Movie Nation

Stories about the modern world’s origins within the Dark Ages have always held a fascination for some — OK, maybe it’s just me. It’s not exactly filmdom’s favorite era, all brown and muddy and unhygienic.
A priest on the run (“The Reckoning”) falls in with a troupe of actors and helps condemn a murderous lord. “The Name of the Rose” and TV’s “Brother Cadfael” had monks investigating crimes, logically and rationally, in a time of superstition. A young Medieval lawyer’s immersion in this new form of provable facts-based law was the foundation of an early Colin Firth gem, “The Advocate.”
“The Physician,” based on a Noah Gordon novel, fits neatly within this historical fiction tradition. It’s about an 11th century English barber’s assistant (Tom Payne) who, upon hearing that real medicine is being practiced and taught in the Islamic East, sets out to study there.
In pre-Norman England, illnesses are referred to as “the sight sickness” (cataracts) or “the side sickness” (appendicitis). The workings of the human body weren’t understood. There were no doctors or surgeons, none outside of the royal courts, anyway. Young Rob loses his mother to illness and takes up with the drunken, wench-chasing traveling barber (Stellan Skarsgard) who failed to save her. The Barber is all about sales pitches, tooth pulling and cauterized amputations.
“Remember boy, the more painful the treatment, the more they respect the Barber!”
But after years on the road with this dissolute healer, sometimes beaten by priest-backed mobs fearing “black magic,” Rob falls into a community of Jews able to treat the Barber’s cataracts. He learns that medicine is only truly taught by the great Ibn Sina (or Avicenna) in far off Persia. Christians aren’t allowed in his madrasah (school). But the world’s wandering Jews are. Rob renounces his religion and sets off for Persia, taking care of that little matter of circumcision along the way.
Ben Kingsley is properly warm and wise as the real-life Ibn Sina, “the greatest healer in the known world,” a studious, scientific man tolerated by the Shah, but not by the Islamic zealots who make up much of the population. In a time of plague, short life-spans and incessant war, Sina taught that “We don’t treat disease. We treat the people who suffer from disease.”
Director Philipp Stölzl and a largely German production beautifully recreate a time of wood, steel, fire and leather. The brown-on-brown art direction extends from the British isles to the sand-dusted Middle East. The costumes of Muslims, Jews and Gentiles are so realistic as to make us feel the scratchy fabrics and smell the unwashed, unchanged leather accessories.
This mini-series length movie is built on an old fashioned framework. There’s a soap opera-style forbidden love with a Jewish girl (Emma Rigby ) promised to an older man, a hint of the supernatural (Rob can feel a patient’s impending death) and an outbreak of plague which tests the physician, his students and the dying city they are all quarantined in.
The film has big, timely themes — health care as a human right, religious fanaticism facing off with science, a plague-induced panic.
Payne makes a decent enough leading man. But it is his supporting cast that lends gravitas to “The Physician.” Kingsley gives Sina the solemnity you’d expect, and an urgency that his decades have taught him to keep from his master, the Shah (Olivier Martinez), a vain ruler capable of glimmers of understanding mixed with ruthless cruelty. Skarsgard’s Barber just swaggers and staggers and twinkles, all to great effect.
The setting and old fashioned structure of the story won’t be to every taste. But “The Physician” is quite good at recreating its era and reminding us that once, long ago, it was the West that was backward and always looking East for enlightenment, education and a way out of the Dark Ages.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, explicit dissection scenes, nudity and sex.
Cast: Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard, Ben Kingsley, Emma Rigby, Olivier Martinez

Credits: Directed by Philipp Stölzl, written by Jan Berger based on the Noah Gordon novel. A Wrekin Hill release.

Running time: 2:33

A marriage, a Broadway debut, a couple of steps up the ladder in her movie career and a well-received pop album — it’s been “a pretty good year,” for Leighton Meester, admits Leighton Meester.
The onetime “Gossip Girl” regular married Adam Brody back in the spring, and promptly joined James Franco and Chris O’Dowd in a revival of the play based on John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” on Broadway.
“Changed my life,” Meester, 28, says.
The reviews weren’t bad either. Playing Curley’s wife, married to the boss’s son, it’s a role usually limited to sultry, teasing sexiness. But Meester brought “an impressive core of loneliness alongside her eroticism” to the role (Newsday), giving the character “flickers of softness and even warmth” (USA Today).
“Heartstrings,” her album of “moody” folk pop released in October, earned her comparisons to Fiona Apple, Jewel and Tori Amos in publications like Lithium Magazine.
“Music grabs you and becomes this dream you can’t let go of,” Meester says. “But not everybody who picks up an instrument is a rock star.”
The willowy beauty –a Fort Worth native who grew on Florida’s Marco Island — walked off with a couple of very funny scenes with He Who Cannot Be Comically Upstaged — Robert Downey, Jr. — in “The Judge.” Another piece of work that found its way to her.
“I don’t have much of a say about what I do,” Meester says. “When something comes my way, that’s when I get a choice. ‘Do I do this, or pass?’ I always have my eyes peeled for something I can relate to and if I’m lucky enough to love a part that I’m offered, I jump on it.
“But those choices are made by people making the offer, not by me. Those projects you get passionate about are few and far between.”
One of those projects that just sort of came her way is “Life Partners,” a new romantic comedy co-starring Gillian Jacobs, Gabourey Sidibe and Meester’s new husband, actor Adam Brody. Asking Meester about the roundabout way she came to the part — Kristen Bell, and then Evan Rachel Wood were supposed to take on the role of the personally and professionally aimless lesbian Sasha — just draws puzzled silence from Meester. Both Bell and Wood got pregnant and had to bow out. In any even, when the movie was pitched to both Meester and her mister, they jumped in.
“Sasha is very much like me, and I’m very much like her. I’ve been directionless, gotten stuck at a fork in the road more than once. ‘Where do I go from here? What do I do with my life?’ That’s Sasha.
“That co-dependent friendship thing, I’ve done that. Dating the wrong people? Done that. Not really pushing myself into the right career? Yup…
She’s sarcastic, honest, weird sense of humor, blurts stuff out and then tries to save the situation by spit balling some explanation, only to make it worse. Just like me.”
She’s also a musician, but Meester loved the fact that “Life Partners” suggests a musician who doesn’t have the passion to actually make that career work.
“Sasha is like the vast majority of people — dreaming of it, never going to get it. The select few make it and musicians are the most reluctant to give up that dream. Real life isn’t a romantic comedy, where dreams always come true. ‘Your dream is valid, and you can be a rock star because the record label saw your performance at that little cafe. You’re going to be rich and famous, at the top of the charts.!
“No. This movie is a lot more realistic than that.”
“Life Partners,” which goes into limited release Dec. 5, is about two friends — one gay, one straight (Jacobs) — and the man (Brody) who comes between them when the straight BFF falls for him. It’s a movie without the standard issue gay romantic tropes. Sasha is gay and looking for love, hitting the gay bars, doing Pride parades and the like. But there’s no drama of “coming out” to family or friends, no wrenching personal turmoil over figuring out who she is.
“Relationships are the same, with the same ups and downs — good choices, bad choices,” Meester says. “You could change her discussions about the women she’s dating to men and it would be the same. Some still live at home, some are really good looking but really young and not very sophisticated. Her sexuality is just another colorful aspect of her personality. But she’s not wondering who she is.”
Meester doesn’t wonder who she is, though she always wonders what will come next. The work seems to be coming to her as it does to gorgeous young talents with a pop music career on the side. She has a couple of films in the can, a TV movie in the works, and a January musical residency at L.A.’s Hotel Cafe, and hopes to tour supporting “Heartstrings”, starting in February. But as with everything else, it’s not really up to her and she’s not in control of it.
“None of this was actually plotted out. And I guess it never will be.”

“A Field Full of Secrets” is, its filmmaker Charles Maxwell admits, something of a fool’s errand. He set out to find a definitive answer to the “mystery” of crop circles, those strange, geometric and artistic grain-mashing designs that have been popping up in the agricultural corners of Britain since the 1970s. After years of filmmaking, Maxwell, a British ex-pat living in Los Angeles, was so far down the rabbit hole that he helped finance a prototype of something one source he spoke to insisted was a 3D rendering of what the “real” crop circles were depicting.
Maxwell had already spoken with legions of experts on film — and a sole admitted “hoaxer,” one of those “cerealogists” who claim to create these things in the dark of the British night. Whatever these things are, and Maxwell gives “hoax” short shrift, “alien messages” more credence and “messages or blueprints from the future” the most credit of all, the adventurous filmmaker was willing to stick his neck out, find investors and make a flying saucer out of what one “inventor” and engineer saw in the designs.
Up to that point, “Field Full of Secrets” is one of the loveliest British travelogues in recent memory — stunning postcard vistas of Stonehenge and environs —  Wiltshire, the county in England where many of these circles have turned up. Maxwell and his interview subjects say that the famed ancient Silbury Hill monument, an earth and chalk neolithic “pyramid” built some 4500 years ago, is ground zero in the crop circle world. So they visit it, trek to circles that have been made and stake out fields waiting to catch hoaxers in the act.
They don’t, which “proves” that these things are not stamped out by humans acting out a sort of large scale Spyrograph toy. Or it “proves” nothing of the sort, which Maxwell is reluctant to admit.
So he pursued other theories, especially the blueprints-send-from-the-future one. Nikola Romanski’s name and posts turn up on UFO forums, here and there. And this odd, roll-your-own-puffing transexual engineering whiz convinces Maxwell that some circles are depicting a flying saucer design and others alternative energy sources. That’s when Maxwell and the movie go down that rabbit hole.
But if you’ve seen “Interstellar” and can swallow at least a little of that film’s time travel/black hole science,  maybe you’ll buy in the way Maxwell did. It’s fun to think just that way. Maybe you’ll see his “failure” as just one attempt at translating something in 2D to something it might be in 3D, as a first failed prototype. The scientist played by Jodie Foster in “Contact” wasn’t starved for cash, after all.
As the Carl Sagan quote that begins “Field Full of Secrets” reminds us, “They laughed at Edison…Fulton…the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with some profanity, pot-use.

Cast:  Charles Maxwell, Nikola Romanski, Francine Blake,

Credits: Written and directed by Charles Maxwell. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:22

I just loved the new Mark Harris Hollywood history “Five Came Back,” an account of the American film industry’s response to World War II as seen through the actions of five filmmakers who joined up, did their patriotic duty and documented the war.

Anybody who knows anything about Hollywood from that period knows that Frank “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” Capra went to Washington, oversaw military movie making, came up with the inspiring “Why We Fight” and the more pointed “Know Your Enemy” documentaries and came out of the war and made the dark classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Which flopped.

You know the flag waving sentimentalist John Ford went in (BEFORE Pearl Harbor, mind you) and oversaw Navy film units and filmed The Battle of Midway, a much-honored documentary shot during the battle, with Ford himself on the island. He got out to make his own downbeat failure, “They Were Expendable.”

Maybe you know William Wyler filmed “The Memphis Belle” and came back to make “The Best Years of Their Lives.” But did you know he lost most of his hearing, making films swallowed by the deafening roar of airplane engines?

George Stevens was on the ground in North Africa, Italy and Western Europe, and went from being a pre-war director of all manner of films, to a post war drama specialist, at least in part because of the months he spent documenting the horror of German concentration camps.

And there was John Huston, who interrupted a just-then-soaring career to serve, but who barely let the war interrupt his pathological womanizing, and who made three controversial documentaries — about the Aleutians Campaign, The Battle of San Pietro and men suffering from what we today call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, “Let There Be Light.”

But did you know that Ford didn’t actually hold the cameras at Midway, that his alcoholism and raging benders got him shoved out before the war was over? You can’t read any John Wayne or Ford bio without stumbling into accounts of Ford’s outrage at Super Patriot Wayne’s incessant draft dodging, his many offers to join Ford in doing war related filmmaking. Wayne the careerist was not having it, and with much of the pride of Hollywood in uniform, he cashed in while Stewart and Gable and the rest were off serving their country. Wayne’s only punishment for this was Ford’s needling him for the rest of his life, which Wayne over-compensated for by making war films and wrapping himself in the flag.

Huston recreated “The Battle of San Pietro,” rather than capturing the actual combat, which he was too late to see. Wyler’s slow style of filmmaking didn’t derail “Memphis Belle,” but it pretty much kept his other work from being finished before the war was over. Capra was anxious to get out, could never get a handle on his “Know Your Enemy” films until they were too late to be of much use as training films, and had issues with his own confused and confusing politics as the war went on.

Harris produces revealing anecdotes about Daryl F. Zanuck, Harry Cohn, the Warner Brothers (first to make Hollywood entertainments about the Nazi threat).

It’s a great, breezy read, and better still, a book you can now read with a notebook PC open next to it. “Report from the Aleutians,” is on Youtube (at that link), as is “The Battle of Midway”.

Wyler’s “The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress” is there as well.  Search youtube for “Why We Fight” and all those documentaries show up.

And then there is Stevens. He was on the beaches on D-Day, and in the camps at war’s end. He compiled films for use at the Nuremberg trials for German war criminals, some of which didn’t see make it before the general public for decades. A lot of that stuff was government financed and is now in the public domain, dutifully uploaded to Youtube by film fans and history buffs.
Battles and jungle training footage were recreated in Orlando, more of a swampy jungle then than it is now. Ford shot his PT boats drama “They Were Expendable” in Key Biscayne and environs. Huston became an expert on combat recreations making “Battle of San Pietro” and used that expertise in “The Red Bad of Courage,” but didn’t go around reminiscing about the war the way Ford did.

And Wyler and Stevens were darkened by the experience most clearly, and let that sober up their work after the war.

So track down “Five Came Back” for the film fan and history buff you’re shopping for this Christmas. And be sure to point out how much of the footage described in it, films that often put film crews in great danger to obtain, is up on Youtube, a great resource for reminding you how some of Hollywood’s finest spent their war years.

One great way to spoil Thanksgiving would be to drag the friends and family to “Horrible Bosses  2,” with its headache-inducing two-guys-babbling/one-guy-screeching all at once dialogue, limp plot and reprised characters totally outclassing the new additions.

Chris Pine does the charming rogue thing, Christoph Waltz is typecast and it is up to Jamie Foxx and Kevin Spacey to walk off with the movie Jason Bateman can’t slow-burn to life. Poor reviews across the board for this one. A good one to sleep off that turkey triptofan buzz with.

What about those over-exposed “Penguins of Madagascar”? I laughed and laughed, but I figured most reviewers would dump over its derivative plot and villains. Naah. We all laughed. Well, most of us. Damned funny penguin puns, John Malkovich has lots of movie star punchlines as the villain. It works. Good reviews for that one.

“The Imitation Game” is an Oscar contender, though perhaps not the slam dunk it might have seemed on the page. Benedict Cumberbatch is solid, but the Alan Turing saves the world but is persecuted for his homosexuality story is conventionally told and oddly unaffecting. I love WWII tales, the Enigma/Ultra story in general (I liked the fictional version of this, “Enigma,” that Michael Apted did with Kate Winslet and Jeremy Northam some years back). It’s quite good, but not the best picture of the year.  Reviews are respectful and overwhelmingly positive.

“Before I Disappear” didn’t get the break I would have hoped. I loved Shawn Christensen’s Oscar winning short, “Curfew,” and was totally into this dark comedy about a suicidal junkie trapped taking care of the precocious niece he doesn’t know. Just one night, padded out to a feature film. Adding Ron Perlman and Emmy Rossum — big pluses. I dig it. Other critics? More indifferent.

“The Babadook” is earning the kind of rapturous praise that only that rare horror story that works does. Reviews from the faithful are titling this one into the high end of the Tomatometer, though Metacritic is, as ever, more measured in its praise. Damned spooky story from Australia, a real midnight movie. Dive in.

World War II, for those a little rusty on their history, wasn’t won by Brad Pitt or General Patton or Captain America. It was won by a bunch of nerds led by a socially inept, puzzle-obsessed mathematical genius who also happened to be homosexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain.

Their work, breaking enemy codes, was “Ultra” secret, the ultimate secret of the war. Ironically, it was entrusted to a man who was already quite accomplished at keeping secrets in his personal life.

“The Imitation Game” is an entertaining, sometimes riveting and yet quite conventional film biography of Alan Turing, the glum but gay Brit who invented the first electronic computer and thus created the modern world.

Graham Moore’s screenplay, based on an Andrew Hodges book, frames Turing’s story within a police case. A Manchester detective (Rory Kinnear) investigates a 1951 break-in at Professor Turing’s home, and is so put off by his aloof insults that he digs into who Turing really is and what his war record was. Detective Nock can interrogate the Great Man all he wants, but he must “Pay attention. I will not pause, I will not repeat myself.”

Norwegian director Morten Tyldum’s film flashes back to Turing’s comically brusque first meeting with his would-be Royal Navy boss (Charles Dance, biting), his incompetence at mixing with his code-cracking teammates and the stroke of genius that had him go directly to Churchill, through the MI-6 intelligence chief (Mark Strong, wonderfully inscrutable) to take over the team.

Turing’s brainstorm — only a machine can defeat another machine, the German Enigma encoder. He will build an electronic device that can sift through the coded Morse Code letters of German transmissions fast enough to save convoys, head off attacks and foil the fascists, who were winning the war pretty much right up to that moment.

There were threats from the Admiralty, security breaches involving leaks to the Soviets and personality clashes along the way.

“Damn you and your useless machine!” shouts fellow code-breaker Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode, effortlessly suave and caddish), not knowing a cliche when he bellows one.

Turing is forever insulting his peers and failing to apologize with more than “That’s actually not entirely a terrible idea.”

He uses crossword puzzle tests to recruit help, among them, a woman (Keira Knightley) whom he cannot even invite into the office with the other men. Turing and Joan Clarke had to meet after hours and ponder the problems of Enigma — a secret within a secret within a secret.

And we travel back to Turing’s boarding school days, his first hint of love, which is meant to further reveal his character. The boy playing young Alan, Alex Lawther, is even more convincing as a guarded, eyes-averting genius with a “dirty” secret than Cumberbatch, who is at his best here.

Tyldum’s film recreates the consequences of the war in quick, digitally-augmented scenes of convoys sinking, bombs falling and battles raging. Moore’s script ably ramps up the pressure on the team. It does a poor job of showing the tragedy of Turing’s hidden life but a better job at making a bigger case — unconventional people make unconventional thinkers.

When you’re tackling “the most difficult problem in the world,” you need all the unconventional people you can find.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong

Credits: Directed by Morten Tyldum, screenplay by Graham Moore, written by . A release.

Running time: 1:54

There’s no pretense of magic and majesty to this “Jurassic Park,” no notion that this is a reboot. No, the story has progressed, the theme park has opened, safety concerns be damned. No, science has learned nothing about genetic tinkering — not the important lessons, anyway.

Nice shot at Sea World, for those willing to look at it that way.

Chris Pratt is the voice of reason. And Chris Pratt, whatever his virtues, is no Jeff Goldblum.

June 12, 2015 — “Jurassic World.”

Writer-director-star Shawn Christensen’s “Curfew” was a minor miracle of a short film. This 2012 Oscar nominee was cynical and bitter, sad and uplifting — and deeply, darkly hilarious — a lot to manage in 19 magical minutes.
“Curfew” earns a feature film treatment titled “Before I Disappear,” with Christensen, his precocious co-star Fatima Ptacek, and a supporting cast that now includes Emmy Rossum, Ron Perlman and Richard Schiff. Expanded and fleshed-out, the short film becomes a somewhat more showy and melodramatic movie, just as moving, just as funny and almost as magical.
We meet Richie (Christensen) in the tub. He’s narrating a letter to Vista, his girfriend.
“I hope this note finds you well. But as these things go, that won’t be the case.”
Richie has a razor blade. Vista is dead. Richie’s planning on joining her. The bathwater turns crimson.
He’s about 30, a junky, and a janitor. Richie’s seen something — a young woman, dead of an overdose, in the toilets he cleans at a club run by Bill (Perlman). Bill tells Richie to forget what he saw, and slips him some “Flora,” a nickname for heroin. Richie lied to his other employer, Gideon (Paul Wesley), who was in love with the dead woman. So Richie figures that’s about enough.
But the phone rings. And rings. And rings. It’s his estranged sister, Maggie (Rossum), who asks a favor in the most profane, judgmental and hateful way. Can you, you worthless, unreliable lout, pick up my daughter from school and get her home?
Richie bandages his wrist, figures he can put off suicide for an hour or two, and staggers, smoking, into young Sophia’s school. She is reciting Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” — first in English, then in Mandarin. She is a uniformed sixth grader, organized, uptight, an overachiever in school and in gymnastics. She is impatient with this stoned stranger picking her up. “There will be hell to pay,” she threatens, if he cannot get her home to do her homework, study for a test and continue over-achieving. And there will be.
The chemistry between these two is electric. Christensen’s eyebrow arches at Sophia’s every insult, as if he is not sure she’s just another of his many hallucinations. He makes Richie soulful and sweet, but given to righteous rages when he feels others are being wronged. Ptacek’s Sophia is the adult, assertive in every situation. They storm into a dinner at Bill’s place, and she sits herself down and digs in with his henchmen. They stagger over to a hipster bowling alley, and she dances to her favorite electronica pop right down the lanes.
OK, maybe it’s whatever drug Richie has popped that has him seeing that.
Through a long, comically tragic New York night, these two bond, we hear the story of how Richie and Maggie grew up and grew apart, and they avoid people who want to collect from him or kill him, or grab her as a way of getting at her mother.
We can guess where this is going, but as with his short film, Christensen fills the sure-to-be-redemptive story arc with surprises. Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil.
And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.
Christensen may have won the best short dramatic feature Academy Award, but his real prize was the chance to turn some marvelous characters and gripping, gritty situations into a feature length film. “Before I Disappear” was his prize, and as it turns out, our prize, too.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, drug use, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Shawn Christensen, Fatima Ptacek, Emmy Rossum, Ron Perlman, Paul Wesley, Richard Schiff

Credits: Written and directed by Shawn Chistensen. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:33