Movie Nation

The path to “The World We Make” is paved with patronizing, heavy-handed and somewhat retro good intentions.

It’s a modern day inter-racial romance set in that corner of suburban Nashville that hasn’t turned a calendar page since, oh, 1975. The film stumbles all over the place when it’s not stumbling over its own awkard, clumsy attempts to make something modern that emerges from a seriously retrograde place.

“World We Make” has faith-based filmmakers behind it, and it is to their eternal embarassment, if not shame, that they treat this idea as if the Bob Jones University lawsuits over interracial dating was happening today, and not in the 1970s.

Yes, a lot of people think that way and it might be worth revisiting the subject in a serious way. But “erious” should not be confused with “mature” or smart in this picture, whose “modern” veneer will feel modern only to those who missed decades of memos on the state of the culture.

Rose Reid (“I’m Not Ashamed”) and Caleb Castille (“Woodlawn”) are the two very attractive stars in this melodrama set in Tennessee horse country.

Jubilee Grove (Reid) goes by “Lee” for obvious reasons, a rising high school senior who teaches kids about horses and riding at the family horse (hobby) farm, an operation she runs with her older brother, Casey (Richard Kohnke). Dad (Kevin Sizemore) bought the place for their mom, and since she died, he’s burrowed into classic car restoration.

Lee’s life hasn’t found its purpose, though a therapist who uses horses with her patients might be a hint to her future.

Casey, though, has come up with the idea that they’ll take their two favorite horses and travel cross-country, old school and on horseback, an “epic challenge,” something that could render them into what their dad has counseled them to be — “a person of distinction.”

But Casey is killed in a car wreck. His high school pal, Jordan (Castille) comes by to help out, shoveling out stalls and heaving “hay cubes.” And quite abruptly, a friendship between the college athlete and the ponytailed high school beauty turns into something more.

It’s an indication of how tin-eared the three writers behind this are that they have Lee suggest Jordan play basketball with her little brother.

Why, because I’m black?

Well, maybe because you’re an ATHLETE?

The whole point of such an exchange is playing up black “touchiness” about the subject of race, and devaluing black victimhood. It’s so patronizing as to make you wince.

There’s no problem from Lee’s dad or brother. But Jordan’s father (Gregory Alan Williams) can’t be told about this romance . And the pretty teen from his neighborhood (Candace West) is here to lecture Lee on how “woke” she isn’t, and how dating this guy won’t “east your white guilt.”

West, of “Nobody’s Fool,” practically grits her teeth, having to spout such stupid lines.

There are promising ingredients to the story, Jordan’s business school/”statistically speaking” brains, Lee’s grasping at anyone who both reminds her of her brother and allows her to get away without properly mourning him.

The leads don’t set off much in the line of sparks, which is just as well. Classmates, local business owners, fellow diners in a restaurant and when push-comes-to-shove, a local cop, all are profiling Jordan and giving Lee an eyeful of the “different worlds” they come from and their different experience of the world they share.

That’s as “progressive” as “The World We Make” gets. Lee spouting nonsense like “We’re a lot more progressive than that. We’ve had a black president.” will get a lot of head-nodding from viewers who hear versions of those lines on Fox News 24/7.

“Is this what it’s always going to be like?” feels like a line from a ’70s movie, and a lot more could have been made out of the fact that it isn’t.

Yes, racism thrives, especially in small towns in the South. But such relationships barely reach the raised-eyebrow level of outrage among anyone under 70, these days.

Moments like that make “The World We Make” hopelessly out of date, and even more out of date for the fact that the folks making it don’t realize that in the first place.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material and brief violence

Cast: Rose Reid, Caleb Castille, Gregory Alan Williams, Kevin Sizemore, Candace West

Credits. Directed by Brian Baugh, script by Brian Baugh, Chris Dowling, George D. Escobar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

“Groupers” is a farce about kidnapping two homophobic high school bullies and forcing them to prove their “thesis” — that homosexuality, “sexual proclivity,” is a choice.

If it is, they can “choose” to dabble in it same sex romance, and voila, go free.

It begins as a chatty, catty and not that amusing or harrowing hostage tale that falls well short of “thriller,” and devolves into something less.

A woman (Nicole Dambro) lures two young jocks (Peter Mayer-Klepchick, Cameron Duckett) into a van, where she gasses them and then ensnares them in an elaborate rope trap in an empty pool in an abandoned suburban LA subdivision.

It’s an “experiment,” she tells these two — cunning Brad (Mayer-Klepchick) and doltish Dylan (Duckett). She’ll record their actions, initiate “phases” to the experiment to egg (threaten) them on, and perhaps humiliate them in front of the world.

“Have you maimed me? Maimed US?”

I had thoughts of “Maybe we’re heading into ‘Hard Candy’ territory,” an early Ellen Page revenge on a rapist fantasy. But no.

We’re just settling into for this myopic three-character “play,” listening to Meg’s lectures on the nature of the trap, the “secrets” one of them keeps on his phone, the power dynamic of her controlling them with tasers as she taunts their narrow-mindedness, when other characters start showing up. And with few exceptions, each new addition waters down whatever point the movie is reaching for and fails to add anything funny to the proceedings.

The three person dynamic has discourses on “trickle-down abuse” of “hate crimes” the kids have been perpetuating on somebody at school, and the uncomfortable fact that Meg is “hate criming the hate criminals!”

And in extreme close-ups, the two boys — tied so tightly together — turn on each other.

“Are you ALWAYS like this, when you’re not high or drunk or both?”

Then, a glib gay stereotype shows up, joking about kidnapping being “number seven on my bucket list” and local criminal/squatters and the movie’s tongue-in-cheek tone goes straight out the window in favor of flailing, failed farce.

Points about racism and homophobia are pounded home, and of the new additions, only Terrance Wentz makes much of an impression, a stereotypical bulked-up black hoodlum who has some surprising opinions and attitudes on the subject at hand, and a funny way with every line he delivers.

“Oh, that’s savage. No need for savagery!”

When his character declares, “You mutha——s don’t know how to end s–t!” he is talking directly to his writer-director.

Which is to say after showing signs of comic life in the third act, the whole enterprise resolves itself in the most half-baked way you can imagine.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, homophobic slurs

Cast: Nicole Dambro, Peter Mayer-Klepchick, Cameron Duckett, Terrance Wentz, Jesse Pudles, Travis Stanberry, Max Reed III and Brian Ioakimedes

Credits: Written and directed by Anderson Cowan. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:49

Netflix has had better luck with teen comedies than with post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

But Oct. 24, perhaps this mashup farce will change all that.

Office romances, especially those between boss and employee, have made a a rapid transition from “frowned upon” by HR to repellant and condemnable in the “#MeToo” era. They’re positively fraught, these days.

Thus, the misfortune that is “Can You Keep a Secret?” It was never going to be all that funny and romantic. But showing up at this point in time, this wan rom-com should give anybody pause before buying the rights to further works by British novelist Sophie Kinsella. She did “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” and if she isn’t setting back feminism with every trip to the keyboard, her work is certainly aging poorly.

Alexandra Daddario of “Baywatch” plays Emma, a young marketing exec who tumbles for the founder of her organic health food/drink company AFTER drunkenly spilling her guts to him as her fellow passenger on a flight she was sure was doomed. DOOMED.

Just turbulence, dear.

Her panicked confession? She’s too young to die. She’s never gotten a tattoo, never had kids, and “I don’t even KNOW that I have a G-spot!” “I wish I could pee, standing up!” And “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love, or been loved!”

That’s a lot to unload on a stranger, who turns out to be your boss’s boss when he shows up at the office the next day.

Jack (Tyler Hoechlin, who is Clark Kent on TV’s “Flash” and “Arrow”) proceeds to use info from that confession to re-arrange the power structure in that office, and to finish off her relationship to the quite-effeminate Connor (David Ebert).

We might not notice that power imbalance so much if they had real chemistry, if Daddario’s bubbly klutz act was matched with something other than humorless hunkiness and nearly-charmless stubble.

Several people in the story have “secrets” — a lawyer-roommate (Sunita Mani) who seems to be bedding a lot of guys from the office, the boss (Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black”) who might not have told anybody she used to identify as male.

Nothing much is made of any of these characters or their secrets. The workplace is a parade of inappropriately public conversations, sleep-with-the-boss shaming, an HR nightmare that isn’t a funny nightmare.

Daddario mugs a bit, takes her best shot at “perky” and “clumsy” and “cute” and never completely gives up on the script, or lets us see that she has. She’s almost all alone in this regard.

There’s almost always a spark in such movies, usually provided with the one supporting player who finds room to be funny. Here, it comes from Kimiko Glenn, who plays the cynical, man-wise, hustlerwear roomie, Gemma.

Gemma has the few funny lines. “You need to get even. I know a guy…” And coaching Emma on the phone, “Yes, bitch! Step into your POWER!”

Glenn is all alone in giggleland in “Can You Keep a Secret?”

And just when you give up on the intended comedy ever coming together, it dives into something edgier. But that flip-flop is only a tease for a movie that never was, and probably never was going to be funnier than the one they ended up making, which is as charmless as it is laughless.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Alexandra  Daddario, Tyler Hoechin, Sunita Mani and Laverne Cox

Credits: Directed by Elise Duran, script by Peter Hutchings, based on a Sophie Kinsella novel.

Credits: A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

It’s been mostly miss or miss, with hits pretty rare, since Tiffany Haddish broke out with “Girls’ Trip.”

Pairing her up with Rose Byrne, under-rated as a comedienne, but damned funny in “Neighbors” and “Bridesmaids” and “Get Him to the Greek,” is a smart play.

And Salma Hayek as badassed and predatory? That’s a slam dunk.

This is a Jan. 10 release, meaning this movie will be competing for attention against blockbusters and Oscar contenders, mostly films released over Christmas.

Paramount is either A) saying not to expect much here, lowering expectations or B) counter-programming against “prestige” pictures with a little lowdown lady-powered comedy that could make some noise.

She’s having a moment, albeit in tiny films.

But pairing up Alexandra D. with Tyler Hoechlin could pay dividends.

Here’s an excruciating foot-dragger of a comedy about how an Italian immigrant makes his way to New York where he then makes his mark, as a waiter — inventing an ice cream dessert when the kitchen runs out of pastries.

The “American Fango” — “mud” in Italian — of the title is invented in the film’s first scene. “Excruciating” kicks in as the film struggles, through long, unfunny and uninteresting flashbacks, to get us back to that “beginning.”

Francesco (Brando Boniver) was a struggling actor in Italy who figures he’ll try his luck in America when a pretty blonde he met on a set (Emily Jackson) invites him to LA.

But the sex and sand of Malibu is just a tease, as Christine suddenly announces she’s got a film to shoot in India. For the first but not the last time, handsome Francesco, who is a mouth-watering temptation to every American woman he meets, is left in the lurch by a lady.

The tedious middle acts have our hero stumbling from apartment to Days Inn, from Venice Beach to Brooklyn, where he is alternately helped, and let down, by various actresses whom he’s met on sets in Rome.

“American women, they change their mind like they change their hairstyle!” his corny actor pal Massimo (Alexander Mannara) opines, because you know actors can’t think of anything funny to say without somebody else writing it for them.

I was almost amused by pretty boy Francesco’s shock SHOCK at discovering Christine and then other actresses are self-absorbed. Just like him.

The movie makes banal points about New York actors helping each other more than L.A. actors do, about actors needing waiting jobs so desperately that there’s an “agent of waiters” (Gaetano Iacono).

Keep an eye out for the actress who “ghosts” Francesco the hardest. Kathy (Samantha Scaffidi) has a married, wealthy boyfriend who keeps disappointing her. Whatever Tony (Brian Vincent) lacks in charm or faithfulness, he is the ONLY amusing character in “American Fango.”

He’s a stereotype, a goombah who warns Francesco away from Kathy, who is letting him crash on her sofa.

“I put about $200,000 into this girl over the past year,” is how he starts. And “Keep your little ziti in cold water” is how he gets to the point.

So many scenes do nothing but delay Francesco’s hiring as an inept but handsome waiter in a New York Italian restaurant. So many scenes go on and on past their possible (not really) “payoff.”

The performances start with promise, but the script limits the players because every character is more colorless than the one before.

And the finale is as soggy a noodle as every waterlogged, droopy moment that’s preceded it.

There have been so many movies about coming to America and struggling to get on one’s feet, it’d be a shame to waste more than a few minutes on “American Fango” confirming my review. This one never gets out of its own way.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations

Cast: Brando Boniver, Samantha Scaffidi, Emily Jackson, Maggie Wagner, Victor Colicchio

Credits: Directed by Gabriele Altobelli, script by Gabriele Altobelli and Brittany McComas. An Artist Connection/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:44

“It Chapter 2” may have underwhelmed critics, but it lost about 55% of its opening take, sndthus earned another $40.7 million this weekend.

“The Goldfinch” had Oscar buzz…until studio people and then critics got to see the finished product. Perfectly watchable, ungainly, well acted. And it opened to a middling to poor $2.6 million.

“Hustlers” is the big “winner” of the weekend, a personal (non animated) bet for Jennifer Lopez and a best ever opening for STX Studios, over $33 million.

“The Sound of Silence” had an impressve per screen weekend in limited release.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/

“The Goldfinch” is a sprawling, ungainly but perfectly watchable mess of a movie, one of those novel adaptations where one wishes they’d taken the time to edit that beast into something tighter before the cameras rolled.

Director John Crowley (“Brooklyn”) & Co. treated Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel the way Warner Brothers treated the works of J.K. Rowling — as if they’d be pilloried for leaving ANYthing out.

But let’s blame Amazon Studios for that, in this case. A 2:24 running time picture fits the co-producing company’s streaming priorities, and they no doubt signed on with visions of Oscar nominations dancing in their heads.

The high-end sheen, the sparkling cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson and Sarah Paulson? That’s the Warners touch.

It’s a tale of loss and grief, guilt and regret, of longing and corruption and “You never know what’s going to change your future.”

And that “sheen?” It bubbles up as texture and subtext, a world of art and antiques, Beethoven and bespoke suits, all swirling around a tragedy at a museum where the 17th century painting by Carel Fabritius that gives the film its title once hung.

Tweenage Theo (Oakes Fegley of “Pete’s Dragon,” very impressive) is taken to the home of a family he once knew, because he can think of no one else after the shock. He was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother. An explosion killed her and many others, and as his one-time actor/father skipped town some time before, Theo’s at a loss.

The authorities make a compelling case to Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman), but one gets the sense she’d have said “Yes” in any event. There’s an old money remove about her, old money that married old money and wound up in an antiques-packed Manhattan townhouse with three children and an Upper Class Twit (“Do you sail, Theo?”) husband (Boyd Gaines). That doesn’t mean she lacks compassion.

Theo has night terrors and is wracked by guilt. His voice-over narration has told us “It was my fault,” and he believes it. But the Barbours indulge him, and he finds another father figure in the antiques restorer (Jeffrey Wright) whom he visits to deliver something another victim of the explosion begged him to pass on.

Hobie lives above the shop, and he’s taken in the ward of his now-dead partner. Theo remembers redheaded Pippa (Aimee Laurence) from the museum. Now, she’s recovering and they take comfort in each other’s company, even though they’re strangers.

We catch a glimpse of “bespoke suit” adult Theo (Ansel Elgort) long before the child Theo’s promising future comes undone as his Vegas hustler dad (Luke Wilson, in a nasty, layered turn) shows up, “51 days sober!” and with his new bartender wife (Sarah Paulson, brittle, blowsy and coarse). They spirit Theo from his world of cloistered privilege and private school to a city of foreclosures, lowlifes and public school, where he falls in with Ukranian transplant Boris (Finn Wolfhard).

The film’s middle acts, the “Vegas Years,” sketch in how Theo recovers from that and loops his way back to New York, back to antiques and back to Hobie and the Barbours.

There are traces of “Great Expectations,” of the closed world of J.D. Salinger’s fiction, and of movies such as “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and “Woman in Gold” in this film, all interesting ingredients in a film which alternately feels like a bloated feature film or a truncated mini-series.

Like director Crowley’s “Brooklyn,” the world portrayed here has the scale and melodrama of a Thackery novel, with many plot twists as obvious as a soap opera. I love the very literary device of suggesting how money knows money, and how everybody in the New York chapters is connected. And if you’re not a born member of that exclusive circle, you’re immediately under suspicion.

But there are unnecessary characters and scenes that don’t drive the narrative here. The big mystery at its heart doesn’t demand resolution, but we can’t have puzzles that aren’t solved, can we?

And the third act is as over-the-top as the first two are understated, which the characters remain even when great and terrible things are happening.

Some of us love being ensconced in a universe of Austenesque/”Antiques Roadshow” quiet and money, of finer things with history and beauty, where tweens can discuss Beethoven until their influences shift to the kid who knows what Vicodin and vodka will do to you, and wants somebody to take an acid trip with him.

We few, we not-easily-bored few, can catch “The Goldfinch” in a theater and revel in unerringly modulated performances — everybody is so softspoken that the verbal explosions have alarming violence about them — and a world we might envy, or at least resent a little bit.

Everybody else can wait to see it on a streaming service. I hear Prime is a good deal, so long as you use it to buy books and fine kitchenware, too.

MPAA Rating:R for drug use and language

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, Sarah Paulson, Oakes Fegley, Ashleigh Cummings, Finn Wolfhard

Credits: Directed by John Crowley, script by Peter Straughan, based on the Donna Tartt novel . A Warner Brothers/Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:29

“Trauma is a Time Machine” is a film title worth parsing, considering as a stand-alone aphorism.

“Trauma” implies something we don’t just “get over.” And as it plays over and over in the mind, it does indeed become a time machine. Life can stand still as the victim is enveloped in shock, depression, anger and regret over the event that has been so personally devastating.

Writer-director Angelica Zollo makes her feature film debut an adaptation of her own short film of that title, about rape and its after-effects on the victim.

It’s a self-consciously minimalist and “arty” production — low-budget, narrow in its point of view, mostly on a single set, although it opens up for a few outside scenes in the third act.

That myopia adds to the viewers’ shared paranoia with the devastated victim, given as much “harrowing” as actress Augie Duke can bring to the part.

The crime itself itself is mostly hidden from view as the screen goes black –in flashes — and we hear “Can you stop? STOP it! STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT,” an avalanche of “No no no nos” followed by a mouth-muffled scream.

It’s what Helen, a photographer, remembers, what keeps her drinking, what traps her in bed narrating her tale, in the Third Person, in very screen-writerly lines.

“Disappointment just lay there with her.”

The voice mails from her mother — “You refuse to sleep….Just tell me that you’re safe.” — fall on deaf ears. All she hears in her rape, and her rapist’s” “You caused this” and “What are you gonna TELL people? Who’s going to BELIEVE you?”

This wasn’t “date rape.” This was rape within what was a relationship. That’s what breaks her.

Helen glances out the window of her city apartment, time passes and seasons change. Other men share her company, but she’s drunk a lot of the time, so those “dates” don’t go well.

She lies in the tub or showers, always in her underwear. She drunkenly dances by herself, chops her hair off.

And being an artist, she tries to make sense of her state through her art — snapshots of her body parts. She impersonates her attacker’s slouched too-cool-for-you pose, his walk. “His shirts were always wrinkled. He was such a beautiful mess.”

That, and the moment she surrenders to the temptation of an iron and burns herself is all part of this “time machine” of processing what she’s dealing with.

“It was just a go at feeling something, anything at all.”

Zollo goes to some pains to make her film opaque, not vague as to what it’s about but obscuring the proceedings by shooting it in black and white, by showing us three unknown/mostly-unnamed males of the “hip art crowd” type at us (the oldest is Helen’s attacker, and he shaves his head on impulse, at one point, for reasons we can only guess).

The woman cast as Helen’s mother (Elizabeth A. Davis) is plainly Duke’s contemporary.

And then there’s the quasi-symbolic arrival of a European figure in silver body paint (Ella Loudon) who might be Helen’s spirit guide through the darkness, or just an artist who gives her an idea for a new way to dress in public.

“I was like you once. But then I found my armor!”

Those meditative musings don’t add clarity, any more than having Helen sit and start watching a VHS comedy of the 1930s South Seas vamp morality tale, “Rain” does. Another hint that Helen blames herself for her rape, perhaps?

“Trauma is a Time Machine” is a film whose weighty subject matter doesn’t demand this sort of obscurant treatment. It’s self-conscious to a fault.

But it’s intriguing “film festival movie” approach gets your attention and forces you to engage with it on its level, which is an achievement in its own right.

And Duke’s brooding, broken turn in the leading role is a game attempt at making us feel what Helen is feeling, or rather not feeling, after the trauma that numbed her to the world.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Augie Duke, Gabe Fazio, Max Duane, Joseph Reiver

Credits: Written and directed by Angelica Zollo. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:22