Movie Nation

It’s like that girlfriend or boyfriend who is too cute, too bubbly, and tries WAY too hard too much of the time.

Adorable? Sure. A real net asset in your life, with more than a few fringe benefits. Maybe more fun than lovable, or vice versa.

Bur girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl? EXHAUSTING.

That’s “Someone Great,” a rom-com so up-to-the-minute “New York Romance Right Now” they could stuff it into a time capsule — or The Cloud.

Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson did TV’s “Sweet/Vicious” a few years back, and she and her players — Gina Rodriguez of “Jane the Virgin,” DeWanda Wise of Netflix’s “She’s Gotta Have It” and the reliably cute and funny Brittany Snow of the “Pitch Perfect” movies — hurl so much slang, so many topical references and use the drugs of the moment (weed and Molly), it’s as if they’ve stuffed a TV season’s worth of sassy/witty banter into a 90 minute movie.

Yes, there are glib laughs. And yes, there’s a very touching moment in the finale. But, yeah. Exhausting.

The three thirty-five year old actresses play three buddies from college who still hang, still party together in New York. Heck, Blair and Erin (Snow and Wise) still share an apartment.

But Jennifer (Rodriguez) is about to break all this up. She’s a writer who just landed a gig with Rolling Stone Magazine. As in San Francisco Rolling Stone.

And even though we have seen her ALL OVER her beau, Nate (LaKeith Stanfield of Sorry to Bother You” and TV’s “Atlanta”), giddily in love, that move has triggered a breakup. Together nine years, and that’s over.

Jenny is drinking and weeping, giggling and drinking, babbling and drinking. Now Jenny and Nate are just a “supercut” montage of flashback memories — meeting and flirting and sex and relationshipping — all set to Lorde’s “Supercut.”

It’s “The end of an era,” she tells her mates, talking about them and her affair with Nate. “I need one last epic day with my girls!”

They need to get into the big Neon City “pop up show,” which her new gig with Rolling Stone should make a snap.

They need to drink mimosas. But Erin, could you like, get some orange juice? And maybe some champagne?

They need to score some of the “Good Molly” for tonight.

Hell, they need to sing-along to Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts.”

“Yeah, I got boy problems, that’s the human in me
Bling bling, then I solve ’em, that’s the goddess in me!”

Yaaaas queen. That’s a direct quote, and yes, that’s kind of dated. Or will be in seven or eight minutes.

There is a LOT of music, more than a dozen colorfully-worded pop tunes, meant to amp up the energy and emotion of this or that scene. It’s a crutch, sure, but hey, Netflix is paying for the rights, so why not?

The dialogue is pause-and-replay snappy and worth quoting, a lot of it coming from Erin. Did I mention she’s African American and gay?

“You know the beginning of a disaster movie, right before the girl who looks like me dies, and like right when a girl who looks like you (blonde Blair) walks outside and be like, ‘Oh my God, look how crazy the SKY looks?’ This feels like that!”

Sassy? Oh yes. Rupaul-approved. And “bee tee dubs,” Rupaul makes an appearance as the dealer with “The good Molly,” named “Hype.”

The Screenwriting 101 plot has the trio plotting and planning to get into that one last epic show, and zig zagging across the city to do so — meeting this connection, that hook-up, doing what comes naturally on occasion.

Jenny is tripping, as the kids say — huge mood swings from giddy to “Oh no, Washington Square/Coke in a bodega fridge/that song reminds me of NATE!”

Nate as a leading man and a character? Way under-developed. What connected them? What really broke them up? Some questions are answered, eventually, and some remain a mystery as this is about the ladies, friend. The guys are just way stations.

As a “romantic comedy,” this venture is depressingly unromantic, a bit like a break-up in that regard. Not straight romantic, not gay romantic, just transactional and sexual, for the most part.

Wise’s endless parade of zingers — about how “Weed is like ketchup, it never goes bad,” ridiculing “hetero-normative lives” and how the easily-swayed tastes of “middle class whites” are like “reparations” to trend-setters of color like her, and how that outfit looks like “Liz Lemon ‘f—–d the Salvation Army” — are winners, and there are so many of them.

Archeologists digging into this time capsule two years from now will learn about “stress diarrhea” and “byeeeee” and the generation that grew up on Harry Potter’s references.

“Technically, I identify as  a Slitherin with a Ravenclaw moon.”

“Yo, that is such a Slitherin thing for you to say!”

There’s this lovely little grace note, good advice from the last place you’d expect it

“You’ve been blessed with a broken heart…Live in this as long as you can.”

But there’s just…so MUCH that comes before it, and the players (especially Rodriguez) are trying EVER so hard to play younger it’s like their memories of being that age — or research — told them everybody was on Speed or Coke and not Molly.

It’s wearing. All that gushing over a relationship remembered for its physicality, and seen through rose-colored glasses, and we don’t have time to take a breath to consider it.

Nate is poorly represented in screen time, solely seen in flashbacks. Having only Jenny’s point of view is empowering, but hamstrings the proceedings.

The character arcs are as tidy and neat as the rest of the movie is breathlessly blurted and rushed, even not all that much happens. The big scenes aren’t big scenes at all, just vignettes — ideas for a sketch. Believable? Kind of. But thinly worked out.

I didn’t dislike “Someone Great” so much as feel like I needed to sleep it off, afterwards. For somebody who harps on “pacing” in comedies as much as I do, you’d think this would be a slam dunk.

I laughed at lines, not characters or scenes or situations. No wonder the soundtrack is crammed with tunes. There’s a lot of dead time and dead feeling to cover up.

Speed in comedy isn’t an end unto itself. “Urgency” is more important, and there’s not a hint of that here, no sense — in the least — that these three pals, so devoted (Hah!) to each other on that “one last night” — won’t have moved on before the moving van is out of sight, out of mind.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content, drinking, sexual material and language throughout

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, LaKeith Stanfield, Brittany Snow, DeWanda Wise.

Credits: Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:32

“The Highwaymen” is a sturdy, slow and stately Western about the hunt for Bonnie & Clyde and the two retired, out-of-date Texas Rangers who birddogged them through the Dust Bowl.

It’s a picture that comes down squarely on the law’s side, de-mythologizing the outlaws, the cult of celebrity and America’s tendency to fall for the wrong sorts of “heroes.” Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s twelve “official” victims were all but ignored by the public at the time and forgotten by history.

As such, “Highwaymen” is a “cop, judge and jury” Old West Western, admiring the ruthless methods of the past, lightly mocking the “soft”  female governor of Texas in 1934 for not approving of them.

And it’s trigger happy, all but fetishizing the firearms that the Barrow Gang and those who pursued them hefted — BARs and Colts and Thompson submachine guns, which gives it an out-of-step-with-our-times feel.

But it strips away the cute, almost ignoring the perpetrators themselves– seen at their most cold-blooded. “Highwaymen” is just about the pursuit of them, the hunters and the people who helped the killers — fans — and their kin, who both understood that “wrong turn in the trail” that changed them, and the need for them to be, as the lawmen said, “to be put down.”

The film doesn’t have the pacing of a theatrical release — it’s “streaming slow,” sluggish at times. Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side,” “The Alamo”) doesn’t so much coast on his own reputation as those of his two formidable, grizzled and manly leading men — Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, playing Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, Texas Rangers in an era when the Rangers had been disbanded, disapproved of by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates), the first female governor of Texas.

“If they make’a fool’a me, there’s gonna be HELL to pay!”

She’d rather her new-fangled state police, working with the new-ish F.B.I., using the law and forensics, track down the robbers and killers who’d become folk heroes to Depression Era America.

But the menfolk knew better, which is why Marshal Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch) tracks down the married well and retired Frank (Costner), who in turn — eventually — seeks out his old partner, Maney.

There are grace notes in the introductions — Costner’s Hamer getting young farmhands to throw bottles that he no longer has the speed or the eye to shoot in mid air.

“Pity’s sake. I’m a goddamned old man!”

Maney (Harrelson) is broke, living with his daughter’s family on a farm in foreclosure, and Frank seems reluctant to offer him the job. Frank runs down a list of other retired Rangers he’d be better off with, men “further down the roster.”

“That’s honest. Too honest.”

The script by John Fusco (“Hidalgo,” “The Founder,””Saving Mister Banks”) fights the urge to make this a buddy picture, from that final invitation, “Judas Priest, get in. No singin’.” to Maney’s constant trips to the toilet to jibes about each other’s shooting or driving.

He wrote each man a fine soliloquy, about violence, their own “one turn on the trail” that put them in the business of hunting down and killing “cold blooded killers who’re more adored than movie stars,” or as Maney calls them, “that jackass and his girlfriend.”

They violate jurisdictions and drive all over the region, chasing their quarry, second-guessing them, stumbling into them.

And they get an earful about what “heroes” the Barrow Gang are.

“They only takin’ from the banks. They ain’t takin’ from the poor folk, like me.”

The film may be a blend of truth and fiction, but that’s one thing it gets absolutely right.

The press of the day was both appalled by and enamored of these two, turning Bonnie into a beret-wearing fashion icon long before Faye Dunaway played her that was in the ’60s. They’d write letters to the editor, get self-mythologizing poems published in magazines.

“Used to be, had to have talent to get published,” Maney drawls.”Now, all you have to do is shoot people.”

All these two see is their violence — coldblooded, sadistic. They have to use their instincts to get ahead of them, staking out Bonnie’s family home in “The Devil’s Back Porch” part of West Dallas.

“Outlaws and mustangs…always come home.”

Hancock shows us the Hoovervilles that littered the impoverished Southern landscape, and takes a stab at giving the picture the proper Dust Bowl grit. Everybody still looks too clean, the vintage cars (generally) too well-cared for, the roads too modern, the paved sidewalks showing through even in the poorest neighborhoods of the day.

Costner’s hoarse growl is put to good use, as is Woody’s innate folksiness. The casting is “on-the-nose,” as we say, two very good actors with great rapport playing a bit too far within their comfort zone, but getting the job done.

William Sadler makes the most of one scene, playing Clyde’s half-sympathetic daddy. Bates doesn’t have enough to play, and Ma’s reputation is tarnished with cracks about “100 pardoned convicts a day” and the like. She’s having her history man-splained by a screenwriter who probably isn’t giving her what’s due.

The picture’s only serious drawback is its pacing, that “streaming slow” remark I made earlier. Starting the story with a prison break and taking us to the final hail of bullets suggests something more compact is about to unfold. Nope. Two hours and 12 minutes of driving around, bickering, running roughshod over “modern” law enforcers and violence makes this play a tad like cable’s “Hatfields & McCoys,” without developing any characters beyond the two leads.

But what leads they are, and if “The Highwaymen” of the tale come off more legend than truth, that’s a deal most Western fans — even Westerns with V8 Fords — are more than willing to make.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence and bloody images

Cast: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson Kathy Bates, Emily Brobst,  Edward Bossert

Credits: Directed by John Lee Hancock, script by John Fusco.  A Netflix Original release.

Running time: 2:12

These are Governor’s Awards for creating bodies of work.

The great Native American actor Wes Studi stands out for me. An iconic character actor and sometime leading man. Lynch and Wertmuller are distinct directing talents whose careers wound down in our corporate cinema age. Geena Davis seems a little out of place in this list, a Mensa member and a great talent. But she’s done great work so more honor to her.

https://www.oscars.org/news/academy-honor-geena-davis-david-lynch-wes-studi-and-lina-wertmuller-2019-governors-awards

Illumination fills these cartoons with funny people’s sometimes funny voices, some good sight gags, and then they hope for the best.

Fingers crossed for this one, because the kids need some laughs after “Aladdin.”

“The Secret Life of Pets 2” opens this weekend.

Amazon prime time for Mr. Bloom

Yes, the X-Men get into “Game of Thrones” casting (Who isn’t?) with this franchise wrap-up, or pause or whatever Disney decides to do with it now that it owns Fox.

“Dark Phoenix” opens Thursday night, and I think the embargo on reviews is Wed. noon or some such.

But we will see what we see when we see it.

The director of the best of the Lance Armstrong documentaries is behind “Maiden,” which is about an all-female crew taking on one of the world’s great oceanic sailboat races, the Whitbread Around the World race back in 1989.

Get your early June 24 tickets at this link, which also tells you which theater near you is showing the film.

The film will roll out into theaters in the weeks that follow, and this preview will include a Q & A with the skipper of that boat, Captain Tracy Edwards.

Here’s a kids-save-the-world action — um, comedy? — from McG that plays like sci-fi that just got its training wheels off.

“Rim of the World” puts a quartet of summer “adventure” camp wiseacres between us and alien invasion-driven extinction. Sure, the safe money’s on the kids.

Because they’re all stereotypes, and there’s a smart if cowardly white boy, a brazen black kid, a tough tween on the run from “juvie,” and the obligatory smart, brave and inscrutable girl who just got in from China.

Those darned crab-legged alien re-animators don’t stand a chance.

This could be the laziest screenplay you’ll watch or hear this year, so mark down this title and the date you saw it, not to mention the name under “script by” at the bottom of this review.

The nerdy coward Alex (Jake Gore) has lost himself online since losing his father in an accident.

“There is a whole world out there beyond these screens,” Mom (Annabeth Gish) counsels.

That’s why he’s going to camp in the mountains of Southern California.

Dariush (Benjamin Flores Jr.) is all blinged to the max, a rich kid whose Mercedes dealership daddy shipped him off to campn Rim of the World.

Zhenzhen (Miya Cech) is like a Red Chinese cartoon, a red beret-wearing mute whom we KNOW will open her mouth at just the right moment to save the day — repeatedly.

Gabriel (Alessio Scalzotto) is the boy-band-ready kid they stumble into who claims he just escaped from juvie when World War Aliens began.

It begins with the International Space Station getting chewed up (common in such movies) and bursts into an “Independence Day” blast of explosions and dogfights between the Air Force’s finest and the interstellar travelers’ own inexplicably just-as-primitive fighter jets.

There’s this key that a scientist entrusts to the survivors to get to Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The kids aren’t all as nerdy as Alex, mixing up EMP and EDM, and more amusingly “TRL” with JPL.

The film’s opening act has the kids leaving for camp, and checking into it — one lame joke follows another as “Ginger Nugget” (Alex) gets his first teasing by the profane and under-or-OVER-committed camp counselors.

“Our musical this year is ‘Fiddler on the Roof!”

The tone is set early on, with the odd off-color double entendre (Netflix’s kids’ movies have that “edge” — all of them), the obligatory over-use of “bitch”and Dariush playing that worn out stereotype, the over-sexed black man — in 13 year-old form.

“I got game…Girl, is this our layover? Because we’re making a connection.”

Other camp counselors of color ask, “Why we talkin’ like black men from the ’80s?” As do we all.

Dariush is a bottomless pit of cornball one-liners.

“Maybe North Korea’s invaded! Zhenzhen! Call it off!”

No, don’t leave him in the woods overnight.

“I don’t do so well with bears. I’m not fixing to get DiCaprio’d up in here!

The direction by the once promising McG is lackluster and perfunctory. The characters and dialogue lurch between clumsy homages to “Goonies” and “E.T.” — stuffed with self-aware references to the screenplay’s origins.

“Guys, we should turn back…I’m tellin’ you, this is how people die in movies!”

Their odyssey takes them from the mountains to Pasadena, past over-matched soldiers and opportunistic ex-cons, by bike and any handy car that has the keys left in it, which has to be a vintage ride because no car with computers in its electronics (save for the Humvees, because again, this script is clumsy) will work after the EMP blasts that crippled Earth.

Only the girl from the East has the answer to every dilemma.

“What do we in life echoes in eternity!”

“Did she just quote ‘Gladiator?'”

Some of which, to be frank, your average twelve year-old may dig. If they’ve seen “Gladiator,” that is.

Adults? We should know better.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, violence, kids in peril, deaths, profanity, sexual come-ons

Cast:Jack Gore, Miya Cech, Benjamin Flores Jr., Alessio Scalzotto , Annabeth Gish

Credits: Directed by McG, script by Zack Stenz. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:38

With the theatrical studios generally unable to find their way through budget bloat and “star-vehicle” burdens to deliver light, frothy romantic comedies, Netflix has found itself a niche that it can have almost all to itself.

“The Set Up” announced the streaming service’s arrival in the genre with a bang. “Always be My Maybe” underscores it, cute modern romances for the “Why go out, we have Netflix?” set.

“Maybe” makes passable use of its comic-romantic leads, comic turned comic-actress Ali Wong and comic actor Randall Park, in a San Francisco tale set against the affluence of high-end dining in the City Too Expensive for Real People to Live In Anymore.

And if you’re thinking, as I was, “This isn’t quite good enough to find an audience in actual theaters,” be patient. The big laughs finally show up in a burst near the midway point, shortly before Keanu Reeves arrives for his killer cameo, and linger for a few minutes after he departs the scene.

Sasha and Marcus have been friends since childhood when they grew up next door to each other. She’s Chinese-American, growing up as a latchkey kid with workaholic parents she rarely sees. Marcus is the darling of his doting Korean-American parents’ eye, and they always have an extra spot at the table for little Sasha.

“Are you sure you’re not Korean?”

His mom (Susan Park) taught her to cook. And when she died, Marcus wasn’t the only one who felt he’d lost his mother.

The high school best friends had one night of something like pity sex (“Hey, where’d you get that condom?” “Uh, seventh grade…”), split up and went their separate ways.

“Always be My Maybe” is about them re-finding each other; Sasha as a buzzed-about LA chef opening a new restaurant in her old hometown, Marcus as the same old goof, still playing in his bar band, Hello Peril, still working with his dad installing and fixing HVAC systems in San Fran.

The three screenwriters, including Wong and Park, know how to set up “obstacles” to this renewed relationship. She’s engaged to her hunky older manager (Daniel Kae Kim), constantly on her phone, working like mad. He’s “stuck,” still doing dainty, cute hip hop and dating a daffy activist/poet (Vivian Bang).

She’s impressed by his HVAC coveralls.

“So you’re like…the air conditioner guy?”

“Nooooo. I just like the convenience of a onesie.”

“You look like a homeless astronaut!”

He’s underwhelmed by her “trans-denominational fusion” cuisine.

“Always be My Maybe” floats along, quite low to the ground, poking fun at San Fran’s all-encompassing LGBTQIA gender blurring, lame Spanx jokes, ridiculing “that racist lady” cook, Paula Deen and laughably pretentious cuisine, all set against the same sheen of gauche affluence of say, a “Crazy Rich Asians” or most of Tyler Perry’s non-Madea comedies.

There’s a little Netflix mockery, the odd goof on their race vs. The Dominant Culture.

“White people eat that s— up!”

Wait for the big phone tantrum, and lean forward in your seat. Because that’s the signal that Keanu Reeves, playing a cockier, more Summer’s Eve version of how we think of “Cool Keanu,” is arriving. Listen to him order at the higher-than-high-end restaurant they all wind up in.

“Do you have any courses that play with the concept of….time?”

That sequence makes the movie. The picture, which lurches from cute to “cutesy” a bit too often for my taste, fizzes out after Keanu has left the building, but finds a little sentimental kick for the finale.

Its most interesting moments are little peeks inside the West Coast Asian American culture it’s set in — Marcus and his dad (James Saito) enjoying a father-son exfoliating massage, Sasha getting over her food snobbery at a little “traditional” Cantonese eatery.

Park is plainly better at the whole “best joke on the set” improv thing than Wong.

About Jenny — “She sleeps bottomless, like a sexy Asian Winnie the Pooh!”

The story gives away its direction and intentions far too early and obviously. But these onetime “Fresh off the Boat” co-stars make a cute, cuddly couple that we root for, even if every joke doesn’t land, even if they let that devilish Keanu steal their movie from them.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, drug use/references, and language

Cast: Ali Wong, Randall Park, Susan Park, Michelle Buteau and Keanu Reeves

Credits: Directed by Nahnatchka Khan , script by Michael Golamco, Randall Park, Ali Wong A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Yeah, the droll playwright/character actor Tracy Letts gets the deadpan laughs here.

“Ford v Ferrari” is about the ’60s and the efforts of Ford to muscle its way into the winner’s circle at LeMans.

It. Looks. Epic. And. Sounds. Epic.

As any trailer that uses racecar motors and “Gimme Shelter” is going to sound epic.

Damn.

November, we see James Mangold’s take on the Age of Speed.