Movie Nation

“Schemers” is an autobiographical slice of Scottish whimsy about a 20ish lad who becomes a concert promoter just to impress a college girl in the Dundee, Scotland of the 1980s.

As Davie McLean (Conor Berry) tells his tale — with ample examples from “real life” and a heavy dose of voice-over narration — he was always a seat-of-the-pants hustler, a hard-drinking, hard-living “degenerate gambler” with a “bit of a love affair with th’horses” long before he met the fair bottle-blonde Shona (Tara Lee) with the Brooke Shields/Lily Collins eyebrows.

How’d he meet her? He got caught crawling into bed with some goon’s fiance. Whatever dreams of soccer glory he held (we never see him play), that ends with the busted ankle that puts him in the hospital, where his morphine-addled vision of a nurse’s aid (Shona) fires his attempts to get her attention once he’s out and on crutches.

As she’s stunning, looking a lot like the future film star Imogen Poots, he invites her and her guardian-friends to “a disco at the uni (versity) I’m organizing.” That’s thinking on your feet.

“She called my bluff. Cheeky that.”

That sets a whole life path in motion for Davie. He doesn’t ditch his dream of studying under the writer-producer of the documentary, “Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia.” Not entirely. The real Dave McLean co-wrote and directed “Schemers,” after all. But it did send him on the steep learning curve of concert promoting, an unsavory corner of the performing arts that set him up for another — filmmaking.

Davie, still on crutches, must entice a married soccer player/dance DJ (Grant Robert Keelan) to do the show and partner with him on it. He enlists his drug-dealing mate Scot (Sean Conner) as well. And they literally leap from a sell-out dance to putting on live shows. This new band, Simple Minds, recommended by Shone and “getting some airplay on (radio host) John Peel?” Try them. XTC, Thin Lizzy, Ultravox and others follow.

This new band. “outta Dublin, they’re gonna be HUGE” is offered. “Never HAIRD of’em.”

The “12 Bridges (of Dundee) Promotions” team finances shows with gambling winnings or drug money, and fakes a death to get out of another.

Much of this meteoric rise happens before Davie even gets his cast off, before he’s convinced Shona that he’s not just a “chancer” but a lad on the move. But when most of the clubs and concert venues he needs to make these shows come off are owned by Fergie (Alastair Thomson Mills), “the chief potato of Dundee’s McMafia,” there’s trouble on the horizon.

And that “next big thing” metal band that Davie wants to score? That’s where the serious money, the serious gamble and most serious threats come in.

“When you begin to swim deeper, don’t be surprised when you meet the sharks.”

Seat-of-the-pants music business tales like this all owe a debt to “24 Hour Party People,” or even “Hear My Song.” Earlier this year, we were treated to the saga of the guy who “discovered Oasis” (“Creation Stories”). I find it a fun genre.

“Schemers,” with real Dundee locations (Caird Hall, where they wanted to book Iron Maiden, is featured) but zero star power, isn’t on a par with any of its predecessors. The story’s throughline is jumbled and the lack of music rights limits the concert scenes and takes away an important feature of the nostalgia being sold here — its soundtrack.

Another big problem. The film’s in untranslated Scottish, the English tongue at its slangyest and least decipherable. You can hope your ear-brain connection gets you into the -playful-musical rhythms of the dialect. But truth be told, I’d bet anybody who hannae lived in Dundee for a wee spell is going to spend a lot of time wondering “What’re they on about, then?”

This isn’t your typical “Trainspotting” Scots-you-can-decipher, albeit a few moments after the phrase has invaded your ear. This is full-on haggis and Highland Park whisky Scots. Oy.

Young Berry makes an agreeable lead, and Lee — perhaps playing a fictional character, considering her “function” in the film — adds sex appeal and nicely humanizes chancer Davie as her character makes him explain himself and face himself when things go wrong because his biggest lie to one and all is “I know what I’m doing.”

Thanks to them, and no thanks to the film’s delusions of Guy Ritchie “underworld” wit, “Schemers” manages to be a tolerable mess of a movie, but little more.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Conor Berry, Sean Conner, Tara Lee, Grant Robert Keelan, Carolyn Bonnyman, Kit Clark, David Izzat and Alastair Thomson Mills

Credits: Directed by Dave McLean, scripted by Dave McLean, Khaled Spiewak and Kyle Titterton. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:29

Hand it to Paramount. They keep making hay out of their most popular intellectual properties, “Star Trek,” and now “The Godfather.”

Miles Teller plays producer/hustler Albert Ruddy, Matthew Goode is handsome slick and vain studio honcho Robert Evans, with Giovanni Ribisi as mobster Joe Colombo, Dan Fogler as Coppola…

April 28 film buffs will be gathered on Paramount+ for “The Offer.”

The gold, or at least silver standard for teen heist movies was filmed way back in 2004. “The Perfect Score” was about breaking in and stealing the answers to that year’s SAT at the Princeton Testing Center, where such data was kept out of the reach of those willing to cheat the system.

The film put future stars Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans and Erika Christensen together, managed a tight, suspenseful and sometimes “Breakfast Club” amusing caper, and opened to middling reviews. But being topical, this little slice of middle class teen rebellion is aging well.

“Coin Heist” dips that formula in even more privilege as it concerns prep school kids trying to break into the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia for a caper they hope will “refill the school’s endowment.” It earned a limited release in 2017, to no fanfare, and as of yet, its stars — Alex Saxon, Alexis G. Zall, Sasha Pieterse, Jay Walker — haven’t emerged as among the major names of their generation.

But what Emily Hagins’ film, based on an Elisa Ludwig novel, gets right is that all-important hook — the caper. It takes us into unfamiliar territory — a Federal factory where coins are made — and shows how ingenious kids might figure out a way to “cheat the system, for a change,” it being a given that even as teens in an exclusive prep school, “the system” is giving them the business.

All those provisos aside, I liked it. I love the genre, and the idea that somebody could bone up on how to do this by “watching 12 heist pictures back to back” is an easy one for any movie buff to endorse.

We see Jason (Saxon), the flighty, “never finishes anything” headmaster’s son, dive into “Gambit.” He might have also watched “The Hot Rock” and “Going in Style,” “Tower Heist” and “Topkapi,” and probably some version or all versions of “Ocean’s Eleven.” One thing he knows they’re going to need to pull this off is “a team.”

Even the grungy clever hacker-chick (Zall) who first broaches the idea to him hasn’t wholly come to that conclusion. She’s trying to impress him, we figure, because he’s hot.

But they’re going to need footballer/part-time mechanic Benny (Walker), who might or might not join up, even though the white kids assume he’ll be down with this because he’s streetwise, aka Black.

And they don’t know it, but Miss Hyper-Organized Class President, Dakota (Pieterse), would be perfect at logistics, “coming up with alibis” and play-acting her way into the Mint to get a security pass they can copy.

They’re driven to this because Jason’s dad is arrested during the art class’s Mint tour for embezzling school funds and putting Dennington Prep in jeopardy. Everybody’s concerned about being able to finish school there. Jason feels spillover guilt for this. And Dakota’s motivated because all extra-curricular activities are the first things to go, “and we’ll have to have the Winter Formal in the cafeteria, unfortunately.”

There’s friction from the start, with Jason’s reliable unreliability clashing with hacker Alice’s risk tolerance and snobby Dakota’s recruiting of jock/engineering whiz Benny taking on a teasing flirtation that might not be the smartest move.

Their art teacher (Michael Cyril Creighton) is a little suspicious, and board of trustees chair Mr. Smerconish (Mark Blum) might have to be tricked, kept in the dark and outwitted.

Because there’s no way these kids can pull this burglary-based-scheme off, right?

Hagins, of “My Sucky Teen Romance,” doesn’t deliver much in the way of humor or witty banter here. There are a few sparks set off among our leads, but the director keeps her eyes on the heist and it plays.

The finale is seriously undigested, but that’s consistent with the film as a whole. It’s a workable, salvageable caper comedy that needed more comedy and a heist picture that needed a bit more interesting content and character development outside of the heist.

The actual heist she got right. It’s what leads up to it and follows it that she botches.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Alex Saxon, Alexis G. Zall, Sasha Pieterse, Jay Walker, Michael Cyril Creighton and Mark Blum

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emily Hagins, based on a novel by Elisa Ludwig. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

You know what this original trailer reinforces? The iconic characters, the legends playing them, the instantly recognizable music?

It’s the idea that “The Godfather” was a “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter” for grownup film lovers. An alien universe obsessively detailed, life and death stakes, villains, a young hero to be tempted and corrupted, all summoned up by a few perfect notes on a score, a line, a shadow, a gesture.

Film fans have obsessed over this film, this trilogy, for decades. Granted, they and we arent cosplayers. But geeking out over a movie can happen to great films, too.

Most of us associate these movies with the holidays, as the third and I believe the second “Godfather” movies opened on Christmas.

But the original came out on today’s date in March of 1972.

A high end housing development is going up on a big British farm that changed hands under unsavory circumstances, a development resented by locals, including the family that lost that farm, and all on ancient land with Druid legends attached to it.

There’s a star sculptress whose work is so prized the fact that she’s creating Druid monoliths to decorate each McMansion’s entrance is a huge selling point. She and her unemployed filmmaker husband are thus presented with the first finished home.

And on this night, the hustler-developer, his lady fair and the latest designer drug are guests for a dinner celebration.

Things are sure to get interesting as “alpha male” posturing, old resentments, broken promises and a toxic personalities are thrown together. And all that’s before masked intruders, the “real” “Barbarians,” show up.

The writing-directing debut of producer Charles Dorfman (“The Lost Daughter,” “The Honest Thief”) lurches from tetchy to tense to downright harrowing as two couples/four people spend the first and much of second act showing us how they really think of each other, only to be brutally tested by the goons who crash their party.

They’re mostly Brits. Can they learn the concept of “United we stand, divided we might not survive the night?”

Catalina Sandino Moreno (“Maria Full of Grace” and TV’s “The Affair”) is Eva, the confident sculptress who figures this new house and and between-projects filmmaker Adam (Iwan Rheon of “Game of Thrones””) is a “fresh start”for them. Bitter, jealous Adam may not agree.

Because tall, swaggering, showboating developer Lucas (Tom Cullen of “Knightfall”) is a bully and a blowhard and isn’t likely to let them — or Adam — forget what he figures they owe him. Whatever else Tom’s wife Chloe (Inès Spiridonov) might be, “enabler” seems to top her list of obligations.

Their evening is already on tipsy tenterhooks when Lucas trots out an eyedrop that promises to be “like ten years of therapy in one night.” And then comes that knock on the door and you-know-what gets real.

Dorfman and his players handle the long, nerve-fraying build-up with skill. And the payoff, with its twists, escalating violence and pointed causes-and-effects, doesn’t disappoint even if it’s a tad thin on surprises.

There are scores of home invasion thrillers that “Barbarians” borrows from — “The Strangers” and the French film “Them” seem most directly related to it. Wrapped in the trappings of horror, this formula action picture doesn’t get by so much on frights as on visceral trapped-and-trying-to-escape situations, which pay off nicely.

And as the violence escalates and whatever was getting out of hand gets seriously out of hand, “Barbarians” can turn downright riveting.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Iwan Rheon, Tom Cullen, Inès Spiridonov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Charles Dorfman. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:29

This looks like a splattered, splintered hoot with a helping helping of “G’Dye.”

April 14, “Wyrmwood” comes to Dunsinane…of Brisbane. Crikey!

The 2020 Czech drama “Servants (Sluzobníci)” could not be a more timely home streaming release, it being a drama set not long after the 1968 Warsaw Pact, aka “Soviet Union” aka “Russian” invasion, “regime change” and occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Director Ivan Ostrochovský’s austere black and white tale is a story of Czech passive resistance running up against fearful, over-eager collusion in the aftermath of that “keep the satellite states in line” assault. It’s a parable-as-crucible for the country as a whole, a timely reminder of past-and-present Russian repression set in a Catholic seminary.

Juraj and Michael (Samuel Skyva and Samuel Polakovic) are friends who join the prestigious Prague Catholic school for priests together. It’s around 1970, and priests and Party bureaucrats alike are obsessed with interpretations of the late Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, “Pacem in terris.” Priests at the seminary, and some of the more tuned-in and activist students, take that edict to heart, determined to stand up for human rights in the face of a brutal crackdown on civil liberties.

Those doing the cracking down, led by a government minister (Vlad Ivanov) “in the churches department,” are hellbent on interpreting the encyclical as an order AGAINST activist priests. This party-member/minister is determined to ferret out dissent in the seminary in order to please his Russian overlords.

We’re shown unanimous votes in the now-rubber-stamp legislature, and the seeming compliance if not downright collusion by the chancellor (Vladimír Strnisko) who faces “visits” that are more like “inspections” from this Ivan apparatchik.

When the chancellor cautions the new class about “some of our brothers strayed from the righteous path” (in Czech with subtitles) the previous year, he’s not talking about sex or any of the modern church’s biggest scandals. He’s talking about putting up the wrong sort of Biblical reference and call to action on the bulletin board.

Just such a note gets all their typewriters impounded, as if the goons can ferret out a dissenter this way.

As the film’s opening scene is a car pulling into a tunnel to reveal a body in the trunk, we know the stakes. Do the young priests?

One friend is approached, recruited and joins the secret group within the school which obtains and passes on smuggled-in books, and when crackdowns start, knows which payphone to call Radio Free Europe’s tip-line about this crackdown, that arrest, a suspicious death-in-custody or a clergical hunger strike.

The other friend? He might feel left out. And as the surveillance outside and interrogations inside ramp up, very young men face life or death consequences head-on as the chancellor does all in his power to “keep this school open.” But at what cost?

Even the man doing the persecuting is paying a price. He’s 50something and looks much older, living alone, in poor health with what we can see is a worsening case of stress-exacerbated eczema.

Ostrochovský’s film, which he co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Marek Lescák, isn’t a Cold War thriller or account of espionage behind the Iron Curtain, although there are hints of those genres around the edges. “Servants” is about those literal “servants” weighing what they know about right and wrong against what their elders — teachers, either conspiratorial or cowed, and the Russian-controlled government — are demanding of them.

The interrogations are quiet and coercive with just enough menace to heighten the moral dilemma such victims faced. Just a generation before, their parents had lived under German Nazi occupation, and strained to resist it. Now, it’s Russian communists. Are they up to the challenge, prepared for the mortal consequences if they’re ratted out, caught or falsely accused?

Ostrochovský never quite achieves “riveting” with this narrative. But he’s made a chilling reminder of the Bad Old Days, when the Cold War might have given the world moral clarity about who was for freedom and civil liberties and who sought to quash them. There was a cost to that clarity. It came with the price of a planet living on a nuclear-tipped edge and ordinary people on the front lines facing prison, torture or death for not sitting by and waiting for rescue from the Free World, but speaking out and taking the consequences when the stakes could not have been higher.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Samuel Skyva, Samuel Polakovic, Vlad Ivanov, Vladimír Strnisko

Credits: Directed by Ivan Ostrochovský, scripted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Marek Lescák and
Ivan Ostrochovský A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:20

A practice engrained by years in newspapers has me avoiding the use of staged/photoshopped promotional photos for reviews of films.

But this image so perfectly encapsulates the Japanese weeper romance “Love Like the Falling Petals,” that avoiding it wouldn’t be fair to the reader.

It’s an insipid “meet cute” romance that never lives up to that introduction, a maudlin meander through an old fashioned Tokyo courtship (mostly chaste) that takes a turn towards “Disease of the Week” TV movie. And that’s rarely a label we trot out for films we endorse.

Yoshihiro Fukagawa’s film, based on a novel by Keisuke Uyama, reaches for a love-is-fleeting-but-love-can-be-eternal message yet struggles to not be love-can-be-damned-boring in this soggy, sentimental slog.

A young photographer (Kento Nakjami) voice-over narrates his love story with the hair dresser (Honoka Matsumoto) he took almost a year to ask out.

“People’s hearts can be more fickle than flower petals,” everybody seems to know. But when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, he gets up his nerve and springs an invitation on her while he’s in her chair. It’s just that he abruptly turns his head as he does.

Blood and profuse apologies fill the Penny Lane Salon. But Misaki’s tears and offer to “pay your medical bills, do whatever you want,” sounds like an opening to earlobe-lopped Haruto. A “date” it is.

He’s somewhat anal retentive, fretting over what day they should go see the flowers, weather being a prime factor. She’s an orphan whose gruff, bluff bartender brother considers himself her father figure and the diners/drinkers at his pub her “family.” Threats notwithstanding, a love story begins.

But it turns out Haruto only passed himself off as a photographer. He quit an internship at a prestigious photographer’s studio and subsists on dead end jobs. Misaki lights into him, and chastened, he apologizes.

“I’ll turn the lie into truth!” (subtitled, or dubbed) he promises.

There’s a lot of apologizing here, a signature of Japanese culture that decorates almost every film you see from there. But there’s little sense of the life there and how lives are lived and how love can um BLOOM in “Love Like the Falling Petals.” The liveliest milieu is that bar, the scenery sampled is limited and the romance only turns truly “real” when she gets her “An Affair to Remember/Dark Victory” news and they part.

So the arc of this story is insipid to tragically sad. And neither extreme is certain to provoke more than an indifferent shrug from even the most saccharine-tolerant viewer.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, possible suicide

Cast: Kento Nakajima, Honoka Matsumoto

Credits: Directed by Yoshihiro Fukagawa, scripted by Tomoko Yoshida, based on the novel by
Keisuke Uyama. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

In a streaming universe where whole channels are devoted to music documentaries, it’s inevitable that almost any band you an think of, any band anybody cares about, is going to merit a film telling their story.

Many of these films are “Behind the Music” formulaic, with the odd variation on a theme. Anvil never made it, for instance.

But “The Sound of Scars,” which tells the story of Life of Agony (LOA), stands out by telling us the story of its lead singer’s transition, from tortured and sometimes even suicidal Keith Caputo, to Mina Caputo, who she is today.

This transition happened just as they were about to break big. And the film’s story arc follows takes us from replacing their singer, to bringing her back as Mina, with struggles and triumph and a refreshing level of acceptance from their fans if not the entire hardcore scene.

The members — Caputo, guitarist Joey Zampella (Joey Z), bassist Alan Robert and recent-replacement drummer Veronica Bellino — tell tales of enduring “Raging Bull” childhoods in Brooklyn (Caputo and Zampella are cousins), where alcohol, abuse and violence were a part of daily life.

The founding cousins got their starts as roadies for other Biohazrd, which played in their local metal club L’Amour, where stage-diving and “letting out (testosteroned teen) aggression on each other” with stage diving, crowd-surfing and brawls were very much a part of that cacophonous scene.

When they formed Life of Agony, with songwriter/bassist Alan Robert coming up with the name, they staked out a more melodic, possibly even radio-friendly corner of hardcore. They still had an audience member die during a show there, and spent time in court over that calamity.

Had Caputo not wrestled with “the genderlessness of life,” and eventually quit to come out and reconcile the fact that “I’d always been feminine,” even in their most rough-and-tumble days, that accidental yet inevitable consequence of violent mosh pits (“Pitting” as Joey puts it.) might have been the focus of this film. It’s all “Somebody tried to steal my sneakers” crowd-surfing fun until the ambulances show up.

Perhaps a future Pearl Jam doc will take on that.

Director Leigh Brooks, who also did a Terrorvision-on-tour doc, interviews band members, record company folks and at one point has Robert’s parents (a lot less “Raging Bull” than the Zampella/Caputos, apparently) unironically read Alan’s bleak lyrics from the back cover of one of their LPs for a “Steve Allen Show” era laugh. As music docs go, “Scars” is almost entirely reliant on one “hook” Otherwise, the range of interviews is too narrow, the entertainment value limited.

But Mina’s journey has been an interesting one and the band is very much a big deal, as Rolling Stone referred to their debut LP, “River Runs Red,” as one of the great metal albums. And the title of their latest, which also gives the name to this film, points to exactly what this troubled journey to triumph is — “The Sound of Scars.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, violence, discussions of drug abuse, suicide, adult subject matter

Cast: Mina Caputo, Joey Zampella, Alan Robert, Veronica Bellino

Credits: Directed by Leigh Brooks. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:30

This is the golden age of binge watching and streaming series. But I find the storytelling cliffhanger formulaic. And reviewing series is time consuming, and the reviews typically have no shelf life.

So I try not to invest in many of those.

But Mr. “Baby Driver,” Tony in “West Side Story” as an American reporter on the Japanese underworld? I’m setting aside the time for that.

Japan remains the most exotic of locales, a manga distillation of east meets west with distinct imprints on sports, romance, sex, gambling, gangsterism and cuisine.

HBO Max, you have our attention.