Movie Nation

As the best day of my professional life happened in the early 1990s, when I followed Leonard Nimoy around central North Carolina on a location scout, pardon me while I get all weepy about his son’s lovely documentary, “For the Love of Spock.”

It’s an unalloyed joy, a film about the journeyman character actor who got the biggest of big breaks, had all kinds of fun with it, but transformed the character, the role and himself into an icon of nobility, generosity and humanity. But it’s also about a son remembering his dad, the ebb and flow of that relationship and how that mirrored the elder Nimoy’s growing into his greatest role, living up to it, and being a better father thanks to it.

Former entertainment lawyer turned director Adam Nimoy’s Kickstarter-funded marvel covers pretty much the full scope of his father’s life, the trek to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, the years of odd jobs — day work in the movies and two week guest spots on TV shows — through “Star Trek” and everything that made possible.

Using old interviews with his dad and the ones Adam conducted just before his father’s death, and clips from the TV shows, the movies, and interviews with legions of his colleagues, friends and fans, Nimoy the Younger constructs a definitive History of Trek, and an adoring portrait of his father, the Man Who Was Spock.

It’s not just anecdotes or Leonard reading from the audio book version of his autobiography (“I Am Spock”).  Almost everybody (not his first wife, not his widow) who needed to be in this story was interviewed. From vintage radio interviews with Gene Roddenberry to J.J. Abrams, they gush the same gusher. They all loved this guy.

Here’s childhood pal Barry Newman (“Vanishing Point”) recalling his visit to the set of the “Star Trek” pilot and his dire warning into Leonard’s pointy ears.

“‘Run,’ I said. ‘Get out of this. It’s a treadmill to oblivion!'”

Fans from Neal DeGrasse Tyson and a couple of NASA engineers, to Jason Alexander (who can do whole Kirk monologues, from memory and in character) and Simon Pegg talk about what made the character and the man special.

George Takei and Walter Koenig marvel at how Nimoy ensured that they stayed in the franchise as it migrated from canceled TV series to animated series to film franchise.

And just as everybody is getting all misty-eyed, here’s Nimoy singing “Bilbo Baggins,” and Shatner cracking wise that yeah, Leonard was the better singer of the two. But even Leonard was off key.

The father-son stuff is terrific (Nimoy’s daughter is here, too). I would’ve enjoyed more of the early life, in Boston, the barber’s son. And it’s a pity there were no clips (with rights approval) of Nimoy’s post-“Trek” stage career, “Man in the Glass Booth,” “Fiddler on the Roof.”

But “For the Love of Spock” is everything you’d hope for in a biography of one of the most universally beloved characters and character actors of all time.

No, he didn’t get to make his Siamese Twins biography, the film he was scouting in N.C. (Chang and Eng retired to White Oak, near Andy Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy) to film. Over the years, I have run into writers and others who found him to be a prima donna and a pill. This guy, for instance. 

Yes, he was an absentee dad for too long, and his first marriage didn’t endure. He still managed to ennoble an actor’s life, to be a mensch to friends, family and fans, even after he became so famous his life would never be the same.

He wore the ears, and wore them well.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a moment or two of profanity

Cast: Leonard Nimoy, Adam Nimoy, William Shatner, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Zachary Quinto, Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, J.J. Abrams, Nicholas Meyer, Jim Parsons, Jason Alexander, Simon Pegg, Neal DeGrasse-Tyson
Credits: Directed by Adam Nimoy. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

Radar Online is reporting, and assorted British newspapers are doing what British newspapers do — stealing that reporting — that Sony and the Broccoli family and other producers backing the James Bond franchise are offering Daniel Craig $150 million Yankee greenbacks to return to the role for two more films.

Craig’s people have shot it down, because that’s a ridiculous amount seeing as how the films have shown diminishing returns, and it’s twice the amount he was reportedly offered back in May. Craig looked halfway out the door with “Spectre.” Two thirds of the way through it, he took on that “When is this over?” gaze. He met his obligation, and I said at the time in reviewing it (fanboy protests and British make-up-news scandal sheets notwithstanding) he was done. He’s young enough to more than manage a Pierce Brosnan length career post-Bond. And he’s a better actor, better than being pigeonholed like that.

Done. Find somebody else. But start with hiring a great screenwriter and it’ll be easier to fill the role, because that’s been an ongoing issue with this venerable franchise — crappy, recycled scripts.

Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” the one about women refusing to make love until the men stop making making war, has proven as timely and malleable as any play the ancient Greeks gave us. Thousands of years before women got the vote in much of the world, the playwright spun a comic parable demonstrating the REAL power of women in a culture.

And it still resonates. Just last year, Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” re-set the women-on-a-sex-strike story in the mayhem of modern day Chicago.

Erase the violence and rub most of the sexual and political edge off that film, and you get something like “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?”, a gun-crazy “Lysistrata” with the feel of a PG-13 TV movie, perhaps one more inspired by “The Andy Griffith Show’s” sexless spin on “Lysistrata” back in the ’60s.

Matt Cooper’s film takes place in Rockford, Texas, a fruit-packing town that’s actually a pistol-packers paradise. “Live free, shoot straight” is the motto they slap up on signs you see as you enter the town limits.

Everybody there loves hunting, sport shooting and the comfort and safety they think their guns give them. Until one day, a kid who has absorbed more of the gun worship than the gun safety ethos of his parents takes his dad’s new pistol to school to show a friend.

A hail of misplaced and fortunately not-fatal bullets later, the boy’s mom, Jenna (Andrea Anders of “Modern Family” and “About a Boy” and many other TV series) is taken aback enough to wonder what kind of fatal-accident prone world they’re raising their children in. Her boy got a slap on the wrist from the school and the sheriff (John Heard). Boys will be boys and boys with guns, etc.

She’s a minority of one, but Jenna thinks Rockford should give up its guns.

“Every avalanche starts with a single snowflake.”

Her avalanche starts with her bookclub and snowballs from there. The women will swear off sex with their men until they destroy their assault rifles, shotguns and pistols. The menfolk, including Jenna’s husband (Matt Passmore of “The Glades”) get their “Second Amendment” backs up over this. And a battle of the sexes and war of wills is on.

John Michael Higgins is the politically spineless mayor, Horatio Sanz and Fernanda Romero are a couple trying to have a baby, Katherine McNamara is a teen who has been making her boyfriend wait — for a year — only to have this protest interrupt their coital plans.

And Cloris Leachman plays the obligatory potty-mouthed granny in this debate. She has the best speech, the testiest scene, laying down the straw men that gun control foes throw up “just like when they were fighting chlorinated water and smoking bans.”

The movie throws a few mass shooting statistics, a history of how the meaning of the Second Amendment was quite recently twisted and broad portrait of the gun lobby that did the twisting, here called The National Gun Association (whose leader reveres his “Cold Dead Hands” portrait of NRA spokesmodel Charlton Heston).

“I doubt the Founding Fathers had this ‘no sex’ thing in mind when they wrote all that stupid crap.”

But this is a toothless satire, a sermon lacking the bite or broad wit of similar films. Cooper attracted a few names to his script, but he’s no Christopher Guest (“Best in Show”) or Norman Lear (“Cold Turkey”). There’s no bite to the debate, no edge to the satire, no sin in the sex.(How DID this earn an R? MPAA hypocrisy?). And, if you’d care to notice, there’s no racial component to all this, either. There isn’t a black face to be seen in this corner of Texas.

That makes “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?” a sermon sorely in need of more sass, more silliness and more sting. It’s pointless to show Jenna scanning the Internet, paging through all the mass shootings and careless “accidents” at gun shows without making the pointed and still very funny (See “The Simpsons,” “The Cartridge Family”) connection in the movie.

The setting and subtext were ripe for lampooning, and Cooper sensed that with his simplest, pithiest argument. He just didn’t take it far enough.

“When did you become such a damn liberal?”

“When did you become such an idiot?”

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content and language

Cast: Andrea Anders, Matt Passmore, Katherine McNamara, John Heard, Cloris Leachman, John Michael Higgins, Horatio Sanz, Kevin Conroy
Credits: Written and directed by Matt Cooper. A Momentum release.

Running time: 1:35

The pert perfection of Sarah Gadon — think Taylor Swift without the autotune — is given its first real test on the screen as something almost totally new in the movies — a “Mom Fatale” — in “The 9th Life of Louis Drax.” Alas, she’s no better here than she was in the woebegone “Indignation.”

“Drax” is an oddly remote and unaffecting (and unthrilling) thriller about a cruel and precocious nine year-old (Aiden Longworth of “Hector and the Search for Happiness”) whose mother is just catnip to the guys.

And that’s bad for the guys. Because young Louis, called “Lulu” by his parents, mistrusts men, thinking they only want “to sex” his mother and then hurt her. That leads to written , in nine-year-old scrawl, to one and all.

“Bad things will happen!”

But the bad things are already happening to Louis. He’s had an accident, at a picnic. He’s in a coma. It’s not, his doctor (Jamie Dornan) learns, the kid’s first dance with death. Read the title if you want to know how many preceded it.

Dr. Pascal (Dornan) tries to unravel the mystery of that day of the accident, and the kid’s past. There was a sympathetic shrink (Oliver Platt, terrific as always) treating him, puzzled by the child’s almost monstrous cruelty. He loves having pet hamsters, who all meet ugly ends.

There’s the boy’s boxer-with-a-temper dad (Aaron Paul), who’d have to be a suspect in any foul play. But not his mom. Oh no. Dr. Pascal is sure “You deserve better than this.”

“How do you know?”

“I can just TELL.”

The cop on the case (Molly Parker, so sarcastic you want to tear her head off) suspects one and all. Perhaps, like us, she’s seen any of the scads of TV medical dramas that have fed us remedial lessons in this sort of always-threatened/injured child cases.

Director Alexandre Aja has never come close to giving Hollywood a film as taut and frightening as his French breakout hit, “High Tension.” “Louis” has a creepily compelling young lead, but not much else. Paul isn’t scary enough to be the obvious suspect everyone else is sure he is.

There’s little suspense, and Dornan and Gadon both fail to register empathy, compassion, menace or fear.

The story shuffles between dark comedy and clumsy mystery, monster movie and psycho-drama, with no character or performance generating a whit of sympathy.

But in the movie’s big scene, Platt’s shrink is our guide into one of the cinema’s most informative trips into hypnosis. And that lets “9th Life” do something that few movies that fail this completely in the first two acts ever manage.

It finishes well.

MPAA Rating:R (for some disturbing images and brief strong language)

Cast: Aiden Longworth, Jamie Dornan, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul,
Credits: Directed by Alexandre Aja, script by Max Minghella, based on the Liz Jensen novel. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:30

The “big surprise” in “Morgan,” a bloody sci fi thriller spun around genetic engineering, is so obvious I won’t insult your intelligence by giving it away.

Hell, some of you have already figured it out, anyway, based on the headline, the still photo and my mention that there’s a “surprise” twist.

What they were shooting for here is an action-packed/bloodstained suspense pic about a scientifically engineered “It” who — OK “which” — is in danger of escaping from the lab where it was created.

Seth W. Owen’s script has moments that suggest he might have seen “A.I.,” or “Blade Runner” or “Ex Machina.”  And many, many more moments that suggest he didn’t and should have.

“Morgan” (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a paler-than-pale test-tube engineered human who with ashen lips, a teenage “girl” who is five years out of the test tube. And now she’s hurt somebody and a corporate “risk assessment” officer (Kate Mara) has been sent to the remote forest lab to figure out if she is too risky to bring to market, and how the isolated team that developed her — Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Boyd Holbrook, Michael Yare, Vinette Robinson and Chris Sullivan — screwed up. 

The team refers to Morgan as “her.” Lee isn’t having it. An “It” is what they’re dealing with, as in “after ‘It’s’ so-called birth” and the like. It hurt somebody.

“She has a right to make mistakes.”

“SHE has no rights whatsoever.”

Most have formed an attachment to Morgan, but not to Skip (Holbrook), whose scientific function is a mystery. He calls Morgan “C3PO,” at one point.

The story sets up a clumsy psycho-sexual dynamic and a faux family, but the film doesn’t develop those. The money scene is provided by “Corporate’s” psychologist, who carries out a psych evaluation. Paul Giamatti plays this scene the way you’d expect him to, with an utterly illogical eruption thrown in for bad measure.

There’s a lot of forest footage and production designed grays “Morgan,” down to the five year old teen’s omnipresent gray hoodie. What there isn’t is a lot of suspense. And I’m not just talking about the big reveal.

Mara and Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”) don’t give us much to cling to, as viewers. Only Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) invites empathy. And only one moment has the poetry of its better sci-fi antecedents.

“Do you know the cruelest thing you can do to someone you’ve locked in a room? Press their face to the window.”

MPAA Rating: R for brutal violence, and some language

Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook
Credits: Directed by Luke Scott, script by Seth W. Owen. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:32

When it’s all tallied up in that great counting house in the sky, or in Burbank, the summer cinema of 2016 may end up the second best ever (probably not) in terms of box office tmay end up the second best ever.

It sure didn’t feel that way. “Captain America” and “Finding Nemo” sequels did great, “Secret Life of Pets” performed and even “Suicide Squad” has cleared $300 million. But it wasn’t a season where the wind kept the sails full or audiences engaged.

The second horror hit of the summer owns this final weekend of the season. “Don’t Breathe” might catch “Lights Out” at the box office. Eventually.

But this weekend, which has, on occasion, produced an Oscar winner, won’t with “The Light Between Oceans,” a middling romance novel starring future Oscar contenders Fassbender and Vikander. Rachel Weisz, who won an Oscar in support in another late August release, “The Constant Gardener,” is the best thing in this one. “Light” is opening in the $5 million range, pathetic for a long holiday weekend. It’s a fall film that jumped the gun.

“Morgan,” a “we created a monster” in the lab thriller, is bombing — big time.

And nothing else, despite pushing “Hands of Stone” into more theaters and the superb quality of “Hell or High Water” or “Southside With You,” is making any money. “War Dogs” is indicative of the dogs of late summer. None of them have blown up.

“The Light Between Oceans” feels like a fall movie. It’s a sad romance, a period piece, a Michael Fassbender film with no funny costumes or comic book plot.

It’s lush and lovely, but a bit limp, like a well-written Nicholas Sparks novel filmed by an artist.  The director of “Blue Valentine” did it.

And it’s earning mixed reviews, a somber send off to a less than stellar summer. Or, if you prefer, a funereal fumble into fall.

I was re-watching “The Danish Girl” the other night, and couldn’t get over how much more adult Alicia Vikander came off in that one. Here, she’s more of a coquette, which makes her look entirely too impish and young for Fassbender.

“Morgan” is another “We’ve made a monster-person in the lab” thriller, with Kate Mara and Tobey Jones trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Poor reviews for that one. We’ve had two decent horror movies this summer, thank you. That’s all we’re entitled to.

Anything else opening wide? Well, Kevin Smith is still around, long after the era when he was “a thing.” “Yoga Hosers” is getting skewered for its amateurism, the fact that Smith put his daughter (and Johnny Depp’s kid) into a movie, despite a talent deficiency that suggested maybe bit parts were all they were up to.

Sometime, decades ago, somebody told Smith, “Don’t ever change, man.” And there you go.

The customs officer in Tokyo asks her, “Purpose of your visit?”

And Sweetpea (Dree Hemingway) is perfectly blunt in reply.

“I came here to break up with my boyfriend.”

But her boyfriend is a mercurial, fragile rock star. He’s shooting a video in a famous and mysterious Japanese forest, and he has other ideas. And since Sweetpea never saw the Natalie Dormer thriller “The Forest,” she has no idea what she’s in for.

Everybody in “The People Garden” goes out of his or her way not to name the location of this music video shoot. It’s Aokigahara, Japan’s “Suicide Forest” on the slopes of Mount Fuji. It’s where the despondent go to wander off, find an unoccupied tree, and hang themselves.

The only reason not to name the place is the earlier movie about this spooky, real-world oddity. A lot of people saw the earlier film, and naming the forest would have been admitting another movie beat you to the subject and amounted to a final nail in the coffin of this drab, dreary thriller.

Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, great grand-daughter of Ernest, is a model turned actress and a drab screen presence with no hint of spark or any other reason a rock star would be attracted to her or despondent over her ditching him.

Given an idiotic character name and playing almost every moment with a kind of resigned puzzlement, Hemingway sucks the oxygen right out of this mystery.

Because that’s what it is supposed to be. Sweetpea is left at the airport, and then ditched by the driver, Mak (Jai West) who is not supposed to “let her out of your sight.” He leaves her at the entrance to the woods with a crude map to the filming location, and police tape to stretch out between the trees to keep her from getting lost.

She finds the place — no thanks to Mak — and takes in the dullest, most unhurried video shoot in Japanese history. James Le Gros is the director, Pamela Anderson the 50ish model hired as eye-candy. Yes, she strips.

Jamie, the rock star? He’s gone missing. And no one seems that upset about it.

Did he flee before Sweetpea’s arrival to avoid being dumped? Did he get lost? Is he on strike? Or did he sneak out to kill himself in the “Suicide Forest” no one mentions by name?

The mystery in actress-turned-writer/director Nadia Litz’s (“Big Muddy”) narrative is no mystery at all if you’ve seen “The Forest.” Even if you haven’t, the funereal pace and willfully cryptic way everyone treats Sweetpea (Must be the name.) drives any interest out of the story before its big reveals are revealed to be not big at all.

The setting itself — a hardwood forest in Canada — is damp and grey and properly creepy. But “The People Garden” guards its feeble secrets so well audience ennui sets in, as it always does when we’re way ahead of where a movie is taking us.

And Hemingway? There are hints of her mother’s mousie voice in lines delivered through the same locked jaws Mariel was famous for, but no trace of mom’s empathetic charisma. There must be more suitable ways for Dree to capitalize on her famous  surname, because acting doesn’t seem to be her calling.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, suicide

Cast: Dree Hemingway, Jai West, Pamela Anderson, James Le Gros
Credits: Written and directed by Nadia Litz. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:22

They’ve made a big deal out of how inclusive and how much more diverse the cast is in the George Lucas “Star Wars” universe.

All well and good. No, the stories aren’t aching with originality, but this time around, there are role models for all. Women, men, a wide sampling of human races cast as alien races in films that more reflect our times.

Including, apparently, the droids. Meet C2-B5. A “droid of color.” Expect this matte-finish marvel in “Rogue One,” just in time for Christmas (shopping). 

It has an A-list cast of hot actors, an Oscar winner and a couple of Aussie acting icons.

It’s an evocative period piece based on a best-selling novel, an era and an exotic setting beautifully captured and lavishly photographed.

But change the locale from remote, coastal Australia to the beaches of Carolina, and all “The Light Between Oceans” adds up to is a Nicolas Sparks novel with more poetic writing.

It’s a romance novel, a romantic fable, brought to life by a pretty good cast that cannot make it more than is, that cannot give it more meaning and make it less frustrating than novelist M.L. Stedman intended.

Michael Fassbender is Thomas Sherbourne, a veteran of The Great War, home and in search of work that offers solitude, peace and purpose. He’s spent four years in the trenches of France. Maybe now he’d like to save lives for a change.

He’s to be the temporary new keeper of the light at Janus Island, a hundred miles from anywhere, keeping the light burning and the ships off the shoals around this island home.

A sensitive man of faith and a philosophical bent, he isn’t looking for companionship. But when the job turns permanent, he is drawn back to the bold, flirtatious free spirit he met at the nearest coastal town. Isabel (Alicia Vikander) has that effect on him. She, in essence, proposes to him on their second meeting. That unsettles Tom.

“I couldn’t stop seeing my life with you.”

What he couldn’t see, beyond the romantic idyll of two lovers on a windswept limestone rock, would be the miscarriages and how those would hit Isabel. The lonely place, the heartbreak, it could do her in. It broke the spirit of the previous lighthouse keeper.

So when a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a baby, she sees her lifeline. And Tom, slavishly devoted to duty and doing the right thing, relents. They raise the little girl as their own, covering up how they got her from everyone.

But the little girl has a mother (Rachel Weisz) who mourns for her and clings to the hope that she still lives.

In adapting the book, Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) spares us no images of the sea or the surf. The wind blows Vikander and Fassbender’s hair, romantically as the fateful couple face their fate, then choose to let fate change that fate.

Vikander seems too young to be cast opposite Fassbender, even if we take into account the differing times and notion that the war has aged Tom beyond his years. But there’s chemistry there, just not enough to make anybody swoon.

The adorable workboat piloted by Captain Ralph, played by the great Australian character actor Jack Thompson, has many, many scenes of coming and going. Weisz suffers, nobly, and another Aussie character player, Bryan Brown, gives flint to the role of her rich father.

A couple of absurdly photogenic and adorable children (Florence Clery plays the little girl, Lucy, once she’s talking) animate the role of a child worth fighting for. 

But the lighthouse love story never adds up to much more than images or feelings, and the story wallows in melodrama as we see guilt weigh on Tom, and his dilemma. Two broken women — which one can he “save”? Either solution threatens to doom the other.

Nothing happy can come from this, and no epilogue can mend the frustrating, heartbreaking choices that come from the knowledge that Tom, and we, cannot save everyone.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material and some sexual content

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown
Credits: Written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, based on the M.L. Stedman novel . A Touchstone/Dreamworks release.

Running time: 2:12