Movie Nation

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.

Well played, Vista del Marvians.

“Little Fish” is a love in an age of pandemic tale, a melancholy romance about the struggle to hang on when a cornerstone of enduring love is removed — memory.

It’s a sad showcase for Olivia Cooke (“Sound of Metal,” “Ready Player One”) playing a newly married big city veterinarian struggling to go on as all around her are losing their memory to a new illness labeled NIA. As she struggles with the alarm that spreads faster than the contagion, with every tiny lapse of memory, “brain fart” to “senior moment” could be a harbinger of doom, she narrates the single line that sums up the story’s heartbreaking dilemma.

“How can you build a future when you have to keep rebuilding the past?”

“Martin Bonner” and “Morris from America” director Chad Hartigan is dabbling in the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” realm with this depressingly-timely film, a movie that struggles to be as romantic as it needs to be for its dread of loss to work, and a film that rarely finds a light moment, even in mid-swoon.

British Emma meets dog-lover Jude (Brit Jack O’Connell, with an American accent here) on the overcast, wintry beach outside of Vancouver.

“I was so sad the day I met you,” remembers, more than once in their story. But after meeting him, “I can’t remember why.”

That’s as pithy a summation of falling in love as the movies have given us in ages.

In the fictive present, NIA (Neuroinflammatory Affliction) is running rampant. People are forgetting close friends and family, fishermen forgetting to stay in their boats, pilots are forgetting to fly, mid-flight.

And in flashbacks, “Notebook” style, Emma and Jude remember their whirlwind first meeting.

“Can I kiss you?”

“Not. Available.”

They share a love of dogs, as Emma is a vet tech finishing up school to become a veterinarian when they meet. By the time NIA hits, Emma is established in her career and people are forgetting they have pets. A daily animal control drop-off at her clinic has her admitting, “I’m not even a vet anymore. I’m just an executioner.”

A warning — the saddest moments in the film concern her arm’s length compassion dealing with this very depressing collateral damage from the pandemic.

We see Jude start to screw up at work (he’s a photographer, weddings mostly) and hear his history, see the ways they test each other’s memories, and get a glimmer of hope that spreads like wildfire — “clinical trials.”

Can this romance be saved?

Cooke and O’Connell give their screen relationship a tenderness that is charming, even if attempts at capturing the “fun” feel strained and out of place.

If there’s a shortcoming everyone who sees “Little Fish” picks up on, it has to be its nearly relentless downbeat nature. Based on a short story by Aja Gabel, it traverses the romantic territory between “wistful” and “grieving,” with a few gentle punches and a couple of shots straight to the gut.

Former child actress Cooke is emerging as a formidable romantic lead, and O’Connell’s (“Unbroken,””Seberg”) a solid dramatic presence. We believe them as a couple and root for them. But mourning for what they might be losing is tempered by the film’s lack of sunny romantic highs.

The film’s accidental timing, arriving mid-COVID, don’t allow it to be a sad, sci-fi romantic escape. The masks, clinics, injections and consequences are entirely too current for that to work. And heaven knows, reminding us there are animal companions who pay the price for a vast social disruption is a bummer that will trigger many.

But the Big Truths about love and memory make “Little Fish” worthwhile, almost profound at times. It’s worth a little heartbreak just to experience that.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult themes and situations, smoking

Cast: Olivia Cooke, Jack O’Connell, Soko and Raúl Castillo

Credits: Directed by Chad Hartigan, script by Mattson Tomlin based on an Aja Gabel short story. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:41

Perhaps there’s something the Poles can teach us all about unfiltered, unfettered youth sex horror comedies. Or at least the Slovenian who wrote and directed “All My Friends Are Dead” could pass on his thoughts.

This is a standard-issue Hollywood “dead teenagers” movie grafted onto the teen party run amok comedy. It is Polish and positively drenched in bad messaging, enthusiastic sex, drugs, drink and bodily fluids.

It’s not offensive, just not for the easily offended. I can’t say I found it particularly funny, but there are amusing bits. And listing the raunchy teen comedy tropes — from “American Pie” and its ilk — could be a fun watching party game if you get bored.

Two cops walk through a crime scene, a New Year’s house party littered with corpses.

A girl in a neck brace is hauled out on a gurney muttering “end of the WORLD” and “All my friends are dead!” (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed).

Jaded Inspector Kwasniewski (Adam Woronowicz) looks at the shooting victims, stabbing victims, the guy hanging and the bodies piled all over the living room and sighs.

Newby cop Grzegorz Dabrowski (Michal Meyer) vomits.

They take a moment to ponder what they’re looking at, barely hazarding a thought as to what happened here or there or in the laundry room or the study. And then a flashback shows us the bloody baccanale that led to this body count.

The party has so many commonalities with movies like “Can’t Hardly Wait” that ticking them off should be a drinking game. Not that I’m suggesting that.

There’s a young couple so smitten the guy is sure to propose any minute now, with his pretty lady friend maybe not quite there yet.

Pawal (Nikodem Rozbicki) shows up with a self-identified MILF (Monika Krzywkowska).

Thirtyish Dariusz (Wojciech Lozowski) is trying to shed himself of clingy, hysterical and teenaged Pinky (Barbara Garstka).

Wild child Oliwia (Aleksandra Pisula) is also too old to be here. But hey.

Marek (Kamil Piotrowski) is the host, the dude whose parents are out of town, not trying that hard to keep the peace, and quick to taunt and then stiff the hapless pizza guy (Adam Bobik).

There are people pairing up and sneaking off to rooms hither and yon for hook-ups, threesomes, bondage etc. “demonstrations,” quasi-orgies and cocaine and vodka and mushrooms and betrayals. There’s more than one crisis of faith, but only one stoned, orgied-out boy sees visions of Jesus.

We can see that a handful of characters have genuine motive to act out, maybe even violently, because of the way the evening is going down.

And then sure enough, a gun appears and jerk Marek is the first to die.

“All My Friends are Dead” (“Wszyscy moi przyjaciele nie zyja” in Polish) stumbles out of the gate, finds occasional bursts of energy and manic moments of grossness — urophilia and the ends one character will go to in order to prove that the fresh red puddle on the floor isn’t blood, but ketchup.

Clever cross-cutting of the dancing/karaoke with the sexing, set to ’80s Western pop like “Gloria,” is funny.

But most of the deaths aren’t. And after a couple, there’s a rush to wrap all this carnage up in an epic finale that isn’t quite “final.”

This isn’t the worst debut feature I’ve seen this week, so writer-director Jan Belcl, better luck with “Wszyscy moi przyjaciele nie zyja II.”

MPAA Rating-TV-MA, graphic violence, explicit sex, drug abuse

Cast: Michal Meyer, Adam Woronowicz, Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz, Adam Turczyk, Monika Krzywkowska, Aleksandra Pisula and Kamil Piotrowski.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jan Belcl. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36