Movie Nation

The late mid-80s were the heyday of the “trouble on the farm” drama, movies that warned us of the perils of Big Ag and small town bank takeovers, just before the Monsanto menace became obvious, just after farmers voted themselves into Reaganism oblivion. ‘

Joe Hall’s debut feature “The Road to Galena” is a less political and half-heartedly nostalgic “trouble” story set in the end game era of the Family Farm. It’s about a banker’s son (Ben Winchell of TV’s “Finding Carter”) who waxes lyrical about the work, the land and the people, and has a whiff of “Green Acres” about it in that regard. But “Galena’s” in step with the latest “back to the land” vibe, even if sustainable, small-farm agriculture is one of the many promising angles it all but ignores.

Cole Baird grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, farm country on the banks of the bountiful (and never glimpsed) Chesapeake Bay. Back in the late ’90s he was a star student, University of Maryland bound. But every time he makes noise about changing majors, or at least adding “ag” to his classload, his dad (Jay O. Sanders) redirects him towards “giving yourself options.” Banker dad knows the good times never last. He’s seen as many farm busts as booms.

Cole may have his best girl Elle (“Friday Night Lights” alumna Aimee Teagarden) and his farm-family best friend Jack (Will Brittain of “The Forever Purge”), a guy who can always count on Cole to pitch in to keep his dad’s place running.

But as we’ve seen Cole in a D.C. law firm meeting in the film’s opening scene, and much of this story is told in flashback, we know college is going to change things. Ben’s rowing crew, dealing with lectures from his dad about focusing on his studies, headed to Georgetown Law at his father’s behest. His time “back home” is limited. At some point, Elle and Jack’s inherited farm, and its problems, take back seats to law school, passing the bar, making partner and all that entails.

Elle gets to make the “you’re never here” speech. Jack takes up with Cole’s girl, Cole’s mom gets cancer, etc.

But that work-the-land dream never goes away.

There’s much-plowed dramatic ground for Hall to dig into here, but he waters-down the drama to Hallmark Channel/Positiv TV blandness, which overwhelms the movie. Every character feels generic, every response to every situation more preordained by the simple goals of the script than organically developed.

The homey African American diner owner (Jennifer Holliday) gets one chance and once chance only to show us she’s the town sage — gently shaking Cole out of his sentimental attachment to “a way of life that’s disappearing.”

Cole finds out Jack is spending time with Elle, abruptly punches him, and all is instantly forgiven. Not much of a tussle.

The movie’s frightfully patriarchal, with Elle the practical woman her eventual husband Jack keeps out of the loop about their collapsing finances, and Alsia Allapach playing the rich lawschool girlfriend-turned-wife who schools Cole on the “ethics” of taking the monied, morally bankrupt clients, making partner and living “the good life” in defiance of Cole’s cliched rural values.

Almost everything introduced into this leisurely two hour movie feels undigested, under-developed. There’s an earnestness to all of this that feels more accepted than justified. And with much of the drama watered-down the big dramatic moments aren’t nearly as big as they need to be.

The acting is a bit bland, too, with only a couple of players making their characters pop. The setting is interesting and the stakes are high enough. But it’s hard to fall into a movie where big, risk-taking commitment is missing, in front of and behind the camera.

Rating: R, profanity (third act f-bombs)

Cast: Ben Winchell, Aimee Teagarden, Will Brittain, Alisa Allapach, Jill Hennessy and Jay O. Sanders.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joe Hall. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:53

A pandemic lockdown romance? July 22.

Grim stakes and goofiness, gods-bashing and GNR — that’s the latest Taika Waititi take on “the Space Viking,” “Thor: Love and Thunder.”

Sure, every Marvel movie panders, cluttered with cross-over characters, self-aware jokes, Easter eggs and cameos. As someone who figures that all of these movies should be played as a lark, emphasizing the silliness of it all, the “Thor” movies have long been my favorites. But this is the first one that really feels as if it’s pandering to me. And that shifting back and forth in tone from the deathly serious to the profoundly silly isn’t going to be to every taste.

That’s not to say that packing four Oscar winners into the cast — one of them the leading lady and another of them that rarity, a deadly villain with legitimate grievances — doesn’t pay off and give the film gravitas in the beginning and pathos in the finale.

But it’s the jokes that make it, with the self-mocking man-mountain Chris Hemsworth setting the tone and making it fun, and Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson and the rest taking their cue from him. The flippant funniness balances against this universe’s crisis of faith subtext, with Thor reassuring kidnapped and perhaps doomed children with the last thing they want to hear, dogma that’s no substitute for a long and happy life.

Not to worry, “If you die, you’ll end up in VALHALLA!” Yeah, that goes over like a beating the family puppy.

A somber opening has Gorr (Christian Bale), a pious alien who discovers his faith is wasted on a god who doesn’t answer prayers, such as ones to save his daughter. His eyes opened by meeting his (literal) idol, callous and cruel and dismissive in the flesh, a magical talisman, the Necro Sword, transforms Gorr into “The God Butcher.” The entire supernatural universe becomes his prey.

Eventually, he’ll have to get around to the God of Thunder, right?

One mercifully-short bit with the last and least of the Chrises — Chris Pratt — and his barely-in-the-first-act Guardians of the Galaxy later, lovelorn and losing-himself-in-his-work Thor finds himself assembling a fresh team to go deal with this new threat.

The ex-girlfriend “Jane Fonda, no, Jane Foster” (Portman) is back, with bad news on the health front and one busted and restored hammer on hand to pitch in with. There’s also “King” Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson, working on her posh Brit RP accent), who gets to give up running the tourist attraction New Asgard to join Thor in his quest, along with his old stone-faced chum Korg (a CGI Waititi).

Saddled with those story/cast requirements, Waititi finds ways to play around with all the seriousness, beginning with Korg amusingly narrating our “Space Viking” tale to a cave/classroom full of kiddies, a tale that involves kidnapping and the possible “extinction” of gods if our villain gets his way.

Thor’s acknowledgement that “This ends here, now,” has become Thor’s catchphrase, Hemsworth’s meaty meathead thrown-for-a-loss by love and Thor’s tactlessness never fail to amuse. Parents are fretting about the outcome of his free-the-kidnapped-children quest?

Not to worry, he and his crew will find and free them, “and then we shall FEAST!” Pause. “NOT on children.” Pause. “We don’t DO that anymore.” Pause. “SHAMEful time!”

Waititi gets laughs out of cameos — check out the “actors” in a Thor/Odin/Loki/ stage show attraction at New Asgard. And guess who plays a grumpy, blustery, Greco-Roman accented Zeus, as if you haven’t read the credits?

The “cool parts,” as you’ve seen and heard in the movie’s trailers, are turn-the-tide brawls all set to Guns’n Roses Greatest Hits, and they’re nicely timed to turn up once in each of the film’s three acts.

And Waititi doesn’t so much curb Marvel’s elephantiasis in running times as draw a line and stick with it — two hours of this is enough. Always.

The “message,” a better to have loved and lost and earned “that sh—y feeling,” comes through loud and clear. But that whole Guardians bit seems shoehorned in and does those characters and actors playing them (save for the scowling Dave Bautista) no favors.

The finales in these films are preordained and formulaic. The best you can hope for is that the CGI fights will at least be visually coherent, which they are in this case.

But Waititi is to be treasured for simply seeing all this as lightweight fun, a bit of nonsense with a bunch of movie stars dressing up like gods and having a laugh. A heroine who rides into battle on a unicorn? The Viking longship tourist attraction converted into a spaceship by the addition of screaming alien goats? The whole idea of supernatural deities reduced to needy, petty bullies or “Zeussettes” who faint at the sight of an accidentally naked Thor?

Hard to take any of that all that seriously, and Waititi, no matter how big the budget or how high the fan-fantasized stakes, never does. Bless him.

So no, “Love and Thunder” isn’t as much fun as its trailers. But it’s close enough, Sweet child o’mine.

Rating:  PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, (profanity), some suggestive material and partial nudity.

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Taika Waititi, based on the comics by Stan Lee and others. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 1:58

A whodunit with a why he dunit rationale and a big con. Trickery in the “F for Fake” tradition?

This looks great.

I excepted more of a “Stranger Things” bounce for Winona Ryder. But she’s working, and this creeper in a cabin in the woods is in the can and on the release slate — July 15.

Dermot Mulroney is also in the cast.

“Hyde Park” is a romantic dramedy with a court case as its backdrop set among affluent African Americans and African immigrants in the Chicago neighborhood that bears the same name as the more famous “Park” in London.

Pitched as an LGTBQ melodrama, as the story’s inciting incident is a shooting stemming from African intolerance for homosexuality, it daintily dances around the subject, avoiding engaging with it in any realistic sense.

The resulting movie, having the slimmest “African” slices of the life of this cultural melting pot, with courtroom scenes almost wholly consisting of ill-constructed and recited opening arguments that suggest the screenwriters did their homework by watching not one, but TWO whole episodes of “Law & Order,” looks polished but is quaintly amateurish, a tenth film that plays like a stumbling debut feature from director Mark Harris.

Eric and Tyler (Xavier McKnight and Vonzell Scott) step out of a revival house cinema and into an Uber, which is Eric’s undoing. The traditionally-clothed/close-minded African driver gets his nose bent out of joint by having two two guys almost kiss in his backseat. He comes at them with a baseball bat, and Eric shoots him.

That takes us into the legal world of David (Kenneth Okolie) and Lola (Dawn Halfkenny), fellow lawyers at a big Chicago firm. David’s angling for “partner.” Lola’s angling to make David her partner.

But he’s a Nigerian, with haughty “You need to be with a Nigerian woman!” parents. Lola is American, taking advice from sassy BFF Aja (Erica Hubbard) on how to move David towards commitment.

Maybe, with her staying in his apartment while hers is renovated and them thrown together on this case — the State is ready to deport trigger-happy Eric — that’ll happen.

Their friends are mostly folks they met in college and law school, with Sam (Corey Hendrix) a somewhat funny guy about to open a comedy club and prosecutor Santiago (Javier Villamil) ready to put the moves on old classmate Lola.

The best scenes in “Hyde Park” make use of the group dynamic and the cultural frisson such a neighborhood offers. Sam’s coming on to a Liberian “queen” (Love Weah) who isn’t having his attempts at African speech.

“We have thousands of languages and dialects. Which one are you pretending to do?”

“Wakandan and Zumundan!” Yeah, some Americans think “Black Panther” is a documentary.

But those playful culture clashes take a back seat to some some of the clunkiest courtroom scenes I’ve seen in a while. The cast seems experienced enough, if uneven in the quality of experiences. Okolie’s clumsy and uncomfortable attempts at lawyerese/legaese and making compelling courtroom arguments make one wonder how David could be up for partner, and how the director didn’t hear the many grammatical stumbles that strip the guy of any sense of law school polish.

No, you don’t have to “print” the first take. Give your actor a few chances to get through the lines so it doesn’t sound like an ESL exercise. Or were the lines this agrammatical on the page?

The screenplay takes a detour into Eric’s “secret,” which we know and the lawyers cannot figure out, and which apparently never came up in his criminal trial for the seemingly justified shooting. Say what now? Old Country “shame” is one thing. But his smart lawyers, his earlier felony trial lawyers, or the shooting victim, would surely have gotten around to exposing that in open court.

There’s great dramatic potential in using African, African Muslim and African American homophobia as a backdrop to drama, in or out of the courtroom. “Hyde Park” keeps this at arm’s length, with even the third act turns towards its subject feeling very 1985.

And for the love of Chicago, DON’T set your movie in a courtroom if you haven’t done more homework than this, if you have no knack for writing courtroom drama, if you haven’t run your script by a real lawyer to at least elevate the dialogue into real legalese.

There’s a better movie in this setting, and a better-acted and written “Law & Order” in this court case.

Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations

Cast: Kenneth Okolie, Dawn Halfkenny, Xavier McKnight, Erica Hubbard, Corey Hendrix and Javier Villamil.

Credits: Directed by Mark Harris, scripted Marvin Nelson and Lotten Yeaney. A Lot10 release.

Running time: 1:29

One of the better sequences in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is recreating that sacred piece of Elvis lore, “Singer Presents…Elvis,” the Xmas season TV show labeled “The ’68 Comeback Special.”

Luhrmann does spectacle like few filmmakers working today.

But you might be surprised how impressive that analog live on videotape show was for its day, and remains. Here’s a favorite bit featuring a song by Burt Reynolds ‘ future sidekick, Jerry Reed.

You can find the entire special on YouTube, in pieces and in complete form. Some of it is teeth grindlingly dated. But what once worked still works.

ONLY at Universal Studios, Orlando!

Ok, that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Soon, tho.

Meanwhile, Universal does a little end zone dance for its two movies in cinemas at the moment.

The action bonafides are pretty solid for “The Terminal List,” a paranoid Big Conspiracy thriller now on Amazon. It’s based on a novel by Jack Carr, series creator David DiGilio scripted TV’s “Traveler,” Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua directed the pilot and Sylvain White (“The Losers”) directed two episodes.

It begins with a special op that goes awry in Syria and its path towards revenge takes it into the lawless “Sicario” corners of Mexico.

But whether or not you decide to invest in its starts-fast/turns-slow unraveling — eight hours worth — probably depends on your devotion to, tolerance for and acceptance of Chris Pratt as the veteran SEAL commander on this quest.

It’s not his first camo-clad role and far from his first time in action. But the guy I labeled “the last and least of the Chrises” in my upcoming review of “Thor: Love and Thunder,” is adequate, at best, leaving an emotional and action heroic void at the center of the series.

Pratt is Lt. Commander James Reece, on the trail of a Syrian chemical weapons mastermind when he and his team are trapped in the ancient sewers of, I guess what is supposed to be Tartus, Syria. Where else could Navy SEALS be smuggled ashore and access generic “It’s a TRAP” tunnels that seem to date from the Crusades?

When he gets home, his debriefing has holes in it. Reece’s memory seems faulty. “Headaches.” He’s had a concussion. Twelve comrades died in the ambush. Reece becomes convinced that they were “set up” and that the set-up is ongoing. The Navy is understandably leery of that, yet determined not to think of Reece as being at fault.

After all, he’s 40 and still “tip of the spear.”

But it’s hard to figure out why he isn’t taken into custody after his family (Riley Keough plays his wife) is murdered with his service firearm. He’s sure he’s being watched and hunted by sinister forces. A cynical reporter (Constance Wu) wants his story, but perhaps not the version of it he’s telling.

Only his old comrade/now-CIA buddy Ben (Taylor Kitsch) has his back. And maybe the Secretary of Defense (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

With NCIS on his case, shady characters revealed, one at a time, and more and more frequent headaches, Reece is up against it trying to get to the bottom of things.

Pratt isn’t very good at all at suggesting concern that “this is all in my head,” so that’s abandoned early on. Pairing him up with Kitsch and Wu just throws his limited range into sharp relief.

The action beats include an assault mid-MRI, kidnapping and “enhanced interrogation” of this lead or that suspect.

We’re treated to more comically degrading situations for Sean Gunn, forever known as director James Gunn’s actor brother, here playing a gauche, abrasive functionary of whoever or whatever is mixed up in this Plot to Get Reece.

Reece’s first attempt at a big speech is meeting this guy, and Pratt lands flat in playing it.

“There’s evil in this world. It’s our job to look it in the eye cause most folks don’t have the balls…All you’ve got to do is pay your taxes and stay out of our way.”

Yawn.

I’ve never been much of a Pratt hater. He was OK in some of the supporting roles that preceded his unlikely “Guardians of the Galaxy” jackpot. But as a star, he’s never amounted to anything outside of that franchise, where he’s a decent comic foil for Dave Bautista and Bradley Cooper as a foul-mouthed raccoon, an unlikely love interest for franchise queen Zoe Saldana.

A couple of fight scenes kind of let us see the fight choreography at walk-thru speed. Even Joey King as “The Princess” was able to disguise that, most of the time.

As for the plot, there’s no “sizzle until it fizzles” because the story never really gets off the ground, never gets up and running.

After that opening firefight, there’s not much action to lift us above rich guy golf tourneys, strip club scenes, clandestine reporter meetings and the like.

It’s established that Wu’s journalist is a gambler, and she’s more colorful in that poker game moment than most of the scenes surrounding her ever is. And Kitsch carries himself like a man with a back story so well that every shared scene makes you wish the casting had been reversed.

Sad to say, if the fanboys ever tire of “Guardians,” that’s exactly where Pratt could land — second banana again. Well, maybe not on TV.

Rating: R, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Chris Pratt, Taylor Kitsch, Constance Wu, Jai Courtney, Sean Gunn, JD Pardo, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Riley Keough.

Credits: Created by David DiGilio, based on the novel by Jack Carr. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: Eight episodes @ 1:00 each.

“The Dark and the Wicked” is a quietly gloomy thriller that wraps a number of horror tropes up in a tidy, compact package.

Writer-director Bryan Bertino (“The Strangers”) keeps his effects simple, his shocks few and his tone funereal in this story of menace visiting a rural Texas farm.

But what sells it is the buy-in. A good cast totally commits to acting “the moment,” letting us see the journey from “This can’t be real!” denial to “Why is this happening?” all the way to “Is escape even possible?”

And what’s the cardinal rule of horror? If they believe it, we believe it.

Marin Ireland of “The Irishman” and TV’s “Umbrella Academy” is Louise, a child of the farm who’s come home to comfort her mother and watch her father die. Just a few spare words of dialogue suggest life hasn’t worked out the way she’d hoped. There’s resignation in this homecoming.

And her mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) isn’t making it easier, starting with “I told you not to come.” Mom is trapped in the routine of the place, testy and embittered.

Her son Michael (Michael Abbott Jr., just seen in “Peace in the Valley”) is no comfort, either.

“It’s gon’be OK, Mama.”

“WHAT’s gonna be OK?”

Her husband is catatonic, in bed with a home health care nurse during the day. But at night, she’s there alone. And something creepy is going on inside, with the creaking doors and floorboards, and outside with their sheep.

As the siblings get a fresh dose of “I TOLD you not to come” just often enough to renew their regret that they did, first one and then the other recognizes that something above and beyond an impending death is going terribly wrong here.

Bertino keeps the menace mostly off-camera, building towards the shocks that come from knives, gruesome makeup, simply-staged apparitions and the like.

“Security” for the sheep is a string of bottles, horseshoes and other pieces of metal that rattle if anything comes to get at their flock. It rattles, and it’s not the wind doing the rattling. We never see what’s coming for them, but Bertino keeps his camera in tight on the alarmed, confused reactions of the sheep to let us know they do.

A shadow looming behind a character rises up behind her. A ghost appears outside, reappears inside and reappears again — instantly behind the person wondering why the bedroom light keeps switching on by itself. Smiles from seemingly benign characters curl into Joker grins.

That’s never a good thing.

Through all of this Ireland and Abbott give us a slow-to-pass denial at what they’re seeing and a slower-to-realize that they can’t remove the threat by putting “daddy in the hospital.”

There’s self-blame in all of this, a family that’s grown up without religion and without hugs of comfort that seems to exacerbate the confusion, limit their options and amplify the agony.

“The Dark and the Wicked” tone is established early and maintained throughout. But the film’s general helplessness can be frustrating, and some characters — Xander Berkeley plays a creepy priest, Tom Nowicki an old family farmhand — get short shrift, making their scenes perfunctory.

I had few memories of this film from first reviewing it a couple of years ago. But its shortcomings remain the same, even if my appreciation of the performances has grown.

Few recent horror movies have gotten more out of less that this one, and that all comes down to the cast. Ireland and Abbott give us different takes on how one might respond to evidence of a supernatural menace. Each actor believes what their character is seeing and feeling. They make us believe it, too.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott, Jr., Julie Oliver-Touchstone, Xander Berkeley and Tom Nowicki

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bryan Bertino. An RLJE release on Shudder.

Running time: 1:35