Movie Nation

A “big city” cop comes home to visit her dying father and is drawn into a mystery that dates from her high school days in “HELLmington,” a moody, well-acted but generally inconsequential thriller in the occult subgenre.

If it holds your interest, thank the cast and the tone. If it disappoints here and there, and features an utterly botched and obvious ending, well you lose some and you win some.

Nicola Correia-Damude of “The Strain” and “Shadowhunters” is Sam Woodhouse, summoned home by her police chief Uncle Rupert (horror legend Michael Ironside) because her retired prison-guard dad is dying.

Sam is on medication, is estranged from her father and is carrying around something with her other than a badge. Dad (Andre Bussieres) blurts out “KATIE OWENS” as his dying words. Maybe that’s a clue.

Samantha certainly thinks so. Katie was a classmate she had a big beef with nine years before. Katie disappeared. Somebody knows something, and apparently that somebody wasn’t Sam, who had left town.

So she starts asking around. And she wonders about her meds, because she was sure she saw a hooded figure wearing a ram’s head in the hospital as her father was passing.

She catches a glimpse of such a figure again when she visits the one-time prime suspect (Munro Chambers), a squirrelly sort who lives in a house in the woods who, like everybody else in HELLmington, offers Sam a drink.

“Not every woman I’m with disappears!”

Sam pulls the file, digs, wonders about the death of Katie’s father, a prison guard like her own, and puzzles over what was eating at her old man so much that he blurts this missing woman’s name out on his deathbed.

Filmmakers Jay Drakulic and Alex Lee Williams (of TV’s “#VitalSignz”) pepper the script with “Twin Peaks” eccentrics. There’s the occult expert professor (Yannick Bisson) who moonlights as a taxidermist (stuffed critters are everywhere). Maybe he can make sense of these symbols, these mysterious “Revennians” Katie might have gotten herself mixed up with.

Oh, and Rupert is a customer in his other business.

“You tell your uncle his pickerel’s ready!”

Sam interrupts the quirky motel clerk (Shannon McDonough) as she’s doing her online German lessons, interrupts her again when an occult symbol is drawn on her motel room wall — in feces — and gets her attention a third time after Sam fights off a murderous intruder.

Flashbacks and archived video files (HELLmington High School, class of ’99) fill in some of the mystery. They introduce more suspects, more intrigue. And Correia-Damude is an interesting enough presence that it would have been intriguing to see this play out as a simpler police procedural.

As it is, the plot lost me, here and there. And as I said, the ending is one of those story elements every character in “It Chapter Two” ridicules when they’re talking about the writings of novelist Bill (James McAvoy). It sucks in a total cop-out kind of way.

It’s never more than occasionally creepy even if it holds one’s interest long enough to complain about that ending.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, substance abuse, nudity

Cast: Nicola Correia-Damude, Michael Ironside, Gabe Grey, Angelica Stirpe, Yannick Bisson Michael Ironside,

Credits: Written and directed by Alex Lee Williams and Jay Drakulic. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running tine: 1:23

A big hit at Cannes an October release from A24.

Was this the performance that made Pattinson an apt choice as the next brooding Dark Knight?

Laurence Fishburne is a prison warden haunted by the past, forced to deal with flashbacks to his past sins as his infamous place of work is about to be imploded in “Imprisoned,” a tale set and filmed in Puerto Rico.

It’s a ponderous melodrama of love, loss, revenge and mass injustice, a wholly fictional tale about an abusive system whose abuses extend to the gallows, which that warden once eagerly employed in a mad rush to empty his death row before changing political tides ban the death penalty there.

As it’s not a period piece and Puerto Rico actually abolished the death penalty (not for Federal crimes) in 1929, it lives or dies in the performances and the grim scenario writer-director Paul Kampf (“Brothers Three: An American Gothic” and “From Grace”) cooks up.

Both come up short.

We meet the warden in retirement, bald and pot-belled, living in a dumpy trailer, but moved to visit his former place of employment (the exteriors are the Castillos San Moro and San Cristobal in San Juan) on the eve of its destruction.

Wandering the wired-to-explode walls, he flashes back to a woman (Juana Acosta) and something she said long ago.

“What you did inside that place will be with your forever…forever.”

He met Maria when she opened a cafe, El Faro, (“The Lighthouse”) near the prison, an anti-death penalty activist who lectures the stranger on “second chances” and how “that should be on your mind every day.”

Her husband, Dylan (Juan Pablo Raba of “The 33” and “Shot Caller”) got such a second chance. He’s an ex-con who hires other ex-cons to work on his fishing boat, aptly-named “Penetincia.” Maria is grateful he got that chance.

The warden? He eyes the pretty wife, asks her if he knows her husband, and bad things start happening to Maria and Dylan Burke. Those bad things are aimed at putting Dylan back behind bars, and Maria under the thumb of a warden who sees the world and convicted criminals in stark terms, and himself as a man charged to carry out “the directives of the people.”

Dylan? He’s turned his life around and we see him act as nothing but conciliatory. An ex-con has to be that way. No trouble with the law is allowed, even if the local chief (the late John Heard, in what may be his last film to reach the screen) is sympathetic.

What unfolds is the generic prison picture war of wills, with prison riots, torture, and Esai Morales as the governor who illustrates the claim that “the death penaltiy is just a publicity stunt by politicians.”

Edward James Olmos is the Old Man of the Yard, not the first nor the last cliche this cliche-ridden picture is saddled with.

Fishburne rarely gets roles this prominent these days, and there’s an attempt by him and the script to show Warden Calvin’s point of view, to somehow temper his cruelty and criminal abuses of the system with his own grievances. That’s a bit eye-rolling.

The dialogue, in English and Spanish with English subtitles, is  prison picture boilerplate.

“I’m a different man.”

“Keep telling yourself that, convict.”

The warden, or at least the writer-director, has fond memories of “Cool Hand Luke,” where lines about “getting your minds right” were born.

The ticking clock nature of the third act is as slow as the rest of the picture, and thus it becomes a clock that stops. The lack of urgency renders the performances dramatically flat.

I’d say there’s a better movie in this material, but there isn’t. A warden violently, murderously framing an inmate, blackmailing the inmate’s wife, and he wants us to understand his reasons? Fishburne tries to do something subtle with him, but his character’s actions speak louder than his “Les Miserables” brooding.

Everybody else is painted in monochromatic shades — the righteous, loving ex-con, the saintly but desperate wife, the grizzled con, the poll-watching politician.

Nothing much here grabs us and drags us into the next scene, much less the following acts. “Imprisoned” never escapes its lack of drive, never takes on the urgency this scenario promises.

They had interesting locations, a decent cast, probably government incentive money to aid the financing, just not a script that was ever going to amount to much, even if perfectly executed.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, disturbing images, some sexuality and language.

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Juana Acosta, Juan Pablo Raba, Edward James Olmos and Esai Morales

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Kampf.  A Cinema Libre release.

Running time: 1:44

Ewan M. is “Danny doesn’t live here, Mrs. Torrance,” all grown up.

Rebecca Ferguson, Jacob Tremblay, Cliff Curtis and Bruce Greenwood are in this Nov. 8 thriller.

Not a bad opening weekend.

Not a holiday weekend, not a “summer release,” almost three freaking hours long.

The $91 million “It 2” pulled only looks bad if you compare it to “It Chapter 1,” which pulled in over $123 million two years back.

And you know, if projections had this one opening at over $102.

Or over $92.

Expect the actual take, announced Monday, to shrink even more.

“Angel has Fallen” did another $6 for second place. The summer holdovers are exhausted.

“It Chapter 2” also won the per screen average, edging and then some the limited release Linda Ronstadt doc from Greenwich Entertainment.

“Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice” earned over $16,000 per screen

Should’ve put that one on a hundred screens, kids. We love that Linda.

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

Oscar winner Brie Larson, Tim Blake Nelson a Andrene Watts-Hammond are the other faces in this Oscar contender about justice down South.

It’s based on a true story and could be every bit as moving as its trailer.

I watch the signature stand-up specials on Netflix and elsewhere, but I rarely bother to review them because they aren’t movies — for the most part.

Not in the sense of “Eddie Murphy: Raw” or the various Richard Pryor concert films of legend. They lack cinematic qualities, story (Pryor’s films had that), etc.

But all the online hullabaloo over Dave Chapelle’s latest “Sticks & Stones” drew me to the reviews that his fans were ridiculing, and then to the special itself. That’s worth tapping out a few lines about.

It struck me that the complaining fans have a few legit beefs, that other critics were groping for things to hate on. And it struck me that “fans” weren’t facing up to whether or not this was Chapelle’s weakest special yet.

Comics get a LOT of license and leeway with me, and always have. Jackie Mason was a hate-mongering slur slinger. Andrew Dice Clay, Eddie Murphy both crossed a lot of lines.

Ever hear George Carlin’s nuclear assault on bulimia and anorexics?

So Chapelle gets a pass or at least, “Well, that was a bit that didn’t come off” on a lot of this from me, just by default.

To the first point, several reviews I noticed label Chapelle “a truth teller,” somebody who “tells it like it is.”

Really? He’s a stand-up. Whatever other pointed observations he’s made about the culture, mainly in his Comedy Central “Chapelle’s Show” way back years and years ago, he’s played stoners in movies and he makes up bits for laughs. “Truth” rarely enters into it. He’s a storyteller.

He shoves a big “gun story” in the middle of “Sticks & Stones.”

He’s making a point about African Americans buying guns to finally force racist America to do something about gun violence and mass shootings (especially in schools, which is his most pointed observation of the night). He talks about buying a shotgun for protection, and shooting an intruder with it in his house. Near as I can tell, it never happened (Internet searches).

“Truth teller?” It’s a BIT. Do not take a “bit” literally.

So when he kicks off a long routine about Michael Jackson’s accusers in “Leaving Neverland” with “I do NOT believe it,” declaring that he is a notorious “victim blamer,” that “somebody’s gotta teach these kids, ‘There’s no such thing as a free trip to Hawaii,'” he’s simply going for shock value laughs.

The evidence against Jackson is overwhelming — the payouts to victims for their silence was in the millions. Chapelle not “believing” that is like him advocating that the Earth is flat. He’s not in the NBA. It’s just a bit. Do not take it literally.

Tasteless? Somewhat.

He throws a pedophile version of the Trump “not my type” defense in bringing up Macaulay Culkin, as if Jackson didn’t molest Culkin, he must be innocent. A bit. Stupid, but a bit.

Anthony Bourdain’s suicide? Fair game and just funny enough to be worth the grimaces.

When Chapelle gets into the funniest portion of the act, the last third, he comments on the Jussie Smollett fake hate crime, exaggerating and ridiculing the actor’s name in a fey-French fashion. That sounds a tad homophobic there, Dave, but no matter.

He claims “black folk” never believed Smollett from the start. Not just black people, Dave. One of the attacks on this bit came from this conservative critic, who used the Rev. Al Sharpton “took Smollett’s charges seriously” to puncture Chapelle’s thesis.

Kyle Smith, who used to write for The New York Post, is being disingenuous or at the very least, is using Rev. Al — who is black — to beat up another black person — a favorite conservative tactic. Rev. Al came into the public eye by virtue of his defense of Tawana Brawley, the Jussie Smollett of her day. Rev. Al is a racialist, willing to legitimize any claim that fits into his outrage. He’s a sucker for a good hate crime fabrication. Always has been.

When Chapelle describes his friend Kevin Hart as “damn near perfect,” you realize he’s too close to the subject to have an impartial take on the “cancellation culture” that “the alphabets” — the LGBTQ “social justice warrior” twitter outrage machine — used to take Hart’s “dream, hosting the Oscars,” away from him.

Hart’s a scandalized womanizer, which has cost him his share of payoffs, a standup who has let his “fat and happy” years of success deflate his stand-up act. And like too many African American comics to count, he’s pandered to his audience with homophobic remarks, tweets about “beating” his son if he found the kid exhibiting gay tendencies.

Granted, this was YEARS ago. But not that many.

As Chapelle has been attempting to reclaim the word “faggot” as acceptable for him to use in his act earlier in the show, you can see why people are upset about that. White comics don’t pepper their acts with the N-word. Not allowed. A straight black Ohio comic doesn’t have permission, nor should he seek it, to hurl that slur into the ether.

Even in front of an audience in Atlanta.

You want to be daring, Dave? Here’s an idea for a future bit. You know who ELSE went down the homophobic route in African American stand-up? Tracy Morgan. And what ELSE do Tracy Morgan and Kevin Hart have in common? They both followed that “scandal” with an awful car accident.

There’s a bit. You can’t be black and slur “the LGBTQ alphabets” (“The T’s hate my f—–g guts!”) because, if you do, you wind up in the hospital.

Drive carefully, Dave.

The overarching grievance I see expressed about this special is the power imbalance on display here. The contrite, self-skewering Chapelle of his post “break down” and “quit my TV show” years is long gone. He’s an older, popular, rich comic punching down at some targets. He’s lost some empathy.

That’s not a cardinal sin, by the way. A lot of comics (Seinfeld comes to mind) never had any.

When Chapelle opened his “alphabets” bit by warning us that he was about to, like Hart and others, violate “an unwritten and unspoken rule of show business,” I leaned in a bit. Is Dave going after Jews?

Naaaah. He’s punching down at LGBTQ. But swap “Jews” for pedophilia victims, or LGTBQ activists, for the #MeToo movement (which he states, flatly and laughably, is responsible for the tidal wave of anti-abortion legislation in conservative states like Georgia). Or for that matter, swap “N—gas” for any of those. Maybe he’d get it. Pointlessly speaking on these subjects in those ways brings out the worst in some listeners. It gives them comfort in their bigotry or denial.

Yeah, there are people in the audience in Atlanta, and Netflix viewers, who hoot and holler and feel validated when Chapelle belittles pedophilia, gay bashing and the like.
Sometimes, the shock value isn’t reason enough to “go there.”

More to the point, it’s no substitute for material that kills. I only laughed a few times at “Sticks & Stones” — yeah, the Culkin bit was funny in addition to taking one aback. Same with Bourdain (he found a payoff) and Smollett, and the whole racist crack vs opioids epidemics connection has been made elsewhere, but still stings.

You got our attention, pal. But for the most part you didn’t deliver the funny.

You’re just doing what those of us reviewing you are doing — trolling.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, crude sexual humor, profanity, and lots of it

Cast: Dave Chapelle

Credits: Directed by Stan Lathan, written by Dave Chapelle. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:02

It’s the movie that could make you fall in love with Morgan Spurlock, all over again.

With “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!” the quixotic documentarian returns to his first, best destiny — investigating fast food and the “myth” that it’s gotten better in the dozen or so years since he almost killed himself gorging on it with “Super Size Me.”

Since then, Americans have gotten fatter, and to all appearances more gullible. So Spurlock digs into this rebranding and spin, with its new brick restaurants with fake wood decor and green imagery, the “health halo” fast food has been giving itself, and pulls back the curtain on their ability to make us believe what we want to believe.

He wants us to know that “free range” and “artisinal” and “all natural” and “No GMOs!” and “healthier” mean nothing in our fast foodie culture.

Burger America is giving way to Chicken Sandwich America, and Spurlock explores why that is and what the consequences of it are — to consumers, farmers and fast food employees.

He finds a new villain, “Big Chicken,” which isn’t that new a villain. We know the evil Koch family is involved (and Perdue and Tyson and Sanderson Farms and Pilgrim’s), and we’ve known about the “indentured servitude” they put farmers in when they sign on to their “Tournament System” of rewards, punishment and “control” since “Food, Inc.”

And he sets out, in this 2017 film just now making it to theaters (Big Chicken strikes again?), to study the market with food, nutrition and restaurant consultants, to visit the competition — reading the MSG on the menu at Chick Fil A (“It’s how they hook you on their sandwiches!”), noting how a Wendy’s chicken sandwich (“It’s like somebody cleaned the grill with a cleaning solvent”) and Burger King’s inedible “chicken bits ground up into…a chicken mitt!” leave the field open for something better.

Which is what he sets out to do, open his own chicken sandwich franchise with “farm to table” branding, renting a grow house in Alabama to raise his own “free range” broilers served in a fast food joint with truth in advertising filling the walls, the cups, the food wrappers and the floor.

Yes, a tiny piece of the Holy Chicken lobby measures out how much square footage you have to have in the open air to call your birds “free range.” It isn’t much.

It’s when he’s riding around with a couple of food consultants, going from Chipotle to Wendy’s to Popeye’s to Chick Fil A to Burger King and McDonald’s that we wonder why this guy needs experts at all. He is THE expert on fast food, its unhealthy ingredients and the underpaid people who create it, all up and down the line.

But let’s see how hard it is to buy a few thousand chicks when Big Chicken controls most of the hatcheries, how Big Chicken punishes a farmer who rents him a “grow out” house to start his enterprise, what maladies hit chickens forced to grow to many times the size they used to grow in a fraction of the time.

For that, he visits a veterinarian who does a chicken necropsy with him. They die with bones breaking under the excess weight they’re raised to reach. The poor cluckers have heart attacks due to the strain.

As with other films he’s made, he points out it’s all about “the story,” the spin, how food consumption trends drive us to seek “bucolic, farm images” that exist only in a fantasy past — or in “The Biggest Little Farm”.”

We learn about the “health halo” that marketing and advertising agencies help restaurant chains attach to the food that is no longer “fried,” that’s “the F-word.” It’s “crispy.”

And yes, he really did open a restaurant.

There’s a laid back confidence to the jokes, a flippancy to his chats with corporate types, consultants and nutrition experts, and a down home connection to the interviews (a farmer cries, fast food workers decry their exploitation) with real people trapped in this onarus machine.

True, he is covering ground he and others have covered before. But the simple fact that we’re getting fatter and unhealthier suggests that this is Spurlock’s true mission in life, to wipe away the “fake” USDA “regulation,” the “fake” euphemisms that saved McDonald’s as it adapted to a changing landscape (The food is still inedible swill, he suggests on visiting one for the first time in over a decade.), the lies we’re letting ourselves believe as our arteries clog, our waistlines bulge and we wonder why we feel so bad after gorging on yet another meal in a place that won’t let “facts” get in between you and your fix.

“Honesty never tasted so good,” he says. It’s still fried, still loaded with fat and calories. But at least now we know, thanks to “Morganic Farms” and Morgan Spurlock.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Morgan Spurlock, Jonathan Buttram

Credits: Directed by Morgan Spurlock. A Samuel L Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:42

A child’s hearing-loss is “corrected” by cochlear implants, leading to him wanting to perform Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.

The boy’s deaf grandfather faces the perils of old age, adding new maladies to his lifelong one.

And the boy’s filmmaker-mother ponders them both, the meaning of it all, the rewards that losing one’s hearing can offer your focus versus the challenges and even prejudices that historically face the hearing impaired, and presents their story and her conclusions in a documentary, “Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements.”

Irene Taylor Brodsky wrote, directed and narrates this very personal documentary, sharing the story of when she and her husband (never named or mentioned, but on camera) discovered that “family genes have a way of arriving unannounced.”

Their first-born was going deaf in toddlerhood, just as her own mother did.

Brodsky’s camera captures little Jonas, singing or humming to himself, bonding with his very-understanding (both deaf) grandparents, learning to speak but talking in the indistinct enunciations of the hearing-impaired.

But Brodsky’s parents had cochlear implants, and even doing that at an advanced age changed their lives. The daughter ponders what they gained and what they lost as Jonas has the operation and takes up the piano, ambitiously wanting to learn Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” (one movement of it, anyway) before The Big Recital.

Brodsky uses the example of Beethoven, who lost the distractions of the world as he lost his hearing, composing works based on what he could hear in his head, and of her father, who invented TTY (a means for deaf people to use the phone), in opining that “silence gave us all something really valuable… It shaped who we were.”

Dad is more sanguine. “You can’t understand the world through your ears,” so you adjust. He had a fruitful career, married and raised a family (none of their children were deaf). But as “Moonlight Sonata” was filming, he faced new adjustments — a life shrinking around him due to his advancing years.

Brodsky uses music, animation and simple footage of Jonas trying to practice the piano in a house with noisy younger siblings and a puppy to make her point. Being able to tune that “storm” out, literally by pulling the magnet plug off his skull, must be a blessing to Jonas, who is a cute, mop-topped and precocious kid. He still has good piano lessons and bad ones. He acts out like any 11 year-old, even one who has taken on the daunting task of learning a movement of this subtle, emotional sonata.

The kid’s other grandfather, a pianist himself, foreshadows how the film will treat the boy’s performance at that recital, explaining to Jonas the difference between playing to please oneself as opposed to playing in public.

It’s a meditative movie, as one underscored with Beethoven’s solo piano pieces “Moonlight Sonata” and “Für Elise” would have to be. Brodsky isn’t the first to get across what it feels like to experience the world without hearing it, so she doesn’t dwell on that, even if it is her central thesis.

The “Three Movements” are as arbitrary as you’d expect a framing device like that, mimicking the “Sonata” itself, to be.

Mostly, what she gives us is an appreciation for the progress science has made in diagnosing and remedying hearing disabilities, and the merest hint of the way not hearing shapes how the mind works when forced to confront the world without aural stimuli.

In that portion of the film, she asks more interesting questions than “Moonlight Sonata” can really answer, leaving this “Sonata” incomplete.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits: Written, directed and narrated by Irene Taylor Brodsky An Abramorama release.

Runing time: 1:29

This is an October release about a real life clown hired to show up and scare the kids — grownups, too.

And it looks revelatory, in terms of why folks are scared of people in facepaint and wigs.