Movie Nation

An inspirational Christian music romance runs into the limitations common to the faith-based genre in “I Still Believe,” a bland tear-jerker that lacks the drama or commitment to wholly come off.

This true story of singer-songwriter Jeremy Camp’s “love of my life” ill-fated romance has warmth and moments of charm. It’s more “I Can Only Imagine” than “God’s Not Dead,” a concerted effort at presenting a positive message without anger or political victimhood. All that’s missing are the basics of good drama — conflict — and commitment and chemistry from its stars.

K.J. Apa from TV’s “Riverdale” plays young Camp, an Indiana lad who is smitten on sight when he spies pretty Melissa (Britt Robertson of TV’s “Girlboss” and “For the People”) at a concert when he arrives at Calvary Chapel Bible College in California.

How we get to that “meet cute” — which isn’t “cute” — sets the tone for the movie. It’s 1999 and Jeremy has to calm his special needs brother (Reuben Dodd) who is distraught at his leaving home. His struggling pastor dad (Gary Sinise) keeps a pizza joint delivery sign on top of the family’s ’80s AMC Eagle station wagon, but the parents (Shania Twain plays his mom) have managed to buy the kid a new guitar before he heads off.

That’s Jeremy’s ambition, “making it.” His “struggle” to achieve that consists of talking his way backstage at a concert The Kry are giving on campus, asking for advice from songwriter Jean-Luc (Nathan Parsons), and becoming a roadie for the night.

That gives him instant entre to a musical sounding board, songwriting feedback, recording studio and…fame.

And it’s in between delivering guitars (“guitar tec:”) to Jean-Luc in mid-show that he spies the prettiest girl on campus, beaming in rapture at the music The Kry perform. As Jean-Luc says, “I write love songs to God.” With maybe a girl in mind as he does, he jokes.

Here’s where the conflict is dodged. Hunky Jean-Luc’s “girl in mind” is Melissa. This being a Bible college and Melissa being chaste, that makes for a slow attempted-wooing. And even though Jeremy doesn’t know that attraction when he flirts, he keeps after Melissa after he learns that news, continuing to take Jean-Luc’s advice and help as he goes after his girl. Cold.

The filmmaking Erwin Brothers (“I Can Only Imagine,” “Moms’ Night Out”) make little of this potential friction. The conflict is snuffed out with nary a spark or raised voice.

Seriously?

There’s no struggle for the hero “make it” either.

That leaves the only spark in the movie the tepid romance between the leads, and the only conflict in the movie the cancer that hits Melissa shortly after their almost-cute “date/NOT a date” dating life debate has been settled.

Kapa does his own singing in “I Still Believe,” a big plus as he covers both Camp’s songs and others from the Christian pop canon, such as a beach campfire rendition of “Find Me in the River.”

His acting is a bit soap-opera-ish — constantly running his fingers through his hair in anguish, flirtation or whatever. He and Robertson have an onscreen attraction that is wholly dictated by the script and never believable. It’s more a “non-repulsion” than attraction.

Robertson’s commitment to the part doesn’t include ever, for one second, looking the least bit sick. A bandana covers the scalp she chose not to shave for the part, and fools no one. Still, she is credible as a true believer, sharing her passion for the cosmos in a planetarium scene – “God is so infinitely vast…and he knows MY NAME!”

The message here is soft-peddled, with only “Hasten the day” — Jean-Luc’s devotional motto, an ethos of “hastening Jesus’ return” — and debates of what Melissa meeting Jeremy and later developing cancer means for “our destiny.”

Jeremy is smooth. He works God into his come-on.

“God wants us to run for it, not away from it!”

The title tune has a potent message — maintaining faith when “proof” it pays off isn’t there — and a dull arrangement. The picture itself runs on past its climax, moist-eyed but never quite wrenching, no matter how long this is dragged out.

As with the Erwins’ “I Can Only Imagine,” there’s something to be said for a faith-based film that is soft-hearted and apolitical. But “I Still Believe” the Erwin Brothers aren’t growing as filmmakers, and won’t until they learn how to generate conflict, which is what it takes to create good drama.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material

Cast: K. J. Apa, Britt Robertson, Nathan Parsons, Shania Twain and Gary Sinise

Credits: Directed by Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin, script by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn. A Lionsgate release.

Running time:1:55

With studios scrambling to move their promising product off the shelves and into later post-Corona virus release dates, one does wonder if Universal isn’t happy just to get “The Hunt,” delayed by its satiric bloody, “liberal gun nut” satire message, off its books.

A hit would be nice, a bomb just a shrug considering the circumstances.

But wetnall curious, right?

This offers two great ones a tour de force. Dern has been dazzlingninbhis

Just a couple of days ago the evolutionary biologist and religion-debunking gadfly Richard Dawkins, whom I follow on Twitter, tweeted the hopeful thought that some British personage making a statement the world was taking seriously heralded “the return of the expert to the national conversation.”

To which one can only snort, “Hear HEAR.”

As the “#panDUMBic” erupts in an America and a planet weakened by anti-science know-nothingism and a sort of “Revenge of the Nitwits” — Centers for Disease Control defunded; politicians callously ignoring the human cost of a pandemic by fretting only about “the markets;” cronies, myopic religious fanatics, hacks and blinkered industry insiders in charge when the Corona comes calling — it’s a relief to catch a lively and engrossing genetics documentary filled with experts, highly educated people who give many sides of a serious scientific issue without the shouting shallowness of cable TV weighing in with all they don’t know.

“Human Nature” is a history of the rapidly evolving world of genetic science and the promise and potential horrors of “genetic editing.”

Archival footage frames Adam Bolt’s film and peppers its many interviews, shifts in subject area and points of view. And a speech at Cal Tech in 1966 by biologist Robert Sinsheimer, decades before he advocated for a Human Genome (decoding) Project, welcoming his “fellow prophets” with a few thoughts about “the potential for disaster” in misuse of the growing knowledge of DNA and how to manipulate it, kicks off the film.

We meet a smart and thoughtful tween named David Sanchez as he undergoes blood transfusions for his sickle cell anemia. His will be a disease dangled in front of the viewer as “Human Nature” unfolds, the sort of coming-soon breakthrough that will be treatable in the “Brave New World” of gene editing.

The greatest scientists in the field discuss the process of decoding, the discovery of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) explained by the Spanish scientist (Francisco Mojica) who was one of the first to recognize this key to the code, and key to future genetic editing.

Jill Banfield and David Baltimore and many others go over potential breakthroughs and pitfalls with the dispassion of academics. Fyodor Urnov speaks of being “at the foot of a very tall mountain,” for which “we may not even have the right climbing gear” to ascend.

Grinning eager beavers at eGenesis, a “garage” start-up founded by Luhan Yang, enthuse at the “Let’s see what we can do” possibilities of gene editing for profit because “there’s a revolution going on.”

And there’s Mike Wallace, interviewing science fiction author and philosopher Aldous Huxley in the late 1950s, a writer whose “Brave New World” provides a chapter heading for the film to begin talking about the potential “horror” of this post-in vitro fertilization, genetic editing “engineering human heredity” future.

Yes, “Designer babies” are discussed, with some academics suggesting codes of ethics for what should be allowed and some for-profit private sector backed folks pooh-poohing concerns, which they are wont to do.

“Eugenics” got a bad name, some say, even as others are quick to remember how it was hijacked by the Nazis (propaganda film footage bears this out) and applied to mental patients in Virginia for much of the 20th century.

The lighter touches in “Human Nature,” which lists Dan Rather as a producer, come from scientists who are all “Big Bang Theory” extras at heart — referencing sci fi books and movies to make their points. Will we accept a positive vision of how this hurtle towards the future turns out (“Star Trek”) or a dystopic one (“Blade Runner”)?

Several scientists remark on the speed with which this “revolution” is unfolding with concern and hope that ethics and codes of conduct will be formed within their community before China — where twins had their genomes edited “as an experiment” in 2018 — or some other entity makes Huxley’s prediction of genetic “horrors” comes true.

Then there is the grandfatherly face and voice of lawyer and bio-ethicist Hank Greely is here to put all this plant-editing/livestock altering in perspective, as reassuring as any expert in a field and a film stuffed with them.

“We have been messing with nature ever since we came down from the trees.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jennifer Doudna , David Baltimore, Jill Banfield, Alta Charo, Fyodor Urnov, Rodolphe Barrangou, George Church, Luhan Yang, Francisco Mojica and Hank Greely.

Credits: Directed by Adam Bolt, script by Adam Bolt, Regina Sobel. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:34

In film and fiction, the phrase “narrative thread” is commonly used to describe the way pieces of the plot are woven together. “Human Capital” is a smart, well-cast drama that lets us see its threads as they bend back and forth on the loom, its mystery unraveling as they do.

It’s about affluence and “gambling” in the markets, snobbery and the myriad mental strains that hammer teenagers, even those rich enough to attend a private school.

That’s the connecting thread in Oren Moverman’s screenplay, based on a Stephen Amidon novel previously adapted into an Italian film back in 2013. Rich parents of students at suburban New York’s exclusive Buchman Academy gather for a fund-raising dinner. A waiter at the restaurant serving that dinner is hit, on his bicycle, on his way home. The script returns us to that dinner several times, via the characters and the threads of their story.

Liev Schreiber is Drew Hagel, a gauche real estate agent with a rebellious daughter (Maya Hawke) at that school and at that dinner. Drew is the sort that blurts his whole story — or too much of it — when he meets the mother (Marisa Tomei) of the boy daughter Shannon is dating.

No, Shannon’s mother doesn’t live here. “I remarried…much younger woman. Kind of a ‘trophy’ thing.”

Carrie (Tomei) gets out of that conversation in a hurry. But what Drew really wants to do is meet her husband, the high-flying and mysterious Quint (Peter Sarsgaard), who runs a hedge fund.

“We move invisible money through invisible markets at invisible speeds guided by invisible hands with invisible oversight,” Quint purrs.

Want to invest? Sure!

That entanglement has legal and moral implications, as well as financial ones. Drew used to have a gambling problem. Maybe he’s moved on from that to SEC filing shortcuts. But he’s still got a whiff of “desperate hustler” about him. Ronnie, the “trophy” wife (Betty Gabriel) may be put off by the glib arrogance of “this crowd,” especially Quint’s vulpine lawyer/board member (Aasif Mandvi, turning up the “vile”). But Drew NEEDS this.

The daughter and her boyfriend (Fred Hechinger), Ronnie’s profession and one client in particular (Alex Wolff) and Carrie’s marriage to Quint, her past and her big dream all are unwound in threads of the story that work their way back to that banquet, that accident and its potential repercussions.

In a business that rarely has room for more that one or two top flight “name” screenwriters, Moverman’s work stands apart, even when he’s adapting a novel. He made his mark by writing and directing the moving drama of soldiers on Casualty Notification duty, “The Messenger.” Scripts like “Rampart,” “Love & Mercy” and “The Dinner” show his gift for plot, beautifully-crafted scenes and zinging dialogue.

An argument between Carrie and Quint is filled with verbal darts that draw blood.

“Why don’t you put the ‘street girl’ back in the wine bottle!”

“Better start looking for your next wife!”

“Oh, I’m on it!”

Few actors working today carry the sinister, snooty menace Sarsgaard can convey when he’s a mind to. Tomei gets a moment or two of fury and fear, Schreiber is convincingly low-class and desperate and young Hawke (“Stranger Things”), the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, makes Shannon dazzlingly sullen, spoiled and impulsive.

There are missteps, threads that seems to clash with everything that’s woven around them. But Moverman and director Marc Meyers (“My Friend Dahmer”) keep that loom weaving, their story moving forward and their movie about the sometimes discounted value of “Human Capital” perfectly engrossing, from start to finish.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, adult situations, alcohol abuse, profanity, violence

Cast: Liev Schreiber, Marisa Tomei, Peter Sarsgaard, Betty Gabriel, Maya Hawke, Aasif Mandi and Alex Wolff.

Credits: Directed by Marc Meyers, script by Oren Moverman based on a Stephen Amidon novel. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:38

KJ Apa, Britt Robertson and Shania Twain star in this Just in Time for Easter Christian music romance, built around the song.

Looks Insipid, in that Nicholas Sparks way. But that just lowers the bar. Could be good.

Hope I don’t get the Covid19 thing from sitting in a theater. https://youtu.be/7Za7-Q8YURM

“The Dog Doc” is a documentary portrait of a Cornell-trained New York veterinarian who pioneered the use of homeopathy, acupuncture, “vitamin C therapy” and other groundbreaking treatments to “hopeless cases” in the animal kingdom.

It’s a feel-good film of wags and tears, hugs and worry as concerned pet owners from across the country come to his Smith Ridge clinic when all hope is lost.

“Her other vet was about to put her down, today,” or words to that effect pop up a lot in this film about an “integrative” veterinary practice.

“If we work on his health and not the disease…support the patient’s immune system” by understanding “the biological effects of good food, homeopathy” along with, if necessary, more conventional cutting edge treatments such as cryosurgery,” Dr. Marty Goldstein is certain he can save many a “helpless” case, improve the quality of a pet’s life and/or extend that life.

“This is NOT ‘snake oil,'” he declares. Because he’s heard that before. We do not hear from a single soul questioning his theories and practices, just his wife reading a mean blog post and a former Doubting Thomas in his profession, now a convert.

Filmmaker Cindy Meehl follows Goldstein and other doctors and vet techs at his practice as they deal with cancers, autoimmune reactions to vaccines, kidney failure and other life-threatening crises facing the pets brought there as a last resort.

“It’s very rare that we cannot offer some sort of hope,” one doctor tells a desperate pet owner. And we see anecdotal proof of that aplenty. We see treatment, often including vitamin C, operations and a radical change to a “carnivore’s diet” — meat, not corn-based dog or cat food — deliver “before” and “after” results that are often remarkable.

Other patients test the staff’s resources and skills to the fullest. Not everybody wags their way out of there.

“The Dog Doc” is a just a tad more emotional and specialized than your average TV veterinary practice program. There’s a little evangelism here, too.

Goldstein is invited to speak and share what he’s learned at his alma mater. And while Dr. Marty is “NOT anti-vaccine,” the sloppy traditions of pet vaccination — “one dose fits all,” and “annual vaccines” and the like —  are making animals sicker, he insists. TEST to see if they still have immunity rather than injecting them every year for every pet malady.

But it’s weird seeing this pleasant little sermon on veterinary homeopathy during an incompetently-managed human pandemic, with tens of millions of Americans facing illness, many of them without health insurance.

No, you don’t see a particularly diverse client base at Smith Ridge. Nobody really flinches at this $1200 treatment, or those follow-up visit costs. One woman’s got her recovering dog on a “Boston Market (rotisserie) chicken” diet. He eats one or more a day, she grins — at $11.49 per chicken.

So aside from the fact that the medicine is not challenged, if there’s a more unironic depiction of “white privilege” on film, I’m hard-pressed to name it.

Nobody on Earth loves dogs more than me, but “The Dog Doc” is too credulous and tone deaf to affluence to give a pass.

MPAA Rating: unrated, surgical scenes, profanity

Cast: Marty Goldstein, Randie Shane, Jaqueline Ruskin, Jennifer Lenarz-Salcedo staff and patients and pet owners at the Smith Ridge Veterinary Clinic

Credits: Directed by Cindy Meehl. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:36

“The Third Wife” is a Vietnamese period piece of “Raise the Red Lantern” variety.

First-time feature writer-director Ash Mayfair creates a lush, intimate character study in cultural mores centered on a 14 year-old girl, May, who steps into adulthood through an arranged marriage into a wealthy family.

It’s a rural life May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My), “The Third Wife” of Master Hung (Long Le Vu), settles into. The clothes may be silk, and there is comfort and plenty on this farm, run by servants and hired hands. But in this blinkered world, life, death, sex and competition to produce an heir are ripe ingredients for melodrama.

Not that Mayfair ever lapses into that. May is taken is as a “sister” to Ha (Nu Yên-Khê Tran ) and Xuan (Maya) in Hung’s house. But they treat her as more of a daughter, too young to know the ways of the world without them explaining things to her.

She has more in common with the older wives’ young daughters, whose hair she combs and whom she helps look after.

Mistress Xuan, Auntie Lao (Nhu Quynh Nguyen) whispers, “is not the real lady of the house” because she hasn’t given her husband a son.

The older wife Ha has. Son (Nguyen Thanh Tam) may be of marrying age, but is high strung and caught up in love-lust with somebody else under their own roof.

We eavesdrop on May’s seduction by her gentle-enough (all things considered) husband, hear her “fake it until you experience it” sexual pleasure lecture from her “sisters” and watch her spy on the other sex going on in the house, in the woods outside.

Her pregnancy becomes a form of prayerful competition with Xuan.

It’s in its everyday life detail, “The Third Wife” most closely resembles the great Chinese period pieces that plainly inspired it. Chickens are butchered and cooked, laundry is hung out and a dying animal’s pain is eased — mostly by servants — as the generally pampered wives teach May to “let a servant do it.”

But those servant/wife lines blur in May’s mind, and ours, when we see women’s value and lack of rights in determining their own future. What to do about an attraction to someone not her husband? Does that have a future?

Some are going to be instantly repelled by the idea of a 14 year-old married off to a polygamous older man. The film’s sexuality is mainly delivered as “instruction” for what unworldly May observes and is told.

“In the end,” the old patriarch philosophizes, “what are we but shadows in the dust of Buddha?”

It’s a different time, simpler and yet harder — something reinforced by the fate of girls even younger than May facing a similar fate.

“The Third Wife” lacks the Technicolor saturated hues of the great Zhang Yimou Chinese period pieces it imitates — “Ju Dou,” Red Sorghum” and “To Live” among them. It lacks the emotional, dramatic punch of those stories as well.

Mayfair presents us with a more passive pastoral drama, meticulously-detailed and lovely, but lacking the payoff, conflict and fireworks that would make it something extraordinary.

The fact that she’s already made another version of this same tale in black and white (“Between Shadow and Soul”) as a follow-up to “The Third Wife” suggests she realizes she pulled some of her punches, this time around.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content

Cast: Nguyen Phuong Tra My, Maya, Nu Yên-Khê Tran, Nguyen Thanh Tam and Long Le Vu

Credits: Written and directed by Ash Mayfair.  A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:36

The economist, social theorist and philosopher Karl Marx took a shot at describing “capital,” the relationship between worker and business owner in capitalism, in “Das Kapital,” a world-altering book first published in 1867.

It described the “exploitation of labor” as the root of a system that made a few wealthy and the many impoverished, downtrodden and trapped.

French economical historian Thomas Pinketty thought it worth revisiting that relationship, that system and that principle — “capital” — with “Capital in the 21st Century.” With a world roiled by a massive, sudden and recent redistribution of wealth upward, the destruction of the middle class in much of the industrialized world, a rise in nationalism and nativism among the increasingly hard-pressed and struggling working classes, his timing could not have been better.

“Capital in the 21st Century,” in documentary form, is an almost overwhelming alarm bell, a call to action and a fact, chart, animated illustration-and-quote-stuffed history of “how we got here” in the first place.

Pinketty, leading a battalion of economists, historians, TV economics presenters, academics and authors, begins his history with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, recalling his visits to Eastern Europe as a student where he witnessed “a complete state of failure.”

But winning that Cold War allowed those who declared victory to run amok, expressing “infinite faith in the deregulation of the market” and the culture to embrace “the worship of private property.”‘

While that might have benefited a tiny, oligarchical “aristocracy,” the aspirational lie being sold to the public at large was but a dream.

Filmmaker Justin Pemberton (“The Nuclear Comeback”) enlivens the many, many talking heads that begin with Pinketty and follow in the film with old educational cartoons, archival footage, old and recent, and clips from motion pictures such as “Les Miserables,” “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Wall Street” and TV shows such as “The Daily Show” and “The Simpsons.”

But the use of music to underscore the various experts’ points is what sticks with you. Looking at images highlighting the increasingly vain hopes of the multitudes to live like a Bush, Trump or Kardashian, we hear the synthesized finger snaps and plaintive, acquisitive lyrics of Lorde’s “Royals.”

“We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash…”

With Pinketty leading, and British economic historian and TV presenter Kate Williams, CNN economics commentator Rana Foroorhar and a legion of others telling parts of the story, we’re taken through the “feudalism” that survived, in economic form, until World War II.

We see the post WWI “irrational exuberance” of the Roaring ’20s, where developed countries realized that taxing the aristocracy was a good thing, inventing and exploiting “credit” not as good, Wall Street speculation worst of all all pointing to the Great Depression.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz and others remind us that criminal bankers (a major villain of the piece) actually went to jail for the Wall Street crash, that the Glass-Steagall Act designed to safeguard the economy against gambling bankers, was passed — only to be repealed in 1999.

What happened nine years after that?

We’re shown how much the wealth and living conditions of the vast majority of working people improved thanks to higher taxes on the wealthy and strong labor movements that spun out of World War II.

And we see how “democracy was captured by elites all across the world” by Francis Fukuyama, an after-effect of the Arab Oil embargo “shock” and the temporary rise of Japan in the 1970s.

Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union rise and Ronald Reagan’s coining of the phrase “Make America Great Again” came as a consequence of that, “Capital” explains — reactions to shifts in status and strains on households increasingly losing ground to an increasingly government-access empowered and favored elite.

University of California psychologist Paul Piff recounts his studies on human nature, greed and callousness, illustrating how “trickle down” economics never works because it is our nature NOT to share. The rich become the “idle rich” in a capital sense (their money neither works for anything or helps anyone other than themselves) by instinct.

Experts describe the current immigrant-phobia and “fear of the other” ginned up by politicians from Turkey and Russia to Hungary, Britain, Australia and the U.S., as temporary and pointless.

“Blaming your neighbor doesn’t make you any richer.”

The upshot of this is the “call to action” part of Pinketty’s “Capital.” With wealth gathering and maintained by a tiny minority, wages and living standards “stagnating” for the bottom 90%, life expectancy dropping for working people and the Baby Boomer Generation, the last one to really have it good, starting to die off and pass on their wealth to their strapped children, a pivotal moment has arrived.

Will we keep worshipping Reagan/Thatcher’s “war on the welfare state?” Will we ever get wise to the hoax of “trickle down economics?” Will we continue to buy into the lie of the “death tax,” promulgated by the wealthy to ensure they stay wealthy and you stay broke? Or will enough of us turn off the Murdoch media long enough to awaken from our daze and act and vote in our own best interests?

You mention any “Marx” that isn’t Groucho, Chico or Harpo and you lose some people’s attention. But Pinketty’s argument, that the feudalism and worker exploitation that Marx was decrying 150 years ago has returned, is worth hearing out in this lively, information-packed and damning documentary.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Thomas Pinketty, Rana Foroorhar, Kate Williams, Francis Fukuyama, Lucas Chancel, Ian Bremmer, Bryce Edwards, Suresh Naidu, Simon Johnson, Faiza Shaheen, Joseph Stiglitz

Credits: Directed by Justin Pemberton, based on the book by Thomas Pinketty, adapted by Pinketty, Pemberton and and Matthew Metcalf. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:43

Matt Reeves tweeted some pix. At the link. “Muscle Car” with angular aerodynamic flourishes?
#TheBatman https://t.co/qJFNprk1ut https://twitter.com/mattreevesLA/status/1235261421425958912?s=20