Movie Nation

Oh to be say, 13 and trapped indoors with AC and Netflix during a long, hot pandemic summer.

That’s your target audience for “Malibu Rescue,” the TV series, the (now two) movies from Savage Steve Holland, who got his start making teen-friendly entertainment in the ’80s. Who remembers “Better Off Dead” and “One Crazy Summer?” Just me?

This franchise is a cheerfully cheesy and harmless “back to the beach” comedy, with goofy-flirty “Junior Rescue” teens mimicking “Baywatch” — in their dreams.

The scripts aren’t much, the cast is set, so Savage Steve and his minions can crank this stuff out — episodes and (short) movie-length features — in bulk. Which they do. “Malibu Rescue: The Next Wave” arrives less than a year after “Malibu Rescue” the movie and the series first appeared.

The new movie finds our tanned, toothy team from Tower Two facing a “shut the program down” moment. That comes as they’re doing support work for a Beach Master Challenge obstacle course with the world’s elite lifeguards competing for the top prize.

SOMEbody intentionally serves the obnoxious four-time champs, Team USA, tainted cole slaw. (Port-a-Potty humor) Because maybe SOMEbody didn’t like the “winning streak” joke the jerk (JT Neal) with Team USA taunted him with.

“The longest streak you’ve ever had was in your SHORTS!”

SOMEbody has to take Team USA’s place — “How hard can it be?”

It’s a good thing SOMEbody — Gina (Breanna Yde) is the daughter of a drill sergeant. Welcome to “Hell” you “MAGGOTS.”

“She’s ‘Mom’ mad. That’s the maddest you can be.”

Eric (Alkoya Brunson) is Urkeling all over Lizzie (Abby Donnelly). Blonde goddess Dylan (Jackie R. Jacobson) is so obsessed with Tyler (Ricardo Hurtado) it’s interfering with uh, grammar.

“I don’t have TYLER for this right now!”

But whenever the chips are down, at least they can count on surfer dude/bus-driver Vooch (Jeremy Howard) in a pinch, or Tyler’s punk stepsister Sasha (Ella Gross) for a dirty deed or two aimed at their arch rivals, the slang-slinging trash-talking Team Oz (Australia).

Too right.

This is generic tween-to-teen TV junk food, harmless enough and hammed up by the cast so that even the slowest kid will get the jokes. Holland knows how the formula works and finds little laughs in the fumbled flirting.

And he cast amusing people in some of the adult roles, which makes it pass the time easily. Carly Hughes vamps the part of the summer school art teacher, fooled into thinking a blow-up dummy animated by squirrel power is one of the junior rescuers who is supposed to be in her class. Howard, a “Breaking Bad” veteran, gets laughs out of his “Duuuuuuude” speak, and from a cute gag where he narrates Tyler’s romantic thoughts about Dylan as Tyler gawks at her across the parking lot.

Parental viewers will pick up on who the janitor is in that summer school running gag. Why, it’s Curtis Armstrong from “Risky Business,” “Revenge of the Nerds” and, yes — “Better Off Dead.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, toilet humor

Cast: Breanna Yde, Richard Hurtado, Jackie R. Jacobson Alkoya Brunson, Abby Donnelly,  Jeremy Howard and Curtis Armstrong

Credits: Directed by Savage Steve Holland, script by Jeff Elinoff and Scott Thomas, based on the TV series. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:11

When you name your junky-abducted-by-aliens genre movie “Fried Barry,” you set up certain expectations.

When your opening scene is an early ’60s looking “official warning viewers of what is coming, that it’s “classified” as “18,” and all manner of violence, drug abuse and sex will be shown in all their unsparing grossness, you prompt giggles as you further those expectations.

Slapping an “intermission” interstitial in it adds to the sense of “fun” you’re conveying.

Character names such as Fried Barry, Little Beast and Sticky Vicky and Caveman promising amusing “types.”

Brag about how it had no actual “script,” just a breakdown of scenes, thrown together over a weekend. Dialogue? The actors came up with that on the set. Thus, the “writer/director” credit in the opening morphs into “A Ryan Kruger Thing.”

But man, bragging about that lack of prep for this in-your-face, gross and grimly unfunny “romp” through Capetown’s street life? A little premature, sport. “Fried Barry” lacks the one thing you’ve promised with everything listed above — a light, loose touch.

It sets up as a “Brother from Another Planet” meets “Crank” genre mash-up, a goof on junky tales, alien abduction stories complete with penile probe and alien insemination.

But every tin-eared line of trite, slapdash dialogue (There isn’t much of it, but none of it is good.), every sophomoric “let’s throw Barry into another sexual situation, the uglier the better,” every leaden encounter — friendly or unfriendly —  undercuts any sense of “fun” the picture might generate.

Granted, I wasn’t watching it in a theater full of hooting, hardcore genre devotees, but I found it just a slog.

Barry (Gary Green) is a high-mileage junky — he might be 50, he looks 60-plus — with a woman (Chanelle de Jager) who curses him, in English and Afrikaans, a toddler and an addiction that’s far more important to him than either of them.

He’s always looking for that next chance to cook up, and there’s a whole support system or barflies and fellow users to give him those chances.

But walking a back alley after his latest plunge — Kruger illustrates drug trips as diving underwater — he’s immersed in light, and lifted into the sky where a hallucinatory blur of probing, laser-scanning and aliens eyeballing him, etc. ensues. Yeah, that’s funny.

And then, still tripping, he’s dropped back on the street — catatonic, wild-eyed and high as a kite.

Barry’s “strange trip” takes him, staggering like a robotic zombie, through hookers, a rave and a bar pickup, because this gross, weathered slob of an addict is just catnip to the ladies.

He is assaulted and abused, nagged (the “wife” finds him) and kidnapped. He also lays a healing hand on a heart attack victim and makes an instant baby, conceived in bile, with a fetching sex worker.

Quite the night.

That which is offensive is meant to be humorously so, and never quite gets there. Barry’s odyssey has hints of a personal journey to it, a rebirth. Not really.

There are suggestions of “Starman” to Green’s performance, that puzzled, alien-in-a-strange-land who regards the world like a stoned pigeon and parrots what is said to him because speech is a “new thing.”  But strip all the charm from that, give the guy one slack-jawed look, and that’s the “acting” we get.

The spare effects are terrific and just flashy enough to not seem out of place in a lowdown exploitation picutre like this.

One can see why the fanboys might buy into “Fried Barry” — the sci-fi/horror elements, the exploitation touches, the primitive sexism (all harridans and whores). But not me.

Let’s just say I got it, but I never got into it. Ever.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, drug abuse, explicit sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Gary Green, Chanelle de Jager, Kelsey Egan, Joey Cramer and Sean Cameron Michael

Credits: Written and directed by Ryan Kruger. A Rock Salt release.

Running time: 1:39

Thrillers by their very nature string you along. The good ones invite you to second-guess the heroine or hero, put yourself in that person’s shoes, collect your wits and think your way out of a life-or-death jam.

And the not-as-good ones? They manipulate, abandon logic and make you grope for reasons for “Why did he do that” “Why did she go back?” “What sane person would go down there?”

“What Keeps You Alive” sucks you in and lets you off the hook entirely too easily. Its set pieces seem to lumber along in slow motion. When one of them is a rowboat chase, well, that’s a given. Its finale abandons every rational thought a human being would have, even as the writer-director is having a smirk over how clever it is to hide a climactic confrontation. And hell, it’s got one of those “talking villains.” Need I say more?

Young marrieds Jackie and Jules show up at her grandpa’s “rustic” lakefront frame house in the wooded Canadian wilderness. Their get-away is coitus-interrupted by a neighbor, and that’s when Jules (Brittany Allen of TV’s “The Boys”) first starts to wonder, “Who IS this woman I’ve married?”

Jackie used to be Megan. But as she’s played by Hannah Emily Anderson, she with the “X-Men: Dark Phoenix” scary eyes, well you’d think Julie would have had a clue or two earlier, maybe when “Jackie” starts plucking out a modern murder ballad, “There’s a demon inside, BLOOD let it out” on the guitar.

Questioning that neighbor (Martha MacIsaac) when Megan/Jackie isn’t around just leads to more questions. Here’s a deal-breaker worth mentioning in couples therapy. When your partner says “I was cleared of any wrongdoing,” sounding like “that’s what my lawyer allows me to say,” run.

All the obvious bits of foreshadowing? Colorful “anecdotes” from Megan’s past, etc? Well, you’ll see.

Jules ends up injured and limping/rowing/pleading/fighting for her life from a very talkative psychopath.

I went along with this further than I probably should have. But the lack or urgency and Jules’ maddening refusal to take flight — we see mailboxes all along the road to the house, know at least “some” neighbors are at home — bugged me, right from the start.

There’s all this ominous Beethoven on the soundtrack, throbbing along as we wonder what Jackie — who rehearses panicked 911 calls the way others internalize Blanche DuBois — can say or do to explain her actions and the times she seems to abandon her own logic.

The performances are good, and the gay marriage twist seems a long way from the old “homicidal homosexual” stereotype. Sort of.

But the endless monologues — Jules diagnosing and narrating her injuries, aloud, for the audience, Jackie giving away her fake distress and switching to instant-threats early and often — punch holes in what would have been a tighter, tenser narrative.

Why tell us everything when good actresses can simply SHOW it? That’s something any filmmaker fretting over making a “not-as-good” thriller should mutter as a mantra, even if what they’re showing us grows more preposterous than fun.

MPAA Rating: R for violence including bloody images, language, and brief nudity

Cast: Hannah Emily Anderson, Brittany Allen, Martha MacIsaac and Joey Klein

Credits: Written and directed by Colin Minihan. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:38

Drive carefully, kids.

This Alexandra Shipp/Famke Janssen vehicle (pardon) opens Aug 14.

True confession. I didn’t get a thing from actress Romina Paul’s sleep-inducing docudrama/memoir “Again Once Again.” Nothing.

A post-partum depression essay on the stages of life, family history and cultural history, “De nuevo otra vez” is basically a series of staged scenes. Conversations, a party, long walks, tutoring sessions in German and slides shows accompanied by Paul’s voice-over narration tell us her personal story, her German-Argentinian family’s history and the existential crisis she’s hit a few years past thirty and three years after the birth of her little boy, Ramón.

“A few artists, a suicide, no real heroes” she says of her people, in Spanish (and occasionally German, when she’s tutoring or talking with her “raised her kids German” mother).  Yes, and?

Paul, perhaps best known for her attachment to the 13 hour film “experiment” in six parts, “La Flor,” is staying with her mother, who gives her a break from the child-rearing (but not from advice on child-rearing) so that Romina can catch up with friends, go dancing at parties, “my desires running wild.”

But “we’re not separated,” she says of her husband Javi to others, and to Javi on the phone. She’s dallying a bit with others, “experimenting” romantically — just a bit. And she’s musing about the state of her relationship, her psyche (the kid is “suffocating” her, she admits at one point) and her place in the world of women.

Younger friends talk to the camera with a slide projected over them as they do, speaking of third generation feminism as “the daughter’s revolution.” Romina can’t quite grasp her place within that.

A guy she knows (Pablo Sigal) is Jewish and headed on a trip and needs German lessons. He too, gets a “testimonial” moment, speaking directly to the camera.

And her mother (Mónica Rank, I think, as virtually NO one is identified, even in dialogue) plays with the boy and urges the mother to start socializing him, and not just herself.

Not that she’s judging, mind you.

Paula gives us a superficial spin on what she’s going through, or what her film has her going through. But she’s an actress and feels like an unreliable narrator.

The situations are generally trite, and the philosophical musings have the feel of pages from a “deep thought for the day” calendar about them, a little profound, a bit pretentious.

The entire enterprise reeks not just of “privilege,” but of shallow, self-indulgent narcissistic entitlement. Yes, I am beautiful and famous, I have access to a good camera operator and we can stage these scenes like pros. “Again Once Again” never quite answers “But why would you?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast:  Romina Paula, Mónica Rank, Ramón Cohen Arazi, Pablo Sigal, Mariana Chaud, Denise Groesman.

Credits: Directed by Romina Paula, Rosario Cervio, script by Romina Paul. A Mubi release.

Running time: 1:24

Sept. 3, Disney furthers it’s transition out of theatrical releases as it launches the delayed live action “Mulan” as a VOD streaming “extra” on Disney Plus. You subscribe to the service for $6.99, and for another $30 bucks you can see “Mulan.” They keep everything they earn this way and recoup costs in a flash, if enough buyers bite.

The service, Variety reports, already has over 60 million subscribers, many of them drawn there by the Disney Plus premiere of “Hamilton.” That worked, and convinced them that they’d “left money on the table,” as the kids in Vegas say.

So. Upcharge for the next pricey theatrical release that they move to streaming.

It will still open In theaters in countries where Disney Plus isn’t offered.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/variety.com/2020/tv/news/disney-plus-60-5-million-paid-subscribers-1234725409/amp/

“Latte and the Magic Waterstone” is an animated adventure for the very young, a tale with all the narrative complexity of an “Ice Age,” CG animated at a Nickelodeon level.

It’s European, a Flemish production, something you can tell just by looking at its “star.”

No dear, there are no hedgehogs in North America. But yes, they are adorable.

Latte, voiced by Ashley Bornancin, is a loner hedgehog in a forest where everybody else — from the boars to the rabbits — has family. She’d love to make a friend, even “a scaredy squirrel” will do.

But standing up to the meadow critters bullying Tjum (Carter Hastings) doesn’t impress the red squirrel. Much. And their roughhousing busts a precious water-storage pumpkin in a forest where the river has run dry.

After everybody assumes Latte caused this latest calamity — “BLAME the hedgehog!” — the “raving raven,” a seer, shows up and decrees that somebody needs to travel far, to the land of the (sometimes French-accented) bears to retrieve the Magic Waterstone and end their drought.

Latte stomps off, all “I’ll show THEM.” Tjum eventually follows, as they meet a beaver and a toad who help them, and tricky wolves and a lynx who don’t.

“Big angry cat with pointy ears? Got it.”

The industrious beaver is planning for the return of water, and explains that with a stutter.

“Better be be be a busy beaver before badness be be befalls!”

That’s about as edgy and un-PC as this movie gets. It is of European origin, after all.

The action — chases, including one down a wet riverbed waterslide — is barely enough to keep even the sippy cup set diverted. The characters are generic, and the voice actors competent, but a fairly colorless lot.

But as Netflix screen babysitting services go, you could do worse.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: The voices of Ashley Bornancin, Carter Hastings and Daniel Amerman.

Credits: Directed by Regina Welker and Nina Wels, script by Martin Behnke, Andrea Deppert and Jesper Møller, based on the book by Sebastian Lybeck. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

“How to Fake a War” is the “In the Loop” meets “Absolutely Fabulous” of “fake news” comedies.

For those who don’t get the references, that means it throws amoral, self-absorbed public relations people at a “We need a war” scenario, that it’s cynical and dark — people die. And it’s comical and quick, if not downright manic.

The story is set up in a furious pre-credits bit, introducing a public relations veteran (Katherine Parkinson of TV’s “The IT Crowd”), a delusion Kanye-esque dunce of a pop star (Jay Pharaoh), a conflict on the Asian steppes that creates a humanitarian crisis, which our PR pro turns into a rep-rescuing benefit concert for her arrogant fool of a pop star client.

Image problem SOLVED for Harry Hope (Pharaoh, formerly of “Saturday Night Live”). All he has to do is headline the concert, lead the fans in chants of “Hope is Dope,” and they’ll ignore what a fur-coat wearing tool he is.

Only peace breaks out between Georgia and Ukbar. “Why couldn’t they wait three more days?” the “client” wants to know. “Make PEACE go away,” Harry demands. “I’m your UNIVERSE, Kate! Follow my PHYSICS!”

Kate needs three days of “fake news” showing that the “cease fire” is nothing of the sort. She and her team — assistant Simon and cameraman/tech-guy Matt (Ali Cook, Daryl McCormack) will fly East and see to it.

“We run red carpets and press junkets. What d’we know about war?”

“Enough to FAKE one!”

Kate’s new intern, her niece (Lily Newmark) is hurled into this as well — fetching coffee, making plane reservations (she’s never flown), flagging a taxi van, herding the troops to the airport.

Peggy is about 20, looks all of 15, and in the film’s cleverest joke, she is a NATURAL at this stuff, a born “fixer.” Sure, they have a local guy wearing that title whom she has hired to get them to the Georgian border/conflict zone. But Peggy is the one who convinces a truck driver to take them. And at every turn, she is there to throw more dynamite onto a “fake” explosion, apply fake blood to “victims” of the “ongoing” conflict — some of these “crisis actors” strung up on telephone poles.

Like “Auntie,” like “niece?” It’s like it’s in her ginger-headed blood.

But the fakery is so convincing that cable news isn’t the only group fooled. The combatants go back at it and Kate has that moment every PR agent takes a blood oath to never give in to — an attack of conscience.

“How to Fake a War” all but sprints by, from fakery to firefights, kidnapping to tirades from the talent, bitching about losing “My Nobel PRIZE.”

Parkinson chooses to play against the chaos and mayhem surrounding Kate. She is calm, quiet to the point of mumble-whispering her lines. It’s a justifiable choice, but not the funniest one. She becomes the weakest link in her own star vehicle.

Pharaoh dials up the diva, Newmark makes the “innocent who isn’t all that innocent” a hyper-competent, almost sinister reflection of Kate’s PR cynicism.

And the first-time feature director who changed his name to Rudolph Herzog keeps things skipping along, a little “Hollywood” fakery here, the sting of violence (flippantly skipped by, cynically exploited) there.

It isn’t “Wag the Dog” or “In the Loop,” and the “Ab Fab” borrowings aren’t as loopy. But “How to Fake a War” amuses and impresses and entertains as it does. You will never again look at those stiletto-heeled women in their little black dresses herding their “talent” down a red carpet, clipboards in hand, “coaching” their celebrities as they put words literally in their mouths, with disdain after this.

Cast: Katherine Parkinson, Lily Newmark, Ali Cook, and Jay Pharaoh.

Credits: Directed by Rudolph Herzog, script by Tim Price. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:25

Chelsea Peretti plays a cynically bemused and “mouthy caterer having no luck planning a wedding of her own in “Spinster,” a dry but whimsical Canadian comedy about involuntary singlehood.

Peretti, of TV’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” plays Gaby, a Nova Scotian we meet as she’s hearing out some bride-to-be’s obnoxious “magical fairytale” story of how she met her future husband.

“Never underestimate the power of romantic love,” the bride (Amy Groening) chirps.

That’s Gaby’s opening to school the woman on how marriage began “as a contract,” and has devolved into “at best, gross consumerism, at worst, a tax break.”

She’s not hearing this nonsense today, even though that’s the bulk of her catering business. It’s her birthday. She’s 39. “Spinster” tracks her story from birthday to birthday, the long Death March to 40.

Her live-in bore of a boyfriend moves out. She gets it. “I’m mouthy and I’m irritable, and and I need to work on my core!”

Her coupled up friends and relatives might be relieved she’s rid of “Mr. Club Soda, all bubbles, no taste.” But is this her fate, to wind up “some old bag lady,” alone like “my great Aunt Elise…died in her bathtub. They found the body a week later.”

BFF Amanda’s (Susan Kent) advice, that she needs to “choose, and not be chosen,” doesn’t convince Gaby of anything. Speed dating, online dating? The allure is fading.

“I’d full-on rather be knitting.”

The year will take her through attempted couplings, a new role as weekly companion to the daughter (Nadia Tonen) of her divorced brother Alex (David Rossetti), adopting a dog and off-handedly pursuing “my dream,” to move from just catering to having her own restaurant.

Will a man ever fit into all that?

The least realistic part of the script is it’s casual dismissal of the all-consuming time-suck that being a professional baker in the hospitality is. Gaby is shown as having all sorts of time on her hands, as the movie is concerned with personal, sexual fulfillment.

Peretti deadpans through 85 minutes of this in blandly pleasant style, with only the occasional flash of testy debate about which is more selfish, singlehood (not feeding the generational social security system) or marriage and procreation (straining resources, and the planet).

This is Canada, after all.

The funniest sequence in director Andrea Dorfman’s (“Parsley Days”) bag of tricks in the over-familiar speed-dating montage, cynical and snarky.

“To be honest, I never really listened to Rush.”

It’s easy enough to sit through, but the entire affair is more deflating than heartening. “Spinsterhood” as depicted here is just as much a “fantasy” of singlehood at 40 as the fantasy’s Gaby ridicules. Large support system, generous father willing to support her dream, professional fulfillment, worry-free Canadian health care, Border Collie, “But why can’t I find a partner, and should I care that I can’t?”

Hard to find much conflict, comic or otherwise, in all of this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Chelsea Peretti, Susan Kemp, David Rossetti, Bill Carr and Nadia Tonen

Credits: Directed by Andrea Dorfman, script by Jennifer Deyell. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:27

A late August release, a ’70s Aussie feminist icon brought back to life. Hey, we had the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs biopic, why not Helen?