Movie Nation

“Lie Hard” is a time-wasting “comedy” about a dope who lies himself into an “out of your league” girlfriend, who lies himself into a mansion to keep her, gets in Dutch with the mob to get the mansion and lies his way right out of the job he had that would have never covered his mob “mortgage” anyway.

Strong-armed by mob, lying to the cops when they get involved, he isn’t even wholly honest to the two random “whippet” junkies — the saddest junkies of all — who might help him find “treasure” in this mansion he can’t afford.

Director, co-writer and star Ian Niles is not a graceful actor, not funny and lacks screen presence to boot. He’s a stumble-footed director and apparently doesn’t know anybody who could have fixed this leaden, utterly inept screenplay or turned into anything remotely amusing.

It’s damned near unwatchable.

Scene after excruciating scene unfolds, unravels or just plain bleeds out, right before our ever-sleepier eyes.

The plot is that this seriously charmless serial liar gets himself into all this trouble by over-reaching, and thus faces threats, kidnapping, and death — his or those he loves.

Not a second of it is polished or engaging enough to hold one’s interest or make one invest in any of it, or any one in it.

Not everybody in this is incompetent, but there isn’t a funny line in it, not a “funny” scene that finds its heart, its laughs or a coherent way to end. Not one.

And before “Lie Hard” director, co-writer and star Ian Niles whines “What’d I ever do to you?” I’m going to go first. Dude, what’d I ever to do you?

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Ian Niles, Melanie Chandra, Catherine Curtin, Chris Jarell, Joel Marsh Garland and Sid O’Connell

Credits: Directed by Ian Niles, scripted by Ian Niles and Harrison Feuer. A Mutiny release.

Running time: 1:30

On the sliding scale of “house party that turns to murder mystery” films, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” falls on the “Ready or Not” end of the spectrum, with “Knives Out” on the other.

It’s glib, topical, jokey and bloody, and as the headline says, it “gives the people what they want.”

Long lesbian make-out scene opener? Check. The young, the beautiful and the affluent wantonly misbehaving with drugs, casual hook-ups and unsafe glow necklaces? Check. Topical jokes mocking “triggers” that “ableist” “self-actualizers” carelessly fling at each other, because it’s the “woke” thing to do?

Oh, check.

Pete Davidson leaning into being “the most obnoxious of all” and gruesomely murdered early in the first act?

Check and check again.

Shockingly, it isn’t only comic book franchises that can pander to their “base” and have a little fun with it as they do.

Dutch actress turned director Halina Reijn (“Instinct”) and first-time screenwriter Sarah DeLappe fling a lot of sex appeal and cultural currency at Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” plot, itself a variation of works by genre-inventor Edgar Allan Poe. It’s a dark, hit-or-miss one-by-one mass murder comedy that caters to Gen Z and backhands it — hard — at the same time.

What fun!

The setup? A bunch of rich, aimless youth gather at the country estate of insecure, defensive David’s (Davidson) rich dad for a hurricane party.

For those of you not from the Southeast, the ethos of such benders is “As long as you’re gonna get blown away, you might as well get blown away.”

The roomy mansion is a fine gathering place for David, his longline actress-girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), sister (I think) Alice (Rachel Sennott), her new beau, the much older “vet” Greg (Lee Pace), Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) and Jordan’s ex, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Sophie’s shy, exotic new foreign-born inamorata, Bee (Maria Bakalova).

And what better time, with the power about to go out, a well-stocked bar and David’s easy access to Bolivian marching powder, for these idle richies to play their favorite game, “Bodies Bodies Bodies.”

Sure, Sophie’s post-rehab and “clean,” and the game — as they play it — begins with Slap Shots.

And as the ever-dramatic Emma reminds everyone, “Someone always ends up crying” by the end of this pick-a murder victim, with everyone else trying to guess who the killer is game.

Characters are sketched in — the over-the-top enthusiast Alice, her “cut” man-of-the-world lover, bitchy, intimidated David, dramatic Emma, feisty Jordan, who puts the moves on Bee and gets into cocky, womanizing Sophie’s head, with the shy, out-of-her-class Bee taking it all in.

The winds howl, the lights flicker, the “game” begins and then it all turns deadly serious.

Sennott, whose breakout turn was as the uninhibited sexpot “Shiva Baby,” pops off the screen here as well, making Alice a stunningly shallow rich ditz — of course she has a podcast — who is down for almost anything except deep thought. Sennott just kills it.

Pace plays the life life-of-the-party/man of the world Greg as someone who seems to have all the manly traits David never will — physical fitness, for starters.

Wonders affects an actressy air that serves her well in the game, but this is no ordinary game. And drugs and alcohol are the ultimate truth serum for how everybody feels about Emma.

“OK, not to be mean, but she wasn’t THAT good in ‘Hedda Gabler!'”

Stenberg (“Everything Everything,” “The Hate U Give”) does the fierce and fiery thing almost as well as Herrold (TV’s “Industry”).

Bakalova, an Oscar nominee for the “Borat” sequel, is good at giving us the mousy one everybody underestimates.

And Davidson may be the best working model of Russell Brand’s career experiment (something he up-front admitted in an interview with me), playing “the same character” over and over again, just a slight variation of his public persona. Davidson “acts” his “image,” the oversexed “vibe I put out there” that David brags about in “Bodies.” When we meet him, he’s blank-faced sporting a nasty black eye with pride. Drugs? On brand, too.

And if there’s one thing he mastered during his Kardashian sojourn, it’s that there’s value in being the object of scorn, the guy everybody wants to see “get it first.”

The unfolding plot makes just enough sense to get by, but that might be because it’s so predictable we can pretty much guess who dies and “in order of disappearance.”

It might be a tad too on the nose for the generation it’s poking fun at for Gen Z to take to it. The “types” here are broadly drawn and almost to a one, insulting. I kept thinking of “The Blair Witch Project” and its amusing “how incompetent these kids are in the woods” subtext.

A hurricane’s coming, and these seven are not concerned about the pool umbrellas they leave open outside, all the exposed windows and making lots of alcohol — and a case of bottled water for the seven of them — their “hurricane prep.” This or that character is fleeing someone they fear might be the murderer, and doing it by cellphone light in pitch black rooms, or wearing a glow necklace that will give away the game that’s no longer a game.

The battery dies on their escape vehicle, an SUV, but it’s not so dead that Sophie can’t rage-honk the horn for a minute or two. OK, that boner’s on the director.

Reijn shoots some splendid chases and life-and-death fights as seen by the waving, wobbling lights of cell phones, and the plot is tricky enough that even if we can guess where it’s going, we can’t really grasp how it began until we hit the finale.

That, and a whole lot of “giving the people what they want” keeps rigor mortis at bay in “Bodies Bodies Bodies.”

Rating: R for violence, bloody images, drug use, sexual references and pervasive language.

Cast: Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Rachel Sennott, Chase Sui Wonders, Lee Pace, Myha’la Herrold and Pete Davidson

Credits: Directed by Halina Reijn, scripted by
Sarah DeLappe. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:35

I reviewed this engaging and informative rocker doc about a ground breaking female band some months back, and how it’s time for the folks who use the Orange County Library System, South Trail Branch, to check this pre-Runaways ensemble out.

Remember, donate your DVDs to your local public library. They’ll expand their collection or sell them as a way of raising cash for more books.

MovieNation, bringing cutting edge screen culture to the Southeast, one DVD, one library at a time.

As 30 year-old whose belief that she’s “a 70 year-old woman trapped in the body of a 30 year-old” is tested out via “past life regression,” Diane Keaton shrieks and sputters, totters on towering high-heel thigh-high boots and tumbles into pools in exasperation in “Mack & Rita,” a comedy in which she plays the AARP version of Elizabeth Lail.

It’s a limp noodle version of “Big” — a “body switch” comedy whose best bits are montages, scenes of a 30 year-old waking up with Keaton’s manic energy, statuesque beauty and one-of-a-kind fashion sense, a senior citizen forced into “influencer” appearances at power pilates workouts, female empowerment rallies and the like. In those quick cuts, the sight gag of hippest-granny-ever Keaton bouncing around doing stuff that would challenge women half her age is a hoot.

The rest of the movie isn’t exactly hoot-free. But the strain of every “get me rewrite” line, the forced jocularity of “Rita” mixing it up with her new-friends/peers (Loretta Devine, Lois Smith, Amy Hill and Wendy Malick) and clumsily-handled hint of romance with much younger dog walker Jack (Dustin Milligan) shows.

And the whole enterprise is Exhibit A that the actress-turned-director Kate Aselton is no better at comedy than she was at thrillers (“Black Rock”).

Lail, of TV’s “Ordinary Girl” and “Gossip Girl” reboot plays Mack, a published author who idolized her late grandmother in her childhood, and finds herself emulating her style of dress and disdain for the hip, the faddish and her peers’ idea of “fun.” She’s got writer’s block and an agent sending her out as the world’s least popular beautiful blonde influencer.

Mack is also maid of honor for BFF Carla (Taylor Paige of “Zola” and “Sharp Stick”), but all she can do on their bachelorette weekend in Palm Springs is try to hide how little energy or interest she has for dressing up and clubbing, and how much she envies the seniors having brunch at the pancake house across the street.

The others ditch her at a “past lives regression” therapy tent, where guru Luka (Simon Rex of “Red Rocket,” funny) shoves her in an old tanning bed and tells her “to connect with the person you once were” and envision “who you want to be.”

That’s how she wakes up old, stylish, and hopefully with a hint of what she envies in her elders — not sweating the small stuff because she’s “figured it out.”

After confusing her for “a ghost” Carla calmly accepts this new State of Mack, and squeezes in helping her track down that “regression” shaman to make her 30 again with own her wedding planning.

Sometimes, Carla parks Mack — who passes herself off as “Aunt Rita” — with Carla’s Mom (Devine) and her ladies of a certain age wine club. Those scenes promise comic electricity, with experienced comic actresses letting the zingers zing. And they barely have a pulse.

Does Rita “have a man?”

“The worst thing that can happen is you wind up with herpes. And if you end up in a nursing home, you’re gonna get it anyway!”

Yeah, it’s ALL like that.

Shy Mack finds herself more relaxed and approachable as “Rita,” which is why she sets off sparks with the hunk next door (Milligan).

The producers of “Book Club” engineered this comedy for Keaton, with a couple of TV writers setting their “grow up and get comfortable with who you are” lesson in a “Big” variation.

Early scenes show Paige and others plainly tickled to be sharing scenes with the Oscar winning legend. But the energy flags as the moribund nature of the screenplay sinks in on one and all.

Maybe if “Rita” had been forced into more bachelorette weekend antics with Paige, bubbly Aimee Carrero and Addie Weyrich, the strain of trying to keep up, comically, with Keaton wouldn’t have been so obvious. As it is, “Mack & Rita” is a criminal waste of seasoned comic talent and a criminal misuse of some of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets coming up behind them.

Rating:  PG-13 for some drug use, sexual references and profanity.

Cast: Diane Keaton, Taylour Paige, Elizabeth Lail, Loretta Devine, Dustin Milligan, Simon Rex, Amy Hill, Wendy Malick and Lois Smith

Credits: Directed by Katie Aselton, scripted by Madeline Walter and Paul Welsh. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

You know what we call a simple, primal, stranded-at-a-great height thriller like “Fall?” Pretty damned good for what it is.

Melodramatic and nerve-wracking, predictable and still jolting, this B-movie directed by Scott Mann (“Heist,””Final Score”) toys with us and plays the viewer like a cheap fiddle. But Mann and two good leads make it sing.

It begins the way every climbing thriller does, the way many a climbing documentary ends — somebody sees somebody else fall to his death. Here, it’s Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), going up a sheer rock wall with husband Dan (Mason Gooding) only to see him hurtle into the abyss below.

A year later, she’s still drinking and grieving, pushing away her pushy Dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who was in “Heist”), still staring at the cardboard package on the counter with “human remains” marked on it.

It takes old pal Hunter (Virginia Gardner) to get her back “out there,” and by “out there” I mean “up there.” Hunter’s an adrenalin junkie who, as “Danger Dee,” has a Youtube channel documenting her fearless climbing feats, and a climbing friend who needs to get back on the horse that threw her.

“Do not let this fear consume you” is her way of goading Becky into joining her on an illegal climb, up “the old B67” transmission tower, out where the buzzards lurk and the Joshua Trees stand guard in the desert. Long out of commission, it’s 2000 feet tall, “the fourth highest in America,” and by God, they’re going up it.

With maintenance ladders going all the way up, this should be a piece of cake “and make GREAT video.” Hunter tends to sex up her climbs with sexed-up death-defying stunts, the last thing Becky needs.

But hey, “I didn’t wear this stupid (push up) bra for nothing!”

The “Danger of Death” signs surrounding the remote TV tower (not a transmission cable left on it) don’t scare them off. What they don’t notice, but simple close-ups show us, are the rusting turnbuckles, loose bolts and buzzards side-eying each other with a look that says “Lunch!”

Mann, who co-wrote the script with Jonathan Frank, sticks to formula. It’s build-up, release, over and over again through an opening series of fakeout frights. And then it’s REAL fright, relax, melodramatic twist, relax again, even BIGGER fright, and so on.

Former child actress Currey (“Ghost Whisperer,” now in the “Shazam!” movies) gives her lungs a workout. We buy into her terror. And she and the brassy Gardner (“Halloween,” “Runaways”) are credible enough climbers and pretty good at selling the scares and the “work the problem” sequences, far fetched as they might be.

But movies like “Fall” are all about the tropes (Foreshadowing, anyone?), the stunts and the editing, all in service of a formula that’s not wholly bulletproof, but close.

And here, enough of that pays off that while we notice how simple it all is, you give the devils their due. It’s still damned good for what it is.

Rating: PG-13, terror, profanity

Cast: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Credits: Directed by Scott Mann, scripted by Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47

This looks a bit by Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away” and its crappy American remake.

Shipwrecked, and class conflicts will come to the fore.

“Triangle of Sadness” is from the Swedish director of “Force Majeure” and “The Square.” So funny? Maybe. Dark? Almost certainly.

Oct. 7.

Let’s play a game, shall we?

It wasn’t a terrible idea.

James Ponsoldt, my idea of the quintessential “indie” filmmaker, who makes character-driven dramas such as “The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour,” takes a stab at bringing us a girls’ coming of age picture in the “Stand By Me” mold.

In “Summering,” four tweenage girls spend their last weekend before starting middle school finding a body and not telling their parents — event the “helicopter moms” among them — about it. Instead they “investigate” who he was and what happened, and even hold a seance to “contact” him.

So yes, there’s the whiff of Stephen King’s story “The Body” to this, with emotional BFF bonding and the like. But barely a note of this contrived, Nutrasweetened melodrama engages, even on those rare instances in which something rings true.

Daughters or not, having a guy co-write this girls’ story with Ponsoldt shows in every false note.

Daisy (Lia Barnett) is our narrator in this sentimental — set in the present day — tale of suburban 11 year-olds who finish off a giddy suburban summer of somersaulting through sprinklers by stumbling across a man, in a suit, lying beneath an overpass.

Mari (Eden Grace Redfield) wants to phone it in, tell the cops and her mother. But Lola (Sanai Victoria), Daisy and Dina (Madalen Mills) vote her down.

A couple of their moms are “helicopter” qualified, but Mari’s mom (Megan Mullally) is the pilot. Their reasoning? If they tell their mothers, “they’ll think we’re like, traumatized” and go overboard in their concern. It’s “our last weekend” of summer. Who wants to deal with the cops AND their mothers (Sarah Cooper, Ashley Mdadekwe and Lake Bell play the others) for an entire weekend?

In news stories and in the movies, dating back to “River’s Edge” and “Stand By Me,” it’s pretty well established that kids are fully capable of this sort of insensate stupidity.

With narrator Daisy leading the way, they start poking around the body, looking for clues — “What, you’ve never seen ‘C.S.I?” And their last adventure of summer takes them to a bar, a locked school, online and elsewhere in search of who this man was, which will tell them whether he jumped or might have been pushed off that bridge.

The dynamics of the various families are interesting enough — a joking pep talk about “the seventh circle of hell” that middle school is from an older sister, this painter mom or that smothering-mothering mom picking up on “something” being off when their children come home from their trip to “Terabithia” (a tree they’ve decorated with mementoes).

The fathers are mostly invisible here.

The kids hang together but don’t really click, largely because the characters don’t have much in the way of earthy reality about them. Their edges have been rubbed off by the daddy screenwriters. They don’t even cuss, the little angels. And here they are, picking over a body and MOVING the body so nobody else sees it?

I’ve been a Ponsoldt fan since his feature debut, “Off the Black.” He’s made three outstanding films built around alcoholics (“Smashed” and “Spectacular Now” and “Off the Black”), and his winners far outnumber the occasional missteps like “The Circle” or now, “Summering.”

The occasional great line in even this one — about “how August feels, like ‘the good part’ is over” — will have to tide one over until his next movie, hopefully one that’s a lot better than this.

Rating:  PG-13 for some thematic material

Cast: Lia Barnett, Sanai Victoria, Madalen Mills, Eden Grace Redfield, Sarah Cooper, Megan Mullally, Ashley Mdadekwe and Lake Bell.

Credits: Directed by James Ponsoldt, scripted by James Ponsoldt and Benjamin Percy. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:25

An “us” and “them” confrontation between famous chef/staff, and his well-heeled clientele.

A little class war savagery, in the guise of haute cuisine?

Nov 18, from Searchlight Pictures.

A triumph of tone more than anything else, Perry Blackshear’s “When I Consume You” is “The Fisher King” reimagined as a bleak horror tale bathed in abuse and mental illness.

Desperately poor co-dependent siblings struggle to forget their traumatized childhoods and lose themselves in the delusions they live under — that a drug addict and a mental “14 year old” can adopt a child, or become an early childhood educator.

But lurking in the shadows is the green-eyed demon of their past. It’s not just their permanent records and employment histories holding them back. Daphne and Wilson are stalked by a great evil, which each must face in her or his own time.

Writer-director Perry Blackshear revisits the themes and general plot outline of his earlier film “They Look Like People” for this down-market New York story set in the grime, violence and poverty of the city’s underbelly.

Libby Ewing (TV’s “Grow the F*ck Up”) is Daphne, barely holding it together, fielding unannounced three a.m. visits from her panic-attack prone “on the spectrum” brother Wilson (Evan Dumouchel, of “They Look Like People”) and patiently meeting with an adoption counselor, as if a “recovering” addict with a police record has a prayer of that ever happening.

All her self-help/self-actualization “Buddhist” “Zen” etc. jargon can’t hide the obvious. She’s too damaged, too needy and too broke to offer anything to a child.

Wilson, a college drop-out janitor, figures he’ll become a teacher to “help kids” and “make them feel safe.” Well, maybe in Florida. There’s quite the governor-generated shortage here, you know.

Daphne is great at calming her brother, propping him up and understanding him. Imagine his and the viewer’s shock when he walks in on her, OD’d in her bed, her blow-dryer still running.

The “14 year old boy” that Wilson is, he flees, trying to outrun this shock and his own lungs in a breathless (handheld camera) sprint. When he catches his breath and comes back, he first assumes he can revive the dead sister, then he calls the cops and insists he saw “a man” fleeing through her no-fire-escape fourth-floor window.

It’s only when Daphne comes back to him that his task becomes clear. He will find “the murderer,” and “become someone who can fight the man who killed you.”

To the ghost of Daphne, and to us, it’s pretty obvious that was no “man.” And as she exhorts Wilson and “trains” him for the big confrontation, we wonder just who or what Wilson will track down and how he might face it.

Blackshear’s preferred vibe here is down and out and fatalistic. Doom and gloom hang over this story and this quest, and Daphne’s spirit does not sugarcoat it for the brother she’s no longer there to protect.

The sibling relationship and intimate details of their lives — he keeps plants that he names after “Lord of the Rings” or “Hunger Games” characters — are major selling points of this downbeat story.

The supernatural nature of the quest make it “horror.” But “When I Consume You” is closer to being an arm’s-length character study in illness, an arrested-mental-development take on what a childish brother believes he’s seen and the “evil” he must confront.

For all its brevity, packaging a simple psychological horror story in a relatively short film, I felt my interest drifting away in the internalized struggle and contrived, externalized confrontation of the later acts.

It’s still an intriguing and somewhat cerebral entry in the horror canon, a movie that reminds us that the real “monsters” are trauma and the real confrontations are best handled in a therapist’s office.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Libby Ewing, Evan Dumouchel, MacLeod Andrews.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Perry Blackshear. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:29