Movie Nation

It started life as a BBC sci-fi radio comedy, became a series of novels, was adapted for British TV and eventually, finally and AFTER the death of its creator, Douglas Adams, became a sort of half-hearted movie.

Now Hulu has a producer/show runner with “Lost” and “Jack Ryan” experience and a screenwriter with “Wonder Woman” bonafides and a cunning plan to put “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on streaming TV.

All well and good. Fine. Etc.

But if I might make a suggestion. Why not take the vintage 1970s radio series, impressive, funny and dazzling in its own way, with Simon Jones and voice-actors as varied as Jim Broadbent, Rula Lenska and Jonathan Pryce in bit parts, and ANIMATE it?

That could be a hoot. And if there’s one thing the earlier visual and even literary versions of the concept have proven, the RADIO SERIES was its natural format — aural effects, verbal wit delivered with a deliriously English deadpan.

No, they won’t do that.Still, they’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect Arthur Dent than Martin Freeman, as Simon Jones will certainly be deemed too old to play the part for Hulu.

Here, by the way, was my DEFINITIVE and widely published wire service story/profile of the star and the director and others from when the movie came out waaaaaaay back in 2005.

You can’t help but notice Disney’s mission creep as it dives deeper into the Marvel business, the gold mine that has made the studio forgo pretty much everything else — save for remaking their animated classics as “live action” (not really) features.

What happened to kids’ fare, the non animated side of their original business?

Two franchises that the “Absent Minded Professor” “Escape from Witch Mountain” company could have made, but that Fox did instead, are now in Disney’s possession. So why not remake “Home Alone” and the far more recent “Night at the Museum?” That’s the thinking, anyway.

https://t.co/ZIO3T9Y9RD https://t.co/WTBwgFIVCd https://twitter.com/THR/status/1158931041601671168?s=17

For the first time in eight years,
Netflix lost subscribers last quarter. Over 130,000 dropped them as the service lost popular series like “The Office” and “Friends.”

As others say, “That’s just the beginning.”

As in, expect the streaming service to start shedding subscribers every quarter, and the bottomless well of subscriber/production money will have to be spent on a LOT more original content.

Rising competition could put Netflix in it’s production place. With less money to lavish on big names, Netflix will be in the position of a lot of small studios. They can’t get much of an audience for their product. Alfonso Cuaron wouldn’t be able to money muscle his way to a best picture nomination for a movie few saw and nobody remembers, for instance.

Scorsese’s blank check for”The Irishman” will have to pay off, every time, to get the amount of attention it will take to lure subscribers who used to sign up because “30 Rock,” Ross and Monica and “The Office” were there.

The paradigm is shifting. Again.

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For an 80 minute movie, “Wicked Witches,” retitled from the ever-so-British “The Witches of Dumpling Farm,” certainly does dawdle along.

I had all but despaired of it ever getting up and running long before its nervy, stomach-churning chase and finale.

But what a finish!

Blood and guts yanked out with jagged teeth by women whose eyes are pools of the most spine-chilling black. It probably didn’t take much “pretending” for star Duncan Casey to shriek like a frightened girl, bellow like a man straining to get through not just the night but the next few seconds and scream like a hunted animal wailing at the prospect of never escaping the clutches of…those “Wicked Witches.”

The Bahamian-born Casey plays Irishman Mark, whom we meet as he yanks off his wedding band and drops it out of the car window.

He’s driving from the wrong side of the vehicle, which tells us he’s in Jolly Olde. A quick call to his mate from his days as a carefree bachelor ensures he’ll have a place to stay tonight.

But something in the way the wild-eyed Ian (Justin Marosa) says, “I’ll see you when you get here…MATE,” sets one’s teeth on edge. Not Mark’s, just “one’s.”

Mark and Ian used to hang on Dumpling Farm in Cambridgeshire, out in crop circle country on the B-roads a ways from town. But walking up on Ian, chopping wood and muttering in strange tongues, should be Mark’s second red alert.

Something has changed here. Ian, who still likes to get high, is a part of that something. Laughing maniacally while stoned is new to his repertoire.

Mark would love to host a “big party” at the place, and plans are made to round up the old gang. But these nightmares he’s having are turning into daymares.  He sees bloodied women taking a bite out of men, and it’s keeping him up all night.

Yes, it’s definitely the nightmares, and not the blasts of beer and blow.

The party is where the strangers show up, a clutch of bombshells led by a woman nobody calls the high priestess (a feral Samantha Schnitzler) and including a spooky blonde beauty (Jasmine Clark) Mark has seen around town.

The effects are simple but chilling — the fake teeth, the blood, those damned “Blair Witch” Wiccan stick-models, the alarming close-ups, the isolating wide shots.

For all the efforts to inject humor belatedly into the third act, it’s the sheer terror of the situation and fear that there is no escape that drives characters’ reactions — which can be, even in the direst panic, funny.

I fret about actors’ unwillingness to let it all hang out when playing characters confronted with the supernatural and their own mortality. Duncan Casey puts on a clinic as to how far over-the-top reasonable human reactions to things that cannot be should be played.

The witches, Schnitzler and Clark, speaking with disembodied Satanic baritones, grow more frightening the longer the film goes on.

But the drawn-out chase, above and below ground, of the third act needed to begin earlier — much earlier. The Pickering Brothers’ debut feature spends too much time setting everything up. No, that first 55 minutes or so doesn’t give us deep insights to anyone. Mark is a womanizer, and is still friends with other womanizers. And…?

The picture shortchanges women in general and the witchy women who leave their brooms at home when they’re hunting in particular. No “ex,” no female friends at the party, just guests who show up, dominate the proceedings and submit to their animal feeding urges.

Still, “Wicked Witches” isn’t a total write-off. But when your movie’s this short, getting to the point, giving us “the good stuff” and all that jazz has got to happen earlier.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Duncan Casey, Jasmine Clark, Samantha Schnitzler, Justin Marosa, Kitt Proudfoot

Credits: Written and directed by Martin Pickering and Mark Pickering. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:20

There is comfort and little risk in rooting for sports superpowers — the Patriots, Manchester Uniteds, Dukes and Alabamas of this world.

But when there is no struggle there is no pathos. And in rooting, when there is no risk, there is no glory.

“The Bromley Boys” is about one lad’s slavish devotion to a faithless lover — Bromley F.C. (football club) in the Southeast of Greater London, North Kent for you geographers. Dave Roberts’ football memoir about frustration, awkwardness, social ostracization and first love makes for a sentimental and twee British period piece about the worst football club of them all.

Forget the century of Chicago Cubs misery, the ongoing agonies of the Chargers, the pointless existence of the Charlotte Hornets. Bromley, founded in the late 19th century, had to be the most frustrating underdogs to ever tie one’s sporting fate to.

Not that young Dave (Brenock O’Connor of “Game of Thrones”) planned it that way. He fell in love with the game when England won its last World Cup (1966). At 11, he’d have rather rooted for Tottenham Hotspur,” “like my friends.”

“You don’t have any friends,” grumbles his ever-“disgruntled” dad (Alan Davies).

“What about the team down the road, Bromley?” offers Mum (Martine McCutcheon), ever the peacemaker.

“Nobody supports Bromley,” the kid protests. “Bromley’s rubbish!”

“FOOTball is rubbish!” thunders Dad, and that’s that.

Only it’s not. Doting Mum is all about encouraging the kid and buys Dave the “uniform” of British football fans (a scarf).

“You can’t choose who you’re going to fall in love with,” the adult Dave (also Alan Davies) narrates. Because that’s what this fandom became.

Mum & Son cook up a years-long ruse to cover Dave’s obsessive attendance at the tiny, tattered home field for Bromley on Hayes Lane. As the years pass, he will become the oldest Cub Scout in Britain, donning the hat, shirt and kerchief, slipping out to meetings and “projects” every Saturday. That’s what they tell Dad, anyway.

Dave’s obsession gets him noticed at school, in all the worst ways. He practices being interviewed about his “career,” and thus talks to himself. A lot. Even the girls bully him.

By age 15, he’s lost for life over Bromley, then a semi-pro team in the Isthmian League, and so very bad that they could lose even their low-team-on-the-totem-pole standing and be “relegated.”

That’s the very year (1970) that Dave falls in with motley adult Bromley fanatics (TJ Herbert, Mark Dymond and Ewen MacIntosh). He’s egged on into protesting the team’s woes. Losing to the likes of Dulwich, Ilford, Hitchin Town, Barking, Corinthian Casuals, Maidstone United and Tooting & Mitcham should get the printer turned part-time manager fired, right?

That puts Dave in the field of vision of team chairman and compulsive gambler Charlie McQueen (the amusingly splenetic Jamie Forman of “Layer Cake”). And that’s how Dave meets McQueen’s daughter, smart but wallflowerish Ruby (Savannah Baker).

Whatever Dave sees in Bromley, Ruby sees in Dave. As in “God knows what.”

The jokes in this tale “based on real events…and some rumours” are of the slight and sly variety.

Dave’s self-made protest T-shirt to oust manager Dick Ellis has “Dick Out” written on it.

School interludes show Dave getting pelted with wads of paper for promoting Bromley, and getting frequent canings from the headmaster for interrupting class to promote Bromley.

He sticks his foot in it autograph hunting when West Ham United comes to play a “friendly” and all their stars skip the trip.

“Excuse me, is anybody GOOD playing today?”

The football stuff sends him into the near-madness of total obsession — sneaking into the chairman’s office to gain intel, spreading “rumours,” fretting over the fate of his favorite player, “Stoney” Stonebridge (Ross Anderso , the very picture of 1970s mustachiod dash).

Ruby? He just uses her to access her Dad, who is plainly spending beyond his means — an Aston Martin, a mansion, a Russian trophy wife played by Anna Danshina.

To “come of age,” Dave’s got to reconcile his obsessions and become a more considerate person, maybe find out why Dad has a limp, why Mum indulges his football mania, why his teachers all find him a waste of space. He needs to see what Ruby sees in him.

“Twee” is just a more polite description of British comedies that err on the side of “cutesy.” The almost-omnipresent narration here takes on “A Christmas Story” incredulity, but never adds much that is funny to the proceedings.

The entire picture is basically one big gag that has a hint of “inside joke” to it, as any Brit could tell you Bromley was a laughingstock for decades, and the kid’s into Bromley, of all clubs, in its direst state.

But young O’Connor has a pale, walking bean-pole awkwardness about him, and uses that ungainly appearance to good effect. Nerdy glasses or not, rich and pretty Ruby wouldn’t give him the time of day.

Except that he’s a lost cause. And like Bromley F.C. circa 1970, there is glory and romance in falling for something or someone that’s going to challenge your faith and maybe break your heart.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Brenock O’Connor, Savannah Baker, Martine McCutcheon, Jamie Foreman, Alan Davies, Anna Danshina

Credits: Directed by Steve Kelly, script by Warren Dudley, based on the Dave Roberts memoir. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:46

Period piece? Accents? British football? Collectible British cars in the background?

Come on. You had me at “Bromley.”

Donovan’s classic is remade for this horror movie, produced by Guillermo del Toro and not previewed for critics.

It opens Friday.

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Whatever virtues it displayed on the printed page, “The Art of Racing in the Rain” makes a movie of modest, melodramatic pleasures, mainly homey aphorisms about motor racing and the hidden life of dogs.

As these are growled out by our narrator — Oscar winner Kevin Costner is the voice of Enzo the Golden Retriever belonging to race car driver Denny (Milo Ventimiglia) — they have the raspy gravitas of Great Truths about the human condition, racing and a dog’s lot.

“I could smell the day on him,” Enzo narrates when Denny gets home. “Motor oil and gas…and roast chicken.”

It’s a movie you either go with or injure yourself, rolling your eyes over. As I love dogs, cars and am a lifelong Costner fan, tally me in the former category. But the thin charms of this script and a charisma-starved leading man turn make that vote a close call.

Enzo, as he tells it, “was meant to be his dog.” His reasoning has to do with Mongolian beliefs about dogs eventually reincarnating into the sort of human they are destined to be.

Enzo? He was named for the founder of Ferrari, was meant to drive fast, win trophies and shake bottles of champagne in the winner’s circle. As he’s seen a documentary on TV about this Mongolian dog-to-human reincarnation, he makes it his life to watch Denny’s races, review the cockpit camera and TV coverage of his performances, and learn.

“I will remember.”

Enzo passes on insights about how “the car goes where the eye goes,” about a what makes a great racing driver, how when it rains on the road courses where Denny drives IMSA sports cars (Porsches, BMWs, etc), working his way toward Formula 1, it’s the driver who takes chances, who skids through the turns by choice and not by accident brought on by the conditions, that wins.

Truthfully, though, it’s not about the racing. “Art of Racing” is about a dog’s life, and a few human ones. That part of the tale begins when Eve (Amanda Seyfried) bumps into them, and Enzo figures out what’s happening almost before Denny does.

“Denny was clearly taken with her grooming.”

Eve doesn’t win him over quickly, but Seyfried sells the film’s most romantic line with all the warmth you’d expect.

“You don’t mind if I love him, too?” is just a whispered aside to Enzo, but it’s perfect and perfectly touching.

As they court and marry, Enzo makes his peace with the pairing and all that comes with that, using it to learn more about human behavior.

“I never really grasped the concept of money and why humans have such a need for it.”

A smattering of observations like that are mixed with a few on-point survival facts about dogs that Enzo passes on when he’s left behind in a locked house for days, and how dogs age, along with the usual anthropomorphized nonsense about what a dog “is really thinking.”

Screenwriter Mark Bomback, who has a resume peppered with action film credits — “The Wolverine,” Unstoppable,” “Total Recall” — was an odd choice to adapt Garth Stein’s best seller. He doesn’t quite “get” it. A lot of “cute” is blundered, even though Costner’s reliably droll way with a line makes “deadpan” work.

The arc of career intersects with the arcs of human lives and dog’s lives (Kathy Baker and Martin Donovan play Eve’s parents) here, and that’s really the meat of “Racing in the Rain.” That plays as pure melodrama on the screen.

And Ventimiglia, of TV’s “This Is Us,” doesn’t deliver the pathos we’d expect from the sadness, tragedy and trials Denny motors through. As he’s not asked to do comedy, romantic or dog-owning, either, Denny becomes a blank page on his resume.

Can’t say he’s a subtle actor or a bad one, as there’s virtually no data here to make the call.

That leaves it all up to the dog and the dog’s story, and the pathos of that makes this weeper on wheels a winner. Barely.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material

Cast: Milo Ventimiglia, Amanda Seyfried, Kathy Baker, Martin Donovan, Gary Cole and the voice of Kevin Costner

Credits: Directed by Simon Curtis, script by Mark Bomback based on the Garth Stein novel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:49

The opening to “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” will give anybody who parented in the early 2000s flashbacks, and any kid who grew up then the warm fuzzies.

We’re treated to that catchy theme song, a real-not-animated little girl (Madelyn Miranda) and her six year-old cousin (Malachi Barton) just bubbling with that relentless optimism, turning to the camera and teaching.

“Can you say…African Pygmy Elephant?”

Yes we can, Dora the Explorer!

It is, as it ever was — What’s the word I’m hunting for? ADORAble.

But that was Dora “then.” “Lost City of Gold” is set ten years later. She’s still got that singing backpack, and a map that sings “I’m the MAP,” and Boots her monkey pal. She’s still living in the jungle with her parents (Eva Longoria and Michael Peña, reminding us he’s one funny hombre). But they’ve let Dora grow up. It’s just that the business with her turning to an invisible camera is still going on — at 16.

“Can you say…neurotoxicity?”

Dad’s “She’ll grow out of it” never happened.

Isabela Moner of “The Last Knight” transformers sequel and TV’s “100 Things to Do Before High School” is a cheek-pinching delight as this adolescent Dora, packaged in a candy-colored comic fantasy that’s like a half-animated version of “Tomb Raider.”

“Half animated” because Boots is still not a “real” monkey, and that darned thieving fox Swiper, Dora’s nemesis, just won’t stop swiping.

Boots virtually never talks, and Swiper virtually never stops trash-talking. You might recognize the voices that take on those roles.

For “Lost City of Gold,” Dora is packed off for a little culture clash, moving to Los Angeles where Diego (Jeff Wahlberg) has been living for years. Naive, still-childish/still-trusting Dora is about to be eaten alive at the high school they’ll now attend together.

Her parents think they’ve found a map to this lost Inca city in the Andes, and want track it down without their “supercool exploradora.”

Dora has just enough time to make a fool of herself on the dance floor, make a smarty-pants nuisance of herself in class (“Dorka,” they call her, the meanies!) and some friendemies at school (Madeleine Madden, Nicholas Coombe) when she, they and Diego are nabbed and sent to Peru by a bunch of toughs (Temuera Morrison plays the leader) who also want to find that lost city.

That’s where they run into a friend of the family, their jungle-phobic “guide” Alejandro, vamped up by Eugenio Derbez of “Overboard” and “How to Be a Latin Lover.”

The quartet-turned-quintet need to avoid the bad guys, including Swiper, and get to Dora’s parents before they do.

Anybody over the age of 10 will have an idea of what challenges they face — quicksand, blow darts from angry natives, a curse and an Indiana Jones booby-trapped temple, for starters.

But that age of 10 proviso is key, here. This is a childish adventure film, deliberately so.

What the screenwriters went for is that “Brady Bunch Movie” approach — a little nostalgia, a bit of fish-out-of-water/character-out-of-her-time comic displacement.

Dora looks at her world with childish wonder, and darned if she doesn’t sing about it.

“Maybe a song will help!”

Nobody does that at 16, not if they don’t want to be called “Dorka.”

“I have to be myself,” she insists. And Diego, sweet as he is on Mean Smart Girl Sammy (Madden), embarrassed as he is, has to respect that.

I was iffy on the whole “Let Dora grow up a little” idea, and darned if some cringe-worthy critic hasn’t wondered why we aren’t treated to a more hormonal Dora.

But that’s not a concern here. I was far more bugged by the admittedly comical presence of Boots and Swiper. Keep her six, and they’re “imaginary friends.” They could even be imaginary at 16. Not if everybody else sees them, though.

So what? It’s still as charming as a ham-fisted Hollywood treatment of a kids’ cartoon can be. I don’t see why any ten year-old wouldn’t adore Dora.

MPAA Rating: PG for action and some impolite humor

Cast: Isabel Moner, Jeff Wahlberg, Eva Longoria, Madeleine Madden, Temuera Morrison, Q’orianka Kilcher, Eugenio Derbez and Michael Peña.

Credits: Directed by James Dobbin, script by Matthew Robinson and Nicholas Stoller, based on the Nickeloden TV series.  A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:42

It’s like panning for gold, this business of rummaging through a summer’s indie releases, looking for a nugget in a cinema season that produces blockbusters, and little else.

But here’s one. “Every Time I Die” is the best no-budget thriller of the summer, moody, cerebral drama about a guy who carries his guilt about a childhood loss through multiple soon-to-be-murdered bodies in search of redemption.

Tensely-plotted, sharply and sympathetically-acted, nerve-wracking and touching, this supernatural tale arrives a startling delight in a summer packed with pyrite at the bottom of the gold miner’s pan.

We meet Sam (Drew Fonteiro), dazed and in bed with Mia. He is smitten, but staring into the bathroom mirror before his shower, he is further confused.

Sam is a paramedic who spends his days with the world-weary Jay (Marc Menchaca), a beery, seemingly happy go-lucky guy with the dark cloud of a suicide attempt and the medication meant to stave off another on his person.

Jay senses something forlorn and broken in Sam, but Sam won’t hear it.

“I never actually wanted to die…”

“There’s more ways to kill yourself than actually committing suicide,” Jay counters.

“I’m not like you…a different kind of crazy.”

“Semantics!”

Jay is married to Poppy (Michelle Macedo), and with Mia (Melissa Macedo, yes they’re sisters) they’ve planned a weekend at a lake house. They insist Sam come along.

Well, not Mia. Her soldier/husband Tyler (Tyler Dash White, fierce) is back from duty overseas. She’s been cheating on him with Sam, and if Tyler figures this out, there could be trouble. Mia wants Sam to not show up. But he does.

Hazy, time-bending flashbacks let us drift with Sam back to the events that haunted his youth — a beloved little sister he promised to “always protect,” a failure to keep that promise, the shattered family, the probing questions of what we assume is a child psychologist.

Sam still carries around a Three Little Pigs tin box with childhood mementos and photos. To say he’s “haunted” undersells what he’s going through.

That weekend get-away is going to bring everything to a head, his past and Mia’s present, and that’s when the dying in “Every Time I Die” raises the stakes and lifts a pretty smart movie into the realm of a thriller that plays.

It’s not a chatty movie. Director and co-writer Robi Michael is more interested in gauzy camera effects, snatches of overheard conversation forcing us to fill in between the blanks, keeping it cryptic.

The “mystery” here has a surreal feel as the film maintains, after a fashion, its opening gimmick — seeing all this through Sam’s eyes.

Fontiero (TV’s “The Last Ship”) plays Sam as introverted, introspective, not sure what he can reveal about himself, not sure which “reality” he trusts.

When you’re a guy who counts his fingers to see if the moment he’s in, or thinks he’s in, is just a dream, your disconnect is strong.

The Macedo sisters (from “Girlboss”) have less to play, but sell the film’s big conceit — that Sam isn’t himself, especially when he turns up in another body.

Menchaca has a soulful vibe he taps into here and that softens Jay into somebody we can believe would be barely hanging on, but still desperate to help his paramedic partner. And Tyler Dash White may be playing a stereotype — the combat vet with the hair-trigger psyche — but he plays the hell out of it.

It’s simple. It’s artful without overreaching, gloomy and brooding by default, suspenseful only when it needs to be.

Maybe you won’t get to see it in a theater, but remember the title — “Every Time I Die.” You’ll want to find this gold nugget on some weekend when Netflix is serving up more pyrite.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Drew Fonteiro, Michelle Macedo, Melissa Macedo, Marc Menchaca, Tyler Dash White

Credits: Directed by Robi Michael, script by Gal Katzir, Robi Michael.  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:37