Movie Nation

It’s the teamwork that steps to the fore in “Born Racer,” an Indy Car racing documentary built around the 2017 season of New Zealander Scott Dixon.

Dixon has had an international racing license since he was 13, and home movies track that climb up the career ladder from go-carts to Indianapolis. Members of his team marvel at his competitiveness, his instincts and trained reflexes.

The film shows the space age tech that he uses to train his neural pathways (mental sharpness and reflexes) and his neck muscles to handle a bouncy, stiff race car traveling at 400 feet per second with 6,000 pounds of down force — fascinating.

Director Bryn Evans works hard to maintain the suspense of a championship points race, covering that 2017 season from the pits, the telecommunications center, the garages and the RV where Dixon and his wife and kids stay on race weeks. We see a big crash, a furious physical recovery and the quiet stoicism of Dixon and those rare few who can do what he does.

But “Born Racer” sets itself apart from other racing films with the on-track sequences, the degree of interaction shown between driver and his entire Chip Ganassi Racing team.

We’re just sitting, either in the stands or at home staring at the TV, watching the cars weave around the road courses or loop Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but “there’s so much more going on.”

Instructions are calmly put in his ear — “Stay left. Debris in front of you, there.”

Profanity blasts back and forth when a pit stop goes awry.

Engineers are staring at telemetry about the car, its speed, fuel consumption — telemetry that distressingly flatlines when a car crashes. They’re not watching the track, they’re like NASA monitoring a spacecraft that’s just had a “catastrophic failure.”

Evans takes us through one of motorsports’ longest days — the running of the 101st (2017) Indianapolis 500 — from pre-dawn preps to team meetings. And he introduces us to virtually everybody who contributes to a winning, or losing, effort.

Kenny the tire specialist checks his “wet” and “dry” tires for the day, and being a veteran in the sport, compares Dixon to legends like Mario Andretti and Ayrton Senna. They all share that same razor’s edge focus.

Assistant engineer Kate notes that “he car itself is not a fun thing to drive. You run over a pebble…the vibrations” rattle your bones.”

Chief engineer Chris marvels at a human “making corrections (on the road) faster than you can think. If you have to think about it, it’s too late.”

And Dixon’s wife, a former Olympic level British distance runner named Emma, shrugs and admits “We just don’t talk about the dangers, really. I married a guy who, unless he’s going really fast, he doesn’t feel he’s really alive.”

The danger part of the sport is mentioned, here and there. But “Born Racer” doesn’t have the pathos or urgency of “Senna,” one of the best recent documentaries about motorsports. It does have a crash, captured as it happened, and it’s a doozy — the Camping World Honda #9 airborne, pieces flying everywhere, flames, the works.

Emma Davies-Dixon keeps a cool head in front of her kids, but confesses, “That car saved our life today.”

Engineer Kate marvels that the debris from that wreck was spread over three garages when it all was over. But they’re on the case, rebuilding the car from scratch, and Dixon is doing his part, limping to therapy, chomping at the bit to get back at it.

It’s hard to reinvent the motor racing movie in the age of GoPro, when any live telecast is giving us points of view and coverage that filmmakers of yore had to move Heaven and Earth to obtain.

Voice over banalities like “It’s just about winning” and  “I think globally, the Indy 500 is a significant event” don’t add squat to our understanding of the psyche, the special skills and gifts of the drivers. They get emotional (a flashback to a tragic earlier crash), but they’re poker-faced daredevils, not given to bragging, emoting or giving too much away.

“Born Racer” still manages to give us things NBC, ESPN, CBS or Fox Sports cannot, an insider’s view of just how many insiders it takes to get a winner off the starting line and to the finish line, week in and week out.

MPAA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi, Dario Franchitti, Tony Kanaan.

Credits:Directed by Bryn Evans, script by  Bryn Evans, Matthew Metcalfe. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

The Indonesian thriller “The 3rd Eye” (“Mata Batin“) is a ghost story built on the premise that once you can see them, they see you. And come after you.

It’s a culture-clash viewing experience, from the language (some English, mostly Indonesian with English subtitles) to its depiction of everything from Indonesian cemeteries and funerals, co-writer/director Rocky Soraya’s vision of the Afterlife and the way the film treats its opening credits and a story that goes on an on after its climax and even after its “resolution.”

The frights and the means of pursuing them are universal, downright conventional, even if the effects are more State of the ’80s than State of the Art.

Years ago, a wealthy family’s life was disrupted when Abel, their youngest daughter, kept seeing people nobody else in the house saw. “This is my house, the man told me,” she said.

She wears headphones and listens to music constantly, so that “they” won’t try to talk to her.

And for all her skepticism, older sister Alia does catch a glimpse, we think, of the corpse that’s haunting her.

Fifteen years later, Alia (Jessica Mila) gets the news their parents have died. She and teenage Abel (Bianca Hello) have to move back to their old house, which groundskeeper Mr. Asep (Epy Kusnandar) has kept up. No sooner have they arrived than Abel is chased out of a room by one of the sheets supposedly just there to cover furniture.

This house is haunted.

Not that Alia accepts that. She’s ready to take sis to a shrink. But they do what their mother did long ago with Abel, they confer with a medium who wears the makeup of a witch (Citra Prima, sexy scary). Bu Windu told Abel, long ago, that she could see ghosts.

“You have the third eye.”

Alia’s response to that? She wants Bu Windu to give her that ability. She wants to join Abel in the “Third Eye NOT Blind” state. If she doesn’t see anybody, it’s off to the psychotherapist for baby sister.

Alia doesn’t realize the conversion has worked until she visits the doctor’s office. She chats with a bloodied and bruised child in a wheelchair.

“Dad hit me,” the kid says. But tell my mom I still love him, she adds. Alia attempts to do that and everybody freaks out — the mother, Alia.

Next thing she knows, she’s being chased by the dead all through the hospital, into the parking garage. Alia believes. Can she convince boyfriend Davin (Denny Sumargo)?

There are more consultations with Bu Windu, increasingly alarming encounters with “bad energy” spirits in their house and the search for who or what caused them to be there, to find out what they want and see if it (revenge) is manageable.

Ghosts materialize through walls, let us see their heads spin (slowly, “Exorcist” style) and claw at the living as if they’re the Living Dead.

A mystery is introduced and solved.

And the damned movie keeps going, into a bizarro Halloween Funhouse version of the Afterlife, where visitors walk down a cloth tunnel viewing all manner of dead people. More people die, more explanations of the “rules” of this Afterlife pile up.

It’s not particularly frightening, it goes on entirely too long, but if you’re inured to the shocks and tropes of American horror, “The 3rd Eye/Mata Batin”) will hold your interest and make you wonder how long it will take Blumhouse to remake it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence (machetes, shears, etc), horror

Cast:Jessica Mila, Bianca Hello, Denny Sumargo

Credits:Directed by Rocky Soraya, script by  Riheam Junianti and Fajar Umbara.  A Hitmaker/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

I’ve been puzzled about all this buzz and gushing over “A Star is Born.” I had high, not unreasonably so, hopes for it. And I went with it for a bit.

But the abrupt, unmotivated actions of the principals, jerky nature of the transitions (What DID she start that bar fight over?), Gaga’s inability to tamp down the polished stage presence that somebody who hasn’t “made it” by 30, for reasons aside from her looks, to dial down the charisma and Cooper’s deflated take on alcoholic burned out superstar strangely drawn to the drag club chanteuse started wearing on me.

Thus my review is an outlier. As I say in it and in responses to some of the almost-civil comments on it (the nasty ones don’t see the light of day), there’s nothing wrong with remaking (fourth version) a film last remade 42 years ago. There’s nothing evil about remaking a BAD movie (ASIBorn is dated, needs to be gender-flipped to work, something more than what we’re shown). Didn’t hate it, just acknowledging that what I watched was middling, at best. The nature of the hate mail I’ve gotten for it suggests that Gaga’s fans won’t stand for that.

And then I found another review which aptly sums up the film’s swooning notices. Kevin Fallon (Related to…?) at The Daily Beast says “the movie’s not that good” and that “neither is she.”

But he folded like an intern given a website byline (every “review” you read on NPR, in other words). Just give her fans the endorsement they demand.

His headline? “The Joy of Lady Gaga Being So Damned Good in ‘A Star is Born.'” If you’re going to wimp out and turn yourself into a liar, might as well troll for a little “Monsters” traffic while you’re doing it. “Cultural moment?” The box office will determine that, but we’re not reviewing its financial prospects, are we?

Her fans have been massaging the process to ensure their idol gets her just desserts. 

His wasn’t the only review with a “just take it” air. As I’ve said in my review and countering those illiterates who mischaracterize it in their enraged comments (most are too ugly to publish), I think Gaga’s inclusion politics are righteous, and that inspires fierce loyalty in those fans who feel included.

It doesn’t make a good film actress any more than that “participation” Golden Globe she won for “American Horror Story.”

And as Kevin Fallon’s Daily Beast doesn’t allow reader comments, he would have been more or less insulated from ugly remarks on his review, his personal appearance, his what have you. Why pussy out, there, Kevin?

“Venom,” the other wide release of the weekend, isn’t as darkly funny as “Deadpool,” isn’t as exciting as any other comic book adaptation. Fanboy cravings for “the cool parts” may be serviced, barely, and Tom Hardy’s always interesting to watch.

With bad notices across the board, I’m thinking Ruben Fleischer had best move on to “Zombieland 2,” because the touch he displayed there has been missing from every film he’s been entrusted to direct ever since. Are they making him “just direct what’s on the (script) page,” or is he “fixing” his projects on set, and botching them in the process?

The director of “The Big Short” rounded up Sam Rockwell to play “W.,” Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld and Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney (Allison Pill is Mary Cheney) for this Dec. 21 dramedy about the “Real” president during the Bush II years, Dick Cheney.

Bale’s transformation sells this.

Annapurna is a boutique studio, so “Vice” might be widely distributed, but probably more a limited release unless awards buzz kicks in.

Did you see the French film “Les Intouchables /The Intouchables” a few years back? No? No worries. Netflix will almost certainly reload it for streaming before this STX remake comes out.

Kevin Hart is a long-unemployed punk (probably not, but in the original film) haplessly applying for jobs, expecting rejection, practically inviting it, until he’s hired to be the driver/nurse/companion for a quadriplegic man (Bryan Cranston). Nicole Kidman plays his wife.

I’d say “The Upside” is the most ambitious film STX has produced and released, but I don’t think they’re Oscar campaigning this and it opens Jan. 11. One fears they’ve reduced it to a simple, broad Kevin Hart comedy. And the original was much more than that (My review is on this link).

So I guess we know now why Sony keeps rebooting and remaking “Spider-Man” movies.

They hadn’t a clue how to film “Venom,” the alien antithesis of “your friendly neighborhood” web slinger.

I mean, we all love Tom Hardy, but he can’t break through in this thinly-scripted, dully acted and badly directed Marvel comic brought to life.

There are casting issues — Riz Ahmed is a little too reasonable and not particularly scary as the science tycoon hell-bent on getting humanity a leg up in colonizing the stars. Michelle Williams may have four Oscar nominations, but she’ under-reacts to every overwhelming experience of extraterrestrial life and violence her character encounters, and can’t do much with the feeble punchlines four credited screenwriters cooked up.

Jenny Slate is wasted in a lab coat role.

But Hardy, not exactly known for his light touch, finally gets a handle on this alien “symbiote” who takes over his body and fights for control of his soul in his head, leading to oodles of the old ultra violence and lots of vengeance fantasies come true.

Because Eddie Brock, the TV reporter he plays, has a bone or three to pick with the world.

He gets fired from his TV gig for going off half-cocked with his big interview with space-faring billionaire bio-tech tycoon Carlton Drake (Ahmed, from “Rogue One”) and gets his fiance (Williams) fired by stealing a tip from her laptop.

They both kiss him goodbye with the same pithy sign off–“Have a nice life.”

So when this alien parasite takes over his body, turns him into a bull in a four-star-restaurant China shop (“HUNGRY!”), bickers with him over “Let’s tear off their heads and eat them” (people) and takes over every time he gets in a tussle, Eddie’s not as un-receptive as you might think.

“Apparently, I have a parasite” he deadpans.

Scott Haze plays the head minion at Drake’s lab, the one charged with bringing this alien thingy that has taken over Eddie back to the lab for more “human experiments.

“Bring me back my CREATURE!” Ahmed bellows, as Drake. And you kind of wish he’d gone more Elon Musk about it.

Slate is the ethically-conflicted scientist trying to expose Drake’s casual, callous inhumanity. Ron Cephas Jones of TV’s “This is Us” and last summer’s “Dog Days” is the underwhelming TV editor who gives Eddie the boot.

“Venom” is an “origin story” comic book movie, so there’s all this prologue about Drake’s spacecraft bringing specimens back to Earth and crashing in Malaysia as it does.

One symbiote makes its way to San Francisco the hard way — one stolen human host at a time.

The other gets out of the lab and gets hold of Eddie by the usual “no good deed goes unpunished” route.

You just know those two toothy, talkative monsters are going to tangle.

Truth be told, you know pretty much everything that’s coming, and the cast fails to act very surprised when these unsurprising, rote comic book story beats are revealed.

The picture finally achieves “tolerable” for a while in the middle acts, with Hardy all goofy and rubber-legged, yanked about by this beast within like a puppet, cracking wise as he negotiates with the invader about how to behave in human company.

The fights are the usual post-“Transformers” digital blur, mayhem that trashes cars, a motorcycle and the drones chasing that motorcycle through car-chase-capital San Francisco.

If you go, you must stay through the credits. Sony is expecting this thing to be another Marvel money-minting machine for them, a franchise and a new villain is thus introduced.

But there’s no franchise future with “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer in charge. He could not spice up or otherwise save this script, and the picture feels under-directed every time there are actors involved or climaxes that he stumbles past as if he didn’t notice them.

Even the last after-the-credits plug is a tin-eared head-scratcher, an “alternate universe” animated “Spider-Man ” TV show sample.

Silly Sony. The cartoons come BEFORE the big, dumb action picture that should have played like a cartoon, but didn’t.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language

Cast: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Michelle Lee, Riz Ahmed

Credits:Directed by Ruben Fleischer , script by Scott Rosenberg, Jeff Pinkner,  Kelly Marcel, Will Beal, based on the Marvel comic. A Marvel/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:52

If ever there was anybody who put out the “New Brando/James Dean” vibe upon his arrival in the movies it was Stephen Dorff. 

His unkempt swagger and commitment to roles combined to create a “cool” persona that lasted at least until Hollywood figured out he was never going to be A-list, and consigned him to villains, indie fare and other genres kinder to an aging out of it hipster.

“Don’t Go” is a supernatural thriller about a father who lost his daughter, but thinks he’s figured out where she “went” after death. It opens Oct. 26

Boy, do we love a mystery, a “puzzle picture.”

Feed us an “Inception” or “Lost” or “Stranger Things,” and it’s as if the Internet was invented with the sole purpose to crowd-sourcing a solution. Not everybody has to be into it, not everyone “gets” it, and that’s part of the appeal, what makes a “cult film” like “The Endless” so “culty.”

Filmmakers and co-stars Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have concocted a sci-fi/horror meditation on eternity, purgatory or any number of other “solutions” to this puzzle of a cult where escape, getting un-“stuck,” only seems like a possibility.

They play brothers named Aaron and Justin, young men struggling to get by in housecleaning jobs in L.A., lost and lonely with only each other for connection and company.

But Aaron remembers when they weren’t in this rut. Back before they escaped the Camp Arcadia cult, they had purpose, family, good health and stimulation. Now? A video tape from the camp’s still-resident sex symbol (Callie Hernandez) has him pining for the past.

Justin? He’s the one who “got us out,” the one who figures a mass suicide is coming, any day now.

“It’s a UFO Death Cult. It’s what they do!”

Aaron talks him into a return visit, and everybody there goes out of his or her way to welcome them. Sure, there was humiliating media coverage of their escape, and their descriptions of a “UFO Death Cult” hurt sales of the Camp/Farm’s one product (beer).

“Everything you did ranges from ‘I don’t care’ to ‘forgiven,’” asserts leader Hal (Tate Ellington).

The food is still good, the entertainment still homemade, the residents a blend of the seemingly sane and the definitely not. The artist Lizzy (Kira Powell) says she recently slipped away from a mental hospital. And the stuff she draws? Disturbing.

A day and a night of hanging with the Arcadians allow “the family” to remake its case to the brothers, who grew up there. There are flirtations, coercive debates and what seem like magic tricks.

Justin hangs on to his skepticism, but for no reason we can logically reason out, he lets Aaron talk him into prolonging their stay. A jog to “the border” of the camp (marked with gnarled, leprous looking posts) spooks him. A couple of the “magic tricks” and weird phenomena rattle him.

And a dive into the on-site lake convinces Justin there’s “something down there.”

Will he make a break for it? Can he drag Aaron out, again, or is his sibling too far gone this time? His brother thinks “I dragged him out of here for no reason” way back when.

Now, with the lousy, limited lives they’re leading in L.A., groupthink and belonging to something bigger than yourself seems like a better option.

And is Justin’s previous escape route even open?

The Family speaks of “the struggle,” which is what Aaron seems to want to get away from, the struggle just to get by, belong, meet somebody who shares his interests.

But Justin? He’s a hard-sell, a believer in Free Will. You’re not going to get to him by joking around.

“You mind if we get a little culty in here?”

The film dawdles in getting around to its Big Mystery and the suspense that entails. And the leads, while perfectly believable as siblings connected by blood, love and maybe a bit of the same skepticism, seriously under-react when extraordinary things start happening.

Most of the energy here when into cooking up the Mobius Strip plot and creating some H.P. Lovecraft-worthy effects — swarming, portentous crows, multiple moons in the heavens, a vast mostly-unseen beast just beyond visual comprehension.

Their very existence seems “stuck,” and all around the camp, lives are trapped in what looks like a skipping video disc or repeating, broken tape “loop.”

This last bit, the “twists,” have spawned an Internet cottage industry of “solutions” (some provided by the filmmmakers) and “possible theories” about the film’s meaning.

As a movie, it’s somewhat fascinating on that “fear of the unknown” level (a Lovecraft quote opens the movie) and somewhat less riveting as a thriller. The leads had a lot on their minds. Amping up each other’s fear factor in their performances to make them convincingly afraid-for-their-lives, gobsmacked by what appears to be the supernatural and “trapped by the unknown” appears to have been low on the list of priorities.

The mystery is more intriguing than the movie is alarming.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast:Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Callie Hernandez

Credits:Directed by Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, script by Justin Benson. A Well Go release.

Running time: 1:51

Sony, the movie conglomerate releasing the latest Marvel picture (the “Spider-Man” universe is theirs for the exploiting), once did this crazy thing.

They showed “The Da Vinci Code” to critics all over the world at the same time — Cannes to Columbus, Manhattan to Miami.

It’s a way of avoiding critical groupthink, that shared “We all loved it” or “hated it” driven by Sundance snow, Austin’s beer and weed, Toronto’s chill or Cannes’ sun.

The shocking result of this “nobody sees it before anybody else” was almost universal agreement among reviewers that Dan Brown sucks and Ron Howard and Tom Hanks couldn’t overcome that.

“Venom” they showed Monday and Tuesday, and reviews are popping up. It’s more a slow-moving consensus — bad reviews mostly. 

That cherry-picked reviewers platforming pays off with SXSW films, fanboy product like “Bad Times at the El Royale,” and Toronto gave “A Star is Born” its ordination as an Oscar movie to beat.

I’m seeing for myself and withholding judgement, but that strategy isn’t rescuing “Venom,” which opens Friday.

Hoping for the best, love that Tom Hardy, but expectations have been lowered.

Even film fans who have never seen “The Searchers” know its quest — girls kidnapped by Indians on the Old West, a brutal-years-long pursuit of them and their captors by their uncle an the adopted nephew who draws into his obsession.

“Les Cowboys” is a modern French re-setting of that tale, borrowing its racial parable, its epic, tragic “hero’s quest” for a story of a French farm-country teen who runs off with her Muslim boyfriend, lost to a world utterly alien to her kin.

Her father Alain (François Damiens) never saw it coming. He’d bring the whole family along to their “Country Music Festival” in the foothills of the French Alps — every line-dancing, boot-scooting son and daughter of Gaul in hats, bandanas, blue jeans and bolo ties, driving Ford Mustangs, diving into Western lore and crafts and singing (in thick accents) “The Tennessee Waltz.”

His wife (Agathe Dronne) seems to enjoy the fellowship, his son, “The Kid” (Finnegan Oldfield) has absorbed this hobby as much as his dad.

Daughter Kelly (Iliana Zabeth)? She picked this 1994 fair as the spot for her to run off with Ahmed.

Ahmed? A friend from school? Who is he? What’s going on? A notebook filled with practice Arabic and extremist tracts turns up in her room, a letter from Charleville about “the life I’ve chosen” tells the tale.

“Maybe we should trust her,” his wife counsels (in French, with English subtitles). The girl is 16, and he’s not having it. He shares the views of many working class Frenchmen he meets — “You know how these savages treat women!”

Alain quickly tracks down the kid’s parents and is enraged at their lack of concern. Alain turns to the cops who give him the “wait three days” and “Let’s not get all steamed up.”

That is exactly what Alain becomes, increasingly furious that his 16 year-old has run off with some “raghead,” and that no one is taking this disaster seriously.

He abandons his business and tracks any lead — the letter from Charleville, a child in a red bandana in a Gypsy camp in Sedan, a port city document forger, an Islamic terror-funding mullah in Antwerp — “Your daughter is not your daughter any more!” — by sea to Yemen, overland to Turkey.

And like any good Old West son, The Kid follows.

Days turn into months and years, but Alain won’t give up — “I’ll come home when I have my daughter!” How far will he, they, take it?

Director and co-writer Thomas Bidegain (he scripted “A Prophet”) gives us a tail of futility, of “saving” someone who does not want to be saved and the racism built into Alain’s fanatical pursuit.

As with “A Prophet,” Bidegain toys with the changing nature of France and its uneasy relationship with the Islamic world that its former colonies and immigration policies have brought into the country, if not assimilated. “Les Cowboys” (as it was titled in much of the world) shows us a subculture that has absorbed one alien culture (America’s Old West) and yet cannot relate to another, the strangely-dressed people of different faith, values and color who have settled in with them.

“The Searchers” was, in American terms, John Ford’s “Brown vs. Board of Education” Western, a film that metaphorically wrestled with America’s 1950s Civil Rights Movement in the form of a cowboys and Indians tale.

The period piece setting allows the film to chart a Western world that moved from racist co-existence along shared issues (oil, foiling left wing revolutions) to vengeful rage by 9/11 and attacks in Madrid, London and elsewhere. Alain’s generation won’t be able to make this right, even if he gets his daughter back. The Kid’s?

“Cowboys” (as it titled on Netflix) meanders and staggers somewhat in its final acts, where the son Georges takes over the hunt. John C. Reilly plays a sage, cynical and world-weary “Americain” who meets Georges in Pakistan, the post-9/11 focus of any search for “radicalized” Muslims of East or West.

The “trader” (as he describes himself) sees a kindred spirit and shared mission in The Kid, and declares “There’s no room for us back home. We take up too much space.”

It is up to Georges to meet that destiny or transcend it.

The marvel of Bidegain’s film (Noé Debre co-wrote it) is that it lets us hope for that, even as it plays into Western contempt, Western fears and Western rage about a culture we’ve been slow to understand.

MPAA Rating:R for a brief violent image and a scene of drug use

Cast: François Damiens, Finnegan Oldfield, Agathe Dronne, John C. Reilly

Credits:Directed by Thomas Bidegain, script by Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:44