Movie Nation

There are days when horror movie film school must sound like NBA practice.

“The key…is ISOLATION.”

Just as star players perform best when they get a one-on-one matchup with a foe, horror movies are built on villains invariably splitting up and dealing with our heroines or heroes in isolation. That gives the good guys a chance to stab, club or trick their way out of whatever hostage torture and murder scenario they’ve been written into.

“The Retreat” is about gay couples lured into the wilderness where they can be captured and and killed for their “lifestyle choices.” A rustic “gay BnB” for weekend getaways and celebrations? That may be the only joke in the movie.

Renee and Val are coming out for another couple’s pre-wedding celebration in the woods of early fall. They’re just at the stage where Val (Sarah Allen) is wondering “where this is going,” and Renee (Tommie-Amber Pirie) isn’t wanting to talk about it.

They won’t settle that at “The Retreat.” They won’t have time. The menace settles in before they leave the inevitable country convenience store stop every horror movie cast stops in before they head for “The Cabin in the Woods.”

The “Take Out Your Ex — One Bullet Oughta Do It” bumper sticker should be a warning. Ominous servings of “Did you hear that?” and “Is somebody watching us?” should seal the deal.

RUN. But no. The moment they get there, they’re hurled into the nightmare we’ve seen another gay couple endure in the film’s prologue.

All those camo masks and hunting accessories we saw in the store aren’t just for deer, you know.

The foreshadowing in Alyson Richards’ screenplay is textbook obvious. Renee grew up among rural hunters who “culled the (deer) herd” and dragged her along for it.

“Why do you think I live in the city?”

A flat tire, another trope of “cabin in the woods” horror, means in this case that we see a shot of the tire iron (actually a crow bar, which makes no sense) used in the repair.

Val? She’s “a scientist.” Got to figure that’ll play into the plot.

The perils they face are cliches and the characters hunting them are stereotypes who like poking through their phone photos post-capture.

“I’m gonna take a peek at your disgusting lifestyle, pervert!”

It’s a shot-in-the-back, victim-clutches-chest slasher pic, with much “quick and dirty” story telling and filmmaking in evidence.

But once our heroines get their “isolation,” the embattled stars give us reason to root for them.

“The Retreat” may be horror by the numbers, but there are solid reasons these character types and story tropes are recycled, again and again. As they teach you in horror film school, they endure because they work, even if they don’t have a prayer of surprising anybody as they do.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Tommie-Amber Pirie, Sarah Allen, Aaron Ashmore and Celina Sinden

Credits: Directed by Pat Mills, script by Alyson Richards. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:22

They are ordinary people, the elderly EveryGerman you’d meet in the park feeding the birds, gathered for a kaffeeklatsch or simply reminiscing in groups in retirement homes.

Their names never made it on the court dockets at Nuremberg, never gained international infamy. They weren’t literal “war criminals.”

With a little prodding, they might break out a photo album or scrapbook filled with memorabilia from a time most have mixed feelings about. Here’s a photo from my Hitler Youth days. Here I am in uniform. Here’s the badge from my SS unit, my Nationalist Socialist Party membership card.

German filmmaker Luke Holland realized, back in 2008, that these people, Germany’s “infamous generation” to America’s “greatest generation,” were dying out. And while screens of every size have been filled with stories of the victims of the Holocaust, families torn apart and murdered off, and of the most heinous criminals of that atrocity, those movies aren’t the whole story.

The ordinary Germans who enlisted, joined the “elite” SS, who fought the war that their votes and their enthusiasm started, and who for decades avoided opening up about what they did during history’s darkest hours, are dying off. Holland set out to find them, hear their stories, prod them and discover how they reconciled this part of their lives, to give a “Final Account.”

That “mixed feelings” about the war and the war crimes associated with fascist “Nazi” Germany is embodied in the phrases we’ve heard so often they’ve become international punchlines.

“Never a member of the Nazi Party…I fought in the Wehrmacht (army, not the SS) on the Russian front.”

We hear the most common of those in Holland’s quietly chilling film. “I knew nothing,” in German, with English subtitles.” “We saw nothing.”

But we also hear of “our shame,” see expressions of guilt and regret scattered among the denialism, rationalizations and worse that the many SS, Werhmacht and Luftwaffe (air force) servicemen serve up, that the female accountants and simple private citizens use as excuses for looking the other way.

Some recall long-dead parents and siblings falling for Hitler. But many of those interviewed here didn’t join the various “party” youth groups out of ideology.

“We didn’t support the party. We loved the uniforms, the singing.” And when they enlisted in the military?

“I believed in it and wanted to die a hero’s death, nonsense like that.”

Former members of the Hitler Youth recall how they were ordered to “guard” (block entry) to Jewish businesses, others remember Kristallnacht’s crimes against Jewish people, property and synagogues.

“We were astounded” when the fire brigades stood by and let buildings burn on those nights in November of 1938.

“The Jews weren’t very popular,” one Waffen SS lieutenant, with the unfiltered bluntness of old age, shrugs. “This had...consequences.”

Their names are given — just ordinary Heinrich and Franz, Klaus, Herbert and Margarethe and many others. Some are questioned by Holland, the oldest man interviewed here is nudged into talking by his daughter. Many repeat the same denials they’ve lived with for 75 years, others mutter “How could they/we NOT know” what was going on, either next door, down the street or in the camp just outside of town.

We see archival photos, “evidence” of the horrors, which almost everyone admits “were whispered about” right from the start. But the reason for the whispering was fear.

And we’re shown memorials, not just to the most infamous camps — Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen. There’s Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen, and Ebensee, Austria and Bernburg, Germany, home to a euthanasia center — lest we forget the German Reich also murdered those it deemed a “drain” on society — those with mental or physical disabilities.

And we hear about those who “benefited” from the mass incarcerations and murders, small local businesses that were willing cogs in a planned fascist-capitalist slave labor industrial complex.

If “Final Account” has a shortcoming, it’s that few moments stick out as most chilling of all. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is very much on display. This stone mason or that infantryman doesn’t have that stick out as the essential testimonial or image here.

There’s no Polish railwayman reprising the throat-slashing gesture he made — out of cruelty, fatalism or warning — to Jewish arrivals at the death camp he delivered them to, the most haunting image of Claude Lanzman’s “Shoah.”

Here, flashes of unapologetic racism and glimpses of humanity intermingle in people whose very “ordinariness” is their most striking quality. That, coupled with the timing of Holland’s film, with global fascism showing its fangs again in countries which always sneered “It could never happen here,” reminds us that most Germans never thought that either. And like us, they could not have been more wrong.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and some disturbing images

Credits: Directed by Luke Holland. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1″34

Angelina Jolie plays a Montana smoke-jumper turned fire-watcher caught up in protecting a child from profession assassins in “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” a strained and clumsy thriller that stands out as the first misstep from director and co-writer Taylor Sheridan, of “Hell or High
Water” and “Wind River.”

Jolie’s the boss of a macho, swaggering team that parachutes into difficult to reach fires, and she’s just been re-assigned after an accident in the field. No more swapping jokes and stunts and a flask with the boys. Fragile Hannah is assigned to a fire tower to think about what she’s done — obsess about it.

Her ex (Jon Bernthal, the muscle of the movie) is sheriff, and inclined to keep an eye on her, seeing as she’s almost been demoted out of her career. But he’s got a survivalist training school operator wife (Medina Senghore, the heart of the movie) at home, so he’s got his hands full.

And that’s before the Big City Accountant (Jake Weber) grabs his kid (Finn Little) and makes a run for…Montana. If the movies have taught us nothing else, it’s that accountants “know things.” If those things were to ever get out, there’d be trouble. He kind of explains that to the kid.

“Trouble” is the elite, sadistic hit squad sent to head them off. Aiden Gillen is the leader, the sort of goon who’ll start a forest fire to cover his murderous tracks. Nicholas Hoult is his not-much-nicer sidekick.

You’ve already guessed that the kid winds up alone, that the assassins bull-in-a-china-shop the locals to find him, and that Hannah is his best hope for surviving to tell his dad’s secrets.

For a movie that keeps its smoke jumping angle in the background, Sheridan works in some good fire effects and a little solid woodlore. Dad imparts the most basic get-out-of-the-wilderness strategy to his kid. Hike downhill, find a creek.

“Creeks lead to rivers, rivers lead to towns.”

Jolie is years-removed from her action lead days, so she does what the aging men in the genre do — swaggers, wisecracks and smirks to compensate. The effort shows, and she’s required to justify in dialogue how somebody as plainly model thin, “skinny,” as her is able to do this sort of superhuman work. Not buying it.

Senghore, of TV’s “Happy!,” and Bernthal (he was in Sheridan’s “Wind River”) are so good together, and separately, that you almost wish they were the leads and starring in a better movie.

Gillen, of “Game of Thrones” and the “Maze Runner” movies, is a perfectly credible killer, as his Hoult.

But Jolie isn’t playing the most interesting character, and she tends to “Maleficent” this — relying on the cheekbones to do the heavy lifting for her.

The movie’s gone wrong before Hannah’s sentenced to her tower, “a 20 by 20 box on stilts with no toilet,” a radio and great views. Weber’s Dad character sputters on and on in some cryptic monologues about what he knows and about whom, and those give the film’s early scenes a serious case of whiplash, as those monologues are intercut with scenes where the regal Jolie is meant to be mixing it up with her “crew,” and seems about as at home doing that as you’d expect.

Even the third act fights and shootouts can’t pull “Those Who Wish Me Dead” back from the you-know-what.

MPA Rating:  R for strong violence, and language throughout 

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Aidan Gillen, Jon Bernthal, Nicholas Hoult, Medina Senghore, Jake Weber, Finn Little and Tyler Perry.

Credits: Directed by Taylor Sheridan, script by Michael Koryta, Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on a novel by Kortya. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:40

“Finding You,” a romantic comedy about two-mismatched Americans in Ireland, is intended as a dessert dish — light and sweet. But think of this trifling comedy as a not-quite-traditional trifle built on top of stale angel food cake. No matter how you dress it up and toss characters, complications and “secrets” at it, the stale angel food cake is all you taste.

Rose Reid, who starred in writer-director Brian Baugh’s “Welcome Home to Christmas,” and  Jedidiah Goodacre, whose “Salem Witch Trials” name was better suited to TV’s “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” are bland co-stars who set off little in the way of sparks.

So, let’s dress things up. Finley Sinclair (Rose) is an aspiring violinist who failed to audition her way into the Manhattan Conservatory. No worries, she’ll spend a semester abroad in Ireland, just like her brother did before her. #problemsoftheprivileged.

Finley has a SECRET. And that secret has its own secret, drawings leading her…somewhere.

Beckett Rush (Goodacre) is the rising young star of a series of “Dawn of the Dragon” sword-and-sorcery romances, all filmed in Ireland. They “meet cute” (not even close) in First Class on the flight over. Beckett’s a tabloid favorite.

And Beckett has a SECRET.

One of Finley’s tasks as a student in Ireland is to befriend and comfort a bitter old woman (Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave). Her Cathleen Sweeney has a SECRET.

Then, there’s the tipsy fiddler down’tha pub — Patrick Bergin, adding twinkling and diddly aye music to his repertoire.

Might fiddler Seamus have…a SECRET?

Sorry to taunt the writer-director over this, but bashing him about the ears over the ridiculous coincidences, inability to find an original laugh and making the lovely Irish scenery and tourist sites look as drab and bland as his leading characters would just be mean.

The silly movie within a movie is seriously half-arsed, with tabloid mating intrigues between Beckett and his co-star (Katherine McNamara) “massaged” by Beckett’s agent (Tom Everett Scott). There’s a “big dance” coming, where every couple in tiny Carlingford claims is where they met their true love.

That plays with lovelorn teen Emma (Saoirse-Monica Jackson, trying WAY too hard), Finley’s “sister” for the summer as she’s the daughter of the B & B owners who put her up. But Finley, whose answer to every early Beckett (chaste) come-on is “I know your type,” has another agenda.

Still, Ireland may take hold of her, put the “diddly aye” life in her fiddle playing and the spring in her romantic step.

This picture is so contrived that the family (Fiona Bell and Ciaran McMahon) who accept exchange student Finley are not only the same folks who took in her brother years before, but they have to announce that they’ve just inherited this B & B (or the money to buy it).

That makes for more potential mischief and more coincidences in the never-ending parade of them Baugh shovels out.

“Potential” is basically what this movie squanders.

The supporting players are more interesting than the leads, who never make us care about them or root for them. And it’s fascinating to watch a brilliant talent like Redgrave and a game hoofer like Bergin try to lift this dead weight all by themselves.

They can’t.

MPA Rating: PG for language and thematic elements

Cast: Rose Reid,  Jedidiah Goodacre, Tom Everett Scott, Patrick Bergin, Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave and Patrick Bergin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brian Baugh. A Roadsides Attraction release.

Running time: 1:55 (too bloody long)

Chris Rock, Samuel L. and the “Saw” brand were able to scare up nearly $9 million on the opening weekend of “Spiral,” somewhat lower that the $10-12 million the venerable franchise might be expected to earn, pandemic be damned.

Angelina Jolie’s made-for-streaming WB star vehicle “Those Who Wish Me Dead” didn’t crack the $3 million mark, puking in $2.7 million. T

That wasn’t enough to take second place away from Guy Ritchie’s Jason Statham actioner, “Wrath of Man,” which collected another $3.74 million.

No other side release made a dent, with Roadside Attractions, “the witness protection program of film distribution,” unable to sell the promising romance “Finding You.” Whatever word of mouth it got was from Irish rom com fans who don’t realize it sucked. Under $1 million for that one.

Focus Features smuggled another movie out with no one noticing — “Profile.” Its take was downright embarrassing. $670,000 on a lot of screens.

That “Demon Slayer” anima thing is still taking in $1.5-$2 million a weekend.

The best film indie icon John Sayles ever made (sorry “Lone Star,” “Secaucus Seven,” “Lianna” fans) was a brilliant period piece about a miner’s strike answered with corporate and state violence — 1987’s “Matewan.”

It is a classic on every level — labor relations history vividly brought to life, period perfect detail, a gorgeous, lived-in color palette. And that cast.

Before he became an Oscar winner, here was Chris Cooper, introduced to the world as he played a miner.

Mary McDonnell went on to star in “Dances with Wolves.”

Sayles favorite David Straithairn would leap from his iconic turn as flinty, miner-sympathizing police chief Sid Hatfield (of THOSE Hatfields) to mainstream Hollywood, films like “L.A. Confidential,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” an Oscar nomination. He’s the male lead in the similarly indie “Nomadland,” a wonderful actor who is great in everything he plays.

And James Earl Jones has one of his best roles playing an old miner who doesn’t suffer bigots, newfangled gadgets or Baldwin-Felts mine-company goons gladly.

The real Matewan is so damned mountainous and remote “they have to pipe the sunshine in” as the old Appalachian joke goes. So they filmed the movie in the more accessible Thurmond, W.Va. But some friends and I are checking out the REAL Matewan today, remembering the UMW history and the battle. Here are some pictures of it as it looks today

Tip…if you go, take the walking tour offered by Jim Baldwin, descended from the founder of the private police force “detectives” of Baldwin Felts.

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The “lost lottery ticket” comedy has a rich (ahem) history in the cinema. Ask anyone of a film they recall revolving around a lost, stolen or “gave the winner a heart attack” (“Waking Ned Devine”) lotto and you might get any of a dozen answers.

“Uptown Saturday Night” is the best American comedy hanging on that plot thread.

The first movie to use the ticket to riches plot was made by silent pioneer Al Christie in 1912. By coincidence, that’s the year Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale was born. He wrote the story that “Doua lozuri,” first filmed in 1957, was based on.

“Two Lottery Tickets” is a Romanian remake of that Eastern Bloc Era farce. Two down-on-their-luck guys — well, three, after some haggling — pick the winning numbers, revel in their good fortune and then realize that the “bumbag” (fanny pack, still a “thing” in Romania, apparently) it was in was stolen.

This “Doua lozuri” is a rare bird, a comedy from Romania that doesn’t have Borat making a mockery of the place, a little slice of life of a country seldom seen on Western screens. Paul Negoescu’s deadpan film finds a few grins as it slowly gets up to speed, and manages a fine finish that makes it worth recommending.

Dinel (Dorian Boguta) is a somewhat hapless auto mechanic/body shop guy who’s probably been bullied all his life. We see a customer refuse to pay him for his work, and we hear him trying to threaten, by phone, the Italian “mafia boss” his wife went off to “work” with, or ran off with (it’s unclear) two years before. Gina he just pleads with.

She says she needs money to buy out her contract and come home, and he can’t pull the cash together.

“I’m penniless!” (in Romanian, with English subtitles).

Fine, his equally broke gambling slacker pal Sile (Dragos Bucur) says. Let’s play the lotto! Their mutual friend Pompiliu (Alexandru Papadopol) may launch into conspiracy theories about government “fixes” on the game, fixes with anti-Semitic overtones, but no matter. They ponder numbers, pool their lei (Romanian currency) and buy a six million Euro jackpot ticket.

But between the time they buy it and the moment they see the numbers they carefully curated listed in the newspaper, Dinel gets muscled by two bullies from Bucharest in the lobby of his apartment building. Giving up his “bumbag” is the price of his escape.

All the two — three, thanks to Pompiliu’s “investment” in the ticket — have to do is figure out who these guys are connected to in the building, track them down to Bucharest and reclaim the bumbag and their riches.

The laughs come from the assorted “types” they chat up, plead with or grill (as their strategy changes) in their door-to-door search in that building.

There’s a little girl who is “very smart, quite right” not to open the door despite their entreaties, the clueless old lady who thinks they’re here to fix the cable, the pot dealers who can’t focus long enough to remember two mugs who might have been customers, a “Gypsy fortune teller” who cons them with her “I know everything,” and a couple of enterprising hookers among them.

The comic possibilities are frankly somewhat richer than the payoff in this slow shuffle of a “romp,” but some of those interviews earn a chuckle.

A revealing running gag is their use of a vintage Dacia sedan that Dinel has restored to sell (also a running gag in classic “Top Gear”).

Cracks about “the things Communism did to this country” and “Jews, Masons” and “Gypsies” pepper Pompiliu’s paranoid rants. But only a guy this knowledgeable of history, this much a film buff and this certain the government is out to “steal” the ticket could pretend to be an interrogator, tracking down two “robbers.”

Reporting the theft to the real cops is a moment fraught with comical cynicism — theirs, because they don’t want to give away that there’s a ticket in the stolen bumbag as they’re sure the police will steal it — and the policewoman’s, who figures they’re wasting her time with this “nothing of value” crime.

“We’ll close the borders,” she deadpans. Then “We’ll let Interpol know. And contact the FBI.“

“Deadpan” is the rule of thumb here, with our three leads shaping distinct character “types” and making them amusingly real — the hapless, gullible coward, the slippery, hustling womanizer (Sile) and the paranoid but well-read bigot (Pompiliu).

They remark about what a “beautiful country this is,” but “all the movies ever show is gloom and doom.” The petty crimes, vice, ethnic small-mindedness and general sense of lingering Soviet decay suggest maybe “Doua lozuri” isn’t any more of a tourism-board-approved comic postcard than anything Borat shows the world.

But it’s cute enough, even if it doesn’t sell anybody other than James May on the charms of a “vintage” Dacia.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Dorian Boguta, Dragos Bucur, Alexandru Papadopol

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Negoescu, based on a short story by  Ion Luca Caragiale .A Dakanalog release.

Running time: 1:25

Michael Keaton is the guy out to…stop her?

Aug 20.

Reviews are embargoed until 7pm Thursday, so stay tuned.

There isn’t much to “2149: The Aftermath,” another entry in the dreaded, cinema-consuming “YA-sci-fi” genre. What’s here is perfectly, if a tad blandly, realized. It’s just that not enough happens.

Editor turned director and co-writer Benjamin Duffield serves up a new version of the post-apocalyptic dystopia, limited in perspective and scope, but myopic, faintly paranoid and competently acted.

An older man tells us this story in voice over, about the days, nights and years when he life in a “sanctuary pod,” cubicle-sized self-contained apartments where people like him stayed in the same chair all day, eating meals, playing games, sending texts to his mom in a separate pod and working — remote control operating front-end loaders for the mining that produces the minerals needed to make sanctuary pods more efficient.

Darwin (Nick Krause) has been in his pod nine years, since “the greatest war of all” killed most of humanity and made the Earth uninhabitable. Any distractions and a disembodied voice barks “Continue working, CONTINUE WORKING NOW.” It’s not like he can afford to not do the job that keeps his air flowing his meals coming and and push-button supersuit (he can shower inside it and never take it off) operating.

But one distraction jolts him. He sees a dog. That’s not enough to get him out of his chair. But a power outage that starts a verbal countdown of his breathable O2 supply does.

“The purification will go off in 15 minutes…Goodbye, Darwin.”

Capitalism. Can’t beat it. But you can figure out it’s been riding that old trope, “the world isn’t as poisonous as they’ve been saying.”

Darwin stands up for the first time in years, wanders outside, and wouldn’t you know it, finds a “family” living in the woods, beyond the reach of the “police cruiser” drones. Molly Parker is the “mother,” but blonde teen Dara (Juliette Gosselin) takes a special interest in this “dweller.”

Can young love blossom amid the gloom? Who or what might stand in the way?

A clever touch, thanks to thought-to-type commands on his computer, Darwin has forgotten how to speak. The other kids in the family have to mimic a keyboard and interpret his “speech.”

The “police cruisers” look suspiciously like assorted specialty conduit-bending tools, or droid soldiers from the “Star Wars” universe.

The threat is “generic,” the “family” lives and entertains itself in “Little House on the Prairie” no-tech fashion, and the passion is dispassionate. The plot is strictly low-stakes, with the characters’ emotions matching that.

Krause (“White Rabbit,” “The Descendants”) makes a sort of Edward Scissorhands impression, which doesn’t give us enough to connect with. Parker is credible, as always. And the Canadian Gosselin (“Kiss Me Like a Lover”) has a moment or two. Actually, just one.

Credit Duffield for making this dystopia feel labor-exploitation lived-in, gutted and depopulated, and the “pod” is pretty impressive.

But the movie with those settings needed some action, man, or a lot more than this.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Nick Krause, Molly Parker, Juliette Gosselin, Jordyn Negri, Daniel DiVenere, and Cassidy Marlene Jaggard.

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Duffield, script by Benjamin Duffield, Robert Higden. A 4Digital Media release.

Running time: 1:17

June 18, we find out.