Movie Nation

Why? Because it’s an IFC Midnight release. And they don’t let anything out on that nameplate that doesn’t have something on the “creepy” to “scared the bejeezus outta me” scale.

Let the healing begin!

A divisive election, culture wars that separated a country into midwestern and southern cultists flirting with fascism, and everybody else led by “Broadway liberals,” and here’s a show aimed at putting a little tickle in the bitchslap America handed Red State America.

I mean, come on, Indiana et al — just sit back and TAKE it!

“The Prom” had its preaching-to-the-choir musical comedy of “inclusion” moment back in 2018. A Ryan Murphy (“Glee!”) all-star treatment of it for Netflix was sure to have the subtlety of a camp sledgehammer wrapped in chiffon. It traffics in some of the very stereotypes it sends up and wastes a Big Name here and there.

But it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, over-the-top, from its casting to its run time.

Edgewater, Indiana has just canceled its prom because the “out” gay teen in town (newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman) wants to bring her girlfriend. A Broadway musical about this woman “nobody ever heard of,” Eleanor Roosevelt, has closed on opening night. Stars Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman (Meryl Streep and James Corden).

They need a “brand” reset, a quick public way to rinse the “failure” off their resumes, “a cause…some little injustice we can drive to” as Dee Dee puts it. What outrage is “trending?” Edgewater! Joined by Angie Dickinson (?!), a never-quite-star hoofer played by Nicole Kidman and waiter-actor-Juilliard alumnus (Andrew Rannells), they hitch a ride on a “Godspell! tour bus to roll in, strike a blow for justice and tolerance and blow away those yokels with showmanship.

“We will be the biggest thing to happen in Indiana, well, whatever happened in Indiana!” They will be fish-out-water in rural America, where “this Apples and Bees” place is but speaking in tongues to the simple, giddy Great White Way folk.

Kerry Washington plays the homophobic martinet in charge of the PTA, well-cast as the villain. Keegan-Michael Key is the show-tune fanguy principal.

The story ambles from outrage to seeming triumph, ugly twists that snatch defeat from victory, and our self-righteous “narcissists” (“I still don’t understand what’s wrong with that?”) have genuine attacks of conscience and try to clean up the bigger mess they’ve made of things — with lots and lots of Broadway show references, their only point of reference.

Need to come out of your shell? Think Fosse.

“If your hands are shaking, just’em into JAZZ hands!”

Streep’s career third-act of belting showtunes continues to shock and awe. Corden will sing anything anywhere and has a light way with the sad gay Broadway who gets sentimental over this poor high school kid’s plight, although there’s little subtle about this “I’m as gay as a bucket of wigs” caricature. And girl, you know there’s a makeover coming.

Key showed off his singing in “Jingle Jangle,” and Washington has surprising vocal chops. Kidman makes the most of a faded kitten chorine’s sad but empowering moment.

As a show, the tunes range from amusing vamps to exposition-packing filler. The emotional stuff doesn’t have nearly the punch of the vain self-parodies of Broadway and its “types” and the over-the-top insults.

“This isn’t America. This is INDIANA!”

Emma’s introductory tune, “Note to self, don’t be gay in Indiana…Note to self, people suck in Indiana” is typically topical. Dee Dee’s “I read three fourths of a news story and knew I HAD to come” points the jabs the other way.

“Join with me and sing this acceptance song…bigotry’s not big of me, and it’s not big of youuuuuu.”

Coming out stories — a subtext here — may never go out of style, but this feels instantly dated. Dressing Emma in “lesbian” sweater vests, stocking cap or butch overalls has “gay as a bucket of wigs” about it, too. The whole shebang could stand a healthy 2020 “updating.”

At its heart, “The Prom” is a “let’s put on a show” musical caught up in lip service about “reaching out” across America’s divides, “confronting” religious-backed intolerance without a prayer of changing a single mind — not on Broadway, not Netflix subscribers — especially those hate-watching it.

Murphy’s direction gives it giddy moments and long, maudlin drags between them. Fans of Broadway and spoofs like “Forbidden Broadway” (and “Glee!”) will get a kick out of big names playing versions of Patti Lupone divas and every small town gay guy who ever danced his way to fame.

The “You’re not alone/It gets better” message? Those who “get it” got it years ago. Those who don’t have already moved on to other things they’ll never get.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, some suggestive/sexual references and language 

Cast: Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key, Jo Ellen Pellman, Mary Kay Place, Andrew Rannells, Tracy Ullman and Kerry Washington.

Credits: Directed by Ryan Murphy, script by Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin, music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12

They don’t need an “experiment” to confirm what anybody of drinking age learns all too quickly — there’s “tipsy” and fun, “cute” drunk, “sloppy” (sentimental) inebriated and “mean” drunk.

They can see it in their students, teenagers who cut loose with a drinking-game/sprint around a local lake which invariably gets out of hand with pranks and general drunk-and-disorderly (vomiting) excess.

But as they’re academics, four longtime friends, colleagues at a Danish high school, why not couch their “research” in scientific/philosophical terms? They can see one of their ranks, Martin (Mads Mikkelson) is hurting and kind of lost. The lonely gym teacher Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) is always down for another Tuborg. Shy and unmarried choral teacher Peter (Lars Ranthe) figures “Why not?”

And then there’s the y gooungest member, psychology teacher Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), the father overwhelmed by the brood back home whose birthday the other three have gathered to celebrate. He sees sad, burnt-out history teacher Martin in need of an intervention. Instead, Nikolaj quotes this Norwegian psychological theorist Finn Skårderud who has the notion humans are naturally alcohol-deprived, that our optimum BAC (blood alcohol content) is .05% off. That’s how he gets “Not tonight, I’m driving” Martin to drink with them.

After all, what harm is there in “Another Round?”

With his latest film (titled
“Druk” in Danish), Thomas Vinterberg (“The Hunt”) dips into dipsomania in its Scandinavian form. He puts four men, their relationships, their careers and their futures in a blender filled with vodka, whisky, wine, beer and absinthe and gazes in no-real-surprise at what happens.

Sure, a better title might have been “Why Men Drink.” But this character study, set against an idea as politically incorrect as as Denzel’s “drugs give this airline pilot his edge” drama “Flight,” is fascinating.

“Another Round” is one of the best pictures of the year.

The story centers on Martin, raising two sons with a nurse-wife (Maria Bonnevie) who works nights, and thus barely sees. Mikkelson, as always, lets us catch the despair in his eyes. What Martin’s students notice is a teacher who has checked-out, endangering their performance on final exams that will determine college, career options, their entire future.

His friends see the signs, maybe even his eyes tearing up. But everybody gets distracted by this “experiment” and what they’ll “discover.” Buy breathalyzers, have a snootfull in the AM, maybe a refill closer to noon, hit that .05% mark and maintain it. No drinking after 8pm, no tippling on the weekends. Because…SCIENCE.

And what follows is something the movies haven’t dared show since Mothers Against Drunk Driving took control of the alcohol narrative. The choral teacher gets interested in his students’ lives and problems, the psyche-teacher Dad lightens up. The gruff, bullying coach warms-up to the unathletic shrimp, “Specs,” whom he’s written off.

And Martin? He takes an interest at home, charms his wife with vacation talk and reaches his students for maybe the first time all term.

His new subject? Churchill and FDR, Hemingway, Hitler and U.S. Grant and their relationships to alcohol.

Vinterberg has a lot of fun with this sidebar, showing snippets of assorted world leaders bending an elbow, Boris Yeltsin to Boris Johnson, politicians getting the public giggles (Bill Clinton with Yeltsin after God knows HOW many vodkas).

Everybody in this teaching quartet is convinced they’re seeing proof of Skårderud’s theory.

“I haven’t felt this good in AGES!” (in Danish with English subtitles).

But remember, SCIENCE. “Why not try going a bit higher?”

And so they do, with riotous sing-alongs, boozy staggering and roughhousing, filling water bottles with vodka for the office and of course, hiding bottles at work.

What can go wrong?

Zeroing in on Martin, Vinterberg gets at the obvious points — alcohol never solves problems — and goes beyond to consider “why men drink” and drinking camaraderie group-think, drinking to not think about your problems as you “take the edge off.”

The alcohol cure (Which can’t be what Skårderud had in mind, or can it?) has its benefits, which movies haven’t dared show in decades. But there are also chiseled-in-stone statistical risks, from damaging-to-fatal BAC levels to the probability that some among the four won’t cope or come out the other side.

The Melancholy Dane Mikkelson, always on the verge of tears in most films (a near-weeping Bond villain), makes the most of a rare opportunity to play it light. We even get a dazzling taste of his pre-acting life as a dancer.

Among the supporting players, Bonnevie (“Becoming Astrid”) gives subtle shadings to “the wife is the last to know,” a wife who may have her own distractions. And Larsen, a co-star of Mikkelson and Vinterberg’s “The Hunt,” is impressive as a tough, bluff guy with a sentimental streak that a couple of beers and a whisky or two brings out.

In a year when much of the world has been stuck at home, day drinking, “Another Round” is a welcome shot of bitters with a warm cognac chaser, and a bracing/revealing renewal of a grand Danish partnership, Vinterberg and Mads his muse.

MPA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Mads Mikkelson, Thomas Bo Larsen, Maria Bonnevie, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thomas Vinterberg. A Samuel Goldwyn release.’

Running time: 1:57

The novelty here, aside from the Louis Prima tune on the trailer, is that Bob punched back this time. Feb 26.

This has possibilities. A mercurial dude, a rising star in publishing.Feb. 5

The most ambitious holiday movie this year isn’t this Hallmark one or that animated one, a gay romance or a kiddie farce.

It’s “Just Another Christmas” and it comes from Brazil, where it’s titled “Tudo Bem No Natal Que Vem.”

Yes, it’s a comedy and the laughs are a bit broad — pratfalls, cakes in the face, mustache gags. And as is often the case, the giggles are too few in number.

But consider the themes and movies this mash-up is mashing up. There’s a little “It’s a Wonderful Life” and a lot of “Groundhog Day,” with just a hint of “Memento” without the violence and with (somewhat) less profanity.

Jorge (Leandro Hassum) is a middle class galoot who’s doing all right by himself, and by his family. Every year, all his wife’s relatives — and a couple of his — gather for Christmas dinner. Every year, he struggles to remember what his kids want, what wife Laura (Elisa Pinheiro) expects him to brave the mob scene at the stores to buy.

And he hates Christmas. He tolerates it for the sake of others, but just barely. Why? He’s told us in the opening narration.

He was born on Christmas Day. And “Everybody born on Christmas Day knows, we never get a decent birthday party,” as he notes (in Portuguese, with English subtitles — or if you choose, dubbed into English, German, etc.). For whatever reason, that blunts the “magic” of the day and leaves one an excuse to sour on it. When you hit your late teens, a lot of people “stop celebrating it.”

But when you get married and have kids, you have to go with the flow and at least pretend to enjoy it. And yes, this is totally a thing for many of us born on the same day as Jesus and Jimmy Buffett.

But on a typically raucous and dysfunctional Christmas eve, his brother (Rodrigo Fagundes) taps him for another cash “loan,” Uncle Victor’s insulted Laura’s sister for her “whorelike” cleavage and taken offense at being called a “senile jerk” and is taking the turkey he brought and leaving in a huff — again — and Jorge irks his mother-in-law — again.

Then Jorge suits up as Santa and takes a fall from the roof. He’s had enough of pretending. These people, young and old, are exhausting and it’s just not worth it.

That’s when catatonic grandpa Nhanhão (Levi Ferreira) speaks so that only Jorge will hear.

“You will find out what Christmas is good for,” he intones.

Sounds like a “curse?” That’s what Jorge figures, too, when he wakes up the next day, and it’s Christmas all over again. Only a whole year has passed. And he missed all of it.

That’s the gimmick here. Jorge, who hates Christmas, experiences nothing but a succession of Christmases. It’s “schizophrenia” or “amnesia” or what have you, but he even misses the brain scans and various diagnoses he’s gotten over the course of the year.

And what he misses multiplies each and every year, jumping ahead occasionally by several years at once, when he wakes up and discovers a kid who’s gotten taller, a mustache he can’t believe he’s grown or the open heart surgery scar from his “latest” bypass.

His family life is passing him by, the connection with them loosens and tears over his dismissal of the holiday. He misses funerals, doesn’t remember when the kids start dating, and who they’re dating now. Heck, there’s even a mistress (Danielle Winits) he doesn’t realize he’s decided he prefers to all this togetherness.

As somebody who figures a Christmas movie should be about something, and something to say about the holidays and family, etc., I have to say “Just Another Christmas” passes the test at least as well as “Happiest Season,” something “Jingle Jangle” failed completely.

Hassum is a pleasantly amusing lead, if entirely too prone to mugging. His reactions to his dilemma and what he’s supposed to learn from it are spot on. His “journey” takes him from “Whatever” to “Why me?” to “Why did you wake me up this year?” Jorge may not be a George Bailey in terms of jerking tears at the sentiment expressed. But he’s a step above Fred Claus and at least on a par with Tim Allen trapped in “The Santa Clause.”

The pacing is a bit pedestrian, even for an imitation “Groundhog Day” or (closer) “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The slapstick is “meh” and too many of the laugh lines are a blurt of profanity when you half-expect it.

And of all the Brazilian films I’ve seen over the years, “Just Another Christmas” is the least Brazilian — from the decor and “traditions” to many of the items on the Christmas meal menu. This picture has been totally Americanizado.

It’d be a candidate for a Hollywood or North American Netflix remake. But all they’d be changing was the actors and the language spoken. I wouldn’t mind the same crew taking another crack at this clever story, one with about twice as many jokes and sight gags to give it its due.

MPA Rating: TV-PG, profanity scattered throughout

Cast: Leandro Hassum, Elisa Pinheiro, Louise Cardoso, Danielle Winits, Rodrigo Fagundes, Lola Fanucchi

Credits: Directed by Roberto Santucci, script by Paulo Cursino. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

A smart cookie on screen, now she’s taking a shot at directing.

Taraji P. Henson will be making her feature directorial debut with “Two Faced,” which has nothing to do with the Batman universe. As the Hollywood Reporter tells us, it’s a high school comedy.

https://t.co/CXE4InrAvd https://t.co/SmLfWxYYPY https://twitter.com/THR/status/1337079731905236995?s=20

The attack was brazen, and because it was captured on video and involved North Korea, it dominated the news for months back in 2017.

The exiled brother of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s latest dictator for life from the Kim Dynasty, was approached by two pretty young women in Kuala Lumpur airport who suddenly smeared something in his face and skipped off. One even looked up at a CCTV camera and smiled on her way to a restroom to wash her hands.

The victim? He talked to police, was taken to the airport clinic, and was dead within an hour.

Who were these two murderously amoral black widows? And who put them up to it?

The answers seemed simple back then, as they do in the first act or Ryan White’s gripping investigative documentary, “Assassins.” Yes, this Indonesian woman in the LOL t-shirt and her Vietnamese colleague did it. But did they know what they were doing?

White talks to their families, and the lawyers for Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong. At first, they fret over daughters were “seduced” by the world outside a Vietnamese farm or Indonesian town. “Confess, if you did it,” Doan’s brother writes her.

The lawyers seem, at first, resigned to their clients’ murderous intent or at least complicity.

White interviews journalists, both inside press-restricted Malaysia and outsiders, to reveal an ever-widening web of conspiracy, complicity and the diplomatic entanglements that the case uncovered and trumped “justice” in the case at almost every turn.

But Malaysian police, snappish and defensive in press conferences, are exposed as “shallow” and not eager to stand up higher-ups who see relations with North Korea, Indonesia and (to a lesser degree) Vietnam as more important than a mere political murder in a public place, with video cameras that ensured the world could see their shame.

That footage, by the way? Leaked to the international media, but kept from the defense attorneys.

The film also gets into the Kim family history, the younger brother/dictator’s need to “keep them (others in government, in the country and in his family) terrified.” For a laugh or two, watch the “outraged” North Korean ambassador declare (in English), “The Malaysian police are desperate to shift the blame to us!” after we’ve seen the cluster of North Korean agents in video at the airport laying the groundwork the day of the murder.

The North Korean “mastermind” and “the godfather” and “the chemist” are identified by Malaysian journalist Hadi Azmi as, in scene after scene, he walks us through the crime’s set-up and the moment by moment events that the CCTV footage document.

We’re allowed to take the lawyers lightly — at first. With clients facing the death penalty, they chuckle inappropriately over the irregularities of the done-deal court and can seem disorganized. But they doggedly pursued the women’s back-stories, that this was a “prank” for a Japanese TV show, that they’d been groomed by doing these very sorts of stunts on strangers for a year by virtually every Korean agent the police ID’d and in some cases arrested and then let go.

White, who did “Ask Dr. Ruth” and a “Serena” documentary, is very good at getting the blood boiling over the injustices at every turn, the feigned outrage of North Koreans trying to bully their way out of blame and Malaysians who let the world know that they know who was involved and how, and just what they were willing to do about it.

The larger theme of “Assassination” is one of the unjust “justice” of press-restricting/oppressive states. When state actors are allowed to get away with murder, who else makes it to the regime’s “immune to prosecution” list? What chance does “the rule of law,” under strain even in democracies, have under such conditions?

It isn’t the Washington Post or New York Times that sticks its neck out in cases like this. It’s the reporter who knows the state’s blind spots and what they’re capable of willing to tell her or his people what’s going on who becomes the hero of a sordid story like “Assassins.”

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast:  Siti Aisyah, Hadi Azmi, Anna Fifield, Doan Thi Huong

Credits: Directed by Ryan White. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:44

“The Father” is as close to dementia as any of us would ever care to get. And yet, thanks to longevity that has turned recent generations into the longest-lived in history, it is touching more lives than ever.

French playwright Florian Zeller, adapting his play, and his peerless star Anthony Hopkins visualize the confusion, paranoia, panic and flashes of sentience that characterize Alzheimer’s and senility’s other variations, both from outside and within.

Oscar winner Olivia Colman is the daughter witnessing this collapse from outside, struggling to prepare her widowed, solitary father for the idea of a nursing home. At the very least, Anne wants him to go easier on the in-care help she keeps arranging and whom his tirades chase away.

“Anthony” is raging against “the dying of the light.” “I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone!” He’s at home in his large, comfy flat with his opera
CDs and his books. Why all the fuss?

“She’s stealing from me!” he hisses about the latest caregiver he’s run off.

But no matter how focused his fury, how articulate his defenses, he’s losing his memory. He’s mixing up conversations and people. He’s even confused, here and there, about what Anne looks like. Olivia Colman? Or is she another woman played by Olivia Williams? He tries to hide it, but we see his panic over this.

This “man” she’s met and planning on leaving London to live with in Paris — does he look like Rufus Sewell or this other fellow (Mark Gatiss)?

Is Anne leaving at all? Is she still with her husband? Did this conversation happen? Or that one? Is she gaslighting him, even if he can’t recall the term or the movie that it’s from?

From Anthony’s point of view, things he remembers that day or a day or two ago are being altered.

“She told me the other day. I’m not an idiot!”

Time is running in an ever-changing loop. Has he chased away his last in-home nurse, or are they just now interviewing another (Imogen Poots)?

“Can I ask you a question? Are you a nun? Then why are you speaking to me as if I’m retarded?”

Of course Hopkins can make us sense the panic, the long-retired engineer capable of mood swings of great charm, losing it, panic-stricken as he tries to hide that fact by covering up that he doesn’t know who this person he no longer recognizes is. And what about younger daughter Lucy, “the artist?”

“I hardly ever hear from the other one.”

Colman gives us glimpses of the heartache and guilt a child feels over being unable to do more for a parent that has become more than a mere relative can handle.

Other characters give us flashes of patience and compassion, and withering cruelty and callousness. Is Anthony imagining these, or are some of his grievances against the world legitimate?

Zeller uses the confines of a couple of sets well, revealing a few more square feet here and there as he goes along, letting the real estate reveal Anthony’s real state. It’s not a play that’s been “opened up.” “The Father” is all about a world closing in.

Demographics and the slow pace of medical improvements in gerantology make “The Father” a story with universal appeal. It’s universally chilling and sad, because no one would wish this on themselves or anybody else.

And Hopkins, Colman, Williams, Sewell and Poots give us an eyeful and and earful of a fate awaiting far too many of us in this quietly gripping and intimate drama.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic material 

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots, Ayesha Dharker and Mark Gatiss.

Credits: Directed by Florian Zeller, script by Christopher Hampton and Florian ZEller, based on Zeller’s play. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:37

A deep bow, from the waist, for any actor who takes a flier on a crazy idea of a movie, on a nutty dreamer with a screen-written dream, on a cracked visionary with the unlikely name Adam Egypt Mortimer.

That’s what Joe Manganiello did. He’s the “name” who signed on the dotted line and got the lunacy that is “Archenemy” made.

He plays a hulking, Letterman-bearded drunk, raving and weaving stories of his life back on “Chromium,” the world where he used to live, where his blood was blue and he was like “a god” who “used to punch holes through space and time,” and who once saved that world by stopping the evil Cleo and her “void machine.”

But…hiccup…”it was the last thing I ever did.”

Now he’s here, telling these tall tales, inventively visualized as lurid hot pink and Slurpee blue comic book animation in his mind or the minds of his listeners. Don’t underestimate this rummy, friends. He’s a superhero!

“I’m not a f—–g superhero!”

And he didn’t fly here from Chromium. Oh no.

“I didn’t fly through space. I came through the membranes of reality.”

OK. The one guy to take this flake he labels “Max Fist” seriously is Hamster (Skylan Brooks of “The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete”). He’s a manic reporter-wannabe, weaseling his way into a job with an online news organization through his stories on Max Fist, his life on Chromium and his plight now.

Hamster’s sister is trying to support them by drug dealing. Indigo (Zolee Griggs of that recent Wu-Tang Clan TV series) wears her dreads long and blue and her nerve on her sleeve when running errands for the wisecracking villain who calls himself The Manager (Glenn Howerton).

He’s fond of wearing tennis gear, and down for pushing his target market for street drugs younger — “the sippy cup crowd. If they’re old enough to download porn on their iPad, they’re old enough to get high!”

He’s joking. He just makes the self-described “sugarplum fairy interstellar princess” more nervous every time they meet.

Threats are both real — from the heavily-armed drug dealer and his minions — and maybe imagined. There’s this Cleo (Amy Seimetz) that Max rants about, the SuperVillain on Chromium whom he defeated but did not vanquish. Might she be just a figment of his stories?

As “Archenemy” flips back and forth from the bloody, violent, lawless “reality” of “Edge City,” its fantasy-“present” and the animated Chromium of Max’s fever dreams, a fundamental flaw drags on any notion of reveling in its gruesome violence and deranged archetypes, in the “story” that isn’t much of a story at all.

There’s no “reality” to ground this in, no baseline that feels real. So there’s no doubt about Max’s true background. None.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for.

And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

But take heart. More drugs are legal in a lot more places now. And nothing converts a loopy, trippy over-reach into a “cult” film better than hallucinogens, shared by the watch party.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Joe Manganiello, Zolee Griggs, Skylan Brooks, Glenn Howerton and Amy Seimetz

Credits: Directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer, script by Adam Egypt Mortimer and Luke Passmore. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:31