Movie Nation

There’s a gloriously workmanlike quality to everything about Ron Howard’s fine film of the famous Tham Lunag cave rescue in Thailand, “Thirteen Lives.” It’s one of those real-life thrillers like Eastwood’s “Sully” or Howard’s own “Apollo 13,” a celebration of competence, courage and modest bravado as people rally around a crisis, do their jobs and see it through.

Twelve tween soccer players and their young coach went into a tourist cave near their corner of Thailand inthe summer of 2018. The rains came and they were trapped. Their country and eventually the whole damned world came to their rescue.

You’d have to be heartless, or Elon Musk, to not be moved by this.

Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson (“Gladiator,” “Unbroken”) do their version of “The 33,” telling a true story with multiple points of view with enough delicacy to avoid stepping on national pride or personal loss and avoid stepping into any “white savior” trap, as the key figures in the event were Western hobbyists — cave divers — summoned to do what mere Navy SEALS could not.

Part of that “delicacy” includes studiously avoiding showing how the kids got caught unawares, their semi-impromptu pre-birthday excursion to a local cavern/shrine turning life threatening when a sudden rainstorm left them stranded deep underground, with waters rising and oxygen levels falling.

We see the story from several points of view. There’s a documentarian “on the ground” perspective where an embattled local governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) is stuck with the thankless job of being the public face of the rescue effort, summoning Thai Navy SEALS, accepting the help of an expat water engineer (Nophand Boonyai) who instantly recognized the problem wasn’t pumping water out, it was preventing the water from pouring in from sinkholes on on the sides of the the mountain called The Sleeping Princess.

The governor, occasionally chewed out by the government minister who oversees him, is set up to be he fall guy when this all comes for naught.

The working class parents, planning a birthday party for one of the soccer players, complete with Spongebob Squarepants cake, are the first to realize their kids are running late. Tanata Srita plays one particularly distraught single mom, a “stateless” refugee who fears the government won’t make any effort to save her undocumented child.

We see the sturdy proficiency of the brave and intrepid Thai military, scrambling to start pumping the water out, mustering a SEALS scuba team, who are untrained in cave diving, because who has the sort of leisure time and thrill-seeking persona to pursue something that risky and dangerous?

That would be the Brits. Lewis Fitz-Gerald plays Vern Unsworth, a British expat/spelunker who offers his help to the governor. He’s the one who puts in the call to John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), a member of a volunteer British cave rescue team. And John is the one who has to the “old man” of their ranks, retired Coventry fireman Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen),and convince that this is a job only they can manage.

“I don’t even like kids,” the old grump mutters.

The heroes are flown in, do their damnedest to avoid stepping on Thai toes (and occasionally fail) and pitch in to help, managing to convince the authorities — military and elected officials — that cave diving a cavern flooding with torrential rains is a specialized skill.

Word gets out that the Thais “don’t want any foreigners dying in the cave,” thus their reluctance to accept Western help.

“We won’t die,” grizzled pro Rick growls. “I have no interest in dying.”

And before you or he can say, “Right, see you in’th’pub,” the Herculean effort to find those boys, determine if they’re alive and figure out a way to rescue them before the monsoons make this tourist attraction a mass grave, gets underway.

The first-rate underwater photography is shot mostly in extreme close-up. The divers are literally in the dark, plunging through two or three kilometers of tight, flooded underground squeezes in search of missing children. Yes, the stars mask and tank up for these sequences.

There’s also lovely Thai travelogue cinematography, of the mountain where this takes place and the rice paddies nearby that may have to be flooded — at great expense — to save these children.

Howard uses music sparingly, letting the noise of the cavern drowned in a downpour — days of rain open the crisis, and it isn’t even monsoon season — the divers’ regulators and driping silence heighten the suspense.

Farrell plays this seasoned diver, a married father and IT consultant, as more empathetic and yet tentative in the presence of brawnier and brassier man’s man Rick.

Joel Edgerton brings a lovely, skeptical warmth to the Australian “Doc Harry” summoned as a sort of Hail Mary by the cynical and seasoned Rick, whose pessimism writes all the kids off, straight away, and right after they’re first found alive.

It’s not just the accent that makes this great work on Mortensen’s part. He’s an aquatic EveryMan/EveryDay Joe here, that one mechanic who can fix your car, the fireman who knows just how to get your kid out of that burning building, the rescue diver who isn’t going to sugar-coat just what they’re facing just to protect anybody’s feelings.

Howard finds the heart in this story, and the perfect places to pluck the heartstrings. It’s an emotional movie, given a real-time “What we don’t know yet” urgency by Nicholson’s script, and a sort of awestruck “Look what these 5,000 people did just to save these children” credulity by one of Hollywood’s greatest “movies with heart” filmmakers.

Emotional or not, “Thirteen Lives” celebrates a sort of Howard Hawks “men doing manly stuff because only they can” competence, an old-fashioned feel-good movie with kids in jeopardy, turf wars over how to save them and everybody doing their damnedest to make sure Job One remains the rescue, and no other consideration matters.

Rating: PG-13, intense scenes, profanity

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Tanata Srita, Pattrakorn Tungsupakul and Joel Edgerton

Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, scripted by William Nicholson. An MGM production on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 2:27

“Buba” is a spinoff movie from a comic German TV series titled “How to Sell Drugs Online Fast,” which I’ve not seen.

So when I say I kind of got into the film’s dark, masochistic comic vibe but found it ungainly and lumbering, take that into account. The episodes of the show this came from were 30 minute quick hits, and that’s a hard format to translate into a 90 minute film, so if you loved the show, you may have a different take.

Still, as anybody not German will tell you, German “comedies” are a rare and bewildering thing, what you get from a culture that set out to wipe out God’s Chosen Funny People from their populace, and almost succeeded.

Too soon?

“Buba” is about a “dealer” who once sold to those kids learning “How to Sell Drugs” and faced an uncertain future thanks to a teen’s enterprising 3D printed gun.

It turns out Buba, played by Germany’s doppelganger for David Arquette (German TV star Bjarne Mädel), right down to the pot belly — has had a rough life.

Its high point came, a flashback tells us, when he was a kid and won a break dancing contest, beating out a youngster living in Germany at the time, a fellow you might have heard of — Leonardo DiCaprio.

But to win that night, young Jakob Otto had to miss some family outing. That evening ended with a car crash, two dead parents and a comatose sibling who woke up with a raft of medical conditions dogging every day of his life. Guilt about Dante (Georg Friedrich) and his fate has hung over “Buba” ever since.

Buba’s atonement for his “crime” is a lifelong aversion to happiness and pleasure, and a life list that he keeps — with Dante’s enthusiastic support — of “negatives,” aka “unpleasant experiences,” a “negatives list.”

Buba can’t feel good about anything without hoping and engineering something awful that follows it. And Dante has lived his life abusing that atonement.

“I can’t afford to have good feelings,” Buba explains (in German, or dubbed into English).

A stunt man job with a local Wild West (German) town means Buba can dodge safety protocols and burn or otherwise injure himself in the shows. Dante still collects their checks. Fake hit-but-a-car accidents? Dante runs that scam, too.

And when they’re warned away from their assorted hustles by The Albanian Mafia, Dante is the one who figures Buba’s masochism can serve them in good stead as they weasel their way into organized crime.

But as they do, and punching-bag Buba has to master being an enforcer in the protection racket while Dante curries favor with the elderly (female) gang boss, Buba meets The First Girl who Ever Kissed Him, a fellow contestant from that long-ago breakdance throw-down. And while the fact that she’s a tattoo artist plays into his whole self-abuse/injury/pain lifestyle, Jule (Anita Vulesica) just might be the sort of the pleasure this 40something lump has denied himself his entire life.

Bad movies are often propped up by incessant, over-explaining, “here’s where the ironic deadpan jokes are” voice-over narration, and director Arne Feldhusen lets this script trap him in exactly that fashion.

“Chapters” break down Buba’s journey through life, and as much as we need to hear about “The day my life changed,” the damned narration spoils it.

There’s color in the Albanian mob material, a brief explainer why this tiny country is the font of much European crime, inspiring an infamous “Top Gear” episode and the entire “Taken” movie series.

When the crone who runs that mob imparts a proverb — “A chicken can only dream of the things the fox has to do.” — we hear a bit of what “Buba” needs more of.

That said, the “takes a licking and keeps on ticking” pratfalls are fun and the Big Finish is big enough.

Those boons are what it takes for “Buba” to overcome its own “negatives list,” and they’re only good enough to lift this misfiring comedy into “mixed bag” movie territory.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug content, profanity

Cast: Bjarne Mädel, Georg Friedrich, Anita Vulesica, Soma Pysall and Jasmin Shakeri

Credits: Directed by Arne Feldhusen, scripted by Sebastian Colley and Isaiah Michalski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Jesus, I hate bad dialogue. Even in a torture porn C-movie, it grates.

It’s not that one doesn’t notice the pitiless, pointless slaughter, the heartless cruelty and bad acting. Idiotic plot? Let’s throw that in, too.

But bad lines badly-delivered? The worst.

“Dawn” is a thriller that “has it all,” as in it’s awful by almost every measure. So writer-director Nicholas Ryan, take a bow.

Jackie Moore of “Westworld” stars in this rideshare-driver-who-kills thriller that begins with (limited) promise and goes straight to hell in short order.

“Dawn” hosts “Dawn’s Den,” a “dark web” murders-for-clicks series. A nice touch? As this artist sits and drawls her “rules” for how to be an Internet “artist” hosting your own thrill-kill series, we can see spots on the lens. Blood, maybe?

But those “rules” are where the godawful dialogue starts. “Rule number one. You don’t always select your canvas, sometimes it selects you.” She means “select your subject to PUT on canvas,” but that’s quibbling.

Pay attention in English class, kids.

“The third and final rule,” she chirps, “ENTHUSIAM!” And then she goes on, Monty Python style, to add “Rule number five. ALWAYS give your audience what they want” and “Rule number six. Always bring a set of tools…and wear a bullet proof vest for safety.” And on and on she goes, “final” rules” and “bonus” instructions, inane and insane in the extreme.

The cutaways to Dawn’s narration are necessary because she’s picked up a seriously dull just-got-engaged couple, and Dawn’s sneering and increasingly menacing exchanges with a school teacher (Sarah French) and her “bro” business exec husband-to-be (Jared Cohn) range from idiotic — they’re insanely slow at realizing the threat — to tedious to downright insipid.

“Lesson for you, NOBODY’s innocent!”

What constitutes bad acting? A Southern drawl that comes and goes and goes some more, for starters. We hear this all through the dark night where Anna and Oliver are kidnapped, tortured and tested, all of it playing out in a kind of sleep-walking slow-motion.

And dagging poor Eric Roberts in for a single scene as a past victim, begging for his life, and Michael Paré in to play a cop is just cruel, no matter what you paid them. Then again, their names plus Moore’s got this garbage script financed.

And don’t hold out hope that the ending will save this, “darkest before the dawn” and all that. It doesn’t.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Jackie Moore, Sarah French, Jared Cohn, Eric Roberts, Nicholas Brendon and Michael Paré.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Ryan. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:18

“The Road” is one of the most evocative two word titles in all of cinema.

It brings up memories of Fellini’s Italian road picture, “La Strada,” the romance of “Two for the Road,” the adaptation of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” even the post-apocalyptic science fiction of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”

You don’t “own” that title, just just borrow it. Rana Salem trots it out for her debut feature film, a largely dialogue-free Lebanese drama about a Beirut couple who soak up the noise, the life and “the scene” in the capital city, and then throw a few things in the truck and hit the highway.

He (Guy Chartouni) is an urban farmer who grows vegetables and raises chickens on land on the outskirts of the city. By night, he’s a performance artist/DJ, putting on laser and light and animation shows for the cognoscenti.

His beard doesn’t give him away, but the tattoos and earrings do. He’s something of a hipster.

She (writer-director Salem) just quit her job and seems a little lost, a trifle overwhelmed and a bit subservient to his ideas, ambitions and whims. He’s the one who puts them on the road.

Salem’s film gives us a taste of the lovely Lebanese countryside, and the grumpy, outsider-resenting locals.

“The Road” is meant to be nostalgic, letting these two reminisce about past trips, perhaps lives left behind. But it doesn’t amount to much of anything. One night of passion, one snippy confrontation, one ugly incident, and on they drive.

There is no story arc or character arc, just a lot of scenes conveying a simplistic narrative with pictures, a film that doesn’t hold one’s interest for more than a third of Salem’s indulgent 96 minute first (it came out in 2015) and thus far only movie.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, smoking

Cast: Guy Chartouni and Rana Salem.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rana Salem. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

August 16, the hustle hits. Could be funny.

If hip hop breaks big among women in the Muslim world, look out.

Look for this Kino Lorber release Sept. 16.

Sept. 2.

Beware of tiny mean girls.

A romantic comedy with “Wedding Season” as its title kind of gives away the game.

There are going to be weddings — maybe “Wedding Crashers” weddings, perhaps “27 Dresses” weddings. Since it’s rated TV-PG and more Indian than Indian American, you can guess which end of the spectrum it skews to.

There’ll be a cute couple who “meet cute” and of course meet testy, because where’s the fun if they’re “destined to be” if it’s too obvious they’re destined to be? You can’t set off sparks without a little friction, right?

But the thing about rom-coms that work isn’t just that they get you in ways you expect. They sneak up on you with a surprise turnabout, little dollops of heart that hit you like a wet slap.”Wedding Season” catches you coming and going.

It’s an Indian American diaspora comedy with the usual nagging, badgering “Why aren’t you MARRIED?” mothers, Americanized “just living my life/get off my back” offspring, with a dash of culture clash and a tiny serving of the “biggest gossip in Little India” bitchiness.

It’s just adorable.

Asha, played by Pallavi Sharda, is a 30ish economist working with an Asian microloan investment fund, a workaholic in a workplace that could not be more diverse.

But her relentless and irritating mother (Veena Sood) is hellbent on marrying her off. She’s wearing out the DesiDream dating website, a place where interfering parents can throw up idealized profiles of their Indian children so that they can attract a proper Indian mate.

Yes, it’s a tradition that smacks of patriarchal/matriarchal “control” with a hint of enthocentrism. But mother Suneeta has already got one daughter (Arianna Asfar) about to marry a whiter-than-white doctor (Sean Kleier). With Asha having having blown up her engagement to “New Jersey’s most eligible brown bachelor,” and having no interest in pursuing another, what’s a mother to do?

Somebody wrote Ravi’s (Suraj Sharma) online profile as well — “spelling bee champ” and”
MIT” and “start-up” are all Suneeta needs to see.

It takes pressure just short of threats to get Asha to meet Ravi for a date. That empty place setting at the family Sunday dinner table?

“This plate is for the husband who should be here!”

But the “nerd” profiled online turns out to be laid back, over 30 and able to give as good as he gets in the cutting banter dept. Still, she’s not interested and Ravi simply walks away.

It’s just that they travel in the same socio-ethnic circles. There are a LOT of weddings coming up. And at one of them, they hear “We promise not to give up on you until we’re sure you’re HAPPY” and married one too many times. Asha armtwists Ravi into being her fake date for the season.

“I’ll just tell them we broke up at the next wedding” becomes an arrangement, and even though she keeps bringing her work laptop to each of the 14 weddings they’re both attending, “arrangements” have a way of becoming something more romantic once the “getting to know you” gets underway.

Sharda, an Indo-Australian actress (“Lion”) sparkles and gives us a hint of (respectful) spitfire in her performance. She makes Asha’s offhanded ABCD complaint while trying to don a sari — “How do half a billion women WEAR these things?” — the film’s lightest laugh.

Sharma, of “Umrika” (STREAM that one!), affects the breezy air of someone more troubled by what Ravi knows he isn’t telling Asha than any brushoff she tosses his way.

The reluctant couple charms, and the supporting players deliver cute laughs hither and yon — the gossipy “aunties” and other older folks complaining about this or that “rascal,” the white boy brother-in-law-to-be who keeps flailing away at Indian cultural appropriation.

“Keep calm and curry on!”

It’s a slight comedy, delicate as kheer with nothing remotely weighty about it. The biggest surprise about that might be the light touch veteran director Tom Dey brings to Shiwani Srivastava’s sweet and simple script. “Wedding Season” is her first produced screenplay. And there was something about its patience, pace and just-edgy-enough sweetness that made a filmmaker 16 years removed from “Failure to Launch” remember how it’s done and how it’s done right.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Pallavi Sharda, Suraj Sharma, Veena Sood, Arianna Afsar, Rizwan Manji, Damian Thompson and Sean Kleier.

Credits: Directed by Tom Dey, scripted by Shiwani Srivastava. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The “In Bruges” team in front of and behind the camera, Ireland’s finest, take us into a very personal feud in an Ireland of the recent past.

Funny, with a nasty edge, as you’d expect from the director of “Three Billboards” and “In Bruges.”

This Searchlight release is headed our way in October, and being a Gleeson, Farrell and McDonaugh fan, I can hardly wait.

“Easter Sunday” is a sentimental, lighthearted star-vehicle built around Filipino American comic Jo Koy.

With Koy playing a stand-up comic trying to mollify his Filipino-American (Catholic) family and cope with their foibles, it’s a cute, occasionally amusing, no-heavy-lifting-required peek into another culture as seen through a comedian’s eyes.

It’s strikingly similar to the recent indie comedy “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers,” covering some of the same Filipino work ethic, values and comic blind spots (endless Manny Pacquiao jokes). Letting Koy “play” a comic just makes this “The Hollywood Version” of “My Crazy Filipino American Family.”

Koy is Jo Valencia here, a stand-up whose peak moment might have been a series of Bud Zero commercials. He even had a catch phrase, “Let’s get this paaaarty STARTED!”

How original.

Jo’s 40something, divorced, and still chasing every standup’s dream, getting a “pilot” for a TV series. He’s auditioned for one in which he’s to be the colorful neighbor/pal and he’s “this close” to landing it, according to his ever-distracted agent (“Super Troopers” actor and director Jay Chandrasekhar, hilarious in every scene). But Jo won’t buy the “Accents are funny, funny is money, DO the accent” thing to land the role.

That’s hanging over his head as he grabs his teen son (Brandon Wardell) to drive up to Daly City, part of Greater San Francisco and a veritable Little Manila of Filipino-Americans. That’s where his mother (Lydia Gaston) and the aunt she’s feuding with (Tia Carrare) are throwing the big family Easter celebration.

A weekend of church and catching up with relatives is the order of business — assorted aunts and uncles (Joey Guila, Rodney To) and the dopey cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero) Jo gave a lot of money to start a taco truck business with, who has instead decided a “HYPE truck” (assorted fashion accessories) is the way to go.

Jo’ll bond with the son he’s always too busy for, the kid he constantly interrupts with “I’ve got to take this” call. Unless, of course, he has to fly back to LA mid-meal just to “salvage” the pilot.

The added stress of Mom and Tita Teresa’s feud, some shady stuff Eugene has gotten into, being called on to take over the sermon in church thanks to a loud whisper/argument with Eugene and trying to help his shy kid charm a cute girl (Eva Noblezada) should make things…interesting, in the “A I having a stroke?” sort of way.

Koy’s stand-out moments are that sermon he takes over and turns into a stand-up act, and assorted antic exchanges with a low-rent low-altitude mobster (Asif Ali, over the top) and a cop who happens to have been an ex.

She’s played by Tiffany Haddish, and she knocks her two scenes right out of the park, as can be expected.

Chandrasekhar might be playing a weary Hollywood “type,” the agent always “going into a tunnel, losing you” and hanging up. But he’s so good at it that he puts on a clinic in comic timing.

The script’s low-hanging-fruit laughs and trite Hollywood choice to have Koy play a struggling comic gives the film the feel of a sitcom pilot. He’s forced to be the reactor, and while’s OK, the few stand-up bits here are lame enough (aside from the “sermon”) to make you wonder how he ever landed this star vehicle in the first place.

The more working class, “scruffy” “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” did a FAR better job of immersing us in the culture and — this is important in culture clash comedies like this — the CUISINE. We see a lot of food in “Easter Sunday,” and pretty much no prep. What’re they eating? How’s it prepared? What role does that food play in the culture and its Easter traditions?

The chuckles and occasional flashes of charm make “Easter Sunday” a perfectly watchable if generally underwhelming comedy. But hey, maybe this sitcom pilot will be picked up after all, with or without the funny accent.

Rating: PG-13, threats of violence, profanity

Cast: Jo Koy, Tia Carrere, Lydia Gaston, Brandon Wardell, Eugene Cordero, Eva Noblezada, Jimmy O. Yang, Carly Pope, Jay Chandrasekhar and Tiffany Haddish.

Credits: Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, scripted by Kate Angelo and Ken Chang. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36