Movie Nation

James Caan, Vito Corleone’s toughest son and Buddy the Elf’s soft touch dad, has died. An old school hardcase who worked pretty much right to the end, he was 82.

“Thief,” “Gardens of Stone,” “The Godfather,” he walked away from good parts and seemed to have as many foibles as anybody who ever attained star status. But he was one of a kind.

Talented people wanted to work with him, even if he wasn’t the nicest guy to deal with on the set. I remember him dismissing “For the Boys,” and keeping Bette Midler, a packed LA cinema and a big band waiting for the premiere, one of a couple of times I interviewed him.

A lot of long “bathroom” breaks in that era in Hollywood.

That British series on movies and the star system that contrasted Caan with gladhander hack Schwarzenegger made Arnold look like a putz and Caan a bitter egomaniac.

And then there was William Golding, Hollywood’s most in demand screenwriter in his day, taking on adapting Stephen King’s “Misery,” not for King or future Oscar winner Kathy Bates or director Rob Reiner. But for Sonny.

RIP.

If you see veteran screen heavy Kim Coates in a velour dinner jacket in a thriller, you can’t go far wrong figuring “Well, he’s playing the Devil.” Wherever his career’s taken him — “Waterworld,” “Black Hawk Down, “Sons of Anarchy” — his look in his mature years can be sinister to the point of satanic.

But his presence is a puzzlement in the thriller “Neon Lights,” a movie so obscurant that even its title makes little to no sense.

We see him growling into the ear of a tech tycoon (Dana Abraham, who scripted this) just before the soft-voiced twitcher is interviewed on TV, where he melts down.

He’s whispering in Clay’s ear as he readies to meet his long-estranged family at a remote 1920s mansion. Is this man “the staff” of the mansion, a particularly pushy “I call, you answer” investor? An apparition in Clay’s head? A demon?

Then we notice that he has a reflection, that others seem to see him even if they don’t seem to know who or what he is any more than we do. And we puzzle some more.

The timid, cracking-up Clay tries to convince bully brother Benny (René Escobar Jr), Benny’s wife (Brit MacRae), other low-life brother James (Stephen Tracey) and niece Blair (Erika Swayze) that he just wanted to reconnect, to show them a swell time now that’s he doing well.

But he’s shell-shocked, “off the grid” as his company preps for an IPO, with rumors he may “lose my company.” And this fellow in the dinner jacker keeps muttering “Into the shadows Clay must go” and “You need to deal with your problems like a man.“

As we’ve seen Clay, shaken and bloodied in the film’s opening shot, we can guess what that might entail. His “personal demons” might be these generally unpleasant relations visiting him.

They just want to know “Why are we here?” and “You losing your marbles, bro?”

The script obscures the relationships, who exactly connects to whom, with characters not necessarily looking like each other and Blair calling those we assume to be her parents by their first names.

Clay is baited and bullied, people start to go through some things and Clay — seen in intermittent moments of psychotherapy and physical therapy — keeps telling himself “I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy.”

The Bangladesh-born Abraham, raised in Canada, is a young bit player who wrote and helped round up the cash for this star vehicle, which is basically a showcase for him playing whimpering timidity, mental mania and meltdowns.

All well and good, or at least adequate. But as a screenwriter his star vehicle has organizational problem and a twisty story in which all the energy is devoted to keeping those twists from being obvious.

The group dynamic he sets up is promising, the “What’s REALLY going on?” solutions a lot less interesting, bordering on nonsensical.

And Abraham, who has a sort of Bangladeshi nebbish Michael Stuhlbarg vibe, does well enough by this character’s twitches, persecution complex and cowering. But Clay isn’t remotely the most compelling character in a move about Clay, what’s in his head or what might really be happening to him.

Coates reminds us of this every time he’s on the screen. He’s a riveting presence, even in the worst movies. “Neon Lights” isn’t necessarily one of those. But it’s close.

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

Cast: Dana Abraham, Brit MacRae, Erika Swayze, Stephen Tracey, René Escobar Jr. and Kim Coates.

Credits: Directed by Rouzbeh Heydari, scripted by Dana Abraham. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:34

Is it “real,” or is it all in our hero’s head?

Interestingly, our hero is a young gay potter with a boyfriend and a dark, violent past, troubled family history, the works.

July 29 in a few theaters, streaming Aug. 4.

A dark comedy about mental illness and its collateral damage, “The Enormity of Life” never really manages a laugh and rarely even crawls out from under its own dispiriting shadow.

And then it gets to one of its many points. A little girl, permanently-triggered by Sandy Hook, endless “Fox News…fear” and mass shootings, wants to stop in Marinette, a town where the one mass shooting that haunts her nightmares took place.

The film is fictional, but this part of it is at least inspired by a real incident. Well, they mess up the age math re: a “survivor,” but something happened in Marinette, Wisconsin that becomes a plot point. The film’s Ohio setting means the movie’s Marinette is meant to be in another state, supposedly off U.S. 16 (which spans the Dakotas).

So, as hard as it is to find a single real-life city or town name in the U.S. that hasn’t had a machine gun shooting event, the filmmakers took liberties with a real life tragedy. That’s unseemly, to say the least.

But long before we take a detour into Marinette, USA, “The Enormity of Life” has lost its way with little hope of ever finding it.

Character actor Breckin Meyer, a veteran lead or lead’s BFF since “Clueless” and “Garfield,” most recently seen on TV’s “Good Girls,” stars in a movie that reaches for cute laughs, sentiment and romance in the midst of depression and schizophrenia and suicide and a little girl broken by obsessing over a unique horror of American childhood.

Meyer plays Casey, whom we meet in voice-over as he reads his own suicide note. Things haven’t worked out, and as the film unfolds and we figure out who he is, who his mother his and see how his nightmarish sister (Debra Herzog) turned out, we kind of get it.

But unlike Casey, we know how tying a noose to a ceiling fan usually works out. They’re not really built for that, son.

That’s not so bad, as he drops to the floor to the sounds of the answering machine message that a probate lawyer needs to see him. Turns out, he’s inherited some cash.

We’re meant to get a chuckle out of the disheveled bottom-feeder attorney (Allen O’Reilly). Maybe things can be turned around when he chats up his cute neighbor (Emily Kinney from “The Walking Dead”), who just happens to be his waitress at a diner nowhere near home. If only he remembered she is his neighbor, that they’ve talked before, that he unclogged her sink once.

Casey is kind of deep into his own despair. He doesn’t really notice other people.

But over the course of a couple of days, he gets involved in Jess’s life, and that of her shooter-obsessed 11 year-old (Giselle Eisenberg), and even of his lowlife sister and off-her-meds mother (Anne McEvoy) as he tries to tamp down his own issues and figure out if this big check and cute blonde and her kid are reason to try again, or just distractions from a life he wishes he’d ended.

The acting here isn’t so much bad as dissonant, as if nobody here is aware “Enormity” is as charmless as it is.

Cleveland director and co-writer Eric Swinderman put some effort into making a Cleveland movie without anything other than the license plates giving away the locale. What he and this film were going for is a sort of life-goes-on, could-be-worse optimism which the viewer and its leading man do not share.

Sometimes things are just too awful, and a lump of cash, a new love and the prospect of helping a similarly despairing child through her funk isn’t enough.

And God forbid Casey should click on a VOD channel streaming “The Enormity of Life” to get him through this. I felt like opening a vein myself by the time it was over.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Breckin Meyer, Emily Kinney, Giselle Eisenberg and Debra Herzog

Credits: Directed by Eric Swinderman, scripted by Eric Swinderman and Carmen DeFranco. A BayView Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:42

“The Purge” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale?”

July 29.

What an interesting niche Paul Walter Hauser has carved out for himself. Whatever else he’s played as an actor, a universal character we might call “Person of Interest” dominates his resume.

From “Richard Jewell” and “I, Tonya” to his new series true crime series “Black Bird,” Hauser’s almost typecast as the seemingly slow, almost certainly “off” prime suspect in whatever crime is at the heart of the action.

With “Black Bird,” Hauser goes prime suspect tour de force as a twisted serial killer who may be in prison, but isn’t wholly trapped. Not yet, anyway. Not until somebody provides him the audience he craves. Hauser’s turn is over the top and stunning to behold.

This series, developed by “Mystic River/Gone Baby Gone/Shutter Island” novelist Dennis Lehane, is based on a prison inmate’s story of being coerced into getting details and perhaps even a confession from a probable serial killer fellow inmate.

With Taron Egerton as the high-rolling, drug-dealing son of a retired cop, Hauser as the suspect who may be released on appeal thanks to the nature of his confession, Sepideh Moafi (“The Deuce,” “The L Word: Generation Q”) as a short-tempered, desperate Fed and Greg Kinnear as an Illinois sheriff’s dept. detective who first puts the pieces of the case together, “Black Bird” becomes a taut, well-cast and beautifully structured limited series that pulls us in and doesn’t let go.

It’s damned good, with equal parts suspense and mystery, a tale told in flashbacks as the prospective “snitch” Jimmy Keene (Egerton) reads the case file on the guy — Larry Hall (Hauser) — law enforcement wants to keep off the street. The flashbacks later shift back to the damaged childhoods of the new prison chums as Keene tries to develop common ground through similar life experiences with a mass murderer.

As Keene’s cop-dad is played by Ray Liotta, in a moving, magnificent and wholly-committed final screen performance, that “We’re not that different” business doesn’t seem as far fetched as you might think.

Consider all the baggage this Hall fellow carries around with him, the simpler, slower twin (Jake McLaughlin plays the smarter, more handsome one), son of a gravedigger whose childhood was more ghoulish than you could imagine. He’s a professional custodian, expert at cleaning up any mess, from a murder scene or the possibly incriminating back of his Dodge van to the aftermath of a prison riot. He’s a Civil War reenactor, with the “Burnsides” to prove it and the marching ballad “We Are Coming, Father Ab’ram” from the war committed to memory.

But as our Fed and out intrepid local detective figure out, he pretty cunning for a guy who “had that look of somebody who’d never been loved or hugged.”

Hauser pitches his voice high and slow, in the M. Emmett Walsh range, for this character, a plainly-off and quietly paranoid man who practically has the run of Springfield (Federal) prison thanks to his mechanical skills and ability to clean anything.

“In my dreams, I kill women,” he confesses, which is all Det. Brian Miller (Kinnear, excellent) needs to be off and sniffing around.

Egerton bulked up from his “Rocket Man” babyfat to become the embodiment of a ’90s drug dealer on the rise — Dodge Viper, turtlenecks and sports jackets, catnip to every beautiful woman he meets, and not just because of his access to nose candy. Keene’s journey starts to resemble a breakdown as events, bad actors and circumstances close in on him stuck in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Alone? This guy is as alone as they get.

There are prison complications, blackmail and an aged big time Italian mobster to contend with and the ever-ticking clock as Hall and the Feds become more and more convinced he’s going to walk out a free man, their only hope a desperate-to-shorten-his-sentence coke dealer.

The villains pile up, and then, “The Lovely Bones” enter the picture — pathos from a victim, quite unexpected in light of the rising suspense of the prison scenes, full of treachery and doom.

Some of the best scenes are the early ones, Miller’s infuriating pushback from his fellow local cops who dismiss his suspicions because they’ve dismissed their own, and Agent McCauley’s “testing” taunting and grilling Keene to see if he’s up to the job of finding common ground with a monster.

“What DON’T you like about women,” she snaps, because what they want is a guy who can connect with a man who traps young women and girls and kills them.

Liotta brings a fading-fast father’s guilt to his few scenes as Big Jim, the cop father who feels responsible for letting his son get away from him and into this trouble, and probably is.

Crime or true-crime has proven itself the most durable genre for limited streaming series, with the built-in cliffhangers, stand-offs, red herrings, underworld or here, prison — beware when the place goes “Riot Quiet” — milieus, interrogations and investigations and police procedural tropes that build in a puzzle and a ticking clock into the proceedings.

“Ozark” and “The Night Of” to “Fargo” or “Black Bird,” you can never go far wrong when you start with awful crimes and unravel the mystery and horror of them, one episode at a time.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug content, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Taron Egerton, Paul Walter Hauser, Sepideh Moafi, Greg Kinnear, Christopher B. Duncan and Ray Liotta

Credits: Developed by Dennis Lehane from the memoir “In with the Devil” by James Keene and Hillel Levin. An Apple TV release.

Running time: 6 episodes @:59 each.

“True story,” the cusp of the 19th century, Dahomey, a power in pre colonial Africa, an Oscar winning star, a sometimes good director needing to redeem herself after that Netflix bomb “Old Guard,” this September 16 release looks promising but of course this could go either way.

A November awards season contender from a marquee director. Think it might be good?

That Menace 2 Society TikTok has created another distraction that’s birthing a mini-uproar.

Teens are dressing up in suits and ties and the like and showing up, “Men in Black” attired, to “Minions: The Rise of Gru.”

They’ve created an online TikTok “cult,” as a sort of game. A mock cult based on an animated comedy whose heroes speak and sing in gibberish? OK. Fine.

Seems harmless enough on its surface, right? But some theaters and chains are seeing “disturbances” in these repeat-viewing flash mobs. In the UK and the US, this copycat behavior is being banned from cinemas. Not sure if the kids are acting out and acting up in theaters, as this seems unclear.

If it was just young white males showing up en masse at daytime screenings of a child’s cartoon, I could totally see this ban. If you’re not a little freaked out by any odd white teen boy behavior these days, you’re not paying attention. Mass shootings, anyone?

Parents complaining at teenagers messing up their experience of taking their children to a CHILD’S movie is not unreasonable. And if the teens playing at this are indeed creating “disturbances” of another sort, sure. Ban them. Theaters have shut down screenings of movies that draw gangs on the fear that rival gangs might show up.

And if you want to carry on with your #gentleminions, do it at night. Any parent dragging their tykes to see “The Rise of Gru” after 9 or 10 seems less likely to sweat a few well-dressed nerds nerding out over a very funny movie.

Who doesn’t love a good hoax? The audacity, the cheekiness of the hoaxer, losing yourself in the question of whether or not you’d have the nerve to try “Inventing Anna,” to attempt becoming “The Phantom of the Open,” much less the confidence trickster of “Catch Me if You Can,” makes such stories irresistible.

What about a hoax where the stakes are much lower, so low as to seem “just the most bizarre thing,” making those victimized by it ask “What would POSSESS someone to do that?”

“My Old School” is about a 32 year-old Scotsman who enrolled at a just-elite-enough Glasgow private school, inventing an elaborate back story and lying on the fly to explain his look, his past, his unwillingness to produce a birth certificate.

When it all came out the press labeled him “The Peter Pan of Bearsden Academy.” But some of his less kind classmates were onto something when they taunted this early ’90s enrollee with the nickname of a recently-broadcast American TV series — “thirtysomething.”

The movie is one of those what’s real/what’s fake documentaries — Orson Welles invented the genre with “F for Fake,” half a century ago — a film that presented unique challenges that encouraged a unique solution.

The 32 year-old who called himself “Brandon Lee,” same as the then-recently-deceased martial arts and film star and son of Bruce Lee, agreed to be interviewed for the film, just not on camera. So the director talked the Scottish stage and screen star Alan Cumming to come in, master the guy’s lines and lip-synch the picture, every line “Brandon Lee” speaks acted-out by Cumming.

Filmmaker Jono McLeod got many classmates and a few surviving teachers to sit down for interviews. And for the flashbacks, he hired animators to recreate the early ’90s school and pop culture in the style of that early MTV hit “Daria.”

The resulting film is a fascinating mystery, a weird case study and an unalloyed delight.

Part of the joy of it is how amused the former students — who went on to become an actress, a mixed-martial arts fighter, a pharmacist, a chiropractor and so on — seem to be at having been fooled, and at how the snobby school was utterly buffaloed by this stunt.

There are any number of places this story could have turned sinister — a secretive, sketchy grown man mixing and mingling with high school kids, impressing their teachers, stealing their thunder and starring in the class musical (It sounds like Cumming sings the animated snippets of “South Pacific”).

The play required an on-stage kiss between “thirtysomething” and a 16-year-old classmate. “Icky.”

But the deeper we get into this documentary, the more we learn about this fellow’s motives, the more questions we — and the reconsidering classmates — have, and the more we and they have to chew on the unreliability of memory.

McLeod makes “My Old School” a nostalgic catalog of the pop culture of the day — “Brandon,” secretive and slow to socialize, making a few friends, driving them in his car (a CLUE) to see “Muriel’s Wedding,” passing on mixtapes not of Ace of Base, R.E.M., UB40, The Pet Shop Boys or Scotland’s own The Proclaimers, but of late ’70s-early-80s punk like Black Flag, television and Hüsker Dü.

Yeah, that another clue, the now-adult kids realize.

And then there’s this man-among-kids influence on school culture and social life, a delightful turn that starts with having somebody around who “knew how to mix cocktails,” but who also helped more than one student with his studies and brought social outcasts into a new social orbit via “Brandon Lee’s” approval.

The real Lee’s story has bits of pathos and misdirected energy, but also cunning and entitlement. If his classmates, interviewed in a classroom at old school desks, can’t quite form an opinion of him, what chance do we have?

The film’s third act turn towards the light side plays with those faulty memories and takes on a “28-Up” tone as we see how the kids have turned out, despite or perhaps because of this disruption of their last year of childhood by this stranger in their midst and the media circus that erupted when it all came out.

I don’t know if there’ll be a feature film on this subject (I seem to recall this project starting life along those lines), but it’s a natural — the dark parts of “Catch Me if You Can” married to the lark of it all of “Phantom of the Open.”

Perhaps Alan Cumming can play the earnest but self-important head master. Be a shame to leave him out of it.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Alan Cumming, Juliet Cadzow, Dawn Steele, David Tattoo Dave McKinlay, with the voices of Lulu and Clare Grogan,

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jono McLeod. A (July 22) Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:44