Movie Nation

Jamie Foxx may be an Oscar winner, and an accomplished musician, singer and stand-up, too. But he’d seem an unlikely candidate for a book on fathering.

Not Herschel Walker unlikely. But a party animal, good-time TV and movie star with two daughters by two different women unlikely.

So his book is about what he learned about staying in his kids’ lives, getting along with their mothers, a working class kid raised by his spare the rod (NOT) grandparents who tried to figure out how to not “ruin” or “spoil” his girls, who would grow up rich.

The book’s like Foxx himself, born Eric Bishop in downscale suburban Terrell, Texas. He’s a scamp and owns it, unfiltered and proud of it, and charming and self-effacing enough to pull it all off.

He charts his the ways his grandmother set him up for success — piano lessons, strict discipline, not letting him run with “no count hoodlums” or miscreants he knew, letting his granddad administer the whippings.

“My grandmother taught me that even if I wasn’t married, I had to be a gentleman and take care of mine.” The baby might be unplanned, but committing to “take care of” mother and child, support the children well into adulthood, is simply the right thing to do.

Seems like a no-brainer, but plenty of men don’t grasp it and don’t act like they’ve “got some sense” in such matters. His own, for starters. His grandparents, Estelle and Mark Talley raised him because his mother couldn’t and his father, an ex-con who did not grow paternal by joining the Nation of Islam, wouldn’t.

And he talks about his rise through the showbiz ranks, figuring out stand-up was a gift that could open doors when the piano could not.

But that’s all folded in with fathering advice, which as he points out in the book’s title, the “things My Daughters Taught Me.”

“Dad Rule No. 1, You Gotta Show Up.”

Some of these pearls are #JamieFoxx problems, a tad rich and entitled, like learning that letting your kid tag along to a party weekend in Miami or Vegas, with “Leo” and the other skirt chasers, isn’t the equivalent of spending quality time with them.

Any dad who drags the kids fishing if they don’t like it, to ballgames they’ve lost interest in or what have you might get something from that.

He tells tales about growing up in Terrell, thanks Miss Reese, the teacher who “made a deal” with the class cut-up, who’d taken to disrupting the class with routines he’d memorized from “The Tonight Show” comics. She gave him ten minutes at the end of class on Friday if he’d give her a week of peace.

The best Hollywood anecdote might be the former high school footballer’s memories of trying out for “Any Given Sunday,” getting brushed off by Oliver Stone more than once, an antic, mugging “TV sitcom comic” who got told “You’re no good” to his face.

Foxx dialed it down, got some pals to shoot a little football play-running and on-field trash talking, and Stone was won over.

The fathering stuff? Getting in the faces of boys dating his daughters and not treating them with respect, the warnings about ulterior motives of some such guys, the perils of social media exposure that enables stalkers, may have “rich guy problems” on the veneer. A boyfriend taken on a father-daughter trip to Paris who then ditches a daughter at the Louvre is gonna get some Texas style Black dad threats unprintable here.

But as Corrinne and Anelise never make the scandal sites and rarely even turn up as gossip, even though neither has gotten famous in her own right, despite some serious showbiz dabbling, you have to appreciate the results.

“Act Like You Got Some Sense, and Other Things I Taught My Daughters My Daughters Taught Me.” By Jamie Foxx. 221 pages. Grand Central Publishing. $30.

A college age daughter returns to Athens to care for her emotionally-distant, now-infirm father in “Moon, 66 Questions,” the latest teaming of writer-director Jacqueline Lentzou with her on-screen alter ego, Sofia Kokkali (“The End of Suffering”).

It’s a self-consciously-filmed soft-spoken drama about family, family responsibilities and family secrets, and truthfully a rather drab affair where the stakes are low and the emotions kept in check for the most part.

Set in the 1990s, so that we can wonder if there’s any autobiography in Lentzou’s script and so she can show off those ugly home video aspect ratios in “home movies” voiced-over to establish Artemis (Kokkali, also seen in “Digger”) has been away, that she’s not close to her father, that he’s gone through something that traumatized him and contributed to a stroke which is what brought her back and yet that doesn’t move her emotionally.

Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulus) is going to need care and rehab, and that’s largely going to fall on Artemis — getting him about, encouraging him to try to do things for himself, engaging him in conversation and changing his diapers.

It’s the conversation that seems trickiest, but the only person Artemis complains to about her new burden is her mother (Maria Zorba), strangely absent and refusing phone entreaties to come see him and maybe help.

The movie tips the viewer that something’s up, and we spend the last 80 minutes of the film figuring out what that might be as Artemis hangs with family, frolics with old friends and overhears her grandmother and aunts and uncles interrogate home health-care workers, a “Last Supper” lineup of chain-smoking Greeks kvetching about “language barriers” when most of the people they interview are Bulgarian or Romanian.

Artemis voice-over narrates “on today’s date” snippets, “Cleopatra was born….’Catcher in the Rye’ was published” and the like. Periodically, chapters of the story are marked by a Tarot card — “Strength,” “The Magician,” etc. Cryptic? A bit. Self-conscious? Annoyingly so.

“Moon” doesn’t necessarily make sense, even if the narrative is perfectly easy to follow and just as easy to “decode,” in terms of guessing “the secret.”

Kokkali is front and center throughout, and doesn’t give us a whole lot to latch onto in her characterization. Artemis doesn’t act like a martyr, even if she seems to struggle with what she’s supposed to do to care for this man she was never all that close to.

A couple of scenes interrupt the care-giving and coeds exercising in the pool, cutting up as they act out scenes from movies for Charades or play ping-pong. Artemis gets into her father’s ancient Jeep Grand Cherokee, and after some driving difficulties, rams it into the apartment garage’s wall — hard.

It’s meant to be a cathartic moment of discovery, but all I could think was “DAMN, they didn’t fake that. How’d they get her to agree to do her own stunt in a no-airbag SUV?”

The film handles accounts of the routine in the father and daughter’s days — he’s very dependent, yet she has time for all this other stuff outside the apartment — in unconventional, non-linear ways. Time passes, nurses are questioned, meals are consumed and a not-so-big-secret is revealed that might bring father and daughter closer.

This story may be more personal to Lentzou than I’ve heard — and really, that doesn’t matter as much as what’s actually on the screen. But if so, my heart goes out to her for how dull this stretch of time was in her or her character’s life, even as my teeth grate at her need to recreate that tedium for moviegoers.

“66 Questions?” If you say so.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Sofia Kokkali, Lazaros Georgakopoulos and Maria Zorba

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jacqueline Lentzou. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:48

Creepy and atmospheric and coming to Shudder July 14.

I can name this movie in one scene.

Hey, I’m a professional. I’ve been doing this for decades. You think I can’t spot a clumsy South African “Crash” knockoff in thirty seconds or less?

“Collision” is the title of this South African variation on an Oscar winning theme. It’s a slow-footed, convoluted “coincidence” riddled take on the movie in which all of LA’s problems are laid bare thanks to a traffic pileup. So it’s not like director and co-writer Fabien Martorell was hiding his cards or anything.

South Africa’s growing pains, prejudice against “foreigners” from Nigeria and Zimbabwe are brought up. Corruption and the old (Apartheid) way of doing things are confronted. Generational schisms, a gangster lying to his mama about doing good by financing a school, a white teen rebelling about “What YOUR people did to this country” to her white father, human trafficking, protection rackets, a kid trying to make his break in the music business all are connected, and rather clumsily brought together at that one fateful intersection in the film’s opening scene.

This Around the World with Netflix film is, of course, a string of flashbacks that connect every story thread to every other one as they stumble towards that pile-up and the pistols that come out after it. That story structure can make a short movie — this one’s only 93 minutes are so plus credits — play as lumbering and slow, because we know what’s coming, and everything that keeps us from getting to that finale can feel contrived.

But here are the threads that must be stitched together, or left hanging.

Bra Sol (Vuyo Sneedon) is a gangster, collecting protection money from businesses and in debt to bigger gangsters, which is why he’s counting on a deal that this Afrikaner Johan (Langley Kirkwood) might make if he gets the Big Promotion. Johan’s under a bit of pressure.

Johan’s teen daughter (Zoey Sneedon) is acting out against her parents (Tessa Jubber plays her mom) and her white privilege by sneaking around with a handsome aspiring singer, Cecil (Siphesihle Vazi).

Palesa (Samke Makhoba) is the daughter of a shopkeeper who is being shaken down by Bra Sol, but who is taking out his frustration on “foreigners.” She’s sweet on a Nigerian cook.

Thando (Mpho Sebeng) is pals with Cecil, but too-eager to get his hands on some money by any means necessary. He’d love to do a solid for Bra Sol and get in with the gangster scene.

Not every thread is resolved in that car crash, and some seem to run straight into the brick wall of the limited imagination of the screenwriters.

Guns are a favorite “end this/resolve this” solution to lazy writers.

The picture staggers and stumbles towards its climax via board meetings and mobster threats, teen sex and club singing debuts and the like.

There’s a lot here to work through and work out, and too much is left feeling unfinished or not wholly thought through.

It’s OK to copy “Crash,” one of the most controversial Best Picture winners in recent Oscar history. That formula, strangers (or connected acquaintances) pre-dates that all-star melodrama by a century. But you’d better back-engineer your story thoroughly once you’ve borrowed a time-honored framework for a thriller.

Because it’s worked before. And when it doesn’t work for you, that’s on you, not on the folks you borrowed from.

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

Cast: Vuyo Dabula, Zoey Sneedon, Langley Kirkwood, Samke Makhoba, Siphesihle Vazi, Mpho Sebeng and Tessa Jubber

Credits: Directed by Fabien Martorell, script by Fabien Martorell and Sean Cameron Michael. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

It opens with the sounds of thumping and a camera tracking through a gloomy, cluttered apartment.

Our protagonist is slowly, rhythmically beating his head against a load-bearing pillar.

A radio suggests a new therapy for the viral, planet-wide outbreak of amnesia. Give up on trying to recover old memories, With clinical help, just start over, make new memories, “manage a new life.”

“Apples” is the debut feature of filmmaker Christos Nikou, who picked up experience as a second unit director for Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) but also Richard Linklaker (“Before Midnight”). There’s a hint of both in this contemplative, obscure and somewhat droll trip into identity and the screwy ways “science” tries to reestablish it, or reinvent it, in this Greek comedy.

Aris Servetalis is our hero. There’s an amnesia pandemic going on all around him, but even without it, we can see just how limited his life is. We see no friends, no relatives. A neighbor’s dog seems to be the only living thing delighted to see him.

One day, he doses off on the bus, and when the driver awakens him, he can’t answer the basics — “What’s your name? (in Greek, with English subtitles) Where do you live?”

The “system” is still functioning, and he’s taken to a hospital. That’s where we see just how little he can retain. He flunks even the most basic short term memory tests.

But the therapy program directors ( Argyris Bakirtzis and Anna Kalaitzidou) decide he’s a candidate for their little “start your life over” project.

He’s assigned an apartment, given a Polaroid camera and a cassette player. The program entails taking instructions from the cassette — going out in public, go places where you can meet people, take pictures of what you do and make a photo album.

New life? New memories.

Find a bike, “try doing a wheelie. No one forgets how to ride a bike.”

Go to the movies. As a revival of a certain “Chainsaw Massacre” picture is playing, that’s his choice. But he’s distracted by the striking stranger (Sofia Georgovassili) who shrieks and cowers behind the seats as if she can’t separate reality from the horrors seen on the screen. It’s like she’s never been to a movie before. Whatever “Aris” is experiencing, “Anna” has it bad.

It’s not until they’re outside the theater and he sees her taking a Polaroid selfie next to the movie poster, just as he’s done, that he recognizes that she’s in the same program as her. And she’s taking it even more seriously.

Thus they meet and meet up, and she drags him along to assorted fresh assignments. Does she remember how to drive? “I think so,” and they’re off. But with the radio on, he can sing along with “Sealed with a Kiss,” in English.

And we sense reluctance to get any more deeply involved with her on his part. He’s hearing “use her” instructions on his tape. No doubt she is, too. He doesn’t want to be her “assignment.”

Maybe this “new life” isn’t all that? What’s going on? Let’s just say the dog knows.

Nikou, credited as co-writer as well as director, keeps the mood quiet, sad and almost somber. But there’s a wink in here somewhere as “Apples” — which takes its name from a purchase Aris makes and the shopkeeper’s question, “Have you ever had tastier apples?” — is making a commentary on how disconnected modern life is.

The picture’s a bit dry and too quiet for my taste. The puzzle at its center is funny and intriguing, and hardly enough to drive the narrative.

The tapes instruct recipients to visit dying people in the hospital, befriend their families and even attend their funerals. That could be a comment on the basic courtesies and empathy of life that our logged-on but checked-out era is missing, although we never see or hear a cell phone.

Aris wasn’t in the best place before his amnesia. You wonder if he needed this socialization therapy — sexist and self-serving as it can be — with or without the disease.

And you know who hasn’t been isolated, changed for the worse and made lonelier by modern life? Let’s just say that sometimes he’s on his leash, and sometimes he isn’t and leave it at that.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Aris Servetalis, Sofia Georgovassili, Anna Kalaitzidou and Argyris Bakirtzis

Credits: Directed by Christos Nikou, scripted by Stavros Raptis and Christos Nikou. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:30

It’s starting to look as if Pixar and Disney should leave “Toy Story” alone. They’ve ridden that mule to death.

A decent but underwhelming Thursday night of $5.2 million, and a $20 million Friday (including Thursday) point to a big but not epic $55 million opening weekend for “Lightyear.”

Earliest predictions pointed a lot higher. Reviews aren’t helping. Indifferent at best. “Humorless and joyless” I thought. This is underperforming the opening of “Toy Story 4.”

Considering that “Jurassic World Dominion” is on track to do $53-55 this weekend, that could point to an epic Pixar slapdown. Take away the Thursday “previews” numbers, and “Jurassic” and “Lightyear” had identical Fridays.

“Jurassic” is down 74%, Friday to Friday tho.

Sunday is Father’s Day, so we’ll see if Sat. and Sunday turn that around. But right now, it’s anybody’s weekend to take.

A $10 million Friday points to “Top Gun: Maverick,” sweeping up another $40 million this weekend. It’s blown by “Doctor Strange” and will clear the $500 million mark by late next week.

So the top three films will pull in $150 between them? Maybe the movies are back!

More will be added to this post as other figures come in.

At a couple of points in this indie trailer one wonders if the filmmakers have seen a Western, much less carefully taken note of their tropes, dialogue, etc.

One of the singular pleasures of traveling “Around the World with Netflix” is tumbling into a new mystery thriller from down Argentine Way.

The genre’s practically a cottage industry down there, with “Blood Will Tell (La Misma Sangre),” “Black Snow” and others rolling out, a couple of winners per year suggesting a pretty good batting average in the genre.

The latest from director and co-writer Sebastián Schindel (“The Crimes that Bind”) is a sinister, twisty adaptation of a novel by Guillermo Martínez, who wrote “The Oxford Murders.” Well-acted and downbeat, “The Wrath of God” touches on issues of personal justice and “divine” revenge, all spinning out of a sexual harassment case and ensuing “mysterious” deaths involving a famous writer.

The frame of the story is an incident after a public reading by the novelist Kloster, played by veteran leadning man Diego Peritti with a sort of imperious, “Just give me my due” haughtiness. He’s summoned to an upper balcony of the opera house where he was reading, and once there, somebody dies.

In the film’s long flashback story, we go back years, to when Kloster had a “scribe,” Luciana (Macarena Achaga), a beautiful young coed to whom he’d dictate his fiction, the scribe as “muse,” Kloster says, just the way Henry James wrote his best fiction.

She was also a scribe for aspiring novelist Esteban Rey (Juan Gervasio Minujín of “The Two Popes”) at the time. And then, one day, a line is crossed.

Luciana went from being an indispensable member of a household, friend to Kloster’s little girl and a great help to his highly-strung ex-ballerina wife, to exile who seeks the help of a lawyer.

Rey and Kloster also had history, with one writer seeking the help and approval of the other, and publishing nasty criticism of him when that wasn’t forthcoming.

In the fictive present, Luciana is convinced that Kloster is “murdering my family, one at a time,” that he’s been engaged in this pursuit for a decade, and that the hard-drinking reporter that Rey has become should investigate and expose this “monster.”

Is she right? Flashbacks within the flashback take us to the various deaths and show “coincidences” that put Kloster — in her mind, at least — in the proximity and almost certainly responsible for them.

“No one would ever this huge celebrity would commit murders,” she protests, in Spanish with subtitles or dubbed into the language of your choice if you’re not a Spanish speaker.

Rey is already struggling to write about a string of arsons allegedly tied to Chinese real estate speculation, has been burned by Kloster before and is reluctant. But he starts to report, write and wonder.

Encounters between reporter and accuser and reporter and the accused are fraught and puzzling. Who is telling the truth? Is Rey a clever enough journalist to sort that out?

The “suspicious” deaths pile up, secrets are revealed and we can’t decide if we’re dealing with a paranoid young woman or a cunning, patient killer who figures he has his reasons.

“The Wrath of God” doesn’t really stick the landing with its religious metaphor, the gray area between “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” and “Nope, I’m taking care of this myself.” Not to me, anyway.

And the story’s messaging is evil in the touchiest sense. Are we to root against the pretty woman whose crime was making an accusation with merit, and got a settlement for it?

That’s kind of the implication as we ponder what might very well be a clever author of genre fiction who might be getting away with murder, a sort of “Talented Mr. Ripley” point of view.

“Wrath” is a downbeat thriller, with only the deaths and a couple of interrogations/debates setting off big sparks. But it’s smart, rewards the attentive viewer and still manages to trip one up about what’s coming, what to expect and what we might be guessing wrong.

And the leads, each playing flawed characters with self-righteous points of view, are especially good at keeping us guessing.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexuality

Cast: Diego Peretti, Juan Gervasio Minujín and Macarena Achaga

Credits: Directed by Sebastián Schindel, scripted by Pablo Del Teso, Sebastián Schindel, based on a novel Guillermo Martínez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

It’s accepted wisdom that people age out of going to the movies. So stories about a demographic that’s abandoned the cinema are unfairly but justifiably rare. But the multiplex’s loss in the streaming cinema’s gain.

Case in point, the laugh-out-loud charmer “Jerry & Marge Go Large,” which pairs up AARP-eligible Annette Bening and Bryan Cranston for a folksy, funny “true story” about small town folk who figure out a way to beat the lottery.

This Paramount+ winner is a niche movie created by niche specialists David Frankel, who directed “The Devil Wears Prada,” and screenwriter Brad Copeland, who got his big break with “Wild Hogs” way back when.

Jerry is freshly-retired from the cereal plant in Evart, Michigan, a “numbers” guy whom Kellogg’s has put out to pasture. He’s all set to “help around the house” with his high school sweetheart Marge, maybe take up fishing, since his family just pitched in to buy him a bass boat.

But Marge sees trouble on the horizon. “I’ve waited 40 years for it to be ‘just us,’ and so far, we suck at it!”

One fishing fiasco and a whole lot of “just under foots” later with Marge, accountant Steve (Larry Wilmore) and everybody else in town that he’s on a first-name basis with later, Jerry stumbles across “a flaw” in one of the lottery games being pitched nationwide.

A cute running gag in Copeland’s screenplay? Everybody Jerry talks to about this, or merely gets into “numbers” with, lets their eyes glass over. That includes their kids, bank teller Mindy, and most alarmingly, their accountant, given a breezy “What, me worry?” air by Wilmore.

Jerry frets and fidgets and tests his “flaw” theory, and frets some more in a crisis of confidence after it doesn’t work out. But damned if he doesn’t figure out the flaw in his theory, and double down. It isn’t until the game is dropped in Michigan but continued in Massachusetts that Jerry finally has to fess up to Marge.

Their first road trip has them pick the perfect, sleepy remote convenience store, run by a lazy, compliant clerk (Rainn Wilson). As the game is “gamed” by large numbers of individual tickets purchased, he lets them run the purchase/printing machine on their own.

“Can you show us how it works?”

“Youuuu’ll figure it out.”

From there, it’s just a matter of time before they get friends and neighbors in their aging, dying little town involved, before they start to “do good” with the cash, that they run afoul of some privileged Harvard nerds who’ve made the same discovery and fall under the gaze of The Boston Globe, which put Catholic priests in jail, and surely won’t let this “scandal” pass unnoticed.

The laughs are strictly low-hanging fruit. The montages — of ticket buying, ticket sorting and road-tripping — set to classic rock (Springsteen, The Who), and the romance, of course, is rekindled as these two small-town folks, taking care to play by the lottery and IRS rules, milk this blunder for all that they can until their secret gets out.

Cranston makes Jerry affably nerdy, scowling at math problems, shocked to realize he’s always paid more attention to them than the wife and kids who didn’t share his mania.

Bening could play this warm, sexy retiree’s wife in her sleep, and simply refuses to do so.

The once-edgy Wilmore’s rarely cast as “cute,” which pays off. And Wilson merely has to show up to give the story blue collar credibility and make every line a laugh line.

The screenplay finds (invents) villains and makes the most of them in the most predictable way. Giving smartass rich kid Tyler (Uly Schlesinger) lot’s of “Look at you two, just like ‘Up'” and “Benjamin Button” and “back on the farm/drive the tractor to the store” lines is a no brainer, but it pays off.

Movies like “Jerry & Marge” can easily be faulted for not trying terribly hard, but that can be the ugly duckling beauty in them. This one doesn’t show strain because it doesn’t have to. The charm and the humor are obvious, our investment in their plight easy and the bad guys perfectly hissable.

Like its protagonists, here’s a movie that isn’t aiming for The Jackpot. They’re just reaching for a pleasant, humorous return on investment, and damned if they don’t get it.

Rating: PG-13 for some language and suggestive references

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Annette Bening, Larry Wilmore and Rainn Wilson

Credits: Directed by David Frankel, scripted by Brad Copeland, based on an article by A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:36

The fascist lampooning stage sensation cones to this big screen — and Netflix — Dec. 13.

Looks “Oliver Twisted.” A distaff “Pink Floyd’s The Wall.”