Movie Nation

Sure, she’s a bit rusty. But even in her post “Cats” despair, Rebel Wilson should’ve known that 113 minutes of her going back to high school was never going to fly.

Here’s the test that will tell you whether or not you like Wilson’s comatose-for-20-years-cheerleader-goes-back for “Senior Year” to achieve ‘my dream life’ comedy. Laugh at this speech, delivered by the “woke” influencer Bri Luvs (Jade Bender).

“I don’t really think about ‘popularity.’ I’m just trying to build my most authentic, socially-conscious, body-positive, environmentally-aware and economically compassionate brand.”

Guffaws? Giggles? Titters? Anyone? Anyone?

That’s the tone of this ham-fisted three-screenwriter’d bore, lots of attempts at showing how “cool” or “cruel” things were “back then,” followed by even more slaps at how PC things are now, without the movie or any character in it actually taking a stand for either position.

And in the middle of a all is Wilson, who’s had a run of stinkers — not just “Cats” — making the sale of this to Netflix Paramount’s best play with a star far past “Pitch Perfect.”

The story they’re telling is of a picked-on Aussie immigrant — Aussie Angourie Rice does a swell job of channeling Young Rebel — who plots a strategy to make herself popular. Stephanie is on the cusp of fulfilling her final high school goal, as cheer captain elected prom queen, when a cheer stunt is sabotaged by her mean girl rival Tiffany (Ani Yi Puig) and Stephanie is left in a coma for 20 years.

Love the way Tiffany’s assault, conspiracy and near-attempted murder is brushed away, by the way.

Twenty years later, Steph wakes up confused.

“Wait, Madonna’s now called ‘Lady Gaga?'”

She lost consciousness in a world of “biatch” and “hos” and Britney and “skanks,” and woke up in a place where “We don’t use that word any more” — a whole lot of “that words.”

Tiffany (Zoe Chao, perfectly vile) has stolen Steph’s “dream life.” She married Steph’s hunky prom-king boyfriend (Justin Hartley), gave birth to the “influencer” who goes by Bri Luvs and even moved into the mansion Steph dreamed of living in.

There’s nothing for it but to get back into school — at 37 — get organized and get back the life she coveted, because Steph still “has the mind of a twelfth grader.”

As her much-abused BFF from back then Martha (Mary Holland) is now principal, and the guy who crushed on her (Sam Richardson) is now head librarian, that should be a cinch.

Except the cheerleaders now all call themselves “cheer captain,” and their cheers are rhymes calling for a cleaner planet and more just human race.

“Who are you CHEERING for?” “EVERYone!”

Nobody gets the former queen bee’s “Ally McBeal,” “Salt’n Peppa” and Mister T references. And nobody gets to be prom queen or prom king any more, and nobody at Harding High cares.

Can Stephanie compete when the stakes are world wide web-centric? Will age-shaming Bri Luvs or her mean-mom let her?

“You don’t realize how many people don’t care about you until see it on a number on your phone.”

Ouch.

Wilson still has solid comic timing and being more svelte than she’s been in decades doesn’t make her any less funny. Director Alex Hardcastle, screenwriters Brandon Scott Jones, Andrew Knauer and Arthur Pielli take care of that for her.

But chewing through her string of dogs that merely climaxed with “Cats” — “The Hustle,” “Isn’t it Romantic” — this much seems obvious. Wilson is a comic force best delivered in showy supporting roles that pack a comic punch. The “Pitch Perfect” franchise may have decreed — she has claimed — that she not lose weight for any of those films. But that trilogy remains a model for the best way to showcase her.

Let her be hilarious every time she’s on screen, but not on screen so much that they run out of funny things for her to say and do, and not so much that we tire of her.

The general comic ineptitude at work here muzzles killer supporting player Chris Parnell (playing her dad) and squanders fine, bubbly work by Rice (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) in the film’s faster-paced opening act.

Everything after Rice is just a long, slogging march to a “Figure out who your REAL friends/supporters are” message that’s been delivered in a hundred comedies better than “Senior Year.”

If Wilson doesn’t see the writing on the wall after this, Hollywood’s about to read it to her.

Rating: R (Brief Teen Drinking/Drug Use|Sexual Material|Language)

Cast: Rebel Wilson, Angourie Rice, Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, Sam Richardson, Jade Bender and Chris Parnell.

Credits: Directed by Alex Hardcastle, scripted by Brandon Scott Jones, Andrew Knauer and Arthur Pielli. A Paramount release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:53

In a couple of days, I finally have a preview screening of “Top Gun: Maverick” that I can get to. And even though I expect to be dazzled by the aerial epic built around Tom Cruise, known for wanting to do enough of his own stunts and an insistence on “authenticity,” I dare say there will be digital effects involving jet fighters in it.

It seems like a good time to revisit one of the films I regard as the gold standard for “modern” recreations of air to air combat, 1966’s “The Blue Max.”

Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels” (1930) went for an unheard of level of silent (then reshot/dubbed with sound) WWI authenticity and even 1976’s “Aces High” with Malcolm McDowell did a decent job of showing planes and pilots the analog way — with genuine (modified) aircraft doing actual stunt-flying.

Most recent films depicting WWI or WWII air-to-air combat have gone the way of “Red Tails” or “Flyboys” — CGI aircraft and air battles. You can always tell the difference. The new Netflix thriller “The Bombardment” is a good example of that. The “Mosquito Squadron” reality of the ’60s is sorely missed there.

Daryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox in the post-“Cleopatra” 1960s, gambled the studio’s fortunes on epics that had World War as their backdrop — “The Longest Day,” with even the musical that saved the studio, “The Sound of Music,” depicting the Nazi menace.

But an epic about an ambitious German fighter ace from the working class shooting down Brits for glory? There’s a hint of madness about greenlighting “The Blue Max,” which was epic in scale and in length, but not a winner at the box office.

Built around George Peppard, filmed in Ireland by director John Guillermin and packed with real planes and real stunts, and the usual rear-projection trickery that put Peppard, co-stars Jeremy Kemp and Karl Michael Vogler in the cockpit, forever “cocking” their synchronized machine guns, it’s still jaw-dropping to look at.

Guillermin would show such a knack for epics on this film that they came to define his later career — “The Towering Inferno,” “Death on the Nile” (no digital rivercraft for JG’s version), the remake of “King Kong” that made Jessica Lange a star.

A lot of writers had a hand in the script of Jack Hunter’s novel, which concerns the cynical striving of former infantryman and hotel clerk’s son Bruno Stachel (Peppard) to show up the noble “officer class” of pilots and the imperious, snobby German general staff that urged war, lost the war and then blamed civilian authorities for their humiliation, setting the stage for Hitler’s rise and World War II.

Bruno’s ultimate goal? He wants to shoot down enough Allied planes to earn the “Pour le Mérite,” an iron cross in blue called “The Blue Max.”

“A pretty medal, The Blue Max.”

“It’s the only one worth having. People respect it.”

“The medal or the man?”

Most World War I combat films are burdened with an after-the-fact cynicism about the pointlessness of it all, the epic slaughter and the fatalism characters carry in recognizing their needless sacrifice. That’s especially evident in “The Blue Max,” one of those hindsight epics in which almost every character sees the end (the film is set in the last two years of the war) and that they’re on the losing side.

James Mason plays the count and general who keeps the faith about his own class setting an example for their inferiors, even as he exploits Bruno for propaganda purposes. The pan-European cast includes the craggy-faced Brit Kemp as a war weary fellow pilot who “tests” Bruno even as he tries to befriend the friendless wannabe Bruce, Anton Diffring, who played German officers in what seem like scores of films, and Vogler, the handsome German leading man trotted out to play “sensitive” and noble supporting cast officers like the squadron commander here and Erwin Rommel in “Patton.”

There’s a sidebar love/sex story, with Bruno’s ultimate desecration of his “superiors” coming from his bedding of a countess and officer’s wife (Ursula Andress).

Peppard never had the big screen career he might have. But in roles like the chancer Bruno or Truman Capote’s alter ego in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” he mastered the cynic who hides his cards, keeps his secrets and judges all around him with scathing looks and stinging one-liners.

“To kill a man, then make a ritual out of saluting him – that’s hypocrisy. They kill me, I don’t want anyone to salute.”

“The Blue Max” feels as bloated as any epic of that era of “give them something grander, more star-studded and longer than TV” Hollywood. It was something of a chore to sit through for the umpteenth time to review it. Most every scene that isn’t airborne feels stodgy and bloated. But whenever I channel surf past it, with its impressive if brief scenes set in the trenches and convincing combat milieu, the aerial footage pulls me right in.

Chase planes and a glider with a camera followed modern-engined replicas of the Fokkers and Pfalzes seen here, darting under bridges and around Medieval ruins, mixing it up in the clouds. It’s still dazzling enough to be worth the effort it took, back then, to make aerial combat look realistic and cinematic.

Let’s hope Tom Cruise strong-armed director Joseph Kosinski (“Tron: Legacy”) into similar efforts, at much higher speeds, to give us an equally convincing “Maverick.”

Rating: “Approved,” violence, nudity

Cast: George Peppard, Ursula Andress, Jeremy Kemp, Karl Michael Vogler, Anton Diffring and James Mason

Credits: Directed by John Guillermin, scripted by Gerald Hanley, Jack Seddon and David Pursall, based on the Jack Hunter novel. A Twentieth Century Fox film streaming on Netflix, Tubi, Amazon and elsewhere

Running time: 2:36

In the years since William Klein’s intimate “all access” tennis documentary “The French” came out, it’s been somewhat displaced as the definitive statement on that glorious era in tennis — the late’70s through the mid-’80s.

“John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” (2018) is a genre-best dissection of tennis, one player’s game and his psyche during McEnroe’s years attempting “perfection” at Roland Garros Stadium outside of Paris, a movie assembled thanks to an archivist’s obsessive examination of the hours and hours of footage that the French shot of McEnroe’s matches there.

But in 1981, photographer and filmmaker William Klein (“Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee”) was granted the sort of access sports rarely permits today. “The French” allowed him into their tourney, behind the scenes, in the alley with the ballgirls and ballboys, in the locker rooms with the players and in the various courts of the stadium complex to paint an immersive portrait of French’s premiere annual sporting event.

Fans of the game with a few years on them will see players we barely remember — the also-rans in the era of Borg, Connors, McEnroe, Navritilova and Evert — TV broadcasters whose names can’t quite reach the tip of the tongue any more, and a sport that seems more quaint — wooden rackets dominated — more graceful and a helluva lot less corporate than tennis is today.

Here’s McEnroe, bashfully brought to the lectern to praise sponsor Canon for giving every player in the tourney a Canon AE-1. That was a camera, kids. It used “film.” There are “bad boys” Ilie “Nasty” Nastase and Jimmy Connors, horsing around in a practice set just before the tourney begins, a crowd roaring with laughter at their antics.

“Nasty,” who could be a nightmare of bad sportsmanship to play against, takes his goofy act into the waiting room beneath the stadium, tickling Chris Evert and Virginia Ruzici as they’re about to face off in a women’s watch. And then we see the past-his-prime Nastase, working the crowd, joking around in French, knock off seeded American Eliot Teltscher in the first round, with Teltscher tossing a classic tennis-brat meltdown as press and others descend on him after his defeat.

Klein & Crew pay particular attention to the reigning king of men’s tennis, Bjorn Borg, on court and off — good naturedly doing promotional events, interacting with pushy fans — and one obnoxious French ballboy. He plays and he wins, insisting to one and all “I’m not a machine. I’m like everybody else.” The final images of “The French” are of Borg in victory, and of the later defeat at the hands of the star who would replace him.

And there’s a lot of coverage of the Great French Hope, Yannick Noah, battling for recognition, analyzing his game and his foot injuries at length as he lies, naked save for his jock strap, on a trainer’s table.

You’d be hard-pressed to find this kind of access to today’s athletes on film, with even footage gathered for HBO’s “Hard Knocks” subject to a lot of restrictions from the most corporate sports entity of them all — the NFL.

“The French” doesn’t so much tell a story as capture a moment from a more innocent age, with lax security, Europeans smoking in the stands and assorted sportscasters asking for “something a little stronger” to sip during the various long rallies and longer matches from an age when the rackets were made of wood and the players, even the most efficient, were never confused for “machines.”

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert, Yannick Noah, Ilie Nastase, Virginia Ruzici,
Hana Mandlíková, Thierry Tulasne, Fred Perry, Don Budge and Arthur Ashe

Credits: Directed by William Klein. A Metrograph release.

Running time: 2:10

If I hadn’t looked the director’s filmography, with titles like “Amityville Uprising” and the biker-chick thriller “Nation’s Fire,” I’d have leapt to some pretty seriously misguided conclusions about “The Godfather Buck,” a rich brothers hunting and bonding and sharing drama shot at Big Bear Lake, California.

It plays, sounds and feels like a movie whose research consisted of forcing oneself to listen to Joe Rogan’s performative masculinity hustle podcast while on vacation at Fire Island. Because writing this at home in West Hollywood, Silver Lake or anywhere in San Francisco wasn’t practical.

It’s that “off.” I could have sworn it was a gay fantasia of what toxic masculinity sounds like. Tough, profane and sexually explicit conversations clumsily mix with straw man arguments about hunting, pro and con, white supremacy and male domination.

Brother lawyers — one “sensitive” and “in therapy,” the other an over-compensating “alpha male” — have blunt discussions about women and their “Chinese sized brains,” about cheating “because I can,” about their penises and sexual secrets and the “primal” nature of hunting, all while stalking the titular “Godfather Buck” at the hotel-sized hunting lodge their daddy left them.

“I’m a wolf,” the butch Dan (Frederick Keeve) declares. “I follow the scent…I’m a NEANDERTHAL. I compete and I win.”

Somebody tell Dan, and the screenwriter who concocted him (Keeve) why there’re no Neanderthals left, and use the word “competition” in your explanation.

Steven? “Sometimes I’d rather be hurt than hurt other people” isn’t going to get you that buck, is it?

This Thomas J. Churchill movie — 15 minutes in the woods, one hour and 50 minutes of sitting drinking and chatting — takes in in a third (Black) half-sibling (Indar Smith) as our brothers plow through a Wikipedia search of “men’s movement” gibberish, “Hindu philosophy,” therapy-bashing, misogyny and homophobia.

And it’s all performed — including a sing-along SONG Keeve wrote for the film — in touchy feeling confessional chats that can only be described as, well, homoerotic.

It’s a stunningly dull movie. I can’t decide if I’m more irritated, or merely confused.

And just guessing, I’m thinking the filmmakers are as well. Very…confused.

Rating: unrated, gunplay, profanity

Cast: Frederick Keeve, Kyle Lowder, Indar Smith

Credits: Directed by Thomas J. Churchill, scripted by Frederick Keeve. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 2:05

The serious and seriously posh actress is finding her career second wind in thrillers like “Resurrection,” which comes our way Aug. 5, thanks to IFC. A paranoid mother will do anything to “protect myself and my daughter from harm.”

That quarrelsome, secrets-keeping couple from Cuzco are still saying “Si, mi amor (Yes, my love)” in “Let’s Tie the Knot, Honey (¿Nos casamos? Sí, mi amor),” an antic if not-quite-silly-enough sequel to their earlier Peruvian rom-com.

Co-star Yiddá Eslava takes on co-writing chores for this film, which means the endless scenes of her character Bea’s passion for food — OK, eating — and sloppy table manners are all on her, this time.

Bea and Guillmero (Julián Zucchi) are still keeping secrets from each other, eight years into their romance. But assorted triggers have Guille popping the question at a fine restaurant in “Let’s Tie the Knot’s” opening scene. But by keeping that a secret, he not only surprises her. Bea almost chokes to death, swallowing the ring along with the dessert she’s shoveling into her pie hole.

That’s typical of the jokes and situations set up here — a bit stale, by global romantic comedy standards.

She’s not so sure they’re ready for this. But she’s in. It’s just that mix-ups over a pregnancy test and the like, and Guille’s deceptions over arrangements to have their over-the-top wedding at the secluded mansion that belongs to BFF Max’s (Andrés Salas) rich, single and always-tipsy Mom (Patricia Portocarrero), who wants to pay for the nuptials, because she’s convinced it’s her son who’s finally getting married complicate matters all the way up to “I do!”

Director and co-writer Pedro Flores Maldonado has no more luck finding laughs than he did with “Si, mi amor.” Bea devouring all the sampled food from the posh caterer Max’s mom Regina wants serving the event, a bachelor party at a drag club and endless efforts to deceive Bea, Regina and the snooty, fey wedding planner (Ernesto Pimentel) about who’s getting married aren’t all that funny. A flaky “healer” spiritualist urging the groom and groomsmen to “open up your anus” in a cleansing gesture is kind of funny. So it seeing who’s drunk enough to fall for drag queens and who ends up officiating at the wedding, letting his sad personal history with women make it into the ceremony and vows he insists the loving/quarreling couple make.

It’s noisy and antic, if not particularly Peruvian in a “local color/local people/local cuisine” sense. The big hang-up with “Let’s Tie the Knot” is a carryover from “Si, mi amor.” The situations and gags just aren’t fresh enough to play and deliver laughs.

Rating: TV-MA, some nudity

Cast: Yiddá Eslava, Julián Zucchi, Mayra Olivera, Andrés Salas, Patricia Portocarrero, Ernesto Pimentel

Credits: Directed by Pedro Flores Maldonado, scripted by Yiddá Eslava and Pedro Flores Maldonado. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Look at that face. Does it terrify you, fill you with dread at what a short-tempered child with telekinetic powers might do to you, the room you’re in or the trees outside?

That’s one drawback to the new “Firestarter,” Blumhouse/Universal’s brisk, lean adaptation of the Stephen King novel that once gave us Drew Barrymore at her most terrifying. Young Ryan Kiera Armstrong doesn’t have the crazy eyes to pull off Charlie, the little girl with “a gift.”

But she’s adequate in the part. And as the movie built around her unfolds, you might think we’ve been treated to a Stephen King adaptation that overcomes the shortcomings of the much longer 1984 film. I got a conspiratorial and sinister “Scanners” vibe from the early scenes, which break from King’s novel as they show Charlie torching the solar system mobile dangling over her crib as a mewling infant.

Director Keith Thomas (“The Vigil”) and screenwriter Scott Teems wordlessly set up the menace, in a horrific montage of images, show Charlie’s parents (Zac Efron and Sydney Lemmon) as college kids, questioned as part of an experiment they signed up for. The unmistakable growl of Kurtwood Smith (“Robocop,” “That ’70s Show”) makes them uncomfortable off camera.

“Can you tell me if you’ve ever had what you’d call an authentic telekinetic experience?”

Whatever they came to that experiment with, what they left with was more focused and a relationship that produced Charlie, which keeps them cautious and on the lam.

But as she grows, she’s developing into a menace, without the maturity to exercise self-control.

“When you hurt people,” Dad says, “you don’t just hurt them, you hurt everyone around them. You don’t come back from that.”

All it takes is one bully at school, one incident and “our cover’s blown.” The “bad people” who’re looking for her and her parents close in, terrible things happen and father-and-daughter are on the road, heading for a showdown with whoever this Capt. Hollister (Gloria Reuben) in charge is, and whatever this Native American “agent” named Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) might represent.

We glimpse the ways Dad hustles up cash via his own power-of-suggestion gift. He’s a “life coach” that can make you stop smoking by getting in your head.

And we meet a kind stranger (John Beasley) who might be instructive to Charlie in an “It takes a village sense.” Irv leaps to conclusions about the girl, calms himself and apologizes for his transgression. That’s how adults manage rage and roll back its consequences.

As much as I appreciate the amount of story packed into just a few scenes, with Charlie’s proper introduction, playing with Dad’s cigarette lighter in the dark giving Armstrong her most menacing moment, I have to say the movie feels malnourished and thin, lacking the extra scenes and grace notes that show Charlie learning or lashing out and the teaching and protecting that goes on after her mother dies.

It’s not that I remember that much about the original film — just Barrymore’s hair-blowing fire-exploding effect, something the new “Firestarter” improves on, but not by much. I don’t recall specific moments and establishing scenes that plainly were left out.

But the film we’re given lacks weight and rising suspense. The confrontation we’re headed for is inevitable, but the stakes feel lower thanks to the execution and the scanty scenes meant to fill in the father-daughter devotion and bond and establish Charlie’s growing power.

What also contributes to that “malnourished” take is the lesser known supporting cast. The original film had rising starlet Barrymore in the lead, with Heather Locklear, David Keith, Art Carney, Martin Sheen and George C. Scott surrounding her. To say the new “Firestarter” saved money on casting is an understatement.

That’s the final blow to a film that starts out with great promise, peaks about 30 minutes in, and then sputters and fizzles into something a lot more humdrum. What starts out feeling lean and stylishly stripped-down, with a faintly-creepy young lead, waters her down and winds up playing cut-rate, abridged and cheap.

Rating: R for violent content

Cast: Zaf Efron, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Gloria Reuben, Michael Greyeyes, Sydney Lemmon and Kurtwood Smith

Credits: Directed by Keith Thomas, scripted by Scott Teems, based on the Stephen King novel. A Universal theatrical release, also on Peacock TV.

Running time: 1:34

Diane Kruger and Jeffrey Donovan play sympathetic parents, but people with their own problems, in this June 17 release. Love the tone. Serious. Romantic. Teenage longing confronted by harsh leaving-for-college reality.

Full disclosure, when I think of Chip and Dale I usually wish they were as funny as the Looney Goofy Gophers Mac and Tosh over at Warner Brothers.

I don’t know when this “Roger Rabbit ish” (live action and all sorts of different forms of animation and famous animated characters) mashup toon is due out. Next week I think. The trailer doesn’t say. But Disney pitched it, so let’s see if they’re as funny as the two Brit accented “confirmed bachelors” (maybe gay) Looney Tunes.

Perfectly good comedy to update every generation. This is a Miami set version with a lot of modern touches — the parents of the Bride are in couples counseling — and there’s a laugh or two on the trailer.

Probably wouldn’t have done much in theaters.

HBO Max has it. June 16.