Movie Nation

The best musical biographies give you a moment when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as you witness the miracle of a song’s creation. We get a chill as Ray Charles cooks up “What’d I Say?” or Mozart madly turns a baroque ditty into a mini-masterpiece, straight off the frilly cuff.
“Love & Mercy,” the new film about the rise, fall and revival of Beach Boy Brian Wilson, treats us to several of those. Producer (“Brokeback Mountain”) turned director Bill Pohlad takes his camera close to the keys as Brian plucks piano strings with hairpins, leaving a few on adjacent strings to create a rattling echo. We hear what singer Mike Love (Jake Abel) heard in the chords that turned into “Good Vibrations,” Wilson’s “pocket symphony.”
Always-engaging, “Love & Mercy” tells a tale of two Brians — the young, competitive genius who transcended the surf, sun and sexy girls pop that made the band famous and concocted “Pet Sounds,”  his answer to the best of The Beatles. Paul Dano, in a brilliant performance, lets us drift into young Wilson’s skull, experience the slack-jawed trances that had him translate the sounds in his head into records. Wilson, as Dano’s version of him says in the movie, “plays the studio” like an instrument.
But “Love & Mercy” captures some of the downside of that genius. We see his descent into madness, the drugs and perfectionism that drove it. And we witness the lifelong struggle for acceptance by his abusive father (Bill Camp, subtle and sharp), and revenge by detailing the abuse — physical and passive-aggressive mental — after his father’s death.
John Cusack plays this older, post-breakdown Wilson, a twitchy, tentative millionaire genius who has the guilelessness and sweetness of an abused puppy. That’s the Wilson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) met when he came to buy a Cadillac from her in the lear;y ’80s. That Wilson was in the care of and totally under the thumb of therapist/guru Dr. Eugene Landy, played with bug-eyed bile by Paul Giamatti.
Landy may have saved Wilson from his downward mental spiral, something “Love & Mercy” doesn’t show.But by time Ledbetter met a smitten Wilson, the relationship had turned manipulative, controlling, over-medicating and predatory.
Pohlad, working from a script by Oren “I’m Not There/The Messenger” Moverman and Michael A. Lerner (“Dumb and Dumber”), weaves these two eras together, showing Wilson at his creative peak, the beginnings of his descent, and then at the moment of his rebirth.
Structurally, it works even if we suspect much is being left out. Landy diagnosed the man as “paranoid schizophrenic,” a not-unreasonable assumption, based on the late ’60s Wilson’s behavior. Somehow, the helper turned into a predator, and that story is a movie in itself.
Dano put on a layer of puffiness for the part, and makes us feel the control freak neediness of an artist who never felt appreciated by those closest to him. Cusack adds vocal and physical mannerisms to the later Brian, but wearing his familiar jet-black dye job undercuts the illusion. He never loses himself in the role. Banks nicely hints at the attraction Ledbetter must have felt before her need to rescue him took precedence in the relationship.
“Love & Mercy” strikes all the expected notes of hunger, creative fervor, success, tragedy and vindication that we expect from such movies. But if you don’t get a little chill hearing Dano, doing his own rehearsal singing, picking out “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” or “In My Room” or “God Only Knows” at the piano, your musical tastes need broadening.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, drug content and language |

Cast: Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, John Cusack, Paul Giamatti
Credits: Directed by Bill Pohlad , script by Oren Moverman, Michael A. Lerner. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 2:00

They call Lin Shaye “The Godmother of Horror.” Read her listed credits on the Internet Movie Database and you start to see why.
“It reads like Al Capone’s rap sheet!” cracks writer/director Leigh Whannell. Some 179 acting credits, roles ranging from “The Long Riders” to “There’s Something About Mary,” comedies and dramas, Westerns — and most especially, scary movies.
“She has so many connections to horror, going all the way back to her brother, Robert, who shepherded the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ films into theaters,” Whannell, who directed Shaye in “Insidious Chapter 3,” marvels. Robert Shaye was head of New Line Cinema when that studio launched the “Elm Street” series, with a nice small role for his sister Lin, included. “It’s a first family of horror!”
At 71, Shaye has more movies in the can, ready for release, than stars and starlets a fraction of her age. But those titles! “Bayou Tales”, “Abattoir, “Tales of Halloween,” “Killing Winston Jones.”
OK, that last one’s a comedy. Shaye’s fearlessness isn’t limited to picking up a flashlight and going down in a basement that she is pretty sure a demon is visiting.
“Most women my age are eating lime jello for lunch,” Shaye cracks. “But not me, baby! Bring on the monsters, the ghosts, the demons!”
Shaye turns up in so many horror films it’s as if the filmmakers, knowing her pedigree, are looking for a good luck charm.
“She’s the calm in the middle of the storm,” says Timothy Anderson, a horror filmmaker and reviewer for Bloodydisgusting.com. ” If Lin Shaye is there to save the day, it seems like everything might just turn out fine. Of course that’s rarely the case.”
And so it is with “Insidious: Chapter 3.” Actor and screenwriter Leigh Whannell launched his career with “Saw,” and scripted the original “Insidious.” To make his directing debut with “Chapter 3,” he wanted “a friendly face,” Shaye, back on set. “The only problem with that? I killed her character (Elise, a demon-chasing psychic) off in the first film!”
A prequel was born, and with it, a rare leading role for Shaye.
“Elise is looking at her own mortality, and that’s a very dark place to start” developing a character, Shaye says. “She’s in this house that she’s kind of afraid to leave. This teenage girl comes to visit her, wanting to talk to her dead mother, and Elise sees the risks in that and that’s what gets her out of her pajamas and out of her house.”
Doing horror conventions puts Shaye in direct touch with the fans of the genre, “and from them, I learn what really scares people.”
What about her? An in-demand actress and admitted animal fanatic who shares her life with cats and a dog, she doesn’t worry about becoming “a cat lady.” But even though she’s “never aware of my actual age…I’m having too much fun to think about that,” Shaye has her fears. And they have to do with mortality.
“I hate the idea of losing my independence, having my health turn bad. When you feel bad, that puts an edge on everything you do.
She’s a true believer in “the good you put out there coming back, and the bad — all those things these movies have in them.
“So my advice? Even when life is long, it’s a short little millisecond that we’re on this planet. Be in the moment. Pet your dog.”

Not the best weekend of the summer for movies, in terms of quality. If you believe the critics. Which we do, we do!

“San Andreas,” the best reviewed of a weak lot, is opening big. Dwayne Johnson and great effects are carrying that to an earth-quaking $47 million opening, or thereabouts, based on Friday’s big numbers.

“Tomorrowland” has fallen way off, despite clinging to the second spot at the box office, and may fall short of $100 million, U.S. Perhaps Disney should have inserted more Chinese content to make up for that.

“Pitch Perfect 2” has defied my expectations by maintaining a lead over “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which should have had stronger legs. Both are well over $100 million, U.S.

There was bad buzz around “Aloha,” those leaked Sony memos suggesting the studio was dismayed by what Cameron Crowe had turned out. Still, studios have been wrong so we Crowe fans held out hope.

Those hopes were dashed when the movie finally previewed. Uh. Terrible reviews, across the board. It’ll manage $10 million this weekend. Bradley Cooper’s “American Sniper” turn will tide him over. But Emma Stone’s reliance on the popular “Work with ‘name’ directors” career strategy will be severely tested, as this and her next Woody Allen picture, “The Irrational Man,” play this summer. Will she be bankable at all by August?

A couple of over-praised mediocrities, “Results”, an unfunny/unromantic comedy set amongst personal trainers in Texas, and “Heaven Only Knows,” a vivid but not the least bit compelling (plotless, almost) portrait of New York junkies and their day to day lives, are also in limited release.

I’m a big fan of Scott Saul’s pretty-much definitive new biography of the late/great and deeply messed up comic Richard Pryor. Saul himself credits the passage of time for a lot of the access he got to Pryor’s friends, family and intimates, people who wouldn’t talk to biographers while Pryor was alive. The result is a book that reveals the true nature of his childhood, the dark family life of brothels, bootlegging, crime and violence that he illuminated in his act — onstage — in his peak years.

I like that Saul stops the book, basically, at Pryor’s “Live and in Concert” breakout concert documentary. So we get a taste of his scene stealing in smaller roles in films from “Lady Sings the Blues” and “The Mack” to “Silver Streak,” which led to his film stardom and — according to one and all — his selling out.

I doubled back to an online PBS documentary on Pryor to see just how the new book reinvents Pryor’s past. The man lied, onstage, to reporters, all his life. And didn’t make many bones about it. The PBS doc has an academic or two repeating the stories Pryor told in his autobiography, but Saul gets at the real history and the naked truth — drugs, the ways he “tested” white people he’d meet, his greatest collaborations (Lily Tomlin, Paul Mooney), the frankness with which he talked about race, sex (including his occasional suggestion that he’d had a homosexual experience or two) and America.

Saul doesn’t hit Pryor hard enough on his treatment of women, his propensity for violence. But some of that becomes clearer when he reminds us of the documentary Pryor took part in and basically stole — “Wattstaxx” — about Watts, almost a decade after the mid-60s riots there, and a tribute concert with the likes of The Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes. Black people, talking in the vernacular of the day, women talking about loving their “abusive” men, men talking about their promiscuity, and Pryor telling stories about his culture that allowed him and the rest of black America to own it — the good and the bad.

Watch that “Wattstaxx” bit, or any of the scores of sketches, etc., sampled on Youtube, and be amazed. Eighth grade education, never the best reader or writer. But incisive, biting insights into the human state and the American state. Clever doesn’t cover it. Everybody else seems but an imitation, and only a contemporary — George Carlin — comes close in the social commentary with wit business.

Look for the book. It’s worth a read. I never “got” Lenny Bruce. What survives of his comedy just doesn’t age  well. But “Becoming Richard Pryor” gives one a whole new appreciation of the most important stand-up — maybe ever. Most imitated, most revered, and, as you can see in “Wattstaxx” (above) — still funny as hell.

Cameron Crowe fans — and that includes most movie critics — have cut him a lot of slack over the years.
Our love for “Say Anything,””Almost Famous” and “Jerry Maguire” made us embrace the big romantic gestures and little traces of heart in “Elizabethtown,” “Vanilla Sky” and “We Bought a Zoo.”
But “Aloha” is a breaking point, a movie that makes you start to see the guy just, well, full of it. Whatever it was going to be — and editing has been a Crowe problem since “Elizabethtown” — “Aloha” has been reduced to a shambling, lurching Hawaiian comedy full of big name actors making long, rushed, declamatory speeches.
And every minute or so, there’s another annoying traditional Hawaiian song, or Hawaiian pop or blues or country tune. They’re meant to tie the mess together, to allow the picture to coast along on musical emotions where script coherence is lacking.
And they don’t. Even Elvis gets into the act. It’s so grating that you find yourself waiting for Don Ho to croon “Tiny Bubbles.”
Bradley Cooper plays a one-time Air Force space program officer, wounded in Afghanistan, semi-disgraced and reduced to being the “fixer” for a space tech billionaire (Bill Murray, seemingly improvising his role). Brian Gilchrest is back in Hawaii, at the little “Mayberry of a base” where he was stationed, to talk the natives into blessing a gate that’s being moved so that big rockets can be moved from location to location.
Rachel McAdams is the girl he left behind, married, with kids and a comically silent Air Force pilot husband (John Krasinski).
Danny McBride is an old comrade, now a colonel more or less in charge.
And Emma Stone is the eager beaver Captain Ng, a pilot assigned to be Gilchrest’s minder, his shadow as he goes to deal with Hawaii’s most nativist natives.
The movie’s more Hawaiian than “The Descendants,” but the early culture clash promise — “Below the ‘Aloha’ exteriors?” “‘Casablanca,’ baby!” — unravels. The president of the Sovereign Nation of Hawaii (Dennis Bumpy Kanahele) just shrugs at how low his old friend has sunk.
“You’re on the wrong side, bra’.” At least he doesn’t throw “Mahalo” in there.
The son of Gilchrest’s ex-girlfriend is a space and Hawaiian mythology buff who insists Gilchrest is a mythical character, “The Arrival,” newly returned to set the future in motion. A little magical realism helps set the expected Gilchrest/Captain Ng romance in motion. But it feels absurdly abrupt, the way we get to “Boy, am I a goner.” That was to be this movie’s “You had me at hello.” It isn’t. Not a lot of chemistry, despite Stone’s enthusiastic plunge into the part.
The performances are passable, save for Murray — who goes ham, and Alec Baldwin, as a general who goes comically nuclear. He at least leaves an impression.
The film-buff Hawaiian resident Crowe has, in essence, made his “Donovan’s Reef,” a movie John Ford and John Wayne did to celebrate Ford’s World War II service in the Pacific, and to get a studio to pay for long tropical vacations for the cast and crew.
“Aloha” has a nod to the power of music and respect for religious traditions and the once-promising frontier of space. But it’s also about the versatility of that one-word title. Sadly, in this case, “Aloha” doesn’t mean “Hello,” or even “Welcome back, Cameron Crowe.” This feels like good-bye, at least to his major studio film career.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language including suggestive comments.

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachael McAdams, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski, Dennis Bumpy Kanahele, Bill Murray
Credits: Written and directed by Cameron Crowe. A Sonjy/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:44

Disaster movies, which pre-date the zeitgeist’s fascination with a world falling apart around us, are always great measures of the state of the Hollywood art of special effects.
In “San Andreas,” you will believe the ground is rippling under Los Angeles, the cracking collapse of Hoover Dam and a tidal wave is submerging San Francisco.
But what sells this formulaic corker of Apocalypse Porn is the cast. Paul Giamatti, as a Cal Tech seismologist who has just this minute uncovered a way to predict earthquakes, wears the horror of what he sees and what he knows is to come on his face.
Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario let panic, grief and relief when the shaking ends wash over them in what feels like real time.
And the actor nicknamed for a geological feature earns that nickname all over again by being that sturdy force of nature the whole movie is anchored on. Dwayne Johnson is the ex-Army chopper pilot, now with the L.A. Fire Department’s air rescue unit, a man uniquely set up to save his soon-to-be-ex-wife (Gugino, his “Race to Witch Mountain” co-star) and college coed daughter (Daddario, of TV’s first season of “True Detective”). Johnson believes what he’s seeing — buildings tumbling like dominoes, fires errupting, the sea fleeing San Francisco Bay — and we do, too.
The script and director Brad Peyton (“Journey 2: The Mysterious Island”) never escape the time-honored formula for disaster movies — the warnings, unheeded, the villainous builder (Ioan Gruffudd), the disaster-built love interest (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) thrown together with the hot coed.
But here’s what he and this production get exactly right.
The first death has meaning and pathos, as does the last one.
The medical moments and derring do can feel far fetched. But the science feels solid. God help them if they’re only bluffing. It’s a “swarm event” that runs up and down California’s infamous San Andreas Fault. Because…geology!
We know where it’s going, from the moment the ground starts shaking, until it finally, several “swarms” later, stops. But “San Andreas” is a well-executed reminder of why we don’t need to fret over the zombie apocalypse when there are plenty of things Mother Earth can throw at us. And that Hollywood’s best craftsfolk at Digital Domain, House of Moves and other effects houses are getting even better at recreating those worst case scenarios we love so much…in our movies.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense disaster action and mayhem throughout, and brief strong language

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Ioan Gruffudd, Hugo Johnstone-Burt
Credits: Directed by Brad Peyton, script by Carlton Cuse. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:54