Movie Nation

Shirley MacLaine has made a wonderful curmudgeon in her dotage. That covers pretty much every movie since “Terms of Endearment.”

“Bernie” was something of a high-water mark in this third act of her storied career, playing a woman so unpleasant a whole town is reluctant to punish her adorable murderer.

So “The Last Word” is no more of a stretch than say, “Guarding Tess,” which had her playing a reviled former First Lady back in 1994.

The idea was to throw Shirley, as a somewhat hip, very self-aware old lady facing her twilight with a determination to control things to the end — including her small town paper’s obituary — and Amanda Seyfried as that bullied obit writer, and just profanity to earn an R-rating (give it some AARP-approved “edge”) and let this Force of Nature make it all worthwhile.

She almost does. But this cutesie collection of confrontations, musical montages and half-based homilies about it’s “never too late” to make your life matter lets her down.

Harriet Lawler ran a local advertising agency in her younger days. She must have been a terror. Because nobody still there has anything nice to say about her.

Her ex-husband (Philip Baker Hall) is more circumspect. “Control is very IMPORTANT to her.”

Her Japanese gardener (Gedde Watanabe, in a role out of the 1940s), her hairdresser (Sarah Baker), even her gynecologist (“the angriest vagina this side of China”) can attest to that.

Her estranged daughter (Anne Heche) won’t even comment.

But those opinions, that view, just won’t do. Which is why the lonely, bitter Harriet insists that her Bristol, California’s best obituary writer (Seyfried) get on the job now, and write one that suits Harriet.

The researching part is amusing enough, with young Anne realizing who “put the ‘bitch’ in obituary.” But Harriet, who has her suicidal moments, has a solution. She’s analyzed Anne’s obits, and those of others, and summarizes the form thusly.

Every obituary says that the deceased was “loved by their family.” They were “admired” by colleagues and business associates. They “touched someone’s life unexpectedly.”

And then there’s “the wild card,” what journalists would call the “hook.” It’s that quirky, unexpected something that makes reading about someone’s life a pleasure.

Harriet and Anne set out to find those four ingredients, manufacturing them if they have to.

Seyfried gives Anne a casual, coarse informality that the hard-drinking (and capable of cursing) Harriet pretends to find grating. MacLaine is properly imperious, flinty and mean.

But the things these two have to put across are just cut-and-paste adorable, knocking the life right out of the money. The “hooligan” moppet whose life Harriet decides to “touch in an unexpected way” (AnnJewel Lee Dixon) screams “CHILD ACTOR” in all the worst ways. “At-risk kid” never crosses or mind.

The idea that elderly Harriet, with seemingly a very limited record collection (The Kinks are the octogenarian’s fave), can bully her way into a drive-time job on the local alternative/college radio station is cute, but a stretch.

Rapprochement with her estranged relations makes for scenes that go nowhere.

But the stars play believable story arcs, and Seyfried never lets herself or Anna seem cowed or awed by the Great MacLaine. And Tom Everett Scott (newspaper editor eager to please) and Joel Murray (former employee of Harriet’s) make solid impressions.

It’s no use wishing “The Last Word” had come out better. But with plenty of examples of failed-films aimed at an older audience to compare it to, an “I’ve seen worse” makes for some consolation.

MPAA Rating: R for language.
Cast: Shirley MacLaine, Amanda Seyfried, Tom Everett Scott, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Heche, AnnJewel Lee Dixon
Credits: Directed by Mark Pellington, written by Stuart Ross Fink. A Bleecker St. release.
Running time: 1:48

Of course, that’s how they get you. Warners/DC anyway. They manage the hype fine, but their comic book movies, of late, have been miss, miss-or-hit, or worse. Keeping expectations low wasn’t an option, I guess. The actress is still more a dazzling, physically fit model who can handle the fight choreography, and some of the dialogue makes one wish they’d brought in somebody for a polish.

But as we never get World War I movies with this sort of budget, let’s expect good things this June.

So it’s “John Wick” meets “Lucy,” James Bond finally played by a woman, and Charlize Theron the toughest she’s been since “Fury Road.”

“Atomic Blonde” (unrestricted trailer below) co-stars John Goodman, James McAvoy and Toby Jones, features a leggy, strip-when-she-needs-to gay heroine, and lots and lots of violence. Oh yes.

This October, Warner Brothers finds a new way to Apocalypse. Technologically manipulated weather. Check out the multi-national cast. Got to cash those Chinese checks, make that Middle Eastern moolah. Smart. Because this needs all the international help it can get.

British TV presenter Louis Theroux and a BBC crew set out to be the latest to “expose” the religion-as-pyramid-scheme Scientology with “My Scientology Movie.”

Not that everybody doesn’t know that. As “shocking” subjects for documentaries go, the buy-your-way-into-a-sci-fi-writer’s idea of “immortality” cult is strictly low-hanging fruit.

And no, I’m not talking about its most famous celebrity adherents.

Theroux, — cousin of actor and Jennifer Astin hubby Justin, son of “Mosquito Coast” writer Paul — latches onto a couple of disaffected ex-members of the IAS (International Association of Scientologists), “apostates” who know where the bodies are buried.

He shows up with a camera crew at the group’s infamous “Gold Base,” a celebrity paradise/non-celebrity dungeon in Riverside, California. Like the thin-skinned current occupant of the White House, the Church always takes the bait — leading to familiar confrontations, threats, showing up with a camera demanding that he leave. Seen that before, too.

But what’s novel here is that Theroux and director John Dower know they’ll never get Tom Cruise, John Travolta (not mentioned) or the cult’s diminutive, intimidating, Naval uniformed leader, David Miscavige, to sit for interviews. So they hold casting sessions for many of these “characters. They’ll film “My Scientology Movie” in an effort to recreate some of the more infamous allegations of abuse and infantile bullying that the church and its leaders are accused of.

And then there are the secrets/tactics/dogma that longtime Scientology Quartermaster General Marty Rathbun explains, and through the actors they “cast,” directs into recreating. The staring contests (Cruise mastered his glower here), intimidation and name-calling designed to get someone “clear” can be understood as genuine “science of self-help” benefits. At least to actors, and maybe Korean border guards.

Of course, these E-Meter interrogations are also used as blackmail, keeping adherents in the cult and pushing them to greater and greater “investments” in buying your way up the hierarchy towards Sci-Tol Nirvana. That, too, is overlooked here.

Theroux has a deadpan and unflappable style that serves him well in his many confrontations with “squirrel busting” Scientology officials, who get in his face and in that of other “SPs” (Suppressive Persons) with cameras, insults, demands and threats.

The many “Do you know why this guy is filming us?” debates — the BBC filming Scientologists filming the BBC — have a comical quality. That, in the end, is the larger point here. Theroux is playing this mostly for laughs. When an actress interrupts an early poolside hotel room chat, we wonder how much of what we’re really seeing is “real,” and how much is just a laugh?

More chilling is how Theroux gets a rise out of Rathbun, once a highly-placed intimidator, a two-fisted “fixer” now undergoing endless IAS harassment, a short-tempered penitent who lets us see the sorts of bullies the church creates. Then there are the ever-shrinking numbers that the Church is drawing. All this money, all this infrastructure and real-estate, and there are maybe 20,000 paying/abused/over-working suckers still listening to the little man in the admiral’s suit sell them on the idea that they’re saving the world.

There are amusing points to be scored with this organization finding a home in close proximity to the gullible, narcissistic dreamers of show business, and the parallels with the “Health and Wealth” pyramid scheme Herbalife as depicted in the new documentary “Betting on Zero” are undeniable.

Theroux’s film misses that. So it’s hardly the last word on this scam and its hilarious embrace of the “Duck Soup” uniforms and the addled imagination and crackpot ideas of L. Ron Hubbard.

But that’s the point. If the F.B.I. can’t break in and “free” cultists being brainwashed and having their bank accounts emptied, if the decades of print and TV news warnings about Scientology haven’t dried up the supply of suckers, maybe this approach can.

Mock them to death.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, threats, profanity

Cast: Louis Theroux, Marty Rathbun, Andrew Perez, Rob Alter

Credits: Directed by John Dower, written by John Dower and Louis Theroux. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:39

Karen Allen still has that freckly twinkle, and movies aimed at women over 60 are so rare that it’s a shame when effort and energy are wasted on one as predigested as “Year by the Sea.”

It’s a writer’s memoir where the only “writing” is an afterthought, a marriage-has-lost-its-romance melodrama about a bored wife who seeks solace by the sea shore.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh did it and wrote it better 70 years ago with “Gift from the Sea,” and as far as movies are concerned, “A Year in Mooring” was a seaside reflection with more drama and pathos.

But “insipid” feels a little over-used today, so we’ll cut precious memoirist Joan Anderson a little slack.

That’s who Allen (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”) plays, an empty-nester whose son’s marriage and her husband’s delayed announcement that his firm is closing its New York office and he must relocate to Wichita prompts her to bail.

Just like that.

Granted, Robin (Michael Cristofer) is something of a whiny complainer. I mean, she has to get up after him to flush the toilet he’s forgotten to empty, but whatever.

So Joan sets out for Cape Cod — Chatham, Massachusetts — where her editor (S. Epatha Merkerson) hopes she’ll start a new book. Joan? She’s not so sure. And living in an oceanside cottage reachable only by dory (dinghy), she’s got her metaphor.

“I’m a bit like a boat…adrift. Nothing to steady me.”

The hunky clam digger (Yannick Bisson) she befriends might change that. But “Nothing goes unnoticed in a small town.”

The quirky local free spirit (Celia Imrie of “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) could help.

“We have a friendship to develop!”

There’s an abusive relationship to intervene in, clam-digging to master and a gloriously rustic cottage to tidy up.

But nothing much happens here. It’s scenic, but writer-director Alexander Janko has cast the thing with no flavor. Nobody has an accent, not even the local Cape Cod characters.

Allen, Imrie and Merkerson have “adventures” only in the broadest sense of that word.

Leaving nothing to recommend “Year by the Sea.” And if the all-too-apt “insipid” is off the table in this review, then “genial post-menopausal dud” will have to do.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild profanity, adult themes

Cast: Karen Allen, Celia Imrie, S. Epahta Merkerson, Yannick Bisson

Running time:Credits:Written and directed by Alexander Janko, based on the Joan Anderson memoir . A Real Women Make Waves release.

Running time: 1:54

Every time you think Hollywood’s got a handle on”faith-based” films, they go out and make another movie reminding you of the extremes these movies too often fall into.

For every “Miracles from Heaven,” “Risen” or “Soul Surfer,” there are scads of clunkers at either end of the spectrum. We get too much of the angry, anti-intellectual victimhood of “God’s Not Dead,” and the insipid piffle of “Heaven is For Real” or “Letters to God.”

“The Shack” sits firmly in the latter trash pile. A grim “feel-good” drama about a father (Sam Worthington) who earns a visit to heaven after losing his little girl to a murderous abductor and losing himself in grief, it features a big name cast and a some novel casting touches, but nothing else to recommend it.

Perhaps, when you see that father sprinting happily across the surface of a lake with Jesus (Avraham Aviv Alush) you will agree. And giggle.

Worthington (“Avatar”), an Aussie who has reduced his acting to a whisper so hoarse every line sounds looped in post-production, is Mack, the dad whose camping trip with his kids goes terribly wrong in an instant.

His teen daughter (Megan Charpentier) stands up in a canoe and tips it over. And while he’s rescuing her and his son, his littlest girl (Amelie Eve) is kidnapped.

Stuart Hazeldine’s film handles the shock and terror of this moment reasonably well. As the trauma of the innocent child’s fate becomes clear, her father falls into crippling grief, the surviving daughter clams up with guilt, leaving the faithful wife and mother (Radha Mitchell) and their preacher (country star Tim McGraw) to try and hold them all together.

Nan (Mitchell) has such a personal relationship with God that she addresses the Almighty as Papa, “a little too familiar for my taste,” Mack confesses. But when he gets a letter from Papa in his mailbox, a teasing taunt inviting him back to “The Shack” where his little girl met her end, Mack is enraged. Who sent it? The preacher, inviting him to seek solace in his faith? The killer?

It’s when Mack sets out for that shack in the woods that his spiritual healing and forgiveness begin.

Here’s what I liked. The oldest daughter questions their faith, comparing the myths of the Bible to an Indian legend Dad likes to relate, to which Dad simplistically replies, “If the Bible says it, it must be true.” Unquestioning, delivered without a serious moment’s thought.

The comforting presence that greets Mack at the shack is played by Earth Mother/Oscar winner Octavia Spencer, not exactly your stereotypical representation of God. Jesus isn’t a blond/blue-eyed Viking preacher, but Middle Eastern.

Then there’s the Third leg of the Trinity, the “Holy Wind” (or spirit, if you like). She’s played by Sumire Matsubara, a willow model, beautiful and runway ready but an acting non-starter.

In this fantastical forest of healing Mack finds himself in, winter ends and all is flowering and verdant. His “issues” are analyzed, and his anger for his deity is delivered in a hiss (as is most every line).

“You let my little girl die. You abandoned me.”

All he gets in return is cryptic, narcissistic self-help hooey.

“When all you see if your pain, you lose sight of Me.”

There are attempts at humor. Cooking in heaven is just…heavenly, prompting “Oh my GOD” this food is good jokes. And there’s half-a-laugh in Spencer’s reaction to Mack/Worthington’s expectation of “your whole WRATH thing.”

“My what?”

But from the unnecessary preacher-narration that invades the film here and there to the inane routines the heavenly trio push at Mack — fishing, eating, walks, debates and prayer — “The Shack” is saddled with the banal when it claims to be presenting the extraordinary.

The best faith-based films don’t lean on the supernatural nearly this heavily. But the self-published novel this is built on is deep into fantasy fiction, so there you are.

So while I appreciate any faith-based film that isn’t all about the anger and intellectual dishonesty of “God’s Not Dead,” there’s no endorsing a fairy-tale this literal and insipid.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material including some violence

Cast: Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, Radha Mitchell, Tim McGraw, Avraham Aviv Alush

Credits:Directed by Stuart Hazeldine, script by John Fusco, Andrew Lanham, Destin Daniel Cretton, based on the novel by William P. Young. A Summit/Liongsate release.

Running time:

The clever scribes handed the job of this generation’s botching of “King Kong” had a cute idea.

“Let’s make an ‘Apocalypse Now’ riff. You know. ‘Heart of Darkness,’ guys named Marlow and Conrad, helicopters in the jungle — Creedence Clearwater Revival and “White Rabbit” — the works!”

So that’s what they did with “Kong: Skull Island.” They made a bad Vietnam movie — Their only research was in watching Hollywood versions of Vietnam — and ladled on metaphors about a trigger-happy U.S. military “invading” a jungle, attacking the freakishly large natives, and paying the price.

It’s “Avatar” simplistic, glib and dumb and not nearly as funny as they seem to think it is.

“Skull Island” resets the Kong myth in 1973, with America backing out of Vietnam (their history is fuzzy) and a helicopter combat corps sent to escort crackpot “scientist” Randa (John Goodman) and others who want to explore this hidden island that a satellite has just discovered.

Samuel L. Jackson is the chopper commander who recites the myth of Icarus to his dozen crews as they helicopter into the stormy abyss. Because, you know, the whole science makes you “fly too close to the sun” metaphor isn’t obvious enough. Capt. Packard makes the standard-issue “wouldn’t let us win” Vietnam speech about “This time, we won’t cut and run.”

Tom Hiddleston, phoning it in, is the ex-SAS officer hired as “tracker.” Oscar winner Brie Larson is the “anti-war (combat) photographer” who tags along.

And John C. Reilly is the World War II pilot whose dogfight, crash and ensuring fight-to-the-death with his Japanese foe — until the giant ape shows up — is the film’s thrilling introduction to this world. Lt. Marlow survives that fight and almost 30 years on the island, with its mystical natives, giant insects, reptiles and mammals, and serves as tour guide for the large, heavily-armed but overmatched team that arrives in the ’70s.

“We’re all gonna DIE.”

The choppers play rock’n roll tapes as they thump into combat, the GIs, who have bombed the island as their first act, are stunningly quick to accept the impossible and try to do battle with it.

“So are we just not gonna TALK about this?”

The effects are impressive, with Kong often seen striding and swatting down helicopters in slow-motion, accentuating his scale. The “science” of the whole thing is B-movie preposterous in the extreme. More effort was spent on the jokes.

Lt. Marlow needs to be brought up to speed about “the world today.”

“So the war’s over. Who won?”

“Which war?”

“Seems about right.”

“We’ve even put a man on the moon.”

“No kidding? They leave him there? What’d he eat?”

“Tang.”

The comic approach to this feels right. But the Vietnam era racism, the constant Vietnam movie cliches and even more constant sermonizing grate on the ears. And something about the whole ‘Nam thing rubs the wrong way. Goodman, who has never given more wooden line-readings (“a place where myth and science meet”) made me think of Walter Sobchak, his loony, funnier character in “The Big Lebowski,” and his rants about disrespected Vietnam vets, the dishonored dead “lying FACE down in a rice paddy.”

Walter would never have stood for a twisting of that memory like this.

Everything about the picture, from jokes and deaths to the epic King Kong vs. Godzilla brawls, is over-the-top, with sound and visuals that assault us. So if you’re inclined to see this, no sense monkeying around. Pay the extra bucks for the IMAX 3D beating it delivers.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for brief strong language.

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Shea Whigham

Credits:Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, script by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:00

Here’s a comic revenge thriller tapping into the general “people are jerks” zeitgeist and starring two character actors who have found the the sweet spot in the niche they find themselves in.

Melanie Lynskey has made her mark as the downtrodden “girl/woman who doesn’t get the guy,” an imprint pressed on her by TV’s “Two and a Half Men.” And Elijah Wood‘s post-Hobbit career has happily settled into quirky eccentrics with a dangerous streak.

“I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Any More” — the title is a variation of the old Carter Family country music song “I Can’t Feel at Home in This World Any More” — is actor turned writer-director Macon Blair’s violent essay on what happens when the put upon starting putting upon others.

Ruth (Lynskey) is a sad and lonely nursing assistant in suburban Portland, somebody who can’t help but notice what intolerant crones her elderly patients are, and what inconsiderate tools almost everyone else she meets turns out to be.

From the dolt barfly (Blair himself) who gives away plot spoilers to the fantasy novel she’s reading, to the pick-up-truck jerk “burning coal” — polluting as a political act, at a stoplight, to every creep who cuts in front of her in line at the grocery store, Ruth and we can see that we have morphed into an angry, incurious me-and-me-alone culture that put a narcissist just like us into the White House.

Even the cops who take her statement after her house has been robbed seem more interested in dismissing her victimhood and her loss than in living up to #bluelivesmatter.

“Why do you NOT want to help me?”

“The world is BIGGER than your (late grandma’s) silverware.”

But Ruth has a tracking ap on her stolen laptop. And when the indifferent 911 operator she calls won’t send police to check it out, she runs through the few people she knows to find someone to help her get it back.

That’s how she settles on Tony. In a neighborhood of gap-toothed perverts and cluelessly self-absorbed seniors, the rat-tailed goth-guy she yelled at for not cleaning up after his dog is her only hope.

“You can hit me, one strike…to balance the energy between us,” he offers, as a way of clearing up the whole dog-messing-her-lawn thing. No. She has bigger needs.

This is where Blair’s movie finds its surprises. There are two ways Tony’s nunchacku bravado can turn out when he confronts the people now in possession of Ruth’s computer. Blair finds a third, and it’s hilarious.

Ruth and Tony (and Tony’s elderly dog) track the stolen goods through the Dark Side of Portlandia (never identified as the location), spilling the blood (accidentally) of re-sellers of stolen goods, working their way towards the trio of thieves (Jane Levy of “Don’t Breathe” among them), including the rich punk (Devon Graye) we’ve seen commit crimes.

There are no “filler” characters or throw-away scenes in a 93 minute movie, and Blair finds giggles for almost everybody — especially the stepmom of the teen-thief. Christine Woods KILLS as a drawling drinker happy to tell these two idiots posing as cops everything she knows about her shady husband’s awful son.

Blair, who spent time on screen in the terrific “Green Room” and starred in “Blue Ruin,” keeps this fairly conventional story just surprising enough and his players make it just funny enough to hold our interest.

It had little chance of life in theaters, but as in other features that found their way to Netflix premieres, wherever there’s a captive, membership-paying audience, there’s hope for “little” movies with sharp, smart edges.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, Lee Eddy, Christine Woods, Devon Graye, Jane Levy

Credits:Written and directed by Macon Blair. An XYZ Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Quick show of hands, then. Who in the English-speaking world doesn’t know that Herbalife, the weight loss/money making “multilevel marketing” company, is a scam?

I mean, exposes by “Nightline,”  CBS News and John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” among others, Federal investigations, periodic crackdowns and simple common sense have given away this hustle for most people.

Those stories, save for Oliver’s take-down, pre-date hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s efforts to short-sell the company out of business. But Ackman’s involvement, starting in 2012, gave this tale a somewhat tarnished “white knight.” Here was a Wall Street insider willing to gamble $1 billion that this company, which makes almost all its money off suckers it lures into becoming buy-in distributors, would be outed, routed and put out of business by the Feds.

Ted Braun’s “Betting on Zero” follows Ackman and the years-long crusade by him and many of those rooked by Herbalife to get something like justice. The victims want restitution, and Ackman, a market manipulator claiming the moral high ground, wants to make money for his clients when Herbalife goes bust.

To Ackman, the multi-billion dollar international “health and wealth” company is “The best-managed pyramid scheme in the history of the world.” It’s a “wealth transfer scheme” designed to lure desperate people in with the prospect of a “business in a box,” only to have them buying and re-selling overpriced products that nobody wants, forcing them to lure in friends and relatives to create a new lower level of the pyramid for the tiny number of people at the top to prey upon.

Braun’s film follows Ackman from his cocky announcement to the world what a scummy operation he and his researchers have found Herbalife to be, into the wars that followed. Former Disney bigwig Michael O. Johnson was CEO as Herbalife grew into a multi-national success story, and got rich off the powdered shakes. He’s not taking this “outing” by Ackman lying down.

And being a hedge fund manager, Ackman has rivals and has made enemies. One of them is Donald Trump’s  economic adviser, Wall Street heavyweight Carl Icahn.

When Icahn threw his cash behind Herbalife in a personal vendetta against Ackman, he put Ackman on the defensive and added desperation to his efforts to get the Feds to crack down on Herbalife.

Braun also focuses on the people often lost in this headline grabbing scuffle, outraged, ripped-off and wronged Latino distributors, and their de facto leader, Julie Contreras. Her group waves “Herbalies” signs in front of corporate cheer-leading conventions, gets on the news and keeps the fight alive while an amoral Wall Street rallies behind the company.

But in a country having its “immigrants are bad” moment, who will care?

It’s repetitive and jargon-filled and a little too long. But “Zero” is still a fascinating story, troubling and chilling when you realize that the people in charge of the government now are the very people we need government to protect us from — scammers, frauds, “wealth re-distribution” hustlers and their protectors.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill Ackman, Julie Contreras, Carl Icahn, Micahel O. Johnson

Credits:Written and directed by Ted Braun. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:44