Movie Nation

You don’t have to be into the art rock/glam rock/proto-punk synth pop pranksters Sparks to get a kick out of “The Sparks Brothers,” the definitive documentary history that fanboy Edgar Wright created in their honor.

The director of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and “Hot Fuzz” is enthusiastic enough for all of us. And in this playful, insightful and thorough film — it’s two hours and twenty minutes long — that enthusiasm is contagious.

What Wright does — in telling us the story of Ron and Russell Mael, quirky Californians who blew up in Europe and never quite got there in North America — is let us share his and other generations of Sparks fans the delight of discovery.

In the ’70s and ’80s, most of us ran across Sparks the same way — on TV. “Oh, the band with Hitler on keyboards. You have GOT to see this!” Legions of their fans, from Wright and Mike Myers to Jane Wiedlin, Weird Al Yankovic, Fred Armisen, Flea and Beck, recount their encountering this “eccentric,” “mysterious” and “quite interesting, but you can’t quite put your finger on it” duo.

Many of us gave their odd art-rock/glam-act processed-vocals tunes a listen, a laugh and a pass. But others, many of them giving on-camera testimonials here, took the tack that early producer Todd Rundgren embraced.

“It’s this weird? Isn’t this great?”

The Maels? They just kept on changing, trying new styles, almost always ahead of the musical curve as they did it. They started out as the Halfnelsons (not their first band) sounding a lot like The Kinks, with a Zappa/Captain Beefheart sensibility. And every year or three, they’d evolve into something new, always with these satire-centric stage performances that played up Russell’s pop star handsome face and songwriter/keyboardist Ron’s ludicrous Fuhrer look.

That became their mystique. Actor Jason Schwartzman appears here and declares he doesn’t want to see this movie because he wants to preserve that mystery, but he “will see it, because I’m in it.”

That play-it-as-a-lark tone fits the music, appearing on LPs with titles like “Kimono My House,” “A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing” and “Angst in my Pants” (25 albums, over 500 songs in all). And it matches the movie, which uses comical moments from their stage shows, clay stop-motion animation, archival footage and fresh interviews to tell their story.

The songs can be deep, were often ahead of their time, and wryly comment on their pursuit of rock/pop stardom and just what it’s all about, this “business” of a music career that started in the ’60s and continues to this day approached through “creative recklessness.”

The suggestion that Sparks needed to make “music you can dance to” prompted them to cook up “Music That You Can Dance To,” described by British DJ Jonathan Ross as “a perfectly crafted sell-out pop song. — except that it isn’t.” Sparks could work in many a pop idiom, master it and mock it all at the same time.

They changed record companies constantly, and with every change, the backing band changed. Many of those musicians appear here, cheerfully grateful for their place in this story, not terribly resentful at their interchangeability.

In “Dick Around,” when singer/frontman Russell sings Ron’s lyrics, “All I do now is dick around,” he’s speaking a truth, ridiculing the fact that he’s letting us look behind the curtain, and celebrating the fact that guys their age (guys in their ’70s) still get to do just that — record, perform, put a lot of effort into repetitious tunes that sound like no effort at all.

They grew up on films, went to UCLA and at various points almost made movies with Jacques Tati (“Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday”) and Tim Burton (an adaptation of the manga “Mai”), and finally have one coming out this year (“Annette”). That should top their screen debut, as an amusement park band in the ’70s bomb “Rollercoaster.”

But they needn’t fret over their legacy and whether, as a “cult band” they’ll be remembered. Wright has paid the ultimate fan homage to Sparks here, a movie so adoring and infectiously fun that they’ll live on in the “music films” queue, later the “classics,” when it finally arrives on Netflix for as long as there is a Netflix.

Cast: Russell Mael, Ron Mael, Todd Rundgren, Jane Wiedlin, Giorgio Moroder, Pamela Des Barres, Mike Myers, Weird Al Yankovic, Jason Schwartzman, Beck, Flea

Credits: Directed by Edgar Wright. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:20

A trailer plus “explainer” bits.

“Origin story” explained by Gemma Arterton, Ralph Fiennes, etc. Because you know, it’s been years since we’ve seen one of these.

Djimon and Colin and the rest are finally in theaters Dec. 22.

Here’s one of the side benefits of spending a lifetime in journalism — learning to listen, paying attention to not just what people you’re interviewing say, but how they express it.

And if you don’t stop at merely taking notes, but record the conversations, you don’t just hear them once. As you’re transcribing someone’s exact words to quote them accurately, or editing audio for a broadcast interview, you hear the music of speech and the way people actually talk.

So when you hear a film character remark, “Not even in death did he show up,” you wonder if you’ve stumbled into a vampire movie, if the actress blew a line or if cinematographer turned writer-director Emily Skye has never listened to the other half of a conversation in her life.

The dialogue she cooks up for her half-cocked debut, “River,” is some of the most trite, atonal and English-mangling I’ve ever had the burden of reviewing.

And since she has her heroine, River (Mary Cameron Rogers, not awful) talk almost incessantly in that laziest of storytelling tropes, “voice over narration,” line after line of pointless banalities and inane cliches and verbal crutches and the like, that’s pretty much all you need to know about “River,” which takes its title from the Carolina woman who comes home after her mother’s death and sort of picks up the life she left behind a year before.

We hear “take ownership of your life” and “I just want you to live a full life…don’t be like me,” and “It’s OK to grieve” and “just take it day by day” and “a year is a long time” and “We love you, Riv, and we’re here for you.”

“Why does everyone here keep TELLING me that?” “What does that even MEAN?” Still, in my voice-over I know, “I can DO this.”

River takes up with her old BFF Amanda (Alexandra Rose), goes back to work for the rural locally made jams and notions shop, run by a licensed psychotherapist (how handy) played by Courtney Gains.

And she flirts with the idea of taking up with her old beau, Jamie (Rob Marshall), who just got engaged.

All of which point to her being a tad off in the head, which is engineered into the “story” because this is no-budget science fiction. As in River disappears for a week with no idea what happened to her. As in her friends pick up on her walking blackouts. As in River never saw “Fire in the Sky,” but her writer-director did.

The leads are competent, with a few wincingly-obvious exceptions. But this dull, tin-eared script, a trite story leadenly told, never gives them a chance.

Drown this one in the bathtub.

MPA Rating: unrated, PG-13ish

Cast: Mary Cameron Rogers, Alexandra Rose, Rob Marshall and Courtney Gains

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emily Skye. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:32

July 16, prepare to be amazed. Chatty trees?

“Meander” is a tense torture porn parable about a tormented soul further tormented and tortured when she’s kidnapped and held hostage in the most elaborate hamster-maze ever conceived.

If you let yourself get caught up in the logistics of how this maze was conceived, financed and built, and by whom, you’re kind of missing the point. But it’s easy to do. This is what Jigsaw would have cooked up with Bezos money and Musk tech.

I found it indifferently interesting, not remotely as gripping and visceral as say “Buried” with Ryan Reynolds stuffed into a coffin, or even “Rupture,” with Noomi Rapace trying to scheme her way out of a kidnapping.

Gaia Weiss plays Lisa, a French expat whom we meet on the road — literally. She’s a waitress, lying on a remote side road, as if waiting for somebody to get her life over with.

The Range Rover driver who picks her up (Peter Franzén) asks a lot of questions, says he’s a night watchman because “I don’t like people.” And then Lisa wakes up in a knee-and-elbow-padded sci-fi jumpsuit, with a wrist bracelet that serves as a light, a timer and we assume tracking device.

She’s in a dimly lit cubicle, barefoot, with no one answering her screams. But a sliding door opens, a crawlway is revealed, and she exits, starting down this or that shaft, led along like a mouse being manipulated, facing barbed wire and pathways that narrow or open up, ceilings that close down on her like a trash compactor, doors that clang open and shut, threatening to lop off a limb. And then there’s the acid and even fire.

She stumbles across a sizzled corpse, silently absorbs the idea that there’s alien tech that can fix her injuries so that she can proceed, and cheats death in its many forms. Otherwise, the movie’s over, right?

Writer-director Mathieu Turi’s settings point us to a fairly obvious solution and fairly early. Beyond the solution to the puzzle, there’s minimalist design, high-tech “traps” and a “ticking clock” that isn’t explained or dwelled up, a wasted plot element in a movie sadly in need of more urgency.

Weiss is a somewhat compelling heroine/surrogate for the viewer. But as the clues to her situation, the meaning of the “parable” at the heart of this torture chamber test and her “solutions” to the deadly dilemmas she’s presented with here play out, I found myself more curious than gripped by suspense, more impressed by the production design than invested in Lisa or by the “tests” she faces.

“Meander” abandons the reality it serves up for something instantly graspable as surreal. You make that leap, and the threat of fire, acid, assault by fellow “inmates” and the like grow less interesting with every passing minute.

It becomes a screen thriller you mentally set aside, like a puzzle with insufficient challenges to ever be worth tackling again.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Gaia Weiss, Peter Franzén

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mathieu Turi. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:30

“Twee” is a seriously small target to aim for in a romantic comedy, a real “go twee or go home” gamble. And when you swing and miss? Ouchie.

“Love Type D” is an ever-so-slight, daft but deflatingly-so Britcom that never quite gets the job done. A little charm, a little bittersweet humor born of hurt, but writer-director Sascha Collington and star Mauve Dermody can’t find the sweet spot, can’t make this somewhat promising premise come off.

Dermody (“2:22”) is Frankie, an Aussie transplant muddling through her days as a cubicle drone in a London firm that produces instruction manuals. She’s never been that lucky at love, but in Thomas, a fellow she met a year ago, she thinks she’s found a winner.

Then he sends his much-younger stepbrother (Rory Stroud), a posh, polite little nerd always in his Blackfriars School uniform, to dump her. He gives her the “You’re a wonderful person” and “wasn’t really looking for a relationship” and “awfully busy” speech.

“What kind of grown man sends a ten year-old child…”

“Actually, I’m 11.”

Alas, love is illogical. He’s also the “kind of grown man” she cannot get out of her head. Phone messages and showing up at his apartment aren’t going to give her closure or satisfaction. Stalking little Wilbur when she spies him going into a jewelers gives her the answer. “Too busy,” “not looking for a relationship,” Thomas (Oliver Farnworth) has taken up with somebody else, an astronaut who happens to be “hotter.”

So he lied, two-timed her and sent his kid stepbrother as his break-up proxy. Why is Frankie still obsessed with him? It turns out she’s a tad too accustomed to this sort of rejection. It turns out that Wilbur, whom she hassles, confides in and consults, has some answers. There’s this research company that has discovered the “Type D” gene, the one that predicts whether you’ll be the “dumper” or the “dumpee” in life. Wilbur’s read up on it.

Frankie finagles a way to be tested, finagles a way for her fellow cubicle drones to be tested and discovered that most everybody she knows is destined for “a life of celibacy” and “hobbies.” But perhaps there’s a way to “cure” this. Of course, Wilbur has some theories.

That adorable set-up is the vehicle for a lot of lame flashbacks in which Frankie remembers every bloke who ever dumped her — the motorcycle “rebel,” the “musician” who wrote an “I could do better than you” song about her that went viral. Frankie needs to track these fellows down.

Schemes involving hypnosis and communing with the dead offer a chuckle here, a wince there.

A movie that structurally resembles Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity” manages a cute moment or two, mainly in the scenes where a “grown woman” is taking advice — medical and personal — from a child. I laughed out loud once, and that required the distribution of elephant pheromones and Frankie’s attempt at being a sexy, sultry lounge singer.

The star’s likable enough. The germ of an idea is here. They’re aiming for the correct tone, but neither the script nor the players land on the “twee” bullseye.

MPA Rating: unrated, seriously PG, barely a hint of PG-13

Cast: Maeve Dermody, Rory Stroud and Oliver Farnworth

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sasha Collington. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:35

The presence of another Asian “dragon” cartoon on the calendar sentenced Sony’s “Wish Dragon” to a streaming release, on Netflix. Well, that and the lame “Aladdin in Modern Day China” premise.

But even though it’s got a magic lamp — OK, tea kettle — and genie who grants three wishes (um, dragon) — it’s not like the “Arabian Nights” have exclusive rights to that fairytale.

And it’s got John Cho, cracking wise, snobbing it up in the title role. The running gag here is that Long, the wish dragon, has been serving out his sentence for years. He doesn’t know from cell phones, “chariot made of steel” (buses) or “SHRIMP crisps.”

“How long have you been in this teapot?”

“Is it still the Qing Dynasty?”

Din and Li Na were friends in elementary school, fellow outcasts, children of the working poor and vowed to be “best friends forever.” Then her go-getter dad got them out and Din never sees her again.

Until she turns up as a billboard model and socialite when they hit their teens. He’s college bound, and a young man (voiced by Jimmy Wong) with a mission — to see Li Na again.

As a food delivery guy, he’s hustling up the cash to at least put himself in her presence. But that’s how he finds himself with a lamp, and darned if the lamp isn’t about to change his life. But how?

Long the dragon looks down on this “peasant boy” and judges him and offers up the usual “peasant folk” wishes — a suit of armor made of gold,” many palaces “made of gold,” etc.

The kid? He’s the only one who sees the dragon, but he’s got his plan and he won’t stray from it. If the darned dragon won’t fly to get him across town, he’ll take the bus. If he can’t make Li Na fall in love with him, he’ll figure that out on his own, too. He won’t “waste a wish” on any of the material things Long, who is in a hurry to get this over with, has in mind.

“Careful what you DON’T wish for,” the dragon purrs.

The gags in this East Asian Aladdin come from the sight gag gang — short goon, bulky goon both working for a tall, thin, MMA skilled boss goon — who also want the lang. And from Din’s accidental wishes — like Din needing to escape the gang’s clutches and mumbling “I wish I knew how to fight.”

Turns him into Jackie Chan, and make no mistake, the martial arts comedy is quick, stylized animated slapstick at its best. Hilarious.

Cho gets maximum mileage out of Long’s irritation at the modern world, overrun with “peasants.” His curses and oaths are period perfect. “Son of a CABBAGE FARMER!” “Great WALL of China!”

The Hollywood comedy made by a Japanese owned studio takes a few shots at Chinese materialism and People’s Republic of Oligarchs class snobbery. Din has no prayer with Li Na (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) unless he can impress her and her nouveau riche dad (Will Yun Lee).

Long gives bad but timeless “impress the girl by acting dismissive” advice, and a sage line here and there.

“Rich people never pay attention to anyone else.” Narcissistic personality disorder, anyone?

The moral of the story, “the power of human friendship,” must have taken 33 seconds to come up with. But some of the sight gags — Long disguising himself as human, the two of them escaping the bad guys by donning a dragon parade costume — are a stitch.

If only there’d been more of them. There’s little pathos and no fall on the floor laughs — although a few are big enough to notice. This isn’t one of the best animated film in an underwhelming year for animation, not quite up to the quality of Disney’s higher minded (according to their press releases) “Raya and the Last Dragon.”

But if the kids insist on sitting through it, adults may get a chuckle out of “Harold” of “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” cracking jokes and looking down his nose at these “peasants.”

MPA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Jimmy Wong, Constance Wu, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Bobby Lee, Will Yun Lee, Aaron Yoo and John Cho.

Credits: Directed by Chris Applehans, script by Chris Applehans and Xiaocao Liu. A Sony Animation/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

So “going back to 1978 and Camp Nightwing, the era of “Halloween” and the birth of the Friday the 13th movies, is where they’re taking this trilogy.

Just a little interest in this, I have to say. Not exactly “It!,” not that “It!” was “The Godfather,” but still…nostalgia sells.

Coming July 9

The crew of three dock with their starship to Mars, pop the hatch on their shiny, white, aluminum alloy and glass space ship and busy themselves with firing it up to make another trip to the Red Planet, and overcoming motion sickness.

It’s a complex “cycler” craft, generating artificial gravity by tethering and rotating the nearly-spent booster to their Mars transport craft, to which their command module has attached itself.

There was a “discrepancy” in their launch trajectory, something Hyperion, the private enterprise launching this ship noted and kind of played down, as does the crew — Mission Commander Marina Barnett (Toni Colette), phycologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) on board to do botanical research on Mars, and ship’s physician Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) — in their post-departure TV press conference.

But those drops on a command module floor Barnett spies aren’t motor oil. And when she pops the overhead compartment open, a bloodied body tumbles out, their “discrepancy” in the flesh, a “Stowaway.”

This film from Joe Penna (he did “Arctic,” a solid survival action pic with Mads Mikkelsen) is pretty good…for a Netflix science fiction film. It’s nobody’s idea of a theater-packing knuckle-biting thriller, a somewhat ponderous but predictably emotional Anna Kendrick vehicle.

Somehow, this launch tech (Shamier Anderson) was jammed up into a crawl space, unconscious, during liftoff. He’s badly hurt, but survives. His injury is directly connected to damage to their life support system. On a two year mission, that’s a problem.

How this happened is rather like explaining time travel in sci-fi films on that subject. A “Let’s not dwell on that” attitude is practiced because this scenario doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny.

Is this guy a Doctor Smith in “Lost in Space” fan? Was this intentional? Sabotage? At the very least, what’s it say about the company running the show that this sort of thing could happen?

But the melodrama takes on a different shape in Joe Penna’s tense, matter-of-life-and-death thriller.

Like “The Martian” and “Gravity,” this is sci-fi built on pathos, chemistry and math. The newly-expanded crew faces a “custom of the sea” level survival dilemma. And despite having Ivy League scientists on board, and the best low-bidder contractors (never seen) working the problem on the ground, there is no Matt Damon here to “science the s–t” out of this.

Collette is well-cast as a seasoned professional who can’t let emotions get in the way of decisions, but is also only human. Kim brings a rational and qualified competence to his role, a man more suited to the lab than to heroics in a space suit.

Kendrick’s Dr. Zoe is the real case of on-the-nose casting — cute and bubbly about her first trip into space, signing on because “you never know where life is gonna take you,” and an instantly empathetic doctor who never for a second lets her new patient see any doubt in her interactions with him.

Anderson’s Michael is more thinly developed. If Zoe is meant to be the audience’s emotional surrogate here, Michael is a simple collection of back story “needs.” He wakes up and “needs” to go back, to be with his sister, etc. He is never more than excess baggage, somebody the others are responsible for and someone they recognize as source and solution to their dilemma.

“Stowaway” has some impressive (enough) space travel footage and space travel science, although little time is spent on the nature of the “cycler” spacecraft, Hyperion, which launched it or the state of the Mars colony they’ll reach — eventually. Or so they hope.

There’s real suspense in the central dilemma and in the Hail Mary efforts to think and work their way out of this. But thin character development and slow pacing render this slower and soapier than one would wish.

A decent enough if dullish outing, it simply lacks the highs and lows of the recent benchmarks in the genre — “Gravity” and “The Martian.”

Cast: Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Kae Kim, Shamier Anderson

MPA Rating: TV-MA, bloody injuries, profanity

Credits: Directed by Joe Penna, Ryan Morrison. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

It doesn’t look like much. The Harrisville, Rhode Island home might not get a lot of second or third looks on Zillow. “Needs paint” translates as “rustic” and “historic.” “Low ceilings” just means its out of date.

But “historic” is right on the mark. This 300 year-old wood frame/clapboard house is where the events depicted in “The Conjuring” took place. And while one person describes it as “the most famous haunted house in the world,” and dude plainly needs to visit Amityville, New York like everybody else, it’s still rather infamous.

An opening credit parks “The Sleepless Unrest” in the post “Paranormal Activity” mania of amateur “researchers” looking for a piece of that reality TV/streaming/podcasting audience, because people can’t get enough of “ghosts exist, here’s proof” content.

It’s amazing how many people there are out there on hunt, serving up “You guys, this REALLY happened” to the public. But considering the stunning success of the “The Conjuring/Amityville/Annabelle” universe and the “Insidious” films (which feature their very own comical “Ghostbusters”), it’s understandable.

“Sleepless Unrest” involves amateurs showing up with cameras, motion detectors and other “repurposed” gear” as they investigate “The Conjuring” House. The new owners, Jennifer and Cory Heinzen won’t say so. But if they’re not AirBnB’ing this place — charging for the privilege of getting spooked and getting “answers” — they’re missing the boat.

Filmmaker/researchers Vera and Kendall Whelpton made the movie, and invited along fellow enthusiasts Richel Stratton and Brian Murray. They set up cameras, “sensors” and the like, carry around GoPro cameras and are filmed by a lean film crew themselves as they do all this.

There’s time-lapse footage of doors opening, books falling off shelves and other objects tipping over. We hear thumps and creaks, although not nearly as loudly as those involved, who crawl around an unfinished attic, poke around a stone-walled basement and even drop into an old basement well, hunting for evidence and getting a little bug-eyed over what they “sense” on occasion.

They play up the drama of everything they’re doing — hyping, taking “risks” and the like — and show us what they find.

Leave aside the lack of a true “This PROVES it!” moment. Skip over the hilarious over-reactions to hearing noises and seeing “lights” in the woods (plainly city slickers) or “finding” a never-really-lost old cemetery. Take into account that with the right music, anything is scary, even time lapse shots of snow melting off a windshield.

Hang on to your skepticism. That’s allowed.

Even with all those eyebrow raising points, let’s just say that “The Sleepless Unrest” convinces us that they were convinced by…something.

And as the “effects” are so simple that it’d be hard to believe anyone would go to the trouble of faking them, let’s just say that what these folks saw and experienced was intriguing, just interesting enough (occasionally, not often, which makes for a dull documentary) to make you go, “Damn. What did THAT?”

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Vera Whelpton, Kendall Whelpton, Jennifer Heinzen, Cory Heinzen, Richel Stratton, Brian Murray,

Credits: Directed by Kendall and Vera Whelpton. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21