Movie Nation

If you got all your crime news from the movies, you’d probably wonder how any of us survive the mass murdering drug cartels, avoid becoming a serial killer’s prey or protect our teenage girls from being abducted into sexual slavery.

Human trafficking is both a Hollywood cause and a horrific yet titillating subject for a thriller. Somebody’s going to be “Taken,” where this “Priceless” child will end up in the “Trade.” Half a dozen movies on this theme come out every year.

Little separates “Trafficked,” a low-budget entry in the field, from the pack, save for the presence of some big names in supporting roles in the cast. It’s an ambitious, multi-national peek at the different paths young women from Nigeria, India and California find themselves trapped in a brothel in Texas.

Mali (Jessica Obilum) tells how her mother compared prostitution to farming — “A man” must be endured for a few minutes, whereas “planting sweet potatoes takes all day, in the burning sun.”

Amba (Alpa Banker) and her pal are comparing notes about the colleges in America that are getting them out of New Delhi . Children of affluence, they cross the wrong punk, are assaulted and Amba finds herself drugged and dragged across the world.

“Two planes, three trucks, one speedboat and one wooden rowboat” later, she’s stuck “owing” the creep in charge, Simon (Sean Patrick Flanery) “500 men” before she’ll be let go.

Anne Archer plays the nun running a group home for orphans in rural California, where Sara (Kelly Washington) is celebrating her 18th birthday. A helpful social worker (Ashley Judd) is there for the party, and to whisk Sara away to a life working on cruise ships. Not really.

All three endure beatings and witness murders on their journeys, but are wholly reassured when one and all comfort them with “It’s just business, honey.” Each is treated like chattel, man-handled, brutalized and killed if they don’t heed the threats.

There is no bystander who will see their plight and rescue them, no relative tracking them down, no help from corrupt border country law enforcement (Patrick Duffy plays the Texas Rangers honcho totally in on the scam).

Mali counsels “Don’t think about who you used to be…You lie back and survive.”

But with drug cartels partnered in an unholy girls for guns for drugs triangle trade, even the youngest among them has to know that promises of release are empty. They either escape or die.

The script is by Siddharth Kara, a Harvard academic who is Director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.  So whatever the screenplay lacks in originality, suspense or action beat plausibility, it has that “This sort of thing really happens” authority about it.

The rarer than rare good lines are given to the most interesting of the victims, Mali.

Actor turned producer and now director Will Wallace didn’t get lessons on pacing, or learned the wrong lessons from the likes of Terrence Malick, whom he’s worked with. The plot, for all its tried and true conventions, has eye-rolling leaps in logic and sort of lumbers between star cameos until we reach a far-fetched if generic conclusion.

All manner of well-intentioned pictures are being made on this awful subject, faith-based movies to simple Liam Neeson thrillers. But whatever its worthiness as a cause worth wiping out, you’ve got to bring something new to the table to make your movie stand out. And casting Anne Archer as a nun, Ashley Judd and Patrick Duffy as villains and Efren Ramirez of “Napoleon Dynamite” as a sympathetic Gypsy bartender in the brothel isn’t it.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content including sexual assaults, language, and some drug use

Cast: Kelly Washington, Jessica Obilum, Alpa Banker, Ashley Judd, Anne Archer, Patrick Duffy

Credits: Directed by Will Wallace, script by Siddharth Kara.  An Epic release.

Running time: 1:39

This year isn’t over yet, but I’m underwhelmed by the trailers of the animated movies opening between now and Christmas. And if those hunches prove true, this will go in the books as perhaps the worst year for major studio animation since the great Animation Wars started with Dreamworks, then Sony and others challenged Disney and Pixar for those parents-take-the-kids-to-cartoons cash.

Sony’s “Peter Rabbit” opens next year, not long after the similarly British “Paddington 2.” Peter and his pals party in Domhnall Gleeson’s house? Actually, that would be a funny touch — Domhnall, who is in “American Made” and seemingly every other picture to come along these days, coping in his “real” life with a critter calamity.

One always suspected that he screams like a little Irish girl.

James Corden voices Peter. This looks loud and fractious in style, with realistic renderings parking the animals in the real (British) world. Might be all right, but not judging from this.

It snows on the people-and-advertising choked streets of Los Angeles. San Diego has been reduced to “Waste Management District” for greater LA. Drone strikes are directed by smart glasses targeting systems, you’re never alone so long as you can afford a hologram, the cops drive flying Peugeots and things still go better with Coca-Cola.

But what are we to take from the chilly magnificence of “Blade Runner 2049?” Can we develop empathy for characters we know, entirely too soon, either don’t exist or do not have the “child of woman born” bonafides?

Thirty-five years after his death, and we’re still pondering sci-fi genius Philip K. Dick’s ultimate question — “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

This long-promised, long-gestating sequel to Ridley Scott’s flawed masterpiece of the ’80s moves humanity no further down the rabbit hole of the murky nature of existence even as it deepens the dystopia that our polluted, violent, over-populated planet might be hurtling towards.

Denis Villeneuve, of “Arrival” and “Sicario,” takes the reins from Scott for the return to the brownscape of Future LA, which looks entirely too much like present-day Hengshui, China, or any mature, built-up smog-covered megacity in what used to be the developing world. Villeneuve has constructed the most-anticipated science fiction film of the year on conventional bones, with surprises that aren’t terribly surprising if you’re paying attention or if you’ve seen the trailers and TV ads.

Ryan Gosling, playing yet another detective, is the LAPD’s “K,” a Blade Runner chasing down replicants 30 years after Deckard (Harrison Ford) tracked down Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and fell for the feminine perfection of Rachel (Sean Young).

Tyrell Corp. is no more, but a visionary industrialist named Wallace (Jared Leto) has made replicant “slaves” safe for humanity.

“We make angels in service of civilization,” he purrs behind milky-white eyes.

There are just a few outdated rogue models left to get rid of, and it’s when K is disposing of one (Dave Bautista of “Guardians of the Galaxy”) that he learns of a new wrinkle in the human/replicant continuum.

“You’ve never seen a miracle,” the dying clone tells him.

This news is so big that Madam, K’s boss (Robin Wright) considers the new hunt a threat to civilization, and news that would terrify humanity.

Which is why she leaves just one cop on the case. ALMOST makes sense, right?

K must sift through clues, visit retirees from the Blade Runner ranks, check eyeballs for serial numbers and deal with Wallace’s most fanatical minion (Sylvia Hoeks) in order to solve and survive this case.

“Blade Runner” presented a Los Angeles logically transposed into its demographic future, with overwhelming Asian and Latino influence. Villeneuve couldn’t resist making his Future LA more pan national — from the “little lady” waiting at home for K (Cuban starlet Ana De Armas) to assorted Euro and Middle Eastern bit players to the comically French product placement of Peugeot futurecars.

The Earth of 2049 is a crowded yet seemingly depopulated world — vast swaths of the empty, the deforested (eco-system collapses) and the abandoned. Visits to the San Diego junkyard are reminiscent of “Wall-E,” “Hardware” and assorted other dystopias featuring a crashed consumer culture.

It’s a largely humorless picture, with Gosling doing the hard-boiled thing in a mechanical minor key, such as when K runs into a hooker (Mackenzie Davis of “The Martian”).

“You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

“Depends. What’s your model number?”

It’s also, start to finish, pretty much heartless. The best acting moments are shared by Gosling and Ford, and by a visit to a professional “dream implant” scientist (Carla Juri).

But for all its stunning visuals and legitimate intellectual and moral heft, the picture has all the emotion of last year’s cell phone commercials.

Wait for one scene that matches the heartfelt intensity of Rutger Hauer’s demonstration of what it means to be human to Ford’s Deckard, in the rain-soaked climax of the original film. You’ll wait in vain.

Hope against hope that the director of “Arrival” will give one actor an “Amy Adams in ‘Arrival'” moment of genuine pathos. Doesn’t happen.

That leaves “Blade Runner 2049” as more impressive than moving, more thought-provoking than heartfelt — chilling in its magnificence.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, some sexuality, nudity and language

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, Jared Leto, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis

Credits:Directed by Denis Villeneuve, script by Hampton Fancher and Dennis Green, based on Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

A Warner Brothers/Son-Columbia release.

Running time: 2:40

The surest way to muck up a perfectly adorable children’s film is the insist upon doing a sequel. Whatever literary qualities “Paddington Bear” has, as a cinematic event he only gets to take us by delightful surprise once.

So. Cast Hugh Grant as the villain, bring in Brendan Gleeson and Julie Walters and Peter Capaldi and other bears…voila! A January sleeper? Could be.

This comic novel adaptation, about an elderly couple who take an ancient RV from Massachusetts to Hemingway’s House down in Key West, may give dementia a “cute” veneer.

But when you’ve got Dame Helen Mirren and the durable Donald Sutherland behind the wheel, there’s the promise of something magical. Good to see the Oscar winner’s still tackling indie films. Good to see Sutherland survived “The Hunger Games” and is as game as ever.

The first images of “The Case for Pot” documentary “The Legend of 420” are a joke — World War II footage re-purposed as a narrator makes the case that Hitler lost the war in the haze of a a mellowing hashish addiction.

The second scene is a joke, too. We follow a “transporter” named Butterfly Jones as he hauls Hefty bags full of Humboldt County pot south to Los Angeles.

The rules of moving marijuana in a nation where not every state considers it legal?

“Have a buyer. Have a supplier. Don’t get popped.”

And how does one “not get popped?” “Don’t stand out,” he offers, donning a loud, striped poncho, fluffing his voluminous dreadlocks and hurtling down the highway in a late model Subaru with the “check engine” light glowing on the dash.

“Legend” may settle down into an assortment of “the thousands of uses” — medical and otherwise — of pot and hemp and tearful testimonials from users whose health medical marijuana has benefited (including rock star and cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge). But those serious notes are always followed by a laugh — stand-up comics doing “pot sets” at a San Francisco area club. And there’s humor even in its choice of (rare) contrary voices — comically shrill shills like Scott Chipman of something called “Citizens Against Legalization of Marijuana.”

Filmmaker/music biz insider Peter Spirer (the classic hip hop doc “Rhyme and Reason” was his) and his team interviewed everyone from Tommy Chong and Henry Rollins to NORML activists (National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws), High Times (a pot mag) employees and faculty at Oaksterdam U., the world’s first cannabis college — teaching how to grow it, how it may be used, etc., to a growing population of entrepreneurs breaking into the legal marijuana industry.

Cannabis-infused coffees and cannabis cuisine are explored, activists rattle off a few of the “400 maladies” pot usage can treat, a veterinarian marvels at how the active ingredient in hemp can be used in drugs to treat sick dogs (Canine cannabis!) without injurious side-effects, a Colorado legislator declares there’s no measurable downside to legalization and there’s brief discussion of America’s future as a Hemp Industrial Complex (it has many non medical or recreational uses, as a plant).

With rarely a discouraging word. The old straw man “gateway drug” is resurrected and swatted down, with ease. When several people say “Nobody ODs on pot,” or robs anyone to get that “next fix,” or sells his or her body on the street to afford an ounce or an eighth, it’s hard to argue that pot should be treated any differently than alcohol or cigarettes.

No, there are no real “experts” to talk about long-term use and its consequences — just jokes about users “forgetting to vote” when this comes up on the ballot in your state, or an un-ironic trip to a pot-friendly “art show” (think R. Crumb, only more pretentious).

Spirer & Co. may talk about “racist” drug laws and the ugly irony of a nation filled with people of color with police records relating to pot, while “the suits” (white folks with money) are the only ones getting finance to dive into the legal trade. The entire film is almost as white as the sheet one comic suggests pot-hating Attorney General Jeff Sessions wears in his off-duty hours.

Spirer must have lost the phone number of Pot’s Most Famous Musical Activist — Snoop Dogg.

And whitewashed or not, the entire affair is a piece of advocacy cinema, nothing more.

But that said, the documentary isn’t anything resembling an over-reach, trotting out stats, uses, compassionate arguments and “harmless” stances that have been around for decades, and never effectively refuted. It’s all as easy to swallow as a THC-infused brownie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug-use and profanity

Cast: Melissa Etheridge, Tommy Chong, Henry Rollins and Michael Des Barres

Credits: Directed by Peter Spirer, script by Andrews. An XLRator release.

Running Time: 1:27

Another year, another over-long, obscure (and often as not, European) Palme D’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival.

This year’s Palme picture is “The Square,” a two and a half hour darkly comic commentary on community, moral responsibility, class and the pretentiousness of modern art.

The latest from writer/director Ruben Ostlund, who created the masterly and more coherent “Force Majeure,” it plays like a performance art piece that outstays its welcome.

That’s what life must feel like for the film’s unheroic lead. Christian Nielsen (Claes Bang) is a hip, posh head of Stockholm’s X-Royal Museum, a modern art repository sitting on the cutting edge of world art culture.

Where else could you go for to see a blockbuster exhibition — “Mirrors & Piles of Gravel?”

They’re pushing hard to answer that eternal question of modern art — “If you place an object in a museum, does that make it art?”

Christian isn’t rattled when he has to explain himself and that credo to a comically underprepared TV reporter (Elizabeth Moss of “The Handmaid’s Tale”).  She asks him just that one question.

He’s got to wonder what might be going on when he’s the victim of an elaborate pickpocket scam that features domestic melodrama, the threat of violence and a fellow “bystander” who enlists his help to intervene.

He’s already brushed past the panhandlers who want to know how little he’d pay “to save a human life.”

So it’s confirmed. No human kindness goes unpunished. Or maybe keeping the real world at arm’s length is why he’s been punished.

Something to chew on as the museum prepares to open an impossible-to-market conceptual piece, “The Square,” a four meter by four meter floor installation (bordered by a light strip) where inside it “is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.”

In a Sweden with insufferably rude immigrant panhandlers, where an artist’s Q & A is hysterically/horrifically interrupted by an alleged Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer that no one dares asks to leave, where avenging yourself on the petty criminals who picked your pocket is unheard of, where a glamorous gala’s performance art piece is a muscular brute (Terry Notary) aping a gorilla to such a degree he puts helpless art lovers in mortal peril, is there a line between tolerance and the intolerable?

Moss and Dominic West, as the artist whose Q & A is ruined by what could very well be a faker (Is it all just “performance art?”) get high billing, even though neither is in the movie more than two or three scenes.

Bang, largely unknown outside of Sweden, navigates a perilous world with a near-unflappable calm. But he can be flapped. His IT guy (Christopher Laesso) tracks his stolen phone, prompting a late night mail run — threatening notes left at every apartment in the building where the thieves must reside. Christian finds himself forced to do this dirty work by himself.

He’s faced with the consequences — a wrestling match over a used condom — of bedding a willing fan with a nasty edge and questionable motives.

And then there’s that exhibit that nobody could market, but willing Young Turks at their ad firm take a shot, with out-of-their-depth consequences.

Ostlund has Christian flip back and forth between English and Swedish at the oddest times. How’s he know if the street person he asks to watch his bags so he can hunt down his unruly, slipped out of sight teen/tween daughters speaks English?

The director makes pointed comments about “installation” art of the “Give me a break” variety. If a custodian “damages” piles of gravel, who will know?

It all adds up to rather less than the “meaning” loaded onto “The Square,” and its various subplots and digressions — Motorcycle hoodlums, anyone? — is as indulgent as any of the hooey he’s ridiculing in the museum.

Still, there’s a tone, an unsettling and rising sense of desperation in Christian that takes us along for the ride. I mean, who among us would dare cross Elizabeth Moss in a dander, or would be the first to ball up a fist when performance art gets out of hand?

MPAA Rating: R for language, some strong sexual content, and brief violence

Cast: Claes Bang, Elizabeth Miss, Dominic West. Terry Notary

Credits: Written and directed by Ruben Ostlund. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:25

Surprised Magnolia let this scene out of the bag, as it’s a highlight of “Lucky.” But if you’re determined to get filmgoers to hunt down a limited release film in the hopes of netting Harry an Oscar nomination, you do what you need to do.

See the film and this arrives at a most unexpected moment, to the delighted reaction of folks onscreen and off. It’s a little boy’s birthday party in the desert Southwest town where Lucky, a lonely creature of habit, lives. Enjoy.

Jason Isaacs dolled up as “Uncle Joe” Stalin, STEVE FREAKING BUSCEMI as Kruschev,” with Andrea Riseborough, Paddy Considine and MICHAEL PALIN — yes, I’m shouting — directed and co-written by the creator of “In the Loop” and “Alan Partridge,” how can this not be hilarious?

It opens in the UK next month, and in the US…soon.

Not a dazzling supporting cast. Kevin Connolly — yes THAT Kevin Connolly, of “Entourage,” directed it. But Travolta takes a big swing at the “Teflon Don” in this modestly-budgeted bio-thriller.

Not sure of the release date. Not sure if they are either. But John T and Kelly Preston and Stacy Keach are aiming high.