Movie Nation

The visual choices writer-director Mary McGuckian made in creating “The Price of Desire” vie with the dramatic ones in a to-the-death fight over “How this movie was ruined?”

It’s a precious, obscure and emotionally flat melodrama about furniture designer and aspiring Irish architect Eileen Gray, and the ugly, personal tug-of-war over being credited for the modernist marvel of a house she designed with her then-lover, Romanian architect Jean Badovici.

The bone of contention between the established, older and bisexual Gray (Orla Brady) and Badovici (Francesco Scianna) isn’t her “other” lover, the singer Damia (Alanis Morissette). It is their house, E-1027, which they built on the Riviera and she put in his name. And the wild card, their friend and rival, the prissy Swiss architect, artist and  swell Le Corbusier, picks at that open wound as he interferes, “decorates” and bitchily narrates (to the camera) this between-the-World Wars, and years-later, story.

The narration has the ring of “epistolary” about it, Le Corbusier (Vincent Perez) eyeing the high-born Irishwoman in her late 40s and purring, “I longed to act recklessly. But I could hear your heart was a different symphony.”

He didn’t think she liked guys, in other words, something he figures out as Damia sings “La Marseillaise” with a theatricality more suited to a French hockey arena than a night club.

Taking up with Badovici, the monied and accomplished furniture-for-the-filthy-rich designer Gray dreams of a house. “A beautiful work speaks more truth than the artist!”

They dabble with the idea of getting Le Corbusier to do the house, but they know he’ll steal the credit for “our” (mostly “her”) ideas.

“I’ve no objections to a woman’s touch,” he sneers. He’s got this “five part plan” of “pure modernism” that he applies to his designs. She’s looking for something open and airy, flat-roofed and functional, and austere.

When the house is finished, her relationship with Badovic is not long for this world, either. Because he invites the Cubist painter Le Corbusier to come in and paint Cubist phalluses and the like, in mural form, on her pure white walls.

Peeing all over it to mark his “turf?”

Credit for the house, ownership of the house, all of it, becomes murkier as time passes.

By the way, this plot summary, with its included links, does more to make sense of this murky mess than the screenplay ever does. McGuckian apparently expects everyone to play the players, the intrigues and the history coming in to “The Price of Desire.”

“The Price of Desire” is an indulgent, gauzy dream from memory, of Gray swanning around white rooms in white dresses uttering profundities in English and French — with white subtitles.

It’s as visually inane, austere and pretentious as its dialogue.

“I wonder which of your many accomplishments will be most remembered,” a wealthy sponsor and friend (Dominique Pinon from “Delicatessen”) asks.

“I prefer to DO things rather than POSSESS them,” the daughter of a baroness sniffs.

The Great Depression is barely glimpsed — a design boutique Gray ran (not explained, just glimpsed) closes. The only response of the insufferable rich aesthetes?

“Why don’t we take a trip?”

World War II? They fled, as the rich always do, to oases of privilege where they rode it out and fretted over who’d get credit for the house code-named E-1027.

I found the characters thin, the performances (save for Perez, brittle and scheming) as flat as the white-on-white images.

Any questions about why this washed-out, high-tone soap opera didn’t earn an American release when it was finished (2015) are thus answered and forgotten, the “true” “Price of Desire.”

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Orla Brady, Vincent Perez, Francesco Scianna, Dominique Pinon and Alanis Morissette.

Credits: Written and directed by Mary McGuckian.  A Little Film Company release.

Running time: 1:47

Vanity Fair talked the lad into it.

Not as dirty as you’d hope.

Yeah, THIS is the movie that should reopen cinemas.

Young Mr. Washington holds his owning the action beats, effects and formidable supporting cast.

A lot of fine British character actors do the voices of “StarDog and TurboCat,” an animated superhero tale about a gadget-loving kitty crusader and a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet dog.

It’s aimed at the very young and preferably undiscriminating, but it’s so bland it plays like a naptime video narcotic.

Gullible Buddy (who sounds nothing like Nick Frost) is sent into space by his owner and master in 1969. Something happens and he comes back 50 years later.

“I don’t know what that is in dog years, but it’s a lot.”

Out of place, in his spacesuit and general disconnection from the present day, he is “rescued” from the animal-hating animal control Officer Peck by the self-promoting “Dark Feline, The Uncollared Crusader,” TurboCat (might be Luke Evans).

Buddy convinces the cat to help him find David, his master from way back when, because David would never abandon him and David always has all the answers.

But humans fear and hate pets, Officer Peck (Cory English) is looking for Buddy’s space capsule and it may just be that TurboCat will need the help of G.U.A.R.D. That’s the Glenfield Undercover Animal Rights Division, led by a magician’s bunny that TurboCat is sweet on.

That would be Cassidy (Gemma Arterton, whose voice leaves no doubt).

There’s a little of the old “If we all work together…” and “There’s no such thing as magic,” a few gags about catnip, laser-pointers and sunbeams (which demand to be napped in) as the only things on Earth that can foil a cat, with a tennis ball serving the same function with dogs.

I counted just two laughs in this, with one about the Youtube source of Bat-Cat’s gadget-buying fortune and the other involving a tactical-minded goldfish in an armored vehicle (“A fish tank, are you kidding me?”).

Ben Smith, whose previous credits are mostly animated shorts and largely unheralded (“Robin Hood 4D,” “Sherlock Holmes 4D”), got Screen Yorkshire help, perhaps covering the cost of the Brits in the voice cast.

The animation isn’t awful, but the best one can say for the script is that it does no harm.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Luke Evans, Nick Frost, Gemma Arterton, Billy Nighy and Morgan Cambs

Credits: Written and directed by Ben Smith. A Viva Kids release.

Running time: 1:30

Charlize and Chiwetel, immortal mercenaries about to be exposed.

Coming to Netflix in July.

You can’t blame rom-com filmmakers for taking shortcuts.

So few of them work, make an emotional and comic connection and deliver a satisfying finale, it’s no wonder that screenwriters and directors go for “sure thing,” elements that worked in romantic comedies that preceded them.

So sure, work in a little Meg Ryan faking an orgasm from “When Harry Met Sally,” a little John Cusack and a boom box from “Say Anything,” buy the rights to that Scottish pop tune that taught us all the meaning of “havering.”

It’s only a problem when these little borrowings are the only things that work in your movie.

The Spanish romance “Te quiero, imbécil (I Love You, Stupid)” is the cut-and-paste job in question, a script with modest potential, a passable cast and cutesy execution.

And about the best you can say about it is that it finishes well.

It’s another story of a poor schlub (Quim Gutiérrez) dumped the night he proposes. Ana (Alba Ribas) gives Marcos the “take a break” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) speech, and he moves out and back in with his parents “for just a couple of weeks.”

We know better, and sure enough, the next day he’s laid off at the TV ad agency where he works.

His hunky pal Diego (Alfonso Bassave ) gives him the “monogamy doesn’t work” get OUT there speech. But Marcos finds the best “real” advice comes from the Internet, from the videos of an Argentine Lothario (Ernesto Alterio) with advice to the lovelorn.

A little screaming “mother—–r!” into the ether, more attention to grooming, hitting the gym? Yawn.

The better advice, straight out of every movie like this since the 1950s classic “School for Scoundrels,” is “be an ass—-.” That’s how Marcos lands a job at a sports media company where Diego works — via threats to tell the ladies’ man Diego’s secrets.

A couple of storytelling gimmicks are half-assed into the picture. Marcos complains and narrates to the camera (sometimes in voice-over) about his woes, his “What I SHOULD have said” moments. This comes and goes. Meh.

Funnier are various occasional online video suggestions from “influencer” Sebastián Venet (Alterio). Going to a party?

“Don’t be near the bar when the ice runs out and the most beautiful girl at the party wants a drink.” Nobody wants to be the doormat making an ice run for a pretty woman who expects such as her birthright, and won’t remember your name.

If the writers had more zingers and observations like this they should’ve used them. Director Laura Mañá can’t make something out of nothing.

Natalia Tena plays Raquel, the mercurial, talented classmate from high school Marcos runs into, the woman who always gets his attention with “Oye, imbécil (Hey, stupid)!”

She’s pink-haired and insulting and vivacious. And while she may have had a crush on Marcos way back when, she’s way too cool for that now. She’ll just give him a makeover and a tattoo and play her accordion and sing and let’s see how long this takes each of them to figure each other out.

The metrosexual makeover jokes — facial masks and foodie gossip (among guys) may play better in Spain and in Spanish than they do in English. They’re passé in the extreme in this hemisphere.

Tena has the potential to be “that woman (girl),” the cute spitfire the guy must eventually come around to falling for. But the two of them don’t have much chemistry, and the script’s only help is in having her insult him constantly early on and having him dismiss her, hurtfully, later.

And then we get to the whole “Say Anything” and “Benny & Joon” stuff, and you kind of wish there were more of a movie before that. Because even “The Proclaimers” greatest hit can’t save this wilted romance.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity, alcohol, nudity

Cast: Quim Gutiérrez, Natalia Tena, Alfonso Bassave, Ernesto Alterio and Alba Ribas

Credits: Directed by Laura Mañá, script by Abraham Sastre, Iván José Bouso. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

Here’s what you remember about “Caro Diario,” Italian actor/director Nanni Moretti’s “diary,” essay, love poem and comical elbow in the ribs of his beloved homeland.

You remember the movie’s long, languorous opening chapter, just narrator, host and tour-guide Moretti “On My Vespa,” scootering from one Roman neighborhood to another, commenting on the stereotypes of each.

Bourgeois Casalpalocco is where one finds — or found 30 years ago when this film was made — German cars, new money and the blasphemy of “pizzas in cardboard boxes,” the mocked, characterless and (back then) poorer Spinaceto, where Moretti spends just long enough to agree with a guy he sees leaning against a crumbling industrial wall, “It’s not so bad,” Olympic Village (1960), Garbatella (1927), Montverde — each has its charms and its stereotypes.

The then-40 year-old Moretti riffs on the state of cinema, how the movie theaters in Rome “are closed for the summer” except for porn, martial arts and homemade Italian melodramas.

He ducks into theaters, mutters at the screen (in Italian with English subtitles) and obsesses and despairs over the savage thriller, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. He reads a review of that one and ponders the critic who wrote it.

“I wonder if whoever wrote this has a moment of remorse just before going to sleep.”

He even runs into “Flashdance” star Jennifer Beals and “In the Soup” and “13 Moons” (starring Jennifer Beals) director Alexandre Rockwell, with Beals — in fluent Italian — trying to brush off the pushy beardo in the dorky scooter helmet and shades, and telling Rockwell (in English) that “I think this guy must be a foot maniac.”

This comic travelogue is like a “Manhattan” era Woody Allen starring in an Italian/Roman version of Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” — droll, scenic and adorable. Moretti — this is his only well-known film — is a delight at showing how delighted this exercise makes him feel, “dancing” on his Vespa as he wheels down stradas and boulevards, whimsically thinking what his voice-over commentary on Garbatella will be.

The rest of the movie? Maybe, if you saw it when it came out (1993 in Italy, 1994 in the US), you were struck by a series of ferry visits to the Italian islands of Alina, Lipari,  Alicudi, Panarea and the volcanic Stromboli.

That’s where his American soap opera-obsessed traveling companion insists Moretti quiz American tourists about what’s coming up (Italy used to get American TV shows and movies months later) on “The Bold and the Beautiful,” a shouted, language-barrier soap dissection that takes place on the lip of a volcano.

“Alicudi makes narcissists,” Moretti opines, because “everybody lives alone” and “everybody has just one child.” A montage of  Italian brattery, indulged toddlers taking over the family telephone, makes that point.

“A party in honor of ‘bad taste'” is dodged, a persistent village mayor insists that they’ll be able to work in the quiet of his island hamlet, when of course they won’t — the film will make one nostalgic for travel, and wonder when today’s grounded globetrotters will get around to ruining these places, all over again.

What you might have forgotten if this new “virtual premiere” (streaming on Film Movement) is not your first encounter with Moretti’s near-masterpiece, is what a dull, pedestrian third act it finishes with. “Doctors” the chapter is called, and its about the convoluted, second, third and fourth opinions of Italian medicine.

If you’re coming to “Caro Diario” for the first time, you may want to preserve its travelogue charms and whimsy and check out after one or two lame doctor visits/”I have this itch” gags, before the movie’s overall effect is spoiled.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Nanni Moretti, Renato Carpentieri, Giovanna Bozzolo, Alexandre Rockwell and Jennifer Beals.

Credits: Written and directed by Nanni Moretti.  A Film Movement release.

Running time:  1:41

The rest of the title of this Faith TV production has “Rise of Christian cinema” in it, and while the timing may feel a little late (peaked a couple of years ago), this is a natural for a movie about movies documentary.

Lots of clips from Biblical films, past and present, illustrating the history — from stories from the Bible and biographies of saints to famous and everyday people of faith to the angry victimhood of the “God’s Not Dead” era.

No Pixar pics during the pandemic, no Sony or DreamWorks. No interest in SCOOB!” What do you think? Should I review this one? Love that Bill Nighy