Movie Nation

Horace B. Jenkins made his romantic melodrama “Cane River” a couple of years before Spike Lee made his breakthrough first film.

It arrived a decade before Julie Dash’s seminal indie drama of people and a place, “Daughters of the Dust.”

But Jenkins died just after finishing “Cane River” in 1982, and the movie never enjoyed an official release — until now.

It never had the chance to make an impact in its day, but as an artifact, it’s almost as interesting as a look back in time as it is a work of grown-up romance, serious cultural debate and forgotten history.

The story could not be more corny. Peter Metoyer (Richard Romain) is the handsome son of middle class members of the First Family of Cane River, Louisiana. They’re Creole, “the Forgotten People” of mixed-race of the region. His ancestors included the Frenchman who built Melrose plantation and the freed-slave woman Monsieur Metoyer married.

Peter’s tall, a star athlete fresh out of college who just told the New York Jet “No thanks” when they drafted him into the NFL.

“The closest I’ll get to the ‘pros’  is the prose I’ll put down with pencil on paper!”

Peter’s come home to a hero’s welcome in spite of that. He is independent enough to be “a farmer aspiring to be a poet.” He takes horseback rides around the old homestead, sits under and ancient oak and fills his journal with insipid “See the Morning Sun” verse.

And then he meets the lovely Maria Mathis (Tommye Myrick), who works in the tourist attraction that the old plantation has become. That raises eyebrows, even among the white busybodies who run the tours through this historic site.

“You Creoles are different people,” one huffs. “You wouldn’t associate with the likes” of Maria, her blue collar hatchery-worker brother, “Brother” (Ilunga Adell) or her mama (Carol Sutton).

Maria and her family are Negroes from Nachitoches (pronounced “NACKitote”), not Creoles. Their skin is dark. Fair-skinned Catholics like the Metoyers kept dark-skinned Mathis ancestors as slaves 125 years ago. No wonder they became Protestants.

That’s the conflict at the heart of the film — class, history and skin color. We see high school drop-out Brother struggling to get by at the hatchery and hear Maria’s plans to leave this provincial backwater, where everybody’s trapped in their social place, for Xavier University in New Orleans.

As for falling in love with Peter, Maria sees trouble, and not just from her “They’re not LIKE us” mother.

Peter may be smitten and determined to forget all that, but that’s a mountain to climb in 1982 Cane River and Natchitoches — “YEAH, I’m a Metoyer! Now what does being a damned Metoyer have to do with it?”

“Do you HAVE to curse?”

Yes, he says. Yes he does. Anything to lift this dialogue out of its incurable banality.

There are other points of conflict, but they’re barely addressed at all. The acting is often flat, and outside of the five leads (Barbara Tasker is Peter’s snobby sister), is downright amateurish. The period-popular rhythm & blues on the soundtrack (by Leroy Glover) is so quaint that it takes some getting used to.

The only way to look at this film is as part of the indie cinema that was being born around it at the time. Victor Nuñez, who went on to make “Ruby in Paradise” and “Ulee’s Gold,” made similarly geographically-authentic, if crude, films such as “Gal Young’Un” and “A Flash of Green” at around the same time.

Perhaps Jenkins would have gone on to make more sophisticated movies. When Peter takes Maria to visit her future college in New Orleans, Jenkins captures time-capsule-worthy images of a gritty, sordid Big Easy that was swallowed by tourism long before Katrina all but washed the city away.

He made a movie well within the rating standards of the day, a regional African American romance where characters joke “Free at last, free at last” about getting out of this backwater, where “slave quarters” were still standing and where college-educated people like Peter could start to protest about “my people” being erased from history by writers, academics and the little old white ladies who scrub the African American story right out of the big local plantation.

“Dated,” quaint and tentative it may be. But Jenkins’ themes and big ideas make “Cane River” a debut film with promise, ambition and social currency.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, mild profanity

Cast: Richard Romain, Tommye Myrick, Carol Sutton, Ilunga Adell and Barbara Tasker

Credits: Written and directed by Horace B. Jenkins. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:45

Director Reed Morano keeps her camera tight on star Blake Lively throughout “The Rhythm Section.” The “Handmaid’s Tale” veteran knows where her meal ticket is, knows that Lively is worth halting filming to have a baby or heal up from a hand injury, which delayed this production.

But that pays off handsomely in this generally crackling vengeance thriller. It is a stylish, gloomy blur of close-ups, hand-held chases, the screen retreating in front of Lively as her character stalks, stumbles, sprints and staggers from one moral dilemma to another.

There are quarries to be stalked, to-the-death fights to survive — barely — and a bomb that’s sure to go off.

And the most bracing and realistic (Sorry, “Fast/Furious” fanatics.) car chase since “The Transporter” pounds an exclamation point on the picture. The star may be the star, but here’s an action director who pops off the screen, too.

Lively dresses down and drags us through the moral descent of a young woman whose family died in a plane brought down by a bomb. Winding up in a flophouse London brothel, an addict selling her body for a fix, isn’t rock bottom. Deciding to take the lives of those who planned and carried out the attack that murdered her parents and siblings is a hard decision for any feeling, thinking and once-moral person.

Stephanie goes by “Lisa,” now. The freelance reporter (Raza Jeffrey) who lures her out of the brothel isn’t doing her much of a favor by telling her that crash wasn’t an accident. But the damage is already done.

“You’re another victim. You’re just not dead yet.”

Stephanie/Lisa gets just enough information and cash from the journalist to do what she decides she must. But when she drops in on the bomber, she loses her nerve.

That’s how she ends up in the clutches of reporter Proctor’s “source,” a mysterious ex-operative code-named “B” and located on remote Scottish loch, reachable only by GPS coordinates.

Jude Law brings a fierce brutality to this guy, just a shadow manhandling the interloper in the dark, just two commando boots in Bear Grylls pants standing over her crumbled body, on the floor where he left her.

He wants nothing to do with her caper, has no interest in training her. He keeps cuffing her, knocking her about and testing her. Law does this with such relish you wonder what his shrink would say, him co-starring with a Sienna Miller (his ex) look-alike and all.

“B” is where Stephanie gets the intel, the means and the opportunity to do what she — like Prince Hamlet — knows she must do — murder the murderers. He declares his skepticism — “In the end, you’ll still be you.” She’ll lose her nerve, in other words. But he teaches her to “Get your ‘rhythm section’ under control — sorted.”

“Your heartbeat is the drums. Your breathing is the bass.” Get rhythm. Get calm.

The film’s flash and tension are a great cover for a script that is absurdly reliant on “deus ex machina” (“god in the machine”), that ancient Greek theatrical shortcut to make the implausible plausible.

Here, we’ve got deus MI-6 “training/intel” guy, deus financier, deus ex-CIA fixer in Spain (Sterling K. Brown). The decision to have Stephanie/Lisa take on the guise of a dead Russian assassin is both pointless and wholly illogical. Add that to the list.

But Moran never loses the urgency even when the plot loses the thread. Dashing from London to Spain to Tangier to Marseilles and New York, she punishes Lively almost as much as Law, and her star gives us just enough “I could/would NEVER do that” moments to immerse us in her quest and put us her in shoes.

The lyrics aren’t all that. But in an action film, it’s tempo that matters. “The Rhythm Section” never loses the beat.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, sexual content, language throughout, and some drug use.

Cast: Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Raza Jeffrey and Max Casella

Credits: Directed by Reed Morano, script by Mark Burnell. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:49

A period piece, from the ’90s, music by Bowie and the forgotten sounds of the day.

Sentiment and cynicism wrestle each other into submission in the Medal of Honor story, “The Last Full Measure.” In writer-director Todd Robinson’s “too much is never enough” hands, sentiment wins the day. And then it does a victory lap and spikes the ball in the end zone for good measure, all but spoiling the impact of his movie with anticlimaxes.

Robinson, better known as a producer, rounded up a star-studded cast of award winners for a script that gives every single one of them grace notes, a veritable master class presented by William Hurt, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Plummer, Ed Harris, John Savage and in his final film, the late Peter Fonda.

Those acting grace notes almost rescue a generally graceless and lumbering combat/post-combat drama.

Most of them played aged veterans of the early days of the Vietnam War, survivors hellbent on seeing to it that an Air Force Pararescue medic who served with them but a single day, and who saved many of their lives, be given the Medal of Honor over three decades after his death.

Sebastian Stan plays a D.C. “government lawyer about to be unemployed” when we meet him. Scott Huffman works for the Air Force, and the Secretary of the Air Force (Linus Roache) has just announced his resignation. It’s 1999 (NOT “an election year,” as several characters say in the script) and Huffman is given one last thankless task by his career-public-servant boss (Bradley Whitford, poster boy for “cynicism on the screen”).

He’s got to review this long-dormant case of a recognized war hero, William Pitsenbarger. He was decorated with the Air Force Cross, but those who served with him in that firefight in 1966 insist that was “downgraded” from the honor they think he deserved.

“Take a few days, go hear some war stories,” kick the process down the road for the next person who has Huffman’s job is the thinking.

But not everybody he talks with is as compassionately insistent as his Air Force Pararescue comrade (Hurt) or as touching as the late airman’s parents (Plummer and Diane Ladd). The vets are not necessarily helpful.

One (Jackson) tosses his tape recorder away the moment he’s tracked down. Another, a school bus driver (Harris), stages their meeting at a gun range where he works off lingering aggression by emptying the mag on an M-16.

“It was one day — decades ago…”

And then there’s the loner in the hills (Fonda), married to his nurse (Amy Madigan), a paranoid PTSD patient who keeps watch and hunts at night and sleeps by day, because that’s what Vietnam did to him, “SIR.”

“I haven’t slept in the dark in 32 years, SIR!”

Huffman is the cynic who fumes over “today’s adventure in post-traumatic exorcism,” but who learns — from their stories, related in combat flashbacks — the meaning of “sacrifice” and “valor.”

His experience of Vietnam is that of a 30ish career public servant, married (Alison Sudol plays his wife), with a son and a baby on the way. He’s seen the movies, in other words. He uses “Apocalypse Now” references, seeing one vet as a “Kurtzian burnout.”

Those flashbacks show us why. They are chaotic, gory and harrowing. It was an ambush and a near-massacre.

British actor Jeremy Irvine plays the version of Pitsenbarger that his brothers-in-arms remember — a guy who dropped out of a chopper into a firefight, refused to leave until the wounded were all out ahead of him and with all the explosions and bullets whizzing by him, never flinched or ducked.

LFM_JLD_0425_15326.jpg

I started my movie reviewing career at the height of what the late critic Roger Ebert labeled the “This time we WIN” Vietnam War movie era, and there are hallmarks of revisionist movies like “Hamburger Hill” and others tossed in here, for good effect.

Jackson’s former Lt. Takoda tells a story of returning home to a rough bar where “dogs and ‘baby-killers'” weren’t allowed.

Paperwork is lost because “This IS the government, after all.” Hints of a conspiracy are dredged up, and politicians play political games with the legislation necessary to confer this medal before the dead soldier’s parents die of cancer and anything else that gets you in old age.

That’s the “cynicism” that the movie traffics in, a form of pandering to the aged, conservative veterans who are the film’s target audience.

In scripting this, writer-director Robinson shows why his producing career (Ridley Scott’s “White Squall”) is more storied than his directing one (“Phantom”). The interviews don’t generally advance the case for the “MOH” (Medal of Honor) or the story. The film gets sidetracked, repeatedly, and when it finally reaches its climax, goes on and on and one after it, manipulatively working overtime to wring tears out of the viewer.

There’s little sense of forward motion to any of this.

And then John Savage shows up, and gives the picture a final grace note to complement those provided by Hurt, Plummer, Harris, Jackson and Fonda.

It’s a crying shame Robinson didn’t have the instincts to wrap the picture up more quickly after that. Because aside from Savage, the highly-fictionalized third act of this “inspired by the true story” is a mess more concerned with agenda than good storytelling.

MPAA Rating: R for war violence, and language

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Irvine, Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, Amy Madigan, William Hurt, Ed Harris, Bradley Whitford, Linus Roache, John Savage and Peter Fonda

Credits: Written and directed by Todd Robinson. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:50

Harlem girl, college-bound, entirely too smart for the neighborhood guys who are all “speak ‘game,’ play game, one big game” with their come-ons.

But then Ayanna, the aspiring writer and would-be poet, stumbles into Isaiah, the earnest, smart would-be music producer.

And before you can say, “Uh oh, here’s a white girl,” before you can mutter those three magic letters — “E.P.T.” — this summer romance takes the turn you just knew it would, dammit.

But it’s where “Premature” and director Rashaad Ernesto Green take us after that cliched first and second act that mark this indie drama as “must see.” Reworking a short film he did over a decade ago, sharing a co-writing credit with his muse and star, Zora Howard (also a star of the 2008 short film), we’re immersed in lives, a world and dreams that won’t be just “deferred” if Ayanna (Howard) loses her way. They will be derailed.

Ayanna narrates, in voice over, her feelings about her Harlem life and the swept-off-her-feet interruption that Isaiah (Joshua Boone) becomes.

She’s content to spend this last summer before enrolling at Pennsylvania’s Bucknell U. with her girls, a brassy quartet who make a big show of ogling the “talent” on the park basketball court. They use safety in numbers to keep the teenage boys on their heels, despite their sexual bravado and blunt and cute/crude pick-up lines.

“I got a THING for ‘thick’ girls!”

Look over Shonte (Imani Lewis) or Tenita “T” (Alexis Marie Wint) on the train, and Ayanna is the one who’ll call your bluff when you try to get off at your stop.

“Y’ain’t get number yet.”

She keeps a notebook with her, wears glasses to denote her bookishness, and insists on fidelity from her feckless would-be suitors.

“Is that your girl?”

“We still chill, right?”

“Go chill with her!”

She wears her long braids and glasses like armor and is quick with a brush-off if there’s unwanted attention. If she wants to be cruel, she lets the sweet-talker get deep into his game before dismissal.

But Isaiah has an offhand charm, speaks lovingly about his dead musician father, his musical aspirations, about how his Mama lectured him on which side a gentleman walks on when escorting a young woman down the street.

Ayanna is smitten, a tad too quickly and a bit too overwhelmingly. But that’s what teenagers do, right?

There’s a line she writes that somewhat sums up the movie and its biggest shortcoming. “We were too young to live this old.”

Everybody and I mean EVERYbody seems entirely too old for the high school-or-just-out-of-high-school world this population lives in.

Ayanna’s poetry about her first big love is polished and adult. “What did I know of my heart before you gave it shape?”

An African-American filmmaker has license to make stereotypical points about inner city kids “growing up too fast,” sexual young men bragging about their babies, very young women hectoring each other not to fall for this one or that one, to learn to “close your legs” if you’ve already had two children before hitting 20.

But making Ayanna 17 when the actresses playing her and her peers are plainly older, street-wise and world-weary, is a blunder. Up everybody’s age by suggesting Ayanna is finally ready to go to school at say, 22, and the picture might work better.

The life around them is deliciously filled-in, with Green and Howard plainly taking their cues from early Spike Lee films in fleshing out the cast and giving them something funny, sassy or slangly to say. Ayanna’s single mom (Michelle Wilson) and her friends — some of them much older — are just as comically crass in the sex talk department as their kids or grandkids are on the other side of the park.

“Who would you ‘give some’ too? OJ, Ike or CROSBY?”

Williams, playing a lonely woman who has drifted from man to man with no relationship sticking, comes off as self-involved, but is still capable of mothering moments when it counts and she’s warning her child about “chasing after those good-for-nothing boys.”

The performances and the milieu, with its colorful colloquial speech and loving if blundering sisterly relationships, is what sells “Premature” and makes it an indie film well worth your time.

It won’t seem wholly original to anybody with “She’s Gotta Have It” and “School Daze” burned into memory. But it’s a lively, lovely and lived-in slice of Harlem life that looks, sounds and feels “right,” even when what we’re seeing is over-familiar to the point of cliche.

MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sexual content, nudity, alcohol, marijuana involving teens, and profanity

Cast: Zora Howard, Joshua Boone, Alexis Marie Wint, Imani Lewis and Michelle Wilson

Credits: Directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green, script by Rashaad Ernesto Green, Zora Howard. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:30

The trailers for this shout “JANUARY thriller,” and that’s a good thing.

It’s a great month to release a picture with no Oscar pretenses, an action film. Mark Wahlberg knocked out a couple, before he was sentenced to Netflix.

Everybody has had lots of chances to see the Oscar nominated films. Most of the rest of what is released is part of the “January dumping ground” for movies that have no box office prospects.

This one stars Blake Lively, the “New American Sienna Miller,” and a guy who used to be married to the original British Sienna Miller.

Perverse casting? A little bit.

Director Reed Morano made her be wit”Handmaid’s Tale,” and Sterling K. Brown headlines the supporting cast.

One of the delights of the third act of Sir Ian McKellen’s life and illustrious career has been throwing dinner parties, sometimes in swank restaurants here or there — often in the ancient and storied pub he owns, The Grapes.

He invites old friends, colleagues from film and a lifetime in the theater, wines and dines the lot. And at the end of the evening, as related in Garry O’Connor’s “Ian McKellen: A Biography,” he stands up at head of table, grins and makes a sweeping, theatrical gesture and utters the words everybody fumbling for the check is delighted to hear.

“Gandalf PAYS!”

Indeed he does. O’Connor may track, in quick vignettes, sketches and the like, the long life of the knighted thespian, heir to Olivier and leading interpreter of Shakespeare for his generation. But cinematic glory — and great wealth — didn’t show up until he became Gandalf the Grey — or the White — in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings/Hobbit” pictures.

O’Connor is a contemporary of McKellen’s, an old friend from the theatre who became a biographer of some note — publishing books on Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Peggy Ashcroft and Alec Guiness, among others. As such, he has just enough biographer’s distance to tell a complete story of the man’s life — pick at his foibles and celebrate his true triumphs.

The opening chapter is O’Connor visiting Sir Ian to enlist his help, and not getting it. How very McKellen, one who has deigned not to write an autobiography, “modestly” refusing to pitch in on a deep dive into his career, his personal story, his life of activism and his victory lap — the post-Magneto (“X-Men”), after-Gandalf celebrity that has made him a public figure still revered in some quarters — but adored far and wide for his fan-friendly projects.

I’ve never seen him on the stage, and first noticed McKellen in “Scandal,” the 1980s British drama about the Profumo affair that crippled the British government in the 1960s.

I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, first when he took his shot at putting his Fascist “Richard III” on screen, something of a breakthrough for him — finally a film star in his ’50s. We bickered over the “virtuouso villainy” of rhe character.

O’Connor’s more intimate acquaintance makes him a fine choice for charting the rise of the Master Thespian, the frustrations of not equaling Olivier on the big screen — never winning an Oscar still gripes him — and the late life glories that have consumed the last twenty years.

He kept up a friendly rivalry with his contemporary Derek Jacobi, was stalked (successfully, ahem), by the young Rupert Everett and with his “X-Men” and later “Waiting for Godot” co-star and chum Patrick Stewart teamed-up to become the great chat show/public appearance and occasional shared acting gig “bromance” of our day.

Just adorable, the both of them.

O’Connor’s book is awfully inside baseball, as we say on this side of the pond, when it comes to theatrical name dropping through McKellen’s pre-film-fame decades. If you don’t know that “Cambridge Mafia” of actors, directors and playwrights who came up with McKellen you may need to hit Wikipedia every page or two.

But it’s insightful in capturing McKellen’s strange accent, the swallowed, plummy locutions that seem to stem from geography, childhood illness and perhaps a recognition that he could be the baritone to Olivier’s tenor.

McKellen’s “coming out,” putting himself in the middle of the public debate over British conservative efforts to revive versions of the country’s anti-gay statues, and doing it at a time when few of his stature dared speak up, plays as heroic and decisive. He was a formidable debater against the forces of repression. He didn’t make his sexuality his identity, and thrived after letting that side of himself into the limelight.

One time I interviewed McKellen was for a story on Magneto, a “villain with a legitimate beef with the world.” The Marvel villain is a Holocaust survivor, remember. O’Connor so discounts the character (monosyllabic words, dull dialogue save for his scenes with Stewart) that he misses the impact that franchise-impacting character had. Sure, these were Wolverine movies. But Magneto was defined for all time by McKellen.

O’Connor shares Tolkien film anecdotes (not many), and seems on less sure footing in these chapters. He found a few anecdotes shared between McKellen and screen legend Christopher Lee — but botches Old Dracula’s age by ten years and rather misses the boat in the glories of McKellen’s read on the much-traveled, intrepid wizard.

The hat, the pipe, the beard, the quizzical voice, the staff all were mere props. Three perfectly-played words made his take on Gandolf sing, and made him a screen immortal.

“FLY, you fools!”

Ian McKellen: A Biography, by Garry O’Connor. St. Martin’s Press. 356 pages, $29.95.

Rosie Perez and Eric Roberts are the familiar names in this bipolar college kid drowning his troubles at a strip club tale. We are intrigued.