Movie Nation

I know what you’re thinking. Ok, maybe it’s just what I was thinking.

Msr. Luc is doing “Dracula?” Vampires and car chases?

But no no.

Caleb Landry Jones, Christoph Waltz (as a priest), Matilda de Angelis and
Zoë Bleu star in this July version of a story we saw (more or less) last Christmas.

Not exactly “Nosferatu,” but pretty danged close.

Besson wrote and directed this adaptation of the Bram Stoker urtext of vampire stories.

July 25, it’s unleashed upon the world.

Golf is a middle-aged white man’s sport and “Stick” is a series tailor made for the TaylorMade set — and Owen Wilson.

It’s a sentimental, easygoing comedy about “a good walk spoiled,” a show that grabs the gimmes and leans into Wilson’s laid back charm.

He plays the title character, a one-time pro star who had a “Tin Cup” meltdown sixteen years before, now reduced to selling clubs and hustling barflies in BFE, Indiana.

Stick’s broke, dodging the ex-wife’s efforts to sell the house he’s cluttered up, still driving a Bondo’d Corvette from back when he was big, still pulling hustles with his smart-mouthed old caddy who’s not shy about cracking jokes about how he “triple bogeyed your whole life.”

And then Stick, in mid little-old-lady golf lesson, hears a swing and a ball strike. And he knows he’s found the next big thing before he turns around and spies the mop-topped teen who hit that ball.

“Stick” is about an aimless “burned-out never was” seeing his last chance to get noticed and get paid for golf via a hot-shot teen he takes on a summer warm-up tour, via RV, in prep for the U.S. Amateur Golf Championship at summer’s end.

Jason Keller, the series’ creator, scripted the crackling “Ford v. Ferrari.” He plays to his leading man’s strengths — Wilson’s gee-whiz, open-mouthed harmlessness, the crooked smile hiding “a deep sadness within.” And he fills this show with familiar characters, low-hanging fruit gags, set-ups and situations.

Those are dramedy versions of golfing’s “gimmes,” too easy to miss.

The kid, Santi (Peter Dager) “plays like a 17 year old,” retired caddy Mitts (Marc Maron, of course) grumbles, “go-for-broke, all risk, no reward.” Santi’s also moody, with golf “issues” dating back to childhood.

Cue the “Gen Z” jokes.

He’s Latino, and his mom (Mariana Treviño) drives a hard bargain and rolls the dice on her kid. So naturally she quits work to come on the trip with them.

Judy Greer brings her impish wit to the course as Stick’s moved-on ex-wife.

Lilli Kay is the disgruntled, Marxist-in-training bartender who connects with the kid just a year or two younger than her.

And Timothy Olyphant is the tour veteran/TV pitch man looming over this quest before making a late in the run appearance, a villain whom Stick has ugly history with.

Yes, Stick’s remembered on youtube thanks to “the worst day of my life.” Yes, he has secret pain. Yes, there’s parenting that comes with this resists coaching teen phenom.

Classic rock score? ZZ Top, The Who, The Knack, Thin Lizzy, Marc Bolan? Check.

Obvious needle drops are soundtrack gimmes. As I said, this series is aimed at middle aged white guys, and Keller ticks off as many boxes as he can think of that pander to that demo.

The golf is mostly unrealistic — holing out or water hazarding, falling down the leader board, racing back up it.

But Wilson and Maron click, the leading and supporting ladies get their backs up (barely) and the show saunters through its paces and its episodes like a par three course they’re laughing through, sipping beers from the cooler in the back of the cart between swings.

It’s not really “a good walk spoiled,” as a legend of the game once put it. Not when you’re riding instead of walking. It’s still a game worth a few laughs.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Owen Wilson, Peter Dager, Marc Maron, Mariana Treviño, Lilli Kay, Judy Greer and Timothy Olyphant

Credits: Created by Jason Keller. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Ten episodes @:30-46 minutes each

“The Heart Knows” is a bland and sentimental serving of cinematic romance comfort food from Argentina.

No, that’s not much an endorsement until you remember that “comfort food” is comforting for a reason. It plays sweetly and goes down easily and Hallmark Channel fans will find things to like about it.

Juan Manuel (Benjamín Vicuña) is a rich, dashing commitment-phobic 40something CEO of a building firm — “Concretely.” He takes tennis lessons, has a mansion, a housekeeper, a steady, high-maintenance girlfriend (Annasofia Facello) and a group of bros he takes trips with, including his top lieutenant and oldest friend at work, Tony (Peto Menahem).

And a few minutes into the melodrama titled “Corazón delator” in Spanish, he has a heart attack on his way to the airport for a bro’s weekend.

That’s also the night of Vale’s (Julieta Diaz) birthday. She’s a waitress/activist for her working poor neighborhood, El Progreso, an area doomed by planned city redevolopment. And on this night, her motorcycling husband, Pedro (Facundo Espinosa), has an accident and winds up brain dead.

Newly-widowed and now single-mom Vale has to make the call. Yes, we’re donating his organs. And you know without me telling you where Pedro’s heart goes.

Juan Manuel recovers, thanks to that heart transplant. But his mania for work and passion for good times seem to have faded. Survivor’s guilt has him wondering who donated his heart. Being rich, he can find that out.

But showing up in El Progreso, where the locals are frantically trying to rebuild their local clinic with no money, and passing himself off as a “construction worker” doesn’t pass the smell test — even when he’s dressed-down.

“You worked in construction, with those hands,” Vale wants to know (in Spanish or dubbed into English)?

She is the most suspicious of the somewhat colorful neighborhood “types” who welcome Juan and his contributions to the labor, materials etc.

In his “real” life, Juan is facing a showdown with his family company and city hall over the planned demolition and new rec center Concretely has been backing for many months. It will be built in El Progreso in Buenos Aires. Vale and her friends are to be evicted to make room for it.

Writer-director Carlos Carnevale, a veteran of Argentine cinema (“Elsa y Fred”) and TV, populates the neighborhood with just a couple of colorful characters — the antic, foul-mouthed special needs adult Pollo (Bicho Gómez) and neighborhood cynic/thug Horacio (Yayo Guridi) stand out.

Carnevale has Juan take “lessons” on living — “See what it’s like to work for REAL?” — among the working poor from his housekeeper/cook Nancy (Julia Calvo). Here’s how you take the bus, boss.

“You don’t take an Audi into that neighborhood!”

The script is formulaic and almost criminally unsurprising. The roles are basically a collection of sketched-in “types.” Vale is barely developed as a character and mother to her not-really-mourning little boy (Manuel da Silva).

Juan’s transformation isn’t supernatural, but “existential crisis” doesn’t quite cover it, either.

Yes, “tennis lessons” and congenital heart failure go hand in hand. Have you ever eaten in an Argentine restuarant? Meat, meat and meat with a side of meat and meat for dessert.

And yes, “The Heart Knows” where it’s going and gets there in a reasonably short amount of time. A couple of sentimental moments hit the sweet spot even if the performances are pretty much colorless.

Rating: TV-14, violence, lots of profanity

Cast: Benjamín Vicuña,
Julieta Díaz, Facundo Espinosa, Julia Calvo, Manuel da Silva, Annasofia Facello, Yayo Guridi and Peto Menahem.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Carlos Carnevale. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

In the mind, at least, one can envision the three credited screenwriters of Hitchcock’s “Young and Innocent” pacing a smoke-filled room, belting back cups of tea like they were bourbon.

They were in a pickle. They’ve reached the climax of their loose adaptation of a Josephine Tey novel, but they can’t figure out how to suspensefully drag out the discovery of a murder suspect in a crowded dance hall.

The suspected killer has a physical tic. The hero, the heroine and the “tramp” who met this fellow and would recognize him on sight know about it.

“Can we disguise him,” writers Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood and/or Anthony Armstrong, working together or alone on “their” draft, wonder? Perhaps Alfred Hitchock himself, or Alma Reville, his writer/ continuity director wife, suggested it.

Let’s put the suspect in the dance band. It’s 1937! Let’s paint the musicians up in BLACKFACE!

That could very well have been the “thinking” that went into this bit of screenplay problem-solving, clever and “racist” only if you think anybody’d mind — anybody with a “voice” back then, anyway.

After all, it’s just a variation of what Billy Wilder & Co. would do with the 1930s period piece “Some Like It Hot” twenty years later — put Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag so they can escape The Mob,. But one disguise is recognized as a gross, demeaning, exaggerated and offensive parody of people unlike the writers. And the other’s well, let’s not go down the road that J. K. Rowling ran off of, shall we?

“Innocent” is Hitchcock on the verge of hitting his confident comic stride.  It’s a near romp of a chase picture about an accused killer on the lam, the Chief Constable’s daughter (and her Schnauzer) aiding him in the pursuit of evidence that will clear him and find the “real killer” for the quick-to judge inept coppers to pin the murder on.

Hitch would elevate his “Man Who knew Too Much” supporting player Nova Pilbeam to her most famous big-screen role for this lighthearted murder mystery, and promote”Things to Come” support Derrick De Marnay into a leading man.

He’d discover how funny eyebrow-raising Basil Radford could be, cast as a quizzical bystander in an amusing children’s birthday party scene, and bring him back for the role that would immortalize him — Caldicott in the comical cricket-loving big screen duo Charters and Caldicutt — in Hitchock’s even jauntier “The Lady Vanishes” filmed the next year.

“Innocent” features police clumsily railroading the suspect in an actress’s murder, then losing him on the way into the courtroom. The Chief Constable’s (Percey Marmont) youngest son wants to know, “If you don’t find him, will you get the sack, father?”

There’s a wee boy of about seven called on to pump gas out in the provinces. He has to climb up the towering pump to even attempt to manage that, and call for help.

Two coppers “commandeer” a farmer and his tiny pig wagon for their pursuit. They gripe about the amount of room in it.

“Aye don’t reckon it’d hold more’n TEN pigs!”

It’s a lark, almost from start to finish, a film that opens with a jaunty bit of jazz and launches into a heated argument so theatrical and broadly played we wonder if it’s part of a filmed play within the movie.

An actress (Pamela Carme) from that argument turns up dead. A young writer (De Marnay) stumbles across her body on the beach, flees from the scene and is seen fleeing. For some reason, a screenwriter who sold the now-dead actress a single “story” has been mentioned in her will.

The cops figure they have their man and grill him. His missing raincoat? That had the belt she was strangled with, they’ll bet.

Writer/suspect Robert Tisdall passes out from the all-nighter interrogation, but the Chief Constable’s plucky oldest child Erica (Pilbeam) revives him. He resolves to get away shortly after he meets the dithering local dope — “Well, it doesn’t look too good for you, does it?” — assigned as his defense counsel.

“Are you representing the police, by any chance?”

Tisdall escapes, and the enterprising Erica finds herself off with him, not sure of his “innocence” and fighting the idea that she’s on the other “side” by birth and by logic.

There’s a brawl at a roadside diner, triggered by Erica’s questions about the MacGuffin coat, assorted narrow escapes from exhausted police, a “china mending” “tramp” (Edward Rigby) to track down, and that amusing kiddie birthday party that the leads get roped into by Erica’s aunt (Mary Clare) and comically suspicious uncle (Radford).

Hitchcock’s cameo has him playing a news photographer at the suddenly in a tizzy courthouse.

The sharply shot and designed picture pretty much trots by at a brisk 83 minutes, from murder to big band rendition of “No One Can Like the Drummer Man” in the finale. The comedy works, start to finish. But I have to say, that plot “problem solving” leaves a LOT to be desired.

Erica is a great creation, the most competent character in the lot. She’s the only one who can start and manage her clunky ’26 Morris Bullnose roadster. Are we meant to think that Tisdall was hiding in the rumble seat when she and the two cops with her run out of gas in hot pursuit of their escapee?

He turns up to help her push the car after the coppers commandeer that pig wagon. Where was he and how’d he GET there?

Logic takes a holiday more than once as Hitch takes his usual shots at police, whom his biographers say he feared and held in a measure of contempt.

As the opening scene is a heated argument between a recently-ditched husband (George Curzon) and his Hollywood actress wife who’s obtained “a silly Reno divorce” in the States, why would the cops never consider him a suspect in her death?

And why would the actress generously remember young writer-for-hire Tisdall in her will, of all things?

Of course, the deal-breaker with “Young and Innocent” is that “clever” bit of Blackface gag writing in the finale, something one can’t dismiss despite the American performing “tradition” that did nothing to sanitize it or excuse one and all of the era “because everybody (white) was racist back then.”

British films dropping the “n” word popped up in that era and on into the ’50s. A sailing magazine I subscribed to in the ’90s had some uproar over a limey who made a plea for a “boat n—er,” and damned if some British Empire celeb didn’t drop that noxious phrase just a couple of years ago on TV. 

I judged a University of Tennessee fraternity sketch show competition with one group of fake-Greeks performing in Blackface in the ’90s, and white politicians have had careers rattled by revelations that they took part in such transgressions in their college years.

It’s inexcusable, and knowing that the folks who concocted the gag in ’37 gave it less thought than they gave the assumed name — Beechtree Manningcroft — that they have the hero invent, is just disheartening.

But that’s the biggest reason this otherwise fun film isn’t remembered with Hitchcock’s other peak pre-Hollywood era work and the reason it is shown on TV with an “offensive” content disclaimer attached to the beginning.

And to think that all they had to do to dodge that bullet was to dress the band in drag.

Rating: TV-PG, “dated cultural practices (blackface)

Cast: Nova Pilbeam, Derrick De Marnay, Percey Marmont, Pamela Carme, Edward Rigby, Mary Clare and Basil Radford

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood and Anthony Armstrong, based on a novel by Josephine Tey. A J. Arthur Rank release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:23

Matchmaking by GPS?

This romantic fantasy takes characters back to the past, makes one remember the regrets, the paths not taken and getting back to “when I thought everything would work out for me.”

A big big-eyed Margot Robbie romance? Overdue. It’s from the writer-director of “Columbus.”

It opens Sept. 19, just in time for awards season?

“A Widow’s Game” is a Spanish “true crime” thriller that’s as dry as your average episode of “Law & Order” or its many spin-offs, and as about as thrilling.

What makes it intriguing enough to stick with is a sexually voracious and manipulative villain and the slow, deliberate and by-the-book way cops take care of business in Valencia.

There’s not much mystery to “whodunit,” so Netflix changing the title from “La viuda negra,” “The Black Widow,” was pointless. Within a couple of days of the murder, veteran National Police Chief Inspector Eva Torres (Carmen Machi) and their team are pretty damned sure they’ve got their suspect.

So what six credited Spanish screenwriters came up with to maintain our interest is telling the story in three chapters. We follow “Eva” as and her team of two (Pablo Molinero and Pepe Ocio) as they methodically work the case, face off with a bullying, press-happy police commissioner and balance this one case against others and with single mom Eva’s family life (a special needs daughter who keeps getting kicked out of schools).

We hang out with the hard working/hard-living suspect Maria Jesus or “Maje” (Ivana Baquero), the widow who doesn’t act like a widow, but through whom we meet her late husband Arturo and her assorted lovers via flashbacks.

And one last chapter reveals who the play-acting, dramatizing and manipulating 20something Maje talked into doing the deed for her.

Baquero makes our Black Widow a fascinating, sexual creature in the Nurse Jackie mold. She’s a nurse working two jobs to help pay for renovating the couple’s Valencia apartment. She feels martryed, but even if she didn’t she’d still cheat. A lot. She enjoys sex and sexual conquests and juggling her many lovers with lies and the help of friends.

But this libidinous, constantly-clubbing 27 year-old never wholly shook her strict religious upbringing in provincial Novelda.

You don’t UNDERSTAND, she breathlessly tells Eva as evidence of her serial infidelities comes to light. “Cheating in Novelda will get you KILLED!” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English).

Maje gossips with pals and texts her assorted lovers, all of it by phone. That’s how the cops come for her, and once they have judicial permission for wiretaps. We’re treated to audio montages of Maje’s lying, cheating indiscretions. But is there “evidence” in all that?

“A Widow’s Game” delivers interesting glimpses of Spanish life — Maje’s Apostolic Church upbringing (she kisses the crucifix above her marriage bed before crashing to sleep after her multiple shifts and what came after), her mother in law’s advice to Maje after she’s caught cheating right before the marriage.

“Everyone has to choose the spoon they want to eat with the rest of their lives.”

But Baquero’s vamped, self-dramatizing sexy suspect aside, “A Widow’s Game” is too tame and predictable to tantalize. The “lives” are glimpsed and glossed, not deeply probed. The suspect “who did her dirty work” is a cliche in Spain, America, pretty much anywhere men fall for the charms of a femme fatale.

“Game” thus amounts to little more than a page-turner, a beach book of a movie for those sucked into How-she-done-it and how the police come to their conclusions and make their case.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity

Cast: Carmen Machi, Ivana Baquero,
Tristán Ulloa, Pablo Molinero, Pepe Ocio and
Álex Gadea

Credits: Directed by Carlos Sedes, scripted by Ramón Campos, Gema de Neira, Jon de la Custa, Ricardo Jornet, David Orea and Javier Chacártegui. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

A day at the races, a night at the Abbey?

I was hoping they’d take this saga to WWII, giving it a “Brideshead” send off.

But 1930 it is.

The gang’s all here, and Sept. 12, the soap’s all done.

“Resurrection Road” is a mediocre Civil War B-movie that lapses into a seriously bad supernatural C-picture for the third act.

That’s also when Michael Madsen, King of the C-movies, makes his mark.

There’s a little promise in the premise — Black Union soldiers sent to disarm a Confederate fort in Arkansas, led by an escaped slave/soldier promised “40 acres” if he takes on this suicide mission, and a hangman’s rope if he doesn’t.

With Civil War movies on an indie film budget, one fun exercise when watching them is looking for anachronisms in the uniforms, firearms, settings and colloquialisms. Yes, there were Confederates who used lever-action repeating rifles. Yes there were truss bridges to cross, but no, “dynamite” wasn’t invented until 1867.

Hard to know if ex-slaves turned soldiers used “mother-f—er” as much as this fractious sextet does.

Malcolm Goodwin plays Barabas, the “convict” busted down to private and imprisoned until General Craven (Jeff Daniel Phillips) shows up with an offer he can’t refuse. Take five other soldiers to your old stomping grounds in Arkansas. Disable the fort’s big guns.

So forget the nightmares you still have about being enslaved by the sadist Quantrill (Madsen), what it cost you and your family. Get a move on “you filthy Black son of a…”

Yeah, there were racists on the Union side, too.

Barabas regains his sergeant’s stripes (we assume) to take command of a motley crew played by Okea Eme-Akwari, Furly Mac, Randall J. Bacon, Davonte Burse and Bryan Taronn Jones. It doesn’t take long for things in “this s— detail” to go wrong, and then more wrong.

A Cherokee survivor of a massacre (Triana Browne) joins their thinned ranks, a handy someone to have around when the detail runs across evidence of gruesome deaths and tales of supernatural “bad juju” goings on in that fort.

Writer-director Ashley Cahill probably needed that supernatural element to sell this screenplay pitch. But it didn’t sell for much. Look at the fort, when the stragglers from the unit finally come to it. It’s digitally painted silhouettes and big, non-functioning (digital) cannon.

Madsen’s Quantrill arrives and things go further South corresponding with that.

Goodwin isn’t bad even if Browne isn’t experienced enough to overcome the caricature her character is and Madsen’s just here for the hat and the ham.

It is what it is and is never more than that. But it’s a damned shame that nobody is satisfied with a simple “suicide mission” combat period piece any more. You’ve got to go “Overlord” or “Sinners” or whatever, because history, even fictionalized “Guns of Navarone” history, isn’t enough.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Malcolm Goodwin, Triana Browne, Okea Eme-Akwari, Furly Mac, Randall J. Bacon, Davonte Burse, Bryan Taronn Jones, Jeff Daniel Phillips and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ashley Cahill. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:17