Movie Nation

In the early days of Italian neo-Realism, there was this little classic called “Bicycle Thieves,” a movie about a father struggling to support his adoring son in post-war Italy. When his bike is stolen, his ability to make a living is threatened. In desperation, the father does something that makes the kid see him in a new light. He steals a bike.

“A Better Life,” based on a story by the writer of “Enemies: A Love Story,” has pretenses of being the Mexican-American “Bicycle Thieves.” It’s about an illegal immigrant single dad struggling to raise a teenage son, hoping to provide a better life for him than the landscaping work he’s done since slipping across the border into the U.S. He buys a truck, that truck is stolen, and the son comes to see his father in a new light.

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You might have noticed her in “The Dark Knight Rises.” That’s Juno Temple, playing Catwoman’s confidante, second banana to the tall, dark and runway ready Anne Hathaway. It’s a small role in a very large studio summer blockbuster.

But you can’t miss Temple in “Killer Joe,” the ferocious and indie Southern Gothic drama in which she stars, playing a “Baby Doll” style sexual naif. Hollywood sees her one way — a supporting player. But Indiewood — the world of independent film — sees her as an object of desire, leading lady material.

“Hollywood does tend to see female beauty just one way,” Temple acknowledges. “If they need a high-cheekboned beauty, I’m probably not going to be cast.” She laughs. “If they’re OK with an English yam, I’m in.”

In major studio pictures such as “No Strings Attached,” indie “It” girl Greta Gerwig can be leading lady Natalie Portman’s pal. If Gerwig, who turns 29 Aug. 4, wants her shot at “driving the action” of her movies, she knows she’s got to go indie, as she did for “Lola Versus.”

“I did one ‘best friend,’ and that’s been it,” Gerwig says. “I may never have to play another. But we’ll see.”

There have always been commercial considerations that drive casting in movies, big and small. Big names and screen exemplars of beauty such as Cameron Diaz or Jennifer Aniston dip their toes in the indie-world, and that gets an indie filmmaker’s movie noticed. Independent filmmakers don’t often have that luxury of casting, which has long explained why unknowns get their big break in low budget films, why the words “indie” and “pixie” (Think Alison Pill, Kat Dennings, Zooey Deschanel) have been joined at the hip.

In a string of films, this summer has underlined the gap separating “Hollywood” screen beauty and independent film beauty. From “Lola Versus” to “Safety Not Guaranteed,” starring Aubrey Plaza, “Killer Joe” to “Ruby Sparks,” written by and starring Zoe Kazan, indie film’s idea of the cute young thing the audience and the leading man fall in love with has taken on its own model — still thin, but not supermodel thin — still pretty, but more cute and quirky than Vogue-cheekboned.

Zoe Kazan  “is such a gifted actress, but she doesn’t fit the type that Hollywood goes for,” director Valerie Faris (“Little Miss Sunshine,” “Ruby Sparks”) says. “She’s appealing and so smart. But Hollywood might not see that, but we do. Which is why we don’t make conventional Hollywood films with Hollywood-style leading ladies.”

Kazan, 28, is the granddaughter of famed filmmaker Elia Kazan. She says she doesn’t like thinking about where Hollywood might pigeonhole her — but looking at studio films from “It’s Complicated” to “Happythankyoumoreplease,” she’d have to notice that the Malin Akermans and Michelle Williams’ are getting the leads. She says she didn’t write “Ruby Sparks,” which has her playing a fictional character a lonesome novelist (Paul Dano) invents who then comes to life “as a vanity project, something for me to star in.” But like Gerwig and Jennifer Westfeldt (“Friends With Kids”), if it was ever going to happen, she knew she’d have to take a hand in it.

“The acting profession is this intense waiting game,” Kazan says. “I don’t like feeling helpless in my own life. Everyone wants to feel some sense of ‘agency’ in your own life. But it’s so much out of your hands. That will make you crazy.”

Kazan wrote a film that she and longtime boyfriend Paul Dano could co-star in and got the co-directors of “Little Miss Sunshine” on board. Gerwig has plans to direct a script she’s written, taking even more control of her screen persona and career path.

“If you’re more about acting than being famous, you really do need to take charge of what people see you in,” Kazan says. “I grew up admiring Ingrid Bergman and I really look up to Cate Blanchette. But I really love (character) actors like John Cazale and Thelma Ritter.”

Temple, 23, the daughter of filmmaker Julien Temple (“Absolute Beginners”), is grateful to be trying to make her mark at this point in time, when definitions of screen beauty seem to be broadening.

“It’s important that young girls who might want to be actresses to see all different types of women, women of all different builds and physical calibers, having success,” Temple says. “Because it’s not just the tall, thin runway models who can do this.”

On its surface, it seems innocuous, sympathetic. Then you think about it for, oh, a second or so.

Cinemark, a pretty well-run theater chain, operates the theater in Aurora, Colorado, where an over-armed nut killed a bunch of fans at a “Dark Knight Rises” screening last summer. They invited, over the holidays, the survivors of those killed to the theater, the last place they’d want to be on the first Christmas they spent without their loved ones.

The intention was OK, well, in a corporate sort of way. But people don’t like a company to suggest that business goes on while they’re still grieving. Bad move, Cinemark.

“Promised Land” is an engaging and entertaining — if preachy —  look at Big Energy and fracking – the land-and-water-wrecking practice of drilling and pumping water and chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas from shale.

To Steve Butler (Matt Damon), a “consultant” who came from farm country himself, farming and the small farm town lifestyle are “delusional self-mythology” believed by simple people living in the past. His “money for nothing” offer – underground leases – is “the only way [embattled, indebted small farm owners] have to get back.”

He’s just gotten the big promotion with Global Cross Power Solutions. But dropping into an Anytown, USA named McKinley with his partner, Sue (Frances McDormand) is a sobering come down. Renting an ancient Bronco II and buying flannel at Rob’s Guns, Groceries, Guitars & Gas won’t be enough this time. It may be a one-bar/one gas station town, but the locals are going to make him work for this.

Hal Holbrook is the high school science teacher who has Googled “fracking.” And as willfully uninformed as some of his shortsighted, let’s-cash-in neighbors might be, the teacher gets things called to a vote.  Bribes to the local board of supervisors won’t be enough.

To make matters worse, a slick “hippie environmentalist” (John Krasinski) shows up with posters of dead cows and poisoned farms. You almost start to feel sorry for the fracking folks as public opinion shifts.

Damon and Krasinski co-wrote the script, and they set up a fairly predictable war of wills – rivals trash-talking each other, both flirting with the cute age-appropriate schoolmarm (Rosemarie DeWitt). Who will win?

But we already know that, don’t we? The movie is a stacked deck of cards. Back when they filmed the play “Other People’s Money,” the idea was to surprise the audience by making both the populist side and the Big Business side of an argument compelling, rational and reasonable. Not here.

McKinley – the movie was filmed near Pittsburgh – really is dying. We see desperation in the eyes of the first farmer (Tim Guinee of TV’s “Revolution”) we meet. Others, such as a rube played by Lucas Black, just envision dollar signs. But in either case, their way of living is going extinct. “Promised Land” pulls its punches in making that counter-argument.

Damon the Oscar-winning writer does something nobody else in Hollywood would – write a dumb character for Matt Damon to play. Steve is blindsided by the old science teacher, humiliated and silenced in a way no sharp salesman would be. He’s been working in this business for years and never let himself see or believe the consequences of his actions?

Krasinski has the “cute” role here, and he and Damon make well-matched rivals. McDormand’s Sue is the flinty, no-nonsense sell-out who refuses to learn what Steve is finding out. DeWitt’s performance is limited to flashing her pretty smile and biting her lip as she flirts. Director Gus Van Sant captures bucolic nature, lands the jokes and does well by the bar scenes – making a Krasinski vs McDormand karaoke contest work.

But more needs to be made of the “They still need the money,” debate. And we needed to see a lot more conflict within Damon’s character. You can’t play “dumb” and “morally compromised” when you can’t say “I’m a good guy” like you don’t quite believe it.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Matt Damon, Rosemarie DeWitt, Frances McDormand, John Krasinski, Hal Holbrook, Lucas Black

Credits: Directed by Gus Van Sant, written by John Krasinski and Matt Damon. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:46

Glenn Close is very still in her latest film — quiet, never cracking a smile. Playing a member of the staff of an upper crust Dublin hotel in the late 19th century, the idea was to be invisible. Think “Downton Abbey” or “The Remains of the Day.”

And since Albert Nobbs, the title character she plays, has a secret as obvious as “his” name, the need to be invisible is compounded, even more important than the husky voice she affects every time she opens her mouth.

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Yoni Netanyahu was the veteran Israeli commando who led the raid on the airport in Entebbe, Uganda, on July 4, 1976. He died early in that firefight, in which Israeli troops fought off terrorists and their Ugandan protectors to free over 100 passengers who had been taken there after their jet was hijacked.

Netanyahu’s place in Israeli history was assured by that heroic act and his heroic death. But he was also an avid letter writer, a soldier who wrote that “at the moment of my death,” he wanted to be able to give an account of how he’d spent his life that was worthy of his times. He lamented “the sadness of young men destined for endless war,” but never let it overshadow his overwhelming sense of duty — “I do things because they have to be done.”

And after his death, his letters made him immortal — at least in Israel. People like the novelist Herman Wouk (an ardent Zionist) and others praised these eloquent but sentimental letters home, to family, lovers and friends.

“Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story” is a sympathetic and modestly compelling documentary about Yoni’s life and death. It is the tale of “someone marked for glory,” but also of a soldier with human failings, a son born in the 1940s who took up his Cornell University scholar-father’s ardent “Revisionist Zionist” cause and took up arms for their new adoptive homeland when he came of age.

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Neil Young is in fine voice, captured live at Toronto’s acoustic treasure, Massey Hall, in Jonathan Demme’s latest Neil Young documentary, “Neil Young Journeys.”

This follows “Neil Young Trunk Show” in 2009. And “Neil Young: Heart of Gold.” And those are just the Jonathan  Demme Neil Young feature films.

 There was an “American Masters” on PBS a few years back, and in ’97 Jim Jarmusch filmed “Year of the Horse,” and so on. And on.

Which prompts a viewer, in between close-ups so tight Demme captures Young’s dental work for posterity, to wonder, “Judas Priest, how many Neil Young documentaries do we need?”

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In her most famous big screen role, voodoo priestess Tia Dalia in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, Naomi Harris wore grey, clay-lumped dreadlocks and the nastiest teeth stains this side of the invention of toothpaste. But as her turn as Eve, fellow British secret agent and flirt to Daniel Craig’s James Bond in “Skyfall” proves, she cleans up well. “Bond Babe” well.

“I have no quibbles with being a ‘Bond Girl,'” Harris, 36, says. With a proviso. “That’s problematic, but it’s also a great compliment. Bond girls are sexy and alluring and all that. But it’s not appropriate for Bond women of today. We’re characters, not stereotypes. Eve is very much Bond’s equal — an agent, in the field. Firing guns. Driving like a madwoman. So ‘Bond Babe’ seems so antiquated in light of that.”

“Skyfall,” the most critically acclaimed Bond film in decades, is earning Harris glowing notices, too, for the “both beautiful and brainy” (Entertainment Weekly) direction she and the filmmakers are taking the longest running franchise on film.

“This movie is about going back to the roots of Bond, getting the classic elements in,” Harris says. “But we’re  modernizing it as well. One thing I was happy that they wanted to bring back was the comedy, that dry British sense of humor. It’s still a darker Bond, I think But there’s more of an effort to add laughs.”

Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican TV writer, is a native Brit who won’t quite say it’s her “duty” to serve when called to join Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “But if you’re British and you’re an actor, it is a huge honor. It’s so part of British culture that it made perfect sense to have James Bond escort the Queen to the Olympics. If you’re British and you’re an actor or are in the film business, it means something extra to have some part to play in making a James Bond film. [Director] Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig said they made this list of their first choices for this film, and every actor they approached said ‘Yes.’

“So maybe it is a duty to do a Bond film. It is quintessentially a British story, British in character. I love that the film acknowledges that, that it’s much more London-centric than other films. That’s all part getting Bond back to his roots, I think.”

Harris, 36, got her start on British TV after college and a stretch at Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre School. Her first break was in Danny Boyle’s zombie hit “28 Days Later.” She’s mixed appearances in Hollywood films such as “Street Kings” with indie fare — “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, “”The First Grader” ” Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.” None of that, even spending time on the well-financed sets of the “Pirates” movies, prepared her for teaming up with Mr. Bond.

“I never exercise. Terrible about it. For this, I had to do two months with a personal trainer, five days a week, two hours a day. I was on the gun range two days a week. I spent one day a week with the stunt trainer, doing kickboxing, combat training. I spent time in driving school.

“And remember the scene where I shave Daniel? I had to train with a barber for weeks just to get some shaving skills. I learned a LOT. Really got my money’s worth out of this film. I could BE an agent, now.”

How many Range Rovers did your ruin shooting the film’s first big chase?

“I did not ruin a ONE, I am very proud to say! I was an AWFUL driver, prior to doing this. But being taught by stunt drivers, three point turns, slides, all that, I got to be a pretty good driver. I feel a lot more secure behind the wheel. Everybody keeps telling me how terrible I am in the movie, which ISN’T FAIR. I mean, so I knocked a few mirrors off. You only need the rearview mirror, anyway, am I right? When you’re going as fast as Eve does in this chase, nobody’s hitting you from behind.”

Whatever use she gets out of her shaving and Rover-wrecking skills in the future, Harris followed “Skyfall” with another indie

film, a role that was “the most challenging I’ve ever played.” She plays the controversial wife of South African president and civil rights icon Nelson Mandela in a film by her “First Grader” director.

“Winnie was exhausting, harrowing, thrilling…I didn’t research Winnie until I got the role and the financing was in place and we were about to start. I terrified myself because I discovered her to be such a complex character. She’s like seven people in one. Her journey is so dark and upsetting. People paint her in two different colors. Horrific things happened to her, and happened because of her. I really got to stretch myself and show the breadth of what I can do as an actress with that film. I cannot wait for it to come out.”

And unlike other “Bond girls,” there’s always a chance that Eve and Harris will maintain their currency with the franchise. Or will they?

“There’s absolutely NO WAY I’m telling you if I’ll be back,” she giggles.

You can count on one hand the number of movies, over the decades, that have depicting Scouting and had the nerve to identify their characters as actual Boy Scouts.

Wes Anderson shied away from that label and the official uniform in last summer’s twee tween romance, “Moonrise Kingdom.”

But not Todd Rohal, writer-director of the R-rated farce, “Nature Calls.” He puts his troop leaders in something close to an official uniform and calls them and their young charges “Boy Scouts.” And the stuff he has these adults and kids say and do would make likely make “official” Boy Scoutdom blanche. A little.

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