Movie Nation

Every time you think Hollywood’s got a handle on”faith-based” films, they go out and make another movie reminding you of the extremes these movies too often fall into.

For every “Miracles from Heaven,” “Risen” or “Soul Surfer,” there are scads of clunkers at either end of the spectrum. We get too much of the angry, anti-intellectual victimhood of “God’s Not Dead,” and the insipid piffle of “Heaven is For Real” or “Letters to God.”

“The Shack” sits firmly in the latter trash pile. A grim “feel-good” drama about a father (Sam Worthington) who earns a visit to heaven after losing his little girl to a murderous abductor and losing himself in grief, it features a big name cast and a some novel casting touches, but nothing else to recommend it.

Perhaps, when you see that father sprinting happily across the surface of a lake with Jesus (Avraham Aviv Alush) you will agree. And giggle.

Worthington (“Avatar”), an Aussie who has reduced his acting to a whisper so hoarse every line sounds looped in post-production, is Mack, the dad whose camping trip with his kids goes terribly wrong in an instant.

His teen daughter (Megan Charpentier) stands up in a canoe and tips it over. And while he’s rescuing her and his son, his littlest girl (Amelie Eve) is kidnapped.

Stuart Hazeldine’s film handles the shock and terror of this moment reasonably well. As the trauma of the innocent child’s fate becomes clear, her father falls into crippling grief, the surviving daughter clams up with guilt, leaving the faithful wife and mother (Radha Mitchell) and their preacher (country star Tim McGraw) to try and hold them all together.

Nan (Mitchell) has such a personal relationship with God that she addresses the Almighty as Papa, “a little too familiar for my taste,” Mack confesses. But when he gets a letter from Papa in his mailbox, a teasing taunt inviting him back to “The Shack” where his little girl met her end, Mack is enraged. Who sent it? The preacher, inviting him to seek solace in his faith? The killer?

It’s when Mack sets out for that shack in the woods that his spiritual healing and forgiveness begin.

Here’s what I liked. The oldest daughter questions their faith, comparing the myths of the Bible to an Indian legend Dad likes to relate, to which Dad simplistically replies, “If the Bible says it, it must be true.” Unquestioning, delivered without a serious moment’s thought.

The comforting presence that greets Mack at the shack is played by Earth Mother/Oscar winner Octavia Spencer, not exactly your stereotypical representation of God. Jesus isn’t a blond/blue-eyed Viking preacher, but Middle Eastern.

Then there’s the Third leg of the Trinity, the “Holy Wind” (or spirit, if you like). She’s played by Sumire Matsubara, a willow model, beautiful and runway ready but an acting non-starter.

In this fantastical forest of healing Mack finds himself in, winter ends and all is flowering and verdant. His “issues” are analyzed, and his anger for his deity is delivered in a hiss (as is most every line).

“You let my little girl die. You abandoned me.”

All he gets in return is cryptic, narcissistic self-help hooey.

“When all you see if your pain, you lose sight of Me.”

There are attempts at humor. Cooking in heaven is just…heavenly, prompting “Oh my GOD” this food is good jokes. And there’s half-a-laugh in Spencer’s reaction to Mack/Worthington’s expectation of “your whole WRATH thing.”

“My what?”

But from the unnecessary preacher-narration that invades the film here and there to the inane routines the heavenly trio push at Mack — fishing, eating, walks, debates and prayer — “The Shack” is saddled with the banal when it claims to be presenting the extraordinary.

The best faith-based films don’t lean on the supernatural nearly this heavily. But the self-published novel this is built on is deep into fantasy fiction, so there you are.

So while I appreciate any faith-based film that isn’t all about the anger and intellectual dishonesty of “God’s Not Dead,” there’s no endorsing a fairy-tale this literal and insipid.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material including some violence

Cast: Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, Radha Mitchell, Tim McGraw, Avraham Aviv Alush

Credits:Directed by Stuart Hazeldine, script by John Fusco, Andrew Lanham, Destin Daniel Cretton, based on the novel by William P. Young. A Summit/Liongsate release.

Running time:

The clever scribes handed the job of this generation’s botching of “King Kong” had a cute idea.

“Let’s make an ‘Apocalypse Now’ riff. You know. ‘Heart of Darkness,’ guys named Marlow and Conrad, helicopters in the jungle — Creedence Clearwater Revival and “White Rabbit” — the works!”

So that’s what they did with “Kong: Skull Island.” They made a bad Vietnam movie — Their only research was in watching Hollywood versions of Vietnam — and ladled on metaphors about a trigger-happy U.S. military “invading” a jungle, attacking the freakishly large natives, and paying the price.

It’s “Avatar” simplistic, glib and dumb and not nearly as funny as they seem to think it is.

“Skull Island” resets the Kong myth in 1973, with America backing out of Vietnam (their history is fuzzy) and a helicopter combat corps sent to escort crackpot “scientist” Randa (John Goodman) and others who want to explore this hidden island that a satellite has just discovered.

Samuel L. Jackson is the chopper commander who recites the myth of Icarus to his dozen crews as they helicopter into the stormy abyss. Because, you know, the whole science makes you “fly too close to the sun” metaphor isn’t obvious enough. Capt. Packard makes the standard-issue “wouldn’t let us win” Vietnam speech about “This time, we won’t cut and run.”

Tom Hiddleston, phoning it in, is the ex-SAS officer hired as “tracker.” Oscar winner Brie Larson is the “anti-war (combat) photographer” who tags along.

And John C. Reilly is the World War II pilot whose dogfight, crash and ensuring fight-to-the-death with his Japanese foe — until the giant ape shows up — is the film’s thrilling introduction to this world. Lt. Marlow survives that fight and almost 30 years on the island, with its mystical natives, giant insects, reptiles and mammals, and serves as tour guide for the large, heavily-armed but overmatched team that arrives in the ’70s.

“We’re all gonna DIE.”

The choppers play rock’n roll tapes as they thump into combat, the GIs, who have bombed the island as their first act, are stunningly quick to accept the impossible and try to do battle with it.

“So are we just not gonna TALK about this?”

The effects are impressive, with Kong often seen striding and swatting down helicopters in slow-motion, accentuating his scale. The “science” of the whole thing is B-movie preposterous in the extreme. More effort was spent on the jokes.

Lt. Marlow needs to be brought up to speed about “the world today.”

“So the war’s over. Who won?”

“Which war?”

“Seems about right.”

“We’ve even put a man on the moon.”

“No kidding? They leave him there? What’d he eat?”

“Tang.”

The comic approach to this feels right. But the Vietnam era racism, the constant Vietnam movie cliches and even more constant sermonizing grate on the ears. And something about the whole ‘Nam thing rubs the wrong way. Goodman, who has never given more wooden line-readings (“a place where myth and science meet”) made me think of Walter Sobchak, his loony, funnier character in “The Big Lebowski,” and his rants about disrespected Vietnam vets, the dishonored dead “lying FACE down in a rice paddy.”

Walter would never have stood for a twisting of that memory like this.

Everything about the picture, from jokes and deaths to the epic King Kong vs. Godzilla brawls, is over-the-top, with sound and visuals that assault us. So if you’re inclined to see this, no sense monkeying around. Pay the extra bucks for the IMAX 3D beating it delivers.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for brief strong language.

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Shea Whigham

Credits:Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, script by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:00

Here’s a comic revenge thriller tapping into the general “people are jerks” zeitgeist and starring two character actors who have found the the sweet spot in the niche they find themselves in.

Melanie Lynskey has made her mark as the downtrodden “girl/woman who doesn’t get the guy,” an imprint pressed on her by TV’s “Two and a Half Men.” And Elijah Wood‘s post-Hobbit career has happily settled into quirky eccentrics with a dangerous streak.

“I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Any More” — the title is a variation of the old Carter Family country music song “I Can’t Feel at Home in This World Any More” — is actor turned writer-director Macon Blair’s violent essay on what happens when the put upon starting putting upon others.

Ruth (Lynskey) is a sad and lonely nursing assistant in suburban Portland, somebody who can’t help but notice what intolerant crones her elderly patients are, and what inconsiderate tools almost everyone else she meets turns out to be.

From the dolt barfly (Blair himself) who gives away plot spoilers to the fantasy novel she’s reading, to the pick-up-truck jerk “burning coal” — polluting as a political act, at a stoplight, to every creep who cuts in front of her in line at the grocery store, Ruth and we can see that we have morphed into an angry, incurious me-and-me-alone culture that put a narcissist just like us into the White House.

Even the cops who take her statement after her house has been robbed seem more interested in dismissing her victimhood and her loss than in living up to #bluelivesmatter.

“Why do you NOT want to help me?”

“The world is BIGGER than your (late grandma’s) silverware.”

But Ruth has a tracking ap on her stolen laptop. And when the indifferent 911 operator she calls won’t send police to check it out, she runs through the few people she knows to find someone to help her get it back.

That’s how she settles on Tony. In a neighborhood of gap-toothed perverts and cluelessly self-absorbed seniors, the rat-tailed goth-guy she yelled at for not cleaning up after his dog is her only hope.

“You can hit me, one strike…to balance the energy between us,” he offers, as a way of clearing up the whole dog-messing-her-lawn thing. No. She has bigger needs.

This is where Blair’s movie finds its surprises. There are two ways Tony’s nunchacku bravado can turn out when he confronts the people now in possession of Ruth’s computer. Blair finds a third, and it’s hilarious.

Ruth and Tony (and Tony’s elderly dog) track the stolen goods through the Dark Side of Portlandia (never identified as the location), spilling the blood (accidentally) of re-sellers of stolen goods, working their way towards the trio of thieves (Jane Levy of “Don’t Breathe” among them), including the rich punk (Devon Graye) we’ve seen commit crimes.

There are no “filler” characters or throw-away scenes in a 93 minute movie, and Blair finds giggles for almost everybody — especially the stepmom of the teen-thief. Christine Woods KILLS as a drawling drinker happy to tell these two idiots posing as cops everything she knows about her shady husband’s awful son.

Blair, who spent time on screen in the terrific “Green Room” and starred in “Blue Ruin,” keeps this fairly conventional story just surprising enough and his players make it just funny enough to hold our interest.

It had little chance of life in theaters, but as in other features that found their way to Netflix premieres, wherever there’s a captive, membership-paying audience, there’s hope for “little” movies with sharp, smart edges.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, Lee Eddy, Christine Woods, Devon Graye, Jane Levy

Credits:Written and directed by Macon Blair. An XYZ Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Quick show of hands, then. Who in the English-speaking world doesn’t know that Herbalife, the weight loss/money making “multilevel marketing” company, is a scam?

I mean, exposes by “Nightline,”  CBS News and John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” among others, Federal investigations, periodic crackdowns and simple common sense have given away this hustle for most people.

Those stories, save for Oliver’s take-down, pre-date hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s efforts to short-sell the company out of business. But Ackman’s involvement, starting in 2012, gave this tale a somewhat tarnished “white knight.” Here was a Wall Street insider willing to gamble $1 billion that this company, which makes almost all its money off suckers it lures into becoming buy-in distributors, would be outed, routed and put out of business by the Feds.

Ted Braun’s “Betting on Zero” follows Ackman and the years-long crusade by him and many of those rooked by Herbalife to get something like justice. The victims want restitution, and Ackman, a market manipulator claiming the moral high ground, wants to make money for his clients when Herbalife goes bust.

To Ackman, the multi-billion dollar international “health and wealth” company is “The best-managed pyramid scheme in the history of the world.” It’s a “wealth transfer scheme” designed to lure desperate people in with the prospect of a “business in a box,” only to have them buying and re-selling overpriced products that nobody wants, forcing them to lure in friends and relatives to create a new lower level of the pyramid for the tiny number of people at the top to prey upon.

Braun’s film follows Ackman from his cocky announcement to the world what a scummy operation he and his researchers have found Herbalife to be, into the wars that followed. Former Disney bigwig Michael O. Johnson was CEO as Herbalife grew into a multi-national success story, and got rich off the powdered shakes. He’s not taking this “outing” by Ackman lying down.

And being a hedge fund manager, Ackman has rivals and has made enemies. One of them is Donald Trump’s  economic adviser, Wall Street heavyweight Carl Icahn.

When Icahn threw his cash behind Herbalife in a personal vendetta against Ackman, he put Ackman on the defensive and added desperation to his efforts to get the Feds to crack down on Herbalife.

Braun also focuses on the people often lost in this headline grabbing scuffle, outraged, ripped-off and wronged Latino distributors, and their de facto leader, Julie Contreras. Her group waves “Herbalies” signs in front of corporate cheer-leading conventions, gets on the news and keeps the fight alive while an amoral Wall Street rallies behind the company.

But in a country having its “immigrants are bad” moment, who will care?

It’s repetitive and jargon-filled and a little too long. But “Zero” is still a fascinating story, troubling and chilling when you realize that the people in charge of the government now are the very people we need government to protect us from — scammers, frauds, “wealth re-distribution” hustlers and their protectors.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill Ackman, Julie Contreras, Carl Icahn, Micahel O. Johnson

Credits:Written and directed by Ted Braun. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:44

Miriam Colón, one of the most celebrated actresses ever to come out of Puerto Rico, has died. A screen mainstay from the late 1950s through her recent triumph, “Bless Me, Ultima,” she was 80 years old.

She worked with Brando (“One-Eyed Jacks”) and did the occasional film. But the lady lived her life on the TV — scads of roles, from “Mike Hammer” and “Have Gun-Will Travel” in the late 50s and early 60s, through “Sanford and Son” and “Law and Order” and on and on. President Obama gave her the National Medal for the Arts.

I interviewed Ms. Colón when “Ultima” came out. A grand character actress who got a moment in the sun late in life. RIP.

“Logan” sends the Wolverine off with a box office bang, as Thursday night and Friday showings push estimates for its opening weekend to $79 million.

With Hugh Jackman recovering from skin cancer (Did you see him on Colbert this week? Wear sunscreen, kids. Wear HATS.), that’s a huge endorsement of his inhabiting that character and the studio’s decision to let Logan age and show Professor X (Patrick Stewart) in his dotage. The dark approach worked.

“The Shack” is another film enjoying a healthy opening weekend. Faith-based (Octavia Spencer IS the Almighty!), starring a former Terminator (Sam Worthington), it’s headed to $16.5 million.

Then there’s “Before I Fall.” Lovestruck teens are missing out on this fine little “Groundhog Day in High School” starring Zoey Deutch. It’s only managing $4-5 million.

“Get Out” held a lot of audience from its first weekend, sitting at $26-27 million. It’s re-writing the rules for horror movies. Big box office, “satire” that doesn’t “Close on Saturday night,” as the wag once said.

Oscar winner “Moonlight” hits 1500 theaters and only does $2.2 million more this weekend.

They didn’t have a word for it, not one that had the right measure of cute, quaint and sentimental blended in. So the English invented “twee.”

It was made for movies such as “This Beautiful Fantastic,” a quirky-cute English romance about an orphan rescued by ducks, a grumpy-poetic old man rescued by an adorable new neighbor and a garden.

Oh so English. Ever so twee.

In writer-director Simon Aboud’s confection, Bella Brown, played by Jessica Brown Findlay (“Downton Abbey,” “Winter’s Tale”) is a foundling kept warm by a flock of ducks until she was discovered by the English park lake and whisked away to a Catholic orphanage.

Years later, she’s grown up with a lifelong aversion to nature, a morbid OCD fear of disorder and the perfect job for someone with those traits — junior librarian and aspiring children’s fiction writer.

But when she’s not being shushed and scolded by the metaphorically named Bramble (Anna Chancellor), she keeps a tidier than tiny house. Her over-organized pantry is like “a food prison,” her one visitor notes.

Her crusty, twinkly and bookish old neighbor narrates our story, and you have two guesses as to who plays him. No, not Jim Broadbent. Tom Wilkinson.

Alfred “Alfie” Stevens is a bully and a brutal wit. It doesn’t matter how neat Bella keeps the inside of the house,  it’s the garden this “horticultural terrorist” has let go that enrages him.

“You have squandered everything Nature has given you!”

He must force her into the yard, into the dirt, into “the beautifully ordered chaos.”

His Irish cook (Andrew Scott) is sympathetic, widowed with two little girls, and smitten. And Vernon-the-cook isn’t alone. There’s this odd duck (ahem) at the library, a noisy/rule-breaking nerd (Jeremy Irvine) with a thing for artist inventors who is enchanted by Bella, and has more of her attention.

Aboud, whose first feature was a heist picture “Comes a Day,” and is best known as Paul McCartney’s son-in-law, unravels this plot in the most predictable ways. Bella’s magical-realism orphanhood is a non-starter, and introducing Bella’s desire to learn Gaelic may be a dead end. Why exactly does she wear only greys and blacks?

But everything else in this sweet nothing of a romance you see coming a furlong away.

Still, Findlay and Scott don’t force their charm on us, Wilkinson makes the aphorisms, anecdotes and literary quotations poetic and warm. So much of it takes place in the flowers and brambles of a garden that this verdant movie smells like spring.

And Aboud has one character utter the most revealingly English line I’ve ever heard in a screen comedy, one that can be applied to the slight charms of his little romance.

“To say ‘No’ would be rude.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic material and language

Cast: Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Wilkinson, Andrew Scott, Anna Chancellor

Credits:Written and directed by Simon Aboud. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:32

It could be a $75 million opening weekend for the final Wolverine X-Men movie. Which means, of course, it won’t be the “final” one after all.

But in any event, all signs are pointing to a huge, fitting finish to Hugh Jackman’s sideburned slasher. Box Office Mojo is saying $74 million. Box Office Guru is pitching $68, which is sand-bagging it a bit. Not seen any figures from last night’s pre-opening showings, but the fanboys and fangirls were sure to turn out.

Great reviews won’t hurt. 

The unpreviewed faith-based drama “The Shack” was the best job onetime Terminator Sam Worthington could land. And it could open well, a $10-12 million take predicted by Mojo. That seems high. The Guru’s conservative $9 million opening seems more like it. “Shack” doesn’t have the victimhood/hate non-believers pull of “God’s Not Dead” and its ilk.

Teen death romance? “Before I Fall” got decent reviews and should do better than its predicted sub-$5 million opening. But we’ll see.

“Get Out” should have another big weekend, but that’s the thing. Will it? It’s smart. It’s social satire. And it’s horror. Will it clear another $20 million with all that audience reveling in Wolverine ultra-violence? We’ll see.

It’s packaged as a love triangle romance in time of war. Its director was behind the break-out Julia Roberts thriller “Sleeping with the Enemy,” and the screenwriter adapted “Bridge to Terabithia.”

But “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” a drama set in the corner of the Ottoman Empire called Anatolia during World War I, has greater aims. Its titular hero and entire point of view seems aimed at correcting the world’s attitudes toward the “Armenian Genocide” that is the backdrop for this romance. And while there are scholarly points to be made in that argument, this picturesque but slow and corny romance is hardly the right place to make them.

The story takes place in a region “of unspeakable violence,” torn by massacres, mass uprootings, treachery and lawlessness. There are Turkish troops facing brigands and rebels — Armenians quick to show support for Russian incursions into the empire after Germany tricked the Ottomans into joining their side in The Great War.

Josh Hartnett is Dr. Jude Gresham, a heroic caregiver in a hospital in the region. On a fundraising trip to Philadelphia, he tells stories of a population under threat, ethnic strife and the urgent need for medical care to an appreciative audience. That inspires an idealistic, free-thinking, wealthy young nurse (Hera Hilmar) to make her way East, and to bring her late brother’s truck with her.

Maybe she’s inspired by the handsome doctor, too.

But Lily Rowe’s eyes are opened the moment she debarks in Istanbul. A dashing stranger (Michiel Huisman) shows her a little of the city, including the great mosque. She is charmed, even if when it comes to her reason for being there, he isn’t having it.

“Miss Rowe? Go home. Go home immediately.”

Naturally, the stranger turns out to be a Turkish officer, an Ottoman Lieutenant. And his superiors may share his concerns, but they see a different solution to the problem of Miss Rowe. Lt. Ismail Valli will escort the American nurse, and her truck, to the hospital in East Anatolia.

Along the way, they see evidence of atrocities — “This wasn’t done by my army.” They face armed bandits (Armenians).

Eventually, he gets her to her hospital, which is coping with a typhus epidemic and a shortage of everything. The founder of the institution (Ben Kingsley) is not impressed.

“This is no place for a woman! We are drowning in death!”

But fierce Lily stays, and in between surgical assistance and romantic boat and horseback rides, finds herself torn between two would-be lovers. Or would, if the simplistic script could manage that simple feat.

The passionate doctor insists that they will treat whoever comes through their doors, but he has taken sides in the conflict. The passionate lieutenant sees things from a world-weary Turkish point of view.

“Freedom is an illusion. We all take the role we’re given.”

And Lily? She is swept up by the guy with the longer hair and uniform.

The Turkish and Czech settings are novel, with striking views of Mount Ararat, and the action sequences handled with skill. Newsreel footage of the World War pepper Lily’s narrated memories of the time.

Hartnett is more impressive in this role than you might guess, “Game of Thrones” veteran Guisman doesn’t embarrass himself, and Kingsley must have taken his small, testy role simply as a show of moral support. He’s played more than a few Turks over the years, and even if he isn’t cast as one, he signs on to the film’s message by being in it.

Young Miss Hilmar of the recent Keira Knightley “Anna Karenina” doesn’t give us much that suggests either possessing passion or inspiring it.

But they’re all stuck in this soap opera bent on historical revisionism. Even if you accept recent, measured scholarship by the likes of Middle East historian Eugene Rogan (“The Fall of the Ottomans”), who recounts in detail the civil war the Turks have long claimed as an excuse for the Armenian death toll, the film plays like Turkish propaganda. No hint of Kurd-driven/Turk-directed Armenian death marches of the historical record.

And even Rogan doesn’t discount that genocide happened, and that Armenian eagerness to be “rescued” by the Russians wasn’t an unreasonable hope, given Turkish/Kurdish oppression and abuses of the population.

So while there are extenuating circumstances that muddy the waters, that’s not enough to justify outright cinematic historical revisionism. That’s what this “Lieutenant” aims for.

What we’re left with is a botched romance saddled with an over-arching, over-reaching message, one that only the Turks will be quick to embrace.

MPAA Rating:R for some war violence

Cast: Michiel Huisman, Hera Hilmar, Josh Hartnett, Ben Kingsley

Credits:Directed by Joseph Ruben, script by Jeff Stockwell. A Paladin/Falco release.

Running time: 1:46