Movie Nation

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.

“Laughter in Paradise” is a British version of that “to inherit my money, here are the wacky conditions you must meet” story, the one born in the play “Seven Chances,” which Buster Keaton turned into one of the great silent film comedies, but recycled scores of times over the decades, most famously with the various versions of “Brewster’s Millions.”

Four relatives of “the greatest practical joker of his day” (Hugh Griffith) are told, at the reading of his will, that they stand to inherit his fortune. Each has one month to live out some appalling version of her or his life to qualify.

Fay Compton (of the first sound version of “Nicholas Nickleby,” and Orson Welles’ “Othello) is Agnes Russell, a cruel spinster who takes out her bitterness on every servant within reach. Upon learning of her uncle’s death, she hisses “You can take a fortnight’s notice!” to the latest maid she’s about to fire.

Meek Herbert Russell (George Cole of “The Belles of St. Trinian’s”), pushed around at the bank where he works, never destined to “get the girl,” is charged with going to a toy store, buying a toy pistol and robbing his bullying boss with it.

Simon Russell (Guy Middleton, of course) is the cad of the lot, a gambler who has “gone through life at the expense of other’s hearts and pockets.” He gets the news of his relative’s passing with a “When’s the celebration…sorry, FUNERAL?”

He has to court and marry someone he has yet to meet within a month.f

Then there’s the cream of the crop, Captain Deniston Russell (Alastair Sim, of “St. Trinian’s” and “A Christmas Carol” immortality). We meet him as he dictates, under one of his many noms de plume, a “penny dreadful,” a sordid crime tale, to his adoring secretary (Eleanor Summerfield).

“All rather disgusting,” he sighs with that Alastair Sim sigh after a particularly lurid passage. “But they seem to like ‘The American Touch.'”

He’s engaged to be married “in a fortnight” (classic British comedies are filled with fortnights) to the judge’s daughter and uniformed officer Elizabeth (Joyce Grenfell, also in “Belles of St. Trinian’s”).

But he needs to get himself arrested and jailed for a month “for a genuine crime.”

As they all have to take a “solemn oath” not to say what they’re up to, this could get awfully dicey.

Sim pretty much steals the picture as a writer of crime fiction who literally cannot get himself arrested. He starts by doing “research,” popping by his local precinct, telling the desk sergeant (after many insults from the lower ranks) “I’m most ANXIOUS to go to prison, and I was wondering if you had anything in mind?”

You know, to put him there? Pickpocket and shoplifter, car thief and smash and grab are pitched, especially after the sergeant realizes who he is.

Sim wrings every laugh out of silent pantomiming tossing a brick through a jeweler’s window, pocketing goods at a department store and acquiring “burglar’s tools” which will help him break into this house or that car.

Cole finds some funny moments in making his meek bank clerk follow through on his “prank.”

Compton’s laughs come from the petty humiliations of a life “in service” to a cranky old man (John Laurie).

Middleton’s best running gag is his ogling women, and utterly ignoring the eye-popping cigarette girl at his favorite nightclub, a winsome young slip of a woman who seems interested. Ladies and gentlemen, “Introducing Audrey Hepburn.”

It isn’t the most briskly-directed affair, but it has laughs and those showcase Sim moments going for it.

Eagle-eyed and eared viewers of a certain age will recognize character actor Sebastian Cabot at a poker game. He is most famous for American TV’s “Family Affair.”

“Laughter” (1951) is freshly back in Bluray circulation as part of a Film Movement boxed set of the Best of Alastair Sim (“School of Laughter”), a quartet of films that includes the classics “Belles of St. Trinian’s,”“School for Scoundrels”and “Hue and Cry.”“Laughter in Paradise” may be the weakest sister of the four, but it’s funny, and Sims is at his very best in it.

The set is a real treasure trove of British film comedy history.

And that cigarette gamine? She’d take over the movies within a couple of years.

MPAA Rating: Approved

Cast: Alastair Sim, Fay Compton, Guy Middleton, Beatrice Campbell, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Hugh Griffith, John Laurie and Audrey Hepburn

Credits: Directed by Mario Zampi, script by Michael Pertwee and Jack Davies.   A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:37

Taut, tense and nerve-wracking, “Into the Night” is a European riff on the “End of Days” disaster movie formula that plays by the rules and rarely disappoints.

Running on wit, grit, bigotry and the national stereotypes that have riven the continent for centuries, and driven by a pulse-pounding electronic score by Photek that maintains its sense of urgency even when the script and the cast slack off, here are six episodes at around 40 minutes each that don’t waste your time.

A nightmare scenario? The plane is hijacked straight out of Brussels by an Italian (Stefano Cassetti) in a NATO uniform ranting about “sunlight means DEATH!”

The handful of people trapped on board, including a stewardess, a co-pilot, a ground crew member and a mechanic, aren’t going to Moscow. Oh no. They must flee west. WEST. Racing against the always-rising sun.

As those dozen or so on board pick up bits and pieces of confirmation that something is going on “down there,” their obstacles are made clear. Fuel, injuries, repairs, “supplies” — it’s “one problem at a time” the co-pilot (Laurent Capelluto) and his passenger fill-in assistant, downcast chopper pilot Sylvie (Pauline Etienne) reassure each other, and then the passengers, none of whom is really reassured.

As Ines, (Alba Gaïa Bellugi), the multi-lingual, mouthy young Italian “influencer” bitches onto her dormant Intagram account, “I’m gonna DIE in Scotland surrounded by Belgians!”

In French, of course, with English subtitles.

The schisms open early. Mistrust is, well, practically genetic.

The Belgian religious crank (Jan Bijvoet) mistrusts every “Muslim” on board, the Turk (Mehmet Kurtulus) in a suit knows a slur when he hears one — “Dirty Turk, gotcha.” There’s a Russian mother (Regina Bikkinina) desperate to take her little boy “home” for surgery, an Afro-Belgian home healthcare worker (Babetida Sadjo) caring for an elderly Russian, and not to be trifled with.

Who will emerge as heroes? Who will be the villains? And how much screen time will we waste while the climate researcher German (Vincent Londez) tries to explain what’s happening with his “science?”

Not a lot, and that’s a good thing about this series, where all six episodes are titled after a character and begin with a prologue. As formula dictates, everybody here has “a secret,” a troubling character flaw, a hole in her or his past to make us question motives even as they show us inner resources when the chips are down.

“Into the Night” dodges the trap of sci-fi disaster tales like “Snowpiercer.” There’s no real time for “factions” to form, for anybody to truly size up who they can trust. The timespan in Jason Georg’se (he wrote several “Scandal” episodes) adaptation of the novel “The Old Axolotl” is just a week or so.

The ticking-clock that underscores many a thriller is only evident in the landing-refueling stops this Belgian airliner has to make. Gas is always a worry, as is what they’ll find when they land to get it. It’s a different race against the clock every touchdown.

The in-flight debates, “one problem at a time” solving, etc., are slower. But as we get to know the cast, this flagging pace is less of an issue than it might have been.

If there’s a flaw to it, I’d say not letting it maintain the compactness that head-down/work-the-next-problem storytelling demands. Yeah, it’s open-ended.

But there’s mordant humor, most present in the early episodes, that carries the day. The co-pilot clinging to “sorry for the inconvenience” corporate messaging too long, his troubled fill-in co-pilot Sylvie’s admission that “I drank a bottle of vodka” before boarding, and the Black woman as truth-teller, sizing up every quarrel on board with a quip.

“Just a buncha white men whining that they can’t control things…for once!”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Pauline Etienne, Laurent Capelluto, Stefano Cassetti, Mehmet Kurtulus, Babetida Sadjo, Regina Bikkinina, Jan Bijvoet,  Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Ksawery Szlenkier, Nabil Mallat and Vincent Londez

Credits: Created by Jason George, based on the novel “The Old Axolotl” by Jacek Dukaj. A Netflix release.

Running time: 6 episodes, 37-40 minutes each

It opens in late May, and as a charter member of the Rob vs Steve on a road trip fan club, I’m quarantining this farce a bit early.

What will they be driving?

“Stan Laurel” (whom Coogan just played) and Tom Hardy!

Cackling already.