Movie Nation

Ethan Hawke found his groove as an actor sometime, I figure, in the late 90s. His indie film connection to Richard Linklater led to the “Before Sunrise” trilogy with Julie Delpy, and eventually to “Boyhood,” Linklater’s masterpiece, the movie that may win the Texas tyro filmmaker an Oscar.

I’ve interviewed Hawke as the various Linklater films have opened over the years. But the memorable chats are always about the offbeat genre fare that he takes on — “The Purge,”
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “Daybreakers.” He’s had decent luck with chancy films that were never destined for big box office or critical acclaim. In his latest, “Predestination,” he is a time traveling agent of some sort, on his “last mission.” That’s the one description of the film I’ve seen that sticks. I will see if before talking with him, but I thought I’d ask for your submitted questions first.

How about it? Something you’re dying to ask Ethan? Comment below, and thanks for the help.

You missed one of the best movies of the year? Top 20, if not Top Ten list material? You weren’t alone. It opened meekly, dropped off screens too quickly, and that’s a crime.

No worries. Hollywood’s dead post-“Hunger Games” stretch means theaters are scrambling to find patrons. Oscar contenders are rolling out slowly, and “Nightcrawler” could well be that. Well, the National Board of Review is no Oscar indicator. But an honor is an honor.

o Friday, it re-opens wide, back in theaters until “Exodus” and other big releases of the holiday season chase it off.

Here’s a link to my glowing review of Jake Gyllenhaal’s finest hour. Read it, and make  plans to go.

Reese Witherspoon finds a role worthy of her in “Wild,” playing a woman who hikes her way out of a tragic past, one painful, traumatic step at a time.
A find-yourself-by-testing-yourself drama in the “Into the Wild” or “The Way” mold, “Wild” sends Cheryl (Witherspoon) on a self-imposed spirit quest to make amends for the self-inflicted damage she’s done to herself and others. A hiking novice with a writerly bent, she is drowning in a quagmire of needle drugs and degrading sexual encounters when she sets out to trek the Pacific Crest Trail.
Her goal is simple, to “walk myself back into the woman my mother thought I was.”
And with every step, every rookie hiker’s mistake, Cheryl remembers that mother (Laura Dern) and catalogs the ways her own life has gone so terribly wrong at such a young age.
Cheryl Strayed is the name she takes upon her divorce. She “Strayed” from Paul (Thomas Sadoski). And even though he is supportive, even though they got matching tattoos celebrating that divorce, even though he promises to send her letters and care packages at addresses along her hike, they can never be together.
Cheryl, a Minneapolis waitress, will march from the Mojave Desert north to Oregon and Washington. She will do it alone, a pretty blonde with no wilderness or long-walk background, relying on her wits, her resolve and the kindness of strangers to get her through.
That, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Adrienne Rich.
What saves this from becoming some indulgent and precious “Hike, Pray, Love” is Witherspoon’s earthy turn in the leading role, and the rich, nurturing presence of Dern, seen in flashbacks as the single-mother who raised Cheryl.
Mom is mercurial, always smiling, always positive even when her kids ignore her when she goes back to their high school to get her own diploma. Dern lets us see the hurt beneath the smiles, the pain that explains their situation long before the movie spells it out for us.
Even lines as corny as “Put yourself in the way of beauty,” and “Try and do the kindest thing” ring true coming from Dern.
As he did with “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” director Jean-Marc Vallée covers this inner and outer journey with a minimum of fuss. The flashbacks and their revelations, filling in the puzzle, are sparingly doled out. The stunning scenery Cheryl hikes through is barely noticed.
The humor comes from Cheryl’s salty fury at all the stuff she does wrong, from the wrong-sized hiking boots, to the overstuffed pack that threatens to “turtle” on her.
Lone hiker Cheryl is unusual enough in the mid-90s to provoke incredulous looks and sexist leers from the many men she encounters. Vallee wrings tension out of every nervous encounter she has with men in the middle of nowhere. Will this one be a folksy friend, a trail guide or that hunter-biker rapist one hears stories of?
Witherspoon, dressed down and bloodied up on the trail, nude and wasted in many of the flashbacks, wholly commits to this quest and makes the psychological journey work in concert with the physical one. When Cheryl walks out on a counselor, we get what she means when she suggests there is no “talking” cure for what ails her. Like Forrest Gump and the hero of next spring’s Robert Redford Appalachian Trail trek, “A Walk in the Woods,” sometimes the only way out of your past is to put one boot in front of the other and start walking.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, Gaby Hoffman
Credits: Directed by, written by Jean-Marc Vallée, screenplay by Nick Hornby based on the Cheryl Strayed memoir. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:55

Sasha and Paige are more than best-friends. They connect, they finish each other’s sentences.
They’re “Life Partners.” And as such, they have rituals — date night consists of drinking, watching “Top Model” together and mocking it, and spying each other in traffic is a queue to stage a fake “road rage” tirade for their own amusement, the more shocked onlookers the better.
They have figured out their future.
“I guess we’re gonna end of dying alone, like planned.”
But they’re gorgeous and they’re hitting their late 20s. They both seem to get they’re peaking, they’re facing adulthood and it’s time to get on with it.
Sasha (Leighton Meester of “Gossip Girl”) is gay, an aspiring folk singer-songwriter (totally NOT a cliche), bar-hopping and barely getting by on her own as an inept receptionist.
Paige (Gillian Jacobs of “Community”) isn’t. She’s an environmental lawyer with a house, a Prius and a little more urgency in her days.
So as adorable as their banter is — “Which one of us is a lesbian?” — as close as they are, Sasha and Paige are headed for trouble.
Their gay BFF’s, Jen (Gabourey Sidibe) and Jenn (Beth Dover), can sense it. Sort of.
“Oh my God, why is every lesbian named ‘Jen’?'”
“Life Partners” is a slight and somewhat demure romantic comedy/friendship comedy built around two mildly interesting characters.
Sasha is prone to hooking up with women so young they still live with their parents. She likes the “dumb lesbian drama” of her life, the gay bar scene, its attendant comic rituals (sex toy “swordfight” competitions), “How many lesbians fit in a Subaru?” contests and “pride” parades.
Paige is a control freak, never apologizing, judgmental but indulgent of her new beau, Tim “the doctor.”
Tim (Adam Brody, who broke out of “The O.C.”) may be a doctor, but he’s “only” a dermatologist. He’s dorky, too fond of “message” t-shirts and is obsessed with firing off snatches of dialogue from his favorite movies, which naturally includes “The Big Lebowski.”
But he’s enough to come between the “Life Partners,” to ruin “Top Model” wine-drunk sleepovers and all that comes with them.
The most fun elements here are the fake road rage scenes and assorted cute slices of communal lesbian life.
Meester, the third choice for the lead (Kristen Bell and Evan Rachel Wood both dropped out), manages a perky “butch” walk and handles Sasha’s sweet cluelessness well. But she’s a character with no edge, which goes for the film as well. You get the feeling Sasha is still exploring her sexual options, just from the lack of heat with her various hook-ups. That’s not the way the character was written, and that arm’s length treatment of Sasha’s sexuality makes the film feel 15 years out of date.
Jacobs is even more generic, though she has some very funny scenes with her mom (Julia White of “Transformers”). Brody is stuck playing a shadow of a cliche. You want to know why actresses roll their eyes at the way the male-dominated film industry portrays them on screen, check out the grab bag of shtick director/co-writer Susanna Fogel and co-writer Joni Lefkowitz saddle Brody with here. Do they KNOW any men?
But Jacobs and Meester click, on some level, and there are enough sparks of life in each performance that we buy them as the pals they say they’re are, even if we can all-too-easily see the break-up that they never suspect is coming.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Cast: Leighton Meester, Gillian Jacobs, Adam Brody, Gabourey Sidibe, Beth Dover

Credits: Directed by Susanna Fogel, written by Joni Lefkowitz and Susanna Fogel. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:32

“Take Care” is an undemanding romantic comedy about love and responsibility and how doing right by someone always has consequences, not all of them good.
It’s a star vehicle for Leslie Bibb, a perky supporting player in films such as “Iron Man 2” and TV shows such as “About a Boy.” She makes the most of this indie opportunity, milking this part for all its laughs — what few there are.
Bibb is Frannie, a New Yorker suddenly immobilized by a broken leg. She lives in a four story walk-up, so just getting her home is a chore. With her sister (Tracee Chimo) living in New Jersey, her gay BFF (Kevin Curtis) busy all the time and her noisy, self-absorbed neighbor (Michael Stahl-David) not interested, how will she manage?
Feeding herself, her difficult toilet breaks, sponge baths and the like? Insurance will be no help.
The moment Frannie stops weeping, she comes up with a plan. She’ll hassle the guy she cared for when he was battling cancer, the guy who made a killing on an Internet start-up, the guy who dumped her for a blond pretty much as soon as he was cured.
“Take CARE of me!”
And Devon, the sap, falls for it. He (Thomas Sadoski) may be married to Jodi (Betty Gilpin), a spoiled woman of means in her own right who demands all his attention. But somehow, through negotiation and subterfuge, he will do right by Frannie. Finally.
The stars have limited chemistry, and there’s a serious charisma shortage that spreads over “Take Care.” But the marvel of it all is that they and writer-director Liz Tuccillo make us care — just a little — what happens.
Bibb plays Frannie’s guilt over this “inappropriate” thing she’s demanding to the hilt, and Sadoski nicely internalizes the resentment Devon feels about this burden he’s been asked to take on and the memories of his own illness and the heel he was for ditching her the moment he got better.
A few sitcomish situations pay off — meals, toilet breaks and just keeping the shut-in company (“Law & Order” marathons). Their “history” folds into every moment, her vain hopes of getting something back from this man she loved, his fear of what this could do to his marriage, revisiting the routines of their former relationship.
The only real quotable sparks here come from bit players — the hostile neighbor, the surgeon who treated Frannie.
“I’m amazing and chicks dig me.”
But “Take Care” manages, more often than not, to rise to the level of pleasant time killer, a rom-com with just enough surprises to justify getting those New York filming permits.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations, profanity
Cast: Leslie Bibb, Thomas Sadoski, Betty Gilpin, Tracee Chimo
Credits: Written and directed by Liz Tuccillo. A Phase4 release.
Running time: 1:34

Stories about the modern world’s origins within the Dark Ages have always held a fascination for some — OK, maybe it’s just me. It’s not exactly filmdom’s favorite era, all brown and muddy and unhygienic.
A priest on the run (“The Reckoning”) falls in with a troupe of actors and helps condemn a murderous lord. “The Name of the Rose” and TV’s “Brother Cadfael” had monks investigating crimes, logically and rationally, in a time of superstition. A young Medieval lawyer’s immersion in this new form of provable facts-based law was the foundation of an early Colin Firth gem, “The Advocate.”
“The Physician,” based on a Noah Gordon novel, fits neatly within this historical fiction tradition. It’s about an 11th century English barber’s assistant (Tom Payne) who, upon hearing that real medicine is being practiced and taught in the Islamic East, sets out to study there.
In pre-Norman England, illnesses are referred to as “the sight sickness” (cataracts) or “the side sickness” (appendicitis). The workings of the human body weren’t understood. There were no doctors or surgeons, none outside of the royal courts, anyway. Young Rob loses his mother to illness and takes up with the drunken, wench-chasing traveling barber (Stellan Skarsgard) who failed to save her. The Barber is all about sales pitches, tooth pulling and cauterized amputations.
“Remember boy, the more painful the treatment, the more they respect the Barber!”
But after years on the road with this dissolute healer, sometimes beaten by priest-backed mobs fearing “black magic,” Rob falls into a community of Jews able to treat the Barber’s cataracts. He learns that medicine is only truly taught by the great Ibn Sina (or Avicenna) in far off Persia. Christians aren’t allowed in his madrasah (school). But the world’s wandering Jews are. Rob renounces his religion and sets off for Persia, taking care of that little matter of circumcision along the way.
Ben Kingsley is properly warm and wise as the real-life Ibn Sina, “the greatest healer in the known world,” a studious, scientific man tolerated by the Shah, but not by the Islamic zealots who make up much of the population. In a time of plague, short life-spans and incessant war, Sina taught that “We don’t treat disease. We treat the people who suffer from disease.”
Director Philipp Stölzl and a largely German production beautifully recreate a time of wood, steel, fire and leather. The brown-on-brown art direction extends from the British isles to the sand-dusted Middle East. The costumes of Muslims, Jews and Gentiles are so realistic as to make us feel the scratchy fabrics and smell the unwashed, unchanged leather accessories.
This mini-series length movie is built on an old fashioned framework. There’s a soap opera-style forbidden love with a Jewish girl (Emma Rigby ) promised to an older man, a hint of the supernatural (Rob can feel a patient’s impending death) and an outbreak of plague which tests the physician, his students and the dying city they are all quarantined in.
The film has big, timely themes — health care as a human right, religious fanaticism facing off with science, a plague-induced panic.
Payne makes a decent enough leading man. But it is his supporting cast that lends gravitas to “The Physician.” Kingsley gives Sina the solemnity you’d expect, and an urgency that his decades have taught him to keep from his master, the Shah (Olivier Martinez), a vain ruler capable of glimmers of understanding mixed with ruthless cruelty. Skarsgard’s Barber just swaggers and staggers and twinkles, all to great effect.
The setting and old fashioned structure of the story won’t be to every taste. But “The Physician” is quite good at recreating its era and reminding us that once, long ago, it was the West that was backward and always looking East for enlightenment, education and a way out of the Dark Ages.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, explicit dissection scenes, nudity and sex.
Cast: Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard, Ben Kingsley, Emma Rigby, Olivier Martinez

Credits: Directed by Philipp Stölzl, written by Jan Berger based on the Noah Gordon novel. A Wrekin Hill release.

Running time: 2:33

A marriage, a Broadway debut, a couple of steps up the ladder in her movie career and a well-received pop album — it’s been “a pretty good year,” for Leighton Meester, admits Leighton Meester.
The onetime “Gossip Girl” regular married Adam Brody back in the spring, and promptly joined James Franco and Chris O’Dowd in a revival of the play based on John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” on Broadway.
“Changed my life,” Meester, 28, says.
The reviews weren’t bad either. Playing Curley’s wife, married to the boss’s son, it’s a role usually limited to sultry, teasing sexiness. But Meester brought “an impressive core of loneliness alongside her eroticism” to the role (Newsday), giving the character “flickers of softness and even warmth” (USA Today).
“Heartstrings,” her album of “moody” folk pop released in October, earned her comparisons to Fiona Apple, Jewel and Tori Amos in publications like Lithium Magazine.
“Music grabs you and becomes this dream you can’t let go of,” Meester says. “But not everybody who picks up an instrument is a rock star.”
The willowy beauty –a Fort Worth native who grew on Florida’s Marco Island — walked off with a couple of very funny scenes with He Who Cannot Be Comically Upstaged — Robert Downey, Jr. — in “The Judge.” Another piece of work that found its way to her.
“I don’t have much of a say about what I do,” Meester says. “When something comes my way, that’s when I get a choice. ‘Do I do this, or pass?’ I always have my eyes peeled for something I can relate to and if I’m lucky enough to love a part that I’m offered, I jump on it.
“But those choices are made by people making the offer, not by me. Those projects you get passionate about are few and far between.”
One of those projects that just sort of came her way is “Life Partners,” a new romantic comedy co-starring Gillian Jacobs, Gabourey Sidibe and Meester’s new husband, actor Adam Brody. Asking Meester about the roundabout way she came to the part — Kristen Bell, and then Evan Rachel Wood were supposed to take on the role of the personally and professionally aimless lesbian Sasha — just draws puzzled silence from Meester. Both Bell and Wood got pregnant and had to bow out. In any even, when the movie was pitched to both Meester and her mister, they jumped in.
“Sasha is very much like me, and I’m very much like her. I’ve been directionless, gotten stuck at a fork in the road more than once. ‘Where do I go from here? What do I do with my life?’ That’s Sasha.
“That co-dependent friendship thing, I’ve done that. Dating the wrong people? Done that. Not really pushing myself into the right career? Yup…
She’s sarcastic, honest, weird sense of humor, blurts stuff out and then tries to save the situation by spit balling some explanation, only to make it worse. Just like me.”
She’s also a musician, but Meester loved the fact that “Life Partners” suggests a musician who doesn’t have the passion to actually make that career work.
“Sasha is like the vast majority of people — dreaming of it, never going to get it. The select few make it and musicians are the most reluctant to give up that dream. Real life isn’t a romantic comedy, where dreams always come true. ‘Your dream is valid, and you can be a rock star because the record label saw your performance at that little cafe. You’re going to be rich and famous, at the top of the charts.!
“No. This movie is a lot more realistic than that.”
“Life Partners,” which goes into limited release Dec. 5, is about two friends — one gay, one straight (Jacobs) — and the man (Brody) who comes between them when the straight BFF falls for him. It’s a movie without the standard issue gay romantic tropes. Sasha is gay and looking for love, hitting the gay bars, doing Pride parades and the like. But there’s no drama of “coming out” to family or friends, no wrenching personal turmoil over figuring out who she is.
“Relationships are the same, with the same ups and downs — good choices, bad choices,” Meester says. “You could change her discussions about the women she’s dating to men and it would be the same. Some still live at home, some are really good looking but really young and not very sophisticated. Her sexuality is just another colorful aspect of her personality. But she’s not wondering who she is.”
Meester doesn’t wonder who she is, though she always wonders what will come next. The work seems to be coming to her as it does to gorgeous young talents with a pop music career on the side. She has a couple of films in the can, a TV movie in the works, and a January musical residency at L.A.’s Hotel Cafe, and hopes to tour supporting “Heartstrings”, starting in February. But as with everything else, it’s not really up to her and she’s not in control of it.
“None of this was actually plotted out. And I guess it never will be.”

“A Field Full of Secrets” is, its filmmaker Charles Maxwell admits, something of a fool’s errand. He set out to find a definitive answer to the “mystery” of crop circles, those strange, geometric and artistic grain-mashing designs that have been popping up in the agricultural corners of Britain since the 1970s. After years of filmmaking, Maxwell, a British ex-pat living in Los Angeles, was so far down the rabbit hole that he helped finance a prototype of something one source he spoke to insisted was a 3D rendering of what the “real” crop circles were depicting.
Maxwell had already spoken with legions of experts on film — and a sole admitted “hoaxer,” one of those “cerealogists” who claim to create these things in the dark of the British night. Whatever these things are, and Maxwell gives “hoax” short shrift, “alien messages” more credence and “messages or blueprints from the future” the most credit of all, the adventurous filmmaker was willing to stick his neck out, find investors and make a flying saucer out of what one “inventor” and engineer saw in the designs.
Up to that point, “Field Full of Secrets” is one of the loveliest British travelogues in recent memory — stunning postcard vistas of Stonehenge and environs —  Wiltshire, the county in England where many of these circles have turned up. Maxwell and his interview subjects say that the famed ancient Silbury Hill monument, an earth and chalk neolithic “pyramid” built some 4500 years ago, is ground zero in the crop circle world. So they visit it, trek to circles that have been made and stake out fields waiting to catch hoaxers in the act.
They don’t, which “proves” that these things are not stamped out by humans acting out a sort of large scale Spyrograph toy. Or it “proves” nothing of the sort, which Maxwell is reluctant to admit.
So he pursued other theories, especially the blueprints-send-from-the-future one. Nikola Romanski’s name and posts turn up on UFO forums, here and there. And this odd, roll-your-own-puffing transexual engineering whiz convinces Maxwell that some circles are depicting a flying saucer design and others alternative energy sources. That’s when Maxwell and the movie go down that rabbit hole.
But if you’ve seen “Interstellar” and can swallow at least a little of that film’s time travel/black hole science,  maybe you’ll buy in the way Maxwell did. It’s fun to think just that way. Maybe you’ll see his “failure” as just one attempt at translating something in 2D to something it might be in 3D, as a first failed prototype. The scientist played by Jodie Foster in “Contact” wasn’t starved for cash, after all.
As the Carl Sagan quote that begins “Field Full of Secrets” reminds us, “They laughed at Edison…Fulton…the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with some profanity, pot-use.

Cast:  Charles Maxwell, Nikola Romanski, Francine Blake,

Credits: Written and directed by Charles Maxwell. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:22

I just loved the new Mark Harris Hollywood history “Five Came Back,” an account of the American film industry’s response to World War II as seen through the actions of five filmmakers who joined up, did their patriotic duty and documented the war.

Anybody who knows anything about Hollywood from that period knows that Frank “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” Capra went to Washington, oversaw military movie making, came up with the inspiring “Why We Fight” and the more pointed “Know Your Enemy” documentaries and came out of the war and made the dark classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Which flopped.

You know the flag waving sentimentalist John Ford went in (BEFORE Pearl Harbor, mind you) and oversaw Navy film units and filmed The Battle of Midway, a much-honored documentary shot during the battle, with Ford himself on the island. He got out to make his own downbeat failure, “They Were Expendable.”

Maybe you know William Wyler filmed “The Memphis Belle” and came back to make “The Best Years of Their Lives.” But did you know he lost most of his hearing, making films swallowed by the deafening roar of airplane engines?

George Stevens was on the ground in North Africa, Italy and Western Europe, and went from being a pre-war director of all manner of films, to a post war drama specialist, at least in part because of the months he spent documenting the horror of German concentration camps.

And there was John Huston, who interrupted a just-then-soaring career to serve, but who barely let the war interrupt his pathological womanizing, and who made three controversial documentaries — about the Aleutians Campaign, The Battle of San Pietro and men suffering from what we today call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, “Let There Be Light.”

But did you know that Ford didn’t actually hold the cameras at Midway, that his alcoholism and raging benders got him shoved out before the war was over? You can’t read any John Wayne or Ford bio without stumbling into accounts of Ford’s outrage at Super Patriot Wayne’s incessant draft dodging, his many offers to join Ford in doing war related filmmaking. Wayne the careerist was not having it, and with much of the pride of Hollywood in uniform, he cashed in while Stewart and Gable and the rest were off serving their country. Wayne’s only punishment for this was Ford’s needling him for the rest of his life, which Wayne over-compensated for by making war films and wrapping himself in the flag.

Huston recreated “The Battle of San Pietro,” rather than capturing the actual combat, which he was too late to see. Wyler’s slow style of filmmaking didn’t derail “Memphis Belle,” but it pretty much kept his other work from being finished before the war was over. Capra was anxious to get out, could never get a handle on his “Know Your Enemy” films until they were too late to be of much use as training films, and had issues with his own confused and confusing politics as the war went on.

Harris produces revealing anecdotes about Daryl F. Zanuck, Harry Cohn, the Warner Brothers (first to make Hollywood entertainments about the Nazi threat).

It’s a great, breezy read, and better still, a book you can now read with a notebook PC open next to it. “Report from the Aleutians,” is on Youtube (at that link), as is “The Battle of Midway”.

Wyler’s “The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress” is there as well.  Search youtube for “Why We Fight” and all those documentaries show up.

And then there is Stevens. He was on the beaches on D-Day, and in the camps at war’s end. He compiled films for use at the Nuremberg trials for German war criminals, some of which didn’t see make it before the general public for decades. A lot of that stuff was government financed and is now in the public domain, dutifully uploaded to Youtube by film fans and history buffs.
Battles and jungle training footage were recreated in Orlando, more of a swampy jungle then than it is now. Ford shot his PT boats drama “They Were Expendable” in Key Biscayne and environs. Huston became an expert on combat recreations making “Battle of San Pietro” and used that expertise in “The Red Bad of Courage,” but didn’t go around reminiscing about the war the way Ford did.

And Wyler and Stevens were darkened by the experience most clearly, and let that sober up their work after the war.

So track down “Five Came Back” for the film fan and history buff you’re shopping for this Christmas. And be sure to point out how much of the footage described in it, films that often put film crews in great danger to obtain, is up on Youtube, a great resource for reminding you how some of Hollywood’s finest spent their war years.