Movie Nation

The leader of the “Keep America White” Nordic Social Club can curse and bully with the best of them. But it’s when he (Bill Camp) dials it down to a whisper that the real menace kicks in.

“I still own you,” he growls at one of his disciples, “and every inch of ink on you!”

Skinheads, their culture, common backgrounds, penchant for violence and passion for symbolic tattoos are the characters and the setting for “Skin,” Guy Nattiv’s searing and seriously unsettling tale of the white supremacists who crawled out from under their rocks when the White House changed hands.

It’s a world of racist rallies, blood rituals and blood spilled, marches for “Blood and Soil!” and the brawls that descend into riots when counter-protestors show up. Hazing and tests of testosterone, Lynyrd Skynyrd covers and rough, unemotional sex, racist rhetoric and the raging mindset that fosters.

For the old folks at home, these are fascists, “very good people,” to some. They’re the “fa” in “AntiFa,” which a whole lot of older Fox News addicts know to fear, but don’t care to find out the crazed “fa” bigots are that they’re protesting against.

Jamie Bell once again transforms himself, this time into Byron “Babbs” Widener, an Ohio skinhead deep into the culture, taken in when he had no home or “family,” now covered in the tattoos of the hardest of the hard core.

The film is framed within shots of Byron going through the excruciating pain of having those tattoos, which were imprinted just as painfully, removed. So we know he took a shot at getting out, and very quickly the narrative sets up his reason.

A rage-aholic with no impulse control, chief lieutenant to “Dad” (Camp) and Mom (Vera Farmiga), can Babbs be saved by the love of a good woman? That would be Julie, played by Danielle Macdonald (“Patti Cake$”), who grew up in “the life,” but with three daughters already, at least talks the talk.

“I don’t want my kids to be around this.”

Tough and tender Babbs sucks her back in. Will she be enough to lure him out?

New recruits are enticed with the promise that if they “join the real deal” they can “do some REAL damage.”

Not just pulling racist online trolling, wearing racist T-shirts and the like. Pulling guys out of melees to beat half to death. Mosque burnings, the works.

Nattiv allows time for just one scene where the ineffectual, threatening cops (Mary Stuart Masterson) try and “turn” Babbs, and plenty more time for the equally long shot approach of Daryle Jenkins (Mike Colter of TV’s “Luke Cage”). He runs the One People’s Project, and he’s had enough confrontations to figure out that meeting violence with violence isn’t the smart play.

“You’ve got a heart! You ain’t like them, Babbs! Love you, Babbs!”

Yeah, yelling that in the middle of a march or perp walk is just what a skinhead wants to hear. Colter makes it seem sincere, even if the character is left under-developed.

Camp is a total buy-in as the “Nordic” chief of this “like REAL Vikings” club/cult. He’s smoothest in the “intervention” they stage when they fear Babbs is drifting away.

Farmiga dazzles as the seductive master saleswoman, the bait for wayward white punks looking for direction, for a family.

“You can call me ‘Mom.”

Macdonald carries herself like the catch she knows she is, Big Girl Magic incarnate.

But it is Bell who makes the movie, belligerent, coiled fury from the tip of his bald head to the toes he bounces on as he stomps into the frame, threatening one and all, righteous in his racist wrath.

The “true story” angle and the foreshadowing — those framework scenes where we see Byron try to erase the emblems of his past — rob “Skin” of its sense of surprise.

The power of Bell’s performance, the horror of the rhetoric and mindless mindset render “surprise” a moot point. We know they’re coming. We just have to decide what to do about them.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, pervasive language, some sexuality, and brief drug use

Cast: Jamie Bell, Danielle Macdonald, Vera Farmiga, Bill Camp, Daniel Henshall

Credits: Written and directed by Guy Nattiv.  An A24 release.

Running time: 2:00

Netflix has a mixed bag on action pics, and that problem extends to the trailers they tend to cut for them.

This one doesn’t really sell this “true story” — and you can feel they’re leaving something out — lots of somethings.

It’s disingenuous in the extreme.

This July 31 film, “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” based on wasn’t about rescuing “dissidents” from famine and civil–war torn Ethiopia. It was about rescuing Ethiopia’s Jews from Sudan, one of several operations carried out by the Mossad (“Operation Moses,” “Operation Solomon”) etc).

Leaving that out of the trailer is either out of fear of anti-Semitic backlash or a simple acknowledgement of the overall optics of Israel bringing in more co-religionists — whose assimilation has been anything but easy  — sure seems less “heroic” than the altruism being sold here.

They’re boosting their population share of multi-ethnic Palestine/Israel, one of many ways that lead people as highly placed as Jimmy Carter to refer to Israel as “an Apartheid state.”

Timing’s a bit odd, too. Netanyahu puffing? It premieres on Netflix July 31.

This tiny bit of BH Tilt raised the hairs on the back of my neck once or two.

A favored niece kidnapped and murdered, a call, from the past? From that niece in the future?

“Wrinkle in Time” heroine Storm Reid is the niece, with the formidable and always empathetic David Oyelowo (“Selma,” “The Queen of Katwe, “United Kingdom”) as the uncle, and Mykelti Williamson.

“Don’t Let Go” opens on Aug. 30.

The words come out in different sentences, but bullies never hear them.

“There will be consequences,” ineffectual authority always says. But when that warning isn’t backed up with action — meeting violence with the full force of the law, or on a more jungle law level, meeting violence with violence — threats have no meaning.

“Consequences” is a Slovenian/French co-production about the pecking order in Ljubljana’s version of reform school. It follows a familiar path and hits many an easily anticipated way-point along that path. Writer-director Darko Stante drops obvious foreshadowing hints in our path, and rarely trips us up with misdirection or twists.

It’s still a grimly if modestly harrowing tale of wayward youth coming of age.

We meet Andrej (Matej Zemljic ), a lean and mean teen at a party, making out with a girl who taunts him when he “doesn’t feel like” having sex with her. We don’t see it, but it’s pretty obvious that he punches her.

Add that to the fact that he steals, rejects authority from his long-suffering mother (Rosana Hribar) and ineffectual pushover father (Dejan Spasic), on up the social ladder, and that this smirking, spoiled punk seems like a lost cause.

“I can’t worry about him anymore,” (in Slovenian, with English subtitles) his mom tells the judge. To “The Centre,” says the judge, even though she hasn’t seen Andrej bully and threaten his parents. This will straighten him out and teach him a lesson.

The fact that he has a pet white rat tells us he has a sensitive side. But all his behavior makes us fear for the rodent and anybody else within his reach. He’s out of control.

We don’t fear for Andrej, even though he’s leaner than the meanest dogs in The Yard. But standing up to Niko (Gasper Markun)  and taking his medicine from the psychotic top dog, Zele (Timon Sturbej) means he won’t have to follow roomie Luka’s go-along-to-get along survival strategy.

“Smoke weed…mind your own business.”

Andrej is “in” with the tough guys.

That might seem like the safest place to be. We and Andrej have seen counselors and teachers alike break up fights, non-violently, but spinelessly.

“There will be consequences.”

Their biggest threat? Taking away these sociopathic thugs’ weekend release. It’s a step rarely taken. The teachers are scared of them, too. The weak are pitilessly beaten, humiliated and robbed.

Stay on the good side of the psychotics is a survival strategy worth considering.

What we’re watching is a young man with just a hint of humanity wrestle with smothering that humanity, all for the sake of the approval of a monster-in-the-making.

Stante sketches in the reformatory in very brief scenes which capture both the nature of the place — teens are taught welding — and the characters inhabiting it. The strongest have learned that they need never control a violent impulse, even those involving open flames and tools.

Quick scenes establish psychotic Zele’s weekend routine — shakedowns, car thefts, beatings, drugs, partying. Andrej is cruel enough to cut the mustard, and soon finds himself charged with taking on tough-guy duties, “collecting” as we say in mob movies in the states.

The “surprises” here either aren’t that surprising, or seem too-abruptly introduced to give this routine teens-in-stir story its standard formula twist. The visual cues are blatant, the payoff fairly commonplace in such movies, if not in Eastern European ones.

On the plus side, the young leads are convincing, if more repellent than compelling. And the story takes on the air of inevitability far earlier than any truly inventive twist on the genre would allow.

The “Consequences” here are a movie that’s more intriguing than arresting, and not harrowing enough to be the most convincing recreation of the real thing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, substance abuse-drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Matej Zemljic, Timon Sturbej, Gasper Markun

Credits: Written and directed by Darko Stante. An Uncork’d Entertainment Release.

Running time: 1:35

It’s a well-established fact that I will watch and get something out of any picture that’s set “on the road,” and any movie set anywhere that stars Jean Reno.

That ethos isn’t given too severe a test by “4L,” (“4 latas”), a Spanish dramedy about old friends who set out to visit a third member of their former crew before he dies.

The hook here is that the friend, Joseba, is dying in Timbuktu. And as Joseba’s estranged daughter Ely (Susana Abaitua) tells and Tocho (Hovik Keuchkerian) and Jean Pierre (Jean Reno) when she meets them in Spain (actually, the Canary Islands), “If you really cared about my father, you wouldn’t go visit him by plane.”

The solution? A vintage Renault Paris to Dakar Rally car, a 1975 Renault 4L (four liters, or “latas” in Spanish).

We’ve seen lonely, drunken druggy Tocho literally chuck his security guard job, stripping the uniform off, on the street in front of his flat, keeping his boots. Jean Pierre isn’t hard to lure from his unsuccessful, half-forclosed Chateau du Soleil winery.

Ely? She’s young and tattooed with a pierced nose, no aims in life and given to picking up young men who never ever learn her name. It was her dad’s car, one he had restored in memory of treks the three guys used to make across the deserts of northwest Africa. She’s coming, too.

Maybe they’ll shoot a documentary about “”a grand adventure” through the “impenetrable desert” where “our cannot be return not guaranteed,” Jean Pierre narrates to Tocho’s camera, “a journey for humanity, for the love of Africa.”

Or maybe not.

At least Ely has Dad’s old journal, which Joseba (Juan dos Santos) narrates to her as she reads it, remembering a 1982 crossing in younger days, with a then-newer Renault 4L.

“Sin is what makes the world go round, and the desert is the epicenter of sin.”

Director and co-writer Gerardo Olivares (“The Lighthouse of the Whales, “14 Kilometers” and “Brothers of the Wind”) isn’t far from his comfort zone with this one. He serves up what you can only call standard-issue road trip/desert trek cliches — breakdowns, Third World (Morocco to Algeria to Mali) bribes, illness and romance, encounters with bandits, an old enemy, new friends and bemused stoners, old wounds and new blunders.

“This is the desert,” we’re told, in Spanish, sometimes French and rarely English, with subtitles. “Something happens at the last minute, and you get another chance.”

And as it drifts along and occasionally sputters to a halt, you either go with it’s picaresque pokiness, enjoying Reno’s grumping and diarrhea gags, appreciating the Keuchkerian (“The Night Manager,” “Assassins Creed”) spin on an ill-tempered burnout, or you won’t.

As the crew finagles its way through checkpoints, putters across the almost trackless wastes of the Sahara and exults in the “freedom” of Africa, all set to a lovely, sensitive world music/folk-rockish soundtrack by Yuri Mendez and the Cube, I almost did.

It’s not quite cute enough, not nearly as funny as you’d hope (although there are laughs, a checkpoint drug dog named “Gadaffi” for one) and not anywhere near as deep as Olivares seems to believe.

“4L” is set in Africa and feels like Africa, but that grounding flow of Africa into your soul that one character promises never happens.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Jean Reno, Hovik Keuchkerian, Susana Abaitua, Juan Dos Santos

Credits: Gerardo Olivares, script by Olivares, Maria Jesus Petrement and Chema Rodríguez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Has a vague, rural “Nightwatch” feel to it, the smell of “vampires” to its story of a serial abductor and murderer.

It opens in Russia first, Direct TV in August and theatrical in that dead zone before fall films begin in early Sept.

It was controversial when it first popped up on the streaming service.

And while I can’t recall be lin any copycats, the very disturbimg and graphic suicide scene that was the climax to the first season of “13 Reasons Why” became the signature of a show now in it’s third season.

Now, on further reflection, Netflix has cut it. Were lawyers involved?

https://www.thewrap.com/graphic-suicide-scene-edited-out-of-netflixs-13-reasons-why-season-one/

America’s cult of swindlers pyramid schemers and hustlers meet in their Mecca, Orlando and environs, in this Showtime series, premiering Aug. 25. A natural move for Kirsten Dunst.

Tom Hanks plays that slippery Dutch con artist Col Tom Parker, and Butler, a TV actor with roles in “The Dead Don’t Die” and “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood,” gets his big break.

Per Variety.

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/austin-butler-baz-luhrmann-elvis-biopic-1203257957/

I’m not sure what sort of quality control, what form the traditional Hollywood “studio chief,” “head of production” or “supervising producers” Netflix operates under.

If indeed, they have any. Heaven knows, they’ll acquire most any piece of junk movie that others have made they can get their hands on. They have to feed that “content” beast, at all costs. Why should “in house” projects be consistently any better?

But whoever put the remake of the fine French thriller “Point Blank” in the hands of actor turned hack-director Joe Lynch should be hiding under a rock, right about now.

What was a lean, mean, desperate tale of a nurse whose pregnant wife is kidnapped, forcing him to help bad guys free one of their gang from the hospital, becomes an eye-roller of an action picture that descends into the worst excesses of “buddy comedy” by the time Lynch is done with it.

Long before the gang boss named Big D (Markice Moore) has shown up, declaring what he REALLY wants to do is not drugs or drive-bys, but to “direct,” showing his gang “Sorcerer” and misquoting classic action pictures left and right — “All RIGHT. Warriors? Let’s go out and play!” — Lynch has turned this tight tale into an ultra-violent violent misfire, and an utter joke.

It’s now a Cincinnati story, where Abe, played by the heaviest of heavies, Frank Grillo, has just limped out of a shootout in the home of an assistant district attorney.

The ADA is dead, and Abe’s been shot. The punchline to that “joke” is when wheelman younger brother Mateo (Christian Cooke) races up and hits Abe with his car.

Ooopsie? Hilarious (cough cough).

That puts Abe in the hospital, with cops guarding him around the clock. Mateo sneaks in to grab what Abe stole from the ADA, an incriminating flash drive. Nurse Paul — it’s the subject of a joke, once or twice, the fact that he’s a “male nurse” — shows up, Mateo beats the hell out of him and steals his ID badge.

Mateo uses that to find out where Paul lives, grabbing Paul’s very pregnant wife (Teyonah Parris) and by the way, beating the hell out of Paul. Again.

Here’s the sight gag in that. Paul is played by Anthony Mackie, who doesn’t hide his years-at-the-gym muscles as he “stretches” playing a guy mentally and physically out of his depth, overmatched with real toughs.

Paul must sneak Abe out and get him to a hand-off with Mateo. Of course, complications ensue.

Lynch and the adapter of the screenplay, Adam P. Simon, stage car chases with Paul’s Prius — “This is MY car, not a rental! You’re driving it tooo hard! Slow down!” — and a PT Cruiser.

The ticking clock here has the cops (Marcia Gay Harden) and Big D’s gang looking for Abe and Paul and Mateo and texting threats as they do.

Lynch lets the urgency sputter out and the clock wind down at about the film’s halfway point. That’s when he goes all in on the comedy, which isn’t that comic. Random scenes pop up that are nothing more than a joke, killing the film’s momentum for a middling gag.

A nervy remake with rolling, hand-held extreme close-ups of Paul hustling his bargaining chip (Abe) on a gurney, in panic and with genuine fear for his wife and unborn child’s life, becomes a Mackie-Grillo swap threats and one-liners fest.

It’s all about the banter.

Who knows how long it took to stage, rehearse and shoot a frantic raid-the-pharmacy scene where Paul/Mackie, in his element, gathers everything he’ll need to resuscitate and move the mobster, a scene filmed as a swirling, manic 360 degree pan?

Breathless.

We see Paul start to transform into a man with a mission, thanks to the kidnapping of his wife.

But then the jokes begin and that tension balloon pops in a flash. The picture never recovers.

Harden’s an Oscar winner, and glowers, insults and shoots her way to almost-credible as a grizzled cop, a tough-broad detective on a tear. Mackie and Grillo play the pages they’re handed because they’re pros, but tone evades them, too.

Foreshadowing in this movie is so obvious there should be an inter-title when a key peripheral character is introduced — “FORESHADOWING.”

And is there anything more grating than Tarantino-fans who create movie-buff characters just to service their own taste in old movies? A character confesses that the action climax was borrowed from “Spartacus,” with “a little ‘Christine?'”

The tone of what feels, for its first half hour, like a solid action picture, feels off the moment the zingers start-flying.

You want to make this a comedy, dial down the violence and bring in Big D a LOT earlier. Because Big D — a sight gag (you’ll see) — is funny.

Big D, you’ve got EIGHT kids?

“I couldn’t pull out of a PARKING space!”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violent

Cast: Anthony Mackie, Frank Grillo, Marcia Gay Harden, Teyonah Parris, Christian Cooke, Boris McGiver, Markice Moore

Credits: Directed by Joe Lynch, script by Adam G. Simon, based on the French film by Fred Cavayé. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:26