Movie Nation

The movies are such a man’s world that lobbying for more “coming of age” stories from a female point of view has long been a given. But when “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is what you get, the lobbyist can be forgiven for having misgivings.
A brazen, twisted and discomfitting dramedy about growing up too fast in 1976 San Francicso, it’s centered on an insecure 15 year-old’s affair with her mother’s 34 year old boyfriend.
The sex is explicit and frequent and pretty much covers the spectrum. The drug use that accompanies it cringe-worthy. No man could have ever gotten away with adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel in such frank terms.
We meet Minnie Goetze, fearlessly played by British actress Bel Powley, on a fateful day in her fifteenth year.
“I had sex today!” she announces in her narration. It’s an event worth preserving on her handy monaural cassette recorder, one she wanted commemorated with a Polaroid.
Hey, it was the ’70s, after all.
She’s sure her mate wasn’t lured in by her looks — cute enough, but shapeless in that lumpy pubescent way.
“I’m lucky he was attracted to my youthfulness.”
Indeed. Mr. First Time was Monroe, her mom’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard).
Minnie, who figures she’s “a woman now,” has to blab to her promiscuous best friend (Madeline Waters). She barely notices her growing allure with her age-appropriate but safe-sex-ignorant classmates.
And Mom, played as a blissed-out/wasted ’70s free spirit by Kristen Wiig, doesn’t catch on. As the affair progresses, Minnie starts to piece together the finishing touches of her personality even as she’s the last one to figure out that what she’s doing is wrong on every level.
Writer-director Marielle Heller makes the most of Minnie’s era and her passion — drawing underground comics in the raunchy-funny R. Crumb style. Her idol is Aline Kominsky, Crumb’s wife and fellow artist. When Minnie isn’t fantasizing butterflies, penises and her own body image, she walks and confides with animated Aline.
Heller, an actress (“MacGruber”) turned director, thus manages wonderful flourishes in a story as predictable as any superhero comic book movie. But her movie doesn’t just revel in sexuality and forbidden “love,” it wallows in it. Minnie, and Powley’s interpretation of her, become less interesting with each lurid new “experiment — from bisexuality to threesomes, pot to LSD.
Thankfully, the period and Minnie’s navigation of it aren’t glamorized. But they aren’t judged, either. And that neutrality makes Minnie’s coming of age seem abrupt and awarded rather than earned.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content including dialogue, graphic nudity, drug use, language and drinking-all involving teens.

Cast: Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgard, Kristen Wiig,
Credits: Written and directed by Marielle Heller, based on the Phoebe Gloeckner novel. A Sony Pictures Classics releaserelease.

Running time: 1:42

The earnestness drips off Nicolas Cage’s “The Runner” like the sweat of good intentions. But you have to appreciate that rare high-minded effort from an actor who has been frantically collecting paychecks for mostly bad, often lowbrow pictures, for years.
Cage plays a Bayou Congressman trying to get some relief for his Gulf of Mexico constituents, embattled and going under after the BP/Deep Water Horizon oil spill.
An emotional speech earns Colin Price some attention, causing his advisor (Wendell Pierce) to suggest “This speech is going to have legs.”
But is Price ready for his moment in the sun?
Passionate, yes. But a complicated marriage (to Connie Nielsen) of political convenience gets exposed when his affair with a fisherman’s wife becomes public.
“Louisiana has always been one big family,” his politico Dad (Peter Fonda) tells the press. “And we don’t abandon family when they make a mistake.”
But even Colin’s decades of sobriety, his still-beloved-but cynical drunk of a dad and a favorite advisor (Sarah Paulson) cannot save him.
It’s back to local organizing, back to grass roots legal work helping these same embattled fishermen and coastal business women, for Price.
There’s a lot of political double-dealing and romantic finagling and the like, with Cage gamely trying to get across a very flawed man with the best political intentions.
Writer-director Austin Stark’s film crams a lot into 90 minutes, leaving no room for grace notes, little time for the heart that this truncated story cries out for.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some

sexual material

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Connie Nielsen, Sarah

Paulson, Peter Fonda, Wendell Pierce
Credits: Written and directed by Austin

Stark. An Alchemy release. An Alchemy

release.

Running time: 1:30

Perhaps the only way to turn Kahlil Gibran’s romantic, trippy and uplifting “The Prophet” into a movie is to animate it. The actress and producer Salma Hayek got that, and talked Roger Allers (“The Lion King”) into directing the film, actors like Liam Neeson and John Krasinski into providing the voices and acclaimed animators such as Tomm Moore and Nina Paley (“The Secret of Kells”) and Bill Plympton (“Guard Dog”) to visualize the abstract positivism of Gibran’s homey aphorisms, and composer Gabriel Yared to set some of the poetry to music.
They turn this “inspirational fiction” about how to the live the well-lived life, his musings on love, work, children, grief, joy and pleasure into colorful animated fantasias backing his words.
Liam Neeson has the title role, a famed poet named Mustafa living under house arrest on an island in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Salma Hayek is Kamila, the widow who comes to clean his house and is inspired by him as she does. Quvenzhané Wallis of “Annie” voices Almitra, Salima’s rebellious, pilfering daughter, who refuses to speak.
Mustafa doesn’t have that problem. Even when he’s offered the chance to end his house arrest by sailing off into exile, he fills the locals’ eager ears with his warmth and wisdom.
“You can only be free… when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal…Rise above your cares and fears.”
“Your children are not your children,” but “sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.”
When The Prophet compares parents to bows and children to the arrows they send into the world, animation by Nina Paley shows that. Literally.
Yared (he did the score to “The English Patient”) turn poems about love into music videos.
At every step of his journey from house arrest to the docks, Mustafa teaches, blesses and challenges. To newlyweds — “Fill each other’s cup. But drink not from one cup…Give you hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.”
To working folk who worship his higher calling — artist, poet — “All work is noble…To be idle is to become a stranger to the seasons.”
Allers has nicely condensed the sentimental prose poems on each subject the Lebanese-American Gibran weighs in on, and Neeson’s soothing brogue makes a warm vehicle for poetry.
The animation varies from cut-out style shadow puppets to lush impressionism, expressionism and Plympton’s signature pencil drawings.
As with the book it is based on, “The Prophet” is only as deep as you make it. Animating it infantilizes the “teachings” and points to the clunky, Platonic dialogues style of the narrative.
But it’s a lovely work, imbued with all the sweetness a Who’s Who of great animators can give it and all the wisdom generation of college coeds have embraced, scribbling “How true” in the margins of their dog-eared copies of “The Prophet.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements including some violence and sensual images

Cast: The voices of Liam Neeson, Salma Hayek, John Krasinski, Alfred Molina
Credits: Directed by Roger Allers, script by Roger Allers, based on the Kahlil Gibran book. A GKids release.

Running time: 1:24

Primo gets emotional about his kids. Bald and charismatic, a big, cuddly bear of a man with a Persian Empire beard and a vast collection of tattoos, he dotes on his autistic son, his little girl and his wife.
And he’s ready to take young John into his extended family. The teen lost his dad. Primo knew him. And he’s more than ready to step up.
“I owe it to your Pops…I’m gon’ do for you what he did for me.”
But Primo is a gang leader, a New York “Blood” since childhood. And John, who might be a good kid if his now-single Mom has anything to say about it, is vulnerable to the dangerous but effort-free paydays that Primo’s promising, the protection that just being in his orbit offers.
Primo, played by real-life gang member James “Primo” Grant, had the brand on his shoulder — five star marks. He’s a five-star general in this world. Is John, a kid in braces and his first real girlfriend, ready for this?
Keith Miller’s “Five Star” has the intimacy of a conversation overheard, the authentiticy of street lives as they’re lived. This isn’t heightened Hollywood melodrama. It’s a depiction of a life that shows its attraction to new recruits.
Because Primo is a man always in control. He’s 30ish, with the confidence of a big man that makes him an in-demand bouncer and body guard.
But Primo has another line of work. And as down low as he plays it, sooner or later John’s going to see that side of him.
Miller stages Primo’s opening monologue — delivered to an unseen passenger in his car — with pathos and compassion, a big sensitive man explaining his feelings in street argot, most lines punctuated with “You feelin’ me?” or “You know what I’m sayin’?”
Even when he raises his voice to an underling who owes him money, he apologizes. “That was very rude of me.”
He still beats the man, and his lieutenants finish the punishment.
John (John Diaz) takes this all in. He sees how people treat Primo. This is “A Bronx Tale” with the Italian Americans of the ’50s replaced by African Americans and Latinos. John is absorbing Primo’s life lessons.
“People are negative…The streets are tough. The streets are evil.”
John’s mom is in the dark, figuring all she has to worry about is her son getting somebody pregnant.
“I did NOT raise you to be a player!”
“Five Star” is too brief to get deep into these lives, and truth be told — Primo and the others here are more instinctual than deep. But he is sage enough to know that if John does screw up and gets killed, it won’t even make the news.
John wonders how his father died, and no one can tell him. He’s taking up a line of work that doesn’t forgive even the smallest mistake.
“This out here, this ain’t no joke, man.”
Is he in over his head? You bet.
That’s the tension and the charm of “Five Star,” an intimate portrait, a slice-of-life that goes just far enough beyond the cliches to be fascinating.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, drug-trade discussions

Cast: James “Primo” Grant, John Diaz, Wanda Nobles Colon, Jasmine Burgos
Credits: Written and directed by Keith Miller. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:23

History credits the Vikings for discovering and attempting to colonize the New World.
But in the movies, those rape-ruin-and-run raiders are always getting lost. They’re stranded on some foreign shore, forced to fight their way home. Richard Widmark had to get past the Moorish Sidney Poitier in “The Long Ships,” Karl Urban was lost and raised among American Indians in “Pathfinder,” and Mads Mikkelson couldn’t figure out East from West in “Valhalla Rising.”
Often, there’s a local princess who falls in with the swarthy blonds, and “Stockholm Syndrome” is invented.
There’s a power struggle within the crew — brother against brother, resentful underling longing to take the helm.
You know these tropes, and I know them, and screenwriters Bastian Zach and Matthias Bauer familiarized themselves with them for “Northmen: A Viking Saga,” a blood-spattered quest story about Vikings shipwrecked in seriously uncivilized Scotland. It’s got every Norse cliche in the book, save for Monty Python’s suggestion that they loved SPAM and sang about it.
Asbjorn (Tom Hopper) leads the survivors inland, in search of Viking colonies in pre-Norman Britain. They stumble into a Scots princess (Charlie Murphy). Her father the king sends mercenaries (Nic Rasenti, Joe Vaz) after them/her.
And all that can save them is their brawn, her pluck and a mysterious monk (Ryan Kwanten) who seems more Shaolin than Cistercian. He is bold and sasses the Scandinavians. They must be lost.
“There are no monasteries to raid” around here, he cracks. But when The Wolves, as the mercenaries are called, charge in, Brother Collan (Kwanten) is handy with a staff, a stick, a knife or sword.
Princess Inghean touches the ground and “see what the land reveals to me.” Cool.

The fights are Old Hollywood meets New Bloodbath — corny and carnage-filled.
The whole saga seems pre-ordained, pre-packaged and pretty boring, entirely too predictable to come off. There’s a reason Viking movies follow a formula. Often it works. They’re the ultimate super soldiers battling long odds, the elements and legions of foes with one quip on their mind.
“You brother waits for us in Valhalla!”
The South African locations are more wooded and don’t quite mimic Scotland. But they’re striking and give you something to look at between well-staged and sometimes berserk battles and hoary B-movie cliches. Director Claudio Fah makes certain to leave none of those out.

MPAA Rating: R for violence throughout

Cast: Tom Hopper, Charlie Murphy, Ryan Kwanten, Nic Rasenti, Joe Vaz

Credits: Directed by Claudio Fah, script by Bastian Zach, Matthias Bauer. An Anchor Bay release.

Running time: 1:37

A teen romance with most of the rough edges rubbed off, “Paper Towns” is as pleasantly bland as the city that is its setting — Orlando.
That’s where Quentin (Nat Wolff of “Stuck in Love”) has pined away for neighboring teen Margo Roth Spiegelman. Margo is outgoing, curious, a risk-taker, even as a tween — trying to figure out why a neighbor killed himself in a park in their subdivision.
Quentin has always worried about getting in trouble, “the future,” which he sees oncology, thanks to a degree from Duke. That’s where he’s headed after graduation.
Margo? She drifted away, plainly just bored with a boy who never takes chances.
Quentin narrates our story — almost incessantly. And when we first hear him, Margo’s disappeared.
“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
But this isn’t a milk carton teen story, not THAT kind of mystery. Margo likes leaving clues. Maybe Quentin can find her.
He reconstructs that one magical night they had together, when Margo — who manipulates and uses him without a second thought — dragged him out of his room, into his mom’s mini van and into a night of revenge and pranks.
“We bring the rain down on our enemies,” she declares. Any time Quentin tries to back off, it’s “We bring the rain, NOT the scattered showers!”
They hit the all-night discount store and stock up on Nair, Saran Wrap and Vaseline. She’s avenging herself on her cheating boyfriend, his pal and her best friend — who never told her her beau was a cheat.
Q and Margo Roth Spiegelman — often referred to by her full name, to underline the sexual and musical free spirit “Jewish wild woman” cliche novelist John Green wrote her to be — have a moment that night, barely.
And then she was gone.
It’s up to Q and his “Sixteen Candles” sidekicks Radar (Justice Smith) and Ben (Austin Abrams) to find clues, solve the mystery and track her to whatever Paper Town she’s run for.
John Green, the vlogger and TV writer-turned teen novelist, has done a nice job staking out the bittersweet romance corner of that universe, from a love affair with a dying girl (“The Fault in Our Stars”) to the love that never quite was (“Paper Towns”).
The story takes us to a teen party and an oddly unworrying road trip as Lacey, Margo’s dumped BFF (Halston
Sage, is that a real name?) joins the boys and Radar’s first girlfriend (Jaz Sinclair) on a quest to find the missing manipulator.
Cara Delevingne plays Margo as all eyebrows and bare midriff, an approachable teen dream and not some unattainable prom queen. There’s just enough charisma here to suggest the allure.
Wolff rarely gives his characters any edge, and that makes Q a bit more boring than he’s written. But of course Mom would let him skip off on a road trip in her car without asking. Guys this dull never do anything irresponsible.
Director Jake Schreirer did the briefly over-rated Old Man and his robotic helper dramedy “Robot & Frank,” and he hits most of the mileposts in this checklist teen romance. There’s just enough teen sex, swearing and drinking (as there was in “Fault in Their Stars”) to make this catnip to the 15 year-olds in the target audience.
Viewers who have been around the multiplex a little longer won’t mind it, even if we are checking our watches, wondering if this is ever going to grow a villain, or grow the guts to make the manipulative Margo into one.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language, drinking, sexuality and partial nudity – all involving teens

Cast: Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Austin Abrams, Justice Smith, Halston Sage
Credits: Directed by Jake Schreier, script by Scott Neustadter based on the John Green novel. A Fox 2000 release.

Running time: 1:49