Movie Nation

Unlucky 2013? Some weekends, it seemed that way at the movies.
Big bad movies, cheap bad movies, ill-advisedly awful and ignominious efforts.
Johnny Depp outstayed his welcome, Adam Sandler sucker punched his enabling fans one last time, Will Smith made a movie so bad people were attaching Scientology recruitment to his motives and Disney made a Pixar spin off that is the worst thing ever to wear Mouse Ears.
And since someday, college kids will create drinking games to get them through “R.I.P.D.” with the once-and-always “dude,” Jeff Bridges, and there’s only enough space for two goshawful horror movies on any year’s list, let’s remember the unmemorable — the very worst in movies, 2013.

“The Lone Ranger” — Twice, big money has been thrown at this “Masked Man” Western on the big screen, and both films were disasters for the ages. A few clever bits — the Ranger galloping through a moving train, Tonto and the Ranger buried in sand and slinging insults — lift your hopes. The rest? Shockingly violent, shockingly stupid. Everybody involved should have seen this coming.
“Creature” — Show this one to your kid, the one whining about becoming an actress. “Someday, honey, you could end up stripping for a no talent hack who has a villain named ‘Lockjaw’ butcher your character and your career.”
“Grownups 2” — A make-work farce for Adam Sandler’s cronies, from David Spade to Dan Patrick, this summer party comedy climaxes with a set by the J. Geils Band. Without J. Geils. He was smart enough to skip this disaster.
“After Earth” — A sci-fi flop that Will Smith manufactured for his charisma-starved kid.
“Planes” — Disney’s worst animated film ever was shipped to theaters on John Lasseter’s watch, Pixar cultists. Chew on that.
“A Madea Christmas” — Fox News has it right. There is a war on Christmas. Madea says so. But she’s that war’s generalissimo.
“Movie 43/InAPPpropriate Comedy” — These assembled cameo sketch comedies make one wonder what jokes they threw out as “not funny enough.”
“The Last Exorcism 2” — Deadly dull, an unscary sequel to the latest “The Devil is REAL” franchise. Instantly forgettable. And forgotten.
“A Good Day to Die Hard” — The ignominious end of a franchise, a finale even worse than the one with Kevin Smith in it. And that’s saying something.
“Free Birds” — Even the best animated films weren’t classics in 2013, but this turkey of a Thanksgiving time-travel farce was a fiasco from the get go.
“The Heat” — Take the couple of laughs — they were in the trailers — from “Identity Thief” and “The Heat” and you’d have a Melissa McCarthy comedy with…four laughs.

It’s a pretty close race for this weekend’s box office title, closer than one might have expected. But then, “The Hobbit” is a bit of an underperformer. And heaven knows, Will Ferrell & Co. have been selling the heck out of “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.”

“Desolation of Smaug” looks to end the weekend in the low $30s, “Anchorman 2” right around $30.

“American Hustle” is doing a $19-20 million opening, not bad for a serious Oscar contender.

“Walking with Dinosaurs 3D” isn’t reaching the very young audience and its parents that it needs to. Under $10 million, maybe $8 million.

“Hunger Games” has faded after making over $370 million. Domestically.

“Madea” is sliding off the table.

Actors, as a rule, like to say that they “never judge” a character they’re playing, no matter how loathsome. Even villains, the logic goes, don’t look in the bathroom mirror in the morning, waxing the moustache they’re about to twirl before throwing the heroine down a well.
But Jonah Hill? He’s judging his guy, Donnie Azoff, a real-life Wall Street bottom-feeder and scene stealer in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
“I couldn’t find a way around it,” Hill says. “I mean, I kept looking for things to like about the guy, things we had in common. And I just couldn’t.”
Donnie has an over-eager charm when we first meet him in “Wolf.” He sees stock trader Jordan Belfort’s fancy, vintage Jaguar E-Type, rudely presses him to find out what he earns and promptly quits his own sales job to become a disciple of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” played Leonardo DiCaprio. Donnie’s got an overly brilliant smile and a back story, which is the first sign this dude isn’t right. Yeah, he married his “hot cousin.” What, somebody else should have her?
“Everybody has a little of Donnie in them,” Hill laughs. “You know, that desire to do whatever you want, to be filthy, ridiculously rich. But if you’re a good person, there’s just a TINY bit of Donnie in you. This guy has no impulse control.”
Hill, 30, has been a reliably rude funnyman since 2007’s “Superbad,” playing characters that often come off as variations on an “impulse control” theme. In film after film, he’s an eating, drinking, cursing, lusting self-absorbed drug-coveting Bacchus. Last summer, he passed a version of that hedonist off as himself in the blasphemous blockbuster, “This is the End.” But the real Jonah thinks of himself as more of a moralist than that.
“Donnie is 100% that thing that we don’t like to show within ourselves. He has no moral compass. No morality. He treats people horribly. He’s the most selfish person in the world. I mean, who wouldn’t like to be him? Or hate him? He wasn’t someone I would want in my life.”
But for a few months, he was. Working for his hero, Martin Scorsese — “‘Goodfellas’ is the reason I wanted to make movies.” — Hill had to get up every morning and literally put on his “game face.”
“His teeth were whiter than white. That’s from Belfort’s book. I wore a prosthetic set of teeth, and that was tough because I’m supposed to be doing a different accent, a different voice. When I first put in the teeth, they gave me this horrible lisp. I had to practice and practice to get rid of it. Tim Monich, our dialect coach, let me practice talking with him hours every day. No one in my personal life would put up with that. Dedicate a couple of hours talking with me, with those teeth in, doing that accent? Forget it.
“I would call different stores like Best Buy or Target and talk to them as Donnie, in character, about products that they had.”
Donnie, Hill decided, was a working class lug “trying to pass himself off as WASPy, upper-class, upper-crust. That’s the key to who he is.”
Hill is earning Oscar buzz for his performance, thanks to rave reviews. He is “not (just) comic relief here but a credible, if weird, figure” The Hollywood Reporter noted, praising the fact that Hill “keeps offering surprises” right to the movie’s end. Donnie matches Jordan excess for excess — lying, cheating, snorting and spending all his ill-gotten gains, reveling in the amorality of it all.
Hill’s gift for spontaneity on the set – improvising — is much in evidence. And that fits the character.
“Everything Peter Brandon says in ‘Moneyball’ is supposed to be incredibly deliberate. Thought over. Thoughtful,” Hill says, remembering his first outing in a serious movie, where improvising funny lines wouldn’t work. “Donnie, having no impulse control, was perfect for improvisation. Every decision, everything he blurts out, was just that second. That’s what he’s thinking. That’s what he’s saying.”
Hill says he hopes “not EVERYBODY on Wall Street is like this.” After all, everybody — especially movie stars — has skin in the stock market game. “Your average Wall Street trader doesn’t get up in the morning and ruin somebody’s life. These guys did, every day. They stole from people. What greed makes people do just shocks me.”
Hill has a sequel to “21 Jump Street” due out in March, and another film in the can. But “Wolf” is hitting theaters and earning accolades during a rare idle period for Hill. He’s not sure how to follow “the most demanding, most complex role” he’s ever taken.
“For the first time in my career, I don’t know what I’m doing next. I’m excited about that. I’ve been lucky, these past couple of years, getting to express different sides of myself. I’ve gotten to try all sorts of different roles. You keep working with people who are better than you are and you get better. That’s all I can shoot for.”

This has been one of those years that makes you think whatever Oscar does, a consensus has pretty much been reached among critics and various critics’ groups about which films will pull down best picture Oscar nominations. With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences now delivering as many as ten best picture contenders, you can pretty much bet that this year will feature a full house and that the listed films will jibe with that consensus.
But there weren’t just ten good movies, most of them released at the tail end of 2013. Films from “Inside Llewyn Davis” to “Blue is the Warmest Color” or “Blue Jasmine” have their champions. Not me. The Danish film “The Hunt” is in the conversation, the best foreign language film of last year (like “Warmest Color,” a tad too melodramatic, I thought), as are the Japanese animated picture “The Wind Rises” and the surprising Canadian documentary/essay “Stories We Tell.” It was that kind of year.
Matthew McConaughey had the best 2013, so good that his mythic turn in “Mud” and his nearly-steals-the-film “The Wolf of Wall Street” cameo could only sit in the shadows of a film as impressive as “The Dallas Buyers Club.”
“Blackfish” sets a new standard for activist documentaries, run in theaters and then parked on CNN for repeat viewings where it convinced musicians to not play SeaWorld, and might encourage ticket buyers to spend their theme park cash elsewhere. Was it the best documentary? No. “Stories We Tell” was better, “Muscle Shoals” and “20 Feet From Stardom” too. “Blackfish” could win the Oscar, though.
Oscar bait that didn’t take? “August: Osage County”, “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Book Thief” seem to earn that distinction. “The Butler” may end up an Oscar contender, but wasn’t a top ten movie, in my book. Nominate Forest Whitaker and move on. Sorry, Oprah.
Best cameo? Peter Jackson chomping on a carrot at the beginning of “The Desolation of Smaug.”
Ten best pictures? Pat yourself on the back. Chances are, you saw a few of these — a lot of mainstream movies made their mark alongside the arty indie cinema in 2013.

“The Dallas Buyers Club” — The tragedy of AIDS, as experienced by a working class Joe who refuses to be written off or killed off by a medical establishment that doesn’t treat him as a person, this is the first movie on this subject with a swagger. Thank McConaughey. Dude deserves the Oscar. Give it to him.
“Gravity” — A serenely cerebral space accident thriller that hangs on state-of-the-art effects, George Clooney’s voice and Sandra Bullock’s decades of audience empathy. The state of sci-fi effects will change but this one will still be touching people, years down the road.
“Captain Phillips” — A lean, perfectly-pitched thriller about a merchant ship hijacking from the director of “United 93,” starring this generation’s EveryAmerican, Tom Hanks. It took guts to give us a taste of the hijackers’ point of view. Director Paul Greengrass and co-star Barkhad Abdi gave us that. But Hanks makes us care.

“Fruitvale Station” –– Ryan Coogler’s film of the last day of the life of a young man killed by a cop at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station is a moving depiction of a mistake-prone young man (Michael B. Jordan) who had the empathy to change. He just never got the chance to. The year’s most touching drama.
“Her” — The year’s best romance was about a man and his sentient operating system. Spike Jonze made this sci-fi trope fresh and heartbreaking, thanks to Joaquin Phoenix and the sexy, empathetic voice of Scarlett Johansson.
“12 Years a Slave” — The grim subject matter and the “history we need to know” label take nothing away from this black man’s eye-view of slavery in the years just before the Civil War. Any arguments over the allegedly “benign” nature of this “peculiar institution” are silenced by this unflinching depiction of its horrors, with Oscar worthy performances by Chiwitel Ejiofor and Adepero Oduye.
“Nebraska” — A Midwestern odyssey that follows a single-minded — and a little simple-minded — old alcoholic as he undertakes one last confused quest for himself and his legacy. Bruce Dern’s Woody is the performance of a lifetime, set off by hilarious June Squibb as the sort of woman any man would walk away from, given the excuse.

“All Is Lost” — Robert Redford does his best acting in decades as an old man, struggling with the sea and the small boat that is sinking underneath him. Call it exciting or call it existential, this J.C. Chandor picture is drama at its most elemental and most human.
“American Hustle” — The cast to this ABSCAM comic caper picture is so good that burning all the attention and Oscar buzz on Jennifer Lawrence is a crime. Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper are just as good. And Amy Adams is better, nothing short of brilliant and her grasping, needy but never bitter turn is the heart and soul of the picture.
“Saving Mr. Banks” — Emma Thompson is gloriously brittle as the author of “Mary Poppins,” a temperamental tempest who descends on Burbank, utterly immune to the charms of Walt Disney — and Tom Hanks, who plays Walt. Sentimental? Yes. Earnest. And overlong. But witty and ambitious and sympathetically acted by the leads, and supporting players such as as B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman and Paul Giamatti.

I’m a bit surprised by the generally positive reviews of “Anchorman 2.” Granted, it is a better film than the first one, smarter, with a target (cable TV news and the destruction of journalism) narrower than just “the ’70s” and more inviting than the first film could claim.

I liked it more than the original.

“American Hustle” is probably due for a little David O. Russell blowback. Overwhelmingly positive reviews. Are they all raves, “best picture of the year” and all that jazz? Fortunately, no. Good, but slick and kind of morally empty. Great turns by Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Shea Whigham.

“Saving Mr. Banks” opens wide Friday, and is a winner. Very good reviews, with Oscar buzz landing on Emma Thompson. A bit too long, but quite good, I thought.

“Her” goes into limited release, and earns its place on lot of top ten lists (mine included) as it does.

“Walking with Dinosaurs 3D” is a cutesy kids’ film in the “Land Before Time” vein — only with great animation and a strong educational ethos. Better than I’d expected, but I am in the minority on that one. Kids under age 12, but old enough to read? It’s for them. Not you.

The BBC series “Walking With Dinosaurs” gets a kid-friendly big screen treatment, complete with cutesy story and dino-poop jokes, in “Walking With Dinosaurs 3D.” Aimed squarely at that dino-crazy demographic (7-12), it pumps a few IQ points into a kid film genre sorely in need of them.
“Walking” takes care to ID each new dinosaur species introduced, including factoids about what they ate and any special skills they might have had. It’s downright educational. Just don’t tell your kids that.
Combining striking cinematography of some of the last great remote places on Earth (Alaska) with state-of-the art dinosaur animation, “Walking” is another “Great Migration” tale — herbivores heading south at the onset of Alaskan winter, hounded by all manner of carnivores and omnivores. But thankfully, it’s not just another “Land Before Time.”
A feeble modern-day framing device packs teenage Ricky (Charlie Rowe) and his tweenage sister Jade (Angourie Rice) off to visit their paleontologist uncle (Karl Urban) in Alaska. Jade’s down with digging for dinosaurs. But Ricky figures he already knows plenty about dinosaurs already and would rather play with his phone.
Then, a raven voiced by John Leguizamo gets the boy’s attention and tells him the tale of the bird’s ancestor, an Alexornis, a bird from the Cretaceous period. “Alex” is friends with a Pachyrhinosaurus, “Pachy,” voiced by Justin Long. We follow the baby Pachy out of the nest, through a few near death experiences and into adulthood as he migrates south with his herd, tries to stick to his bigger, tougher brother Scowler (Skylar Stone) and catch the eye of the fetching Juniper (Tiya Sircar).
They endure attacks by T-Rex like Troodons, Gorgosauruses and flying Pterosaurs, injuries and the threat of a forest fire.
“What’s fire? Does it eat meat?”
“It eats EVERYthing!”
Leguizamo, veteran of the “Ice Age” movies, cracks a few jokes along the trek — “If you want to know where the food is, follow the fat guys.”
Alex is a wiseacre of a narrator, rolling the film backward to deflate any claims of heroism Pachy makes in this incident or that one.
Of course there are dino-doo jokes and sibling rivalry zingers. But the biggest laughs are sight gags of the sort you might catch in a good nature film — simple behavior, simply observed.
Co-director Barry Cook came from animation (“Mulan”), and partnered up with BBC nature film vet Neil Nightingale (he produced “Meerkats: The Movie”). And while the tale they tell (the “Happy Feet” scribe wrote it) has dull patches that may try an adult’s patience, the animation is astonishingly real and the approach is just smart enough to keep your interest.
Computer-assisted animation has moved forward by leaps and bounds since “Jurassic Park” and Disney’s “Dinosaurs,” and dinosaur research is able to paint a more complete picture of how they looked, who had feathers, how they sounded and how they might have behaved.
The story they package all this in might be too childish for anybody over 12, but the research behind it and effort to pass that knowledge on to young dinosaur fans make “Walking With Dinosaurs 3D” as at home in the classroom as it is in theaters. But again, let’s keep that between us. No reason the kids need to know it might be good for them.
 
MPAA Rating: PG for creature action and peril, and mild rude humor
Cast: The voices of John Leguizamo, Tiya Sircar and Justin Long, with Charlie Rowe, Angourie Rice and Karl Urban
Credits: Directed by Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale, written by John Collee.  A  Fox release.
Running time: 1:26

“The Past” is a deliciously soapy French romantic mystery, a melodrama that gives that label a good name.
It’s about divorce and the rippling waves of pain caused by it and the affair that precipitated it. And the more we learn about who did what to whom and when, the more intriguing it becomes.
Ahmad, played by Iranian actor Ali Mosoffa, flies in to Paris and is met at the airport by Anne-Marie (Berenice Bejo of “The Artist”). There’s a warmth in that meeting, but something’s a bit off. We start to figure it out on their drive home.
He’s been gone for four years. She’s ready for a divorce. That’s why he’s come back.
The brittle undercurrent turns more tense when he arrives at what used to be there home. Anne-Marie’s daughter by an earlier marriage, Lea (Jeanne Jestin) remembers him, But there’s a strange, hostlile little boy, Fouad (Elyes Aguis). Anne-Marie, it turns out, has a new beau.
And Anne-Marie’s other daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet, a soulful, sadfaced teen) cannot stand him.
Ahmad finds himself sucked into some sort of domestic mess involving Lucie, Anne-Marie and Fouad’s father, Samir (Tahar Rahim). Yeah, mom took up with another Iranian.
Samir’s got a wife. She’s in a coma. And Ahmad cannot hide his unease at every fresh tidbit that someone adds to the mix, while Anne-Marie has troubling masking her guilt.
“What was that?”
“We call it a ‘smile.'”
“We call it mocking!”
Veteran writer-director Asghar Farhadi takes his time unraveling all this French (with English subtitles) soap opera, maintaining a faint suspense as he does. Emotions, repressed or not, are high. We worry what the combustible little Fouad will do (he’s messing with knives, having tantrums, the works), how Lucie’s teen angst will express itself.
Mosaffa is very good at taking on the role of “the adult” here, Rahim underplays a sort of quiet, guilty resentment to perfection and Bejo makes Anne-Marie seem perfectly reasonable — until that instant she isn’t.
The surprises in “The Past” don’t justify its length, but Farhadi has created a believable, lived-in world of cluttered kitchens, cramped small businesses, a Parisian community of Iranian expats and the little people with big problems who inhabit them. Like the characters in this inter-connected world, you may feel the need to let go of “The Past,” only to realize, after the credits, the hold it still has on you.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for mature thematic material and brief strong language
Cast:  Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim, Ali Mosaffa
Credits: Directed by  Asghar Farhadi, written by Asghar Farhadi and Massoumeh Lahidji.  A  Sony Classics release. 
Running time: 2:10

All the various film awards and nominations are piling up at the same doorsteps this year, a monotonous drumbeat of “12 Years a Slave” and “Gravity” acclaim. Those films, from “Dallas Buyer’s Club” to “All is Lost,” earn a new lease on life, thanks to the fickle finger of “awards season.”
But with over-rated pap (“Hunger Games”,”Frozen”) sucking every other season-ending cent out of the box office, it’s time to reflect on the good movies you missed while you were wasting hours and bucks on “Pacific Rim”, “Thor” and “R.I.P.D.”
With hundreds of releases, many which didn’t play far and wide, you can be excused for missing a few gems. But there’s no excuse now. Here are ten titles worth tracking down in their video afterlife over the holidays.

“Blue Caprice” — Maybe the star, the still-controversial Isaiah Washington, kept this from the sort of attention it merited. But his performance as D.C. sniper Svengali John Allen Muhammad was the most chilling performance of 2013 — amoral, bitter, petty and manipulative. Very disturbing.

“The Spectacular Now” — Yes, “The Way, Way Back” got the box office bounce among the summer’s slew of slight coming-of-age comedies. But this one, about teen love, co-dependency and alcoholism, was far and away the best of the bunch. It’s a charming just-say-yes comedy that turns smart and serious and heartfelt the moment Shailene Woodley shows up.

“Prince Avalanche” — Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch paint a lines on a road through a burnt-out forest in Texas. “Deadpan” defined.

“In a World…” Gorgeous actress Lake Bell takes us into the sexist, ego maniacal world of movie trailer voice-over announcers, and this laugh-out-loud romp with a touch of feminism is what resulted.

“Stories We Tell” — Sarah Polley set out to document the story of her parents and her odd, headline-making childhood.  And darned if she doesn’t shock herself and us as she does. You’d have to be Canadian to know even a hint of this story of marriage, secrets, tragedy and the way we spin our personal history to make it palatable to others.

“Drinking Buddies” — Call it a male wish fulfillment fantasy if you want, but a best friend who loves beer and looks like Olivia Wilde? Win win. The fact that she’s wonderful, as the lonesome lager lover who is the last to figure out that the guy (Jake Johnson) she loves knocking back a few craft beers with is her soul mate, is a bonus.

“Mud” — All the Oscar buzz for Matthew McConaughey is for his nuanced, swaggering, not-dead-yet-AIDs patient turn in “Dallas Buyer’s Club.” But his take on title character in this river romance/coming of age fable is downright mythic. It did decent business, for an indie film. Which still isn’t much. Rent it.

“Parkland” — Buffs tend to want their Kennedy Assassination movies to give us conspiracies. This is the straight story, as seen by the folks at the hospital where the president was taken that fateful day. We see the confusion, the heartbreak and the grim business of emergency room medicine, and where the seeds of doubt were planted for all the future conspiracy buffs. Missteps and CYA efforts fed the fascination with the most infamous murder in American history.

“Grabbers” — No zombies, vampires or serial killers, here. Just blood-sucking aliens invading a tiny Irish island in the funniest, most jarring of the year’s many MANY horror offerings. The Irish get to save civilization again by figuring out a most Irish solution to this menace. Scary, funny, with a wee touch of the “diddly aye.”

“Still Mine” — James Cromwell is the stubborn, self-sufficient Canadian who wants to build his wife (Genevieve Bujold) a house that will keep her out of a group home (she has Alzheimer’s) a bit longer. Sublime, wry, with Cromwell charmingly folksy and the little-seen Bujold reminding us just how fearless an actress she was and remains.

As Nelson Mandela, Idris Elba towers over the rest of the cast in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.” That’s literally true and perfectly accurate. Mandela was tall, as is Elba (of the “Thor” movies and “Takers”). And Elba manages both the voice and a hint of the presence of the great man.
He tends to tower over the movie, as well, in this comprehensive but generally dry account of one man’s journey from upwardly mobile attorney to activist to revolutionary to statesman. There are no “name” actors arrayed against him as his South African oppressors. Some of the sense of struggle is lost when you spend almost all your charismatic cash on your leading man and don’t give him villains of equal stature.
With “Long Walk,” the screenwriter of “Gladiator” and “Les Miserables” and director Justin Chadwick, at home in period pieces (“The Other Boleyn Girl”) and Africa (“The First Grader”) manage a comprehensive history lesson that approaches but never quite achieves “epic.” They’re better at humanizing their hero than Richard Attenborough was with “Gandhi,” for instance. But there’s barely a hint of grandeur and triumph to this amazing story.
Like Gandhi, Mandela was a lawyer who came to the conclusion that working within an unjust system wasn’t going to pay off. Unlike Gandhi, Mandela turned to violence. Unlike Gandhi, Mandela was no saint. And unlike Gandhi, Mandela was a player.
“Long Walk to Freedom” captures the womanizing attorney in 1942 who figures that “education, hard work and pride” are the secrets to his success and to that of any black South African. He just has to ignore all the times the white Boers call him “boy.”
Trying to get justice for a friend murdered in police custody is what radicalizes him. He finds his purpose and his voice, speaking out for equality.
“‘They’ are having a party, and we are not invited.”
His political activism and wandering eye cost him his first marriage. His life, his cause and the movie get a serious jolt of electricity when he meets, courts and marries his much younger second-wife Minnie in the late 1950s.
Naomie Harris is at her most beguiling in their courtship and marriage scenes, two modern Africans who don first Western wedding wear, then traditional tribal attire for their nuptials. Then Harris lets us see the rage and hatred rise up in Winnie, the imprisonment, interrogations and mistreatment that fired her fury. Nelson was in prison, having been convicted of terrorism agitation, bombings of power plants and the like. Winnie, given even worse treatment, the film suggests, seethes. She decides to take everything to the next level.
“I HATE them so much!” she fumes, plotting her revenge.
In this script, Winnie is the counterpoint to Nelson’s journey from principled revolutionary to pragmatic yet still principled negotiator and conciliator. He ages into wisdom and grows into the job of “leader.” Winnie dons combat fatigues and punishes “traitors” and “informers” within her own community in ways every bit as horrifying as the regime.
The story feels simplified, but never simplistic. There’s nothing of Mandela’s dalliance with the wider world of politics (communism) and the dictators (Qaddafi) he embraced, anyone who would lend a sympathetic ear to his and his people’s plight. Snippets of newscasts feed us the decades it took for the world to pay attention to and devise a strategy (divestment, sanctions) to help him end Apartheid.
The framework captures Mandela’s tribal childhood, if not the abrupt transition from grass huts to law school. As long as the film is, one feels his famous 1960s trial and the war of wills he fought in prison are shortchanged. But there are still lovely grace notes — gorgeous African panoramas, moments of grief — personal and national.
And looming large above this “Long Walk” is Elba, in a mostly still performance, one of quietly compelling authority that dominates every moment — save for those when Harris shows up and sets the screen on fire.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of violence and disturbing images, sexual content and brief strong language
Cast: Idris Elba, Naomie Harris
Credits: Directed by Justin Chadwick, written by William Nicholson, based on Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.”   A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 2:15

King of quirky Spike Jonze sets out in search of the profound in his profoundly simply sci-fi romance “Her.” A “How I Met Your OS (operating system)” comedy, “Her” is a search for the essence of what we really want out of love, separating the physical from the psycho-spiritual meeting of the minds.
An austere film of heartache and self-assessment, it has an aching loneliness about it that only a movie about a man who falls in love with a sentient computer-generated voice and mind could manage.
Joaquin Phoenix is Theodore, a professional love letter writer of the not-that-distant future. He is a true romantic and is good at his job. But he is deflated and depressed and alone. He’s going through a divorce.
Smart phones have become brilliant phones in this future, connecting Theodore to all manner of media by his compact, wallet-sized companion. Can’t sleep? Anonymous, random phone-sex chat is but a voice command away.
Then he downloads a new “intuitive entity,” an OS that is a learning, empathetic, all-knowing companion. “Samantha,” unlike his testy, brittle ex-wife (Rooney Mara), “gets” him. In an instant.
Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation”) cast the voices in this movie of a world of disembodied voices with extraordinary care, none more than his “Samatha.” Scarlett Johansson’s scratchy, sexy, playful voice is used to great effect as we listen to this machine-generated person learn about Theodore, sympathize with him and fall in love with him. And Phoenix, doing almost all his scenes solo, lets us believe that this crazy notion — which is really just an short extrapolation from where our plugged in and tuned out society is now — is real. Theodore falls for Samantha. Hard.
He makes the leap from “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my computer” to hurting Samantha’s feelings. Because Samatha has feelings.
Jonze lets us laugh at the idea of this in a lot of ways, because on first blush, this is ridiculous. But as vulnerable Theodore botches a blind date (Olivia Wilde) simply because he’s too damaged to let good things happen, the sensitivity of “Her” steps forward.
The fashions are dress-down funky –Hushpuppies have won the shoe wars. But it’s no great leap to see legions of commuters chattering away, seemingly to themselves, ear-buds plugged in, human race tuned out. We’re living in that world now.
And as Theodore and then others around him (Amy Adams and the omnipresent Chris Pratt play friends) accept this “relationship,” you start to wonder just which tech companies are working on this final social frontier. Is there an OS that can be a balm to a lonely world?
And this being a romance, you wonder where it can go or how it might end? Jonze cleverly ponders the soon-to-be-ponderable?
Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

MPAA Rating:  R for language, sexual content and brief graphic nudity.
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, the voice of Scarlett Johansson
Credits: Written and directed by Spike Jonze. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:00