Movie Nation

Sprawling and spectacular, brawny and bloody, Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings” stabs an exclamation point onto a year peppered with religious films, one that began with the less conventional and trippier “Noah.”
This is Old Testament as action epic, featuring a two-fisted, Hittite-slaying “Prince of Egypt,” a Moses selected to lead the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery because God needed “a general.”
Christian Bale is that general, a growling skeptic who poo-poohs superstition and religion and chuckles at the prophecy that suggests he will save young Ramses (Joel Edgerton) in battle, and become a great leader himself. A pagan priestess makes that accurate prediction, by the way.
Raised in the royal household, adviser first to the elder pharaoh (John Turturro, who wears the eye-liner better than most) and then his son and heir, Moses makes enemies. And when those enemies win the new Pharaoh’s ear and reveal that Moses was born a Hebrew, the acclaimed soldier, anti-corruption zealot and rational man is exiled, not even allowed to live amongst the enslaved Israelites, whose elder (Ben Kingsley) knows his story and his destiny.
You probably remember the rest — Moses wandering, marrying into a family of shepherds (Maria Valverde makes the most gorgeous Sephora, his bride). A bush catches fire, a reluctant Moses is given the task of going back to Egypt and freeing his people — plagues ensue, seas part, etc. It makes no difference, as historian Simon Schama wrote in his book and PBS series “The Story of the Jews”, that there’s no written or archaeological evidence to support this Biblical account. It’s still a ripping good yarn.
Scott shows us a vast 3D civilization, propped up by slaves laboring in the quarries that feed the pyramid and monument-building mania. This Moses becomes a guerrilla leader, bickering with the Almighty over how this business of freeing the Hebrews is going.
“Wars of attrition take time!”
The cleverest conceit is the voice and face of God/Yahweh, who guides Moses. It’s an 11 year-old English boy named Isaac Andrews — childishly vengeful over the 400 year enslavement of his Chosen People. As we’ve seen in “Children of the Damned” and assorted other bits of Brit horror, there are few things scarier than an English schoolboy. Their scenes are alternately funny and creepy. Scott also shows us realistically grim consequences of these plagues, and the movie is at its most moving when we see the suffering, the deaths of Egyptians, Hebrews and animals of every description.
Bale wears a fine beard and underplays The Lawgiver as droll, dry and skeptical. His confrontations with the Pharaoh are generally mild, debates over the “economics” of slavery. That robs Edgerton of the white-hot rage that is supposed to drive Ramses’ later actions. Edgerton’s best moment may be his resigned swatting of flies during one of the later plagues unleashed on Egypt. Others — Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver as the Queen Mother, Aaron Paul as Joshua — are given almost nothing to say or do.
Thus, for all its stunning and stark wilderness settings (Spain and the Canary Islands), its stunning effects, technical proficiency and scriptural cleverness, “Exodus” is a chilly affair — a Biblical epic lacking even a stab at preaching or inspiring. Like modern translations of the Bible compared to the King James version published in Shakespeare’s time, “Exodus” lacks the stentorian, poetic authority of the cornball Cecil B. DeMille “Ten Commandments.” You will never hear “BEHOLD, his mighty hand,” or anything remotely like it.
It’s still an exciting, entertaining epic. But those hoping for a sermon might feel let down. Scott’s Old Testament may be action packed, but it doesn’t preach, not even to the choir.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence including battle sequences and intense images

Cast: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Isaac Andrews

Credits: Directed by Ridley Scott, script by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian . A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:30

Prison doesn’t suit Santa. Yeah, his long white hair and beard are perfectly
weavable into prison dreadlocks. Call him “Mad” Jimmy Claus and try to get him
to talk tough, maybe the other cons won’t eat him alive.
But surely his jolly demeanor, his hearty “Ho Ho Hos,” his firm grasp of the
other inmates’ childhoods — what they begged for in their Letters to Santa,
long ago — will get him through.
“Get Santa” is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce from those blasphemous
Brits. Writer-director Christopher Smith cast jovial Jim Broadbent as an
out-of-sorts St. Nick, scatter his reindeer across London — loose on the Tower
Bridge, for instance — and have a little boy (Kit Connor) bully his ex-con dad
(Rafe Spall) into helping him “Save Christmas,” and you’ve got something cute,
if not exactly a new holiday classic.
Santa loses his reindeer, so he visits young Tom (Connor). Father Christmas
needs Tom’s dad, Steve (Spall). And not because Steve’s a get-away driver. The
ex-con once saw He Whom No Child Must See, long ago. Steve believes. Or will,
when he’s reminded of it.
Steve has an ex-wife, visitation rights and a no-nonsense probation officer.
He isn’t having this, no matter how convincing the suit and beard are.
“Are you on medication? Or worse, are you OFF your medication?”
Santa’s efforts to retrieve his reindeer from various animal control shelters
get him arrested. So Tom browbeats poor Steve into helping, probation be damned.
Cool effect? Santa magically attracts every letter that’s written to him. You
lose Santa, just write him a note and the paper flies off until it’s in his
hands.
Kid friendliest gag? Reindeer, especially Dasher, communicate with humans
through flatulence. That’s right, reindeer farts.
Best cameo? Warwick Davis, of “Star Wars” and “Willow” and various Harry
Potter pictures, one of the most famous Little People in Britain. No, he’s not
an elf. He’s an inmate.
Best image? Santa, counseled and made-over by the prison barber, walks
through Lambeth Prison in the aforementioned dreadlocks.
“Oy! Santa! You gonna escape up the CHIMNEY?”
Whatever else “Get Santa” has or hasn’t got going for it, you will spit up
your soft-drink over the sight of the Oscar-winning Broadbent, befuddled and
bemused as a Rasta-ready Santa just trying to fit in amongst the cons.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild rude humor and language
Cast: Jim Broadbent, Rafe Spall, Warwick Davis, Kit Connor</P>
Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Smith. A Wrekin Hill release.
Running time: 1:40

Josh Brolin just kills in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” a dark Thomas Pynchon drug culture/generation gap comedy set in 1970. Brolin plays a brutish LA detective named Bigfoot “who has the twinkle of civil rights violation in his eyes,” to paraphrase Pynchon. It opens Friday.

At the end of our interview, talking about “Vice,” I asked Brolin about “Hail Caesar!,” another period piece, this one about Hollywood’s Golden Age and the MGM “Fixer” who made sure all manner of crimes, dalliances and indiscretions never made it into the police blotter or into the newspapers and gossip columns. Brolin plays Eddie Mannix in this dark comedy from the Coen Brothers.

“I was reading ‘The Fixer,’ a book about Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickland. Howard was the PR guy for MGM, and Eddie was Louis B. Mayer’s right hand man, his general manager and the guy who made problems disappear — covered up, swept under the rug.

“FASCINATING. the things that went on that Eddie, my character covered up. Unbelievable things.”

Things like suicides, car accidents, sexual orientation secrets and the like.

“So the movie’s a fun labyrinth that you navigate through this guy’s eyes. He’s in every scene, working and weaving through the (Golden Age) studio system, having to pacify stars in trouble, and cops, trying to cover up all the debauchery that’s going on. This is the Coens’ take on that era and Eddie’s role in it. Reading ‘The Fixer,’ you realize that the minute the movie industry started, all these working class guys went from making a few thousand dollars a year to the equivalent of hundreds of millions a year. That kind of power had to be protected from mistakes and indiscretions. It’s astounding what it created. That kind of power has the money to make problems disappear.

“From 1912-15, to the ’20s and on, amazing scandals were happening all over the place. You think it’s bad today? That’s nothing, compared to what Eddie Mannix and those guys saw and knew and covered up.

“We get to see that world from the Coens’ perspective, and that’s always fun. A great cast (Tilda, Scarlett, Jonah, Channing) , and I get to work with all of them. This thing is going to be worth a chuckle or two when it comes out.

“Eddie could not have survived the age of social media. No way he could have covered up stuff with all these cell phone cameras, all these places for people to sell their gossip.”

“Miss Julie,” August Strindberg’s 19th century drama about class and that Darwinian fixation of the nobility, “breeding,” comes to austere life in an adaptation by the Swedish actress-turned-director Liv Ullmann. She has re-set the Swedish tale in 1890s Ireland, and uses canny casting to underline the connections between class distinctions, then and now.
Though the play is dated and was and remains the very picture of minimalism, Strinderg’s naturalism and a spirited cast give it a pulse that throbs with life.
John (Colin Farrell) is valet to a baron, but a valet with big dreams. Dashing and handsome and a little worldly, he has an intimate relationship with the cook, Kathleen (Samantha Morton). They’re engaged. But John wants more than this simple, servile life.
Which is probably why he endures the dizzy, needy flirtations of the baron’s daughter, Miss Julie. The fact that she’s played by Jessica Chastain helps. “The mistress of the house” is lovely, a little lordly, and likes to dance with the hired hands
On Midsummer’s Eve, the baron is about to return from a trip, so it’s just the three of them in the great house. And Miss Julie is beside herself with…it could be desire, or boredom with a hint of madness. She cannot stay away from John.
“I’ve chosen to forget all rank,” she purrs, imperiously. “And so should you.”
Kathleen and John are powerless in this situation. They’re just the rich young woman’s playthings. Not that John isn’t above playing, or scheming where this play could lead him.
But “They don’t think like that. Not THOSE people.”
During that long afternoon and night, John tries to juggle two women with competing agendas, even as both realize his fecklessness, that he probably doesn’t have the “choice” he thinks he has — between the frumpy, built-for-working-class-comfort Kathleen and the flighty and rich Miss Julie.
Chastain suggests rather more cunning than the typical Miss Julie, a character almost bipolar in her lurch from flirtation to “know your place” snobbery. Morton (“The Messenger,” “In America”) gives away hints of soulfulness in the wounded but never dangerous Kathleen.
And Farrell, given a role of limited canvas but no constraints, reminds us how rare it is for him to have a chance to show us what a wonderful range he has. John’s scheming, masked by compliant servitude, is interrupted by eruptions, a go-for-broke, roll-the-dice gamble on changing his destiny with the mercurial Julie — if only he can catch her on the right moment in her bipolar wanderings.
“Miss Julie” is a handsome production, its few settings (indoors and outdoors) painterly and period-perfect. It’s entirely too long for a filmed chamber drama of such limited stakes. But Ullmann’s adaptation reminds us that the gap between “those people,” now called “the one percent,” and the rest of the world will always be ripe for conflict, drama and tension, no matter how much we evolve.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton
Credits: Written and directed by Liv Ullmann,adapted from the August Strindberg play. A Wrekin Hill release.
Running time: 2:10

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But “Beside Still Waters” there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”
Yes, it’s another knockoff of “Chill” and “Return of the Secaucus Seven”, another gathering of young “old friends” at a remote summer house or in this case, lake cabin, where old feelings are stirred up and old yearnings given in to thanks to opportunity and alcohol.
Co-writer/director Chris Lowell’s excuse for plopping eight late 20somethings in remote, woody Michigan, is the death of Daniel’s parents.
Ryan Eggold (TV’s “The Black List”) is Daniel. He’s grieving, but he’s over the whole condolences thing. They died in a car wreck near the cabin, an accident he won’t talk about. So he’s loaded the bar with booze and invited all the childhood friends who did not make it to the funeral for “a moving out party” in his parents’ honor.
There’s boisterous practical joker Tom (Beck Bennett), who is newly-laid-off, and James (Brett Dalton of “Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D.” ), an actor who gave up the struggles of the stage for cheesy a reality TV show. Abby (Erin Darke) and Martin (Will Brill) are married, but his unemployment has ruined their sex lives.
Charlie (Jessy Hodges) is a free spirit who has a romantic history with most everybody there.
And of course, Daniel’s willowy ex Olivia (Britt Lower) shows up with her new fiance (Reid Scott) who is, by the formula in play here, the “straight-laced one.”
They drink, play cards, drink, do the silliest coed drinking game ever — “whisky slap,” as in “You take a shot of whisky, I slap you.” — skinny dip, couple up and guilt-out over coupling up during the course of that last weekend in the cabin.
Hey, at least there’s no stalker in the woods, no bigfoot watching them, no ghostly presence.
These flesh and blood folks have flesh and blood issues, of course. Most of them, we can see coming, even the ones that aren’t overused and banal.
The nostalgia is weak, the “betrayals” somewhat less than scandalous, the dialogue unquotably bland. Did this play in the same festivals as last August’s “About Alex”? Because “Beside Still Waters” makes that imitation “Chill” seem like Shakespeare, by comparison.
Daniel has a writerly bent — he’s always quoting Hemingway, researching “The Lost Generation” and drinking like Papa & Co. At least “Waters”, like Hemingway’s sentences, is mercifully short. Not short and punchy or short and catchy. Just brief, because even they know there’s no sense dragging out material this played.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, drunk driving, profanity and frank sexual discussions
Cast: Ryan Eggold, Britt Lower, Beck Bennett, Erin Darke, Jessy Hodges, Bret Dalton, Will Brill, Reid Scott
Credits: Directed by Chris Lowell, written by Chris Lowell, Mohit Narang. A Tribeca release.
Running time: 1:16

The evolving state of Britain’s soccer hooligans is explored, one bloody beating or brutal brawl at a time, in the imported Brit drama, “Green Street Hooligans: Underground.”
It’s the third in a series of films about the two-fisted fans of West Ham United Football Club — their lives, their fights, their loves. Hey, if your favorite sports franchise was nicknamed “The Hawthorns,” you’d probably fight, too.
In America, men may gather, paint their faces and tailgate themselves into a stupor before football games where they root, root root and bet bet bet on the home team. In Britain, they gather in ancient pubs, sing fight songs and drinking songs and stagger to games where the singing continues. And every so often, afterwards, they get into a scuffle over whose side is best. Head-butting is often involved.
They call themselves “The Green Street Elite,” but the coppers have cracked down so much on hooliganism that the soccer fan street brawls that made the evening news are mostly a thing of the past. “Underground” is where that fighting has drifted. The premise of this third film in the “Green Street” saga is the discovery that the brawls have been formalized, taken into back alleys where five-on-five fights take place and the last five standing win and move on in “the standings.”
That’s what Danny (Scott Adkins) discovers when he tries to learn how his younger brother, Joey (Billy Cook) was killed. Danny is a brawler who got out, a mixed martial artist who trains other fighters in a gym in a nicer part of town. But back in the day, Danny was “The Guvner,” the punishing puncher who led the G.S.E. into action. Win or lose on the pitch, the lads always had an eye for a punch-out with Tottenham or Arsenal backers.
Realizing his old mate, the cop (Joey Ansah) will never get to the bottom of Joey’s murder, Danny picks up a few pints at The Abbey Inn, G.S.E.’s watering hole. And The Guvner’s back in the thick of it, sniffing around for clues as to who knows what, and what they’re not telling him or the cops.
The slang in gritty Brit films is always fun — “You’re bang out of order, mate. “Jog on” (get lost). Every line punctuated with “Oy!”
Adkins, an accomplished screen pugilist, is sort of a Jason Statham — with hair. Good looking enough to merit the attentions of the impossibly pretty and out-of-place barmaid (Kacey Barnfield), tough enough to mix it up with the toughest.
The British title of this was “Green Street 3: Never Back Down,” which tells you how worn this modern spin on the fight picture is. Hollywood got to this sort of barefisted, off-the-books brawling years ago, and often.
The milieu is barely gritty enough to get by, so director James Nunn stages the fights with split screens (three images) and lots of blood-spurting slo-mo. Nothing original there, either.
And however well executed this formula fight picture might be, Americans may find the idea of grown men — well-past their testosteroned teens — beating the daylights out of each other for wearing the wrong scarf to a soccer match a tad pathetic.

MPAA Rating: R for brutal street fights, language throughout and a scene of sexuality/nudity
Cast: Scott Adkins, Kacey Barnfield, Joey Ansah, Jack Doolan, Billy Cook
Credits: Directed by James Nunn, written by Ronnie Thompson. A Wrekin Hill/Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:33

Clever title, taking us back to James Bond’s arch nemesis, the extra-governmental crime syndicate that kept Sean Connery and Roger Moore so busy all those years.

Clever, too, in reviving  “Spectre” in an age of Al Quaeda and ISIS.

Ernst Stravro Blofeld will make his return as the original supervillain — played by Christoph Waltz, a two-time Oscar winner who is pushing 60 and is utter master of the narrow range of villainy he tends to play.

Look for “Spectre,” starring Daniel Craig, opens Nov. 6.

Took them long enough.

Ethan Hawke found his groove as an actor sometime, I figure, in the late 90s. His indie film connection to Richard Linklater led to the “Before Sunrise” trilogy with Julie Delpy, and eventually to “Boyhood,” Linklater’s masterpiece, the movie that may win the Texas tyro filmmaker an Oscar.

I’ve interviewed Hawke as the various Linklater films have opened over the years. But the memorable chats are always about the offbeat genre fare that he takes on — “The Purge,”
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “Daybreakers.” He’s had decent luck with chancy films that were never destined for big box office or critical acclaim. In his latest, “Predestination,” he is a time traveling agent of some sort, on his “last mission.” That’s the one description of the film I’ve seen that sticks. I will see if before talking with him, but I thought I’d ask for your submitted questions first.

How about it? Something you’re dying to ask Ethan? Comment below, and thanks for the help.