Movie Nation

Another great one is gone. Good in “Sounder,” legendary in “The Pride of Miss Jane Pittman,” colorful in every character role she ever took. I’m remembering her in “Because of Winn Dixie” right now.

Cicely Tyson just released a memoir. She was 96

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https://abc13.com/cicely-tyson-actress-dies-at-96/10105726

This Cuban Missile Crisis tale looks tense, tight and period perfect.

Cumberbatch, Benedict Cumberbatch, plays a “salesman” recruited to snoop around Moscow in the early 60s.

I am so there for this one.

“Savage” sums up a gang member’s life in three key episodes, pivotal moments where young Liam might have had a choice in the way his life turned out. The catch to that is, he had a lot fewer choices than we’d like to think.

The film’s novelty is its New Zealand setting and the biker gang that our hero (Aussie actor Jake Ryan) helped found, the “Savages,” is a Maori-Anglo mob. The tattoos, haka chants and the bonding of warriors are borrowed from Maori culture — they even ID their hometown as “Poneke,” the Maori slang for “Port Nichols,” aka Wellington, on their “colors” (jackets) or as they call them, “patches” — and their profanity-laced language donated by the Brits.

It’s a brutal blur of a movie, rendering its themes and actions in broad, violent strokes. That’s a help, as they mumbled accents are a bloody jumble to get through without subtitles.

We meet gang “Sergeant” (enforcer) “Damage” in 1989, bonded for life with his best friend and chief, Moses (John Tui), his faced covered in tattoos, including “Poneke.”

“Why d’you wear that mask?” gang moll/female gang leader/pimp (not sure) Flo (Chelsie Preston Crayford) wants to know.

“So you can see who I am.”

Damage and Moses maintain their gang through intimidation, protection money and recruitment. Young Red (Poroaki Merritt-McDonald) is their latest “prospect” (initiate).

But with Damage reaching what amounts to dotage in biker gang years, he’s half-heartedly wondering how much longer he’ll be able to manage the violence, physically or morally.

Real tough guys don’t need guns.

We see young Danny, as the future “Damage” was known, back in 1965, rugby roughhousing with his brother, stealing from the corner grocer’s, too hard for his homophobic hardcase Dad and indulgent Mum to handle. He is torn from brother Liam and sent to a brutal reform school where he is anything but reformed.

That’s where he meets Moses.

And we drop in on 1972 teen Danny and Moses (James Matamua and Haanz Fa’avae-Jackson), who have graduated from petty theft and into car thievery and the like. There’s violent potential in them. All it takes is a moment at the train station when they see the denim-clad thugs from a gang stomp through the crowd of civilians, intimidated as if they’re being menaced by the Yakuza.

The charismatic Moses comes up with a name and the denim vests for his five mates. “Savages” they’ll be henceforth. The shifting loyalties of brothers are dramatically tested in the 1972 segment. Danny’s brother Liam (Jack William Parker), left behind at home, has joined a rival gang. Sooner or later that will have to be worked out.

Ryan and Tui have kicked around Down Under films and TV for a couple of decades, with the occasional minor role in a Hollywood film as well. The conjure up riveting presences at the heart of “Savage,” magnetic characters who don’t give much away but still draw us in.

I was intrigued by Damage’s “trigger word” since childhood — a homosexual slur — and where writer-director Sam Kelly might go with that in his debut feature.

The dense accents make this a film that washes over you and makes sense thanks to the familiar tropes it builds on and scenes — some of them quite violent — which require no verbal explanation.

After all, what’s the point of calling yourself “Savage” if you’ve listened to Mommy’s plea that you “use your words” to settle anything?

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Jake Ryan, John Tui, Chelsie Preston Crayford,  Haanz Fa’avae-Jackson, Jack William Parker, Eden Flynn and James Matamua

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sam Kelly. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:40

Wiig and Annie Mumulo from “Bridesmaids” and “This is 40” and “Bad Moms” are in Florida, going “Floridian.”

If you’ve ever lived here, you know what I mean. And if you haven’t, you probably still get it. Florida, amIright?

Lots of SNL and “Office” alumni in this one, which I believe has been delayed like many other pictures in the pandemic pipeline.

We’ve only had teasers for this up to now. It opens Feb. 12, which means they’re not sweating the limited filmgoing audience our current stage of the pandemic decrees.

“Haymaker” is an intriguing movie mashup, if nothing else. It’s “The Bodyguard” with a transgender twist, served on a beefcake MMA (Muay Thai) boxing platter.

The picture isn’t quite this or even remotely that, but it still might have come off had its leading man possessed something beyond an impassive A-B range of imparted emotions.

As its star is also its writer-director, well that wasn’t a problem that was going to fix itself.

Nick Sasso wrote, directed and stars as Nick Malloy, a defeated and humbled fighter reduced to doing bouncing work for his brother (D.B. Sweeney), who much preferred their previous life. Mack was Nick’s cornerman. These clubgoers?

“They pay the bills, so let’s be polite.”

But Nick loses the bouncing gig when he interrupts a backstage beating/rape of a star performer at a club. Still, that singer (Nomi Ruiz) is grateful, flirtatious and generous. And she’s got a job for him.

“What kind of job?” “A fun one…protect ME.”

It’s an odd relationship from the start. Transexual Nomi is vivacious, popular, a rising star and something of a drama queen. Trouble seems to travel with her, seeing as how she’s a bit of a mouthy provocateur.

Nick can’t keep her from every unpleasantness, because she’s got history and ongoing feuds — with a recording studio rival, with an LA sugar daddy (Ugo Kier) who resents her moving on “in this new life that I made for you.”

Nomi can’t even be bothered to tell Nick where they’re off to — by car or jet — half the time.

“Can’t you just adjust to your surroundings or whatever, like a ninja?“

The movie’s only important question is “Will they or won’t they?” And Sasso, the writer-director, is more interested in getting our guy back in the ring — doing a pilgrimage to Thailand, taking on onetime trainer (actress/stunt-goddess Zoë Bell) — than in answering that.

The story would be more interesting if the script — with its “I’ve got nothing to prove.” “I know that. Do you?” message — more overtly tied this need to fight again to Nick questioning his masculinity after falling for this transgender siren.

Sasso gives us a little of that, and a lot more concert drops and training montage.

Ruiz is an interesting if limited performer, confined here to playing a “type” — overtly sexual, over-compensating as female, with only the odd line here and there suggesting there’s more going on.

Sasso’s performance feels like a pulled-punch, and not just in the half-speed fight scenes. Are you in for this romance or not? Go big or go home.

The film’s style points for having the gender issue never come between Nomi and Nick (others have a “problem” with her) are squandered if Nick’s journey never seems that great and Sasso is too poker-faced to make it compelling.

Avoiding the conventional one man’s journey “from prejudiced to lovesick” leaves “Haymaker” with a vacuum where its heart should be. The picture was never destined to be a knockout, but settling for a draw seems a waste.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Nikck Sasso, Nomi Ruiz, D.B. Sweeney and Zoë Bell

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nick Sasso. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:23

“The Third Man” is widely acknowledged as British director Carol Reed’s breakthrough film, even if his breakout title — the one that ensured his employability as a filmmaker –came much earlier.

But film scholars and cinema buffs, poking around his earlier works, often run up against just what was transformed in his eye, ear and style by that Vienna masterpiece. Was it the influence of Orson Welles on the set as star, perhaps even co-directing his own scenes or making blocking and lighting suggestions?

As that would tend to take something away from the future director of an epic (“The Agony and the Ecstasy”), a lovely period-perfect musical (“Oliver!”), and a grand Graham Greene spy dramedy (“Our Man in Havana”), the “Welles Influence” theory is often dismissed.

After all, Reed skillfully adapted Greene’s “The Fallen Idol” just the year before “Third Man.”

But poking around 15 years of his earlier films can be frustrating if you’re looking for an emerging style, an eye and ear that made “The Third Man” his undebatable masterpiece.

“The Way Ahead” is a pretty good case in point. It’s a classic WWII “unit” film, a story of men plucked from civilian life, trained, shipped out and finally tested in combat. Hollywood made so many of these — and Clint Eastwood and others have revived the genre more recently (“Heartbreak Ridge”) — that the best you can say for this one is that it’s from a British point of view and the humor is more droll than rowdy.

There are two action sequences, handled with great skill — the ship that Lord Glendon’s Light Infantry Regiment are on is torpedoed, and the company pitches in to try and save it, and a taste of combat in Algeria.

But otherwise, this is strictly formula, colorful in only the generic sense.

Based on a story by pulp action novelist and screenwriter Eric Ambler (“Journey Into Fear,” “Topkapi”), with on-set rewrites (he’s credited as co-screenwriter) Peter Ustinov, “Forward” is most unusual in its efforts to lay out the pre-Army lives of its soldiers and its pointed late-war (released in the UK in 1944) self-awareness.

Most of these would-be soldiers are late “call-ups,” men expecting deferments due to their age, their delusions about their “value” in their current jobs. Pretty much to a one, they are reluctant draftees.

The funniest is played by music hall legend Stanley Holloway, most famous as Eliza Doolittle’s street bum dad in “My Fair Lady,” singing “Get Me to the Church On Time.” He plays a boiler operator/stoker at Parliament. That makes him a Cockney expert on British government. Brewer has heard the speeches, is sanguine about the coming war when we meet him (in 1939), and judges Members of Parliament by how long their speeches keep him past his suppertime.

“Only one good man ever got into Parliament.”

“Oh really? Who?”

“Bleedin’ Guy Fawkes!”

Before he’s the Dunkirk-survivor turned lieutenant in charge, David Niven‘s Perry runs a service station catering to the roadster classes.

There’s a travel agent, a mid level manager and his flunky at a garden supply company, and so on.

They meet on the train, muster in Crewe, and are put through their paces by a not-that-unreasonable Sgt (William Hartnell), an encouraging, buttoned-down character far-removed from the stereotypical insulting Drill Instructor Sgt. of American prepping-for-combat movies. (See “Full Metal Jacket” for the most infamous of these).

I like the framing device, a couple of old age pensioners — veterans of the Boer War or earlier from the looks of them — griping about their old regiment, “The Dogs,” going to the dogs because of the declining state of British manhood and toughness. They wear their colors, meet in a London square and complain about the Army, the government, the works. They’ll have to be won over by film’s end.

Other than that, “The Way Forward” is best appreciated for the future stars tucked into it. Trevor Howard was a couple of films away from his “Brief Encounter” breakthrough. Reed set the tone for the rest of Howard’s career with his non-nonsense British occupation officer turn in “The Third Man.” He turns up as an officer on the torpedoed transport, here.

James Donald, playing a private quickly promoted to corporal, is best known for a few war films such as “The Great Escape,” most famously as the humanist doctor in “Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Future big screen Poirot, epicurean and talk show raconteur extraordinaire Peter Ustinov plays a cafe owner in Algeria who grouses (in French) about the soldiers coming to his place until they introduce him to that British pastime, darts.

There’s Leo Genn (“Moby Dick,” many other films) as the unit’s commanding officer, John Laurie and many a familiar face to any fan of British cinema of the ’50s and ’60s.

So even if the plot is pro forma and the “types” a tad over-familiar, “The Way Forward” has its rewards. If nothing else, it’s worth seeing if you plan on having that “Orson Welles MADE Carol Reed” argument any time soon.

Rating: “U”

Cast: David Niven, Stanley Holloway, James Donald, John Laurie, Leo Genn, with Trevor Howard and Peter Ustinov.

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, script by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov. A Two Cities/Eagle-Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:45

Oscar winner, eight time Emmy queen, oh and Miss Chicago, 1946 — Cloris Leachman has passed from life into legend. She was 94, and worked and worked and worked (she was in “The Croods” cartoons) until the very end.

What a career, a so-so opening act, a stellar middle act career that included the Oscar for a sad, neglected housewife in “The Last Picture Show,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its sequel, “Phyllis,” and then — damn, she kept going, like her MTM co-star Betty White.

I only interviewed her once. She had a picture out and I was scrambling to pull an Oscar story together and thought, “Cloris LEACHMAN has an Oscar story and Oscar advice. You bet she does.” Here she is, the big name in this story, headlined…

“OSCAR NIGHT: Don’t Blow ‘The Big Speech'” — from 2005

It’s a moment you’ve practiced since you were old enough to stand in
front of the bathroom mirror — or “thank the Academy” in the shower.

But as Diane Wiest famously observed, in front of an audience of
zillions, “Gee, this isn’t like I imagined it would be in my bathtub.”

The Oscar acceptance speech is what people dream of, an actor or
filmmaker’s moment in the spotlight, those 45 seconds when you have
the whole world’s attention.

And yet the best-trained, best-paid actors, writers, directors and
producers in history most often get up there, take possession of that
statuette, and blow it.

They choke. They babble. And, heaven help us, they take out index
cards and start thanking their lawyers, their accountants, their
lawyer’s accountant’s pet-sitter.

“The moment one of those index cards comes out, I just die,” says
Oscar-winner Cloris Leachman (The Last Picture Show).

“You can plan for everything under the sun, but at the same time
you’re at the mercy of the guy who is voted best actor, and whether he
pulls out a list and starts reading all these names, or if he’ll let
himself get emotional and give a great speech everybody remembers,”
says Steve Pond, author of The Big Show: High Times & Dirty Dealings
Backstage at the Academy Awards.

“Actors are used to having scripts,” says Oscar-nominated screenwriter
John Logan (The Aviator). “Maybe they just want something they can
read.”

PRACTICE AND IMPERFECTION

Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock) says she understands the instinct.

“Actors believe in being prepared,” she says. “And to get where you
are, that night, there are people who go all the way back to college
who were encouraging you. There were these waiters I worked with in
New York who would cover my shift for me when I would have to dash out
to an audition. Every single person counts!”

And there’s that nagging feeling that “it’s your one shot up there,
and ‘So-and-so is going to be upset if I don’t mention him,’ ” says
Pond, who covers the Oscars from backstage for Premiere magazine. “But
for every person you mention because you’re afraid they’re going to be
upset that you don’t mention them, there’s five others you’re
forgetting.”

Jennifer Connelly may never get another shot. When she won her best
supporting actress Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, she looked as though
she’d just been dumped (she had). And then she pulled out the laundry
list.

Martin Landau spent the summer and fall of 1994 practicing his speech,
a tribute to Bela Lugosi and the award Bela — his character in Ed
Wood — never won.

It was great. It was poetic. And you didn’t get to hear it Oscar night.

Because Landau used his Oscar, basically a lifetime achievement award,
to thank everybody who ever crossed paths with him.

Pond was sitting behind Oscar producer Gil Cates that night. “You
could feel the tension just growing and growing and growing,” he says.
“You could never sense that this guy was about to get to something
emotional and moving. You just had the feeling that this guy was going
to keep on naming names until he named everyone he knew, or Cates cut
him off.

“So Cates played him off the stage.”

Big moment, blown. There’s no greater indignity than being “played
off,” especially when the orchestra is playing you off to the Mission:
Impossible theme as with Landau.

“It seems that no matter how many times at the nominees lunch you hear
the producer say, ‘Don’t pull out a list,’ people still do,” Pond
says.

BUT WHAT IF?

It is, Logan says, “bad luck” to prepare a speech you might never get
to deliver. But Leachman, a best supporting actress winner for 1971’s
The Last Picture Show, says you should have something in mind to say,
even though she didn’t.

“I worried about finding a dress that ‘walked,’ you know, open in
front and back so I could get up and walk to the podium,” she says.
“But I gave no thought at all to having something to say, because
Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret had won the big pre-Oscar awards.

“I turned to my date, who happened to be my estranged husband, and
said, ‘My God! What if I win? Should I thank my teachers?’ And I
mentioned a couple of them to him. He paused for a second and said,
‘Those are funny names.’ “

When “the winner is, Cloris Leachman” rang out, the actress was
flustered “beyond belief.” But she came up with something, a funny
little dig at “all those kids” who made fun of her in elementary
school.

In 2001, Harden was prepared to win, but expected to lose.

“That’s why I was wearing a bright red dress with lots of ‘Notice me!’
cleavage, that night,” she says with a laugh. She had a speech —
actually it sounds a lot like a laundry list — scribbled on a napkin.

“But I picked up the Oscar, and the note was in the same hand. And
they’re right when they say it’s heavy. I was embarrassed to take the
Oscar out of my hand and read something. So I just winged it, and
forgot to thank my teachers.”

Adrien Brody made a heartfelt appeal for peace, after laying an epic
smooch on Halle Berry. Michael Moore made it a political diatribe.
Sally Field went off into “You really like me” land. Randy Newman
joked about how many times he’d been nominated without winning.

“I don’t want your pity.”

But Jonathan Demme rambled incoherently. James Coburn sputtered and blew it.

In the Internet age, there’s no excuse for not having something to
say. There’s even an Oscar-speech generator
(chickenhead.com/stuff/oscar/index.asp) for those who can’t think of
anything themselves.

So don’t prepare if that’s bad luck. But if your moment comes, have
something to say.

“It’s a TV show. You should be willing to entertain,” says Leachman.

Mike Leigh, Oscar nominated for writing and directing Vera Drake, says
that not prepping should be no handicap, considering what everybody in
the Kodak Auditorium does for a living.

“If the time comes, and I don’t expect it will, I’ll get up and, if
necessary, give them a few lines from Macbeth, a joke and something
they’ll remember,” he says. “It’s not all that hard, is it? There’s
only a billion people watching.”

There’s something ever so disconcerting about the sight of Laura Carmichael, prim blonde Lady Edith of “Downton Abbey,” swearing, knocking back a few and having a quick shag in a night club’s restroom in “Burn Burn Burn.”

But, you know, ACTING and all that. You do what the part calls for, and letting her hair down and her near-hysterical freak flag fly is what this quite funny, surprisingly-touching dramedy requires. She’s great fun in the part.

Carmichael and another period piece princess, Chloe Pirrie of the recent Austen adaptation “Emma.” take a rowdy road trip across Britain in this film about two friends fulfilling their late pal Dan’s last wish — that his ashes be scattering in locations of his naming, places he longed to get back to but never did.

Dying at thirty tends to batter a bucket list.

Seph (Carmichael) is in a committed but clingy relationship with James (Joe Dempsie). Alex (Pirrie) has just walked in on her lover Pandora (Eleanor Masuura), who skipped Dan’s wake for her latest infidelity.

Dan (Jack Farthing, terrific) was always the life of the party, as an opening scene notes. He comes off as one of those truth-telling tipplers, and as he got the news that his last months of chemo would be “palliative,” he put some effort into “fixing” his two unhappy friends. He left videos on a flash drive, an offer of an old Volvo, and orders. Spread his ashes, wrestle with some issues, “sort things out” for yourselves and each other.

“Impossible,” they mutter. Dan being Dan and all that. Then Alex discovers Pandora cheating and somehow, advertising copywriting isn’t going to allow her to lose herself in her work to get over these twin blows.

Seph? She hits the wall on “nannying” for her boyfriend’s boss’s upper class twit wife (Sally Phillips) and maybe a little time away from James will clear her head.

“Let’s do it. Let’s scatter Dan!” Better title for the film, BTW. But never mind.

The duo will venture from Yorkshire to Wales, Glastonbury to Scotland, running into hippies, stern “no ashes allowed” tour guides, a confused older hitchhiker (Alison Steadman) and their true selves as Dan — with a different video (and getting progressively sicker) for each locale, forces them to deal with their issues, their secrets and the messy lives he can no longer be a sounding board for fixing.

The scenery’s soggy but grand, the comic bits comic and the touching ones quite affecting. The cast is across-the-board excellent, with the leads wonderfully contrasted — dizzy and lost, bitter and crushed. It’s all just sweet and lovely, not terribly deep, but charming.

I was late getting to Chanya Burton’s tiny jewel of a film. If you’ve missed it, you should too.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with some rowdy sex, drinking, smoking and swearing

Cast: Laura Carmichael, Chloe Pirrie, Jack Farthing, Joe Dempsie, Eleanor Matsuura, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Alison Steadman and Jane Asher

Credits: Directed by Chanya Button, script by Charlie Covell. A Film Movement Plus streaming release.

Running time: 1:46

⚡️ “First look at Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in ‘Spencer’” by @ETCanada https://twitter.com/i/events/1354449566855286784

Suppose you’re a ghost, happily haunting this house, chasing away every potential tenant with a steadily escalating series of “unexplainable” events — empty rocking chair that starts rocking, a metronome that clicks on by itself, doorbell ringing on its own, doors opening, cabinets shutting.

And then this fellow shows up who gets mildly creeped out, realizes he’s on the clock and just barks “No, NO” at every new supernatural manifestation you summon on?

Do you check back with your “spectral agent” manager? Up the ante? Summon Beetlejuice?

Or maybe you negotiate, bargain and cajole in an effort to get the place all to yourself, return order to the whole ghosts vs. People Afraid of Ghosts universe.

That’s the adorable set-up to “A Ghost Waits,” a rarely spooky, sometimes funny, overreaching romance no-budget indie whose creators almost certainly would take it as a compliment if told “It looks like it was shot on a cell phone.”

It begins as a deadpan monochromatic comedy and grows rather less interesting as it drifts from that mission statement. But it’s still a novel approach to a ghost story and well worth watching if a lighter version of “A Ghost Story” interests you.

Co-writer MacLeod Andrews is Jack, a handyman who contracts out to a rental company to evaluate their homes, in between tenants, and either do repairs or arrange them. When we meet him, he’s trying to wrangle a place to stay for a few days while his place is fumigated, and nobody is returning his calls.

Thirtyish with no real friends you can lean on? It makes a guy wonder.

This house he’s supposed to inspect and prep for new renters presents a problem. It looks as if the previous tenants abandoned it, and all their stuff. He can’t do but so much “until all this stuff is gone.”

Neal, on the other end of the phone, isn’t having it. He needs this job rushed through, this house ready to rent. And he needs an answer.

“See why everyone breaks their lease and leaves it.”

We have more information than Neal or Jack. We’ve seen a montage of a previous family chased out by this Goth-girlish apparition (Natalie Walker).

As Jack sings along to his radio and leaves taped-reminders of all the power outlets, appliances, etc. that he’s checked and/or need further attention, he’s missing all this stuff going on behind him — rocking chair rocking, door closing, cabinet opening.

Jack’s dreams take on a “Shining” vibe — served drinks in the attack by a ghostly doppelganger.

We see him stalked from the ghost’s point of view, a camera just above and behind her capturing her walking up, invisible to him, singing along as he sings, starting a metronome, ringing the doorbell, throwing a crying baby’s wails into other rooms.

An actual appearance is what usually seals the deal. Muriel (Walker), all pale and veined, wild-haired and with an ungodly howl, presents herself to Jack and scares him.

Only it doesn’t take. He’s got work to finish, and Muriel, as he comes to know her? She’s more interesting than alarming, at least to him.

The earliest scenes sell the joke, and a cute soundtrack of bouncy, upbeat and off-color/mordant songs by Margaret Darling set the tone.

And then they go and suck all the wind out of the picture with dry arguments between Muriel and her third-wheel supervisor (Amanda Miller) who brings in a fourth wheel. Static, less funny and not-exactly-romantic exchanges with Jack ensue, who admits this “no real friends” life isn’t working out — “There’s no RECIPROCATION!” — and Muriel answering a lot of questions, profound and inane, about being a ghost.

“We prefer ‘spectral agent.'”

It’s a winning concept and not awfully executed, although the acting isn’t very good and the chemistry between the leads is thus pretty tepid. The ending stings, but the narrative’s taken a turn up a dead end before that, making this 80 minute movie feel longer.

Still, as indie “spectral agent” dramedies go, it’s worth a look and offers a few laughs if little else.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: MacLeod Andrews, Natalie Walker, Sydney Vollmer and Amanda Miller

Credits: Directed by Adam Stovall, script by MacLeod Andrew and Adam Stovall. An Arrow Films release.

Running time: 1:19