Movie Nation

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

Was writer-director Miranda July at least “inspired” by the Oscar nominated Japanese drama “Shoplifters?”

She’s not saying. But “Kajillionaire,” more a dramedy — colorfully comic con artists, until their “daughter” figures out she’s being used — than a drama, certainly has hints of that film about it.

This Sept. 18 look at how “the other half” hustle also stars Gina Rodriguez, and looks delightful.

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.

Gleeson? Uncanny

Showtime is tossing this movie Molotov cocktail at the traitor and his self righteous and clumsy GOP FBI chief right before the election.

You’ve seen Tom Bower in scores of films over the years, brief appearances that leave a mark in “Die Hard 2,” “Light of My Life” or the “Breaking Bad” movie — “El Camino.”

Parked front and center in an indie drama for once, he gives a performance for the ages in “Senior Love Triangle,” a stark, harrowing and touching portrait of what we euphemistically call “The Twilight Years” and one man raging “at the dying of the light.”

It’s based on a famous Isadora Kosofsky photo essay about just what some of the extremely elderly are up to in their dotage. Past and present collide, or are confused for one another, and romance and dreams die hard in the generations that live on past 80.

Bower stars as William Selig, a gruff and bluff Navy veteran who seems to remember he used to be somebody. In his mind, he still is, “closing this deal” that he promises will make him flush, bullying “John” on the other end of his cell phone conversations to make this go through.

The fetching Adina (Anne Gee Byrd of “Wild”) can’t hide her adoration of his take-charge bluster.

“I’m gonna get you OUTTA that dump,” he says of the posh L.A. assisted living facility where they live. He drives her around in his forty year-old Mercedes, wines her and dines her and fields calls. And every so often, they hit her ATM.

William is evicted. He stopped making payments on his room in their facility, and now the authorities and her son are tossing him out.

“Haven’t you spent enough of my mother’s money?”

That barely slows William down. Sure, she’s Jewish, as is her son. But Adina is “surrounded by Nazis,” and only he can “save” her.

First, though, he needs another place to live. The WWII Pacific Theater veteran is used to raising his voice, getting his back up and bullying staff to get what he wants. Spencer (Travis Van Winkle) is in the middle of showing William the amenities at Gramercy Towers when he gets an “I don’t like your TONE,” from the old man in the Navy Veteran cap.

“We are versed in the care of the elderly,” Spencer says, apologizing and pointing out his degree in gerontology.

“You’re a CHILD.”

Spencer’s getting off easy. “Nazis” and “Vichy swine” are the preferred non-profane insults this man who “chased Tojo across the Pacific.” William is “a man of God” who answers to “no one,” and curses like the sailor he once was even as he invokes the Almighty. All that’s missing is a MAGA hat.

“Thank you, Richard Nixon,” he bellows after a bit of good news.

He’s got big plans, and this is but a setback. But Gramercy Towers is where he meets Jeanie (Maryln Mason, whose TV credits go back to “The Real McCoys”).

Great. Now William’s got TWO women he wants to take care of. That damned “John” better put that deal through, and quick!

Director and co-writer Kelly Blatz cooks up some great scenes showing the arc of the women’s relationship — mistrust, jealousy and insulting one-upmanship followed an uneasy truce that turns easier.

All those stories you’ve heard about “swinging” senior communities, VD outbreaks in Florida’s largest concentration of the elderly — The Villages — come to mind and find a depiction based in reality in “Senior Love Triangle.” There are “senior moments” ranging from mere confusion to deep, irrational delusions. We can sense it long before the script makes the degree of mental disconnect obvious.

And Bower tears through the scene and the scenery like a bull in a Chinatown shop, an old man not nearly as old as the movie would have us believe. Filmmakers should recognize that WWII vets are almost all gone, with survivors well into their 90s and none of them driving around LA.

The surface gloss of such movies about the very old is this notion of “one last great adventure,” even if it’s just a December-LATE December romance. But it is the dark undertow tugging at “Senior Love Triangle”  that lingers, the bitter reminder of everything you lose control of and the predators, blowing up your phone, hoping to catch you in decline or in the middle of your worst “senior moment.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tom Bower, Anne G. Byrd, Marlyn Mason and Travis Van Winkle

Credits: Directed by Kelly Blatz, script by Kelly Blatz and Isadora Kosofsky, based on Kosofsky’s photo documentary. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:32

Oh, the mischief movie-makers get up to when they forego trimming their scripts and editing their films to a running time that their story can sustain.

When you title your movie “Romance Doll,” and build it around a Japanese artist turned sex doll (“‘Love doll,’ we call them now.”) sculptor, you’re just asking for trouble stretching that into something more than a 95 minute farce.

But even though Yuki Tanada’s film begins with a giggle and transitions into a guffaw or two, “Romance Doll” doesn’t always over-reach as it looks for something more profound to say on this subject, or rather dancing around this subject.

Tanada, of “Moon and Cherry,” “Mourning Recipe” and “One Million Yen and the Nigamushi Woman,” conjures up a comedy with a sad aftertaste, little moments of laughter chased-off by a breaking relationship and breaking hearts.

Tetsuo (Issey Takahashi) answers a job opening at Kubota Co., an “unemployed artist just out of school.” The giggling old lady there figures a friend was pulling his leg when he recommended the place. Tetsuo shown up at a dumpy, tiny warehouse space where Kinja (Kitarô) designs ever more realistic sex dolls for the lonely-and-or-kinky in the somewhat prurient culture of Japan.

“Tetsu” takes the job, and after a misguided first effort, which the boss (Pierre Taki) “tests” by groping in front of the staff, gets into the spirit of the place, with its silicon-over-metal-armature (frame) dolls for the company’s discriminating clientele.

“I don’t want knockers, I want knockouts,” the boss hectors. The idea is to make a doll so real “it might come to life.”

The way to achieve that, the artist convinces his mentor Kinja, is to make their molds out of a real live woman, a “perfect” natural beauty. But when artist’s model Sonoko (Yû Aoi) shows up, the two men cast “rock, paper scissors” lots over who gets to smear the modeling plastic over her nude form, like a couple of sniggering school boys.

And Tetsu, a nervous wreck three years between girlfriends, falls in love at first…touch. Shockingly, Sonoko accepts his confession of affection and they court and marry.

One sitcom-worthy catch. He’s let her believe that she modeled for prosthetic breasts for cancer survivors, “helping people,” and not a sex doll. Another catch? The doll becomes a not-quite-underground/not-quite-porn sensation. Tetsu finds himself keeping stupid hours and not just a stupid secret as Kubota cranks out the silicon Sonokos.

Their marriage will be tested in ways tawdry, conventional and profound. We see that coming, as the film opens ten years in the future, and Tetsuo’s voice-over narration hints at a tragedy to come.

Tanada gets a wonderful tenderness and fragility out of the performances, with Aoi suggesting someone almost too delicate for this world, at least when she first marries. She expects marriage to be one thing and isn’t able to make it turn out that way.

Takahashi takes “shy” and “awkward” to their usual manifestations, and then some. “Tetsu” has let this job-for-life take over his life, much as Kinji did before him.

Mournful tone aside, Tanada is working within a sort of comedy-of-manners framework here. There’s a Japanese wedding and a funeral, lots of bowing and confessing and apologizing. From this culture, Tanada winks, geishas, “adult manga (comic books)” and sex dolls reached full flower.

A more compact package might have made the movie’s themes and ideas pop out more. Energy and story coherence tends to evaporate in the second act, setting up a more melodramatic third act. A tighter film would have made for a shorter and better “Romance Dolls.”

But as sedately-paced as it is, sprinkled with third act twists, it’s still an intriguing peek inside a culture and the Japanese psyche, one of the more interesting journeys one can take on a journey “Around the world with Netflix.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, adult themes

Cast: Yû Aoi, Issey Takahashi, Kitarô and Pierre Taki

Credits: Written and directed by Yuki Tanada. A Kadokawa release on Netflix.

Running time: 2:03

They’ve had to delay and delay, and then reduce their scope and cut capacity at the one theater, the Enzian, that they’ll be showing films in for this year’s Florida Film Festival.

You know why.

But a lot of their titles will be available “virtually,” as in — log in, buy your ticket and watch the movie at home.

A LOT of titles.

Virtual FFF kicks off Aug. 8. The lineup is below.

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