Movie Nation

I was going to use the phrase “an authentic American Saint” in describing TV host, child welfare advocate and sensitive ordained minister and TV host Fred Rogers.

But in the new documentary about him, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” one of his long-adult sons talks about growing up, having dinner every evening with “The Second Christ as my Dad,” and rendered that point moot. Even his kids knew this was a Biblically righteous dude raising them, in between daily TV shows aimed at giving America’s children value and “values.”

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is far from the first Fred Rogers documentary, merely the latest movie to use archival programs, footage from other films and chats with those who knew him to lionize America’s foremost TV advocate for children. But Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

And his film, and give the Oscar to somebody else, I DARE YOU, takes on the topicality of the moment, placing Rogers within the zeitgeist of America, 15 years after his death. It’s a loving portrait that is in awe of what genuine kindness looks like, a movie shockingly out of touch with our times, and yet a tonic for them.

Using interviews with those who knew and worked with him — guests like cellist Yo Yo Ma, producers, actors, the show’s salty-voiced floor manager, a TV critic and family — Neville conjures up a flattering, occasionally biting picture of the soft-voiced, comforting figure of “America’s Dad,” a TV host who brought to kids and adults “a different way of being a man” in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and ’90s.

Neville’s film doesn’t find many dark sides to Rogers’ open-hearted TV persona. He hired a gay black actor and singer (François Scarborough Clemmons) to play a principal role on the show, and had im share a wading pool foot-bath, almost Biblical in its foot-washing implications in the divided America of the late 1960s. He might have been behind the cutting edge curve on acceptance of the difference of “gay,” but he was way ahead of America at large in such acceptance.

Rogers’ eagerness to separate “make believe” from the real world is documented, time and again, as his simple, under-produced puppet show dealt with divorce, racism, the Vietnam War and “assassinations” in ways the youngest kids of the ’60s, 70s and onward could understand.

Neville’s film deals with Rogers’ critics, from members of Congress to the Fox News nattering Nazis of negativism, mostly in clips, all of which are suitable for ridicule.

The filmmaker choses to emphasize what Rogers himself pointed to, “love” as the only virtue/issue/talking point worth considering. Kids who have it, thrive. Those who don’t, make your own inferences here, become a Trump or those who blindly/slavishly support him.

It’s worth remembering that Rogers wasn’t alone in holding the line against the antic, noisy, frenetic sugar-buzzed toy-selling nature of kids’ TV of his era. Bob Keeshan wasn’t an ordained minister with Rogers’ child psychology bonafides, but as “Captain Kangaroo” he reached an even larger audience with his quiet, contemplative animals-and-animation and-characters-driven TV show, which lasted on a commercial broadcast network almost as long as “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” hung around on Public TV.

But Morgan Neville has conjured up the ghost of a man who called for acceptance, tolerance, kindness and love — understanding — as a way of healing America and the world it was straining to find its place in. A TV host who swayed Congress in is appeal for taking children’s feelings, hurt and emotions seriously, who told all who would listen that “what is essential in life is invisible to the naked eye — love, “and the absence of it” — is worth listening to, 15 years after his death.

Rogers wasn’t talking just about TV and programs and market research and demographics, he was speaking philosophically and existentially, to children and adults about conflict and connection, about each person’s “value” as well as her or his “values.”

No wonder the Foxists hated him. And no wonder he makes the perfect rallying point in a movie about fundamental 2018 American values, where they’ve gone and how they might be reclaimed, in a documentary that questions (lightly) if he can be said to have had any impact at all in a country that named a godless, feckless, lying bully as its leader a dozen years after his death.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and language

Cast: Fred Rogers, David Bianculli, Margy Whitmer, Joe Negri, Joanne Rogers, Susan Stamberg

Credits:Directed by Morgan Neville, script by . A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:41

The great ones suffer for their art — Keaton and Lewis, The Stooges and Wanda Sykes.

And nobody suffers more than Johnny Knoxville, still doing enough of his own “Jackass” stunts, at 47, to make you question his durability, his sanity and his insurance rates in “Action Point,” a pratfall farce in the “Bad Grandpa” tradition.

There are so few laughs in this thing that it’d have been a shame had somebody gotten hurt making us laugh at their pain. Whatever promise was in the premise, an old man (Knoxville, real name Philip John Clapp) telling his grandkid about the amusement park he used to run before safety regulations and “The Nanny State” took over, there’s nothing verbal and precious little physical that Knoxville & Co. could find funny in it.

Pee Paw regales his granddaughter, “Princess Bride” fashion, as she’s confined at home, thanks to a busted ankle. He talks of an earlier carefree age, the ’70s, when rides were unsafe, hazardous activities weren’t legally actionable, because “Back then, there was a little thing called ‘personal responsibility.‘”

Pee Paw remembers his rural California (this was largely shot in South Africa) park, Action Point, crushed by competition with corporate, lawyer-backed “7 Parks” (A Six Flags joke?), but glorious in the unsafe rides, less safe “petting zoo” and crazy “stunts” he and his gang of reprobates pulled to get attention and lure patrons.

He had a neighborhood bear that would only hassle him when he was having a Schlitz, a park that served beer, violence, accidents (go-karts, zip lines that snapped, water slides that collapsed) and good times until The Man shut him down.

Sight gags about duct-taped repairs aren’t improved with punch lines, canine copulation is always more crass than funny and the circus of grotesques Knoxville always surrounds himself with are somehow not as amusing when they’re a multi-national cast of mostly unwashed unknowns.

The animal stunts — ostrich rides (by unruly adults), porcupine and gator baiting, yanking a raccoon by its tail — had me sitting all the way through the credits to see if the joke of an “oversight” organization, listed as just “American Humane” here, actually signed off on this.

They did. Even though you can see with your own eyes just what was pulled by this offshore production. I can say with some certainty that some animals “WERE harmed,” or at least badly misused (physically) in the making of “Action Point.” And not just Johnny Knoxville.

Good on you, Paramount. You found a loophole to escape even the most lax oversight organization in animal welfare. Shoot offshore.

Yeah, the drunken bear was funny. The flashback granddad remembering how much trouble he had with his granddaughter’s mom (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) back in the day, produces one laugh.

“Relax Dad, it’s a TAMPON.”

“Don’t you swear at ME, young lady!”

Knoxville’s dye job just makes him look more and more like a Southern fried Frankenstein — no, NOT the mad scientist — as he closes in on 50.

But again, props for the guy for continuing to do so many of his own stunts. Fear stopped figuring into it, many “Jackasses” ago. Unfortunately, so did funny.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language, drug use, teen drinking, and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Johnny Knoxville, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Chris Pontius, Don Bakkedahl, Brigette Lundy-Payne

Credits:Directed by Tim Kirkby script by Dave Krinsky, John Altschuler. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:25

Totally down with Jennifer Garner taking back her “Alias/Elektra” action chops, though the set-up for this Vengeance is MOM thriller is an eye roller.

Woman loses her family to drive-by punks, takes five years to “train,” and comes back to splatter their brains all over creation.

“Death Wish” is more interesting if it’s revenge crimes of an incompetent, heat-of-passion nature. “Three Days of the Condor” is a LOT more involving when it’s a guy out of his depth dealing with assassins, not somebody with that Liam Neeson set of “particular skills.” Not that I didn’t like “Taken,” but we’re hurling all these “Ex-Special Forces” dudes and women at villains, and acting “shocked” when they slaughter the to last scumbag.

A fish out of water, “American Animals” who don’t know how or want to “hurt anyone,” that’s more dramatically fascinating to me.

“Peppermint” opens in that Labor Day “dead zone” of releasing, Sept. 7.

Not the first Fred Rogers documentary, but as it is from the director of “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” it’s the first one with Oscar buzz.

An American TV saint gets his documentary due. Really looking forward to this one.

“Hereditary” is a horror film that features ghosts, a Satanic cult, grisly deaths, flies, possession and seances, children imperiled, nightmare sequences, a doubting adult or two and a dog who seems to be the only one to know pretty much what’s going down.

Nothing new to see here, right?

And the fact that first-time feature director and writer Ari Aster treats all this as if he’s just discovered it, and that these cliches merit a stately two hours and seven minutes of screen time, should be turn-offs. I mean, come on.

But Aster landed superb actors Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd, Alex Wolff and especially Toni Collette. Great actors make you believe because they believe. It gets under your skin by messing around with those conventions and cliches.

And damned if “Hereditary,” macabre, meditative and meandering as it is, doesn’t well up in your throat like a breathless scream that can’t get out.

Collette plays Annie, a visual artist in the alien, underpopulated wilderness and wealth of Park City, Utah, the home of the Sundance Film Festival. She, husband Steve (Byrne) and their two kids live in a mountainside chalet that looks like a designer dollhouse.

And that’s sort of what her art looks like. It’s a dollhouse filled with dollhouses, actually meticulously crafted diaoramas ranging in subject from the banal to the bizarre.

As Annie bases these on her world and events in her life, her latest is “Hospice,” part of a show she’s pulling together for a prestigious art dealer. “Hospice?” That’s where her hated mother was until she died. Yeah, the funeral will make a cool “subject,” too for “Small World Artworks.”

“Should I be sadder?” she wonders, and she’s not alone in that family. She should be worried. She’s got a teen son (Wolff) who tolerates her via a serious dedication to marijuana. Her daughter Charlie? That girl ain’t right.

Whatever’s going on or about to in that house, Charlie( Milly Shapiro) is the focus of our suspicions. “On the spectrum,” as we say — she’s 13, disheveled, miserable and morbid, playing with grim toys of her own design, obsessed with death and plainly indulged by a school when she should be in a class all her own.

She obsessively devours chocolate bars (without nuts), clucks her tongue, scribbles weird graffiti on her walls, seems far away even when she’s sitting right next to you and would give anybody not used to her appearance, her slow-wittedness and manner the creeps.

It’s a portrayal so unsettling that you worry for the young actress creating it, fret over how her young life might be scarred by association with a character so homely, socially crippled and mentally off.

Charlie doesn’t so much drive the action as incite it.

And Aster’s film isn’t so much a cerebral (This IS an A24 release) exercise in genre filmmaking as a picture that gets in your head through the performances. The grief support group lady (Ann Dowd) Annie meets who talks her into a seance is a laughably abrupt introduction and re-direction of the film.

But Collette plays that seance with the overwhelming shock that most of us would register upon seeing “proof” of the supernatural.

Peter’s reaction to tragedy is mute shock and denial in a searing scene that is the movie’s first-act jaw-dropper. Byrne’s Steve is stoic, keeping it all together, skeptical and haunted, in his own way, by what he sees in his wife and what he knows about her past.

Collette’s Annie? She comes completely, believably apart, dissolving in paroxysms of grief.

Ordinary horror films give us hope, but Aster’s vision doesn’t, an apt metaphor for the End Times the world and America seem to be heedlessly sprinting toward.

“Hereditary” isn’t original enough to merit “great film” praise. But by bending and extending the tropes of the genre and hiring top drawer talent to buy in, Aster makes us buy in, too, and gives us a pretty disturbing picture to chew on and mull over on the way home.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence, disturbing images, language, drug use and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd

Credits: Written and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:07

Shailene Woodley makes a salty wench on a halyard winch in “Adrift,” a solid if unsurprisingly conventional survival at sea tale that’s for fans only.

By “fans” I mean Shailene fans, those who forgave the “Divergent” sell-out or who just picked up on this extraordinarily open actress on “Big Little Lies” on TV.  The young star of “The Descendents” and “The Spectacular Now” is a polished veteran now, able to hold her own with Nicole, Laura, Zoe Kravitz and Reese Witherspoon on the melodramatic HBO soap-thriller.

What she’s done with “Adrift” is take a stab at Reese’s “Wild,” playing a young woman tested by the sea. Instead of a long hiking trail, a journal and flashbacks of her dead mother to buck her up in her hour of trial, she’s got an injured beau to complain “We’re gonna DIE out here” to, and the open Pacific to test her.

We meet Tami (Woodley) after the “knock-down.” That’s the sailing term for a wave and/or wind that broaches the boat, rolls it and tears off the mast. Yes, the other “fans” in this “fans only” affair might be old salts like myself.

The Hazana is a 40-44 foot ketch with both masts torn off, their sharp ends pounding against the hull with poor inexperienced Tami bloodied in the cabin, which is trashed and half full of water.

Richard (Sam Claflin), the experienced world-cruiser who is the love of her life and her skipper on this Tahiti to San Diego run, is nowhere to be found. Once Tami fights her way out of the cabin and takes a quick inventory of the damage, getting to Richard, who has floated away on the dinghy, is priority one. Getting them both to Hawaii with no radio, a makeship short-canvas mast, jammed rudder and no electronic navigation help is priority two.

Flashbacks show us the sweet, instant-attraction affair between the drifting traveler Tami, who odd-jobs her way from port to port, and the dashing Richard, a few years older and cruising the world in a boat he built himself.

Friends of his ask that he deliver their ketch, Hazana, to San Diego. And even though that’s where she’s from and she has no interest in returning, that’s their quest.

Where the movie by Iceland’s greatest director, Baltasar Kormakur (“Contraband,” “Everest”) lets Shailene and us down is in the personal journey she must make, the estranged mother who abandoned her, details of the life that sent her to sea, running from who knows what. Three screenwriters took a shot at giving her psychological depth and romantic heft, and Woodley is left playing that strained indulgent laugh women trot out to let you know they’re interested.

But as there’s a real Tami Oldham who tells this tale, there wasn’t much room for sexing the script up. Woodley takes care of that with endless swimsuit shots and a little nude sunbathing.

Mainly though, she dresses down and blisters up for this epic, scenes and shots of just her struggling with the boat, the sun, the sea, her personal demons and her injured boyfriend — diving to fix this, enterprising her way past drinking water and food shortages.

If you’re a yachtswoman or man, or just an armchair sailor, you know that there are scores of such narratives on bookshelves, and plenty of TV and film versions as well, including the more spiritual and more harrowing “All is Lost.”

You also know the tropes of the genre — waiting for the rain to cure a dying thirst, that first container ship that does not see your flares, spear-fishing your food supply.

It’ll be new to Woodley’s young audience, but to nobody over 30,  especially no one who has a passing acquaintance with stricken sailboat stories.

Woodley’s barefoot ease on the not-quite-pitching deck is impressive, and her diving and swimming are real resume-assets. She displays a physical confidence on the water, and on the docks as Tami effortlessly comes off as shy and guileless when it suits her purposes.

But the dialogue has few moments of poetry and the call of the sea, “just you, the wind and the sound of the boat cutting through the ocean.”

Claflin, of “The Hunger Games” and “Me Before You” has an easy charm, and Woodley works the girlish giggle and body contact towards “chemistry,” but never quite sets off sparks.

Still, it’s great seeing Woodley out of YA sci-fi and into a role that makes use of her approachable reality. And truth be told, no movie with sailboats in it can be all bad. John Candy and Kurt Russell tested this maxim to the max, and they’re no Shailene Woodley.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for injury images, peril, language, brief drug use, partial nudity and thematic elements

Cast: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin

Credits:Directed by Baltasar Kormákur , script by Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell |and David Branson Smith. An STX release

Running time: 1:47 

“What’s wrong with you?”

Jersey islander Moll hears this often, and her reactions — wincing, wounded, resigned — make us realize she’s been hearing it for years, if not all her life.

Moll (Jessie Buckley of the recent A & E “War & Peace”) may sing in the art chorale, but the choir director (Geraldine James) seems to have it on the tip of her tongue…always. She’s her mother.

The cop (Trystan Gravelle) who fancies her doesn’t dare say it. But you know he thinks it.

Her oaf of a brother  (Oliver Maltman) might trot it out just to hurt her. And her prettier, happily married sister (Shannon Tarbet) works the hardest at avoiding using those words. But even she looks over, looks down on and pities Moll, and has for years.

It’s no wonder shy, brittle Moll falls for the first guy who sticks up for her, the one everybody says is “bad news,” the young man who might give her story its title, “Beast.”

The feature film debut of Michael Pearce, “Beast” is about the monsters we think we recognize and the ones we’re creating, unknowingly, by neglect, oppression and simple failure to act. It’s about a torrid, liberating love affair consummated in the middle of a horrid serial killer investigation.

And right from the start, we and everybody else suspect Pascal (Johnny Flynn, who was young Albert Einstein in TV’s “Genius). As the old song says, “He’s a rebel and he’ll never be any good.”

She meets him as she’s fleeing a birthday party that sister Polly has just upstaged, and after a night of drinking and dancing and letting a lout get overfamiliar. Pascal interrupts what might become a sexual assault with the unthinking bravado of a brute. He’s toting a rifle at the time.

He’s crude, coarse and fearless, careless about his grooming and his attire, careful not to give away his name right away, conspiratorial in letting her know what he was doing with a rifle by the beach. He’s a poacher.

Moll, downtrodden at home, her family the very model of repressed English emotions which holds manners uber alles, is smitten.

“I love the way he smells.”

He’s gauche, tactless and profane, everything Moll (a bus tour guide when she’s not singing) and her family are not.

As the affair kicks off, two lost souls tearing into each other like starving cast-aways, Mom’s disapproval grows, sister tries to be encouraging and the cops start asking questions. Another girl has been abducted and murdered. The entire island seems to be picking out suspects and coming after them hammer and tong.

Pascal, a solitary misfit and “craftsman” (good with his hands), has a record. He is Suspect One.

Moll is questioned, confronted left and right. She is his alibi. We know she’s not telling the truth. What does she see that we don’t? What’s in her past that could explain her deeper understanding?

Pearce cast this well, with Buckley glorying in bullied Moll’s growing defiance. Moll quietly, resolutely and unfeelingly revels in wearing the evidence of her roll in the grass all over Mom’s white carpeting and furniture. Give the stubbly, unkempt Flynn a motorcycle and not the ancient diesel Land Rover he rambles about in and he could be a Johnny playing another Johnny — Brando’s anti-hero of “The Wild One.”

The mystery is less interesting than the revealing set-pieces — Moll’s first trip out poaching with Pascal, the escalating confrontations with her family, cops and neighbors.

“Beast” is hard to watch at times, from its graphic crime-scene photos to the pitiless way a rabbit is dispatched. But as cryptic as it aims to be, it’s not hard to follow. And yeah, that rabbit is a clue. Good thrillers don’t explain the psychoses involved. They show them.

This one lets you keep up, encourages you to guess ahead, and then surprises you with what comes AFTER what comes next.

MPAA Rating: R, gory violence, somewhat explicit sex, gore, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Geraldine James, Trystan Gravelle

Credits:Written and directed by Michael Pearce. A Roadside Attraction/Film 4 release.

Running time: 1:47

Actually, the first film of the day is a belated viewing of “Beast.” Then there’s “Hereditary,” the new Toni Collette horror piece from A24.

But STX is releasing this Shailene lost-at-sea adventure without previewing it for critics, and as I am on my fifth sailboat, third cruising sailboat, and I’m a Shailene booster from WAY back, “Adrift” is the one I’m most looking forward to.

Sure, Shailene damaged her brand with the damned “Divergent” movies, cut-and-paste YA sci-fi based on books that were more commodities than works of fiction. But “Big Little Lies” gave her back her mojo, holding her own with Nicole, Laura and Reese.

Now the first weekend in June isn’t prime movie release date real-estate, which is why Blumhouse cheery-picked South by Southwest fanboy praise reviews for “Upgrade.”

“Action Point,” a Johnny Knoxville non-Safety Inspected theme park comedy, wasn’t previewed for critics.

And “Adrift” is also lumped in there, its pre-release rep damaged by not letting critics see it. The trailers have been impressive, even if the story is fairly conventional (in sailing quarters, anyway, the “sailor” on board is hurt in a boat-crippling accident, the inexperienced mariner must get them to safety).

STX should spend a little money and preview these pictures, unless “Hurricane Heist” and “Bad Moms” and “The Circle” and “The Foreigner” and “Gringo” and “Den of Thieves” and “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” are sole ambitions. They did release “Edge of Seventeen,” “I Feel Pretty” and “Molly’s Game.” It’s not like EVERYthing they make is crap. Why let people think that if the movie’s good?

Well, this just looks daft.

In the Old West, R. Patts pines away for his long lost beloved. He’s brought a preacher with him to Tie the Knot when he catches up with the fair Penelope. And she’s not having it. Tough as nails, that Penelope.

Glad this screwball Western is getting released, by Magnolia, no less. June 22, limited release.

In the netherscape of Sword and Sorcery Land, a lad takes his training and his lessons from his father.

“You must draw from your surroundings,” the would-be warrior’s dad (Adam Gregory) counsels, dropping the tweenage kid again. Find strength on the ground you fight upon, in other words.

And so the boy knocks down his dad and grows up to wear the furs, leather and the facepaint, to wield a samurai sword and all manner of machete and battleaxe, to vanquish his enemies and spill blood.

He will save the princess and protect “The Veil.”

Well, first he slaps a princess (Alexandra Harris). The Warrior (William Levy) has his motives. And he has her dad’s “sacred” sword because he killed the old man rather than let him “save” his daughter from capture (by stabbing her to death).

“The Veil” is a mud and blood quest fantasy of the “Conan” school, and calling it a B-movie insults a rich tradition of cheap but entertaining Bs.

Left for dead by an opportunistic comrade (Nick E. Tarabay), The Warrior must survive his wounds, recover his health, recover the Desert Princess and have his revenge. On somebody. The Emperor, maybe? That’s how these things usually go.

I know. I’ve watched them all. Something about that pre-history “never history” of Conan the Barbarian and his ilk, tales set in a Dark Age of steel and sinew, lures me in. European or Chinese, Japanese or Indian, I dive into the leather, the big-haired maidens and witches, the stentorian comic book trash talk and prophesy.

“The world of war has given birth to a great warrior. His enemies shall fall by a sword not of man.”

Hallucinations, magic herbs and a second princess — “Zera didn’t mean to harm you. She only wants to know your soul.” — in a peaceful, “we do not kill here” land. Except “You are not welcome here.” Well, was his capture by Zera (Serinda Swan, straight out of the “Steel Magnolias” hair salon) foretold, or not?

A hero needs a sidekick, and Aysel (William Moseley) fills that bill. He’s a bit of a hippy with a “Teach me how to FIGHT them” Jones. Aysel has bigger-than-sidekick ambitions.

“Now KILL me” is his first lesson. “Or I will kill YOU.”

Yes, it’s an insanely silly, dippy installment in a generally dippy genre. Lots of romantic pauses by scenic streams and remote lakes. And this.

“All you’ve ever known is war. One self pitting against the self of another. It is the world of man. And to you, it’s real.”

That Zera could talk the stubble right off a dark-eyed warrior, I tell you what.

Love the gauntlets — sharp elbows for stabbing — love the tents, clever to include a herd of buffalo (filmed in strikingly barbaric Oklahoma), like the costumes, underwhelmed by the swords.

The Cuban Levy has that Christopher Lambert “Highlander” accent requisite to many a sword and sorcery C-movie. Of course, it’s not the accent, it’s the shirtless chest it murmurs out of that counts.

The acting in general isn’t anything to pack onto an audition reel.

They didn’t have a lot of money to make this thing, but the production values are solid, not quite up to the Dark Ages Vikings vs. Brits series, “The Last Kingdom,” but aside from the anachronistic haircuts and middling hardware, not bad.

But the script is a mish-mash of tedious prophetic nonsense, the fights humdrum and the scenes between the fights are unalloyed, uninterrupted tedium.

Where’s the villain? Tardy, or just AWOL? AWOL it is. For most of the movie.

And about this titular “Veil.” It’s a hallucinogenic mask that hides reality from the wearer, blinds him or her and incites visions of prophesies. Nobody calls it a “Veil.” Not that I heard.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: William Levy, William Moseley, Serinda Swan, Nadia Comaneci, Adam Gregory

Credits:Directed by Brent Ryan Green, script by Jeff Goldberg. A Toy Gun release.

Running time: 1:25