Movie Nation

Writer-director Neil LaBute makes a mockery of film noir in his new thriller “Out of the Blue.” It’s a lampoon of the classic femme fatale stories that define the genre — from “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” to this film’s closest antecedent, “Body Heat.”

The filmmaker who has dabbled in and sent-up misogyny (“In the Company of Men”) and racism (“Lakeview Terrace”) goes glib and tacky with a story of Rhode Island wrongdoing set in motion by an unhappily married, abused rich woman played by Diane Kruger.

The sex scenes have a wacky unreality about them — in a reading room at a library, on a rock in a park. There are dozens of pointless time inter-titles — “Three Days Later,” “The Next Wednesday” — waving a red flag over all of this.

“I’m not being serious, folks!”

And he cast Jack Nicholson’s kid as the “Postman” sap, the ex-con lured by a sexy older woman into a situation we see coming a mile off, which LaBute doesn’t even try to make realistic because the genre is, on its face, kind of laughable. To him, I guess.

Ray Nicholson is the fitness freak Connor, a librarian in Twin Oaks, Rhode Island. Kruger is the blonde he sees walking out of the sea after a morning swim. He is goofily enamored. She is guarded and coy.

“Fortune favors the bold,” she scolds him after a near flirtation.

When she drops by the library later, in sunglasses hiding a black eye, he is hooked.

But Connor isn’t just some naive, mild-mannered librarian. We figure that out when we meet his abrasive, bullying probation officer (Hank Azaria, terrific). The guy plainly isn’t interested in helping his parolee settle into a new life and forget the past. He wears a windbreaker with PROBATION in large, alarming letters emblazoned on the back. In public.

Do such jackets even exist?

The probie creates scenes and humiliates Connor because he can. And Connor, smitten by the lonely, battered and rich stepmother and her plight, pursued by the pretty and more age-appropriate librarian Kim (Gia Crovatin), replaces the secret his probie won’t let him keep with a bigger one. He begins a (somewhat) torrid affair.

LaBute is messing with us, first scene to last, with his obvious foreshadowing, the way Connor steers Kruger’s Marilyn to “The Postman Always Rings Twice” on the library’s shelves, his mention of the town’s name, “Twin Oaks, the name of the cafe” in the novel and movies made from it.

As to Marilyn’s “problem?”

“Maybe I can be the solution.”

The general idea here is a sound one, taking the conventions of a celebrated genre and sending them up. But LaBute’s incessant grasping for laughs out of “The Next Tuesday” and “Sometime After That” titles is instantly cloying.

Kruger plays Marilyn straight down the middle — a little Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” an attempt at Lange sensuality in the Nicholson/Jessica Lange version of “Postman,” a smidgen of Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat.” She’s adequate in the part, which is inadequate for the movie as Nicholson-the-Younger is out of his depth here, not really giving us much to hang onto.

Connor needs to be gullible but dangerous, his naivete and passion something we connect with, his secrets sinister. Nicholson gives us a couple of notes, not the full sonata. Without reading his bio beforehand, I didn’t make the resemblance connection and kept wondering “Who IS this guy and why’d LaBute entrust him with his movie?”

But the film’s bigger flaws are all on the director who cast him, a filmmaker who keeps trying to have his noir and mock it, too.

Rating:  R for sexual content, language and some violence.

Cast: Diane Kruger, Ray Nicholson, Gia Crovatin, Chase Sui Wonders and Hank Azaria.

Scripted and directed by Neil LaBute. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:44

An indie interfaith romance with no one I recognize in it. Sept. 16, kosher or not, here it comes.

Oct. 18, this documentary, narrated by PBS favorite Peter Coyote, streams and promises…a lot more UFO hearsay?

Lotta sizzle and “testimony” endorsements in this trailer.

Sept. 20, from Yellow Veil and 1091. Trailer doesn’t make the sale, but maybe.

It’s entirely possible that the universe was trying to tell Robert something, and he missed the traumatic and obvious sign it gave him in the opening of “Funny Pages.”

Robert, played by Daniel Zolghadri, is a cocky, indulged high school cartoonist with dreams of Mad Magazine glory. We meet the hero of our story at a mentoring session in which his cartoonist/cartoon historian high school teacher (Stephen Adly Guirgis) has praised Robert to the high heavens and told him he’s “already at a professional level” with his drafting, artwork and comic strip/comic book wit.

“College?” It could very well “ruin” him.

But as that session comes to an awkward close, Robert causes his mentor’s gruesome death. Maybe this adult world of adult cartoon humor, the people who create it and the people who consume it, isn’t the right path to go down.

“Funny Pages” follows Robert as he follows that “forget college” advice and his dream, gets in trouble with the law, finds work and gets a dose of supporting himself on a pittance. He will live through his art, feeding on the the Fellini grotesques of his corner of New Jersey. Wild hair, exaggerated noses or ears, pot bellies and bizarre personality quirks and perversions in real life are fodder for his art.

He could be the next R. Crumb, and he’s sure of it. Almost everybody he meets encourages his “Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant” level genius.

Bit player turned first time feature writer-director Owen Kline takes us into a “Ghost World” of the comic book store of pop culture lore, filled with oddballs, obsessives, the obese and the acned, the whitest white kids — and adults — you know.

Kline leans into the stereotypes and leads us into the darker recesses of lonerdom as Princeton-pampered Robert dismisses his parents (Maria Dizzia and Josh Pais), drops out of high school and moves into a hellish dump of an apartment in Trenton.

Robert rudely dismisses the crude efforts of his fellow comic-obsessive and would-be artist pal Miles (Miles Emmanuel) and starts selling off his comic collection to supplement his two part time jobs — at The Garage Comics store and as a transcriptionist for the lawyer (Marcia DeBonis) who kept him out of jail.

And he shows off his work and the pornographic “Tijuana bibles” to the creepy confirmed bachelors (Michael Townsend Wright, Cleveland Thomas) he rents a bed from, judging that this is exactly the sort of stuff they’d be into. Eventually he meets someone new to idolize, a former comic book industry insider (Matthew Maher).

Eighteen is not too young to learn the lesson, “Never meet your heroes.”

Kline goes for cringe-worthy characters and cringy laughs of the R. Crumb variety, and Maher, a veteran supporting player often typecast in scary or instant-impression “fringe” character roles (“Gone Baby Gone,” “Wonder Wheel,” “Marriage Story”) is the source of most of those intensely discomfiting chuckles.

This “Wallace” fellow, a former artist who used to work in “color separating” in the inking of comic books, is eccentric beyond eccentric, bitter and wrapped too tight. He becomes Maher’s tour de force. Wallace’s insecurities are many, his “triggers,” the things that set him off, many more.

Kline presents us with a coming-of-age story, or an artist finding his voice tale, and never quite delivers either. As an actor, he once worked with Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”), and “Funny Pages” has a bit of Baumach’s funny-not-funny ear mixed in with Terry Zwigoff’s “Ghost World” “harmless” screwballs-who-might be dangerous vibe.

He’s found a fascinating subculture to take us into, settled on a hero to take on a quest through it. And then he kind of lost the thread, if not his nerve. Whatever the universe was telling Kline, the message or warning got a little muddled in translation.

Rating: R for crude sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief violent images.

Cast: Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Maria Dizzia, Miles Emanuel, Josh Pais, Marcia DeBonis, Michael Townsend Wright, Cleveland Thomas, Jr., Stephen Adly Guirgis and Ron Rifkin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Owen Kline. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:26

A November release scripted and directed by the man whose story it tells, Elegance Bratton.

This might be something to add to the tsunami of bad to not-that-good news rolling over the dominant streaming service.

This morning I was notified by email that Netflix had authorized someone else to change the email address and phone number allowing them to change MY account to their log-in.

I had paused Netflix a month ago, and all of a sudden, I have multiple charges from them on my credit card, obviously due to some MAJOR hole in Netflix’s account security.

Anybody else running into this? This sort of data breach usually is spread far and wide, and while it’s not absolutely certain that this was on Netflix’s end, that seems to be where the fishing is going on. A

And it’s been going on for years.

Let’s get an early EARLY jump on Halloween by breaking the rules. Let’s put “The Day After Halloween” out in August. Just like “Easter Sunday!”

It’s a no budget indie horror comedy that makes “breaking the rules” one of its guiding principles, after all.

Characters aren’t identified by name. The narrative is chopped up into literally dozens of scenes inter–titled with a countdown clock — “11 hours, 23 minutes” before and “two hours” etc after, with a whole subplot/flashback set roughly “2 years, 3 months and 24 days before.”

We see how characters meet, or preps for a years-before Halloween party near the local drive-in on a couple of timelines. But again, characters aren’t identified — just a couple of them, and only in an imaginary police interrogation they discuss as they’re about to dismember a dead woman identified as “The Corpse.”

This is of course comic, as The Corpse (Aimee Fogelman) may have “bite marks” you-know-where. Then again, maybe she doesn’t, a matter for comic debate. She’s dead in the bathtub. And even though she’s the long-time girlfriend of one of the slovenly louts — the one NOT nicknamed “Fat John McClane” in a “Die Hard” joke with a hint of “Do some sit-ups” built in — we do not hear her name or pick up on any remorse or grief for her passing, although there is some hesitation in pursuing the course of “chopping her up.”

The movie doesn’t name any women. They are sex objects who are bizarrely compliant, this being rural Pennsylvania, basically here to serve male characters with little that explains their pairing up. Well, aside from the director saying “She’s hot, let’s hire her.” And one is supposed to be a vampire, so what she’ll got through to get a little neck could entail a heavy dose of demeaning.

“Misogynistic?” Extremely so. But it’s a boys’ movie and a comedy so let’s not dwell on that.

What star and screenwriter Danny Schluck, director Chad Ostrom & Co. were going for is a kind of 30ish “Clerks” set in a backwater drive-in.

That could work.

Hayes (Brandon Delany) sort of runs it, his buddy Addison (Schluck) sort of helps. The frame of the story is a closing-for-the-season last hurrah of horror movies (35mm cannisters of “Night of the Living Dead” and “From Dusk Til Dawn” are unloaded) at the old Mahoning, with heavy drinking, Oct. 31 costumes and one dorky customer who doesn’t seem to get in the spirit of things.

Over many timelines pointing to “The Day After” that particular Halloween, we see how Hayes met The Corpse, efforts to unroll plastic sheeting to prevent damage to the carpet before a previous Halloween rave at Addison’s inherited farmhouse, the deadpan reaction of the two bros to finding The Corpse Girlfriend in the tub and a lot of goofy interactions with others and random male-bonding discussions of women, their sex lives and such.

Addison, aptly insulted with the “Die Hard” reference, prefers younger women.

“Who should I be preying on, older women? They’re brutal beasts fueled by white wine and a lifetime of pilates.”

Some of the one-liners land, a few scenes play as half-amusing.

But the chop-chop-choppy narrative trick of scores of “this is 4 hours after the death” or “two years” before it wrecks the flow of the story, such as it is.

There’s probably some heroic yarn to how hard this was to make, and how long it took. It isn’t just a haircut or beard here and there that suggests “they must’ve worked on this for years.” Maybe not. Maybe it’s just bad lighting and unflattering photography that makes characters almost unrecognizably different in later scenes.

You kind of root for scruffy little no-budget horror pictures like this to come off. But often as not, you’re cheerleading in vain.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Danny Schluck, Aimee Fogelman, Brandon Delany, Victoria Meade, Joe Lazenby

Credits: Directed by Chad Ostrom, scripted by Danny Schluck. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24