Movie Review: Redford gives us a Bank Robber in Winter in “The Old Man & the Gun”

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You’d swear that Oscar winner Sissy Spacek is injuring herself, as big as her grin is and as long as she holds it.

Danny Glover and Tom Waits may be old pros playing ex-cons, but there’s something just tickled about their performances in group moments.

Brooding Oscar winner Casey Affleck may be playing a morose burnout case, but his eyes give away genuine delight in his scenes with the titular “The Old Man & a Gun.”

That would be Robert Redford, 82, playing a 61 year-old who only breaks out of prison so he can rob some more banks. He’s been got caught time and again, only to get out, get the itch, break out his police scanner and stopwatch, put on a suit, a hat and a fake mustache and charm some poor teller or bank manager out of all the cash on hand.

“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt,” he’ll purr, “because I like you.”

It’s like Mister Rogers has a drawl and a yen for stickups.

“A gentleman,” the ladies and gents he robs tell the cops. Courtly, well-mannered, with eyes that dance a little, they might add.

Redford plays this guy with all the bemused goodwill his decades in the movies will allow, and we eat it up because of that residual goodwill and good humor. It couldn’t have hurt to remember, before each take, that this real life bank robber shared the name of a famous comic character actor — Forrest Tucker. 

Writer-director and frequent Casey Affleck collaborator David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”) gives this breezy “mostly true story” nicely spaced moments of whimsy and a touch of romance in between the bank jobs and getaways.

Because this Tucker stumbles into a widowed horse rancher (Spacek) on one of his getaways. Her car trouble gives him a passenger when the cops are looking for a fellow by himself. And her smile lights him up and makes him over-share. Yeah, he robs banks. Nooooo, he’s just kidding.

“What’d be worse, that I’m lying about this, or that I’m not.?

Whatever the motives of his accomplices (Glover and singer/actor Waits), this Tucker fellow only feels he’s really living when he’s doing something daring, dangerous and that requires skill, nerve and cunning to pull off. All those earlier arrests? That was different.

“I know what I’m doing now.”

“The Old Man & the Gun” ambles across half the country, pulling off heists, getting away more or less clean, wooing the Texan with the horses in between jobs. His laid-back, sway-backed zest for life is infectious. He’s got things he wants to do before he dies.

The one guy who could stand to catch what he’s spreading around is John Hunt, a just-turned-40 Dallas robbery detective who has a beautiful wife (Tika Sumpter) and two little kids, but no will to go on.

“I need to start trying a lot harder, or quit,” he says. When he has his kids with him on the day Tucker robs a Dallas bank, right under his nose without him having a clue it’s happening, it really is, as they say in Texas, “Go big or go home” time.

His colleagues (Keith Carradine plays his boss) will never let him hear the end of this if he doesn’t make this “Over the Hill Gang” case. “I’ve already got the AARP on it,” one wag teases.

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It’s Redford’s show, and he lays on the genteel charm, even when the fact that he’s got a gun and is robbing a poor clerk on her first day makes her cry. Who wouldn’t wipe away her tears in the face of that kindly grin?

His scenes with Spacek have a simpatico snap to them. He’s swapping lines with a peer, and their matching reddish hair and similar accents (Tucker grew up in Florida) makes them seem just right together. He’s made better movies, but never one more charming.

Lowery never quite takes this into “Elegy for Old Age/All is Lost” territory, even with the epilogue that plays far more sober and downbeat than the lighter half-speed action comedy that precedes it.

Deciding how much of the story to tell (the man’s escapes were a hoot, and allow the filmmaker the chance to recycle young Bob’s turn in the 1966 thriller “The Chase,” in which he played an escaped convict) is a bit of an issue. Short as it is, that epilogue makes “Old Man” feel it’s going on past its curtain call.

But Redford never lets us tire of Forrest Tucker’s presence, never makes him larger than life when life-sized is enough and never allows us to fret too much that somebody’s going to get hurt in this real-life “Going in Style.”

Like Forrest Tucker himself, who figured experience was a good thing even if he’s not nearly as fast or quick to react as he used to be, Redford knows what to let us see and what we can just sense from his familiar, engaging presence.

“I know what I’m doing now.”

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MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck

Credits:Directed by David Lowery, script by David Lowery based on a magazine article by David Grann . A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:33

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Documentary Review: Bogdanovich reminds us of the Genius of “The Great Buster”

buster1Film fans revere Charlie Chaplin, but they — we — LOVE Buster Keaton.

He was the embodiment of comic stoicism, an often hapless but never rattled “Great Stone Face” who never let on how funny he was or how hilarious his precarious predicaments could be.

Peter Bogdanovich, the film scholar turned filmmaker (“Paper Moon”) has loved Keaton forever, and his documentary “The Great Buster: A Celebration” establishes those bonafides right in the opening moments. He and director Frank Capra chatted at length on “The Dick Cavett Show” in the early ’70s about this then-forgotten genius of the silent cinema.

A child of vaudeville, trained to take a punch and a fall from infancy, named “Buster” by no less than Harry Houdini, a giant of the silent cinema, creator of some of the most enduring and repeated-to-this-day sight gags in film history, director of “The Boat,” “Seven Ages” and the greatest epic of silent comedy, “The General,” Keaton undergoes a revival every decade or so simply because his antiquated black and white/silent movies remain hilarious to this day.

“Great Buster” turns Bogdanovich’s lifelong appreciation into cinematic adoration, using generous clips of Keaton’s short films, features and late-life TV appearances to remind us that, as Johnny Knoxville says in the movie, “he was funny then, he’s funny now and he’ll be funny 100 years from now.”

Stuntman/actor Knoxville is one of the legions of Keaton fans Bogdanovich rounded up to give testimonials, with Knoxville most admiring that the man did his own deathly-dangerous (and funny) stunts right up to the end. Actor James Karen was a friend, Paul Dooley (“Breaking Away/Popeye”) was such a fan he fought to get into a TV commercial Keaton did for Ford Econoline vans in the 1950s (He’s one of the “Keystone Cops” in this spot).

Dick Van Dyke knew Keaton, learned how to take pratfalls from him and admits, “I stole as many moves from him as I could…He was like a ballet dancer, incredible control of his body.”

The clown Bill Irwin gushes at Keaton’s single-take brilliance in a classic “Candid Camera” bit, admirer Richard Lewis befriended Keaton’s widow and treasures a porkpie hat she made him just like the one that was Keaton’s trademark.

Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks and “Spider-Man: Homecoming” director Jon Watts use Keaton as a filmmaking reference and inspiration.

“He always had that quiet tragedy which is very, very funny,” Werner Herzog says. And about Keaton’s role as a founding father of motion pictures, “He is the essence of cinema.”

Cybill Shepherd vouches for his acting, Keaton’s mime-face realization that “Acting’s all in the eyes.”

Bogdanovich shows us a sequence, the facade of a house falling over Keaton or him grabbing a passing car to make his getaway in “Cops,” and Carl Reiner, Bill Hadar and others marvel at “How’d he DO that?”

Comic actor Nick Kroll dissects the deadpan Keaton persona with this spot-on take — “In these heightened comic scenarios, playing them incredibly seriously  raises the stakes of every scene he plays.”

And Bogdanovich as narrator relates Keaton anecdotes, describes the arc of his personal life — triumph to tragedy, to revival — and analyzes scenes, Keaton’s penchant for long takes allowing an entire gag to develop without tricks or cuts, what film critic Leonard Maltin means when he says “The best special effect in a Buster Keaton movie is Buster himself.”

Back in 1987, PBS filmmakers David Gill and Kevin Brownlow presented a three part “American Masters” tribute titled “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow.” Narrated by the great British director Lindsay Anderson, it was thorough, sweeping and at close to three hours in length, pretty much the definitive Keaton biographical documentary.

It was itself a hard act to follow as Bogdanovich’s film covers the same ground in much the same way. But Bogdanovich found different scenes from Keaton’s movies, fresher TV commercials from Keaton’s later years and lots of funny people to marvel over their idol in this fresh, lively and thoroughly entertaining remembrance of a great clown, a “Great Stone Face” and a brilliant filmmaker.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Buster Keaton, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Werner Herzog, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll, Carl Reiner, Cybill Shepherd, Richard Lewis

Credits: Written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:42

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Preview, “The Prodigy” tries something new in a horror trailer

A child sitting with a psychotherapist (Colm Feore), hypnotized by the sound of his voice and the metronome he uses to put patients under.

Not saying this trailer is particularly scary, but the concept is killer and it is most certainly chilling.

Jackson Robert Scott of the “It” remake has the title role. Taylor Schilling and Brittany Allen also star in “The Prodigy,” which opens Feb. 8.

 

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Preview, Ansel Elgort lives a “double life” as “Jonathan”

This Nov. 16 thriller has a hint of Jekyll and Hyde about it.

Ansel Elgort plays two brothers trapped inside the same body, living separate, contradictory lives. Elgort was just cast as “Tony” in the Spielberg “West Side Story” remake.

“Jonathan” also stars Patricia Clarkson as the shrink trying to help him “manage” this situation, and Suki Waterhouse (“Assassination Nation”) and Matt Bomer.

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Preview, Teen House-breakers Rob the Wrong Mansion in “Monster Party”

A seventeen day wonder built on the premise “What if the Bling Ring had stumbled into a convention of serial killers?”

Robin Tunney and Lance Reddick and Erin Moriarty and Julian McMahon are among the stars of “Monster Party,” making the rounds of horror film festivals as we speak. Maybe IFC Midnight or Magnet will get their hands on it.

 

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Preview, Christopher Lloyd time travels BACK…to take up with the love he lost long ago in “ReRun”

Bunch of good looking young actors dressing up in ’60s wear live out Lloyd’s character’s past in this romantic fantasy, which premiered at Woodstock.

As Rev. Jim, Lloyd’s most famous TV character would put it, “Okeydoke!”

No release date for this one yet, still traveling the film festival circuit. Keep an eye out, because truly, who doesn’t love Christopher Lloyd?

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Preview, Tim Tebow presents “Run the Race,” sort of a faith-based “Friday Night Lights”

Those marketplace masters Roadside Attractions got their hands on this Tebow Brothers-produced football drama in the “Friday Night Lights” tradition.

Two Truett brothers, trying to ride athletics out of the dead-end town where they live, screw up and pursue second chances in this Chris Dowling (“Priceless,” “Where Hope Grows”) family drama.

Tanner Stine and Evan Hofer play the brothers, Dowling’s go-to athletic looking guy Kristoffer Polaha is the drunken dad they could never please.

 

Frances Fisher (as Grandma?). Myleti Williamson (as a coach) and Mario Van Peebles (A preacher!) also star.

“Run the Race” opens Feb. 22. 

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Movie Review: The Old West was at its most violent when “The Sisters Brothers” showed up

 

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Most Westerns are, by default if not definition, “picaresque” in nature.

Our hero or anti-hero wanders and roams, an itinerant cowboy, gambler or gunfighter in the saddle, stirring up trouble or righting a wrong, often through the barrel of a six-gun.

Which is why “picarseque” in the Western sense is distinctive for its blood and bullets.

“The Sisters Brothers,” based on Patrick DeWitt’s novel, follows two amusing yet violent, pitiless and murderous rogues — guns for hire — as they pursue their prey down the West Coast in the Gold Rush Era 1850s.

All it takes is an order from the mysterious, never-explains-himself Commodore (Rutger Hauer) and they’re off, punishing, retrieving but mostly killing those this Oregon oligarch deems have “cheated” or otherwise wronged him.

But these siblings — Charlie and Eli (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, King of the Buddy Picture) — just appear to be without conscience or remorse, dealing death wherever they go. They’re both undergoing a sort of existential crisis, wrestling with awful childhoods, fretting over the “bad blood” passed down from their drunken, violent father.

They have a lot of time to ponder that in between blasts of mayhem, mishaps on the trail, drunken visits to the brand-new towns springing up on their route and arguments about their past.

They’re hunting a chemist named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed of “Nightcrawler” and “Rogue One”). Actually, they’re following the tracker, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) the Commodore also hired to do the difficult work of finding a thin, dark-skinned educated man in a world of white mountain men, miners, murderers and roughnecks.

Morris is also an educated man, and he recounts his tracking via journal entries and the occasional note he leaves behind for the brothers, who are to do the dirty work at the end of this quest. Their quarry, he relates, “made a precipitate departure,” in one note.

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Hotheaded, drunken Charlie isn’t suffering such “pretentious bull—t” gladly. Morris, whom he calls “Mau-RICE” in his rants, gets under his skin.

Eli? He’s just trying to survive the spider who crawled into his mouth and bit him, the grim injuries to his horse, the double-dealing madam Mayfield (Rebecca Root) who gave her name to the town they stop in, a place that could be their last stop ever.

Eli pines for the schoolmarm who gave him her shawl as a talisman while Charlie hunts for that next drink or hooker. Hermann, meanwhile, has connected with John Morris and enlisted him on his own quest for a less violent future financed by his chemical shortcut in the panning for gold process.

Director and co-screenwriter Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet, “Rust and Bone”) stages unforgettable gunfights. None of this old Hollywood “day for night” filming of late-night ambushes. The only thing illuminating the pitch-black darkness of pre-civilization is the flash of a firearm.

He goes to some pains to mimic DeWitt’s novel’s pacing; deliberative passages, comic exchanges and hilariously florid turns of phrase (via Morris) interrupted by carefully spaced-out spasms of violence. That tends to slow the picture. And in showing us the consequences of a .45 bullet to the head or the mauling of a horse, he’s giving us detail that is more unpleasant than most Westerns would include.

But the casting is startling in how spot-on it is, from the pairing of Reilly (producer of the film) with Phoenix to reuniting Gyllenhaal with his “Nightcrawler” co-star, to the mother of the brothers, a shockingly moving (and a tad funny) turn from Carol Kane, most recently seen as daffy neighbor to Netflix’s Kimmy Schmidt.

“The Sisters Brothers” sneaks its messages in the back door, how a world built on justifiable fear and firearms makes life cheap and souls hollow, how the amorality and violence numbed one and all and how lives back then could be just as angst-ridden as they are today, no matter how quick the “hero” is on the draw.

And if you spill enough blood, and “picaresque” just doesn’t cover it.

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MPAA Rating: R for violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content

Cast: John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane

Credits:Directed by Jacques Audiard, script by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick DeWitt.  An Annapurna release.

Running time: 2:01

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Movie Review: Can Thanksgiving survive “The Oath?”

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Ike Barinholtz’s “The Oath” is a filmgoing experience not unlike the nightmarish Thanksgiving dinner with relatives on the other side of the political divide that the film portrays — excruciating.

A satiric comedy that rarely lightens its shrill tone with anything like a laugh, it’s hardly a cinematic break for anybody looking to escape the tidal wave of cruelty, callousness, criminal stupidity and “America Worst” news to pour out of Washington these past few years. And for those not looking for a break? Heaven help you. The stress of endless “outrage” updates on your phone or on cable news is amped up by this miscalculated attempt at “The Movie America Needs to See.”

It’s not biting, it’s pummeling. And while it isn’t incompetent or terribly written, acted or shot, while its warning has the sting of “Yeah, we’re pretty close to that happening here,” it is just plain unpleasant to sit through.

Writer-director Barinholtz (TV’s “The Mindy Project”) stars as Chris, a hyper-sensitive, seriously-worked up LA marketing guy married to a like-thinker, Kai (Tiffany Haddish) and upset enough to declare “I will not ALLOW my daughter to grow up in a country like this!”

What he means by “like this” is a country that has leapfrogged a few steps down the ladder towards fascist totalitarianism and come up with a “Loyalty to my president” oath — promising perquisites for those who sign it, and rightly-feared penalties, harassment and worse for those who don’t.

Turn off Fox News for five minutes and accept that this idea has surely passed through the current chief executive’s head.

Kai is more concerned with “keeping my little girl safe,” and with keeping the peace. That’s the key to this upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. His parents (a clucking Nora Dunn and Chris Ellis) were quick to sign. He doesn’t even have to ask his “stupid” brother Patrick (Jon Barinholtz) or Patrick’s Eva Braun blonde girlfriend Abbie (Meredith Hagner, magnificently vile) if they signed.

Kai and Chris’s mother vow “No politics” at the weekend get together. Kai has to constantly remind Chris to step away from the TV.

It’s no use. His phone goes off with every fresh development — riots, civil rights violations by the newly formed CPU, “Citizens’ Protection Units.”

Chris shouts “LIES” at his car radio and finds himself trapped in one of the ugly situations a lot more commonplace these days — angry racist people (a road rager) emboldened by a bellicose bigoted bully in the White House, slashing tires and screaming “Get out of my country!”

His like-minded sister Alice (Carrie Brownstein) arriving with her sick-with-diarrhea husband (Jay Duplass) doesn’t balance the battle lines enough to suit Chris.

Dinner starts out with the old white people singing the praises of comic Bill Engvall, the knee-jerking Chris and Kai chortling that they prefer Chris Rock, whom Abbie and Pat describe as “racist.” Oh yeah?

“It’s racist to THINK Chris Rock is racist!”

An epic meal is slipping into chaos when two CPU guys (John Cho and Billy Magnussen) show up at the door wanting to have a little talk with Chris. This is the movie’s most troubling moment. A gun-averse, thinker-not-fighter liberal is confronted with two guys — one specifically (Magnussen of “The Big Short”) — refusing to leave, refusing to acknowledge how laws all the way up to the United States Constitution require them to leave, baiting the mouthy guy whose politics they aim to suppress by dropping the hammer on him.

It’s just that the violence they, or specifically Mason (Magnussen) intends to mete out backfires.

How do you extricate yourself from the legal problems of resisting, injuring and disarming pseudo-legal authority? And once you’ve committed violence, how far can a non-violent person go with it?

Magnussen is like every scary encounter you’ve ever seen on the news or had in person with a no-neck racist musclehead who agrees with a third of this country that his might or gun or badge permits him to lord over “elites” in any way he wants?

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There haven’t been any real laughs before this sequence, and after it “The Oath” descends utterly into darkness. For a short movie, a supposed quick take on this subject with satiric intent, “Oath” drags thanks to its lack of “funny but scary-true” observations.

It’s almost a waste to cast Comic of the Moment Haddish in the film, and while she has little “believable couple” chemistry with Barinholtz (totally out of his league), she does get away from her “Girls’ Trip” shtick and show us something new.

As the violence escalates and the blood flows, the sharp if not-funny observations give way to “How can we extricate these people from this scenario in a way that makes sense?”

And Barinholtz the writer-director lets his straining against incredulity show. He utterly loses his nerve with the finale.

If you want to see how this sort of movie is supposed to work, track down the 1995 Canadian satire “The Last Supper,” about liberals moved to betray their non-violent values when confronted by a power-abusing right-wing talk show host (Ron Perlman).

That was dark, bloody, biting and funny. Unlike “The Oath,” which manages half of those.

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MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, violence and some drug use

Cast: Ike Barinholtz, Tiffany Haddish, Nora Dunn, Meredith Hagner, Jon Barinholtz, Carrie Brownstein, John Cho, Billy Magnussen, Jay Duplass

Credits: Written and directed by Ike Barinholtz . A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:33

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Documentary Review: “Weed the People” tries to make the case for medical marijuana

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There’s this odd, jarring anti-marijuana ad campaign running in the previews in cinemas where I live in Florida — “Marijuana: Know the Truth.” It’s a mother using the “gateway drug” argument against legalizing pot. I can’t locate who is paying for the campaign, but Big Pharma has been linked to such efforts in the past.

Because if one thing is made clear in the advocacy documentary “Weed the People,” it’s that Big Pharma is the enemy, because whatever race politics had to do with the demonization of marijuana over the past 80 years, drug companies fret over losing control of pain killing, appetite restoring and cancer battling to cheap, legally available weed. Fighting legalization, this film suggests, is putting blood on drug companies’ hands.

The film is an emphatic re-branding of the the “legalize pot” movement, putting suffering children’s faces front and center in the fight, with weeping parents and increasingly defiant doctors, most of them in states where medical and/or recreational marijuana is already legal, making case on the kids’ behalf.

“When your kid gets cancer, the rule book goes out the window.blameless children

We see babies in hospitals, mothers praying at bedsides, blameless children suffering from fatal cancers of most every description. They’re grasping at slim but not off-the-wall hopes. Whatever medical science says about pot’s chemical ability to bolster appetites and keep chemo-patients strong enough for the fight, there are other corners of research — entirely too anecdotal at this point — that suggest marijuana kills cancer cells and shrinks tumors.

Director Abby Epstein’s movie (she did the birth control doc “Sweetening the Pill”), produced by Ricki Lake, responsibly gets at the counter-arguments parked in advocacy’s path in the opening moments. There have been studies that showed marijuana-derived  cannabinoids killing cancer cells in test tubes, but human trials are another matter.

San Francisco oncologist Dr. Donald Abrams

“Is cannabis an anti-cancer agent?” San Francisco oncologist Dr. Donald Abrams asks, rhetorically. Perhaps. But there are suggestions, cases like several of the ones shown in the movie which argue that the government should be allowing and even underwriting testing. Still, Dr. Abrams adds, “The plural of anecdote is not ‘evidence.'”

We meet desperate families, some of whom will see success, others failure, as they pursue “alternative medicine” treatments for their dying children.

Bonni Goldstein, a pediatrician and medical marijuana treatment specialist speaking at a “Patients Out of Time/Medicalcannabis.com event, says that “To a family that’s suffering, it feels like a miracle. It’s really just science. It’s not fairy dust and it’s not voodoo. There are chemicals in the plant that work just like any other drug.”

Master herbalist (herbs, people, not “herb”) Angela Harris thumbs through 200 year-old manuals about how cannabis could be used to treat this or that malady in earlier eras, and makes the point that marijuana in assorted forms was “part of the pharmacopia well into the 20th century.”

No less august body that the American Medical Association, the AMA, recommended that pot not be banned back in the 1930s because of what they knew if could help with, and perhaps what they suspected were its other benefits. Xenophobia and anti-Mexican racism ruled the day and it was parked on a banned substance schedule likening it to heroin, where it remains to this day.

We see baby Sophie and her parents endure the roller-coaster of emotions, treating their child with conventional medicine (scans, chemo) and then cannabis oil, trying to battle the tumors ravaging her brain.

Little Cecilia givesher dolly a version of “the black medicine” (high dose cannabis oil) that she is being treated with for her lung cancer.

The movie is full of desperate, hopeful, upbeat parents, looking for a “miracle,” hoping for medical backing for those hopes, and finding it. Many look straight into the camera and say what doctors are often (but not always) reluctant to attribute to one treatment, that their child’s shrinking tumors “We believe was definitely due to the cannabis.”

Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance complains about a reactionary Drug Enforcement Agency that blocks research, research that instead is happening in places like Spain and Israel, where the breakthroughs in how cannabis works on the body, on cancer cells, are coming from.

Parents complain about the under-researched, unregulated and unsupported by officialdom nature of cannabis treatments, leaving Angela, a Texas mother whose son Chris is knocking on death’s door when we meet them, “in the dark.”

Quacks and short-cut taking jerks are selling oils using rubbing alcohol as their solvent, doing more harm than good

A Chicago mom works the angles to establish California residency so she can get her child the treatment that might be his last hope.

And then there’s Mara Gordon, a California cannabis cooker who brings to mind every West Coast flake you’ve ever seen complain about child vaccines or extol the virtues of crystals.

“I don’t have medical training.  I have something that I think is more important — experience,” is not confidence inspiring.

But “Weed the People” watches Gordon in action, a process engineer turned Aunt Zelda’s founder, concocting oils, meeting parents, taking phone calls.

The parents are incredulous because the lack of research and Drug Agency and drug company resistance, the “stigma” attached to wood, means “the medicine we were relying on is made in somebody’s kitchen.”

“We’re lab rats!”

But Gordon, making few promises but vowing to launch a carefully monitored and documented treatment with doses that start small and grow, if necessary, with hospitals running the tests to see if tumors shrink, comes off as a genuine folk hero.

“Take care,” she says to one caller. “Help’s on the way.”

She leaves parents to do her evangelizing for her.

“I’m going to tell you what it did for my son…”

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“Weed the People” works best in recounting history, covering the stigma long-attached to a plant that can grow most anywhere, is cheap to process and got its reputation, as Jimmy Buffett sang, “when only jazz musicians, were smoking marijuana.”

And it brilliantly rebrands a fight that is very blue state/red state hit-or-miss in a deeply divided America. That unkempt college kid standing outside your polling place, pleading for legalized marijuana, isn’t going to convince many.

That mother holding her cancer-ridden baby, comforting her dying teen or weeping with joy at the life “the demon weed” gave her child will.

Put her in ads that run with the coming attractions before movies, and this argument’s over.

3stars2
MPAA Rating: unrated, drug use subject matter

Credits:Directed by Abby Epstein. A Mangurama release.

Running time: 1:37

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