Movie Nation

Absolute peers, known each other from their beginnings, a chat among equals in every sense. Funny bits, and the show is generally at it’s best when Jerry isn’t higher status than his guest. Tries harder, let’s them be them.

Murphy? Relaxed. Lying about planning to get back into standup. Comfortable in his own skin, no “uncomfortable” questions.

Nice cars, as always. I must say, the tendency towards newer Porsches and Rolls Royces seems a tad…product placement.

More comics, Seth Rogen chuckling over moving off the Sony lot by because “They hate us” after the whole Kim Jung In movie and hack, much more.

Ricky Gervais, back and in a Roller, no less. Cackling.

“Not shy about the fact that we’ve done well.”

Matthew Broderick, disarming and charming and walking his old neighborhood — DENIED entrance to a pretentious NYC coffee shop.

Driving Melissa Villaseñor around in the personification of Seinfeld’s view of collectible cars, that they’re “like toys from when you were a kid.” He puts her in a Nissan Figaro, the most toylike car of its day.

Seinfeld’s most human moment? Showing his prickly side (journalists have seen it, and Ke$ha), fuming about an unnamed comic who criticizes him to Bridget Everett. Gottfried? Goldthwait? Kindler?

Best show of its type. Why waste time with Leno? Or for that matter, Letterman?

New season’s on Netflix.

It’s subtle enough that you might not notice it while “Wild Rose” is telling its story on the screen. Maybe it’ll hit you later, on the ride or walk home.

This is a world of women, succeeding or failing, aiding or hindering, self-helping or self-destroying, where the men are in the background — drinking/sex buddies, house band members, all-but-anonymous stepping stones or obstacles to a woman obsessed with achieving her dream — becoming a country music star.

That’s what Rose Harlan, played in a break out performance by Irish-born actress Jesse Buckley (Marya in British TV’s “War & Peace”), covets above all. If only she could stick to it, put the effort in, maybe learn to play an instrument and write songs, sober up.

If only she wasn’t in prison when we meet her. Of course, that wasn’t a hindrance for  Merle or Johnny Cash. But still, everything we learn about her in a brisk opening montage — exuberant on release, stopping for a quick drink and a shag with an old beau — points to “This is NEVER happening.”

Rose is in her mid-20s, with two kids she gave birth to before she turned 18. Her mum (Julie Walters) has been raising them — because Rose was in prison, and Rose took care of her own impulses and “needs” before coming “home” to her plainly-traumatized, almost-strangers children, aptly named Wynonna and Lyle.

With an ankle monitor keeping her at home between 7pm and 7am, how will she make time for honky-tonking?

And hell, Rose lives in Glasgow. “Whoever HAIRD of a country music star from Glasgooooooo?” she purrs in that lovely burr.

Screenwriter Nicole Taylor, who did that wonderful Dominic West/Romola Gary/Ben Whishaw Cold War TV series “The Hour,” cooks up a marvelous portrait of self-destruction that at times feels like an homage to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s indie cinema finest hour, “Georgia,” at other times a bit like “The Thing Called Love,” seeing the Nashville Dream through an outsider’s eyes.

But the “tell” here is the casting of Walters as Rose’s long-suffering mother. “Educating Rita” introduced the world to Walters, and Buckley’s Rose sounds just like her with her “Maybe 20 years at the bakers’ was good enough for you, but not for me” defiance.

Taylor lets us fall-in-hate with Rose, who is, by any yardstick, a terrible mother. Her bipolar temperament — drinking, laughing, the life of the party when she’s onstage or at the pub, exploding at those who have replaced her as “the star” of the Glasgow Grand Ole’ Opry, at her mother for not dropping everything to help out with the kids — makes us fear for the children.

Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) is bookish and won’t speak to her mother. Little Lyle (Adam Mitchell) is acting out, furious at the world and the only parent he’s ever had a chance to know, but wasn’t interested in knowing him.

Taylor introduces a veritable fairy godmother into this circle of dysfunction. Sophie Okenedo (“Hotel Rwanda”) is sweetness, light, enthusiasm and wealth, the woman whose house Rose takes over cleaning. Susannah doesn’t know about the prison record or the kids, doesn’t keep track of Rose raiding her liquor cabinet.

But she is given a tour of Rose’s favorite tattoo — the most flattering and pithy definition of country music ever put in ink.

“Three chords and the truth.”

As Rose loses herself in her headphones, belting out country classics, dancing and imagining the house band at the Opry backing her whilst she vacuums, Susannah’s kids are smitten. And soon Susannah is as enthused about “Country and Western” — “It’s just COUNTRY. There ain’t no ‘Western.'” — as Rose.

And she starts helping.

film wild rose with Julie walters

I love the way Taylor and Buckley set us up for disappointments, the way Rose is always disappointing her mother and children. A chance to meet BBC Radio’s legendary country music program host (Bob Harris plays himself)? Rose gets drunk on the train and has her money, phone and bag stolen.

Buckley is a gloriously earthy presence at the heart of “Wild Rose,” so much so that you can’t help but root for this reckless wreck. We can see that the white leather jacket and omnipresent white cowboy boots and star spangled stage blouse aren’t enough. Freckled, uninhibited and unexercised Rose tends more towards Celtic “cute” than pretty, her voice a tad thin and undistinguished to stand out in an industry/art form of bombshells and belters.

Buckley never lets us see that Rose sees this, and takes us on this drive down Delusional Dreams Blvd. with her. Walters brings a feisty sobriety to her mother, and Okenedo an indulgent understanding that’s plainly based on misunderstanding.

I wasn’t keen on the tacked-on finale, part of a third act collapse that dings but doesn’t utterly derail the picture. But “Wild Rose” is still a vivid, estrogen-charged charmer, a winning twist on “chasing your dream” and “You can have it all” with just enough sober slapdowns to keep it honest.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some sexuality and brief drug material

Cast: Jesse Buckley, Sophie Okenedo, Julie Walters

Credits: Directed by Tom Harper, script by Nicole Taylor.  A Neon release.

Running time: 1:41

Lots of prognosticators, perhaps intimidated by Disney and its ability to retaliate, seemed to be avoiding predicting how much the Mouse would make on the second worst-reviewed of its animation-to-“live”-action remakes, “The Lion King.”

I’ve read on discussion boards predictions of as high as $200 million, or as low as $100.

Box Office Mojo was late posting the suggestion that $190 million was the mark Disney is going for.

But Deadline.com lets slip that $180-192 is the range, and a $22-25 million Thursday puts the lower end of that spectrum within reach.

That will bury “Spider-Man: Far from Home” on its third weekend ($22), with “Toy Story 4” fading to $10-12, and only “Yesterday” holding audience, weekend to weekend, and “Crawl” managing another $6-7 million, if they’re lucky.

Bleecker Street’s wide release of “The Art of Self-Defense” is neither wide enough in release (550 or so theaters) or appeal to crack the top ten.

With Jesse Eisenberg as the high-voiced “femine name” hero-dweeb, and Alessandro Nivola as his scary foil and karate “sensei” (teacher/master), “The Art of Self-Defense” is the very picture of “on the nose casting.”

So writer-director Riley Stearns, of the little-seen “Faults,” makes it his mission to have that be the only thing that’s predictable in this quirky, violent satire of “toxic masculinity” and revenge in a culture where the affronts to one’s manhood lie around every corner. And for the most part, he succeeds.

Eisenberg is Casey, mild-mannered accountant and loner in an unnamed city, for an unnamed firm where there’s no point to him trying to squeeze in to the “hate the boss” chatter among the guys in the coffee break room.

Like a lot of Eisenberg characters, there are traces of “on the spectrum” to his awkwardness. And meek? A blunt “get out” ends those conversation overtures. A sad look from his dachshund guilts him into a late night walk to fetch dog food.

That’s the walk that changes his life. He is accosted and savagely beaten by visored-helmet hoodlums on motorcycles, the sort of thing that happens mostly in the movies and not in, say, Louisville, the unnamed city where this is filmed.

Stearns uses indistinct license plates to mask that, and leaves most characters’ names out, or delays their revelation. We’re meant to focus on the satire, the droll send-up of aspects of masculinity, bullying, violence and gun ownership.

Because that is Casey’s first solution to his “I can’t go back out there” after dark, the fear and humiliation that accompanies the physical injuries.

A TV newscaster has warned people not to venture out “without a weapon,” thanks to these motorbike muggings. Casey takes that as his cue to visit that museum of fetishized manhood, his local gun shop, where the owner takes a sadistic liberal’s delight in citing statistics about suicide and accidental death risks, joking about the vastly heightened danger to having children in a house with guns, but “if you’re having kids, we sell child-safety locks that are reasonably effective.”

But it is the macho bellows and grunts emanating from a local dojo that lure Casey in. A woman (Imogen Poots) is teaching small children in fairly graphic terms the sorts of pain, injury and even death they can hope to achieve by mastering this move or that “choke hold,””closing the carotid artery, cutting off oxygen to the brain,” etc.

Hilarious.

The “rules” of the dojo are on the wall. No shoes on the mat, and “Guns are for the weak.”

The sensei, played by that face of beady-eyed malevolence, Nivola (“American Hustle,” “A Most Violent Year”) is dry, blunt, obsessed with his version of honor and martial arts respect, and yet seductive. He seems to understand Casey more than he should, sizing him up, challenging him but also gently flattering him. Why is he here?

Forget the answers Casey gives most easily. There’s only one that counts.

“I want to become what intimidates me.”

For a guy teaching himself French, mastering “I want no trouble, sir. I am but a tourist” just in case, this is a giant step.

Dojo becomes not just therapy, but his obsession. And “The Art of Self-Defense” drags us down that rabbit hole with him. This is “The Social Network” with “use your foot as your fist, your fist as your foot” solving a smart, wimpy guy’s shortcomings.

We can guess what’s coming, though Stearns puts in admirable effort at twisting up expectations, or at least delaying them.

Stearns could be getting at the notion that it’s not a coincidence that America’s feminine obsession with “bullying” and ways to deal with it that don’t involve the age-old rule of “always confront, always fight back” that boys have had hard-wired into them by fathers, movies and TV, preceded by a couple of years the election of the most stereotypical bully ever to hold the presidency.

“The Art of Self-Defense” struggles, in a clumsy or at least problematic third act that takes us to its darkest corners, to have it both ways — a world where somebody else does the confronting before the way is cleared for a more enlightened and yes, feminine and peaceful future.

Perhaps that’s what Nancy Pelosi is waiting for.

Discounting that, Stearns has still made us laugh through the grimaces for much of “The Art of Self-Defense,” and if nothing else, has given anyone — “Karate Kid” parents or adults — a veritable checklist of the warning signs that maybe this dojo isn’t for you, signs that perhaps the sensei doesn’t use the word “teacher” because what he really wants aren’t classes, but a cult.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, sexual content, graphic nudity and language

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, Imogen Poots

Credits: Written and directed by Riley Stearns. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:44

More of a dogs guy myself. Still, it always felt like the perfect Christmas musical. Always.

No sense “opening it up,” trying to improve or remove the theatricality.

Like “Rent,” it is beloved just as it is.

Another feather in the longevity cap of the ’80s most iconic movie star.

Next year,Top Gun AARP comes to theaters. Good on him.

Quite the summer and fall for Mr. Brad Pitt.

Tarantino and sci fi. Quite the one two punch.

Sept. 20.

Husband and wife Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara star in “Bottom of the Ninth,” a “second chance” romance that get swallowed by the generic and generally dull baseball story it’s wrapped in.

Manganiello plays a ballplayer sent to prison for a deadly mistake he made in his youth, trying to start over again 18 years later when he gets out.

Vergara is the neighborhood girl he left behind, probably not reluctant enough (realistically) to reconnect with an old flame with horrific baggage, wracked by guilt and struggling to “grow up” after losing the promise of a life where he’d never have to.

Sonny Stano (Manganiello) was a Bronx kid who had it all back in the ’90s, a big swing and a big league contract. But a teenaged brawl ended that looming career with the Yankees. He turned his back on the game while in prison, doing nine years for (I’m guessing here) manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter, and nine more years “for just staying alive.” He had to fight and hurt others just to survive Sing Sing.

Getting out, going back “to the old neighborhood,” he figures out that there’s no forgetting, no making amends, no going back.

“Second chances are hard to come by,” the old friend (James Madio) who hires him to haul fish and run personal errands, says. Like everybody else, he’s tactless about “You were the king, once, remember Sonny? And “that kid whose life you took.”

Denis O’Hare (“Dallas Buyers Club) is the perfectly blunt parole officer, not sugar coating the “major league contract, and you blew it” past.

Michael Rispoli is the old Yankees coach, now minor league manager, who tries (inexplicably, I should add) to reconnect. Sonny’s not having it.

“Me and baseball? We’re done…I gotta grow up.”

But the petty indignations of the menial job — caddying is included — eat at the former baller.

“You were a Yankee?”
“Almost.”

“What happened?”

“Killed a guy.”

The batting cage beckons. The sweet, beefy swing is still there.

So is that “offer” from the old coach. Help teach the rookies on the Staten Island Empires. Get back to the game and give back to the game.

And so is Angela (Vergara), the one he wanted to “move on with your life” back then, but still making him weak in the knees as a 40ish single mom/Spanish teacher.

The problem signs with “Bottom of the Ninth” bubble up almost right from the start, a funereal “slow walk” back through the old neighborhood that make everything that follows seem enervated.

Director Raymond De Felitta did “City Island” with Andy Garcia, and his special gift to the cinema is stretching 65 minutes of story into 110 minutes of movie. Slow, leaden scenes, one right after the other, are the rule. The conflicts here are either lost in the editing, watered down or so abrupt as to seem ridiculous and out-of-the-blue.

The only hints of style are in the baseball scenes, extreme close-ups of what Sonny “sees” in the batter’s box, “reading” pitchers, what he might be able to teach the cocky Latino (Xavier Scott Evans) slugger who might say “I don’t have to listen to no sorry-ass ‘never was,'” but who has no idea how to hit big league pitching.

The love story follows a familiar path, but is shockingly lacking in sparks. I like these actors, but Vergara dials her on-screen bubbliness down so far as to be drab on screen. And Manganiello struggles to play meek, chastened and wounded.

He’s a big guy who shines when he swaggers, is self-aware of his “Magic Mike” beefcake and has a laugh with it. He’s a convincing hitter, but the character seems like a poor personality fit. Sonny’s a boring, brooding figure that isn’t a compelling reason to immerse yourself in his story.

There’s a little life in the tired locker room tirades of Rispoli’s “Bull Durham Lite” manager, and Burt Young shows up as an old Yankee telling old Yankee stories.

But “Bottom of the Ninth” plays more like the “Seventh Inning Stretch,” a long pause between scenes where nothing much of consequence happens.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some violence.

Cast: Joe Manganiello, Sofia Vergara, Michael Rispoli, Burt Young, Vincent Pastore

Credits: Directed by Raymond De Felitta, Robert Bruzio. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:51

The leader of the “Keep America White” Nordic Social Club can curse and bully with the best of them. But it’s when he (Bill Camp) dials it down to a whisper that the real menace kicks in.

“I still own you,” he growls at one of his disciples, “and every inch of ink on you!”

Skinheads, their culture, common backgrounds, penchant for violence and passion for symbolic tattoos are the characters and the setting for “Skin,” Guy Nattiv’s searing and seriously unsettling tale of the white supremacists who crawled out from under their rocks when the White House changed hands.

It’s a world of racist rallies, blood rituals and blood spilled, marches for “Blood and Soil!” and the brawls that descend into riots when counter-protestors show up. Hazing and tests of testosterone, Lynyrd Skynyrd covers and rough, unemotional sex, racist rhetoric and the raging mindset that fosters.

For the old folks at home, these are fascists, “very good people,” to some. They’re the “fa” in “AntiFa,” which a whole lot of older Fox News addicts know to fear, but don’t care to find out the crazed “fa” bigots are that they’re protesting against.

Jamie Bell once again transforms himself, this time into Byron “Babbs” Widener, an Ohio skinhead deep into the culture, taken in when he had no home or “family,” now covered in the tattoos of the hardest of the hard core.

The film is framed within shots of Byron going through the excruciating pain of having those tattoos, which were imprinted just as painfully, removed. So we know he took a shot at getting out, and very quickly the narrative sets up his reason.

A rage-aholic with no impulse control, chief lieutenant to “Dad” (Camp) and Mom (Vera Farmiga), can Babbs be saved by the love of a good woman? That would be Julie, played by Danielle Macdonald (“Patti Cake$”), who grew up in “the life,” but with three daughters already, at least talks the talk.

“I don’t want my kids to be around this.”

Tough and tender Babbs sucks her back in. Will she be enough to lure him out?

New recruits are enticed with the promise that if they “join the real deal” they can “do some REAL damage.”

Not just pulling racist online trolling, wearing racist T-shirts and the like. Pulling guys out of melees to beat half to death. Mosque burnings, the works.

Nattiv allows time for just one scene where the ineffectual, threatening cops (Mary Stuart Masterson) try and “turn” Babbs, and plenty more time for the equally long shot approach of Daryle Jenkins (Mike Colter of TV’s “Luke Cage”). He runs the One People’s Project, and he’s had enough confrontations to figure out that meeting violence with violence isn’t the smart play.

“You’ve got a heart! You ain’t like them, Babbs! Love you, Babbs!”

Yeah, yelling that in the middle of a march or perp walk is just what a skinhead wants to hear. Colter makes it seem sincere, even if the character is left under-developed.

Camp is a total buy-in as the “Nordic” chief of this “like REAL Vikings” club/cult. He’s smoothest in the “intervention” they stage when they fear Babbs is drifting away.

Farmiga dazzles as the seductive master saleswoman, the bait for wayward white punks looking for direction, for a family.

“You can call me ‘Mom.”

Macdonald carries herself like the catch she knows she is, Big Girl Magic incarnate.

But it is Bell who makes the movie, belligerent, coiled fury from the tip of his bald head to the toes he bounces on as he stomps into the frame, threatening one and all, righteous in his racist wrath.

The “true story” angle and the foreshadowing — those framework scenes where we see Byron try to erase the emblems of his past — rob “Skin” of its sense of surprise.

The power of Bell’s performance, the horror of the rhetoric and mindless mindset render “surprise” a moot point. We know they’re coming. We just have to decide what to do about them.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, pervasive language, some sexuality, and brief drug use

Cast: Jamie Bell, Danielle Macdonald, Vera Farmiga, Bill Camp, Daniel Henshall

Credits: Written and directed by Guy Nattiv.  An A24 release.

Running time: 2:00

Netflix has a mixed bag on action pics, and that problem extends to the trailers they tend to cut for them.

This one doesn’t really sell this “true story” — and you can feel they’re leaving something out — lots of somethings.

It’s disingenuous in the extreme.

This July 31 film, “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” based on wasn’t about rescuing “dissidents” from famine and civil–war torn Ethiopia. It was about rescuing Ethiopia’s Jews from Sudan, one of several operations carried out by the Mossad (“Operation Moses,” “Operation Solomon”) etc).

Leaving that out of the trailer is either out of fear of anti-Semitic backlash or a simple acknowledgement of the overall optics of Israel bringing in more co-religionists — whose assimilation has been anything but easy  — sure seems less “heroic” than the altruism being sold here.

They’re boosting their population share of multi-ethnic Palestine/Israel, one of many ways that lead people as highly placed as Jimmy Carter to refer to Israel as “an Apartheid state.”

Timing’s a bit odd, too. Netanyahu puffing? It premieres on Netflix July 31.