Movie Nation

Travolta’s an ex-baller/private eye in this neo noir, coming to theaters and VOD May 24.

Good to see Famke Janssen and Brendan Fraser getting into films again.

The strain of achieving “twee” shows in far too many scenes and moments in the arrested development/coming of aged dramedy “Peel.” It may offer Emile Hirsch a chance to recreate his tweens even though he’s in his mid-30s. But there is little if anything of consequence that comes out of this grasping, gasping overreach for daft.

Even the big overarching theme — a broken family mended by revisiting that breaking point — is inconsequential in the extreme.

“Peel” is a kid whose childhood consisted of meekly playing along with his rough and tumble brothers, drinking Orange-zina (think “Tang”) and being doted on by his hippy mom.

Mom (Amy Brenneman) gets into rows with Dad (Victor Verhaeghe) over how she’s sheltering and home-schooling their youngest, shortest and only redheaded child. That leads Dad to take brothers Will and Sam and leave, never to make contact again.

Twenty-five years later, Mom has crawled into a bottle, with Peel (Emile Hirsch) in charge of mixing her vodka and Orange-zina cocktails. He’s eccentric, something of an artist, and utterly naive to the ways of the world outside their yard. He can’t even tell the cute Korean-American neighbor (Angelina Joo) is sweet on him.

We can. We can also tell that he’s entirely too old for her, physically if not socially.

Then Mom dies. Peel is left on his own, no visible means of support and a mortgage to pay. And so he rents out a room to the first musclehead who rolls by in a 1970s Gremlin.

Jack Kesy of “12 Strong” and TV’s “Claws” plays Roy as a sort of good ol’boy Ryan Gosling. He chain smokes, sports a crew-cut with a cute little Bieber tail and drawls, mostly about women.” ‘Ritas” he calls them — short for “senoritas.”

“I’m-o teach you every Godd—-d thing you need to know to attract the opposite sex!”

With Roy comes Chuck (Jacob Vargas), whom Roy labels a “Professor…with a “Degree from the University of Adversity.” Chuck refuses to speak English, and purrs poetic observations, opinions and insults at Peel in Spanish, which Peel doesn’t understand.

Chad (Garrett Clayton) is a third new roomie/renter, the college guy who can help populate their parties with lots of lovely ‘Ritas. Or so Roy figures.

That first party has Peel blowing up condoms because he thinks they’re balloons, with Chuck feeding drinks to “El hombre de la casa” (Peel) and Chun Ja (Joo) and her Korean cousin Jooeun (Hana Hwang) dancing to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” with Peel.

But that cannot distract the easily-distracted Peel from his need to fill the gaping hole in his life. He needs to find his brothers. And being too naive to know how to do that, he’s going to need help.

I’m scanning back over my notes for “Peel,” scraping up the not-even-a-handful of jokes and situations and marveling how anybody could get a 100 minute movie out of this.

It’s an enervated film, with Hirsch tasked with being the irony-impaired naif who just reacts and misreads every human interaction he has.

Visiting Mom’s lawyer (producer and sometime actor Ray Bouderau) produces a wry grin or two. What can Peel do with a house, a mortgage and no job or living on his own skills?

“I don’t know. I’m not a life coach, son.”

“Do you think you could help me find my brothers?” earns an elaborate dismissal, just a lawyer writing on a slip of paper, folding it up several times and turning it over to Peel.

The numbers “411” are all he wrote.

Kesy provides comic counterpoint as tactless horndog Roy, who greets Chun Ha at the door by calling back to his landlord — “Hey Peel, your math tutor’s here.”

It’s just that there’s too little for everybody to play, too much effort in emphasizing how eccentric and gifted Peel is supposed to be, with only the odd bit of evidence for either.

The characters, from the roommates to Peel’s family, all have the potential to be made interesting. Chuck, for instance, is a race handicapper and Roy an inveterate gambler. There’s an avenue ripe for comic situations. Screenwriter Troy Hall and director Rafael Monserrate do nothing with it. They’re hell bent getting us to the third act with mere hints of “twee” to sustain us until they do.

That potential is turned inconsequential at every turn.

Hirsch is a gifted comic actor and could have made a lot more out of this unworldly guy who draws and snorkels obsessively and gets his hair cut about as often as Johnny Depp.

And no, a few sweet moments in the final act don’t paper over the emptiness that precedes them. “Peel” is just as its title suggests, a movie that’s all surface peel and no substance.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, and for some drug content

Cast: Emile Hirsch, , Shiloh Fernandez, Amy Brenneman, Jack Kesy and Yaya DaCosta

Credits: Directed by Rafael Monserrate, script by Troy Hall. A Sony Pictures release.

Running time: 1:41

When we talk of “pace” in a movie review, it doesn’t just mean the speed at which the story unfolds.

It refers to energy in the performances, narrative drive, “urgency” in the way what we’re watching grabs us and pulls us with it to the bitter end.

“The Dirty Kind” is a movie with no pace, no narrative drive, sleepwalking performances and zero urgency.

That’s why if you jump to the end of the review you’ll see zero stars, a rating so rare I have to track down internet art to illustrate it whenever I have to trot it out.

This mystery-thriller has no mystery and no thrills. It’s a picture with more off-screen gossip than story. This is how bad a movie can turn out when Michael Madsen’s trumpeted as a producer and nine days is the length of the shoot, and something the filmmakers felt the need to brag about.

What, we’re supposed to evaluate this crap on the curve? This is “48 Hour Film Project” bad. How’s that?

Sniffing around the Internet, you can discover that the “story” — I hesitate to call it that — was “inspired” by the Congressman Anthony Weiner sex scandal. A senator gets his lap-dancing girlfriend pregnant and the guy he hires to “take care of it” doesn’t drive her to the clinic. He brings along a friend who kills her to get all the money promised for taking “care of it.”

But the lax, meandering movie loses track of the senator (Paul C. Kelly) and the missing woman, professional name “Natalie Cottontail” (Victoria Wallace).

The private eye may borrow the names of detective story novelists Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain for his name, Raymond Cain (Duke Williams). But he’s no tough guy, no smart guy, no guy with any sense of urgency about this missing and presumed dead daughter of the person who hired him. If you must see this, watch how he’s abused in the inevitable “asking too many questions” kidnapping and beating. Very, um, Harvey Weinstein styled punishment from the hoodlums.

While there’s some justification for taking our PI into a private, off-the-books “lap dance club” (filmed in dim, red lighting). He’s asking questions, right? But shlepping to a party for the most banal cocktail banter in screen history? You’ve got 84 minutes of movie. DO something with them.

Writer-director Vilan Trub manages one cute moment. Raymond Cain is paid in cash, which he stashes in a Trojans box in his nightstand.

Nothing else — not one performance, not one moment of action, not one bit of questioning — engages, enlightens, enrages or titillates.

Our hero doesn’t show up for 20 minutes, and we regret that the filmmakers interrupted his nap.

His best line may be in self-defense –“I am not a creep.”

His worst line is every other word out of his mouth. “I think we got off on awkward terms.”

Ever heard that sentence by a native English speaker? Anywhere?

“Awkward” is the perfect single-word description of “The Dirty Kind.” There are awkward pauses in exchanges of dialogue, as if the actors are struggling to come up with their line. Not that there’s any sign of a struggle. Every single actor seems drained of life.

The editing is awkward to the point of clumsy. And don’t get me started on the lighting.

The film’s brief 84 minutes are interminable.

It’s only May, and we may already have a candidate for Worst Picture of 2019. And keep in mind, I’ve already seen “79 Parts.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Duke Williams, John Mertens, Amanda Plant, Victoria Freire, Ed Glynn

Credits: Written and directed by Vilan Trub.  A Bayview release.

Running Time: 1:25

https://kotaku.com/sonic-the-hedgehog-movie-design-to-be-changed-following-1834488203

Love that Gurinder Chadha. The director of “Bend it Like Beckham” got the rights to some pretty good music for this version of a true story. Damn.

The New York Times says publishing houses have finally taken the Farrow family side about Woody Allen’s alleged child abise. And so it ends. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/movies/woody-allen-memoir.amp.html

Since time immemorial, this truism has ostensibly marked the difference between TeeVee and movies.

Television, even “It’s not television, it’s HBO,” is a close-up medium, more about intimacy, “neck-up acting” than film, which even in the HD-bigger screen era, still has the edge in terms of sweep and scope.

The action auteur Walter Hill, one of the few living filmmakers with the knack for making a Western look like a Western, gave us “Wild Bill,” which was the template for TV’s “Deadwood,” which he had a hand in producing (the pilot, setting the tone).

Sepia-tinged, dusty, grimy, rough and ready, “Wild Bill” looked like the Frontier Perdition you kind of imagine the real Deadwood must have been — earth tones, wood and dirt and mud and rough fabrics and dimly-lit saloons and gunsmoke and blood.

If HBO was going to all the trouble of making a stand-alone sequel, you’d think they’d bring Hill back as the “consulting producer” he was for the original pilot.

“Deadwood: The Movie” looks scrubbed and sanitized — mainly because of the “end of that era” civilization that is coming to the town — and has barely a hint of rough trade about it. It looks like what it is, a TV movie.

Here’s a mob comedy as patchwork as its title –– “79 Parts.”

It’s a pieced-together period piece stuffed with characters, with multiple narrators and story threads, a “ticking clock” deadline or two that no one remembers and a hodgepodge of vintage vehicles dating from the 40s through the very late ’70s.

And none of it, not one moment of screen time, delivers anything resembling a laugh.

The two narrators are Slattery (Aidan Redmond, interesting), an Irish mobster who runs loan shark and chop shop operations (the “79 Parts” of the title) in his corner of “New York” in 1979, and Jack Anderson (Ryan O’Callaghan, meh), a one-time aspiring artist who is in the home stretch in law school because he’d love to get his crooked dad (Eric Roberts) out of prison.

Slattery needs to keep his young Italian immigrant mistress (Daniela Mastropietro) happy and his mob-connected wife (Lisa Regina) from killing him. Mob life?

“In your 20s, the job used to be sexy. Now that we’re in our 40s, it’s lost a certain luster.”

Anderson, no relation to the famous newspaper columnist of the era (apparently) needs $5,000 to pay off his last semester of law school. And darn it, let’s throw in that he’s “still a virgin,” because that’s what his narration tells us. His three-piece tan corduroy suit explains that.

The connection between the two is Gino, whose grandad (Tony LoBianco) is also in prison, and whose aunt is Slattery’s mob-made wife. Gino (Johnny Solo, badabing badaboom) is a classmate and hustler who’s always dragging Jack to the track.

Gino works for Slattery, whose marriage has created a combined business, “Paddys and Wops” chopping cars, using muscle and making threats. He vouches for Jack’s loan from Slattery, which Gino plans on gambling on “fixed” horse races with.

What could go wrong?

There are also INS agents sniffing around Slattery and his Italian baker mistress, assorted mugs and thugs, women who misuse Jack and vast collections of street walkers.

That may be the most accurate thing about this “period piece,” which looks like a film student’s idea of what the ’70s were like — a film student who doesn’t like doing research (the cars, the CARS).

Not that director Ari Taub is a film student.

It’s a movie of garish colors, big and badly-knotted ties (on the money) and hooker-wear straight out of “Starsky & Hutch.” It’s all shot in a could-be-anywhere Netherworld of gutted factories, abandoned railroad tracks and streets that haven’t been driven on in years. You shot in Brooklyn and this is what you got?

Every now and then, a character is given a funny name.

“Eight Track! Don’t touch the whores!”

The script’s idea of a sight gag is having the INS agents tie a string to a hubcap and drag it in front of suspects, looking for “a nibble” so they can hook them.

Hilarious.

All kidding or ridiculing aside, this is what could have worked. That milieu, that “Fort Apache — The Bronx” era New York at its nadir, chop shops and ranting, stereotypical Irish mobsters, maybe in comical conflict with stereotypical Italian ones.

Redmond needed more coherent lines than this for Slattery — “They say a leopard can’t change his spots. Everybody ends up where he’s s’posed to.” Say what now? Still, there’s something possibly worth working with here in all this unfunny clutter.

So many characters don’t work, so many lines don’t land, so much casting (cameos by Roberts, LoBianco and Sandra Bernhard) seems fruitless.

The “parts” might be here — a few of them, anyway. They just needed cleverer people to put all 79 of them together better.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex and profanity

Cast: Ryan O’Callaghan, Aidan Redmond, Kathrine Narducci, Sandra Bernhard, Tony LoBiancp and Eric Roberts

Credits: Directed by Ari Taub, script by Chuck McMahon.   A Factory Film Studio release.

Running time:

There’s a squishy wistfulness that hangs over “Tell It to the Bees,” a same sex romance set in small town Scotland in the 1950s. Flashes of magical realism gently but gratingly clash with drab melodrama. Winning performances by leads Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger can’t banish it.

But the handsomely-mounted period production has its rewards and the finale manages a nice messiness that undoes some of what’s trite and far-fetched that’s come before it.

Jean Markham (the Oscar and Golden Globe-winning Paquin) has returned to the town she left decades before, taking over her late father’s medical practice. It’s 1952, and whatever she left town for — and we can guess that — she felt the pull of purpose drawing her back.

“These women, they work,  keep quiet and they don’t complain,” she tells a friend. “think I could make a difference.”

Lydia (Grainger, of “The Finest Hours,” “Tulip Fever” and TV’s “Bonnie & Clyde”) is one of those women, an outsider who moved here, putting in a full day on the looms at the textile mill, indulging her curious son Charlie (Gregor Selkirk), weeping when she thinks he’s not looking.

She’s married a lout (Emun Elliott) who refers to their child as “YOUR son” as he walks out on them. How will she pay the rent?

Charlie is how Jean and Lydia meet. His hobbies are Sherlock Holmes novels and getting into brawls with boys who disparage his Mum. One of those fights puts him in the doctor’s care.

And he and the doctor connect over a shared fascination with bees.

“My father used to say, ‘You tell the bees your secrets and they’ll never go away,'” Jean tells him. So Charlie takes to telling the bees his secrets.

But his mother and Jean are conjuring up secrets all their own. The whispering about both only grows as the homeless Lydia and Charlie move in with kind-hearted and well-off Jean.

The whispering, before and after, is about pretty much what you expect, thanks to the predictable arc of Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth’s screenplay.

So are the obstacles to their “forbidden love” in an era when homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain and small towns were the last place you wanted to test that.

“Those sort of people don’t change their minds,” Jean’s solicitor-friend (Steven Robertson) counsels.

It’s a romance of tasteful love scenes and brittle bigotry, with jarring transitions and a messy climax and that messier finale I mentioned earlier. Lydia’s a bit of a party girl, and seems more instantly-attracted to Jean than such stories traditionally play out. Her brutish soon-to-be-ex is a caricature of villainy, checked-out and moved-on, but still wanting control of this woman and son he refuses to support.

Some of that can be attributed to what might be our unreliable narrator (the adult Charlie). He’s pulling this all together from memory, and “The line between what I saw and what I thought I saw is blurred.”

Director Annabel Jankel broke through in films with the Dennis Quaid/Meg Ryan remake of “D.O.A.” in the 1980s, and whatever she can’t finesse in the script she compensates for in tone. This is a verdant, conservative place more comfortable with whispers and hissed insults than confrontation.

But even Jankel can’t smooth over the eye-rolling moments in the film’s climax. That doesn’t kill “Tell It to the Bees,” which passes otherwise without objection. But it does tend to rob one of much enthusiasm in endorsing it.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult subject matter

Cast: Anna Paquin, Holliday Grainger, Gregor Selkirk, Emun Elliott

Credits:Directed by Annabel Jankel, script by Henrietta Ashworth, Jessica Ashworth. A Good Deed Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:46

Kaya Scoledario and Barry Pepper star in this thriller, which captures two of the great menaces to Florida in one movie. Sam Raimi produced it.

This creeper “Crawl” opens July 12.