Movie Nation

Pandemic or poor buzz, based on its cryptic trailers and “Not everyone’s going to love this” reviews — or filmgoers leery of checking in for another self-indulgent “Us” ride — “Nope” is opening 36%/$20-25 million lower than Jordan Peele’s last “GOTCHA” outing, “Us.”

Deadline.com is saying that a $6.4 million Thursday folded into Friday for a $19.5 million opening day will produce a $45 million opening weekend. $44 million is what Exhibitor Relations is reporting on Sunday, a flying/dining saucers horror tale with Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer headlining it isn’t going to sell tickets based on the star power.

“Thor: Love & Thunder” is looking at a healthy $22 million take.

That bested “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” It pulled in another $17 and change. It’ll clear the $300 million mark by end of business Tuesday.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” will have one more good weekend — $10, and a couple of middling ones, unless the target audience continues to show up and find it.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is rolling up on another $9 million or so, closing in on $650 million in North America by next weekend.

“The Black Phone” is still ringing, another $3.45 this weekend.

I will be updating these figures Sat and into Sunday as more data rolls in from Exhibitor Relations, Box Office Pro and others.

Sometimes you wonder if every over-40 white dude in America needs Lil Rel Howery as a confidante, the best friend willing to be the one to tell Your Average White Man “You’re outta your damned mind” when the need arises, the guy who points out the obvious.

“Chuck, this is creepy as f—!”

That last line makes him the surrogate for the audience, snappishly trying to set straight Patton Oswalt’s estranged-dad desperate to maintain contact with his son in “I Love My Dad.” Father Chuck crosses all SORTS of lines to make that happen in this cringe-worthy comedy about a Dad catfishing his own kid.

Let’s ignore the fact that co-worker Jimmy (Howery) is the one who suggested creating a fake social media profile so that Chuck can get around his depressed, once-suicidal son’s “blocking” him. Chuck takes that tip, cyber-stalks a cute, friendly waitress (Claudia Sulewski) he’s met — once — steals her photos and invents an irresistible “friend” request.

It’s what Chuck has to do to maintain the illusion that takes this dark James Morosini laugher into “creepy” as you-know-what territory.

An opening montage of voice mail messages serves up Chuck’s parade of beg-off excuses and lies for not being there for this, that or the other big moment in son Franklin’s (Morosini) life — birthdays, graduations, promised vacations. These have piled up into the biggest grievance imaginable.

However supportive his mom (Amy Landecker) is, 20something Franklin has struggled with a staggering depression. His absentee Dad makes a convenient target, and when Franklin “shares” his decision to cut off contact with him at his suicide survivors support group, there is no pushback.

Chuck, they and we take for granted, is toxic for his son, who recently tried to kill himself. Only Chuck, struggling to get by across the state line in Maine, sees things differently. Well into his 40s, stuck in a cubicle job, his ex hates him and he’s dating a co-worker (Rachel Dratch) who’d rather swap sexts and phone come-ons because when it comes to sex, “You’re not good a it.”

His kid, just now getting over “thoughts of self-harm,” cutting him off? Chuck can’t bear it. That’s how the whole “Becca” thing online gets started. Whatever the ethics of it, Chuck can see a net positive in “her,” bucking up his son — who never learned to drive, has no job or thought of how to get one — giving him confidence and advice under the guise of this beautiful age-appropriate woman.

And if she suggests he not be “so hard” on his dad? That’s a win win.

Of course Franklin is flattered by this attention, and that turns to “smitten.” Cue Jimmy.

“This is INCEST, Chuck.”

Actor turned actor-writer-director Morosini, looking for something edgier than his threesome-goes-wrong outing “Threesomething,” takes things to the next level in passing off “I Love My Dad” as something that “actually happened” in an opening title. That’s neither here nor there.

The clever touch here is having Franklin imagine, in his mind, Becca actually there with him as they’re having these chats, which take a turn from seeing her everywhere (inside the supermarket refrigeration case) to “Can we video chat?,” “Can I call?”, “I’m coming to see you” to “I’m kissing you.”

And Chuck is seeing these “creepy” encounters the way they really are, especially the kissing part.

The best bit? A frantic driving-while-texting (typos included) moment with Sulewski forced to act-out the misspellings and botched grammar to lovesick…and confused, Franklin.

It’s a cut, cringey gimmick, and it’d be nice to say “I Love My Dad” transcends that and finds something interesting to say about fathers and sons and “growing up,” even later in life. It doesn’t.

But Oswalt is properly perplexed, stricken, devious and amusingly careless as this lifelong liar, someone who with a long track record of cheating to take the easy way out. Morosini is convincingly morose. Dratch brings the funny, as always.

Winsome newcomer Sulewski is alternately sweet, the smile that launched a thousand catfishes, and real — a working class 20something who may have a limited horizon, but who has already had to learn how to brush off unwanted attention.

And Lil Rel, perfecting that incredulous glare behind those thick glasses, makes the most of another “Black voice of reason in the hero’s ear” role. I wonder if he’s accepting “friend” requests?

Rating: R for sexual content and language.

Cast: Patton Oswalt, James Morosini, Claudia Sulewski, Rachel Dratch, Amy Landecker and Lil Rel Howery.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Morosini. A Magnolia (Aug. 5) release.

Running time: 1:36

Remember how cute it was that Chris Pratt’s hero in “Guardians of the Galaxy” totes around a mix tape from his late mother? Planet to planet, stolen ship to shoot-out — all set to tunes like “Hooked on a Feeling” or “I’m Not in Love” or “Cherry Bomb,” “Go All the Way,” etc.” heard on Peter Quill’s Sony Walkman?

Sure, it felt like pandering to a fanboy demo trapped in 1970s classic rock and pop, but it was adorable, right?

That’s what those hacks the Russos were trying to tap into by having a sickly little girl obsess over a tune by Mark Lindsay, formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders, in “The Gray Man.” After leaving his group, the solo Lindsay had a couple of anthemic hits — big arrangements, soaring melodies, power chords with horns like “Arizona” and the song used in the movie — this one, “Silver Bird.”

It’s not explained, a song that predates the child, the child’s parents and almost predates her uncle, an ex-spook played by Billy Bob Thornton.

Why does she like it? No idea. How obvious is this “Guardians” pilfering? Pretty obvious. Even the fact that the Russos went to Lindsay, whose tunes turned up in Tarantino’s latest and “Licorice Pizza,” seems like something they “lifted” from their betters.

How cheesy is the tune?

Well, maybe little Claire’s uncle was into motorcycles. Maybe he remembered “Silver Bird” was sold as a jingle, almost straight off, to a Japanese motorcycle company trying to make early ’70s inroads into the American market.

“Silver Bird, won’t you fly me a-waaaaay” became “Yama-HAaaaaaa, today is the day.”

Stupid memory, remembering that. Stupid movie, punching in that ear worm. Stupid Youtube. They even have the Yamaha commercial!

I must’ve skipped past this trailer three or four times figuring “just for some new incarnation of the game, meh.”

Wishful thinking. Because then I remembered something about the movie being in the works, Chris Pine being REALLY anxious to get another “Star Trek” film in, and Michelle Rodriguez getting another badass turn in between “Fast/Furious” installments, etc.

High Grant, Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, that “Hamilton” fellow from “The Gray Man”…

It looks kind of fun, in a stunningly cheesy game adaptation way. Aged cheese by the time it comes out next year.

Check it out.

A Trailer a week, I figure, until this epic series comes to Amazon Sept. 2.

It looks good, more human, I must say., if more than a little familiar.

What daft Manx nonsense is this?

“Mindhorn” is a loopy British farce about a has-been TV star, his former co-star and girlfriend, his former stuntman and a real-life murder suspect so delusional he insists the actor play that part in his little cat-and-mouse game with the local Isle of Man police.

Julian Barratt has the title role, inhttps://twitter.com/The_Mal_Galleryor that of actor Richard Thorncroft, a few decades and many pounds — the fat kind — removed from his signature role, that of a former secret agent experimented on by the Russians so that his super-powered eye (covered in an eyepatch) can discern “the truth” of any situation.

“It’s TRUTH time!”

Back in the day, “Mindhorn” had the cool porn mustache, the cool “capoeira” martial arts skill, cool tan leather jacket, the boots and the uncoolest Jaguar ever — the bargelike ’70s vintage XJS.

He had a sexy sidekick (Essie Davis) whom the actor playing Mindhorn was carrying on with off camera, a dopey but brave stuntman (Simon Farnaby) and another co-star (Steve Coogan), whose character, Windjammer, has gone on to decades of much-resented success in a spin-off show.

Thorncroft took his shot at Hollywood, and the fact that he’s got a ratty wig, a pint-gut and a dumpy flat in Walthamstow — a less fashionable corner of London — tells you Hollywood didn’t buy in. Thorncroft is reduced to begging his agent for news on his “autobiography,” which no one wants, and crashing auditions for a film directed by his old mate Kenneth Branagh.

Not sure he’s the best choice to play a Jamaican mobster, mon.

“Three years at RADA’ll give a man SOME skills!”

Fate intervenes in Richard’s plunge to the bottom. A madman (Paul Tovey) on the Isle of Man, where “Mindhorn” was filmed, is wanted for murder and hiding out in the island’s old smuggler’s tunnels (a real thing). And the only copper he’ll talk to is “Mindhorn.”

Not the actor, but the guy in full kit, full’stache and ugly-ass jacket and Jaguar. The nut calls himself “Kestrel,” and he won’t show himself until his idol is on the case. With his agent smelling “publicity” and Richard sensing his chance to be “back on the map,” it’s off to the isle to mix with the Manxes, as the locals are called.

Maybe he can catch up with that old flame/co-star, now a reporter for MANX TV. Maybe the locals have forgotten the Trumpish label he gave the place, way back when. Maybe not.

He’ll mix with the cops, including Det. Sgt. Baines (She Who Must Be Worshipped, Andrea Riseborough), don the wig and jacket and bully-boy our nutjob suspect into surrendering.

“Comeback,” here we come.

What former “Mighty Boosh” co-stars Barratt and Farnaby (co-writers) were shooting for in this goof of a film — which never played in the U.S –was a sort of Steve Coogan/Alan Partridge styled with-fame/without celebrity death spiral.

As reliably funny as these two are, they not only landed Riseborough and “Chariots of Fire” alumnus Nicholas Farrell and Coogan as co-stars. The Oscar-winning Branagh shows up, and Simon Callow also appears as himself, another client of Richard’s agent, who is played by another big name in Brit stage and screen circles, three time Emmy nominee Harriet Walter of “The Last Duel,” “Sense and Sensibility” and TV’s “Succession” and “Ted Lasso.”

“I believe we’re making another transition, Richard, from unemployed actor to unemployable actor.”

Barratt is all bluster and bloat and letting it all hang out, and he’s a damned stitch in this part. Farnaby, Richard McCabe (as Thorncroft’s hard-times ex-publicist) and dopey Tovey as the dopey Kestrel all score.

The story unfolds in some screwy and unconventional ways. The complications are often amusing, sometimes hilarious and always messy and personal and on Richard’s part, delusional. And the island he once calls a “s—hole” is shown off — on screen — to glorious effect.

What they managed here is no mean feat, the second funniest comedy ever filmed on the Isle of Man. And there’s no dishonor at all in finishing behind “Waking Ned Devine,” is there?

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, innuendo, profanity

Cast: Julian Barratt, Essie Davis, Andrea Riseborough, Simon Farnaby, Richard McCabe, Paul Tovey, Nicholas Farrell, Simon Callow, Steve Coogan and Kenneth Branagh

Credits: Directed by Sean Foley, scripted Julian Barratt and Simon Farnaby. A now on Netflix.

Running time: 1:29

There are classic films, and among them are quintessential classics, the “life list” movies that every film fan has to know to be cineliterate.

Among the latter, I’d list “Lawrence of Arabia,” “La Strada,” “The 400 Blows,” “The French Connection” and “Zorba the Greek,” just for starters.

The fact that three of those star Anthony Quinn suggests the unique quality he brought to almost every performance, from “Viva Zapata” to that late-life/peak Keanu period piece “A Walk in the Clouds.” You watch that mostly-forgotten film and there are moments when Old Man Quinn’s larger than life reputation, presence and playfulness makes Keanu Reeves crack up in what can only have been surprised delight.

We see that look cross Alan Bates‘ face, almost out of character, in Quinn’s greatest leading man turn, as “Zorba the Greek.” Bates, playing a young Brit who has inherited property on the island of Crete, maintains his English reserve, skepticism and general impatience for this working class hustler with his own ideas about work, love, food, wine and telling time. But every now and then, Bates the actor lets a little “Damn, what’s that rascal up to now?” delight peek through his Keep Calm and Don’t Trust the Greek reserve.

“I don’t want any trouble!”

 “Life is trouble! Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and ‘look’ for trouble!”

Quinn’s Zorba is a titanic performance, the very definition of Larger than Life. What critics at the time sometimes wrote off as “hammy” and “over-the-top,” Quinn turned into a brand, cinematic shorthand for Big Characters full of the zest of life. If his turn as Auda Abu Tayi bowled you over in “Lawrence of Arabia” — and it should — Zorba was his zenith.

“Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.”

Quinn cooked up a dance that became a national folk dance of Greece. The movie collected three Oscars and had a good shot at several others. The character, already iconic thanks to the 1946 Nikos Kazatzakis novel, became a U.N. Heritage site thanks to the film.

If you haven’t seen it, you must.

Bates is Basil, a young writer who meets this grinning, gregarious bear of a man while waiting for a rainy passage from the mainland to Crete, where Basil hopes to hole up and write, and maybe re-start an old lignite (crumbly, brown coal) mine on his father’s property.

“Lignite?” Zorba exclaims. Whatever other line of BS he was serving to his new friend, here’s his surest footing. Zorba’s been a soldier, a lover and many other things. Among them? A miner. He will help his new “Boss,” as he labels him. No no, there’ll be no arguing about it. A deal is struck.

Once in this village on this backward, sleepy pre-war island, Zorba will translate, bargain and engineer the mine back to life. He will translate, bargain and half-engineer the boss’s romance with a lonely young widow (Irene Papas), shunned and harassed by the locals.

“God has a very big heart but there is one sin he will not forgive! If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go. I know because a very wise old Turk told me.”

Zorba will woo a lonely older widow (Oscar winner Lila Kedrova) himself.

 “If a woman sleeps alone, it puts a shame on all men.”

And he’ll translate, bargain and engineer Basil into a new way of living life.

“Do you dance, boss? Dance?”

We remember the iconic music, by Mikis Theodorakis, a tune that turned into a Greek cliche. We can’t forget the dance. We quote the faux profundities that remind us of what “a man’s world” used to be, toxic as it was. We fall into the Oscar-winning black and white cinematography of Walter Lassally. Maybe we don’t give a lot of thought to the direction of Michael Cacoyannis, who had a mostly-indifferent career aside from this classic.

But rewatching the film anew, I found myself lost in the stunning, Oscar-winning production design of Vasilis Fotopoulos. His work takes us to a Greece and a Crete long gone, poor and primitive and run down, and yet “unspoiled” by the tourism this movie and later EU membership and investment generated.

It’s a stark world of stunted trees, rocky ground and rain, a sleepy village with all the universal foibles, failings and human miseries and joys and possibilities on display. And even though there’s a writer present, only Alexis Zorba truly sees it.

The best way to come to “Zorba” is the way I did, through a friend, somebody who sees The Greek as a role model, a guide to the Well Lived Life, rich or poor, somebody who truly “sees it.”

So I’m telling you, as your friend, you need to track this down. It used to be hard to come by — a film society showing here, an old movies TV channel screening there. That’s not the case any more.

If you haven’t seen “Zorba the Greek,” you’ll never be more than a film “buff.” Cacoyannis, Kazantzakis, Fotopoulos and Anthony Quinn put on a graduate school seminar in “cinephile, how to become one” with this, one of the greatest films ever made.

Rating: unrated, violence, adult themes

Cast: Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates, Irene Papas, Lila Kedrova

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Cacoyannis, based on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. A Twentieth Century Fox release on Movies!, Netflix, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 2:22

If “The Gray Man” does nothing else, Netflix’s latest blank-check action thriller is going rock the worlds of legions of Marvelettes, those fanatics who have been whining about the latest “Doctor Strange” and “Thor” on Twitter because, as one wag put it, the acclaimed directors behind them “didn’t make me cry” and “didn’t have the depth of story” of — you know — the Russo Brothers’ many Marvel outings.

W.T.F?

Imagine staring, slack-jawed as the “Gray” credits roll, and realizing for the first time, “Wait, the Russos suck?”

Yes, some have been blinded by the Spandex, by all those comic book heroes playing together like Superfriends, by famous actors who all “stick the superhero landing.” Take those bomb-proof trappings away and the Russos can still stage an over-the-top action beat — a decent fight, a pretty-good digitally-augmented chase adhering to the laws of Bugs Bunny Physics.

But man, “The Gray Man” is one seriously stupid movie. It’s so hackneyed it’s like the Russos are trying to parody hackneyed, blowing their own punchlines as they do.

Still, they got Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Evans’ “Knives Out” co-star Ana de Armas, Billy Bob and Alfre and a pretty good Indian action star, Dhanush (“Karan”) for it, so it can’t be all bad.

I mean, staging a couple of slaughter scenes to the 50 year old pop hit “Silver Bird” is a reminder than only James Gunn should have access to the action cinema cheese tray. And the globe-trotting “plot” is so embarrassing that “novelist” Mark Greaney should take his Netflix millions and flee the country.

Aside from that, though…

Gosling plays an imprisoned murderer recruited to be a “Gray Man,” a CIA assassin, because he’s already killed somebody. What’s a few dozen more to him?

He is “Six,” as in “Watch your six,” or because “Double-O-seven was taken.”

Billy Bob Thornton plays his recruiter, the guy who’s retired years later when our “Gray Man” is ordered to pull the trigger, and doesn’t. “Collateral” damage has entered the room.

“You’re closed for collateral. GO LOUD. Stay the plan!”

That’s the tone of half of the dialogue, “wet work” jargon, “COS” (Chief of CIA Station) acronyms and the like. The other half? Strained jokes, some of which land.

“You know what makes me sad?” “Your small hands?”

Billy Bob speaks for us all when he passes judgement on the film’s tough-guy-banter-generator.

“I get it. You’re glib.”

The MacGuffin here is a SIM card with incriminating evidence of misdeeds and treason, which the target of a hit gives to Six and Six won’t hand over to his sketchy supervisor (“Bridgerton’s” Regé-Jean Page). That’s when the CIA calls in an independent contractor.

Lloyd Hansen (Evans) is the sort of guy who does his torturing in Monaco, who quotes Arthur Schopenhauer mid-torture because the famed German pessimist “saw the value of suffering.”

“Hand the jumper cables to somebody else,” he’s ordered. “Get ‘it’ back. Make ‘him’ gone.”

Lloyd hunts Six. Lloyd kidnaps Six’s recruiter (Thornton) and the old recruiter’s infirm niece (Julia Butters), the one who loves “Silver Bird.” Six’s colleague Miranda (de Armas) shows up, every now and then, to save his bacon.

Asia to Eastern Europe, Bangkok and Baku to Prague, Vienna and scenic Croatia, the hunt is on, with hunters hunting a hunter and the hunted having his own ideas about that.

The fights? There’s the opening act to-the-death wrestle in the middle of a New Year’s Eve fireworks rocket-launching pad, a mid-air melee on a military cargo jet, a throw-down on a Viennese tram and an oddly perfunctory punch-out with a Tamil assassin (Dhanush) that ends because the plot needs it to end and heck, they want this Netflix movie to play in India.

Six MacGuyver’s his way out of one trap, but a lot of his escapes and “How’d he get theres?” are skipped over just to plunge into the next action beat.

There’s one decent chase, the one that puts him on that tram, and one graceful moment, provided by Alfre Woodard which the Russos are hackneyed enough to try and repeat later.

Some of the third act mayhem does get the old pulse racing, and Gosling and Evans are perfectly capable of handling what is intended as a cool catch-phrase or punchline.

“You must be Lloyd.”

“What gave me away?”

“The white pants. The trash ‘stache.'”

Whenever Six is in need of a change of disguise, those strangers willing or unwilling to part with their threads hear the same line.

“You must be a…42 Regular?”

There are enough fun bits here to stream “The Gray Man,” maybe as background noise, only worth your attention now and again. And there are so very many soulless, head-slapping moments that one can’t help but think, “It must be time to pause (or cancel) Netflix again.”

Rating: PG-13, endless violence

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard, Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick and Dhanush.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, scripted by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on a novel by Mark Greaney. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

Variety must be worried worried about inflation. They’re publishing sketches of what actors are commanding for acting in movies, what Netflix is paying Hemsworth and Millie Bobby Brown, what Paramount spends to keep Tom Cruise happy.

$20 million for Joaquin Phoenix to make “Joker 2?” There’s no movie without him. Pay the man.

Yeah, Netflix is spending money like drunken sailors, seeing the wealth. And? They’re figuring out how that pays off. Or doesn’t.

At least it’s not the hypocrites at Forbes scratching their heads and wringing their gnarled hands over why some worker bees are creating value and insisting on being compensated for it.

Here’s the Variety piece.

This is what privilege looks like…on drugs and dealing drugs in high school.

The pretty boy/buzzed boy title character in “The Runner” was in “House of Gucci.”

This one comes out Aug. 19.