Movie Nation

This look more conventional than the film the first trailer promised.

We are a month from finding out the truth.

“Ms. Purple” isn’t a movie you review. It’s a character study you put on the psychoanalyst’s couch.

Justin Chon’s tender, intimate followup to his bracing, gritty and sometimes funny “Gook” shows us the shattered remains of a Koreatown family and makes us ponder what broke them.

Kasie (Tiffany Chu of TV’s “Artificial”) is a pretty 20something whose almost expressionless face might crack if she ever managed a genuine smile. She is a karaoke hostess, a “doumi,” piling into a van every night, just another pretty-enough face in a little black dress. At the bars where they work, they are lined up — “Turn around!” — and selected by groups of men out for a night of drinking, singing and pawing.

Judged (harshly), used, misused and sometimes cheated, it is a particularly degrading line of work. It’s prostitution by almost any definition of the word. And every now and then, that last sexual line is crossed.

What put her here? The desperation becomes clearer when she gets home. Her comatose father (James Kang) is in home hospice care, waiting to die. Flashbacks tell a story of fatherly love, an obligation passed down. When their mercenary mother fled, he dutifully raised Kasie and her brother, soldiered on.

The crisis that begins “Ms. Purple” is one any American can relate to — healthcare. The soul-crushing work of bathing, monitoring and changing IVs on her father has also broken his nurse, Juanita (Alma Martinez). “I can’t do this any more. When’s he going to die? He needs to be in a hospice!”

Kasie loses her poker face in this argument. She’s desperate enough to beg nurses, in the parking lot, going into the nearby hospice to take on the job she can’t handle on her own. And there are no takers, only “Do yourself a favor, put your dad in hospice” advice.

This is as sad a scene as you’ll see in a movie this year.

Kasie’s last hope is the brother she’s still close to, but who won’t return her calls. Carey (Teddy Lee) has the same emotionally-drained visage. He has no visible means of support, only an addiction. He can’t stay away from the PC Bang a den of multiplayer gaming sin.

Kasie needs to hear from him, needs his help or at least support. Carey surprises her by finally returning a call, and then shocks her, and maybe himself, by saying he will watch their father, take care of him while Kasie works the bars and, crossing one more line, takes up with a rich, callous and yet generous client (Ronnie Kim).

Kasie has a sugar daddy, someone to be arm candy for when he attends functions — weddings, etc. But it’s a loveless, cruel arrangement.

The one break in her life of misery might be Octavio (Octavio Pizano), the valet at one of the bars where she works. He’s not much on first glance — broke, bottom-tier job, over-eager. But he is everything important that her life lacks — kindness, a young man happily ensconced in an upbeat, loving family.

Carey, who stormed out of their house as a teen, is atoning for his broken relationship with Dad. But his “care” includes sneaking him out, in his hospital bed, to rooftop sunbathing sessions, even into Carey’s favorite PC Bang.

That impulse is underscored with The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles,” and it is a jarring moment in a movie that is otherwise forlorn, set to weepy strings or plaintive Southwestern guitar music. It’s seriously off key.

But that one scene highlights how drained of energy Chon’s film is. The arguments (often in Korean with English subtitles) have heat. The sister-brother dynamic, re-established when Carey moves back in, has a teasing charm. They never grew out of razzing and calling each other “Dude.” But most of what we’re shown by the characters is the exhaustion that comes after brooding, endlessly, on an overwhelming problem that is devouring every life it is allowed to touch.

The singular vitality of Chon’s work is as a tour guide to this undiscovered culture admidst the roiling, multi-cultural life of L.A. He’s almost a throwback to regional filmmaking, specializing in a small corner of America, directors like Victor Nunez (“Ulee’s Gold”) and Leslie Harris (“Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.”).

That Koreatown Travelogue is still in evidence in “Ms. Purple.” And the performances work, despite their requisite flatness. It’s just that the few flashes of heightened drama and the gentleness of the Kasie/Octavio scenes aren’t enough to lift the weight these characters and this story carries.

It’s almost relentlessly downbeat.n “Ms. Purple” can’t help but leave you a little blue.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, nudity, smoking.

Cast: Tiffany Chu, Jake Choi, Teddy Lee, James Kang, Octavio Pizano

Credits: Directed by Justin Chon, script by Justin Chon, Chris Dinh. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:27

They bought Fox so they could retire the X-Men and revive them under their own banner.

They own the box office like no studio that has come before. And they are plainly irked at goosing Sony’s Spider-Man in Avengers movies only to have him earn a billion that Disney wants for itself.

No more “sharing” the Marvel Universe with Spider-Man. Whatever deal that allowed Tom Holland to play an Avenger, financial and otherwise, is kaput.

It is interesting to note that Disney has gambled its entire film slate on Marvel, “Star Wars” and inferior remakes of animated hits of the past. All about brands, and original content be damned. What happens when audiences reject one or two or all three legs of this tripod?

The greed is showing, and this could be the hastening of a general fatigue in the whole comic book movie enterprise. Or not.

Via THR

“Sony Pictures is vowing to carry on the #SpiderMan franchise without Marvel Studios’ involvement, placing the blame on Disney for cutting the successful inter-studio co-operation short” https://t.co/DGNmZHURGS https://twitter.com/THR/status/1164021312999890944?s=17

He keeps putting in the effort, giving us fair value in his action franchse long past the point when he or any of us should care anymore.

These Secret Service super agent code name movies — “Olympus has Fallen,” “London has Fallen” and now the one about the agent himself taken down, “Angel has Fallen,” have an audience and Butler & Co. do right by that audience.

This is Butler’s “Expendables” or “Fast & Furious,” a lingering connection to the status he once enjoyed.

Could be good. And in any event, the films keep Morgan Freeman out of trouble.

That’s the title of the last Daniel Craig Bond outing.

Let’s hope he doesn’t get hurt…again…filming it.

Everybody who played lays Bond gets hurt. He just has to read about it on the Interwebs.

Coming not soon enough to a Cineplex near you.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/no-time-die-end-daniel-craigs-james-bond-1233452

I wonder if Ed Helms has invested his “Hangover” checks wisely? Or his “Office” residuals?

Because the stuff I see him in (check out what happens to his character in this Sept. 20 release, “Corporate Animals”) makes me wonder.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Dan Bakkedahl are other TV-famous actors in the cast of this “127 Hours” laugher.

Her rebellion begins with curiosity, which is what brings her to Club Lulu. She makes the leap into full-fledged revolt in the restroom there.

Taking off her hijab, shaking out her long, flowing hair, Fatima tells us and the bathroom mirror “You’re going to BOTH your parents’ Hell for this!”

Some movies walk a fine line between comedy and drama, or between melodrama and farce. There is no “fine line” where “Becoming Burlesque” is concerned. It’s about a Toronto college student who discovers the liberation and empowerment in burlesque.

Did I mention she’s Muslim, niece of a local Imam?

Actress turned writer-director Jackie English has cooked up a laugh-out-loud Islamic East/Hedonistic West culture-clash comedy with an edgy, almost menacing undertone. It’s not subtle, but not as scary as you might expect either.

Fatima is an engineering student who “Googled” that name once. “It means ‘captivating,’ I think.”

That suits, as Fatima (Shiva Negar, in a career-launching turn) is a great beauty, something not obscured by her wearing of a traditional hijab.

OK, “traditional” is a stretch. Her scarves are pretty, something her Anglo-Canadian mother (Severn Thompson) scolds her about. As tolerant as Dad (Hrant Alianak) can be, Mom is unironic when she quotes her Imam brother-in-law, who already regards Fatima as a “half-breed.” For the love of Allah, let’s at least appear to be “devout.”

Dad is prone to heart-attacks. Let’s not give him one. Uncle Yousef (Sam Kalilieh, terrific) is the Iman, even more conservative, a man who sees himself as a bulwark against not just the temptations of the West that they’ve relocated to. Yousef is a strict but not strident uncle merely trying to illuminate his faith’s path in a city of “lost and confused people,” riding his extended family to stick to that path.

Maybe moving to Canada (from Syria) has softened the men. Yousef is patronizing, sexist, overbearing and insufferable. But he’s nobody’s idea of a wild-eyed nut.

He just, you know, insults Fatima’s white Christian-born Canadian mom right in front of her.

“Your wife might be the shame of the family, but she makes excellent lamb!”

Fatima is too young, smart and Canadian to put up with that. None of his “You’d be happier with a man to take care of you.”

She bolts from dinner and marches into rebellion. Earlier that day, Fatima silently intervened when a pushy, aggressive man attempted to put the moves on a voluptuous overly-made-up redhead at the bus stop.

That’s a near-perfect introductory scene, because after young Fatima has introduced herself to Texas Red Tempest (Courtney Deelen), the Muslim and the burlesque dancer have a brief, awkward conversation that sets the entire film up.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to dress, you know, a little more…” Fatima wants to know.

“Easy is no reason to do something,” the defiant redhead snaps back.

“Wow, you’re a stripper!”

“And you’re a terrorist!”

The message? Don’t judge. Don’t stereotype. And never, ever call a burlesque dancer a “stripper.”

“In stripping, the observer imposes his fantasies on the dancer. In burlesque, we impose our fantasies on the crowd.”

Fatima is just open-minded enough to find her way to Lulu’s, to meet choreographer and star attraction Catcha Foxx (Pastel Supernova). And she’s just rebellious enough to let herself get talked into things. Filling in as “kitten” for starters.

That’s the non-dancer in skimpy burlesque-wear who picks up the clothes, garters and gloves that the strippers — sorry, burlesque dancers — leave on stage.

We don’t need Fatima’s panicked “This isn’t going to end well” to know this isn’t going to end well.

Writer-director English finds, if not a happy balance in which way the script’s cultural biases lean, at least a pleasant one. The movie, like most of the characters in it, errs on the side of tolerance.

“This is a new time and place,” Waleed, Fatima’s father counsels in his endless Koranic debates with his brother. “Evolve!”

We get a sense that Fatima’s fellow dancers get a thrill out of converting or at least corrupting her. Texas Red, in particular, seems to know the sexist patriarchy that women in the the Islamic world have to cope with.

Fatima may bond with this sisterhood of sin — “You guys feel more comfortable naked than I do clothed!” She underlines the fact that she’s intellectualizing this whole “empowering through art” experience by dropping a Schrödinger’s Cat joke into conversation with them.

And that “How’re you gonna keep’em in the mosque after they’ve seen the lights of Club Lula?” thing extends to Fatima’s older brother Mahmoud (Khalid Klein). He’s supposed to keep an eye on her, and that involves stopping in your neighborhood cabaret for a drink.

“Looking for my sister. Strip joint’s a bit of a stretch. But with her, I’ve learned to be thorough.”

The dialogue often sparkles and the situations, although generally far-fetched, teeter on the edge of “Well, that’s at least possible.”

For a movie that loses itself in a lot of nearly nude onstage and backstage (Got to put the glitter on!) antics, “Becoming Burlesque” has room for little acting flourishes, the funniest involving Negar’s virginal Fatima learning to walk like a burlesque dancer, in stilettos (“Knees together, chin UP. Butt OUT. And smile!”) or flirt.

As I said at the outset, there’s nothing subtle here, no “fine line” is walked. But “Becoming Burlesque” makes a cute fictional introduction to the art form, the reason women practice it and what can happen when cultures this far apart run smack into each other — pastie to pastie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Shiva Negar, Courtney Deelen,  Alex Harrouch, Hrant Alianak, Severn Thompson, Khalid Klein, Sam Kalilieh.

Credits: Written and directed by Jackie English. An Ammo Content release.

Running time: 1:36

“Ready or Not” is a horror film.

“Antlers” starring Keri Russell, James Badge Dale, Graham Green, Rory Cochrane and Amy Madigan, and opening next year, is a horror film.

Is Disney moving this boutique division from its Fox purchase into horror, a Screen Gems for the House of Mouse?

Bit of a departure for the director of the Oscar winning “Crazy Heart,” Scott Cooper.

“Ready or Not” is a “Get Out” that doesn’t quite get it, a “Purge” that pulls its most important punches.

It’s a horror movie as social satire, about the rich hunting and killing their “inferiors.” You know, similar in plot to “The Hunt,” the one Fox News and Trump got pulled from release.

But the satire here turns limp as the supernatural is introduced.

And when you build your film on that classic foundation, the humans-hunt-humans/hunters-become-the-hunted formula invented as “The Most Dangerous Game,” you tamper with that formula at your own peril.

Grace (Samara Weaving, from “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri”) is marrying into the uber-rich Le Domas (snort) family. Alex (Mark O’Brian) dotes on her, jokes about the family’s board game empire — “We prefer ‘dominion.” And he offers her, in her white dress all set to walk down the aisle, “an out.”

Okaaay.

We’re getting the “She’ll never be one of us” vibe from the future in-laws, although Alex’s mother (Andie MacDowell, in fine form), who also married into the “dominion,” pooh poohs her fears that “your blood will never be blue enough.”

It’ll be fine. Sure. That prologue with little boys fleeing the mayhem of some sort of murderous hunt, decades before, through the halls of stately Le Domas Hall? Think nothing of it.

Grace is a salty, free-spirited woman who makes her own decisions, and she doesn’t regret Alex’s “You wanted this” proviso, even on the wedding night, when their conjugal bliss is postponed by a family “ritual.” The new bride must pass muster by playing a game.

Fine. Except that game is “Hide and Seek,” and these Le Domas’s play for keeps. She must must elude the patriarch (veteran villain Henry Czerny), matriarch (MacDowell), evil Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni), Charity (Elyse Levesque), Emilie (Melanie Scrofano), Alex’s drunken brother Daniel (Adam Brody) and Fitch (Kristian Bruun) and even Alex himself, until dawn.

The thing Grace must figure out on her own? That they’re chasing her with shotguns, rifles, battleaxes, bows and crossbows. Even Alex.

“YOU wanted to get married!” doesn’t let him off the hook.

What ensues is meant to be splatter-comic mayhem as our heroine survives narrow escapes and turns the game around on her pursuers through her own pluck, native cunning and hardening ruthlessness.

That’s what’s sold in the trailers, anyway. That and the satire.

But the script gives Grace few moments that suggest her agency in her own fate. Time and again, she’s a goner. And she isn’t finished off. Time and again, she has the drop on her murderous pursuers, and doesn’t cross the line she will need to cross to survive.

That’s kind of admirable, in a “take the high road” sense. It’s a way of subverting expectations,  I suppose. But it’s frustrating and it doesn’t work dramatically.

And when the rich are trying to take your life, it’s nonsense.

The villains here are a generally toothless lot, expressing sympathy for their victim, professing a lack of “choice” in the matter — the whole supernatural or “The rich are as superstitious as everybody else” subtext, which is a non-starter. The performances are mostly 50 shades of blasé.

Czerny is properly loathsome, and Guadagni of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (of course), is thoroughly, hilariously vile. The rest? Meh.

If you chuckle at semi-creative ways bit players (the help) are dispatched, get your giggles at the death gurgles of the impaled or shotgunned bleeding out, this might be the horror comedy for you. I found it grim going.

This is great fodder for satire. It’s not that there isn’t a lot of that rich-preying-on-the-rest-of-us stuff in ample evidence in the news and in plain sight. Super-rich sexual predator rings, self-serving anti-patriots who throw democracy, social justice and common decency under the bus for the sake of tax cuts for their extra-national class, which by and large, is above reproach and beyond the law or any justice, poetic and otherwise.

But as I kept waiting for Grace to take control of her destiny, to do unto others as they’re doing unto her, the “class war” so feared by the fat cat fascists and their Fox News propaganda arm, my mind wandered over to “The Hunt.”

I kept waiting for the big blows to land. I kept waiting for this movie, which wants to be about something, to be about something.

We can only wonder, until something changes with “The Hunt,” if the inferior movie was the only one to get released.

MPAA Rating:Rated R for violence, bloody images, language throughout, and some drug use

Cast: Samara Weaving, Henry Czerny, Andie MacDowell, Adam Brody, Nicky Guadagni, Mark O’Brien

Credits: Directed by  Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillettm script by  Guy Busick, Ryan Murphy. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:35

“Honeyland” is an elegiac and gloriously photogenic tragedy, an environmental parable played out in striking images and stark lessons in the high desert of northern Macedonia.

Filmmakers Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov utterly immersed themselves in the ruins of a village where Hatidze Muratova, a high mileage/hard miles 55 year-old farm woman shares all she surveys with a house full of cats, a hound named Jackie and her blind-in-one eye 80something mother, Nazife.

They bill her as “the last female bee hunter in Europe,” and who are we to question that claim? They tell her story without titles, without narration or explanation, without easily giving up either the geography or even her name.

They just watch her, as do we, crawling along cliffs, raiding wild bee hives in the rocks, in hollow trees — not that there are very many trees. She calls to the bees as she sweeps them into her mud and wicker portable hives. She will take them home and use them to diversify her own colony, supplement her home hives.

Her “all natural” honey is the one thing she has to sell to the world to add to their meager income and spartan diet. She travels to Skopje to sell it in the market so that she can buy bananas, medicine for her mother and hair dye for herself.

Hatidze is the very picture of Third World poverty, a woman who’s never seen a photo of a dentist, much less the real thing. A banana is a dietary treat, especially for her mother, who may say “I don’t intend to die,” but plainly isn’t long for this world.

In the ruins of the barns and houses of their abandoned village, Hatidze sets up hives in chimneys, lecturing the bees (in Turkish) as she harvests honey, applying the smoker, never using gloves.

“Half you give to me, and half I leave for you.”

She may be poor, and may even be the last of her kind. But she knows how to be a steward of the land and knows her trade.

And then, a mob moves in next door.

They’re all Turks, like the Muratovas. But Mom sizes them up, even with her poor hearing and one half-good eye. “Cursed be the neighbors.”

Hussein and Ljutvie Sam have a full brood — I counted half a dozen kids, from mid-teens to toddler. They show up with a tiny, half-gutted travel trailer, a battered flatbed and a herd of cattle.

And with all the empty hovels and ruins scattered across this village, they move in right next door to the Muratovas.

They are fractious and careless, short-cut taking rednecks whose free-range children are a perpetual serious accident waiting to happen. While we wait, we might hazard a thought to what the filmmakers will do when this child nearly drowns in the river, that one roughhouses him or herself or a sibling into a gory injury, a cow tramples a tiny tyke or the bee stings take their toll on them all.

Because you know these hicks are hellbent on getting into that bee keeping business. The dad is a lummox, having kids hold nails as he pounds them in with a rock, making them pitch in — even the smallest — in caring for the cattle.

Which you know they’re neglecting.

Adding beekeeping to their duties just means a lot of crying, some serious profane backtalk from the older ones, and a lot of swollen faces from stings.

Hatidze’s pastoral tranquility is first disrupted, then seriously challenged. She tries to help out, and one boy takes a genuine interest in treating bees like the endlessly renewable, symbiotic resource they are to people like Hatidze.

Dad doesn’t want the kid hanging out with her and sure as hell doesn’t want him listening to her lectures. Because Hussein is a dimwitted know-nothing know-it-all with an eye on putting a few more Euros in his pocket.

He lets a plump partner he supplies honey to bully him into cleaning the hives out, which stresses his bees and has them raiding her hives to keep from starving.

He trashes the landscape in the manner of millennia of subsistence farming (and big time rancher) cattlemen, burning trees and shrubs that the bees need because his cattle will need the grass that grows out of the scorched earth.

Short term thinking, greed, writ large in the First World, just as tragic in the Third World.

Where “The Biggest Little Farm in the World” was a warm and optimistic film about getting back to “the old ways,” self-sustaining farming practices, “Honeyland” is about what happens in reality — First World, Second World and especially slash-and-burn to just feed yourself Third World farming.

Kotevska and Stefanov let their camera linger over a whole array of arguments and accidents as they occur, creating suspense as the viewer fears for this child, that toddler, that spouse pushing a truck 25 times her weight, or that kitten or calf roughly handled by unsupervised kids.

It’s also a lovely film, with stunning vistas that belie how hard life must be there.

The first act shows us the dry, sparse vegetation of a form of “paradise,” one which — let’s be frank — most people had the sense to flee. The second act is chaotic, the bedlam and hardship the “neighbors from hell” visit upon Hatidze and her mom.

And the third act? Melancholy, sad, and yet you find yourself hoping against hope that “hope” will find its way back into this world in the form of nature’s way, the natural order of things put right by Hatidze’s wise and weathered hands.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, injuries, death, animal deaths, profanity

Cast: Hatidze Muratova Nazife Muratova, Hussein Sam, Ljutvie Sam and their brood.

Credits:Directed by Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov A Neon release.

Running time: 1:27