Movie Nation

Emma Stone vs. Emma Thompson.

May 28, in theaters or on Disney+ (upcharged), it’s game on.

I was sold on “Sugar Daddy” thanks to one scene screenwriter-star Kelly McCormack made certain to include.

She plays a singer and musician struggling in “The Big City,” not making rent or getting anywhere until she signs up for online arm-candy work. She becomes a “sugar baby” to wealthy men who want someone attractive to go to dinner, the symphony or other public events with.

And the scene in question is the Big Debate over what gawky, naive and self-absorbed “artist” Darren is doing. Her platonic-and-unhappy-about-that roommate (Ishan Davé) has just outed her to her “free-thinking, super open friends.” And Darren is put OUT.

“Why do you do it?” is not something this artsy ditz has given serious thought to. Her stammering “It’s just DINNER” and “I don’t have to wonder what I’m worth” leaves the way open for snipes about “women as property” and “setting back women fifty years,” sparking her own snappish comebacks to a judgmental “friend” who is mooching off a “trust fund baby” and guys who don’t like the idea of their girlfriends “dating” other men for money.

It’s a brilliant, brittle and heated exchange over the transactional nature of sex and the pleasure of one’s company, the double standards women face and yet often embrace and how there’s no way any woman would put up with this behavior from a man.

“It’s NOT the same exchange rate!”

“Sugar Daddy” is a mature, artful and disturbing peek into being “open minded” about something that borders on “sex work,” and sometimes crosses that border. That one scene opens the whole men/women/dating and sexual imbalance of power and control can of worms. And it’s fascinating, like the film itself.

McCormack, of “A Simple Favor,” Netflix’s “Ginny & Georgia” and a lot of Canadian TV, has created a big girl for her to play, and plays the hell out of her. “Big girl” isn’t a compliment. Darren is childishly unpolished, a talented soprano with perfect pitch and the ability to pick up any instrument in a flash. She gropes around with song ideas, trying to figure out a niche, experimenting with video, performance art, the works.

But there aren’t any decent jobs for 25 year-old music major dropouts in Toronto. She’s careless about her appearance and about her latest catering waitress gig, stuffing her face with leftovers when Chef Dan isn’t looking. She’s fired of course.

Not to worry. She’ll just get roomie Peter to “carry” her another month. La di dah.

The one thing she picked up on from that last gig was the idea of “sugar daddy” work from one of the dolled-up escorts. She hits a website, and next thing we know she’s in a shop picking out evening wear, designer day dresses and the like with much-older Jim (Nicholas Campbell) laying down ground rules.

He loves this local symphony, which he lavishes his wealth on. He may drive an ’80s Chrysler and dress like an off-duty butcher, but he is loaded. Can she go to a symphony and “act like you’re paying attention?” We wonder the same thing.

Darren, going by “Dee,” finds herself immersed in a world of fine dining, fine art and money. She is trading on her beauty and her youth, and little else. She has the table manners of a trucker, the vocabulary of a longshoreman and the sophistication of a “Pretty Woman.” She’s about as at home in elbow-length gloves as a Cub Scout.

Even her best “Daddy Date” customer (Colm Feore, dry, frosty and yet fragile) is slightly taken-aback by how gauche his “starving artist” is. But business is business.

“It’s important to assert your value when you’re selling an intangible quality,” he says. Supply is limited, demand is great and all that.

This is a very interesting time for “sugar babies” to be “having a moment.” “Shiva Baby” and “Sugar Daddy” are quite different films, save for their approach to the “gig” their heroines share. Women created these films, they’re not judging these characters and they kind of dare the viewer to do otherwise.

We must be “woke” we must we must.

Both films’ heroines are young, selfish and vile, in many ways. Darren is so far into her head that she can’t even answer obvious questions like “What kind of music do you play?” Meeting a real record label chief (Amanda Brugel) — who is worldwise and just might see some of herself in this lost woman who is plainly just a “big girl” — has little value to Darren.

“Is this how you really dress? Is this you? I won’t be the only one to ask you this.”

She’s into her music but disinterested in everything else — slovenly, impulsive, neglecting her divorced mother and younger sister (Hilary McCormack). She’d be despicable if she wasn’t so plainly lost. McCormack doesn’t shy from making Darren raw, attractive enough but company so dull and rude as to make you cringe.

Video and TV director Wendy Morgan’s feature debut is based on a script that doesn’t have this “exploitation/exploited” thing figured out any more than her heroine does. As Darren stumbles about, looking for an end and grasping at an unsavory means of getting herself there, “Sugar Daddy” invites us to ask hard questions about how this transaction is any different from the scores of ones every woman faces, in any corner of the world and in any profession on any given day.

How is acting, where actresses like McCormack are constantly asked to appear nude and in sex scenes, that far removed from taking cash for “It’s just dinner?”

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Kelly McCormack, Colm Feore, Amanda Brugel, Hilary McCormack and Ishan Davé

Credits: Directed by Wendy Morgan, script by Kelly McCormack. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:40

It takes a while for thriller writer James Patterson’s impact to be felt on the mostly-mistitled non-fiction history, “The Last Days of John Lennon.” The book is almost entirely given over to a history of The Beatles, from that first meeting between John and Paul in 1957 through their breakup.

Patterson, with co-writers (Researchers, probably?) Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge, turns out punchy, short chapter/sketches on the broader strokes of Beatles history, recycling virtually every anecdote, but finding a few fresher takes as he leads us through the assembly of the band, their first fashion statements and musical influences, on through Beatlemania, Ed Sullivan after the JFK assassination, Sgt. Pepper, Yoko, etc.

Interspersed within that well-known history is the occasional short chapter about Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman, what he was doing those last days in New York, fake-befriending other Lennon fans who staked out the Dakota, rudely menacing other celebrities (Robert Goulet, for instance), fondling the hollow point bullets he’s secured from an ATLANTA POLICE OFFICER.

Patterson’s prose makes all of this perfectly readable, even if you’re familiar with the details of The Beatles’ timeline and Lennon’s own curious journey, from working class bloke with a chip on his shoulder to entitled poseur, faithless husband and bad father (with first son, Julian).

But the crime novelist and sometime historian (“House of Kennedy”) hits his stride with the final chapters, giving us lots of details about Chapman’s mania, his every move in the days leading up to the night of Lennon’s murder.

The come-on of the title aside, the book doesn’t feel particularly cinematic, because there are already several “last days” takes on the singer/songwriter/icon’s life. But it could certainly inspire a fresh “Last Days of Lennon” documentary. As the extensive quotes from Geraldo Rivera included here remind us, some in Lennon’s orbit are still around and willing to talk about him.

“The Last Days of John Lennon,” by James Patterson, with Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge. Little, Brown & Co. 431 pages. $15.99 and up.

So Netflix went out and rented themselves another A-list filmmaker.
Rian Johnson has signed a $400 million deal to bring two “Knives Out” sequels, starring his “gentleman amateur detective” (Daniel Craig is part of the deal) to the streaming service.

Another part of the deal? Netflix doesn’t get final cut or even “notes” on the projects. That is the Hollywood version of the “blank check.”

This is why Steven Spielberg was tossing a fit about streaming service films being eligible for Oscars. Netflix is buying its way in with deals that most studios would refuse to make.

And the upshot for viewers? Do you still think fondly of Cuaron’s “Roma,” if you ever pined for its washed-out digital black and white and obscurant “personal” story?

Under the impression that Scorsese’s “The Irishman” isn’t his weakest mob movie?

Still cheerleading for the mediocre “Treasure of the Sierra Madre as Crap Vietnam ‘History'” that Spike Lee called “Da Five Bloods?”

Still unsure whether “Mank” isn’t just a famous Fincher’s washed-out, thinly-scripted (by his late father) wank? If it isn’t the biggest loser Oscar night, I’ll be shocked.

Indulging filmmakers in an age when the “Star Director” as concept has been all but abandoned entirely isn’t an awful thing. But giving these folks all the money and zero feedback and supervision is just shoveling more bloat on the the nation’s high speed internet connections.

You can’t blame Johnson for taking the money, but the studio that backed the original film should be the entity to benefit from their gamble and show of good faith. This is greedy, and I’ll bet you money it leads to overlong dull films where Johnson cuts corners on casting. It’s the Netflix payday model. Just you watch.

A couple rents a little vacation getaway in a state-of-the-art secure house out in the country, and find themselves locked in it forced to reckon with their brittle marriage in “Held,” a tame and tentative thriller that turns tense only as it reaches its climax.

Any foreshadowing is underlined twice in writer and star Jilly Awbrey‘s script as she plays a wife who arrives at this gated, super-secure rental, dropped-off by a rideshare guy (Rez Kempton) who asks enough nosey questions to give us the creeps.

But as she makes herself at home, punching buttons to ensure the security system is on, she might wonder how — with a locked gate — somebody got to the front door to ring the bell and leave her flowers. Maybe she’s still wondering where that wine she spilled drained off into under the bar.

Husband Henry (Bart Johnson) is there just in time to divert our attention, and hers, to this tepid marriage they share. It’s only after they’ve passed out that things turn really ugly.

“I think there’s someone in here!”

Who tucked them in? Who left this note? Where are our cell phones?

When sliding metal shutters clamp down and electric shocks greet their efforts to get out and a voice, first on the land line and then on a PA system, commands “You will NOT leave the house again” and “You MUST obey” and “You brought this on yourselves,” they start to get the message.

Us? We’ve been treated to a stand-alone prologue with different characters that resembles more of a rape than a hostage situation and seems to have little to do with the tale that we’re now being told. We have reason to be a little nonplussed.

With CCTV cameras Emma and Henry didn’t realize were there covering the whole house and with fresh surgical implants behind their ears that add to the “control” the distorted, disembodied voice seems to have, their “What do you WANT?” seems like a fair question. God knows we’re asking that, and “How will they get out of this?”

This Fresno-made thriller presents a conundrum that screenwriter/star Awbrey puzzles through with mixed results. The “solutions” to the various mysteries presented by all this drag cost-benefit analysis into the viewing experience.

Are any of these means worth whatever end the “You will OBEY” captor hopes to achieve? The suggestion that Emma and Henry are being forced into some sort of couples therapy — “A husband opens the door for his wife.” — run by say, the Promise Keepers, smells insane. Legal exposure, cost of the customized house, and who’s paying for all this? And why?

The acting is a tad unpolished, which matters less when we get to the slam-bang third act. But the plot hurls one “Give me a BREAK” at us after another, which matters a lot.

“Held” may have messaging that fits the cultural moment well enough, and visceral violence that pulls us in and engages — eventually. But that first hour has beaten our interest in this slow-moving indie thriller to death long before that.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Jill Awbrey, Bart Johnson, Rez Kempton, Zack Gold

Credits: Directed by Travis Cluff, Chris Lofing, script by Jill Awbrey. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:34

It’s Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse,” so naturally the guy hunting down the people who killed his wife is a Navy SEAL. And there’s a big old conspiracy at the heart of this April 30 Amazon release.

So, how many Dutchwomen and Dutchmen does it take to script a romantic comedy? Based solely on “Just Say ‘Yes,” the answer is “six” and the response to that is “It wasn’t enough.”

This generally-lifeless, mostly-haphazard wedding-centric rom-com wanders across the emotional spectrum and can’t make Big Proposal, betrayal, being jilted or “bouncing back,” flirtations and a “cat-fight” funny or charming. There’s a grin or two in it, mostly in its TV production milieu. The whole “romance” thing, in its various forms, is a non-starter.

Even the structure — a long flashback in which a would-be bride tells her tale of woe “from the beginning” — seems designed to boil any flavor right out of it.

Ibiza native and Dutch TV mainstay Yolanthe Cabou is Lotte, a TV producer for “RegioFun,” a gimmicky, feature magazine TV show starring her longtime squeeze (Juvat Westendorp). But the show is struggling, and while Lotte’s gotten something like her dream proposal from Alex, this new “consultant” Chris (Jim Bakkum) shows up just in time to tart the show up with stunts, accidents and a more mocking tone.

Lotte’s wedding plans, with her self-absorbed social media star sister (Noortje Herlaar) and circle of cliches scripted as “friends” play into that. Alex bails out of the wedding on live TV, and heck, hapless Lotte’s misfortunes are a hit.

She is transformed into an on-air hostess who poses as a biker chick amongst women bikers, “milks” the wrong cow and has accidents with pretty anything you can imagine.

“All the losers in the Netherlands relate to you (in Dutch with English subtitles, or dubbed)” her boorish boss enthuses.

But will that help her find happiness?

As this picture staggers from Lotte’s pursuit of love to Estelle’s impending, socially mediated nuptials, nobody involved gives us a single excuse why we should care.

The voice-over and banter with a tactless dork on a park bench that ties all this together does no such thing. And isn’t funny either.

The tunes are cute (ish), the production design sparkling and the performances have their moments. But the conflicts are sour and dull, and Lotte’s journey, to “star” and then producer of a big production numbers wedding show called “Just Say Yes” isn’t the script twist that could save this, any of it.

MPA Rating: TV-14, adult situations, animal bodily function, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Yolanthe Cabau, Noortje Herlaar, Jim Bakkum, Juvat Westendorp

Credits: Directed by Appie Boudellah, Aram van de Rest, script by Appie Boudellah, Mustapha Boudellah, Marie Kiebert, Michiel Peereboom, Jill Waas and Maarten van den Broek. An MGA/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Jerking a character suddenly out of the frame has been a horror movie staple for years now. There’s nothing more chilling than an abrupt vanishing carried out right before our us, a victim, wild-eyed with terror, ripped away into the dark unknown.

But the way Rose Williams is yanked, lifted, tugged and twisted in “The Power” takes it to a new level. Writer-director Corinna Faith (“Ashes”) contorts her leading lady in ways that startle and chill in a movie that’s more about tone than scary jolts.

It’s an immaculately realized period piece set in the lowering gloom of an old, poor but tidy East London hospital in 1974, when Britain’s Conservative government carried out selective blackouts as a measure to combat coal miners who’d gone on strike.

“You couldn’t have picked a worse day” Val (Williams, of TV’s “Medici”) is told by “Old Starchy,” the matron (Diveen Henry) in charge of nurses who gives newly-graduated Val the once over before starting her new job.

The hospital’s patients are mostly being transferred out, with just a couple of wards kept open for the night, lit by candles or kerosene lanterns for the planned blackout.

Val is eager, compassionate, and not wholly at odds with the older staff. But she has some sort of history, something sneering ex-classmate Babs (Emma Rigby) remembers and has passed around. Irish Terry (Nuala McGowan) doesn’t sweat that. Much. She’s got bigger worries.

“A place people die in should never be allowed to get that dark.”

Val finds herself encouraged by Dr. Franklin (Charlie Carrick), who sees her way with children, and punished by the matron.

“You need an iron will” for pediatric nursing, she hisses. “Not a ‘feel for it.'”

Maybe working the lonely, scary and dark night shift will make that clear.

But once the lights go out, spooky things start happening around Val, and to her. What’s going on? And is this like what happened “before?”

There are pacing problems that keep this picture from reaching its full potential, and truth be told, there’s a bit of stiff-upper-lip under-reacting to the supernatural stuff that befalls Rose and her colleagues.

But as candles blow out on their own, Rose is pulled hither and yon and a fearful child (Shakira Rahman) with little English at her command tries to articulate her terrors, “The Power” works on you.

Not as well as it works on Nurse Terry, perhaps, who is not having this, perhaps because of the novel she’s reading in between rounds. It’s “Carrie,” the 1974 hit by that new American fright-writer.

Williams, playing a young woman fighting her fears even as the hint of recognition of what she’s dealing with keeps her from flipping out entirely, makes us believe Val’s peril and believe in her ability to fight it.

Which “The Power” more than just a “nice try,” even if it’s not quite all the terror you’d hope Faith might wring — or yank — out of it.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Rose Williams, Emma Rigby, Diveen Henry, Charlie Carrick and Shakira Rahman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Corinna Faith. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:32

It takes a few minutes to get past the feeling that “Here Are the Young Men” isn’t a simplistic “Trainspotting” homage, some sort of boys-come-of-age, generationally-indulgent wank with an Irish accent.

The characters are “types” — the rebellious lad entering the workforce with lust in his heart and a mouth always open for whatever pill is proffered, the long-haired sensitive druggy who has found love if he can figure out what to do with it and the raging hothead always up for a little ultraviolence.

Sound familiar, Begbie fans?

But whatever novelist Rob Doyle owes to “Trainspotting” writer Irvine Welsh as chronicler of the drug abuse of an era — the early 2000s here — the film of it goes further, turning the violent hothead character into an Incel age example of toxic masculinity and the broader theme that escaping it is even harder than quitting drugs.

Dean-Charles Chapman is Matthew, just finishing school and about to have his eyes opened about what he’s always been told will be “the best summer of your life.”

Ferdia Walsh-Peelo plays Rez, a bookish type with a sort-of girlfriend and the most access to drugs.

And Finn Cole (“Peaky Blinders,” “Animal Kingdom”) is Kearney, coiled-rage incarnate, impulsive and capable of most anything. Their mutual friend Jen (“It” girl Anya-Taylor-Joy) speaks for us all when she asks “Has anyone ever told you you have an extremely punchable face?” He does. Which partly explains why he’s eager to get in the first blow.

We figure every character’s thing in the opening scenes, where Matthew is calmly lectured on “the choices you make” by his headmaster (Ralph Ineson), only to walk out of school, dump his school jacket in Dublin’s River Liffey and join his mates for a little sneak back into school (Kearney was expelled) for a little good-natured vandalism. Kearney goes berserk.

And in the film’s first suggestion that we’re not stuck in reality, the headmaster calmly shakes his head as he walks up on them destroying his car.

This is the summer Matthew will start work at the tire shop, Rez will read, get high and aimlessly postpone his future and Kearney will brag about running off to America. Jen will seem more mature than all three put together, and somehow decide the tire shop lad is “sensitive” enough for a summer fling before she “travels” or goes to university. And they’ll all dive into the pills that are the drug of choice in 2003.

As they hit clubs and raves, experience epiphanies via a homeless addict and try to ignore how different they are from one another, the days start to seem like a fever dream version of their favorite abusive TV chat show, whose judgmental creep of a host (Travis Fimmel) eggs them on, heightens their contrasts and in their dreams, points them at a reckoning.

That’s what you’d call the “inciting incident” in this drama. There’s a death, one that they’re too stoned to prevent and slow to recognize as a trauma they will never get over, even if it eventually teaches them the valuable lesson that school and the headmaster did not.

Actor turned director Eoin Macken has trouble keeping the unreality clearly separate from the reality they live through and we witness. The many surreal “chat show” breaks speak to the delusions of youth, narcissism and callousness. But while it’s cliche to have the boys so haunted by an accident that “not feeling anything” about it drives each deeper into his own insecurities, that plays as engrossing drama.

Taylor-Joy, who blew up thanks to her turn on Netflix’s “Queen’s Gambit,” is the reason this otherwise marginal, phallocentric parable merits wider release, even though her role here, while pivotal, is limited. Jen is the character who makes the least sense with this lot. Her every entrance suggests “out of their league.” That holds true for the performances, too. She’s the only one who transcends playing a “type.”

Still, “Here are the Young Men” makes for an interesting snapshot of yet another version of “wayward youth.” And while we can take comfort from the generational move from heroin (of “Trainspotting”) to Oxy and MDMA (“Molly”), the one hope the film leaves us with is that the toxic masculinity of that age group is at least being acknowledged. Maybe the next generation will be the one that grapples with that core problem, a big reason for drug-dabbling bravado, and rejects it before doing itself permanent damage.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex, some nudity, profanity

Cast: Dean-Charles Chapman, Finn Cole, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Travis Fimmel, Ralph Ineson and Anya Taylor-Joy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Eoin Macken, based on the novel by Rob Doyle. A Well Go release.

Running time: 1:36

A new one from the director of “Wanted.”

“New” meaning filmed in 2018, and a no name cast and a May 14 release.