Movie Nation

In his wry, goofy and prescient radio series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — later turned into books, a TV series and a feature film — author Douglas Adams wrote of “Teasers.”

“‘Teasers’ are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them… They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul, who no one’s ever going to believe, and then strut up and down in front of ‘em wearing silly antennae on their head and making “beep, beep” noises. Rather childish really.”

If you take the UFO hunting documentary “On the Trail of UFOs: Dark Sky” the least bit seriously, think of it as a celebration of “teasers.” Because if there’s a corner of America that would make most people roll their eyes as a font for “the unexplained” and UFOs, it might be “wild, wonderful West Virginia.” If you’re an alien “rich kid” who wants to do flybys and landings and “visitations” in a place where few will take the eyewitnesses seriously, the Appalachian heartlands would have to be awfully attractive.

Ohio filmmaker Seth Breedlove, who’s made movies about Mothman, “The Flatwoods Monster” and a TV series with the same title, “On the Trail of UFOs” (Is this merely a re-editing of that?), and his Vegas-based hostess/star, Shannon Legro, trek all over West Virginia, “collecting stories,” cataloging the state’s colorful history with “the unexplained.”

The extremely credulous pair visit many folks who relate “episodes of high strangeness” — often from their own youth. More often they speak with other local “collectors” of stories relating this or that second or third or fourth-hand tale, some covered by local newspapers in the 1950s and ’60s.

The eyewitnesses are generally straightforward, if relying on very old memories of something they saw and didn’t understand at this or that time. The local “experts” are a more breathless lot, pondering “lights in the sky” through the lens of conspiracies — “secret military bases” and connections to coal mines or chemical plants, and the arrival of the first “documented” encounter with “Men in Black,” perhaps a chap who called himself “Indrid Cold” who might have been trying to get witnesses to keep quiet about what they claimed they saw.

A funny sidebar. Lowell Cunningham, who created the comic book “Men in Black,” is also from Appalachia — Tennessee — and told me the story of how a friend introduced this urban legend to him while he was in college in Knoxville. Black SUVs near campus? “That’s what the ‘Men in Black’ would drive,” the friend told him. Odd to think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as Appalachian lore.

Funnier sidebar — Did Douglas Adams ever visit West Virginia? Is his “lying on my back in the Austrian Alps” staring at the sky “inspiration” for the radio series and all that it spawned a fib? Because a lot of what pops up in this documentary, the yarns spun by the gullible (“You wanna talk about a BOMBSHELL” to the credulous, has a familiar Adams ring to it.

“Hollow Earth,” alien visitors in “haz-mat suits” before anybody knew what they were called, military secrets, “The Grafton Monster,” “The Green Monster,” “Bashful Billy,” Point Pleasant’s “Mothman,” “The Flatwoods Monster” and its associated museum, “On the Trail of UFOs” covers a lot of ground and even points its own camera at the dark sky with some fellow enthusiasts and gets images that will convince…nobody.

The most credible material here might be the samples of 1950s “flying saucer mania” movies, connecting all this to Atomic Age zeitgeist in perhaps the most paranoid corner of a pretty paranoid country.

The most interesting interviewee is the late West Virginia folklorist, storyteller and paranormal buff Susan Sheppard, who relates the lore matter-of-factly, noting how “stories are told and retold” in that part of the world, where population density is thin, economic and educational opportunities are more limited but yarn spinning is an Irish and Scotch-Irish birthright.

With the military adding to the chorus of “There’s something out there,” documentaries like this are flying out of the editing (or re-editing) bays of anyone who has “collected” stories the way these two have. Breedlove and his star, with her sing-songy, new-to-this-practice narration and deadpan softball questioning of this or that witness, aren’t the most polished to uncap a lens on this subject. Not by a long shot.

But that’s almost an asset. If you’re saying, on camera, “I’ve finally seen something that I can’t identify,” that kind of hype, after swallowing every under-sourced story fed you for the first hour of “On the Trail of UFOs,” has its own naive charm. The poor dear.

Because these folks, in front of and behind the camera, are why “teasers” haven’t touched down at JPL, MIT or Cheyenne Mountain. Not yet, anyway.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Shannon Legro, Seth Breedlove, Susan Sheppard, many others

Credits: Directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:25

Submitted for your approval — one loner, a hermit of the Pacific Northwest who spends his days and nights with an unnamed “Pig,” with whom he hunts truffles for sale to the swanky eateries of Portlandia.

He and the pig are America’s “Truffle Hunters,” and the hermit’s devotion to the prize porker/sniffer rivals that of the men who love the dogs who do the fungi sniffing in the European forests in that documentary.

Like the French dog owners of the hit documentary, Oregon’s “Robin” (Nicolas Cage) doesn’t take it well when his “Pig”is stolen.

But there’s another connection which the savvy viewer will pick up on in this film. Why did the filmmaker cast Adam Arkin, son of Oscar winner Alan Arkin, as the rich gourmand who has designs, perhaps, on cornering the market for truffles through nefarious means?

Well, perhaps that filmmaker saw Arkin’s glorious comic turn in the ’80s TV comedy “Northern Exposure.” Who was “Adam,” in that quirky series?

He was a hermit, a phantom of the forests near Cicely, Alaska. He had a bad temper and a desire to disconnect from the Human Race.

Adam was a walking, talking, erudite clear and present danger, a threat owing to his “CIA” ties. He could kill a man with a spoon.

Why a spoon? Because erudite misanthrope Adam had ties to the “other CIA,” too — the Culinary Institute of America- America’s premiere cooking school.

“Pig” is basically a soulful revisiting of Adam and his quixotic quest to be left alone and cook gourmet food and become a “legend of the forest” who was once a legend at CIA — the cooking school.

Virtually everybody reviewing “Pig” has pointed out the “John Wick with a Pig” expectations the movie lures you in with, only to upend those as Robin turns out to be both menacing and zen in his serenity, Messianic in his willingness to suffer and his simple devotion to a beloved companion.

“Adam,” on the other hand, would have been a great candidate to “Go John Wick” on those who stole his pig. His threats would have been palpable and oh so colorful. He’d have dispatched many a pignapper, probably using just a spoon.

Saving that for the sequel?

How mad are you allowed to get at a schizophrenic?

That’s the premise driving “Broken Diamonds,” a dramedy that may start “crazy cute,” but which doesn’t back away from the ugly truths about mental illness.

“Your sister didn’t ruin your life, her illness did,” a therapist lectures Scott Weaver (Ben Platt of the “Pitch Perfect” movies).

“Same thing.”

We meet Scott at his going away party at the restaurant where he’s quit his job. He’s packed his place, has a “For Sale” sign in his Mazda and makes daily calls trying to locate where his long-ago-ordered passport is.

He’s moving to Paris, he tells everyone. He’s going to be a writer.

That’s when he gets a call. His father’s died, Dad’s second wife tells him.

“Pick up your sister on the way.”

He does. But Cindy (Lola Kirke of “American Woman,” “Mozart in the Jungle” and “American Made”) won’t get out of the car, won’t look upon the corpse or talk to Dad’s widow (Yvette Nicole Brown).

Scott collects a few effects, takes the deed to the house he and his sister inherited and drops his older sister off at the mental hospital that’s been her home for a pretty long time.

Cindy’s bubbly, a tad manic and full of ideas about having Dad’s ashes “turned into a diamond,” totally a thing. “If I gave it to you, would you pawn me?”

Scott? He’s focused on getting out the door and out of the country. Naturally, that’s when he gets the second call. His sister’s “issues” at her hospital have gotten out of hand. She’s evicted. There’s another place that will have room for her…in two weeks.

Before he’s gotten her home she’s thoughtlessly damaged the car he’s desperate to sell. Before he can get a bead on getting a quick sale of their father’s house, she’s set his apartment on fire, torching the passport she just signed for on delivery. He finds her staring at the lamp she’s ignited.

“Did you not know if this was real?”

Counting the pills in her various prescriptions, he may get the answer he doesn’t want.

Kirke plays Cindy as mercurial and cute — but a walking collection of triggers whose delusions include going to the party of a high school friend (Debs Howard) who became an actress, to “finding a job” to live independently — to living independently.

Scott, “guilt tripped” by her therapist (Catherine Lough Haggquist) indulges her, but Cindy can’t fake sanity long enough to get through a job interview.

“I can’t stay here, no no no no no no…”

Irrationality is the rule.

Most of our sympathies are directed at Scott, with flashbacks showing just a hint of the horror Cindy experienced, and of growing up in a house where one child has taken ill and sucked up all the stability and happiness as she did. But Scott’s either developed a martyr complex or simply decided he deserves to run away, and Platt makes these diagnoses understandable, defensible and still not very attractive.

There’s an honesty to Steve Waverly’s script that makes its light moments irritating, its darker ones heartbreaking. A soulful, broken-hearted soundtrack (songs by Julia-Jean Baptiste, Strong Asian Mothers, Nathan Reich and Mia Dyson) underscores the sadness of it all, a life lost, lives around it shattered.

We immerse ourselves in the story and hope for the best even as we expect the worst. All we really know by the end is what Scott’s journey is designed to teach him. He’s allowed to get mad at Cindy. He just has to get over such furies quickly and realize it’s the illness he hates.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and a crude gesture

Cast: Ben Platt, Lola Kirke, Debs Howard, Yvette Nicole Brown

Credits: Directed by Peter Sattler, script by Steve Waverly. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:30

“The Boy Behind the Door” is a lean, reasonably tight B-movie thriller about two kidnapped Little Leaguers and how they respond to their plight.

It’s sentimental yet nervy, kind of predictable and a tad slow-footed. But it gets to you in all the right ways and in all the right places.

Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey) are best buds, “friends till the end” they promise, who long to escape their corner of South Dakota.

Instead, they’re clubbed unconscious and kidnapped on their way to Little League. Kevin is yanked out of the car trunk, screaming and crying. Bobby is locked-in and left behind. Which gives him time to weep and scream and then reason and kick his way out.

But making his escape, his conscience and the sound of Kevin’s cries drag him back. He will slip into the house and free his friend, come what may. His first communication with his shackled pal has good news and bad. Their tormenter “is gone.”

“What about the OTHER one?”

Movies like this are filmmaker and film character problem-solving exercises. The kidnapper dialogue may be banal and empty — “You don’t have to hide from me. I just wanna TALK.”

What matters is the possible solutions Bobby and Kevin see to their plight. Can I use this? What if I try that?

The stumbling blocks are stronger, murderous adults, the remoteness of their location, old fashioned locks, the mystery of “land lines” and manual transmission cars, and newfangled gadgets meant to entrap or disable.

The young players do a decent job of suggesting the terror their perilous situation makes them feel. The villains are villainous in some of the usual ways.

Co-writers/directors David Charbonier and Justin Powell may slow-walk some of the between-fights action. Victims are always getting the drop on their tormentors and leaving the job unfinished, leaving a weapon behind, not getting out when the getting’s good.

But that’s part of the fun.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Lonnie Chavis, Ezra Dewey

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Charbonier and Justin Powell. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:28

The thing about parenting is that we’re doing it wrong. And our parents were no better. Their parents? No going to win any prizes either.

And if even Canadians can’t get it right, Québécois to boot, what prayer do we mere mortals have of not raising screwed-up kids?

“The Guide to the Perfect Family” is a bittersweet comedy about “parenting today,” the endlessly indulgent practices, the utterly ineffectual counter-measures pitched by “the experts” and the bad or at least far from foolproof “rules” and ideas the elders preach and preach and preach.

This French-Canadian film is framed within a private school’s parent-teacher group meeting that turns into a near-wilding. Privileged, hovering, “woke,” and indulgent parents try to one-up each other about what the school isn’t doing, what their little angels need to flourish, and how everything about the school day — from meals and curricula to expectations and “nurturing” — should bend towards coddling each and every one of their “above average” kids.

Martin, played by co-screenwriter Louis Morissette, takes in this, can’t help but notice where his ridiculously indulgent young wife (Catherine Chabot) sits on the spectrum, and all but rolls his eyes. His journey in this story is one of self-awareness. He’s as bad as the rest.

They are raising a five-year-old monster. Mathis (Xavier Lebel) tosses aside meals, throws things at people and talks back, and all his parents do is mollify his latest rage at how the world isn’t catering to his every whim.

Martin’s 16 year-old daughter from an earlier relations, Rose (Emilie Bierre) seems like the normal one, the “good” kid. She’s knuckling down and making 11th grade pay off. She must, “so you don’t end up a cashier at a 7-11” (in French with English subtitles).

There’s a vast chalkboard covered with all the things scheduled in both kids’ lives — hockey and dance and tutoring for her, day care for him, where he’s about to “graduate.”

“The Guide” reminds us that this is a new phenomenon, and that it’s the sort of thing that can’t withstand any sober step-back-and-take-a-look-at-that assessment.

“I just do” what everybody else does, social media mad Marie-Soleil (Chabot) chatters. She does along with the day-care “ceremony” the way Martin and his extended family indulge her need to dress them up for social media cards, showing off their “perfect family.

But at work, Martin sees the fruit of this “every child is special/every kid deserves a trophy” parenting. A new underling, the son of a senior colleague, is a lazy, self-absorbed snowflake, all “I can’t do well under pressure” when the idea that he’ll put in a full day at the office is broached.

“This is a job, not a hobby,” the kid is reminded. “I NEED you” to do the work.

“I’ll think about it,” is all Mr. “I don’t want to end up like my parents,” even if that means quitting and moving back in with his parents.

All this comes to a head when Rose is suspended from school and his kid’s secret, stressed and rebelling by “checking out” life is exposed. Martin and the girl’s professional dancer mother (Isabelle Guérard) have some serious thinking/talking/deciding to do.

“The Guide” is great at showing how widespread this attitude and these behaviors are in the culture, especially in this affluent, white Francophone one. And the script upends the standard expectations set up by all the “What ARE these parents THINKING?”

There is no Madea here to threaten a dope slap or a “RAISE your kids” lecture. Martin’s brother and his wife seem in an indulgence/fad-following (“Mathis and I are both gluten-intolerant.”) contest. But their gruff dad (Gilles Renaud) isn’t much help.

“Kids today have no fear — no fear of their parents, teachers, cops, nothing. FEAR is a good motivator!”

Bierre and Morissette are well-paired, with her playing classic secretive (and then lashing out) teen rebellion and him as your standard issue “distracted” by work and his cell phone dad.

No character quite descends into caricature, and as superficial and predictable as “The Guide” can be, I appreciated the sober, adult tone. None of this gooey, wish-fulfillment fantasy “Parenthood” easy-answers-only, please. These are hard questions, and the quick call for “medication” by some takes as big a hit as “this is how you raise a brat.”

Reading all the latest “You’re screwing your kid up” books, paying lip service to “listening” to your kid and trying to follow mercurial whims of psychotherapy’s “treatments” (suggesting its role in creating Generation Brat) might make you more open to seeing the obvious.

But even putting down the phone, limiting what the boss can demand of you, and paying attention is no guarantee of a happy, well-adjusted and “successful” kid.

The best take-away the film leaves you with is that it doesn’t really “reflect on you,” which is kind of a cop-out. But simply “seeing” that, and starting to “see” the child in her or his own light can’t hurt.

Which is all the Hippocratic Oath of Parenting really demands, isn’t it? “First, do no harm.”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, profanity, discussions of drug abuse

Cast: Louis Morissette, Catherine Chabot, Isabelle Guérard, Xavier Lebel, Gilles Renaud and Emilie Bierre

Credits: Directed by Richard Trogi, script by François Avard, Jean-François Léger and Louis Morissette

Running time: 1:42

A $31.65 million opening is nothing to sneeze at, but the reason”Space Jam: A New Legacy” won this weekend was the plunge off a cliff “Black Widow” took after opening over $80 million last weekend.

It’s streaming in addition to being in theaters, so I guess the comic book crowd all saw it last weekend, and any repeat viewing is going to Disney+. And it still added another $26.3 million, even as it fell off a whopping 68%.

Not sure if this bodes anything for the future unless studios push their streaming launch back a week or two or announce figures for premium priced home viewing.

“Space Jam” leapt out of the gate with a $13 million kids out of school Friday, while “Widow” managed mere $8.

“Escape Room: Tournament of Champions” didn’t bring out the horror crowd. I saw it with one other person Saturday. It did around $8.8 million, $10 million less than the original film opened with, per Exhibitor Relations.

“F9” did another $7.6, it’s over $154 and will pass “Quiet Place 2” any minute now.

“Boss Baby: Family Business” added another $4.7 million. A $44 million windfall for a worn out brand.

“The Forever Purge” added $4.1 million more to Universal’s coffers. $35 million in total.

“Roadrunner,” the Anthony Bourdain documentary, earned over $1.9 million, all gravy as it’ll make HBO Max and CNN fans happy and sad later this year.

Nic Cage and his “Pig” opened at $945k in limited release. “That’ll do,” says everybody making a “Babe” joke.

“A Quiet Place 2″ added another $2.3 million, climbing towards $175 or so.”

“Zola” should have been a sleeper hit. But nobody went, it’s lost screens and did $240k this weekend, $4.2 million total.No wonder A24 made it’s deal with the Devil (HBO) this week.

This August is positively jammed with movies, all of them COVID delayed.

This is one I’ve been looking forward to. Caught this trailer in my trip to the cinema today.

Good cast, a real singer — an Oscar winner, to boot — imitating the inimitable Aretha Franklin.

Forest Whitaker, and Marc Maron as legendary producer Jerry Wexler.

Stephen Lang returns as the blind guy you don’t want to underestimate if you’re a housebreaker.

This one comes out August 13.

This is the Ireland/UK trailer for this August release, a post-climate apocalypse romantic thriller about people losing themselves in nostalgia, a past they can isolation-tank themselves back to, as the planet couldn’t get its act together in time to stave off disaster.

Seems prescient, cautionary, and not necessarily like an “escape to the movies.” But we do love our dystopias.

“Westworld” producer Lisa Joy wrote and directed this August 20 release.

You’ve got to hand it to the screenwriters who brainstorm the ever-more-elaborate ways to off people in these clockwork killing pictures — the “Saw” series and their evil stepchild, the “Escape Room” movies.

Are escape rooms still a thing? I see abandoned versions of such enterprises in empty malls I pass through. A fad that’s done?

Doesn’t matter. Knowing what they are and how they work is the lingua franca of this tiny corner of horror.

“Escape Room: Tournament of Champions” serves up death by electrocution, (literal) acid rain, mechanically-engineered quicksand, laser slicing and drowning in just 89 minutes.

Who could live through that? This is, of course, the whole point.

We had two survivors from 2019’s “Escape Room,” not to be confused with several other variations of that title. Puzzle-whiz Zoey (Taylor Russell) and nerdy Ben (Logan Miller) solved the murderous puzzle cooked up by an oligarchical entity called Minos, an enterprise that entraps people in deadly, ornate and obscenely expensive “rooms” where the hapless victims die, on camera, for rich subscribers.

Zoey is in therapy when the sequel begins, looking for a cure for her mania. “Every single thing you see is a ‘clue,'” her therapist (Lucy Newman-Williams) complains. But no breakthroughs today, “Our time is up.”

Zoey talks Ben, slavishly devoted to her since “You saved my life” in the first film, into driving them to New York to seek clues and find these Mino multi-millionaires who are cooking up puzzles that kill “players” who don’t realize the stakes.

But events conspire to put them in a subway car with four strangers. As the car goes off planned route, lights flickers and ominous noises thunk and clink around it. They realize that the other four passengers on board (Indya Moore, Thomas Cocquerel, Holland Roden, Carlito Olivero) are also survivors of their respective escape rooms.

“So that makes this, what, Tournament of Champions?”

They’re promptly jolted, prodded, threatened and lured from one “room” to the next, getting picked-off along the way. They and we must reason our way through clues that nobody under that sort of stress would handle all that well. Winging it is never a good idea.

“It’s worth a try.”

“Yeah, like nothing bad happens when we touch things!”

The puzzles don’t play fair with the viewer. We could never piece together what the players do, and neither could they without the screenplay’s “obvious” (not in the least) clues.

The clockwork nature of the killer-rooms is mimicked by the script, which barely has time to sketch in what this character’s backstory might be, what that person’s worst fear is.

With every room a ticking clock killing machine, who has time for that?

That deprives the actors of empathetic characters, and breaks whatever emotional pact such movies make with the audience. There’s one decent moment of pathos here, and a dozen blown chances for more.

But director Adam Robitel must’ve gotten a bonus for every second under 90 minutes “Tournament of Champions” runs. There’s just “no time” for anything like that.

The actors could have given us more, but the mad rush to get where EVERYbody knows this thing is going (with an odd wrinkle or two) deprives them of that and us of the “escape” a better movie would have delivered.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror/peril and strong language

Cast: Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Indya Moore, Holland Roden, Carlito Olivero

Credits: Directed by Adam Robitel, script by Will Honley, Maria Melnick and Daniel Tuch. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:28