Movie Nation

There are a lot of ways to appreciate this run of bloody minded B movies Mel Gibson has been starring in since his meltdown.

He still gives great value, even as an aged tough guy, and being a director he ensures that whoever he is acting for doesn’t make a hash of the movie, just by being on the set.

And even if you’re not of the Christian conservative forgive-and-forget attitude about his antisemitism and homophobia and awful temper and alcohol issues, there’s something redemptive in seeing him sentenced to this corner of filmdom, taking it like a man.

Look for Mel, Kate Bosworth and Emile Hirsch in this on June 30.

Some thrillers work simply by hewing closely to the Thriller Rules.

Don’t waste our time. Pacing equals “urgency” and urgency is what makes the pulse pound. Raise the stakes and keep them high. Give us twists we never see coming.

Make the interludes revealing about character, but not TOO revealing. Don’t over-explain.

And lastly, and this one comes directly from Hitchcock, “Good villains make good thrillers.”

Canadian writer-director Christian Sparkes’ “Hammer” follows those to a T. He doesn’t waste time. The movie’s 81 minutes practically fly by.

He keeps it simple, and keeps the twists coming.

High stakes? How about a son (Mark O’Brien of “Ready or Not”) comes home, on the run from a drug deal double-cross that backfired. His whole family may pay for his criminal associations and his blundering.

And the villain? That would be veteran character actor Ben Cotton (“Stargate: Atlantis,””Hellcats”). As Adams, the money man fetching the cash young Chris (O’Brien) has just duffel-bagged across the border into Sault Saint Marie, Ontario, he has the build and the crazy eyes of a guy you do NOT want to cross.

Will Patton plays the retired teacher Chris runs home to when the scheme goes wrong. Only not exactly. Mom (Lara Jean Chorostecki ) and Dad kicked Chris out of the house for shenanigans just like this. They have his younger brother (Connor Price) to worry about, after all.

Dad Stephen has just reassured Mom Debbie that “Chris is fine,” when he stares — slack-jawed — as a guy looking just like his son hurtles into town, a bit bloodied, racing a dirt bike to his now-empty grandfather’s house.

Chris doesn’t want Dad involved because “You gave up on me.” But he’s got a body to stash, bags of money to fetch, a drug distributor (Cotton) to evade. So sure, OK. Come along. But no lectures about why he didn’t “just turn to you because I need help.” That wasn’t really an option.

Patton, one of the great character players (last seen in “Halloween” and the “Swamp Thing” TV series, gets across their “history” with just a look, a wince of recognition, a grimace of guilt. How DID his son go so wrong? Can he believe a word out of this punk’s mouth?

A LOT is left unsaid here, which makes us work and forces the actors to “be” their complicated history, not verbalize it. It’s textbook screenwriting and bang-on.

Sparkes (“Cast No Shadow”) runs all manner of random/not-random scenes by us. The hunt for the “stashed” cash includes a senile dog and a snake swallowing its own tail. The seeking of a hitman (Curtis Caravaggio) — “He’s NOT a hitman.  He’s ‘protection.'” — has a “Trainspotting” homage as “protection’s” wife shoves a baby in Chris’ hands when he walks in the door.

“She looks GOOD on you.”

A visit to a pawn shop/jeweler goes awry, just as the opening scene’s double-cross collapses in on itself.

Everybody tries to keep things from everybody else, which makes Stephen’s ongoing in-person and on-the-phone fight with Deborah over her father, freshly-placed in a nursing home and hating it, even trickier.

“Hammer” — the title is one more thing for us to figure out — doesn’t break genre. It’s the umpteen-millionth “drug deal gone wrong/drug money/drug gangsters wanting that money” thriller. The surprises here come within the narrow confines of a well-worn plot path.

But more importantly, in this instance, it doesn’t break the Thriller Rules. They make this “ticking clock” thriller tick over like clockwork, jumpy opening to nerve-wracking finish.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Mark O’Brien, Will Patton, Ben Cotton,  Lara Jean Chorostecki, Connor Price Dayle McLeod.

Credits: Written and directed by Christian Sparkes. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:21

A moral dilemma in a pregnancy is the heart of this pregnancy and possible parenthood drama, finding out a baby you’re carrying has Down Syndrome.

This one comes out in late June.

This Mark Waters film comes out Sept. 20, and features Russell Brand, Marina Abramovic , Alex Grey, Graham Hancock, Gary Weber, Rupert Spira, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein and Matthew Watherston.

You can search the Internet, high and low, for a profile of filmmaker Abel Ferrara that doesn’t use the word “maverick.” He’s made it his brand, probably using it about himself and in press releases like the late U.S. Senator who so coveted that label.

I’ve always thought “indulged” was more suitable. He came to fame in his native New York with thrillers like “The King of New York” and “Bad Lieutenant” decades ago. But in the years since, Ferrara’s turned out increasingly iconoclastic indie films. With an exception, here and there, he’s been on something akin to a deeper and deeper gaze into his own navel, or some other bodily orifice.

And even though these movies make barely a peep outside of his tiny cult following, he continues to find financing and stars — OK, a star — willing to take these unprofitable, obscure journeys with him.

Willem Dafoe has become his muse, his alter ego, for half a dozen films now including the upcoming “Siberia” and most famously in his Ferrara-esque portrait of Italian novelist, poet, intellectual, political gadfly and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

“Tommaso” has the collaborators teaming up for a story about an ageing, insecure filmmaker struggling to to polish a symbolic quasi-religious script (story-boarded) in Rome, obsessing over his little girl, fretting over his very young wife’s possible infidelity, as he cheats with students in his acting class and a shapely server at his favorite cafe, in between long “sharing” sessions with an English language AA group.

The young wife is played by Cristina Chiriac, the model-actress-wife of Ferrara, less than half his age. The toddler is Anna Ferrara, their daughter. Dafoe is like a slightly-younger, somewhat more handsome version of Ferrara, who now makes his family’s home in Rome.

The sum of which begs the question, “Wait, Ferrara’s in Alcoholics Anonymous?”

The semi-autobiographical Tomasso is being tutored in Italian and teaching Italian actors (almost all women) movement, “finding the gesture” via games that look like conga lines. It feels very 1970s, and Dafoe shines brightest in these scenes where one can leap to the conclusion “This is how a Willem Dafoe acting school might look.”

“For me, performing is always somewhere between control and imbalance,” he lectures, a student translating for the gathered Italians. Acting is “not to show, but to DO.”

Tommaso has his freedom and his routine, teaching, learning Italian, attending meetings, having dalliances, writing (in voice-over, in his head) a screenplay with Eskimos and a bear and taking his child to the park.

There is stress in the marriage, which he vents in his AA meetings, or afterword with sponsors and the like.

“She’s 29,” he grouses/brags. “You’d think she’d appreciate my experience.”

No, you clueless old cradle robber. She’d appreciate a little freedom herself, not being on child-care duty 24-7, not having to be at your beck and call, the chance to discover the city (she is Moldavian-Russian) and life for herself.

Neither the character nor the filmmaker seem to get this.

The usual surreal Ferrara touches decorate the tale — documentary footage of Indian and Moldovan musicians and Buddhist teachers, a graphic bear attack, a little Sophia Loren Italian film dance scene, and a “flashback” to a Dafoe interrogation scene that could have been in Ferrara’s “Pasolini.”

And the excesses are here — lots of female nudity, sex, screaming jags, violence, a moment where the angst-ridden artist literally yanks out his own heart.

Still, it’s not Ferrara’s most “out there” film, and Dafoe is always a riveting presence. He is mesmerizing in the AA scenes, amusing in the acting classes and convincingly “at home” in Rome.

No, the pondering of “What is truth?” and the nature of those things that “elicit pleasure in your mind” isn’t solved. Ferrara, at 69, still comes off more a poseur than the deep thinker he’s trying to attach to that “maverick” label.

It’s pretentious and indulgent. But as with most Ferrara films, “Tommaso” makes for an interesting trip into a seriously unconventional mind visualized by an always unconventional storyteller.

And if European money lenders are still indulging Woody Allen, why not Ferrara?

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac Ferrara, Anna Ferrara

Credits: Written and directed by Abel Ferrara.  A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:53

Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) Tweeted: Aaron Sorkin writing Mark Zuckerberg as a power hungry, morally bankrupt sociopath in “The Social Network” is probably the best thing he ever did. https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1265825677401624578?s=20

The world’s fourth largest island, a country famed for its beauty, its wildlife and a series of animated films about zoo animals making their way there, “has an image problem” a UNICEF official says in the early moments of the documentary “Madagasikara.”

Those popular images, of lemurs and striking landscapes, greenery and baobab trees, aren’t the real Madagascar. The truth about the place is that without any civil war, drought or other obvious external threat, it has plunged from impoverished to dire.

The real Madagascar, the natives, non-governmental aid workers and activists in “Madagasikara” declare, is more Dickensian than Dreamworks.

People are so poor that a generation is growing up physically and intellectually stunted, a byproduct of starvation.

The government was no picnic before 2002, but then a local oligarch seized the presidency after an election he lost, and proceeded to loot the place. When he schemed to sell off half the arable land to South Korean interests, in 2009 the people marched, in spite of massacres by government troops, and chased him away. American sanctions under the Obama Administration cut off aid and embargoed international help.

The aid is trickling back, but poverty seems endemic without a lot of help.

Cam Cowan’s film profiles several Malagasy women, and through them lays out the dire circumstances of the place, the source of some of its problems and the search for solutions.

Lin is in her early 40s when we meet her, raising her six children and a grandchild on almost nothing. The occasional bit of laundry work might give them a couple of cups of rice on a given day. It may come off as judgmental of Cowan to let her name the babies she lost (one is buried under the front stoop) and mention that she had each child with a different man.

Her desperation is visited much earlier in life when we meet Deborah, a former sex worker who is about 16 when we meet her. She weeps recalling how she had to take up this work at 12, how she often wouldn’t get paid or would be beaten by men or their enraged wives. She wanted to study the law, but had a child at 13 and is doing what she can to get them beyond subsistence and into a better situation.

Can she do that without a man?

And we meet 32 year-old Tina as she brings her toddler with her to the quarry where she, like her parents before her, makes gravel by hand.

“The stones are our bread of life,” she sighs, worrying that even this grinding, starvation-wage work will disappear.

Father Pedro Opeka (the island is largely Catholic) complains that the poverty rate has gone from about 30% when he got there in 1970, and rose steadily until 2009, when it spiked and reached as high as 90%.

Punishing the people by cutting off aid when it is the crooks looking to finish looting the land of everything of value, as elected officials, who have demolished democracy and rendered the island an Indian Ocean version of Haiti is almost genocidal, several argue.

Seeing “Madagasikara” in the middle of a pandemic, where elected American officials are using cold calculus about who gets to live and who gets to die, with a government referring to its people as “human capital,” and openly corrupt officials seemingly set on looting the national patrimony before everyone catches on, is sobering. This is what a “one-percent” oligarchy’s end game looks like. Yes, it can happen anywhere the rich grab power and impose their priorities on the rest of us.

The tiny glimmers of hope that “Madagasikara” offers — people with so little can be impacted by even the slightest charity — can’t obscure either the humanitarian catastrophe being visited on one of the most gorgeous lands on Earth, or the cautionary nature of showing what a malevolent and illegitimate government can do to create that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, disturbing subject matter, child sex worker content

Cast: Lin, Deborah, Tina, Father Pedro Opeka

Credits: Directed by Cam Cowan. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:24

Every now and then in various corners of the South, I’ll see a guy taking his fully-restored 1969-79 Chevrolet Nova out for a Saturday AM spin, maybe a run to a car show.

And I’m not going to lie. I always feel a little sorry for these men. Of all the cars to pour money into fixing up, of all the “first car I ever owned” nostalgia to be misplaced, they’re clinging to this?

This was one of the ugliest big “little” cars from an age that some Internet wags (and Facebook groups) dub “Malaise Motors.” With good reason.

In college marketing classes, Hell, even in Spanish classes, the story of how Chevrolet pitched this model (which dates from earlier in the ’60s) to the Americas and the world, how they didn’t realize “No va” is Spanish for “Won’t go” is legend. 

But damned if these tiny tanks aren’t turning up every couple of days in something I’m watching or reviewing. Thanks to “Stranger Things” and “Peanut Butter Falcon” and “Snowfall” and “Cry Havoc” and “The High Note,” this butt-ugly (especially the butt) Detroit “compact” is having a moment.

“Stumptown,” “The Evil Down the Street,” even the animated “Bojack Horseman” feature a Nova, here and there. Jared Leto drives one in “The Little Things.” Hey, all the best serial killers do. What’s down-and-out, “poor decisions” queen Jena Malone drive in “Lorelei?”

Nothing says “poor decisions” like owning a Nova. It goes back to the Ugliest Nova of them all. What do his pals do to send “Good Will Hunting” on his way? They buy him a beat-up, patchwork 1971 Chevy Nova.

Damned if the bank-robber Tom Holland plays in February’s “Cherry” doesn’t meet a street drug dealer driving a late-run 1978 model. Shoot toot, here’s one in “F9 — The Fast Saga.”

Everywhere I look. Marcia Marcia Marcia, Nova Nova Nova.

Go figure. Am I being too harsh about its looks? Look at the pictures above and tell me I’m wrong.

There are worse sins than leaning into the cute if you’re making a diva-and-her-assistant romantic comedy, especially if you’ve cast sitcom star Tracee Ellis Ross (“black-ish”) as the diva, and Dakota Johnson as the assistant.

Ross, the daughter of that diva’s diva, Miss Diana Ross, gives her 45-and-counting singer, Grace Davis, a sitcom rhythm to her punchlines and plays “nice” when the caricature of the “type” is arrogant, needy and cruel.

And Johnson, daughter of divas Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, is always helped when she’s surrounded by funnier people than herself.

That makes for an agreeable dramedy about music, showbiz dreams and family legacy, a movie that amuses and occasionally even surprises, sometimes when it hits “The High Note.”

The relationship set up here seems more a product of chemistry and the dynamics established on the set than the requirements of the first-produced-script of its screenwriter.

Johnson, as Margaret “Maggie” Sherwood, is a bit old to be an assistant. But she’s been with Grace three years because, more than anything else, she’s a fan. And being 30ish, she’s inclined to speak her mind.

Grace is being talked into taking a Vegas residency at Caesar’s Palace. Maggie is appalled and thinks it’s time for that first new record in ten years because “the fans want one.”

And then Ice Cube, as Grace’s grumpy lifelong manager Jack, comes in and steals the damn movie from these two glamour pusses.

Jack is all about “Play it safe, STACK that money.” And “new material?” Don’t get him started.

“Don’t nobody wanna go to no Yankee Doodle Springsteen concert and hear him play that wrecking ball folksy bull-s–t! People want ‘THUNDER ROAD,’ Ok? And that’s what we’re gonna give’em — ‘Thunder Road!'”

Grace is almost a passive presence in her own career, rarely getting her back up about her “11 Grammys,” her due respect, HER ideas.

Maggie? She wants to be a producer. She’s secretly befriended an engineer who helped her remix cuts for Grace’s concert album. And then she meets this apparently well-off aspiring singer-guitarist-songwriter (Kelvin Harrison, Jr. of “Waves” and TV’s “Godfather of Harlem”).

He may think he’s just “some douche-bag who thought he could be a singer.” To Maggie, “You’re just self-sabotaging. And I can work with that.”

It’s a perfectly pleasant movie to sit through, although there’s more sitting than the material warrants, and “pleasant” shouldn’t be the highest note you’re reaching for — not with this many “names” in the cast (Eddie Izzard and Bill Pullman show up later).

Director Nisha Ganatra got her second chance at feature film glory with last year’s “Late Night,” and still has trouble getting out of her own way. Her first crack was a Heather Graham bomb, “Cake.” “High Note” should sing and just zip by, and she’s made 113 minutes that show off Ross’s voice (thinner than her mother’s, not bad), frequent rides in Grace’s McLaren 570s, an abortive “No Scrubs” sing along, a movie that bogs down in Maggie’s machinations and romantic pitfalls and delays, as long as it can, some pretty corny third act surprises.

Like “Late Night,” this plays as soft, no edge. Even the arguments are squishy. Until Ice Cube’s Jack pipes up.

“Who the Hell you think you are, Missy Elliott? GO to Starbucks!”

That’s how a diva talks to an assistant, dears. Make a note of it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, and suggestive references

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bill Pullman, June Diane Raphael and Ice Cube.

Credits: Directed by Nisha Ganatra, script by Flora Greeson. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:53