Movie Nation

Best friend Alice comforts her British stand-up comic pal Henrietta, “Henri,” the heroine of “Daddy Issues,” with one lie. But it’s such whopper that it the whole movie spirals down the drain with it.

“Aww, Henri,” she says, “You’re ALWAYS funny.”

No. She isn’t. Henri, played by Kimberley Datnow, isn’t ever funny on stage. The canned laughter at her appearances implies much more forgiving and drunken viewers than anyone watching “Daddy Issues.”

Henri has one almost-moment, after she’s skipped her Dad’s funeral, after she’s moved to LA to “take over” his design firm there. She treats her first board meeting as a stand-up gig. Holding a pencil like a mike, she works the room. And she hasn’t got one bloody funny thing to say there, either.

This woebegone comedy is about not living up to expectations, refusing to grow up, struggling in LA and “I’m here because I can’t afford therapy right now” stand-up.

Moving back to LA, Henri catches up with her Loyola Marymount classmates, people who have started lives, grown up. Well, most of them.

Nolan (Tanner Rittenhouse) is living in her Dad’s house, works in her Dad’s firm and hasn’t ever gotten around to restoring the deck — which was their deal.

Alice (Alice Carroll Johnson) may work in a well-known talent agency. But what her pals don’t know is that she’s on the bottom rung of the ladder, makes no money and is drowning in student loans. She sneaks around, driving for a rideshare company. And in a bizarre twist, seeing as she’s gay, she surfs a Sugar Daddy app, hunting for someone to pay her bills for “companionship.”

Yeah. Right.

We’re meant to giggle as Henri throws herself at an old flame who turns out to be a self-absorbed anal-retentive jerk. Giving him the name “Hunter” (Francis Lloyd Corby) is a tad “on the nose.”

There are other dates with other guys, a potentially amusing ride-share with a bachelorette party that turns into a “let’s get even with Hunter” vendetta. Meanwhile, she’s bonding with Nolan over the cutest ping pong match ever.

Yes, that’s me throwing a feeble comedy with a duller-than-dull script, colorless characters and a posh-accented “star” who seems like a born bit player, nothing more.

The titular “bit” almost works, and as that’s in the film’s first five minutes, it fills one with false hope. Henri jokes that she’s developing an app called “Daddy Issues. It’s a destructive way to search for love you never got as a child.”

Everything that follows? It’s worse.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, some profanity

Cast: Kimberley Datnow , Alice Carroll Johnson, Tanner Rittenhouse, Francis Lloyd Corby

Credits: Directed by Laura Holliday, script by John Cox and Laura Holliday, A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

Little known cast, daffy fairytale premise, a guy so pretty people drop dead at the sight of him.

Did they try to get Timothee Chalamet?

Dan Myrick, co-director of “The Blair Witch Project” is behind this docu/mocku thriller, headed to a drive in bed you. And me.

Once you’ve noticed them — parked after-hours in a big box store parking lot, tucked under a bridge — you can’t stop seeing them.

The car, truck or van windows are covered with sun shields, or just cardboard. The windows are cracked open. Just a glance tells you they’re America’s motorized homeless, on the road — by choice or by circumstance — living lean, “off the grid” and well, poor.

“The Short History of the Long Road” paints a somewhat romanticized picture of #vanlife. This is about people living like that by choice, checking out of whatever social ills that worry the drivers the most — mortgages, TV,  “failing” public schools. Writer-director Ani Simon-Kennedy gets a perfectly charming road odyssey out of that conceit.

Nola has “been on the road since before she could walk, her Daddy Clint (Steven Ogg of “Walking Dead”) brags. He preaches “the low-budget/high experience manner of living” to anybody who’ll listen. And daughter Nola (Sabrina Carpenter of “Horns” and TV’s “Girl Meets World”) is his captive audience.

She’s absorbed some of his handyman skills (he hustles work at home improvement stores they pass by), learned to drive their “Hulk” 1984 VW Westfalia from him, and shares his live-lightly-if-barely-legally ethos, that what America needs is “an army of self-sufficient agitators.”

Her mom? “She zigged and we zagged.” School? A kind of “school of life” version of home schooling applies. He taught her to “surf” theaters on their nights out at a multiplex, but to pass on their leftover pizza to the homeless.

But what’s young Nola — forever wondering about Missing Mom as they’re wandering from campground to parking lot to empty, foreclosed-on house — to do when Dad’s not there?

“Short History” is her story, struggling to manage the way her father always did with few of his skills and fewer scruples — trying to siphon gas, attempting a dine-and-dash.

As is the way of such stories, Nola encounters the kindness of strangers. Rusty Schwimmer is a hovering Earth Mother who takes her in, as part of her already-large adopted brood. Danny Trejo is the gruff immigrant mechanic who might be able to fix her long-out-of-production VW, and whose barking rebuffs at her efforts to finagle a work-for-repairs job out of him get him nowhere.

These encounters are so pleasant that the contrived betrayals of such kindnesses which Nola abruptly serves up go down easier.

Actress: Sabrina Carpenter. Cinematographer: Cailin Yatsko.

As homeless road pictures go, this is more “Peanut Butter Falcon” than “Leave No Trace.” Dad’s not in the picture long, but there’s a “Captain Fantastic” element to the portrayal.

Carpenter shows no strain at capturing somebody who may not have learned table manners, but did learn who she can trust and maybe just how far she can push that trust.

I liked Simon-Kennedy’s decision to leave romance out of the equation. Nola is media-and-peer-pressure immune. Her focus is “wherever the road takes me,” that next meal, next tank of gas and maybe figuring out where her long-absent mother ended up.

Trejo, that burly tattooed pussycat of an ex-con, makes the strongest impression among the supporting cast, Mr. “None of My Business” who puts some effort into not showing the soft side that we know he must have.

It’s not as challenging a movie as those three antecedents I mentioned above. But “Short History” is certainly engrossing and entertaining enough to be in the best recent “feel good road pictures” conversation.

And it helps in supporting the (perhaps delusional) belief that this is somebody’s “lifestyle choice” the next time we see a parked van with the covered-up windows nowhere near a pay-per-night campground.

MPAA Rating: unrated, PG-worthy

Cast: Sabrina Carpenter, Steven Ogg, Danny Trejo, Jashaun St. John, Rusty Schwimmer and Maggie Siff

Credits: Written and directed by Ani Simon-Kennedy.  A Film Rise release.

Running time: 1:30

The very serious man has stopped in Denmark’s version of Lowe’s, looking for rope. He’s being particular about the strength, as one must be when choosing the right rope for the right job. He’s only got one question of clerk.

“Do you know how to tie a noose?”

The employee thinks nothing of it, demonstrating as he ties it and asks about the weight it will need to support. The answer, “92 kilos” takes him aback. Not that he doesn’t finish the knot. This is Scandinavia, after all.

“Game of Thrones” favorite Nikolaj Coster-Waldau  is that suicidal man, an insurance claims investigator with a loving wife (Tuva Novotny of “Annihilation”), interesting work and seemingly a good life. But when we meet him, he’s giving his “When you watch this, I will be dead” video testimonial. Max is ending it all.

“Exit Plan” is a quietly chilling, sometimes moving Danish film about “a beautiful ending,” Max’s desire to end his life on his own terms, and the resort (apparently in Norway) that can allow this to happen.

We see the effort wife Lærke puts into being cheerful around him, and we hear the digital assistant that reminds him it’s time to do his twice-daily “practice rhyme.” It’s about clams.

He hasn’t been to work in a while, and long before the latest cat scan, we can guess what’s going on with him. He’s depressed. And that brain teaser? It’s to keep him sharp as the tumor grows inside his head.

Max’s attempts at doing himself in are not played by laughs even as they don’t come off. It’s hard when there are no firearms present, no quick poisons, and what you’re not good at knots.

But there’s this place, the Hotel Aurora, in the forested mountains, a veritable Bond villain’s lair of a resort where they guarantee you “a satisfactory goodbye.”

The video pitch from the place promises “a painless injection set to the song that best represents your life.”

For a 90 minute drama, with thriller elements, that borders on profound. What song would you want to exit this world to?

The film splits its time between Max’s time at the hotel, and flashbacks that show how he got there.

Other patients (Lorraine Hilton, Robert Aramayo) chat with him, even if Ari (Aramayo, also from “Game of Thrones”), his arms covered in half-healed razor blade cuts, wonders “What’s we supposed to talk about here?”

“Maybe not the future.”

The second feature by Jonas Alexander Arnby (script by Rasmus Birch) is serene, almost sterile but generally thoughtful right up until it dips into somber yet nightmarish melodrama.

Think “Coma.”

And dressing the patients at the hotel in striped concentration camp pajamas seems a tad too on-the-nose.

“Exit Plan” doesn’t achieve the lovesick ache one wishes for it, the sad lament of what is being surrendered to ensure that “she” has “closure,” and only good memories of you to carry with her.

But Coster-Waldau, speaking his native Danish (and English), makes the most of this daunting role, capturing the deflating depression, allowing room for doubts about this one last “my own terms” choice.

The film manages to be a meditative essay on death and dying and love, even if the chill never quite wears off.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Kate Ashfield, Tuva Novotny, Robert Aramayo

Credits: Directed by Jonas Alexander Arnby, script by Rasmus Birch. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:29

No, it won’t be opening July 17.

America’s premature opening endured a COVID summer, but it was going to be a long shot to.ake that date anyway.

He new date? Go to the link. It’s not as far a move as you might expect.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/christopher-nolan-tenet-delayed-coronavirus-1234576169/

The comic Michael Jr. isn’t new to faith-based films. He was in “War Room.”

But stepping into the lead role, he’s plainly more comfortable with the funny stuff than playing troubled, converted and sincere in “Selfie Dad,” a limp if lightweight essay in “family” taking precedence over “ambition.”

Back in the day, Ben Marcus made the scene at all the comedy clubs. The residue of that 1990s life is still on the internet in the opening scenes of “Selfie Dad.”

Now, he’s a married man with a devout, Hispanic wife (Dahlia Waingort), two kids, two cars and a steady job. He’s a video editor in an LA post-production house, enduring the complaints of reality show host’s like drawling gardener Rosie of “Rosie’s Roses” (Chonda Pierce of “All Saints”).

A colleague there (Johnny Pacar) is finishing up seminary, ready to become a pastor. As Ben and his family are faithful churchgoers, Mickey passes on his copy of “Why We Need the Bible” to Ben.

Ben doesn’t look like he’s having a good time. Distracted, frustrated, he turns a deaf ear to wife Jesse’s pleas — “Help out around the house. Spend some time with your CHILDREN!”

Their oldest (Shelby Simmons) is in “Grease!” at school. But it’s the younger son (Jalon Christian) who tips Dad off to the riches to be had on the World Wide Web. Post videos, get views, collect subscribers on “Utoo” (cute). Become famous.

Ben decides to tape himself doing a few sure-fire jokes.

“Can I call a white duck a ‘quacker?’ Why is ‘abbreviation’ such a long word? My wife is of a different race. We have ‘mixed feelings.'”

Yeah. I know. Calling these “Dad jokes” is an insult to fatherhood.

It’s not until Ben stumbles through a home repair failure, which he tapes but which his kid edits and posts, that he catches on. DIY home repair accidents, not memorized jokes, works.

But as the numbers spike and “second chance” at success beckons, Ben is distracted at the office, more distracted at home, and tempted by show business and the cute women who work in it.

Writer-director Brad J. Silverman (“Grace Unplugged,” “No Greater Love”) didn’t come up with a challenging story — just a little “test”of faith, some bland reactions to that test.

And he sure as shooting didn’t find anything funny for Michael Jr. to say or play. You’d think a veteran comic like Michael Jr. would riff more funny stuff in that “funniest line on the set wins” way. But confusing “prescriptions” for “subscriptions,” telling his kid “I made a selfie” when in fact, he posted a video? Not amusing.

A traffic stop almost delivers a laughs. The drawling, griping diva “Rosie” that Christian comic Pierce plays tickles, more through her delivery than via any “funny” lines she has.

“Selfie Dad” may be topical, and doesn’t lean on the Christian “victimhood” crutch as hard as the worst films in this genre. Where it fails is in suspense, emotion and comedy.

There’s a “Have to you seen ‘War Room?” “I don’t really like Christian films” reference that lands with a thud.

There are comics who work clean, and comics who ply the Christian audience trade with amusing success. John Crist (On the nose name for a Christian comic.), Pierce and others find laughs in home schooling, Veggie Tales, Chic Fil A and preachers’ kids.

There’s no reason this concept shouldn’t work. As angry as some faith-based films are, I really wanted it to.  When any regular churchgoer says “I really don’t like Christian films,” lifeless fare like “Selfie Dad” is what they’re complaining about.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and some suggestive material

Cast: Michael Jr., Dahlia Waingort, Chonda Pierce, Johnny Pacar, Shelby Simmons

Credits: Written and directed by Brad J. Silverman. A GVN release.

Running time: 1:37

A horrific, accidental but long-time-coming moment in history gave Spike Lee this stage at this moment. He has a big movie about Vietnam, Black History, racism, greed and rage coming out just as most of those subjects are coming to head in a nation roiled by protests.

But that movie had to be an epic-length, cringe-worthy riff on “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” It had to be a sermonizing, dawdling, cluttered and cornball homage to every Vietnam War ever made, movies which characters in his own movie ridicule.

It had to have the single dumbest “land mine” scene in all of cinema.

A tip — don’t make fun of Chuck “Walker: Texas Ranger” Norris’s godawful “Missing in Action” movies if making “Miracle at St. Anna” and oh, re-watching “Apocalypse Now” are your chief preparations for going “in country” yourself.

“Da 5 Bloods” is about old comrades — Delroy Lindo, Isaiah Whitlock Jr., Clarke Peters and Norm Lewis — reuniting in Vietnam almost 50 years after their service there. They have unfinished business.

Their cover story is they’re here to recover a fallen comrade, “Stormin Norman” (Chadwick Boseman), the squad leader they left behind on a combat mission that went wrong long ago.

The real story — which this script has them blurting out to a whole lot of unsavory characters (Jean Reno among them) — is that they buried CIA gold they found during their service.

Why they waited fifty years to come back, hike into the jungle and dig up 600+ pounds of gold bars that they’d then have to tote out of said jungle is a mystery.

The characters? They’re not mysteries at all. They’re “types.”

Eddie (Lewis) is the wealthy owner of car dealerships, Otis (Peters of “The Wire” and “John Wick”) is hobbled with age, Melvin (Whitlock) is the hard-drinking ex-grunt who always kept his head down and did his job, with a kid who just finished high school.

All of them have to be 70 or so, but late start, I guess.

And then there’s Paul (Lindo), the touchy, haunted one. “I see ghosts,” he confesses. He’s a walking trigger warning, and he’s got a grudge.

“We got back from ‘Nam, we didn’t get nothing but a hard time.”

He wears a MAGA hat, held onto his “gook” bigotry, and won’t hear any talk about what HE should do with HIS share of this gold. And then he son (Jonathan Majors) tracks him down to join their merry band on its quest.

“We could be Bloods, one more time!”

The script shoves as much of “The American War” (as they call it in Vietnam) experience — much of it seen in earlier movies and TV shows — as it can into their visit. They hit a bar named “Apocalypse Now,” where one of them gets drunk enough to get chatty and LOUD about what they’re doing there, one discovers he has an Afro-Asian daughter. There are noisy confrontations with peddlers and panhandlers over what “they” did to “my” country.

And then they take a river journey, cruising along to “Ride of the Valkyries” and every ’60s rock and pop song associated with the war and especially movies about the war.

The quest opens old wounds, reveals PTSD, and then things go wrong in assorted too-predictable ways.

The ex-soldiers take on combat wariness like muscle memory, and when the chips are down, it all comes flooding back with them, along with the adrenaline.

The cleverest conceit here is the way Lee handles the flashbacks. The old men remember themselves, as they are now(70ish), in country and in combat with “Stormin’ Norman,” who fills their down time with lectures about African American history — from Jamestown and Crispus Attucks onward.

“He was our Malcolm and our Martin,” one Blood remembers.

The film opens and closes with Lee’s montages about the State of America “then,” and the State of America “now.” These are the best sequences in this simple, overscripted, stumbling movie — Muhammed Ali’s statement about the draft and Neil Armstrong on “Da Moon,” included. Little bits of history, this real-life decorated vet, that real Bobby Seale speech, decorate “Da 5 Bloods” and give it some heft.

But Lee’s like an old boxer who remembers his game, but telegraphs his punches and bores you to death talking about the punches he’s about to throw.

Nothing here arrives as a surprise, from the clumsily-foreshadowed action beats to the insane “Sierra Madre” monologues.

The stilted dialogue is a mashup of topical “Klansman in the Oval Office” riffs, and exhausted expressions of bonhomie and “get some BARbecue up in here.”

The criminally under-employed Lindo goes full Humphrey Bogart in “Sierra,” so much so that nobody else save for the jovial, foul-mouthed Whitlock makes an impression.

Boseman is barely in it, even in the flashbacks.

What we’re left with is a stark reminder that, “BlackKklansman” aside, it’s possible to agree with most everything Spike Lee says in his movies these days while lamenting the decline in his storytelling skills and his unwillingness to edit them into sharper focus.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images and pervasive language

Cast: Delroy Lindo, Chadwick Boseman, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., Norm Lewis, Clark Peters, Jonathan Majors

Credits Directed by Spike Lee, script by Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo, Kevin Willmotand Spike Lee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:35

Dave Chapelle arranged an outdoor appearance, with a socially-distanced audience in masks, for his hometown of Beavercreek, Ohio.

He threw on a black shirt and black pants, grabbed his black notebook — where comedians jot down ideas they want to work into “material” — picked up the mike, and spoke.

“8:46” is the name of this stand-up special, his first public performance in 87 days, a graphic tells us.

But he didn’t show up to be funny.

“Am I boring you?” he asks at one point. “This is not funny at ALL,” he admits later.

Because these aren’t “jokes.” He’s not waiting for applause lines to register applause. Chapelle goes late-period Lenny Bruce here, 27 minutes of enraged, emotional and blunt talk about George Floyd’s murder, TV talkers, the litany of infamous cases of police shootings and chokings, George Zimmerman shooting Trayvon Martin, the deaths of Philando Castile and Eric Garner.

Here it is, for free, on Youtube.

He opens with the Minneapolis tape that triggered a national uprising. “I can’t unsee it,” he declares. “NOBODY is going home,” is his first thought after seeing it, lamenting that “This man KNEELED on his man’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds! He said ‘I can’t breathe.’ He called for his DEAD mother. He KNEW he was going to die!”

Chapelle burns opinionater Candace Owens, “the most articulate idiot I’ve ever seen.” He claps back at those like CNN anchor Don Lemon, “that hotbed of reality,” asking where “celebrity” voices are in this sea of protesters, the police riots and agitator looting.

“You kids are excellent drivers,” Chapelle declares, of the young people taking to the streets. “So I am comfortable being in the back seat of the car.”

Chapelle gives the crowd (mostly middle-aged, from the audience cut-aways, largely white) a history lesson, charting the back and forth of murders — a civilian killed by cops here, here and here, Black veterans carrying out mass shootings we might have forgotten, men like the L.A. cop fired for reporting a colleague for abusing a suspect, Christopher Dorner, who wrote a manifesto (mentioning Dave) and went on a murder spree.

Chapelle’s voice cracks as he remembers his own history, his connection to the death of a black man by police in Beavercreek, with Chapelle “pulled over by that same cop the NIGHT before.”

And he remembers his family history, the South Carolina ancestor (his namesake) who was part of a delegation that visited racist President Woodrow Wilson in the White House to protest a lynching and the rise of lynchings in the South during Wilson’s presidency. That isn’t ancient history, the comic/truth-teller reminds us.

This isn’t Chapelle at his best. It’s just Chapelle at his most honest, unfiltered and unpolished material, spoken from the heart. Don’t expect him to make a habit of this, he says. He doesn’t feel the need to.

“These streets will speak for themselves.”

Cast: Dave Chapelle.

Credits: A Netflix is a Joke release, on youtube.

Running time: 27.20

#davechapelle846

Looks properly gripping and grim. And it’s good to see JGLevitt acting again. His side interests and inane Twitter positivisms are no substitute for doing what he does best.

“7500” comes to Amazon Prime June 19.