Movie Review: Horror hides in plain sight on “Clinton Road”

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The movie star saunters up to the young lady who decides who gets in and who doesn’t at the newly re-opened bar, Chelsea Landing.

Eric Roberts,” he says. “I’m on the list.”

“You’re not Eric. I know Eric. He’s taller. And he’s younger.”

At least the first laugh in the lost-in-haunted-woods thriller “Clinton Road” is intentional.

The rest? The poor actor (Ace Young), thrashing about in the Haunted River, because “Something GRABBED me!”

The pauses for sex or hallucinations in those haunted woods?

The many, many times this character or that one yells, “Holy S—, you scared the f— outta me!” at sudden arrivals that truthfully, don’t scare the “f—” out of anybody?

Those laughs might be happy accidents. Or unhappy ones, if they meant for this mess to be taken seriously.

It’s a story that opens with big titles on the screen, about a legendary stretch of road in New Jersey, famed for “murders, hauntings, the occult and of the paranormal,” that is “one of the most haunted placed in the United States.”

Not to worry. For those who don’t like to read, a narrator reads those titles for us.

You need “names” to get your movie financed and distributed? Cast Roberts, as himself, in a cameo, veteran “made man” character actor Vincent Pastore as a club co-owner, and Ice-T, a third big name in the opening scene — set in that bar — an ex-cop who knows all about “Clinton Road.”

“That place is DARK, man…I had a f—–g EXPERIENCE on that road.”

He proceeds to deliver the creepiest moment in the film, just an actor telling a story about running into the same ghostly hitchhiker multiple times on the same drive down “Clinton Road,” punctuating it with the phrase, “like some TIME shift s—!”

OK, that’s probably an intentional laugh, too.

The film opens the way every other horror movie these days does, with a screaming woman being chased because she’s about to die.

A year later, friends have gathered at Chelsea Landing to party with her husband, Michael (Ace Young), and to talk themselves into joining him and the wife’s shrill sister (Katie Morrison), who has hired a one-eyed medium named Begory (James DeBello) to go with them into the woods to “communicate” with the missing Jessica.

Begory’s randy girlfriend (Erin O’Brien) and Michael’s new lady love (Why wait for the police to declare the wife dead?), played by Lauren LeVera, and jerk frat-bro skeptic Tyler (Cody Calafiore) all pile into an SUV to get some answers.

They’ll find a lot more than that…on “Clinton Road.”

Can Tyler tamp down his cynical disbelief, and stop throwing off Begory’s game? Berogy cannot believe Tyler doesn’t believe after Begory goes into a convulsive trance.

“It makes my heart heavy to see somebody that doesn’t understand the energies of the Earth.”

Yes, it’s a “Blair Witch” lost in the woods ” I feel like we’re going in circles” thing.

The problems — with the deathly consequences for the characters and the risible menaces to the movie — all begin when they leave that bar.  A bearded, bald and sunglassed (even in the dark) biker, a crazed hobo “park ranger,” a ghostly little girl spooking everybody in the movie and nobody in the audience, all worn out horror movie tropes.

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It’s a terrible film, barely worthy of the label “Z-movie.”

But I had a moment, early on, where I thought that the three biggest names in the cast meant that this might become a scary-tales-people-tell each-other-over-drinks movie.

One location, plus flashbacks, decent actors relating their hair-raising experiences in a place that yes, is notorious for being haunted.

The best way to avoid lines like the phrase “wrongfully killed” (Think about it.) and “I gotta get some air” from nonsensically turning up IN THE WOODS, is to keep the movie in the bar.

Let the rhapsodes tell their tales, especially Ice-T.

“I love scaring white boys!”

1star6

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sex, profanity, alcohol

Cast: Erin O’Brien, Ace Young, Ice T, Lauren LaVera, James DeBello, Eric Roberts, Vincent Pastore

Credits: Directed by Richard Grieco, Steve Stanulis, script by Derek Ross McKay and Joel Ashman. A Midnight Road release.

Running time: 1:17

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Preview, Jean Reno’s hit man retires, only not so much in “Cold Blood”

Jean Reno’s Leon may not have lived through being “The Professional,” but that doesn’t mean he’s not up to playing hit men into his dotage.

“Cold Blood” parks him in the snowy wilderness, suddenly visited by Sarah Lind, when he “Saves” her.

Yeah, I’ve guessed how this turns out, too. But July 5, maybe we’ll get the surprise of our movie-going lives.

And I just love that Jean Reno.

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BOX OFFICE: ‘Dark Phoenix’ duels ‘Secret Life of Pets 2’ in sequels showdown

dark3Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have had stories this week about how Disney/Fox are tamping down expectations for this, the last X Men movie we’re likely to see for a while.

Will It do $60? $50? $40s?

Box office Mojo is going all in, figuring that bad reviews, a lack of box office power from the latest “Game of Thrones” star to try the movies and simple franchise fatigue mean “Dark Phoenix” won’t earn $40.

C’mon. It made $5 million Thursday night. Surely…  Never mind.

So the weekend will belong to “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” which everybody figures will take in over $50.

Keep an eye, also, on how far “Godzilla” and “Rocketman” fall. One should have legs, but mightn’t, the other should plummet.

This should be the last weekend “Booksmart” is in the top ten. Fading faster than expected, a critic’s darling that Mid America ignored.

 

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Netflixable? Indian comedy “Chopsticks” finds laughs, just not quite enough

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A mousey, easily bullied and naive small town girl buys her first car thanks to her first job in the Big City — translator and tour guide.

She gets scammed out of her Hyundai the day she picks it up.

The cops are no help, but a friendly stranger at the police station says “I know a guy…”

And that “guy,” a suave, mysterious and slippery criminal who cracks safes and aspires to a life in haute cuisine, calls himself “Artist.” He leads her on an odyssey through the Big City, to chop shops and organized beggar brigades, food stalls and slums, a quest that leads them both to a mobster who dotes on his fighting goat like its his own child.

Oh yes, there’s a winner of a screen comedy in “Chopsticks,” a Mumbai-set romp that never comes close to romping, but finds its caper comedy footing in a delightful third act.

Director/co-writer Sachin Yardi, who has done caper comedies before (“C Kkompany” never made it to the U.S.) can be accused of lapsing into “cutesy,” in the cloying music and a few of the situations. The real problem is the most elemental mistake in creating this comedy (for Netflix, in this case).

It’s an 85 minute movie trapped in a 100 minute film. It starts so slowly, lumbers through an hour of jokes that don’t translate, and even in its funnier, more brisk finale, could use a few more gags to make it sing.

So what I’m saying is, somebody snap up the remake rights. This should work, and can work better.

We meet Nirma (Mithila Palkar) beaming that “new car” smile.

Sure, she’s named “for a detergent.” She may be bullied at her job, translating for Chinese tourists as a guide working for the Taj Land’s End Hotel. And she’s small-town superstitious enough to wish the tiny Hyundai i10 had luckier numbers on the license plate.

But no worries. Get her guru’s sticker on the window, leave the plastic on the seats, pop in one of her self-actualization CDs — “”When s— happens in my life, I turn it into fertilizer!” — and as mom directs on the phone, she heads to Mahalakshmi Temple to pray, and maybe ask for a Hyundai blessing.

This is Mumbai, one of the most crowded places on Earth. Traffic is murder. She tries to park, entrusts an attendant to do it for her.

And he was no attendant.

One of the best reasons to hunt down foreign films is to get a taste of the culture, and comedies often do that best. We sample Indian bureaucracy and poverty (the Dharavi slums are must-see for Chinese tourists, where “Slumdog Millionaire,” and which Nirma tells her tourists (in Mandarin) that “is the only place in the world that makes more counterfeit goods than China!”

And everybody Nirma meets and tells her sad story to gives her that clucking, sad/mocking/understanding/affirming Indian head wobble.

Including the dashing crook squatting in an unfinished building with a mysteriously finished and fully-equipped kitchen. Veteran actor Abhay Deol has the matinee idol hair and the cool arrogance of a man in his element. He’s cooking when they meet, and mocking.

From “Couldn’t your parents find you a better name?” to asking if she studied English, demanding that she tell him the name of the fish she’s cooking, no, it’s “Salmon….the ‘l’ is silent…You should ask your school for a refund.”

But sure, he’ll help her find the car.

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And along the way, he’ll pass along life lessons — about being confident, assertive, about not being naive enough to see that “everybody steals something,” and about how no matter how dire the situation she’s in, “There are always options.”

Artist cracks safes, picks locks and is pals with everybody who is anybody in the Mumbai underworld. But he’s seriously unhurried, and Nirma’s already been told she has three days, tops, to find her car before it’s re-sold out of town, or chopped for parts.

That’s a gripe about the movie, as well. There’s little urgency about it.

But great ideas and gags pop up, here and there. One of the city’s many impromptu street rallies, a traffic-killing parade, with music — no permits required — gives Artist the chance to show he’s too cool for school. He sidles up to a drummer, slips him a bribe.

Damned if the band doesn’t launch into the National Anthem. The dancing stops, and the marching. Every driver, cabbie, motorist and cop gets out of the car, stands at stock-still attention, and hears it out.

And when it finishes, the politician for whom this traffic jam parade is for follows tradition. “You can’t follow the National Anthem!” In America, we may play it at the beginning of ballgames, but apparently things work differently on the Subcontinent.

The villain who ends up with the car, the guy with the fighting goat (Vijay Raaz, menacingly funny) is a very humane mobster. He tortures a singer who owes him something by forcing him to run on a treadmill. And sing his favorite songs to him when he’s done.

And he takes it VERY personally if his chef has the temerity to serve lamb at a birthday party for the goat (named the Indian equivalent of “Armstrong,” even though nobody knows who Neil or Lance are).

Palkar’s in her 20s and looks about 15, which fits. She does well with Nirma Sahastrabuddhe’s character arc, from pushover to assertive. Remember, it wasn’t just John Wick’s dog that he lost. It was his car that got him worked up. People are like that, in Miami or in Mumbai.

Deol has a Brad Pitt swagger here, rolling his own smokes, at ease in any situation, unflappable even when things go off the rails, as they must. Artist is so cool that he keeps a photo of the extended family of India’s leading lock-makers on his wall.

“I feel we’re…connected!”

There’s a hand-held camera panicked chase (funny), a bit of heavy underlining of scenes with slogans written on cab windows –“Take Action, if you dare. If not, Endure.” Director Yardi isn’t subtle, but ladling in a song with “Death is inevitable” (like the rest of the film, in Hindi with English subtitles) as ironic counterpoint to a simulated “death” scene made me laugh.

I didn’t mind “Chopsticks” — the title is a play on the eating implement, and chop shops — which isn’t the same thing as a ringing endorsement. Finishing with a funny flourish helps. Call it a “near miss” comedy, with a bit of “better luck, more joked-up script, editing editing next time” written into Yardi’s contract.

Before making his next film, though, I’d suggest he get his agent to shop the remake rights around. Somebody could make this sing.

2stars1

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Mithila Palkar, Vijay Raaz, Abhay Deol with Sanjeev Kapoor

Credits: Directed by Sachin Yardi, script by Rahul Awate and Sachin Yardi. A Netlflix release.

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Review: Baby snatching at the B & B — “The Child Remains”

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She’s “an acclaimed reporter,” pregnant at 42 and desperate for a little weekend getaway on her birthday.

He’s a younger musician, struggling to keep the dream alive a little longer with fatherhood bearing down on him.

Rae (Suzanne Clément) has post traumatic stress disorder, which covering crime scenes will do to you.

Liam (Allan Hawco) just wants to make her happy, and has just the place for them to unwind — this recently opened B & B, The Mersey Inn — remote, historic and Canadian.

But The Mersey wasn’t always an inn. And as the overly-solicitous manager (Shelley Thompson) coos that they’re “our only guests” this fall weekend and won’t stop talking about “Mother,” Rae starts to experience “triggers” — flashes of the horrors that have visited the place in its earlier guise, horrors we’ve seen sampled in the prologue to “The Child Remains.”

Writer-director Michael Melski (he did the doc “Perfume War” and the comedy “Growing Op”) manages only the most modest chills in this gloomy production, filmed in Nova Scotia.

His prologue establishes that history — a young expectant mother (Lesley Smith) — is held down, surrounded by other women, a “midwife” birth from hell.

There’s blood and judgement from the leader, who mutters prayers and condemns Faith (Smith) of “doing the Devil’s work.”

Faith hemorrhages and screams for her baby, to no avail.

Now, decades later, Rae experiences “flashes” of what happened, the crimes and their aftermath. She sees visions of Faith.

“It’s like…the house has what I have.”

“The house has…Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

Liam is slow to pick up on hostess Monica’s hints, her rose-colored recollections of “my mother Rose, a proud Christian” “delivering many babies here,” Monica’s barely-concealed distaste for “abortion” and “birth control” in these “more enlightened times.”

Rae gets plenty of warnings, too. The creepy groundskeeper asks “Your watch, is it gold?” That’d be enough to make most of us pack out bags.

But no. She’s a crime reporter and she’s going to sniff around, no matter what Liam decides to do, whatever his motivations.

The cast is properly invested in the material, but Melski takes his sweet time getting around to Rae’s immersion in the mystery.

Treating what we’re seeing as a mystery when we’ve seen the give-away prologue feels like a mistake. Rae’s investigation, snooping around the small town library nearby (a book “chooses” her), fills in the blanks and deepens our understanding of what’s happening, but would work far better as “WOW” revelations lighting the dark.

Which is where “The Child Remains” should have kept the viewer — in the dark. A shorter, simpler prologue, quicker set-up and far more pulse-pounding finale are what this picture needs.

Do more with the chilling, unusual setting, the so-called antique “Ghost Box” Liam stumbles across (a ghost presence detector patented by Edison).

Have Faith give us the clues so that we can find our way. Don’t just throw it all out there in the opening.

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As it is, the too-obvious/too-slow “Remains” doesn’t frighten, doesn’t engross and doesn’t remain on the memory much past the closing credits.

1half-star

 

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Suzanne Clément, Allan Hawco, Shelley Thompson, Lesley Smith

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Melski. An Uncork’d release.

Running time:  1:47

 

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Cherokee Wes Studi first Native American to receive Oscar with Lifetime Achievement Award

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Well deserved. A great actor and iconic screen presence.

Great in Westerns, well-cast as cops, etc. in any tale set in the Desert Southwest or “The Nations,” criminally under-used in other films.

I interviewed him when “Last of the Mohicans” and “Geronimo” came out, and found him cool, regal and funny.

Give this man an honorary Oscar and send him to film festivals for his VICTORY lap.

https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/ny-wes-studi-first-native-actor-oscar-lifetime-achievement-cherokee-20190606-dn2wpnhkine5fb2yr7gsx2qt2u-story.html?outputType=amp

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Christian boycott of Netflix and other producers that say they’re pulling out of Georgia

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Faithwire, source of this story, would have you believe it’s an explosive “movement” that is convincing anti abortion conservatives to drop Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus etc

The numbers are laughably low to be making that claim.

But it’ll be interesting to see who blinks — Georgia or the various production entities that have condemned the state’s actions and are threatening to take their production elsewhere.

The smart money’s on Georgia giving in. They’ve built this industry up, thanks to all these incentives Hollywood loves (free money to make movies there). But Hollywood will go somewhere else that has incentives if a state gets too reactionary and the pressure from the acting, production community from liberal California gets too much.

 

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Preview, So how down and dirty will “The Quiet One,” the doc about Rolling Stone bassist and cradle robber Bill Wyman, get?

He took notes, photographed and documented the band’s Iives and their career together.

June 21, we see what he saw.

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Movie Review: Baldwin finally plays somebody other than Trump in “Framing John DeLorean”

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The life of John DeLorean would make a helluva movie.

That’s a thesis that opens and closes “Framing John DeLorean,” a new genre-bending docu-drama about the creator of the car immortalized in “Back to the Future.”

There were screenplays floating around, projects in development about the GM star who invented “The Muscle Car,” got fired and started the futuristic DeLorean Motor Company only to get caught trying to close a drug deal in order to save it.

It could be a “Tucker: The Man and his Dream” — with cocaine, and a supermodel (his then-wife), the politics of “The Troubles” (they built DeLoreans in Northern Ireland) and a Shakespearean hero with a Shakespearean “tragic flaw.” Or two.

But “Framing John DeLorean,” by the filmmakers who gave us “The Art of the Steal” and “Batman & Bill” (Don Argott, Sheena M. Joyce) so demythologizes the man that you can sort of see why the movie never came to be.

It’s still too soon. Maybe too much is remembered. Maybe it’ll take time to forget that the heroic image the public once bathed this ’80s icon in was as phony as Reagan’s hair color. Maybe the Coppola who makes this “Tucker” is a kid who just fell in love with “Back to the Future.”

Joyce and Argott build “Framing” with interviews with DeLorean’s associates, with a biographer and journalists who covered him and even reviewed his “slow, didn’t handle great, cost more than a Corvette” car.

But the structure they frame the movie with is recreations of DeLorean’s big public moments, reenactments of the F.B.I. surveillance footage of that infamous drug deal (we see the real footage in the film’s opening), and those reenactments star Alec Baldwin, Morena Baccarin (as supermodel Cristina Ferrare, his wife), Josh Charles, Michael Rispoli and Jason Jones.

The documentary takes on meta-movie qualities as we see Baldwin putting on the makeup to simulate DeLorean’s plastic-surgeon-sculpted face, watching video interviews with DeLorean while he’s in the makeup chair and commenting on motivation, the inner life an actor imagines when he’s working on a character.

Baldwin picks up on the reserve, the native cunning in DeLorean’s gaze, and puts his own subdued and subtle touches in the character, not seeing him as “history” sees him.

“You go ‘No no no no, he’s a HERO.’ You have to play who he thinks he is.'”

Baldwin chuckles on Facetime with his wife in makeup, notes he married somebody even younger than DeLorean did and declares, “I GET this.”

It’s no wonder the filmmakers let Baldwin direct himself, more or less, in these scenes. We see Baldwin act, and see him prep to play a scene in many cases, choosing camera angles for dramatic effect, etc.

And amidst all the producers who were going to make a movie about DeLorean, and Bob Gale, the co-writer and producer of “Back to the Future,” “Framing John DeLorean’s screenwriter — in essence — is another interviewee. Zach DeLorean is the salty, salt-of-the-Earth adopted son of John DeLorean, and he shows up to strip away the mystique (about the man, the father and the “damned car”). He narrates the structure a “movie about my dad” should take, more importantly how it should end.

Joyce and Argott briskly track Detroit-native DeLorean’s rise, skipping his early Packard years to nail down the day he gave the edict to designer Bill Collins (seen in the film, and played by Josh Charles in reenactments) to put a bigger motor in the ’64 Pontiac Tempest, launching the Muscle Car craze that lasted through the Arab Oil Embargo a decade later.

We hear how DeLorean, bound for the presidency of the World’s Largest Company (General Motors) criticized his way out of the job by pointing out how GM needed to adapt to fight the smaller, more economical and better-built VWs and Toyotas that flooded the country in the Oil Embargo ’70s.

And we meet government officials and assembly line workers from Northern Ireland where DeLorean gambled and took incentive money to built the sleek, futuristic stainless steel DMC 12 sports car that bore his name.

“John was the biggest hero in Northern Ireland” the day the first cars rolled off that assembly line in war-torn Belfast, Protestants and Catholics, proudly working together on — let’s face it — the coolest car of its age.

But the car had engineering issues and build quality problems. Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and pulled the plug on incentives that were actually helping keep the peace. And then the Reagan Recession hit.

There was no time and no money to ride it out, get the car sorted and get sales back up, something DeLorean was mysteriously slow to get a handle on. Desperation set in, a “confidential informant” (played by Rispoli) had a mark.

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“Framing John DeLorean” has a classic story arc that, thanks to the character it’s based on, is problematic. Although we see footage of an ’80s documentary celebrating the man and the Belfast car company directed by doc legends Chris Hegedus and Don “D.A.” Pennebaker, we know now what they didn’t then. He’s not heroic, not really anti-heroic either. He’s the Gordon Gekko of car builders — a creature of the “Greed is Good” era.

But Baldwin lets us see glimpses of a movie that might be — on cable or streaming, a mini-series of “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson” style. Baldwin gets the tall, ungainly gait down and the makeup looks like that of a vain, egotistical “winner” who’d had work done to give him that profile.

One producer of an abandoned film project notes, “If it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t dare make it up.”

And screen veteran Bob Gale, his fondness for the subject warmed by the glories of “Back to the Future,” all but predicts the path the story will take when it finally does become a movie. He quotes John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a newspaperman in that classic Western said.

Whatever the facts, Gale knows just how Hollywood will immortalize the man the way “Back to the Future” immortalized the car.

“We print the legend.”

3stars2

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Alec Baldwin, Morena Baccarin, Josh Charles, Dean Winters, Michael Rispoli

Credits: Directed by Don Argott, Sheena M. Joyce, scripted by Dan Greeney, Alexandra Orton.  An IFC/Sundance Selects release.

Running time: 1:44

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Movie Review: Cultures clash in the mild mannered way in “Papi Chulo”

 

“Papi Chulo” doesn’t start with much promise.

The idea of a wealthy gay Angelino bonding with a Latino laborer he hires to do some painting for him feels cloying, and the situations that spin out of that are generally eye-rollers.

Casting the good-looking Matt Bomer, of the “Will & Grace” revival and “Magic Mike,” as an LA TV weatherman isn’t the slam dunk you’d expect, because he doesn’t carry himself on the dated, cheap “local TV in the ’80s” newscast set like anybody who could hold such a job in any market outside of say, Williston, North Dakota.

But give it time — a LOT of run time — and Irish writer-director John Butler’s little dramedy finds its feet and eventually, its heart.

This run of the mill culture-clash comedy set in the most tiresomely over-filmed city on Earth works. Again, eventually.

Bomer plays Sean, who breaks down in mid weathercast on live TV. His boss (Wendi McLendon-Covey of “The Goldbergs”) and co-workers are sympathetic. They put him on “garden leave,” give him time to get it together.

“The viewers saw tears. That is VERY distressing to them.”

Sean is reeling from the end of a relationship. He’s compulsively calling and leaving voice-mails for Carlos, his ex. Selling the potted tree Carlos once gave him all but wipes their slate clean. He hopes.

But darn it, the pot left an unpainted circle on his wooden deck. And he’s utterly inept at painting over it. Time to get a professional.

That’s how he meets Ernesto, one of the day laborers who gather in the parking lot of the lumber/hardware store, picking up handyman jobs that pay in cash.

Ernesto (Alejandro Patiño of “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”) speaks no English, and Sean only speaks what I call “survival Spanglish” — just enough to cover the basics.

“Hablo un poquito,” he admits. But “$20 an hour” they both understand. And when they get to Sean’s house, “Mas de u dia” gets through, too.

Ernesto will sand, clean and then paint the deck, and that’s going to take a few days.

But what starts as a simple transaction rapidly morphs into an awkward, boundaries-blurring “relationship.” Sean wants to feed Ernesto, constantly interrupts him to offer drinks. Sean cuts the days short.

“Es tarde,” he says. And next thing Ernesto knows, he’s being driven to stores, to a lake where Sean insists they go rowing (Ernesto takes the oars), for a hike.

All of which Sean fills with endless babble about Carlos, himself, the hole in his life without that relationship, none of which Ernesto understands.

“You think I’m crazy, right? Loco? I confess, I am going through a rough patch.”

It’s a “talking cure,” a confessional. And even though Ernesto doesn’t understand Sean’s soliloquies, and looks a lot like the late Mel Blanc, Sean senses a connection.

He can’t understand what Ernest says when he calls his wife (Elena Campbell-Martinez).

“I’m rowing this gringo,” he tells her (in Spanish, with English subtitles), or “”$200 for a walk in the sunshine.” She seems to figure out what’s going on here in a flash.

Passersby are more insulting.

“You guys have a ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ thing going on, here.”

Butler goes about as far with this as he can, adding the odd moment of California’s “Invisible Mexicans” casual racism.

Ernesto shrugs at any Hispanic person he meets, just shrugging at the odd situation he finds himself in.

“Aye, gringos,” is all he can say, and to the right person, that’s all he needs to say.

The light sprinkling of laughs spring from a gay cocktail party he drags Ernesto to.

“We met at the hardware store!”

“I get it. Nobody wants to say they met on Grindr!”

Butler doesn’t reach for laughs, and that’s a serious shortcoming in “Papi Chulo.” The guys have a Madonna sing along to the radio moment in the Lyft ride home from that party. Guess the song. Try. Come on.

Suffice it to say that it’s a little too “on the nose,” which you could say about the entire film.

The performances present an engaging contrast, with Bomer growing on you as you start to appreciate what’s broken in Sean, and Patiño’s deadpan shrug evolving into something more compassionate.

But the third act, which brings everything that’s going on here to a head, atones for the cliches, stereotypes and limp jokes of the first two. Most of them, anyway.

Now that Butler’s over the novelty of getting to make a movie in Hollywood (this was made with Irish financing), I look forward to his next picture, which hopefully will be more like “Handsome Devil,” his previous film — Irish.

God knows we’ve all seen enough movies set and filmed in LA to last many lifetimes.

2half-star6

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Matt Bomer, Alejandro Patiño, Elena Campbell-Martinez,Wendi McLendon-Covey

Credits: Written and directed by John Butler. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:38

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