Movie Nation

Memories of many a cinematic spook tale waft through David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” a haunting, meditative and cryptic variation of age-old themes.

It’s about love’s link to the afterlife, more Tibetan Book of the Dead than its warm and fuzzy big screen interpretations “Ghost” or “Truly, Madly Deeply.”

The ever-downbeat Lowery casts his “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” stars, Oscar winner Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, as a musician and his wife. The husband ever-so-softly resists his wife’s efforts to move them out of the rundown suburban ranch house that’s been their home. It needs paint. Things go thump in the night there.

But he’s accepted that move, and they’re slowly packing up. Then he dies, and as we see her  (Rooney Mara) tearlessly identify the body in the morgue, he rises up, under the sheet, and follows her home.

We have to take Lowery’s word for it that this is Affleck under that elaborate, layered bed clothing. There’s no spoken conversation in the afterlife. No living person sees the sheet, much less the spirit allegedly looking through the two coal-black eyeholes out of it.

The dead husband watches her grieve. He drifts through the silence, with only the wind, wind-chimes and the sound of distant children playing to ease his solitude.

A startling moment — he spies another ghost in a neighboring house, “waiting for someone,” and realize that’s his fate, too. He sees his wife start to move on, and as she does, she slips a note into a crack in the wall.

Then? Oblivion. Or a rental’s version of it. Other tenants show up, and there are endless efforts to retrieve, without corporeal fingers (covered by the sheet) the hidden note and moments of supernatural rage and frustration and a long lecture on the metaphysical by the sharpest drunk at a Texas party.

Lowery shot this in a square aspect ratio, giving the picture the feel of a series of photos in an old family album. He is sparing with sound effects, more sparing with action and incident, giving the actors little to work with other than a whisper and their eyes.

As both Mara and Affleck have made brooding silences their forte, that minimal plot, dialogue and story arc feel complex even when the movie has stumbled into gazing into its own navel. They don’t give us much to cling to, here.

“A Ghost Story” is just cryptic enough to spark conversation, but cut-and-dried enough to make that debate a short one. The odd hair-raising moment — it is a supernatural romantic mystery, after all — doesn’t explain why it was ridiculously saddled with an “R” rating.

Its spooky tone and the odd jolt don’t remedy its chilly remoteness or self-conscious longueurs. But it’s good to be reminded that there’s a reason we cling to the afterlife as a concept and flock to films that indulge that belief, the warm and fuzzy versions, anyway.

MPAA Rating: R for brief language and a disturbing image

Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara

Credits:Written and directed by David Lowery. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:32

A teen discovers a magical Chinese Wish Pot, makes a few wishes and is slow to grasp or accept responsibility for the consequences of her actions in “Wish Upon.”

Yeah, that’s a worn plot device and the movie has the same theme as a thousand and one morality tales, starting with Aladdin and taking in assorted “Twilight Zone” episodes, plus films like “The Box” and “The Brass Teapot.”

The twist here is that, since it’s set in high school, the pot can be used to punish mean girls, lure the boy you’re crushing on and bling up your life without credit cards. And the high school stuff, at least, is nasty-tasty fun. The rest? A mildly unpleasant shrug of a movie.

Joey King, of “Independence Day: Resurgence” and “Going in Style,” is Clare, our pouty, put-upon heroine. We root for her because in the opening scene, we see the five year-old Clare park her training-wheeled pink bike, run upstairs and witness her mother’s suicide.

Years later, that bike is still lying in the grass where she left it. Life goes on, with her dumpster-diving junkman dad (Ryan Phillippe) adding to their unkempt hoard and Clare enduring the ceaseless teasing of the mean girls (Josephine Langford, Daniela Barbosa) and their cell-photo-shaming gay mean boy accomplice (Alexander Nunez).

The balance of power between Clare and her outcast pals (Sydney Park, Shannon Purser) and Team Mean changes the day her dad brings home a clockwork six-sided music box with Chinese inscriptions all over it. A random wish “I wish Darcie Chapman (Langford) would just ROT” comes true.

But it’s not until Clare has made other wishes that come true, followed by dark fates for friends, relatives and others, that she turns to the Chinese nerd boy (Ki Hong Lee) who harbors a not-so-secret love for her, and they figure out what she’s got.

For every one of the seven wishes she’s in store for, there are seven ugly repercussions — death dealt with wildly varying degrees of skill and little suspense by cinematographer turned director John J. Leonetti (“Annabelle”). Most of the “repercussions” fritter away the chills and eyes-averting horrors to come, although a couple almost pay off.

The big idea such stories all boil down to is “What would you be willing to subject others to in order to get what you want?” Leonetti and screenwriter Barbara Marshall pretty much botch that, too, and King doesn’t do well at playing “moral dilemma.”

The Chinese subject matter and characters suggest this one was built for a lucrative foreign market, one in particular.

What works here is the gothic nightmare of a modern American high school — filled with rude, cruel and even violent kids, all of whom want to look like Taylor Swift, their queen.

King makes a gawky, accessible girl-next-door, the short, dark girl the class dreamboat would never notice. Her scenes with sassy BFF Meredith (Park) have some snap.

“I think he said ‘Hi’ to me once…”

“Well, that’s something!”

“…in the FIFTH grade!”

But once the magic box, its allure and its consequences take over, the run-of-the-mill “Wish Upon” loses its promise and its footing, like a character about to tumble into a randomly-placed set of cow horns. Ahem.

Maybe it’ll feel smarter and tighter once it’s dubbed into Chinese.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violent and disturbing images, thematic elements and language

Cast: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Sydney Park, Ki Hong Lee, Josephine Langford, Alice Lee

Credits:Directed by John R. Leonetti, script by Barbara Marshall. A — release.

Running time: 1:24

As its all-encompassing title suggests, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is a vast sci-fi cornucopia.

It is an eye-popping encore from the director of “The Fifth Element,” a densely packed screen that overwhelms you with sights unseen and worlds beyond imagination.  Luc Besson and his team out-“Avatar” James Cameron when it comes to state-of-the-art eye candy.

It’s light and goofy, a “Flash Gordon” for our times pairing up two pretty young space commandos on a meandering video game string of quests — magical talismans included — that somehow fit into their simple, original mission. Skewing young, it plays like the many lesser “Harry Potter” pictures, interested in our hero and heroine’s quest, more interested in the exotic creatures and stunning things it can show us.

Costumes, alien races, technology and geography dazzle, and if that’s not enough — there’s model-turned-actress Cara Delevingne and her eyebrows-without-end, and sleepy-eyed island siren Rihanna and sleepier-eyed Dane DeHaan center stage.

If summer movies are morphing into game-inspired thrill rides, “Valerian” is the next logical step — pointless chases that hurtle through wildly imaginative gamescapes as seen by the character doing the running, shootouts that have everything but a body-count scorecard at the bottom of the screen, banal dialogue and thinly developed characters.

It’s a lot to take in, with nothing worth absorbing.

DeHaan is the title character, a government agent long teamed up with Agent Laureline (Delivingne, of “Pan” and “Paper Towns”). He’s a player who longs to marry his partner, and she’s not having it. Not pre-mission, with them parked on a Holodeck beach, or on the mission itself — racing their spaceship across the cosmos to pluck the last Mul Converter from an other-dimensional “million stores” bazaar.

Naturally, that’s in the desert. Science fiction films should swear off alien deserts for a decade or two.

We’ve already seen this alien world, Mul, peopled by lanky, glittery digitally-enhanced runway ready transgender models, destroyed  — collateral damage in some vast battle in space. The movie’s most touching and fanciful scenes are here, on Mul in the film’s prologue.

Valerian and Laureline dash back to Alpha, the ultimate outcome of humanity’s space-station-building mania. It’s a vast interstellar cosmopolis, with a myriad of races in an endless variety of environments — underwater, underground — all cobbled together in a floating mass that supports millions.

Clive Owen is their trigger-happy commander, the jazz icon Herbie Hancock is the “minister” in charge of their team. There are battlebots and spies, portly American tourists, alien hustlers and smugglers (John Goodman voices this film’s version of Jabba the Hutt), and a red light district where every sexual fantasy — and fanboy fantasy (look for a version of Jessica Rabbit) — can be fulfilled.

That’s where Bubble (Rihanna), a shape-shifting dancer, does her show-stopping act. Ethan Hawke, taking his costume cues from Mardi Gras, Captain Jack Sparrow and Woody Harrelson’s “Zombieland” hunter, is her musical accompanist and pimp.

Besson should have spent the money on a rewrite, to dress up the dreadfully dull comic book dialogue, if nothing else. “Valerian!” is exclaimed more often than “Harry Potter!” was, which was a lot — enough to warrant a drinking game.

The banter — “The honeymoon comes AFTER the wedding. You know that, right?” — rarely interrupts “Valerian, be careful!” variations.

I’d dwell on the three short, obsequious anteater-snouted aliens (Shingouz) who sell information as a little old-fashioned intergalactic French anti-Semitism. But you’ll see that for yourself.

It’s epic, the action beats are sturdy and the laughs — while not plentiful — give it a “Guardians Lite” tone. “Valerian” has more of a sense of wonder about this exotica than the “Star Wars” universe,  and more of a universe for that matter.

But for all that, it needed effort on a higher plane to eclipse the other ambitious but generally disappointing sci-fi of this summer. Workshop the story, script-doctor the dialogue and recast the lovely leads with actors who generate a little actual sexual heat and Besson might have had another “Fifth Element,” a minor classic on his hands.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action, suggestive material and brief language

Cast: Cara Delevingne, Dane DeHaan, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke

Credits:Written and directed by, Luc Besson, based on the French comic book. An STX/Europa release.

Running time: 2:12

Love that Luc Besson, or as he likes to refer to himself, “Monsieur Luc.” As in, “I prefer to produce. Zat way, when dinner time comes, I say to the director, ‘Bon chance,’ and he says, ‘Leaving, Monsieur Luc? But we have hours to film.”

“Not Monsieur Luc.”

Told me that one of the times I’ve interviewed him.

But as a director, he is probably the one guy in Europe with the behind-the-camera clout and the vast team it takes to get something as ambitious as this comic book adaptation on the screen. He’s a justly-celebrated action director. So as odd as the trailers are, promising eye candy and Besson’s famous eye (leer) for young talent (Cara Delevingne, Dane DeHaan) and little else, I’m remembering how low I set the bar for “The Fifth Element,” and was pleasantly surprised.

We’ll see, Monsieur Luc. We shall see. “Valerian” opens July 21. 

“Battle Scars” wraps itself in the flag, the Corps, the Purple Heart and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

But really, it’s just a lowdown and dirty B-thriller set in the underworld of any city in America that Johnny comes marching home to.

“Johnny” in this case is Luke Stephens, played by Zane Holtz of the TV version of “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Luke is just back from Afghanistan and has locked himself in the bathroom where he can stare in the mirror, or look down at the bodily injury settlement check he got from Uncle Sam.

He doesn’t seem to be missing any limbs. There’s no empty shirt-sleeve, no limp, just the screeching of his concerned “You won’t TOUCH me” wife (Amy Davidson) to clue us in on his injury. He silently packs a bag and storms out, into a strip club where he runs afoul of credit card theft, then he drops in on his low-level drug-dealer brother (Ryan Eggold).

But brother Nicky is having a fling with one of the strippers, and “Summer” (Kristen Renton) is best buds with Michelle (Heather McComb), the fishnet-bedecked fox who filched Luke’s card numbers to finance a shopping spree.

And that little crime entangles Luke in Michelle’s world — her Russian thug-boss (Fairuza Balk, scary as ever) and that boss’s muscle (Jamal Woolard, best known for playing Biggie Smalls in a couple of movies).

There are beat-downs and threats, kidnapping and confrontations with “The Colonel,” the brothers’ nickname for their Corps-to-the-Core dad (David James Elliott).

” I KNEW that Purple Heart was going to go to your head!”

Every now and then, there’s a flashback. Luke only remembers that last day of combat in Afghanistan, different details come forward in every dream. There’s little hint of PTSD in the script, or Holtz’s performance. It doesn’t drive the plot or really connect to the mess he finds himself in.

It’s forgotten altogether when Luke gets into tussles. Fellows in his condition shouldn’t submit themselves to a beating, “hero” or not. And the reasons this married man takes an interest in the stripper who stole from him are as laughable as the surprise third-act “twist.”

There’s one touching scene — just one. It hints at a movie that might have been, one that didn’t involve strippers and strip clubs. The performances are mostly flat, but let’s not lay this mess at the feet of the actors.

The assorted fights and arguments are blandly written and staged by writer-director Danny Buday. And he does a less-than-half-hearted job of working his big PTSD subtext into his utterly generic thriller.

But there are opening and closing titles that throw statistics about injuries, the alarming suicide rate among veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars. So, um, support the troops and see it? Is that what he had in mind?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, combat, drug content and strip club sexual content.

Cast: Zane Holtz, Fairuza Balk, Jamal Woolard

Credits:Written and directed by Danny Buday. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:34

Here’s a ferocious little gangland thriller with a Persian twist.

“The Persian Connection” is a gangster picture set among Iranian ex-pats living, loving and dallying in the dark side of LA as they grapple with their tortured past.

Reza Sixo Safai, in a career-making performance, is Behrouz, a hustler/junkie/fixer struggling to “go clean” by moving into real estate in Los Angeles.

But his past won’t let him. Behrouz was once a Basiji, an Iranian boy conned into becoming a child soldier/martyr by the Ayatollah and his minions. They ran an elaborate con on kids recruited to fight and die in the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s, dressing up actors in Medieval armor, plumes and scimitar to convince them an ancient warrior had returned from the grave to lead them to victory over the Iraqi apostates.

Decades later, Behrouz still smokes black tar opium, takes care of the spawn of an Iranian crime boss, Cirrus-jar (Parfiz Sayyad), sleeps with a Russian hooker (Helena Mattson) and dreams of taking her and her young son Sacha away from all this violence and depravity.

Of course, Cirrus-jar isn’t having that. He’s going to deal with Sacha’s competing dealer-dad (Nikolai Kinski) by making it Behrouz’s lethal business to take care of the guy. 

It’s all about blackmail, competing drug regimes and competing loyalties, as Behrouz tries to skate over the mayhem bubbling beneath him and escape his bloody past.

If you understand the phrase “genre picture,” you know just how impossible that will be.

Women (Laura Harring among them) throw themselves at our hero, who is “fighting for a place in the sun…Or do you prefer the shadows?”

Men (Dominic Rains among them) knew Behrouz back when he was a child warrior for Allah, which is how he developed his taste for opium, his skills at poker and his ability to swing both ways, sexually.

“How many men did we bury together?”

Somehow, events have to transpire to park Behrouz, Oksana his love and the killer Persians (Cirrus-ray) and Russians (Julian Sands, remember him?) in a place where all this confusion, menace and murder can be settled, once and for all.

Safai is a Persian Clive Owen in this part, a long and lean villain trying to go clean by fighting, stabbing, shooting and double-crossing his way out of his various entanglements, all for the love of a Belorussian hooker and the son Behrouz’s actions left fatherless.

“The Persian Connection” is a movie of lurid, neon-colored set-pieces (clubs, motels, etc.) where violence is meted out to the unjust by the just. If you don’t know how this will play out, this must be your first gangland thriller.

A stand-out moment — a gun slinging newcomer from Persia (David Diaan), so fresh that he doesn’t speak the language, empties a clip at Berhouz in a fit of rage. His employer demands, “Where do you think you ARE?”

“In America,” he fires back, where any nut or terrorist or gangster can get a gun and use it with little threat of repercussions.

It’s a B-movie, start to finish, a film noir with Americo-Persian flourishes, but a formula picture in any event. “The Persian Connection” still manages scenes that pop, violence that shocks (and satisfies) and performances that remind us that in the United States, movie stars come from all races and classes. Eventually.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, drug abuse, explicit sexual content

Cast: Reza Sixo Safai, Helena Mattsson, Parviz Sayyad, Julian Sands, Laura Harring, Dominic Rains

Credits: Written and directed by Daniel Grove. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:40

The mean, miserly curmudgeon whom arthritic Maudie has come to work for lays down the law in the cruelest terms.

“Let me tell you how it is around here,” Everett bellows. “There’s ME. There’s them dogs. Them chickens. Then YOU.”

It speaks volumes about the crippled Maudie’s desperation that she chooses to stay on as live-in housekeeper in a weathered fish peddler’s cottage in 1930s Nova Scotia. She’s suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since childhood. Her family has hidden her away with a callous, disapproving aunt. She smokes, drinks, walks with a doubled-over limp and tries to not let the fact that kids throw rocks at her when he passes.

“Some people don’t like it if you’re different.”

The inarticulate brute she’s to work for abuses her. And as she’s played by “Happy Go Lucky” Sally Hawkins, we fret that we’ll never see that shy but electric smile that literally lights up the screen.

“Maudie” is a conventionally unconventional “life of an artist” film biography. We see the obstacles, ranging from the gnarled fists she uses to hold a brush to family dismissal to local disdain for her work. She’s a town character. “My six year-old could paint as well.”

But he doesn’t, and couldn’t. Maudie Lewis was one of the great Canadian primitive artists of the twentieth century. And Hawkins shoulders her burdens without complaint in this simple, sedate romance with art.

Because as mean as Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) is — the movie takes some liberties — the relationship these two actors recreate from Sherry White’s simple script is a slow-motion marvel.

Maudie is desperate to escape a family that has deemed her a burden and an embarrassment. Everett, the village crank, has advertised for a maid.

“Lookin’ for a woman.”
“What d’ye think I am?”

From that unpromising beginning, through every insult, rude rejection of her food, cleaning skills or feminine wiles and every public humiliation, Aisling Walsh’s film lets us see the tiniest degrees of softening. The moment Everett finally lets Maudie ride in the push-cart he makes his deliveries in pops off the screen like a “You had me at ‘Hello'” kiss.

Hawkins easily slips into this character like the other eccentrics and downtrodden women in her repertoire. Hawke does the real stretching here, dressing down, roughing up and achieving “utterly detestable” — at first.

“I don’t like most people,” Everett grumbles.

“Well, they don’t like you.”

Whatever life hurls at Maudie, she still has her paintings. She does seasonal scenes of the life she sees around her, Christmas cards. It takes a New York vacationer (Kari Matchett) to see talent — “Show me how you see the world!” — and exploit it. Maudie is paid a pittance for her paintings, even as her fame grows.

The best way to progress through a story whose arc is this familiar might be to deal with the well-worn touchstones in such a life in brisk strokes. Director Walsh and screenwriter White focus, instead, on the slow-boil romance, two outsiders who almost grudgingly make that love connection.

This is more “Iris” than “Frida” or “Seraphine,” though anyone who has ever seen the screen story of an artist — “Basquiat,” “Pollock,” etc. — will ease into the well-established rhythms of such films.

Its nearly two-hours on the screen can be a bit of a trudge, at times. Even though “Maudie” limits itself these two characters packed into this tiny house, it never feels as if anything’s been left out.

We see their world and their relationship through their eyes, not the outside world’s. Hawkings and Hawke turn that myopic view into lives as dark, rich and full as “Mr. Turner” with performances that bite, bend and breathe.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some thematic content and brief sexuality.

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett

Credits:Directed by Aisling Walsh, script by Sherry White. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:55

A little mid-summer horror is headed our way this weekend. Curious to see this one, and if it has more suspense and harrowing emotions than the indie Aussie thriller “Killing Ground.”

I tend to roll my eyes at supernatural horror pics. But this looks creepy.

Harry Dean Stanton has classed up many a small role, from “The Rose” to “Alien,” “Escape from New York,” and “Paris, Texas” to “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”

Remember his famous line from “Red Dawn?”

“AaaahhhhhhVENGE me, boys!”

“Lucky” is a tour de old OLD age gives us Harry in his comically weathered, desert Southwest dotage, with support from David Lynch, Beth Grant, and Tom Skerritt, Ed Begley Jr.  and James Darren.

James DARREN!

Stanton has long been the acting profession’s version of Keith Richards — aging, living on, surviving, smoking the whole way. And cool for just hanging on.

Remember, director John Carroll Lynch is NO relation to weird agent David Lynch. J.C. Lynch was the probable Zodiac killer in “Zodiac,” and the stressed-out McDonald brother in “The Founder” (Nick Offerman’s the other brother).

This looks and feels like a fall film, so thank heavens we won’t see it until the blockbuster dust has cleared the air.

Style points to the makers of “The Sabbatical” for puncturing, once and for all, the stereotype of “nice” Canadians for all of us below the 49th parallel.

The film’s perpetually dyspeptic “hero” is cranky enough to put that “They’re just so much NICER than us” image to rest.

James Whittingham, sort of a grumpy Dan Aykroyd, plays Professor James Pittman, a photography professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. He’s the kind of guy who reads the student evaluations at the end of the semester and vows revenge upon the worst of them. Nasty “customer comments” card remarks at the offending student’s coffee shop is about as clever as that gets.

James is about to go on sabbatical, the one thing, after tenure (job security) that non-academics hate about academia more than most anything — aside from the informed liberal politics that dominate the world of the educated “elite.”

And James underscores that year-off-with-pay resentment by planning on taking it easy, getting over his burn-out. That’s when his dean hits him with “We’re all looking forward to seeing the BOOK you bring back.” He wants a “magnum opus” of photography, with an implied “publish or perish” threat in his plea. He wants proof that “someone likes your work well enough to kill trees for it.”

Damn. So much for leaning back, recharging the old batteries. James, given to withering comments to his publisher and complaints to his academic wife (Bernadette Mullen), who tunes him out, is stuck with this ax hanging over his head. The fact that this “street photographer” is as harsh on his own work as he is on everybody else in his field isn’t a help.

But that’s how he meets his muse.

Lucy (Laura Abramsen) weeps at art shows, picks at her guitar in the park and flirts — just a bit — with this crank with a camera. She’s a painter, a student and when James loses his license (don’t ask), the free spirited/reckless driving/romantically-complicated Lucy agrees to drive him around so that he can take pictures.

The movie’s limited landscape — in and around Regina — suggests James’s do-the-bare-minimum approach to this project. Whatever he’s photographing, it won’t require travel.

Its charms lie in the grumpy way James deals with the world, a culture overrun with junk art and the lazy thinking that cannot grasp the difference between real “depth” and emotional connection to a picture, a real book (not a comic one) or film that aims just over our heads, and pandering piffle.

In one giggle of a scene, James offends a young woman by taking her picture. She demands he “delete it,” even as he tries to explain celluloid film cameras don’t work that way. The generation of “idiots” all around him can’t even grasp the difference between digital and analog, or so it seems to him.

“Sabbatical” is an “Educating Rita” of slighter-than-slight charms, too short and close to the surface to achieve much more than vasectomy gags, a pot-bellied academic’s first acid trip and the joys of ridiculing a “fraud” of a “blind photographer” (Paul Crépeau). 

But Whittingham, an actor unknown on this side of the border, is onto something with this grump, a misunderstood EveryMan just talented enough to fear his own lack of talent, just smart enough to see the limits of his intelligence, and the horrific shortcomings of the next generation’s.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual references and brief drug use

Cast: James Whittingham, Laura Abramsen,  Bernadette Mullen, Mike Gill, Paul Crépeau

Credits:Directed by Brian Stockston, script by James Whittingham and Brian Stockton. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:22