Movie Nation

“Semper fidelis,” the Romans used to purr into their dogs’ ears, long before the Marine Corps adopted the Latin for “Always faithful” as their motto.
Most faithful of all? Marine Corps war dogs. That’s the message of “Max,” a pleasant if somewhat clunky and melodramatic crowd pleaser about one such dog who comes to live with the family of the soldier who died serving with him in Afghanistan.
One day, Max, a Belgian Malinois is serving with his handler, Kyle (Robbie Amell) in Kandahar, sniffing out arms caches in villages controlled by the Taliban. An ambush leaves Kyle dead, with Max refusing to leave his side.
Kyle’s family, played by Lauren Graham, Thomas Haden Church and Josh Wiggins, are still in shock over the awful news, when Max is brought to Kyle’s funeral. I don’t know if this really happens, but you’d have to be an ISIS sympathizer not to be tear up at this moving final reunion.
Trouble is, Max is in shock, inconsolable and too erratic to return to duty. He’s lost his sense of purpose. The Wincott family — one-legged Corps vet Dad, mourning mom and rebellious teen Justin — take him in.
“He’s your dog now,” Dad (Haden Church) growls. Justin (Wiggins) has to put down the video games and try to calm a distraught animal that howls in the night, shakes in fear at fireworks and only will bond with the boy who smells like his beloved Kyle.
Kyle gets little help from his pal sassy pal Chuy (Dejon LaQuake), a lot more from Chuy’s even sassier cousin, Carmen (Mia Xitlali). Their family’s part of a long line of chihuahua hoarders.
Director and co-writer Boaz Yakin, whose best credit was “Remember the Titans,” shoves weighty subplots about Justin getting mixed up with crooks, thanks to his talent for burning copies of unreleased new video games, and the nefarious activities of one of Kyle’s comrades from the Corps. That gives Max a chance to battle the bad guys’ dogs and perform almost supernatural feats of tracking.
All the eye-rolling melodramatics may be crowd-pleasing, but it clutters up the film. The script, co-written by combat vet turned hack screenwriter Sheldon Lettich (“Lionheart,””Legionaire,””Rambo III”), shoehorns in ideas like Justin’s dad’s intolerance and how “war hero” is sometimes an over-statement. The film wraps itself in the flag like a lazy country music song.
But the heart of Max is a boy learning about an always faithful dog, and as sentimental and manipulative as their bonding moments are, that’s what works.

MPAA Rating: PG for action violence, peril, brief language and some thematic elements

Cast: Josh Wiggins, Lauren Graham, Mia Xitlali, Thomas Haden Church, Dejon LaQuake, Luke Kleintank
Credits: Directed by Boaz Yakin, script by Sheldon Lettich and Boaz Yakin. A Warner Brothers/MGM release.

Running time: 1:51

So, Alan Rickman, what did you know about Louis XIV of France before playing him and directing a movie about the creation of a verdant outdoor ballroom in the gardens of Versailles Palace?
“Wigs,” the director of “A Little Chaos” purrs. “‘The Sun King.’ EXTRAVAGANT. And a great patron of the arts!”
Rickman got a crash course in The Sun King, who reigned over France for 54 years. France became the envy of Europe, as he nurtured or protected great writers such as Moliere and artists in every medium from architecture to furniture and textiles.
“A lot of weird people got some encouragement, thanks to him,” Rickman says.
Including, his fictional film suggests, a widowed gardener and landscaper, played by Kate Winslet. In “A Little Chaos” she is commissioned by the royal gardener (Matthias Schoenaerts of “Far From the Madding Crowd”) to stir up the nature he and his peers were determined to master, manipulate and put into some sort of order.
“I love this metaphor of a balance between order and chaos, and illustrating that through the garden,” says Rickman, who tweaked Alison Deegan’s fanciful script to emphasize that. “You can’t have one without the other in nature.”
The two gardeners are thrown together in this epic undertaking, and love story develops.
And Rickman “judiciously injects himself (in) whenever it feels as if the film is become a little too set in its ways,” notes Leigh Paatsch of Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper.
“To me, Louis XIV is the chaotic element here,” Rickman explains. “He asks his gardener to build this perfect Eden in the worst place he could have picked — a mosquito-ridden swamp. It’s genius, but madness, to put a garden there.”
As a performer, Rickman wanted to flip the image of the god-like absolute monarch and show his human side, “the man beneath the wig.”
He manages that in the film’s opening scene, as he explains the duties of a monarch to his children.
“That actually was a scene that came about thanks to economics. Louis was to make a speech to a few hundred courtiers in a ballroom. And I said to (screenwriter) Alison, ‘We can’t afford that. How about, he’s rehearsing it with his kids?’ She went away and wrote it.”
That’s a reminder that “Chaos” is an opulent period piece shot on a budget. The actor frets that his investors insisted he act in “Chaos,” not because he was perfect for the part, but because they figured he’ll never be short of cash, thanks to his Harry Potter haul. He was Severus Snape, who towers and glowers over the franchise, start to finish.
“The investors figure you don’t need to be paid to act in a movie you’re directing,” he says, laughing.
Is he good in “A Little Chaos”? He is, with Alastair Harkness of The Scotsman newspaper noting that “It’s disappointing to discover he’s not the main player” after that opening scene, and Peter Bradshaw of Britain’s Guardian newspaper suggesting that “He almost pulls off the curious trick of upstaging his own movie.”
At 69, Rickman manages a film or two a year. He plays a general in “Eye in the Sky,” a drone warfare drama starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul and Barkhad Abdirahman, is due out next. While there was a period, after “Die Hard,” when he could have dined out on plummy-voiced screen villains forever, that wasn’t the path Rickman chose.
“It was great to be asked to sing in ‘Sweeney Todd.’ It’s exciting to be asked to do the comedy one gets to do in a ‘Galaxy Quest.’ You have to keep yourself interested and surprised.
“In this work, you are so dependent on other people’s imagination. So you never lay down rules for what you’re looking for. You always hope somebody will have a better idea of what you should be doing than you do. That’s my hope, anyway.”

An 18th century Swedish nobleman rides a horse into a bar.
Thus started no joke anyone ever heard or told. But it’s a high point in Roy Andersson’s “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence,” so stay with me.
The horseman, an officer, waves his sword about and chases out the female Swedish barflies. “No women in the establishment!” The king, Karl XII, is coming.
And so he (Viktor Gyllenberg) does, a callow strawberry blond leading his army to teach those Russians a lesson.
Karl is thirsty. His aides order him water. Karl is drawn to the “young and handsome” bartender, and his aides proposition the guy for him.
All this before Karl rides off to the battle that ended the Swedish empire.
Andersson’s third film in an Absurdist trilogy (“Songs from the Second Floor” and “You, the Living”) about the human condition is a reminder that no, Sweden isn’t known for comedies — on the big screen or the small one, or on the stage. And there’s a reason for that.
“Pigeon” is a series of bleak black-out sketches, little human scenes in bars, bus stops and shops. They’re linked, sort of, by these two frustrated novelty toy salesmen, Jonathan and Sam (Holger Andersson, Nils Westblom). They’re having a hard time moving their joke junk, a “laughing bag” and vampire teeth, “extra long” wares.
The players in these Swedish-language (with subtitles) playlets are often in heavy, pale makeup, the settings spare and bleak.
A bartender, after Karl XII’s bloodied return from the Battle of Poltava, faces every woman in the bar and tells them, one by one, “You were widowed at Poltava. A widow’s veil is your grief.” Each woman, in turn, bursts into tears.m They’re mourning men from a battle 300 years ago? Their own men? The return of the sexist prig who would ban them from bars?
British colonial soldiers drive black slaves into a cylinder that drives a steam engine — heating them makes the Empire run.
The lightest moments come from the barmaid who leads her bar in a stirring Swedish drinking song — set to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
The insights into the human condition are obscure and thin, though the Absurdism is as offbeat as anything in “Waiting for Godot” or “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”
This “Pigeon” is quite unlike anything you’ll see on the screen this year. But beware of any advertising that labels Andersson “wacky” and this a comedy. Even by deadpan Swedish standards, this is pretty dry. And saying “The Emperor Andersson has no clothes” is just rubbing Sweden’s nose in it. That’s from a Danish story, and a funny one at that.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief sexuality and some disturbing images

Cast: Holger Andersson, Nils Westblom, Lotti Törnros, Viktor Gyllenberg
Credits: Written and directed by Roy Andersson. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:41

Asif Kapadia wishes Amy Winehouse had “just gotten out of London, out of Camden, away from the people, the drugs and that scene, and TRAVELED to where she wasn’t famous.” But it didn’t happen, and Winehouse was dead — not of drugs, but of alcohol poisoning, at 27. The drugs could have gotten to her just as easily.

As we ended our interview, I suggested to the documentary filmmaker that it’s a pity The “Rehab” singer, Winehouse wasn’t able to dial back the fame, the drugs, the venues she was playing at, and have a nice chanteuse-y career, “Like Sade.” And he lit up.
“I’m not sure putting her up onstage in front of 20,000 people was a great idea. Play jazz clubs, smaller venues, perform with hip hop people. Just be creative. “She never seemed to enjoy it, and never had the chance.”
“Sade is the ultimate example of how Amy could have gone. She’s always
making records, always touring. No one
knows her on sight. No one knows
anything about her personal life.”
Amy’s manager “Nick Shymansky mentioned Sade to me as what
should have been Amy’s ultimate career
choice. The right level of fame,
surrounded by people who obviously
look out for her better.”

The acquired taste that is Seth MacFarlane is harder to acquire and the one joke in his one-joke comedy about the pot-smoking/potty-mouthed teddy bear wears thin in the endless two hours of “Ted 2.”
Really, if you’ve seen one f-bomb dropping child’s toy take a bong hit, you’ve seen them all.
“Ted 2” finds Ted and his new bride Tami-Lynne (Jessica Barth) trying to save their crumbling marriage the old-fashioned way — by having a kid.
“It’ll teach us how to love each other again!”
Ted’s doing his working class belly-aching to Tami-Lynne in his wife-beater T-shirt and low-class Boston accent, she’s giving as good as she gets. Stuff gets thrown. A kid’ll fix that.
But that opens a whole can of worms about their fertility, with sperm bank gags. And their marital status and Ted’s legal status as a doll that’s come to life are on the table, too. Is he a “thing,” or a person?
Most of the movie is about Ted trying to prove the latter, with the aid of a child-lawyer (Amanda Seyfried) who’s a bit fond of the weed herself. The trial is a non-starter that starts early and goes on for way too much of the movie. Not funny, not moving or profound, either, no matter how much Ted (the voice of MacFarlane) gripes that they’re treating him “just like the homos.”
Several few laughs land, but they’re scattered. The pacing is leaden. MacFarlane’s yen for song and dance gets a workout — a pointlessly elaborate opening number, Ted and a chorus line dancing around a giant cake — MacFarlane’s Ted breaks into song at random points in the picture, Seyfried (“Mamma Mia!”) sings by a campfire and arch-villain Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) covers a little Neil Diamond.
Yeah, Mark Wahlberg is back as Ted’s best bud, Johnny, the one who wished Ted to life as a kid. Tom Brady has a cameo, Patrick Warburton, Dennis Haysbert and Morgan Freeman show up.
Best bit — Ted visiting New York’s Comic Con, a convention where Warburton’s “Guy” gets to dress up as Warburton’s super hero character The Tick. Guy has a new boyfriend who dresses up as Mr. Worf from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The new boyfriend is Michael Dorn who played Worf. Hilarious.
Stoner comedies aren’t for everyone. But with marijuana gaining legal footing in more states, the sky seems to be the limit for movies that pander to that audience. Can “Ted 3” and a serious attack of the munchies be in the cards in our future? The mind reels.

MPAA Rating: R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, and some drug use

Cast: The voice of Seth MacFarlane, Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, Jessica Barth, Morgan Freeman, Giovanni Ribisi, Patrick Warburton
Credits: Directed by Seth MacFarlane, script by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:55

“Glass Chin” is a boxing picture with very little actual boxing. As the title suggests, putting the ex-fighter (Corey Stoll, in a break-out performance) in the ring wouldn’t be a pretty sight.
Bud “The Saint” Gordon used to be somebody, used to be a contender. He had a restaurant, every pro athlete’s dream. Now that’s all gone.
All he has is s dumpy house in Jersey, his native wit, his girl (Marin Ireland), his dog, Silly, and two choices.
Will he go back to Yellow Bird Gym and help his old corner man train an up-and-comer, Kid Sunshine? Or will he tie his fate to the oily loan shark, J.J., played with sexually ambiguous venom by Billy Crudup?
The first thing you notice about this Noah

Buschel film is that it’s made up entirely of boxing movie archetypes, and that none of them talk in the inarticulate “dese-dem-dose” phrases common to movies set in that gritty milieu. Stoll (“The Good Lie”) suggests intelligence, even in the coarse dialogue of a Jersey boxer.
Crudup just revels in making J.J. a ruthless, faintly effeminate operator determined to muscle his way into Manhattan’s chic set — rolling his money into a restaurant and art gallery.
“This is me, marveling,” he says to the boxers. “I marvel at you lads.”
Yul Vazquez (“American Gangster,””Captain Phillips) is perfectly cast as bad news for Bud, Roberto, the “pick up and delivery guy” J.J. wants Bud to accompany on collections. Even Roberto uses words like “trenchant,” not your every day thug speech.
Kelly Lynch is a dishy, high-mileage ex-model bartender J.J. uses to corrupt Bud. David Johansen is one of the debtors they collect from. He remembers Bud. You were “one smart bruiser.”
There aren’t many new wrinkles to the story. But Buschel keeps things bleak as Bud confronts his past and his ever-narrowing present. And Stoll, nicely underplaying a once-big-man straining to get back to where he was, gives us both the tough guy exterior and the glass chin that could be Bud’s undoing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, nudity

Cast: Corey Stoll, Billy Crudup, Marin Ireland, Yul Vazquez, Kelly Lynch
Credits: Written and directed by Noah Buschel. An eOne/Phase 4 release.

Running time: 1:28

Fifteen minutes into a serious thriller about shooting down Air Force One and kidnapping the president, “Big Game” turns seriously silly.
But we’re in the hands of the writer-director of the Finnish “Santa Claus is a monster” movie, “Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale.” So it’s goofy by design.
Samuel L. Jackson’s the president who survives the crash that turncoat Secret Service agent Morris (Ray Stevenson) has engineered in a presidential “escape pod.” The person who pops him out of the pod, lost in the wilds of Finland, wants to communicate via a paper-cup and string “telephone.”
“From what planet are you from? Do you come in peace?”
Jackson fights back the desire, the NEED, to use his favorite expletives. Very presidential. And prudent. His savior is a boy just turning 13, a Finnish kid (Onni Tommilla) who insists the Prez (whom he doesn’t recognize) call him “Ranger.” The in-over-his-head kid is on a solo bear hunt, a rite of passage among Finland’s Duck Dynasty crowd.
“Big Game” — and as a villain notes, “game doesn’t get any bigger” than a president played by Samuel L. Jackson — is a violent formula actioner stuffed into a PG-13 box. Writer-director Jalmari Helander pulls his punches and goes more goofy than gonzo in this survivalist shootout. The result is a movie that won’t please his fans, or the kids he waters this down for.
“Ranger,” or Oskari, may be so rural that he has more knowledge of driving an offroad four-wheeler than who the U.S. president might be. But he speaks English, spoiling the most promising comic possibilities here — a language barrier. It’s easy to envision a foul-mouthed President Samuel L. trying to make himself understood and respected by a Finnish kid with a bow and arrow.
Instead, Oskari and President Moore set out to finish the boy’s Finnish vision quest, and then rescue the POTUS.
“Tomorrow, I will be a man,” the boy insists.
The president makes little effort to get a sense of urgency into this boy. Even after the people who shot down his plane (Mehmet Kurtulus is their leader) show up and start shooting and chasing.
Meanwhile, Jim Broadbent is the wily old spy brought in to run the government’s efforts to satellite track and bring back the president. Victor Garber is the vice president, Felicity Huffman the CIA chief, Ted Levine a general at a loss for cleaning up this mess.
Jackson’s best acting comes in every moment he plays a passive president in the hands of a wimpy hunter-boy who can’t even draw back his bow.
“Sometimes, you don’t have to be tough, just look tough,” he counsels the kid.
“The forest is a harsh judge,” Mini Mel Gibson hisses back. “It gives each of us what we deserve.”
The production values and high-caliber cast suggest “Big Game” had better intentions than results. Helander may have memorized “Die Hard” and “Air Force One” and “Olympus Has Fallen.” But his version of that formula, given the loopy twist of making a woodsman/kid the hero “with particular skills,” loses most everything in translation.

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for sequences of intense action and violence, and some language

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Onni Tommila, Ray Stevenson, Felicity Huffman, Victor Garber, Jim Broadbent
Credits: Written and directed by Jalmari Helander. A Relativity release.

Running time: 1:26

Amy had a bad breakup, probably the latest of many. She’s an artist, so her post-breakup grief is an unusually deep wallow in self-pity.
But self-pity, in this case, leads to self-expression. After friends have helped her cope with changes in her Facebook status, the feeling that “I’m never safe” and suicidal talk of “Is there a way NOT to dream?”, she starts building alter egos to soothe her wounded psyche.
When one friend won’t agree to her “Let’s go on a killing spree,” Amy starts sewing masks, brassieres and genitally–endowed panties, therapy made from felt. And then, she goes on the warpath in the San Francisco dating scene, trying on these new personae to unsuspecting blind dates.
“Felt” is sort of a mumblecore psychodrama, an exploration of victimhood and one woman’s role-playing to escape it.
Amy Everson stars as the a skinny, sadfaced 20something heroine, Amy, struggling with a descent into madness.
It starts with being rude to assorted blind dates and escalates to showing up for paid “photo sessions” (she wears a nude costume of her own design) and taunting the pervy photographer.
And then Kenny (filmmaker/actor Kentucker Audley) comes into her life. Like a pop starlet who loses her tortured love-gone-wrong ballads, Amy’s attitude turns around. Only her best friend (Roxanne Lauren Knouse) isn’t fooled.
Jason Banker, who directed and co-wrote the script with Everson, makes “Felt” a cloth-covered navel-gazer of a melodrama — doling out Amy’s shocking costumes and “statements” here and there amongst endless scenes of her muddling through her misery. Everson has a mildly disturbed girl-next-door screen presence, here — capable of anything, or anything a feather-weight manic depressive might manage.
For all its shocks, “Felt” doesn’t serve up many surprises, just a lot of moping and talking and talking about moping, dates that go nowhere, men behaving badly, Amy behaving worse. The germ of an idea is here. I’m just not sure it’s worth more than a shorter film than this one, which at 80 minutes is a bit of a drag.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic sexual content, profanity, violence

Cast: Amy Everson, Kentucker Audley, Roxanne Lauren Knouse
Credits: Directed by Jason Banker, script Jason Banker and Amy Everson . An Amplify release.

Running time: 1:20

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“A Little Chaos” is an overlong ditty of a movie, Alan Rickman’s amusingly fanciful version of how a famous outdoor ballroom in the gardens of Versailles came to be.
He directed and co-stars with his “Sense and Sensibility” love interest, Kate Winslet, in a tale of a woman entering a man’s world, a plucky widowed gardener who carries out design and construction one of the wonders of Versailles for Louis XIV, “The Sun King.”
Louis (Rickman) wants Versailles to “embody the true glory and splendor of France.” The regular court landscapers are letting him down. The royal landscape architect, Andre le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) is ordered to throw open bids to see who can “order” the “chaos” of the swampy landscape.
But Sabine De Barra (Winslet) sees too much “order” in the place. Her design, with its “abundance of chaos” is her Garden of Eden. She gets the commission.
Sabine is hurled into lightweight court intrigues and rivalries, hated and sabotaged by many, championed by the Duc d’Orleans, playfully played by Stanley Tucci. The Duke is the king’s brother, with the effrontery to speak up to his king, who has a big family, a mistress (Jennifer Ehle) and no appetite.
“If the King does not eat,” the Duke reproaches him, “FRANCE does not eat!”
Le Notre, unhappily married to a feckless courtier, is smitten by the swarthy, earthy Sabine. Their flirtation is earthy — and earth-covered.
Rickman, who co-wrote the script, delivers gardening in the rain and a delightfully unlikely meeting between the unrecognized king and the lady gardener, a woman who “adapts, like a well-trained plant.” His is, of course, regal and marvelous as Louis. But he gives Tucci a blank check and Ehle, famed for TV’s “Pride & Prejudice,” a stunningly tender scene among her ladies in waiting.
It’s all a bit much, adorably so. And yet the love story at its heart is given short shrift. Winslet and Schoenaerts kind of click in those few scenes where that’s allowed. But Rickman and his players have enough witty and winning moments that we don’t mind.
Even in period pieces, overdoing prim and proper “order” can be a drag. A little more chaos might have truly lit this one up.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality and brief nudity

Cast: Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jennifer Ehle, Stanley Tucci
Credits: Directed by Alan Rickman, script by Jeremy Brock, Alison Deegan and Alan Rickman . A Lionsgate/Focus release.

Running time: 1:57