Movie Nation

A sentimental documentary about a race horse and the little town that bred and raced him, “Dark Horse” is a feel-good movie that sneaks up on you, even if you know what’s coming.

Because it’s not just about a moody, plucky horse who beats the odds. Being British, it works in subtexts of class conflict and hope springing out of a Welsh town left for dead when its coal mines closed.

Cefn Fforest has young people in it. But filmed, in lonely snippets in its back alleys, they’re a shrinking minority. Almost everybody interviewed for this film is old enough to be missing teeth, to have a lazy eye that was never corrected.

A local barmaid and sometime dog and pigeon breeder got it into her head that she could breed a racehorse. She talked friends and locals from the pub into pitching in. They found an inexpensive, injured mare, bred her with an American stallion with a decent track record, and Dream Alliance was born.

Dream Alliance was a steeplechaser, a turf-track horse who jumps hedges and dodges the horses that often take tumbles in such races. And he was, one and all agree, “a street fighter.”

Moody, with undistinguished bloodlines and inconsistent, he’d prompt “When’s that donkey running next?” from the locals. He was “a real Welsh boy,” Janet Vokes, the barmaid-turned-breeder purrs. “You can’t always trust’em.”

But despite the dismissals of the serious horse-racing community, despite their own lower than low expectations, he started winning. And then he got hurt.

Louise Osmond’s film gets a real feel for the town and its people. And there’s a little drama here, if you’ve not heard of the horse named after pretentiously-titled Simpson-Bruckheimer (“Crimson Tide”) film production company.

But if you’ve not surrendered to its thin and predictable charms by the time the horse takes a fall, you will.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild thematic elements and language

Cast: Bookies, horse racing experts and the plucky people of  Cefn Fforest, Wales.
Credits: Directed by Louise Osmond A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:25

You’d think that the vital but thankless and tedious process of editing a book wouldn’t make much of a movie. And you’d be right.

“Genius,” about the greatest editor of them all, Maxwell Perkins, is all dimly-lit offices, train rides and sitting in one’s living room after the kids have gone to bed, marking up pages and pages and pages with a red pencil.

Even the promising character study of a man, played by Colin Firth, content to do Herculean labors in the shadows of the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe, feels superficial, dry and somewhat unsatisfying.

But actor-turned-director Michael Grandage’s debut feature bubbles to life thanks to casting.  Guy Pearce is a blocked, forgotten but plainly brilliant Fitzgerald, Dominic West puts his stamp on 1930s vintage “Papa” Hemingway, and Jude Law, all manic energy, vomits up paragraphs and pages and more pages of the purplest prose as Wolfe, the tempestuous relationship that is the heart of this story.

Wolfe desperately wants to be published, to release his “little testament, faith cast out into the dark night.”

It was the toughest editing job the legendary Perkins ever took on — shaping the fiction of a wildman of letters of the North Carolina mountains whose rough drafts deforested whole states. Turning 5000 pages into “Of Time and the River,” or rendering the mad meandering navel gazing of “O, Lost” into a Great American Novel — retitled “Look Homeward, Angel”were Perkins’ severest tests, and it is suggested, his most rewarding.

Law’s Wolfe is brash, needy, rude and drunk much of the time. He is in awe of Fitzgerald until Perkins agrees to edit and publish him. Suddenly, Wolfe is overly familiar with the “Great Gatbsy” novelist, cruel to Scott and his mentally unstable wife.

Nicole Kidman is just the right touch of theatrical as stage designer Aline Bernstein, Wolfe’s married lover and sponsor. Wolfe grasps at the hem of her skirt until instant fame arrives. His “sweet Jewess” bridles at being shunted aside for his new “love,” Perkins — the man who will make all his dreams come true.

Laura Linney plays Mrs. Perkins, long-overshadowed mother-of-five and wife to a confirmed workaholic. Perkins is so wrapped up in the important business of “putting good books in the hands of readers” that he never, ever takes off his fedora. He’s a mild-mannered Walter Winchell, living vicariously through the mercurial Wolfe, always seen in his hat.

A telling scene straight out of Screenwriting 201: Defining Characters, pairs the two up at a Harlem speakeasy, with Wolfe comparing his “grandiose” and verbose style to jazz, and Perkins confessing an affection for the squarest tune of all time — “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.”

Law’s Wolfe is a “monster,” “Caliban,” he says, comparing himself to Shakespeare’s troubled servant/beast of “The Tempest.” He sucks all the oxygen out of any room, and Firth has a hard time registering as anything other than a dull pedant in awe of Wolfe’s prose and way of devouring life.

The relationship is so uneven that the lovely, muted colors that recreate the period, the dazzling casting all around and Law’s breathless way with a Wolfeian phrase barely right the scales.

“Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?” he asks in a florid Carolina drawl. “Ghost, come back again!”

Law’s overpowering performance is funy, but “Genius” adds up to just a little more than a lovely bore. And any hint that Perkins was the “true” genius never pulls clear of the shadows cast by the blinding light of Law’s Wolfe.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and suggestive content

Cast: Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Dominic West
Credits: Directed by Michael Grandage, script by John Logan, based on the A. Scott Berg biography. A Summit/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:44

The road to the “Free State of Jones” is paved with good intentions.

Ambitious, with a vivid turn by Matthew McConaughey in the lead role, its also timely, a story worth telling and remembering.

But the film woven out of this open-ended Civil War saga is preachy, cumbersome and patronizing, to boot. Whatever lessons anyone — especially any Southern one — might pull from this historic parable are muted by a film that is epic in length only.

The Civil War isn’t really over and wasn’t exclusively about slavery are its messages. And those are underlined, at every turn, by Gary “Seabiscuit” Ross’s script and direction and Matthew McConaughey’s righteous and committed performance.

In 1862, Newton Knight, McConaughey’s character, discovers the war’s class war subtext and isn’t shy about sharing it. It’s a war to help the rich folks stay rich by having slaves to pick their cotton. Hardscrabble Mississippi farmers like himself, his neighbors and his kin? Just cannon fodder in this “poor man’s fight, rich man’s war.”

We meet him as a medical orderly, toting the wounded back to the hospital tents in mid-battle. He switches the coats of some of the badly injured.

“They think you’re an officer, they’ll fix you sooner.”

When he cannot save a young relative for just that reason — the rich, whose war this is, come first — he’s had enough.

And back in Jones County, the injustice of it all is even more pronounced — wealthy plantation owners living in the style their slave labor cultivated, with the poor losing their boys, their livestock and their harvests to forced conscription and tax seizures.

It’s when he crosses swords with the rear echelon Confederate enforcers that Newt must go on the lam. And in the swamps, taken in by escaped slaves, this blacksmith/farmer comes to see the real enemy — the Antebellum One Percent.

Newt surrounds himself with like-minded dirt farmers. Gradually, some of them start to see past their racism and understand shared interests with the runaways. Jones County, and a couple of others, eventually fall under their control. The Free State of Jones may hope for help from the Union, but its founders have even higher aspirations — fairer taxes, freed slaves and a redistribution of wealth.

The story, the larger scope of which is true, is told in a fictive present in the 1860s and ’70s, with flash-forwards to a court trial about marriage and racial purity of the Mississippi of the 1950s. That’s an unsatisfying way of highlighting how little has changed, and sort of the first place the movie goes astray.

Newton Knight’s wife (Kerri Russell) and young son flee when he has a bounty put upon his head. That leaves the door open to a relationship with the Creole healer slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and some awfully forward-thinking living arrangements.

The combat sequences are vivid, thanks to Ross keeping the camera and the carnage right in our faces. This “noble” conflict was gory beyond imagining, bathed in blood, something the stark black and white photography of the day (sampled, here and there) left out. But the battles are Hollywood-style stand-offs — ambushes that lead to massacres.

Ross keeps his camera in McConaughey’s face, too. Every dirt stain, every twitch, every glower, wink and wince, is hard to miss. It’s not a bad performance, but it is an absurdly busy one.

Mahershala Ali, as a freed slave, and Mbatha-Raw are the standout supporting players. But “Free State” is peopled with legions of unknowns and non-actors in bit parts. Like “Gettysburg” and most under-budgeted Civil War movies, too many roles were cast based on who could grow (or fake) a decent beard, who could handle a horse or who fit into the overly-elaborate Confederate uniforms.

The “romance” is played down, as it almost certainly has to be in these more enlightened times. There’s too much exploitation inherent in the relationship for the old-fashioned she-saves-his-sick-kid/he’s-kind-and-generous-to-her dynamic to work.

But more of “Free State of Jones” comes off than you’d expect. And if modern fans pick up on the idiocy of falling for political race-baiting and the moral bankruptcy of 150 years of Southerners blindly following the burning cross, or relying on armed intimidation to preserve an unjust status quo, then Ross, McConaughey, Mbatha-Raw and Russell’s faith in this malnourished and overreaching project seems justified.

MPAA Rating:R for brutal battle scenes and disturbing graphic images

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Keri Russell, Mahershala Ali
Credits: Directed by Gary Ross, script by Leonard Hartman and Gary Ross. An STX release.

Running time: 2:19

Blake Lively, a swimsuit and a shark — that’s all the titillation and terror most of us will ever want.

“The Shallows” turns out to be just what the summer cinema needed, a little reminder to be afraid to go back in the water.

Horror and action specialist Jaume Collet-Serra (“Orphan,” “Non-Stop”) serves up a harrowing serving of sea food in this simple, somewhat sensible shark-attack thriller.

Clever, funny and gripping, it goes all far-fetched in the third act. But for 75 minutes or so, we’re stuck with a bloodied Blake out on a rock, waiting for high tide to bring a 24 foot shark into her lap to finish his meal.

Lively shows off her between-babies beach bod to good effect as Nancy Adams, a free spirit who bailed out of medical school to find her way to a beach her late mother once frequented.

Anthony Jaswinski’s script establishes her pluck, her back story and her sense of humor as she mangles Spanish communicating with the friendly local (Oscar Jaenada) who drives her to a Mexican cove with distinct off-shore islets guarding its bay.

“Cuidado,” he tells her (“Be careful.”). “Siempre,” she replies. “Always.”

There are a couple of Mexican surfers there. One has a GoPro mini-camera. And we all know what that means.

While they swim for shore at dusk, Nancy goes for the “one last wave.” And we all know what THAT means, too.

Next thing she knows, she’s stumbled into a shark in a very logical place to find one. She’s grievously bitten, loses her board and finds herself on a low-tide islet with only a shark-injured seagull for company.

Corny touches — Nancy talks to the gull, and the shark.

“Where are you TAKING me?”

And she talks herself through the inevitable surgery-on-oneself moment — not for the weak of stomach.

Lively gives Nancy a hint of shock, a touch of panic and a trace of resignation at her situation. She lets us see the wheels turning as the surfer tries to reason her way out of this jam.

Collet-Serra treats us to stunning underwater slo-mo, establishing Nancy’s ease with a board and a wave, and the hint of menace just beneath the surface. The seas are Tanqueray clear, but the bottom is a minefield of jagged rocks, fire corals and the shark we know is on his way.

Things get into the area of “Oh come on” before they’re done. But “The Shallows” never tries to pass itself off as deep. It’s a straight, simple and primal thriller playing with our darkest deep sea fear — getting eaten.

And Lively, with every bruise, cut and abrasion added to her makeup, with every grunt and scream at a fresh injury, puts us on that rock with her, trying to outsmart one pitiless fish between low tide and high.

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for bloody images, intense sequences of peril, and brief strong language)

Cast: Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada
Credits: Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra , script by Anthony Jaswinski. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:25

An important, hot-button topic gets an amusing, convincing if cursory treatment in “Can We Take a Joke?”, a documentary about the war on free speech in America.

It’s not a film about government censorship or old-school State Sponsored Religion restrictions on what people can say or write. It’s about the political correctness that has so infected college campuses and the Internet that stand-up comedians are spending a lot of time apologizing, when they should be trying out new jokes that prick the orthodoxy and challenge sensibilities.

Insult comics from Lisa Lampenelli to Gilbert Gottfried marvel at how emboldened hecklers have become, at how colleges — supposed bastions of airing challenging ideas and hearing others out — have become the home to the “mob censorship” movement.

Director Ted Balaker begins with a parade of public apologies, from Don Imus and Jimmy Kimmel and others, for jokes they’ve made. It shows us video of coed fascists, shouting down plays they take umbrage to, charging the stage to snatch the microphone from comics who offend them.

And scholars, comics and others weigh in on the public’s runaway “right to be offended,” stunned that a generation has grown up to “become what they hated” — censors.

Penn Gillette and Gottfried and a Lenny Bruce biographer marvel over the legendary martyr for free speech who must be rolling in his grave over battles he fought with the anti-free speech conservatives of his day made moot by anti-free speech liberals.

Bruce, whose challenging work of the 1960s is generously sampled here, pushed boundaries that George Carlin and Richard Pryor exploited after him, and generations of comics have enjoyed great freedom in the decades since.

As anybody who has spent 15 minutes studying stand-up could tell you, NOTHING should be off-limits. Or is supposed to be. Gottfried famously told the first post 9/11 joke about 9/11, and was more far famously fired from a duck-quacking insurance spokesman gig for making Japanese earthquake/tsunami/meltdown cracks “too soon” after that tragedy. Thanks to a “Let’s get him FIRED” Internet campaign.

The movie wanders off topic, sidetracked by Internet shaming and its consequences. Considering how brief “Take a Joke” is, that deflates the message and feels like filler.

After all, everybody from Jerry Seinfeld on down the comic hierarchy has complained about this campus-fueled assault on free speech. More voices would have been nice, and just one person, on camera, defending the whole tyranny of “safe space” where “hate speech” and “bullying” is banned on campuses is a grievous omission.

Hearing from the “other side” in a movie that advocates advancing knowledge and understanding through free speech seems like, um, a no brainer.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Gilbert Gottfried, Lisa Lampenelli, Karith Foster, Penn Jillette,
Credits: Written and directed by Ted Balaker. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:19

“Nuts!” is a comical documentary exploration of Americana, a piece of Great Depression history playfully related with animation and tongue planted firmly in cheek.

It’s about a Great American, a visionary almost forgotten today, Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, whose impotence cures made him a legend back when movies were silent, radio was new and Viagra was but a Big Pharma wet dream.

Brinkley kicked around the  fringes of medicine in the early years of the century, settled in Milford, Kansas, and discovered that implanting billy goat testicles cured men complaining of having “a flat tire,” “sexual weakness” Brinkley called it.

It made him and his little town rich, and as he became one of the earliest adapters when radio rolled around, it made him famous.

The adorably-named director Penny Lane has built her film upon Brinkley’s “authorized biography,” and lists the achievements of this scientific wonder, chapter and verse. The famous — Rudolph Valentino, Huey P. Long, William Jennings Bryan — supposedly took the cure. Buster Keaton may have, too, and certainly plugged “goat gland” therapy in one of his movies.

Brinkley put the fourth radio station to take to the airwaves in these United States on the air, and used it to do consultations and make prescriptions and talk, frankly, about sex and sexual dysfunction. One of the historical experts Lane puts on camera describes the goateed Brinkley as “the Dr. Ruth…of the ’20s and ’30s.”

Endorsed by the Los Angeles Times, a man who built an empire of cooperative pharmacies, private hospitals and eventually, multi-state broadcasting, Brinkley was so admired he might have become Governor of Kansas, had the state not engaged in election chicanery to prevent it.

And it was all a hustle. The infant American Medical Association came after him, as did the pre-Federal Communications Commission (Federal Radio Commission). His “real” story was simply scandalous.

Lane saves her departure from the script, according to the self-published biography, for the third act, when Brinkley took his place among the infamous figures of early radio — Father Coughlin and Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.

But that takes little away from his pioneering status. Laws were written to protect the public from people like Brinkley, but millions embraced him. His radio station put country and western music and traditional folk musicians on the air. And when he lost that one, he became the first to sell his elixirs and cures on a purpose-built super-powered Mexican radio station on the border with Texas.

His status as an outlaw radio/musical taste-changer warranted a mention in ZZ Top’s early hit, “Heard it On the X.”

This quick, short Sundance Film Festival award winner leaves out a lot more about Brinkley than in it includes. But save your trip to the library (or Wikipedia) for after the film. The surprises, comic and tragic, are worth waiting for.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult sexual subject matter

Cast: Pope Brock, Dr. James Rearden, the voices of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, Gene Tognacci and others. 
Credits: Directed by Penny Lane, script by Thom Stylinski. A Cartuna/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:19

Sensitive child actor turned sensitive character player and leading man Anton Yelchin is the latest celebrity death in the grim gallery of 2016. Pinned against a wall by his own car, apparently.

It was a Jeep Grand Cherokee, under a recall for gear shifter/park problems, according to Jalopnik and CBS.

The too too young “Star Trek” and “Green Room” “Burying the Ex” and “Rudderless” and “House of D” and “Alpha Dog” star and musician (check him out in “Green Room” and especially “Rudderless” to sample his musical side) was just 27 years old.

I interviewed him a few times over the years. He seemed to work constantly.

A real sweetheart, his co-stars went all goo-goo talking about him. I remember Felicity Jones (“Like Crazy”) went “Who WOULDN’T fall in love with him?” when I asked.

Loved him in many an indie film, especially his most recent, “Green Room.” Just stunned at his sudden death.

This will cast a pall over the  his final “Star Trek” movie, opening next month. Sweet kid, good actor, very funny Chekhov.

Some movies, and almost all popcorn pictures, don’t need to be previewed for critics. They’re “brands” more than movies. They have a built-in constituency, and the only things do for that constituency is rile them up if some of us dare to speak truth-to-fanboy.

“Warcraft” sucks. “X-Men: Apocalypse” is a bore. “Transformers” are for trolls. Etc.

A movie like “The Da Vinci Code” may have its problems with critics, but the first rule is “Never show fear.” “Da Vinci was previewed at Cannes, and in theaters for critics all over America, at exactly the same time. We all said pretty much the same thing — “Ugh.” But no matter. Sony leveled the playing field, rolled out the red carpet and took a shot.

Did it hurt the movie? Not a whit.

But another message is sent when you’ve spent hundreds of millions on a movie and are supposedly marketing it to retrieve some of that investment. You’re scared of reviews. You know they aren’t going to be good. And, what the hey? Why spend money getting a beating you know is coming? How can that help?

I get the logic. But if “Warcraft’s” producers had the guts to show the movie pre-release, if every “Transformers” movie and every Michael Bay mishap is hurled at critics before the public release, why wouldn’t you critic screen your movie? You’re already test-screening it.

Twentieth Century Fox has been trying to blunt criticism by opening a lot of its blockbuster in Rupert Murdoch’s home country — Australia. If you own a lot of the media, maybe the first wave of reviews will be kinder. If the critics know what’s good for’em, eh?

They don’t appear to be attempting even that with “Independence Day: Resurgence.” 

“No previews, at all,” I was told. My sister-and-brother critics have been getting the same message. Unless somebody is lying, there won’t be previews of this one before it opens.

Protecting the surprises? Preventing spoilers? Or hiding a product they know is going to get killed? We’ll all have to wait for Thursday to find out.

Pixar’s magic touch has never been more magical. “Finding Dory,” the “Finding Nemo” sequel, is on pace to set the opening weekend box office record for animated films.

$134 million, per Deadline.com.

The most beloved Pixar (Disney Pixar) title to never earn a sequel, it’s earned terrific reviews and didn’t really need them, with that “Finding” brand and “Disney” brand and “Pixar” brand going for it. Staggering numbers.

To compare, the grossly inferior Finnish “Angry Birds” movie has just cleared $100 million, after a month in release.

The sun hasn’t set on Kevin Hart, for those who worried about the Little Man. He’s headed to a buddy picture $32-33 million take with “Central Intelligence.”

Yeah, reviews were mixed. He ends up being second banana to The Rock, after all. But it’s funny enough and there you go.

Of last weekend’s openings, “Warcraft” fell off a cliff. A 72% drop is what we in the business call “A Tyler Perry Plummet.” That plunge would be enough to stagger even those die-hards who loaded my review with enraged comments. Except, you know, numbers, percentages and what not befuddle them. The dears. They think the fact that it’s huge in China is a counter-argument for its quality. China. Where anti-freeze in dogfood and communism are still in fashion.

A POS vid game adaptation in which only adherents could find anything to embrace. Sorry. Only fans could love. Big words. Apologies, “Warcrafters.”

“Now You See Me” held a lot more audience, as did “Conjuring 2.”