Movie Nation

“A long time ago…in a city far far away…I had a future,” the “hero” of the Brazilian thriller “2 Rabbits” narrates.

Edgar (Fernando Alves Pinto) is handsome, well-off, loved by his restaurateur dad, and known — as a comical montage of testimonies tell us — by many. And the story he has to tell — of accidents and loss, guilt and redemption, gangsters and the  corrupt system that keeps them on the streets of Sao Paolo — is complex. He has this scheme to kill “two rabbits with one shot.”

But “2 Rabbits” is a movie with no heroes, just a lot of unsavory folks painted in various shades of gray.

A car crash that kills a mother and child opens the film. And as it progresses and the story circles back around to that event, we meet the medicated femme fatale prosecutor (Alessandra Negrini), her defense attorney husband, a gangster (Marat Descartes), a mugger who might come in handy and a political boss looking to get paid any time anything happens in Sao Paolo.

“Justice is…peculiar in Brazil,” Edgar explains. He has dodged it himself, but he has a scheme — involving a bomb — to get a little justice for himself and others let down by the system.

Writer-director Afonso Poyart rode this cryptic, hallucinatory action picture into a job directing “Solace,” with Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Colin Farrell.

The prosecutor has stress-driven blackouts. When you and your husband are conspiring to get murderers released and regularly dealing with the lawless as peers, you’re bound to have paranoid visions of slaughter.

Poyart’s lurid visuals, sea of characters and the turgid and subtitled Portuguese dialogue make the picture hard to follow and even harder to swallow, at times. Edgar is no better than those he wants “justice” from, and one person who teams up with him makes no logical sense.

But the electronic (magical, almost) triggering device for Edgar’s bomb makes for some tense stand-offs. And you have to trust that Poyart feels as uncertain about Edgar’s place as “hero” in the tale as you do.

It’s not just “2 Rabbits” he’s concerned with nailing here. It’s a rabbit warren of venality only a lot of mayhem will clear up. And if it’s not wholly satisfying and righteous, well, welcome to Brazil.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic gun violence, sexual situations

Cast: Fernando Alves Pinto, Alessandra Negrini, Marat Descartes

Credits: Written and directed by Afonso Poyart. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:41

Sure, another blockbuster weekend for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is here. Over $140 million, based on Christmas Day/Friday numbers.

But the shocker has to be the staying power of Will Ferrell.  “Daddy’s Home” smelled like a hit. Not with critics, mind you. But it’s Will being Will and Wahlberg playing the bully. And that’s enough. A $40 million+ weekend is unfolding for this latest odd coupling.

“Sisters” is actually doing better this weekend than it did on opening weekend, as the ladies like to laugh, too, and the holiday has everybody off and in a moviegoing frame of mind. “Star Wars” primes the pump, people see posters and trailers for movies they might want to see as well, and voila, a big boost to the BO results.

“Joy” is opening a lot bigger than “The Big Short.” One’s a bio-comedy that doesn’t work by an Oscar-burnished cast and crew. The other is…complicated. Funny, but about the financial bust and bubble of 2008 and how it happened.

Over $21 million for “Joy,” just over half that for “Big Short.”

“Concussion” will do about $12, much to the relief of the NFL.

“Point Break” will manage even less. Patrick Swayze’s ghost is grinning somewhere. Under $10.

“Hateful Eight” will clear $4 million on just 100 screens. “Revenant” will hit half a million on just 4.

All those silly film critics, whipping out their Top Ten Lists without first catching “Point Break.” How COULD they?

Call it a hunch.

But after a year of blockbuster rehashes masquerading as “sequels”,  here at last is a remake that dares call itself that. The stunts are in 3D and are more especially when you’re in that flying suit, zipping through the Alps or looking down from the top of Venezuela’s Angel Falls.

It’s the New Age/Nirvana-seeking script that lets it down. And as moving as the action beats are, the actors aren’t. The stunt team races through the frame. The actors stand stock still and recite.

Luke Bracey is the new Keanu in this one. Johnny Utah is a motocross “poly-athlete” who loses a buddy in a reckless moment, and does what it takes to join the FBI to atone for it.

Some extreme athletes are pulling off daring heists — stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, riding dirt bikes and popping parachutes. And Utah’s boss (the under-used Delroy Lindo) doesn’t like it. Our new “provisional” agent has an idea. These crooks are following the path of an extreme sports/eco warrior guru who preached that one should pursue stunts that tell the “Life of Wind” or “Birth of Story” or “Act of Ultimate Trust.” There are eight stations of the cross in this ethos. Utah knows them.

Utah discovers his quarry at an epic, once-in-a-decade wave off Biarritz, France. Their leader is Bodhi, a thrill seeking spirit warrior who leads a team to the ultimate snowboarding/surfing/rock climbing/flying suit experiences.

Bodhi (Edgar Ramirez of “Joy”) believes in saving the planet. “We have to give more than we take.” So stealing from robber barons or closing an open pit mine or lumber operation is what he’s all about.

Utah intrigues him.

“Are you ready to let go?”

Deep cover, in this case, means risking his neck every day doing things no sane or under-trained person should try.

Director/cinematographer Ericson Core does a great job capturing the big stunts — especially the climbing and flying ones. The surfing occasionally lets on that we aren’t seeing the real deal, or that love interest flower child Teresa Palmer might be able to surf — but not an 80 foot wave.

The casting does the film few favors. Ramirez is charismatic, but has none of Patrick Swayze’s mad twinkle. It’s a humorless film that makes you go “Wow” more than it involves you.

Kathryn Bigelow staged the greatest foot chase in film history in the original “Point Break.” There’s nothing to match that here. Bracey (“G.I. Joe: Retaliation”) is a buff, blonde stiff covered in tattoos. Palmer grins in every shot as if to remind us she isn’t her look-alike, she-wh0-never-smiles, Kristen Stewart.

It’s not a movie to think about. The Arabic millionaire  financing these stunts (not captured for Youtube), the promising but vanishing Robin Hood motif, the wacko way Utah keeps outguessing his quarry — none of it stands up to scrutiny. The enviro-agitprop is laughable.

“Nature will always find a way to make you feel small.”

But the 3D stunts are eye-popping, even if the new version’s cast and cut-and-paste script are not.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, thematic material involving perilous activity, some sexuality, language and drug material

Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Luke Bracey, Ray Winstone, Teresa Palmer, Delroy Lindo
Credits: Directed by Ericson Core script by Kurt Wimmer. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:53

Many of us wonder about exactly who gave Quentin Tarantino the license to use the word that, historically (and often hysterically–as in comic) no black person gives any white person permission to use.

Axel Rose? Not permitted. Michael Richards? Ditto.

But Tarantino? Decades of using it, willy nilly.

As Gawker demonstrates.

An unsettling dread hangs over the boys of “Yosemite,” a character study built around a couple of interconnected James Franco short stories from his book, “Palo Alto.”

Boys talking about death. News reports (set in the early ’80s?) mentioning, about humans encroaching on mountain lion habitat, a child befriended by a creepy much-older teen (Henry Hopper, son of Dennis) promising comic books, boys grabbing each other in the crotch, kids finding a gun, taking rides from strangers, walking barefoot on railroad tracks.

This is Franco’s “Boyhood,” a collection of scenes sketching out many facets of that phase of life — callowness, cruelty, compassion and comic books. And curiosity. Bi-curiosity. You know how Franco’s brain works.

They don’t add up to much, but writer/director Gabrielle Demeestere manages a mood built on some solid performances by promising young actors.

“Chris” (Everett Meckler) is on hiking trip to Yosemite with his kid brother and his dad (Franco). His parents are estranged, dad is celebrating “my sobriety birthday.” There are steep falls, and the radio reminds us, mountain lions in the mountains they’re hiking.

And warning shots — “I TOLD you to look after him.”

Chris isn’t keen on the kid sibling. “Dear God, sometimes I just wish my brother didn’t exist.”

At least there’s early ’80s porn on the TV in their room at the lodge.

“Joe” (Alec Mansky) is a local schoolboy, bored, but tormented by a classmate (Calum John) who keeps grabbing his nether regions in their ongoing crotch-oriented slapfight. Joe is constantly getting in trouble for fighting with this San Francisco-bound creep.

His parents are out of town, he’s hassled for shoplifting. But he’s rescued by Henry (Hopper), who has a vintage Mustang, a comic book collection and sexual predator written all over him

With all these dangers and all this dangerous behavior, from the mysterious to the obvious, we keep waiting for something calamitous to happen. But when it does, even that isn’t as jarring as one would hope.

It never adds up to anything more than the mood Demeestere manages to translate from Franco’s fiction. Which makes “Yosemite” a “film festival movie,” nothing more than a promising idea or two and an interesting tone to recommend it.

MPAA Rating:R for some sexual material/nudity and language

Cast: James Franco,Henry Hopper, Everett Meckler, Calum John, Alec Mansky

Credits: Written and directed by  Gabrielle Demeestere, based on the “Palo Alto” short stories of James Franco. A release.

Running time: 1:22

In Los Angeles, even the homeless are better looking than we could ever hope to be. With better hair and makeup, too.

So that’s a comfort. I guess.

“Other People’s Children” is an indie drama featuring a bunch of quite attractive young actors slumming.  Literally.

They bum money, buy and do drugs, cavort (a little pick-up basketball) and squat in what has to be the cleanest loft and “abandoned warehouse” in the history of homelessness.

Whatever high-minded intent of Liz Hinlein’s drama, it never for a minute feels authentic or anything but superficial. Nobody involved, from the screenwriter through the cast, dared to get her or his hand’s dirty.

Diane Marshall-Green is Sam, daughter of a famous painter (Scott Patterson), a suffering artist who barely humored his videographer-daughter’s effort to make a shallow documentary about his work.

What are your influences, she wants to know?

“My bank account,” he growls, slashing more paint across canvas in his best Jackson Pollack fit.

Dad has died, and Sam has been laying low, trying to cope.

“I Facebooked you when I found out!”a faux-friend offers.

But Sam meets this irritable homeless guy (Chad Michael Murray), a peer and a hunk, too, with perfect teeth, perfect abs. She wants to FILM him. And his tribe.

Murray (“To Write Love on Her Arms”) makes P.K. a philosophical junkie (“No NEEDLES,” he insists, underlining the movie’s refusal to gets it hands dirty).

“When you’re hellbent on self-destruction, there’s nothing anybody can do.”

Will Sam figure this out in 85 minutes? What do YOU think?

The supporting cast is colorful but entirely too put together — with the occasional exception — to be living on the streets.

Sam has an ex (Michael Mosley) who has taken up with an old friend (Alexsandra Breckenridge).  But the whole love triangle thing is a non-starter.

Marshall-Green is so alluring as Sam that men keep caressing her face, leading on some occasions to the removal of shirts and naked wrestling.

But movies that dabble in homelessness, even movies about cute filmmakers who want to film and flirt with the homeless, require more commitment than this. No number of scenes featuring a nubile nude can countermand that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some violence, nudity, substance abuse

Cast: Diane Marshall-Green, Chad Michael Murray, Alexandra Breckenridge, Harrison Thomas, Michael Mosley
Credits: Directed by Liz Hinlein, script by Adrienne Harris. A release.

Running time: 1:28

You can see the logic here in Scott Eastwood’s mind. Or his agent’s.

“Dad broke through in Westerns. Why don’t I do a Western?”

Thus, “Diablo,” a violent and grimly obvious frontier thriller that Clint Eastwood might have made during his Spaghetti Days.

But Eastwood the Elder would have famously dirtied up, worn stubble, not a beard. He’d have chosen his hat with care, and crossed out much of his dialogue and told the story with his character’s actions, and his squint.

And truth be told, Clint already had years of TV work behind him before Sergio Leone came calling. Scott hasn’t got the screen presence of a leading man, not yet anyway. And Lawrence Roeck, safe to say, is no Sergio.

“Diablo” is that classic Western trope, the abduction odyssey. Eastwood plays Jackson, a rancher whose beloved Alexsandra (Camilla Belle) is taken by Mexicans, who shoot up his house, torch his stable and yell “You will never keep her” at the gringo.

That sends Jackson on a quest — to find his woman and avenge himself on those who took her. Are they marauders, her family? Considering the tale’s title, are they her coven?

Jackson meets a Chinese settler (Tzi Ma), an Indian boy who fires arrows at him.

“That wasn’t very nice!” If that’s not a line Clint would have X’ed out of this script, I don’t know Clint.

Walton Goggins (“The Hateful Eight”) has the best lines and the most presence, playing a murderous highwayman who kills, seemingly for pleasure.

“Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

Adam Beach plays an Indian who nurses the wounded Jackson, Danny Glover an old Army friend.

So Eastwood was gifted with a good supporting cast and at least the solid bones of a classic Western. The striking wintry Alberta settings are a bonus.

But it doesn’t work, partly because we figure it out too quickly, partly because Eastwood just isn’t anybody to hang a film on. He’s OK in the saddle, not commanding. He’s a bit uncomfortable with a gun, a real handicap.

And he’s overmatched, in every scene in which he’s paired with another player. They seem to steal his thunder without even trying. The camera-savvy charisma, the economy of gesture that the great Western heroes manage, aren’t written into the character or played by the actor cast as him.

In Westerns, his daddy could tell Scott, “The diablo’s in the details” — striking a match, pulling a pistol, swinging a rifle into the frame, the way you sit a horse. Eastwood’s director doesn’t help him with the little things.

And in an archetypal tale like this, the details matter more than the big themes.

MPAA Rating: R, violence

Cast: Scott Eastwood, Camilla Belle, Danny Glover, Joaquim de Almeida , Walton Goggins, Adam Beach
Credits: Directed by Lawrence Roeck, script by Carlos De Los Rios and Lawrence Roeck. A Momentum/Orion release.

Running time: 1:28

Any fan of cinema has to have a passing knowledge of the German movies of the Weimar Era. That’s the democratic respite between the autocratic horrors of Imperial Germany, broken by World War I, and the rise of National Socialism to power in 1933.

The arts flourished and German cinema from that era invented genres, pushed the limits of the silent and sound film art through Expressionism and — decades before the Italians were credited with inventing it — Neorealism. The thesis of the documentary “From Caligari to Hitler” is that perhaps this vibrant age of moviemaking predicted  the rise of the Nazis and by extension, Fascist art.

Filmmaker/narrator Rüdiger Suchsland, working from the writings of Weimer thinker and critic Siegfried Kracauer, digs deep into the culture and the movies and filmmakers of this Gilded and famously hedonistic, or at least permissive age.

So we revisit the famous and the lesser known movies of F. W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, Ernst Lubitsch and Joseph Von Sternberg. We remember that long before he was the villain of “Casablanca,”  Conrad Veidt was the original somnambulist-puppet and murderer of “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.”

Marlene Dietrich is captured as her sexually voracious peak in “The Blue Angel,” Peter Lorre breaks out in German cinema with “M” and German society faces its hard reflection in the assorted movies about the criminal mastermind “Doctor Mabuse.”

Good documentaries like this one are a Film Appreciation/History of Film course unto themselves. And despite some clumsy subtitling of the German language narration, “From Caligari” makes you reach out — for online versions of Curt Siodmak’s “People on Sunday,” basically a French “New Wave” film (four young people flirting and heading to the seashore) made 25 years before the French got around to it.

Louise Brooks and Dietrich did their greatest work under the Weimar Republic, as did most of the filmmakers. And to a one, they fled the country when the armed oompah-music loving bumpkins seized power.

The films can be stunning in their art — achieving Expressionist effects straight out of “Inception” by tilting entire sets rather than digitally leaning buildings to and fro. But they’re also prophetic.

“Metropolis,” with its impersonal future city run by oligarchs, taken down by proletarians, “M,” the original Film Noir, we know these. Others are more obscure.

As Suchsland narrates, in the mid-20s German films were depicting stock market crashes and backlash against city elites, sentimental attachment to German mythology and the rise of the Alpine cinema that Leni Riefenstahl came to embody.

Remember, fascist art, as Susan Sontag taught us, reveres nature, physical beauty and the Motherland. The Weimar films predicted Hitler by showing up in the pop culture preceding his rise to power. Hitler, it can be inferred, tapped into something he saw German culture was already embracing, assisting his rise to power.

Most fascinating of all are the close readings of the “Doctor Mabuse” movies, celebrating a criminal elite, suggesting a day when the rule of law might be replaced by criminals writing the laws.

What IS the sick, twisted and above all Evil Doctor Mabuse writing in the sanitarium in Fritz Lang’s coda to the series, “The Testament of Doctor Mabuse?”The analogy is clear. It’s “Mein Kampf.” No wonder the Nazis banned it before Lang could release it.

Movies are much better at reflecting their era than predicting the future. Hollywood’s “This time we win” Vietnam allegories of the Reagan presidency managed that, though you could say the crime films of the ’70s (“Dirty Harry”, “Death Wish”) predicted America’s turn to the right.

“From Caligari to Hitler” suggests that the most perfect example of an artistic, social and cultural synthesis coming together to warn the present and predict the future had to be Germany in the “Cabaret” era 1920s and 30s.

The film is on Netflix Streaming now.

MPAA Rating:unrated, nudity

Cast: Fritz Lang, Volker Schlöndorff, Siegfried Kracauer, Elisabeth Bronfen, Eric D. Weitz
Credits: Written and directed by Rüdiger Suchsland, based on the writings of Siegfried Kracauer. A Widehouse release, now on Netflix

Running time: 1:58

Equal parts damning and infuriating, “Concussion” can be appreciated for being that rare movie that takes on the business/game that has utterly swallowed American sport.

Here is a film that goes after the National Football League, that shows game footage and uses actual team logos in telling the story of the NFL’s dubious handling of a problem it has known about for decades — traumatic brain injuries caused by the collisions on the field.

Conspiracy-buff filmmaker Peter Landesman (“Kill the Messenger”) tells this story through the heroic, foreign-born pathologist who discovered CTE —Chronic traumatic encephalopathy — a degenerative brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head — concussions.

Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian over-achiever who treats his dead patients with the same care he would treat living ones. He’s a neuro-pathologist, a coroner. And he talks to the dead.

“OK Rachel,” he’ll say, “I need your help.”

Cute. Cuter than cute. Drives his Pittsburgh coroner colleagues crazy cute.

His boss (Albert Brooks) piles on the adorability, joking that Omalu (“DOCTOR Omalu”) needs to find an outside interest, a girlfriend, “be less of an artist” on the job.

But a detail-oriented artist and a scientist is what is called for when Omalu tries to figure out what caused beloved Hall of Fame center “Iron Mike” Webster of the Steelers to go mad and die at 50. Omalu pays, out of his own pocket, to get Webster’s brain sliced and put on slides. And he discovers something awful.

Omalu is depicted as being idealistic and naive, handy arrows in Smith’s quiver. That lightens the story, somewhat. But sterner stuff is called for as Omalu takes on the mightiest corporation in American sports, trying to show the NFL his findings, trying to get them to “work together” on a solution to a problem he has given a name to. More than tears and a lightly-accented “Tell the TRUTH!” is called for as he is rebuffed, threatened and intimidated — by the league, by the fanatical fans, by colleagues.

And then he finds an ally (Alec Baldwin).

Smith is the one actor to pull a Golden Globe nomination out of this film, and that’s an injustice. His performance borders on adorable, as Omalu over-explains everything, enjoys the sound of his own voice a tad much and clumsily courts a Kenyan (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) his church fixes him up with. I kept wondering how far Chewitel Ejiofor would have knocked this character out of the park.

David Morse turns himself into Webster, a lovable hulk we see inducted into the Hall of Fame in the opening scene, a physical and emotional wreck a short while later when we see him, living in a truck, huffing ammonia and ranting, twitching and flailing at what is going on in his head. It’s a stunning transformation and performance.

Eddie Marsan gives the movie gravitas as a rock star brain surgeon who recognizes — instantly — that Omalu is onto something.

“You have my attention.”

Richard T. Jones and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje are impressive as ex-players Andre Waters and Dave Duerson, high-profile victims who helped push this story into the headlines, despite the NFL’s best efforts.

The film is on shaky ground as it veers into persecution and some paranoid “Silkwood” touches.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this “inspired by a true story” conflates events and make suppositions that history and in some cases medical statistics don’t back up. Suggesting the FBI could be talked into threatening the doctors after the first study was published is not true. And the halo Landesman puts on Omalu is not without a hint of tarnish.

When you have characters in your script who note that if you’re going after an institution “that owns a day of the week,” you’d better get it right, the same holds true for your movie.

But the bigger picture, that the NFL has known concussions are doing deadly things to its athletes and fought, for decades, to cover it up, holds up. The late Coach George Allen made this “inconvenient truth” a personal crusade after his career ended. And yet little — especially equipment, his personal push (he wanted helmets padded on the OUTside) — has changed, even as the, game and the conditions under which is it played have grown more violent.

“Concussion” will open and close without making much of an impact on a sport that is generating enough money in gambling, TV and merchandising rights to purchase its own country. But see it, watch Smith/Omalu shake a jar with a peach and a little liquid in it to illustrate what happens to the brain during a blow to the head, and you might re-think what sport you let your children play, and how much of your time to donate to this business as sport “any given Sunday.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material including some disturbing images, and language

Cast: Will Smith, Albert Brooks, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, David Morse.
Credits: Written and directed by Peter Landesman. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:03

Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell go at it again in “Daddy’s Home,” a bio-dad vs. stepdad romp that rarely romps, despite the considerable comic chops of the two leads.

Ferrell is the hovering, nurturing step dad to two tykes whose mother (Linda Cardellini of TV’s “Mad Men” and “New Girl”) he married.

Brad is all about the tucking in, the volunteering at school and singing the praises of his practical Sport Maternity Vehicle (a Ford Flex).

The kids’ often-absent “real dad” is named Dusty (Wahlberg). Tough, menacing and sexy, he’s “like Jesse James and Mick Jagger had a baby!” And he’s angling to get back into his kids’ lives and his ex-wife’s bed.

Not that he comes right out and says so. He flatters, disarms, and THEN attacks. Brad has “cracked the code,” so much respect he says. Only respect is the last thing on Dusty’s mind.

Brad tries not to let Dusty’s pushiness, his rudeness and his gamesmanship rattle him. He’s just “a rascal.” All Brad needs to do (according to “Step into Step Fathering,” his self-help book) is “set up a loving fence.” Create some boundaries, preferably ones that Dusty won’t roll over like Putin in Crimea.

The conflicts here are obvious, the bones of contention even more so. Brad advocates a non-violent approach to bullies. Dusty?

“Check your history books. Almost everything is solved by violence.”

The reality of the set-up — kids who don’t respect “not my real dad” — is undercut by patently ridiculous scenes. Dusty comes along to the fertility clinic where his doctor pal (Bobby Cannavale) might help the less masculine Brad procreate?

But Thomas Haden Church scores some funny lines as Brad’s boss at the “Smooth Jazz” station where they work.

Director Sean Anders (“We’re the Millers,” “Horrible Bosses 2”) is satisfied letting this play out by rote, a comedy whose laughs are more irritating than anything else. You feel sorry for Ferrell’s character, then Ferrell himself. He still can deliver, but this script is watered-down lite beer.

Watch for the Go Pro skateboarding half-pipe scene for the movie’s one clever visual touch, an effect that looks pasted-together on Youtube.

The dead spots — and there are many — let you wonder if this might have worked had they tried what Fey and Poehler did in “Sisters,” playing against type. Make Ferrell the butch tough guy and Wahlberg the wuss.

By playing it too safe, “Daddy’s Home” never finds that comic sweet spot and never rises above, “Well, it’s not awful.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, crude and suggestive material and for language.

Cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, Thomas Haden Church
Credits: Directed by Sean Anders, script by Sean Anders, Brian Burns and John Morris. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:36