Movie Nation

A little fighting back against the horror, from Quiver May 21.

Over his comic lifetime, Billy Crystal has made more people laugh in more venues than just about anybody alive. Stand-up to sitcom, “Saturday Night Live” to Oscar host, one-man Broadway show to movies, he’s created and forgotten more characters and laughs than any mere mortal could ever remember.

So he’s earned the indulgence of a movie — more than a few — that simply don’t work. Well, he certainly thinks so.

That’s what “Here Today,” an indulgence about a comedy legend indulged with a head writer gig with a TV sketch show, a guy who’s lost his fastball, curveball and spitball and who is hiding the fact that he’s losing his memories to dementia.

Crystal stars in it, directed and co-wrote the adaptation of an Alan Zweibel (“SNL,” “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”), playing a comedy icon who might be a shell of his former self, but hoping to hang on to just enough of himself to get through a memoir. His best hope? This stranger (Tiffany Haddish) who won lunch with him at a charity auction.

Whatever else Crystal accomplishes with this movie, he’s created a nice half-normal “acting” job for Haddish, who sheds some of her wild-woman persona to play a singer with a cover-band specializing in jazz novelty tunes (Fats Wallers’ “Your Feet’s Too Big,” etc.), someone who doesn’t know who this guy she always addresses as “old man” is, but who sees the signs and takes a compassionate interest in his well-being.

The movie surrounding them? It flirts with “insipid,” and is about as funny as a teenager’s funeral.

The best laugh for this story of a writer who pushes his half-awed junior writers to look for “the right kind of laugh,” is a sight gag — a digital bit of face contortion meant to mimic SOMEbody’s shellfish allergy at that awkward “meet cute” lunch. The worst? Almost everything else.

Comic polymath Charlie Burnz, who keeps post-it notes on pictures of his family so he won’t forget their names, talks Emma the singer into visiting New York’s version of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. They can’t find so much as a giggle among wax statues of the famous and infamous.

The running gag of the TV show “This Just In” where Charlie is the producer’s mentor and eminence grise to the “kids,” is that one performer has such tin-eared intonation that he ruins many a sketch and pretty much every punchline — “SUB-peona,” “MITCH McConnell.”

HILarious.

Charlie mentors a struggling Harvard Lampoon alum whose sketches are failing to get on the air, and even the “improved” sketches are painfully unfunny. Nobody in those scenes, from the writer’s room to the “live” performances, is remotely funny.

It’s like the comic icon who made the Oscars he hosted all about him was too insecure to cast anybody else, other than Haddish, who’d make an impression. Cameos by Sharon Stone, Kevin Kline, Barry Levinson and Bob Costas, playing themselves in a “tribute,” merit a smirk, at best.

Those cast as Charlie’s not-quite-estranged family (Penn Badgley and Laura Benanti play his kids, Louisa Krause his late wife in flashbacks) barely register. Actress-playwright Anna Deveare Smith plays his sober-minded doctor.

The script is littered with — literally — throw-away jokes from the last century. “There’s this new invention called a ‘computer.’ You might want to try it.” “Throw-away line” is too generous a description for much of it. “Litter.”

But Haddish, toned down and not trying too hard, brings an offhand charm to Emma. Haddish isn’t much of a singer, but she’s game and confident and puts over a cover of “A Little Piece of My Heart” at Charlie’s grand-kid’s bat mitzvah that makes us wish the movie was about her, struggling to make a go of it with a seven piece cover-band in the Big Apple.

The over-arching theme here is cherish the memories you’ve acquired over a lifetime, the good and the bad. Because they’re “Here Today” and gone tomorrow. Our memories of Billy Crystal won’t be tarnished by one more unamusing, heartburn-not-heartwarming comedy.

But there’s no denying the evidence on the screen. He USED to be funny.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for strong language, and sexual references.

Cast: Billy Crystal, Tiffany Haddish, Anna Deveare Smith, Penn Badgley, and Nyambi Nyambi

Credits: Directed by Billy Crystal, script by Alan Zweibel and Billy Crystal, based on a short story by Zweibel. A Sony/Stage 6 release.

Running time: 1:57

The movies have always been glib in how they depict mental illness. And there are a few minutes at the beginning of “Paper Spiders” where you can wonder if we aren’t about to be treated to more of the same.

A clingy, widowed Mom (Lili Taylor) makes inappropriate remarks and superstitious dismissals of the school to her half-smothered daughter (Stefania LaVie Owen) as the kid checks out a prospective college. It’s really all about Mom.

“Why did I push you to make straight As? I just pushed you right out the door.”

But any cutesie “Terms of Endearment” delusions go right out the door, and in a hurry, as mother Dawn’s delusions become manifest, manic and overwhelming, threatening to derail daughter Melanie’s future and turn her present into a living hell.

“Paper Spiders” is a bluntly-realistic portrayal of how a lone teenager might cope with or compensate for such a situation, and where she can and frankly cannot expect to find help when her only parent goes crazy.

Driven by a sober, case-study-real and wild-eyed performance by Taylor — from “Mystic Pizza” to the new “Perry Mason” one of the finest actresses of her generation — and anchored in the overwhelmed kid Stephanie LaVie Owen (“I’m Dying Up Here,” “Krampus”) shows us, this sad, anxiety-inducing drama about what results from Mom’s mania is a veritable tutorial on “Mental Illness Hits Home.”

Melanie is a smart kid — class salutatorian at Erie Canal High. She’s always written-off Mom’s quirks as “neurotic.” But she’s just reached an age where she can see more and process it with growing alarm.

It “starts” with the new neighbor Mom instantly gets into a feud with. She becomes convinced “he” is watching them, throwing rocks, sneaking around and into their house and worse. Melanie takes all of this seriously, up to a point.

Mom calling the cops is a tipping point. Hiring a private detective (Max Casella) is the next “logical” step.

Seeing Dawn at work with an aging, long-suffering lawyer (David Rasche), we wonder how long it’ll be before she snaps there and that job is gone.

Melanie seeks help close-at-hand, from the school mental health counselor (Michael Cyril Creighton).

“I’m here because of my Mom” earns a “Me, too” from him. He veers between flippant and uncaring to consulting a textbook for a “diagnosis” and then dithering on beyond his pay grade.

And then there’s the obnoxious, hunky new rich kid at school (Ian Nelson), a “playa” who zeroes in on Melanie. He’s persistent, drives a BMW convertible and always has a flask or water bottle spiked with vodka. Considering the other “issues” in her life, Melanie starts to give in a little.

That too, by the way, is textbook behavior.

Director and co-writer Inon Shampanier (“Beautiful and Twisted,” “The Millionaire Tour”) makes us anxious for Melanie, and LaVie Owen makes us fear for this sweet kid unable to figure out how to help her mother and trapping herself with a feckless boyfriend who will either lean on her for sobriety or drag her into the bottle, bong or brownie with her.

Every movie hits every viewer a little differently, and this one pulled me right in. This is exactly the way such situations often play out — tirades, paranoia, threats of involuntary commitment, a child forced to make adult decisions.

Shampanier keeps the anxiety level high all the way to the closing credits, offering a little hope but taking incredible care to highlight the “no easy choices” and “no end in sight” difficulties facing Melanie, and the lesson that Mom “didn’t choose to be mentally ill, any more than somebody chooses to get cancer.”

This is a scenario with no villains — not Mom, not the neighbors Mom suspects, not the potentially-predatory PI she hires, not even the half-clueless-but-trying school counselor.

And as “Paper Spiders” suggests, it’s not just the terror that witnessing this sort of breakdown creates, it’s the relentless, insidious nature of the illness and the utterly deflating realization that doing this or doing that is awful, and taking no action is worse.

The cast and filmmakers have made a very good movie about a very tough subject. and somehow have managed to never cop out once by showing us easy answers.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, teen drinking and sex, profanity

Cast: Stefania LaVie Owen, Lili Taylor, Peyton List, David Rasche, Ian Nelson and Max Casella

Credits: Directed by Inon Shampanier, script by Inon Shampanier, Natalie Shampanier. An Entertainment Squad release.

Running time: 1:50

Another May 7 release, a thriller, that literally just popped up on the date.

Reviewing this Lili Taylor comedy, opening Friday, shortly.

You will recognize the stand-up faces, if not necessarily the names they go by in this late June release.

A rigid, traditional Vietnamese dad and his Polish-born daughter stumble towards a connection in “The Taste of Phở,” a slight but engaging dramedy from Poland.

Long (Thang Long Do) is chef at Warsaw’s struggling, somewhat hidebound Ha Long restaurant.

His Phở soup and noodle dishes contribute to the homesickness of the owner (Gia Khai Ton) and his wife (Thi Thanh Minh Tran), who are ready to sell out and go “back home.”

Will Long stick it out? As he’s the father of a ten year old (Lena Nguyen), he probably will. Her mother may have died, but Maja’s devoted Polish grandmother further ties her to the only home she’s ever known.

We see his Zen devotion to cleaning the kitchen and the cigarette-butt littered street in front of the restaurant, devotion that extends to his careful ironing of Maja’s school skirt each day and the beautifully prepared Vietnamese lunch he packs for her.

Not every kid has a chef whip up a fancy meal like this on a daily basis. If Long knew she was changing into blue jeans and ditching the lunch en route to school every day, we know he’d stoically bear the hurt, but we’re sure he would feel it.

When the restaurant changes hands and the new Polish entrepreneur in charge redecorates, tactlessly gripes about the other Vietnamese kitchen staff (“Are they your family?”) not speaking English, fires them and just as tactlessly suggests Long make Thai food and sushi, Long wonders how much he can endure.

And that’s the very time that Maja’s acting-out goes public. She’s convinced that Dad is “forgetting Mom,” and making time with the pretty blonde (Aleksandra Domanska) in the building across the way. So she breaks out the binoculars and starts spying on them.

Writer-director Mariko Bobrik’s debut feature is a drama of subtle adult shadings and stresses, and comical childs-eye-view responses to change. What will break Long’s will, Maja’s rebellion or the Indian-immigrant assistants — who figure he’s “Japanese” — the new boss brings in to save money?

Long will have to adapt or abandon this job, and possibly even Poland. Maja’s biracial efforts to fit in at school have paid off, but she’s become a classical Western “brat” in the process. How many “I hate yous” and “I wished you’d died instead of Mom (in Polish and Vietnamese with English subtitles)” can one father endure?

The overall effect is one of overcast skies and overcast lives, carefully hidden pain and longing, with barely a hint of the life Long dreamed of and maybe had, or of the life he left behind to emigrate to Poland.

Not a lot happens here and the personal journeys that the characters make are the very definition of “baby steps.” But the milieu, the simmering food and tensions of the kitchen and the frosty stand-off between adult and child make this chamber piece from Poland pay off.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Thang Long Do, Lena Nguyen, Aleksandra Domanska

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mariko Bobrik. A BAM Kino Polska streaming release.

Running time: 1:24

What’s the old joke? “Authenticity is the hardest thing to fake?”

The new “countdown to my big ‘homecoming’ concert” documentary, “The Boy from Medellin,” presents a portrait of an artist under a lot of stress.

José Álvaro Osorio Balvin, aka “J Balvin,” is the “Prince of Reggaeton,” a best-selling, Grammy-dominating Latin superstar who has built a great career and attained great fame and wealth by being among the very best in the world at what he does. “Boy from Medellin,” released on his 36th birthday, is a video victory lap.

He comes off as an earnest, lightly-charming entertainer who “gets OCD” if he dodges a fan’s request for a selfie (VIDEO selfies, too), wears his Latin roots with pride and is gobsmacked by the tour receipts ledger his business manager shows him. And we also see a guy under enormous pressure to deliver when he does his first big “solo stadium show” in “the city that gave him to the world” (as Medellin radio puts it).

Like legions of entertainers before him, he insists (in English, and Spanish with English subtitles) “on stage, I become my alter ego. I’m J Balvin, off-stage I’m just ‘ José .'”

He takes to heart advice that he should “Be you. Never pretend.”

But hip hop or reggaeton, rocker or rising leading man in the movies, some artifice always enters the picture, some bits of self-mythologizing. Nobody wants to make it look “easy.” Some illusions an artist feels a need to make to rationalize that great success.

And when Balvin makes his first “up from the streets of Medellin” claim as footage of him with pals diving into a pool under a scenic waterfall, you smell the BS waft right off the screen.

He tells his hard-knocks story, moving to Miami to learn English and “follow my dream,” “painting houses by day,” renting limos and propping up his “superstar” pose by night.

“My poor friends thought I was rich, my rich friends figured I was poor,” he says.

He leaves out his time in Oklahoma and New York, an upper middle class exchange student shipped abroad to learn English. Fine. Artists make their own myth and if that’s what gets you through the day — mentally — have at it. Tupac took ballet as a teen, and nobody worked the “I’m from the street” angle harder.

Balvin speaks frequently of the “hard work” it took to get him where he is and there can be no doubt about that. But as the film’s limited to one week of his life, we don’t see process — no composing or writing, no recording studio time, no rehearsals, a stage show that involves a lot of co-stars carrying much of the load, and a lot of backstage breaks/costume changes in between his appearances.

What we see and hear a LOT — as captured by the many photos from the film posted above — is the mental toll this great fame has taken on him. He’s medicated and he meditates. “Meditation saved my life,” he says. He recalls huge weight gains, suicidal thoughts and near break-downs.

That’s the distinguishing characteristic of an otherwise generic “star in his moment” doc. An easy-going, affable guy has a lot on his mind and is suffering for his art.

And then there’s this concert, planned months in advance, but arriving as all of Colombia — former “cartel” capital Medellin included — is protesting the right wing government there.

The most interesting moments director Matthew Heineman captures on camera are the angst the superstar undergoes trying to figure out how to respond in a way that won’t make things worse, that won’t get people hurt or his concert canceled or broken up by unrest.

His diplomatic tweets and on-stage “statement” remind us he’s every inch the adult, and nobody’s fool. Perhaps politics lies beyond his days of Latin-flavored hip hop wardrobe and pop star hair.

Other revealing bits are less flattering — offering to meet “face to face” with a local critic who pans his music and posture, whining from the stage about his treatment by the press.

Truthfully, “revealing” this film isn’t. It’s emotionally flat, and with very little of his back story (a cute home video of an early concert where “no one has shown up, yet”) and not much of his music included at all. Compare it to the scores of such films on other artists, and there’s just not enough here.

That’s not really on him. J Balvin got to where he is through ambition and talent. It’s the film about him that doesn’t show that.

If you want to learn more about him, Wikipedia is a lot more helpful. If you want a concert film, this isn’t it. But if you want to see a singer at peak popularity interacting with fans, smiling in traffic and stressing out when he steps out of the public eye, have at it.

MPA Rating: R for language

Cast: J Balvin, his friends, family, doctor and entourage

Credits: Directed by Matthew Heineman. An Amazon Studios release (on Amazon Prime May 7)

Running time: 1:35

Robert Mitchum was a high-mileage/hard-miles 57 when he took on Raymond Chandler’s iconic private eye Philip Marlowe in 1975’s “Farewell, My Lovely,” a character immortalized by Bogie in “The Big Sleep” in a story of that had been filmed twice before, in the film noir-mad 1940s.

He wasn’t too old to take the part, but he looked it.

But there’s nostalgia value in seeing a genuine big-screen tough guy tackle a story and a genre one more time. And if the movie is a lot better looking — lurid, neon and shadows design, a properly seedy 1941 Los Angeles — than scripted or acted, well there’s a reason we remember Dick Richards as a creator of iconic TV commercials of the ’60s, and not for his movies — “March or Die,” “Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins” and “The Culpepper Cattle Company,” and this one.

Mitchum’s weathered voice-over narration decorates the festivities and gives it the world-weariness that Chandler all but perfected. Voice-over is an awful crutch for a filmmaker to lean on, but of all the gin-joint films in all of the cinema, the movies where it works best are Chandler adaptations.

“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.” “The house itself wasn’t much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler building.”

But there’s “world weary” and there’s “enervated,” and that’s where “Lovely” sits on the “too-many whiskies/too-many-smokes” end of the spectrum.

Marlowe is hired by an ex-con, Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran, one of Terrence Stamp’s villain-accomplices in the “Superman” movies) to “find my Velma.” She was “a girl” at a club he used to frequent before he went to prison for armed robbery. Now the club’s become an African American hangout, and Marlowe finds the Velma trail cold, even before Moose kills the Black owner of the joint, trying to beat answers out of him.

But Marlowe isn’t in a position to blow off the man mountain/client. He meets with an alcoholic widow of the previous owner (Sylvia Miles, who steals the movie), a nefarious local shaker and mover (Anthony Zerbe, oily as ever) and the obligatory “femme fatale,” the arm candy of a rich old judge, played by a very young Charlotte Rampling.

Mitchum’s Marlowe takes the usual Marlowe beatings and clubbings, gets kidnapped by a madam and drugged, dodges bullets hither and yon, drinks too much whisky and gets too little help from the one old school “honest” cop (John Ireland, not at his best) and his corrupt underling (Harry Dean Stanton).

Sly Stallone has a non-speaking supporting part as a mug, probably his fate had he not written “Rocky” and blown up the next year.

Rampling, almost 30 years younger than Mitchum, vamps up her Bacall-smitten-by-Bogie homage, although by the ’70s this sort of pairing — even for an acknowledged gold-digger character — was becoming a head-scratcher.

The film’s post civil rights era racial attitudes don’t tidy up Chandler entirely. The “N” word is dropped, and the lack of police interest in a Black man’s death is both ancient and up-to-2021 modern.

But for all that, for all the residual goodwill any classic film fan feels for Chandler, Mitchum, Ireland et al, the picture’s as stiff as last week’s pancakes

The Dick Powell version of this story is still the definitive one. “Murder My Sweet” (1944) it was called, and it still crackles, while this version never manages more than a creak.

MPA Rating: R, for violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Jack O’Halloran, Harry Dean Stanton, Sylvester Stallone, Sylvia Miles and Anthony Zerbe.

Credits: Directed by Dick Richards, script by David Zelag Goodman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. An Avco Embassy release on various streaming services

Running time: 1:35

“The Water Man” is a gorgeous looking tween fantasy/adventure in the “Bridge to Terabithia” tradition, well-cast and designed to tug at the heartstrings.

But the feature directing debut of co-star David Oyelowo (“Selma”) is a Bridge to Nowhere — dramatically flat and emotionally lacking. Simply put, the manipulations required to draw out tears don’t manipulate and the quest — for a scary and mythic forest dweller who has supposedly become immortal — is a dead end.

The message may come through loud and clear, but the movie delivering it’s a bit of a muddle.

Lonnie Chavis of TV’s “This is Us” is Gunner, the new kid in his small Oregon town, a loner who rides about on an electric scooter, haunting the bookstore and eavesdropping on funerals as he does “research” for the graphic novel he’s writing about a detective investigating his own murder.

Dad (Oyelowo) is retired from the Navy. But doting Mom (Rosario Dawson at her earthy, nurturing best) is sick. She’s wearing a lot of headscarves and closing the door to the bathroom. A lot.

Her son has BIG questions. “Where do we go when we die?” But she’s not ready to deal with that.

“That’s easy. The cheesecake factory.“

Dad, who spent much of Gunner’s childhood overseas, is an stressed and short-tempered stranger and of little comfort.

There’s this local myth, fancifully illustrated — comic book animation style — of a sort of “Slender Man” in the dense forest up around Wild Horse. The Water Man may be just a tale “parents tell their kids to keep them out of the woods,” or he might be — the charismatic homeless girl Jo (Amiah Miller, showcased as Jodie Foster/Chloe Grace Moretz, The Next Generation) tells the other kids who come to hear her stories in her secret camp.

That’s something else Gunner overhears. As he gets a grip on what’s going on with his mother, he realizes book research isn’t enough. He’s got to “find the Water Man,” this immortal boogeyman, and figure out his secret, that “fire” on his chest that’s some sort of talisman against death.

He gets tips from a reclusive “expert” (Alfred Molina). But to find Wild Horse and his quarry, he needs somebody who says she’s seen him — Jo. She’ll take him — for the right price.

And Dad? He’s desperate to get the sheriff (Maria Bello) to help him find his kid.

Screenwriter Emma Needell’s first produced screenplay wears its antecedents too obviously and puts its message — “Every one you love will one day leave you.” — ahead of suspense, entertaining action, frights, the works.

Losing track of, even failing to so much as mention your title character for most of a 90 minute movie means you fail to build up the myth and leave out the implicit threat in an unseen “boogeyman.”

That makes for a “Terabithia” meets “It!” that’s harmless and not entirely charmless, but more a collection of pretty locations (Oregon), good actors and a couple of kids who barely hold our interest in a journey that less interesting than the destination, which isn’t interesting at all.

MPA Rating:  PG for thematic content, scary images, peril and some language

Cast: Lonnie Chavis, Amiah Miller, David Oyelowo, Rosario Dawson, Alfred Molina and Maria Bello.

Credits: Directed by David Oyelowo, script by Emma Needell. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:32