Movie Nation

It helps to remember that Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter who conjured up the original “Jacob’s Ladder” back in 1990, also wrote the blockbuster “Ghost.”

And Mr. Rubin, as he told me way back then, wrote these afterlife thrillers during his deep dive into “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” holding his interest, too.

Sure, we all remember the “vibrating man” effects — apparitions shaking into a blur, an effect used often in the decades since. But these were thought-provoking ghost stories in an era that produced those, tales of time and memory unhinged and an afterlife that offers either peace and closure or eternal damnation.

And yes, purgatory might mean you’re stuck on New York’s subway system for all eternity.

The new “Jacob’s Ladder” is significantly different from the original in many ways, but not in a couple of important ones.

Casting Michael Ealy, a leading man given to playing sensitive leads or haunted heavies, pays off. He is Jacob, an Iraq War vet confused by the unraveling reality of life back home in Atlanta, and Ealy’s an old pro at convincing us of shock, terror and hurt. His eyes scream “The horror, the horror” when the need arises.

And the tone of this David M. Rosenthal remake — he did Ealy’s “The Perfect Man” with Sanaa Lathan and Morris Chestnut — is spooky and spot on.

It works about as well as a remake that’s half an hour shorter than the original can work, which isn’t a ringing endorsement, I know. Still worth taking a look at.

Jacob Singer is an Atlanta trauma surgeon who works in the city Veterans Administration hospital. He was a combat trauma surgeon in Iraq, and that experience hangs over him, with memory overwhelming his present reality on occasion.

Jacob didn’t realize the patient he was about to lose in a field hospital in Iraq was his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams) until he spied his tattoo.

Now Jacob is running into demented vets on the street. They’re wearing combat jackets and hoodies, and their messages are all over the place.

“Your brother’s here…You’re brother’s in trouble. I can show you.”

And then there are the hooded ghouls who invade the house he shares with wife Sam (Nicole Beharie). Unmasking one is Jacob’s first clue that he’s not dealing with something of this world.

“Better keep your mouth shut” is what he’s told. By the house-breaker who vanishes into the trees.

Who to confide in? Sam? She’s busy with their baby who was born when he was overseas.

There’s Hoffman, the VA pharmacist (Guy Burnet). And there’s the psychotherapist (Michael Panes) helping Jacob deal with whatever level of post traumatic stress he’s suffering.

Will either have the answers when that one traumatized comrade of his brother’s (Joseph Sikora) leads him to his dead brother, hiding out in the bowels of The City Too Busy to Hate.

Isaac? You were dead!

Bringing the “dead” sibling home merely intensifies the hallucinations, the flashbacks — to their childhood together, to Jacob’s wedding day with Sam, to combat or field surgery in Iraq.

These flashbacks — machine fire, visions of choppers, the works — are so intense they can kill a man. Jacob’s not the only one having them. There’s this anti-psychotic drug,HDA, “The Ladder,” that was out, then pulled, that seems like a clue.

Rosenthal’s film, based on Jeff Buhler and Sarah Thorpe’s rewrite of the 1990 “Jacob’s Ladder,” grabs us with a gory rib-spreader surgical opening and then settles into the moody terrors that Jacob won’t speak about, so certain is he that all this supernatural stuff is really roiling around him.

Would a doctor REALLY believe clerical mistakes let him think his brother has been dead?

“I just want to know what’s going on!”

As in the original “Ladder,” the one person who might have answers that provide solace is named “Louis.” Then, that was Jacob’s chiropractor-protector and father-confessor, played by the great Danny Aiello.

Here Louis is a similarly calming presence, his psychotherapist. Character actor Michael Panes (he was Gore Vidal in “Infamous”) summons up the soothing tones of Louis’s profession to talk Jacob off his psychic ledge.

“We all see things,” he says, quoting Medieval theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart to his fellow physician. “The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of yourself that refuses to let go.”

The first “Jacob’s Ladder” earned mixed notices upon release, and never quite achieved “cult” status. This version is no better in many ways, and altering its twist ending isn’t much of an improvement.

Honestly, it seems to muddle the whole wrestling with mortality and “what comes after” thing, aside from Louis’s little speech.

But there isn’t a bad performance in it, and those turns made me buy in just enough. It’s still a mixed bag, but for those in a “Ghost” frame of mind, it’s not bad.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence, sexuality and drug content

Cast: Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie, Joseph Sikora, Karla Souza, Ninja N. Devoe

Credits: Directed by David M. Rosenthal, script by Jeff Buhler and Sarah Thorpe, based on the Bruce Joel Rubin script for the 1990 film.  A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:29

As I twiddle my thumbs, waiting for the embargo to clear for “The Kitchen,” allow me to share the fond hope that this, the latest 70s-80s music film to demand our attention, will be worth the wait.

A Pakistani Briton in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain discovers an American voice that speaks to his very soul, the longing, the aching loneliness, the frustration of, as Harlan Ellison so aptly put it, having “no mouth but I must scream.”

Sure, it’s titled after my least favorite Springsteen song. But this trailer has a sheen of sheer joy about it. Hope it’s better than “Yesterday” or “Rocketman,” but we’ll see.

Supporting players Rob Brydon and Hayley Atwell are the only “names” in the cast.

“Blinded by the Light” opens Aug. 16.

It started life as a BBC sci-fi radio comedy, became a series of novels, was adapted for British TV and eventually, finally and AFTER the death of its creator, Douglas Adams, became a sort of half-hearted movie.

Now Hulu has a producer/show runner with “Lost” and “Jack Ryan” experience and a screenwriter with “Wonder Woman” bonafides and a cunning plan to put “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on streaming TV.

All well and good. Fine. Etc.

But if I might make a suggestion. Why not take the vintage 1970s radio series, impressive, funny and dazzling in its own way, with Simon Jones and voice-actors as varied as Jim Broadbent, Rula Lenska and Jonathan Pryce in bit parts, and ANIMATE it?

That could be a hoot. And if there’s one thing the earlier visual and even literary versions of the concept have proven, the RADIO SERIES was its natural format — aural effects, verbal wit delivered with a deliriously English deadpan.

No, they won’t do that.Still, they’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect Arthur Dent than Martin Freeman, as Simon Jones will certainly be deemed too old to play the part for Hulu.

Here, by the way, was my DEFINITIVE and widely published wire service story/profile of the star and the director and others from when the movie came out waaaaaaay back in 2005.

You can’t help but notice Disney’s mission creep as it dives deeper into the Marvel business, the gold mine that has made the studio forgo pretty much everything else — save for remaking their animated classics as “live action” (not really) features.

What happened to kids’ fare, the non animated side of their original business?

Two franchises that the “Absent Minded Professor” “Escape from Witch Mountain” company could have made, but that Fox did instead, are now in Disney’s possession. So why not remake “Home Alone” and the far more recent “Night at the Museum?” That’s the thinking, anyway.

https://t.co/ZIO3T9Y9RD https://t.co/WTBwgFIVCd https://twitter.com/THR/status/1158931041601671168?s=17

For the first time in eight years,
Netflix lost subscribers last quarter. Over 130,000 dropped them as the service lost popular series like “The Office” and “Friends.”

As others say, “That’s just the beginning.”

As in, expect the streaming service to start shedding subscribers every quarter, and the bottomless well of subscriber/production money will have to be spent on a LOT more original content.

Rising competition could put Netflix in it’s production place. With less money to lavish on big names, Netflix will be in the position of a lot of small studios. They can’t get much of an audience for their product. Alfonso Cuaron wouldn’t be able to money muscle his way to a best picture nomination for a movie few saw and nobody remembers, for instance.

Scorsese’s blank check for”The Irishman” will have to pay off, every time, to get the amount of attention it will take to lure subscribers who used to sign up because “30 Rock,” Ross and Monica and “The Office” were there.

The paradigm is shifting. Again.

https://t.co/NJzNIYXHWc https://twitter.com/Medium/status/1158879372415250432?s=17

For an 80 minute movie, “Wicked Witches,” retitled from the ever-so-British “The Witches of Dumpling Farm,” certainly does dawdle along.

I had all but despaired of it ever getting up and running long before its nervy, stomach-churning chase and finale.

But what a finish!

Blood and guts yanked out with jagged teeth by women whose eyes are pools of the most spine-chilling black. It probably didn’t take much “pretending” for star Duncan Casey to shriek like a frightened girl, bellow like a man straining to get through not just the night but the next few seconds and scream like a hunted animal wailing at the prospect of never escaping the clutches of…those “Wicked Witches.”

The Bahamian-born Casey plays Irishman Mark, whom we meet as he yanks off his wedding band and drops it out of the car window.

He’s driving from the wrong side of the vehicle, which tells us he’s in Jolly Olde. A quick call to his mate from his days as a carefree bachelor ensures he’ll have a place to stay tonight.

But something in the way the wild-eyed Ian (Justin Marosa) says, “I’ll see you when you get here…MATE,” sets one’s teeth on edge. Not Mark’s, just “one’s.”

Mark and Ian used to hang on Dumpling Farm in Cambridgeshire, out in crop circle country on the B-roads a ways from town. But walking up on Ian, chopping wood and muttering in strange tongues, should be Mark’s second red alert.

Something has changed here. Ian, who still likes to get high, is a part of that something. Laughing maniacally while stoned is new to his repertoire.

Mark would love to host a “big party” at the place, and plans are made to round up the old gang. But these nightmares he’s having are turning into daymares.  He sees bloodied women taking a bite out of men, and it’s keeping him up all night.

Yes, it’s definitely the nightmares, and not the blasts of beer and blow.

The party is where the strangers show up, a clutch of bombshells led by a woman nobody calls the high priestess (a feral Samantha Schnitzler) and including a spooky blonde beauty (Jasmine Clark) Mark has seen around town.

The effects are simple but chilling — the fake teeth, the blood, those damned “Blair Witch” Wiccan stick-models, the alarming close-ups, the isolating wide shots.

For all the efforts to inject humor belatedly into the third act, it’s the sheer terror of the situation and fear that there is no escape that drives characters’ reactions — which can be, even in the direst panic, funny.

I fret about actors’ unwillingness to let it all hang out when playing characters confronted with the supernatural and their own mortality. Duncan Casey puts on a clinic as to how far over-the-top reasonable human reactions to things that cannot be should be played.

The witches, Schnitzler and Clark, speaking with disembodied Satanic baritones, grow more frightening the longer the film goes on.

But the drawn-out chase, above and below ground, of the third act needed to begin earlier — much earlier. The Pickering Brothers’ debut feature spends too much time setting everything up. No, that first 55 minutes or so doesn’t give us deep insights to anyone. Mark is a womanizer, and is still friends with other womanizers. And…?

The picture shortchanges women in general and the witchy women who leave their brooms at home when they’re hunting in particular. No “ex,” no female friends at the party, just guests who show up, dominate the proceedings and submit to their animal feeding urges.

Still, “Wicked Witches” isn’t a total write-off. But when your movie’s this short, getting to the point, giving us “the good stuff” and all that jazz has got to happen earlier.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Duncan Casey, Jasmine Clark, Samantha Schnitzler, Justin Marosa, Kitt Proudfoot

Credits: Written and directed by Martin Pickering and Mark Pickering. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:20

There is comfort and little risk in rooting for sports superpowers — the Patriots, Manchester Uniteds, Dukes and Alabamas of this world.

But when there is no struggle there is no pathos. And in rooting, when there is no risk, there is no glory.

“The Bromley Boys” is about one lad’s slavish devotion to a faithless lover — Bromley F.C. (football club) in the Southeast of Greater London, North Kent for you geographers. Dave Roberts’ football memoir about frustration, awkwardness, social ostracization and first love makes for a sentimental and twee British period piece about the worst football club of them all.

Forget the century of Chicago Cubs misery, the ongoing agonies of the Chargers, the pointless existence of the Charlotte Hornets. Bromley, founded in the late 19th century, had to be the most frustrating underdogs to ever tie one’s sporting fate to.

Not that young Dave (Brenock O’Connor of “Game of Thrones”) planned it that way. He fell in love with the game when England won its last World Cup (1966). At 11, he’d have rather rooted for Tottenham Hotspur,” “like my friends.”

“You don’t have any friends,” grumbles his ever-“disgruntled” dad (Alan Davies).

“What about the team down the road, Bromley?” offers Mum (Martine McCutcheon), ever the peacemaker.

“Nobody supports Bromley,” the kid protests. “Bromley’s rubbish!”

“FOOTball is rubbish!” thunders Dad, and that’s that.

Only it’s not. Doting Mum is all about encouraging the kid and buys Dave the “uniform” of British football fans (a scarf).

“You can’t choose who you’re going to fall in love with,” the adult Dave (also Alan Davies) narrates. Because that’s what this fandom became.

Mum & Son cook up a years-long ruse to cover Dave’s obsessive attendance at the tiny, tattered home field for Bromley on Hayes Lane. As the years pass, he will become the oldest Cub Scout in Britain, donning the hat, shirt and kerchief, slipping out to meetings and “projects” every Saturday. That’s what they tell Dad, anyway.

Dave’s obsession gets him noticed at school, in all the worst ways. He practices being interviewed about his “career,” and thus talks to himself. A lot. Even the girls bully him.

By age 15, he’s lost for life over Bromley, then a semi-pro team in the Isthmian League, and so very bad that they could lose even their low-team-on-the-totem-pole standing and be “relegated.”

That’s the very year (1970) that Dave falls in with motley adult Bromley fanatics (TJ Herbert, Mark Dymond and Ewen MacIntosh). He’s egged on into protesting the team’s woes. Losing to the likes of Dulwich, Ilford, Hitchin Town, Barking, Corinthian Casuals, Maidstone United and Tooting & Mitcham should get the printer turned part-time manager fired, right?

That puts Dave in the field of vision of team chairman and compulsive gambler Charlie McQueen (the amusingly splenetic Jamie Forman of “Layer Cake”). And that’s how Dave meets McQueen’s daughter, smart but wallflowerish Ruby (Savannah Baker).

Whatever Dave sees in Bromley, Ruby sees in Dave. As in “God knows what.”

The jokes in this tale “based on real events…and some rumours” are of the slight and sly variety.

Dave’s self-made protest T-shirt to oust manager Dick Ellis has “Dick Out” written on it.

School interludes show Dave getting pelted with wads of paper for promoting Bromley, and getting frequent canings from the headmaster for interrupting class to promote Bromley.

He sticks his foot in it autograph hunting when West Ham United comes to play a “friendly” and all their stars skip the trip.

“Excuse me, is anybody GOOD playing today?”

The football stuff sends him into the near-madness of total obsession — sneaking into the chairman’s office to gain intel, spreading “rumours,” fretting over the fate of his favorite player, “Stoney” Stonebridge (Ross Anderso , the very picture of 1970s mustachiod dash).

Ruby? He just uses her to access her Dad, who is plainly spending beyond his means — an Aston Martin, a mansion, a Russian trophy wife played by Anna Danshina.

To “come of age,” Dave’s got to reconcile his obsessions and become a more considerate person, maybe find out why Dad has a limp, why Mum indulges his football mania, why his teachers all find him a waste of space. He needs to see what Ruby sees in him.

“Twee” is just a more polite description of British comedies that err on the side of “cutesy.” The almost-omnipresent narration here takes on “A Christmas Story” incredulity, but never adds much that is funny to the proceedings.

The entire picture is basically one big gag that has a hint of “inside joke” to it, as any Brit could tell you Bromley was a laughingstock for decades, and the kid’s into Bromley, of all clubs, in its direst state.

But young O’Connor has a pale, walking bean-pole awkwardness about him, and uses that ungainly appearance to good effect. Nerdy glasses or not, rich and pretty Ruby wouldn’t give him the time of day.

Except that he’s a lost cause. And like Bromley F.C. circa 1970, there is glory and romance in falling for something or someone that’s going to challenge your faith and maybe break your heart.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Brenock O’Connor, Savannah Baker, Martine McCutcheon, Jamie Foreman, Alan Davies, Anna Danshina

Credits: Directed by Steve Kelly, script by Warren Dudley, based on the Dave Roberts memoir. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:46

Period piece? Accents? British football? Collectible British cars in the background?

Come on. You had me at “Bromley.”

Donovan’s classic is remade for this horror movie, produced by Guillermo del Toro and not previewed for critics.

It opens Friday.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/lana-del-rey-season-of-the-witch-guillermo-del-toro-1203292435/

Whatever virtues it displayed on the printed page, “The Art of Racing in the Rain” makes a movie of modest, melodramatic pleasures, mainly homey aphorisms about motor racing and the hidden life of dogs.

As these are growled out by our narrator — Oscar winner Kevin Costner is the voice of Enzo the Golden Retriever belonging to race car driver Denny (Milo Ventimiglia) — they have the raspy gravitas of Great Truths about the human condition, racing and a dog’s lot.

“I could smell the day on him,” Enzo narrates when Denny gets home. “Motor oil and gas…and roast chicken.”

It’s a movie you either go with or injure yourself, rolling your eyes over. As I love dogs, cars and am a lifelong Costner fan, tally me in the former category. But the thin charms of this script and a charisma-starved leading man turn make that vote a close call.

Enzo, as he tells it, “was meant to be his dog.” His reasoning has to do with Mongolian beliefs about dogs eventually reincarnating into the sort of human they are destined to be.

Enzo? He was named for the founder of Ferrari, was meant to drive fast, win trophies and shake bottles of champagne in the winner’s circle. As he’s seen a documentary on TV about this Mongolian dog-to-human reincarnation, he makes it his life to watch Denny’s races, review the cockpit camera and TV coverage of his performances, and learn.

“I will remember.”

Enzo passes on insights about how “the car goes where the eye goes,” about a what makes a great racing driver, how when it rains on the road courses where Denny drives IMSA sports cars (Porsches, BMWs, etc), working his way toward Formula 1, it’s the driver who takes chances, who skids through the turns by choice and not by accident brought on by the conditions, that wins.

Truthfully, though, it’s not about the racing. “Art of Racing” is about a dog’s life, and a few human ones. That part of the tale begins when Eve (Amanda Seyfried) bumps into them, and Enzo figures out what’s happening almost before Denny does.

“Denny was clearly taken with her grooming.”

Eve doesn’t win him over quickly, but Seyfried sells the film’s most romantic line with all the warmth you’d expect.

“You don’t mind if I love him, too?” is just a whispered aside to Enzo, but it’s perfect and perfectly touching.

As they court and marry, Enzo makes his peace with the pairing and all that comes with that, using it to learn more about human behavior.

“I never really grasped the concept of money and why humans have such a need for it.”

A smattering of observations like that are mixed with a few on-point survival facts about dogs that Enzo passes on when he’s left behind in a locked house for days, and how dogs age, along with the usual anthropomorphized nonsense about what a dog “is really thinking.”

Screenwriter Mark Bomback, who has a resume peppered with action film credits — “The Wolverine,” Unstoppable,” “Total Recall” — was an odd choice to adapt Garth Stein’s best seller. He doesn’t quite “get” it. A lot of “cute” is blundered, even though Costner’s reliably droll way with a line makes “deadpan” work.

The arc of career intersects with the arcs of human lives and dog’s lives (Kathy Baker and Martin Donovan play Eve’s parents) here, and that’s really the meat of “Racing in the Rain.” That plays as pure melodrama on the screen.

And Ventimiglia, of TV’s “This Is Us,” doesn’t deliver the pathos we’d expect from the sadness, tragedy and trials Denny motors through. As he’s not asked to do comedy, romantic or dog-owning, either, Denny becomes a blank page on his resume.

Can’t say he’s a subtle actor or a bad one, as there’s virtually no data here to make the call.

That leaves it all up to the dog and the dog’s story, and the pathos of that makes this weeper on wheels a winner. Barely.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material

Cast: Milo Ventimiglia, Amanda Seyfried, Kathy Baker, Martin Donovan, Gary Cole and the voice of Kevin Costner

Credits: Directed by Simon Curtis, script by Mark Bomback based on the Garth Stein novel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:49