This is a real eye-popper of a trailer.
Lurid colors, vamped up “Sin City/Streets of Fire” settings. Simon Pegg playing another hit man. Mike Myers acting into his dotage.
Max Irons. Kind of “Kill Me Three Times” or “Seven Psychopaths” meets “Sin City,” if I’m reading the plot summary right. A May 11 release directed by Vaughn Stein. Not a household name…yet.
“Outside In” is a quiet, contemplative melodrama about starting over and the obstacles facing an ex-con fresh out of a 20 year stretch in prison.
The script that director Lynn Shelton (“Humpday,” “Your Sister’s Sister”) co-wrote with her fellow “mumblecore” icon Jay Duplass (“Jeff Who Lives at Home,” “The Puffy Chair”) has secrets and surprises, layers that peel away as we follow that ex-con and wonder why so many people are so welcoming when he comes back home.
Chris, played by Duplass, is sheepish when his younger brother (Ben Schwartz) drives him back into Granite Falls, Washington. There’s a surprise “Welcome Home” party.
“People have been waiting 20 years for this,” Ted tells him. “Suck it up and receive the love.”
Among those waiting for him is the woman who got him out. Carol, played by Edie Falco, is his former high school teacher, a woman who made his case her cause. Her digging got him out. Her communications, when his family and others turned their backs, gave him hope and kept him going.
Chris is grateful, but much more. He’s so touched, so nervous around her that we can wonder if there wasn’t something going on between them before that felony conviction.
The fact that she’s got a husband (Charles Leggett) and teenage daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) doesn’t deter him. He’s in love. He must be with her.
The husband is leery and a little sarcastic upon meeting his Carol’s “project.”
“Maybe now I can get my wife back.”
But the teen daughter, Hildy, is curious, sympathetic and perhaps a little too eager to keep company with a 40 year-old ex-con whom she’s only known from her mom’s research into his life and crime.
Duplass is better known as a writer/director than actor. Mark Duplass (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) is the “acting” Duplass brother. But Jay, who was in TV’s “Search Party,” “The Mindy Project” and “Transparent,” gives Chris a kind of lost quality the belies the horrors of what he must have endured in stir in Walla Walla.
He aimlessly checks back into a mothballed life, riding the ancient BMX bike gathering dust in the family garage, taking his first jumps with a kid less than one-third his age because that’s what feels normal.
The great Falco (“Transamerica,””Nurse Jackie”) suggests a woman good at keeping secrets, straining to keep the younger man at arm’s length, burying the longing that a dull marriage has built up.
And Dever, of TV’s “Last Man Standing” and last summer’s “Detroit,” beautifully mimics Falco’s air of mystery, a not-quite-sullen teen who is distancing herself from her unhappy parents, at a loss for finding somebody to talk to about them or about herself in this tiny, rainy, fog-shrouded town.
I’m sticking with my opening label of “melodrama” for this, as events transpire that rather archly heighten the drama even if they’re conventional tropes of forbidden love romances. But Shelton and Duplass cook up twists to each of these predictable turns that their story takes.
And thoughtful performances render this intimate drama a rewarding and engrossing look into life after prison, and a mystery well worth waiting for its unraveling.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, alcohol abuse and profanity
Cast: Jay Duplass, Edie Falco, Kaitlyn Dever
Credits:Directed by Lynn Shelton, script by Lynn Shelton and Jay Duplass. An Orchard release.
Running time: 1:31
It varies from family to family, the one member everybody calls “the rock,” “the glue” that seems to hold them all together.
And when that glue is gone, it can seem as if gravity itself has failed. Members spin off, aimlessly, lose their footing. Every flaw they kept under wraps can show itself, every one of those flaws a new stress on their coherence as a group. It all stops making sense.
“Love After Love” is a quietly distressing disintegration, a film full of grief unspoken, but showing in every member of a family’s loss of footing, responsibility and sanity after the death of a patriarch. Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh has created a chamber tragedy, intimate in its dimensions, devastating in the damage we see spiral out of that one death.
It opens with a woman (Andie MacDowell) questioning a man, Nick (Chris O’Dowd) about his state of happiness. He shrugs.
“I mean, what’s ‘happy,’ really? It’s so arbitrary.”
His relationship, with the smart and beautiful Rebecca (Juliet Rylance)?
She “validates how I feel about the world.”
And the woman doing the questioning, who it turns out, is Nick’s mother?
“You can’t always be happy.”
As they head back outdoors to the extended family gathering, the reasons for the philosophical musings become obvious. For all the randy, frank talk about the difference between “an open marriage” and just “swingers,” there’s a pall hanging over the drinking and laughter. The brother who drinks too much (James Adomian), the marriage ( Francesca Faridany) that strains, other considerations fall aside. Dad (Gareth Williams) can barely speak above a hoarse whisper. We can guess what’s going on.
Harbaugh’s film skips forward to the world that father Glenn’s death has created. Brother Chris (Adomian) and wife Karen (Faridany) are in trouble. Mother Suzanne, a college drama teacher and costumer, has taken on a brittle intolerance of her students and colleagues.
And Nick, a book editor, has utterly lost his way. His acting the bounder included sex with a young actress (Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel) in the back of his Volvo at the orchard behind his parents’ house, and now Rebecca is no more.
She is “a woman of consequence,” a more unfiltered Mom snaps. Rebecca was challenging and her mere presence as Nick’s BS detector is missed. There’s nobody around to point out how self-absorbed and self-destructive he can be, no one to endure his hypocritical tirades, lashing out at Rebecca when the viewer knows he’s the heel here.
Chris may drunkenly tell Nick “You’re the GOOD one,” but his coping mechanisms seem less self-destructive. An aimless unpublished “writer,” he channels his pain into a stand-up act that’s both icy and bracing (Adomian is a comic writer, actor and stand-up).
Nick? He’s lashing out, getting drunk, creating scenes at parties, threatening to break up other relationships, grasping at anything and anyone he thinks can give him back his footing — even Rebecca.
Harbaugh is said to have had his cast watch John Cassavetes dramas (“Love Streams,” “A Woman Under the Influence”) as a way of prepping to play these characters. That’s the tone he wanted — people deflated by life and loss, their sharp edges showing.
O’Dowd shows us a side we’ve never seen before, throwing around dramatic weight only hinted at in a mostly-comic film career. Rylance imbues her every scene with a gravitas that underscores what Suzanne has said of her — a woman “of consequence.”
And the ever-underrated MacDowell gives one of her finest dramatic turns, playing a woman who is supposed to replace her husband as “the rock” at the center of this clan, but so devastated and without bearings that she dates/sleeps around inappropriately and is of no help to her “boys,” as she has no moral high ground to stand upon.
“Love After Love” isn’t a happy tale or even one with an ending. Like Cassavetes, Harbaugh was going for doubt, and for the most part, he succeeds. It’s the uncertainty that drives the fear that motivates every character, the realization of mortality that has one and all struggling to “get on with it,” this business of adult life that almost all who knew him were able to postpone while Dad was still around.
MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity, violence
Cast: Andie MacDowell, Chris O’Dowd, Dree Hemingway, Juliet Rylance, James Adomian
Credits:Directed by Russell Harbaugh, script by Russell Harbaugh and Eric Mendelsohn. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:31
I don’t know what it is about Saab convertibles and movie road trips. But it’s a “car with character,” as in it says something about the owner, movie shorthand.
Volvos and Saabs? Typically driven by academic characters in the movies.
Ed Harris plays a legendary, aged photographer, Jason Sudeikis his estranged son and I gather that Olsen is the old man’s nurse. She’s found rolls of film the old man forgot to develop, and the three of them have to drive to Kansas to the last plant that processes Kodachrome film.
“Kodachrome” comes to Netflix April 20.
I grade big screen cartoons for kids on a sliding cynicism scale.
They’re all products designed for and marketed to children, and most every studio has a deal with some animation house or other to get themselves a cut-rate piece of that Pixar pie.
The folks who made “Gnomeo & Juliet” figured out a way to make a cheap semi-musical, basically showing British garden gnomes having epic under-sized adventures while Elton John and Bernie Taupin turn Elton’s back-catalog into cash by parking his bubbly ’70s/80s pop-rock at appropriate places in the action.
The involvement of “Rocket Pictures” as producers parks “Gnomeo” and its sequel, “Sherlock Gnomes” somewhere below “Despicable” sequels, and slightly above “Free Birds” and assorted abominations foisted on the under-age public by Harvey Weinstein and others.
It doesn’t have a laugh in it, and the story isn’t worth more than a sentence long summary. London is undergoing mass gnome-nappings, including the clan of Gnomeo (voiced by James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt), so the gnome world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Gnomes (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Watson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are on the case.
Moriarty may be involved.
“Fudge buckets!”
And since Ricky Gervais wasn’t available, Jamie Demetriou takes a shot at impersonating him.
There’s barely a quotable line. Juliet wants to know, “What are you LOOKING for?”
“An assistant who asks fewer questions!”
But there are two clever visual ideas, so credit where credit is due. The filmmakers took a shot at depicting Holmes’ observation and deduction powers from inside his day-dreamy brain. They’re mimicking what Guy Ritchie did with Robert Downey Jr. This Holmes pieces together his puzzle in his head in black and white Escher-scapes and the like.
The other cute scene? Their quest takes the quartet to Chinatown, where they run afoul of Asian cat garden statuary, porcelain boss, cat statue warriors, etc. And the voice of the peerless James Hong.
Otherwise, there’s nothing to this for adults, and precious little for kids aside from a disco version of Elton and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.”
MPAA Rating: PG for some rude and suggestive humor.
Cast: The voices of Johnny Depp, Emily Blunt, James McAvoy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, James Hong, Mary J. Blige, Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Ozzy Osborne
Credits:Directed by John Stevenson, script by Ben Zazove. An MGM/Paramount release.
Running time: 1:26
Marvel has been taking movies in a video game Easter Egg “nothing but the fun parts” direction for the past decade.
But leave it to the Old Master, Mr. Spielberg, to beat them to the punch and make a movie that’s ALL Easter Eggs, an endless parade of “cool parts” and eye candy that will require repeated viewings to take it all in.
Pay no mind to the assorted lousy TV commercials and trailers for “Ready Player One.” They don’t do it justice. It is jam packed with inside jokes, self-referential sight gags, movie, video game and pop culture history and trivia. All that time you spent in front of the screen, memorizing “The Breakfast Club” or “The Shining,” mastering every generation of video game from Atari to the current state of the art? Here’s a movie that reassures the GameGirls and Gameboys that it wasn’t time wasted.
Conversely, pay no heed to the fanboy nerdgasms that arrive, like a tidal wave, with this film, suggesting a Wakanda-sized cultural and box office tidal wave. The story, based on Ernest Cline’s novel, is simpleton simple. The acting is mostly done by digital avatars which left me cold.
And the dialogue? “Welcome to the Rebellion!” Too often, it’s straight out of every GD YA Sci-Fi P.O.Piffle that’s been trotted out to a Cambridge Analytica’d audience, market researched down to the atom.
My advice? Just go with it. But maybe after the buzz has worn off consider just how low the bar has been dropped on these Bollywood-length mass market confections, movies that go on and on because they have to give EVERYbody everyTHING that they want. And lots of it.
An opening suffering from exposition-overload introduces Wade Watt (Tye Sheridan), teen tyro of 2045’s mass virtual reality gameworld “The Oasis.” He’s not old enough to remember when America and the world “stopped trying to fix problems.” We’ve all just plugged-in and accepted our impoverished vertical trailer park (“The Stacks”) lot. All anybody needs money for is the latest game gear. And maybe food. Much of that cash is crypto-currency earned playing the multiverse of games woven into “The Oasis.” Get in debt? “Loyalty Center” workhouses allow the slaves to work off the money you owe.
Oasis was designed by the late game guru Halliday, played by Oscar winner (“The Bridge of Spies”) Mark Rylance in an American accent, curly mop of hair and socially awkward nerd-hero Wozniak mode that is within his vast acting range, but still…odd.
Upon Halliday’s death, he planted Easter Eggs (secret clues/prizes) within The Oasis. Find the “three keys” and unlock that one-last egg and you get to take over the game universe that Ate Planet Earth, or at least every spare second of every sentient person’s day. That’s worth so much money that a rival company (EveryVillain Ben Mendelsohn of “Rogue One” runs it) is devoting legions of techs, O-ologists (Oasis experts), “gunters” (egg hunters) professional gamers and Halliday Historians to cracking the puzzle, finding the keys and taking over The Oasis for themselves.
That would be a bad thing, like the loss of Net Neutrality, or trusting all your private data to Google and/or Facebook.
Wade, in the guise of his prettyboy punk avatar, Parzival ( named for Percival, the Arthurian knight who finds the Holy Grail all by his lonesome) is a loner who only accepts help from “H,” a hulking warrior/tech whiz he only knows in the game.
Wade may have “big plans in the real world” with what to do with the endless cash that will come to him if and when he wins. But the real world is just a place to plug in — in his case, a junkyard van just down “The Stacks” from the creaking double-wide his Aunt (Susan Lynch) and her abusive game/addict boyfriend (Ralph Ineson) and he call home.
That sexy, stand-offish avatar that he’s competing with? That’s Art3mis. She’s played by Olivia Cooke, when they finally meet in the flesh.
The “games” within the Oasis, places where the eggs hide, are first-person shooter epics, casinos, “Death Race” car chase games and the like. So basically this is a PG-13 “Wreck-It-Ralph.” No “Candy Crush” here.
You race in Doc Brown’s DeLorean against players driving the Adam West Batmobile and motorcycles from “Tron” and other pop culture touchstones while a T-Rex and King Kong try to stop you.
Spielberg’s greatest gift to this era and this sort of film might be the visual coherence he brings to these digital brawls, chases and cliffhangers. He does what Michael Bay and whoever takes on this or that “Pacific Rim” or Marvel mayhem hasn’t. He picks camera angles, depths of field and framing that makes the conflicts make sense to the naked eye, no “Transformers/Avengers” blur here.
The actors aren’t quite an afterthought, but compare Cooke’s turn in anything else she’s done — “Thoroughbreds” or even “Ouija” — with this Fury in Fishnets. She’s plucky but in the most generic YAs save-the-world way.
Sheridan (“Mud”) barely registers, and their “chemistry” is strictly of the adolescent game-nerd cliche variety, faintly sexist to boot.
Of the avatars, the funniest impression is made by T.J. Miller voicing the villain’s henchman I-R0k, a hulking Viking god-beast with nothing but nerdy sarcasm for his ostensible “boss” (Mendelsohn) .
“You never lick. You bite…straight to the creamy chocolate center of the Tootsie Pop. ‘Member those TV commercials with the owl?”
Miller is the alter ego for the audience for this movie. Why would a character from 27 years in the future remember a TV commercial from about 1980? For the same reason “Guardians of the Galaxy” classic rock rules this world (Joan Jett, Bruce, Hall & Oates and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”) — pandering to your demo.
I didn’t dislike “Player One,” even if I rolled my eyes at the low-hanging fruit one-liners and cloying characters, the on-the-nose soundtrack tunes (Van Halen?), the cringe-worthy avatars from your favorite horror movies, all introduced to the giggles and applause of an audience sure it’s in on the joke. Because the movie was concocted to elicit just that reaction.
A “Shining” detour dazzles in approach, technique and slavish attention to the film’s legend in film nerddom, but fizzles every time somebody opens his or her mouth.
Just go with it. And every time you go, you’ll see or hear more Easter Eggs. John Williams’ score from Spielberg’s flop “1941?” Check. A magic talisman “Zemeckis Cube” that allows you to go “Back in Time?” Ditto.
But do all those eggs, and a heaping helping of cheese, make an epic cinematic omelet? Nope.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action, a violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language
Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Mark Rylance
Credits:Directed by Steven Spielberg by, script by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on Cline’s novel. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:20
Not every deserving person can win the Nobel Peace Prize.
There are other, lesser forms of “laureate,” for instance the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.
But even had Dr. Tom Catena not won that, it seems the least society can do to honor them and shine a light on their good deeds is produce a good documentary about them.
“The Heart of Nuba” is about Dr. Catena’s work as the medical director and only full-time physician in a hospital in the middle of that permanent hellhole of horrors, Sudan. In the Nuba Mountains, a million members of 50 or so African tribes live. And the dictator in charge of the country, a racist Arab named Omar al-Bashir, wants that land, “but not the people on it.”
Catena and Mother of Mercy Hospital are treating thousands of civilian casualties, smack in the middle of not just a war zone, but an ongoing genocide. A handful of foreigners and a growing staff of locals are defiantly doing their work, diving into foxholes during the frequent air raids, while the world frets more about what the Kardashians are wearing or So and So is tweeting.
Ingrid Revaug, who raises funds for the hospital while working on site, notes that “humanitarianism isn’t something you do at work, it’s a way of living your life.” She and Catena are the best representatives of such an ethos that you will ever run across.
They duck and cover at every Antonov An22 that rumbles overhead, a Soviet era cargo plane the Sudanese Muslim regime uses to drop barrel bombs on villages and the hospital compound itself. Dr. Catena wanders the ward, pointing at patients of all ages.
“Artillery shell, Antonov, Antonov, Antonov,” fingering the World Court-condemned culprit behind this primitive region’s woes. Catena takes it personally, because it is.
A local nurse, Sister Angelina Nyakuru, shakes her head. “They want to kill Dr. Tom? Why?”
He wakes up before the dawn, prays his Rosary, and gets to work. He talks with patients in their native tongue, charms and cajoles them. And he takes photos of every civilian victim of the military, “evidence,” he says, for a war crimes trial to come, a reckoning for al-Bashir.
Catena mentors nurses, nurse’s aids, works with visiting doctors who risk their necks to come in and help. And six days a week, he is physician, surgeon, OB-GYN to legions of Nubans who come seeking his care, and who he travels to see on house calls.
It’s important to touch these people,” he says of the inhabitants of a village of lepers. “Every life has value. Every life holds the promise of hope.”
Director Kenneth A. Carlson’s film starts with a grabber — the age-old routines of grinding grain and preparing food in a village of grass huts. Then, the shriek of fighter-bombers, the cries of children as every they flee to the bomb shelters dug beside every hut there.
From the brutal present of grim choices, bloody surgeries and near-despair over young lives so brutally cut short of circumscribed by grisly injuries, Carlson takes us into the back story of a man whose quotation opens the film, about “each and every one of us” being obligated to make the world a better place, a Tom Catena quote from when he was all of 18.
He was a New York state engineer-in-the-making from a large Catholic family when he turned his attention to medicine. He played football at Brown, joined the Navy and went to med school at Duke. But something in Catena drew him to missions work. After polishing his surgical skills in Kenya, he found his calling in perhaps the worst place on Earth, working himself sick at times, because there is so very much that needs to be done, that won’t be done if he doesn’t do it.
Carlson uses clips from the one news network covering this conflict zone, Al Jazeera, which to its credit condemns the dictator that the World Court finds such a monster. In the main, though, he keeps his camera on Dr. Tom and and small circle of people — proteges and colleagues — at Mother of Mercy. It’s a moving, inspiring choice.
Sure, an uplifting film like “The Heart of Nuba” plays like hagiography, but you’re hard-pressed to find complaints about this saintly, sometimes profane surgeon and healer. Unless you want to interview al-Bashir for your film.
So far as we know, Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer didn’t swear. But neither of them were All Ivy League nose guards for Brown U. That makes Catena a fascinating character to study, someone “The Heart of Nuba” more than does justice to.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, graphic surgery scenes, mild profanity
Cast: Dr. Tom Catena, Sr. Angelina Nyakuru, Dr. Corry Chapman, H.E. Macram Max Gassis, Sr. Rocio Sanluz, Ratiba Ibrahim Kodi, Ingrid Revaug
Credits:Directed by Kenneth A. Carlson. An Abramorama- release.
Running time: 1:25
“Isle of Dogs” is the stuff of Wes Anderson’s nightmares.
Anderson’s made a Japanese epic as viewed through the twee lens in which he sees the world. A dark, daft vision of a culture that’s Turned its Back on Dog, it’s easily the most inspired, dazzling and original use of stop motion animation ever.
Is it for children? How about “Take that PG-13 rating seriously,” and read on before you decide.
A prologue tells of us ancient animus between a Japanese clan and dogs. In the near future, that Kobayashi clan sees its moment for revenge. An outbreak of dog flu and assorted illnesses cause Mayor Kobayashi of Megasaki to order all dogs dumped offshore, on Trash Island. There, they’re left to fend for themselves, eat garbage and die of neglect.
To set an example, the mayor nobly makes the guard dog he’s given to his ward, Atari, the first canine exiled to the “Isle of Dogs.”
Months later, that boy (voiced by Koyu Rankin) shows up on the island, looking for “Spots,” his beloved guardian and pet. The pack of “scary indestructible alpha dogs” led by the reasonable Rex (Edward Norton) but held together by the tough street stray Chief (Bryan Cranston, perfect) debate helping him, despite the language barrier. The kid speaks generally untranslated Japanese. The dogs? English, of course.
“Are we eating him, or is this a ‘rescue?‘” Boss (Bill Murray) wants to know.
“Rescue” it is. Anderson, working from a story he cooked up with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Japanese actor/DJ Kunichi Nomura, conjures up a grimly whimsical quest about doomed dogs. All of them look worn, injured and uncared for. And all of them devote themselves to a 12 year-old boy from a race that has forsaken them. They help him look for the one member of their canine community who still has a human who misses him.
As onetime showdog Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) reminds them, “He’s a 12 year-old boy. Dogs love those.”
Say the title, “Isle of Dogs,” three times fast — aloud. You get it.
The animation is a highly-textured, fanatically-detailed delight, a more exacting looking film than Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Stitches on injuries, gruesomely explicit surgery, anatomically-perfect dog skeletons (not every dog could survive this), puppy and human puppet eyes that well up with tears, all provide a backdrop to Anderson’s deliciously deadpan dialogue, running gags and sight gags.
As in all of his films, he creates a family. Here, there are two, with one consisting of pro-dog teen resisters (led by “exchange student” Tracy–Greta Gerwig) back in Megasaki, trying to figure out why the dogs were exiled. Cameos by Ken Watanabe and Yoko Ono deepen the mystery.
The sense of place is every bit as vivid here as the fantasy pre-War Europe Anderson created for “Grand Budapest Hotel.” Anderson achieves this not just with large swatches of untranslated Japanese debate (easily deciphered by the visuals), but with thunderous taiko drums and drummers underscoring sumo wrestling, Noh theater interpretations of the back-story and current story, “Hello Kitty” visual puns and haiku, which many a character whips out to explain his or her actions and motivations in just three lines of just seventeen syllables.
“I turn my back…”
“On ManKind!”
“Frost on a window pane!”
It’s clever to the edge of brilliant, and damned funny, start to finish.
But for all the sentimental stuff about dogs, all the DIY delights of animation using cotton balls to simulate clouds of dust kicked up by a fight, or pulled apart to show thin strands simulating fog or vapors escaping from a test tube, is this complex, sometimes grisly and downbeat conspiracy dramedy for kids?
Yes, but only in the sense that “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was. When it comes to children’s stories, nobody was darker than Roald Dahl. But Roald Dahl never met Wes Anderson, a storyteller who found humor in European assassinations in “Grand Budapest” and in animal neglect and animal testing on his “Isle of Dogs.”
Just be glad he chose Japan as his setting, and not China. They eat dogs over there.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and some violent images
Cast: The voices of Edward Norton, Koyu Rankin, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Greta Gerwig, Kunichi Nomura, Jeff Goldblum, Ken Watanabe, Yoko Ono, Bill Murray, F. Murray Abraham with Courtney B. Vance as The Narrator
Credits:Written and directed by Wes Anderson. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:41
Martin Luther King, Jr. was often introduced, as he was in his final “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech in Memphis the night before he died, as “a Moses for our times.”
He was eulogized at his funeral as a man “sent out as a Moses into the wilderness of this nation’s injustice.”
But the last year and a half of his life saw him in his own personal wilderness. He was a leader struggling to keep his 12 year-old movement relevant, straining to get divided America to embrace his more inclusive “Poor People’s Campaign,” arguing with the otherwise supportive President Johnson about the Vietnam War and hoping just to be heard in a country and a community that he felt was tuning him out.
“King in the Wilderness,” director Peter Kunhardt’s fine, moving documentary for HBO, remembers those troubled final days on the 50th anniversary of King’s murder. Kunhardt, known for directing films about Nixon and Gloria Steinem and for producing the Ben Bradlee “Newspaperman” film, assembles the faithful — King’s inner circle and surviving members of the Johnson White House — one last time to summon up 18 months of turmoil, frustration and fatigue.
In late 1966 King, the Atlanta “co-pastor” of his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, could look back as he said, “on a solid decade of progress in the South.” His non-violent strategy of marches, protests, boycotts and speeches had paid off in sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, in a zeitgeist that had turned the tide of historical discrimination and injustice. But the Vietnam War was escalating, economic injustice and the futility of the inner cities was leading to summer riots.
The giddy high of 1963’s “I have a dream” had, “at many points” King told TV’s Sander Vanocur, “turned into a nightmare.”
“The nation had turned against him,” his closest aid, Andrew Young remembers.
His lawyer Clarence Jones calls this period “the most difficult time of his life.”
Kunhardt found shots of King playing pool with poor folks in Chicago, there to help the push for better housing and economic opportunity, a recording of him calmly haggling with LBJ over the phone over Vietnam, and close friends like the singer Harry Belafonte, Marian Wright Edelman and Xernona Clayton talk of an exhausted man who told them, “It doesn’t matter how long you live, but how well you live.”
Much of that material is familiar, collected in other documentaries (PBS’s “Eyes on the Prize” series is the definitive filmed account of The Civil Rights Movement).
What’s new here is Young recalling King’s first college love, with a white woman who would never have earned the approval of King Sr., how even that pointed him towards his work on equality in America, of goofy pillow fights with his staff in the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, the day before he was gunned down.
What we forget is the grace and dignity his widow, Coretta Scott King, displayed hours after his death, her touching visit with Jackie Kennedy the day of the funeral and a funeral caisson, a simple wooden wagon drawn by mules, surrounded by thousands. 
Documentaries more than any other genre of film sink or swim due to their subject matter. In King and his last days, Kunhardt has found a rich subject, one that could only be illuminated by that shrinking few still around who remember the highs and lows, fifty years later. Kunhardt and HBO have made a film that’s not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.
MPAA Rating: unrated, riots
Cast: Andrew Young, Marian Wright Edelman, Xernona Clayton, Harry Belafonte, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Joseph Califano, Xerona Clayton, and (via archival footage) Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.
Credits: Directed by Peter W. Kunhardt, script by Chris Chuang. An HBO release.
Running time: 1:51
Judd Apatow, who regarded the late comic master Garry Shandling as a mentor, produced and directed this documentary — adding interviews with comics who knew Garry and worked with him (Sarah Silverman, Jim Carrey) to vintage Shandling stand-up, “The Larry Sanders Show” clips and that last, memorable “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” appearance.
The film focuses on the good and the bad of Garry, whose “You’re dead to me” behavior to those who crossed him was legendary, whose quick wit was hard to match.
Shandling looked deathly ill, but sitting in a 1979 Porsche 930 (Seinfeld’s personal brand), riffing on life, comedy, spirituality, the man delivered one of the great live (on tape) epitaphs in comedy history.
“Zen” premieres tonight on HBO.
