Movie Nation

After last year’s Oscars announced the “arrival” of director Lee Isaac Chung, those clever celluloid archivists at Film Movement rounded up the Korean-American filmmaker’s earlier works and released them as DVDs and on Film Movement+.

Seeing “Munyurangabo,” “Abigail Harm” and “Lucky Life” could give away the style, tropes and ensemble that Chung would call on for “Minari,” his most personal film, a drama about family, culture shock and the Korean-American immigrant experience in rural Wisconsin.

“Abigail Harm,” a modern day fairytale of romance, love and loneliness in an empty/not-entirely-empty New York, features future “Minari” co-star Will Patton as a wounded stranger who grants a lonely woman who reads to the blind (Amanda Plummer) a wish for saving him from pursuers. Patton also narrates the film in self-consciously arty voice over.

“It is when she is face to face with someone that she feels most alone.”

“Self-consciously arty” applies to the film as well. It’s a somber, downbeat and slow meditation on love and loneliness, and one can see the patient storytelling style that has become Chung’s trademark on this 2012 release.

We meet Abigail as she goes about her routine, making visits to blind clients, reading from books and newspapers and sorting through their mail, if they so desire.

The picture’s tone is set in its abrupt but quiet open. Abigail reads aloud a long passage from “Alice in Wonderland.”

Burt Young plays a tetchier “new client” who insults her voices and barks/pleads, “Left to right, OK? Left to right” about how he wants to experience his daily newspaper.

Abigail is also fielding calls from the nursing home where her father is “always going in and out.” She won’t be browbeaten into another “emergency” visit.

“It has nothing to do with how much I love him or don’t love him.”

She walks through the seemingly empty city, wandering abandoned apartment buildings or along disused piers. Abigail “spends her days never being seen by anyone,” our narrator admits, a play on the fact that there is no one in the streets, and her clients can’t see.

And then the narrator shows himself. He’s got a gash in his gut, he’s manic and somewhat panicked. And he pleads “Please, hide me!”

When she does, and when the danger has passed, this disheveled stranger prattles on and on about this and that in rushed stream of consciousness whisper. He wants to repay her, and cash won’t do.

“Have you ever been in love? I can arrange it.”

And that’s how, on one of her daily rambles, she stumbles across the naked, silent young Japanese man (Tetsuo Kuramochi). Abigail drapes a wrap over him, takes him home and proceeds to feed him and talk to this silent stranger, beaming all the while.

What Chung and co-writer Samuel Gray Anderson give us is a truncated relationship, the highs, lows and abrupt breaks and make-ups of a love affair, much of it with only one character talking.

It’s freighted with slender, sometimes obvious metaphors, and whispered about via narration.

“Abigail Harm” is somewhat pretentious and entirely too slow and self-conscious to be of more than passing interest to a casual film fan. And even the cognoscenti might find the labor to plumb its meaning spoils any joy that could spin out of another Amanda Plummer eccentric.

Of the three features Chung made leading up to “Minari,” this is by far the dullest. Munyurangabo” was a fascinating and ambitious debut, but the films — years apart — that followed were internalized bores, lacking incident or much in the way of dramatic tension or novelty — “film festival movies” that could only exist in the rarified air of film fanatic gatherings.

Perhaps that’s why film festival goers were so bowled over by “Minari,” as it has far more incident, drama and pathos than his earlier films. It’s Chung’s great leap forward. Watch “Abigail Harm” only if you want to see how far he had to leap.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sex

Cast: Amanda Plummer, Tetsuo Kuramochi, Burt Young and Will Patton.

Credits: Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, scripted by Samuel Gray Anderson and Lee Isaac Chung. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:20

Here’s the TV commercial for this summer release.

Yup, “Nope” looks cryptic and creepy and big and outdoorsy. Daniel Kaluuya costars, with Steven Yuen and Donna Mills and horror mainstay Michael Wincott.

Love that Keke.

Well, at least they kept “the cute.” Some of it, anyway.

The sequel to the glib and engaging “Tall Girl,” telling of the trials and tribulations of a towering beauty at her Louisiana high school settled on a theme — self-doubt — and added a few cast members.

But “Tall Girl 2” never manages to surprise as it skips semi-merrily down the same primrose path as its predecessor.

Jodi (Ava Michelle) is still tall, still a bit awkward and clumsy. But those traits only come out as she’s rehearsing for the spring musical. She’s landed the lead in “Bye Bye, Birdie.” She high fives her way down the hallway every day. Insecure kids come to her for advice.

And a lot of people are still talking about her big Homecoming Dance speech.

She’s still with Dunk (Griffin Gluck), still mad at Swedish exchange-hunky/dorky Stieg (Luke Eisner), still pals with aspiring designer Fareeda (Anjelika Washington), still in a heated rivalry with mean girl Kimmy (Clara Wilsey), still getting self-absorbed advice from her shorter beauty-pageant contestant older sister (Sabrina Carpenter).

“Harper! This is not ABOUT you!” “I always forget that.”

We know pretty much everything that’s coming here, from anxiety attacks over her big role on the stage, more rivalry from back-stabbing Kimmy, a contrived break-up with Dunk, a possible new love interest. Only now that’s this voice in her head sewing one doubt after the other about her self-worth, her acting, her place in life, the works.

Oh that’s nothing, says Harper. Everybody has that.

“It’s just a horrible part of life that never goes away…like Maroon Five.”

That’s pretty much what we come back for, why sequels are cinematic comfort food. We know what we’re getting, and we like the clever quips, the funny-cute parents (Angelina Kinsey from “The Office,” and Steve Zahn).

Maybe some viewers check into this movie for affirmation, and in what almost passes for an edgy scene, the drama teacher/director of the play challenges Jodi’s victimhood.

“Being tall’s not a real problem!” Lady, didn’t you see the first film?

We did. And “The Kissing Booth” movies and other teen rom-coms that Netflix has all but cornered the market on. Thus, the lack of any real surprises. What’s worse, even the “mean” characters have their edges rubbed off.

I’m pretty sure they dubbed Michelle’s singing voice (few of us can sing well enough to carry a movie about doing a high school musical).

As in the first film, Carpenter, Kinsey, Wilsey and Zahn carry it. The leads are OK, but kind of weak, and their relationship is some sort of short male wish fulfilment fantasy.

About the best one can say about “TG2” is that in addition to never surprising and never moving us emotionally, it never offends.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Ava Michelle, Griffin Gluck, Anjelika Washington, Sabrina Carpenter, Luke Eisner, Clara Wilsey, Angelina Kinsey and Steve Zahn.

Credits: Directed by Emily Ting, scripted by Sam Wolfson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

It’s not Valentine’s Day yet, but the big room com released this weekend — almost all ROM and no com — is already being called a flop.

“Marry Me” is sweet and it plays, but it didn’t manage much on Thursday night or Friday and looks to be an $8 million opening weekend. Maybe VDay Monday will turn it around.

But Jennifer Lopez isn’t box office any more, and she and Owen Wilson are much older than the rom-com movie going demographic. Light charm like this may be more of a streaming ready movie than anything that will pull couples into theaters during a pandemic.

“Death on the Nile” is doing better, a movie that is ok but not remotely as much fun as “Murder on the Orient Express.”

There’s money on the screen, very convincing digital effects, riverboat and scenery to go with the stunning costumes and less expensive cast. It is on track to open with @$13 million ($12.8), against a $90 million budget. It earned another $20.7 million overseas.

“Blacklight” bombed, pulling in $3.6 million.

“Jackass Forever” will be in a race with “Marry Me” for second place — $8 million and change ($8.05 million).

E

Recognize him? “High Fidelity” and “Peaky Blinders,” and he was Obama in “The Comey Rule” on TV. He was Malcolm X in “One Night in Miami.”

Can he sing? Play guitar? Look great in dreads?

Deadline.com broke the story, which is thin on details, but landing your lead after a long search is a big step.

Love the idea of this picture. A fascinating, iconic figure who T shirts still outsell Che.

A phrase that become a Twitter trend during the Trump Era pops to mind when watching “Within the Whirlwind” and recalling what the Russians under Stalin did to their own people to placate the paranoia of a megalomaniac.

“The cruelty’s the point.”

A story about the vast purges of “intellectuals” and anybody smart enough to recognize a diminutive despot in the making, the first of the millions sent to Soviet gulags in one flimsy “legal” pretext after another, this unjustly ignored Marleen Gorris (“Antonia’s Line”) gem contains perhaps the finest performance of Emily Watson‘s career.

Never heard of the movie or her performance in it (in 2009)? Talk about “snubbed.”

Watson (“The Theory of Everything,” “A Royal Night Out,” “Chernobyl”) plays Evgenia Ginzburg, a passionate teacher of Russian literature and poetry at Kazan University when we meet her, a lady with vast reservoirs of memory for the works of Pushkin and the other greats of the Russian canon.

A mother of two boys, married to the university newspaper editor (Benjamin Sadler), she is also a Communist Party member in good standing, and a true believer. Any bit of unsettling news husband Pavel passes on from Moscow gets a considered look, and an unworried response from Evgenia.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”

Pavel is weighing facts and seeing signs as he tosses her latest “story” on the Party’s sanctioned food and manufacturing production figures in the bin.

Sure enough, they see a respected colleague (Pierce Quigley) abruptly arrested in front of them, hauled away for his possible association with Stalin’s biggest boogeyman, the Red intellectual Leon Trotsky. Everybody had best distance themselves from their “Trotskyite” friend, and quick.

When Pavel lets his wife know he’s apologized to local Party bosses for her “association,” Evgenia is livid. Soviet rewriting of history, something we’re seeing in America as I type this, is in full swing. Evgenia’s “crime” is that she didn’t “suspect” Yevlov, the colleague, that she didn’t rat out this Party endorsed friend before anybody knew Stalin’s goons were going to accuse him.

The idealistic Evgenia won’t repeat this act of contrition in front of the myopic, officious apparatchik who has a confession for her to sign. She figures she has rights. She has people she can appeal to.

She lacked “political vigilance” about the already rewritten history of this Yevlov’s rise? She’ll show them.

But damned if the smirking goon from the capital Beylin (Ian Hart) doesn’t take an instant disliking to this “arrogant” and smart member of the “elite.” Appeals and assurances from others disappear as she’s put on trial, where she outlawyers the ignorant mugs assigned to judge her. “Tell me, who am I suppose to have ‘terrorized?'”

That, or course, seals her fate. Ten years in a camp it is. That’ll teach her to be smarter, to have ideals, to insult deplorable men with authority.

Evgenia finds herself torn from her family, renounced by her save-my-own-skin husband, denounced by comrades she tried to help and stuffed in a cattle car with scores of other freezing, starving women on her way to Siberia.

Much of Gorris’s film is standard Gulag/concentration camp horror — the brutal labor conditions of a lumber camp, the subfreezing weather, the “400 grams of bread a day” diet, the rape culture of the callous, hair-trigger guards.

Evgenia lives, cut off from home, desperate for any word of Kazan from strangers from other camps she stumbles into. She keeps her own and others’ spirits up by telling stories from literature and reciting poems from memory in the barracks. She loses the last shred of “The investigators made a mistake” idealism that many shared when they first boarded that train.

As women walk off into the woods to die, or starve and give up, the cynicism of the history-altering state settles in among them all. How did you end up here?

“That was a long time ago,” is their mantra. “And it never happened, anyway.”

Watson doesn’t oversell the “pluck” of Ginzburg, whose memoir this is based on. She portrays the woman as smart, logical and naive, someone who figures reason, truth and the law will protect her.

She shows us the exterior ordeal and interior suffering of a woman who figures she has to survive this sentence (as if the Party is bound to keep its promise about the length of political prison sentences) for her children. She has to try and protect her sanity and her dignity, resisting the sex-for-food come-ons of the monsters who guard them.

Watson lets us see the layer of callouses and scabs that crust over this woman’s once hopeful heart. It’s a magnificent performance.

Hart makes a perfectly vile impression as the kommissar who makes it his business to put this Jewish academic in her place. And Ulrich Tukur shines as a (pre-war) doctor of German descent, imprisoned because of his lineage, but necessary to the camp and thus tolerated as he treats his patients with compassion and firmly defends them from being worked and starved to death.

“Within the Whirlwind” doesn’t break much new ground in historical terms or its depiction of the Reign of Terror that the purges were, or in its assessment of how quickly people succumb to inhumanity — in how they treat others, in how they think of themselves.

But it’s a hidden gem, one of Gorris’s best and a high water mark for an actress nominated for Oscars for “Hilary and Jackie” and “Breaking the Waves,” and an Emmy nominee for “Chernobyl.”

Rating: unrated, violence, including rape

Cast: Emily Watson, Agata Buzek, Ulrrich Tukur, Pierce Quigley and Ian Hart.

Credits:Directed by Marleen Gorris, scripted by Nancy Larson, based on the memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:40

Some movies are slow. Some manage a kind of languid torpor. And there’s “Help,” which might be described as “inert.”

It’s a disastrously undramatic debut feature from writer-director and bit “character” in the film Blake Ridder, who is also distributing it.

It takes forever for something — ANYthing — to happen. And when that something does, it’s no help. This corpse just lies there, a trio of attractive actors in an odd “menage” thriller variation filled with what’s meant to be menace, but which is merely a collection of awkward pauses, mostly the product of the most inept editing this side of student cinema competitions.

A pointless prologue lets us see leading lady Grace (Emily Redpath) get dumped by a callous American beau — via phone. Grace, a forensics researcher, decides a pop-in visit on her friend Liv (Sarah Alexandra Marks) is in order. It’s her man Ed’s (Louis James) birthday.

They chat, awkwardly. Grace is imposing, but there’s no being rude. They are, after all, British. She settles in for a weekend into what appears to be a perfectly passable relationship. But thanks to her forensics background, Grace can’t but notice blood stains here and there.

And then there’s the on-the-spectrum oddball neighbor (Ridder) who greeted Grace’s arrival with a warning.

“It’s bad.”

Anyway, Grace sits and they all catch up. At some point, somebody says “I think it’s time you met Polly.” That’s odd, and we’re invited to ponder the idea that Grace is somehow unstuck in time, that the movie’s events are unfolding out of order.

Because, you and I know we saw Grace come into the house when no one answered the door. And she chatted and coo’d at the cute little Jack Russell, whom she called “Polly” by name. They’ve met.

But no. That appears to be simple editing incompetence. And nobody told the writer-director about it to fix it. That’s never a good sign.

It’s kind of all downhill from there, with revelations that will surprise no one, violence and schemes and escalations that are nothing the least bit interesting.

Not to get any meaner than I’ve been up to now, but there’s a reason this dog is self-distributed. And the word “delusional” explains it.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Emily Redpath, Louis James, Sarah Alexandra Marks, Blake Ridder

Credits: Scripted and directed by Blake Ridder. A Ridder release.

Running time: 1:36

A blind teen, a hunter stumbled into, a creature hunting them. March 18.

There aren’t a lot of music clubs that have made the journey from “THE place to be” to “an Institution” with more grace than Ronnie Scott’s, the Frith Street landmark in Soho, London.

“Ronnie’s” is a gloriously musical celebration of the club where everyone from Dizzy to Sonny, Chet to Miles, Sarah and Ella to Carmen and Cleo held forth.

Oliver Murray’s documentary gives us the history of the club via the biography of its namesake and co-founder, British sax player, jazz mainstay longtime MC at the club, which as the film was shot, was passing through its 60th year.

What the Blue Note and the Village Vanguard are to New York, Ronnie Scott’s has been to London, which is exactly what Ronnie Scott himself had in mind when and his fellow musician and manager Pete King had in mind when they opened the place in a tiny basement space back in 1959.

Scott, already a star of British music at the time, conceived this “club designed for musicians,” an “ideal setting for jazz to be played in,” after helping break the union musician barrier that kept Brits from performing in clubs in America and Americans from making much musical noise in Britain.

He visited The Down Beat and the Three Deuces in New York and with the much more business minded fellow sax man King, set out to make it happen.

In archival interviews with Ronnie and Pete, and voice-over testimonials from everyone from Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins to fan and popularizer Michael Parkinson, the British TV chat show host, we learn all about the partnership, the struggles and a dream that came true — being able to introduce (often with a little stand-up comedy) the greatest names of jazz’s Be Bop gilded age, and then hear them, sometimes sit in and at the very least catch every note played from the club’s stage from his backstage office.

And the music sampled here, from other films, TV programs and the like, is pristine, with every performer at something like her or his very best. Oscar Peterson works up a serious sweat, Chet Baker plays with Van Morrison (1985) as the Irishman sings “Send in the Clowns,” Ella Fitzgerald dazzles and Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie and Roland Kirk blow the roof off the joint.

Murray fills the screen not just with their performances, but with reams of street life footage from the London and New York of the late ’50s into the ’70s.

Colorful tales about the mobster, “Italian” Albert Dimes, the “godfather” who enabled Scott and King to score their bigger, upgraded location, moving from a Gerrard St. basement to a swank Frith Street showroom, and Jimi Hendrix coming to jam with Eric Burdon and War in what would be his last performance pepper the picture.

Musicians talk about the improvisations one describes as “looking for transcendence,” about how difficult it is to achieve it, and how that drove Scott himself to fame, glory and eventually depression.

The club always booked with an ear for jazz as a “big tent,” encompassing much more than just “trad” and swing and big band and the like.

And the fact that, as the film points out, it continues today, outliving its founders and thriving as a music fan’s bucket list totem, turns the film from not just a history lesson and musical memoir. It’s a call to action.

See this film about the legendary London jazz club. Note exactly where it is. Make your travel plans accordingly.

Rating: unrated, a little profanity, smoking, drugs mentioned

Cast: Ronnie Scott, Barbara Jay, Cleo Lane, Roland Kirk, Mel Brooks, Nina Simone,
Oscar Peterson, John Dankforth, Sonny Rollins, Michael Parkinson and Quincy Jones.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Oliver Murray. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:43

“The Privilege” is a too-predictable German mashup of a couple of horror genres and several paranoid thrillers, all underscored by the big idea in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

Hey kids, your elders are taking away your future, and not just with economics and environmental dimwittedness. Think “succubi.”

Finn (Max Schimmelpfennig of “Dark”) is a haunted teen who is still dealing with the childhood trauma we witness in the opening scene. He saw his older sister die after a mad sprint and drive into the night with her shouting (in German with subtitles, or dubbed), “We can’t let it GET us!”

He’s still under a doctor’s (Nadeshda Brennicke) care, still medicated, still watched warily by his parents (Lise Risom Olsen, Roman Knizka). He sees things — flashbacks, and what might be hallucinations. Whatever “it” was ten years before, he sensed it just as surely as his dead sister did.

“You all think I’m crazy, right?”

Maybe his gay BFF Lena (Lean van Acken) believes him. Maybe his crush Samira (Tijan Marei) would, if he ever got up the nerve to ask her out.

But his parents? Was that them he say carrying out some sort of ritual involving his twin sister Sophie (Milena Tscharntke)?

“What? What are you talking about?” Is it all in his head? Does he know
gasbeleuchtung is the German word for “gaslighting?”

We do. Well, maybe not the German word thing. But pretty much every other plot point and action beat in “The Privilege” — as in “You’re part of a most privileged generation, you know.” — we see coming from 22 kilometers off.

The science class about “fungi,” the Russian “experts” in hallucinogens, the DIY “exorcism,” all of it seems cut and pasted from a dozen other pictures.

Even the dialogue has a stultifying over-familiarity, from “We can’t let it GET us” to “You all think I’m crazy” to “Take this, bitches!”

The leads are game enough, with van Acken having the “fun role” and Schimmelpfennig forced to do the suffering, investigating and heavy-lifting. Nobody else makes much of an impression beyond the tropes and archetypes they were hired to be.

The definition of movie “comfort food” is filling your film diet with the undemanding and overfamiliar. “Privilege” is cinematic sauerbraten. But if that’s your thing, “Guten appetit!”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations

Cast: Max Schimmelpfennig, Lea van Acken, Tijan Marei, Milena Tscharntke, Lise Risom Olsen, Roman Knizka and Nadeshda Brennicke.

Credits: Directed by Felix Fuchssteiner and Katharina Schöde, scripted by Felix Fuchssteiner, Sebastian Niemann, Katharina Schöde and Eckhard Vollmar A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44