Movie Nation

This October, in theaters, for two nights only, a faith-based movie embracing the faithless, truthless, feckless, sexist, racist, Godless Russian puppet who “at least isn’t that WOMAN.”

No, churches don’t play political kingmakers. Nooo. OK they do. Praying for Obama’s death over the years has them relieved they have a “leader” more like themselves.

You know, stupid white and bigoted, unable to spell “hypocrisy.”

And churchgoing conservatives don’t understand “cognitive dissonance,” or the irony of making a “pussy grabbing,” “pee-pee tape” treasonous cheat and vulgarian as their champion. And never will, until the last meth lab burns down around their ears.

This movie might have offered something to the debate, but the filmmakers were too gutless to argue that “hastening Armageddon and The Rapture” is their end game.

Sorry, I stumbled across this abomination today and after I stopped laughing, I just had to share it.

Sure looks like it.

This George Tillman drama is based on the Angie Thomas novel, a ripped-from-today’s-headlines story of a shoot-on-suspicion police killing and the prep school girl (Amandla Stenberg of “Everything, Everything”) who witnesses it and decides to speak out as unrest over just this sort of shooting breaks out.

Common, Regina Hall and Anthony Mackie are the big names in the cast. “The Hate U Give” looks topical, touching and very good, and opens Oct. 19.

Some people have an eye for it, a grasp of someone so different the zeitgeist changes overnight, that quality that makes a star. And those folks don’t all work for movie studios, publishers, TV networks or record companies.

Sometimes, they’re journalists.

“Life” makes for an unusual take on the stardom of James Dean. His arrival on the scene just as youth culture, The Beats, rock’n roll and “The Method” were about to roll over America like a just-started-shaving tsunami, might have been foretold by Brando, who preceded him, or Elvis, who blew up at the same time.

But this brooding, proto-“Beat” punk “artist” “discovered” by the last great days of “the studio system” was no sure thing.

Until he met the photographer who carved his image in ice — iconic still photographs that captured his insolence, his disaffected youth, his uncompromising cool.

Robert Pattinson is Dennis Stock, that photographer. We meet him at a 1955 Hollywood party, just another ambitious shutterbug dreaming of fame, gallery shows and respect, because “nobody respects photographers in Hollywood.”

Nicholas Ray (Peter Lucas) is showing off Natalie Wood (Lauren Gallagher), a child star about to transition to adult roles in Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause.” The director still hasn’t found his leading man, though. Even though he’s sitting at the bar at the party, bored.

That would be young Mr. Dean, gawky, bespectacled, just wrapped on “East of Eden.” Dane DeHaan, long-hyped as another “next James Dean,” and widely ridiculed for it, with bombs from “Valerian” to “Tulip Fever” to “Knight of Cups,” to his credit, takes on Dean.

Pattinson is spot-on as a striver, an ambitious divorced husband and negligentm workaholic dad who recognizes, after the semi-flirtatious and always casual Dean invites him to a preview of “Eden,” that this guy is the Next Big Thing.

“It’s Hollywood,” Dean mumbles, dismissively.

“What you’re doing isn’t Hollywood.”

Stock can’t sell his “photo essay” pitch, maybe for “Life Magazine,” to his agent/editor (Joel Edgerton). But he will.

“There’s an awkwardness” he can’t quite articulate. The kid is “very pure,” and “Something’s changing, Jimmy’s a part of that.”

DeHaan? I’m going out on a limb here and saying he grows on you. With his friendly, laid back Indiana drawl, he comes off as vaguely flirtatious (to both sexes), sleepy, with a kind of high, soft voice — annoying, inventive, insistently passive and intent on Devil may care cool — kind of like Dean himself. DeHaan took a bit of a pounding when “Life” came out, and frankly, it’s undeserved.

The picture may meander even as director Anton Corbijn (“The American,” “A Most Wanted Man”) plunges into not just recreating an era, but over-indulging in the complex, teasing, begging relationship between the about-to-be star and the needy photojournalist condemned to shoot press conferences, parties and studio-sanctioned still images as a set photographer.

“Wow, they let you on the set? You must be well-behaved!”

But I think DeHaan is a good-enough Dean, as good a Dean as Dean himself deserves, a bongo-playing hipster, affecting while pretending not to use affectations, unguarded enough to insult the producer of “Eden” when the press asks him if he’d have jumped at the chance to make “The Boy From Oklahoma,” a Jack Warner bomb starring Will Rogers Jr.

“Didya SEE it?” he boyish giggles to the reporter who asks the stupid question.

Corbijn leads us through this world, letting us meet the stars ( Eartha Kitt, Julie Harris, Raymond Massey, Natalie Wood) of the age, including the Italian bombshell Pier Angeli (Alessandra Mastronardi) who was involved with Dean at the time.

“Who do you think will be beeeeger?” she demands of Stock, “Jeemy or Poll (Paul Newman, with whom she co-starred in a couple of films)?”

The minx. It wouldn’t matter. She was still going to marry Vic Damone.

The dazzling impersonation here is Ben Kingsley, playing the powerful and grudge-carrying Warner brother, Jack Warner, one of the Last Titans of Old Hollywood.

“You’re an intelligent boy, right? Follow certain rules…I’m not sure we should emphasize the rebel in you, Jimmy.” And then the naked, brutish threat — “Do you want to be working back at the CBS parking garage?”

Corbijn and the script string out the “courtship” between photographer and future star. “I’m going to make you a star!” Dean is evasive, “Do I like the sound of that?” He isn’t sure he wants that, or that he wants “to rush it. ”

Pattinson’s Stock grows more frantic as Dean prevaricates, dances off with Eartha Kitt (Kelly McCreary) and lets some flirtatious pal at the Actor’s Studio introduce Stock to “uppers.” Stock’s deadline approaches and his agent/editor tears apart the shots he’s taking.

There’s no guile to this James Dean, which may be inaccurate. But this “friendship” seems damned one-sided. And Stock’s editor is more blunt.

“You’re chasing a nobody who likes to be chased.”

Then, a rainy day on Times Square, he’s hungover. The “talent” is late and the photographer has lost all his confidence. And hell, let’s just get this over with.

If “Life” has a point, it’s about images and how they are crafted — by the artist on either side of the camera. Dean, for his feigned disaffection, “performed” for Stock. And Stock might have pictured “a sunny day,” but sunny days are never as arresting as the dull grey hues of a rainy, chilly late winter day in Manhattan. He lucked into an iconic image.

Pattinson may not be the best actor to convey naked, craving desire (for fame), but he’s pretty good at matching what Stock must have done when confronted by Dean — caring without letting on he cares. And the “Twilight” star absolutely nails Stock’s first-ever experience of “uppers” — chattering complaints and hopes and disappointments without taking a breath.

DeHaan has snatches of Dean the way he was, and the way we remember him, which aren’t always in sync. Put the glasses on him and he’s “the artist,” deep, sensitive, visiting home in Indiana or his “happiest place” The Actor’s Studio. Take the glasses off and he’s a Hollywood star, whether he welcomes that or not.

The biggest problem with “Life” might be how long it goes on past its climax, trips to Indiana, the “East of Eden” premiere, soul-searching and tears for the life Dean (and to some extent Stock) will leave behind.

But if you’re a Hollywood history junky like me, you won’t mind this excess, or the film that Corbjin, with each artful visual composition (filmmakers do that in movies about artists) builds around this little known relationship and the seminal moment in culture that it produced.

MPAA Rating:R for some sexuality/nudity and language

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Dane DeHaan, Lauren Gallagher, Alessandra Mastronardi, Peter Lucas, Ben Kingsley

Credits:Directed by Anton Corbijn, script by Luke Davies . A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:51

Nobody in this corner of the woods around Mount St. Helens, in Washington State, wants to acknowledge it. They don’t want to call it by name.

Your fiance got snatched, tent and all dragged off in the dark of night? Your pickup got pounded to pieces?

“Could’ve been a grizzly.”

They haven’t heard the rumbling moans, the knocking in the dead of night in the middle of the endless forest. They haven’t seen skulls dangling from trees. Hell, they haven’t seen the footprints.

“Big Legend” is a slow-footed bigfoot horror tale, a story of an unprovoked attack and the survivor’s guilt that sends the “ex-Special Forces” woodsman Tyler (Kevin Makely, a Bradley Cooper look-alike) black into those forbidding woods “looking for answers.”

Yes, he is armed to the teeth. No, he doesn’t have a cell phone, sparing us the “No bars, NO BARS!” wilderness thriller cliche.

Writer-director Justin Lee has lulled us, almost to sleep, with a sedentary, lovey-dovey prologue as Tyler delivers his “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you” lies to the woman (Summer Spiro) he wants to marry.

Her “If we get eaten, I’m gonna KILL you” is the film’s lone funny line.

Tyler doesn’t want to believe in legends, and spends a year in the psyche ward afterward dealing with his and society’s refusal to accept what he heard — knocking, moans — and saw — rock cairns, a gigantic flash of grey fur in the dark, yanking a tent with the screaming Natalie inside.

But Mom (Adrienne Barbeau) taught him never to leave big questions unanswered. And once he runs into the beer-swilling poacher (Todd A. Robinson), he figures out he’s not crazy after all. The new guy just calls what’s out there “The Big Man.”

“Big Legend” settles into a deadly stalk and a survivalist quest. Guns and military training may not be enough to take down, or evade, “The Big Man” in his own element.

Lee, a screen newcomer with three low-budget pics slated for release this year, manages a few hair-raising moments and stages good attacks and fights. Plotting, dialogue, characterizations and coda would be his weakest skills, at this point.

“Big Legend” delivers “Revenant” scenery and generic monster-in-the-dark fights, but just lumbers along, barely suggesting forward motion at all.

Makely is adequate, but not an arresting screen presence. The script gives no one a moment to shine, though Robinson had a potentially fun cliche to play, the grizzled backwoods sage who calls Tyler “Chief” in between belts from his flask. Pity he couldn’t do more with him.

That’s the over-arching knock on the picture — lack of invention and effort. It’s not enough to pick your setting and select your monster. You’ve got to make more of it, get more human interplay, create more suspense. The odd chill is never enough, not in this crowded horror marketplace, especially if you’re deluded enough to think you’ve got a franchise on your hands.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast:  Kevin Makely, Summer Spiro, Todd A. Robinson, Adrienne Barbeau, Lance Henriksen

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Lee. A Vega Baby.Sony release.

Running time: 1:28

Monique is a mess.

We get an earful of that the moment we meet her. Her clothes are being hurled out a window and the profanity comes fast and furious — from her, a wiry, raging teen with dyed coppery hair, and from the foster parent who is doing the hurling.

Monique has been “messing with a man twice” her age — her stepfather. Another inner city foster home bites the dust.  The entire housing project has to hear about it, through a torrent of curses about how “your ass about to learn” what happens when you pull that. At 17, no less.

“Ain’t my fault she ain’t learn how to please her man,” Mo’ sniffs.

Mo (Elvire Emmanuelle)  steals. She defies whatever foster parent is saddled with her. She skips school. She comes on to men, uses men and boys. She even misuses her childhood pal Omari (Jharrel Jerome), the one her junky/ex-con dad taught to wrestle, by staging matches for Happy Meal toys between them when they were tykes.

Now, Dad (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is out of jail with no interest in resuming fatherhood.

“What you need me for anyway? You’re a grown woman. You go your way, I go mine. See each other along the way.”

And Monique, fighting in school, punching the world when she isn’t giving Omari (and his coach) an earful about tactics and technique, has just one way out, one way to get her dad’s attention, one place to channel all this fear and rage and aggression into — wrestling.

“First Match” is a gritty streetwise high school wrestling tale and coming of age/finding your “thing” drama. Emmanuelle makes a fearsome first film impression as Mo, a kid worth giving up on, which is why almost everyone has.

Coach (Colman Domingo) isn’t interested in her “outlet for my anger” needs. But he’s not above challenging her, himself and the lackluster kids already picked for the squad with Monique’s skills and psychotic temper.

“Practice starts at three, which means you’ve got four minutes to stop wasting my time.”

Domingo’s tough love take on that role gives us the first likeable character in “First Match,” built around an intensely unlikeable, promiscuous, trash-talking punk who sexually shames the boys who pair up with her at practice.

“You never touch a girl before?”

Even sweet Omari gives us a dose of “It ain’t right” for her to be on the team.

“Get your girl in line, Omari.”

Weight mismatches just piss her off. She may have sucker-punched Malik’s girl, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to let the star of the team pin her, even in practice.

The father-daughter scenes writer-director Olivia Newman cooks up have a flinty authenticity, the one thing her ex-con now janitor Dad could teach her was to not care what anybody else thinks of her, and not take anything off anybody. She wins a match? Maybe a hug is in order. Maybe a love-tap to the side of her helmet. Mateen sells this relationship, from disinterest to toothy enthusiasm.

Emmanuelle hurls herself into the physicality of the role, a bit obvious with her indicators — temper, disappointment, focus, fear — but dazzling in her mat savvy.

Her confidence with the cutting comebacks betrays a spitfire sure she can hold her own, with or without rules.

Wrestling is her lifeline, the “discipline and all that” thing she can throw back at her social worker (Eisa Davis) who must explain that, in turn, to the not-much-English “Spanish Lady” (Kim Ramirez) who is her last shot at sticking with a foster parent, which becomes the film’s funniest scene.

“La lucha libre?”

And damned if — don’t be shocked — this hardboiled hood rat doesn’t start to soften up and connect, with teammates, her father and herself. Not right away, not so quickly she doesn’t spread more hurt.  People don’t change overnight. And everything off the mat is more likely to be a let down than anything that happens after the whistle blows.

Newman, making her feature film directing debut, stages the matches in tight closeups, foggy wrestler reactions to slams and eyes narrowing into inner resolve. She’s not above doing the whole match montage set to hip hop, the hoary cliche of every sports movie — ever.

And the picture veers into a seriously hackneyed sidetrack or two late in the third act. You kind of wish it wouldn’t, but there’s not enough here without some other story wrinkle, some extra set of obstacles.

“There is no losing, only winning and learning,” coach preaches. But the “learning” peripheral distractions hurt the film.

The film “First Match” parallels most closely is “Girl Fight,” and it’s not in that film’s brutal league. But the petite Ms. Emmanuelle, fierce as she is, can’t carry her film to that level.

But she can take compensation from this. “Girlfight” made Michelle Rodriguez a star.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, fisticuffs, profanity, substance abuse discussed.

Cast:  Elvire Emanuelle, Jharrel Jerome, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Colman Domingo

Credits: Written and directed by Olivia Newman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Olivia Cooke has a star vehicle that doesn’t involve a deadly illness or horror in “Katie Says Goodbye,” which parks her in the middle of nowhere with a brutish (but sensitive) mechanic beau (Christopher Abbott), and Oscar winner Mary Steenburgen and Jim Belushi as the sage older folks who might be her sounding boards, along with peer Keir Gilchrist.

It’s made the festival rounds, earned release in France and a couple of other places where Indie Cinema’s desolate New Mexico is Red State America (rural) incarnate plays as fact. Will we get “Katie Says Goodbye” in a limited U.S. release? 

This one looks all kinds of wrong, way out of #MetToo step.

Stacy Martin plays the aspiring actress who gets around among the sugar daddies (Knoxville, Shalhoub?), kidnapped by an InCel who just wants her to get to know him. Yeah.

“Rosy” earns limited release in mid-July, protests to follow?

In the academic world I traveled through in the ’80s, the teachers and philosophers (children of the ’50s and ’60s) had taken to calling him “Bucky.” Buckminster Fuller, the futurist who set his mind to practical, sustainable (in so far as it was possible to speculate back then) versions of what we’d be doing, wearing, driving and living in when the “Jetsons” future finally arrived.

Geodesic Domes were his answer. That’s not the story, just the setting and inciting action of “The House of Tomorrow,” a coming of age comedy starring Asa Butterfield as a kid who has grown up isolated in such a house, his grandmother (Ellen Burstyn) as his over-protective idealistic (Bucky style) guardian. Alex Wolff is the sickly, punk-loving teen whose youth group visit sparks an education for the sheltered boy, Maude Apatow is the teen’s sister and Nick Offerman is their dad.

Yeah, the trailer gives the whole movie away, or seems to. And isn’t it great when Hollywood keeps it all in the nepotistic family?

“The House of Tomorrow” is in limited release, chances are, Netflix will be our best bet for catching this one.

She waited long enough, living a life which she regards as “so much wasted time.” That’s what prompted Old Age Pensioner “Edie” to slip out and have an adventure.

She’d climb a mountain. Not Everest of the Matterhorn, just one in Scotland. And she’d need a willing and tell-no-tales guide if something went wrong.

Not a big distributor, more a UK general release of the sort we’d only see in film festivals in the US. But I hope we get to see Simon Hunter’s film and Sheila Hancock’s performance here on a big screen.

The dancer and title character is nude, contorting, lithe and athletic when we meet her, bending her body in intense, jerky and breathless movement.

“Bobbi Jene” is Bobbi Jene Smith, an Iowan who jumped from Juilliard into one of the world’s most innovative modern dance companies, Batsheva of Tel Aviv. Tall, free-spirited, focused and malleable, she became star, lover and muse for choreographer and company Ohad Naharin.

Why? The evidence on the screen suggests its her fearlessness. Dancers are very free with their bodies, casual in the nudity in their art. But Naharin suggests it’s her willingness to share something else, “juice,” the sweat of herculean effort and intensity that put her where she is.

“He wants to see me drip.”

“Bobbi Jene” is a foreign language documentary by filmmaker Elvira Lind. The “language” here is dance, movement. When we meet her, Bobbi Jene is facing her 30th birthday and quitting one of the best jobs in dance.

It’s not her coming birthday, with 30 being the backside of a dancer’s career. Nor is it the fact that she and Naharin used to be lovers. She has taken up with a much younger man herself, “a kid,” about her age when she was lured to Israel by a genius and his “Gaga” dance movement theories (which have nothing to do with the pop star).

“It’s time to start creating my own work. and to go back home. “Bobbi Jene” rather haphazardly follows her journey, from her final performances with Batsheva, her struggles to get her start back home and some all-access intimate moments as she tries to talk her beau, Or Schraiber, into coming with her back to the States.

She lines up a teaching job at Stanford. But he’s at the beginning of his career, not at the pinnacle.

“You could do a lot of things — dance for Beyonce. We could make our art together. You said you want to go to acting school.”

That could be a problem down the road. For now, Bobbi heads stateside, reconnects with her family — holds her infant nephew for the first time and fends off awkward, working class parent recollections of her “eating problem” and insistence on choreographing and performing pieces in the nude.

The banality of the interviews, the conversations, and the effusive backstage praise after the shows throws the actual performances into sharp relief.

The dance features extended body lines, stretches and reaches in slow motion broken up by bursts of repetitive jerks, turns and twists and rolling on the floor.

The “Gaga” contemporary dance language emphasizes the personal, the cathartic — quasi-orgasmic, frenzied, trancelike performances that push towards some sort of breakthrough. Naharin’s philosophy is that there’s no rehearsing in front of mirrors so that there’s nothing self-conscious about the performer’s search for effects and positions.

The dance is interesting. I have to say, the dancer? Not so much. We tend to forget that the focus artists put on their art implies a dull myopia and narcissism. As Bobbi regales guests, especially Laura Dern, at a dinner party Lind and her husband, the actor Oscar Isaac, Smith’s “dance cured me” evangelism runs up against a sort of cornfed unsophistication that Juilliard and years in Israel haven’t polished out of her.

How lucky was she, she’d like to know, finding “a dance company ran (sic) by a straight man who loves women?”

There’s so much given away in that sentence that one scarcely knows where to begin.

Smith comes off best when her dancing is doing the talking.

Lind’s camera doesn’t so much objectify her as zoom in on her physicality, sweating, pushing against an outdoor raquetball wall, tying herself into knots, stripping in front of a paying crowd of aesthetes in her dance-performance art piece “Harrowing.”

Her conversation? Boring.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexuality

Cast: Bobbi Jene Smith, Laura Dern, Or Scraiber, had Naharin

Credits:Directed by Elvira Lind. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:38