Movie Nation

All the years of fitfully studying Spanish, all the Spanish language films I’ve reviewed, and today I learn a new word.

“Ñoño.” It’s Spanish (Mexican slang) for “lame.”

I didn’t hear it in the new Netflix comedy “All the Freckles in the World (Todas las pecas del mundo).” I had to look it up to describe it.

In this ñoño, lazy, sexist, retrograde, stumbling Mexico City teen romance — yeah that’s a mouthful — a freshman pursues the upperclasswoman with the blonde hair, making his plans with her before they’ve ever met, before he’s ever heard her voice.

Jose Miguel is a movie cliché, and he doesn’t even know it.

He pursues the “chica rubia” (Loreto Peralta) of his desire even though the first girl he meets at his new school, Liliana (Andrea Sutton Chávez) is more interesting, more punk and more into him.

The script goes to great lengths to pass this kid, Jose Miguel Mota Palermo (Hanssel Casillas) off as an inventor. But it never finds anything clever to for him to invent.

The limp “first love/new school” stuff tumbles into a too-familiar “BIG GAME” comedy as Jose Miguel and his band of nerds and losers square off against Cristina’s actual boyfriend, the older, more soccer skilled and better looking Italian boy Kenji (Luis de La Rosa).

And Jose Miguel’s pal and his team’s star player? He’s an oft-flunked classmate, Malo (Alejandro Flores), a dullard who only shines on the pitch — and in after-school “tutoring” with teacher Miss Yolanda (Montserrat Marañon).

It’s 1994, and the World Cup has come to Mexico. Jose Miguel is into it — only not that much. His baby sister is the one who keeps calling the 900 number of Mexico’s star player, just to hear his voice.

Jose Miguel befriends Liliana and Malo straight off, and proceeds to bore them with his single-minded pursuit of the unattainable Cristina.

“Nothing worse than an idiot with initiative,” Liliana cracks — the film’s only funny line (in Spanish with English subtitles, if you like).

Liliana gives Jose Miguel a mix-tape as a come-on. Jose Miguel passes it off as his own to Cristina. Kenji is nice enough to the kid at first, until he figures out his game.

That’s how the soccer bet comes to be, and that’s the direction the story limps toward.

Promising ideas are introduced and abandoned. Jose Miguel’s home life, with pilot Dad moving them all over the country, is strained but unexplored.

The World Cup backdrop is mentioned but not embraced.

Liliana’s nose-pierced punk sensibility would have a lot more edgy cred if her mix tape wasn’t Fine Young Cannibals, not remotely edgy in ’94.

The inventions don’t work, and nothing is done to make them work as Jose lets his pursuit of Cristina take over his life and the movie.

“Freckles” are easily observable, but no fascination with them is mentioned. Jose Miguel is smitten with girls who have them, but never broaches this.

By the way, suggesting a sexual relationship with a student is a pretty serious taboo north of the border these days. It might have been funny in ’94, not in a 2019-20 movie SET in ’94.

That’s not the biggest problem with Yibrán Assuad’s slow-footed tale. The cast is dull, the direction pedestrian and the dialogue lifeless. The conflicts are believable, but routine and played out.

The fact that he’s borrowed and botched ideas from decades of big screen teen romances, from John Hughes’ “Sixteen Candles” onward doesn’t matter, because his young audience won’t be familiar with those films.

But that does park “All the Freckles in the World” in the middle of its biggest criticism, though. It’s seriously uninspired, lifeless and lame, “noño.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, PG mostly (with a hint of PG-13)Cast: Hanssel Casillas, Andrea Sutton Chávez, Loreto Peralta, Luis de La Rosa, Alejandro Flores and Montserrat Marañon

Credits: Directed by Yibrán Assuad, script by Yibrán Assuad, Javier Peñalosa and Gibrán Portela. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

Deadline.com is saying that “The Grudge,” the lone wide release on this first weekend of 2020, should pull in $9 million, but could reach the $teens.

Box Office Mojo seems to agree,as this early Jan. horror opening thing generally/historically seems to pay off.

It’s a reboot of the franchise that gave Sarah Michelle Gellar a movie career way back at the turn of the millennium. Reviews have been terrible, mine included.The director had a very good cast, but it is older-skewing. And he made rather a hash of the story and in fright-delivery terms. I saw it opening night with a one-third full house in a suburban multiplex, and word of mouth could be weak. It earned a $1.8 million Thursday night.

It’ll be in a battle with the fading “Frozen 2” and the rising “Little Women” — both projected to clear $12 million or so — for third, fourth and fifth places.

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” will own the weekend, and probably next weekend as well. How long this desultory finalereigns will depend on who is right in their projections. Deadline is saying low $40s over three days, Box Office Mojo betting its more like $34, with others projecting somewhere in between.

“Jumanji: The Next Level” seems likely to spend its last weekend over $20 million, a second place finish.

“Cats” is losing screens already and this may be its last weekend in the top ten.

“Bombshell,” “Spies in Disguise” and “Uncut Gems” are sticking around, earning in the $5-8 range. “Richard Jewell” is done.

The film is largely French, and has opened in France. But somebody’s sure to pick it up here, if only for limited release pre-VOD/Streaming.

A drama about motherhood, the Big Mission and the tug between the two. A plum role for Green, who has managed a decent career after breaking out as a “Bond Girl” back in “Casino Royale.”

Not going to name names or anything, but SOME of us remember when Alice Krige made her first big splash on screen as the title character, a young woman accidentally killed by callous young men who are later haunted by her in “Ghost Story.”

That was in the last millennium, when she was also the flapper sex symbol of “Chariots of Fire” and the leader of the Borg in the “Star Trek: TNG” universe.

Jan 31, she’s scary yet again, the witch matching wits with“Gretel & Hansel.” 

The thing that stands out about the second trailer for this Guy Ritchie/STX action comedy (Jan. 24) is how canny Henry Golding’s agent was for talking him into this gig. A somewhat fey romantic lead in his recent films, let’s butch the lad up a bit.

Fun cast all around. Hope they preview it, as it plainly looks promising and just as plainly could go either way.

A very accomplished cast can’t prevent “The Grudge” reboot from being the first dog of 2020, a well-acted but incompetently-plotted tale of a curse that transfers like a deed — a haunted house that crosses hemispheres.

A gaunt Andrea Riseborough, playing a newly-widowed cop digging into a case she cannot fathom, physically quakes in the presence of the supernatural, a reaction any human could understand but which few actors can manage when the camera rolls.

Legendary horror movie mascot Lin Shaye matches the great Jacki Weaver, blood-curdling scream for blood-curdling scream.

And Betty Gilpin and John Cho play a couple already in mourning for a baby that’s not been born, sucked into the creepy Japanese curse of the stringy-haired girl. Why? Because husband Peter’s a realtor, and he’s just got to close on that house on 44 Reyborn Drive in creepy, perpetually-rainy Cross River, Pennsylvania.

Writer-director Nicolas Pesce (“The Eyes of My Mother”) juggles multiple stories in multiple timelines showing how every person who enters this repeatedly resold 1930s Arts & Crafts house is a candidate for haunting, hunting, tormenting, demonic possession and murder.

But he often blunders the most basic requirement in a modern horror thriller. He’s made a most inefficient fright delivery vehicle.

In 2006, a still-grieving widow (Riseborough) starts life over with her little boy and their dog and a new detective position in a new town — Cross River. First day on the job, she and her partner (Demián Bichir) are called out to a gruesome, months-old death scene.

The tone is established in an instant. This “Grudge” is all rain, rotting corpses, a runty ghost and rusty ’80s vintage Chevrolets.

In 2004, a Cross River woman (Tara Westwood) hurried home from a job in Japan, spooked out of her mind, but sure she’s left her troubles at the front door of the house she was renting in Nippon. Nope.

A prologue has told us of “the rules” of this “powerful curse,” which holds that when someone dies in a “powerful rage,” the curse stays with the place of the rage until it attaches itself to someone who visits there and moves on.

Even by supernatural horror film parameters, that’s some seriously silly supernatural nonsense. Nobody else feels the rage. They’re just assaulted until the raging presence that preys on them consumes them.

William Saddler plays the ex-partner of Bichir’s Det. Goodman, a mangled shell of a man who never escaped, never got over what he came to believe, the nightmares he still sees.

“Maybe we should tear our eyes out so that we can’t see any more!”

Weaver, of “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Bird Box,” plays a “compassionate companion” who comes to help a husband (Frankie Faison) cope with a dying wife (Shaye) too demented by the haunted house to be able to carry out an assisted suicide.

Pesce wastes them all, never giving Riseborough (“Battle of the Sexes” and “The Death of Stalin”) a chance to show a mother’s desperation to save her child, draining the pathos of the staggered expectant couple Cho and Gilpin (of “Searching” and “Isn’t it Romantic”) facing a terrible pre-natal decision and also haunted by the demonic Wednesday Addams as “The Orphan” (Zoe Fish), and on down the line.

Bechir of “A Better Life” and “The Nun” is given nothing to play here, just cigarettes and whisky glasses for props.

The first hair-raising moment comes 50 minutes in, but the deaths that follow are anti-climactic even as the chilling tone is maintained, largely through dim lighting and very good actors.

Writer-director Pesce was blessed with this cast. But after this, my guess is he’ll never work with players this accomplished again.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence and bloody images, terror and some language

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, John Cho, Demián Bichir, William Saddler, Betty Gilpin and Lin Shaye.

Credits: Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, based on the original Takashi Shimizu script. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:33

Even if you’re old enough to remember “How High,” you probably don’t remember how sloppy and generally unfunny it was. Because the whole point of watching it back in pre-legalized 2001 was to be a little buzzed during the experience.

Taking umbrage that Method Man and Redman weren’t included in the 2019 sequel even though they’d been approached and promised that they’d get to reprise their stoners-with-a-mission movie career high-water mark roles is understandable, but misguided.

Look at Mike Epps in “How High 2.” Fiftyish guys still playing stoners is a little sad and not nearly as funny.

The original film had some funny bits and a quirkiness that some remember fondly. The sequel has less than that going for it.

But the big diff is that “How High” landed Garrett Morris, Fred Willard, Anna Maria Horsford, Hector Elizondo and Jeffrey Jones in the supporting cast.

“How High 2?” Mike Epps is the only “name” in it. You might recognize Mary Lynn Rajskub from “Night School” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” A scattering of famous (Lil Baby) to a lot less famous rappers and comics show up. But a funny script attracts big names to play funny bits. So there you go.

Lil Yachty and  D.C. Young Fly star in this tale of two Atlantans who discover, then lose, “superweed” and the “bible” for growing it, and embark on an odyssey through high school and college, Big Pharma and Russian Mafia to get it back.

Because Roger (Yachty) has this Big Idea for an app that he needs to get financed. “Two Smack” will be an app “to deliver snacks to weed heads!”

Gold mine, right? He should know. Two temptresses ply him with joints in an effort to rob the fast food joint where he works in the film’s opening scene.

That gets him fired, and without his cut-rate dealer/Uber-beater driver cousin Cal (Fly) at the bank loan officer meeting to back him up, all Roger has is gift cards for collateral.

All is lost until that night they they stumble into a stash hidden behind a brick in the wall of Roger’s mama’s basement. A “Weed Bible” might not impress anybody, but the lone sample joint included with it has them seeing Baby Powder (Epps) from the first “How High,” and multiplicities of themselves on a Never Ending Sofa, pretty much in an instant.

They’ve no sooner grown a “Little Shop of Horrors” sized plant from the seeds than they’re “ghetto-taxed,” robbed of their herb. Who got it? Big Bang (DeRay Davis) the dealer next door?

“Why do they call me Big BANG?”

“‘Cause you’re the spark that startled it all.”

Maybe the Russian mob down at the strip club grabbed it. Or high school kids. Or college kids. Or that big pharmaceutical firm Alicia (Alyssa Goss) works at. Roger’s been sweet on her since high school. For some reason, beautiful business woman with a good job Alicia joins them on their quest.

Here’s what works. Davis as Big Bang has the most funny lines, bad puns such as “You’re heard of Selma? They SELMA weed down there!”

I had to look up D.C. Young Fly’s real name (John Whitfield) to make sure he wasn’t Chris Tucker’s kid. Because the lad is ANTIC, wound UP. And funny.

He mugs for the camera, but he’s got amusing physical shtick and a lightning quick “Young Chris Tucker” patter. Listen to him tick off Cal’s “rules of survival” for getting out of any jam — fender bender to out-of-control frat party.

“Rule number one, NEVER apologize! Rule number two, NEVER give out your GOVERNMENT name. Rule number three, NEVER throw a cup that gets free refills!”

Lil Yachty (look for a Miles Park McCollum sight gag, because that’s his real name) isn’t nearly as good at the whole mugging, manic way with a line thing. He’s saddled with a flurry of obscure (ish) pop culture reference zingers — “Why y’all gotta go all Clermont Twins on me like that?” Alicia? She looks “Angela Rye/Jemele HILL amazing!”

Yeah, older white guy critic cracking on African American pop culture jokes is exactly what Cal is bitching about when he barks, “Y’all GOTTA stop watching black movies, right? Cuz you’re F—–g up the culture!”

I get it.It’s kind of like this, right?

But hey, I used to work with Jemele. Gotta count for something. And I follow Tommy Chong on twitter. What’s that tell you?

It’s not just the cast or the script that lets down “How High 2.” It’s the whole legalized/CBD Oil culture shift that does it in.

MPAA Rating:  TV-MA, pot use and abuse, sexual situations, mock violence

Cast: Lil Yachty,  D.C. Young Fly, Alyssa Goss, DeRay Davis, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Mike Epps.

Credits: Directed by Bruce Leddy, script by Shawn Ries and Artie Johann. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:28

“The meek shall inherit the Earth,” Jesus preached in his “Sermon on the Mount.”

By that ethos, Soane Tokelau should be landed gentry on his native Wallis Island in French Polynesia.

He doesn’t look it, a Polynesian hulk of 120 kilos (265 pounds). But when we meet him, this 19 year-old seems built for pushing around. He never looks anyone in the eye, never speaks until spoken to and then only softly.

Playing rugby seems out of character, but he does. Size alone makes him a prospect, and a home island talent scout, Abraham (Laurent Pakihivatau) is the first to bend the kid to his will. He talks him into taking a plane ticket and signing away a chunk of his future for a shot at playing rugby in France.

And then there’s his defiant, rageaholic father (Petelo Sealeu) puts his foot down, repeating the “WORTHLESS” label he’s long given the boy. The old man administers a power-cord beating for the kid’s budding defiance. Soane (Toki Pilioko) just whimpers and takes it. His mind is made up, and scoring his back won’t change it.

“Mercenary (Mercenaire)” is about Soane’s journey, a pitfall-packed sports drama built on a “Once Were Warriors” domestic tragedy. It’s conventional in its structure, exceptional in its dread. Because unlike young Soane, we can see the holes he’s about to fall into long before he does.

His father may treat his rebellion and savage beating as some Wallis Island rite of passage, even throwing him a farewell banquet, slaying the fatted pig for the family gathering. But Soane’s younger brother’s begging to come with him tell the real story.

Dad’s a mean, brutish drunk, prone to waving guns or machetes in the faces of those who stand up to him. It’s leave, or die.

Soane boards a plane with just the clothes on his slashed-up back, a family Bible his grandmother gave him and the address of a family cousin in France. As green as he is, he’ll need all that, and a lot of luck, because the moment be deplanes, his luck is bad.

He gives the French club rep his correct weight, leading to instant dismissal. Big time rugby wants its Polynesian players to be giants. Passersby on the street might ask Soane if he’s from the All Blacks, New Zealand’s famous Maori-packed squad. But no expert would make the mistake.

“He’s not what you’d call a beast,” is how one player describes him (in French with English subtitles). “Just a big teddy bear.”

The cousin (Mikaele Tuugahala) has little pity. The kid screwed up, and screwed over Abraham, who is out the money for a very pricey plane ticket, signing bonus, all of it. He should just go home.

But OK, sure. Let’s find somebody that’ll let him play as a semi-pro prospect.

Soane finds himself trying to make the grade with the Fumel minor league squad, teased and taunted by the native-born French players, who’re given to racist cracks (“Did you go ‘cannibal’ on her? Are you a savage, or what? How about a‘ Haka’ (the Pacific islander chest-thumping dance challenge made famous by New Zealand’s All Blacks)?”

Only the impoverished Georgian ex-pats on the team bond with the kid, one of them giving him advice (“Don’t get married” while trying to make a living in this sport.) and the film its title.

“We’re god–mned mercenaries.”

Writer-director Sacha Wolff skillfully navigates the inevitable training regimen in dialogue-free montages. Pilioko stays true to character, always averting his eyes, guileless in the extreme.

Sloane must get bullied and tested and bullied some more to make an impression on him, give him the desperation and fury he needs to succeed in this toughest of team sports.

The “dread” I mentioned earlier comes from Soane’s attitude towards Abraham, his ignoring of the don’t-get-attached-romantically advice thanks to cashier and club groupie Coralie (Iliana Zabeth).

Wolff’s made a perfectly passable making-the-grade-in-your-game sports picture, but wrapped it in Wallis Island sequences that give us that “Haka,” and give the movie cultural currency.

A film that could have just been a standard-issue rugby primer– with subtitles –becomes something with grit and heart, a rite-of-passage tale that’s as revealing of the island culture that’s embraced rugby as it is of the sport itself.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse

Cast:  Toki Pilioko, Iliana Zabeth, Mikaele Tuugahala, Laurent Pakihivatau, Petelo Sealeu

Credits: Written and directed by Sacha Wolff.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Screen Gems is the “We don’t preview these for critics” (generally) division of Sony.

So this Sam Raimi-produced, Jackie Weaver horror take with an over familiar title becomes a pig in a poke, and the first wide release of a new decade. May not be a pig, but it is indeed hidden in a poke.

The tropes, story arc, violence and stereotypes of mob movies are so ingrained that it’s nigh on impossible to do anything new with the genre.

The only novelty in the “true story” variant served up in “The Irishman” by Martin Scorsese, the master in the field, is excessive “epic” length and attempts to digitally de-age three giants of the genre — DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci.

So don’t punch up “The Ruthless,” a fact-based account of the Milanese mafia of the ’70s and ’70s and ’80s, and expect anything new. A generous take? It’s “Goodfellas” with subtitles, a career in crime about‘ Ndrangheta, an Italian mob run by men from Calabria (Southern Italy, the toe of the boot) and not Sicilians.

A compelling lead, brutal violence set in unfamiliar settings and period piece detail don’t put “Lo spietato” (the Italian title) on a par with Scorsese’s 1990 Liotta/Pesci/DeNiro masterpiece. It’s also not as compelling as the most famous Italian mob picture, the docu-drama “Gomorrah.”

But the real made-men who live these “Donnie Brasco” lives rarely realize what cliches they are. And it’s 90 minutes shorter than “The Irishman.” So why not?

“Ruthless” is a portrait of Santo Russo, played by the sleepy-eyed Riccardo Scamarcio of “Loro” and “John Wick: Chapter 2.” We meet him in 1990 at his self-satisfied peak, a penthouse with a view of Milan’s famed Madonnina gilded statue — the sava topping the city’s famous Cathedral, a yellow Lamborghini to tool around in.

But some guys he’s crossed on a dope deal show up and make some threats. That sends Santo into a reminiscence — an 85 minute flashback that takes him to his 1960s arrival in Milan, teen skirt-chaser in revolt against his mob-shamed father, busted for a crime he didn’t commit.

Prison is where Santo’s education begins with an initiation beating/head-dunking in a toilet from “Slim.” It takes no time for him to become as ruthless as everybody else.

“We Calabrians aren’t like Sicilians. We meet, talk and deliberate before we kill someone!”

The lengthy flashback, with periodic narration from Santo, takes him into the ’70s, a young thug on the make and on the rise, still teamed with Slim (Alessio Praticò), learning the crude art of armed robbery where savagery counts for more than cunning.

“I can honestly say,” he purrs in the narration (in Italian, with English subtitles), “I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

His crew ingratiates itself with the higher-ups in the underworld, he meets the girl from his hometown (Sara Serraiocco), all grown up and pious — but not so pious that they don’t make a baby before their wedding day.

A “business” that Mariangela turns a blind eye to, even as she’s washing the blood out of his shirts, ambitions that rise from robberies and theft to kidnappings, extortion and murders, the tempation (Marie-Ange Casta) of another woman — an artist.

It’s all entirely too familiar.  

Director and co-writer Renato De Maria (“Italian Gangsters”) makes few attempts to find anything fresh to say in all of this. The script’s “humor” is in the pregnant wedding, rushed because the cops bust in for Santo’s latest arrest, the priest hurrying through the vows and the obliging Carabinieri posing with the wedding party for photos, and in Santo’s beast-mode reaction to walking in on a gay conceptual artist friend of his mistress’s viewing/”happening” in the apartment he puts her up in.

It’s bloody. The swells in attendance think the savagery is all part of the show.

Scamarcio has an owlish menace about him that overcomes much of the over-familiarity of all this. The old-fashioned sexism — the women are almost literally Madonnas or Whores — isn’t excused by what is plainly intended as a cinematic throwback. The leading ladies come off as more interesting than the characters they’re playing, which helps.

The gaucherie, the ugly fashions and cool Alfa Romeos, Fiats, Jaguars, Ferraris and Citroens are little compensation for the weariness of the plot, the gruesome but not novel violence and the charmingly half-assed car chase shoved in here.

I’d say “Think of what SCORSESE could have done with this.” But hell, I’m not up for another three and a half hours married to the mob any more than you are.

Cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Sara Serraiocco, Alessio Praticò, Alessandro Tedeschi, Marie-Ange Casta

Credits: Directed by Renato De Maria  script by Renato De Maria, Valentina Strade and Federico Gnesini, based on the book “Manager Calibro 9” by Piero Colaprico. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51