Movie Nation

“The Argument” is an indie comedy built on the frame that supported that favorite of community theaters, far and wide — “Noises Off.”

Show us a frazzled, rattled and unsatisfactory story — one that leads to an “argument,” in this case. Then show us the folks in that argument walking through the scenario again, with equally unsatisfying results.

All of it heads towards a finale that is a manic, thrown-together rough facsimile of what we’ve seen happen, aka what we know is SUPPOSED to happen, and let us laugh at the chaos that ensues.

Yes, it’s a very writerly conceit. But throw some funny people at it and let’s see if it works.

Veteran funnyman Dan Fogler (“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “Take Me Home Tonight”) plays Jack, a struggling screenwriter made awfully insecure by his actress girlfriend of three years, who seems a little TOO into her co-star in this Mozart play they’re doing.

Emma Bell (“Deviant Love,” TV’s “Relationship Status”) is Lisa, all worked-up over what she hopes is her big-break, playing ditzy wife Constanza to co-star Paul’s randy Wolfgang Amadeus.

Jack hopes to be supportive, get past the argument they had in bed before opening night with a little get-together with his literary agent Brett (Danny Pudi of “Community”) and Brett’s no-nonsense entertainment lawyer lady friend, Sarah, played by Maggie Q of the “Divergent” films, and “Balls of Fury,” with Dan Fogler.

But their tetchy evening — Sarah’s first words are “We should probably be heading out…” — takes a more openly hostile turn when Jack realizes that Lisa’s invited her flirty co-star Paul — Tyler James Williams (“Everybody Hates Chris”) — and Paul’s ditzy British accented girlfriend, Trina (Cleopatra Coleman of TV’s “Last Man on Earth”).

The giddy actors romp around, doing rambunctious scenes (spanking) from their “Amadeus” knock-off. Jack grits his teeth between trips to the kitchen. Sarah? She fumes.

“You have a LOVELY home” Trina says to her, complimenting the wrong woman for Jack and Lisa’s shabby Mission-style bungalow.

“I do NOT live here,” is about the nicest thing Sarah will say all night.

During the course of the evening, the actors flirt, the agent keeps telling his “single screen credit” client he’s a “genius,” and Jack tries to shrug off the fact that Trina has seen that one credit, “The Dead Doth Trod the Hills at Night.”

“I never LAUGHED so hard in a movie!”

No. It wasn’t a comedy.

All this is headed towards a resumption of Lisa and Jack’s morning hostilities. And nothing good can come of that. But as the evening implodes and the guests recede and Jack and Lisa blame each other, Jack frantically comes up with a “do over.” Invite everybody back, walk through EXACTLY the same evening, and pinpoint the spot where he or she can make the point that the OTHER caused the fight.

It’s a stunningly silly conceit. Not one person who lived through that evening-on-eggshells would want to return, but here they all are again. And just in case they miss a gesture, line or moment, seething Sarah is there to correct them.

“Unfortunately, I have a photographic memory.”

There aren’t a lot of laughs in the first two acts of this three act comedy. Not enough funny lines, and Maggie Q’s dead-eyed annoyance can only carry us so far. We share Sarah’s contempt for one and all.

But the third act? That’s when screenwriter Jack decides the only way to REALLY “fix” this party and fix blame is to bring in ACTORS to play the principals. And damned if the casting session — with Karan Brar, Marielle Scott, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Mark Ryder struggling to get the “parts,” and then get the point of this “play,” with the characters they’re playing sitting slack-jawed or loudly protesting in their presence — isn’t hilarious.

It’s loud, fast, in-your-face, broad and low. Packing that living room with actors, having Trina cope by drinking (she really shouldn’t), with Brett and Sarah having it out and Jack raging at every recreation that doesn’t fit his script or make his point and “actors” acting like, well, actors makes “The Argument” funny.

If only the set-up was half as amusing as the payoff.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drinking and profanity

Cast: Dan Fogler, Emma Bell, Maggie Q, Cleopatra Coleman, Danny Pudi, Tyler James Williams, Marielle Scott, Karan Brar, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Mark Ryder.

Credits: Directed by Robert Schwartzman, script by Zac Stanford. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

A British period piece that mixes 1840s fossil hunting and same sex romance? Smashing!

The Oscar winning Hawkins goes medicated, depressed and possibly in love for this Brt dramedy. https://youtu.be/NiqwtgZzbds

Let’s see what all the fuss is about, shall we?

“Tenet,” much shuffled about on the release slate, opens Sept. 3.

Netflix has her number.

Here’s the buy-in moment for “1BR,” a “forced-to-join-a-cult” thriller given a healthy dose of horror movie torture porn.

New tenant Sarah has awoken after a few sleepless nights of banging noises have kept her awake in her (supposedly) one bedroom apartment. She smells smoke. There’s something in the oven, and seeing as how she wasn’t supposed to have pets here, we fear the worst.

Sarah sees the worst. Sarah is assaulted. Sarah is taken hostage. And contrary to what a normal human reaction might be to any one of these might be, Sarah shows us her poker face. No freaking out at what’s happening to her, entirely too little crying in horror at what’s been done to her furry companion, no frantic struggle through the shock.

Just Nicole Brydon Bloom, not giving away if her hole cards give her that full house.

That’s a HUGE hole in the center of this sadistic and sedate debut feature from writer-director David Marmor. Some of it works, little bits of misdirection here and a full-blooded finale there.

But Bloom, in what should be her big break, gives us nothing to hold onto, little to root for and a passive turn that is partly how the character is written but mainly the blank-faced range of the heroine.

Sarah moved to LA “to start my life over.” She’s taken a temp job and she has a place to stay. But the ad for the Asilo del Mar is too enticing. Who cares that she has to lie about having a pet on the application? Yes, she has only a temp job, and one of the couples she meets there is a doctor married to her lawyer. “This should be out of my price range” never enters her mind.

And apparently she flunked high school Spanish. “Asilo del Mar” means “Asylum by the Sea.” Who names an apartment block that?

Jerry, the manager, maybe? He’s played by Taylor Nichols, who first came to fame thirty years ago in “Metropolitan,” playing an earnest thinker who could talk your ear off, even back then.

That’s handy, because that’s what’s going on the night when Sarah stops being a tenant and starts becoming a member of “The Community.” Jerry talks a bit, and threatens a bit more.

Sarah under-reacts to every insane thing, from injections and “stress position” with cheesy pop music torture, or other stuff involving a hammer.

“It’s not crazy,” she’s assured. “It’s science.” She’s being “conditioned.”

My jaw dropped. Bloom’s never does.

Jerry, with the aid of everybody else in the complex, doesn’t just commit physical violence against Sarah. He sadistically breaks her will with words.

“Sarah, no one’s coming for you.”

Is she cunning enough to escape? Does she have the will to try?

The test of the movie is whether we’ll instinctively root for the standard white-girl-in-jeopardy and accept the physical abuse, mental anguish and humiliations Sarah must endure before figuring out if she can fight back. Because Bloom? She gives us nothing.

The other characters are quickly sketched in — the elderly failed-actress neighbor (Susan Davis), the creepy one-eyed guy (Clayton Hoff), the hunk who keeps inviting her to cook-outs and dinner parties (Giles Matthey), a would-be support system that includes a Dad (Alan Blumenfeld) she’s semi-estranged from, and a brassy co-worker (Celeste Sully) who is everything mousy, meek and passive-faced Sarah is not.

None of them really pop off the screen as potential heroes or villains. Nichols stands out, and that’s about it.

I don’t like to single out actors as being the reason a film fails, and maybe this was Marmor’s doing — not getting terror or dread out of his heroine. But this is dull, unengaging acting in service of a slow-footed story that marches through some over-the-top “conditioning” towards a pretty inevitable conclusion.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Nicole Brydon Bloom, Giles Matthey, Taylor Nichols, Susan Davis, Alan Blumenfeld, Celeste Sully

Credits: Written and directed by David Marmor. A

Running time: 1:30

Deadpan, surreal and pandemically prophetic, Tsai Ming-liang’s “The Hole (Dong)” didn’t make much of a splash, globally, when it premiered in 1999. A droll fantasy-musical about loneliness, plumbing and a virus spread by cockroaches who makes people act like cockroaches, it’s nothing if not strange.

But here it is, earning NY and LA virtual premieres because whatever we avoided in the film’s fictional version of New Year’s Eve, 2000, it’s biting us on the butt right now.

A cascade of news reports, only heard/never seen, set up the problem. There’s a new “Taiwan Virus,” and evacuations have been ordered in assorted hotspots. But the residents of this one run-down apartment building aren’t complying.

The Man Upstairs (Lee Kang Sheng) lives in 804, just lying around in his untidy whiteys smoking when he isn’t running his ground-floor grocery stall. He’s listened to the many news reports and apparently decided to ignore them.

But the pounding at his door isn’t an eviction or government-ordered evacuation. It’s a plumber. There’s a leak downstairs. Could he take a look?

Next thing we know, he’s knocked a hole in the floor, fixed nothing, and left. Yeah, it happens there, too. And as big a mess and inconvenience as it is for The Man Upstairs, for The Woman Downstairs, it’s a nightmare.

She (Yang Kuei-Mei) has water issues. The wallpaper is peeling, puddles are everywhere. You prepare for a pandemic — she has stacks and stacks of wet wipes — and then THIS happens. Perpetual rain outside, drips everywhere inside, especially when the fellow in 804 uses the toilet. Her water? On and off.

“The Hole” is about their solitary efforts to cope with this nightmare of plumbing, pandemic and near solitude.

He spies on her through the hole on his floor, and once even vomits through the hole. She blasts him with bug spray, barges in on him in his market stall and demands that he stick around for the plumber, a plumber she can never land an appointment with.

“Do you think you’re the only plumber around here?” she yells into the phone (in Chinese with English subtitles). We get a feeling she’s just glad to have a conversation with somebody. Anybody.

He, at least, has a cat he feeds downstairs at his market.

And every so often, our story is interrupted for a little Chinese lip-synching as The Lady Downstairs turns up in a decorated hallway, or stage-set elevator, dressed up in wig, heels, gloves and cheongsam, putting on a show.

Sometimes she has backup lip-synching singers. Sometimes, The Man Upstairs figure into the fantasy.

Is it hers, or his?

There’s a soundtrack mostly filled with news reports, a rising level of frustration and a growing sense of despair as these two disconnected people try to cope with miseries that are just the cherry on top of their slice of lonely cake.

Are there worse fates than succumbing to a disease that makes you skitter across the floor like a roach? Probably.

Tsai Ming-liang (“Rebels of the Neon God,” “What Time is it There?”) suggests that isolation is one of those fates. And he takes his sweet time making that simple point, creating a mesmerizing and deliberate if never-quite-poignant fairytale allegory about the hole in modern lives.

“The Hole” goes down easily, even if we’re distracted by exactly where The Woman Downstairs found all those lovely, coveted wipes.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Yang Kuei-Mei, Lee Kang Sheng

Credits: Directed by Tsai Ming-liang, script by Tsai Ming-liang,Yang Pi-ying. A Big World Pictures release.

Running time: 1:30

On August 11, 2014, the world got a bit sadder and a lot less funny. That’s the day we learned Robin Williams, the great, mercurial talent of his generation, had died.

His death by suicide added to the shock, until we thought about it. Manically funny and wistfully melancholy, a man who’d battled addiction and other personal demons, it wasn’t just the media that leapt into speculation about what drove him to hang himself.

It was rare, in interviews, to not have his sad side show up. I know I saw it the few times we talked. The “unhappy, depressed clown” narrative gained a foothold, even among those who loved him. Those who didn’t wondered what drugs he had in his system.

But we were all wrong. He didn’t know, his wife didn’t know, his doctors had thought Parkinson’s and depression, and they were wrong. It wasn’t until that fall that the coroner’s report showed what had really gone haywire in his brain.

“Robin’s Wish” is a documentary that expands on the interviews his widow did once that diagnosis — “Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia” — became known. It’s a film that chronicles his decline, the panic he felt over it, what friends, neighbors, colleagues, his handler for his many USO tours and his widow, Susan Schneider heard and saw and could not understand.

Despite his access to neurologists and some of the best healthcare America has to offer, Williams didn’t realize that he was “at the mercy of something he could not control…and didn’t know about,” his director in the “Night at the Museum” movies, Shawn Levy explains.

One of the medical experts here lets Williams, those close to him and even those treating him off the hook by noting “the last thing they think of is a degenerative brain disease.” And he had “the worst case of it I had ever seen,” notes Dr. Bruce Miller of the Memory and Aging Center of UC-San Francisco. The post mortem evidence was stark.

“Robin’s Wish” quickly sketches in Williams’ career, his brief stay at Juilliard where he studied Shakespeare but “would make up lines in iambic pentameter…X-rated lines,” in rehearsals, where he befriended Christopher Reeve and actor Stanley Wilson (seen here), his connection to stand-up and the Mill Valley theater where he still performed it, on occasion, close to his Tiburon, California home.

David E. Kelley, creator of Williams’ final TV series, “The Crazy Ones,” Levy and others marvel at the explosions of wit, the endless riffing on takes, “every one of them different, a lot of them…gold” on movie and TV sets, recording the genie in Disney’s “Aladdin.” Being “that Robin Williams” made his sudden decline doubly alarming because he never wanted to let people expecting him to bring the fun down.

The stated purpose of the documentary is to ensure that no one still harbors those notions of a rich, successful comic taking his own life through self-destructive addictions or impulses. “Suicide,” we’re told, is far-too-often the end result of the onset of this Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia. I like what his friend, the comic and filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait says in a radio interview included in the documentary.

“His brain was giving him false information,” making Williams manic, insecure, unable to remember lines, giving him a left-arm tremor and making him think “I’m not me.”

The film’s narrow focus and heavy reliance on his third wife, Susan Schneider and the lack of testimonials from his three children, gives “Robin’s Wish” an odd aftertaste, especially when you remember the legal fight over his estate where “Robin’s wish” was that his children inherit pretty much everything. The title itself seems like a final shot in that battle.

But zeroing in on Robin’s disease, his decline and what she and a few others close to him observed, with plenty of medical explanations, make this brief film feel complete, in its own way. What they’ve made is a solid, medically sound and emotional final chapter in a life that touched many, one that deserves to be remembered for how he really lived and what truly caused his death.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Robin Williams, Susan Schneider, Mort Sahl, Shawn Levy, Stanley Wilson, David E. Kelley and Bobcat Goldthwait

Credits: Directed by Tylor Norwood, script by Scott Fitzloff and Tylor Norwood. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:17

This portrait of the black male experience comes to the Peacock streamer in early Sept.

https://www.blackboysfilm.com/trailer

Ok. Director telling us we’ll be surprised.

Totally impartial. But we’ll see.