Movie Nation

To be fair, the #epicfails of romance dramedy “Hopeless Romantic” doesn’t feel written and directed by committee. Half a dozen directors and eight credited screenwriters don’t mean it plays “choppy” and uneven, like many an “anthology” film before it. There’s a consistent pace, vibe and tone pretty much throughout.

If it doesn’t work, it’s because the episodes intended to be funny only occasionally are, and the “edgy” scenes cross over into off-putting.

Lynda Boyd of Netflix’s “Virgin River” stars in this make-work project for every Canadian actress under the sun. She plays Anna, recently-widowed and attending a friend’s wedding.

She’s a cardiologist, able to define “broken heart syndrome” as a cardiac illness that sometimes accompanies the stress of a romantic loss. Yes, that’s a MUCH better title for the film as “Hopeless Romantic” has been used many times before.

Anna is fretting over the wedding reception speech she’s slated to give, and as she frets, she encounters, stumbles into and meets women who — with a little prompting –relate tales of heartbreak, “ghosting,” death, actionably inappropriate student/”teacher” canoodling and barely-avoided not-quite-a-date date rape.

There are seven such meetings/flashbacks, including Anna’s own.

The funniest is the comically-unhappy encounter a “cougar” (Amy Groening of “Goon”) has with the mother and sister of a punk boy toy she’s been hooking up with. Mom went to school with her and bullied her. And she’s still at it, as “Simmy” searches the 24 year-old’s apartment for pills she lost there. Her paramour’s jerk teen sister videos the entire humiliating affair, which doesn’t really end with an out-the-window escape.

Groening is the stand-out performer here.

Joy (Kirstin Howell) flashes back to her first boy-encounter, a semi-funny/tweens-misunderstand sex talk tale of the boy who threw rocks at her to get her attention when she was 11. She never solved the mysteries of attraction and romance, but not because of an avoided “birds and bees” talk with her rattled dad.

The only other lighthearted end-of-love memory has a tipsy ER doc (Susan Kent) relating stumbling into an “adult beginners” swim class that features another woman who assures her it’s a “great place to meet guys.” Ms. On the Prowl promptly sets her eyes on a ringless man of appropriate age, who happens to be the doctor’s just-divorced ex.

A couple of chuckles ensue.

Other stories, of a young woman struggling with the humiliations of dating in an age of “ghosting,” a young waitress recalling her first same-sex crush, that near date-rape thing, etc. are sadder, more flatly-played and intriguing only in how problematic some of them are.

The best connection to “anthology” as a genre is the film’s don’t-quite-work sequences weighing down the ones that do, or come close to a decent payoff.

“Mixed bag” comes with the “anthology film” territory.

MPA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, sexual situations, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Lynda Boyd, Kirstin Howell, Francine Deschepper, Amy Groening, Katie Dorian, Susan Kent, Emily Power

Credits: Directed by Martine Blue, Deanne Foley, Latonia Hartery, Stephanie Joline, Ruth Lawrence and Megan Wennberg. Script by Martine Blue, Emily Bridger, Jay Dahl, Deanne Foley, Stephanie Joline, Ruth Lawrence, Iain Macleod and Megan Wennberg. A Game Theory release.

Running time: 1:26

An ancient treasure, an old old Spanish bank vault…say no more!

We meet them all at a tearful Italian dockside farewell.

A family is disembarking for France, looking for better opportunities than their tiny coastal village can provide them. Mamma is crying, but little Lucia is inconsolable. Mother and father area leaving, and taking her kid brother with them.

Tweenage Lucia (Marta Castiglia) insists, “I’m all grown UP now! I can work, too!”

But no, she’s not old enough to work and she’d be another mouth to feed. She must stay here, in her quaint, aging-and-dying village, a place younger people leave because there’s no work.

Mom may promise to be home by Christmas, that she’ll call and write, but Lucia knows she’ll be on her own, “Alone With Her Dreams.”

The debut feature of Paolo Licata is an adaptation of the novel “Picciridda – Con i piedi nella sabbia” by Catena Fiorello, a coming-of-age tale with some bite, a picturesque period piece that finds the ugliness whitewashed over in any small town and not just an Italian fishing village.

Lucia will learn this through her stern, scowling grandmother, called “Donna Maria” (Lucia Sardo) by her neighbors. It’s a label of “respect,” she tells her granddaughter. But the kid understands Granny’s other nickname without explanation — “The General.”

Grandma is bossy, short-tempered and quick with a slap or to whip out a spoon for a quick serving of corporal punishment.

Lucia has to content herself playing with her favorite chicken all through the sunbaked summer. In fall, school starts and the attentions of a new friend (Nicoletta Cifariello), who adores her and lets the viewer know that someday she’ll graduate from kissing pictures of her favorite actresses and divas on the covers of magazines to kissing real live girls.

But that’s of no concern to Lucia, who is just old enough to start picking up on a family feud. Here in this village, where everyone knows everyone else, and their history, there are still secrets. And a big one is why The General isn’t on speaking terms with her sister Pina (Ileana Rigano) or Pina’s vivacious daughter Rosamaria (Katia Greco).

Stumbling on Rosamaria having a go with a local married man in a coastal cave isn’t the “secret,” shameful and dangerous though that might be. What is it?

Director and co-adaptor Licata vividly recreates a time and a place. The lack of cars in this village suggests it might be a coastal island, and the kids are all free range in a seemingly idyllic, if dying, piece of Old Italia.

It is the closeness of death of many of the inhabitants that first tips us that The General might not be the villain she seems. “No one dresses the dead like Donna Maria,” her granddaughter is told (in Italian with English subtitles). She comes whenever called to prepare the dead for their funerals.

Her threats to Lucia about associating with Pina’s family suggest she’ll “cut your hand” if she catches them hanging out. So naturally, that’s what the kid does. Pina dotes on her and Rosamaria takes her in as a co-conspirator in the torrid affair she’s having with the icecream vendor.

But as stern as The General is about chores, coming home after school, reading her parents’ letters aloud (the old woman is illiterate) and staying away from Pina, she knows “there is no life here.” She knows that when her family comes for her, Lucia should leave and never come back.

The performances here have a consistent brittle tenderness, adults and children playing a sort of getting-on-with-a-limited-life resignation that doesn’t allow much pleasure into it.

The film’s third act surprises pack a punch, and make a touchy change in tone in a movie that is never quite “Cinema Paradiso” sunny. It tells a story that reaches a climax, finds another and drifts on a bit after that second one.

It’s still a mesmerizing visit to Italy as it was, natural beauty and quaint “character” hiding the same harsh truths and ugly realities that any place else has.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Marta Castiglia, Lucia Sardo, Katia Greco, Ileana Rigano, Nicoletta Cifariello

Credits: Directed by Paolo Licata, script by Paolo Licata, Ugo Chiti and Catena Fiorello, based on the novel by Catena Fiorello. A Corinth Films release on Film Movement Plus.

Running time: 1:39

When all this “Free Britney” hysteria started, and every time it’s kicked up since, I’ve shaken my head at the conundrum her unique situation seems to present.

Is Britney Spears still with us because of the draconian conservatorship her family imposed on her in the middle of her head-shaving, lashing-out hospitalizations of 2007-8? Maybe you’re like me and you’ve thought the same thing.

“Framing Britney Spears,” a “New York Times Presents” doc on FX/Hulu, should make us all question what we’ve heard, what we think we “know” in what could be an altogether different read on her plight — monitored and “controlled” by her father, Jamie Spears, her “$60 million (and counting) estate” under his “supervision.”

Yes, she seemed to pull herself together, but was she ever “falling apart?”

Yes, she’s turned around her image and her career with a dazzling and lucrative “comeback,” as a performer and as a person in the public eye. Would she have managed that without restraints placed on her actions, purchases and social life?

Samatha Stark’s “Framing,” which had no direct access to any member of the Spears family — Britney, her father Jamie, mother and semi-“silent” partner Lynne, or siblings — is in many ways yet more speculation of about the same order as the attention that the film suggests misused, abused and drove her to distraction a dozen years ago.

Record label folks, a personal assistant, lawyers, a backup dancer and assorted New York Times reporters on the Britney beat (none have interviewed her) can surmise, question and throw thoughts against the wall.

But like the bloggers, protesters and ardent fans, they and we DON’T KNOW.

Like reality TV, Stark’s film serves up villains, this time with a touch of New York condescension. Spears’ father comes off as a greedy, drawling ne’er do well, aimless and country and with his eyes on the prize early on. Her mother, glimpsed rarely even in archival interviews, seems passive and negligent.

The one sibling, “film producer” Bryan Spears, who spoke on a podcast about his sister’s situation, intimates that there’s some sort of ugly patriarchy ruling over her life even as he suggests they saved her life a dozen years ago and that she’s a lot more “free” than the “Free Britney” protesters seem to think.

The film doesn’t lay a glove on ex-husband Kevin Federline, a pretty serious omission. And it doesn’t bring up Britney’s whirlwind of other engagements, messy and impulsive relationships that led right up to the conservatorship.

Justin Timberlake, who rode a high-profile relationship with Spears to solo stardom post-“Mickey Mouse Club” and N’Sync, takes a big hit, too. But a single piggish radio interview isn’t necessarily a fair characterization, any more than a paparazzi-induced meltdown right before the conservatorship was of Britney.

The through-line of the film is the sexism and cruel nature of the attention Spears was subjected to, almost from the start — a “Mickey Mouse” club alumnus whose sexy breakout hit with its game-changing music video upsetting “parents” and conservatives and male interviewers and that Damned Diane Sawyer, too.

Another repeated message is that she’s not a dunce who needed puppetmasters to make her famous and maintain her fame. Leaving small town Louisiana for New York auditions, TV fame and then recording superstardom, she “grew up fast” as we say. She is lucid and sober, if somewhat taken aback or brought to tears in some of the interviews (Sawyer and Matt Lauer are rightly being re-crucified for their treatment of her, but many others were even worse.).

The “sexy vamp in underwear” image she was saddled with played into the later rush to judgement that she was a careless mother, driving with a baby in her lap photos making that case against her, the film suggests.

Being hounded by a seriously predatory celebrity press (only one paparazzo speaks here, and a magazine photo editor) and photo corps almost certainly contributed to incidents like that. “Instigated” and “provoked” the incidents might be more like it. “Framing” lets them off easy. If Paris Hilton (a celeb pal) is here, where is Perez Hilton, a major online tormenter of Spears at her lowest moments?

Her onetime-chaperone turned “business assistant” on tour, Felicia Culotta, opines that Spears is “capable of so much” more than she’s allowed to control now, and was seriously in charge of her image and career earlier on. But mainly Culotta is here “to remind people of why they fell in love with her in the first place.”

That’s the part of the film I could relate to. As Jive Records exec Kim Kaiman dissects her star’s “approachable” image and the way even a seemingly exploitive music video showed her in command of herself, her space, her flawless choreography and her choices, I remembered an early Sept. 1998 pitch from a Jive Records publicist.

I was angling for an N’Sync interview, and he said “Oh, we’ve got this girl opening for them (on their about-to-begin tour), let me Fed Ex this video to you. She is going to be SOMEthing.”

Dude was, if anything, understating the case. And as reluctant as I have always been to talk to REALLY young “talents” (she was 16), I caught up with her a couple of days after the video arrived.

As “Framing” rightly points out (culture critic Wesley Morris makes the case), that Oct. 1998 video release was a paradigm-shifting event in American pop culture.

All the girl powered pop of the past 20 years owes a least a little something to Britney and “Baby One More Time.”

Back then and in a couple of chats I had with her over the next few years, she came off as sweet, a little unsophisticated and girlish. A kid. Her one-admitted guilty pleasure was binge-watching “Friends” at home or on the road.

She understood and took ownership of songs written for her and had a pretty big hand in that whole schoolgirl uniform “Hit Me Baby” video vibe, and in every image-makeover that followed. “Sexy” wasn’t imposed on her.

“Normal” and “very young” was her offstage persona. But yes, you could tell she’d never been to college.

Later interviews, sampled in “Framing,” show a quickly-maturing and sophisticated, if vulnerable and living-under-glass, self-aware star who was starting to see the walls of her life closing in around her.

As Kaiman and others say in “Framing Britney,” younger girls went mad for her not necessarily for the sexy school girl image, but for the teen who was front and center and in charge, the relatable cool kid who could recruit her own dance corps to fall in line behind her, copying her moves and her fashion-forward treatment of the required-dress in that fictional school.

“Framing” may show a press conference where the stupidly rude land mine “Are you a virgin?” question was asked, which became an early misstep in terms of her image and reputation. But it doesn’t show how the media turned that into a “brand” that everyone rolled their eyes at, and it doesn’t ID the pig who asked it. She was a kid and it was an awful question.

Lacking interviews with the principals, we don’t get anything about possible drug use — allegations that she was drugged by one would-be Svengali, Sam Lutfi, yes. If she ever flunked a drug test, that’s germane.

She’s probably not sending “secret messages” in her Instagram posts. But she’s definitely showing a growing defiance about her situation and getting her message out, even if the California court system is unfairly keeping her from hiring her own lawyer in the fight over her life and her interests.

I don’t know if “Framing” solves anything, or if we actually get closer to her than any of the decades of superficial print and video profiles and interviews did. I appeared on a VH-1 “Behind the Music” on N’Sync and when asked about her personal life, her JT history, I had to shrug them off. Those parts of a celebrity life are unknowable, something I think that Stark’s film reinforces.

The best endorsement for “Framing Britney Spears” might be the fact that it opens the floor for questioning, forcing the public to reconsider her and the courts to look at her situation through the eyes of other known abuses of involuntary hospitalizations and conservatorships the way her fans and the general public have. It’s not just Lifetime Original Movie villains who manipulate that system.

If there’s a lot of money involved and a chance for ill-use and exploitation, that’s reason enough to suspect it. Maybe it’s time Britney got the benefit of the doubt, instead of giving that to literally every other lawyer, parent or gold-digging ex-husband in her orbit.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, substance abuse, some profanity

Cast: Britney Spears, Felicia Culotta, Nancy Carson, Paris Hilton, Kim Kaiman, Daniel RAmos, Wesley Morris, Vivian Lee Thoreen, Diane Sawyer, Matt Lauer

Credits: Directed by Samantha Stark. On FX and Hulu

Running time: 1:14

Here’s my review of one of the best films of 2020, a sure Oscar contender.

And here’s the new trailer. Feb. 19, see the film for yourself.

This looks creepy as all get out, in a “Rosemary’s Baby” way. “Son” opens March 5.

They don’t speak each other’s language, so communication is a tad catch-as-catch-can.

He’s given to explaining his country to her — poverty and waste, open-hearted generosity and theft with “That’s the way it is in India…That’s how people are in India.”

She’s testy, greedy, suspicious and self-centered.

“Family is very big here,” he preaches.

“Family is stupid” is all she’ll say to that.

And she is impatient, fuming at his every stop for “street food” (which she avoids), or to help stranded bikers and bicyclists with his handy on-bike tool kit.

Full disclosure here, I was pretty damned impatient myself with this Indian road picture/romance. It takes what seems like forever for “Kilometers and Kilometers” to get on the road and underway. And even underway, it’s rarely more than sentimental, with little dollops of charm sprinkled in.

But this film by the whimsically-named Jeo Baby (“The Little God”) almost gets by on warmth, cute supporting characters, scenery and banter — much of it muttered in Malayam by the teeth-gritting tour guide Josemon (Tovino Thomas) as he drives this lotto-winning American Cathy (India Jarvis) to the temples, caves, markets, statues and ruins of Kerala, his corner of India.

Josemon is commissioned to do this by a relative who runs Appacham’s Holidays Hotel. The idea, cooked up by his brothers (Well, that’s how they address each other.) is that he’ll charge and charge this young woman with the bottomless bank account so that he can pay off debts, cover his sister’s college and the like.

But that’s not his style. Neither is putting up with some tourist’s leeriness of Indian street food — she’d rather not go to the hospital with Kerala’s version of “Dehli Belly” — who gripes at every way he “wastes” her time, and who won’t even lend him her extra sunglasses when he’s getting dust in his eyes from driving kilometers and kilometers over roads and backroads.

A robbery alters the dynamic, the balance of power, and at least lets Josemon turn his endless muttering into a “You fool stupid woman” tirade. Good thing she doesn’t speak Malayam. And boy is she lucky that their unscheduled stop didn’t cost him the motorcycle he inherited from his late father. “Bullet” is his great love.

Their story unfolds at a dawdling pace, and there’s rarely a scene in it that doesn’t go on past its dramatic or comic payoff. Thomas provides most of the story’s spark (a supporting player or two registers as well) and all of the not-quite-there chemistry with his co-star.

All that said, it’s not without its engaging characters and the occasional winning plot thread. Josemon has spent the movie explaining India’s begging to Cathy, and when they lose their cash and phones, Thomas lets us see how quickly Josemon can put on a pitiful face that strangers immediately want to help.

We see touches of grief, some sad and Third World hospital-based, others silly.

And we see the American come to understand what Josemon, with every stop to mend a stranger’s punctured tire, explains as India runs on “relationships,” not money.

Not bad messaging in this pretty, slow-footed and obvious romance. It’d all come off better in a film with the opening half-hour whacked off and the rest subjected to a vigorous edit as well.

MPA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Tovino Thomas and India Jarvis

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeo Baby. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

Mia Goth, Grace Van Patten, Juliette Lewis, Soko and Havana Rose Liu star in this story of armed girl gangs at war.

Will it make it to a theater near you or a streaming service at your convenience?

Mayhaps.

Looks cute and grown up. A March 5 release.