Movie Nation

Disney has a responsibility to Winnie the Pooh that extends beyond licensing agreements and mere commerce.

Wherever A.A. Milne’s books still stand within the kid lit universe, Disney gave Pooh a voice, and the childish, gently daft and very English tone of its many cartoons fixed Pooh in the minds of generations.

So moving Pooh into the “real” world, the “adult” world, by making him a tactile, real walking-talking, honey-craving bear proves to be tricky in “Christopher Robin,” a mopey, downbeat “rediscover my inner child” ode to the grown up boy who inspired the Pooh stories.

It’s a fantasy that has nothing at all to do with the real Christopher Robin Milne. 

Still, you can’t make a Pooh movie without at least a hint of the Sherman Brothers’ “Winnie the Pooh” song, without him sounding like the late Sterling Holloway, who voiced him in the earliest cartoons.

But no longer drawn, “real,” with an inexpressive plush face and entirely too much faux fur? Well, as the bear might put it, “Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”

Ewan McGregor is the harried, workaholic Christopher Robin, ignoring wife (Hayley Atwell) and little girl Madeleine (Bronte Carmichael) as he struggles to find “efficiencies” at Winslow Fine Luggage, an upscale firm finding it hard to serve the well-to-do in austere, post-War Great Britain.

When he neglects to join the family for a weekend at the Sussex farm where he grew up, the bear stirs. A gloomy fog has descended over The Hundred Acre Wood.

“If only Eeyore were here to enjoy it.”

Pooh frets over where the Old Gang might be. So he sets out to find Christopher Robin, stumbling upon him in a London park.

The businessman, with his attache filled with “very important things” (papers), figures he has at long last snapped.

“Stress,” he says, on imagining that he sees and hears his childhood toy-pal talk.

“Not ‘Stress,’ Pooh,” insists the bear, who recognizes him even in his “wrinkly” middle age.

They return to the Hundred Acres and fall into their old roles without so much as a second thought — Pooh sighing, puzzled at  anything beyond honey, naps, friends and adventure, Christopher Robin explaining the world — “There’s more to life than balloons and honey!” — fixing Pooh’s problems, tracking down Eeyore, Piglet, Owl and Rabbit, Kanga and baby Roo.

Madeline Robin (Bronte Carmichael) and her father Christopher’s longtime friends Tigger, Piglet and Winnie the Pooh go on an adventure in Disney’s CHRISTOPHER ROBIN.

But is it “Always a sunny day when Christopher Robin comes to play?”

Sadly, no. Director Marc Forster is over a decade removed from “Finding Neverland,” and whatever the “World War Z” filmmaker might have brought to a production that relies on CG toys in a photo-real world, the light touch was not one of them.

It’s a quietly dispiriting film, keeping the viewer on tenterhooks, watching a grey and exhausted domestic melodrama play out while groping for some recognizable Pooh tune, Pooh mischief or Eeyore complaint to grab hold of.

“Looks like a disaster,” the sad old plush donkey says, surveying Rabbit’s crashed home. “Why wasn’t I invited?”

McGregor gamely tries to fit in here, but there’s little whimsy in the character or his performance of him.

Jim Cummings has made a career out of sounding like Pooh’s Holloway and original Tigger voice Paul Winchell. Brad Garrett of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Finding Nemo” is an apt voice for Eeyore, Toby Jones a good choice for Owl and Peter Capaldi a daring one for Rabbit.

But the laughs, what precious few there are, and the obvious but Pooh-appropriate theme (Make time to play.) are strictly of the lowest low-hanging fruit variety — Pooh making a mess with honey, Pooh unable to fathom the mysteries of a compass.

The adult stuff won’t do much for adults or children, and the childish moments don’t add up to a kid-movie’s worth.

I can’t find it in me to hate on the little big screen bear. But the whole affair feels like a desperate, big-budget response to last year’s far superior and non-Disney “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

Protect the brand and all, you know. One can’t help but wish they’d honored that brand by simply saying, “Nicely done” to the earlier film, and left it at that.

MPAA Rating: PG for some action

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael

Credits:Directed by Marc Forster, script by Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy and Allison Schroeder, based on the A.A.Milne/Ernest Shepard characters . A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:44

An unstable has-been “star” for a granny, who is the source of the family fortune, even now in her Home Shopping Network appearance years.

A grandkid who loves the lazy way he lives, forced to scramble for a solution to “saving” the income, if not the granny.

Here’s a mystery. The film isn’t listed under this title on IMDB. But the cast (Warren excepted) and story appears to be from “American Pets,” which has opened in Poland, at least.

Curious.

Curiosity gets the better of us all, and as I, like the rest of the universe, missed Charlie Sheen’s big screen “comeback” when it was (barely) released in 2013, I took a gander at this one.

The opening on-camera confession/interrogation of Charles Swan III (Sheen) pokes into his character’s obsession “with power and sex,” and the tiny part of his brain that handles “bodily functions and other affairs.”

“Affairs?” The aging, sunglasses-wearing, chain-smoking trainwreck has his interest piqued.

Thus do we begin the flashbacks to the clutter and disasters of his life as seen from inside his head, “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.”

And a bigger Cluster-Sheen I could never imagine.

It’s a staggering, under-scripted and shockingly unfunny all-star “rescue” comedy designed to put some of that Tiger Blood on the screen, while Sheen was still kicking and worth a tabloid headline or three.

Long time ago, in other words.

In the title role, Sheen/Swan wanders through the demented fantasies of a celebrated photographer who has philandered away his latest lady love (Kathryn Winnick), with occasional advice aid and advice from his musician-pal (Jason Schwartzman), his accountant (Bill Murray) and and his sister (Oscar winner Patricia Arquette).

“Therapy?”

“I don’t need some guy in wingtips to tell me I’m suffering.”

We revel in a literal dance-at-your-own-funeral sequence with Charles (and a stunt dancer) tripping the light fantastic with assorted exes, a bossa nova duet (Sheen on guitar) with Winnick and Sheen, a dream sequence “Best B.S.” awards ceremony, an imagined “Injun raid” where the warpainted attackers are other Swan exes (Mary Elizabeth Winstead among them), all featuring Sheen and the glories of his omni-present sunglasses and Reagan-Elvis dye job.

It’s a debacle as only a Coppola (Roman Coppola) could fashion.

I’m leaving out the best parts, the endless parade of traveling shots — Swan in his vintage Caddy, or riding in Schwartzman’s vintage Bentley — all set to the quizzical pop of Liam Hayes.

Stay through the charming closing credits — the only place “charm” figures into this — to see who Hayes is.

None of this really ties together, little makes a lick of sense, and Sheen’s movie career plainly ended for a reason. Acting requires more than a smirk.

Roman Coppola wrote and directed this lifeline to the then-death spiraling Sheen, and the fact that Ol’Charlie’s still with us suggests it did him some good to make it.

Not that he’s done anything at all with this second or seventy-fifth chance. Pity they couldn’t have rounded up all these co-stars, from Aubrey Plaza to Dermot Mulroney,  to save, say, Prince.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some nudity

Cast: Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Patricia Arquette, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aubrey Plaza, Dermot Mulroney

Credits: Written and directed by Roman Coppola. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:25

McGinley’s an under-rated funnyman, and parking him in a dugout with a bunch of post-T-ballers is a cute enough idea. Could be funny.

Not that the trailer gives a lot of the funny away.

“Benched” opens in limited release Aug. 17.

Reverend Jim, or Doc Brown, if you prefer, as a heavy?

Not a first, but usually it’s been in kids’ films that the trapped in flaky roles for life Christopher Lloyd showed a touch of the dark side.

Here, he’s a sexual predator nobody wants back in town, and isn’t long for this world when he gets out of prison.

Michael Jai White is the star, playing the detective tracking through a Western town’s collection of characters (and character actors like Sally Kirkland, Mike Starr) who might be the creep’s killer.

“Making a Killing” opens in 2019.

The letters “YA” are enough to strike terror in the hearts of any sentient movie goer, especially fans of science fiction.

Because for every “Hunger Games” or “Maze Runner” that hits and spawns too many repetitive, inane sequels to count, there’s a “Divergent,” so silly even “Young Adults” of 15 or 16 lose interest in a flash.

“The Seeker,” “The Giver,” “The Host,” Mortal Instruments” — Netflix is littered with “franchises” that never sold enough tickets to return from the dead.

“The Darkest Minds” seems fated to fall into that last dustbin. It’s a tediously derivative tale based on an Alexandra Bracken novel about a plague that wipes out most of the world’s children, and leaves the rest as candidates for Professor Xavier’s “special” school.

Except the government hunts them down and packs them into camps, and the kids who flee the camps become rebels against, you know, a corrupt system.

Of course there’s a “chosen one,” naturally she’s preternaturally pretty and of course there’s a young hunk or three vying for her attention, affection and maybe the use of her powers.

Here, Ruby (Amandla Stenberg of “Everything, Everything,” about to blow up in “The Hate U Give”) is the child reared in labor camps, agirl classified as very smart, but non-threatening, a “green” as the scientists have designated them.

There are more dangerous golds, and oranges and reds with psychotronic powers, able to read minds, hurl objects with their brains and fling fire and what have you from their fingertips.

Ruby is “rescued” by “The League,” an organization that snatches these little brain-bombers from Federal custody. Mandy Moore is Cate, who seems like a heroine…

UNTIL Ruby falls in instead with Liam (Harris Dickinson), Chubbs (Skylan Brooks) and the mute and deadly Zu (Miya Cech), the scariest tween ever.

“Tracers” hunt them, and the government forces under the command of a “concerned” president (Bradley Whitford). If only they can make it to sanctuary, figure out where the cool kids are hiding. Maybe track them down on AM radio.

“If you can hear this, you are one of us...”

Animator (“Kung Fu Panda”) turned director Jennifer Yuh Nelson treats us to some “Maze Runner” level dystopia — a half-ruined entropic country (the story is set in Virginia), abandoned malls (No kids, no need for malls, right?), legions of locked-up kids paraded, by color, into detention camps.

Sound familiar? You’re not watching the news.

The rebel kids live on the fly, on their own and in the woods and form their own hierarchy. Sound familiar? You’re not seeing enough YA sci-fi.

Nelson keeps the kids, especially Stenberg, in tight bedroom-poster-size close-ups. But the performances are nothing to make you think, “We’ve got the next Jennifer Lawrence/Shailene Woodley here.”

These movies live or die on their action beats, and only a couple register — a random car chase with supernatural assistance, and a big battle involving soldiers and Osprey troop transports and kids with eyes that glow orange or red when they get into a dust-up.

It’s inconsequential enough that even the filmmakers hedged their bets on setting up a sequel. New generations of kids come along fast enough that “derivative” doesn’t bother YA viewers as much as the rest of us.

But even they might roll their eyes at the best “The Darkest Minds” can come up with. Which is nothing we haven’t seen before, repeatedly, over the past five years.

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for violence including disturbing images, and thematic elements

Cast: Amandla Stenberg, Mandy Moore, Harris Dickinson, Skylan Brooks, Bradley Whitford

Credits:Directed byJennifer Yuh Nelson, script by Chad Hodge, based on the Alexandra Bracken novel. A Fox release.

Running time: 1:45

The ambition is obvious, right from the swirl of opening credits to “Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story,” a six part documentary series about the “Pandora’s Box” of race, death, the relative values of human lives and the nightmare that “stand your ground” laws have brought to America.

Six years after that Oscar night shooting in Sanford, Florida, the racial schism the shooting of an unarmed 17 year-old exposed seems wider than ever, with the national “backlash” over Trayvon Martin’s shooting now running all three branches of national government.

But was there enough in this pilot, focusing most heavily on the boy’s parents, his lawyer Benjamin Crump and assorted Sanford officials and public relations specialists, to hook everybody in for the other five episodes?

The editing is dazzling, the witness list impressive and there’s plenty of cover footage of The Retreat at Twin Lakes, where the shooting occurred, the fanciest 7-11 in Sanford and the city of Sanford from across Lake Monroe.

Every day that I drive into Orlando I see the Hunter 31 sailboat anchored just shy of the city beside the Interstate 4/St. John’s River Bridge, as seen in the movie.

But this overview episode, with its outsiders-looking-in point of view, misses the mark on how big a deal this was locally before it became a national hot button story. A short montage of Martin/Zimmerman coverage from local TV is all it merits in “Rest in Power.”

Jay Z’s hired filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason had great access to the Martin family, but put zero effort into the reporting that actually first exposed the shooting as something other than “simple self-defense.”

Yes, the attorneys the family hired pushed to get 9/11 tapes released and raised the pressure on a hapless, wrong-footed police department (heavily represented in the film, too). But where are the local journalists who drove this story before it became a cable chattering classes cause celebre?

You can have Al Sharpton, but the newspaper I used to work for was all over this thing early on. Were those intrepid reporters unavailable? All laid off and unwilling to comment? Because putting some dipstick from DC-based Politico on the earliest episode, when it was a Central Florida story, seems half-assed.

The court cases, sure, by then this shooting had become another Casey Anthony Circus, to use the other big Orlando area crime analogy. But from the get-go, this thing was covered by print reporters with access and initiative, and TV reporters competing like hell for leads in a highly-competitive top 20 TV market.

It wasn’t about Al, not for a while. It was never about Politico. I hope this changes in future installments, but the tone and reach of the piece, from Trayvon to Trump, Charlottesville and Kaepernick, suggests otherwise.

Cast: Tracey Martin, Benjamin Crump, Sybrina Fulton, Police Chief Bill Lee, Sgt. David Morganstern, Officer Christopher Serino, Mayor Jeff Triplet

Credits:Directed by Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason, script by . A BET/Paramount Network release.

Running time: 1 hour

Golly, talk about a MILF buzzkill.

Not a lot of household names in this “Trashy Housewives Get Kids Killed” drama — Krista Allen, Megan Ward, Amber Frank.

“Party Mom” looks like a “Lifetime Original Movie” with a splash more sex.

“Special” children survived the apocalypse. And now the government fears these “very rare” kid, X-Men and Women by another name.

Keep the expectations low — an August movie doesn’t have the potential to be a blockbuster than a July movie does.

But maybe it’ll break the YA curse and turn out to be a dazzler. “The Darkest Minds” opens Friday.

It’s a rite of passage saga as old as storytelling, as universal as fathers and sons — a son and his father bond over the ancient act of hunting.

But in today’s wired, urbanized world, can it be taken seriously?

In America, maybe not so much as the not-all-bad Netflix comedy “The Legacy of a White Tail Deer Hunter” made clear — or murkily clear.

As in the U.S., if you get far enough away from the big cities, the life lessons offered by such a trip still have resonance. And in Argentina, as in North America, the further South you go, the more likely you are to find it in practice.

“Temporada de Caza” (“Hunting Season”) is an Argentine film that uses this “coming of age” trope as its subtext. But where it goes with it can be surprising, making some of the same points as “White Tail Deer,” but in all earnestness, with much darker undertones.

Nahuel (Lautaro Bettoni) is a spoiled city kid/private school student teetering on the brink of “out of control.” We meet him just as he’s about to spontaneously set off a rugby brawl.

We don’t know what started it. But…rugby.

He’s expelled, and his stepfather (Boy Olmi) has to remove him from school. He’s sympathetic, but emotional. He packs the kid off to the South, to his biological dad. There are papers to be signed and a connection to be renewed.

Nahuel just lost his mother, and the smoking, cursing, fist-fighting punk is pretty touchy about it.

Ernesto (Germán Palacios) isn’t sure about this visit. Maybe that’s why he sits in his battered Toyota pickup at the airport, staring at the kid waiting for him at the entrance. Hours. 

“I had things to do,” he grouses (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

The gauntlet has been tossed, because this kid isn’t having any of his redneck birth-dad’s nonsense.

“He’s not my father,” he snaps at Ernesto’s wife (Pilar Benitex Vivart), who warns him away from “your father’s seat” at the dinner table.

The kid is rude to her, insults the principal at the school he’s supposed to enroll in to finish the year, sneering about having to “mingle with these people,” and Ernesto, something of a rough customer himself, isn’t having it.

Tempers explode as Nahuel disrupts the family dynamic (they have three small girls), skips out to hang with the hip hop happy snowboard punk locals.

Insolent Nahuel and grizzled cabin-dweller Ernesto have to find common ground. In desperation, Ernesto takes the kid out into the snowy hills to learn to shoot.

Ernesto gets the little acne-spotted jerk’s interest. Something about a deadly weapon does that for teenage boys. He’s got to master using the scope, the bolt-action of the rifle.

Maybe they have nothing in common, but as Ernesto leads Nahuel as several of his hunting buddies out to chase away poachers from the national park near where they live, camping and drinking by the campfire might be their thing. Together.

Writer-director Natalia Garagiola presumably doesn’t have a lot of first-hand experience with his in patriarchal Argentina. But she builds a story of pain, grief and miscommunications, a film of snowy vistas and rustic authenticity.

It’s a cliche to show a kid being taught responsibility by making him chop wood, and another cliche is his eschewing the offered gloves as he does it. We all know where that leads.

But using a hand-held camera to capture the moments of action and taking care to add pathos to both man and boy as the story unfolds, she finds something fresh to bring to this hoary story.

With every glimpse at an old video he’s saved on his phone, with every time he snaps at someone mentioning “what you’ve been through,”Bettoni and director Garagiola let us into this reckless kid’s world.

The veteran actor Palacios makes Ernesto’s “tree” to Nahuel’s “apple that doesn’t fall far from it” perfectly credible, a man who isn’t used to communicating feelings, worries and other unmanly subtleties to anybody. He plays Ernesto’s temper, his confidence in the woods and his out-of-his-depth-dealing with a teenager scenes with deft understatement.

The ground they cover here is so over-familiar that even with the odd surprise, the added subtext of a son rejecting who his “father” is, “Hunting Season/Temporada de Caza” isn’t novel enough to make you rethink its genre.

But this film festival favorite has enough ingredients — setting, gritty father-son dynamic, pall of death hanging over it — to warrant a look, “Netflixable” as we say.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Germán Palacios, Lautaro Bettoni

Credits: Written and directed by Natalia Garagiola . A  Cinetren /Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48