Movie Nation

An old quote attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, I think, justified his thinking that “Gone With the Wind” would flop. “No movie about the Civil War ever made a dime.”

This coming summer, we’ll see if that still holds (as it has, mostly, for every film outside of “GWTW” and “Birth of a Nation.” “The Free State of Jones” has lower stakes, but could be that rare stumble in Matthew McConaughey’s post-“Lincoln Lawyer” career.

STX, a 2014 studio startup with multiple theater chain backing and “The Gift,” and the remake of “Secret in their Eyes” as their track record, got Gary “Seabiscuit” Ross to direct Matthew McConaughey in the second version of a small county in Mississippi’s revolt against the Confederacy in the middle of the Civil War. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Keri Russell also star.

McConaughey plays Newton Knight, who led the revolt.

Van Heflin starred in a 1948 version of the story, based on a historical novel about Knight and the revolt — “Tap Roots.” The new one will emphasize the anti-slavery rebels vs. the cotton plantation owners’
“one percent” in open, armed conflict. The trailer to “Free State of Jones” popped up during NFL playoff games Saturday.

“The Revenant,” one of the best pictures of 2015, opens wide this weekend. Will it top “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the world-beating blockbuster rehash that is decidedly NOT one of the best movies of 2015 on its opening weekend?

Sunday may be the most telling day.
Friday put “Revenant” on track to take in over $38 million dollars this weekend. Huge for a frontier tale, not a franchise, not a comic book adaptation, non-Western Western starring Leonard “And the Oscar goes to” DiCaprio.

When buzz on a picture is this good, we don’t have to call it hype. Great film. See it. And if you do, it could narrowly nudge the “glib facsimile” “Force Awakens” ($35-37 million) into second place.

“The Forest,” a widely-trashed January horror opening, will manage a passable $12 million opening weekend.

“Revenant” should pass Tarantino’s tepid Western “Hateful Eight” by midweek.

“Daddy’s Home” may be clobbering “Sisters,” but they’re both making bank. The holiday comedies sit at $115 (Will F. and Mark W.) and $73 (Amy and Tina).

“Big Short” is holding up, “Joy” is fading, “Concussion?” Nobody remembers it’s still playing.

There is nobility and purpose in work — any work. Giving any job your best is a worthy goal to carry through life.

And it’s always generous when an actor with a name lends some of that name-recognition to a filmmaker and film project with none.

But Jason Patric — Jason PATRIC? — co-starring in a limited budget/limited release horror picture? Man, what happened?

“The Abandoned” happened. To Jason Patric. He’s not even the star of it (co-star), but his presence classes up this tepid psychological/supernatural thriller, un unstable woman in a haunted house tale that begins with little promise and ends with even less.

Louisa Krause is Julia — “Just call me Streak.” She’s medicated. She’s in school. She’s got to keep this new night watch job if she wants to get her daughter back.

But the watching goes on in a baroque monstrosity of an unfinished condo complex. The interiors look like the lobby of assorted Gilded Age New York hotels, or maybe Grand Central Station. It was never occupied, and the real estate bust shuttered it.

The young-and-dainty Julia has to keep things secure, monitor the wall of video monitors and occasionally do a walk-through, wearing a camera/microphone headset. That’s so her partner can see where she is and communicate with her.

But the partner is a bitter, sarcastic and sadistic practical joker who keeps porn pasted on his desk and a bottle in his pocket.

“Games? I don’t play GAMES.”

Patric plays Cooper as short-tempered, smart and mean.

“What’s your story?” incites a calm, furious tirade about “community college girls” hired, briefly, for a job they’re ill-suited for. But “Streak” insists she’s made of sterner stuff.

“I like the night.”

That doesn’t explain the deep end she plunges from when Cooper shuts her up in a lightless elevator. Or the voices she hears there, and in every other spooky corner of this vast piece of prime real estate.

The script quickly abandons Cooper’s acrid edge, as he reveals his inner and outer pain, and tries to understand Julia’s. Something is going bump in the night. Something happened here, years before. Someone, and we’re not talking about the homeless guy (Mark Margolis) she let in, is shutting doors behind her and creeping her out.

The film gives up any sense of mystery about who or what is behind Julia’s experiences. She sees things in mirrors, and we see human (ish) creatures on the ceilings. Maybe it’s all in her head, but making Cooper more of a suspect would have helped spook this thing up.

The closed-circuit video gimmick is wasted, as is Patric, a long way removed from “In the Valley of Elah” and “Rush.”

The few scary situations are more a product of mood lighting than acting and editing, which is usually better applied to build tension.

“The Abandoned” leaves us in the lurch, wondering at the nonsensical ending exactly what we wondered at the beginning. Jason Patric — Jason PATRIC? Man, what happened?

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Louisa Krause, Jason Patric, Mark Margolis
Credits: Directed by Eytan Rockaway, script by Ido Fluk. An IFC Midngith release.

Running time: 1:26

A reliable formula for getting your indie drama made is to write a lot of small, chewy parts that several good actors will want to sink their teeth into.

Another part of the formula involves having access to those good actors. Which is why more than a few such films are made by actors themselves — the peer-to-peer approach.

So actor/director Tim Blake Nelson (“O Brother Where Art Thou,” “O”) had a couple of legs up getting his “Anesthesia” filmed and released to theaters. And good for him.

The movie, a multi-character melodramatic puzzle that resolves itself in convenient, soap opera fashion, is very much a mixed bag, as is the cast. But there’s just enough there — or almost just enough, anyway.

Sam Waterston plays a college philosophy professor on the verge of retirement. His every action is a bit of calculated “good.” His every sentence seems to quote Nietzche, St. Augustin, Shakespeare or Montaigne. So it’s troubling that we meet him and he is promptly stabbed.

New York, you see.

Corey Stoll and Mickey Summer are the couple who find him, bleeding, in the foyer of their apartment building. Kristen Stewart is the professor’s  “brilliant, but troubled…inscrutable” student. Tim Blake Nelson is the professor’s son, whose wife (Jessica Hecht) has just discovered she has cancer. Their kids (Hannah Marks and Ben Konigsberg) are bright but oblivious, diving into pot.

There’s also a well-read junkie (K. Todd Freeman) whose childhood friend, now a rich lawyer (Michael Kenneth Williams) is willing to hire “muscle” to get the guy into rehab.

And Gretchen Mol is a rich, bored housewife who feuds with other rich, bored housewives, wonders if her husband is really traveling for “business” and drinks too much wine as she’s wondering.

They’re all people suffering in various ways, failing to connect in various others. There are good lines and great scenes — a just-dating couple disagreeing over having children, teens stumbling and giggling into their first lovemaking experience, the spoiled suburbanite (Mol, along with Waterston the stand-out performer here) fuming about “our entitlements,” and the legions of former New York career women reduced to sitting in pricey SUVs in the pickup line at their private school, bickering.

“What’s LEFT but polishing our children?”

Stewart seems to play the linchpin character, a coed struggling with loneliness and alienation. And although I’m a fan, she is weak, here. Her line readings play like rote recitations, rants about how she must “crave interaction” in an era where her peers cannot disconnect from their “devices,” which make all their decisions for them.

They must be under anesthesia, we can surmise. Too easily.

Shot in the overcast greys of late winter/early spring, Nelson’s actors pitch their performances that way, giving “Anesthesia” a narcotizing effect.

Which wasn’t exactly what he was going for. But the intellectual ambition, the showy “smart” dialogue and collectively quotable characters played by actors we respect make “Anesthesia” watchable, and its existence as an indie film that attracted this cast, won financing and made it into theaters easy to explain.

MPAA Rating:R for language, sexual content, drug use and brief violence

Cast: Sam Waterston, Kristen Stewart, Corey Stoll, Glenn Close, K. Todd Freeman, Gretchen Moll, Michael Kenneth Williams, Tim Blake Nelson
Credits: Written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson. An IFC  release.

Running time: 1:29

The colors, the shadows pierced by unearthly shafts of light, the venal billionaire villain and the Shades of Vangelis score tell us this about “Synchronicity” before we have one hint about what it’s about.

This is a “Blade Runner” homage, a tribute to the over-designed underlit glories of early Ridley Scott films.

Screenwriter/director Jacob Gentry (“The Signal”) has crafted a mood-over-all time travel thriller with a paranoid inventor, a femme fatale and assorted “versions” of these characters manipulated by the “topological anomaly” that scientist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight) has discovered and is exploiting.

In the not-that-distant future, Beale and his team have created a “reversible wormhole in the fabric of the space-time continuum.”

Even if you know almost nobody ever uses that last phrase outside of science fiction movies, and you don’t understand, you’ve got to figure Jim is onto something.

That’s the thinking of his financier, played by Michael Ironside, one of the cinema’s greatest heavies. Jim’s got to outsmart the billionaire to keep control of this epoch-shaking invention. But who can he trust to help him?

“Synchronicity” is about paranoia and betrayals, real and imagined. And it’s about nerd lust, the kind of temptation that presents itself in the person of Abby (Brianne Davis). When she asks “Where did YOU just come from?” she might better be asking “When did you just come from?” Her curiosity is piqued.

Something about time travel makes it oh-so-friendly to manage in a micro-budget movie.

Think of the cut-rate thrillers, from “Primer” to the Spanish “Time Crimes,”  to say nothing of the scads of budget-conscious TV episodes and entire series that have managed something interesting in the genre without “Back to the Future” bucks.

That’s the stand-out trait of “Synchronicity,” the austere future cityscapes, the gloomy nights, the realistic-looking gear and “scientific method” approach to testing this new procedure/gadget on a planet, and then people.

Characters may bicker about the fates of Tesla and Edison — one, rich and famous, the other too late to get credit for his genius. Love and trust are given and withdrawn, depending on the relative level of paranoia. And characters are constantly running the risk of running into earlier — or later — versions of themselves, trying to tidy all this up.

“If I’m doing my math correctly, there’s a good chance I’m on my way here right now.”

McKnight suggests barely enough of a science nerd to be believable. Davis (“True Blood”) has a sexy mystery about her that suits the character’s uncertain standing. Is she guileless, or scheming? Abby’s attraction to Jim never feels real, so that’s given away too easily.

It all comes back to that look, the feel, Gentry was going for. That’s not enough, as the story gets lost in the murk and the relationships are never as clear as they should be simply because of the lack of light.

Think of the shocks of “Primer,” the intricate puzzle of “Los cronocrimenes (Time Crimes”). No matter how gorgeous “Synchronicity” looks, it can’t keep you from feeling this was an opportunity missed.

 
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast: Chad McKnight, Brianne Davis, AJ Bowen, Michael Ironside
Credits: Written and directed by Jacob Gentry. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:41

Here’s information you need before settling in to watch the surreal indie dramedy “Entertainment.”

The star is Gregg Turkington, and the character he’s performing is named Neil Hamburger, Turkington’s stage alter ego, aka “The World’s Worst Comic.”

Which, from the bountiful evidence presented by the film proves, he is.

He looks like Dwight Yoakam gone to seed — pudgy, flop sweaty in his ill-fitting cheap tux, balding, with only a greasy comb-over to call his own.

The Hamburger conceit is a through-the-looking-glass performance art riff on comedy, the psyche of comics and the viewer’s response to stand-up, challenging our Pavlovian reaction to ba-DOOM-boom set-up/punch line humor.

“What’s the worst thing about being raped by Crosby, Stills and Nash?”

“Why don’t rapists eat at T.G.I. Friday’s?”

The punch-lines are squirm-inducing, excruciating, as indeed is his entire act. His rage at hecklers — of which there are many — crosses every line in the book.  He may be “literally plucking jokes out of my heart,” but onstage, he has no heart. And onstage, he has no jokes.

Co-writer/director Rick Alverson (“The Comedy”) uses a desert Southwest tour by this character called “the comic” (one person does call him “Neil”) to ask the existential question — Are you a comic if nobody laughs?

That’s giving the film more credit for a through line than it actually has. “Entertainment” is rife with randomness, shot through with misery and self-loathing and flat out unpleasant as a screen experience.

As “The Comic” plays prisons, parties and the emptiest, sandiest dives this side of Tucumcari, he leaves heartfelt (and unreturned) phone messages for his daughter. He encounters Latin Americans, hecklers, dazed “fans” and a wealthy orange-grower cousin (John C. Reilly) who doesn’t understand his edgy act at all. He’s not alone.

“Where do you wanna go?” the cousin, standing in for the audience, asks. “Where’s this leading to?”

The pregnant woman giving birth in a public restroom, the guy (Michael Cera) taking shelter there? As random as the remains of an offroad car wreck that draws The Comic’s attention, and the director’s.

Is Hamburger in Hell? Purgatory? The anger and isolation and nightmarish nature of the never-ending road-trip through the boondocks capture something fundamental to the stand-up experience.

But it’s difficult to give Alverson and his star too much credit for depth, insight or having a point. Because I’m not certain they have one.

MPAA Rating:R for language, crude sexual material, a disturbing image and brief drug use

Cast: Gregg Turkington, Tye Sheridan, John C. Reilly, Amy Seimetz
Credits: Directed by Rick Alverson, script by Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington and Tim Heidecker. A Magnolia release.

Running time:

“Oh no,” I said to myself, noting the presence of another “new” book about Orson Welles. “Definitive,” I thought. Again. “The last word,” I was sure.  Again.

No other life in film has been so devoured, pored over and parsed. You could make a lovely flow chart of the ebb and flow of Wellesiana and the state of his legend — the nadir coming from Pauline Kael’s credit-removing “The Citizen Kane Book,” and Charles Higham’s “pathography.” Then there was all his former partner John Houseman wrote about Welles in Houseman’s own memoirs.

His reputation was revived Barbara Leaming’s “as told to” biography, Simon Callow’s two volume dissection, interview transcriptions from Welles acolytes Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom, “rethinking/setting the record straight” books by Frank Brady and Robert Carringer and Welles the Shakespearean (Michael Anderegg) and on and on.

But damned if Patrick McGilligan’s “Young Orson” doesn’t sum all those earlier works, open some new doors and close — with finality — several others.

In 750 or so pages, McGilligan thoroughly covers Welles’ pre-history – a family saga that might make for a great PBS series post-“Downton Abbey.” About 100 pages pass before Orson is born.

The last 50 pages cover the last day of Welles’ life.

In between, we discover “new” inspirations for “Rosebud,” new testimony (a 1950s copyright suit by the author of a biography of William Randolph Heart involving Welles, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz  and Houseman) that settles several matters of authorship and biographical underpinnings for “Kane.”

And all that comes in the latter pages. McGilligan focuses on the fascinating debut Welles made, the run Welles had — reinventing the New York stage of the 1930s, conquering radio and frightening America with a take on H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” and then reinventing the movies with “Kane.”

As many Welles books as I’ve read, I never tire of re-discovering his all-African-American “Macbeth” (glimpsed below), his transformative Fascist-era “Julius Caesar.”

He took his first shot at directing something like a movie as a teen — a silly “student” project, “Hearts of Age,” long available on Youtube. More recently, the footage he shot for a stage farce he was trying to turn into a multimedia (filmed intervals moving the plot forward) project surfaced, which showed him how important and how difficult editing was (he never finished it. See below).

And then there was radio, my first career (college, and just after), where I really fell in love with Welles, thanks to transcriptions of his “Mercury Theatre of the Air” broadcasts, and that playful “War of the Worlds.”

All leading up to the great climax of “Kane,” the fourth or fifth idea for a “first film” from the “boy genius” Welles.

“Young Orson” is a brisk read, illuminating — McGilligan uses a dogged pursuit of exact dates to tear apart some of the “myths” around Welles. No, he didn’t father a future filmmaker with Geraldine Fitzgerald. And he eviscerates and dismisses, for once and for all, the various labels slapped on the director by Houseman, Higham, Callow, Kael and others, including the mythmaker himself. Welles was something of a fabulist, you know. Couldn’t take anything he said about his history, his career and “Kane” seriously — without doing the research.

McGilligan did. A terrific book.

“Band of Robbers” is more a clever conceit than a satisfying, coherent and involving crime comedy. But what a conceit!

It’s a modern resetting of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” with characters living out their adulthood in the patterns Twain established for their youth way back in 19th century St. Petersburg (Hannibal) Missouri.

So, Huck Finn (Kyle Gallner) is fresh out of prison, having taken the rap, one more time, for dreaming/scheming Tom (co-writer/director Adam Nee).

Huck wants to go straight, grow up, “have a family…a life.”

Tom? He’s the same scamp at 30 he was at 13. He’s a cop, now, suffering under the thumb of brother Sid (Eric Christian Olsen), but always with an eye on that buried pirate’s treasure that got him and Huck into so much trouble in their youth.

Tom rounds up their pals (comic Hannibal Burress, among them) and resolves to start a “Band of Robbers,” a gang of “merry men” just like Robin Hood. He pitches a “blood oath,” but the guys are too squeamish. He has to be satisfied with having his own mob. What’s it called and who’s in it?

“It’s on a need-to-know basis. And nobody needs to know.”

Tom’s a bit of a cunning dope. As always. He’s got a cunning plan, robbing a pawn shop where Injun Joe may have stashed something that will lead to them to the treasure. Tom the cop will get his gang to knock over the pawn shop and keep them out of the reach of Injun Joe. Who isn’t “real.” Or a “real Injun.”

“That’s kinda racist!”

“How is it racist to want to be MORE like another race?” Injun Joe himself (Stephen Lang) and others want to know, a funny running gag.

Tom has to throw his new partner, Officer Becky Thatcher (Melissa Benoist) off the scent, get his gang to show up on time and follow the plan, and track down the treasure that has consumed his dreams since before Mark Twain’s hair changed color.

“Band of Robbers” is a film of little flourishes that work better than the story they’re adorning. Everybody wondering why “Injun Joe” wants to be a Native American, clumsy gang members missing appointments, forgetting their panty-hose disguises (plastic grocery bags will have to do), clumsy attempts at Spanglish (they’ll pass themselves off as Mexicans during the heist).

A police interrogation gets off track when we’re asked to wonder how a mermaid might ride a snake.

“Sidesaddle.”

Nee, as Sawyer, has most of the hilarious lines, but doesn’t have a comic’s timing or a film star’s camera charisma. His awkward babbling to Becky Thatcher almost sings, but doesn’t. Nothing else comes as close to working.

But you have to hand it to the Nee brothers (Aaron is the other co-writer/director) for trying. In an age when every film student and filmmaker wannabe is grasping at the low-hanging fruit of horror, they’ve taken a shot at a classic. And missed. No dishonor in that.

 
MPAA Rating: unrated, with bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Kyle Gallner, Adam Nee, Melissa Benoist, Hannibal Burress, Stephen Lang
Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, based on Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:33

Put it off long enough, I figure. I got to all the films that mattered in 2015 in a timely manner, and spent entirely too long mulling over which might constitute the “ten best.”

Consider — “Straight Outta Compton,””Bridge of Spies,” “Labyrinth of Lies,” “Chi-raq,” “While We’re Young,” “Far from the Madding Crowd,” “Legend,” “Youth,” “Carol,” “The Danish Girl,” “Room,” “Love & Mercy, “Inside/Out,” “Trumbo,” “Sicario,” “Brooklyn”,  “Beasts of No Nation,” “Black Mass,” even the lightweight “A Royal Night Out,””– you could build a perfectly honorable list of the year’s best with those. For me, 2015 was a gilded year — for three star (out of four) movies.

The movies I hold in the highest regard hit an emotional chord that frankly, the aforementioned movies — to a one — missed. The swooning over “Carol” and “Brooklyn” and “Compton” I quite understand. But what you remember, years later, are how films made you feel. None of those measured up in that regard.

Still, the awards season rush toward any of those films feels deserved and easily defended. But the Broadcast Film Critics going for…”Star Wars: The Force Awakens”? That smacks of a label that rhymes with my last name.

Here’s what I figure were the best films of 2015 — delivered in reverse order, in order to preserve some sort of suspense. A few films have been utterly ignored by the Oscar buzz juggernaut, many of them weren’t seen by a very large segment of the moviegoing public. Their qualities stick in my mind and make me confident we’ll recall them years from now, which is all that counts.

10) “The Best of Enemies” — A civil, absurdly literate and bruising series of debates over the future of America at the birth of the “Nixon Era,” this film about the Gore Vidal/William F. Buckley Jr. TV tangles of 1968 was, for many, the last frank, blunt debate about U.S. politics that the country ever staged. That it came at the birth of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” pitting a white, less educated, more rural “silent majority” against assorted minorities — including the gay novelist Vidal — was prescient. Fascinating cultural artifact, great biography of these two patrician poseurs facing off over political philosophies.

9) “Mad Max: Fury Road” — The day is already here when those grasping, bandwagoning lightweights who glommed onto “Furious 7” (I miss Paul Walker, too — the movie was tripe) or “Jurassic World” (most pointless reboot this side of “Force Awakens”) as dazzling cinema, or in either case, “the movie of the summer,” hope that you will forget that they endorsed those dogs. “Fury Road” was what a reboot should be — namely, different. Amped-up action, altered message, original casting. Best role Charlize Theron has had since “Monster,” and Tom Hardy is setting himself up as the new “best actor to never win an Oscar.” THE movie of the summer.

8) “The Big Short” — I could easily endorse the idea that every complex story in American life, from the Wall Street collapse to Sabremetrics in Baseball, should be entrusted to author Michael Lewis. I could almost get on board the notion that turning such complexity over to a Will Ferrell crony as director (Adam McKay) will always pay off. But this all-star romp through the people who saw The Big Bubble and set out to punish those who created it — by shorting their stock holdings — is a delight and a modern civics lesson. No, we never did break up “too big to fail” depression-starters like Goldman Sachs. But Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt and others suggest we might want to get around to that.

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