Movie Nation

A soap star of some standing lets her psycho flag fly as a murderously obsessive fashion photographer in “Fatal Fashion,” which was orphaned and homeless as “Deadly Runway” before Netflix took it in.

It’s a chance for Linsey Godfrey (“The Young and the Restless,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “Days of Our Lives”) to lose the “neck-up acting” and um, subtlety of daytime drama for a little over-the-top nut-with-a-knife/pistol-packing mama/shove-a-model-over-a-railing mayhem.

Gosh, if only it was that much fun.

Godfrey plays Jennifer Higgens, introduced in a wordless opening as a top New York fashion photographer whose lip-biting and salivating over her latest toy-boy “creation” ends wither her waving a knife at him and his paramour — in the middle of a photo shoot.

How DO you bounce back from that? Well, the California Public School System just might have a job for you! Jennifer winds up running the new “Fashion and Photography” class at Palm Vista High.

And in a flash, she’s “creating” her next obsession. David Doolittle (TV actor Joshua Hoffman) is the bespectacled nerd the bullies pick on. Until he signs up for Jennifer’s class, where she teaches runway walking and photography, with the kids thrift-shopping and reworking clothes for their runway moments.

Except for Caitlyn (Ellen Michelle Monohan). She’s happy doing the clothes, which mean girl clothes-horse Brittany (Heather Hopkins) will throw tantrums over.

David just wants to be a photographer, but Jennifer picks’em for their low self-esteem.

We see variations on this routine — a makeover montage, Jennifer cooing “The camera LOVES you.” And then, something happens.

Maybe it’s the prettiest mean girl in school taking an interest in you. Maybe it’s a modeling manager (Maria Pallas) interested in poaching talent.

“I am NOT obsessed with him!”

That’s a sure sign somebody’s about to get cut. Or shot. Or pushed. Or…

Director Doug Campbell (“The Surrogate,” “Stalked by My Doctor”) tries to tease out Jennifer’s game, running through the basic cable level titillation — she undresses and “lights” her subjects — like an old pro.

Yawn.

Even as we see Jennifer exert some positive influence on wallflowers’ lives, we don’t have to ponder “What are teacher’s motives?” because we didn’t forget the nut-with-a-knife prologue. That prologue also strips away the mystery and seriously dings any chance “Fatal Fashion” has at suspense.

There’s always a little pleasure in seeing a killer plan or improvise her way into covering her tracks, but we only get a tiny dose of that.

When, we wonder, will some parent, model-kid, school administrator or COP get curious enough to do a little Internet search on Teacher Jennifer?

The players aren’t the most charismatic lot, but look at who they’re playing.

Only Godfrey has any fun at all, and even that’s fairly drab, even by TV movie standards.

“I know I can be a little dramatic sometime.”

“‘A little?'”

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast:Linsey Godfrey, Joshua Hoffman, T.J. Hoban, Heather Hopkins, Ellen Michelle Monohan

Credits: Directed by Doug Campell, script by David Chester. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

Sweet and ever-so-slight, “The Farewell” is a Chinese culture-clash comedy built on melancholy, driven by sentiment.

A family matriarch has lung cancer. But the doctors haven’t told her, just alerted the family. And the family, in China and in America, join ranks to keep the news from her.

Aspiring (and failing) New York writer, Billi (Awkwafina, aka Nora Lum) doesn’t see “Nai Nai” (Shuzhen Zhao) very often. But they’re constantly on the phone, and she’s appalled at what “the family has agreed” to do — lie.

“Chinese people have saying,” her brusque, flinty mother (Diana Lin) explains. “When people get cancer, they die.”

That’s the tone of the picture in a phrase. It’s about death. It’s about the lie. And keeping the first out of your mind while adhering to the second is where the comedy will come from.

A marriage has been hastily “arranged” for a cousin, as an excuse for everyone to gather around their widowed mother/grandmother and say “Goodbye” without letting her know they’re saying their farewells.

And nobody wants Billi to come. Dad (veteran character actor Tzi Ma) is “drinking again.” Mom seems bitterly resigned. But everybody in family diaspora is SURE Billi will be the one who cracks. She’s emotional, tight with Nai Nai and seriously assimilated.

“In America, you couldn’t do this,” she says, in English, and later in Chinese. “It’s ILLEGAL.”

Needless to say, Billi goes to the “wedding” anyway, the family holds its breath and her uncle takes her aside when they decree she cannot stay in Nai Nai’s flat, and lectures her.

“Be careful,” he says (in Chinese, with English subtitles). No matter what, “You cannot tell her,” he adds. And on and on.

Billi’s endlessly repeated reply (in Chinese, with English subtitles), is “I knowwwww.”

Writer-director Lulu Wang (“Posthumous) lets us know in an opening credit, that this is “based on an actual lie.” The shape of that lie, bending and folding, and on occasion causing the person telling the latest version of the lie to wilt with regret, is the substance of “The Farewell.”

But its values come elsewhere.

There’s Nai Nai herself, an amusing scold, calling her adored Billi “Stupid girl” at every turn, backhanding her weight, matchmaking for her because she seems to need it, insisting on arranging this faux “wedding,” insulting the Japanese bride (Aoi Mizuhara) that young Haohao (Han Chen) is to marry, totally missing the expression in both bride and groom’s eyes.

Think “deer in headlights.”

I adopted the bride, Aiko, as my guide into the movie. Speaking no Chinese, hustled into something that may not be formalized when they get back in Japan, where Haohao’s parents settled, she is the Queen of Good Sports and her reactions to the bickering, the drinking, the weeping and the lying is priceless.

Lin’s embittered mother figure is the soul of the picture; not that sentimental about Nai Nai’s passing, increasingly disappointed in her daughter (Billi has a big lie she’s living, too), resigned to going through all this rigamarole because that’s what “the family” wants.

Awkwakina has a tricky part to play, a woman suffering a sort of post traumatic separation anxiety. She is far more at home giving us sarcasm, sass and laughs than at getting across the subtler shades of grief and regret. The arc her character traverses is more interesting than her performance of it.

“The Farewell” is winning justly-earned praise for its moments (just a couple) discussing the immigrant experience (“You’re still Chinese.”) and one touching anecdote that explains America to those who have never been there.

The film’s real value, I think, is its vivid, fully rounded, warts-and-all portrait of Chinese family life — in America among the expats, and back home. There’s also an East-West comparison that gets at the difference between “family” here and there that is eye-opening.

This family has many fault lines. The city (Changchun) is ugly, dingy and grey. “New” hotels aren’t any better than timeworn ones. People drink too much and smoke too much. Service sector folks are often bored, disinterested and unbending. Too many relatives and strangers want you to compare China and America, even though nobody wants to get into which “war” Nai Nai is supposedly a veteran of (there’s a reunion of comrades scene).

And like the 1993 film this one most resembles, Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet,” we see a lot of food — some cooking, and much eating.

There’s a lot of hype surrounding this movie, some of it warranted due to its relative novelty, and some of the “OK, take a deep breath” variety.

What Wang gives us is an engagingly sentimental story with warmth, compassion and wit, peopled by relatives who, for all their cultural differences, are universal and yet enviable in their devotion to “the good lie” and the quality of life they see as worth protecting with it.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, brief language and some smoking.

Cast: Awkwafina, Diana Lin, Shuzhen Zhao, Tzi Ma, Han Chen and Aoi Mizuhara

Credits: Written and directed by Lulu Wang.  An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40

I don’t expect much “Behind the Music” drama in this Aug. 16 release.

Drugs? Sure. Not exactly a feminist band, not “woke.” But not a lot of controversy, just a band that has Aerosmith level of endurance, staying power as a stadium act, their audience has aged. Classic rock may be drifting into bikerland for bands of this vintage.

Still, could be a fun story.

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The set-up is “love triangle” simple — two testosterony guys and a woman who comes between them, trapped on a boat in the middle of the sea.

Roman Polanski launched his career with that scenario, the 1962 classic “Knife in the Water.”

Only that was simpler than simple. The setting was an 18 foot long sailboat, the only weapon on that claustrophobic vessel — a rigging knife.

“Dead Water” — characters use the phrase “Dead in the Water” several times, so plainly they wanted to use that over-used title for it — parks our menage a trois on a 75 foot long Lazzara luxury motor yacht.

Hey, if you need product placement money to make the movie, there’s no shame in that. Name the make of the boat, show it off to good effect, especially in the closing credits.

Casper van Dien (of “Starship Troopers”) plays a hard-drinking jerk of a trust-fund-baby orthopedic surgeon, ready to help his just-mustered-out Marine captain pal “Coop” (Griff Furst of TV’s “The Magnificent Seven”) lose a little PTSD with some time on the water.

Coop’s TV-reporter wife Vivian (Brianne Davis of TV’s “Six)? She’s the atom on board, tugging at these two free electrons, setting off a competition that, well, maybe the screenwriter should have developed a bit more fully.

Because wasting an hour on poker, boozy reminiscences and — I kid you not — a drunken game of “Truth or Dare” — may establish that Coop’s tense, wrapped-too-tight and stressed, that John the surgeon is trying to set him off, and that Vivian is the object of desire and jealousy for them both. But we know that the moment they all climb aboard in the U.S. Virgin Islands where John bought the “Bella Would.”

Bad puns are standard issue when it comes to boat names. I’ve owned a “Tranquil? Aye-Sir!” and “Over-Easy” and “Sail La Vie” (already-named, bought used, and it’s bad luck to rename a boat, even if it’s a stupid name). “Bella Would” is a pun on the famed Marine Corp WWI Battle of Belleau Wood in France.

John was best friends with both Coop, and Coop’s fellow Marine and older brother Danny, who is dead. So, it’s a tribute?

Anyway, things get weird, motives get murky, and then Judd Nelson shows up for a little third-act melodrama on the high seas.

“Dead Water” is all about the gin-clear Caribbean, although the picture is depressingly cabin-bound for most scenes.

There’s a smattering of decent tough-guy banter.

“You can eat your words, or you can eat this bar.”

“What are you, just a one-bullet Marine?”

And there’s amusingly clumsy foreshadowing in a few other exchanges.

“You ready for a weekend that’s going to change your life?”

“It’s not going to be a ‘three hour tour,’ is it?”

The characters have a somewhat psychotic idea of what constitutes “no harm, no foul.” Pranks have a lethal edge. Violence hangs in the air, although we can’t for a second think the surgeon would be stupid enough to test himself against a Marine.

But I brought up the boat size difference between “Dead Water” and “Knife in the Water” for a reason. It may make more sense, realistically, to separate characters for private conversations, seaway sex and scheming at sea. Nobody really knows what the other people are doing, what they’re capable of.

But the movie wastes most of its run time giving us tours of the boat, Zodiac (dinghy) rides and frittering away the tension that’s supposed to rise and rise with these three trapped in close quarters.

No wonder they needed Nelson. It’s just that his very presence — spot-on as his performance may be — is a cop out, an admission of defeat.

“Dead Water” has all it needed to create suspense and grim, up-close-and-personal conflict. Why throw him in there for the third act?

Because the movie’s comatose until he shows up. Not that the cast is bad, but the characters are blandly sketched-in, perfunctory “types” in a claustrophobic setting that promises us a better movie than director Chris Helton delivers.

Still, if you’re boat shopping, at least it’s better than the online videos at the boat builder’s website. “Dead Water” still sinks more than it swims.

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

Cast: Casper van Dien, Brianne Davis, Griff Hurst and Judd Nelson

Credits: Directed by Chris Helton, script by Jason Usry. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:32

There’s a nasty musical joke that runs through “The Mountain,” Rick Alverson’s morose tale of The Last Lobotomy Doctor and his newly-hired photographer, driver and wingman.

Andy, played by Tye Sheridan with a single facial expression, from start to finish, grew up in the home of a German-born skating coach (Udo Kier) who liked nothing better than to drink and watch “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall” on the television.

Como’s music is the joke. It turns up again, here and there, within Andy’s world in Alverson’s deflating psychological odyssey. Because if there’s a musical allegory for the childlike, catatonic state Dr. Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum) leaves his patients/victims in, it would have to be the easy listening sounds of Como crooning “Home on the Range.”

“The Mountain” is Alverson’s most accessible film, and if you know “The Comedy” and “Entertainment,” you realize how little that statement says. He’s an obscurant writer-director who concocts discomforting movies of arty pretense and acting intensity.

By those standards, “Mountain” is practically a road comedy. Because that’s where it finds its life, on the road.

Andy runs the Zamboni and sharpens skates at the rink where his father works in upstate New York. That ends with his father’s death.

Andy is haunted by memories of his mother, unsent letters to her, visions of how she might be now. She’s in a mental institution, which in those less enlightened days (the early 1950s) was labeled an insane asylum. There were lots of them, even back then.

Andy finds this out when he has an estate sale, trying to get rid of his father’s things. The tall, white-haired fellow who buys Dad’s old pipe tells him, “I knew your dad. I’m Dr. Fiennes. You can call me Wallace. Or Wally. That’s what the girls call me.”

The perfect Jeff Goldblum line is followed by the kicker, delivered in that halting, revealing cadence that is Goldblum’s trademark.

“I was one of your mother’s…physicians.”

That’s all Dr. Fiennes will say about the mother. No, he no longer works “there,” and can’t “get you access to her…But I’m sure she’s…comfortable…there.”

He makes a proposal. He could use an assistant, “somebody to give me a hand with stuff. Take photos.”

He talks Andy through using the then-new Polaroid Land Camera.

Dr. Fiennes, “Wally,” travels pre-Interstate America, stopping into mental hospitals, offering his services, looking to “help.”

Goldblum gives Fiennes a confidence that we frequently see shaken. He has the look of pained recognition, replaced on occasion by a kind of slack-jawed guilt.

He drinks and chases skirts after hours, although Silent Andy isn’t much of a wingman.

Alverson serves up a saga of quiet observation, austere white-walled hospitals and rarely-speaking staff. There’s a library level of silence in most of these places, perhaps a product of Dr. Fiennes’ work.

Lobotomies, basically severing connections in the brain with what amounts to an ice pick punched through the corner of the eye socket, were the psychological profession’s desperate solution to a helpless situation — increasingly crowded mental institutions where they weren’t helping many, and the need to calm, quiet and more easily control the population was paramount.

It’s just that Fiennes, no longer employed at any single institution, merely a freelancer, is practicing a dubious craft that common sense peers and administrators were starting to see as barbaric. The tide was changing on the procedure, something echoed in a not-quite-testy newspaper interview the good doctor gives at one point.

Fiennes knows this, has his own suspicions about what he is doing. And yet, he persists.

Chronically depressed Andy photographs patients after the procedure, sometimes before.

“Read the woman. She’s in distress. I’m going to help her. Now take a picture.”

He chats with them, asks a lot of questions. His instinct is to comfort them. But sometimes, they ask HIM questions, which he cannot answer.

“Why are they screaming? Does it work? Is it dangerous?”

He’s having weird dreams and visions. His conscience is eating at him. What might this road trip be doing to his fragile psyche?

Alverson serves up a lot of slow mo, freeze-frames and arresting angles, capturing Andy’s dreams, melding the disturbing with the familiar. What he’s most familiar with is skaters.

There’s a lovely but quiet and disquieting skating school tribute to their late teacher, a lot of random scenes of Dr. Fiennes flirting with ladies in restaurants, picking them up in bars, in between miles of wintry, wooded roads and an endless parade of hospitals and patients, almost all of whom are women — something borne out by the shocking statistics of the day.

I’ll watch anything with Goldblum in it, and “The Mountain” has its rewards, although no one should be fooled into thinking this is anything but disturbing. Sheridan’s joyless, blank-faced turn just underscores that.

And Alverson has a serious cinematic anti-climax problem. He cannot escape this morbid trap he’s driven us into. He finds grace notes, and eventually a conclusion. But that is preceded by 15 minutes of scenes that walk the movie backwards from where it’s taken us.

Those gripes aside, he’s still made a meditative movie about the fragile psyche, about the fumbling around the Best Minds in Science have been doing for well over a century when it comes to addressing mental illness and the guilt and denial that precede every failed “cure” in the minds of those struggling to implement it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, adult subject matter

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jeff Goldblum, Hannah Gross, Udo Kier, Margot Klein, Denis Levant

Credits: Directed by Rick Alverson, script by Rick Alverson, Dustin Guy Defa and Colm O’Leary. A Kino Lorber release.

A father tries to protect his son from the viral apocalypse, and social breakdown that follows.

Riveting trailer in the tradition of “The Road.”

This one earns limited release on Aug. 9.

A movie about the young, curious and already-inventive Leonardo Da Vinci? That’s not a bad idea for a work of children’s entertainment.

But “Leo Da Vinci: Mission Mona Lisa” is a seriously undemanding if harmless realization of that movie pitch. The Italian production, with dated CGI animation, a voice-actors-only cast, a few limp songs and not much in the line of jokes or clever sight gags, is probably more suitable for small screens. That way the animated details don’t matter, and the film’s other shortcomings can be ignored as the kids watch in the car, at the laundromat or airport — any place “waiting” is involved.

This Leo (veteran anime voice-actor Johnny Yong Bosch) is a teen tinkerer, barely old enough to drive. That shouldn’t be a problem as, you know, it’s the 15th century.

But Leo’s always saying, “That’s my new invention,” and one of them is a combination wind-up roadster, sail-paddle wheel boat and glider he calls “The Barrel.” So yes, he drives, recklessly. And those Medieval roads!

His pal Lorenzo (Bryce Papenbrook) is always teasing him about neighbor girl Lisa (Cherami Leigh). She’s a long way from “Mona Lisa,” but Leo’s a sucker for a girl in Renaissance yoga pants.

“You think I like Lisa? We’re just friends!”

We’re set up for a battle of intellects, because Lisa is “a know-it-all…she always thinks she’s right.”

But there’s no such empowerment in the script. She’s just his somewhat appreciative audience for The Barrel, his new diving suit, etc.

When her family’s farm burns, Leo resolves to help save Lisa from having to marry a foppish count to cover their debts. He’ll seek his fortune in Florence!

Only he falls for the old “shipwreck…treasure map” scam. He and Lisa, a tweenage pickpocket named Agnes (Faith Graham) and tween inventor Niccoló (Landen Beattie) are off to find it.

Lorenzo? He’s been kidnapped by pirates, who know a bit about Leo and his inventions. The lead pirate is fond of blue eye makeup. Must be Italian.

There’s a goofy rapped narration to a puppet show, pirates chanting in rhyme and a flippant electronic love ballad for Leo to sing through.

“When I am here with you, I am a fish inside a creek. And I don’t know how to speak. Maybe a mobile phone could help.” Or “you are far away, too far to run to you. Maybe a bicycle could help.”

Leo was WAY ahead of his time.

There’s a little education value here, as a character explains how eclipses happen. Leo takes on the role of myth-buster, briefly, debunking a feared ancient “monster.”

Mostly, though, “Mission Mona Lisa” is just a somewhat under-animated (flat, inexpressive faces, blandly animated water and fire, incompetently rendered beards and dolphins) kiddie time-killer with lame “jokes” and limp gags

“So was that fun or was that fun?”

“Listen, in ALL my years of pirating, I never got hit by… (lightning, which then strikes).”

Every promising idea is introduced and forgotten.For instance, Agnes is a street urchin who speaks of herself in the third person, especially when she wants to invite herself along on their adventure.

“Agnes is alone in the world. Agnes just wanted a story she could tell her friends. Agnes never had any friends.”

The “twist” even a ten year-old could see coming.

The cleverest visual touch is a cut-out stick puppet adventure tale rapped out as street entertainment. The “Leonardo” touches are a first crack at the “Mona Lisa” (of teen Lisa) and a pre-adult riff on his Vitruvian Man study.

Does all that add up to a movie? Not for anybody over oh, six.

It’s not awful, and as I said, the conceit is a good building block for a film. Just not this one.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gunplay, a smooch

Cast: The voices of Johnny Yong Bosch, Cherami Leigh, Bryce Papenbrook

Credits: Directed by Sergio Manfio, script by Anna Manfio, Francesco Manfio, Sergio Manfio and Davide Stefanato. An Ammo Animation release.

Running time: 1:25

Last week, it was Netflix slowing its “growth” in subscribers as NBC and others yanked hit shows off the streaming service. Direct TV Tuesday said that it lost 168,000 subscribers.

Now HBO reports “lower domestic linear subscribers” for its second quarter, “partially offset by higher digital and international growth.”

Add that to the slack box office this year and the Hollywood entertainment content delivery business is looking pretty grim. Audience splintering into a la carte atoms? Movies too narrow in appeal are dominating release slates? “Must binge/stream TV” lacking fresh titles to lure us in?

Or are broke people bailing out of costly entertainment options?

https://t.co/2bCjNHtwiu https://t.co/lObzwHFOc3 https://twitter.com/THR/status/1153986211226234880?s=17

It’s a Sino-Russian or Russo-Chinese action fantasy with a Russian director, two aged stars and a long, unweildy title — “The Mystery of he Dragon Seal: Journey to China.” Filmed and finished two years ago, so you know it’s fresh. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jackie-chan-arnold-schwarzenegger-film-gets-china-russia-release-1226561