Movie Nation

The colors, the shadows pierced by unearthly shafts of light, the venal billionaire villain and the Shades of Vangelis score tell us this about “Synchronicity” before we have one hint about what it’s about.

This is a “Blade Runner” homage, a tribute to the over-designed underlit glories of early Ridley Scott films.

Screenwriter/director Jacob Gentry (“The Signal”) has crafted a mood-over-all time travel thriller with a paranoid inventor, a femme fatale and assorted “versions” of these characters manipulated by the “topological anomaly” that scientist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight) has discovered and is exploiting.

In the not-that-distant future, Beale and his team have created a “reversible wormhole in the fabric of the space-time continuum.”

Even if you know almost nobody ever uses that last phrase outside of science fiction movies, and you don’t understand, you’ve got to figure Jim is onto something.

That’s the thinking of his financier, played by Michael Ironside, one of the cinema’s greatest heavies. Jim’s got to outsmart the billionaire to keep control of this epoch-shaking invention. But who can he trust to help him?

“Synchronicity” is about paranoia and betrayals, real and imagined. And it’s about nerd lust, the kind of temptation that presents itself in the person of Abby (Brianne Davis). When she asks “Where did YOU just come from?” she might better be asking “When did you just come from?” Her curiosity is piqued.

Something about time travel makes it oh-so-friendly to manage in a micro-budget movie.

Think of the cut-rate thrillers, from “Primer” to the Spanish “Time Crimes,”  to say nothing of the scads of budget-conscious TV episodes and entire series that have managed something interesting in the genre without “Back to the Future” bucks.

That’s the stand-out trait of “Synchronicity,” the austere future cityscapes, the gloomy nights, the realistic-looking gear and “scientific method” approach to testing this new procedure/gadget on a planet, and then people.

Characters may bicker about the fates of Tesla and Edison — one, rich and famous, the other too late to get credit for his genius. Love and trust are given and withdrawn, depending on the relative level of paranoia. And characters are constantly running the risk of running into earlier — or later — versions of themselves, trying to tidy all this up.

“If I’m doing my math correctly, there’s a good chance I’m on my way here right now.”

McKnight suggests barely enough of a science nerd to be believable. Davis (“True Blood”) has a sexy mystery about her that suits the character’s uncertain standing. Is she guileless, or scheming? Abby’s attraction to Jim never feels real, so that’s given away too easily.

It all comes back to that look, the feel, Gentry was going for. That’s not enough, as the story gets lost in the murk and the relationships are never as clear as they should be simply because of the lack of light.

Think of the shocks of “Primer,” the intricate puzzle of “Los cronocrimenes (Time Crimes”). No matter how gorgeous “Synchronicity” looks, it can’t keep you from feeling this was an opportunity missed.

 
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast: Chad McKnight, Brianne Davis, AJ Bowen, Michael Ironside
Credits: Written and directed by Jacob Gentry. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:41

Here’s information you need before settling in to watch the surreal indie dramedy “Entertainment.”

The star is Gregg Turkington, and the character he’s performing is named Neil Hamburger, Turkington’s stage alter ego, aka “The World’s Worst Comic.”

Which, from the bountiful evidence presented by the film proves, he is.

He looks like Dwight Yoakam gone to seed — pudgy, flop sweaty in his ill-fitting cheap tux, balding, with only a greasy comb-over to call his own.

The Hamburger conceit is a through-the-looking-glass performance art riff on comedy, the psyche of comics and the viewer’s response to stand-up, challenging our Pavlovian reaction to ba-DOOM-boom set-up/punch line humor.

“What’s the worst thing about being raped by Crosby, Stills and Nash?”

“Why don’t rapists eat at T.G.I. Friday’s?”

The punch-lines are squirm-inducing, excruciating, as indeed is his entire act. His rage at hecklers — of which there are many — crosses every line in the book.  He may be “literally plucking jokes out of my heart,” but onstage, he has no heart. And onstage, he has no jokes.

Co-writer/director Rick Alverson (“The Comedy”) uses a desert Southwest tour by this character called “the comic” (one person does call him “Neil”) to ask the existential question — Are you a comic if nobody laughs?

That’s giving the film more credit for a through line than it actually has. “Entertainment” is rife with randomness, shot through with misery and self-loathing and flat out unpleasant as a screen experience.

As “The Comic” plays prisons, parties and the emptiest, sandiest dives this side of Tucumcari, he leaves heartfelt (and unreturned) phone messages for his daughter. He encounters Latin Americans, hecklers, dazed “fans” and a wealthy orange-grower cousin (John C. Reilly) who doesn’t understand his edgy act at all. He’s not alone.

“Where do you wanna go?” the cousin, standing in for the audience, asks. “Where’s this leading to?”

The pregnant woman giving birth in a public restroom, the guy (Michael Cera) taking shelter there? As random as the remains of an offroad car wreck that draws The Comic’s attention, and the director’s.

Is Hamburger in Hell? Purgatory? The anger and isolation and nightmarish nature of the never-ending road-trip through the boondocks capture something fundamental to the stand-up experience.

But it’s difficult to give Alverson and his star too much credit for depth, insight or having a point. Because I’m not certain they have one.

MPAA Rating:R for language, crude sexual material, a disturbing image and brief drug use

Cast: Gregg Turkington, Tye Sheridan, John C. Reilly, Amy Seimetz
Credits: Directed by Rick Alverson, script by Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington and Tim Heidecker. A Magnolia release.

Running time:

“Oh no,” I said to myself, noting the presence of another “new” book about Orson Welles. “Definitive,” I thought. Again. “The last word,” I was sure.  Again.

No other life in film has been so devoured, pored over and parsed. You could make a lovely flow chart of the ebb and flow of Wellesiana and the state of his legend — the nadir coming from Pauline Kael’s credit-removing “The Citizen Kane Book,” and Charles Higham’s “pathography.” Then there was all his former partner John Houseman wrote about Welles in Houseman’s own memoirs.

His reputation was revived Barbara Leaming’s “as told to” biography, Simon Callow’s two volume dissection, interview transcriptions from Welles acolytes Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom, “rethinking/setting the record straight” books by Frank Brady and Robert Carringer and Welles the Shakespearean (Michael Anderegg) and on and on.

But damned if Patrick McGilligan’s “Young Orson” doesn’t sum all those earlier works, open some new doors and close — with finality — several others.

In 750 or so pages, McGilligan thoroughly covers Welles’ pre-history – a family saga that might make for a great PBS series post-“Downton Abbey.” About 100 pages pass before Orson is born.

The last 50 pages cover the last day of Welles’ life.

In between, we discover “new” inspirations for “Rosebud,” new testimony (a 1950s copyright suit by the author of a biography of William Randolph Heart involving Welles, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz  and Houseman) that settles several matters of authorship and biographical underpinnings for “Kane.”

And all that comes in the latter pages. McGilligan focuses on the fascinating debut Welles made, the run Welles had — reinventing the New York stage of the 1930s, conquering radio and frightening America with a take on H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” and then reinventing the movies with “Kane.”

As many Welles books as I’ve read, I never tire of re-discovering his all-African-American “Macbeth” (glimpsed below), his transformative Fascist-era “Julius Caesar.”

He took his first shot at directing something like a movie as a teen — a silly “student” project, “Hearts of Age,” long available on Youtube. More recently, the footage he shot for a stage farce he was trying to turn into a multimedia (filmed intervals moving the plot forward) project surfaced, which showed him how important and how difficult editing was (he never finished it. See below).

And then there was radio, my first career (college, and just after), where I really fell in love with Welles, thanks to transcriptions of his “Mercury Theatre of the Air” broadcasts, and that playful “War of the Worlds.”

All leading up to the great climax of “Kane,” the fourth or fifth idea for a “first film” from the “boy genius” Welles.

“Young Orson” is a brisk read, illuminating — McGilligan uses a dogged pursuit of exact dates to tear apart some of the “myths” around Welles. No, he didn’t father a future filmmaker with Geraldine Fitzgerald. And he eviscerates and dismisses, for once and for all, the various labels slapped on the director by Houseman, Higham, Callow, Kael and others, including the mythmaker himself. Welles was something of a fabulist, you know. Couldn’t take anything he said about his history, his career and “Kane” seriously — without doing the research.

McGilligan did. A terrific book.

“Band of Robbers” is more a clever conceit than a satisfying, coherent and involving crime comedy. But what a conceit!

It’s a modern resetting of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” with characters living out their adulthood in the patterns Twain established for their youth way back in 19th century St. Petersburg (Hannibal) Missouri.

So, Huck Finn (Kyle Gallner) is fresh out of prison, having taken the rap, one more time, for dreaming/scheming Tom (co-writer/director Adam Nee).

Huck wants to go straight, grow up, “have a family…a life.”

Tom? He’s the same scamp at 30 he was at 13. He’s a cop, now, suffering under the thumb of brother Sid (Eric Christian Olsen), but always with an eye on that buried pirate’s treasure that got him and Huck into so much trouble in their youth.

Tom rounds up their pals (comic Hannibal Burress, among them) and resolves to start a “Band of Robbers,” a gang of “merry men” just like Robin Hood. He pitches a “blood oath,” but the guys are too squeamish. He has to be satisfied with having his own mob. What’s it called and who’s in it?

“It’s on a need-to-know basis. And nobody needs to know.”

Tom’s a bit of a cunning dope. As always. He’s got a cunning plan, robbing a pawn shop where Injun Joe may have stashed something that will lead to them to the treasure. Tom the cop will get his gang to knock over the pawn shop and keep them out of the reach of Injun Joe. Who isn’t “real.” Or a “real Injun.”

“That’s kinda racist!”

“How is it racist to want to be MORE like another race?” Injun Joe himself (Stephen Lang) and others want to know, a funny running gag.

Tom has to throw his new partner, Officer Becky Thatcher (Melissa Benoist) off the scent, get his gang to show up on time and follow the plan, and track down the treasure that has consumed his dreams since before Mark Twain’s hair changed color.

“Band of Robbers” is a film of little flourishes that work better than the story they’re adorning. Everybody wondering why “Injun Joe” wants to be a Native American, clumsy gang members missing appointments, forgetting their panty-hose disguises (plastic grocery bags will have to do), clumsy attempts at Spanglish (they’ll pass themselves off as Mexicans during the heist).

A police interrogation gets off track when we’re asked to wonder how a mermaid might ride a snake.

“Sidesaddle.”

Nee, as Sawyer, has most of the hilarious lines, but doesn’t have a comic’s timing or a film star’s camera charisma. His awkward babbling to Becky Thatcher almost sings, but doesn’t. Nothing else comes as close to working.

But you have to hand it to the Nee brothers (Aaron is the other co-writer/director) for trying. In an age when every film student and filmmaker wannabe is grasping at the low-hanging fruit of horror, they’ve taken a shot at a classic. And missed. No dishonor in that.

 
MPAA Rating: unrated, with bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Kyle Gallner, Adam Nee, Melissa Benoist, Hannibal Burress, Stephen Lang
Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, based on Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:33

Put it off long enough, I figure. I got to all the films that mattered in 2015 in a timely manner, and spent entirely too long mulling over which might constitute the “ten best.”

Consider — “Straight Outta Compton,””Bridge of Spies,” “Labyrinth of Lies,” “Chi-raq,” “While We’re Young,” “Far from the Madding Crowd,” “Legend,” “Youth,” “Carol,” “The Danish Girl,” “Room,” “Love & Mercy, “Inside/Out,” “Trumbo,” “Sicario,” “Brooklyn”,  “Beasts of No Nation,” “Black Mass,” even the lightweight “A Royal Night Out,””– you could build a perfectly honorable list of the year’s best with those. For me, 2015 was a gilded year — for three star (out of four) movies.

The movies I hold in the highest regard hit an emotional chord that frankly, the aforementioned movies — to a one — missed. The swooning over “Carol” and “Brooklyn” and “Compton” I quite understand. But what you remember, years later, are how films made you feel. None of those measured up in that regard.

Still, the awards season rush toward any of those films feels deserved and easily defended. But the Broadcast Film Critics going for…”Star Wars: The Force Awakens”? That smacks of a label that rhymes with my last name.

Here’s what I figure were the best films of 2015 — delivered in reverse order, in order to preserve some sort of suspense. A few films have been utterly ignored by the Oscar buzz juggernaut, many of them weren’t seen by a very large segment of the moviegoing public. Their qualities stick in my mind and make me confident we’ll recall them years from now, which is all that counts.

10) “The Best of Enemies” — A civil, absurdly literate and bruising series of debates over the future of America at the birth of the “Nixon Era,” this film about the Gore Vidal/William F. Buckley Jr. TV tangles of 1968 was, for many, the last frank, blunt debate about U.S. politics that the country ever staged. That it came at the birth of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” pitting a white, less educated, more rural “silent majority” against assorted minorities — including the gay novelist Vidal — was prescient. Fascinating cultural artifact, great biography of these two patrician poseurs facing off over political philosophies.

9) “Mad Max: Fury Road” — The day is already here when those grasping, bandwagoning lightweights who glommed onto “Furious 7” (I miss Paul Walker, too — the movie was tripe) or “Jurassic World” (most pointless reboot this side of “Force Awakens”) as dazzling cinema, or in either case, “the movie of the summer,” hope that you will forget that they endorsed those dogs. “Fury Road” was what a reboot should be — namely, different. Amped-up action, altered message, original casting. Best role Charlize Theron has had since “Monster,” and Tom Hardy is setting himself up as the new “best actor to never win an Oscar.” THE movie of the summer.

8) “The Big Short” — I could easily endorse the idea that every complex story in American life, from the Wall Street collapse to Sabremetrics in Baseball, should be entrusted to author Michael Lewis. I could almost get on board the notion that turning such complexity over to a Will Ferrell crony as director (Adam McKay) will always pay off. But this all-star romp through the people who saw The Big Bubble and set out to punish those who created it — by shorting their stock holdings — is a delight and a modern civics lesson. No, we never did break up “too big to fail” depression-starters like Goldman Sachs. But Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt and others suggest we might want to get around to that.

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“A long time ago…in a city far far away…I had a future,” the “hero” of the Brazilian thriller “2 Rabbits” narrates.

Edgar (Fernando Alves Pinto) is handsome, well-off, loved by his restaurateur dad, and known — as a comical montage of testimonies tell us — by many. And the story he has to tell — of accidents and loss, guilt and redemption, gangsters and the  corrupt system that keeps them on the streets of Sao Paolo — is complex. He has this scheme to kill “two rabbits with one shot.”

But “2 Rabbits” is a movie with no heroes, just a lot of unsavory folks painted in various shades of gray.

A car crash that kills a mother and child opens the film. And as it progresses and the story circles back around to that event, we meet the medicated femme fatale prosecutor (Alessandra Negrini), her defense attorney husband, a gangster (Marat Descartes), a mugger who might come in handy and a political boss looking to get paid any time anything happens in Sao Paolo.

“Justice is…peculiar in Brazil,” Edgar explains. He has dodged it himself, but he has a scheme — involving a bomb — to get a little justice for himself and others let down by the system.

Writer-director Afonso Poyart rode this cryptic, hallucinatory action picture into a job directing “Solace,” with Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Colin Farrell.

The prosecutor has stress-driven blackouts. When you and your husband are conspiring to get murderers released and regularly dealing with the lawless as peers, you’re bound to have paranoid visions of slaughter.

Poyart’s lurid visuals, sea of characters and the turgid and subtitled Portuguese dialogue make the picture hard to follow and even harder to swallow, at times. Edgar is no better than those he wants “justice” from, and one person who teams up with him makes no logical sense.

But the electronic (magical, almost) triggering device for Edgar’s bomb makes for some tense stand-offs. And you have to trust that Poyart feels as uncertain about Edgar’s place as “hero” in the tale as you do.

It’s not just “2 Rabbits” he’s concerned with nailing here. It’s a rabbit warren of venality only a lot of mayhem will clear up. And if it’s not wholly satisfying and righteous, well, welcome to Brazil.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic gun violence, sexual situations

Cast: Fernando Alves Pinto, Alessandra Negrini, Marat Descartes

Credits: Written and directed by Afonso Poyart. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:41

All those silly film critics, whipping out their Top Ten Lists without first catching “Point Break.” How COULD they?

Call it a hunch.

But after a year of blockbuster rehashes masquerading as “sequels”,  here at last is a remake that dares call itself that. The stunts are in 3D and are more especially when you’re in that flying suit, zipping through the Alps or looking down from the top of Venezuela’s Angel Falls.

It’s the New Age/Nirvana-seeking script that lets it down. And as moving as the action beats are, the actors aren’t. The stunt team races through the frame. The actors stand stock still and recite.

Luke Bracey is the new Keanu in this one. Johnny Utah is a motocross “poly-athlete” who loses a buddy in a reckless moment, and does what it takes to join the FBI to atone for it.

Some extreme athletes are pulling off daring heists — stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, riding dirt bikes and popping parachutes. And Utah’s boss (the under-used Delroy Lindo) doesn’t like it. Our new “provisional” agent has an idea. These crooks are following the path of an extreme sports/eco warrior guru who preached that one should pursue stunts that tell the “Life of Wind” or “Birth of Story” or “Act of Ultimate Trust.” There are eight stations of the cross in this ethos. Utah knows them.

Utah discovers his quarry at an epic, once-in-a-decade wave off Biarritz, France. Their leader is Bodhi, a thrill seeking spirit warrior who leads a team to the ultimate snowboarding/surfing/rock climbing/flying suit experiences.

Bodhi (Edgar Ramirez of “Joy”) believes in saving the planet. “We have to give more than we take.” So stealing from robber barons or closing an open pit mine or lumber operation is what he’s all about.

Utah intrigues him.

“Are you ready to let go?”

Deep cover, in this case, means risking his neck every day doing things no sane or under-trained person should try.

Director/cinematographer Ericson Core does a great job capturing the big stunts — especially the climbing and flying ones. The surfing occasionally lets on that we aren’t seeing the real deal, or that love interest flower child Teresa Palmer might be able to surf — but not an 80 foot wave.

The casting does the film few favors. Ramirez is charismatic, but has none of Patrick Swayze’s mad twinkle. It’s a humorless film that makes you go “Wow” more than it involves you.

Kathryn Bigelow staged the greatest foot chase in film history in the original “Point Break.” There’s nothing to match that here. Bracey (“G.I. Joe: Retaliation”) is a buff, blonde stiff covered in tattoos. Palmer grins in every shot as if to remind us she isn’t her look-alike, she-wh0-never-smiles, Kristen Stewart.

It’s not a movie to think about. The Arabic millionaire  financing these stunts (not captured for Youtube), the promising but vanishing Robin Hood motif, the wacko way Utah keeps outguessing his quarry — none of it stands up to scrutiny. The enviro-agitprop is laughable.

“Nature will always find a way to make you feel small.”

But the 3D stunts are eye-popping, even if the new version’s cast and cut-and-paste script are not.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, thematic material involving perilous activity, some sexuality, language and drug material

Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Luke Bracey, Ray Winstone, Teresa Palmer, Delroy Lindo
Credits: Directed by Ericson Core script by Kurt Wimmer. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:53

Many of us wonder about exactly who gave Quentin Tarantino the license to use the word that, historically (and often hysterically–as in comic) no black person gives any white person permission to use.

Axel Rose? Not permitted. Michael Richards? Ditto.

But Tarantino? Decades of using it, willy nilly.

As Gawker demonstrates.

An unsettling dread hangs over the boys of “Yosemite,” a character study built around a couple of interconnected James Franco short stories from his book, “Palo Alto.”

Boys talking about death. News reports (set in the early ’80s?) mentioning, about humans encroaching on mountain lion habitat, a child befriended by a creepy much-older teen (Henry Hopper, son of Dennis) promising comic books, boys grabbing each other in the crotch, kids finding a gun, taking rides from strangers, walking barefoot on railroad tracks.

This is Franco’s “Boyhood,” a collection of scenes sketching out many facets of that phase of life — callowness, cruelty, compassion and comic books. And curiosity. Bi-curiosity. You know how Franco’s brain works.

They don’t add up to much, but writer/director Gabrielle Demeestere manages a mood built on some solid performances by promising young actors.

“Chris” (Everett Meckler) is on hiking trip to Yosemite with his kid brother and his dad (Franco). His parents are estranged, dad is celebrating “my sobriety birthday.” There are steep falls, and the radio reminds us, mountain lions in the mountains they’re hiking.

And warning shots — “I TOLD you to look after him.”

Chris isn’t keen on the kid sibling. “Dear God, sometimes I just wish my brother didn’t exist.”

At least there’s early ’80s porn on the TV in their room at the lodge.

“Joe” (Alec Mansky) is a local schoolboy, bored, but tormented by a classmate (Calum John) who keeps grabbing his nether regions in their ongoing crotch-oriented slapfight. Joe is constantly getting in trouble for fighting with this San Francisco-bound creep.

His parents are out of town, he’s hassled for shoplifting. But he’s rescued by Henry (Hopper), who has a vintage Mustang, a comic book collection and sexual predator written all over him

With all these dangers and all this dangerous behavior, from the mysterious to the obvious, we keep waiting for something calamitous to happen. But when it does, even that isn’t as jarring as one would hope.

It never adds up to anything more than the mood Demeestere manages to translate from Franco’s fiction. Which makes “Yosemite” a “film festival movie,” nothing more than a promising idea or two and an interesting tone to recommend it.

MPAA Rating:R for some sexual material/nudity and language

Cast: James Franco,Henry Hopper, Everett Meckler, Calum John, Alec Mansky

Credits: Written and directed by  Gabrielle Demeestere, based on the “Palo Alto” short stories of James Franco. A release.

Running time: 1:22

In Los Angeles, even the homeless are better looking than we could ever hope to be. With better hair and makeup, too.

So that’s a comfort. I guess.

“Other People’s Children” is an indie drama featuring a bunch of quite attractive young actors slumming.  Literally.

They bum money, buy and do drugs, cavort (a little pick-up basketball) and squat in what has to be the cleanest loft and “abandoned warehouse” in the history of homelessness.

Whatever high-minded intent of Liz Hinlein’s drama, it never for a minute feels authentic or anything but superficial. Nobody involved, from the screenwriter through the cast, dared to get her or his hand’s dirty.

Diane Marshall-Green is Sam, daughter of a famous painter (Scott Patterson), a suffering artist who barely humored his videographer-daughter’s effort to make a shallow documentary about his work.

What are your influences, she wants to know?

“My bank account,” he growls, slashing more paint across canvas in his best Jackson Pollack fit.

Dad has died, and Sam has been laying low, trying to cope.

“I Facebooked you when I found out!”a faux-friend offers.

But Sam meets this irritable homeless guy (Chad Michael Murray), a peer and a hunk, too, with perfect teeth, perfect abs. She wants to FILM him. And his tribe.

Murray (“To Write Love on Her Arms”) makes P.K. a philosophical junkie (“No NEEDLES,” he insists, underlining the movie’s refusal to gets it hands dirty).

“When you’re hellbent on self-destruction, there’s nothing anybody can do.”

Will Sam figure this out in 85 minutes? What do YOU think?

The supporting cast is colorful but entirely too put together — with the occasional exception — to be living on the streets.

Sam has an ex (Michael Mosley) who has taken up with an old friend (Alexsandra Breckenridge).  But the whole love triangle thing is a non-starter.

Marshall-Green is so alluring as Sam that men keep caressing her face, leading on some occasions to the removal of shirts and naked wrestling.

But movies that dabble in homelessness, even movies about cute filmmakers who want to film and flirt with the homeless, require more commitment than this. No number of scenes featuring a nubile nude can countermand that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some violence, nudity, substance abuse

Cast: Diane Marshall-Green, Chad Michael Murray, Alexandra Breckenridge, Harrison Thomas, Michael Mosley
Credits: Directed by Liz Hinlein, script by Adrienne Harris. A release.

Running time: 1:28