Movie Nation

June 16, it’s your turn to “Go to hell.”

The Mexican “40 Years Young (Cuarentones)” is a midlife crisis romantic dramedy that’s so slow that I had to check to make sure Netflix wasn’t experiencing screen-freeze.

Its 81 drab minutes pass by like a long, labored comic death rattle.

The cast is cute and seem to possess the light touch whatever they were going for requires. But nothing happens in this movie — nothing funny, nothing that dramatic, nothing particularly romantic. It’s 81 minutes of nada.

An opening scene establishes that Cesar (Erick Elias) and Paolo (Adal Ramones) are partners in a popular Mexico City Italian eatery, L’Allegria, where they’re not just the chefs, they’re the singing, joking, charming floor show. That’s one seriously open kitchen and one potentially entertaining way to connect with customers.

We only see this promising “concept” in one solitary scene.

They’re having money troubles, with Paolo’s two exes and kids back in Italy needing upkeep.

Cesar? Everything’s grand, with sexy wife Amelia (Ximena Gonzalez-Rubio), tween son Enrique (Ricardo Zertuche) and his mother around to see his success. They’re planning a big European vacation.

All it takes is one impending 40th birthday — Cesar’s — to take down the whole house of cards.

Actually, his 40th has little to do with that, even though he’s keenly aware that his father died at 40. He can be childlike forever, right?

“Forty is the new 12, after all.”

Only Cesar is not childish, not upbeat and not even that much fun. Imagine how he’ll be when he brags about his mother’s good health just before she drops dead, when Amelia introduces him to her ex, who’s been in prison for ten years and is probably the father of her son.

Perfect time to get away to sunny, sandy Acapulco, where L’Allegria’s duo will compete in a week-long cook-off with the best chefs in Mexico for “Delicacies” magazine’s $20,000 prize.

Cesar’s marriage is ending, the son he doted on isn’t his, he’s just lost his mother.

Maybe we should be surprised that he doesn’t set off sparks with vacationing Chicagoan Naomi (Gaby Espino) as Paolo is hitting on her BFF Selina (Sonia Couogh). But this is a rom-com, you know. Sparks are supposed to happen.

The central couple doesn’t click, the cooking scenes are abbreviated and practically food-free and the “contest” has little conflict, despite the snobby director of it (Miguel Pizarro) obviously having it in for these “entertainer” chefs.

“Your clients all leave…enchanted,” he hisses (in Spanish or dubbed into English), as if that’s a bad thing.

A trip to a romantic swimming grotto, a potentially romantic snorkeling trip and all we get is the barest glimpse of scenery and maybe a single scene with the potential to amuse or “enchant.”

And it doesn’t.

Rating: TV-MA, for no particular reason

Cast: Erick Elias, Gaby Espino, Adal Ramones,
Ximena Gonzalez-Rubio, Sonio Couoh, Ricardo Zertuche, Antonio Fortier
Miguel Pizarro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pietro Loprieno. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:21

Hard to get a bead on exactly what’s happening in this creepy trailer to a May 17 release.

Haunted place? Haunted people? An older woman with Alzheimer’s is hunted by a horror in Herefordshire.

Always alliterate.

It was a city remote enough from the rest of the world’s experience or knowledge of Chinese geography that we couldn’t place it on a map. But Wuhan’s name would enter the consciousness in infamy as a global pandemic burst out of this Hubei Province metropolis. It became a symbol of Chinese failings as a society and secretive totalitarian state.

Filmmaker Yung Chang’s “Wuhan Wuhan” is a documentary filmed by being embedded in the city of 11 million as “ground zero” of this devastating pandemic wrestled with COVID-19 and ordinary people faced up to the fear, the confusion and grim realities of a total lockdown.

Though other films have followed the drama of those earliest days there — “In the Same Breath” and “76 Days” — Chang’s film takes the unusual tack of personalizing the pandemic, and humanizing the first population trapped in it.

The “Wuhan Virus” and “Wuhan” as pejorative insult –American politicians who bungled and politized the pandemic were nicknamed “Wuhan Don” and “Wuhan Ron” — recede as we see put human faces on doctors, an expectant couple and others just coping with this extraordinary event that they didn’t cause any more than we did.

Jumping into the lockdown in Feb. 2020, we meet Yin, a factory worker on furlough who now works as a volunteer delivery driver for medical personnel, doctors and nurses he picks up from their homes or (in the case of those shipped in to help) from hotels to the city’s many hospitals and makeshift overflow wards in civic buildings.

A GoPro camera in his makeshift rideshare captures candid conversations between Yin and assorted unnamed “front line” responders. It’s “hard to see the end of this” right now, one nurse sighs. “The actual number (of infected and dying) is more than we know” right now, another admits.

They are as exhausted as the many viral video testimonials that medical professionals in the West posted during their darkest days. But these people, wrapped in Personal Protective Equipment of a more DIY nature until they get to work where they don hospital-provided protection, are speaking out in ways we never hear the People’s Republic allow.

At home, Xi, Yin’s wife, is concerned, eating and craving meat as she is 37 weeks pregnant. She’s about to give birth and as more than one rider tells Yin, “a hospital isn’t safe to be in right now.”

We hear and see government public address vans ride around passing on information and instructions, a chilling bit of “1984” Big Brother-speak about the fact that “the state has implemented number twelve notice,” a lockdown, and that everyone is ordered indoors. “Contact your local committee” if you have questions.

In the hospital, patients gripe and family members advocate for and pitch in to help ensure good care of their children or spouses. An officious nurse calls a rebelling 50ish man’s wife when she’s had enough of his “To HELL with treatment, I’ll just die here!”

The patients, like the hospitals, are numbered — impersonalized. But we see the people behind the bureaucracy.

The ER chief at one hospital, Dr. Zheng, respectfully argues with higher-ups about the quality of Red Cross-donated PPE, and we see the exhausted staff’s work-arounds. Staff members use magic markers to write each other’s names and titles on the disposable plastic outer wear. Custom embroidered scrubs and lab coats and name tags are among the casualties of the emergency.

A patient who has been there a while comes to the filmmaker and gives an impromptu testimonial.

“He is the best doctor here,” she enthuses (in Mandarin with English subtitles). “I only know his voice. I’ve never seen his face.”

Chang’s film doesn’t give us much of an overview, doesn’t investigate or judge, doesn’t dwell on the unsanitary “live” markets where the disease made the jump from animals to humans (the “lab created” myth has been floated and shot down repeatedly in the past two years).

He just lets us see a Wuhan version of what we watched on the nightly news play out in New York at the peak of the pandemic and shows us the faces, the hopes and fears of those coping, at a personal level, with this awful event that’s taken over their lives.

And he lets us hear in Chinese what we’ve heard in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, a phrase that became global as this contagion tore through humanity in wave after wave.

“This is the new normal now.”

Rating: unrated

Credits: Directed by Yung Chang. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

Thrillers beyond number have been built on the “throw a bunch of characters together and ‘test’ them” trope. So why not “Escape the Field?”

Characters wakes up in a tractless/endless corn patch, with a single sinister scarecrow watching over it. Each person has some item — gun with a single bullet, knife, matches, compass, lantern, etc. — that might help them all get out.

And hanging over them all is the knowledge that someone drugged and dropped them here, and someone or some thing is out there amongst the rotting stalks, manipulating and maybe even hunting them.

Jordan Claire Robbins of “Supernatural” is Sam, the nurse, the first victim we meet and the first to blurt out “Where AM I?

Theo Rossi of “Sons of Anarchy” plays Tyler, who seems rational…or sketchy.

Shane West — “Bane” on TV’s “Gotham” — is bossy and butch and tough and twisted and ex-military, a hothead with a guilty conscience and a tendency towards mistrust.

Because as this “team” assembles in the middle of this field, not everybody is totally honest with everybody else. And when they get the notion that others have been out here before them, and people get snatched out of the frame by whatever is imprisoning, hunting and injuring or testing them, “working together” to work-the-problem seems like a goal beyond their reach.

If you’ve watched more than a few movies or binged on “The Twilight Zone,” you’ve probably invested in a version of this — “Maze Runner,” “And Then There Were None,” “In the Tall Grass,” the theater’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” “Twilight Zone’s” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” the variations are endless.

But in our “Escape Room” era, screenplays have a tendency to emphasize “the puzzle” that all must cooperate to solve side of the story. And forcing logic on this, over-explaining it and the solution that three screenwriters come up with lets the players down.

The more we know, the less mysterious and less interesting “Escape the Field” is. The more that’s revealed, the more obvious the panic amongst those writers becomes.

The players struggle to escape the archetypes they’re playing and the plot they’re selling.

Fear fades and the back-engineered, over-thought and above all else over-explained problem and solution take over the movie As the terror of the unknown is vanishes, we shrug off the characters and their predicaments.

Any worries about them shaking in their boots take a back seat to us shaking our damned heads.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Shane West, Tahirah Sharif, Elena Juatco, Julian Feder, Niki Kerro

Credits: Directed by Emerson Moore, scripted by Emerson Moore, Sean Wathen and Joshua Dobkin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

A Frenchwoman of a certain age considers the question from the US Customs officer at LAX, and speaks her mind.

“I want to start a new life.”

And so she sort of does, 50 and “putting herself out back there” with the guidance of that Everywoman’s LA accessory, the gay BFF. And as she’s dating again, she’s writing (in voice over) an autobiographical screenplay about her neglectful, self-absorbed “diva” mother who left her in a small boarding school as a child, deliberately letting the child Lisa think it was something she did that caused this first of many abandonments.

“I Love America” makes a decent 50something showcase for the almost-ageless Sophie Marceau (“Braveheart,” “The World is Not Enough”) and pretty much nothing else. It’s a dry, somewhat vapid “French sophisticate in LA” dramedy about parenting, love, age and finding closure as the heroine of your own story.

And if writer-director Lisa Azuelos, who teamed with Marceau for the equally empty “LOL” 15 years ago, doesn’t utterly waste our time and Marceau’s, that’s only because Marceau doesn’t let her.

Lisa arrives in LA just as her mother (Sophie Verbeeck) takes a terminal turn for the worse back in France, “pissing me off to the end,” the daughter grumps (in French, with English subtitles).

But getting past that, her already-in-LA gay bartender pal Luka (Djanis Bouzyan) puts her on dating apps, drops her age from 50 to “43” and invites direct messages by the hundreds, most of them on the sliding scale of lascivious to crude.

The dates begin, a middling string of older-men-pretending-to-be-young and one dedicated cougar hunter (Colin Woodell) who insists a dating app can lead to something permanent and meaningful.

These outings, often connecting to the discos and disco of her youth, prompt flashbacks to the wounds of childhood — her “playboy” and out of his depth (not married to Mom) dad, Julien (Hubert Benhamdine), whom she nicknames “Judas,” her mother’s “new life” and new family pushing Lisa further into the background.

The running theme of these memories as they work their way into the screenplay within the screenplay is a life of longing for unfulfilled needs, scars Lisa made a decision to not pass on to her own kids, whom “I created to make sure someone loves me on this planet,” with much of what she encounters in LaLa Land being a potential trigger — “reunions,” etc.

Every so often, Lisa talks about Los Angeles, the movies and the cinematic landmarks of her life that live on there — “The Way We Were” to “The Big Lebowski.”

Azuelos renders all this in sweeping strokes of randomness — Lisa breaking her “no sex on the first date” rule, Luka living out some sort of ’80s gay cliche — hookups that can’t recall ever meeting him — mixed with modern LA gay stereotypes (Luka’s ex has married and has a child with his new partner).

The entire affair seems researched by watching lesser Hollywood films and sitcoms. Luka’s high-end apartment and cherry condition 1966 Mustang convertible make one wonder about bartender salaries in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Marceau remains an arresting screen presence, but that’s severely tested by Azuelos’ inane, meandering and trite tale of love, loss and closure, wrapped in a female wish fulfillment fantasy.

Rating: unrated, nudity and sex, profanity

Cast: Sophie Marceau, Sophie Verbeeck, Colin Woodell and Djanis Bouzyani

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lisa Azuelos. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:43

Leave it to Sam Raimi to sidetrack the efficient but creatively flatlining Marvel money train of Avengers idolatry.

Granted, the director of the sparkling, soulful original “Spider-Man” trilogy spends the first two acts of “Doctor Strange in the Universe of Madness” performing fan service, stuffing the screen with talismans, gimmicks and characters just like every recent Russo & Co. Marvel outing.

There are more gimmicks/characters/magical agents in “Doctor Strange 2” that have no real impact on the plot’s outcome than you can count. It’s the whole “Is Indiana Jones necessary for finding/saving the Lost Ark?”” argument writ even larger.

The Multiverse idea gets further beaten to death — with more cool effects — and a few beloved characters are trotted out and treated like fodder, and not just Bruce Campbell and Raimi’s infamous Olds Delta 88, either.

There’s a character symbolically-named “America” so that others can fret over America’s fate, wonder if “America is lost” or “America’s isn’t lost after all.” A little on the nose, symbolism-wise.

But then Raimi does Raimi, and “Drag Me to Hell” becomes more than one of his most fun horror outings, it’s a guiding principle for this Multiverse’s third act. It’s scary, harrowing fun, with a body count and a shift in direction that may rattle the “play it safe” suits at the Mouse’s prized nameplate.

We’re still in a post-Thanos Earth, half-ruined and periodically assaulted by monstrous enemies of humanity. Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is still regarded as a hero, but one and all — himself included — wonder at what price.

He’s still not the Sorcerer Supreme, still not as respectful as his friend with that title (Benedict Wong) would like. And indignity of indignities, he’s got to keep it together at his best gal’s wedding. She is of the “It would have never worked” persuasion, and Rachel McAdams playing Christine Palmer makes that whole relationship credible and worth mourning.

But these “dreams” the good doctor is having, with a young person with powers whom he doesn’t know (Xochitl Gómez) seem to be heading towards another “sacrifice for the greater good” situation. And the girl named America isn’t keen on dying nobly by his hand.

When Stephen Strange finally meets her in his world, it turns out she’s a multiverse traveler being pursued by demons at the direction of — you guessed it — another disaffected Avenger whom the script expects us to believe has gone totally, and almost justifiably rogue.

Thus this is the movie where casting a terrific actress, Elizabeth Olsen, as Wanda The Scarlet Witch, pays dividends.

Because if there’s one great novelty in all the multiverse mayhem, it’s the sight of the petite Olsen staggering, like a wounded and enraged Igor or Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a violent and nerve tingling chase, where she’s the monster doing the chasing.

The third act, which one can’t go into any detail about for fear of “spoilers,” is the corker here — full of candles and dark spells and demons and dead people and dead people summoned back to help.

The preceding multiverses? Go see “Everything Everywhere All At Once” to get a more thrilling, amusing and scientifically intriguing take on that. For that matter, the last “Spider Man” movie was better, start to finish, than this.

But Raimi gives his actors lots of close-ups, and they deliver in spades, making this one of the better-acted Marvel movies. Regret, grief, pathos and fury all register and hit you right in the face at times.

The messaging starts with this grand, simple line — “Just because someone loses their way doesn’t mean they’re lost forever.” But it is centered mostly on one newcomer — America.

Her character is focus-grouped virtue signaling in the flesh — Hispanic, with Puerto Rican decor on her jacket and a rainbow-colored Puerto Rican flag pin denoting her two moms. The intolerant corners of the Islamic world — the Gulf States — are banning the movie over that. But that’s ok. When she’s old enough America will be driving a plug-in hybrid.

America is here to represent conscience and hope, and Gómez adequately embodies that as well as the script — which has her imprisoned or almost helplessly in jeopardy for much of the time — allows.

There was a stretch “in the Multiverses of Madness” that I wondered if corporate Marvel hadn’t muzzled the life, independence and fun out of Sam Raimi, as the film’s early and middle acts are just generic — big, dull action beats, limp, recycled Strange and Wong jokes, tedious “I’ve put the magic behind me” declarations that no one believes and “fan service.”

But as someone who’s hard on Marvel “content” in general, I found “Multiverse’s” third act bracing and eye-opening, reminding us what can happen when you put a filmmaker with style and a talent for something other than Make the Avengers/Wizarding World etc. Trains Run on Time “management” in charge.

This isn’t one of the best movies of this genre. But when at its best, “Madness” takes Marvel places it’s been entirely too timid to go before. And no, I’m NOT talking about this endlessly-flogged “multiverse” fantasy of physics and comic book movies.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, frightening images and some language.

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, Xochitl Gómez, Patrick Stewart, Bruce Campbell and Chiwitel Ejiofor.

Credits: Directed by Sam Raimi, Scripted by Michael Waldron. A Marvel Studios/Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:06

Not sure when this Vertical release with Holly Earl, Catherine Hannay, Malachi Pullar-Latchman and Thomas Flynn comes our way.

So I’ll just flesh out this post with my favorite “Jetski” jokes. That was the working title of this sharks-eat-jetskiers thriller.

What’s the difference between a Jetski and a vacuum cleaner? The location of the dirt bag.

What’s the difference between a Jetski and a cactus? On a cactus, the little pricks are pretty sharp.

You hear’em in every marina I tellya, and Jetskier jokes never get old.

Yes, we’re finally getting those “Avatar” sequels James Cameron was coerced, bribed and arm twisted into creating and releasing.

Disney/20th Century is attaching these to the “Doctor Strange” sequel and asked critics to come to tonight’s “Multiverse of Madness” preview extra early so they could show this off as well.

This is the only theatrical preview of the “Avatar” teaser for critics in Florida. So we’re special, seeing it in Orlando’s finest multiplex, Regal’s Winter Park location.

I’m seeing it in 3D. I’ll update this if it makes my eyes pop out of my head. Damned impressive 3D, and it’s a lot longer than the teaser of the teaser posted below.

The trailer doesn’t give away much, just reminds us what Sam Worthington’s voice sounds like and what the animated versions of him and Zoe Saldana look like. “Family” and pregnancy and more conflict with the off world Earth-born exploiters.

If you want to make a movie feel like a movie “event” again, put it in a theater in 3D, I tell you what.

It’s “Avatar” all right. The movie demands to be seen in a cinema, the bigger the screen the better. The teaser? Get to “Strange” early enough to check it out.

You can make the argument that Richard Pryor was the greatest, and I’ll hear you out.

Some will toss Lenny Bruce in there to stir it up.

But once you’ve said your piece, we’ll look at the evidence, the influence, the evolution, the final acts with their unadulterated rage and endlessly quotable wisdom, and we’ll agree that George Carlin was the greatest stand up of them all.

I daresay any number of bits he did in the ’90s would get him “canceled” now. I recall one long riff on eating disorders that almost got him picketed, even back then.

Interviewed him once, by phone. The fire alarm went off at the newspaper where I was working. He heard it, paused a beat, and said “TWO MINUTES. Get your SHIT together.”

The best there ever was, “The Natural,” the real Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

And funny, from beginning to end.

HBO brought him back from the dead a couple of times. It’s only fitting that this appreciation comes from HBO Max.

A doc in two parts, May 20, HBO Max.