Movie Nation

The people that brought us “The Wave” and “The Quake” annex another piece of disaster movie real-estate with “The Burning Sea,” a compact, tense and smart oil rig yarn that’s light on melodrama, heavy on facts and heartening in its environmental messaging.

It’s “Deep Water Horizon” without clear-cut villains or swaggering, one-liner-popping heroes. Yes, some of the genre tropes the Scandinavians choose to leave out are missed. But there are things this trilogy of “when things go wrong in a big way” thrillers do that Hollywood might be well-served in copying.

For starters, the Big One, when it comes, won’t likely arrive from space as asteroids or aliens. It could be Earth-bound and natural, with a heavy dose of the Arrogance of Man involved.

“Burning Sea” follows the team that operates a fancy new underwater drone on behalf of the Norwegian oil industry. Sofia (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is young and seriously smitten, but not with the tech support specialist Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen) who keeps Eelie, the articulated, motor-driven eel that she drives that is able to wend its way through undersea oil-rig architecture to spot problems and make or identify fixes. Sofia is in love with single-dad Stian (Henrik Bjelland), a worker on one of the scores of rigs that fuel Norway’s economy by drilling for and pumping oil out from under the North Sea.

One day, Sofia and Arthur are called on an “emergency mission” that the big boss (Bjørn Floberg) won’t disclose to them the particulars of until they’ve signed their Non-Disclosure-Agreements (NDAs).

Uh oh.

Sure enough, a rig collapsed and sank. Everybody in a suit is worried about “security” and no one seems that excited when Eelie tracks down and finds a survivor. They have just enough time to take in that video when Sofia sees something far more disturbing. Telling her boss, the aptly-named William Lie (Floberg) gets her nowhere…she thinks.

“Why don’t we leave that to the specialists,” he purrs (in Norwegian with English subtitles).

But before you can say “COVER UP,” we’re treated to a meeting with “specialists” and the government official (Christoffer Staib) in charge of this corner of the economy. Nothing is released to the press, but nothing is covered-up or sugar coated inside that meeting. They’re looking at a calamity, perhaps “something we did ourselves (man-made)” that could skill scores of people and spill “350 times” what the Deepwater Horizon disaster dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

One can’t help but find refreshing the idea that nobody ducks the awful choices this dilemma presents to every decision maker. Steps are taken, but as is the way of such movies, things don’t go according to plan. I’ll let you guess who needs rescuing and who does that rescuing.

The “Quake” director and “Wave” screenwriter (one of them) strip the movie of a lot of conflicts that a Hollywood story would have jammed-in and any movie that wants to realistically appear “American” in this day and age would have to include.

There are no greedy corporate villains. Culpability is cultural, spread over the entire country that has gotten rich in this environmentally-catastrophic business.

There is no corporate or corporate media pushback, no politicians praising oil and rooting for the sea to catch fire, no Tucker Carlson begging for an apocalypse that he can blame on somebody his overlords want to make the scapegoat.

The Norwegians here are presented in a sort of idealized consensus-building aimed at “the greater good,” the sort of image polishing one usually associates with movies made by and about China.

“The Burning Sea” lacks the pulse-pounding ticking clock to doom of an impending earthquake or a tsunamic bearing down on our heroes, vital in “The Wave” and “The Quake.” Such an element is introduced, but the editing fritters away that edge-of-your-seat excitement, no matter how much the musical score insists it’s coming.

But those shortcomings are papered-over with a few scenes of genuine suspense and performances that go all-in on portraying these folks as slack-jawed at the scale of what they’re dealing with, but professionals ever intent on “working the problem.” Bosses soberly pass on awful news to those impacted by it, and people caught up in the maelstrom may look wild-eyed with fear, and seem manic, but they never panic.

And any time you can top your tale of crisis, calamity and heroism with sacrifice, pathos and a hopeful message, you call that a “win,” in Hollywood or Aelsund.

Rating: PG-13 for peril, some disturbing images, language and brief partial nudity

Cast: Kristine Kujath Thorp, Henrik Bjelland, Rolf Kristian Larsen and Bjørn Floberg

Credits: Directed by John Andreas Andersen, scripted by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Lars Gudmestad. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:44

We know the minute we see the old man strike up a conversation with the young woman that she’s a ghost. Serene, silent and spectral, it doesn’t matter that he chats as if they’re old acquaintances. Something about him (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) and her (Noutnapha Soydara) suggests that they’ve met this way, on this long dirt road in rural Laos, many times.

The latest feature from Mattie Do, the LA daughter of Laotian refugees who moved back to Laos to become the country’s “only female filmmaker,” is a quiet and ominous story set in the future, but scripted and acted like an ancient folk tale. “The Long Walk” isn’t exactly a thriller, more of a mystery. And it’s science fiction with the barest traces of that genre in its slow-moving narrative.

But whatever you call this unicorn filmed by a unicorn, it’s engrossing and arresting.

We wonder about the old man from the start. He gathers scrap to sell in his village market, gets paid via an electronic implant in his arm, and seems to always be walking, with or without that lonely young woman who knows him but never speaks.

We’ve seen skulls half-buried in the dirt, and women suffering grievous injuries. There’s someone missing from that market. And as he always seems to be around these activities, we size him up as a serial killer or a shaman, because when the cops interrogate him and poke around his house, it’s as if they suspect him and also want him to contact the missing and presumedly dead woman.

A boy (Por Silatsa) lives along that same road, the son of an ill-tempered , hard-drinking father and sickly mother. The kid sees the young woman, too. And when the old man and the boy meet, what the child is told about her and himself is troubling, mind-blowing and illuminating for this tale of the unsettled dead and the superstitious, confused living.

They’re not the only ones. The Christopher Larsen (“Creepshow”) and Douangmany Soliphanh script is cryptic, giving up in secrets in tiny, belated servings. Director Do (Larsen wrote “Dearest Sister” for her, and they co-wrote “Creepshow”) patiently doles out clues and fixates on tone and the novelty of the setting.

It may be the future, but Laotian burial practices and rituals are treated as eternal. Characters like the old man leave oranges at roadside shrines, which the ghost eats and shares with the boy. There’s modernity, and a shamanistic “commune with the dead” tradition in addition to the mystery of who these women were or are and who is making them vanish, leaving their families grasping for closure.

Deaths we witness aren’t happening in real time, but in the past, the future or some Mobius loop containing both.

The patient storytelling won’t be to every taste, and truth be told, not a whole lot happens over the course of these 111 minutes. This isn’t jolting horror, and nothing about it could be pitched as “scary.”

But Do isn’t just an “only Laotian” novelty act. She’s not making commercial films (this 2019 festival film is just now earning distribution), and while there’s always a place at film festivals for movies from an exotic, little-filmed locale set in an exotic culture, one has to hope she’ll figure out “action” and how incidents, not tone alone, make for entertaining drama that plays beyond the film festival circuit.

Still, there’s style and a vivid sense of place in this most unusual movie, a film of future tech and sonic booming jets and unelectrified farms where the work is still done by hand, the way it has been for hundreds of years.

That makes this “Walk” long, but rewarding in the end.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast:Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Noutnapha Soydara, Por Silatsa, Vilouna Phetmany

Credits: Directed by Mattie Do, scripted by Christopher Larsen and Douangmany Soliphanh. A Yellow Veil release.

Running time: 1:51

It isn’t his “Twilight” stardom or his piece of the Harry Potter universe that has me intrigued to see Robert Pattinson’s take on “Batman.”

The director isn’t a lure either. We’ve had Burton and Nolan. Other filmmakers’ imprint on the franchise has been fleeting.

But the startling variety of roles R. Patts has taken on, with varying degrees of success, suggest a curiosity that could make an interesting rich, reclusive and haunted Dark Knight.

“The Batman” opens March 4.

What do you make of this? VERY Japanese, really…out there.

Who do you think the title is referring to as “The Cherry Bushido?” Surely not…

Anyway, this is odd looking sword-and-sorcery and nationalism and North Korean missile provocations mashup. March 11 we shall see what we shall see.

The early scenes of Martha Coolidge’s Holocaust romance “I’ll Find You” cover over-familiar ground with a Polish classical music subtext. A flashback takes us back to the days our future lovers met, as rival tween prodigies in pre-war Lodz, Poland. The foreshadowing is obvious and we aren’t the only ones who know the awful things to come.

The only thing that distinguishes the film’s opening act is the fact that a real violinist/actress, Ursula Parker, plays one of the fiddling kids. As Rachel Rubin, she is impressive, playing the real pieces by Chopin and others. Rachel is a bit of a smarty pants who lords it over the lesser mortals at their school. And young fellow fiddler Robert Pulaski (Sebastian Croft) is intimidated by her.

Besides, “she’s Jewish and I’m Catholic. There could never be a ‘crush.'” Famous last words.

The director of “Valley Girl,” “Rambling Rose” and “Lost in Yonkers” cuts back and forth between the kids as they meet and the young adults (Adelaide Clemens of “The Great Gatsby,” and Leo Suter) re-connect just as Poland is having to pay heed to what Germany is doing in Czechoslovakia, with Rachel engaged to another and Robert on the cusp of fame, not as a violinist, but as a tenor.

And through all this, I shrugged the picture off as it just lies there, flat, uninvolving and waiting for somebody to shock it to life. That’s what happens when the great Stellan Skarsgård shows up for the second time. As a great German tenor named Benno Moser (Skarsgård’s “Mamma Mia!” voice means his singing is dubbed), he’d met Robert as a boy soprano, telling him to look him up after his voice changed. Robert (newcomer Suter, quite good) takes him up on that as he flees Poland after Rachel and her family are rounded up.

Showing up at the tenor’s estate, Robert fears he’s gambled on a German who might not be a “Good German,” and willing to help him save Rachel. The aging diva does nothing to put his mind at ease, bulling past any talk of a young woman shipped to Auschwitz. He just wants to know about the kid’s voice. C’mon, he says as he sits at the piano. A duet!

“Hitler has only got one ball,” the tenor bellows, starting in on an infamous ditty beloved by the Brits, sung to the “River Kwai” “Col. Bogey’s March. “Göring has two but very small…”

The lad has his answer, and the obligation to join in.

“Himmler is rather sim’lar, But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!”

Skarsgård lifts the movie and makes the later acts a serious improvement over the earliest ones.

The stakes have already been raised, with death all around them. The young singer has to control his emotions when they’re called on to perform Wagner to the Fuhrer and his minions. And the opera legend gradually gets involved in trying to save the star violinist of the Auschwitz inmate orchestra.

The war goes on and on Robert’s promise that “I’ll find you” and that they’ll meet at Carnegie Hall seems more and more remote.

The leads don’t have dazzling chemistry, but that’s partly due to the script giving them few opportunities for that.

It’s a fictional story and while it more or less tracks the course of the war, start to finish there’s this jerky, lurching quality to the narrative, with little flow and zero urgency considering the woman was at a death camp, after all.

Coolidge, who has done mostly TV in recent decades, has a film with built-in pathos and stakes and beautiful music, and she only manages a scene or two that deliver anything like real emotion.

Thus “I’ll Find You” comes off like a lot of the lip-sync’d singing and mimed playing of the actors portraying musicians — fake and lacking the heart and passion necessary to pull this off.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Adelaide Clemens, Leo Suter, Ursula Parker, Sebastian Croft, Stephen Dorff, Connie Nielsen and Stellan Skarsgård.

Credits: Directed by Martha Coolidge, scripted by David S. Ward and Bozenna Intrator. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:56

So who are the Scandinavian commandoes fighting up there near the Artic Circle in this mid-apocalyptic thriller?

Maybe Russians?

March 18, on Netflix.

This March 11 thriller from RLJE and Shudder is about going home because “Your mama’s grave has been vandalized,” and realizing that hell’s bells, there’s a way on but not way OFF this island.

I can’t be the first to notice Jocelin Donahue looks like Famke Jansen, the Next Generation.

Looks like a number of driving situations I’ve stumbled into Way Down South, I tell you what.

There’s a little “ick factor” that nestles itself into the heart of today’s Around the World with Netflix venture, the sci-fi action rom-com “Ai Love You.” This Thai film expects us to root for a machine that’s taken over a hapless human’s body.

But the AI, named “Dob,” takes over Bob out of love. I guess that makes it all right. Hey, “one night in Bangkok” is all that matters.

“AI Love You” is a glossy, high sheen science fiction imagining of the near future, when smart buildings are the rule and digital personal assistants come with that package — intrusive, nosy, interfering and always “monitoring” digital assistants.

Dob the robotic building (cute) has eyes that see over the skyline, and personal data harvesting capabilities that make Facebook seem like rubbing two sticks together. Dob knows Lana (Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon) down to her temperature and heart-rate.

“How’d your date go last night?” Dob wants to know. That big presentation she had to give? She blew it, but then, “You heard EVERYthing,” she snaps. Lana is a little leery of this all-invasive digital babysitter’s place in futureculture.

But Dob pitches in with her do-over marketing presentation, and it’s a hit. She overshares with him, and sure enough, he gets the wrong idea
“Love.” After is possible, after all, because “feelings are nothing but codes and numbers.”

Lana brushes him off. And that creep date Bob (Mario Maurer) who took “be a tough guy” rude-jerk suggestions from the online “Love Guru” (David Asavanond)? He doesn’t have a prayer, either.

It’s just that Bob, it turns out, works in IT with the company that maintains this particular smart building. He sees what Dob has been doing, obsessing about and stalking Lana and all. Bob attempts a “2001: A Space Odyssey” computer lobotomy/reset. That’s how Dob shocks his way into Bob’s body, and the romantic possibilities take on flesh-and-blood implications.

Can Dob as Bob turn on the charm that almost worked on “But you’re AI, it would never work” Lana, as Bob? Can Dob as Bob learn to eat, brush his teeth, speak and everything else required to operate as a human body?

There’s nothing particularly serious about this, until you start pondering where technology is taking us, whether we want it to or not.

At one point, Dob as Bob consults Bob’s building’s AI, Chip, for suggestions and advice on correcting his behavior/programming so that he doesn’t get into a nightclub fights or come on too strong to strangers, just to learn how to court Lana. Yes, a machine is helping another machine that’s guilty of a “Level 5 Body Hijack” win the fair lady.

There’s also violence here that’s aimed at both the gadgets and people, which kills any buzz that this somewhat hopeless tale might have generated.

The computer in a human body thing could have delivered laughs, but the slapstick is limited and Mauro’s jerky motions, quizzical looks and machine-as-human quirks never quite get there.

The look of this “future” is sunnier than “Blade Runner,” and the nightclubs have an ’80s Devo music video vibe.

The only laughs here are seeing how the English language dub (it’s in Thai with subtitles, or dubbed) differs — to a profane degree — with the direct Thai translation.

Computers blackmailing people to go on dates, studying us so that they can give us exactly what they calculate that we want? That’s just creepy, and no way no how should anybody be rooting for “Dob/Bob” to “get the girl” at the end.

Rating: TV-14, with violence, crude sexual innuendo and profanity

Cast: Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon, Mario Maurer and David Asavanond

Credits: Directed by Stephan Zlotescu and David Asavanond, scripted by Stephan Zlotescu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Yeah, we also recognize the distinctive vocal stylings of Sam Rockwell in this April 22 release. Sam makes this trailer fun and tasty.

But then there’s Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz, Richard Ayoade, Craig Robinson, Marc Maron, Anthony Ramos and Alex Borstein.

“Let Me Be Me” is an upbeat documentary biography of Philadelphia fashion designer Kyle Westphal.

We see him at Drexel University, prepping dresses and the like for his college program’s senior collection. We feel Kyle’s enthusiasm and attention to detail at his work. We also pick up on Kyle having a somewhat feminine voice and maybe a Forrest Whitaker droopy eyelid. He’s making eye contact, not a lot of it.

And then we see his home movies, the baby with an undeveloped eye muscle, a child who didn’t really master speech until six or later, who “didn’t relate” to his siblings or his parents.

We’re shown a montage of the way TV news — local and national — covered autism in the ’80s and ’90s. Wherever Kyle is now, he was born with a birth defect, grew up gay-but-didn’t-know-it, and he was autistic at a time medicine was slow to abandon the “childhood schizophrenia” diagnosis.

Katie Tauber and Dan Crane’s film uses home movies, interviews with Kyle and his family, his teachers and others to show us how he was and the vast support system that “Let Me Be Me” and become the engaged, creative adult he plainly is.

The filmmakers, the parents and their subject emphasize “each unique situation” nature of how lives are lived “on the spectrum,” and present Kyle as a sort of case study. A lot of things, starting with a proper diagnosis and early, persistent and exhaustive intervention, as well as “learning” from TV shows and movies, contributed to Kyle’s socialization and self-actualization.

But as this biography of an autistic fashion designer progresses and we notice who most of those outside the family are giving testimonials to Kyle’s treatment and his prognosis are from the same “institute,” “Let Me Be Me” prompts a wary raised eyebrow of skepticism.

The film is not just about Kyle’s unique story. It’s also a not-skeptical-enough endorsement of the Son Rise program of behavioral treatment for autistic kids, an immersive, all-in commitment that some experts say may have value and may get positive results, but lacking peer-reviewed science to back it up, could be just a “somewhat” effective and even well-intentioned goldmine for the family that founded it.

Later efforts to walk back this wholehearted endorsement in the film are halfhearted at best.

“Let Me Be Me” is on its surest ground in showing the ever-evolving understanding of autism and how radically views about it have changed just in last few decades. We get a sense of the desperation that every parent we know who’s dealt with this, that we’ve ever seen interviewed on TV about the subject must feel, the hope for a “cure.” We even hear the judgmental “You just need to get control of your child” that parents faced until medical science reassured them “It’s not our fault.”

The footage of the Son Rise-sponsored “play room” stripped of distractions where parents and volunteers kept Kyle company, joined in with games of his own invention, is most fascinating. And hearing Kyle give an insider’s view of the autism experience, why an autistic child spins, repeats gibberish phrases (Disney cartoons provide a lot of “Bippy, boppity boos”) and covers him-or-herself in blankets or hides under cushions is illuminating as well.

A play room that cuts down on the overstimulating outside world — vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, noisy siblings, TV — seems to give an autistic child a calming baseline to start experiencing the world from.

Hearing Kyle talk about “learning how to act” from the TV shows his siblings and peers loved is also interesting. “Buffy” and “Alias” and others shows showed him behaviors that passed for a “norm,” and “Gossip Girl” gave him a future outlet for his childhood Disney princess fascination — fashion.

Aside from its tacit Son Rise approval, “Let Me Be Me” has value in reinforcing the difficult concept we hear so much from autism experts, that every child on that spectrum truly is a “unique” case. The film, Kyle and his family suggest a “whatever works” ethos that can be heartening to desperate parents looking for something that helps with a child they can’t reach.

But you don’t have to dig into Son Rise’s effectiveness or financials to know that kind of “outside the box” and “outside science” thinking is what drives the Jenny McCarthys of the world as well. “Evoling understanding” or not, we don’t know “whatever works” is working, or just a case of misdiagnosis, until experts study it and their peers weigh in to back them up.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Kyle Westphal, Jennifer Westphal, Jeff Westphal, Barry Neil Kaufman

Credits: Directed by Dan Crane and Katie Tauber, scripted by Dan Crane. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:15