Movie Nation

We few. We lucky, lucky few.

We who nothing of the magical qualities of the doula, we for whom the acronym “RIE” is akin to speaking in tongues. We have no idea how lucky we are.

Here’s a comedy about childbirth in present day LA, in the America of self-actualizing, over-sharing, conflict resolution and conflict-avoiding, of becoming “Fully Realized Humans” before they try to birth and raise such a creature.

It’s a sometimes hilarious post-mumblecore meditation, rumination and romp about getting prepared (for childbirth) and realizing how unprepared you are, about judging the lumps who raised you and realizing that maybe they didn’t have the data at their disposal you do, Dr. Spock or not.

Mostly, it’s about the panic that sends our settled and prepping couple — Jess Weixler and Joshua Leonard — into “bucket list” fits of all the living they need to do before life, as they know it, is over.

It all starts when Jackie and Elliot have a baby shower which turns into a comical series of friends’ one upping each other on childbirth as “the worst thing ever” and “crib death” riffs.

Their doula, aka “Mommy’s new (paid) best-friend,” midwife, birth coach (Erica Chidi Cohen) makes the mistake of asking them to close their eyes and visualize “what YOU need,” at this point. They doze off, just for a second.

Then they take Maya’s “prescription,” “one orgasm a day” and head home and realize time’s running out on all the things they never did. Jackie is VERY pregnant, but they both dive straight into the deep waters of the River Denial, given this “bucket list” chance.

“Jump out of an airplane!” “Dine and DASH!” “Go SWIMMING with SHARKS!” “Get tattoos!” “Visit ANTARCTICA!” “Buy a classic car and drive it up the coast!” “Get chased by COPS!”

But the path to “Fully Realized Humans” has to pass through that very first “item” that they settle on actually doing. The words “pegging” and “strap on” are enough to make a grown man like Elliot quake.

Director and co-star Leonard, a long way from his days lost in the woods in search of “The Blair Witch,” gets laughs out of Elliot’s wide-eyed alarm at their visit to a sex toys shop and everything that visit opens up. Turns out they both have “daddy issues.”

Weixler (“The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” and TV’s “The Good Wife”) was a solid eight months pregnant when they filmed this, so deliver her a special Oscar for that. She gives us a Jackie who is fine until that moment where she figures out she’s not…as prepared as she thought.

Banter, group scenes and debates have an improvised, “nobody really knows where this is going” feel. Funny people riffing, actresses who’ve given birth unloading the LOWdown on childbirth to the pregnant actress, parents (Michael Chieffo, Beth Grant and Tom Bower) jolted and backpedaling as they confronted by their shortcomings in a pre-birth intervention staged by their son or daughter.

The film is scripted (by the co-stars), but that “mumblecore” sense of chatty people chatting something to death until funny words come out bubbles through every scene that isn’t a montage of the two spraying graffiti, daring the cops to chase them, or getting lost in the dark on a nature hike.

It’s a scruffy comedy and what’s on screen can be pretty rough at times. But get past the jaw-dropping nature of the “pegging” and ponder how much of what went on there was improvised and the laughs become impossible to suppress.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, drug abuse, sexually explicit and lots of profanity

Cast: Jess Weixler, Joshua Leonard, Erica Chidi Cohen, Michael Chieffo, Tom Bower and Beth Grant

Credits: Directed by Joshua Leonard, script by Jess Weixler and Joshua Leonard. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:16

A Nordic folktale of the darkly comic or horrific persuasion, this Oct. 8 release stars Noomi Rapace.

Yeah, it’s from A24 and is as weird and wooly as you would expect from them.

“Bankrolled?” Think of it as a classic example of “meeting a comedy on its own terms.”

It takes a while to settle in. And truthfully, you’ve got to be simpatico with its vibe, something that ties “Bankrolled” to the stoner comedies of the past.

I started this Mexican satire from Netflix three times before it roped me in. It’s almost manic and as random as random can be. But then you see, “Ah, so this is ‘The Producers’ with a hint of classic Cheech & Chong (“Nice Dreams”) and a lot of satirical invention?”

Something like that. Just go with it.

The glimmering, shiny Silicon Valley send-up is set in a high-glossed Mexico City of youth, easy money, loopy “entrepreneurs” and born-victim venture capitalists. It’s about two aimless sometimes-stoned non-hustling hustlers (Aldo Escalante, Ricardo Polanco), hitting 30 and seeing their peers “start-up” and “network” their way to fame and glory.

All Polo (Escalante) wants is to fit in with them, with pretentious poseurs and their wacky apps and “ping pong” parties where they brainstorm “the next next thing.” He already has the bossy influencer/”muse” (María Chacón) such self-hype kings require. If only he had, you know, an original thought, “Big Idea” or any notion of what “follow through” looks like. And the money to bring that idea to fruition.

Even more directionless Blas (Polanco) is a slacker’s slacker. He’s got programming talent wrapped in misplaced idealism. His pretention is cynicism mixed with coffee snobbery. His ambition is no higher than landing a barista gig at the upscale beanery too snooty to ever hire him, maybe settling in Catalonia and reading architect Antonio Gaudi’s autobiography in his leisure.

But they finagle their way into a classmate’s (Guiseppe Gamba) “ping ponging” (a new phrase for “brainstorming”) networking party and stumble into their drug dealer pal Aderales (Fabrizio Santini). He’s no longer selling weed, etc. He’s rebranded. “Nootropics” is all about stimulants, things that may or may not be legal and may or may not help one zero in on a great idea and pound away at it — drugged-up and sleeplessly — until they have something, “just like Elon.”

Damned if they don’t wake up with an online pitch they don’t remember making for an idea that sounds stupid and seems stupid but just might be nutty enough to catch on in crowdfunding/Venture Capital circles.

SignNow will allow players/downloaders to indulge in our mania for “clicktivisim,” “the stupidest form of social justice.”

You click “like” on some cause, save the manatees or support homeless women, feel righteous, collect “points” in competition with the other self-righteous-and-too-lazy-to-lift-more-than-a-finger, and “change the world.” How addictive is that?

Polo and Blas can’t shrug off this drunken “ping ponged” idea that they pitched and posted. Because a VC outfit named Bankrolled, where “crowdfunding is the NEW economy,” get behind it and next thing you know, they have a $2,000,000, their own start-up, status with the other “entrepreneurs” and…expectations.

They’ll live large, spend like drunken sailors, and fail. On purpose. Just like “The Producers.” Only things don’t work out that way. Just like “The Producers.”

Veteran Mexican TV and film writer (“How to Survive Being Single”) turned first-time feature director Marcos Bucay takes too long to get us through this long set-up. But starting with the way the guys “remember” what they did to get to that video “pitch” — their hungover selves llook across the room at their drunken, stoned “last night” selves to see how they got to here — “Bankrolled” is on a roll.

Welcome to a world where everybody is online and maintaining the illusion of their lives online. Everyone is live-streaming, everyone wants attention, everyone wants the validation of likes and the ultimate ego trip of a YayTalk. You know who and what that’s sending up, right, the “Here I am, ain’t I great?” TED Talk phenomenon.

YouthBank, where their line of credit is set up, is part ashram, part VR gaming room where you set up accounts with a “singing” password.Yeah, you sing or hum a bar of music and that unlocks your account.

Every office is a romper room, every “meeting” a pep rally, every colleague half-clueless about whatever it is they’re doing, and what drinks, colon cleanses and drugs will help them meet the deadline for whatever it is they’re making.

It’s just nuts. They’re all making…nothing.

The parallel story has two Bankrolled “professionals” working the SignNow account — officious workaholic Nat (Natalia Téllez) and cocky free-spirit Mayte (Seo Ju Park), who thinks every day is “Slutty Monday.” They’re in charge of supervising this start-up, keeping tabs on where the money goes, and as an afterthought, figuring out if this “idea” is worth anything to anyone and if the guys who came up with it are just con artists.

Because their bubbly boss, Gus (Sebastián Zurita) is too ditzy and enthusiastic to sweat details like that.

The dialogue and situations hurl a thousand riffs on the start-ups that closed the door on new “big ideas” in hospitality, dating and sex (Lyft, AirBnd, Tinder, Grindr), on every “cleanse” and new drink/supplement/lifestyle fad “fresh from LA” and on everything that can go wrong at the top of a start-up just like this.

It’s all a mad clutter, but I got into Polo’s egomania and work-avoidance “networking” and Blas’s delusions that he’s being cheated out of credit when the two of them are changing their coding team’s priorities every hour on the hour.

For a comedy that gets in its own way more often than not, that doesn’t give nearly enough screen time to the two somewhat funnier women (Park is seriously hilarious and seriously shortchanged) or even enough to let the leads fully form their characters, this still manages some serious third act laughs.

It’s amusing enough to be worth reading the subtitles if you’re not fluent in Spanish. And it might be even funnier once Hollywood realizes its promise and tidies things up for an even more manic and messy remake.

Cast: Aldo Escalante, Ricardo Polanco, Natalia Téllez, Fabrizio Santini, Seo Ju Park
María Chacón, Sebastián Zurita and Guiseppe Gamba.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcos Bucay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Any movie with “dolphin” in the title is pretty much pre-certified “kid-friendly,” and “Dolphin Island” certainly honors that.

It’s a lightly-charming Bahamas travelogue with a teen, her dolphin friend and her fisherman grandpa who just might lose custody of her to her “other” grandparents — rich American cityfolk.

The plot could have been cooked up over a conch fritters and beer lunch, the drama is that predictable. And the acting’s uneven. But the adorable trained dolphin, the “island time” pacing and often flattering depiction of Bahamian life make it family viewing of the “Can we take a vacation THERE?” variety.

Annabelle (Tyler Jade Nixon) is a 15 year-old who loves on her grandpa’s aged fishing boat and whose day starts checking the stone crab traps and poking around for conch, and playing around with Mitzi, her dolphin DFF.

School comes after that, after her colorfully-named granddad, Jonah Coleridge, has used any excuse to bluster about keeping their “bourgeois” creditors at bay or break into song. He’s played by British stage actor Peter Woodward, who is the film’s great delight. His plummy locutions lend a literary, salted air to the picture and he generally classes up the joint.

Mitzi? She chatters and squeaks and leaps and picks up trash with her snout whenever she leaves the family aquatic center where they all live. It’s supposedly a non-profit “research” lagoon, but looks more like your typical dolphin training, “swim with the dolphins” private enterprise operation, wholly downplayed in the movie.

Their “beach bums on a permanent holiday” idyll is interrupted by the social worker (Dionne Lea) who coins that phrase to describe Jonah, who reminds her a little too much of her ex-husband to be “a good parent.”

A lawyer (Bob Bledsoe) everyone confuses for a “pirate” on first meeting — “Hey, I OWN a SUIT!” — is another interrupting. Barrister Carbunkle (ahem) has been retained by the “other” grandparents to get custody of the kid. He’s well-versed in the way things work in “de islands.”

“Money goes a long way here. And if you will just let me take a pile of it” and spread it around (bribes), this will all happen in a (slow walked) flash.

All this happens just as Annabelle is discovering peer parties and a cute boy (Aaron Burrows) who picks up cash by picking pockets, offering them back to the “You just dropped this” tourists, and is invariably offered a “reward” for being so thoughtful.

The movie’s limited locations and incidents and amateurish bit players betray its modest budget. Its cut-and-paste script, lack of focus on where the audience’s interests lie (in the kids, the water and the dolphin) betray limited ambition, and maybe sticking with the actors they know will deliver.

It could be a Bahamian Tourism Board production if it weren’t for the casual corruption, lax legal, child and animal welfare standards on display.

But it’s diverse by design, sunny and as I say the dolphin is as adorable as dolphins unfailingly are. If you’re looking for something beyond Disney+ or the hormones and conspicuous consumption of virtually every series and streaming movie made for this audience, it’s worth a watch.

MPA Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: Peter Woodward, Tyler Jade Nixon, Dionne Lee, Aaron Burrows and Bob Bledsoe

Credits: Directed by Mike Disa, script by Shaked Berenson, Mike Disa and Rolfe Kanefsky. An Entertainment Squad release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:31

Tiffany Haddish, Willem Dafoe and Tye Sheridan co-star in this poker and war crimes tale, “presented by Martin Scorsese,” a peer and an old pal backing 70s screenwriting/directing icon Schrader’s Sept. 10 release.

This looks brilliant. Hard to beat that cast.

This one plays up Annie Potts, Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon, and teases a certain Blues Brother. The kids have been given a “Stranger Things” build up in the first trailer. This one emphasizes the geek tech, as well.

What I’m nostalgic about is remembering the time I asked Jason Reitman how much he figured he owed his start in Hollywood to his “magic surname,” and how bent he got about the idea that there’s “nepotism” in the movie business.

Ahem. You were saying, Mr. Son-of-Reitman?

Thanksgiving…

A little “Invisible Man” styled horror from Searchlight, this one opens August 20.

We have just enough time to settle in for the fun ride that “Jungle Cruise” might have been before the rug is almost wholly pulled out from under us.

Dwayne Johnson turns up the charm and charisma as everybody’s favorite theme park ride skipper, Capt. Frank Wolff. He’s a con artist, but “It’s only a scam if you fall for it.” He’s a smart aleck tour guide — “We know that of all the jungle cruises you could have taken….ours was the cheapest.” He’s entirely too fond of puns. “I used to work in an orange juice factory…But I got canned.”

And those go over with the tourists as well as they ever have.

“Mommy, please make him stop.“

Johnson has unexpectedly effortless chemistry with Emily Blunt, who plays Lily Houghton, a somewhat swashbuckling, ever-so-English scientist/researcher who wants to hire him to search for this enchanted Amazonian tree with healing powers.

“If you’re a believer in legends, you should believe in curses, too,” he warns her. “Is there a single thing about you I can trust?” she wants to know.

Paul Giamatti is introduced as an upriver monopolist and threat to Capt. Frank’s tour boat trade, Jesse Plemons makes a perfectly fleshy-faced Teutonic villain, a German prince also looking for a Tree of Life, one possessing “The Tears of the Moon” — blooms which can heal most anything.

Something like that could come in handy in pre-penicillin 1916, in the middle of World War I.

When the formidable Édgar Ramírez (“Point Break,” “Hands of Stone, “Yes Day”) as a supernatural Spanish conquistador, shows up, we go along with it, all part of the “African Queen/Pirates of the Caribbean” mashup that’s being served up. He’s got the Javier Bardem/Bill Nighy role.

But at some point, director Jaume Collet-Serra (“The Orphan,” “House of Wax”) remembers he’s not Spielberg, who made “Raiders of the Lost Ark” after “Sugarland Express and after “1941.” He’s not Gore Verbinski, fresh off the glorious farce “Mouse Hunt” when he launched “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

This “African Queen/Pirates/Raiders” romp, with all its light “Romancing the Stone” potential, goes dark and violent and CGI production-designed to death. Collet-Serra plays up the script’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God” elements and utterly loses the thread. In punning terms, the “jungle” gets the better of him.

“Jungle Cruise” is a gorgeous-looking lark, with teeming jungles, towering waterfalls, a half-sized German U-Boat and a “cruise” boat — La Quila — that looks like the zombie African Queen.

Lily Houghton brings along her fey fop of a brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) who “comes out,” something of a first for a Disney family action film. We get our first gay double-entendre from him, and a less printable second.

“Gosh, there’s certainly a lot of you, isn’t there?”

And we’re treated to a spirited sail up river (and yet “down” rapids) towards the corner of Amazonia that legend says was home to this magical tree, with shifty Capt. Frank repeating “You’re gonna BEG me to turn back” and labeling the first woman of science he’s ever met as “Pants,” thanks to her attire.

As her hired captain, he’s just “Skippy” to her.

Giamatti may mostly be lost in the story early on, but there’s enough nonsense to atone for that.

Still, the digital snakes, toucans and piranhas — “Better eat them before they eat you!” — are joined by Capt. Frank’s half-convincing digital jaguar, something of a let-down.

The jokes wane and the tone darkens and the charm just drains straight out of “Jungle Cruise.”

Collet-Serra spoils a bravura opening, with Blunt giving us a taste of Johnny Depp/Orlando Bloom derring do as Lily tricks the sexist, dismissive Royal Society out of its map of that jungle she wants to cruise to find that tree she insists really exists.

He wastes Johnson summoning up decades and decades of Disney Jungle Cruise theme-park ride nostalgia — the puns, the wisecracks, the dire warnings — “Everything you see wants to kill you, and can.”

It’s a film that wants to be a little of this, a lot of that and funny in the bargain. You want to like it so much that you can sense Disney getting a new franchise out of it, even if it doesn’t quite come off. But if they do sequels, they’d bloody well better hire somebody who knows comedy to film them.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of adventure violence

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Paul Giamatti, Jesse Plemons, Jack Whitehall,
Veronica Falcón and Édgar Ramírez.

Credits: Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, script by Glenn Ficara and John Requa. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:07

Sept 17 this doc about a musical bio documentary of the musician, gay icon, signature guitar line star St Vincent comes out and we find out where “things went horribly wrong.”

For once, you can’t blame that on the casting of Dakota Johnson. Then again, she is in it.

Bet her former tour mate David Byrne is kicking himself that he didn’t think of this first. Has a whiff of “True Stories.”

Much and all due respect to the gent who did “Hamilton” and that “In the Heights” New York tuner that opened back in June.

But “Summertime” is the musical of this summer. It bounces and tickles and touches and shares the credit, the rhymes and the love among some 22 poets, rappers and singers.

This LA “musical” with rap and slam poetry, dance and mariachi and folk-pop is the “Slacker” of musicals — borrowing its storytelling style from Richard Linklater’s groundbreaking indie comedy. The camera starts on one person in one setting, and attention is handed off, scene to scene, character to character, with some folks returning for a second or third helping in a different setting.

That makes it tightly-choreographed, no matter how loose and liberating and freestyling its performers get. “Summertime” saunters out of the gate, works up to a trot, and takes a bit of a breather in the third act. It’s still brimming over with street life and the occasional laugh.

Mila Cuda skates and plays the guitar in an intro set at the Venice Breakwater, where “all the winged dreams around me scribble footnotes in our city’s story.”

A prissy, hyper-critical video essayist, food, architecture and urban culture critic (Tyris Winter) launches into a tirade for the ages at an overpriced eatery that wants $15 for an over-decorated slice of toast. This life of the party shows up again and again in the film, lamenting changing storefronts — “The colonizer has given us…blouses!” and bemoaning the lack of cheeseburgers in the diet, dining pretension and avocado toast capital of the world.

A graffiti “artist,” a Korean 20something cook, a side hustling street vendor turned limo driver and a feuding couple whose therapist prescribes her book, “How to Rap Battle Her Demons” all get their say. And our opening serenader (Cuda) returns to shut down a bus rider who complains about same sex public displays of affection.

“I’m gay as a wool flannel on a summer day…gay like grandma ‘doesn’t get it’…gay like too-short fingernails!”

Amaya Blankenship and Bene’t Benton and others swap definitions in “Home Is,” as in “Home is the only salon that I know in this city is closing,” the only place (Blankenship complains) that can be trusted with “braiding me armor every morning.”

Rappers (Bryce Banks, Austin Antoine) try and succeed in getting themselves discovered, a Rodriguez sound-like serenades a lovelorn lady on a train, a Latina teen bickers with her “Lady Macbeth” mother over lipstick, one and all spitting “that emotional fire” in each other’s and the city’s faces.

As I say, “Summertime” gets a little gassed by the third act. There’s such a thing as “performative poseur” fatigue, and rappers and slam poets push that button even as they push the envelope.

But the energy, humor and wit of the early scenes carry it. And the pathos of the later scenes, along with a burger joint break down and the fun in discovering the secret to any rapper’s success as a novelty act (rapping about “my mom”) make even the slow jams go down easy, leaving a warm, fuzzy afterglow that makes LA seem nicer and maybe a trifle less superficial than its image.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout and sexual referencesCast: Tyris Winter, Anna Osuna, Amaya Blankenship, Bryce Banks, Austin Antoine, Gordon Ip,
Bene’t Benton, Mila Cuda, Maia Mayor, Sun Park, others

Credits: Directed by Carlos López Estrada, script by Paolina Acuña-González, Jason Alvarez and Austin Antoine.