Movie Nation

On a good vacation, time seems to stand still. You lose track of the days, the deadlines, the impending day of departure.

“Good Life” is movie about such a getaway that mimics that stasis. And as anybody knows, “time seems to stand still” isn’t something we look for in a movie.

It’s a downbeat romantic comedy that summons few laughs, even if it manages to deliver a little romance, even if it does a passable job of passing a coastal town in South Africa off a a quaint Greek village.

Hey, any port will do in a pandemic storm, right?

South African casting director turned writer-director Bonnie Rondini excels in her specialty, populating this picture with a diverse selection of South African actors and some passably authentic looking and sounding Greeks (everybody speaks English, mostly). But the picture’s limp story, indifferent direction and static pacing do it in.

Olive (Erica Wessels) is a 30something Cape Town dental hygienist with her mind on love, even when her hands are cleaning some little old man’s teeth. She’s checking her messages constantly, hoping to close the deal with this on-again/off-again guy who might be “the one.”

But John dumps her, by text, and that’s that. Getting “back out there” is a struggle. Disapproving snipes from her recently-widowed mother (Jennifer Steyn) are no help. The shock of how quickly John moves on rattles Olive further. In the middle of a snippy exchange with her mother and family friends over “How did you come to South Africa,” Olive has her answer.

Mom and Dad fled Greece “after the coup.” Dad still has a house there. There’s even an aunt Olive’s never met. No, Mom will “never go back.” That settles it. Olive will “get away,” go see the old house in the old village, over mother Athena’s testiest objections.

That’s also the vibe Olive picks up on in the tiny seaside town. A man tells her where the house is…or was. But the old bitties of the village won’t sell her mosquito netting or anything else that will allow her to camp on the house’s ruins. And nobody will speak to her about her parents, the past or their history there.

An Albanian refugee (Caleb Payne) boy is her sole confidante, go-between with the merchants and advisor. He’s seven years old.

“The village has given you the evil eye,” he declares, and considering the tea-leaf reading, spitting in her presence and gossip (in Greek) in her absence, Olive has to assume he’s right.

Too many movies have already been made about a lovelorn woman finding a hot younger Greek lover that it’d be a shock if Rondini didn’t provide one (Sven Ruygrok). It plays as a perfunctory invention here. The entire movie’s a collection of cutesy cliches and Greek stereotypes.

Lazy bureaucrats, tribal locals, a love-hate relationship with tourists and other outsiders are all trotted out in this cut-and-paste screenplay.

There’s little spark to any of the performances, even the ones meant to twinkle. Like its heroine, “Good Life” starts out “stuck” in South Africa, and too little changes when she moves to Greece.

Rondini does her best to give the picture “local color” — an octopus fished out of Homer’s “wine dark sea,” a town square that feels utterly Mediterranean.

But there’s not enough “color,” jokes, romance, surprises or incidents — just the occasional accident — to animate this still-life.

Rating: unrated, adult situations, smoking

Cast: Erica Wessels, Sven Ruygrok, Caleb Payne, Robyn Scott, Jennifer Steyn and Nicky Rebelo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bonnie Rodini. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:45

It’s “Girls Gone Wild” meets Pete Davidson.

Let’s play a game, somebody died and ohmygodohmygodohmygid who did it, you guys?

Aug 4, from A24

“The One Big Union,” they called it, an organization that would represent every worker laboring for “The Man.” Unlike the “skilled labor” guilds of the earlier American Federation of Labor, it would take in everyone, including the the extreme exertion “unskilled” jobs — farm labor, lumberjacks, longshoremen and miners. It would be a union whose work actions and strikes were meant to not just exercise some control over their work days, their wages and their safety It would struggle to gain outright ownership of the industries where the workers toiled.

The One Big Union would rattle “ownership” in America’s rapacious “gilded age” and threaten capitalism itself if it succeeded.

“The Wobblies” is a classic labor documentary from 1979, a film that gets back to the core meaning of the film genre — “to document,” to have history recounted by those who actually lived it. Filmmakers Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird interviewed the dying out members and eyewitnesses to the actions and struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World, “The Wobblies,” and let these old men and women speak of the idealism, desperation and determination that drove America’s most radical labor movement, which came to life in 1905 and then disappeared, after 20 years of strife, scapegoating and bloody attacks from America’s defenders of the status quo.

The newly-restored film is a reminder of the varied styles and formats of documentaries before PBS an Ken Burns codified and formalized these films into academics and “experts” and actors reading letters or performing speeches of the figures represented.

What that looks and sounds like is a tapestry of testimonials, on and off camera, recreating an era of child labor and the murderously callous reign of America’s first oligarchs — Rockefeller and Ford, Carnegie and J.P. Morgan.

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” financier Jay Gould sneered.

And so he could. In an era where workplace safety was deemed an unnecessary bother, when giant lumber companies could strip America’s forests with a remote workforce they could underfeed and house under deplorable conditions, when mining disasters were a simple “cost of doing business” worth no one’s attention, when hired cops and militia could be relied on to mow down longshoremen striking for an eight hour day, capitalists and capitalism were literally killing much of America, and getting anybody to care was a near impossible struggle.

“The Wobblies” uses archival silent films, still photographs, posters and performed recitations to recreate the labor ferment that boiled over from the late 1800s into the early 20th century. Interviews then hammer home what the Wobblies — their nickname may have come from Asian workers’ inability to say “I.W.W.” — represented, an impatience with the pace of reform and change.

“Work, good wages and respect” was their credo, witnesses recount.

“Free speech” battles erupted as the right to organize and protest was assaulted from Minot, North Dakota and Butte, Montana to Everett, Washington and Lawrence, Massachusetts, site of an early Wobbly unionizing success.

A hostile press and a political system bent towards the whims of the celebrated robber barons, who would quickly call for and receive lethal assistance in attacking and imprisoning labor organizers and shooting strikers was what the Wobblies were up against.

“Shakedowns” from railroaders hired to transport farm workers and lumbermen from site to work site via boxcar were common, abuse on the job and across industries was common. The Wobblies vowed that they wouldn’t just take a punch waiting for a passive public and blind-eyed government to act. They’d punch back.

The lack of experts interviewed here leaves the film with an implicit, sympathetic bias, but also deprives it of academically underscored proof of the context all this struggle took place in. World War I and the first “Red Scare,” the birth of the Soviet Union,” took place just as as the Wobblies were on the rise. A refusal to condemn or support the war, or to call off strikes during the conflict, added to heated pushback, attacks and image tarring by the press and government.

The “bomb throwers” label slapped on every labor movement since the Haymarket Square Riot was unjustly attached to the Wobblies from their birth and on into the age of animated film.

Clips from Ford-sponsored silent cinema cartoons depicting IWW organizers as rats and even an early Walt Disney (he hated unions) effort, “Alice’s Egg Plant” remind us how quick conservatives were to tie labor to the brand new boogeyman — communism — and smear workers’ rights organizations with that.

“The Wobblies” is a bracing, enthusiastic film, with many an old Wobbly recalling mottos, chants and even songs.

One remembrance ends with words he recalled his sympathetic father passing on to him. A worthy cause with worthy goals, the old Wobbly remembers his old man saying. “But it’s just a dream. It’ll never happen.”

Rating: unrated

Credits: Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer. A Kino Lorber re-release.

Running time: 1:29

A generation ago, “Amelie,” the cheerful fantasy about a Paris coquette’s charmed life, became quite the five-time Oscar nominated punching bag, hated for its adorable and adorably-optimistic heroine.

Coquettes got a bad name in the cinema after that. Gamines took it on the chin.

Actress turned director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet has her revenge on Audrey Tatou and the all the gamines, coquettes and Parisian pixies the cinema has produced with “Anaïs in Love,” an amusing/maddening little exercise in pixie-puncturing.

Bourgeois-Tacquet’s star and titular muse is Anaïs Demoustier, far enough over 30 to not seem a natural fit for this childish, impulsive, cute and quirky college coed who sets hearts aflutter and creditors, lovers and landlords’ teeth on edge.

Anaïs bolts, late, into her flat, insisting to her landlady that “I HATE being late” (in French with English subtitles) as she dashes from room to room, checks the time repeatedly and chatters on about the lover who just moved out, how unsuited she is for marriage, how she wants to truly feel and understand passion and love and how she’s “not a thief,” she will catch up on her rent.

She sloppily installs a smoke detector — which falls on the landlord — and voila, she’s gone! Off to a party where she can’t go upstairs until somebody’s willing to ride with her, her bike and the increasingly crumbled flowers she brings for the hostess in an elevator. Because they spook her.

She’s a graduate student, and that elevator mate, 50ish Daniel (Denis Podalydès), is an academic a bit smitten by her “carefree” ways — stretching out a wrenched knee (she climbed the stairs rather than ride the elevator, sticking him with her bicycle) mid party, etc. More on him in a moment.

Because POOF, she’s off to the movies with the sullen ex Raoul (Christophe Montenez), only she’s late and they’ve missed it. Fiddle dee dee. And by the way, I’m pregnant. Do you think I should have the “vacuum treatment” here (in Paris) or back home where I can see my family OB-GYN?

Raoul’s “Wait, WHAT?” is met with an “I’m just unlucky, I guess.” Bad luck, missing a week’s worth of birth control pills.

Everything just washes off Anaïs like that — thesis requirements for her paper on how “passion” was portrayed in 17th century French lit, the unemotional, sexually-flatlining affair she starts with Daniel, even the news that her mother’s cancer has returned.

When she helps her brother, who fears he’s killed his traveling girlfriend’s hyperactive pet lemur by giving him a Xanax, we realize ditziness runs in the family.

But the moment her salmon-like attention turns away from Mom (Anne Canovas), Anaïs focuses her obsessive gaze not on Daniel or her schoolwork or her obligations, but on Daniel’s longtime love, a famous writer, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi).

Might that be the solution to our heroine’s lack of focus and passion? An older woman? Or a menage a trois? Like, you know, her possible literary namesake, Anais Nin?

Bourgeois-Tacquet finds droll laughs in Anaïs’ inane over-sharing, questioning and self-absorption. Her “By the way, I’m pregnant” bombshell gets a scolding from a dismayed ex, prompting her to storm off with “You’re too violent in your inertia!”

Daniel’s “I love my life and don’t want to change it” plea prompts her to spit “Bourgeois cliche!” at him.

Emilie is puzzled by all these times she runs into this girlish “fan,” but her “What do you want from me?” doesn’t phase or even interrupt Anaïs in her running list of suggestions, desires and delusional self-analysis that means they should be together.

And every time you turn around, this “stuck” childish woman is doing something else that makes you roll your eyes — lying left and right (“I never lie!”), lighting candles, just as she told her landlord she’d done when she almost set her family’s house on fire as a child, setting off the smoke alarm mid-lovemaking, smashing the smoke alarm rather than figuring out which button to punch and irresponsibly renting out her flat to Korean tourists while she goes home and travels to a symposium to get closer to Emilie.

Yeah, it’ll all work out. Sure.

It’s not a bon bon or a comic delight. But Bourgeois-Tacquet and her muse Demoustier give coquettes, gamines and manic pixie dream girls (a Hollywood staple) the kind of butt-kicking all those people who misguidedly hated poor Amelie for decades ago longed for.

Pretty? Flighty? Sexy? Adorable? Of course. But it takes a lot of work by a lot of stupidly-compliant enablers to let this sort of free spirit run roughshod over every psyche she meets. One gets the feeling that her “gather ye rosebuds” expiration date is here, no matter how things work out for her by the closing credits.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Anaïs Demoustier, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Denis Podalydès, Xavier Guelfi and Anne Canovas

Credits:Scripted and directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:38

Four Polish filmmakers teamed up for the vengeful and funny “State of Polska” anthology film, “The Land,” a dark episodic comedy about people lashing out, using or abusing the law and punishing each other personally for their unhappiness.

This Around the World with Netflix outing tells six stories with varying degrees of well-acted morbid wit, delivering jokes that find their often-grim punchline and hit it hard, time and again.

A grizzled, seen-enough cop (Krzysztof Stroinski) hectors his shrugging partner about the stream of reckless speeders passing in front of their cruiser, neither of them wanting to get out in the rain and enforce the law.

“They don’t read books,” the old officer grouses, in Polish with English subtitles. “They have no imaginations.” They can’t imagine, for instance, the consequences of their carelessness.

A crash in front of them forces him to take action, and since it involves a BMW driver, and “I would kill EVERYone in a BMW. I’d kills the drivers of older BMWs TWICE,” has been part of his tirade, just you wait.

A harassed young construction worker (Tomasz Wlosok) took his baby to work that day, and is getting chewed-out on the phone by the baby’s mom as he shops. A careless bump in the aisle — him looking at his phone as another shopper looks at his — leads to one of those just-long-enough lapses, and his baby disappears.

He frantically searches the aisles, runs to the sounds of any crying child, chased and hounded by the store’s security guards. Nobody believes him when he thinks he’s spied the culprit and his infant in the checkout line.

But maybe coming after a frantic dad still wearing his tool belt isn’t the smart play here. Hammer time!

A family schemes to kill or blackmail a tax auditing team that visits their factory, a gauche bullying young bureaucrat takes over a government art gallery run by a young woman (Joana Niemirska) he once deflowered, a couple of neighbors in troubled marriages tit for tat their way into an all-out fireworks war one holiday night and a passive aggressive young nudist (Daria Polasik-Bulka), single mom and squatter faces off — dancing naked — with the owners of the apartment she refuses to pay rent for or vacate.

That old saying “Everybody’s dealing with something” is never spoken, but that’s what we’re into here — a lot of characters blithely unaware of how their taken liberties and transgressions are impacting those around them get them into “situations” with each other.

Tax auditors scare a factory owner into a heart attack and prank the eavesdropping relatives who are planning to poison or otherwise harm them, seemingly justifying their treatment. Simple errors of judgement escalate into a bottle rockets/roman candles shootout on Polish Independence Day. And a belligerent speeder “with no imagination” can’t understand how racing and causing a crash might impact a cop with a personal connection to such a road tragedy years before.

Not every piece in “The Land,” titled “Kraj” in Polish, has what I’d call a neat and tidy moral or object lesson. The nudist is plainly a head case and nobody is willing to deal with her on a mental health level, the factory audit story is on morally shaky ground no matter how it turns out and the gallery tiff doesn’t really add up to much.

But for anybody who doubts the Poles can take a joke, tell a joke and go seriously dark when in search of laughs, “The Land” and filmmakers Veronica Andersson, Filip Hillesland, Mateusz Motyka (who did the best segment, “Supermarket”) and Maciej Slesicki (who did three) clear up that misunderstanding with style, carnage and explosions.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Adam Bobik, Joanna Niemirska, Daria Polasik-Bulka, Bartlomiej Nowosielski, Paulina Masiak and Tomasz Wlosok

Credits: Directed by Veronica Andersson, Filip Hillesland, Mateusz Motyka and Maciej Slesicki, scripted by Maciej Slesicki, Veronica Andersson and Mateusz Motyka. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

The new art film oddity from Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy”) enfolds art, performance art, haute cuisine and horror and comes out June 24.

A grabber premise gets solid if not terribly affecting workout in “The Aviary,” a psychological thriller about two women escaping from a cult across the deserts of New Mexico.

On foot, they’re putting distance between themselves and “The Aviary,” a thinly sketched-in science of “self help” retreat where “Skylight” is explored by people with problems. But on the lam, we start to figure out that Jillian (Malin Akerman) and Blair (Lorenza Izzo) carry that cult and its charismatic, manipulative leader Seth (Chris Messina) in their heads with them every precarious step they take.

Jillian was high up the chain of command at the Aviary, and she’s trying to keep her sense of humor as she leads them across unpopulated miles of wasteland on their way to Gallup.

“Would you call the Girl Scouts a cult?” What with the uniforms, the indoctrination, the cookie coercion…

“Be kinda ironic if my first cult saved me from my second!”

Jillian is navigating by the sun, telling younger Blair which berries are poisonous nightshade and probably concocted their escape plan, stashing water and portable snacks for the two or three day trek.

She’s a bit too giddy about escaping from the “trust fund babies” like Blair suckered into the cult. Malibu-born Blair is, she hastens to add, an exception to that label. Blair was willing to flee, and Blair is the one who tamps down Jillian’s premature celebrations of their “escape,” screaming into the night, lighting a fire, because Blair knows they’re not out of the desert yet.

They will be tested as things go wrong and the short, vigorous hike becomes a grueling one through a land of ghost towns and no water. Hallucinations of their leader, accidents, guilty dreams of what transpired at the thinly-veiled Scientology knock-off (video-taped “Barrier Therapy” sessions that can be used for blackmail) set the two women against each other.

“I didn’t join a CULT!” “I didn’t EITHER!” “I thought Skylight WORKED!” “I guess we’re both f—-ng IDIOTS, then!”

The performances are competent if not particularly compelling. There’s not enough of a bond built between the two for us to despair them tearing apart.

Messina (“The Mindy Project”) makes an interesting casting choice as the mesmerizing leader suggesting just enough menace beneath the “I just want to help” exterior.

But with “The Aviary,” co-writers/directors Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite have essentially delivered a proof-of-concept project. Here’s a picture you can film in a pandemic with a skeletal cast and crew and low-cost locations and limited effects.

The things that should make it work are here, most of them anyway. The fact that it doesn’t draw you in or deliver an ending with impact doesn’t mean it couldn’t have. They needed more incidents and to impress upon their players that sense of urgency that a story about “We’ve escaped, they might be looking for us, and we’re in the desert without enough water or food to survive long” should convey.

Sure, he’s “in our heads,” but that should heighten the panic, not increase the resignation. Whatever the psychology of that, giving in to it makes for lukewarm drama and weak cinema.

Rating: R for language and some violent content

Cast: Malin Akerman, Lorenza Izzo, Chris Messina

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

The Limey prat piles on Disney. Way to buck up Dictator DeSantis, pal.

Telling its story out of order does nothing for the undercover cop investigating the Birmingham drug trade thriller “Bluff.”

This indifferent cop-embeds-with-junkies-and-drug dealers tale is already saddled with colorless performances, banal dialogue, low energy villains and an overfamiliar story arc.

Forcing one to figure out why this character’s hairstyle keeps shifting and that junkie seems to have “outed” the “suspended from the force” London copper in the first act is pointless, waters down any hope of suspense and needlessly slows down an unthrilling thriller to a funereal crawl.

It wasn’t working on set (coffee might have awakened the narcoleptic cast), and shuffling scenes about doesn’t fix anything.

Gurj Gill plays our droning-on voice-over narrating hero, Det. Sgt. Daniel Miller, whom we see cashiered out of uniform, and then met by the lone superior (James Jaysen Bryhan) who will be his contact as he moves out of town to “become one of the invisible addicts that people walk past every day.”

How does one do that? Look around for somebody with the right, semi-staggered gait of a heroin/crack (speedball) addict trying to pass for “straight.” sit on a park bench and offer him a smoke. Ask about gear, offer to “pay for yours, too.”

Just like that, Danny is in with “Cooks” (Jason Adam), on his way to Shots, the dealer and set to work his way up to local kingpin Imran (Nisaro Karim) and maybe beyond.

The officer in charge tries to halt the investigation because of what it’s doing to his undercover man, but we have no sense that drug abuse and doing the drug trafficker’s bidding is giving Danny anything over than a more groomed (shorter haired) look the longer he’s in.

Danny’s declaration that he’s not letting the operation end, “not after everything I’ve been through, all I’ve sacrificed” breaks protocol and has zero conviction, the way it’s played here.

First-time feature director Sheikh Shahnawaz properly populates his seedy underworld and deglamorizes the lifestyle. Cooks is homeless, curled up in what looks like an abandoned parking garage.

Shahnawaz underpopulates his picture, and leaves women out of it almost completely.

But the real issue with it is that everything about this robs it of pace. The way the scenes are written — little or long anecdotes that begin with “You see Danny, I was an only child” and don’t improve the longer they go on — actors who take their sweet time working up to the point of a scene — editing that captures dead time between words, reactions and a narrative with little urgency and almost no forward motion make “Bluff” an almost interminable movie to sit through.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Gurj Gill, Jason Adam, Nisaro Karim, James Jaysen Bryhan and Joe Egan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sheikh Shahnawaz. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:54

“The Bad Guys” is a children’s version of a caper comedy, an “Ocean’s Eleven” featuring CUTE critters as criminals.

It’s got cartoonish car chases and “Impossible” heist missions. And thanks to droll, cool crook voice work by Oscar winner Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Richard Ayoade , Awkwafina and Anthony Ramos, it’s kind of a stitch.

Lots of animated films go for big name actors to provide voices. But few figure out what this Dreamworks action comedy’s team did. Landing the right “funny” famous voice is all important.

That rule is underscored in the opening scene, just a couple of criminal lowlifes, the sharp-dressing, laid-back Wolf (Rockwell) and the grumpy, grousing Mr. Snake (Maron, the only actor to disguise his voice) banter, bicker and over Snake’s “taste for guinea pig”T and Wolf’s eye for the next reputation-making score.

“Big Bad” Wolf’s the mastermind, Snake is a “serpentine safe cracking machine,” Tarantula (Awkwafina) is their hacker/tech support, Shark (Robinson) is a “master of disguise” (Hah!), “apex predator of a thousand faces,” and Piranha (Ramos) is the gonzo wild card, the muscle.

Their motto?

“Go bad or go home.”

Wolf has a custom getaway car and they keep their loot in a subterranean lair. And there’s this Golden Dolphin with an emerald eye that’s the big prize for the best do-gooder in town. They aim to snatch that right from under the nose of foxy Mayor Foxington (Zazie Beetz) as she gives it to popular, wholesome, saintly guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Ayoade).

The message here — don’t judge a book by its cover, don’t let yourself be defined by stereotypes others impose on you. The villains of the animal kingdom maybe aren’t such “Bad Guys” after all.

All it takes is a “Who’s a good boy?” for Big Bad “Wolf” to wag his tail. But is their rehabilitation genuine?

“The Bad Guys become the Good Guys so we can stay Bad Guys!”

Rockwell’s way of playing every word on the backbeat makes even limp lines land. And veteran British funnyman Ayoade, who’s done lots of animation since breaking out in the sitcoms “The Mighty Boosh” and “The IT Guys,” induces giggles with every plummy, pedantic witticism to come out of his mouth.

The animation has a Tex Avery elasticity — exaggerated gestures, eyes bugging out, “Bugs Bunny Physics” and all that as a visual reinforcement of the bad guy banter laid over it.

Based on the children’s books by Aaron Blabey, the plot isn’t all that, but “The Bad Guys” sparkles to life when it’s at its most antic — frantic chases, capers going wrong or just heated, animated debates in the gang.

And Rockwell’s Big, ever-so-Bad Wolf? “WHO’S a good boy?”

Rating: PG, rude humor (fart jokes)

Cast: The voices of Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos and Marc Maron.

Credits: Directed by Pierre Perifel, scripted by Etan Cohen and Yani Brenner, based on the books by Aaron Blabey. A Dreamworks Animation film released by Universal.

Running time: 1:40