Movie Nation

The kids had simple instructions growing up.

“Don’t look around, look down at the floor” whenever they had to visit Mom and Dad’s business.

“Don’t ask a lot of questions.”

If other kids or their parents trot out the “So, what do your parents do?” query, “Tell them we own a bookstore.”

Whatever you do, don’t mention the name. Because “Circus of Books” was famous — infamous, notorious — and not just in West Hollywood, not just in Los Angeles. It was a pioneering porn emporium, caught up in legal test cases, an original distributor of “Hustler Magazine” and a producer-distributor of gay porn movies, on Betamax, VHS and later DVD.

It was a landmark “for every pervert in America,” a former employee jokes, a safe space for social gathering and even “cruising” for people who had been mostly underground only a few years before it opened.

And Karen and Barry Mason were the couple behind it. They fell into the business — she had been a journalist who wrote a lot about “smut raids” and even profiled “Hustler” publisher Larry Flynt back in Cincinnati. He was a tinkerer, a one-time movie effects artist who worked on “2001” and “Star Trek.” Up against a wall, with a growing family to support, they took over a dingy bookstore, changed its focus and became famous.

Daughter Rachel Mason, the director of “Circus of Books,” takes a shot at presenting a Jewish West Hollywood version of “An American Family,” the groundbreaking PBS cinema verite documentary series that showed a “typical” family with what seemed quite atypical rifts, roiled by the challenges and changes of the sexual revolution.

But the Masons and their “Mom and Pop” bookstore were anything but typical, although nowadays, the long and seemingly happy marriage, children still speaking to them, you’d be comfortable labeling them “normal.”

The film lacks much in the way of drama. One of their three children came out as gay. It’s hard to expect tension and drama to come from that (no matter what worries that child had) when your parents have a gay-friendly business filled with gay employees, like the drag queen-clerk Alaska.

Homosexuality may have been, as mother Karen (who “wears the pants” in the family) notes, “an abomination in our religion.” But they’re no hypocrites.

Employees, friends and customers find laughs in the promiscuous atmosphere such a  store invited in gay West Hollywood in the ’80s. Uninhibited customers — and some employees — who were a bit fuzzy on decorum and boundaries — would hook up in the stacks of “Blue Boy” and “Mandate” magazines, sex toy collections and videos like “A Rim with a View.”

The funniest moment in the movie might be the tour Barry is giving where he points  and says, “And this is our ADULT section.”

Say what now?

It was all good clean — OK, not so clean — fun, clerk Alaska Thunder—k giggles.

“I’m a weirdo and kind of a pervert, I guess,” Alaska jokes. You couldn’t mind those labels if you wanted to work at a business where the back entrance area was nicknamed “Vaseline Alley.”

AIDS is mentioned, but more or less skipped over. The film is more concerned with the changing economy that dooms bookstores in general, that has wiped out porn as a DVD industry and that “Circus of Books” must navigate. “I kind of wish the movie was over, so I could see how this turns out” Karen notes and she donates (to academic archives) and trashes inventory that no longer sells.

Larry Flynt gives a testimonial to the couple’s “honesty” and guts, their legal struggles mirroring his own (but he was rich) in the days of the  Reagan/Ed Meese War on Pornography.

Porn star Jeff Stryker remembers making movies for the Masons’ video distributing arm.

The Masons never allowed themselves the luxury of being judgmental, although Karen’s eagerness to scurry through a porn industry Expo, making a couple of deals and all but sprinting out, suggests some discomfort with having the world they work in filmed and archived for eternity.

The film doesn’t judge, either. Viewers who might cringe at the subject matter can decide for themselves if the sweeping changes in the culture that the ensuing decades have brought have been glorious, catastrophic or a seriously mixed bag.

An end to “porn” prosecutions and gay civil rights, sure. But let’s not think too much about a coarsening of the culture, with the phrase “I f—-d a porn star” reaching the White House thanks to the Christian Right’s choice for president.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual content

Cast: Karen Mason, Rachel Mason, Barry Mason, Larry Flynt, Jeff Stryker, Alaska

Credits: Written and directed by Rachel Mason. A Netflix Original

Running time:

The guy who showed Hollywood and the world all that comic book movies could be, Sam “Evil Dead” Raimi, is stepping back behind the camera for “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.”

He directed the best of the “Spider-Man” movies, the 2002 trilogy starring Tobey Maguire and J.K. Simmons and Kirsten Dunst.

This is no doubt good news for Marvel fans, as the studio has shown an awful tendency to save money on “name” and “prestige” directors and hire place-fillers in their increasingly producer/studio “manufactured” “Avengers” sequels.

Raimi, 60, is the elder statesman of a couple of genres, horror chief among them. In recent years he’s been content to produce horror gems like “Don’t Breathe” and remakes of “The Grudge” and “Poltergeist.”

He’s also done TV series such as “Spartacus.”

Having him step back behind the camera on a comic book movie is a Spielberg-level event.

“Multiverse of Madness,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Chiwitel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong and who knows who all, is due out in Nov. of 2021.

Will the Doctor take the wheel of the Vista Cruiser?

A new Starz series with an arresting setting and a little known cast. “A murder investigation” on the fishing coast.”

“Code 8” is a “mutants” movie in everything but name, cast and backing studio.

No “Marvel,” no Hugh Jackman and frenemies. Just a lesser known cast in a very familiar scenario, people with “special powers” resented, discriminated against with lots of opportunities to go wrong.

Impressive production values and decent performances justify wanting to watch it, a story with no real new ideas and poor pacing may make you regret the decision.

In Lincoln City, those with “powers” used to be valued and beloved. But that was long ago, when the place was being built, when “The Incredibles” were still in theaters.

Now, they have to have a permit to do anything, even though people with “TK” (telekinetic), “pyro” (fire-fingers), “electric” (lightning bolts), mind-reading and “healer” and the like “gifts” once were handy to have around.

Connor (Robbie Amell from “The Duff”) has a sick mother who works, when she shouldn’t. He has to get by with day labor in construction, and that only lasts until the cops show up — with their robocop “Guardians” (delivered by giant drones) — to check ID.

The tech here, BTW, is almost A-picture level. “Caps off, chins to the sky!” The drone has facial recognition software, among other gadgets, to figure out who has “power” and who has outstanding warrants.

But one day Connor gets into a power company van with a tough crowd inside of it, and finds himself aiding and abetting robberies — “Cut the (electrified) fence. Short out the car alarm.”

Garrett (Stephen Amell) pushes Connor around, but he pays well — when HIS boss (Greg Bryk) pays him, that is.

And big boss Marcus has The Trust to worry about. They’re over his head.

Connor is trapped in the middle of all this, like Nia (Kyla Kane), Maddy (Laysla De Oliveira) or even the stone-cold killer Copperhead (Sarah Hoedlmoser) and everybody else.

Garrett endures being put through “tests,” lots of late night meetings and increasingly violent heists — apparently rounding up the raw materials for the hip street drug of the moment — “psyke.”

I know that drug name, if not that spelling of it, has been used in at least one other movie I’ve reviewed. But as the rest of “Code 8” is pasted together from earlier scripts, whatever.

It’s not a particularly quotable script, in any event — recycled “Normal people have always hated us” and the like.

The bad guys are more interesting than the good ones, the heists — including an armored car — are generic.

And The Guardians are a somewhat interesting variation on “a guy in an armored suit playing a robot” thing.

It’s not terrible. There’s nothing to work up a moment’s hate about. But “Code 8” is more interesting looking than actually interesting, more a sharp prospectus for a movie than one that actually makes great use of its design and ideas, fresh or recycled.

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

Cast: Robbie Amell, Kari Matchett, Stephen Amell, Greg Bryk and Kyla Kane

Credits: Directed by Jeff Chan, script by Chris Pare.  A Vertical/Netflix release

Running time: 1:38

“Twin Flower” is a solid if static on-the-road thriller that loses its way when it stops running.

It’s a quiet character piece with little dialogue, as writer-director Laura Luchetti (“Hayfever”) throws two mismatched teens together in the half-ruined, half-empty South of her native Italy.

Anna’s (Anastasiya Bogach) is the first face we see, fleeing, looking back over her backpacked shoulder at The Bearded Man (Aniello Arena) who means her harm. He’s been bloodied, and the script makes much of being slow to unravel this mystery.

What’s he want with her, why is she so afraid and who can she turn to?

We meet Basim (Kallil Kone) as he tries to hustle up tip money in the parking lot of a local market. He’s been here long enough to speak Italian, but Basim is an undocumented migrant from the Ivory Coast. There is no work for him, and being pushy about it won’t help.

They meet when Basim intervenes in a situation that has become an Italian stereotype. Two creeps on a motorscooter make their lewd interest in her known.

“Pretty girl, all by yourself,” they start in, stating the obvious.

Wherever these two wind up going, “trust” will be Anna’s journey. A man is hunting her. Flashbacks reveal her disappointing father. She’s pretty, looks about 16 or so, and if the stereotype holds — many a male in Italy is a threat. How far can she make it on her own?

Basim stands out even more. No “papers,” no chance at work. He’s headed for “northern Europe,” and he loves to walk. How can he come up with money to feed himself and get there? Aside from accepting rides from strangers, and whatever they have in mind about his “value.”

The picture stops when they stumble into a nursery owner (Giorgio Colangeli) who could use some help. No work for you, eager-but-illegal Basim. But Anna?

Luchetti wants us to be leery of Anna taking this job, fretting over the old man’s motives. She’s slower-than-slow trusting Basim. He’s stuck, with only her money to feed them, and despairs of ever getting away.

The Bearded Man is asking around. And flashbacks show us how Anna got to that opening scene, sprinting away from a crime scene.

The revelations are slow in coming, and predictable to boot.

The two leads relate like gunshy teens, which is almost charming.

And heaven knows, we see precious little of this far-from-the-scenic side of Italy in the movies.

But “Twin Flower” is at its most intriguing when they’re on the move, at its most suspenseful when they’re trying to avoid their fate, which awaits them as soon as The Bearded Man abruptly figures out where they are.

When “Twin Flower” puts down roots — ahem — that’s when it turns pedestrian, static and dull.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Anastasiya Bogach, Kallil Kone, Aniello Arena, Giorgio Colangeli

Credits: Written and directed by Laura Luchetti.  A Film Movement release on Film Movement Plus.

Running time: 1:35

In recent years, the UFO community has relished various military and governmental agencies’ confirmation that they’ve been looking into Unidentified Flying Objects and that they’re taking the subject seriously, even releasing some credible and incredible close encounter footage to demonstrate why they’ve been looking into this.

Dr. Steven Greer, a onetime Lenoir N C emergency room physician turned widely-read and followed UFO expert, figures this is the perfect time to spike the ball in the end zone and double down on his increasingly far-out claims — that he and his followers can meditate and in essence “summon” “trans-dimensional” alien space ships, almost at will.

“Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind” is his victory-lap follow-up to 2017’s “Unacknowledged.” It’s a flurry of wild claims, dubious “experts,” Ad hominem attacks on doubt-sewers, (aka “fascist demagogues” of “the national security and media state”), clip after clip of sci-fi movies mixed in with newsreel footage. And there are cherry-picked inter-title quotes from thinkers, scientists and others — read by narrator Jeremy Piven — as well as on camera endorsements.

More than a few clips from “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast show up, none more authoritative than this one — “Watch ‘Unacknowledged.’ Watch ‘Unacknowledged.’ WATCH ‘Unacknowledged!'”

No less a luminary than Steven Tyler of Aerosmith utters that “last word” on Greer’s bonafides. A regular Algonquin Round Table, that show.

Go ahead and start your hate comment now, because kids — if you can’t see through this bulls–t, you need to update your medicine glasses.

Greer sits on a “Close Encounters” lit sound-stage in a director’s chair, wearing a tie and glasses, as if those hide how brown his eyes get every time he’s constipating a whopper.

He named his organization CESTI, to intentionally confuse it with the real-science/real scientists SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute. Full disclosure, I’ve interviewed Dr. Frank Drake, who ran SETI for years and whose “Dr.” doesn’t come from a medical career he abandoned to seek fame by spouting the fantastical.

Greer is the King of Trumpish “many people tell me,” and “a member of the military” and “a person from the Royal Family… who doesn’t want to be named” assertions.

Greer comes back later to reveal a frank discussion about the military-media-National Security State apparatus trying to prepare the world for “interplanetary war…and Force the Return of Christ,” with the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein.

So, that’s his “royal?” The “in-breeding” jokes write themselves at this point.

Plenty of people appear on camera in his film, “household names” only within the insular online world of UFOlogy. Some have credentials that impress, some most perplexingly do not.

Darn it, where’s Bob Lazar?

Greer goes on and on about “getting the Vatican and the Jesuit Brotherhood” involved in talks about how to prepare the world for accepting “We are not alone,” and fills much of the movie’s two hour running time with name-dropping.

Every political and military figure he’s ever been in the same county with he claims to have “briefed,” including “every president since Clinton.” Some have most pointedly denied ever meeting him.

All the Trump footage here hints that Greer might have “briefed” one president, and that one — the dumbest — might have taken him seriously.

Those digging into Greer’s background note the ways his “how’d you become interested in this” story has changed, becoming more fantastical and self-mythologizing with every new iteration.

His guest experts, who include physicist and “parapsychologist” (a pseudo-science) Dr. Russell Targ, play the same “keep talking, make it sound like facts” games.

“There was an unpublished experiment” one not-shaving-yet enthusiast “expert” declares. OBJECTION. Hearsay! As in, “I don’t need to prove it happened because you can’t prove it didn’t.”

The film is packed with claims about Greer’s version of The Deep State ginning up fear about what’s behind UFOs, the need for millions to meditate and “bypass the National Security State” to reach out to our sisters and brothers beyond the stars.

It’s always funny how closely these hucksters’ claims match up with science fiction cinema and TV. But sampling “Mars Attacks” the “The Twilight Zone’s” “To Serve Man” is entirely too “on the nose.” Greer is showing us his homework.

“Close Encounters” goes out of its way to discredit earlier “tin-foil hat” (one interview subject uses that phrase) fad claims of alien abductions, “faked” by the government, of course.Take THAT Whitley Strieber!

But the film offers ZERO evidence that the after-the-colon half of its title, “Contact Has Begun,” is happening. What’s more, that “fifth” type of “Close Encounter,” that pro-active human contact where humans do the reaching out (another BS invention by Greer) is never supported by anything we can see or verify in the documentary.

For a fun sidebar, Google “Dr Steven Greer” and “Fraud.” Even some of the Faithful find his pricey little meditation seminars eye-opening in ways they did not want to see.

The actual video “sighting” evidence, which is given short shrift (montages, mostly), is fascinating — although too much of it has the audio of tipsy, foul-mouthed rednecks overheard on the tape as they’re filming it. Still, you don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid to to buy into the notion that “the Truth is Out There.”

But when you’ve got Jeremy Piven narrating “Certain scientists have known that ‘The Force’ is real…for a very long time,” you see through the nonsense. Every other sentence out of Piven’s or Greer’s mouth begs for a “Oh give me a BREAK.”

Whatever “proof” finally comes out, it won’t be the book, video, “seminar” and meditation-CD-selling Greer who summons a space ship into hovering over the Rose Bowl. And none of the needy fringe figures in his circle will be adjudicators of that “Truth.”

My money’s on David Duchovny spilling the beans.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Dr. Steven Greer, Daniel Sheehan, Adam Michael Curry, Joe Martino, Dr. Russell Targ, that dude from Blink 182

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Mazzola. A 1091 release.

Running time: 2:00

Jose doesn’t look out of place, hanging in “The Bar,” having a drink and playing cards with the boys.

The goatee may make him stand out. And the fact that we never see him smile. Not ever.

He’s tight with the family that runs the place, Juanjo and Pili. He’s more than welcome at their little girl’s first communion party. And then there’s Juanjo’s sister, Ana. She’s working class sexy, and the way he looks at her suggests not so much smitten as obsessed.

He asks questions of her and about her. Lots of them.

Ruggedly handsome or not, why would she ever pay him any mind? Her old man is in prison, but their conjugal visits are…enthusiastic. He’s about to get out, an eight year sentence for being a getaway driver for a failed jewelry store robbery.

And again, Jose never ever smiles.

He carries a lot on his mind and in his heart. His daily visits to his father, in extended care on a ventilator show that. But as we saw that failed bank robbery in the opening scene, we wonder.

“The Fury of a Patient Man” is a tight, graphically violent Spanish revenge thriller, a story about playing the long game — learning, meeting, ingratiating yourself with people you need in a world you’re not familiar with.

It’s not about some “ex Special Forces” man “with very particular skills,” a favorite crutch of lazy screenwriters and fans of “Taken” and every movie Jason Statham ever made. Jose (Antonio de la Torre) isn’t the bravest man. He’s not the toughest. He is not a man of violence.

But he’s smart, willing to take a rebuff, a slap or even a beating if it gets him to where he wants to be.

His deal, when he finally offers it, is blunt and simple — a threat delivered to a much tougher man.

“Help me to find them, and make sure nothing happens to me first.”

De la Torre, of TV’s “The Night Manager,” wears that one squinting scowl, from the first scene to the last. Jose has guile and can mask his feelings. But there’s no pretending he’s having a good time.

Ruth Díaz suggests a kind of joyless, calculating working mom. Perhaps she’ll ditch the soon-to-be-ex-con for this man who seems to have more going on.

And Luis Callejo, as Curro, the getaway driver, has pent-up fury of his own — survival skills, a willingness to commit violence, and not flinch when others do.

Actor turned director Raúl Arévalo, who also wrote the script, keeps the viewer wondering where this is going, how it all will pay off.

The violence is shocking, even when we see it coming, even as we watch Jose do the math on how it’s about to play out. There’s nothing here that someone with no “history of violence” could not do. But will he?

I wasn’t thrilled with de la Torre’s one-note performance, but at least it’s defensible. Can he go through with this after dining with this family, chatting with the spouses and small children of those he is stalking?

And Arévalo himself shows the patience of a much more experienced storyteller. “Fury” gives up its secrets slowly and immerses us in the “gipsy” music, unpretentious bars, ancient, treeless streets of small town southern Spain (once the characters leave Barrio de Usera, Madrid).

The payoff is a superior thriller of a well-worn genre, a thriller with limited action but well worth watching in Spanish (with English subtitles) or dubbed — perfectly Netflixable.

Cast: Antonio de la Torre, Luis Callejo, Ruth Díaz and Raúl Jiménez

Credits: Directed by Raúl Arévalo, script by Raúl Arévalo and David Pulido. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Aliens? In LA? Go figure.

May.

A juvenile in jeopardy, impressively dark and gloomy production values and a leading lady who delivers bug-eyed alarm with the best of them give “Dark Light” a fighting chance.

It’s a creature feature with a silly but scary enough “creature concept (by Aaron Sims) and a few good jolts trapped in a dumb and desultory plot. I can’t say it wholly comes off, but it’s a far piece from a total write-off. Genre fans could dig it.

A single set dominates it — a spooky old frame farmhouse in Mississippi, cloaked in fog and gloom, the place where post-“nervous breakdown” Annie (Jessica Madsen) grew up, the place that her mother was dragged from on her way to a mental hospital.

But when your husband’s cheating on you, where else do you take your little girl (Opal Littleton) to start over? That creepy unused elevator? That moved granny up and down the stairs. That scratching in the wall? Yeah, me too.

Those too-bright lights out in the cornfield? Teenagers with halogen spotlights? Nah.

The kid is being pursued by something which only an Internet visit can (insanely) explain. There’s a lot of lights and scratching, biped figures only glimpsed in a “Signs” sense, an “expert (Gerald Tyler)” who thinks he knows what’s going on and a lot of blood and mayhem and shotgun shooting before that inevitable confrontation.

“Annie, put the gun down.”

“Sheriff, you don’t understand.”

They never do. Never ever.

It’s a humorless fright fest with corpses, mildly-impressive effects, a Big League string orchestra score and sturdy work by Madsen (“Leatherface”) in the lead.

She doesn’t give us panic, just fright. The weeping moments don’t sell the picture. And not giving anybody anything cool or clever quippish to say robs her performance, and those in support, of any “pop” the picture might have had.

But as creature features go, any given weekend we can say “Hey, I’ve seen worse.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Jessica Madsen, Opal Littleton, Ed Brody, Kristina Clifford, Gerald Tyler

Credits: Written and directed by Padraig Reynolds.  A Zee Studios/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

If only every comedy had the surprise twist that the Czech road picture “Winter Flies” saves for its finale.

It’s simple, and simple-minded, and it so upends expectations that it leaves you the way every comedy should — tickled.

It’s about two dorky teens sprinting across the country in a stolen late-model Audi. They’re headed…somewhere. To France? Or maybe some place Heduš (Jan Frantisek Uher) can “join the French Foreign Legion.”

Why? When we meet him he’s covered in camo, paintball-sniping passing cars. He may be plump and clumsy, but he’s a good shot. Besides, he tells Mára (Tomás Mrvík), the slightly older friend he flags down in that Audi, “they don’t ‘bully’ in the Legion.”

Kid’s seen a few movies, but how he missed the ones with all the Legion bullying going on remains a mystery.

Their trip is an odyssey interrupted by a series of flash-forwards. Mára’s been caught, and a couple of cops (Lenka Vlasáková and Martin Pechlát). He won’t spill his name or hometown. But by Václav Havel, he has a tale to tell.

Mára’s more mature. Or at least he seems that way. Heduš is downright childish.

They hit the open road, dodge the big cities and stop to ditch their phones so that they’re not tracked. They’ve both seen those movies.

Along the way, they’re hassled by some creep who proceeds to try and drown the dog they refuse to take off his hands, they practically kidnap a pretty hitchhiker (Eliska Krenková) and try to impose their crude, childish notions of sexuality upon her and Mára tells tales of his beloved grandpa, who taught him “to drive before I could walk.”

The cops, who are dishonest, faintly corrupt and homophobic (“Are you a ‘tranny’ in training?”) decide he’s got “an active imagination and a sentimental side” (in Czech, with English subtitles). But we can see that.

At every step of the way, we fear for them. With Heduš’ ungainly cluelessness and Mára’s misguided confidence, what else could we do?

We know it all came to an unexpected end. One kid’s being grilled by the police. But it isn’t until that ending arrives that we see how unexpected it is.

“Winter Flies” — the title is a snowy insect metaphor — is short, sweet, kind of crude but always to the point. That’s the thing about road comedies. Even when they’re meandering, it’s never an aimless wandering. They’re always taking you somewhere, and in this case, it’s a destination you never see coming.

MPAA Rating: unrated, crude language, sexual content, animal cruelty

Cast: Tomás Mrvík, Jan Frantisek Uher, Eliska Krenková, Lenka Vlasáková

Credits: Directed by Olmo Omerzu, script by Petr Pýcha. A Film Movement release on Film Movement Plus, Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:21

, Jan Frantisek Uher, Eliska Krenková, Lenka Vlasáková

Credits: Directed by Olmo Omerzu, script by Petr Pýcha. A Film Movement release on Film Movement Plus, Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:23