Movie Nation

“Night Teeth” is another one of those vampire movies more concerned with “rules” and exposition and “explaining” how this world operates than most of the elements that make such genre pictures work.

The pacing is funereal, the reactions — or under-reactions — of anyone confronted with the realization that this blood-sucking creature of legend actually exists and lives in tony neighborhoods all over LA, are shockingly tame.

The action? Hit or miss, although I have to give credit the writer and director manage a bang-up climax. Sure, they blow it with an anti-climactic coda. But that’s to be expected. Horror movies aren’t allowed to make graceful exits. Not when there’s the chance to “get a franchise” out of this.

Jorge Lendeberg Jr. of “Bumblebee” is the hip-hop crazed college kid who takes his brother’s car-service Escalade out and picks up “Children of the Night” on the prowl for uh, fresh blood.

Benny dons the suit and tie because his brother, Jay (Raúl Castillo) has other concerns. Somebody snatched his girlfriend. That can only mean the vampires broke the long-standing peace between themselves and the Gangs of LA. Unknown to Benny, Jay is something of a peace-keeper in Boyle Heights.

But Jay had no idea that the clients Benny is summoned to pick up would be Blaine (Debbie Ryan) and Zoe Moreau (Lucy Fry). Rich, entitled, pouty and rude, they hand over the addresses of five parties and clubs which they plan to hit tonight, with the proviso that they “get to the last stop by morning…Non-negotiable.”

That isn’t the first “rule” the viewer has been treated to. And it won’t be the last.

To wit, vampires can stay in LA if they “Don’t let humans know we exist” and “Don’t feed on the unwilling (a kinky town expects no less)” and “Never ever enter Boyle Heights without permission.”

The kid spies the ruby token that the ladies use as admission to every place they go. He spies messages on a carelessly unlocked cell phone that reveals they know his brother, and think that’s who is driving them around. He spies the sack of money the ladies acquire, and notices it’s got blood on it.

And then a scream from inside a building, a quick peek inside, and…the horror, the horror.

Lendeberg had to master acting ongreen screens with digitally-added Transformers for “Bumblebee.” But he never comes anywhere near registering the terror, panic and shock Benny should experience when he sees club prowling hotties biting into bros who know what’s coming, but don’t expect it to be gruesome and terminal.

Ryan’s Blaine becomes the vampire to take a fancy to the innocent “driver,” and feels the need to “explain” their “world” and its rules to him, even though this question suggests why she feels this free.

“What would you do if tonight was your last night on Earth?”

Alfie Allen plays the vampire villain, Victor, who has broken the peace, and Sydney Sweeney and Megan Fox show up as vampires figuring they’ll take Victor down a notch or three.

The dialogue is littered with innuendo — “He gives real good…blood.” Mostly, it’s just snide putdowns of “your kind” by “out kind,” and terminal but tepid threats.

“She can drain your whole body before you pull the trigger.”

Still, as I mentioned above, the action beats are OK and the climax is cleverly conceived, even if so much that comes before it is dull and credulous, with Lendeberg never once registering an appropriate reaction to this supernatural horror that’s just been revealed to him, in all its gory glory.

Rating: TV-14, bloody violence

Cast: Jorge Lendeberg, Debbie Ryan, Lucy Fry, Raúl Castillo, Alfie Allen, Sydney Sweeney and Megan Fox.

Credits: Directed by Adam Randall, scripted by Brent Dillon. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

A $50 million opening afternoon/night in a pandemic?

That’s not as good as “Avengers: Endgame,” which confined its showings to Thursday “night” previews and raked in $60 million. This “Spider-Man” started its showings at 3pm — two more showings added to the “night,” on average.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” pulled in $57 million not all that long ago.

I ducked into a suburban multiplex’s 5pm showing before my “Matrix” preview last night in America’s Vacationland. A 75% capacity house, and the movie played — even the lamest jokes landed, hoots and hollers at every “returning” character.

This beast is going to eat Christmas moviegoing up, leaving scraps for everyone else.

The first grabber moment comes during a college party at a wealthy friend’s house, the perfect place for (Chloe Grace Moretz) to be just after she’s urinated on a stick. She and boyfriend Sam (Algee Smith of “Detroit”) may be shocked. He may be rattled that his rushed proposal has been shot down. She’s upset because, as she tells a friend, she’s got this problem and she’s not even sure he’s who she wants to be with.

Maybe we noticed the waiter whose reflexes are entirely too quick for a beer pong ping pong ball hurled his way as he efficiently works the room with drinks and tidying up duties.

A noise, a flickering of the lights, and “the event” begins. That waiter starts slaughtering all the privileged kids who have paid him no mind all night. All over the city, all over the world, lights are going on, screams are piercing the night sky. The androids who make life easy have started their own Judgement Day. It’s the robot uprising.

Pregnant Georgia and a guy she’s not even sure she loves and can depend on are on the run, scrambling to survive, to make their way to this or that rumored safe harbor — Boston? Korea? — and to get help delivering that baby on board.

Writer-director Mattson Tomlin’s “Mother/Android” is a straight up mash-up, “Terminator” meets “Children of Men.”

Human babies are rare things, which is what the whole “sanctuary” in Korea is about. They’ve been through the zombie apocalypse (“Train to Busan”) and coped with monsters in the rivers (“The Host”). They’re more prepared for the robot apocalypse, I guess.

Tomlin takes us through the generic dystopian landscape of collapse and decay, an Army descended into Darwinian anarchy with survivors hiding in forests in “No Man’s Land” while trying to find their way in to the “fortress” that Boston has become.

Who can you trust to be human? Are there humans you can actually trust?

Tomlin spent most of his screenwriting time working out the logic of a machine-driven takeover. Having no souls, no morals or sense of self-preservation, the electronic “hive” mind would work more like bees than zombies, the attainment of a group goal is paramount, “individuals” don’t matter. Machines don’t have angst over self-sacrifice.

Moretz can make most any character compelling, and we get little glimpses of Georgia’s self-preservation panic that should shift to protective mothering. But with no support system to reinforce that, are we still wired biologically to make that leap? The movies generally assume that to be the case. I don’t think “Mother/Android” does, which is an interesting twist.

Smith’s Sam has a simpler arc, a guy in love and acting out every chivalrous, heroic and self-sacrificing thing he can come up with to get baby and mother to safety. Sam gives us the sense that he’s making this up as he goes, maybe mimicking behavior he’s seen in movies. It’s “expected” of him.

As a filmmaker, Tomlin (“Solomon Grundy”) does a good job with the chases, violence and suspense. But he’s too reluctant to abandon the “Terminator” voice-over narration and hard-pressed to do much that’s new or interesting with this survival quest plot.

That makes Mother/Android” something of a mixed bag. But with Moretz here to ensure it’s at least a story we invest in, bringing emotional heft to the moments that beg for it, this nothing-special dystopia manages the bare minimum that fans should expect from films of this genre.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Algee Smith, Raul Castillo and Kate Avallone

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mattson Tomlin, scripted by A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:50

A guy writing a more famous guy’s biography. And?

This one rolls out Feb. 25.

There are few genuine competitors for the title “Most Quixotic career after winning an Oscar.” Nic Cage would seem to have it locked down. Cuba Gooding Jr. And Mo’nique are great examples of how hard it is to find work that measures up to a defining performance.

Adrien Brody? He marches to his own drummer. He’s not the workaholic Cage became, which in Cage’s case is thanks to tax issues and a desire to never be at rest and lost in his own head.

Brody still attracts the attention of good directors. Wes Anderson always has a role for him. But he’s not really a movie star. He can’t sell tickets based on his name in the credits.

“Clean,” which Brody produced, has him playing a recovering junkie with a fervent desire to keep his head down and get past “one day at a time.”

Then he’ss triggered into trying to save someone else. Is this junkie a man with “particular skills?” Could be.

We’ll find out Jan. 28.

Waiting for the “Resurrection?” Mm?” Here we go.

Jacques Cousteau was an omnipresent part of the lives of generations, the first “undersea explorer,” inventor of the aqualung — which brought modern scuba diving to life –a one-time oil-company sponsored explorer who helped develop undersea oil extraction who became the greatest environmentalist of his day, he cast a giant shadow over world culture and the ways all of us think about the planet and its oceans.

But in “Becoming Cousteau,” the revealing and moving new documentary now streaming on Disney+, filmmaker Liz Garbus shows us a passionate man who drifted into despair in his later years, an imperfect man who was his own harshest critic, an icon so embittered by the lack of progress in saving the oceans and the planet that he resented even giving autographs by the end.

If there’s a good thing about the passing of Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1997, it’s that he exited before the narcissistic selfie mania that would have surely driven him mad.

You couldn’t miss Cousteau on North American TV when I was growing up. His “Undersea World” series and specials were an ABC staple, so much so that he became an object of imitation and fun, taken for granted by a culture that got its first taste of what the world under the sea looked like through his documentaries, a label he hated right from the start.

“They are adventure films!”

The first surprise “Becoming Cousteau” delivers in this re-examination of his life is that the ex-French Navy officer saw himself, first and foremost, as a filmmaker. “My sense of cinema” was his great gift, he insisted, not his passion for the sea, his inventing or his talent for communicating the urgent need to save this “undersea world” from unchecked pollution, exploitation and development.

He got his first film camera at 13, during the silent film era. And one of the reasons “Becoming Cousteau” is so revelatory is the fact that Garbus had access to a treasure trove of early footage, films Cousteau shot right after taking up snorkeling and spear fishing as rehab after a bad car accident in the 1930s.

An American had already popularized holding-your-breath recreational diving — snorkeling. Spear fishing existed all over the world, even places where the water wasn’t warm enough to dive in and pursue your prey.

But Cousteau met someone who’d invented a gas regulator for cars, and adapted that for the first scuba tanks, liberating him to explore the world that so transfixed him.

We learn that his first wife, Simone, loved the sea as much as he did and loved the converted U.S. minesweeper he turned into the “Calypso” after World War II even more. She lived on it as he traveled the globe, marketing the films he started making in the 1950s, becoming a “brand” for diving and taking a camera down with you.

The early history is the most interesting part of this film, taking us back to the events that put him in the water and made it his passion.

His celebrity is reflected in the scores of TV show appearances, as interview subject and more, that were a part of his growing fame in the ’60s and 70s, a wizened grandfatherly Frenchman with a stocking cap and pipe always at hand.

But we’re also reminded that he considered himself a bad parent and became embittered and depressed after the death of his partner and “favored” son Philippe, who crashed flying a plane for a documentary project he was producing.

If you followed his work at all, you remember the later films and their bleak depictions of pollution and the dying seas — his beloved Mediterranean especially — that he’d once shown us were full of life. He never quite gave up, but some of the fire went out of him even as the planet was finally awakening to a threat he’d seen coming since the ’60s.

“My job was to show what was in the sea so people would get to know and love it…You only protect what you love.”

If he thought himself a failure, as the film suggests, that’s a crying shame. Like millions of others, I was fascinated by what he showed us was underwater and made snorkeling a lifelong passion. Seeing footage of him watching a 1960s NASA launch just down the street from where I dock the sailing yacht I live on reminded me of his role in making a life by the sea, on it and under it, so damned attractive.

His reflective nature meant that he quickly realized that he was no better than others at protecting the sea in his youth, and that he recognized his biggest failings were humanity’s, he and we “just didn’t know any better.” His faith, shaken as it no doubt was, was that we’d wake up to the threat and act decisively, just as he did.

The jury’s still out on that, but not on Cousteau. He is a singular figure in human history, and “Becoming Cousteau” does a decent job of showing how that came to be, the burden it might have been and the regrets he left behind, many of them warnings which we’re still only slowly taking heed of over two decades after his death.

Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language, some disturbing images and smoking.

Cast: Jacques Cousteau, Philippe Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Francine Cousteau, Simone Cousteau, Albert Falco, Frédéric Dumas, Dick Cavett, Jocelyne de Pass, David L. Wolper and the voice of Vincent Cassel.

Credits: Directed by Liz Garbus, scripted by Mark Monroe and Pax Wasserman. A National Geographic Film on Disney+.

Running time: 1:34

This animated offering finds it’s way to theaters in July.

“Crooked House” made little to no noise when it came out theatrically in 2017-18. Labeling something “Agatha Christie’s Crooked House” should have helped, considering Kenneth Branagh revived her ancient murder mystery “brand” with his remake of “Murder on the Orient Express” over Christmas of 2017.

“Sarah’s Key” director Gilles Paquet-Brenner doesn’t have Sir Ken’s polish or witty way with the material, and the film’s “all-star cast” is slightly less glittery. But this rich patriarch’s suspicious death amid-a-house-full-of-suspects tale still works, showing off Christie’s genius for plotting and creating characters. If it’s not as much fun as “Knives Out,” it still has its moments, and plainly was one of the inspirations of Rian Johnson’s comic jewel.

Max Irons, you-know-who-and-you-know-her’s son, stars as Charles Hayward, the posh-enough offspring of a Scotland Yard legend, a onetime member of the “diplomatic service” (a spy), now a private detective visited by an old flame (Stefanie Martini of TV’s “The Last Kingdom”).

Femme fatale-ish Sophia insists her rich grandfather — a hotel, restaurant and “Associated Catering” tycoon and Greek immigrant who married into the British upper class — was murdered in his great house, Three Gables.

“I believe the killers may still be in there,” she declares, meaning the extended members of the late pere Leonides, his children, grandchildren and in-laws.

After dismissing her with extreme prejudice — Charles still carries a grudge about “Cairo” — he reconsiders, consults with an old Scotland Yard colleague of his father (Terrence Stamp) and motors into the country.

It’s 1957 or so, “the war” is fading into memory, rock and roll is just now arriving in Britannia and Charles drives a stylish Bristol to “pass” for posh, because that’s what you did back then.

But questioning this lot is going to be tricky.

“How does it work, all of you living in this house together?” “Who told you it works?”

Not Chief Inspector Taverner (Stamp). “These people relish their privacy as much as their money.”

Sophia isn’t really a suspect…at first. Then there’s her grandfather’s “favorite” son (Christian McKay) who runs the business empire, that son’s biologist/poison expert wife (Amanda Abbingdon). An older brother/historian (Julian Sands) who used to gamble and married a high class/no success actress (Gillian Anderson) resent the hell out of them.

“Ruin the family business and bugger off to Barbados, how LIKE my brother!”

Better than “losing everything playing baccarat on the Riviera!”

There’s a nanny and a tutor, bratty younger children, and the sister (Glenn Close) of old Leonides’ lesser-nobility first wife. And of course, there’s the Vegas chorine second wife, now a widow, given a jaded bombshell as “common” touch by Christina Hendricks.

The film has just enough glossy period detail, just enough intrigues, deaths or near-deaths and twists to pass for Christie and keep us interested.

The supporting cast ranges from good to downright delicious (Close, Anderson), with its leading man (Irons was in the “Condor” and “The Little Drummer Girl” and “Tutankhamun” TV series) standing out mainly by not standing out.

Young Irons hasn’t learned or aged or what-have-you enough to know how to embrace the camera and seize our attention. It may be a charisma thing and he may never get there, but he’s merely adequate here, and that dampens the fun of the film.

Similarly, Martini is reminiscent of Ruth Wilson/Natalie Dormer in that “manipulator of men” screen bombshell way, but doesn’t quite get there in this performance.

The bratty children (Honor Kneafsey and Preston Nyman) make far bigger impressions in tiny roles. And Close, often wielding a shotgun as her Lady Edith takes on the estate’s moles, devours the scenery, but with effortless great humor.

Perhaps Sir Ken will bring her round for the next Agatha he does and win the lady her Oscar. This film’s slack middle acts and smaller-than-life performances remind us, almost constantly, that he’s not behind the camera at “Crooked House.”

But Christie’s mastery of the genre survives even lesser adaptations, and she and the best bits of casting rescue “Crooked House,” even if they couldn’t make it much of a hidden gem.

Rating: TV-14, murder most foul

Cast: Max Irons, Stefanie Martini, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks, Julian Sands, Christian McKay, Terrence Stamp and Glenn Close

Credits: Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, scripted by Julian Fellowes, Tim Rose Price and
Gilles Paquet-Brenner. A Sony release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:55

“A Journal for Jordan” is a sweet, sad holiday weeper about a soldier who kept a diary filled with life lessons for his newborn son, just in case “the worst” happened. Which it did while First Sgt. Charles King was serving in Iraq.

It’s a glossy, sentimental star vehicle for Michael B. Jordan and another feather in the cap of Chanté Adams (“Bad Hair, “The Photograph”) who plays the single mom left behind to raise that son and pass that journal on to him when he was old enough to understand.

But it’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads. That makes it play longer than its two hour and 11 minute runtime, and makes it that rarest of movie “unicorns” — a misstep by director Denzel Washington.

Whatever the messaging and emphasis of the memoir it’s based on, the movie reaching theaters needed a serious re-edit.

Adams plays Dana Canedy, a hard-driving New York Times reporter and Army brat with “daddy issues” who nevertheless lets Daddy (Robert Wisdom) put a handsome, courtly and honorable “tanker” that he trained in her path, plainly match-making for the 30ish, sophisticated Big City Dana.

First Sgt. King always introduces himself that way, always says “ma’am,” and is blunt about picking the Army as a career. But he’s into art, painting in the style of his French favorites — the pointillism of Georges Seurat, the impressionism of Claude Monet.

Dana has a New York apartment, a New York career and that hard-won New York sophistication, and Adams lets us see both a ravenous attraction to this new hunk her dad’s introduced her to and her reluctance to fall for someone so potentially like her father.

“Journal for Jordan” may hang on the hook of “fallen father writes timeless advice to his son” hook, but it’s about “How Dana Canedy Fell for Charles Monroe King” — from set-ups (Dad even provides her “excuse” for asking for a ride) to slow-moving courtship to love, sex and a baby.

The script and the star let us see Charles as ramrod straight, chivalrous and “corny,” a man of few words “unless I’ve got something to say,” unpolished in his ratty “grandpa” tennis shows and ignorance of what the phrase “off Broadway” means, but the sort of straight arrow father figure who passes on “live by your convictions” because that’s the way he lived.

He serves because he wanted “the discipline” the Army had to offer his life, and because he’s a real “patriot.” “I love my country.”

It’s worth noting how startling that line plays here, when that word has been so devalued by Americans unfit to claim it as a label.

The film frames their love story as a flashback, drifting through years of their relationship as seen by Dana in the years after his passing when she’s raising Jordan, eventually played by Jalon Christian as a teen.

But it’s that cumbersome flashbacks/flashforwards and flash around the edges structure that lets “A Journal for Jordan” down.

With every lingering tracking shot down up Adams’ curves or Jordan’s shirtless six-pack during “patient” scenes of banal phone conversations, every “over-sharing” chat between Dana and her “variety-pack casting” co-workers (Susan Pourfar plays her best Times friend), every jump backwards and forwards in time, delaying what the overlong prologue has told us is coming, “Journal” loses the thread.

That lost thread is “What’s IN that Journal that’s important enough to pass along to my boy.”

It finishes so well, with such a grand lump-in-the-throat scene, that one might be fooled into thinking it’s a better movie than it is. Then you remember there should have been moments like this all along, that saving it for “a surprise” that is no surprise at all, is a miscalculation, “the Journal” should have been the point.

Long before we get to that break-out-your-hankies moment, it has to hit even the most enthusiastic fan that “was this scene/exchange/overlong shot really necessary?” Washington squanders some of the viewer’s good will and attention with a lot of extraneous moments and even entire scenes.

It’s tempting to suggest “He should’ve done this by the book,” but it’s most likely that the memoir itself, full of the messiness and minutia of real life, created this problem. Director Washington and screenwriter Virgil Williams (“Mudbound” was similarly scattered) failed to correct it.

Rating: PG-13 for some sexual content, partial nudity, drug use and language

Cast: Chanté Adams, Michael B. Jordan, Jalon Christian, Robert Wisdom and
Susan Pourfar

Credits: Directed by Denzel Washington, scripted by Virgil Williams, based on Dana Canedy’s memoir. A Sony/Columbia release (Christmas Day).

Running time: 2:11