Movie Nation

Shirley Knight, whose first screen appearance was in 1955’s “Picnic” and who collected her first Oscar nomination for 1961’s “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” gets the spotlight one more time in “Redwood Highway,” playing a woman who walks from a retirement home to the coast of Oregon just to prove she can.
It’s a tepid road picture comedy, a journey of discovery with little new to say and even less to reveal about her character — curmudgeonly Marie, a woman who sneaks off for her 85 mile trek because “They’ve taken my house, and my car. But the haven’t taken my legs, yet!”
“They” in this case means mainly her son (James Le Gros). Marie avoids his visits, doesn’t hesitate to remind him of his failed marriage and refuses to his daughter’s wedding out of spite.
“You’d push me right in my coffin,” she growls.
A phone message from her embittered granddaughter (Zena Grey) gives Marie second thoughts. So she raids the breakfast buffet, packs her tiny backpack and sets out from Grants Pass to the coast, following the “Redwood Highway” that is right along the Oregon/California border.
Along the way, she meets cute kids and helpful, hiking teenagers, a bartender and a driftwood artist.
Tom Skerritt, of “M.A.S.H.” and “Alien” and “Steel Magnolias” plays the artist, a cuddly, overly friendly sort who might have given this movie a little more of the many things it lacks. That “lacks” list starts with urgency, as the search for Marie has none and the wedding plans continue. Other shortcomings include charm (the Skerritt scenes have those) and interesting incidents. She stops at the Great Cats World Park, a roadside attraction, a couple of campgrounds, and a bar where she gets loaded. And along the way she meets virtually no one of interest.
Compare this to “The Way,” Martin Sheen’s hike through Spain, or David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” which sends an old man cross-country on a quest by riding lawnmower. “Redwood” is a road picture without landmarks.
Marie may have flashbacks, seeing some sailor she knew long ago. She may gripe that she needs to do this herself. But even her griping is mild-mannered, lacking comic edge or anything revealing about her personality.
So as fit and well-preserved as Ms. Knight remains, “Redwood” is a bland star vehicle for her, a scenic trip with nothing much to recommend it aside from that scenery.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including a scene of menace
Cast: Shirley Knight, James Le Gros, Tom Skerritt, Zena Grey
Credits: Directed by Gary Lundgren, written by James Twyman and Gary Lundgren. A Monterey Media release.
Running time: 1:30

“Deliver Us from Evil” takes a very long time to deliver us from dullness. This demonic possession police procedural only gets good and wound up for its third act exorcism.
That’s when Edgar Ramirez, as a chain-smoking, whisky loving Jesuit priest, stops phoning it in and gets wound up himself. As Mendoza, too hip to go by “Father,” he’s offered his services to the puzzled cop, Sgt. Sarchie (Eric Bana) much earlier.
But the doubting Sarchie makes us play the “How long before the cop gets around to calling the helpful priest” game as Satanic civilians (Iraq War vets) start showing signs of supernatural evil thanks to a tomb they stumbled into while on duty in the Middle East. Neither priest nor cop made a good first impression.
“So, you’re not all pedophiles, huh?”
Sarchie is a cop with “radar,” strong hunches that have him leading his partner (Joel McHale) into harm’s way.
“You know when you use ‘radar,’ you usually wind up with stitches.”
Checking into a domestic violence call, another “scratching noises in the basement” call, and a third “crazy woman at the Bronx Zoo” (at night) one has Sarchie seeing bloody visions and hearing static — and snippets of The Doors. “Break on through to the other side,” he’s ordered. “People are strange,” he’s warned.
The foreshadowing is obvious in this “inspired by the real Sarchie” account (a real New York cop who’s seen “The Exorcist a few too many times, judging from this). We hear him say, “I hate cats,” his daughter wonder “Why doesn’t Daddy come to church with us?,” and The Doors, and we know every one of those is a plot point that comes back for a cheap scare or an attempted jolt.
Overwhelming its other shortcomings is the Scott Derrickson film’s agonizing lack or urgency. Sarchie should be alarmed, frightened, obsessed. He has his own demons, we’re told. Bana doesn’t give us much of that.
And Ramirez, as Father Exposition, is just there — explaining demonic possession, how he came to believe in it and the stages of exorcism. He seems detached, barely involved, sleepy-eyed and sort of “Been there, done that” about the whole thing.
Ramirez comes off like that prom queen you envied back in school, and maybe pitied later in life. “Well, at least she’s pretty.” If we hadn’t seen him in that “Carlos the Jackal” TV film, we’d think he had nothing else to offer beyond looks.
But after 90 minutes in which the only creepy moments come when the evil comes after Sarchie’s wife (Olivia Munn) and kid (Lulu Wilson), everybody gets their game face on for the big Good/Evil confrontation with crucifixes, including an eyewitness black cop straight out of some horror parody.
And that delivery arrives as too little, too late.
　
MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, grisly images, terror throughout, and language
Cast: Eric Bana, Olivia Munn, Edgar Ramirez, Joel McHale
Credits: Directed by Scott Derrickson, screenplay by Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman, based on the book by Ralph Sarchie and Lisa Collier Cool. A Screen Gems release.
Running time: 1:58

It takes 90 minutes for Dinesh D’Souza’s rambling, mistitled “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” to get to its REAL point. There’s D’Souza, arch-conservative Ivy League immigrant, creator of the popular anti-Obama screed “2016: Obama’s America,” in handcuffs.

“I made a mistake,” he says to the conservative choir he’s preaching to. We’re supposed to know he pleaded guilty to felony Federal campaign finance law violations back in May, and that he faces prison time when he’s sentenced later this year.

Snippets of assorted Fox TV commentators link that conviction to his earlier film criticizing Barack Obama. He’s a martyr to the cause is the implication. And for those in his choir a little slower to catch on, he cuts to an actor playing Abe Lincoln, giving his “farewell address,” a speech freighted with symbolism.

“I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return.”

Cut to John Wilkes Booth, an assassination, and a great Republican lost to history.

What doesn’t matter is that Lincoln actually gave that address as he left Illinois for Washington in 1861, four years before his assassination.

What does is D’Souza’s almost comical gall at daring to make the comparison. Lincoln was murdered by a conspiracy of racist Southern conservatives, D’Souza may be jailed for making up fake campaign contributors to try and buy a U.S. Senate race.

“America” sets itself up as a piece of documentary counter-history, opening with George Washington not surviving the 1777 defeat at the Battle of Brandywine, which causes Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty to dissolve. Where would the world be if America wasn’t here? Interesting. The execution promises to be sort of History Channel lite — middling production values, but a worthwhile subject.

But D’Souza then instantly abandons that as he posits his main thesis — that a conspiracy by academics and activists have created a culture of “shame” about American history. He lists five “indictments” that Native American activists, Mexican-American academics, African American leaders, leftist historians and the Occupy Movement have sold the American public — that we stole Indian land, Mexican land, African slaves, global colonies (and oil) and that capitalists are stealing from each and every one of us, even today. Then he sets out to dismiss each of those indictments.

He’s on his safest ground going after historian Howard Zinn, whose “People’s History of the United States” is a de-mythologized look at assorted American wrongs, dating from European settlement of the New World, to slavery, Indian “genocide” and through Vietnam and today’s “Oil Wars.”

Zinn is darling of the left — Hollywood liberals embraced him — which makes him a good conservative whipping boy. Yes, his book is taught in a lot of America’s colleges and universities. No, D’Souza doesn’t mention that it’s typically taught as an added text to counter the standard narrative of American history. Using the shrill Zinn along with more conventional texts teaches students critical thinking.

D’Souza takes issue with the notion that keeping “conquered lands” was something we invented, punctures the use of “genocide” to describe the impact of disease on Native American populations in the early years after European settlement, and counters the idea that the Sioux Nation, for instance, should refuse compensation for lands they had taken from them in violation of treaty because they expect the lands to be given back to them. The Sioux themselves seized those lands from other tribes, so maybe they should cash Uncle Sam’s check and shut up, is the suggestion here.

D’Souza whines that “capitalists are under fire” and flings the usual hero entrepreneurs up on screen (Steve Jobs, et al) while avoiding mentioning rapacious corporate compensation culture, Wall Street chicanery or high finance gambling.

He dismisses the notion of any lingering impact of slavery on African Americans, 150 years after the fact, with a couple of up-by-their-bootstraps anecdotes, and sidesteps the fiasco of Vietnam by interviewing a pilot who was shot down, held prisoner and tortured by the Vietnamese.

His reenactments include a somewhat undersized Lincoln, and a more spirited impersonation of that one Frenchman conservatives love, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote so admiringly about our “character” — 175 years ago. D’Souza could probably have found better credentialed historians to weigh in on his side of these topics, making for a serious and civil debate, but is generally content to aim lower in that regard. Canadian-born Sen. Ted Cruz is tossed up as an expert on Texas history, one of the few laughs in “America.” A few academics, a few ideological hacks, and Alan Dershowitz.

What he’s doing, it turns out, is lowering the viewer’s standards of proof for a vigorous return to “2016” territory, a hatchet job on Obama and Obamacare that tries to tie everything to a 1960s “radical” organizer who might have influenced the president and, of course, Hillary Clinton, with only a lone right wing ideologue on camera, backing him up.

D’Souza cannot help himself. He’s discovered a way to get rich hurling red meat Obama-baiting to an audience that cannot get enough of that. So he abandons any pretense of making a movie about how this country should have a more vigorous debate about its image, its principles and just what the truth is about its history.

Well, don’t begrudge him that. He will need a conservative financed nest egg when he gets out of prison.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violent images

Cast: Dinesh D’Souza, John Koopman, Ted Cruz,

Credits: Written and directed by Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:40

He could be generous and petty, competitive and nurturing, absurdly public and ferociously private.
And given access to a soap box, you could be sure Roger Ebert would scramble on top of it. Quite aside from being America’s most famous film critic, Ebert was a film enthusiast, a critic who championed films in print and on TV, cajoling-begging-demanding that America sit up and pay attention to a movie he loved.
It happened to Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), whose work Ebert championed all his career. And it happened to another documentarian, Steve James, who owes his career to the attentions of Ebert and his TV foil, Gene Siskel.
“Their impact on ‘Hoop Dreams’ (1994) was remarkable,” James remembers. “This was a three hour documentary about basketball and two kids and their families from Chicago, people nobody had ever heard of, and when we got the film into Sundance, we submitted it to distributors. Didn’t hear a peep…But when Roger and Gene reviewed it on the show, during the Sundance Film Festival, they said ‘We really think it deserves wider distribution’ during the review, suddenly, the Sundance showings were sold out and we got distribution.”
That long-ago endorsement made James famous. And it made him the natural choice to make a documentary about Ebert, based on his memoir, “Life Itself,” a film that would, of course, turn out to be about Siskel as well.
After Siskel died and as Ebert faced his own mortality — losing his voice and much of his face to cancer, before finally succumbing in 2013 — James and Ebert discussed documenting the life Ebert described in his 2011 memoir.
“I told him I wanted input, but that I would have final say,” James recalled. “Roger and (his widow) Chaz understood that. But as that one email that he sent me that’s in the movie is the most important.
“He said, ‘This is not just your film, it’s mine.’ I love that. I want every subject to feel that way about a documentary I make with them.”
James captured the last months of Ebert’s life and had access to decades of Ebert TV appearances and his newspaper cronies and college pals. He filmed the movie’s anchoring event, the Chicago Theatre memorial service that drew moviegoers and movie makers, singing Ebert’s praises.
“I’m puzzled by how beloved he seemed to be,” Chaz Ebert says, noting how “beloved” and “critic” rarely turn up in the same sentence. “I think he was extremely likable, down to Earth, charismatic and very funny. But he also could connect with people. He was real. That’s how he did it.
“He only had a competitive edge when he was around Gene Siskel. With others, he seemed very generous – moviegoers, other critics, actors. He didn’t seem to feel threatened by them, and that disarmed people. That’s the kind of guy he was. What you saw with him was what you got.”
That line filmmaker Oliver Stone used about Ebert stands out — he was “Midwestern fair” in his assessments.
As “Life Itself” notes, Ebert became a critic at what James calls “a golden moment,” 1967, as “Bonnie and Clyde” and “2001” were launching American “cinephile culture.” Ebert championed films, first for the Chicago Sun-Times, and then on assorted TV shows paired with Siskel, and James says “helped shape the cinema” over three of the most important decades in Hollywood history. An early adapter to the Internet — Ebert saw the potential in Google so early, and put money into it, that he was invited into its IPO (Initial Public Offering) when the company went public and offered stock — Ebert talked movies, politics and eventually, his illness, on his wildly popular blog.
Even critics who didn’t grow up with Ebert’s decades-long TV presence have been touched by “Life Itself,” an “impressively clear-eyed and deeply moving portrait” (Amber Wilkinson, Britain’s Daily Telegraph).
“I want people to know that he grabbed life with both hands, with gusto and joy, right up to the end,” Chaz Ebert says. “That’s a model for anybody who had good fortune in life, as he certainly did, and then illness, surgeries. He was someone who never lost that gusto.”

Say this for Melissa McCarthy. A couple of years into her stardom, and not all that far past the dust-up over critics’ deriding her comic reliance on the sight gag that is her physique, she puts it all out there in the opening moments of “Tammy,” a star vehicle she co-wrote for herself.
From the moment we meet her, Tammy is a slovenly, morbidly obese vulgarian, from the top of her home-dye-job mop to the bottom of her omni-present Crocs.
She’s not just another nametag at Topper Jack’s, the bottom step on the ladder of American fast food. Stuffing her face with Doritos, distracted, she runs her ancient Toyota into a deer. She’s late for work — again — and fired for it.
Her gross and profane “exit interview” is the highlight of the movie. Because whatever those riotous opening moments promise — swearing, food-abuse — “Tammy” and McCarthy have their sentimental side. This is a rude, crude comedy with a hard candy shell on the outside, soft and squishy on the inside.
Tammy catches her husband (Nat Faxon) sort-of cheating with a neighbor (Toni Collette) and tosses a fit. She rants to her mom (Allison Janney), and tries to storm out. But she has no money and no car.
Enter Granny, played by Oscar winner Susan Sarandon. Tammy needs a change of scene. Granny has always wanted to see Niagara Falls. And Granny has an old Cadillac and a few thousand dollars saved up. How hard can it be to get from small-town Illinois to the New York/Canadian border? When you’re an idiot with anger-management issues, pretty hard.
They stumble south into Missouri, where Tammy lets on she’s never heard of the guy the Mark Twain National Forest is named for. But she has heard of the Allman Brothers, when Granny brags that she used to date one of them (“the dead one”).
Much of the pleasure from “Tammy” derives from Sarandon, decades removed from playing someone this uninhibited, learning to let her hair down from McCarthy — a butchered duet of the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider,” a “most outrageous thing I’ve done” confession contest, lots of drinking.
Tammy drinks and drives. And Granny washes her pills down with cheap bourbon, so Tammy’s got nothing on her in terms of “outrageous.”
The joy of McCarthy’s comedy is the way she ignores the fact that she’s as wide as she is tall, even if we can’t. She’s cocky about her sexuality. Hit a bar, a BBQ joint, she thinks she owns it.
“I can get ANY guy in this room.”
When Granny Pearl is pursued by a randy farmer (Gary Cole), Tammy figures the farmer’s son (Mark Duplass) should be a pushover. Not so fast. Indie screenwriter/actor Duplass has a deer-in-the-headlights look about him opposite McCarthy, which undercuts the chemistry the script insists they have.
All Tammy has to do is lose the “ugly inside” and he’ll see the real her, right? And maybe ignore the stupidity that’s as obvious as every sentence she utters.
“I’m kinda like a Cheeto,” she purrs. “Ya can’t eat just one.”
That’s Lay’s Potato Chips.
“Noooo. Me? I love a Cheeto!”
There are health issues, mean drunk moments, a “lesbian Fourth of July party” (Kathy Bates is Tammy’s hip aunt, with Sandra Oh in the mirthless role of Auntie’s partner), a stick-up, jail time.
All packed into a movie, co-written and directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, that’s more sentimental than sloppy silly. Because we all just want to be loved, deep down, right? Especially the more outrageous among us.
It is crowd-pleasing, in its own way, mixing girth gags and slapstick with clueless come-ons.
But for a movie that comes out swinging, “Tammy,” in the end, feels like a pulled punch. McCarthy promises a haymaker she never quite delivers.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Gary Cole, Mark Duplass, Sandra Oh, Alison Janney
Credits: Directed Ben Falcone, written by Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. A New Line release.
Running time: 1:37