Movie Nation

You shouldn’t make a Cinderella movie without having some killer “Steps” in mind. “A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish,” has some doozies.

You don’t have to be a tweenage girl to get your back up at how LOATHESOME the evil stepmother (Hallmark Channel favorite Johannah Newmarch) and her daughters, Joy (Lillian Doucet-Roche) and Grace (Chanelle Peloso) are.

They are SO mean to poor Kat (Laura Marano of “Perfect Date” and “Ladybird”). Her dad married Deirdre (Newmarch, perfectly vile) and died, leaving her stuck cleaning up after and even financially supporting these golddigging neer-do-wells.

Stepmom bullies and steals and connives and will not HAVE you interrupt her time to “bitchwatch ‘The Real Housewives of Manhattan Beach.'”

Joy has a vlog, and never misses a chance to humiliate Kat, videoing her after she stumbles while toting their shopping and massive Starbucks order.

“You’re TRENDING, Starbucks Girl!”

Grace and Joy take turns trashing her appearance.

“You could use some color. You look like a fetus!”

And gauche? Fuggedaboutit! They’ll be right at home at the big Chrismas Eve gala.

“It’s pronounced GAW-la! I’ve been working on an upper class accent!”

At some point, MANY points in this little ditty of a holiday musical comedy, you may find yourself wishing Kat would just nunchuck the lot of them.

NOT that kind of movie, though. It’s a simple holiday wish-fulfillment romance about a girl who just wants to write songs and sing songs and “sell out arenas.”

For now, she sings and dances in the show at Santa’s Village with BFF Isla (Isabella Gomez), wearing an elf costume as they do.

But wait! There’s a new Santa joining the ensemble. He’s their age, but he’s already got the beard on every time they see him. “Hot Santa” they call him, not realizing he’s rich boy/would-be music impressario Dominic Wintergarden (Gregg Sulkin of Hulu’s “Runaways”), the VERY guy Kat tripped up and spilled all that Starbucks product all over herself in front of.

All these movies are offspring of that 2004 Hilary Duff hit, “A Christmas Story,” which took its plot from the famous fairy tale. No magical mice or glass slippers are here, and actress/choreographer/writer/director Michelle Johnston doesn’t make the movie “fit” the tale’s parameters as neatly as you’d hope.

Glass snowglobe, not glass slippers? Nah. It’ll take “A Christmas Miracle” to throw the downtrodden Kat and handsome Prince/Son of the Richest Guy in Town together. We know it’s coming.

The emphasis here is on the wish fulfillment stuff, not the romance. So “chemistry” barely matters. Marano has a cute, plucky presence, and Sulkin isn’t “sulkin'” when they’re together (Sorry!).

The songs? Think “Autotune: The Musical.”

Truthfully, there’s no much to it save for some some pleasantly-underwhelming choreography, and lots of righteous bullying. Those “steps” do it like they were born to pick on the less fortunate.

“Potatoes wear sacks better than you!”

MPAA Rating: PG for rude and suggestive material

Cast: Laura Marano, Gregg Sulkin, Isabella Gomez, Johannah Newmarch, Lillian Doucet-RocheHa, Chanelle Peloso.

Credits: Written and directed by Michelle Johnston,   A Warner Home Video release, on Netflix.

Running time: 1:26

No DeNiro for “The Irishman,” a lot less Netflix than the critics’ groups and Golden Globes crowd have been crowing over.

From Variety…
SAG Nominations: 22 Biggest Snubs and Surprises From ‘Little Women’ to ‘The Morning Show’ https://t.co/RK1nA9rwPo https://t.co/yORJ4oFvtn https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1204805932951035905?s=20

Oh, look at all the guys who try to take advantage of the tipsy lady at the bar. Look at what she does to them. Or seems about to.

“Promising Young Woman” opens in April.

The “great singer who can’t get a break in this business” trope earns a desultory, if occasionally tuneful treatment in “Hold On,” a faith-based drama “inspired by true events.”

It plays as preordained, and the emotionally-flat performances, even in roles designed to manipulate, undo it as it covers ground many before have covered.

Sidney Rhodes, played by Micayla De Ette, is introduced as the most gifted singer ever to come out of North Oakland, California. We hear her being interviewed on local radio, a contest victory under her belt and her eyes on that “Make it big in LA” prize in her voice, under the opening credits.

Years later, we see her dealing with the reality of the music business in the showbiz capital. She’s singing jingles, showing off that five octave range for a cut-rate producer with a “studio” in his apartment. His only note to her? “Be less ethnic.”

She’s a singer. She can sound “whiter” if that what he doesn’t have the nerve to request.

She keeps up a video blog, summoning up bubbly enthusiasm for her “fans,” excited for this “big audition” coming up, her “new music.”

But the truth is, Sidney’s nobody’s idea of a modern pop star. She’s aging out of her window to “make it,” and knows it. She’s got talent and training, but she’s Adele-sized, and then some.

“It’s about more than the voice,” a dismissive talent scout mutters, refusing to make eye contact. “What’s special about you?”

“I was meant to reach more people,” Sidney thinks.

Her day job is with a local church, working in the office, making deliveries to the homeless, choral director and singing “worship leader” on Sundays. Her pastor (Luiz Guzman) would love for her to come up with some more traditional fare for the worship band/choir to perform.

That’s what sends Sidney to a local record store, where the owner has no idea who Mahalia Jackson is.

“Is she the one between Janet and LaToya?”

But the irritable clerk there, Vic (writer-director Tarek Tohme) helps her out, before having the final meltdown that’ll get him fired. That sets the stage for this troubled “rich kid,” driving a Mercedes SUV that the record store owner used as his contemptuous nickname (“Mercedes”) to fall under Sidney’s spell.

NOT romantically, he and the screenplay keep insisting (if there’s “fat shaming” here, it’s in moments like that). But he’s the estranged son of a famous producer (Maurice Benard). He finds Sidney’s singing samples on Youtube, swipes some gear from his daddy’s home studio, and badgers her into letting him record her and manage her.

The “douchebag bipolar crazy person” has to convince Ms. “I can’t trust ANYbody out here” to sing him that one song, “written from a hard place,” that captures the scope, range and drama of her Mahalia Jackson-sized voice. And the rest will be history, right? Or at least according to formula.

Flavor Flav is wackily miscast as “the kid’s” probation officer. He’s not an awful actor, but he doesn’t adjust his appearance to look the part — in the least.

Guzman is one of Hollywood’s best character actors, but he’s nobody’s idea of a charismatic preacher. No presence in the pulpit.

Amanda Lillard plays an example of the sort of pop star record companies adore today, Alvaro Manrique is Sidney’s prodigal (junky) brother that she won’t give up on and Mikel Butler plays her supportive younger sister.

Merely introducing the characters points us in exactly the direction all of this is going. It’s going to take some magical performances to bring this predictable tale to life, and nobody here is up to the task.

De Ette is a much more dramatic singer than actress, Tohme has but a wan, single note to play and he can’t make that an interesting one. The shots and editing have an enervated feel, as if everybody involved is just showing up on a shoot they realize is just “Here we go again.”

As with most every film, there’s the germ of a good idea here — a faintly-edgy faith-based music movie with an unconventional leading lady and a story arc that avoids conventional “Star is Born” dynamics. It’s just that nobody involved seems to have a grasp of what they could do with this, other than the most predictable choices.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a scene of violence, thematic elements and some language

Cast: Micayla De Ette, Tarek Tohme, Luis Guzmán, Mikel Butler and Flavor Flav.

Credits: Written and directed by Tarek Tohme. A Film Bureau release.

Running time: 1:46

Netflix could use some help in its “plot summar blurb” deparment. Because their brief description of “Atlantics” is so far off as to lure viewers in under false pretenses, and scare off the viewers most likely to enjoy it.

It’s a hip, topical and sexy romance with a dose of the supernatural, set in a place few in the West would associate few of those adjectives — Senegal, West Africa. Built on a fated love-affair in a (somewhat) strictly Muslim country, it shows a vibrant capital city, Dakar, where the young like to dance, go to clubs, fall in love with a person of their choosing and dream of a future unencumbered by their present.

Just like young people any place else.

Ada, sensitively played by the radiantly beautiful Mame Bineta Sane, loves Souleiman (Traore). They steal away, any chance they can. And when she returns to her “girls,” a couple of whom wear the product-placement names of Dior and Fanta, they know what she’s been up to.

“Why the smile?” Mairana (Coumba Dieng) wants to know (in the local language Wolof, with English subtitles). “Did you lose your virginity on the way?”

Hey, they’re young, good looking and hormonal. They act like the 18-20 year-olds they are.

But Ada is engaged to Omar (Babacar Sylla), an arranged marriage according to local Muslim custom. Omar is handsome, aloof and well-off, with a car and a job that puts him on a plane every now and them. He’s given her an iPhone.

But the heart and hormones want they want. That iPhone is just another way to be with Souleiman. On the down-low, of course. Her family acts as if they don’t know something’s up, but Mairana does.

“God is testing you! He put Souleiman in your path!”

Not for long, it turns out. He’s one of the legions of laborers working on another modernist high-rise in the coastal city. But the rich developer building it is months behind in paying them. Yes, it happens there, too.

Souleiman and his mates resolve to sail off, up the coast to Spain, to try their in the EU. Ada is bereft, with a wedding day marching towards her, pressure from friends and family to marry and get pregnant “before (Omar) takes a second wife!” Her Romeo has gone to sea. Who will save her, now?

That’s when the ghosts start showing up. That’s when things start to “spontaneously combust.”  

French actress-turned-director and co-writer Mati Diop makes her feature debut with “Atlantics,” a langorous and at times luxe affair that uses its stately (ok, slow) pace and many many MANY shots of the tranquil or turbulent sea to suggest how serious and meaningful it all is.

I don’t think she makes that case. But in showing us another of an Afro-Islamic country rarely seen on film, she has done a great disservice. And in her depiction of the very “natural” supernatural, she gives “Atlantics” righteously chilling overtones.

The “ghosts” are white-eyed avengers straight out of Greek tragedy, ad hoc assemblies of women out to right the wrongs of the developer, the arranged marriage, all of it.

The fires even get the interest of an arson investigator. How are the vengeful harpies with the white eyes going to take that?

Sane’s Ada is not overtly willful, and she gets across her youthful impulsiveness, quiet desperation and silent suffering. She can’t really confide in anyone, with Souleiman away. But her friends all know what she’s going through and take sides. Sane is a terrific, understated “re-actor,” letting Ada reflect the pressures and wishes of whoever she confronts — friend, family or the cop wondering about these fires.

Still, lovely as it often is, “Atlantics” isn’t as deep as it wants to come off and isn’t anybody’s idea of a great film. But in the world it depicts and the vivid characters inhabiting it, it is engaging, informative and absolutely worth your while — perfectly Netflixable.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, sex, some frightening images

Cast: Mame Bineta Sane, Traore, Babacar Sylla and Diankou Sembene

Credits: Directed by Mati Diop, script by Olivier Demangel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

If you’ve seen the movie, you don’t have to ask which one.

From The Hollywood Reporter.

“Lionsgate is leaning into the popularity of @ChrisEvans’ cozy, white cable-knit sweater in #KnivesOut”

https://t.co/co3wmlQ93C https://twitter.com/THR/status/1204690566665113601?s=20

The air of “played” hangs over “Jumanji: The Next Level,” a sequel that flails and flogs the premise that made “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” so funny, to death.

It’s not the folks stuck inside a video game idea that makes these fly. It’s Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black, as video game avatars doing comic impersonations of teens sucked into that game that works.

So let’s take that idea and double down on it, add impersonations and impersonators, have the impersonators change their impersonations. Once the writers and director Jake Kasdan settled on that, they seem to have clapped their hands together with an “Our work is done, here,” and hoped for the best.

Because even by video game logic/physics and “story” standards, this “Jumanji” is nonsensical and dull. And heartless, to boot.

We’ve got to get the kids — Alex Wolff, Morgan Turner, Ser’Darius Blain and Madison Iseman — BACK into the game that they smashed at the end of the first film, because who’d want to go through THAT again? The first of the film’s many lazy leaps is here.

Spencer (Wolff) has some contrived beef with the other three, especially Martha (Turner). Holiday depression? Painful breakup? He decides that fixing that busted game in his basement so he can turn into Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Dr. Bravestone again will cure his Blue Christmas. The others chase him into Jumanji to bring him back.

Only this time, the game sucks in Spencer’s arthritic, CPAP machine-breathing grandpa (Danny DeVito) and grandpa’s folksy, long-winded ex-business partner (Danny Glover), and THEY move into the bodies of game avatars played by Johnson and Hart.

Yes, they’re chased by ostriches and mandrills (ferocious apes). Bravestone knocks bad guys around and a Viking biker villain (Rory McCann of “Game of Thrones,” a great big shrug) must be hunted down and separated from the game’s “Falcon Jewel” magical talisman.

Oh, they need to track down Spencer, in whatever guise he’s in.

The one-liners are few and far between, with the jock Fridge (Blain) grumbling ” I gotta stop hangin’ out with white people!” being the stand-out.

That means this sequel comes down to performances. Even more than in the last film, it’s all about “Who’s the best at doing a funny version of another character in a body ill-suited to that voice?”

Even more than in the first film, Black does the heavy lifting here. He has his Bethany moments (as in “Welcome to the Jungle”). And he’s a drawling, irritable Fridge, griping about this broken down “fat guy” body he’s stuffed in, this time around.

Hart’s impersonation of Glover, slow of speech and “Shut the FRONT door” grandfatherly in his jokes, is almost as good. It takes old man Milo forever to get over the idea that he’s in a game in this “small muscular Boy Scout” body. His pedantic zoology speeches about ostriches and mandrills are of the “Get to the damned point, Grandpa” variety.

“Did I just kill Eddie…by talkin’…too slow?”

Johnson does his level best to suggest irritable Jersey Shore guy DeVito’s voice and pose, and the disconnect lands a few laughs. He and Hart feed off each other well, but he’s still looking for giggles goofing on his “smell what The Rock’s cookin'” persona.

Gillan’s “Tomb Raider” impersonator is far less interesting, unless you’re talking about her rock-hard abs.

The picture peaks early and gets winded early and that’s when more stops are pulled out, more characters introduced or re-introduced. Avatars switch, and truthfully, none of that works or amounts to much fun.

Awkwafina? Wasted here.

It’s not hateful, the violence is cartoonish (with many video game “deaths”) and there’s just enough profanity to earn sniggers from tweens.

But “The Next Level” is a game too glitchy to stick with long enough to finish, so limited in appeal that it’d be under the tree Christmas Eve, consigned to a closet or basement storage by New Year’s.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for adventure action, suggestive content and some language

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, Awkwafina, Danny Glover and Danny DeVito

Credits: Directed by Jake Kasdan, script by  Jake Kasdan, Jeff Pinkney and Scott Rosenberg, based on the Chris Van Allsburg novel. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 2:02

She is a tiny woman, white-haired, hard of hearing and stooped with age.

When the film crew checks in with her, Marthe Cohn is about to turn 96 (she’s 99 now), long-retired from nursing and the medical research assistant work she did with her husband, Dr. Major Cohn.

But the small and “shrinking” (as she puts it) woman with the French accent still has work to do, traveling the United States, which has been her home for over half a century, and Europe, which is where she earned that chest full of medals she sometimes has on her coat.

“Chichinette,” they called her during World War II. “Little pain in the neck,” Cohn translates with a laugh. The Jewish Cohn — her name was Hofnung then — is a Holocaust survivor “bearing witness” to the tragedy that befell her sister and millions of Jews, Gypsies and others under Nazi rule.

But the people who gave her that nickname “for asking too many questions” and being a pest about it were in French Intelligence. “Chichinette: The Accidental Spy” is about the story she tells when she speaks to schools, colleges, Jewish groups and others. She went into Nazi Germany to help the Allies finish the job of winning World War II.

Director Nicola Hens follows Cohn and her equally-elderly husband as they revisit her life, the places she lived, and remember what she did as she catches up with relatives and speaks to groups all along the way.

It’s mainly just the two of them, mostly her speaking (in English and French with English subtitles) as they venture from Paris to Metz, where she was born, fleeing to Poitiers in “Free France” after the Germans invaded and occupied the rest of the country.

Life was mainly about avoiding discovery, a large family of Jews hiding in Occupied France. Her beloved older sister was arrested. Her fiance joined the Resistance and was executed. Marthe, after becoming a nurse, acquired a fake passport and moved from Marseilles to Paris, mourning her lost love and wondering if she had a future.

But after D-Day, she found new purpose. Fluent in German as well as French, she enlisted as an agent, and in the very last days of the war, provided important intelligence to the French army as it was about to move into Germany.  

Those expecting derring do and fireworks in this story, which she didn’t tell publicly under the early 2000s in the book Behind Enemy Lines: the True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany, won’t find a lot of it here. It took several tries for young Marthe to cross into Germany-held territory. She took as few extra risks as possible, gathered just a couple of key bits of information, and made sure it reached the right people.

She doesn’t over-dramatize her exploits. It’s enough to know that in an age and place where her ethnicity alone was a death warrant, she took risks and “a mission” that saved soldiers lives and helped shape plans at the tactical level in April and May of 1945.

Stylistically, “Chichinette” is a personal story told in almost entirely her voice (mostly in French), with much detail skipped over about her daily survival, if not her long-ago travels in Occupied France and Vichy France. Dramatically and cinematically, it’s quite flat, almost drab at times. I didn’t find it nearly as emotional as other documentaries I’ve seen on the subject, but that’s because while she suffered tragedies, Cohn’s life was plucky and even heroic.

It’s a compelling Holocaust/espionage story not given the most dazzling treatment, cinematically.

Hens uses animation to recreate scenes, such as the dance where she met her beloved Jacques, and draws from a large supply of still photos Cohn and her family were able to keep throughout the war.

These serve to remind us that not every Holocaust story was a relentless tragedy, and that some survivors, when given the chance, fought back — even if they had to be a “pain in the neck” to do it.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Marthe Cohn, Dr. Major Cohn.

Credits: Directed by Nicola Hens. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:26

Why do the British hate Christmas so much?

Is it their anti-Catholic thing, the culture’s sturdy and vigorous undercurrent of atheism?

Or maybe the better question is WHEN did they start hating Christmas?

Is it because they’re sick of the whole hullaballoo, thanks to 150 years of “God bless us, every one!” Yes, Dickens all but “invented” the holiday. But for some time now, it’s been obvious that filmmakers from there have nothing new to add to the Christmas entertainment canon.

Rubbish pop tunes about the holiday and rubbish holiday movies, some of them (“Last Christmas”) based on rubbish holiday pop tunes.

James Dearden scripted “Fatal Attraction” in the last millenium, went on to make “A Kiss Before Dying” and pretty much disappear. When his latest big screen project came out in the UK, it was titled “Surviving Christmas with the Relatives.” Kind of on-the-nose and artless, as titles go. But accurate.

“Christmas Survival” it is called as it reels onto Netflix, and a bigger bollix job of a holiday comedy I cannot remember seeing.

As a genre, such films are churned out, mostly for The Hallmark Channel and Netflix these days, inisipid almost to a one — “Christmas Prince” this and that. But they’re often perfectly acceptable background (visual) noise for when you’re wrapping gifts, ordering online and prepping holiday meals and treats.

I mean, you can’t watch “A Christmas Story” but so many times. And not everybody has Amazon Prime where they can see the lone new “holiday” comedy that works this year, “Feast of the Seven Fishes.” 

But the very least one can expect from such fare is that it won’t offend the family. Because who, other than families, is even interested in movies of this type?

Dearden’s lump of coal in the stocking has profanity, annoying in-laws, domestic strife times two families, groping, drunken infidelity, a pot addict who’s gone mental and has to be hospitalized, and every few minutes, a word nobody drawn to “The Hallmark Holiday” and its movies wants her or his children to hear.

“Bastards!” That’s just for starters.

Dan and Miranda (Julian Ovenden and Gemma Whelan) are a couple of who given up London life and careers and taken over Miranda’s family farm. They’re spending everything they have to convert it to a B&B/organic vegetable and goats milk business.

They’ve hired a cadre of Eastern European laborers for the work (on the cheap). The house is half-wrecked in restoration projects. And they’re having her whole family over for the holidays.

Lila (Joely Richardson) is her sister, a fading film star married to Hollywood agent Trent (Michael Landes). They bring their American kids, and a Chinese exchange student (Jade Ma), with them. And they’ve gone ahead and invited more family to show up.

There’s also the local “tradition” that their parents started of inviting the entire village over for Christmas Eve drinks.

The stove doesn’t work. The roof leaks. Miranda is so rushed and distracted she never takes off her night gown during the hectic day.

Dan? He’s put off shopping, coping with his stoner teen son from an earlier marriage (Jonas Moore) and killing “Gobbles,” the big turkey they were planning on serving for dinner, until the last minute.

Elaborate set-up, drawn-out Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to follow, thank you very much.

There are hollow debates about presents. Trent is Jewish, and they shower their kids with Channukah baubles. Dan and Miranda want theirs to believe in Santa just a smidge longer.

Cooking debacles, kids who want to “prank Aunt Peggy” (Patricia Hodge) and yell “Child abuse!” the moment they’re corrected, a newly-broken-up-with-her-boyfriend aunt (Ronni Ancona), the wheelchair bound uncle (James Fox) who is no help at mediating financial disputes, drunken workers who flee the scene of the restoration, the whole drunken groping between in-laws, the Amerian teen daughter (Sophie Simnett) wondering how boy crazy she can go…

Oh, and the family “football” game.

Did I leave out a cliche? Did they?

There’s not a laugh in the bloody thing, and “grating” — what’s left — is not what you want out of your holiday romp, even if it’s just background noise with a British accent for everything you and yours have going on over the holidays.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drug and alcohol abuse, infidelity, profanity

Cast:  Julian Ovenden, Gemma Whelan, Joely Richardson, Michael Landes, Patricia Hodge, Sophie Simnett and James Fox.

Credits: Written and directed by James Dearden. A Studio Soho/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44