Movie Nation

You can’t help but root for any romantic comedy that comes along to work, because so very few of them do.

“The Right One” has a few promising elements which make themselves obvious from the get-go. But the good ideas run out quickly and the cute scenes turn few and far between long before we’ve taken that first peek at our digital watch.

And that chemistry we get a whiff of between the stars remains just that, a whiff — as in a swing-and-a-miss.

Cleopatra Coleman of “The Argument” and TV’s “The Last Man on Earth” makes a perfectly bubbly leading lady, a romance novelist with writer’s block. Sarah needs to get inspired, get writing and get her next book in the stores because her agent Kelly (Iliza Shlesinger) says “You’re almost 30. It’s my last chance to sell you as ‘a prodigy.'”

“I’m 31!“

She needs to get over her last break-up, Simon, get out there and get her mojo back.

That’s how she starts running into this mysterious stranger played by Nick Thune of TV’s “Life in Pieces” and “Love Life.”

First, he’s a pretentious art critic at a gallery opening she and Kelly drop in on. Later he poses as a pretentious artist, with a minor wardrobe change and serious upping of his poseur game.

“I before ‘me,’ except after ‘you,’ THAT’s what this painting is about!”

Running into him busking as ‘Cowboy Cody’ in a city square (set in Seattle, filmed mostly in Vancouver), doesn’t get any answers in the face of her persistent questions. He cryptically suggests he’ll be at a performance space that night, and she winds up ditching her set-up date after catching his wigged, cross-dressing (he has a beard) impersonation of a singer-songwriter “gal” fresh off the bus from Tulsa.

Sarah is hooked. And as we’ve seen this guy at his day job, gonzo skateboarding free-spirit “G-Money” at his phone sales office, and volunteering as puppeteer Mr. G at a preschool, we’re at least intrigued.

Whoever this “G” is, he’s damned good at becoming whoever his costumer will bond with and buy from on the phone — a master of accents, tastes and multilingual, multicultural trivia. His many voices come in handy performing for kids, too.

He even dazzles his new boss (David Koechner) by bonding instantly over a supposed shared love of Blues Traveler and its harmonica-master lead singer, John Popper.

Sarah finds herself tagging along on this stranger’s evening odyssey, donning a neon-smiling plush kitty head for an all night rave as “DJ Meowna” to his DJ Catamice .

“Like DJ Deadmau5?”

“Where do you think he got the idea?”

But as caught up in all this as Sarah professes to be, she doesn’t know this dude. She wakes up in bed with a chameleon tour-guide to Pacific Northwest entertainment, “Matteo” the Argentine ballroom dancer/”Scarface” coke dealer or slam poet “Tim Demint.” And while in character, he never breaks character.

As this upsets her but doesn’t scare her off, any more than a stalker who warns her to “Stay AWAY from him,” Sarah starts probing his mystery, hunting for his secret sadness and taking notes for a possible book as she does.

Yeah, this is sure to work out.

There’s just a touch of antic energy to these early scenes that gives “The Right One” promise. Piling all the incidents and guises this “G” takes on into one night could have been giddy fun. Comedies like this work at a quick and breathless tempo, which would hurtle us and Sarah to the point of “swept away” with mere momentum.

Instead, reality TV producer turned writer-director Ken Mok stops everything cold by having G-for-Godfrey turn off the charm like a switch. This character isn’t remotely engaging or charismatic as himself, so hiding that aspect of him until late in the game is essential, revealing his sad “secret” later in the game a must.

What would Sarah, author of “romance novels for dumb millennials” want with him?

The sparks Thune sets off, in character, with Coleman and with Koechner (in just a couple of scenes) point to this obvious conclusion. The movie only comes to life when our guy is playing other characters.

What’s worse, the squishy relationshippy stuff is strictly a non-starter. Thune as G-Money clicks with Coleman and Thune as unfunny Adam Scott TNG does not.

I think he’s playing the character as accurately as he thinks is called for, but never broadly or energetic enough to make the movie work. When he’s not cute and charming he’s REALLY not cute and charming.

Bad call on somebody’s part. Coleman’s Sarah needed to be more down in the mouth to make her coming-out-of-her-shell journey pay off.

Add the fact that it’s the tamest R-rated romantic comedy in the history of motion pictures to its gloomy pauses and funereal pace and you haven’t got a rom-com on your hands, just a rom-corpse.

MPAA Rating: R for language and sexual references 

Cast: Cleopatra Coleman, Nick Thune, Iliza Shlesinger and David Koechner

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ken Mok. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Just go to this link and check out the man’s filmography. Hal Holbrook had a very long, deep and interesting career. Like others we’ve spent this winter of 2021 mourning, he was active a very long time, made many memorable roles his own and became famous — late in life — for just being a grand voice of age in movies and on TV.

I interviewed him a few times over the years, the last time when he was up for an Oscar for “Into the Wild,” which wasn’t even close to his last performance, even if it was one of his twinkling finest.

“Lincoln” for Spielberg after playing “Lincoln” on TV, a Dirty Harry movie villain, “The Fog” and of course, “All the President’s Men.” “That Evening Sun,” “Capricorn One,” the list is endless. Or nearly endless.

He was the first guy ever to use “I’d tellya, but I might have to killya if I did” when I jokingly asked him about who the man later ID’d as FBI Agent Mark Felts was. Holbrook’s “Deep Throat” in “All the President’s Men” entered myth, a Harry Lime shadow, lit by a cigarette in a DC parking garage, saving democracy by verifying one Republican misdeed at a time for The Washingon Post.

That interview was back in the ’90s, when he stopped off on one of his many tours as “Mark Twain Tonight!” to speak to students at a conservatory I used to cover in Winston-Salem, NC.

He was just hilarious on the phone years later when I interviewed his wife Dixie Carter about her cabaret show, which she toured the country (Florida included) with. A “Designing Woman” with an authentic “Evening Shade” drawl, she gave Holbrook added Southern bonafides, as he told me while he called her to the phone and filled the time as we both waited for The Lady. Delightful.

Our last chat, for “Into the Wild,” was a phoner that took place as he waited for her to finish an appointment at a Houston hospital. Dixie was sick with the cancer that killed her shortly afterwards, but he put on a brave face.

A grand old man who will be remembered for a LOT of films, fondly remembered. Rest in Peace, Mr. Twain.

Here’s that 2010 interview, timed to the release of “That Evening Sun,” a phrase I can hear him drawling through still — “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down.”

Hal Holbrook isn’t a Southerner. He was born in Ohio. But he has spent much of his life impersonating a famous Southerner — Mark Twain, on the stage. He has spent time in the South. Lots of it, from the 1940s onward.

“And I married into it,” he cracks. He has been married to singer and actress Dixie Carter since 1984.

The marriage was the most helpful of all when it came time to play Abner Meacham, the cantankerous Tennessee farmer and store owner who busts out of a retirement home determined to reclaim his farm from the new tenants in the indie film That Evening Sun , now showing in some cities. It wasn’t Twain that Holbrook channeled to play Abner. It was his late father-in-law.

“[Halbert] ‘Cart’ Carter was a short man brought up in a small town — Republican,” Holbrook says in storytelling cadences polished by decades of one-man shows. “I learned to avoid certain subjects, especially with a man who loved to talk about his prowess with a knife. And about the fights he’d won, and how he could punch somebody out. He was full of advice about that sort of thing.

” ‘Cart, why is it you had to fight so much when you were young?’

” ‘Hal,’ he says, ‘there weren’t any policemen around to settle things.’ This was in McLemoresville, Tennessee, where they lived. He says, ‘The closest police were in Milan, 12-15 miles away. If you got into something, you had to settle it yourself.’

“That was integral to my approach to Abner Meacham. Even at his age, he had to settle this dispute himself. He wasn’t going to go call on anybody.”

Because of that father-in-law connection, Holbrook took extra care to be very specific about the accent in That Evening Sun, which was shot in Tennessee. “My wife, Dixie [of TV’s Designing Women], went over every syllable with me!”

Reviews for the film have been glowing, with The New York Daily News noting that “a twitch of his jowl is all Holbrook needs to convey hard-earned experience.”

We were reminded of Holbrook’s folksy charms by the Oscar nomination he landed for Into the Wild a couple of years ago. But the upshot of that acclaim is “I’m working harder than I ever have in my life. I don’t understand what in hell is going on. I am going to be 85 in February. I had to give up sailing. Not just because I’m not strong enough to take a boat across the ocean. I don’t have time.

“I did two small films in September and November. And I’m still doing Twain, 20 or so times this year. I like to do him 30 times a year, but in this economy…”

With Holbrook, it always comes back to Twain, the writer/humorist/philosopher whom he studies constantly, updating his Mark Twain Tonight act with Twain’s timeless riffs on Americans and the American condition.

“There isn’t anybody that I know who put it down more clearly and more accurately, what we are as people, than Mark Twain. I cannot get over the miracle of what this man had to say about our lives, our civilization.

“Nobody tells the truth any more. That’s one of the chief reasons my show works. People are surprised at hearing the truth spoken. And because they’re surprised, they laugh. Because it’s funny.”

He recites a bit from the “Money is God” portion of the act, a section added to include Twain’s thoughts on recessions and “panics,” of which he lived through a few.

“‘A blight has fallen upon us. And the monarchy of the rich and the powerful are the authors.'”

Holbrook pauses and chuckles.

“That’s the double whammy. You watch the show and you think ‘This guy’s alive and he’s talking about this scoundrel or that one.’ Then five seconds later you remember, ‘Wait a minute. He died 100 years ago.’ “

His old friend and sometime collaborator, stage director Gerald Freedman, says that after doing the act and polishing his Twain for 50 years, “Now, when he is on stage it is hard to remember that he is acting Mark Twain.” Holbrook has become his character. Freedman marvels that well into his 80s Holbrook still totally commits to a part and seems “to be truly living in the moment.”

Holbrook has a biography coming out later this year, and he’s working on another volume of that, too. When you’re about to hit 85, you’ve been acting since the 1940s, and have covered as much theatrical, TV and cinematic ground as he has, one book wouldn’t cover everything.

There are more films, he hopes. And more shots at Twain. He’s about to hang up the phone to reread some more of Bernard DeVoto’s book, Mark Twain in Eruption. “Homework,” he says.

“Why quit? The man’s got as much to say to us as he ever did. And people still want to listen.”

The great filmmaker Andrey Konchalovskiy knows that sentimentality and nostalgia are poison pills, and has never been shy about making films that defy that maudlin tendency of Mother Russia.

The director of “Maria’s Lovers” and “Runaway Train,” the films he’s best-known for on this side of the Bering Strait, wants to remind us that Russia’s grim, dictatorial present is no reason to forget the Bad Old Days of the Soviet Empire, where bread was pricey and life was cheap when viewed from the lofty “Animal Farm” of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

“Dear Comrades!” has the Russians of 1962 Novocherkassk gossiping about rising food prices and “production quotas” and waxing near-nostalgic for the good old days, when meat was plentiful and bread was cheap and, uh, Stalin was in charge. Or the Czar.

There are idealists in their ranks — young and old — certain that the Kruschev Era USSR has “freedom of speech,” that the State “would not let us starve,” and that if they quote Lenin accurately, the Army would never “shoot its own people.” These “Dear Comrades” are about to get a reminder that State propaganda may be quoted as gospel, but it’s just as much myth as the original gospel. And believing too deeply in it isn’t just naive. It can get you killed.

“Dear Comrades!” is about the Novocherkassk Massacre, a wildcat strike that threatened to spread in a country where discontent rivaled nostalgia as a default frame of mind.

We see the events of those few days in June of 1962, mere months before the Cuban Missile Crisis (Kruschev’s “Wag the Dog” moment), through the eyes of Party veteran Lyuda. She is a city official, working her way from one committee meeting to the next, trying to keep her affair with a married man quiet and her teen daughter Svetka on task (she has a factory job) and in line.

Lyuda, played by Konchalovskiy’s wife and longtime muse Yuliya Vysotskaya, a native of Novocherkassk, isn’t shy about using her Party Privilege to get the back-room shopping treatment at the grocer’s or to lecture friends and family that the Party’s “words are law” (in Russian with English subtitles), “You don’t get to argue with them.”

She survived the Great Patriotic War believing that, so it’s good enough for everybody else. When word comes down that the electric locomotive plant’s workers, grumbling at the latest squeeze to their diets, salaries and standard of living, have gone on strike, Lyuda is the first to refer to them as “ignorant criminals,” a “bunch of hooligans” who should be dealt with swiftly, and with force.

It isn’t long before she is reminded what that means and how ugly it can be.

Konchanlovskiy, telling this story in period newsreel black-and-white, has it unfold in brief, unhurried strokes. A committee meeting interrupted by the sounds of a distant civil defense siren, a worried call or two or three, instant buck-passing, kicking decisions up the ladder to Moscow, one and all citing Soviet Truths they take for granted.

The local military commander is sure those in uniform would never be ordered to fire on “our own people.” He summons a boy’s military academy and members of whatever artillery unit is close by. “Munitions?” They don’t need bullets, not for a protest, even one that closes in around City Hall, even after a few windows are broken when the marchers won’t be mollified.

Maybe after the marchers break in, rage at the “cognac, Hungarian salami” and other delicacies the Party members enjoy the Army will change its mind. Can’t have that Orwellian truth getting around.

There’s no real comedy to this story, although the endless meetings, backbiting, each Party Official determined to out lie the next about how loyal her or his constituency is and how few “hooligans” are in their ranks, how loyal and compliant and not-the-least-bit-disgruntled one and all are, is drily amusing.

Lyuda is the loudest voice in the room in a few of these meetings. But as outside officials convoy in to take charge, as the KGB weighs in, as the legions of informants and KGB plants in the town and in the factory provide intel (hearsay and photos) on what’s happening in this pre-CCTV, pre-Internet era, as efforts to contain the strike, deny the strikers access to the city and close off the city from the world, physically and electronically (“Every phone call is being monitored, Comrades!”), Lyuda’s eyes open. And not because she sees the light, the comical inefficiency, the Big Lie and the inhumanity of The State.

What rattles her is the shooting, seeing that KGB sniper heading to the roof with a cello case hiding his rifle, the chaos that follows and the fact that idealistic Svetka (Yuliya Burova) is nowhere to be found.

Revolution and “counter-revolution” hit close to home.

Konchaolskiy shows us everything that happens on a human scale — human foibles, raging petty rivalries, a well-intentioned Army officer over-ruled, repeatedly, the frantic calls for instruction from Moscow because nobody wants to be caught holding the bag. And he shows the shooting at street level, random targets dropping in pain, tending to the wounded, screaming and scrambling for cover.

The film’s third act mimics every story of a mother confronting the mystery of a missing child, working every angle in rising desperation and fatalistic dread. Vysotskaya is most impressive in these scenes, Lyuda struggling with hide her despair and use her connections, not knowing who to trust, warned away by friends, arrested by those just “following orders.”

The intimacy of the story and the black and white cinematography keep “Dear Comrades!” from crossing into “epic.” Konchalovskiy is more interested in reminding people of the violence their neighbors, soldiers, police and leaders are capable of, how drab and circumscribed life was back then.

He’s not shy in his messaging. Protests met with violence aren’t just of the past and aren’t just a Russian thing. In a universal viewership sense, we might not see ourselves in the nameless victims, but we can certainly see ourselves in Lyuda, someone who thinks “the system works” right up to the moment when we see that it doesn’t work for everybody.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, smoking, drinking

Cast: Yuliya Vysotskaya, Vladislav Komarov, Andrey Gusev, Yuliya Burova

Credits: Directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy, script by Andrey Konchalovskiy, Elena Kiseleva. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:01

People who’re seriously down the rabbit hole on any given subject are fascinating specimens, and often make for engrossing magazine profiles, book-length studies or documentary dissections.

Chess fans or “The Shining” fanatics, Scrabble buffs or orchid thieves, we never tire of taking a hard or merely wry look at those who only come up for air to share a bit of their obsession with we merely curious mere mortals.

Rewatching Rodney Ascher‘s “Room 237,” about seriously absorbed close-readers of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Steven King’s “The Shining,” I wondered how many of those interviewed in it, those on the conspiracy buff end of the spectrum, have been institutionalized since that film came out in 2012?

With “A Glitch in the Matrix,” Ascher’s found another subculture from pop culture to dive into, people who have taken a thought experiment a lot further than most of us would deem sane — “What if humanity and the whole of our existence is but a vast, complex computer simulation?”

It’s been kicked around a lot over the decades, and with people like tech genius Elon Musk and America’s Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson giving it lip service or credence, fans of the “The Matrix” movies have started to extrapolate that maybe these twenty year old films are holy text, a warning or at least a hint of what might really be going on.

Ascher’s documentary is a deeper dive than most of us would ever care to take into this, filled with testimonials from those so obsessed and paranoid that they prefer to be interviewed as digitally-animated avatars, or speak by phone from the prison where they’re being held for murdering their adoptive parents.

But it’s fascinating as a deconstruction of pop culture history and way of looking at how thinkers have looked at the world, from Plato’s parable about “The Cave” to the entire canon of sci-fi writer, futurist and in the end, madman Philip K. Dick.

Using snippets from panel discussions Tesla/Space X mogul Musk participated in, clips from the many movies and series made from Philip K. Dick’s stories (“Blade Runner,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Minority Report,” “The Man in the High Castle”), fresh interviews with academics, thinkers and video-game junkies deep into what I’d call a “digital theology,” Ascher ponders the thesis Musk presented publicly and echoes in frequent half-winking tweets.

At some point, Musk says, extrapolating the sprinting advancement of video games from Pong to whatever VR sim world fans are deepest into today, “games will become indistinguishable from reality.” And others, echoing that, suggest the nature of technological civilizations might be that at some point, we get tired of doing things andf lose ourselves in play-acting/simulating that we or avatars we create and control are doing them.

Yes, that’s the premise of a few “Star Trek” episodes. But what if it’s already happened and some advanced entity, computer or civilization is running one and we’re in it?

The more fancifully-inclined interviewed here scrutinize the “synchronicities” in their lives — little coincidences that suggest to them that a computer is reading their thoughts and extrapolating scenarios that foretell a relationship renewed or a next meal you didn’t realize you craved.

The anchor voice in “Glitch” is the mysterious Dick himself, appearing at a 1977 French symposium and giving a speech about how “we’re living in a computer-programmed reality,” how his dreams and snatches of what he recalls from being under anesthesia tipped him to this “reality” and informed his seriously out-there fiction.

“If you think this world is bad,” he famously joked, “you should see some of the others,” implying that he’s seen them, if not actually visited them.

Some have taken that long (with longer pauses for translation) speech as proof of Dick’s growing paranoia and mental illness. But this Big Idea was out there already, and not just in classic “Trek” episodes. Douglas Adams conceived his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in the early spring of 1977. a radio series that morphed into books, a TV series and a feature film (sampled in “Glitch”), comical fiction which suggested that the Earth was a multi-million year science experiment, conceived by a computer, to come up with the Meaning of Life. “Tron” went inside a video game and gave characters digital lives there.

“The Matrix” movies absorbed that from the zeitgeist, folded it into a video game or digital simulation that Keanu and Carrie Anne, Laurence and Hugo performed, lived and died in and fought to escape.

And some people, like the “Glitch” subject interviewed by phone with the unmistakable sounds of a prison in the background, used that “reality” to try and explain their descent into murderous madness.

I found the “Matrix” movies eventually-tedious eye candy when they came out, but “A Glitch in the Matrix” succeeds in making the argument that they could be as appealing as “Avatar” or “Star Wars” as a universe and way of thinking one could lose himself (all of the obsessives interviewed here are guys) in.

“Glitch” becomes as repetitious as “The Matrix” in its own right, and some of this can’t help but come off as a filmmaker indulging the slightly or greatly deranged…again.

But the documentary, like the idea behind it, makes for a fascinating thought experiment. And a few years down the road, maybe it’ll be worth revisiting to wonder if more than one interview subject has wound up in an institution.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, discussions of violence

Cast: Nick Bostrom, Joshua Cooke, Erik Davis, Paul Gude, Elon Musk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Philip K. Dick.

Credits: Directed by Rodney Ascher. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:48

So many movies about Mary Shelley and the writing of “Frankenstein,” and yet there’s always room for another bad one.

“A Nightmare Wakes,” coming entirely too soon after the bigger budget/name cast “Mary Shelley,” or for that matter “Gothic” and the all-star “Rowing with the Wind” in the ’80s, is a version of the Frankenstein creation myth that makes one wonder how the writer, wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and confidante of Lord Byron, ever had the time.

What with all the bad, dimly-lit sex, the dead babies and the bloody soap opera that swirled around their circle, her adulterous lover-later-husband sleeping with her half sister, impregnating his not-yet-ex-wife, Byron coming on to anything with two legs I mean.

Who, even today, could keep it all straight? Aside from Shonda Rhimes?

Not writer-director Nora Unkel, alas, losing herself trying to turn an overfamiliar story, of Lord Byron’s teasing “best ghost story by firelight” “competition, his doctor and pal Polidori coming with the first famous vampire story and Mary S. topping it with ” It’s alive… It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!”

I mean, she could see the screenplay possibilities, even back in 1818.

That’s when Mary (Alix Wilton Regan), the man who made her “the other woman” Shelley (Giullian Yao Gioiello) and her half-sister Claire (Claire Glassford) summered in Switzerland with Byron (Philippe Bowgen) and Dr. Polidori (Lee Garrett).

Even if you can’t remember all the particulars, the basics stick to you, film by Gothic film. Percy’s haunted and lusty, Byron’s the doomed life of the party, Polidori’s got a great idea for a genre-launching novel (“The Vampyre”). Mary Shelley? She’s the one with the nightmares, haunted by lost babies and blood and lives that might be retrievable after death, with the right application of…science.

Unkel films much of the story in a period piece murk, crafting a short thriller that seems to waste more screen time than it can afford. Staring out onto the lake, wading in the lake, rejecting Percy’s sexual advances, submitting to others, and on and on.

There’s little here recognizable as “Frankenstein in the Writing,” just a hint of a scene or two from the novel (not the bowdlerized films of it) coming to Mary, and the odd shot of her tipping quill into ink and scribbling furiously on the page.

She may “feel like Michelangelo chipping away at a block of marble.” That doesn’t mean we’d want to watch a movie of her doing that.

“It was on a dreary night of November,” she intones more than once, in love with that line from the finished book, a masterpiece polished by one of the great poets of the day — her husband.

Whatever it is most of us want from this story — little tastes of recitation by candlelight raising the hairs of the back of the neck would be grand — aren’t here. And no repetitious shots of Mary’s sex life or her visions of bloody eyes, bloody nightclothes and bloody hands make up for it.

This “Nightmare” all but put me right to sleep.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex and blood

Cast:  Alix Wilton Regan, Giullian Yao Gioiello, Philippe Bowgen, Claire Glassford and Lee Garrett.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nora Unkel. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:31

Men watching “4×4” might breathe a sigh of relief when Ciro, trapped inside a locked-and-bulletproof Toyota Highlander, reaches into the glove compartment and consults the owner’s manual.

Women viewers? We know you’re going to roll your eyes, so just get on with it. I mean, the guy’s been stuck inside this inescapable SUV for over two days. And after kicking and shooting at windows, dismantling doors, tearing up carpet and what not, this accomplished car thief finally does what no man ever wants to do.

He reads the owner’s manual. Sure, he ends up chewing on a few pages of it, because he’s dying of thirst and starving. But you and me, we all get the joke.

“4×4” is an Argentinian thriller that is simplicity itself — just a thief, trapped in a car he just tried to steal, harangued and lectured by the owner of the Toyota, who occasionally calls in to see how Ciro (Peter Lanzini) is doing and remind him of the “28” robberies, burglaries, kidnappings and stolen cars he’s endured in his crime-ridden corner of South America.

Dr. Enrique (Dady Brieva) has, we realize, had enough — MORE than enough. And this modified SUV, with bullet-proof tinted windows that no one can see into, soundproofed so no one can hear screams or gunshots, is designed to be Eddie Izzard-look-alike Ciro’s coffin. Maybe.

Director and co-writer Mariano Cohn has to, by rights, open this story up in the third act. But for much of the film, it’s just Ciro suffering (he injures himself), dehydrating, freezing (the doctor controls the AC, etc), trying to reason his way out and considering the mess of a life he’s had that put him in this spot.

“This place is full of poor people, with laws made by rich people and FOR rich people,” he rationalizes (in Spanish with English subtitles). Damned if he’s going to change. But man, has he screwed up and big time.

The minimalism works well in the early acts, and even the preachy finale — with its civics and socio-political debates built in — doesn’t wholly break the spell of “4×4.”

If nothing else, you’ll pick up your owner’s manual and give it a glance after seeing this one.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Peter Lanzani, Dady Brieva

Credits: Directed by Mariano Cohn, script by Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat. A Red Hound release.

Running time: 1:31

The “comedy of manners” is a long-established tradition of Western fiction. Jane Austen collected a lot of posthumous Oscars mastering that genre.

The “tragedy of manners” is less common, limited to the occasional “Remains of the Day.” But if any culture has the potential to claim it as its own, it might be Japan’s. A nation of rigid social norms and manners rendered into rituals, it’s fertile ground for Japanese fiction writers and filmmakers.

“True Mothers” is a long, somber Japanese tragedy about childbirth and adoption, and an object lesson in apology culture. Characters are wronged and do wrong, disappoint and let each other down. And nothing can be done about it and no one can move on with his or her life until that apology comes.

Filmmaker Naomi Kawase (“Sweet Bean”), adapting a novel by Mizuki Tsujimura, tells us two mothers and one child, breaking each story out separately in two long flashbacks, tying the women at a couple of intersections in their stories.

We meet doting mom Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku) as she quietly sings to her little boy Asato (Reo Sato), who is brushing his teeth. It’s his first day of kindergarten, and she and husband Kiyokazu (Arata Iura) have planned their day around walking him to school.

She’s a stay-at-home mom, he’s a watch-checking office drone. But they’re a team and this kid, in his suspenders and cap, will have every advantage they can give them.

A call from the school later that same day interrupts that. There was a playground accident. Asato is blamed for it. He denies it, but Mom broods and frets over who to believe, how to gently question the teachers. She even calls the mother of the other little boy.

The woman she calls is taken aback that she hasn’t called to apologize, and dumps a blunt “settlement” demand, doubling down on her rudeness. An apology might fix this, but is it merited?

As she ponders this, Satoko takes us back to her courtship and the difficulties she and Kiyokazu had getting pregnant. He frets about this in a drunken bar confession with a colleague, professes to be less “obsessed” with having children, and even goes so far as suggest “divorce is an option,” offering her a way out. It’s a medical problem on his end and he feels humiliated.

They reluctantly turn to adoption, dealing with some fairly draconian conditions that “Baby Baton” demands — one spouse will have to give up their career, the child must be told he or she is adopted, etc.

After all that, now they have the added shame of wondering if their is pushing other kids off the monkey bars? To top it all, Satoko has been fielding with hang-up calls. Finally, the caller speaks and she says she’s the birth mother and she wants her child back.

That points us to the sadder story of teenaged Hikari (Aju Makita), a shy Nara schoolgirl who fell for the first guy to take an interest in her, swooned at her first kisses and wound up pregnant, to her family’s eternal shame.

Well, at least the boy apologized. But that’s perhaps the last thing that goes right for her.

Kawase and her players tell these interfolding stories with great sympathy and compassion, leaving little twists and bits of mystery for the viewer to pick up on as we’re immersed in lives that are tested by this pregnancy, this childhood and the ongoing repercussions of giving up a baby for adoption.

With Japan’s sagging birthrate, “True Mothers” has greater cultural significance at home than it does abroad. But the universal elements of this story are touching, no matter where you live.

The sedate, baby-steps storytelling style won’t be to every taste. “True Mothers” is a melodrama with 90 minutes of story awash in 139 minutes of movie.

Kawase holds our interest by letting us see the unexpressed pain of characters generally too well-mannered to express loss, shock, outrage and resentment out loud. That won’t entertain everyone who meets these “True Mothers,” but there it is.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Hiromi Nagasaku, Arata Iura, Aju Makita and Reo Sato

Credits: Directed by Naomi Kawase, script by Naomi Kawase and Izumi Takahashi, based on a novel by Mizuki Tsujimura. A Film Movement Release.

Running time: 2:19

The interminable horror period piece “The Reckoning” is a picture out of its time. It’s a Restoration plague, swirling amidst witch hunters, witch trials and positively Medieval punishments.

Let’s give Neil Marshall (“The Descent”) and his team the benefit of the doubt and call that “the point” of it all. A great infectious calamity like a contagion brings out the primitive in us all, or at least the most deplorable among us.

Abandon humanity and human progress — science, however primitive — for “witch finders” and superstition, mob rule and conspiracies.

Sound familiar, anti-vaxxers, “COVID is a hoax” folks? History is but a distant mirror.

But this movie, a gruesome, grim, grinding, and bumping and-grinding (got to have sex scenes) affair with period detail and anachronistic dialogue, is never less than a chore to get through.

In 1665, the time of “The Great Plague,” and English town is ravaged, but a farm family (Charlotte Kirk, Joe Anderson) is socially distancing and weathering it well enough. Still, there’s a baby on the way and crops to sell, so Joseph goes to town to sell it.

That’s where he runs afoul of a harlot (Emma Holzer) and his nefarious landlord, the Squire (Steven Waddington). One poisoned drink later and he’s showing symptoms.

And when he fears for his family back home, there’s nothing for it but the noose, leaving poor Grace to dig his grave in the rain and cut his body down and bury it.

The Squire’s master plan seems murky to us, but Grace can only imagine what it is he’s truly after, and what he’s willing to do — attempted seduction, accusations of witchcraft, the works — to achieve it.

“You’ll pay for this, harlot!”

That brings in Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), the greatest “witch finder” of them all. England’s no longer Catholic, but here’s a British version of The Inquisition in one man, a veteran of trumped-up charges and burnings at the stake, someone Grace and everybody else is familiar with.

An interesting touch. Moorcraft keeps a burn victim who survived the stake (Margit Bárdos) in his employ, as a murderous bodyguard.

“Never doubt the virtue of our task!”

With such forces arrayed against her, what chance does Grace have? Might these visions of her dead husband and mother in her prison cell hold the key?

Is Satan available?

Everything director Marshall and his team do here seems designed to drag this out, from the ridiculous afterthought of numbering the days Grace is imprisoned with intertitles — Day 1, she’s locked up, Day 2, she’s whipped, Day 3, the Rack! — to the ruminations of the witch finder.

A habit of bad horror — if you’ve got a fetching leading lady, give her a few sexual moments. Consorting with the Devil, anyone?

The tale’s turn towards revenge is too tepid and comes entirely too late. The most creative killing involves minor supporting characters.

And the whole tedious affair makes one wish they’d gone to less trouble making a bad movie with tame villains, an uninteresting lead and confused (Was this recut to play up “the plague?”), scattered story.

All that lovely period detail gone to waste.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Charlotte Kirk, Steven Waddington, Joe Anderson, Sean Pertwee, Emma Holzer, with Ian Whyte as The Devil.

Credits: Directed by Neil Marshall, script by Edward Evers-Sweindell, Charlotte Kirk and Neil Marshall. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:50

The answer to that rhetorical question headline is “Yeah, pretty much.”

David Fincher’s brutal, sprawling fever-dream of Incel America can seem prescient, 22 years after its release.

It crossed over into cult status sometime before the lunatic right embraced its anarchy, toxic masculinity and division of huMANity between those who submit to the pain of life and embrace violence as a means of changing it, and “snowflakes.”

“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.”

“Fight Club” embedded itself in the culture with its swagger, bravado and catch phrases.

 “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!” 

Watching the film now, post Jan. 6 2021, it’s hard to see in the same visceral if seriously troubling way it washed over us all on first viewing. The satiric, stumbling narrative still stings, but the sting is no longer particularly funny.

It felt 30 minutes too long in 1999. It plays closer to “interminable” now.

Edward Norton’s insurance recall assessment agent, drowning in a pitilessly amoral job that reduces his life to frustrating air travel, soul-crushing car accident analysis and an IKEA-furnished “nest” at home, is by most measures Incel Patient Zero. No, he’s not unattractive, morbidly obese and living in the cliched “Mom’s basement.” But Incel he is, so numbed that he starts crashing support groups — testicular cancer to TB — just to “feel” something, to unload his suppressed Life of Tears.

Meeting a fellow support group crasher (Helena Bonham Carter at her Goth-punk sexpot best) doesn’t help. But this swaggering hunk Tyler Durden does. He’s “don’t give a f—” America incarnate — all bravado and attitude, willing to take a punch and more than willing to deliver one.

Whatever else once-and-always pretty boy Brad Pitt has done on the screen, this is the role that defines him. And who is he defining? Tyler’s a craft soap maker (Holocaust allusion) and banquet waiter who pees in the soup he serves the well-heeled.

Tyler Durden is still walking among us, refusing to “socially distance,” that “ass without a mask.” He is quick to trigger, quicker to feel dismissed, quick to turn violent. He is an icon to just the sort of people who ruined this movie, the ones who filled (more than one seat each) a commuter train I took in Orlando a year or so ago — uniformed and uniformly obese pasty-faced Proud Boys on their way to a Trump rally. I was taking the same train to see the Baby Trump balloon. Go figure.

When The Narrator of Many Fake Names (Norton, often speaking to the camera) and Tyler Durden invent Fight Club as a release for the similarly-disaffected, Tyler is the one who gets the girl. The Narrator finds himself surrounded by Incels, the emasculated looking for masculine meaning — pain, honor, glory, belonging to something larger than themselves.

Last summer’s riots, with much of the rioting organized by masked and tac-geared-up Boogaloo Boys, was “Fight Club’s” coda, an epilogue to the organized mass destruction that the Project Mayhem offshoot of Fight Club delivers in its finale.

I think David Fincher and novelist Chuck Palahniuk were prophetically reading the tea leaves rather than “inspiring” the cretins who adopted this movie as their ideal. Scorsese didn’t invent the mob, but his mob pictures provably influenced mob behavior, mores and social acceptance. That’s where “Fight Club” sits — a socially prescient social hot button film that was a magnet for disaffected, struggling white guys who wanted to see an idealized, buff and quotably flippant version of how they imagined themselves.

“We are all part of the same compost heap,” Durden aphorizes. “I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. “

The film tapped into what was, 17 years later, to make Trump president and 20 years later would lead to the sacking of the capital.

Aside from prophecy, how’s the film hold up? The grimy design, runway ready gaucherie of Durden’s look, attire and that Camaro convertible he peels off in for his airport exit is all of a piece. It’s ugly-beautiful.

The performances are spot-on, a hallmark of Fincher’s pictures. Norton’s reputation for immersion in a part predates this film, but it was chiseled in stone after it.

The narrative? It’s a tad sloppy and ambling. The picture unravels in pretty much the way the narrator does, with a third act that feels inevitable and unearned, “just right” and ridiculously “on the nose.”

And while there are jaw-dropping surprises along the way, the picture’s look and tone give away the biggest “twist,” then and now.

I remember wincing at what I thought were its flaws, way back when. Seeing “Fight Club” again, post-Jan. 6, they stick out more.

Cult films are seldom great films, they just connect with a corner of the audience more intensely than was intended, elevating their status.

That’s “Fight Club.” And appealing to the wrong sort of cult just makes that clearer.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent anti-social behavior, sexuality and language

Cast: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter and Meat Loaf.

Credits: Directed by David Fincher, script by Jim Uhls, based on the Chuck Palahniuk.  A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:19

First time I ever saw “Saturday Night Live” this band with Hitler on keyboards appeared. I thought it was another comedy element of the show. This film just premiered at Sundance.