Movie Nation

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

An $82 million Friday suggests that millions of Americans forgot the plot of 1992’s “Jurassic Park.” Or ignored scads and scads of warnings that “Jurassic World” is exactly the same movie.

Well, anything to sell the popcorn. It is a popcorn movie. Not like “San Andreas” or “Mad Max” reinvented the wheel. “Jurassic World” will pass “San Andreas” on its very first weekend, and catch “Mad Max: Fury Road” by Tuesday or Wed.

Then again, in the time it took you to read this, “Jurassic World” made more money than the far superior (only on 15 screens) “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” It’s made $70,000 thus far, will be lucky to manage $165 K this weekend.

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Jason Bateman and Ginnifer Goodwin provide the voices, Disney has set this one for release in March of 2016.

“All poets are mad,” the 16th century scholar observed. And so they have been, at least in the movies — mad and mercurial and of course, entertaining drunks.
Dylan Thomas is the patron saint of this stereotype, and it’s his boozy, reeling first visit to America, as “the purest lyrical poet in the English speaking world,” that is the subject of “Set Fire to the Stars,” a Welsh co-production celebrating and illuminating the great Welsh poet.
By 1950, Thomas, in his mid-30s, was both celebrated and notorious. He’d come to fame reading his poetry on the BBC during World War II. But it was his bawdy, rude and riotously ripped personal reputation that gave America’s academics pause before they’d agree to sponsor a U.S. tour.
Elijah Wood plays John Brinnin, the New York poet whose idea this tour was. The first scene in “Set Fire to the Stars” is Wood, flippantly trying to put his fellow academics at ease about Thomas. His reputation as a drinker “must be inflated,” surely. “How much trouble can one poet be?”
Quite a bit, if you turn him loose on the tavern capital of North America.
Thomas, played by Welsh actor and Thomas look-alike Celyn Jones (who co-wrote the script), is the life of every party, the barfly’s barfly. He’d rather listen to the music in a waitress’s jargon-jazzed order than recite a poem. But give him enough to drink and he’ll break into song, or obscene limericks.
“A frustrated lady named Alice,” he bellows, “used a dynamite stick for a phallus.” And that’s as printable as that poem gets.
But Brinnin, straining to keep Thomas sober enough to perform and polite enough to rub elbows with college faculties, is in over his head. Even dragging the poet to a cabin in Connecticut doesn’t help, when there are fans/neighbors (Shirley Henderson, Kevin Eldon) willing to flirt and drink into the poet’s good graces.
Wood is well-cast as the closeted, repressed Boswell to the Great Man, ill-used and put-out at the poet’s many indiscretions.
Jones is lively as Thomas the drunk, predictably maudlin and morose as the man behind the partier. He makes his best impressions as the poet, summoning up the voice that turned Thomas into a recording star, reading his work for others.
“I may without fail,” the poem that provides the film’s title goes, “Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.”
“Set Fire to the Stars” is shot in a period-perfect but video-flat black and white, with Welsh locations nicely doubling for New York.
Co-writer/director Andy Goddard delivers lovely grace notes — in a roadhouse where Rosie, the slangy-waitress (Maimie McCoy) presides, and near the end, where those who have met Thomas on his travels perform that titular poem, “Love in the Asylum.”
This film, based on Brinnin’s memoir, “Dylan Thomas in America,” could easily have become a tragi-comic “My Favorite Year” with poetry. But Goddard and Jones never quite turn it loose, never let us forget the haunted man who couldn’t have just one drink/one woman (Kelly Reilly plays Caitlin Thomas, the wife, in a vision). The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol abuse, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Celyn Jones, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Reilly, Steven Mackintosh
Credits: Directed by Andy Goddard, script by Celyn Jones and Andy Goddard. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:37

Touching and wise, cute and occasionally cloying, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is a dramedy that taps into both real teen angst and behavior, and our fantasies of what we hope teens are thinking and feeling and doing.
It’s about a couple of high school movie makers and the “dying girl” one of them is forced to befriend. From tha set up, the film leans heavily on high school comedies of the past. It then proceeds to go out of its way to trip up our expectations about cliques, jocks, geeks and the prettiest girl in school.
Awkward Greg (Thomas Mann) is our narrator, a camera geek who lives outside the cliques with his “colleague,” Earl (RJ Cyler). They kill lunch hours watching classic cinema (“Fitzcarraldo,” “Burden of Dreams”) on youtube in the office of the “cool” teacher. After school, they make parodies of those films — using stop-motion animation and costumes of their own creation that they wear in playing the stars of “My Dinner With Andre the Giant” or “A Sockwork Orange.”
Then Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) gives him bad news. His classmate, Rachel, just learned she’s dying of cancer. Greg, to his credit, reacts the way we’d expect a teen to react. Bummer. Too bad for her. But Mom wants more. Go talk to this girl.
“Do one nice thing for another person.”
What’s worse, Rachel doesn’t “need your stupid pity.” But Greg has just a little charm, and thanks to his parents (Nick Offerman is his sweetly eccentric college prof dad), empathy he didn’t know he’d developed. With disarming tactlessness, he insists on sticking around, and the story begins with the title “Day 1 of Doomed Friendship.”
Cooke, a winsome veteran of the other genre of “dead teenager” movies — horror (“The Quiet Ones,””Ouija”) — gives Rachel a vulnerable beauty. She lets us see the terror at what is coming behind whatever brave front Rachel puts up.

Mann (“Project X”) manages the sensitive insensitivity Greg has to project. He’s scared, too. He needs pep talks from that cool teacher (Jon Bernthal), and from a Wolverine poster in Rachel’s room. Wolverine (the real voice of Hugh Jackman) chews Greg out for botching the empathy thing. Make a dying girl feel worse with your jokes?
“Not on my watch, pal.”
That’s one of many cute and funny touches director and “Glee!” veteran Alfonso Gomez-Rejon slips into what should be the saddest movie since “The Fault in Our Stars.”
The films within the film are hilariously awful. And the assorted high school “types” amusing as ever. But it’s where “Me and Earl” departs from the old John “Breakfast Club” formula that distinguishes it.
The adults — Molly Shannon is Rachel’s weeping, crawl-in-a-bottle divorced mom — are sympathetic and they remember what it was like to be teens. The “hot girl” isn’t a “mean girl.”
Earl is given stereotypical poor black kid street smarts and oversexed teen dialogue. But Cyler makes Earl soulful, deep and smart, something the whole school seems to already know as Greg, and we the audience it out.
Cooke and Mann carry the film, her making great use of Rachel’s cancer-makes-you-wise perspective, Mann playing up the slow and steep learning curve Greg endures. “I have stage four cancer” ends any argument, and the accusation, “You’re only hanging out with her because she has cancer” makes him try a little his soul searching.
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” isn’t deep. But this sure-to-be-a-crowd-pleasing laugher/weeper reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with a romantic comedy that reaches for inspiring and cathartic between the laughs.

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for sexual content, drug material, language and some thematic elements

Cast: Thomas Mann, Olivia Cooke, RJ Cyler, Moolly Shannon, Connie Britton, Nick Offerman
Credits: Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, script by Jesse Andrews, based on his novel. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:45

Handsomely mounted, period perfect and starring the empathetic Mia Wasikowska in the title role, the new “Madame Bovary” narrows the scope and finds a different focus within Gustave Flaubert’s novel.
But stripping away complexity doesn’t just undo decades of politically correct efforts to add justifications for the actions of the bored, repressed 1840s French housewife. Director Sophie Barthes (“Cold Souls”) dares to see her acquisitive, shallow heroine as a villain. That should raise some eyebrows.
We meet Emma during her convent training (poise, posture), followed by her wedding day. Her father is happy to marry her off to a handsome and reasonably well-off doctor (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). But dad lets slip something of Emma’s nature in a toast that mentions “all these ideas in your head.”
Emma has just enough knowledge of the world to feel that the provincial life they settle down to in tiny Yonville is depressing. The sylvan forests and bucolic farms and cottages may enchant us today. She sees them as her trap. Dinner chat limited to “Any patients of interest today?”, consultations with a priest — her only sounding board — who doesn’t see or hear her desperation — that’s her future.
But Emma has a rescuer. The pushy shop owner Monsieur Lheureux, played with a greedy purr by Rhys Ifans, labels her “an elegant woman of taste” and proceeds to show her the fine dresses, curtains and furnishings a lady of her refinement must covet. Put it all on her account.
She isn’t flighty enough to fall for the romantic but callow law clerk Leon (Ezra Miller, more at home in a boy band than a period piece). But Emma is still doomed. And not just because of the attentions of the dashing Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green). Her desperate desire for a richer life will impact her marriage, her husband’s practice and others as the house fills with the finer things and her neediness leads to affairs.
Barthes, who co-wrote the script, emphasizes Emma’s isolation (no peers or girlfriends) and her gullibility. She leaves out the passion for romantic novels that fed Emma’s fantasies and taught her there was a wider world out there. But the film also omits some of her affairs and the daughter she had with Charles, which made her social striving seem even more selfish on the page. Paul Giamatti plays the pharmacist Homais, charming, pushy, but stripped here of his ulterior motives.
Still, Wasikowska nicely gets across Emma’s boredom and dullness. This is a character who can’t quite articulate her ennui, who sees things as Monsieur Lheureux tells her to, “possess what you love.”
Perhaps it’s the “Real Housewives” era that conjures up thoughts of the original “realist,” Flaubert, and his greatest novel, as we’ve already been treated this summer to the tarted-up dark comedy, “Gemma Bovery,” inspired by his book. This latest “Bovary”, sumptuous as it is, only hits the tragic highlights and connects her, firmly, with the Culture of Acquisition. It still plays, but doesn’t really move us. So purists have every right to look down their noses at it.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Rhys Ifans, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Laura Carmichael, Logan Marshall-Green, Paul Giamatti
Credits: Directed by Sophie Barthes, script by Felipe Marino and Sophie Barthes, based on the Gustave Flaubert novel. An Alchemy release.

Running time: 1:58