Movie Nation

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.

Remember calling your favorite radio station and making a dedication to “the one I love?”

No? Alas, you kids don’t know what you missed out on.

“Tune in for Love,” aka “Joyful Music Album” (the translation of its Korean title) is about a star-crossed romance tied together by a shared favorite DJ and his romantic pop Seoul radio show.

Actually, it’s not that neat and tidy, which is a pity. It rambles around that connecting thread and doesn’t make enough of it. And by the way, the Internet Movie Database plot summary for this title is almost entirely wrong.

It’s a tale of missed connections, misunderstandings, troubled history and bad influences, of “I waited for you” and Coldplay’s “Fix You,” the angst of one’s 20s, “when you feel like a loser, all you see is other losers” and “Get in touch with me when something good happens.”

It’s a romance that tries to pair up a young woman, almost instantly smitten by a troubled young man with a secret, and catches up with them as they connect and reconnect, sometimes via KBS “Cool” FM 89.1, home to the Yoo Yeol Show.

That’s what the winsome Mi-soo (Go-eun Kim) is listening to in 1994 when “he” shuffles into her bakery. He wants something with “soybeans in it.” The baker, Eun-ja (Gook-hee Kim) sizes him up as “just out of prison,” and gives him a nickname — “Tofu.”

His real name is Hyeon-yu (Hyun-woo, for those following along on IMDb). Hae-In Jung plays him with a mumbling, eyes-cast down demeanor. Yeah, it turns out he just got out of juvie. The one time Mi-soo asks what he did, “I don’t want to talk about it” (in Korean with English subtitles) is all she gets.

He’s 19. So is she, it turns out. There’s an attraction, driven by what she, Eun-ja and schoolgirls who squeal their way into the bakery agree, is his looks.

“He’s so HANDsome!”

But Hyeon-yu’s brooding is a sign of trouble. He takes a job delivering and helping out around the bakery, WITHOUT anybody knowing why he was in JAIL, mind you, seems shy but interested in Mi-soo, even helps her put up the Christmas tree.

But a delivery boy on a bike stopping by is trouble. That would be Tae-seong (Choi Joon-Young), a punk and old running mate of Hyeon-yu. Whatever Hyeon-yu’s hope of “living a decent life” might be, Tae-seong is there to drag him back to the past, summoning the old gang to the bakery, starting trouble.

Hyeon-yu disappears, the bakery closes, Mi-soo goes to college and it’s 1997. Damned if these two don’t cross paths again.

And again in 2000.

One more time in 2005. That, of course, is the year Coldplay’s “Fix You” came out, and it packed just as much romantic longing and meaning onto Cool 89.1 FM as it did on any radio in the West.

Will Mi-soo “fix” Hyeon-yu? Will he fix their relationship by revealing his “big secret?”

Will they ever get past the hand-holding and sensitive, tentative nature of their love connection, accept their “fate” to be together, and get romantic?

I like the way writer-director Ji-woo Jung (“Modern Boy” was his) pieces together his plot.

One time, Hyeon-yu is headed for his mandatory military service. Mi-soo sets him up with an email account, only to realize after he’s gone that she forgot to give him the password to get in. She puts the word out on their favorite radio station.

But this two-hour-plus romance just dawdles along, allowing plenty of time for missed connections and break-ups, but also omitting key moments of connection.

Not the big ones, mind you — first kiss “etc.”

Still, the obstacles to love are all winners and include losing contact (pre-Internet), moving, closing a business, changing jobs, falling into trouble over and over again.

And the payoff, set to a certain song in a certain year after 11 years have passed, is worth it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, romantic situations

Cast: Go-eun Kim, Hae-In Jung, Hae-Joon Park, Gook-hee Kim, Choi Joon-Young

Credits: Written and directed by Ji-woo Jung. A Neflix release.

Running time: 2:02

Those $30 million opening predictions for “The Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep” vanished Friday AM. Thursday night tipped Warner Brothers and Stephen King’s accountants that all was not well at The Overlook.

The damned movie only earned $14 million and change.

As it didn’t cost as much as “Midway,” it is more likely to come close to breaking even at the North American box office. Roland Emmerich and the effects companies burned through $100 million to recreate World War’s decisive naval battle. It earned over $17.5 million to win the weekend. Not enough.

John Cena and his kiddie comedy “Playing with Fire” kicked Paul Feig’s George Michael music-based maudlin movie “Last Christmas” in the teeth, taking third place. Over $12 and then some for the putrid “Playing.”

“Game of Thrones” fans didn’t show to see Emilia Clarke laugh and flirt, “Crazy Rich Asians” devotees didn’t come for Henry Golding and Michelle Yeoh. They could smell a spoiler in the title tune “Last Christmas” and weren’t having it. $11-12.

“Dark Fate” is proving to be the last big screen “Terminator.” Fifth place and plunging.

https://t.co/L2Y7Cwqduq https://t.co/QRlgGnt0mH https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1193578006918451204?s=20

It’s a film that falls under the animation house’s Sparkshorts program, not necessarily to be attached to any upcoming feature. Just content designed to provide training ground for animators, solidify the brand and may you think. And cry.

Sure, it’s drinks and strip clubs, beaches and hot Thai food when brothers Mehdi and Hicham see each other for the first time in 15 years.

You’ll love Thailand, younger brother Hicham crows. And not just for the scenery, the red light district, the easy living and the vices.

“We’re French here,” he tells Mehdi. “NOT Arabs.”

But you know it can’t last. Not when you realize where Mehdi (Sami Bouajila, who first gained notice in the Arabic-French WWII film “Days of Glory”) has been for the past 15 years.

That opening scene, of the bank heist that devolved into a shootout? That’s where he was captured. Hicham (Tewfix Jallad of “Fast Convoy”) got away. So did the other four members of their gang.

They’ve been living large, free as birds, running their own businesses in “paradise” off the money from the bank job. And Mehdi doesn’t want to hear their “You’ll LOVE it here,” in French with English subtitles. No.

“Where’s my share?”

That’s the dramatic problem that “Paradise Beach,“ a French potboiler of a crime thriller that plays that familiar “Sexy Beast/Point Blank” card, the member of the gang of thieves here to collect what he thinks is owed to him.

Of course, there’s no simple answer, as Jimmy Stewart told the old “building and loan” depositors during the run on the bank in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The money’s tied up in this bar, that restaurant, my yacht, his beachside bungalow.

Damned Thai law won’t let foreigners (“falang”) own businesses. Put everything his his wife’s name, or that conniving partner’s name.

And Mehdi, man, that tsumani? It wiped us out?

But Mehdi won’t accept that answer. And when it comes down to these businesses that they’re running, nightclubs filled with stripper/hookers, the old gang is getting handed its head by the new gang — Afro-French expats who have moved their human trafficking business from Morocco to Thailand.

Marrying into a cop family didn’t help. Keeping girlfriends and spouses in the dark about their line of work wasn’t smart.

Mehdi? He’s fresh out of the joint and not shy about throwing his weight around.

The ex-con after-his-share tale becomes another gangster movie trope — the turf war.

And director and co-writer Xavier Durringer isn’t content with that direction, either. The story coasts to a halt, for all intents and purposes, as Mehdi’s old flame Julia (Mélanie Doutey) shows up, the gang breaks down into factions and the other gang isn’t about to back down.

Women are pawns in this story, kidnapped and traded, increasingly furious at what they never realized and how their husbands’ business is now threatening their lives.

Bouajillo makes a grizzled, compelling anchor for all that’s spinning around Mehdi. It’s a pity the film loses track of that. The supporting cast of actors playing “types” make strong impressions, but never strong enough to transcend the cardboard cutouts they’re playing — the loyal comrade, the bully, the punk with something to hide, the brother who takes blood ties the most seriously.

The third act is a nonsensical collapsing house of cards with corrupt cops, blood feuds and mayhem

that points to panicked meeting in somebody’s hotel room where one screenwriter said to the other screenwriter (in French, with English subtitles), “We finish filming tomorrow. How the hell do we END this thing?”

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Sami Bouajila, Tewfik Jallab, Mélanie Doutey, Hubert Koundé, Hugo Becker, Kool Shen, Seth Gueko

Credits: Directed by Xavier Durringer, script by  Xavier Durringer, Jean Miez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34