Movie Nation

Many have taken a shot at creating a “Zoom” call comedy or drama or dramedy during COVID. But it took actress (“Parks & Rec.”) turned actress-director Natalie Morales and actor and sometime writer-director Mark Duplass (“Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” “Safety Not Guaranteed”) to stick the landing.

“Language Lessons” leaves COVID more or less out of the picture. It’s just an affluent, middle-aged Oaklander unknowingly signed-up for Spanish lessons by his husband, and the utterly charming Spanish speaker on the other end of the video calls.

The unseen Will signed up former-Spanish speaker Adam up for 100 lessons, immersive conversations carried out via video chats which he can do from the comfort of their too-tasteful hillside McMansion.

“Casa GRANDE,” Adam admits, and Cariño, as his teacher is nicknamed, has to agree. She’s taken $1,000 for 100 lessons, so it’s no great shock to learn (a little later) that she’s not down the street or across the state. She’s in another country.

Adam is “muy incómodo,” he confesses. VERY uncomfortable. “It’s bad that I have all the things and that you don’t have them.” Sure, her perfectly-streaked hair and designer glasses suggest “Hollywood,” just a little. But her simple video call background of chalkboard and bulletin board and taking $10 per lesson/conversation is a real liberal “privilege” guilt trip.

Morales and Duplass give us a taste of the effortlessly charming and undemanding movie that “Language Lessons” might have been in the opening scenes. He’s conversational in Spanish, but makes plenty of grammatical stumbles. And Duplass masterfully conveys a man trying to remember what he once knew, and mentally searching for words he might never have mastered as he does. He even makes the classic gringo new-to-Spanish boo-boo.

“Yo soy muy MUY embarazado!” he confesses. And Morales, like every native Spanish speaker in all of recorded history, cackles at yet another American confusing “I am so VERY embarrassed” for the Spanish word for “pregnant.”

We just have time to settle in for a cute movie about learning a new language when “Language Lessons” takes its first turn toward serious. It’s not the last. As these two banter, struggle to schedule this weekly meet-up into routine and slowly let layers of their real lives peel away in the conversations, grief and danger and melodrama Zoom into play.

Our leads have the kind of chemistry rom-com screenwriters dream of, and the fact that Adam is gay and rich and Cariño isn’t only makes it their connection that much more interesting, and great fodder for jokes.

“You’re so poor,” as Adam puts it, “and I’m pregnant.”

They chat or video-mail each other about their lives and movies, mostly in Spanish (with English subtitles), but slipping into Spanglish when the need arises. She catches him in bed, just waking up, in the pool or sweating in the home gym. She gives him a peek at the bamboo garden behind her house, and even has a tipsy musical moment — via Zoom — commemorating his birthday.

When tragedy strikes, they share and reach out to one another, because they’re compassionate human beings. But there’s a lot being avoided here, a lot she isn’t saying or that he isn’t figuring out.

The film travels from light and frothy to abruptly and less-convincingly sad, and for my money, that happens too early on in the narrative. Give us more of the giggly stumbling through Spanglish bonding before turning dark.

But even in the film’s third act lurch into sheer melodrama, with brittle conversations carried out on eggshells, Morales and Duplass are wholly immersed in character. The twists are believable because they’re totally credible in their roles.

They make “Language Lessons” a most engaging human connection, and a seriously entertaining way to brush up on your own rusty Spanish in the bargain.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Mark Duplass, Natalie Morales

Credits: Directed by Natalie Morales, scripted by Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:31

The teaser trailer…

This mid-Oct release from IFC is about an American filmmaking couple (Roth and Krieps) who vacation in the Faroe Islands, where Ingmar Bergman made his most famous films, and rediscover the memories and connections that made them a couple in the first place in this evocative fall romance.

Looks superb, a real movie lovers movie.

Whatever new ground the Philippine cinema is breaking in dramas and thrillers, the romances and rom-coms rolling out of there and onto Netflix aren’t making any impression.

Even taking into account cultural differences as we travel Around the World with Netflix, “Here and There (Dito at Doon)” is a sleep-inducing nothing of a romance, every bit as warm and/or titillating as that photo of its star, above, sitting there swapping stories, insults and (tepid) flirtations via computer during COVID lockdown.

This reuniting of co-stars from “The Woman and the Gun” doesn’t do much for either Janine Gutierrez or JC Santos, or for anybody hoping for something — anything — to motivate you to stick with it.

Len (Gutierrez) is at home, alone and bored with her nurse-mom (Shyr Valdez) at work and overwhelmed by the spreading pandemic. Len socializes via Facenook (tee hee), where she grumps that this lockdown isn’t a big deal with her friends, all of whom are of the “just drink at home” (in Filipino with English subtitles) instead of going out mind.

Save for this one commenter who gets under her skin. “Caloy” takes her and her pals’ “just stay at home, what’s so hard about that, mother-f—–r?” slaps personally.

They exchange a few shots, and that’s that. Until Len convenes her girlfriend/boyfriend pals Jo (Yesh Burce) and Mark (Victor Anastasio) for a group guzzle and gab — online.

Wouldn’t you know it? Mark invites his buddy “Cabs” into the mix. And before too long, as Len vents about her annoying exchanges earlier that day, Cabs figures out, and then Len is clued in, that he was the guy who got on her nerves.

Hanging up only means, their “meet cute” (note remotely) will require an apology or two to really come off.

It does, and she figures out he’s from Cebu, runs a street vending coffee cart for his livelihood, and the shutdown is basically putting him out of business.

They chat and chat and call and what not, and whatever will be, will be.

The film’s most modestly clever conceit is the way Len imagines these conversations playing out. The group is gathered in her living room, or later Caloy is talking to her in a more intimate way at the foot of her bed.

That sounds even less racy than it is. This film’s chastity rivals the coy extremes of Bollywood in terms of “romance.” At least in Bollywood they make eyes at each other and sing and dance with one another as they court and flirt.

“Here and There” can’t even manage that.

Comedies and dramas made under COVID conditions either strain to not seem claustrophobic, mimicking the solitude and isolation we all feel, or lean into it. This one does both, to zero effect.

It’s a polished production, as handsomely mounted as any Hollywood, Bollywood or British soundstage romance. It’s just not romantic. And unlike the dramas and thrillers exported from the islands, it ventures little in the way of commentary on the state of the nation under the autocratic goon Duterte.

Anybody hoping to see a Filipino version of Tom and Meg or Miss Bennett and Mister Darcy in this new “couple” will be sorely disappointed. It’s dull and pretty much charmless.

Rating: TV-14, beer drinking, profanity

Cast: Janine Gutierrez, JC Santos, Yesh Burce and Victor Anatasio

Credits: Directed by Jaime Habac Jr., scripted by Kristin Parreño Barrameda, Alex Gonzales A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

We’ve seen other versions of this operator who cares tale, starring Halle Berry and others.

This Oct. 1 take on the genre looks more fraught. On Netflix

The fin de siecle for London’s independent music scene showed up a little late, and seemed awfully retro as it passed from existence, at least in the version related in Laura Jean Marsh‘s too-brief, too-thinly-sketched parable “Giddy Stratospheres.”

A bunch of artsy-druggy and fashion-backward types boozed and snorted their way through a reprise of The End of Punk, which faded from favor almost 30 years before this 2007 tale is set.

This “Giddy” time had a dash of New Wave in its sound, fewer piercings and no razor blades, but lots more cocaine, just judging from this.

Marsh — a bit player with a decade in cinema behind her — wrote, directed and stars in this, playing a would-be artist and certified party pussycat — definitely over 30 — captured over a couple of days that spell “The end of all this” to her, at least.

Lara is near the end of her “pure denial on toast” age, according to her running mate, Daniel (Jamal Franklin). He can’t get her to talk about “last night,” about the guy she woke up with, how “wasted…off your face” she was, and what that says about her.

He’s quite fey and has had trouble with drugs and warnings about “that girl” from his worried mother. But heedlessly, the duo boards a train to dash off to the funeral of Lara’s granny. She’s to read a poem, something she can’t fob off on her New York artist-brother (Nick Helm) but something she’s not really up to performing.

She can’t remember to get them off at the right station, forgot to bring money, and only has it together in the context of the arch and Pythonesque “types” who comprise her family, the other mourners. Richard Herring plays her too-too-theatrical Dad, Charlotte Milchard‘s is Dad’s new wife, Fifi (Lara’s dizzy nemesis) and Charlotte Weston is her caring but indulgent Mum.

Flashbacks give us a whiff of the club life, bands that sound like the early ’80s (New Order was their god…apparently) and Lara’s disreputable crew.

It’s all winding down, and that’s what the movie shows us, “giddy” stoners carrying on until that “Trainspotting” moment when she sees the dead end.

There’s a heady sense of “vibe” here, old feuds, “friends” who aren’t dependable and rivals who aren’t dependably at odds.

It’s a little hard to make heads or tails out of, what with thick accents, the under-identified characters and their relationship to each other. The film needed more scenes, more background, more fizzy fun and more pathos for any of this to come off properly.

Marsh seems a trifle old for the part, which may be the point. But that’s the lure and the trap of a “scene,” isn’t it? You show up, very young, with the energy and ambition and talent to master your art, and the good times and the drugs and the “going out” and endless fear of missing out have friends remembering the “grant” you got to study art and see “what a waste” you’ve made of things.

I’m grading this class project/music history remembrance “incomplete.”

Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Laura Lean Marsh, Jamal Franklin, Richard Herring, Charlotte Milchard and Charlotte Weston

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Jean Marsh. A Bulldog release.

Running time: 1:07

The animation for this MGM sequel is amazing. It really pops.

The story may focus more on Wednesday, but we’ve still got Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron voicing Gomez and Morticia.

They’re releasing this to theaters and streaming on Oct. 1.

The gloriously sentimental 9/11 musical “Come from Away” comes to Apple TV with all its Canadian cuddliness intact. This filmed version of the Tony winning show captures the charms of this folksy production, about the good people of Newfoundland and their role in coming to the aid of thousands of stranded airline passengers on that fateful day back in 2001.

Using real locals and composites of the 7,000 strangers “come from away” to “the rock,” the giant remote airport on the North Atlantic in Gander, Irene Sankoff and David Hein crafted a feel-good celebration of Canadian empathy and compassion, and the unique hospitality of a windswept town at the edge of a continent.

A cast of 12 assume multiple roles as Newfoundlanders and passengers, pilots and stewardesses, mayors and the constable, an animal shelter worker, a profiled Egyptian passenger and barflies, a gay couple, strangers who connect and others worried and wary and the lone local TV reporter, new to the job, who captured this miracle of logistics and triumph of generosity as it happened.

It’s as Canadian as Tim Horton’s, as warm as “a cuppa” whether that cuppa be of tea, coffee or Irish whiskey.

“Fish and chips and shipwrecks, that’s Newfoundland” the mayor (Joel Hatch) and ensemble’s opening number proclaims. The school bus drivers are on strike. The constable (Paul Whitty) is keeping the peace, which is peaceful. The airport is set for another routine day of limited arrivals, its days as a refueling station for almost all transatlantic flights receding into the past. In 2001, much of the place was overdue for a planned demolition.

And then there it is, on the radio, the TV. All these flights are diverted as North America’s skies empty of planes, with every landing flight a potential threat.

Newfoundlanders? They’re singing “Can I do something, I need to do something! Because I can’t watch the news.”

So they start converting schools, a Salvation Army Camp and the like into shelters. They empty the stores, with shopkeepers telling them “Take what’cha need.”

A pioneering female airline pilot (Jenn Colella) sings of her struggles to get this coveted job, and remembers a colleague she learns died that day.

And on the planes — fear, uncertainty, everyone kept in the dark about the “incident” in the U.S. Unable to call home, unable to deplane, having run through every movie on every flight (38 jetliners), the “complimentary booze” comes out.

As somber and sad as all this was and is, “Come from Away” is never more than a minute or two removed from reminding us that there was an awful lot of disarming, homespun hilarity.

A bus driver (Tim Walton) — they put their strike on hold — turns late night tour guide as he shuttles people from all over the world through the woods to a shelter.

“Dot dare in de middle of the road? Dot’s a moose. Yah. She’ll move when she’s good an’ready.”

Local cuisine earns raised eyebrows — “Cod au gratin. Fish. With cheese!” “Are there no vegetables in Canada?”

The cub reporter (Emily Walton) does live updates, becoming a town crier as the Newfoundlanders rally, and maybe get a bit carried away as they do.

“For tha’LOVE of God, stop bringin’ toilet paper to the Lion’s Club!”

And the frightened and suspicious, the mistrusting, the worried-sick and the ethnically-profiled find moment after moment of common ground and communication as Operation Yellow Ribbon springs to life.

The stage magic here is the simplicity of the production — just characters in chairs, swaying in time to simulate a bus ride, singing as they do. All it takes to turn a few tables with people seated at them into an air traffic control tower is dimming the lights and breaking out flashlights.

Six passenger cardiologists have their “Magic Mike” moment, volunteering to clean the toilets at their shelter.

And with an accompanying on-stage musical ensemble and lots of booze passed around, can a lesson in singing a local sea chantey be far behind?

It’s an old fashioned show, not remotely as hip as the Lin Manuel Miranda musicals that have turned such folksiness into antiques. The songs are pleasantly forgettable, even as the get the job done.

But as characters riff through personal stories, slip into Swahili, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew and Newfie — “Lard thunderin’ JESUS!” — and the plucky have their moment to shine, “Come from Away” reminds us of a time when people gathered together and did the right thing, and those they were doing it for appreciated the heck out of them for it.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, drunking

Cast: Petrina Bromley, Jenn Colella, De’Lon Grant, Q. Smith, Caesar Samoya, Tony LePage, Joel Hatch, Astrid Van Wieren, Emily Walton and Paul Whitty.

Credits: Directed by Christopher Ashley, musical by David Hein and Irene Sankoff. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:47

An Oct. 15 release. Doesn’t look like much, but maybe…

How much should one give away about “Post Mortem,” this six episode Norwegian series set in a funeral home and a nursing home in Skarne, a little town where the running gag — among cops and morticians alike — is that “no one ever dies in Skarnes?”

Saying “It’s ‘Six Feet Under’ meets ‘True Blood'” is stretching things a tad. Because it’s just not as interesting or engrossing or darkly funny as either. But yes, there’s a character who turns up as a corpse in the opening scene, and then wakes up, just after a coroner has joked “We declare Live Hallangen (the undead woman’s name) open for business!”

As Live (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) does not sputter the Norwegian word for “BRAINS!” upon awakening after that first incision, we guess “Oh, vampire,” even though the script tries ever-so-hard to hide the obvious.

Live doesn’t know how she showed up, stiff as a board, in a field outside of town. The cops (Kim Fairchild and André Sørum) do nothing to disavow the local joke that Skarnes would be “the best place to commit a murder because” of the lazy” police.

The chief, Judith, fusses over “natural causes” and dismisses every suggestion otherwise because of “budgetary” considerations involved in an autopsy. When Live turns out to not be dead, Judith offers her most heartfelt apology.

“In our defense, you looked really dead!”

Reinert, her subordinate, frets over who they call to get the body. Because this isn’t “NCIS,” Judith scolds. There’s no calling an ambulance (money). Reinert is reluctant to summon the only funeral parlor in town. Because he recognizes Live. She’s the daughter of old Arvid (Terje Strømdahl) and sister of fellow mortician Odd (Elias Holmen Sørensen). That would be an awful way to give her family this terrible news.

It’s just that the old man takes it well. Or well enough. It’s Live’s awakening on the autopsy table that chills him to the core. What does he know?

And whatever Judith says, Reinert’s sure some crime was committed that put Live out in the middle of a field, seemingly dead. As Live gets a few flashes of her memory back, the long process of piecing together what happened begins, and the series settles into her finding clues, evading detection and adjusting to her new hyper-sensitive hearing and her ability to see veins pulsing beneath the pale Norwegian skin of pale Norwegian necks.

Did I mention Live works in a nursing home? With her sister-in-law, Rose (Sara Khorami)? Who’s trying to have a baby with Odd?

Petter Holmsen’s series peaks with that first episode, and I’d go so far as to say that it peaks in the first couple of scenes in that episode. Everything that follows is about the tedium of a small town where “nobody dies,” the struggles of keeping a funeral parlor in the black when there simply aren’t enough corpses to turn to cash and Live’s efforts to either adapt to her new life cravings, or fight them off, and keep “lazy” cop Reinert from figuring out what’s really going on here.

The best moment for me with the obvious financially-strapped glee that the morose, broke Arvid lets show when he gets that first phone call from the police.

Johansen makes an affecting lead, trying to play cagey and cracking under the strain at the same time. And Sørensen has his moments as a guy wrestling with a funeral business that stretches back five generations — to 1914 — and yet has only survived due to a Trump level cooking of the books and dodging of debts.

Yes, there are political jokes (in Norwegian, with English subtitles, or dubbed into English).

The problem is that the dark humor isn’t humorous enough and the darkness too light to hold interest on its own. The series empties its clip in the opening episode, and little that follows reloads it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Elias Holmen Sørensen, André Sørum, Kim Fairchild, Sara Khorami and Terje Strømdahl

Credits: Created by Petter Holmsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: six episodes @:44 each