Movie Nation

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.

A teenage fencer survived meningitis, which scarred her face and took her arms and legs.

“How can you live without arms or legs?” she cackles, in Italian accented English. Her condition just merits a shrug and a teenaged “S— happens!”

A sprinter survived losing a leg to machete wielding fanatics in the Burundi Civil War, and saw his own mother butchered in front of him.

The archer holds the bow with his feet and draws the string with his teeth.

“This is how I am,” he chuckles. “Merry CHRISTMAS.”

A weightlifter may have no legs, and until Beijing had to host a Paralympics, was among the millions of invisible disabled in the People’s Republic. A wheelchair sprinter was born in the former Soviet Union, which also was reluctant to admit “We have disabled people here.” She came to fame as an American paralympian.

“Everybody has a story,” Xavier Gonzalez, a member of the International Paralympics Committee, says. And in the case of paralympians, that story is going to be touching and triumphant.

Because as the athletes in “Rising Phoenix” put it, they’re the real “superheroes” among us, people who have overcome physical limitations to physically excel, human beings who fight prejudice and dismissal every day, and who aren’t afraid to punch back.

There are athletes all across the spectrum of sport who would kill to have a documentary portray them as heroic, epic and badass as Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui paint the superstars in “Rising Phoenix.”

Ryley Blatt, Australian wheelchair rugby star, the “Blattering Ram” of the sport still called “Murderball,” is one. Ellie Cole, a single-legged swimmer from Oz is another.

“Everybody in Australia has to swim,” she shrugs. It’s just that for her, “I was swimming in a circle” with just one leg “for a while.”

The film is a cornucopia of stories like theirs, legions of athletes shaking off “disability” as a label, donning “cheetah blades” and running with them.

“Phoenix” covers the history of the Paralympics movement, from its German Jewish emigre founder and those first 16 “men injured in the war” (WWII) games in London, to assorted triumphs (London, 2012) and debacles (Atlanta, 96, and Moscow refused to host them during the tainted 1980 Olympics), to the Rio games, which had a little of both.

For a fairly generic sports documentary, “Rising Phoenix” still manages a few thrills, some moving moments and a lot of sports action — blind soccer, armless swimming or ping pong, wheelchair fencing and all manner of other games and races competed on wheels.

And to a one, the athletes get the “superhero” treatment, lit like Greek gods, photographed in stunning slo-motion, celebrated with musical fanfares and profiled in the most delightfully unfiltered and sometimes profane ways.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, brief violent images, some strong language, and for brief suggestive references

Cast: Ellie Cole, Matt Stutzman, Jean-Baptiste Alaize, Ntando Mahlandu, Andrew Parsons, Cui Zhe, Bebe Vio, Jonnie Peacock, Ryley Blatt, Tatyana McFadden, Xavier Gonzalez and The Duke of Sussex

Credits: Directed by Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

There’s no mistaking “Tom of Your Life” for anything other than an indie comedy of singular vision.

A daft, sometimes dizzy and occasionally sentimental dash through relationships, parenting, morality, and life experiences packed into a story of a boy born and magically aging “four years, every hour on the hour” through his life over one long day, it is one filmmaker’s One Big Idea for a movie.

Jeremy Sklar goes by “Jer,” here, and for his debut feature film, he wrote, directed and did the music for a picture he also co-stars in, at least for the third act. That’s when he takes over the role of “Tom,” a child kidnapped from the hospital by a manic, unstable and abrasively funny nurse named Jess (Baize Buzan).

The best thing Nurse Jess ever did in her drug-abusing/restraining-ordered life was grabbing this potential science experiment and taking him out into the world for one eventful and often funny day. She stuffed tiny Tom (Levi Emerson Paul) into a garbage can, calmed him as she wheeled him to the parking lot, lying to anybody she met, and lit out.

She feeds him, takes him horseback riding and watches him age through two other actors (Judah Abner Paul and Joshua Paul) at the end of his first and only bicycle lesson.

Next thing you know, Tom (Dominic Rescigno) is in a track suit bugging her about sailboats (he saw a picture) and “maybe trying driving?”

“You’re not old enough…or maybe you ARE!”

He promptly ditches her and races to a strip club — because PUBERTY!

And so it goes through this long day, Tom aging (Sklar takes over at a going-to-seed 30), taking his first ever boat ride, a Chicago river tour, “a floating sidewalk of elderly people,” gulping his “first alcoholic beverage,” first sex, first hit of cocaine, first-ever poker game…

His first ride on the El is his first-ever encounter with a person-of-color. Fiftyish and tactlessly fascinated with “Your skin, what happened?”

All along this fast-moving day of stumbling from one adventure to another via extreme close-ups, we’re given insights into Jess’s fury. She has a purse full of pills and a pipe and has an unhealthy thing for older men — one of whom was her hospital boss (Paul Tigue), the other who pulled the trigger on a restraining order. She’s…unbalanced.

“Need a lift?“

“Not in your purple piece-of-s— RAPE van, I don’t!”

“That was HURTful!”

Buzan gets across the “not really a parent” thing of the early scenes well. But as she indulges little Tom, and then bigger and older Tom, her frazzled turn becomes sympathetic, as if she took Tom at four because she was good at math, and has a heart.

Sklar, as the eldest Tom, looks more and more like Tom Sizemore the older and paunchier and greyer he gets. It’s a fun performance with a hint of mortality to it.

There are more random funny encounters than just the guy trying to give Jess a lift, the foul-mouthed farmer who gives horseback rides and the hooker Tom finds on the Internet.

It doesn’t all work, and “Tom of Your Life” kind of grinds to a halt for a spell. But with every loopy scene, every underscored country-ish ballad Sklar croons on the soundtrack — “This is flyover country. They fly over…the BEST.” — you know you’re in the hands of a filmmaker who knows exactly the message he wants to get across and the tone he wants to set.

And if that means he takes every job in the production save for catering, so be it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Baize Buzan, Jeremy Sklar, James Sharpe, Judah Abner Paul, Joshua Paul, Dominic Rescigno and Paul Tigue

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy “Jer” Sklar. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:31