Movie Nation

How on Earth does a movie set amidst the sun, vineyards, food and earthy-sexy sensualists of Tuscany turn out as drab as Helsignor during a mid-winter rain?

“Toscana” is an Around the World with Netflix stab at “Italian for Beginners,” another story of stoic Scandinavians turning lighter and sunnier via exposure to Italy, Italians and the Italian food, culture and lifestyle. It’s a “stab” that mises the mark widely enough to matter.

Anders Matthesen stars as Theo, a hard-driving 50ish chef whose famous attention to detail extends to the table settings he triple checks and his kitchen, which he guards like a hawk because no matter how big his kitchen “crew,” “nobody cleans up after me” (in Danish, or dubbed into English).

But on the make-or-break day Theo must deliver and dazzle to a gauche, new-money investor-bro, he gets the news that his estranged father has passed away in far-off Tuscany. Buttoned-down, repressed Dane Theo keeps it together only so long before that arbitrary moment when he snaps and cusses out that “bro” (Sebastian Jessen) and lets down his crew and his manager (Lærke Winther).

Their last hope of fresh cash must be in Italy. His dad left the worn villa and “ristorante” Ristonchi” to him. A “quick sale” and they’ll be flush enough to carry on.

But “quick” anything is going to be a problem in Italy. And that would be funny in any other film covering this very familiar “Under the Tuscan Sun” transformation storyline.

But writer-director Mehdi Avaz, apparently new to comedy, can’t manage it.

Theo can’t find the lawyer/executor of the estate Pino (Andrea Bosca). Theo visits the ristorante, and Gordon Ramsay-fashion, finds everything there lacking. Throw in a little Northern European “don’t drink the water” prejudice, among other prejudices (the kitchen is filthy), and watch the sparks fly.

Only they don’t. Not for a moment.

His sarcastic, seen-it-all waitress Sophia (Cristiana Dell’Anna) dismisses him until she learns who he is. But there’s no apologizing. She grew up here, under Theo’s father Geo’s roof, raised like his daughter. She is Roma, but “feisty” barely figures into it. She may not be thrilled Theo is set to sell the place, but Dell’Anna plays that with resignation, not resistance.

The “magical” conversion scenes, where Theo tastes the olive oil and bread, the only thing Ristonchi has going for it, visits the vast aging warehouse for the local cheeses and such aren’t magical in the least.

Matthesen doesn’t play a single moment in this light and “fun.”

And the wedding banquet, which Theo decides to cater, partly to impress a potential buyer for the Italian property, and partly to impress, honor and “repay” Sophia (it’s her wedding), has a few mouth-watering moments, but no funny, sunny or even sweet ones.

The big emotion here is melancholy, shocking for a Dane I know, but ill-suited to the subject matter and aims of “Toscana.” Theo’s daddy issues have to be resolved, along with him surrendering to Italy’s charms, pace and ethos.

I didn’t buy that transition for a minute.

All “Toscana” has to offer is some decent (limited) scenery, a little taste of high-end cooking, and a love story that’s about as romantic as the one The Bard set in foggy Helsignor.

At least nobody kills herself this time round.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Anders Matthesen, Cristiana Dell’Anna, Lærke Winther and Andrea Bosca

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mehdi Avaz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Here’s the stand-out moment for many people who fondly recall 1988’s sometimes dazzling blend of live-action and animation, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

It’s the long-awaited teaming up of Warner Brothers’ wise-quacking anti-hero Daffy Duck with Disney’s sputtering, exasperated and always put-upon Donald Duck.

But it’s not just the startling sight of seeing them both on the screen at the same time that made it work. It’s the idea of them being a nightclub act, furiously pounding through a dueling pianos routine. It’s the funny lines they exchange, in growing exasperation with each other.

“I’ve worked with a lot of withe-quackerth, but you are dethpicable! Thith ith the latht time I work with thomeone with a th-peech impediment!”

That’s a key lesson ignored in Disney’s Chip’n’Dale version of an animation-in-a-live-action-setting comedy, an extension of their beloved-by-90s-kids “Rescue Rangers” TV show. You can round up “the old gang,” make one of the chipmunks — Chip — “tradigital” animated, the way we remember them from TV. You can make the other an “upgrade.” Dale’s “had the CGI (plush, textured 3D) surgery done.”

You can give “Chip’n’Dale: Rescue Rangers” a Roger Rabbitish quest/plot. Somebody’s kidnapping cartoon characters and forcing them to work in pirated versions of their films.

And you can throw The Simpsons and Flounder, Batman and Baloo the Bear and even Roger Rabbit himself into the mix, with either mentions, appearances and jokes about scores of other animated characters.

But if you don’t come up with gags and funny lines for them to say and amusing situations to stick them in, that’s all you’ve got — a “stunt.”

Cast comics Andy Samberg as Dale and John Mulaney as Chip, our lead chipmunks and leaders of the Rescue Rangers, but failing to give Mulvaney a single line that might merit so much as a grin is the epitome of missing the point.

Seth Rogen as a Viking king with a hilariously over-used laugh? Ok. But Aussie-accented Eric Bana, as kidnapped “Ranger” Monterrey Jack is wasted in a role that’s largely absent, as his character’s being held hostage.

Animated or live action, you can’t do better than hiring Will Arnett as your villain. He barely registers.

And on and on it goes.

Yes, the cop the chipmunks team up with (Kiki Layne) is a plucky young woman. But female cartoon inclusion comes up SERIOUSLY under-represented in the film, which had a male director and male writers and it apparently never occurred to them that little girls loved that TV show, too.

Still, the “Rescue Rangers” is technically impressive enough to be worth a look. And if you’re of a certain age, it might give you a bit of the warm fuzzies.

Me? These two just remind me of how much funnier the Warner Brothers gay gophers Mac and Tosh were and still are, lo these many decades later.

Rating: PG for mild action and rude/suggestive humor

Cast: The voices of Andy Samberg, John Mulaney, Seth Rogen, J.K. Simmons, Dennis Haysbert, Will Arnett and Eric Bana, with Kiki Layne

Credits: Directed by Akiva Schaffer, scripted by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. A Walt Disney/Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:37

The sinister side of that British passion to “Escape to the Country” is the font of horror in “Men,” a genuinely hair-raising thriller from the director of “Ex Machina.”

Alex Garland puts Jessie Buckley in jeopardy in a quiet country village, and makes her plight a universal statement on men’s mania for controlling women as she is judged, menaced and imperiled by every bloke she meets in tiny Cotson, where she’s rented a house to be alone with her thoughts and recover from trauma and tragedy.

Buckley, of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” and “The Lost Daughter,” gives a tense, troubled performance that leans into one of her great acting gifts — her ability to look stricken without saying a word.

Harper may put on a brave face on the phone with her best friend (Gayle Rankin) and give the chatty, “very specific ‘type'” Wellington’d landlord (Rory Kinnear of “Penny Dreadful” and the James Bond franchise) of Cotson Manor a smile. But she’s come here to escape something awful that haunts her. Her husband (Paapa Essiedu) killed himself, jumping off their apartment building, leaving her with the image of James staring her in the eye as he plummeted past her window to his death.

The toothy, jocular country squire Geoffrey might ask, “Where’s hubby?” of his renter “Mrs. Marlowe” in all innocence. That doesn’t mean she has to answer, or tell him the truth about anything — whether or not she plays the piano, for instance, as this 500 year old house with the bright red walls is equipped with one.

“I’m just going to have to learn to deal with it,” she tells her chum Riley.

But the moment she takes a bite out of the apple from the tree in the front yard, we don’t have to be reminded of “forbidden fruit” by Geoffrey to sense her unease or what this is about. That first long walk in the lush, dense woods cast in overcast English gloom hits us with other creepy metaphors. That long, echoey old train tunnel might make Harper giddy at its magical, musical properties. We see the danger before the silhouette of a strange man appears on the other end.

And there’s nothing like ending your near-panicked run back home like glancing back and seeing a naked, nicked-up and muddy man staring out of the gloom at you.

This “Escape” and recover idyll is going to be nothing of the sort.

Garland hurls assorted creepy local oddballs at Harper — an unfiltered, on-the-spectrum mean boy, a male cop given to shrugging off her concerns when his female partner takes her seriously, the comforting-and-helpful-until-he-judges-her priest.

“You must wonder how you drove him to it.“

And all the while, our heroine is remembering the grisly details of her last day with her husband, the horrific nature of his injuries, the reason she’s “haunted” by what happened to him, and to her.

Garland uses simple casting and makeup tricks and elaborate and gory childbirth effects to raise Harper’s threat level from troubled to alarmed about this conspiracy of “Men” — starting with her husband — who seek control over her, physically, psychologically and socially.

And Buckley gives us a stoic woman whose strong self-assurance is attacked and eroded by man after man in assaults that range from mental to physical, with a heady dose of the supernatural compounding her terror.

The writer-director and his star manage several chills, a bit of breathless suspense and some eyes-averting gore as they challenge us to stare down the threat of “Men” their EveryWoman faces and confronts. And they put us in her shoes, shaken by their violence, handicapped by her own empathy and guilt until she sees the Big Societal Picture — the cruel manipulation of a system engineered to keep her from “the forbidden fruit” and under control.

Rating: R for disturbing and violent content, graphic nudity, grisly images and language.

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu and Gayle Rankin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Garland. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40

Same director as “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Only…on Netflix.

Totally down with this as a concept.

June 7.

Perhaps the best representation of the tediously-over-titled latest installment in the “Ghost in the Shell” media vortex –– “Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Sustainable War” — is that hideously over-loaded title itself, translated from “Kôkaku kidôtai SAC_2045 Jizoku kanô sensô.”

Three directors, six credited screenwriters, vividly-animated characters with rigidly immobile faces, exteriors that have some of the most realistic CGI “sunshine” ever coupled with generally dull and dark eye-straining interiors, endless low-stakes action buried under endless exposition masquerading as dialogue from an infantry battalion of “characters” — some of them kewpie-doll voiced robots — one hardly knows where to begin.

How about at the end? This two hour movie never, for one second, lets your forget that it’s “content” — manufactured, formulaic piffle with a fixed set-price/run-time that’s been filled with material that feels more like something generated by an algorithm than anything humans put any heart and soul into.

With manga, TV series, video games and the occasional movie assembly-lined into existence over the past three decades, it’s damned near impossible to drop in and out of “Ghost in the Shell,” film by film. You don’t so much absorb the blizzard of words, the sea of characters and ever-deepening pile of backstory and exposition as let it wash over you. It’s a little like having your brain buried in sand.

The big idea here is that the “Ghost” mercenary team — with many members, vehicles and a robot or two — are treated as pawns by competing billionaire-run global conglomerates which came up with the concept of “sustainable war,” manufactured conflict designed for maximum profits, only to turn civilization into a few fortified citadels, cities and billionaire compounds separated by a near-wasteland on its way to “Mad Max” status.

“Even Japan’s dangerous now,” the ex-detective/ex-“Ghost” team member Togusa mutters.

One billionaire has been nicknamed “The Good One Percenter.” Random remarks reveal where this or that mercenary or “amateur” gang came from — ex-college athletes “bankrupted by student loans” created one.

Chases, chases and more chases end in fights, with characters chattering away to each other in future combatspeak that resembles telepathy because nobody’s lips move…much.

I guess adding that to the “content” would’ve cost too much. The entire affair looks pricey but cut-rate at the same time, like a Tesla… The Budweiser product placement does nothing to dispel that.

If you’re way down the rabbit hole of “Ghost,” you will almost certainly get more out of this than the rest of us. I guess my question, repeated too often when I dip back into this franchise, is “Why would anyone bother?”

Cast: Cherami Leigh, Michael McCarty, Dave Wittenberg, Laura Post, Keith Silverstein, Roger Craig Smith, many others

Credits: Directed by Shinji Aramaki, Michihito Fujii and Kenji Kamiyama, scripted by Ryô Higaki, Harumi Doki, Kenji Kamiyama, Daisuke Ohigashi, Kurasumi Sunayama and Dai Satô, created by Shirow Masamune. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

Jonathan Rhys-Myers at his most evil, Dennis Hopper fully amped-up and Robert Carlyle in all his “Trainspotting” rage — that’s Kyle Gallner in “Dinner in America.”

Gallner and Emily Skeggs made the oddest and most adorable couple, a warm and fuzzy Sid & Nancy, in this rude and raw dog punks-in-love romance.

The title comes from a song by this underground punk band — PSYOPS — that both members of our mismatched couple dig — her as a fangirl, him as their raging, ski-masked and mysterious lead singer.

Writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeir’s film is a movie in three dysfunctional family-dinner acts. It takes a while to get going, but Gallner sets the tone from the start.

Kicked out of a drug study at a college lab, Simon is pissed, and invited to dinner by a sexually available fellow test subject. Before his hostess, the girl’s trashy mom (Lea Thompson, a hoot), can make a pass at him, before he half-trashes their house and sets fire to their shrubbery (he’s a “pyro”), Simon has to drop a few unfiltered remarks on one and all as he’s enjoying a turkey dinner parked in front of a TV tuned to football. He has to challenge the jock-obsessed patriarch (Nick Chinlund).

“What’s your name again?” “Bill.” “Do you hate me, Bill?”

Simon’s a rebel without a cause or a place to crash. His pyromania has the cops looking for somebody just like him — they only have a sketch on the “Wanted” posters. And his band is selling out, going “eyeliner punk” in search of their big break at a prestigious local dive. Only he can keep them together.

Patty (Skeggs) is the dullish pet store custodian whose high school graduation didn’t stop the relentless bullying by girls, jocks, anybody who takes a dislike to her dull, lumpy looks and minimum wage job attire.

Events throw Simon into the path of Patty, leading to a second awkward dinner (Mary Lynn Rajskub and Pat Healy play her “take it down a notch” parents) and Simon’s demonstration of his ability to lie on the fly.

His parents are missionaries in Tanzania, he says. He was there with them, building churches, for years. He’s looking for a place stay. And yes, he’ll say the dinner blessing. That’s the best place to burn Patty’s confrontational and bratty adopted brother (Griffin Gluck) a new one. Because the jerk teen doesn’t know he’s adopted.

Rehmeier’s film really finds its footing as the teasing, taunting and rude rude rude Simon is shocked that this wallflower in oversized glasses is into his band. Not that he tells her who he is. Not that he lets her know that her Polaroid sex-shot fan letters have been landing in his backpack.

Gallner (“Scream,” “The Finest Hours”) is hilariously obnoxious, dropping slurs and F-bombs like he’s afraid they’ll fall out of punk fashion, a blast of fury, spit and tough talk that he may or may not be able to back up. Pairing him with bullying misogynists or “Bill,” the racist host of that first dinner, is the only way to make the homophobic Simon halfway palatable.

Skeggs, of “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” dresses down and acts “slow” to make Patty a young woman everybody underestimates. The story’s upbeat arc has Simon soften into her champion and Patty come out of her shell as she sticks up for her almost indefensible punk beau, and sings her disaffected and hip poetry in front of his music.

Rehmeier gives this conventionally unconventional romance some surprises and twists, upending expectations early on and never letting “Dinner in America” settle into “predictable.”

And his stars throw themselves into this as if there are “And the Oscar goes to” stakes involved, which there most certainly are not.

Seriously, what could be more punk rock than that?

Cast: Kyle Gallner, Emily Skeggs, Griffin Gluck, Pat Healy, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Lea Thompson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier. A Best & Final release.

Running time: 1:46

Olga Kurylenko and John Malkovich also starting this June 3 release about the hunt for cops who witnessed an assassination attempt.

Most Ukrainian combat pictures are set during the Crimean invasion a few years back.

Based on “a true story,” this Well Go release comes our way July 1.

A politician on the rebound after a failed campaign gets to ponder what might have been when his high school girlfriend returns from a 20 year space journey in “The Time Capsule.” It’s a downbeat, wistful and entirely-too-quiet romantic drama that could use a little more romance and a lot more drama in a story that downplays the science fiction, and most everything else.

It’s about young love interrupted, put on pause and revisited thanks to “time dilation.”

“Desperate Housewives” and “With Love” alumnus Todd Grinell plays a Senate candidate whose campaign imploded in an unguarded, profane blast of public enthusiasm for schools in front of school kids. Now he and his ambitious-enough-for-them-both wife (KaDee Strickland of TV’s “Shut Eye” and “Private Practice”) are headed to his family’s old lake house down South.

Our first tip that this is “somewhere else in time” is at the rental car agency. “Self-driving” is an option. Cell phones have holographic projectors. And that “old” lake house is a modernist McMansion, “modern” by 1970s standards.

Former Congressman Jack barely has time to reminisce over a digital photo album of his high school girlfriend when BOOM — there she is in the supermarket. Elise (Brianna Hildebrand of “Deadpool”) still looks 18. She took a trip far away “to the colony.” She came back. Cryo-sleep was involved.

Now Jack’s 40 and Elise is, well a bit mature for her age but still a kid.

“Who cares that you look like some creepy old dude” in her presence, his old pal (Baron Vaughn) blurts, in a tipsy moment? Well, he does, and we dare say his hard-driving have-a-baby-it’ll-help-the-next-campaign wife.

And we as viewers do, as well. Which makes the very premise of “The Time Capsule” more icky than romantic or nostalgic.

The “big ideas” wrestled with here are the stuff of many a high school reunion dramedy. “Most people don’t get to see how everybody turned out” before they themselves “turn out,” wife-Maggie notes.

Elise “can’t relate to people I used to know because they all think I’m just a child.”

And Jack, when he isn’t mooning over Elise or indulging her and his arrested-development pal Patrice (Vaughn) by hitting their old night club (Elise gets carded), can’t help but act a little fatherly and sage to the teenager on his arm.

“As you get older, disappointments add up.”

Icky moments aside — and cast and crew work hard to avoid them– nothing that’s wrestled with here wouldn’t have fit in a “Twilight Zone” episode — the 30 minute version.

There’s little chemistry between the leads, the dialogue has a drab, lifeless Lifetime Original Movie quality and the sci-fi elements are limited to mundane layman’s-eye-view takes on space travel and a dash of the technology that’s replaced fireworks — “artificial meteor showers.”

The political stuff, in which Jack questions his commitment and the phoniness of his image because Elise reminds him of his more outspoken, passionate youth, is mildly interesting at most.

It all adds up to a blasé sci-fi variation of “If I knew then what I know now,” so blasé that it dares to trot out that moth-eaten old expression in an attempt at third act profundity.

Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol and cannabis abuse.

Cast: Todd Grinell, Brianna Hildebrand, KaDee Strickland, Baron Vaughn, Nelson Padilla and Ravi Patel

Credits: Directed by Erwann Marshall, scripted by Erwann Marshall, Chad Fifer. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:43