Movie Nation

Comedy Central phenoms Key and Peele and the cutest kitten ever put on the big screen team up for “Keanu,” a bullet-riddled, laugh-out-loud “gangsta”farce.

It’s wildly uneven, rather like their TV series (Jordan Peele and series director Peter Atencio scripted it). And it is wincingly violent, with some of the John Woo-style slo-mo shootouts going on too long and spilling too much blood.

But the chemistry is still there, the banter between the bald, bug-eyed, high-maintenance metrosexual Keegan Michael Key (left, above) and the slow-burning Peele still zings.

Those versions of their personas are on display in this comedy, about an LA stoner, Rell (Peele) and his married, one-kid and Honda Minivan cousin, Clarence (Key).

We meet Rell, mid-bong hit. He’s lost his girlfriend and is feeling sorry for himself. But then this cat shows up at his door.

We’ve met the kitten first. He was a drug lord’s pet, the lone survivor of a shoot-out in the abandoned church turned drug lab. And he is irresistible.

Rell devotes himself to this cuter-than-cute kitten, names him “Keanu,” poses him in shadowbox movie scenes (See Keanu in “Reservoir Dogs,””Point Break,” etc.) and just generally dotes on the critter that gives him reason to live.

Then the kitten is catnapped, probably a mistake, as Rell’s drug dealer (Will Forte, a stitch in cornrows) lives next door. Rell is livid and on a mission. The buttoned-down Clarence, a “team-building” coach, in his Minivan Dad-clothes, wearing his George Michael fandom out loud and proud, is dragged along on a trip to the dark side.

But getting that cat back is going to be tricky. Everybody who meets him, from thugs to cops, falls for Keanu the kitten.

Peele may do the writing, but Key is the truly hilarious one here. Clarence is the ultimate fish-0ut-of-water. They have to look “hard” when mingling with the gangsters who stand between them and the cat. Rell figures he can fake it. But Clarence isn’t keen on slinging the N-word around “shiftlessly,” just to pass.

Facial tattoos prompt a “God gave you ONE face, why would you change it?”

His eyes bug out and the N-bombs tumble out of his mouth, inventing gang slang as he does.

“Word to Big Bird…Wordness to the turdness.”

Clarence convinces gang bangers that George Micheal is black — “George Michael is holding it DOWN.”And both of them try to look capable of just about anything.

It’s a movie with scattered moments of humor and the occasional Big Comic Idea, starting with the cat, a cute running gag.

Anna Faris plays a drug-buying, samurai sword-swinging version of herself.

“I was in ‘Scary Movie’ 1, 2, 3 and 4. Not 5! Too old!”

A drug hallucination becomes the highlight of the film.

Whenever the movie runs out of ideas, which is often, Key is there to amp up the bug-eyed intensity to hold us over until something funny happens. Just as he did on the equally uneven TV show.

It’s not up to the lowdown level of “Pineapple Express,” which was kind of the idea. It’s just not gonzo enough, not as brisk or out there, not as overloaded with funny supporting players. (Method Man and Luis Guzman play gangleaders).

“Pineapple Express” had Seth Rogen and Danny McBride. But it didn’t have the world’s most adorable kitten. Keanu the cat helps “Keanu” the movie get over and get by, a passable comedy from a team that needs a little more outside help to make the big score.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, language throughout, drug use and sexuality/nudity

Cast: Keegan Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Method Man, Nia Long, Anna Faris, Luis Guzman, Tiffany Haddish
Credits: Directed by Peter Atencio, script by Jordan Peele and Alex Rubens. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:38

Well, “G & Ts all around, sweetie darling?”

“G & Ts darling!”

It’s about 12 years too late getting here, but Jon Hamm, Kate Moss, Miranda Richardson, many other cameos. July 22 everything gets “Absolutely Fabulous” darling. Everything.

“Mother’s Day” is an ensemble holiday comedy packed with all the sappy sentimentality and mawkish manipulation that only the old master, Garry Marshall would dare give it.

It’s not very funny, and the plot points are so head-slappingly obvious that the audience is an hour ahead of the movie for most of its not-quite-excruciating two hour running time.

But it’s for Mom, so let’s all guilt ourselves into dragging her to it before the holiday it’s named for is here and the only movie options are about guys in tights and masks.

The “Valentine’s Day/New Year’s Eve” formula of interlocking stories returns for this Atlanta dissertation on the trials of motherhood, and the trials mothers can be.

Sandy (Jennifer Aniston) is the divorced mother of two, coping with the news that her ex-husband (Timothy Olyphant) has “married a tween.” Maybe she’ll be used to it “when her face clears up.” The new bride (Shay Mitchell) is young. Get it?

Jesse, played by Kate Hudson as if she’s doing an infomercial for her line of sportswear, and Gabi (Sarah Chalke) are sisters who live next door to each other. They have secrets. One’s married to an Indian-American doctor (Aasif Mandvi). The other’s gay and living with her partner (Cameron Esposito).

They both have kids, and they’ve never told their parents. Because, well, Mom and Dad (Margot Martindale and Robert Pine) are from Texas. They’re bigots. Get it?

A single-dad (Jason Sudeikis) plans on having his two girls ignore Mother’s Day since their military mom (Jennifer Garner) was killed in combat a year ago. Because the movie needs a dollop of sad, and Marshall loves to show how he supports the troops. And that gives Sudeikis the chance to play the awkward dad buying tampons for his teen, while Aniston, his “We’re the Millers” co-star, flirts with him. That’s comedy pre-packaged for your protection, get it?

There’s a young couple (Britt Robertson, Jack Whiteall) with a baby and no wedding rings. He’s an aspiring stand-up comic who tends bar, she’s a waitress who doesn’t know who her birth mother is.

And then there’s the infomercial queen, Miranda, played by Julia Roberts, given a wig and wardrobe that exaggerates her features into something tacky and a little frightening. She’s chosen “career” over motherhood, so she’s cold and a monster. Get it?

That gives Aniston and Roberts a chance for a couple of big-screen scenes together.

Marshall and his gaggle of writers are hard-pressed to find more than a giggle in all this. The stand-up comedy scenes are supposed to paint over that hole. Teens curse, a kid gets sick, and the Texans show up, letting the “trailer park” jokes pile up.

“I don’t get that joke, but it sounds racist.”

Martindale makes those scenes come the closest to working.

“And I put on a bra for this.”

Hector Elizondo plays Miranda’s agent, given to dispensing Hallmark card pearls of wisdom.

“We are who the world thinks we are. Or we’re not.”

Hospital scenes are peppered with hospital employees well past retirement age, many of them with “Marshall” as surnames. The director rounded up many of his equally elderly cronies and relatives with the promise of “I’ll PUT you in the movie.”

It’s all as predestined, slow-footed and played-out as People Magazine (equally played-out) naming Aniston its “Most Beautiful Woman” — again — cynically timed for this wilted daisy of a comedy’s release.

But will all that manipulation pay off at the box office? Why shouldn’t it? You’ve got to do something with mom after taking her to dinner on May 8. She’d better be an easy laugh, though. Otherwise, it’s “And I put on a bra for this?”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some suggestive material

Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts, Jaspn Sudeikis, Kate Hudson, Sarah Chalke, Britt Robertson, Margot Martindale, Hector Elizondo, Jack Whitehall
Credits: Directed by Garry Marshall, script by Tom Hines, Lily Hollander, Anya Kochoff, Matthew Walker. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:58

“Papa Hemingway in Cuba,” the “first Hollywood feature shot in Cuba since The Revolution,” gives us a portrait of the great writer in decline, a man of human dimensions.

This isn’t the Ernest Hemingway of myth, though he’s certainly living off it. The war correspondent, world traveler, safari-loving Great White Hunter still loves deep sea fishing and still closes down the bar, regaling one and all with his larger-than-life tales.

But this Hemingway, from its casting to the story about him it tells, is in every way smaller-than-life. And seriously, who wants to see that?
Producer and erstwhile self-named studio owner Bob Yari (“Crash,””Thumbsucker”) turns director for this adaptation of Denne Bart Petitclerc‘s memoir of meeting and befriending the Great Writer during his final years.

The story goes that Petitclerc, renamed Ed Myers here, is a Hemingway worshipper and Miami newspaper reporter who wrote him an adoring/fawning fan letter. Ed (Giovanni Ribisi) touched on his orphaned childhood, his dreams of becoming a writer, and told Hemingway “You gave me hope.”

Our image of the gruff “man’s man” who would laugh at such “womanly” sentiments takes its first hit when Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) is touched enough by the letter to call “the Kid” up. Hemingway the sentimentalist invites Ed the fanboy down to Havana.

It’s 1957, and the American is “the biggest tourist attraction in Cuba,” living in his famous house, “Finca Vigia,” taking his famed fishing yacht Pilar out to chase tuna and swordfish.

His meals are the moveable feasts of legend, surrounded by friends who never tire of his war/safari/sexual conquest/plane crash stories. His wife, Mary (Joely Richardson) however, is of another mind. She may be “my perfect pocket-Rubens,” but she’s also an accomplished woman who supports him but bristles at his petulant need to be the only center of attention.

Their nights are spent at this or that mob-owned hotel bar, downing tropical drinks and bending ears.

Ed sees Two Cubas upon his arrival, the poverty of the vast majority, the wealth of the Battista-government and mob-connected few. Soldiers are everywhere, plainclothes policemen in suits and sunglasses are rounding up agitators.

And this fellow Castro is in the hills, threatening to upend it all.

Ed also sees two Hemingways, the bear of a man who exudes confidence in every gesture, and the fearful writer at the end of his tether, facing his 59th birthday with fear and his blank typewriter pages with terror.

The Kid gets fishing lessons, writing lessons (“It’s the Power of Less.”) and life lessons from the Old Man.

“The only value we have as human beings is the risks we’re willing to take!”

So they dash off to see a shoot-out with student terrorists (summary executions follow), with Hemingway still a cagey get-close-to-the-action war reporter.

And every now and then, Papa lets on that he’s losing it, that his father’s way out (“Killed himself. Couldn’t take it any more.”) is very much on his mind.

“He may be crazy,” the war-wounded poet pal Evan Shipman (Shaun Taub) warns, “but no way do we want him cured.” The world still needs Papa’s genius.

“Hemingway in Cuba” lives and dies on its “Papa,” and Yari did himself no favors by cutting corners there. Stage actor and veteran bit player Adrian Sparks has the barrel-chested look. And his voice is actually closer to the real Hemingway’s than that of better actors who have played him — George C. Scott in “Islands in the Stream,” Stacy Keach on TV. Sparks has more of a higher-pitched bark than a growl. Listen to Papa on youtube clips narrating his documentary, “The Spanish Earth,” for instance. Short sentences delivered in a clipped bark. But Sparks doesn’t spark.

Hemingway was an old 59 at a time long before 59 was the new 45. But this guy looks ancient. And sorry to be cruel, but he has all the screen presence of a third runnerup in a Key West Hemingway look-alike contest.

Scenes feel stage-bound, with Victorian melodramatic speeches, declarations, etc. A cute birthday moment — Mary singing and vamping to Marlene Dietrich’s wartime torch song, “Lili Marlene,” works. Dietrich was a Hemingway favorite. But other scenes are laugh-out-loud awkward, thanks to arch and clumsy dialogue.

A side-story — Ed is neglecting his lover, the fellow newspaper employee (Minka Kelly) whom he lured away from her husband — is given short shrift.

As is Hemingway’s sympathy for Castro’s cause. That can’t have stood him in good stead with America’s conservatives. Or Cuba’s.

James Remar classes up the third act as the mob boss Santo Trafficante, but an account of Papa’s troubles with “the Feds” seems shoehorned in and overloaded with conjecture. Some have used that to explain his late-life depression and paranoia.

The novelty of “first Hollywood film made in Cuba” wears off quickly. The culture preserved in amber, just the way it was when Hemingway lived there, is strikingly captured — ancient hotels and bars, just as they were pre-Revolution. But the cheapness of the production peeks through, even there. There’s one glaring botched shot (Lens flare run amok?) which would never have made the final cut of a better-financed film. Details like the anachronistic long hair of several players, a fishing hat not designed until the ’80s and vintage cars wearing ’80s mag wheels in 1957 stand out.

And don’t get me started about a car ride in a nicely-preserved Pontiac convertible that sports a Chevrolet-insignia’d dashboard and steering wheel. That’s how Cubans have kept those classics on the road — DIY, scavenging parts from other vehicles. They weren’t doing that when the cars were new, in Hemingway’s day.

But none of this would have been enough to kill the picture had Yari spent some cash and landed a charismatic, age-appropriate movie star leading man. Vincent D’Onofrio, maybe. Randy Quaid, if he gets back on his meds.

As it is, “Papa Hemingway in Cuba” will endure only as a last celluloid document to a Cuba before normalized relations and the Burger Kings, Ritz Carltons, Starbucks and Forever 21s move in and take it over. The real Papa would have at least approved of that.

MPAA Rating:R for language, sexuality, some violence and nudity

Cast: Giovanni Ribisi, Adrian Sparks, Joely Richardson, Minka Kelly, James Remar
Credits: Directed by Bob Yari, script by Denne Bart Petitclerc. A Yari Film Group release.

Running time: 1:49

Whatever quality it was that made Dave Eggers the “It Boy” of American literature ever since the modestly-titled “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” plum evades big screen translation in “A Hologram for the King.”

A misshapen, aimless midlife crisis travelogue/romance with discourses on the the repression and inequity of Saudi Arabia, dating in the Islamic world and the nature of American/Chinese business competition, it’s the weakest Tom Hanks vehicle in decades.

And as a signature piece, it renders the ineffable qualities of Eggers into the WTF-able, another eye-rolling revelation that publishing is a New York circle-jerk, serving up one self-absorbed, photogenic young rich white prodigy after another — see McInerney, Jay, or Roth, Veronica.

Hanks stars as Alan Clay, introduced to us in a dream rendition of his state-of-life delivered through a music video. Clay walks through his divorce, career uncertainty and 60ish ennui singing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”

“And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, How did I get here?'”

“Here” is on a plane and in a pickle, an aging salesman flying to Saudi Arabia where his Boston tech firm is pitching The Kingdom its business communication services, complete with holograms. It’s a do-or-die mission for Alan, badgered by his boss, divorced and without the cash to send his daughter to college.

He faces jet lag and culture clash in Saudi Arabia, where his team is stuffed into an air-conditioned, wi-fi deprived tent in a long-gestating Metropolis of Economy and Trade, a planned-city that is nowhere near ready for them.

He is stood-up, dismissed, brushed-off and lied to at every turn by assorted Saudis. And he can’t seem to wake up in time for his daily shuttle bus to the planned city. So he keeps hiring a driver, the chatty, working-class Western pop fan Yousef. Casting a non-Arab in this part (Alexander Black) is the least of this comic relief character’s problems.

“You like Chicago?”

“Not in the winter.”

“No, CHICAGO,” followed by the vocal stylings of Peter Cetera.

Alan’s fish-out-of-water search for a palliative drink in this Islamic State leads him into the hedonistic underworld of Westerners who sneak off for drunken, semi-nude revels out of the sight of disapproving clerics and their version of the Church Police.Sidse Babett Knudsen plays a not-quite-helpful but on-the-make Danish employee of The Kingdom.

Everywhere Alan turns, there is evidence of open class warfare, the dismissive contempt of the sheikhs, the semi-enslaved foreign workers hired to do everything and the tightly-controlled non-royal populace, their behavior and future curtailed by religious restrictions in a rich, backward totalitarian state.

Every random episode — Alan goes to the mountains to see how Yousef’s armed, rural fundamentalist extended family lives, watch Alan get ditched by the minor nobleman he’s trying to meet — is a cliche.

It’s enough to give a guy a cyst, which is how Alan meets the attractive (Sarita Choudhury) female doctor (A female doctor in Saudi Arabia? The scandal!). That sets up another random change in what, for want of a better word, we will call the movie’s “direction” — a romance.

Speaking of fellows out of their element, the German director Tom Tykwer is an odd choice to handle something this light. I mean, “Cloud Atlas” and “The International” and “Perfume” are not exactly calling cards for adapting a comic novel, or whatever you want to call Eggers’ book.

Hanks is game, playing a guy coming to terms with his shortcomings and the business practices that put him and America in this position, toadying to a bunch of hostile, rich rubes. Hanks doesn’t let us see him straining for cute, the way he did in the even shallower but similarly plotted (career reboot, romantic reboot) “Larry Crowne.”

But jokes don’t land and our ability to be slack-jawed over the stunning contrasts and social limitations of life in TKS (The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) is long past. We know these gauche monarchs, oligarchs and their irate and often fanatical subjects aren’t anybody worth cozying up to, even if some of our leaders are slow to figure that out.

“A Hologram for the King” is a movie about mirages, illusions and delusions, none bigger than the notion that this was ever going to be anything more than an intriguing, watchable failure.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity, language and brief drug use

Cast: Tom Hanks, Sarita Choudhury, Alexander Black, Tom Skerritt, Sidse Babett Knudsen
Credits: Written and directed by Tom Tykwer, based on the Dave Eggers novel. A Liongsate release.

Running time: 1:38

One LA woman, a sometime actress and producer, remembers stepping over this listless, very elderly homeless woman sitting on the curb of Montana Ave. in Santa Monica.

Another woman, a sometime producer, endured a chewing out by the old lady in her local laundramat.

A famous actor from the “Hangover” movies befriended her, put her on TV and took her to premieres. An Oscar winner befriended her as well.

But it was a neighborhood barista and aspiring filmmaker who looked at Mimi, “The Queen of Santa Monica,” and thought, “There’s a story here. And a movie.”

“Queen Mimi” is a documentary about homelessness that puts a sympathetic face on homelessness and says a lot, perhaps accidentally, about Los Angeles as it does.

Mimi works, lives and sleeps in the Fox Laundry on Montana Ave. when we meet her. She’s funny, articulate, very old and stooped, at least in part because of the fact that she sleeps sitting in one of those plastic lawnchairs that you find in most of America’s eternally downmarket laundramats.

But even there, you cross paths with “the industry.” Somehow, Renee Zellweger met Mimi. And Zach Galifianakis.

And Yaniv Rokah, who moved to LA to make movies but found himself pouring coffee, spent years learning her story and filming “Queen Mimi.” She’s met a lot of people, and as the cliche goes, “touched a lot of lives.”

She’s memorable because she’s a genuine character, prone to fussing as customers “she takes an instant dislike to.” She doesn’t refer to herself as homeless and bristles with contempt at those who do.

But as Rokah gets a little deeper — not that deep at all, to be honest — we learn how she spent decades on Westwood and Santa Monica’s streets, a tiny bit of how she survived and a little about her background.

“I didn’t eat a lot, I’ll tell you that.” She took “spit baths.”

But she dances with the younger employees of the laundramat. She’ll tell you “I like YOUNG men, not some of these old crawdads.”

Which is how Zach Galifianakis was drawn to her. She’s likely to be found in a Hustler t-shirt, with “Relax, it’s just sex.”

“She fits in, in a very strange way,” Galifianakis says of her and why he’s taken her to movie premieres. Is there something going on between them?

“She’s old enough to be my ANCESTOR,” he cracks.

Rokah — he allows himself to be a character in his own film — hangs with her, and learns something of where Mimi came from, but never zeroes in on why she is the way she is. Others, those who have tried to help her with varying degrees of success, hint that “she likes to drink.” But 40 years of homelessness is hard to explain, except between the lines.

She found herself alone, divorced, embarrassed to let her kids know how she was living, unemployed and perhaps unemployable in a stupidly-expensive but generally warm and survivable coastal city. Mimi endured.

“Queen Mimi” is generally content to be cute when it might have gone deep, warm when it could have had pathos, warmly upbeat because, you know, homeless people have a lot of Hollywood advocates or those who stick up for them in the culture as a whole.

It can be a bit frustrating that way, kind of flippant, a tail-wagging-the-dog (does the filming put those who know her on the spot to spend some Hollywood cash and DO something for her? Maybe.

But there’s a real hero here, and his name’s Stan Fox. He’s the laundramat owner who decided this homeless person hanging around his business wasn’t a nuisance, was worthy of compassion and was worth getting to know. He let her live there, gave her a job and purpose and a shred of dignity.

And it’s Stan that “Queen Mimi” celebrates, right alongside the charismatic and eccentric Queen that is the film’s star in this good but not great documentary.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, sexual content

Cast: Mimi Haist, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Boatwright, Rita Branch, Yaniv Rokah
Credits: Written and directed by Yaniv Rokah. An XLRator release.

Running time: 1:17

The best thrillers blast through fear and demand action.

They drag you to the edge of your seat. They make you shout at the screen, or at least mutter your response to whatever life-threatening scenario is unfolding before you. You’re there. You’re involved. You’re trying not to panic, trying to avert your eyes, hoping to reason/scheme/plan your way out of the same jam confronting the hero or heroine on the screen.

“Green Room” does that. A ferocious, bloody, primal and pitiless gut-punch of a movie, it packs a struggling band in the green room (backstage waiting area) of a club they have underestimated at a gig that they never, ever should have taken.

They’ve witnessed a stabbing. They’ve tried to call the cops. But management, and its minions, aren’t having it.

The threat here isn’t zombies or werewolves or vampires. The bad guys are Nazi skinheads, violent men, gun nuts, fanatics. But like all gangsters, they’re also menacing morons with impulse control issues. If these over-matched, scared-witless musicians can catch their breath, maybe they can think their way out of this.

Actor/musician Anton Yelchin is Pat, the guitarist for the Ain’t Rights, a DC area punk band at the end of a busted tour, siphoning gas out of cars in packed parking lots just to get home from Washington state. Alia Shawkat is the bass player. They’re the common sense members of the group, and the best at siphoning gas.

A guilt-ridden promoter (David W. Thompson) offers them a chance to make some road trip money, in the woods at a club off the beaten path, somewhere in Oregon. Yeah, it’s a skinhead club. But it’s a gig.

“They run a tight ship, except it’s a U-boat.”

The Ain’t Rights soak up the jackboots, the SS insignias and Confederate flags. First set, they salve their consciences by provoking the rougher-than-rough crowd with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks.” But backstage, they walk in on a murder scene.

And that’s when it all goes south.

They can’t get a reading on the club manager (Macon Blair). Is he threatening them, holding them hostage, protecting them?

“We’re sorting it out,” isn’t comforting. Out comes the first gun, and no, they cannot leave, cannot speak to the cops.

And the one hostile eyewitness from the skinhead community (Imogen Poots) trapped in the green room with them cannot decide if she’s friend or foe.

The pacing of writer-director Jeremy “Blue Ruin” Sailnier’s film gives it the feel of both victims and those holding them making this up on the fly. Everybody on scene is improvising their reaction to this situation.

There’s no over-explaining, little stating of the obvious.

“You’re trapped. That’s not a threat, it’s a fact.”

Patrick Stewart rolls in as the club owner, a quietly menacing leader of “a movement, NOT a (political) party.” This is “manageable.” He just needs to get the right people on scene, his “Red Laces” squad — the Survivalist Northwest’s version of Hitler’s Brown Shirts.

Meanwhile, in a room with one exit guarded by a hulking brute with a gun, the band is panicking. What can skinny young pacifists — well, save for the hothead lead singer (Callum Turner) — do in the face of Nazi brute force, Nazi machetes, Nazi guns, Nazi dogs and sheer Nazi numbers? They face a moral dilemma that gives this nail-biter the feel of a parable. What CAN nonviolent people do when confronted with murderous brute force? Can they be as ruthless?

“Green Room” has logic issues, “counting shotgun shells” issues, timeline issues and urgency issues (as in “Shouldn’t we be panicking now?”) .

But even when he slacks off in the suspense department, Saulnier ratchets up the violence — gruesome, bloody, box-cutter wounds and the like. And if you can avoid averting your eyes and keep from slipping off the edge of your seat, you’re going to want to shout suggestions at the cast on the screen.

Doesn’t matter if they can’t hear it.They’re still going to need the help.

MPAA Rating:R for strong brutal graphic violence, gory images, language and some drug content

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart, Eric Edelstein
Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

August is, realistically, the first crack in the window of “Oscar season,” when movies with any sort of buzz/potential open with hopes of having the legs to stick around to October.

The story of McDonald’s empire builder Ray Kroc, starring Michael Keaton (and Laura Dern and Nick Offerman), directed by Mr. “Blind Side”, John Lee Hancock. This probably isn’t a contender.

But it has the bones, the timing, and maybe a hope.

For all the near photo-realism of today’s generation of computer-generated effects, there’s still something to be said for old-fashioned, tactile costumes and make-up, for real settings and real scenery.

Want to show an ogre? Dress up a very tall man, dress him in furs and thicken his features.

Telling a story set in Medieval castles? Use real castles, real Medieval towns.

Need albino twins for your movie? Cast real twins, dye their hair and give them contact lenses.

The Italian director Matteo Garrone took this approach in “Tale of Tales,” an adaptation of the early 17th century Neopolitan fairytales of Giambattista Basile. Though the adaptations are not literal and you’ll be hard pressed to find moral lessons in these fantasies, the film is cinematic eye candy — not as spectacular as the more fanciful works of Terry Gilliam (“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”, “The Brothers Grimm”), more on the order of Tarsem Singh (“The Fall”).

Basile’s morbid, bloody and often sexual tales pre-date the collecting of The Brothers Grimm. Garrone and screenwriter Eduordo Albinati take on three of them for their somewhat plodding two-hour-plus film.

Salma Hayek and John C. Reilly play a queen and king who cannot conceive an heir. A mysterious conjurer shows up and says all they lack is a measure “of courage and sacrifice.” Oh, and the heart of a  sea monster, cooked by a lone virgin and fed to the queen.

He warns them that “Every new life calls for a life to be lost,” but the brave king dives and attacks a monster, dying in the process. The queen gets her heart, and her child, an albino boy (Jonah Lees) grows up to become transfixed by a servant’s son who is a dead ringer for him (Christian Lees). Nothing the Queen can do can keep these mismatched twins apart.

Vincent Cassel (“Mesrine,” “Eastern Promises”) plays a sexually insatiable king who becomes enchanted by the singing of two sisters, played by Shirley Henderson and  Hayley Carmichael . But he hasn’t seen them. They’re both spinsters, impoverished crones.

And when he tries to court one of them, she fearfully hides this by only letting him touch her finger. He thinks she’s just being coy.

Finally, she relents and agrees to come to his bed. But that involves her sister gluing her sagging breasts into place and pulling back her wrinkles. The king isn’t fooled, is repulsed, and has her hurled out a window. But a witch takes pity on Dora and makes her young again. Not that this pays off, either.

And then there’s the king (Toby Jones) and single-father who is infatuated with fleas. He raises one to be the size of a sheep, and when his daughter (Jessie Cave) demands that he “get me a husband,” he has the flea skinned and tests each of her suitors by demanding that they identify what animal produced this pelt.

That’s how he ends up giving her to an ogre (Guillaume Delaunay).

The tales are peopled with jugglers, fire-eaters and other Medieval circus folk. Garrone reminds us, in gory detail, how violent and sexual ancient fairytales often were. This is about as suitable for “the little ones” (Basile’s own words in the title of his “Tale of Tales” collection,  Il Pentamerone) as “The Huntsman–Winter’s War.”

The ambitious effects and simple Medieval-ness of the works are what recommend “Tale of Tales.” It’s fun to see this cast tossed into this milieu, even if the stories, so freely adapted and altered, don’t connect or truthfully, seem to have much point.

The two sisters one is the cleverest, the two albinos one the most unfathomable and “The Flea” the least inscrutable. See it for the eye candy, the vivid recreation of an Italian “Once upon a time,” all of it done without computers and digital fakery.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, sexual situations, graphic violence

Cast: Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, Bebe Cave, Jonah Lees, Christian Lees
Credits: Directed by Matteo Garrone, script by Eduordo Albinati, based on the stories of Giambattista Basile . An IFC release.

Running time: 2:13

The Filmmakers’ Generation has but a handful of saints. More than a few of them are Italian-American. Most have had to fall back on their reputations in recent years. Some got too rich to keep working. Some tried to do intimate pictures that audiences didn’t connect with.

But their names are a veritable ’70s movie lovers’ mantra.

There’s Spielberg and Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese.

And Brian De Palma.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I consider A24 the new studio with the hottest, most-debatable lineup of films, an outfit that released “Ex Machina” and “The Spectacular Now,” “Amy” and “Room,” “Spring Breakers” and “Locke,” “Mississippi Grind” and “The End of the Tour.”

So it’s not the least bit surprising that they’ve got their hands on a movie-lovers’ movie about a filmmaker who has long been a favorite of genre movie-lovers, covering a fairly wide range of genres.

“De Palma” opens in June in limited release.