A belated sequel with few surprises

 A well-matched Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman don't miss much of a beat as they revisit their performances in Practical Magic 2, a sequel to 1998’s Practical Magic, an adaptation of a novel by Alice Hoffman. 

 Despite dealing with witchcraft, Practical Magic 2 — directed by Susanne Bier — proves innocuous, a movie that unfolds pretty much as you'd expect, offering a cheerleading session for sisterhood and fan service for loyal followers of the original, a group that evidently swelled after the movie finished its theatrical run.

    Once again, Bullock and Kidman play the Owens sisters, sibling witches still haunted by the curse that drove the first installment. Men who venture into loving relationships with an Owens sister are doomed to die — and not of old age. 

    The lethal power of the curse explains the absence of Gary (Aidin Quinn), the character Bullock’s Sally paired with at the end of the first installment.

    This version restates the sisters' divergent approaches to magic: Kidman’s Gillian, the flighty sister, remains devoted to witchery. Sally tries to avoid it. She doesn't want her daughters (Joey King and Maisie Williams) to lead lives marred by spells, curses, and heartbreak.

    Perhaps as part of nostalgia service, the movie provides small roles for Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, who play aging witches, the aunts who raised Sally and Gillian in the small Massachusetts town where they still reside.

     Now a young woman, King's Kylie has fallen in love with genial Gideon (Xolo Mariduena). Doomed once the dreaded death beetle appears, Gideon is en route to becoming another victim of the love curse. 

    It doesn’t take long for an auto accident to leave poor Gideon in a coma. Once hospitalized, he's tended to by Williams' character, who's conveniently in the midst of her medical residency at the same institution. Hopefully, she'll have a great medical career because she pretty much vanishes from the rest of the proceedings.

     Not until Gideon's accident does Kylie learn about the witchy inheritance her mother has taken great pains to hide from her. Feeling betrayed by Mom's secrecy, Kylie jets off to England, hoping to end the curse so that she can marry Gideon.  

     Worried that inexperienced Kylie will fall prey to the dark side of magic, Sally and Gillian follow. In London, they contact a professor (Lee Pace) who’s made his academic bones studying what the movie refers to as “the craft.” Maybe he can help save Kylie while providing Sally with a potential love interest. 

   What? You thought she'd get through the movie without one?

     Before Sally and Gillian can catch up with Kylie, she meets a local (Solly McLeod) who offers to help but is so amiable we immediately suspect him of treachery.

      Add a few special effects (none particularly impressive), and you’ve got the idea, a sequel that leans heavily on the chemistry Bullock and Kidman ably generate. They don't collapse under the weight, which is about the best you can say for a movie that waves its wand lightly but can't conjures up little by way of surprise.

A rock doc charts its own course

   Now and again, a pop cultural phenomenon breaks boundaries with an energy so furious, it can be mistaken for outrage. It’s not easy to connect the throwers of such pop-cultural hand grenades to a specific agenda; it’s never entirely clear what they want or whether they want anything at all. One thing is clear, though: They are committed to assertion.

   I thought about that while watching Butt Hole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, a documentary about a raucous Texas art/punk band that caught fire in the 1980s. The doc left me wondering if it’s even possible to tell where the art ended and the punk began. 

   Whatever the case, it's clear that the Butt Hole Surfers were creative in their craziness, blurring the line between performance art and music in ways that could be both provocative and hilarious. Their show made use of surreal projections, and it's fair to say that they seasoned their weird stew with countercultural zest.

    Drummer King Coffey was known to pour lighter fluid on this cymbals and set them on fire. The band made enough use of strobe lights for the documentary to begin with a precautionary warning for those who might be subject to seizures.

   All of this becomes clear in director Tom Stern's documentary about a group that not only ignored conventional rules but stomped on them. The band formed in the late '70s when its two principals -- Gibson 'Gibby' Haynes and Paul Leary -- met at Trinity University in San Antonio. 

  Leary, who played guitar, and Haynes, who became lead singer and frontman, weren't sure where they were headed; they reflected their indecision by changing the band's name from one show to the next, eventually settling on the ... well ... you already know.

  Throughout a turbulent history, the band tended to go through bass players with the speed of hockey line changes. Eventually, they got lucky with Jeff Pinkus. He was number eight. 

   In the film, Kathleen Lynch reflects on her days as the band's naked dancer. Yes, for a time they had one. Coffey and Teresa Nervosa played dual drums in a band that once feigned sex on stage. Haynes, too, sometimes appeared naked.

   The Surfers evidently leaned heavily on the drug side of the sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll equation as they bounced their way through the '80s and '90s, accumulating a loyal following that became part of an underground scene. It sounds a bit old-fashioned but the effect of a Butt Hole show might be described as psychedelic.

  Stern emphasizes the influence the band had on artists such as Kurt Cobain. He also offers footage from a Hollywood period when Haynes did some heavy hanging out with Johnny Depp and other celebs.

   I found myself amused -- albeit a bit battered by a film about a band built to foster chaos.

   Oh well, sometimes all you can do when confronted by non-stop craziness is laugh. Made with ample amounts of humor, Butt Hole Surfers employs animation, puppets, interviews, archival footage, and in-your-face boldness to capture the spirit of the band's music. 

  To add perspective, Stern interviews director Richard Linklater, who knew the band from its early Austen days. He also includes comments from Flea and Dave Grohl. If you don't know those names, you're probably not part of the movie's target audience. 

  In sum, Stern offers a comprehensive look at the band, highlighting its don't-give-a-shit daring,  balancing things with contemporary interviews with band members who have matured. Haynes, turns 70 in September; Leary is 69. 

  At one hour and 46 minutes, the film tends to wear out, but Stern saves a big reveal about Haynes for the final going. 

  I'll leave it to others to judge the band's music, although I know that Leary's guitar work has been praised and that the band received acknowledgement for its invention and originality.

   Some of their albums -- Locust Abortion Technician -- were recognized for contributions to experimental rock, which has something to do with a willingness to expand the rock soundscape to include sounds not typically thought of as musical. They liked feedback from amplifiers. 

   To me, the movie seemed a chronicle of a long-running band that presented an unruly front -- part tantrum and part creative explosion -- that eludes easy explanation. 

   So rather than being reductive about it, I’m left to say,  "Hey, it was the '80s," and leave it at that.

   The documentary had a limited run at some Alamo Drafthouse venues and probably will turn up again. Maybe. I suppose. Who really knows?

Bucking the tide in Edwardian England

Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel, Night & Day, has been brought to the screen by director Tina Gharavi, who benefits greatly from actress Haley Bennett's spirited performance as a woman who’s ahead of her time. Bennett's Katherine wants to deepen her study of math, physics, and astronomy but is hampered by constricting tradition and a grumpy father (Timothy Spall) who wants her to marry. Dad's beau of choice: an amiable sap of a suitor (Jack Whitehall) who lights no sparks with Katherine. The closest Katherine comes to romance arrives when she meets Ralph (Elyas M'Barek), an editor who's helping Katherine's mother (Jennifer Saunders) finish a 30-year project, a book she's writing about her late father, a celebrated poet. Nicely mounted and benefiting from a light touch in its opening scenes, Night & Day is burdened by obviously declared intentions about the importance of allowing capable women to find places in male-dominated institutions and, of course, to win the right to vote. After Katherine applies to Cambridge, a university that isn't likely to admit her, we wind up with a message-driven movie that feels as if it's preaching to a contemporary choir. Still, a well-chosen cast and period-piece pleasures shouldn't be discounted. Put another way: Woolf's novel isn't regarded as a masterpiece, but it receives something akin to Masterpiece Theatre treatment nonetheless.

Rifles, chainsaws & cleavers, oh my

 Judging by movies, it’s almost impossible to believe there’s anything left to blow up. 

 That didn't stop director Adam Wingard from finding plenty of targets in Onslaught, a thriller that not only relies on pumped-up gunfire but also makes room for horror-style killings, notably referencing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  A minimal plot turns three combat veterans into brain-altered, genetically engineered warriors the movie deems  as "the human equivalent of heat-seeking missiles."  

 These lethal automatons are part of a conspiracy concocted by Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), a German (make that holdover Nazi) scientist who’s introduced when he crawls across the floor of his sleek digs to lick the stiletto-heeled shoe of his equally evil wife (Rebecca Hall).

   Nothing like a little marital affection to warm things up.

   Dr. Kammler's happy degradation primes us to expect that a bit of additional kink will season this boldly presented but depthless hunk of blood-splattered mayhem. 

  And that’s the trouble: You can almost feel the movie straining to hit notes that will make an audience gasp at its audacity. 

    Although Onslaught can be viewed as an extended set piece, it tells a story of sorts. A battle-scarred former soldier -- Adria Arjona's Celeste -- presides over a rundown desert trailer park that's invaded by the movie's three super-warriors. 

  To augment the looming sense of threat, Celeste's  young daughter (Blake Kennedy) has been left with Mom when her ex-husband, also a former soldier, turns up with daughter in hand. It's Mom's turn to take care of the kid.

   Looking more like a junkyard than a place to live, the trailer park is occupied by a hand full of former soldiers, many suffering from their wartime experiences.

    Mom, for example, seems burdened by PTSD flashbacks. Her hand shakes when she tries to pull a  trigger, something revealed early on when she fires at carved pumpkin heads she's propped up on spikes. 

   Additional kink arrives when we meet Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a twisted government official assigned to clean up the messes left by the soldiers, who try their skills at a highway rest stop before heading for the trailer park.

     I’m not going to describe all the mayhem, but I will say that a sequence in which a cleaver-wielding soldier crawls under a truck as he chases Kennedy’s character struck me as a step too far. These soldiers are ruthless killing machines, and we already knew the kid was in danger.

      Not to worry, though. As Onslaught progresses,  Celeste becomes the ultimate protective mom, and a few additional  relationships temper the relentless action, notably Celeste's ties to Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), an older trailer park resident who adds his weapons stash to the fight.

     Continually abetted by Matthew Pusti’s industrial-strength score, Onslaught includes an opening montage that suggests thematic depth, but even a countdown clock warning of the impending invasion can’t convince us that the stakes involve more than demonstrating a dialed-in capability for delivering rock, shock, and carnage.

  

     

Fleeing Russia during the Cold War

 

   

In Mayday, Ryan Reynolds plays a Navy pilot shot down while flying a spy mission at the height of the Cold War. In Russia, Reynolds’ Troy is saved by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB agent living as a backwood recluse in the Russian wilds. Ustinov regrets his KGB past, obsessively watches Top Gun, and wouldn’t mind moving to the US. After an opening full of swaggering top-gun bravado, the movie begins to temper its view of US-Soviet relations, adding a bit of nuance. All-American Troy seems shocked to learn that ordinary Russians are capable of kindness (big reveal, no?). Mayday quickly moves into hybrid territory: part action movie, part buddy comedy, and part road movie as Troy and Ustinov try to escape the Soviet Union. A KGB official (Marvin Dorocinski) doggedly follows in close pursuit, but  Nikolai is no pushover. His KGB fighting chops haven't entirely eroded. Maria Bakalova signs on as Nikolai's  daughter, and David Morse has a small role as Troy’s ailing father. Writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) give Mayday the kind of big-budget look we expect from such thrillers. Still, the mix of humor and action doesn’t quite click, and Troy’s penchant for wise-cracking hardly budges the needle on the wit meter. The story picks up for a big finish, having set itself apart by leaning on what looks like novelty casting. Branagh doesn’t seem the most likely choice for kick-ass action, but there he is, trying to inject a touch of Russian melancholy into Ustinov's dialogue. In sum: I won’t give this one a resounding “Nyet,” but I can’t give it an unqualified  “Dah!” either.

Plenty of fun in ‘Coyote vs. Acme’

 Someone once told me that the two key questions  people most ask about movies are 1) Who’s in it? and 2) What’s it about?

  If that’s true, I offer the following:

  Who’s in Coyote vs. Acme, a mix of live action and animation that brings a rich trove of Looney Tunes characters back to the screen with a level of humor that’s difficult to resist?  

   Well, Wile E. Coyote and his nemesis, Road Runner, have major roles. But you’ll also find appearances by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety Bird, and John Cena.  

   Oh, wait. Cena is one of the movie’s  human characters. Displaying the right amount of cartoonish exaggeration, Cena plays the chief attorney of Acme Corp., a company that makes destructive devices for cartoons. If something blows up, you can be sure the blast arrives courtesy of Acme.

   Now, for part two: What's it about?

   Wile E. Coyote wants to file a suit against Acme for giving him a defective pair of rocket skates that went blooey while he was chasing the Road Runner down a desert highway.

    Coyote enlists Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a small-potatoes Albuquerque attorney, to battle a corporate titan. Think Better Call Saul without the larcenous streak. Ill-prepared for a high-profile case, Avery bungles his way toward the courtroom and eventually an appearance at a congressional hearing presided over by Elmer Fudd. 

    Lana Condor plays Kevin's niece, an intern at his firm, Avery, Jones & Maltese, a name derived from Looney Tunes icons Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. Condor's Paige does most of the heavy lifting as Avery suffers through a perpetual crisis of confidence.

   Director Dave Green assembles this cartoon mashup in clever ways that make sense out of the outlandish, mixing cartoon and human characters with skillfully applied wit. Wisely, the animated and human characters live in the same world, which frees the story from having to alternate between realities.

   Better yet, the movie doesn’t feel as if it were concocted solely to ride a swelling wave of nostalgia.

   Screenwriter Sam Burch broadens the fun by adding a layer of satire about corporate greed that leads to negligence. Acme has an ulterior motive for exploiting cartoon characters. Applied with the same buoyantly cartoonish spirit that ripples throughout, the message adds a contemporary flourish.

    No need to oversell Coyote vs. Acme. For Looney Tunes fans, the movie provides an engaging helping of colorful fun. Besides, you won't want to miss Foghorn Leghorn’s courtroom oration about Acme’s devious Project Sisyphus.

    If you follow movie news, you know that Coyote vs. Acme had difficulty reaching the screen after Warner Bros. shelved it. It was eventually bought and released by Ketchup Entertainment. I won’t reiterate the whole story. Google away if you want to know more.

     Maybe it doesn't matter how Coyote vs. Acme reached the screen. I'll remind you, though, that the movie's message about refusing to accept defeat in the face of inevitable failure has existential relevance that still can strike home. These days, it might be the comic relief we desperately need.

    

Travelers on the road to nowhere

  In It Ends, director Alexander Ullom gives the road-movie genre a mind-bending twist.

  Ullom tells the story of four characters stuck on a road that never ends. They drive and drive, but can never find an exit from this road to nowhere.

  If they leave the car, they're quickly surrounded by hordes of people who seem intent on harming them, but whose motives aren't made clear. Eventually, the travelers determine that they can exit the car for about 90 seconds before an attack begins. That allows them (and the movie) to stretch a bit. 

   Then, as the Willie Nelson song goes, it's on the road again. No longer a symbol of mobility and freedom, the car becomes a cage.

   Ullom relies on his actors -- Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchel Cole, and Phineas Yoon -- to create characters who understandably are baffled by their situation. None of them knows why they've been assigned to a perpetual limbo in a car that never runs out of gas, always passing through the same wooded area.

   By refusing to dot every “i’ or cross every “t,” Ullom encourages us to wring some meaning from the ambiguous absurdity of the situation the movie depicts.

   Still, there's only so far Ullom can get with a movie that measures itself in miles, at one point showing us that these travelers have covered 186,000 miles. At another point, they discover an abandoned car with an odometer that's approaching one million miles. Others apparently have shared this horrific fate.

  Some see the movie as an expression of Gen Z frustration among recent college grads who are poised to enter a society that has rendered them pointless. 

 As an exercise in low-budget, indie creativity, It Ends earns a high score, but the movie continues to the point where we, like the characters, begin to feel beaten down. That takes some of the edge off what has been a canny little slice of contemporary horror, a foray into a world in which no option seems to make much sense. 

  Happy travels.

 

'Marching Band' sounds the right notes

Not every formula movie can be counted a failure. Consider The Marching Band, an amiable French offering that tells the story of two men who learn they are brothers when it becomes necessary for one of them to locate the other for medical reasons involving a bone marrow transplant. Both were adopted by different parents as young children. Neither knew of the other until the medical crisis that brought them together. A successful conductor, Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) benefited from a privileged upbringing, but is shaken when he learns he has leukemia. Brother Jimmy (Pierre Lottin) lives in a small town where life revolves around a factory; he plays trombone in the town’s marching band. The movie flirts with becoming a familiar tribute to small-town pluck as the band prepares to enter a contest. Additionally, though, the story deals with the relationship between brothers who contemplate what their lives might have been given different rolls of the dice. Director Emmanuel Courcol contrasts the town band’s amateurish efforts with Thibaut’s accomplished work as a classical musician, and the movie builds toward an ending centering on Ravel’s Bolero and sounding the right chord for a small-scale crowd-pleasing effort.

An uneven post-apocalyptic thriller

   We’ve had so much post-apocalyptic “entertainment" that it now qualifies as a pop-cultural obsession, if not an addiction. Still, dystopian overload didn’t stop director Ridley Scott from taking us to a time when life as we know it once again has come to an end.

 That said, The Dog Stars, which is based on a 2012 novel by Peter Heller and leans heavily on stars Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce, includes what might be the year’s wackiest sequence.

  I won’t make you wait for it. 

  The sequence to which I’m referring features a commanding Allison Janey as leader of a post-apocalyptic cult headquartered in an airport in Grand Junction, Co. 

  Janey's Darlene dresses like an airline stewardess (don’t call her a flight attendant) and flashes a smile that could chill a martini. She and her cohorts have created a throwback world that evokes the '50s and '60s and stands in absurd contrast to the movie's rugged frontier terrain.

  Perhaps as a bow to movie lore, Scott also unleashes a frenzied raid that resembles something from a bygone western. Raging barbarians attack an outpost where Elodri’s Hig has taken refuge with a grizzled father (Pearce) and his daughter, Cima (Qualley in what might be the movie's best performance).

 A word about the movie's western settings: Shortly after the story begins, Hig flies his dilapidated Cessna to Denver. He plans to stock up on supplies before returning to the remote settlement he shares with Bailey, a highly focused former marine played by Brolin. 

  The Denver scenes include a trip to City Hall and to something called The Denver Athletic Center. Neither of these facilities resembles anything you’ll find in Denver, and Scott's sweeping aerial views of mountain landscapes don't look much like the Rockies either. The movie, I've read, was shot in Italy.

 Look, I know movies require generous suspensions of disbelief, but for those of us who call Colorado home, some of the movie’s geographic references waver between disorienting and amusing. 

  But back to the review….

  It’s hardly surprising that Scott, an acknowledged master, deftly handles action sequences that prove exciting, even embellishing the Grand Junction episode with a pyromaniacal scorching that looks as though it might have been lifted from a horror film.

  Too often, though, the movie sags, and the relationship between Hig and Bangley, who lives by a rudimentary code emphasizing raw survival, relies on dialogue that could have used a touch of finesse.

  The two share living arrangements at an abandoned airfield near Erie, Co.  Hig still has some human impulses. All-business Bangley climbs a wooden tower to pick off unwanted visitors with a high-powered rifle.

  Elordi opts for quiet reserve with hints of grief and remorse. Hig lost his wife to the virus that caused this massive global retrogression. At one point, Hig and Cima become nostalgic about pleasures they've almost forgotten: She misses driving while listening to music on the radio; he wouldn't mind if the traffic jams he once hated broke up the movie's empty landscapes.

  Perhaps as an alternative to the hard-boiled survivalist ethos of most of the characters, the movie adds a brood of farmers and kids led by a character played by an underutilized Benedict Wong. Bangley refers to them as Mormons but seems to be using the term sarcastically for a group of decent folks that dress like Mennonites.

  In the early part of the movie, Hig’s dog Jasper serves as his main companion. The dog follows Hig everywhere,  even flying in the passenger seat of his Cessna. Much is made of Jasper’s spirit and in a tender moment, Hig — who always sleeps outside —shares a gooey-eyed moment of stargazing with the dog he calls his partner.

  I hope it’s clear by now that the wildly uneven Dog Stars has its moments. I laughed at some of it, although I'm not sure that's the response Scott meant to elicit. 

  For the record: Dog Stars doesn’t rival Scott’s best work (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, or, for some, The Martian). 

  Oddly, the parts that don’t really mesh with the movie's pervasive dystopian gloom save Dog Stars from wallowing in a mood of total defeat. They may not be enough to make the movie a success, but they at least jar it awake. 

An oddly structured Kafka biopic

 

  Director Agnieszka Holland subverts traditional biopic structure in Franz, a fragmented look at the life of Franz Kafka, the Czech author who died in 1924.

  Holland (Green Border) blends Kafka’s personal and aesthetic sensibilities with the quotidian aspects of a life that included a domineering father, loving relationships with his mother and one of his three sisters, and nondescript employment at an insurance company.

 Disregarding chronological order, Holland leaps about in time, offering ample references to Kafka's work. At various points, Holland shows Kafka imagining that his hands are webbed, a conceit he used in his fiction.

 These references sometimes feel forced, and it helps to be familiar with Kafka’s work if you want to catch them all.

   In one such unmistakable effort, Kafka’s father crushes a cockroach that has wandered onto the dining room table, a brash joke that points to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novel in which a man becomes a giant insect. 

   Raised in a German-Jewish family, Kafka’s imagination far surpassed the measured quality of his life.  Kafka's relationship with his father becomes important but isn't offered as the sole explanation for his inward-looking personality.

   In a sequence involving the young Kafka (Daniel Dongres), his beefy father (Peter Kurth) tosses his son into a river, a move designed to teach the boy to swim. Was Kafka scarred for life? Evidently not. We later learn that Kafka enjoyed swimming and swam throughout his life.

   German-Israeli actor Idan Weiss plays the adult Kafka as a strange man who inspired a wave of kitsch in contemporary Prague. Holland shows us burger joints with Kafka's name. A kaleidoscope is one thing, but Holland’s present-day scenes, which include a guided tour of Kafka-related sights, are more disruptive than illuminating, self-conscious attempts to let us know that the misfit has been mainstreamed.

    Kafka’s love life isn’t exactly scintillating, either. At one point, Kafka becomes engaged to Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), a woman in whom he shows little romantic interest. After falling for Bauer's best friend, the lively Greta Bloch (Gesa Schermuly), Kafka broke off his engagement to Bauer in embarrassing fashion.

    Writing evidently didn't come easily for Kafka. Holland creates early scenes in which Kafka, while still living at home, tried to write amid household bustle and intrusions by a father who wanted his son to pay more attention to the family business. Kafka longs for silence.

     Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924. He was 40, and his death preceded the Third Reich, which Holland points to in a late scene in which Kafka's confidant 

Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) and his wife nervously deal with a Nazi soldier as they flee Prague. Brod had all of Kafka’s work with him. Without Brod, Kafka’s writing might never have been discovered.

     Holland’s approach puts a considerable burden on Weis, who sometimes has the sly look of someone who’s protecting secrets no one else knows. Thin and prone to engaging in strange physical exercises, Kafka is tender with a prostitute but abandons the pursuit of pleasure when his attention suddenly shifts.

   It’s possible to take this sudden shift as a metaphor for a movie that frequently shifts its attentions, sometimes in scenes in which characters -- notably one of Kafka's sisters -- break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera.

     Working from a screenplay by Marek Epstein, Holland conveys the contradictions between Kafka’s interior life and bourgeois life in Prague, making  room for information that can seem almost incidental.

      We learn that Kafka wrote only in German and had no use for typewriters. He wrote by hand. At one point, Kafka checks into a sanitarium where the men march around nude and play games of tug of war in the nude. He seems to be having a good time.

      Perhaps to give the uninitiated a sense of Kafka’s work, Holland presents a scene in which Kafka does a public reading of In the Penal Colony. Holland presents a bizarre reenactment of the story, which centers on a brutal but meaningless punishment.

    At its best, Franz gives us a feeling for this odd, elusive fellow who saw the absurdity of institutions in a world of ungraspable rules.

   The word "Kafkaesque" has become an overused cliche for anything that appears to be off-kilter. Holland works more slyly, but if Kafka’s life was a riddle, Holland’s movie, though sometimes vividly realized, doesn't solve it.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 'The Rivals of Amziah King' and 'Learning to Fly'

The Rivals of Amziah King

 The Rivals of Amziah King stars Matthew McConaughey as a country singer and beekeeper who turns a Native American woman into a devoted protege. As a foster child, Kateri (Angelina Looking Glass) shared a home with Amziah. When she re-enters his life as an adult, she's exposed to a beekeeping world she learns to love. 

  In an overextended dramatic section, Kateri tries to save Amziah’s business after his hives are stolen.

 The movie emerges as a bit of a hodgepodge: a celebration of down-home virtues (the kind you’d find at a weekly potluck at the local church), a lively music film, and a labored drama in which Kateri searches for Amziah’s bees.  

  Too long at 130 minutes, Amziah King gets only so far with applications of rural Oklahoma color. I enjoyed director Andrew Patterson's presentation of toe-tapping music, and McConaughey seems to be having fun, but this foray into country virtues can’t sustain the infectious rhythms of its early going. Perhaps because of a surfeit of plot, what begins promisingly loses its way.

Learning to Fly

Scattered and teetering on the edge of becoming an advertisement for HOKA running shoes, the documentary Learning to Fly tells a story about ultra-distance running. The movie introduces Aisha McAdams, a photographer who made her mark chronicling the efforts of long-distant competitors. The movie includes a variety of runners, principally Jim Walmsley, a top runner whom McAdams follows to several races. 

   A runner herself, McAdams reveals details of her difficult upbringing as she tries to understand why people participate in such a grueling sport. 

    Torn between McAdams and the depiction of various races, the movie could have done more to develop both.

  You may not realize that MacAdams, who offers narration throughout the film, isn't the movie's director. That job falls to Max Lowe, who skillfully shows the teamwork required to support a 100-mile run. Race scenes can be impressive, although the athletes are more defined by the intensity of their efforts than by anything revealed in interviews. 

 So, a mixed review of Learning to Fly, a less-than-triumphant documentary that earns points for opening a world that may be unfamiliar to many viewers.

A shipping magnate throws a party

   Willem Dafoe plays a Greek shipping magnate in The Birthday Party, another barbed critique of life among the obscenely rich.

   Basing his movie on a 2007 novel by Panos Karnezis, writer/director Miguel Angel Jimenez creates a fictionalized view of a character who resembles Aristotle Onassis. 

   Aways adventurous, Dafoe plays Marcos Timoleon, a calculating boss who’s accustomed to controlling everything but who has difficulty corralling his strong-willed daughter, Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne). 

   Sofia’s latest challenge to her father centers on her plan to marry Ian Forster (Joe Cole), a writer who's working on a biography of Marcos.  

   To further complicate matters, Sofia is pregnant with a child Marcos insists she'll never have. The movie eventually shows the twisted lengths to which Marcos will go to ensure that he prevails.

     The story begins with a more conventional attempt at persuasion. Marcos arranges an elaborate 25th for Sofia that’s designed to coax her back into the family fold.

   Hangers-on and those wishing to curry favor with Marcos have gathered for the event. To him, they’re like extras in a show meant to protect his legacy.

    The cast includes Emma Suarez as Olivia, the wife Marcos is divorcing. Estrangement aside, he wants her help with wild-child Sofia. Sofia’s fate became even more important to Marcos after his beloved son died in a seaplane crash.

    A steady Christos Stergioglou plays Patrikios, a doctor who’s also Marcos's closest friend and confidant. The movie could have used more of him.

   We’ve already seen too much wealth porn to be overwhelmed by the luxe surroundings of Marcos’ private island, and the drama that unfolds proves more dispiriting than illuminating, a dip into a toxic pool full of characters, none especially admirable.

Regan and Gorbachev talk nukes

 

  Put Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, and J.K. Simmons in the same movie, and you’ve created interest - at least among those who value capable acting. In The Brink of War, Daniels plays Ronald Reagan; Harris appears as  Mikhail Gorbachev, and Simmons portrays George Shultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State. 

   In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik for a summit meant to tackle issues of nuclear disarmament. 

   The Brink of War offers a dry, sometimes prosaic account of a meeting disrupted by Reagan's insistence on including  a human rights discussion Gorbachev had no interest in having.

    Gorbachev also objected to Reagan’s plan to build a Star Wars defense system for the US., even after  Reagan suggested that Gorbachev could use US technology to build his own missile shield.

    The summit failed, but a year later it produced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. That means the  movie must focus less on a triumphant outcome than on the back-and-forth between the two leaders. 

     Aside from Simmons Shultz, who cautions Reagan, not to miss an unprecedented opportunity, the supporting cast doesn’t have much to do.

     Nancy Reagan (Hope Davis) remained at home, staying in phone contact with the president. Branka Katic portrays Raisa Gorbacheva. She accompanied her husband, but mostly remained on board the ship that brought Gorbachev to Iceland. Occasionally, she came ashore for photo ops.

     Rather than playing like a momentous historical moment, the film, written and directed by Michael Russell Gunn, unfolds like a determined recreation. 

     As for Daniels, make-up can’t quite turn him into a Reagan lookalike, but he masters Reagan’s delivery and offers moments of hard-headed conviction and easy wit.

    In all, the movie's style feels musty and dated, as if it has been shackled to the need for period authenticity and seriousness, which is understandable but less than exciting.

A horror movie with sex on its mind

  Remember the horror series Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? The original starred Billy Preston, an actress who has vanished from public view. Obligatory sequels followed, establishing the Camp Miasma movies as a horror staple that wore out its welcome.

  Stop scanning your memory. There never was a Camp Miasma series, but director Jane Schoenbrun bases her movie -- Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma -- on a meta-conceit. An indie filmmaker, Hannah Einbinder's Kris wants to remake the original Camp Miasma movie, retooling it for contemporary audiences.

    To prepare, Kris travels to an abandoned camp where the movie's former star (Gillian Anderson) lives in isolation. Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) makes movies that have garnered a following, partly because Schoenbrun's films deal with (wait, let me try to calculate the number of themes) movie madness, trans issues, pop culture, female eroticism, and campy asides, this time evidenced in the search for the perfect Jolly Rancher.

     The horror element of Schoenbrun's movie involves a character called Little Death that lives at the bottom of a lake near the abandoned camp, emerging occasionally to spear people to death or, in the case of Anderson's Billy, to deliver the world's best orgasm. 

    Little Death wears a box over his head that resembles a repurposed air vent that might have been salvaged from the bottom of the lake. His look is more last-gasp Halloween costume than one calculated for terror.

     The screenplay makes comparisons between Billy and Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard. Kris wants to convince Billy to appear in the remake. A studio wants a version that's more woke, less transphobic.

     Less a character than a collection of intellectualized tropes and inhibited sexuality, Kris makes an argument for the remake that sails over Billy's head. Billy understands that Kris' over-intellectualization masks the link fundamental between fear and desire that she's been avoiding.

      Transparent artifice from production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly makes it clear that Camp Miasma, which includes a segment from the original movie, needn't be taken with Kris' cinematic seriousness.

     That's not to say that Schoenbrun doesn't indulge in gushing sprays of plasma as Billy slowly coaxes Kris into accepting her libidinous desires, no matter how strange they may seem to others. 

      Mostly a two-hander, the movie includes supporting performances from Jasmin Savoy Brown as Mari, Kris's bisexual partner, and Aren Buchholz as Thor, Mari's male lover.

      Appearing as a studio exec who's baffled when Kris calls him to pitch her latest version of Camp Miasma, Dylan Baker lands the movie’s funniest scene, a send-up of the mismatch between studio preoccupations and auteur ambitions.

      Wild and amusing as all of this may sound, Camp Miasma misses an essential horror ingredient: scares. Moreover, its amusements seem aimed at an audience that, like Kris, is fluent in the language of horror. It pays to know something about split diopters and how they’re used in horror films.

      Speaking with a southern accent, Anderson's Billy is more intent on liberating Kris's sexuality than on making another movie. Anderson's's vampy, campy performance constitutes the movie’s main attraction, enriched as it is by the humanity Anderson* conveys.

      Camp Miasma, which is less morose than I Saw the TV Glow, lives in its own world and seems aimed at those who want to be part of Schoenbrun's inside joking and gender explorations. Me? I kept waiting for the movie to break through its own self-involvement.

*Thanks to reader who pointed out name mistake. Now fixed.

Hungry dinos trample the burbs

 Advanced publicity for The End of Oak Street blames a mysterious cosmic event for transporting a  typical American suburban neighborhood to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. 

  Anne Hathaway, who seems to be everywhere this summer, and Ewan McGregor, who lately has  been working in TV series, star as husband and wife in a high-concept job that keeps them on the run. 

  Director David Robert Mitchell can’t muster the suburban charm that Spielberg has mastered, but his movie begs for comparison with Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, which did a better job of providing a reason for why humans must struggle to keep from becoming dinosaur food, a fate not all Oak Street residents can escape.

   The movie's involuntary time travel involves a large bubble that intermittently appears and serves as a portal through time. As an explanation, it proves laughably feeble. Maybe that was the point.

    Mitchell leans heavily on two young performers — Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. They play the Platt children, who dodge dinosaurs without their parents when Convery's Brian sets out to find his beloved dog Starbuck. His sister follows, and another youngster (Jordan Alexa Davis) eventually joins them.

   The End of Oak Street seems to be turning pages in a give-em-what-they-came-for playbook, offering a series of dinosaur attacks and relying heavily on CGI to keep the film monster heavy and to ensure that these destructive behemoths prove reasonably disgusting.

   A giant snake invading a house makes for one of the best-assembled set pieces and there is (wait for it) a scene of dinosaur copulation), a stab at genre-mocking amusement in the midst of survival terror.

   Watching McGregor's character try to defend himself with a sledgehammer looks a bit silly. Hathaway wields a rifle. But the movie emphasizes flight more than fight.

    Modest attempts are made to deepen the characters. Aspiring to be more than a homemaker,  Hathaway’s Denise is writing a novel; McGregor’s Greg tipples from a hidden bottle; he has been reduced to delivering pizzas to earn extra cash. Husband and wife often argue.

   Best taken as a love letter to ‘80s cinema, End of Oak Street might have done well to lean more heavily into its goofier aspects and tried for full-out comedy. 

  As it stands, a formulaic End of Oak Street offers many views of Hathaway running, Hathaway screaming, and Hathaway expressing fear. 

  It’s not easy to spoof shlock movies without becoming one, a trap that End of Oak Street can’t entirely avoid, but credit Mitchell with moving rapidly until he reaches the film's unfortunately muddled copout of an ending.

 

Coming of age in Las Cruces

  

 It's not unusual for a family to go through a crisis. But what if every day presented a crisis of some sort? I ask the question by way of introducing Olmo, a movie about a Mexican-American family living in Las Cruces, N.M. in 1979. Aivan Uttapa plays the title character, a young man who is often called upon to care for his quadriplegic father (Gustavo Sánchez Parra). Burdened by the need to work, Mom (Andrea Suárez Paz) relies on Olmo and his sister (Rosa Armendariz) for help around the house. Olmo does help, but typical teenage impulses and needs often conflict with his familial role. Olmo focuses his hormonal attentions on Nina (Melanie Frometa), a girl who lives across the street. Director Fernando Eimbcke mostly adopts Olmo's point-of-view, developing the story around attempts by Olmo and best friend Miguel (Diego Olmeda) to attend a party Nina has told them about. They're welcome -- providing they bring a stereo. A scene in which Dad gives Olmo a lesson in stereo repair becomes a mini-study of father/son tensions. All the performances are good, and young Olmeda is perfect as a kid who supports his friend, tries to learn how to dance, and follows Olmo when he mistakes a home where a funeral is being held for the location of the party they hope to crash. Olmo has serious moments, but Eimbcke's affection for the characters is palpable, and we feel it too.

When sex happens once a year

  Boasting a blatantly contrived high-concept premise, One Night Only is better than it ought to be. At the same time, the movie — which rides on  agreeable performances from Monica Barbaro and Collum Tower — isn’t the winning charmer it might have been.

  The contrivance: One Night Only, directed by Will Gluck and written by Travis Baum, creates a world in which unmarried people are subject to an oppressive government mandate: They’re allowed to have sex on only one night a year. 

  Don't expect a hard satirical punch; the movie delivers more of a powder-puff pat. The sex mandate stems from a fascistic government that wants to promote marriage and restrain what it regards as profligacy. 

   Gluck surrounds this implausible premise with a spiffed-up version of New York City, where Tower’s Owen operates a pizza restaurant and Barbaro’s Allie sings for a living. 

    Afflicted by stage fright, Allie is relegated to recording songs for commercials, in this case for a drug that’s supposed to help with psoriasis. Is there a compelling reason that psoriasis maintains its cliched status as joke material? 

   After an initial flop of a meet-cute, Allie and Owen try to find someone with whom to have sex while the clock ticks its way towards celibacy. 

    A romantic at heart, Allie gives up on any hope of finding love after an ill-fated foray to a bar with a pal.  She heads home, but her gay roommate (Quintessa Swindell) gives her a sexy dress and pushes her out again.

    For his part, Owen is stranded by his girlfriend (Maya Hawke). Over an expensive omakase dinner, she announces that she doesn’t plan to sleep with him. She's after a new experience. 

   Allie and Owen keep encountering each other as the movie works its way through a variety of contrivances, notably a search for condoms in a market where they seem to have sold out.

   Eventually we meet Owen’s mom (Molly Ringwald). She has planned a sexual evening with her partner (LeVar Burton). Still, the movie mostly wanders through a Gen Z world, introducing a set piece involving a hip private party. Allie easily gains admission. Owen is shut out.

    At the party, Allie meets a rock star (Charlie Gillespie) who pushes her to sing in public. He charms her until their encounter goes bad with a bit that lands an unneeded sour note.

    A determined socialite (a sharp Ella Loudon) gets Owen into the club, but that relationship also goes awry in another scene that hovers on the border of tastelessness.

     Look, we know that Owen and Allie are destined to be together. Some of the dialogue is amusing, as is a precocious kid (Mateo Ray) who boldly presents himself as a possible sex partner for Allie.

     So back to the beginning. Gluck (Easy A and Anyone But You) gets good work from his cast, but can't liberate enough laughs from this gimmicky fable. 

     

       

       

'Ice Cream Man' offers gore galore

Eli Roth has directed notable horror movies, among them  Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005). He's also produced such helpings of horror as Clown (2014) and Haunt (2019). Now, Roth arrives with Ice Cream Man, a horror movie that tries to cut the heart out of idyllic, small-town life when a smiling ice cream man (Ari Millen) turns the town's kids into killers. Ice Cream Man tries to walk the line between sadistically funny and sickeningly gory. Roth knows how to do that, but once you see a sweet little girl saw off her mother's head with a hacksaw, you've pretty much got the bloody drift. I'm not going to describe all of  Roth's bloody inventions, but if Roth was looking for a satirical edge, he misses. Roth can't squeeze much thematic juice out this gory kiddie revolt against adult authority. The plot centers on Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), youngster who remains immune to the killing urge because he's lactose intolerant and didn't eat the tainted ice cream. Before the movie ends, Roth serves up a silly, tortured explanation for all the kiddie carnage. For the record, Roth plays Jared's father in a serving of horror that melts away while we await the next serving of gore, such delicacies as brains scooped from the head of a school principal. Gross? Yes. Up to the best standards of horror wit? Hardly.

The callow youth of Anthony Bourdain

  In the summer of 1975, a callow 19-year-old from New Jersey traveled to Provincetown, Mass., a certified mecca of free-style living. Tony (later to become celebrity chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain) spent the summer working in restaurants and partying. 

 At the time, Bourdain was dealing with rejection for a writing fellowship at Vassar, the college he attended. But that didn't stop him from claiming to be a writer to anyone who’d listen. 

 Bourdain assayed this early part of his life in Kitchen Confidential (2000), a bestseller that helped boost his public profile and establish his reputation as a bad boy of culinary arts. 

  In the movie, Tony, a renegade young Bourdain  (Dominic Sessa) follows a girl (Emilia Jones) he has fallen for to Provincetown. Once there, he lands a restaurant job and sleeps on a hammock on the porch of the Portuguese restaurateur (Antonio Banderas) who will become his mentor.

  So goes the movie-altered version of this fledgling period of Bourdain's life. Johnson turns Tony into a coming-of-age story in which a young man learns to accept the use of the more formal  “Anthony,” a decision that's emblematic of his emerging seriousness about food.

   The movie opens with a telling quote from Kitchen Confidential in which the mature Anthony looks back at his young self: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” 

    We don't spend much time wondering whether this knockabout kid will ruin his life. We know Tony's arrogance will make way for the man who became a worthy guide through the world of food — no matter how exotic the fare. Bourdain's travelogue and food expeditions also yielded one of the best-written shows on television.

     In that sense, Johnson’s movie can't help being a bit of a cheat. We know the immature jerk of Tony will mature. We also know that Tony's pretensions about being a writer eventually became real; as a writer, he matched a broad range of interests with keen powers of observation. He didn't have to pretend to be smart; he was smart.

     Filled with drinking, drugs, and carousing, Tony's youthful summer is set against the noisy mayhem of a kitchen backdrop. Tony makes novice mistakes but eventually gains some footing. He discovers that he could feel at home in a kitchen, a feeling I'd liken to what some of us felt about the newsrooms where we learned to be reporters, places where we thought we could belong.

     A small cast of kitchen characters includes Sal (Leo Woodall), a womanizing, cocaine-snorting oyster shucker and prep cook who wears his callousness with a confidence Tony can't match. 

    Johnson’s story includes an incident in which the restaurant suffers a major calamity. Other scenes depict Tony's wobbly relationship with Jones’ Nancy. She's the woman who eventually would become Bourdain's first wife. 

    Credit Banderas with a weary and wise performance as a chef who's so religious he makes Tony accompany him to church on Sunday. Banderas's character presides over a band of young rogues but he respects the disciplined ways of the kitchen. He may not be a the top of his game, but he knows where the peaks are.

    Tony stands as a decent preview of a life that was destined to become more interesting after the movie’s redemptive conclusion. The adult Bourdain was better company than his 19-year-old self -- and more interesting, as well.

     Bourdain committed suicide in June of 2018. He was 61. Johnson minimizes suggestions about the tragic end awaiting the cocky kid who Sessa brings to life. He sticks to the world Bourdain inhabited before his life began to take shape.

      Some of the dramatic license Johnson takes bothered me, but I went along for the ride. I appreciated the movie’s willingness to spice up the coming-of-age formula. I also realized that in this post-Bear era, I could still appreciate a foray into the bustling world of a professional kitchen, even in a tourist trap of a restaurant that was a long way from Brasserie Les Halles, the now gone New York eatery where Bourdain became executive chef.

     Nineteen-year-old Tony probably would have had to borrow a few bucks to purchase even a moderately priced appetizer at Brasserie Les Halles. Tony's mix of comedy and colorful incidents will do until someone makes a movie about the grown-up who fascinated us with his adventurous spirit and knowledge. That might make for a more memorable movie.

      

      

A samurai tires of the sword

  When a movie entitled The Samurai and the Prisoner arrives, it's fair to expect ample swordplay. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa defies that expectation in a big way.

 Adapting a 2021 novel by Honobu Yonezawa, Kurosawa's 16th-century period piece offers more talk than action, much of it concerning intrigue inside a castle that's about to be overrun by a powerful warlord.

  Although the movie contains one battle sequence and a couple of additional violent scenes, The Samurai and the Prisoner mostly involves conversations in which the lord of the castle questions retainers or ruminates about the coming siege. 

   Kurosawa relies heavily on these conversations to accomplish what other directors might have shown in flashbacks or as part of a flowing narrative. The approach takes a bit of adjustment, but it soon becomes clear that Kurosawa’s four-part story centers on betrayals, tests of loyalty, and the difficulties of breaking with long-established customs.

    Masahiro Motoki plays Araki Murashige, lord of Arioka Castle. Tired of fighting and wary of samurai demands for revenge, Murashige disappoints his followers by sparing the lives of those who cross him.

    A pivotal event occurred before the movie's start when Murashige broke with the invading Oda Nobunaga, a leader of acknowledged brutality. Murashige spends most of the movie trying to outsmart his opponent or trying to avoid the worst consequences of a devastating invasion.

   Masaki Suda plays Kuroda Kanbei, the prisoner of the title, a brilliant strategist who works for Nobunaga. Murashige imprisons him, even relying on the brilliant him for advice, much of it delivered in the form of cryptic riddles.

    Murashige’s wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka) may have her own agenda. Having already tasted Nobunaga's cruelty, she’s obsessed with ideas about the afterlife and allows Kurosawa to explore another theme while establishing Murashige as a skeptic about beliefs he dismisses as superstitious.

    As for Murashige, he interrogates his retainers about matters that include murder and betrayal. At times, the movie plays like a series of high-stakes mini whodunnits that include the murder of an eight-year-old captive Murashige wanted spared.

   Another episode centers on a severed head that has been taken by Murashige's forces, a battle trophy that also confirms the death of an enemy general.

   Divided into chapters marked by each of the four seasons, the story proves talky and sometimes confusing. The characters are based on real historical figures who may be well known to Japanese audiences. American audiences aren’t likely to have that advantage.

    Known mostly for horror films (Cure, Pulse, and Retribution), Kurosawa (no relation to the great Akira Kurosawa) plays this one straight, although he's not averse to adding melodramatic flourishes, particularly at the film's conclusion. 

   The Samurai and the Prisoner boasts fine performances, an unwavering commitment to dialogue, and what appears to be careful period detailing. But as the movie wore on, I wondered whether Yonezawa's book -- described as a blend of historical and detective fiction -- might have worked better on the page. 

   Kurosawa’s approach tells as much as it shows, and the result can be wearing in ways that keep the characters at a distance, turning a 147-minute movie into a succession of sometimes revealing puzzles that generate limited emotional involvement.