Movie Nation

Much of the enduring pop and rock of the 1980s had this shimmering, sunny sheen and rhythmic bounce to it, and that wasn’t just a product of the end of disco and punk as they were absorbed into New Wave and the New Romantics. Nor can you attribute it simply to the transition from analog recording to the pristine reproduction of digital.

From “I’m Still Standing” to “Walk of Life,” “Sailaway” to “Reflex,” everybody from Phil Collins and Boy George to Earth Wind & Fire, Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits and James Taylor recorded on the under-populated West Indian island of Montserrat, at Sir George Martin’s remote live-in studio in paradise, literally “Under the Volcano.”

Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder harmonized to “Ebony & Ivory.” The Police peaked, and then took their final bows as a recording band there. The Rolling Stones shook off the “oldies act” label one last time with “Steel Wheels” and Jimmy Buffett, the second artist to record in AIR Studios Montserrat, provided the sing-along anthem for the place, which operated from 1979-1989 — “Volcano.”

That volcano, Soufrière Hills, was “the presiding spirit over the island” and their recording sessions there, according to Sting of The Police, who conjured the masterpieces “Every Breath You Take” and “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” at AIR, and shot a frolicsome music video to accompany the latter on the island.

Martin, already a legend for having recorded The Beatles, dreamed up the ultimate “artist friendly” recording experience where extremely famous people could escape the world, the press and their fans and record in a place with a state-of-the-art studio, a view, a pool, “banana hammock” friendly beaches, rum punches and wind surfing lessons.

“There was no rush,” Verdine White from Earth Wind & Fire (the “Faces” LP) recalls. “There was no clock.”

It was “like living in a surrealist painting,” Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes says. “Black sand, giant iguanas.”

Elton John “got the band back together” and turned out his seminal MTV era LP “Too Low for Zero,” composing with Bernie Taupin “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” and “I’m Still Standing” (inspired by a stoned colleague’s protests that he was still on the job).

The Police peaked with their “Ghost in the Machine” and “Synchronicity” LPs, clashing with each other as they recorded their era-defining albums in Montserrat.

And after they finished, Sting stuck around “for a holiday,” and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits asked him in to do the “I want my, I want my, I want my MTV” bit on “Money for Nothing,” one of the hits that made “Brothers in Arms” the LP that put that band in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame.

“You can hear the island” all through the LP, band member John Illsley says. Especially on the dreamy, laid-back “So Far Away From Me,” with its oceanic breeze synthesizer and calypso -tinged guitar.

Giles Martin, son of George, recalls the “quirky” staff of locals, many of them musically inclined, as making AIR Montserrat “like staying in Fawlty Towers,” and Australian filmmaker Gracie Otto makes sure to include many locals — displaced by the volcano, that oddly enough, was not what killed the studio — among the interview subjects.

From dive “night club” owners, one of whom played host to a Stevie Wonder jam session (recorded on audio tape), staff at AIR to Davey Sweeney, the colorfully charming windsurfing instructor many of the stars remember with great fondness, we hear and see how they pitched in on harmony vocals, percussion and what have you, and enjoyed their encounters with the famous.

But it wasn’t the perfect fit for everybody, with the sailing, sun and rum-branded Buffett recalling the “colonial aspect to things,” Lou Reed (in archival footage) griping about the lack of “traffic” noise and Andy Summers of The Police lamenting how everybody in the band “entered into divorce proceedings” as they cut “Synchronicity.”

And still, “Under the Volcano” lacks some of the details, grit and personal dirty-laundry edge of the legion of earlier recording studio history documentaries — “Muscle Shoals” and “Sound City” among them.

Yet McCartney’s and Knopfler’s home movies, stills shots of parties, jam sessions and binges and the other footage rounded up here paints a winning picture of a time and a very sunny place — now gone — where the best of their era recorded the songs that defined it.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, discussion of drug use

Cast: Sting, Jimmy Buffett, Nick Rhodes, Yve Robinson, George Martin, Stewart Copeland, Mark Knopfler, Davey Johnstone, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney

Credits: Directed by Gracie Otto, scripted by Cody Greenwood and Gracie Otto. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

Distributor Gunpowder & Sky takes a shot at Netflix teen film turf with this latest spin on the classic “Cyrano de Bergerac,” coming out in early Sept. Better than “The Half of It” or “Sierra Burgess is a Loser”? We shall see.

Some good ideas and chewy, hardboiled dialogue don’t entirely go to waste in “Crime Story,” a thriller that barely transcends its beyond-generic title.

You have to buy Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, in his reduced-mobility years, as a retired mobster still capable of roughing guys one half to one-third his age up. And you can’t, something writer-director Adam Lipsius fails to write around.

But at least casting him opposite Oscar winner Mira Sorvino, as the estranged daughter who became a cop and liaison to a Congressman, should have paid off. It almost does, save for the peculiar, weepy outbursts nature their relationship. It seems out of character for them both.

“I’m not finished yet” Ben Myers (Dreyfuss) narrates from a hospital gurney. “If I wake up, I’ll chose different.”

It’s that last day leading up to him in the hospital that “Crime Story” encompasses.

He’s an ex-con “twelve years straight” thanks to a sweetheart deal with the powers that be. But he’s old and enfeebled, and his wife “left me without going anywhere.” She has dementia. Getting a nurse he can keep to help out with her isn’t easy, as Ben still carries a pistol and scares people.

Ben has one junky daughter (Joanna Walchuk), hospitalized and disowned, and another — the cop — whom he was never close with.

And on this fateful day, he just might need one’s forgiveness and the other’s help.

A cagey old SOB, Ben notices the white panel “surveyor” truck parked across the street when he leaves, and the power steering fluid stain in his driveway when he gets back and finds his house ransacked and wife further traumatized. But he has a nanny cam, and it shows him the faces of the crooks who emptied his safe and took the rings off his wife’s fingers.

“I decided to do what I do.”

The geriatric hunt for revenge is fun, if absurdly far-fetched. The father-daughter debate, two Oscar winners going toe to toe in a dimly-lit Savannah bar, has a moment or two.

And the political and personal plot has twists aplenty, enough to make this worth watching, despite the odd moment of acting excess (from each star), slack pacing (matched to a smoky, jazz-blues score) and a somewhat less-than-wholly-coherent finale.

But the players can’t quite put it over and the writer-director can’t quite pull it off. It’s a thriller that shuffles when it needs to trot, simmers when it needs to boil and goes on after it needs to end.

MPA Rating: R, violence, language (profanity) and some sexual content

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Mira Sorvino, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Cress Williams

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Lipsius. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:39

Udo Kier takes a tragi-comic victory lap in his storied career with “Swan Song,” an old man’s odyssey long walk into twilight, revisiting and even reliving past glories as he does.

In cinema buff shorthand, it’s David Lynch’s “The Straight Story” without a riding lawnmower, and in which the hero is anything but “straight.”

Mister Pat he still calls himself, uncomfortably ensconced in assisted living, not interacting with the other residents much at all, listening to his Judy Garland concert LP in private.

He’s got all the hallmarks of old age — compulsions he never outgrew, a hint of hoarding, a grim grip on old vices (More cigarettes) — but with a dash of style and a splash of bitchy rebellion. Back in the day, he was rust belted Sandusky, Ohio’s hairstyling hero.

His lone comfort these days is a long-silent, wheelchair-bound little old lady whom he sneaks smokes with, wordlessly, occasionally regarding her hair as if there’s something he could do with it, or much that he once did with that very hair in the past.

A surprise visitor– a lawyer he holds in light regard — interrupts this long day’s journey into night. A former client has died, the doyenne of Sandusky society (snort). Can he forget his grudge against her (Linda Evans of “Dynasty”) and do her hair one more time? You know, like this photo on her front page obituary in the local paper?

“Split ends, as well?“

Yes. He’s gay. And still quick. But no. He’s not interested.

“I haven’t pulled hair in years.”

The movie would be over if Pat didn’t find a reason to change his mind, so of course he does. Thus begins his journey — sneaking out, walking and accepting rides — into town and through his past. We hear of his great love, who died of AIDS. He walks the floorplan of his long-demolished old house and visits the salon he used to rule over, a queen with her court.

It’s an African American beauty parlor now, and the sassy, compassionate ladies there are one of many grace notes this Todd Stephens film finds in Mister Pat’s odyssey.

A running gag? Everything has changed, and Mister Pat, who doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t realize it. The haircare products that he’d need to work his magic were discontinued and banned as dangerous. Every business is different, even his beloved More cigarettes are a hard find these days.

Kier, a legend of European and American indie cinema (“Dogville,” “Soul Kitchen”), B-movies (“Halloween,” “Bloodrayne”) and TV (“The Kingdom”) takes this rare leading role and strolls through it like a man who never changed even as the world around him did.

Meeting up with a contemporary who still haunts a local park men’s room (Ira Hawkins), they marvel at the gay couples playing catch with their son or toting babies around that very park.

“I wouldn’t even know how to be gay anymore,” Mister Pat sighs.

And in a rare dramatic turn, Jennifer Coolidge (“American Pie,” “Two Broke Girls”) shows range, wit and meanness we never knew she had in her as a former protege who isn’t Mr. Pat’s favorite old acquaintance.

Shoplifting, a visit to the drag bar he used to haunt on weekends, an extraordinary moment of kindness and some tipsy epiphanies about what gay men of his generation have to reconcile themselves to in their dotage makes for a simple yet sweet and at times deeply moving day of “swanning” through scenic Sandusky.

And Kier makes a most companionable tour guide for us as the day gently, sadly and amusingly makes its way to the long night to come.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Udo Kier, Jennifer Coolidge, Ira Hawkins and Linda Evans

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Stephens. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

A “Blade Runner” set in an ever-closing-in future, a world where machines become the new Tinder/Grindr, and murderous stuff is going down? Sept. 3.

Sept. 17, get CAGED.

Sofia Boutella and Nick Cassavetes are among the co-stars of this “legendary” tale about the one man who can break a curse and free a kidnapped young woman.

Sometimes, it can seem that the only reminder that Netflix didn’t always own the teen rom-com market at the movies is the presence of Molly Ringwald as the Mom in the “Kissing Booth” movies.

The first film, back in 2018, announced the streaming service as the new King of the Teen Pic Mountain, with Joey King as their queen.

“The Kissing Booth 3” is, as you’d expect, one trip too many to the well that kept on giving with “Kissing Booth 2.” Everybody’s gotten older. The formula — affluent kids having affluent fun as they live it up before “college” and “growing up” — has been watered down.

Like the last years of TV’s “Friends,” they’ve kind of run out of ways to entangle and disentangle Elle Evans and her BFF Lee (Joel Courtney) and their separate-not-equal love lives.

And yet, here we are.

Elle is hung up on whether to follow beau Noah (Jacob Elordi) to Harvard or childhood chum Lee to UC-Berkley. Tough call. Either way, “I’ll make one of my two favorite people unhappy,” she narrates.

So she pretends she’s “wait-listed,” lies and prevaricates, decides and undecides.

And as Lee’s family is giving up their tony beach house, she and Noah and Lee and his girl Rachel (Meganne Young) shack up there for the summer, leaving time for Lee and Elle to live out a childhood “bucket list” that they discovered in all the packing up.

The bulk of this candy-colored, bikini-clothed overlong amble through the last days of “childhood” consists of parties, old rivalries and romances bubbling up and a string of musical montages accompanying “#14, Go cliff jumping,” “Learn to Juggle,” “Win a pie-eating contest,” or most amusingly, race go-karts while dressed as Super Mario Brothers, flinging balloons filled with Nickelodeon-grade “slime” at each other.

After three years of such movies, the audience for this trilogy has probably aged out of the story, and the third film isn’t really good enough to convince today’s 15 year-olds to check out the first two installments.

But it’s still good, clean “fun” and as harmless as it is high-tone and, by now, tone deaf (a world where money is no object and COVID does not exist). At least they have the good grace to officially wrap it all up in a way that leaves no room for sequels.

Or DO they?

MPA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Joey King, Joel Courtney, Jacob Elordi, Molly Ringwald, Taylor Zakhar Perez and
Maisie Richardson-Sellers.

Credits: Directed by Vince Marcello, script by Vince Marcello and Jay s Arnold, based on the novels by Beth Reekles. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

I doff my fedora at any indie filmmaker with the wherewithal to take a shot at making a period piece with little or no money, rather than going the slasher/spatter film route like everybody else.

But if you’re letting actors complain, in a 1933 gangsters-in-the-sticks thriller, about “Bogarting” a bottle of Virginia Dare wine, if you’re not just leaning on voice-over narration as a crutch, but as a genuine FDR vintage wheel chair, if you’re pretentious enough to name your slow-talking, slow-moving movie “Whelm,” maybe slasher is the safer way to go.

When a character labels another a “more of a pencil, he’s not the muscle,” and gets chewed out, take your own scripted criticism to heart.

“What’re you writing, a play? Nobody talks like that.”

“Whelm” is a reasonably good looking thriller about rural brothers getting mixed up in a nasty cat and mouse game between a famous gangster and his biggest fan, a pompous, pitiless fanboy who spells his name out so all will know who is messing around with bad boy “Jimmy.”

“Alexander Aleksy,” he (Delil Baran) intones. “Spelled A.L.E.K.S.Y.”

That sets the tone for this portentous, obscurant and meandering movie that skirts the edges of the Dillinger legend. We are not at all surprised when Alexander starts speaking German, not Russian, to a woman whom we’ve heard ID herself as “Edie” and “Polly” at various points.

Just picking up on who is named what is a chore in this laborious “film festival movie.”

And it’s also no surprise when Alexander gets his hands on a fencing mask and an épée, which becomes his weapon of choice later on.

“Jimmy” (Grant Schumacher) is our gangster, a guy with some cash stashed in the safe of a rural Midwestern inn. Alexander gets to that cash first in the most bizarre and pointless way, a talkative robbery that involves torture, a big block of ice and an old innkeeper (Mark Hoover).

The brothers, who are mixed up in moonshining, are bearded tough-guy August (Ronan Colfer) and the fellow who does most of the not-quite-constant sleepy narrating Reed (Dylan Grunn), whose name I didn’t pick up until very late in the picture, not that it matters.

Reed drawls through florid narrated passages meant to illuminate the proceedings and flesh out the other characters, but make you wonder if ol’Tennessee — Williams, or Ernie Ford — is takin’ his mint julep on the VERANDA in the cool of this evening.

“He had a way of wrapping you in words so tight, you didn’t know which way was up.”

Indeed.

“Our man was a Grade A mystery, but he had a shine for low company.”

There’s a little gunplay, a lot of walking and a lot more talking in this tale that unfolds in thirteen slowly slow-walked chapters.

Odd twists aren’t wholly explained, relationships are uncertain, characters flip from antagonists to trusting confidantes with no more motivation than the expediencies of the script. Most of the performers struggle to find their footing, and when in doubt, walk even slower and talk even slower still.

But praise be, a Ford Trimotor airplane is trotted out among the period-correct firearms and motorcars and Virginia Dare win. It’s still a shame “Whelm” is a period piece gangster “thriller” that drowns in its own murk.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex and profanity

Cast: Delil Baran, Dylan Grunn, Ronan Colfer, Grant Schumacher, Mark Hoover and Francesca Anderson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Skyler Lawson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:56

Netflix has this different spin on 9/11, a movie about the quantifying of the value of a life that went on after 3000 Americans were murdered by Saudi financed hijackers while George W Bush napped.

“Ema,” the latest film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, is about interpretative modern dance, so naturally it’s “open to interpretation.”

The director of “Jackie” and “Neruda” has conjured up a fever dream of tragedy, the “monster” who feels responsible for it, egos and fire. And if I can’t say it comes off in any simple, fulfilling way, it’s quite the lovely, sexy show and leaves you with a lot to chew on.

Chilean actress Mariana Di Girólamo turns dancer for this film, the bleached blonde gamine at the center of a company run by her choreographer husband, Gaston (Gael García Bernal). And when we meet them, they’re coming apart.

They had a child, a boy. But Ema, twelve years his junior, flatly notes that “You’ll never give me a son, a real one,” (in Spanish with English subtitles). And Gaston’s response to this cruelest of accusations about their briefly-adopted boy Polo, gets at the nature of their rift.

“I gave you a son, a REAL one. And you threw him away.”

This self-described “bad mother” turned their child back over to family services after an act of violence, a fire. The victim was her sister, and it’s just like this movie to ignore discussing “motivations” for the boy or any sense that he was responsible for awful this thing he did.

It’s just “He’s sick” and “Polo’s parents don’t love him any more” and the dance that Gaston choreographed, inspired by this gutting set of circumstances.

The company performs it despite “hating” Ema, she is convinced. “I’m evil.” Plenty of others chime in on her rash act. A social worker who screams “f—–g psycho” might be on the money.

And with her marriage ending, she does what characters do in movies about the gaping hole guilt leaves in their hearts. She has sex with anything on two legs — female or male, her lawyer or a virile firefighter, fellow dancers, whoever. She accepts the blame, but her self-punishment involves acting out, orgasming her way to a solution to this empty, guilty space in her heart.

That’s “punishment,” “atonement?” Hey, I said “open to interpretation.”

She toys with a flame thrower as part of this interpretive dance, but only loses herself when she and her corps are cutting loose to reggaeton, which is sexy and well within our star’s dancing skill set even if her soon-to-be-ex dismisses it as “prison music.”

The big emotional moments in this come from supporting characters, as our leads are emotionally-stunted (her) or shocked and dismayed (him).

The film has no conventional heroine/hero whom we can “root for,” as even the boy — barely glimpsed until the third act — plainly needs “help” and not unconditional forgiveness (we see the victim’s burns).

The dance is pulsating and fun, well-staged and beautifully shot. The sex is dancer-athletic, titillating and mostly packaged in a montage sure to be a widely-shared Reddit clip any day now.

But the whole is rather an empty experience, something I confess it shares with other Larraín films. “Ema” is pretty, provocative and surprising in ways that are more interesting to chew on than satisfying to experience.

MPA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity and language

Cast: Mariana Di Girólamo, Gael García Bernal, Santiago Cabrera, Giannina Fruttero and
Paola Giannini

Credits: Directed by Pablo Larraín script by Guillermo Calderón, Pablo Larraín and Alejandro Moreno. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:47