Movie Nation

Every movie is engineered to reach a specific audience, and most of them can’t help but give away that intention. It can be as obvious as the pandering inclusion of this or that extraneous character or Big Supporting Character moment in your typical fangirl/fanboy friendly comic book or “Star Wars” movie, or Denzel making sure he lets his leading lady sing along to her favorite R&B song on the car radio, or that he gives her lingering, tracking close-ups in her PJs, celebrating “Real Black Women have curves” in “A Journal for Jordan.”

I was really struck by the “fan service” the Alabama siblings the Erwin Brothers layered into the faith-based adaptation of The Kurt Warner Story, “American Underdog.”

It’s unusual because Hollywood doesn’t tend to put much effort into this audience — rural, white, identifying as Christian — largely because it skews mostly older. And it’s very hard to get anybody over 40 or 50 into a theater, with or without a pandemic. It’s natural that as filmgoers marry, start families and fret about where their entertainment dollars are best spent that they don’t go out to the movies often, if ever. If Hollywood theatrical studios ignore this audience, it’s because they’re staying home watching cable or streaming Netflix.

We talk and joke a lot about “virtue” signaling — people who add every pronoun they’re not offended by to their facebook/Twitter profiles, who go out of their way to look, act and be “woke.” But there’s a flipside to it lathered all over this faith-based “conservative signaling” formula sports drama.

The first recognizable voice we hear on the soundtrack is Ronald Reagan’s, doing a little politicking by performing the coin toss for Super Bowl XIX. It’s a little jarring and pointless, but if the audience you’re counting on worships the guy as a fifth face for Mount Rushmore, it makes perfect sense.

There are lifted pick-ups and honky-tonks and country music in this mostly-Red State Iowa story. The Black teammate characters — Ser’Darius Blain has the principal supporting role — are portrayed as nice folks, decidedly in the minority, here to endorse, authenticate and back up Kurt (Zachary Levi), drive lifted pick-ups, listen t country music and teach our hero to line dance.

Warner’s future wife (Anna Paquin) can be summed up thusly — ex-Marine, divorced, single mom who likes country music, line dancing, Christian but “living in sin,” tries not to dwell on the mistakes/carelessness that blinded her kid among other misfortunes. And she sports a seriously out of step hair style.

All I remember about Warner’s playing days were how “gunslinger” fun the games were to watch, and the way sports talk radio and the nascent Internet sports chat rooms cruelly picked on the quarterback who wasn’t married to the prom queen. Ugly stuff about her hair and the like.

In the movie, Brenda Warner’s character, modesty and kindness exempts her from political recruitment to run for office. But she’s a walking advert for rural white American conservative “virtue” triggers — hard-working, tested by life, resilient, a real person reduceable here to a “type.”

The “faith” part of this story — Warner was somewhat less outspoken and demonstrative about his faith on the field than Tim Tebow, but not by much — is a soft-sell.

It’s the romance, the hard-knocks “reach for the American dream” struggle — some of the rough edges rubbed off, others mythologized — that is played up and should appeal to just about anyone, but particularly to rural white Christian conservatives and older football fans.

Will they show up to see it?

One has to curate indie and international DVD titles one donates to libraries all over the rural or semi urban Southeast. One must, given the wide range of content pitched and sent one’s way in hard copy form.

Which Spanish language drama or comedy would have an audience in this county or town, which Oscar nominee from Asia or Eastern Europe would add welcome diversity to a local collection in that town?

Urban Maitland, part of metro Orlando, is certainly hip and sophisticated enough to look past the “Gotta be porn” cover of Bruce LaBruce’s French Canadian satire of identity, sexuality and inventing the selfie, one 1972 Polaroid snapshot at a time.

Well I hope so, anyway. Here’s a link to my review of “Saint-Narcisse.*

It’s Out There, for sure. Not porn. Just daring. Are you ready, Maitland?

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Because we all should support and patronize our invaluable public libraries. You do it your way, I do it mine.

It’s no coincidence that there have now been two sentimental, plucky-outsider-makes-good pro football stories committed to film built around the coaching of Dick Vermeil. At Philadelphia and later with the St. Louis Rams, Vermeil perfected that heart-on-your-sleeve, “team/players that nobody believed in” storyline to such a degree that Hollywood should probably pay him a retainer.

They don’t. But 15 years after “Invincible,” about a sandlot leaguer who made the Eagles, here’s “American Underdog,” about a quarterback nobody wanted, who found himself on food stamps, bagging groceries in Iowa, whom Coach Vermeil rode all the way to Super Bowl glory.

It’s a film by the faith-based filmmaker Alabama Erwin Brothers, Jon and Andrew, who made a mark with “Woodlawn” and set the box office alight with “I Can Only Imagine.” They deliver a solid formula sports picture with a light dose of faith and some overt small town America “conservative signaling,” and a generally entertaining movie thanks to a decent lead and stellar supporting cast.

Zachary Levi brings a little “Shazam!” swagger and a just-light-enough touch to Warner, whose Midwestern dreams of NFL fame were a long shot from the start, and grew longer and longer until the aging rookie that his coaches took to calling “Pop Warner” made the Rams contenders.

The story is framed within the romance of “fifth year senior” Northern Iowa (Division I-AA) backup quarterback Kurt and honky-tonking, line-dancing, ex-Marine divorced mother-of-two Brenda Meoni, given a flinty vulnerability by Oscar-winner Anna Paquin.

And boy, that Brenda description reads like the movie’s marketing pitch.

Theirs is a romance of modest possibilities and big dreams, but always pragmatic and always strictly PG, “living in sin” or not. Brenda has a little girl and a blind son (Hayden Zaller) just old enough for school. Kurt doesn’t need his single-mom Momma (Cindy Hogan, quite good) to tell him the stakes.

“Single mom? That’s no joke.”

But with a lot of love, a little luck and a busload of faith, they get by. Kurt doesn’t get drafted after graduating, and makes it just two days into a tryout with the Green Bay Packers. The couple and the kids eventually find themselves in an Iowa apartment where the unpaid power bill means the heat’s been shut off, forcing a road trip to his mother’s place in a blizzard in which they carelessly run out of gas.

Their salvation comes from the carnival on concrete Arena Football League — eight-players-to-a-side underpaid teams playing in civic arenas designed for rodeos and basketball games.

“It’s not football. It’s a CIRCUS!” grocery stacker Kurt blusters to owner-coach Jim Foster (Bruce McGill, perfect).

“He GETS it,” Foster enthuses to the not-yet-Mrs. Warner. “People LOVE the circus!”

This is the most cinematically-promising chapter of “American Underdog.” But while all the games are have a certain sizzle to their blocking, filming and editing, and we get plenty of how “football at the speed of NASCAR” prepared Warner for NFL success, not nearly enough is done with this seat-of-the-pants, cut-rate sports spectacle.

As dry as McGill is and as funny as we’ve seen Levi before, the Erwins keep one and all under a wet blanket for these scenes.

That makes the call-up to the Big Leagues — where Coach Vermeil (Dennis Quaid) sees “something” in our hero that his celebrated offensive coordinator Mike Martz (Chance Kelly, testy and testing) most certainly does not — play as more muted than electric.

As for “the rest,” as they say and shouldn’t even bother saying, it most certainly “is history,” and not all that surprising. Even the “inspiring” thing will only register for folks looking for “faith” signifiers.

Despite that preordained story arc and pre-digested feel, “Underdog” still gets more than enough right to recommend it. Real, grainy pre-HDTV coverage of the pre-game shows and actual games, with Levi artfully intercut with vintage footage, lends the film a lot more authority than Levi naturally brings to the role.

He’s entirely too old to be playing even a “fifth year senior,” although he’s big enough to pass for “Pop” Warner in uniform.

The picture flows much better than earlier Erwin films, and although “faith-based” and “corny” can seem interchangeable, they go easy on the corn here.

Paquin won her Oscar as a child and has only gotten better with the passing years. She makes Brenda, infamously mocked on sports talk radio and the Internet for her looks and double-wide beauty salon hairstyle, earthy and real.

Adam Baldwin gives a fine fury to his role as Warner’s college coach, blowing his stack at every fumble of “MY football” during practice.

McGill gives us a chuckle or three as the coach who dryly schools his new hire in the art of surviving Arena football.

Quaid isn’t the appropriately teary-eyed Vermeil that teary-eyed Greg Kinnear brought to “Invincible.” But he’s warm and folksy, with that faraway “underdog” twinkle when he’s talking about being underestimated, but knowing your “moment” and being ready for it when it comes.

I like my faith-based films upbeat, not “God’s Not Dead” angry and political. The Erwins manage that even as they go out of their way to not offend their Southern/Middle American “Football” and “NASCAR” audience.

“American Underdog” is — like its hero — plucky, the sort of guy/gal next door and struggling story that does itself credit when it lets its characters dream and lets us believe the American dream can still come true. Read anything more than that into it at your own peril.

Rating: PG, for some language (mild profanity) and thematic elements (alcohol, honky tonking)

Cast: Zachary Levi, Anna Paquin, Bruce McGill, Ser’Darius Blain, Hayden Zaller, Adam Baldwin and Dennis Quaid.

Credits Directed by Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin, scripted by David Aaron Cohen, based on “All Things Possible,” by Kurt Warner and Michael Silver. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:52

“The Medium” goes on too long, repeats itself often enough for you to notice and travels so far over the top for its finale that it’s practically bathed in blood.

But this chilling mockumentary from Thailand is one of the most harrowing horror films of the year. Even as it’s going over-the-top for that climax, it pulls you to the edge of your seat with a ticking clock exorcism countdown that may be the cleverest touch of all.

Well, that and sights and sounds of a documentary camera being chased, screaming and weeping, scared out of their wits.

The mockumentary element in writer-director Banjong Pisanthanakun’s film (working from an original story concocted by others) is that a Thai film crew has shown up among the mountain Isan people to make “Shaman Bloodline,” a film about the local Shaman Goddess of Ba Yan, a village spiritual advisor/healer role fulfilled by the same family for generations.

Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) hears people’s problems, helps them bury their dead and sometimes provides healing spells or incense thanks to her connection to a revered spirit, captured in statue form in a local cave.

As the crew follows her through her rituals and routines, Nim reveals she reluctantly accepted the call. Her sister Nio (Sirani Yankittikan) is the one who first caught “Shaman fever” and displayed the signs that she would take over from their grandmother. But Nio wanted to marry, and converted to Christianity to dodge this demanding obligation.

The viewer has just enough time to mutter “Uh oh,” after learning Nio’s husband just died…and that her son died under mysterious circumstances some time earlier.

Nim is nobody’s fool, either. When Nio’s surviving daughter, 20something Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) starts acting “weird,” so odd that her friends and family cell-phone record her lashing out, reverting to childhood at an indoor playground (shoving and hurting the children) and other episodes.

And let’s not get into what the CCTV camera caught her up to after-hours at the office.

Another film crew starts to follow her. And the one following Nim sees her growing concern, and then her doubts about what being be going on with her niece.

“Have you been having nightmares,” she asks Mink (in Thai with English subtitles)? “Have you heard someone calling you?”

Mink’s tirades start with incidents at work and hissed “I hope you all DIE” threats. She flips out, all dressed in a white gown, on a float at the town’s Christmas parade. She brakes down, chasing and hitting the film crew, afterwards mortified and terrified at what she’s experiencing.

Nim starts to think she needs reinforcements. That’s when the shaman Shanti (Boonsong Nakphoo) joins the fray.

This thriller only goes as far as its leading ladies can take it. And Utoomma’s panicked shaman goddess and Yankittakhan’s fiercely loyal but staggered mother are impressive.

But Gulmongkolpech goes at the madness of Mink hammer and tong. This is as fierce and alarming a performance as I’ve seen in many an exorcism/demonic possession movie. There is so much here that a reasonable actress might flinch at or protest — not because its degrading, just that it’s so “out there” as to leave her literally exposed. Gulmongkolpech fearlessly takes this character to depths and depravity that should make one and all who are trying to “save” Mink might be tempted to wonder if holly grows in Thailand in a size appropriate for making stakes.

Writer-director Pisanthanakun shows us more than we need to see, and can’t figure out a quick, chilling exit, so he drags things out in a movie that has a few too many langours in its action beats early on.

He still manages to land many a blow in that pummeling third act, so many he’d win it by decision if he hadn’t bloodied and bludgeoned us almost senseless already.

Cast: Sawanee Utoomma, Narilya Gulmongkolpech, Sirani Yankittikan, Yasaka Chaisorn and Boonsong Nakphoo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun. A Shudder release.

Running time: 2:11

The Erwin Brothers, whose faith-based “I Can Only Imagine” (based on the song) was a hit a few years back, first-teamed with “American Underdog’s” biggest name, Dennis Quaid, on that film.

This one is the unlikely story of a Super Bowl quarterback who tried and failed to break into the game, and even wound up stacking groceries, if memory serves.

Zachary Levi of “Psyche” and “Shazam!” has the title role. “American Underdog” opens Christmas Day.

The thing about cult cinema is that it requires a buy-in, an “enlistment” in the cult that often requires a different sort of suspension of disbelief.

You have to believe the film is all that others say it is, and be willing to probe and plumb its mysteries to get at what they assure you should be gotten from the effort.

It’s no surprise that Pedro Almodovar is quoted as calling the 1970s Spanish horror experiment “Arrebato” or “Rapture” his favorite horror film. It was made when he was but an aspiring filmmaker himself, a daring, sexual (not erotic) Spanish film in a country that had never seen that. But should that alone account for the movie’s rapturous embrace by the horror cognoscenti?

It’s a self-consciously arty, indulgent and obscurant essay on the “addiction” of cinema, and the horrors of “possession” by that addiction made by a one-off filmmaker back when Spain was in the giddy throes of hedonism following the death of the dictator Franco.

“Arrebato” has time capsule appeal, a film that reminds us — especially filmmakers — of the tactile, delayed pleasures of shooting, processing, editing and projecting movies filmed on celluloid. It gives us a taste of the Spain of the pre-EU era, and of the drugs and sex and artistic opportunities the consumed the country in those heady disco-laced decade of blowback against forty years of Catholo/fascist repression.

But is it deserving of its reputation and the rubber-stamped approval others are contorting themselves into writing as it earns a re-release? I think not.

Slow, of limited shock and equally-limited intellectual and aesthetic appeal, “Rapture” is a grind to sit through. It subjects us to almost two hours of fervid, hoarsely-whispered voice-over narration, recorded on audio cassette, of an experimental (8mm) amateur filmmaker’s discoveries and fate as his addiction grows greater with every reel (cassette) of Kodachrome he exposes and drops off to be developed.

It delivers its payoff, which is…interesting — but hardly worth what we sit through to get to it, drugs and sex and vampire movie subtext included.

Jose Sirgado (Eusebio Ponsela) is finishing the editing of his latest, a vampire thriller. We’ve seen him working and bickering with the editor on its last scene. It’s a vampire being tucked into a coffin, and turning to give the viewer her best deadpan stare.

Pedro Almodovar’s first feature (“Pepi, Luci, Bom”) was filmed under conditions similar to those depicted here, shot on 16mm and released (blown up to 35mm) a year after “Arrebato” came out.

The filmmaker lives in a cinema-decorated apartment with a junkie leading lady (Cecilia Roth) he’d love to ditch. He gets loud with her, and even a little rough. Passed out from her latest heroin fix, she’s not going anywhere.

That’s why he unwraps the film package that was delivered in the day’s mail. He plays the audio cassette that came with it, and in between fights with Ana, he’s invited to remember his connection to the narrator on that cassette, Pedro (Will More), a highly-strung, effeminate and camera-obsessed experimenter who lived in a house and estate that Jose once visited on a location scout.

Pedro mesmerized the director who came looking for a place to film his “Wolf Man,” but left with a fixation on the amateurish, random 8mm reels Pedro showed him. Pedro is a fellow whose obsession only grew when he discovered how to film time-lapse on his Canon Autofocus 1014.

Pedro eventually moves on from scenery, time-lapse shots of crowds and such and onto filming himself, single-frame-by-frame. And that’s why he’s sent this director his next to last reel of processed film. The last reel, he fears, he won’t be able to deliver in person. Jose will have to come for it. What does Pedro expect to happen?

Ivan Zuleta, who only made one feature film and whose name was superseded long ago by a more famous accordionist, makes this a character study of Jose’s addictions, which he is trying to shake by the time he gets this mysterious reel of film from a fellow he only met “one or two times.”

That’s the source of his rows with Ana. She’s still deep into the coke and heroin and pills, although she vamps a mean lip-sync cover of Elvis’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” in her more lucid moments.

Is Pedro trying to warn Jose on an addiction even more insidious? What is it that he is discovering in his relationship to cinema/the camera that is showing him the “Rapture” of which he speaks?

Beats me.

After a lurid, promising start, Zuleta’s movie staggers into the presence of the pre-fanboy fanboy Pedro, who takes it over and is meant to, I guess, transfix us. He’s got old comics and trading cards from the ‘1950s adventure epic “King Solomon’s Mines,” a Betty Boop doll he kind of freaks a stoned Ana out with. I found him a bit boring after a few exposures, a serious of a drag after that.

He’s a quirky character, given to “perching” rather than sitting, wild-eyed and long LONG-winded, he insists that “cinema and I were up to something special together.” But if you’ve ever seen old “discover the camera” first-year film student super 8mm films, there’s nothing “special” to any of it.

We are going to get to a point where Jose (in Spanish, with English subtitles) rues the day he cracks, “It’s not me that loves cinema, it’s cinema that loves me.” We will get our payoff, which is as chilling as it is primitive.

But all due respect to Almodovar, who’s made the odd stinker himself, there’s a reason this other chap never made another movie. And as I can’t find an obituary for him, I’m guessing “death” wasn’t it.

Rating: Unrated, violence, nudity, sex, drug abuse

Cast: Eusebio Ponsela, Cecilia Roth, Will More

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ivan Zulueta. An Altered Innocence release.

Running time: 1:55

Eye popping? You betcha.

April 22.

This looks cute, and Amazon sends it our way just in time for Valentine’s Day – Feb. 11.

“Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf” is as mercurial and scattered as its teen heroine, a 17 year-old struggling to process identity, multiple family crises, hormones and the unwanted attentions of “a friend of the family.”

It’s a movie with a lot more promise and ambition than its lurching, stumbling execution can do justice to. The second feature film by Susan Youssef (“Habibi Rasak Kharban”) is a melodrama that teeters between frustrating and infuriating.

Marjoun (Veracity Butcher) is a teenaged daughter of Islamic Lebanese parents, just another high school kid in ripped jeans and black tees coping with high school in the only hometown she’s ever known — Little Rock, Arkansas.

She has a mother (Clara Khoury) who is on medication, given to impulsive rages and naivete that seems as much a part of her culture and upbringing as her mental illness. Marjoun’s little sister (Maram Aljahmi) has taken up the hijab — at age 10 — for reasons never made clear. To please her mother, maybe? That puts a target on her at middle school. She’s being bullied.

And then there’s Dad (Tarek Bishara). He’s in jail on a host of politically popular charges, all stemming from donating cash he earned from the family convenience store to the wrong Middle Eastern groups.

With her testy, can’t-read-English mother checked-out, her sheltered sister who can’t even feed herself and her dad in the clutches of “the system” with only a public defender to help, Marjoun needs to step up. But how?

Marjoun, a smart kid, enters a cash prize essay contest and asks one and all for money to help get her father proper counsel. She even hits up the boy (Alexander Biglane) she’s just started dating.

Her cracked mother makes a bad situation worse by inviting an actor-friend (Dominic Rains) to come “help with the store.” All he wants to help with is Marjoun.

“Sami is a man of God,” Mom prattles, as if she has a clue. Khoury never lets this mother character warrant sympathy. She serves up a mentally ill woman wholly incapable of making adult decisions, slapping and lashing out at her children, “medicated” or not. And she likes the idea of Sami coming on to her teenaged daughter.

Youssef slow-walks her young heroine through this minefield, struggling to show us how someone utterly inexperienced when confronted with all this would try to process it. Marjoun needs to save her father, wants to rally support in their Islamic community, desperately needs cash and has to cope with the cartoonish but criminally serious lechery of a 20something actor who comes on strong.

“Marjoun” slowly whips the viewer back and forth, letting us see rather than have explained to us Marjourn’s decision to “cover up” herself, watching the conflict she’s feeling between her culture and her environment play out over her desire for a motorcycle.

There’s good stuff here — Butcher’s title role turn, for instance. But Youssef loses track of it as she shifts points of view willy nilly and throws everything and anything at this family, little of it landing with any emotional impact.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Veracity Butcher, Clara Khoury, Maram Aljahmi, Alexander Biglane, Tarek Bishara and Dominic Rains.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Susan Youssef. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

Major points for style in this trailer for the Boy Harsher “Twin Peaks” meets Lady Jason thriller “The Runner.”

Shudder will release this Jan.16.