Movie Nation

Preston Sturges may have had a decade of sparkling dialogue for films and such scripts as the holiday delight “Remember the Night” and “The Good Fairy” on his resume when he finally got to use “written and directed by” in his credits. But it would still be a mistake to label “The Great McGinty,” his directing debut, one of his very best.

“Sullivan’s Travels,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Unfaithfully Yours” were to follow, after all.

But 1940’s “McGinty” had glimpses of the trademark Sturges cynicism with a faint touch of optimism, his populism and the crackling screwball comedy banter that would make him an icon of Golden Age Hollywood.

This time out, the dialogue was straight out of “Palookaville.”

“You got me all a’tremble. I bet you’re scared TO DEATH of yourself!”

He took the “romance” out of courtship to comic effect and dared to see optimism in the most cynical political operators.

Sturges cast a couple of Black actors in stereotypical subservient roles, but sees to it that they get their laughs from digging commentary at the white folks, something he’d expand on as his career progressed and Hollywood evolved.

And he built his film around not big name stars, but a trio of the great character actors of his day — Brian Donlevy, William Demarest and Akim Tamiroff. That pays off in most very scene and gives the picture a cute little kick in the finale.

The story here is a Roosevelt/Huey P. Long era political satire, about a down-on-his-luck mug who stumbles his way from voter fraud to “collecting” to graft to Big Time Graft, but who starts to grow a conscience about “helping folks” as he does.

You see veteran tough guy Donlevy (a “Beau Geste” Oscar nominee) in the corner of your eye in the opening scene, in which a tipsy American barfly (Louis Jean Heydt) staggers into a “Banana Republic” suicide attempt before the sultry saloon singer (Steffi Duna) enlists the bartender in helping her pull this failed bank clerk together.

You think you got it bad, the bartender (Donlevy) wants to know? “I used to be a governor.”

The story of Dan McGinty’s rise and fall is told in flashback, a burly, blustery hustler on the bum until he’s solicited to “vote” by a political fixer (Demarest). Two bucks if you go vote for Mayor Tillingast.

Greedy McGinty wants to know how many times he can get away with that unregistered voter scheme.

“Whaddaya think this is, Hicks Corners? Some people is too lazy to vote, that’s all. They don’t like this kind of weather. Some of ’em is sick in bed and can’t vote. Fixer Skeeter (Demarest) pauses a beat.

“Maybe a couple of ’em croaked recently…” 

McGinty pulls the scam at 37 polling stations, which is how he meets the Big Boss (Tamiroff), who pulls all the strings in this town and who lapses into his native Russian at the first sign of aggravation.

A Russian fixing elections? Go on.

McGinty becomes a mob collector then a mob alderman. And when the jig is up on that corrupt administration, he becomes the “unknown” alternative “reform” candidate. He can be the mob mayor if he just runs out and gets himself married.

A nearly forgotten piece of World War II lore is brought back to life in the Chinese epic “Dongji Rescue.”

It’s about the Oct. 1942 sinking of a Japanese transport loaded with British POWs from the capture of Hong Kong, which the Japanese used as an excuse to try and execute their entire “cargo,”

Leave it to the Chinese to remind the world what barbarous bastards the Japanese were during WWII.

But “slow” is the byword in this heroic epic by veteran Chinese TV director Zhenxiang Fei and Guan Hu (“The 800”).

Slow is the submarine (the U.S.S. Grouper) that stalks the unmarked Lisbon Maru, slow enough for free diving Chinese fishermen swimmers to catch up to it to check out the torpedo-firing.

Slowly the Lisbon Maru sinks below the waves with over 1800 British POWs locked in the holds and doomed to die.

And slow is the reaction of the Dongji Island villagers to this horror, who take a lot of time and plenty of extra murderous outrages from the Japanese occupiers before they decide to attempt a rescue via their junk-rigged (sailing) fishing boats.

That doesn’t prevent this formulaic thriller from being moving in its big moments of shared humanity and supreme sacrifice.

The fishermen brothers, marked by their neighbors as having “pirate blood,” live on the other side of the island from the village where a small Japanese garrison runs the show. Both dive and swim like very fast fish, but Ah Bi (Yilong Zhu) is the younger, reckless fisherman. He’s the free diver who spies the U.S. submarine, hears the explosion and fishes a survivor flushed out when the Lisbon Maru is punctured.

Ah Dang (Lei Wu) is the older pragmatist. He’s got dreams of escaping to Shanghai with his fellow outcast girlfriend Ah Hua (Ni Ni). He’s the one to try to shove the injured British survivor (William Franklyn-Miller) under the waves.

“Why borrow trouble,” after all, says Ah Dang (in Chinese with English subtitles)?

The younger sibling won’t hear of it.

We know that Ah Dang will come around to Ah Bi’s humanity and righteousness about the shipload of doomed men that they learn about. It takes a LOT of movie for that to happen.

We know that the “chief” (Haoyu Yang) appointed by the Japanese will have to shake off his appeasing nature, that Ah Hua will have to take a stand. The army deserter/school teacher (Minhao Chen) isn’t just here for drunken comic relief. He has a reckoning with his past coming. And we figure out that Old Wu (Dahong Ni), the protected village sage who once led resistance to the Japanese three years ago when they occupied the island will have to gird himself for one last fight.

“The longer you kneel, the harder it is to rise up again.”

Every obvious thing the script sets us up to expect takes forever to happen.

The middle acts are seasoned with confrontations with the murderous and thin Japanese lieutenant and his trigger-happy garrison, Imperial navy decisions to murder all the Brits rather than transport them to Japan and each of the two “pirate” brothers taking matters and the fight into his own hands in his own way.

Some of the swimming stunts are borderline superhuman, and the sailing and fighting sequences make for delicious spectacle.

It never pays too much to ponder the reasons the Chinese military and its film production companies (check out the Communist Party agitprop logos of the various studios involved) want this particular story to be told. “Heroic” idolizing of Chinese fishermen’s when they being used as pawns for attempted island grabs in the Philippines Sea? Wedge issue “We were FRIENDS to the British back when” used against the Japanese?

American clumsiness in sinking a shipload of Allied POWs played up?

But when this lumbering but intimate combat saga winds its way to a grand, predictable finale, the propaganda and slack pacing aren’t deal breakers. When the chips are down, it isn’t the fact that “They helped us fight the Japanese” that matters. It’s the first law of the sea — when others are in distress, you come to their aid that is the story’s moral compass.

“It doesn’t matter what they look like…A life saved is still a life.”

Rating: unrated, graphic and bloody violence

Cast: Yilong Zhu, Lei Wu, Ni Ni, William Franklyn-Miller, Haoyu Yang, Minghao Chen and Dahong Ni.

Credits: Directed by Zhenxiang Fei and Guan Hu, scripted by Shu Chen, Runnian Dong, Ji Zhang, A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:13

Horror icon Sam Raimi takes his shot at a “Cast Away” tale in the “Admirable Crichton,” “Swept Away” vein with“Send Help,” an over-the-top romp in the Raimi “Drag Me to Hell” style.

It’s about class and sexism, survivalism and revenge showcased in extreme close-ups that punch jokes right in the nose, violence that will pin your ears back and a dressed-down Rachel McAdams flipping the script on the movie that made her — “Mean Girls.”

And even though it gives away one twist/gag too easily and tends to pummel us in the finale, I have no notes. This is a damned funny riff on “Survivor” and the very idea that the dainty McAdams might have a little “Misery” era Kath Bates in her.

McAdams plays the uncool “victim” here — dowdy, 40ish Linda Liddel, the “workhorse” at Preston Strategic Solutions. But being a little older than the rest of the staff, she doesn’t fit in socially. She dresses down, right down to her “practical” comfortable shoes. She feels the need to suggest “googling” her “go to” song in bar-karaoke. “One Way or Another” by Blondie might as well be “Bringing in the Sheaves” to the bros and Gen Zs that fill out the staff there, the ones who don’t INVITE her to karaoke night.

Not that these Tau Kappa Dipsticks give two damns what the bespectabled numbers “savant” who does all the digital heavy lifting there thinks or says.

Linda’s on-the-spectrum awkward. So that vice presidency promotion that the now-late-founder of the firm promised her before his death is out the door when his frat-bro-promoting son (Dylan O’Brien) takes over.

The guy’s rich, young and entitled, with just enough biz school “management” track study under his belt to suffer Linda’s attention if only to “handle” her. The sharp-dressed slacker (Xavier Samuel) frat brother who steals credit for Linda’s work gets to promotion.

But they need her along when they close a big deal in Thailand. A lot of extra work is her consolation prize. She’s been humiliated to her face by this sexist creep, showing off for his model-fiance (Edyll Ismail). One last insult? The bros all watch a pirated copy of Linda’s goofy audition tape for “Survivor” on the private jet they’re all taking to Bangkok.

Payback is a bitch, and it starts the second the jet loses power and starts to go down. In short order, Linda the “Survivor” fanatic and her injured, no real skills in life Gen Z boss are stranded on an island in the Gulf of Thailand.

She proceeds to “Survivor” the s–t out of this dilemma, relishing every survival skill she learned for a show she never got on but gets to try out now. And everything she can do that he can’t is just more leverage in this class/status reversal.

The script by Damien Shannon and Mark Swift does a blunt-instrument chiseling in of Linda’s character — over-sharing to colleagues who could not care less, confessing her dreams to her pet cockatiel, lacking the spine, the wardrobe or the makeover to “make it” in the culture where she works, and not having a clue about that.

Raimi plays with the camera — exTREME closeups of senior partner Dennis Haysbert’s nose as he sniffs an errant dab of tuna salad from Linda’s uncleaned lip, funny/scary jolts of Linda having nightmares over how far she can take this status-reversal thing she’s playing with her hapless “boss,” a stunning drone shot -pull back from Linda on the beach, tipping its hat to “Castaway” and then throwing the latest tech in Robert Zemeckis’ and Tom Hanks’ faces.

But it is McAdams and O’Brien (“Maze Runner,” “Saturday Night” and TV’s “Teen Wolf” alumus) who make the sale here. They give their characters edges and strained efforts to hide those edges, if only for a little while. The way O’Brien’s Bradley oversells “Love the backpack. You make that TODAY?” to Linda’s latest latticework palm fronds creation, how McAdams hits just the right newly-hinted-at menace when she intones “We’re not in the office any more, Bradley,” grounds the characters in an amusing reality.

The film’s gender politics and Gen Z slaps aren’t going to earn universe endorsements. But Raimi’s delivered a laugh-out-loud variation on a well-worn theme. And those of us lucky enough to remember his body of work and age with him (look for the vintage Delta 88 wagon, kids, and Sam’s daughter in the office scenes) can appreciate the novel horrific touches he can bring even to the pedestrian of genre films even if some people are more the butt of the joke that in on it.

Rating: R, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel and Dennis Haysbert.

Credits: Directed by Sam Raimi, scripted by Damien Shannon and Mark Swift. A 20th Century Studios release.

Running time: 1:53

The quips clip by and corpses pile up (off camera) as “two guys who look like they eat steroid pancackes for breakfast” team up for the action comedy “The Wrecking Crew.”

Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa tear through Hawaii as estranged half-brothers who will crash, kick, crack and cut down anyone who gets in their way of getting to whichever villain or villains killed their dad.

Director Angel Manuel Soto (“Blue Beetle”) takes a few too many cues from “Old Boy” for this not to be a blood bath. He and his “crew” expect us not to notice the boatloads of pedestrian and motoring innocent bystanders who drop like flies all around the periphery of this jovial mayhem.

Momoa and a tanner-than-usual Bautista have decent chemistry and “Deadpool” alumnus Morena Baccarin all but steals the show as one’s ex-girlfriend who finally gets to land zingers of the Ryan Reynolds variety.

Bald cherub “Spiderman” sidekick Jacob Batalon is here as a paid punching bag and accomplice.

“Who’s Uncle Fester?“

“It’s ALOPECIA man!”

Yes, there are some dumb laughs. But the timing of this kind of “due process” ignoring “rogue cop” piling up victims who are in his sights, or just civilians in the way. could not be worse.

Momoa’s a veteran, rules-bending Oklahoma Reservation cop named Jonny summoned home when his low-rent private eye father is killed in a Honolulu hit and run. Bautista is James, a Navy SEAL trainer who brings the toughness to a new generation of the toughest of the tough.

They bicker and brawl and have their psychological issues bandied about by James’ child psychologist wife (Roimata Fox). And they figure out no, it wasn’t an “accident,” no matter what the aged Honolulu police detective (Stephen Root, in rare form) says.

The Japanese mob, the Yakuza, are involved. There’s this casino developer (Claes Bang, settling into the “New Jeroen Krabbé generic second-choice Euro villain role) who seems sketchy.

Hawaian culture is sampled, and the script is peppered with more Hawaianisms and slang than a dozen Kona Beer commercials. Maori character actor and “Star Wars” alumnus Temuera Morrison even plays the governor.

But damn this beast is violent and stupidly predictable. You can’t have a car chase getaway from the yakuza without “Ninjas on motorbikes!” Don’t bring in a helicopter on that CGI-assisted chase if there isn’t a tunnel that’ll come into play.

The “talking villain cliche” is on its way!

And you can’t set out for a final confronation without visiting a Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Statham et al styled private armory of firearms of every persuasion. Action heroes are “hoarders” in cheesy action comedies.

Soto takes a couple of shots at reprising the famous Park Chan-wook “mowing through foes on a narrow hallway” scene from “Old Boy,” the last one even including a claw hammer to complete the homage.

This overlong but rarely slow picture almost gets by on Momoa’s playfulness bouncing off Bautista — “You got old.” “You got FAT.” — and a light tone that almost wholly belies the arm-yanked-off/head-sliced/woman-tossed-out-a-window gore we’re treated to.

There’s no gore like glib gore, right? And there’s no body count when nobody bothers to count, which Soto, screenwriter Jonathan Topper and their cast take pains NOT to do.

Rating: R, graphic violence in big doses, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Morena Baccarin, Jacob Batalon, Frankie Adams, Stephen Root, Temuera Morrison and Claes Bang.

Credits: Directed by Angel Manuel Soto, scripted by Jonathan Tropper. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Runnging time: 2:04

“Conspiracy of Fear” is another “future is the past” slice of sci-fi noir, a shiny but emotionally empty thriller that lacks the suspense, intrigue and pretty much anytbing else to recommend it.

But it’s another B movie featuring Malcolm McDowell as a seemingly urbane villain, so there’s that.

An exposition-packed voice-over narration by a private eye tells us that a decade has passed since World War III, which climaxed with electro-magnetic pulse blasts that fried everything electronic. The world is analog again, with newspapers, landlines, cathode ray tubes, celluloid photography and vintage Chevy Novas making a comeback.

Capitalism? It collapsed into one great big monopoly, with The Company running everything that got the world back to work.

But a virus came roaring in after the conflict, one with symptoms similar to rabies. Big pharma concocted Suppresco, a “little white pill” that allows “purists” to live without catching it and the infected to suppress symptoms.

Reporter/poker player Alice, expressionlessly played by writer-director Kayla Tabish, is being watched because of what she’s been told about Suppresco’s latest iteration. There’s a kid on the run she’s trying to protect.

That private detective (Nick Lima Heaney) has been hired to find the girl on the lam by the knife-wielding heavy Vega (Steven Baeur). Will Gumshoe Avery switch sides because “She’s just a kid” or the reporter’s easy on the eyes?

Is that a grimace we detect every time the esteemed Brit character actor McDowell mispronounces (intentionally, “in character” we hope) the name of Halley’s Comet, which is due to return in 2061, which barely figures in the movie’s plot?

A high stakes “Company Money” game of Texas Hold’em opens the film, with our intrepid reporter looking more deer-in-headlights than poker faced. Tony bars, clubs and a party fill the middle acts. And double crosses abound in the finale.

But the whole never amounts to much more than antiques-adorned/production-designed-to-death tedium.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Kayla Tabish, Nick Lima Heaney, Steven Bauer and Edoardo Costa.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kayla Tabish. A Vision Films release on Youtube, Tubi, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:25

On October 20 of 1944, with World War II at its peak and hurtling towards its conclusion, the “zipper,” the iconic New York Times electronic headlines billboard on Times Square, briefly displayed the two tops stories among “all the news that’s fit to print.”

“MacArthur lands at Leyte Ethel Barrymore’s Temperature Lower.”

A general who promised “I shall return” had returned. But just as importantly to its readers, “the First Lady of the American Theatre,” “Queen of the Royal Family of Broadway,” was recovering from her bout of pneumonia.

That revealing moment is one of the grander take-aways in Kathleen Spaltro’s new biography of the grande dame of American acting, descended from generations of acting Drews and daughter of an actor who married into that clan and changed his name to Maurice Barrymore because he didn’t want to bring shame to his “real” family name.

Ethel Barrymore was a theatrical pop star in her youth, idolized and adored as a winsome beauty as an ingenue and flirty gamine of stage comedies by critics and audiences alike. As aspiring concert pianist in her youth who trained for and announced her intention to become an operatic prima donna in the midst of her earliest theatrical fame, Barrymore was the uncomfortable “queen” of a profession that was chosen by her footlights footsoldiers family of troupers.

As Spaltro’s academic biography details, Barrymore got stage fright the moment she became a “star.” It lasted until her dying days.

The “queen” title conferred on her in middle age was a further burden. Celebrity confined her early on, limited her ambition and the title “queen” was used as a cudgel by generations of critics who heard or heard of the plummy locutions and enunciations of her forebears in her mannerisms and speech and called her acting “old fashioned” in ways that never troubled her stage-turned-screen-actor siblings, John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore.

Ethel had an early triumph in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” a risk which critics and audiences punished the prototype “Ethel Barrymore Girl” actress for taking. Barrymore was forever frustrated that she only got a few chances to play Shakespeare — Juliet when she was too old for the role, “Merchant of Venice” and snippets of other plays for radio. The “cult of Ethel” dogged her for most of her career and limited her choices rather than broadening them.

But as Spaltro notes, Barrymore endured, “hating” the movies even as she dabbled in the silents, then found her own post-theatrical career with Oscar winning and Oscar nominated turns as she became matronly and her fame, her reputation and her imperious hauteur could be showcased to fine effect.

“Shy Empress of the Footlights” is very much an “academic biography,” with some 70 pages of notes, index and appendices stretching it to a still-thin 277 pages. The biography proper has whole pages filled with quotations from scores of reviews from publications long defunct and writers often without a byline — ardent admirers at first, comparing her to earlier legends like Eleneora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt in cascades of archaic purple prose.

That contributes to the book’s stodgy, arm’s length feel. Barrymore was very private woman who didn’t dish about an abusive marriage, famous “engagements” and courtships and her alcoholism in her evasive memoirs.

Spaltro never lets the reader forget the challenge of “knowing” someone whose greatest fame came from the ephemeral experience — for actress and audience — of the theater. “Legend” and “lore” about her and those like her will have to do.

There is more analysis of the film work — a disastrous “Rasputin” bio-pic for MGM, a lesser Hitchcock, the Oscar-winning “None but the Lonely Heart” opposite Cary Grant, the racially-charged but muzzled “Pinky” for Elia Kazan, a noir and “Portrait of Jennie” for David O. Selznick.

Barrymore gave lots of interviews early in her career, and turned more press shy later, which might explain Spaltro’s repetition of any anecdote or quip that plays like a Barrymore creed or secret to a happy life. A quip is quoted, then quoted again and then again in blocks of copy rarely broken into paragraphs. That comes off as sloppy editing or “padding” a thin manuscript.

The chronology of the life and career of “First Lady of the American Theatre” is jumbled up so much that one loses track of which “Jack” (John Barrymore or “Uncle Jack” Drew — the writer is talking about. Names are dropped by the bushel basketful and unless you know your Woollcotts and Dorothy Parkers from your “Thomas Hishak,” you’ll wear out Wikipedia trying to supplement all the author left out which her editors did not attempt to clarify.

Spaltro indulges herself in long sidebars about stage and screen depictions of disability in Barrymore’s day, and ever so daintily refers to Barrymore’s struggles with the bottle as “misuse of alcohol” and “alcohol misuse.” That’s not just dainty, it’s precious.

A naive, hyper-sexualized Southern “wild child” makes an imprint on the pre-war Southern family where she comes to work and a son of the family comes of age in “Rambling Rose,” a florid, folksy and comically sexual period piece that made Laura Dern a movie star.

It’s “Baby Doll” meets “The Reivers,” if you can imagine that, a dark comedy about feminine sexuality and men bowled over by it as imagined by William Faulkner and drawled with a lurid, amused wink by Tennessee Williams.

Scripted by a celebrated screenwriter (“Little Big Man”) and fiction writer now considered “The Lost Novelist,” sentimentalized by a director then only known for the teen comedies “Valley Girl” and “Real Genius” and sexed-up by an actress looking to break free of being known as the daughter of a famous actor and actress, “Rambling Rose” was a picture out of its time in its time.

And now?

Few male fiction writers would confidently wade into the psychology of an orphaned young woman careening through, coupling and captivating every male within her sight line in 1930s Glenville, Georgia, the fictional stomping grounds of writer Calder Willingham. Even doctors didn’t toss around “nymphomaniac” much back then. And in the 35 years since the movie based on a 1972 novel came out, the simplistic, judgement-tainted word’s been all but banished from the language.

A scene with Rose allowing a “curious” and insistent-to-the-point-of-creepy boy (Lukas Haas of “Witness”) do a lot more than “cop a feel” might be picketed today, and was censored out of British prints for “child exploitation” reasons even back then.

A fiftyish father (Robert Duvall) extravagantly complimenting the new maid/nanny the family insists on treating like family might cross the line to “icky” with present day viewers.

“Rosebud, I swear to God you are as graceful as a capital letter ‘S!'”

And having the overripe girl less than half his age throw herself at the patriarchal Georgia hotel owner is as eyeroll worthy as this one-Black-face-in-town version of the Old South so many filmmakers and novelists who inspire them unthinkingly serve up.

But Dern, vamping and drawling and trying and failing at being “innocent” and not in control of her hormones at every turn, is a stitch.

“I have robbed a CRADLE and fell into HELL!”

Paired up with Dianne Ladd, her mother playing the mostly deaf proto-feminist, ahead-of-her-time tolerant matriarch of the house, they serve up giggles most every scene together. Menfolk from Daddy (Duvall) to the sheriff to a doctor (Kevin Conway) get put in their sexist patriarchal places by a flake defending a defiantly promiscuous girl in search of “love.”

“What you don’t understand is, it’s positive energy on this planet. It’s what we do with (sex) that makes it negative!”

Duvall finds a new playfully blustering gear to show off.

“I am STANDING at Thermopylae,” he bellows to Rose, whom he wants to fire, and his wife and kids who won’t have it. Dern and Ladd and Duvall are what stick in the memory with this film, and that phrase became my critic’s credo after seeing it. Willingham, who scripted “The Graduate,” “Thieves Like Us” and “One-Eyed Jacks,” had a way with a turn of phrase.

So a painter, a priest and their paisan partisan walk into a movie…

That’s the hackneyed set-up of “The Big Fake,” a fictional, skips-over-a-lot-of-the-good-stuff Italian heist thriller about a real life art forger who came to fame during Italy’s turbulent, violent, kidnapping-crazed 1970s.

The real forger’s odyssey is odd enough, climaxing with an epic bank robbery in the ’80s. In “Big Fake” (“Il falsario” in Italian) director Stefano Lodovichi (Netflix’s “The Trial”) and screenwriter Sandro Petraglia (“The Best of Youth”) throw our anti-hero into everything from mob intrigues to the political chicanery that went on behind the scenes of the Red Brigade’s kidnapping of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

Three pals from the provinces — painter Toni (Pietro Castellitto), priest Vittorio (Andrea Arcangeli) and tough-guy steelworker Fabione (Pierluigi Gigante) set out for the big city where Toni expects to be recognized as a great painter. But his ominous voice-over narration on the day of their departure speaks of “the day that I died” (in Italian, or dubbed into English).

The object lesson of the cinematic sermon he gives in “Big Fake” is “To get where you want go, what are you willing to do?”

He starts to figure out just how far when he meets art dealer Donata (Giulia Michelini) who notes his talent but dismisses him as a ‘figurative’ (representational) artist in an abstract world.”

Toni will never find traction with his realistic potraits and the like.

But when she spies his version of Bernini’s “Self Portrait as a Young Man,” she sees another use for his talent. He can “copy anybody,” he brags. So let’s see how you do in faking Modigliani, Monet or other early 20th century painters.

The script seriously shortchanges the painting part of the picture. Donata knows art and which artists are easiest to pass off with this or that “lost” masterpiece. We see little of Toni’s “talent” with a brush and there’s little mention of so much as adding a bit of age to the paintings — just the frames.

What the story is more focused on is seriously-unscrupulous Toni’s encounters with the Italian underworld. This mobster needs a fake passport. That one wants a wall-covering copy of “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.”

We see Toni steal bicycles and cheat on Donata and deliver paintings by modern masters in a mere week’s time. It isn’t long before the government operator known as “The Tailor” (Claudio Santamaria) notices and commissions him to fake kidnapping messages from the notorious Red Brigades, who have taken the country’s prime minister hostage.

And it isn’t long after that cocky Toni is the last to figure out he’s in over his head.

Getting your first feature film finished and released is a cause for celebration. It’s a Herculean task involving training or on-the-set-experience, finance, casting, locations and hiring a crew.

Most first-time feature filmmakers don’t get this far. And many of those who do can’t find distribution for their newborn feature.

If you wonder why no distributor nibbled at “The Wedding Party,” director and co-writer Kyle Larsen, it might be due to you filming, editing and releasing a walk-through hehearsal. Your “finished” film needed a few more staged readings in a workshop setting, a fresh set of eyes and ears to tell you “Not one joke works” and that entire production is 113 minutes of Arizon to Montana road trip tedium.

The “editing” should have started with the script and left out a third of the incidents — again, no laughs — that were sleepily acted-out and filmed. Another vigorous cut in the final edit — providing you cooked up or bought a few gags that play — would have shaved endless unfunny reaction shots and further trimmed this wallowing hog of a movie down.

The cast has little to work with and can’t make that “little” even a little bit funnier.

You’ve made a road to nowhere road trip comedy that staggers toward a conclusion, not a climax. So I hope nobody blew too much money on champagne to celebrate the wrap.

Two sets of adult siblings are wrangled into making a 1400 mile trek together in a former rock band’s van by their aged about-to-marry parents (Shalee Mortensen Schmidt and Bill Gillane). They make videos, leave QR coded quests for them to accomplish on the way.

And short-tempered job-quitting Sean (Ische Bee) and her put-upon, just-dumped born victim sister Maggie (Amelia Joan Bowles) aren’t equally enthusiastic about “crazy” Dad’s latest scheme.

“The road to Thompson Falls (Montana) is full of surprises,” they’re promised. Not really.

Onetime TV star Theo (Erik Kl Larsen), reduced to teaching acting at summer camps and his writer-brother Olan (James Rudd) aren’t all that thrilled, even after the van Mom they toured the country with accompanying her and her band Neon Valkyrie decades ago.

“Shield Maiden” the van had good memories. Some of them were good, anyway.

They head out on an odyssey that includes meeting old hippy acquaintances of their parents and the like, finding items in a scavenger hunt and playing confessional road-trip games to tell each other all about themselves.

Nobody’s “story” is fascinating, although a couple have promise. Characters with edge have that edge rubbed off by the funereal pacing and general mamby-pamby nature of the story.

Simple slam-dunk “incidents” are so mishandled as to play as lifeless.

Road comedies are one of the cinema’s most reliable genres, but this movie doesn’t try hard enough when hunting for interesting interludes, detours and moments of truth or “personal growth.”

The players don’t have a lot of pop to their performances, and Larsen the director smothers potential in the slack way they’re filmed, pointless edits filled with dead space before and after a line or “gag.” It’s “student film” sloppy.

Comedy is fast and this picture stalls out at the first intersection it teeters into and never gets going afterwards.

Yes, all involved got your first feature finished. But don’t ever roll camera again without having more on the page and more sense about what to cut and what to leave out of each and every finished “take.”

Rating: TV-14, a hint of violence, some nudity, profanity

Cast: Ischa Bee, Amelia Joan Bowles, Erik K. Larsen, James Rudd, Bill Gillane and Shalee Mortensen Schmidt

Credits: Directed by Kyle Larsen, scripted by Kyle Larsen and Tyler Harrah. A District 22 release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:53

In the dark of night, a child is taken from her bedroom right in front of her younger sister. She lived to describe her ordeal and the years it took to brng her kidnapper to justice.

Near misses, moments when she might have been discovered and freed, are detailed and chillingly remembered.

Law enforcement goes “by the book” and gets nowhere except to have an innocent man die in custody after weeks of interrogations. The fact that he “had a record” seems to be their only concern.

And a family takes matters into its own hands to get the word out and get around doubting, occasionally competent but stubbornly dogmatic lawmen who did less to free Elizabeth Smart than they’d like you to remember.

The British director of “Atomic People” and the Brit series “24 Hours in Police Custody” takes us inside a closeknit Salt Lake City Mormon family and into an investigation that transfixed the U.S. in 2002-2003 for “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.”

The documentary focuses on the Smart clan’s frustrations, the days the police spend focusing on members of the extended family as suspects — which is at least statistically defensible as such cases are often perpetrated by relatives — and the arrogance of detectives who fixate on a suspect the eyewitness daughter told them wasn’t the perpetrator.

Director Benedict Sanderson skillfully re-creates suspense where there shouldn’t be, as we know Elizabeth Smart survived and are reminded of that by present day her appearance on camera, early on. What we didn’t know or certainly don’t remember are all the times Smart came close to being discovered, rescued and freed — from the early searches to public and even police encounters with her and her kidnappers months afterward.

Smart grimly describes her religious crank persecutor as looking like Rasputin, with “this terrible smile” he broke into when he told the 14 year-old he wasn’t going “to rape and kill me…yet.”

The police come off understandably trapped by procedure, dogma and fixated on false leads. But there’s no getting around this reminder that the sharpest, most competent “Law & Order” detectives are figments of TV producer Dick Wolf’s cop-worshipping mind.

Smart’s under-suspicion uncles Tom and Dave have character arcs, coming off as klutzes early on, but redeemed by the third act.

Sanderson apparently didn’t have access to the mother of the missing girl, or her aunts. Is that the patriarchy at work? And “religion” should certainly figure more prominently in the story as the Mormon Church shares American Catholocism’s record of abuse and coverup.

Elizabeth talks about her young teen naivete about the sexual nature of this awful crime at the time it happened, but not about her advocacy for abused children in the years since. About the most revealing thing the film touches on regarding the Mormon faith of the family is the not-exactly-shocking realization that Mormons curse like everyone else.

“Kidnapped” is a solid piece of work, recreating a touchstone case in America’s furious fixation on abused children and kidnapped girls and women — the white and the blonde ones especially. For all the cans of worms it almost opens and doesn’t quite, it still tugs at the hearstrings as we remember the awful crime and the child who survived nearly a year of abuse, hunger and living under an abusive fanatic’s veil.

Rating: TV-MA, discussions of sexual violence, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Smart, Mary Katherine Smart, Ed Smart, Dave Smart, Tom Smart, Cory Lyman and Cordon Parks.

Credits: Directed by Benedict Sanderson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31