Movie Nation

Todd Haynes, director of the Dylan-of-Many-Faces biography “I’m and Not There” and glam/punk appreciation “Velvet Goldmine,” isn’t interested in spoon-feeding anybody a history of “The Velvet Underground.”

Haynes figures if you show up for it (Apple TV+ has it), you already know a little something about the highly-influential/legendarily “unsuccessful” 1960s and early-70s band fronted by Lou Reed and John Cale, produced by Andy Warhol and sometimes featuring the imposing film starlet, model and singer Nico, “the blonde iceberg in the middle of the stage” filled with musicians and their avant-garde rock.

So what Haynes delivers is a lovely, warm and impressionistic sketch of the band — montages of images and archival news, interviews, “Factory” and concert footage to set the scene and place the Velvets within their time. That and old interviews with members no longer living and fresh, fond and sometimes blunt takes on why they matter from surviving members Cale and Maureen Tucker. Fans, relatives and others paint a picture of a famously-experimental band that (with Warhol) invented the ’60s version of “multi-media” musical performance and influenced generations that came after them.

Haynes “shows” us rather than “tells” us a lot of the basics. We see the cover of Michael Leigh’s scandalized 1963 book “The Velvet Underground,” an exploration of “paraphilia,” that the band took as its name — eventually.

We hear from Reed about his first interest in music, listening to “The Diablos, The Jesters, The Paragons, doo-wop, rockabilly,” and from childhood friends and Reed’s sister Merrill about his sexual curiosity, performing at New York’s Hayloft gay bar as a teen.

There’s nothing of Reed himself talking about his sexuality.

Cale is first seen in an appearance on the 1960s TV quiz show “I’ve Got a Secret,” where the Welshman’s 18 hour long performance of a piano piece by an avant-garde composer he knew is puzzled over, respectfully acknowledged and lightly ridiculed by the program’s panel.

Cale’s brief discussion of his childhood mentions how he “got taken advantage of” as a child. You have to know, or look up his life story to learn about his abuse at the hands of a music teacher and Anglican priest.

The film doesn’t dwell on drugs, barely touches on them in fact.

But we see footage of what Andy Warhol’s “Factory” was like, and hear ringing endorsements of how this artists’ coop/workspace “was all about the work,” the way the painter, film and music impresario pushed those he invited there, including Reed.

The Velvets — Reed and fellow guitarist Sterling Morrison, who met at Syracuse University, multi-instrumentalist and classically trained Cale, Morrison’s childhood friend, drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and later, when Warhol got the idea they needed a sex symbol out front, Nico (Christa Päffgen) who was in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” — are heard and seen as they’re tracked through a surprisingly long and depressingly downhill career.

They started out as Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the “house band” at Warhol’s happening and hip “Factory,” became celebrated in New York for Cale’s “droning” musical backdrop on viola or whatever and Reed’s clever, arty and poetic pop sensibilities, made clear on songs such as “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs.”

It’s fascinating to hear snippets of Reed’s pubescent pop tunes — he cut his first record at 14 — and Cale talk about his early exposure to “the 60 cycle (motor) hum of the refrigerator,” which to him and his earliest collaborators was “the hum of Western civilization.”

Applying that primal “drone” to the texture of rock records made even their most poppish tunes distinct and strange.

“That weirdness, it shouldn’t have existed in this space” an early acolyte marvels.

“You need physics to describe that band at its height” another enthuses.

Haynes tracks down big fan Jonathan Richman (of The Modern Lovers, and the movie “There’s Something About Mary”) and he speaks adoringly of his experience meeting with and being mentored by members of the band. Jackson Browne, of all people, remembers playing guitar for Nico shows in the ’60s.

There’s not enough of the music, not really enough of the “experience” of seeing them live when they played with Warhol films projected behind them, psychedelic lights, “white polka dots” bathing them in performance, with Nico struggling to stay on pitch during her brief turn as a singer.

Immersive and informative as it is, that keeps “The Velvet Underground” from being definitive. And that in turn lets it fall short of making its case, backed up by musicians and music critics (not seen here), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of their seminal status.

But Haynes handles the band’s post-breakup years in a lovely, warm final montage that celebrates Reed’s growing fame and later life, Cale’s revered status in music circles and the lives — too short, some of them — that this “it” band of the ’60s avant-garde went on to lead after shaking music up every bit as much as The Beatles, if not as profitably.

Rating: R for language, sexual content, nudity and some drug material

Cast: John Cale, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Mary Woronov, Nico, Sterling Morrison, LaMonte Youung, Jackson Browne and Jonathan Richman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Haynes. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:01

Neve Campbell had me at “I’ve been through this…a lot.”

Next year.

Looks like mostly an homage to the original. And it looks like it works.

Denis Villeneuve’s film of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” looks exactly as it should on the big screen — epic in scale, baroque in design, fatalistic in outlook, grim in its life-or-death stakes.

But then the reason we know what it’s supposed to look and feel like from David Lynch’s flawed 1984 adaptation, if not the SyFy Channel’s malnourished dive into it. This dense, tense and Bedouin culture/feudalism-in-space piece of science fiction, first published on the heels of David Leans’ “Lawrence of Arabia” in the 1960s isn’t so much “unfilmmable” as a bit played out in terms of themes, action beats and plot points. Herbert stole from desert Arab culture. Everybody from George Lucas onward stole from Herbert.

So as faithful to the spirit of the novel as this adaptation is, as wonderfully as visionary Villeneuve cast it, as stunning as the “Arrival/Blade Runner 2049” director’s production design and art direction team makes it, this pretty picture often plays as ponderous.

And Villeneuve makes that conclusion entirely too easy. You don’t have to remember Lynch’s “Dune” to realize that while Villanueve added material to the opening act and stripped away narration that organized both the novel and earlier adaptations, his film mimics the earlier film’s pace. You don’t have to remember the story from the novel or earlier adaptations — also referenced in “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the documentary about a third “visionary” who almost made a version of this desert planet saga back in the ’70s — to get impatient with Villeneuve’s many lingering shots of “Star Wars” sized military formations, gigantic worms, ginormous spaceships and the “Thopter,” the dragonfly-like ornithopter that flies over the planet Arrakis, coveted s for its hallucinogenic, interstellar-travel enabling “spice.”

“Dune” gives us the dreams of its hero, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), heir to the dukedom of House Atreides. Again and again, we’re teased with flash-forwards thanks to Paul, son of not just Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), but of his witchy spellbinder of the Bene Gesserit mother (Rebecca Ferguson). This “chosen one” has glimpses of a possible future, which creates impatience in the story as it plods through everything it takes to put our hero in those more-exciting-than-what-we-see-here dream scenes from “Dune 2” and/or “3.”

Even though Villeneuve & Co. realized that Herbert’s book was going to take multiple films to cover, unlike David Lynch and his producer Dino DeLaurentis, by pacing this “Dune” exactly like Lynch’s — both films give us our first taste of the Sand Worms” one hour in — he all but ensures the slowest “origin story” franchise film in ages.

House Atreides, led by Duke Leto, has been given the “fief” of Arrakis, sending him and his vast armed clan to take over the spice mining on this forbidding desert planet whose natives, the Fremen, aren’t keen on “Outworlders” making a mess of things and giving them nothing in return.

The Duke, his concubine Jessica (Ferguson), his son Paul and most trusted lieutenants (Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin and Stephen McKinley Henderson) and palace guards will take over from their bloodthirsty rivals, House Harkonnen, led by its bloated ogre of a Baron (Stellan Skarsgård) and his thuggish nephew (Dave Bautista).

“When is a gift not a gift?”

Arrakis is a poison pill for Atreides, a hellishly hot place infested with people-and-machinery-devouring sand worms, wracked by terrorist attacks from the Fremen. The Duke hopes to pacify the place by “negotiating” with the natives and fixing everything the Harkonnen messed up.

Fat chance.

Javier Bardem plays a gloriously insolent leader of the Fremen, Zendaya is a native dominating Paul’s dreams of the planet and his future. Charlotte Rampling is the forbidding Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, who “tests” Paul, reminding him “You have more than one birthright, boy!”

“Dune” takes us from grand, oversized sets to striking Norwegian coastal cliffs and the stunning desert vistas of Abu Dhabi as it immerses us in this universe of intrigues and a Chosen One’s martial and ESP Bene Gesserit training from Mum.

“Use ‘The Voice!'”

And the film introduces us to an arid world where shade is a life-saving must just after sunrise, where water is so precious it has to be recycled in special suits and spitting isn’t the insult it is in much of our world, even though it’s just as gross.

Chalamet tends to overdo his many take-a-thoughtful-pause moments and Bautista seems woefully miscast in this ensemble of Oscar nominees and an Oscar winner.

But Mamoa and Brolin are macho delights, Ferguson soulful and scheming, Isaac and Sharon Duncan-Brewster (playing an Imperial ecologist) make strong impressions and Stellan Skarsgård, almost buried in (Digital?) prosthetics, tickles as an embittered, bloody-minded beast with little control of his “appetites.”

Hans Zimmer’s score leans heavily on the Arabic influences that inspired Herbert, whose novel gave much of the Western world its first taste of such words as “jihad” and The Mahdi.”

David Lynch was forced to suddenly squeeze in two thirds of the novel into the ruinously-rushed last 45 minutes of his “Dune,” and Villeneuve faces no such dilemma. But his take on the tale dawdles, pretty much from his opening scene to the anti-climactic finish.

There’s a trick to making first-film-in-a-franchise films, and while the sweep of this one is every bit the eye candy fans could hope for, Villeneuve, the screenwriters and I must add composer Zimmer don’t so much stick the landing as let their picture peter out.

Let’s hope “Dune 2” turns Villeneuve’s vision into more entertaining action epic.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Javier Bardem, Chen Chang, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Dave Bautista and Stellan Skarsgård.

Credits: Directed by Denis Villeneuve, scripted by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth. based on the novel by Frank Herbert. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:35

Worms and Chalamet and Aquaman and memories of Lynch.

Here we go.

It’s not stopped, it’s not gone away.

They’ve just gotten nice cinematography for this latest twice on the venerable franchise.

“Next of Kin” comes to Paramount Plus Oct 29. Theaters too?

There’s a rich Hollywood tradition of glib treatment of the mentally ill — movies with the medically disastrous “all they really need is love” message.

The simplistic melodrama “My Brother, My Sister (Mio fratello mia sorella)” flirts with giving us an Italian twist on that Hollywood “cure.” But it doesn’t wholly embrace that idea even at its soapiest. What we see here is a sometimes glum portrait of a family drowning in the illness of one member, unable to see that until the irresponsible prodigal brother (uncle) returns.

Haggard Tesla (Claudia Pandolfini) is presides over a properly weepy Roman Catholic funeral for her father, an astrophysicist whose life merits many a tearful testimonial.

Until, that is, a RayBanned beach bum strolls in and steps to the pulpit. Brother Nik — their dad named his kids “Nikola” and “Tesla” — has a different take, one a little off script. Tesla’s fury at the sibling (Alessandro Preziosi) she hasn’t seen in many years has just begun.

Their dad left them the family apartment — together– which the movie tries to convince us is only three rooms. Somehow, they’ll have to reconnect and work things out, and it might just take them a year.

It’s just that Tesla never told Nik that her son, Sebastiano (Francesco Cavallo) is schizophrenic, filled with tics and chatter with this Martian, “Kelvin,” inside his head. He’s a gifted cellist, and not the only musician in the family. But the apartment is papered over with Post It notes, reminding him of this or that, and everybody else of the medications, routines and bubble they’ve turned all their lives into to help him cope.

Tesla’s despair is that “surfer philosopher” (in Italian with English subtitles, or dubbed) is a disruption that their world cannot withstand.

Her college age daughter Carolina (Ludovica Martino), whose rebellion has taken the form of addressing her mother by her first name, uses her inheritance — grandpa’s old RV — to move out. She’s given up enough of her life to her brother’s care.

And Sebastiano’s piano accompanist, Emma (Stella Egitto), keeping to a strict routine to “help” Sebastiano, frets over Nik’s interference even as she despairs of ever being able to perform with “Seba” publicly.

Nik, given to random moments of nudity and naked romps with young women he’s picked up while kite-surfing on the beach, is a bull in their china shop of rigid routine, enforced quiet and lives totally built around the sick person in their midst.

Old wounds will be opened, a sibling rivalry half-renewed and ugly secrets exposed as Nik “interferes” with one and all, and that routine is shaken up.

Pandolfini (of “Cuanda da Note, When the Night”) and Preziosi (“None Like Us”) have an apt brittle chemistry, and the supporting players have just enough good scenes to lay out each one’s agenda.

Cavallo’s catalog of nervous twitches and banter with the voice inside his is reasonably convincing, in a “movie version of schizophrenia” way.

The “secrets” are a mix of “Wow, didn’t see that coming” and “Really, who couldn’t see THAT coming?”

There are several points where writer-director Roberto Capucci — the soccer road-trip comedy “Ovunque tu sarai” was his — could have turned this into something lighter, if less psychologically defensible.

But even Sebastiano stumbling into Nik’s nubile, naked new girlfriend in the bathroom never quite plays as a laugh.

The film takes on the timid/don’t-make-noise tone of the family, living under the cloud of the gifted cellist’s illness. Nik has old issues to resolve, Tesla has to take stock and Carolina asserts herself as a fashionista once she’s out from under the family’s roof. But Sebastiano’s part of the story smothers the life out of the rest of it.

That makes for a drab mental-illness-in-the-family Italian melodrama, one without much in the ways of upbeat highs or soul-crushing lows.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sexuality, smoking, drinking

Cast: Claudia Pandolfini, Alessandro Preziosi, Ludovica Martino, Stella Egitto, Francesco Cavallo and Caterina Murino

Credits: Scripted and directed by Roberto Capucci. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

Eliza Coupe, Chris Baker and Eric Roberts star in this bit of murder camp, opening Oct 22.

If you like movies with “pluck,” here’s one that uses the phrase “up by your bootstraps” more than once. And there’s nothing more plucky or All American than that.

“Women is Losers” is a tale of Latina struggle and overcoming discrimination, of making your own American dream, and of the way things were before Roe v. Wade.

Actress turned writer-director Lissette Feliciano doesn’t give herself enough screen time to do all of those themes justice. And she’s overly fond of having characters turn to the camera to deliver sermons when the “message” is already right there in front of us. But pluck wins out and makes this one a winner.

We meet Celina (Lorenza Izzo of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) as she’s having a loud shouting match with her baby daddy (Bryan Craig of TV’s “Grand Hotel”) on the stoop in front of their San Francisco apartment building.

Mid-argument, she turns to the camera and suggests we go back to “the beginning” to see “how far we’ve come.”

The shouting match was happening in the early-70s. The story takes us back to the late ’60s, when Celina and her brassy buddy Marty (Chrissie Fit) were in Catholic school, dreaming big dreams, trying not to get too distracted by boys.

But their “older men” come home from Vietnam, and both wind up pregnant.

“We’re not going to let this ruin our lives.”

Two teenaged girls go to a “use the back door” dentist Marty’s beau has suggested for abortions. Only one walks out, because of how dangerous “back alley abortions” were, way back then.

“Women is Losers” lets us see the scar that stays on Celina’s heart from that experience, and her struggles to get a job without a degree, get an apartment as a single mother away from her judgmental and even cruel parents (Steven Bauer and Alejandra Miranda) and swim upstream against a society that was living down to James Brown’s soul hit warning.

“This is a Man’s World.”

Filmmaker Feliciano serves up gender discrimination in housing, employment and banking, in addition to the life Celina has sentenced herself to for one night of unprotected sex, a woman’s world in America pre-Roe v. Wade.

Characters occasionally “breaking the third wall,” a banker delivering his “I didn’t really say” his institution discriminates based on race and gender, Celina grousing about this obstacle or that one, is just one of the ways “plucky” translates as a little bit messy in “Women is Losers.”

The asides are often cute, as is a party homage to “West Side Story,” a cha-cha courtship dance set to a pre-Santana version of Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va,” and a “How the Chinese Made it in San Francisco” history lesson, in black and white.

We glimpse an Applebees in an early ’70s San Fran street scene (it was born in Georgia in 1980), hear Donna Summer singing “She works hard for the money” a decade before she recorded it, and see all sorts of sexism, domestic discord and violence and other issues brought up without much more than a glancing treatment in the script.

Not every kindness shown Celina — her bank boss (Simu Liu) mentors her, teaches her the “Chinese way” of making it in America — seems to come with strings attached. But the ones that aren’t bizarre coincidences are.

But Izzo is terrific in a positive-role-model role, Bauer is amusingly vile (and believable) and “Women is Losers” hits home with its messages, even if it struggles a bit to tie it all into Roe v. Wade.

Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity, adult themes

Cast: Lorenza Izzo, Bryan Craig, Simu Liu, Chrissie Fit, Liza Wiel, Steven Bauer and Alejandra Miranda

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lissette Feliciano. An HBO Max release.

Running time:

Sebastian Stan, Jason Wong, Edgar Ramirez are the token testosterone in this thriller, kicked around and now finally landing on Jan. 7.

The director of the last X-Men, and I do mean The Last, was behind the camera. So, low expectations, high hopes?

It’s one of the most notorious scams of WWII, using a corpse to convince the fascists that the Allies were invading somewhere other than Sicily when they were, in fact, invading Sicily.

Great cast for this January historical thriller. Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly MacDonald, Jason Isaacs and Penelope Wilton are the stars, keeping that stiff upper lip thing going as they engaged in a classic act of espionage.