Movie Nation

The first thought that pops into your mind is “Did I change channels to Lifetime?”

But then, the title kind of points you that way — “Home Is Where the Killer Is.” “If that’s not a Lifetime Original Movie, I don’t know original,” you think. Not that “original” has much to do with it.

This thriller is as obvious as a cold sore. “Retired” doctor rents part of her house to sickly young women. A young woman recovering from cancer checks in.

We know where this is going. It’s not “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” we’re in for. It’s “Munchausen by Proxy,” or some murderously melodramatic version of it that is sure to play out.

But if her years of soap operas (“Days of Our Lives,” “The Young and the Restless,” “All My Children,” and um, “Melrose Place”) have taught Stacy Haiduk anything, it’s how to give all the menace in a character’s heart away by the glint in her eyes, and how to look good doing it.

Young Nicole (Kelly Kruger of “The Young and the Restless”) getting evicted, awaiting the results of her treatment, waiting for a “settlement check” from the lawyers of the doctor who blew the diagnosis? Retired Dr. Thomason (Haiduk) “reluctantly” renting her a room, passive-aggressively bad-mouthing Nicole’s pal (Anne Leighton), her hunky ex (Christopher Sean)?

Mere foreplay. Try to keep up.

“Glad you could finally make it.”

The warnings and warning signs are not exactly hidden.

“I think that woman has a screw loose.”

Haiduk never leaves any doubt.

The picture is everything you expect from such an obvious and unoriginal “Lifetime Original Movie,” and less, until its finale. And even then it’s not terrible, although it does manage to feel perfunctory and abrupt even there.

Renting from somebody? GOOGLE them, people. And look for the murderous glint in their eyes.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, violence, some profanity

Cast: Stacy Haiduk, Kelly Kruger, Anne Leighton, Christopher Sean and Beth Littleford

Credits: Directed by Kaila York, script by Christina Welsh. A MarVista/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

Ofra Bloch is a psychotherapist, specializing in trauma, who always wanted to be a filmmaker. But it’s her actual profession, not her preferred one, that makes her documentary “Afterward” a valuable document.

She questions, she probes, she listens and she tries to understand in this film that connects the Holocaust and Israel’s political use of it to what the Palestinians call “Nakba,” that day in 1948 when the State of Israel was born, displacing 750,000 non-Jews who had been there long before the influx of Jewry that came to be called “Zionism” began.

Bloch buys into the idea that “trauma can be passed down generations.” Her interviews with non-Jewish Germans over the collective guilt many feel there about the sins of their parents confirm this for her.

But what about the land she was born and grew up in, Israel? There’s trauma everywhere, and it isn’t just evident every year in that Holocaust Memorial Day, when Jews across the land hear sirens, and stop whatever they’re doing for a full minute to remember. What Bloch wants to wrestle with is the trauma of Palestinians in a land torn by strife since the late 19th century writings and exhortations of Theodor Herzl urged Jews to move there.

Bloch recalls the image Israel has long trumpeted, of industrious, oppressed Jews arriving in a “barren desert” and turning it into the modern state as a revival of the historic Judah/Israel.

“They built their state on our ruins,” one Palestinian she speaks with explains. Yes, they were fleeing pogroms and later The Holocaust. But on arrival, they had to destroy the towns, homes and lives that were there to have living space for the arrival of “God’s Chosen People.”

A good therapist doesn’t let her emotions get the better of her, even if we can feel Bloch shudder a bit at taking in this new point of view, hearing out Palestinian grievances, their version or “spin” of the violent resistance that from time to time grips a country that at times can seem like an Apartheid state.

She hears out the “Zionist colonization” stories, the cause of trauma, and listens to Germans reach for some sort of atonement for their past sins, and connects the two experiences — even if she does not seek or could not find any Israelis who share her growing sense of guilt over and the violence against children perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and even civilians in the endless tit-for-tat struggle.

More gutsy is her hearing out and agreeing with “Israeli/Jewish victimhood,” the ongoing spin that excuses walls, “soldiers as police,” and state sponsored violence against an oppressed minority.  And Bloch brazenly begins the film with the most inflammatory statement of all, from a fellow psychotherapist, a Muslim woman practicing in Jerusalem.

“Whenever Palestinians bring up The Occupation, The Holocaust is brought up…The history of The Holocaust is silencing the world.”

“Afterward” isn’t a great film, with some of Bloch’s interviews taking us off topic, as interesting as they might be. But any documentary that suggests that victimhood isn’t reserved for one group, that injustice, repression and genocidal “occupation” can’t be shut down with “But, but THE HOLOCAUST,” is a great way of considering what comes “Afterward.”

As a filmmaker, psychotherapist Bloch puts Germany, Israel and the Palestinians on the couch and lets them see the one awful memory that binds them — trauma.

MPAA Rating: unrated, images of violence, nudity

Credits: Directed by Ofra Bloch. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:35

“Underwater” is “Alien” at the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea. That much you can tell from the movie’s commercials and trailers.

But it’s also “Alien” with laughs. That doesn’t really come across in the advertising, despite the presence of Deadpool’s amusing Father Confessor — T.J. Miller.

So as we’re yanked through what a deep sea drilling crew do to survive the collapse of their vast, elaborate habitat due to “earthquakes” and/or “There’s something OUT there,” we’ve got Miller as doughy Paul, a lump with too many tattoos, tattered underwear and a stuffed bunny he clings to life like itself.

We hear him refer to our heroine and narrator, plucky engineer Norah, as a “sweet, flat-chested Elvin creature.” As she’s played by Kristen Stewart, we concur, even as we recall Miller’s #MeToo failings.

Here’s an action film about half a dozen survivors of an undersea accident trying to get to safety on the surface, crawling through debris, stripping to their underwear — sexy, in the ladies’ case, tattered and not-covering-enough of Paul — struggling into “Pacific Rim” sized pressure suits for walks across the sea floor, hoping the rising water, the exploding walls, the lethal pressure at 6 miles down or the “thing” or “things” out there don’t kill them.

Here’s what makes all that bad, dumb action movie fun. “There’d better be a good punchline, because the set-up is WEAK!”

Norah narrates our tale, and it is from her point of view that we’re hurled straight into crisis. She’s brushing her teeth when the walls cave in.

She scrambles hither and yon, picking up other survivors (Jessica Henwick, Mamoudou Athie, John Gallagher Jr.), including Paul.

But it is finding the captain (Vincent Cassel) that is the most sobering. He’s stuck in the escape pod chamber, having sent other survivors to the surface. He’s here because “that’s what captains do.”

Now that there’s help, he formulates a plan and they set off to make way to other escape pods. Mayhem ensues. Not all survive. But you guessed that.  

Kristen Stewart and Vincent Cassel star in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Underwater”.

Director William Eubank (“The Signal”) keeps the camera close, inside of Norah’s dive suit, staring out into the murky void of the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Frantic moments are blurs of hand-held XCU mayhem — water and explosions and frantic-scrambles-to-escape menaces tactile and knowable, and those unknown.

Stewart does a fine job as tour guide through this little slice of salty hell, of carrying our sympathies and hopes with her as Norah confronts inner demons and sea monsters, reaches outside herself to help others and, oh, by the way — fixes every jammed door, frozen computer and balky piece of tech. Because she’s an engineer, dammit.

The script isn’t all that, serving up a collection of character “types” (you’ll know who the first to die is at first glance), But Paul quotes from “Alice in Wonderland,” another character describes a doomsday “energy” drilling explosion with the authority of “I watch a lot of anime.”

In other words, “Underwater’s” a goof — a fun bad movie and a perfectly fine way to waste 90 minutes at the cinema.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for sci-fi action and terror, and brief strong language

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, Mamoudou Athie, John Gallagher Jr. and T.J. Miller

Credits: Directed by William Eubank, script by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozan. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:35

The first comedy of 2020 is a movie worth rooting for. Considering the state of the world, the country, and what we’re inundated with via the media, everybody could use a break and a few laughs.

You can’t always wish something like that into being, but “Like a Boss” delivers a solid opening twenty minutes, and a few laughs, here and there, after that. Just not enough.

“Like a Boss” has Tiffany Haddish in full R-rated “Girls Trip” mode, is Mia, all mouthy and libidinous and “Put that in your purse. You’re a WHITE woman. You will NOT go to jail!” And “My PayLess bogos is about to be in a meeting in your ASS!” You know, THAT Tiffany.

Rose Byrne (“Bridesmaids,” “Neighbors,” “Get Him to the Greek”) plays Mel, lifelong friend, partner in their struggling M&M craft cosmetics start-up, a true-blue friend whose purse is the perfect place to stash something because “You will NOT go to jail,” remember?

And Salma Hayek, turning herself into a red-headed, big-toothed cartoon of her image, plays the cosmetics mogul who might be getting something from PayLess deposited in her derriere.

“You remind me of myself — when I was whiny, weak and lame.”

Singer/actor Billy Porter of TV’s “Pose” plays the flamboyant makeup-mixing pal to M and the other M, and Jennifer Coolidge is also on their team, running the tiny Atlanta store from which these two late-bloomers hope to build a cosmetics empire.

They’re underwhelming their rich Buckhead gal-pal peers (Ari Graynor among) and in debt up to their eyeballs. But they had this one great idea, a “One Night Stand” makeup kit. And that’s gotten the attention of Claire Luna (Hayek), the fiery chief of Oviedo Cosmetics. She wants to buy them out.

We know all this from the movie’s trailers. But the two dudes who wrote this script, and the dude who directed it, make that courtship — and Claire’s efforts to “break the two of them apart” — the whole movie.

The culture clash of corporate cosmetics vs the personalized “We want (women) to shine from the inside out” ethos of M&M doesn’t deliver nearly the laughs it should.

Claire’s lectures about how to be “Like a Boss,” avoiding getting sentimental about customers, products or employees go only as far as Hayek’s exaggerated (and funny) accent can take them. ”

“Steeetch that on a PEEElow and put it on Eeeeeetsy.”

Porter has an amusing moment or two, Coolidge plays the same character she’s been trotting out since “American Pie” and the picture staggers to a near halt for its middle acts.

You don’t have to visit the IMDb page’s credits  to see evidence of serious re-edits. It’s only 83 minutes long, and a major third act “surprise” character was recast.

If only the players involved wielded enough clout to get this re-written, maybe bring a female funnywoman’s sensibility to the script. We’ve seen this rude and raw-dog “just like a man” sort of raunchy farce before, in films which Haddish and Byrne got famous for. “Like a Boss” needed something fresher, something funnier and probably a lot more hilarity from Haddish and Hayek.

MPAA Rating: R for language, crude sexual material, and drug use

Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne, Salma Hayek, Billy Porter and Jennifer Coolidge.

Credits: Directed by Miguel Arteta, script by Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:23

In the opening scene of “Fall Girls,” Paige (Amara La Negra) wakes up from an all-night bender in a swank hotel to find her “boss lady” (Joely Fisher) not breathing.

“This is NOT funny,” she says, freaking out.

And there’s your warning. This is NOT funny. There’s not a single laugh in 80 minutes of this “Weekend at Bernie’s” knock-off, a film without the caliber of cast, the writing, the tasteless daring or wit of that earlier comedy.

As in “Bernie’s,” there are people in a strange location — a swank San Francisco hotel that “boss lady” Simone (Fisher) has invited “my team” to for a farewell weekend. As in “Bernie’s,” something bad happens to the host — and it wasn’t an accident.

As in “Bernie’s,” the survivors, played here by La Negra, Erica Peeples, Erica Hubbard and Paris Phillips, have to pretend the dead person’s still alive, at least long enough to ensure they aren’t the ones blamed for the murder.

Simone was about to sell her company. That had all her “girls” sad, but not worried. But Paige was freshly-promoted, tech tyro Tyra (Hubbard) couldn’t sure of her status, snooty VP Lexy (Peeples) couldn’t be sure of her future, either.

Keke (Phillips)? She’s just Paige’s dead-weight, grammar-mangling sister-in-law. At least she’s in the clear.

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!”

“But we’re in SAN FRANCISCO!”

They consider no alternatives to the option of dressing up Simone in one of the other women’s wigs (every woman in this has a wig) and passing her off as still alive, still in charge, still taking meetings as they root out the real killer.

There’s zero suspense to that search, which is so badly handled as to be an afterthought. There’s no creativity to the Simone’s body out “living her life” stunts. Bringing in a couple of the women’s suspicious husbands adds nothing.

The villains, to a one, are colorless, and that’s not a crack about race.

Maybe the only gag worth noting is Keke’s choice of hoodie — “My GOD vs my enemies” is the slogan on it.

OK.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, adult subject matter, alcohol abuse, implied violence.

Cast: Amara La Negra, Joely Fisher, Erica Peeples, Erica Hubbard, Paris Phillips and Tami Roman

Credits: Written and directed by Chris Stokes.   A BET/Footage Films release.

Running time: 1:20

A Western with practical, lactose considerations at its heart.

John Magaro and Orion Lee star in this “opening of the West Western, with Toby Jones, Alia Shawkat. And this March 20 release, “First Cow,”from A24 has the last big screen performance of Rene Auberjonois.

Looks magical.

Well, nice use of Pink Floyd in this trailer to the April 13 release I suppose SOMEbody is actually looking forward to.

Disney has said it is shutting down the whole X-Men “mutants” thing, now that it runs Fox. But we’ll see.

Netflix’s best bet for a Best Documentary Academy Award is almost certainly “American Factory,” a good film and a candid look at Chinese investment in the American workforce. It was produced under the Netflix banner of Barack and Michelle Obama, and you know how Hollywood loves the Obamas.

But the streaming service has another “short listed” contender (the 15 films they’ve narrowed their nominees list to). What about “The Great Hack?” 

I’ve put off seeing this one because the subject is almost too dispiriting to wrestle with, and seeing this movie about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, data-mining and voter manipulation (for starters) that Big Tech and our addiction to it is doing to democracy, didn’t exactly lift my spirit.

After all, it’s not like the criminal behavior of the Steve Bannon-founded Cambridge and many lies that company’s CEO, Alexander Nix, and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg were caught in led to punishment of any real consequence.  So yeah, it’s 2020 and it’ll probably happen again.

The “data scraping,” the “thousands of data points” Facebook and others have mined with all our “likes,” searches, map points, “fun online quizzes,” purchases and the like are being used against us every day, why not Election Day?

But filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim lay out a version of the history of Britain’s decision to Brexit the European Union and America’s turn to Trumpism in digital terms, and in journalistic ones.

There’s the New York digital media professor, David Carroll, the film’s hero and narrator, a man very much savvy to the personal information that’s been harvested from him, a fellow resourceful enough to sue Cambridge Analytica to see just what his “5,000” (and counting) data points “profile” has in it.

British reporter Carole Cadwalladr, doggedly breaking and pursuing the story of Cambridge Analytica’s decades of electoral manipulation (Thailand to Trinidad, to Britain and America), has been sounding the warning about the “high tech gangsters” and the “grossly unethical experiment” that this “criminal enterprise” has been carrying out all over the world.

And then there’s heroic villain or villainously heroic Brittany Kaiser, a one-time Obama campaign intern who sold her social media marketing skills to the highest bidder — Cambridge — helped strategize the company’s efforts for clients from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump, “Leave.eu” and Nigel Farage. She was one of the public faces for Cambridge Analytica, and once the heat turned on her, turned whistle-blower on the her deceptive, law-breaking employers.

And Kaiser kept campaign pitches, her calendar of meetings, lots and lots of things that pointed directly to the lies Nix and Zuckerberg were telling in front of elected officials in the UK and the US.

The Great Hack (2019) – pictured: David Carroll

The timeline, the testimony, the atomization of voter pools into “the persuadables” who could be bombarded with negative ads that pull them into backing Brexit or pushed into voting “against” Hillary Clinton, it’s all informative and damning as hell.

But aside from your “full service propaganda machine” with Cambridge in its name being broken up, nothing else has changed. We haven’t all abandoned Facebook, and the Russians are still able to slip divisive ads onto Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

We still haven’t defined this sort of data-mining, profiling — “psycho-graphics” — as “a weapon.” And with authoritarian conservative regimes in power in much of the world, the idea that “data rights are human rights” isn’t going anywhere. For now.

Have we learned anything? Have the “Bond villains” at the heart of this story been discouraged from repeating their actions? Do we have any idea what can be done, and is anything at all BEING done?

Aside from all those “Election Security” bills gathering dust on the desk of #MoscowMitch?

Nope.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, some profanity

Cast: David Carroll, Carole Cadwalladr, Christopher Wiley, Brittany Kaiser

Credits: Directed by Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

You’ve heard or figured out on your own that January is one of those “dead zones” on the movie release calendar where studios have traditionally dumped films they have limited expectations for.

But there have been many exceptions to this in recent years — a horror breakout, clever counter-programming against the flood of Oscar contenders that many people have seen or are tired of hearing about since Thanksgiving — or an action picture, usually starring Mark Wahlberg.

The Wahlberg years are gone — he was to January what Will Smith once was to July 4 weekend — but here’s a Kristen Stewart/T.J. Miller “Alien” in the Deep thriller.

Could be fun. It opens Friday.

Ten nominated feature films made the Producers Guild Awards cut, including the usual suspects, from “Little Women” and “1917” to “Ford v Ferrari,” “Joker,” “Jo Jo Rabbit,” “Once Upon a Time,” “Irishman,” “Parasite,” “Knives Out” and “Marriage Story.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/pga-awards-nominees-2020-list-full-1267527