Movie Nation

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

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

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

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

“Making a Killing” opens in 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar? You’re not watching the news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running time: 1:45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running time: 1 hour

Golly, talk about a MILF buzzkill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Germán Palacios, Lautaro Bettoni

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

Running time: 1:48

In “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” the road to gay conversion is paved with good intentions.

Or so those pushing for the conversion tell themselves.

This film, based on the Emily M. Danforth novel, is a faintly-mocking take on something the culture at large might find quaint, the “pray the gay out of you” Christian gay conversion therapy “movement.” And yes, “quaint” is being generous and kind.

It’s a touching coming-of-age tale that remembers that we truly only come of age when we start to know ourselves, and grow the spine to stop letting others define us.

Chloe Grace Moretz is as impressive as ever in the title role, an orphaned teen who has found her first love. And it’s not the prom date her guardian (Kerry Butler) insists “put your arm around her” for their promo photo. The saddest prom since “Carrie” only sparks to life when the girls, who love to dance, all give up on their dates and take over the dance floor.

And the night is made most memorable when Cameron and Coley (Quinn Shephard) crawl into the backseat of a car — and get caught doing it.

That’s what her guardians are whispering to her pastor about. And that’s why Cameron is dropped off at boarding school, God’s Promise, a Christian re-education camp run by cheerful, singing and guitar-playing Pastor Rick (John Gallagher Jr.) and stern Dr. Marsh (Jennifer Ehle).

They wear uniforms. They take classes. And they have cutting group therapy sessions, where Cameron suggests everybody call her “Cam,” like they do back home.

“Cameron is already a masculine name,” Dr. Marsh purrs. “Abbreviating it only exacerbates your gender confusion.”

Dr. Marsh, given a self-confident, no-nonsense “Handmaid’s Tale” smile by Ehle, lectures that “There’s no such thing as homosexuality…Sin is sin…Would we let drug addicts have parades for themselves?”

She’s a regular Nurse Ratched, though the kids won’t know “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

She’s “like having your own Disney villain,” the Lakota kid Adam (Forrest Goodluck of “The Revenant”) cracks. Adam and the girl who goes by Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane of “American Honey”) are thick as thieves — shoplifters, to be more precise. Jane is also an expert at “ditch weed,” wild cultivation of marijuana. Cam is naturally drawn to the rebels.

Whatever the emphasis of the source novel, director Desiree Akhavan (the same-sex romance “Appropriate Behavior” was hers) zeroes in on the oppressive mood of this remote school, the self-policing judgment of the students and the crackpot New Age-Meets-Fundamentalism language of “the cure.”

The adults (Marin Ireland is “conversion” success story Pastor Rick’s colleague and “girlfriend”) declare they’ll do “the detective work,” prodding and questioning each student about the father she “bonded over sports with” or the mother who let him “join in feminine pursuits.”

Each kids draws an “iceberg,” filling in the crucial “evidence” of his or her turn towards “SSA” (same sex attraction) in the part of the iceberg beneath the surface. Akhavan treats all this stuff with a straight (ahem) face.

But when a school outing results in a flat tire on the school van, Akhavan gives away the game with the movie’s funniest moment, “converted” Pastor Rick’s triumphant shock at his first-ever tire change  — “Hey, I DID it!”

The conflicts at school, like everything else there, are suppressed — muted. The melodramatics here are common to “coming out” films, and only rarely does this story take a turn that surprises us.

Still, there’s a dispiriting reality to the day-to-day grind of “hating who I am” and a bracing gusto to the sex scenes (flashbacks, mostly), with Cam and Coley taking their inspiration from that 1980s queer cinema breakthrough, “Desert Hearts.”

And even though the brevity of the film means some characters feel underdeveloped, Woodluck — who played the son in “The Revenant” — steals the picture merely by suggesting a “type.”

“That sounds sarcastic, but it’s not. It’s my genuine voice.”

The triumph of “Miseducation” is how lightly it treads down a well-worn path, how quaint and out of date it makes the attitudes of  early ’90s authority seem to modern eyes.

And that’s precisely the point. Cameron Post takes us from “It gets easier” to “See how much easier it got?” in a heartbeat.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, pot abuse, all involving teens.

Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, John Gallagher Jr., Jennifer Ehle, Marin Ireland, Forrest Goodluck

Credits:Directed by Desiree Akhavan, script by Desiree Akhavan and Cecilia Frugiuele, based on the Emily M. Danforth novel. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:31

Disney has an embargo of reviews of “Christopher Robin,” starring Ewen McGregor and a bear “with a very small brain” and a thing for honey.

It’s 7pm Pacific time Thursday, after the movie has opened in the East.

But it’s not as if they haven’t screened it for critics, which is always a dead giveaway. We saw it earlier in the week.

So make what you will of that.

There’s no confusing it for this earlier version of the same sort of tale. But I’ll wait and see how long the embargo holds to post a review.

In any case, I posted this in case you were wondering why there were no reviews up yet. Fox’s “The Darkest Minds?” Well, that’s previewing tonight (Wed.), the night before it opens. And Fox’s embargo is at MIDNIGHT.

Make what you will of that, as well. The idea is “They can’t say we DIDN’T screen the movie for critics,” when in essence, their (Disney’s, especially) embargo has the same effect.

I call this “Embargo Abuse,” as the first “Christopher Robin” showing where I live is at 600 Eastern Daylight Time, Thursday. So nobody going to see it will have reviews to peruse before buying a ticket, thus neutralizing the “consumer advice” part of the movie reviewing profession.

Somebody who does what I do is going to say “To hell with that” tonight or Thursday and publish and roll her or his eyes at this nonsensical “You can’t review the movie until we’ve made all our money on it.”

UPDATED: My review of “Christopher Robin” is here. 

The folks who made “The Spy Who Dumped Me” aren’t previewing that in many markets, but the reviews that are out?

It is August, and what do we generally say about August (not ALL August) movies?

By equal turns hilarious and right on the edge of horrific, “Blindspotting” is a dark comedy as bleak as a given day’s headlines, as goofy as every white guy who ever figured he has a lifetime pass when it comes to using the N-word.
Written by and co-starring friends Tony winner Daveed Diggs of “Hamilton” and Rafael Casal, when it clicks, it’s witty and wise, harrowing and heartbreaking. And even when the effort shows, it’s a marvelous mashup of slacker comedy and drama about violence and its consequences.

Everybody here has blind spots. Collin (Diggs) can’t see his childhood pal, Miles (Casal) as he really is — a loose AK-47 who is a burden on his life. Miles can’t see that his lifetime of acting “hard” doesn’t fit in with his persona as a father and family man in a newly-gentrifying Oakland, where they grew up.

Val (Janina Gavankar) cannot see Collin in his true light after the incident which got him tossed in jail, making him an almost-ex-con (he’s on probation).

And the cops? They can’t see past Collin’s skin color and his braids, see that he’s a By-the-Book Brother with just three days left in his halfway-house probation. He’s a walking, rhyming case of racial profiling waiting to happen.

Miles and Collin work with Commander Movers, and probation or not, Collin’s the responsible one. His ex Val got him the job, a cornerstone of his probation. She’s the clerk who assigns movers to each move, but Collin cannot hit the reset button with her. Nope. No way.

“Collin, just take responsibility for the things happening around you,” Val complains. Collin’s one of those guys things just happen to.

Miles? He’s Eminem and Jay from “Clerks” on steroids, an old school B-boy with the grill, the tattoos and the patter to be down with his homeys, guys Collin would rather not be seen with. Because, you know, probation.

Such as when Miles drags Collin for a ride with Yorkie (Nyambi Nyambi), and it turns out to be a gun sale — a car literally stuffed with pistols, any one of which could stretch Collin’s sentence out to the horizon. Miles needs a piece. To, you know, “protect my family.”

Ashley (Jasmime Cephas Jones) wants their little boy to go to a private school, be bi-lingual, have a head start in life.

“Why he need to be bilingual?” Daddy Miles complains. “He already biracial.”

The yuppies and hipsters are taking over the Oakland these two grew up in, with their house flipping and coffee bars and Priuses and designer glasses and designer coupling, and a good running gag is Miles’ repeated complaint, “Who ARE these people?”

But the best running gag is the contrast between these two. Collin may be rhyming and rocking the braids, but Miles is plainly the “blacker” of the two. Even so, Collin went to jail for an incident that was as much Miles as it was him.

“We got a kind of  a ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ thing going on,” Collin admits to the photographer/gallery owner (Wayne Knight of “Seinfeld”) whom they’re moving.

But Miles’ hustling and Collin’s keeping it on the down low until probation is over moved into the background when Collin witnesses a cop (Ethan Embry) shoot a young unarmed black man in the back.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” doesn’t ever seem to work

As Collin has nightmares where a jury all having the murdered man’s face wants the judge (Embry) to hear Collin’s testimony evidence, while his mom (Margo Hall) passes on pamphlets to Ashley about how to have “The Talk” with her little boy, the one about how you act around police to minimize your chances of getting shot, make Collin snap.

Long before this movie showed us, we and he knew “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” didn’t work.

Director Carlos Lopez Estrada knows to film the quick-cut banter and comic confrontations involving the hustler Miles and those he hustles (Tisha Campbell Martin plays hairdresser Mama Liz) in tight, full-faced close-ups. Close-ups are funny.

And he frames the violent moments and dream sequences in full screen, capturing haunting images of Collin facing the judgment of a court, or jogging past a cemetery confronted by a sea of black faces, many wearing hoodies, by each tombstone.

“Blindspotting” turns on a dime, many dimes, as it bobs and weaves between low farce and high, politically-charged melodrama. The ending is a bit much, but even so we feel the story and the characters have earned it.

Diggs makes a case for better-late-than-never screen stardom, though we may have to do something about that hair. Casal has a future as an over-the-top comic foil, a manic hip hop hipster who cajoles, charms, insults and harms with just a wicked, rapid-fire patter which even The Brothers dig. Because, you know, they “like the bounce.”

A star is born. OK, TWO stars.

And with “Blindspotting,” they’ve announced to the world that they’re a screenwriting duo to be reckoned with, one that pretty much doesn’t have any blind spots of its own.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some brutal violence, sexual references and drug use

Cast: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Ethan Embry

Credits:Directed by Carlos López Estrada, script by .Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:33

Tom Hardy plays a reporter “who found something…really bad.”

It’s “Deadpool” run monstrously amok, a villain’s villain — Jekyll and Hyde and Tom Hardy as the conflicted fellow fighting it out from within.

Oct. 5, we figure out how “We…are Venom” plays out.