Movie Nation

Channel surfing by this title the other night took me back to 1986, when John Hughes was just finishing up an epic run as “Movie Voice of American Teenagers” and Molly Ringwald took her curtain call as The Girl in that “Sixteen Candles,” “Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink” trilogy.

I follow a lot of “Pretty in Pink” principals on Twitter, and they’re always reposting some flattering remembrance of it from fans and influencers and people who are both (James Corden, of course).

Reviewing this back in the day (not my third rodeo, kids), I remember dragging two pals to the showing and wondering if they ruined it for me. I mean, they made quacking noises every time “Ducky” showed up on screen, and truthfully, I think they came just to catch the famously hip soundtrack Hughes’ team always compiled for him.

As the newspaper I wrote that review for flooded, and then burned (at the same time) and thus my clips and those years at the paper are lost to “The Red River of the North” mists of time, I thought I’d try to see it with fresh eyes.

But I wonder if I’m about to get another batch of Twitter blocks. Because within minutes, the hot pink mess “Pretty in Pink” is comes flooding back.

Is it a movie where “The girl gets the wrong guy?” It was a very different time, but did Hughes not have the guts to make Ducky (Jon Cryer) gay? Or bi?

 “This is an incredibly romantic moment, and you’re ruining it for me!”

Or was Hughes taking his shot at a sort of “Pride & Prejudice,” where the fashion conscious but poor heroine Andie (Ringwald) gets her head turned scoping out the houses of the well-off like Elizabeth Bennett driving through the rich part of town in a battered Karmann Ghia?

“Ever consider going out with someone who has money?” she asks her school clique.

Dreamy rich Blane (Andrew McCarthy) has her eye. But Ducky — relentlessly — has her ear, sharing her fashion sense, stalking her to clubs he can’t get into, lip-sinking to Otis Redding. He’s like an Anthony Michael Hall from “Sixteen Candles” who’s given up the macho shrimp shtick and is trying on “FAB-ulous!”

Blane’s country club comrade Steff (James Spader, his first turn as “venomous) may have it in for the pretty in pink Andie (who rebuffs his advances). But can those two kids from the literal opposite side of the tracks find love anyway?

The teeth-grinding nature of “Pretty in Pink” goes back to Ducky, and not just because of his annoying, cloying, clinging omnipresence. The movie reflects that character. It tries too hard.

Hep cat cowpoke Harry Dean Stanton as Andie’s unemployed, depressed dad? Annie Potts as the record store manager who matches Andie’s thrift-store fashion sense, and raises her crazy and crazier hair in every scene? That pink Karmann Ghia?

It’s all so artificial and on-the-nose.

Hughes wrote from a very narrow perspective, something that became more and more obvious the more movies he made. Suburban Chicago settings, upper middle class affluence, rarely if ever a Black face in sight. Gedde Watanabe’s outlandish Asian stereotype turn in “Sixteen Candles” wasn’t an accident.

Hughes ran out of things to say about teens with “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” signaled a new, more grownup direction that he never took.

He didn’t rediscover his clout until he turned his attention to younger children such as the upper middle class Chicago suburbanite left “Home Alone” for the holidays. “Curly Sue” followed that, and threw in some seriously retrograde anti-feminist messaging to go with the whiter-than-whiter world Hughes worked in.

As for “Pink,” it lives on as an artifact, more of a time-capsule than the other Hughes teen comedies, and not just because of the standards of who and what were “hot” back then. The decor of that record store, the Morrisey poster and conspicuous placement of The Smiths LP (and cassette) bin, are more idealized than our memories of the era.

But those fashions! It’s not the colors that date it. You see yoga pants that look like flattering versions of the bagwear all the young women are trapped in underneath all that hair product. The gaudy accessories that push “more is more” style, the “relaxed” lines of the men’s and women’s wear (Spader’s “Miami Vice” without the tropics linen suits). Were we ever that young?

All that said, “Pink” lives on. But is this a “cult film” that deserves to? I don’t think so.

MPA Rating: PG-13, lots of profanity

Cast: Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, Andrew McCarthy, Annie Potts, James Spader and Harry Dean Stanton.

Credits: Directed by Howard Deutch, script by John Hughes. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:37

Much respect for writer-director Stephen Basilone for leaning into what any movie fan is thinking after our hero is bowled over by our bubbly heroine in “Long Weekend.”

“Are you REAL?” Bart (Finn Wittrock) wants to know of this Force of Nature named Vienna (Zoe Chao). “Or are you just one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girls?”

We’ve seen them in scads of films, some would say going all the way back to “Bringing Up Baby.” Think of Zoe Kazan in “Ruby Sparks” or “What If,” Kate Winslet in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Zooey Deschanel in “(500) Days of Summer,” and pretty much everything else.

But that’s not Vienna. However downbeat Bart is, ignoring scores of increasingly urgent voice mails from his doctor’s office, downcast after a break-up, unemployed and abandoning his apartment, the young woman who awakens him after passing out drunk at a revival house cinema showing of “Being There,” however upbeat and forward this grinning “Hey, bud” young woman might be, asking if there’s a decent neighborhood bar and dropping straight into “OK, let’s go,” she’s got secrets and most importantly, agency.

Vienna takes the initiative. Vienna drives the plot. Vienna has a wad of cash, no ID, no cell phone and a lot of odd omissions from her life-experiences resume. “Bill & Ted?” “Sparklers?” And she’s not letting go of this pleasantly troubled guy. Not on your life.

Understandably, he’s just sober enough to have questions.

“Hey, you’re not a MENNONITE, are ya?” “Am I about to wake up in a bathtub missing a kidney?”

The whirlwind opening is the best part of “Long Weekend,” because it makes its case that these two are fated to pair up in a flash — they even have matching grins — because Wendi McClendon-Covey drops in and gets laughs as a landlady reluctant to let Bart go, and because Damon Wayans Jr. pops in for a quick overwhelmed-by-fatherhood best friend and gets to be funny for a change.

Once the film settles into its more conventionally unconventional story, Vienna’s “secret” explained, little bursts of “serious” and “the sads” slip in and it just doesn’t have the gravitas or plot twists to bear up under the weight of reality. Or unreality.

But the leads click, and the viewer is reminded that even if the culture wants to toss out “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” as a “sexist” and “limiting” concept, some “fantasy” in the minds of screenwriters, who are always looking for shortcuts to tidy up their character relationships (killing off parents in “romances” goes back 100 years), such pixies exist in nature.

And as in reality, the best part of the story of any such romance is that bowled-over introduction. It’s every complication that intrudes after that which becomes a drag, and becomes the part we forget or wish we could.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout.

Cast: Finn Wittrock, Zoe Chan, Damon Wayans Jr. and Wendi McClendon-Covey

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stephen Basilone. A Sony Pictures release.

Running time: 1:30

So tell me what shocking about this pitch.

Some Obama speech writer and image manager is scripting a remake of “The President’s Analyst.” That 1960s comically paranoid thriller offered us the phone company as the Big Villains out to Rule the World.

Yeah, that changed.

And Paramount wants Trevor Noah to star in it.

I can totally see it. He’s got this hip shrink vibe. And hey, anything to keep him from starting every sentence, “Last summer, in band camp (in South Africa).”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/trevor-noah-tackling-remake-of-the-presidents-analyst-for-paramount-exclusive?__twitter_impression=true

“Luz” is a slow, soapy prison romance that, if nothing else, is not quite like any prison and “getting out” picture you’ve ever seen.

It comes at Latin machismo from a queer point of view, upending prison and post-prison life tropes one after the other. And if it was the least bit realistic and had even the tiniest hint of urgency about it, it could have amounted to something.

We meet Ruben on the day he checks into prison. He meets Carlos for the first time when they’re not-introduced as cellmates. And the guard who drops him off has barely cleared earshot when Carlos (Jesse Tayeh) turns his murderous glower into an assault.

There will be no rest for Ruben (Ernesto Reyes) in this California penitentiary, no letting down his guard. The gangs? How will he navigate them? The gay thug down the block who wants to “roll with” him? How will he negotiate that?

Thank heavens Carlos is there to coach him, teach him the “rules,” how to survive his sentence.

“You need to learn how to lose a fight…Always roll with somebody.” And “don’t associate with homosexuals.”

That last line is a lot more polite that homophobic, probably not the way one inmate would warn another about protecting his macho rep “inside.” But then, we’ve already seen Carlos turn from a seething, mistrusting enemy to an intimate friend in half a flash, with no more motivation than an intense locking-of-the-eyes or two.

Jon Garcia’s movie isn’t about “surviving in the yard,” finding a gang for protection or mastering “the system.” It’s about guys who attend mass in the chapel, start “sharing” their pasts (the “how you ended up here” story) and become more than intimate friends.

When roomies Ruben and Carlos scrape plastic shards into sharpened knives on the rough concrete walls of their cell, they’re making blades…to cut fruit and vegetables.

“Real men know how to cook,” Carlos counsels. As they move their relationship from “my brother” to “my lover,” he might add that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

That’s what I mean by “soapy.” Hot sex scenes and a fascinating back story that reveals the transgender crush (Evie Riojas) Ruben once had “on the outside,” his mob boss’s “goddess,” “Luz” is one seriously corny riff on prison.

When Sal, the muscular pal who Carlos rolls with for protection, assures Ruben that “He loves you, man,” we have left “Midnight Express” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” behind and entered a whole different level of gay prison fantasy.

The movie dawdles through all this, with Ruben professing determination to get “my daughter back” when he gets out. But when he gets out, his first act is tracking down the lover who left him in the lurch in the cell. Can their romance survive outside the same-sex petri dish of prison? That’s a lot more pressing than tracking down his only child.

Reyes, of TV’s “American Gods,” has matinee idol looks and real chemistry with Tayeh in a film that could be a big break for them both.

But this script is a real eye-roller.

Throw in prison, the whole gay gangster thing and grievances SLOWLY addressed, a daughter as an afterthought and the guilt over loving a transgender woman who did not profit from the relationship and you’ve got a picture with structural issues that overwhelm its messaging and LGBTQ film festivals written all over it. And even that audience will be checking its phones between love scenes.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast:  Ernesto Reyes, Jesse Tayeh, Rego Lupa, Evie Riojas and Jimmy Garcia

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jon Garcia. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:58

Something’s made the old fisherman sleepwalk. He stares off into space, blacks out, forgets where he’s been or why he took his boat out in the middle of the night.

Is he drinking? Has mental illness taken him? Is it the windmills recently-installed offshore?

Or is that low growl he hears at sea, sometimes even at home, the sign something more sinister is out there in “The Block Island Sound?”

This properly creepy if somewhat aimless creature feature from the McManus Brothers is built to get under your skin and up your nose. That nice air of mystery smells salty in this case. We get a whiff of the fish kills, the briny grime of a fishing town where something new is “out there,” something strange is “going on.”

It’s the sort of movie where the local hero, Harry (Chris Sheffield) spends a lot of time trying to explain himself and their increasingly “unstable” fisherman-dad (Neville Archambault) to his EPA/fish-and-wildlife researcher sister (Michaela McManus). But we’ve picked up from an early scene that the conspiracy nut (Jim Cummings) might have a theory or two closer to the mark.

“You should talk to Dale. He knows what’s going on.”

“It’s not just here. It’s all over…”

Fisherman Tom (Archambault, of “13 Cameras”) woke up on his boat after one blackout to a wheelhouse in shambles, and an empty dog collar. He doesn’t know what happened and doesn’t discuss what he does know.

When daughter Aubry (McManus) shows up, Harry insists “He’s fine,” even though he’s had a few panicked searches for Dad after “episodes” like this.

But the last incident turns up an empty boat. Tom is gone. A tearless funeral and collation reveal to us that Harry’s starting to show the same symptoms. Aubry and his other mainland-living sister (Heidi Niedermeyer) are furious after Harry winds up in jail. It’s not drinking, he keeps insisting.

“We’re not all crazy here, you know.”

But when you’re seeing your dead Dad’s corpse everywhere (Archambault could be the new Sig Haig, a crazy-eyed horror mainstay), maybe you’re overselling the sanity thing. Harry’s due for a brain scan and a Trump style “cognitive” test. Overdue.

Kevin and Matthew McManus (“Funeral Kings”) give us a movie with a fairly distinct sense of place, but seriously lacking in “local color.” No accents, no real “old salts,” for instance.

They underutilize their experienced actress sister Michaela, by casting her in the Richard Dreyfuss role in this “Jaws” and not giving her scenes to show off expertise. They’re more interested in finding another conspiracy-minded crank, this one with first-hand knowledge of what father Tom and now son Harry are going through.

And the story, while maintaining mystery, has a certain stumbling about with no big point to it all other than to get to the third act revelations, where the theories come home to roost.

“It’s probably the government doing this s–t, anyway. It’s all connected.”

Their most heavily-used effect is that growling sound that makes the film’s title a pun. But the visuals they trot out for the third act, especially the finale, are real eye-poppers.

That payoff makes this mixed-bag of a thriller worth your time, an interesting if not terribly compelling sea tale where all the answers can be found in the sound.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, smoking, profanity

Cast: Chris Sheffield, Michaela McManus, Neville Archambault, Jim Cummings and Willie C. Carpenter

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kevin McManus and Matthew McManus. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt and Joe Manganiello are among those voicing characters in this dark, violent animated fantasy.

“And Breathe Normally” is about two women who arrived at their similar circumstances in vastly different ways, but who recognize the desperation they have in common.

This Icelandic drama is about human migration, refugees, homelessness and the missteps that put the Icelandic Lára and West-African Adj in each other’s paths in the bleak Reykjavik of early spring.

Lára (Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir) is a woman at the end of her tether. She’s a single mom, in between jobs and drowning in “past due” notices. She and little boy Eldar (Patrik Nökkvi Pétursson) are about to lose their apartment. So naturally she relents when the kid wants to adopt a cat from the shelter.

We get hints of her past and a “Dragon Tattoo” taste of her sexuality (Haraldsdóttir even looks like Noomi Rapace, cheekboned and makeup free). Every ball she’s juggling is about to tumble to the ground.

But the state has Lára lined up with a potential job. She’s to be a trial trainee with airport passport control. Can she keep her son fed and housed until she lands the gig? With her past, is she even up to this important but menial job?

That’s how Lára meets Adj. The woman with a French passport is about to be passed through on her way to Toronto. But the eagle-eyed eager-to-impress trainee spots something her supervisor doesn’t. Adj is not French, she’s from Guinea-Bissau. That’s not a legitimate passport.

Lára has to guiltily escort a devastated Adj into custody. “Guiltily?” The woman desperate to land a real job has enough history to recognize desperation and remember “Let she who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Writer-director Isold Uggadottir’s debut feature takes us into Lára’s failings and deep into Adj’s predicament. The illegal immigrant is treated politely, but without sympathy. “It’s just the system,” she’s told (in English), the answer to her every question. How long will she be in custody? Can she apply for asylum? Will she be deported back to the place she fled?

Overwhelmed Lára and deflated Adj are destined to reconnect in ways that bring to mind “It takes a village” as this film hunts for and finds tears in their shared plight.

It’s a “small” story in every sense of the word — intimate, with the scale of the tragedy achingly personal. “And Breathe Normally” has suspense and pathos, despair and clever script twists and two beautifully modulated performances making every setback gut-wrenchingly real and every glimmer of hope inspiring.

MPA Rating: TV-14, suggestions of drug abuse, sexuality

Cast: Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir, Babetida Sadjo, Patrik Nökkvi Pétursson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Isold Uggadottir. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

This Johnny Depp thriller/police procedural was in the can long before Depp’s career imploded with allegations of physical abuse of his ex-wife Amber Heard.

This March 19 (April 9 on VOD) story about the cops, what they knew and what they didn’t reveal about the two rappers’ shootings also stars Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Glenn Plummer, Shea Whigham, Xander Berkeley, Toby Huss and Michael Pare.

Stylized, impressionistic and striking, “Bombay Rose” is a fanciful animated melodrama for adults, a tale of India’s past and present, with some of that past rendered into old fashioned Bollywood movie myth.

A simple parable that’s a little hard to follow in a style best-described as under-animated — the drawings more painterly and the movement more jerky — it’s poetic and prosaic, a hybrid of anime nd CG and old school TV 2D animation and quite unusual in appearance.

Gitanjali Rao’s script tracks several interlocking stories, gives us fantasy flashbacks and little tastes of Indian TV and cinema storytelling, and sacrifices a realistic ending for one that’s dark but dramatically satisfying.

Kamala is a young woman who makes leis out of flower petals, a Hindu who looks after her school age sister Tara and her grandfather, who runs a failing watch repair kiosk.

Salim is a Muslim from Kashmir, new to Bombay, hustling flower and scent sales for Mishra Ji, who is an old friend of Kamala’s grandpa. Salim “left heaven (Kashmir) for hell on Earth,” but he has flashbacks about the violence of this border country flashpoint. He’s smitten with Kamala, and none of this “But she’s a Hindu and you’re a Muslim” palaver is going to change that.

Kamala and Tara are under threat from the pimp/hustler Mike, a mustachioed villain who promises Kamala a passport and work (as a maid, at best) in Dubai and threatens to “look after your sister when you’re gone.”

As if that seals the deal.

And young Tara is taking English and young lady comportment lessons from Ms. D’Souza, a long-retired actress with a house full of Bollywood romance memories, music-boxes mostly.

It is a time of mass roundups of child laborers, and every walk with Ms. D’Souza sees Tara and her teacher walking through India’s past — black and white backdrops, modern economy cars and auto-rickshaws replaced by running board roadsters and sedans.

The jumble of stories begins in a local cinema with the audience griping “Why’d you censor out the kiss?” (India long kept its films comically chaste), and as Kamala makes eyes at Salim, she drifts off into reveries straight out of Indian myth — flying horses and hunter/prey parables and the like.

Mike’s intrusions into her life take the form of a predator hawk shape-shifting into the street predator he is in actuality.

The film comments on itself when it notes how this is yet another depiction of India’s vast underclass. “Misfortune is always around the corner for the poor” is true enough here.

Before long, all these peripherally-connected characters, and Ms. D’Souza’s antiques-dealer pal Anthony, Tara’s new mute street kid friend Tibu, Kamala’s exotic dancer colleagues and the cops are headed for a collision.

I like the way the film commands your attention despite its simplicity. The color palette is vivid even if the actual images — characters, flowers, backgrounds and the like — are closer to sketches than finished and sharp digital renderings. Not a huge fan of the style, not for an entire movie. The jerky motion can be wearing.

But if you’re looking for an animated dip into Indian culture and a film that charts its own path to a distinct animated style, it’s well worth a look.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic/suggestive material, smoking, some violence and language 

Voice cast: Cyli Khare, Amit Deondi, Amardeep Jha, Shishir Sharma, Anurag Kashyap,  Makrand Deshpande

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gitanjali Rao. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

“The Vigil” is the most original, most chilling horror film of the new year. And let me hasten to add, it’s not even close.

It’s a supernatural thriller set in an Orthodox Jewish community of New York, which is novelty enough. But first-time writer-director Keith Thomas builds on what recent documentaries have shown us about the struggles of men and women who want to escape such rigid, insular, patriarchal and punitive groups, films such as “Unorthodox” and “One of Us.”

That’s how we meet Yakov (Dave Davis), in a support group of fellow “ex-Orthodox,” struggling to do manage the simple business of living and finding work in big, bad New York after disconnecting from a society where much of that was taken care of by the theocratic elders.

He is being stalked by his former rabbi (Menashe Lustig), not that Reb Shulem sees it that way. He waits under a street lamp and just “wants to ask a question.”

The rabbi has an offer of work that he wraps in words of concern and gently-badgering recruitment to return to the fold. Sure, whatever. What’s the job?

Be a shomer for the night. Sit with a recently-deceased recluse, recite Psalms, “protect” the body from “an unseen evil,” the opening titles of the film informed us are the meaning of the tradition.

The dead man had a shomer, “but he just ran out.”

After haggling over the midnight to dawn fee, Yakov agrees. The meeting with the slightly-demented widow (Lynn Cohen) doesn’t go well, despite reassurances that “she’ll likely sleep through the night…It’ll be quiet.” But a deal’s a deal.

As Yakov pops in his earbuds and fiddles with this new smartphone gadget, Googling “How to talk to women,” we get the distinct impression that he’s not taking this “holy” but creepy duty seriously. The ominous brass in the score and the metallic thunks and bumps behind the walls and ceiling, the “whoosh” sounds around him tell us that’s not the smart play.

The conventional but clever plot is familiar to anybody raised on Indiana Jones. Take religious tradition, especially Old Testament rituals, too lightly, and there’ll be Hell to pay.

Just as predictable is the thing we just know is Yakov’s best hope of surviving the night, the very thing he fled.

But Thomas weaves in genuinely chilly moments and background details that take “The Vigil” from interesting to riveting. They include the support group’s unworldly naivete and thinly-veiled contempt for the “goyim” they’re having to deal with now, Yakov’s troubled personal history and the film’s framing device.

The story opens on a grim, grey day in hazy soft focus — a pistol pointed at a head, an SS lapel badge in view. The dead man survived the Holocaust. Now his body is under threat again.

Thomas locks in the viewer with a mystery we must unravel, traditions and rituals we ponder. He stumbles into over-explaining, a single scene that dissipates too much of “the unknown.”

But that doesn’t wholly break the spell of “The Vigil,” a most unusual twist on demonic possession and the benchmark movie for the horror films of 2021. See if you can top this.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for terror, some disturbing/violent images, thematic elements and brief strong language

Cast: Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Malky Goldman and Lynn Cohen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Keith Thomas. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:29