Movie Nation

Here’s an intriguing spin on the whole “found footage” mockumentary genre, a thriller built around a documentary filmmaker’s misadventures with online “cam girls.”

As depicted in “Use Me,” these are dominatrixes who make money off humbling, using and humiliating men with very particular sexual peccadilloes.

Actor and sometime documentary-filmmaker Julian Shaw plays himself, an Aussie obsessive who films “everything” — whose next subject is to be the porn performers/sex workers of America’s online sex trade. He will immerse himself in this world and get close to the queen bee of this universe, porn actress and “cam girl” Ceara Lynch.

Lynch, in the film and in real life, bills herself as a “humiliatrix,” a nubile young woman who play-acts and interacts with male clients via video. In various states of undress, she fulfills assorted unconventional fantasies, be they tongue-sucking or cuckolding, being bossed around and insulted –each and every one billed extravagantly for the privilege.

She’s been written up on Salon.com, bills herself as having a psychology degree and insists she’s “helping” these men by showing off her thongs and cleavage, teasing and taunting them to fulfillment with come-ons in her distinctly coquettish vocal fry.

“People pay her vast sums of money, basically for the privilege of being used,” Shaw explains to an interviewer. It’s an online shortcut for those who don’t have the time to court, marry, buy a woman a house and get used the old fashioned way, in other words.

He flies to Portland, Oregon (of course) to meet her, to “find the truth behind me” for this woman who purrs, “The Internet is my dungeon.”

Shaw’s film purports to show 71 days of his immersion in this world, leaving behind his ex girlfriend, whose break-up with him he taped (pausing camera so that she could video his reaction, too), kickstarter funding the film when he and Ceara burn through his cash too quickly, and generally crossing all sorts of moral and documentary-ethical lines as they do.

Shaw rather clumsily sees this as an “American Dream” story — hers, getting rich by providing a service no one else can provide as well as her, using her sexuality to entice “clients” (interviewed in masks or shadows) to give her money and baubles for her sexual attention.

She sells her used panties and excrement to the more monied of her weirdo clientele, which her lawyer says makes her “a genius of capitalism.”

And “everything’s virtual,” she insists. She “never meets a client in person,” which is why her dad, interviewed on camera, is OK with it.

Assorted randoms of the “vox populi” persuasion are interviewed about what “The American Dream” represents, and an Australian therapist differentiates between Ceara’s clients fetishes,”paraphilia,” and sexual or behavioral addictions.

“These are all male desires, they aren’t my desires,” Ceara adds.

Trotting out her psychological bonafides (sort of), the “humiliatrix” gives us her guidelines. No full nudity, no sexual intercourse on camera and no “in person” sessions. Those are Ceara Lynch’s rules.

Julian Shaw’s “rules” as a filmmaker are to “never cut,” never let his camera operator shut down. Ignore everybody who says “You’re not recording this” and “Please stop recording.”

These two, the film implies, were made for each other — at least in that compulsive/”services” compulsives way. And as Julian tumbles into her world, burning through cash, having hot tub romps and lewd limo lust-offs, we watch the narcissist moviemaker indulged by Ceara and her friends in “the biz,” all of them very pretty people rolling around doing what comes naturally, in assorted payment plans.

Her “whole brand is that I’m unattainable,” but we’ll see about that. The entry-button on her Cearalynch.com website is “Use Me” but we’ll have to figure out who is using whom here.

Because that’s the game “Use Me” plays. The leads use their real names, but not much of what we see is real — actress playing a girlfriend, actor playing a shrink, etc.

Where “Use Me” goes off the rails is in the contrivances Shaw pieces together out of “Thrillers for Dummies” to set up the third act melodrama that takes over the film.

The mockumentary stuff, with Ceara purring on camera “If you didn’t have money, I wouldn’t even spit in your general direction…Do you want to be my dog?” to clients, the costumes, contortions, writhing and lip-licking exhibitionism of her sex trade “acting” on camera? That’s fascinating.

So is the accounting part of her business — billing clients while she leaves them on hold, “my ignore line,” $5 a minute.

The “actress” Ceara comes off as confident, with the right setting, revealing wardrobe and makeup taking her from pretty to “bombshell.”

Shaw ably plays the eager obsessive, always taping, often lying, keeping his distance but plainly into being around Ceara and her leading competitor and protege, “Princess Cassie” (Jazlyn Yoder of “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Justice.”).

And by “being around” I mean naked in a bed, a tub, wherever with these compliant “professionals.”

Hearing Ceara’s stories, seeing where and how she grew up, compels Julian to “open up” himself — about sexual experiences, his mania for filming his entire life and the like.

That interaction, with the sobering transgressions of inventing your own ethical lines in this ever-evolving situation, with the documentary-real treatment of the business, was a pretty good movie.

But Shaw had to muck it up with a corny, under-developed and over-explained riff on “The Grifter” that doesn’t surprise, inform, delight or appall in the later acts.

This was never going to become “a thriller.” Its first, best destiny was to find its way as a pair of character studies, with mystery and intrigues dropped in along the way.

“Use Me” is a mockumentary that works only as long as its still mocking.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult sexual subject matter

Cast: Julian Shaw, Ceara Lynch, Jazlyn Yoder

Credits: Written and directed by Julian Shaw.   A Green Light release.

Running Time: 1:30

“Wild Nights with Emily” was close, but not canonical “Drunk History” in feature film form. Deadline.com says the producers/creators are talking about having a go at making a movie themselves.

https://t.co/a7c4TZUDiN https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1133816548777316352?s=17

With Europe and America flirting with fascism in ways we haven’t seen since the McCarthy Era, here’s a sour and generally unsatisfying parable set in the Spanish Civil War to remind us of how these things go down and how quickly their lessons are forgotten.

Ana Murugarren’s Spanish film, “The Bastards’ Fig Tree,” based on a Ramon Pinilla novel, is about a members of a fascist murder squad so shaken by a child who watched him kill his parents that he becomes a hermit and nurtures the fig tree the boy planted over their graves — for decades.

The promise of that title, of a modern man becoming a hermit to spare himself the revenge of a child who will grow up determined to avenge his family, is one of poignant reflection, repentance and maybe a hint of whimsy.

But it’s hard to lighten the tone after we’ve watched Rogelio, played with a guilty grimace and a twinkle by Karra Elejalde of “Timecrimes,” dispatch multiple “Reds” in the brutal late-night murder missions Franco’s Falangists carried out against teachers, activists or anybody else fingered by a snitch whose motives were never questioned.

Rogelio wasn’t an officer, he was just one of the trigger-men. The rich hidalgo in charge (Mikel Losada) did the driving. And sniveling Ermo (Carlos Areces) was the snitch, who denounced anybody whose land or house he coveted.

Don Pedro Alberto may declare, “We don’t kill kids, and that’s that,” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) sparing the little boy (Marcos Balgañón Santamaría). But Rogelio knows knows better. He insists they shoot the child as well.

“You’re going to kill me…in six years, when you turn 16, aren’t you?” Rogelio demands of the child. “Have you chosen a method?”

The boy just fixes him with a “Danny doesn’t live here Mrs. Torrence” stare — hate and accusation incarnate.

When the right wing hit squad took his brother and father, he slipped out after them. When they gunned them down in the rain, he watched. And when they left, the ten year-old spent all night digging their graves. He planted a fig sapling there to remember them.

Rogelio isn’t exactly wracked by guilt and doesn’t show a great deal of fear. But he takes the implicit threat in the child seriously. It’s the wife of the newly-converted (insincere) Falangist mayor, Cipriana (Pepa Aniorte of “Volver”) who gets in his head. She’s sure he’s had a graveside conversion.

“Our Lady spoke to you tonight?”

No, she didn’t. No, he hasn’t repented. No, the kid isn’t speaking. So Rogelio fixates on that damned tree, which cows or wildlife might munch to death and Ermo is anxious to pull up. He takes on the job of ensuring it gets watered and becomes round-the-clock guardian of a fig sapling in a remote field outside of Getxo, Bilbao.

He abandons his murderous duty, but not his Make Spain Great Again hat, uniform or pistol.

He’s entirely too profane and trigge- happy to admit it, but Cipriana knows.

“You’re a hermit paying for your sins!”

Murugarren, an editor turned writer-director, finally hits on a tone that suits this dark but potentially comic subject in the ensuing decades of the story, as Rogelio becomes a famous “tourist attraction” hermit, adopted by the town but keeping the dark secret of why he’s really guarding this fig tree.

His beard grows, the kid leaves home to go to seminary (at Rogelio’s desperate, self-serving insistence) and festivals and fairs are thrown on his hermitage, this plot of land with the fig tree and two ugly reminders of Spain’s past hidden beneath it. Pilgrims seek “miracles” at the hands of this cynical assassin, who never really reforms.

There are many places she could have taken this story of guilt, redemption, the lack of remorse of the “winners” and the short memories of everybody else. Perhaps they were all too conventional for the novel and the script she wrote from it.

What all concerned wound up with was a parable without a righteous payoff, a frustrating film that seems more aimless than it rightfully is, that plays darker than it wants to be.

As Rogelio takes on the hermit’s rags, he almost grasps the search for truth that comes with the job. Questioning a priest is as close as “The Bastards’ Fig Tree” (“La higuera de los bastardos”) comes to delivering a moral to the story.
“What do priests do when they get the urge to kill?”
The priest answers, “Cause a war so others kill for you.”

Mururgarren has made a “Belle Epoque” for time too dark to support it, a grim grasp at whimsy that isn’t there and probably not the fable about fascism that Western Civilization needs or even wants to see right now.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Karra Elejalde, Pepa Aniorte, Carlos Areces, Mikel Losada, Andrés Herrera

Credits: Written and directed by Ana Murugarren, based on a Ramon Pinilla novel. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:43

Oscar winner Octavia Spencer brings it, and how, in “Ma,” a real world horror tale blessed with a top-drawer cast and a grimly satisfying third act.

But you know that if you’ve seen the trailers. Two Academy Award winners, plus Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans and Missi Pyle, an up-and-coming young actor contingent headed by Diana Silvers of “Booksmart,” all fodder for the vengeance of a woman who never got over her high school disappointments.

It’s a screenplay that gives away its mystery fully and all too easily, and as directed it just sort of ambles along — flashbacks over-explaining the motivation of the villain, her history. The fact that we’ve seen the money shots in those trailers makes “Ma” play longer than its 100 minute running time.

It’s just that there’s much to recommend it outside of those failings, sharp observations about the trap of small town life and the persona you take on in your teens than you never escape, the casual cruelty of teenagers that can (in the movies, anyway) leave scars that linger forever, the craving for acceptance that once denied, you never outgrow.

Maggie (Silvers)  and her divorced mother (Lewis) move back to mom’s old hometown in Ohio. Mom’s too old to be wearing cocktail waitress fishnets, but here she is, starting over at the casino that popped-up near where she grew up.

Maggie? She’s cute enough to make friends easily.  Haley (McKaley Miller) may be a born mean girl, but she and her crew (Dante Brown, Gianni Paolo, Corey Fogelmanis) invite her in. Parties, cruising around town in cute-guy Andy’s van, drinking binges and bonfires at “The Rockpile,” an abandoned industrial site outside of town, are sure to follow.

If they can only score some booze! It’s just that every customer they approach to make the purchase for them at the local liquor store blows them off. Even the lady in nurse’s scrubs (Spencer). But Sue Ann lets us see the wheels turning, the thinking that moves her from “You want to spend the night in jail?” to “I used to do the SAME thing when I was your age.”

She fills their shopping list, but she also talks them into a “safe” place to party. It’s her basement, but it can be their hangout. Just a few rules. Surrender your car keys, for starters. She wants to ensure no drunk get behind the wheel, she says.

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Don’t spit on my floors,” and above all, “DON’T go upstairs.”

Thus is the bond made between a bunch of tipsy teenagers and the veterinary nurse they call “Ma.” It starts out looking like charity and quickly turns to something darker and more desperate.

Ma is all “Now you know where the PARTY is!” and flirting with Maggie and the guy who has Maggie’s interest, Andy (Fogelmanis), telling them “I don’t drink. You REALLY don’t want to know,” and social media blasting them with the only question that matters, if they’re “all down to clown?”

The signs that Ma isn’t what she seems are everywhere. The audience gets flashbacks, sees Sue Ann swiping phones to grab numbers, social media stalking and skulking around their homes and school.

The kids? They’re subjected to a temper that flashes in view and a practical joke that involves a gun — right at the outset. And still they’re slow to catch on. That’s liquor for you.

The backstory stuff is how actor-turned-director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Scott Landes landed Spencer, her fellow Oscar winner Janney (playing her mean-with-good-reason veterinarian boss), Lewis, and quintessential Mean Girl Grown Up Missi Pyle and Luke Evans as locals who peaked in high school and never moved away.

But all that stuff, the flashbacks, the relationship dynamic that hasn’t changed since the ’80s, explains too much. It gives away the whole game.

Ma’s little mood swings may tease us into thinking “Here we go,” but we don’t. It takes an hour of stripping away mystery and “motivating” everybody for this picture to truly get on its feet.

Better to leave Ma’s tricks and her backstory for the third act? I think so.

Spencer makes “Ma” malevolent and motivated, but there’s little shock value to the character’s plunge into “unhinged.” The adult stories are interesting, if on the nose, trite and true. And that strips screen time from the kids, who are just pawns in the Big Game and are so underdeveloped that rooting for them takes effort.

The finale may fool you into thinking all that came before was necessary, even if you’ve forgotten it as soon as you toss your popcorn box. But the preliminaries slow “Ma” down and soften its blows for far too long to make that final punch the knockout this might have been.

MPAA Rating: R for violent/disturbing material, language throughout, sexual content, and for teen drug and alcohol use

Cast: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, McKaley Miller, Corey Fogelmanis, Juliette Lewis, Missi Pyle, Allison Janney and Luke Evans

Credits: Directed by Tate Taylor, script by Scotty Landes. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:39

It’s all just man/boy sex with peaches to some folks.

https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/114916965.html

She didn’t want to have her picture taken next to the Gateway to India monument like a tourist or pilgrim to Mumbai. But something about his pitch, about how she’d “look back, see the sun on your face” and have a memory she’d never forget worked.

She didn’t mean to stiff him and not pay for it, but that’s just what she did when friends called her away.

It’s just that the photo left him transfixed.

Maybe she’s feeling guilty, as her friends are all stunned at how flattering the shot turned out as well.

And in one of the most crowded cities on Earth, all they’ve got to do it, you know, run into each other again.

That’s the twitter-length set-up of “Photograph,” Ritesh Batra’s colorful but tepid and utterly inconsequential follow-up to the chaste romance of “The Lunchbox.”

Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a dark-skinned provincial, 30ish and still hustling up money to pay off an old family debt back in Balia. Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) is a painfully timid college coed, studying to be a chartered accountant.

Whatever Rafi doesn’t have in his life, sharing a railside attic with four friends, at least he can call himself a photographer, at least he can send money home to buy back the family home for the grandmother (“Dadi”) who raised him.

Miloni? We’re told she was a student actress, but that dream is as unlikely as Malhotra’s interpretation of Miloni. She is meek as a mouse, bending to whatever her family’s will might be, rarely speaking at all and never speaking in anything above a timid monotone.

“Actress?” Far-fetched.

The first act has them meet-but-not-meet, and sets up an amusing community support system of cousins, uncles and anybody who relocated to Mumbai from Balia, ALL of whom know way too much of Rafi’s business.

Specifically, the taxi driver, the street cart kulfi seller, the shop stall owner, the roommates, each and every one repeats his dadi’s demand that he “find a wife.” Dadi, they tell him, has stopped taking her medication, such is her woe at his lack of urgency in providing her with a great-grandchild.

He sends her a terse note to knock that off, as he’s met someone in the city. Noorie, he says, has “eyes full of questions, but also full of answers.” He sends along the unclaimed photograph of Miloni (he doesn’t know her name) as “proof.”

That’s all Dadi (Farrukh Jaffa) needs. Next thing he knows, the pushy old crone is on a train, coming to meet them, withholding her approval until she does.

Other versions of this old “fake fiance” trope are filled with panic and urgency as the liar (Rafi, in this case) must secure the cooperation of the young woman he’s only met once and whose name he doesn’t know set against the ticking clock of Dadi’s impending arrival.

Batra’s solution to this fraught situation is to skip over it, pretty much, finesse it with some cultural quirks that serve as shortcuts. It’s not the first time he cheats us of “the good parts.”

The second is Miloni’s acquiesence. A lovely moment on a bus, a boldly proffered seat next to her, seemingly wholly out of character for the mousie Miloni.

Batra’s film, in English, Gujarati and Hindi with English subtitles, takes some pointed jabs and Indian pigment prejudice. Every friend, cousin or working slob on the street feels he has the license to question why fairskinned, cosmopolitan Miloni is hanging with a “raisin…your face is black as doomsday.”

Miloni is, conversely, “too delicate” for the street-life and street cuisine he can offer her. “Delhi Belly” isn’t confined to New Delhi. “Ice Candy,” basically a snow cone? You’re asking for intestinal issues, dear.

I love Indian cinema that gives us a sense of the ecosystems of the street, Rafi’s world. That’s the best element of “Photograph.”

But I puzzled and puzzled over the connection between the two. All they seem to share is the sad eyes of resignation. The tiny droplets of empathy that pass between them feel almost meaningless, simply not consequential enough to merit her hiding this play-acting she’s doing with the village guy from her family. What is she playing at, here? Is it nostalgia, a longing for the righteous ruralism of Gandhi?

So much is undeveloped or under-developed. Miloni’s guide to this peasant world might have been her family’s village-born servant. Rafi’s ambition is fired by their meetings, and that has potential, too, only to be dispensed with in cryptic, unsatisfying way.

Only the fiery nuisance Dadi pays off as a character, unschooled and untraveled with wise to the ways of her family.

“Why should I be a bone in your kebab?”

It’s unfair to impose Western standards of screen “chemistry” on movie couples on the Subcontinent, but we’ve got to buy in to the relationship, root for the couple to find common group and hunt for the character arc that will let each grow in the direction of the other.

This couple and this “Photograph” remain undeveloped.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material

Cast: Sanya Malhotra, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Farrukh Jaffa, Jim Sarbh

Credits: Written and directed by Ritesh Batra. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:50

Traditionally, and by long-established cultural cliche, it’s cats that “little old ladies” hoard. Or dogs.

But it can be pigs. And in extreme, but seemingly more readily “diagnosed” cases, it can be tigers — large cats kept, by and large by rural, disabled hoarders.

“For the Birds” is about an Upstate New Yorker who developed a passion for living with farm fowl — turkeys, and as the song goes, “chicks and ducks and geese better scurry” when visitors to Kathy Murphy’s trailer and mini-farm in Wawarsing, N.Y.

But “visitors” are plainly rare in Kathy’s world. We may meet her and husband Gary in old home videos in the film’s opening scene, cooing over a lost duckling they’d had to take in. Ten years later, the place is overrun with animals that she’s bought and hatched, adopted or picked up — hundreds of them.

“Found a little duck in the yard one day, and that was all she wrote,” Kathy grins.

She loves her birds, gives each a name and picks up and hugs this duck or that rooster to underscore that affection. But she’s “overwhelmed,” others note. The county has taken notice. Husband Gary Murphy is scheming behind her back to get the birds moved elsewhere — some of them, ANY of them.

Richard Miron’s film doesn’t pretend to psychoanalyze Kathy’s mania for mallards, wood ducks, geese and the rest. She’s caring for them, but not all that expertly. She’s doing better by the fowl than she is for herself. Her teeth are a wreck. She’s estranged from their daughter over this, and Gary’s got to know where Kathy’s priorities are, and resent them.

“He knows that I would chose them over him!”

It is the way of such documentaries that things start out looking cute, quaint, eccentric and sweet, even if we see the words of the police report that underscores the trouble on the horizon.

Reasonable, patient, well-intentioned people from the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary pay a visit and ever-so-gently persuade Kathy to let them take some of the more malnourished or eye-infected ducks and chickens to their big farm. Ulster County leaves this “problem” up to them. For now.

But something in Kathy’s cooperative, sympathetic yet increasingly manic manner tells us this is the easiest it’s going to be, relocating some 150 fowl from a place that might more comfortably hold a dozen.

Miron’s film sets up our characters, Kathy with her “Who cares?” what other people think attitude, Gary with his indulgent, “indifferent” and remote attitude towards the whole thing, a guy whose fondest “wish is that they was a little…bit further away.”

Her “hobby,” the reason she gets up in the morning, “It’s interesting, to say the least.”

We meet Scottish Sheila from the Sanctuary, and Elana and other volunteers, delicately negotiating the release of two turkeys, finding Kathy increasingly difficult to deal with, calling Gary inside the trailer (by phone) begging for him to intervene.

She gets angrier and angier, Gary turns more and more remote — “You think you’re going to grow old with someone…” and then a heavy handed SPCA coordinator with the county shows up, barks “I own this property right now. OFF the property!” and the film crew are chased off, a folksy but tactless “old country lawyer” named Bill brags about how she “takes better care of those chickens than Col. Sanders, or Tyson” and a boy prosecutor who hasn’t shaved yet face off in court.

The closest this charming films gets to “revelatory” is when the lawyers bicker over the label “hoarder.” Is there not one person who can point to what’s really going on here? Kathy seems reasonable enough, sane enough. Is this, pardon the pun, a dark turn in an “empty nest” syndrome situation?

Of course, there are no pat answers in a single-case/single person profile film like this. Films I’ve reviewed about Big Cat collecting visit scores of people, almost all on disability, filling some “control” and “strength and power” hole in their lives by keeping tigers and lions.

Maybe it’s as Kathy says, she just fell in love with them and had to have lots and lots of each species. But as “For the Birds” unfolds its increasingly bittersweet story and we see the problem and the destructive nature of the solution to it, one can’t help but wish there’d been a tad more attention paid to “What’s going through the bird lady’s head?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Kathy Murphy, Gary Murphy

Credits: Directed by Richard Miron. A Dogwoof release.

Running time: 1:32

An overnight shift in professions, outmoded or newly in demand, the power of agents and the simple metrics of what constitutes cinematic success is about to roil Hollywood, on top of the changes already on progress.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/05/hollywood-changing-fast-can-film-industry-lifers-change-too-1202145060/

Like most early but not “earliest” adapters — I found Jackie Chan’s action comedies at the insistence of friends into Asian cinema.

A top tier stunt man, martial artist and Keaton-esque clown, it took a while, a few tries and then some, for him to break out in the West. But once he did, Asia’s biggest action star became the world’s darling, an impish dynamo who wore his working class roots with pride, and never palmed off a stunt on others he wasn’t gutsy enough to do himself.

The outtakes at the end of every Jackie Chan movie showed just how often those stunts could go wrong.

He lists the major injuries he’s suffered to every part of his body in “Never Grow Up,” his second autobiography (the first was “My Life in Action.). From his back to his neck, cheekbones to teeth and all points in between, Jackie Chan has broken, wrenched, concussed and dislocated them all.

The new book is an “as told to” autobiography, built around his decades of anecdotes, the mealtime/drinks-after-work conversations he has with his large entourage and overheard by his longtime publicist, Zhu Mo.

So “Never Grow Up” isn’t a researched and verified biography, but more a “How I remembered it/What I learned in life” recounting of his upbringing, his harsh martial arts schooling, rough and tumble crawl to stardom and how he used and misused that stardom over the decades.

The former Chan Kong-Sang is 65 now, sanguine about his shortcomings and forthcoming in ways aimed at a “Learn from my mistakes, kids” narrative.

I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, and always found him to be a star seeking to come off humble, but prone to bragging (with cause), relentlessly cheerful but not shy about the hard life and hard falls he took to get where he is.

Not bitter, but still a guy with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, which he freely admits in this new autobiography.

“Never Grow Up” has him questioning, again, his lack of enthusiasm for elementary school, which landed him in a martial arts/acting-tumbling China Drama Academy for ten years.

He was functionally illiterate for much of his life, and even now says he freezes up at autograph sessions in China (tougher write than English).

He was scared to death at many of the stunts he and his team cooked up for him, and once he had control of his screen projects, would put off dangerous falls and the like for days and days, working up the nerve.

He’s always loved gambling and drink, and wasn’t always the nicest guy to date, and owns up to it all freely, though one suspects he’s protesting a bit too much here.

He mistrusted his Taiwanese movie starlet wife, the mother of his son. But he was the one caught cheating.

He spent money freely, and confesses to being petty and greedy and acquisitive in the extreme for much of his life — holding grudges against shops that wouldn’t serve him when he was poor, lavishing presents on friends, family and colleagues, building schools in China with his charity foundation.

There’s a bit of star worship in reverse here and there — Stallone confessing “Whenever we run out of (action beat) ideas, we watch one of your movies,” reciting, at length, his honorary Oscar presentation (Tom Hanks honored him that afternoon).

He doesn’t name names much — avoids insulting those who treated him badly in his early years, when Hong Kong was hellbent on making this smiling joker “The New Bruce Lee.” He skims past his biggest global hits, so no fun or digging Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson anecdotes.
He befriended Stallone, visited Cameron and Spielberg on the sets of their blockbusters, but continued to do his work with lesser lights, cashing the checks as he did.

There are blurbs on the back of “Never Grow Up” with those directors and producers, and those co-stars singing his praises.

That’s where Zhu Mo’s book of “listening” to Jackie Chan shows us how it falls short. Too much of a tough life is handled with kid gloves, there’s too little about working out the stunts, etc., taking a shot at working with very young John Woo EARLY on (some of it covered in “My Life in Action”).

There are too few confirming or contradictory voices laying out the “real” Jackie Chan — insecure, driven, brave and canny (Chinese filmmakers always have to worry about how their words will play back home, and with the overlords in charge).

At least he doesn’t trot out his weariest anecdotes — the one about how he was supposed to be filming, hanging off the side of the World Trade Center as a window washer on 9/11, etc.

“Never Grow Up” (Simon & Schuster, $26) is thus a pretty good book, but more a stepping stone for a better book which somebody not quite in awe of their subject will be the one to write.

An all star cast featuring The Best of Britain (men, anyway) — Cumberbatch, Firth and Mark Strong are among those on board for this Spielberg production directed by Bond very Sam Mendes.

Bit late to be getting in on all the Great War hooplah, but we are intrigued.

https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/filming-begin-spielberg-blockbuster-being-16337531