Movie Nation

Leave it to Mother Russia to come up with the most complex nesting doll of a series, a darkly comic tale of suspense and interlocking stories originally produced for Russian TV.

“An Ordinary Woman” reeks of cultural rot and personal corruption, a culture of casual criminality, cheating and lies, all wrapped up in a single “ordinary” Russian family.

And it can be damned funny, in a “Weekend at Bernie’s” way. Prostitution, adultery, drugs, blackmail and murder make for darker than dark comedy.

Marina (Anna Mikhalkova) is a high-mileage 39 year-old who earns that label, “an ordinary woman.” But by that time we hear that we’ve already seen the pregnant Marina get the results from her ultrasound. Her surgeon husband (Evgeniy Grishkovets) is so consumed with work calls that he’s barely there. But the OB-GYN won’t tell her until he hangs up.

“Hydrocelaphalus.” Their unborn son has a birth defect and probably won’t live long, if at all.

This is where the tone for this entire series is set. The news all but rolls off her, and doesn’t floor her husband either. Everybody we meet in this series is unflappable, resigned to the worst. Forget the plot for a moment and bathe in what lives of quiet desperation look like when resignation has set in. In a world of incompetence, cut-rate service, slackers (Nobody is EVER on time.), drunks and juggling jobs, what’s another piece of bad news?

But “ordinary?” Not Marina. She shrugs off the latest expenses of her florist shop, Plan Bs her latest childcare issue with her youngest by corralling her college age daughter Katya (Elizaveta Kononova) and makes a public restroom inspection of her latest recruit for her real business.

Zhenya (Aleksandra Bortich) is beautiful, fresh from the provinces and in need of work. Marina will be her pimp.

“What, you expected a Black guy in a leopard print top,” (in Russian with English subtitles)?

Marina’s husband knows nothing of this, nor does Marina realize Artyom has a chick on the side, a highly strung nurse (Mariya Andreeva) at his hospital, and she’s got…demands.

Daughter Katya is pretty much skipping college and living with her boyfriend at the motorbike garage where he works. When she borrows a bike to cover her tracks with her mother, it gets stolen and now the beau is in hock with a guy who expects a payout.

And then one of Marina’s hookers is murdered in the high end hotel where she helped former hooker Galina (Yuliya Melikhova) land a desk clerk job.

Complicated? You have no idea.

Let’s throw in the attention-starved drama queen of the family. No, not the harridan mother-in-law (Tatyana Dogileva), but Tanya, the eight-year old who thinks nothing of derailing a day or a night with her drama, faked injuries in gymnastics class or growing fury at the idea that a baby is about to steal her spotlight in the family.

How is “an ordinary woman” supposed to deal with, well, a body in a hotel, a murder she can’t let the cops hear about, a family that doesn’t know about her side hustle or a MURDERER (She’s too busy to think of that, for now.)?

There were CCTV tapes in the hotel? Who knows how to erase them?

Katya needs fast cash to get the boyfriend out of a jam. Maybe dealing drugs to the nerd who crushes on her?

And just wait until the alcoholic detective (Darya Saveleva) whose mother has dementia shows up!

It takes some getting used to the way everybody in “An Ordinary Woman” under-reacts to every fresh crisis that threatens to bring the house of cards she or he has built crashing down.

It’s not just Marina’s repeated demand that this or that underling “Use your HEAD” or “BRAIN,” as she expects little pieces of impossible to be dispensed with by other “ordinary” people. Everyone knows how lying works, that putting off a reckoning is the best they can hope for.

We’re looking at an entire nation of people who learned to scramble, lie on the fly, take short cuts and create work-arounds to get by long before the Bolsheviks took over. Problem pregnancy, lost motorbike, body to dispose of, there’s little asking for help and a whole lot of unspoken “I’ve GOT this,” all of it carried out in secret. Nobody shows anybody else their cards.

The award-winning “An Ordinary Woman” makes for TV that bowls you over with almost too much complexity, but draws you in with one instance after another of “How in the hell is she getting out of this?”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, alcohol and drug abuse

Cast: Anna Mikhalkova, Elizaveta Kononova, Evgeniy Grishkovets, Aleksandra Bortich, Darya Saveleva, Yuliya Melikhova, Tatyana Dogileva

Credits: Written by Maria Melenevskaya, Denis Utochkin and Aleksandr Sobicheviskiy. Streaming on Topic and Topic.com

Running time: 17 episodes @42-52 minutes each

This Searchlight thriller has a whiff of some of the smart horror coming out of A24 these days.

Rebecca Hall stars in “The Night House,” a mirror image mind-game tale from the director of “The Ritual.” It’s coming our way July 16.

“Your parents. They visited.” “That’s impossible. My parents are dead…”

“Then who are they?” “Nobody?”

“They visited. Who are they?” “Nobody. Nobody came over.”

“You know them. Who ARE they?” “Demons.”

“The Believer” is a creepy pseudo-intellectual horror story, a pretentious and arch mashup of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Misery.”

It starts with head games, veers into blood games and staggers into injection games. And while I can’t say I think it’s great or even all that coherent, it stands out as cryptic horror whose grasp exceeds its reach.

Lucas (Aidan Bristow of TV’s “L.A. Macabre”) is on crutches, unemployed and seeing a shrink (Billy Zane). Their sessions including the “talking cure,” and unconventional timed-maze puzzle tests and slideshow association.

But Lucas is an unconventional patient. He’s a physicist, and he’s not sure about his wife, what she’s done and what she might do…to him.

Violet (Sophie Kargman) speaks in a trancelike monotone, with the eyes of an automaton. She thinks Lucas is “close-minded.” But she’s been different since “the thing that happened last month.”

And her explanations, that “My eyes are open, are YOURS?” and handing over a tattered book on demonology and infamous demonic “cases” aren’t getting anywhere with a man of science.

“I firmly regard what you did last month as your own conscious and selfish choice…Not a demon or demon’s manipulation of you.”

Can this marriage be saved?

Writer-director Shan Serafin (“The Forest”) builds his story on such brittle, formalized exchanges, dim lighting, extreme close-ups and a not-that-mysterious mystery that unfolds with flashes of violence, splashes of blood and deepening paranoia.

“Believer” has comic moments, with those “parents” (Susan Wilder, Lindsey Ginter) barging in, nosing around and talking nonstop as they do.

“We are SOoooo rude!”

The unemployed physicist tries to engage his wife on a variety of subjects, tries to find a new job after breaking his foot (How DID that happen?) and tries to get an explanation from Violet about “last month,” or else he’s just going to have to leave.

“I can’t have you itinerant. You agreed to stay by my side.”

Kargman, pop-eyed and poker-faced, makes a nice, soulless foil to Bristow’s confused, nightmare-haunted and increasingly fearful Lucas. She’s ex-cheerleader scary.

And Zane? He’s here to layer on the mumbo jumbo. Lucas wants to try hypnosis to see if this mania and mystery is all in his head.

“What makes you think we’re not in the middle of hypnosis right now?”

How often does that line pop up at your typical 420 night out?

As I said, “Believer” didn’t quite come together for me, never settled into a space where I thought it was going to resolve itself in a more coherent fashion than the story that precedes that finale.

But it’s just strange and unsettling enough to be worth a look, if this kind of horror is your thing.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexuality

Cast: Sophie Kargman, Aidan Bristow and Billy Zane

Credits: Scripted and directed by Shan Serafin, A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:31

Submitted for your persusal…an April 23 adaptation of H.P.’s “writings.”

In the last weeks of his life, a visitor urged the British novelist, playwright, screenwriter and poet to look back over his storied career and take pride.

“A few, yes, are good books,” the author of “The End of the Affair,” “The Quiet American” and “Our Man in Havana” allowed. “Perhaps people will think of me from time to time as they think of Flaubert.”

That might very well be true on this side of the Atlantic, with America’s eagerness for all things “new.” But in Britain and much of the world, English-speaking or otherwise, Graham Greene remains a fascinating figure, a Catholic contrarian, a hard-drinking, womanizing ex-spy, the greatest novelist never to win the Nobel and someone whose reputation was such that he was called on to literally intervene — through journalism, fiction and passing on “messages” from government to government — in the 20th century crisis zones where so much of his work as centered.

Canadian Biographer Richard Greene (No relation apparently, although he leaves that out along with Greene’s actual birthday. And Haiti is NOT on the “east side” of Hispanola. And Hemingway’s Sloppy Joes is in Key West, not Havana ) takes a solid stab at boiling this extraordinary life into 500 pages, when Greene “completists” have taken as many as three volumes to try and get it all in.

There are also volumes of his correspondence, memoirs by friends, colleagues, ex-lovers or the offspring of ex-lovers out there as well. What Richard Greene seeks to do is recover all that ground in summary form, turn out fresh or at least the best anecdotes and dive into the reasons we still think of Greene as “a Catholic writer” and the ways he turned his research treks to Sierra Leone, Kenya, Russia, Vietnam, Panama, Haiti, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Paraguay and elsewhere into fiction.

We read of how he sought out danger, suffered manic depression and suicidal tendencies and put himself in harm’s way in conflict zones of Central America, how he eviscerated dictators, from Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti to Stroessner in Paraguay, and lauded others — Castro of Cuba, Trujillo of Panama.

He loathed American meddling, British heavy-handedness and in Vietnam — French stupidity — in the “post colonial world.” He seems to have been a lifelong America-hater, despising the consumerism, dictator-coddling and arms-exporting that spiked after WWII (where he served in MI-6) and peaked with “that fool Reagan” in the ’80s.

Greene the biographer isn’t the first to see Greene the journalist/novelist as “prophetic.” “Our Man in Havana” arrived minutes before the final act of the Cuban Revolution, coups and interventions followed his fiction hither and yon. He toured the upheaval of Central America brought on by Reagan Era policies of arming and (mis) training reactionary government or insurgent forces, and called attention to it at every turn.

Had he lived longer than 1990, he’d be the perfect guest in our glib TV “talk-news” era, pointing out how any “crisis at the border” was created by Reagan and his minions in the ’80s.

But movie lovers remember the many works of his that made it to the screen. There are 89 versions of his stories, books and plays, as well as his original scripts, currently listed on IMDb.

“Ministry of Fear,” “The Fallen Idol,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “Our Man in Havana,” “The Comedians” and perhaps his best-known adaptation in this country, his Vietnam bungling “Quiet American” leap quickly to any cinephile’s mind.

He wrote “The Third Man” for Carol Reed, one of the cinema’s acknowledged masterpieces, a script that Reed and on-set, Orson Welles, added to in making it the classic it remains to this day. Greene roughed out the novel for the script, then polished it for publication. It’s also been turned into a radio and later TV series over the years.

He didn’t dabble in comedy much, but “Our Man in Havana” is one of the triumphs of his, Reed’s and Alec Guinness’s careers. He wrote the novel and with Reed, turned the script into a textbook in droll, dark satiric screenwriting.

His focus on the world’s trouble spots, the geopolitics and religious persecution and differing victims in such places, earned those locales their own name — “Greeneland.” Leper colonies and new forms of slavery, oppressed Africans, South Americans and Asians, persecuted Catholics, homosexuals and others, all found something of a champion in a writer whose “heroes” were flawed, guilt-ridden or oppressed themselves.

“Happy endings” were not his thing.

His love life — he was married, and simply moved on from that family early on, supporting them in growing comfort even as he carried on affair after affair with married women, adding homes on the Italian isle of Capri, Paris and Antibes — is easier to understand (perhaps) when you notice that he cut a dashing figure to the end, resembling “Downton Abbey/Legion” star Dan Stevens in his younger days. (Above left).

He was a “voyeur of violence” who courted controversy — “What fun is there in working if one doesn’t go too far?”

And unlike any author anyone can name, he pursued a form of social justice via the high regard the Russians, Cubans and Catholic countries of the world held him in. Want me to speak there? Release X, Y or Z imprisoned writers. He observed, listened, won over and often after a visit (to Castro, for instance), would challenge this or that dictator or state to address this, stop that or free political prisoners.

“A reputation is like a death mask,” he joked. But Greene used his, on many occasions, to good purpose.

It’s a remarkable life, even if you’re not a lifelong resident of Greeneland, even if you’re not sure how well his distinctly 20th century privilege, values, politics (a leftist) and prose will age.

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene, by Richard Greene. W.W. Norton & Co., 507 pages plus indexes. $40.

There are messy movies and shambolic comedies, and then there’s whatever the hell “Last Call” is supposed to be.

It’s a “back to the old neighborhood” dramady almost guaranteed to give you a hangover. I’m on my third aspirin already, and I haven’t had a drop.

Unlike everybody else in this boozy, lazy, unfunny “redemption” tale about the “success” who “got out” of Darby Heights (Upper Darby, Philly), went Ivy League, but never lost his “Jersey Shore” loving edge.

Jeremy Piven is Mick Callahan, 50ish and single and working for an unscrupulous Italian-American developer (Garry Pastore) who wants to build a casino in the old ‘hood.

Mick, supposedly a high roller with a top-end desk job, is arm-twisted into getting names on a petition to get the locals, most of whom he’s known since childhood, to stop putting “Casi-NO” signs in their yards.

He’ll have to work that in around his mother’s wake. She’s gone, and now there’s just his aged dad (Jack McGee), another “mick” running another Irish bar, Callahan’s Pub. He’s third generation, but without Mick to float loans to save the place or quit his job and run it, “The Bucket” isn’t long for this world, steady clientele (Bruce Dern as “Coach”) be damned.

Because Mick’s no-good muscle-bound lady-killer “big brother” (Zack McGowan) is headed back to prison, and on a bit of a bender as he braces for that eventuality.

Back to the Heights means Mick might run into his childhood crush, Ali (Taryn Manning of “Orange is the New Black” and “Hustle & Flow”) and her kvetching, cooking, cussing Greek mom (Cathy Moriarty, in rare form).

As they guzzle through Mick’s Mom’s wake and its endless elbow-bending aftermath, Mick collects those signatures and we wonder not so much if he’s sold his soul, but if he has the cash and wherewithal to buy it back.

The script was co-written by a real-estate developer, not that you can tell (cough cough). It’s a picture more wrapped up in ensemble and semi-seedy milieu than in anything that makes sense.

Trite and cliched redemption stories always go down easier with Irish stereotypes and toasts, right?

“If yer’gonna lie, lie for love. If yer’gonna steal, steal a heart. If yer’gonna cheat, cheat death.“

Piven dials down his “Entourage” cock-of-the-walk persona so much here that he gives us nothing to hang onto. Mick is presented as loud, still tough, still able to hold his liquor, still single and still pining for the still-single girl next door.

None of that plays. For the first time since he was John Cusack’s perpetual second-banana, Piven’s boring.

Every movie in this vein has to have “the boys” you grew up with. Jamie Kennedy plays one of those. There are old grudges about Little League brawls, sexual conquest contests, a blowsy tart roughly their age (Betsy Beutler) and dreams of a group vacay to “Tha SHORE.”

And at every juncture, with every scene (save for the tippling priest hearing confessions in a phone booth at the bar at the wake), “Last Call” grates. The script is tone deaf and the direction (Paolo Pilladi settling some ancient Italian grudge against the Irish, apparently) incompetent.

It’s the sort of picture where a supporting “villain” (Kresh Novakovic) lines up a pool shot, fully expecting the dunce behind the camera to notice he’s still rolling even though he’s lining up to poke the 6-ball with his cue, and keep that out of the frame

The dunce doesn’t.

“Pop” is fixing up the boat in the driveway for crab fishing, pulling huge chunks of fiberglass off a Swiss-cheesed junkyard prop. Alert viewers can see motor’s been pulled out of it, and that the boat in the water later looks nothing like this.

Not that anybody should be paying that much attention to this. The headaches “Call” induces are real, even if you don’t enjoy the libations it usually takes to earn them.

MPA Rating: R for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some drug use

Cast: Jeremy Piven, Taryn Manning, Zack McGowan, Jack McGee, Jamie Kennedy, Cheri Oteri, Kresh Novakovic, Garry Pastore, Cathy Moriarty and Bruce Dern.

Credits: Directed by Paolo Pilladi, script by Paolo Pilladi and Greg Lingo. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

In a passing glance, I thought this was Spiderman on a Catamaran. Which makes sense in an onomatopoeia sort of way.

But no, this Texas cat in my Florida marina rocks Deadpool to scare off gulls, pigeons and other wrongdoers.

Yes, it is very “f—–g fog–” on the Florida Space Coast this am, as Mr. Pool would say.

Always thought of the Pool as more of a cutter-rigged ketch superhero myself. @vancityreynolds care to clarify?

This looks like a hoot. Coming very soon from IFC.

Yeah, Margot Robbie’s back. Oscar winner Viola Davis is here.

But Idris, Cena, Alice Braga, Joel Kinnamon, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi and Michael Rooker? UP grades, my dears. UPgrades.

This looks ultra violent and James Gunn funny/cool. Aug. 6.

“Boys vs. Girls” is an homage to those wacky/edgy kids summer camp comedies of yore, a “Meatballs” for a new generation…or rather it might be if it hadn’t been such a limp biscuit.

It’s a period piece send-up of such films with barely a laugh in it. “Edgy?” It’s “DeGrassi” with menstruation jokes.

It starts with a hint of promise, but never gets out of the gate.

The one chuckle I had was in the outtakes under the credits, and what do we say about outtakes in most comedies, kids? That they’re almost always a sign of comic desperation.

Camp Kindlewood has not-quite-thrived run as a boys-only July/girls-only August summer get-away for kids, and the older kids who act as camp counselors there. “Boys vs Girls” is about the summer of 1990, that first summer that they went “coed.”

Narrator Dale (Eric Osborne) is a high school kid and counselor who doesn’t know what “coed” means. Seriously. But he and BFF Ben (Jesse Camacho) and the other lads have to learn new rules, now that it’s not just “be our true selves” boys acting boyish time.

Camp director Roger (“Whose Line Is It?” comic Colin Mochrie) lays down the law.

“No more naked morning dips…No more peeing wherever you happen to be.”

Girl narrator Amber (Rachael Dagenais) is head female counselor, fated to spar with Dale and you-know-how-that-will-end.

“That’s Tiffany (Samantha Helt),” she tells us. “She thought penicillin was a fashion statement.”

There’s a surfer dude himbo counselor (Tim Dowler-Coltman) and a would-be B-boy (Romeo Carere) who can’t freestyle to save his Canadian whiteboy life.

On the other side of the gender divide we have the knife-carrying Goth-girl (Michala Brasseur) and Miss Eager to Please (Nia Roam) who swoons over the B-Boy.

The boys and girls first square off in “training” for that first coed summer, but things get really out of hand when the coed crews of campers show up, taking the “feud” to the next level.

Except things never come close to “out of hand.” The genders square off in a British Bulldog match, leaving the poor boys at a loss.

“They have GIRL parts! What do we grab onto?”

“The…gender NEUTRAL parts!”

The “pranks” are so lame you know it’s intentional, but none of Canada’s Bright and Pretty Young Things can play “irony” in a way that lands a laugh. Camacho, of TV’s “Insomnia” and “Locke & Key” tries for over-the-top and finds a dirty chuckle or big guy sight gag or two.

Everybody else? Hired for their nearly perfect looks and eagerness to spend extra hours in the makeup chair to complete that perfection.

The ’80s fashions and hairstyles are on the money. So? That matters as much as the imitation ’80s synth pop on the soundtrack (Pat Benatar was the only “original artist” I recognized).

Writer-director Michael Stasko didn’t have much luck with low-budget sci-fi (“The Control”), and sadly has no eye or ear for comedy either. The movie’s scattering of raunchy touches — camp “skits” on what “toxic” boys are really like and how ditzy girls get over their first “period — don’t have novelty or any comic bite.

The acting ranges from indifferent but cute to “At least he looks right at home, outdoors in all that makeup.”

The two veteran comics in the cast, Mochrie and “Kids in the Hall” alumnus Kevin Macdonald (as the drinking, pill-popping camp caretaker) have nothing funny to play. Until the outtakes.

And those outtakes? They hint at a picture that might have been aiming for an R-rated rudeness, an idea that was almost abandoned, but not quite. Every coarse and crude moment feels like a punch that Stasko pulled or that his cast didn’t have the stomach to deliver.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual humor, profanity

Cast: Rachel Dagenais, Eric Osborne, Michala Brasseur, Nia Roma, Romeo Carere, Jesse Camacho, Samantha Helt, Shaun Benson, Kevin McDonald, Colin Mochrie

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Stasko. A Dot.film release.

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