Movie Nation

So this is what pulling out all the stops looks like.

“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is a candy-colored, image-crammed B-ball bauble for the bambinos, children of the kids who flocked to the 1996 hit, which paired-up the Looney Tunes with Michael “His Airness” Jordan.

It’s a people-and-cartoon-critters-trapped in a video game comedy, visually dazzling if narratively vapid. There are a few hearty laughs and a lot of smiles and smirks of recognition as six screenwriters threw everything in their Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers memories at the screen to keep the kiddies happy, or at least distracted.

This is, front and center, a Lebron James star vehicle, built on his brand — “King” James — and that of the studio that’s been “the stuff that dreams are made of” since 1923. So we hear everybody call James “the King,” see his LJ crown logo (and Nike, of course) and get a heaping helping of his personal “brand” — doting dad, basketball workaholic, stand-up guy, not afraid to speak up on social issues — and a LOT Of jokes at his expense. Yeah, he’s changed teams…a lot. Yes he’s got a towering ego and yeah he can be touchy about that.

What adults dragged into “Jam” might take away from this harmless kid-centric ‘toon is a lifetime — several lifetimes — of Warner Brothers references, from their Looney legacy to lesser Saturday Morning cartoon characters, King Kong and “The Matrix,” “Casablanca” (Another “Sam,” this one with a big’ol red mustache, is at the piano.) to Harry Potter and “Game of Thrones.”

“Winter, I say WINTER is comin’!”

If you’ve ever watched a Looney Tune, you’ll get that and laugh. It’s a JOKE son. JOKE, that is.

The story is pure piffle — Don Cheadle is “Al G Rithm,” a thinks-for-himself computer program that sucks Lebron and his video gamer son Dom (Cedric Joe) into the “serververse” and blackmails them into competing in basketball with “video game rules” (erp) and Bugs Bunny physics. The various Looneys, scattered across the Warner Brothers spectrum (Potterworld, “Casablanca,” “GOT” etc.) are summoned for a do-or-be-deleted “Let’s settle this on the court” showdown.

They play against Al G’s unfortunately named “Goon Squad,” which includes bizarre, digitized and supernatural versions of “The Brow” (Lebron’s teammate, Anthony Davis), WNBA star Diana Taurasi, Klay Thompson and “Dame” (Damien Lillard).

No, it’s no more “logical” or less easily-labeled “mindless” than the original “Space Jam.” But it’s for kids, remember?

James is, if nothing else, a better actor than Jordan ever was. He’s no DeNiro, but he mugs on cue and stays in the spirit of this thing.

And the messaging is simplistic, but always positive. “You can’t be great (at anything) without putting in the work.” “Family is everything” and “There’s a short cut for EVERYthing in the serververse,” which isn’t necessarily a virtue.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “The Best Man”) and the credited screenwriters try to wring a little fun out of all this, and miss as often as they hit. But younger kids will eat up the eye candy and get a tiny taste of what The Looney Tunes were all about, even if this big budget monstrosity never comes close to the anarchy created by Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the team at Warner Brothers’ “Termite Terrace.”

MPA Rating: PG, for some cartoon violence and language (profanity)

Cast: Lebron James, Don Cheadle, Cedric Joe, Sonequa Martin-Green, Ernie Johynson, Lil Rel Howery and the voices of Anthony Davis, Diana Taurasi, Damian Lillard and Zendaya.

Credits: Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, script by Juel Taylor, Jesse Gordon, Tony Rettenmaier, Terrance Nance, Keenan Coogler and Celeste Ballard. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:55

Ryan Reynolds’ gin? Check. #AMCovercharges4g&t.

It’s 1993, and movie going in Montevideo, Uruguay will never be the same.

Mierda. Wait they have matinees at night in South America?

As if going to the cinema wasn’t scary enough. An August 6 theatrical release, Aug 24 for you fraidy cats who only watch movies at home.

A September 17 release that has a whiff of “awards season” about it.

“Here After” is a a romance premised on the idea that you can’t get into “heaven” without having a “soul mate.”

It is terrible on a lot of levels, a godawful script that was drably-cast and indifferently-directed and passes before the eyes, deathly-dull scene after leaden scene.

Almost everything about it screams “CUT this,” and not with a scalpel either. This two hour indulgent wank needs to be chainsawed. They changed the title from “Faraway Eyes,” but that was no help at all.

Broadway and “SVU” star Andy Karl is Michael, a New Yorker who dies in a car crash after his drunken girlfriend breaks up with him rather than put down the drink and get on a plane to go meet his parents.

Ouch.

This plot-launching moment is drawn out, ad nauseum, in a monologue our hero utters from the gurney as he’s being worked over going into the hospital. Michael relates this long, almost-interesting story from his teens about a redhead and handcuffs. That goes on and on before we realize he’s telling this story to a counselor (Christina Ricci) of some sort. She’s having a hard time getting him “focused” and on topic.

“Can you recall exactly how it was you died?”

She’s in “admissions,” I guess you’d call it. “Heaven” — the director and star (both Jewish) avoid that word — requires that you enter paired-up, with your “soulmate,” and no, don’t ask about “What about if you’re a kid?” or whatever. Michael tries to, and no, the movie makes no sense right from the get-go, so why belabor things?

Michael is given “one last second chance” to wander the Earth — New York — cruise the streets and bars and find “the one.” The whole world is his oyster, but he limits himself to Manhattan. Other souls/ghosts wander there as well. They just don’t want to answer his questions.

“It’s New York. Even when you’re alive, nobody talks to you.”

Michael’s often-drunken approaches to women bring out his “misogyny,” or “woman hating douche” side. The one dead pal (Michael Rispoli) he remembers and consults has a few answers, but no suggestions about sorting out their problem. Angelo’s already given up. At least there’s booze in their shared afterlife.

“This ain’t Hell. But it’s sure doing its best impression.”

Michael and the movie about him fritter away minutes and more minutes, and then he meets somebody (Nora Arnezeder of “The Words”) in a bar. They chat, and however bored their banter might make the viewer, destiny and the screenplay dictate that they “click.”

One problem? She’s not dead.

Writer-director Harry Greenberger did a film called “Staring at the Sun,” which played a few festivals, never got a proper release and isn’t even listed on Rotten Tomatoes. “Here After” should be so lucky.

The most charitable view is that it’s an overreach for something romantic and profound that was a misfire pretty much at conception.

Karl, of Broadway’s “Groundhog Day” adaptation, knows his way around a joke. None scripted here work and he comes off like dead weight trying to make them play. Making his character an actor with dreams of a one-man show just underlines what Karl doesn’t accomplish here — lighting up the screen, or even holding our interest.

Ricci has nothing funny or interesting to play and is absent from much of this interminable, dreamy dramedy. She got off easy.

Arnezeder might be well-cast as a romantic ideal if there was anything to play, and she was better at being more than just a beautiful face. “Honey Bee” is the character’s name, and that’s the most intriguing thing about her.

I don’t know what they were here after but I do know what I was here after. And “Here After” isn’t it.

MPA Rating: unrated, lots of alcohol consumption, profanity

Cast: Andy Karl, Christina Ricci, Nora Arnezeder and Michael Rispoli.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Harry Greenberger. A Vertical release.

Running time:

Ryan Reynolds should just do trailers and TV commercials.

At this point, the “content” is irrelevant. He’s funny mocking pretty much anything, especially his own movies. He’s “meta” incarnate.

The shot at “Cruella,” jokes about Disney+, cracking about the late arrival of “Free Guy,” which finally comes out next month.

Taika Waititi is…KORG.

“Looks fun in a kind of ‘last days of Fox’ firesale way…”

This one looks good. Bizarre. Offbeat. Very…Ell-aaaaa.

August 6 it opens.

“Great White” might be the dullest shark attack thriller ever.

From the mundane, flatly-filmed first scene attack to the contortions it has to go through to put five people into a life raft with no one looking for them off the Great White Land of Oz, to the “one by one” picking off of passengers, the strain to make this terrifying, original or just marginally interesting shows.

A struggling couple (Katrina Bowden, Aaron Jukabenko) running a float plane charter business take a Japanese-Australian couple (Kimie Tsukakoshi, Tim Kano) off to a reef island for the day, find evidence of the first scene’s slaughter-on-the-sailing-sloop, and promptly set off to find a missing body, without “waiting for the Coast Guard.”

The five folks on board each have “issues.” And the instant conflict within the group — Te Kohe Tuhaka plays the charter’s “picnic on the reef” cook, despised on sight by the Japanese husband — is, like most everything else here, forced and inorganic. The husband may be a jerk, but of course he’s the one who says “We need to leave this to the Coast Guard, and is ignored.

They see the wrecked sailboat, SET DOWN, and guess what? They never take off again.

The primal fear that sharks generate kicks in here and there — a nice beneath-the-shark POV shot looking up from the deep at the hexagonal shape of the life raft they’re confined to, a bobbing body (via “Jaws”) suggesting the shark is “playing” with its food/bait.

The tone is set in stone by the first sailboat couple attack, by that first fake fin sighting that will have you humming “Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo doo…”

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Katrina Bowden, Aaron Jukabenko, Kimie Tsukakoshi, Tim Kano and Te Kohe Tuhaka.

Credits: Directed by Martin Wilson, script by Michael Boughen. An RLJE Films/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:31

So how do we compartmentalize and allegorize “Gunpowder Milkshake,” the hit-woman action “comedy” starring Karen Gillan?

“Joanna Wick?” “Gloria” at half speed? “La Femme Samantha?” “Sin City” sans most sins?

Set in a lurid, neon-soaked underworld of gangs, gangsters and “The Firm,” just another mob with a “keep order” ethos, meet-ups are at “The Diner,” a ’50s themed joint that’s been there for ages and the waitress Rose always asks “Can I lighten your load for you?” as a polite way of disarming the armed.

Our hitwoman goes to The Library where mild-mannered “librarians” (Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett) check out Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf classics with pistols hidden in the pages.

“This girl needs to do some READING.” So “Joanna Wick” it is.

Sam, played by Freya Allen as a teen, never quite got over mommy abandonment issues. Splitting milkshakes at The Diner was their routine. Then Mommy (Lena Headey) had to fend off attackers out for revenge for her latest job, and kisses her off with an “I have to disappear for a while.”

Fifteen years later, Sam (Gillan) has taken over Mom’s duties with Nathan, “HR director with The Firm” (Paul Giamatti, of course). But there’s this one job that goes sideways. Some “accountant stole from us.”

“How much did he take?”

“Enough to earn to a visit from you.”

It turns out the guy did the stealing under duress. The villains have his little girl (Chloe Coleman). Shooting him only makes things worse. Motherless/Daddyless Sam has to make this good.

Nothing else goes according to “plan.” Nothing ever does in these movies.

It’d be easy to get behind the movie’s latest twist on empowered equal opportunity mass murder if there was much more to this than the slow-footed slaughter.

The cutesy “mothering” touches are insipid in this setting.

There aren’t many jokes, and most of those don’t land. Gillan’s shown a wry, deadpan side in the “Jumanji” movies. It doesn’t play here. The lack of big ticket charismatic villains, the Netflix thriller brand (alas) is also a minus. The fights have a half-speed, edit-the-fight-choreography-to-cover feel.

I really enjoyed a goofy/bloody slo-mo-due-to-drugs brawl at a spotless white dentist’s office where the doctor (Michael Smiley) is an after-hours mob surgeon. But an underwhelming car chase/shoot-out follows that.

The dialogue is amusing enough, here and there. “”A girl made the three of you look like ‘The Walking Dead.'”

The “give every name actress a big fight moment” pays off, even if it’s kind of spoiled by draping Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” over one brawl, and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” over another. That, like every excessive Bowling Alley Beatdown or Death Comes to the Diner screams “trying too damned hard.”

All that said, if Israeli B-movie maker Navot Papushado (“Rabies,” “Big Bad Wolves”) had kept this thing on its feet and sprinting — fewer pauses for motherly pathos, Spaghetti Western face-offs, etc. — “Milkshake” would have gone down easier, no matter how much gunpowder was used.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence and profanity throughout.

Cast: Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Paul Giamatti, Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, Freya Allen and Carla Gugino.

Credits: Directed by Navot Papushado, script by Ehud Lavski and
Navot Papushado A Canal+ film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

When it premiered in 1989, “D-Man in the Waters” was hailed as “dance of the moment,” a symbolic, energetic and balletic piece that “radiates life in the face of tragedy.”

The co-founder of the Jones-Zane Company that created it had died of AIDS. When he passed away, the paramedics that came to pick up his body refused to touch the corpse. One of the stars of that company, the “D-Man” of the title, was about to succumb to AIDS, yet made an brief appearance onstage in that premiere performance.

Can a work so much of its time, “dance of the moment,” live on, stay relevant and inspire young dancers and new audiences decades later?

That’s not questioned in the documentary, “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones & D-Man in the Waters.” The piece endures and the film, shot before another pandemic tore through America, is largely set within the context of a new production of the piece mounted by Loyola Marymount University, directed by a veteran of that Jones-Zane ensemble.

But this sometimes emotional film shows us the struggle of Bill T. Jones and new production choreographer (and co-director of this film) Rosalynde LeBlanc to convey the symbolism and stakes to dancers too young to remember AIDS and all it did to dance, America and American culture.

LeBlanc and co-director Tom Hurwitz get Jones and veterans of his company to remember the crucible the show was created in, finished off as they all witnessed the wasting death of Jones’ “wife, husband” and business partner, half of a couple he describes as “a continent of two.”

“Cathartic” rehearsals altered the choreography of the show and gave it the emotional punch that made it a distinct live dance experience.

LeBlanc, leading Loyala Marymount students in rehearsals, stops to question the ensemble about what they’ve been told about AIDS in school, by parents, friends and relatives. Then she asks them about what crises they feel the show might relate to today — rampant gun violence, etc. — all in an effort to raise the emotional stakes in their performances.

Jones sits in on some of the rehearsals, instructing, encouraging, coaxing — “Don’t think ‘decorative.’ You’re an ATHLETE!”

It’s an intimate film that breaks down sequences of the dance as they’re slowly walked through and then assembled. If the movie lacks something, it’s the outside voices — academics, contemporaries in dance, critics — placing this work within dance history, verifying its importance and significance.

Still, “Can You You Bring It” is a fascinating history lesson, especially to generations that didn’t grow up under the AIDS specter, when sexuality and dating had dire consequences and when the big city worlds of dance, theater and the arts were decimated, almost overnight.

One dancer recalls that “half my phone book” of colleagues and collaborators “had died” before treatments arrived to stem the tide.

Up until then, and all through rehearsals and that premiere production of “D-Man in the Waters,” dancers were struggling to stay afloat, to carry on as almost everyone they knew went under.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill T. Jones, Rosalynde LeBlanc, Janet Lilly, Arthur Aviles, Heidi Lasky, Laurence Goldhuber

Credits: Directed by Tom Hurwitz, Rosalynde LeBlanc. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:34