Movie Nation

Marty Jackitansky is a paranoid leech who scams everyone from the bank where he works to the frozen pizza company that makes his favorite evening meal.
He lies with every breath he takes, steals without conscience and explodes in outrage whenever he himself is hustled.
And when he’s outraged, he’s violent — a nerdy, lashing-out that you might expect from a comic book/horror movie/death metal addict. His hobby project is a modified video gaming glove controller that he’s added Freddy Krueger finger-knives to.
Think of Marty as an R-rated Napoleon Dynamite — foul-mouthed, irritating, irritable, self-absorbed and clueless. He’s also a bit dangerous, the personification of the bird that gives his filmed story its title — “Buzzard.”
Marty, created by indie filmmaker Joel Potrykus and his muse, actor Joshua Burge, is a riveting train-wreck of a character, fascinating to watch as he works one low-rent hustle after another, closing his bank account so he can then re-open it and collect a $50 new account reward that comes with it.
“C’mon,” the hapless, unseen bank officer complains to him, “this is a waste of my time.”
“Not mine,” Marty says with a bug-eyed vulture’s grin.
He’s afraid to use the office PC (surveillance) and pilfers office supplies that he then returns to the store for cash.
He brazenly wonders how to sign over customers’ refund checks to himself to nerdy cubicle clone Derek (played by writer-director Potrykus).
“What do you care? We work in a bank. And we’re TEMPS.”
But that’s a line he crosses, and being paranoid, this buzzard takes flight — paying for bus tickets and hotel rooms with cash, copying hotel room keys so he can sneak back in after checking out, every low-rent scam in the book.
Potrykus (“Coyote” and “Ape” were his two earlier film festival people-as-animals movies) manages moments of wit, such the game “party” boy Derek (yeah, right) invented that involves having Bugles snacks fed to him on the conveyor belt of his exercise treadmill.
Mostly, though, his camera and his energies are focused on Burge who wears a feral, furtive malevolence in every frame. His Marty is scary not because he’s physically imposing. He might not have the guts to actually hurt you. But you just know he’d sure like to pick over your carcass.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, fisticuffs, blood

Cast: Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus
Credits: Written and directed by Joel Potrykus. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Running time: 1:37

“Write what you know,” the old novelist’s adage goes. So Adam Carolla co-wrote, co-directed and stars in a movie about a has-been/never-quite-was comic whose glory days were more than a decade ago and whose “partner,” back in the day, went on to bigger and better things.
The TV show that Bruce, his character, starred in was “The Bro Show.” His co-host, played by Jay Mohr, went on to host a late night TV chat show and still tries to help Bruce with a gig. The real Carolla starred in “The Man Show” and Jimmy Kimmel, his co-star in that, hosts a popular late night TV talk show.
Let’s hope the rest of “Road Hard” is fiction, because Bruce is a bitter, comically self-destructive jerk forced to live in the garage apartment of the house his ex (Illeana Douglas) refuses to sell, even as she’s taken up with another man. And that man is played by David Koechner, cast, as ever, as a pudgy, bald and delusional loser. Nobody, in real life or the movies, wants to lose their ex to Dave Koechner.
Bruce gets recognized in airports, but not by hotel clerks, who feel his wrath. He unloads on his fellow economy class passengers and on club owners who short him on his “guarantee,” is humiliated by would-be bar-pickups and tries to hide his resentment at others’ success. David Alan Grier plays a pal who just shot a pilot. Watch Bruce/Carolla try not to bite his own lip off as he hides the agony you know this news is putting him through.
Because Bruce is back “on the road,” jetting from Dallas to Atlanta, Omaha to Winnipeg, with stops in Tulsa, and if he’s lucky — Boston. It’s where every comic wants to be — in his or her twenties. Bruce, pushing 50, wants to stay at home, hang with his adopted daughter, get some rest.
The funny thing is that Bruce is actually funny, as quick as he ever was. A visit to cowboy country leads to a riff about rodeo bull-riding from the cow’s point-of-view, minding his own business when “a 140 pound racist from Wyoming” drops onto his back.
A big fee from a hotel for smoking in his room generates a riotous “Would you rather” have a smoker or masturbator in that room rant.
The trouble with Bruce is, he’s unfiltered. He’s politically incorrect.
“Black people, the fastest on the planet…the slowest pedestrians.”
He’s never played the game well, and worse, he’s never put the extra work in that it takes to get rich and famous. He’s lazy. A flash of easy success made him that way.
“If I could just scrub my mind of the ’90s.”
Bruce’s plight is not as interesting as his work on stage, or the hilarious people Carolla surrounds himself with on screen. The under-used Grier pushes hot-buttons and samples his own live act, and character actor Larry Miller sports one grotesque wig after another as Bruce’s agent. He’s called “Baby Doll,” because he calls everybody else “Baby Doll.”
Baby Doll’s lectures about Bruce’s lack of effort and inability to be charming fall on deaf ears, but he’s got a point. Baby Doll plays the game. Baby Doll is a success.
“You see that new Jag in my driveway? You know who’s up in my bed? EVERYone!”
A mildly unconventional love story drags “Road Hard” to a most conventional conclusion. But Carolla gets a lot of stuff about his career choice off his chest, sometimes hilariously, in this hits-too-close-to-home comedy. And if you’ve ever heard a comic wax all sentimental over going back on tour after film or TV success, Carolla exposes that for the grueling, disappointing lie that it really is.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, adult language, alcohol consumption

Cast: Adam Carolla, Jay Mohr, Illeana Douglas, David Alan Grier, Larry Miller, Robyn Cohen, Howie Mandel
Credits: Written and directed by Adam Carolla, Kevin Hench. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:37

John Boorman, one of the giants of British cinema, just turned 82. The director of “Deliverance,” “Excalibur” and “The General” has an announcement tucked into the finale of “Queen and Country,” just now opening in the United States.
“You may have noticed that the last shot of the film was a camera that stops,” he says. “That was my way of indicating that this is my last film.”
So even though “Eastwood is, what, three years older than me? And (Portuguese director) Manoel de Oliveira is, oh, 106,” it’s time.
But not before he finished “Country,” his long-planned sequel to the Oscar-nominated 1987 autobiographical dramedy “Hope and Glory.” That film recreated his experiences growing up in World War II Britain. “Queen and Country” catches up with his character (named William Rohan) as he serves in the early 1950s British Army, training on the home front, hoping not to be sent to Korea.
“My experience of the Army was that if you extract combat, if it’s an army just training for combat, you really emphasize the absurdity of it. ..The object of training in the Army is to brainwash the soldier… to crush any individualism, any independent thinking. Make your soldiers into automatons.”
And looking back on that, Boorman found it funny. So “Queen and Country” has service comedy hinjinx, as a pal named Percy steals an officer’s cherished Boer War era clock from the company mess. In real life– and “everything in this story really happened — there are consequences to that.
“The Percy character was court-martialed. And I took him in handcuffs to the military prison. I still have the receipt I was given. ‘Received from Sgt. Boorman, the live body of Private Bradshaw.'”
Boorman laughs. “Absurd.”
“Hope and Glory” was full of nostalgia in a child’s view of the “adventure” of war — school closed, when it is accidentally bombed, children shipped to the country where cantakerous Grandfather presides, teaches and amuses. Boorman was determined to do the sequel because it captures another turning point in British history.

“The older soldiers, the ones who’d been in ‘The War,’ and were training us, they still clung to the idea of Imperial Britain and the British Empire. The biggest empire ever had vanished within a handful of years. We, the younger generation, embraced the change and England became a very different place. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the art scene were transformed by about 1960. All the class rigidity that went along with ’empire,’ we younger people were glad to see that go.”
As the film suggests, Boorman was film crazy (“American movies seemed so glamorous to those of us growing up in a pretty bleak post-war Britain.”). He grew up near Shepperton Studios, got a job as a film editor for the BBC and worked his way toward directing movies. His career path mirrored that of the great editor-turned director David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “A Passage to India”), who became a friend and mentor. Lean died at 83, in 1991.
“I was with him just before he died, and he was trying to make ‘Nostromo’ and cancer felled him,” Boorman recalls. “He told me ‘I do hope I get well enough to make this film, because I feel I’m just beginning to get the hang of it.’
“That’s how I feel, that I’m just ‘getting the hang of it.’ But it’s time. It’s time.”

“Focus” earned mixed reviews, and truth be told, Will Smith’s kind of yesterday’s news. So this caper comedy/romance wasn’t going to be that much-needed blockbuster comeback for him. It’s opening in first place this weekend, but will be lucky to clear $20 million. Word of mouth Saturday will be key.

“The Lazarus Effect” is a sturdy enough bring-back-the-dead thriller, poor reviews, but I thought its cast and director made it work. It’s opening at over $10 million.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” will be close to $150 million by Sunday night, “American Sniper” will be over $330.

“McFarland” and “The DUFF” aren’t holding much audience on their second weekend. Enough. Costner’s film is set to clear $20, “DUFF” just shy of it.

Among the Oscar winners re-issued to get people out to see what they missed, “Still Alice” is the one to crack the top ten.

“Queen and Country” begins with a reprise of one of the most famous scenes in British cinema. It’s that magical moment from John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory” when a schoolboy, living in London during The Blitz, turns a corner and is stunned by a scene of delirious chaos.
The Germans have bombed his school, and children are screaming — in delight — throwing their papers and books in the air, every child’s fantasy brought to life.
There’s nothing that jolly, jaunty or joyous in writer-director Boorman’s long-gestating sequel to that semi-autobiographical 1987 film. “Queen” is set in the early 1950s, just as Elizabeth was taking the throne, with Boorman’s hero just old enough to be conscripted into the Korean War era British Army. And while Boorman’s picture has the hallmarks of many a post-war “service comedy,” about training, feuding with superior officers and dating hijinx, the elder statesman of British cinema has conjured up a more melancholy and measured sequel weighted with adulthood and freighted with some of Boorman’s own doubts and regrets.
William “Bill” Rohan, played by Callum Turner of “The Borgias,” is still living in the enchanted mid-Thames River house “The Spinx,” where he and his mother and siblings decamped after a German bomb destroyed their house nine years before. The avid movie buff is a shy 18 year-old, unsure around girls, hoping the Army missed sending him a notice.
They haven’t, and his years-long aquatic idyll is over. On his first in boot camp, Bill meets and befriends Percy (Caleb Landry Jones), a conscript who is even more of a malcontent. Boorman serves up some standard issue service comedy gags — inept marching, a twitchy, martinet sergeant (David Thewlis), a long-suffering major (Richard E. Grant) and a role model Redmond.
Redmond (Pat Shortt of “Calvary”) is a “skiver,” a professional slouch, malingerer, “goldbrick” in U.S. Army slang. He has mastered the art of getting out of Army work and hard duties. He’s dodged being shipped to Korea, and he is the one who can help the new lads fend off discipline, duty and combat.
Bill falls for “the unattainable” girl, who lets him call her “Ophelia” (Tamsin Egerton), a posh, socially-connected college student. She is, as she always is in such “comedies,” the one he confesses his deepest feelings to — his hatred of Sgt. Bradley, who is forever dragging Percy and Bill and Redmond in front of the Major for minor “insolent” infractions, his disenchantment with Army life.
“Is there nothing good you can take from it?” she wonders. That’s when he talks about the cameraderie that is something like love shared by men who train to go to war together.
Boorman brings back one surviving member of the 1987 film’s cast, David Hayman (as Bill’s dad). Sinéad Cusack replaces Sarah Miles as Bill’s mom, Vanessa Kirby takes over for Sammi Davis as Bill’s war bride sister, Dawn, who married a Canadian, had children but never lost her wild streak.
And the esteemed John Standing (“V for Vendetta”) has the unenviable task of taking over for the late Ian Bannen, whose gruff, grumpy sparkle as Grandfather George is sorely missed.
“Queen and Country” stands on its own, for what it’s worth. But the filmmaker’s mixed emotions about the Britain that was lost in the war and buried in the less focused, less disciplined 1950s robs “Queen and Country” of the lightness and the life that energized the sentimental original film. Bill’s “discovery” of how movies are made and resolve to get into the profession are dead moments that could have been giddy.
The scenery is still stunning, but there’s little of the brio of a filmmaker who went on to make “Deliverance,” “Excalibur” and the glorious “Hope and Glory” in it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Callum Turner, Caleb Landry Jones, Pat , David Thewlis, Richard E. Grant, Vanessa Kirby, Tamsin Egerton
Credits: Written and directed by John Boorman. A BBC Films release.
Running time: 1:55

The dust rises in puffy clouds over every scene in the limply-named “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.” To call this comedy old fashioned, old school or just old and creaky doesn’t do this fusty farce justice. Even the cobwebs have cobwebs.
Cheyenne Jackson steps out of the shadows of supporting roles (he was a regular, for a while, on “30 Rock”) as Michael, a crude, cranky at-home dance instructor working Ground Zero of Florida’s retirement mecca — St. Petersburg and environs.
His off-color cracks don’t fly with his new customer, Mrs. Harrison (the great Gena Rowlands, of “The Notebook”).
“Just gotta get used to my sense of humor,” he explains.
“DO I?”
They don’t get along, and don’t set off much in the way of sparks, either. Michael’s gay, bitter about his work situation and touchy about Mrs. Harrison’s Southern Baptist bonafides. But he needs the job.
“We got off on the wrong foot.”
“I have a feeling you spend all DAY on that foot!”
And on it goes, this snappy repartee that’s some screenwriters’ idea of what the hip AARP set would find “with it” and “happening.” A few smart observations about ageing sneak into the bland banter.
“People start to disappear when they get older,” as in “nobody notices you.” Seniors of a certain age are living day to day, “people trying to make an interesting day for ourselves.” Michael is a compulsive, impulsive liar, and Mrs. Harrison won’t tolerate that. But she has secrets of her own.
Rowlands works at something like half-speed, here, something highlighted by a few on-the-phone arguments with that firecracker Rita Moreno as an irritable elderly neighbor.
Jackson tries too hard in almost every scene. Michael’s tin-eared cracks — about jitterbugging turning Mrs. Harrison into “a loose G.I. groupie” — “You’ll be waking up in the barracks tomorrow!” — feel sitcom trite and a little desperate.
Few studios bother to finance films for an older audience, and the films themselves too often make the mistakes “Six Dance Lessons” does. Your audience and your stars may move a lot slower. That doesn’t mean your movie should.

MPAA rating: Unrated, with profanity, innuendo

Cast: Gena Rowlands, Cheyenne Jackson, Rita Moreno, Jackie Weaver, Julian Sands, Anthony Zerbe

Credits: Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman, screenplay by Richard Alfieri. A Dada release.

Running time: 1:47

As accounts of movie-flops-in-the-making go, “My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn” is a pretty tame affair. The stakes are low. Nobody died or divorced, nobody’s career ended.
The director of “Drive” only loses his temper when he has to admit, upon finishing it, that he’s wasted years of his life making “Only God Forgives.” But his documentary filmmaker wife’s camera captures hints that he knows the film is a bad idea much earlier, maybe in pre-production.
Lacking the deadly splendor of on-set accidents, casting bungles and money-devouring madness that documentary makers captured while “Apocalypse Now” (“Hearts of Darkness “) and “Fitzcarraldo” (“Burden of Dreams”) were unfolding, “My Life” plays as more intimate. And dull.
“Only God Forgives,” named by readers of the Village Voice as “the worst film of 2013,” polarized critics and scared off audiences. But Refn simply frets on camera about “not repeating myself.”
He turns to fabled filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, most famous for a movie he was not allowed to make (“Dune”), for advice.
“Why are you working for ‘success?'” Jodorowsky wants to know. “You need to have the pleasure to do it!”
Movies are cumbersome, expensive ocean liners that you cannot stop on a dime, even if you know they’re half-baked. So they’re off to Bangkok– family in tow — to shoot this thriller about a drug smuggler, played by Ryan Gosling when Luke Evans had to drop out (not depicted), who is coerced into finding and punishing his brother’s killer by their Lady Macbeth Mom (Kristin Scott Thomas).
Gosling is always a good sport, standing up for his “Drive” director with just a knowing smirk, in or out of gory makeup.  He dotes on their children, and only once allows himself to be sarcastic at some misguided compliment.
“What’s THAT supposed to mean?”
“Make it dirty, unique, interesting, never seen before,” Refn, the son of Danish filmmakers tells his fight choreographer. “And VIOLENT.”
We see a little of that violence, with Scott Thomas asking her director, “So you’ll kill me and disembowel me tomorrow?” They do.
We see Refn rethink a complicated motorcycle shootout on the fly, and we watch him hold his temper as his wife keeps filming him as he tries to unwind or figure out a way out of this fix.
Liv Corfixen, a pretty blond captured in several scenes, asking questions off camera in others, follows her husband all the way to Cannes, long past the point Refn shouts “I think it’s a BAD film” at her.” She even shows him reading the nastiest reviews.
“Why do they have to be so mean?”
“In a way,” she answers, off camera, “you asked for it.”
Perhaps he did. But that’s not really compelling enough to warrant a documentary.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Nicolas Winding Refn, Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas
Credits: Directed by Liv Corfixen. A Radius/TWC release.

Running time: 1:01