Movie Nation

Once more, dear friends, once more, cast and crew, once more — ACCOUNTANTS — let us return to “Jumanji” for a little more Kevin Hart/Dwayne Johnson cold hard buddy-teen movie cash.

North American audiences an be forgiven for scanning past this title on Netflix, “Revenge of the Pontianak,” and wondering if the first half of is missing.

Shouldn’t it be “Aztek II: Revenge of the Pontiac?”

No, nothing to do with the former GM home of the Bonneville, the G8 and the GTO. This is a Malaysian vampire tale (in Malay, with English subtitles), a soapy horror melodrama that’s very similar to Hollywood’s “Ghost Story” of some decades past.

It’s pretty tame, by Western horror standards. But it plays by the rules, it’s in an exotic setting and it’s a period piece — colorful costumes from Malaysia’s swinging ’60s clothe the cast, all characters trapped in a sylan village in the mountainous suburbs.

It’s 1965, and everybody’s gathered to celebrate the wedding of Siti (Shenty Felizaina) and Khalid (Remy Ishak).

He has a little boy from an earlier relationship, but she’s pretty and the locals seem to take to her. But check out the look on Khalid’s face when his best man Rais (Tony Eusoff) serenades the newlyweds with a song that seems to mean something to Khalid, and maybe to Rais.

And the dirty look he casts towards the stage presages what happens later. Rais has a car accident, gets out to check the damage, and is gutted by something that also attacks his date.

When new bride Siti sees Rais next, his bled-out corpse is hanging from a very tall tree overlooking their classy village bungalow on stilts. Of course she screams.

But the locals instantly wonder what curse Siti has brought upon them. The local imam (Namron) who has shaman qualities (he touches people and sees montages of what’s happened to them) shares a prophecy, and a warning.

“Darkness has descended upon this village!” he intones. “CLEAN YOUR HOUSE!”

He’s not just lecturing Siti, who has all this blood on the porch. It’s the whole village that must “clean.” And as seizures and sickness start striking locals, they amp up the superstition and point their fingers at the outsider, this “demon woman.”

But we, being sophisticated horror viewers, know better. That look Khalid and Rais shared had meaning.

And others know their secret.

The frights are fairly routine, up until the finale, which has blood and fury and meaning and comeuppance.

I liked the look and the tone of Glen Goei and Gavin Yap’s picture, the foliage of the rainforest framing the world they’re showing up, beautiful people in exotic clothing dealing with problems any vampire film fan (or “Ghost Story” fan) will recognize.

A long flashback gives away the mystery, which we’ve already guessed if we read the opening credit, that a “Pontianak” is a woman who dies in childbirth but who isn’t given a proper funeral. A “Pontianak” she is called.

And who is bringing a child into this marriage?

It’s all a trifle murky and underscripted (for foreign, not Malaysian audiences) to follow, but if you watch a lot of horror, you’ve seen worse. The acting is solid all up and down the line with Namron, as the seer or whatever his real title is (he dresses like a Malaysian Imam, and the Muslim call to prayer is heard in one scene), the stand out.

It’s not a hidden gem or anything like that, just another culture’s take on plot points and themes Hollywood has beaten into the ground. Just interesting enough to wish all involved “Better luck next film.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations

Cast: Nur Fazura, Remy Ishak, Hisyam Hamid, Shenty Felizaina, Tony Eusoff and Namron.

Credits: Written and directed by Glen Goei, Gavin Yap.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

You can see why Edward Norton held onto the rights to make “Motherless Brooklyn” for years and years before he finally got his chance to film it. It’s his shot at making a “Chinatown,” a film noir about the brute force that created New York the way forces beyond Jake Gittes’ control shaped modern Los Angeles.

And Norton, who made characters with tics and afflictions, or who were affecting afflictions, a mainstay of his early repertoire, would play a detective with Tourette’s.

But one can appreciate the ambition, the scope the actor was going for, while acknowledging the material isn’t “Chinatown” and the actor/director’s reach exceeds his grasp when it comes to realizing it.

In mid-50s New York, Lionel (Norton) doesn’t call his tendency to blurt out sounds, words, phrases and profanity Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s “like having glass in your head,” he narrates, the implication being that the glass is broken and keeping your thoughts to yourself cuts and hurts too much to manage it.

Being asked “How’d she take it?” might get a “Tim-buck-TAKE it” response, and a lot more blurted words to boot.

He’s obsessive compulsive, too, worrying a sweater thread until he ruins it, opening and closing doors, repeatedly patting someone on the shoulder after initially making that gesture out of compassion.

And for the love of God don’t ask him to light your cigarette.

Lionel works in a small private eye agency that doubles as a car service. He lives with a cat his tics and blurts scare, and copes with gum (at work) or marijuana (to sleep), anything to occupy or dull his mind.

And aside from his off-putting condition, which everybody he meets excuses with “That’s OK” (New York is very tolerant, in this way, in the movie), Lionel’s got a fine mind. It’s why Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) employs him. Lionel, nicknamed “Freak Show” by his colleagues (Dallas Roberts and Bobby Cannavalle and Willis), has one of those total recall/video-rewind memories that only appear in the movies.

In 1954, Frank relies on Lionel to listen to a meeting where he’s left a phone off the hook so that Lionel can “record” it, at least in his mind.

And that’s important, because this meeting, a bit of finagling and working the angles with mobsters and connected “types,” is what gets Frank killed.

We know what that means in private eye tales (Jonathan Lethem wrote the novel this is based on). You solve the case “cuz he’d have done it for us.” Ignore the not-grieving-enough widow (Leslie Mann, the perfect blonde shrew), and figure out why Frank was following this “colored girl,” who turns out to work for a housing agency and advocacy group for the working poor.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is Laura, and even she doesn’t know how she fits into whatever’s really going on here. Like her boss (Cherry Jones), she knows “What happens to poor people in this city wasn’t news yesterday and it won’t be news tomorrow.”

There’s an all-powerful city planner with his fingers in various “authorities” and commissions that made things go in the days when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. He’s plainly based on the megalomaniacal “visionary” Robert Moses, who steamrolled people and neighborhoods reshaping the city in that era, and he’s played by the menacing and mesmerizing Alec Baldwin.

Michael Kenneth Williams plays a scarred, scary jazz man with a sweet side, based on Miles Davis.

And Willem Dafoe is Mr. Exposition, the gadfly who knows how “things get done in this city,” the wild-eyed one who fills Lionel in on the sorts of stuff that’s about to happen that the dead Frank might have been wise to, which is how he became Dead Frank.

Norton makes the most out of his classic gumshoe with a tic, and plays those blurted insults, confessions or profanities for laughs. It’s not the most sensitive portrayal, but he never lets Lionel’s condition render him less than competent. And nobody under-estimates him because of it.

It’s a movie that lingers over its clues, and lets Lionel’s total recall reset them and slowly and deliberately figure this puzzle out.

That “slowly” business is a hindrance, because the picture follows the noir “Chinatown” template to a fault. That makes it predictable. That makes it play SLOW.

Lionel gets beaten up, repeatedly. Bad guys are always getting the drop on him. But even with Frank dead, they let Lionel live.

Scenes that don’t drive the action dress up the city in its post war grime and slums. The narration is borderline incessant, the sax-flavored jazz score de rigeur.

And the payoff seems almost quaint as it reaches for “Chinatown” shock value and scandal.

The upshot of all this, two hours and 24 minutes of vintage car chases, fire escape chases, punch-outs and puzzling over clues? “It’s NOT ‘Chinatown,’ Jake.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including some sexual references, brief drug use, and violence

Cast: Edward Norton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Written and directed by Edward Norton, based on the Jonathan Lethem novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:24

The really bad ones you stare at, slack-jacked, like a grisly road accident that so distracts you it’s a wonder you don’t wind up in the ditch yourself.

“Eminence Hill” is like that, a Western so ugly, inept and endless that you marvel at the number of people who had to sign off on thinking, “This could be pretty good,” and “That fellow who made ‘Redemption?’ He knows what he’s doing.”

The whole picture can be summed up in a bit of torture, where a hammer is used to break a gunfighter’s hand. Knowing where to put the camera so that the hammer-swinger can take a full whack, and where to edit so that we believe a hand has just been crushed, is first year film school stuff.

Robert Conway slept late that day. Apparently.

It’s a meandering sagebrush saga that begins with a quartet of rogues hunting down the jury that hang the brother of the gang’s leader (Clint James). He talks a farmer’s ear off before he guns him and his wife down as he was the last juror.

Their daughter (Anna Harr)? “Unspoiled” and thus, sellable to “the savages.”

A lawman (Owen Conway, sibling to Robert, co-writer of the script) might look like a city dandy, but he’s awfully handy with a gun, and notorious. He takes a horse thief (Charlie Motley) out of jail to track down the outlaws.

And the outlaws? After run ins with Apaches and a snake oil salesmen, they stumble into the hidden town of the film’s title, a cult that dresses like Quakers and tortures like the Marquis de Sade.

Grizzled veterans of the screen Barry Corbin, in Westerns from “Lonesome Dove” to “No Country for Old Men,” and Lance Henriksen, whose first screen credit was the Western “Emperor of the North” back in the ’70s (better known for “Alien 3″”and “The Quick and the Dead”), are top billed. But that’s just to get our interest up and lend legitimacy, as they aren’t the stars and are blameless.

Dominique Swain shows where you end up when you start your career making a sordid “Lolita” for Adrian Lyne. Nude scenes pushing 40, out in the Arizona desert in the dead of night. Roughing it.

The rest of the players you won’t know unless you spend your Netflix time perusing the C-Westerns of recent vintage.

There are endless stumblings across other folks gathered round a campfire out on the trail, which begin with “We don’t want no trouble” begging for coffee, maybe, and “a simple passage of words.”

Almost all of these leaden, cement-footed scenes talk us to death before they resolve themselves in bloodshed.
The talking reaches a sort of peak with Henricksen’s cameo, showing up in a worn Confederate sergeant’s uniform, recognizing the “marshal” as “a child killer.”

“Some things need to be said,” he speechifies, in the manner of pretty much everybody else in this thing. “In a hundred years, only a time or two has Hell has spat out such a man as this.”

Well. OK.

The picture waddles here and there, spills lots of blood, reaches its climax, and then goes on and on past it.

Too much of a good thing? Don’t be ridiculous.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity, drinking, spitting

Cast: Clint James, Anna Harr, Owen Conway,  Charlie Motley, Dominque Swain, Barry Corbin and Lance Henriksen

Credits: Directed by Robert Conway, written by Robert Conway and Owen Conway. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:40

I interviewed him when one of his “Friday” comedies came out, a grand old man of comedy, even then.

John Witherspoon was a comic of the chitlin’ circuit era who found off color laughs in the stoner comedies of the recent past.

He was 77.

Hollywood Reporter (@THR) Tweeted:
Ice Cube (@icecube), Regina King (@ReginaKing) and Marlon Wayans (@MarlonWayans) also shared memories and kind words on social media in the wake of John Witherspoon’s death https://t.co/Zj99L8nTi6 https://twitter.com/THR/status/1189571937435041792?s=17

If the Chinese government isn’t careful, the world will give Liu Ximei the Nobel Peace Prize.

And if there’s one thing the Hollywood and NBA-coddling one-party dictatorship hates, it’s having another version of its greed, incompetence, repression and aggression exposed to the world.

“Ximei” is about a genuine social justice warrior fighting the lonely fight on behalf of  AIDS patients in China. Liu Ximei is one of them, and the documentary “Ximei” recounts how she was infected, how society and her own family treated her and how the sunglasses-wearing thugs of the “People’s Republic” keep coming down on her for speaking out, garnering attention and demanding justice.

She and millions of Chinese like her are victims of China’s “Black Blood Economy.” A peasant in a nation that rarely acknowledges it has them, she was gruesomely injured doing farm work — at age 10 — in Xinoa County, Henan Provice.

But “child labor” wasn’t the worst of it. While in the hospital, she can given a transfusion of hospital-provided and sold HIV positive blood. For years, China callously and carelessly exploited peasants, getting them to sell their blood. They didn’t bother to test it until much later. They didn’t bother to keep the blood gathering and dispensing gear disinfected. AIDS exploded in Henan Province.

Ximei contracted it, and in a culture built on family, she became a prime example of the shunning families did to members who contracted the disease. She shows us the hospital where she grew up, living for eight years with no family or friends, with only reluctant staff and animals that roamed the courtyard for company.

In “Ximei,” we follow her as she visits other victims, old farm women, younger women like herself.

“Have some pig feet soup,” they insist.

She leads the film crew into the chaos of “clinic day” in town, where medicine that these patients need to survive is delivered and sold. Everybody asks her advice, even as they’re getting the same drugs she needs, even as they’re facing the same impossible bills for a deadly disease official policy and cutthroat shortcuts gave them.

There’s supposed to be government reimbursement (the LEAST they could do) for this massive, shadowy government screw-up. But the bureaucracy demands that patients prove it was their fault, and bury illiterate peasants under paperwork that would qualify them.

Ximei and her friends talk about this, as she visits them in their homes or in the house in town where she provides food and shelter to those coming into town for treatment.

With a mop-top (possibly a wig) and pronounced limp due to her long-ago accident, Ximei is a local celebrity.

“Everybody knows the AIDS girl who can’t walk properly,” she says (in Chinese, with English subtitles). And that’s the other burden she must carry. Hand-weaving plastic AIDS ribbons is one thing. Being summoned to international conferences for consultation, and followed by a film crew is an altogether different thing.

We see her stroll past a Chinese-hosted health and justice event past government sanctioned posters (in English) decrying the state of women’s rights and ecological rights — in India.

The cops and hired thugs who rough her up and take her phone? Just the Chinese making sure the focus is on India’s scandals, and not those of the People’s Paradise.

Ximei makes a quietly compelling heroine, and the filmmakers — who can be seen questioning the men in sunglasses following her around — do her their greatest service in just letting her tell her story, just letting their camera capture the indifference, fear and fury that has been officialdom’s knee-jerk reaction to her cause.

But I don’t know. She’s just one woman and it’s just one documentary, even if it a pretty good one with limited prospects for release. Ximei still looks like one of those solitary heroes who doggedly lead by example until others help her move mountains.

And those others just might live in Sweden.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Liu Ximei, Liu Min

Credits: Written and directed by Andy Cohen and Gaylen Ross. An AC Films release.

Running time: 1:38

Totally down with putting the fate of mankind in the hands of womankind in the “Terminator” franchise.

Giving your movie some immigration debate relevance, a little election debate currency in a workplace where machines are taking away jobs? Savvy.

It’s great to see Linda Hamilton as bacon screen as Sarah again. And turning Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 killing machine into a cuddly, white-bearded savior? Alrighty then.

But the sequel built on those components, “Terminator: Dark Fate” turns into the most ridiculous, recycled and repetitive film of the franchise. Two tedious hours covering ground we’ve been over and over and OVER again in these damned films, with digital parkour chases and digital MMA/anything goes brawls and just enough “improvements” in the effects to suggest this isn’t the exact same movie we’ve seen several times before.

The molten metal morphing version of this latest mechanical killer from the future (Gabriel Luna) is black, and not chromium. So yeah, drop what you’re doing because, wow, this is um, different.

Tim Miller of “Deadpool” directed the film, and it staggers, straight out of the gate. We’re treated to a the fate of John Connor (Edward Furlong, digitized) and his mom Sarah, their best efforts to head off “Judgement Day” of 1998 be damned.

“I stopped it,” Sarah narrates. “Saved three billion lives. You’re welcome.” As if.

Human extinction at the hands of Skynet was foiled. But something else went wrong. Time-travel spheres from the future are popping up in Mexico City, depositing their travelers as naked as ever.

One of them is this new and improved hunter-killer (Luna). Another sphere drops the swan-necked/model-thin blonde “super-soldier from the future” Grace (Mackenzie Davis), here to foil the Rev-9, as the new machine is called.

This time, the woman to be protected is a bilingual Mexican auto worker, Danielle (Natalia Reyes). She’s barely made it to the auto plant where she works when it’s under assault. And Grace is there with this not-the-least-bit-pithy one-liner.

“Come with me or you’re dead in the next 30 seconds.”

Two big-name screenwriters (and a third dude) and this was their best shot?

“Dark Fate” eventually lets Grace tell us who she is, an “augmented” Six Million Dollar woman from the future. She’s here to save Dani from a machine she can’t stop.

Fortunately, Sarah Connor is still roaming the Southwest, north and south of the border, packing heat. Hamilton, who still can carry off “bad ass,” but whose acting seems soap opera rusty in the early scenes, gets a real “star entrance” here, arriving with a deadpan sneer and a bang.

“I’ll be back.”

Now Dani’s got two protectors. And it’s just not enough.

Miller lets his film settle for big, dumb digital brawls — half a dozen of them, each more dizzying than the last — over character development. The picture grasps for tepid Arnold jokes about Texas, explanations about how his machine ended up with a family (not how he aged), and generic, half-assed Schwarzenegger gun fetishizing, a feature of the weightlifter’s action movies since the ’80s.

It all plays as points on a sliding scale of ridiculousness.

Davis and Luna are OK in the effects fights, but lack the charisma of Hamilton at her best and Robert Patrick’s Aryan-eyed menace as the molten chromium terminator upgrade.

Reyes, still newish to English language acting, is uninspiring playing a character who makes little sense, logically or chronologically.

And that leaves the picture to the AARP couple, who can’t bring anything new to their relationship, their rivalry or the banter.

What, no “Come mitt me iff you vant to liff?”

I had high hopes for this. The trailers really play up the sentimental tug of bringing Hamilton back on the payroll.

But damn, “Dark Fate” is dull.

MPAA Rating: R for violence throughout, language and brief nudity |

Cast: Linda Hamilton, MacKenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gabriel Luna

Credits: Directed by Tim Miller, script by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes. Billy Ray. A Paramount/Fox release.

Running time: 2:08

This abortive effort to sell the 1970s horror classic to movie fans never made it into theaters. It’s arty and horrific, images popping on the screen that play like Friedkin’s thriller’s greatest scariest hits.

The guard is changing for filmmakers we have treated as “brand names” for years.

Which is why the director of the indie horror pic, “It Comes at Night,” sort of “The Quiet Place” only Australian and somewhat less creepy, is getting billed as “acclaimed director Trey Edward Shults.”

Same thing happened with that TV guy who made “Lucy in the Sky.” Yes, studio marketing people are billing these films by filmmakers of little to no renown — Noah Hawley, looking at YOU — as auteurist events.

“Waves” is another South Florida coming-of-age-as-an-African-American” tale, is over two hours long and has some heavy blurbs from critics who have caught it in film festivals.

And even though Trey Edward Shults doesn’t roll off the tongue like “a Martin Scorsese Picture” or “A Spike Lee Joint” or “a film by Kathryn Bigelow” or “Taika Waititi” or John Woo” or whoever, perhaps he’ll be the marquee name director that they all do, even if we’ve passed the golden age of the auteur.

What’d the ol’ball coach tell us? All the ol’ball coaches?

“Play through the whistle,” he’d say. “Play through ‘The Last Whistle.’”

“The Last Whistle” is a lukewarm Texas melodrama that lets your parse that phrase and ethos. Exert yourself to the maximum, even past the point where the referee has blown the play dead. “Leave it all on the field.”

When the weather’s hot, that athletic bromide takes on sinister tones.

“Last Whistle” is about a veteran Texas high school football coach pushing his boys to the limit in his effort to achieve that undefeated season.

“I can feel it,” Coach Vic (Brad Leland) growls. And an instant later, his real motivation rears its head.

“Think I’ll get that offer?” he asks his assistant (Eric Nelson).

Coach Vic is awfully long in the tooth to be thinking about making that big NCAA leap. But there’s a whole lot “FOOTball” “The Last Whistle” throws at us that beggars belief.

Start with the movie’s half-speed version of on-field play, stripping the game of its velocity and violence, guys in the cleanest (and dullest designed) uniforms ever seen in the fourth quarter on natural grass.

That’s why most of “Last Whistle” is about Coach Vic’s struggles off the field. He’s got a rich kid (Tyler Perez) who thinks his big-donor daddy will arm-twist him some more playing time.

Star running back Benny (Fred Tolliver Jr.) is thinking about college, a kid whose mother (Deanne Lauvin) isn’t crazy about him wasting time on sports when he should be focusing on academics and the future they can give him.

The community lionizes him, but that’s because he’s winning. He lives alone, having run his wife off and estranged himself from his daughter. Hitting the local bar is his only means of unwinding, as he is feeling the heat from his might-be-my-replacement assistant.

When the rich kid peer-pressures Benny and a few others to dog it, showing up for practice, Coach thunders for “eleven GASSERS,” one brutal round of windsprints for every minute this quartet of slackers made everyone else wait. The assistant thinks that’s a bit much.

“Ah don’t CARE what you think!”

That puts a kid in an ambulance.

“Is he gonna be OK?” one player wonders as that ambulance departs.

“I don’t think so. Didn’t even turn the lights on.”

Football deaths are way down from their peak, we learn (as does Coach Vic) as the school board and the town rile themselves up to run the old coach off. The local press is all over him, as as his fellow barflies. His reaction is off-the-charts tone-deaf.

I mean, he’s got the season and his possible college job to think about!

The trial that comes when the mother of the dead player sues is laughably intimate, convenient and low-stakes.

And the story resolves itself in a way guaranteed to deliver eye-rolls.

Brad Leland plays the mayor of Nome in the new “Great Alaskan Race” feature film, a career character actor who does his best in this rare leading man role. He makes us feel neither pity nor revulsion for this callous man who has made his sport and his job his life.

Lauvin has the best scenes and best lines, a smart mother who sizes up the coach’s influence and promises to Benny with “So, you trust him? Everyone I ever worked with is a liar UNTIL they put it on paper!”

The world doesn’t need another movie or TV series about the Texas football obsession (Leland was in “Friday Night Lights,” too). It surely doesn’t need another African American athlete claiming “I ain’t smart like my mama” in search of a way out via athletics.

Pat the indie film production team on the back for trying, but even the varios faith-based films centered on high school football look more polished and realistic than this.

Whatever the ol’ball coaches say, it’s what Texans like to say that matters in movies of his genre.

“Go big, or go home.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and language

Cast: Brad Leland, Deanne Lauvin, Fred Tolliver Jr., Tyler Perez

Credits: Written and directed by Rob Smat. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:28