Movie Nation

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

British theater cinema of the 1950s was famed for its “kitchen sink” realism, working class movies that showed how people really lived . “Look Back in Anger” and “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and the like set their stories against the struggles of coping with post-war austerity in Broke Britannia.

And it wasn’t just the Brits who survived the war who endured those years. The only novelty of writer-director Fritz Urschitz’s “Where I Belong,” his homage to “kitchen sink” cinema, is that the young woman living with her old, unemployable and deluded father is Austrian. They were expats who fled their homeland when Hitler’s Germany annexed the (mostly) willing Austrians in the 1938 “Anschluss.”

If you’ve ever wondered at the plight of Austrians not named Von Trapp, who only got as far as Britain in fleeing the Nazis, here’s your answer. Rosemarie (Natalie Press of “Suffragette”) and her father Friedrich (veteran character player Matthias Habich of “Downfall,” “Enemy at the Gates” and “The Reader”) spent the war interned as “enemy aliens,” stuck in a camp from 1939-45.

Now it’s 1959, and 20something Rosemarie is still struggling to find her place and plan her future. She works in a haberdashery during the day and attends secretarial school at night, but loves dancing to the newfangled rock’n roll with her few friends.

But time has stood still at home. Her father is obsessed with being compensated for the big house they fled in Vienna. He has no lawyer, and is getting nowhere with an Austrian government that tried to pretend they were an “occupied” country, and that they didn’t turn a blind eye to properties that illegally changed-hands when people fearing fascism or the coming Holocaust fled.

“I will not give in,” her father assures Rosemarie (in German with English subtitles). “I will get our property back!”

Rosemarie isn’t counting on it. She has the vague outline of a plan — pass her exams, get a job in London, start her life…finally.

Then an old acquaintance of her father’s, an old “friend” from the camp, shows up at their door. Anton, given an oily Old World charm by Johannes Krisch (“A Hidden Life,””In the Fade,” “The Tobacconist”), was younger than her father, and has made something of himself. He has a car. He has means.

And it’s not coincidence when he shows up to buy fabric for a tailored suit at the shop where Rosemarie works. Unlike the English boy she’s half-interested in, Anton can show her things, maybe even buy her things.

Unpolished and plain, she is flattered by the attention.

Urschitz’s debut feature takes a sharp turn into straight melodrama from that point on, with every obstacle, pitfall and poor choice pre-ordained. The drab interiors and exteriors mirror the dramatically flat odyssey that our heroine embarks on.

There’s more to stories told in this era than just milieu, and that’s where Urschitz comes up short. The performances are fine, but trapped within the parameters of a script that lacks imagination and spark. Urschitz, who hasn’t made a film since this 2012 release, leaves promising avenues unexplored, lapsing into over-familiar plot turns.

Take away the citizenship status of the principals, and “Where I Belong” could be any other late ’50s slice-of-life melodrama with only the German conversations separating it from decades of far more compelling and novel stories.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity

Cast: Natalie Press, Johannes Krisch, Matthias Habich

Credits: Written and directed by Fritz Urschitz. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:30

Get a load of that image above. That’s Ryan Phillippe as a Delta Force commando, shooting, punching and brawling his way to the rescue of his son, and that Supreme Court Justice’s daughter the kid crushes on — kidnapped as part of a pro-gun control conspiracy in a movie with the catchy title “The 2nd.”

Battered and bloodied, and armed with an assault rifle, he’s in need of a ride. So he’s written a sign in his own blood to indicate his intentions to anybody who might drive by.

That’s the cleverest touch in this pig-headed, ham-fisted “Die Hard” on a closed college campus.

Put Phillippe in the hero role, cast C-movie villain Casper Van Dien (“Starship Troopers”) as the suited, sunglassed heavy and dress screen newcomer Lexi Simonsen in cut-off shorts as the damsel in distress, and here we go!

It’s the sort of movie where the hero’s bonafides — his resume — is read out over the walkie talkie by the villain once they realize “who we’re dealing with.”

It’s the sort of movie where the kidnappers/terrorists are professionals in everything but slinging the accent of the country they’re supposed to be from. James Logan‘s character is Russian agent and a a master of dialects — Southern drawl to (Southern?) Russia?

“I ate man in GULAG!”

It’s a place where longtime heavies like Richard Burgi move up to “the heavy’s boss” roles, so that the next generation of bad guys can wear the shades.

It’s a film where all the baddies take dramatic sips from their whisky glass before and after delivering a line.

And it’s the sort of movie where I’d tell you to fast forward to the 77 minute mark, where our damsel — first seen in Posh SouCal College’s fencing class — throws down with a villainess, with swords.

“En garde, BITCH!”

I’d tell you that if that scene and that fight held any interest at all. But it doesn’t.

That’s the problem with “Die Hard” knockoffs. We’ve seen too many versions to be surprised. The brawls are paint-by-numbers. The bad guy “escapes” require hilarious “pauses” in the hero’s pursuit.

We’ve been treated to too many actors-turned-screenwriters (Paul Taegel) who might as well have “FOREshadowing!” in a flashing title on all the scenes where this character shows her swordplay or that one — the son (Jack Griffo) — lists all the martial arts his Delta Force dad has taught him over the years.

But hey, give a guy credit for some decent villain trash talk.

“I see subterfuge is pointless. Put the a—–e on!” “You know, three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

Phillippe has found more interesting work on TV in recent years, with “Secrets and Lies” and “Shooter” giving him a career second wind.

But there’s no “acting” here, the shootouts and fistfights are OK but nothing special.

Films like “The 2nd” — quite aside from this one’s loopy “afterthought” politics — don’t burnish anybody’s resume.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Casper Van Dien, Lexi Simonsen, Jack Griffo, Richard Burgi, William Katt and James Logan

Credits: Directed by Brian Skiba, script by Paul Taegel. A Voltage film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:33

A drama about a Guantanamo prisoner, this Feb. release also stars Zachary Levi.

Actors are always encouraged to “make work for yourself” — start a theater group, put on shows, write a story with a plum part in it for yourself.

So there’s no such thing as a “vanity project” in that world, not in a general sense.

Still, when you’ve written yourself that part, when the film is self-distributed, and when there’s a young woman in the cast with the same surname (His daughter?) as the character actor who co-scripted himself a leading role, well…

“King of Knives” is a melancholy late-midlife crisis holiday comedy built around Gene Pope. If you’ve ever seen him in anything, you might’ve thought “Oh, he’s Mark Ruffalo’s older brother.”

Pope plays a well-heeled 60something ad-man whose biggest gripe is losing an account because a younger colleague has “rebranded” the mascot of a toilet paper company client. Sammy the Squirrel has gone “urban.” Yeah, it’s offensive.

Frank’s biggest fear is that he’ll be canned for that, or for being old in a profession that loves “young.” And he’s still making payments on that Maserati convertible.

There’s the hint of something sad, a loss, that happened not that long ago in Frank’s life. It’s his wedding anniversary, and there’s a family party. So on this day, of all days, he decides to be late getting home, stopping to smoke himself a J on the way.

His buttoned-down daughter (Emily Bennett) might not approve. Kaitlin, her just-go-with-it-sister (Roxi Pope) laughs it off. Kathy, his wife? You haven’t lived until you’ve heard prim, earth momma Mel Harris of TV’s “thirtysomething” deliver this insult.

“I don’t want you driving high.” “YOU do!” “Yeah, but I handle that s–t better than you do!”

The “loss,” which everybody dances around, was of Danny, the other adult child in their family. And over the course of a weekend, Frank and Kathy — mostly Frank — will deal with all that’s gone wrong, their part in it and “Where does life take us from here?”

The “holiday” ingredients are mostly a suburban neighbor’s over-the-top Christmas decor. Frank gets blitzed and buzzed and talks a would-be groom out of the “trap” of marrying his wife’s niece — at their engagement party. He begs his way into a Bushwick (Brooklyn) party Kaitlin’s been invited to, gets drunker and hits on her (girl)friend Darla (Kara Young) and then submits to a sensitive sprite’s (Justin Sams) offer of a tarot card reading.

That scene is touching, life-altering for Frank, and gives the film its title. Frank is a sad soul braced for a cruel world, the King of Knives (Swords, actually). Frank starts to take action and take responsibility for his mistakes, sort of.

There are single scene grace notes in this that almost make it worth your while. Frank meeting the woman who hosted that party the next day, an athletic and sexy aerialist who shows off her trade (the Spanish Web), Frank having half-hearted heart-to-hearts with his daughters and wife.

It’s not a bad movie, even if there isn’t a lot to it or Pope’s laid-back, roll-(stoned)-with- the-punches performance — even if there’s a whiff of “vanity project” about this “write a good part for myself” indie dramedy.

Hey, it’s better than being confused for Mark Ruffalo’s older brother.

MPA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Gene Pope, Mel Harris, Roxi Pope, Justin Sams, Emily Bennett and Kara Young.

Credits: Directed by Jon Delgado, script by Lindsay Joy, Gene Pope. A Pope III release.

Running time: 1:33

Argentina’s troubled past is the backdrop of a lifelong personal connection to “The German Friend,” a romantic drama from Argentine filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel.

It’s about a Jewish girl who becomes infatuated with her new neighbor in 1940s Buenos Aires, a relationship that takes them both through decades of Argentine shame and activism.

Sulamit, played by Julieta Vetrano as a child and Celeste Cid into adulthood, is quite taken with Friedrich (Juan Francisco Rey, later Max Riemelt) when he and his family move in across the street. It may be the fact that he’s blond, or that he has a cute dog.

When that dog is taken by the dog catcher, she tries to get her parents to help recover it. But they’re a little leery of the Burgs. Yes, the neighbors speak German as well as Spanish, like the Lownesteins. But Dad (Jean Pierre Noher) goes so far as to snub them in the street.

To Sulamit — who has to go by “Susana” on official forms in Peronist Argentina — “He’s Argentine, just like me.”

The parents tolerate the kids’ budding friendship, Sulamit’s eagerness to celebrate Christmas with the Burgs instead of Chanukah with friends and relatives at home, Friedrich’s “soul mate” connections to the “interesting girl” his parents allow him to take up with.

Friedrich figures things about his family out as he gets older. And as he turns against them and against the ideas they represented — fascism was still in full flower in South America well into the 1960s — he becomes an activist and then a revolutionary.

Sulamit shares that enthusiasm, writing radical pieces for the school newspaper in their early college years (and beaten up for it), following Friedrich to Germany where his 1960s radicalization is completed.

Meerapfel makes the relationship the heart of the story, and then loses track of it for several stretches. The tale is told mostly from Sulamit’s point of view, quarreling with her parents (Noemí Frenkel plays her mother) over her devotion to Friedrich, who seems more devoted to “The Cause” than her by the time they’re studying in Germany.

Radical political action turns to violence as The State — many states — start responding in kind during the Castro/Che era. Sulamit finds herself in the meetings where the “revolution” is talked up, and at later meetings with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo — women protesting children who “disappeared” in 1960s and ’70s Argentina.

The film is inelegantly-framed within a train trip Sulamit takes later in life, and she remembers the ebb and flow of their love affair on her journey. The characters may be archetypes, but they’re vividly played by the leads, turned into flesh-and-blood representatives of their generation in those turbulent years.

This 2012 film, new to video, isn’t a lost masterpiece. There’s very little of the “history” that plays out behind our lovers actually shown on screen. But “The German Friend” still manages to tell a compelling love story showing a generation rejecting much of what their parents represented, loving each other and “the struggle” almost equally as they grew up in an age when disillusions died hard and the generation gap was never wider.

MPA Rating: Unrated, violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Celeste Cid, Max Riemelt, Benjamin Sadler, Hartmut Becker, Noemí Frenkel and Jean Pierre Noher

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeanine Meerapfel. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:40

A romantic comedy built around these two seems…dicey. He has no screen presence and she’s yet to prove she’s more than a pair of model’s eyebrows. But here we go.

The limp is pronounced, the crazy eyes pop out here and there. But the twitchy-tic that has long been cinema-speak for “cracking?” That’s implied, more something you feel than what Aaron Eckhart actually shows the camera in “Wander.” Because you can’t have a “paranoid thriller” without the hero’s paranoia.

Eckhart gives a tour de force turn as an ex-cop and conspiracy podcast co-host who chases a case to a desert town named Wander where an awful lot of what he’s believed all this time seems to be proven true.

It’s a solid enough thriller about video “monitoring,” implanted tracking/controlling chips, “compromised” phones and people who die from bullet wounds, but without the bullet. That’s all part and parcel of the “Deep Web Podcast” that Arthur and his accomplice Jimmy (Tommy Lee Jones) run from the remote travel trailers “compound” they’ve named “Middle of Nowhere.”

“Big Brother” and “MK-Ultra” and the “Illuminati” and “White Sands/Alamogordo” dominate their nightly ramblings in this a world they and their listeners have checked out of, a world out of time woven in a dark web they unravel for eager listeners.

Arthur’s a guy living in flashbacks, broken by the night two years ago when a car crash killed his daughter. He keeps her fortune cookie fortune in a Lucite block dangling from his keychain. His wife was rendered catatonic and left in full-time nursing home care. Arthur is the walking wounded, getting “worked up” by Jimmy, given a little private eye work by a lawyer (Heather Graham) who might be his sister-in-law.

A young woman’s execution is what drew Arthur to Wander, where he decorates his motel room in that photos-and-newsclippings “connect the dots” style favored by the movie investigators and copied by the “Beautiful Mind” crowd. He digs around, breaking into the morgue, getting anonymous tips, having his worst fears confirmed at every turn.

We remember, even if he doesn’t, Jimmy’s podcast mantra about the way “whistle-blowers” like them wind up — “pawn, patsy or dead.“

Is he onto something here? Was he “lured?” When you live by “There ARE no coincidences,” anything is possible.

The cast is top notch across the board, with Kathryn Winnick and Raymond Cruz as vivid caricature versions of a town medical examiner and sheriff.

Director April Mullen’s film doesn’t hide its secrets well enough (note the vehicles) and makes more of the story’s politics than the film delivers. The actress-turned-director is Canadian Anishinaabe Algonquin with mostly TV credits and does well by this simple yet convoluted story.

Tom Doiron’s first produced script lapses into a long series of over-explained “expository endings” which spoil the mystery of what’s come before.

But Eckhart reminds us of how good he can be when given a showy role, and a supporting cast worthy of his talents.

MPA Rating: R, violence

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Tommy Lee Jones, Heather Graham, Kathryn Winnick, Raymond Cruz

Credits: Directed by April Mullen, script by Tim Doiron. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

Who says Loyd Kaufman’s Troma catalog has no shelf value? Peter Dinklage will star in and Macon Blair will write and direct what is described as a contemporary reimagining of Troma Entertainment’s 1984 hit of the same name https://t.co/e504GTFTgg https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1333728549543571457?s=20

Ambitious, sprawling, sluggish and bland, “Stand!” is a Canadian musical about Winnipeg’s general strike of 1919.

The director of “Stomp the Yard” can’t get this stagey, stodgy and history-set-to-song up on its feet any more than the screenwriters can turn a this story about immigrants and veterans, sweatshop-laboring women and foundry and dairy-working men, whites and Natives and African Americans finding common cause for one brief moment into a coherent, compelling narrative.

And a generally underwhelming cast, playing an array of archetypes, can’t animate it.

I used to live just south of Winnipeg, and drove up a few times to a city known for its hockey, Randy Bachman and jelly donuts. This “general strike” isn’t something you hear about in American history textbooks. Like strikes broken up by soldiers in West Virginia and Colorado in the same era, it’s too big a deal to be ignored like that.

The story threads follow father-son Ukranian immigrants Mike (screen veteran Gregg Henry) and Stefan (Marshall Williams) as they slave away for low WWI wages to earn enough to book the rest of the family passage to the city, fleeing “the Bolsheviks.”

Stefan is smitten by a Jewish neighbor (Laura Wiggins) in their tenement. Rebecca and her brother Moeshe (Tristan Carlucci) are labor organizers, agitating in a time of postwar unrest.

White “English” veterans — and a First Nation vet (Gabriel Daniels) — are returning from World War I to no jobs and low wages for the ones to be had. Discontent was widespread, but immigrants feared deportation and all feared violence.

And the “Citizen’s Committee” of capitalist power-brokers (Paul Essiembre, Blake Taylor) was quick throw those threats out there.

Troops deployed or deploying themselves to intimidate workers, goons hired, cops whose loyalties shift back and forth, a government pushed to change laws overnight to make protesting and striking illegal, racism and anti-Semitism dividing the strikers — that’s a lot to cover in a film. And every so often, a song comes up.

The tunes, by Danny Schur, rhyming “immigration” and “cancellation,” lamenting that sweat-shop sewing is where “repetition promotes attrition,” have to carry plot and do almost all of the emotional heavy lifting.

They aren’t up to it. A riot is lamented in a feeble ballad, “This Saturday in June.” Others decry racism or plot their villainy in tunes that are forgotten before they’ve concluded.

Director Robert Adetuyi’s camera is mostly static. As there are no production numbers to speak of, some movement and whizbang editing is desperately needed to give the film pace, raise the stakes, pump up the passions and give the story the urgency that the flat performances and tepid tunes do not.

The “dramatic climax,” and its climactic song don’t do justice to the phrase.

I was reminded of several boilerplate historical regional musicals I’ve seen and reviewed on the stage over the years. I never saw “Strike!,” the stage show that it’s based on. But middling songs can convey more power in live performance, and a show about local history always generates more local interest and enthusiasm.

“Stand!” has great historical underpinnings and potential universal appeal in its messages and its take on the labor and immigrant experiences. But as a labor musical, it feels “small town.” It should never have been dragged off the stage and filmed. It’s strictly a Winnipeg thing.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Laura Wiggins, Gregg Henry, Marshall Williams, Hayley Sales, Gabriel Daniels, Tristan Carlucci, Blake Taylor, Paul Essiembre

Credits: Directed by Robert Adetuyi, script by Rick Chafe, Danny Schur, music and lyrics by Danny Schur. A Fathom Events release, in theaters Dec. 1.

Running time: 1:50