Movie Nation

So here I was, eye-strained from all the eye-rolling at the pretty and utterly vapid Italian beach romance “Under the Riccione Sun,” ready to UNLOAD on it with this opening.

“If you missed out on how dry and empty American teen sex comedies could be in the ’80s, fear not. Italy is reviving them. ‘Under the Riccione Sun’ is proof.”

And then some pop star giving a concert in the finale of the film, set on the Daytona Beach of the Italian Riviera (apparently), and he sings about his “melancholy,” in Italian with English subtitles.

“My melancholy,” he croons, “is YOUR fault. And the fault of some ’80s movie.”

Nothing like being all set to ridicule a retro rom-com, its cheesy synth-pop music, diversity-impaired cast and 20ish college-kids raining descriptive, coitus come-on F-bombs on each other only to see them end up in these chaste, PG “hook-ups,” and then realizing, “Oh, they’re IN on it! They’re doing this on PURPOSE!”

The electronic tunes, the almost entirely tattoo-free teens and 20somethings (VERY ’80s), girls so skinny you want to raid the Girl Scout sales booth and walk the beach shouting, “Posso offrirti un biscotto” (May I offer you (poor emaciated kids) a COOKIE?), it’s exasperating, even for the eye candy it’s sort of meant to be.

I wonder, is there really an Italian director who goes by “Younuts?” Because I guess “Deeznuts” and “Numbnuts” were too jargonish?

The formula — lots of young people descend on the beach town for sand, sun and sin. More than a few of the guys (It’s phallo-centric, just like the ’80s.) are virgins, and can’t stop talking about the p-word and how they want the f-word to fill their nights.

Marco (Lorenzo Zurzolo) has even shown up with his mother (Isabella Ferrari). He’s blind, and she’s over-protective. Shocking. Lucky for him, gauche, sex-obsessed and delusional “ladies’ man” Furio (Davide Calgaro) takes him under his wing.

Ciro (Cristiano Caccamo) showed up with dreams of playing his guitar and finding fame at the “IDOL” auditions. No luck. But the moment he hits the beach and takes off his shirt, he’s offered a lifeguard job. Because he looks the part.

“I forgot to ask, can you SWIM?”

He has a girlfriend back home, and runs into a lifelong friend (Claudia Tranchese) who takes it on herself to “keep an eye” on him. So. No extracurricular “fun” allowed. Not that he’s looking for it, even when flirty-floozy Mara (Giulia Schiavo) comes on strong to get him on her beach volleyball team.

Marco (Saul Nanni) pines for the just-broke-up-and-obsessed-with-her-ex Guenda (Fotinì Peluso). He needs the help of his stoner-roomie (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli) and their ex-lifeguard/womanizer landlord (Andrea Roncato) to get out of Guenda’s “friend zone.”

There’s little in the line of scenery, unless you count stick-thin Italian ingenues — which apparently, the filmmakers do count…as scenery.

Nobody makes much of an impression, with the only funny bits coming from the 50ish mother (Ferrari) getting insulted and brushed-off by the bouncer (Luca Ward) who won’t let her into a beach rave because she’s his age — “too old.” Their back and forth about her “annoying” clinginess and need to “take care of “her son is the only conversation with any life to it.

It’s not bad enough to hate, and the worst you can say about “Riccione” is that it’s just a big tease. No sights, no flavor for the place, not quite sexual enough to be “sexy,” not the least bit amusing.

Which reminded me of lots of Hollywood ’80s on-the-make/on-the-beach comedies, all of them bad — “Casual Sex,” “Hard Bodies,”” “Spring Break.”

Which, in turn, begs the question — Who on Earth would want to revisit, emulate and revive these? Other than some director who goes by Younuts?

MPAA Rating: TV:MA, skin, innuendo, lots of profanity
Cast: Cristiano Caccamo, Claudia Tranchese, Isabella Ferrari, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Ludovica Martino, Cristiano Caccamo
Credits: Directed by Younuts, script by Caterina Salvadori, Enrico Vanina, Ciro Zecca, A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:42

Kevin Rafferty’s most acclaimed documentary, “Atomic Cafe,” was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. It was about America’s atomic testing legacy.

Harvard educated, a relative of the Bush clan, he made a very entertaining sports doc about a legendary moment in Ivy League lore — “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29 “ — a film which featured an interview with Tommy Lee Jones, who played with the Eli and was Al Gore’s roommate at Yale.

He was cinematographer for Michael Moore’s splashy debut, “Roger & Me.” Just having him around turned out to be Moore’s film school.

Rafferty made films about American Nazis (“Blood in the Face”) decades before they became an acknowledged problem in modern American culture, about smoking and tobacco and the economic (“The Last Cigarette”) and about New Hampshire’s stranglehold on the American presidential selection process (“Who Wants to be President?”).

He was an archetypal documentary maker of his era. Not prolific, but painstaking, serious, the sort sent up in movies like “While We’re Young” and “Real Life” — privileged, indulging in a quixotic pursuit that was more of a cause than a career.

Rafferty died July 2. He was 73.

Writer-director Ash Mayfair made a modest splash with her artful, serenely suspenseful “The Third Wife,”about a child bride’s experiences in 19th century Vietnam, and loosely based on Mayfair’s family’s 19th century history.

The 14 year-old bride, May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) has a marriage arranged with a wealthy heir, Hung (Le Vu Long), is welcomed by the two senior wives, Ha (Tran Nu Yên-Khê) and Xuan (Mai Thu Huong Maya). But soon she awakens to the rural gender politics at play, the familial intrigues, her own desire to give birth to a male heir and improve her status and her intense attraction to one of the other wives.

“The Third Wife” is a beautiful film, strikingly photographed, with understated dialogue, glances, stares and images carrying the subtle story and some lovely performances.

It look Mayfair five years to get it made, although it was withdrawn from release in Vietnam because, well, she cast a 12 year old who was still WAY underage when she placed her in this seriously sexual story, with nudity and simulated sex — the works.

But how did Mayfair spend the artistic capital and notoriety she won from that splashy debut? She took the same cast, same story and same locations and re-told the same story, in dialogue-free (“silent movie” style) black and white.

“Between Shadow and Soul” is, in most regards, an inferior copy of “The Third Wife.” It’s a doubling down on the controversy, in a way, even though the cast is somewhat older, a forthright assertion of an artist’s right to “pound the same nail, over and over again.” It makes for a “totally different experience,” she insists.

No. It doesn’t. The black and white cinematography calls attention to itself, but it is the gloriously contrast-rich celluloid black and white of earlier cinema? Again, no.

Are the actors accomplished enough to get across every nuance of the story, the shifting dynamics of this sylvan silkworm plantation in a lush, pre-war Vietnam? Not entirely.

Are the occasional, almost entirely random intertitles (silent movie style) enough to convey any information that limiting the soundtrack to music and sound effects (husband Hung sensually slurping a raw egg off the bare belly of his new bride, for instance) costs the story.

No.

Talents Vietnamese filmmakers are in short supply. Mayfair, born in Vietnam but educated in the UK and the US, almost certainly had other options for a follow-up feature. One only gets to make so many movies, after all. What, was she fretting that we/they “didn’t get it?”

Limiting yourself to a single story is may present a few modest fresh challenges, but feels wasteful. And what is the indulged, privileged Mayfair wasting most of all? Time — hers and ours.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity

Cast: Nguyen Phuong Tra My, Maya, Nu Yên-Khê Tran Hong Chuong Nguyen Nhu Quynh Nguyen, Nguyen Thanh Tam

Credits: Written and directed by Ash Mayfair. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:29

Dame Helen Mirren sits at a desk and begins reading aloud from a book — a diary. The desk is in the room in “The Annex” in Amsterdam, the very room where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis and the teenaged Anne wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Later in the documentary “#AnneFrank: Parallel Stories,” the Oscar-winning Mirren puts the book in its cultural context. Generations of teenagers who have read it in countries where it is on the curriculum, as Mirren narrates, are “forced to grow up.” Reading of Anne’s privation and teen rebellion, coming of age in history’s most horrific era and yet maintaining optimism, a lot of teenagers gain a new perspective on humanity, cruelty and the big wide world they’re about to enter as adults.

That’s the hook with this latest take on “The Diary.” The # gives it away. The film follows a young, Uggs-wearing/nose-ringed European girl, #KaterinaKat (Martina Gatti). She visits Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne died, and other memorials, museums and historic sites. Through social media posts directed at #AnneFrank the way Anne composed her diary to the imaginary friend “Kitty,” #KaterinaKat brings up the questions a modern teen has of this girl who bore witness, but more importantly, has felt so contemporary and connected to generations of young people who read her book.

“Anne, who were you? What were you dreaming of? Where are you taking me?”

This is a film that tries to recreate Anne’s experience of The Holocaust or Shoah through the voices of contemporaries, very old women who were very young when they, like Anne, were arrested, deported and confined to German concentration camps. They’re the last of The Survivors, and their experiences mirror her own enough that they offer more insight into what she lived through in hiding, and what she and her sister Margot went through in those last, imprisoned months of their lives.

“I want the diary to be my friend,” Anne began. So she called it “Kitty,” with entries about her routine, her dreams, her fears, even her budding sexuality all beginning with “Dear Kitty.”

Going back to the book, she reminds us that anybody in Europe with access to a forbidden radio (as the Franks and their fellow Annex tenants did) knew what was coming. “The English radio says they (Jews, Roma and others being “deported”) are being gassed!”

Historians and curators of various Holocaust memorials provide the historical background as “#AnneFrank” visits a rail car museum exhibit, or the Czech Pinkas Synagogue, where the names of all the Czech Jews murdered in the Shoah are written on the walls.

The young person “experiencing” this world gimmick is expanded later, as other teens talk about Anne along with the actress playing #KaterinaKat. But the gimmick isn’t really what this is about. As the last of the survivors die off, one more film gets their voices, their memories of “seeing Anne” as she was pointed out by somebody else in the camp who knew her, down on film.

Descendants, including an accomplished violinist, talk about how they view their great grandmothers, knowing what they know about the ordeal they survived. One has gotten a forearm tattoo with his great granny’s German ID number. And feisty survivor Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard speaks of her generations of descendants as “my revenge” on her Nazi persecutors.

The most striking “new” location covered here is the Terezin (Theresienstadt) camp where one survivor managed to live through the horrors by being a shepherd — and now collects sheep dolls from admirers all over the world.

And the most interesting new fact (Well, new to me.) is the revelation of why Anne’s writing had such a poetic touch, something Holocaust deniers have used to insist her father wrote the book to profit from her death. No, she rewrote it herself, with an eye toward publication. The Dutch government in exile was telling residents of Occupied Holland (by radio) that their memoirs and witness stories would be published after the war. The writer in Anne wanted to be included in that.

The “young people” angle or gimmick if you will doesn’t make or break “#AnneFrank.” So don’t get hung up on the cute teen musing, via social media posts, about “what it all means.” Generations of kids have figured it out, and the cell-phone addicted won’t be any different.

Filmmakers Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto have created a “pop” cinematic take on Anne Frank, sober and serious and haunting at times. But it’s also topical and an earnest attempt to keep this story relevant for another generation.

It’s a hard story to screw up, and appreciating its simple authority, how quickly this film breezes by and how moving it is in the end, they didn’t.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, graphic imagery of genocide

Cast:Helen Mirren, Arianna Szorenyi , Fanny Hochbaum, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Andra Bucci, Helga Weiss and Martina Gatti.

Credits: Directed by Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

This August release looks simply amazing. Ambitious, too.

A mystery about who she really is and whose life she is really living emerges in this July 10 release.

About “Desperados,” the played-out sex farce Netflix wants to foist on the unknowing — don’t find yourself annoyed and muttering, as I am.

“Damn. I wish I had that 100 minutes back.”

You shouldn’t watch it just because SOMEbody thought it’d be cute to stage a sort of “New Girl” supporting players reunion (Nasim Pedrad, Lamorne Morris) as a glossy, foul-mouthed rom-com. The the universe was calling for that.

Just because Netflix figured the TV director who goes by “LP” (Lotsa Pretension?) was ready to make a feature film, after shooting episodes of the “Mr. Mom” TV series nobody watched and “Tacoma F.D.,” which, ‘Is that really a thing?”

Just because the screenwriter hasn’t had much luck since, oh, “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” 15 years ago and the abortive feature “The Starlet,” and Netflix has this “Make Work for Mediocrities” program in place and uh, going strong.

But, you know, dildo falling out the purse, 30something woman mistaken for a pedophile attraction to a tweenage boy jokes never get old, right?

Pedrad stars as the most hapless of a trio of pals — high-strung and high-maintenance, over-sharing, sexually, in a job interview at a Catholic School (she wants to be a guidance counselor), lovelorn and DONE “being myself.” Wesley is ready to accept that “personality is an acquired taste.”

She’ll try that out on Jared (Robbie Amell), her knight in shining armor after a disastrous blind date gone bust, ending with a concussion.

It’s not like Brooke (Anna Camp), separated from her husband, single-mothering, has any reason to look down on Wesley’s “NOT being myself” strategy. And Kaylie (Sarah Burns) is so wrapped up in “my pregnancy journey” (She and hubby cannot conceive.) that she’s not judging Wesley, either.

Wesley’s so good at being “the perfect girl,” as in not-at-all-herself, that she and Jared connect. Until he goes five days without calling, and the three BFFs get drunk and drunk text a tirade to him that burns that bridge to the ground.

Only he’s been in a car wreck in Mexico, in a coma for a few days. No, he hasn’t been able to read his messages.

There’s nothing for it but to fly to Cabo San Lucas, break into Jared’s hotel room and erase that message before he can see it, in the manner of “Seinfeld” and several other comedies that have covered that ground first.

The running gag — Wesley’s stumbles into this kid (Toby Grey) who thinks she’s INTO him, with his mother (Jessica Chaffin) lighting her up as she cusses her out — is kind of funny, and the only place this wilted daisy of a farce feels edgy.

Whatever screenwriter Ellen Rapoport’s strong suit, vulgar gags aren’t it. Wesley is humped by a dolphin on a “swim with the dolphins” encounter, there’s an unfunny “naked and locked out of my (Jared’s) room” gambit, a bar pick-up scene where Brooke and a guy totally out of his league see how nasty they can get with the masturbation insults, all point to one lesson.

Shock value has no value if it’s not shockingly funny.

Meanwhile, Sean (Morris), who takes his “automatic out” (escape clause) from his one blind date with Wesley, keeps popping up and charmingly rolling with Wesley’s increasingly desperate, generally unfunny antics trying to get to Jared’s email before he gets released from the hospital.

There’s a little chemistry between Pedrad and Morris, not nearly enough to compensate for every tired obstacle (Mexican jail, anyone?) the script throws at Wesley and every weak witticism Rapoport gives her to say.

“I swear to GOD when I get OUT of here (Mexican jail) I’m going to TAKE this to social media!”

The film so focuses on these two that the other “Desperados” are shortchanged. As both Brooke and Kayleigh are destined to encounter Heather Graham, playing a guru running “The Heart Sanctuary,” a sort of ashram run by a “Goop wannabee,” that’s probably for the best.

Graham’s presence in a comedy often a dead giveaway that your sex farce isn’t going to be sexy or farcical.

Exercise your “automatic out,” avoid the desperation of all involved.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, pedophilia jokes, near nudity, lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Nasim Pedrad, Lamorne Morris, Anna Camp, Sarah Burns, Robbie Amell, and Heather Graham.

Credits: Directed by LP, script by Ellen Rapoport.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

“The Runners” is a low-budget rural Texas riff on child sex trafficking, with a rural Texas take on “how we deal with’em, down in Texas.”

It’s a straight-up C-movie that reaches its climax, and then stumbles towards a far bigger one because, well, we’ve got to get more guns and a Mexican drug cartel involved.

It’s bad. And as that climactic shootout arrives, with a villain who brings a bolt-action rifle to a gunfight to take on a hero’s shotgun, you chuckle and think, “This can’t get worse.” And then it does.

Older brother Ryan (writer and co-director Micah Lyons) has been raising sister Zoe ever since their parents died. But now that she’s a teen (Netty Leech), rebellion has set in.

She’s been cutting classes, dating a popular jock on the Hallsville High football team, talking back to her “guardian.”

That’s what puts her at the after-game party. That’s where she figures out the jock isn’t faithful, which leaves her there alone. And that’s when she’s grabbed.

Ryan flips-out when she doesn’t make it home, and frantic calls to the cowboy hat sheriff’s department doesn’t even get their boots off their desks. A tip here, an hunch there and he stumbles into a mass kidnapping. The rescue fails, but the otherwise ruthless and murderous kidnapper (co-director Joey Loomis) lets him live.

In bad thrillers, they always let the hero live. They don’t always leave a Polaroid of the gagged victim, and a ROAD MAP of where they’re a-going. But that’s the difference between a B-movie and a C, D or Z one.

Ryan rounds up his bearded doofus pal Kooter (Jason Peter Kennedy) and sets off after an RV loaded with bound teens, held by a Ms. Nasty Braids, Cash Money (Rhoda Morman), a skinhead to provide the muscle and mastermind Marty (Loomis).

The interlocking pieces of how a no-budget film is planned, financed and cast are laid bare in movies like “The Runners.”

Lyons is producing, writing and acting in movies in and around his tiny hometown, Hallsville. He knows the lay of the East Texas land.

He’s making thrillers on hot-button topics. There’s a “COVID-19: Invasion” movie in production.

And he landed an actual movie star for a bit part. That helps get the movie financed. Tom Sizemore plays the preacher a couple of characters consult, the only guy who can get lazy, dimwitted but armed-to-the-teeth law enforcement off its collective butts.

The fights aren’t awful, although the first big shootout is laughably under-armed, by Texas standards and by career-criminals-in-the-movies standards. They saved all their cash for an over-ordnanced finale, which is a Sig-Sauer slaugherhouse of assault rifles.

But the script ranges from bad to worse, with generic character melt-downs and amateurish plot lapses. Why kill a “problem” when you can leave him to keep chasing you, and later capture and then torture him, with a little trash-talk tossed in?

Here’s a tip to film financiers. If the script you’re being pitched has the tritest thriller line of them all in it — “We’re a lot alike, you and I” — drop it and run. Run away like “The Runners.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault, profanity

Cast: Micah Lyons, Netty Leech, Joey Loomis, Rhonda Morman, Jason Peter Kennedy, and Tom Sizemore

Credits: Directed by Joey Loomis and Micah Lyons, script by Micah Lyons. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:38

Robots and Theo James and Stacey Martin and Rhona Mitra, with Toby Jones as the heavy.

July 10 it streams.

The singer Duffy experienced something akin to the perverse kidnap/rape fantasy depicted in this Italian Netflix “romantic thriller.”

So she’s naturally a little peeved Netflix would finance an Italian thriller in the “50 Shades” veinan Italian thriller in the “50 Shades” vein that turns kidnapping and rape into something potentially romantic, and then put that on American Netflix, where we take #MeToo issues more seriously.

From The Hollywood Reporter

Duffy is reportedly criticizing Netflix for its “irresponsible” decision to stream the controversial film ‘365 Days’ https://t.co/PNn1ngGcMH https://twitter.com/THR/status/1278824134911365126?s=20