Movie Nation

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

And just like that, J. Lo is a movie star. Again.

The “hit every audience” demographics of the casting, Latino, Asian, African American hip hop, “Riverdale” fans, and a populist message about looting America’s unpunished looters–Wall Street– is working.

“Hustlers” had a good Thursday night and a VERY good Friday, and damned if the strippers dramedy isn’t opening at $32 million, The first movie to overperform in ages.

STX gambled on that cast — Lopez, Wu, Cardi B and Lili Reinhardt and Keke Palmer — bet on Lorene Scafaria behind the camera and it paid off

And how.

“It Chapter 2” lost two thirds of its opening weekend audience and should win this one with a $40 million take. Any less, though, and the $32.5 and rising “Hustlers” could give it a race.

“Goldfinch” is bombing, “Overcomer” and “Good Boys” and “Peanut Butter Falcon” enjoy another week inside the top ten.

https://deadline.com/2019/09/hustlers-jennifer-lopez-it-chapter-two-weekend-box-office-1202733682/

It looks less digital as a combat pic, in other words.

Luke Evans, Mandy Moore, Patrick Wilson, Ed Skrein and Woody Harrelson are the stars.

Nov. 8 we relive America’s greatest naval victory.

Maybe there aren’t a hundred movies about somebody taking stock of their life and deciding “the ultimate test” of running a marathon will help them change everything for the better.

But including documentaries and episodes of TV series? Yeah, it’s common enough.

The dismissive take on “Brittany Runs a Marathon” is a makeover movie of the “Bridget Jones’s Diary” variety — “put-upon fat girl gets fit and finds love, health, happiness and renewed purpose.”

It’s “Run, Fat Boy Run” in an era when fat shaming has become verboten, unless you’re Bill Maher. 

But it’s also a little more than that, a story of an unpleasant woman wrapped up in self-loathing and body image issues who might start to engage with others once she starts to love herself.

Still, to accomplish that — “judgemental” movie cliché here — she’s got to lose weight. 

“Brittany” is played by Jillian Bell, a comic actress often cast as the the testy, plus-size wife (“The Night Before”) or the plump best friend or member of a pack of friends (“Rough Night”).

Here, she’s a downtrodden cliché — a 28 year-old who stress-eats at every reminder that New York, and life itself, is “fat shaming” her. Her low-self-esteem is an plain as her double chin and a top-knot hairstyle that screams “Who cares?”

Her petite and pretty roommate (Alice Lee) drags her to the clubs, and if she’s lucky, lets Brittany paint her toenails for her when they get home.

The only guys to take notice of her prey on her sense of self. Of course you’ll join me in the bathroom — on your knees. That’s how little you think of yourself, why should I be any different?

Brittany sleeps until the crack of noon, and tries to crack up the patrons at the theater where she’s an usher, a job this once-aspiring advertising jingle-writer could lose at any moment.

These early scenes are meant to establish a bubbly person smothered by weight and depression, and Bell is better at the smothered part than “bubbly.” Brittany may be acting out the “funny (fat) person comically compensating” stereotype, but neither the writing nor Bell’s performance of it deliver many laughs.

Having a character say “You’ll always be the funniest person I know” doesn’t make it so.

Maybe that’s because Brittany can’t hide the bitter.

She doesn’t let it out to her roommate Gretchen, or to her adoring, nurturing brother-in-law on Skype (Lil Rey Howery). But she lets the photographer-neighbor she nicknames “Moneybags Martha” (Michaela Watkins) feel her wrath. A Fitbit fascist who’s always jogging, she just brings out Brittany’s desire to add another pizza box and jumbo bottle of “Cannonball” wine to her collection, after another night of getting hammered at the club with Gretchen.

A trip to her doctor is her wakeup call. At 5’6″ and nearly 200 pounds, drinking and sedentary, Brittany is headed for a shortened life of major health issues. And even if she isn’t telling her doctor or anybody else, she knows how young her obese father was when he died. Seeing her “real” self in the distorted chrome reflection of a hot dog cart seals the deal.

Gym memberships cost money. Running it is. But as she begins, she rejects the encouragement of “Martha Moneybags,” real-name Catherine. “I don’t want your pity.”

She uses that word a lot. And “judgemental.” But if she’s angry, at least she’s channeling it into running — first a block, then a mile, then running with a jogging club.

Two things she picks up from Catherine (Watkins)? Set “tiny goals” in life, and in running. And everybody is dealing with something. If she ever stops calling her “Moneybags,” perhaps she’ll see that.

It isn’t long before running a marathon with two new jogger friends, Catherine and gay dad (rom-com cliché) with a dad-bod Seth (Micah Stock).

Writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo builds the picture on a conventional framework. We watch Bell transformed from multiple chins to a single one in short order.

The obstacles are generic, too. Progress, then a setback. A little boosted self-esteem has her sign up for OK Cupid, but promising dates are abandoned, awkwardly.

Brittany is still working on Brittany.

Her renewed ambition has her take on pet-sitting/house-sitting work, which runs her afoul of 30something “entrepreneur” and slouch Jern, amusingly played Utkarsh Ambudkar of “The Mindy Project.”

There might be “something” there, if only she can see it, if only Brittany can get past Brittany issues to let it happen.

Colaizzo fearlessly makes a movie about body-shaming that indulges in more than a little of this as it does — extreme close-ups of body parts oozing out of tops and shorts. The “health” angle allows the picture to separate itself for the curvy-and-proud comedies of Amy Schumer (“Trainwreck”) or America Ferrara (“Ugly Betty,” “Real Women Have Curves”).

But those movies had more emotive, funnier stars who gave us a sense of joy that came with accepting themselves. As complicated as “Brittany” the character and the character comedy can seem, both still feel “judgy.”

And Bell, parked front and center in a tale built around her, never lets Brittany truly blossom. The bitter, like the body fat she’s lost, clings to the character and makes any attraction anybody else might express for her feel contrived. The performance is muzzled when it cries out for exulation.

She’s not unattractive, except when the movie goes out of its way to make her so. But Bell’s screen presence isn’t warm or engaging and the script’s jokes aren’t good enough to transform that.

We know where the finish line to “Brittany Runs A Marathon” is, and have a very good idea what’s standing between it and her goal of crossing it.

It’s just that while Brittany might smile most days when she steps on a scale, we feel no joy in her for what she’s doing. We feel none of the thrill that her new friends express at reaching her “tiny goals” and her biggest one.  That makes this a comedy that never quite reaches the finish line.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexuality and some drug material

Cast: Jillian Bell, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michaela Watkins and Alice Lee and Micah Stock.

Credits: Written and directed Paul Downs Colaizzo. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:44