Movie Nation

Here’s a French farce along the lines of “The Hangover,” where the bachelors — instead of Vegas — venture to the scenic, sinful “Wild West” of Budapest, Hungary.

The twist here is that two guys fed up with their MBA desk jobs take the advice of a 50something expat stripper who said of her home city’s hedonism, “It’s not hard to get in. It’s impossible to get out!” They resolve to set up a bachelor party/travel agency that takes Frenchmen about to marry to a place where it’s “anything goes,” and “vodka’s cheaper than Coke (Coca Cola).”

“Budapest” is a comedy that goes for “giddy gonzo ‘Hangover’ romp” and settles, entirely too quickly, for tedious. A couple of “out there” laughs, one of them right before the closing credits, is what you get for your 100 minutes of investment.

Still reading? OK, here’s the plot.

A busted bachelor party where the lads, led by Arnoud (Jonathan Cohen) and Vincent (Manu Payet), are denied entry to a swank club, gives these two an epiphany. They are never going to be “in the club,” hanging with the high-rollers.

But the aged stripper (Tamar Baruch) who lapdances on them at the dump where they wind up talks up Budapest. That sticks in their minds as their work bludgens the life right out of them. Over some protests from their wives (Alix Poisson, Alice Belaïdi), they decide to set up “Crazy Trips,” a bachelor experience in Budapest.

The film’s first act is mostly the two guys’ scouting trip to the city, with the stripper’s son-in-law Giorgio (Monsieur Poulpe) as their trippy tour guide and intermediary. 

Giorgio is an homage to a rich tradition of crazed locals leading innocent foreigners through the crazier corners of a strange land. He’s like a Hunter S. Thompson version of the Ukrainian guide played by Eugene Hutz in “Everything is Illuminated.” Never seen it? Rent it. It’s better than this.

You want hookers? Giorgio offers up his wife (Henrietta Edvi) in a French maid’s outfit. No? Then let’s see what else we can stir up for your guests’ “experience.”

One of the best sequences in “Budapest” is the guys’ hallucinogenic trip through an “Eyes Wide Shut” of lurid clubs — “That’s Wolf Blitzer’s favorite seat!” — depravity, prostitutes, drugs and general hedonism. But Vincent is more impressed with the prices of everything — massages, hotels, booze, “the world’s longest Humvee limo.”

“It’s Berlin,” he chortles (in French with English subtitles, if you wish), “but FREE!”

The guys come up with some distinct touches which they pass off as “The Hidden Pleasures of the East.” Want to shoot all manner of Eastern Bloc army ordnance? Drive a tank? THIS is the bachelor party trip for you!

It’s just that the script, co-written by co-star Payet (Vincent), then gets bogged down in the logistics of it all, how this “real” business would work — the debacles that turn into international (news) incidents, learning the maxim attributed to P.T. Barnum — “There’s no such thing as BAD publicity.”

The story also dwells on the cost all this sophomoric, sexist “fun” has on actual relationships — with their wives, and between the two partners.

BO-ring. Perhaps necessary as an obstacle the characters must overcome, but still BO-ring.

The things that go wrong aren’t on a par with the shenanigans of “The Hangover,” the “shocks” aren’t shocking enough and the skin — after a while — becomes just wallpaper behind a lot of unfunny scenes or moments.

The French comic Poulpe, as Giorgio (or Georgio), is the life of this party. Watch him blithely supervise the first clients, blazing away on a makeshift firing range as shell casings bounce off his shirt. Listen to him encourage the haggling the grotesque tank and machine guns owner Gabor (Arthur Benzaquen) wants to do over how much “extra” he’ll charge should they actually want to “kill somebody.”

His starting position, BTW, is 800 euros.

“Budapest” strikes me as a comedy that could have worked, with snippets and snatches, here and there, coming off. But the structure is all wrong, the pacing deathly slow and not everybody pulls his or her comic weight.

Build an 85 minute movie with Giorgio and his funny wife and Arnoud (Cohen has the funnier partner to play, and is funnier in playing him) and we’ll talk.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drugs, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Manu Payet, Jonathan Cohen, Monsieur Poulpe, Alix Poisson, Alice Belaïdi

Credits: Directed by Xavier Gens, script by Manu Payet, Simon Moutairou. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

“José” is an intimate character portrait depicting the struggle between responsibility and love in a gay teen in modern day Guatemala.

What was the last movie you saw set in Guatemala? Director and co-writer Li Cheng loses himself in the milieu, the street life of Guatemala City, as much as he does in the story, and “José” is all the richer for it.

Cheng’s camera captures street food, street commerce, street festivals and street protests in an old, worn working class city where struggle takes the form of very hard work for very little pay. Down here, it really does take two to make ends meet.

At an age when we’re all at our most hormonal, longing to follow love, opportunity and optimism wherever they take us, José, tenderly but cryptically portrayed by Enrique Salanic, is a young man trapped in poverty, responsibilities and a culture that isn’t accepting of his sexual orientation.

From this simple plot Cheng (“Joshua Tree”) weaves a near-perfectly-observed character study with a vivid and novel sense of place.

Cheng uses images, not a lot of dialogue, to set the tone and tell an over-familiar tale of love in the shadows, a furtive romance and the crushing burden of life on the edge of poverty.

José has a job, waiting tables and working the curbside business — hustling up customers driving by on the street for a dobladas restaurant..

And he has a boyfriend, Luis (Manolo Herrera), a construction worker he sneaks off to hour-rate hotels whenever he can. It started as a pick-up and turns into something passionate.

But burning through cash for assignations and blowing off work isn’t smart. He’s letting down his mother (Ana Cecilia Mota), a street vendor barely able to keep a roof over their heads.

“What would I do without you?” she pleads (in Spanish with English subtitles). And she’s serious. She is that close to homeless and starving.

She is a pious Christian woman in a culture of bus preachers, street preachers and Protestant pastors, and what she doesn’t know about José she’s starting to suspect.

Luis can’t talk José into running off with him, some place they can be “normal…anywhere but Guatemala.”

José internalizes all of this and clings to that late-teens denial as long as he can — motorbike rides in the country, making out in the sugar cane, lying to his mother well past the point it works.

Something has to give.

In Cheng’s version of Guatemala, men leave women. José is the son of a single mother who was the daughter of a single mother. This weighs on José. He’s giving pep talks to Carlos (Esteban Lopez Ramirez), a cook at the restaurant dating waitress Monica (Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez), telling him what she needs and expects, trying to head off yet another man-runs-off scenario.

But can he break the pattern with his own mother? Can Luis?

The scenario here is soapy and a tad familiar. But Cheng’s vivid depiction of the life going on all around his characters — bus rides and sermons, a traditional parade for the Virgin Mary, Alka Seltzer, Coca-Cola and Advil signs, businesses with “Siguenos en Facebook” posters — enriches the story and makes José, his life, his world and his predicament something anyone can relate to.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity and sex

Cast: Enrique Salanic, Manolo Herrera, Ana Cecilia Mota, Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez, Esteban Lopez Ramirez

Credits: Directed by Li Cheng, script by Li Cheng, George F. Roberson.  An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:28

Love Michael Peña, and I’ve interviewed him a few times over the years, beginning with his break-out in “World Trade Center.”

He’s made fine comic foils and a first rate Cesar Chavez, is always credible as star or co-star, playing cops and BFF to “Ant Man” and the like.

But there’s a half-joking crack I’ve parked in reviews of maybe a dozen movies where he’s a co-star. Is he the ONLY Latinx actor Hollywood thinks of when they want to diversify the cast of this thriller, that comedy or action film? Because it sure seems that way.

Look at the trailer to “Fantasy Island.” Does he suggest exotic sophistication, romance and inscrutable menace the way aged “Latin Lover” Ricardo Montalban did? How LONG was the list of people the studio considered for the role of Mr. Rourke? It sure looks like the usual “Just get Michael Peña” ethos prevailed.

And the guy just looks off in this setting.

Banderas might not have been available, but he was the more obvious choice. Watching “The Grudge” the other night (which followed this trailer), I thought “Demián Bichir could have shaved and purred his way through that role and been more interesting in it.”

The trailer I posed earlier today stars another more interesting choice — Andy Garcia. He’d be in that Banderas ballpark. Jimmy Smits? Esai Morales? Benjamin Bratt?

Make Mr. Rourke “Ms. Rourke” and Salma Hayek would have delivered something I’m not seeing in that clip below. She would have KILLED it.

I have no issue with grabbing an aged TV brand and conjuring something dark out of it. But I think they’ve blown Big Screen “Fantasy Island” by showing an unwillingness to hunt for the best linchpin actor to hold it all together.

As I’ve said many times in jest, let me now say in all seriousness, “Guys and gals, there’s more than ONE Latin leading man out there. Peña can be on your short list, but when he’s the ONLY one on the list, you’re missing out.”

Films set in Puerto Rico are as rare as hurricane aid to the storm tossed island. This is worth seeing just for the novelty.

All the years of fitfully studying Spanish, all the Spanish language films I’ve reviewed, and today I learn a new word.

“Ñoño.” It’s Spanish (Mexican slang) for “lame.”

I didn’t hear it in the new Netflix comedy “All the Freckles in the World (Todas las pecas del mundo).” I had to look it up to describe it.

In this ñoño, lazy, sexist, retrograde, stumbling Mexico City teen romance — yeah that’s a mouthful — a freshman pursues the upperclasswoman with the blonde hair, making his plans with her before they’ve ever met, before he’s ever heard her voice.

Jose Miguel is a movie cliché, and he doesn’t even know it.

He pursues the “chica rubia” (Loreto Peralta) of his desire even though the first girl he meets at his new school, Liliana (Andrea Sutton Chávez) is more interesting, more punk and more into him.

The script goes to great lengths to pass this kid, Jose Miguel Mota Palermo (Hanssel Casillas) off as an inventor. But it never finds anything clever to for him to invent.

The limp “first love/new school” stuff tumbles into a too-familiar “BIG GAME” comedy as Jose Miguel and his band of nerds and losers square off against Cristina’s actual boyfriend, the older, more soccer skilled and better looking Italian boy Kenji (Luis de La Rosa).

And Jose Miguel’s pal and his team’s star player? He’s an oft-flunked classmate, Malo (Alejandro Flores), a dullard who only shines on the pitch — and in after-school “tutoring” with teacher Miss Yolanda (Montserrat Marañon).

It’s 1994, and the World Cup has come to Mexico. Jose Miguel is into it — only not that much. His baby sister is the one who keeps calling the 900 number of Mexico’s star player, just to hear his voice.

Jose Miguel befriends Liliana and Malo straight off, and proceeds to bore them with his single-minded pursuit of the unattainable Cristina.

“Nothing worse than an idiot with initiative,” Liliana cracks — the film’s only funny line (in Spanish with English subtitles, if you like).

Liliana gives Jose Miguel a mix-tape as a come-on. Jose Miguel passes it off as his own to Cristina. Kenji is nice enough to the kid at first, until he figures out his game.

That’s how the soccer bet comes to be, and that’s the direction the story limps toward.

Promising ideas are introduced and abandoned. Jose Miguel’s home life, with pilot Dad moving them all over the country, is strained but unexplored.

The World Cup backdrop is mentioned but not embraced.

Liliana’s nose-pierced punk sensibility would have a lot more edgy cred if her mix tape wasn’t Fine Young Cannibals, not remotely edgy in ’94.

The inventions don’t work, and nothing is done to make them work as Jose lets his pursuit of Cristina take over his life and the movie.

“Freckles” are easily observable, but no fascination with them is mentioned. Jose Miguel is smitten with girls who have them, but never broaches this.

By the way, suggesting a sexual relationship with a student is a pretty serious taboo north of the border these days. It might have been funny in ’94, not in a 2019-20 movie SET in ’94.

That’s not the biggest problem with Yibrán Assuad’s slow-footed tale. The cast is dull, the direction pedestrian and the dialogue lifeless. The conflicts are believable, but routine and played out.

The fact that he’s borrowed and botched ideas from decades of big screen teen romances, from John Hughes’ “Sixteen Candles” onward doesn’t matter, because his young audience won’t be familiar with those films.

But that does park “All the Freckles in the World” in the middle of its biggest criticism, though. It’s seriously uninspired, lifeless and lame, “noño.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, PG mostly (with a hint of PG-13)Cast: Hanssel Casillas, Andrea Sutton Chávez, Loreto Peralta, Luis de La Rosa, Alejandro Flores and Montserrat Marañon

Credits: Directed by Yibrán Assuad, script by Yibrán Assuad, Javier Peñalosa and Gibrán Portela. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

The film is largely French, and has opened in France. But somebody’s sure to pick it up here, if only for limited release pre-VOD/Streaming.

A drama about motherhood, the Big Mission and the tug between the two. A plum role for Green, who has managed a decent career after breaking out as a “Bond Girl” back in “Casino Royale.”

Not going to name names or anything, but SOME of us remember when Alice Krige made her first big splash on screen as the title character, a young woman accidentally killed by callous young men who are later haunted by her in “Ghost Story.”

That was in the last millennium, when she was also the flapper sex symbol of “Chariots of Fire” and the leader of the Borg in the “Star Trek: TNG” universe.

Jan 31, she’s scary yet again, the witch matching wits with“Gretel & Hansel.” 

The thing that stands out about the second trailer for this Guy Ritchie/STX action comedy (Jan. 24) is how canny Henry Golding’s agent was for talking him into this gig. A somewhat fey romantic lead in his recent films, let’s butch the lad up a bit.

Fun cast all around. Hope they preview it, as it plainly looks promising and just as plainly could go either way.

A very accomplished cast can’t prevent “The Grudge” reboot from being the first dog of 2020, a well-acted but incompetently-plotted tale of a curse that transfers like a deed — a haunted house that crosses hemispheres.

A gaunt Andrea Riseborough, playing a newly-widowed cop digging into a case she cannot fathom, physically quakes in the presence of the supernatural, a reaction any human could understand but which few actors can manage when the camera rolls.

Legendary horror movie mascot Lin Shaye matches the great Jacki Weaver, blood-curdling scream for blood-curdling scream.

And Betty Gilpin and John Cho play a couple already in mourning for a baby that’s not been born, sucked into the creepy Japanese curse of the stringy-haired girl. Why? Because husband Peter’s a realtor, and he’s just got to close on that house on 44 Reyborn Drive in creepy, perpetually-rainy Cross River, Pennsylvania.

Writer-director Nicolas Pesce (“The Eyes of My Mother”) juggles multiple stories in multiple timelines showing how every person who enters this repeatedly resold 1930s Arts & Crafts house is a candidate for haunting, hunting, tormenting, demonic possession and murder.

But he often blunders the most basic requirement in a modern horror thriller. He’s made a most inefficient fright delivery vehicle.

In 2006, a still-grieving widow (Riseborough) starts life over with her little boy and their dog and a new detective position in a new town — Cross River. First day on the job, she and her partner (Demián Bichir) are called out to a gruesome, months-old death scene.

The tone is established in an instant. This “Grudge” is all rain, rotting corpses, a runty ghost and rusty ’80s vintage Chevrolets.

In 2004, a Cross River woman (Tara Westwood) hurried home from a job in Japan, spooked out of her mind, but sure she’s left her troubles at the front door of the house she was renting in Nippon. Nope.

A prologue has told us of “the rules” of this “powerful curse,” which holds that when someone dies in a “powerful rage,” the curse stays with the place of the rage until it attaches itself to someone who visits there and moves on.

Even by supernatural horror film parameters, that’s some seriously silly supernatural nonsense. Nobody else feels the rage. They’re just assaulted until the raging presence that preys on them consumes them.

William Saddler plays the ex-partner of Bichir’s Det. Goodman, a mangled shell of a man who never escaped, never got over what he came to believe, the nightmares he still sees.

“Maybe we should tear our eyes out so that we can’t see any more!”

Weaver, of “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Bird Box,” plays a “compassionate companion” who comes to help a husband (Frankie Faison) cope with a dying wife (Shaye) too demented by the haunted house to be able to carry out an assisted suicide.

Pesce wastes them all, never giving Riseborough (“Battle of the Sexes” and “The Death of Stalin”) a chance to show a mother’s desperation to save her child, draining the pathos of the staggered expectant couple Cho and Gilpin (of “Searching” and “Isn’t it Romantic”) facing a terrible pre-natal decision and also haunted by the demonic Wednesday Addams as “The Orphan” (Zoe Fish), and on down the line.

Bechir of “A Better Life” and “The Nun” is given nothing to play here, just cigarettes and whisky glasses for props.

The first hair-raising moment comes 50 minutes in, but the deaths that follow are anti-climactic even as the chilling tone is maintained, largely through dim lighting and very good actors.

Writer-director Pesce was blessed with this cast. But after this, my guess is he’ll never work with players this accomplished again.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence and bloody images, terror and some language

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, John Cho, Demián Bichir, William Saddler, Betty Gilpin and Lin Shaye.

Credits: Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, based on the original Takashi Shimizu script. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:33

Even if you’re old enough to remember “How High,” you probably don’t remember how sloppy and generally unfunny it was. Because the whole point of watching it back in pre-legalized 2001 was to be a little buzzed during the experience.

Taking umbrage that Method Man and Redman weren’t included in the 2019 sequel even though they’d been approached and promised that they’d get to reprise their stoners-with-a-mission movie career high-water mark roles is understandable, but misguided.

Look at Mike Epps in “How High 2.” Fiftyish guys still playing stoners is a little sad and not nearly as funny.

The original film had some funny bits and a quirkiness that some remember fondly. The sequel has less than that going for it.

But the big diff is that “How High” landed Garrett Morris, Fred Willard, Anna Maria Horsford, Hector Elizondo and Jeffrey Jones in the supporting cast.

“How High 2?” Mike Epps is the only “name” in it. You might recognize Mary Lynn Rajskub from “Night School” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” A scattering of famous (Lil Baby) to a lot less famous rappers and comics show up. But a funny script attracts big names to play funny bits. So there you go.

Lil Yachty and  D.C. Young Fly star in this tale of two Atlantans who discover, then lose, “superweed” and the “bible” for growing it, and embark on an odyssey through high school and college, Big Pharma and Russian Mafia to get it back.

Because Roger (Yachty) has this Big Idea for an app that he needs to get financed. “Two Smack” will be an app “to deliver snacks to weed heads!”

Gold mine, right? He should know. Two temptresses ply him with joints in an effort to rob the fast food joint where he works in the film’s opening scene.

That gets him fired, and without his cut-rate dealer/Uber-beater driver cousin Cal (Fly) at the bank loan officer meeting to back him up, all Roger has is gift cards for collateral.

All is lost until that night they they stumble into a stash hidden behind a brick in the wall of Roger’s mama’s basement. A “Weed Bible” might not impress anybody, but the lone sample joint included with it has them seeing Baby Powder (Epps) from the first “How High,” and multiplicities of themselves on a Never Ending Sofa, pretty much in an instant.

They’ve no sooner grown a “Little Shop of Horrors” sized plant from the seeds than they’re “ghetto-taxed,” robbed of their herb. Who got it? Big Bang (DeRay Davis) the dealer next door?

“Why do they call me Big BANG?”

“‘Cause you’re the spark that startled it all.”

Maybe the Russian mob down at the strip club grabbed it. Or high school kids. Or college kids. Or that big pharmaceutical firm Alicia (Alyssa Goss) works at. Roger’s been sweet on her since high school. For some reason, beautiful business woman with a good job Alicia joins them on their quest.

Here’s what works. Davis as Big Bang has the most funny lines, bad puns such as “You’re heard of Selma? They SELMA weed down there!”

I had to look up D.C. Young Fly’s real name (John Whitfield) to make sure he wasn’t Chris Tucker’s kid. Because the lad is ANTIC, wound UP. And funny.

He mugs for the camera, but he’s got amusing physical shtick and a lightning quick “Young Chris Tucker” patter. Listen to him tick off Cal’s “rules of survival” for getting out of any jam — fender bender to out-of-control frat party.

“Rule number one, NEVER apologize! Rule number two, NEVER give out your GOVERNMENT name. Rule number three, NEVER throw a cup that gets free refills!”

Lil Yachty (look for a Miles Park McCollum sight gag, because that’s his real name) isn’t nearly as good at the whole mugging, manic way with a line thing. He’s saddled with a flurry of obscure (ish) pop culture reference zingers — “Why y’all gotta go all Clermont Twins on me like that?” Alicia? She looks “Angela Rye/Jemele HILL amazing!”

Yeah, older white guy critic cracking on African American pop culture jokes is exactly what Cal is bitching about when he barks, “Y’all GOTTA stop watching black movies, right? Cuz you’re F—–g up the culture!”

I get it.It’s kind of like this, right?

But hey, I used to work with Jemele. Gotta count for something. And I follow Tommy Chong on twitter. What’s that tell you?

It’s not just the cast or the script that lets down “How High 2.” It’s the whole legalized/CBD Oil culture shift that does it in.

MPAA Rating:  TV-MA, pot use and abuse, sexual situations, mock violence

Cast: Lil Yachty,  D.C. Young Fly, Alyssa Goss, DeRay Davis, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Mike Epps.

Credits: Directed by Bruce Leddy, script by Shawn Ries and Artie Johann. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:28