Movie Nation

This LA-set “friends take stock of life after a tragedy’ was produced by basketball star Victor Oladipo.

“If Not Now, When?” streams and hits some theaters Jan. 8

Film buffs salivating over the prospect of David Fincher taking on the making of “Citizen Kane” may be left a tad dry-mouthed by “Mank,” his Netflix bio-pic of “Kane” co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Filmed in digital video black and white, it’s a mostly sizzle-free blend of fact and fiction based on Fincher’s late father Jack Fincher’s screenplay. “Mank” is a fair-enough revisit of the writing credit battle over that “Kane” screenplay, a fine buffing of the image of actress and William Randolph Heart mistress Marion Davies and another acting showcase for the great Gary Oldman.

Oldman — who is terrific in the part — had his own battles with substance abuse — like the wit/screenwriter he portrays in the title role. He’s a high-mileage 62, playing a higher-mileage 43 year-old. Pairing him up with Tom Pelphrey as brother Joseph Mankiewicz and Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s long-suffering wife, “Poor Sara” Mankiewicz, both actors half Oldman’s age, makes that gap obvious and worth wincing over.

But Amanda Seyfried is Brooklyn streetwise and warm Davies, a reinvention not unlike what Tarantino did for Sharon Tate with “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” And Charles Dance brings the upper class menace to newspaper baron and “Citizen Kane” villain Hearst.

“Mank” is built on two timelines — the writing of the first draft of “Kane” in a remote ranch in Victorville, California, where Welles’ producer and confidante John Houseman (Sam Troughton) drops the easily-distracted alcoholic Mank off with a German nurse (Monika Gossmann) and an English typist (Lily Collins). His orders? Write the first draft of “American,” the working title that would become “Citizen Kane.”

Houseman is worried sick about losing his job for not getting this piece of work done.

“I’ve never BEEN fired.” To which Mank quips, “I’ve never NOT been fired.”

The second timeline is Mank’s Hollywood history, a former New York newspaper drama critic who came to California and struck it rich as a screenwriter and uncredited “script doctor.” Well, he would have struck it rich if he hadn’t gambled and drank away his paychecks and pissed off everybody he ever worked for.

We too-briefly see his place within the mob of New York journalists he helped lure to town at the end of the silent film era — S.J. Perelman, Charles MacArthur, George S. Kaufman and Ben Hecht.

And we see him run afoul of studio chiefs, most famously Louis B. Mayer of MGM. Arliss Howard is a fine actor who suggests too little of the monstrous, bullying weeper Mayer, although he manages a fine tirade or two.

The Jack Fincher script’s conceit follows the Hollywood lore that Mank’s social mixing with Hearst, Davies and Mayer inspired his take-down of Hearst et al with “Kane.” Mank’s sharp tongue — loosened when he drank, which was always, led to cutting wisecracks. He insulted one bigshot too many too often and was banished, so the legend goes. He took what he knew about the Hearst story and circle and scandalized it into a movie.

He even named the sled after Hearst’s nickname for his girlfriend’s genitals. As Marian was fond of saying then and says often in the film, “Aw, Nertz!”

The story wanders far from facts as it pinpoints political differences as the source of this friction, making the Hollywood division over the 1934 California gubernatorial race — with union guys like the nascent Writer’s Guild pulling for socialist author Upton Sinclair in his battle with the Republican establishment candidate, backed by the Big Studios.

And the film compresses the efforts to suppress “Citizen Kane” into furtive and fervid calls and visits to Victorville. Mayer, his pal and sometime backer Hearst and others fretted over Mank and Welles “hunting dangerous game” in sending up Hearst. There’s even the suggestion of remorse as Davies sweetly confronts the writer in a scene that never happened.

Yes, Welles first used Mankiewicz for radio scripts, and tried to take sole credit for the Kane screenplay. But decades of exhaustive research have demonstrated his contribution to the rewriting was substantial, and that his direction was paramount to the film’s reputation. Robert Carringer’s “The Making of Citizen Kane” settled that argument 40 years ago.

Fincher creates a detailed if somewhat visually washed-out milieu of smokey executive suites, baroque Hearst Castle (San Simeon) parties and nightclubs contrasted with the “dry” austerity of Mank’s desert writing retreat.

Oldman is compelling, first scene to last. Yes, the man can play a convincing wit and convincing drunk. I wanted more twinkle from him, but the decision was made to play this Mank as a cynic and alcoholic burnout. Even his younger scenes lack the “court jester” personality to match the zingers.

At least Seyfried and Dance sparkle in support.

The passing parade of witty writers and Hollywood legends is given seriously short shrift, with lightweight casting to match. The players, by and large, aren’t up to making a cutting impression playing larger-than-life figures in tiny character actor roles. A decent Houseman impression here, a hint of Norma Shearer there — that’s about it.

The uptempo jazz that dominates the score cannot disguise the film’s stolid pacing.

And “Mank’s” abrupt finale, at the end of a meandering story of writing and remembering (Welles, played by Tom Burke, is barely in this), leaves something to be desired as well.

The funny lines are here. But where’s the fun, the breathless/childish conspiracy it took to make the movie, the boyishness Mankiewicz claimed Welles (who was just 24) brought out in him writing “Kane,” which Mank enthusiastically realized would be the defining work of his career?

Fincher’s made a sometimes fascinating/sometimes plodding recreation of film history, perhaps with its own share of Oscar bait attached. But his richly-detailed movie just reminds us that the more modest “RKO 281,” about the actual filming of “Kane,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” and “Me and Orson Welles,” about Welles’ days shaking up New York theater, were a lot more entertaining.

MPA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins,
Tom Pelphrey, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Burke, Arliss Howard and Charles Dance

Credits: Directed by David Fincher, script by Jack Fincher. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:13

Disney goes back to the “Enchanted” well for “Godmothered,” a Jillian Bell comedy that casts her as a dizzy fairy godmother-in-training trying to make one little girl’s wish for a “happily ever after” come true.

Bell is in fine (PG) madcap form here. Isla Fisher plays that “little girl” who stopped believing in fairy godmothers not long after writing her “meet a cute boy” wish on a note. And June Squibb and Jane Curtin are almost amusing as the elder sisters in a sort of Hogwarts for wand-wishing pumpkins-to-carriage training school, “Motherland.”

But a script that scrimps on laughs — not enough zingers or pratfalls — and relies on sentiment to get by lets them down.

Bell, of “Brittany Runs a Marathon” and “Rough Night,” is Eleanor, youngest student at Motherland, where Curtin plays the head mistress and Squibb (“Nebraska”) the narrator/mentor and school DJ.

The school hasn’t had a “mission” for a fairy godmother in ages, and rumor has it if SOMEbody on Earth doesn’t believe and have her wish come true, they will close their doors and be retrained “as tooth fairies.” So klutzy Eleanor takes it on herself to grab a letter and fulfill its author’s fondest wish.

“Knock’em dead, kid,” co-conspirator Agnes (Squibb) says.

“Oh, if everything goes right, nobody’s gonna die!”

It turns out the letter writer, Mackenzie (Fisher) wrote that note decades ago. Now she’s a single mom and very jaded TV news producer who sees “fairy tale constructs” as teaching the dark lesson that “normal life is not enough.”

“Mac” can’t convince this whack-job to leave her be. A few inept waves of the magic wand later, Eleanor’s moved in and with a little help from Gary the enchanted raccoon, is out to change Mac’s life, and the lives of her tween Mia (Willa Skye) and stage-frightened teen Jane (Jillian Shea Spaeder).

Can she find love for Mackenzie, maybe that cute Hugh Prince reporter (Santiago Cabrera) at work?

The under-trained fairy godmother creates chaos in a pumpkin patch, wrecks the power grid and gets on TV and goes viral with a sledding accident.

Has Bell ever done a horror movie? The lady’s got a blood-curdling scream for the ages.

The Boston settings shine in this winter wonderland, the cute bits are somewhat cute, the flying and wand effects post-Potter polished and the soundtrack peppered with hits from Kool and the Gang, Nilsson, Steppenwolf and the Julie Andrews songbook, including a sweet sing-along in front one particular Boston landmark.

The brief glimpse of Motherland, where the rules about wishes and “true love” are covered, is blessedly brief. That’d be the perfect place for it to bog down in “myth making.” But the story proper is a letdown — recycled and drawn out.

What they were going here was a quick and cheap (ish) made-for-TV “Enchanted,” and that’s how this plays — light on the charm, far fewer laughs, heavy on effects. And blood-curdling screams.

MPA Rating: PG (beer)

Cast: Jillian Bell, Isla Fisher, June Squibb, Jane Curtin, Santiago Cabrera, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Jillian Shea Spaeder, Willa Skye

Credits: Directed by Sharon Maguire, script by Melissa K. Stack. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:49

“All My Life” is “The Big Sick” without laughs — not a one — and without the charm, well, most of it, anyway.

“True story” or not, it’s a check-box romantic weeper that checks those boxes — Meet Cute (meh), She makes the first move, “BIG romantic gesture,” that first “Must’ve pulled a muscle” grimace of foreshadowing, CAT Scan — without a hint of style and precious little heart.

Pairing up the always-game Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”) with Harry Shum Jr. doesn’t pay off. Wasn’t he the groom’s best man/BFF in “Crazy Rich Asians?” Remember who he had chemistry with in that one? The filmmakers here didn’t.

There no sparks — comic or otherwise — between them or emanating from a lackluster supporting cast. There’s probably a more interesting list of “names” in colorful bit players who turned this down when they saw how blah the script was.

Rothe adds another college student to her resume as Jennifer, a New Yorker in pursuit of a degree in psychology, who hits a sports bar with her besties, only to be hit on by the dully obnoxious trio that includes Sol (Shum).

She flirts. She makes what passes for a first move, and does that all through the relationship.

He’s an online targeted marketing whiz suffering through a dull job with dullards, but whose secret passion is cooking. All the super-friendly food truck dudes know him.

They court, he establishes that he can’t sing, but is willing to try it around her and she fakes being into running and exercise to get past that “first date.”

What’s that wily animator-turned-screenwriter Todd Rosenberg setting up, kids? Why, that “big gesture” — a proposal involving Sol singing Oasis, and that first unusual pain? “Must’ve pulled something” working out.

There’s a novel and downright poignant touch to the inevitable doctor visits/treatment scenes, and it involves a dog and that’s all I’ll say about it. Spoiling the one interesting twist to a straight-up cut-and-paste screenplay wouldn’t be fair.

But don’t harbor any illusions about “All My Life.” Everything about this couple, from the way they pair up to the ways their romance plays out, feels scripted and inorganic, people “acting” like they’re soul mates because that’s in the job description. They know it, and we know it from watching them.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for brief language

Cast: Jessica Rothe, Harry Shum Jr.

Credits: Directed by Marc Meyers, script by Todd Rosenberg. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:31

Let’s share a little of the older generation’s infatuation with the sentimental memoir about the hard life an Irish mother, “Angela’s Ashes,” by showing the wee ones “Angela’s Christmas,” a witty and warm bit of Frank McCourt in holiday animated form.

It’s about his mother Angela’s childhood in 1914 Limerick, and it’s introduced by Malachy McCourt, Frank’s brother, in whimsical and nostalgic voice-over narration.

Angela (voiced by Lucy O’Connell) tustles with her brother as she joins the family for Christmas Eve Mass.

It’s St. Joseph’s, as Malachy recalls, “a church so cold if you didn’t go in with a cough, you certainly came out with one.”

Angela is concerned that Baby Jesus, the doll in the church’s creche, will freeze and catch his death all under-dressed in swaddling clothes as he is. She kidnaps him to “warm him up.”

“This is where myself and Aggie (her little sister) sleep. But be careful,. She ripped the head off my last doll.”

There are dull sermon jokes, a “miracle” that involves a Baby Jesus sneeze, an outhouse gag, Angela’s version of warming the doll — “wrap you up like a little holy sausage” — a song, some impoverished sadness, and a lot of irreverent wit.

“Mother of GOD! Is that the Baby Jesus from St. Joseph’s? Oh…JEEsus!”

Ruth Negga (“Loving”), as the long suffering mother (Frank and Malachy’s grandmother) is the other stand-out in the voice cast.

“His mummy will be sick with worry!”

If you’re watching a McCourt Christmas animation this holiday, make it this one, as there’s nothing remotely as warm and fun in the sequel, “Angela’s Christmas Wish.”

MPA Rating: TV-Y

Cast: The voices of Lucy O’Connell, Ruth Negga and Malachy McCourt

Credits: Written and directed by Damien O’Connor. A Netflix release.

Running time: :30

The McCourt family’s “Angela’s Ashes” brand finally produces one offshoot too many with the animated sequel, “Angela’s Christmas Wish.” It’s an inferior and longer follow-up to “Angela’s Christmas” of a few years back, with a little sentiment but barely enough warmth to be worth the bother.

Still, if your kids are into wee children with wee brogues, it’s only 47 minutes of TV-worthy (far short of feature film) animation. They’ll have time left over to watch “Angela’s Christmas” all over again.

What’s missing is the charming voice-over narration of Malachy McCourt, brother to family memoirist Frank McCourt, who told the story of their mother’s hard Irish upbringing in “Angela’s Ashes.” Malachy provided the twinkle and context in the first film, about their mother’s infatuation with the baby Jesus doll in their local church’s Nativity scene (creche).

“Angela’s Christmas Wish” is set after their father goes off to Australia “for work,” and mother (voiced by Ruth Negga) has to keep spirits up for the holidays two long years later.

Angela’s (Lucy O’Connell) still talking to Baby Jesus, and making wishes. But to make this Big Wish come true — getting Da’ home for Christmas — she’ll need bother Pat (Brendan Mullins) to pitch in. I mean, a girl can’t dig all the way to Australia by herself — in winter, no less.

The story’s got a couple of things Angela wants to happen, the one closer to home being that neighbor McGinty’s new calf survive the holidays. A visit from the vet (Jared Harris) would make all the difference. But he can’t be persuaded. Perhaps his daughter Dorothy (Lola Metcalfe) can use her influence.

The shenanigans this time include attempts to book passage — or stow-away — on a departing ship (World War I, underway in 1915, impacted Ireland indirectly and is never mentioned).

There are songs, as the kids try to earn money singing for the men down t’the pub, and there’s a bit of lump in the throat sentiment for the finale. The funny stuff isn’t as funny, the cute moments not cute at all, and the humor?

Not enough, alas. The animation seems malnourished even if the kids don’t, and the laughs are in short supply.

You’re better off re-watching the first film, to be Frank. Or Malachy.

MPA Rating: TV-Y

Cast: The voices Lucy O’Connell, Ruth Negga, Lola Metcalfe, Brendan Mullins and Jared Harris.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Damien O’Connor. A Brown Bag Films production, for Netflix.

Running time: :47

Warners is moving its entire 2021 film lineup, big titles all, to a theatrical and HBO Max simultaneous release schedule. Pandemic or not, will anybody go out to a theater if they can watch new releases at home? Not likely.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/warner-bros-hbo-max-theaters-dune-matrix-4-1234845342/

Having trouble sleeping?

Here’s a maudlin Filipino melodrama set mostly in Morocco that has scenery and very little else going for it save for the promise of a nap it prompts.

Flat performances, feeble attempts at humor, heartless grabs at sentiment, “Finding Agnes” is a terrible representative of an industry that produces poignant dramas and spectacular action pics — many of them for Netflix.

This is the dullest film Netflix has ever made in the Philippines.

It’s about a wealthy businessman (Jelson Bay) who flies to Marrakech to fulfill his mother’s dying wish. Virgilio, who renamed himself “Brix,” is as emotional as he is interesting — as in, not at all.

His mother ditched him as a child, twisting up his Rubik’s cube and assuring him (in Tagalog, with English subtitles) that “I will come right back when you’ve solved this.”

She didn’t. Over 25 years later she shows up, meets him, but he can’t set aside much time for her. And then she promptly dies of a stroke.

At the B & B Mom ran in Marrakech, there’s a young woman named Cathy (Sue Ramirez) who shares Brix’s last name now in charge of the place. Brix takes his sweet time asking her the Big Question. Everything in this movie takes its sweet time about everything.

Cathy and Brix have to undertake a get-to-know-each-other quest to carry out Mom’s final wishes, and as they do, they’ll get an idea of why Mom came here and what she did in the intervening 25 years.

Every single thing about this, every scene, has the pace of pandesol (Filipino bread) batter slowly dripping out of the mixing bowl.

Mom’s activities have a bland, predictable righteousness. Brix’s reactions to each revelation and meeting each person who knew his mother are stunningly unemotional and insipidly scripted.

“Too bad she had a heart attack,” he quips.

Too bad all around.

MPA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Jelson Bay, Sue Ramirez, Sandy Andolong

Credits: Directed by Marla Ancheta A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

“Billie” is the far and away the most definitive Billie Holiday biography ever put on screen, a film that celebrates her magic and examines the demons that haunted her, chemical and human.

It’s a film built out of two tragedies, Holiday’s — she died at 44 in 1959, at the end of a long, drug-fueled decline — and that of a dogged reporter hellbent on telling her story in a book which she never got around to writing. Linda Lipnack Kuehl, a school teacher and widely published freelance writer, spent eight years interviewing Holiday’s friends, family and generations of colleagues before they were gone and their often-frank memories of this singular talent were lost forever. Kuehl recorded those interviews on cassette, but died in 1978, having struggled to wrestle all this material into a book she never finished.

Veteran sports documentary filmmaker James Erskine (“The Battle of the Sexes,” ” The Ice King”) builds his film around those tapes of Kuehl’s hours and hours of interviews — some friendly, some that turned testy as she dug into dark parts of Holiday’s saga. Legions of jazz legends who worked with her were still around in the ’70s and agreed to talk for the book. Count Basie, Billy Ekstine, Barney Kessel, Tony Bennett and music impresario John Hammond are here, with friends, one-time roommates, comics and sidemen who knew and played with her or appeared on the bill with her at The Apollo, Cafe Society, Club Hot-Cha and the like.

There’s even a snippet of singer Carmen McRae giving her compelling reason for not doing an interview.

Early champions talk of her instinctive use of her voice as a version of a horn or reed instrument. Paired up with trumpeter Louis Armstrong early on and sax player Lester Young later, they turned many of her solo vocal recordings into the most sophisticated duets in jazz history.

Kuehl’s interview recordings are a beautifully-preserved treasure trove of opinions, eyewitness accounts and frank adulation, and equally frank assessments of Holiday’s tastes in drugs and sexual partners (actress Tallulah Bankhead was linked with her for a while), all heard through a 1970s filter. Narcotics agents who pursued her and colleagues who acknowledge how much “she liked being high” sat down for chats.

Kuehl also found a psychotherapist who evaluated her at one point (she was arrested for drugs twice, served a year in prison) and refers to as a “psychopath” in a clinical sense. Interviewing an early pimp, from back when the Baltimore girl born Eleanora Fagan was just a child, puts that into perspective.

Raped, a sex worker at 13, with all manner of interview subjects talking about music business types using her by becoming sexual partners when they thought Kuehl’s recorder was off (Benny Goodman is among those named) paints a sad picture.

Hearing the many dated suggestions that “she liked it rough” and was beaten by more than one lover — publicly by her last husband — is chilling.

Erksine intercuts Kuehl’s intereviews with generous helpings of Holiday performances (live TV, and on film) and radio and TV interviews she gave during her short, storied career. You can make out the voice of Mike Wallace among those asking the questions.

But unlike those talking to Lady Day while she was alive, Kuehl didn’t need to dance around the hard questions. Her pugnacious challenging of music legend Hammond with the accusations that he tried to make her into a “colored mammy” stuck singing only blues and fired her from Basie’s band, bandmates’ stories of her being forced to wear dark makeup to appease Southern venues that booked that band, Artie Shaw’s failed efforts to integrate his ensemble with her, anecdotes about the drug dealer who’d attach heroin or coke packets to her dog’s collar for delivery to her New York apartment, it’s no wonder Kuehl got blocked when she tried to organize this treasure trove into a book.

Erskine’s film does that work for her, no doubt leaving much out, but painting a moving portrait of a tormented artist who made great art as she slowly and steadily self-destructed.

MPA Rating: unrated, drug content, profanity, off camera violence

Cast: Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, John Hammond, Sylvia Syms, Tony Bennett, Barney Kessel, Harry “Sweets” Edison, “Pigmeat” Markham, Linda Lipnack Kuehl, many others

Credits: Directed by James Erskine. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:37

The generic nature of international pop songs, pop stars and “American Idol” TV shows is the been-there/voted-him-out subtext of “Fierce,” a Polish dramedy about a teen who competes in a singing competition to get back at the father who ran out on her mother before she was born.

Skinny young things who can sing on key (more or less) are a universal commodity — apparently. The language they sing in is less important than the skin they flash and the runway-ready look they put out there.

“Fierce” doesn’t give us much of the context that its “Music Race” TV show thrives in, because it doesn’t need to. Such shows are a smash around the globe because of the formula that Simon Cowell perfected. Singers give their all, the “right” ones are pre-destined for glory and those deemed unworthy are trashed by The Hanging Judge on the three-judge panel — humiliated.

On “Music Race,” that’s one-hit-wonder Olo, played with the attendant surly superiority necessary by Maciej Zakoscielny.

“You’re all WET,” he taunts each loser, whereupon a watery deluge is dumped on the sad runner-up on live TV.

But years ago, before his one-hit, he was just another boy with a girlfriend back in the village of Rozalin. And now, the smart-ass/conflict-seeking producer of “Music Race” (Tomasz Karolak) has decreed that they’ll take the show to his “hometown” on a talent hunt. And Olo is irked. With reason.

Marta (Katarzyna Sawczuk) grew up knowing who Mom (Anita Sokolowska) always maintained was her father — her high school love. Now’s their chance to confirm this, at least have the satisfaction of telling Olo off, maybe on TV.

But when that doesn’t go according to plan, Marta, an ill-tempered would-be Goth who goes by “Fierce,” has to enter the competition just to get close to and to “humiliate” him the way he’s humiliated her and her mother.

The players are probably better than the soppy script they’re forced to muddle through. Hard to tell, though. Leaning so heavily on the show within the movie turns the film into a “Poland’s Got Talent” episode. Not sure who wants to see that, even though Sawczuk is a winsome presence with a pleasant-but-thin singing voice.

Teasing that single solitary idea out for nearly two hours takes some doing. The script manages this by diverting most of the attention away from Fierce, her mom and the kid (Adrian Majewski) who is sweet on her. So we see the sordid drama of Olo’s life, a loveless love affair with PR benefits with co-judge singer/social media influencer Ewa (Julia Kaminska), the spirited manipulations of the producer and the lame only-one-singer-performs “competition” segments.

As the contest goes on and Olo and Ewa try to sabotage her, Marta/Fierce becomes a viral sensation. Shockingly.

How will all this play out? Unamusingly, unsurprisingly and sentimentally.

You don’t need 30 minutes to figure this out, much less 118.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, profanity and sexuality

Cast: Katarzyna Sawczuk, Maciej Zakoscielny, Julia Kaminska, Anita Sokolowska, Tomasz Karolak, Adrian Majewski, Urszula Dudkiak

Credits: Directed by Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz, script by Piotr Jasek, Julia Kaminiska, Wojciech Nerkowski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58