Movie Nation

Rewatching the Capra, Colbert and Clark classic I’m reminded of an old Frank story about the way the movie MIGHT have turned out.

The runaway heiress is thrown together with the dipsomaniacal reporter on the bus from Miami.

They get stranded in Jacksonville when she misses the last call for reboarding.

She is upset, because she has no idea what’s in store. He, on the other hand is familiar with the rougher side of things. He describes the charms of Jacksonville –“There AREN’T any” to the “brat.” He looks at the itinerary –“Savannah, Columbia, Charlotte, Greensboro, Richmond,” bleaker by the stop, and decides to end it all right there, a post Prohibition bender in the John on the St.John’s. She has to talk him out of it.

True story. Ever been to Jacksonville? Tell me I’m wrong.

Kidding aside, this is that rare early ’30s comedy that ages wonderfully, quaint and dated, cute, sexy and daring.

#StanleyKubrick’s cast, crew, family and fans break down their favourite scenes 40 years on in this video. https://t.co/Q05rZOcODc https://twitter.com/StanleyKubrick/status/1264149072195313665?s=20

Desperation loses out to resignation in “The Lovebirds,” a flailing couple-on-the-lam comedy that pairs up Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani, with indifferent results.

The “desperation” comes from the riffing. Maybe it’s a wild guess, but all the antic arguments, crosstalk/trash talk and occasional almost-funny zingers? They sound like stuff the stars and maybe folks in the crew came up with on set.

The “resignation” comes from realizing there’s nothing in the credited screenwriters’ credits that says “One Stop Comedy Shopping.” And the plot Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall (usually a producer) patched together should have been enough to scare off Nunjiani, his “Big Sick” director and Rae (queen of “Insecure”).

It’s “Stuber,” the last failed Kumail Nanjiani comedy, with an “Eyes Wide Shut” conspiracy and “Amazing Race” as a running gag. If that sounds like comedy gold, consider — you’ve picked up all that from the trailers, which are funnier than the finished film.

A prologue shows the one-long-date that followed a one-night hook-up Leilani and Jibran shared, the sparks that lead to the “relationship” that four years later, is coming to an end.

She thinks they could win “The Amazing Race,” he frets that “We can’t even agree on a RESTAURANT.”

They’ve barely decided “this isn’t working” when BAM, they hit a frantic cyclist. He dashes off, and they’re stopped — “POLICE! I need your CAR!”

The “cop” (Paul Sparks) proceeds to chase down, then before the word “JUSTICE” has finished leaving Jibran’s lips, run over — and over and over — his “suspect.”

Faced with judgy eye-witnesses who call them “murderers,” they flee into the gathering dusk of New Orleans, skipping the party they were headed to, trying to clear their names.

“Who do you think we are, Hobbs and SHAW?”

He’s all indecisive and snobby, a social justice documentary-maker who would never watch “The Amazing Race” because “I don’t need to see some reality show I know if gonna SUCK.”

She’s the smart-mouthed ad exec who knows just how to punch back. “You makes documentaries! Those are reality shows NO ONE WATCHES!”

Over the course of a dull, winded evening where the leads seem a step or two behind the audience EVERY step of the way, they dodge the police and hunt for clues.

They figure the cops have their description, and an intense eyeballing by a white officer in a cruiser means he is “TOTALLY onto us.” Only he drives on.

“Whew. He’s just a regular racist.”

There’s a frat boy looking fellow they catch and try to interrogate, with taunts of “Little Brett Kavanaugh” and “Chug-a-lug Chuck.”

Things only start to seem manageable — enduring threats and torture and injuries — when they realize the obvious.

“This is like ‘The Amazing Race with DEAD people!”

There’s nothing amusing in the set-up, the most interesting villain is a one-scene throw-away and the main villain is charisma-starved proof in the old adage, “Good villains make good (even funny-good) thrillers.”

Both Rae and Nanjiani have taken cracks at formulaic Hollywood comedies — him with “Stuber,” her with “Little.” The genre isn’t doing either of them any favors.

You can see they see this as they go through the motions of the film’s second and third acts. “This isn’t going to get any better,” their eyes say. “And doing a sing-along to a Katy Perry hit in a Lyft (share) isn’t going to help.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language throughout and some violence

Cast: Issa Rae, Kumail Nanjiani, Anna Camp, Paul Sparks.

Credits: Directed by Michael Showalter, script by Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall. A Paramount release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:27

Spoiler alert — Kate Nash is the ginger-haired Brit on Netflix’s “GLOW,” the hit “glamorous ladies of wrestling” dramedy series and ’80s period piece.

So we know how the hard-luck story presented in “Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl” is going to come out.

But do fans of the series even realize this is her second “reach for the big brass showbiz ring” career? She’s over 30 and has been in the music business since she was a teen, since a pretty young British girl singer-songwriter could launch a career on MySpace.

Remember MySpace?

The meandering, uneven “Underestimate the Girl” summarizes that career, the hit song “Foundations” (2007) that led to the hit record, “Made of Bricks,” her getting a record deal and losing that deal. Amy Goldstein’s film concentrates on the years of struggle that followed, playing big venues in China, and self-promoted shows in tiny U.S. and British venues that make no economic sense, moving to LA in pursuit of a new deal, playing CMJ in an attempt to get signed, losing most of her money to a manager and forced to sell her clothes…and do radio commercials and QVC-style millennial fanboy-collectibles selling on Shop XSN.

The music evolves from Tiffany-impersonates-Torii Amos/Katy Perry pop to a Hole, Bikini Kill, Pussy Riot glam-punk thing to the beyond-categorization rock/pop/sometimes-rapped thing she’s doing now, still in that affected, girlish “mockney” accent.

Lyrics are superimposed on the stage, over the audience, in the performance snippets in “Underestimate.”

“I think about death all the time
Do you think that’s morbid?
I’m not like the other girls
Don’t get me started…”

She’s interesting musically and worth taking seriously lyrically. She puts on fun shows, all decked-out in Sleeping Beauty ballet costumes, or sequined body-suit on top of Elton John-platform shoes.

She’s political, writing protest tunes about the Russian imprisonment of Pussy Riot, griping about the double-standards male and female musicians face, the sexism and callousness and the cruel way “the next big thing” is abandoned for “the next big thing.”

That happened to Kate Nash.

“It wasn’t like I was trying to be a pop star,” she insists (eye-rolls optional). “This is a matter of life and death to me because making music keeps me alive,” she says. “And being in the music industry has almost killed me.”

So she took charge of her own career, formed an all-female punk band, toured incessantly, became the “bitch from hell” about business and performing and lost her deal and kept on.

“Kate being dropped by her record label, without a doubt, is probably the making of her,” Brett Lomas, her road manager insists, early in the film.

But things go from bad to worse.

Goldstein uses concert footage, backstage banter with the band, personal appearance footage (Kate and guitarist Linda Buratto performing, sans mikes, in an office somewhere), Kate’s online video diary and interviews — Kate, lying on the salt-flats of Death Valley — to paint a portrait of somebody who talks a good game, drops the word “artist” like it’s in her contract and…does what pretty young things do when they’ve had a taste of fame — she tries her hand at acting.

See Wahlberg, Mark, Smith, Will and Love, Courtney.

“Underestimate the Girl” skims the surface of much of this, playing up Nash’s victimhood and her pluck, giving us just enough of the music to want to find more.

She was already dabbling in acting before “GLOW,” so that “life and death” desperation she makes music out to be seems just an element of that larger craving for “fame.”

But she also doggedly plays the hand life deals her. She moved to LA to “make a lot of money,” she admits. “I told the universe what I wanted, and the universe said ‘No.'”

And to her credit, the glow of “GLOW” didn’t pull her off the hard path she’s chosen for herself. NOW I’ve got a little money and a little fame, so let’s make another RECORD.

The film is a mixed bag, an interesting look at the disposable nature of the music business and the way that cripples musicians and the things a singer-songwriter has to do to hang on (Aimee Mann and others started the “house concerts” craze, back when everybody had the money to indulge in such things).

But presenting her turn to “acting” as abrupt and Netflix driven is a cheat, and as likable as Nash seems to be, the “woe is me” privilege that creeps in here and there grates. We don’t get enough of her mistreatment by the British press (back THEN) and enough justification for “Why should we care, again, now?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Kate Nash, Alicia Warrington, Brett Lomas, Linda Buratto, Emma Hughes.

Credits: Directed by Amy Goldstein.

Running time: 1:29

An optimistic take on what can be done to make Earth more livable in 20 years? We could all use that right about now.

Carbon sequestering, smarter farming practices, “empowering girls,” “2040” and its Aussie creators insist “We have everything we need” to make a better future.

June 5, this comes to “virtual cinemas” (streaming).

The visual choices writer-director Mary McGuckian made in creating “The Price of Desire” vie with the dramatic ones in a to-the-death fight over “How this movie was ruined?”

It’s a precious, obscure and emotionally flat melodrama about furniture designer and aspiring Irish architect Eileen Gray, and the ugly, personal tug-of-war over being credited for the modernist marvel of a house she designed with her then-lover, Romanian architect Jean Badovici.

The bone of contention between the established, older and bisexual Gray (Orla Brady) and Badovici (Francesco Scianna) isn’t her “other” lover, the singer Damia (Alanis Morissette). It is their house, E-1027, which they built on the Riviera and she put in his name. And the wild card, their friend and rival, the prissy Swiss architect, artist and  swell Le Corbusier, picks at that open wound as he interferes, “decorates” and bitchily narrates (to the camera) this between-the-World Wars, and years-later, story.

The narration has the ring of “epistolary” about it, Le Corbusier (Vincent Perez) eyeing the high-born Irishwoman in her late 40s and purring, “I longed to act recklessly. But I could hear your heart was a different symphony.”

He didn’t think she liked guys, in other words, something he figures out as Damia sings “La Marseillaise” with a theatricality more suited to a French hockey arena than a night club.

Taking up with Badovici, the monied and accomplished furniture-for-the-filthy-rich designer Gray dreams of a house. “A beautiful work speaks more truth than the artist!”

They dabble with the idea of getting Le Corbusier to do the house, but they know he’ll steal the credit for “our” (mostly “her”) ideas.

“I’ve no objections to a woman’s touch,” he sneers. He’s got this “five part plan” of “pure modernism” that he applies to his designs. She’s looking for something open and airy, flat-roofed and functional, and austere.

When the house is finished, her relationship with Badovic is not long for this world, either. Because he invites the Cubist painter Le Corbusier to come in and paint Cubist phalluses and the like, in mural form, on her pure white walls.

Peeing all over it to mark his “turf?”

Credit for the house, ownership of the house, all of it, becomes murkier as time passes.

By the way, this plot summary, with its included links, does more to make sense of this murky mess than the screenplay ever does. McGuckian apparently expects everyone to play the players, the intrigues and the history coming in to “The Price of Desire.”

“The Price of Desire” is an indulgent, gauzy dream from memory, of Gray swanning around white rooms in white dresses uttering profundities in English and French — with white subtitles.

It’s as visually inane, austere and pretentious as its dialogue.

“I wonder which of your many accomplishments will be most remembered,” a wealthy sponsor and friend (Dominique Pinon from “Delicatessen”) asks.

“I prefer to DO things rather than POSSESS them,” the daughter of a baroness sniffs.

The Great Depression is barely glimpsed — a design boutique Gray ran (not explained, just glimpsed) closes. The only response of the insufferable rich aesthetes?

“Why don’t we take a trip?”

World War II? They fled, as the rich always do, to oases of privilege where they rode it out and fretted over who’d get credit for the house code-named E-1027.

I found the characters thin, the performances (save for Perez, brittle and scheming) as flat as the white-on-white images.

Any questions about why this washed-out, high-tone soap opera didn’t earn an American release when it was finished (2015) are thus answered and forgotten, the “true” “Price of Desire.”

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Orla Brady, Vincent Perez, Francesco Scianna, Dominique Pinon and Alanis Morissette.

Credits: Written and directed by Mary McGuckian.  A Little Film Company release.

Running time: 1:47

Vanity Fair talked the lad into it.

Not as dirty as you’d hope.

Yeah, THIS is the movie that should reopen cinemas.

Young Mr. Washington holds his owning the action beats, effects and formidable supporting cast.

A lot of fine British character actors do the voices of “StarDog and TurboCat,” an animated superhero tale about a gadget-loving kitty crusader and a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet dog.

It’s aimed at the very young and preferably undiscriminating, but it’s so bland it plays like a naptime video narcotic.

Gullible Buddy (who sounds nothing like Nick Frost) is sent into space by his owner and master in 1969. Something happens and he comes back 50 years later.

“I don’t know what that is in dog years, but it’s a lot.”

Out of place, in his spacesuit and general disconnection from the present day, he is “rescued” from the animal-hating animal control Officer Peck by the self-promoting “Dark Feline, The Uncollared Crusader,” TurboCat (might be Luke Evans).

Buddy convinces the cat to help him find David, his master from way back when, because David would never abandon him and David always has all the answers.

But humans fear and hate pets, Officer Peck (Cory English) is looking for Buddy’s space capsule and it may just be that TurboCat will need the help of G.U.A.R.D. That’s the Glenfield Undercover Animal Rights Division, led by a magician’s bunny that TurboCat is sweet on.

That would be Cassidy (Gemma Arterton, whose voice leaves no doubt).

There’s a little of the old “If we all work together…” and “There’s no such thing as magic,” a few gags about catnip, laser-pointers and sunbeams (which demand to be napped in) as the only things on Earth that can foil a cat, with a tennis ball serving the same function with dogs.

I counted just two laughs in this, with one about the Youtube source of Bat-Cat’s gadget-buying fortune and the other involving a tactical-minded goldfish in an armored vehicle (“A fish tank, are you kidding me?”).

Ben Smith, whose previous credits are mostly animated shorts and largely unheralded (“Robin Hood 4D,” “Sherlock Holmes 4D”), got Screen Yorkshire help, perhaps covering the cost of the Brits in the voice cast.

The animation isn’t awful, but the best one can say for the script is that it does no harm.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Luke Evans, Nick Frost, Gemma Arterton, Billy Nighy and Morgan Cambs

Credits: Written and directed by Ben Smith. A Viva Kids release.

Running time: 1:30