Movie Nation

“Finding You,” a romantic comedy about two-mismatched Americans in Ireland, is intended as a dessert dish — light and sweet. But think of this trifling comedy as a not-quite-traditional trifle built on top of stale angel food cake. No matter how you dress it up and toss characters, complications and “secrets” at it, the stale angel food cake is all you taste.

Rose Reid, who starred in writer-director Brian Baugh’s “Welcome Home to Christmas,” and  Jedidiah Goodacre, whose “Salem Witch Trials” name was better suited to TV’s “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” are bland co-stars who set off little in the way of sparks.

So, let’s dress things up. Finley Sinclair (Rose) is an aspiring violinist who failed to audition her way into the Manhattan Conservatory. No worries, she’ll spend a semester abroad in Ireland, just like her brother did before her. #problemsoftheprivileged.

Finley has a SECRET. And that secret has its own secret, drawings leading her…somewhere.

Beckett Rush (Goodacre) is the rising young star of a series of “Dawn of the Dragon” sword-and-sorcery romances, all filmed in Ireland. They “meet cute” (not even close) in First Class on the flight over. Beckett’s a tabloid favorite.

And Beckett has a SECRET.

One of Finley’s tasks as a student in Ireland is to befriend and comfort a bitter old woman (Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave). Her Cathleen Sweeney has a SECRET.

Then, there’s the tipsy fiddler down’tha pub — Patrick Bergin, adding twinkling and diddly aye music to his repertoire.

Might fiddler Seamus have…a SECRET?

Sorry to taunt the writer-director over this, but bashing him about the ears over the ridiculous coincidences, inability to find an original laugh and making the lovely Irish scenery and tourist sites look as drab and bland as his leading characters would just be mean.

The silly movie within a movie is seriously half-arsed, with tabloid mating intrigues between Beckett and his co-star (Katherine McNamara) “massaged” by Beckett’s agent (Tom Everett Scott). There’s a “big dance” coming, where every couple in tiny Carlingford claims is where they met their true love.

That plays with lovelorn teen Emma (Saoirse-Monica Jackson, trying WAY too hard), Finley’s “sister” for the summer as she’s the daughter of the B & B owners who put her up. But Finley, whose answer to every early Beckett (chaste) come-on is “I know your type,” has another agenda.

Still, Ireland may take hold of her, put the “diddly aye” life in her fiddle playing and the spring in her romantic step.

This picture is so contrived that the family (Fiona Bell and Ciaran McMahon) who accept exchange student Finley are not only the same folks who took in her brother years before, but they have to announce that they’ve just inherited this B & B (or the money to buy it).

That makes for more potential mischief and more coincidences in the never-ending parade of them Baugh shovels out.

“Potential” is basically what this movie squanders.

The supporting players are more interesting than the leads, who never make us care about them or root for them. And it’s fascinating to watch a brilliant talent like Redgrave and a game hoofer like Bergin try to lift this dead weight all by themselves.

They can’t.

MPA Rating: PG for language and thematic elements

Cast: Rose Reid,  Jedidiah Goodacre, Tom Everett Scott, Patrick Bergin, Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave and Patrick Bergin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brian Baugh. A Roadsides Attraction release.

Running time: 1:55 (too bloody long)

The best film indie icon John Sayles ever made (sorry “Lone Star,” “Secaucus Seven,” “Lianna” fans) was a brilliant period piece about a miner’s strike answered with corporate and state violence — 1987’s “Matewan.”

It is a classic on every level — labor relations history vividly brought to life, period perfect detail, a gorgeous, lived-in color palette. And that cast.

Before he became an Oscar winner, here was Chris Cooper, introduced to the world as he played a miner.

Mary McDonnell went on to star in “Dances with Wolves.”

Sayles favorite David Straithairn would leap from his iconic turn as flinty, miner-sympathizing police chief Sid Hatfield (of THOSE Hatfields) to mainstream Hollywood, films like “L.A. Confidential,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” an Oscar nomination. He’s the male lead in the similarly indie “Nomadland,” a wonderful actor who is great in everything he plays.

And James Earl Jones has one of his best roles playing an old miner who doesn’t suffer bigots, newfangled gadgets or Baldwin-Felts mine-company goons gladly.

The real Matewan is so damned mountainous and remote “they have to pipe the sunshine in” as the old Appalachian joke goes. So they filmed the movie in the more accessible Thurmond, W.Va. But some friends and I are checking out the REAL Matewan today, remembering the UMW history and the battle. Here are some pictures of it as it looks today

Tip…if you go, take the walking tour offered by Jim Baldwin, descended from the founder of the private police force “detectives” of Baldwin Felts.

.

The “lost lottery ticket” comedy has a rich (ahem) history in the cinema. Ask anyone of a film they recall revolving around a lost, stolen or “gave the winner a heart attack” (“Waking Ned Devine”) lotto and you might get any of a dozen answers.

“Uptown Saturday Night” is the best American comedy hanging on that plot thread.

The first movie to use the ticket to riches plot was made by silent pioneer Al Christie in 1912. By coincidence, that’s the year Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale was born. He wrote the story that “Doua lozuri,” first filmed in 1957, was based on.

“Two Lottery Tickets” is a Romanian remake of that Eastern Bloc Era farce. Two down-on-their-luck guys — well, three, after some haggling — pick the winning numbers, revel in their good fortune and then realize that the “bumbag” (fanny pack, still a “thing” in Romania, apparently) it was in was stolen.

This “Doua lozuri” is a rare bird, a comedy from Romania that doesn’t have Borat making a mockery of the place, a little slice of life of a country seldom seen on Western screens. Paul Negoescu’s deadpan film finds a few grins as it slowly gets up to speed, and manages a fine finish that makes it worth recommending.

Dinel (Dorian Boguta) is a somewhat hapless auto mechanic/body shop guy who’s probably been bullied all his life. We see a customer refuse to pay him for his work, and we hear him trying to threaten, by phone, the Italian “mafia boss” his wife went off to “work” with, or ran off with (it’s unclear) two years before. Gina he just pleads with.

She says she needs money to buy out her contract and come home, and he can’t pull the cash together.

“I’m penniless!” (in Romanian, with English subtitles).

Fine, his equally broke gambling slacker pal Sile (Dragos Bucur) says. Let’s play the lotto! Their mutual friend Pompiliu (Alexandru Papadopol) may launch into conspiracy theories about government “fixes” on the game, fixes with anti-Semitic overtones, but no matter. They ponder numbers, pool their lei (Romanian currency) and buy a six million Euro jackpot ticket.

But between the time they buy it and the moment they see the numbers they carefully curated listed in the newspaper, Dinel gets muscled by two bullies from Bucharest in the lobby of his apartment building. Giving up his “bumbag” is the price of his escape.

All the two — three, thanks to Pompiliu’s “investment” in the ticket — have to do is figure out who these guys are connected to in the building, track them down to Bucharest and reclaim the bumbag and their riches.

The laughs come from the assorted “types” they chat up, plead with or grill (as their strategy changes) in their door-to-door search in that building.

There’s a little girl who is “very smart, quite right” not to open the door despite their entreaties, the clueless old lady who thinks they’re here to fix the cable, the pot dealers who can’t focus long enough to remember two mugs who might have been customers, a “Gypsy fortune teller” who cons them with her “I know everything,” and a couple of enterprising hookers among them.

The comic possibilities are frankly somewhat richer than the payoff in this slow shuffle of a “romp,” but some of those interviews earn a chuckle.

A revealing running gag is their use of a vintage Dacia sedan that Dinel has restored to sell (also a running gag in classic “Top Gear”).

Cracks about “the things Communism did to this country” and “Jews, Masons” and “Gypsies” pepper Pompiliu’s paranoid rants. But only a guy this knowledgeable of history, this much a film buff and this certain the government is out to “steal” the ticket could pretend to be an interrogator, tracking down two “robbers.”

Reporting the theft to the real cops is a moment fraught with comical cynicism — theirs, because they don’t want to give away that there’s a ticket in the stolen bumbag as they’re sure the police will steal it — and the policewoman’s, who figures they’re wasting her time with this “nothing of value” crime.

“We’ll close the borders,” she deadpans. Then “We’ll let Interpol know. And contact the FBI.“

“Deadpan” is the rule of thumb here, with our three leads shaping distinct character “types” and making them amusingly real — the hapless, gullible coward, the slippery, hustling womanizer (Sile) and the paranoid but well-read bigot (Pompiliu).

They remark about what a “beautiful country this is,” but “all the movies ever show is gloom and doom.” The petty crimes, vice, ethnic small-mindedness and general sense of lingering Soviet decay suggest maybe “Doua lozuri” isn’t any more of a tourism-board-approved comic postcard than anything Borat shows the world.

But it’s cute enough, even if it doesn’t sell anybody other than James May on the charms of a “vintage” Dacia.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Dorian Boguta, Dragos Bucur, Alexandru Papadopol

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Negoescu, based on a short story by  Ion Luca Caragiale .A Dakanalog release.

Running time: 1:25

Michael Keaton is the guy out to…stop her?

Aug 20.

Reviews are embargoed until 7pm Thursday, so stay tuned.

There isn’t much to “2149: The Aftermath,” another entry in the dreaded, cinema-consuming “YA-sci-fi” genre. What’s here is perfectly, if a tad blandly, realized. It’s just that not enough happens.

Editor turned director and co-writer Benjamin Duffield serves up a new version of the post-apocalyptic dystopia, limited in perspective and scope, but myopic, faintly paranoid and competently acted.

An older man tells us this story in voice over, about the days, nights and years when he life in a “sanctuary pod,” cubicle-sized self-contained apartments where people like him stayed in the same chair all day, eating meals, playing games, sending texts to his mom in a separate pod and working — remote control operating front-end loaders for the mining that produces the minerals needed to make sanctuary pods more efficient.

Darwin (Nick Krause) has been in his pod nine years, since “the greatest war of all” killed most of humanity and made the Earth uninhabitable. Any distractions and a disembodied voice barks “Continue working, CONTINUE WORKING NOW.” It’s not like he can afford to not do the job that keeps his air flowing his meals coming and and push-button supersuit (he can shower inside it and never take it off) operating.

But one distraction jolts him. He sees a dog. That’s not enough to get him out of his chair. But a power outage that starts a verbal countdown of his breathable O2 supply does.

“The purification will go off in 15 minutes…Goodbye, Darwin.”

Capitalism. Can’t beat it. But you can figure out it’s been riding that old trope, “the world isn’t as poisonous as they’ve been saying.”

Darwin stands up for the first time in years, wanders outside, and wouldn’t you know it, finds a “family” living in the woods, beyond the reach of the “police cruiser” drones. Molly Parker is the “mother,” but blonde teen Dara (Juliette Gosselin) takes a special interest in this “dweller.”

Can young love blossom amid the gloom? Who or what might stand in the way?

A clever touch, thanks to thought-to-type commands on his computer, Darwin has forgotten how to speak. The other kids in the family have to mimic a keyboard and interpret his “speech.”

The “police cruisers” look suspiciously like assorted specialty conduit-bending tools, or droid soldiers from the “Star Wars” universe.

The threat is “generic,” the “family” lives and entertains itself in “Little House on the Prairie” no-tech fashion, and the passion is dispassionate. The plot is strictly low-stakes, with the characters’ emotions matching that.

Krause (“White Rabbit,” “The Descendants”) makes a sort of Edward Scissorhands impression, which doesn’t give us enough to connect with. Parker is credible, as always. And the Canadian Gosselin (“Kiss Me Like a Lover”) has a moment or two. Actually, just one.

Credit Duffield for making this dystopia feel labor-exploitation lived-in, gutted and depopulated, and the “pod” is pretty impressive.

But the movie with those settings needed some action, man, or a lot more than this.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Nick Krause, Molly Parker, Juliette Gosselin, Jordyn Negri, Daniel DiVenere, and Cassidy Marlene Jaggard.

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Duffield, script by Benjamin Duffield, Robert Higden. A 4Digital Media release.

Running time: 1:17

June 18, we find out.

Scholarship, my advisor in graduate school always reminded us, is a wall you build brick by solitary brick. You add your bricks to those assembled before you and hope the subject is important enough that the next scholar to come along will raise the edifice a little higher than you managed.

Documentary films aren’t usually assembled the same way or looked at as primary scholarship. But the movie “Coup 53,” about the MI-6 and CIA-sponsored Iranian coup of 1953, brings to light startling evidence of Britain’s primary role in the planning of it, something the United Kingdom has been united in denying for nearly 70 years.

As seen in the film, this coup — which eventually saw the Shah of Iran installed as supreme leader with dictatorial powers — was a desperate move engineered by a crumbling British empire clinging to oil fields and a showpiece refinery lost when a democratically elected Iranian government nationalized them.

After a somewhat self-promoting opening that includes a sample of his TED talk about this subject and revealing his personal connections to the story, director Taghi Amirani paints a brief, worshipful picture of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister who insisted that Iran’s resources were Iran’s to exploit, and no longer the property of the British.

“He was the closest Iran came to have its own Mahatma Gandhi!”

A privileged, well-educated member of the lesser nobility, others in the film describe Mosaddegh as “eccentric” (He was as fond of pajamas, and bedside meetings, as Hugh Hefner.), both a social democrat and a “a feudal warlord” who tolerated Iran’s communists only because they were the only organized political party in the peculiar “Persian Empire” vestiges of a British protectorate.

And in 1953, Churchill and his Conservative government, with a little urging from the company that would change its name to British Petroleum after the coup, plotted with the Shah to depose Mosaddegh in an event still recalled with vehement bitterness in Iran.

Making what is largely a documentary about making a documentary, filmmakers Amirani and editor and co-writer Walter Murch use Ali Charmi’s striking animation to recreate the coup itself, and events leading up to it. And they do a splendid job of showing us lots of “bricks” pulled together by others who came before them in building the most complete account of this coup, how it happened and who planned it, and its implications for the history of the Middle East.

The Iranian born and British educated Amirani spent nearly 10 years working on “Coup 53.” As the film shows, there is a whole subculture of Iranian expats who have kept the memory of this outrage alive, preserving archives, newspaper accounts, interviewing on camera survivors, combatants and plotters. Their exhaustive work is generously offered and generously added to the wall Amirani and Murch are building.

Several historians who have written books on the coup and this fateful moment in Middle East/Western relations appear and ponder the “What ifs” of a “regime change” — plotted by Allen Dulles of the CIA, with Eisenhower’s approval, and Churchill’s MI6 — the ways it altered the history of the region forever and shaped American ideas of how “easy” regime change could be.

Most importantly for the makers of “Coup 53” was the research done for a British documentary TV series in the ’80s that interviewed most of the surviving British protagonists about this “chapter” in British history. “End of Empire” (1985) adds significantly to the “meat” of Amirani and Murch’s new film, which samples interviews from many of those involved who have since died.

And then there’s that fellow who didn’t appear on camera, not that ITV/Granada Television will admit, anyway. Norman Darbyshire was a British intelligence officer, not quite 30 years old when he “arranged” the coup. In 1985, Darbyshire wasn’t shy about speaking his mind and spilling the beans, no matter what denials his government continued and continues to make about the 1953 coup.

The “twist” that Amirani makes the most of here is the fact that no video or audio of Darbyshire’s keystone interview exists. There’s just a transcript.

A lot of “Coup 53” is spent showing us the efforts the filmmakers went to in trying to confirm this happened. When they’re satisfied they have, they convince actor Ralph Fiennes — perfect, of course — to “play” Darbyshire in a recreation of this interview, cynically talking about British racism, callous high-handedness and the many ways Pounds Sterling greased the wheels for removing a popularly elected leader from a budding democracy because it was bad for (future) BP.

The sea of talking heads appearing here tend to dull the senses in between flashes of animated action and a Darbyshire interview made as le Carré chilling, officious and suspenseful as Fiennes could manage. After a brisk opening act, the film tends to bog down until we get to the third act’s bloody nitty gritty of the coup. “Coup 53” could stand to shed some minutes.

Some of the claims of “censorship” and have been disavowed by the original production company, some of the “revelations” debunked, with Amirani criticized for sensationalizing the way the transcript of an interview not used in “End of Empire” was “leaked” to journalists and then to Amirani. I’m willing to buy into his claims of “censorship,” but others got hold of his “big revelation,” which was publicized 35 years ago, even if he didn’t know it.

The film was yanked from distribution for a bit over clearance rights (money) to those archived ITV interviews.

“Coup 53” is still a lively treatment of important history, adding bricks to the wall of what scholars know about Iran, Britain and the U.S. (with Israeli involvement, training the Shah’s dreaded secret police) at that time, what happened and how. Now it’s up to other scholars to take up the story and make their additions to it.

MPA Rating: unrated, depictions of violence

Cast: Taghi Amirani, Malcolm Byrne, Alison Rooper, and Ralph Fiennes.

Credits: Directed by Taghi Amirani, script by Taghi Amirani and Walter Murch. An Amirani Media release.

Running time: 1:59

“Los Hermanos” is an engaging musical documentary about two Cuban brothers, star musicians, separated by the 62 year-old embargo the United States has imposed, to no positive effect, on the island nation.

Ilmar, the older brother, took up the violin as a child, and in the last years of the Cold War, went to the Soviet Union with his mother so that he could further his classical music studies as a young teen. He never moved back and eventually settled in New York and helped found The Harlem Quartet chamber music ensemble.

Aldo, six years younger, took up the piano in a country whose development and economy have remained stagnant for decades But he became a star jazz composer and musician, a teacher married to successful orchestral conductor, Daiana, all thanks to family and government support for classically trained musicians.

Although they stayed in touch and managed to meet, with extreme difficulty, here and there. It wasn’t until the Obama Administration started to thaw the relationship with Cuba that they could work together. The film charts this collaboration, which climaxed with a North American concert tour, sometimes playing as a duet, often with Aldo joining the Harlem Quartet for compositions of his or his brother’s creation.

But what happened after Obama left the White House of course changed all that.

The sons of a famous (in Cuba) composer, they were “condemned to be musicians,” their father Guido says with a laugh. Ilmar jokes about how he was “tricked” into taking up the violin when his father returned from an Eastern European tour with a junior-sized violin.

“Next thing I know, there’s some Russian in our apartment yelling at me,” Ilmar says with a laugh, remembering that first teacher in 1980s Havana.

The film skips back and forth, between New York and Havana, going on tour, filling in their history, charting each aspiring performer’s rise through competitions (Aldo studied in London for a bit) and noting, as many have before them, the economic disparity between lives in the US and those in Cuba.

“Los Hermanos” is at its best in showing us the difficult logistics of life in Havana. They were born into a performing arts family. But while musician mom had a Steinway, heaven help them all when it breaks and the embargo makes any fix impossible.

“There are only two (suitable) grand pianos in all of Cuba,” Aldo shrugs (mostly in Spanish with English subtitles, although he speaks English and the film is mostly in English). If he wants to play a concert, that takes a lot of planning and scheduling.

Government support for the arts peaked during the Soviet years, but the lingering embargo, with its travel restrictions, mean that artists who want real success and financial security have to travel abroad, travel that doesn’t include their most lucrative market — the United States.

The siblings make a congenial pair as they play their way into middle age. The joyous moments come on stage or in group meals in Havana, where every utensil turns into an instrument since every dinner guest is a musician.

It’s an “interview” heavy documentary, traveling and chatting with the brothers, having them tell their stories and explain their history. “Los Hermanos” turns somewhat more intimate thanks to fly-on-the-wall moments, watching Aldo teach a young concert pianist on one of the two serviceable grand pianos, this one in an empty concert hall.

The bittersweet sets in over the separation, the ordeal just getting permission to travel and the limitations put on that travel by a 1959 embargo that outlived Castro even if it never forced the country to give up its communist dictatorship.

Through it all, you can’t help but get the feeling that like slowly-decaying corners of Havana, we’re looking at the end times for decrepitude. Someday, we’re going to look back on all this arbitrary political pandering to the far right Cuban expats and the politicians who curry their favor as one of the colossal blunders in American political history.

With a little luck we’ll look back and laugh about it, maybe as heartily as Ilmar and Aldo do when they join a Chautauqua, New York outdoor concert that climaxes with an orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” The audience, including “Los Hermanos,” give it that big finish its famous for by blowing up and popping paper bags to simulate the cannon fire in the finale.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Aldo López-Gavilán, Ilmar Gavilán, Daiana Garcia and Guido López-Gavilán

Credits: Directed by Marcia Jarmel, Ken Schneider. A First Run release.

Running time: 1:24

Dev Patel, Alicoa Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sea Harris and Barry Keoghan star in the retelling of the story of “Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.”

Fantastical. July 30.

This one comes out May 18, for those who can’t what to see what “when things get worse” looks like.