Movie Nation

“The Holy Game” sets out to give the Catholic Church a little image burnishing by showing how its stages a civil, sportsmanlike soccer matches among the various seminaries and schools of Rome, in and around Vatican City.

It’s called The Clericus Cup, a mini “World Cup” for pre-ordination seminarians and some of their teachers and mentors, playing on behalf of Pontifical Urban College, North American College’s Martyrs, Mater Ecclessiae, Redemptoris Mater, schools filled with players from five continents and 66 nations.

One young priest compares it to the Quidditch World Cup of the “Harry Potter” novels. Considering the names of the colleges and teams, it’s no wonder than analogy caught on.

But as we meet a sampling of the player/seminarians, see practices and watch soccer matches (not awful) play out, as we get a glimpse of the lives these men lead in their pursuit of a life of “self sacrifice” that is “not a job, a vocation,” taking vows of poverty and chastity as they talk about “putting all their trust in God,” the Elephant in the room is poking his nose over our shoulders, and theirs.

For most of the people he’s met after announcing his choice of vocations, Grayson Heenan says, “The only press they’ve heard about the Catholic Church is negative.” That’s ongoing and no, he doesn’t know what to say to that.

Some of the men speak of the lives they might have led and we get a hint of regrets. Their teachers, directors of colleges, talk about pursuing “happiness…that goes beyond fame and glory and money,” a student speaks of the “sacrifice for the greater good.”

Still others ponder why there are pedophiles in the priesthood, and TV news coverage shows TV anchors and Catholics around the world reacting to the shocking crimes the church has covered up.

And then, sure enough, one of the priests we’ve seen on camera, waxing lyrical about the calling and the work, is exposed as one of “those” priests. Not an usher-boy molester, but just a “celibate” who fathered children post-ordination.

Of course this hijacks the movie, a light treatment of the final years of a priest’s education, showing us how they’re trained to give the last rites in hospitals, for instance, and setting an example of how futbol should be played (they give out “blue cards” as penalties, in which the offending player goes to the sideline and “spiritually reflects” on what he’s done).

Which begs the question, “When the whole point of your movie is undercut, what should a filmmaker do?” Was there a way to re-cut it, re-direct the focus and make this somehow worthwhile, at least in a “slice of life about the priesthood today” sense?

No. Directors Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly were at a loss about what to do, and cannot “finesse” that grenade that went off in their footage. The picture is only 67 minutes long, making you wonder what had to be left out as they scrambled to “pivot” and take in the film’s new reality. The version I watched had “rights” clearance issues, people whom they talked to who might not agree to appear in the final cut.

They probably should have accepted that they’d wasted resources, time and effort on a movie that was never going to work, even at the truncated 67 minutes this one comes in at.

“The Holy Game” just leaves us wondering if maybe the sexually problematic Catholic Church should take off the cleats, stop moralizing about others and playing politics and take a red card. Sit down and shut up until they’ve fixed their catastrophic, faith-killing, life-shattering problems.

And Gravitas Ventures? When did you guys lose the judgement that should tell you when a lightweight “Vatican clerical students play soccer” doc is rendered unfit to release?

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Grayson Heenan, Mike Zimmerman, Eric Atta Gyasi, Father Oscar Turrion, Felice Alborghetti

Credits: Directed by Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:07

Here’s a light Indonesian dramedy about a teen who comes to New York to find the Mom who left him back in Jakarta over a dozen years before.

Yes, it’s a “fish out of water” comedy, after a fashion. And yes, the deck in this Islamic Indonesia screenplay is stacked against poor Mom (Marissa Anita), whom we see in a flashback say goodbye to a little boy and a confused, deflated husband. She is “pursuing” her “dream,” to become a singer in the Big Apple. The kid overheard parental quarrels as the months passed and Mom refused to return with a self-absorbed “I can’t go back and be NOTHING.”

When we meet near-adult Ali (Iqbaal Dhiafakhri Ramadhan) he is reaching out, composing a hearfelt message online for her. Only he doesn’t know where she is. It’s only after his father’s death that Ali finds the postcards and letters, the plane tickets Mom sent for them to come see her.

And a pleasant family gathering comes a tad unglued when Ali finds out they were in on the deception, that they never forgave Mia for “abandoning” her family. There’s nothing for it but to rent out the house he inherited and fly to New York to track her down.

The trail isn’t totally cold, but the apartment in Queens she once rented is now home to a quartet of women her age, one a former roommate. These boisterous, hard-working women are determined to finish raising the money to open a restaurant. Sure, kid, you can stay here (in English and Indonesian with English subtitles). Sure, we’ll help you find Mom. Yes, you’ll need to help us out on the rent.

“Ali & the Queens” as it titled on The Internet Movie Database (“Ali & Ratu Ratu Queens” on Netflix) is lightly charming, in its own way. But to stick with the game of cards analogy, the filmmakers leave an awful lot of money on the table, underdeveloping many a comic or tragi-comic possibility, mainly to beat up the abandoned-her-kid Mom.

The four women — the house-cleaner Party (Nirina Zubir), sexy masseuse Chinta (Happy Salma), cook and single-mom Ance (Tika Panggabean) and hustler who got hustled the day she arrived, and now supports herself gambling at chess and mahjong and what have you Biyah (Asri Welas) — flirt with being greedy enough to sucker the kid out of all his cash to realize their “dream.” But that would have been edgy, and nothing here comes close to that.

The search for Mom is haphazard and short. Her reaction to being found is…pretty much what you’d expect.

And then there’s the teen daughter of Ance, pretty, arty and helpful Eva (Aurora Ribero) who becomes Ali’s crush.

Every New Yorker they meet is pleasant, supportive and helpful? Even in Queens, that’s a stretch. Ali’s hopes of going to art school, maybe becoming an animator (we see him animating his drawings) are met with “Sure, you’ll get a scholarship.” And money?

“This is New York, man. Money is EASY to find if you look!”

Not nearly enough is done with how “American” the Indonesian have all become — drinking alcohol, swearing.

In short, there’s not much in the way of struggle, too little conflict and almost every rough edge has been rubbed off, save for Mom the Abandoner.

“Coming to America” narratives are coming back as a genre, but you’re going to have to do better than this mushy movie selling an absurdly softhearted fantasy version of New York if you want Western audiences to buy in.

MPA Rating: TV-14, alcohol, mild profanity

Cast: Iqbaal Dhiafakhri Ramadhan, Marissa Anita, Aurora Ribero, Nirina Zubir, Tika Panggabean, Happy Salma and Asri Welas

Credits: Directed by Lucky Kaswandi, script by Ginatri S. Noer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

A little quickie exploitation flick — timely,  starring Taryn Manning, Cory Hardrict and Jasmine Burkeand and set for…BET?

Don’t Fear the Reaper, chillun.

One of the last moments of the documentary “Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide,” has the artist revisiting huge, fanciful and playful painting that gives the film its title. He goes with his daughter, Malia, who co-directed the film, to see it for the first time in years.

“When World’s Collide” is the quintessential Scharf painting, his “Jetsonism/Hanna-Barberism” graffiti/Warholian pop art style on a vast canvas. He takes a look at it, turns to his daughter and says “See ya later!” and leaps, as if to lose himself in the gaudy, goofy and insanely colorful world he envisioned in 1984.

As we’ve seen in the family-made/Kenny-sanctioned movie that precedes that giddy moment, “That’s so Kenny.” Playful at 62, just as playful as he was in the ’80s, when he was one of the three Andy Warhol fans/proteges who lit up the New York art scene with their “graffiti” style.

It’s somewhat safe to say that of the trio — Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny — Scharf is the least famous, at least outside of the art world. But as the sad old joke goes, most painters don’t get truly famous until after they’re dead.

Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988. Haring succumbed to AIDS in 1990. That goofball Californian, Kenny Scharf? He’s still raiding dumpsters in LA or “cleaning the beach” of his Brazilian home for his “precious plastic,” turning cast-off cup lids, straws, plastic fruit serving baskets and the like into whimsical “bathroom art.” He’s still losing himself in canvases that have homages to pop culture, advertising, junk and Hanna Barbera cartoons like “The Jetsons” and “The Flintstones.”

And yes, as fans, peers, curators, historians and collectors testify in this too-humorless (considering the subject) film, he’s still a pretty big deal.

His work is filled with “the noise of life,” and are just “too much” for mere mortals to take in, testimonials insist.

With him painting isn’t a trade, a craft or even a calling, “it’s an obsession” one fellow artist declares.

Here’s performance artist and actress Anne Magnuson recreating the “peak decay” New York of the Reagan years, where Scharf, Haring and Basquiat saw to it that “the Uptown World started paying attention to the Downtown World.”

“Experimenting” with paint, sculpture, video and performance art, putting on all manner of bizarre and Dadaist “happenings” at Club 57, these rising stars of pop art found their voices and advertised their aesthetic in a city craving “fun” in its visual art.

“They just seemed to bring the ’80s alive,” actor, artist and collector Dennis Hopper declared.

There’s all this old video of Scharf performing, playing around, being interviewed (often with his best-bud, Haring) to go along with new footage of Scharf traveling, working and dissecting his own influences — Warhol and Picasso, Escher and Lichtenstein and Dali, from the evidence we see on canvas.

He decorates–OVERdecorates his house. We see the ancient Cadillacs he’s transformed into rolling, over-the-top art-on-wheels exhibits. We get a glimpse of a TV cartoon he made for The Cartoon Network (“The Grooveians”).

When critics interviewed here talk about the “infantilism” of the ’80s New York creative scene, they’re paying Scharf the ultimate compliment. Not only did he outlive and outlast his peers, but he’s kept his sense of play intact, polishing his technique, maintaining his childish sense of wonder, making his “use everything” art to this very day.

The film is, truth be told, entirely too stodgy to “get at” the essence of the artist or mimic his psyche and aesthetic. Yoko Ono celebrates Scharf as “a goofy wind…in the art world,” and that should have been the filmmakers’ agenda.

Still, it’s great to see him still at it, fun to take in the works and fascinating to get a new take on Manhattan art scene history, with the home movies to show just how uninhibited, creative and offbeat it was.

MPA rating: unrated

Cast: Kenny Scharf, Ann Magnuson, Dennis Hopper, Samantha McEwen, Richard Marshall, Jane Panetta and Yoko Ono.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Basch, Malia Scharf. A Maliable Films release.

Running time: 1:17

Thursday night, the tenth film in the “Fast and Furious” franchise (don’t forget “Hobbes & Shaw”) sold over $7 million in tickets.

Friday was a $30 million old fashioned blockbuster opening day.

That points to a final “F9: The Fast Saga” opening weekend tally at around $68-70 million by midnight Sunday.

Not a great film, I thought. But the fan service within makes it a genuine “Welcome back to the movies, Fam” experience. Love that about it.

So thanks to Universal for moving it around and saving it for just theaters, thanks to Vin and Michelle and Tyrese and Ludacris and the gang for giving the people what want.

Thanks to John Cena for taking a few on the chin, eh?

The dying old mobster wants to set the record “straight,” give us “the real story,” one more time in “Lansky,” the latest version of the “mob accountant” who allegedly died with hundreds of millions of dollars that nobody ever found.

It’s a lot like many a mob memoir, especially a 1999 HBO film of the same title. That “Lansky” was scripted by David Mamet, starred Richard Dreyfuss, Eric Roberts, Ileana Douglas and Anthony LaPaglia, and is remembered for the same tired “interview” framing device, its brutality and image-burnishing.

Director John McNaughton (“Wild Things,” “Mad Dog and Glory”) at least gave it a gritty gloss.

This new, more down-market biopic has no Mamet, no McNaughton, and more exaggerated versions of the same flaws as the last “Lansky.”

It’s reasonably well cast, with Harvey Keitel as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Seigel’s “partner,” the casino mogul with an “accountant’s” mind, telling “the real story” to a (fictional) journalist/biographer (Sam Worthington).

“When they don’t know you,” Lansky intones, “they put labels on you.”

The image Lansky paints of himself, in person as he’s interviewed, and in flashbacks (Joe Magaro isn’t bad, or the least bit charismatic, as younger Meyer) shows him still polishing his image, playing up his WWII “patriotism,” pitching in by hiring goons to beat up Nazi rallies in New York, cooperating with the Navy in using the mob to track down German spies (mob torture included). He was a big postwar backer of Israel, shuttling casino cash to help Golda Meir establish the Jewish state.

He’s still how we remember him, a top Jewish mobster in a mostly Italian mob era, a “survivor,” still careful to never pull the trigger or wield a knife himself. But it’s always implied in these stories that he was rougher and tougher “coming up.” Implied, but never shown.

This Lansky’s partner Ben “Bugsy” Siegel (David Cade) is a murderous monster who is the real tough guy. Lansky only gets physical when he’s fighting with his first wife (Anna Sophia Robb), perhaps the least flattering addition to his screen image.

Writer-director Eytan Rockaway (“The Abandoned”) serves up a cluttered, clumsy and dull portrait that blunders most obviously by not having Keitel do the voice-over narration for the flashbacks. Some are in Magaro’s voice, some in Worthington’s.

There are Feds (David James Elliott et al) racing to find Lansky’s alleged hidden millions, strong-arming the hapless, broke and desperate “biographer” to get him to help them track it down.

Thus is the wizened, tanned mobster, whose conditions for agreeing to the interviews are that they not be published until after his death, engaged in one last set of intrigues, keeping one last big secret even as he’s giving his spin on others he passes on to writer David Stone (Worthington).

People still die when they talk too much about Meyer Lansky, even as he nears death, in this story. But Rockaway never lets anything interesting get on screen that he doesn’t undercut with sadly sentimental slop in the very next moment.

Keitel is relaxed and magnanimous as the elderly mob capo, saddled with exposition, aphorism and rationalization-heavy dialogue, given one flashback of his own (his attempts to escape U.S. justice in Israel) in which to show us the fire the actor is famous for.

The mob movie tropes and cliches end up being the only memorable moments in “Lansky,” material so overfamiliar we can finish the lines before the actors do.

“I’m an angel…with a dirty face.” “You do what you can to feel alive.” “I’m a businessman. We don’t choose sides. We choose opportunities.”

The trouble with every screen treatment of Lansky (the saintly Ben Kinglsey played him in “Bugsy”) is this idiotic deference writers, directors and actors treat him with. Like everybody else, Rockway separates and insulates the man from the world he was immersed in, as if he’s “above” all that extortion, stealing, murder and mayhem.

If Rockaway had been as loose and cynical with Meyer Lansky as he was with Siegel or the Italians in his movie, it might have had some edge. Then again, when you underscore a meeting between Lansky and Lucky Luciano (Shane McRae) with the cornball Neopolitan musical cliche “Funiculì, Funiculà,” maybe “edgy” is beyond you.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language and some sexual references.

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Sam Worthington, Joe Magaro, Anna Sophia Robb, Minka Kelly, David Cade and David James Elliott.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Eytan Rockaway. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:58

This sci fi drama opens July 9.

A true story comedy with built in whimsy, tragedy, protest and charm, this looks so cute you want to pinch its cheeks.

Will this make Simu Liu a big star? This opens Sept. 3.