Movie Nation

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

Friday.

What’s this then? An “all-star romp” featuring Sir Ben Kingsley, John Cleese, Joanna Lumley and the late Bob Hoskins, Diana Rigg and Oliver Reed?

Why’d it never earn a US release? And if not, how did Bobcat Goldthwait see it and decide to remake a movie Britain’s Empire Magazine infamously named one of the “50 Worst Movies Ever?”

That Bobcat. Leave it to him to make “God Bless America” out of “Parting Shots,” a movie so bad it was almost Bobcat’s own “parting shot.” He still directs TV, but he only made one more theatrical film.

The British director Michael Winner, of “Death Wish” movies and worse, came up with the idea for “Parting Shots,” a British farce about a dying man who goes on a comical “settling my affairs” settling-scores killing spree. Winner got someone else to take the fall for the screenplay, and landed then-50ish British rocker Chris Rea, whose career only featured “acting” in his own music videos, to play the lead.

Shockingly, it didn’t go well.

Rea plays Harry Sterndale, a 50ish photographer who does weddings — mostly — who gets the bad news in the first scene. Six weeks to live, “get your affairs in order,” all that.

And as he’s doing yet another favor for his faithless, cheating ex-wife (Rigg), he has an epiphany. He’ll visit this notorious pub he’s seen on TV, the sort of place where one can buy an illegal gun (from Lumley), and he’ll carry out a one man “purge.”

No school bully (Patrick Ryecart), thieving financial advisor (Hopkins) or credit-thief colleague (Cleese) and the like is safe.

British TV mainstay Felicity Kendal of the PBS import “The Good Life” plays a sympathetic bystander. Gareth Hunt — who co-starred with Lumley on “The New Avengers”– is the cop on the case, and the dipsomaniacal legend Mr. Reed…well, wait and see who he and Kingsley play.

The Big Names give fair value, wringing what they can out of a bad idea and a worse screenplay. Cleese just sparkles as an ad-man given to shouting “Jolly UP” at an old colleague he’s just learned is dying.

Kingsley gives a discounted version of Ben Does Dazzling Accents.

Lumley is scandalous and louche, Rigg that ever-snobby obscure object of desire, etc.

And in spite of all that, the spark of life is nowhere to be found. Rea, who apparently has never toured America in a career spanning many decades (“Fool If You Think It’s Over” was his biggest US hit), got no encouragement to do so after this.

He also hasn’t acted in a movie since. The character is glumly-drawn and dully-acted, a “nice guy” who is asked “What’s wrong with being nice and keeping your word?”

“You lose.”

Reed ensured that there were better “stories” about his work on the film, and his boozing, than anything that appeared on the screen.

And Winner went out with a loser, a movie with demure murders, inept police chases and not a single surprise in it — not one — a bomb rightly considered one of the worst British films ever made.

Sad story about Bobcat G’s over-the-top violent remake, “God Bless America,” which came out in 2011. My review of the film was pretty mean, and as I was syndicated, the Chicago Tribune ran it. That was star Joel Murray’s hometown newspaper, and he was upset enough to send me an angry note or three. Bill Murray’s bit player brother was sure he’d get better parts after Bobcat gave him his first lead.

Bobcat, who had to know the awful rep of the original film, never let Murray figure out the joke was on him. That’s just cold.

Rating: TV-14, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Chris Rea, Felicity Kendal, Diana Rigg, Joanna Lumley, Gareth Hunt, Oliver Reed, Bob Hoskins, Ben Kingsley and John Cleese.

Credits: Directed by Michael Winner, scripted by Nick Mead. A United International Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:38

“Let’s go get famous.”

Sept. 16.

Everything every movie theater on Earth has been doing to try and stave off “going dark” — the upselling of the experience, “reserved seating,” IMAX, RPX and other shake-the-seats sound gimmicks — was kicked right in the teeth by the global pandemic.

Regal Cinemas was slow-reopening after getting what was not so much an “all clear” from the CDC as a “well, let’s see what happens.” Having upgraded most of their locations pre-pandemic, with more room between seats, a fuller menu and a bar in every multiplex (543 theaters, some 7,000 screens), they’ve been my go-to-cinema when I have a choice in where a movie I’m seeing is screened.

But the Brits at Cineworld bought them out a while back, taking the Knoxville, Tennessee incorporated company deep into debt. Now, with summer being a blockbuster or two shy of survival, their stock price is taking a beating and they’re considering bankruptcy.

Let’s hope they come through it. My first fulltime newspaper job was in Knoxville, and I profiled the two former Food Lion managers who started their first cinema empire by re-opening a closed two screen theater outside of Knoxville. I watched them sell off that first chain and launch Regal and make it a movie empire.

Regals are by and large well run theaters, clean and comfy. AMC, America’s biggest chain, has been slower to renovate and they’ve been rewarded by young folks Gamestopping their stock. AMC shares are down 33% Monday, according to Twitter reports.

I dare say every cinema and cinema chain is facing the same pressures. One Pixar bust and Marvel underwhelmer, and the whole summer came back to bite Cineworld right in the ill-timed debt.