Movie Nation

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

We see the mistakes before the principals do.

That’s what makes the news-story-gone-wrong drama “Truth” so compelling. The audience knows that the “60 Minutes” team investigating then-President George W. Bush’s shady service in the Air National Guard “doesn’t have it” even if they never realize it themselves.

That doesn’t appear to be the intention of this drama, based on story-producer Mary Mapes’ memoir and her dogged assertion that “We got it right” in the face of a storm of criticism and a serious picking-apart of one element of that story. Cate Blanchett turns Mapes into a martyr here, a troubled woman and acclaimed journalist who fights “bullies” at every turn.

“We are supposed to question EVERYthing!”

That’s what she’s doing when she comes across the embittered, wheezing vet (Stacy Keach) who possesses faded photo-copies of military memos regarding Bush’s slack, politically-protected service and his alleged year spent “AWOL” (Absent without Leave), shirking even his combat-dodging rear echelon duties to work on Republican political campaigns in the early 1970s.

Her source isn’t totally forthcoming about where he got these pages. She cannot create a “chain of ownership” to show where they originated, who had them at every stage of their existence.

But she has other sources. She has an on-staff military expert (Dennis Quaid). She has document analysts who tell her they’re real. And she has some who express their doubts. Add that to the number of insiders denying the “truth” of the narrative she was pursuing. But in the mad rush to get a scoop on the air, those voices aren’t heard.

It’s 2004, and as Mapes has considered tales of Bush’s connection to the Bin Laden family, not reported due to thin proof, and allegations that Bush was unfit to fly during his Air National Guard service because of his laziness and substance abuse problems, and as she’s promised her documents source (Keach) to put him in touch with John Kerry’s campaign, you can see the murky waters as they’re being navigated.

“Agenda” is a label that leaps to mind.

Writer-director James Vanderbilt takes us back to that politically charged era, with a president whose legitimacy much of the country questioned, possibly winning re-election despite letting 9/11 happen on his watch, thanks to billionaire-financed smear campaign TV commercials. Everybody has political motives — the right wing military men who curse Mapes for asking questions about “preferential treatment,” the cynical leftist reporter (Topher Grace) who was part of Mapes’ team. Everybody.

Vanderbilt shows us a time-pressed reporting team, straining to get a story out far enough in front of the election so that they cannot be accused of an “October Surprise.” But their September story turns out to be just that. The story aired, the documents, which merely buttress the reporting, were instantly assailed by conservative Internet researchers. And that made the whole country– and the rest of the media — turn on Mapes and her on-air reporter, Dan Rather (Robert Redford).

Redford gives Rather a sophisticated, self-aware sheen. He endures the ribbing over his folksy “Courage” sign-off, isn’t shy about saying “We don’t have it, yet” and comes off as the face and voice of integrity. Considering Rather’s tortured relationship with the Bush Dynasty — his bungles had a hand in two election outcomes — painting him as the victim here kind of grates. But the performance is self-assured, polished and wounded.

The film touches on Mapes’ abused childhood, the reasons she does what she does with such determination. Like Rather, she was and is a decorated journalist, credited with the TV version of the breaking Abu Ghraib story. But we see the shortcuts, here, the holes in the story, as they appear — the edits that undercut her finished piece’s damning tone, the stumbles that even the Watergate reporters experienced as sources change their stories, after they air.

It doesn’t matter that the “60 Minutes” team’s stated intent — proven clearly in the story — was that Bush the younger and his father used political connections to let him avoid serving in combat during the Vietnam War. It was old news, in any event — a mildly interesting counter-narrative to the widely discredited lies of the “Swiftboat Veterans for Truth” and their arch-conservative backers. The bigger AWOL story had holes.

Screenwriter (“Zodiac, “White House Down”) turned director Vanderbilt leaves enough of the conclusions of “Truth” to us to keep it honest. Grace’s quasi-anarchist may scream about a corporate conspiracy — Bush White House, Viacom collusion. Their flawed story gave “them” the openings to discredit the reporting and the reporters.

Jobs were lost, CBS News took a hard turn to the right (botched Benghazi stories and conservative anchor Scott Pelley followed). And another Bush got elected thanks to having “taken down” Dan Rather — all consequences of a TV story that needed to be bulletproof, and wasn’t.

MPAA Rating: R for language and a brief nude photo

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Stacy Keach, Bruce Greenwood.
Credits: Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, based on the Mary Mapes book.  A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 2:01