Movie Nation

Few personal documentaries can boast of the sort of notices the Canadian actress/director Sarah Polley has earned for her film, “Stories We Tell.” This dissection of her family history — her actor father, the actress/casting director who died when Sarah was 11, the secret that they all kept from her — plays like “a mystery uncovered like a detective story, wrapped in a love letter,” raves The New York Daily News, a film informed by Polley’s own “deep sense of personal ethics.” (New York Times).
But Polley admits she’s felt more relief than pride at the film’s notices. “Stories We Tell” has her father narrating the story of his life and marriage and Sarah’s place in it, but also has siblings, half-siblings, other relatives, friends and family describing her late mother and her parents’ marriage. It brings up old news stories that were a source of humiliation, and new revelations about that family and Sarah’s lineage that could be embarrassing.
“The scariest thing was that I knew I could be setting my family up for judgement,” she says. “I tried my best to be as authentic with them as I could, and trusted that what I love about them would come through. I’ve been surprised by how sympathetic people have been to my family as they come off in the film. I was making other people vulnerable by making this, and I took that seriously.”
An actress since age 4, an Oscar nominated screenwriter as an adult, Polley is something of a phenomenon in her native Canada. But she realized that her story, from TV’s “Avonlea” to “My Life Without Me,” her Oscar nominated “Away From Her” and the recent “Take This Waltz” is run of the mill compared to this complicated family history she was sitting on — that her parents aren’t who she thought they were.
“What interested me was the number of ways the story was being told. We all have an obsession with creating a narrative out of the major events of our life, to provide structure and context. Structurally, when I set out, this was going to be a lot more like ‘Rashomon” (the famous Japanese film that recreates a crime by having its story told from many points of view). I figured I’d do my dad’s version of the story, my version and another version. And then it become more interesting to add in these other points of view and sprinkle them throughout the story.”
She used actors to recreate old home movies of her mother and their lives before she came along. And she presented conflicting evidence the way it was presented to her.
“I wanted to give the audience a parallel experience to the one I had, hearing these stories. I was never sure if what I was hearing was fact, or if it was faulty memory or nostalgia. I wanted the audience to wonder if what they are seeing is real.”
The result is a documentary that recreates a Swinging ’60s and ’70s in Canada, a mercurial “free spirit” mother, a frustrated father who gave up acting, pretty much, to raise a family and the daughter that emerged from that troubled marriage’s most troubled period.
“I sort of knew what I was going to end up with, in this search of my parents’ past,” Polley says. “And I had a lot of hesitation about putting this story out in public. I had hints other people knew, and I was a bit worried about how this information might get out into the world, without all the perspectives I included in the film. I wanted all these other voices heard. It would have felt really bruising for a journalist to report this from their perspective instead of me trying to bear witness to everybody who was somehow involved in it. On top of all the other reasons for wanting to make this, I did it to avoid the bruises.”

(the Movie Review: “Stories We Tell” is linked here)

Just once, it’d be nice if the couple fleeing from a trigger-happy hit man through, say, a crowded hospital, would yell out — “Run for your lives!” And if the hospital’s in Belgium, say,it’d be nice for them to yell it in French.
“Erased” has such a scene, where Aaron Eckhart, as a security contractor whose company, bank records and recent history have been “erased,” is fleeing with his daughter (Liana Liberato). And you can’t help but feel for the innocent doctors, nurses and patients on gurneys who catch a bullet during the mayhem. Don’t they deserve a warning?
“Erased” is a run of the mill “Bourne” imitation in which covert operatives are desperate to tidy up a scheme in which American-expat Ben Logan may be the only witness. It’s an exposition-heavy thriller with that generic Euro-thriller blue-grey color palette and duller than grey villains, all chasing the good guy and his daughter through scenic Brussels and Antwerp, Belgium.
What Colin Farrell said about Bruges during “In Bruges” leaps to mind during the travelogue moments.
We’ve seen the scars on Ben’s back. We know he’s reluctant to use Liam Neeson’s line from “Taken,” announcing he has very “particular skills.” But he does. His bratty teen daughter Amy is slow to catch on.
“You can kill a man with your bare hands,” Amy shouts. He can speak languages she’s never heard, evade security cameras in a crowded train station — “Corners are safe.”
“What kind of father can do these things?”
One with very particular skills, of course.
There’s a staggering amount of plot to be explained, which greatly slows down this chase picture which takes father-and-daughter into a high-stakes arms smuggling and a Belgian underworld of illegal Middle Eastern immigrants. Yassine Fadel engagingly plays a would-be boyfriend of Amy who is their guide into this world.
And every so often, Euro-trash shooters with silenced pistols gun a bunch of people down as Ben ably fights and thinks his way through all this. Not that Amy knows when to duck.
“Just a flesh wound,” goes the favored cliche of weary thriller writers. Rare moments remind us that director Philip Stolzl (“North Face,” “Young Goethe in Love”) has done better work, but not in thrillers.
Eckhart is in fine form, but apparently, they blew all their Euros on him. Hitchcock’s worn out maxim about “Good villains make good thrillers” was ignored here, with only the pretty but slight Olga Kurylenko to provide name-recognition menace.
Nobody else leaves an impression. The other baddies are just as faceless as those Belgian bystanders mowed down because nobody has the good manners to yell “RUN.”

MPAA Rating:R for violence
Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Liana Liberato, Olga Kurylenko,Neil Napier, Yassine Fadel
Credits: Directed by Philip Stolzl, written by Amash Amel. A Radius/TWC release.
Running time: 1:44

The giddiness of “Star Trek” is gone, but “Star Trek Into Darkness” maintains its love of character and pathos, the other great selling points of this re-booted sci-fi franchise. There’s action in abundance and some production design flourishes that are as eye-popping as any science fiction ever to hit the screen.
But as our old friend Ricardo Montalban said thirty years ago in “The Wrath of Khan,” still the best of the “Star Treks” — “It is veeery coooooold in space.” “Into Darkness,” for all its dense textures and epic scale, left me cold.
Director J.J. Abrams, who has owned up to not having an emotional attachment to the TV show or the movies it spawned, commissioned his screenwriters to do a riff on “Wrath of Khan,” an alternate history of the Khan myth. So knowing the Classic Trek version — dating from a TV episode in the ’60s, updated with the ’80s movie — doesn’t help in appreciating the new one, or spoil its surprises.
That’s both good and bad — good in its novelty, bad in the sense that it still relies on the original series’ back story to draw on. “Remaking” “The Wrath of Khan” while not actually actually remaking it muddies the message and robs the villain and the story of its mythic staying power.
In terms of tone, “Darkness” is balanced between the original series and the more pacifist “Next Generation” — an action film with a staggering body count, and characters protesting the morality of combat by remote control.
Abrams is intent on delivering a more democratic “Trek” in which all of the principals have big scenes, big moments and serious character development. Thus Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) shows off her linguistic competence, and her emotional attachment to the recklessly selfless Spock (Zachary Quinto). Scotty (Simon Pegg) displays moral objections to the new ways of war.
And everyone has his or her ethics, courage and convictions tested by a new villain, a terrorist (Benedict Cumberbatch) whose agenda is a mystery even more puzzling if you remember “The Wrath of Khan.”
In a bravura intro, Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock try to intervene without intervening in a primitive, red-foliage planet whose simple, belligerent natives are about to be wiped out by a volcano. Kirk wants to act, Spock wants to lecture him on “the Prime Directive” (no interference), one of many “technicalities” that rule his life.
“I am a Vulcan, sir. We embrace technicalities!”
Kirk faces demotion, the crew of the Enterprise may be broken up, and then the mysterious terrorist starts blowing stuff up at Starfleet. Is he connected with the “sworn enemy” Klingons? Can the bad guy be taken out by photon torpedo drone strikes? Can Kirk convince the admiral (Peter Weller of “Robocop”) that only he can save the day?
The 3D here is stunning and that depth of field is put to good use in space battles and on alien worlds. Abrams and his writers toss in scads of offhand references to the Trek universe — Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) shows up, Nurse Chappel is mentioned, Chekov (Anton Yelchin) kvetches like never before.
There’s plenty of humor leavening all the weighty questions about who is a terrorist and who has the moral high ground. Scotty has the best lines, especially when he’s had a few to drink.
“If it isn’t Captain James Tiberius Perfect Hair!”
But the movie’s a muddle, a piece that Abrams seems to want to turn into a “Lost” puzzle that makes more sense in his head than on the screen. The confusing conflation of past films and alternate universe story is burdensome. And Cumberbatch makes a decent villain but a much better TV Sherlock Holmes.
“Star Trek” is still boldly going its own way, even as it references the classic “Trek” canon. But somewhere along the way, Abrams got lost in the Galaxy of Not Much Fun.

LINK: (Would this deleted Benedict Cumberbatch scene have helped?”)

LINK: (This “Trek” is all about ensemble.)
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence
Cast: Chris Pine, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Alice Eve, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin
Credits: Directed by J.J. Abrams, written  by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof. A Paramount release.
Running time: 2:12

The movie’s about disaffected teens who run away and rough it in the woods over summer vacation. And they’re funny.

But the hilarious characters in “The Kings of Summer” are Nick Offerman (“Parks & Recreation”) and Megan Mullally (“Will & Grace”), his wife in real life. He plays a sarcastic, tuned-out single dad of one kid, she’s the micro-managing “nice” mom who smothers one of the other kids with affection and supervision.

Questions for either of them? Comment below.

Well, at least the credits to “Black Rock” showed promise.
It was written by one of the Duplass brothers, creators of “The Puffy Chair,” “Cyrus” and “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Mark Duplass wrote it for a member of that “Puffy Chair” circle, actress turned actress-director Katie Aselton, his wife.
But slumming in the land of the horror-thriller doesn’t pay off for anyone involved. “Rock” is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.
Lake Bell, playing one of a trio of single thirtyish women off for a camping trip on the tiny coastal New England island of their youth, puts it best.
“This is SUCH a bad idea.”
Sarah (Kate Bosworth) has lured Lou (Bell) and Abby (Aselton), two ex-friends estranged since high school (over a boy, naturally) under false pretenses. They’ll spend a weekend on remote Black Rock, remembering old times, drinking, digging up a time capsule they buried there in their youth. Just us girls, right?
They’ve barely stepped out of the surf when they run into three hunters (Jay Paulson, Will Bouvier and Anslem Richardson), younger guys whose older siblings they knew in high school. And when the ladies ask the one pertinent question that will determine the rest of of their weekend, they utterly botch their reaction to it.
“Wait, is it hunting season?”
Um, no. And these guys? Fresh out of the military. “Dishonorable discharges,” they offer. And still the women don’t flee.
Because that would prevent the drunken night of mixed signals, attempted rape and violent self-defense. That would preclude the women fleeing into the dark, chased by unstable creeps armed to the teeth. That would spare us this pearl of Duplass-scripted wisdom.
“They’re trained soldiers! Trained to KILL people!”
Aselton and her comrades get to be beautiful actresses all roughed up from the wilderness and being hunted. Their responses to their peril are predictable and not particularly inventive. The movies have a century of “Most Dangerous Game” stories to draw on, unarmed, unprepared people struggling to outwit armed stalkers.
What do these ladies do? They strip. Naked.
“We have to get out of these wet clothes!”
The plot-driven nature of this exercise means that nobody makes much of an impression, save for the gorgeous Bell, who shows up on set with presence to burn. The stunts, escapes and fights are grim and grisly, but generic. We’ve seen all this before.
And despite the odd moment of sisterly bonding (the point of view sometimes switches to the camp of the inexplicably psychotic men), there’s little here aside from that plot and a vague curiosity.
Who will live, who will die? And whose wet clothes will dry first?

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, pervasive language, sexual references and brief graphic nudity
Cast: Kate Bosworth, Lake Bell, Katie Aselton
Credits: Directed by Katie Aselton, scripted by Mark Duplass. An LD Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:21