Movie Nation

Honest truth? Ask any guy with a sailboat, and this is the romantic image he had of himself that made him go out and buy one.

Dashing, wind-lashed, hair flowing in the breeze — Robert Redford at the helm.

“All is Lost” is an almost-dialogue free drama, a metaphysical interior thriller about a man at war with the elements and a crippled boat.  It is “Gravity” at Sea. Which is not a bad thing.

Redford, at 77, plays a character too caught up in recovering from one blow after another to fret over his own mortality. But that’s exactly what he’s contending with.

Questions for the screen legend in what could be his last best shot at a Best Actor Oscar, Robert Redford? Comment below, and since I live on a sailboat myself, I’ve got that corner of the interview covered.

Beware the horror movie that lists its “special effects” team too high in the credits. It’s a dead giveaway. “This is what we spent our money on” and “This is what we’re proudest of.”
But hats off to Spectral Motion and effects maestro Mike Elizalde. The ghosts in “Nothing Left to Fear” are the only things to fear in this pedestrian spook fest.
They could have pitched this as a “reunion” of the on-and-offscreen paramours of the late TV show “Men in Trees” — Anne Heche and James Tupper. But who remembers that?

They play a preacher and his wife who move their family — two sassy, profane preacher’s daughters, Becky and Mary (Rebekah Brandes and Jennifer Stone) and a younger son (Carter Cabassa) — to Small Town, U.S.A., for a fresh start. Preacher Dan (Tupper) was recruited by Preacher Kingsman (Clancy Brown) to take over his flock upon retirement.
Kingsman seems a tad young to retire, which isn’t the first clue that all is not as peaceful and pastoral as it seems here. The hunky farmhand Noah (Ethan Peck) rattles the newcomers by slaughtering a sheep and letting it bleed out in front of the girls.
“Ewwww.”
And there’s all this forbidding music underneath even their welcome to the parsonage, where the congregation pitches in to help the Bramfords unpack.
But Dan was “called by a Higher Power” to this town of church socials, county fairs, romantic walks along the railroad tracks (Noah and Becky) and little old ladies who bake cakes with Satanic teeth in every slice. You bite down on that cake, and evil things are set in motion.
“Has the choice been made?” Kingsman wants to know. Yup.
“Nothing Left to Fear” doesn’t preserve its sense of mystery and only once or twice — at the very end — discovers any sense of urgency to the proceedings. Director Anthony Leonardi III is more interested in the slow, small-town courtship between a 20something hunk in a truck and hormonal city teen (Brandes) and lingering shots of the rebellious and fetching two preacher’s daughters, slowing the picture to a snail’s pace in between Becky’s nightmares and visions. She senses something is going on amid the tired plot points and beyond-banal dialogue.
Cue Spectral Motion and the effects team. Faces contort into long-jawed horrors that Edvard Munch would be proud to call his own, eyes hollow out into sockets and black bile streaks up bodies as they’re possessed. By something.
Nobody seems that upset by what is going on, even the preacher and family who find themselves, in the third act, under ritualistic, supernatural assault. And if they’re not that scared, why would we be?
But at least the effects are cool.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content and some language
Cast: Rebekah Brandes, Anne Heche, Clancy Brown, Ethan Peck, James Tupper, Jennifer Stone. 
Credits: Directed by Anthony Leonardi III, written by Jonathan W.C. Mills. An Anchor Bay release. 
Running time: 1:40

Whatever his other gifts, Justin Timberlake has a hard time playing “hard.”
Ben Affleck has no hint of “sinister” about him.
For director Brad Furman, “The Lincoln Lawyer” is looking more and more like a fluke, and even bringing in someone with gambling movie moxie — the screenwriter from “Rounders” — doesn’t help.
So the problems of the Internet gambling thriller “Runner Runner” are many and manifest.  A thrill-free thriller with no urgency, scanty wit and limited sex appeal, plays like just a paycheck for A-list actors who should know better.
Timberlake is Richie Furst, a Wall Street dropout whom we meet as he tries to hustle his way to a graduate degree at Princeton. But the online gambling he’s using to finance college fails him, and a little number’s crunching tells him he’s been cheated. Somehow, he scrapes together the cash and the moxie to go to Costa Rica and confront the online gaming kingpin, Ivan Block, played by Affleck.
Block likes that moxie and next thing you know, Richie’s his right hand man, crunching numbers, recruiting “affiliates” to their Internet empire and making eyes at the boss’s babe — Gemma Arterton.
He has”everything you ever thought you wanted, when you were 13.” And then a rules-bending F.B.I. agent (Anthony Mackie, funny) kidnaps him and we wonder whose loyalty Richie will honor — Ivan’s, the Feds’ or his own.
“Runner Runner” is the sort of movie where the “hero” narrates his tale so thoroughly that there’s little mystery as to what’s coming. It’s a static picture about a sexy world that robs that world of sex and pizazz with student film staging and camera blocking. Actors stalk into a shot, hit their marks, make eye contact and recite (weak) lines.
“You forgot the eternal truth. The house always wins.”
A couple of scenes in this choppy, glumly edited-picture work, but they involve “real” gambling, not the online kind — which is uncinematic. There’s barely enough gambling slang to dress up the script. Timberlake’s best moments come in scenes with Richie’s apple-doesn’t-fall-far-from-the-tree dad (John Heard), who is the very picture of addiction.
Affleck? You never believe a word he says, not a gesture. This is the sort of acting he did in the sort of movies he made before he started writing and directing his own movies — bad.
Let’s hope this was just a quickly-forgotten bump in the career path of our stars. And Furman had better hope Matthew McConaughey someday feels indebted for the launch “Lincoln Lawyer” gave him. This “Runner” goes nowhere. Fast.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Cast: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton, Anthony Mackie, John Heard. 
Credits: Directed by Brad Furman, written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. A 20th Century Fox. 
Running time: 1:30

Josh Trank of “Chronicle” is slated to direct Fox’s reboot of the comic book franchise “The Fantastic Four.” Simon Kinberg (“Sherlock Holmes”) is rewriting the script and collecting a producer credit as he does.
I was never one of those who beat up the first version of this franchise. The films were under-performers largely because they were kid-friendly. The casting was decent, the tone was light, but that’s not what the fanboys want so the films took a beating and whimpered off into the cinematic sunset.

“Now Muscle Shoals has got The Swampers,” Ronnie Van Zant sang on the Southern Rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” “And they’ve been known to pick a song or two.”
For many, it was the first time they’d heard of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, or the studio band that made first Fame Studios, and then the competing Muscle Shoal Sound Studios legendary locales in American music.
This dinky little berg on the Tennessee River was the home to musicians, producers and studios that launched everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Allman Brothers, Percy Sledge to Jimmy Cliff. Everybody who was anybody in music from the ’60s through the ’80s did transformative work there. And even today music’s best and historically brightest make the pilgrimage to the little town on the Alabama/Tennessee state line to record and soak up a little of that gritty, funky “Muscle Shoals Sound.”
Director Greg “Freddy” Calimier” cleverly saves the “Sweet Home Alabama”anecdote for the closing credits of “Muscle Shoals,” his elegiac, picturesque documentary about a place that rivals any in North America in its importance to popular music, then and now.
“Muscle Shoals” tells the hard-luck life story of Rick Hall, a poor sawmiller’s son who discovered Percy Sledge and changed the world when he recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman.” The film sketches in how Hall founded Fame studio amid the kudzu and cotton fields, and focuses on the local white boys he turned into a backing band for the ages, the fabled “Swampers” immortalized in the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
“You never knew when you were making history,” backup singer Donna Jean Godchaux says. But they did, quarreling with Aretha Franklin’s entourage even as they improvised and scratched out “I Never Loved a Man” and turned her into a legend with a single track.

The band was funky, and “all funky was, was we didn’t know how to make it smooth,” drawls drummer Roger Hawkins.
Wicked Wilson Pickett weighs in on how the brittle interplay between black singers working with white musicians in the Deep South created “Land of 1,000 Dances” and “Mustang Sally,” and Aretha herself acknowledges that her time there was brief, but the key moment in her career.
Then, as the film details, just as Fame Studio reached its peak, the house band upped and moved across town, setting up Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and giving the martyred perfectionist Rick Hall competition. Southern rock was born there. Hall, meanwhile, turned the Osmond Brothers into platinum record superstars, always evolving with the music.
No music documentary is complete without rock’s reigning poet-historian Bono showing up to connect music to river towns and declare that in this sound, “we felt the blood in it. It’s like the songs came out of the mud.”
Hip hop may be wandering into middle age and looking back on its own history, and rock history curdles into sentiment in films like this one, “The Wrecking Crew”, “Sound City” and last summer’s wonderful background singers doc, “20 Feet From Stardom.”
But to fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two. 

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements, language, smoking and brief partial nudity
Cast: Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Bono, Percy Sledge, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Steve Winwood. 
Credits: Directed by Greg “Freddy” Camilier. A Magnolia release. 
Running time: 1:52