Movie Nation

“Monday” is a “lost weekend” romance, something so obvious a one of the main characters uses the phrase at his most blitzed.

It’s a love affair that walks on eggshells for the better part of two hours, two people with hints of co-dependency who have no business being together, sticking it out for that weekend — and many to follow — just trying to make it to “Monday.” And even though it overstays its welcome and its characters achieve a degree of “grating” that you wouldn’t think Denise Gough and Sebastian Stan could manage, it makes for a compelling portrait of denial, because that’s one big thing these two have in common.

Chloe and Mickey are a couple of ex-pats living in Greece. He’s a sometime musician and popular DJ living like he knows this line of work and lifestyle has an expiration date. When we meet her, she’s leaving drunken messages for an ex who dumped her.

It’s boozy love at first sight. Or lust. That’s how they end up naked on the beach and arrested. It’s “Friday” a title tells us. They’re kind of thrown together for the weekend by the fact that she misplaced her purse. There’s a “big gesture” and a brittle connection — with the odd testy moment — is made.

It’s just that Chloe, an immigration lawyer helping immigrants who want to come to the States, is finally done with the place and is flying home Monday.

Mickey’s “You’re always gonna regret not doing something rather than doing something” doesn’t move her. His last ditch effort to interrupt her passage through the terminal does.

“Monday” tracks their love affair — impulsive sex, co-habitation, an impromptu street rave to celebrate her furniture, which won’t fit into his apartment, through their first “his friends and YOUR friends” party, humiliations and slights — and deep into the messy intimacy that comes from people with baggage and “issues” coupling up.

Stan, of the “Captain America” movies and TV shows, hits on a sort of blitzed, uninhibited Jason Bateman vibe and makes it work for him here. He lets us see that Mickey’s old enough to know better, and that he can’t help himself.

Gough (“The Kid Who Would Be King,” “The Good Traitor”) has the tougher performance as the viewer’s surrogate. Chloe sees the signs and hears the warnings about “Mickey Go Lucky” and what a “baby” this “irresponsible,” self-destructive guy she’s hitched her future to, and Gough lets us watch the doubts creep across her face and body language even as Chloe’s scrambling to tamp those doubts down.

It all gets to be too much, what with the full frontal at the drop of a hat, and “four, no SIX shots of tequila” and “Get us drugs” and complications from each character’s history. No scene seems superfluous even if many go on too long. “A bit of a wallow” may cross your mind, as it did mine.

But director and co-writer Argyris Papadimitropoulus (“Suntan”) doesn’t let his baby drown in the bathwater, even if he never figures out he could have turned off the tap twenty minutes before the closing credits and delivered the same message in a tighter film.

MPA Rating: R (Sexual Content|Drug Use|Pervasive Language|Nudity/Graphic Nudity)

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Denise Gough, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Dominique Tipper, Eilli Tringou and Andreas Konstantinou.

Credits: Directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos, script by Rob Hayes, Argyris Papadimitropoulos. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:57

The only thing keeping every member of the cast of “Game of Thrones” from having her or his own movie to star in is a lack of chutzpah in the outliers’ agents.

Eugene Simon, once Lancel Lannister on TV, is on his third film post-“GOT,” misleadingly titled “Sensation.” It follows “The Lodgers” and the dark ensemble comedy “Kill Ben Lyk.”

It’s a drabber-than-drab DNA-driven “special” people fantasy, and it’s not stretch to say the material leaves him drab in it. “Sensation” is so lifeless and pointless as to make one ponder “What is the half-life on a ‘Game of Thrones’ career bounce?”

Simon’s Andrew Cooper, an intense London postman curious about his ancestry. But getting the “results” of his test proves to be a test in itself.

The bullying older man who insists he be addressed as “DOCTOR Marinus” (Alastair B. Cumming) is all obfuscations, threats and contempt.

“All data is the property of the company,” he sneers. And his “program” has “flagged certain characteristics” in the lad’s genetic makeup that mean “You are coming with us.”

Cooper, without “any idea” of how he’s doing it, snaps bones and bests the “muscle” Marinus has brought along in case the kid gives him any backtalk.

We puzzle over why Cooper still gets in the car with these creeps, despite having abilities he didn’t realize he had.

We wonder what’s up with his eyes, which wobble wildly when he takes in information, and about his manic violin playing, something he “just (copies) videos I watch” to master.

And we fret over this English manor house where people like him have been gathered “for study” by the expressionless supervisor Nadia (Emily Wyatt). It’s the sort of place where people with “special” senses and “abilities” are told “No one’s holding you here” when we can plainly see several someones are.

The “tests” the talented undergo there involve scenarios transmitted into their heads that have them thinking they’re shooting someone or witnessing somebody tossed off a double-decker bus, all while they’re confined to the grounds of this “institution.”

Like Cooper, we wonder what they want with him and how much of what he’s experiencing is real and what is merely induced-hallucination.

Director and co-writer Martin Grof (“Excursion”) has no effects budget here, so simple digital edits take Cooper in and out of scenarios, with music “selling” the transformation (not even close) we’ve just witnessed.

The “training” these subjects undergo at this facility are rendered in exercises too bland to mention. The action beats — aside from the “Is this real?” questions — are dull.

Among the cast, only the sinister Cumming (“What a Cirus”) stands out, and his character all but vanishes after the first act.

With the release of “Sensation,” Eugene Simon can take comfort on last month’s news that HBO has signed George RR Martin for six possible spinoff series. That doesn’t do the Slovak director Martin Grof any good, but at least his star could have a future in Westeros.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Eugene Simon, Emily Wyatt, Jennifer Martin and Alastair G. Cumming

Credits: Directed by Martin Grof, script by Magdalena Drahovska, Martin Grof. A GROFilm release.

Running time: 1:35

Yes, it’s a sequel. You remember that sassy, silly violent action comedy Samuel L joined @vancityreynolds for back in the early days of RR’s gin peddling days?

This summer’s installment adds Salma and her brand of murderous sass. “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” is slated for June 16.

It doesn’t take much effort to sympathize with Turquoise Jones.

She’s not just a single mom struggling to keep a hormonal teen in line. She’s not just a working woman who needs two jobs to cover their bills, not just a woman in the workplace forced to contend with the “interest” of an employer, and not just somebody who has to hassle her almost-ex to fork over a little child support.

Turquoise is hung-up on what might have been, the ways her life didn’t go according to plan, the mistakes she made and the people who helped her make them, through unprotected sex or AWOL parenting. Because as the newspaper clipping on the wall of the bar/barbeque where she works reminds her every day, she was once “Miss Juneteenth.”

Writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples cooks up a lot of relatable complications for Turquoise, played with weary but stoic focus by Nicole Beharie, to contend with. There’s nothing here most of us haven’t dealt with or run into in real life, much less seen on the screen.

Because “Miss Juneteenth” is about a disappointed woman determined that her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze, superb) not have it as hard. To that end, she’s riding her 14-year-old “about to turn 15” and making sure that somebody is in the child’s company, even when she’s waiting tables at Wayman’s BBQ, or cleaning down at Baker’s Funeral Home.

Sometimes, it’s her handsome but distracted husband (Kendrick Sampson), who every so often reminds her and tells us why he’s not living under their roof any more. Other days it might be her seriously religious mother (Lori Hayes), who isn’t shy about turning Turquoise down because “She’s not MY daughter.”

Mom remembers when Turquoise was Fort Worth’s Miss Juneteenth, a teen with a scholarship to the Historically Black College or University (HBCU) of her choice. That was 15 years ago. And who’s about to turn 15?

Turquoise makes it her mission to put Kai in that same tiara, with that same scholarship and a chance to make better choices and get out of the grind of low-paying jobs, overdue bills and occasional power shut-offs.

Turquoise has avoided the snobs who run the contest for years, but now she’s got to doll up, primp and remember the poise, posture, etiquette and perfect grammar the contest insists on, just to register a VERY reluctant Kai, who’d rather try out for the school dance squad.

“We will ensure she is transformed,” the ladies of Juneteenth purr. And “No daughter of mine” is dressing up “like a pole dancer” to shake her money maker on that dance squad. It’s a very touchy subject for Turquoise.

There’s a long tradition in African American cinema of making movies that entertain, dramatize real life experiences and teach. Here, the instruction is on the 1865 history of the holiday, celebrated when Texas slaves learned they’d been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier.

Kai has to take lessons in what fork, glass and spoon to use in formal settings and visit a run-down, unassuming Juneteenth Museum to learn just why she’s going through all this.

Turquoise has to scramble to find the money for a gown and entry fees so that her daughter can live the dream she never did. She’s also got to decide what to do about this marriage and how to respond to the funeral home boss (Akron Watson) who wants to bring her into the middle class with him.

“You were meant for more. You’re too good of a woman to be living the way you do,” paycheck to inadequate paycheck.

The settings feel lived-in — worn down bars, dirty streets and cowboy boots. The script has just enough surprises to keep us engrossed, lots of signs that Turquoise’s pluck and determination are bordering on mania, and plenty of heart, sad affirmations of what Black working poor poverty does to people in the South.

“Ain’t no ‘American Dream’ for Black folks,” BBQ owner Wayman (Marcus M. Maudlin, well-cast) laments. He never misses a day of work and doesn’t over-maintain his popular business because he’s watching every dollar, determined to avoid “the white man’s bank” and hang onto it rather than risk any unnecessary expense.

Writer-director Peoples lets us see Turquoise learn from everybody in her life, even those snubbing her. And he ensures that Kai learns a little, too. Will it be enough to change their fates?

As tried and true as its plot points and sympathies are, “Miss Juneteenth” manages to be a bracing depiction of generational working class poverty, and a beautiful lesson in how easily plans fail when your options are this limited and the pathway to success this narrow.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, alcohol, smoking

Cast: Nicole Beharie, Kendrick Sampson, Alexis Chikaeze, Lori Hayes and Marcus M. Mauldin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:37

This one comes our way April 30.

Remember this one? I reviewed it when it got a little taste of theatrical release a ways back.

May 20, if you missed it, “PG: Psycho Goreman” comes to Shudder, in all its kid sass no budget glory.

Poet, political activist, proto-rapper, stand-up, singer, musician and the original “bluesologist,” Gil-Scott Heron can be viewed in all his glory, an experimenter at his personal peak in 1983’s performance documentary/history lesson and travelogue, “Black Wax.”

Almost 40 years later, and it’s hard to think of a music doc that snaps, crackles and pops with the wit, warmth and musicality of this one.

The in-your-face poet of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” had hit the Reagan era with his passion intact, but his patter laid-back, his stage presence polished to perfection.

Gil Scott-Heron on the bank of the Potomac, checking out landmarks and walking “the real city” (“Tenth and Ave. V.”) with a boom box on his shoulder, singing his “Washington, D.C.” is about as cool as a performing artist doing performance art gets.

GSH was sort of Bob Marley Android Richie Havens meet Dick Gregory and Frank Zappa. As he talks about history he walks down a line of wax figure representations of America’s presidents, historical and civil rights icons, critiquing many, and tells us a little of his biography.

He was born in Chicago to an opera singer mother and Jamaican soccer star dad, raised in Jackson, Tennessee by his grandmother, and heard his first Mississippi joke there.

“What has four ‘I’s” and will never see? Mississippi.”

He went to college, got into music and then poetry, moved into academia while in DC, and kept singing, reciting and playing.

The performance part of the film has college-professor caliber rapped/rattled off riffs about “Ray-Gun” (Reagan), whitewashed history, colonialism, his hit single “Johannesburg,” and “Here’s a look at the closing stocks — racism is up, human rights are down…” “Why wait till 1984? You can panic now…and avoid the rush.”

He snaps off his poems “HIStory” and the hilarious, satiric and biting “Whitey’s on the Moon,” much of this backed by a funky nine-piece band, with horns, providing “vibemosphere.”

“Times have changed, but very few folks in America have,” he laments, a phrase we’re hearing every day now. And “Every channel I stop on got a different cop on.”

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” may be his ticket to pop culture immortality. And when you look at what television is broadcasting that was recorded on eyewitness cell phones, it’s hard to argue with that thesis.

Scott-Heron died in 2011 and earned a posthumous Grammy the next year. In “Black Wax,” he was at his sharpest, a film that showcases timeless music and great poet at his most prophetic.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Gil-Scott Heron

Credits: Directed by Robert Mugge, scripted by Gil-Scott Heron. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:19

It’s not often that a mere limited series can be said to “take the piss out” of an entire culture where that expression is common.

That’s kind of the goal in “Frank of Ireland,” a six-short-episode series hitting Amazon this weekend. Every installment has glimpses of the Ireland of cinematic lore — pubs, wakes, funerals, priests and “diddley aye” music, even a duck boat tour (it was shot in Dublin and Belfast).

The series co-stars and was co-created by brothers Brian Gleeson (“Peaky Blinders”) and Domhnall Gleeson (“Star Wars: Episodes VII, VIII and IX”, “Peter Rabbit”), and there’s even a bit of support by their icon Irish actor dad Brendan Gleeson.

They play co-dependents, with Brian, as the unfiltered, lazy and boorish title character.

Frank is a musician whose inspiration and career went in the crapper when he split from Aine (Sarah Green of “The Guard,” “Peaky Blinders”). Their relationship is years-gone, but he still has to scribble “Do Not Sleep With Aine” on his hand, just to make sure.

Doesn’t work.

His long-suffering best mate Doofus (Domhnall) is always at his beck and call, with Frank yanking him out of work for whatever impulse he’s acting on this time.

I described Frank as “unfiltered,” but everybody here seems as foul-mouthed and coarse as our hero. Granted, his constant profane “Taxi Driver” monologues get him banned from cabs, but the f-bombs and blunt if not exactly hilarious sex talk could come from any quarter, most any character.

Aine’s mom dies, and Frank’s persuaded to sing at the funeral. He stops cursing just long enough to try (not really) a tune.

“Here’s a little ditty for God’s sickest woman,” he offers. Doofus he assigns the task of moving merch at “the gig” — handing out CDs, selling T-shirts. Doesn’t end well.

The arc of the series is about Aine moving on, and Frank “working on new material” (NOT) and trying to placate the equally foul-mouthed mother (Pom Boyd) he mooches off as he faces a reckoning with being a 32 year-old lay-about lout.

Every episode has a cutesy movie riff title, setting up movie riff running gags throughout — “We Need to Talk About Kevin Costner,” “‘Memento’ Mary,” “You Talkin’ to Meath” (“Taxi Driver”), “A Few Good Angry Women,” “James Caan’t” (“Misery”).

The jokes can be delightfully random. A dog’s “accident” warrants a hilarious response to “You should rub his nose in it.” But “can be” is quite the proviso here.

Man, we need to talk about workshopping these scattered, frenetic and miss-or-hit scripts and indulging these siblings in this nonsense wank of a series. A “show about nothing” has been done, lads.

“Surreal” is giving “Frank” and the Gleesons too much credit for the strained mania, insistent vulgarity and blabbering, blithering unreality of it all. Don’t get too attached to any character.

The story arc of an obnoxious dead weight lead character isn’t rendered interesting, and the novelty of a family of Irish gingers teaming up wears out. Quickly.

But what do you expect for a show that sets out to “take the piss” and in which being quite Irish and utterly “charmless” is the end goal?

MPA Rating: TV-MA, drugs, nudity, profanity galore

Cast: Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Pom Boyd, Sarah Greene, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Pat Shortt

Credits: Created and written by Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson and Michael Moloney. An Amazon Original series.

Running time: Six episodes @ :25 each

Ready or not, pandemic-pounded movie year or not, here come the 93rd annual Academy Awards, Hollywood’s grasp at trying to return to something like “normal,” and hopefully with enough of a TV audience tuning in to make it worth their trouble.

Unlike the Zoomed and largely-ignored Golden Globes, in other words.

I’ve been looking at 2020 as the ultimate “asterisk year,” to use the sports analogy. There was no March Madness last year, not even a dinged-up and abortive version like the one we just witnessed. The Dodgers finally won a World Series in a shortened season.

And Hollywood spent all year postponing films, pulling releases and trying to figure out a way to get income from their pricey product out of streaming services, in most cases streamers they started up themselves. All the old rules about a movie “must play in a theater” went out the window, and that lingered on into awards season.

Like NCAA football and hoops teams, movies didn’t have a chance to go out, make an impression and make their case in this climate.

So we’ve got “Nomadland” and “Sound of Metal” and “Minari” as contenders, an actor who died (Chadwick Boseman of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) as a sentimental favorite and Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”) and Andra Day (“The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) as legitimate contenders in movies that almost no one has seen.

Even in a year with theaters mostly closed and heavyweight studios not putting expensive product out in time to compete, this year’s Oscars promise to promote the least popular — in terms of ticket sales and streaming views — contenders and winners in Academy history.
Still, we got something resembling a “normal” awards season build-up to the Oscars, so based on the SAG Awards and Critics Choice Awards, even with the outlier BAFTAs (ALL “Nomadland”) maybe picking the winners will still be a breeze.

Do the betting odds reflect this, this time around?

“Nomadland” is the prohibitive favorite to take Best Picture. Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” is the only film within laughing distance, according to the site. I don’t know. Lots of actors are in “Chicago.” And lots of actors make up the Academy.
Still, as the old Oscars’ saying goes, “Best directors direct best pictures.” Chloe Zhao is just as favored to win Best Director for “Nomadland.”

Cary Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”), despite not winning the BAFTA last weekend, is favored to run off with Best Actress. With Frances McDormand taking the BAFTA and Viola Davis winning Screen Actors’ Guild honors this is a real horse race.

Boseman is our Best Actor winner. Bet your pink slip on that. A wonderful actor who took a lot of iconic roles — Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Black Panther — in his too-short life, this is the way Hollywood will commemorate him, and bless them for doing it. Another great performance by Anthony Hopkins and a brilliant “Sound of Metal” turn by Riz Ahmed won’t produce Oscars for them, alas.

Putting Daniel Kaluuya in the supporting actor category for “Judas and the Black Messiah” will almost certainly pay off with the Oscar. I’d say he ended that discussion with his SAG win and glorious, fun and self-effacing turn as “Saturday Night Live” host a couple of weeks back. The Oscar is just his victory lap.

So that means that an actor who played a real Black Panther and the actor who played the comic book “Black Panther” will both collect Oscars on the same night. Pretty cool, huh?

Best Supporting Actress down to the Youn Yuh-Jung, the grandma from “Minari” and the unladylike young “daughter” (Maria Bakalova) from “Borat Subsequent MovieFilm?” Youn seems likely, based on the SAG win. I think “Minari” and the “Borat” sequel are the two most over-rated contenders in this year’s Oscars. I’d to think Glenn Close, nominated for a disastrously tone-deaf “Hillbilly Elegy,” has a sentimental shot. She’s never won. Amanda Seyfried was the best thing in “Mank.” But they’re the longer shots in that field, along with Olivia Colman (“The Father”), and we’ll never know how close it was if they lose.

“Promising Young Woman” is the best original screenplay favorite, with “Trial of the Chicago Seven” given a shot.

I’m hoping the film I think was the best movie of 2020, “Another Round,” wins Best International Feature.

Best Documentary will go to either “Crip Camp” or “My Octopus Teacher,” sentimental pics with big fanbases.

Best Animated Feature seems like a lock for “Soul,” but anybody who’s seen both knows “Wolfwalkers” is better.

I figure Best Adapted screenplay is anybody’s guess, with an odd amount of love going to the “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Team” up to now, but I’d like to hope “The Father” has a shot. “Nomadland” is also a contender, and as its the Big Picture favorite, this could be a big night for Chloe Zhao all the way around.

“Sound of Metal” should win Best Sound, “Emma.” is my pick for Best Costume, Best Production Design might be the best shot for “Mank” to win something (“News of the World” was better designed and more challenging, in my opinion), and “Tenet” LINK should have a shot at Best Visual Effects.

In any event, Oscar night is Sunday, April 25, and socially-distanced or not, could be a fruitful evening hoping fans show up for the TV event, and then go out theaters again to see any of these worthies still showing — or re-released — afterward.

A life of toiling the land and hard drinking put the old man on a box in front of a pool hall in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1930s. He’d use pencils and children’s “poster paint” to create art out of scraps of cardboard — the back of a Philip Morris cigarette standee, a window card, soft drink posters and the like.

That was the first time anybody “discovered” Bill Traylor. It wouldn’t be the last.

Montgomery found him and feted him, in the limited ways the Deep South city could manage to acknowledge a Black genius in their midst in the 1930s. New York took notice, but only really grasped his significance decades after his death.

And now editor-turned-director Jeffrey Wolf’s spirited, adventurous documentary, “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts” brings Traylor’s “crude, primitive” and “simplistic” work back into the spotlight as one of the great, not-quite-forgotten self-taught artists of American history.

Wolf uses actors reciting works by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, snippets of the blues, interviews with family, art experts and artists such as Radcliffe Bailey, and even a tap dancer to conjure Traylor’s story and the world he lived and created in, much of it concurrent with “The Harlem Renaissance,” just a long long way from Harlem.

The film fills in the blanks of a life that began in late-state slavery (he was born in 1853) and can only be sketched in, thanks to a few family memories, rare legal papers, the recollections of Charles Shannon — the major Montgomery cheerleader for Traylor’s work during the man’s lifetime — and even excerpts from the journal/log-book of the slave owner who owned Traylor’s family before Emancipation.

As the art itself is discussed and dissected (“Chasing Ghosts” is one of his more famous paintings) a portrait emerges of a man who “seemed to live a very small life, doing something big, nurturing a gift” and bringing a lost “world back to vivid life.”

After Traylor aged out of the farm work that had supported him and his family from Reconstruction to The Great Depression, he was homeless for stretches, drawing to supplement his Roosevelt Era “relief” checks. Or he’d stay with his adult children, nailing some of his pictures — spare, stylized representations of his life and African American life in the Cotton Belt — on the wall.

“What child drew these pictures?” one descendent — many are interviewed here — remembers somebody asking during a visit, deeply insulting Traylor’s daughter.

When the last member of Traylor’s family that he’d stayed with in his last years died, much of his work was tossed. The nature of it, painted or drawn on discarded cardboard, led to most of his decades of paintings disappearing, even as the art world was starting to recognize his genius and those works’ value. Only a couple of hundred pieces exist.

Admirers say “He just made the work. He didn’t ‘think’ the work,” which seems faintly condescending. But so-called “primitive” artists always face that sort of labeling.

The soulful, vibrant, expressive art is almost documentary in nature, like great cave paintings put on cardboard. Works like “Possum Hunt” and “Blacksmith Shop” stylize folkways, and “Drinking Bout” encapsulates Traylor’s own struggles with hard liquor — giddy abandon painted in the colors of doom.

He lost a foot and later a leg to diabetes gangrene late in life.

But unmentioned through all this is the treasure hunting aspect of Traylor’s career. As much of his work as has been lost, surely there’s art still extant outside of landfills or disintegration. Flea marketers would be well-served watching “Chasing Ghosts” just to pick up on his distinct style. You just know there’s art out there somewhere, maybe not even regarded as “fine art,” in somebody’s garage sale, waiting to be added to this prolific painter’s legacy.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Radcliffe Bailey, Roberta Smith, Jason Samuels Smith, Sharon Washington and assorted family of the late Bill Traylor

Credits: Directed by Jeffrey Wolf, script by Fred Barron. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:15