Movie Nation

All these years later, and Tyler Perry is still making “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.”

“A Fall from Grace” is his first film made for Netflix, and it’s another female wish-fulfillment fantasy, this one with wrapped in a vengeance melodrama.

It has the trademark Perry woman-as-victim, here a disgraced banker (Crystal Fox) in prison for killing her husband. It’s got other sympathetic women — older women often (Phylicia Rashad, Bresha Webb, Cicely Tyson), a chaste, slow courtship with a hint of fireworks in it and Perry in a supporting role wearing somewhat outlandish makeup.

The same structural problems of every Perry script hobble it, the same refusal to edit the material into something more compact, with a sense of a story in forward motion about it.

And all the guys? Eye candy, often shirtless.

It’s good to see Perry’s getting full use out of his Tyler Perry Studios. A Southern filmmaker with a brand that he’s extended from theater, to TV and film, he has the makings of a genuine media mogul.

But as a writer-director, Tyler P. is the LAST guy Netflix needs to be giving its usual blank check and final cut to. Like the over indulgent Martin Scorsese with “The Irishman” and Alfonso Cuaron, Perry has earned his position in the business. They made stupidly long movies for Netflix before Perry did.

But Tyler P’s diminishing returns on the big screen tell the bigger story. He needs somebody to bounce ideas off of, somebody to save him from his worst dramatic, casting and editing instincts.

This clumsy, cadaverously-slow tale is about how Grace came to be in prison, the green public defender Jasmine (Webb) sent to get her a plea deal, but hear out her story in endless flashbacks.

And that takes two hours.

Perry’s done a decent job acting in thrillers that other people scripted. Apparently, he didn’t pick up any tricks from reading those screenplays.

None of the performances are affecting, although Rashad brings a little of her get-my-back-up fire to playing the accused woman’s best friend. Perry just barks out orders as the chief of the public defender’s office that sends Jasmine to plead out this unwinnable case.

“If you argue like that in court, you could actually be a LAWYER!”

Mostly, though, it’s just “Coffee! COFFEE! COFFEE!” from him, in that huge beard and wig.

Check out the cut rate “fireflies” effect, Netflix. Perry isn’t giving you what you paid for.

This is like watching the paint dry in the still-new Tyler Perry Studios soundstages.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Crystal Fox, Phylicia Rashad, Bresha Webb, Mehcad Brooks , Cicely Tyson and Tyler Perry.

Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01

Not nuts about the first hire on this one.

Will Nice Nic Cage return? Probably.

#BadBoysForLife screenwriter Chris Bremner will pen the script and Jerry Bruckheimer will return to produce the sequel to the Nicolas Cage classic.

via @THR https://t.co/dyWZZ5mgIc https://twitter.com/RottenTomatoes/status/1218272282226786304?s=20

An interesting premise, a fascinating milieu and a grabby, “Blair Witchy” finale are the big pluses of “Deadcon,” a “trapped in an ancient chatroom” thriller that doesn’t frighten much — until it counts.

Lauren Elizabeth, Claudia Sulewski, Keith Machekanyanga and Mimi Gianopulos transform into convincing conventioneers who check into the wrong hotel for their Snapchat, vlogger “internet influencers” gathering.

Little do they know that long ago, an ahead-of-his-time developer tried to sell his MacIntosh-formed “LinkRabbit” chat room tech, and somehow trapped the essence of a missing little boy.

They’re just streaming away, living their lives on the web for their “fans,” their “subscribers” at AKAshley or MeganByte, posing for selfies, sitting on panels and fending off screaming tween fangirls.

Ashley (Elizabeth, of TV’s “Out of My League”) is over it. Every exhausted video claim of “I’m soooo excited,” “It’s going to be soooo much fun” or “I love you guys sooo much” has worn her out. She can’t do this. Only her assistant Kara (Gianopulos) can keep her on task.

Megan (Sulewski of TV’s “T@gged”) is still into it — the fame, the gift bags, the sponsorship money. She’s two-timing her vlogger beau with another vlogger (Machekanyanga of TV’s “Your Honor”). Life is good.

Until Ashley is shoved into a room that the hotel never uses. When front desk old-timer Warren (Carl Gilliard) finds out, he’s shaken. As he’s told the rest of the staff that room is haunted, some of them are spooked, too.

Poor Ashley won’t know what “8 bit demon” hits her.

Cinematographer turned director Caryn Waechter doesn’t get much of a jolt out of springs on a bed, depressing as if a child is jumping on it, or an empty chair spinning at the desk. Loud noises, thumps and shrieks are a little more on the mark.

And again, the finale has a nice payoff, sold by the able cast members who play it like they’re freaked out by it.

Too much of the prelude to that is perfunctory. And even if the convention is basically “50 Shades of Narcissism,” and kind of funny — it’s not as if we root for bad things to happen to these vapid web queens, or their fans.

Which seems to have been the intent. At least, at 77 minutes, “Deadcon” doesn’t waste much of our time.

MPAA Rating: unrated, blood, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Lauren Elizabeth, Claudia Sulewski, Keith Machekanyanga and Carl Gilliard

Credits: Directed by Caryn Waechter, script by Scotty Landes. A Gunpowder & Sky/Hyde Park release.

Running time: 1:17

Happy 98th Birthday to the one and only Betty White.

Love that Ryan. Love that Sandy, too.

So “Underwater” was the final 20th Century Fox film?

The studio created by the merger of 20th Century and William Fox’s operation at the birth of the Golden Age of Hollywood is no more.

Rupert Murdoch has tainted the “Fox” brand, so it makes sense.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/disney-dropping-fox-20th-century-studios-1203470349/

Sony was lowballing its expectations for “Bad Boys for Life,” counting on a $38 million opening weekend.

Variety was underguessing. Box Office Mojo, all of them/us.

That damned thing blew the f-up last night (just getting in the spirit of things) with a whopping $6.3 million in “previews,” which started at 4pm Thursday.

That’s huge, “American Sniper” huge — according to deadline.com.

Granted, “Sniper” had fewer showings (I recall its previews starting at 7). But now one and all are predicting $55 million+ for this franchise sequel. Dayem.

Give the people what they want, an old fashioned, glib about blood and violence 90s style action action comedy with two familiar characters and people will show up.

Let’s see how that plays out. A four-day weekend leaves lots of time for popping champagne corks at Sony/Columbia.

Being a kids movie during the school year, “Dolittle” didn’t get the sort of Thursday night bounce “Bad Boys” did. It didn’t reach $1 million.

The telling day is always Saturday, but toxic reviews won’t help and parents would have to be deaf and blind not to have heard how joyless and flat this debacle is. I will be surprised if it hits its lowballed $24 million estimate. But maybe.

I hope Downey bought an island or something with all that Universal money he got for it. The picture cost $175 million. Hearts and prayers, Universal.

“1917” is the strongest holdover title and should be in the top three this weekend, maybe the top two if “Dolittle” dies a quick death.

Everybody’s picture of “The Ideal Indie Film” is different, but here’s mine.

It’s got to have a human story, preferably about humans and human activity (professions) Hollywood doesn’t make movies about.

It should be witty. Crackling dialogue adds nothing to the budget.

And it has to have a sense of place, preferably a place far away from the Lands of the Over-Filmed — LA, New York.

“Buffaloed” ticks off those checkboxes. It’s set in Buffalo, the dump down the road and up the river from Niagara Falls. It looks like Buffalo and sounds like Buffalo. It’s about the working poor and the amoral hustle of debt collecting. And it’s funny, as any movie starring the fast-talking pixie Zoey Deutch ought to be.

The actor-turned-screenwriter Brian Sacca had a bit part in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He may not have had many lines in that one, but brother-man was taking notes. He’s produced a fast, flippant mashup of “Wolf” and “Boiler Room,” a lightweight story with a dark undercurrent.

And Deutch, of “Set it Up” and “Zombieland: Double Tap,” gives it the zingy underdog such a tale needs to come off.

Our heroine/narrator is Peggy Dahl, a member of the working poor in “the epicenter of the Rust Belt.” That would be Buffalo, New York, which shows its seedy despair in every scene in this Tanya Wexler (“Hysteria”) comedy.

Peggy adored her late hustler/dad, so that’s who she aims to become. Her mother (Judy Greer, perfect as always) may be buried in debt, running a cut-rate hair salon out of their shabby house. Her brother JJ (Noah Reid) may have simpler dreams — open his own bar, get by just well enough to say he’s “fine.”

“Fine” won’t do for Peggy. Not since she was a child.

“‘Fine’ is like mediocrity’s DUMB cousin!”

Peggy is a hustling prodigy, smart enough to be admitted to an Ivy League school, practical enough to know they’ll never be able to afford it (and that the student loans would bury her), naive enough to think she can shift from hustling cigarettes to high school classmates to scalping counterfeit tickets to Buffalo Bills games so that she can afford to go.

Busted. For sacrilege.

Jail isn’t as much of an education as you’d hope. But when she answers one of her mother’s calls from a collection agency after getting out, she finds “my true calling.”

Fast-talking, charming, cute and cutthroat — Peggy dives deep into the shadowy industry that seems right at home in a withering factory town that no longer stinks the way it did when it had factories, a baseball and a basketball team to go with its hard-luck Bills and hapless hockey team, the Sabres.

And once she’s established, under the hulking crooked collection king “Wizz (Jai Courtney, terrific), she breaks free and sets up a shop of her own — rounding up the usual misfits that movies like this people “the team” with.

To Wizz, this means war. To Peggy, that means she can’t date the cute prosecutor (Jermaine Fowler) who put her in jail the last time, and just might lock her up again.

Deutch is is just-short-of-dazzling as the persuasive opportunist who convinces one and all that “debt is JAIL,” and what they’re selling to debtors is the chance to “break these people OUT.”

The script is littered with boiler-room collection agency slang, the ethos among collectors that “debt never dies” and the assorted approaches of Peggy and her team  of ex-phone sex operators, Indian restaurant street-pitchmen and Bible salesmen — distinct and distinctly funny “types,” to a one.

But the type that tickles the most is the “Buffalo” type — a sea of “jagoffs” who live for Sunday, “dem Bills” and the libations of choice — “A case of Genny (Genesee Ale/Lager),” or — for special occasions “Crown (Royal) all around!”

A judge shows up for court covered in Buffalo wing sauce, a brawl breaks out over “Anchor Bar, or Duffs?”

Yeah, they’re lowbrow regional stereotypes. But they’re funny, and they’re adorable.

Much like Ms. Deutch, who makes this ideal indie film, this “Wolf of Wall Street Lite” come off, with just her fury, her charm and the acting evidence that this broke cookie is too smart to stay here, too desperate to ever pull off her Great Escape.

MPAA: unrated, some violence, sexual situations, profanity, smoking

Cast: Zoey Deutch, Judy Greer, Jai Courtney, Jermaine Fowler

Credits: Directed by Tanya Wexler, script by Brian Sacca. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:35

Pietro Marcello’s lush working class take on the Jack London novel has been reset in Naples. It comes to America April 17.

I’m not sure how much urgency many of us will attach to watching the Netflix documentary “The Edge of Democracy,” now that it’s been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar.

I knew what it was about and held off watching it until after it nabbed the Oscar nomination.

It’s about an American democracy under assault by the rich and their democracy-averse-racist, fascist, fundamentalist-homophobic supporters. Do we need a two hour film to see that? Doesn’t everybody already have CSPAN?

But Brazilian journalist/interviewer/filmmake Petra Costas has crafted an exceptional film, a downbeat funeral dirge for her country’s much younger democracy, a blow-by-blow of how it all went wrong.

The daughter of leftists and lifelong democracy advocates in a country whose military junta imprisoned them and forced them underground for years, Costas was named for a murdered activist. But her family’s history has crossed that democratic/totalitarian divide more than once, with various branches and generations embracing free speech or military takeovers that might benefit them.

She is white. In Brazil, labor, the underclasses and uneducated who are kept in poverty by the oligarchy, are of the darker races — indigenous or descended from African slaves. White liberal academics and leftists joined with them to pull the country toward democracy. And for successive administrations, they seemed to succeed.

Then, “at the peak of optimism” that Costas would live in a country governed the way her parents had dreamed of, “the foundation of democracy itself would begin to crack.”

Her movie — using first-person eyewitness filming — talking to men and women on the streets during demonstrations, archival news footage and close-access interviews with the two democratic politicians her movement identified with, presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his hand-picked successor, Brazil’s first woman president, Dilma Rousseff — shows us point by point, how a democracy is killed.

Years of progressive rule move millions out of poverty, but the moment the leaders pushed for corruption investigations of the state run oil company, and into bank practices, right wing movements found financial backing, social media support and leaders suddenly rising up in classic “bandwagon effect” propaganda fashion.

Defeated candidates use mob incitement to contest election results. “Guns” are promised to the impressionable, the under-informed and the rural.

“Lock him up! Lock her up!” chants at big, widely and uncritically covered rallies, an impeachment, activist judges twisting the law to suit the needs of the oligarchs, feckless ex-military members wrapping themselves in the flag, glorifying violence, torture and appealing to bigotry — that sounds nothing like what’s happened anywhere else, does it?

In Brazil, the monied and the corrupt used impeachment to halt an investigation. In America, the monied and the corrupt are the ones fighting impeachment.

Nothing in common, right?

Costas notes how the country’s schism “runs directly through the center of my family” without interviewing any members of that family other than her mother. But she gets at important truths about democracies in general — be they Chile, Britain, Brazil or the United States.

“Our democracy was founded on forgetting.” They are sustained, reformed and menaced by “forgetting,” too. People Costas records arguing on the streets or in congress seem clueless about the dangers of their “military takeover” pleas and the like. People who can’t remember history vote to tragically repeat it.

With the death of the myth of “American Exceptionalism,” we can’t help but feel, while watching “The Edge of Democracy,” that yeah, it could happen here.

I remember interviewing the great Chilean writer, playwright/screenwriter (“Death and the Maiden”) Ariel Dorfman, who saw his country’s democracy ended by a CIA backed coup. He was pretty quick to disabuse me, and any American he met, that the United States was no so special, so united, so vigilant that we couldn’t take a seriously wrong turn after a few modest mistakes that preceded it.

“The Edge of Democracy” won’t convince that “It CAN happen here.” It’ll make you wonder how far down the hole we’ve already tumbled.

A final thought about this riveting, sometimes confusing and always dispiriting film — don’t be a martyr. Remember to change the language to “English” on your Netflix settings for this film (unless you’re fluent in Portuguese). At least the narration, still by Costas, won’t require subtitles.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Dilma Rousseff, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Marisa Letícia Lula da Silva

Credits: Directed by narrated by Petra Costa.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01

Disney will expand Fox’s FORD V. FERRARI from 567 to 1,069 screens this Friday, January 17.
#FordvFerrari https://twitter.com/BoxOffice/status/1217901407027654656?s=20