Movie Nation

A plagiarist steals from a single source, a “genius” from many, so the old saying goes.

But that dates from the days before cut-and-paste software. So there’s no wriggle room in that adage for Joe Ballarini, author of and screenwriter who adapted the book “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting.”

It’s “Adventures in Babysitting” meets “Monster House” with “Harry Potter” touches, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as its plot-hook and a hint of “Beetlejuice” in its villain.

Cut. And paste.

It’s a kid-friendly mash-up of limited imagination and endless exposition. Boring as all get out, in other words.

Tamara Smart stays on brand as Kelly Ferguson, aka “Monster Girl.” No, her Rhode Island (actually PLAINLY the Pacific Northwest) classmates didn’t name her that for her acting credits (“The Worst Witch,” “Are You Afraid of the Dark”). She got that label for being a girl who swore she was attacked by monsters when she was five.

Now, trapped babysitting the fraidy-cat son of her mom’s “Ice Queen” boss (Tamsen McDonough is dressed as The Ice Queen for Halloween–hilarious.), Kelly has just enough time to bond over what might be under his bed or in his closet with little Jacob (Ian Ho) when the monsters they both kind of believe are real grab him.

Gosh, and his Mom said “No scary movies, NO trick-or-treaters, and KEEP JACOB SAFE!”

Calling 9-11 doesn’t help. It’s Halloween, after all.

Lucky for Monster Girl that Riot Grrrl She Warrior Liz LeRue (Oona Laurence of “The Beguiled” and “Pete’s Dragon” rolls up on her motorbike, a baby in her backpack, to save the day. Or night.

She reluctantly introduces Kelly to The Order of Babysitters, an underworld of “Ghostbusters” blobs stealing kids, the book “Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting” and the evil plot of Grand Guignol to steal enough kids so that he “run the WORLD.”

Tom Felton of Potterworld vamps up Grand G, “stealer of dreams, bringer of nightmares.” He sings, he schemes, he takes custody of Jacob and if he can just get him to doze off and have a really good nightmare…

There’s all this monster-hunting tech and all these global babysitters organized to help with the hunt (VERY inclusive), and all these “toadies,” creatures like the Shadow Monster and Vampire Rabbit, Cloud Serpants and assorted members of “The Boogie People.”

Indya Moore makes quite the impression as the Mother of all Cat Ladies.

Naturally, they have to follow clues through Brown University and a local high school party, make time with Kelly’s idea of a hottie and deal with a mean girl.

“Since the dawn of time, every Basic Girl who’s thought she’s hot has gone for the cat costume.”

Not much that even approaches a funny line in this script, alas.

The plot is more cluttered than interesting, the effects dated but passable, the kid acting is indifferent most of the time, with Smart better at playing “the smart girl” than somebody facing her demons, fearing she’s lost a little boy to the Prince of Nightmares. Laurence isn’t much better.

Felton never lets us think he’s punching the timeclock, setting a good example that the kids aren’t up to following.

Realizing this “meh” of a movie was directed by “Tank Girl” veteran Rachel Talalay is startling and sad, until you remember how much that sucked as well. But with all this “nightmare monsters” lore and tech and effects, I could totally see “Babysitter’s Guide” becoming a Netflix franchise.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, scary bits

Cast: Tamara Smart, Oona Laurence, Ian Ho and Tom Felton.

Credits: Directed by Rachel Talalay, script by Joe Ballarini, based on his book. A Netflix release.

running time: 1:38

We are.. .intrigued. Or maybe we just need a nap.

A lover on the lam, a missing “sucker,” body parts in a lake, an abused escort-wife, an illegal immigrant smitten with her, a corrupt bureaucrat, a murderous mobster he’s in dutch to, a clumsy-nosy-pushy cop, a family trapped in debt and dead-end jobs — and a misplaced Louis Vuitton carry-on.

How all those “Beasts Clawing at Straws” tie together is the mystery at the heart of this thoroughly entertaining debut feature from the Korean director Kim Yong-Hoon.

Money and the lack of it drives the film, a bloody and yet ever-so-tidy adaptation of a novel by Japanese writer Keisuke Sone. The film may break into chapters — “Debt,” “Sucker, “Shark,” etc. But there’s pleasure in its disorganized organization.

The plot is non-linear, a mobius strip that loops in on itself. And the characters? They’re a collection of yin-and-yang opposites — pairs.

Two women, one a femme fatale (Jeon Do-Yeon), the other (Shin Hyun Been) a prostitute beaten by her husband each night; two men, one a family man (Bae Song-Woo) trying to keep his daughter in college and his mean, violent, senile mother from hurting his wife, the other a port officer (Jung Woo-Sung ) in the dutch to a mobster, drinking alone to forget his problems because he’s lost his lover.

Mi-ran (Shin) takes her beatings at home. But trip to the brothel is all it takes for the young illegal Chinese immigrant Jin Tae (Jung Ga-Ram) to become smitten. He’ll help her with this brute husband problem.

But he runs over the wrong guy with his car, and that knocks this port city world off its axis. We’ve got our suspicions about this bag left behind at the gym where sad, weary Jung-man (Bae) works, and fret about what the monstrous mobster Mr. Park (Jeong Man-Sik) is capable of, with regards to port officer Tae-young, and everybody else I mean, the man employs a literal monster (Bae Jin-woong) hitman who “enjoys intestines.” And not the ones from pigs, either.

And then the missing lover, the femme fatale, the brothel boss Yeon-Hee (Jeon, in a scorching turn) shows up, leggy and lusty, and murderously mercenary. All bets are off from this moment on.

Kim Yong-Hoon keeps the picture on the move and on its feet as we follow this or that character into and sometimes out of peril, skipping through a timeline with only that damned Vuitton bag to keep them, and us, focused.

The tone veers from righteous outrage to comic romp, with flashes of jaw-dropping violence filling the third act. It’s challenging and fun.

And if you don’t find the twisty story enough of a mind-game, try taking notes and reviewing it. The subtitling is less than complete, characters are barely identified, here and there, if at all. The spelling of the character names varies in the subtitles, the closing credits and the Internet Movie Database. YOU try keeping all that straight.

But you don’t have to. As the old Korean adage says, “Just go with it,” and even if you guess where it’ll end up, the circuitous way “Beasts Clawing at Straws” gets there is never less than pure thriller-watching pleasure.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, bloody violence, prostitution, profanity

Cast: Jeon Do-Yeon, Bae Seong-Woo, Shin Hyun Been, Jung Ga-Ram, Kim Jun-Han, Jeong Man-Sik

Credits: Directed by Kim Yong Hoon, script by Kim Yong-Hoon and Lee Jeong -Hwa, based on a novel by Keisuke Sone. An Artsploitation release.

Running time: 1:48

Remember that time Eric Clapton got up on stage and snapped “Get the wogs out, get the coons out” of his native Britain?

That time David Bowie said “Britain is ready for a fascist leader?”

“Good old days,” right?

Adam Ant using Nazi agitprop to launch his career. Clapton and Rod Stewart singing the praises of the white supremacist/Nazi “National Front,” a fringe political party that threatened to go mainstream before Thatcherism turned Britain hard right without the spoken-out-loud bigotry.

“White Riot” is a documentary trip down a dark corner of Britain’s Memory Lane, the country’s mid-70s flirtation with racist fascism, and the small “underground” group, Rock Against Racism, that used a fanzine, effective labeling, activist concerts and protest marches to stem the tide at a time when punk ruled, and punk, beloved by skinheads of all stripes, could “go either way.”

It was the brainchild of Red Saunders. He was then a colorful fringe figure from the music industry who saw what was happening, and after stirring up a stink with an eviscerating “open letter” to Clapton, King of the Rock’s Cultural Appropriators and “rock’s biggest colonialist,” a letter than ran in ALL the popular music mags, started the ball rolling to enlist musicians and their fans to fight back.

Rubika Shah’s documentary uses extensive archival footage, everything from concerts and protest marches that turned into near-riots when racists and anti-racists met, to vintage interviews in which stars of the day let everybody know, as the old song Pete Seeger made famous, “Which Side Are You On?”

“White Riot” takes its name from a song by The Clash, the most prominent group to align itself with “RAR,” as its organizers called Rock Against Racism. But before The Clash came along, performers and fans were figuring out that Britain had a problem.

Britain’s post-colonialist/post-war history of bringing in “foreigners” from its colonies had reshaped the country, and re-colored it. A nation whose entertainers were still making racist cracks in sitcoms and still putting on blackface for song and dance numbers well into the ’70s was ripe the rise of the National Front.

Saunders and associates like “Irate” Kate Webb talk about freeing skinheads from the NF, about turning punk away from its skinhead/nationalist-fascist street-fighter roots.

“Our job was to peel away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika underneath,” Saunders says.

With no money, and rarely having big name musician to headline their shows (Steel Pulse, 999, SHAM 69, X-Ray Spex), with a magazine that looked pieced together in someone’s garage (because it was), Rock Against Racism became the button many a kid wanted on her or his denim concert-going jacket.

There’s little nostalgia from the fresh interviews collected here, and plenty of fire in the vintage ones. Kids complaining about racist National Front-sympathizing police, everyday bullying that could be life-threatening — the footage may look dated, but the message — delivered in print, on buttons, in punk and reggae songs — feels as current as “the latest news from the BBC.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, street violence, profanity

Cast: Red Saunders, “Irate” Kate Webb, Pauline Black, Myataell Riley, Pervez Bilgrami, Joe Strummer and Tom Robinson

Credits: Directed by Rubika Shah, script by Ed Gibbs, Rubika Shah. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:24

There are great films, and there are movies “of their moment.” Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is a bit of both.

Harrowing and cautionary, inspiring and thanks to a healthy splash of ironic wit, damned entertaining, it’s a movie about America then and “justice” then and now, and an emphatic reminder that the political civil war that seems to have come to a head under Donald Trump had its origins in a kangaroo court that “the whole world” was “watching.”

Sorkin, whose political and courtroom bonafides were established with “The West Wing” and “A Few Good Men,” cast the eight (never seven) leftists accused of conspiring to start riots in 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention well, cast the legal counsels better and cast the perfect villain.

I can’t say how we’ll look on this all-star vehicle five years down the road. But for today, nearing an election in the most politically roiled and corpse-littered year America has had since Vietnam, “Chicago 7” is the movie that matters, the movie of the moment.

Sorkin sets up the rivalry between the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), led by Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and the Youth International Party of Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong).

He has wonderful actors embody their respective branches of the broader anti-Vietnam War-anti-fascist/pro-civil rights movement, and gives them glorious lines to make their case.

“Dr. King is dead,” Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, terrific) thunders to his office in explaining his decision to come speak at those 1968 protests. “Martin’s dead. Malcolm’s dead. Medgar’s dead. Bobby’s dead. JESUS is dead. They tried it peacefully, we’re gonna try something else!”

Lifelong pacifist and conscientious objector David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) allies with Hayden to try and keep the peace and the focus on “ending the war.” That rubs against the broader “revolutionary” aims of protest clown princes Rubin and Hoffman. But when Hayden’s arrested, who will bail him out? You, Abbie?

“I don’t carry money, do you?” he asks Dellinger.

“I do,” the older man snipes. “I’m a grown man.”

We’re introduced to the prosecutor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in a meeting that reveals the conspiracy Nixon’s thin-skinned and partisan attorney general John Mitchell set up to bring the protest movement leaders to trial — for conspiracy.

The movie hustles us into court, and between witnesses and court motions and arguments, flashbacks (using reenactments blended with shocking documentary footage) take us back to the clashes between tens of thousands of protestors and police, all there for a convention, Walter Cronkite points out on live TV, “about to begin in a police state.”

And in that court we see a “system” twisted, manipulated and perverted by Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella, venomously imperious and confused), who can’t keep names straight, can’t control his court and whose biases are obvious from the beginning, so much so that Rubin and Abbie blurt “OVER-ruled” and “SUSTAINED” before the judge can get every pro-prosecution ruling out of his mouth.

Judge Hoffman’s hostility, raining “contempt” citations on the defense — particularly the un-represented Seale, shown as the real “victim” of all this — gets so out of hand that he blurts “sustained” out before it has ever occurred to the prosecution to raise an objection at facts that undermine its case.

Oscar winner Mark Rylance stands out in the cast for reviving the reputation of celebrated/vilified defender-of-causes attorney William Kunstler, a performance of wry whimsy and barely-contained outrage. Rylance fumes and twinkles like the master craftsman he is, swaying the viewer and maybe the judge and jury. .

Cohen’s Hoffman, seen beginning his years of college campus “stand-up” lectures, recreating the protests and the trial, is hilarious, smart and committed, quick with a quip and yet capable of startling empathy. He goofs around over gaining protest “permits,” but he wants that spotlight, for himself and “the revolution.”

“There’s no place to be right now but IN it!”

But it is Sorkin’s film’s sense of “right now” that sticks with you. If we’ve re-learned anything over the past couple of years it’s that yes, cops often start riots, that the police lie to make their case, that they hide their badges when they’re planning to do violence they don’t expect to be held accountable for. Sorkin shows this happening in 1968, and we grimace at how many images just like these we’ve seen in 2020.

A former attorney general takes the stand to remind us that this office is not SUPPOSED to be the lawyer for “the president.”

There were no cell phones back then, although there were enough cameras around capturing the ugliness and violence enacted by The State that the protestors could rightly chant, “The whole WORLD is watching.” If we didn’t learn from what we saw with our own eyes then, Sorkin reminds us, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it again now.

MPAA Rating: R, violence, profanity, drug references

Cast: Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Eddie Redmayne, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Carroll Lynch, Jeremy Strong, Michael Keaton and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

Disney continues emptying its larger of Fox product, this 20th Century release opens next Friday.

Gritty, impoverished and with a trailer that bends towards epic. Nov. 6 https://youtu.be/lRVMe0GsdUg

Heidi Schreck is a TV writer and actress who gave the world “Billions” and “I Love Dick” after writing “Nurse Jackie.” But back when she was a teenage in small town Washington State, she was a world beater at the American Legion-sponsored “What the Constitution Means to Me” contests. Lots and lots of them.

She refers to that as her mother’s “scheme” for her to make enough money to go to college. She makes that reference in her revival and adaptation of her speeches from way back when in her Broadway show “What the Constitution Means to Me,” and filmed a performance of it which premieres Friday on Amazon.

Her voice cracks when she says, “In recent years, I’ve been thinking a LOT about the Constitution...for various reasons.” Sure, it’s rehearsed. But yeah, we get it. Oh do we ever.

What stands out from this one-woman/two-co-stars show is how exhaustively and thoroughly she had to master this material — at 15 — dissecting and extemporizing on America’s Holy Writ, given an angle to speak about in her presentation — “America’s Constitution: A Living Document” or “The Crucible of the Constitution.”

So, the show, a sort of “TED Talk” meets “Full Frontal,” with the “very late” 40something Schreck dressed in The Samantha Bee Collection, remembering those speeches and debates. She “personalizes” those long ago-researched and prepped improvisations with stories from her family’s history and personal anecdotes about how the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s interpretations of it in making law impacted her, her family, immigrants and women.

Schreck and her show are smart, informative, funny and often touching.

Schreck talks about her abortion, at 21, her mother, aunt and grandmother’s abuse at the hands of an abusive stepfather her grandmother married.

She relates case law that contributes to America’s epidemic of violence against women, summons up statistics and punches holes in Supreme Court missteps, and awkward “progress” in civil rights and the “right to privacy” that opened the door for women gaining control of their own bodies.

Schreck, on a stage that mimics the Wenatchee, Washington American Legion hall where she “got her start” as a performer and writer, relates how a 1965 Supreme Court of “nine men, four of whom are cheating on their wives,” debated and heard arguments about a woman’s right to birth control.

And then we hear a tape of that clumsy, cluelessly sexist oral argument from way back when.

Schreck analyzes and sings the praises of Amendment 9, which says “just because a certain right is not in the Constitution doesn’t mean you don’t have that right,” which provided the avenue for much expanding of the rights, racial and sexual minorities.

And she breaks down, with an American Legion judge and moderator (Mike Iverson) asking the questions “on the clock,” Amendment 14, which promised everyone in the U.S. — immigrants included, “due process of law.”

Her family’s story includes a “bought” bride (“a good immigrant”) who “died of melancholia” and the shared trait among females of her clan — “Greek tragedy crying.”

And her own story includes what we’d today call something akin to “date rape,” involving a guy so nice she’d never figure there was any reason to fear him, but who triggered her “just stay alive” response to his aggression.”

“We’re friends to this day,” she offers. “I mean we’re ‘Facebook Friends.'”

At 100 minutes, “Constitution” plays a bit long. But if you’re going to Broadway, 60 minutes will never do.

Schreck fumes and jokes, rages and comes close to tears along the way, with a break only for her co-star Iverson telling the story of the “character” from her life that he’s playing and personal experiences and challenges he’s faced in regards to his rights in America.

And a third act “debate” with a new version of young Heidi, fourteen-year old (then) “Constitution” debater and speaker Rosedely Ciprian, plays to a live audience better than it does as something you passively take in as a TV viewer.

But as food-for-thought watching goes, this election season performance could not be more timely as our lifelong Constitution fan and expert reminds us, in fact and in anecdote, how our founding document is more flexible than the Antonin Scalias of history have ever believed, that it is a “living document” written by folks, flawed as they no doubt were, who recognized “Who we are now might not be what we will become.”

And what we need, more than many of the amendments that the country’s political, economic and ecological crises scream out for, is a Court made up of jurists who remember that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, some adult subject matter

Cast: Heidi Schreck, Mike Iveson, Rosdely Ciprian

Credits: Directed by Marielle Heller, script by Heidi Schreck. An Amazon release, on Amazon streaming.

Running time: 1:43

A WWII combat medic and Holocaust survivor meets a woman who left her combat vet husband in an otherwise empty New York bar in “The Second Sun,” a crushing bore of a screen romance starring one of writer Norman Mailer’s nine children.

If you ever doubted that a movie with a Holocaust subtext could be dull, here’s 75 minutes of proof. It’s a three-set drama, with flashbacks and a lot of mundane flirtation that probes at the wounds he won’t show, but that she cannot hide.

Max (John Buffalo Mailer) came home from the war to a job in a pastry shop/breakfast cafe. But it’s at his Irish friend Joe’s empty bar that he meets Joy.

Symbolism much?

She (Eden Epstein) is mysterious, pretty and curious when he insists on talking to her, catering to her every need. She needs cold.

“Take my coat.” “That’s not necessary.” “I insist.” I said no THANK you.”

She wants to know about his life, the drab job he took on after “sewing people up” on the battlefields of Europe.

“Is it enough?” “Hell, just being alive is enough.”

Later, as the night wears on, he cuts to the chase of his personal survival.

“I stayed alive to meet the woman of my dreams.”

Mailer, slinging a Brooklyn (ish) accent, plays Max as a immigrant who learned to talk at the talkies, “gangster pictures,” a man sanguine about what he saw in the war and all those he lost.

When Joy sees the tattoo on his arm, she is taken aback by guilt, by how his experiences make her feel “small” by comparison.

But Joy has had her losses, her burdens to carry.

As they sip (she gulps) wine into the wee hours, she questions him and he picks up the pieces of her story. Flashbacks (black and white, drably-acted) fill us in on personal loss, war and the disconnect she senses and tries to flee, but which Max brushes off at every turn.

There’s a theatricality to some of the dialogue that makes one think James Patrick Nelson’s script started life as a simple single-set play, reliant on poetic word pictures to carry the load.

“Autumn — that’s my favorite time of year, the way the colors change, it’s like dying and coming to life at the same time.”

Working from that, director Jennifer Gelfer goes for something old-fashioned — a dance scene set in a pool of light on a dark soundstage, a tidy, well-lit bar that would pass for higher end, even then, complete with Irish owner (Ciaran Byrne) brogueing up a twinkle.

Mailer plays every scene and every line in a flat tone that suggests resignation, accepted fate and muted optimism — or a very limited range. Epstein, of the Starz series “Sweetbitter,” is at least more animated.

But for all the melodrama here and the dramatic possibilities presented, this is a stilted, stunningly stale directing debut. The performances don’t connect and the “reality” of it all is treated as an airless age of exhaustion and ennui.

The post-war past was never this dull.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, alcohol, smoking

Cast: John Buffalo Mailer, Eden Epstein, Ciaran Byrne

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Gelfer, script by James Patrick Nelson. An 1844 release.

Running time: 1:17

Of all the things necessary to make a screen thriller work, “urgency” has to rank at the top of the list.

That’s conveyed via direction, editing, sometimes a pulse-pounding score, but most importantly in a script that expresses high stakes and a clock ticking down to “doom,” and actors who convince us that they believe that.

“The Complex: Lockdown” fails at that as badly as any recent thriller I’ve checked out of late.

Sleepwalking performances, a lack of action and a general ennui behind the camera cripple this bio-terrorism thriller, which takes place in an “Andromeda Strain” lab complex under assault by those who would cover up a genocide, protected by a crusading doctor/researcher and her scientist ex.

“The Complex” began life as a video game/interactive movie. Does that explain the flat, emotionless turn by leading lady Michelle Mylett, who stars in that and in “Lockdown.”

I won’t say everybody in this dulls it down. But the static turns don’t exactly animate a movie where a lot of the “action” and debating is done via video phone.

Mylett is Dr. Amy Tennant, an “American” (Mylett is Canadian) “Doctors without Borders” type familiar with many a combat zone. Bio warfare isn’t just for Syrian dictators and their Russian masters any more.

She’s never keen on being teamed with Dr. Rees Wakefield (Al Weaver, not bad). They had a “thing,” we realize. We don’t realize that until they’re confronted with terrorist infiltration of their elaborate Kensington Corp labs.

A woman (Kim Adis, giving the best performance among some pretty bad ones) who stole the experimental computer-driven nano stem cells that Dr. Amy has been developing for space travel surgery and healing. Letting that stuff loose in London would be catastrophic.

Not that Mylett lets us feel that. Her Scottish boss, Nathalie Kensington (Kate Dickie), can’t get the curled, burred words out fast enough to jolt the good doctor out of her torpor.

Villains in hazmat suits toting automatic weapons are punching through “the void,” a ballroom-sized vacuum chamber entrance to the lab. You’d think the urgency would enter the this no-thrills thriller at this point.

But Mylett’s monotonous Dr. Amy doesn’t break a sweat and speaks as if she’s Siri ordering pizza.

“I’m not a murderer…This is madness. There has to be a way for her to survive…She has to pay for what she’s done…Nice work, Dr. Wakefield…End call.”

A good character and actress to carry all the exposition in the finale, BTW.

A couple of good action beats and two good lines adorn “Lockdown.”

“I listen to liars every day. You’re not a good one.”

“I knew there was something about Malkin, What kind of scientist wears a pony tail?”

But that finale. Damn. And pretty much every scene before it? Damn.

MPAA Rating: violence, profanity

Cast: Michelle Mylett, Al Weaver, Kim Adis, Okorie Chukwu, Kate Dickie and Rachel Petladwala

Credits: Directed by Paul Raschid, script by Lynn Renee Maxcy. A Giant Pictures release.

Running time: 1:18