Movie Nation

Another OK but pandemic depressed weekend at the box office is shaping up as Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” dominates, “”Old” falls off 60% and “Black Widow” lingers at around $6.

The $32-33 million that Dwayne Johnson’s latest is pulling is is based on a solid Thursday night and a $13 million+ Friday.

“Green Knight” is riding good buzz to a $6.5 million opening, better than the $4 or so A24 had projected.

“Stillwater” is shuffling towards $4 or so first weekend. It won’t be around long enough to generate Matt Damon Oscar buzz.

“Space Jam” is drying up and going away. Another $1.3 million Friday, a lower top ten weekend.

If you were raised and educated in English, chances are you have at least a passing acquaintance with the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This chivalric romance comes up in any class that goes back to “Beowulf,” dips into Chaucer and climaxes with Mallory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur.”

As strange and magical as David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” is, that familiarity reveals it as a fairly conventional — or more conventional than you expect — retelling of the story of an ambitious member of court who accepts a combat challenge from an interloper and has his mettle, his mental state and his honor tested by the “game” the green stranger proposes.

There’s little Terry Gilliam/Terry Jones Medieval whimsy in this film from the director of “A Ghost Story” and “Pete’s Dragon.” This is as quiet as a whispered fireside legend, deadly serious and portentous as it honors the somber tone of the original tale.

Dev Patel is Gawain, a young lay-about aspiring to knighthood in the court of his king (not “Arthur,” an opening narration insists), a place at that king’s (Sean Harris, the movie whisperer) esteemed round table.

Gawain has a lover, a short-haired pixie (Oscar winner Alicia Vikander) who wishes he would make her his “lady,” and marry her.

The aged king and his queen (Kate Dickie) long for Gawain’s knighthood so that he can take his place at the table as the son of the king’s sister. She (Sarita Choudhury) is the conjure woman of the court, “a witch,” in the vernacular of the day. And Gawain?

“I fear I am not meant for greatness.”

Christmas is the day of reckoning for this round table of revelers. A towering stranger bangs open the door, rides in wielding a huge battle axe and states his case. Let one knight strike a blow against him, only if that knight visits the stranger in his Green Chapel one year hence, where The Green Knight is obliged to return the blow.

“Oh greatest of Kings, let one of your Knights try to land a blow against me! Indulge me in this game.”

Only headstrong Gawain accepts the insulting, Christmas dinner-interrupting affront.

“Do not take your pledge honoring this idly,” he is warned.

And even when the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) lays down his axe and offers his neck, the kid doesn’t smell a trap. He takes the king’s sword and slices that head off.

Which the Green Knight’s body picks up and gallops off with, the original “headless horseman” with the head bellowing a reminder about “NEXT Christmas” as he makes his exit.

Gawain has a year to consider the consequences of his haste, the “bravest of the brave” fame it generates (including a Punch & Judy show in his honor), the prospects of maybe marrying better than his beloved Essel (Vikander) and the grim payback awaiting him after a long journey north come next Christmas.

He hadn’t reckoned on the (literal) green stranger not dying of beheading.

The Green Knight himself is leafy, woody and flowering, so much so that you half expect his introduction to be “I am Green Groot.” His underreaction to his beheading brings John Cleese’s “a mere flesh wound” (“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) to mind. But again, this is more “Excalibur” than Monty Python.

Lowery’s film stakes its claim to “exceptional” in the second and third acts, a lengthy quest to the north where “a small kindness” to a battlefield scavenger (Barry Keoghan) is repaid with treachery, a mysterious “St. Winifred” (Erin Kellyman) requires his service and a noble couple (Joel Edgerton and Vikander again) offer hospitality, with a catch.

The quest is shrouded in shadows and fog, with tension and dread building via long tracking shots of Gawain crossing treeless hills and moors, with the last forests either being chopped down or full of menace, hiding highwayman.

Patel makes a sturdy, sensitive Gawain, someone who lets us see the hard lessons he’s learning with his face and eyes. “Green Knight” is a film of few words in that regard, and all the richer for it.

And thanks to a muddy, gloomy glorious Dark-Ages-on-a-Budget look and the almost heartbreaking pathos Patel brings to each “lesson learned” moment, it works. If you want to know why this fable endures, Lowery’s film makes that case better than any English lit class ever could.

MPA Rating: R for violence, some sexuality and graphic nudity

Cast: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Lowery. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:10

So anyway, I have this Johnny Appleseed/Roger DVDseed thing I do on the endless Nomadland road trip that is my life. I donate DVDs I review to whatever public library I pass on my travels. Plant City Fla. to Danville VA, Bluefield , W. Va. or Walterboro, S.C., assorted hamlets all along life’s “blue highways” get their hands on some grand mostly international cinema.

Tonight’s donation is to the Forsythe Co. Public Library in Winston Salem, N.C. Interested Interested in a little slice of life in Ghana? “Nakom,” which I reviewed this week, should be in their collection by Tuesday

Matt Damon makes a most convincing Oklahoman in a china shop in “Stillwater,” co-writer/director Tom McCarthy’s wholly fictional tale of an American coed locked up by a European justice system and the father who tries to help.

The story resembles the infamous Amanda Knox case just enough that it bears mentioning. But this drama is set in Marseille, the “conviction by media” was French and not Italian and the convict’s family isn’t AM talk show telegenic and bourgeois, but Oklahoma roughneck, working class through and through.

Considering what she’s been through and the way the movie flirts with her case, it’s understandable that she’s furious about it.

McCarthy “Spotlight,” “The Visitor”), Damon & Co. serve up an “Innocent Abroad” in Damon, a laid-off oil worker, a single parent burning through generations of family wealth visiting his daughter (Abigail Breslin) in a Marseille prison, incarcerated for murdering her girlfriend and roommate there.

The drama is about Dad’s search for a missing material witness whom his daughter accused of being “the real killer,” and the film gets sidetracked by one of the most adorable cases of “mission creep” in the murder mystery canon. Damon’s Bill Baker meets, befriends and leans on a French single mom (Camille Cottin) and her impossibly cute moppet, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), who help him and distract him from his hunt for the mysterious “Akim,” whom his daughter is sure broke in and butchered her lady love, Lina.

But what the film is really about is American heavy-handedness, that “bull in a china shop” allegory, with Damon perfectly embodying a sturdy, flawed and determined man, out of his country and way out of his depth. Baker’s stoicism dominates the early scenes as we pick up the routine of this under-employed “between jobs” high school dropout trying to, if nothing else, light a fire under his daughter’s French lawyer.

But she (Anne Le Ny) is at the shrug and “There is a time for hope, and there’s a time for acceptance” stage.

Hiding this news from Allison and his late wife’s mother, who is underwriting their continuing legal fight, Baker takes matters into his own hands.

This is “Stillwater” at its most compelling and real. This man with a “lost daughter” in Marseille isn’t Liam Neeson with his “particular skills.” This is a ballcap, blue jeans, plaid shirt and work boots Everyman who doesn’t speak the language, who is oil-field roughneck tough, but nothing special.

He says grace at meals, never lets his drawling, charming requests for help give away desperation and just keeps “gettin’ it,” as he describes every job of work he’s ever had.

Baker gets just far enough to get himself in over his head.

McCarthy serves up nervy scenes — interrogations, pursuits. But he lets this quest drift and drift, which at least leaves plenty of room for Damon’s portrayal to sink in. There are actors who never should “play dumb,” and he’s probably one of them. But damned if he isn’t utterly convincing, letting us see the wheels turn, the mistakes blundered into and the flawed reasoning that is all that he has to apply to this problem that would be beyond most mere mortal’s reach.

M

Breslin gives one of her finest performances as a young woman desperate enough to cling to straws, bratty enough to cast blame, enough of her father’s daughter to make us wonder.

Cottin, who rarely works in Hollywood films (she was in “Allied,” but might be best known for the French film “Dumped”) is perfectly cast. Virginie is the idealized American stereotype of a French woman — smart, effortlessly stylish, sexy and confidently so even if she is just “a stage actress,” not a “model actress” type making movies and TV. She is convincingly curious about this stranger who needs her help, not shy about making him her “latest project” or getting in over her head. We shouldn’t buy the connection or any possible attraction. She sells it.

But you can’t watch “Stillwater” without feeling the drag, noting where the dragging kicks in and muttering to yourself “Hitchcock would have fixed this.” McCarthy spoils the twists and waters down what should be the tensest moments.

This is a dramatic thriller, and while McCarthy loses the drama here and there, the thriller thread plum gets away from him.

Whatever metaphor about an American abroad seeking American satisfaction and an American resolution in a place where “that doesn’t work here” is belabored and buried in the mix. Fine performances aside, this is a classic 100 minute thriller that runs on for an extra 40 minutes and blows the punch line.

MPA Rating: R, for language (profanity)

Cast: Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Idir Azougli, Deanna Duggan

Credits: Directed by Tom McCarthy, script by Tom McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey and Thomas Bidegain. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:20

Focus Features didn’t make this available to me pre release, the fraidy cats. So I’m catching it on the fly in an artsy cinema in the artsiest city I ever lived in, Winston Salem NC.

It’s been a long time since I lived here, but if I remember it right, the city motto was “Winston Salem, it’s not just about lung cancer.” Something like that.

A/perture Cinema it is.

This, my friends, is the way to walk off into the action hero sunset.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, kicking ass and doing splits, donning disguises and having a few laughs at his own expense. Pontificating like a pugilist/prophet, a sage for the ages.

“He who wants to approach a lion should look like a gazelle.” “If a beard endowed wisdom, then all goats would be prophets.”

And “The Mist…it can be seen, but it’s impossible to CATCH it!”

That’s his character’s code name in “The Last Mercenary,” the funniest French action romp in ages, a laugh-out-loud farce filled with “Wow, the old guy can still DO that?” fights and stunts.

Brawls in bathroom stalls, a chase in a driving school Suzuki econobox, a dash through Paris on a rented Cityscooter in tidy whiteys — OK, a supporting player handles that — “Last Mercenary” is the sort of lark that a lot films in this genre try to be. But everybody involved in director David Charhon’s overlong skip-along the silly side is up to the task, doing it “old school” (in French with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

JCVD is the title character — ancient, mysterious and not photographed since middle school, a “James Bond” who has been off the books for decades until he pops back into Paris on urgent business.

There’s this entitled Middle Eastern prince (Nassim Lyes) who’s leading police on chases, singing along to the disco on his antique gullwing Mercedes 300, doing drugs and barking his best Tony Montana impersonation, because “Scarface” is more of a documentary to him than a fictional (remake) character. And he can’t be prosecuted because he has “full immunity.”

Richard Brumere, aka “The Mist” (JCVD) is the one who guaranteed that immunity. But it was for his son, a hapless, directionless 25 year old named Archibald Al Mamoud (Samir Decazza), a kid his father left in the care of a brother agent. The prince has been given his identity and “immunity for life” by some corrupt member of the government.

Now, that immunity has been pulled, the kid is just “a mess from the ’90s” to be “cleaned up.” Only the intervention of his unknown Dad can save him.

There’s this EMP gadget called “Big Mac” that is about to fall into the wrong hands, and The Mist has to save his son, clear his name, foil the Big Mac sale and expose the corrupt. And he’s got to do it wearing every kilometer of Van Damme’s high-mileage body and beautiful Belgian face.

The Mist gets unwelcome “help” from “Archie’s” friend Dalila (Assa Sylla, an Afro-French spitfire) and her hulking stoner brother Momo (Djimo).

And there’s this out-of-his-depth bureaucrat (Alban Ivanov) who might not be so dumb that he’s willing to be the designated patsy when all this goes sideways. He’s the one who loved tidy whiteys, and he’s hilarious.

The set pieces are action-packed stunners played for MAXIMUM giggles. That Suzuki driver’s ed car is chased by assorted cop cars and vengeful agents in a Dodge Challenger, a sprint at high speed and in slo-mo, with The Mist “driving” from the instructor’s side because his kid never learned to drive and freezes at the steering wheel. It’s set to Blondie’s “One Way or Another.”

The fights are cleverly photographed, and as much fun as Van Damme has with disguises — janitor, swim instructor, waiter, driving instructor and hooker — he has even more showing off those freaking splits he can still do, only now for jaw-dropping comic effect.

Van Damme is in on the joke, and never for a second lets us see that he’s in on it. That’s what’s the most fun about “The Last Mercenary.”

If only Arnold and Sly, Bruce and Wesley and Jackie and Mel and Jason were taking notes. This is how you want your past-your-prime action years to pass, with a punch and a laugh.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence and lots of it, profanity — ditto.

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Samir Decazza, Assa Sylla, Djimo,
Alban Ivanov, Patrick Timsit, Eric Judor and Nassim Lyes.

Credits: Directed by David Charhon, script by David Charhon and Ismaël Sy Savané. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

The tug of the old life struggles with the promise of the new in “Nakom,” a neorealist Ghanian drama made by a couple of American filmmakers.

The debut feature of co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman may tell a classic “How’ll you keep’em down on the farm after they’ve seen the lights of the big city?” tale. But the details they include and the surprising places they take it make it a novel and richly-rewarding film experience.

Iddrisu, played by Jacob Ayanaba, is a smart 20something college student thriving in teeming Kumasi. He’s acing his classes, even has a city girlfriend. And then his sister calls. Their father has died.

“Come back to Nakom.”

Iddrisi is the eldest, the favored son who got to go away to college. Returning to his village he gets a quick lesson in what it took to put him in that position, and what is expected of him now.

Dad went into debt with his brother, Uncle Napoleon (Thomas Kulidu), a reasonable man with many cows. But he expects to be reimbursed for the bull he sold to finance his nephew’s education.

There’s an extended family led by Senior Mother (Justina Kulidu) who welcome him back and insist “The house is yours, now.”

But the house is just a big hut. There’s no running water, no in-house electricity. His next-oldest brother Kamal (Abdul Aziz) is an embittered layabout. His smart little sister Damata (Grace Ayariga) would love to go to college, but grimly faces a future of being “married off to one of these village boys.” Littlest brother Hassan is already skipping school, doomed to be trapped here if no adult takes on the job of riding his lazy behind.

There’s a much younger “junior mother” (Shetu Musah), as African-Islamic polygamy is practiced here. And that creates all sorts of tensions in the mourning ritual.

They’ve also taken in teen Fatima (Esther Issaca), the granddaughter of Uncle Napoleon. She’s treated as a servant.

And there was a drought the previous year. Will later, shorter rainy seasons thanks to climate change let them grow enough onions and millet to get by, pay their debts and keep Iddrisa in school?

Oh, and then there’s the Christian first love (Felicia Atampuri) he left behind when he left for college.

That stricken look permanently painted across Iddrisu’s face isn’t just from mourning. He’s overwhelmed, despairing of ever getting back to his “life.”

His “I’ll leave it to the women” to get this place on its feet is a delusion.

“Is it only you, or are all men this blind?”

His uncle’s nagging “Don’t disappoint me,” his mother is badgering him “Who will watch over this house?” The sage Chief (James Azure) has practical advice, but a tendency to speak in homilies.

“They say when a man dances, the drums are beating for him.”

What is a college lad with dreams of med school to do?

The script teases out little victories in Issidru’s “dream deferred” life. He’s in a college of science, so he knows that the soil is played out. He listened to his father’s advice on planting, waiting for the rains to begin in earnest before putting seed in the ground.

And he’s got a cell phone and a bicycle. He can track the best prices for the family’s onion crop, and is willing to take on “women’s work,” pedaling hither and yon (even over the border into Togo) to get the most money for their efforts.

But this myopic, circumscribed life, with its petty squabbles, personal melodramas, limited horizons and shorter life span, isn’t “calling him home.” Is there a way out of his trap that won’t bring shame and ruin on them all?

The dialogue — in English and Kusaal with English subtitles — carries layers of meaning beyond the story’s simple plot points and messaging, which is as plain as the pained look on Ayanaba’s expressive face.

“It is always for men to decide things,” Damata sighs, a family dominated and maintained by women but dependent on the labors, decisions and caprices of its men.

Filmmakers Norris and Pittman refuse to sentimentalize this story. Recognizing the sacrifices his family made for him to go to college doesn’t guarantee Iddrisu will take the accepted, “noble” path laid out for him here. But will he?

That quandary lets “Nakom” engage the viewer on a lot of levels, an exotic tale set in a seldom-filmed milieu but with pressures, obligations and decisions that are a universal rite of passage.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jacob Ayanaba, Grace Ayariga, Justina Kulidu, Shetu Musah, Abdul Aziz,
Felicia Atampuri, Thomas Kulidu and James Azure

Credits: Directed by Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman, script by T.W. Pittman and (dialogue) Isaac Adakudugu. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:30

In the late 1950s, the golden age of the TV Western, Sam Peckinpah was a TV writer and sometime director whose scriptsstood out thanks to their hard, unconventional and unsentimental edge.

In 1960-61, the future director of “Ride the High Country,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Getaway” parlayed that limited notoriety, and his association with rising star Brian Keith (Peckinpah wrote five episodes of Keith’s “Westerner” series) into his first shot at making a feature film.

“The Deadly Companions” is a Western quest tale, a dark and unsentimental spin on the John Ford/John Wayne fable “3 Godfathers” about desperadoes who care for an infant they stumble across on the run, a film which came out over a dozen before. Watching it, you can see the cantankerous Peckinpah poking The Old Master right in the eye more than once.

In an early church scene, set in a saloon that doubles as tiny Gila City’s house of worship, the congregation is rushed through “Rock of Ages,” the sort of hymn Ford milked and built many a stately, pious Western around.

“Companions’ co-star is the formidable Maureen O’Hara, a Ford favorite.

And the “3 Godfathers” here are mistrusting, violent and pitiless men who throw in together for a robbery. “I hear they got a new bank and an old marshal in Gila City” is all it takes for the ex-soldier still wearing his cavalry blue with yellow piping pants (Keith), the cutthroat Turk (Chill Wills, in a rare villainous turn) whom he recruits dangling from a noose, and Turk’s womanizing psycho-gunslinger partner Billy (Steve Cochran) to team up.

When the bank robbery is delayed due to “Yellowlegs” (Keith) considering having a bullet removed from his shoulder, others hit it first and the “trouble with his shootin’ arm” Yellowlegs accidentally kills the son of the doyenne of the local “dance” hall (O’Hara, playing a genuine “fallen” woman).

Ostracized by the locals, Kit (O’Hara) hisses that she’ll bury her boy next to his father in far off Saringo, “Apache country” on the Mexican border. Yellowlegs orders the “godfathers” to join him to escort her and the body, over her furious objections.

The movie has a TV-budget myopia but a hard-nosed tone and hardboiled dialogue that would become Peckinpah trademarks.

The simple, weathered saloon setting for the first scene, with Wills bound and noosed in his thick buffalo coat, balancing on a small beer keg to delay his strangulation, is a grabber. Yellowlegs recognizes the card-cheat who’s about to die and sets out to free him before the guilty man’s dissolute partner staggers in, tipsy and with two women, to shoot the rope and disrupt the ongojng card game, which isn’t paying much heed to rough justice they had a hand ordering carried out.

The mistrust in the impromptu trio is palpable, with Turk and Billy bristling at being given orders and Turk nagging Billy to shoot “Yellowlegs,” or Turk will do it himself — shoot him in the back.

“That ain’t no way to kill a man, not even a Yankee!”

Wills has one moment where his character’s itchy, hot overcoat gets the best of him and he scratches his back, bear-style, rubbing up against a Saguaro cactus.

The plot is head-slappingly illogical, from all the passed-up opportunities to shoot Yellowlegs to the various ways their journey is delayed. Losing a horse or two is one thing, but stopping to “bury the wagon?” The reasoning for ditching it is sound, but…

One thing I’ve never seen in all my decades of watching Westerns is the wild, drunken rumpus an Apache war party engages in after they’ve attacked and seized a stagecoach, many donning the clothes of the dead passengers.

That’s another shot at Ford, who launched Wayne’s career with the Ur Western “Stagecoach” in 1939. How are the Apaches drunk? Must have had a whiskey salesman on board.

Peckinpah’s biography “If They Move, Kill’em” supports the fact that he filmed this quick and cheap. The day-for-night shots don’t match a couple of lovely scenes actually filmed in twilight. The early gunplay is mostly sound effects. And did he lure O’Hara to the role by promising her she could sing the opening credits song?

It’s odd to watch a Cochran movie after reading how thriller writer James Ellroy portrayed him in his 1950s Hollywood drugs, sex, tabloid gossip and murder tale “Widespread Panic.” Cochran is one of the real-life characters in that riff on “Confidential” magazine’s days of infamy. Colorful Cochran is celebrated by the penis-size-obsessed Ellroy (His most juvenile book? I’d say so.), a B-movie figure of leftist politics and stag-film infamy, according to the novelist/”L.A. Confidential” historian.

As with most debut features in the celluloid century before you could make a movie on your cell phone, the miracle of getting “The Deadly Companions” made is worth considering. It’s far from Peckinpah’s best. But he got it made and made it all work.

And back in 1961, seeing O’Hara in this light and the Old West this rough must have been quite the novelty. I wonder what John Ford thought of it?

MPA Rating: “approve,” violence, adult themes

Cast: Brian Keith, Maureen O’Hara, Tom Cochran and Chill Wills.

Credits: Directed by Sam Peckpinpah, script by A.S. Fleischman. An American Pathe release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:33