Movie Nation

Let’s throw all those declarations that “Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach’s dissection of a divorce, is unbearably “real” because of its “honesty.”

It’s not a docu-drama. It’s theatrical, melodramatic, over-the-top and no more representative of the end of a marriage than say a Woody Allen movie set in the same showbiz family milieu, “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

“Real” suggests a lot of people can vouch for it out of experience. The people here are unrepresentative in the extreme. So that’s not true. Perhaps my sister and brother critics should consider that.

No movie with a a bi-coastal bourgeois acting community couple, a “TV pilot” and “MacArthur (genius) Grant,” blood-spilled on a court-ordered “evaluator” visit to an apartment where one parent might get custody, where generations of one family have agents and the husband can remember dialogue and the lyrics from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” and feels the confidence and freedom to get up and belt “Being Alive” out when he hears the pianist in a New York bar tinkle out the first notes, is “real” is any sense for the vast majority of us.

And I’m not just speaking for “flyover America” when I say that. But you’re not going to hear anybody in Roanoke or Grand Forks or Orlando defend themselves to their lawyer with this sentence.

“I had never come alive myself. I was just feeding his aliveness!”

But it is touching at times, and it does find and broach some emotional truths. And Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, as Nicole and Charlie, are gloriously alive on the screen and can feel ripped from real life, even in their over-the-top moments.

It’s an indulgent dramedy, with hilariously venal lawyers (Laura Dern, Ray Liotta), $25,000 retainer fees and a sweeter, sensitive practitioner of “family law” who can’t help coming off as a doddering, wussy pushover (Alan Alda).

The script has a mediator who can’t mediate (Robert Smigel), scattered moments of “counseling” or “family law” speak, elaborate “theater people” Halloween costumes, on-set gossips and an acting family — Julie Haggerty plays Nicole’s dizzy actress-mom, Merrit Wever (“Nurse Jackie”) her sister — that stages and rehearses the moment sister Cassie “serves” Charlie his divorce papers.

And when Charlie arrives, he literally breaks down “the scene” to uncover its intent, how he’s supposed to react.

The uglier truth about divorce, divorced from the theatrics, is that it can be abrupt and emotional without lawyers, or drawn-out and emotional and expensive with lawyers.

I’d wager that there is rarely the sort of wall-punching post-filing shout-off depicted here. And the safe money is on this one last truth. There is no closure.

Baumbach frames this “Story” in lovely, sad scenes. We begin with the mediator trying to get each to remember everything they fell in love with about the other, and failing to convince the two to read what we’ve heard in voice-over narration out loud to each other.

“She’s a good citizen… She can drive a stick…She’s a mother who plays, really plays.”

“He cries easily in movies…He dresses well. He never looks embarrassing, very hard for a man.”

Yes, there are backhanded compliments mixed in. We know this isn’t going to change direction. Ever.

And the finale, no spoiler here, is heartbreaking as that “not reading aloud” declaration of virtues was never corrected.

This is the heightened reality of melodrama and comedy, where the distracted pitbull lawyer (Liotta) consulted because “she” has hired his female equivalent (Dern) thunders “If we start from a place that’s reasonable, and THEY start from a place of CRAZY, when we settle we’ll be somewhere between reasonable and CRAZY.”

Still, as with many failing marriages, the in-laws have fallen for the spouse being kicked out of the family.

“You have to STOP loving him, Mom. You can’t be friends with him any more.”

Mom can’t swear on “my dead gay husband” that she’ll do that. But hey, it’s a movie.

That, as you certainly have picked up by now, is my big gripe here. Whatever Baumbach, who has been through his own (public) divorce is working through in this script, the “truths” we can sink our teeth into and relate to are few and far between.

Yes, mediators “take sides.” Plenty of other movies and TV shows got to this first. Yes, there is a “loser” in even the “friendliest” divorces. Dern and Liotta score points breaking down — again (other movies, TV shows beat them to it) — California’s whiplash-inducing family law code biases.

The son Charlie and Nicole share (Azhy Robertson) becomes a tyrannical tyke, acting out — also choosing sides.

But the artifice of the world this is set in, the cash that even the supposedly “struggling” can bring to bear in this abstract showbiz world, was a turn-off to me.

I have a little experience of divorce, others and my own. For my money, HBO’s “Divorce” is funnier and more realistic and representative, if less emotional and operatic.

“Marriage Story” is almost funny enough and touching just often enough to endorse. It’s good, but it’s no “Scenes from a Marriage” or “Husbands and Wives” or hell, “Company,” for that matter. It’s just Netflixable.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and sexual references.

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Julie Haggerty, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Merritt Wever, Robert Smigel and Wallace Shawn.

Credits: Written and directed by Noah Baumbach. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:17

Sometimes as a journalist you catch a glimpse of something when you’re talking to a child actor.

Maybe Macaulay Culkin is too interested in “performing,” distracting you as the interviewer. River Phoenix? Antic, manic, “wired” you decide later.

You hear the stories, the “stage parents,” the “growing up too fast” and worse. But some, like Amanda Bynes, are too put together to ever give a hint. Until later. Corey Feldman? He only gave away the game as an adult.

I remember chatting up the very young Natalie Portman and her contemporary, Mia Kirshner, and wondering just what kinds of parents thought it was a good idea to put these girls in sexually-charged roles in their early, early teens? Maybe they’ll tell us in their books, like Sally Field.

But Shia LaBeouf hid it better than most of them. He was earnest, lots of eye-contact, making the sale (talking about “Holes” and then “The Greatest Game Ever Played” and later “Disturbia”). His patter was hyped-up, breathless. And it only sputtered and deflected when you mentioned the p-word — “parents.” He had his work-arounds ready to recite, there. Not that he ever, for a second, came over as dishonest. Diplomatic or candid, always eager, wanting-to-be-liked to the point of being confrontational, eyes on the prize — a dazzling talent.

But the short sprint to stardom, anchoring franchise pictures, working working working — because when he wasn’t working, he was turning up in the tabloids, drunk or worse — gave everybody pause. Someday, you’d think, somebody’s going to put this young man on a couch.

LaBeouf decided to do that with a movie. “Honey Boy” is his searing, unsentimental statement on that life, that “career” and the guy who put him where he is today, the good and the bad of it. He scripted this semi-autobiographical drama about coming to terms with a traumatic childhood of grueling, dangerous work, the skills passed on and the awful parenting that got him where he is today.

And LaBeouf plays a version of his own father in it.

Three towering performances make “Honey Boy” one of the best pictures of the year. There’s LaBeouf, creating an “origin story” through the man who schooled him and pushed him, a wound-up fast-talking substance-abusing ex-con with anger issues, bitterness issues and an outlet for all that rage and disappointment — his kid.

Noah Jupe of “Wonder,” “A Quiet Place” and most recently “Ford v. Ferrari,” is Otis, a mop-topped spitting image of young Shia, smoking and swearing at 12, and already trying to declare his independence from a careless father who drills him and works him like the meal ticket he is.

As the adult Otis Lucas Hedges channels Shia, vocal mannerisms to physical tics (intense eye contact, followed by eyes cast down in fury), all mastered in a performance of hurry, panic and temper.

We meet Otis (Hedges) fully formed, already in a franchise (resembling “Transformers”), doing a yanked-back-by-an-explosion stunt over and over again, an unpleasant experience that his wince gives away he’s been suffering through for a decade.

Still, he has it all, right? It’s just that he’s alone, tormented, grasping at connections.

It all goes wrong for Otis, distracted and drunk behind the wheel. That, too, is a force of habit. And he’s sent to rehab because one judge has had enough of it. It is there, amid the “hug yourself” and “trust” and “primal scream” exercises that he faces his inquisitor, a therapist (Laura San Giacomo of “Pretty Woman”).

She’s not hearing his glib “I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex!” Classic Shia, by the way. Their sessions hunt for “exposures.” She flat out tells the rich punk movie star that she sees “clear signs of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).”

And that’s how we meet the 12 year-old Otis, living in a fleabag motel across the courtyard from hookers, riding to and from the set on the back of father James’ (LaBeouf) motorcycle, jolted awake so that he won’t tumble off in traffic.

This is a bracing, maddening love-hate relationship, a man who breathlessly declares, “I’m your biggest CHEERLEADER, Honey Boy” in one moment, and belittles the kid in every other.

Otis wearily looks over the call-sheet to see when he needs to be on set and what scenes he’s shooting tomorrow. James just wants the envelope it came in because “they put the per diem in there.”

We get a glimpse of the set where Otis is put through the ringer, his distracted Dad rarely looking out for him, backstage in his Army Vet “POW-MIA” biker vest, John Lennon glasses and bandana, trying out his pick-up lines on a cute production assistant.

As adult Otis pieces these moments together in the fictive “present” (2005), younger Otis (1995) is trying to bond with a Big Brothers of America set up by his never-seen mom. Clifton Collins, Jr. plays this guy, all about baseball games and role-modeling, resented and “tested” by crazy-jerk James at every oopportunity.

But for all James’ bad traits and parenting lapses, all his tirades aimed at his estranged wife, we see him coaching the kid in comedy because “It’s ALL clowning.” He was a rodeo clown, once upon a time. He pushes his son to re-do a scene until he believes it, or “until you make me laugh.”

We see James in AA meetings, hear him remembering prison, and see Otis left alone, making friends with the young prostitute (FKA Twigs) in the motel, struggling to either break free from this dead weight in his life, or at least put the old man in his place.

“You’re my employee!”

Jupe lets us see the apple, sensitive, but straining to fall further from the tree, trapped by circumstances and family history, despite his growing success. LaBeouf pulls out all the stops, holds nothing back — love, jealousy, addiction and other weaknesses — as that tree.

And Hedges brings it all home, brilliantly encompassing all that these past experiences would produce; a talented, uninhibited and very polished performer who cannot keep it all together and bottled up the moment “that’s a wrap” is pronounced on a film set.

Whatever first-time feature director Alma Har’el brought to this, just keeping her eye on  the “effect” in light of all the “causes” is a signal contribution. Maybe she just, as the old saying goes, “stayed out of their way.” But the film’s grit and tone are unerring. And there’s a lot to be said of a filmmaker who knows how to let a great cast get down to business and tell a story that’s as raw as this.

Child actors occasionally tell their stories, after retirement. And the documentary “The Hollywood Complex” from a few years back captured some of the behind-the-scenes desperation of families gambling all on turning their children into stars and meal-tickets.

“Honey Boy” just tells us one story, with judgement and compassion, with an honesty that surprises and moves us. And it leaves it to us to decide if it was all worth it, if indeed the end justifies the means. You will never look at a child’s performance in a film or TV show the same way after this.

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

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA Twigs, Clifton Collins Jr., Martin Starr and Laura San Giacomo.

Credits: Directed by Alma Har’el, script by Shia LaBeouf.  An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:34

I am an audience of one at an afternoon matinee of “Playmobil: The Movie.” I am in one of the busiest cinemas in the gigantic Regal Cinemas chain. What does the rest of North America know, or at least suspect, about this movie that I do not?

The toys are “the brand that’s NOT Lego,” for starters. It’s a Canadian production, a veteran of Disney animation directed it, the music’s not by anybody you ever heard of and it’s distributed by up-and-coming distributor STX (“Hustlers”). There are some names — not really BIG names — in the voice cast.

But there aren’t enough cute moments to even cut a decent trailer or TV ad out of it.

Still, for a few minutes, as we roll through a live-action prologue, as Anya Taylor-Joy sings about all the places she’ll go, as Marla, backpacking with just her passport and undiscussed cash reserves, the charm sets in.

Can’t let the cops who show up at the door to tell Marla and bratty brother Charlie (Ryan S. Hill) “there’s been an accident” be a buzzkill. That’s right, the parents die-off in the prologue.

A few years later, Anya’s dream has been deferred. She’s got a job that requires a name-tag and a burden — raising Charlie. He (now played by Gabriel Bateman) is prone to sneaking out, and ducking into a Toy Expo, he loses himself in a gigantic Playmobil display. But it’s only when Marla shows up that they are magically transformed into plastic figures (he’s a Viking, she’s just a plain Plastic Jane version of herself) and hurled into the many worlds made possible by Playmobil toys.

A battle between Vikings kicks things off, but there’s Pompei and Ancient Rome, Quantum City, the Old West’s Rattlesnake Junction, with pirates, knights, fairies (singer Meghan Trainor) and a suave spy, Rex Dasher (Daniel Radcliffe).

“It’s OK to be excited to see me! You’re only human!”

Charlie’s kidnapped, by pirates no less (Kenan Thompson voices one). The “plot” has Marla pursing them from Playmobil world to Playmobil world, often with the help of a “magic hay” food truck driver voiced by Jim Gaffigan. The pirates? What a bunch of cretins!

“What be a cretin?”

“Arrr, it’s uh BREAD ye put in a salad!”

The are villains, such as Emperor Maximus (Adam Lambert).

“What do we have here?”

Your WORST nightmare!

“You’re not a piñata full-a BEES!”

The animation’s not bad, the songs aren’t much, the jokes are even less. Tiny, tiny tykes might find something to like about it.

But long-review-short here — it’s too dull to sit through, too noisy to sleep through.

MPAA Rating: PG for action/peril and some language

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Gabriel Bateman, and the voices of Jim Gaffigan, Daniel Radcliffe, Meghan Trainor, Adam Lambert and Kenan Thompson

Credits: Directed by Lino DiSalvo, script by Blaise Hemingway, Greg Erb and Jason Oremland. An STX release.

Running time: 1:39

Julia Garner has the title role in this thriller about an overlooked, bullied and discriminated against personal assistant to Matthew McFadyen.

It opens Jan. 31, early Feb in most cities.

The bad news? Bleecker Street has it. The witness protection program of film distribution will ensure no one sees it. As always.

I was an audience of one for a matinee showing of STX’s “The Playmobil Movie” Friday.

A toy-based musical fantasy with Anya Taylor whatsit and Jim Gaffigan and Daniel Radcliffe voicing characters, it cost $40 million and didn’t sell enough tickets Friday to cover the catering at the voice-over recording studio. A coupe of hundred thousand.

Ouch.

It should clear $1 million. But will it?

Review to come shortly.

All the animation movie money is going to “Frozen 2,” another $40 mill weekend.

“Knives Out” another $15, “Neighborhood” and “Ford v Ferrari” are dueling for third in the low teens, “Dark Waters” cracks the top six.

https://deadline.com/2019/12/frozen-2-already-past-300m-leading-dreary-december-weekend-with-40m-playmobil-coming-apart-1202802388/

Some skeptical critic friends and I were speculating about the Death March that is “The Irishman.” Netflix viewing figures, via Nielsen, show over 17 million dove into Scorsese’s last long walk on a short mob movie pier. And maybe 700,000 finished it.

“Too long?” “Seen this with (mostly) the same cast, only better?”“Hero” of the piece is neither likeable nor credible? DeNiro can’t be de-aged to look a believable 33?

For whatever reason, most aren’t compelled ton stick with it. Maybe they’re getting to it eventually.

But keep giving this recycled indulgent, slack surface skate of a Made Man Movie “Best Picture of the year” honors. Maybe that’ll help.

“Sequestrada” is a lyrical docudrama whose advertising tag-line could very easily be, “Well, we didn’t see THAT coming.”

It’s a Brazilian/American co-production about the Amazon, the indigenous people who live there and a dam that’s being pushed by the government and financed largely by Wall Street.

It uses news footage to set up the story, the years-long struggle to put the Belo Monte dam right in the middle of indigenous tribal lands in the upper Amazon. A 13 year-old girl from the Arana people, Kamodjara Xipaia, poetically narrates the folklore and story of her tribe of 104 — “I am number 85” (in Portuguese, with English subtitles) she tells us, in one of her river-swimming idylls. “We don’t want to leave.”

And then we meet those conspiring to uproot them.

Tom Vogel (Tim Blake Nelson) is a New York “fixer” for the investment company anxious to see that this project move forward. Over 140 dams are planned, and any delay could give the whole world the chance to see how destructive this could be to the locals, and to the Earth’s climate. Dams along the rivers of the Earth’s lungs — the rainforest — are a catastrophic environmental mistake.

Tom is rushed onto a plane by Grace (Gretchen Mol), promising “I’ll be gentle.” He’s just got to sweet talk the government official in charge of making a final report on the project.

“I’ve dealt with guys like this in more countries than you can name!”

The “guy” here is Roberto (Marcelo Olinto), a bureaucrat with the indigenous agency FUNIA who may have his orders from above to “make this happen.” But when Tom sidles up to him in a bar, Roberto gets his back up.

“You’re devoting your life to a TRAGEDY! For you, this has nothing to do with the truth!”

Tom’s efforts to lobby the Arana directly just show him as a slightly-less-menacing version of “The Ugly American.” No deal.

Kamodjara’s people are part of the protests that make the news. “Stop Belo Monte or we will stop Brazil!” That’s why she and her family visit the closest small city, Altamira. And that’s how she becomes separated from her people, a tribe Roberto admires (to Tom) as “pure.”

The main “didn’t see that coming” in this Sabrina McCormick/Soopum Sohn film is given away in the title. “Sequestrada” translates as “kidnapped.” Kamadjara finds herself being trafficked, and the film turns into a scheming, double-crossing thriller as we fret over her fate and just who will be blamed for it.

That twist in the plot isn’t the only one, but it is the driving force of the film and is quite melodramatic. Nelson’s Vogel gets a lot closer to this situation than anyone who doesn’t speak Portugeuse would want. But he’s a good actor who doesn’t come close to convincing us that he’s afraid he’s about to die.

Young Kamodjara projects the proper innocence in scenes that threaten to turn creepy and criminal at any moment. Yes, that’s also melodramatic, and it contributes to the film losing track of the big message it wants to deliver and the bigger story it wants to tell.

That can be as frustrating as the film’s bizarre sympathies. Who exactly do we root for here?

It’s also frustratingly subtitled with white lettering, which considering the washed-out backgrounds, white clothes, etc., leaves a non-Portugeuse speaker at a loss in catching the nuances of the threats, etc. I thought this argument was settled in the early ’90s. YELLOW lettering for subtitles works best.

Those complaints aside, the slices-of-life that “Sequestrada” shows us as it makes its arguments and counter-arguments (“Hospitals, schools, medicine, houses” are promised to the Arana.) sell the picture and tell its story.

If this rainforest bespoiling melodrama leaves the viewer unsatisfied, that’s because there is no happy ending here. You can’t help but think as you’re leaving the film that everything you saw here was doomed, save for the bureaucrats and Wall Street types. Everything green and everyone living in tha green is under threat.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, human trafficking

Cast: Kamodjara Xipaia, Tim Blake Nelson, Marcelo Olinto and Gretchen Mol

Credits: Written and directed by Sabrina McCormick and Soopum Sohn. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:36

Thanksgiving leftovers are what your local multiplex will be dining out on this first weekend of December.

Variety and others are predicting another $40 million or so for Disney’s animated blockbuster, the “Frozen” sequel. Box Office Mojo, linked below, thinks $43 and change will fatten Disney’s bottom line by midnight Sunday.

“Knives Out” is going great guns, but $13 to $14 are the top end of its second week projections.

“Ford v Ferrari” is quietly making bankeven as it misses out on the early awards buzz it deserves. It and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” ar looking for an $8 million or so weekend.

“Dark Waters” opens wide. Mark Ruffalo’s lawyer fights poisoning chemical company picture is also one of the year’s best, and has become the former Hulk’s cause. He even testified before Congress about water supplies tainted by “forever chemicals.” Go see the movie, prove these $4 to $5 million guesses wrong.

“The Playmobil Movie” smells like a bomb, a cheesy attempt to grab some of that “Lego Movie” loot for a different toy. It won’t clear $5, and probably will be lucky to manage half of that. That’s one I have to catch opening day as STX didn’t preview screen it in my market.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed3262120964/?ref_=bo_hm_hp

I am guessing this autobiographical film about Shia LaBeouf will take me back to the first time I interviewed him at the Toronto Film Festival way back when.

Antic, smart, wired, worldwide and maybe…18?

I’ll have to look that up. Every interview afterwards was the same. And blunt. I had to get the newspaper lawyer to get me out of testifying in a suit brought against a movie he made, a suit partly based on something he tol me in an interview.

Who says feel-good tear-jerkers can’t have a little edge?

“Wish Man” may be the story of the Arizona police officer who founded theMake-a-Wish Foundation, the quintessence of “heartwarming” as subject matter. But it’s got violence, dirty cops and alcohol abuse, to go along with flashbacks to a traumatized childhood.

Hell, it’s even got profanity. You know how cops talk.

The squishy, emotional stuff is intercut with the story of a highway patrolman being framed for beating a suspect he most certainly never beat. But in British writer-director Theo Davies’ messy, meandering but heartfelt and righteous film, it all points Officer Frank Shankwitz (Andrew Steel) toward the path he eventually took — making the dying wishes of children come true.

The film opens on Frank’s 1950s awful childhood of poverty, bullying and neglect. His mother (Fay Masterson) drags him from place to place, trailer to hovel, just to keep him out of the reach of Frank’s father.

Her motivations, the film suggests, are purely venal. She just wants to deny her ex (Jason Gerhardt) access to his son. Even though he’s from Chicago, Dad wears cowboy hats and boots. And he teaches young Frank “There’s only one way to make a promise — a cowboy’s binding contract!”

That’s a handshake exchanged over a fence, showing a man’s as good as his word.

But handshake or no, it’s mom who sneaks them out of town again, abandoning the family dog as she does. There has GOT to be more to this story than this, but never mind.

Decades later, it’s 1980 and Frank has become an Arizona Highway Patrolman. He’s a womanizer who gets phone numbers for letting pretty speeders off with a warning, a honky tonk barfly used to making women jump when he barks, “C’mere!”

Kitty Carlisle (not the famous one) doesn’t respond well to that. But events will throw the two of them at each other soon enough.

We see the drunk driving traffic stop that derails Frank’s career (the formidable Dale Dickey plays the foul-mouthed, two-fisted driver). And later we see the accident that makes his heart stop for three minutes.

That scene, by the way, with an allegedly trained officer on-site choosing to let a PASSERBY administer CPR, is the dumbest moment in the movie.

Frank’s sergeant (Robert Pine) assigns new-secretary-hire Kitty (Kirby Bliss Blanton) to stay with skull-fractured Frank until he’s out of the woods and on the road to recovery.

Yeah, she thought that was out of line, even in 1980.

The story of Frank’s departmental and legal difficulties plays out in the 1980 fictive “present,” as snippets of many bad stops in the travels of his childhood pop up to remind us of how rough Frank always had it. As a boy, one diner owner (Danny Trejo) might fire him, with the angry cook delivering a terrible beating afterwards. But another diner owner (Steven Michael Quezada) comes along to take him on, feed him and teach him his second and most important life lesson.

“Remember, someone needs help, you give it to him!”

All of which points to that 1980 moment when Larry Wilcox, playing an old friend of the department, shows up and gives us that “first wish,” a dying child who is obsessed with the TV show “CHiPs.” Yeah, that’s cute, casting Wilcox in that part.  

“Wish Man” unfolds like a movie with multiple personality disorder. The film it compares to in my mind is that TV movie about the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, “My Name is Bill W.” But there’s this whole violent and corrupt Frank Whaley/Tom Sizemore subplot, playing bad cops who cover for each other and implicate Frank in an incident of police brutality that he didn’t commit.

And there’s the love story, which drifts from afterthought to perfunctory. As I said at the outset, the picture is just “messy.” Writer-director Davies has only one other feature credit, “Five Hour Friends” starring Tom Sizemore. His inexperience at wrestliing this cluttered script into something tighter and more coherent shows.

But Steel, a Sam Rockwell look-alike, does a decent job of making this cop no angel. Frank’s change from ill-tempered hell-raiser to granter of wishes is thrust upon him, although the events of his life are meant to show this as fated-to-be.

It’s no surprise that’s some well-known players didn’t hesitate to sign on to a film about such a righteous subject — Whaley, Sizemore, Trejo, Dickey and Pine are joined, in the latter acts, by Bruce Davison. All give good value.

I can’t say “Wish Man” is a great film, or even a particularly good one. But it has heart, Steel & Co. make it likeable and writer-director Davies makes its emotional payoff pay off.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, with violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Andrew Steel, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Fay Masterson, Frank Whaley, Tom Sizemore, Dale Dickey, Robert Pine, Danny Trejo, and Bruce Davison

Credits: Written and directed by Theo Davies.  A Vision Time/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48