Movie Nation

Leave it to Jordan Peele to turn a fun twist on a summer saucer story/creature feature into a Major Motion Picture Event.

“Nope” is Peele’s “Signs,” turning his camera away from the scalding racial satire of “Get Out” and the obscurant, self-serious messaging of “Us” and pointing it at everyone in our “get mine” fame-whoring culture, especially the exploit-everything ethos of Hollywood where he makes his living.

Damn it’s fun, a popcorn movie with smarts, sentiment and unconventional performances, plot turns and “logic” that wrong-foots the viewer time and again.

Haywood’s Hollywood Horses is a ranch in a remote, mountainous, treeless and oft-filmed valley in Southern California (Santa Clarita and environs). A stunt-horse rental operation for the film industry, it’s run by a Black family that claims descent from that “first movie star,” the Black jockey filmed in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1881 movies-inventing snippet of a horse and its jockey in motion.

Patriarch Otis (Keith David) is a master trainer long past retirement age. But his introverted son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) doesn’t seem ready to step into his shoes. And manic chatterbox daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) is never around.

One day, metal rains from the sky and Dad winds up with a nickel punched into his skull. It kills him. Otis Jr. or “OJ” doesn’t really mourn. He hasn’t the time. How can he keep this ranch going?

A commercial shoot that goes terribly wrong underscores this. Otis needs the outgoing, showbiz striver Emerald to interact with and charm the crew, and she’s irresponsibly late, infuriatingly self-promoting and distracted, so there’s an accident.

Nothing for it but to start selling off horses until they can get back in the industry’s good graces. The owner of the latest incarnation of a nearby small-time theme park (Steven Yuen of “Minari”) is a buyer. Emerald tags along for the sale and we hear Ricky “Jupe” Park’s claim to fame as he shows them, and us his tiny personal career museum.

He used to be a child star, but on one show co-starring a chimpanzee, the ape went nuts and blood was spilled. Actors died, Jupe was traumatized and Hollywood changed its rules for working with chimps. At least OJ gets this. That’s one thing the slow-to-get-it trainer OJ understands — animal behavior.

But selling one more horse won’t save Haywood’s Hollywood Horses. For that, the extraordinary thing that killed their dad — noise and lights and movement and whatever-else-it-is-in-the-sky that made it rain metal objects — has to repeat itself. They’ve got to get “the money shot,” “undeniable” proof of of flying saucers on video.

That’s how they meet tech nerd/conspiracy buff Angel (Brandon Perea giving us a dopey/hyper Dave Franco riff) at the nearby consumer electronics/CCTV warehouse store.

“Maybe you’re in a UFO ‘hot spot!'” Angel enthuses. “‘Ancient Aliens,’ History Channel, WATCH that sh–!“”

That’s why Emerald wants that grizzled director of photography (Michael Wincott) from that failed commercial shoot’s help as well.

OJ — yes, people wince at the sound of his name — keeps his head down as he maintains his routine and can’t quite think ahead as he ponders the nature of the “bad miracle” that has befallen them. Emerald’s eyes are on the prize — intellectual and photographic property, “Oprah” TV fame, the works. And Angel? He’s hellbent on horning in on whatever they have planned.

Peele’s films and TV (the “Twilight Zone” reboot, “Lovecraft Country”) all have a flicker of folklore about them. In “Nope,” it’s Hollywood and show business myths and UFO or “UAP” lore that he taps into, serving up “facts” and events that resemble real history, or at least the “Ancient Aliens” version. Some of these are presented in flashbacks or related in mesmerizing, sober and seriously-detailed anecdotes. That TV show debacle? “SNL’s” take on it was “killer!”

Horror movies exist in their own world, and Peele plays around with “rules” in this one that are basically brain droppings of sci-fi author Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” “Teasers” are aliens who just want to mess with us by showing up in remote places and appearing to yahoos “nobody will believe” when they claim to have seen aliens. And in Adams’ universe, there’s something called The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, an animal “so mind-bogglingly stupid that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.” Animal behavior, a big subtext of the plot, just might be universal.

Keke Palmer flat out brings it here, turning her brand of “What’s she on?” manic intensity to someone who reacts with awestruck terror at seeing the extraordinary, but only when it turns menacing. Palmer dazzles as Emerald shifts from frenetic eagerness to exploit “our moment” to fear to fury as the story unfolds. Perea matches her comic energy as Angel.

Kaluuya has the trickier job, playing the introvert. OJ seems on-the-spectrum slow on the uptake, even when things fall from the sky and knock his aged father out of the saddle. Kaluuya makes OJ as irritating as Emerald– forever under-reacting to threats, danger and loss. OJ’s inertia is as “off” and Emerald’s breathless, unthinking let’s GET something out of this over-eagerness.

Peele picks up a Tarantino trick in casting two iconic character actors, David and Wincott, giving them them lovely big screen curtain calls/career bumps with these two chewy roles.

Not all of it makes perfect sense, not every character’s behavior is logical or psychologically defensible. And the title has a glib one-liner Will Smith sales pitch quality that feels forced when we hear it on screen.

But “Nope” is a thoroughly entertaining ride, as strange as it is beautiful, growing even stranger and more beautiful in the later acts. And Peele, “Tenet” director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema and composer Michael Abels ensure that every scene, every frame has the look, sound and feel of an Event, a movie you won’t want to miss on the big screen because everyone will be talking about it for the rest of the summer.

Rating: R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott and Keith David

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jordan Peele. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:15

The Cher-like Endless “Farewell Tour” that is the Halloween franchise brings back Jamie Lee one more time, Oct. 14.

“Too Old for Fairytales” is an aimless, amiable coming-of-age ramble about a video game addict who has to grow up — at least a little — when his mother gets sick.

It’s a harmless and not utterly charmless Polish kids’ dramedy (subtitled, or dubbed into English) of The Big Game genre — a video game team hoping to win The Big “Robot Masters” e-sports tournament. But there’s stuff about learning to think of others, getting over being “spoiled,” getting that first crush, coping with bullies and figuring out life is better lived when you add some balance to it, blended in.

Maciej Karas is Waldek, our hero and narrator. He’s a tween deep into first-person-shooter online games and doted-on by his single mom (Karolina Gruszka). With her cooking for him, dressing him and walking him to school — not even letting him cross the street by himself — he’s got all the time in the world to practice his sport and dream of gaming glory, the spotlight, “hordes of fans…and GROUPIES.”

That part of the dream is shared with his BFF Staszek (Patryk Siemek), who has “gone all hormonal” and girl crazy. They just lost a local tourney, but no worries. The BIG one is a month away.

But Mom is giving him and us a lot of worried looks. She’s summoned her no-nonsense/all-nonsense hippie aunt (Dorota Kolak) to stay with Waldek, because Mom is headed to the hospital “for tests.”

The coddled kid may not have a clue what that means. All he can see is this major disruption in his life right before his Big Tourney. Goofy Aunt Mariola makes him step away from his games and take bike rides. And that’s not all.

“I have to DRESS myself? I have to FEED myself? I have to walk ALONE to school? I have to cross the STREET by myself?”

Wait’ll he tells mom that he’s dozing off at the computer from exhaustion, that a team member quit on him and that he’s breaking a sweat for the first time in his life thanks to this flakey aunt who has this skydiving-simulator rig she uses to hang from the ceiling and go to her happy place.

Waldek and Straszek will have to recruit (“cast”) a new member for their “Three Kings” team. It might be an older player, maybe a younger one, possibly a girl (“No WAY!”) or even a gamer whose online image is a voice-disguised giant ant avatar.

And Waldek has to learn life lessons, to think about others and care for their needs, to “cut (someone’s) fear in half” by shouldering part of their burden, to learn the difference between good lies and bad ones and how to be a man from his grandpa (Andrzej Grabowski), who appears in the third act.

Kolak’s dizzy auntie character is pleasant enough, but not remotely hilarious or “larger than life” gregarious the way such figures typically turn up in movies.

The jokey handling of meeting and competing for Waldek’s first crush (Amelia Fijalkowska) is cute, if not exactly original. All the ways the movie makes the kid grow up, with a healthy dose of “No more hugs, shake hands LIKE A MAN” lecturing, play as kind of traditional if not downright old fashioned.

And the story arc’s limited parameters mean we know most of what’s coming, with our guesses predicated on how locked-in the need for “happy endings” is for this “fairy tale.”

All of which inspire the label “harmless, not utterly charmless.”

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Maciej Karas, Dorota Kolak, Karolina Gruszka,
Patryk Siemek, Amelia Fijalkowska and Andrzej Grabowski

Credits: Directed by Kristofer Rus, Scripted by
Agnieszka Dabrowska, based on her novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

This debut indie comedy got a little attention at Cannes, and picked up by A24.

Looks cute. Comes our way Aug. 24, which is that notorious late August dumping ground for movies with low expectations.

He made a few mostly-forgotten films, but clay animation pioneer Will Vinton brought stop-motion animation back into vogue with his famous “California Raisins” TV commercials in the ’80s.

Anyway, his role in bringing back the art form that was used long before he came along — Remember “Gumby and Pokey” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV? Clay animation predates tjosenshows in films, is worth taking a look at.

His Claymation work was featured in Michael Jackson videos, “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” that Eddie Murphy TV series “The PJs” and elsewhere, his career probably helped by the fact that he copyrighted the term “claymation,” although I’m not sure who first coined that. I remember his lawyers sending me a threatening letter for using it in a review around 1990. I don’t know who coined the term “douchebag” either, but its equivalent certainly comes to mind at the thought of this guy seizing a term in common currency and claiming it as his own.

The art form predates Vinton by decades and decades. It broke out on TV in the ’50s (“Gumby,”;Davey and Goliath”) and even earlier in film.

“Claydream” comes out Aug. 5.

There’s an adjustment period facing the average viewer for those first few minutes of Billy Porter’s high school trans-romance “Anything’s Possible.” It’s not unlike what one experiences diving into a film from a foreign culture, in a genre you can’t quite peg, starring actors you’ve never seen before and in a language you don’t understand.

You can be a bit unmoored by it all.

It’s not the subject matter of “Anything’s Possible” that made me disconnect. The entire enterprise seems artificial, even leaving out the omni-present “gender issues.”

When a dad character in the movie jokes about his primping teen son’s piled-high pompadour — “‘Grease’ auditions today at school?” — that’s kind of what’s on the screen, a lot of Actor’s Equity veterans playing high school kids, just the way Olivia and Travolta did it back in the ’80s.

Porter, a Broadway and TV (“Pose”) star, cast his film with stage actors and a social media influencer as his star. So it’s a dewy-youth coming-of-age story that feels like “Grease,” or those filmed youth-oriented stage musicals Disney+ televises, only with feature film production values. The older-than-they-should-be actors require some extra “suspension of disbelief.”

None more than our heroine. As Kelsa, a clothes horse adored and accepted by her divorced doctor Mom (“Hamilton’s” Renée Elise Goldsberry), the trans woman, influencer and TV actress (“Sideways Smile”) Eva Reign speaks in a thoughtfully-considered, deep and adenoidal affectation that belies whatever age Eva is using today.

When she moved from St. Louis to New York, her birth name and gender were tossed away, and so apparently was her birth certificate.

Her performance is polished, subdued and very much controlled, a world-wise actress with a lot of perspective playing an innocent, just-figuring-everything-out-for-the-first-time youth. It’s an affectation piled on top of other affectations, each one further removing the character from a connection with the viewer.

Think of the transgender turns in “Orange is the New Black” or “Tangerine.” Those performances felt organic and natural. This feels like pose-as-performance.

As Kelsa vlogs about transitioning — at 17 — in high school, about her favorite exotic animals, and muses about her “existential despair,” the viewer can wonder “What high school kid talks like that, with that voice in command of a vocabulary that wholly articulates one’s gender dysphoria and ‘despair? At 17?'”

It’s almost a relief when her BFF Em (Courtnee Carter) blurts out “I broke my finger on accident” later in the movie. That’s one characteristic of authentic high school speech — grammatical boners.

The rest of the movie — like life itself, like high school, like your hormonal teen years — is kind of messy, something you muddle through.

She’s on hormone suppression therapy, she reveals, but is far enough along and above all MATURE enough to ponder moving on from knowing “what I need to survive” to figuring out “what I need to THRIVE.” Kelsa is wrestling with all this on her semi-secret (Mom doesn’t know about it) vlog, to “help others” by sharing her experience of transitioning and just getting through high school.

Kelsa has a zoology degree and becoming a nature film camera operator among her life goals. Boys?

“Why have a boyfriend when I have two best friends?”

That would be the tall fashion plate Em and the boyfriended hipster Chris (Kelly Lamor Wilson).

Em’s got her eye on cute Khal (Abubakr Ali). But Khal is noticing the attention-grabbing blend of fashion and femininity that is Kelsa. Not that he can tell his gay-intolerant pal Otis (Grant Reynolds) that.

Kelsa gets to turn her attention from herself with a “Not EVERYthing is about gender” as she wonders, “How do you know when you officially have a crush?”

And Khal finds himself and others challenging and questioning his attraction. Is he is just in this for “the ‘woke’ points?” Kids in high school aren’t just known for “experimenting.” They’re infamous for the stand-out-from-the-crowd posturing.

“There are a lot of men who’re attracted to trans women,” Chris growls at him, “but when it gets down to it, they’re not down...to get to it.”

Each member of River Point High’s most talked-about couple loses a friend over their coupling. With outside pressures and out of town college on the horizon, can this relationship be saved?

The best scenes in “Anything’s Possible” aren’t the tender moments, the blush of first love and the chemistry of a first kiss. Because, to be brutally honest, we don’t buy it and those scenes — far too many of them for the film’s own good — simply do not play, not with a couple of 26-31 year olds trying to project an innocence that would only be convincing on the stage, and not in cinematic close-up.

But cute bits work, such as the way Khal courts Kelsa by imitating her favorite nature documentary host, David Attenborough, as he comically comments on high school courtship rituals and the like.

The folks playing the grownups make the best impressions here, parents that range from understanding to defiantly protective, with Goldsberry having an epic shout-off with a fellow parent in a meeting in the principal’s office.

Porter, a first time filmmaker (look for his cameo), tries to get into almost EVERYthing to do with trans issues into this film — bathrooms, and “our space” and J.K. Rowling-styled “socialized male energy” debates about testosterone and what defines a woman. When Kelsa bumps shoulders or gives somebody a shove, she transforms into the equivalent of a pugnacious point guard “creating space,” and that strength, muscle and aggression disparity is very much part of the whole public discussion of that corner of the ever-lengthening LGBTQIA acronym.

All that makes for an unfocused, jumbled movie that isn’t quite settled on what it wants to be, a romance at war with itself, struggling to find its heart while never-really-landing punches in its political debates. It’s topical, but it settles nothing, informative and sensitive in its representations, cute but never cute enough.

Rating: PG-13 for strong language, thematic material, sexual material and brief teen drinking.

Cast: Eva Reign, Abubakr Ali, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kelly Lamor Wilson, Courtnee Carter, Naveen Paddock and Grant Reynolds.

Credits: Directed by Billy Porter, scripted by Ximena García Lecuona (as Alvaro Garcia Lecuona). An Orion/MGM release via Amazon.

Running time: 1:36

Call me old fashioned, but the last thing I want in a sex comedy is “timid” and “coy.”

“How to Please a Woman” is an airless, laughless romantic “romp” from down under about a woman who takes over a failed moving company and turns “Pleased to Move You” into a moving, house-cleaning, stripping and sexual service operation.

Because, in Oz — Australia — the ladies are frustrated. And nobody wants to live in a dirty house.

Sally Phillips (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) stars Gina, a 50something business viability assessor who gets laid off on her birthday, of all days. Rather than take the slam-dunk age discrimination lawsuit laid at her feet by her clueless, boorish younger boss (Oliver Wenn), she has an epiphany. She’ll take over this all-guy moving company her firm has just shut down.

Blame her mates at her morning swim club for that. They pitched in and bought her a “whatever you want” stripper (Alexander England) for her birthday, and she turned her embarrassment into “Could you clean my house?”

As that stripper/sex worker happened to be one of those newly-laid-off movers, the idea’s right there in front of her.

What do women really want? A guy who’ll clean her house. Topless. And maybe take things to the next level.

“Obviously the cleaning must be effective,” she says, pitching the new business model to the lads of “Pleased to Move You.” “With a minimum of one orgasm” guaranteed. No boys, “yours” doesn’t count.

Word gets around.

“I hear he leaves no SURFACE untouched.”

That’s the movie’s opening pitch. The twist here is that the guys — one hunk, the rest several peers short of a six-pack — aren’t all that in the sack. So, Gina’s sex-worker-hiring mates from the swim club are needed for on-the-job training.

Gina’s own frustrations are a part of the package, as well. And as predictable as that is, as amusing as her first encounter with a vibrator might be and with an age-appropriate manager (Erik Thomson) right there in the office with her to “solve” her problem, writer-director Renée Webster can’t find a funny line or amusing situation to save her life.

Here’s how “off” this is. Gina’s friends hire her a sex worker for her birthday. They mention the passage of time since she’s had something romantic happen to her. And we’ve seen Gina with a husband (Cameron Daddo), a lawyer who gave her cash for her birthday because he’s that considerate.

But since her friends don’t speak of this Adrian fellow, since Gina seems mostly alone at home, there’s hint after hint that character isn’t really there. One can’t tell if he’s dead and she’s just seeing his tuned-out/checked-out-of-the-marriage ghost, or if he’s just a stiff, and not the good kind.

The are semi-comical sex scenes here, but the nudity is all in the locker room of their swim club. There’s a signals-crossing joke sitcom moment or two and a “Real cop, or stripper cop?” gag. There is the hope of a little comic frisson from her gaggle of gal-pals.

But none of it generates anything more than a smirk. The players mug a bit, but nobody works up a sweat, in front of or behind the camera.

“How to Please a Woman” may play to its target audience, giving voice to female relationship frustrations and the like. But as pleasantly drab as it generally is, I dare say it won’t please any gender, any where.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Sally Phillips, Alexander England, Caroline Brazier, Erik Thomson, Tasma Walton, Hayley McElhinney and Roz Hammond

Credits: Scripted and directed by Renée Webster. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:47

My heart goes out to any aspiring filmmaker who takes a shot at making a Western with no money. All horror takes is a bit of makeup, some fake blood and — in the case of a cheap zombie movie — ragged clothes and tubs of ashen gray makeup.

But a Western? You have guns, and cheaping out on having an armorer on the set is what killed Brandon Lee. You have horses, and need to hire actors who look like they know which end is which, as well as wranglers. And you need some undeveloped, less-spoiled corners of the American West, and a director of photography who can give your picture a look that feels documentary real, sepia-toned nostalgic or dust and sweat and blood and sagebrush Sergio Leone.

“Black Wood” has a novel setting, the under-filmed wilds of South Dakota’s Black Hills, and every now and then an image pops on screen that looks just right — fog in the rocky, forested hills, a rider galloping down a prairie ridgeline. But writer-director Chris Canfield’s debut micro-budget/no-budget feature — a horror/horse opera hybrid — doesn’t do either genre justice.

The performances are uneven, with a few players having experience on obscure, equally malnourished and overreaching indie film sets, and others outright amateurs. There are continuity errors, with shots not quite matching up — scenes with fog when shot from one angle, bright sun from another.

The “beast,” a Native spirit called Wendigo, is just another dude in a fur suit and antler head. And the gold — remember, there was a gold rush in the Black Hills during “Deadwood” days — is plainly spray painted rocks.

Tanajsia Slaughter plays a tormented Lakota woman named Dowanhowee who comes to Coyote Junction looking for a horse. She ends up killing a guy to get one. Guided by “The Great Spirit,” she has a date in the “Black Woods.”

Bates Wilder, who was in the even more misguidedly ambitious “The Great War,” an attempt at making a World War I movie is the pine forests of Wisconsin if memory serves, plays Dutch Wilder, a limping hardcase who leads a gang of five that fetches things that can’t be fetched and does other dirty deeds, for a price. It was one of his men who lost his life and then his horse, and he had all their cash in his saddle bags.

It doesn’t matter that the sinister schemer Pickerton (Kara Rainer) has sent her right hand man (Glenn Morshower) to lead the gang to a mining claim they’re to help steal, a “You know to kill people, I know how to find shiny things” deal. First things first.

Amusingly, neither the Native tracker (Casey Birdinground) nor Dutch’s field glasses can figure out they’re hunting a woman, even after they get close enough to wound her. She’s led them into the Black Woods, but even she is afraid of the creature that they might run into there — Wendigo.

“Twice as tall as a man,” tracker Two Feathers growls, “with the claws of a wolf, the teeth of a cougar and the strength of a bear.”

As we’ve already seen the film’s no-expense-spared depiction of disemboweling injuries, we can believe it.

I like Canfield’s efforts at giving us a West we can buy into. The town is very DIY and sloppily thrown together. None of this Hollywood’s Finest Craftsman construction. The streets may be grass — never seen that in a place where horseshoes and wagon wheels turn thruways into dust and mud — but the place feels lived-in, with high mileage hookers, two-fisted cowpokes and virulent racist drunks.

“You goin’ soft on feather heads?”

But even in those stretches where the acting is passable and the locations pretty enough, the movie all this effort was inspired by is dawdling drivel, a pokey tale with dialogue that’s basically one long series of profane, blood oath threats and translated Lakota and a story that we’ve seen 1670 versions of already, virtually none of them any more memorable than this.

Rating: R for violence, gore and language.

Cast: Bates Wilder, Tanajsia Slaughter, Glenn Morshower, George Thomas Mansel, Casey Birdinground, Stelio Savante, Andrew Stecker and Kara Rainer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Canfield. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:35

Adrift, unable to hold a job, maladjusted and arrested in her development. Maybe what Audrey needs is for somebody to adopt her.

This film festival darling isn’t the comedy which that set up suggests. It hunts at something more existential and self-help friendly.

Intriguing.

The Netherland in Ranch Country design suggested by the trailers make this feel like yet another Jordan Peele genre-transcending horror “event, which “Get Out” most certainly was and “Us” never quite managed to be.

The streaming series “Lovecraft Country” has it’s admirers. But aside from getting Spike Lee back to being his best by producing his “BlackKklansman,” Peele could use a blockbuster. We’ve been watching trailers for this thing forever, and as they’re previewing it on an Imax screen, expectations are high.

Great moment for Keke Palmer, and let’s hope it’s a great movie.