BOY VEY

On Apple TV+...

Boys State--Under the opening titles, we learn that alumni of the American Legion's longtime, nationwide youth civic program are as diverse as Rush Limbaugh, Samuel Alito, Bill Clinton and Cory Booker. Watching this documentary by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, it's hard not to wonder if we're seeing a future big deal, or more than one, in this crop.

The movie's focus is on the 2018 program in Austin, Texas, where a thousand or so high school juniors, all boys, assembled to create their own political parties, develop platforms, nominate candidates and hold an election (there's a Girls State, too; which would also make a terrific movie). Seeing these guys in their matching shirts, marching through the streets of Austin waving standards, it's almost impossible not to think of a Fascist youth group. Yet the movie gradually reveals a more complex reality.

Certainly they're a rowdy, wound-up bunch, and at first they seem highly reactionary, bellowing anti-abortion and (especially) pro-gun sentiments to howling approval. "Our masculinity will not be infringed!" declares one kid. Another suggests a bill proposing that all Prius drivers be relocated to Oklahoma. (In 2016 the Texas Boys State Senate voted to secede from the Union.)

But as the movie brings the individual kids into closer focus, we see startlingly open-minded, honest, even vulnerable attitudes come out. We also see cynical political angling, and guilt over it: "Sometimes you can't win on what you believe in your heart," bemoans Robert MacDougall, who's privately pro-life but can't admit it.

MacDougall, who looks like the rotten rich kid who insults Molly Ringwald in a John Hughes movie but proves more thoughtful than we expect, is one of several of the boys who make a strong impression. Others include Ben Feinstein, a Ronald Reagan-adoring double-amputee, and Rene Otero, a flamboyant African-American kid who becomes party chairman.  Probably no one comes across as strongly, however, as Steven Garza, a sober working-class kid from Houston; the son of Mexican immigrants.

He seems an unlikely candidate for prominence at Boys State, not only because of his progressive views but because of his undramatic, soft-spoken personality. Yet his serious-minded and principled approach wins the respect of the boys, and ultimately his party's nomination.

And that's how this movie works; one minute delivering depression or even terror at the prospect of this generation taking over America, the next minute offering inspiration and hope. Just like this country.

L FOR LAKE

Now streaming:

Lake Michigan Monster--Having grown up on the shores of Lake Erie, I've often wondered why nobody has yet made the signature Great Lakes monster movie. So despite a twinge of regional jealousy, I take my hat off to the makers of this very low-budget, very silly spoof, resourcefully shot on cool locations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Muskegon, Michigan.

Seafield, an ebullient nautical sort played by writer-director Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, assembles a sort-of-crack team including a weapons specialist, a Navy veteran and a "sonar individual" to hunt down and destroy the title creature who, he insists, killed his father. Like Wes Anderson's Steve Zissou, Seafield isn't after research or scientific achievement or even profit; he's out for revenge.

Tightly scripted, crisply edited and shot in lovely faux-vintage black and white, the movie starts with facetious sketch-comedy material, amusing enough for a while but probably not sustainable at feature length. Just as you're thinking this may prove a long hour and eighteen minutes, however, the tone shifts, as we get to Seafield's underwater confrontation with the monster, and with his own mysterious past.

With eerie ruins and anglerfish and unsettling yet somehow endearing robed masked ghosts, the movie spins off in its homestretch into a free-associating surrealism that leavens the nuttiness with a weird visual beauty. It's like a combination of Lovecraft, Georges Melies, Cabin Boy and SpongeBob, and it's pretty memorable.

ICE FOLLIES OF 1993

Now streaming:

Red Penguins--Back in 2014 filmmaker Gabe Polsky chronicled the Soviet Union's national hockey team during the Cold War years with the documentary Red Army. Now Polsky is back with this post-Cold-War take on Russian hockey as it abandoned itself to western-style capitalist decadence.

The new film tells how, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, a group of U.S.-based investors led by Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin, and including Mario Lemieux and Michael J. Fox, took a 50% financial interest in the broke, decrepit Soviet National team. They dispatched a young marketing whiz named Steven Warshaw to the team's crumbling Moscow stadium on a mission to, as the saying goes, get asses in the seats. He wasn't above using a wacky penguin mascot, strippers and circus bears to do it.

Polsky's film is brisk and jaunty in tone, but it contains some grim passages showing how rough the transitions between political and economic systems can be. It gradually settles into a contrast between the manic, bouncing-off-the-walls hustler Warshaw and the team's baleful coach, Viktor Tikhonov and GM Valery Gushin, both scary old-school Soviet apparatchiks who resented and mistrusted the vulgar (and effective) antics of this young American showman. Gushin and Warshaw are still around to tell their tales as talking heads (Tikhonov died in 2014). Both seem to have mellowed with age, but traces of the '90s-era craziness remain.

A TOUCHING STORY

On digital and VOD today:

Yes, God, Yes--Teenage Alice stumbles into a dirty online chat one day after school and finds herself on the verge of masturbating; she's interrupted, in what turns into a running gag. Being a good Catholic schoolgirl, she has been taught that the wages of sex outside of marriage--even just with yourself--is eternal torment. She's already guilt-ridden over having replayed the Leo-and-Kate sex scene in Titanic three times.

So she goes on one of those four-day retreats where she gets further lectured and browbeaten and socially pressured, all under the pretext of therapeutic tenderness, and this, along with exposure to a friendly, handsome counselor whose arm hair mesmerizes her, only seems to make her urges stronger. Also, there's a rumor going around that she "tossed the salad" of another boy, and she doesn't know what that means.

This coming-of-age comedy, written and directed by Karen Maine (based on her 2017 short), gets at a theme that isn't discussed often enough: the conflict between the normal sexual impulses of adolescence and the cosmically, existentially terrifying prospect of being damned to hell for all eternity. It seems like one of the more vile forms of abuse practiced by organized religion, and, experience suggests, one of the most hypocritical.

Maine, who co-wrote the story for 2014's Obvious Child, seems very in touch with her anger about this, but she keeps it low-key; her touch is light and funny and observant. Anybody who's ever been on a church retreat, Catholic or not, will immediately recognize the world Maine creates.

And the cast is strong, especially the waiflike Natalia Dyer, an actress unknown to me as I am apparently one of the half-dozen people in the U.S. who still hasn't seen Stranger Things. Dyer is awfully good as Alice, down the rabbit hole of morality and propriety versus hormones and nerve endings. Maine has, perhaps wisely, left the role unwritten; the dialogue isn't glib teen-movie-speak, so it's left to Dyer to get across Alice's awakening through wide-eyed takes.

She's hilarious, but her befuddlement also arouses our sympathy. When Alice finally gets an outside perspective on her predicament, it's like she's found her way out of a cave.

ALL FOR THE BEST

One of the most unimportant casualties of the pandemic, by far, has been my "Four Corners" restaurant column in Phoenix Magazine. But Your Humble Narrator did get to contribute some half-dozen or so items to the magazine's 2020 "Best of the Valley" issue, now on the stands...

See if you can tell which ones I wrote!

CURIE-ING FAVOR

Streaming this weekend:

Radioactive--Debuting in 2002's Die Another Day as a Bond girl, Rosamund Pike has since proven she's more than an English beauty, showing her potent acting chops in 2014's Gone Girl and other roles. But she's probably never had a showcase part quite as juicy as that of Marie Curie, the pioneering, Nobel-winning scientist who discovered radium and polonium and coined the title term.

Adapted by Jack Thorne from a 2010 graphic novel by Lauren Redniss, and directed by Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis, the movie sketches the Polish-born Marie Sklodowska's life in Paris. We see her marriage to Pierre Curie (the fine, restrained Sam Riley); her discoveries and celebrity in partnership with him; her later bereavements and unhappy affairs; her heroic introduction of X-ray technology into field medicine during WWI; her unwitting ruination of her health from long exposure to her own discoveries.

Interwoven with this are free-floating episodes depicting Hiroshima, the nuclear tests in Nevada, Chernobyl; also early efforts in radiotherapy. In general, the movie's take on Curie's legacy seems ambivalent and rather dark.

But its regard for its heroine is strong and unsentimental. Pike creates a portrait of a wary, unapologetically ambitious woman, and gets across an electric sense of brilliance mixed with a passionate nature. She also has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes of Curie in extremes so intense and emotionally naked that they're almost hard to watch. She's spectacular.

Zombie for Sale--A young zombie (Jung Ga-ram) wanders into a small South Korean town, and ends up in the custody of the nervy, squabbling family who runs the local tow service. He's fond of munching heads of cabbage, and he's on the cute side, so the young sister (Lee Soo-kyung) takes a shine to him. But when it's discovered that his bite has a rejuvenating effect on old men (initially), the family finds itself in a position to make a fortune.

Also known as The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale...

...this light-on-gore horror satire directed by Lee Min-jae is full of screwy, truly imaginative ideas, and delightfully acted by a terrific ensemble--I especially enjoyed Uhm Ji-won as the forbidding pregnant sister-in-law. It's the hip spin on classic zombie shtick that Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die wanted to be. Probably what makes the film so enjoyable is what makes many of the South Korean films that make it to the states, including The Host and Parasite, so much fun: Their hard-edged, even jaundiced, yet somehow still deeply affectionate view of family.

MOONIESTRUCK

Streaming this weekend...

Blessed Child—This documentary was directed by its principal subject, Cara Jones, who was born into and grew up within the Unification Church, also known as the “Moonies” after their late leader Sun Myung Moon. Jones is no longer in the flock, but still clearly adores her parents, who remain leading figures in the American church. The film details her efforts to renounce the homophobic and profit-minded sect—her gay younger brother, who worked with her on the film, also left the church—while retaining a loving relationship with her folks.

Her sweet mother suffers terrible guilt about leaving her daughter, as an infant, to be raised by a sort of church nanny while she did mission work, although this woman, who Jones also visits, was kindly. The Princeton-educated Dad's handsome, brahmin-ish-looking face likewise strains with guilt when Jones gently questions him about the church's ideology that condemns his son. It's bitterly sad, but not depressing to watch, because it's clear that love came first in this family. Yet the damage wrought by the church in the lives of these people was very real.

Of course, as one of the talking heads points out, there's nothing in this movie that couldn't be equally true of, and certainly no worse than, a family dynamic in, say, the Catholic Church, or any major organized religion. The peek inside this particular church is intriguing, but the family portrait is what makes Blessed Child affecting.