Movie Nation

Brittany Snow plays a sex addict/sex columnist who drags a guy she just met on a cross-country “revisit every place I’ve had sex” romp in “Hooking Up.”

Which is as crude as it sounds, and a description that works for about half of this generally unamusing road trip romance.

It’s the film’s attempted pivot into seriousness, after making light of sex addiction and –oh — the guy’s reluctant “bucket list” participation in all this before taking one last shot at treatment for his testicular cancer, that the degree of tone deafness the screenwriters suffer from becomes obvious.

“Pitch Perfect” Snow is Darla, whose craving for coitus has her grabbing a quickie in an elementary school classroom on her way to a “Managing Your Sex Addiction” support group meeting down the hall. Her partner? You guessed it, the guy running the group.

Sam Richardson (“Veep”) is Bailey, the support group seeker who stumbles into the wrong room. He’s busted up, at 30, over losing his high school sweetheart (Anna Akana) because, he believes, she is turned off by the testicle-free future.

Darla’s brusque, remote and flippant about everything — her court-ordered support group, sex with an intern on the boss’s desk (Jordana Brewster). After all, her Atlanta magazine column makes her “the Oprah of orgasms! EVERYbody gets one!”

It isn’t concern for her well-being, the perverse idea of an addict writing a column that feeds her addiction, that gets her fired. “Your stories lately just aren’t worth fighting for.”

So she bum’s-rushes Bailey into taking a trip with her. The support group gave her a map as a means of documenting her sexploits and perhaps making amends. She’ll use that map to retrace her steps, reenact her couplings and give Bailey a little dose of what Mr. “One Woman Man” has been missing.

That tacky tale barely holds your interest, even if Snow goes at this with a kind of bug-eyed mean-girl-turned-mean-woman gusto. “This one’s a predator,” as Bailey warns off one guy.

Richardson ably plays the straight-man role in this comic couple, the mopey “All my sexual history could fit on a bar napkin” sidekick and less-than-eager-“assistant” in this stunt that Darla hasn’t told him will make it into a blog and probably into a magazine.

The “Sex Trip” part of the picture never for one second feels giddy, although the stars give it their best in service of screenwriters who can’t manage any better.

But stopping to see Bailey’s parents (Vivica A. Fox and Bryan Pitts), stumbling back into the ex and taking stock of what’s really been wrong with his life turns the picture into something just as dissatisfying, but supposedly serious.

We also get a load of Darla’s gene pool (Amy Pietz, making a mark), too.

A politically-incorrect comedy about sex addiction isn’t the freshest idea, but at least that one had some possibilities. Darla, opening the map in the ancient Cavalier convertible she’s bought for the drive, looking at an “X marks the spot” covered map and catching Bailey’s dismay.

“You’re either judging me or under-ESTIMATING me!”

The limp start and depressed finish make “Hooking Up” a sex comedy in which you can like the cast even as you give up on the movie. Early.

MPAA Rating: R (for sexual content and language throughout)

Cast: Brittany Snow, Sam Richardson, Jordana Brewster, Vivica A. Fox, Amy Pietz and Anna Akana

Credits: Directed by Nico Raineau, script by Nico Ranineau and Lauren Schacher. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:43

In a semi-seedy New York apartment, an actress  mutters her lines, referring back to the text as she does.

“Receive the blood: and when that they are dead,
Let me go grind their bones to powder small…”

She’s prepping a monologue from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” But this pale young (Annarosa Mudd) isn’t just deep into character. She’s…off. If doing a DIY tongue piercing doesn’t tip you off, the light wrist-cutting might, the lipstick she wipes away the blood to cover her lips with firms up the idea. And there’s the body cam and microphone she’s taping to her torso.

There’s an audition, a dozen or so young women, fresh and naive, eager to get their careers started with a reading for a reality show. The handsome casting director, Lux (Tarek Bishara of HBO’s “The Tale”), is charming and buzzy, feeding on their enthusiasm.

Forget acting school, he preaches. “The real world is about connection, chemistry and socialization!”

Our tongue-pierced observer strikes up a chat with Pearl (Isabelle Fuhrman of “The Orphan”) who echoes everybody’s “I’m VERY excited!”

Pearl chatters through her meeting with Lux, insecurely filling his silences with “I need to learn to market myself.” But even if it doesn’t land her the part, Lux purrs, there’s the promise of a management contract. With him. “I’m silently asking you to PROVE” his “hunch about your talent!”

“Silently?” Never mind.

But in weepy phone calls home, Pearl gives away how depressed and distressing this struggle to get her foot in the door is. Lux’s “management” offer entails meetings at a coffeehouse, and then another audition — this one private — just the two of them, performing a scene.

“Tape” is about how icky that obvious set-up and come-on is, and how it’s turned on its head by a third observer. “Rosa” (Mudd) has spy cams and a tablet they feed into. When she mouths along to the lines Lux and Pearl exchange in the “scene,” we know she’s been through this herself. She knows what’s really going on. What will she do about it?

Writer-director Deborah Kampmeir, who gave us the queasy exploitation of “Hounddog,” has created a master showbiz villain, a slick-talking salesman who doesn’t apologize for “the real world,” or give away what this casting couch “audition” is going to be. He phrases his oozy stage directions and pep talks in literary and empowerment terms.

USE “those secret powers that are so intrinsic to the female gender,” he coaches. “SEDUCE me with your poise!” He references the 16th century “The Book of the Courtier,”which he knows the recent NYU grad read as part of her curriculum. He refers to what he’s up to as “this exercise.” He shames her for “self-deprecation,” insists that she “OWN the room.”

Yeah, he’s kind of a naive person’s idea of what a world-wise “mentor” would sound like.

Rosa? She’s storing clips on her tablet, listening in through earbuds, muttering occasionally at what’s going on as she plots whatever action she has in mind.

“Tape” is an intensely myopic experience, with much of what we’re seeing caught via Rosa’s tablet-eye-view. The suspense comes from our fear of what Pearl has gotten herself into, what Lux is capable of and what Rosa — with her thing for blood and self-injury, might be cooking up.

The performances are spot-on, with Fuhrman, no longer a child actress, well-cast as someone with that fresh-faced but not-a-knockout hunger of an actress who will need help standing out and getting ahead. Screen newcomer Mudd is just plain disturbing.

And Bishara is terrific playing the seducer as salesman and drill sergeant — knocking Pearl down then building up, perfectly polished in his patter, patient in his step-by-step approach to sexual harassment and “consent.”

Kampmeir’s made a lean, disturbing #MeToo tale that should be the last thing any acting class shows its students before graduation, if not on enrollment day as well.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, nudity

Cast: Annarosa Mudd, Isabelle Fuhrman, Tarek Bishara

Credits: Written and directed by Deborah Kampmeir

Running time: 1:38

Coming in May, or whenever, the Scooby Doo prequel.

Idris Elba (@idriselba) Tweeted:
This morning I tested positive for Covid 19. I feel ok, I have no symptoms so far but have been isolated since I found out about my possible exposure to the virus. Stay home people and be pragmatic. I will keep you updated on how I’m doing 👊🏾👊🏾 No panic. https://t.co/Lg7HVMZglZ https://twitter.com/idriselba/status/1239617034901524481?s=20

“Bad Lucky Goat” is funnier and sunnier than any movie that opens with a decapitated goat’s head floating in the Caribbean has any right to be.

It’s “Weekend at Bernie’s” with a billy goat — “Weekend at Billy’s” — set on a remote Caribbean island where the people are as musical as their English Creole patois. Throw in a little voodoo, DIY jug band and washboard bass band interludes, and this laugh-out-loud charmer becomes the next best thing to a trip to the islands.

The island in this case in Colombia’s Providencia, closer to Nicaragua but not exactly close to anywhere. The pace of life may be slow, but there’s a lot of living going on in those eight square miles in the middle of the gin-clear Caribbean.

Corn (Honlenny Huffington) is a teenager who loves music and has big ambitions — as big as the island allows, or as big as anybody whose instrument is a harmonica can dream.

We meet him as he and a pal are warning drivers of a speed trap on one of the island’s few roads. One holds up a sign of warning, the second collects tips just after the warned drivers have passed the speed-gun equipped cop.

Corn’s parents run the tiny, homey Hotel Denton, and mom Pauline (Arelis Fonseca) needs him to run out and fetch some benches. The problem with that? He’s got to do that with sister Rita (Kiara Howard). These two can’t stand each other.

They’re bickering in Dad’s truck on their way to get those benches when, unbeknownst to them, a goat tied to a “Blair Witch Project” altar of sacrifice (stick triangles, etc) on a mountaintop gets loose. If you’re yelling at your brother, you’re not watching the road.

Dead. Goat.

The rest of the movie is a picaresque odyssey in which the feuding siblings have to figure out what to do with the goat and how to get the family truck fixed. They venture from a butcher to a pawnbroker (he uses a one-minute hourglass to haggle), drop in on a mangrove pool jug band and a cockfight, bartering with meat and goatskin, bickering every step of the way.

They’re on foot or in a truck, on a motorbike or in a motorized skiff as they stumble through “bad luck” that includes a kidnapping, robbing from a church collection plate and some pretty serious superstition. No, the “Blair Witch” won’t get them. “The Ghoul” might.

Corn is counseled to “keep the spiritual vibe” (in Creole/English/Spanish/Caribbean with English subtitles) and “just be patient with” this quarrelsome sibling. Rita has to get over her “materialism” and maybe take her slacker-brother and his “music” more seriously.

And even when it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, it is amusing and utterly disarming.

First-time writer/director Samir Oliveros, working with untrained actors on a dazzling, unfilmed location, has delivered a lucky charm of a movie about a dead, “Bad Lucky Goat,” now on on Film Movement + (you can find it on Amazon, too).

MPAA Rating: unrated, with a dead goat and a cockfight scene, some profanity

Cast: Honlenny Huffington, Kiara Howard, Elkin Robinson, Jean Bush Howard, Arelis Fonseca and Eduardo Cantillo

Credits: Written and directed by Samir Oliveros. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:16

Here’s a little soapy escape from the calamities of the day, an Indian “Joy Luck Club” set in a “Downton Abbey” world.

“Draupadi Unleashed” is a multi-generational saga about the struggles of women in the Indian patriarchy, limiting most of its story, struggles and commentary to life under “The Raj,” Britain’s rule of India which ended in the late 1940s.

It’s based on a book by Nisha Sabharwal, who co-directed it and delivers its voice-over narration (it’s all in English). And it takes as its inspiration a character from Indian literature’s “Mahabharata.” Draupadi was a woman who was the subject of a five way tug of war, an apt description of our heroine here.

The setting is the “Little London” of Quetta,a city now Pakistani but once an island of affluence in British-occupied India. No British intrude on this world in the movie. There’s no sign of the social unrest Mahatma Gandhi and his followers, India’s underclasses, were involved in.

We’re introduced “to my fifteen year old mother” Sita (Indigo Sabharwal) as “she is about to meet her husband.” It’s 1915, and the young woman bristles at the arranged marriage, the “traditions” that are harped on, her instructions from her parents — “Don’t speak…Look down at his feet.”

It looks like a promising marriage, but she is the first to have a vision of a shirtless little boy who foretells “Soon, you shall find liberation.”

And so she does.  Her husband dies in his sleep. She goes off to live with her mother-in-law.

Years later, Sita (now played by Melanie Chandra) and that mother-in-law (Anna George) prep Sita’s daughter, our narrator Indira (Salena Qureshi) for her own “meet the man you might marry” moment. Indira is even less enthusiastic about the handsome sugar baron Amar (Dominic Rains) she is set up with.

Because she’s just met a younger and more handsome cousin (Taaha Shah Badusha). And they’re already “kissing cousins.”

“I would NEVER be fully Amar’s!” And when Amar sees her smooching on Cousin Guatum, he realizes that, too.

What IS a girl to do? Aside from have visions of the same comforting boy spirit her mother saw. And then there’s the mind-reading and wise Swami G (Cas Anvar), who regards her “as if he was unwrapping my sari!”

“You can see your future,” he counsels. “You destiny is set, Little One. Lord Krishna’s will be done!”

Arrangements can be made, nothing is permanent, we’re all very SOPHISTICATED about these things, and there’s lots of foreshadowing of earthquakes in between the rituals, references to The Raj and Rolls Royces.

The rituals are one thing you fall into with this soap opera — the tradition of a bride’s entry into her husband’s home,“Griha Pravesh,” her tipping over of a vase filled with rice and colored herbs to mark her footprint.

Another noteworthy trait of this American-made Indian film (again, in English) is the beautiful cast. There’s a Miss India mixed in here with the exceptionally striking women and men of various generations.

The sexuality here is more explicit than you’d ever seen in a Bollywood production, although tame by Hollywood standards.

What isn’t noteworthy, or even terribly sensible, is the plot. The message, repeated repeatedly between women, from the swami to Indira, is “You are not born slaves.”

But in 1930s India, that must’ve been hard to swallow, even among the elite and their “sophisticated” arrangements.

Qureshi, George and Savar are the stand-outs in the cast, doing what they can with thinly-drawn characters and predictably melodramatic situations. The lush settings and high living implied are just that — implied. The film doesn’t revel in its decadence or reach for heightened soap opera reactions to the over-the-top situations.

It’s all just as soapy and unreal as “Downton Abbey,” with little of the mother-daughter-“sacrifice” of poignancy of “The Joy Luck Club.”

They had an interesting world to work with, and an interesting era in that world. But “Draupadi Unleashed” is a romantic soap opera entirely too restrained for its own good.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a tad more sexually explicit than most Indian cinema

Cast: Salena Qureshi, Anna George, Dominic Rains, Cas Anvar, Azita Ghanizada, Taaha Shah Badusha

Credits: Written and directed by Tony Stopperan, Nisha Sabharwal, based on the novel by Nisha Sabharwal. Passion River release.

Running time: 1:50

That sort of social distancing should be easy as attendance plummets.

AMC CEO says “whichever is less” will be their guideline.

I was in two showings Thursday in which I was the sole customer.

The Hollywood Reporter adds that
“S&P Global Ratings said it would review AMC Theatres’ debt ratings for a potential downgrade amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

Details: https://t.co/V8OV5qlfY0 https://twitter.com/THR/status/1239563359202283520?s=20

All these replays of sports events of the past filling the network airwaves this last weekend brought this image to mind.

Charlton Heston, sitting alone in an LA movie house, remembering what “crowds” look like.

What was he watching? Michael Wadleigh’s “Woodstock,” an event that celebrated a major anniversary last year, a movie Martin Scorsese helped edit.

Chuck’s got there in style, too. Grabbed himself an American convertible fresh out of the abandoned showroom.

“The Omega Man” was sort of the “rugged American individualist gun nut’s guide to surviving the apocalypse” and shaped a lot of such End Times tales to come. Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend” is the book it was based on, and Will Smith’s remake was slightly smarter, a tad more progressive and in step with the times.

Anyway, movie going’s gotten a lot like Chuck’s experience in that film. Not sure how long the cinemas will stay open. Cities like NYC and LA have already shuttered theirs. Governors may act because Washington won’t. And even without that, no multiplex can cover expenses with the few paying customers who are showing up.

AMC is facing a debt crisis as it struggles to stay open via a limit of 50 customers per theater.

Let’s hope there are still places to go see a movie when all this shakes out. For now, streaming it is.

Madeline Murray O’Hair, Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly…a generation of”The Most Hated Women in America.”

Two of them have been the subject of feature films. As of April, anyway.

Hulu has Cate as Phyllis next month.