Movie Nation

“Burying the Ex” is a horror comedy that never frightens and rarely amuses. It’s a zombie breakup movie whose best joke might be its all-the-description-you-need title.
Horror shop clerk Max (Anton Yelchin of the revived “Star Trek”) has this shrill vegan/environmentalist girlfriend, played by Ashley Greene of the “Twilight Saga.” She’s self-righteous, short-tempered and when she gets on roll, funny. Listen to her tear into the sexual conquests of Max’s lump of a half brother, Travis (Oliver Cooper) the morning after, when they’re passed out on Max’s sofa.
Don’t know where you’re going, but you can’t stay here, Evelyn begins, burning daggers at Travis. “I suggest the nearest church, or Planned Parenthood.”
She’s too intense for Max, who doesn’t frighten easily. He spends his days at Bloody Mary’s Boutique, watching old Vincent Price movies, selling horror paraphernalia and costumes.
Meeting the fair “I Scream” for ice cream horror-deserts shop owner Olivia (Alexandra Daddario of “San Andreas”) is the final straw. Max arranges to meet Evelyn in a public park to break up with her. And that’s when he sees her hit and killed by a bus.
Hard to get happy after that. Max’s “We will always be together” promise to the dying Evelyn doesn’t help. And taking Olivia on a date that passes by Evelyn’s grave is just asking for trouble. Ex-girlfriend rises from the dead, and Max is stuck trying to figure out what to do about that and how not to let Olivia know he’s still living with The Living Dead.
Veteran director Joe Dante, who had a nice run from the late-70s to late ’90s with films such as “The Howling,” “Gremlins” and “Matinee,” attracted a decent cast and conjures up a nice milieu for “Burying the Ex” — horror shops, goth dance clubs and the like.
But he can’t skip by or make funny the script’s abrupt need to get rid of Evelyn, and then dispose Zombie Evelyn. The half-brother sidekick is yet another “Jack Black lite.” The funniest one-liners aren’t quotable in polite company, but there’s not much here to merit that R-rating, other than the grisly and touching death that is supposed to amuse us. This is decades removed from the state of the horror comedy art.
Greene does her best with post-mortem jokes such as “Oh come on! My morning face is NOT that bad!”
But “Burying the Ex” is so artless, humorless and lacking in urgency that it’s no surprise realizing that Dante has spent recent years on the quicker/dirtier schedules of TV. But what works on “Hawaii Five-O” and “Splatter” doesn’t add up to anything worth shelling out shekels to see on the big screen.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, partial nudity, some horror violence, and language

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Ashley Greene, Alexandra Daddario
Credits: Directed by Joe Dante, script by Alan Trezza. A Voltage/Image Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:29

In talking with Alan Rickman about directing and co-starring in the 17th century period piece “A Little Chaos,” the subject of his Harry Potter work came up. It always does, though in this case, it was within the context of getting his movie financed and filmed.

Investors, Rickman jokes, insisted that he play a part in his film, because they figured “I had all this ‘Harry Potter’ cash, so I wouldn’t need to be paid!” He acted for free, and directed for a song. “Actors,” he notes, “are always subsidizing and supporting their own work.”

Since several friends and commenters on this blog were bubbling over with suggested Snape questions, I bent them into one all-encompassing query about what his greatest satisfaction was in having played the part. He’s not crass enough to suggest the decade of paychecks, or the new level of fame the character brought him. He was already a brand name in the movies before taking on that part.

“You didn’t know what Snape would become, at least I didn’t, when I took the part. Because she’d only written three books, at that point. I didn’t know that I’d be in all the films. I found out, along with everybody else, what he was about. As J.K. told us.

“It was great to confound expectations, and to die a great death. To die a hero, a complicated hero. Very satisfying to play.

“When we started, we worked on location. As we filmed the series, CGI caught up with us and over ten years, it tended to take over. I found it particularly satisfying, after ten years of work, to finish up with just me and Ralph — just a couple of actors doing their job, without much in the line of effects.”

It’s not the laughs that tell us Pixar has returned to form with its latest offering, “Inside Out.” It’s the heart.
Here’s a children’s cartoon that deals with emotions, from temper tantrums to sadness spirals. It teaches kids, with animation and jokes, how every emotion has its place and its value.
As in “Toy Story” and “Up,” it is wistful about the loss of childhood, and how the most powerful memories can be the sad ones.
We meet the five emotions that will drive Riley at birth. Joy (Amy Poehler) is Riley’s first experience of the world, what she feels as she opens her eyes to her parents (Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan).
But Sadness (Phyllis Smith of “The Office”) is close behind, adding a glass half-full to everything the kid feels for the rest of her life.
Anger, voiced by Lewis Black, has most of the laughs — tirades, meltdowns in the classic Angriest Man in Comedy style.
Then there’s Fear (Bill Hader), the ninny, and Disgust (Mindy Kaling), the snob.
Joy, smiling, upbeat and well-meaning, runs the show. She wants to give the kid happy thoughts, even after the family moves from Minnesota and her friends to San Francisco, where Mean Girls rule.
Sadness compulsively pulls Riley into disappointment, nostalgia and regret for what she’s lost.
“Crying helps me slow down and obsess over life’s problems,” she whines.
Fear frets over what might go wrong and Disgust tries to narrow Riley’s choices so that she fits in.
There’s an uneasy balance of Core Memories, which Sadness threatens to tip over at any moment. When she does, she and Joy tumble out of the Control Room, the nerve center where decisions about how to react are made. Their efforts to get back via a Train of Thought take them from the memories of Family Island past Abstract Concepts and into the Subconscious.
“It’s where they take all the trouble makers” among memories are sent, the psychic scars that make us who we are.
The characters are simplistic and the quest only mildly diverting. It’s the film’s fanciful treatment of the workings of the mind that delight here — orbs of memory, short term and long-term, husband and wife C0ntrol Rooms which play with “Women are from Venus/Men from Mars” in their contrasts.
When you find yourself tearing up at a long lost Imaginary Friend (Richard Kind), you’ll realize just how much this film is on the right wavelength.
“Inside Out” isn’t designed to sell toys, like much recent Pixar product. It isn’t an out-of-ideas sequel. It’s a wholly original child’s-eye-view of emotions and growing up, a demanding movie for small children and a rewarding and touching one for their parents.
And there’s a stunningly simple and romantic short, “Lava,” a love-story between volcanos set to a Hawaiian ukulele tune, that nicely sets the table for all this, a reminder of what the Pixar brand is supposed to be.

MPAA Rating: PG for mild thematic elements and some action

Cast: The voices of Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Bill Hader, Mindy Kalin, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan.
Credits: Directed by Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen, script by Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley. A Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:34

“Gabriel” is a moody, intimate character study filmed and performed in shades of grey. It’s about a mentally ill young man desperate to use his first hours after getting out of an institution to make his life right.
Not that any of that is spelled out for us. But it’s so easily guessed — from Rory Culkin’s performance in the title role, from the way others react to his character — that you wonder why first-time feature director Lou Howe is going to so much trouble to conceal the back story and the plot.
We meet Gabriel on the bus, where he’s guileless enough to not realize that playing and sharing Twizzlers with a small child is going to freak out her mother when she finds out. His cell phone keeps ringing, and when he finally answers it, he lies.
Gabriel is on a mission. He’s hunting for a college girl he knows. But it’s winter break. Alice is nowhere to be found.
And his information on her — a two year-old letter, old family addresses — is dated. He is disarming enough to get help, but there’s something off. Does she know he’s coming?
“It has to be a surprise…I’ve just been…away.”
It’s only when he meets his brother (David Call) at the bus stop that the murk clears, though nobody comes out and says where Gabriel was. His no-nonsense mother (Deirdre O’Connell, quite good) has developed a coping strategy, and that involves Gabriel doing what he says he’s going to do, being where he’s supposed to be and taking his medications.
But he lies as easily as he breathes, he throws up his pills. And every chance he gets, he’s plotting his getaway. Got to find Alice.
“I’m not dangerous,” he pleads. But we wonder. Is he just “the psychotic younger brother”?
Howe, who also scripted this, has built a film that is all observations — the banalities of “normal” life. Gabriel visits the old diner where he had his favorite unhealthy meals, ducks into the apartment of his Nonny (Lynn Cohen of “The Hunger Games”), always skulking, looking for familiar objects even if he’s avoiding people who know his story.
But for all the unease Culkin generates and has often generated in films such as “The Chumscrubber” and “Igby Goes Down,” “Gabriel” never has much urgency. The big revelations aren’t revealing, the dramatic explosions not remotely explosive and there’s always time for another cigarette.
For filmgoers with longer memories, Howe has made an “Ordinary People” where the stakes are too low, the impetus for the plot too mundane and the title character entirely too ordinary.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult themes, threatened violence, profanity

Cast: Rory Culkin, David Call, Deirdre O’Connell, Lynn Cohen, Emily Meade
Credits: Written and directed by Lou Howe. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Running time: 1:26

The teen hides comic books inside a book of Shakespeare’s plays. His favorite stories concern a superhero, The Phantom Halo.
But Dad doesn’t approve. When he’s sober, he quotes Shakespeare. He does that when he’s drunk, too.
So Sam, played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster of “The Maze Runner,” is constantly being quizzed on The Bard, performing monologues and soliloquies.
“At your age,” the old man (Sebastian Roche) spits, “I was better!”
It’s the way the plays are used that gives novelty to the drama “Phantom Halo,” the setting and the unexpected characters who quote Shakespeare. This is a family of down-and-outs, petty thieves. But their father knows poetry and perhaps had a shot at a career in the arts. All he’s passed on to his boys is a way to abuse that education.
Sam is the hook, reciting the Bard in a monk’s cowl, tossing a little British accent and British culture at passersby in an L.A. street mall. He mesmerizes viewers while his older brother Beckett (Luke Kleintank) picks their pockets.
Beckett wants to pay their bills, get a little money ahead, move up in the world. But if the old man who named them “Samuel” and “Beckett” finds his stash, it’ll all go to booze and gambling.
That’s the germ of an idea behind Antonia Bogdanovich’s film, one she proceeds to complicate with a loan shark (Gbenga Akinnagbe), pursuing the father of the family, counterfeit cash and the divorced, “vulnerable” and apparently rich mom (Rebecca Romijn, quite good) of one of Beckett’s classmates.
“Vulnerability is not hot. Hot is hot.”
These added complications are but distractions from the fascinating family dynamic the film sets up — an “artist” reduced to sending his kids out to shoplift, pick pockets and keep them afloat.
The performances are believable enough. But the film’s violence is both expected and absurdly random, the older woman romance thing played out before it begins and the rising stakes meekly handled, a burden that a film this slight cannot carry.
Bogdanovich — yes, she’s Peter Bogdanovich’s daughter — loses whatever point she was making with the comic book tie-in. It’s far too obvious far too early in the film that she’s chasing a phantom only she sees and cares about.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and brief sexuality

Cast: Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Rebecca Romijn, Luke Kleintank, Sebastian Roche
Credits: Directed by Antonia Bogdanovich, written by Anne Hefron and Antonia Bogdanovich. An ARC Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:29

The Savage Nomads, Black Spades, Harlem Turks, Screaming Phantoms, Golden Guineas — these were “the armies of the night,” as an iconic 1970s film described them.
Block by block, they controlled much of New York, especially the South Bronx, nicknamed “Fort Apache” by the locals — a wasteland of poverty, drugs and ruined tenements.
Shan Nicholson’s documentary “Rubble Kings” tells their story, the late ’60s to late ’70s epoch in New York history when a disaffected, no-hope generation turned to street gangs as a means of organizing their society.
Interviewing the middle-aged survivors of those years, academics and politicians, using archival TV news footage and animation, Nicholson creates an entertaining and even upbeat history lesson about a dark corner of New York history.
He is helped, especially in the film’s opening, by every living eyewitness summoning up the same image.
“It was like that movie, ‘The Warriors.'” “Remember that scene from ‘The Warriors’? That really went down.”
Walter Hill’s 1979 street gang classic, based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel, provides context and clips, as one and all proclaim the fictional film — with its bizarre and colorful gangs, hand-to-hand violence and Us vs. “Them” peacemaking interrupted by an assassin — wasn’t far from reality.
“It was a time of social and cultural reckoning,” John Leguizamo narrates. Bad urban planning (Robert Moses, who chose highways over urban neighborhoods, is demonized again) and other conditions created areas where gangs popped up, in imitation of the infamous motorcycle gangs that preceded them. They were filled with kids wearing “colors,” their gang’s “coat of arms,” violent groups with brutal initiation rituals and savage punishment for anyone violating their turf.
Nicholson zeroes in on the Ghetto Brothers, founded by Benji Melendez and two siblings, whose founder now says “It wasn’t supposed to be a gang” and who were held in high regard by other city gangs as mediators, peace-makers, people who moved beyond violence and power over turf into something more positive and political.
Nicholson doesn’t ignore the violence so much as downplay it in his larger narrative. He’s trying to get to what these gangs morphed into — the earliest rappers, DJs and break dancers, an ’80s generation that expressed itself in different ways.
It’s an over-simplification and something of an overreach for a 67 minute film. But “Rubble Kings” is more interesting as cultural mythology than straight history.
And those who know this history only through a famous feature film released as that era was ending turn out to be much better informed than we’d have ever dreamed.
As the man says, “That really went down.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, discussions of violence

Cast: Benji Melendez, Carlos Suarez, Kool Herc, Ed Koch, narrated by John Leguizamo
Credits: Directed by Shan Nicholson. A Goldcrest release.

Running time: 1:07

He’s not working as much as he did during his Go-To Villain days. I blame Harry Potter for that. Surely Alan Rickman got rich off that franchise and could pick and choose the parts to turn his plummy voice loose upon.

I talked with him a few years back after he’d starred in a history of California wine dramedy, “Bottle Shock.” He was good in it. As he always is.

Now he’s directed and stars in “A Little Chaos,” a comic romance set in 17th century France, as “The Sun King,” Louis XIV, built his palace and gardens at Versailles.

Kate Winslet stars, with Mathias Schoenaerts, Jennifer Ehle and Stanley Tucci.

Delicious cast, a fun turn by the Great Rickman.

I’m interviewing him about it today, but always looking for other angles — lines of questioning — to pursue.

Suggestions? Post them as comments, and thanks for the help!

The hook for Luke Korem’s engaging documentary, “Lord Montagu,” is scandal and sex. But that becomes just a prologue, abandoned early on in this story of a bisexual British lord who survived imprisonment for his sexual orientation and went on to save the family estate through a combination of passion, chutzpah and desperate showmanship.
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu grew up in Palace House, one of the lesser Great Houses among Britain’s vast estates. His father died when he was young, and he grew up a fey and high-voiced dandy who liked “both girls AND boys.”
That got him into trouble in the 1950s, when he was accused of sexual improprieties with young Boy Scouts (acquitted) and then hounded into prison for facilitating a sexual encounter between a Royal Air Force officer and his same sex lover.
Korem’s film, using modern interviews with friends, relatives and historians, archival TV footage and narration (actor Oliver Tobias reads from Montagu’s memoir), does a wonderful job at providing context. In the 1950s, Britain still had The Buggery Act of 1533 in force. And thanks to the gay treason scandal at the British spy service, homosexuality was linked to communism. Even a peer of the realm could be a police target.
Korem suggests that Montagu’s “sensational” trial had something to do with Britain eventually rescinded that ancient law, but provides no evidence of that.
The filmmaker is far more interested in how Montagu, trying to save Palace House, Beaulieu Abbey and the thousands of acres in the South of England that are his inheritance. “Lord Montagu” shifts from tragic scandal to triumph as a member of Britain’s idle class reinvented himself as the country’s greatest preserver of antique cars, building a popular museum that fed the national car craze that endures to this day, with or without the canceling of “Top Gear.”
Montagu, his ex wife and current wife, and children, go on about creating a tourist attraction and then having to live in it — “We live above the shop” — but reveal just what it takes to preserve a piece of national history, houses that have been the setting of hundreds of period pieces, from “Pride & Prejudice” to “Downton Abbey.”
It’s a fascinating life, but one this suited-for-TV documentary has, we guess, only skimmed the surface of.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes and subject matter

Cast: Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Sir Jackie Stewart, Sir Stirling Moss, Oliver Tobias
Credits: Directed by Luke Korem, script by Luke Korem, Bradley Jackson. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:20