Movie Nation

It’s hard to make any movie about newspapering these days without it feeling like a wallow in nostalgia.

So with “The Newspaperman,” the new documentary about Ben Bradlee, the iconic editor of The Washington Post, director John Maggio doesn’t even try. His portrait of Bradlee, a giant from the Watergate era Washington Post, captures the windswept romance of a swaggering crusader who oversaw the newspaper that brought down what we used to regard as the corrupt presidential administration in American history.

The film, premiering on HBO Dec. 4, has memories of “The Good War” and the glamour of Camelot and the tension of exposing the military’s cynical desire for and conduct of the Vietnam War by publishing “The Pentagon Papers,” also the subject of this Christmas’s feature film, “The Post.”

Maggio, a mainstay of the PBS documentary series “American Experience,” may have taken the easy way out, building his film around Bradlee reading his own memoir “A Good Life” (he died in 2014). But how else was he going to capture the chain-smoking, fast-talking champion of “the truth?” Why NOT let him narrate his own story?

I mean, Jason Robards, who spun Bradlee into a crusty, cocksure icon for Democracy in the classic real history thriller “All the President’s Men,” died 17 years ago, so he wasn’t available.

A native Bostonian of middle class roots, like FDR a polio survivor, a Navy veteran who fell for Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” and proceeded to make himself one (for Newsweek), Bradlee married three times in an age when that just wasn’t done, expressed the barest hints of remorse at the children and families he left behind, sized-up his reporters and kept them on task and focused as the Post went after “The Watergate Plumbers” and every tainted member of the Nixon Administration who had a hand in their hiring, creation and cover-up, all the way to the president himself.

“I don’t think he ever had a moment’s guilt in his life,” PBS veteran Jim Lehrer opines.

Maggio was interested in Bradlee’s college-years attachment to a 20 year psychological study of Harvard men like Bradlee, how he could have been identified, straight out, as a stereotypical “alpha male,” a man the Navy taught “I liked sizing other men up.”

But the director, like the rest of us, is most fascinated by Bradlee’s years-long attachment of John F. and Jackie Kennedy, hobnobbing with them from the time Kennedy was new to Congress and Bradlee was finding his place, then with Newsweek in Washington.

Like the rest of reportorial Washington, Bradlee had some knowledge of Kennedy’s personal failings. But like most other reporters of his day, he kept his fellow Bostonian’s secrets, at least until Kennedy was president, and then assassinated.

His peers, his employees (Woodward and Bernstein are here, David Remnick, Bradlee’s widow Sally Quinn, Tina Brown, Henry Kissinger) and others talk about how “utterly inappropriate” that connection was — vacations together, sailing excursions. But different times, different mores, different rules. The documentary’s fixation on this era throws it somewhat out of balance, and having Bradlee give so much of “his” version of his life via the audio book readings undercuts the film at times.

It wasn’t until a few years after the Kennedy assassination that Bradlee was given the reins of the Post, “a second-rate provincial newspaper” in an age when the D.C. air “was thick with lies,” and turned it into the Washington institution it remains to this day.

Not that his hubris didn’t knock the paper down several pegs in the ’80s. The Janet Cooke made-up-stories debacle was merely the most public. I distinctly recall him brushing off criticism during a 1980s NPR interview with Bob Edwards, using his seat-of-the-pants hiring of a new movie critic (of course I’d remember that) with an “I think he’s terrific.”

The very young critic was quietly shoved out the door, under a cloud (using his journalistic access to peddle his scripts) within the year.

But the personality traits that the W.T. Grant Foundation study identified, “ability to adjust to changing realities” served Bradlee well enough through it all.

With “Newspaperman,” Maggio has given us an old school blustery, brilliant, competitive and righteous icon in the flesh, and not just the caricatures popular culture (J. Jonah Jameson and Perry White in comic books) has long fed us.

How are you going to truly understand the upcoming Oscar contender “The Post” (Tom Hanks plays him there, too nice?) without watching “The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee”? Here is something like the full measure of the man without Hollywood spin.

Bluff, arrogant, self-righteous, sure. But when your mistress is “the truth,” how could you be otherwise?

Which is why even though he didn’t live to see it or have any say over its coinage, you have to figure the truth-hunting Bradlee would love the Post’s new motto — “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It’s just his style.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, adult themes

Cast: Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Tom Brokaw, Sally Quinn, Jim Lehrer

Credits:Directed by John Maggio, script by Benjamin C. Bradlee. An HBO Films release.

Running time: 1:29

If it weren’t for the subtitles, you might be fooled into waiting for the usual Hollywood twists and turns tailored for an American audience.

But “In the Fade” is German, a terrorist thriller, courtroom drama and soul-searching plunge into grief, and Germany’s selection for contention in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race.

Hollywood twists and Hollywood endings don’t figure into it.

Diane Kruger, the German actress whose best work is often far way from Hollywood (She was Helen in “Troy”) is Katja, a woman we meet on her wedding day.

She’s got her share of tattoos and piercings. More than her share. And the fellow she’s marrying? He’s in prison. But love finds a way.

And Katja and Nuri (Numan Acar) build a life, after his sentence. A Turkish Kurd, he’s a professional translator in a country with a lot of Turkish ex-pats. She raises their beautiful little boy.

Until that fateful day when a bomb goes off at Nuri’s office. Their son was there with him. And Katja’s cries notwithstanding, the police warn her away. “They’re no longer people,” they assure her (in German, with English subtitles). Just “body parts.”

The shock of this loss is quickly shoved aside, ever-so-politely, to make way for the investigation. She is stunned at how quickly her husband and their lives together become suspect.

“Was he Muslim? Was he ‘politically active?‘”

Nein and NEIN, Katja insists. He wasn’t dealing drugs again, either. “Nazis” did this. And eventually, the cops agree.

The film’s second act is the trial of the young Aryans accused of committing the crime, a showcase for the differences between German justice and American (the victim and her attorney sit with the prosecution, and participate, for starters).

And the third act is about the aftermath of that trial, Katja’s struggle between grief and rage, all to try and fill the vast empty spot the murderers — called terrorists everywhere but perhaps in the current White House — left in her heart.

Denis Moschitto, as a sympathetic but steely attorney, and the scary Johannes Krisch (as counsel for the Nazis) impress. But it’s Kruger’s picture, riveting as a character drowning in despair — sometimes, literally. She slashes her wrists at one awful moment where she might slip beneath the water turns crimson with her blood. Kruger gives Katja moments of fury, but many more of deflated despair.

Director/co-writer Fatih Akin, who did the German culinary comedy “Soul Food,” treats the material in the most straightforward manner imaginable. He doesn’t let technique get in the way of the rising rage of losing someone, only to be put on the defensive by police willing to leap to prejudiced conclusions. Still, the picture plays as a bit dull and frustrating, at times. It could have used more pizzazz, a few bigger twists.

The surprises come in the investigation, in court and in that aftermath, where “Hollywood” twists present themselves as possibilities, but are never submitted to.

Like life after a murder, there is no “happy” ending, no thrilling feeling of justice served. “In the Fade” is that rare thriller which finds more to mull over in the culture clash — within Germany, within the Turkish expatriate community, and between German justice and American expectations, between German storytelling and Hollywood endings.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Diane Kruger, Denis Moschitto, Numan Acar, Samia Muriel Chancrin, Johannes Krisch

Credits:Directed by Fatih Akin, script by Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

Here you go.

Warm in all the most predictable ways, edgy and surprising at times, and always willfully quirky, “Permanent” is an old-fashioned coming-of-age-in-the-hell-of-high-school comedy with a few new twists.

It’s about bad hair in a place (suburban Richmond, Va., THE SOUTH) and time (the early 1980s) when that could be a social death sentence for a white American teenage girl.

That’s Aurelie Dixon’s plight. Kira McLean brings gawky, wimpy Aurelie to life in a breakout performance that will feel oh-so-lived-through for generations of female filmgoers.

The Dixons are new to town, freshly arrived from Washington, D.C. But that’s not going to stand her in good stead at her new high school, even though she could play “the big city sophisticate” card, even though her dad (Rainn Wilson) served three U.S. presidents, and has the autographed photos to prove it.

Dad is retired from the Air Force, but was a steward during his entire enlistment. He was a glorified waiter to presidents, diplomats and potentates. All he has to show for it is a toupee, and a scholarship to a small Christian college where he can begin his pre-med studies, starting over in his 40s.

Aurelie needs something to cling to, some sort of signature, heading into the school year.

“I’m ugly and I feel bad about myself!”

It’s not going to be her odd, ridiculous and taunt-worthy name — “ORALLY?”

She can’t change that.

And it’s not going to be fashion, partly because it’s 1982 (ick), partly because she has no fashion sense and mostly because, as her mother reminds her — CONSTANTLY — “We’re poor. Working poor!”

But long-suffering, fried chicken joint waitress and family breadwinner mom (Oscar winner Patricia Arquette, in top form) hears that “all the OTHER girls look like Farrah Fawcett” complaint once too often and finds a low-cost answer to Aurelie’s request — a small-town “beauty school” run by, well, the only gay in the village.

Before you can say, “My GOD, what have you done?” the drawling klutz who does the deed hollers, “Come check out this permanent I just done did!” And Aurelie’s woes are just beginning.

Writer-director Colette Burson of TV’s “Hung” must know whereof she speaks, because what follows is a spot-on spoof of the upper South fifteen years removed from The Civil Rights Movement, on the cusp of MTV.

Overt racial name-calling has subsided, but the only black girl in this school (amusingly sullen newcomer Nena Daniels) is “stuck in with the RE-tards” by teachers uninterested in her intelligence, and yet not so ostracized that she can’t reject the new kid’s “I’ll be your FRIEND” pleas. Lydia lives every school day in barely-contained rage.

The girls are all bullies, the boys freshman vulgarians.

And at home, Aurelie’s mom is out of patience with her bald-and-fooling-no-one husband, whose sex drive ended with his Air Force career, a dork (as only Rainn Wilson can play him) with an indulgent side he shows their daughter and an ineptly self-important one he shows everybody else.

There’s temptation outside the marriage, small-town imitations of Big City “group counseling,” competent but not top-flight teachers with stock answers/ WRONG solutions to every social woe in the school and the hint of ways Aurelie and Lydia might stand out from this mob. If only they can learn to stick up for themselves.

The ending is entirely too pat, considering what’s come before. But Burson has channeled her dark memories of freshman year into something that occasionally touches and often tickles, but stings with familiarity, start to finish.

Yes, a bad perm will “relax” and eventually go away. And once the trauma has worn off, someday you’ll look back on it and laugh. Just give it 20-35 years or so.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude sexual references, language and thematic elements

Cast:  Kira McLean, Patricia Arquette, Rainn Wilson, Nena Daniels

Credits:Written and directed by Colette Burson. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:33

OK, I kid. And what do we say? We kid because we love.

I was chatting with a couple of theater managers today about Thursday night’s and Friday pre-sale numbers for “Justice League,” and one said and I quote, “OK, but it’s not like WE KNOW this movie is opening because of the crowds. Not like ‘Star Wars,’ where the place is just packed and buzzing.”

So. Multiply that by a few thousand cineplexes, and damned if “Justice League” didn’t manage a Thursday night and daytime Friday that points to a $93-96 million opening.

Considering the projections from Box Office Mojo and others were $110 million, well, no champagne at the WB this weekend. Maybe Korbel. But not the good stuff.

I saw it as roughly on a par with the spectacularly successful and grossly over-rated “Wonder Woman.” Folks, these movies are long past the point where they share an original idea. “Wonder Woman” was “The First Avenger” — War, Germans, a bomber that “must be stopped.” Seriously.

“Justice League” has a great Jason Momoa take on Aqua Man, a nebbishy spin on The Flash. And that Israeli model Gal Gadot is back as Diana, the “adult in the room” over all those superheroes. Light in tone, utterly generic in plot (structure, villain, etc).

These aren’t serious movies, they’re serious money-makers and the best “Avengers” is not that much better than the worst “Justice League.” So, as Abraham Lincoln once said in a review, “Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

He used that because “I laughed, I cried,” was taken.

On the other hand, “Wonder” is selling out evening showings, my manager friends told me. Sure enough, Deadline.com confirms it’s headed towards a spectacular $27 million plus opening.

“Nobody” is going to see “The Star,” my cineplex folks tell me. Maybe $9 million nationwide by Sunday midnight.

And “Lady Bird,” on just 240 or so screens, cracked the top 10. “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” is in there, too. Quality and Oscar contending is a selling point, too.

One thing working against “Justice League”  which nobody is talking about? Rotten Tomatoes withholding critic-linked reviews of the film until Thursday afternoon, to allow two critics that they’re promoting on a TV show/webcast as their…whatevers.

Warners, part owners of RT, might have been down with hiding reviews for a movie after the “Batman vs. Superman” debacle (which I rather liked for its tone and the fact that is was “about something”), and “Suicide Squad,” where all the reviews (mine was one of the first posted) nuked it.

Remember, fans were raging at RT for killing “Suicide Squad” by simply aggregating all the reviews, which were bad, or at least somewhat negative. RT doesn’t determine what real movie critics say. The new folks on their payroll? Jury’s out on that.

You could go to the much more nuanced and selective (fewer fanboy “critics”) Metacritic and get an accurate take on “Justice.” Not terrible, not at all.  Weak, but workable. Not every movie buff checks Metacritic, though. The fools.

And RT’s “Justice” stunt made it look like they were helping WB hide the film from ticket buyers.

Who, if my staggering readership numbers are an indicator, simply clicked on Metacritic (lots of referral links in my metrics) and saw the movie wasn’t terrible.

RT gave the film the air of something worth hiding. They punched a hole in “Justice League,” just for a chance to launch two young, telegenic nobodies nobody has ever heard of on a TV show where they share their five years of moviewatching experience.

Sorry, sometimes you feel like poking the bear.

Anyway, maybe Saturday will fix this shortfall, maybe Sunday will push those numbers up. Stay tuned. Here.

Second trailer, fun clash between primitive man and Bronze Age Man.

Great voices (Eddie Redmayne, Oscar winner), Maisie Williams, Tom Hiddleston,  Richard Ayoade, Timothy Spall.

Watch for the “Jurassic Pork” gag.

Feb. 15 for this one. 

“Around Alone” is a solo sailboat race around the world that’s gone under a variety of names over the decades.

But one name stands out in its history, Donald Crowhurst. And not because he was a winner, either.

Oscar winner Colin Firth and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz plays the Crowhursts — the solo sailor with a lot of bravado and not much else, and the woman who says “Promise me you’ll come home.”

Not sure when “The Mercy,” “The Mercy,” which probably started life as Oscar bait, will see the light of day in the U.S.

“The Star” is a tepid comic re-telling of the Nativity Story as seen through the eyes of the talking, joking, saving-the-day animals who accompany Mary and Joseph, and the Three Magi, to Bethlehem.

The animation is stunning as befits the current state of the CG animation art. But the jokes — and yes, it’s supposed to be a comedy — flail and fail at every turn. There’s barely a laugh in it, and take away Tracy Morgan (voicing a numbskull camel transporting a wise man), even that’s gone.

You can sense, on screen, the tension between Sony Affirm, the faith-based studio offshoot distributing this Birth of Jesus holiday story, and Sony Pictures Animation, which KNOWS how to create funny characters, deliver a sight-gag and give a funny voice actor something funny to say.

Maybe the folks at Affirm smothered the comic life out of it. Maybe they got handed the movie when Sony Animation realized “This isn’t funny.”

Either way, as we follow Mary, from the moment the Almighty (a column of light) tells Mary (Gina Rodriguez) she’s going to raise the Son of God — “Thank you! Do I say thank you?” — through the perilous journey from Nazareth to the town with “no room at the inn,” pursued by Herod’s minion and his dogs, “The Star” begs the grownups in the audience to play a game of “Pin a Name on the Voice Actor.”

As in, “That’s Kris Kristofferson (as ‘The Old Donkey”). There’s Ving Rhames (as a vicious tracking dog). And who’s that impersonating Cheech Marin? Gabriel Iglesias! Do your OWN funny voice, Fluffy. No stealing! Christopher Plummer! (Herod). Kristin Chenoweth (as a mouse-like pygmy jerboa, who overhears God’s plan).

Steven Yeun voices “Boaz,” the little donkey who escapes a life of millstone slavery to live with the newlyweds, Mary and Joseph (Zachary Levi), plotting his escape with doltish dove Dave (Keegan-Michael Key, funny-ish) until he realizes Mary’s in danger.

Meanwhile, Herod’s gotten wind of the “newborn king” about to become a threat and sent his dogs looking for him. The camels (Oprah, Tyler Perry and Tracy Morgan) carrying the wise men? They’re taking bets on where they’re headed.

“Birthday party!”

“Maybe a baby shower!”

“What’s a baby going to do with Frankinsense? BIRTHday party!”

Maybe they’re both right. But only very young children will find anything funnier and more entertaining in “The Star” than that.

MPAA Rating:PG for some thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Steven Yeun, Keegan-Michael Key, Gina Rodriguez, Tracy Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Zachary Levi, Ving Rhames, Mariah Carey, Christopher Plummer, Kristin Chenoweth, Kris Kristofferson, Gabriel Iglesias

Credits:Directed by, script by . A Sony Animation/Sony Affirm release.

Running time: 1:26

A Mexican boy needs the help of his ancestors to realize his dream of becoming a famous mariachi in “Coco,” an enchanting musical and the most charming Pixar movie in years.

And how does a Mexican lad confer with, debate and persuade his dead relatives to lift the family’s edict that no Rivera can ever be a singer? By visiting the colorful Land of the Dead on “El Dia de los Muertos,” the fall celebration called “The Day of the Dead.”

Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) idolizes the late singing film star Ernesto de la Cruz, taking Ernesto’s motto to heart.

“Seize your moment! Reach for that dream, grab it right and make it your own!”

But “a Rivera is a shoemaker, through and through,” his big extended family reminds him. NO singing. Somebody in the past was a no-good musician who abandoned his wife and daughter. They’re not having any mariachis in their clan.

There’s a big singing contest in the Santa Cecilia town square. Miguel knows, in his heart, he could win it. If only he can get his hands on a guitar, master playing it and sneak away from the family to enter it.

The contest is on the Day of the Dead, and it is while Miguel is in the cemetery, paying his respects to the remembered dead that he spies an instrument that could change his life. Except that it’s in the locked crypt of the town’s most famous expat, the great Ernesto himself.

And stealing it transports him into the world of the dead, who are lining up to visit the living who remember them on this festival day. Miguel must meet Ernesto, fend off his own dead relatives (who KNOW why the family cursed musicians forever and ever) and negotiate a return to the land of the living in time for the Big Show.

Benjamin Bratt does a Latin Lover purr, and croons a tune or two as the great Ernesto, a silky smooth romancer from the Golden Age of mariachi. Gael Garcia Bernal also sings, as Hector, a desperate, long-dead corpse who must wangle his way back to visit the living so that he’s not forgotten forever.

The songs, by a rotating team of writers, are lilting and fun, especially a tune called “Un Poco Loco” that Miguel (Gonzalez is a marvelous child singer) and Hector perform, on the fly, to win an audience with Ernesto.

Ernesto’s theme song long ago was “Remember Me,” a lightly haunting love song that conveys the movie’s message. The dead are never truly gone so long as some one remembers them.

The colors are as vibrant as you’d expect, considering the subject matter. It’s a Pixar movie treatment of a subject the engaging “Book of Life” used as a setting a few years back, with the standard “Follow your dreams” Pixar messaging.

The afterlife is peopled by skeletons and run like a busy border crossing, a clever touch with a little political edge to it. And the jokes, respectful of the culture the film embraces, rely on the average viewer’s familiarity with all-things-Mexican to come off.

A skeleton sneezes at Miguel’s stray dog (Dante, a Mexican hairless), who has followed him into the underworld.

“I am TERRIBLY allergic.”

“But Dante doesn’t have any hair!”

“And I don’t have a nose. And yet, here we are.”

The whole enterprise is amusing, warm and embracing, so much so that English words fall short of perfectly summing up this enchanting, charming film.

Only a Spanish word will do. “Encantadora.”

(Read Roger Moore’s interview with “Coco” star Anthony Gonzalez)

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Sofia Espinosa

Credits:Directed by Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, script by Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich. A Disney/Pixar release.
Running time: 1:49