Movie Nation

The recent passing of 1950s pinup, matinee and pop idol Tab Hunter is reason enough to revisit or take in, for the first time, this 2015 documentary, a film as sweet, discrete and lightly charming at the man himself.

“Tab Hunter Confidential” is an upbeat, revealing portrait of a man who spent his career and indeed most of his life in the Hollywood closet, by necessity in the beginning, by his own desire for privacy he insists in the film. And if director Jeffrey Schwarz goes easy on his in the questioning and tilts towards flattering in the discussions of Hunter’s talents, well, Tab’s longtime companion, producer Allan Glaser, rounded up the money and produced the picture.

It’s basically an autobiography, as in “My version told my way.”

A Santa Barbara native born Arthur Gelien to a single mom from Germany, Hunter had the chiseled blond good looks of the quintessential California surfer (he wasn’t, and only made one “surf” film). A gay talent agent specializing in “pretty boys” (Rock Hudson, most famously, Chad Everett and Guy Madison) cooked up the name — “We’ve got to TAB you something!”

Hunter, who died at 86, started his career at the tail end of the Hollywood long-term studio contract era, signing with Warner Brothers, making a few notable films for them (“Battle Cry,” “Damn Yankees”) before buying out that contract, starring in his own TV show, a quick failure, and watching himself quickly replaced by the next pretty boy (boys) to come along — Troy Donahue, among them.

Pre-Method, his acting was slow to come around, and critic Rex Reed notes how “not a hint of talent” turned up in his earlier movies.

But being “The Sigh Guy,” as he was nicknamed, opportunities kept dropping into his lap. Want to sing, Tab? Sure! He knocked Elvis off the top of the charts with his version of this one.

I’d forgotten that aspect of his career, because even though he was a chart staple, pre-Beatles, and cut many LPs, you almost never see that old vinyl at estate sales or flea markets.

Did you know he was a competition level figure skater, concurrent with his Hollywood career? He was, and his first true love was a fellow skater, he reveals in the movie.

Dating and competing with Paramount rival/lover Tony Perkins, fending off “Confidential” magazine accounts of his sex party arrest in the early ’50s (homosexuality was illegal then), befriending and frequently co-starring with Natalie Wood, Hunter ruled the roost as much as any guy getting by on mostly looks could back then. He was as shirtless as any star of the era, via posters, magazine covers and at least one scene in every movie. But he tackled tough work in the Golden Age of Live TV, too, taught himself to act and got better even as his star was fading.

Peers from Robert Wagner and Connie Stevens to Don Murray and Clint Eastwood set the scene and talk about Tab’s place in it. Women who were teeny-bopper fans recall his appeal, their infatuation and one remembers her “Win a date with Tab Hunter” evening.

And Hunter himself talks about his closeted life, the Catholic upbringing that he abandoned when he realized the Church condemned his sexual leanings, a fellow who “never confronted these things” until much later in life.

“If you were with a man, you would be sinning. If you were with a woman, you would be lying.”

He came closest to marrying a French co-star, eventually came back to the church, had to commit his mother to a mental institution and worked, largely he says, to ensure she had a comfortable life and never had to go back once he saw what she went through there.

And through it all, Hunter comes off as pleasant and guileless as he does in many of his films, and in one of the opening interview moments on camera in “Confidential.”

“What the heck? I’m an old man. This is my life.”

John Waters brought his career back from the odd TV guest appearance with 1981’s “Polyester,” Hunter got “Lust in the Dust” a Divine romp in the same (non Waters) vein, met his longtime companion and got back to his first love — horses. The former hunky stable boy (“discovered” while doing that as a teen by actor/manager Dick Clayton) became a ribbon-winning equestrian and stayed on horseback much of the rest of his life.

Check him out in any of his Westerns — “Burning Hills,” “Gunmman’s Walk,” “They Came to Cordura.” The guy could ride.

Maybe it’s not as revealing as its teasing title suggests, but “Tab Hunter Confidential” makes a splendid history lesson and light, fun portrait of what you can only call a blessed life, one lived with a big, open secret that only old age convinced him he should let out.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Tab Hunter, Connie Stevens, George Takei, John Waters, Robert Wagner, Don Murray, Rona Barrett, Clint Eastwood, Portia de Rossi, Rex Reed

Credits:Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz . A Film Collaborative release.

Running time:

Ciaran Hinds is the aged creeper who has married somebody about one third his age, for we assume, nefarious purposes. Carla Gugino is his accomplice. Matthew Beard and Dylan Baker also star in this one, which nabbed an Aug. 10 release date. 

Checking in on an artist’s work after a scandal is always problematic.

If you don’t look at the films of Roman Polanski, James Toback, Kevin Spacey or Brett Ratner differently after their public shaming, you’ve got a shorter memory than me.

Well, Ratner always sucked, kind of a general consensus all along.

If there’s one good thing — to be glib — about the #MetToo self-engineered takedown of workaholic/sexaholic James Franco, it’s that we finally have the chance to catch up on a vast body of indie work, movies that few people saw, now that he’s a lot less employable.

“The Adderall Diaries” doesn’t make you flinch at every young woman we see on the set with him (his predatory MO), because there aren’t any. Pairing him up with Amber Heard, giving Wilmer Valderama a supporting role just seems…tabloid appropriate.

It’s based on writer Stephen Elliott’s memoir about his troubled past, his “monster” father, his sins against veracity and the victimhood.

As a film, adapter-director Pamela Romanowsky’s take on its many themes and subtexts is cluttered, unsatisfying almost by design. It’s “Running With Scissors” and “The Great Santini” grafted onto “True Story,” with Franco recast as a version of the Jonah Hill character in that one — with Christian Slater as the murderer (Hans Reiser) that the grandiose Elliott figured he’d get his “In Cold Blood” out of.

Romanowsky has to do justice to three major threads — Elliott in the present, riding high with his editor/agent (Cynthia Nixon) calling him with one offer after another and Elliott in the past, the two-fisted, drug-abusing childhood (Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet plays the younger Stephen). 

And then there’s the criminal trial that Elliott haunts, and which haunts him  — a father (Slater), even worse than his own father, accused of murder. That’s what triggers his descent back into drugs, and that’s the leg of the movie that Romanowsky gives short shrift to.

What sparkles here is the interaction between Franco and Ed Harris, playing Elliott’s “monster” of a father, Neil. The kid’s gotten published and famous writing about his “dead” abusive dad. Imagine how awkward it is when that dad interrupts the self-made star of the literary scene at a tony New York book reading.

“How convenient for you to have a dead monster for a father!” Neil scares the gathered glitterati almost as much as much as he “might” have scared the son, who lost himself in every drug under the sun, state custody, group homes, suicide attempts — all according to Stephen.

This revelation, that the “dead” father is still living, makes the whole fact-checking-impaired New York publishing community back away from him. At least he’s got this murder trial he can turn into a book, right?

Movie memoirs like this always make one wonder just how much was invented, and how trustworthy the narrator/hero is, shown to be self-absorbed and prone to seeing things his own dishonest, self-glorifying way. It’s not overwhelming, this fear of narrative dishonesty. But on a marginal film, it doesn’t help.

Heard plays an equally disturbed New York times reporter with a thing for his motorcycle, drawn into Elliott’s dark sexual practices and his “story,” which is probably more true than false.

Chalamet, a reason many will check into this after his breakout turn in the over-rated, over-ripe “Call Me By Your Name,” makes an impressive impact in flashbacks that feature little dialogue.

Franco holds his own with Harris, is utterly convincing in the kinky scenes (go figure) and makes us wonder just what the final penalty his predations will impose with regards to his career.

As his character starts to see his upbringing through the eyes of others, starts measuring the shades of gray that color his father’s “crimes” and his own  excesses and misdeeds, you can’t help but wonder if Franco’s off-camera life will benefit  from shades of gray. You wonder about the age-old Hollywood equation — “relationships” built on furthering careers — and wonder if his relative youth gives Franco room for a comeback that Kevin Spacey will likely never see.

In any event, he filled his IMDB page with too many credits like this one –– thoughtful, challenging dramas worth making, but underwhelming in execution, their stories and themes as over-familiar as the over-exposed Franco’s bearded, not-wholly-thought-out performances.

MPAA Rating:R for language throughout, drug use, sexuality, and some aberrant and disturbing content

Cast: James Franco, Ed Harris, Amber Heard, Cynthia Nixon, Christian Slater, Timothée Chalamet

Credits: Written and directed by Pamela Romanowsky, based on the Stephen Elliott book. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:26

Roswell, New Mexico has nothing on Joshua Tree, California, when it comes to otherworldly weirdness.

Its exotic siren’s call was obvious years before U2 came to the place “Where the Streets Have No Name, decades before the singer Gram Parsons’ most devoted friends snatched his body and gave him the heroic cremation a future legend warranted. 

Blame it on the remoteness, the silence so close yet so removed from the cacophony of Los Angeles, the trees so hairy their name was Biblical, but seers and prophets, nature lovers and flakes have congregated there forever.

One of the flakiest had to be George Wellington Van Tassel, aeronautical engineer and later “contactee,” a man who said he’d been visited by aliens.

He founded a desert airstrip, burrowed a cafe under “Giant Rock,” started picking up on what the desert and the aliens were saying to him and became guru to followers who helped him realize his alien tech vision — a life-extending, health-curing, mind-expanding, time-traveling domed gadget called the Integratron. 

Van Tassel died in 1978, but his followers are still around, with young new recruits showing up in the unfinished dome to meditate and speculate on what it might have been capable of had he not died (“Mysteriously,” they suggest, a “stroke at 68,” the records show), his plans and some of his technology disappearing as he did.

“Calling all Earthlings” visits the Integratron, its caretakers (Nancy and Patty Karl), and many of those who knew Van Tassel. It plays snippets of interviews, including one long and in dept early ’60s TV chat with a West Coast station.

And filmmaker Jonathan Berman talks to those who knew him, those protecting his legacy, local cultists and the odd academic astrophysicist of historian who can place the man and the phenomenon within the context of California’s longtime allure to and tolerance of seekers, spiritualists and flakes.

“The currents…raise our consciousness” via Tesla science, the true believers declare. “I’ve seen some ghosts, but never no UFO” another local (Joshua Tree, 29 Palms and Yucca Valley are the locales) declares.

Berman finds them in parched, scorched trailer parks, taking a drink (and God knows what else) in the desert at night at Giant Rock, in the dome itself — built without nails, with a gigantic Tesla coil and split-ring resonator that would have given it, once it had its aluminum roof sheeted on, its oscillator and other gear operating, the appearance and sparks-jumping glow of an alien spaceship.

There’s no judgement here, so any laughs you have are of your own devising. They’re a funny lot, the devout and the doubters. Even the late USC historian Kevin Starr takes the subject seriously, parking it within ancient belief systems and modern California loopiness.

I couldn’t quite figure out why Eric Burden of “The Animals” is here. Perhaps Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 wasn’t available. The radio UFOlogist Art Bell was still living when this was filmed, and he is sorely missed as well.

But the people and the exotic places of “Calling all Earthlings” burn it into the memory. It reminds me of the desert dweller classic Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea. If you’ve chosen to be there, that choice has some sort of oddball higher calling to it.

My only visit to Joshua Tree was after U2 and Parsons had given it pop culture currency. But that one trek made obvious its alien encounter allure. Strange lights in the night sky? Odd goings on? It’s no wonder Van Tassel started the first UFO believers conventions, holding them at Giant Rock all through the ’50s and ’60s.

A friend and I had just ascended a Joshua Tree National Monument peak when a roar and a blur of objects in camo green took our breaths away. A squadron of huge C-130 military transports were hurtling by, at treetop level, in the valley well below where we were standing — training for the Middle East, no doubt.

The huge Marine base at 29 Palms is probably responsible for some of the weirdness there, adherents of the dome admit. But even diving into Area 51 conspiracies don’t sugar coat it. Where’s the “mystery” in that, where’s the fun?

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: George Wellington Von Tassel (archival footage), Dr. J.J. Hurtak, Nancy Karl, Patty Karl, Dr. Kevin Starr, Ted Quinn, Eric Burdon

Credits:Directed by Jonathan Berman. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:17

We’ve known, from his first moments in character, that Jason Momoa was the wise cracking bad-ass Warner Brothers has been looking for in its DC comics universe films.

The first trailer for his stand-alone turn as “Aquaman” gave me a little chill, and several chuckles. And I’m not a fan of the genre. Watch them go and make it all about the digital brawls. Character is what works here. With Nicole Kidman as his mom, with Djimon Hounsou, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Michael Beach, Randall Park and Dolph Lundgren in the supporting cast, this seems like a can’t-miss Christmas present for the fanboys and girls.

The similarities are too spot-on to be a coincidence — a father breaks out of prison, reconnects with his three sons, who come to realize he’s a murderous psychopath and not the daddy they’ve been taught to respect, revere and love.

But “Last Rampage: The Escape of Gary Tison” is a fact-based account, using real names, “the true story” of how three adoring boys (Alex MacNiccol, Skyy Moore, Casey Thomas Brown) busted their dad (Robert Patrick) out of an Arizona prison, and only figured out what they’d done when their dash for the Mexican border turned murderous.

The kids are sons of Dorothy, played by Heather Graham as if she’s thrilled to finally be free of the tarts Hollywood always saw her as. She’s a dimwitted religious crank who fell under the spell of Gary Tison (Patrick) during an earlier prison stint. That’s right, she met him in stir.

“A good man…sometimes a good man listens to a bad one,” she explains to the naive young reporter (Molly O’Quinn) who “befriends” her.

Three sons were the result, boys who really only knew their “innocent” father via Sunday visits after his final conviction. Donnie (MacNicoll of “MacFarland, USA”) is the oldest, pragmatic, with a stint in the military behind him. Ricky (Moore) is the youngest and would follow his older brother anywhere. Ray (Brown) takes after his mamma — sensitive, unquestioning, soft-in-the-head.

They show up at prison every week to chat with daddy. And one week, they show up with guns, two of them overpowering the aw-shucks guards at the entrance desk, the other “visiting” Daddy by escorting him out.

Another convict (Chris Browning, brilliant, and every bit as scary as Patrick) pitches in when the escape goes down, and they’re off — swapping vehicles, racing to a rendezvous with Gary’s brother and a plane that will take them to Mexico.

It’s 1978, remember, and the U.S. border was even more porous than it is today. They could drive or walk, with a bit of water, across. But Gary wants to “leave in style.” If they get bored, “there’s a little bank I think we ought to hit!”

Donnie starts questioning the old man right at that point, his rages about having the wrong vehicle to make their getaway (a Chrysler 5th Avenue, a “yank tank” of the era and totally unsuitable for desert driving), his tardy brother, the poor planning the boys did, how this person or that one “ain’t no better’n me,” when plainly every one of them is more evolved than this sociopath.

His threats that “I won’t hesitate to paint these walls the color God made you!” and assorted Biblical allusions (“Blood calls to blood!”) let us see how he got his boys to carry out his scheme, and how he got the Church Lady to fall for him.

But the one guy who would never fall for any of that is the sheriff (Bruce Davison, sober and real in the part) who locked him up, now scrambling to find him again before Tison can hurt anybody else.

Of course, he’s a step late in doing that — repeatedly.

It’s a movie of cheap wigs (Graham’s, not out of character), dusty, ruined trailer parks, car thefts and murderous hijackings.

Greenawalt (Brown) takes a dislike to Donnie, but he’ll take a fatherly interest in showing the lad how to steal a late 60s vintage pickup (it wasn’t hard).

“You can have anything you want in this world, long as you know how to steal it.”

A terrific scene — the testy no-nonsense sheriff questioning the good ol’boy prison warden, played by John Heard in one of the last performances of a great character actor.

Director Dwight Little did chunks of TV’s “Prison Break” and “Nikita” and “Bones,” and manages this brisk saga in efficient if colorless strokes. As on TV, it’s more about performances and actor close-ups than flash and style.

Patrick, who worked with Little on TV’s “Scorpion,” makes the most of a rare big screen starring role, joking about an escape that was “cleaner’n a whore’s Bible,” dropping  a colloquial “Do WHAT now?” just often enough to give the picture — with California’s Joshua Tree subbing for Arizona — an authentic tang.

It’s not the career-making genre thriller that the fictionalized “At Close Range” was for director James Foley. Patrick’s no Christopher Walken, after all. But his riveting turn, and some terrific support from the under-used Davison and misused Graham make “Last Rampage” worth checking out, the very definition of “Netflixable.”

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, and language throughout

Cast: Robert Patrick, Heather Graham, Bruce Davison, Chris Browning, Alex MacNicoll, Skyy Moore, Casey Thomas Brown, Molly C. Quinn, John Heard

Credits:Directed by Dwight H. Little, script by Alvaro Rodriguez, Jason Rosenblatt. An Epic Pictures release.

Running time: 1:33

Presented without comment.

He didn’t like “getting permission,” signing up for filming permits.

So when writer/director/producer Larry Cohen needed a scene of comic Andy Kaufman in the company of a lot of cops, he dressed Kaufman as an NYPD uniform, shoved him into a parade of police and “stole a shot,” without permission from anybody, in a sea of New York’s finest.

He didn’t script much, hates the idea of “over-preparing” for a shoot, and used his locations as with as much innovation as any movie maker who ever lived.

Hollywood doesn’t like “hiring old,” be they actors, cinematographers, composers or grips? Larry Cohen would “find out whose mortgage was overdue, who needed to work,” and land Oscar winners, from Bette Davis and Broderick Crawford to composers Bernard Hermann and Miklós Rósza, lifting his no-budget “exploitation” pictures into at least the vicinity of “prestige” productions.

 “King Cohen: The Wild, Wonderful World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen” celebrates the cinema of a the King of Cut-Rate, the Emperor of Exploitation, the writer, director and producer of “Black Caesar,””It Lives!,” “Q:,” “Best Seller” and the screenwriter of such recent genre novelties as “Phone Booth,” “Best Seller,” “Cellular” and “Captivity.”

The just-turned-77 indie icon may comically gripe, walking through a horror convention in the film’s opening, that he’s “unrecognized, unrewarded for my lifetime achievement.”

But the fans know. And after “King Cohen,” you will too.

“This is my epitaph,” Cohen bellows at one point in Steve Mitchell’s film. Maybe it is. But one thing you take away from the film is his eagerness to continue to work, and how foolish it is for a business he never really “joined” (he made his movies outside the system) to not find a use for him now.

Stars, from Fred Williamson and Yaphet Kotto to Tara Reid, Michael Moriarty, Robert Forster and Eric Roberts, sing his praises. Peers like Scorsese, Dante and Landis revel in the urgency, neorealism and grit in his work. And critics, historians and retired colleagues laugh and laugh at the nonsense that happened on the set because Cohen believed in making movies on the fly, with little prep and panic-stricken brio.

You’ll laugh, too, at him and Williamson swapping lies about who came up with what in “Original Gangstas,” who did or didn’t demonstrate the stunts to whom in “Hell Up in Harlem.”

Trust fund kids whisper about “guerrilla filmmaking” in tony film schools from coast to coast. Cohen, pre-9/11 mind you, would drag actors and stage shootings in front of Tiffany’s (“Black Caesar”), sneak into J. Edgar Hoover’s old house (“The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover”) or park an un-permitted shootout in the baggage carousel at LAX.

Who has the guts to try any of that, nowadays? This is guerrilla filmmaking as taught by the Che Guevara of genre exploitation.

There’s always overstatement in such documentaries, and Cohen’s movies often were more memorably for their junk genre cheapness than their topicality, Big Themes or performances. But watching “King Cohen,” you can’t help but be dazzled by flashes of genius in future Bond villain Yaphet Kotto, in Michael Moriarty and Eric Roberts — flashes made possible by the seat-of-the-pants filmmaker’s free-wheeling style.

Larry Cohens don’t come around any more, and seeing J.J. Abrams introduce the picture just underlines that. Everybody playing exploitation games to come along afterward was just an imitation. Pity Mitchell didn’t interview Tarantino, but QT would probably have been too embarrassed to sit for it, anyway. All his “borrowing” would come home to roost.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, fake violence, profanity

Cast: Larry Cohen, Traci Lords, Martin Scorsese, J.J. Abrams, Michael Moriarty, Fred Williamson, Yaphet Kotto, Eric Bogosian, Eric Roberts, Tara Reid, Robert Forster, Joe Dante

Credits: Written and directed by Steve Mitchell.  A — release.

Running time: 1:43

Much soiled underwear re-soiling at Comic Con over this nonsense.

But here you go. 

Late getting to this. Am I the first to say, “Are they KIDDING?”

No Noomie, no Rooney, no Stieg Larrson original novel, no reason to exist. November, this hits the fan.