Movie Nation

Netflix has had better luck with teen comedies than with post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

But Oct. 24, perhaps this mashup farce will change all that.

Office romances, especially those between boss and employee, have made a a rapid transition from “frowned upon” by HR to repellant and condemnable in the “#MeToo” era. They’re positively fraught, these days.

Thus, the misfortune that is “Can You Keep a Secret?” It was never going to be all that funny and romantic. But showing up at this point in time, this wan rom-com should give anybody pause before buying the rights to further works by British novelist Sophie Kinsella. She did “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” and if she isn’t setting back feminism with every trip to the keyboard, her work is certainly aging poorly.

Alexandra Daddario of “Baywatch” plays Emma, a young marketing exec who tumbles for the founder of her organic health food/drink company AFTER drunkenly spilling her guts to him as her fellow passenger on a flight she was sure was doomed. DOOMED.

Just turbulence, dear.

Her panicked confession? She’s too young to die. She’s never gotten a tattoo, never had kids, and “I don’t even KNOW that I have a G-spot!” “I wish I could pee, standing up!” And “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love, or been loved!”

That’s a lot to unload on a stranger, who turns out to be your boss’s boss when he shows up at the office the next day.

Jack (Tyler Hoechlin, who is Clark Kent on TV’s “Flash” and “Arrow”) proceeds to use info from that confession to re-arrange the power structure in that office, and to finish off her relationship to the quite-effeminate Connor (David Ebert).

We might not notice that power imbalance so much if they had real chemistry, if Daddario’s bubbly klutz act was matched with something other than humorless hunkiness and nearly-charmless stubble.

Several people in the story have “secrets” — a lawyer-roommate (Sunita Mani) who seems to be bedding a lot of guys from the office, the boss (Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black”) who might not have told anybody she used to identify as male.

Nothing much is made of any of these characters or their secrets. The workplace is a parade of inappropriately public conversations, sleep-with-the-boss shaming, an HR nightmare that isn’t a funny nightmare.

Daddario mugs a bit, takes her best shot at “perky” and “clumsy” and “cute” and never completely gives up on the script, or lets us see that she has. She’s almost all alone in this regard.

There’s almost always a spark in such movies, usually provided with the one supporting player who finds room to be funny. Here, it comes from Kimiko Glenn, who plays the cynical, man-wise, hustlerwear roomie, Gemma.

Gemma has the few funny lines. “You need to get even. I know a guy…” And coaching Emma on the phone, “Yes, bitch! Step into your POWER!”

Glenn is all alone in giggleland in “Can You Keep a Secret?”

And just when you give up on the intended comedy ever coming together, it dives into something edgier. But that flip-flop is only a tease for a movie that never was, and probably never was going to be funnier than the one they ended up making, which is as charmless as it is laughless.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Alexandra  Daddario, Tyler Hoechin, Sunita Mani and Laverne Cox

Credits: Directed by Elise Duran, script by Peter Hutchings, based on a Sophie Kinsella novel.

Credits: A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

It’s been mostly miss or miss, with hits pretty rare, since Tiffany Haddish broke out with “Girls’ Trip.”

Pairing her up with Rose Byrne, under-rated as a comedienne, but damned funny in “Neighbors” and “Bridesmaids” and “Get Him to the Greek,” is a smart play.

And Salma Hayek as badassed and predatory? That’s a slam dunk.

This is a Jan. 10 release, meaning this movie will be competing for attention against blockbusters and Oscar contenders, mostly films released over Christmas.

Paramount is either A) saying not to expect much here, lowering expectations or B) counter-programming against “prestige” pictures with a little lowdown lady-powered comedy that could make some noise.

She’s having a moment, albeit in tiny films.

But pairing up Alexandra D. with Tyler Hoechlin could pay dividends.

Here’s an excruciating foot-dragger of a comedy about how an Italian immigrant makes his way to New York where he then makes his mark, as a waiter — inventing an ice cream dessert when the kitchen runs out of pastries.

The “American Fango” — “mud” in Italian — of the title is invented in the film’s first scene. “Excruciating” kicks in as the film struggles, through long, unfunny and uninteresting flashbacks, to get us back to that “beginning.”

Francesco (Brando Boniver) was a struggling actor in Italy who figures he’ll try his luck in America when a pretty blonde he met on a set (Emily Jackson) invites him to LA.

But the sex and sand of Malibu is just a tease, as Christine suddenly announces she’s got a film to shoot in India. For the first but not the last time, handsome Francesco, who is a mouth-watering temptation to every American woman he meets, is left in the lurch by a lady.

The tedious middle acts have our hero stumbling from apartment to Days Inn, from Venice Beach to Brooklyn, where he is alternately helped, and let down, by various actresses whom he’s met on sets in Rome.

“American women, they change their mind like they change their hairstyle!” his corny actor pal Massimo (Alexander Mannara) opines, because you know actors can’t think of anything funny to say without somebody else writing it for them.

I was almost amused by pretty boy Francesco’s shock SHOCK at discovering Christine and then other actresses are self-absorbed. Just like him.

The movie makes banal points about New York actors helping each other more than L.A. actors do, about actors needing waiting jobs so desperately that there’s an “agent of waiters” (Gaetano Iacono).

Keep an eye out for the actress who “ghosts” Francesco the hardest. Kathy (Samantha Scaffidi) has a married, wealthy boyfriend who keeps disappointing her. Whatever Tony (Brian Vincent) lacks in charm or faithfulness, he is the ONLY amusing character in “American Fango.”

He’s a stereotype, a goombah who warns Francesco away from Kathy, who is letting him crash on her sofa.

“I put about $200,000 into this girl over the past year,” is how he starts. And “Keep your little ziti in cold water” is how he gets to the point.

So many scenes do nothing but delay Francesco’s hiring as an inept but handsome waiter in a New York Italian restaurant. So many scenes go on and on past their possible (not really) “payoff.”

The performances start with promise, but the script limits the players because every character is more colorless than the one before.

And the finale is as soggy a noodle as every waterlogged, droopy moment that’s preceded it.

There have been so many movies about coming to America and struggling to get on one’s feet, it’d be a shame to waste more than a few minutes on “American Fango” confirming my review. This one never gets out of its own way.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations

Cast: Brando Boniver, Samantha Scaffidi, Emily Jackson, Maggie Wagner, Victor Colicchio

Credits: Directed by Gabriele Altobelli, script by Gabriele Altobelli and Brittany McComas. An Artist Connection/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:44

“It Chapter 2” may have underwhelmed critics, but it lost about 55% of its opening take, sndthus earned another $40.7 million this weekend.

“The Goldfinch” had Oscar buzz…until studio people and then critics got to see the finished product. Perfectly watchable, ungainly, well acted. And it opened to a middling to poor $2.6 million.

“Hustlers” is the big “winner” of the weekend, a personal (non animated) bet for Jennifer Lopez and a best ever opening for STX Studios, over $33 million.

“The Sound of Silence” had an impressve per screen weekend in limited release.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/

“The Goldfinch” is a sprawling, ungainly but perfectly watchable mess of a movie, one of those novel adaptations where one wishes they’d taken the time to edit that beast into something tighter before the cameras rolled.

Director John Crowley (“Brooklyn”) & Co. treated Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel the way Warner Brothers treated the works of J.K. Rowling — as if they’d be pilloried for leaving ANYthing out.

But let’s blame Amazon Studios for that, in this case. A 2:24 running time picture fits the co-producing company’s streaming priorities, and they no doubt signed on with visions of Oscar nominations dancing in their heads.

The high-end sheen, the sparkling cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson and Sarah Paulson? That’s the Warners touch.

It’s a tale of loss and grief, guilt and regret, of longing and corruption and “You never know what’s going to change your future.”

And that “sheen?” It bubbles up as texture and subtext, a world of art and antiques, Beethoven and bespoke suits, all swirling around a tragedy at a museum where the 17th century painting by Carel Fabritius that gives the film its title once hung.

Tweenage Theo (Oakes Fegley of “Pete’s Dragon,” very impressive) is taken to the home of a family he once knew, because he can think of no one else after the shock. He was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother. An explosion killed her and many others, and as his one-time actor/father skipped town some time before, Theo’s at a loss.

The authorities make a compelling case to Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman), but one gets the sense she’d have said “Yes” in any event. There’s an old money remove about her, old money that married old money and wound up in an antiques-packed Manhattan townhouse with three children and an Upper Class Twit (“Do you sail, Theo?”) husband (Boyd Gaines). That doesn’t mean she lacks compassion.

Theo has night terrors and is wracked by guilt. His voice-over narration has told us “It was my fault,” and he believes it. But the Barbours indulge him, and he finds another father figure in the antiques restorer (Jeffrey Wright) whom he visits to deliver something another victim of the explosion begged him to pass on.

Hobie lives above the shop, and he’s taken in the ward of his now-dead partner. Theo remembers redheaded Pippa (Aimee Laurence) from the museum. Now, she’s recovering and they take comfort in each other’s company, even though they’re strangers.

We catch a glimpse of “bespoke suit” adult Theo (Ansel Elgort) long before the child Theo’s promising future comes undone as his Vegas hustler dad (Luke Wilson, in a nasty, layered turn) shows up, “51 days sober!” and with his new bartender wife (Sarah Paulson, brittle, blowsy and coarse). They spirit Theo from his world of cloistered privilege and private school to a city of foreclosures, lowlifes and public school, where he falls in with Ukranian transplant Boris (Finn Wolfhard).

The film’s middle acts, the “Vegas Years,” sketch in how Theo recovers from that and loops his way back to New York, back to antiques and back to Hobie and the Barbours.

There are traces of “Great Expectations,” of the closed world of J.D. Salinger’s fiction, and of movies such as “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and “Woman in Gold” in this film, all interesting ingredients in a film which alternately feels like a bloated feature film or a truncated mini-series.

Like director Crowley’s “Brooklyn,” the world portrayed here has the scale and melodrama of a Thackery novel, with many plot twists as obvious as a soap opera. I love the very literary device of suggesting how money knows money, and how everybody in the New York chapters is connected. And if you’re not a born member of that exclusive circle, you’re immediately under suspicion.

But there are unnecessary characters and scenes that don’t drive the narrative here. The big mystery at its heart doesn’t demand resolution, but we can’t have puzzles that aren’t solved, can we?

And the third act is as over-the-top as the first two are understated, which the characters remain even when great and terrible things are happening.

Some of us love being ensconced in a universe of Austenesque/”Antiques Roadshow” quiet and money, of finer things with history and beauty, where tweens can discuss Beethoven until their influences shift to the kid who knows what Vicodin and vodka will do to you, and wants somebody to take an acid trip with him.

We few, we not-easily-bored few, can catch “The Goldfinch” in a theater and revel in unerringly modulated performances — everybody is so softspoken that the verbal explosions have alarming violence about them — and a world we might envy, or at least resent a little bit.

Everybody else can wait to see it on a streaming service. I hear Prime is a good deal, so long as you use it to buy books and fine kitchenware, too.

MPAA Rating:R for drug use and language

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, Sarah Paulson, Oakes Fegley, Ashleigh Cummings, Finn Wolfhard

Credits: Directed by John Crowley, script by Peter Straughan, based on the Donna Tartt novel . A Warner Brothers/Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:29

“Trauma is a Time Machine” is a film title worth parsing, considering as a stand-alone aphorism.

“Trauma” implies something we don’t just “get over.” And as it plays over and over in the mind, it does indeed become a time machine. Life can stand still as the victim is enveloped in shock, depression, anger and regret over the event that has been so personally devastating.

Writer-director Angelica Zollo makes her feature film debut an adaptation of her own short film of that title, about rape and its after-effects on the victim.

It’s a self-consciously minimalist and “arty” production — low-budget, narrow in its point of view, mostly on a single set, although it opens up for a few outside scenes in the third act.

That myopia adds to the viewers’ shared paranoia with the devastated victim, given as much “harrowing” as actress Augie Duke can bring to the part.

The crime itself itself is mostly hidden from view as the screen goes black –in flashes — and we hear “Can you stop? STOP it! STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT,” an avalanche of “No no no nos” followed by a mouth-muffled scream.

It’s what Helen, a photographer, remembers, what keeps her drinking, what traps her in bed narrating her tale, in the Third Person, in very screen-writerly lines.

“Disappointment just lay there with her.”

The voice mails from her mother — “You refuse to sleep….Just tell me that you’re safe.” — fall on deaf ears. All she hears in her rape, and her rapist’s” “You caused this” and “What are you gonna TELL people? Who’s going to BELIEVE you?”

This wasn’t “date rape.” This was rape within what was a relationship. That’s what breaks her.

Helen glances out the window of her city apartment, time passes and seasons change. Other men share her company, but she’s drunk a lot of the time, so those “dates” don’t go well.

She lies in the tub or showers, always in her underwear. She drunkenly dances by herself, chops her hair off.

And being an artist, she tries to make sense of her state through her art — snapshots of her body parts. She impersonates her attacker’s slouched too-cool-for-you pose, his walk. “His shirts were always wrinkled. He was such a beautiful mess.”

That, and the moment she surrenders to the temptation of an iron and burns herself is all part of this “time machine” of processing what she’s dealing with.

“It was just a go at feeling something, anything at all.”

Zollo goes to some pains to make her film opaque, not vague as to what it’s about but obscuring the proceedings by shooting it in black and white, by showing us three unknown/mostly-unnamed males of the “hip art crowd” type at us (the oldest is Helen’s attacker, and he shaves his head on impulse, at one point, for reasons we can only guess).

The woman cast as Helen’s mother (Elizabeth A. Davis) is plainly Duke’s contemporary.

And then there’s the quasi-symbolic arrival of a European figure in silver body paint (Ella Loudon) who might be Helen’s spirit guide through the darkness, or just an artist who gives her an idea for a new way to dress in public.

“I was like you once. But then I found my armor!”

Those meditative musings don’t add clarity, any more than having Helen sit and start watching a VHS comedy of the 1930s South Seas vamp morality tale, “Rain” does. Another hint that Helen blames herself for her rape, perhaps?

“Trauma is a Time Machine” is a film whose weighty subject matter doesn’t demand this sort of obscurant treatment. It’s self-conscious to a fault.

But it’s intriguing “film festival movie” approach gets your attention and forces you to engage with it on its level, which is an achievement in its own right.

And Duke’s brooding, broken turn in the leading role is a game attempt at making us feel what Helen is feeling, or rather not feeling, after the trauma that numbed her to the world.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Augie Duke, Gabe Fazio, Max Duane, Joseph Reiver

Credits: Written and directed by Angelica Zollo. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:22

Augie Duke and Gabe Fazio star in this little no-budget lingering trauma from rape drama that is earning a release at the end of the month.

Teen romances, a genre theatrical release Hollywood has pretty much abandoned, has been a fertile niche for Netflix to make its own. The streaming service has made the edgy, hormonal teen sex comedy its sweet spot in movies that appeal to teenagers.

“To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and basically anything starring Joey King (“The Kissing Booth,” “Summer ’03”) had naughty wit and “They grow up so FAST” sexual overtones that proved catnip to kids out of school for the summer.

The teen comedies further from the edge have proven trickier.

“Tall Girl” wears its “TV-PG” rating with pride, and is practically swimming in sweetness, almost refreshing in its eschewing “naughty” for naivete.

But sweetness can only carry it so far when the jokes are this weary, and the cast — playing slight variations on the usual high school movie “types” — doesn’t have that “pop” that screen charisma delivers.
Willowy dancer/actress Ava Michelle of TV’s “Dance Moms” stars as Jodi, at 6’1″ entirely “too tall” to easily fit in at the New Orleans high school where she’s spending her sophomore (16 year old) year.

We meet her as there’s a near-flirtation in the library, her girl-splaining “The Confederacy of Dunces” to a new classmate. He’s all set to ask her out when they stand up to leave, and it’s obvious she could dunk on him all day long if they played one-on-one.

Her school years have been one class photo, standing in the back row, after another. Her days are filled with “How’s the weather up there?” cracks, “Jodi Green Giant” jokes, a girl who has come to dread being noticed at an age when most of us are trying to find a way to get noticed.

Her dad (Steve Zahn) has been concerned since her childhood, weighing with her mother (Angela Kinsey of “The Office”) the merits of “growth stunting” drugs (“You don’t really want to have children, do you, honey?”). Now, he’s just tactless, bringing up “health problems” of the very tall, how the “freakishly” towering “die young.”

Good parenting.

Jodi has emotionally shrunk the taller she’s grown. She stopped playing the piano, which she loved, because “I don’t need to give other people a reason to look at me.”

She has a defender and BFF at school, the free-spirited “Why walk when you can dance?” Fareeda (Anjelika Washington) and a persistent, too-short-for-me suitor, Jack Dunkelman (Griffin Gluck) whom she keeps in the friend zone.

The vivacious mean girl Kimmy (Clara Wilsey) has teased her since forever, one of Jodi’s “OTs — original tormentors.”

“Nice sweatpants, Sasquatch!” has morphed into “Let’s face it, Jodi. You’ll always be ‘the Tall Girl.’ You’ll never be ‘the Pretty Girl.'”

And then a movie miracle occurs. A Swedish exchange student arrives, tall blond and backlit as he strolls into class. Stig (model turned actor Luke Eisner) might have been a “dork” back home. But here, he’s the exotic Nordic god all the girls swoon over “like sharks to chum!”

That includes Jodi. And that leads her to take the desperate step of consulting with her dizzy community college (Hotel Management studies) beauty queen older sister, Harper.

“How do I get a guy to notice me?” leads to the makeover, and the sassy “judgement” from older-but-shorter-and-cuter Harper, given a dizzy snap by child star Sabrina Carpenter.

“Stop dressing like a — no offense — a very LARGE little boy!”

Things break down in utterly expected ways, with Mean Girl taking on Tall Girl for the Swede Boy.

“What’re you playing at, Bean Stalk?”

The big bite of pathos comes from this line — “Being a tall guy in great. When when you’re a tall girl, that’s ALL they see!”

Michelle looks like this year’s taller, new version of Leelee Sobieski, but doesn’t have the acting chops to give us much more than shy and awkward at this stage of her acting career. Thus, most of the laughs come from the more polished actresses playing Mean Girl, BFF and Sympathetic Sister.

Hints of the movie this might have been come from the few moments where the production makes use of the location. New Orleans streetcars, marching band parades and a voodoo escape room are the only traces of this exotic locale that make it onto the screen.

Yeah, you’re making a low-budget comedy for Netflix with Louisiana incentive money. If you’re setting the story there, why not have the cast — some of them, anyway — take a shot at the accent? This lot are generic SoCal child-actors-in-their-teens. Colorless.

Still, the sweetness of “Tall Girl” compensates for some of its shortcomings. Payoff moments come in the oddest places, Dad’s tactless attempt to induct Jodi into the Tip Top Club (all tall people, adults), Harper’s pre-pageant command to “Slap if you EVER see me eating carbs!” and the reason dorky Jack “Dunkers” totes his books to school in an orange crate.

I love the idea of Netflix tailoring some of its teen-friendly output to younger teens. Not every comedy has to have the promise of virginity-ending hook-ups with Joey King or her male counterpart, Noah Centineo.

So keep at it, guys. “Tall Girl” may miss, but it doesn’t miss by much.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG.

Cast: Ava Michelle, Sabrina Carpenter, Angela Kinsey Steve Zahn, Will Eisner, Griffin Gluck

Credits: Directed by Nzingha Stewart, script by Sam Wolfson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42