Movie Nation

As weighty as a snowflake, and just as prone to turn to mush at room temperature, “Let It Snow” is a holiday comedy that sits right in Netflix’s wheelhouse.

It’s a teen-rom comedy, cast with winning smiles like Odeya Rush, Isabela Merced and Shameik Moore, who was the voice of young Spidey in “Into the Spider-Verse.”

It’s centered around a blizzard, and an off-the-hook party, which must be supplied with beer, no matter which bullies you have to steal it from.

There’s plenty of “What the kids are listening to these days” pop in the soundtrack, tunes by Black Caviar, Illuminati Hotties, a cover of The Waterboys, as well as a heaping helping of those teen titans, The Rolling Stones.

But all it does is demonstrate how much the acquisitions folks at Netflix have raised the floor in this genre. They throw that cast and those elements at the screen, screenwriters who had a hand in “Office Christmas Party,” “Pitch Perfect 3” and “Finding Dory,” and if they can’t transcend the trite and the treacly, at least they spend enough to avoid the label “unwatchable.”

I was reading a rare disappointed comment about the film on IMDb. “It’s not as good as the book,” “A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle,” she fumed.

SHE’s disappointed? What about the REST of us? I mean, this cut-and-paste job was based on a BOOK?

The screenplay the writers’ pieced together follows three main threads converging on the teen hangout in Laurel, Illinois (actually Brantford, Ontario).

There’s Julie, played by Isabel Merced, the big screen “Dora the Explorer,” off to the big city to find that one missing figurine that will make her Mom’s elf village complete. On the commuter train home, she runs into an R & B star (Moore) who dodged the tour bus after a Chicago radio appearance.

“Oh my GOD, was that STUART BALE?”

“I really don’t care.”

That’s the nub of their “meet cute,” he’s a shy, lighting charming “pretty important person” (he jokes). She is…underwhelmed.

They’ll get off together at her home town, and duck into Waffle Town, which has aptly lost the “W”” from its sign.

“Say it aloud. AWFUL Town!”

That’s where short order cook Keon, aka DJ K*Pow$ (Jacob Batalon) hopes to host a party that launches his DJing career.

Waitress Dorrie (Liv Hewson of “Santa Clarita Diet” and “Before I Fall”) is all agog — not because the singer’s shown up, but because this dance team member (Anna Akana) she TOTALLY had a fling with has shown up. For waffles.

It’s also where Jeb (Mason Gooding) is hanging out with…oh my GOD — Madison (Hallea Jones). That drives Jeb’s alleged girlfriend Addie (Rush, of “Goosebumps”) batty.

She’s desperate enough to hitch a ride with the loon in the tinfoil suit (Joan Cusack) who drives the town tow truck through the snow to get her there.

Meanwhile, Keon’s pal Tobin (Mitchell Hope) has been assigned the beer run. He’s distracted by his futile efforts to move out of “the friend zone” with Angie (Kiernan Shipka, of “Mad Men”). But she’s distracted by the tall, cute and totally “woke” JP — home on break. No, Tobin is “not at ALL jealous of the enlightened, broomball meditating college boy.” 

“Let it Snow” is a picture where little bits here and there, land — gags, one-liners.

The only relationship with any snap to it is the Julie/Soul Singer Stuart one. It starts out aloof and only turns awkward when she introduces him to her mom (Andrea de Oliveira) — “You look like that singer. He smiles like he’s holding in a fart!” — and grandpa (Victor Rivers).

“I Googled you. You grab your crotch a lot!”

As a general rule, the performers are chipper, cute and bland.

The funniest moment is a multi-denominational, SUPER politically correct holiday pageant at the church, and the most cringe-worthy is an organ duet by two of the principals of The Waterboys’ “Whole of the Moon.”

A car chase on snow that kills a beloved ancient station wagon — “She died doing what she loved. Getting really bad gas mileage!” A little lecture from the tinfoil lady about being obsessed with your social media life, via cellphone.

“It’s like standing on a whale, fishing for minnows!”

Another profundity?

“Snow hides a lot. It’s like the Spanx of weather!”

None of it adds up to much, but throwing a lot of cute actors and funny lines at the wall means “Let It Snow” isn’t a complete bust.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude sexual material, strong language, and teen partying

Cast: Isabela Merced, Shameik Moore, Odeya Rush, Kiernan Shipka, Liv Hewson, Jacob Batalon, Mitchell Hope and Joan Cusack.

Credits: Directed by Luke Snellin, script by Kay Cannon, Laura Solon and Victoria Strouse, based on the novel  “A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle” by John Green, Lauren Myracle and Maureen Johnson.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

“Hate the disease, not the diseased.”

That’s a hard message to massage when you’re making a movie about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Movies about “psycho vets” oversimplify the illness and amplify its most dangerous and anti-social symptoms.

It’s hard not to hate Hank Peck in “Mickey and the Bear.” James Badge Dale plays this swaggering, hard-drinking, war-stories-to-tell bullying life of the party in Anaconda, Montana.

The cops don’t mind picking him up. He’ll tell them stories about his Marine Corps service, funny anecdotes and hairy moments from “the Second Battle of Fallujah.”

The bars still let him drink there. As much as he wants. He’s a veteran. Hell, he’s widowed, too.

No, he can’t hold a job. There seems no end to the things that trigger him. Any number of subjects are off limits — his late wife, happy family memories.

“I’m not having this conversation.”

And the person living at ground zero with this ticking time bomb is his smart, pretty and trapped caregiver, the one who picks him up after a bender, gets him dressed for bed after he’s passed out in the shower — his teenage daughter, Mickey.

How smart? Mickey’s doing well in school, considering college and holding down an after school job working with a taxidermist. Studying marine biology in San Diego is damned tempting.

How pretty? Her immature, hormonal high school beau (Ben Rosenberg) is already making plans, with that promotion at his daddy’s business letting him dream big — “a motorcycle” he can “put you and them babies on it.” He knows this is his peak moment, and he’d love her to believe it’s hers.

Camila Morrone gives a lovely, understated turn in this coming-of-age tale, a just-turned-18 daughter struggling to control her won’t-visit-his-doctor dad, to manage her impulsive doofus boyfriend who steals her daddy’s oxycontin, and embrace her own ambitions.

How pretty is Morrone? She’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest girlfriend-pretty. She hides that runway-ready look behind just enough bad hair and working-poor clothing choices to lose herself in this part.

Mickey is the one who cooks, cleans up and tends to her father. She’s the one who has to visit the clinic and convince the doctor (Rebecca Henderson) to renew his prescription, even if it’s against the law, even if it isn’t doing Hank any good over the long run.

“You think Hank off his oxy is a pretty sight?” the kid wants to know.

Veteran character actor Dale has played his share of soldiers, and he gives Hank’s mercurial personality the ominous menace that drives the picture. His idea of “charming” and “cute” is bullying his kid, leaning on her more than any man with any pride would chose to, teasing her when she doesn’t need it.

What’re you going to do with your life, Michaela?

“Get a bunch of tattoos,” she scowls. “Get a husband. Get fat.”

Her horizons expand ever so slightly when the “new kid” at school, Wyatt (Calvin Demba) bats his eyes at her. He’s biracial, and he milks that “I’m from the U.K.” accent for all it’s worth. She is, of course, intrigued.

The debut feature film of actress turned director Annabelle Attanasio lives on authentiticy — a real heartland story told in the heartland — but runs on forboding. Who will knock Mickey off the tightrope she’s walking on? Will it be Dad, all medicated and muscle-bound, a collection of tics, tattoos, nightmares and guns?

Will it be Aaron, pursuing sex with her like it has an expiration date?

Or will it be Wyatt?

The details here are rooted deep in Red State reality. Mickey recognizes her dad’s symptoms, even among the old men who served in earlier wars. The guys hurting are the first to blurt out “I didn’t ASK for your help.” A small town where “everybody gets cancer” has its virtues. People are inclined to look out for Hank, give him a pass on much of his misbehavior, which crosses into criminality.

But it’s a trap, and the script plays with our recognizing that to create instant empathy for Mickey’s plight.

No, it’s not surprising, although I was impressed by all the PTSD cliches Attanasio manages to avoid. We still know where it’s going once we see how it begins.

But “Mickey and the Bear” is to be relished for its performances and its gritty indie cinema sense of place. Movies like this, set in the America far beyond the over–filmed confines of Hollywood, are why I roll my eyes at every movie trade publication that laments “runaway production” — films NOT made in Tinseltown.

MPAA Rating: R for substance abuse, language throughout and some sexual material

Cast: Camilla Morrone, James Badge Dale, Calvin Demba, Ben Rosenfield, Rebecca Henderson.

Credits: Written and directed by Annabelle Attanasio.  A Utopia release.

Running time: 1:28

“Those of you who like this sort of thing might find this the sort of thing they like.” Abraham Lincoln

No buzz around this one, but with Dame Helen and Sir Ian, it seems like a safe bet. “The Good Liar” opens Friday.

Michael Peña in the Ricardo Montalban role?

No more Hollywood has-beens realizing their PG TV “fantasies.”

Nubile starlets and hunks get tested and occasionally tortured in the best Blumhouse tradition.

Releasing Valentine’s Day? That’s just sick.

May of next year. Can hardly wait. Yay.

Sometimes, a performance doesn’t give the slightest hint of looking like acting.

That’s what we see when veteran character actor Wendell Pierce, of “Treme” and “Chicago P.D.” and “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” steps into the spotlight and behind the pulpit in “Burning Cane.” 

He calls, “Let the church say AMEN” as if he’s been doing it all his life, as if he could do it half-drunk, or grieving and too depressed to get through the day without emptying his whisky flask two or three times.

Because that’s what Rev. Tillman must do, and under just those conditions. Not drunk in church, but a man staggered by the blows life has handed out. And yet, he’s still able to fluidly piece together an infamous Malcolm Forbes quote about “He who dies with the most toys, wins” and warnings about what Forbes found to be the truth when he “crossed over Jordan,” joining Proverbs 18:24 and a hymn into an impressive sermon for a rural Louisiana church he can see, from his vantage point, is dying.

New Orleans filmmaker Phillip Youmans’ film is a portrait of a place and a few of its people at an interdeterminate time. Suffering, and the alcohol that doesn’t really salve it, ties the stories together, as does the church.

It’s an impressionistic, incomplete and indulgent film of strong performances, Deep South soliloquies, of the folks there, captured in extreme closeups or glimpsed in shadows, coping with a world so suffocating that merely leaving them to their devices feels like a prison sentence.

“Cane country” rarely has been brought to such vivid life in a film.

“Burning Cane” begins with a five and a half minute interior monologue from Helen (Karen Kaia Livers of “Treme”), going into Bubba Gump detail of all the home remedies she’s tried to cure her beloved dog Jojo’s mange.

Helen’s son Daniel (Dominique McClellan) drowns his work/guilt over abusing his wife/you-name-it sorrows straight from the bottle, and insists that his son of about ten (Braelyn Kelly) share the bottle with him as they stagger-dance to Robert Johnson’s “Hot Tamales (They’re Red Hot).”  

Youmans treats us to almost the entire song, another big chunk of screen time in a thinly-plotted tale that only has 78 minutes to play out — with credits.

Helen’s motherly advice is for everybody, starting with her son — “It’s hard to dance with the Devil on your back.” — but including the pastor, who needs to give up the wheel of his 1974 BMW if he needs to get to the Piggly Wiggly.

“You don’t think I can hold my liquor…The Good Lord is looking out for me!”

She worries over them all, frets over her dog and suggests “the Lord” might help — eventually — even as she, like the preacher and everybody else, lapses into profanity at the burdens they’re all carrying.

“Burning Cane” has great regional cinema bonafides, a bit of film festival hype and the  rhythm of poetry in its images, human connections, monologues and gloom.

Which is to say as prose, it isn’t all that. Vignettes can add up to a wholly realized film, but in this case, they tell the tale but don’t quite complete the story.

Pierce and the sermon he is delivering, intercut throughout “Burning Cane,” stick with you, a performance that transcends vignettes and makes an even stronger impression than the forlorun, overcast images that prophesy doom, or at least a purgatory no one here will escape without scars.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, alcohol abuse, smoking, implied violence, profanity

Cast: Wendell Pierce Karen Kaia Livers, Dominique McClellan and Braelyn Kelly

Credits: Written and directed by Phillip Youmans. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18

Sound design is an often under-appreciated characteristic of a film, in any genre. But good sound can make or break a horror film. So let’s begin our appreciation of “Little Joe,” a “horticultural horror” tale from the UK, with a shout out to Matz Müller.

This film, about a plant genetically altered to release a scent “that makes people happy,” but with unforseen consequences (Yeah, right.) is set in labs and sealed greenhouses, around Big Science. And Müller fills the soundtrack with dissonance. It’s a veritable symphony of unnerving high-pitch tones, shrieks, synethesized barks (as in “dog”) and rustling.

Married to chilly, flourescent visuals, it keeps the characters jumpy and the viewer on edge. It’s the creepiest sounding horror tale since “A Quiet Place.”

Emily Beecham of TV’s “Into the Badlands” plays Alice, lead plant geneticist on a new project at her plant lab, gene-editing into existence an “anti-depressant happy plant.” Its scent will improve your mood, and you don’t have to trim its leaves, dry them and roll them up into  joint to get the effect.

Ben Whishaw is Chris, who assists her in the lab and in the greenhouse. He’s the one who tells the boss (David Wilmot) that the plant delivers this happiness in return for attention.

“What this plant really needs is love.”

They’ve taken the precuation of rendering the flower, which looks like something you’d see in Dr. Seuss’s evil twin’s garden, sterile. It won’t be able to breed and spread.

Among their colleagues, only Bella (Kerry Fox) sees problems with that. The essence of life, she reminds them all, is “the ability to reproduce, ensuring its own survival.” That plant “will follow its own” agenda, she prophesizes.

Bella has a dog, “Bello,” who comes with her to work. See where this is going?

Alice has an ex she rarely sees (Sebastian Hülk) she rarely sees, a shrink (Lindsay Duncan) she shares her feelings with, and a son (Kit Connor) she treats as an adult, a regular dinner date when she finally comes from from work, with take-out food, to catch up on the day with her latchkey tween.

She thinks Joe could use one of her happy plants.  Scientists in science fiction are often this “I know what I’m doing” arrogant. She suggests Joe dote on the plant, talk to it. She names it “Little Joe” in his honor.

Bella, of course, sees the peril in that. Alice is “a good mother,” she notes. But if push comes to shove, “which of your children will you choose?”

What unfolds in Austrian director and co-writer Jessica Hausner’s thriller is more dread than horror, dread with an icy chill about it. The “ticking clock” the story is building up to is “The Big Plant Fair” where they’ll unveil their creation and turn it loose on the world.

“Little Joe” is “Children of the Damned” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by way of “Little Shop of Horrors.” No, the plants don’t sing. But if you talk to them…

The violence is mild, by modern cinema standards. But when it comes, it shocks. Mildly.

Whishaw suggests devotion to the point of menacing, with aplomb. And Beecham gets across Alice’s conflict — the arrogant scientist who realizes the cost of “playing God” — with skill.

It’s a mood piece, and the element that ensures that it comes off is Matz Müller’s brittle, unsettling soundtrack. The characters may debate the morality of their behavior in dialogue, but it is the soundtrack that matches their actions — violent, reckless and disharmonious to the end.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some violence

Cast: Emily Beecham, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox, David Milmot and Kit Connor and Lindsay Duncan.

Credits: Directed by Jessica Hausner, script by Géraldine Bajard, Jessica Hausner. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

It has a brand name author and is a sequel to a cult classic. So “Doctor Sleep” should have been the latest Stephen King adaptation to blow up the box office — tracking data suggested. Audiences were aware and interested, or so the studio believed.

It was supposed to do $25-30 million. It opened to $14.1 million domestically and lost to Roland Emmerich’s “Midway” spectacle.

Veterans turning out for a Veterans Day tale? Stephen King fatigue?

Too long between original and sequel?

Too long for its target audience?

Via THR “Here’s how Hollywood is reacting to the shocking upset.” https://t.co/PJLlkeK8ML https://twitter.com/THR/status/1193901224472567808?s=20

Dauntless dive bomber, dive brakes (flaps) deployed, above –F4F Wildcat fighter below. Warbirds Museum, Titusville, Fl.