Movie Nation

“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.

A steep falloff in business at theaters thanks to the Coronavirus and a reduction in new releases.

Theaters may be empty one way or the other next weekend.

“Onward” expected to pull in $15-16 million and change. It barely cleared $10 million.

That’s a 73% falloff from an opening weekend Disney tried to hide it’s disappointment over. ($39).

Blame Coronavirus for the steepnfall, but audiences know it’s a dog

“I Still Believe” had church presales that pointed to an opening in the $teens. It only managed $9.5. Reviews pointing out how bland it is didn’t help.

“Bloodshot” cleared $9.3 million, on the low end of expectations.

“The Hunt”bombed big time. $5 million in wide release.

Ben Affleck’s “The Way Back” fell off a cliff — a 70% drop, $2.4 million and change on its second weekend.

“Sonic” managed another $2.47.

“The Call of the Wild” pulled in another $2 million or so. It is over $100 million worldwide. A bomb because Fox spent $145 million making the dogs and wolves digital.

“Emma.” cleared another $1.3 or so.

“Bad Boys” added another million to its $200 million plus take

“Burden” did poorly in limited release.

Having electricity and internet connection and extra time on your hands, with no sports (Today’s “opiate of the masses.”) to while away any indoor hours you have for social isolating, maybe it’s time you caught up on classic cinema.No, I don’t mean watching “Die Hard” or “Billy Madison” again.Start with Open Culture, where they have titles like Bunuel’s “Robinson Crusoe” streaming for free, over 1100 films listed.There’s still free film content in the inner recesses of YouTube.Assorted museums and archives keep online libraries up for your streaming convenience. The Library of Congress and The British Film Institute are good places to start.Some for profit “free movie” sites jam you with commercials, or are pirate sites. You can tell the difference.Vudu is one of the sources for commercial cut feature films and TV series.You don’t have to pay for Netflix’s limited menu of films or have a Roku to go down a movie rabbit hole online.Got a favorite site you go to (No bloody pirates, please)? Help everybody else with a comment/tip, if you would.http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline

I wonder if theater chains will be facing bankruptcy over this, something this “Hollywood” centered Hollywood Reporter story omits.

Amid the #coronavirus outbreak, taking wide-release tentpoles off the schedule doesn’t come cheap — nor does shuttering production on hundreds of scripted and unscripted TV series — and what happens to the unemployed workers? https://t.co/OaasceJxbv https://twitter.com/THR/status/1238963153679060993?s=20

The casual film fan might not recognize this, but serious movie buffs can vouch for what a game-changing venture Gore Verbinski’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” blockbusters were.

For half a century before Verbinski and Depp, Keira and Orlando set sail, pirate movies were career-killing box office poison. Robert Shaw died just as the flop “Swashbuckler” was coming out, “Pirates” and “The Pirate Movie” — hell, “Cutthroat Island” torpedoed Geena Davis’s marriage to director Renny Harlin, didn’t it? Didn’t do his career any favors either.

Peter Medak is a Hungarian filmmaker whose career was on the early 1970s rise — “The Ruling Class,” “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.” Then he let his friend Peter Sellers, “the greatest comic actor in the world,” talk him into directing a film of the novel “Ghost in the Noonday Sun.”

It would be shot in Cypress. They’d buy and refit a ship to film it on. It was 1973. And it was about pirates.

The fact that you’ve probably never heard of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” says it all. It was a debacle on every level, so bad Columbia Pictures refused to release it. It slipped out on home video a decade later, and nobody heralded it as “a lost masterpiece” when that happened.

To this day, Medak is haunted by the film, the trauma of making it and the price it cost his career. He went on to make “The Krays” and “Romeo is Bleeding” and oh, “Zorro: The Gay Blade.” But he could’ve been a contender, he figures.

“The Ghost of Peter Sellers” is his 90 minute documentary therapy session, an attempt to revisit a fiasco and exorcise the demons it unleashed. Medak is 82 now, and was 80 when he filmed the doc. He breaks down in tears more than once in the film.

“My career was completely destroyed by this movie,” he whines to Norma Farnes, who was Peter Sellers’ agent at one point.

“You’ve got to let it GO,” she says, attempting to console him.

But this cinematic therapy session turns out to be one of the more fascinating dissections of a film that failed.

Here’s a chunk of the black and white prologue to “Ghost of the Noonday Sun” to give you an idea of what we’re talking about here.

The clips from the making of the movie and from the film itself, with Medak revisiting every location, from the London street where Sellers made him the pitch, to the villa they rented for Sellers on Cypress, reveal a movie that became a nonsensical big screen riff on “The Goon Show,” the precursor to Monty Python which Sellers and pal Spike Milligan had co-starred in.

Milligan script doctored the movie, but “Spike didn’t really understand film,” Medak confesses.

Trotting out production memos, company letters, daily shooting schedule and summary reports, and talking with producers, financiers, surviving cast members and those who were there reveals the train-leaving-the-station trap of movie-making. A movie without a coherent script, checks rolling in, a start date, sets and a ship built in Cypress — once this disaster started rolling, all the star tantrums and feuds with director and his co-stars, all the threatening letters from the London production office, all the director’s doubts could not stop it.

That train was leaving the station, had left the station and had damned well better arrive at its destination, twelve screenwriters, star “heart attack” and pirate ship sinking — on the DAY a drunken Greek captain crashed it on delivery in Cypress — be damned.

Stopping production was never an option. They stop, and NOBODY gets paid. Sellers fired producers and tried to fire Medak and tried to cajole him into quitting (with a bribe) so Sellers could get out of a movie he was instantly ready to abandon.

The actor turned up “catatonically depressed” after breaking up with his latest girlfriend, Liza Minnelli. Even Sellers’ “Goon Show” co-conspirator Milligan, on set for a supporting role and depended on for rewrites, couldn’t shake him out of it.

And Medak? “I signed that contract, I desperately needed the money, and I had a responsibility, I thought, to see this through.”

His most revealing line might be this one. “I want to KILL people, but they’re all DEAD.”

So he does the next best thing. “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” turns into a reexamination of a famously “difficult” film star’s behavior, Sellers’ troubled mental state “that was never looked after,” the portrait of a man Medak still says he loves and still calls “a f—–g GENIUS.”

Medak then sits down with Robert Wagner, who had to work with Sellers on “The Pink Panther.” He chats up Rita Franciosa, widow of actor Tony Franciosa, co-star of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun.” And as a coup de grace, Medak brings in Joe McGrath (“Casino Royale”) and Piers Haggard (“The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu”), directors who ALSO suffered from working with Sellers on movies that became epic failures.

All this piling on turns “Ghost of Peter Sellers” into a “pathography,” the nickname given biographies that torch the reputations of the dead. And frankly, it’s deserved.

As John Heyman, the late producer of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” and man who sent letters threatening to fire Medak during filming recalls, “Everybody knew Peter was nuts. Watch out.” They never guessed “HOW nuts.” But they figured it would be worth it.

Medak crosses into self-pity, here and there, invoking a traumatic WWII childhood (Jewish in Occupied Hungary), the loss of a sibling and his father while young, psychoanalyzing why he let this film get the best of him.

It was a movie several people, including Medak, say, “never should have been made.” But by the end of this documentary, you wonder if perhaps Medak’s closer to Heyman’s peace with making a misfire, “just a movie” after all. Not bloody likely, though.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Peter Medak, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Robert Wagner, Rita Franciosa, Norma Farnes, John Heyman, Joe Dunne, Joseph McGrath, Piers Haggard

Credits: Directed by Peter Medak. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:33