Movie Nation

You might have heard the name, if you subscribe to Billboard. Maybe you caught him on “Soul Train,” just once.

The last name he shared with Obama’s pick to be U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, his daughter.

He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s best friends with Quincy Jones.

And then a montage of the famous folks he’s linked to, revered by, people he helped — from Hank Aaron and Bill Withers to Bill Clinton, Andrew Young and Barack Obama, Jimmy Jam AND Terry Lewis, tells you who Clarence Avant –it’s pronounced “A-vant” — knows.

“The Black Godfather” they call him. They laugh; Jamie Foxx, Clinton, Lionel Ritchie, almost all of them with stories of some time “Clarence cussed me out.”

The man is a veritable Samuel L. when it comes to his generous use of the phrase that first references your mother and then what you do to her.

“The Black Godfather” is filmmaker Reginald Hudlin’s love letter to Avant, a major figure in music, politics, concert promotion, the star making machinery of Hollywood and the friendly ear and — when needed — megaphone with connections who can “get you paid.”

It’s a film of warm remembrances and salty anecdotes, deals made with just a phone call, “power” wielded almost always behind the scenes.

Greensboro born, raised in tiny Climax, N.C., Avant’s life is only shortchanged in Hudlin’s film — he did “Marshall” and “Boomerang” and a LOT of TV — in those early years. We get a hint of how he got out of rural N.C. during segregation, and no idea of how he landed his first showbiz gig or three.

But Avant went from running a club in South Jersey to handling much of the black talent for powerful, mob-connected agent Joseph Glazer’s portfolio at a time when black agents were as rare as black presidents.

Composer Lalo Schifrin is the first to give us a hint of Avant’s catholic tastes. If he’s an equal opportunity offender, sweetly and profanely insulting the high and mighty, from early on he made no distinction about talent. Being shipped to Hollywood to help jazz man Schifrin get his foot in the door composing for movies and TV (“Mission: Impossible,” scores upon scores of scores), he didn’t mind rattling cages as a short, well dressed black man representing a white jazz man.

When he started his own record label years later, he got in trouble with black radio stations for making guitarist Dennis Coffey an instrumental soul hits star. Coffey’s white, something that only became obvious when he hit “Soul Train.”

Avant dabbled in sports when he was asked to mediate getting Jim Brown to agree to do a documentary with TV producer David L. Wolper.

“He said, ‘You want to do movies?'” Brown remembers. “The Dirty Dozen” and a long screen career, after football, followed.

When Andrew Young decided to run for Congress in Georgia in the 1970s, Avant calls him up and offers to mount a benefit concert. Isaac Hayes and Rare Earth packed 30,000 in Young’s kick-off event.

When Hank Aaron was near to breaking the all time home run record, Avant offered to go to Atlanta’s most famous company and get the man a decent endorsement deal.

He marched into the president of Coca-Cola’s office in 1975, Aaron remembers, and says, sans introductions or any niceties — “N—–s drink a LOT of Coke!”

The man was Samuel L. Jackson before Samuel L. Jackson came along.

“I don’t have problems. I have friends.”

He signed 30something aircraft toilet builder Bill Withers to his start-up record label and made him a star. He signed Sixto Rodriguez, too. “Took 40 years” for the rest of the world to catch on to the voice, the poetry and the man who became “Sugar Man,” subject of a classic documentary and all-time great comeback story.

And on and on it goes, testimonial after testimonial, a man who often didn’t get paid for these “favors,” but who’d produce Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour — even though he knew nothing about concert promotion, who strong-armed ABC, where he had a consultancy, into backing off letting Dick Clark run “Soul Train” out of business by launching the competing “Soul Unlimited” dance and music show.

“Godfather” they still called him, “Kingmaker.”

His status as a political fundraiser and voice in the ear of big time Democrats is verified by sit-down interviews with Clinton and Obama, Kamala Harris and Andrew Young.

Story after story backs up Bill Withers’ chuckling assessment of this man who has “never seen…with a tool…His tools are his ability to manipulate people. I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily. He puts people together.”

Avant laughs at all this, curses a little. Constantly. “Say Clarence Avant’s name and doors opened and the seas parted!” offends his modesty. “A celebrity’s celebrity” seems more than his due.

It’s a shame nobody thought to use the Yiddish word “chutzpah,” or the other one, “mensch,” because both fit the man to a T.

Here’s Quincy, Jones, rolling his eyes at every Avant pronouncement (they’re interviewed together), but offering, “He was fearless, man…He was in there calling Lew Wasserman (chairman of MCA) a mo-fo. And got away with it!”

There’s Snoop Dogg, getting choked up, Jamie Foxx attempting an impersonation, Hank Aaron the most bemused and relaxed we’ve ever seen him in an interview, David Geffen, Cicely Tyson, that daughter Nicole, who ruffled Dad’s feathers a little when she chose to campaign for this little known Senator from Illinois, rather than Dad’s friend Mrs. Clinton in 2008.

Of course, we’ve heard the story about the call Avant made that got Obama’s famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech moved to prime time. So he can’t have been too upset.

“You either join the country club or you remain a GD caddie,” Avant growls. “I’m not a f—–g caddie!”

“Life is about numbers…” he preaches, talking money. Always money.

For a man who’s self-made, come up from nothing to the very highest corridors of power, largely based on favors, advice and legs up he’s given others (as the film has it), he sure obsesses about money. Then we hear about the time he went broke.

A two hour film seems his due, although “The Black Godfather” is quite repetitive and lacks anything resembling a discouraging word. Even people he’s feuded with have nothing but sweet things to say about him.

He’s no “Supermensch,” to compare this to another “rare Hollywood man of integrity.” But Avant, like Shep Gordon, the always-helping/unfailingly kind agent of that documentary profile, reminds you that whatever you’ve done to get to that Oscar, Grammy, Emmy or Tony podium, or that Washington office, the person who encouraged you, helped you and kicked your behind when you needed it at whatever stage of your career you had it coming to you is worth remembering, too.

Seminal figures behind the scenes should get their due, too.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Clarence Avant, Quincy Jones, Hank Aaron, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Snoop Dogg, Bill Withers, Lionel Ritchie, Jackie Avante, Jamie Foxx, Barack Obama, David Geffen

Credits: Directed by Reginald Hudlin.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:58

Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson take over the franchise.

New blood new life? We’ll see.

The review embargo is 9am Wed.

Which has now passed. HERE is my review.

It begins by decrying “the largest science experiment in history,” our 250 years of burning coal and oil in such quantities that we’ve warmed the atmosphere and the oceans, altering the climate of our fragile planet — perhaps, fatally.

But don’t let that, the grim opening chapters of the grimly-titled documentary “Ice on Fire” scare you off. This HBO documentary, narrated by actor/environmentalist Leonardo DeCaprio, ends with a long summary of assorted other science experiments.

A Croatian scientist working in America is has been testing seeding the oceans with tiny iron particles to help duplicate a natural process, “marine snow,” a de-tox for the seas that makes the ocean less acidic by being a magnet for carbon, microbial life and everything associated with it.

There’s the Harvard researcher who helped invent “the artificial leaf,” for use in CO2 sequestration, a form of artificial photosynthesis for taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

A kelp farmer in the Thimble Islands of Connecticut swells with pride that he’s moved from simple fishing to growing and harvesting a replacement lifestock feed, kelp, that heals the ocean as it grows and is now “part of the army that’s going to save the planet.”

A forester with a non-profit that’s bought 2000 acres to manage young redwoods into old, carbon-sucking redwoods in California has a role. Iceland, which is losing glaciers and warming faster than the rest of us (the closer to the North Pole, the more pronounced Climate Change is), show off carbon capture machines (powered by Iceland’s natural thermal vents) that filter carbon out and bury it in the ground as others look at ways to use captured carbon to stimulate growth in greenhouses.

It’s not that Leila Conners’ film isn’t filled with dire warnings, and more than a few shots at environmental villains, from Ronald Reagan (Who only set back America’s solar energy revolution when he removed solar panels from the White House. The world ignored him.) to disgraced EPA fraud Scott Pruitt, who relaxed regulation on the already lax natural gas industry, adding to the world’s methane woes with leaky wells.

“Ice on Fire” is a globe-trotting state-of-climate-change update that starts with a history of when this research began — the 1950s — to the 2015 Paris Accords, which are on hold in the U.S., thanks to Trumpism. The film circles the globe with quick visits to air monitors in Colorado, “biomimicry” experts in Costa Rica, Norway and Britain, Africa and California, showing us some of the consequences of climate change and the diligent scientists documenting it thoroughly and raising the alarm.

Scores of such scientists are given a voice here, in between newspaper and magazine headlines, a rising chorus that is finally drowning out the denials of those “people who are literally profiting off the death of life on Earth,” as one expert declares.

“Some climate denial…rises to the level of a crime against humanity that probably should be prosecuted in The Hague.”

But “Ice on Fire” isn’t about reprisals and punishment for the Koch Brothers and their hirelings. It’s about a race to get the planet on a course to “return the climate to what it was 200 years ago,” just before the Industrial Revolution.

As narrator DiCaprio reminds us, speaking over scenes of the rapidly disappearing Arctic ice sheet, our bad decisions and climate destiny “need not be set in stone.”

Although the film has little that one could call exciting — the emphasis is on sober presentations of research and those doing it, because as DiCaprio narrates, “It’s their time to be heard — there’s an inherent call to arms in this engrossing HBO doc.

If we do turn our eyes away from Twitter and focus on doing this, what the world accomplishes will top the moon landings as “an unprecedented achievement in human history.”

As grim as seeing wildlife dying of thirst, starving polar bears and mass die-offs of whales and the like, the third act of “Ice on Fire” is bluntly can-do and upbeat.

More than one scientist unknowingly echoes the intro to TV’s “The Six Million Dollar Man.” “We have the technology” to fix this. “We don’t need to invent anything” to make it happen.

We just have to tune out and vote out liars who deliver whoppers about “Clean coal” and “Clean natural gas” and “Clean diesel.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio

Credits: Directed by Leila Conners. An HBO Films release.

Running time: 1:28

He’s in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” The butt of a pretty sharp put down, judging from the trailers. And a butt-kicking.

His daughter isn’t going to be happy about that.

No heads up, no money changing hands, that’s not going to mollify her, if the family “Green Book” stink is any indication.

Not sure she has any rights at all in this scenario. Bruce Lee’s image and name are used–ill-used possibly– but the legal boundaries there seem just muddy enough to allow her to make a stink, if she likes. Nothing more.

https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/bruce-lee-tarantino/

First full trailer to the latest Disney confection in sequel form.

This kid — and yes, he was a grown man when he tragically died, killed by a defective Jeep –was a sweetheart.

Ask anybody who knew him or interviewed him. Which is why this trailer to the new doc about his too short life might make you cry.

Sometimes you wonder if Netflix even bothers watching all of the movies they write the checks for.

I mean, there are thousands of titles, so I get it.

But “Oh, Ramona!” makes you really…wonder.

It’s sexist, vulgar and retrograde, a candy-colored teen sex comedy in English from Romania.

It’s filled with nubile young women in eroticized school girl uniforms, callous, coarse pre-#MeToo boys who aren’t in their league with the two best looking young women in the cast both falling for the nebbish played by Bogdan Iancu.

It’s lazily smothered in insipid, cloying voice-over narration about all the things Andrei (Iancu), wants out of life with a girl, all delivered in his cutesiest 16 year-old Romanian-accented voice.

“We totally were NOT doing drugs…There could be cops in the audience!”

“Wait a minute, I can’t show you this part! There are children in the audience, for God’s sake!”

We’re treated to male wish-fulfillment fantasy sexual come-ons, visual euphemisms of cucumbers, “USB drive and rear-entry VGA” ports, squishy cake and champagne corks popping, little old ladies licking lollipops, bodily fluid and over-full toilet gags, animated smoke coming out of bananas (substituting for doobies).

And fat girl jokes. Did I forget those?

Nerdy-horny Andrei narrates even the things we can see for ourselves.

Andrei has lusted after short-haired teen pixie Ramona (Aggy K. Adams), who gets a little wound-up at a party and grabs him.

“I know you’re in love with me. I think it’s…cute.”

But wait. Andrei’s a talker, and not just in voice-over. Talk talk talk.

“I’m not like all the other guys…” And then, “I just can’t have sex with a girl if we’re not in a relationship.”

But. But. But. “I’m the hottest girl in school…and you’re….YOU. Stop being silly.”

Thus things turn to a series of disastrously public failures with Ramona. She takes up with a boy who hits her, and she’s mean enough to tell everybody Andrei did it.

Very, um, Eastern European? Hitting girls? WTF?

His foul-mouthed single-mom (Andromeda Godfrey) coaches him on the phone while asking girls out, and when she decides that they need a vacation, Andrei meets the other supermodel-to-be who takes an interest in him.

Front desk clerk Anemoma (Holly Horne) is putty in his hands, thanks to his “gold medal pick-up line…’Hey, pretty…do you believe in love at…first sight?'”

And his attempt to serenade her, beachside with a little Elvis, seals the deal.

The boys here are insanely banal and drab characters, and yet every young woman — stunning to Mama June-ish — longs to sex them up. More visual euphemisms, more lollipop licking.

“Ooooo, ‘Fifty Shades of Andrei!'”

Yeah. It’s like that, only worse.

Mom gets the best line — “Between now and your 50s, you’re going to have so many women to disappoint.”

Andrei? He’s so naive that he can’t decipher college girl Anemona’s tattoo.

“Je ne regrette rien? Who to f— is RYAN?”

Romania looks lovely and perfectly visitable — if not for the creepy boys who no doubt grow up into creepy cave men.

Perhaps it’s comforting to some that there are selfish, oafish frat-boy types on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Perhaps someday the young women depicted here will figure out they’re way too good for sexist garbage, and young actresses, too, will realize they’re better than movies lol oke “Oh, Ramona!”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Aggy K. Adams, Bogdan Iancu, Holly Horne, Adina Stetcu, Andromeda Godfrey

Credits: Directed by Cristina Jacob, script by Andrei Ciobanu, Alex Cotet and Cristina Jacob. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Yes, this NSFW trailer is the one that almost sells this re-imagining of “Shaft” in action-comedy Samuel L. Jackson-speak.

I still have faith that Gina Carano is going to land good action film roles. Even though she’s trapped in B and C thrillers like “Daughter of the Wolf,” she has presence, and her fist-fighting bonafides remain impressive.

She’s had bit parts in a “Deadpool” and a “Fast and Furious” picture, and she’s a long way from her thrilling break-out film, “Haywire.” But she can take heart that Jason Statham went through such a lull, movies where the best reason to sign up is you need the work and the stunt coordinator and fight choreographer are impressive and will keep you from getting hurt.

She and we are hurled into “Daughter of the Wolf.” We meet her character as she’s fetching a shotgun and a stash of cash from her family’s long idle (British Columbia) lumber mill.

It’s the dead of winter, and she’s got a snowy rendezvous with three kidnapping thriller cliches — “You want to see your boy again?” thugs in masks.

Her kid’s been kidnapped and she is paying the ransom.

“We had a deal.”

“Deals change.”

The plan, of course, is to get the cash and kill her. No kid returned. But Clair Hamilton is, of course, “ex-special forces.”

Bad screenwriters always want to explain away somebody’s “particular skills.” There’s very little that follows that suggests Clair has “particular skills.” She can fight, but there are other reasons that can be. She can shoot, but she’s from the rural mountain Northwest.

And she’s not shy about threats. Again, that doesn’t require military training, but screenwriters love their crutches.

After an impressive SUVs-on-snow chase and spectacular crash, Clair gets the drop on the last surviving bagman. And Larsen (Brendan Fehr), bullet in his leg, is still more scared of this ringleader “Father” than he is of the woman pointing a gun at his “good” leg.

Father is played by Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss as a crusty, profane old coot with a grudge and a cult-like gang of followers, only some of them family.

He’s got Clair’s kid (Anton Gillis Adelman), a child he’s inclined to school, a bit, on the ways of the world.

“Boy, I HATE t’raise my voice…stupid kid.”

He grouses at his underlings.

“If they’re not dead, they’d better G–D—ed WISH they were!”

The script gives us three threads to follow — Clair’s trek, with Larsen, over the mountain to the villain’s lair, the goings-on in that lair and flashbacks showing the inevitable neglectful “You were never HERE when I needed you!” mom guilt Clair feels.

When she’s not fighting on a frozen lake, or trying to crawl out of it, or brawling at the top of a waterfall, dodging bulle, Clair tries to figure out why the wolves, which are EVERYwhere, seem not as interested in her as they are in Father and his minions.

Yes, nature wants its revenge, too.

Ex-MMA star Carano has the sturdy build of a brawler, and acquits herself well in the fights, and the stunts are upscale and realistic for a modest-budget thriller.

The narrative is built on oddly theatrical twists, a film that begins in mystery and then sheepishly sets out to EXPLAIN every mystery away in the middle acts.

David Hackl, a production designer  (“Outland,” a “Saw” sequel) turned director, gets the look of the film right even if the pacing is slack and the script a few rewrites shy of being pretty good.

But that script was good enough to get one and all, including the 70something Dreyfuss, out in the snow of British Columbia in late winter, so give them that. And the stars, to a one, acquit themselves admirably in this frostbitten script.

It’s just that in thrillers starring martial artists, it’s the action that counts, the speed it comes at you, the violence in your face thanks to a tight, intimate camera frame. It’s how cool the fights look and how cool the star handles herself in them.

Production design and endless explanatory motivations are for sissies.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language

Cast: Gina Carano, Richard Dreyfuss, Brendan Fehr, Sydelle Noel, Brock Morgan

Credits: Directed by David Hackl, script by Nika Agiashvili. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:28

You can see why country singer Trace Adkins would be a natural to cast in a Western.

He’s got the growl, the tall-in-the-saddle stature, the ability to wear a hat like he’d be naked without it.

And his first moments in “The Outsider” cash in on all that promise. He strolls into the frame, in profile, a man in black in a black flat-brimmed hat and maybe a little too much hair-care in evidence.

“You’spect me t’believe one man, on UNARMED man, did all’a this?” he says, surveying a saloon with bodies scattered about.

It’s a rainy night — there are lots of them in this corner of the dusty Southwest, and all Marshal Walker wants to know is “What happened?”

“All hell broke loose,” the bartender mutters, cleaning up the crime scene as if it’s just another Thursday.

This slower-than-slow, sordid and sour Western is about “The Outsider,” an ostensibly unarmed Chinese railway worker (Jon Foo) who unleashed the hell that broke loose, and his reasons.

It’s a “Kung Fu” tale of racism, rape and revenge built on bloodless performances, limping longueurs between brief blasts of action, sexual violence and unsavory sex slapped in for good measure.

So it’s a lot rougher than the stuff Adkins usually ties himself to on the screen — the faith-based “Moms’ Night Out,” “I Can Only Imagine.”

There’s a “Chinaman” Jing, played by the Sino-Irish British-born martial artist Foo, whose adoring wife Li Phang (Nelli Tsay) waits for him in the laborers’ camp while he lays track all day.

They don’t speak Chinese on camera and don’t sport accents that suggest they’re recent arrivals. Their public displays of affection feel modern and out of place. And yes, it’s less than historical to suggest a common laborer would be able to get his wife into this country while still doing this itinerant work.

The marshal’s son Frank (Kaimi Lyman of the malnourished Western “Hickok” by the same production team) is a deputy, and all the deputies have the bullying swagger of “a law unto themselves.”

“I have ‘yellow fever,'” Frank purrs, spying Li Phang. “And I’m hoping that she’s the cure.”

You can guess what happens, and yes, it’s both graphic and oddly passive.

And you can guess what Jing, the stereotypical “man of peace,” does. He starts in on the deputies. And he sends a note.

“This stop when James Walker dies!”

Director Timothy Woodward Jr. (of “Hickok” and other B-movie action pictures starring folks like Dolph Lundgren) and screenwriter Sean Ryan basically turn their backs on Foo to focus the movie on the father-son dynamic and the army of deputies this small town is able to muster as fodder for Jing’s vengeance.

Frank can protest his innocence to Daddy all he wants.

“You are many things, but ‘innocent’ is not one of’em, boy!”

Daddy is even moved to go to church to pray for the kid, for a “quick” resolution to this mess, explaining his intentions to God, even though he knows his boy has “no good in’em.”

Sean Patrick Flanery is the tracker hired to hunt down Jing.

“I’m retired.”

“Not today, you’re not.”

Danny Trejo has a glorified cameo as a Hispanic deputy who rides herd on the tracker.

“Do we have a PROBLEM Señor?”

“Well, ain’t you mad enough to fight a barr with a hickory switch!”

The dialogue is a strong suit of this teeth-grindingly slow picture, as is the use of shadows — dimly lit saloon to dimly-lit barn.

The central conflict, immigrant faces off with rural, racist cruelty in the form of murderously cruel “law enforcement,” is a solid foundation.

But “The Outsider” lurches along, a film that makes its compromises to quality painfully apparent in every scene.

Can’t get a charismatic star? Shoot around the guy you end up hiring. Realizing the horse opera audience they’re making this for might not take to its message of “Be nice to immigrants, or else?” Play that down. Put Trace in a church.

“God turned his back on us a long time ago!

The lofty place “Kung Fu” still enjoys in our culture suggests this is a movie that could have/should have worked.

But the pace is dispiritingly slow. The action bits are uninspired and rare. And the performances — only Flanery escapes unscathed, and Adkins would have been an asset had the picture not required him to carry it — have nothing about them that make us want to take “The Outsider” in.

MPAA Rating: unrated, rape, other violence

Cast: Trace Adkins, Danny Trejo, Jon Foo, Nelli Tsay, Sen Patrick Flanery

Credits: Timothy Woodward Jr., Sean Ryan. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:26