Movie Nation

“The Public” is premised on a simple fact of modern urban, and even suburban life. Public libraries have become, as writer-director-actor Emilio Estevez has acknowledged, “de facto homeless shelters.”

Senior citizens and cheapskates who prefer to borrow books rather than buy them (like me), school kids who need a safe place to do homework and wait for their parents to get off from work still use them.

Any time you need a laugh, ask any reference librarian, our flesh-and-blood “Google,” what sorts of inane, loony questions they field in a given day.

“I need a color photograph of George Washington.”

“I was reading this book, and I don’t remember the author or the title or the characters’ names, but it was on that shelf over there. Where is it now?”

“What kind of apple did Eve eat?”

But to the homeless, libraries are a sanctuary, a place to spend the day in air conditioned or heated comfort, with clean bathrooms which they wash up in, computers or wifi they can use for free like the rest of us, quiet so they can doze, if left to their own devices.

Couple that necessity with the knowledge that a sizable portion of the homeless population are mentally ill, unstable enough to put others ill at ease or worse, and yet are the last problem government seems ready to wrestle with and you’ve got the makings for a well-constructed if rather ham-fisted drama as American civics lesson.

Estevez stars as Stuart, a librarian in Cincinnati during a late winter cold snap. He knows many of the homeless by name, and they know him. They’re veterans like Jackson (Michael Kenneth Williams), or chattering, scatterbrained mental patients no longer institutionalized like the mascot of Jackson’s circle, Caesar (Patrick Hume).

“Hail Caesar!” the homeless guys chant after any arcane and typically erroneous “fact” Caesar spouts, like the Tourette’s Edition of Trivial Pursuit.

Jena Malone is a super-progressive underling of Stuart’s, anxious to lose herself in the literature department, Jacob Vargas is the front door security guard (part of a “team,” which I have never seen in any library, no matter how big) and Jeffrey Wright plays the world weary library director trying to keep the peace and hold on to some semblance of the institution’s core mission — a fact delivering, education supplementing bastion of learning, civic responsibility and civility.

That’s one thing “The Public” absolutely nails. As somebody who stops to work in libraries all up and down the Eastern seaboard while I’m on the road, one can’t help but notice the sea change in them, from an oasis of quiet, reflection and literacy to a noisy, cell-phone cluttered cacophony of under-parented kids, senses-dulled seniors and homeless folks on various spectrums who, at any given moment, will disrupt the sanctity of the place and the serenity of the other patrons, who otherwise don’t give them a thought.

Stuart’s got a high tolerance for this. But on the day when he learns the one homeless guy he had turned out for an “offensive odor” could cost him his job, the homeless “get organized” about the lack of shelter space in the city and the frigid cold that is killing them by ones, twos or threes every night they have to spend on the streets.

“Tonight, we occupy!” Jackson jokes. He hasn’t thought this through, at all. And when Stuart and Myra elect to remain with the 70 or so men on the third floor until their grievances are heard, Stuart finds himself becoming their mouthpiece for this “exercise in civil disobedience.”

Alec Baldwin plays the police department’s veteran negotiator with a personal interest in the homeless, Christian Slater is an opportunistic prosecutor running for mayor, anxious to make this problem go away in a way that buttresses his “tough on crime” campaign. And Gabrielle Union is the shallow and equally opportunistic TV reporter on the scene, hyping the drama of this “hostage crisis” as a way of boosting her career.

Taylor Schilling of “Orange is the New Black” is Stuart’s neighbor and apartment building supervisor, where we get a dose of who he really is (and what he and she have in common).

Estevez has built a perfectly workmanlike melodrama, a blend of “John Q” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with a tense agenda-driven police standoff in the Black Lives Matter era and seriously-dated “cute” crazy people.

Rhymefest makes a great impression as the obligatory man mountain among the mentally ill, a soft-spoken gent who makes no eye contact until you can convince him he doesn’t have laser eyes installed at birth “by the government.”

Estevez’s picture loses its urgency even as it never quite loses its away, blending the cornball and the cliched with the preachy (Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” is a major subtext) and the odd genuinely funny or touching moment.

Taken with his “Bobby” Kennedy bio-pic and warmly upbeat “The Way,” Estevez is staking out a unique place in not-quite-mainstream cinema, that of an old fashioned civics teacher and a humanist. The best we can hope for him each time out these days is that every film finds enough of an audience to earn him a shot at making another.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, nudity, language, and some suggestive content

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Michael Kenneth Williams, Taylor Schilling, Jeffrey Wright, Alec Baldwin, Gabrielle Union, Christian Slater

Credits: Written and directed by Emilio Estevez. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:59

Here at Maitland’s Enzian Theater for the beginning of the annual Global Peace Film Festival, docs and features about peace and civil rights issues.

It runs through the week at venues all over Central Florida. Sept. 16-22.

An exhibit of Jimi Hendrix artworks was added to this Woodstockish festival’s line up.

http://www.peacefilmfest.org

Opening night film is “The Public,” which I missed during its brief run this summer.

Emilio Estevez, homeless folks in a pubic library, moved to action.

Right up the festival’s alley, and mine.

The world’s largest excavator, or digger, chews through a wall of earth and rock that was once the German town of Immerath.

A young man, one of the thousands of residents of the Dandora Landfill in Kenya, raps to hear the echo in the canyons that decades of debris have created.

Chefs in Venice horse around in waders, carrying each other home, piggyback, as the city  streets floods, as they now do most any time it rains, or on certain tides.

A yodeling choir helps open the longest rail tunnel in the world, Gotthard Base, which runs underneath 35 miles (56 kilometers) of Swiss Alps.

A wildlife protection activist stands in front of $150 million in confiscated elephant tusks and sadly marvels how many elephants were poached to create this hoard — “Can you imagine? Ten thousand elephants!

These are some of the images, many epic in scale, in “Antropocene,” a documentary aimed at helping scientists make the case that the great geologic ages of Earth history have a new chapter. The Holocene Epoch, which began after the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, the argument goes.

But humanity, in just 10,000 years, has reshaped the Earth in permanent, astonishing and gravely destructive ways that will be obvious long after humans have gone extinct.

The filmmakers who gave us “Watermark” and “Manufactured Landscapes” travel the world to see the “story” that we’re leaving behind in “the rocks.” Oscar winner Alicia Vikander delivers a dry narration, the odd local witness speaks on camera (unidentified) and we see screen chapters on everything from “Extraction” to “Extinction,” detailing the ways we’re altering the ecosystem we live in.

An early visit is to Norilsk, “the most polluted city in Russia,” a sprawling complex of mines and smelting operations north of the Arctic Circle.

“It takes some getting used to,” one of the female crane operators admits.

In Atacama Desert, Chile, we see the vast array of drying ponds where Lithium sand is extracted to make the batteries that may save us from the hell that coal mining in Germany or the air-choking complex of oil refineries in Houston are pushing us to.

Maybe not.

With limited graphics and spare narration, “Anthropocene” shows the gigantic open pit where Carrara marble has been mined in Italy since the days of the Roman Empire.

“Climate change” comes up when looking at the seas rising on Venice, the “acidification” of sea water brought on by fossil fuels (a reef in Indonesia) and a 120 km/75 mile long sea wall that China built to, um, keep sea water from flooding their highly productive Shengli Oil Field.  

A still from Anthropocene – The Human Epoch by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky, an official selection of the Spotlight program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Edward Burtynsky. All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

The images are occasionally bleak, and the messaging more pressingly so, as old growth forests disappear in British Columbia and Nigeria and landscapes transformed by industrial-scale farming are viewed from the air.

Yes, we’ve filled the atmosphere with levels of carbon dioxide not seen in 66 million years of geologic time. But at least we get our own “epoch,” the Anthropocene,” named after us.

And there’s a smidgen of cautious hope underscoring much of what we see here.

Sure, the Third World, China and Russia are setting a poisonous, destructive tone where regulation and wages and health concerns are lower. But the ingenuity that built that lengthy sea wall, that pierced the Alps and that has turned London’s old air raid shelters into vast underground farms (Bean sprouts, anyone?) can probably figure out ways to save endangered species, reduce carbon and move “extraction” into the realm of science-fiction — “off world.”

If only we can all agree to do it,

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Narrated by Alicia Vikander

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier, script by  Jennifer Baichwal.An Oscilloscope Labs release. 

Running time: 1:27

It looks so easy on a map. Just a few inches, or centimeters, get you from here to there. Even if you wholly comprehend the miles — or kilometers — they translate to, modern Western life has conditioned us to regard journeys as simple “trips,” not ordeals.

But when you’re trekking from Tajikistan to Afghanistan, through Iran into Turkey, Bulgaria and you hope, into Europe, when you’re a refugee fleeing for your life, nothing about it is simple.

Hassan Fazili is an Afghan documentary filmmaker who, in 2015, ran afoul of the Taliban. No, they aren’t the government any more. But the fanatical Islamo-fascists still have the run of much of the country. When they say you’re going to come to some harm, you take it seriously.

He, his filmmaking wife Fatima Hossaini and their two little kids fled to Tajikistan. And when time ran out there, resolved to cover 3500 miles to safety in Germany or some other haven.

“Midnight Traveler” is the movie he made while on this arduous, years-long journey. With only a little cash, what little they could stuff into their car and their cell phones, they fled — using their cells as maps to plan their passages, communication with friends and potential smugglers who could help them, musical entertainment for the kids and as a film production they could stash in a purse or pocket.

Fazili — I’m assuming Hossain did some shooting, too, and we see the oldest daughter Nargis get some images — captures the ardous car ride, videoing through a cracked windshield or a lens fogged up by early morning condensation when they camped out.

We’re shown daytime treks in groups of refugees led by smugglers across easier borders, and the midnight scampers involved when crossing more dangerous ones.

Nargis reads narration to set the stage, “The road of life winds through Hell,” and we can believe it.

Our global refugee crisis, happening in an increasingly dystopian world hostile to the displaced, is personalized in “Midnight Traveler.”

Fatima rages at the smuggler who gets them into Bulgariia and threatens to kidnap their children if they don’t pay up. “These men are vultures!” she complains (in Pashto, with English subtitles). “How do you say ‘help’ in English?”

In some countries, they want the police to find them. A reasonably comfortable refugee camp, freedom of movement and getting your name on an official “list” to cross the next border is what awaits them.

In others, the cops are sympathetic to the right wing protesters who hurl rocks, chase them, march and chant (in Bulgarian), “DEPORT! No day in COURT!”

Aid workers pop up here and there, a TV crew shows up to battle the language barrier to report their plight, friends help here, officials turn them away there.

And as on any family road trip, there are (understandable, here) child meltdowns, miserable stretches and flashbacks.

Fazili remembers (in voice over) the former friend who joined the Taliban, and who called to warn him when a film he made about a Taliban commander irked the commander’s leaders. He was going to be arrested.

As he remembers this, and at other points, he talks of the film he sees in his head, adding “cut” to segments of voice-over, detailing a horrific moment’s potential as “the best part” of his finished movie, imagining a final family triumph that will underscore the closing credits.

Yes, documentary filmmakers are like that, making a “story” out of the reality they or the people or animals the film is about are dealing with.

Much of what was harrowing about their odyssey happens off-camera — the smuggler threats, a rock throwing incident, etc. At other times, Hossaini and others tell her husband to “turn it off.”

And just when you think, “Even in Bulgaria they don’t separate families and treat refugees humanely,” along comes a border crossing into Hungary where the refugee “transit station” is a razor-wired prison camp, which young Nargis takes a phone out to record in “the yard” because “I want to REMEMBER this.”

“Midnight Traveler” is a documentary whose “How we made this film under these conditions” story almost overwhelms the finished product. Too much happens off camera, too many scenes capture the drudgery of the camps, where they were trapped for months and months at a time.

But Fazili has made an otherwise-unblinking cell-phone verite film of the crisis of our times, a first-person account of what people who cannot live where they are do to save themselves. Nobody watching “Midnight Traveler” can come away from it unimpressed, even if some are determined to look on this crisis and remain unmoved.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, some violence

Cast: Fatima Hossaini, Hassan Fazili, Nargis Fazili, Zahra Fazili

Credits: Directed by Hassan Fazili, script by Emelie Coleman Mahdavian. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:27

You knew he was a goner the moment that damning clip showed up. That wasn”t a lapse, ancient history or anything you can explain away.

That was a vile bigot comfortable in long held prejudices.

Via The New York Times

“Shane Gillis, a comedian announced as a new cast member on “SNL” before videos surfaced in which he used slurs and offensive language, will not be joining the show, “SNL” announced Monday. A spokesperson said they “were not aware of his prior remarks.” https://t.co/j5mlsffU73 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1173694477908815878?s=17

The path to “The World We Make” is paved with patronizing, heavy-handed and somewhat retro good intentions.

It’s a modern day inter-racial romance set in that corner of suburban Nashville that hasn’t turned a calendar page since, oh, 1975. The film stumbles all over the place when it’s not stumbling over its own awkard, clumsy attempts to make something modern that emerges from a seriously retrograde place.

“World We Make” has faith-based filmmakers behind it, and it is to their eternal embarassment, if not shame, that they treat this idea as if the Bob Jones University lawsuits over interracial dating was happening today, and not in the 1970s.

Yes, a lot of people think that way and it might be worth revisiting the subject in a serious way. But “erious” should not be confused with “mature” or smart in this picture, whose “modern” veneer will feel modern only to those who missed decades of memos on the state of the culture.

Rose Reid (“I’m Not Ashamed”) and Caleb Castille (“Woodlawn”) are the two very attractive stars in this melodrama set in Tennessee horse country.

Jubilee Grove (Reid) goes by “Lee” for obvious reasons, a rising high school senior who teaches kids about horses and riding at the family horse (hobby) farm, an operation she runs with her older brother, Casey (Richard Kohnke). Dad (Kevin Sizemore) bought the place for their mom, and since she died, he’s burrowed into classic car restoration.

Lee’s life hasn’t found its purpose, though a therapist who uses horses with her patients might be a hint to her future.

Casey, though, has come up with the idea that they’ll take their two favorite horses and travel cross-country, old school and on horseback, an “epic challenge,” something that could render them into what their dad has counseled them to be — “a person of distinction.”

But Casey is killed in a car wreck. His high school pal, Jordan (Castille) comes by to help out, shoveling out stalls and heaving “hay cubes.” And quite abruptly, a friendship between the college athlete and the ponytailed high school beauty turns into something more.

It’s an indication of how tin-eared the three writers behind this are that they have Lee suggest Jordan play basketball with her little brother.

Why, because I’m black?

Well, maybe because you’re an ATHLETE?

The whole point of such an exchange is playing up black “touchiness” about the subject of race, and devaluing black victimhood. It’s so patronizing as to make you wince.

There’s no problem from Lee’s dad or brother. But Jordan’s father (Gregory Alan Williams) can’t be told about this romance . And the pretty teen from his neighborhood (Candace West) is here to lecture Lee on how “woke” she isn’t, and how dating this guy won’t “east your white guilt.”

West, of “Nobody’s Fool,” practically grits her teeth, having to spout such stupid lines.

There are promising ingredients to the story, Jordan’s business school/”statistically speaking” brains, Lee’s grasping at anyone who both reminds her of her brother and allows her to get away without properly mourning him.

The leads don’t set off much in the line of sparks, which is just as well. Classmates, local business owners, fellow diners in a restaurant and when push-comes-to-shove, a local cop, all are profiling Jordan and giving Lee an eyeful of the “different worlds” they come from and their different experience of the world they share.

That’s as “progressive” as “The World We Make” gets. Lee spouting nonsense like “We’re a lot more progressive than that. We’ve had a black president.” will get a lot of head-nodding from viewers who hear versions of those lines on Fox News 24/7.

“Is this what it’s always going to be like?” feels like a line from a ’70s movie, and a lot more could have been made out of the fact that it isn’t.

Yes, racism thrives, especially in small towns in the South. But such relationships barely reach the raised-eyebrow level of outrage among anyone under 70, these days.

Moments like that make “The World We Make” hopelessly out of date, and even more out of date for the fact that the folks making it don’t realize that in the first place.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material and brief violence

Cast: Rose Reid, Caleb Castille, Gregory Alan Williams, Kevin Sizemore, Candace West

Credits. Directed by Brian Baugh, script by Brian Baugh, Chris Dowling, George D. Escobar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

“Groupers” is a farce about kidnapping two homophobic high school bullies and forcing them to prove their “thesis” — that homosexuality, “sexual proclivity,” is a choice.

If it is, they can “choose” to dabble in it same sex romance, and voila, go free.

It begins as a chatty, catty and not that amusing or harrowing hostage tale that falls well short of “thriller,” and devolves into something less.

A woman (Nicole Dambro) lures two young jocks (Peter Mayer-Klepchick, Cameron Duckett) into a van, where she gasses them and then ensnares them in an elaborate rope trap in an empty pool in an abandoned suburban LA subdivision.

It’s an “experiment,” she tells these two — cunning Brad (Mayer-Klepchick) and doltish Dylan (Duckett). She’ll record their actions, initiate “phases” to the experiment to egg (threaten) them on, and perhaps humiliate them in front of the world.

“Have you maimed me? Maimed US?”

I had thoughts of “Maybe we’re heading into ‘Hard Candy’ territory,” an early Ellen Page revenge on a rapist fantasy. But no.

We’re just settling into for this myopic three-character “play,” listening to Meg’s lectures on the nature of the trap, the “secrets” one of them keeps on his phone, the power dynamic of her controlling them with tasers as she taunts their narrow-mindedness, when other characters start showing up. And with few exceptions, each new addition waters down whatever point the movie is reaching for and fails to add anything funny to the proceedings.

The three person dynamic has discourses on “trickle-down abuse” of “hate crimes” the kids have been perpetuating on somebody at school, and the uncomfortable fact that Meg is “hate criming the hate criminals!”

And in extreme close-ups, the two boys — tied so tightly together — turn on each other.

“Are you ALWAYS like this, when you’re not high or drunk or both?”

Then, a glib gay stereotype shows up, joking about kidnapping being “number seven on my bucket list” and local criminal/squatters and the movie’s tongue-in-cheek tone goes straight out the window in favor of flailing, failed farce.

Points about racism and homophobia are pounded home, and of the new additions, only Terrance Wentz makes much of an impression, a stereotypical bulked-up black hoodlum who has some surprising opinions and attitudes on the subject at hand, and a funny way with every line he delivers.

“Oh, that’s savage. No need for savagery!”

When his character declares, “You mutha——s don’t know how to end s–t!” he is talking directly to his writer-director.

Which is to say after showing signs of comic life in the third act, the whole enterprise resolves itself in the most half-baked way you can imagine.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, homophobic slurs

Cast: Nicole Dambro, Peter Mayer-Klepchick, Cameron Duckett, Terrance Wentz, Jesse Pudles, Travis Stanberry, Max Reed III and Brian Ioakimedes

Credits: Written and directed by Anderson Cowan. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:49

Netflix has had better luck with teen comedies than with post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

But Oct. 24, perhaps this mashup farce will change all that.

Office romances, especially those between boss and employee, have made a a rapid transition from “frowned upon” by HR to repellant and condemnable in the “#MeToo” era. They’re positively fraught, these days.

Thus, the misfortune that is “Can You Keep a Secret?” It was never going to be all that funny and romantic. But showing up at this point in time, this wan rom-com should give anybody pause before buying the rights to further works by British novelist Sophie Kinsella. She did “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” and if she isn’t setting back feminism with every trip to the keyboard, her work is certainly aging poorly.

Alexandra Daddario of “Baywatch” plays Emma, a young marketing exec who tumbles for the founder of her organic health food/drink company AFTER drunkenly spilling her guts to him as her fellow passenger on a flight she was sure was doomed. DOOMED.

Just turbulence, dear.

Her panicked confession? She’s too young to die. She’s never gotten a tattoo, never had kids, and “I don’t even KNOW that I have a G-spot!” “I wish I could pee, standing up!” And “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love, or been loved!”

That’s a lot to unload on a stranger, who turns out to be your boss’s boss when he shows up at the office the next day.

Jack (Tyler Hoechlin, who is Clark Kent on TV’s “Flash” and “Arrow”) proceeds to use info from that confession to re-arrange the power structure in that office, and to finish off her relationship to the quite-effeminate Connor (David Ebert).

We might not notice that power imbalance so much if they had real chemistry, if Daddario’s bubbly klutz act was matched with something other than humorless hunkiness and nearly-charmless stubble.

Several people in the story have “secrets” — a lawyer-roommate (Sunita Mani) who seems to be bedding a lot of guys from the office, the boss (Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black”) who might not have told anybody she used to identify as male.

Nothing much is made of any of these characters or their secrets. The workplace is a parade of inappropriately public conversations, sleep-with-the-boss shaming, an HR nightmare that isn’t a funny nightmare.

Daddario mugs a bit, takes her best shot at “perky” and “clumsy” and “cute” and never completely gives up on the script, or lets us see that she has. She’s almost all alone in this regard.

There’s almost always a spark in such movies, usually provided with the one supporting player who finds room to be funny. Here, it comes from Kimiko Glenn, who plays the cynical, man-wise, hustlerwear roomie, Gemma.

Gemma has the few funny lines. “You need to get even. I know a guy…” And coaching Emma on the phone, “Yes, bitch! Step into your POWER!”

Glenn is all alone in giggleland in “Can You Keep a Secret?”

And just when you give up on the intended comedy ever coming together, it dives into something edgier. But that flip-flop is only a tease for a movie that never was, and probably never was going to be funnier than the one they ended up making, which is as charmless as it is laughless.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Alexandra  Daddario, Tyler Hoechin, Sunita Mani and Laverne Cox

Credits: Directed by Elise Duran, script by Peter Hutchings, based on a Sophie Kinsella novel.

Credits: A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

It’s been mostly miss or miss, with hits pretty rare, since Tiffany Haddish broke out with “Girls’ Trip.”

Pairing her up with Rose Byrne, under-rated as a comedienne, but damned funny in “Neighbors” and “Bridesmaids” and “Get Him to the Greek,” is a smart play.

And Salma Hayek as badassed and predatory? That’s a slam dunk.

This is a Jan. 10 release, meaning this movie will be competing for attention against blockbusters and Oscar contenders, mostly films released over Christmas.

Paramount is either A) saying not to expect much here, lowering expectations or B) counter-programming against “prestige” pictures with a little lowdown lady-powered comedy that could make some noise.