Movie Nation

The unspoken grief of a small, patriotic rural town that refuses talk about its combat dead is a heavy burden to slap on a formulaic city-kid-turns-rural-dance-team-into-champs dramedy.
But that’s what the high-minded “Bravetown” attempts. An R-rated drama about drugs and remorse and death and kids questioning a town that’s “good for nothing but turning out future soldiers,” it’s somewhat undercut by the whole “Step Up’/Footloose/Glee” dance showcase that got it financed.
Lucas Till is Josh, a rising, drug-abusing DJ whose one drug-bust-too-many gets him shipped off by his onetime addict mom (Maria Bello) to live with the father he never knew.
Dad is played by Tom Everett Scott, with barely a line and not one decent scene to play. That’s because Dad is a combat vet, and in Paragon, guys don’t talk about the war they fought in and families don’t talk about the sons, brothers and friends they’ve lost.
Josh Duhamel is well-cast as the psychotherapist the troubled-teen Josh is forced to visit. He’s content to watch soccer matches and eat pizza during their sessions, until the kid starts to reach out, and the therapist is obliged to try and help. Not that the kid is having it.
“You learn that at shrink community college?”
The one thing the hip mixmaster might do to fit in is hip up the disastrous dance team, whose routines are as dated as their Avrile Lavigne-laced dance track.
Mary (Kherington Payne, very good) is their control-freak captain. Even she recognizes the city boy with his mad mixes would be just the ticket to turn around their fortunes.
Mary takes Josh to a tree adorned with the medals of the town’s fallen, a romantic concept (lit by kerosene lanterns) straight out of Nicholas Sparks. She suffered a loss, too. Her medicated, manic mother (Laura Dern, always sterling) is the only townsperson to talk about the dead. And she’s in depressed denial herself.
Till, one of the new X-Men, isn’t bad, although his character seems cut and pasted from assorted dance, music and troubled teen pictures. And there’s good support surrounding him.
But whatever its intent, “Bravetown” stumbles through a steady supply of contrivances designed to make the budget work and the storylines overlap. Relationships are abrupt, absurd legal expediencies push Josh into his dad’s town’s problems, Duhamel’s shrink is a vet with a secret, all the dance team’s contests are somehow staged on their home gym and the shattered town will be made whole at the foot of that tree of medals.
The result is an off-tone R-rated melodrama more suited to the unsophisticated PG-13 sentiments of a kids gotta dance picture, or a romance novel, Nicholas Sparks without a beach.

MPAA Rating: R for some language, drug use and brief sexuality

Cast: Lucas Till, Josh Duhamel, Kherington Payne, Maria Bello, Laura Dern, Jae Head, Tom Everett Scott
Credits: Directed by Daniel Duran, script by Oscar Orlando Torres. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:53

Patrick Stewart preens, poses and gives us a little song and dance in “Hunting Elephants,” livening up a fairly dark and somewhat predictable Israeli caper comedy.
He plays Lord Michael Simpson, a not-quite-starving actor, a highly born ponce whose stage production “Hamlet: Revenge of the Sith,” has him barely a full step ahead of his creditors.
Then he learns his sister, who married an Israeli, is catatonic and dying in the same retirement home where her hotheaded ex-underground commando husband Eliyahu (Sasson Gabai) protects her from the staff.
“The only person with permission to kill my wife is me!” Eliyahu rages. And since he still wears a holster and sometimes brandishes his pistol, they take him seriously.
Lord Simpson flies to Jerusalem to reclaim the home that their foreign service family owned that his sister and her husband lived in for decades.
But the situation he stumbles into is what “Hunting Elephants” is actually about. Eliyahu, whose name Lord Simpson butchers in every hilarious way possible (“Elly Hoo Hoo”), is caring for his bullied, estranged grandson (Gil Blank). And like Lord Simpson, like grandson Yonathan, and like his ex-comrade in arms, also retired (Moni Moshonov), Eliyahoo is in desperate need of cash.
Why not rob the bank where Jonathan’s dad ran security until he was worked to an early death? Revenge for the son of the victim, and the victim’s father, Eliyahu — and ready cash for everybody else.
“I’ve never played a bank robber,” Lord Simpson coos. “Is it a big part?”
The set-up, built out of a longish prologue that shows Yonathan’s grief, guilt (he was unable to save his father) and bullying, is uncertain in tone and direction. But the moment Eliyahu and then Lord Simpson show up, Reshef Levi’s film, in English and Hebrew with English subtitles, figures out what it wants to be.
It’s an Israeli “Going in Style,” that American tragi-comedy about geezer bank robbers that the late George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg starred in decades ago.
But in taking his time to get to that plot, Levi gives Gabai a chance to work up a fine lather. There is no cranky old man like a self-righteous “freedom fighter” who still carries a gun. Stewart’s Lord Simpson is not-quite-anti-Semitic, comically dismissive of this nation of “terrorists,” ridiculing the violence, tribalism and bunker mentality of Israeli culture.
Levi packs a lot onto what boils down to a very simple plot, with simple characters with simple motivations. But the occasional surprise and the over-the-top performances make “Hunting Elephants” a somewhat worthy quarry.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Sasson Gabai, Moni Moshonov, Patrick Stewart, Gil Blank, Yaël Abecassis
Credits: Directed by Reshef Levi, written by Reshef Levi and Regev Levy . An XLRater Media release.

Running time: 1:48

In a time of intense new scrutiny of police practices and tactics around the country, the documentary “The Seven Five” shows just how wrong these public servants in blue can go when the circumstances are right.
A new film about a notorious New York Police Department precinct and its “most corrupt cop ever,” “The Seven Five” takes us back to the ’80d crack cocaine epidemic at Ground Zero, where the drugs and money were easy temptations for weak links in “the thin blue line” that separates society from criminal anarchy.
And while it would be a mistake to conflate Tiller Russell’s film with the incidents that brought national attention to policing today, here’s a movie that does a very good job of explaining where many a misdeed by someone with a badge comes from, a vocation that has become a culture and law unto itself.
The very definition of “good cop” is the center of it all. Whatever it means to the public, to elected and judicial officials, to the NYPD of this post-Serpico era, it meant “never giving up another cop.”
Michael Dowd was the head of a corrupt ring of cops in Brooklyn’s embattled 75th Precinct, where poverty and despair, murder and addiction were already endemic. Dowd, discovering the easy money available, robbed, burgled, took payoffs from drug dealers and eventually run his own drug distribution operation with his partner, Kenny Eurell. They made a bad place much worse.
Russell’s film uses archival footage of Dowd testifying before a corruption commission, TV newscasts of the day and modern interviews with dirty cops, DEA agents sold out by those dirty cops and the Internal Affairs officers slow to get the goods on these guys.
The film allows these middle-aged men to swagger and brag, one last time, about their exploits, to rationalize their behavior way back then. Russell only sketches in the background of these men who apparently never absorbed basic tenets of right and wrong, either from the police academy or their parents. But their slippery slope was a simple one — overwhelmed by a tidal wave of drugs and crimes in the most violent precinct in New York, “you feel under-appreciated as well as overwhelmed.”
The cops are slangy, like over-eager reality show contestants auditioning for a bit part in a Scorsese movie. Those chasing them are more sober-minded about how difficult it is to catch a crooked cop, and just what it takes to convict them after they’re caught.
In a neighborhood “that would scare Clint Eastwood,” they found a way to not just get by, but to thrive — by stealing, by working for the people they were supposed to arrest and get off the streets.
Although well-told, it’s an over-familiar story, and a sad one. And being far enough removed from the issues that have police in the spotlight post-Ferguson, “The Seven Five” also feels a little dated. Remember when all we had to worry about was cops going on the take?

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some grisly crime scene images, and drug content

Cast: Michael Dowd, Kenny Eurell, Adam Diaz, Baron Perez, Dori Eurell
Credits: Directed by Tiller Russell. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

By this point in the virus’s decades-long mutation, we’ve seen pretty much everything zombies have to throw at us. They won’t die, even as their corpses rot and turn green, and they’re always on the (usually slow) hunt for brains and human flesh.
Which is why “Maggie” is so unexpected. This is a walking dead drama laden with doom, a young woman’s horrific and depressed death spiral in which she knows death is the least of her horrors.
And most surprising of all is the tender, sad companion and caretaker as she dies — her quiet, compassionate and mournful father, played with great sensitivity by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As you let that last sentence sink in, here are the basics. Maggie’s been exposed to what the news calls “the Necro-ambulist” virus. Because we can’t call them “The Walking Dead” here.
Society is functioning, hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, government is packing the infected off to quarantine camps where they wait for “the turn.” It’s not as if they’re being treated or cured. They just wait for the end.
Wade, a Midwestern farmer who has overseen the burning of crops which newscasts suggest were the cause of the infection (An anti-genetically modified organism/food slap?). The only time he picks up a gun is when he has to dispatch the neighbors, including a child, who have “turned” and hidden from the authorities.
And then Maggie (Abigail Breslin) comes home. She knows what’s happening to her, cannot stop picking at the skin that is going bad and whacks her own finger off as a desperate, impulsive effort to stop the disease.
“What good’s a finger if your arm is falling off?”
Breslin is as doom-laden as any zombie heroine of recent vintage, and quite good at it. Schwarzenegger, as Wade, isn’t a man of action here. He mostly reacts — on the edge of tears, much of the time — to the warnings and counsel of his stoic second wife (Joely Richardson), local sheriff and sympathetic doctor.
“Think about what you had to do today, and what you might have to do in the future. What happens when she gets close?”
Titles (opening credits) designer turned director Henry Hobson filmed “Maggie” in the muted browns and greys of fall, a world still functioning, but in mourning for the winter to come. The effects are good, better than what TV serves up weekly.
But the over familiarity and fatigue of this corner of apocalyptic cinema wears on “Maggie.” We know the awful choices she and her dad face as well as they do. Almost 50 years of zombie movies and TV shows, including a recent explosion of films in this genre, have beaten the living dead to death.
Sad and forlorn as “Maggie” is, there are no surprises left in Zombieland.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material including bloody images, and some language

Cast: Abigail Breslin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joely Richardson
Credits: Directed by Henry Hobson, written by John Scott 3. A Roadside/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:35

The problem with any screen romance between someone from the Hassidic community and an outsider is the limited range of outcomes.
Either the Hassidic character, say she’s a woman as in John Turturro’s comedy Fading Gigolo,” turns her back on her community and embraces the “real” or she doubles down on the family, religion and support system and rejects “forbidden” love.
One outcome is politically correct, the other grates in simpler, more moralistic ways.
The French-Canadian romance “Felix and Meira” teeters back and forth between those two payoffs. Co-writer/director Maxime Giroux tips his hand with an early scene in which the unhappily Hassidic Meira (Hadas Yaron) is challenged by her “Have more babies, it’s our duty” pal — challenged and threatened.
“What would you do without us?”
Here’s a movie, set among Montreal’s Hasidim, that comes right out and says it. Meira’s in a cult. She doesn’t get to just leave. She’ll have to escape.
But she’s not thinking about that when the charming Felix (Martin Dubreuil) tries to chat her up in a Jewish bakery. A married woman, she refuses to talk, won’t make eye contact.
But he keeps bumping into her, often as she’s pushing a stroller with her toddler in it. What are his intentions? Then again, what are hers?
Meira gets chewed out every time her traditional husband (Luzer Twersky, stiff and stern) catches her listening to blues or ’60s soul, corrupting the upbringing their daughter. Meira has taken to playing dead at these rebukes. She’s already dead, she hints, living this oppressive, sexist life.
Felix just lost his dad. A non-religious single man, his come-on seems both desperate and sincere.
“Maybe you can tell me something about God or death?”
Giroux makes the possible love affair so mild-mannered that there aren’t a lot of sparks when these cultures clash, just a “You’re strange, WEIRD,” vs. “I’m not strange. YOU are!”
“Felix and Meira” move forward, tentative and fearful, and make the viewer struggle with whether or not to root for them. Meira’s in a trap now, might Felix be the “trapped” one down the road?
How exciting can a hothouse flower like Meira, with her proscribed view of the world, be to  Felix? And for Meira, what is there beyond that magical moment when she puts on her  first pair of jeans?
As they flirt in English, French and Hebrew with English subtitles, “Felix and Meira” eventually go where we sort of figure they’ll end up, even though their low heat movie peters out long before they get there.

MPAA Rating: R for a scene of sexuality/nudity

Cast: Martin Dubreuil, Hadas Yaron, Luzer Twersky
Credits: Directed by Maxime Giroux, script by  Maxime Giroux, Alexandre Laferrière. An Oscilloscope release.

Running time: 1:44

Reputation suggests you could conjure a half-decent B-movie out of Dolph Lundgren and martial arts dynamo Tony “Ong Bak” Jaa. Especially if their supporting cast includes Ron Perlman as a Slavic mobster, Peter Weller as a Jersey-accented cop, Michael Jai White as a Fed and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (“Memoirs of a Geisha,””47 Ronin”) as a corrupt Thai official mixed up in the “Skin Trade.”
The subject and setting (Thailand, Cambodia, New Jersey) mean there are plenty of scenes of scantily-clad (schoolgirl stripper outfits) and unclad sex slaves and pole dancers to interrupt the shootouts, explosions and athletic Jaa-brawls.
But “Skin Trade,” a project Lundgren co-wrote and has been trying to film for years, feels so dated and over-familiar that “half-decent” always seems just out of reach.
Lundgren is Nick, a Jersey cop hot on the trail of a human trafficking ring led by Viktor Dragovic (Perlman) and his four sons. The death of one of those sons makes the fight “personal,” meaning that Nick’s family is doomed, and so is Nick, judging by the bullet hits he takes before his house is consumed in flames.
But Nick peels himself out of intensive care and sets off to track down bad guys.
For Thai Detective Vitayakul (Jaa), the case is a matter of personal and national pride. Southeast Asia’s shame — its sex trade, which parents sell children into — and the detective’s Vietnamese girlfriend/informant (Celina Jade) are in danger.
Nick is being hunted by the Feds (Michael Jai White) who enlist the Thais, as Nick himself hunts the Serbs who wiped out his family.
On finding a container ship full of dead skin trade immigrants, Lundgren’s Nick threatens to “wrap every dead body
from that container around your neck.” And Jaa’s detective spits “Negotiation is over” before one summary execution.
The one-liners are more obvious than pithy, and there’s something more unsettling than ever about cops pumping one last round into a disarmed bad guy. It’s as out of date as insisting that the bad guys are Serbian, “with no ‘code,'” when the Russian embassy is who they run to when arrests come down. Let them be Russians. They’re still recent history’s best villains.
Jaa is getting a little older, and the director is best known for the sensitive Thai fighter-who-wants-a-sex-change bio pic “Beautiful Boxer,” so Jaa’s always-amazing punch-outs are a tad muted.
But “Skin Trade” still benefits from the total commitment of the players. Even if we know it’s a B-movie and roll our eyes at every corny line, every obvious direction the action and story travel in, they never do.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence throughout, disturbing sexual content, nudity, drug use and language |

Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Tony Jaa, Celina Jade, Michael Jai White, Ron Perlman, Peter Weller, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Credits: Directed by Ekachai Uekrongtham, written by
Gabriel Dowrick, Steven Elder and Dolph Lundgren. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:35

She flips off the nuns who took her in and educated her, is fond of profanity and wasn’t above a little premarital sex.
It was the “Swinging Sixties,” after all.
By any measure, Christina Noble was not your average heroine of a faith-based film. By any measure, hers was not a life with your average share of suffering.
“Noble,” the film about her, is a veritable “Angela’s Ashes” of trials. Christina lost her mother to tuberculosis in 1950s Dublin, was betrayed repeatedly by her abusive-drunk father (Liam Cunningham), homeless more than once, raped and impregnated, her child stripped from her by the Catholic nuns who had once enslaved her to labor in their orphanage. And then there was the bad marriage she endured.
But through it all, Christina kept her faith, her prayers from childhood (Gloria Cramer Curtis) through adolescence (Sarah Greene) and into adulthood (Deirdre O’Kane) having a hint of bargaining about them, each a fresh challenge to the Almighty.
“I know you’ve got a much better future in store for me.”
That future, in this film told in the 1989 present, with progressive flashbacks detailing her hard upbringing, may be about her dream. Christina always could sing and uses songs, from childhood all through her life, to earn pennies on the street or persuade adults to support her charity. Because what she really wants to do is make better lives for orphans like herself. As an adult, she resolves to set up a compassionate orphanage and hospital for street children cast-off in Vietnam.
“An Irish gutter is the same as a Vietnamese gutter,” she tells callous officials in a way that lets them know that “No” is not an answer she’ll submit to.
Writer-director Stephen Bradley, best-known for the clumsy zombie comedy “Boy Eats Girl,” is unflinching in presenting this film’s harsh Irish reality. Christina is as tough as someone from her background can be, and as Earthy.
Veteran Irish character actress O’Kane, best known for “Intermission” and the TV series “Moone Boy,” shines as the spirited “Mama Tina,” leaning on Vietnamese bureaucrats, immersing herself in the poverty of Vietnam, browbeating an Irish oil mogul (Brendan Coyle of TV’s “Downton Abbey”) for support. But all of the Christinas cast here are inspiring.
Bradley only occasionally ladles it on too thick, and doesn’t make clear how Christina went from seeing the horrors of the Vietnam War on TV in the ’60s to believing setting up orphanages there was her calling twenty years later.
But if American faith-based audiences can plow through the Irish accents and distinctly European sensibility — coarse language and rough situations — “Mama Tina” might be just as nobly inspiring to them as she plainly was to Bradley and the producers of “Noble.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material, including some violent and sexual situations

Cast: Deirdre O’Kane, Sandra Greene, Brendan Coyle, Liam Cunningham
Credits: Written and directed by Stephen Bradley. A release.

Running time: 1:40

The world long ago figured out who this Arnold Schwarzenegger fellow is supposed to be on the big screen. And the actor has always been comfortable with this image.
“The most heroic guy in the biggest action movie of the day,” is how he puts it. “In the old days, I’d look for scripts, see how heroic the guy was, how many bad guys he kills, and how he kills them.”
He chuckles.
“That’s my baggage.”
That’s why his turn in the new zombie drama “Maggie” (May 8) is leaving film fans and critics slack-jawed. As Wade, a Midwestern farmer who watches his daughter become infected and go into decline during another screen version of the zombie virus apocalypse, Schwarzenegger is earning his best reviews in decades.
In a film that “may have the smallest budget of any film I’ve ever made,” in a role David D’Arcy in Screen Daily said “isn’t so much a father as a monument,” Schwarzenegger “plays Wade with a deeply earnest passion.”
The Austrian-born body builder turned action star and two-term governor of California turns 68 the day before “Terminator: Genisys” opens at the end of July. He has possible big budget sequels to “Twins” and “Conan the Barbarian” prepping. What else does he have to prove? Maybe that he can handle something more subtle.
“I don’t get offered dramatic roles, even in zombie movies,” he says from the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, where “Maggie” premiered. “It’s something I was more comfortable with today than maybe I would have been twenty, thirty years ago.”
Maybe that’s just spin from an actor at the tail end of his action hero career, though digital effects may give him “Terminator” turns for years to come. Maybe that’s just the born salesman in him talking. The guy didn’t get elected governor of the nation’s largest state on his accent.
Or maybe what his biographer, Ian Halperin, wrote in “The Governator” is true, that he’s “evolved considerably from the arrogant, insensitive bully he once was.” Hard-nosed politics, a trial and conviction by tabloids and the modest box office of his recent action pictures may have humbled him, just a bit. Perhaps he should start to think smaller if he wants to continue working.
“I look at scripts a different way today,” Schwarzenegger admits. “It will give me the chance to get more scripts like this. If people think I can do this, and that I will consider it, then more people will take a shot.”
But indie filmmakers take note. It would help if you have someone like former “Little Miss Sunshine” Abigail Breslin lined up to share the screen with him to get Schwarzenegger to sign on the dotted line.
In “Maggie,” Schwarzenegger pondered what it might be like to lose a child to a wasting illness, and “just acted out what I felt. But it was easy, thanks to Abigail Breslin…She never made me feel like she was acting. This was MY daughter and she was REALLY sick and scared. She made it easy for me to be this father, because she made me upset. Her seeming so totally confused and frightened, looking to me for some comfort, made my performance.”
Schwarzenegger is braced for the coming months of selling audiences on another “Terminator,” hopeful that the planned Hollywood movies on his calendar come to fruition. And if not, there’s always indie cinema.
“I’m not that analytical, but I do know that movies are not a science. Will people be surprised by ‘Maggie’? Will they see it? I don’t know.”
But don’t be surprised if a fellow who has reinvented himself more times than Madonna finds a new niche, even in the twilight of a very long and lucrative his screen career.