Movie Nation

The eye-roll, that universal symbol for “You gotta be kidding me,” gets a fearsome workout in “Si, Mi Amor,” a candy-colored rom-com bauble from Peru.

It’s as if the cast recognizes that many of the comic tropes and gender stereotypes they’re acting out are dated and retrograde — and not just to norteamericanos.

It’s about a guy who keeps a secret from his paranoid and insecure girlfriend, only to have her leap to the worst possible conclusion and melt down, telling off him and all their friends and her relatives at a Christmas party.

There’s a teen present, so Bea (Yiddá Eslava) becomes a Youtube sensation as “The Christmas Hulk” (“La Navidad Hulk,” as this is in Spanish with English subtitles).

The rest of the comedy is each trying to move on without the other, Bea living with her best friend and running into (literally, via fender-bender) her next beau, the doctor Horacio (Sebastian Monteghirfo), who wheezes and brays as he laughs, and Guillermo, aka “Guille” ( (Julián Zucchi) getting drunk, singing with the famous singing duo (don’t recognize them) and getting picked up with the girlishly manipulative Britany (Ximena Palamino).

This is what happens when a Peruvian takes up with an Argentinian, or so this slow-footed Pedro Flores Maldonado “romp” would have us believe. Because that’s one thing that pays comic dividends in the third act.

That’s when Bea has to deal with Argentinians, or rather Peruvian ideas of what Argentinians are like. Obsessed with Maradona, the soccer legend? Si. Arrogant, patronizing and pretentious, with a tendency to correct that Spanish of their Latin American lessers? Oh, si, si.

Guille’s accent is a big joke to strangers he meets in his little organic food/medicine shop. The word muttered in his direction is “maricón,” which may play for laughs south of the border, but is very out-of-date in most of the rest of the world.

“Si, mi Amor” has the obligatory gay BFF (Andrés Salas), a mincing, lisping bitchy-sissy editor-boss at Bea’s newspaper (she writes horoscopes) and a lead couple that set off no sparks. We’re pretty much invited to assume Guille is gay, right from the opening “We should be more than friends” scene.

“Your voice is high! You’re LYING Guille!”

Maldonado gives us a quick picture of modern day Lima, the street music and club scene. Actors get to trot out their versions of playing a drunk, throwing a tantrum, dancing, singing karaoke (or singing along with a band).

Cute gags? A breaking into a cell-phone bit is cute, the drunk scenes aren’t bad. The only really funny moments come very late, those lessons in “How to be more Argentinian.”

Maldonado leaves promising premises at the door and confines himself to easier laughs, for the most part.

The women are mostly shrill, judgmental harridans or gold-diggers, stress binge-eaters and club hotties, and wishing this “couple” back together seems like a stretch.

But the good-humored, better looking neighbor (Mayra Couto) who keeps running into Guille at the worst moments — moving his ex’s underwear out, locked out, nearly nude in the middle of a bleach-job — is out of the question, I guess.

The performers are all polished and make do the best they can with a script that has maybe 50 minutes worth of rom-com lost in a 100 minute movie.

However this played in Peru and the rest of South America, I could have used a LOT more “Let’s make fun of Argentinians.” If you’re leaning on stereotypes, the gay ones are played out, but the Pretentious People of the Pampas are still fair game.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Yiddá Eslava, Julián Zucchi, Andrés Salas, Mayra Couto, Ximena Palamino, Sebastian Monteghirfo.

Credits: Written and directed by Pedro Flores Maldonado. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

There must be a template in a screenwriting textbook, or a “Thriller Writing for Dummies” edition that has to “protagonist finds a BUTTLOAD of cash” scenario that every lazy hack under the midnight sun can use as guideline.

Because heaven knows, we see that story line a lot. I guess if aspiring screenwriters can say “Hey, the legendary Cormac McCarthy got away with it (“No Country for Old Men”), Why not me?”

So whatever kudos are due screen veteran Tom Berenger, who turns 71 at the end of May, for stumbling around in the snows of Maine, hunting and getting hunted, the thriller “Blood and Money” hangs on utter hackwork as a screenplay.

Maybe it started with “Platoon,” but more likely with 1993’s “Sniper.” Casting people, especially for B-movies, have no trouble seeing Berenger behind a rifle scope. So even if the eyes squint with age and the movements have a gingerly hint of care about them, here he is, another retired “Marine,” Jim Reed, a loner out to “get my buck” in the not-quite-tractless wilderness up near the Canadian border.

We pick up from Jim’s “custom job” camper that he’s living lean, with photos that hint that he had a family at one time. As a hunter, he’s not the most particular shooter. He kills a doe, but can navigate around that by calling an old acquaintance who knows somebody with “a doe stamp” and “could use the meat.”

We see him in AA, hear the hard luck stories of the men therein, one of whom admits he takes out things on his wife and family.

And when he overhears the waitress (Kristen Hager) hashing out her problems on the phone out back, he has sympathy. “My daughter was just LIKE you.” Emphasis on “WAS.”

Jim jaws a little with the various state game wardens, with clerks in stores, many of whom are talking about the “casino robbery” and shootout that happened nearby (this was filmed around Oxford, Maine). Jim barely engages with this.

But back out in the remote snow and trees, missing his shot at a buck has him careless enough to take a second shot at the first sign of movement. Damned if he doesn’t kill one of the robbers, a woman he watches bleed out, bellowing complaints “What are you DOING here?” at her as she does.

What’s Jim do? He high-tails it. It’s only when he thinks back later about clues he might have left at the crime scene that he goes back. And that’s when he takes the big black duffel stuffed with money.

The remainder of “Blood and Money,” which was first titled “Allagash” (the region where this is set), is even more perfunctory — facing off with the rest of the gang, picking them off, getting an innocent bystander killed, seeking some sort of dubious “redemption” in the process.

As trite as the screenplay’s bones are, they’re nothing to the dubious moralism or “code” or what have you writer-director John Barr tries to shove in here. Jim’s present is not unlike his past. He’s done a terrible wrong, and he’s not accepting responsibility for it. His actions and reactions are quite human — careless, coverup, then kill or be killed and don’t sweat the collateral damage.

The story’s over-familiarity isn’t the best reason to skip “Blood and Money.” Its messaging is. And whatever butch points Berenger earns for getting the job done in extreme conditions at an age when “don’t slip you’ll break your hip” has to be a concern are squandered on a film that isn’t worth it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Tom Berenger, Kristen Hager, Paul-Ben Victor, Jimmy LeBlanc

Credits: Directed by John Barr, screenplay by John Barr, Alan Petherick. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:30

If “accuracy” should never supersede the demands of “story” in a screen biography, then Josh Trank’s “comeback,” an account of the last months of mobster Al Capone’s life, can be dismissed as a total write-off.

Starring Tom Hardy in a “Method” immersion into “Capone” that borders on utter incoherence, playing the syphilitic psychotic after he’s lost much of his mind and most control of his bowels, it’s far more interesting than that.

The Dark Knight’s “Bane” sounds like Alan Rickman reciting Shakespeare by comparison, the demented growl further muffled by an omnipresent cigar. This Capone is a study in diseased, malign decrepitude, balding, lurching, scarred — with eyes that give away the memory of murderous menace, guilt and maybe even regret.

The most obvious read in those eyes, straight off, is confusion. The performance may be challenging, almost inaccessible. But you can’t say it’s “wrong.”

Trank (“Chronicle” was his big break, “Fantastic Four” his undoing) captures Capone in his gauche Miami mansion, celebrating the last Thanksgivings of his life. He may be running out of money and is certainly far removed from mob power. He served ten years in prison for tax fraud, undone by the IRS. Now, the Feds are watching and listening for anything else he might give away as lives out his last days in tacky splendor.

He romps with the grandkids, “Godfather” style, in the film’s opening. By the end, he’s in a diaper, his paranoia matched by his incontinence.

Strokes are stalking him, but his embittered wife Mae (Linda Cardellini) accepts that at least now, she has “peace and quiet.” The threat of drive-bys, gang wars arrest are far in the past. He growls “I love you,” and she acts as if she’s never heard the phrase in her life.

“He don’t scare me” is all she’ll say to “the men” they keep close by, to the doctor (Kyle MacLachlan) the Feds have coerced into treating him.

The family is near, but these collect calls from Cleveland point to an estranged son that nobody but “Fonse” knows about. That matters to no one. What does he have to pass on to anybody, even his son by Mae (Mason Guccione)?  Nothing.

Except, in his sentient moments — when he’s not dreaming of his salad days, banquets where he was feted and Louis Armstrong was the entertainment — he remembers something.

“I hid $10 million bucks!”

“Where?”

“I don’t f—–g know!”

There’s a potential “treasure hunt” the movie might have explored, to farcical effect. But Trank takes all this ugliness too seriously for that.

Capone is haunted by his murderous past, still seeing the blood spilled in his name by his still-loyal lieutenant (Gino Cafarelli). He can still make “cut your f—–g head off” threats to anybody who makes moves to sell his ugly statuary. But he’s in no position to follow through.

Unless it’s a gator who steals a fish and his rod from his boat while he’s out with old pal Johnny (Matt Dillon). Old Alphonse fetches a shotgun and blasts the offending reptile.

“Was it WORTH it?”

Johnny is almost amused.

“This is what happens when people spend too much time in Florida. They turn into f—–g HILLbillies!”

DSCF4989.RAF

Hardy is unshakably in character, first scene to last, chomping on that cigar and later a carrot when the doctor orders a substitution, fending off fresh Federal interrogations, fantasizing a Biblical Tommy Gun vengeance upon “these people” he no longer recognizes around him.

It’s not “Scarface” colorful, and the scattered flashbacks — seeing his boyhood self — don”t reveal much of anything. It’s as if Trank wanted to ensure this wasn’t  some anti-heroic celebration of a monster, and stripped the glory, sympathy and psychoanalysis out of the story down to the point where no one would make that mistake.

But Hardy is fascinating to watch, first scene to last, an actor wholly committed, as always, even if the script for this showcase feels incomplete or straight-to-video.

Hardy MPAA Rating: R for strong/bloody violence, pervasive language and some sexuality

Cast: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan

Written and directed by Josh Trank. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:44

How bad is the Colombian farce “No Andaba Muerto, Estaba de Parrando,” clumsily translated to “Death Can Wait” on your English language Netflix menu?

After flailing away for what seems like forever, setting up “You have six weeks to live” premise, its travel-agents-stumble-into-the-company’s money laundering scheme and thus skip off for the European vacation of their dreams, mugging for the camera and nattering and chattering unfunny jokes, running “gag,” our two leading  men are subjected to the film’s first genuinely amusing moment.

In a simple streetside cafe one-on-one conversation between the “dying” Juan Pablo (Ricardo Quevedo) and his annoying, exhausting nuisance of a “like a brother” colleague, Javier (Nelson Polonia), writer-director Fernando Ayllón “breaks the plane.”

He stops his comedy cold by tripping over one of the fundamental rules of seamless filmmaking. It’s rare. A few have done it on purpose over the decades, but it’s almost always a clumsy mistake.  I can’t remember the last movie I saw, outside of a student films showcase at a lower tier film school, where it made it into the movie.

“No Andaba Muerto, Estaba de Parranda” actually translates as “I’m not dead, I was just out partying,” and the phrase is a Spanish language meme that’s been around for years. Google it and you see jokey photos of dead dictators (Franco, Castro) and others.

Hilarious.

The film is about the put-upon Juan Pablo, misused by his gold-digging, cheating girlfriend, pranked by her punk son, arm-twisted and hustled by the security guard at his workplace and forced to do all the work that the dolt, cellphone game app-addicted, gum-snapping boss is supposed to do.

Then there’s the overbearing and infantile colleague Javier, a motormouthed boor always leering at the new assistant (Liss Pereira) and taunting his “brother” about how his life isn’t working out, when it’s obvious neither of these two have anything to get up for in the morning.

Their running word-game gag, where they launch into rhymes like “baker, maker, taker, and “faker” on hearing any random word that can be rhymed in conversation, isn’t funny. Their punning riffs on “naked truth” and the like aren’t funny, even allowing for “lost in translation” issues.

And then a fall at work sends Juan Pablo to the hospital (by crowded city bus, because ambulances would cost the company too much). And the MRI reveals, his distracted, heartless, sexing-up-her-nurse doctor gives him the news before answering her phone.

“Glioblastoma…six weeks to live,” she says (in Colombian Spanish with English subtitles). “Put your affairs in order…Enjoy your last days. Excuse me.”

Nobody reacts to this in any conventional way, although the girlfriend’s “life insurance” question when Juan Pablo is considering what to do before he dies is almost funny.

An absurdly generous bonus at work (where he doesn’t reveal his death sentence) leads him and Javier to jump to the correct conclusion that the owner (Ana Cristina Botero) is using the over-staffed office for money-laundering, leads them to impulsively chuck it all and jet off to that “bucket list”” vacation — Barcelona, Paris, Genoa, Marseilles and Ibiza.

It’s just that “NOBODY steals from Miss Lucy and LIVES!”

As the film opens with Juan Pablo narrating his introduction, from his coffin, at his wake, we know shenanigans are afoot.

The trouble is, they aren’t forthcoming. It takes over an hour for “No Andaba Muerto” to give the lie to that first half of its title — “I’m not Dead.”

The third act has some splendid shtick, a brawl with a hitman, tumbles here and there, a laugh-out-loud corpse-come-to-life moment. Physical comedy is sorely missed in every single scene that precedes these.

The production took Netflix’s money and flew to the various cities and found virtually nothing funny to do in them — mugging for the camera here, trying to improvise a tightrope walk illusion there, dancing with street entertainers.

Setting a second Notre Dame (in Marseilles) on fire with a votive candle is funny, and torching an Italian museum while the Italian-trying-to-speak-Spanish tour guide is distracted is good for an “Innocents Abroad” laugh.

But even that arrives too late to resuscitate this corpse. You can tell from the credits that the stars have made names for themselves in earlier comedies. “Death Can Wait” does their reputations no favors.

Rating: TV-14, gunplay, sexual situations, alcohol abuse

Cast: Ricardo Quevedo, Nelson Polonia, Liss Pereira and Ana Cristina Botero

Credits: Written and directed by Fernando Ayllón, A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Filmmaker takes 40 years to years to film and finish his documentary on the great writer.

Reminds me of the stories about Henry Jaglom and Peter Bogdanovich, always recording and filming as they cozied up to Orson Welles.

Will this see the light of day?

He doesn’t compose songs or write lyrics. Yet.

But is there nothing this man cannot do?

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_8IgCmHFuC/?utm_source=ig_embed

A few months before “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio” came out on film, the publisher and releasing studio (Dreamworks) sent me the book, Terry Ryan’s memoir of growing up in a dysfunctional yet functioning family in the 1950s and ’60s.

The film was poorly distributed and didn’t really get its due in 2005, not even playing the big market where I was living and reviewing. I didn’t get around to seeing it when it hit video as, well, you could tell what it was going to be just from the book and the casting.

It would be sentimental, old fashioned and nostalgic, a memoir of having a plucky mother raising 10 kids in a Catholic family whose creative outlet — after motherhood — was concocting winning jingles, poems, slogans and the like in the contest-crazy America of the “I Like Ike” ’50s.

Julianne Moore, the very face of white American motherhood in the ’50s (“Far From Heaven”) stars,  with Woody Harrelson as the hapless husband who never quite earns enough to prop them up, and who occasionally drowns his responsibilities and dashed dreams in drink — a repentant but abusive drunk.

Mom’s prize winnings kept them afloat for decades, until that era of contests that rewarded creativity and not mere chance passed.

I felt as if I’d seen it before seeing it. But coming across up leading up to Mother’s Day, I got around to it and watched it with my mother.

Adapter-director Jane Anderson’s film has a vivid “Christmas Story” sense of place and stars three future Oscar winners. Julianne and Laura Dern, a fellow contest fanatic, would collects statuettes. And Harrelson’s on the short list of the best characters actors to never have won one…yet.

Anderson already had an Emmy (“The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-murdering Mom”) and would win another for “Olive Kitteridge”). She wrote “The Wife,” which landed Glenn Close an Oscar nomination.

Her “Prize Winner” is predictable in its theme, the saintly mother overcoming all, including a husband her kids suggest she kick out (their priest won’t hear of it).

But it gets by on pluck and charm and that “Stella Dallas” mom-as-martyr thing that works every single time.

As “Dad” says (like the Pences, these archaic Ohioans call each other “Mother” and “Dad”) — “You know what your problem is?”

“No Dad, I don’t.”

“You’re too damn happy.”

The kids aren’t entirely colorless — none have gone on to fame in the acting field.

And the story lurches from crisis to crisis, Mother living that life of “a dream deferred” as trips she wins are passed up, a Triumph TR-3 she collects as a prize must be sold, and Dad drinking and lashing out at the glories and cash this one-time aspiring poet and small town newspaper writers brings to the household.

But Moore makes this caricature of 1950s motherhood a down-to-Earth delight.

“Let’s go to bed. I’m tired of this day. I need a new one.”

Dern lends her radiant presence to the third act. And Harrelson does what Harrelson always does — make the hateful or pathetic charming and sympathetic.

“Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio” may not speak to younger generations. But to anybody looking for how hard working mom’s had it back in the day, the struggle their mothers and grandmothers lived through pre-“liberation,” you couldn’t ask for a better Mother’s Day movie.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, some disturbing images and language

Cast: Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Ellary Porterfield, Trevor Morgan and Laura Dern.

Credits: Written and directed by Jane Anderson, based on the Terry Ryan memoir.  A Dreamworks release on Roku, Tubi, Amazon Prime.

Running time:

Don’t you just hate it when a tearjerker works?

The manipulation’s built-in, understood, right there in the open for you to put up your guard against. And then…dammit.

Netflix put “18 Presents (18 Regali)” on its menu just in time for America’s “Mother’s Day,” a fantasy about a girl who has to grow up without her mother, and turns 18 thoroughly embittered about it.

And then, an accident. Sullen, lashing-out Anna (Benedetta Porcaroli, haunted and gaunt) wakes up, and it’s not next to the Saab that knocked her down. It’s her mother’s VW, and her mother (the luminous Vittoria Puccini) is standing over her.

Elissa is pregnant, and Anna “meets” her on the worst day — the day Mom got the news of the cancer that will kill her in childbirth.

After Anna puts this incredible turn of events together, she will hide her real identity from her mother and experience the woman she never got to know. They will bond and bicker, and Elissa will never be the wiser.

Director Francesco Amata (“Let Yourself Go”) hits his marks and takes us through the preliminaries — a montage of Anna’s increasingly fraught birthdays leading towards that 18th, the gifts her hyper-organized mother bought and set aside for each birthday — a bicycle, dresses, diving lessons, a piano, “18 Presents” — and Anna’s acting-out against this as the years go by.

Immature soccer coach Dad (Edoardo Leo) seems like the last guy who could guide her through this difficulty. He’s a procrastinator, doesn’t handle the bad news from Elissa with her strength. Anna never gave him any credit.

The prologue has promise, with Anna acting out in her sport (synchronized diving), hurting others, running away only to get “picked up” by a creeper in a Beemer who turns out to be an old friend of Dad’s.

The mother-daughter bonding moments pay off beautifully, a “feel her kicking” moment in the quiet of a pool, little kindnesses that show Anna growing the heart her mother always hoped she would have.

And then there’s Anna’s realization of just what a horror her mother faced, sitting in (as this new “friend”) on Mom’s cancer support group, the burden she carried even as her husband was reaching for a miracle “second opinion.” There are other surprise revelations in store, and Anna has “suggestions” that redirect her mother’s “presents.”

It’s not as tidy as it might be, a 95 minute melodrama soaking in 115 minutes of movie.

But the emotional punches in this film (in Italian, with English subtitles) reminded me of “Peggy Sue Got Married,” thanks largely to how Puccini and Porcaroli play them. The poignant moments may be sentimental, but they work.

That goes for the film as well. Contrived, manipulative? Sure. But sweet and subtle and even surprising, here and there.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, smoking, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Vittoria Puccini, Benedetta Porcaroli, Edoardo Leo and Sara Lazzaro

Credits: Directed by Francesco Amato, script by Francesco Amato, Massimo Gaudioso, Davide Lantieri Alessio Vicenzotto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

“Castle in the Ground” is the simplest of rescue parables.

A young man devotes himself to saving his dying mother. And when that fails, this teen in shining armor starts using mom’s leftover painkillers. That’s what changes his focus to the junkie across the hall. Can she be saved?

There’s a little more to writer-director Joey Klein’s Canadian drama, much of it pro forma. But Alex Wolff, Neve Campbell and the case study that Imogen Poots lays out for us make this coming-of-age plunge into the abyss of addiction well worth our while.

Henry’s life is on hold when we meet him. He (Wolff) is crushing up pills and mixing them in jam for his mother (Campbell). He’s trekking to the drug store to get her more pills, taking her to visit her doctors.

She’s still mothering him — “SEAT belt!” But she’s fretting over what he’s missing. His girlfriend is headed off to college. Has he been applying?

“You get better, then I go to school.”

He’s Jewish, and her illness has him desperately diving into prayer. She needs her pain meds and her rest. Damn that noisy neighbor across the hall, the racket he hears, the goings-on he spies through the peep hole. He asks a guy waiting for her to let him in to “turn her music down.”

He sees her bickering for a methadone refill at the pharmacy. She (Poots) is a junky. But even junkies can be reasonable, right? He asks her to keep it down. She happily agrees. “Can I use your phone?” “Give me a lift?” Just this little detour? Lend me $40? $20?

“You owe me, BIG time,” she grins.

Anna is older and cannot be bothered learning his name. And her phone calls are a string of lifelines, cursing out “friends” who won’t pick up, begging her mother for cash. But as Henry’s mother relapses and dies, Henry’s grief takes on forms Anna, in her sentient moments, should recognize.

He’s dazed. “Are you high?” Pause a beat. “Have any left?”

And he’s ignoring her one edict. “Don’t SNOOP.” Henry does. “Wait in the car” becomes “Let’s see what’s taking her so long.”

“How do you know these people?”

“I don’t.”

It’s a shooting gallery. She’s got to “get well,” even though she brags on the phone about “67 days without a poke” (injection). She’s ingesting in other ways. She’s using him. Her occasional words of comfort about his lost mother don’t atone for that.

And others in her circle Henry runs into are more blunt in their warnings.

“She will sell your soul for something THIS (pill-sized) small!”

Actor turned writer-director Joey Klein (“The Other Half”) leaves our hero with no counter-force to help him resist the gravity that pulls him into Anna’s decaying orbit. The religion he’s plunged into is abandoned (he walks out on his mother’s shiva), the girlfriend he pushes away, are no comfort. Nobody is going to rescue Henry.

We can see the perils, why can’t he? There’s no sexual component to this connection. He gives Anna his mother’s phone, and guess who starts to see her as?

Wolff, of “Hereditary” and “Jumanji,” is so screen-seasoned that it’s tough for him to sell “naive and vulnerable” the way he used to.

Campbell gets across the quiet struggle of knowing one’s fate and trying to keep it from breaking her son’s future — concealing, then revealing, edging up to “the talk.”

But Poots is the driving force of “Castle in the Ground,” magnetic, irresistible and insatiable. How deep will Anna draw Henry in? Poots lets us see this as reflexive behavior, myopic and self-interested. We don’t see the wheels turn that generate this performance.

The path Klein sends these characters down is too familiar for “Castle in the Ground” to offer much in the way of twists. But the players take us into this world with them, make us face the same choices and dare us to make different ones than they do.

Put in the same spot, how many of us would?

MPAA: unrated, drug abuse, violence, profanity

Cast: Imogen Poots, Alex Wolff, Neve Campbell and Keir Gilchrist

Credits: Written and directed by Joey Klein. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

Remember AOL, AOL chat rooms and the naughtiness that could be unleashed there in the early days of the Internet?

That’s what this comedy’s about. A Catholic girl getting online and in over her head.