Movie Nation

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.

Showings: Floridafilmfestival.com

Is there life after “Twilight,” Stephenie Meyer? At least at the movies?

Critics, who carped away at various installments of “The Twilight Saga” are almost uniform in their scorn, or at least dismissal of Meyer’s follow-up book-turned-film, “The Host.”

Not terrible reviews. Just all negative. Almost all. I went easier on it than some, but man.

“G.I. Joe: Retaliation” got off quite a bit easier. Stupid, but some fun bits. Having a sense of humor might have helped Stephenie Meyer.

“On the Road” opens in most markets this weekend. Not great, not terrible. Not “The Host,” that’s for sure. It has a sense of a time, a place and a restless need to wander, to be somewhere you’re not. Right now. Mixed reviews on that one.

Nothing mixed about “Room 237,” the deconstruction, by fanatics, of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Fascinating for a film buff.

The brilliantly, hilariously offbeat “History of Future Folk” is a sci-fi comic thriller folk music musical.

Even its genre is a hoot.

There’s this goofy janitor (Nils d’Aulaire) and dad who tells his daughter funny bedtime stories about a distant planet, Hondo.

And after she’s gone to bed, he dons a space suit and a bucket helmet, picks up a banjo and hits a New York city club where he tells that same story, in between bizarre little banjo ditties. And it’s TRUE. He’s a general in the Hondo military, General Treus. He’s come to scout out the best way to invade.

Only he got distracted. By music (Very “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). Bluegrass music, it turns out.

We don’t take him seriously until the assassin Kevin (Jay Klaitz) shows up and just misses his chance to kill the treasonous (he’s not done his duty) General Treus. But Kevin, too, gets the bluegrass bug. He picks up the guitar. He sings.

Next thing you know, they’e an indie late night New York sensation — burbling marvelously catchy ditties “farming space worms” on Hondo, in between bluegrass covers of “Hava Nagila” “The Moonliht Sonata.”

“The History of Future Folk” veers from daft offstage scenes to deliriously musical onstage ones as Klaitz and d’Alulaire work the crowd into a “future folk” frenzy. Whatever the “story” about the clock ticking down to an alien invasion as the two aliens struggle to reconcile their feelings for Earth, Earth music and Earth women, the musical moments in this are just magical.

Showings: Floridafilmfestival.com

The scenario has the ring of familiarity — a friend dies, so a couple of mates resolve to bury him in a poetically appropriate place. It’s what happened to folk-rocker Gram Parsons, whose pals smuggled him out to Joshua Tree National Monument and cremated him there.
That legendary stunt drives “The Taiwan Oyster,” a winning road picture about hard-drinking young American ex-pats teaching English to kids in Taiwan.

Simon (Billy Harvey) is a would-be writer who longs for a magazine job, and seems on the verge of landing one.

“I feel like a minor character in someone else’s story.”

If only he could decide. On anything. If only he could stop drinking with his buds, who spike their binges with vows of loyalty and tests of drunken bravado.

Which is how one of them dies. Which is how Darin (Jeff Palmiotti) talks him into taking the body of their not-quite-friend (They barely know him) to a spot Hank Williams might approve of (the guy had named a Hank tune as his funeral dirge) and put him to rest.

They get a truck and manage to steal the body, with the help of the impulsive and fetching Nikita (Leonora Lim), an employee of the morgue. She promptly joins their quest.

And they’re off, trying to carry out the last wishes of a guy they don’t really know, bickering over how to do that all the way across Taiwan.

Mark Jarrett’s amiable road picture has a morbid whimsy and a coming-of-age hook as it follows this trio through thick and then, and captures lovely, under-filmed Taiwan at its most-attractive and charming. And the players, not yet famous, make their thinly drawn characters appealing in spite of their many obvious shortcomings.

Showings: Floridafilmfestival.com

Jason Chaet’s wafer-thin romantic comedy “Putzel” is about a put-upon loser, Walter (Jack T. Carpenter) who only wants to inherit the family business, Himmelstein’s House of Lox.

It’s all he’s known and all he’ll probably ever know. It’s how the Upper West Side sees him, the kid (30ish) who knows his whitefish.

His wife’s ditched him, the guy she cheated with (Adrian Martinez) can’t understand why Walter would hold a grudge. His Uncle Sid (John Pankow) owns and runs the place, but would love to sell it out from under Walter to finance his dreams of running off with a woman who isn’t his wife.

He’ll not feel guilty about it either, no matter what Putzel pleads.

Jewish “guilt is like the GPS of the Soul!”

And that woman (Melanie Lynskey) also has Walter the Putzel’s attention. Will the downtrodden Walter convince Sally (Lynskey, of “Win Win” and “Perks of Being a Wallflower”) that her future lies with him? And is his future in lox?

The performances have a dry, predictable charm about them, with Lynskey alone suggesting layers of hurt and fear and vulnerability beneath the veneer the script created for Sally. There’s a nice sprinkling of Hebrew and Yiddish slang, a cute sense of place. But “Putzel” leaves you hungry for something more than a bagel, with or without lox.

Showings: Floridafilmfestival.com

The title is, frankly, creepy. The premise, profiling one of those guys who shops the personal ads and matchmaking websites “Seeking Asian Female,” is right on the cusp of repulsive – creepy white guys seeking Asian girlfriends or brides.

But put an Asian female filmmaker — Debbie Lum — on the case and something altogether different emerges. The Chinese-American Lum locates a subject, the disarmingly icky Steven, a guy with “yellow fever,” as she calls it, and follows the efforts of this 60 year-old parking lot cashier to meet, court, marry and set up a life with a  much younger Chinese woman.

Lum, a nascent filmmaker, manages to avoid being put-off by Steven’s blurted observations about her heritage and attractiveness and sticks with him as he closes in on a prospect, fails, and then finds a woman, in China, willing to be his mate.

And that’s where the REAL trouble starts.

Lum paints Steven as a nerdy, broke “collector” whose obsession gives him a hint of the chilling. Then, we get to know him, his open-hearted neediness and naiveté. And then we start to wonder about the Chinese woman who agrees to marry him, sight unseen. Lum found a relationship that punctures preconceived expectations that we form for both halves of the couple — what he wants and expects, what she gets out of the bargain.

In an era when love and marriage are being redefined, here’s a documentary that shos yet another way such couplings can work. Or not work out.

Showtimes: Floridafilmfestival.com

Matthew Vaughn  Fox will distribute the 2014 release, according to Deadline.com.

“The Secret Service” is based on a graphic novel/comic series by “Kick-Ass” creator Mark Millar (and artist Dave Gibbons) which is about a legendary spy on the trail of a diabolical international plot, and mentoring his nephew into becoming the “next James Bond.”

There’s no Madea, no Tyler Perry at all on the screen in his latest, “Tempation.”

Just lots of PG-13 rated temptation, and Journee Smollett, Brandy Norwood, Vanessa Williams and Kim Kardashian. The guys are eye candy in Perry’s movies, and Lance Gross fills the bill, here.

It’s about a married woman tempted by a private-jet owning billionaire.

The presence of Kardashian suggests a message about gold-digging that Perry may or may not have intended, but we’ll see. Perry’s studio never really warmed to the idea of previewing movies in general, and his movies in particular. He might be cut more slack if people didn’t go into them thinking Lionsgate was hiding the merchandise because it’s inferior. Then again, maybe not.

A romantic melodrama is only going to have so much steam in it, if it has as PG-13 rating. The man knows his audience.

In the future, hunger, violence and money have disappeared. Lying is unthinkable. And stealing – from the place where one acquires one’s every need, a building labeled “Store” – is pointless. Because we’re all wearing spotless white suits and driving shiny, chrome-plated Lotus Evoras. Well, a lot of us are.
Humanity has been “perfected.”  Thanks to the aliens. They came, they moved in – not just onto the planet, but into our bodies. And now, the human race is all but extinct, our bodies governed by seemingly benign conquerors. Free will dies as our corpses become “Hosts” to the “Souls” of those who apparently know what’s best for us and make us serve “the common good.”
But Melanie (Saoirse Ronan) is resistant to this body snatching. She debates and wars with the old soul, “Wanderer,” who has invaded her most personal space – her mind. Melanie wants to shake free of these alien bonds, to find her younger brother, her boyfriend (Max Irons) and the Resistance movement they’ve run off to join.
That’s the world of “The Host,” Stephenie Meyer’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” follow-up to “Twilight.” On screen, it’s just another chaste, action-starved and absurdly talky action romance. And it has to be. Most of the movie is a heated argument that takes place inside poor Melanie’s head.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol (“In Time,””Gattaca”) finds some sarcastic laughs in that most eye-rollingly anti-cinematic situation – a few of them intentional. And Ronan (“Hannah”, “Lovely Bones”) struggles gamely against the limitations of staging bickering interior dialogues.
“This body is MINE.”
“I hate you. If only I could HURT you.”
Melanie cannot hurt Wanderer. But she can persuade her of the longing Melanie has for Jared (Irons), her need to save her younger brother Jamie (Chandler Canterburry), her desire for freedom. Melanie/Wanderer find that fabled colony where a lot of guys of the same build and light brown hair color (Irons, Jake Abel and Boyd Holbrook) are fascinated by this new “soul” now in their ranks. Another Meyer love triangle is set up. OK, quadrangle, if you count Wanderer. Meanwhile, one obsessed “seeker” among the Souls (Diane Kruger) is determined to find her missing Wanderer and wipe out the last of the Resistance.
The action beats – chases, hunts, fights and shootouts – are few and far between here. Too many characters (William Hurt is Uncle Jeb, patriarch of the resistance) have to spend too much time on exposition – explaining who they are and how this Brave New World works. The young would-be lovers talk and talk and talk. The leads generate little heat and the look-alike lads (that’s a casting blunder) try to figure out if it’s Melanie or the sympathetic alien who took over her bod that makes her irresistible to the Resistance.
The film’s slack pace allows us to ponder Meyer’s ever-present Big Themes – body image, guilt, free will, right and wrong as it relates to groupthink. Like the argument going on in Melanie’s head, Niccol struggles to come to grips with his interpretation of those themes. Is the Mormon romance novelist quietly rebelling against a hierarchy, or endorsing it? Is Niccol in revolt against Meyer’s myopia?
That makes for a meandering, misshapen film where Big Ideas stolen from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” fail to ignite because the sparks are smothered in tedium, the romance drowned out by all the arguing going on in that confused girl’s head.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sensuality and violence
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Diane Kruger, Max Irons, William Hurt, Frances Fisher
Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, based on the Stephenie Meyer novel. An Open Road release.
Running time: 2 hours