Movie Nation

“Lucky Them” is an indie rock’n roll romance that had a good enough script to attract decent talent, just not good enough to develop any one of its many promising threads. File it under “slight, but worth checking out,” mainly for the performances.

Toni Collette is Ellie Klug, heroine and narrator, ageing Seattle rock journalist. Closing in on 40, she’s never outgrown the habit of falling into bed with the promising young musicians she profiles for Stax Magazine. She’s a veteran of the scene who can spot talent in a street busker (Ryan Eggold). If she could only talk her boss (Oliver Platt) into letting her write about him.

All of this might be forgivable, if she’d stayed relevant. She’s still trapped in the alt-rock era she came up in. And she’s never gotten over the most promising lover-rocker of them all, Matthew Smith, who hopped in his car, drove to a waterfall and…disappeared years and years before.

“There is no WAY he would’ve jumped,” she has insisted all along, especially to her bestie bartender (Nina Arianda, sparkling in the part).

That’s the very story her embattled editor needs her to do, “pick at the scab” of her great, lost love. Find out what happened to him.

“Reclaim your place at this magazine,” Giles (Platt) charges her. So she will.

Stumbling into a onetime flirtation, Charlie( Thomas Haden Church, always funny) could be a boon. He’s a rich dabbler who longs to dabble in documentary filmmaking. He’ll assist in her quest.

An online tip — surreptitious footage of a singer who “might be” their quarry — sends them on their way, a road trip into the heart of post-Grunge Seattle and the ever-overcast Pacific Northwest.

Complicating this is Ellie’s dalliance with that street busker, Lucas (Eggold), who is either smitten or determined to get publicized in print. And Charlie is more than hoping he still has a shot with her as they revisit the scenes of Ellie’s romance with the long-missing Matthew, including where she lost her virginity to the missing singer.

“I was 14,” Charlie counters, helpfully. “She was our 46 year-old Jamaican housekeeper. Had a lot of MOLES.”

While director Megan Griffiths (“Eden,” “The Off Hours”) can be commended for avoiding turning this into something utterly predictable, the story elements and arc here are wearily over familiar. The film is part “Almost Famous,” part “Eddie and the Cruisers,” with elements of the Kurt Cobain, Tim Buckley and Jim Morrison stories wrapped up in the fiction.

But Collette always delivers fair value. Her Ellie is hard-drinking, high-mileage, slimmed down and flirting with Cougar-hood, a woman living in the trap of her world, her work and the love she lost. Platt and Arianda are on the nose.

And Thomas Haden Church makes his dyed-hair 40something bachelor a comical cliche, a bore with more money than luck when it comes to love.

Still, “Lucky Them” is rarely deep, rarely more than anything other than a pleasant enough picture you’d find at your average film festival, Netflix bound and worth downloading when it is.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and drug use

Cast: Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church, Oliver Platt

Credits: Directed by Megan Griffiths, screenplay by Huck Botko and Emily Wachtel. An IFC release.

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Movie There’s something to be said for giving even tiny tykes a good, old fashioned fright all in the name of good clean fun. But Disney’s “Maleficent” still feels like a sour miscalculation on somebody’s part.

A dark, gloomy and quite violent riff on the “Sleeping Beauty” fairytale, this time seen through the eyes of the evil fairy who put this Beauty under a curse, it’s a lovely-looking thing with most of the joy left out.

In short, it’s the sort of movie we often get when somebody decides to promote a filmmaker from the visual effects ranks into the director’s chair. The 3D wonderland created here has the texture and tone of time-worn three strip Technicolor films from Hollywood’s Golden Age — think “The Wizard of Oz” or “Gone With the Wind.” But effects guru turned director Robert Stromberg rarely breathes life into the dazzling visuals he conjures up.

Angelina Jolie and her prosthetically augmented cheekbones have the title role, a fairy who grew up in The Moors amongst assorted pixies, trolls and sprites, only to have her heart broken by the human boy who, to win the right to claim the throne, avenges a malevolent king who has battled Maleficent by whacking off her fairy wings.

The gruesome surgery takes place off-camera, for the most part.

That gives the fairy queen a grudge like no other. So when young Stefan (Sharlto Copley of “District 9”) becomes king, marries and his queen has a daughter, Maleficent storms her ex’s baby’s christening. And she lays on a curse. Young Princess Aurora will, when she turns 16, have an accident and “fall into a sleep like death.”

Aurora will some day doze off and require a — wait for it — “True love’s kiss” — something the cynically wingless Maleficent doubts will ever happen.

The Disney spin on the story is that Aurora, played by assorted adorable babies and toddlers, is sent to be raised by three incompetent pixies (Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple, Lesley Manville) to keep her from harm. Maleficent looks over her, gets mistaken by the child (Elle Fanning plays her as she reaches her teens) for her “fairy godmother” and develops feelings for the rugrat, whom she nicknames “Beastie.”

That situation is ripe for comedy, which this Linda Woolverton (“Alice in Wonderland”) script rarely delivers. Jolie can handle a withering put down and a convincing Mistress of Mayhem, but rarely gets the chance to do either.

“I like you begging,” she hisses. “Do it AGAIN.”

The pixies have their moments. Which are few. And the humorless humans have none.

Stromberg instead treats us to pretty little mudfights amongst Aurora and the froglike trolls of the swamp and big set-piece brawls between human soldiers and a forest turned into tree demons battling to save the magic.

Impressive. And violent. Just not a lot of fun.

Rating: PG for sequences of fantasy action and violence, including frightening images

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sharlto Copley, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple

Credits: Directed Robert Stromberg, script by Linda Woolverton, based on the Grimm fairytale and Disney film “Sleeping Beauty.” A Walt Disney release.

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If America hadn’t produced Gore Vidal, we’d probably have had to import him.
Novelist and playwright, wit and patrician-voiced politician, gadfly and scold, we might have been able to buy him at a British sale of surplus public intellectuals from the U.K. when they were selling off the rest of Britain after the war.
But as the delightfully flattering new documentary “Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia” reminds us, the late author of “Burr,” “The Best Man” and “Myra Breckinridge” was home-grown to the core, as passionately American as any public figure the republic has yet produced.
Nicholas Wrathall interviewed Vidal, traveled with him as he gave a few last talks, visited his cemetery plot in Washington, D.C. and closed up his Italian villa, winding down his life to his death in the summer of 2012. And thanks to a generous helping of archival footage, we’re treated to a nearly complete life, from his privileged Washington childhood to his emergence as a writer and his scandalous status as one of the first public homosexuals in American history. It’s almost a hagiography, and Vidal would have demanded no less.
He famously quipped, “I never miss the chance to have sex, or appear on television,” a line that says as much about American culture today as any prophesy in our history.
He cracked that “The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country, and we haven’t seen them since.”
Wrathall’s film is both a Vidal’s Greatest Hits — his political campaigns, his memorable political debates with the equally patrician William F. Buckley Jr., his put-downs of Jerry Brown and Reagan, Nixon, Carter and “Junior” (George W. Bush). It captures a hint of the feuds, the pettiness and the contradictions of the man, as well, but only hints.
Yes, he subscribed to “the Conspiracy Theory” of American history, which made him a cynic. His ready command of facts was daunting. Did anybody ever fact-check him? His self-mocking demeanor — “Greed and vanity,” he said, “drives my character.” — masked the way every anecdote or impersonation ended with him, in some way, coming out on top.
An expert witness interviewed here who positions Vidal midway between the humorist/novelist Mark Twain and the literary stylist Henry James might have been right. But there’s a lot of self-promotion, the fabulist about him, a touch of the showman. He was literature’s Orson Welles, a Hollywood peer who also never missed the chance to appear on television during that era.

His books may live on, or be forgotten. But the “Gore Vidal” focuses more on the bright star he was in the culture at large. Friends with Newman and Woodward, the Kennedys, Tim Robbins (in the film) and Gorbachev (likewise), Vidal lived a long life as a bon vivant and a Jeremiah, warning Americans about the National Security State we have built and the threats, from within, to our freedoms from “the ruling class,” which he was born into but rejected.
That he managed so much of this during decades of living abroad — in Italy — should come as little surprise. We didn’t have to import him. He turned out to be our cleverest export.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity
Cast: Gore Vidal, Dick Cavett, Joanne Woodward, Christopher Hitchens, Tim Robbins
Credits: Written and directed by Nicholas Wrathall. A Sundance/IFC Release.
Running time: 1:24

The young couple doesn’t say much when they visit the remote hydroelectric dam.
“No fish ladders,” she complains. “Wonder how they got around that?”
There’s not a lot of spark between them, even when they’re shopping for a ski boat. They have a pickup with a trailer hitch. So they close the deal — with greenbacks.
“Cash, the poor people’s money.”
What they plan to do with this boat and when they plan to do it is what the quiet, sometimes tense thriller “Night Moves” is about.
The latest film from the director of “Meek’s Cutoff” and “Wendy & Lucy” is set within the off-the-grid/love-the-land eco-terrorism movement. Kelly Reichardt is practiced in the art of storytelling with little dialogue/less music, and that gives “Night Moves” a serenity even amidst the rising suspense and paranoia that follows as this terror cell makes its plans.
Josh, given a deflated, sensitive veneer by Jesse Eisenberg, seems to be running the show. Dena, played by Dakota Fanning with a spoiled, smart impatience, is his sidekick, gifted at lying on the fly, should that become necessary.
And it does. Because the guy who can turn the boat into a bomb, Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) may be ex-military. But he’s careless, the sort of fellow who dismisses each new concern with “This is nothing.”
Good thing there’s a paranoid planner and talented liar on hand to take care of the details, like buying the fertilizer to mix with the diesel fuel to load into the boat so that Harmon, who doesn’t sweat details, can set the fuse. Because that’s just the sort of guy you want doing that.
Reichardt, who co-wrote the script with Jon Raymond, has never been very good at bringing urgency to her movies. They amble along, which both suits this film and hampers it. The Brit Marling eco-terrorism vehicle “The East” was better at creating tension. But Reichardt creates a more convincing subculture of Mother Earth activists — young people living on media-deprived co-ops, frequenting organic farmers’ markets and trying to live “off the grid” in the most cell-phone connected, privacy-menaced era in human history.
Then we follow Dena, code-named “D,” into the rural Oregon farm supply store and we understand the extreme corner of that world, another reason privacy is under attack. Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer, the McVeigh weapon of choice? And you want HOW much?
“Controlled substance,” says the hardcase store manager (James LeGros).
Sarsgaard brings a devil-may-care menace to his slacker and Fanning nicely transitions her character from headstrong idealist to someone who starts to realize that idealism has its limits and its consequences.
But Reichardt hangs her film on Eisenberg, who subtly suggests a loner whose primary gift for the cause is he whole in his soul where a longing or human contact should be. It’s a terrific performance and it holds the movie together even as “Night Moves” stumbles toward its foregone, and rather poorly handled, conclusion.
　
MPAA Rating: R for some language and nudity
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard, James Le Gros
Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, written by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt. A Cinedigm release.
Running time: 1:58

What were your first thoughts on seeing the snippets of video of Elliot Rodger, son of a Hollywood second unit director, as he gave his reasons for setting out on a killing spree?

Hollywood brat, I thought. Not ugly, apparently smart and articulate. Well put together. Smug. Entitled. He was sitting in a BMW daddy’s money paid for. Daddy’s money (presumably) also paid for the handguns and ammo he used on his spree.

The excuse “Asperger’s” had been applied to his social skills. Mentally ill, in any event.

Anne Hornaday, the Washington Post film critic, wrote an op ed suggesting that Hollywood’s spate of losers who get the girl comedies, and love of violence, created this monster.

“Sexist escapist fantasies”? Yeah, that’s a fair cop. Judd Apatow, who created a whole school of comedy built around that and around casting funny alter egos like Seth Rogen in his films (Rogen’s latest is “Neighbors”) is a funny schlub who married the gorgeous and funny Leslie Mann. If it can happen to Judd, his movies reason, it can happen to a “40 Year old Virgin”, a loser who can get Katherine Heigl (remember her?) “Knocked Up.”

Never thought of his films as connecting with violent male frustrations in any way, I must say.

Needless to say, mellow man Seth Rogen was not pleased. Nor was Apatow.

He ripped her a new one in a couple of tweets. Apatow pitched in.

Yes, she’s right, that the sexism in the focus of Hollywood films in general and romantic comedies in particular, is ongoing and defies belief. Apatow, however, is far from the worst offender. Women come off better in his films (especially when the woman is played by his wife).

But when you throw that ad hominem “white males on charge” stuff out there, you’re starting down a slippery slope. The Rogen/Apatow and by extension Sandler etc. tilt to rom-coms these days has more in common than just “white males” greenlighting the pictures, writing the pictures, directing the pictures and starring in the pictures. The slippery slope of “sexist” white males becomes more offensive to the ears when you say, “Jewish males” sexism, and attach broad sexist attitudes to the films attributable to their creators/studio champions. Doesn’t it?

Then again, the ONE Hollywood event Mr. Rodger was photographed at was a violent, youth-oriented film which his father did second unit photography on. And “The Hunger Games” is about a killer female, isn’t it, Anne? Doesn’t fit her thesis, doesn’t figure into her argument.

A better pop culture connection, I thought, was “Big Bang Theory,” where smart cute guys bemoan their inability to get dates, or did in the first few seasons. But that has nothing to do with a mentally disturbed child of privilege going out and buying guns either, does it?

Neither does the eat-or-be-eaten ethos of “reality” TV, where narcissistic video diary confessionals, like Rodger’s, are commonplace. But that’s a much closer connection than “Neighbors” or “Knocked Up.”

Social media is another arrow in that quiver, and perhaps the sharpest. That’s where this guy posted his threats and planned his posthumous famous. Social media’s built in “everybody has it better than me/has a girlfriend but me” angst, NRA guaranteed access to as many firearms as you can afford, an affluent micro-culture where his father was high but nowhere near the richest 1% of the pecking order, pathologically awkward socially…sounds as if movies have less to do with this than video games, and nobody’s even talking about video games.

My guess? Hornaday will end up apologizing. The piece is poorly argued and a sharper editor would have demanded more evidence. But op ed editors don’t go to the movies, so they just let her go for it. A swing and a very public miss.

Bobo and Klara, two 13 year-old Swedish girls, are having a debate by telephone. And the moment Klara (Mira Grosin) holds her phone through the cracked door, capturing a loud, pointless shouting match her free-spirited mother and father are having, “We Are the Best!” sets itself apart from other coming-of-age pictures.
“See?” she says. “MY parents are worse!”
“We Are the Best!” is a musical period piece, a winning tale of girls figuring out who they are, what their tribe will be and who they can depend on as they punch through whatever glass ceiling Sweden has to offer their sex in 1982.
The first ceiling? It’s the age of ABBA, but Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara are punks.
“Punk’s dead,” their derisive classmates might say, at their choppy hairstyles and tastes in music. “Don’t you know that?”
They don’t. And Bobo, a wallflower emboldened by the defiant Klara, is determined to be every bit the punk her more assertive best friend is.
They hate gym class, try to talk cashiers in the food court into the socialist idea of giving them free french fries, panhandle strangers and annoy their teachers and classmates.
“We have a band,” Klara lies. And so they do, borrowing instruments, demanding rehearsal time at the local community center and thus ticking off the heavy metal wannabes Iron Fist, who bullied them.
Klara will play bass, write a song and sing it. Bobo, eager to please, takes up the drums. They hate gym? “Hate the Sport” becomes their first punk anthem.
Lukas Moodysson’s film, based on his wife Coco Moodysson’s comic book, beautifully captures that last stretch of innocence in childhood. They’re obsessed with music, wearing out their favorite Scandi-punk tapes on their Sony Walkmen.
Klara and Bobo read about Swedish punk rockers close to their age in the newspaper, and Klara boldly calls them up and makes a hang-out date with them. Boys, of course, are what come between girls. They’ve got to learn that sooner or later.
They need a guitarist? Why not court the conservative, shy “Kumbaya” playing Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne)?
“We Are the Best!” is a scruffy, anarchic picture that gets better as it stumbles along. There’s just a hint of formula here — the “band” will make its debut at a coming community center Christmas concert. Will they humiliate themselves, or is that just a smidge of improvement we detect, rehearsal by rehearsal?
The point, for those who remember that era in America and Britain, is that “It’s punk. Who’ll know the difference?” It’s the brash attitude, the defiant haircuts and the rage that counts. Even when you’re 13 and Swedish and the best thing you have to rebel against is gym class.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult situations, profanity, teens partying
Cast: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne
Credits: Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, based on the Coco Moodysson comic book. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:38

Reviews for “X-Men: Days of Future Past” have been excellent. Yes, mine, too. It’s on nearly 3,000 screens. It’s in 3D. So there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit $100 million over a long holiday weekend, right?

Box Office Guru thinks it has a shot to hit $110 by Monday night.

Box Office Mojo predicts $98 million by midnight Sunday, $119 by Monday.

“Blended” is earning scathing reviews for the too-bored-to-care Adam Sandler. Hated it. Truly. A whopping 15% positive reviews on the tomatometer, which only proves that 15% of the people published there are special needs.

Mojo figures “Blended” will manage $30 million or so by Monday night, $23 million Sunday night.

Guru thinks $26 million, all-in Monday night.

A fall-off for the Sandman? Maybe. Warners will probably break-into the Sandler business in the black. Not guaranteed.

Joe, the 400 pound Latino boy from Houston, weeps in fear and frustration. He’s not alone. Maggie, a 212 pound 12 year-old from Oklahoma, joins him. Wesley, an overweight 13 year-old in Houston, is desperate.

But Brandon, 15, a 215 pound South Carolinian headed toward diabetes, morbid obesity and being a member of “the first American generation to not live as long as their parents,” is documenting his on video life, reading up on his diet and the causes of his problem, determined to “not be just another fat kid.”

Those are the faces of “Fed Up,” the Katie Couric-backed documentary about America’s spreading childhood obesity epidemic. It’s a frank, dismaying and yet surprisingly upbeat look at a problem the country’s been wrestling with for decades.

The problem, as narrator Couric and the many experts she and director Stephanie Soechtig talk to put it, is that we’ve been looking at the causes all wrong. That business about exercise vs. “sloth” and “lack of willpower” and “sedentary lifestyles” and “poor choices” either is misleading, or is avoiding the bigger issue.

“It’s your fault,” our way of stigmatizing the victims of this epidemic, “is not accurate,” they say. Exercise isn’t enough to compensate for the diet we’re being offered. The caloric math doesn’t work.

The elephant-sized issues that we’re avoiding — the pervasiveness of processed foods, packed with sugar in its many forms, and the pervasiveness of the marketing of those foods to children.

In 90 minutes, Couric & Co. trace the first time the problem was recognized- the 1977 McGovern Report from the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs — to the years of efforts to reign in advertising, force food processors to produce more accurate content labels, or to simply get them to cut back on sugar. Those efforts, Couric’s retinue of a couple of dozen experts agree, have failed — thwarted, again and again, by Big Sugar, Big Corn, by Big Pizza, by multinational frozen food concerns.

Michael Bloomberg, demonized as New York mayor for promoting the “Nanny State” by pushing restrictions on sugar soft drinks, diagrams the battlefield. Michael Pollan, the food expert made famous by “Food, Inc.,” laments the powers of lobbies that can buy Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle. Bill Clinton, a Surgeon General and a USDA head, as well as academics and professionals from nonprofits tackling this issue lament the business influence that has co-opted even First Lady Michelle Obama’s innocuous “Let’s Move!” efforts to address this head on.

And kids struggle to understand why this is happening to them and what is within their power that allows them to do something about it.

Mrs. Obama is among those who declined to be interviewed for the film, putting her in the company of Big Cheese, Big Sucrose and their lobbyists as those who avoid talking about the politics of this national disaster. The real villains, captured in Congressional testimony footage and corporate propaganda, are the profit-obsessed titans of food business and their lobbyist lackeys. They provide many of the ironic laughs of “Fed Up,” saying Ronald McDonald isn’t “marketing to kids.” Fox News isn’t the only media enterprise to push the phrase “nanny state” out there. But, as the film makes plain, protect-big-business-from-criticism conservatives made it a rallying cry, perhaps with less than pure motives.

The ripple effects of unfettered processed food capitalism are felt as we see the impact of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of school lunch programs, which led to schools selling their stoves, mixers and the like and laying off real cooks. Next thing you know, processed food and fast food conglomerates are in the schools, offering cheap, unhealthy alternatives to take the place of cooked, healthier meals. Coke and Pepsi vie for exclusive deals with cash-starved school systems.

The film is less pointed in focusing on the obese parents whose lifestyles help create obese kids. It’s a little annoying that all the plump children here are from the South — South Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas. Are there no fat Minnesota teens, no obese New Yorkers?

What makes “Fed Up” a tolerable harangue is both the humor injected into it, and the hope it draws from the Battle against Big Tobacco analogy. In a simpler time, that seemed like a fight no one could win. Then tobacco companies were demonized, their CEOs depicted as heartless villains, their advertising restricted and teen smoking plummeted. Maybe it’s time, the “Fed Up” experts say, to demonize Coca-Cola, Big Sugar, KFC, Kraft and the whole alphabet soup of food conglomerates that created this deadly epidemic. This movie, not a watered-down/advertiser supported TV news feature, could be a second step.

The first one, Pollan reminds us, as he did over and over again in “Food, Inc.,” is to eat “REAL food.”

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements including smoking images, and brief mild language

Cast: Narrated by Katie Couric

Credits: Directed by Stephanie Soechtig , written Mark Monroe, Stephanie Soechtig. A TWC/Radius release.

Running time: 1:32