Movie Nation

A classic philosophical conundrum is, “If a tree falls in the forest with nobody there, is there any sound?”

To that let me add, “If there’s a movie that appears, on DVD and the Internet, with no credits, did anybody make it?”

“Murder Death Koreatown” is a found footage mockumentary with no credits. Whatever creative energy went into making a generic first-person point-of-view “investigation of a murder” mystery, just as much has gone to conjuring an air of authenticity and “reality” to the movie, which as any film fan knows, did not just “appear,” shoot and edit itself.

They’ve built a website to deepen “the mystery.” I know “The Blair Witch Boys,” so pardon me if I pause here to roll my eyes.

We never see the filmmaker shooting his “investigation” of a bloody crime in his neighborhood via cell phone. We just hear his questions, his “impromptu” narration, see his attempts to reconstruct the crime, diagram the ways “it just doesn’t make sense” and question neighbors, his girlfriend and random homeless people in the W. Pico Blvd.  section of Koreatown where the crime took place.

And we watch him journey from curious to annoyingly obsessed on into paranoia and madness — Or IS he mad? — as he spirals deeper down the rabbit hole.

He hears “I think you’re overreacting” from his girlfriend, “As far I’m concerned, this is over” from a dismissive, officious neighbor (apparently not the building owner). He gets rejected, because not everybody wants a cell phone in their face as they’re being asked questions by an unemployed movie maker (LA has a lot of them).

“Maybe I’m just the world’s worst investigator,” he says. I can’t recall if that is before or after he visits the psychic.

While he refers to an online story of the murder — a woman allegedly stabbing her husband to death — he never speaks to the police who apparently treat this as an open and shut case. He doesn’t speak to the street preachers, whom he becomes convinced are leaving him messages, in Korean, scrawled on walls or an abandoned sofa along his street. But he becomes consumed by the ramblings of a homeless “guy in the alley,” and gets rude with everybody who doesn’t instantly buy into his mania. He’s having “dreams.”

And we never learn who this “camera shy” cinema detective is, because he…went nuts? Or doesn’t want credit for this clever-ish “48 Hour Film Project” quality production?

Just as well. “Koreatown” has a sharp sense of place and works, here and there, as a drama/mystery. If it’s interesting  at all it’s as a movie-making exercise. But it feels long and “OK, we GET it” repetitive, even at a mere 80 minutes in length.

MPAA Rating: unrated, blood, evidence of violence, profanity

Credits: No one wants credit for acting, directing, writing or distributing this.

Running time: 1:22

If you’re an American adult, and sentient, you’ve got to figure there are two attitudes to take towards Hulu’s exhaustive, four hour+ Hillary Rodham Clinton documentary, “Hillary.”

It’s either too soon, or too late.

Documentarian Nanette Burnstein’s interviews with Clinton and the list of others she selected to speak about Clinton paint a fairly one-sided and generally flattering portrait of the former Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady. She does a great job of humanizing a public figure who has been demonized since the early years of her husband’s 1990s presidency.

That suggests “too late,” the “Why didn’t we see THIS Clinton when she was running for president?” trap. As if Clinton had any control of the press narrative and stigmas attached to her reputation by her feminism, her business practices and her often well-intentioned stumbles as a public figure.

Then there’s the painful and fresh memory of her 2016 campaign, the poisonous blame-deflecting/tax-returns-hiding smear that Bernie Sanders ran against her, and what came after. Who wants to relive that, aside from MAGA cultists, who would never watch a Hillary documentary not distributed by Dinesh D’Souza, Jerry Falwell or Rush?

“Hillary” feels “too soon” in that regard.

But it’s a film that has historical value, beyond the near-hagiography it flirts with. And someday, future documentary makers will be able to use the many interviews, from Clinton’s childhood friends, college classmates, campaign staff and others to present a more balanced and dispassionate take on her career, her accomplishments and her foibles.

She’s got a point, that “What IS this about?” — the label that she is “inauthentic,” is rubbish. Campaign manager Robby Mook’s take that her style, a “problem solver” who looks at issues that way, rather than echoing the vague promises of “change,” “hope,” “Make America Great Again” or “Free college for everybody,” isn’t a good way to appeal to voters, who don’t sweat specifics.

But to anybody who avoids “Hillary” with the thought “I don’t need to hear any more about her, 2016, etc.” right now, I would quote hubby Bill.

“I feel your pain.”

Rolling out this film in March means it was too late for clueless Bernie Sanders to see that unless he changed his message, the size and the tone of his irritatingly myopic “bass,” that he’d lose EXACTLY the same way he lost in 2016 in 2020. Which he did.

The unfortunate timing of its arrival, on the heels of the TrumpDemic, which further reveals just how little the capital press corps has learned about its intellectual and intestinal shortcomings, its biases, double-standards and inability to direct public fury at the corrupt and unqualified (2000 was the first hint), is doubly frustrating.

But for fans, at least, the first episode — “Golden Girl” — is uplifting. The second, which blends her First Lady years with her 2016 primary campaign against Sanders, isn’t soul-crushing.

The 2016 campaign/trials and personal life exhumations, hearing Donald Trump deflect his sexual indiscretions onto Bill Clinton’s cheating during that race might turn you away from the third installment.

Losing to the callow first-term Senator Barack Obama, and then ably serving under him only to become a lightning rod for the right wing smear machine is part of her history that we haven’t forgotten.

And the triumphalist tone of her Senate victory and Secretary of State “Most Admired Woman on Earth” years makes the finale seem like “alternate history.”

Add to the “too late” or “too soon” labels one other, “too long.” As thorough as this is, and in keeping with the “It’s a streaming service, WHY CUT IT DOWN?” ethos, it’s wearing to go through all this again.

Still, it’s a decent attempt at capturing the background that formed the backbone, a life of engagement, activism, “problem solving” and ambition and that makes “Hillary” worth your while. I don’t, however, recommend going at it in one fell swoop.

That binge is enough to make you think, “Too soon, too late, too much and to what point?”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Hillary Clinton, Andrea Mitchell, Bill Clinton, John Podesta, Barack Obama

Credits: Directed by Nanette Burstein. A Hulu release.

Credits: Four episodes @ one hour and five minutes.

Dutch novelist Herman Koch’s moral dilemma drama “The Dinner” was turned into a properly tense and claustrophobic night-out drama by Oren Moverman (“The Messenger,” Love & Mercy”) pitting Richard Gere and Steve Coogan against each other a couple of years back.

But the first version of that novel was filmed in Italy. Ivano Matteo’s “The Dinner” has enough that’s different about it to make a viewing worth your while. The bones of this story — two privileged siblings discuss what to do about a crime their kids may have committed — don’t change, but the approaches to it certainly do.

Moverman’s film was set entirely at a restaurant, a meal where all that’s transpired is brought up in an increasingly tense and testy conversation. It’s practically a filmed play.

Matteo’s movie gives us two dinners, with the tragedy in question happening between them, taking the temperature of an increasingly short-tempered Italy and the amoral kids the inattentive wealthy are raising, taking its sweet Italian time to get around to “the inciting incident.”

Paolo (Luigi Lo Cascio) is a pediatric surgeon dealing with a paralyzed little boy caught in the crossfire in a road rage incident involving the kid’s father and a trigger happy cop. Paolo and wife Clara (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) are just starting to have worries about 16-year-old Michele (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), a brooding, acne-covered teen with all the insecurities that comes with.

Massimo (Alessandro Gassmann) is a high-rolling defense attorney with a cavernous townhouse, a second wife (Barbora Bobulova) and baby, and a 16 year-old daughter, Benedetta — “Benny” (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers).

Benny and Michele are tight. Their dads? Less so. Massimo is defending the cop who injured Paolo’s patient.

“I’m not God,” he shrugs (in Italian, with English subtitles). “I don’t judge anyone.”

A party that Benny drags social outcast Michele to changes that. The kids come home sulking. And then Clara sees the CCTV video on a news program. Two teens beat a homeless woman into a coma. Could they be Michele and Benny?

The tiny cracks between the competitive brothers, their civil-but-unfriendly wives and the parents and their children become chasms as tensions rise, panic sets in and tempers flare.

Moverman probably went to school on this version of “The Dinner,” figuring out how to tighten and raise the tension of the piece. Matteo takes entirely too long to get down to business.

But the Italian film scores over the Hollywood (indie) one in feeling more grounded in reality. The brothers are closer to equals, and their moral stances clearer and more defensible from the start.

How will those stances change over the course of the drama? That’s the appeal.

Seeing a 2014-15 movie like this, set in an Italy long before “Covid 19” was on the world’s lips, gives it an added pathos. All those stylish, beautiful people, design that awes, from the old civic architecture to the striking apartments, casual wear to cars — under viral lockdown as I write this.

Getting to know the children better is a plus on the Italian film’s side, too. We get just enough background to carry around doubt, even as the parents grapple with theirs.

“I know my son. Do you?”

It’s not as good as “The Hollywood Version,” but “The Dinner” still makes for an engrossing immersion in families under stress, siblings still “rivals” when the stakes — years later — are at their highest.

Now streaming on Film Movement.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, teen drinking and smoking, nudity, profanity

Cast: Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessandro Gassman, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Barbora Bobulova, Rosabell Laurenti Sellers and Jacopo Olmo Antinori

Credits: Directed by Ivano de Matteo, script by  Valentina Ferlan and Ivano De Matteo, based on the Herman Koch novel. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:34

Can a physicist and a  photographer find love? And keep it?

Not speaking about “The Big Bang Theory,” of course.

Here’s one that’s out there in the streaming universe now, a struggling couple who look cute and Canadian, but may not be able to make it past the crossroads they’ve reached.

“Blow the Man Down” is a homey and nasty little neo-noir set on the fishing coast of Maine.

Stylish, with a “Greek Chorus” of oilskin-clad fishermen looking on and singing sea chanteys as the murders and cover-ups are laid out before us like a newly-gutted haddock, it’s a tasty slice of wintry escape with a coda that had me shouting at the screen — in a good “Oh my Jayzuss” sort of way.

In movie fan shorthand? “Blood Simple” meets “Mystic Pizza.”

Two sisters, played by Sophie Lowe and Morgan Saylor, are feeding friends and family after their mother’s funeral when we meet them.

Pris (Lowe), short for Priscilla, is the dutiful one, running Connolly’s Fish Market like her mother before her. Mary Beth (Saylor) is the bitter one, the “wild child” who stayed only under duress. Now that mom’s dead, “I’m on my way OUTTA town” she tells anybody within earshot, calling drab little East Cove “this s—hole,” which it plainly is.

Their mother’s peers are a gossipy bridge club missing their fourth. But don’t underestimate these “hens.” Casting veteran character actresses Annette O’Toole, June Squibb and Marceline Hugot lets us know who the real power in this village of fisherMEN is.

And now that the girls’ mother’s gone, these three are out to “do something” about the former friend (Margot Martindale, FIERCE) who runs the local B & B. Young floozies, including Alexis (Gayle Rankin, perfect), make it their base of operations as they work “the docks,” nicknamed “the desert” here.

Golly, a brothel in a sleepy little town in modern day Maine? Go figure.

The crime is one of self-defense. One sister gets in over-her-head with a bar pick-up (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). She drives his car when he’s too drunk to navigate, sees the gun in the glove box, the blood in the trunk and his rising, drug-fueled aggression and tries to flee.

And when that fails, she harpoons the dude. Plenty of those on the docks, mixed in with the lobster traps, ropes, gaff-hooks and the like.

Can these two cover up the crime, dispose of the body and pretend all this never happened?

Not if the busybodies have any say. The madam of the brothel may be interested in that, too.

And the state police (Will Brittain, Skipp Sudduth) might be on the case, if they ever figure out anybody’s missing.

Co-writers/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy don’t reinvent the “Can they get away with it?” murder mystery here. But they take us through the tropes of the genre with wit and a healthy dose of “local color.”

The myriad tensions that show up here create a veritable “Twin Peaks” soap opera of backbiting rivalries, dirty secrets and violence.

The woman are a sparkling collection of new finds and timeworn Oscar nominees and together they own the show, with Martindale and Squibb standing out. Saylor (“White Girl” and TV’s “Homeland”) has the showier sister to play, even though both she and Lowe do their siblings justice.

Brittain does nice work as the “Sorry to bother you” young cop always two steps behind events, still one step ahead of his look-the-other-way veteran partner.

And the conceit of having a fisherman soloist and chorus of fishermen singing and setting the tone for the tragedies and drama with a playful version of “Blow the Man Down” as the opening credits, and songs like the mournful “Blood Red Roses” shanty scattered throughout is just brilliant.

It’s that extra touch that even genuine Down Easters, from Stephen King onward, should appreciate and that makes “Blow the Man Down” an Amazon streaming winner.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence, sexual material and brief drug use

Cast: Sophie Lowe, Morgan Saylor, Will Brittain, June Squibb, Annette O’Toole and Margot Martindale

Credits: Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:32

Maybe the world didn’t know it needed a Russian Guy Ritchie film. But here it is.

“Why Don’t You Just Die!” is a grimly gruesome and laugh-out-loud tale of lies, double-crosses, brawls, gunplay and torture. And if Madonna’s ex-husband didn’t learn Russian to make it, writer-director Kirill Sokolov gives him quite the tip of the cap in this dark movie of murder and mayhem in Mother Russia.

It’s got many a Ritchie “Snatched” touch — “explainer” flashbacks, character-named “chapters,” and the old ultra-violence, here taken completely over the top with almost-goofy geysers of blood at this bloody nose, that gunshot/knife/power-drill wound.

It opens with Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), antsy, standing at an apartment door. He’s summoning up his courage. “One two three, evil won’t touch me (in Russian, with English subtitles).” As he rings the bell, he hides a claw-hammer behind his back.

Matvei is on a mission.

The man who answers the door is suspicious but unafraid. So you’re “Olya’s boyfriend?” Sure. Come in. Wait.

But as he sits down to eat, the bald-headed bulldog Andrei (Vitaliy Khaev) turns their chat into an interrogation. How long’ve you known Olya? What’s with the hammer? Describe the “friend” you’re taking that hammer to.

Andrei is a police detective. The kid may have 30 years on him, but not when the cop picks up the shotgun.

The movie’s first epic brawl leads to first this man, then the other, getting the upper hand.

We have just enough time to wonder about motives when this is “explained” in a Matvei flashback.

We have plenty of time to second guess those motives before lovely Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde) shows up.

And we can reason through how this character can get out of handcuffs or that one can wonder about which among his enemies set this up before flashback “explainers” let us see that “It’s not that simple,” getting out of handcuffs, the detective’s partner (Michael Gor) gets involved and the whole affair turns bloodier and more complicated still.

The dialogue has a droll Russian fatalism — “And I’ve lived to see my own death.”

The players capture desperation, fear and resignation, if not the actual real impacts of bone-crushing blows, compromising injuries and massive blood loss.

The title warns you to never take any coup de grace as “final.”

And the simple five-handed cast (Elena Shevchenko plays Olya’s mom) allows us to keep the many double-crosses and betrayals and ulterior motives straight.

Sokolov, in his feature-directing debut, has made a film that’s plays like a Guy Ritchie film’s leaner, tighter first draft — before the twists within twists, before the layers of upon layers of funny lines have been carved out.

But the effect is the same as “Snatched, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” or “The Gentlemen” — violent people meting out over-the-top violence without pity, but never leaving out the pithy.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gory, graphic violence

Cast: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Vitaliy Khaev, Evgeniya Kregzhde, Michael Gor, Elena Shevchenko

Credits: Written and directed by Kirill Sokolov. An Arrow release.

Running time: 1:34

The theatrical release for this festival award winner has been c anceled, so VOD it is.

You’d be hard pressed to find better examples of “on the nose” casting than having Kerry Washington play a proud, sensual but stand-offish artist and Reese Witherspoon an obnoxiously over-organized control-freak queen of an affluent “planned community.”

Add “single mom” and “controlling mom” to those character descriptions and you might think you’ve seen “Little Fires Everywhere” before, maybe with these two in similar roles. The fact that each is talented enough for them to have flipped characters in the casting doesn’t shake that.

But “Little Fires,” based on Celeste Ng’s novel, uses their acting baggage, that familiarity in the casting, to trip us up, surprise and sometimes touch us. Over the eight episodes of the series, the characters and their very sympathetic performances of them build expectations that the next episode, next frosty or understanding encounter, upends.

The upper hand shifts back and forth. The women they play show white liberal guilt and African American anger at “profiling,” but also underhandedness, pettiness, intolerance and inattention. And then we’re bowled over by the little kindnesses they’re capable of, seemingly wholly out of character, the things each — as an artist and a locally-connected journalist — sees that others around them might not.

Washington plays a single mom/artist who drags her bright and pretty teen daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood) to yet another new town in her battered early ’80s Chevette. Sure, they spend their first night in that car in tony “planned” Shaker Heights, Ohio. But this is a place Mia (Washington) has picked out for studying and making art about. The kid just smiles and rolls with it.

Model-citizen Elena (Witherspoon) is the sort of woman this HOA (home owner’s association) Hell was made for, where the houses are McMansions, the grass height is uniform and mandated and the schools filled with bright, rich Ivy League-bound over-achievers.

It’s 1997 and Elena lives her on a rigid schedule, insisting that her prosperous family of six adhere to the vast calendar covering the fridge. “Four ounces of wine” is all she ever allows herself. Sex (Joshua Jackson plays her husband)?

“It’s not Wednesday or Saturday!”

She writes part-time for the local newspaper, has a book club (Rosemarie DeWitt is a pal), knows and charms everybody. She’s all about “doing kind things for kind people who appreciate the kindness.”

The sheen of perfection hangs over Shaker Heights, from Elena’s absurd over-dressing for work, the perfectly-manicured yards and every beautiful child we meet. This has a gloss that’s more “Desperate Housewives” than Witherspoon’s similarly affluent but grittier “Big Little Lies.”

Ah, but we’ve seen the first “fire” in the opening image of the series, a “big” fire that burns down Elena’s huge house. “Little fires everywhere” are how it was set, and that’s what the two women notice over the course of the series — all these “little fires” — hurting people, situations that need tending, nurturing of smothering.

Elena’s problem child is Izzy (Megan Stott), a rebellious 14 year-old whose name comes up at that first fire. She’s acting out, alienated from her “wear this/study that” mother, teased by her three siblings and bullied at school.

Mia’s Pearl? She just wants stability, a home, a room she can paint more than one wall in because “sample size” cans only cover one wall. In Elena’s brood she sees nuclear family normality.

That’s a clever if obvious dynamic to play with up — Mia’s “We artists gotta stick together” connection with Izzy, Elena’s “I like to hug” bond with Pearl.

The series treats us to other “fires” going on in this idyllic, monied community, the “secrets” each woman keeps and a lovely back and forth, see-sawing between the two leads “having a moment” juxtaposed with many scenes where they’re rubbing each other the wrong way.

Brief flashbacks allow us to pass judgement on who someone is, only for another scene to come up undercutting that judgement.

The ’90s nostalgia for Beck and “The Real World” may connect with some.

Suspense shows up in the “secrets” that are inevitable in stories this soap operatic. Because that’s what this is, mysteries, conflicts and relationships teased out over eight hours — no cliffhangers — building back towards that opening blaze.

And “on the nose” or not, even if the parts don’t much in the way of “She’s really stretching here,” there’s something to be said in very good actresses taking a pitch, right in their wheelhouse, and belting it.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, alcohol and marijuana use, profanity

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, Joshua Jackson, Rosemarie DeWitt, Megan Stott, Lexi Underwood

Credits: Created by Liz Tigelaar, based on the book by Celeste Ng. A Hulu original.

Running time: Eight episodes, @1 hour each

“The Banker” is a sturdy, entertaining period piece about a little known episode in civil rights history, an effort to open the door to “The American Dream” by a couple of real estate tycoons who took over two banks.

The tycoons? Black men who made their fortunes in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s. The film follows their struggles to get their businesses up and thriving in racist 1950s LA. And it climaxes with the problems that spun out of their efforts to get into banking in 1960s Texas, of all places.

The movie is framed within a 1960s Senate hearing over that attempt.

Anthony Mackie plays Bernard Garrett, a “genius” fascinated by the mathematics of “How to get rich in real estate,” practically from birth. We see the teenage Bernard listening to all the business men’s conversations as they’re carried on in 1930s Willis, Texas, and he’s shining their shoes.

By the 1950s, he’s sold one business, married (Nia Long plays wife Eunice), had a little boy and moved them to the greener, supposedly more tolerant pastures of California.

Bernard scouts rental complexes, ignores the overt racism and the half-whispered comments about his suits — “pretty fancy for a colored guy.” He is rebuffed, blown off by bankers, not taken seriously by his first big seller (Colm Meaney). And he’s loathe to accept help from a nightclub owner, Joe Morris, his wife used to know and who remains entirely too flirtatious with her, even now.

But Morris is a hard guy to avoid, and impossible not to like. He is played by Samuel L. Jackson with all the bemused, brassy and profane bravado the man can muster.

“I don’t trust white people,” Joe counsels. “Truth be told, I don’t even trust black people.” But he’s intrigued by what Garrett isn’t letting anybody see in his eagerness to accumulate properties and build a real estate empire — “the thrill of STICKING IT to the man!”

All they need is somebody to “front” for the business, when officialdom, finance or racist customers present a problem. That’s how they turn failed businessman turned laborer Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult) into the face of their partnership.

The movie’s lighter moments are the crash-course montage of Bernard drilling Matt on real-estate math by night as Joe gives him “keep your effing HEAD DOWN” lessons on the golf course, which is where a lot of business connections are to be made.

Any time there’s a big meeting, a “silent partners” purchase that Matt has to bluff his way through, Joe dresses up as his chauffeur to listen in, oversee and maybe provide a little silent coaching. Bernard starts off  too dignified to do that, but finds himself in custodian clothes, his wife dressed as a maid, just to make these deals happen.

The pleasures “The Banker” are the easy rapport of the cast and underdog tale the film tells. Equal rights, equal rights to housing and equal access to capital (loans) were all years away when these two crunched the numbers and made the deals, behind the scenes, that pointed towards change.

Mackie’s Garrett keeps his cool at every hassle from the cops, every racist renter who lights into him, and takes pains to dress the part every time he’s got to meet and negotiate with “the man.” Jackson’s Morris is the older, cynical pragmatist, who isn’t the man you say “You wouldn’t understand” to.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I not wake up BLACK this morning?”

Veteran screenwriter (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Adjustment Bureau”) turned director and co-writer George Nolfi doesn’t dazzle us with technique, flash or pace, here. It’s a straight-forward tale given a period gloss but pedestrian pacing, thanks to a script a lot of hands typed out.

“The Banker” was being pitched as Apple’s bid for Oscar consideration last fall, which seems an over-reach. That doesn’t taint it, nor does the knowledge that the given reason it was pulled, sexual abuse allegations about Garrett’s son, who signed on as a producer on the movie.

It’s an earnest film graced with surprising glimpses of humanity amid  persistent racist venality. The great value is in showing us a piece of history we don’t know but should, and as a terrific showcase for Mackie, Jackson, Long and Hoult.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 on appeal for some strong language including a sexual reference and racial epithets, and smoking throughout

Cast: Anthony Mackie, Nicholas Hoult, Nia Long, Colm Meaney and Samuel L. Jackson.

Credits: Directed by George Nolfi, script by Niceole R. Levy, Stan Younger, David Lewis Smith, and George Nolfi. An Apple TV release

Running time: 2:01