Movie Nation

I’m catching this one just before it opens because I’ve had conflicts at earlier showings, and I’ve never gotten past the first commercial break watching the animated series.

Quite right, you have to invest in a sitcom with the sort of dry, droll, askance view of life that this one traffics in. I saw no evident return on that investment. Same with “Schitt’s Creek,” which those who love praise to the high heavens. Anyway, I like some of the voices and characters and I hear BBTM is funny and that’s promising enough. And the investment in time is limited to 90 minutes or so.

Here goes!

Michael McKean, Rainn Wilson and Larry Wilmore are among the co-stars this June 17 release has to offer.

It’s a true story about a mathematical flaw in a particular corner of the lottery, and a math whiz who exploits it.

Looks cute. Paramount+ has it, as it doesn’t look theatrical.

Probably won’t see it, as Paramount didn’t pitch the trailer and doesn’t usually pitch me their wares. I guess they figure “that with Yellowstone” and “Star Trek” and “Godfather,” they don’t need most critics.

Sharlto Copley co-stars in this safari-gone-wrong thriller, featuring doting dad Idris Elba struggling to save his kids from a monstrous and ever-so-digital lion.

August 19.

Well Go USA is putting this Sundance pic in theaters — some theaters anyway — June 3.

Looks cute.

For everyone who chose not to chance COVID and show up in theaters to make “Jackass Forever” a box-office-boosting hit back in February, I get it.

One could get downright sentimental over the idea that these lovable louts literally saved the cinema, that the “old men” among them had done their doofus duty, pummeled, blown-up, bitten and battered for our entertainment, probably for the last time. But not everybody felt safe going.

And it’s just as understandable that Johnny Knoxville, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuña, “Danger” Ehren McGhehey, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Preston Lacy and the newcomers wouldn’t want all their trials, tests and injuries to have been for naught. Thus, “Jackass 4.5,” a film of reminiscences surrounded by stunts not good enough to make the theatrical release, was assembled for Netflix. I get that, too.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Most of these gags didn’t make the “movie” for a reason. And those that did and are recycled here don’t add up to the same sort of experience “Forever” delivered.

Guys, you already dropped the mike. There’s no coming back on stage and stumbling, kicking it around as you try to pick it up again.

We see 2019 “test footage” where producer Spike Jonze, directed Jeff Tremaine and white-haired, gaunt, bespectacled and 50 year-old Knoxville started shooting to see “if this was still funny” and “if we had a movie” in all of their tomfoolery.

And we’re treated to entire bits that didn’t make the theatrical feature — a jokey electric eel shock stunt with Wee Man dressed as Ben Franklin, subjecting a castmate to jolts via a brass key inserted up the lad’s anus. I think that was “Danger” Ehren on the receiving end of that “prod.” He’s the stand-out in much of what’s seen here, a man they love to abuse and who takes it (mostly) like a good sport.

“Ehren was amazing in ‘Jackass Forever,'” Knoxville notes. “He didn’t MEAN to be.”

There’s “Hot Sauce Enemas,” which is exactly as titled, with the added bonus of popsicles on offer to cool off the nether regions scorched by having sauce piped up four Jackass’s poop-shoots.

It’s easy to see why Knoxville’s disguised stunts — dressed as Old Man Irving Zissman for assorted pranks on hapless recruits who don’t recognize him — were ditched for “Forever.” They aren’t funny enough.

The big finish this time out is mainly all about the build-up of subjecting streetwise Dark Star, father of newbie Jasper and a man who has survived multiple gunshot wounds, to his first ever taste of skydiving. The build-up is OK, the payoff anticlimactic.

That seems all too appropriate for “Jackass 4.5,” a movie with some funny new bits, some new gross bits and a lot of guys (and newcomer Rachel Wolfson) standing around cackling, mostly at stunts we already saw in “Jackass Forever.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, nude-violence and ensuing profanity

Cast: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Rachel Wolfson, Chris Pontius, and Eric Andre.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Tremaine. A Paramount picture released on Netflix.

Running time: 1:30

The Cold War Soviet military provides a high-stakes backdrop for “Firebird,” the true story of a gay romance in a place where homosexuality wasn’t merely shunned and shamed, it was forbidden and persecuted.

It’s a policy that returned under the dictator Putin, which makes this period piece timely as well a reminder of a bitter past.

British stage actor and occasional big screen supporting player (“Kingsman,” “Blood on the Crown”) Tom Prior has co-written and produced himself a breakout star vehicle in which he plays a closeted conscript who finds love with a superior officer on an (occupied) Estonian airbase in the late ’70s.

A fighter squadron stationed there is on high alert during a time of rising tensions with NATO. The Soviet Empire is teetering towards the Afghan debacle that brought it down, and the Sukoi jets stationed here are scrambled at the merest hint of a Western provocation or probe of their defenses.

That’s what brings Lt. Roman Matvejev (Ukrainian actor Oleg Zagorodnii) there. He’s a crack pilot.

But what the clerical workers Sergey (Prior) and Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) notice is his dashing good looks. They may flirt and talk about the future — Sergey’s enlistment is up in weeks, Luisa is studying for admission to medical school — but artistic-minded Sergey has a secret, something the handsome lieutenant picks up on.

Yes, gaydar was one area where the Soviets had absolute parity with the West.

A shared interest — photography — leads to an invitation to a Roman’s dark room. And where there’s darkness and intimate, hands-on instruction, and needless to say — “chemistry” — signals are sent and received.

Sorry, but the early flirtation scenes have a same-sex-romance corniness that invites a little teasing.

Still, this is going on at an airbase, a perilous place to start an affair.

The lieutenant takes the younger private to his first ballet — Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” Even that turns fraught, as there are checkpoints and base patrols to be evaded. We’ve already seen a “Stop or I’ll shoot” encounter with men on guard duty that Sergey, his friend Volodya (Jake Henderson) and Luisa faced, just for taking a late night dip in an on-base lake. Imagine what will happen if two men in uniform are caught in an intimate same-sex moment.

And naturally, there’s a Major (Margus Prangel) who starts to suspect what one, if not the other, is up to.

There’s something a soap operatic about all this — the “sensitive” young man who longs to go to acting school, the cultured, privileged older man, classical music LPs, the “love triangle” that develops and the threats of betrayal.

But there’s a reason romantic cliches became cliches. This is one way love develops, and as the script is taken from the memoirs of actor Sergey Fetisov, there’s only so much criticism that’s warranted about the waypoints of this romance.

It’s just that film adaptations are reductive processes, and in selecting what to include and what to leave out they make “Firebird” predictable, leaning toward the melodramatic.

Prior wrote himself a splendid part, and engagingly underplays young Sergey. Zagorodnii has great presence and a command of English that could stand him in good stead with casting directors, if he survives Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Even if the story here is as preordained as the ballet that gives it its title, they’ve made a nicely-detailed reminder of another critical difference between the totalitarian East and the more tolerant West, one that shows us how bad things were and how bad they still are there, and how bad they could be if Russia-loving/emulating politicians in the Free World are allowed to take power.

Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Tom Prior, Oleg Zagorodnii, Diana Pozharskaya and Margus Prangel

Credits: Directed by Peeter Rebane. scripted by Peeter Rebane and Tom Prior. A Roadside Attractions release on Lionsgate Home Video (June 3).

Running time: 1:47

A little IFC Midnight sci Fi horror for you. Coming soon.

Richard Dreyfuss, Anna Camp and Isaiah Mustafa saddle up — or sit and shoot — in this Western due out June 24.

Switzerland’s “Escape King,” a bourgeois-born career criminal who declared “I like to steal my luxury,” and a sickly, crusading leftist lawyer who fell for him would seem an unlikely pair to hang a story about the pursuit of justice, human rights and “freedom” on.

But then, we don’t think of 1980s Switzerland as a “fascist” “prison state,” where rights were trampled in an effort to quash dissent.

Perhaps that’s one reason the Swiss biographical drama “Caged Birds (Bis wir tot sind oder frei)” resonates. This “inspired by true events” account of the many escapes and confinements of Walter Stürm is more about the tireless, health-sapping efforts of activist attorney Barbara Hug to free him, and to end many Swiss prison practices and overturn unjust laws and intrusions on personal liberties in the process.

Swiss director and co-writer Oliver Rihs (“Ready, Steady Ommm!”) takes a serious step into the big time with this gripping saga, a story that begins escape-artist jaunty and occasionally finds its way back there even as the story turns grimmer and the color palette progressively greyer.

It’s a film that rides two fine performances, by Joel Basman and Marie Leuenberger, as the seriously mismatched pair who came to fame through their association and changed Switzerland — by accident, on his part, by dogged determination on hers.

Everybody loves an “escape artist” story (see “The Getaway King” on Netflix), and that’s what Stürm has already become when we meet him. Sure, he can crack a safe and swipe a car. But it’s getting out of Swiss jails that makes him notorious. We see him slip into a police uniform, out a window, swipe a prison van and then swap it for a police car as he makes his getaway.

He pulls this off in the middle of street protests, which are leading to mass arrests and general mistreatment of prisoners by the irate cops. Hug is in court representing one hardcore protester, a German (Jella Haase) who has crossed the border to take to the streets with the Swiss. Hug uses that case to make point after point against an outspokenly authoritarian prosecutor (Anatole Taubman) and generally unsympathetic judge, and she doesn’t let the fact that she’s on a crutch and suffering from kidney failure hold her back, even if that means falling into seizures at the end of a heated diatribe.

Stürm crosses her path on purpose. A wily master of disguise, he approaches her with a big prison file that just happened to be in the van he swiped. No, it can’t be admitted to court as “evidence.” But who needs courts when you can send material to newspapers about abuse, a prison riot cover-up and the like?

Over the course of the film, Stürm will commit crimes, lay low and every now and then reach out to Hug to get him across the border or represent him after he gets caught.

Amusingly, the Swiss keep re-capturing the guy. But their instinct to lock this flight-risk in solitary rubs against Hug and the International Criminal Court’s idea of inhumane treatment. And outside of solitary, the folks known for their famous watches and cheese and chocolate are damned careless with a man who has made them look foolish, time and again.

Hug and Stürm break bread with serious Red Army Faction German terrorists (Bibiana Beglau) and try to keep things professional between themselves. He takes up with that fetching young activist client Heike (Haase), who carries the film’s ongoing debate about the nature of “freedom” into the sexual arena. Hug would rather suffer in silence than “share.”

It’s obvious that the idealists are seeing this veteran thief in a more heroic light than perhaps he sees himself. His idea of “freedom” is a fast car, a safe to crack and another narrow escape, another chance to don a wig and lie on the fly, using his wits to humiliate the hapless police.

An American viewer will note how reluctant the cops are to shoot the guy, but we, Hug and Stürm suspect they have their limits, and that they’d like nothing better than to execute him in the act rather than catch him in the act.

The veteran German actress Leuenberger (“The Divine Order”) gives Hug a temper, a fatalism about her sick-since-childhood health issues and a sad longing when it comes to this colorful man in her life. Hers is a nuanced performance of very human dimensions. We see Hug’s flaws and blind spots, the lines she’s willing to cross, and feel the pain she stoically bears and all but shrugs off as Stürm makes one escape with her romantic rival as his accomplice.

Basman, of “The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch,” brings a twinkle to Stürm that, coupled with the thief’s “non violent” approach to crime, must have been part of his “Robin Hood” appeal back in the day. But we see flashes of temper, a hint of darkness and just a touch of mania. He can’t stop, and being born into money, doesn’t really understand “freedom” the way the protesters who adopt him as their champion do. And when challenged, his mood can change in a flash.

Rihs keeps the film focused on these two, through trials and shootings, hunger strikes and seemingly misguided attempts to soften a career criminal’s treatment. We don’t see anything from the point of view of what Hug labeled “the prison state,” even as things take a turn towards darkness as our struggling hero and struggling heroine try to reconcile their agendas with each other and with Hug’s fellow activists.

The resolution lacks that Hollywood moment where somebody gets to wave the flag in triumph or smile with the quiet satisfaction of a battle hard fought and won. That takes little away from “Caged Bird,” which in the end is an artfully-wielded scalpel that peels off the veneer of Switzerland’s reputation, and reminds us that even in the country that holds the headquarters of most of the world’s human rights organizations, people have to fight to keep their rights in courts, in the press and even marching in the streets, from time to time.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, smoking

Cast: Marie Leuenberger, Joel Basman, Jella Haase, Anatole Taubman, Pascal Ulli, Philipe Graber and Bibiana Beglau

Credits: Directed by Oliver Rihs, scripted by Oliver Keidel, Norbert Maass, Ivan Madeo and Oliver Rihs. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:59

Bale and Taika and Tessa.

Natalie’s back? And golly, Russell Crowe?

Fun fun fun. July 8.