Movie Nation

Marshall Curry’s Oscar nominated film is an editing of footage — silent and with sound — of a February, 1939 “Support the Nazis” rally — not in Nuremberg, but at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

It’s all there, the nationalist co-opting of the flag, the “Star Spangled Banner” and American icons like George Washington, Americans giving the Nazi salute, just another night in America’s most “liberal” metropolis, 20,000 true believers voicing support for the most un-American dogma imaginable.

German-accented speakers spouting anti-Semitism, urging violence on protesters (and getting it), rallying the Make America Great Again bigots of their day.

Chilling and Fascinating. The link to watch this Oscar nominee is here.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/nightatthegarden/video-nightatthegarden/

“First Man” tried to show us an intimate portrait of Neil Armstrong, and succeeded.

No, the Ryan Gosling/Damien Chazelle bio pic wasn’t a blockbuster and made NO noise this awards season. But it outshone many of the films we’re making bets on winning “Best Picture” this year.

Part of the problem is the filmgoing audience today would rather see Avengers or Superman or the “Guardians of the Galaxy” in space than watch a movie about space history.

That’s what Neon, the edgy studio releasing “Apollo 11” runs up against, something Ron Howard showed us began back “Apollo 13” — a hit movie showing an America that had already grown complacent about human space flight — many years ago.

This Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13”) film, which just premiered at Sundance, faces apathy in the movie market place. But CNN co-produced it, so it’ll reach a TV audience.

I live within sight of KSC, so this is promises to be a thrill to me. But I know I’m the exception these days.

The first image in the trailer shows the NASA’s massive crawler, that hauls spacecraft from the VAB (Vehicular Assembly Building) to the launch pad. The guy who used work on the diesel engine on my sailboat was a NASA layoff post-Apollo. His job? Keeping the diesels running on the crawler.

Dan Myrick’s “Skyman” has that “appearance of ‘real’ history” look of “The Blair Witch Project.”

But “Skyman” is about a man who met a “Skyman” decades earlier.

A mockumentary format, with “interviews” rather than “found footage,” is what the film is built around.

Reminds me a little of that Bob Lazar UFO doc.

This isn’t the first time a co-director of “The Blair Witch Project” has taken on this subject. Ed Sanchez’s “Altered” (originally under a much better title, “Probed”) beat it to the punch.

But hey, go with what you know.

You can fight back the grin that wants to creep onto your face, every so often, during “In Like Flynn,” the good-natured, not-totally far-fetched Aussie film based on the early life of Australia’s first and greatest screen icon — the swashbuckling rake, Errol Flynn.

It’s a patchwork affair — with four credited screenwriters, including a “Flynn.”

There’s not a lot of star power in the cast and Aussie director Russell Mulcahy’s big-screen career went off the rails with “The Shadow” and “The Real McCoy” nearly 30 years ago.

But Mulcahy, who did a few “Highlander” pictures and a “Resident Evil,” knows how to shoot action. And as long as “In Like Flynn” is playing up the two-fisted, devil-may-care bravado of its subject, it’s on solid ground — brawling, dodging straight razors, daggers and bullets in the days before he “went Hollywood.”

That Hollywood trek could have happened earlier than it did, according to this “mostly true” movie based on Flynn’s memoir, “Beam Ends.” We meet him in the bush of Papua New Guinea in 1930, leading a Hollywood producer (Dan Fogler) on a trek to secure grisly footage of the victims of the primitive natives fighting off a new gold rush, and the intruders that come with it.

The politically correct Flynn (Thomas Cocquerel of “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken”), all of 21, may not be as seasoned as he makes out. But as he fires warning shots into the air rather than at the murderous tribespeople, dodges arrows and a hail of blow darts (which kill a native guide and friend), crossing a croc-infested river to make his Indiana Jones getaway, he shows manliness and star quality to that producer.

“You find yourself in Hollywood, come find us.”

But Flynn has that gold on his mind. He recruits a couple of pals — the tough, hard-drinking cynic Rex (Corey Large) and pedantic, posh-accented Dook (William Moseley) — to join him. They outfight/outwit Achun (Grace Huang, venomously sexy), the Dragon Lady of the Sydney waterfront in stealing her boat — the first Flynn sailing schooner to be named Sirocco (“desert wind”) — and make their way up the wild and wooly coast of Oz.

The previous owner of the boat, a weepy, violent old salt named Charlie (Clive Standen of TV’s “Vikings” and “Taken”), muscles his way into their partnership.

There are prize fights and shootouts when they aren’t threatened with dying of thirst, starvation or drowning by sinking.

Death hangs over the story and marks Flynn’s life, this version of his biography tells us. “Beam Ends,” the sailing slang title of that book, hints at despair, desperation and life of narrow escapes that Flynn says he was living at the time. “Beam Ends” means a boat that’s heeled so far over in a strong breeze that it’s about to capsize.

As we know he got his start in Australian films shortly after this period and that he wasn’t a literal Hollywood “discovery” (“He’s a headliner and doesn’t even know it!”), it’s hard to say where the truth ends and the Flynn memoir and four-screenwriters-adapting-it fiction begins.

The good parts of “In Like Flynn” make you wish there were more of them, and that the movie’s modest budget and modest ambitions weren’t slowing it down, thanks to a screenplay that serves up dead stretches in the midst of action picture cliches.

Digitally recreating Sydney Harbor in 1930 is fine. Digitally adding dolphins to the Sirocco’s wake? Less so.

The Indy opening sequence is quickly topped by a short, riotous, dodge the razors, punch the thugs and kiss the girl brawl that gave me high hopes for the picture. Dropping in on the opium den/brothel HQ of Achun didn’t dim those hopes. Much.

The idealistic young Flynn crows about relishing the moment, as “We will never be these men again,” and expectations rise.

“The sirens of the sea beckon!”

And then the movie unfolds in an updating of the corniest, old-fashioned two-fisted balderdash that Flynn’s movies, way back when, used to be.

Only less fun.

Standen has the best lines and the best role, warning the lubbers on board his boat — “Thievin’ sissies” he calls them — to brace for “Cyclones that’ll blow your foreskins off.”

“Won’t be long before y’get yourselves dead.”

But as the young Flynn revels in the low-rent adventure he’s dragging them all into, the old salt makes him consider his lack of ambition and the future (which Charlie is sadly living).

“You need to hoist your sail a little higher, mate.”

The handsome Cocquerel has an athletic grace and just a hint of the bravado that suits the role, and it’s no surprise to see him standing in the bosun’s chair on the top of one of the schooner’s masts. Young, relatively unknown guys are the easiest to talk into doing their own stunts. But he’s merely adequate in the role, with nothing that suggests Flynn’s brash physical presence or the wicked glint Flynn brought to his camera-loving grin.

Moseley manages a few moments of comic relief. What sort of ‘bath house’ is this?” Dook asks those in the Townsville (Queensland) brothel they’ve ducked into.

“The good kind,” a lady of the evening informs him.

David Wenham (“300”) plays the crooked priest/mayor of Townsville, Callan Mulvey the not-nearly-writerly-enough writer marooned there, and Isabel Lucas of TV’s “MacGyver” is a cunning, brawling hooker/ex-girlfriend of Flynn’s, sort of the Karen Allen to Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in this picture.

“In Like Flynn” would probably benefit from lowered “cut-rate Indiana Jones” expectations. But Mulcahy is too visual (a music video vet) and visceral a director to not lift them, just a bit, in the best of those early scenes, before the weary screenplay limited supply of charisma in the cast let him and the movie down.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, drug use and a brief sexual reference

Cast: Thomas Cocquerel, Corey Large, Costas Mandylor, Isabel Lucas, William Moseley, Grace Huang, Nathalie Kelley, David Wenham, Dan Fogler and Clive Standen

Credits: Russell Mulcahy, script by Marc Furmie, Steve M. Albert, Luke Flynn, Corey Large, based on the Errol Flynn memoir. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:46

“He won’t hurt us, right?” the husband of the conjuring woman wants to know, asking about the monstrous entity his wife has summoned with mud and blood and a parchment of secret letters.

“Of course not! He’s here to PROTECT us!”

You know better. I know better. You don’t have to know Jewish folklore or have a grasp of Kabbalah to know “The Golem” may have been brought to life to protect and avenge, but that he — It — won’t limit his vengeance to murderous, Pogrom practicing Gentiles in 17th century Lithuania.

This English language Israeli production makes its moral lesson in the plainest terms. An oppressed people — raped, murdered and exploited for being apart, different and mysterious to the superstitious Russian Orthodox locals– learns the true price of vengeance in this parable.

For the horror fan, there’s grisly violence but little in the line of suspense, terror or performances that embody anything like that.

It begins with a narrated lie — “In Jewish folklore, it’s impossible to separate the truth from myth.” Nah.

A prologue traces the first Golem to ancient Prague, where a rabbi summons a mud monster of Hulk/Thing/Batman’s bad guy Bane proportions to protect his people, who are being murdered for all the usual hate-mongering reasons.

This Golem “must only be used for protection, for the greater good of all.”

It never works out that way.

Centuries later, a small shtetl in Lithuania enjoys relative tranquility, isolated from the Gentile world, its men spending their days in prayer and Torah study, the women raising babies and doing more than their fair share of work.

For Hannah ( Hani Furstenberg of “The Loneliest Planet”), that isn’t enough. She isn’t willing to go full “Yentl,” but she wants the education the men are getting. She slips under the floor of the rabbi’s school and listens, gets her husband Benjamin (Ishai Golan of “The Island”) to sneak a Torah out for her to pore over at nights.

They are childless, so anything he can do to keep her happy and willing to perform her wifely duties (complete with post-coital incantations) is fair game. The rabbi might be lecturing Benjamin that “seven years” without a baby is long enough, but Benjamin is devoted. He knows Hannah’s pain, even if he doesn’t know about her trips to the village “healer” for birth control.

A chance encounter lets the villagers know that plague has broken out among the Gentiles. And you know Gentiles and their ability to find somebody to blame.

When Vladimir (Alex Titenko), cruel on a good day but driven mad by his daughter’s infection, shows up to demand the mystic Jews “cure” his little girl, the unarmed villagers have no choice but to pray and make their best effort.

“Fail, and I will burn this place to the ground.”

But his minions don’t wait for a prognosis. They single out villagers for raping and pillaging, starting with Hannah’s sister. Unlike the passive men, she won’t let this go unavenged. She uses her biblical knowledge to perform the ceremony that summons the avenger from Hell, who might be either a heartless monster or a “savior to us all.”

The pitter-patter and clumsy thumps she hears in the attic tip her that she’s succeeded. But it’s not until she’s dangling from a rope for being caught outside the village confines by the Gentiles that she has her proof.

A naked, skinny mud-covered boy with coal-black eyes dismembers her attackers. She almost thinks it’s her long-dead little boy. But we know it’s “Danny doesn’t live here, Mrs. Hannah.”

It takes a while for the rest of the village to figure out what she’s done, and as she sees the mayhem The Golem unleashes, Hannah has her moment of doubt. The rabbi urges her to get that parchment with the 72 unspoken letters that spell “The Hidden Name of God” that she placed in the child’s mouth and thus kill it.

“It will never die like the rest of us.”

Hannah considers drowning him, but cannot. And to the horror of her neighbors, the avenger has a lot of avenging to do and isn’t picky about who he stabs, whose heart he pulls out of their chest and whose head he makes explode.

“The Golem” is a nicely-detailed period production that reaches a fine climax, where all Hannah and the Hebrews’ and their tormentors’ chickens come home to roost.

It’s a far-from-awful folk tale with a horrific edge. But it’s not suspenseful, and the generally unaffecting performances by the Israeli cast fail to draw us in and create empathy for the endangered.

Hannah is a figure who demands more of a character arc, something more wrenching or embittered or broken or vengeful than what Furstenberg gives us.

The Golem himself? Creepy as only a dead-eyed little boy can be. But scary? Not really. Any number of American B and C horror movies have given us bone-chilling tweenage villains.

But as I said, the parable comes through loud and clear. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. An eye for an eye only makes everybody blind in the end, especially when the eyes look like puddles of crude oil, and just as pitiless.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Hani Furstenberg, Ishai Golan, Brynie Furstenberg, Alex Titenko,

Credits: Doron Paz, Yoav Paz, script by Ariel Cohen. An Epic release

Running time: 1:35

This horror period piece, set on the coast of Scotland in the mid 19th century, features an unknown-in-the-US UK cast  playing three sailors tossed upon a rocky shore, with just a handful of locals to shelter them, mislead them and…

Well, we can guess but we’d probably be guessing wrong.

“The Isle” opens Feb. 8.

Rosamund Pike and Clive Owen are the Feds turning the screws on an ex-con who has to go DEEP undercover — like, all the way BACK to prison — to bust up a criminal conspiracy in this March 22 release.

Prettier than pretty actor turned writer and director Andrea Di Stefano is behind the camera for “The Informer.” He did an “Escobar” movie, and acted and looked good in any number of features, from “Eat Pray Love” to “Life of Pi.”

We all have our beefs with Bill Maher. Check out his craven collapse into cowardliness when Julian Assange threatened him on live TV right before the 2016 election.

But he’s not wrong on this “When I was a child…outgrow comic books” take.

Stan Lee was lovable in the extreme, a salesman always on message (I interviewed him several times, nice guy — salesman, cheerleader.)

Comic books? Not great literature. Comic book movies? For the most part, formulaic pap. Junk food.

All modern vampire tales are variations on an “addiction” allegory. The “victim” needs her or his “fix.” Even in the “Twilight” movies, that was what played out — Kristen Stewart was addicted to Robert Pattinson’s pale (literal) sparkle.

“Painkillers” is novel in that it removes the subtlety of that allegory. A victim, not bitten (but infected, via transfusions or something) craves blood. He gets the hollow-eyed shakes without the taste of it.

And damnit, Jim, he’s a DOCTOR! He should be able to figure this out.

“Painkillers” is an indie production that bills Mischa Barton as a “star,” when really, she only had to show up for the opening scene. She plays the nameless victim of a vampiric slasher attack outside of a club.

“See Mischa Barton getting her wrists cut and sucked!” That’s that for Mischa.

Cut to a suburban surgeon dad (Adam Huss, making the most of his first starring role in film), playing with his son (Tate Birchmore), doting on the lad, and then playing the stupidest version of the “Wanna see something scary?” game ever. He turn the headlights off ass they drive home — in the dark.

Stupider still, that isn’t the exact reason they crash. Silly screenplay.

Dr. John Clarke wakes up in a coma and lurches into spasms of grief upon hearing the news that his boy died. He tumbles into the delirium tremens — uncontrollable shaking, alarming.

His Head of Medicine (Debra Wilson) is stumped. “Nothing is physically wrong with you.”

His wife (Madeline Zima), already heartbroken, is gutted that they cannot talk about this and that he is unable to return to work or function in any normal way.

But this Morris fellow (Grant Bowler) sidles up to him at his kid’s funeral and assures him, “I can help.”

And after John cuts his hand and discovers the restorative/curative powers of sucking a little blood, he looks this Morris fellow up.

“You drank your own blood, and the pain went away,” he’s told. “That particular cure works only once.”

How convenient. For the movie, I mean. Morris reassures John that he’s not a “vampire.”

“You’re NOT going to live forever. You can go out and enjoy the sun. Enjoy garlic on your steak and your good looks in the mirror.”

No. He’s just another junkie. He’s hooked. But to get his fix, he’s going to need to “adjust your notions of good and evil.” Besides, not everything’s black and white simple. He’ll be living in a “grey” area from now on.

As the stark string duo score (by Dustin Morgan) shrieks its approval, John dodges Morris’s offer to “help” and being a doctor, avails himself of easy access to blood for “my condition.”

Fans of splatter films and bloody vampire pics won’t be bowled-over by these scenes of John collecting surgical leftovers and draining blood bank bags. They’re pretty damned gross, though. Getting a little nauseus here, remembering it to write about it.

But shortcuts like donated blood won’t cut it. No, Morris has an answer. It won’t be “wrong” so long as the people you hunt and drain kind of, you know, DESERVE it.

“What are we doing?”

“Justice!”

The “vigilante vampire” hook for this tale is like Ms. Barton’s brief appearance in it — terribly under-developed.

But what isn’t is Huss’s value-added performance in the lead role. A supporting actor best known for support work in TV’s “Power,” he gives us wrenching grief that bends into withdrawal symptoms. The shakes and twitches, uncontrollable bobbing up and down have you fearing for the character and buying into the notion that the man needs restaints.

No fooling. If Huss ever wants a job playing any other kind of addict, this is the highlight reel he should show the casting director.

“Painkillers” may not be much, and I’d have gladly accepted a longer running time (more vigilante scenes) than the 83 minutes delivered here if it meant the story had more moral dilemma meat on its bones.

Bowler has an understated villainy about his performance, Zima gives wife Chloe a gutted-by-grief cast and Wilson does OK at creating empathy for her character in just a couple of scenes.

But Huss holds center stage with a body-contorting commitment like few actors we’ve seen outside of an A-picture about addiction. It’s great work in a middling movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast:  Adam Huss, Madeline Zima, Debra Wilson, Grant Bowler, Tate Birchmore, Mischa Barton.

Credits: Directed by Roxy Shih, script by Giles Daoust. A Vision Films release.

Running time: 1:23

Sorry for the breathless hype headline. But here you are, so now that I’ve got your attention.

Fox is setting up free showings of this Feb. blockbuster. Or what they hope will be a blockbuster.

The screenings for this Valentine’s Day release will be THIS Thursday, Jan. 31.

“The screenings will take place in Dolby Cinema in 3D at AMC, IMAXÔ 3D and other select 3D premium large format theatres. In addition to the film, fans at selected theaters will get to see a conversation with the filmmakers and cast including James Cameron, Jon Landau, director Robert Rodriguez and cast members Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connell, and Keean Johnson and a special inside look at the making of the film.”

Go HERE to sign in for the free admissions.