Movie Nation

This opened in the UK during the pandemic (Streamed?) and finally gets a US release Sept. 17.

Melissa McCarthy is in mourning, and a damned starling is ruining her garden and her life.

Chris O’Dowd raises the bar, playing the spouse of this broken relationship. And Oscar winner Kevin Kline lends grand seriocomic support.

This looks like a contender.

A “Chinatown on the Cheap” tale of a missing teen, gangland shenanigans, water rights, the works, all uncovered by a “special ops” (the hoariest trope in action cinema) veteran.

Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Sloan, Taryn Manning, Jake Webber and Michael Madsen are among the stars of this Oct. 22 vengeance thriller.

The plot has been around since Shakespeare sold out to Netflix. Guy courts woman, or vice versa, based on a dare, a bet or some other “arrangement.”

It’s a “Taming of the Shrew” variation, whether it’s “Cruel Intentions” or “Ten Things I Hate About You,” Kate Hudson chasing Matthew McConaughey, Matthew McConaughey chasing Kate Hudson, or hunky jock Freddie Prinze Jr. pursuing wallflower Rachel Leigh Cook, as a bet, in “She’s All That.”

That’s the movie Netflix gender-flipped and remade as “He’s All That.” It’s a not-quite-note-for-note remake, with a few fond nods to the original film — Rachel Leigh Cook plays a mother, this time, and Matthew Lillard graduated from popular guy’s best friend roles a while back. He’s a dorky high school principal here.

And if you remember the original with any fondness at all, recycling that pop classic “Kiss Me,” used in the “She’s All That” soundtrack and again here, may give you the warm fuzzies. Enjoy them while they last, because they don’t.

Padgett (newcomer Addison Rae) is a popular teen “makeover/influencer,” the well-paid and perfectly-put-together queen bee of Cali High, vlogging and live-streaming her way to being able to afford the college of her choice.

Because unlike her prettiest girls posse (Madison Pettis, Myra Molloy) and pretty much everybody else at the school, she’s not Child of Hollywood rich.

That’s become the studio style of Netflix teen movies. Not all of them have the gloss and glitz of absurd affluence. But most of them do.

Padgett dates hunky pop idol classmate Jordan (Peyton Meyer) because of course she does. She needs his Instagram followers, and he needed hers, and her gift of a makeover. But as is the way of social media romantic comedies, she catches him cheating and melts down while live-streaming.

She’s caught in a spitting fury, chewing him out in his trailer on the set of his latest music video. And a little bit of teary mucus that slips out her nose kills her online image. She goes viral as “Bubble Girl” (snot bubble), and her main beauty products sponsor (Kourtney Kardashian) drops her like Johnny Depp.

Losing followers is one thing. Losing her prom date, and the sponsor she was depending on for college, matters more. She’s got to rebound, and quick. Maybe she can pick a new guy, give him a makeover, and get back everything she’s lost by prom night.

Sidekick Alden (Pettis) suggests making it a bet, with Alden selecting the “loser” who will be Padgett’s “Makeover: Impossible.”

Enter scruffy, outspoken outcast Cameron (Tanner Buchanan of “Kobra Kai”), the flannel-and-stocking-cap kid Jordan and his entourage bully, the anti-social photographer with only his gay BFF (Annie Jacob) and sassy younger sister (Isabella Crovetti) to hang with.

He shovels horse excrement in a tony local stable, takes photos with real film, mourns his dead mother and plans to “opt out” of college because he’s fighting the system, man.

“High school is just a bunch of scared people trying to be something they’re not.”

He’ll do nicely. Let the pursuit begin, and let’s make sure to hit every single waypoint on this wellworn path along the way — his secret grief, her secret shame, awkward not-quite-a-date, Big Romantic Gesture, fistfight for honor, her keeping the “bet” secret, all of it.

At my most generous, I can say “He’s All That” passes by without a whole lot of unpleasantness as it does.

The leads don’t really click, the situations are ordained by formula and the extreme wealth grates in ways only a Kardashian fan can ignore.

Teenagers having a “Drop it like F. Scott” “Gatsby” themed birthday party in the family mansion? A pool party that would put a decade of “MTV Spring Break” beach-blasts to shame?

The film’s only bow to diversity is shoehorning in a cute same-sex flirtation for the gay BFF.

But by themselves, the chirpy Rae and sullen-according-to-script Buchanan aren’t bad. And the “makeover” montage is punctuated with a cute punchline.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I just lost ‘Dancing with the Stars!'”

The reason this formula endures is that, done right, it works. It’s proven to be Freddie Prinze Jr. proof over the centuries, from “Shrew” to “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Cruel Intentions” to any of the dozens of sitcoms that have trotted it out.

But the charm is thin and the laughs hard to find in this iteration. Aside from a little nostalgia for the middling film this is based on, “He’s All That” just isn’t all that.

Rating: TV-MA, a sexual situation, a fistfight, but mainly because of one F-bomb.

Cast: Addison Rae, Tanner Buchanan, Madison Pettis, Annie Jacob,
Isabella Crovetti, Myra Molloy, with Kourtney Kardashian, Rachel Leigh Cook and Matthew Lillard.

Credits: scripted by R. Lee Fleming Jr. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

He died in 1995, but there’s plenty of evidence that PBS painting show star Bob Ross is as popular as ever. For starters, the reruns of the 30 series of “Joy of Painting” that he did for the network are still on the air here and in other countries around the world.

Ross, of the calming voice, upbeat demeanor and fluid facility with a brush, was a pop culture icon in his day, and lives on not just in those reruns, but in painting supplies and brushes that bear his name, and in Internet memes, where his gentle “Mister Rogers with an Easel” persona is sent up, almost always in the spirit of good fun.

But as its title implies, “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed” implies, all is not well in Rossworld. All that money he’s generating after his death is going to some seriously unscrupulous business partners. An artist who preached art as therapy, renewal and a means of changing your sense of self-worth is being bled dry, post mortem, by some Jamie Spears/Col. Parker/Jeff Zuckerberg-level villains.

Director Joshua Rofé, who has Lorena Bobbit and Sasquatch documentaries under his belt, gives us a lovely “origin story,” and tracks the laid-back Ross, an affirmation-oriented teacher “who was never in it for the money” as he became famous enough to teach Regis Philbin the “Joy of Painting” on live TV. Then Rofé introduces the hissable villains who bought in, took over and exploited Ross and the family name and continue to do that to this very day.

Born in Daytona Beach and raised in Orlando, Ross was in the Air Force in Alaska when he and his first wife started a business of painting wilderness landscapes on gold miner’s pans. Eventually, he spied early PBS painting teacher William Alexander, the first guy to manage that “wet on wet” or “ala prima” finished painting in half an hour trick.

Ross befriended the accented, manic Alexander, became an acolyte and teacher of workshops on Alexander’s behalf. And when the time came for Alexander to pass the baton on to a younger TV host, Ross took over and positioned himself as a quieter, more calming and some said “seductive” version of a painting teacher.

Art critics and art historians weigh in, placing Ross’s work within the history of painting, not fluffing his talent but making a point to not dismiss him, either. His value as a popularizer of painting and an inspiration to others emphasized, again and again.

But you never had to paint along with Bob Ross to get something out of his show. He could be downright hypnotic, burbling about “fluffy clouds” and embracing the “happy accidents” he’d make with a brush, painting knife or errant drop of paint. Like Fred Rogers, his brand of mellow could be a balm in a harrowing, stressful world.

Members of the production crew of the homey (their studios were literally in a house) Muncie, Indiana PBS affiliate that launched “Joy of Painting” speak adoringly of Ross, who comes off as a slightly edgier and hipper Mister Rogers, a permed-hair, shirt-open “sex symbol” to middle aged women who longed to learn to paint from a guy with a bedroom voice.

Rofé harshes our mellow when he introduces Annette Kowalski and Walt Kowalski, who come off as controlling, paranoid and greedy manipulators who helped boost Bob into fame, and poured all their energy into ensuring that his legacy, archives and his very name belonged to them and not his family.

They are described as people who “love to sue,” and the film goes to some pains to show those who choose to talk about them relating stories of the many too scared to do so on camera. Bob’s son, Steve Ross, trained to take over his teaching, if not his TV series, disciple and friend Dana Jester and an Alaskan teacher who had Bob in class all relate tales of the underhandedness, avarice and callousness of the Kowalskis, who as of this writing are the poster children for “Evil Triumphs.”

This movie cries out for a “to crowdfund a lawsuit against the Kowalskis, visit http://www.suethosebastards.com” closing credit.

That isn’t the case, of course. Not yet.

But as we follow the back and forth of a newly-empowered Britney Spears in battling her father, any documentary that takes up the cause of an embattled public figure, even one long dead, at least leaves us with hope.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Bob Ross, Steve Ross, Cathwren Jenkins, Sally Schenk, Dana Jester, Annette Kowalski and John Thamm.

Credits: Directed by Joshua Rofé. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

This one opens in Italy before it hits North America on Oct.1.

Tim Blake Nelson in the title role? I’m there.

“HipBeat” opens with docudrama scenes of European protest and solemn voice-over narration.

“No one is free if others are oppressed,” the aptly-named “Angy” (short for Angus) intones. We’re “being lied to…capitalism ruined democracy…These police, they’re only here to protect capitalism.”

And in the mind of our Euro-Irish hero, “We the people must fight back” because “every struggle is real.“

But in this fever dream of writer/director/star Samuel Kay Forrest (“Groove”), it’s “every struggle” added on to that global one against anti-democratic fascism that takes over his movie.

Angy’s in Berlin and in love, he thinks, with “the one,” Angie (Marie Céline Yildirim). It’s just that he can’t stop picking up women in all the raves that are part of the Euro-anarchist scene.

He can shoplift spray paint to spread his “HipBeAt” graffiti, with the “A” rendered into global brand for for “anarchists.” He can plan breaking and enterings to “hack” the system with trusted friends. He can weather arrests and arguments with his single mom, whom he’s always hitting up for money because “I live on the streets.”

Somehow, he’s managing to maintain that hip “Last of the Mohicans” haircut, drink and do drugs, organize without cell phones and philosophize without a college degree or any visible means of support.

Yet Angy can’t stop obsessing about his “polyamory,” his feckless infidelity, his need to hook-up — constantly — to consult with drag queens, cross dress and occasionally go down on a guy.

“The Revolution will not be televised,” he narrates, quoting Gil-Scott Heron. “It”ll be live streamed!”

Not in you’re in charge, mate. In broadening Angy’s amorphous notion of “The Struggle,” Forrest — the writer-director– takes his eyes off the prize.

There’s an argument to be made about “struggle” being universal and ensuring the rights of women and everybody on the sexual spectrum having equal validity in that debate. But man, “HipBeat’s” abrupt turn in this direction makes for a messy, indulgent and shallow movie.

Because if you can’t identify a threat and stay focused on it as the subject of your movie without it drifting into other obsessions, you’re lost.

“Everything passes, but freedom will rise again,” Angy says, hopefully. Nothing Angy or Forrest shows us here backs that up. Whatever pronoun Angy is comfortable with isn’t focused enough to manage that.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Samuel Kay Forrest, Marie Céline Yildirim

Credits: Scripted and directed by Samuel Kay Forrest. A Mother Earth Films release.

Running time: 1:29

I’ve seen and reviewed a few Robinson Crusoes over the years. Aidan Quinn was in a good one, Pierce Brosnan did another. “The Wild Life” was a cartoon version that came out in 2016. Georges Melies made it one of his pioneering “fantasy” shorts way back in 1903. It’s been adapted too many times and in so many different ways that it’s hard to keep count.

But I can’t recall ever catching the most straightforward and faithful-to-the-novel and its time version, the one Luis Buñuel made shortly after his international breakout hit “Los Olvidados.”

“The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” which turns up as “Robinson Crusoe” on streaming platform menus, is old fashioned in look and feel and in its “white man’s burden” racial politics. It would fall to later generations to update the 18th century novel into something a little more enlightened.

But as in Defoe’s “first novel in English,” our “hero” is shipwrecked while involved in the slave trade and does experience something of a conversion and a discovery of his own humanity during his trials.

Dan O’Herlihy went on to a long and storied Hollywood career that stretched all the way to “Robocop” and TV’s “Twin Peaks,” but “Crusoe” offered him a rare early lead, and he delivers in one of the iconic roles in all of fiction.

Buñuel faithfully presents this as a long reading from “the book” of Crusoe’s life and exploits — even showing us “the book” as was the style of such films (“Adventures of Robin Hood,” etc). The narrative is largely delivered in voice over by O’Herlihy, who recalls tumbling out of the surf on a Caribbean isle with his folding razor “my only possession, my only weapon.”

This version of the story makes the most of Crusoe’s industry and enterprise, a British Isles work ethic that has him not merely salvaging the wreck of the “Ariel,” rescuing its cat and dog as he does, but setting up his island “castle” with all the comforts of Scotland (the birthplace of Alexander Selkirk, whose true story was the inspiration for Defoe).

The first thing Crusoe reaches for on swimming aboard the wreck is a musket, the second a keg of rum.

Before he’s done, he’s constructed a fortified jungle cave-pit, cultivated grains to make bread and domesticated the island’s roaming (from earlier shipwrecks, Selkirk said) goats and invented the doggie door.

“You can wag your tail,” he notes, forlornly, “but you cannot talk to me.”

Loneliness becomes his greatest enemy, with dreams of the father he left behind and drunken hallucinations about his plight, “one day much like the other.”

And then the cannibals show up, a victim (Jaime Fernández) escapes and Crusoe intervenes, saving a man he names “Friday” who becomes both companion and subservient labor, a native who calls him “master.”

There are but tiny hints of the surrealist artiste Buñuel, the one who first gained notoriety working with Salvador Dali on “Un Chien Andalou” a quarter century earlier. The storm and wrecking of the ship are glimpsed in painterly flashes, but everything that follows is literal and simply if skillfully rendered.

The Mexican shoot skimped on having an on-set armorer. The gunfire is merely a sound effect. No flash or smoke of discharge, nothing that could be “fixed in post” back then. The sound is has a looped feel, as one would expect from an international film of the period, especially one told in voice-over (Spanish and English versions were released).

It was shot in Pathe Color, closer to Hollywood’s washed out Eastman Color than the glorious, saturated Technicolor that make films from that era still seem lush and larger than life dreams.

Still, the Buñuel “Crusoe” holds up like the benchmark telling of the story it has long been, the version every adaption since has referred to, even those that modernized its values and morality.

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dan O’Herlihy, Jaime Fernández

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, based on the Daniel Defoe novel. A United Artists release on Tubi and other free streamers.

Running time: 1:30

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dan O’Herlihy, Jaime Fernández

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, based on the Daniel Defoe novel. A United Artists release on Tubi and other free streamers.

Running time: 1:30

“The Old Ways” is an intriguing Mexican twist on the exorcism thriller.

It imagines a demonic possession diagnosed and treated in “the old ways” in a remote corner of the culture that’s more tribal than Spanish, more pagan than Catholic.

A young reporter has been taken hostage, dragged to a remote house with her head covered in a sack. She (Brigitte Kale Canales) doesn’t speak Spanish, but protests all she can in English. And she can’t answer her 60ish captor’s (Sal Lopez) Spanish questions.

“What were you looking for in La Boca?”

She throws a name out in desperation, a cousin from here. Miranda (Andrea Cortés) shows up, somber. She hears “She has it” from the face-painted one-eyed crone (Julia Vera) and stays. She will act as Cristina’s translator and guide to what’s about to happen.

“They think you have a demon inside you.”

Cristina has stuck her nose where she oughtn’t. But as she and Miranda talk, their mutual connection to this place and Cristina’s reasons for returning to the town of her birth become clear. Her mother went through something similar, with little Cristina witnessing it.

Now, the reporter whose “job is to go places people tell me not to go” will be subjected to the ritual, strapped down as “la bruja” (the witch) practices psychic surgery, pulling stuff out of her abdomen, chanting and dancing and blowing smoke to lure out the demon that mother may have passed to daughter.

The effects and production values set the gloomy scene for Christopher Alender’s (script by Marcos Gabriel) take on the genre. The body-contorting tropes of “possession/exorcism” films can seem to span many cultures, but the music (listen for the pre Valens “La Bamba”), face-painting and tribal incantations give this film it’s Mexican flavor.

But the tone is set by the performances, and they generally give the whole film the feel of a low-stakes game.

Seasoned reporter Cristina may be, but Canales under-reacts to her horrific plight, others render the ceremonial exorcism more matter-of-fact than part of a grand struggle against evil.

Dealing with this Postheki demon should feel terrifying to the outsider, if not the grimly-resigned locals. It isn’t.

“The Old Ways” never builds empathy for anyone, making it a horror movie you watch but don’t “experience,” its bland heroine someone who never makes us fear for her sanity, her safety or her life.

Rating: TV: MA, violence

Cast: Brigitte Kali Canales, Andrea Cortés, Julia Vera, Sal Lopez

Credits: Directed by Christopher Alender, scripted by Marcos Gabriel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Fun fact, “Vacation Friends” was set up as a comedy to star the then-married Anna Faris and Chris Pratt — back in 2014. Was that even its first incarnation?

The point is, this pitch was funny enough to make the rounds for years, promising enough for actors to sign onto and worth throwing five credited screenwriters at. Well, five that we know of.

And it still turned out like this.

Wisecracker and master-reactor Lil Rel Howery and John Cena in gonzo comic mode — cliff diving and boat wrecking, drug tripping and wedding crashing, fox hunting and baby begetting, all thrown against the wall in a comedy that rarely stays on its feet long enough to amount to anything.

Howery (“Get Out,””Free Guy”) is Marcus, a “control freak” Chicago building contractor who only wants this Mexican vacation with his girlfriend Emily (Yvonne Orji of “Night School,” and TV’s “Insecure”) to come off, for his Big Gesture proposal in their resort suite to be perfect.

But it doesn’t. That flooded hotel room upstairs and the devil-may-care couple staying in it sees to that.

Ron (Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner of “Set it Up” and TV’s “Search Party”) are YOLO/”live for the moment” working class lovers who blew every cent they have on this trip. Each of them is an open book, and both of them together are open-hearted enough to “save” Marcus and Emily’s trip. They’ll share their penthouse suite with them.

The uptight, accomplished Chicagoans will learn to “loosen up” at the feet of folks whose chief privilege is their irresponsibility. A toast! Margaritas all around! But uh, that’s not salt on the rim of the glass, kids. That’s “blow,” “Bolivian marching powder,” cocaine.

It’s all downhill from there, thanks to the “fun” couple that never learned when to say “When.”

Practical jokes with an edge, cliff diving in the dark, catamaran-wrecking in the broad daylight, all with a buzz on, this is a vacation to remember. Well, what they can remember of it, anyway. And when it’s done?

“You guys are in our lives now,” Ron, with a hint of menace in his voice, says as they depart. “Nothing’s ever gonna change that!”

Not even the high-stress/high-toned society wedding that Emily and Marcus don’t invite them to. But just wait until that pickup truck “crashes” it, with Ron and Kyla facing Emily’s snobby parents (Lynn Whitfield and Robert Wisdom), her punk-snob brother (Andrew Bachelor, funny) and all the upper echelon events (high stakes golf, a fox hunt, rehearsal dinner) that go with it.

The pitch for this was perfectly reasonable, that “what happens on vacation stays on vacation” dynamic of “Couples Retreat,” “The Heartbreak Kid” all the way back to “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation,” an ancient James Stewart/Maureen O’Hara vehicle.

On an allegorical level, it’s a comedy built on the “real” rift between The Two Americas — the careful and the careless.

But this feels forced, right from the start. Everybody has to lean into the would-be laughs too hard because they’re uncertain there’s another one coming again any time soon.

The situations are recycled and dully predictable. Of COURSE Ron throws big money bets into this golf foursome, of COURSE he’s sandbagging it. Of COURSE Ron and the insufferable father-in-law have a secret bond.

The drugged-up bits aren’t awful, and under-credited (he’s been “working” a long time, without much success) director Clay Tarver almost gets a laugh by filming the 40 foot catamaran wreck in long shot so — you know — they don’t have to actually wreck a $350,000 sailboat.

But as Barry Sonnenfeld (“Get Shorty”) decreed, comedy is a close-up medium. That was never going to play as funny. And if you can’t make “getting stoned and going on a fox hunt” funny, maybe comedy isn’t your thing.

Lil Rel’s over-the-top reactions aren’t far enough over-the-top, and Cena letting it all hang out (ahem) is only funny once or twice. Bachelor is the only supporting player, save for Carlos Santos, perfectly smarmy as an inept concierge, to come close to hitting comic paydirt.

This thing winds up being about as funny as the reason Anna Faris and Chris Pratt weren’t able to star in it.

Rating: R for drug content, crude sexual references, and language throughout

Cast: Lil Rel Howery, John Cena, Yvonne Orji, Meredith Hagner, Andrew Bachelor, Lynn Whitfield and Robert Wisdom

Credits: Directed by Clay Tarver, scripted by Tom Mullen, Tim Mullen, Clay Tarver, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. A 20th Century Studios/Hulu release.

Running time: 1:47