Movie Nation

Yeah, it’s a radio show on NPR. But it’s coming to theaters a week from next Thursday, and far be it for me to pass up the chance to turn the interrogation tables on Peter Sagal, the host of the weekly news quiz show.
It’s a panel show, with people like comic Paula Poundstone and humorist Tom Bodette sitting on it, most weeks.
Fathom Events is televising the show, live, Thursday May 2 to theaters. A public radio show that becomes, in essence, a movie. Where have we seen that before?
How about you? Got suggestions for questions?

Jeff Bridges, WAY over the top. Ryan Reynolds, in AWE of it. Dead cops keeping dead bad guys from re-infecting the EArth. Dazzling effects and laugh-out-loud gags. “R.I.P.D.” opens July 19.

The original came out in 2004, when Vince and Ben & the “Frat Pack” were at their peak.

Now, almost ten years later, Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn and a screenwriter are envisioning a sequel, with Ben and Vince on the same side this time around.

Really? Vince has “The Internship” that could boost his quote this summer, and Stiller has “Walter Mitty” in the can. Do they really need this?

“At Any Price” is an engrossing if somewhat over-the-top “trouble on the farm” melodrama. The troubles facing this corner of Iowa fall just short of Biblical as they pack in everything but a drought and plagues of locusts.
Indie director Ramin Bahrani leaves behind the spare, mournful character studies that made his name — films like “Chop Shop” and “Goodbye, Solo.” Here, he’s a kid in a cinematic candy store, delivering an embarrassment of character actor riches.
Dennis Quaid is Henry Whipple, not the stoic, righteous farmer of our collective memory but a grinning, back-slapping hustler. The new “expand or die” ethos in farming isn’t new to him. “When a man stops wanting, a man stops living” he preaches, even showing up at funerals to get an inside track on a dead man’s acreage.
Henry learned this from his hard-bitten old man (Red West of “Goodbye Solo”).
“Don’t you LOSE what my daddy started,” the old man barks.
Henry has plans to pass on his farm to his oldest, but that kid hasn’t come home from college. There’s no point in pitching the legacy to his youngest son, Dean (Zac Efron). The kid is ashamed of what his dad has become, and is hellbent on becoming a NASCAR star, learning his craft at the local dirt track. He rejects Dad’s overtures and busts into out-of-town auto parts stores to customize his race car.
His high school age girlfriend Cadence (Maika Monroe, a real find) is from a troubled home and lives with the Whipples, where Henry tries to give her “life lessons.”  But with Dad cheating the genetically modified seed company he works for and  cheating with the Co-Op secretary (Heather Graham, playing another in a long line of tramps), only mom (Kim Dickens, terrific) seems to grasp what they all miss.
“Why can’t you be happy with what’s right in front of you?”
The film grapples with a household full of broken dreams. Henry, given a marvelous brave-front on a drowning man take by Quaid, is losing his hold on his bio-seed client base to another aggressive salesman farmer (Clancy Brown). Mom ruefully watches PBS travel shows and wonders if she’ll ever get to take a trip with this round-the-clock business they’ve bought into. Dean’s NASCAR hopes and Cadence’s dreams of Dean are all in for a test.
Bahrani piles melodramatic flourishes on top of this solid base of characters and almost overwhelms the film, at times. But then, Quaid’s Henry will flinch in the presence of his taskmaster father, or Brown will show us a side never seen in his lifetime of character roles. Graham will wince at the realization of what her character is and Monroe will wear the hurt of one last “life lesson” that isn’t from Henry.
Beneath all the melodrama, beyond the fine performances, what sets “At Any Price” apart is the depiction of farming as it is today, the salesmanship, the traditions and ideals abandoned for greater profits and easier work and the ruthless world these patented “high yield” seeds have made. If the Whipples aren’t the poor but proud Joads of “The Grapes of Wrath,” or the embattled Ivys of “Country,” it’s because they’ve been remade by the changing landscape they work in and twisted by what it takes to thrive in this toxic environment.
“At Any Price” could just as easily be titled “At What Cost.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content including a strong graphic image, and for language
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron, Kim Dickens, Heather Graham, Clancy Brown, Maika Monroe
Credits: Directed by Ramin Bahrani,  written by Ramin Bahrani and Hallie Elizabeth Newton. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:45

There’s something utterly unnerving about seeing a child with an AK-47. He can be
Nigerian, Sudanese or Canadian, but the sense of innocence lost, of that “Lord of the Flies” cruel streak too many of us carry with us makes the image of a twelve-year-old looking down a barrel with pure malice just chilling.

“I Declare War,” co-directed by Jason Lapeyre and  Robert Wilson, is an allegory about kids’ playing war that works better as entertainment than as allegory. The toy guns that this group of Canadian boys (and one girl) make out of sticks, cans, what have you, transform into real weapons blazing away with live rounds in the action sequences of this elaborate kids’ game run amok. And when they do, combat movie cliches fall one after the other as the kids cross the line from fun-and-games to psychosis and torture.

P.K. (Gage Munroe) is the unbeatable leader of one combat team in this urban forest game of capture the flag. He has cunning, the loyalty of his half-dozen troops, and braces. For his teeth. He’s 12.

Kwon (Siam Yung), his best friend, is also his most loyal soldier. Smaller than the rest, he avoids bullying by playing along and sticking close to P.K.

Quinn (Aidan Gouveia) is the fair-haired leader of the opposition. He’s oblivious as to why a girl (Mackenzie Munro, a younger Emma Stone) would join his troop. But she’s got “techniques” and “skills”these boys don’t understand. Even though she’s still practicing using her feminine wiles, you know they kids will be putty in her hands.

Paint balloon become grenades and whittled sticks become machine guns in firefight as the two teams go on patrol, feel each other out and seek each other’s base.

There’s a religious pacifist kid, a couple of bullies, one more psychotic than the other, a mysterious, unspeaking “scout” who covers terrain with his faithful husky (This is Canada, after all), and ambitions, fears, prejudices and terrors that play out in the course of this epic battle.

Torturing prisoners? Sneaking non-combatants into the enemy camp? Selling out your best friend? It’ll all happen in this hellish “War,” a film a little too long and too broad to fully come off as a “This is what happens when you go into combat” allegory. The kids’ performances are uneven (They are children, after all) and the story takes a very long time to get where it’s going.

Still, it’s engrossing, violent, frightening and funny in the ways it captures the way kids speak with no adults around, and the way kids act when society’s rules take a back seat in time of war.

Music’s School of Hard Knocks produces another alumna in “Filly Brown,” a gritty and well-acted  Latin hip hop variation of a long reliable formula.
Gina Rodriguez delivers a breakout performance in the title role, a tough, two-fisted rapper named Majo whose two goals in life intersect — to become a star and make enough money to get her mom (the late Jenni Rivera) out of prison.
When Mom couples another plea for help with some scribbled down rhymes, the “lady on the mike,” vows to make her move. She finds herself a DJ (Braxton Millz) who can mix some promising melodies (” a mix that drips”) and sets her eye on catching the attention of record label owner Big Cee (Noel Gugliemi).
“He liked what I spit,” she enthuses. Then come the compromises — the need to “sex it up” and “merch it up.” And then come the family complications, fresh barriers to her success and her credibility.
What’s truly novel here is the world captured by writer-director Yousef Delara and his co-director Michael D. Olmos. It’s insular and self-sustaining. Need cash? First ask Uncle Mani (Emilio Rivera), who makes a mint with his tattoo business. Need exposure? Go on Khool-Aid”s web radio show.
Rodriguez gives a fierceness to this character that makes it only natural for the guys she’s confronting to try and calm her down with “Relax DUDE.” She’s comfortable with the slang and charismatic at the mike.
A couple of veterans of the Latin film scene lend “Filly Brown” some gravitas. Edward James Olmos is the lawyer who sees more to Majo’s mom than she’ll let herself see. And Lou Diamond Phillips plays the hard-working contractor father who is dealing with his own “stay true to yourself” issues when his work is threatened by white realtors who don’t like seeing tattoo-covered crews working on their properties.
There’s nothing much new here, but the performances and the milieu make “Filly Brown” an entertaining, honorable installment in a story that is the American Dream incarnate, and has been ever since the first wannabe showed up on Tin Pan Alley at the beginning of the last century.

MPAA Rating:R for language, some drug use and violence
Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jenni Rivera, Edward James Olmos
Credits: Directed by Yousef Delara and Michael D. Olmos, written by Yousef Delara . A Pantelion release.
Running time: 1:38

The cinema’s leading purveyor of Southern Gothic, Jeff Nichols, hands Matthew McConaughey his latest tour de force turn in “Mud,” a down and dirty if entirely-too-long mythic melodrama in the “Tobacco Road” tradition.
Nichols (“Shotgun Stories,” “Take Shelter”) has cooked up an exotic stew that includes obsessive love, a woman unworthy of it, a criminal on the run and a Huck Finn coming of age tale set against a dying way of life in backwaters Arkansas.
Ellis (Tye Sheridan, terrific) is a poor kid who lives on one of the last houseboats allowed on that stretch of shoreline. He and his buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) have the run of the river, know their way around skiffs and boat motors. But Ellis’ daddy (Ray McKinnon), who fishes for a living, knows they’re one misstep from being kicked off the houseboat his wife inherited. And when Ellis and Neckbone stumble across a man named Mud hiding out in an abandoned cabin cruiser jammed high in a tree on a mid-river island, that mistake seems already made.
Mud (McConaughey) is in “a tight spot,” he drawls, “and could use a little help.” He’d like to fix up this boat, which the boys covet themselves. Is he “Night of the Hunter” dangerous, or “Stand By Me” loyal? Mud, it turns out, is waiting on a woman, “a dream you don’t want to wake up from.” And since Ellis is in the middle of his first crush, and has a touch of chivalry about him, he agrees to help Mud.
Reese Witherspoon is Juniper, a Britney-trashy bombshell who has lived off how well she fills out a pair of Daisy Dukes her whole life. Ellis becomes go-between for Mud and Juniper, and being a growing boy, learns hard life lessons from them both.
Nichols revels in the milieu here, capturing authentic Southern voices and classic, over-heated Southern melodrama — revenge, betrayal, strained family ties and attitudes toward women that date from the time of Jezebel. And it’s all in this indistinct berg on the very buckle of the South’s Piggly Wiggly belt.
McConaughey has truly found his place within the film firmament in Southern Gothic movies like this one and “Killer Joe.” Mud is full of folk wisdom and singular in purpose. Michael Shannon plays a river diver and inattentive uncle to Neckbone. McKinnon, with a physique straight out of the Dust Bowl and a Fried Green Tomatoes accent, is the very picture of rural, working class Red State integrity. And Sam Shepard is a mysterious, secretive houseboat neighbor who figures into the story.
It doesn’t trivialize “Mud” to label it Tennessee Williams lite — at least in its romantic notions. Nichols gets good performances out of one and all, but lets himself get so caught up in his sense of place that this potboiler hangs around more than a few minutes after that pot has come to a boil.
But “Mud” is a vivid reminder that for all the changes cable TV and Interstate highways have wrought, there still corners of the country we hear very little about, places with a voice, vibe and vigor that are still distinctly emphatically Southern.

(Roger Moore’s interview with Matthew McConaughey about “living off the grid” is here.)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence, sexual references, language, thematic elements and smoking
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon
Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Nichols. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 2:10