Movie Nation

Seaside locations on the scenic Kentish coast, a period piece story set “during the war” and a stellar cast can’t quite make the debut feature of playwright-turned-writer/director Jessica Swale come off.

She’s probably kicking herself over “Summerland” as it is, what with wasting a rare pairing of Gemma Arterton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. So I’ll leave my boots off for this review, no matter how disappointing the film.

It’s a sad, drab tale told by pretty faces in a pretty place, a slow-footed story wrapped in the most boring part of myths and legends — the academic study of them — and a love story tested by too-convenient coincidences.

We don’t have to ask who took lots of notes during “deus ex machina” week at playwrighting school, in other words.

An impatient older woman (Penelope Wilton of “Downton Abbey”) smokes and types away in 1975. Something gives her a case of the flashbacks, and she remembers a long ago summer in Kent, when she was even grumpier.

Alice Lamb (Arterton) is a loner who won’t let a little thing like World War II keep her from hunting for “the reality” behind famous bits of folklore and myth. She’s hated in the town, and her nicknames are many, which the headmaster at St. Nicholas School (Tom Courtenay) will list, when prompted.

“Bad apple,” “the beast on the beach,” “the witch,” “a Nazi” — that’s what the kids, and the adults, all say about her. Stomping about in trousers, chasing schoolboys who sabotage her mailbox and making littler kids cry are what “provoke” the locals. Not that she cares.

Then she’s abruptly “assigned” a little boy (Lucas Bond) who’s been evacuated from London, as children were in the early years of the war. All her outraged protesting gets her is a “We’ve all got to do our bit” lecture that lasts about as long as that sentence.

Her “find somebody else to take him” and “Don’t expect me to cook for you” barking isn’t what a lonely child needs to hear in a stranger’s home in a remote village. But she’s Miss “You’ve got to toughen up…Nobody likes a coward.”

But but “I always have milk before bedtime.”

“Good for you.”

Oh, she’ll soften. Maybe. A little bit. Eventually. His constant questions are the start of it, his thin grasp of her research — about King Arthur, Morgan Le Fay, “floating castles” (mirages) — makes her a teacher, whether she wants to be, or not.

“Summerland” is a piece of pagan myth that gives the film it’s title, and little else. Viking heaven? Kind of.

That’s kind of interesting but thinly developed. Even less screen time is devoted to his equally reluctant “partner” at school, Edie (Dixie Egerickx). She’s “an individualist” who doesn’t believe in “partners” or “sharing.” It’s all a pose. They become pals.

Alice spends part of each day rummaging through the kid’s things, picking up his story and reminiscing — yes, there are flashbacks within the flashback — to her long lost college friend (Mbatha-Raw) who was her one true love, back when both were flappers.

As her connection to Frank grows, she shares a little of that past with him.

Arterton does her utmost to make Alice funny-mean and lonely by choice. The script doesn’t give her many good moments, just a lovely deflated look when Alice gets the news that women often got “during the war” and most movies set “during the war” feel the need to replicate.

Mbatha-Raw has absolutely nothing to play, and whatever promise might have come from casting these two opposite each other is wiped away in flashbacks that serve a structural purpose, but fail to give them the emotional connection we need for us to feel the pain of their separation.

Courtenay and Wilton are similarly wasted, accomplished actors who sparkle when given a sliver of a chance, but so limited in screen time as to smother their contributions.

Even the kid with, his anachronistically long hair, fails to register.

Swale did some of her homework in setting her story mostly in 1942 or 1943. But no way this doctoral student of hers would have the petrol to galivant about looking for mirages when “there’s a war on.” Not that early in the war.

But it’s not period detail that lets “Summerland” down. It’s not moving beyond the story’s naturally watchable qualities (cast, setting, period) to give us a film that ever feels it doesn’t need one contrived situation after another just to stagger to its feet. Not that it ever moves those feet once it does, mind you.

MPAA Rating:  PG for thematic content, some suggestive comments, language, and smoking

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Gugu MBatha-Raw, Lucas Bond, Penelope Wilton and Tom Courtenay.

Written and directed by Jessica Swale. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:39

Don’t see a lot of Wilford Brimley interviews Youtube archived from chat shows.

But Craig Ferguson had him on, and with a little coaxing and a lot of rooting from the audience, the veteran character actor, who just passed away at 86, just delights.

First time I noticed him was as a folksy decent rancher helping “The Electric Horseman” make his escape with a race horse turned Vegas show horse.

Never a big fan of “Cocoon,” but he was wonderful in decades of films — “The Natural,” “The China Syndrome,” “Harry and Son,” “Absence of Malice,” “Brubaker” among them, generally cast as “decent,” common sensical and righteous. He was so grumpily beloved that he became a breakfast oatmeal spokesman, a TV diabetes activist and a guy who was in on the joke when “Seinfeld” cast him as the Postmaster General.

He toured with shows like “Love Letters,” worked here and there,and lived an interesting life on and off camera. 

“The Burnt Orange Heresy” is a ham-fisted thriller with a cast so “on the nose” it shows little imagination on the part of the filmmakers, who seem determined to leave the viewer unchallenged.

But what it has going for it atones for those shortcomings.

It takes place in a villa on Italy’s gorgeous Lake Como, for starters.

Mick Jagger plays a posh, ruthlessly unscrupulous art dealer and collector. Claes Bang of “The Square” is a scrambling, unethical fraud of an art critic. Elizabeth Debicki of “Widows” portrays a mysterious, willowy and sexy siren with a possible hidden agenda.

And Donald Sutherland is a reclusive artist of legendary reputation and no “surviving” works for dealers to haggle over.

Not a stretch for any of them, especially Sutherland, who twinkles whenever he isn’t playing the heavy, and doesn’t so much speak as “intone,” especially in this part.

“May I be direct, in the modern way?” Jerome Debney, his character, never is. “A favorite spot of mine,” he says, showing a guest a rocky beach on the lake, “one must labor to apprehend it.”

Who talks like that? Archetypes on a novelist’s page, of course. But the plummy locutions, the pithy digs at art, artists, “legends” and critics can be a quotable delight, and often are in Scott B. Smith’s script, adapted from Charles Willeford’s book.

Bang is James Figueras, an art critic who scrapes out a living publishing reviews, here and there, and giving this cleverly calculated lecture to art fans and tourists in cities around the world.

He weaves this florid metaphor, critics as “the banks of a river,” with the river “art flowing between us.” Then he, with a slapdash-looking work of modern art as his prop, proceeds to weave a back-story for the painting that convinces the unsophisticated that no no, this is a work with meaning and genius behind it.

It’s all a ruse, a joke and a lesson. No, we shouldn’t care that Hemingway’s mommy dressed him like a girl or how much your indie film cost. The work’s merits should be manifestly obvious. But critics, and art dealers and collectors, traffic in “the myth” as often as what’s inside the frame. Beware of such “critics,” Figueras and the novelistwarn us. They’re manipulators of reality.

A brazen American (Debicki) approaches, flirts and confronts James with the word “liar” so quickly they’re bound to wind up in. “Berenice,” she says her name is. From “Duluth,” she insists. It’s “the telling details” in such lies that put them over, he notes. And he should know. He’s an expert.

Jagger is Cassidy, the art dealer who invites James — and by extension his “freshly minted” friend — to his villa on Lake Como, ostensibly to get the guy to write a gallery catalog or some such. But what slithery Brit really has in mind is something rarer. He’s housing a famous artist on his property, one whose works have all burned in gallery fires. He wants one of whatever Debney (Sutherland) has been working on.

And being the criminal once-removed type, Cassidy the collector blackmails James into “procuring” such, by whatever means the enterprising and unscrupulous “critic” deems necessary.

When the two outsiders meet the J.D. Salinger of painters, there’s no drama — just pretentious musings about “blue.” But with four people capable of lies and trickery involved, deceit and dares, death and destruction await.

Director Giuseppe Capotondi (the speed-dating thriller “The Double Hour” was his) can’t hide the story’s too-few/too-obvious secrets. So he wisely leaves this one to the cast, letting them turn the script’s anecdotes, reminiscences and unreliable “history” into fascinating word pictures.

This is a storyteller’s movie, one where we can’t really trust any story to be true. That’s something of a cheat, because we are set up to believe there are bigger deceptions going on and hidden agendas that simply don’t pan out or are left hanging.

Even the third act’s twists have a prescribed order about them.

But if you can’t revel in Jagger’s delivery of every I’m-rich-and-you-have-no-idea-what-I’m-capable-of smiled threat, you’re missing out.

“I should never let a thing’s worth obscure the value.”

If you can’t take pleasure in Sutherland’s boring tales from an artist’s past, anecdotes freighted with gravitas because a “great artist” mouths them, this might not be for you.

“I saw a blue once, genuine blue, you understand.”

And if you can’t hear the danger in all the sexy but unromantic banter between James and Berenice —  “You treat serious things as if they’re trivial, and trivial things as if they’re serious.” — “The Burnt Orange Heresy” will be a mystery you won’t see the value in unraveling.

MPAA Rating: R, for some sexual content/nudity, language, drug use and violence

Cast: Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger and Donald Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, script by Scott B. Smith based on the Charles Willeford novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:38

“Seriously Single” is a seriously inconsequential Buppie rom-com from South Africa, a movie with a few laughs, lots of wigs and costume changes and little else.

But it’s very existence makes it another movie that points to the massive footprint Netflix is establishing in international cinema. It’s lame in a lot of perfectly conventional ways. In the U.S. this story of a Black woman desperate to not be alone, and to get married, and learning to see that trait in guys she’s dating, would be set in Atlanta and might very well have Tyler Perry’s name attached to it.

Beautiful Black professionals mingling and mixing, drinking and sexually getting around, with their white collar jobs funding all these clothes, apartments-with-a-view? Seen it.

But we’ve never seen it Johannesburg. Netflix is spreading formulaic rom-coms like this from Peru to Italy, France to South Africa.

Yay.

Dineo, played with a lot of spunk and spark by Fulu Mugovhani, works in social media marketing and cannot stand to be without romance, a man in her life. But everybody in her office, whether they speak Zulu or Xhosa, English or Afrikaans, knows her romances have a two to three month life span.

She loves being in love, and gives every relationship the full court press, right from the start. She ends up socially stalking her exes, because she scares them off.

“You men don’t get how hard we love!”

Vivacious roommate and BFF Noni (Tumi Morake) is always dragging her “back out there,” pushing to up her “bounce-back game.” That’s what brings her to Lunga (Bohang Moeko), a good-looking guy with a “just roll with it” game.

“Sometimes, relationships aren’t meant to last. We should enjoy them while we can.”

“Why hold onto the past when your future can be right in front of you?”

She’s all about having “someone to come home to.”

“I say it’s better to have someone to come home with!”

She falls for it and falls for him. Noni may cluck that “You’re already picking out baby names,” but Dineo isn’t hearing it. Yes, she’s headed for another fall.

Meanwhile, Noni’s ethos — never sleep with a guy more than once, “otherwise, it’s a ‘relationship,” is tested when hunky bartender Max (Yonda Thomas) gives her all his attention.

Who will change? Who will learn her lesson? Guess. Come on, it’s easy.

“Seriously Single” suggests we seriously need to rethink what we label as “generic” crutches in such romantic comedies. Yes, they’re conventional and worn out — the clubs, “doing shots,” Instagramming (renamed here) your “fun,” having your shame “go viral.”

Here, that’s in the form of Dineo’s wigless rant about faithless, feckless men not wanting what she wants, getting her labeled “#DesperateBae.”

That directors Katleho Ramaphakela and Rethabile Ramaphakela and screenwriter Lwazi Mvusi put that trope in a South African film suggests that either Netflix is handing a checklist to filmmakers in Spain, Italy, Colombia or wherever, or this “generic” device is now universal.

The viral rant, by the way? Funny. Morake gets most of the scattered funny lines and double-takes.

Mogovhani makes a perfectly cute, interesting, plucky and pouty heroine. And the little of South Africa that we see — integrated workplaces, beautiful and distinctly-decorated apartments, Africa-meets-nightclub-couture fashions — dazzles.

Leave the closed captioning on, because there’s a dizzying array of dialects listed. But in any language, this weary, overlong rom-com doesn’t deliver enough that’s distinctive about the “rom” or much of anything that’s funny in the “com” to come off.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Fulu Mugovhani, Tumi Morake, Bohang Moeko, Yonda Thomas.

Credits: Directed by Katleho Ramaphakela, Rethabile Ramaphakela, script by Lwazi Mvusi. Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Talked to him a few times over the years. A class act, sort of a British Norman Jewison.

“The Commitments,” “Fame,” “Bugsy Malone,” musicals that often didn’t play like musicals.

“Mississippi Burning” took deserved heat for its “white savior” tropes. But who else was making movies on that sort of subject at the time?

Hard to think of another director who would attempt at “Bugsy Malone.” A bigger deal in the UK than it ever was here, “The Commitments” likewise took on icon status in its Nation of Origin.

Parker was 76. Here’s the New York Times obit.

http://www.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F07%2F31%2Fmovies%2Falan-parker-versatile-film-director-is-dead-at-76.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&h=AT1K6zlpUqhDzZuTgKDhXxWejNrGxkvnk9fMHnQt9VsqRiv6HzSj6xjq99iWWci3rqghd9U_pTSq-B7efvuKr18ltdLNl2IFGiVVT8Cxd9yzVGvG8A3tL1ESVDsTK9D5zFjjktkJ6_rE8bb3x8rpTDo

It’s not so much a rule, as an understanding — an agreement between filmmaker and audience. If your comedy or rom-com is only 80 or so minutes long, you’ve got to give us something to laugh or at least smirk at in the first hour.

“I Used to Go Here” is an enervated laugher in a minor key starring Gillian Jacobs of TV’s “Community” “Ibiza” and “Walk of Shame.” For much of the movie, all that’s demanded of Jacobs is that she look cute and lonely.

She plays a first-time novelist deflated by the news that her book isn’t selling, that her publisher’s book tour has been canceled, and that her ex-fiance isn’t that interested in returning her calls.

And “deflated” is the only note Jacobs hits for most of this Kris Rey (“Unexepected”) comedy.

Kate’s book, “Seasons Passed,” has just come out. She’d love to celebrate, paint the town (Chicago), etc. But while her friends are thrilled for her, most of them seem pregnant and are otherwise distracted. The ex isn’t taking her calls. The publishers are underwhelmed, and their assurance that “a good New York Times review could change everything” is small comfort.

And we viewers know ominous foreshadowing when we hear it.

A call from out of the blue is her salvation. Her mentor at her alma mater down in Carbondale (called “U of I” here, but really the home of Southern Illinois U.) invites her down for a reading, a few days of being lauded and mentoring student writers.

Her “book tour” is how she describes it, in yet another message to the ex. Yay. It’s been 15 years, a little return-in-triumph is in order, and a walk down memory lane.

We sniff out the mentor in an instant. Casting Jemaine Clement in the role seals the deal. This writing teacher falls in the “those who can’t teach” bin, and a cozy college’s tenure will have to do. And even though he’s married, we do wonder about the student he lavishes his attention on (Hannah Marks) and wonder what he and Kate might have shared.

Kate revisits her old rental house, now filled with mild-mannered college boys, stumbles into a classmate and cyber-stalks her ex, who has plainly moved-on. But no matter what she puts out there, how needy and ready-for-a-rebound fling she advertises, the sophomoric sophomores aren’t buying, or are missing the signals.

Actress turned writer-director Rey is an alumnus of the “mumblecore” school of rom-com, films more about the banter than the action. She used to be married to mumblecore king Joe Swanberg.

But while this Aug. 7 release is plenty chatty, it’s not particularly witty, just winsome and sad. It’s starved of oxygen and incident, of funny lines or clever exchanges. Nothing the least bit amusing happens until Kate joins the generic college kids for some over-the-top hijinks, “hijinks” we’ve seen in scores of other comedies — “American Pie” is referenced, perhaps unintentionally.

It’s not grim to sit through, but casting comic talents like Kate Micucci (girlfriend of an old classmate) and Clement sets up expectations Rey can’t or won’t meet.

The movie this most resembles in a most superficial sense is “Liberal Arts,” which sent Josh Radnor back to campus to fall for Elizabeth Olsen. Like Radnor, Jacobs is used to the rhythms of sitcom acting. Like Radnor, she’s trapped in a movie that doesn’t have sparkling writing to rescue her or a particularly interesting character to play.

Like Radnor, she’s waiting for something clever or cute or funny to perform. You can almost see the wheels turning, “Maybe NEXT week’s script’ll be better.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, drugs, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Gillian Jacobs, Jemaine Clement, Zoe Chao, Hannah Marks, Josh Wiggins, Khloe Janel, Forrest Goodluck and Kate Micucci

Credits:  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

The amorality that is obvious about Tomasz Giemza, from the first moment we meet him, had to have set in years before.

He’s still young and in college — law school, no less. But the plagiarism which gets him thrown out in the opening scene of “The Hater (Hejter”) suggests a lifetime of shortcuts. The canny bit of flattery that he uses on his accusing professor? That’s an acquired talent.

And seeing what he uses that flattery for — getting her to autograph and “dedicate” a copy of her book, even as she’s kicking him out of school? This is one cunning SOB, somebody well-practiced in playing chess five moves ahead or leaving a spare cell phone behind to “broadcast” what people say about him after he’s left the room.

This Polish film follows Tomasz or “Tomek” (Maciej Musialowski) from that fall, to his humiliation by the posh Warsaw family that has sponsored him, betrayed by their beautiful slacker daughter (Vanessa Aleksande), and where one goes when your moral compass has failed and life punishes you for it.

Into PR, of course!

“The Hater” is about Tomasz’s new life, bluffing his way from “moderator” for a social media sweatshop into manipulating public opinion, via unscrupulous and illegal “fake news” and online smears for “Best Buzz Public Relations” and its “whatever-it-takes” boss, Beata (Agata Kulesza).

Tomasz quickly graduates from smearing an online trainer and fitness drink vendor to working the “dirty tricks” side of a Warsaw mayoral election, manipulating video, messaging, situations and people put in those situations to keep a progressive gay candidate (Maciej Stuhr) from stemming the tide of Polish nationalist bigotry, which his opponent is counting on for victory.

Director Jan Komasa and screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz follow up their acclaimed drama “Corpus Christi,” about an ex-con posing as a priest, with one about another poseur.

Musialowksi makes Tomasz a poker-faced provincial, insulted behind his back and to his face by the rich relatives and co-workers, but not the sort of guy you want to cross. He looks out of place every where he goes, from the clubs he schemes to get into to be closer to Gabi, to the office where he hustles his way to a gig, to the upscale gallery openings and political fundraisers he worms his way into to “get” his “man.”

The script gives Tomasz access to all manner of gear, expertise and all sorts of situations where you’d think they’d see a conning creep like him coming. That sort of omnipotence doesn’t spare us from being shown the many steps it takes to get from kicked-out-of-law-school to “fixing” an election, by hook or by crook.

Forward motion in “The Hater” ceases to be a priority, the manipulations grow more convoluted and grotesque and the “long game” — a villain getting exactly what he wants, or deserves — seems more the product of serendipity and the contrivances of a screenwriter. Characters don’t register as much more than “types,” including our all-powerful anti-hero.

Tomasz is preternaturally gifted at video gaming, which he seems as the proper platform to recruit others, anonymously, to his master plan. Illustrating these “interactions” with a patsy, all set to Tomasz’s readings of the copy of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” which Beata has given him, is the most contrived element of all, contributing mightily to the bloat that weighs down “The Hater.”

All this amorality is in service of a morality tale, of course, pointing out that politics is more than just a game manipulated by liars and cheats. It’s a blood-port, and hate speech incites hate crimes in this self-righteous, long and meandering allegory.

Wear that “love conquers hate” T-shirt if you want. The cynical message of “The Hater” is “How could anybody be that naive?”

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

Cast: Maciej Musialowski, Vanessa Aleksande, Agata Kulesza, Maciej Stuhr, Piotr Biedron and Adam Gradowski

Credits: Directed by Jan Komasa, script by Mateusz Pacewicz. A Canal+ film/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:15

When it hits Amy, it arrives in a rush.

She jams Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” into a single night, at most just hours. Amy (Katie Lyn Sheil) will blast through “denial” and “bargaining” and go straight to “acceptance.”

“I am going to die tomorrow.”

There’s nothing for it but to tell her friend Jane (Jane Adams) “I’m not crazy, I just have a feeling,” open some wine and put Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” Requiem on repeat on the turntable as she considers what to do with the last hours she has left.

Leaf blowing the hillside behind her new house, in the dark, seems like a handy distraction.

Actress (“Stranger Things,””Pet Sematary”) turned director (“Sun Don’t Shine”) Amy Seimetz wrestles with mortality and our understandable unease when grappling with it in “She Dies Tomorrow,” surveying a range of reactions via a modest cross-section of characters loosely within Amy’s orbit.

Because Amy’s “I’m going to die tomorrow” hunch is contagious.

Jane may counsel “Don’t do anything you’ll regret” by phone, and suggest past addictions have come back to put Amy in this state. But when artist-Jane stops fiddling with her microscope slides-blown-up-into “art,” she runs out into the night in pajamas to check on her. She cuts herself breaking into Amy’s house to comfort or confront her.

It is Amy’s irrational, resigned certainty that wins that argument. Next thing we know, Jane has barged, bleeding and in pajamas, into the birthday party of her brother’s (Chris Messina) bitchy girlfriend (Katie Aselton).

“I’m dying tomorrow! I’m dying tomorrow! I’m dying tomorrow!”

Thoughts of COVID 19″ and “contact tracing” burst in on this shockingly-timely and surreal ramble through The End of My Life experience. Who will dissolve into crying jags? Who will get drunk and giddy? Who’s going online to shop for urns, or worse, to look up ways to turn their mortal flesh (skin) into a cool jacket?

Seimetz doesn’t confine herself to a single character or a linear timeline, as Amy keeps dozing off and awakening, with a start, from flashbacks to a trip to a desert resort with an old beau, to earlier intimations that she might have seen this coming.

“She Dies Tomorrow” drifts away from Amy’s mania, showcasing Jane (Adams goes back to TV’s “Family Ties,” and was in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) as a more efficient “carrier” of the contagion.

A doctor (Josh Lucas) is shaken by her visit to an emergency room. A gay couple (Michelle Rodriguez, Olivia Taylor Dudley) instantly accepts (they’re stoned) her thesis and just rolls with bloodied Jane turning their pool pink.

The performances click, although I have to say nobody here generates much in the line of pathos. Even a hospital visit to a dying father prompted by one man’s (Tunde Adebimpe of “Rachel Getting Married”) “infection” by Jane comes off as cold.

“Hey, this is Amy,” Sheil deadpans into her voicemail, “I won’t be around tomorrow. Or any day after that. There’s no need to leave a message.”

Seimetz doesn’t so much wrestle with mortality as splatter it all over her characters, and us, provoking odd reactions, dark humor, arguments and morose acceptance.

But there’s a larger theme built into the panic attack contagion of “She Dies Tomorrow,” and that makes this self-conscious and arty take on the subject worthwhile. When you start thinking about death — yours, a close relative’s — it will swallow you whole if you let it. And that’s the reason “we never want to talk about it.” It’s hard to live when all you can think of it who’s “dying tomorrow.”

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual references, drug use and bloody images

Cast: Katie Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Josh Lucas, Tunde Adebimpe, Chris Messina and Michelle Rodriguez

Credits: Written and directed by Amy Seimetz.  A Neon release.

Running time: 1:24

The new Epix series “Helter Skelter: An American Myth,” weaves its story out of the culture’s collective memory of LA’s infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by drug-addled cultists in the thrall of Charles Manson.

In half a dozen episodes, documentarian Lesley Chilcott, who earned her bonafides as a line producer on “An Inconvenient Truth,” parks Manson firmly in the world of celebrity and uniquely late-’60s sin that produced hippies, Altamonte, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and the “back to nature” environmental movement.

Working with fresh interviews with surviving members of “The Family,” she creates visual and aural collages that suffuse the film in its “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” era, and immerse the viewer in what we’ve forgotten that we remember. Still photographs of the Spahn Ranch, archival footage of the vivacious starlet Sharon Tate and the hip LA “scene” — The Daisy nightclub, Sunset Strip streetlife — spare recreations and generous samplings of Manson’s music, including demo tapes, paint a picture of a charismatic guy (he died in prison in 2017) with delusions of pop stardom and dreams of fame in an place built on the promise that “anything can happen.”

And when the fame didn’t work out, the music being a tolerable imitation of the airy fairy folk pop of the day, the dark acid-fueled fantasies of “a race war” and the hidden meanings of The Beatles’ “White Album” (including the song that came to signify the crimes, “Helter Skelter”) came to the fore. Manson sent his most loyal followers into the summer LA night to kill, write “Death to the Pigs” in blood, and start the revolution he was sure he’d come to rule.

Archival news footage shows how the crimes were covered, from that first morning after, when reporters asked questions they already knew the answers to from cops who’d been slow preserving the crime scene.

“Was there anything written on the door?”

Episodes with titles like “Charles Manson is Your Brother,” “Nobody Joins a Cult” and “Some Bad Mistakes” take us on Manson’s journey, with surviving “Family” interviewees such as Dianne Lake, Stephanie Schram and Catherine Share laying out what they know and heard from him and pieced together over the decades.

The women, almost to a one, tend to look back incredulously on their involvement, with Schram still dazed that “You kind of gave up your identity” when you fell under Manson’s influence.

The series makes a fascinating, if repetitive and incomplete account of the crimes and the prosecution for them. This isn’t prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s best seller on “the case.” It’s “How we got there” oriented, dwelling on Manson’s obsession with fame and the allure he had for not just teenage girls, but to actors, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and others.

He was a part of this ferment, and you can’t help but wonder if there’s a Castro sort of “What might have been” in his story. Fidel Castro was an aspiring baseball player with talent who gave up that dream and refocused his energies on revolution. Manson suffered disappointments and humiliations. Songs like “Cease to Exist” and “Sick City” weren’t going to get any sober record producer’s attention (and several heard them). So Manson, with the help of drugs, embraced madness and sent his minions out to murder in the hopes of starting a race war he figured he’d win.

In any event, Epix has a series (Sunday nights through August) that makes a fine companion piece to Quentin Tarantino’s tale of the end of one era and “the coming darkness” of another, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” It’s a good primer on the time, the crime and the criminals that Tarantino liked to imagine “Old Hollywood” could vanquish, like the villains in the third act of a run-of-the-mill TV Western.

MPAA Rating: unrated, discussions of violence, crime scene photos

Cast: Charles Manson, Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, David Dalton, Stephanie Schram, Bobby Beausoleil, Ivor Davis

Credits: Directed by Lesley Chilcott, created by Greg Berlanti, Barbara Kopple.  An Epix release.

Running time: Six episodes @:55 minutes each.