Movie Nation

“Easy Does It” sets out to be a pleasantly jokey and junkie homage to the “on the lam” road trip thrillers of the ’70s.

It’s got the period music (cover versions), two yahoo partners in crime, the ’60s vintage Mustang, the cheesy split-screen editing covering the chases (not really) and the various protagonists, something we saw in ’70s movies from “Vanishing Point” and “Sugarland Express” to “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.”

Linda Hamilton shows up with gold-tooth and braided hair as a fearsome small town rackets boss named King George.

But try as they might — and they never let us forget they’re trying too hard — co-stars Ben Matheny and Matthew Paul Martinez, with Cory Dumesnil as a nerdy-goofy “hostage” in tow, can’t get this clunker across one state line, much less all the way across the country, from BFE, Mississippi to San Clemente, Cali-forny.

Jack (Matheny, who co-wrote the script) and Scottie (Martinez) are a couple of bungling hustlers who can’t even “fix” a bare knuckle back-alley fight in their little corner ’70s Redneckiana.

They wash dishes down at a greasy spoon, live in an old and under-sized Airstream and dream of getting out, and getting out from under King George, whom everybody in the county seems to owe money.

“Lazy white (trailer) trash” they may be — “Hey, I’m half APACHE!” — and flat broke, to boot. But a cryptic postcard from mumble-mouthed Big Talker Jack convinces him his momma’s left him something, a treasure maybe, way out in San Clemente, where Richard Nixon is about to go into exile.

There are no secrets in Aberdeen. So they have to lie their way out of the “You skipping out on me?” run-in with King George. But how can you drive a ’60s Mustang 2100 miles with no cash money?

“We’re good people. They’ll help us out,” Jack opines.

So, “gas’n dash” at the local Stump’n Pump, for starters? Only it goes wrong. And this meddlesome carless customer, Collin (Dumesnil) gets in the middle of it.

“Let us gas-up or the dork gets it!” or words to that effect ensue. And they’re off, bluffing and bungling and crime-spreeing their way West.

Inept law enforcement is on their tails (not really). But so is King George’s enforcer, the fearsomely butch Blue Eyes (Susan Gordon), who happens to be the King’s daughter.

Snippets of a period-correct (sort of) documentary about what yokels think “American dream” means are intercut with the misadventures. Fireworks and firearms play their part.

“Round here, due process is a bullet” might be the best line.

We catch the voices of John Goodman and Harry Shearer as drawling radio ball game  announcers.

And here’s what I laughed at. King George turns up in the back seat of their Mustang, full of threats and driving instruction way back in Aberdeen.

“Use yer GOD-d—–d TURN signal!” she barks.

That’s it, the comic highlight of the picture, and it’s early in the first act. Hamilton’s character turns up in asides, or “meanwhile, back in Aberdeen” updates, which justifies her billing.

I guess that career-bounce from “Terminator the Last” didn’t take. At least she got this movie noticed and into a lot of minor film festivals.

There may have been funny lines from co-writer and co-star Matheny, but his articulation is so bad I couldn’t make out much of what he says after the first act. And I grew up in the South.

So, all due respect to filmgoers at the Rockport (Illinois) Film Festival, who named “Easy Does It” “best narrative feature,” but you all need to get out more.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mayhem etc.

Cast: Ben Matheny, Matthew Paul Martinez, Cory Dumesnil, Susan Gordon and Linda Hamilton.

Credits: Directed by Will Addison, script by Will Addison, Ben Matheny. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

We can tell, in an instant, that “The Truth” is going to be a lot less consequential than writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda’s previous film, the Oscar-nominated “Shoplifters.”

That had crime and mystery and side of Japanese life that few filmmakers there show, but which Koreeda has brought to the world at large through such films as “Our Little Sister” and “After the Storm.”

“The Truth” about movie stars, who have been known to bend it, distort it and sacrifice it for their craft, their fame and their egos.

But the star in question here is played by Catherine Deneuve, the serene and regal queen of her generation of French actresses. And as she makes her latest film, does interviews about the release of her memoir (titled “The Truth”), squeezing in time for the visiting family of the daughter (Juliette Binoche) she has never made time for, she is forced to consider her choices.

And at one moment, she pulls out “the dress.” It’s supposed to be from a key moment in her character, screen legend Fabienne Dangeville’s  past. But any film fan will recognize it in an instant. It’s the dress from the role that made Deneuve an international star, 1968’s “Belle de Jour.”

Koreeda, and Deneuve, have made a movie inviting us to see what it takes to get there, the narcissism and selfish choices, the cutthroat cruelty, a focus so intense and so internal that one cannot help but see it as self-absorbed callousness.

Daughter Lumir (Oscar winner Juliette Binoche, queen of the generation of French actresses after Deneuve) is a New York screenwriter who shows up with her actor-husband (Ethan Hawke) and little girl (Clémentine Grenier) in tow.

A reckoning is coming. We can feel it. Don’t ask Lumir to go fetch wine. “I hate the cellar,” she tells little Charlotte. “Grandma used to lock me in it.”

She reads to the child from her favorite book from her own childhood, about witches.

“Is grandma a witch?” Charlotte wants to know. “Yes, some people used to call her that.”

That becomes a running gag in the movie, one the pleasantly-disdainful “Fabi” embraces for her granddaughter.

But the only real explosion is over the book, of which Lumir complains (in English and in French, with English subtitles), “I can’t find ANY truth in it!”

Fabi has written out her agent/manager (Alain Libolt) entirely. He politely announces to her his sudden decision to retire, mid-movie, mid-book PR tour. He will spend time with his grandkids.

“You have grandchildren?” “Yes. You’ve met them.”

She has misrepresented her relationship with her daughter. And she has played down the fellow actress who was more of a mother to Lumir than Fabi ever was, a woman whose career Fabi “stole,” a woman whom the star (Manon Clavel) of this sci-fi time travel drama Fabi  is filming resembles and is earning comparison to.

When Fabi pulls out that “Belle de Jour” dress, maybe she’s considering everything her daughter and others are hissing at her, even if she just rolls her eyes or shrugs it off as they do.

Deneuve has a showcase here that allows her to play off her iconic status — her face was used as the new model of “Marianne,” the national personification of France (Think Uncle Sam) in the ’80s — and her career.

The people around Fabi talk about the great French actresses who were her contemporaries. Watch the semi-eyeroll Deneuve’s Fabi uses to dismiss any mention of Brigitte Bardot.

Giggle at the way she looks down on Hank, Lumir’s self-described “second rate TV actor,” how she fills his wine glass when he’s said he no longer drinks.

She isn’t quite rude, but “dismissive” enters into every exchange. She uses the word “crap” to jokingly describe footage and scenes she isn’t in. A man within earshot lightly protests.

“Oh, you’re the director?”

Yes. Yes he is.

Watch the way she side-eyes Manon, the star of the film, as she pulls camera attention, upstages and IMITATES elderly Fabi in her performance. Others don’t see the affront. Fabi does.

It’s a glorious star turn, certainly good enough to get Deneuve considered for the Oscar Binoche has but she does not. Fabi, we know, would hold an epic grudge over that.

Binoche has to carry the film’s emotional baggage, a daughter trapped (while she is in France) in orbit around “the star.” Hawke’s laid-back charm is put to great use, especially in scenes with children. We can see what Lumir saw in him.

No, there’s little in the way of fireworks and it’s not “stop the presses” news that film actresses have to be fiercely self-absorbed. But a film-lover’s movie like “The Truth” gets at the vulnerability that comes with that in cute but cutting, sly and subtle ways. Thank Deneuve for that.

“I could play this role dead drunk!”

Damn right she could.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic and suggestive elements, and for smoking and brief language

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Manon Clavel, Alain Libolt,  Ludivine Sagnier, Roger Van Hool and Roger Van Hool.

Credits: Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda.   An IFC release.

Running time: 1:46

There’s a little Kanye cray cray at play in this Aug. 7 release.

Pop/hip hop star with delusions of grandeur gets bent when peace breaks out BEFORE his big charity concert. And he –Jay Pharaoh — ain’t having it.

On July 31, Scottish director Kevin Macdonald’s 2012 documentary “Marley” returns to theaters and streaming to celebrate what would have been the Jamaican reggae singer/songwriter’s 75th birthday. Check your local art cinema website to see if they’re showing it.

Below, find my 2012 profile of me old mate Kevin Macdonald, Scotland’s greatest Bob Marley fan long before he made “The Last King of Scotland.”

Bob Marley remains, as his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography attests, “reggae’s foremost practitioner and emissary.” More than 30 years after his death at 36, his estate still earns millions from sales of his music — his “Legend” greatest hits disc has sold more than 20 million copies, and counting — and the omnipresent T-shirt that bears his image.

“People love to listen to him at the beach, to hear ‘Three Little Birds’ or ‘One Love’ in parties,” says filmmaker Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “State of Play”). “‘Stir It Up’ plays in elevators, supermarkets. He’s become background music, background noise actually.”

And that’s what Macdonald, who did documentaries such as “Being Mick” before breaking out in narrative feature films with “The Last King of Scotland” and “State of Play,” wanted to change.

“I wanted to rescue Bob from that fate. If you become ubiquitous, you become invisible all over again, like at the beginning of your career. I wanted to understand Bob, understand his music, hear his music afresh.”

“Marley” is Macdonald’s critically acclaimed new documentary about the Jamaican reggae icon. The native Scot filmmaker was drawn to Marley’s music as a teenager and vowed to spend years tracking down the people who never talk about Marley — friends, relatives and estranged band mates — to make the definitive film portrait of the singer/ songwriter/ Rastafarian prophet.

Macdonald started planning to make the film after shooting his Oscar-winning drama “The Last King of Scotland” in Uganda in 2005. “Maybe in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve kind of tuned Bob out. But in Africa, Uganda, his music and his image are everywhere. He’s an icon. You see dreadlocks, see the T-shirts, and you realize he still lives on as an inspiration to the developing world. They don’t know Elvis in the Congo, or the Beatles in Indonesia. But they know Bob Marley. Maybe we should take another look at him, too.”

Hey, whoa, the horror movies of August, amIright?

Early August, the fun and the fear come to light.

You can’t grade movies on the curve, as much as filmmakers wish you would. It’s all about story, and characters and performance and entertainment value.

Budget, “degree of difficulty” getting it made don’t matter.

But if they did, that might be the tipping point for “Deany Bean is Dead.” It’s the sort of movie critics “root for,” a little no-budget affair of the type one can throw together in Los Angeles, just based on the available “idle” talent there.

Actress-writer Allison Marie Volk (she had a small part in “The Lone Ranger”) concocted a deadpan “cringe” comedy for herself, and it darned near comes off.  And even though it never quite gets there, it passes the time lightly, if darkly.

Deanna (Volk) is stalking her ex-fiance’, in person and on Facebook. That’s a distraction she doesn’t need, as her harridan of a boss (Wendy Wilkins) is already riding her for being “an idiot.”

She  tries to cope with her misery, grief and jealousy through a “spiritual meditation trauma support group.” It’s California, so it’s a thing. Not that it’s helping.

And maybe she shouldn’t be hooked on “The Murder Macabre” podcast, whose storyteller narrates our “scorned lover” tale, and quite luridly. HE’s the one seemingly giving her ideas about what “the vengeful knife” looks like as she’s shoving it “deep into the course of your greatest pain.”

That would be the ex, Tom (Christopher Glenn Cannon). Or maybe it’s the woman she’s nicknamed “Yahoo” (Sarah Siadat), whom Tom just ran off to Peru with and asked to marry him.

Her sassy officemate (Pauline Lule) is all “You should just get a dildo and move on with your life.” But before she even has a chance to do that, Deanna faces another chewing out by the harridan, and the temptation of the boss’s ever-growing list of “food allergies.”

Safety tip — never scream at and abuse the person you put in charge of your lunch every day if you have to keep an epi pen in your purse and hope somebody around you knows how to use it.

As our narrator podcasts about “What to do with the body,” Deanna — “Deany Bean” to her ex — decides to bury the woman in her trunk in her ex’s yard. Only he and “Yahoo” are back from Peru, throwing a little dinner party, and Angela, aka “Yahoo,” interrupts her. Not knowing who Deany is or her connection to her fiance (at first), she invites her in.

Let the awkward evening, which includes that ex, a “very rude” guy Deany met at meditation (Colin Taylor Martin) and other people who don’t want to see her any more than she wants to see them.

The script has coincidences and twists that just pretzel-up the awkwardness. The direction is perfunctory, lacking the extreme close-ups that deliver bigger laughs — the Coen Brothers/Barry Sonnenfeld Rule.

There’s enough here to provoke a smirk, here and there — maybe a chuckle. And one of the tiny surprises shows us how charming this all could have been.

But “Deany Bean is Dead” never quite lands a laugh the way it never quite lands a punch. It’s pleasant enough, but there’s not much substance, and none of the characters pulls you in.

We kind of watch every appalling thing happen at a distance, hoping we’ll get more than a giggle out of what comes next. And we never do.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Allison Marie Volk, Colin Taylor Martin, Wendy Wilkins, Christopher Glenn Cannon, Sara Siadat and Paulina Lule.

Credits: Directed by Mikael Kreuzriegler, script by Allison Marie Volk. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:24

They don’t carry around that California fear of “The Big One” in Japan. Earthquakes have always been a fact of life, and what we see on the news and from experts there shows a resolve, an ability to live with the danger via social unity and preparedness.

“Japan Sinks: 2020” pokes holes in that image. Based on an acclaimed sci-fi novel by Sakyo Komatsu, it takes its handful of Tokyo survivors through the trauma of Japan’s “big one,” which sinks Okinawa in a flash and causes land masses to collapse along the eastern coast of the islands.

Within hours after the quake and tsunami, Japanese people recognize their plight from the silence. “I don’t hear sirens from ambulances or fire trucks.” Cell service may be back, Big Media isn’t. The power goes out.

Anarchy sets it, an every woman and man for himself — bickering over food and water, what course to take to safety — mistrust followed by social Darwinism of the ugliest kind.

“Trivial laws don’t matter any more,” laughs a tipsy truck driver as he tosses his latest bottle out the window.

The situations in this anime series are conventions of the genre — four members of the Mutoh family face “The Beginning of the End” separately, with their first frantic thoughts being to reunite to face this apocalypse together.

Mother Muri (Grace Lynn Kun) is on a flight, returning from the States. It ditches in Tokyo Bay, buffeted by the shock wave of the magnitude seven quake.

Her husband is a lighting contractor, temporarily dangling from his harness at a stadium work site. Little boy Go is finally distracted from his video game — having taken shelter under a table because he knows the drill — when the walls crash around him.

And track star Ayumu (voiced by Faye Mata), our narrator? She’s trapped with her team on a subway platform. When she leaves them there, bleeding, trapped and dying, in panic, we know we’re in for a grim ride.

The story jumps along in a not-quite-nonsensical travelogue. Dad (Billy Kametz) pushes them to go to higher ground, to the west, through emptied towns and up mountainsides where springs provide fresh water.

But don’t get too attached to any character. And don’t expect the teen narrator to be rational, altruistic or cope with survivor’s guilt with grace and dignity.

Death, when it comes, is sudden and often grisly. Some people behave with honor and compassion, most do not.

The plot, conventional as it is, may bring us to “Japan Sinks” and keep us watching, all the way through its ten episode story. The animation, however, is nothing to write home about.

It’s flat, faces and characters and locales with little definition or depth. The color palette is washed out and the action TV “on the cheap” jerky, far more pronounced than you see in high quality, more elaborately animated anime.

This is more a series, like most anime made for TV, that you listen to rather than watch closely. It has the look of a hastily-drawn comic book hastily flash-animated for TV.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, blood, attempted rape, profanity

Cast: Faye Mata, Grace Lynn Kung, Ryan Bartley, Aleks Le, Billy Kamatz

Credits: directed by Masaaki Yuasa and Pyeon Gang-ho, animated by by Science Saru, based on the novel by Sakyo Komatsu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ 25 minutes each

Wide-eyed Lucy Hale takes her shot at a rom-com wrapped in a sex farce with “A Nice Girl Like You,” whose title gives away the game, and its central failing.

The “Pretty Little Liars” pixie, most recently seen in the not-her-fault bomb “Fantasy Island,” isn’t miscast as a Harvard alumnus/violinist abandoned by her boyfriend because “You’re not into sex.” Hale just can’t make that, or her, funny.

Lucy is a “make a list, do your research” type. She’s distracted during love-making, mentally compiling shopping lists and the like.

“Whole wheat waffles!” she blurts, and not out of passion.

Game-tester and porn-watcher Jeffrey (Stephen Friedrich) is out the door with barely a “Bye, girl.”

Lucy resolves to do her own twelve step program to “solve” her little shortcoming, her “sex ‘to do’ list.”

“Number one, ‘Watch 25 porn films.’ Two, ‘Go to a sex store.'” Visit a strip club, surf internet porn, drop in on a brothel, etc.

Isn’t that adorable?

Other members of her string quartet support this, among them, her fellow violinist, Priscilla. The fact that she’s played by Mindy Cohn (“The Facts of Life”) tells you how edgy all this will be.

Lucy’s misadventures take to a “better sex” class, a TV show hosted by a Phd (Skye P. Marshall) in a negligee who treats “Sexual Attention Deficit Disorder” (SADD) and subjects Lucy to a sex psychic “reading,” a brothel and the other stops on her sex tour.

Oh, here’s a blow-up man doll, “a feminist who doesn’t watch football or fart!”

“None of them do, at first,” long-married Priscilla complains.

The hazards of erection cream and Ben Wa balls are dissected for limp laughs.

All the while, there’s this hunky, stubble-faced Brit (Leonidas Gulaptis) she’s trying to make a love connection with, or at least drag to third base. He’s intrigued by this not-quite-virginal bore on a sex odyssey through “cliterature” and strip clubs.

I got a couple of chuckles out of Lucy’s interactions with bored strippers in a club.

The funniest character is her string-quartet’s cellist, Nessa (Jackie Cruz), sexually forward by her choice of instrument. Ask any lady cellist and they’ll repeat the zingers served up here, how much they enjoy “wood” or something “warm and vibrating” in the place where they hold it and bow it.

Hale has no chemistry with the male leads, which isn’t totally her fault. She can’t make this perky prissy miss’s search for sexual fulfillment funny, which is.

Or would be, if the script, based on a book called “Porn-ol-O-gy” (apparently) had anything fresh, sexy, naughty or remotely funny to say.

As sex farces go, “A Nice Girl Like You” is about as nasty, dirty and funny as a sitcom…on The Disney Channel.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content throughout and language

Cast: Lucy Hale, Leonidas Gulaptis, Jackie Cruz, Stephen Friedrich and Mindy Cohn.

Credits: Directed by Chris Riedell, Nick Riedell, script by Andrea Marcellus, based on a book by Ayn Carillo Gailey. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

World War II GIs are sent to hold a remote French chateau, and confront the ghosts of those the Nazis murdered there — and maybe a few demons of their own — in “Ghosts of War.”

The temptation is strong to just say “Not really my thing,” and leave it at that. It’s a mediocre mash-up of genres that leaves no cliche unspoken, no horror trope unturned.

We get a tip, about midway through it, from “the smart one” (naturally wearing glasses), Eugene. He’s been reading from this journal he found. He’s been explaining the pentangle found upstairs. He’s been leading the support group meetings of what “haunted house” really means, what agenda ghosts might follow and the like.

And then he plugs this famous short story, the inspiration for many a horror movie and TV war-horror episode. Just out of the blue, blurts it out.

And “OH,” we think. “This isn’t just grim going now, it’s going to turn WORSE.” And so it does.

The details here — a squad of five, including the “always gotta be a hero” Butchie (“Titans” cast member Alan Ritchson), Eugene (Skylar Astinof the “Pitch Perfect” movies), Kirk (Theo Rossi of TV’s “Like Cage”), the lieutenant, Chris (Brenton Thwaites, also of TV’s “Titans”), and the sharpshooter, who might be a psychopath (Kyle Gallner of TV’s “Interrogation”).

To be fair, it’s hard to remember who executed assorted survivors of a German command car they ambush, who used his bayonet to search for gold teeth fillings among the SS men.

They meet refugees, some in concentration camp stripes, before reaching the chateau. And the airborne troopers they relieve (Don’t look at anybody’s shoulder patches, it’ll just make you cringe.) are awfully skittish, look like they haven’t slept and that they’re keeping a secret.

“So, what’s wrong with the joint?”

They’re not saying. But as the sun goes down and the nightmares begin, well — a Nazi column headed their way seems like the last straw.

“Lookit, before the Nazis come, we should like 23 skiddoo!”

Of course they can’t. Something’s in the tub, in the attic, in the cellar. Something vengeful or something evil?

“Evil? Well, it’s what makes the violence so much fun!”

We’re not meant to pay any attention to the lax way these blokes go about their soldiering. They’re all inside, and instantly assume any threat they face is coming from within. It’s like they’ve read the script and know better than to waste time putting anybody on, you know, WATCH, when you’re behind enemy lines.

Why does every sniper-sharpshooter in a WWII movie look like Barry Pepper in “Saving Private Ryan?” Nobody else in the cast really stands out, even the chatty one with the eyeglasses. Did Billy Zane learn to speak German phonetically for this?

There are a couple of visions-of-hell moments that writer-director Eric Bress (He did “Butterfly Effect,” which he wishes we’d forget.). But there’s little here, spirits yanking people into the darkness, that we haven’t seen before and seen done better.

And then the movie switches gears for a drawn-out finale full of inane, nonsensical explanations and a whole other setting.

It doesn’t work, even if you invoke the name “Ambrose Bierce.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing and grisly images, language and brief nude images

Cast: Brenton Thwaites, Theo Rossi, Kyle Gallner, Skylar Astin, Alan Ritchson and Billy Zane.

Credits: Written and directed by Eric Bress. A Vertical release

Running time: 1:34