Movie Nation

Imagine “Harold & Maude” as a Japanese musical, a morbid, deadpan dark comedy and social satire, a surreal snapshot of Japanese culture that’s also J-Pop band origin story.

That’s “We Are Little Zombies,” a daft, candy-colored Japanese confection that is the epitome of originality, the definition of post-ironic irony and the next best thing to an underage drinker’s tour of Nippon.

Not that there’s underage drinking. There’s no time, what with all the shoplifting, car-jacking, ridiculing Japanese funeral rituals and “screen” and “schoolgirl” fetishizing,  referencing Kafka, all of it underscored by Puccini and Beethoven and burping Japanese video game themes, it’s the trippiest movie you’ll see this year.

There’s a whopping 15 minute prologue, a false ending with fake closing credits, a story told with seizure-inducing montages, stop-motion animation and video game animation as it riffs on Japanese homelessness and Japanese chat shows. You’ll feel your passport got stamped even if, by some chance your mind isn’t blown.

They meet staring at a smokestack. It’s a crematorium, and this quartet of thirteen year-olds have two things in common. Each has just lost his or her parents. And none of them feel a thing.

Bespectacled longer Hikari (Keita Ninomiya) is our narrator, a child whose parents gave him every video game and game-platform under the Rising Sun. He’s availed himself on them ever since he was old enough to use his thumbs. His folks? They “died on a stupid stupid stupid” package bus tour, killed on their way to an “All You Can Eat” wild strawberry farm, “so they went straight to hell.”

Rotund Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno) grew up in the family stir-fry karaoke restaurant, coming home one night to a “bright orange sunset” hours after the sun had gone down. The careless restaurateurs accidentally torched it.

Abused kleptomaniac Takamura (Mondo Okumura), Mr. “The more I steal, the less I have,” lost his parents to suicide.

And Iluko (Sena Nakajima) was forced to become a nine-fingered pianist by her parents, who were murdered by her obsessed piano teacher. “I’m a femme fatale,” she deadpans, spelling and explaining the concept as we see her teacher “come on” to her and her father “propose” to her.

So yeah, “issues” abound.

They resolve to cut school and have “adventures,” start with a group grab-and-run in a convenience store, stumbling across a deliriously funny homeless jug band at the garbage dump. And that’s how “We are Little Zombies” become a band.

Writer-director Makoto Nagahisa’s debut feature is video-game-manic in execution, a tale told in short but numerous chapters identified as game “stages” (or levels).

The tunes are genuine Japanese ear worms.

And the social commentary is sweeping  and skewering. The “schoolgirl” obsession is such a cliche you can see it in many of the films of famed animator Hiyao Miyazaki, to say nothing of the costumes showcased in any red light district. The disaffected “screen addicted” generation is our four “little zombies.”  Nagahisa suggests how they turned out that way.

It’s so antic in pacing that when it finally loses steam in the middle of the third act, it’s almost a relief. There’s so much to take in, you almost miss Rinko Kikuchi, and two actors who starred in Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan “Mystery Train” over 30 years ago.

Not that this is about the adults. The kids are captivating charmers, even if they’re just playing “types.”

All these things — and more — considered, and I have to say “We Are Little Zombies” is the most entertaining thing to come out of Japan since sushi, “Iron Chef” and the Miata.

Maybe travel there is a dicey proposition this year, but watching “Zombies” makes for the kitschiest “package tour” of them all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Keita Ninomiya, Sena Nakajima, Mondo Okumura, Satoshi Mizuno

Credits: Written and directed by Makoto Nagahisa. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 2:00

This one streams Aug. 11. Of course I’m going to review it.

“Greyhound” is an old fashioned “Victory at Sea” style combat epic — narrow in focus, heroic in nature and relentlessly action-packed.

The escort destroyer skipper Tom Hanks plays gets no rest, on the bridge and on his feet for days on end as the U.S.S. Greyhound confronts a German wolf pack of subs, attacking his convoy day and night in the “black pit” — the point farthest from land, in the middle of a Feb. 1942 crossing.

This nail-biter of a thriller will make you feel like Capt. Ernest Krause — adrenaline rushes of alarm that will leave you exhausted by the end of this 90 minute summary of what this dangerous duty was like in those, the darkest days of the Battle of the Atlantic. Nazi submariners called it “Die Glückliche Zeit” — “the (second) happy time,” when the pickings were the easiest among Allied merchant ships and their escorts.

Capt. Krause is an older-than-he-should-be Navy officer who finally gets his first command after Pearl Harbor. He is the Navy version of Army Captain Miller, Hanks’ character in “Saving Private Ryan.” He’s by-the-book, reminding his young subordinates “This is what we trained for,” but probably conscious of the looks the others on the bridge exchange at every miscue, misstatement and gamble he makes in this fight.

The script — by Hanks (adapting a C.S. Forester novel) — is peppered with “explainers,” WWII Naval jargon which the captain or his crew illuminate the audience about, the tools of the U-Boat hunting trade  —“huff duff” and the like.

The strict chain of command on the bridge, with Krause dealing with an endless succession of messengers, relayed radio messages, intercom updates with his trusted “Ex O” (executive officer, played by Stephen Graham), give us the same sense of professionalism that Hanks brought to his “Private Ryan” captain, his tanker skipper in “Captain Phillips,” to Sully” the airline pilot, even the Fed Ex manager of “Cast Away.”

He REVELS in this stuff, sounding like an old salt for whom Naval jargon is second-nature, maintaining professional calm in the frenetic heat of battle because that’s what he’s been conditioned to do.

The film’s first “pip” (submarine radar surface contact) is chased down almost in real-time, a breathless sprint to keep a U-Boat from reaching the convoy. Before the days in this “no air cover” zone in mid-Atlantic are over, the “Greyound” (another nickname for destroyers) and its “flock” — merchant ships, tankers, converted ocean liner troop carriers and fellow escorts — will be attacked, time and again.

And in between attacks, erman taunting by radio. A sub skipper of the U-Boat “Grey Wolf” sneers “We hunt you. Zis wolf is HUNGRY. HOOOOooowwwwl.”

I kid you not. Did this sort of thing happen? Maybe. Then again, I’ve never read anywhere that Germans gave their U-Boats names.

That, and a somewhat pointless prologue — Krause was not just late in life getting a command, he can’t seem to convince Elisabeth Shue to marry him — are the rare missteps here.

“Greyhound” is made the way such films are created these days, with bridge interiors and deck shots of still-floating WWII vintage destroyers, and a lot of digital recreations of surface ships and U-Boats, hunting and being hunted — shooting and depth-charging, rising and plunging on the towering seas of the North Atlantic in winter.

Cinematographer turned director Aaron Schneider (“Get Low”) masks that with nearly non-stop action and a beautifully gloomy blue-grey color palette with splashes of orange flames and explosions. The film’s look is consciously reminiscent of a J.M.W. Turner painting — violent, dark and foreboding.

It’s the sort of movie Hollywood made plenty of examples of, from the early ’40s well into the ’60s. Hanks has skippered a picture that stands with the best of them, movies like “The Enemy Below,” an action-packed thriller with pathos, patriotism and military professionalism.

It might have been lost among the blockbusters of a normal movie-going summer. This year, it’s as good an excuse as any to sign up for Apple TV+.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for war-related action/violence and brief strong language

Cast: Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, Karl Glusman and Elisabeth Shue.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Schneider, script by Tom Hanks, based on the novel by C.S. Forester. A Sony Film, an Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:32

A nerve-wracking Korean heist-gone-wrong thriller goes seriously wrong itself when “Time to Hunt (Sanyangeui sigan)” devolves into straight-up melodrama.

An ill-conceived armed-robbery, a naive “crew” that figures it’s gotten away clean when it hasn’t, and all the resources of the mob that ran the illegal gambling house they hit are ignored and a lone assassin goes on the “hunt.”

Worse still, he’s a predator who likes to play with his food. You know what that means. He toys with his prey, amps up their panic by taking his time, giving them a head start, even a chance to return fire, now and again. And you KNOW he’s going to talk, when silence is the scariest thing he could use on them.

It’s a shame, because the young actors and the characters they play, teaming up for a job they’re not quite up to, are a charismatic collection of gangland “types.” Their “plans” seem elaborate — because like most crooks, they’re not criminal masterminds.

Jun Seok (Lee Je-hoon) is fresh out of prison when he regales his old pals, the thoughtful Ki-Hoon (Choi Woo-sik) and the oafish Jang-ho (Ahn Jee-hong), that all they really need is that “one last score.”

Yeah, they say that in Korea, too (dubbed into English, or in Korean with English subtitles).

There’s this island off Taiwan where the sea is green and the living is easy. Steal some U.S. dollars, and they’ll be set for life.

The “job” Jun Seok comes up with isn’t rocket science, but stealing from a basement “gambling house?” Ill-advised. Desperate times in the Korea of the near future, with IMF protests and economic strife far and wide, inspire desperate crimes.

The benchmarks in such movies are covered — the planning (underdeveloped), arm-twisting an “inside man” (Park Jeong-min, who should be in a KPop band, with that hair), meeting an underworld gun dealer. The job itself goes off with a minimal fuss.

The mob they’re stealing from just misses grabbing them, and the leaders are furious. The guys?

“We’re safe! We did it!”

And then the dominoes start to fall and the hunter (Park Hae-soo) is on their scent.

Writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun has been directing movies for a decade, and he should certainly know that turning this tale into a solitary stalk has its advantages and serious shortcomings.

The “super-hunter” is charismatic, a cool costumer who sizes his quarry up and takes his time. But that stops the movie cold. A 90 minute thriller runs way over two hours when that happens.

The urgency goes right out the window, even though some of that is attributable to the criminals being utterly stunned at becoming the prey.

They’re young, did their time in the military and know a little something about guns. But when the pieces start to fall and the incriminating calls start to come in and the gang starts to shrink, they freeze-up. They should high-tail it, as stagecoach robbers used to put it. No. Let’s get caught in a hospital where the hunter Han can find us.

I was pretty forgiving of this right up to the finale, which is ridiculous, a sequence of scenes that don’t play by the rules the movie has set up. Characters are misplaced, people go down, get up, and are gunned down again. We wait for an absurd third act “intervention” because we know it’s coming. That’s what sloppy genre pictures stumble into.

“Time to Hunt” turns tiresome many minutes before it utterly wears out its welcome.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Lee Je-hoon, Ahn Jae-hong, Choi Woo-sik, Park Jeong-min, Park Hae-soo

Credits: Written and directed by Yoon Sung-hyun.  A Sidus/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16

A couple of days late getting to this, but longtime Gannett Newspapers film critic Jack Garner died over the weekend.

I used to run into him at film festivals, Hollywood and New York new-release junkets, etc., a hard guy to miss (6’9″, a Falstaffian BEAR of a man) and a harder one to not like.

He had this great booming laugh that let you know, at a film preview or a movie premiere, that A) he was in the audience and B) the comedy was “working.” I distinctly remember him roaring through a New York preview of “In or Out” back in ’97. Practically drowned the rest of us out.

Like many newspaper film critics, he brought an editor’s mindset and skills to reviewing, shifting over from “the desk” to become one of the country’s most enduring and widely read film reviewers. And unlike a lot of us (cough cough), he had an easy charm and was widely liked among his peers.

Jack G. was 75.

“Relic” may be shrouded in gloom and fog, draped in the trappings of many a haunted house thriller. But its most revealing lines of dialogue can be appreciated by everyone, even those who don’t believe a house can be haunted.

A daughter, talking about her grandmother, reveals her understanding of life, aging and family responsibility to her mother in a universal truth.

“Isn’t that how it works? Your mum changes your nappies, then you change hers?”

This chilling Aussie horror tale is a parable on care for the aged wrapped in a curse that’s been literally built-into the family homestead.

Kay (Emily Mortimer) has been busy in Melbourne, too busy to keep close watch on her aged, widowed mother at her forest home out in the country. Now she and daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote, of “Dark Shadows” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) have to go back there because neighbors haven’t been able to raise  “Gran” (Robyn Nevin, who was in “The Matrix” movies) on the phone or get her to come to the door.

Mother and daughter have to break into the house when they arrive. They search high and low. Every blanketed bed, every shawl-covered chair they YANK the cloth from, fully expecting to find her corpse.

Organized Kay files a missing person report, and the police arrange a search through the foggy pinewood forest. Sam, less settled in life and career, frets over the lack of visits, ways this tragedy could have been avoided.

And then Gran shows up; barefoot, remote, not really sure where she’s been but reluctant to give up much of what she thinks is going on.

There are thumps in the night behind the walls. She talks to someone in the shadows and walks in her sleep. She’s not…right.

Kay continues “organizing” and cleaning and checking on nursing homes. Sam makes that “nappies” remark I quoted earlier, wondering why Gran can’t move in with Mum, or why she shouldn’t move in with Gran herself.

But as she asks around about her grandmother’s new habits, she grows especially spooked by whatever’s making Gran chew on old photos, or bury them in the woods, and her increasingly violent mood swings.

Director and co-writer Natalie Erika James, making her feature film-directing debut, finds the frights in all the usual places — that thumping behind the wall that, when you thump it yourself to see what’s there, thumps back, creepy and possibly suicidal grandmother in the claw-foot tub, menacingly wielded knives.

But what resonated for me, and I suspect will for a lot of people, is the familiarity of it all. The post-it notes — “flush,” on the toilet, “turn off tap” stuck to the tub.

No one gets out of this world alive, we’re reminded. If you aren’t dealing with this in your family, you will be soon enough. “Relic” is awash in this grim side of late life, details that most screenplays go to some pains to dodge.

I’d call the film, whose titular “hook” is seriously “meh,” more a solid feature that does what it sets out to do than any sort of landmark in the genre.

But with death all around us and end-of-life decisions hitting millions around the world, all at once, the timeliness of “Relic’s” real-life horror, with a dab of supernatural violence tossed in, could not be more apt.

This is spooky on an effects and story-telling level, downright chilling on a personal one.

MPAA Rating: Rated R for some horror violence/disturbing images, and language

Cast: Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote

Credits: Directed by Natalie Erika James, script by Natalie Erika James and Christian White.  An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:29

So if churches are getting payroll relief stimulus just like any other business, they should be subject to the same other times as any other business, right?

That’s the logic applied to this suit. Churches aren’t “special.” They are like concert halls and cinemas, businesses. Close one you have to close them all.

I’m not sure theaters in most places shouldn’t stay closed. But with all these pulpit-packed pandemic hot spots traced to the faithful, maybe this suit will shake a little common sense into political panderers letting religious cranks set policy.

Via The Hollywood Reporter

“AMC, Cinemark and Regal say that if churches are reopening, so must movie houses https://t.co/yVjqMC1H2Q https://twitter.com/THR/status/1280504587292639232?s=20

“Archive” is a slick, moody sci-fi mashup, a thoughtful thriller cobbled together from a lot of better films that came before it.

The central premise — a scientist tries to engineer a robot to hold his wife’s “soul” — has lots of antecedents. But you’ll see “Ex Machina” in the movie’s look and moral quandary, a hint of “2001” here, some “Silent Running” there.

It doesn’t quite jell into anything brilliant or profound. But I have to say it plays. Production designer/effects creator (“Moon”) turned writer-director Gavin Rothery and star Theo James (“Divergent”) have conjured up a great looking film with some heart, a neat twist or two and that manages to be perfectly watchable, start to finish.

We meet George Almore in the not-that-distant future, a lone developer, thinker and engineer opening up a mothballed super-futuristic and secure “facility” in the snowy mountains of Japan.

It could be a supervillain’s lair or a spaceship, but it’s a place where he and he alone can work on an AI/robotics project he’s sold his employer on. The cute, clunky and empathetic robots — J-1 and J-2 — hint at what he’s going for. J-2 can carry on conversations, make decisions and judgement calls. A threatening phone call from his new boss (Rhona Mitra of TV’s “The Last Ship” and “Supergirl”) annoys J-2.

“I don’t like her. She’s a bitch.”

George exchanges static-riddled video calls with his wife, Jules (Stacy Martin of “High-Rise” and “Vox Lux”). She starts every call upbeat, but she’s clearly upset, not terribly happy about what he’s up to.

“It hurts, George. Even like this!”

It turns out, these two black computer stacks in the facility are from an outfit called “Archive.” George makes those calls through these. Toby Jones plays a pushy company representative who “checks on” them.

Flashbacks take us to a happy marriage, a drive in a self-driving car where George insists on taking the wheel. There was an accident. Somebody died. Archive makes its money out of storing a person’s neural essence/soul, allowing  a survivor to communicate with the dead, but only for a limited time.

And George? He’s in hurry, fretting over every security system in the facility because he doesn’t want to be disturbed, frantically trying to finish a more human/very feminine robot, his latest, before he’s caught.

This poignant set-up is augmented by the frosty setting, indoors and out. The almost-human machine George is working on is an upgrade of the boxy, awkward child-like J-1 and J-2 that can’t go outside and get wet, but can be petulant, jealous, fearful and sad.

James’s George seamlessly interacts with them, treats them like children and over-uses the phrase “Trust me.”

Can they? Can we?

Rothery, who also works in production design in video games, creates a world both futuristic and familiar, thanks to the visual sci-fi tropes. There’s even a hellish Japanese nightclub for George to visit for a meeting, all holograms and “Star Trek” furnishings. Love to have a drink there.

Put these elements together with some solid acting by James and a touching turn by the Parisian Martin, and “Archive” becomes a genre film that, if it doesn’t transcend the sum of its parts, at least has the parts to let us buy in and enjoy the story that it’s telling, derivative as it is.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Theo James, Rhona Mitra Stacy Martin, Hans Peterson and Toby Jones.

Credits: Written and directed by Gavin Rothery.  A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:49

This looks sun-kissed, romantic, and fun.

And yes, I’m talking about the Fiat Spider that figures into a few clips here.

The movie? It’s as close as most Americans will get to Italy and Tuscany any time soon. Lovely.

“First Cow” is a droll and scenic parable, a period piece about immigrants and American “enterprise” in the Old (Pacific North) West.

A soft-spoken cast given to underplaying, a muddy, overcast setting in the beaver-trapping era on The Frontier and reveries about the simple pleasures of home, dearly bought in a rough and tumble world of men make this quiet, almost melancholy movie one to be savored.

John Magaro is “Cookie” Figowitz, a Jewish baker ill-suited to traveling West with a fur trapping party. But that’s the hand life has dealt him, sending him to seek his fortune at the tale end of the beaver-trapping era, at the beginnings of the various western silver (and later gold) rushes, circa 1830.

He’s resented by the trappers, struggling to fill their larder as they trek on foot toward a distant fort/settlement. He gets distracted hunting for mushrooms. Delicacy or not, mushrooms are not “what’s for dinner.”

That’s how he stumbles into an under-clothed but well-spoken man on food (Orion Lee).

“You speak purty good English, fur an Injun,” he says, with little hint that this drawled line has turned up in 670 Westerns before it.

“Not Indian. Chinese.”

Cookie helps “King Lu” out of his predicament. Later, in the co-occupied (by Brits and Americans) Oregon Territory, they renew their acquaintance.

Lu is a fellow with lots of plans, dreams, business pitches. Beaver oil is valued in China. But trappers discard the carcasses. All around him, “I see possibilities.”

A farm, maybe, with pecan, walnut and almond orchards. “But that takes time.” They need to team up on something quick. “History isn’t here yet. It’s coming. But we got here early this time.”

It’s just that there’s “no way for a poor man to start” a business without “capital, leverage” or “a crime.”

When Cookie, who apprenticed under a baker in Boston, gets in a word edgewise, he talks of “a hotel, with a bakery.” He can cook, and he can bake. It’s just that in this neck of the (literal) woods, ingredients are in short supply.

That’s when they first take note of the “First Cow.” The tough-minded British fussbudget (Toby Jones) imported it. Can’t have our tea without cream, can we? And being a fussbudget, you know he has a cat, which likes a little milk, too.

King Lu sees the possibilities here, not with “capital” or “leverage,” either.

“Can cows give milk at night?”

Thus they set out to earn their fortune, procuring the ingredients for deep-fried, honey-dipped “cakes” (corn muffins or hush puppies, of a sort), just the thing to make trappers, soldiers, prospectors and the rest part with their “pieces of silver.”

The film, the best that director and co-writer Kelly Reichardt (“Wendy and Lucy,” “Night Moves”) has yet made, scores “parable” points for showing how many a money-making enterprise is built on breaking the rules and stealing, from land speculating and “squatting” to Google and Uber.

Adapting Jonathan Raymond’s novel (he co-wrote the script), she gets the hardscrabble period details just right. That sets the table for the little bit of civilization that the baker brings, making grown men (Ewen Bremner plays a Scots settler) get misty-eyed over “a little taste of home.” To the Englishman in charge, “I taste London in this cake.”

The recipe? “Ancient Chinese Secret!”

The cast sparkles, with Jones in particular livening things up with a little 19th century “posh” and “menacing,” Bremner (“Trainspotting”) still needing bloody subtitles and Lee and Magaro giving a light touch to their “fellow outsiders” chemistry.

And the lovely air of melancholy that hangs over all is might be the knowledge that no San Francisco bakery or hotel named “Lu & Figowitz” ever came to be. Or maybe we paid attention to the movie’s prologue, featuring a modern woman (Alia Shawkat) and her dog wandering those same river banks.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language.

Cast: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Rene Auberjonois, Alia Shawkat, Ewen Bremner and Toby Jones

Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, script by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond, based on the novel by Jonathan Raymond. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:02