Movie Nation

A couple of days late getting to this, but longtime Gannett Newspapers film critic Jack Garner died over the weekend.

I used to run into him at film festivals, Hollywood and New York new-release junkets, etc., a hard guy to miss (6’9″, a Falstaffian BEAR of a man) and a harder one to not like.

He had this great booming laugh that let you know, at a film preview or a movie premiere, that A) he was in the audience and B) the comedy was “working.” I distinctly remember him roaring through a New York preview of “In or Out” back in ’97. Practically drowned the rest of us out.

Like many newspaper film critics, he brought an editor’s mindset and skills to reviewing, shifting over from “the desk” to become one of the country’s most enduring and widely read film reviewers. And unlike a lot of us (cough cough), he had an easy charm and was widely liked among his peers.

Jack G. was 75.

“Relic” may be shrouded in gloom and fog, draped in the trappings of many a haunted house thriller. But its most revealing lines of dialogue can be appreciated by everyone, even those who don’t believe a house can be haunted.

A daughter, talking about her grandmother, reveals her understanding of life, aging and family responsibility to her mother in a universal truth.

“Isn’t that how it works? Your mum changes your nappies, then you change hers?”

This chilling Aussie horror tale is a parable on care for the aged wrapped in a curse that’s been literally built-into the family homestead.

Kay (Emily Mortimer) has been busy in Melbourne, too busy to keep close watch on her aged, widowed mother at her forest home out in the country. Now she and daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote, of “Dark Shadows” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) have to go back there because neighbors haven’t been able to raise  “Gran” (Robyn Nevin, who was in “The Matrix” movies) on the phone or get her to come to the door.

Mother and daughter have to break into the house when they arrive. They search high and low. Every blanketed bed, every shawl-covered chair they YANK the cloth from, fully expecting to find her corpse.

Organized Kay files a missing person report, and the police arrange a search through the foggy pinewood forest. Sam, less settled in life and career, frets over the lack of visits, ways this tragedy could have been avoided.

And then Gran shows up; barefoot, remote, not really sure where she’s been but reluctant to give up much of what she thinks is going on.

There are thumps in the night behind the walls. She talks to someone in the shadows and walks in her sleep. She’s not…right.

Kay continues “organizing” and cleaning and checking on nursing homes. Sam makes that “nappies” remark I quoted earlier, wondering why Gran can’t move in with Mum, or why she shouldn’t move in with Gran herself.

But as she asks around about her grandmother’s new habits, she grows especially spooked by whatever’s making Gran chew on old photos, or bury them in the woods, and her increasingly violent mood swings.

Director and co-writer Natalie Erika James, making her feature film-directing debut, finds the frights in all the usual places — that thumping behind the wall that, when you thump it yourself to see what’s there, thumps back, creepy and possibly suicidal grandmother in the claw-foot tub, menacingly wielded knives.

But what resonated for me, and I suspect will for a lot of people, is the familiarity of it all. The post-it notes — “flush,” on the toilet, “turn off tap” stuck to the tub.

No one gets out of this world alive, we’re reminded. If you aren’t dealing with this in your family, you will be soon enough. “Relic” is awash in this grim side of late life, details that most screenplays go to some pains to dodge.

I’d call the film, whose titular “hook” is seriously “meh,” more a solid feature that does what it sets out to do than any sort of landmark in the genre.

But with death all around us and end-of-life decisions hitting millions around the world, all at once, the timeliness of “Relic’s” real-life horror, with a dab of supernatural violence tossed in, could not be more apt.

This is spooky on an effects and story-telling level, downright chilling on a personal one.

MPAA Rating: Rated R for some horror violence/disturbing images, and language

Cast: Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote

Credits: Directed by Natalie Erika James, script by Natalie Erika James and Christian White.  An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:29

So if churches are getting payroll relief stimulus just like any other business, they should be subject to the same other times as any other business, right?

That’s the logic applied to this suit. Churches aren’t “special.” They are like concert halls and cinemas, businesses. Close one you have to close them all.

I’m not sure theaters in most places shouldn’t stay closed. But with all these pulpit-packed pandemic hot spots traced to the faithful, maybe this suit will shake a little common sense into political panderers letting religious cranks set policy.

Via The Hollywood Reporter

“AMC, Cinemark and Regal say that if churches are reopening, so must movie houses https://t.co/yVjqMC1H2Q https://twitter.com/THR/status/1280504587292639232?s=20

“Archive” is a slick, moody sci-fi mashup, a thoughtful thriller cobbled together from a lot of better films that came before it.

The central premise — a scientist tries to engineer a robot to hold his wife’s “soul” — has lots of antecedents. But you’ll see “Ex Machina” in the movie’s look and moral quandary, a hint of “2001” here, some “Silent Running” there.

It doesn’t quite jell into anything brilliant or profound. But I have to say it plays. Production designer/effects creator (“Moon”) turned writer-director Gavin Rothery and star Theo James (“Divergent”) have conjured up a great looking film with some heart, a neat twist or two and that manages to be perfectly watchable, start to finish.

We meet George Almore in the not-that-distant future, a lone developer, thinker and engineer opening up a mothballed super-futuristic and secure “facility” in the snowy mountains of Japan.

It could be a supervillain’s lair or a spaceship, but it’s a place where he and he alone can work on an AI/robotics project he’s sold his employer on. The cute, clunky and empathetic robots — J-1 and J-2 — hint at what he’s going for. J-2 can carry on conversations, make decisions and judgement calls. A threatening phone call from his new boss (Rhona Mitra of TV’s “The Last Ship” and “Supergirl”) annoys J-2.

“I don’t like her. She’s a bitch.”

George exchanges static-riddled video calls with his wife, Jules (Stacy Martin of “High-Rise” and “Vox Lux”). She starts every call upbeat, but she’s clearly upset, not terribly happy about what he’s up to.

“It hurts, George. Even like this!”

It turns out, these two black computer stacks in the facility are from an outfit called “Archive.” George makes those calls through these. Toby Jones plays a pushy company representative who “checks on” them.

Flashbacks take us to a happy marriage, a drive in a self-driving car where George insists on taking the wheel. There was an accident. Somebody died. Archive makes its money out of storing a person’s neural essence/soul, allowing  a survivor to communicate with the dead, but only for a limited time.

And George? He’s in hurry, fretting over every security system in the facility because he doesn’t want to be disturbed, frantically trying to finish a more human/very feminine robot, his latest, before he’s caught.

This poignant set-up is augmented by the frosty setting, indoors and out. The almost-human machine George is working on is an upgrade of the boxy, awkward child-like J-1 and J-2 that can’t go outside and get wet, but can be petulant, jealous, fearful and sad.

James’s George seamlessly interacts with them, treats them like children and over-uses the phrase “Trust me.”

Can they? Can we?

Rothery, who also works in production design in video games, creates a world both futuristic and familiar, thanks to the visual sci-fi tropes. There’s even a hellish Japanese nightclub for George to visit for a meeting, all holograms and “Star Trek” furnishings. Love to have a drink there.

Put these elements together with some solid acting by James and a touching turn by the Parisian Martin, and “Archive” becomes a genre film that, if it doesn’t transcend the sum of its parts, at least has the parts to let us buy in and enjoy the story that it’s telling, derivative as it is.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Theo James, Rhona Mitra Stacy Martin, Hans Peterson and Toby Jones.

Credits: Written and directed by Gavin Rothery.  A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:49

This looks sun-kissed, romantic, and fun.

And yes, I’m talking about the Fiat Spider that figures into a few clips here.

The movie? It’s as close as most Americans will get to Italy and Tuscany any time soon. Lovely.

“First Cow” is a droll and scenic parable, a period piece about immigrants and American “enterprise” in the Old (Pacific North) West.

A soft-spoken cast given to underplaying, a muddy, overcast setting in the beaver-trapping era on The Frontier and reveries about the simple pleasures of home, dearly bought in a rough and tumble world of men make this quiet, almost melancholy movie one to be savored.

John Magaro is “Cookie” Figowitz, a Jewish baker ill-suited to traveling West with a fur trapping party. But that’s the hand life has dealt him, sending him to seek his fortune at the tale end of the beaver-trapping era, at the beginnings of the various western silver (and later gold) rushes, circa 1830.

He’s resented by the trappers, struggling to fill their larder as they trek on foot toward a distant fort/settlement. He gets distracted hunting for mushrooms. Delicacy or not, mushrooms are not “what’s for dinner.”

That’s how he stumbles into an under-clothed but well-spoken man on food (Orion Lee).

“You speak purty good English, fur an Injun,” he says, with little hint that this drawled line has turned up in 670 Westerns before it.

“Not Indian. Chinese.”

Cookie helps “King Lu” out of his predicament. Later, in the co-occupied (by Brits and Americans) Oregon Territory, they renew their acquaintance.

Lu is a fellow with lots of plans, dreams, business pitches. Beaver oil is valued in China. But trappers discard the carcasses. All around him, “I see possibilities.”

A farm, maybe, with pecan, walnut and almond orchards. “But that takes time.” They need to team up on something quick. “History isn’t here yet. It’s coming. But we got here early this time.”

It’s just that there’s “no way for a poor man to start” a business without “capital, leverage” or “a crime.”

When Cookie, who apprenticed under a baker in Boston, gets in a word edgewise, he talks of “a hotel, with a bakery.” He can cook, and he can bake. It’s just that in this neck of the (literal) woods, ingredients are in short supply.

That’s when they first take note of the “First Cow.” The tough-minded British fussbudget (Toby Jones) imported it. Can’t have our tea without cream, can we? And being a fussbudget, you know he has a cat, which likes a little milk, too.

King Lu sees the possibilities here, not with “capital” or “leverage,” either.

“Can cows give milk at night?”

Thus they set out to earn their fortune, procuring the ingredients for deep-fried, honey-dipped “cakes” (corn muffins or hush puppies, of a sort), just the thing to make trappers, soldiers, prospectors and the rest part with their “pieces of silver.”

The film, the best that director and co-writer Kelly Reichardt (“Wendy and Lucy,” “Night Moves”) has yet made, scores “parable” points for showing how many a money-making enterprise is built on breaking the rules and stealing, from land speculating and “squatting” to Google and Uber.

Adapting Jonathan Raymond’s novel (he co-wrote the script), she gets the hardscrabble period details just right. That sets the table for the little bit of civilization that the baker brings, making grown men (Ewen Bremner plays a Scots settler) get misty-eyed over “a little taste of home.” To the Englishman in charge, “I taste London in this cake.”

The recipe? “Ancient Chinese Secret!”

The cast sparkles, with Jones in particular livening things up with a little 19th century “posh” and “menacing,” Bremner (“Trainspotting”) still needing bloody subtitles and Lee and Magaro giving a light touch to their “fellow outsiders” chemistry.

And the lovely air of melancholy that hangs over all is might be the knowledge that no San Francisco bakery or hotel named “Lu & Figowitz” ever came to be. Or maybe we paid attention to the movie’s prologue, featuring a modern woman (Alia Shawkat) and her dog wandering those same river banks.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language.

Cast: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Rene Auberjonois, Alia Shawkat, Ewen Bremner and Toby Jones

Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, script by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond, based on the novel by Jonathan Raymond. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:02

An extraordinary film with “Ordinary People (Ang Pamliya Ordinaryo)” as its title, this is the movie that announced Filipino filmmaker Eduardo Roy Jr. (“Lola Igna”) as a major talent.

He takes us among the young, hustling homeless of Manila for a Filipino “Bicycle Thieves,” without the bikes. He gives teenagers Jane (Hasmine Kilip) and Aries (Ronwaldo Martin) a baby. And he shows us the consequences of children, broke and struggling children, having children of their own.

“What’ll we name him?” Aries wants to know (in Tagalog, with English subtitles).

“We’ll use BOTH our names,” Jane answers. Thus, “Baby Arjan” is introduced.

They sleep on the streets, or when they’re fighting, Jane stays with a friend or family member. Aries is 17 and all about the sex. Jane is a distracted 16, worried about the baby, needing the physical escape of her quickie-prone “husband” just as badly as he does.

Aries runs with a gang of four, little beggars who distract the marks while he and another old boy grab their iPhones, purses or wallets.

Roy shows us every crime seen in “Ordinary People” via CCTV — child dies in a hit and run accident, a purse is snatched at an ATM, a phone is grabbed in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

There’s even closed circuit footage of the major crime at the heart of the film. We’ve already seen the too-helpful transsexual Ertha (Moira Lang) flattering and cozying up to teen Jane. Ertha keeps baby clothes in her backpack, and is always “loaning” them to very young mothers she befriends.

Her joking/haggling over what Jane will owe (Jane tells her she’ll never be able to pay her back) finishes with a throw-away line Jane is too dazed and naive to comprehend.

“Why don’t you just sell me your baby for ₱10,000?”

It’s only later that Jane figures Ertha was serious.

“The transsexual stole my baby!”

Writer-director Roy creates tier upon tier of exploitation facing Jane and the short-tempered Aries as they try to recover their 30 day-old infant.

A visit to a police station to look at mugshot books includes an unspeakably cruel, leering “assault.” The supermarket where it happened may have video of the crime, but they’re more determined to show that “we’re not responsible” for what happened.

A radio station interview is cut off when a sexy teen model shows up for the next segment. And a TV piece on their plight is built on a reenactment that will be little help in tracking down Ertha and their baby.

The kids have to be street thieves just to survive among the predators above them on the food chain.

The performances are age-appropriate and poignant, the twists and turns an homage to Vittorio de Sica’s Italian neo-realism classic.

And writer-director Roy shows himself to be a De Sica, Spike Lee or Cuaron of the Philippines, an artist who points his camera at his world and makes us see it the way he does.

(Roy’s “Lola Igna” is just as good, and on Netflix)

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, smoking, nudity

Cast: Hasmine Kilip, Ronwaldo Martin, Moira Lang

Credits: Written and directed by Eduardo Roy Jr. A Quantum Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

“Parallax” is a mysterious, no-budget sci-fi story of identity and its manipulation, a movie that lives on mood and tone.

Writer-director Michael Bachochin crosses the line from “cryptic and obscure” to “obscurist”early on. And when the film finally reveals its secrets, they’re almost pedestrian compared to everything that’s been withheld from the plot-starved and repetitious first 90 minutes.

A young artist wakes up next to a stranger and spends her days living inside her head. Thanks to the film’s heavy reliance on voice-over narration, we move in there with her.

“How many days does it take to open your eyes?” she wonders. “The boundaries of my world are endless…I am fear. I am panic.”

Naomi (Naomi Prentice) has no memory. The man she lives with, who tells her he’s her fiance, Lucas (Nelson Ritthaler) just wants her to do something — anything — to jar that memory back into her consciousness.

Start painting again (she is obsessed with the backyard fig tree, and seascapes), get out of the house.

Just change out of your pajamas, for Pete’s sake.

The tactile experience of making a painting, and then touching it, transports her.

“What did you do today?”

“I went to the ocean.”

“How?”

Lucas is patient, but desperate. He’s seeing a shrink (Ted Gianopolis), hunting for answers. What happened to my fiance? Where is she?

Bachochin doles out clues — flashbacks — like a miser determined to take it all with him. “Parallax” tests the patience with its sinking underwater nightmares, its wandering the the sea side in a negligee interludes, its nosebleeds.

This stinginess creates a disconnect which we in the movie-reviewing trade call “boredom.” A night of their engagement moment here, a new character (Hattie Smith) there, a fresh location — if anybody who’s ever watched a California movie can call Joshua Tree “fresh” — isn’t enough to make the viewer connect with the characters or what’s going on with them.

Prentice plays her fictional Naomi as utterly poker-faced for most of the film, something that suits the film’s intended mood more than it engages the viewer.

That pursuit of mood and mystery means we’re puzzling our way in “Parallax’s” wake for most of the film, even  as we’re way ahead of it in terms of what’s admitted on the screen.

“I think something’s wrong with me” comes about 45 minutes too late for it to be a surprise.

And the resolution, when it at long last comes, both contrasts with the somber meditation that’s come before, and fits it perfectly. Because like most of what’s come before it, the finale fails to satisfy.

I mean, we all love a mystery, but come on.

Rating: unrated, blood, nudity, profanity

Cast: Naomi Prentice, Nelson Ritthaler, Hattie Smith, Ted Gianopolis

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Bachochin. A Primal Group release.

Running time: 1:53

He won an Oscar for scoring Quentin Tarantino’s lesser send-up of the genre, “The Hateful Eight.” But the great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone made his mark on the cinema in the ’60s, scoring the Italian-made/Spanish-filmed Westerns of Sergio Leone and others.

“Fistful of Dollars” was the first, and the music helped set the tone and hip cachet the films acquired — guitars, grunting choruses, horns. They’re timeless.

Morricone passed away over the weekend of complications following a fall. He was 91.

Morricone scored films of most every other genre, in Italy, Hollywood and elsewhere. Think Tarantino “rediscovered” him? Oh no. Warren Beatty used him for “Bulworth,” De Palma for “Casualties of War,” Polanski for “Frantic.”

His Wikipedia biography mentions all the singers, from Paul Anka to Andrea Bocelli.

A horn-playing jazzman who evolved into a conductor, composer and orchestra of great range and virtuosity, we’re not likely to see one as long-lived and impressive as Morricone again.

“The F**k-It List?” What a crock of s**t.

An “edgy” teen comedy bereft of laughs, wrapped in “life lessons” and nestled in privilege, it is as infuriating an entry in the “graduation” genre as Hollywood has produced.

That’s an important distinction — “Hollywood” — as this tone-deaf dud exists in the sort of bubble that would have been maddening even if it hadn’t arrived in the middle of a pandemic.

A pretty-boy/pretty-bland over-achiever whose rich parents can’t get over the fact that he was “wait-listed” for Harvard — after being accepted at every other “Ivy” — gets mixed up in a prank that blows up his Pacific Palisades high school.

Consequences? “You won’t be graduating from here.” But there aren’t a lot of road bumps you can’t roll right over when you’ve got options, your parents (Jerry O’Connell, Natalie Zea) have their own “college admissions scandal” scheme in mind, you still have access the Mercedes Daddy gave you, not when your seven-year crush is “impressed” by the “f**k-it” nature of the prank.

Young Brett (Eli Brown) proceeds to one-up “f**k-it,” “go viral,” lead a book burning and entice cute Kayla (Madison Iseman of the “Jumanji” franchise) and become a one-teen “movement.”

There’s just no failing when you’re this rich, and there’s nothing remotely cute, funny or heart-warming in watching this bland boy succeed because it’s pre-f***ing ordained.

Brett is the Cali High (Yeah, that’s what they call it.) valedictorian, accepted by Cornell, Yale, Dartmouth, etc. after following a path painstakingly plotted by his living-vicariously parents-with-money. He’s still studying, still practicing the clarinet (an Ivy League shortage of “reed instruments” players), and his pals Clint, Nico and Les (Marcus Scribner, Karan Brar, Tristan Lake Leabu) can’t believe it.

“Dude, the race is OVER. You won by like, a MILE.” Come along on their “senior prank,” whydoncha?

One blown-up school later, Brett is in hot water (ok TEPID water) but realizes he’s been living other people’s dreams and expectations. A manifesto is in order. Live stream that s**t. Start an online movement built on following your bliss, or your immature impulses.

“BASE jumping!”

Kayla has some serious issues she works out via the “f***-it” impulse. Pal Clint’s (Scribner) is a tad more obvious.

A PR guy gets involved, a college-admissions coach figures out how to spin it and the parents try to redeem their “18 year” investment, “not including my nine months of ‘bodily sacrifice,” Mom adds.

Co-writer and director Michael Duggan had a germ of an idea. It’s just not that risky, even if it has PG “Risky Business” pretensions.

NOBODY in this thing is the least bit interesting as a character, NONE of the situations are funny or freighted with great personal or social import.

No performance stands out. And when you don’t give some pretty solid character players (the adults) any chance to “add value” to the proceedings, your movie becomes a blank spot on the resumes of Manheim, O’Connell, Zea and Peter Facinelli (as a family friend on the Harvard “board”)

And the list? It’s practically an afterthought, something you bicker about on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in your tony neck of the woods.

Netflix “The F**l-It List?” F**k that.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity, adult themes

Cast: Eli Brown, Madison Iseman, Marcus Scribner, Natalie Zea, Jerry O’Connell, Camryn Manheim

Credits: Directed by Michael Duggan, script by Michael Duggan and Dan McDermott. A Paramount release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:43