Movie Nation

This looks like a splattered, splintered hoot with a helping helping of “G’Dye.”

April 14, “Wyrmwood” comes to Dunsinane…of Brisbane. Crikey!

The 2020 Czech drama “Servants (Sluzobníci)” could not be a more timely home streaming release, it being a drama set not long after the 1968 Warsaw Pact, aka “Soviet Union” aka “Russian” invasion, “regime change” and occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Director Ivan Ostrochovský’s austere black and white tale is a story of Czech passive resistance running up against fearful, over-eager collusion in the aftermath of that “keep the satellite states in line” assault. It’s a parable-as-crucible for the country as a whole, a timely reminder of past-and-present Russian repression set in a Catholic seminary.

Juraj and Michael (Samuel Skyva and Samuel Polakovic) are friends who join the prestigious Prague Catholic school for priests together. It’s around 1970, and priests and Party bureaucrats alike are obsessed with interpretations of the late Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, “Pacem in terris.” Priests at the seminary, and some of the more tuned-in and activist students, take that edict to heart, determined to stand up for human rights in the face of a brutal crackdown on civil liberties.

Those doing the cracking down, led by a government minister (Vlad Ivanov) “in the churches department,” are hellbent on interpreting the encyclical as an order AGAINST activist priests. This party-member/minister is determined to ferret out dissent in the seminary in order to please his Russian overlords.

We’re shown unanimous votes in the now-rubber-stamp legislature, and the seeming compliance if not downright collusion by the chancellor (Vladimír Strnisko) who faces “visits” that are more like “inspections” from this Ivan apparatchik.

When the chancellor cautions the new class about “some of our brothers strayed from the righteous path” (in Czech with subtitles) the previous year, he’s not talking about sex or any of the modern church’s biggest scandals. He’s talking about putting up the wrong sort of Biblical reference and call to action on the bulletin board.

Just such a note gets all their typewriters impounded, as if the goons can ferret out a dissenter this way.

As the film’s opening scene is a car pulling into a tunnel to reveal a body in the trunk, we know the stakes. Do the young priests?

One friend is approached, recruited and joins the secret group within the school which obtains and passes on smuggled-in books, and when crackdowns start, knows which payphone to call Radio Free Europe’s tip-line about this crackdown, that arrest, a suspicious death-in-custody or a clergical hunger strike.

The other friend? He might feel left out. And as the surveillance outside and interrogations inside ramp up, very young men face life or death consequences head-on as the chancellor does all in his power to “keep this school open.” But at what cost?

Even the man doing the persecuting is paying a price. He’s 50something and looks much older, living alone, in poor health with what we can see is a worsening case of stress-exacerbated eczema.

Ostrochovský’s film, which he co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Marek Lescák, isn’t a Cold War thriller or account of espionage behind the Iron Curtain, although there are hints of those genres around the edges. “Servants” is about those literal “servants” weighing what they know about right and wrong against what their elders — teachers, either conspiratorial or cowed, and the Russian-controlled government — are demanding of them.

The interrogations are quiet and coercive with just enough menace to heighten the moral dilemma such victims faced. Just a generation before, their parents had lived under German Nazi occupation, and strained to resist it. Now, it’s Russian communists. Are they up to the challenge, prepared for the mortal consequences if they’re ratted out, caught or falsely accused?

Ostrochovský never quite achieves “riveting” with this narrative. But he’s made a chilling reminder of the Bad Old Days, when the Cold War might have given the world moral clarity about who was for freedom and civil liberties and who sought to quash them. There was a cost to that clarity. It came with the price of a planet living on a nuclear-tipped edge and ordinary people on the front lines facing prison, torture or death for not sitting by and waiting for rescue from the Free World, but speaking out and taking the consequences when the stakes could not have been higher.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Samuel Skyva, Samuel Polakovic, Vlad Ivanov, Vladimír Strnisko

Credits: Directed by Ivan Ostrochovský, scripted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Marek Lescák and
Ivan Ostrochovský A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:20

A practice engrained by years in newspapers has me avoiding the use of staged/photoshopped promotional photos for reviews of films.

But this image so perfectly encapsulates the Japanese weeper romance “Love Like the Falling Petals,” that avoiding it wouldn’t be fair to the reader.

It’s an insipid “meet cute” romance that never lives up to that introduction, a maudlin meander through an old fashioned Tokyo courtship (mostly chaste) that takes a turn towards “Disease of the Week” TV movie. And that’s rarely a label we trot out for films we endorse.

Yoshihiro Fukagawa’s film, based on a novel by Keisuke Uyama, reaches for a love-is-fleeting-but-love-can-be-eternal message yet struggles to not be love-can-be-damned-boring in this soggy, sentimental slog.

A young photographer (Kento Nakjami) voice-over narrates his love story with the hair dresser (Honoka Matsumoto) he took almost a year to ask out.

“People’s hearts can be more fickle than flower petals,” everybody seems to know. But when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, he gets up his nerve and springs an invitation on her while he’s in her chair. It’s just that he abruptly turns his head as he does.

Blood and profuse apologies fill the Penny Lane Salon. But Misaki’s tears and offer to “pay your medical bills, do whatever you want,” sounds like an opening to earlobe-lopped Haruto. A “date” it is.

He’s somewhat anal retentive, fretting over what day they should go see the flowers, weather being a prime factor. She’s an orphan whose gruff, bluff bartender brother considers himself her father figure and the diners/drinkers at his pub her “family.” Threats notwithstanding, a love story begins.

But it turns out Haruto only passed himself off as a photographer. He quit an internship at a prestigious photographer’s studio and subsists on dead end jobs. Misaki lights into him, and chastened, he apologizes.

“I’ll turn the lie into truth!” (subtitled, or dubbed) he promises.

There’s a lot of apologizing here, a signature of Japanese culture that decorates almost every film you see from there. But there’s little sense of the life there and how lives are lived and how love can um BLOOM in “Love Like the Falling Petals.” The liveliest milieu is that bar, the scenery sampled is limited and the romance only turns truly “real” when she gets her “An Affair to Remember/Dark Victory” news and they part.

So the arc of this story is insipid to tragically sad. And neither extreme is certain to provoke more than an indifferent shrug from even the most saccharine-tolerant viewer.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, possible suicide

Cast: Kento Nakajima, Honoka Matsumoto

Credits: Directed by Yoshihiro Fukagawa, scripted by Tomoko Yoshida, based on the novel by
Keisuke Uyama. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

In a streaming universe where whole channels are devoted to music documentaries, it’s inevitable that almost any band you an think of, any band anybody cares about, is going to merit a film telling their story.

Many of these films are “Behind the Music” formulaic, with the odd variation on a theme. Anvil never made it, for instance.

But “The Sound of Scars,” which tells the story of Life of Agony (LOA), stands out by telling us the story of its lead singer’s transition, from tortured and sometimes even suicidal Keith Caputo, to Mina Caputo, who she is today.

This transition happened just as they were about to break big. And the film’s story arc follows takes us from replacing their singer, to bringing her back as Mina, with struggles and triumph and a refreshing level of acceptance from their fans if not the entire hardcore scene.

The members — Caputo, guitarist Joey Zampella (Joey Z), bassist Alan Robert and recent-replacement drummer Veronica Bellino — tell tales of enduring “Raging Bull” childhoods in Brooklyn (Caputo and Zampella are cousins), where alcohol, abuse and violence were a part of daily life.

The founding cousins got their starts as roadies for other Biohazrd, which played in their local metal club L’Amour, where stage-diving and “letting out (testosteroned teen) aggression on each other” with stage diving, crowd-surfing and brawls were very much a part of that cacophonous scene.

When they formed Life of Agony, with songwriter/bassist Alan Robert coming up with the name, they staked out a more melodic, possibly even radio-friendly corner of hardcore. They still had an audience member die during a show there, and spent time in court over that calamity.

Had Caputo not wrestled with “the genderlessness of life,” and eventually quit to come out and reconcile the fact that “I’d always been feminine,” even in their most rough-and-tumble days, that accidental yet inevitable consequence of violent mosh pits (“Pitting” as Joey puts it.) might have been the focus of this film. It’s all “Somebody tried to steal my sneakers” crowd-surfing fun until the ambulances show up.

Perhaps a future Pearl Jam doc will take on that.

Director Leigh Brooks, who also did a Terrorvision-on-tour doc, interviews band members, record company folks and at one point has Robert’s parents (a lot less “Raging Bull” than the Zampella/Caputos, apparently) unironically read Alan’s bleak lyrics from the back cover of one of their LPs for a “Steve Allen Show” era laugh. As music docs go, “Scars” is almost entirely reliant on one “hook” Otherwise, the range of interviews is too narrow, the entertainment value limited.

But Mina’s journey has been an interesting one and the band is very much a big deal, as Rolling Stone referred to their debut LP, “River Runs Red,” as one of the great metal albums. And the title of their latest, which also gives the name to this film, points to exactly what this troubled journey to triumph is — “The Sound of Scars.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, violence, discussions of drug abuse, suicide, adult subject matter

Cast: Mina Caputo, Joey Zampella, Alan Robert, Veronica Bellino

Credits: Directed by Leigh Brooks. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:30

This is the golden age of binge watching and streaming series. But I find the storytelling cliffhanger formulaic. And reviewing series is time consuming, and the reviews typically have no shelf life.

So I try not to invest in many of those.

But Mr. “Baby Driver,” Tony in “West Side Story” as an American reporter on the Japanese underworld? I’m setting aside the time for that.

Japan remains the most exotic of locales, a manga distillation of east meets west with distinct imprints on sports, romance, sex, gambling, gangsterism and cuisine.

HBO Max, you have our attention.

Michael Bay and Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza Gonzalez…April 8.

An Italian period piece/fantasy of romance, treasure, pistols and crabs. This one opens April 15.

Oscilloscope has “The Tale of King Crab,” and you know how I feel about them.

A mushroom expert bonds with a runaway he meets in the woods collecting mushrooms in “The Issue with Elvis,” a milder-than-mild-mannered family drama set in wild, wonderful West Virginia.

The drama is low-key/low-stakes, the pace is leisurely and the dialogue bland to inane in this All-in-the-Wincott-Family production.

Canadian character actor Jeff Wincott leaves his martial arts behind, but not his Canadian dipthongs, as retired academic mycolist Dr. Mercer, a man living alone in the woods outside of Morgantown but still able to rattle off Latin names and long lists of medicinal/culinary properties of assorted fungi on sight.

He’s not seeing nearly as much of his most treasured varieties in his corner of the woods. It turns out there’s this kid (Wolfgang Wincott) out there harvesting as well. Mercer barters for some of the kid’s mushrooms, and soon they develop a little system — food for fungi.

But no kid should be living in the woods, or the edge of them, in late winter. Mercer’s curiosity is piqued when the boy finally starts talking. The kid gives his name as “Elvis,” named after “Costello,” not Presley, he insists. And as the good doctor takes an interest he takes him in.

In between discourses on mushrooms, how you only harvest “half” from the tree so that it’ll come back, about life, religion and “modern medicine,” Mercer finds time to make some calls as he tries to figure out what to be with a runaway with a made-up name.

And that’s about all there is to this inoffensive, innocuous and dramatically-flat film by Jeff Wincott’s wife and Wolfgang Wincott’s mother. It’s not particularly interesting, and the performances do nothing to animate it.

The shot selection isn’t the best, the one pointless instance of juggled hand-held footage feels amateurish and in low-light, the shortcomings of whatever gear they used to record “Elvis” stands out.

It’s also worth pointing out that Charlotte Wincott started out as an academic neuroscientist before taking up movie making. Their son will hopefully experience a similar search for a true calling, as acting doesn’t appear to be it. Leaving your kids’ stumbling line-readings (almost every line) and awkward, coached gestures in the finished film isn’t exactly a confidence booster.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Jeff Wincott, Wolfgang Wincott

Credits: Scripted and directed by Charlotte Wincott. A Random media release.

Running time: 1:28

Film and the culture it reflects tends towards gross oversimplifications. When a terrible crime happens, we want it explained. We want to know what “triggered” this person, what made them “finally snap.”

The truth is always muddier, more complicated. Sometimes, some disturbed people are repeatedly, almost constantly “triggered.” It’s just the last and worst incident forces us to put it all together, to “see the signs.”

For Nitram, it could be a lawnmower that won’t start, being told that he can’t/shouldn’t set off fireworks at a nearby school during recess or even a suggestion that he cut his unkempt hair that sets him off.

“Nitram” is a tense thriller about a mass shooting whose edge-of-your-seat suspense comes from the viewer’s dread and growing alarm at how “off,” angry and unmanageable its subject plainly is. What will set off the title character, played with dead-eyed, hair-trigger intensity by Caleb Landry Jones, next? And how bad will it be?

“Nitram” spelled backwards is “Martin,” the filmmakers’ way of giving themselves a little distance from the worst mass shooting in Australian history, and a bit of fictional latitude in depicting it. The murderer’s name is Martin Bryant.

Director Justin Kurzel (“Assassin’s Creed”) reteams with his “True History of the Kelly Gang” screenwriter Shaun Grant to show us a developmentally-disabled child with dangerous tendencies who grew up as a medicated, almost unmanageable son lacking empathy, impulse control or a rational way of approaching any problem that confronted him.

He’s in his mid 20s when he threatens to run away. Again. His weary mother (Judy Davis) is sanguine about that.

“He’ll be back. No one else can live with that boy but us.”

There’s conflict in the house about regulating the son’s behavior. His mother still makes attempts at reining him in. His dad (Anthony LaPaglia) gives him more leeway just to limit the meltdowns.

The kid’s mania for fireworks began in childhood where we see him interviewed on television with other kids in a burn ward.

“You think you’ll be playing with firecrackers again,” the reporter wants to know? After all, he’s had skin grafts and suffered great pain.

“Yes,” the tween tells her. No “lesson learned.” He’s hooked and he cannot fathom the idea of consequences.

The adult he grows up into gets disability payments from the state and regular healthcare visits to a troubled shrink. Nitram drifts from passion to passion. He was into scuba diving. Now he’s all set to become a surfer. But he can’t earn enough extra to pay for a board, as he can’t even get a driver’s license.

So the social-signals-missing adult with the long, stringy hair and scary intensity sets off, door to door, trying to earn money mowing lawns. The neighbors, many of whom scream at him about the fireworks thing, have to ask the frankly-creepy guy to remove his foot from their doorway to close it on him. His sales pitch is blunt to the point of rude.

Yet the flighty, Gilbert & Sullivan-addicted oddball down the road, Helen (Essie Davis) takes him on. She has a constantly-spinning record player and a house full of dogs, and tells him “You look like a movie star.” His behavior around her seems calm enough, until we see what he does when somebody else is driving, until the target-practice with his air rifle comes to her yard.

And no, his “I just get sad sometimes” isn’t a real explanation.

Kurzel and Grant blend in story points from the real shooting and its prologue with fictional speculation and cinematic simplification. There was a B & B that dad had his heart set on buying so that their son could help them run it, and both parents could be there to “keep an eye” on him and regulate his behavior.

Jones, of “Three Billboards” and “Get Out,” mastered the Aussie accent of this Tasmanian killer, and gives a performance that could make one and all mutter, “Well, we saw that coming.”

Just casting the two-time Oscar-nominee Davis as his mother renders the woman bitter, brittle and resigned to the life sentence giving birth to him gave her.

One fraught scene has the son try to deliver some sort of “tough love” to his father, who turns morose, refusing to get up and get dressed after the lifeline that purchasing Seascape B & B is yanked from him. It’s a brutal moment, and we wonder if this is something the kid’s parents tried on him early on, to no avail.

And there’s the soul-sucking amorality of a “no worries,” just-make-big-sale gun dealer, who lets the lack of a firearm license slide with an “Awright, nooo dramas” as he arms this Tasmanian sociopath to the teeth.

It was always going to be a chilling, emotionally deflating film. Kurzel and Grant double-down on that by not showing the murders and not focusing on the victims. And they finish it off with a coda that doesn’t let the way this slaughter impacted Australian society get sugar-coated, the way it’s often discussed in the US.

There are people among us who are “triggered” without even trying. And if the wrong politicians get a say, there’s no keeping machine guns out of the country or out of their trigger-happy hands.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Essie Davis.

Credits: Directed by Justin Kurzel, scripted by Shaun Grant. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:51

The latest film from the writer director of “A Prophet,” “Rust and Bone” and “The Sisters Brothers” is a menage a quatre romance.

This one, titled “Les Olympiades” in France, opens on North America April 15.