Movie Nation

Just as high-concept as “WandaVision” and funnier, even without the sitcom-centric premise, “Loki” takes our favorite Marvel mischief maker and puts him on trial for his crimes against time. And timelines.

It gives him the chance to make good on those crimes by helping the TVA — which has nothing to do with dams and electricity in Tennessee — catch another Loki, one who is scampering through time in an alternative and overlapping timeline and making a general mess of things in pursuit of some unknown payoff.

And it gives us the chance to get pure, unadulterated Tom Hiddleston in the title role. None of this sibling tussling with Thor, dodging Black Widow, Captain America, Scarlett Witch and Hulk, just glimpses and reminders of the Avengers throwdowns of the past.

I have to say, I went with it pretty much from the moment when we see who master airline hijacker and escape artist D.B. Cooper REALLY was.

This is a Marvel spinoff that could be very easily overwhelmed by exposition, and yet escapes that fate by the skin of its teeth. The TVA are the Time Variance Authority, whose origins and mission are outlined in a cheesy ’60s-style cartoon video which Loki (Hiddleston) is forced to watch.

They’re the enforcement arm of the Time Lords, who keep track of who is supposed to be where and when, maintaining “the sacred timeline” with a vast, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose SWAT-armored goons are but a tiny portion of their work.

When Loki, nabbed after his 2012 escape in “The Avengers,” is taken in, his tesseract won’t save him. He’s robo-stripped, put in in a prison jumpsuit and “processed. A mountainous computer printout is shoved in his face.

“Please sign to verify that this is everything you ever said.”

His “powers” gone, helpless in the clutches of those who control time, he gets read the Marvel riot act by a judge (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and placed in the hands of Major Mobius, ace detective of the agency. He’s played by Owen Wilson.

Mobius wants to study the lying, double-dealing, back-stabbing (“literally fifty times”) “variant” so that he and his team can catch this other Loki from another timeline, the most cunning of all, from whatever evil scheme he is up to.

We’re whisked from 1549 Aix-en-Provence, France to A.D. 79 Pompeii to the Medieval fair of…Oshkosh, Wisconsin (1985) as Mobius chases his quarry and Loki seems to help, always with an Asgardian finger crossed behind his back. The lad knows how to work the angles.

“If you sheathe your smarm for a moment,” he sneers at one point. “Trust is for children…and dogs,” he opines. “Those you underestimate will devour you,” he counsels.

The dialogue isn’t Shakespeare but is pithy enough. And the big, overarching theme, with hints of Biblical self-determination — Loki doesn’t want to be told what’s “NOT supposed to happen” and resents these unseen “time lords” ordaining that he stay-in-his (temporal) lane — seems more interesting in theory than anything the series will seriously wrestle with.

Hiddleston and Wilson aren’t the next great comic duo, but they mesh well enough as the series unfolds (Disney provided a couple of episodes for reviewing).

The one sentimental thread running through the many Marvel multiverses, in their big and small screen forms, is nostalgia — for characters, and for the era which much of the base-audience for these productions vegan reading comics. The jokes play into that, a fight set in a Medieval Fair tent with Bonnie Tyler singing “I Need a Hero” playing over the PA. Stuff like that.

The effects are primo, if not exactly novel — time portals as translucent blocks, etc.

There’s little pretense to social satire here, so “Loki” is easier to get into the spirit of this than “WandaVision,” although I’m of the minority opinion that none of these Marvel small-screen spinoffs pack enough wit, action, pathos or what have you into them to justify “series length” treatment.

But Loki and Hiddleston — in all their many colors — are fun enough to bring one back to the stream to catch each new episode to see what that “scamp” is up to now.

MPA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Sophia Di
Martino, Richard E. Grant, Sasha Lane

Credits: Directed by Kate Herron, scripted by Michael
Waldron. A Marvel Studios/Disney + release.

Running time: episodes Six episodes @52-55 minutes each.

Spall’s a guy who “waits” for this and that and Ms. Right and who gets a dose what he might be missing out on, losing a whole year at a time, in this July 2 romance.

“Chasing Comets” is a damp dishrag of a “footy” comedy from Down Under. It’s about a coulda-woulda womanizing player for the Comets of Wagga Wagga, a small town “so nice they named it twice.”

And that’s about as funny as this gets.

Scripted by a rugby veteran, Jason Stevens, with cutesy credits thanks to director Jason Perini (“Costumes by Jason Stevens’ wife…Catering by someone Jason Stevens met at a chicken shop…Directed by a different Jason.”), it has maybe two laughs in it. Total.

It isn’t really working out for Chase Daylight (Dan Ewing). He’s the local hunk/jock “who could’ve been anything,” but is stuck here in the minor leagues, not cut out for the big time. So he takes out that frustration by skirt-chasing and ruining any chance he has with the fair Brooke (Isabel Lucas).

He’s a heel, and to hear his Mom (Deborah Galanos) tell it, when broken-hearted Brooke confides in her, he got it from his no-good, cheating, walked-out-on-them Dad.

So he’s got “issues” far beyond not being able to hang onto the football.

His running mates are up for drinks and “We’re not wired for monogamy” cruising. But his spiritual advisor, The Rev (George Houvardas) keeps working on his character. The Rev’s smart-aleck “never date a footballer” daughter Dee (Kat Hoyas) pitches in.

So Chase, freshly-benched with the Comets on their way to another “wooden spoon” in their league, resolves to clean up his act, hit The Rev’s church regularly and give up sex. That’s front page news in Wagga Wagga.

Any guesses as to where this is going? Any reason given by the script or the actors playing it to care? Not really.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, alcohol abuse

Cast: Dan Ewing, Isabel Lucas, Kat Hoyas, George Houvardas, Deborah Galanos, John Batchelor, Justin Melvey and Rhys Muldoon.

Credits: Directed by Jason Perini, script by Jason Stevens. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:36

 The endlessly fascinating figure of artist, provocateur and artistic bon vivant Salvador Dalí has been dissected on film before, but rarely with the detail that “Salvador Dalí : In Search of Immortality” does.

It’s a psychological biography, emphasizing the childhood trauma that drove him, the paranoia that he fed on (not always his own) and the psyche behind the 20th century’s greatest surrealist painter.

Few artists turned themselves into the grand, dapper-to-the-point-of-foppish public figure Dalí did. He set out to outrage and often succeeded.

An early fascination with film and a lifelong love affair with “media” ensures that there is a treasure trove of footage of Dalí painting, creating “performance art” before the phrase had been coined, and being interviewed by the likes of Mike Wallace, Dick Cavett and others, a wit with a flair for self-promotion, a walking “meme” before that was a thing.

His obsession with fried eggs, which manifested in many a wilted, draped image (clocks, most famously) in his art, his insistence that he remembered the “paradise” he experienced “in utero,” his pointed decision to “make myself seem eccentric to set myself apart” are all explored.

The film is packaged here in chapters covering his early years, 1904-1929, or from Dalí’s birth, near Barcelona, up to his arrival as an international sensation in Paris, climaxing with the avant garde short film “Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog),” made with his friend and art school classmate, future film legend Luis Buñuel.

“It had neither Andalusians nor dogs,” Dalí famously quipped. “I shall be a genius and the world will admire me,” he predicted. And to ensure that he stood out, even before that happened, “I let my hair grow long, long as a girl’s,” inspired by his favorite Grand Master, Raphael’s long-haired self-portrait.

Other chapters cover his years of rising fame with his muse, Gala, and his enfeebled final years after her death.

Using archival interviews blended with opinions of the principal in-house experts of the painter’s museums (in conversation with the filmmaker at significant Dalí “sites”), and lots of voice-over narration from Dalí’s autobiography, letters to and from his wife and muse, Gala, his many friends and admirers, we gain a deep understanding of the autobiography that drove the work. The older brother with the same name who died before Dalí was born haunted him his entire life.

There are clips from some of the filmmakers he worked with (Hitchcock, most famously, but he planned an animated film, “Destino,” with Walt Disney and did sets for productions of Luchino Visconti), and archival interviews with other admirers. Thanks to all that, and generous samplings of Dalí’s art, we get a very good picture of his sources of inspiration and the obsessions of his life, which of course drove his art.

But despite the lengthy running time, there’s little of the “personal” Dalí, the scandals of his life and late career (allegedly signing canvases when his hand was too shaky to create the art attributed to him), his flirtation with fascism and endorsement of the Spanish dictator Franco, stealing another man’s wife only to cheat on her with others over the decades.

There’s next to nothing of his New York years, famous and cutting quite the figure, friend to Mia Farrow and anybody who was anyone in the swinging ’60s into the ’70s.

The film, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation-produced and thus officially endorsed by his estate, had a theatrical release that was ran just under two hours. In this new form, it’s half again as long if not necessarily more illuminating. You could make a pretty interesting Dalí documentary on what they chose to intentionally leave out.

Most fascinating here are the scenes set at his house at Portlligat, on the extreme northeastern Mediterranean coast of Spain, of the castle Púbol he bought for his wife and muse, Gala, and his hometown, Figueres, where he built his Dalí Theater-Museum, the most immersive Dalí experience of any museum featuring his work.

There’s also a discussion of his relationship to Picasso and an extended look at his closest famous friends, the poet Federico García Lorca, filmmaker Buñuel and painters Joan Miró and Juan Gris.

So what’s here is engrossing, if somewhat repetitious, with so many letters, so many interludes with the hand-picked home-team experts as to take on an air of tedium.

And that’s the last word you’d think to associate with Salvador Dalí.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Salvador Dali, Alfred Hitchcock

Credits: Directed by David Pujol, script by Montse Aguer, David Pujol. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: In three parts, 174 minutes

Don Cheadle and Matt Damon, Benecio del Toro, Ray Liotta and Jon Hamm and Brendan Fraser are among the “Usual Suspects” of this Steven Soderbergh, HBO Max July 1 release.

Texas executing an innocent man while a killer goes free? Color me shocked. This comes out July 2.

Something’s eating at Charlie. He’s working on this house at all hours, sawing and shoveling and whatnot.

The phone rings incessantly, but he won’t answer. He’s always popping in his ear buds and tuning out the world.

With his sister Betty about to marry Park Ranger Benny and trying to sell their Dad’s old Crown Victoria, with his mother fretting about the one year anniversary of his father’s death, Charlie’s got a lot on his mind. Or nothing at all.

What’s in that body-shaped bag we see him burying when we meet him, flies everywhere? And uh, was that a wraith we saw passing in the shadows behind him?

“Woe” is an oddly unsettling horror tale that packs most of its “action” — such as it is — in the finale.

Betty (Jessie Rabideau) is a bit fraught with all that’s going on. She never answers Benny’s (Ryan Kattner) “I love yous” with one of her own. He lets that slide off his back, struggling as he does to keep everybody on task. He’s constantly trying to get Charlie’s attention, to get him to commit to showing up to the wedding, to show any sign that he’s not catatonia walking.

And Charlie? He’s seeing that wraith. He’s got bloody claw marks on his arms that he tries to hide. He eyes that huge wasp nest in his Dad’s yard with suspicion. And he hallucinates a fateful night in that Crown Vic, the car his father died in just a year before.

Maybe no-nonsense Uncle Peter (James Russo) can shake Charlie out of his tupor.

“This thing is going to destroy you, just like it did your father!”

The debut feature of Matthew Goodhue tries to get by on a chilly tone and a clever twist in that somewhat “action packed” finale. I’d say it does, except it doesn’t.

The performances have a sleepwalking blandness, dictated by the character requirements.

Too little of the mystery is divulged too slowly, in teeny, tiny revelations. There’s little suspense or urgency to Charlie’s plight. We’re missing a lot because a lot seems left out.

“Woe” is the filmmaker who can’t get more “horror movie” in an 85 minute film.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Adam Halferty, Jessie Rabideau, Ryan Kattner, DeVaughn LaBon and James Russo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matthew Goodhue. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:25

“Sweet and Sour” is a Korean romantic fantasy that isn’t remotely as cute and clever as those who made it seem to think it is.

It’s a standard-issue “meet cute” romance about a plump nerd who falls hard for the nurse treating him for jaundice (hepatitis B), who falls in love, loses weight, and gets promoted into a job that threatens the relationship that was all he ever wanted out of life.

And then there’s the code, which toys around with the time as a mobius strip, an afterthought that does nothing for what has already been middling and formulaic, if not utterly without charm.

Da-eun (Chae Soo-bin) is an overworked contract nurse who gives endomorphic Jang-hyuk (Jang Ki-Yong) sweet-natured attention, and just a glimmer of hope that she might be interested in him as more than a saffron-colored (jaundice) patient.

He’s slack-jawed and moon-eyed in her presence, a nerd fresh out of engineering school, still living with his parents, with liver damage thanks to his student lifestyle (his constantly-texting pals are also endomorphs).

She’s harder to read. She takes advantage of him, dozes off in his cubicle, wolfs down his food (they’re working her to death) and flirts just enough to keep him on the hook.

Turns out, she is interested. And as they fall in love (a mostly off-camera eventuality), she commits and he is transformed into the sort of lean young hunk he thinks she deserves.

But his first job wins him a transfer from Incheon to Seoul, and right after they’ve moved in together. Paired up with the fellow new transfer Bo-young (Krystal Jung), we can see the sparks long before the characters in the movie do.

She’s manipulative, ambitious, uncouth and unethical. She eats like a pig and wears several meals on her blouse. But their “meet cute” is almost as cute as Jang-hyuk’s original cute meeting. And forced to work together on an, all-consuming bridge design project, their lives become work and the commute “home” to Seoul becomes a grind.

How will this all play out?

The tropes of such romances are pretty close to universal, as this installment in “Around the World with Netflix” demonstrates. His parents are shocked SHOCKED when Jang-hyuk gets his first-ever girlfriend. A night guard at his new firm tries to give him life-balance advice. There’s a ring, patterns of behavior that point to the rut that the “circle of (your) life” can put you in and performances that are more winsome than winning (save for Jung’s sloppy temptress turn as Bo-young).

None of which are quite charming or remotely amusing enough to make this come off. It’s “Sweet,” all right. Just not sweet enough. And the “sour” half doesn’t quite play, either.

The dopey, twisty ending? Let’s not go there, even if they did.

MPA Rating: TV-14, profanity, sexual themes

Cast:  Krystal Jung, Jang Ki-Yong, Chae Soo-bin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kae-Byeok Lee, based on a novel by Kurumi Inui. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Whatever hardcore Stephen King fans get out of “Lisey’s Story,” with its suggestions of a writer’s supernatural powers and “visions,” haunted childhoods aging into crippling adulthoods and a post-mortem “bool (treasure) hunt” as the last gasp of a great love affair, I found it most fascinating in its dissection of fame and fandom.

Does that sound like “Misery?” That’s not the only prior King work referenced in this self-adapted screenplay — a violently obsessed “biggest fan,” a honeymoon in a snowy New Hampshire version of “The Shining’s” Overlook Hotel, torturing children with just a whiff of “It” — keen-eyed fans will find an Easter Egg here and there.

There’s a familiarity to all of this that gives the tale a “Stephen King’s Greatest Hits” feel, complete with flashbacks decorated with the music of King’s youth — Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Roy Orbison.

Your patience for this eight part series may be gauged by your degree of devotion to Mr. King. I found it slow, obscure, structured to maximize the tedium and obscurity, and thus a little wearing. But then I didn’t get all the way through “Mr. Mercedes,” if that matters.

If King is anything at all like the writer character Scott Landon, whose fans have developed a cultish devotion that didn’t end with his death, then the Dean of America’s suspense/horror/fantasy novelists sees himself in a John Lennon light. Of course King has fans on the lunatic end of the spectrum, like the one who killed Lennon, like the one Landon attracts in “Lisey’s Story.”

Landon (Clive Owen, seen in flashbacks) is a tad messianic with “healing” powers, a creator of worlds that fans — some of them “not wired right” — will not let go of, much like his widow Lisey (Julianne Moore) is not ready to let go of the husband she lost.

Landon is dead. His wife is consumed with a life-draining grief, communicating with him in dreams, losing herself in flashback reveries. She needs answers, and he left her clues, “bools,” to lead her…back to him? To answers? To closure?

Why exactly is he dead if Lisey “saved” him? And there was this supernatural “All Landons are fast healers” thing he kept repeating to her, and even demonstrated to her. The movies beat that gimmick to death long before King published this novel (in 2006).

Lisey has Landon’s legacy to deal with, and a pushy academic (Ron Cephas Jones of “This is Us) all but demanding that she surrender Scott’s papers to a particular university.

As Lisey “saved” Scott from a crazed fan’s assassination attempt at a ground-breaking at that college and she’s not keen on that professor’s “role” in that rescue, she is hell-bent on preventing that handover, which includes unpublished works, no matter what the “fans” want.

“Most of them love you!”

“But it only takes one who doesn’t.”

Dane DeHaan channels Mark David Chapman (sans glasses) as an eerily obsessed, dead-eyed fanatic who takes this insult to academia, Landon’s legacy and his own ability to have more Landon stories, personally — and in the most psychotic ways.

There’s this Delphic pool where “The waters” have the power to not just heal, but to fascinate,” that may exist in more than just Scott’s fictive imagination.

“I have visions,” he always said. “I write them down. People pay to read them.”

The one person most connected to that “water” and Scott’s “world” might have been Lisey’s older sister Amanda (Joan Allen). But she’s gone mad, cutting herself even in the mental institution where Lisey and sister Darla (Jennifer Jason Leigh) have placed her.

So the threat is murderously real and in the physical world. The “help” might be in Scott’s “bools,” little clues, his supernatural “other world,” or it might be in Amanda’s cracked mind and her ready access to that world.

Is there any autobiography in “Lisey’s Story,” which one of the works King has labeled “his favorite” novel rather the way Cher is always labeling things “farewell tours?” Perhaps. Let’s hope not much.

The most adult thing presented here isn’t the fantasy escape from grief but the grinding, friction-causing shared responsibility of dealing with a mentally ill sibling given to cutting messages on her arms. Moore, Leigh and Allen are a perfectly matched trio of sisters, even if Amanda’s mental “escapes” to that pool are stingy with revealing their alleged meaning.

The film is at its most fraught whenever DeHaan is in the picture. He may play this stalking, threatening fan in one note, but it’s a helluva note.

But the series is at its eye-rolling worst in the endless Owen flashbacks, all pitched in somber-voiced tones, memories inside of memories, an invented language of childhood magic, “powers” and monsters. His performance doesn’t get across a love that transcends death. Owen isn’t usually as boring as he makes Scott.

The “drip drip drip” storytelling style of such series is built on us craving a solution to the plot threads, learning “the mystery” at the end of the “bool hunt,” figuring out if Lisey gets the better of her stalker or discovers the cure and closure for her grief.

The dialogue, however, is some of the sharpest King has slapped his name on.

“He said you would see it even before you saw it.”

As someone who never got that into the works of the omnipresent, prolific King, I lost that craving long before the author satiated it and finished “Lisey’s Story.”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Joan Allen, Dane DeHaan and Ron Cephas Jones.

Credits: Produced by J.J. Abrams, directed by Pablo Larrain, scripted by Stephen King, adapted from his novel. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Eight episodes @50-55 minutes each.

For years, whenever “M*AS*H,” popped up as I was channel surfing, I’d check to see where we were in the story, and often rewatch a big chunk of it.

Robert Altman’s breakthrough film, the one that taught us what “Altmanesque” means, casts its satire and ridicule far and wide, and some of the laughs and performances have aged well enough to matter.

Mimicking “The Last Supper” with a scene about a dentist (“introducing John Schuck”) whose solution to erectile dysfunction is a very public suicide, which is faked by our heroes, is blasphemy at its most amusing. The Vietnam War era futility, which the movie (based on Richard Hooker’s novel) twists into transgressive mockery at every turn, still plays.

I’ve always hated the lazy, run-time-devouring — if occasionally funny — “football game” that eats up the third act and tends to water down the picture’s anarchy when it is supposed to be underscoring it. It’d been years since I watched “M*A*S*H” past opening kickoff before sitting through it the other night.

But these days, though much of what earned the film that “R” rating back in 1970 is tame enough to put it on broadcast TV, the film plays like one long cringe.

And I’m not just talking about the hurt and stupefied look Tom Skerritt wears the moment Elliott Gould’s “Trapper John” shows up, pushing Skerritt into a veritable bit-player role, when he was star or co-star of the first act.

When one of the objects of your ridicule is the casual racism of the Korean War era ’50s, still present in the Vietnam ’70s, you’re walking a fine line. I’m not sure Altman was a racist, although all we know for sure about that is he was a native Kansas Citian who loved the jazz scene he grew up in there. And he gives a little agency to this or that African American or Korean character in the film.

But the racial slurs are on a Mel Brooks magnitude, and none of them play as funny any more. When the one thing you figure you have to bleep out is the racist nickname footballer/surgeon “Spear-chucker Jones” (Fred “The Hammer” Williamson) wears, without comment, you know your film isn’t standing the test of time. Altman, like Brooks with “Blazing Saddles,” had to recognize crap like that wasn’t earning laughs the right way when the film hit theaters, and only racists chuckle at it to this day.

And all that shrill, stereotypical sing-songy Radio Tokyo Japanese cover artist pop playing over the PA system might be here to emphasis the strangers meddling in a strange part of the world nature of “a land war in Asia.” But it was played for racial ridicule laughs.

Even more problematic is the naked sexism, both in the script and in what was worked out on the set. It goes far beyond the spin-off TV series’ leering and creepily aggressive womanizing.

Sure, take down the hypocritical religious prig Major Burns (Robert Duvall, deep into character). But the all-out assault on his almost-paramour, Major Margaret Houlihan (Sally Kellmerman) after giving her the nickname “Hot Lips,” is just patriarchal cruelty.

“Well, what’s the matter with her today?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s one of those ladies’ things.”

“Hot Lips” only gains acceptance after Burns is goaded into punching a taunting Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and is bedded by third-banana Duke Forrest (Skerritt). Ms. “By the Book’s” corruption is a viable target for satire. Her abject humiliation suggests a porcine boy’s club in the screenplay and its execution.

Women are objects, to make passes at and be passed around. The “sacrament” of that last supper? She’s nicknamed “Lt. Dish” in the opening scenes. Jo Ann Pflug would count game show panelist as her major credit after the film, largely due to the way she was treated on-screen here.

Altman never “went there” in terms of patriarchal, frat boy sexualization again. At least he didn’t make a habit of it, although there was that infamous photo of him, on oxygen, on the set of “A Prairie Home Companion,” with his hand up a starlet’s skirt.

Gould, wearing a 1970 pornstache, RayBans and silence (he makes his mark with few lines) stands out. Sutherland was far loopier/hippier in “Kelly’s Heroes.”

The Altmanesque characters-talking-over-each-other art was never more perfect that when Roger Bowen and Gary Burghoff — as Col. Blake and Cpl. Radar O’Reilly — did it.

A lot of people appearing here, including Kellerman, became part of Altman’s repertory company in the years and decades that followed.

From “Dr. Strangelove” through “M*A*S*H,” the ’60s are still widely regarded as the peak decade for cinematic satire, with Altman’s anti-war war film the exclamation point (more or less) on an era. I’ve taken college classes devoted to that subject and these films.

But unlike most of the others, the once-adored “M*A*S*H” is really showing its age. I’d go so far as to call it “obsolescent” now.

MPA Rating: R, blood, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Tom Skerritt, Roger Bowen, Gary Burghoff, Rene Auberjonois, Jo Ann Phlug, Fred Williamson, Bobby Troup, Michael Murphy, Bud Cort and John Schuck

Credits: Directed by Robert Altman, script by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:56