Movie Nation

“Countdown” is for those horror fans who like their drinks straight, no chaser.

Nothing too fancy. Not too much “explaining,” none that has to make any sense, anyway.

Nice and cheap (a $6.5 million budget). Cast good-looking unknowns (Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway), save for the creepy doctor (Peter Facinelli of “Nurse Jackie”).

Use comics in key supporting roles, for laughs — the cell phone repair whiz (Tom Segura), the geek priest who got into the Holy Catholic Church for the Latin and the demonology (P.J. Byrne).

Get your jolts, and this one is “jolty” in the extreme, the old-fashioned way –shrieking sound effects (including a ring tone), abrupt, shocking edits, and shadows.

Effects? Yank somebody out of the frame — across the floor, or up to the ceiling.

And hire the right master of the macabre to design your creature costumes, makeup and effects. Here, it’s Ehsan Bigloo, who conjures up assorted wraiths, demonic corpses and a genuinely chilling Grim Reaper, cape and cowl, Satanic hands, everything but the scythe.

First-time feature writer-and-director Justin Dec makes the jump from “miscellaneous crew” credits with this latest variation of “the killer app,” a horror subgenre involving the cell phone as harbinger of death (“One Missed Call,” “Cell,” etc.).

Here, it’s a new “Countdown” app that has all the kids abuzz.

“If you could know exactly when you’re going to die, would you WANT to know?”

You know “kids.” Sure. Download that bad boy. “Accept” that “User Agreement.” “Fine print?”  Who has time to read anything longer than a tweet?

Some get the good news of lives of great longevity. Others? Days. Hours. Tick tick tick tick…

“Countdown” doesn’t just count you down to your untimely demise. It all but takes over your phone. It’s malware you seemingly can’t delete — like MacAfee, only free.

And it hits you with these shrieking, insistent “alerts.” Especially when you try to alter your fate by cancelling a trip, ducking out of a car whose driver is drunk, etc.

If we learned nothing else from the “Final Destination” franchise, it’s that “death’s grand design” will not be thwarted. Dodge a drunk driver here, get yanked into the air and dropped on a tub there.

Elizabeth Lail is a nurse whose patient, grimly awaiting his “Countdown” clock to wind down, probably in surgery, convinces her to offhandedly add this new app and unthinkingly click “accept.”

When the patient dies — a prologue sets up”the app that decides when you die inevitability” — Nurse Quinn, Medicine Woman has a moment of doubt. She won’t reach “worry” and “panic” until later.

The tech-nerd cell phone “doctor” (Segura) is awfully droll about how Quinn, and another panicky customer (Jordan Calloway) have been suckered in to this obviously fake app designed to scare the life out of you. But Quinn and Matt are seeing things. And people are dying.

It takes two priests, one referring them to another, the demon “expert,” to get some answers.

“The Bible is like, the ULTIMATE graphic novel!” Father John (Byrne) enthuses. Best line of the movie. Demons in chapter after chapter, descriptions, myth and apocrypha thrown in.

There’s a #MeToo set up, with a creeper doctor (Facinelli), and attacks that the new couple, bound by the shared threat, face together, along with demonology-based “solutions” and an ending that isn’t the worst “How do we write a way out of this?” I’ve seen.

It’s not highbrow entertainment. Movies like this always feel “designed,” like a theme park ride — story beat, JOLT, exposition exposition JOLT, etc. But “Countdown” manages the bare minimum — the occasional shock, characters we root for, thanks to the actors playing them, and situations fraught enough that the audience is talking back to the screen.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language and thematic elements

Cast:  Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Eliana Bateman, Peter Facinelli, with P.J. Byrne and Tom Segura

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Dec.  An STX release.

Running time: 1:30

Artists, the old saying goes, “pound the same nail over and over again.”

For the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, that nail often has fingernail polish on it.

“Pain & Glory,” his 22nd feature film, finds the 70 year-old legend in a reflective mood, an old man played by a handsome alter ego (Antonio Banderas) musing over his bad back, his migraines, his aching joints and his seized esophagus, a veritable recluse who no longer creates, but is ready to reconsider his past work in a new light.

His fragile health and a newly restored version of his great success, “Sabor (Taste)” has Salvador Mallo ready to forgive the film’s star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), whom he feuded with long ago. An actress Salvador used in his films (Cecilia Roth of “All About My Mother”) puts him in touch with Alberto, a less employed actor holed up in the picturesque tourist town of El Escorial.

They reconnect, forgive and forget. And it turns out, the issue the two had way back when offers some relief to Salvador now. Alberto loves his heroin, and has managed it for decades. Salvador finds pain relief with him as they “chase the dragon.”

And in flashbacks, some of them drug-induced, there she is, the woman (played by Penélope Cruz) who “made me who I am,” the mother whose influence drove the alter-ego filmmaker’s life and work just as it did the real director here, the one who gave us “All About My Mother” and “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom,” who all but invented Spanish queer cinema in the process.

There’s an almost Fellini-esque magic to some of these childhood memories of a mama’s boy whose life in the arts began in the Catholic Church — a boy soprano soloist in the school choir, picking up his voice from his mother, who’d sing with the other women as they did their laundry in the river.

She was underwhelmed by the life they led, moved to Paterna by his laborer dad, living in one of the town’s famous cave houses. Jacinta (Cruz) lamented the rough-hewn walls, the dirt floor, the window skylight that let the rain in. Her mother lectured her, “Yiou live in catacombs, like the ancient Christians!”

And little Salvador loves this adventurous lifestyle, exchanging his book learning for writing lessons he gives a local teen (César Vicente), who whitewashes their walls and inadvertantly lets little Salvador realize that maybe he likes boys instead of girls.

In the present day, Salvador has nothing but the past. “I cannot film in this condition. Without filming,” he says (in Spanish, with English subtitles), my life is meaningless.”

But he has this autobiographical script that Alberto reads, one that could be staged as a one-man show. Let me “play you,” the actor begs, between sessions of “chasing the dragon.” Will this pull our hero out of his funk?

There’s little emotion to all of this, and aside from a brief moment that flirts with “joyous,” even the flashbacks lack the brio and abandon characteristic of Almodóvar’s signature films.

It’s as if Banderas is taking Salvador’s own advice to Alberto-the-actor too literally. “The better actor is not the one who cries. It is the one who fights to hold back the tears.”

We aren’t given much to cling to here. Even the infirmities of old age are only portrayed as a stiff slowing down, and the depression that comes with that.

The locations — especially Paterna — can be striking. But generic doctor’s offices and apartments weigh the film down visually.

As the filmmaker, on screen and behind the camera, reflects on “the cinema of my childhood,” we hope for something more picaresque, a hint of “The 400 Blows” or “Cinema Paradiso.” Something more colorful and childish. “Fellini-esque.”

Almodóvar can’t be bothered with that. He never seems more like an old man than when he lets his film wander into old man complaints — that litany of physical ailments that we all obsess over as we age.

The sentimentality — for his mother, his formative childhood, an old lover — is what interests Almodóvar, here. And while it’s great that longtime collaborators Cruz and Banderas showed up to help him walk down memory lane, it’s not the most interesting cinematic journey he’s taken us on.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, some graphic nudity and language. |

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Celilia Roth, Leonardo Sbaraglia and Penélope Cruz

Credits: Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:53

For someone who gripes that a big problem with Hollywood these days is its abandonment of proven, visionary directors, this is sobering.

Ang Lee has been given a lot of chances to deliver the goods since “Brokeback Mountain,”none bigger tha a Will Smith actioner with lots of effects.

Virtually every picture he’s made has been a critical flop and box office bust.

The red ink from “Gemini Man” could have financed five “Brokebacks.”

Via THR

https://t.co/svnGEb5czB https://twitter.com/THR/status/1187288897476349953?s=17

It wasn’t anybody’s idea of a classic, not even the best kiddie movie about witches of its day.

But “Hocus Pocus” has aged well, as have its stars– Bette, Sarah Jessica P. and Kathy Najimy. Will they be on the now planned sequel, 26 years later?

You’d think the plan would be for a prequel.

Disney mines more of its archives for product is the real story here. Originality is dead at Disney. Blockbuster remakes of animated classics is what the Mouse — especially its accountants — is all about.

https://t.co/weNqDVGxkY https://t.co/zPESlwPIt3 https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1187292675734724608?s=17

Yeah, more youngsters menaced by a “killer app.”

Embargo on reviews for this one, so mum’s the word about its quality until Noon Thursday.

Real vote of confidence there, STX. A horror movie that works has nothing to fear from critics.

The narcotized normality of suburbia takes a pastel-colored pummelling in “Greener Grass,” a daft and dark comedy from two alumni of the comedy troupe, Upright Citizen’s Brigade.

That shared credit, where Dawn Luebbe and Jocelyn DeBoer connected, tells you what to expect — broad, scattershot, random and deadpan swipes at faddish, amoral and faintly repellant suburbanites. It won’t be to many tastes, but this “Stepford” meets “The Prisoner” in “The Truman Show” satire is engineered for cult status, and sure to own it.

In an unnamed planned community where life is so insulated that everyone knows everyone, and everyone must use the same orthodontist (Braces for all!) , everybody gets around in golf carts and every single person is too polite — or meek — to be the first to roll through a four-way-stop.

It’s a community where routine seems…routine, it is impulse, bend-over-backwards politeness and easy on-the-fly shaming drives society.

And what they get used to, accept as normal? Wow.

A murder by a bag packer at the local market is shrugged off, even as cops in the cutest teal uniforms (Shorts!) stake the place out in plain sight.

Provincialism rules, conformity and how to achieve it is the norm.

And Jill (co-writer/director Jocelyn DeBoer) and Nick (Beck Bennett of “Saturday Night Live”) spend their smiling, conforming lives a tad mortified. Their kid, Julian (Julian Hilliard) just isn’t right. He’s unfocused, scattered, highly strung and marching to his own one-armed drummer. He treats all physical contact as an attack. That makes him the perfect soccer “flopper.” But his random shrieks and wails go up in volume when a game of catch with Dad goes terribly, if not remotely injuriously, wrong.

Jill spends her life apologizing, at least in part, because of Julian.

Maybe that explains her chat at the soccer game with bestie Lisa  (co-writer/director Dawn Luebbe). Jill’s second baby, Madison, is on her hip. Nothing gets by Lisa.

“Oh, I didn’t even notice you have a baby!”

“We wanted to try something new!”

Lisa wishes she had a newborn.

“You want her? TAKE her! She’s yours now!”

“Thank you SO much!”

“ENJOY!”

Baby Madison becomes Baby Page, just like that.

Vapidity is not gender-specific, here. The couples mix up their mates (Neil Casey plays Lisa’s husband), but only after a little competitive public displaying of affection at a cookout.

Nick’s new passion is their new pool, whose water he tinkers with and tests until he’s at the point he carries gallons of it around with him.

“Here, TRY this!”

In that setting, the most bizarre occurrence of all barely registers with Jill and Nick. Julian, in one of his many moments of attention-grabbing drama, plunges into the pool at Nick’s 40th birthday party. He emerges as, well, a Golden Retriever?

Jill, ever-rattled, always-apologizing, just goes along with it. Nick? He’s lost a son who can’t play catch, who wets himself in fear on a daily basis in second grade, who ruins every soccer match with his flopping. But he’s gained someone who wants to play with dad, frolic and a natural canine athlete.

Nick is overjoyed. So what if Julian is kicked out of “Rocket Math?”

“D’you think he was going to be an accountant?”

“Greener Grass” rides this randomness, and a lot of insta-shaming moments from Lisa — who won’t give back Jill’s baby, even though Jill doesn’t want to be “an Indian giver.”

“You can’t SAY that now!” Lisa’s up on everything people aren’t allowed to do or say any more. And she’s not alone. It’s the lifeblood of this place — shaming over potluck dishes, over the boy whose parents let him watch “Kids Play with Knives” and who learned to swear and act-out from it.

What I can’t say is that “Greener Grass” is much of a movie, that it held together for me. It’s like three “Upright Citizens Brigade” episodes, built on a common cast and haphazzardly selected themes, barely jelling into a “story.”

Still, see “Greener Grass” for the set pieces. The teacher, Miss Human (D’Arcy Carden) sings a ballad about her sharecropper/spree killer mother, accompanying herself on her class guitar — which she’s plainly not playing.

Lisa, on a whim, grabs a soccer ball, shoving it under her dress and letting this world see she’s pregnant (carrying that joke all the way to term).

Neighbor Kim Ann (Mary Holland) lets the world know she’s divorcing by having people over as her husband packs his things into their golf cart.

“Sit. I made lemonade. We’re watching.”

No, set pieces don’t make a movie, and there’s a struggle not to let anyone have a character arc, make a journey into self-awareness. They almost let it happen, but don’t.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe, Beck Bennett, Julian Hilliard, Janicza Bravo, Neil Casey, D’Arcy Carden

Credits: Written and directed by Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe.   An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:36

Now it’s Ken Loach, veteran of the British film scene, who burns Marvel Movies a new one.

The director of “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” “Bread and Roses,” “Jimmy’s Hall” and many Celtic-flavored dramas in the UK, has added his complaints to those of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Loach, correctly, I have to say, called the output of the blockbuster building Marvel Studios “commodities, like hamburgers.”

One of the consequences of the rise of comic book blockbusters is the loss of status, vision and control in the title “director.” Hollywood isn’t producing directors with any staying power, treating rising stars as nothing special, ignoring the legends of the profession.

Overseas, and in indie film, directors are still auteurs. Hollywood? Get us The Russo Brothers, or somebody from TV (British TV, preferably, as in the Potter pictures) — somebody CHEAP who can make the trains run on time.

And if you say, “Ken Loach? Who’s he?” That’s on you. Loach, Leigh, Holofcener, legions of directors with style, distinct voices, who insist on making movies ABOUT something, have no place at Marvel, or at Disney — which has become a blockbuster remake or bust studio. Joe Johnston, Ken Brannagh, Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon and Patty Jenkins all had “names” before taking on comic book directing duties. But while thus employed, all they could stamp their projects with was a little cute dialogue and a vague notion of a point of view.

Marvel and its ilk are the death of auteurism, and directors who claim that label are rebelling. No matter how old they are.

“Black and Blue” is a lean, simple, pulse-pounding thriller built around an intensely relatable star, a perfectly alarming villain and a story that has the ring of “ripped from today’s headlines” about it.

It’s a genre picture, plain and simple — a clean cop chased by dirty cops through an arresting setting — foggy, rainy and wintry New Orleans. Director Deon Taylor, of “The Intruder” and “Traffik,” working from a Peter A. Dowling script (“Flightplan,” “Reasonable Doubt”), keeps us guessing which of the three or four obvious directions this can play out with will be one the characters choose.

And damned if they don’t manage a surprise or two, almost in spite of themselves.

Naomie Harris, a slip of a thing who is Moneypenny to Daniel Craig’s James Bond, plays Alicia West, a Big Easy native who returns from military service to take a job on one of the nation’s more notorious police forces.

Growing up in the 9th Ward, she is idealistic enough to think relating to the few folks she still knows there, making conversation in the best “community policing” fashion, will let her affect change.

A veteran of the force (James Moses Black) sets her straight.
“WE are your people,” he says. She’s no longer black. “You’re blue, now.”

That is put almost instantly to the test when she witnesses the execution of some young drug dealers.

Alicia, a rookie, but a veteran once stationed in Kandahar, has no problem with the new department-issued body cams. That’s what seals her fate. It’s on while Narc Malone (a ferocious Frank Grillo) pulls the trigger. He’s barely attempted to explain “This ISN’T what it looks like,” when a subordinate riddles Alicia with bullets. If not for the bullet proof vest, her wounds would be worse.

Now, she’s on the run, unarmed — she dropped her gun — with a dead cell phone and a vest-attached camera archiving explosive video that exposes a vast, corrupt conspiracy within her precinct. Who can she trust? How can she survive, on foot and bleeding?

How will justice be done?

Early scenes neatly establish her inability to reconnect with “her” people, among them Milo (Tyrese Gibson), the older brother of a friend, and a onetime teen pal (Nafessa Williams) who runs with the wrong crowd, and is all “I don’t KNOW her” now.

It’s no surprise when doors slam in Alicia’s face as she frantically runs from house to house.

“Oh HELL nawwwww”

Early scenes have also established the soul-crushing brutality of police relations with the African American community in the 9th. Routine thumpings under the guise of “stop and frisk,” a real cop as prosecutor/judge and jury complex amongst “Blue,” who are “armed, and with a bullet proof vest” have traumatized much of the populace.

And this woman, this “You one’a THEM” whom bystanders, drug dealers and frantic hunting cops call “Bitch” about 400 times, and in 400 different ways, wants help?

Gibson does some of his best screen acting by doing less, playing a man beaten down by a life of limited choices, a system and constant violent, humiliating encounters with those who claim “To protect and serve.”

Grillo is emerging as the finest heavy of his generation, a villain with native cunning and a ruthlessness built on a calculus that he lets you see in every raised eyebrow or steely glare.

But Harris is the key here, letting us see how troubled she is about the state of her city and of relations between the “black” and the “blue.” We believe her idealism, her good intentions and her naivete. And we appreciate her wide-eyed panic.

“They’re trying to KILL me, man!”

I don’t want to oversell “Black and Blue.” It doesn’t transcend its genre. But it doesn’t waste our time, modulates its chase with alternating brisk and slow pacing, hand-held camera sprints interrupted by bursts of violence and stops, every so often, at a moral crossroad.

“She’s ain’t one’a us. She picked her side!”

The cleverness of the picture is that we doubt she has, and we’re never confident either “side” will pick her.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Naomie Harris, Tyrese Gibson, Frank Grillo, Mike Colter, Nefessa Williams and Reid Scott

Credits: Directed by Deon Taylor, script by Peter A. Dowling. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:48

Love Naomi Harris. Frank Grillo is one of the better heavies making movies today.

Fingers crossed for “Black and Blue” lives matter, which opens Friday.

What do you think? Does it sell the picture? Promise improvements over the other formulaic and recycled installments in the saga?