Movie Nation

It can seem that there have been as many film versions of “Cyrano de Bergerac” as there are stage productions of Edmond Rostand’s timeless romance. I can remember animated ones and bloody ones, witty ones and Cyranos set in high schools and in rural fire departments.

But modernizing it inevitably sweetens it up and strips away the tragedy of it all. You have to go back to the late 17th/early 18th century for audiences to tolerate “Cyrano” as the broken-hearted figure he truly is.

This latest tale of the swordsman, wit and lover too “ugly” to woo fair Roxanne is based on the 2018 stage musical, with stars Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett reprising the lead roles. And it’s just lovely, with all the romantic longing, the heartbreak and the waste of war intact.

And then there are the sweet songs by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, mournful ballads that do the things musical numbers do so well — express longing, loss, venal rage and fatalism, and in ways that let the characters show us that mere words and moist, laughing or flashing eyes aren’t enough when it comes to expressing emotions this intense.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences didn’t pay this latest take on an old fashioned romance much heed. The songs feel modern, but lean more to ballads than the “Hamilton” hip hop of Lin Manuel-Miranda. The casting is daring, not exactly A-list prestigious, but quite good.

So let’s just say the Academy can suck eggs. This is gorgeous, and if it isn’t my favorite “Cyrano” (Jose Ferrer, one more bow, if you please.), it’s still a damned fine interpretation.

Joe Wright (“Atonement,””Darkest Hour”), moving the production to ancient and sundrenched Sicily, makes the fanciful characters and situations seem flesh-and-blood real. He takes us from a riot in the theater, where insults and wordplay lead to bloody swordplay, to balcony confessions of true love and to a grim, grey and expressionistic battlefield where the men who would woo Roxanne face their fate.

The story, as if you need reminding — Roxanne (Bennett of “Hillbilly Elegy” and “The Girl on the Train”) sashays around the unnamed city like the belle of the ball, confiding much, if not all, to her “dearest friend,” the soldier and poet Cyrano de Bergerac.

This Cyrano (Dinklage, fresh off “Game of Thrones”), who thinks himself too “ugly” to woo the fair lady hasn’t got the infamous nose standing in his way. He is a dwarf, and a sharp-tongued and short-tempered one to boot. He ridicules and bullies a hammy star actor of the day off the stage, is challenged by a foppish friend (Joshua James) of the Duke (Ben Mendelsohn) right there on that stage, in front of Roxanne and her suitor, the imperious, lusty Duke himself.

Whilst Cyrano is trying to impress Roxanne and spare the theater from being turned into a “stye,” Roxanne is swooning at the sight of a new recruit to Cyrano’s regiment, The Guards. Christian, played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. (“Waves,””The Photograph”), is young and handsome and just as smitten. But he’s a tad green.

When Roxanne insists her friend, Cyrano, look after the lad in the army, “I am your servant” is all he can say. Dinklage lets us see the utter devastation behind Cyrano’s eyes.

He will write the lady letters on Christian’s behalf. He will protect him from hazing rituals. And when Christian and Roxanne insist on wooing by moonlight, the romantic poet Cyrano’s baritone will be the voice from the shadows, speaking in Christian’s stead.

“I have no wit,” the lad admits. “Borrow mine” the dashing swordsman offers.

“Catfishing” was much more romantic this way, one must confess.

Bennett, who first gained notice in the pop musical (ish) “Words & Music,” has a lovely voice. Dinklage gives a pleasing, manly melancholy to Cyrano’s laments. Harrison is quite good, and Mendelsohn, playing another heavy, growls through his big number with panache.

There’s an elegant minimalism to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s choreography for the film — army recruits balletically backing Christian’s reprise of that opening “longing” song sung by his beloved, Roxanne, bakers sensually plunging their hands in the dough and in rhythm in a scene without singing.

And cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and production designer Sarah Greenwood turn the ancient locations into lived-in, loved-in and fought-over spaces bathed in light and candlelit shadow.

No, the songs aren’t going to turn the soundtrack into a best-seller, and as is often the case with this source play, the middle acts sag and slow down from the giddy opening. But the film’s battlefield scenes, with their blasted (Volcanic?) landscape and limited, backlit color-palette are the real grabbers.

That’s where the film and the score’s greatest moment plays out, doomed soldiers writing letters to loved ones before a “suicide” mission, with various infantry (including singer Glen Hansard from “Once”) singing that “heaven” will be “Wherever I Fall.”

Forget the judgment of the distracted Academy, whose “youth movement” in expanding membership is probably not the audience for an old fashioned (diversely cast) tearjerker of a musical. You’ll see it’s not just Dinklage’s stunningly-soulful, Oscar-worthy rendition of the title role that will stick with you afterwards. Cyrano is meant to make you cry, and this musical and its star do, and more than once.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, thematic and suggestive material, and brief language

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Dolan, Ruth Sheen, Anjana Vasan, Glen Hansard and Ben Mendelsohn

Credits: Directed by Joe Wright, scripted by Erica Schmidt, based on her stage musical which was based the play by Edmond Rostand. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:04

I dare say YouTube had a hand in greenlighting and titling this potentially cute and heartwarming tale, the movie Channing Tatum got to make when Marvel turned him down, to hear him tell it.

What’s huge on YouTube? Dog videos.

This one opens Thursday night/Friday.

Tony, monied, upscale and posh Winter Park is the high rent district/suburb of Orlando. I lived here for several years before moving to the coast.

Winter Park, being monied and almost Biblically prideful, designed itself a library and adjacent events center that is a wonder to behold, a showplace that holds its own among the most striking recent library builds anywhere in the world.

A fitting place for MovieNation to leave a copy of Lee Isaac Chung’s pre-Oscar “film festival film,” the quirky character study “Abigail Harm?” Film Movement recently released all of Chung’s pre “Minari” movies, and this was the last I got around to reviewing.

Anyway, here’s one for your collection Winter Park, courtesy of Film Movement and Roger DVDseed, spreading fine cinema across the Southeast, one library and one DVD at a time.

“Anne +,” titled “Anne+ : the Film” on Netflix, is a Dutch journey of queer self-discovery that travels the vast distance between point A and point B.

Yes, that’s sarcasm.

It’s another light dip into a gay culture, this one in enlightened, liberal Amsterdam.

We meet a somewhat aimless 20something lesbian who struggles with a long distance relationship, a rambling, unfocused novel that she somehow got a book deal for despite needing a writing coach — assigned by the publisher — to write it, and mastering the whole new pronoun thing in the shifting sands of on-the-spectrum sexuality.

Well, that’s kind of comforting. It’s not just straight people who have trouble keeping pronouns um, straight.

Did Anne (co-writer Hanna van Vliet of “Quicksand”) get her book deal because the publisher thought she was cute? Maybe. Is she unsure about moving to Montreal with her lover, Sara (Jouman Fattal)? Maybe. Is she rattled and turned-on by the seriously boyishly butch drag performer Lou (Thorn Roos de Vries)? Maybe. Did she ever come out to her Dad? Maybe.

The most universally relatable thing about “Anne+” is the confusion and panic over the direction many of us haven’t figured out we want our lives to take in our 20s. That’s Anne in a nutshell.

She has her community, a close circle of friends, a nice house that she and Sara got even though Anne has no visible means of support. Was it her book advance?

And she has questions — about herself, herself and Sara, about Montreal.

The most interesting sequence in this Valerie Bisscheroux film is Anne’s dabbling in the world of drag, shown here as evolving into something more sexuality-spectrum fluid, and yet still fun. Anne doesn’t wear makeup — until she’s dolled up like a girlish man.

“Drag is about reclaiming your space,” Lou coaches one and all in Dutch with subtitles, or dubbed into English. “You’re always being looked at….Turn it into a positive!”

But even that part of “Anne +” feels a tad overfamiliar. This isn’t a movie about coming out or finding one’s tribe, place in the world, career or calling. Anne’s confusion may be more basic, something suggested by the first time she has sex with Lou. If a male-impersonator with a strap-on rocks your world, maybe you have bigger questions to consider.

Her book is to be about “gender identity,” “being queer” and “relationships.” Whoa. Stop the presses…in 1979.

Even the requisite nudity/sex scenes contrasted with “walking the canals, pondering” sequences seem something of a cliche.

And anyone with any experience of gay lifestyles or queer cinema could decorate Anne & Sara’s house — drawings and paintings of female nudes and disembodied genitalia. Gosh, who hasn’t been to a party there?

“Anne+” isn’t unpleasant to sit through. A couple of sequences — the “big argument” and “the talk” with Dad (Hein van der Heijden) stand out. His “Is this a ‘tea’ talk or a ‘whisky’ talk?” may be the truest, most heartening line in it.

But as queer “finding oneself” dramas go, it’s routine, recycled and as even the Dutch must admit, “algemeen,” “generic and undemanding.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, explicit sex

Cast: Hanna van Vliet, Jouman Fattal, Thorn Roos de Vries, Jade Olieberg

Credits: Directed by Valerie Bisscheroux, scripted by Maud Wiemeijer, Valerie Bisscheroux and Hanna van Vliet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Tom Holland the laws of physics both take a licking and keep on ticking in “Uncharted,” Sony’s big screen adaptation of the Sony video game starring Sony’s Spider-Man.

Holland’s kinetic turn as the young pickpocket/historian and bartender turned adventurer is emphatic proof that it’s not just digital effects and stuntmen in that spider suit.

But the movie? It’s as edgy as a Scooby Doo mystery, as plausible a “National Treasure” mashup with “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Let us all pause whilst Disney, which owns those last two properties, hires a screenwriter for that idea.

“Uncharted” co-stars Mark Wahlberg as the guy who might have “the key” to Magellan’s lost treasure, but who was probably cast because he’s one of two action stars who doesn’t tower over the diminutive Brit leading man. (The other? JCVD.)

Yes, there are billions in gold that the Portuguese explorer working for Spain Ferdinand Magellan found and didn’t live long enough to bring home in history’s first circumnavigation of the globe. No, the gold part isn’t true, but never mind.

When he was little, Nate Drake and his older brother Sam dreamed of tracking it down. But being orphans in Boston, fat chance of that. Sam went off on his own in his teens. Nate, the younger sibling “with pirate blood” (they think they’re descended from the first British circumnavigator, Sir Francis Drake) went to New York and mastered the light fingers that get the attention of Victor Sullivan (Wahlberg).

Actually, he knew about the kid because he met his brother. Now, he’s out to steal this golden crucifix that doubles as the key to the lost treasure. Sullivan needs a hustling, ballsy pickpocket who can hold his liquor so that they can split the $5 billion allegedly buried inside whatever those keys unlock.

You know the drill, endless “Da Vinci/Tombraider/Raiders/National Treasure” clues, an auction disrupted, a mad hunt through Barcelona and the South Pacific, because booty calls.

The complications are the heir to an ancient Spanish banking dynasty (Antonio Banderas unleashes his perfect growl), his treacherously sexy lieutenant (Tati Gabrielle) and the equally athletic, self-serving and sexy Spanish “partner” (Sophia Ali) in Nate and Vincent’s enterprise.

It begins with a “falling out of a cargo plane” set piece that we get back to later. Holland’s Nate battles gravity, and logic, and wins. Bugs Bunny Physics at its finest. And that’s not even the finale.

Barcelona always photographs well, rarely more beautifully than in this Reuben Fleisher film.

But damn, is this movie stupid and dull or what? The plot is cut-and-pasted from a half dozen other movies. Every line is more banal than the one that preceded it. A good example, the billionaire banker never travels anywhere without his vintage Mercedes 300 Gullwing. He takes the time, as it’s loaded on the cargo plane, to tell a minion “Be sure not to scratch it.”

Banderas should be chasing Oscars, starring in dramas and romances and comedies, not taking Sony’s bottomless bank for reciting the obvious.

Holland is perky enough, but the may be the most sexless role of his generally neutered career. And Wahlberg, without a good script, funny lines or a great director to insist he raise his game, only occasionally achieves “adequate.”

There’s nothing wrong with popcorn pictures that blend history and action, even if the history is bent beyond recognition and the action is as implausible a Bugs Bunny or Captain Jack Sparrow cartoon.

But the cartoon should be fun and funny, not just a collection of recycled bits from a game and a bunch of other movies.

“Video games make lousy movies” has been a truism since SEGA, and while there have been nearly tolerable exceptions, “Uncharted” isn’t one of them. And Holland may very well do a lot of his own stunts, but he’d be better served picking his own scripts.

Rating: PG-13 for violence/action and language

Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle and Antonio Banderas.

Credits: based on the Sony Play Station videogame. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:50

Sometimes, avoiding the “dating scene,” recognizing that maybe “You don’t need a man in your life” can be good advice.

Particularly if Daisy Edgar Jones’ character “connects” with a guy like the dude Sebastian Stan plays in “Fresh.”

This horrific take on dating today…and letting him cook for you… opens in theaters and on Hulu March 4.

Sharlto Copley takes us inside the head of infamous, murderous crank Ted Kaczynski in “Ted K,” a straightforward and yet surprisingly disturbing look at the man the FBI labeled and hunted as “the Unabomber” for some 17 years.

What’s surprising about this account isn’t his methods, his cunning and his amoral, horrifically random selection of targets. It’s how relatable the South African Copley (“District 9”) makes this monster.

The classic “dangerous, disturbed loner,” Kaczynski moved to a 120 square foot cabin he and his brother built in the mountains outside of Lincoln, Montana. A math prodigy who entered Harvard at 16, he checked out of the human race early on. In Montana, he worked odd jobs without much success or enthusiasm, hunted for meat and cadged cash off his mother and brother for years as he pioneered a version of the “off the grid” lifestyle others have emulated since.

And whatever state he moved to Montana in, the solitude and the escalating “disruptive sounds” and “destruction” of technology all around him, from oil exploration and lumbering to yahoo motocross biking and snowmobiling drove him off the deep end, vowing revenge and keeping a journal of his grudges, his plans and his bombings in a numerical code.

Director and co-writer Tony Stone built his script out of Kaczynski’s endless writings, his letters to the editor, his phone calls with his increasingly estranged and eventually alarmed family, and out of his infamous newspaper-published “manifesto.”

And Copley brings the articulate, twisted and deranged writings to life.

From the first scene, when Ted K” breaks into a mountainside chalet — busting through the wall with an axe, not through a window or door — Copley makes us forget this isn’t a documentary. Bearded, tetchy and wild-eyed, socially awkward in even the most innocuous situations, his Kaczynski must have been a trial for the locals, many of whom seem to know him and treat him as sane when they had to know that Illinois transplant wasn’t right in the head.

We see him ranting at “evil jets,” passenger and military, shooting at oil company helicopters hauling explosives to do sonic geologic prospecting for oil. As Stone plays up every disturbance to the quiet of nature, from snowmobiles to sawbills, we start to get it. And maybe we kind of see what turned this off-the-IQ charts/on-the-spectrum oddball into the ticking time bomb he became.

His turn to violence is horrific in its topicality, as we see deranged outliers all over North America arm for war and threaten their own enemies lists of grievance. “Violence,” Kaczynski notes, is condemned. But “history shows it does work.”

Stone’s film tilts us towards Ted K’s point of view as the public radio listener/bomb-maker whistles Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” when he commits his first acts of vandalism.

He was around decades before social media took the hit for some of society’s ills, but here he was in the ’70s and ’80s, declaring that he and we needed to “stop technology before it’s too late,” before it develops ways to “control our behavior.”

Stone doesn’t turn this nut into a hero or even a “mad prophet.” Like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, the Unabomber takes the coward’s path to revenge on perceived, unwarned “enemies” — making bombs.

There are plenty of scenes of Kaczynski ranting and over-sharing to his mother about his inability to socialize and meet a woman, and blaming her for it. We see him vehemently chew on a phone company functionary over the “thefts” their clunky pay phones in Lincoln subject him to and fail to respond to neighborly efforts at humor or a sympathy.

Despite moments of normality, when he hides his arrogance, his hair-trigger temper and his brutish sexism, we wonder how anybody could have ever given him a lift, offered him a job or let him volunteer sorting books at the local library.

Copley performance explains that. He never makes the man charming or appealing. But he humanizes this murderer, strips him of his “boogeyman” status and lets us ponder what might have been had family, neighbors, medicine or the state had enough cause or the common sense to intervene, or at least cut off the cash he needed to buy guns and gunpowder.

Rating: R for language, some sexual content and brief nudity

Cast: Sharlto Copley

Credits: Directed by Tony Stone, script by Gaddy Davis, John Rosenthal and Tony Stone. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:00

“Too Cool to Kill” is a gonzo pastiche of genres, a goofy, gorgeous and almost deliriously dizzy send-up of everything from “El Mariachi” to pretty much every gangster movie John Woo ever made.

And God knows, we all love John Woo.

It’s like a Coen Brothers version of a Tarantino tale — without the wanton bloodshed or prolific profanity.

A soundstage-bound farce from China, writer-director Wenxiong Xing’s romp is based on a 2008 Japanese film, “The Magic Hour.” But it steals from and pays affectionate homage to a score of other pictures and a lost way of of making movies as it does.

The set-up? In a netherworld of fashion and cars from the ’40s through the ’60s, with the movie-making technology to match, a mobster named Mr. Harvey (Minghao Chen) survives an assassination attempt. He’d love to meet, or maybe get his hands on the infamous “Karl the Hit Man.” But first, he’s got to shut down this dopey film he’s financed.

His idea might have been to seduce and even marry the star, Milan (Li Ma). But her director brother Miller (Lun Ai) is sure to serve up another flop. And as Milan has rejected every overture, well, money is money. Itt’s curtains for the cinematic siblings.

Except the star knows how to roll like a femme fatale. She picks up on this desire to meet “Hitman Karl.” She knows him, she says. Give her ten days and she’ll bring him to you.

“TOMORROW, it is!”

That’s how she latches on the hapless, hammy extra Wei Chenggong (Xiang Wei), a bug-eyed, over-enthusiastic ham with a beaverish grin. The actress and her director brother pitch their new “hit man” movie to him. He’ll play…Karl. There is no script. And he’ll never see the camera or crew, just “extras” and co-stars like Ms. Milan. He will “freestyle” (improvise) his scenes in this “new way of filming.”

Thus is our fake “hit-man,” a born ham, given free license to make up gestures, movements and lines as he goes, stunning the mobsters (Dayong Zhou plays Mr. Harvey’s lieutenant, Jimmy) with his manic bravado, confusing them when he figures he can do replay the scene better.

“Sorry. Let’s go AGAIN!”

He brings his own props, improvises a deliciously menacing, over-the-top bit of licking the blade of the Big Boss’s letter opener and disarms one and all with a Hollywood flourish, EVEN in the second take — when they know where he keeps his gun.

A hit man with his finger poised to give Mr. Harvey the worst ear flicking of his life isn’t to be trifled with.

“I don’t believe you can flick me to death!” Yes, that’s funny in Chinese with English subtitles.

Xiang Wei (“Another Me”) turns out to be a gifted physical comic, sliding across desks, shamelessly mugging and carrying on like a “walk on” nobody who’s just landed his big break. He is a riot, pretty much first scene to last. Everybody else has only to react for much of what he does to be funny.

Director Xing keeps this picture on its feet and on the movie. That’s despite the limited number of settings, all of them soundstages, with even the driving sequences using old fashioned rear projection. “Too Cool to Kill” never feels stagebound as it recreates a sort of British seaside town in the early ’50s — “Lying Town” where Rick’s Cafe and the Red Lobster Inn reside.

Every sequence has gags that just kill, situations that are a hoot in the making.

I’d suggest you make a game out of all the movies given a nod here (“Yojimbo,” “Singing in the Rain,” “The Killers”), in scenes recreated, costumes mimicked and the like. But that might make you miss a laugh or 33.

And even though the third act disappoints after what’s come before, Xiang Wei never does. There isn’t a lot of call for actors to pretend to be really bad at what they do. Wei may have cornered the market.

“Wait! WAIT! I’ve prepared a dance to show my PAIN!”

Rating: unrated, comic violence, some of it bloody

Cast: Xiang Wei, Li Ma, Lun Ai, Dayong Zhou and Minghao Chen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Wenxiong Xing,  based on the Fuji (Japanese) movie “The Magic Hour.” A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:49

Sharlto Copley dives into the pathology of the math prodigy turned hermit who unleashed terror from a tiny shack in the woods of Montana.

This is heavy on exposition, a trailer explaining the Doctor’s state of mind and course of action.

Eye popping, of course. Cerebral? Cumberbatch lends it that.

Easter Eggs? It wouldn’t be a Marvel trailer if it didn’t have a few of those.