Movie Nation

Grant Judd Apatow this.

Pete Davidson, perhaps the quintessence of “comic as acquired taste” as a member of the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” grows on you during “The King of Staten Island.” By the third act of this highly fictionalized riff on Davidson’s life story, the son of a New York firefighter killed on 9/11, you understand something of what it’s like to grow up carrying the weight of a martyred hero on your shoulders.

Whether that’s enough to alter one’s overall impression of “King” comes down to your tolerance of Apatow’s inability to edit, to kill his (limp) “little darlings,” scenes that don’t add laughs, drive the story or greatly deepen our understanding of the hero’s journey. And Davidson’s inability to carry a comic or serio-comic feature film, proven in the slightly-funnier if less consequential “Big Time Adolescence,” figures in the equation, too.

We’re some 100 minutes into the picture before the grating, gauche Davidson — and his character, Scott Carlin — achieves “Well, we should cut the kid a break” status. Apatow pictures always run long, but here the thin laughs make us reach “All RIGHT already” far too soon.

Scott is well into his 20s, unemployed and almost unemployable, still living with his widowed Mom (Marisa Tomei) and sister (Maude Apatow), who is about to graduate and head off to college and frets over her morose big brother.

“Be nice to MOM!”

Scott has a cannabis crew (Moises Arias, Lou Wilson, Ricky Velez), here primarily to illustrate Scott’s aimlessness, and serve as punch lines for his insults — “Look, ‘Fat Kanye,’ shut your pie hole!” — and as sounding board for Scott’s BIG IDEA.

“Ruby TatTOOSdays!” Get a tattoo while you eat?

First, aspiring artist Scott has to develop tattoo skills. He practices on his friends. And then he’ll need backers but well, it’s not likely he’ll ever clear that first hurdle.

He has a sometime sex partner/might-be “girlfriend” (Bel Powley), but it’s hard to have a relationship when you’re depressed, with Crohn’s Disease and ADD so severe that he has almost zero impulse control.

That’s how he decides to tattoo a random child he and his pals run into one afternoon. That’s how the kid’s raging dad, Ray (Bill Burr, who steals the movie) meets his mother — chewing her out because “You didn’t even RAISE him.”

But when Ray finds out who the kid’s father was, he softens. When he cools off, he realizes this is a pretty widow he’s bawling out. Dating begins, and maladjusted Scott has one more thing he cannot cope with on his “Things to not get over” plate. Ray is also a firefighter.

No, the movie doesn’t take necessarily take the predictable turns you expect from here on out. More credit to Apatow. But when you’re throwing in scenes from a part-time restaurant job for Scott (which exist to set up a single funny bit), firefighters bonding moments, the on-and-off “girlfriend” thing, Mom’s pursuit of happiness and Scott’s desire for destruction — his and others’ — a little of what your throw against the wall just might stick.

Burr does. The talented Powley almost does. Tomei doesn’t embarrass herself.

The jokes are of the miss-miss-or-hit variety, like explaining the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease in scatological and gross detail.

“Hey, I’m just trying to spread awareness.”

Scott’s self-deprecation at every point — “I’m just stupid…I’m just an a–hole.” — doesn’t make him endearing, just self-aware.

But they’d all have to turn in their union cards if they couldn’t get some sentimental, lump-in-the-throat moments over a dead 9/11 firefighter. A streamlined script that got rid of a some of the random and zeroed in on that (Steve Buscemi plays a fellow firefighter) would have helped.

As it is, the best thing to happen to “King of Staten Island” was the high-profile digital release COVID 19 gave it. Davidson’s fans will find it, and Apatow devotees. But let’s just say Davidson’s renewed threats to quit SNL (“Nobody there likes me.”) stopped at around the time he saw a final version of his latest movie star vehicle.

MPAA Rating: R for language and drug use throughout, sexual content and some violence/bloody images

Cast: Pete Davidson, Marisa Tomei, Bel Powley, Bill Burr, Steve Buscemi.

Credits: Directed by Judd Apatow, script by Judd Apatow, Pete Davidson and Dave Sirus. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:16

The Polish word for “consent” is “zgoda.” In Italian, it’s “consenso.”

But mere translations don’t do justice to the chasm that separates them in meaning from how that word is used in “woke” North America. Not if the Polish film with an Italian setting “365 Days (365 Dni)” is any measure.

This is a laughable “Fifty Shades of Grey” kidnapping porn mafia picture — softcore, of course — about a hunky Sicilian mob boss (Michele Morrone) who spies a beautiful tourist on the day his father is assassinated. He recovers from the shock (and the bullet that passed through Daddy and his him) to pursue her, drug her and take her prisoner five years later.

When Polish hotel marketer Laura (Anna Maria Sieklucka) wakes up, she’s been taken from her brutish, inattentive boyfriend and dropped in a world of extravagant wealth, crime and cruelty. And it’s all happened on her birthday.

So, Massimo. You have some explaining to do!

“When your entire life is based on taking everything with force,” he purrs (in English, although Italian and Polish also pops up), “it’s hard to react in a different way.”

He’s going to take her liberty away for one year, one year “for you to fall in love with me.” He’s going to take her shopping — a lot. She will “take part in an adventure that fate has given you.”

Laura is all “I’m not your PROPERTY!” She sees the SOB commit murder. And we’ve already seen him force himself on the stewardess on his private jet.

Black on black wardrobe, smoldering good looks and Italian perma-stubble aside, this Massimo is a beast.

“I won’t do anything without your permission,” he insists. “I lose my vigilance when I’m around you,” he whines.”

“Don’t PROVOKE me,” he repeats, again and again — as they’re showering together, nude sunbathing, and he’s showing off his Christian Grey bondage bed and calling in a hooker to “show you what you’re missing.”

It’s a good thing “LOL” means the same thing in Polish and Italian.

“365 Days” is slick, shiny and insanely silly softcore, with a situation that beggars belief at most every turn. Laura’s protestations are weak, her attempts at escaping half-hearted.

But all this affluence and induglence and this seriously-cut Sicilian with his “Want to TOUCH it?” come-ons? Irresistible. Apparently.

The direction is competent, but no kudos are owed the co-directors as they’re also responsible for the godawful script.

Here’s a “romance” that sets women back 50 years and makes anybody (like me) take back every ugly thing we wrote about Dakota Johnson and that guy whose name I’ve already forgotten and those awful “Fifty Shades” movies.

Good looking people acting badly while playing reprehensible characters? That’s 365 shades of “gówno,” as they say in the Old Country.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drug abuse, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Michele Morrone, Anna Maria Sieklucka, Bronislaw Wroclawski

Credits: Written and directed by Barbara Bialowas, Tomasz Mandes, based on a novel by Blanka Lipinska.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

The Japanese broadcaster NHK has a spot on many US cable systems, and on PBS affiliates’ HD alternate programming channels.

This documentary series is now mixed in with the news, music and travel programming that it carries.

Exquisite detail, fascinating agony that he and his team go through to make these hand drawn anime films.

A pervy lump of a landscaper gets his revenge by putting on the tights and lacing up the boots in “Wrestlemassacre,” a splatter film perfectly summed up by its title.

It’s an amateurish abomination of a splatter thriller thrown together by a filmmaker with access to a bunch of wrestlers, current or retired, and clumsily filmed somewhere in Pennsylvania, by the looks of things.

Not that any town’s putting up billboards advertising that fact.

The plot? Randy Sanchez (Richie Acevedo) is a put-upon loser who pines for Becky (Rosanna Nelson), who is dating one of his employers, deadbeat Owen (Julio Bana Fernandez).

Randy’s caught ogling somebody’s circus-grotesque girlfriend, put on leave from work, picked on by one and all and humiliated at the wrestling camp run by the aged Boogie (Jimmy Valiant). His retired-wrestler Dad (Josip Peruzovic) berates him as “an idiot.”

And as we’ve seen he talks to himself, and hears voices from a preacher on the TV, we know what’s coming.

He goes from being “the only undocumented Mexican groundskeeper in the state” (“But I’m CUBAN!”) to neck-snapping, finger-biting-off, arm-ripping avenger.

Gore-fans are made to endure an hour of “back story” to get to the geysers of fake blood. Well, aside from the obligatory chase a naked woman and her beau through the forest in the opening scene.

We’re treated to cross-dressing fake TV commercials, where performers can’t figure out their sight-lines and the edits don’t match, to a preacher who blows the pronunciation of “evangelical” to wrestling and fights that look awful, and acting acting that is far, far worse.

“Are you SERIOUS?”

“Serious as a rectal prolapse!”

The one plot element here that has a tiny bit of promise is the wrestling camp, and that was touched on by “Peanut Butter Falcon.” Google “wrestling camp” and you’ll see they’re all over the place, especially the rural South.

The one gimmick Brad Twig had going for him was rounding up all these colorful also-rans from the world of the ring — generations of them.

It’s a crying shame this is the movie he came up to use them in.

Cast: Richie Acevedo, Julio Bana Fernandez, Jimmy Valiant, Tony Atlas, Jimmy Flame, Manny Fernandez, Josip Peruzovic and Rosanna Nelson

Credits: Directed by Brad Twig, script by Matthew L. Furman and Brad Twig. A Wild Eye release.

Running time: 1:41

Paging all “Redskins,” “Braves” and “Indians” fans…

COVID numbers are spiking in states like Texas, Florida Michigan and NC and others.

But theater owners expect everybody to open by July 17 just to cash in on Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet.” Unless Warner Brothers blinks.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/06/tenet-july-17-theaters-open-1202235450/

Its notoriety may be more historical than erotic, almost ninety years after its release. But the German drama “Madchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform)” retains its subtle power to move, a dated but still impressive landmark in queer cinema history.

The sexuality is implied, the repression overt, the style may not be stodgy or stagey but is plainly dated. Yet that one big speech suggesting that what the world long knew as “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” wasn’t the abomination religions had long decried it to be still packs a punch.

Set in a German girls boarding school just before World War I, it chastely relates the sexual awakening of an orphaned teen of the ruling Junkers class. And the woman who unintentionally drives that awakening? The teacher all the girls have a crush on.

The headmistress (Emilia Unda) preaches “Discipline, not a life of luxury” (in German with English subtitles) to her staff and her large student body. “Hunger and discipline will make us great again!”

She’s a dictator, and with her martinet assistant, presides over a school of lectures in the classics, languages, drama and the Bible, of hymns and privation and rules.

“No letters without prior approval…Hair must be tight.” Uniforms, with aprons must be worn at all times.

And “Books are verboten!”

Sad-eyed Manuela (Hertha Thiele) takes all this in. But her classmates mock the authoritarians behind their backs. Ringleader Isle (Ellen Schwanneke) gives Manuela the real skinny. You’re in Miss von Bernburg’s dorm? Lucky thing!

“Just don’t fall in love” with her. ALL the girls do.

Every longing gaze from the kind, softly-lit von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck) provokes silent sighs. But that kiss on the forehead good night?

“Wunderbar!”

And no matter how many warnings the headmistress lays on her staff, to “keep your distance” and how fraternizing “leads to infatuation,” Miss von Bernburg won’t be hard on her kids. She’s not listening to the rhetoric.

“The Fatherland needs people of steel!”

As daring as “Madchen” (and its 1958 Franco-German remake) are supposed to be, there’s not so much as a lip bitten in unspoken desire. But the signals are all here — girl-bonding in the locker-room, a motherly swat on the bottom that registers more delight than surprise, moon-eyed close-ups.

OK, that touch by director Leontine Sagan (“Showtime”) is obvious.

Tame as it now seems, “Madchen,” restored and re-issued via virtual cinema streaming (check your local art cinema’s website) is still a movie of prescience, poetry and honesty, essential viewing for anybody interested in the cinema as bellwether of change and indicator of the cultural cutting edge.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, Ellen Schwanneke and Emilia Unda.

Credits: Directed by Leontine Sagan , script by Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann, based on the play by Christa Winsloe. A Kino Classics/Virtual Cinema release.

Running time: 1:30

As worn-out as the found-money wish fulfillment fantasy plot is, it still makes a useful framework to build morality tales, parables and social commentary on.

That’s what the Indian melodrama “Choked (Paisa Bolta Hai)” does. A troubled marriage, dashed dreams, money troubles and voila — cash just pops out of the family’s perpetually-stopped drain pipe.

The source of that money, the corrupting power of it and the way class conflict is played by Indian politicians — specifically Indian Prime Minister Nerandra Modi — all work their way into this slow and uneven if occasionally suspenseful and even amusing potboiler.

The bloom has gone off the rose in Sarita (Saiyami Kher) and Sushant’s (Roshan Mathew) marriage. He hasn’t worked regularly in years. He goofs off with the neighbors, picks at his guitar and doesn’t bother cooking or cleaning up in the tattered but roomy flat they raise their son in.

She’s a Mumbai bank teller struggling to keep them afloat, even as he adds debts to their burden. The teasing from his mates — “Sarita wears the pants in his house” (in Hindi with English subtitles) seems a small price to pay for being such a dead weight.

He even has the nerve to complain about her meals. So many potatoes!

“Potatoes for a couch potato!”

Things get so bad they shout at each other through their kid, ordering him to relay their angry arguments to each other.

Something happened between them, before their boy was born, a reality TV talent show where Sarita’s stage fright cost them their shot. Sushant never really got over it.

And then the noisy, ever-clogged pipes wake Sarita up in the middle of the night. She investigates, and plastic-covered rolls of cash fall out. This isn’t a Bollywood musical, a couple of songs and dance numbers notwithstanding. The cash didn’t magically appear as an answer to a prayer. We’ve seen strange men lugging suitcases to the apartment upstairs. Something’s going on.

Sarita keeps this discovery from Sushant, even as she tries to keep his meanest creditor at bay.

She’s sneaking around, fretting about being followed, slow to gain the confidence that makes her do what such fantasies dictate that she do — start spending. Nightmares, complications, threats and marital suspicions follow. Because Sushant is NOT the sort of fellow you can trust with this kind of news.

Then comes the ultimate complication. It’s 2016, and the prime minister has decreed that all 500 and 1000 rupee notes in circulation will be demonetized. There’s a run on banks, including Sarita’s, as everybody tries to swap the notes that are about to become useless.

Sushant, his pals and neighbors, dance and taunt those better off than them, lining up around the block in a panicked attempt to get new money before the sudden deadline.

“Corruption,” Modi says on the TV. “Counterfeit bills” and underground economy cash will be purged from circulation. But that money doesn’t just fund criminals and terrorists. And Sarita has all these bills to swap, right under the noses of her banking colleagues.

Director Anurag Kashyap of “Bombay Talkies” takes his sweet time (by Western standards, anyway) getting us into the story and escorting us to the finish. Gossiping neighbors, melodramatic mourning over a wedding that may not happen thanks to the currency exchange, hard feelings over Sushant’s business partnership gone bust and the added pressure of a shifty hotelier (Everybody is corrupt.) are what motivate Sarita’s nightmares.

And most of these plot decorations slow the movie down. A couple of scenes, including the finale, have an excruciating “For the love of God would get ON with it” quality.

But the journeys the characters take, their arcs, lift “Choked,” adding heart and a surprise twist or two.

Kher lets us see the wheels turn as Sarita does the calculus of what she wants to do, what she can do and what she might be forced to do. It makes more and more her  sarcastic at home — she runs this house and drives this movie — and snappish at work. Little old ladies begging to change more money than allowed don’t move her newly hardened heart.

“Banks dole out cash, not sympathy.”

Mathew makes an agreeable heel.

And the whole is a more revealing slice of real Indian working lower middle class life than the confections served up by Netflix India typically manage.

“Choked” is not a very good film, but it’s a perfectly watchable and engrossing peek into a culture, its classes and its politics — governmental and sexual.

Cast: Saiyami Kher, Roshan Mathew, Amruta Subhash, Uday Nene

Credits: Directed by Anurag Kashyap, script by Nihit Bhave. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

“Death with Dignity” is a subject rich with drama and promise, and one avoided by most movie-makers because, “Seriously, who wants to think about that?”

But “Death with Dignity” earns a sad and sweet treatment in “Here Awhile,” an intimate indie drama about a young woman who travels home, to Oregon, for her final days.

Anna (Anna Camp of “Pitch Perfect” and “The Help”) leaves what we take to be a waiting room at a doctor’s office and makes her way back to Portland, checking in with the younger brother Michael (Steven Strait of “The Expanse”). They haven’t seen each other in years, and it’s a surprise visit. So there’s a bit of shouting, for starters.

But for his annoyance at how she “just took off” can’t last. He knows their Dad “threw your abomination lesbian sister out.” Now, Dad’s dead and they can reconcile, catch-up, scatter the old jerk’s ashes.

Only Anna’s always slipping off to throw up. “You OK?” is followed by “Not really” and “Can we talk?” She has cancer. It’s terminal. She’s come to a “death with dignity” state to make her exit.

“This is my life, what’s left of it. And I’ve got one move left.”

Helluva thing to dump on somebody, and Michael is going to have issues with her choice and the way she’s taking advantage of him, out of the blue, with this harsh news and his role in making her wishes come true.

“Here Awhile” doesn’t dwell on that conflict, and as Anna’s partner (Kristin Taylor) shows up and Michael’s girlfriend (Chloe Mason) makes an entrance, we pick up on the trauma of the siblings’ past (flashbacks), focus on Anna’s current needs and discover how Michael has grown up to be a natural caregiver who jst happens to work in IT.

For instance, there’s this app-building neighbor (veteran comic actor Joe Lo Truglio of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Reno 911!”) who is “on the spectrum” — Asperger’s, OCD, agoraphobia. Michael keeps an eye on him for his family, has control of his sugar intake and indulges his quirks.

“It means a lot. A lot of WHAT?”

Despite the third act step-by-step explainer of “How Death with Dignity Works,” “Here Awhile” is a light, somewhat superficial treatment of this.

Still, a movie on this subject coming out mid-pandemic, with friends, lovers and relatives dying — often alone in hospitals and nursing homes — can’t help but gain an extra poignancy.

There are beach visits and romantic montages set to music. Camp is another of those lovely actresses who looks too healthy to be dying.

But she and the more-competent-than-compelling supporting players keep this watchable, with even the standard-issue “adorable” take on Asperger’s going down easily.

When all is said and done, “Here Awhile” is here just long enough for Anna Camp to break your heart.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Anna Camp, Steven Strait, Joe Lo Truglio, Chloe Mason and Kristin Taylor.

Credits:Directed by Tim True, script by Csaba Mera and Tim True. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:22