Movie Nation

Another sci-fi best seller — this one by Jeff VanderMeer — earns a big screen treatment, this time courtesy of Alex “Ex Machina” Garland.

“Annihilation” gives us an alien entity that doesn’t look like, oh, Klingons or Borg or humans in any way. It’s kind of the anti-“Arrival,” with Oscar Isaac as the missing husband Portman pines for, Jennifer Jason Leigh as the scientist/warrior on the hunt. This teaser trailer is awfully generic, mysterious but maddeningly familiar, and yet  creepy enough.

And then there’s the presence of dish-of-the-day candidates Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez. Because, you know, “Ex Machina” made Alicia Vikander a star.

Look for “Annihilation” in February.

“I’m not psychic,” our young narrator reassures us. She’s just a near-savant at guessing numbers, cards, the right slot machine to toss a quarter into.

That’s a skill even a tween can use in Reno, Nevada.

Maybe she got it from her mama. But she (Jessica Collins) cannot tell her. She’s so developmentally disabled that her entire vocabulary is 22 words — one of them, her daughter’s name — Heidi.

The woman who looks after them both, Bernadette, may know something. But “B” is keeping it to herself. Which is why Heidi makes her escape — 12 years old and riding the bus from Reno to mysterious Liberty, New York in “So B. It,” a wan odyssey about disabilities, special abilities, looking for your history and changing your future by taking that one big risk.

Director Stephen Gyllenhaal (“Losing Isiah”), father of actors Maggie and Jake, returns to subjects similar to his disabled Debra Winger drama, “A Dangerous Woman” in adapting (with screenwriter Garry Williams) Sarah Weeks’ novel.

Mom is an adult child nicknamed “Precious,” full of love and eager to paint pictures of their happy “family.” But she can’t take care of herself, much less a child. Bernadette, given all the earthy mothering the great Alfre Woodard is famous for, cooks and cleans and dresses one and all, and home schools Heidi (Talitha Eliana Bateman, one of the child stars of “Annabelle: Creation”).

But that’s because Bernadette hasn’t left her Reno apartment in years. She’s agoraphobic.

Only our narrator is “normal.” And she’d like to know why that is, who her people are and where her mom is from. She has just enough clues, and a growing sense of independence from the ever-fearful “B.” A photograph and a town name send her on her way.

Odd big screen outing aside, Gyllenhaal has built his career on TV directing — episodes, and TV movies. And that’s how “So B. It” plays —  a film of pre-digested emotions, close-ups (TV loves close-ups) and yawn-inspiring revelations — small-screen melodrama.

Landing Jacinda Barrett, an Oscar winner (Cloris Leachman shines as a fellow bus passenger), the late John Heard (good value to the very end) and the Oscar-nominated Woodard speaks to his reputation.

But while there might be a movie in this material, the muted performances, muffled emotions and simple lack of dramatic sparks or surprises wastes the talents of one and all.

Young Miss Bateman never makes Heidi empathetic enough to warm up to. And as she is in most every scene, and narrating the story which skips back and forth — from the bus to the recent past, and then to the end of the trip — that hobbles the picture.

So, “Lifetime Original Movie,” here we come.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements

Cast: Talitha Eliana Bateman, Alfre Woodard, John Heard, Jacinda Barrett, Jessica Collins, Cloris Leachman

Credits: Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, script by Garry Williams, based on a novel by  Sarah Weeks. A Branded release.

Running time: 1:37

Gun-fetishizing, catch-phrasing, “Back in Black” set mayhem from a cranky old action star and a torture porn famous director. Yay.

So what has Hollywood shoved down our throats too often and for too long over recent decades?

Hit-man movies –as thrillers and comedies. And Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. The aged body builder’s slide into irrelevance probably won’t be halted by a Saban Films release. “Killing Gunther” is about a team of also-rans (actors, as well as the characters they play) trying to get “the world’s #1 hit-man,” the top dog in “the hit-man industry.”

Only in the movies do either of those things exist. Only in the movies is Arnold still working way past his expiration date. Why hasn’t he reached for cable? Oh. Right. His movies, with rare exceptions, are violent, lazy paycheck pictures for mouth-breathers.

The long strange odyssey of Christian Bale’s Oscar-winning/cape wearing career takes another turn with “Hostiles,” a Western of moral ambiguity, dust and violence.

Back in the Golden Age of Movies, leading men had benchmark roles. You did your combat film, your cop roles, your boxing picture, your Westerns. Bruce Willis was the last big star to complete that cycle. Now Christian Bale rides among the sagebrush.

“Hostiles” is slated for later this year.

A little “Kinsey,” a hint of “The Whole Wide World,” and the secret history of the character who inspired the year’s biggest box office hit — “Wonder Woman.” And the story of the man, the two women he loved (and who loved each other) whose personalities contributed to Wonder Woman. Looks fascinating, and tres kinky.

“American Made” gives Tom Cruise his “Goodfellas,” and brings Doug “The Bourne Identity” Liman back from the directing wilderness.

In Barry Seal, Cruise has a real person to bite into, a drawling, unquestioning, self-delusional anti-hero who parlayed gonzo flying skills to an integral role in an anti-communist crusade that devolved into an epic American debacle of The Greed Decade.

And he got filthy rich off Medellin drug cartel money in the bargain.

It’s “Blow” and “Air America” and “Narcos” all rolled into one laugh-through-the-grimaces romp, a picture so clever its damning history lesson may be ignored by those who don’t know history, and cannot recognize when it repeats itself.

Gary Spinelli’s script is built around mid-80s self-confessional videotapes in which Seal/Cruise tells all, tracking through his boring Baton Rouge life with his cheerleader-hot Baton Rouge wife (Sarah Wright), a TWA pilot recruited out of endless tedious “Welcome to Bakersfield” hops and into covert photographic work by the CIA, in the person of Agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson).

As Barry is a tad reckless — “I do tend to lead before I look.” — with the tiny taint of corruption (sneaking Cuban cigars into the country) about him, he buys in.

But what starts with taking photos of insurgent groups in the jungles of Central America quickly morphs into using his CIA-provided twin-engine plane to bring cocaine into Louisiana from Colombia. Rising kingpins Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda), Carlos Ledher (Fredy Yate Escobar) and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) make him an offer he cannot refuse.

And as it’s a challenge, to survive overloaded take-offs and murderously trigger-happy employers, one that pays him suitcases full of cash, Seal goes all in.

“I’m just a gringo who always delivers,” he grins.

Of course he grins. He’s Tom Cruise. But he dials down the swagger as the screenplay has Seal recall the thrills, the insanity and “patriotic duty” of it all with barely a trace of irony. As his family grows and his operation expands, sassy wife Lucy does what any made man’s bride would do. She asks few questions until after the fact, complies with affection and doesn’t worry about the mounds of cash buried in the backyard of their airport-side property in rural Arkansas.

“Daddy’s done lost his mind,” she says to comfort their small children on the night of a hasty “We’ve got to get out of town” moment.

Liman makes great use of Cruise’s ability to project physical competence — in the cockpit, making that first CIA delivery of guns to the backwoods thugs, the Contras of Nicaragua (they mug him), not totally panicking whenever the cartel hirelings joke around, threatening his life.

Cruise lets us wonder about Seal’s bravery and smarts. There’s bravado, not heroism, native cunning here, not deep thought. The character is flippant, and the film reflects this — glibly ignoring the consequences of all these off-the-books shenanigans, keeping death (if not the threat of it) mostly off-camera.

It’s a piece of history that many Americans — especially those of “There’s space on Mount Rushmore to put Ronald Reagan!” persuasion — choose to forget. As Seal flies his guns, drugs, Contras triangle for the Reagan White House, Central America and Colombia are permanently destabilized, causing decades of violence and a tidal wave of illegal immigrant refugees.

North America is narcotized — flooded with drugs. Contras slip out of their U.S. training camp and into the U.S. population. And there’s Ron and Nancy, on TV, “Just say no,” they say. And the whole illegal enterprise is crowned with criminal collusion with an enemy of the United States – Iran — the Iran-Contra Scandal. So yeah, let’s put the original criminal dotard Reagan on the dollar bill.

Whatever lessons for today “American Made” might offer, Cruise, Liman and Spinelli never let those consequences and the epic culture of corruption they came from spoil a good joke — dodging the FBI, DEA and ATF, earning a “get out of Arkansas jail free” phone call from Governor Bill Clinton (directed to do it by the Reagan White House).

The details are dazzling, endless “pizza delivery” orders from the CIA and from the cartel on rows of Mena, Arkansas pay-phones, grand parties with the drug lords in Colombia, blessed by their own bought-and-paid-for priests. And the nuts-and-bolts of the work — the precision flying, the money laundering and cash impact on a small town that looks the other way — make other movies and TV shows on the subject seem humorless and tame.

Just don’t think too much about the myriad bills that came due after the conviction (without jail time) of Col. Oliver North, or the staggering body count. That might spoil all the fun.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Alejandro Edda

Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, script by Gary Spinelli. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:55

“Abundant Acreage Available” is an intimate, warm and slightly screwball dramedy about country people old enough to fret over where they’ll be buried, and what constitutes “our land.”

It’s an indie film that reminds us of a world of actors Hollywood rarely uses playing characters who never turn up in mainstream films. And it’s set in a tiny corner of a vast country that the film industry is generally loathe to explore — the home stomping grounds of playwright, writer/director Angus MacLachlan (“Junebug,” “Goodbye to All That”) — central North Carolina.

We meet siblings Tracy (Amy Ryan) and Jesse (Terry Kinney) as she’s burying their dad. His remains are in a cardboard box and the perfect place to put him, she figures, is in the middle of their farm, amidst the stubble of last-year’s corn crop.

Under the bare trees of winter, they shiver a bit and bicker a lot.

“I think, uh…”

“I don’t care WHAT you think! This is his place, here with us, with his two kids for eternity!”

Jesse is a religious man, a Southern “type” — a “Big Mistake Christian.” Some disaster in his past made him reach for the lifeline and comfort that the Bible and church offered. He wants to “say some words,” but she isn’t having it. He declares he’s going to move the ashes to an old graveyard on the property. Even though those buried there aren’t from their family, it’s still “consecrated ground.” This just irks her further.

They don’t weep as they doggedly pack up their father’s few late-life possessions — a hospital bed, wheelchair, walker and medications.

And then one morning they wake up to the sight of a tent with three old men snoring in it on their 50 acres. Jesse is puzzled. Tracy just grabs a shotgun to punctuate her lecture about trespassing.

But Hans, Charles and Tom grew up on this farm, long ago. Their parents sold it to Jesse and Tracy’s dad. Now, Tom (Francis Guinan) uses a cane and has the unfiltered filthy mouth of a stroke victim, Hans (Max Gail) has a serene kindness that calms troubled waters. Charles (Steve Coulter) is the practical one, not wanting to impose, just wanting to get the car they drove up from Orlando fixed so they can leave now that they’ve seen the farm and the wooden, weathered 19th century farmhouse.

Tracy is alternately irritated and wary. But Jesse tends to see things as signs.

“God’s looking out for us, sending them here.”

And before you know it, he’s walking all over Tracy’s wishes, making plans to sell or give away either part of the farm or the whole thing to atone for some sin neither of them had anything to do with.

“Acreage” is a movie of little grace notes about the permanence of land, the impermanence of people, things and everything else.

“It’s all temporary,” Hans philosophizes. Finding an arrowhead in the dirt, hearing about this illness or that, remarking on flocks of starlings (an invasive bird species) or staring at the stars just underlines that.

Stage, TV and big screen veteran Kinney gives Jesse a weariness about life and the emotional rawness of a lost soul deep into the faith that is all that lets his life make sense.

Ryan gives Tracy a mercurial bite — veering from the obligations of “Southern hospitality” and the pent-up resentment of a woman who gave her life to caring for the dead father and a foolishly impulsive brother, coupled with an innate mistrust of city strangers.

There’s rarely a false note in the performances, even if much of what happens feels abrupt and part of someone’s (the writer/director’s, not the Almighty’s) plan. Characters, not just the stroke victim, tend to blurt out plans and “fantastic ideas” that leave Tracy — the sanest one here — dumbfounded.

The characters are homespun and vividly real even if the story unfolds in comfortable, easygoing melodramatic flourishes involving family legacies, dead fathers and land — Sam Shepard without the edge. Down to Earth folks in rural America talk about mortality differently than city people, and there isn’t a line of dialogue on that subject that doesn’t ring true.

But what’s most striking is the film’s palpable sense of place, the wintry scenes of people walking land that has, between them, formed generations of both families. I know a little something about that part of the world. Visit the Wikipedia page for East Bend for proof.  “Acreage” is so embedded in that earth you can taste it, smell the tobacco, cedar and slowly rotting corn stalks on those gently sloping hills.

And that firms up the characters and their connection to that land, making the film’s thesis, that there’s a genetic bond — at least in the South or to people who come from farming stock — to the place where they came from and the place that, at the end of life, calls them home.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Amy Ryan, Terry Kinney, Max Gail, Steve Coulter, Francis Guinan

Credits: Written and directed by Angus MacLachlan. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

If Dame Judi Dench was going to revisit one of her great roles in the twilight of her storied career, it had to be Queen Victoria.

Her take on the sad, autocratic, fat, lonely grump who ruled over the British Empire at its peak was a career highlight, showing the iconic queen’s vulnerable side in “Mrs. Brown.” 

Recent scholarship about another particular friend of the widowed queen provided the inspiration for “Victoria & Abdul,” a send-up of Victorian conservatism that is “based on a true story — mostly.” And start to finish, it’s bloody delightful, a romp “mostly.”

As the ageing Victoria heads into her Golden Jubilee, the Empire’s rulers the The Raj (India) strike a commemorative coin. They press a tall, impressive-looking jail clerk, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) and a grumpier, shorter draftee (Adeel Akhtar) into service to deliver it to her as a grand royal banquet.

Their escort, Mr. Bigge (Robin Soans) and the various royal decorum enforcers who instruct them have one over-riding edict. “You must not look her in the eye.”

Abdul does, and gives her a smile. And thus does a great little-known friendship between ruler and servant begin.

The Empress of India has found her biggest Muslim fan, and Abdul, with his musical accent and tales of the lost love that inspired the Taj Mahal, the glories of Indian architecture and the opulence of the subcontinent’s rulers, enchants her.

Which troubles, then enrages her Head of the Royal Household (the slack-jawed Tim Pigott-Smith) and her ageing wastrel of an heir apparent, Bertie (a marvelously blustering Eddie Izzard). The insults, veiled and unveiled racism of one and all (Olivia Williams is Lady Churchill, no “lady” at all) pour forth.

There are mixed signals, confused intentions all around. And the source of it all is her “most obedient servant,” her sounding board, the man who would teach her Urdu “because Hindi is of the lower classes,” her instructor in the Koran.

It’s delightful to think of this dowdy old woman being this curious about the world into her dotage, determined to learn something of her Empire through a man who only wants to please her, to brighten her days. A weary monarch tired of life and power learns something of what life is all about from this humble man of India — “service.”

And Abdul and his reluctant sidekick Muhammad (Akhtar)?

“How do you like your new Scottish clothes?”

“They’re very scratchy, ma’am.”

“Everything in Scotland is scratchy.

Director Stephen Frears (“Philomena,” “The Queen”) gives Dench’s return to the role of Victoria a splendid build-up. She’s ancient, doddering, has to be helped out of bed, dressed and marched through every dreary day of her Jubilee. She speed-slurps her soup and sprints through meals, a near slob whose dinner guests must likewise race to polish off a course before she does, lest they leave the table hungry.

“Victoria & Abdul” spares no expense in peopling the glorious settings of Empire, from Windsor Castle to Balmoral to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight with legions of red-coated servants and scores of over-dressed guests at court. It’s a gorgeously detailed look at the empty opulence of an era.

Dench, who spoke of retirement a couple of years back (she’s going blind), manages some lovely moments of empathy, outrage and wounded vulnerability. Surrounding her with the likes of Michael Gambon (her prime minister, Lord Salisbury) is only her due.

Fazal’s Abdul is less fully drawn in. The character can seem opportunistic, vain, a bit full of himself as he rises in the ranks thanks to his student’s patronage. He glories in his uniforms, with the gold brocade “VR” (Victoria Regina) embroidered upon his chest. He is a Muslim eager for acceptance in the modern West.

But Fazal rarely has more to play than guileless. For a movie about racism, repression and class distinction, “passive” is a troubling take on the character. It never quite crosses over into patronizing, however. The Lee Hall script gives the whole picture the air of a comical “sick burn” of colonialism and ethnocentrism, and leaves all the British-hating fury to Muhammad, which tends to balance things out.

The picture remembers “Mrs. Brown,” but tilts towards “The King & I” in its light tone and jolly befuddlement. Perhaps that’s all we’re meant to take from this post-Brexit jab at British racism, that cultural exchanges, not cultural clashes, are how we grow and come to know those we dismiss, resent or fear.

Either way, this comical poke at the people who invented most of the world’s racial slurs could not have come at a better time, for Britain and for the Queen of Actresses, Dame Judi, back to playing one of her greatest roles and managing it, as always, with acrid wit and style.

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

Cast: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Tim Pigott-Smith, Michael Gambon, Olivia Williams, Adeel Akhtar

Credits: Directed by Stephen Frears, script by Lee Hall, based on the  Shrabani Basu book. A Focus Features release. 

Running time: 1:52

So the Danish toymaker LEGO just announced massive layoffs because kids aren’t buying enough of their snap-together designer toys.

Their latest movie isn’t helping the bottom line all that much. “The LEGO Ninjago Movie” opened to a paltry (for animation) $20 million last weekend. Variety reports Warners spent a fortune on TV advertising on the monstrosity. And all it did was tip filmgoers — especially the young — that it isn’t very funny.

Heaven knows I avoided seeing it as long as I could.

But hey, there’s the new interactive Ninjago Ride to pull in park patrons at LEGOland California and LEGOland Florida. So maybe all this corporate synergy — movies that sell toys and theme park tickets, toys that draw moviegoers and park visitors — will pay off down the line.

Because darned if there’s an honest to Pete laugh in this film. “Ninjago,” with its slapdash script by like a dozen credited (story and screenplay) writers, three directors and 101 minutes of talking, kung-fu fighting plastic toys, should send this franchise back to direct-to-video where it belongs.

After the unexpected delights and Oscar-winning song of “The LEGO Movie,” “Ninjago” shows LEGO movies jumpingthe shark — literally.

A city not-unlike Hong Kong — Hey, LEGOland Shanghai opens in 2022, coindence I’m sure. — Ninjago lives under the menace of a four-armed villain named Garmadon, voiced by Justin Theroux.

And no slap at Theroux, but if you can’t get Will Arnett to do your dark-voiced wise-cracker villain (or hero), maybe don’t make the movie.

Garmadon terrorizes Ninjago from his volcanic lair just offshore, leading his minions (no, Universal doesn’t own the label) and their “mechs” (cool LEGO gadget planes, subs, etc.) in raids, shooting sharks at the natives, sharks who go “Num num num num num” as they rain down on all the plastic people.

A team of six young ninjas are all that can stop him, ninjas whose skills are named for water, ice, fire, earth and who-cares-what-the-others-are?

One of them is Lloyd (Dave Franco), who just happens to be Garmadon’s son. They’re so estranged the villain doesn’t know how to pronounce his kid’s name — “Luh-Lloyd.” Two ‘l’s,’ right?

Things get bad enough where the ninjas have to call upon “the ultimate weapon.” Hint, it’s something that the big, furry pet that is the bane of LEGO kids the world over, a joke given away in the trailers, is crazy for. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always “the ultimate ULTIMATE weapon.”

And the quest that may bring father and son back together is to the “Temple of Fragile Foundations.” Eleven credited writers, back-engineering jokes into a movie designed to sell toys, and that’s what they came up with.

The story is told by a Chinese curiosity shop owner (Jackie Chan) to a little boy who comes in to see his wares in a live-action prologue. That casting will also help with the Chinese market, though it does zilch for the movie.

The slangy-jokey dialogue is of the “I’m totes profesh” variety, the best musical gag is the Chinese flute-playing teacher, Master Wu (Chan again) bleeping out “It’s a Hard Knock Life.”

In other words, the dull, exhausted toy ad that the TV commercials for this film prophesied came true. Unless you’re totes’ ‘sessed with plastic toys fighting, flirting and telling lame jokes, “Ninjago” has nothing to offer.

As a franchise, LEGO movies are toast. Totes’.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Jackie Chan, Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Fred Armisen, Michael Pena, Abbi Jacobson, Ali Wong, Charlene Yi

Credits: Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan, script by Bob Logan, Paul Fisher, Tom Wheeler, William Wheeler, Jared Stern and John Whittington A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:41