Movie Nation

Forget “Alpha,” here’s the REAL “dog of August” at the movies — “Mile 22” — an antic, nonsensical and bloody B-movie amped up by Mark Wahlberg’s motor-mouthed character and the savage, sadistic martial arts stylings of  Iko Uwais.

Wahlberg’s go-to director, Peter Berg, has spent a lot of Chinese production money on a Hollywood-ized version of the Indonesian action pic “The Raid” or “The Raid 2,” which starred Uwais.

It’s a big ol’swing and a miss of a movie, a thriller whose frantic, crazy-quilt editing can’t hide how static and motionless it often feels, whose laptop-loads of  punchlines don’t cover the inanity of every sentence.

“You think you know about election hacking? You think you know the definition of ‘collusion?’ You know nothin’.”

Wahlberg plays Silva, a faster-than-fast-talking team leader of “Overwatch,” an elite off-the-books team of ex-CIA “problem solvers” who only exist in the movies and the fever dreams of a delusional public speaker whose every paragraph ends with “Believe me.”

“Diplomacy is ‘option one,'” Silva breathlessly blurts through in a mission debrief that frames “Mile 22.” “Option two is military. We’re the third option. We solve problems on short notice.”

Such as when nine pounds of radioactive cesium disappears in a country-not-named Indonesia. A rogue cop, Li Noor (Uwais) shows up at the U.S. Embassy with a coded gizmo that reveals the locations of the “discs” of the “dirty-bomb” ingredients. Fly him out of the country and he’ll give you the code.

Oh, and the info? It will self-destruct in mere hours. His information will recover the cesium AND “bring down a government.” Whose?

Get him from the embassy to a disused airstrip twenty-two miles away, and spirit him to safety. Simple, right?

With a team of cyber-wizards directed by “Mother” (John Malkovich) to tap into everything from the power grid to every blueprint for a building on the planet, hackable cars stuck in traffic and CCTV cameras, drone over-views, all of it inter-linked via radio, Silva’s squad (Lauren Cohen, Ronda Rousey, Carlo Alban among them) should be able to convey this “package” to the plane.

Except that locals, led by the sadistic Axel (Sam Medina), have legions of…wait for it…motorcycle assassins. And SUVs stuffed with henchmen armed to the teeth,  all of whom have other plans.

It’s just that we’ve seen their first attempt on Li’s life. Handcuffed to a gurney or not, the guy is a Beast from the Southeast (Asia). Killing him is going to be no easier than transporting him.

Those are the keeper scenes, here, not the shootouts, the epic moments of “sacrifice” from the team, the endless torrent of Wahlberg wisecrackery. Uwais delivers breathtaking action beats via his epic beatdowns, insanely violent fights helped along insane editing.

The guy makes a great take-no-prisoners sadist. Assaulted in a car, Li busts the villain’s head through the car window, then DRAGS his neck across the jagged glass remains of that window. Back. And forth. And back again.

Berg made Wahlberg do shots of Red Bull before every take, creating an out-of-his-comfort-zone “performance” (“Manic? Narcissistic? Bipolar?”) that is simply exhausting, not exhilarating. Endless blasts of banter, pithy one-liners to his “team,” generally hurled at inopportune moments.

“You’re never gonna do something WRONG until die!”

“Try that Jesus guy, they say he’s very FORGIVING.”

“Didn’t they teach you ANYthing about cesium at Harvard?”

Wahlberg makes you wish the movie was finishing up with every breath-gulping line. The pace of his high-pitched barking contrasts with the slow-moving film. When you have the bad guys pause, every so often, to give the “heroes” a breather, you never get where you’re going.

It smells like the classic “franchise” that’s died of crib death — “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” “Alex Rider: Stormbreaker,” etc.

There’s no conviction to any of this, and the mad scramble of words suggests they’re firing all these jibberish pronouncements over the heads of people impressed by antic, nonsense tweets, a movie with a “great game” subtext (Russian villains, yet Americans CAUSING Russian malfeasance) that strains to muddy the waters with misinformation and murkiness where the world sees clarity, and leaves a seriously sour taste in its mouth. Yes, there are news clips of Trump hinting at  the existence of suicide squads like this, which only exist in the movies.

He’s confused. As you will be.

Because aside from its myriad other sins, whose side is this dog on, the Chinese financiers? The Russians? The Russian Apologist in Chief? QAnon?

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Sam Medina, Ronda Rousey

Credits:Directed by Peter Berg, script by Lea Carpenter. An STX release.

Running time: 1:35

It’s now on VOD and is almost certainly worth tracking down. A bit of Michael Caine autobiography (he narrates), a lot of Swinging London. I have a call in to Gravitas to see if I can get my hands on it.

Danny McBride does “out there” better than most anybody.

Rosemarie DeWitt, David Allen Grier, Luke Wilson, and a murderous wack-job who isn’t that keen on the promises of realtors and the future that didn’t happen for him. Comedies don’t get much darker than this.

“Arizona” is coming soon, in limited release. How soon? Not sure. Great use of its titular pop song, in any event.

As AIDS swept across America in the 1980s, the country and its many distinct subcultures were sorely tested in figuring out how to confront it.

Confusion and misinformation, prejudice and superstition, genuine fear and revolting callousness all bubbled up during the disease’s deadliest early years.

The culture wars got wrapped up in a public health crisis and all manner of “not discussed in public” subjects burst into the light.

The main battlegrounds of this war have been carved into history — San Francisco, New York, Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control, remembered and documented in films such as “And the Band Played On,” “Silver Lake Life,” “Threads,” “Positive.”

But what about Utah, with its Mormon heritage and Church of Latter Day Saints hostility to homosexuality? Yes, “Angels in America” announced from the Broadway stage that gay Mormons do exist and did it decades ago. Still, how did a state that back then and later went on to stealth-back California’s infamous “Proposition 8” “(“Prop hate”) cope

The neglect, bigotry and contempt were as bad as anywhere in the U.S., with LDS officials openly inveighing about “The Gay Plague,” some families believing “their sons got what they deserved” and almost everyone forced to choose between embracing a doomed child or throwing in with their faith and the state legislature giving voice to crackpot, inhumane gay “leper colony” ideas, bans on marriage for people suffering from AIDs, almost daily.

“Quiet Heroes” is a documentary that remembers that time and those extremes, but celebrates a handful of almost angelic healers. We meet a lone infectious diseases specialist, her physician’s assistant and recall the Catholic Hospital and its heroic nurse-nuns, all of whom created “an island in a sea of fear” in Salt Lake City in the ’80s and 90s.

Utah State Senator Jim Dabaki remembers taking friends (he’s gay) for treatment and being ordered out of waiting rooms. Dr. Kristen Ries faced a circumscribed practice, thanks to her willingness to take on a disease that sent her nothing but the dead and dying, and sometimes infectious, for 15 lonely years when nobody else in the city was willing to fight the unfolding disaster.

The nuns of Holy Cross Hospital eschewed social judgment (hard for most to do, back then) and took in the sick, comforted them when in many cases, even the patients’ families would not.

Filmmakers Jenny Mackenzie, Jared Ruga and Amanda Stoddard talk to survivors, show home movies and archival TV footage of dead activists and simple, unheralded human victims of disease. A psychotherapist (Paula Gibbs) bluntly describes the work all of them faced back in the deadly ’80s — “We helped them die.”

Ballet dancer now Ballet West director Peter Christie tears up as he remembers Dr. Ries and PA Maggie Snyder “never wore rubber gloves…they would touch your face, give you hugs” as a time when understandable fear kept laymen and women from doing that, and less understandably, doctors who should have known better avoided it.

“Quiet Heroes” packs a quick AIDS history into its 78 minutes, marking the benchmark moments in treatment — AZT in 1987, the “triple combo” of drugs, protease inhibitors, that finally bought victims remission and their lives back (1995). This is not new material, just a reminder of what happened.

Mostly though, the film (premiering on LOGO Aug. 23) touchingly celebrates physicians who take their calling seriously, and with compassion, even as it recalls how far we as a culture have come in the 37 years since AIDS was discovered. It makes us flinch at how publicly, fearlessly wrongheaded some people were, and not that long ago, either.

And Holy Cross Hospital? They lost so much money fighting this humanitarian public health crisis they had to be sold, with new owners eschewing the doctor, her patients and the practices that made the institution famous.

No compassionate viewer can hear that news and not think, “That’s the most righteous use of red ink, ever.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Dr. Kristen Ries, Maggie Snyder, Elizabeth Clement, Peter Christie, Jim Dabaki, Sister Bernie Mullick, Ben Barr

Credits:Directed by Jenny Mackenzie, Jared Ruga, Amanda Stoddard. A Vavani/Verite release –on LOGO.

Running time: 1:18

A little mid-August action for your cinema going pleasure.

Alas, STX chose not to screen “Mile 22,” a Mark Wahlberg/Peter Berg picture, for critics. Reviews are popping up today, and I’m catching it the first showing in the small town I am visiting.

August has produced some passable films with audience appeal — “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Alpha” dress up the major studio release slate for this, a dumping ground month for movies which could not compete in summer and might get lost among the films of fall.

But one certainly feels that when STX has this star and his go-to director for an action pic, they’d be showing it in advance if they thought it was any good. Review to come shortly.

As Deadline.com notes, the adaptation of “Crazy Rich Asians” is the first major studio release to be headlined by an almost all-Asian cast in 25 years. “The Joy Luck Club” was the last, and oddly enough, a hit. Which begs the question, “What took so long?”

But “Asians” based on Kevin Kwan’s popular, soapy novel, is rolled to a Big Wednesday opening, with tracking and pre-sales pointing to a $6 million opening day.

Will that hold true for the weekend? Competition is weak, summer comedies preceding it have faded. The film’s appeal is broad enough (PG-13, not R) that you’d think the sky was the limit. Will the promotion of it and the emphasis on its Chinese-ness scare off non-Asian filmgoers?

In any event,  $30 million is what Deadline is saying. We’ll check back with Boxofficemojo to see how that’s progressing.

That might be enough to win the upcoming weekend (probably not, as Wednesday won’t count), depending on whether “The Meg” tanks on its second weekend.

“Mile 22” (not previewed for critics) and “Alpha” are the only significant wide releases opening opposite “Crazy Rich,” so we will see what we see.

I think $30 million is low-balling it. $40 Wed.-Sunday would match the hype, in any event, if not the audience tracking data.

He never seems to stop smiling, and why should he?

Pop phenom Ed Sheeran can improvise at will, conjure lyrics, hooks, riffs and verses out of thin air, or so it seems in his cousin’s “Songwriter” documentary.

Kick around a dirty title of an “I’m dumping you” tune, in his pajamas on the tour bus and “Love Yourself” results.

“Gon’ get my laptop and write it down,” he croons in that famous Brit-falsetto, while producer/collaborator Benny Blanco (“Moves Like Jagger,” “Teenage Dream” (for Katy Perry) just grins and prognosticates.

“Instant classic.”

Sheeran also tosses “classic” around like a Coke exec in “Songwriter,” directed by his longtime personal filmmaker and cousin, Murray Cummings. But it’s disarming coming from Sheeran, and as we watch him collaborate with a seven fellow singer-songwriters, including Foy Vance and Julia Michaels as he pulls together his album “÷,” we get an earful of his talent and his work habits.

He travels from Malibu to New York, recording on the Queen Mary 2 and at legendary Abbey Road Studios, trotting out his Jackson/Timberlake/Bieber falsetto for tune after tune — the Gypsy influenced “Barcelona,” and “Galway Girl,” the charming Irish family history romp written with Irish band Beoga and performed on traditional Gaelic instruments.

As lyrics flow and riffs pile up on the laptop, he really does make it look ridiculously easy. Then you realize that’s all you see him doing — stockpiling material, saving up rhymes, for months, on his phone. Even his improvisations, his “fun” moments, instrument in hand, have a hint of “all business” about them.

“Songwriter” is all about the work, with little of the personal intruding in its  84 compact minutes. Sheeran’s certitude about his talent and his marketability has him boasting of bettering Adele’s sales records, even as he’s insisting on drowning one song in schmaltzy Abbey Road-recorded strings (only to realize his error later).
Cummings peppers the film with old home movies (as well as his first ever clips of Sheeran recording), not so much tracking the 27 year-old’s career from trying his hand at drums, bass and piano before settling on guitar and taking that to Youtube fame, and on to super-stardom as noting the focus that was there, from the first.
A personably impersonal behind-the-scenes documentary, “Songwriter” has less pathos than Katy Perry’s similar film, but his genuine chops and blunt treatment of songwriting as a craft lift him above the rest of his peers — Bieber, et al — who have been immortalized on film.

What’s not to love, or at least respect? He goes back to Thomas Mills High School in Framlingham to pay homage to Mr. Hanley, a teacher who “got him,” and gives the next generation of musicians brilliant advice. Songwriting it like a rusty tap in an abandoned house — “s— water” comes out at first, grit and dirt and rust. And then? The good stuff.

“When you know you’re writing a bad song, be sure to FINISH it,” he insists. “Get it out of your system.” The good stuff comes after.

Time will tell if this latest pop idol has staying power — the falsetto songs mostly run together in the ears of a non-fan — but even Sheeran doubters should appreciate the work ethic,  musicianship and wit of this chart-topping ginger tyro. As for right now, he’s got that tap turned wide open.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Ed Sheeran, Benny Blanco, Foy Vance, Julia Michaels, Murray Cummings

Credits:Directed by Murray Cummings. An Apple Music release.

Running time: 1:24

Oscar winner Viola Davis plays a woman married to a robber (Liam Neeson) whose gang is wiped out in a heist gone wrong. So she, Michelle Rodriguez and the other “Widows” take on that “one last job” that will clear their family slate with Bryan Tyree Henry.

A Little Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl,” “Sharp Objects”), a little Steve “Twelve Years a Slave” McQueen, a lot of action.

“You reap what you so,” says Colin Farrell (Oscar winner Robert Duvall plays his dad). Kind of wonder if ol’ Colin will see the closing credits.

“Widows” opens Nov. 16. 

“Alpha” has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog.

It’s a movie with more blood and guts than Disney would have allowed. But any movie with a teen and a dog in it is going to tug at the heart, even if the dog’s a wolf and the kid’s not much further along the civilized scale. And while it’s not on a par with that classic of pre-history, “Quest for Fire,” director Albert Hughes (“The Book of Eli”) gives us a beautifully barren prehistoric Europe of steppes, volcanoes, mesas and canyons, a forbidding land presented in magnificent 3D.

Keda, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee of “The Road” and “Slow West,” is the son of the chief (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) of his tribe of hunter-gatherers, good with his hands (he fashions enviable flint spearpoints) but sensitive, a bit of a mama’s boy.

He may pass spearhead making, but he flunks his first and second Big Tests on the joint tribal hunt, refusing to finish off a wounded wild boar that squeals in pain and looks him in the eye, terrified. That second test, fleeing the bison the hunting party are chasing off a cliff, gets him gored and flung down a cliff-face.

Mother (Natassia Malthe) will have only his memory to cling to.

But Keda, left for dead, clings to that cliff, re-sets his busted ankle and using the tribal tattoo — a constellation inked on his hand — he might be able to find his way home. If only he can dodge the saber tooth tigers, hyenas and wolves.

It’s one of those that almost gets him, and one of those that he almost kills defending himself. Showing empathy, he nurses himself back to health and tends to the wary wolf he knifed as he does.

The production almost seamlessly marries CGI wolves to a real wolf for some scenes, mostly close-ups. Hughes may give us windswept vistas and time-lapse scans of the night sky, but “Alpha” lives or dies on its extreme close-ups — hunters, camouflaged in mud, crawling up on the herd, a wolf softening its fear of fire and the humans who create it (with great difficulty).

The kid talks to the wolf — in a subtitled pre-Greek or Latin dialect — far too much for my taste. The movie itself is chatty when in essence language was a newish thing and vocabularies were limited enough that using gestures and images to tell the story would have been a safer, smarter and more cinematic bet.

Still, there’s value in a father teaching his son, “Raise your head, your eyes will follow” and that wolfpacks are led by the Alpha dog, not an inherited title, “but one won through courage.”

Hughes, who came up with the story the script was based on, has fashioned the simplest of quest narratives and rarely gets in the way of it. He takes us exactly where we expect him to.

But he gets the boy and us to connect with the dog and has a little fun showing us boy-and-his-dog firsts — first whistle to call Alpha (what he’s named the dog), first accidental game of fetch.

It’s kid-film cute some of the time, pretty rough and bloody going at others. But “Alpha” holds together well-enough and exceeds expectations. When this was first announced, I was sure Sony would animate it, “Ice Age” style. I’ll bet you were, too.

Smit-McPhee is no Leo and “Alpha” is no “Revenent.” But in an era where films have shied away from challenging, scaring or hitting kids with anything resembling harsh reality in critter features, “Alpha” is a lovely yet tough-minded reminder that the cuddly Spaniel or Pomeranian curled up at your feet didn’t get there by accident, or by being a pushover.

Then again, maybe that’s exactly what put him there.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense peril

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Natassia Malthe, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Leonor Varela

Credits:Directed by Albert Hughes, script by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt . A Sony/Columbia release.,

Running time: 1:36

True story — classical pianist Don Shirley had a white tough-guy bouncer-type driver behind the wheel of his Caddy as he toured the segregated South of the 1960s.

They followed the “Green Book” of places that accepted black patronage — hotels, restaurants, etc., as they toured. And sometimes, the Green Book was no help at all, so a guy’s gotta get tough, you dig?

In this Peter Farrelly (The “serious” half of the Farrelly Brothers?) film,  Mahershala Ali of “Moonlight” is Shirley, and Viggo Mortensen is Tony Lip, the guy doing to the driving.

Might this Universal pic set for Thanksgiving release be Oscar bait? It’s happened before. The KFC jokes blend easily with the injustice that Tony Lip has his eyes opened to, and the innate “dignity” of a great musician breaking great music to white audiences more used to seeing people like him in waiter’s uniforms in this trailer.