the state line in Maine, sees things differently. Well into his 40s, stuck in a cubicle job, his ex hates him and he’s dating a co-worker (Rachel Dratch) who’d rather swap sexts and phone come-ons because when it comes to sex, “You’re not good a it.”

His kid, just now getting over “thoughts of self-harm,” cutting him off? Chuck can’t bear it. That’s how the whole “Becca” thing online gets started. Whatever the ethics of it, Chuck can see a net positive in “her,” bucking up his son — who never learned to drive, has no job or thought of how to get one — giving him confidence and advice under the guise of this beautiful age-appropriate woman.

And if she suggests he not be “so hard” on his dad? That’s a win win.

Of course Franklin is flattered by this attention, and that turns to “smitten.” Cue Jimmy.

“This is INCEST, Chuck.”

Actor turned actor-writer-director Morosini, looking for something edgier than his threesome-goes-wrong outing “Threesomething,” takes things to the next level in passing off “I Love My Dad” as something that “actually happened” in an opening title. That’s neither here nor there.

The clever touch here is having Franklin imagine, in his mind, Becca actually there with him as they’re having these chats, which take a turn from seeing her everywhere (inside the supermarket refrigeration case) to “Can we video chat?,” “Can I call?”, “I’m coming to see you” to “I’m kissing you.”

And Chuck is seeing these “creepy” encounters the way they really are, especially the kissing part.

The best bit? A frantic driving-while-texting (typos included) moment with Sulewski forced to act-out the misspellings and botched grammar to lovesick…and confused, Franklin.

It’s a cut, cringey gimmick, and it’d be nice to say “I Love My Dad” transcends that and finds something interesting to say about fathers and sons and “growing up,” even later in life. It doesn’t.

But Oswalt is properly perplexed, stricken, devious and amusingly careless as this lifelong liar, someone who with a long track record of cheating to take the easy way out. Morosini is convincingly morose. Dratch brings the funny, as always.

Winsome newcomer Sulewski is alternately sweet, the smile that launched a thousand catfishes, and real — a working class 20something who may have a limited horizon, but who has already had to learn how to brush off unwanted attention.

And Lil Rel, perfecting that incredulous glare behind those thick glasses, makes the most of another “Black voice of reason in the hero’s ear” role. I wonder if he’s accepting “friend” requests?

Rating: R for sexual content and language.

Cast: Patton Oswalt, James Morosini, Claudia Sulewski, Rachel Dratch, Amy Landecker and Lil Rel Howery.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Morosini. A Magnolia (Aug. 5) release.

Running time: 1:36

Remember how cute it was that Chris Pratt’s hero in “Guardians of the Galaxy” totes around a mix tape from his late mother? Planet to planet, stolen ship to shoot-out — all set to tunes like “Hooked on a Feeling” or “I’m Not in Love” or “Cherry Bomb,” “Go All the Way,” etc.” heard on Peter Quill’s Sony Walkman?

Sure, it felt like pandering to a fanboy demo trapped in 1970s classic rock and pop, but it was adorable, right?

That’s what those hacks the Russos were trying to tap into by having a sickly little girl obsess over a tune by Mark Lindsay, formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders, in “The Gray Man.” After leaving his group, the solo Lindsay had a couple of anthemic hits — big arrangements, soaring melodies, power chords with horns like “Arizona” and the song used in the movie — this one, “Silver Bird.”

It’s not explained, a song that predates the child, the child’s parents and almost predates her uncle, an ex-spook played by Billy Bob Thornton.

Why does she like it? No idea. How obvious is this “Guardians” pilfering? Pretty obvious. Even the fact that the Russos went to Lindsay, whose tunes turned up in Tarantino’s latest and “Licorice Pizza,” seems like something they “lifted” from their betters.

How cheesy is the tune?

Well, maybe little Claire’s uncle was into motorcycles. Maybe he remembered “Silver Bird” was sold as a jingle, almost straight off, to a Japanese motorcycle company trying to make early ’70s inroads into the American market.

“Silver Bird, won’t you fly me a-waaaaay” became “Yama-HAaaaaaa, today is the day.”

Stupid memory, remembering that. Stupid movie, punching in that ear worm. Stupid Youtube. They even have the Yamaha commercial!

I must’ve skipped past this trailer three or four times figuring “just for some new incarnation of the game, meh.”

Wishful thinking. Because then I remembered something about the movie being in the works, Chris Pine being REALLY anxious to get another “Star Trek” film in, and Michelle Rodriguez getting another badass turn in between “Fast/Furious” installments, etc.

High Grant, Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, that “Hamilton” fellow from “The Gray Man”…

It looks kind of fun, in a stunningly cheesy game adaptation way. Aged cheese by the time it comes out next year.

Check it out.