Movie Nation

The difference between “biography” and “hagiography” is the presentation of contrary views, critical voices that the biographer or bio/filmmaker takes seriously.

That goes for anybody you’re profiling, from political opportunist Sarah Palin to hair care product purveyor Jean Paul DeJoria, or  A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.

He’s the guru profiled in “Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started it All,” an adoring, uncritical documentary about the Hare Krishna movement that Swami Prabhupada launched in America in the 1960s.

And even if you just think the shaved-head monks who used to hassle you at airports or in Times Square are a cultural punchline, the movie’s got something to offer, and not just its (relative) riches to rags story of a teacher who gathered followers and inspired a worldwide movement.

The swami was a well-educated Indian businessman who renounced his wealth and past life to take up teaching what he’d been taught by his guru. Whatever attention he attracted in India was nothing compared to the fame he gained, moving to New York, penniless, with just a few books and translations to sell to help him survive the Big City in 1965.

In one of the world’s most turbulent eras, and America’s most roiled decades, Swami Prabhupada grabbed the attention of hippies, LSD users and wealthy spiritual seekers.

“The ancients knew something,” the argument went at the time. Sure, India was one of the poorest, least educated corners of the planet, with the life expectancy to match. But the allure of the exotic, the comforting anti-materialist message of this “ecstatic Vaishnava (wandering) monk,” caught on.

The poet Allen Ginsberg was a fan, and can be seen chanting to an eye-rolling William F. Buckley Jr. on “Firing Line” in the ’70s.

The Beatles followed another swami to India, but when his misbehavior sent them packing, George Harrison found new friends among the followers of Prabhupada. “My Sweet Lord” is something of a Hare Krishna anthem, a poetic sermon delivered, in Hindu, in the chorus.

The movie is filled with the faces and the voices of the faithful, the elders of the movement now, survivors of the ’60s still walking the straight and narrow path laid out for them by the anti-materialist Prabhupada. Supposedly.

Did you know that the reason they shaved their heads and started wearing saffron colored “bedsheets,” was to “stand apart” from the colorful denizens of swinging London? Branding your movement in a place that colorful was difficult.

The movement drew a lot of gays, and figures like Ginsberg and Boy George have been linked to it. But all non-procreative sex was deemed “illicit” by the founder’s reading of ancient texts., with celibacy a big part of consciousness raising.  So, there’s a paradox some folks have to wrestle with, and there were scandals involving “boys” that the film ignores.

“Hare Krishna!” shows the elder stateswomen and men of the movement (ISKCON, International Society for Krishna Consciousness) exaggerating their connection to The Beatles, acknowledging the many movies and TV shows that have mocked the movement, without seeming to “get” the mockery.

The documentary’s final third gets at some of the controversy attached to it, the “de-programming” craze that it fostered and money issues that the filmmakers go to great pains to distance the Swami from.

There have been many critical TV reports and books on the movement over the decades, most of which seem shrill, ignorant and misguided today. And there have been several other documentaries about it, most of them too much like this one. But lacking anything like a dispassionate outside voice discussing this group’s benefits and failings, “Hare Krishna!” never amounts to anything more than a mix of historic relic and modern day recruitment film.

And aside from the already-converted, who’s going to want to see that?

MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Srila Prabhupada, Bonnie McElroy, Michael Grant, Allen Ginsburg
Credits: Directed by John Griesser, Jean Griesser , written by Jean Griesser. An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:26

The only way to appreciate “The Book of Henry” is by treating it as the movie equivalent of a summer read, a beach book that tries to pack in the full breadth of human experience into a few too many pages.

It’s got terror and tragedy, romance and charm, warmth and wit and a real page-turner of a plot. But every single one of those attributes is undercut by the fact that it aims to be the first “cute” thriller about child abuse, making it the most tone-deaf picture on that subject since “Radio Flyer” (Look it up).

Henry, played by the luminous Jaeden Lieberher of “St. Vincent” and “Midnight Special,” is a brilliant 11 year-old, a genius even.

“I prefer precocious.”

He’s so smart he trots out an impromptu discussion of our shared “existential crisis” for his fifth grade “My Legacy” writing project, but his teacher is always more impressed with his humanity.

He’s treated like an adult by most of the adults he knows, mom’s taunting waitress colleague (Sarah Silverman), for instance.

“Hello HANK,” she says, baiting him every time they meet.

“Hey, fashion road-kill,” he snarks back.

He’s the one who manages the finances (investments, included) of his single mom (Naomi Watts, Lieberher’s “St. Vincent” co-star). He’s tall and gangly enough to keep his bullied little brother (Jacob Tremblay) out of harm’s way.

But he can’t keep his cute neighbor (Maddie Ziegler) from the clutches of her creepy stepfather (Dean Norris). He can sense her trauma, see her bruises and guess what happens when the lights go out next door. And he can count the days she misses from school and is willing to cuss out the principal who refuses to act against the well-respected/well-connected Cavalry township police commissioner who is that evil stepdad.

So Henry, who delights in creating elaborate chain-reaction Rube Goldberg (Wiki him, too.) contraptions, makes plans to rescue her. It’s just that he gets these headaches and he might not be able to do the job himself. He needs to get his lonely, hard-drinking mom on board.

“Violence isn’t the worst thing in the world,” he reasons. “Apathy” is.

Director Colin Trevorrow, getting back to his “Safety Not Guaranteed” indie roots after a dip in “Jurassic World,” lets Lieberher have plenty of sweet, empathetic moments even as he’s plotting the crime that will free the neighbor girl he crushes on, the one with her hair always draped over one eye.

Watts, playing an overmatched, indulgent mom who never quite makes the “nature vs. nurture” argument for raising geniuses, gets to sing and play ukulele to her boys — one brilliant, the other also quite bright. Lee Pace makes an appearance as a sympathetic neuro-surgeon.

“Book of Henry’s” wild lurches in tone, from serio-comic and sweet to tragic and murderously violent, can almost be forgiven thanks to those grace notes, and the caper plot, which moves it right along.

But it’s just a bit off, from the child’s “solution” to this intractable problem Henry wants to solve, to the picture’s too-pat resolution. Trevorrow and screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz don’t let us know the girl next door. She’s just a remote object of pre-teen desire, sexualized in all the creepy ways Hollywood manages that.

The various manipulations and plot devices — the sobering reality of sickness, Henry’s omnipotent “narration” in his “book” and tape recorded instructions to his mother — don’t excuse the abrupt leap we’re expected to make, along with his mother, to Henry’s radical “solution” to the big problem he sees next door.

Like a beach book, we lean into the story, the more complicated and manipulative it gets. But like such books, we just shrug when we finally reach the end, knowing this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama will be long forgotten by summer’s end.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and brief strong language

Cast: Naomi Watts, Jaeden Lieberher, Sarah Silverman, Dean Norris, Lee Pace

Credits:Directed by Colin Trevorrow, script by Gregg Hurwitz. A Focus release.

Running time:  1:45

Awww, SOMEbody’s got a girl crush.

Well, it’s on “Saturday Night Live” MVP Kate McKinnon, so I certainly get it.

Every time McKinnon takes a breath and launches into a “bit” in the “Bridesmaids with a Dead Body” comedy “Rough Night,” director Lucia Aniello singles her out in the frame, gives her isolation and says “Have at it. BRING the funny, GIRL.”

Well, maybe it’s not a crush. Maybe it’s from desperation. A tin-eared women-talk-dirty farce with blood and a seriously unfunny “Weekend at Bernie’s” body to dispose of, “Rough Night” needs some laughs. And Scarlett Johannson isn’t going to provide them, and the overbearing Jillian Bell (“Fist Fight,””Office Christmas Party”) wears out her Melissa-McCarthy-meets-Amy-Schumer welcome pretty fast.

“I got my IUD for MIAMI!”

The wildly uneven affair is set during a bachelorette weekend in Miami where four George Washington U. party girls we’ve seen dominating beer pong back in the day gather to celebrate state senate candidate Jess’s impending nuptials.

Jess (Johansson), as a candidate, is a seriously gorgeous stiff. Alice (Bell) is a seriously needy and possessive elementary school teacher.

Then, there’s the professional protester Frankie (Glazer, of TV’s “Broad City”) and the gorgeous, rich, about-to-be-single mom, Blair (Kravitz) Frankie used to have a thing with, back in college.

So nothing like a weekend in Sin City to renew their friendship and party like they’re not trying too hard to relive their college hedonism. But of course they are. “Shot SHOT SHOT SHOT” leads to booze, weed, blow, bickering and bantering.

And then there’s Pippa (McKinnon), Jess’s “new” friend from Down Under. McKinnon trots out catch-phrases — “Bu-MA-zing” — and the worst “shrimp on the barbie” accent this side of “Dumb and Dumber.”

When a stripper shows up and gets killed, by accident, due to their over-enthusiasm? Par for the course. And not funnier than anything that’s come before it.

The stars, playing caricatures, have their moments — save for Johansson, who, like McKinnon, is funnier on SNL than she’s ever been on the big screen. The laughs in this Aniello and Paul W. Downs (“Broad City”) romp live around the edges. The pervy/swinger neighbors (Ty Burrell and Demi Moore) who live next door to the house the party girls are staying in, the parallel metrosexual bore of a bachelor party, with the wimpy-bore of a fiance (co-writer Downs) and Peter the fiance’s mad drive to save a marriage he thinks will never come off are far and away the funniest sequences in the picture.

A confusing phone call sends Peter packing — South, from DC to Miami. Can’t go by plane, or train. He’s got to go “Sad Astronaut.” A bachelor party (wine tasting) bro tells him the story of Lisa Nowak, the crazed astronaut in the adult diapers, hurtling cross country to kidnap a romantic rival in Orlando — doing a “Sad Astronaut.” The picture is peppered with Florida cop jokes and references to Florida gun laws.

But truthfully, even though it rallies in its last third to manage something like comic momentum, “Rough Night” never recovers from the bloody death and the mess that ensues. And all the attempted McKinnon moments and omnivorous Demi and Ty come-ons to Kravitz (playing it straight, and killing it) cannot save it.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language throughout, drug use and brief bloody images

Cast: Scarlett Johannson, Kate McKinnon, Zo  Kravitz, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer, Paul W. Downs, Ty Burrell, Demi Moore, Dean Winter

Credits:Directed by Lucia Aniello, script by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:41

The movie I’m most looking forward to this summer, as I’ve written on several occasions, is Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” an epic of survival during the darkest moments of World War II.

But that’s just me. As this movie has no comic book tie-in, Warner Brothers has to figure it’s going to be a hard sell. Getting the word out in a culture awash in capes and crusaders, superheroes and superheroines, and getting audiences jazzed up about a vivid piece of history barely beyond living memory is tough.

Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh? Not names to justify the cost of recreating the British evacuation of Europe, a defeat spun into victory, even if the director of “Inception” is behind it.

So WB is touring this “DUNKIRK Prologue Cinetransformer Movie Theater experience,” a mobile cinema with optimum projection, bone-rattling sound and a five minute stunner of a sequence from the film. It’s in Orlando Wed and Thursday at 5421 International Drive, in the parking lot of DXL Men’s Clothing. It’s due in Atlanta, next.

They give you a little “Dunkirk” swag — including a copy of the propaganda the Nazis (Germans) dropped on the trapped British Expeditionary Force and its French allies.

And then you see a breathless, dazzlingly intercut sequence — two corpsmen toting a wounded friend through the chaos of the evac beaches, a businessman played by Oscar winner Mark Rylance, doffing his tweed jacket, overseeing two teens offloading plates ad other non-essentials from his pleasure boat, Royal Navy officers leaving a boatload of life jackets for them to take on.

Tom Hardy takes to the skies, dogfighting in a Spitfire, trying to keep the Germans from strafing the men on the beach.

Rylance, gripped with concern, overwhelmed when his tiny boat passes a destroyer, packed to the railings with evacuated troops — explosions and music and tight closeups and Kenneth Branagh, as the Naval officer in charge of planning, his collar turned up so that he can look cool under pressure.

It’s stunning stuff, and I can hardly wait to see the finished film.

Meanwhile, this Big Trailer with the 60 seat surround sound/floor shaking dazzler of a sequence to the movie may be coming to a city near you. Atlanta by the weekend, and so on, up to opening day. 

Do I look excited to see it? No? Orlando. Too darned hot for that.

That opening day is July 21, and kudos to Warners for indulging Nolan and making this effort to get the word out. “Wonder Woman” may pay the bills, but if there’s an Oscar contender from them this summer, it’s going to be a WWII movie with a top-drawer cast and a great history lesson tucked into the stunning effects.

Two movies I’m looking forward to this summer, and not just because of their killer trailers — I’m a history buff — “Dunkirk” and “Detroit.”

A WWII epic about a Britain that never tires of hearing about it’s “finest hour.”

And “Detroit,” from the “Hurt Locker” team, because America isn’t shy about recalling its darkest days.

Have you seen the comically horrific “Alien Raiders” — you know, the one about a motley collection of folks trapped in a supermarket when the Aliens Attack?

You should.

How about “Killers” (Ashton K. and Katherine Heigl) or “The Air I Breathe?” Worth Netflixing, for sure.

The creators of the web horror/comedy series “20 Seconds to Live” directed and wrote those pictures, respectively.

And they’ve developed the knock for creating get-in/get-out horror jokes, short one-idea films with great production values and funny payoffs.

Here’s a sample of their first season’s work — a gag piece the length of a movie trailer.

They’re hunting for funding for season two, a worthy wagon to get on board, horror fans.

A great wrong — Ok, a minor wrong — is righted with the belated theatrical release of “47 Meters Down,” a trapped-in-a-shark-cage thriller whose production values suggest it deserves better than a direct-to-video fate.

The film’s star, Mandy Moore, has experienced a career re-boot, thanks to TV’s hit weeper, “This is Us.” Claire Holt (“Pretty Little Liars,” “H2): Just Add Water”) has always looked great in a swimsuit.

And the murky blue void that co-writer/director Johannes Roberts and underwater camera specialist Mark Silk present has menace enough without the not-noticeably-digital sharks that menace our protagonists.

What’s summer without an “Open Water” or “The Shallows”? Sharks are still scary, even if Asia is devouring them like the potato chips of the sea.

So never mind the blips of logic in the script, the fact that it requires Mandy Moore to shriek into her mask — “We’re gonna DIE down here!” — too many times, to narrate everything she (and um, we) see her do.

“Get the spear gun!”

Moore and Holt plays sisters vacationing in sunny Mexico, where the drinks have umbrellas and the rules for dive charters are, we’re told, pretty lax.

Lisa (Moore) is just getting over a breakup. Sister Kate (Holt) is her replacement companion on this holiday, somebody to help her shake the funk that being dull and predictable has gotten Lisa into.

Why not an impulse trip into the Gulf on a low-rent shark experience charter with two local hunks they’ve just met?

Nothing to worry about. The boat may look like it’s seen better days, and the actual shark cage they’ll sit in when they’re lowered five meters down appears to be held together by rust. But the corners-cutting captain (Matthew Modine) is American, the actual gear is top drawer — full-face masks with radio links.

Lisa’s never dived in her life, but they don’t need to know that. “Is this even safe?” is replaced with “Think of the (social media) pictures!” Her ex will have to rethink his whole “boring Lisa” complaint.

Then, the crane breaks and they’re dropped to the bottom, out of radio range. They’re running out of air, and will get the bends if they ascend too quickly.

And the fact that the boat crew has filled the water with crimson chum, luring Great White Sharks — actually quite rare in the too-warm/too BP-polluted waters of the Gulf? That’s just another, grislier way to die.

The plot presents the sisters with some awful dilemmas and the viewer with plenty of “Oh come on” moments.

But any thriller set in the blue-grey isolation of the domain of sharks is fraught with possibilities for frights. And Roberts, a horror vet (“The Other Side of the Door”) knows the when, where and how to place his shocks.

Silly as it sounds, “47 Meters Down” is downright intense. And it manages the odd surprise twist, too.

It still has a hint of “Just Wait for Netflix” about it, but that denies you the fun of sitting in the dark, laughing and muttering at the characters on the screen, with a hundred other fans of cheap thrills and summer cinema shark cheese.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense peril, bloody images, and brief strong language
Cast: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine
Credits: Directed by Johannes Roberts, script by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera. An Entertainment Studios release.
Running time: 1:29

Brett Haley has described “The Hero” as “a love letter” not only to Sam Elliott, but to a particular breed of Hollywood icon.

Elliott plays an aging Western hero, getting by on voice-over work in commercials, facing mortality and hoping for that one last big role before heading for that last roundup.

I’d suggest it’s a movie about the sort of icon the throwback Elliott never quite got to become in a Hollywood that rarely makes Westerns.

Lovely movie, and I’m talking with Haley, who grew up in the Florida Keys, about it today.

And as always, I’m looking for suggested questions. Got anything in mind? Post it as a comment below, and thanks for the input.

The Holocaust has been so exhaustively covered as a movie subject as to become a Hollywood punch-line.

But the Israeli drama “Past Life” finds a new angle, a new corner of collective guilt. Avi Nesher’s “What Dad did during the Holocaust” mystery may not have the most satisfying resolution, but that’s part of the point.

Sephi (Joy Rieger, introspective and demure) is a star soprano with her college choir, an aspiring composer willing — even in 1977 — to go to West Berlin to perform — if it can further her career.

Meeting the famous choral composer Thomas Zielinski (Rafael Stachowiak) could pay dividends, too. But Zielinski’s aunt has come with him to the concert. And she recognizes Sephi’s last name, and her face. That leads to a “Marathon Man” moment. The old woman has to be dragged, shrieking (in German), “Murderer! Daughter of a murderer!”

Yes, she knew Sephi’s father. And since Sephi’s sister, Nana (Nelly Tagar), a feisty Tel Aviv magazine writer who argues about Israel’s faults and “the Holocaust excuse” Israelis have historically made for any territorial grabs or “re-settlement” schemes, Sephi has someone willing and eager to unravel this mystery.

Dad (Doron Tavory) is a respected Jerusalem gynecologist, humorless, touchy. But in flashbacks, we get a hint about why his two daughters think this guy could be a murderer. He never talks about how he, a Polish Jew, survived when millions didn’t. And he used to slap the girls around, and worse, growing up.

“You can’t understand the world ‘back there,'” he explains. Not so fast, Dad, they decide.

Nesher doesn’t do a great job of hiding her cards when it comes to the mystery in this “inspired by a true story.” We know what’s up, more or less, from the first moment father Bruno hears that his girls have talked to people who knew him “back there.” His wife (Evgenia Dodina) gets a stress-induced nosebleed.

“Here we go again,” she mutters, in Hebrew with English subtitles.

The story takes on melodramatic children-suffer for the sins-of-their-parents tones, or as on old kibbutz-dweller puts it, “Parents ate sour grapes, and now their children have rotten teeth.”

But the larger idea, that in order for people, the world, Israel and Israelis to live on, there has to be an emotional statute of limitations on what people did in the distant past  — to survive, following orders, etc. — has weight.

Nesher’s re-creation of the Israel and Europe of the Cold War ’70s is vivid and biting. Sephi suffers under a sexist, bunker-mentality culture at home, and feels the burden of a some-crimes-cannot-be-forgiven or forgotten mentality abroad.

“Past Life” is best appreciated as an attempt to finally give permission, at the source of the grievance (Israel), not to forget, but to at least forgive.  Not every horror was committed by gentiles, not every sin was mortal, Catholic or Protestant in nature.

At some point, the past is passed.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with nudity, smoking.
Cast: Joy Rieger, Nelly Tagar, Doron Tavory, Rafael Stachowiak
Credits: Written and directed by Avi Nesher. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:48

As Mandy Moore grew up in Orlando, learned her acting and musical chops here, and since her mom used to work at the newspaper where I used to work, I have interviewed her many times over the years.

She always saw her future, the post teen-pop starlet/child star years, as being rebooted by Broadway. She can sing, she can act, it seemed like a natural transition. She did “Nobody Loves You” off-Broadway a few years back.

But it was TV and “This is Us” that gave her a career second wind. And that’s why she’s got a movie coming out. A little deep sea horror, anyone? “47 Meters Down” pairs up a couple of divers and traps them in a shark cage.

Talk about claustrophobic. I don’t think Disney’s “Rapunzel” will be doing any singing, at that depth.