Movie Nation

“Sadie” is a very dark girl, even for 13.

The more violent the video game, the better. She’s into horror films and takes in the world through the jaded eyes, her bleak connection to violence pouring out into the compositions she writes for English class.

She’d scare people, if they only knew. But when you’ve grown up in the dumpiest trailer park in Greater Seattle, when your Dad escaped from the family by constantly re-upping his military service, who’s going to notice a kid like her and wonder what’s going on in her head?

Writer-director Megan Griffiths’ Sundance-produced “Sadie” is a domestic melodrama with working class grit and concerns. Poverty is never mentioned, because the poor don’t talk about the horizons that have closed in around them. We can see it, and so can they.

Sadie, given a poker-faced seriousness by Sophia Mitri Schloss of TV’s “Kicks,” writes letters to her father expressing longing and a tender connection. But even those have an edge.

“I think adults just get nervous when kids are smarter than they are…Adults are so pointless.”

She’s talking about her teachers, who keep red-flagging her bloody-minded essays and ignoring the constant bullying her pal Francis (Keith L. Williams) endures. She might also mean her nurse mother (Melanie Lynskey) and the guidance counselor (Tony Hale) who gives her extra attention because he pines for her mother.

She cuts him down with all the sophistication a movie 13 year-old can muster. She tolerates Bradley, but not his seeming concerned questions about her father, “considering you’re over here trying to sleep with his wife while he’s off defending his country.”

The Shady Plains Mobile Home Park accepts anybody and anything passing for a “mobile home,” and is entirely too close to a junkyard, where Sadie and Francis hang out.

But those days may be winding down. They’re getting sexually curious. Well, she is. And while the director dresses her in mid-winter frumpiness, Sadie’s emerging sexuality is something she’s aware of even if she can’t articulate it to her father figure and whittling mentor, grumpy Deek (Tee Dennard).

To Deek, Francis’ grandpa, Sadie is “an old coot at the ripe age of 13.”

“What’s a coot?”
“I’m a coot.”

The free electron introduced into this atomized world is Cyrus (John Gallagher Jr. of “The Belko Experiment”). He’s cagey about his past and his present, wary about how much to say in front of anybody. Used to be a pilot. Works as a mechanic. Living in a battered, undersized Winnebago.

Lynskey inhabits a working class world as well as the best of them and has hit “The Mom Years” of her career by giving performances both tragic and funny (“Goodbye to All That,” “I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Any More” “Happy Christmas”), but always suffused with realism. She lets us see the neediness in her character, Rae, even as she refuses to compromise on her “type,” her idea of what a man should be.

“So, you lived here long?”

“You could say that.”

“Change of scenery?”

“Something like that.”

“Pretty sad view.”

Gallagher suggests similar down-and-out desperation, a working class self-awareness that is he rationalizes just to get by.

“If everybody got to do what they love, there wouldn’t be any janitors or fry cooks. And the world would be a very messy place without any fried food.”

But this is Schloss’s show, and even though everything from her eyebrows to her wiser-than-her-years cynicism screams “CHILD ACTRESS,” she colors Sadie in shades of grey, the eternal color of Greater Seattle.

Deek gives her the Big Life Metaphor in whittling form — “I’d keep it simple — frogs and squirrels and stuff. Men are tough.” Sadie is too sophisticated for that — canny, looking for angles to play to create solutions to her problems, and Francis’.

Schloss lets us see that Sadie is savvy enough to see her friends bully issues and Cyrus’s seriously rough redneck edges, that she’s cunning and nervy enough to think up solutions, too childish to see the consequences of her actions.

Director Griffiths never lets reality slip too far beyond her film’s grasp, though the sexual complications, all of them, play like melodramatic conventions, some less organic than others.

She’s still delivered a convincing portrait of a world and how its limited horizons shape those who might never escape it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, substance abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Sophia Mitri Schloss, Melanie Lynskey, John Gallagher Jr.,  Danielle Brooks, Tee Dennard, Tony Hale

Credits: Written and directed by Megan Griffiths. An Electric Dream Factory release.

Running time: 1:36

A huge weekend is underway for both a critically-scorned comic book pic and the fourth version of “A Star is Born” as Sony’s “Venom” is overcoming bad reviews to set the October record for its opening and “A Star is Born” is pulling them in as well.

A $10 million Thursday night preview pushed into a big Friday and sets the stage for a $77-80 million “Venom” take. No, the trailers don’t entice and the reviews have been red flag warnings. But the fangirls and fanboys are swarming out to see for themselves.

The upper end of projections pointed to a $60 million take. So there is a franchise here after all.

“A Star is Born” is benefiting from vast reservoirs of Lady Gaga love — from fans and most critics — and has easily overcome its long run time to manage a $44 million opening.

The previous record for an October debut was “Gravity,” which did $55 million and change a few Octobers back. So you can see the scale of this, a sea of film fans flooding theaters to escape the news or what have you.

“Night School” experienced a steep week to week plunge to end up in fourth place, “Smallfoot” is holding its own as the lone kiddie film for parents to lean on for another weekend. It might hit $70, 60 anyway.

There’s a new “Goosebumps” coming, which should end “The House with the Clock in its Walls.”

“A Simple Favor” has had legs and will clear $50 million by Sunday, Monday at the latest.  

Most people don’t give a lot of thought to rock climbing. It’s a demographic thing, a racial thing, a “Because it’s there” thing that doesn’t connect with the average person without the upper body strength, the skill and determination or the free time.

But for a few weeks in late 2014 and early 2015, America and much of the world were riveted by images from Yosemite’s El Capitan, to two tiny dots climbing “The Dawn Wall.”

At night, the blackness, with El Capitan outlines in dark blue, captured the tiny dot of a camp light, two guys in a tent dangling a 1500 feet up.

Filmmakers Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer weave a fascinating, upbeat story of obsession, pain, exertion and achievement in getting up close on the cliff-face with Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgesen and into the lives that put them there, attempting an ultimate free climb, The Dawn Wall of the 3000 foot high El Capitan rock in the park.\

It’s mostly about Caldwell, 37 at the time he made the attempt, widely acknowledged as the greatest climber of his generation. Trying to free climb (just hands and feet, ropes only to limit his fall)

“The Dawn Wall” begins with the guys hanging in a cat’s cradle of ropes holding men, gear and tents, where Caldwell takes a “Tommy, what’s the point of all this?” cell call from the New York Times.

El Capitan is “the Mecca of rock climbing,” and the bald, seemingly featureless “Dawn Wall” is its Black Stone in the Grand Mosque, rock climbing’s ultimate achievement.

Caldwell, a developmentally-delayed son of a climber and body-builder who took climbing by storm in his teens, set this impossible task as his goal.

Friends, family and fellow-climbers profess their amazement at his dexterity, infinite patience for reasoning out a climb, muscling through pain and making history.

Jorgesen was a less experienced climber when they met, but a king of “bouldering,” flying up and over smaller faces.

They took years to plan their route, sketched out in graphics in the film, each stage called a “pitch” where they could stop and rest for the next pitch — places with colorful names, the Muir Wall, The Mushroom, The Dyno, The Traverse, Wino Tower.

But Caldwell’s life had plenty of drama before then, meeting a woman who shared his passion for climbing, joining her and others for a once-in-a-lifetime climb in the Kara Su Valley in Kyrgyzstan.

They were kidnapped by Islamic rebels, caught up a firefight with government troops, forced to take matters in their own hands to survive. Other pieces of Caldwell lore are woven into the narrative.

Climbing legend John Long is among those interviewed in “The Dawn Wall,” and his commentary becomes the narration of the film’s main body, the big climb itself. He expresses skepticism, amazement and sober analysis of the effort, the frustrations and every difficulty the two encounter (with roped off camera operators capturing the effort as they do).

Caldwell resolves that “We’re not coming down until we’re done,” and as we see the bloodied, chalked fingers hammered and nail-busted toes, the dozens of tries it takes to accomplish some moves, we know caught up in a wait….wait for it…cliff hanger.

Filmmakers Lowell and Mortimer were there to document every excruciating inch, with stunning Yosemite scenery as their backdrop for almost every striking frame. the film they got out of it is, like the experience they were documenting, one of a kind.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Tommy Caldwell, Kevin Jorgesen, John Long, John Branch

Credits:Directed by Josh Lowell, Peter Mortimer. A Red Bull Media release.

Running time: 1:40

“This is the last one,” Clint Eastwood’s character says in “The Mule,” a movie he directed and stars in, perhaps the last time he will do that for his beloved Warner Brothers.

And damned if this isn’t the most touching trailer to a Clint movie in ages — even more moist-eyed than the ones cut for “Million Dollar Baby.”

He plays an old man using his age as a cover for smuggling drugs — big paydays, huge risks, but maybe not so for a man who regards his life as a waste and essentially over. It’s an elegy to old age, “last rides,” crime and those chasing the criminal.

Oscar winner Dianne Weist, Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, Lawrence Fishburne, Tessa Farmiga and Alison Eastwood are also in the cast.

It’s a holiday release, according to IMDb, but as the trailer says “Next Year,” it seems headed for a limited Oscar-qualifying run in late Dec. with wider “American Sniper” sized release coming in January.

The common refrain from all the filmgoer comments directed my way about “Venom” has been “I could see it was bad, just from the trailer.”

As a film’s trailer is comprised of its best, most audience-enticing moments, that’s a fair shot. The best Sony’s Marvel movie has been able to drum up is a shrug from most folks.

Reviews have been mostly bad.

But it’s still supposedly going to open HUGE. Deadline.com is saying “others” are hinting it could go to $70, but $60 seems safer. That’s a CYA attempt on Deadline’s part.

Box Office Guru is betting low and I’m with him. Maybe $46 million.

It could open in “Ant-Man” territory — upper $50s — or in the realm of Tom Hardy’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” (mid-40s), Box Office Mojo opines. Then the site sticks its neck out and says $60 million.

As the movies everybody is comparing its chances to earned GOOD reviews, it could be they’re inflating the expected take in the hopes of smearing egg on Sony’s face.

Lady Gaga fans have been trolling “Venom” in the hopes of creating a depressed box office and a real horse race, with the longer, better reviewed “A Star is Born,” a date movie that should make money into November or award’s season, depending on how its buzz fares.

Mojo and Deadline.com are figuring the critically-boosted and all-media hyped “Star” will hit the low $40s. Box Office Guru is lowballing that one, too — $36.

THURSDAY’S take put “Venom” at $7 million, a strong is not epic start to the weekend. “A Star is Born” managed $2.5, and stuffed “preview” showings in on Tuesday and Wed. nights as well. (Warner Brothers is winning the fall marketing wars with this one).

“Venom” is on so many screens (4250) that it should win the weekend easily, but we will see what we see. “A Star is Born” is the one that’s selling out early showings on Fandango.com. I’m guessing the $45 for and up predictions are on the mark. And if “Venom” only manages the $45-50 that quality and pre-release attention suggest, the Gaga Monsters may have their way.

The Brits loved this black and white take on “Cold War” era Poland, jazz and love in a time of oppression, limited freedoms and dictatorship.

Might resonate with American audiences come Dec. 21.

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.