Movie Nation

The chatty bellhop doesn’t know. All that chatter is what keeps him from figuring it out, reading the signs.

Because heaven knows we have. It was in the evasive conversation Holly (Claire Forlani) had with “Russell” on her way to the hotel, the “conference” that was really more a consultation.

It was in the flinch she gave the desk clerk when he called her “Mrs. Allen,” and mentioned “Mr. Allen” has already checked in to the suite.

Holly’s there to cheat. Twenty-one years of marriage or not, this is her weekend getaway with Mr. Not-Her-Husband.

The computer print out notes he’s left her in the room, the sexy undies and uh, handcuffs and BLINDfold in the box? Good times to come.

Only they don’t, not when it’s “An Affair to Die For.”

This cleverly plotted and aesthetically streamlined thriller puts two cheaters in a hotel suite, blackmailed by a spouse who tells the cheating man that he has his “family” so he’d better not tell, and he’d better not let the blackmailer’s spouse out of that room.

Or ELSE.

“I will KILL your family, starting with your beautiful wife, Lydia. What do you think about that, Lydia?”

A muffled scream in the background seems to confirm it.

The spouse? The blackmailer tells her she needs to GET OUT of that room, that she doesn’t know what manner of monster she’s been hooking up with these past several months.

Everett (Jake Abel) is handsome, sure. Younger. But FEAR him, husband Russell (veteran screen heavy Titus Welliver) hisses into the phone. “GET OUT.”

So there’s no faulting the set-up here. Two people with honesty and trust issues, each in the dark about the other’s motives, about to engage in a battle of wits to satisfy their competing agendas.

Sweet talking, oozing charm, trying to figure out if the balcony is something one can escape from, hoping to get a clue as to how Mr. Cuckolded knows what they do the minute that they do it.

Paranoia and tension rising, walls closing in, the ante being upped. The cutting remarks start.

“You were always the more ADVEN-turous one!

But much of that promise and a pretty good cast — Forlani was in “Meet Joe Black” and other big studio pictures back in the ’90s, Abel was in “Love & Mercy,” playing Beach Boys lead-jerk Mike Love, Welliver’s been in everything, from “Law and Order” to “Argo” and “Shaft”) — is frittered away in a movie that generates little empathy and zero suspense.

It’s only 82 minutes long, but it doesn’t feel brisk. The stakes start out plenty high, but the players don’t give a hint of the panic that they’re supposedly trying to hide.

And the resolution is a third act cop-out.

If this screenplay hasn’t been test-run in the theater, it should be. It might make a good stage thriller, with some tweaks. The dialogue lacks punch, the competing agenda “incidents” need to be amped up — one trying to escape, the other desperate to do whatever awful thing it takes to save his family.

This “Affair,” as it stands, is nothing to die for, or even catch a cold over. The execution here, bland direction (a veteran of “The Mirror 2” behind the camera), colorless dialogue and performances pitched as almost mild-mannered (save for Welliver) earn this one a bored shrug.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sexual violence

Cast: Claire Forlani, Titus Welliver, Jake Abel, Nathan Cooper.

Credits: Directed by Victor Garciá, script by Elliot Sand. An Aqute Media/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

Dreamworks’ “Abominable,” not to be confused with Sony’s “Smallfoot” or Laika’s “Missing Link,” is an animated Chinese travelogue that tugs at the heartstrings.

That’s pretty much in lieu of laughs in this fluffy twist on a fantastic beasts and the land of wonders where you find them — Tibet, er, China.

Humor is in such short supply — four chuckles, tops — that you notice things like how the creature doesn’t look like a photo-real Yeti, or abominable snowman. He looks exactly like an animated plush toy.

And then there’s the story, which has a heroic, violin-playing Chinese teen (voiced by Chloe Bennet for English speaking audiences) and her two cousins trying to save the first-ever Yeti specimen captured from the people who captured him.

That would be an obsessed, aged British explorer (Eddie Izzard) and the scientist, apparently American, who did the actual capturing (Sarah Paulson).

The fact that the creature’s humming, which he does as he is about to do something “E.T.” magical, is unmistakably the tone of a Tibetan Monk’s Moan, “throat singing,” is a last bit of eyebrow raising detail.

So Dreamworks has made a movie designed to sell a plush toy and pander to not just the Chinese movie marketplace, but a Chinese worldview — anti-Western, with a dash ot Tibetan cultural (and territorial) appropriation.

The “just a kids’ cartoon” tale is about Yi (Bennet, of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D”), who lives with her mother (Michelle Wong) and Nai Nai (grandmother, voiced by Tsai Chin). She’s a loner, working odd jobs for extra cash after school, not fitting in with her cell-phone-and-fashion-obsessed peers, who include her vain cousin Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor of TV’s” Liv and Maddie”).

Yi’s Me Space is the roof of the apartment building where they all, and younger cousin Peng (Albert Tsai) live. It’s where she stashes her cash, saving for “my big trip across China,” and the post card collection her late father left her. It’s where she plays mournful Chinese folk melodies on the violin he left her.

Then this beast gets out of a vast containment facility and private soldiers with all the gear of an over-equipped police force set out to capture it. But Yi is the one who finds it — “him” — who, she gathers through visual cues, comes from Mount Everest.

Yi backs into the idea of taking him home, taking that “big trip” a lot sooner than she expected.

The cities are neon-and-LED lit metropolises, the rivers, forests and Gobi desert are pretty, if somewhat computer-animated generic, and the giant mountainside Buddha is the Leshan Buddha, a real bucket-list travel destination.

The jokes are of the slapstick variety — belches and vomit and mud and what not.

And lest one think this is just Chinese agitprop, with a Western conspiracy to snatch a Yeti from his natural home — Tibet, which has been occupied by China since the 1950s — there are subversive touches.

The police state nature of the villains’ minions suggest more than a mere private contractor, the joke about keeping a truck driver quiet after a Yeti road accident — “It’s a bribe.” — hints at corruption.

That unmistakable Tibetan monk moan, and casting an ethnic Tibetan (Trainor is the grandson of the Tibetan who was with Sir Edmund Hillary when he was the first to summit Mount Everest) as one of the voices are digs that won’t be repeated in the People’s Republic version of the movie.

“Abominable” isn’t a bad film, and the Chinese violin renders some moments quite touching. But it is dull and some of that comes from the similar animated films that beat it to market over the past year.

And some of it is the result of a script that has too little to it — too little originality, too few incidents, virtually no jokes.

MPAA Rating: PG for some action and mild rude humor

Voice Cast: Chloe Bennett, Albert Tsai, Tenzing Norgay Trainor, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Paulson and James Hong
Credits: Directed by Jill Culton, Todd Wilderman, script by Jill Culton. A Dreamworks/Universal release.

Running time: 1:37

The drawl, the shock of unruly white hair and scraggly beard can lead to the wrong first impression of Jim Allison.

Learning that this Texan, a lifelong blues harp player and committed Willie Nelson fan, has been known to close down his share of honky tonks cements it.

This “sumbitch,” as they say down yonder, is “Just another Texas s—kicker.”

But this salty Texan has fought his share of battles over Creationism intruding into the state’s science curriculum. This UT alumnus has run experiments in labs from Austin to Berkeley to the Scripps Institite.

This s–tkicker has a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. That’s because this sumbitch has come up with a cure for cancer.

“Jim Allison: Breakthrough” tracks Allison’s long career and his solitary path from research to immunotherapy drugs that in many patients, cure cancer.

The film is a portait in dogeddness and going against the current thinking in cancer treatment and research.

Allison lost his mother to cancer, and a family predisposition to the disease helped drive him.

“You ought to at least do something that helps people.”

As he immersed himself in the world of the newly-discovered (while he was in college) “T-cell” antibodies the human body uses to fight disease, and turned that research towards getting T-cells to fight tumors, he was swimming against a flood and the tide of cancer treatment history.

“Breakthrough” reminds us of another big “cure for cancer” using the immune system. Interferon wasn’t a complete bust, but the 1980s “cure” was a significant letdown, in terms of what was promised and what actually resulted.

Still, Allison pushed on, challenging other research, sticking with immunotherapy at the T-cell receptor (molecular) level. He is an iconoclast, colleagues — some of them competitors — say. “Stubborn” is a word they avoid. Not that his brother Murphy does.

“Diamond Head” he was nicknamed, Murphy Allison jokes. Jim’s skull is “the hardest substance known to man.”

He had to be hard-headed. One of Allison’s scientific peers from the world of “peer reviewed science” marvels that “the skepticism was widespread, and Jim experienced it every day.”

That didn’t stop when he and his colleagues had their breakthrough. He had to then turn over his life to finding a company to polish the discovery of something that worked in cancerous mice into a drug fit for human trial. He had to convince Big Pharma to get behind a corner of the field that they had been leery of since Interferon.

Documentarian Bill Haney (“The Price of Sugar”) also tells the story of Sharon Belvin, diagnosed with melanoma at 22, and one of the first people to benefit from the unusually long clinical trial it took for Allison’s “breakthrough” to show results. Her story adds flesh and blood to the cold chalkboard science.

And as a sidebar, Haney — through narrator Woody Harrelson and others — recalls Allison’s early efforts to fend off the intrusion of non-scientific “Creation Science” from being introduced into the Texas curriculum.

The flinty Allison’s blunt, dispassionate take-down could be a model for a two sentence end to that debate.

The film’s third act tracks patient-Blevin’s experiences and the history of Ipilimumab, the antibody Allison’s work developed and got to market — a near-run thing that took years and years.

Some cancer patients survived long enough to have it there for them in their darkest hour. Others did not. The film isn’t great at building suspense, and like the FDA approval process it summarizes, hits a point where it drags a bit.

And whatever the thrills of a call from Sweden might bring, the fact that Woody Harrelson narrates this and Willie Nelson has been mentioned should tip you to a Big Moment that surpasses the Nobel in the finale.

Did I mention Allison’s from Texas?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and brief strong language.

Cast: Jim Allison, Sharon Belvin, Dr. Jedd Wolchock, Malinda Allison, Dr. Max Krummel, Eric Benson, Andrew Pollack, narrated by Woody Harrelson

Credits: Directed by Bill Haney. A Dada Films release.

Running time: 1:29

I laid out a couple of ideas for places to take the high toned soap opera in my review of “Downton Abbey: The Movie.” Now the production team is saying they hope they get another shot at this story, these characters, that Abbey.

I could totally see that happening, and the current film certainly hints at a changing of the guard.

A $31-33 million opening weekend certainly makes that much more likely.

The two ideas from my review? The Great Depression, or move the story forward to World War II.

As Simon Jones, who plays George V in “The Movie,” was in “Brideshead Revisited,” the template British soap opera on which “Downton” is based, and “Brideshead Revisited” is framed within a great estate serving new purposes in World War II, that would make this a nice, neat circle of posh TV soaps with great casts and vast audiences.

It’s always been an act of revenge, this “Between Two Ferns” mock chat show that Zach Galfianakis brought to Funny or Die.com

He has his revenge on a universe of folks who can’t pronounce his damned name. He gets even for all the inane and downright insulting questions he’s been asked since popping out of “The Hangover” movies, a Carolina comic with a character actor’s gut under that ever-unruly mop of hair.

But here’s a little Netflix money to celebrate the eleven years of inviting celebrities to sit with him, “Between Two Ferns,” to hear him get their names wrong — to ask questions that are more challenges, insults delivered at a “Comedy Central Roast.”

A little back story about the cable access channel “in Flinch, N.C.,” where he does the show, a flimsy “road trip” premise, 82 minutes delivered to the embattled streaming giant, cash their check. Badabing badaboom.

Guess what? The concept, mostly viewed in short snippets on Funny or Die, still works. He opens with his funniest new bit, a classic assault on Matthew “Mack? Muck? Mc-CON aw-way.”

“I notice you’re wearing a shirt. Is everything all right?”

He wants to compare scars with Keanu Reeves, the actor’s from a motorcycle accident, Zach’s acquired while “walking out on the movie ‘Lakehouse.'”

It’s all praise for an actor who is “just a man with below average intelligence.”

“Have you ever considered researching a character who was taking acting lessons?”

Galifianakis has a deadpan way of hitting stars with these zingers that is so disarming that we think he’s got permission to be that mean. Which he does. It’s implied. Just as it was for the chat show spoof this borrows from, Martin Short’s “Jiminy Glick.”

But stay through the closing credits. The outtakes show us spit takes as Paul Rudd hears the “advice to young actors who want to hide their Jewishness as well as you have” for the first time.

The framing story? Zach’s dream, to host a network talk show, can be realized if he, his producer, sound mixer and camerman (Lauren Lapkus, Ryan Gaul, Jiavani Linayao) can dash across country, catching an attention-desperate Jon Hamm signing autographs in a church, Tessa Thompson in her element, Peter Dinklage in the lap of overpaid luxury, piling up interviews for a “Two Ferns” movie for Funny or Die emperor Will Ferrell. 

So Brie Larson has to sit through a “question” about her superhero movie — “‘Captain Marvel?’ Boy, they really have stopped trying,” Benedict Cumberbatch perfects his side-eye, Tiffany Haddish lets us hear her real (maybe hungover), unguarded laugh.

And Chrissy Teigen comes on to Zach in a bar, only to have her husband John Legend storm in and charmingly DEMAND to be on the show. Here’s the best insult aimed at him.

“Can I get an autograph? For my mom? Because she wants to give it to HER mom!”

It’s not much of a “Movie,” but the bottom line is that Galifianakis, the interviews and those being subjected to them are still funny. Enjoy a beverage while watching and you’ll be doing your own spit takes.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, lots of profanity

Cast: Zach Galifianakis, Brie Larson, Rashida Jones, Matthew McConaughey, Paul Rudd, Tessa Thompson, Lauren Lapkus, Ryan Gaul, Jiavani Linayao

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Aukerman. A Funny or Die/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

Kudos to whoever is serving his or her time as Trace Adkins’ agent. He’s getting a lot of screen work, considering what he has to offer film viewers.

Kevin Makely stars in this, Bruce Dern has another role where he gets to lie down, and yes, Mira Sorvino makes her Western debut in this well-scrubbed (1950s TV Western “authenticity”) gunslinger’s delight.

“Badlands” doesn’t look like much, and opens Nov. 1.

Here’s a thriller that begins badly, descends into dull and rallies for a third act filled with “You’re kidding, right?”

In “Deviant Love,” “Walking Dead” and “Dallas” reboot Emma Bell stars as a woman haunted by her childhood, rejected by her husband and vulnerable to Mr. Wrong, whose beady-eyed intensity she confuses for…love?

The onetime Miss Northern California returns to her hometown and her parents’ home when she finds her her husband’s been cheating.

She has a tweenage son in tow, and is doing “all right, for a scorned woman.”

No worries. She’s got her parents (Gail O’Grady, Corbin Timbrook) for support, and sister Casey (Kate Miner) has her back.

Only her dad’s making noises about “forgiving” the cheating spouse. Mom might be wavering, too.

Then, she stumbles into this fellow Whit (Nick Ballard of TV’s “The Haves and the Have Nots”), not once, but twice.

She’s only separated, but he’s charming. Heck, who wouldn’t enjoy swimming-through-piranhas first date dinner conversation?

Sending their glasses back to the kitchen, hoping they’ll be returned “washed, this time?” That’s a little nutty.

Dad’s “I don’t like him” falls on deaf ears, because Dad’s got no credibility in this matter, after sticking up for prickly soon-to-be-ex Rick  (Robert Adamson).

The film’s weird prologue has given away the game. Not that we care.  “Deviant Love” — it HAS to be trending because of that sexy lie of a title — is meant to be a picture where we’re two steps ahead of the heroine in jeopardy.

That almost never works. And it doesn’t here. The players can’t make the  “surprises” surprising, suspense never enters the picture and the climax isn’t worthy of the use of the word in this context.

So it’s a big ol’raspberry for actress-turned-screenwriter Leah McKendrick and veteran TV movie director (“Munchausen by Internet” is an upcoming credit) Michael Feifer. They had a title here, and nothing more.

MPAA Rating: TV-14:

Cast: Emma Bell, Nick Ballard

Credits: Directed by Michael Feifer, script by Leah McKendrick. A Marvista/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

The first wide release kiddie cartoon of the fall?

It’s my Saturday outing.

“Abominable” opens Sept. 27.

For several years, just outside of Monroe, Georgia at a bridge on Moore’s Ford Road, they’ve been reenacting a horrific moment from the area’s past.

On the anniversary of a 1946 lynching, black actors playing the four victims (one a pregnant woman) and whites playing the lynch mob, recreate a monstrous, barbaric unsolved crime, one that came on the heels of a visit by a virulently racist, KKK loving gubernatorial candidate.

They stage this awful thing every year, activists say, to keep its memory alive and perhaps stir someone to tell what they know so that the criminals names can be made public.

So far, in Monroe, where white folks interviewed in the film “Always in Season” lament the reenactment and gripe about “leaving the past alone,” nobody’s talked.

Nobody is talking up in Bladenboro, N.C., either. That’s where in August of 2014 a black teenager and popular football player, 17 year-old Lennon Lee Lacy, was found hanging from a swing-set in a playground just off one of the main roads in town.

As family members, a local mortician, a lawyer and others relate, his death was instantly labeled a suicide.

A photographer who worked for the medical examiner had his camera confiscated. The crime scene wasn’t secured and the family waited for days while the inept, incompetent or willfully obtuse local police department was “closed,” and did nothing.

“Not a hate crime,” the local police chief asserts. But Claudia Lacy remembers Lennon’s grave being desecrated mere days after the funeral.

The belts Lennon was found hanging from were not his, his mother adds.

Lacy’s family demands answers. Filmmaker Jacqueline Olive’s “Always in Season” cannot provide them.

But in 89 minutes of historical analysis, eyewitness testimony and Danny Glover reading newspaper accounts, letters and “an invitation” to the planned lynching of Claude Neal, a Marianna Florida man accused (with no evidence linking him directly to the crime) in the disappearance of a young white woman in 1934, we’re given plenty of reasons to wonder about this teenager’s death thanks to its parallels to the crimes that came before it.

Academic lynching experts such as Sherilynn Ifill of the NAACP note the general nature of the crimes — grisly mutilations of the victims while they were still living, bodies displayed in public places, often photographed with a sometimes grinning, celebrating white mob in the shot.

Sweeping these events, common from the end of the Civil War until the late 1950s, under the rug of “the past” does not do them justice, Ifill says. Local people alive back then saying “We didn’t know” is a lie.

The photographs and historical record “condemn the white community,” she adds. “They DID know.”

The Claude Neal lynching may be the most glaring proof of that. Newspapers ran an Associated Press account of the crime which labeled it, in appearance, as “A Hanging Bee,” a play on rural America’s tradition of community engagement through “quilting bees” and the like.

The daughter of a Klan official recalls, as a little girl, the many rallies and cross burnings she was taken to. There were plenty of “other kids to play with” at the events, she remembers. Even at the one where a man was lynched, her mother covering her mouth to keep her from crying out in horror.

The white grandson of a Ku Klux Klan member who once infiltrated the Klan on behalf of Klan watch groups and later volunteered to play a member of the Monroe lynch mob in reenactments declares that “We all need to keep doing what we can if we think we can make a difference.”

Filmmaker Olive saves some of the possible evidence that Lennon Lacy was lynched for the third act, and the denouement — demands for state and Federal investigation of the case — provides nobody with closure.

But the contrasts in Bladenboro laid out in the film’s opening, older white folks saying “Everybody gets along,” the local historical society president, the mayor and others using “an ‘Andy Griffith’ feel” to describe the place (one black actor appeared in the entire run of “The Andy Griffith Show”), could not be more stark. Images of Confederate flags hanging from garages and “Blue Lives Matter” signs parked in many a white yard signal the divide.

The local newspaper editor has prominently played-up anything new in the case that’s come to light, but confesses that with a tiny staff and in a small town, where the police department itself isn’t equipped, professionally or temperamentally, to dig into this, there’s nothing he can do short of keeping the story alive.

And still, Claudia Lacy’s words stick with you.

“Think about it, if it was your son or daughter…How far would you go? How soon would you get it go?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence images

Cast: Claudia Lacy, Pierre Lacy, William J. Barber II, the voice of Danny Glover

Credits: Directed by Jacqueline Olive, script by Don Bernier, Jacqueline Olive. A Multitude Films/POV release.

Running time: 1:29

Judas Priest, what CENTURY was “Golden Boy” filmed in?

I don’t have to ask when it was conceived, as that is obvious and the answer is “In Ancient Times.”

This injuriously eye-rolling gay coming-of-age melodrama harks back to the early years of Queer Cinema, when every tale — even the sensitive ones — had the feel of soft-core porn and the arch absurdity of “We’ve never written a screenplay before, so here’s some CLICHES.”

I could limit this review to a single “tell” — two words of dialogue that are both so dated and numbingly overused that you’d think nobody with an ear would think to ever put them in any movie ever again, especially one with a gay setting.

“Fresh meat!”

That’s what the smirking men and sexually omnivorous women purr when James Myers (co-writer Mark Elias) first starts showing up at the randier sort of parties in L.A.

Yes, 1977 is calling. Yes, I’ll hold.

James Myers hears his name a LOT in this inane, pokey tale of a Carolina “boy” (of 28) who hits bottom, only to be rescued by all the many of gay and gay friendly folk — pretty much everybody he meets — in and around West Hollywood.

They practically swoon in his presence, picking him up out of the gutter, inviting him home, giving him work and “access” to all the coolest parties and gayest clubs. Homeless? Not any more.

As the star is also the co-writer, one could point to a little self-delusion in the crafting of how he is described by all he meets — “boy” when he’s not that boyish, a looker when he’s basically Rami Malek without the Freddie Mercury teeth, strung-out looking sunken eyes and pallid skin in a city where the sun is shining all the time.

The character’s supposed to be an innocent when we meet him, a liquor store delivery “boy” whose name is blurted out by every single gay customer he meets.

“James Myers!”

One of those is the semi-mysterious man of means “CQ” (Lex Medlin), who always has a party going on.

“Jesus boy, you make misery so proud!”

Another is “Houston” (Logan Donovan), a creature of the streets who flirts, nicknames him Captain Liquor, then just “CL.” And who points out after James is fired from the liquor store, “A guy like you could clean up at the park!”

Yeah, he’s suggesting James Myers, “CL,” become a hooker. It is CQ who rescues James Myers from that life, takes him in, no sexual strings attached, and eventually has him make his own “deliveries.”

Houston stays in the picture, and as James is clothed, coiffed and car’d by Nutrasweet Sugar Daddy CQ, he also meets Josh (Paul Culos), a photographer who takes him in after he’s passed out on the street, vomiting from a night of sex and “X.”

This isn’t just dated, it’s a gay fairytale.

Houston and Josh become the magnets tugging the hard-partying, sex-with-anybody-who-asks James in two different directions. Josh is a stand-up guy, plays gay basketball in a gay basketball league and photographs himself, shirtless, every morning.

Because gay men and narcissism are the movie stereotype that never dies.

One of the older men who likes having “pretty boys” around is played by Armin Shimerman, long-shorn of the Dumbo ears he wore on “Star Trek”: Deep Space Nine.”

As CQ’s demands shift and James grows more careless with his “work,” dealing with more and more dangerous people with these deliveries, as he submits to the sexual advances of more women and men, “Golden Boy” gets around to an odd and pejorative “message” it wants to send.

Gay men, this movie says, are all hustlers at heart. Sex is more transactional than romantic, and it really is all about “opportunity” in that Gore Vidal sense.

“Never pass up the chance to have sex or appear on television,” the writer declared.

I’m not gay, but I’ve been watching what came to be labeled “Queer Cinema” since “Lianna,” only catching up to the pre-history films in the genre at festivals in later years.

And I think “Golden Boy” is a giant step backwards, clumsy and silly and dumb and dull.

The “fresh meat” here spoiled around the time Reagan left the White House.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with bloody violence, drug abuse, sex and nudity

Cast: Mark Elias, Lex Medlin, Logan Donovan, Kimberly Westbrooke, Paul Culos and Armin Shimerman.

Credits: Directed by Stoney Westmoreland, script by Mark Elias and Jonathan Browning. A DFM Creative release.

Running time: 1:42