Movie Nation

A dark redneck comedy of the sort the Coen Brothers might have pulled off, in their youth.

This Hassan Fazili Sundance Award winner opens Sept. 18 in New York, limited release in Oct.

The trailer alone is as moving as the best feature films I’ve seen this year.

Chuckleheaded vulgarian Seth Rogen produced “Good Boys,” but apparently didn’t have enough input on the script to make this “tween ‘Superbad'” all that funny.

A wildly uneven one-joke farce, sometimes amusing in that “Oh no they DIDN’T,” way, dispiriting in many others, it’s one of those “If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the laughs” late-summer arrivals.

It’s novel if you’ve never been cussed-out by a middle schooler, and how many of us can still say that?

The joke here is that these 12 year-olds may want to get obsessed with girls, sex, drinking and fitting in with the prematurely “mature” among their classmates. But while they have the profanity in their vocabulary, access to the World Wide Porn Web and peer pressure egging them on, these little suburban Chicago dweebs haven’t a clue.

Sex to sex toys, drugs to “childproof  caps,” kissing to carnal acts, PBR to puberty, “The Beanbag Boys” are totally out of their depth, but only rarely hilariously so.

“My neighbor’s a total nymphomaniac!”

“She starts fires?”

Max, Lucas and Thor (Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams, Brady Noon) have been pals since kindergarten. They live near each other, and plan on being each other’s support system in the wild and wooly world of sixth grade.

The deepest insight in this script is how middle school gives the “best friends forever” tree a good, hard shake. Interests diverge, horizons broaden and you move on to a different circle of close acquaintances. “The Beanbag Boys” haven’t figured that out.

Lucas (Williams) is big for his age, a bit of shrieking, high-voiced mamma’s boy and woke as hell. He’s all about “consent” and the Student Coalition Against Bullying (“S.C.A.B.”), the fellow likely to insist, “Go over there and tell the truth, and God will be on our side!”

Thor (Noon) is all about chorus, his new earring and auditions for the school’s production of “Rock of Ages.” It’s why he dodges taking a group sip from a bottle of beer with the cruel “cool” kids — “They drug test for beer” at these auditions, he insists.

His hippy choral teacher says he has “the voice of an angel.” Our ears and Autotune tells us otherwise, but whatevs.

Max (Tremblay) is making sixth grade the year he makes his feelings known to the fair Brixlee (Millie Davis). Short, inexperienced, a seriously unwelcome and misguided pep talk about masturbation from his dad (Will Forte)? No matter. There’s a “kissing party” coming up at the home of short, cool and popular Asian classmate Soren (Izaac Wang), and Max is hellbent on going.

That’s how the three get all caught up in figuring out how “kissing” works. That’s why they “borrow” Max’s dad’s pricey drone, to spy on teen neighbor Hannah (Molly Gordon of the far-superior “Booksmart”). That’s how it crashes, and Hannah and pal Lily (Midori Francis) take possession of this “spy” vehicle.

That’s why Thor steals’ the teens’ supply of “Molly,” and thus we have our obstacles all set in place foiling Max’s plans to make it to this party.

Yes, they will be chased by the vengeful girls. Yes, they will attempt to hustle stoner frat boys. Yes, they will try and swipe beer. Yes, that will run them afoul of the law. Sound familiar?

“Good Boys” teeters somewhat uneasily on that fine line between “childish” and “juvenile.” Bigger issues wrestled with include the ephemeral nature of love and friendship at that age, parental divorce, the rush by some to grow up too fast while others would rather play Ascension, trade collectible cards (Stephen Merchant shows up as a card collector, “NOT a pedophile!”), ride bikes or as Lucas suggests, “Climb a tree.”

The jokes are of the out-of-their-depth variety, not recognizing sex toys, sex dolls (“my parents ‘CPR doll'”), or words like “anal” and “misogynist.”

“I’m NOT a feminist! I love my mother!” Thor’s worried about becoming “the school piranha” when he means “pariah.”

Some of it lands a laugh, much of it just a shrug.

And without the shock value of age-inappropriate sexual, drug and alcohol content (the boys are anti-drugs, un-attracted to beer), the scattered “For the love of God, DON’T try this at home” bits, the whole enterprise is just beautiful but bland and very young child actors and actresses mugging for the camera, miming the Rogen vocabulary.

And who the f— wants to see that?

MPAA Rating: R for strong crude sexual content, drug and alcohol material, and language throughout – all involving tweens

Cast: Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams, Brady Noon, Molly Gordon, Midori Francis

Credits: Directed by Gene Stupnitsky, script byu Lee Eisenberg, Gene Stupnitsky. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:29

My stars and garters, “ECCO.”

Here’s a “Dog of August” that’s so bad that it’s a wonder that the month, infamous as a movie dumping ground for features not good enough to cut it any other month of the movie year, didn’t spit it back out the moment its release (“Escape?”) was announced.

It’s a robotically-acted thriller about a mysterious hitman who looks like Will Forte, without the spark of wit, warmth or life itself about him.

It’s about his varying degrees of stubble, his “wet work,” murdering folks. Only we rarely see that. We see him stare. A lot. And ponder. A lot. And we remember his name — Lathrop Walker. Because those words on a poster should be warning enough.

It’s about his double life, the women he’s loved, and the threat to them.

It’s about the old man in a wheelchair who pulls his strings, a cut-rate Brian Dennehy meets Brian Cox ham (Michael Winters) who sputters poetic warnings into his sat phone.

“They know where you are…Our sins are mine alone to bear!”

And it’s about two hours and three minutes of your life that you will never get back if you deign to take a flyer, hoping for the best, and sit through it.

A cryptic tale about a man of many names and the same face, a killer we see wipe out a plane full of oligarchs in the opening sequence, it follows his flashbacks to the loves he’s had, or has now, the “last job” he figures he’s done so his unknown boss can “leave me in peace.”

Of course, he doesn’t. And when that happens, beware collateral damage, to the Pacific northwest tugboat that is his cover business, to his lovers (Tabitha Bastien, Helena Grace Donald) and the life (lives) he might want to lead once he’s done adding to his body count and the staggering collection of scars he sports when he dares to strip his shirt off.

There’s little dialogue, which is a mercy. There’s little action, which is a pity.

And there’s too much “movie,” much of which makes so little sense that there’s no point in trying to wring meaning or message or “Where is this going, when it gets going, and when in the Name of God will it get there?”

It’s terrible on every level — the action beats that don’t suggest this guy would survive his first brawl, much less his first firefight, the “cryptic” business about not knowing who is really is, who he really works for and if these people he’s killed really had it coming.

He’s not Jason Bourne. Because Jason Bourne was interesting.

Pointless scene follows pointless scene, takes are edited to catch the actors tensing up as if waiting to hear “action” and go on and on and on after their payoff.

Terrible script and flaccid direction by Ben Medina. Terrible movie. Will it be the worst of 2019? We’ll see, and we’ll remember.

MPAA Rating: R for violence including bloody images, language, and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Lathrop Walker, Tabitha Bastien, Helena Grace Donald, Michael Winters

Credits. Written and directed by Ben Medina.   A Citadel Film Group release.

Running time: 2:03

To be blunt, none of them are any good.

But you have to, when you’re reviewing the Dogs of August, forget the month you’re watching the movie in. Because every now and then, a good movie that nobody could figure out how to market slips out in August.

Still, at some point during “Angry Birds #2,” you think, “Yeah, if this had been any good they would have given summer kiddie audience pop the chance to find it.”

Can I just say how insane this Rottentomatoes rating for “Angry Birds 2” seems to me? It rises to mediocre, here and there. Barely a laugh in it. The Sat. AM screening where I saw it had people and their kids walking out at about the one hour mark. Life is indeed too short. Metacritic gives it a barely-worth-considering (much less bothering with) 60.

Kudos to Universal Studios marking, They sold the hell out of “Good Boys,” but where’s the good movie?”

It did over $2 million last night, and there was a big crowd at the Thursday night showing I caught of this one. Many of them were tweens, whose Seth Rogen-ish parents bought them the R-rated tickets and left them there. Good parenting. At least they weren’t laughing. Much.

(The Hollywood Reporter mocks the Box Office Mojo prediction, saying $20 million is within reach each after that big Thursday night.)

There’s a “No wonder Annapurna Pictures has gone broke” thought as you try to make yourself charmed or amused by the debacle that is “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.”

Will “Good Boys” manage $12 million? Maybe. Same with “Birds.”

Neither has a prayer of staying on screens long enough to be a “Booksmart” or “Angry Birds #1.”

“47 Meters Down: Uncaged” won’t clear $10, and even that is ill-gotten gains for a movie that had little talent in front of or behind the camera, none that registered in the finished film, anyway.

“Bernadette” is a total write off.

“Hobbs & Shaw” will win the weekend without even trying. Maybe $13-14 million will do the trick.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4537&p=.htm

One of the odd “coincidences” I’ve noted in my years of interviewing Chinese actors and filmmakers, some from Hong Kong, many from the mainland, is how the need for “order” in China finds its way into conversations.

“Harmony” is a big word there, broad enough to mean “getting along” with historic enemies and narrow enough to put “Don’t make waves” above “liberty.”

Something about the sheer scale of the country and a drilled-in “fear” of disorder and protest seems in evidence whenever you hear such film figures, like a star of Disney’s “Mulan,” offer knee-jerk support of the government and disavowal of protests and protesters.

Via Variety…

“Hong Kong Protesters Push Boycott of Disney’s ‘Mulan’ After Star States Support for Police Crackdown” https://t.co/IGJJteWNkg https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1162232442222022656?s=17

If you follow his various social media feeds (@rustyrockets) and ventures, Russell Brand seems a lot more interested in spiritual and post political things than in comedy of movies.

But Kenneth Branagh wants him to join Gal Gadot and Armor Jammer, among others, for his latest Poirot picture, “Death on the Nile.”

Sounds…nuts. Will he accept? It’s about as mainstream a project as Brand has ever dipped into, hints that he’s at home with the 50-and-over audience, etc.

From the Hollywood Reporter…

https://t.co/eFAt4KTliW https://twitter.com/THR/status/1162307023054278657?s=17

Take away the shark cage, and you can title your sequel “47 Meters Down: Uncaged.”

The fact that your heroines in peril are no longer “47 meters down” isn’t a deal breaker. They’re not in the open ocean, stuck in a cage with oxygen running out and a shark or sharks keeping them trapped. But cave diving is actually a much more dangerous activity within the scuba community. Theoretically, that adds a little claustrophobia to the other phobias that the original “47 Meters Down,” one of the great sleepers of recent years, managed.

And heck, let’s stick a blind shark or two in the dark grottoes of this Yucatan Peninsula, just for kicks.

But there’s no getting around the fact that subbing in passable older supporting players (Nia Long and John Corbett in place of Matthew Modine) and parking a bunch of barely legal bikini bottoms and expecting any of them to measure up to Mandy Moore as an actress was the big gamble, here. And it doesn’t pay off.

“Uncaged” is inherently less intense, less nerve-wracking and less fulfilling than the film it follows. It’s clutter where the first film was simplicity, with shoulder-shrugging deaths where the first film made you feel its high stakes desperation.

The film can’t swim out of its own way, most of the time.

Sophie Nélisse and Corinne Foxx are step sisters who have moved with their parents (Long and Corbett) to the Yucatan Peninsula where Dad is leading the scuba exploration of Mayan caves lost to rising sea levels.

Mia (Nélisse) is bullied at the Modine Prep School for Girls (Yup, that’s right.), Sahsha (Foxx) rolls her eyes rather than help. But when they’re supposed to bond over a group glass-bottom boat-ride in shark waters and Sasha has the chance to go do something more fun with her friends, she brings Mia along.

Before you can say “Bring your bikini!” they’re all diving in a coastal grotto that leads into the same cave system Dad is working in. Teenagers being teenagers, mistakes are made and soon they’re trapped in the dark with their oxygen running out, cut off from escape by a cave-blind Great White Shark.

Yeah.

The foreshadowing is too too obvious, the assorted set pieces have no punch and little logic.

The claustrophobia is never emphasized, only one death is wrenching and one other death has something like surprise in it.

But we know where this is going even as it takes its sweet time getting there. Brianne Tju is the standout in the cast, the ONLY actor (including Corbett) who gets across the panic such a situation warrants. Sly Stallone’s kid Sistine Rose Stallone barely registers, something Jamie Foxx’s daughter Corrine manages.

As I said, “bikini bottoms,” something the script (“Sasha, you can barely get your ass through this!” “Shut up, Nicole! As least I HAVE an ass!”) and the sometimes leering direction emphasize.

The sharks don’t exist in real space. They look digitally animated into a process-shot underwater cave.

Mark this one “Uncaged” and going down for the third time.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense peril, bloody images, and brief strong language

Cast: Sophie Nélisse, Brianne Tju, Corinne Foxx, Sistine Rose Stallone John Corbett and Nia Long

Credits: Directed by Johannes Roberts, script by Ernest Riera, Johannes Roberts An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1

Entertainment Studios doesn’t typically preview their films far and wide for critics, so let’s see if this works without Mandy Moore or Matthew Modine.

“Chained for Life” is a fascinating if daft parable about normative beauty as it appears on the big screen.

The director of the festival fave “Go Down Death” has made a movie within a movie within a movie, all of them clever inversions of Todd Browning’s 1932 cult classic about circus sideshow folk, “Freaks.” It takes its title from a 1952 film starring actual Siamese twins, and its marching orders from an opening quote by the late film critic Pauline Kael, about how the movies are filled with unnaturally beautiful people.

“And why not? We love to look at them.”

A German “auteur” is making his first movie in America. Herr Director (“Dick Tracy/What About Bob/Hook” child star Charlie Korsmo) has an amusingly inconsistent Werner Herzog accent, and a vision.

“Marked for Life” he calls his film, and he’s cast a pretty starlet, Mabel (Jess Weixler from “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” and TV’s “The Son”) to play a blind woman seeking treatment at a strange hospital/sanitarium in the late 1950s.

The hospital has giants and dwarves, a bearded lady, Siamese twins and all manner of unusual looking folks, “freaks” as they were called in the less-enlightened past, “Undesirables” as Herr Director will eventually re-title his movie. And he won’t hear of using makeup or digital effects to make them this way.

“Nein! Ze suffering must be REAL!”

Thus, the co-star for this “mad visionary” director’s leading lady must be played by Rosenthal. He is played by British actor and TV presenter Adam Pearson, whose neurofibromatosis made him the daring choice to host programs such as “The Undateables” and “Beauty and the Beast,” and who appeared alongside Scarlett Johansson in “Under the Skin.”

Mabel may be “slumming” on an indie film with a “hot” director, hoping to get a career bounce. But this film, with its blind woman/Elephant Man romance, “exploitative” to some, is going to be challenging on a very human level. And by God, whatever pause Rosenthal’s facial tumors, the huge folds of skin that all but hide his eyes, may give her, she’s going to prove she’s up to it.

She is solicitous, encouraging, open, offering to help the non-actor cast opposite her learn to act for the movies. In a series of close-ups, we see him ask her how to show “fear,” “happiness” and “empathy.”

She’s reassuring even as he says “children and dogs are terrified of me,” and that this IS his “happy” face.

“That director, he’s intimidating!”

“Not really.  It’s his accent. It makes him sound like a villain.”

As they bond, we’re treated to an Altmanesque view of movie-making, the organized chaos of a film set, overheard dizzy conversations where the pretentious actor (Stephen Plunkett) playing the German-accented surgeon at the hospital recites Shakespeare and a producer confuses it “for that movie about the rich little orphan girl.”

They’re shooting in a real re-opened old Carnegie-financed hospital, where real staff and patients keep their distance in other wings. If the crew runs roughshod over parking or off-limits areas and a staff member tries to find who on the shoot to complain to, or if a cop shows up about this “man with marks on his face” case we see talked about on TV, the crew, to a one, say “You need to see Trentolini.”

Trentolini does not exist. It’s just a way of blowing you off, unworthy non-film person.

We see scenes play out, busted takes and retakes. Herr Director, in one of the film’s many delicious (or eye-rolling) drawn-out scenes, explains the concept of “making your ENTRANCE” to non-actor Rosenthal. He does this, with Rosenthal on camera, in closeup, about to enter a shot in a pool of light, explaining to him off camera by reciting the entire opening of “The Muppet Movie” until the moment Orson Welles shows up for his “entrance.”

And as we watch dailies, the footage that’s already in the can, we watch Mabel watch Rosenthal and see the wheels turning about how she sees this warm, British and self-aware “deformed” man and wonder about what she values and her own prejudices.

The film’s roving camera on a busy set is reminiscent of many movies-about-making-a-movie, especially Michael Winterbottom’s “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.” There’s overlapping dialogue, competing agendas, little snippets of actors’ vanity (beauty treatments at the end of the day), a director losing his concentration to his star questioning the “reality” of a blind woman “touching” someone’s eyes, physically, and deciding he is “beautiful.”

“Vy are you bringing zis to me, now?” His scene was written as “a poetic truth, a rhapsodic truth,” so don’t question it.

I got a kick out of seeing Korsmo, who hasn’t acted on camera in 20 years (he’s a law professor at Case Western Reserve University), ham his way through this obvious poseur, an artiste who claims he grew up in a circus, but probably isn’t even German.

Weixler lets us see what an expressive actress she can be, just with her face. Shadows fall across her appearance as she ponders Rosenthal and questions her snap judgement of this unattractive non-actor she’s agreed to co-star with.

Max (Plunkett), the shallow pretty boy in the cast? He has no such self-reflection about Rosenthal.

“You’d make a great Richard III!

Several members of the cast joke about “membership” in this production, quoting that infamous line from “Freaks” — “One of us!” But that’s emblematic of how they treat these “undesirables.” Cast and crew stay in a nearby hotel, the “freaks” stay on set, in the hotel, and guard the equipment.

Which leads to them making their own movie, after hours, one that further flips the script on “normal” and “beautiful.”

It’s a lot to chew on, and I’m not sure it makes absolute sense.

“Chained for Life” invites repeat viewing and “cult film” status, pretty much by design. Whatever writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s other intentions, he’s made a must-see movie for film buffs, one you must-see again just to get all the inside jokes.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, nudity

Cast: Jess Weixler, Adam Pearson, Stephen Plunkett, Charlie Korsmo

Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Schimberg. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:31