Movie Nation

The first wide release kiddie cartoon of the fall?

It’s my Saturday outing.

“Abominable” opens Sept. 27.

For several years, just outside of Monroe, Georgia at a bridge on Moore’s Ford Road, they’ve been reenacting a horrific moment from the area’s past.

On the anniversary of a 1946 lynching, black actors playing the four victims (one a pregnant woman) and whites playing the lynch mob, recreate a monstrous, barbaric unsolved crime, one that came on the heels of a visit by a virulently racist, KKK loving gubernatorial candidate.

They stage this awful thing every year, activists say, to keep its memory alive and perhaps stir someone to tell what they know so that the criminals names can be made public.

So far, in Monroe, where white folks interviewed in the film “Always in Season” lament the reenactment and gripe about “leaving the past alone,” nobody’s talked.

Nobody is talking up in Bladenboro, N.C., either. That’s where in August of 2014 a black teenager and popular football player, 17 year-old Lennon Lee Lacy, was found hanging from a swing-set in a playground just off one of the main roads in town.

As family members, a local mortician, a lawyer and others relate, his death was instantly labeled a suicide.

A photographer who worked for the medical examiner had his camera confiscated. The crime scene wasn’t secured and the family waited for days while the inept, incompetent or willfully obtuse local police department was “closed,” and did nothing.

“Not a hate crime,” the local police chief asserts. But Claudia Lacy remembers Lennon’s grave being desecrated mere days after the funeral.

The belts Lennon was found hanging from were not his, his mother adds.

Lacy’s family demands answers. Filmmaker Jacqueline Olive’s “Always in Season” cannot provide them.

But in 89 minutes of historical analysis, eyewitness testimony and Danny Glover reading newspaper accounts, letters and “an invitation” to the planned lynching of Claude Neal, a Marianna Florida man accused (with no evidence linking him directly to the crime) in the disappearance of a young white woman in 1934, we’re given plenty of reasons to wonder about this teenager’s death thanks to its parallels to the crimes that came before it.

Academic lynching experts such as Sherilynn Ifill of the NAACP note the general nature of the crimes — grisly mutilations of the victims while they were still living, bodies displayed in public places, often photographed with a sometimes grinning, celebrating white mob in the shot.

Sweeping these events, common from the end of the Civil War until the late 1950s, under the rug of “the past” does not do them justice, Ifill says. Local people alive back then saying “We didn’t know” is a lie.

The photographs and historical record “condemn the white community,” she adds. “They DID know.”

The Claude Neal lynching may be the most glaring proof of that. Newspapers ran an Associated Press account of the crime which labeled it, in appearance, as “A Hanging Bee,” a play on rural America’s tradition of community engagement through “quilting bees” and the like.

The daughter of a Klan official recalls, as a little girl, the many rallies and cross burnings she was taken to. There were plenty of “other kids to play with” at the events, she remembers. Even at the one where a man was lynched, her mother covering her mouth to keep her from crying out in horror.

The white grandson of a Ku Klux Klan member who once infiltrated the Klan on behalf of Klan watch groups and later volunteered to play a member of the Monroe lynch mob in reenactments declares that “We all need to keep doing what we can if we think we can make a difference.”

Filmmaker Olive saves some of the possible evidence that Lennon Lacy was lynched for the third act, and the denouement — demands for state and Federal investigation of the case — provides nobody with closure.

But the contrasts in Bladenboro laid out in the film’s opening, older white folks saying “Everybody gets along,” the local historical society president, the mayor and others using “an ‘Andy Griffith’ feel” to describe the place (one black actor appeared in the entire run of “The Andy Griffith Show”), could not be more stark. Images of Confederate flags hanging from garages and “Blue Lives Matter” signs parked in many a white yard signal the divide.

The local newspaper editor has prominently played-up anything new in the case that’s come to light, but confesses that with a tiny staff and in a small town, where the police department itself isn’t equipped, professionally or temperamentally, to dig into this, there’s nothing he can do short of keeping the story alive.

And still, Claudia Lacy’s words stick with you.

“Think about it, if it was your son or daughter…How far would you go? How soon would you get it go?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence images

Cast: Claudia Lacy, Pierre Lacy, William J. Barber II, the voice of Danny Glover

Credits: Directed by Jacqueline Olive, script by Don Bernier, Jacqueline Olive. A Multitude Films/POV release.

Running time: 1:29

4

As I said Thursday, pre-sales of “Downton Abbey” opening weekend tickets suggested a much MUCH bigger opening than the West Coast experts, working off market research provided by the studio and their own hunches, were saying.

Variety, Deadline and Box Office Mojo were all about the $22 million opening they were sure was coming. Noooo. Bottom end of expectations, I thought.

Packed screenings at a theater where I was catching “Rambo” pointed to this, too. A sea of mostly AARP age white women — but plenty of younger faces too– milling in the foyer, waiting for the many showings that were packed into that multiplex.

And here we are, Saturday AM, after a decent Thursday night and a HUGE Friday, “Downton Abbey” is on track to do a whopping, Focus Features record $33 million at the box office.

That, for the math-averse, is 50% above projections. Either Focus was lowballing expectations and others fell for it, or this is going to be a surprise blockbuster, at least for a week or two.

Think there’ll be another sequel? This hints that the movie could make $75-100, depending on its legs. Maybe it’ll encourage repeat viewings (I mean, it’s pandering and a bit of an eye-roller, but fans will feel served, for sure).

“Ad Astra” is surpassing “Rambo: Last Blood” with perhaps as high as a $20 million opening, although word of mouth could push that down to $18-19.

Nothing will help Sly Stallone’s gory, Trumpist “Rambo: Last Blood” gun fetishist’s delight. $17 million, maybe. Big for Lionsgate, no reason to ever make another of these after that.

“Hustlers” spent the week beating “It Chapter 2,” pretty much every day, and may edge it for the weekend as well — $teens for both of them.

A PBS TV show, a strippers get even dramedy and a Stephen King sequel are leading Hollywood out of the box office doldrums.

Judas Priest, what CENTURY was “Golden Boy” filmed in?

I don’t have to ask when it was conceived, as that is obvious and the answer is “In Ancient Times.”

This injuriously eye-rolling gay coming-of-age melodrama harks back to the early years of Queer Cinema, when every tale — even the sensitive ones — had the feel of soft-core porn and the arch absurdity of “We’ve never written a screenplay before, so here’s some CLICHES.”

I could limit this review to a single “tell” — two words of dialogue that are both so dated and numbingly overused that you’d think nobody with an ear would think to ever put them in any movie ever again, especially one with a gay setting.

“Fresh meat!”

That’s what the smirking men and sexually omnivorous women purr when James Myers (co-writer Mark Elias) first starts showing up at the randier sort of parties in L.A.

Yes, 1977 is calling. Yes, I’ll hold.

James Myers hears his name a LOT in this inane, pokey tale of a Carolina “boy” (of 28) who hits bottom, only to be rescued by all the many of gay and gay friendly folk — pretty much everybody he meets — in and around West Hollywood.

They practically swoon in his presence, picking him up out of the gutter, inviting him home, giving him work and “access” to all the coolest parties and gayest clubs. Homeless? Not any more.

As the star is also the co-writer, one could point to a little self-delusion in the crafting of how he is described by all he meets — “boy” when he’s not that boyish, a looker when he’s basically Rami Malek without the Freddie Mercury teeth, strung-out looking sunken eyes and pallid skin in a city where the sun is shining all the time.

The character’s supposed to be an innocent when we meet him, a liquor store delivery “boy” whose name is blurted out by every single gay customer he meets.

“James Myers!”

One of those is the semi-mysterious man of means “CQ” (Lex Medlin), who always has a party going on.

“Jesus boy, you make misery so proud!”

Another is “Houston” (Logan Donovan), a creature of the streets who flirts, nicknames him Captain Liquor, then just “CL.” And who points out after James is fired from the liquor store, “A guy like you could clean up at the park!”

Yeah, he’s suggesting James Myers, “CL,” become a hooker. It is CQ who rescues James Myers from that life, takes him in, no sexual strings attached, and eventually has him make his own “deliveries.”

Houston stays in the picture, and as James is clothed, coiffed and car’d by Nutrasweet Sugar Daddy CQ, he also meets Josh (Paul Culos), a photographer who takes him in after he’s passed out on the street, vomiting from a night of sex and “X.”

This isn’t just dated, it’s a gay fairytale.

Houston and Josh become the magnets tugging the hard-partying, sex-with-anybody-who-asks James in two different directions. Josh is a stand-up guy, plays gay basketball in a gay basketball league and photographs himself, shirtless, every morning.

Because gay men and narcissism are the movie stereotype that never dies.

One of the older men who likes having “pretty boys” around is played by Armin Shimerman, long-shorn of the Dumbo ears he wore on “Star Trek”: Deep Space Nine.”

As CQ’s demands shift and James grows more careless with his “work,” dealing with more and more dangerous people with these deliveries, as he submits to the sexual advances of more women and men, “Golden Boy” gets around to an odd and pejorative “message” it wants to send.

Gay men, this movie says, are all hustlers at heart. Sex is more transactional than romantic, and it really is all about “opportunity” in that Gore Vidal sense.

“Never pass up the chance to have sex or appear on television,” the writer declared.

I’m not gay, but I’ve been watching what came to be labeled “Queer Cinema” since “Lianna,” only catching up to the pre-history films in the genre at festivals in later years.

And I think “Golden Boy” is a giant step backwards, clumsy and silly and dumb and dull.

The “fresh meat” here spoiled around the time Reagan left the White House.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with bloody violence, drug abuse, sex and nudity

Cast: Mark Elias, Lex Medlin, Logan Donovan, Kimberly Westbrooke, Paul Culos and Armin Shimerman.

Credits: Directed by Stoney Westmoreland, script by Mark Elias and Jonathan Browning. A DFM Creative release.

Running time: 1:42

Thora Birch (“Ghost World”) and Chris Klein (“American Pie”) are pretty far removed from their ’90s teen cinema heyday.

But “The Competition,” a rom-com that pairs them up, has a hint of that era about it, even if it is an emphatic reminder that “You can’t go home again.”

The quirky cute Birch and earnestly hunkish Klein still have their signature “look” about them. But this wan, chemistry-and-laugh-starved comedy suggests reasons they might not have smoothly transitioned to adult roles, even if they were offered better ones.

It’s a tepid tale of a scientist who crunches “formulas” for everything from “the perfect pizza” to the statistically doomed relationship. Lauren (Birch) has a successful blog — “The PIG Theory” — that might become a book about her “Point of Infidelity and Guilt” theorem.

Calvin (Klein, ahem) is a Portland attorney who specializes in women’s rights, female advocacy and women in divorce court, “undefeated” in the field, his firm reminds him.

But he abandons what we take to be his “integrity and honor” and assumed innate feminism to take up a partner’s  task. Gena (Claire Coffee) wants him to meet her, court her and get her to abandon the blog and the book deal over some vague concern that “the sister I grew up with” is about to disappear forever.

Right. She’s down the rabbit hole of cynicism. Can he rescue her?

Lauren’s establishing scene, the ONLY funny moment in “The Competition,” has her skydiving with a then-beau, assuring him that he’ll “love” this, that she is “certified,” which is why she gets to jump AFTER he exits the plane.

Yes, she’s breaking up with him. “It’s not you, it’s me” is shouted over the noise of the Cessna. After he’s gone, she assures the pilot, “I LIKED that one.” She’s done this before, which is why she had the foresight to bring a thermos of martinis to sip on the flight back to the airport.

Cute. Funny. Everything the movie that follows is not.

Cal forces a “meet cute” on her, charms Lauren and in a whirlwind (and super-short) montage, is about to get to the sleepover (after a week) when he “confesses.” Only nnot really. He tells her just enough to set up a contest.

He’ll pick five couples he knows, mostly guys from his poker “afternoons,” not “nights. A new mom at his office (Kelsey Tucker, also screenwriter of the film) is added to give the game a little gender equality.

Lauren will sic her bombshell “dancer” (stripper, played by ex-Playmate Tiffany Fallon) and other temptations at the experiment’s subjects. And we’ll soon see if her “six months” dating limit is all most people can handle “theory” is valid.

Yes, the “wager” is absurd. She’ll give up the blog, book, etc. He’ll give up, what, his bachelorhood?

No, the “subjects” aren’t interesting. At all.

Yes, the Lauren-Calvin relationship is tested, the ante is upped. The most dispiriting bachelor party in screen history ensues.

Klein is a sturdy, ruggedly handsome leading man more cut out for “the guy she leaves behind” in romantic comedies. He’s never funny. Not even in “American Pie” was he the source of humor, strictly an earnest “straight man” to all the pastry defiling going on.

Birch has a little more on the ball, but her lot, too, seems destined for perpetual second bananahood, “the best friend,” the “odd girl/woman out at the bachelorette party.” Her big shortcoming here is an inability to create funny sparks on her own with deadweight Chris.

The supporting cast might have sparkled had their been more amusing things for them to say and do. The plot was never going to manage a surprise, because Hell’s Bells, this is the narrative of every Matthew McConaughy/Kate Hudson comedy ever. Almost.

For those reasons, and more, “The Competition” is lost in losing.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Thora Birch, Chris Klein, Claire Coffee, Tiffany Fallon, Henry Noble and David Blue

Credits: Directed by Harvey Lowry, script by Kelsey Tucker.  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:40

Whatever the title suggests, this is a classic “January thriller.” There’s revenge and conspiracy, stars but not “box office” stars.

Mark Wahlberg used to own January with pictures like this, action and violence as counter programming to the “awards season” fare (and January horror film, there’s always at least one).

Blake wants to find the people who killed her family. Jude can help. Jan. 31.

“Good villains make good thrillers,” Hitchcock supposedly declared. And if there is better proof of his thesis in a world where Alan Rickman is no longer with us than “Villains,” I can’t think of it.

Jeffrey Donovan of “Burn Notice” puts moviegoers and filmmakers on notice that he can be bad, and wickedly funny at it, in this tour de force. Looking for a good heavy for your action pic or horror tale? Donovan is open for business and taking your calls.

He is George, oily smooth, silkily Southern and as devious as he is deviant in this story of two couples — both on the wrong side of the law, one wholly evil — that meet, by chance and mix it up in a murderous game of cat and mouse.

Filmmakers Dan Berk and Robert Olsen haven’t reinvented the wheel or delivered a masterpiece in their breakout film. It’s predictable to a fault, but serviceable, tight, well-acted and amusingly pitched.

And they hired themselves a doozy of a heavy to carry it.

Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) and another of those damned Skarsgårds, Bill Skarsgård (Pennywise in “It”) play a hold-up duo straight out of “Pulp Fiction.”

Wearing bizarre Halloween masks, we see them brandish a gun and HUGE crowbar as they noisily knock over a convenience store…after they figure out how to get the dang register open.

They’re manic, amped up, impulsive and horny, and you know what that implies. When they run out of gas making their getaway “to Florida,” they need “a creative boost” to figure out what to do.

The “boost” goes up their noses. It’s probably why they forgot to steal gas when they were robbing a gas station.

They grab their stash and set off in search of a car, and stumble into a big, newish and empty house in the middle of the the woods. Lots of antiques of the “mid-century modern” style decorate it. But dang, no keys can be found to the car in the garage.

Let’s look for something to siphon the gas out of the car with, something to hold the gas in, and gas up our OWN car!

That’s when they see the cellar. We’ve seen THAT movie. So has Jules (Monroe).

“Oh, I’m not going down THERE.”

Mickey won’t be dissuaded, although in this couple, he’s more of the “flight” than “fight” in the relationship.

There’s a kid down there, chained up. Jules won’t leave without freeing her, despite Mickey’s protests. And the delay in figuring that out is how they miss the warning that a stored video camera holds, and how they’re still there when the owners of this comfy abode return.

Gloria (Kyra Sedgwick) is alarmed. I mean, she’s got a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes in her arms. George (Donovan) is smoother, not the least bit panicked at the pistol stuck in his face.

“That’s just our sweetie pie,” he drawls of the chained child. Can’t we reach “some kind of compromise?”

Jules and Mickey are “Pulp Fiction” profane and wound up. George and Gloria are Southern genteel. All are villains, it’s just a question of degree.

Let the games begin.

The men size each other up. George is sure of how much “wish you hadn’t gone down those stairs.” Mickey notes their ancient TV and declares “I don’t think you guys watch TV a lot, which I think is weird!”

The women are competing visions of “motherhood,” one delusional, the other bat-poop crazy.

It looks like a fair fight.

The most sophisticated filmmaking touch is the grainy, old-home movies flashback (and flash-forward, to their seaside Florida sea shell shop dream) that the youngsters experience when the tables are turned.

The best lines all belong to George. “There ain’t a sweeter sound in the world than a man trying hard not to scream.”

“Villains” doesn’t hold many surprises, but it’s fun to see the bad-people vs. bad people who have met by accident scenario, a familiar thriller trope, play out.

The violence is rattling, the tension nerve-fraying and the baddest-of-the-bad-guys?

“Who RAISED you, boy? Making a woman cry like that?”

Hell, he’s the reason to see these “Villains.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some violence, drug use and sexual content.

Cast: Maika Monroe, Bill Skarsgård, Jeffrey Donovan, Kyra Sedgwick

Credits: Written and directed by Dan Berk, Robert Olsen. An Alter release.

Running time: 1:22

I had to catch “Rambo: Last Blood” on opening night Thursday night, to a largely empty theater.

But just outside the Regal Winter Park 20, long one of the busiest cinemas in the Regal empire, the scene was straight out of a Tom Jones concert. Hundreds of women, young to old, chattering away as they entered the many showings of “Downton Abbey: The Movie.”

So I’m a little skeptical of these predictions, from Box Office Mojo ($20 million) and from Deadline.com (ditto) that Stallone’s latest outing as the trigger-warning Vietnam vet who slaughters all challengers — by the dozens — is going to make a run at the Granthams.

Thursday night, “Downton” clobbered “Ad Astra” (#2) and “Rambo” (#3) nationwide, $2.1 million to $1.5 and $1.3.

But we’ll see. The fashion film vs. the “fascist snuff film” would be an interesting BO race.

HUGE pre-sales suggest “Downton” will clear $22, that $22 will be the FLOOR of expectations for it opening weekend. I expect it to go much higher. The wildly popular BBC/PBS series has millions of fans chomping at the bit to see this story of posh English privilege moved up to 1927, the cusp of The Great Depression.

“Ad Astra” is a “cerebral” sci-fi outing that reminded me more of “2010” than “2001.” I was a bit of an outlier among critics on that one, but again, Rotten Tomatoes has fleshed out its ranks with a lot of folks new to the profession. “2010?” “Solaris?” What’re those? the youngsters chirp. It will underperform, in terms of that genre, with $18 million seen as its ceiling.

“It Chapter 2” was already fading, and should fall off more steeply this weekend than the 55% or sent or so predicted — mid $teens. Is anybody going to see it a second time? All 2:40+ of it?

“Overcomer” is losing screens, but should still be in the Top Ten.

“Villains” isn’t opening wide enough to crack the top ten. But we’ll have to check in Sunday to see if that turns out to be true.

What an odd place Sly Stallone has taken John Rambo in his dotage.

In “Rambo: Last Blood,” the traumatized VietNam vet, always reluctant to fight, efficient quasi-psychotic killing machine never daunted by the odds, is a retiring horse farmer on the Arizona/Mexican border.

He lives in a nice ranch house, decorated with the medals and memorabilia of the soldiering past he was so haunted by, with a housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) and a niece who’s been his ward (Yvette Monreal).

Oh, and guns. Lots and lots and lots of guns, to go along with his usual bows and “Damascus steel” knives (he forges his own) by the bushel basketful.

And uh, he’s tunneled under the place. Lots of tunnels to, you known, remind him of his days fighting the Viet Cong underground, a “Lurp” (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) loner trained to slaughter.

So yeah, maybe this is precisely where he’d end up.

The movie? Revisiting one of the most violent screen creations of his career requires him to up the ante from his ’80s, Italian-maned mayhem machine. Gory. This is a Trumpist vision of the border country, a fascist snuff film.

The ethos, “What if you CAN’T move on?” from his past, his trauma which he’s “just trying to keep a lid on every day,” is the same. But even now, reduced by age, most comfortable on horseback (a nice, show-boaty opening scene in a corral that hides the stunt work, if indeed he even needed a double), John Rambo can be triggered.

The college-bound niece crossing the border — “Why’d you want to do that?” — to find the father she never knew, kidnapped by a drug-and-sex-trafficking led by The Martinez Brothers (Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Óscar Jaenada), a “rescue mission” that includes the requisite savage beating and cutting that no 70something Vietnam Vet would survive without an airlift, the help from the cliched “independent journalist” (Paz Vega)?

That’s what sets our old man in “No Country for Old Men” off. Let the slaughter begin.’

The insanely violent Mexican borderlands, where North America’s endless appetite for drugs ripples all the way from the First World to the Second (Mexico) on down the continent and into the Third, is as good a place as any to park Rambo.

The acting ranges from adequate (the women) to dismal (assorted villains, starting with the girl’s father). “Psychotic” has many shades. Not here.

And the bloodletting, and long preparation for it in the finale, is something to see — and avert your eyes from –144 ways to die. It starts out nuts, and leaps far beyond it by the time the credits roll.

Whatever fondness people cling to for Stallone’s most beloved character, the “Balboa” in his “Balboa Productions,” hanging on to Rambo is like never outgrowing torture porn. This borders on sick.

“Last Blood?” Let’s hope so. Action Stallone may never act his age, but he seems much more at home in the direct-to-streaming C-movies I’ve been seeing him in these past couple of years.

MPAA Rating: R for strong graphic violence, grisly images, drug use and language.

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Yvette Monreal,Adriana Barraza, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Óscar Jaenada

Credits: Directed by Adrian Grunberg, script by Sylvester Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1: 35

Saw this attached to a Neon release last summer. Could not track a copy down to share.

Until now.

Awards buzz for the Great Alfre Woodard?