Movie Nation

This one seems right up my alley, so let’s hope this Sept. release has a hint of “fall film” sci-fi seriousness about it.

Fingers crossed!

Once one figures out “Depraved” is a modern re-setting of “Frankenstein,” how does a filmmaker maintain interest through the over-familiar story beats that march us toward that inevitable hunt with pitchforks?

Sure, it’s changed up a bit. The “monster” is pieced together by an Army surgeon haunted by all the mortally injured comrades he lost in the Middle East. He does this in a loft in modern day Brooklyn (Gawanus), and there’s this college pal/drug maker/financier who is backing the “experiment.”

We see the murder of the man whose brain turns up in “Adam,” the stitchwork creature “born” the day he is revived on the operating table.

Otherwise, it’s the same movie.

Actor turned writer-director Larry Fessenden (“Beneath,” “Wendigo”) seeks to distract us from the well-worn path by talking us to death. There are endless scenes of the doctor (David Call of “Tiny Furniture”) “teaching” the creation he names “Adam” (CLE-verrr) the fundamentals of life.

“OK. Can you say ‘OK?'” “Gravity makes the ball go down.”

Then there are debates — moral ones between Henry the doctor and his psychotherapist girlfriend (Ana Kayne), ethical and financial quarrels between Henry his rich backer, Polidoro (Joshua Leonard of “The Blair Witch Project”).

And don’t get me started on Polidoro’s “field trip” with Adam (Alex Breaux of “When They See Us”) — to museums, strip clubs, into “the world.” Polidoro loves the sound of his own voice, and teaching Adam about violence via an exhibit of war artifacts and weapons.

“Depraved. That’s what we are, Adam, utterly depraved!”

Adam silently absorbs much of this, learning all the time, quickly mastering the master at ping pong. He shows off his scar collection and his handiness with a pun come-on to Henry’s girlfriend, Liz.

“How do you feel?”

“With my hand!”

How “Rocky Horror.”

It’s all just a slow/slower/slowest prologue to the moment Adam becomes self-aware, questions his captive state and discovers his power. “Depraved?” He’ll show you depraved!”

Fessenden begins by adding a prologue, “How this person died,” the person whose tiny remnants of memory linger in Adam’s brain, tossed about in the special effects bubbles and murk meant to show him thinking.

Leonard comes off best in all this chatter, playing an amoral, rich schemer who loves the sound of his own voice, and likes the notion of “teaching” this science experiment that will make his new drug a blockbuster.

“Do you know what a lie is, Adam?”

None of this talk-talk-talk alters the course the story must take, and simply makes one impatient for the filmmaker to get on with it. Tedium sets in early and rears its head often as “Depraved” unfolds.

The violence, save for that opening stabbing, is exactly where it always has been in Frankenstein tales — in the third act.

And the villagers with pitchforks are, you know, cops and tracking dogs now.

As any viewer will see through this very early on (the damned stitching gives away the game, for Pete’s sake), there’s no excuse for dragging “Depraved” out. It crawls along, a  mildly creepy tale with no pace to go along with its lack of suspense.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity, alcohol

Cast: David Call, Joshua Leonard, Alex Breaux, Ana Kayne, Chloe Levine, Owen Campbell

Credits: Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:54

The comedy “3 Days with Dad” is a dark farce about a family gathering to say goodbye to their patriarch as he faces the end of life on tubes and life support in a hospital.

It’s a dismissable, hit or miss affair intended as a star vehicle for career supporting player Larry Clarke, who wrote and directed it.

But here’s why we stick around to the finish, kids. This one concludes with a flourish, some genuinely amusing moments and a couple of heart-stopping ones, both from unexpected places.

The third act makes the movie.

The Mills of Maryland gather for the funeral of brusque, racist hard-drinking ex-military husband and dad Abner (Brian Dennehy). His widow (Lesley Anne Warren) is barely keeping it together, but steady, weepy and devoted Catholic son (like his father) Andy (Tom Arnold) is prepared to give the man a eulogy he deserves.

Only Dad’s wish was that the more disappointing son, Eddie (Clarke), a hotel doorman in Chicago, single, 40something and as we’ve heard on phone conversations in the opening, not flush enough to be able to buy his own plane ticket to get there, be the one to honor him before his funeral mass.

Eddie breaks Catholic decorum and “wings it” through his speech, and we can’t figure why on Earth the Prodigal Son would be the one picked for this hefty responsibility. The movie, in flashbacks to the more distant past and the last few days, and in the stumbling sibling-and-stepmom debates about how to proceed AFTER the funeral, sets out to show us why.

There are funny lines, here and there — and funny supporting players.

J.K. Simmons plays a stereotypical goombah funeral home employee in training, blunt and profane, but with a compassion that makes him born for the job.

Mo Gaffney makes an amusingly human, but over-the-top mourner as daughter Diane. Jon Gries plays her tactless husband, always ready to say the wrong thing.

“So, who’s next?”

Eddie runs into high school crushes in a bar (Amy Landecker) and in the hospital (Julie Ann Emory), and a brutally outspoken classmate who wound up quadriplegic (Mike O’Malley). Everybody wants to know why they’ve checked his father into “the Death Hospital, the Roach Motel — ‘They check in, but they don’t check out!'”

And they have to hear what Eddie’s been up to.

“I’m a doorman. I’m broke. And I’m single.” 

At some point, though, the comedy is joined by an unblinking look at dying in America today — the succession of tests and “teams” an increasingly enfeebled man must face in his terminal days. “Swallow tests” and “lung clearing” and the myriad of conditions, from diabetic kidney failure to “end of life emphysema,” the “bed team” that has to come in and evaluate bed sores and decide on a course of action.

Never dealt with any of this, with helping an infirm, aged parent to a hospital bathroom, struggled to allow them cling to a little dignity in the face of an inhuman machine bent on prolonging life at the very end? You will.

Some of the jokes land — “So, last rites again? Third time’s the charm, Father?” Some don’t.

But the reality of it all almost never fails to connect, and some of that is amusing.

Dennehy has made a career out of barely-lovable and gruff, and his bluff turn anchors the picture. Warren’s stepmother figure is a fascinating study in distraction. She’s fretting over how much more she “can take,” doting on her husband but already moving on in her mind, hunting for distractions — routines that move her out of this vortex of death and dying.

And veteran funnyman David Koechner breaks free of “type” as an end-of-life doctor who is all soft-spoken tenderness, with the occasional euphemism, dealing with a distraught family at the bedside of the dying man.

It’s those human touches that make “3 Days with Dad” endurable. And if they don’t quite save it (the difference between character actors and leading actors is not skill, but charisma), they at least give it purpose, with the occasional break for levity.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic sexual situation, adult subject matter, profanity

Cast: Larry Clarke, Lesley Anne Warren, Tom Arnold, Mo Gaffney, Brian Dennehy, J.K. Simmons, David Koechner, Jon Gries, Julie Ann Emory and Amy Landecker

Credits: Written and directed by Larry Clarke. A Unified releease.

Running time: 1:34

Yes. Yes we are.

A 2:40 “It” sequel, and that’s just last weekend’s example.
https://t.co/Yd16VmWnMI https://twitter.com/THR/status/1172140355963277313?s=17

Joey King, Megan Fox and Jackie Weaver are the leading ladies, Farrell and Rogen and Robinson and McBride…and Feanco– those are just the guys in this movie about a movie.

A wide-eyed young actress comes to LA in the same year that “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is set.

“Zeroville” opens Sept. 20

Think “Hustlers” is just about strippers ripping off lap-dance clients in a well-publicized New York skin club?

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria, who scripted “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” and “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” sees this “true” story in epic parable terms.

These are the She Wolves of Wall Street, working class women who screwed over The Street the way Wall Street screwed over America. And Scafaria treats them as classic antiheroines, glammed-up, sisterhood strong and when the need arose — pitiless about the “Masters of the Universe” of the 2008 Great Recession, who should have been in prison when a gang of out of work pole dancers lured them into maxing out their credit cards in the years just after that.

Scafaria and a game cast headed by Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez — glittery cleavage, T-backed, tattooed and feminine to the max — strike a blow for equality in the ruthlessness they employ in carrying out their crimes, showcased on the dance floor with dazzling lighting and stripperwear, stalked into combat in the longest tracking shots this side of Tarantino.

It feels lightweight at times, with some of its rough edges rubbed off for the sake of sisterhood. But man, this caper comedy packs a punch.

Wu sheds any shred of “Crazy Rich Asians” naivete and sweetness as Destiny, a skinny dancer with a pasted-on “I need the money” smile and a lack of polish that earns her the protective pity of Ramona (Lopez) the Queen Bee of Moves, the club based on New York’s Scores, over-familiar in its day due to the constant plugging it got on Howard Stern’s radio show.

Destiny lives with her grandmother, who knows her as Dorothy. There’s something of Dorothy in the way she approaches the work, not as an innocent, but not the most competent of “new girls.” She’s not that “new” either. Moves is just a step up from the dive where she used to offer inept lap dances.

Lopez, in a showcase scene, demonstrates how to work the pole to make the faceless Johns in the audience rain bills on the stage. “Ankle hook, knee hook, table top,” selling the sultry with every move, shaking her butt, arching her back and WORK that hair, girl –WORK it.

With another dancer (stripper turned rapper Cardi B), Ramona improves Destiny’s lap dancing, and dollar bills are soon raining down.

Some of the legion of girls at the club, mothered by “Mom” (Mercedes Ruehl) bond. That’s how Ramona gets Destiny, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) to join her in a self-preservation scheme when the 2008 Recession hits and the Wall Street types they’ve been sizing up, cozying up to and servicing for years suddenly are spending a lot less money at strip clubs.

After the fact, Dorothy tells this tale to a reporter, played by Julia Stiles (the “Bourne” movies) with a perfect blend of empathy and horror. Because the short cuts these ladies take to separate rich guys from their cash would make anybody blanch.

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez star in HUSTLERS

The script, based on a magazine article about the real women who did this hustling, fails to make the Robin Hood points it shoots for. And the distinctly feminine touches — shopping sprees (buying everything with stacks of dollar bills), line dancing, Christmas gift exchanges — are as cliched as any heist picture or caper comedy’s well-worn tropes.

The movie reduces the menfolk into simple marks — the pricey watch, the expensive shoes, the aggressive cheat, the power broker (Frank Whaley, the only recognizable male star in the cast) not shy about spending thousands for a single memorable night.

A hundred years of women being treated like meat in such movies makes this feel like a little payback. And it works. Only the women have agency, here.

Wu is transformed and Palmer (who had the title role in the indie “Pimp” last year) long ago left her child-star image behind. But Lopez is the stand-out in this cast, giving Ramona many facets — mother figure and real-life mother, user, cold-blooded cash hound and a polished dancer who has the muscle memory, the highlights, glitter, lip gloss and furs of a woman who has ridden this horse as far as she can take it and is ready, willing and able to “transition” into bigger paydays as demand for her stripping dries up.

“Hustlers” finds awkward laughs in female-on-male cruelty, loses its nerve in the late acts, but finds its heart in the finale. And it hits the “I don’t want to depend on anybody” empowerment message awfully hard.

It may not be the “cause” it tries to become, but if there’s justice at the box office, it will become a phenomenon.

And only Hollywood’s short memory could stand in the way of awards nominations for Lopez, who finally has a role as gritty and mercenary as the nickname she seemed ill-suited to wear at her pop star peak — “Jenny from the Block.” Ramona’s got rocks, too, and you’ll be shocked at what she did to get them.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive sexual material, drug content, language and nudity

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Cardi B, Constance Wu, Keke Palmer, Lizzo, Julia Stiles, Mercedes Ruehl, Madeleine Brewer and Frank Whaley

Credits: Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, based on a magazine article by Jessica Pressler. An STX release.

Running time: 1:

“Inspired by a true story,” women working at New York’s notorious Scores strip club, taking the marks for all they were worth. Or some of it, anyway.

Are the Toronto Film Fest group-thinkers right, that Lopez an itd STX have a shot at an Oscar nomination for her in a Sept. film about strippers/thieves?

We shall see what we see when we see it.

She is haggard, as something in her life, this city or her apartment is keeping her awake at night.

He meets her, inscrutably scrutinizes her apartment as he walks from room to room. He listens.

“Mind if I lie down?” he asks.

“Is that typical?”

It is. And that’s where the “house tuner” reaches his conclusion. His diagnosis?

“I think you need a new toaster. That should do it.”

She’s mildly flabbergasted. That’s IT? But he’s certain, something to do with a minor chord the toaster resonates at clashing with her fridge’s motor hum.

“I’ll have a new model sent over soon.”

The first seventeen minutes of “The Sound of Silence” plays like the best short film in many a year. It’s compact, provocative and thanks to the serenity of its star, Peter Sarsgaard, and fraught exhaustion of the client (Rashida Jones), draws us in pretty much instantly. It leaves us with a sense of whimsy unexplained — mystery.

It’s so good you figure out “The Sound of Silence” was a short film before reading that in the credits. Alas, not every short film can sustain its interest when the mystery is unraveled, when the characters, story and back story are augmented to feature film length.

“Before I Disappear” is one recent example of a short turned into a winning feature.  “Silence” isn’t on a par with that, but compelling performances and an unbroken tone established by the acting, the sound design and a dimly-lit production design make this eccentric indie drama worth your while.

Peter Lucian has been studying New York City’s sound for years, covering neighborhoods, breaking out a tuning fork or two — or three — finding the pitch, the chord, the equivalent musical note for the sonic nature of that corner of town.

He takes meticulous notes, by hand and old analog microcassette recorder. He keeps a vast hand-notated map detailing his findings. He has an academic mentor (Austin Pendleton) who might help him get his “G Major Theory” published.

But that’s his passion. His vocation is consulting on what ails people’s lives, tonically and sonically. It might be a couple that’s worried about the stress their relationship is undergoing, a newcomer to the city wanting “soundproofing” or, as with Ellen (Jones), somebody who isn’t sure why they’re not sleeping.

Word of mouth recommendations are his lifeblood in a city where faddish cures, “readings” and treatments are worn like status symbols, something you know that your circle of friends have never heard of.

Lucian has even been profiled in The New Yorker’s quirky “Talk of the Town” life-in-this-city column.

Sarsgaard suggests preternatural calm as this lone prophet of sonic sanity in the cacaphony of the Big Apple. He is a professional with the resolute confidence of a man who knows what he’s about. And the messages clients leave on his answering machine bear out his unerring ear, and his success rate.

The movie, of course, is about the woman who becomes his greatest challenge. She is recently single, 40ish, works for a non profit helping the homeless. And his “toaster” prescription doesn’t do the trick.

He can talk about “foundation notes” and the “tonic” landscape surrounding her, the notion of “oppressive chords” and the “electrical silence” of a building that’s been perfectly grounded (as any recording studio or radio engineer about that).

She’s still not sleeping. And she’s throwing his game off. His mojo has fled.

A go-getter grad assistant (Tony Revolori) meant to help collate Peter’s research doesn’t help. Meeting with the CEO (Bruce Altman) of a company meaning to profit from giving frazzled New Yorkers more visually and aurally tranquil surroundings shows Peter’s obsession with his “great discovery.”

“This is about universal constants, not commerce.”

And Ellen is curious, maybe even attracted to this soft-spoken oddball who cannot, for the life of him, find a simple sonic solution to what airs her. Whatever she has, it’s contagious, and it derails his equilibrium.

None of these plot embellishments does much to extend or heighten our enjoyment of “The Sound of Silence.” Sarsgaard gives the fictional Peter a nice downward spiral, retreating into himself, lashing out, grasping for whatever it was that her troubling case (her office makes him fumble for sound-canceling earbuds) took away from him.

Jones has less to play around with, a bigger leap to make. Awkward on-the-spectrum types like this chap are catnip to the opposite sex ONLY in the movies. “Silence” needed more scenes with her and about her, less of Peter’s rising paranoia about his “discovery” and those who might steal it.

But we still have two empathetic actors playing compelling characters to latch onto. And we still have that perfect short film that is never completely subsumed in the “noise” that fleshing out this charming, autumnal tale of loneliness, sleeplessness, sounds and silences in the big city gives us.

MPAA Rating: unrated with PG-level content

Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Rashida Jones, Austin Pendleton, Tony Revolori, Bruce Altman

Credits: Directed by Michael Tyburski, script by Ben Nabors and Michael Tyburski, based on their short film. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:28

The guiding ethos of “Aquarela,” by the Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky, is water, in all its forms, reminding us who Earth really belongs to and the warnings water is giving us.

Men — Russians, apparently — struggle with winching a sunken station wagon from a frozen lake that is usually frozen solid “three weeks longer” than they’re used to. It’s tedious work, shown at excruciating length. It’s also darkly comic, with tragic undertones. We see this work in the foreground as behind them, SUVs dash across the too-thin ice, crashing through it off-camera (an attempted rescue fails).

A Greenland glacier (no locale is identified on screen, and there is no narration) rumbles and CRACKS and calves off icebergs, and we’re shown the underside of these mountains of ice underwater, and how it dwarfs a 60 foot cutter–rigged ketch used in the production.

That ketch, with an intrepid crew of two, experiences “Lord, thy sea is so great and my boat so small” in thunderous, rolling seas, some of the most striking sailing footage ever captured.

Waterfalls, floodwaters overwhelming Third World villages and a dam in the American West, a hurricane pounding Miami, there’s water water everywhere, and we’d better watch out for it and take care of how we pollute it.

Anyway, that’s what I took from “Aquarela.” Lacking narration and scene-setting intertitles, the viewer is overwhelmed with images of our Waterworld, presented in mesmerizing detail (super high resolution projection is available in some theaters) without explanation, nature’s beauty and power for their own sake, with humanity’s hapless efforts to cope with it.

It’s stunning stuff. But lacking a story, per se, and with no narrative drive, “Aquarela” is almost sleep-inducing, like a loop playing on super-high-resolution video on the screen.

Kossakovsky and his crew bowl us over with images which would make glorious second unit footage on a movie with an actual story to tell. “Aquarela” hasn’t enough shape to its water to recommend it as a stand-alone feature.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements

Credits: Directed by Viktor Kossakovsky. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:29

It’d be fun to drop in on the tail end of the documentary “Liam Gallagher: As It Was,” having only the Oasis singer’s reputation to go on, his Wikipedia biography to tell you what to expect.

He’s charming in that part of the film — giving, generous, well-adjusted. He’s older, mellower, playing at being the attentive dad to two sons and a daughter he only recently connected with.

He’s said “All I care about is getting the fans back” in the documentary, meaning the massive crowds that embraced Oasis until his brother Noel Gallagher quit the band and broke it up. And as “As It Was” concludes, the fans are indeed, back.

But the rep? “Loutish,” “arrogant,” with the “abrasive bearing” of someone his brother Noel, the guitarist and principal songwriter of Oasis, described as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet.”

His mother, in this documentary about the decade it took for Liam G. to figure it all out again, declares “He never changed. He is who he is.”

His “partner and manager,” is Debbie Gwyther, the Sharon Osbourne to his Ozzy, who helped him turn everything around after the breakup of Oasis, the collapse of Beady Eye, Gallagher’s first post-Oasis band, and the end of his marriage. She admits “He’s impulsive. He swears a lot.” But adds that she knows he has “regrets” about the way he’s treated people, and hurt some.

Sometime after filming was completed, the police were called to investigate a domestic violence incident. But maybe that’s just “the press” which has “never had anything nice to say about him,” as his Mum puts it.

None of which is readily evident in the triumphal finale of “As It Was,” the title a play on his “As You Were” comeback LP. But a great deal of the first act of this flattering, conventional but somewhat shapeless documentary gets all of those personal failings across.

If you know anything at all about the band, chances are you reached the same conclusion as Noel. The guy’s an overbearing, temperamental jerk.

Noel and Liam are still estranged, so the only snippets of Noel in this film are from radio interviews. The feuding siblings can’t stop slagging off on one another. But he’s the only critical voice, here, and that dings the film’s credibility and makes this portrait of a “mellowing” rock legend too much of a promotional film to have much value as biography.

“As It Was” kicks off with snippets of news footage, acting up on airline flights, defensive, hostile interviews at every turn and that fateful night in 2009 when the show no longer went on. It was in Paris, and a backstage fight ended Oasis.

The film is about the singing Gallagher’s long journey from “‘E split me band up!” to “not becoming a f—–g casualty…not letting the bastards win” to the realization that heedlessly charging on after Oasis with Beady Eye (the same Oasis band, sans Noel) wasn’t going to work.

Visiting every pub in Ireland when on break (they’re from Manchester, but Ireland’s where the Guinness is made) wasn’t paying off.

“You stop in for a Guinness. And you know how it is. You never stop at one.”

Acting agrieved wasn’t a good look. “Rumbling on Twitter,” lashing out at one and all wasn’t solving his problems.

“You’re no longer playing giant venues, no longer headlining?”

“Headlining? Been there, done that.  F—–g done with it!”

The GQ Men of the Year Awards 2017 – Arrivals Featuring: Liam Gallagher, Debbie Gwyther Where: London, United Kingdom When: 05 Sep 2017 Credit: Lia Toby/WENN.com

Brother Paul turns out to be the most reliable witness here, noting the “childlike charm” that comes through, backhandledly hinting at the ways Liam derailed the band, which both brothers have picked at, like a scab, in the decade since.

And there are hints of the character of the man in the ways he attempts to gloss and sugarcoat his image, hiking with his family in California — three kids from different mothers — in between shows, noting how well his now-teen children have turned out.

“The mothers have done great bringing them up!”

The saving grace of “As It Was” is Gallagher’s saving grace as well, that John Lennon-meets-John Lydon voice, the songs he wrote or co-wrote that brought him back from the dead, the album that restored his place in British rock.

The tunes are generously sampled, with snippets of studio sessions and lots of live concert footage that underlines his great talent and stage charisma.

He knows he needs this, needs them. Otherwise, he’d probably not worth the trouble.

The movie? Indulgent and despite following that “Falling from a great height, climbing back up” formula, is all over the place and the sketches of Gallagher it provides seem polished and officially approved. It’s probably for fans only.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol consumption and lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Liam Gallagher, Debbie Gwyther, Peggy Gallagher, Paul Gallagher

Credits: Directed by Gavin Fitzgerald and Charlie Lightening. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:28