Movie Nation

All over Istanbul, entrepreneurial scavengers pull junk carts, filling the canvas bags on those carts with recyclable cans, liquor bottles and especially cardboard.

A lot of them are orphans, the street children of the city who grew up on this work, running carts for a go-between who pays them for their collections and sells those recyclables on.

In “Paper Lives,” Mehmet (Çagatay Ulusoy) is the Fagan to a gang of these junk-collecting Oliver Twists, feeding the kids and young adults donuts as they head out, paying them off when they return, taking an interest in them because he grew up the same way.

Mehmet is saving up his litter-loot for something, nothing that’s on the “bucket list” he and his best collector Gonzi (Ersin Arici) came up with years back.

“Ride in a convertible,” (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed into English), “fly on an airplane…stay in a luxury hotel…find my mother.”

We meet Mehmet knocking on death’s door. A trip to the emergency room reveals that he has kidney failure, has known about it for some time and has been saving up for the day when this rationed health care system finds him a kidney. As it’s his “turn” to get dialysis, he fights off death for another day. But all he frets over is the frantic mother (Selen Öztürk) who dashes into the ER with a little boy who’s stopped breathing.

When he stumbles across a little boy named Ali (Emir Ali Dogrul) stowed away in one of those collection bags, turning him out or calling the cops never figure into his thinking. No, he’s going to “save” this child, maybe get him back to mother the boy claims helped him escape a cruel stepfather.

Screenwriter Ercan Mehmet Erdem and director Can Ulkay introduce us to a fascinating underworld operating in broad daylight of veterans of the carting trade who fend off rival collectors, hide from the cops and know all the tricks for collecting what has value and making a quick get-away when others covet it, too.

Early scenes have a “Man Push Cart” flavor, lots of details of how this off-the-books economy works. Liquor bottles with their caps have value because black marketeers refill them with cheap knockoffs and re-sell them at premium prices, for instance. They carry on with their work as the affluent — locals and foreigners — weave in and out of traffic in luxury cars on their way to chic hotels that the paparazzi stake out for work.

Mehmet is a sort of benign, somewhat shady eminence in his little corner of the world — giving cash to street urchins, making them promise they won’t spend it on glue to sniff.

But “Paper Lives” quickly descends into a sort of overwrought madness the moment the little boy arrives. Mehmet’s behavior is soap opera meltdown over-the-top. He protects the child, lashes out at threats to the child’s wellbeing and threatens even his most intimate friends when they’re not all-in and on-board this little experiment on orphan-raising-an-orphan child rearing.

Ulusoy’s near-hysteria in many moments reminded me of Italian neo-realism pictures like “Bicycle Thieves,” the least realistic parts of those films.

The hero’s histrionics and the fact that the viewer can guess the solution to the “mystery” too soon lessen its impact. But the attention to detail, taking us into this world of Artful Istanbul Dumpster Divers, holds one’s interest throughout.

Little Ali may drive the plot and present obstacles to Mehmet’s life-saving kidney surgery. But one can’t help but think his story, and the movie about him, would have been more interesting and less maudlin and melodramatic had the screenwriter found something more interesting to do with the child.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, glue-sniffing and lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Çagatay Ulusoy, Emir Ali Dogrul, Ersin Arici, Selen Öztürk and Turgay Tanülkü

Credits: Directed by Can Ulkay, script by Ercan Mehmet Erdem. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

I’ve interviewed Olympia Dukakis a few times over the years, but let me tell you about catching the Oscar winner, stage legend and TV acting icon on a bad day.

She was just recovering from an injury, but had gamely agreed to show up at an acting conservatory I covered to talk to the students, buck them up and give them the lowdown on “the craft” and “the profession. She was a bit wary when I showed up. I think the school sprang the “reporter here to talk to you and listen in” thing on her, literally over lunch, so she was taken aback and withdrawn.

But then she sat down in front of the assembled thespians and the performer kicked in. She was gregarious, uproarious, loud and a laugh riot. “It’s not a competition,” she said of acting, a mantra based on a personal epiphany. She was mesmerizing and moving. What kid with greasepaint dreams could not be inspired?

THAT’s the Olympia Dukakis the public loves, larger-than-life, fervently urging Sally Field to punch out Shirley MacLaine in “Steel Magnolias,” giving Cher (playing her daughter) the business in their Oscar-winning turns in “Moonstruck,” swearing like a sailor on leave in “Tales from the City.”

That’s the Dukakis of Harry Mavromichalis’s “Olympia,” an adoring portrait of a brassy woman made of bronze.

She may reflect on her wayward, rebellious youth, her down times, and guiltily ponder her (sometimes absentee) parenting.

She describes the mother hellbent on making a “traditional” Greek-American woman out of her, the New York casting folks who wouldn’t even audition her based on her surname.

“Too ETHNIC…But who in America DOESN’T have an ‘outsider’ feeling?”

And then Armistead Maupin, author of “Tales from the City,” the TV mini series that provided one of her iconic roles, shows up at her hotel after she’s been grand marshal of San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade.

“Sit DOWN and have a drink!”

First-time documentary director Mavromichalis follows her from the Toronto Film Festival, there for a “Moonstruck” anniversary celebration but where she’s quick to comically chide the festival director for not admitting her latest film, to New York, Hollywood, Cypress and Greece, where her mother was born and where Dukakis shares the books she’s read that changed her perspective and pointed toward the lie that the past couple of thousand years has sold humanity.

“For 25,000 years, God was a woman,” she declares as we see her duck into the Tomb Clytemnestra, as good a place as any to make that point.

She waves from the grand marshal’s convertible in that San Fran parade, smiles and mutters to the camera “These people don’t know who the f— I am!” Oh, but they do.

Colleagues from Laura Linney and Lainie Kazan to Austin Pendleton and Lynn Cohen sing her praises. Ed Asner was there to unveil her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“This is TALENT up the WAZOO,” he enthuses.

The film, largely filmed a decade ago (2011 Toronto FF, etc.), captures Dukakis as she turned 80, speaking frankly about her marriage to actor Louis Zorich (“Mad About You”), her struggles with self-image and drugs (briefly), the determination it took to launch Whole Theatre in Montclair, New Jersey, where she and her company tackled the classics and she played the Great Roles of the Stage.

Norman Jewison caught her in the comedy “Social Security” on Broadway and cast her in “Moonstruck.” And suddenly, the struggle for recognition and parts was over.

“Olympia” has been finished since 2018, Zorich has since died and Olympia will turn 90 this June. It may be that this film sat on the shelf for years because that struggle to recognize her is ongoing, or that the film is a bit fawning and the questions tossed at her from behind the camera can be inane and/or random in the extreme.

“How do you feel about death?”

But she finds something to grab hold of and conjures a response worth remembering every time. And injured (she’s in a cast for part of the film, too) or exhausted, exasperated (tech rehearsals for a show) or chatting with fans in English or Greek in a Cypriot supermarket or a Greek village, Olympia Dukakis is sure to never come off as anything less than larger than life.

MPA Rating: unrated, smoking, drinking and lots of profanity

Cast: Olympia Dukakis, Ed Asner, Laura Linney, Lanie Kazan, Austin Pendleton, Michael Dukakis and Louis Zorich.

Credits: Directed by Harry Mavromichalis, script by Sam Eggers and Harry Mavromichalis. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:40

The best moments in the Netflix comedy “Yes Day” don’t involve slapstick — although there’s some of that. They don’t come from the list of scenes that include the big water balloon fight, driving through the car wash with the windows down or a tween’s baking soda volcano experiment that gets out of hand.

It’s the singing that sells it and the leave-it-all-out-there commitment of the leads in those moments that makes this otherwise forgettable kids’ pic memorable.

What parent hasn’t had an over-the-top sing-along with the kids in the car on their way to school? The window for that is narrow, getting them to do it before they’re too embarrassed by “the very IDEA.”

Edgar Ramírez, a mainstay in dramatic roles such as Gianni Versace in “American Crime Story,” leaves nothing in the locker room when he and little Everly Carganilla start a drive with a kiddie song about gummy bears but sing their way to an encore, which is “Epic.”

Jennifer Garner and Ramírez star in this uneven but occasionally giddy family farce about a fun-loving, impulse-indulging couple who said “Yes!” to everything when they dated and married, only to evolve into the Empress and Emperor of “NO” when they had three kids.

“NO is part of the job,” Mom narrates. But as their teen (Jenna Ortega of TV’s “Stuck in the Middle” and that “Babysitter” horror sequel) hits “I wanna go to Fleekfest (a concert) with FRIENDS” age and son Nando (Julian Lerner) bridles at the limits put on his science experiments, they realize they’ve turned into no fun.

The goofy guidance counselor (Nat Faxon) has a suggestion — a “YES day,” where they say yet to everything the kids pitch. There can be limits to that, too — long term consequences, cost, something all three, ages five to 14, can partake in and agree on.

Sure, raising children is just an 18 year-long suicide watch. But it’s just one day. What can go wrong?

Director Miguel Arteta has become a reliable go-to filmmaker for kids’ films (“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) in between the edgier fare (“Duck Butter”) he got his start with (“The Good Girl”).

But what sells this comedy is the way the two leads are all-in on it. Garner produced it so it’s no surprise that she’s committed, first scene to last, to this harassed “No” mom forced to revisit her fun past. Ramírez is the real surprise, pulling out all the stops in a genre where you’d think he was a bit at sea.

ACTORs. I tell you what.

Some of the “say YES” gimmicks are funny, some lame. And there’s down time between them and before a sweet “teachable moment” finale that makes “Yes Day” play like a two hour drag (it’s under 90 minutes long).

But Garner, Ramírez and the kids never let on that this isn’t “Epic,” and that maybe this is one screen comedy where you can get away with “Go ahead, try this at home.”

MPA Rating: PG, scatological humor

Cast: Jennifer Garner, Edgar Ramírez, Jenna Ortega, Tracie Thoms, Nat Faxon, Julian Lerner, Everly Carganilla and H.E.R.

Credits: Directed by Miguel Arteta, script by Justin Malen, based on the book by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

It’s “Italian for Beginners” for Danish foodies? Who aren’t “beginners?”

This looks adorable. And mouth watering. “Food Club” is due out March 19 in the US of A.

I’m fixing to have a problem with this if it turns out “Krypton’s” Georgina Campbell, in the title role, is a CIA agent masquerading as a journalist.

More than a few reporters have been kidnapped and a few killed by “freedom fighters” who make that assumption. Even the CIA knows that “cover” is murderously unethical.

“Wildcat” opens April 23.

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