Movie Nation

Back in vaudeville and the silent cinema, they called them “gags.” It’s the problem solving process, usually in comedies, that gets a character into or out of trouble or the next situation.

Such as “How do you get a character, paralyzed in a wheelchair, out of a locked bedroom in the second story of a remote farmhouse?”

That’s one of the clever bits of problem solving in “Run,” scripted and directed by the team that made “Searching.” This is a simple, myopic thriller with suspense, a few neat twists and superb “gag” writing by director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian.

Sarah Paulson plays a single mom who isn’t shy about letting her support group know that she’s given up “dating, travel” and everything else for her daughter. We saw the birth. We get it. Chloe was a preemie, and paralysis, diabetes, asthma and other conditions are what put her in a wheelchair — for life.

Still, “She is the most capable person I know,” Diane declares.

Pill regimen, insulin tests, inhalers, home schooling and doting care characterized Chloe’s childhood. But Chloe (Kiera Allen) is 17, smart and getting a little annoyed at the things she’s going without — friends, a social live, school and a smart phone, for starters.

She’s eagerly awaiting a college acceptance letter. And then comes to the fateful day she digs into Mom’s Kroger bag, hunting for candy. There’s a pill bottle there. And the prescription is in her mother’s name.

That triggers a manic curiosity and a cat-and-mouse game pitting the resourceful, suspicious teen with limitations, and a canny and paranoid mother whose motives Chloe comes to question and eventually fear.

Allen, making her screen debut, gives us flashes of shock, joy, fury and despair as Chloe improvises, plots and DIYs her way to answers she’s too young to fear the way she ought.

And Paulson underplays the Motivated Mom from Hell thing so well that when lines are crossed and the “game” is out in the open, we still don’t know what to expect from her.

“You need not understand this now. But I’m doing what I think is right for you.”

The wit is in the script’s collisions between Chloe’s native cunning and real world obstacles that would foil anybody. Need to find out what a prescription is in a small town after your wifi mysteriously goes out? When the pharmacist’s instincts, even the 411 service provided by your landline company, will give you away?

The funny bits are the way both mother and child play the “I’m paralyzed, feel sorry for me (her)” card.

But the thing that sets “Run” apart, even from other movies that cover similar ground — from TV’s “Sharp Objects” to “Everything, Everything” and “The Night Listener” — is the top drawer gag writing, putting a problem before Chloe, and letting her and the viewer reason, wrangle and “science” her way out of a jam.

Well done.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, some violence/terror and language

Cast: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen

Credits: Directed by script by Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian A Lionsgate film, a Hulu release.

Running time: 1:30

Not buying it? Well, it is LGBQ and Aubrey Plaza is also in it. And it’s on Hulu.

A John Patrick Shanley script, with Jon Hamm as well. Faith and begorrah!

Vince Vaughn runs like a teenage girl. News flash, right?

In the body switch horror comedy “Freaky,” he puts that rarely-seen talent (check out the touch football game in “Wedding Crashers”) to good use as a serial killer who switches bodies with a mousey high school girl.

When “The Blissfield Butcher” becomes meek high school mascot Millie (Kathryn Newton of “Blockers” and “Big Little Lies”), “she” becomes ravenously ruthless and murderous.

And he screams in fright, realizes “Standing and peeing is kinda rad” and scampers hither and yon with his-her hands in the air like a girl who who’s scared.

It’s “Freaky Friday” with a “Scream” twist. Throw a bunch of teen “types” in the path of a pathological killer, with each death meant to generate a laugh– whacked in a wine cellar, chopped in shop class, crushed by a commode.

Millie’s two BFFs, Nila (Celeste O’Connor) and Joshua (Misha Osherovich) get it.

“You’re Black, I’m gay. We are sooooooo dead!”

Millie, stuck in her Blissfield Valley Beavers’ mascot costume, waiting for her widowed wino mom (Katie Finnernan) to pick her up after the Homecoming game, sees the stadium lights go out and a hulking dude straight out of local urban legend marches toward her.

“Please don’t be The Butcher! Please don’t be The Butcher!”

It’s no use. But the murderer, who has slaughtered his way through a couple of Homecoming’s over the years, stole this collectible Mayan dagger. When he stabs her, their bodies switch.

She is he and he is she. If only they can remember that.

“PRONOUNS!” Joshua the gay kid is here to keep that “straight.”

Over the course of a long night, Millie needs to convince her friends she’s in “his” body, track down The Butcher, dodge her sister the cop and reverse the body-switch with the magic knife — that’s now police evidence in an attempted murder.

The bullied, sexless girl is transformed into an assertive bombshell, and the tall, middle-aged brute finds a sensitive side.

A couple of one-liners land in the first act, but the movie doesn’t start until Butcher/Vaughn starts running like a girl.

And truthfully, while he makes the whole “I’m really your meek, sweet friend Millie” thing funny, not much else plays that way.

A cruel shop teacher (Alan Ruck of “Ferris Bueller” cast against type), assorted jocks, bullies and a mean girl — who will face Millie’s revenge?

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.

Terror? Suspense? They don’t figure here, even with a “Butcher” on the loose.

What Landon and “Freaky” have is Vince Vaughn running and shrieking like a girl, and making eyes at the boy Millie crushes on. That’s not quite enough to make this movie’s “Freaky” flag fly.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence, sexual content, and language throughout

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Celeste O’Connor, Misha Osherovich, and Alan Ruck

Credits: Directed by Christopher Landon, script by Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:41

A mid-December sci-fi release pairing the longtime R-rated action stars.

“Journey to New Earth,” and “I hope it’s the paradise they said it would be.”

Maybe not. The journey there is “Alien” with vampire/zombies. Or something like that.

Thomas Jane in shades.

A George Soros documentary biography from the guy who directed “How High” and “Kicking and Screaming?”

It could work. “Soros” streams beginning Nov. 18.

Just defining who and what Frank Zappa was, just categorizing the music he performed, is daunting enough. Try summing up his life and career in a mere documentary.

Autodidact and polymath, iconoclast, satirist and gadfly, composer of comic ditties, fusion mashups and pieces for full if somewhat oddly-adorned orchestras in “rhythmic polymetric notation,” Zappa cut a huge swath through music, culture and the “culture wars” before he died of prostate cancer in 1993.

Alex Winter’s “Zappa” is perhaps the most thorough Zappa screen biography to come along, and that’s acknowledging how hopeless the job of making The Compleat Zappa bio-doc is. And even this two hours+ film is missing memories from Zappa’s famous (and apparently feuding) children. There’s no mention of his first band, and that famous appearance, as a kid, on a Steve Allen show “playing” a bicycle is left out.

Winter — best-known for being the first half of “Bill & Ted,” but director of terrific non-fiction films on crypto-currency and “The Panama Papers” — frames “Zappa” within Frank’s late life triumphs.

Zappa was so celebrated in Czechoslovakia that after “The Velvet Revolution,” he was brought in and feted, mobbed everywhere he went when he performed there in 1991. The reasons for that are surprising, and explained here.

And his late-life orchestral concerts in Frankfort, Germany with Ensemble Modern are sampled to close the film.

But one thing “Zappa” gets across most clearly is that his shows were never mere “concerts.” Modernist, jazzy and surreal “comedy rock,” they were multi-media events — often with choreography — “happenings” as they could be called in the ’60s, but spectacles to the very end.

An old interview shows Zappa taking a film crew through his vast personal archives, album and concert master recordings. He kept home tapes of jams with friends from Don Glen (Van) Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, Eric Clapton and others, his films and films he did soundtracks for such as stop-motion clay animations by filmmaker and fan Bruce Bickford — the works. Winter had access to mountains of material, hour after hour of Zappa interviews on TV and radio, a famous 1970s TV special that never aired.

“Go ahead and bleep it,” Zappa jokes to one New York chat show host who feigns shock at the unfiltered Frank’s 1970s provocations. Conservatives debating him over censoring and/or putting warning stickers on music in the ’80s were left no doubt what Frank thought they should “kiss.” On TV.

The filmmaker spoke with many a musician who worked with Zappa over the decades, from The Mothers of Invention to Steve Vai. Alice Cooper describes him as “our savior,” with Zappa signing Cooper & Band to a record deal that launched them.

Rare footage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono joining Frank and The Mothers onstage captures just how influential the guy was during his Laurel Canyon heydays, in the 1960s.

The Kronos Quartet gets together for a fresh rendition of a piece Zappa composed for them in the ’80s.

The portrait that emerges is complicated and messy, an arrogant, brilliant, condescending and standoffish artist who wanted every show to be it’s own
“composition.”

“It won’t be perfect, it’ll be music,” he lectures his accompanists for one show, informing them that he will at times just “show you a chord” and expect them to invent and keep up.

A sexist and a womanizer, “politically incorrect” way ahead of his time, every record he made during his “rock” years was filled with provocations and slaughtered sacred cows.

Zappa kept even musicians he used again and again over the decades at arm’s-length. “You were just a tool” to him, Vai offers, and longtime collaborator Ruth Underwood and others agree.

But few musicians persevered through wide public indifference like Zappa, and few made grander use of every “moment” the culture afforded him. He was disdainful of the dumb drug jokes of his 1978 “Saturday Night Live” appearance. But the show, where he ridiculed disco with “Dancing Fool,” was something of a cultural watershed. Disco died that night.

“Valley Girl” became a touchstone, and remembering its sad origins (Moon Unit, his daughter, slipped a note “pitching” the basic idea under her neglectful Dad’s studio door) colors in his character further — playful music made by a serious, cynical workaholic.

But long before that “break,” all the “cool kids” knew “Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.” And after “Valley Girl,” America had its most outspoken champion of free speech. Zappa spent much of the ’80s doing interviews on TV and appearing before Congress.

For all the archival Zappa interviews, Winter’s anchor interview here is footage of Zappa’s widow Gail (who died in 2015), the one who “got” him, put up with him and kept the flame of his ouevre alive. Gail Zappa ties most of the disparate elements that comprised Frank together for “Zappa,” from his cultural commentary to his musical idealism.

He didn’t seek fame or riches from his music, Gail says. Frank’s measure of whether a piece was a success was “how close did you get to the realization of the idea as you had it.” Maybe he was never truly satisfied. But what he left behind influenced others, and endures in its own right. Because nobody else ever did it the way Zappa did.

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

Cast: Frank Zappa, Ruth Underwood, Gail Zappa, Steve Vai, Alice Cooper, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, Mike Kenneally and Ray White

Credits: Directed by Alex Winter. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:07

Lame lame dialogue, underwhelming acting. At least in the trailer.

But the action? This one streams/downloads Nov. 10.

“The Giant” is a colossal waste of time, 100 minutes of underlit scenes filled with (mostly) high school characters whispering every single profundity that writer/director David Raboy can think of putting in their mouths in a story that never engages us or even tries to.

It’s a stunningly dull Deep South thriller about kids trying “make one last memory” after another with a serial killer taking out teen girls from the area, one at a time.

Raboy’s script isn’t so much cryptic as obtuse, with the kids whispering on and on, all nostalgic for the lives they just graduated from, heedlessly partying and hitting The Ole Swimmin’ Hole and attributing the deaths to some unseen, unknowable “giant in the woods.”

Heedless youth ignoring the COVID virus analogies might work, but the film was finished before the pandemic.

Aussie Odessa Young of “Assassination Nation,” “A Million Little Pieces” and the upcoming remake of “The Stand” does a fine American accent. But as Charlotte, her whispered vocal fry here, half-remembering the suicide of her mother, dealing with the deflated but menacing boyfriend (Ben Schnetzer) she’s trying to move on from, mumbling off the attempts to explain himself from her police chief father (P.J. Marshall) is sleep-inducing tedium itself.

That boyfriend is a poet in a pick-up truck, I tell you what — “All this sweat, this humidity…when I felt myself melt into you…I just needed to stand in your light again.”

Charlotte tends to bring that out in people, as in her BFF Olivia (Madalyn Cline), who philosophizes that “sometimes, we need people to not listen to us.”

Our heroine is in a muted, slack-jawed shock over what’s going on here and over Monroeville way. She brushes off Joe, keeps clumsy-flirt Will (Jack Kilmer) at arm’s length and tries to get these shallow ditzes to care.

“We saw Daphne on her last night on Earth.”

Her friends are all “It’ll be over before you know it,” in Bud Light denial.

Raboy tells much of the story after dark, and some scenes are so poorly lit that you can’t tell who Charlotte is sitting with in this car or that truck. Extreme closeups keep Young front and center, the only one meriting light in many of those moments.

The odd “Fi, fie, foe fum” thumping footsteps and screams from the forest should ratchet up the suspense, but dangle here like unanswered questions. Is this some psychic reckoning for careless kids, some payback for a perceived wrong, maybe committed by someone they all know?

From the look of things, our writer-director has no more grasp of the answers to the questions he half-asks than the viewer does.

MPA Rating: unrated, murder, teen drinking, smoking, suggestions of sex

Cast: Odessa Young, Ben Schnetzer, Jack Kilmer, Madalyn Cline, P.J. Marshall

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Raboy. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:40

He was using a Beretta which M took from him and replaced with Ian Fleming’s iconic choice of firearm in “Dr. No.” The Hollywood Reporter typist who wrote this up must have never seen a Bond film, leaving out the “K” in “PPK” twice. Got $250k to bid on it?

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