Movie Nation

“The Fanatic” deals a glancing blow to the golden age of the Fan Boy via a cautionary tale that smacks of the way society used to look at that sort of obsessive, socially awkward cultural cliche that’s too into comic books, GI Joe, Pokemon cards and anything else that most adults leave behind in childhood.

Except, of course, for sports fanatics, who still get a pass.

It’s a dissonant and clumsy if eerily accurate portrayal of a social “type” that really exists, even if its most ardent members are decades younger than John Travolta, who has the title role here.

Travolta is Moose, an Angelino “on the spectrum” who spends his meager savings on anything Hollywood collectible. He’s as into horror and sci-fi as any “Ain’t It Cool News” junkie. And being in Hollywood, he’s close enough to many of those he admires to collect autographs, get this or that memento signed.

Memorabilia store manager Aaron (Josh Richman) sells to him and indulges him his eccentricities. Hey, clientele like Moose come with the territory.

“I can’t talk too long. I gotta pooh.”

Antic, childish, tactless, pleading, Moose travels the city by scooter, dresses in the uniform of his tribe — Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts — and slaps his head in frustration at any interruption in his manic pursuit of the trophies of his obsession — celebrity interaction, and the proof (selfies, autographs) of it.

Moose just HAS to have the very jacket that one of his idols, Hunter Dunbar, wore in “Space Vampires.” If only he can get it signed!

But $300 just gets him disappointment, as he catches Dunbar (Devon Sawa of “Final Destination,” nasty and buff) at a signing, but misses his chance.

But since another person who indulges Moose is Leah (“DeGrassi High” alumna Ana Golja), a celeb journalist of the video stalkerazzi TMZ school, and our story’s narrator. Thanks to her, Moose has a second shot at Dunbar, at a party.

“Some sort of deaf-mute pervert,” Dunbar mutters once. “Some sort of freak autograph hound that won’t leave me alone,” he says on second meeting.

Finagling a third shot at the elusive, not-quite-a-has-been Dunar is what sends the movie star over the edge.

“How about I sign your face with my f—–g fist?”

And that’s when Moose crosses that line that every celebrity fears any given stranger could cross — violence.

“I am NOT a stalker, I AM A FAN!”

What interested Travolta and more to the point, Limp Bizkit rocker turned co-writer and director Fred Durst, is the ugly edge of the symbiotic relationship between fans and the objects of their adoration.

To the stars, having to deal with “your freaky little hobby” comes with the territory, that whole “Without you, I’m nothing” thing.

To the pursuers, a “Please take more time to show your fans how much you care about them” is punctuated with “celebutard” when they don’t get what they want.

Travolta is saddled with a character speaking dated but, in his case, almost age-appropriate slang  — “Oh oh, this is really RAD.”

Moose is an object of pity and mockery, visiting the open bar at the party and  expecting a “strawberry milkshake, with real ice cream.” 

So much of this ground has been covered in movies such as “The King of Comedy” and every picture named “The Fan” or words to that effect that “The Fanatic” narrows into a simple character study by Travolta. That’s not enough, and what’s here is as quaint and dated as many of the words that come out of Moose’s mouth.

Moose talks too loud, misses every social signal and has been obsessed like this since childhood (seen in flashbacks). He makes pocket money as a British bobby (cop) street performer.

Lot of demand for that on Hollywood Boulevard (Actually, Birmingham, Alabama, a pretty good stand-in). Apparently.

He has rivals who out-hustle him in hustling the tourists, but despises them because, “You don’t respect the Boulevard and you don’t respect the fans!”

“The Fanatic” veers between corny and creepy, and its third act surprises only up the “ick” factor. Sawa makes his irritable actor a little more than a “type,” but not much more.

It all plays Old Hollywood dated, with a near child, Leah, playing the jaded Tinseltown “Sunset Boulevard” narrator.

“They say you should never meet your heroes. But meeting them is not the problem. It’s when you get too close.”

There’s so much that seems off here that running through a mental list of “fixes” gets exhausting. Should “The Fanatic” have ever gotten off the ground? It lurches along, over-reaches for themes and never quite gets a handle on the promising ones.

I could see Jackie Earle Haley as Moose, 25 years ago. He’s more the “type,” and can be fearlessly nasty. Travolta’s edge in most villain roles always feels like a vamp. To that point, “The Fanatic” feels kind of gutless in the ways it backs into its violence, and backs into the sadism that comes with it.

But hell, it took DeNiro two shots at this sort of nut to find the right tone and edge.

Moose feels like an accurate portrait. He is not violent by nature, just loud, over-excitable and monomaniacal. More to the point, he’s simply not that interesting, more a cultural cliche at this point than anything else.

The only viewers he’s guaranteed to make cringe are the fanboys he’s sending up.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, and language throughout

Cast: John Travolta, Devon Sawa, Ana Golja

Credits: Directed by Fred Durst, script by Dave Bekerman, Fred Durst. A Quiver Distribution release.

Running time: 1:29

“Bittersweet” could be the ultimate single-word “spoiler alert” for any screen romance, aside from the fact that it’s almost a given in the genre.

That’s true even in same-sex romances, as “The Blonde One” reminds us.

It’s an Argentine tale of smoldering looks and sexual discovery, not quite of the more confining and worn out “coming out” genre, but still a story of those first smoldering looks, “first contact” and all that comes after that.

Juan (Alfonso Barón) likes his girlfriend, likes his beer, loves watching futbol with his mates in his roomy two story flat in suburban Buenos Aires.

And he’s got a new roommate, a guy from down at the furniture building shop. It’s Gabriel, Juan tells his burly pal Leandro (Charly Velasco).

“Gabriel?” Leandro asks, in Spanish with English subtitles. “Which one?”

“Un rubio,” Juan says. “The blonde one.”

Gabo (Gaston Re) is an introvert, a bookish sort keeping to himself as he reads Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” He’s got a little girl in second grade in a nearby town,  being raised by his doting mother.

The roommates and co-workers have an awkward rapport. There’s lots of silence in Juan’s place when they’re alone. He may give his roomie his most fetching grin, but he’s not even getting mixed signals from Gabo. No signals at all is more like it.

Neither grimaces when pals from work show up to watch soccer. Dopey, tactless Leandro is bad enough, talking over the action, yammering on about women when they’re watching a movie.

Older Mario (Fabio Zurita) hasn’t quite joined the 21st century. It’s “Better my son is a homosexual than my daughter a lesbian,” and other such slurs fill his anecdotes. “Weak fathers bring up queer sons.” The guy can’t keep his homophobia to himself.

And why should he? None of their circle of friends seem to suspect a thing of Juan and Gabo.

It’s just that Juan likes to parade around the place nude after sexing up his girlfriend, and Gabo steals a glimpse. And Juan notices Gabo stealing those glimpses.

That sets our affair in motion, a slow-starting, torrid-turning thing that goes the way such things go, through the heat of lots of sex all the way to the other end of the line.

There’s little that’s novel here, a few words of just what the limits they might put on what they have going on might be, here in the Capital of Latin Machismo.

I like the way writer-director Marco Berger (“Plan B,” “Taekwondo”) parks the two standoffish roomies in the frame, especially on the trams that take them home from work, or out to the bars. They’re so close their faces overlap, underlining that queer cinema cliche of a couple that doesn’t just start to look like each other, they’re attracted to somebody looks a bit like them, who has the same taste in facial hair and T-shirts.

The arguments are over the usual things — “Don’t make me explain myself like you’re my girlfriend!”

There’s little that’s light here, but I was still reminded of the early films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began his career in the heady years after the repression of the Franco regime.

Like Almodóvar, Berger shows us lots of sex in a way that suggests the newly liberated. “I do it because I CAN.” If “The Blonde One” plays a trifle long, that could be due to the half dozen or so sex scenes, growing more explicit as the picture progresses. 

They’re still repetitive even if you can understand why they’re here. They give the film a dated feel, covering ground we’ve seen covered too many times before.

The leads play everything close to the vest. There’s nothing flamboyant in their demeanor, just the odd moment when each registers a hint of hurt at something the other just said or did.

Still, the story’s minor twists don’t mask the feeling that we’ve seen this romance before, many times. Sometimes straight, sometimes gay, but generally in English.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking, alcohol use

Cast: Gaston Re, Alfonso Barón, Charly Velasco, Fabio Zurita, Malena Irusta

Credits: Written and directed by Marco Berger. A TLA release.

Running time: 1:51

You should be.

Proceeds benefit the ERA Coalition.

#Oscarmom Patricia Arquette is rocking one and pushing everybody else to shirt up.

The Emmy goes to…the future is female…and the torch has been passed.

Can you wear it as well as #Oscarmom? Maybe after a few pushups…

Here’s your link love- https://t.co/2cCOvUORcA https://twitter.com/PattyArquette/status/1166134742992818176?s=17

Natalie Portman’s the astronaut who experiences something akin to what the late, great Douglas Adams called “The Total Perspective Vortex.”

She’s been to space, seen how insignificant she and her corner of the world is within it, and is desperate to get back out there.

Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Nick Offerman, a very cool cast and that damned Beatles tune quoted on the soundtrack. “Lucy in the Sky” has it all, and maybe — after Toronto — a hint of Oscar buzz.

But we shall see.

Oct. 4 release.

Science fiction doesn’t have to be pricey to put up on screen. There have been plenty of low-budget dazzlers — “Prime” in the U.S. (Utah, I think),  “Alien Raiders,” “Timecrimes” from Spain leap to mind.

All it took to make “Empathy, Inc.” was a couple of dentist’s chairs, helmets with a lot of wires attached, some outdated computer (code typing) graphics and a syringe.

It’s a black and white sci-fi chiller that doesn’t quite come off, doesn’t have nearly the sense of discovery or surprise you’d hope for in a story of the Next Big Thing in virtual reality (VR). But the effects, which include a black construction paper “mask” for the lens (shrinking the frame into unsettling DIY “virtual” vision), give it the grounding in reality that all such movies require from the get-go.

We catch up with Joel (Zack Robidas) just as his Silicon Valley start-up crashes. The scandal sends him and actress wife Jessica (Kathy Searle) “back East” to live with her overbearing parents (Charmaine Reedy, Fenton Lawless).

Fleeing to a local bar is where he runs into old acquaintance and corporate fundraiser Nicoulas Veezy (Eric Berryman, sharp). Joel hasn’t forgotten the guy’s nickname, “Sleazy Veezy.” But he’s desperate. And Nicoulas has a pitch and a business card — “Empathy, Inc.”

A VR whiz he knows has dreamed up this “next step” tech that will allow “high end clientele to learn what it feels like to be underprivileged,” to gain “perspective.”

Rich people can “Walk a mile in the shoes of the less fortunate” and feel better about whatever they fret over in their own lives.

Okaaaaay.

Joel meets scientist Lester (Jay Klaitz, a creepier Dan Fogler) and gets a trial run, after first hearing “The Rules” (every horror or sci-fi film like this has them).

“Stay in the environment you wake up in. Don’t open any doors…Avoid mirrors at all costs!”

Side effects can include delusions and flashbacks.

Joel sits in a dentist’s chair, dons a helmet, gets an injection and wakes up in the (frame-masked) world of an impoverished old man. Dazzled, he talks his in-laws into investing.

But his second “trip” is even more disturbing. And things happened that he doesn’t remember. He starts to suspect that Sleazy Veezy and ill-tempered Lester aren’t telling him the truth.

Director Yedidya Gorsetman, working from a script by Mark Leidner, drops the masked lens conceit for Joel’s later “trips,” shedding the limitations of that First Person POV, but loses what’s unnerving about the process (your view and understanding of that view is limited and more alarming because of that).

We also shed the whole “avoid MIRRORS” thing too quickly for comfort.

That said, the screenplay sets up an intriguing journey to send its anti-hero on. Joel lacks the very thing that’s on that business card. He sees himself one way, and is puzzled when others say that he, or his avatar, is going out in the world and ill-using others.

Because Joel has been doing that in his business dealings for years.

The central question of the Empathy, Inc. pitch is “If you could be someone else, without consequences, what would you do?”

“Empathy, Inc.” (in limited release, Sept. 13) has the compactness of a Poe short story or a “Twilight Zone” parable.

But its third act surprises aren’t surprising at all. Suspense is created when the audience is a step ahead of the heroine/hero, not five steps ahead.

The violence that comes seems a contrivance. Desperate people have several hurdles to clear before they reach that “I’m going to KILL you” step, which the film deprives us of.

And in all honesty, the performances rarely rise to the occasion, although I bought into one or two moments of rage and a nicely played scene with pathos built into it.

Not a lot of money was risked on this one, which makes it easier to write off as “Nice try. Take another shot.” But I sincerely hope they do.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Zack Robidas, Kathy Searle, Jay Klaitz

Credits: Directed by Yedidya Gorsetman, script by Mark Leidner. A Dark Star Pictures release.

Running time: 1:35

Charlie Hunnam, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Billy Bob, Juliette Lewis, and a lot of fantastic visualizations of an addict’s halucinations drive this drama.

Billy Bob stands out in the trailer, because that’s what he’s good at.

And a touch of “A Walk to Remember.”

As I write this, there are half a dozen reviews of “Overcomer” posted on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, even fewer on Metacritic.

And I get it. Whatever you say about the films in terms of writing, directing, acting and just “quality,” people take a bad review of a faith-based film as an attack on their faith, an affront. Who needs the “You just don’t get it” or “I’ll pray for you” complaint mail?

I’ve always found the movies by Georgia’s preacher/filmmaker Kendrick brothers harmless tear-jerkers, politically-muted proselytizing which — considering the state of Southern Baptists these days — is in itself a blessing.

And the films have an audience, so I’ve tried to catch every one of their releases after missing their debut feature (“Flywheel”) — the sports drama “Facing the Giants,” “Fireproof,” “Courageous,” and “War Room.”

Approach them as genre features, take notes on the script, the performances, the caliber of actors they’re able to enlist. Listen for more sophisticated dialogue, look for more polished direction, search for signs they’re growing as filmmakers.

It’s the same tack I took, ages ago, with Cheech & Chong movies, with Chuck Norris or Tyler Perry’s careers. Like those other examples, these aren’t film school alumni, they’re two of the pastors at Albany, Georgia’s Sherwood Baptist Church. Are they learning their craft, moving beyond Kendrick Brothers and “Christian conservative” branding and realizing there’s more to a movie than messaging?

The films have never been less than competent. The stories have something of an arc, obstacles for the heroes/heroines to overcome. Scenes are pieced together with coherence and order, and music grows in importance with every release.

But “Overcomer” is, I think, their worst movie. And these guys once hired Kirk Cameron.

It’s about what one must “overcome” in life to achieve your goals, and what you overcome when you find your way to Jesus.

An orphaned 15 year-old Hannah (Aryn Wright-Thompson) who broods, keeps to herself and steals, is new to Brookshire Christian School in Franklin.

It’s a mill town that loses its mill, gutting the school’s enrollment and devastating Coach John Harrison’s (Alex Kendrick) top tier basketball team as parents leave town for jobs elsewhere.

Nowhere is it mentioned that the school’s tuition might be a luxury newly-unemployed folks cannot afford.

Coach Harrison has to double up, take on another sport. Cross country it is. Principal Brooks (Priscilla C. Shirer) must have seen “McFarland, U.S.A.” I dare say the Kendricks did.

Hannah loves to run, much to Coach’s chagrin.

“I had one girl show up,” he tells his wife (Shari Rigby). “And she’s got asthma.”

One more thing for Hannah to overcome.

Oh, and Coach stumbles into her blind, dying dad in the hospital while on a church visit to the sick. Hannah thinks her Dad (Cameron Arnett) is dead. That’s what the grandma who raised her always said. Would she like to see him, see that he’s Saved?

OK, that’s two more things to overcome.

This movie, more than earlier Kendrick pictures, seems to exist in a bubble where kids still say “Yes sir” and “No sir,” where marital conflicts are contrived and never as big a deal as the characters seem to think and are resolved with “We need to pray,” where sibling rivalry doesn’t exist.

“Ethan’s a good big brother.”

Insipid is the word for that, all of it.

The drama has a solid grounding in reality, but the jokes play like watered-down lemonade, from Coach/Dad who’s delusional about his physical condition to the flamboyant drama teacher who uses Coach and the cafeteria lady to judge dramatic presentations.

Showing how tolerant we are? Not a bad idea, just shoehorned in too obviously to work.

“Why would ANYbody do this?” is a running gag about running cross-country, 5K races that test lungs and your ability to hold your lunch, if you’re not in shape.

The acting is stiff and static — player after player standing stock-still, too-often blank-faced, delivering speeches, too many of which go on past their payoff.

The leads are so flat and bland that the odd moment of tears or fire from supporting players is almost rattling. Not powerful, exactly. Just rattling.

Scenes reach whatever climax they have in them, and go on and on.

The direction is pedestrian. The Kendricks’ scripts need brutal, blunt work-shopping and their footage needs heartless cutting.

There’s not a “name” in the cast. Every time I see Alex on screen, I think of the legal joke about a defendant who represents himself. If the parts were any good, wouldn’t somebody else want to play them? Sure, it saves money. But if you’re not exercising vanity, why wouldn’t you let pride take precedence? Wouldn’t you want a better actor saying your lines?

They must like their independence. Like Spike Lee in his years in the wilderness, they don’t want their writing, blocking, acting and directing criticized by people who have been around the movie block a few times.

It’s no more hateful than any other film in their canon. But there’s just nothing here.

Even as comfort food for true believers, “Overcomer” cannot overcome its myriad shortcomings.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements

Cast: Alex Kendrick, Aryn Wright-Thompson, Shari Rigby, Priscilla C. Shirer

Credits: Directed by Alex Kendrick, script by Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick. An Affirm Films release.

Running time: 1:59

There isn’t much to “Before You Know It,” but where there is I have to say I absolutely adored.

It’s a sisters comedy, one of those “walking and talking New York” tales of mismatched siblings, dysfunctional parents, and the frothy, just a tad bitchy world of “the-A-tuh” actors and the soaps. And there are just enough delights scattered throughout — in the situations, the snappy banter, the performances and the milieu — to put it over.

Co-writers Jen Tullock and Hannah Pearl Utt co-star as Jackie and Rachel, daughters of a mercurial, domineering playwright, Mel Gurner, given a mood-swinging, song-singing twinkle by Mandy Patinkin.

The sisters grew up with the “unconfirmed” rumor that their mother was an actress. She died when they were little. Dad raised them in the Village’s Gurner Family Theatre, where they helped him put on the decades of flops he’s written since his acting peak (the early ’70s) passed.

Jackie (Tullock) has a fizzy, dizzy, impulsive side, just like her dad. An actress, she’s raised a daughter she incongruously named Dodge (Oona Yaffe) in that same, roomy basement flat underneath the theater that she’s shared with Dad and Rachel for 30 years.

Rachel? “Imagination’s not really Rachel’s thing,” her sister cracks. “Rachel’s actually more of a logic guy.”

That’s a little mean. Rachel is the stage manager of the theater, which earns most of its money by hosting support group meetings. She’s producing Dad’s latest play, “The Way I See It,” “which could actually BE something.” She’s editing him.

“It’s my play,” he sniffs. “It’s my play and I should be able to do what I want with it, right? Inserting yourself in the process does not make you a playwright!”

“I just need you to have a life so that I can finally have one,” Rachel confesses. It’s a pity play she’s producing. She’s a thirtysomething New York lesbian who can’t manage a relationship, and the trap of Life with Father…and sister and sister’s kid is what she blames for all that.

Jackie’s never had a role-model mother to help her with Dodge. Mom would have talked her out of the stupid name, for starters. And now she’s taking the kid to her first therapist (Alec Baldwin), one of those “just here to listen” guys she’s met at a wine tasting. If he wasn’t just listening, he’d ask Dodge what’s going on with making herself look like a “Third Rock” era age-12 ringer for young Joseph Gordon Levitt.

And then Dad has his last death scene.

You see as many movies I have, what you find yourself hoping for is the odd “perfect moment,” something with a dash of “Welp, never seen THAT before.” The first one here is when Dad has to give a speech to an off-Broadway theater’s fellowship committee, the people who are offering a “real” theater and cash to get his play produced.

Patinkin’s Max bursts into nonsensical song when asked to make a speech, and ends with a raspberry when that’s not enough — self-destructive to a fault.

Hannah Pearl Utt and Jen Tullock appear in Before You Know It by Hannah Pearl Utt, an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition an at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Anna Kooris All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

The second perfect composed, staged and acted scene comes in the office of the daffy lawyer (Ben Becher, killing it) where the sisters read Dad’s will. Rachel figures out that their mother isn’t dead in a pregnant pause, staring at a computer screen, looking at a Googled photos and bio of the name on the deed of the Gurner Family Theatre and asking, “Why is a soap actress…listed as co-owner…of…our…building?”

Jackie plays catch-up, and eventually gets there, too. And “the impulsive one” immediately sets out to meet the elusive Sherrell Gearhardt, forcing Rachel to chase after her as she dashes for the “Soap City” (Manhattan TV production center) studio where Gearhardt has been on TV for the past 30 years.

“I’d say we could just flirt our way in. But you decided to dress like a Menonite caterer today.”

Judith Light plays Gearhardt, who has some of Jackie’s grasping ditziness and a touch of Rachel’s smarts and kindness. They all “meet cute,” but the daughters withhold big chunks of their story from her out of wariness.

Meanwhile, Jackie and Rachel have lost track of Dodge, who falls into the care of their just-hired accountant (Mike Colter, TV’s “Luke Cage,” always good). And that’s where Dodge, who lacks real-world role models, falls in with the accountant’s slightly-older daughter, Olivia.

Here’s the third perfect moment of “Before You Know It.” The girls, barely getting along, bond over something Olivia (Arica Himmel, bubbling over with personality) has experience with that Dodge doesn’t. A big-screen “How to use a tampon” lesson is the very definition of “Welp, never seen THAT before.”

The play within a play, viewed through a single scene rehearsed, rewritten and cast throughout the film, is “Bad Theatre” without being funny. The “Soap Dish/Tootsie” soap opera recreations are more amateurish than the real thing, and dated-feeling to boot. Have our co-stars/co-writers (Utt also directed) never watched a soap in this millennium?

But the relationships here all impress and defy expectations. The screenplay finds new twists to timeworn actor’s life cliches, and Tullock and Utt discover new wrinkles to the “stunted emotional growth” that dysfunctional families tend to produce in such movies.

There isn’t a bad performance in this, and sweet-talking Tim Daly into a bit part as a soap co-star, Baldwin into a two scene cameo and the famously persnickety Patinkin into taking on their father figure and letting it all hang out, are just bonuses.

Sitcom veteran Light brings a fragile majesty to Sherrell, stuck in the security of a TV show where the writing was never great, but has become more hackneyed with every passing decade.

Yaffe lends real-world drollery to Dodge, who never has a line too clever for a 12 year-old to think up and say. Her arrested development mom is self-involved, forgetful, loves her wine too much and is late for everything.

“I’m pretty sure she can’t tell time.”

And as the sisters, Utt and Tullock are walking, talking, weeping and kvetching endorsements for that age-old actor’s maxim, “If you’re not offered good parts, WRITE one for yourself.”

Which they did, and if there’s any justice, “Before You Know It,” they’ll get to write, produce and star-in another.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, alcohol consumption

Cast: Judith Light, Jen Tullock, Hannah Pearl Utt, Mandy Patinkin, Alec Baldwin,Peter Jacobson, Tim Daly

Credits: Directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, script by Jen Tullock and  Hannah Pearl Utt. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:39