Movie Nation

“I’m not…CRAZY!”

A February movie, Moss lets her late spouse get in her head. Or maybe he really is “The Invisible Man.”

“Soul” has a little jazz, and a little “Inside/Out” metaphysics. Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey are the voice acting stars of this June 20 release, which looks like a fairly significant departure for the animation house.

A good departure.

What’s the afterlife like?

We never like to see our movie stars “trying too hard” in a screen comedy. But sometimes, the effort itself is worth a few laughs.

I mean, they’re suffering for their art, trying to wring laughs out of thin material, adding value, giving the studio paying them fair value, no matter how silly they look doing it.

“Playing with Fire” takes wrestler turned action star (“The Marine”) John Cena where Vin Diesel (“The Pacifier”) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (“The Game Plan”) have gone before.

Put this prime slab of action hero machismo in a scenario that forces him to deal with little kids, and fail. Haplessness and hilarity ensues, right? Except that it rarely does.

It’s a topical comedy about the heroes of the moment — Smoke Jumpers, the elite parachutist firefighters deployed into blazing forests, saving lives and homes as they struggle to contain the consequences of drought-stricken forests in a hotter, dryer and “changed” climate, and people who like to live in the middle of such tinderboxes.

Jake Carson (Cena) is station superintendent (“Sup”) in the woodlands of Redding, California, a no-nonsense firefighting son of a legendary fire fighter who died in the line of duty.

He’s got no time for flirting with the cute biologist (Judy Greer) obssessively studying toads by the lake down the mountain, and no time for shenanigans, even though Keegan-Michael Key, John Leguizamo and the lumbering “Lurch” of a fireman, “Axe” (Tyler Mane) are his kinda-goofy crew.

“Where’s my REDDING CREW AT?” he bellows.

“EVERYWHERE!”

That changes when he has to airlift three kids out of a blazing cabin, and the weather and the weekend means nobody can come take them off he and his Redding crew’s hands until Monday.

He’s just had the other half of his crew quit on him. There’s a big promotion coming, with the super-hero-sized division commander (Dennis Haysbert, having a laugh) about to retire. The last thing Jake needs is unruly, unmannered kids messing up his firehouse, playing with his fire extinguishers and flare guns, demanding bedtime stories.

The kids — played by Brianna Hildebrand, Christian Convery and Finley Rose Slater — are unrestrained, unschooled, prone to pilfering and petty vandalism. Well, not little Zoey (Slater). She’s the lovable one.

He may think of himself as “a father figure, only way cooler.” But Jake’s about to learn a hard lesson.

“Kids. You can’t control them. You can only contain them until they burn themselves out.”

“Race to Witch Mountain” director Andy Fickman finds most of the movie’s laughs via slapstick — detergent accidents, oil spills, flares and fire extinguishers used IMproperly.

The funniest sight gag might be Jake’s attempt to pull the kids out of that burning cabin via helicopter. Rodrigo, the pilot (Leguizamo) keeps misunderstanding Jake’s commands, yanking him up into the ceiling — hard — over and over again.

Key and Leguizamo mug for the camera and trip through some grownup one-liners. Rodrigo is from “San Quentin.” Can’t tell the kids what that really is. “A small college in Vermont” is the quick explanation Mark (Key) comes up with.

A running gag is Rodrigo’s quick way with a homily or anecdote, and inability to process the facts of his quotes.

“As Lance Armstrong once said, ‘That’s one small step for man. And WATCH out for the next one!”

Cena is a funny guy, as he’s proven in “Trainwreck” and those kiddie “Fred” movies of about ten years ago. Here, he’s got too little to work with, even if the poking the uptight guy is the surest way to laughs that there is.

Attempted one-liners aside, the only character and performance to generate giggles is Mane’s turn as the always axe-toting “Axe,” a lumbering menace who turns out to be a soft touch around toddlers.

Everybody else — the sprightly Greer included — tries too hard. Because they have to.  Every wrinkle in the plot is nakedly contrived, an obvious screenplay convenience. Every gag is given away. Every one-liner vanishes into the void.

Kids may love projectile poop gags, but even they should be able to smell the odor “Playing with Fire” puts out there.

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor, some suggestive material and mild peril

Cast: John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Brianna Hildebrand, Dennis Haysbert, John Leguizamo and Judy Greer

Credits: Directed by Andy Fickman, script by Dan Ewen, Matt Lieberman. An Nickelodeon/Paramount release

Running time: 1:36

The Big Race didn’t finish exactly the way it’s depicted in “Ford v. Ferrari.”

And the Money Moment, the hilarious scene previewed in the trailers and TV commercials where racing driver and race-car building legend Carroll Shelby delights and then frightens to the point of tears the Ford heir and CEO of the Motor Company on a mad lap in the company’s Ferrari-fighting GT40 racer? Never happened.

But damn, it feels right — dramatically, comically and thematically. And in James Mangold’s epic, bracing and breezy spin around a piece of motorsport legend, if it didn’t happen, it sure as hell should have.

Want a lesson in how a two and a half hour period piece can just fly by? Mangold (“Walk the Line,””Logan”) gives a master class in it, using the struggle, the titanic figures engaged in it and the pedal-to-the-metal setting to plunge us into American motorsport’s equivalent of The Moon Landing.

Here’s Shelby, a hustling hard-selling Texan given a compact, cunning and comic understatement by Matt Damon. He was the first American to win the prestigious 24 Hours of LeMans, and when he was forced to stop racing himself, he put a Ford V-8 into tiny British AC Ace sports car and created a world beating racer, and one of the most valuable collectible automobiles in history — the Shelby Cobra.

At Ford in the early ’60s, Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) has just innovated the company out of the doldrums with the young-motorist-magnet Mustang, and convinced the boss, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), amusingly nicknamed “The Deuce,” that what Ford REALLY needs, image-wise, is to buy the great European sports car builder Ferrari, which runs the fastest cars in the races that have cachet among the young — sports car races.

Bernthal gives us a taste of the Great American Salesman and cheerleader that Iacocca would become.

“James Bond does not drive a Ford, sir!”

The Deuce is sold. Sure, let’s cut a check. Even if the CEO thinks James Bond is “a degenerate.”

But the Italian-American Iacocca gets hustled by the real Italian, Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), who finishes his “NO deal” tirade (Fiat bought an interest in Ferrari instead) with a flurry of insults about the “fat” Ford and his “ugly factory” putting out millions of “ugly cars.”

The bluff and deadpan Ford — we’re introduced to him shutting down an assembly line to chew out and motivate the work force during a downturn — has had enough of “getting it in the tailpipe from a Chevy Impala.” And he’s not going to take this insult from some snooty Italian slur. Oh no.

Build a car. Form a team. Win LeMans. And do it quick.

That’s how they come to Shelby. But Shelby comes with baggage, an ornery Brit who owns a garage that services British sports cars like the MGA in Southern California, a champion SCCA race car driver with a test pilot’s feel for tweaking, adjusting and turning a car into a world beater.

“Brilliant, but difficult” is the label Ken Miles wears. Christian Bale wouldn’t be insulted by noting how on-the-nose casting him as Miles is. Yeah, they have a few things in common.

Shelby has to “handle” Miles and please his Ford masters, including Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), Director of Special Vehicles at Ford, basically the “suit” in charge of its racing teams, set up as the villain of the tale.

The Italians are the exotic foreign menace, arrogant again a mere two decades after their World War II humiliation. But the “enemy” in this 90 day sprint to put a car on the track that will humble them is ponderous American Corporate Culture, and Beebe becomes a thorn in Shelby and Miles’ side — hated, always putting “the company” and its culture and “image” first.

We don’t see the Brits who hastily designed the GT40, just them delivering it to Shelby and Miles and Shelby’s ace in the hole, engineer Phil Remington (Ray McKinnon). The movie focuses on that trio’s efforts make this burly beast hold the corners, hug the track and “go like hell” when she does.

The car is iconic, and gets that “Right Stuff” sort of star entrance here. Brits designed it, but it feels American — bluff, muscular and aggressive. Put a Ford V-8 in it and you can’t wait to hear her get angry.

Casting Bale pays dividends in all the scenes with the car being tested, through Remington’s DIY wind-tunnel on-the-track idea of figuring out why it’s trying to go airborne, through engine changes, brake issues, all the racing failures leading up to “The Big Race.”

Bale’s Miles is in the car for all this, thunking through gears, talking to himself and the car in his no-nonsense Cockney cheerleader accent. “Oh YES,” at everything he likes in the set-up. “I’ll have some more of THAT, if you please!” Inevitably punctuated with a disappointed “Bloody hell!”

Characters show their emotions in “Ford v. Ferrari” in fits of recklessness — ex-Air Force pilot Shelby taking the controls of a Ford company plane to land at the big announcement ceremony, Miles’ venting his fury at Shelby on the track, Mrs. Mollie Miles (Caitriona Balfe) scaring Ken half to death careening their Ford station wagon through backroads as she chews on him for not telling her he’s getting back into racing.

And then there’s that Shelby drives Hank the Deuce in the “$9 million car you paid for” moment.

Letts, a playwright and actor who has made deadpan authority figures something of a specialty in his film career, gets a laugh every time he turns up in the film. He’s got Ford-during-World-War II anecdotes to underscore his “just win” lectures. He’s peevish at failure, and you could believe this man would spare no expense just to get even with somebody who insulted him. This is a great supporting turn.

Damon’s take on Shelby is colorful and canny, letting us see the wheels turning as he sizes up people and summons up the appropriate, drawled “My Daddy used’t tell me” anecdote to get what he wants — from Miles, Remington or Ford. His Shelby is a compromised hero, never quite living up to “larger than life,” but still a Western archetype whose laconic narration puts the film on a man-finding-out-what-he’s-made-of footing.

Bale’s Miles has just enough manners to not tell off customers who don’t know how to drive the British sports cars they bought and that he services. He never loses his suffer-no-fools-gladly demeanor, even as he faces corporate shunning and other disappointments.

Mangold and his screenwriters didn’t make this movie just for gearheads and racing fans. Including Miles’ son Pete (Noah Jupe) lets Ken explain to him and the audience the danger, performance requirements and other tests of LeMans.

The racing sequences are low-camera-angle montages passing by at a whiplash-quick blur. Suspense builds, humor defuses it, and the thrills feel hard-earned, deserved and well, patriotic.

It stands with the greatest racing movies ever, and it’s certainly the most entertaining. But there is no doubt about one last superlative. “Ford v Ferrari” is one of the best pictures of the year.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and peril

Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Caitriona Balfe, Tracy Letts, Jon Bernthal, Josh Lucas

Credits: Directed by James Mangold, script by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Henry. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:32

All star cast, funny trailer, great buzz.

Here’s a holiday movie that has it all — Jamie Lee C and Toni Collette, Chris Evans and Christopher Plummer.

Don Johnson, Michael Shannon.

Murder most foul, a dead rich guy, a house full of suspects.

Daniel Craig trotting out a Foghorn Leghorn Southern accent, Suh!

Something came down here, via meteorite.

The South African writer of “Hardware,” one of the great indie dystopian sci-fi thrillers of the ’90s, directed this adaptation.

Joely Richardson, Q’rianka Kilcher and Tommy Chong co-star with Nicolas Cage. Looks trippy enough.

Bale and Damon, and Tracy Letts — Ford crashes the 24 Hours of LeMans with its brand-new Ferrari et al killer, the GT40.

Yeah, kinda looking forward to this one.

“Crown Vic” is a grounded and gritty cops-on-the-night-shift melodrama built around a tightly-coiled turn by Thomas Jane.

He plays a 25 year LAPD veteran assigned to FTO (Field Training Officer) duty, mentoring a “transfer cherry” (Luke Kleintank) through his first night on the job.

And that set-up inevitably forces a comparison to “Training Day,” because a century of cop films and seven decades of PD-TV demands it. There have been so many police procedurals that it takes a lot to make such a story stand out, to avoid the label “Training Day Lite.”

On a night when the duo deal with a belligerent drunk BMW princess, a punk who throws something at their Crown Victoria cruiser, a domestic disturbance call, a manic mouthy meth-head, a convenience store theft, a burning SUV (with a “crispy” body in it) and lots of “personal” business, all while two armed and trigger-happy bank robbers are working their way across the city to their patrol zone, we see how difficult it is for writer-director Joel Souza’s film (“Break Night”) to break formula. And it’s impossible for it to avoid melodrama.

Jane is Ray Mandel, a twice-divorced loner whose razzing of the “cherry” is profane and not at all good-natured. It’s “I ain’t your f—–g valet, sweetheart” when the rookie from Oakland makes him wait, “genius” this and “rookie” that.

Nick Holland (Kleintank) is the son of a cop, married, with a baby on the way. Everything he says to anybody else in uniform gets him cussed out. Every bit of “us vs. them” advice from Ray seems confrontational.

“Somebody looks guilty? Watch’em. They look innocent? Watch’em closely!”

Ray’s ethos? This car is “home,” dividing the world between “in here” and “out there.”

Their philosophical debates, common to the genre, reveal Ray’s cynicism — “Married? That’s…optimistic.” — and “dark” and defensive worldview.

“The world was dark when I got here,” he grouses.

He orders the kid to watch him, stay behind him, follow his lead. And the kid does.

Even when they see the roid-and-speed-raging plainclothes detective Jack (Josh Hopkins, way over the top) start the evening amped up, and take things to illegal extremes with a suspect — his partner (David Krumholtz) egging him on.

Even when Ray starts dealing with personal matters having to do with his dead partner’s junkie widow (Bridget Moynahan).

The highlights here are a nervy opening sequence, a bank robbery as seen from inside and outside of the getaway car (shots fired out, and into the vehicle), and Jane’s flinty performance and smooth mastery of world weariness.

“There’s the person you want to be when you’re young. And there’s the person you wind up being.”

Jane’s Ray Mandel is resigned to that, a lifetime of being most comfortable on the job, most at home in his Crown Vic.

A few moments like the roid-raging detective and a couple of other encounters took me right out of the picture, which is largely a straight-arrow “Adam-12” (this team is “20-Lincoln-14”) dangers and drudgery of the job drama.

Ray can complain that “They think it’s take-a-free-shot-at-a-cop night,” but we see lots of police restraint, none of this shoot-on-suspicion nonsense that has dominated the news about police killings nationwide. “Blue Lives Matter” doesn’t figure into the thinking either.

But Souza’s film reminds us that being apolitical is a political statement, too.

And after all the movies and TV shows, “Training Day” and “Rampart,” “End of Watch” and “Blue Knight” and years and years of “Cops” and “Live PD,” it’s not just the cops who’ve “seen it all.”

“Crown Vic” isn’t a bad picture. It’s just too unexceptional to stand out.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and pervasive language, disturbing content, sexual references, drug material and brief full nudity

cast: Thomas Jane, Luke Kleintank, Josh Hopkins, David Krumholtz and Bridget Moynahan

Credits: Written and directed by Joel Souza. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:50

Bound to happen. Cheaper than casting the real thing,beceb the ones who aren’t dead?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/afm-james-dean-reborn-cgi-vietnam-war-action-drama-1252703

One way to get past that seasonal “holiday movie phobia” thing more than a few of us suffer from is to throw in some Italian-Americans, as writer-director Robert Tinnell does with “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”

Make it a period piece, nostalgic for the days when a lot of your relatives were World War II vets, and one was at D-Day.

Make’em cook, you know, the “seven fishes” of this Italian Catholic Christmas Eve dinner tradition — bacaloa, smelt, whiting, shrimp, oysters, eel and calamari.

Let’em grab each other by the neck, for hugs and brother-on-brother wrestling fights.

Give’em plenty of sassy banter, throw-away lines that are the garlic of any dishy Italian-American comedy.

“What am I, Kojak?”

“You’re an idiot. Not your fault. You take after Uncle Carmine’s side of the gene pool!”

“Very funny. Tell me when to laugh!”

A little wistful romance, a touch of leaving the cozy family nest, all set against a holiday feast — prepping for it, cooking it, bickering, chasing the womenfolk out of the kitchen — that’s a winning combo for a holiday rom-com.

No low-hanging comic fruit is left unplucked in this sentimental easy-going and at times adorable entry in the seasonal comedy onslaught.

“On Christmas Eve in this town, EVERYbody is Italian. Or thinks they are!”

Tony Oliverio (Skyler Gisondo of “Booksmart”) is college age, but stuck at home in Greentown, West Virginia (actually Rivesville and Fairmont, West Virginia). He’s a painter who works in the family meat market his parents run. No chance of accepting admission to a “pretty good art school” in Pittsburgh.

It’s 1983 and his big Italian family is one generation removed from working in the coal mines. They’ll never go for anything as seemingly frivolous as “art school.”

He’s just broken up with his girlfriend since elementary school, and Katie (Addison Timlin), isn’t taking it well.

Cousin Angelo (Andrew Schultz) reminds him that “the chicks that went away to college, the ones we NEVER get to see? They’re back…and horny for the holidays!” That’s how Tony meets Beth (winsome Madison Iseman of the “Goosebumps” movies), a pretty blonde coed who went straight from prep school to the Ivy League.

It being 1983, Beth is resisting her parents’ push toward making more concrete plans with rich preppie Prentice (Allen Williamson), who’d rather be skiing this holiday.

Beth and Prentice, or Beth and Tony? If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, right? Que sera sera and all that.

There’s a mouth-watering comic montage of fish cooking as Tony explains the day’s cuisine to Beth.

But a comedy like this lives or dies on its supporting characters and the supporting cast you get to play them, and “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a terrific one. Sure, they’re playing “types” — the lazy great uncle, the lazy little brother, the grousing patriarch (Paul Ben-Victor of TV’s “Goliath,” shining in a rare comic turn), the gambling, hustling “businessman” brother, given a “Paisano!” twinkle by Joe Pantoliano.

The grumpy great-grandmother (Lynn Cohen) doesn’t approve of the pretty blonde non-Catholic. Beth, one and all agree — when they switch to Italian when talking about her in front of her — is a “Mangia-cake,” a cake-eater. Rich. And the Oliverios? “Not OUR kind of people” Beth’s mother reminds her.

Naturally, she’s dragged into the holiday feast, old men in their t-shirts peeling shrimp, stuffing calamari and frying bacaloa.

Naturally, everybody they know drops by, including Juke (Josh Helman), a bookish, bespectacled philosopher/psychoanalyst who just happens to be a mechanic. “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a little bit of every family holiday comedy about it, a touch of “Big Night” thanks to the food, and in this one character — Juke — a hint of “Diner.”

Most of the players have their moment or two, but none rings more true than Katie’s, a young woman devastated by her break-up, acting-out to try and win him back — adrift.

“I didn’t just lose Tony. I lost the whole family!”

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

Call “Feast of the Seven Fishes” what it is, Christmas comedy comfort food. And bring your appetite.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with a little fisticuffs, a little pot, a little profanity

Cast: Skyler Gisondo, Madison Iseman, Josh Helman, Paul Ben-Victor, Lynn Cohen, Addison Timlin, Jessica Darrow and Joe Pantoliano

Credits: Written and directed by Robert Tinnell. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:37