Movie Nation

The new Epix series “Helter Skelter: An American Myth,” weaves its story out of the culture’s collective memory of LA’s infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by drug-addled cultists in the thrall of Charles Manson.

In half a dozen episodes, documentarian Lesley Chilcott, who earned her bonafides as a line producer on “An Inconvenient Truth,” parks Manson firmly in the world of celebrity and uniquely late-’60s sin that produced hippies, Altamonte, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and the “back to nature” environmental movement.

Working with fresh interviews with surviving members of “The Family,” she creates visual and aural collages that suffuse the film in its “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” era, and immerse the viewer in what we’ve forgotten that we remember. Still photographs of the Spahn Ranch, archival footage of the vivacious starlet Sharon Tate and the hip LA “scene” — The Daisy nightclub, Sunset Strip streetlife — spare recreations and generous samplings of Manson’s music, including demo tapes, paint a picture of a charismatic guy (he died in prison in 2017) with delusions of pop stardom and dreams of fame in an place built on the promise that “anything can happen.”

And when the fame didn’t work out, the music being a tolerable imitation of the airy fairy folk pop of the day, the dark acid-fueled fantasies of “a race war” and the hidden meanings of The Beatles’ “White Album” (including the song that came to signify the crimes, “Helter Skelter”) came to the fore. Manson sent his most loyal followers into the summer LA night to kill, write “Death to the Pigs” in blood, and start the revolution he was sure he’d come to rule.

Archival news footage shows how the crimes were covered, from that first morning after, when reporters asked questions they already knew the answers to from cops who’d been slow preserving the crime scene.

“Was there anything written on the door?”

Episodes with titles like “Charles Manson is Your Brother,” “Nobody Joins a Cult” and “Some Bad Mistakes” take us on Manson’s journey, with surviving “Family” interviewees such as Dianne Lake, Stephanie Schram and Catherine Share laying out what they know and heard from him and pieced together over the decades.

The women, almost to a one, tend to look back incredulously on their involvement, with Schram still dazed that “You kind of gave up your identity” when you fell under Manson’s influence.

The series makes a fascinating, if repetitive and incomplete account of the crimes and the prosecution for them. This isn’t prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s best seller on “the case.” It’s “How we got there” oriented, dwelling on Manson’s obsession with fame and the allure he had for not just teenage girls, but to actors, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and others.

He was a part of this ferment, and you can’t help but wonder if there’s a Castro sort of “What might have been” in his story. Fidel Castro was an aspiring baseball player with talent who gave up that dream and refocused his energies on revolution. Manson suffered disappointments and humiliations. Songs like “Cease to Exist” and “Sick City” weren’t going to get any sober record producer’s attention (and several heard them). So Manson, with the help of drugs, embraced madness and sent his minions out to murder in the hopes of starting a race war he figured he’d win.

In any event, Epix has a series (Sunday nights through August) that makes a fine companion piece to Quentin Tarantino’s tale of the end of one era and “the coming darkness” of another, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” It’s a good primer on the time, the crime and the criminals that Tarantino liked to imagine “Old Hollywood” could vanquish, like the villains in the third act of a run-of-the-mill TV Western.

MPAA Rating: unrated, discussions of violence, crime scene photos

Cast: Charles Manson, Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, David Dalton, Stephanie Schram, Bobby Beausoleil, Ivor Davis

Credits: Directed by Lesley Chilcott, created by Greg Berlanti, Barbara Kopple.  An Epix release.

Running time: Six episodes @:55 minutes each.

Gleeson? Uncanny

Showtime is tossing this movie Molotov cocktail at the traitor and his self righteous and clumsy GOP FBI chief right before the election.

You’ve seen Tom Bower in scores of films over the years, brief appearances that leave a mark in “Die Hard 2,” “Light of My Life” or the “Breaking Bad” movie — “El Camino.”

Parked front and center in an indie drama for once, he gives a performance for the ages in “Senior Love Triangle,” a stark, harrowing and touching portrait of what we euphemistically call “The Twilight Years” and one man raging “at the dying of the light.”

It’s based on a famous Isadora Kosofsky photo essay about just what some of the extremely elderly are up to in their dotage. Past and present collide, or are confused for one another, and romance and dreams die hard in the generations that live on past 80.

Bower stars as William Selig, a gruff and bluff Navy veteran who seems to remember he used to be somebody. In his mind, he still is, “closing this deal” that he promises will make him flush, bullying “John” on the other end of his cell phone conversations to make this go through.

The fetching Adina (Anne Gee Byrd of “Wild”) can’t hide her adoration of his take-charge bluster.

“I’m gonna get you OUTTA that dump,” he says of the posh L.A. assisted living facility where they live. He drives her around in his forty year-old Mercedes, wines her and dines her and fields calls. And every so often, they hit her ATM.

William is evicted. He stopped making payments on his room in their facility, and now the authorities and her son are tossing him out.

“Haven’t you spent enough of my mother’s money?”

That barely slows William down. Sure, she’s Jewish, as is her son. But Adina is “surrounded by Nazis,” and only he can “save” her.

First, though, he needs another place to live. The WWII Pacific Theater veteran is used to raising his voice, getting his back up and bullying staff to get what he wants. Spencer (Travis Van Winkle) is in the middle of showing William the amenities at Gramercy Towers when he gets an “I don’t like your TONE,” from the old man in the Navy Veteran cap.

“We are versed in the care of the elderly,” Spencer says, apologizing and pointing out his degree in gerontology.

“You’re a CHILD.”

Spencer’s getting off easy. “Nazis” and “Vichy swine” are the preferred non-profane insults this man who “chased Tojo across the Pacific.” William is “a man of God” who answers to “no one,” and curses like the sailor he once was even as he invokes the Almighty. All that’s missing is a MAGA hat.

“Thank you, Richard Nixon,” he bellows after a bit of good news.

He’s got big plans, and this is but a setback. But Gramercy Towers is where he meets Jeanie (Maryln Mason, whose TV credits go back to “The Real McCoys”).

Great. Now William’s got TWO women he wants to take care of. That damned “John” better put that deal through, and quick!

Director and co-writer Kelly Blatz cooks up some great scenes showing the arc of the women’s relationship — mistrust, jealousy and insulting one-upmanship followed an uneasy truce that turns easier.

All those stories you’ve heard about “swinging” senior communities, VD outbreaks in Florida’s largest concentration of the elderly — The Villages — come to mind and find a depiction based in reality in “Senior Love Triangle.” There are “senior moments” ranging from mere confusion to deep, irrational delusions. We can sense it long before the script makes the degree of mental disconnect obvious.

And Bower tears through the scene and the scenery like a bull in a Chinatown shop, an old man not nearly as old as the movie would have us believe. Filmmakers should recognize that WWII vets are almost all gone, with survivors well into their 90s and none of them driving around LA.

The surface gloss of such movies about the very old is this notion of “one last great adventure,” even if it’s just a December-LATE December romance. But it is the dark undertow tugging at “Senior Love Triangle”  that lingers, the bitter reminder of everything you lose control of and the predators, blowing up your phone, hoping to catch you in decline or in the middle of your worst “senior moment.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tom Bower, Anne G. Byrd, Marlyn Mason and Travis Van Winkle

Credits: Directed by Kelly Blatz, script by Kelly Blatz and Isadora Kosofsky, based on Kosofsky’s photo documentary. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:32

Oh, the mischief movie-makers get up to when they forego trimming their scripts and editing their films to a running time that their story can sustain.

When you title your movie “Romance Doll,” and build it around a Japanese artist turned sex doll (“‘Love doll,’ we call them now.”) sculptor, you’re just asking for trouble stretching that into something more than a 95 minute farce.

But even though Yuki Tanada’s film begins with a giggle and transitions into a guffaw or two, “Romance Doll” doesn’t always over-reach as it looks for something more profound to say on this subject, or rather dancing around this subject.

Tanada, of “Moon and Cherry,” “Mourning Recipe” and “One Million Yen and the Nigamushi Woman,” conjures up a comedy with a sad aftertaste, little moments of laughter chased-off by a breaking relationship and breaking hearts.

Tetsuo (Issey Takahashi) answers a job opening at Kubota Co., an “unemployed artist just out of school.” The giggling old lady there figures a friend was pulling his leg when he recommended the place. Tetsuo shown up at a dumpy, tiny warehouse space where Kinja (Kitarô) designs ever more realistic sex dolls for the lonely-and-or-kinky in the somewhat prurient culture of Japan.

“Tetsu” takes the job, and after a misguided first effort, which the boss (Pierre Taki) “tests” by groping in front of the staff, gets into the spirit of the place, with its silicon-over-metal-armature (frame) dolls for the company’s discriminating clientele.

“I don’t want knockers, I want knockouts,” the boss hectors. The idea is to make a doll so real “it might come to life.”

The way to achieve that, the artist convinces his mentor Kinja, is to make their molds out of a real live woman, a “perfect” natural beauty. But when artist’s model Sonoko (Yû Aoi) shows up, the two men cast “rock, paper scissors” lots over who gets to smear the modeling plastic over her nude form, like a couple of sniggering school boys.

And Tetsu, a nervous wreck three years between girlfriends, falls in love at first…touch. Shockingly, Sonoko accepts his confession of affection and they court and marry.

One sitcom-worthy catch. He’s let her believe that she modeled for prosthetic breasts for cancer survivors, “helping people,” and not a sex doll. Another catch? The doll becomes a not-quite-underground/not-quite-porn sensation. Tetsu finds himself keeping stupid hours and not just a stupid secret as Kubota cranks out the silicon Sonokos.

Their marriage will be tested in ways tawdry, conventional and profound. We see that coming, as the film opens ten years in the future, and Tetsuo’s voice-over narration hints at a tragedy to come.

Tanada gets a wonderful tenderness and fragility out of the performances, with Aoi suggesting someone almost too delicate for this world, at least when she first marries. She expects marriage to be one thing and isn’t able to make it turn out that way.

Takahashi takes “shy” and “awkward” to their usual manifestations, and then some. “Tetsu” has let this job-for-life take over his life, much as Kinji did before him.

Mournful tone aside, Tanada is working within a sort of comedy-of-manners framework here. There’s a Japanese wedding and a funeral, lots of bowing and confessing and apologizing. From this culture, Tanada winks, geishas, “adult manga (comic books)” and sex dolls reached full flower.

A more compact package might have made the movie’s themes and ideas pop out more. Energy and story coherence tends to evaporate in the second act, setting up a more melodramatic third act. A tighter film would have made for a shorter and better “Romance Dolls.”

But as sedately-paced as it is, sprinkled with third act twists, it’s still an intriguing peek inside a culture and the Japanese psyche, one of the more interesting journeys one can take on a journey “Around the world with Netflix.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, adult themes

Cast: Yû Aoi, Issey Takahashi, Kitarô and Pierre Taki

Credits: Written and directed by Yuki Tanada. A Kadokawa release on Netflix.

Running time: 2:03

They’ve had to delay and delay, and then reduce their scope and cut capacity at the one theater, the Enzian, that they’ll be showing films in for this year’s Florida Film Festival.

You know why.

But a lot of their titles will be available “virtually,” as in — log in, buy your ticket and watch the movie at home.

A LOT of titles.

Virtual FFF kicks off Aug. 8. The lineup is below.

Continue reading →

The favorite writer of the “let’s slum it” reading set, Charles Bukowski, has been the subject of many docs and appreciations.

Aug 7, here’s another.

His gritty, working class/drinking class novels were rarely adapted to film, but “Barfly” and “Factotum” both turned into decent movies. If you’re a fan, here you go.

Filmmakers who take a shot at Southern Gothic these days have to take care to avoid the traps of tropes.

Stories set in remote Southern towns, whose residents can seem frozen in time and wrapped in caricature, can come off as parodies even under the best of intentions. And when Hollywood “types” do the storytelling, stereotypes and “hill people” cliches are the rule — and not just in horror.

Writer-director Bethany Brooke Anderson is a native Kentuckian and a University of Kentucky alumnus whose debut feature avoided none of those traps, and found a few of her own devising.

“Burning Kentucky” is a quasi-coherent and inconsequential wallow in Southern Gothic, a tale of moonshine and “Duck Dynasty” beards, of murder and revenge, small town addiction and Hazard County corruption. And from the decision to let the cast swallow much of the dialogue in subtitle-worthy under-enunciated accents, to the trite story crawling through worn-out themes, it is miscalculated Appalachian mush.

Aria (Emilie Dhir) and Wyatt (Nick McCallum) give us some sense than they’re better than their corner of Appalachia. They carry their baggage with a glimmer of hope that they might escape this hellhole. But their bond is brittle.

“We both lost our mamas the same night.”

Like most who grow up in a too-small town, they can have no secrets from each other.

“You’re the meanest man I ever met. ”

“You never met my daddy.”

Wyatt’s dad (John Pyper-Ferguson), Jaxon, is  the alcoholic sheriff in need of a haircut. He doesn’t approve of this dalliance or Aria’s “people.” And yet, somehow, he’s never met her.

Wyatt, being the sanest and soberest in his family, tries to convince junkie brother Rule (Nathan Sutton) to sober up and clean up “granny’s house,” which was never much and which he and his junky would-be country singer girlfriend (Augie Duke) have reduced to ruin. Her name is Jolene. Of course.

“Don’t you feel the weight of this place?” she asks Rule. The viewer certainly does.

Ten years have passed since the night both our young lovers lost their mothers. And through a “concerned” preacher’s (Andy Umberger) anniversary tribute and the unsentimental concern of the preacher’s son (Charlie Bewley) and the many MANY mumble/drawled, slow cigarette-prop conversations between the principals, we pick up on what went down, why Jaxon carries his grudges and what Rule is trying to narcotize out of his memory.

“Blood isn’t everythin’,” we’re told, when the contrary seems to be the guiding force for everybody else.

Flashbacks take us ten years into the past, but play like Hatfields and McCoys who brought back booby-trap knowledge from service in Vietnam. We see no still and hear no banjoes, which is a relief.

Moonshine is a subtext and heroin is another, when the movie would have been better served addressing the opioid (pill) or meth issues of rural America.

Anderson was going for an Appalachian “Winter’s Bone,” after a fashion — with mostly local actors and timeworn Appalachian addictions — booze, guns and revenge.

What she ended up with is a movie you feel “the weight of” rather than comprehend, and even at that, with all the long pauses and quiet, unfriendly conversations over smokes, it’s of no consequence whatsoever.

MPAA Rating: violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast:  John Pyper-Ferguson, Emilie Dhir, Nick McCallum, Nathan Sutton, Andy Umberger, Charlie Bewley and Augie Duke

Credits: Written and directed by Bethany Brooke Anderson. A Snowfort production on Tubi and other free streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:31

Voltage pictures has this Oct. 2 romance with Josephine Langford and a fellow called Hero Fiennes Tiffin Redgrave Burton Olivier. Some of those, anyway.

“Good men do bad things,” the speech begins, promisingly enough. “And bad men do good things.”

And then, the punchline — “If I can’t stop a beast like him, what’s my purpose?”

The bloke delivering those lines is “geezer” tough guy Vinnie Jones, a British mob enforcer who’s telling his boss (Malcolm McDowell), that this West Virginia goon has killed his girlfriend, and by God he’s getting his pound of flesh for it.

It should be a high point in veteran screenwriter and director Scott Wiper’s “The Big Ugly.”

But there’s all this palaver that comes in between the cliches that open that monologue and the flinty finish to it. And there’s the dead weight at the heart of this West Virginia mob war movie. The flashes of B-movie action are but interruptions for the endless succession of long, pretentious C-movie speeches.

That’s probably how he rounded up the grizzled quartet of character heavies he built the movie around. Ron Perlman, playing a Mountaineer mineral tycoon, has several stump speeches about “losers” and their fetish for Confederate flags and “honoring” the land he wants to drill for oil on. Malcolm McDowell goes on about “loyalty” and such in his talkative moments with Perlman, whose oil scheme is the perfect place to park London mob money that needs laundering. Jones, whose character narrates this saga of “God, land and oil,” talks more than he’s verbalized in a score of other movies.

Only Bruce McGill, as the mostly-silent and lethal “fixer” for Perlman’s character, avoids soliloquies in a movie that could use a lot fewer of them.

It’s a ludicrous tale of mob molls and comely barmaids, of private jets and Big London money and the good ol’oil boy (Perlman) who describes himself in terms that make him the Al Gore of Big Petroleum.

Harris (McDowell) brings Neelyn (Jones) and Neelyn’s girlfriend (Lenora Crichlow) to “Wild, wonderful West Virginia” to close a deal and plug an associate.

Neelyn’s given to snorting coke and chasing it with bourbon, and is black-out drunk when the son (Brandon Sklenar) of Perlman’s big chief hits on Fiona (Crichlow), and she disappears.

Neelyn looks for her, and since he’s the sort that barmaids and bar owners (Joelle Carter) just give a truck and “Daddy’s old clothes” to, he finds out what happened to her.

But confronting “Junior” won’t be easy. Junior’s used to bullying and beating up his way through this corner of W. Va. Even if the “geezer” can hold his own, Junior has Daddy and a whole organization behind him.

The other Londoners have gone back to London.

Fists fly, then bullets. Threats are made, and promises.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Prettiest blonde in town Kara (Leven Rambin) gets caught between Junior and the Brits. And lurking in the wings is Milt (McGill, from “Lincoln” and “Animal House”). Don’t MAKE him have to pull the trigger.

Stupid scene follows bloated speech, all the way through to a finale set up to go off, but which fizzles like soggy fireworks. Precious few movies are set in Appalachia, and every one that doesn’t work makes it less likely we’ll soon see another.

I like the old guys in this one, and have tracked down each and every one of them at one point or another for “movie tough guy/character actor” interviews.

Wiper (“The Cold Light of Day,” a couple of direct-to-video “The Marine” sequels) didn’t have enough of a movie to justify rounding up this cast, these locations and this budget for. Simple as that.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout, some sexual content and brief drug use

Cast: Vinnie Jones, Ron Perlman, Leven Rambin, Malcolm McDowell, Brandon Sklenar, Lenora Crichlow, Joelle Carter, Bruce McGill

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Wiper.  A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:46

The Muppets return from that abortive “adult” mockumentary TV series Disney/ABC attempted a few years back with “Muppets Now,” a device-friendly Disney Plus series that won’t make anybody forget their 1970s heyday.

Which is kind of the idea. The original voices are gone, replaced by not-quite-funny imitations, which hamstrings the characters.

Kermit’s mood swings — enthusiastic cheerleader to dismayed impresario beaten down by the needy no-talents and diva puppets surrounding him — are missed.

But “Diva, it’s a POSITIVE term, right?” Missy Piggy (voiced-performed by Eric Jacobson) asks guest RuPaul. Yes, she’s reassured. And we’re treated to RuPaul’s unintentionally fake laugh.

Keeping in mind Disney has this valuable property and it can’t make a dime off nostalgia, let’s forget how genuinely tickled most of the guest stars on the original “Muppets Show” seemed to be, back in the day. The very process of acting and interacting with wise-cracking adults doing vaudeville shtick via puppets made Rita Moreno, Julie Andrews, Milton Berle, Pearl Bailey and Alice Cooper just crack up.

So it’s on to this new series, which begins with a video call each week as producer-Scooter confers with Kermit and dodges “notes” and pitches and pleas from Piggy and Fozzy, et al, for new bits and sketches as he drags and uploads each new episode to the network/streaming service.

It takes a while to reach that first “bit” that pops. A long while. Some performers never quite find a voice that suits the persona of the funny character they’ve taken over. Some bits are utterly dependent on the enthusiasm of their guest stars (some of whom return for multiple episodes).

Pepe the Prawn hosts “Pepe’s Unbelievable Game Show,” a zingy parody with “real” contestants and what sounds like genuine riffing by the Spanish-accented host (Bill Barretta). Pepe changes the rules of the “game,” willy nilly, forgets to introduce the contestants, and mispronounces the names when he does.

“Artun” becomes “Cartoon,” and it’s “Oh, so joo INVENTED cartoons?”

In a show of bits and bytes, this recurring sketch is the funniest, the one that works pretty much every time out.

The reinvention of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew (Dave Goelz) and his hapless victim/assistant “Beak-R” comes via “Muppet Labs Field Test” segments, where they explain (Hah!) concepts like “velocity” by catapulting pizzas into a wall. “Combustion?” You KNOW that’ll be “lit” (Genuine Muppet Joke).

“Let’s skip learning and let’s start BURNING!”

Miss Piggy’s “Life Sty” segment must have “tested” well, because they keep coming back to it (Taye Diggs and Linda Cardellini are here for the early episodes) and the Pig isn’t as funny and the “hot yoga” and “slap massage” bits kind of flail in silence.

The “test audience” for the series is like the critics in the balcony of the original show. Nothing the wisecracking old grumps Statler and Waldorf  say or do is worth a rim-shot.

The Swedish chef’s “Okëÿ Dokëÿ Køøkin” segment is packed with promise. Bring in a celeb chef — Carlina Will or Roy Choi — for a competition with the nutty, incompetent Swede. The deadpan, stoic and “Swedish” nature of the character is tossed aside for these throw-downs. I guess even Swedish “ethnic humor” is out (not for Pepe, though).

The only one of these that I saw that worked had Danny Trejo going mustache-to-mustache over a molé cook-off. Trejo’s the rare guest star to really blast past the surreal and get into the over-the-top spirit of Muppet acting.

“Meatballs shmeatballs. Hah!”

Sketch comedy is by its nature hit or miss. Adjusting for the “device” era in viewing habits means that double-take subtlety and wordplay take a back seat to big (ish) sight gags and the like.

Will a new generation discover the pleasures of a Fozzie the Bear joke?

“Why’s the chimney under the weather? He’s got a FLUE! Wocka wocka!”

Hard to say.

Disney and Henson Co. might be on the right track with the Muppets. But judging from the early episodes, they may have to beef up the writing and deliver some blunt “notes” to the performers. For “Now,” they’re just not getting it done.

MPAA Rating: general audiences

Cast: The Muppets, with guest stars such as Danny Trejo, Linda Cardellini, Taye Diggs, Chef Roy Choi

Credits:  A Disney Plus streaming release.

Running time: Episodes are @24 minutes each.