Movie Nation

“The Peanuts Movie” is the beneficiary of a year’s worth of lowered expectations.

Hey, you mention “From the creators of ‘Ice Age'” and score the commercials and trailers with modern hip hopped pop, and share nary a joke…well, what’re we to think?

But the movie turns out to be a pleasant surprise — voices closely resembling the TV special voice actors of the ’60s, music mostly recycled from Vince Guaraldi’s lovely and beloved “Peanuts Jazz…”

It’s more charming than funny, and critics seem to be almost universal in that assessment, with it sitting in the 85% approval range on Rottentomatoes and somewhat less on Metacritic.

I’m still not sure how this will go over with kids, but as parents buy the tickets and it’s nostalgia and sentimentality will appeal to them, this should be a slam-dunk opening. Big.

“Spectre,” the fourth Daniel Craig as James Bond film, is earning the weakest reviews of his tenure in the role. Recycled bits from earlier films, self-conscious comedy, a weak on-the-nose villain (Christoph Waltz) and beautiful but charmless love interest. Middling reviews from the Metacritic crowd, slightly more positive from the Rottentomatoes sample.

It’s critic proof and should make a bundle. But let’s hope Craig gets his wish and gets out of the series and that he’s not merely playing hard to get in a contract negotiation to do one more film. He’s backed his career into a corner and he and the series would be better off (as he has hinted in interviews) with a change.

It’s all here. From the kite-eating tree to that football Lucy never lets him kick.

“You blockhead!” and “Curse you, Red Baron!” to “Good grief.”

“The Peanuts Movie” is “Peanuts Greatest Hits.” The little profundities — “It’s the courage to continue that counts” — the swinging jazz stylings of Vince Guaraldi, the warm fuzzies, all carry over from the many “Peanuts” TV specials to the computer-animated 3D movie screen.

The Blue Sky (“Rio,””Ice Age”) filmmakers pay homage to the scribbly, DIY-looking original Charles M. Schulz comic strip and those 1960s TV specials with hand-drawn flashbacks and thought-balloons. And if they never achieve the sublime sentiment of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” they still manage to make this timeless source material utterly charming.

Generations removed from the newspaper comic strip — or newspapers in general — and from the family gathering to watch oft-repeated TV specials, may wonder what the fuss is about. That lovable loser Charlie Brown still can’t fly a kite, still can’t pitch a one-two-three inning, still can’t screw up the guts to chat up that Little Redhaired Girl. His beagle steals his thunder at every turn. His “friends” take advantage of him and disparage him when they aren’t ignoring him.

But the bald kid with the yellow shirt with the black stripe keeps getting up, dusting off the dirt of the pitcher’s mound, and tries again.

The story here takes place over an entire school year — touching on the seasons that marked those long-ago TV specials. A new girl is in school. She doesn’t know Charlie Brown (voiced by Noah Schapp) or his tortured history. It’s his chance to start fresh,  make a great impression. But he stumbles, as always. The blockhead.

Snoopy, giving dance him dance lessons when he isn’t off fighting the Red Baron in sharply-animated dogfights in his Sopwith Camel doghouse, also has a love interest.

Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) is still full of nickel-a-session psychotherapy, Linus still soulful enough to recognize his friend’s heart. And Charlie’s sister Sally (Mariel Sheets) still assumes Linus is her “Sweet Baboo.”

It’s more an exercise in adult nostalgia than a re-invigoration of a valuable animated “brand.” The sound effects (squawky adults) are the same, and the new voices closely resemble the old. Schulz’s darker, deeper touches never really made it into the TV specials, and certainly have no place in this cartoon for the very youngest viewers.

But the character’s EveryBoy humanity still shimmers through in “The Peanuts Movie,” especially when another line drive’s knocked the cap off that shiny, baldish noggin. Whatever children take from it, adults may find themselves choking up, just a bit, at the realization that you’re still a good man, Charlie Brown.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: The voices of Noah Schnapp, Hadley Belle Miller,  Alexander Garfin, Anastasia Bredikhina, Mariel Sheets
Credits: Directed by Steve Martino, script by Bryan Schulz, Craig Schulz, Cornelius Uliano. A 20 Century Fox/Blue Sky release.

Running time: 1:33

I got to know Fred Dalton Thompson when I worked at a newspaper in Tennessee — after the Watergate hearings and the movie “Marie,” where he played himself as a politician who helps a woman stand up to corruption — right around “Die Hard 2” and movies where he played generals, admirals, police chiefs and “Any authority figure you can think of. That’s what Hollywood wants me to do.”

An accomplished Republican politician, opposite number (Minority Counsel) to Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Senate Watergate committee, Senator from Tennessee and one-time candidate for president, he died of cancer this weekend.

I tracked him down for that “Die Hard” sequel appearance, and a few years later when he played an over-compensated banker in over his head during the heady days of takeover mania in “Barbarians at the Gate.”

He’s turned up in horror films and a few Christian movies in recent years. And on TV in those cynical “Sell Reverse Mortgages to the Elderly by Pandering to Aged Veterans and Mentioning Ronald Reagan” TV ads.

A nice guy. An opportunist, to be sure, pandering to the Tea Party wing of the GOP. I recall mentioning to him “If you ever run for office again, SOMEbody is going to pull up that footage (of an overweight Fred foolishly dressed in a Superman suit for a super-rich Manhattan costume party) and beat you over the head with it.”

He laughed, and said, “You know, you’re probably right. So I probably should keep those Democrats guessing.”

A sophisticated slicker, he bought a pickup and flannel shirts and played a good ol’ boy to win his Tennessee Senate seat. What a hustler. Good actor. Presence to burn.

The first time I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., it was on a school day. And whole classes of teenagers filled the chilling exhibits — the halls of photos, prison clothes and uniforms, the railcar full of shoes, whose scent is among the most vivid memories anybody takes from the place.

And in the room where the barracks from a concentration camp were set up, I saw a couple of teenage boys picking at the wooden supports. Looking for a souvenir? A little wanton destruction of property on school time? Their classmates snickered until I barked  at them. “What the HELL are you doing?”

It was all meaningless to them, just another boring field trip, just another chapter in history that they had no interest in learning or learning from.

So it comes as no great shock to hear, in the fine German drama “Labyrinth of Lies,” that Deutschland did its best to hide its recent past from the kids raised after World War II.

The unspeakable, the film suggests, became the nation’s open secret and open wound — ordinary men and women who did despicable things to unarmed civilians and POWs, “just soldiers” and “just following orders,” they would say. Not that anybody asked the butcher, the baker, the mayor or autoworker “What did you do in the war?” Nobody wanted to hear it. The kids? They just didn’t know.

One of those younger people is Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling, earnest and solid), a state’s attorney. His father went MIA on the Russian Front. It’s 1958 when the film opens. His mother is remarrying, but she reminds him to do his father proud each day when he heads off to work. He worships the law, so much so that a young woman who commits a minor offense shrieks “You stickler, you monster!” at him.

It sounds even more hateful in German (with English subtitles). But somehow, the hip and artsy young designer Marlene (a spunky/radiant Friederike Becht) becomes smitten with Johann.

A school teacher is recognized as a guard from Auschwitz by a survivor, and a tabloid journalist, Gnielka(André Szymanski), tries to get the man some justice, to interest the authorities. Radmann’s boss, his entire office, doesn’t want to hear it.

“Is there an actual victim?”

“Proof” is an eyewitness seeing this fellow or that one bayoneting a child, loading the gas canisters of Zyklon B into the gas chambers. Harder to come by than you think. More war criminals than victims survived.

Radmann, being curious and ambitious, digs around. The American military is safekeeping the records of German activities during the war, and the American officer in charge can’t figure out why Radmann wants to have a look.

“You were ALL Nazis.”

Gnielka schools Radmann that this isn’t far from the truth.

“They came home, hung up their uniforms and went on as if nothing happened.”

Only the attorney general, Fritz Bauer, gives Radmann free rein. Played by the late, great German actor Gert Voss, Bauer is a cagey figure whose motives we question. Is he letting “the kid” tackle this because be wants nothing to come of it, or because someone his age is untainted? What did HE do in the war?

And so the young lawyer and his journalist accomplice plunge into the labyrinth, hunting for proof this or that actual war vet committed this specific crime. Temptations are hurled Radmann’s way — from a private sector firm with connections that could get Marlene started in dress designing. Higher ups, and the Americans, are more concerned about the Cold War than criminals from the last one.

German police, from town to town, refuse to cooperate. Only the Israelis seem interested.

A big fish who keeps close ties to Germany, perhaps even returns for visits, emerges. Dr. Joseph Mengele? Just another guy Radmann has never heard of. He grows more distressed and more outraged, the deeper he digs.

“Labyrinth of Lies” is based on the real-life events surrounding a pivotal moment in (West) German history, a big 1960s trial that rounded up many of those who ran Auschwitz and the nation started coming to grips with its past.  Watching the film unfold and the story drive toward that reckoning, you realize anew how important it is to remember this happened, the scale of it all, the barbarity.

And as an aside, you recall this German reckoning was one that the nearly-as-barbaric Japanese never pursued, given the cover of victimhood by Hiroshima and a rug to sweep their crimes against humanity under by MacArthur.

“Labyrinth” wanders into melodrama — of course Radmann, Marlene and others will find out about relatives, colleagues and higher-ups with unsavory pasts. And while the film mercifully stops short of the actual trial, it does meander a bit as it takes us into records, legal rabbit holes and oddly muted confrontations with the accused.

But it’s a fine film, and a surprising history lesson — not because the Germans don’t remember the Holocaust, but because we’re reminded that there was a time when they didn’t want to.

MPAA Rating:R for a scene of sexuality

Cast:André Szymanski, Alexander Fehling, Friederike Becht, Gert Voss
Credits: Directed by Giulio Ricciarelli, script by Elisabeth Bartel, Amelie Syberberg and Giulio Ricciarelli . A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:04

“Woodlawn” is a formulaic football film with some meat on it. It’s a faith-based “Remember the Titans” built on solid performances, the occasional feel-good (inspirational) moment and a script that lacks focus, if not ambition.

Woodlawn was a newly-integrated high school in troubled Birmingham, Alabama in the early 1970s. Its football team helped the city overcome its nickname — “Bombingham,” earned by the church bombings and other violence against civil rights activists — by ever-so-gently breaking segregation.

And the way they did this, the film tells us, was through faith and football.

Tony Nathan (Caleb Castille, good) is a shy teen, the hardest working athlete in town. He endures the racism of his new school’s fans, and his Woodlawn Colonels teammates, just for the chance to break through in this overwhelmingly white/newly integrated high school.

Coach Gerelds (Nic Bishop, stoic) isn’t overtly racist. He’s gone along with the way things always have been. But a couple of people bend his attitudes. One is his little boy, who wonders why he won’t do what it takes to win (play the black guys). The other is this self-identified sports chaplain who talks the coach into letting him address the team.

Sean Astin has his best role since “Rudy” as Hank, a preacher with a limp, a guy who sometimes uses a baseball bat as a cane. He gets the kids’ attention. And he ties their football fate to their common Southern Protestant Christian heritage. “Jesus Christ” is the way to win.

So while the rest of the school in “the most segregated city in America” is a boiling cauldron of racial rage — racist white kids, militant black ones — the football team starts doing prayer meetings, showing up at Christian Athletes events. Together.

They still lose, but Hank reassures them that losses “are God’s way of testing us.”

And then Tony gets to play and Woodlawn starts winning.

The Erwin Brothers, who gave us the anti-abortion drama “October Baby,” took a simple “Big Game/Integrate the Game” sports story of the “Glory Road” genre and worked too hard to place it in its “Jesus Generation” context. There’s a Billy Graham Crusade, Time Magazine’s “The Jesus Revolution” cover, the whole “Godspell/Jesus Christ Superstar/Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” era subtext rattling around the edges, tugging the picture away from its core story. “The Fifth Quarter” and “Facing the Giants” were more focused and more on-message.

That “This is bigger than football” message is hammered home, something you expect in a faith-based film. The sense of Christian martyrdom and  just a hint of Christian militancy of such films (the principals run rampant over church-and-state separation) are here, too.

Tony refuses to have his photo taken with “Segregation Forever” Gov. George Wallace. He’s in love with a militant girl (Joy Brunson, delightful), creating a “You’re just these crackers’ trophy” conflict. The Graham crusades are glimpsed, and University of Alabama Coach Bear Bryant (Jon Voight) takes a growing interest in young Nathan. After all, Bear finally got around to integrating his football team after the film’s opening scene, a 1970 Crimson Tide loss to USC.

All this peripheral detail clutters “Woodlawn,” even if the Erwins and the faithful don’t see that. It undercuts their message. What integrated Alabama wasn’t so much Christian brotherhood as the REAL state religion — football. ‘Bama doesn’t lose to USC, who knows how long before Bear quietly admits “It’s time?”

But “Woodlawn” still has its pleasures, and unlike so many faith-based films, it’s not just  has-been actors in the pandering, sappy leading roles, but the occasional big laugh and the sheen of a polished production. The games and on-field footage are well-shot and cut, the emotional scenes have some real power.

The soundtrack is peppered with pricey, period-perfect (if a tad too on-the-nose) classic rock songs, from “Sweet Home Alabama” (of course) to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” (ditto), “Jesus is Just Alright” (ahem) to “Spirit in the Sky” (amen).

And C. Thomas Howell, no stranger to race-based tales (Remember “Soul Man”? He probably wishes you didn’t.) all but steals the picture, playing a snickering, trash-talking arch rival, Coach Shorty White.

“Jesus cain’t save ya’ now!”

When Woodlawn plays Shorty’s Banks High School, the black running back gets targeted. And then it rains. Divine intervention? Not to Shorty.

“That’s angels cryin’!”

The whole enterprise is  very much a mixed bag, but as films that cater to this audience go, “Woodlawn” isn’t half bad. Like a lot of pastors in the pulpit, the Erwins could use a little editing, somebody to tap their shoulder at the 100 minute mark and say, “Preacher, maybe that’s enough for today.”

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements including some racial tension/violence

Cast: Caleb Castille, Sean Astin, Nic Bishop, Joy Brunson, Jon Voight, C. Thomas Howell
Credits: Directed by Andrew Erwin, Jon Erwin, script by and Andrew Erwin, script by Quinton Peoples. A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 2:03

“The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” takes the Living Dead/Walking Dead/Brain-eating Dead as seriously as this worn-out genre deserves.

Which is to say, not very seriously at all. You poor stay-at-home shut-ins parsing every scene in that AMC soap opera about zombies can suck it.

This is “Superbad” with Scouts. And zombies. And superhot supermodel thin actresses.

They’re not BSA (Boy Scouts of America), BTW, but Associated Scouts of America (ASS). Better prepared, perhaps, for the zombie apocalypse.

It doesn’t have the laughs or the killer cast of “Superbad,” but there are gory giggles aplenty in this B-movie addition to the horror genre that displaced vampires once Edward impregnated Bella.

Ben, Carter and Augie (Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Joey Morgan) have held onto their uniforms and Scouting values into their driver’s license years. Bad move. That neckerchief, that shirt and sash covered with merit badges?

“Like a male version of a chastity belt.”

But Ben and Carter stuck with it, for Augie’s sake. He grew up without a dad, with only Troop Leader Rogers (David Koechner, of course) for guidance.

Ben and Carter will go through one last cookout/campout, one last ration of beans and weiners,  “welfare food.” Then they’ll skip off to a party full of high school seniors, including Carter’s t00-hot sister Kendall (Halston Sage, that’s really her name).

But there’s been an accident at the biolab near their California town. The dead are reanimated, and recruiting new brain-eaters with every bite. The boys miss the worst of it, camping out and all. But very quickly, they’ll need all their knots and knives and MacGuyver-improvisation skills to survive the Scout Leader who has turned, the cat-hoarding lady ) Cloris Leachman who is undead, and all her carnivorous kitty cats to boot.

Fortunately, there’s also help from the former classmate turned stripper at “Lawrence of Alabia,” the hot club in town.

“It’s got good Yelp reviews!”

Denise (Sarah Dumont) is handy with a shotgun. And an erotic dream vision in Daisy Dukes.

As my fellow Eagle Scout, David Lynch, could tell you, the jokes should have been centered on various Scouting skills — fire making, whittling, knot-tying — which come in handy when you’re trying to survive the Living Dead. And the movie sets those up nicely, depicting the Scouts as outdated and uncool as they’re largely regarded in this Mormon-dominated, homophobic era in Scouting.

But the film meanders from set-piece to set-piece, with the (accurately) foul-mouthed teens often being rescued by others. It takes entirely too long getting to the finale that we’ve foreseen an hour before.

Only Koechner stands out in the cast, unfortunately. Sheridan is adequate, as are Miller and Morgan. But you’re left wondering how much more a Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse might have made of these characters. They’d have certainly goosed the jokes a bit.

Still, as zombie comedies go, falling short of “Zombieland” and “Warm Bodies” is no crime. The yuks and yucks add up to close, but no cigar. At least it’s still better than TIVOing that recycled undead half-hearted satire and its prequel that TV is serving up Sunday nights.

MPAA Rating: R for zombie violence and gore, sexual material, graphic nudity, and language throughout

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Sarah Dumont, Logan Miller, Joey Morgan, David Koechner, Cloris Leachman
Credits: Directed by Christopher Landon , script by Emi Mochizuki, Carrie Lee Wilson, Christopher Landon and Lona Williams. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:33