Movie Nation

Hard to tell much more than the seedy milieu and mostly unknown cast from the trailer. This indie feature streams/downloads April 28.

The anime exception to the rule that “If you can tell a story more easily without animation, why animate?” is given a pretty serious test by “Pompo the Cinephile,” a movie about the magic of the movies.

Sure, it was based on a manga (graphic novel), so it’s already anime-adjacent.” But this film, titled “Eiga Daisuki Pompo-san” in Japan, is a fairly conventional inside-a-film-production dramedy — paying lip service to film as “art,” but celebrating B-movies, and featuring a movie within a movie with just a whiff of “A Star is Born” to its set up.

The anime touches include shy, wrapped-too-tight “kids” — one given her big break, the other a production assistant abruptly handed directing duties by an impulsive kewpie-doll pixie studio chief (with the voice to match). Characters shriek — aurally and visually — and take the vapors over this mistake, that shocking piece of good fortune. “Those big anime eyes” that Robin Williams jokes about in the Hollywood animation “Robots” are everywhere, and there’s a lot of music.

And the setting is an alternate anime reality of “Nyallywood,” where the Nyallywood Awards are Oscar statuettes with cat heads. Hellooooo kitty.

But the story is perfectly mundane. Green newcomers get their big break and work with a legendary actor on location in Switzerland. We’re treated to the shooting of a movie, editing a movie, fretting over location budgets and reshoots and an old timer’s advice that to be a great director, one has to find ways to sing “your aria,” that showpiece that composers build into their operas and that give the singers their best chance to show off. All of these are familiar tropes in “magic of making movies” movies. A classic one is even referenced, and ridiculed as “too long” here — “Cinema Paradiso.”

Gene Fini (voiced by Hiroya Shimizu) is the shy and apprehensive production assistant to studio boss Pomponette (a flower), “Pompo” for short. She’s a flatly-designed high-pitched, highly-strung redhead who inherited her B-movie empire from her grandfather, who still occasionally drops by to see that “the screen is filled with cute asses.” Pompo — voiced by Konomi Kohara — got her basic philosophy of movies from him.

“As long as the lead actress is attractive, it’s a good movie,” she preaches.

Films need to run about 90 minutes. Going longer is “insulting” the audience. A shot at Marvel and the Potter pictures?

A typical film from Peterzen Studios was “Guns Akimbo” in the past, and is “Marine” today. It’s a creature feature with a curvaceous, bikini-clad surfing heroine who confronts a sea monster. It stars studio “It” girl Mystia (Ai Kukama). Gene is delivering coffee and donuts to this production, frantically taking notes of everything he sees to understand how a film set works.

Bleary-eyed and frazzled, Gene sees one of those perfect cinematic moments — a pretty young woman splashing in a puddle at a crosswalk — on his way into the office. That young woman turns out to be an aspiring actress. That young woman just auditioned for Pompo.

And despite thinking she’d incompetently blown her chance, despite Gene being late for work and missing that audition, Pompo decides to write a script pairing up this meek newbie Natalie Woodward (Rinka Ôtani) with screen icon Martin Braddock (Akio Ōtsuka) .

“Meister” will be about an exacting, legendary conductor touched by meeting a not-so-manic-pixie-dreamgirl. And after letting Gene edit the trailer to “Marine,” Pompo decides to make him a director.

Epiphanies come during the agonizing process of editing, Pompo’s director-grandpa revels in the pleasures of editing on old fashioned celluloid and scenes are rethought out in ways that show Gene has an eye, all “inside the movies” conventions common to “making my first movie/follow my dream” stories.

But the animation is gorgeous and not particularly anime-jerky, with multi-plane camera shots that take us through clouds and into the Alps, beautiful cityscapes and dazzling split-screen bits during Gene’s editing nightmare — 72 hours of footage that must be turned into a film “no longer than 90 minutes.”

I still don’t see why this not-that-fantastical fantasy needed to be animated, and no, “just because it’s a manga” is not reason enough. It’s nobody’s idea of a deep dive into making movies, and not even a particularly entertaining take on the subject.

But it panders to cinephiles in some pleasant ways, has attractive leads and doesn’t go much over 90 minutes. So it must be “good,” right?

Rating: unrated, mild profanity, leering bikini sequences commented on lasciviously

Cast: The voices of Rinka Ôtani, Hiroya Shimizu, Konomi Kohara, Ai Kukama and Akio Ōtsuka.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Takayuki Hirao, based on a manga by
Shôgo Sugitani. A GKids release.

Running time: 1:34

This is the first honest-to-Pete B- or C movie I’ve seen Butler in since his “Olympus Has Fallen” late leading man career bump.

He’s not getting along with “the wife,” the wife disappears, “The Vanishing” style, at a convenience store.

Not sure of the release date, but that’s what happens when your latest project winds up on this link of the distribution food chain.

An unconventional sex comedy about a newly widowed woman who hires a sex worker, and their love or lust connection.

June 17, Emma T. reminds Kenneth B. what he misses.

Don’t let the bad pun in the title scare you off the wine country mystery “Brut Force.”

Writer-director Eve Symington’s debut feature is a solid, engrossing film noir set in California’s pinot noir terroir. It’s the sort of smart, simply-shot, well-acted indie film that you wish more first-time filmmakers would aim for, instead of this “I’ll get my start with a cheap horror movie” mantra that they must drill into the kids in film school.

Symington created a marvelous star vehicle for her younger sister Lelia Symington, casting her as an inquisitive just-fired-reporter who starts looking into some shenanigans aimed at the migrant workers who pick the grapes at her step-dad’s vineyard in tiny, working class Santa Lucia de las Frutas. The can of worms she opens brings land ownership history, dirty tricks, violence, arson, corrupt cops and small town politics into play.

It’d make an interesting news story, if she was still working for the magazine we see her smirking her way out of, carrying everything from her desk with her as this guy — we assume her boss — rants and rails at her in an introductory scene.

In an instant, Sloane Sawyer’s character is set up. As befits the name, she comes from money. Symington plays her with the cocksure self-confidence that comes from that, a good education, journalism experience, that lack of self-consciousness worn by the unassumingly beautiful and a life that’s toughened her up.

Doesn’t matter that Sloane drives an ancient Toyota. This is her town or her stepdad’s town, and she’ll stick her nose wherever she wants. That boy that crushed on her in high school’s now a cop, and this creep who snaps “Be gone, college girl” is a guy she sent to the hospital senior year.

And there’s no worrying about a place to stay, so long as vintner stepdad (Sidney Symington) still has the hacienda, the winery, the land and the clout in this two vineyard town.

Sloane spies the hoodie-wearing dirty trickster harassing the Latin farm workers, starts asking around about a suspicious fire and starts getting her tires slashed.

Whatever’s going on here, the pickers — people she regards as family — are scared. And you’ve got to figure her semi-estranged stepfather — mom is dead — knows something, and that maybe the matriarch of a rival vineyard (Patricia Velasquez) is mixed up in it.

Director Symington takes her time unraveling this simple story with a lot of “history” in its moving parts. Tyler Posey comes in as “friend of a friend” and finds himself looking for the same winery employee (Vico Escorcia) that Sloane would like a word with.

Romantic sparks might fly if the ex-Angelino can dial down her snark. A local “activist” council member blathers away about how “Congress” might be her next step.

“They can have you.”

Someone speaks of her recently-deceased mother in “I’m sure she was a wonderful woman” platitudes.

“You didn’t know her.”

Not every player has the screen presence of our leading lady, so director Symington never lets a scene go by that Lelia Symington isn’t in the center of.

The mystery is somewhat diffuse before it finally starts to come into focus for the third act. Wine making is only glimpsed in picking montages and grape-crushing sequences, which feels like a waste of milieu.

Ah, but “Chinatown” wasn’t really about Chinatown, was it, Jake? “Brut Force” is about land, who controls it, and who will do whatever to get his or her hands on it.

The production values are modest but TV movie adequate, and that goes for the film as well. Director Symington puts some effort into creating the milieu that Sloane came from, and sending her into it thinking she’s a bull in a china shop even if she doesn’t have that sort of throw weight.

You can kind of pick up on this or that element that would probably make a larger distributor pass on putting this film out there, and the finale is kind of a melodramatic wash. But that takes nothing away from its virtues.

Eve Symington set her sister up for stardom with “Brut Force.” Maybe Lelia can return the favor next time out. But about that title…

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Lelia Symington, Tyler Posey, Sidney Symington, Patricia Velasquez, Vico Escorcia and Chase Mullins

Credits: An XYZ release.

Running time:

There’s an optimism in every DisneyNature release, each timed to fall on Earth Day. No matter how embattled, threatened or tested nature is by a human race unwilling to switch off their SUV engine while we sit watching cat videos on our iPhone, a “nature will endure” ethos is the bullet point messaging.

But even on a film about a “Polar Bear?”

Veteran British nature documentarian Alastair Fothergill and his “Penguins” director partner Jeff Wilson give us a sober-minded call to action in this beautifully-shot film, empathetically narrated by Catherine Keener, who tells the story from an “ice bear’s” point of view, a bear with nostalgia for the less-climate-changed past.

“The home of my childhood is changing,” she notes. “The ice we depend on is melting away.”

That point is repeated in the film, as you’d expect from any movie documenting the state of “ice bears” — a clever bit of absolutely vital Disney re-branding — on a heating planet Earth. “Fire and ice” have been eternal foes is how she narrates the problem. “Fire is winning.”

“Polar Bear” takes us through this bear’s childhood, the ways Keener’s bear cub and her brother were taught to hunt and scavenge and survive in a climate which threatens them directly and indirectly. The ice the bears need is even more necessary for seals to breed and raise their pups. The bears need not just the ice to get from place to place, but the seals that need it make up a major part of their diet.

So we see things bears do to keep going between rarer and rarer whole meals — seaweed chewing, learning about “finding small scraps (bird nests) in hard times” and the like.

Hunting sequences depicted here are graphic, but not bloody. The omnipresent threat of gigantic menacing “males” to mothers and cubs — ursine cannibalism is on the rise — give the film a touch of suspense. But perhaps the saddest image is of the Arctic permafrost melting into a muddy muck in summers “that grow longer and longer.”

There’s no talk of giving up, of acknowledging that the last five years of reactionary anti-environmental revanchism in America and abroad — but especially in the U.S. — may have been fatal to the climate that’s been more or less constant for thousands and thousands of years.

Disney may be nagged into pushing back against its far right political allies thanks to a more gay tolerant workforce. But there are limits to what the Mouse that Ate Florida will do to poke the bears of Florida politics, whom they have financed and propped up just to maintain their corporate freedom of action in the overdeveloped swampland of Central Florida.

A DisneyNature film a year doesn’t change the corporate ethos that would make these sprawling parks more green — allowing light rail that would get tourists from airports, hotels and train stations to their cash cow attraction without choking the roads with Smogwagons, etc.

Perhaps that’s where the optimism in “Polar Bear” comes from. They see the problem, but there’s still money to be made from expressing concern while in the deepest, dollars-driven denial.

DisneyNature allows a global corporation to finance great nature filmmakers’ projects that pay lip service to the problem without having to admit “We, as a company, don’t mean it.”

Rating: PG, bears hunting seals

Whatever

Cast: Narrated by Catherine Keener.

Credits: Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson, scripted by David Fowler. A DisneyNature release on Disney+.

Running time: 1:25

They were the first all-female rock band to put out an album on a major label, a fixture on concert tours, opening for Deep Purple, Jethro Tull and others, and a “novelty act” mainstay of TV musical variety shows of the early ’70s.

“They came along ten years too soon,” was the knock on Fanny, which broke up before ever cracking the top of the charts. That explains why they’d been mostly forgotten, until no less a luminary than David Bowie weighed in on them in Rolling Stone Magazine in 1999.

“One of the most important female bands in American rock has been buried, almost without a trace.”

“Fanny: The Right to Rock” remembers this seminal hard-blues/glam band that earned enthusiastic reviews and “proved girls could rock” every time they plugged in. As Canadian Bobbi Jo Hart’s film demonstrates, they may not have made as big a mark as guitarist-singer and contemporary Suzi Quatro, but women from Cherie Currie (The Runaways) to Kate Pierson (B-52s), Kathy Valentine (The Go-Go’s) and The Bangles caught them live or on TV and were inspired to take up the mantle by this “ferocious” quartet fronted by two Filipino American sisters, Jean and June Millington.

That “Filipino” connection never came up in reviews and profiles of the group back in the day, nor did the fact that with any given lineup, half the band was gay. Members of Fanny talk about those burdens, added to the uphill struggle of invading “a man’s world” by singing and playing guitar-driven rock at the birth of metal and glam.

A host of British TV’s “Old Grey Whistle Test” at the time introduced Fanny — whose name was even more provocative in the UK — as a band “conquering male chauvinistic hearts,” one show at a time. Helen Reddy introduced them on her variety show as “The Queens of Rock’n Roll.”

And watching their live performances — Joan Baez-length hair thrashed with early Metallica intensity, chunky power chords and howled vocals, you see what she means and you wonder why they never quite got there.

Fun anecdotes include accounts of their swinging days rehearsing and naked swimming and wandering the halls of the Warner/Reprise Records rented Fanny Hill Mansion, where they let Bonnie Raitt live with them just as she arrived in LA. A later LP’s studio sessions with producer Todd Rundgren (who made Meatloaf a star) got their then-drummer so hot she stripped to pasties, with Rundgren gamely joining her as moral support.

The Millington sisters, two different drummers — Brie Darling and Alice de Buhr — and replacement guitarist Patti (sister of Suzi) Quatro talk about those heady years, the near misses and “almost made its” that decorate many a rock documentary of the “Anvil” school. Fanny broke up for the last time just before their best-charting single, the naughty novelty “Butter Boy,” came out in 1975.

Their musicianship– praised by Def Leopard’s Joe Elliott, members of Bowie’s band and critics far and wide, was unquestionable, with some of the members moving on to session work or playing with tour bands for Carole King, Robert Palmer, Jimmy Buffett and others after Fanny disbanded.

The reasons for their “almost” status are explained as due to timing and producer/manager mishandling — attempts to sex up the act — rather than their of-their-time music.

There’s enough bad blood lingering that one key member of the quartet declined to participate in the film, which tied into an abortive “re-launch” of the band with a new LP back in 2018. That robs “Fanny” the film of its punch.

It’s still a fascinating argument for yet another major omission from the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame (only eight percent of inductees are women, and Stevie Nicks was inducted twice), and an argument not just for their inclusion, but for a Rock Hall “Old Timer’s/Big Influences” committee to rectify the Jann Wenner/Springsteen & Friends slant that has dominated its nominees and inductees since the beginning.

The band’s rippling impact is undeniable. Members host “rock camp for girls” at a music center one of them runs. And just the other night I was walking by a local Guitar Center when two wild-haired short-skirted teens strode out, giggling with delight at the Les Paul replicas they’d just picked up. From Fanny and Quatro and The Pleasure Seekers to The Runaways, The Go Go’s, L7 to Warpaint, ready to drag an axe through the glass ceiling that Fanny first broke.

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: June Millington, Jean Millington, Brie Darling, Alice de Buhr, Patti Quatro, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Elliott, Kate Pierson, Kathy Valentine, Cherie Currie, John Sebastian, Richard Perry and Todd Rundgren.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bobbi Jo Hart. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:36

A period piece for Christina R, this one opens in early May.

A mobster on the lam turns life coach for an introverted Italian comic book nerd in “The Turning Point (La svolta),” an Italian mob dramedy with a hard, bloody edge.

Riccardo Antonaroli’s film, based on a Roberto Cimpanelli/Gabriele Scarfone script, skips from a heist that goes wrong to a “Three Days of the Condor” situation to — of course — jokes about “Stockholm Syndrome” as our nerd learns a few things about carrying oneself as a “made man” before slamming into a brutal and bullet-riddled finale.

It packs all that, and romance and mob power struggles, into 90 minutes. Not bad.

A 40ish courier/collector makes one of his stops at the Flamingo Bar, only to have his collections backpack snatched by a brash, motorcycle-helmeted interloper who makes his getaway on a scooter.

Ah, but the courier is on a motorcycle and no head start will be enough, even without the wipeout our-nearly-panicked pack-snatcher has in Rome’s old Garbatella neighborhood. He flees on foot, dropping some of the loot as he does.

What can the big brute (Andrea Lattanzi) do but barge in on diminutive Ludovico (Brando Pacitto), a shy aspiring comic book artist who studies economics because that’s what his disappointed and well-off farmer father expects?

The bargain — made at gunpoint — is that Filippo the armed robber will give the cowering shrimp Ludovico a few thousand Euros once he’s able to slip out.

The reality is that the courier mobilized “the boys” to invade the neighborhood, stake out the various old high rises and begin an apartment-by-apartment search to locate the money that Big Boss Caino lost. The seriousness of the situation is underscored when that hapless courier gets a lecture on “fate” before his is primly dispatched by the amoral Bruzzetti (Marcello Fonte). Made Man Spartaco (Max Malatesta) and his partner are sent to round up this brazen thief. Spartaco doesn’t approve of Bruzetti’s methods or the boss’s heartless way of blaming and executing the courier, or of the boss’s ulterior motives.

Laying low makes antsy Filippo chatty, scrambling for something to do. He’s Italian, so naturally he’ll cook. No, first he’ll goad/train his meek hostage to break into a neighbor’s apartment to steal ingredients. He fixes broken and untidy things about the nerd’s apartment.

And that cute coed (Ludovica Martino) whom our hostage can barely make eye contact with, a young woman who can’t free herself of a rich and abusive boyfriend? One busted boyfriend nose later, and it’s problema risolto.

This promising first feature by Antonaroli juggles the lighter side of being a mob hostage — the makeover, the advice to the lovelorn — with the brute force/bullet-to-the-head/knife-in-the-neck methods of Caino (Tullio Sorrentino) and his gang.

Caino’s growled lectures (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed) on “Do you know what’s the most important thing to a man? His reputation. It doesn’t matter what you are, it’s what people THINK you are” are contrasted with Filippo’s tough love tough talk to cowering Ludovico, who uses”I have a serious illness” to explain his miserable life.

Oh? The teenager’s stocking cap you wear covers your chemo? No?

“‘Depression?’ You hate yourself. You don’t need a degree to see that.”

That sentiment is sure to set off folks who preach that “depression is a serious illness,” but in this script, it has Ludovico facing up to his issues and addressing them thanks to “my guardian angel.” Yeah, it’s glib and formulaic, but it plays.

The acting is quite good, particularly on the mob side, with Fonte oozing menace, Malatesta seething resentment and Sorrentino’s relaxed, murderous air suggesting a hard man untroubled by who and what he has to do or have done to get his “reputation” back.

The leads click just well enough in a serio-comic “bromance” sort of way.

And Antonaroli ensures that the story clips along, never letting us lose the thread or the fact that the stakes are literally life and death, something underscored by the hammer blows of the finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Andrea Lattanzi, Brando Pacitto, Ludovica Martino, Max Malatesta and Marcello Fonte

Credits: Directed by Riccardo Antonaroli, scripted by Roberto Cimpanelli and Gabriele Scarfone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

As beaten, shot, torched, blown-up and hacked to death as the zombie picture is, Uruguayan
Gustavo Hernández finds a way to give us something that at least feels fresh in the genre.

“Virus-32” or “Virus :32” is as pitiless as it is stylish.

The arresting filming style is established in a killer long-take opening, when we see a kid being dropped off with her irresponsible mother as the camera swoops from close-up to soaring over rooftops and into the apartment of manic, ditzy Iris (Paula Silva), who will bring Tata along with her to work at “the club.”

There are probably cuts hidden within this five minute-plus shot, but it’s a bravura opening, tidily establishing characters (Tata is eight, with a skateboard and the arm in the cast that comes with it) and the loving dynamic between exes that makes us wonder what tore this marriage apart.

The “pitiless” part kicks in when the virus turns the populace into crazed and flesh-craving muertos vivientes who invade “the club” and Iris and Tata must cope with one of the defining dilemmas of horror — how to survive the zombie apocalypse.

We’ve checked out Iris’s pink-streaked hair, her piercings and her use of the word “club” (in Spanish with English subtitles). We’re pretty sure she’s the irresponsible type. But “club” means an athletic club that’s closed after hours. She’s a night watchman. Still, her new employers got the same “can’t trust her with anything” vibe that the viewer did. They didn’t give her a gun.

Iris and others will face awful choices and fates worse than death as writer-director Hernández spares few and shows little pity to the rest as we and Iris — naturally, mother and child get separated — must grasp what is happening and gather enough wits to cope, find her kid and keep her safe.

One thing the more observant survivors pick up on is this movie’s zombie pause mode. After they’ve attacked and killed somebody they stand there for :32 seconds before going about more of their bloody business.

Handy to know, still a stupid gimmick, but it is what it is. Not much is made of the first “infection” symptom, either — stigmata.

The grabber scenes involve avoiding joining the undead’s dinner menu by leaping into a pool (underwater zombie attacks) and Iris finding herself “rescued” only to owe the preternaturally calm Luis (Daniel Hendler), who did her a favor and expects one in return.

That involves helping his wife give birth. She’s infected. No, “The Walking Dead” birth scene has nothing on what we see here.

The trick to making a non-comic winner in this genre is early on stablishing how far you’re’ willing to go and just who and what you’re willing to sacrifice to make the viewer think “This nut’s gonna make us watch a gore-stained wretch devour a child and her puppy.”

Hernández gives us the idea that he will do the unexpected, and that it won’t be pretty.

But that’s not exactly true, as this is a beautifully shot film — gloom, smoke, smoke bombs and shadows dominate the visual palette. We see the first undead trying to get in through distorted shadowy hands and faces pressed against opaque windows.

The :32 second thing provides one dandy suspenseful sequence. And the stakes start out high and only go higher as there is that childbirth thing and we’re witnesses to a meaningful death or two, and not just wanton, anonymous video-game style slaughter.

It’s not all that original and not actually on a par with the benchmark films of this corner of horror, “Night of the Living Dead,” “28 Days Later,” “World War Z” and “Zombieland.” But Hernández shows a flair for thrillers and an eye for showy visual storytelling that, with his third film (after “La casa muda” and “You Shall Not Sleep”) establishes him as a horror director to watch.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Paula Silva, Daniel Hendler

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gustavo Hernández. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:30