Movie Nation

Oh yes, we’re going back under the sea for a few Spongebob shenanigans, Patrick pratfalls etc. Next May.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is a biographical essay in sweetness and light.

Tom Hanks playing the most beloved TV personality America has ever produced, “Mister Rogers,” may be the epitome of cinematic “on the nose” casting. A “national treasure portraying a national treasure” and all that.

But that’s precisely what is called for in this moving portrait not just of the man, but of his impact on those who came into contact with him in person, and the generations who started life watching him on TV.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me” director Marielle Heller and her screenwriter frame this portait within a fictionalized account of a cynical magazine journalist’s attempt to profile “a living saint,” and falling under the spell of a man who was a veritable “human whisperer.” That would be the soft-spoken Presbyterian pastor with an early childhood development degree, Fred Rogers.

On TV, he preached kindness, compassion, forgiveness and patience. He looked into the camera, as Hanks’ Rogers recalls, and imagined that “one child” he was talking to. And if that child, like him, got frustrated setting up a tent (as Fred does), here’s Mister Rogers showing you how to deal with frustration.

The fictional conceit here is pure manipulation. Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys of “The Americans”) is a hard-hitting investigative reporter assigned by his editor (Christine Lahti) to do a 400 word “puff piece” on Mister Rogers for a 1998 Esquire Magazine issue on “Heroes.”

He gets to write about “Someone good, for a change.” “We’ll see,” he mutters.

Vogel is a journalistic pitbull who chews up most of those he writes about. Rogers quietly and kindly regards him, leaves a lot of long pauses in their chat, and turns the interview around, probing Vogel’s open psychic wound, the reason he shows up in Pittsburgh for their conversation with a cut nose and the beginnings of a black eye.

Vogel has estranged father (Oscar winner Chris Cooper) issues, and a hair trigger rage about the subject. How mad do you have to be to get testy with Fred Rogers? Mad enough to walk out on the interview when Rogers gently turns the questioning on him?

It’s an obvious conceit, the “angry journalist” cliche. The whole movie is framed within it, with Rogers taping his show, dragging Vogel into it (in his dreams) for little childhood lessons about what to do when you’re feeling mad and “forgiveness.” His puppets pitch in. He does what Rogers was famous for doing, taking an interest and kindly devoting all his attention to the person he was with, even though he’s just met them.

The real magazine writer was Tom Junod, and the best reason to change his name for the movie was that all of this stuff is invented hokum. But it works, a motion picture parable built on lessons we’ve forgotten in the rage of adulthood in a divisive age.

Hanks isn’t as wiry and doesn’t attempt the high-pitched voice that made Rogers the target of generations of comedians. But he absolutely masters the hypnotic, soft-spoken calm Rogers projected, a calm that pervaded the set of his show and could seem to follow him into the world.

Lovely scenes in a local Pittsburgh restaurant where the other diners lapse into dead silence so that they can overhear Fred’s zen-like calmness exercise and the homilies that he passes on to Lloyd, or when Vogel and Rogers catch a New York subway, only to be serenaded by the other passengers, starting with the children, with generations of adults chiming in, with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s” theme song, give the picture its heart.

It’s not just what he meant to us as individuals, it’s seeing what he meant to all of those around us that gets to you.

Rhys makes a marvelously bitter, broken “professional” — new to fatherhood, a bit of an emotional chore for his wife (Susan Kelechi Watson of “This is Us”).

Cooper is a properly inappropriate, clueless and self-centered Dad who can’t figure out why his son will never, ever forgive him for the past.

And “Just Shoot Me” veteran Enrico Colantoni underplays the disapproving TV show publicist who may have warned Fred away from speaking to this hatchet man, Vogel, but who isn’t surprised his boss, who scowled at being called “a living saint,” turns the reporter into a puddle of feelings, just by sizing him up and being himself — empathy personified.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” isn’t as weepy and sentimental as the fine documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” a film that conjured up not just Rogers’ persona and role in our lives, but childhood itself for millions of viewers. “Beautiful Day” is still a splendid synthesis of the essence of the man and his values, a teacher who never stopped teaching while he was alive, and via another Oscar-worthy performance by Tom Hanks, is teaching us still.

MPAA Rating: PG, (fisticuffs, alcohol abuse)
Cast: Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Enrico Colantoni, Christine Lahti and Chris Cooper.

Credits: Directed by Marielle Heller, script by Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster, inspired by Tom Junod’s 1998 article for Esquire Magazine. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 1:48

Scary stuff. Horror from Luxemburg?

A 2020 release with Udo Kier and an imperiled young woman learning about her troubling history.

A Hollywood starlet is radicalized, with cause, in this biopic.

Stewart plays the “Breathless” who found screen immortality overseas, and her cause in African American radical politics in the US.

Anthony Mackie, Zazie Beetz, Colm Meaney and Stephen Root also star.

Limited prospects for this one as she was praised but the movie panned in festivals. Amazon made it, so it will live on online.

“Night Sweats” is a nervy indie thriller that never quite overcomes the malnutrition of its budget.

I mean, kudos for casting and shooting it in New York, on the fly, for a just (unconfirmed) $200,000. The story and the most of the action beats, and some of the performances, don’t give away the game.

Sure, we can tell the characters from The Centers for Disease Control are wearing haz-mat suits from an auto body shop paint booth, and are tooling around in a white van with only plastic sheeting in the back as disease “containment.”

A restaurant and apartments all look real and lived-in (and probably are), and if the various offices you want to know aren’t convincing, roll all the action into streets, stairwells and entryways. Which they pretty much did.

That kind of inventive thinking was a hallmark of Orson Welles’ post-Hollywood movies. But the cheapness (Frank Zappa spelled it “Cheepnis” in his ode to no-budget thrillers) can’t help but get in the way in a story about contagion and conspiracy in New York city.

“Night Sweats” arrives in New York with Yuri (Kyle DeSpiegler), a Boulder Colorado skateboarder who moves in with his old pal Jake (John Francomacaro).

He’s barely had time to adjust and find coffeeshop work, when he meets Jake’s friend, waitress-who-wants-to-be-an actress MK (Mary Elaine Ramsey). And things are just getting interesting with her when Jake starts vomiting and slips into a seizure.

Next thing they know, Jake is dead. The flippant medical examiner (Allison Mackie) suspects poisoning. And as Yuri frantically tries to detox the apartment (covering his face with a bandana, because SAFETY FIRST), he starts to puzzle over what really happened.

The EMT (Brett Azar) who barged in, mid-seizure, claiming he heard what was going on “next door” was odd. Him fleeing before the “real” EMTs arrived was odder.

And there was this company Jake worked for, a start-up called True Healing, where he videotaped survivors of trauma for a website’s video library, “data” that apparently has value to Big Pharma.

As the medical examiner expresses alarm at what she’s finding, Yuri sees connections to True Healing and decides to go undercover, taking Jake’s old job, “interviewing” these trauma survivors on video. His boss (John Wesley Shipp of “The Flash”) is VERY touchy about how these interviews should go.

“Stick to the G– D—-d SCRIPT!”

Whatever happened to Jake, it’s happening to others. Could Yuri catch it? MK?

And what is UP with that EMT, who seems to show up –by motorcycle — every time somebody gets sick?

Writer-director Andrew Lyman-Clarke finesses a simple, conspiracy-minded script with a lot of disorienting close-ups, little tricks of having the players run down the street holding a camera on themselves at chest level.

Yuri’s “interviews” with trauma victims have some edge. DeSpiegler’s reactions to what he’s seeing run hot to cold. Sometime, we buy that he’s frantic and fearful. Other times, his callousness and lack of self-preservation defies the logic of the situation.

There’s one funny scene having to do with scaring some answers out of True Healing’s resident germaphobe.

But the suspense is often undercut by the cheapness. Characters say they’re calling for cops who never arrive, vehicles, costumes and haz-mat suits look so cheap they can’t be anything the “real” agency or city bureaucracy would put out for bids, with layers of specifications, and equip themselves with.

So even people who might be what they say they are lack visual credibility. The viewer suspects everyone, because the filmmakers didn’t have the money to give characters authority in their costume. Or hire people to play cops.

The germ of a good idea is here, the dialogue isn’t awful even if the finale kind of is.’ The biggest “name” in the cast is the only one who goes too far over the top. And the simple effects — nothing’s cheaper than vomiting up whatever soup they fed the actors — come off well enough.

You can’t grade on the curve, so no praising “Night Sweats” for its budget. Stick to that rule and what we’re evaluating here is an intriguing cut-rate thriller that (unfortunately) looks it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual content, substance abuse, mild violence and profanity

Cast:  Kyle DeSpiegler, Mary Elaine Ramsey, Allison Mackie and John Wesley Shipp

Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Lyman-Clarke. A Witness release.

Running time: 1:39

No, I’m not the last critic in America to get to see this one.

Close.

Love Tom. Love Mister Rogers.

Bringing tissues.

“Most Likely to Succeed” is an ambitious, smart and affecting documentary that follows four disparate high school over-achievers, kids who collected that title in their respective alma maters, to see how life worked out for them in the decade after graduation.

It may be smaller in scale and scope than the gold standard for such films, Michael Apted’s classic “7-Up,” (and “28-Up,” etc.) series of British films. But Pamela Littky’s four subjects, followed for ten years, give us a healthy dose of white privilege and a taste of the struggle that people who don’t start out on second or third base in life face on the “road to success.”

And what’s striking about this quartet — blonde Sarah, the Florida preacher’s kid, Quidrela (“Quay”) and Charles (“Disco”), both black teens from Detroit, and California boy Peter, the son of two college professors — is how much alike they are.

The arc of the film shows them to be go-getters, piling up awards, club responsibilities, good grades and ambitions at 18. And no matter what false starts or pitfalls life gives them, that shared character trait was still obvious a decade later.

Littky, an on-point off-camera questioner, can’t quite avoid stereotypes, even in her selection of subjects. Two black kids from Detroit — one raised by a single mom, the other abandoned by drug addled parents? That seems too on-the-nose. But they’ve already made up their minds to rise above their childhoods, be the first in either family to go to college.

With her vocal fry, and the vast wardrobe that she moves into the Gainesville dorm, Sarah could easily be set up as “the villain” of the piece, the one who gets on your nerves, with so much of what she achieves seemingly arriving on a selection of silver platters.

But there was work going on as she carved out FIVE semesters abroad during her University of Florida career, a Fullbright Scholarship, a fluency in Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic. Yeah, she wanted to be in the foreign service, maybe Secretary of State someday. At 18. Her focus in not straying far from that course is impressive.

Her love life? “I’m not the kind of girl who will follow a man” says it all.

Quay has some vague notions about “travel” and not wanting “a regular job” at 18. She changes colleges before she even starts school, and starts to work out what she can do with her interests in children and healthcare.

Peter? A musician who is self-aware enough to realize he’s not self-aware, a tad “on the spectrum” perhaps, he starts Ivy League Brown University wishing “I felt emotions more strongly” and “realizing my own ignorance about other people.” He studies Chinese, talks of teaching and ends up exactly where very smart white guys with Ivy League degrees who aren’t the most sensitive to human emotions go.

Charles, abandoned by his parents, only wants to get married someday, maybe become a physical therapist or athletic trainer.

“Life happens” to them over the next decade — a marriage, a first, second and third romance, travel and graduation, first jobs and first careers changing into second or third jobs and different careers. Grad school, a pet chihuahua, funerals.

Who will figure out that white privilege means “opportunities (were) almost handed to me,” who will see a dream deferred and who will want to “Pay if forward?”

I like Littky’s mix of elements used to tell these stories, catching up with some via cell phone video they shoot themselves, social media updates (re-created, typed out on screen). Her questions, heard here and there, elicit great responses.

“I hear you’ve got a boyfriend” to one. “You guys are SERIOUS” to another.

Her film reinforces the thesis of Apted’s British TV films, which tested Aristotle’s theory that “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” These young people were already formed when Littky settled on them as subjects. They might fall into college partying a little too hard, divorce, quit jobs and lose their way here and there.

But they cannot escape the grounded, adaptive and achieving or overchieving kids they were at 18. That can be taken as heartening, because it suggests at least some color-blindness, at least a window they’ve all already half-crawled through at 18, no matter what circumstances stood in their way or gave them a head start before then.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Peter Hayes, Sarah Kaiser-Cross, Quidrela Lewis, Charles Rider.

Credits: Directed by Pamela Littky. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:36

Yes, we all knew director John Ford was at work, running a photographic unit on the middle of the battle.

But deadline.com reminds us it was even more harrowing than the sequences he is depicted in the movie portray.

As It Turns Out, ‘Midway’s Bravura John Ford Moment Was Understated https://t.co/YfLAbm33rB https://t.co/zYgqPPFhM9 https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1194647877059923970?s=20

What do the limp holiday romance “Last Christmas” and the potentially romantic thriller “The Good Liar” have in common?

Both films are built on revelations that aren’t the “BIG REVEALS” the filmmakers were hoping for. And both hinge on relationships that have the frosted feel of unreality to them.

At least “Liar,” based on the Nicholas Searle novel, serves up the pleasures of two of Britain’s finest co-starring and carrying a movie at the stage of their careers when supporting roles make up the bulk of their work. They give us flashes of gusto, here and there, as this Bill Condon (“Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls”) film skips towards a third act in which the whole of what came before is pretty much undone.

Ian McKellen has the title role, and the early moments — beginning under the credits — show him and Helen Mirren as two lonely, seemingly well-off seniors (OAPs, “old age pensioners” as they say in the UK) making a love connection via “Distinctive Dating,” a matchmaking website.

It’s 2009, we are told, and each click their checkboxes — “Non smoker,” “Don’t drink” — we see him taking another drag off his cigarette and her sipping a pinot grigio. Yes, we all fib on such websites.

“Brian” and “Estelle” meet for dinner, with diplomatic pleasantries (she’s knocking back a martini) and — in short order — tiny confessions. He holds honesty as of paramount import, and there’s been “a deception on my part.” His real name is Roy.

Not to worry. Dating websites invite white lies. Her real name is Betty. Can’t let that stand in the way of romance, can we?

But as we follow Roy, we see the fake name is merely the tip of the iceberg. He’s got this big business deal with “Russians seeking to join the English Investor class.” Something to do with a fast overseas real estate flip. There are backers who’ve been invited to participate. Roy and partner Vincent (Jim Carter of “Downton Abbey”) lay it all out.

We don’t have to be told this is “dodgy” to know this is dodgy. And as you look at all of those assembled for this bank transfer business, the moviegoers’ mind weighs just one question.

“Who, exactly, is the ‘mark,’ in this con?”

That, unfortunately, spills too easily over to the romantic side of the story. Roy gallops down the street, only to affect a limp when he staggers into his dinners and other meetings with Betty. He finds himself invited to stay over, regards her suburban tract house with disdain every time her back is turned, even as he, to all intents and purposes, abruptly moves in.

It’s not just her scholar grandson (Russell Tovey) who is instantly suspicious. Because for all Roy’s twinkling, there’s something about Betty’s haste in inviting him to stay, the passive nature of the character, her willingness to hear any proposal, that instantly alters the dynamic to the viewer.

You can’t help but wonder, again, “Who is the mark and who the hustler?”

(L-R) IAN McKELLEN as Roy Courtnay and HELEN MIRREN as Betty McLeish in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and New Line Cinema’s drama “THE GOOD LIAR,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

The performances and the stakes involved keep us engaged as we’re shown the depths of Roy’s deception and just how ruthless he can be. McKellen has always made a great villain, and this fellow is one of his most interesting — dapper, charming, cunning and quick on his feet when “the game” is afoot.

Mirren’s role is so underwritten and underplayed early on that we can’t help but leap ahead in guessing why she’s top billed. She has her scenes and some delicious moments. Later.

Then the third act arrives, and the flashbacks — long narrated anecdotes — take over. They revisit the distant past, serve up differing versions of that past and how it relates to who and what Roy is today, and just how shocked Betty will be at the admissions.

There’s one clever bit of business in all that. But for the most part, the picture’s believability falls to pieces here. The hustles stopped being cute earlier, and the denouement pummels the picture into something grimmer.

And “The Good Liar” lapses into being “The Poor” one in a movie that’s become both more far-fetched and utterly conventional.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, and for language and brief nudity

Cast: Helen Mirren, Ian McKellen, Jim Carter and Russell Tovey

Credits: Directed by Bill Condon. script by  Jeffrey Hatcher, based on the Nicholas Searle novel. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:49

Every August, the world’s greatest pickers, strummers and fiddlers of “Old Time” and bluegrass music gather in Galax, Virginia, to compete, perform, jam through the night and drink corn liquor out of Mason jars.

It’s called the Old Fiddler’s Convention, and it is the Bayreuth of Bluegrass, one of the the longest running music festivals of its kind.

But for her gloriously tuneful documentary on it, filmmaker Julie Simone and Co. focused on young fiddlers, flat-pickers, mandolinists and virtuosos of the upright bass.

“Fiddlin'” is about tradition, a dying way of life, a small Southern town that’s lost the textile and furniture manufacturing the were its lifeblood for decades, but clung to its music. The film’s focus eventually settles on showing us a genre of string music that just like classical music, puts great stock in passing down its repertoire, musicianship and performance style, generation to generation, face to face.

Simone and her crew camped out at the 80th edition of the convention, back in 2015. And from the looks of the film, they began with no clear idea of who to focus on, just determined to get a lot of music on film, and musicians talking about it.

Touch on the history. Aim for inclusion, reaching out to old timers and youngsters, old men and boys, young women and girls, a lesbian flat-picker and a black ex-NFL player who has taken up the mandolin.

“Fiddlin'” gets at the difference between “old time” music, with its Scots-Irish and African roots, and the “fancy” offshoot popularized by Bill Monroe and generations that came after him — bluegrass. The schism between the two, good-natured as it is, hath not healed.

“If God had meant for people to play bluegrass,” one picker grins and growls, “he’d have put their fingernails on th’other side of their fingers!”

As with most documentaries, a story eventually makes itself clear and the movie sets to telling it in its latter acts.

Galax may have lost its industry, but the instrument makers who have long made it their base of operations have grown world famous, their guitars, violins, mandolins and banjoes coveted by everybody in Nashville, and found a global customer base, including Eric Clapton. A generation of luthiers like Wayne Henderson and Tom Barr have begun passing down what they know to their children.

Similarly, the generation of performers who learned the 200 year-old style of music from relatives and others they crossed pathso with are making it their business to ensure a new generation is there to take their place.

And the result, Simone’s team discovered, was several schoolbuses full of old time and bluegrass prodigies. Kids like Ivy Phillips and Presley Barker, Kitty Amaral and Eli Wildman have gotten hooked and taken to their instruments with the passion of fanatics. Through conventions like this one, personal encounters with legends and Youtube’s treasure trove of archived performances, the kids have mastered the music much younger than their forebears.

The performances here, gathered mostly at campsite jam sessions, under the various meet-and-pick tents all over Felts Park in Galax, or on the stages there, are just jaw dropping.

The convention lures some 1400 competitors to battle for blue ribbons in music and flat-footing, the Appalachian clogging dance style that old time music was invented to be danced to.

And some 40,000 spectators come to hear, sing, flat-foot and maybe even whip out their spoons to play along.

“Fiddlin’s” message of inclusion points mostly to the growing foothold young women have gained in this very traditional, very white and male-dominated form of music, music that reflects “the first American frontier,” where Scots-Irish farmers moved after coastal America had already been settled.

But the film also does a decent job of capturing the music’s centuries-old connection to a place, to this being the music of working class folk who have played through prosperity and hard times, clinging to a passion that they seem tickled to share with those just now plunging into it with them.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Ivy Phillips, Presley Barker, Kitty Amaral, Wayne Henderson, Jon Lohman, Samantha Amburgey, Martha Spencer, Jake Krack, Ronald L. Tuck and Eli Wildman

Credits: Directed by Julie Simone, script by Janice Hampton, Julie Simone, Vicki Vlassic. A Utopia Release.

Running time: 1:32