Movie Nation

With “Steve Jobs,” his effortlessly brilliant portrait of the late Apple visionary, Aaron Sorkin once again upends the equation that points to the director as the most important creative force in a movie.

Oscar winner Danny Boyle directed “Jobs.” But it is Sorkin’s movie, as surely as “The Social Network” was his picture, or “A Few Good Men.” It wears the imprint of TV’s “West Wing,” the hallmarks of a genius dramatist conjuring up vivid characters, limiting the settings, stripping down the number of scenes to get at the essence of story.

And filling the air with words — pithy, pointed and revealing words. It begins with a bravura opening 15 minutes, a carefully modulated tirade in the middle of a mass panic attack — Apple launching The Macintosh just days after its “1984” commercial revolutionized TV advertising.

Jobs tears into engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) because the first Mac can’t say “Hello.” There’s a glitch and the mere minutes before the curtain rises aren’t time to make it work. Even Jobs’ long-suffering marketing director/conscience, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) can’t change his mind.

Hertzfeld — “You’re not hearing me.”

Jobs: “FIX it.”

Joanna: “Do you want to try being reasonable, see what it FEELS like?”

Within moments, we’ve forgotten that star Michael Fassbender looks nothing like the real Jobs. Sorkin puts Jobs on the couch, rewrites our images of his various key collaborators — Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) among them — and boils his life down to three key moments.

We’re backstage for the epic Macintosh launch, where Jobs’ “reality distortion field” made the impossible happen, where his cunning manipulation of his “visionary” image in the press came to full flower. Then, we’re backstage for the introduction of his serenely perfect “cube,” the NeXt computer. The market failure of Macintosh and Jobs’ ouster from Apple is skimmed over in a montage.

And then we’re there, again behind the curtain, for the introduction of the iMac, Jobs’ triumphant return to Apple and to the top.

At each event, Sorkin serves up Jobs’ key relationships — “The Woz,” his engineer-pal and conscience, a man he condescendingly calls “Rainman” behind his back. Rogen’s Wozniak — or should I say Sorkin’s — is less the cuddly music nut who started The Us Festival, not “Dancing with the Stars” Steve, but a persistent, assertive, nagging idealist in his own right, pushing for recognition of his less flashy Apple II team, which made the company great and kept it going in between disasters. Do it because “It’s the right thing to do.”

Jobs isn’t hearing it.

Winslet’s Hoffman is the one who keeps pushing the daughter he long-refused to recognize as his own onto him, at every one of these events. Jobs’ cruel, control-freak side cuts to the marrow in these scenes, sparring with his impoverished, manipulative baby-mama, Chrisann (Katherine Waterston, superb). His chill melts, only briefly, in the presence of his beguiling, curious little girl, Lisa, played by three actresses.

And Jeff Daniels brings wonderful, fatherly gravitas to John Sculley, the Pepsi CEO Jobs convinced to run Apple, whom Jobs blamed for his ouster, but who finds Jobs something of a case study in the “abandoned” adopted boy who so wants to be beloved that he wants every product with his imprint on it to be friendly, personable and perfect.

“Don’t play stupid,” he scolds Jobs. “You can’t pull it off.”

To a one, they try to humanize this boss/father/partner and prove you can make great things and not be a bad guy. And fail.

Sorkin slips in the Bob Dylan fixation, the push for “human” sized and shaped products. But if you want another trek through the decline and fall of Jobs, an account of his death from cancer, or even in-depth looks at the garage where he and Wozniak invented the future, other movies cover that.

If you want to check off the iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc., off your “Jobs’ Greatest Hits” list, get a sense of the salesman/tyrant, the ruthless zen master vegetarian too cruel to practice what he preached, to get other people’s definitive take on what made him tick, see the great documentarian Alex Gibney’s superior “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.” It strips away the myth and icon and reveals Jobs for the hustler-huckster he was, just a smooth, smiling turtleneck, trying to sell us something. In many ways, his film makes all other Jobs movies unnecessary.

But Sorkin and Fassbender have given us a Jobs of human dimensions, a Jobs we can sink our teeth into, a Jobs we can understand. Boyle, to his credit, doesn’t allow directing flourishes to distract us from that. What we’re looking at here isn’t “Jobs: The Legend,” its a new legend and one that — however accurate — allows us to step back from the cult and the haircut and see the man as a man, flawed, driven, arrogant and yes, visionary.

MPAA Rating:R for language.

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg
Credits: Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the Walter Isaacson book, directed by Danny Boyle. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:02

Meanwhile, over at io9, they’re trying to figure out how to dispense with the”Luke Skywalker problem.”

And they’re wondering, at Jalopnik, why there’s a Subaru Brat half-buried in the sand, in one scene.

Perhaps all will be clear Dec. 18.

There’s a Byronic dash to Tom Hiddleston on the screen, a brooding fatalism that in an earlier era might have made him a go-to romantic lead.

But like Alan Rickman, he’s been defined by Hollywood as a villain. And like Rickman, he’s making the most of it. For now.

Guillermo del Toro’s stylishly gruesome “Crimson Peak” plays with that dichotomy, a horror film with a whiff of romance to it. If we never buy into the romance, it’s because we look at Hiddleston’s jet-black curls and think “Loki.” We just know he’s up to no-good, the worst kind of no-good.

Miss Play-it-Straight Mia Wasikowska stars in this return to horror form for del Toro, freed from hobbits and robots and “Hellboy” to seek his natural genre. The “Pan’s Labyrinth” director delivers a rather obvious but gruesomely stylish Gothic tale of a young woman who believes in ghosts, but doesn’t understand the warnings they pass on to her about this handsome baronet who comes calling.

It’s early 20th century Buffalo, and Edith Cushing is a catch. Her widowed industrialist dad (Jim Beaver) knows it. And he knows his daughter’s impressionable. She’s a would-be writer (her literary narration underscores early scenes) who is trying to publish a ghost story.

No, she corrects. “It’s a story with a ghost in it.”

Baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston) whisks into Buffalo, the catch of the social season.He is smitten, and he says all the right things to young Edith.

“You see, where I come from, ghosts are not to be taken lightly.”

He’s hunting for investment money for a clay-mining scheme at the family estate. When his eyes turn to Edith, Mr. Cushing objects. And turns up dead.

Edith doesn’t see the coincidence, doesn’t suspect Thomas or his sinister sister Lucille played by Jessica Chastain with a viper’s gaze and not a whit of subtlety.  Only Edith’s ophthalmologist friend (Charlie Hunnam), an Arthur Conan Doyle buff, suspects foul play.

Too late. The couple are married and dash off to the moors of…somewhere in Britain. In the great ruined haunted Allerdale Hall, sitting on top of an oozing blood-red clay mine, Edith must discover the truth, or have the ghosts explain it to her, or she’s finished.

Del Toro has long been a master of visual tone, and the gloom of “Crimson Peak” weeps off the screen. The apparitions are a modern movie marvel — diaphanous, floating ghouls of black or reddest red, with tentacle-length fingers and voices from Hell.

“Beware of Crimson Peak!”

They’re hair-raising, and del Toro knows how to get the most from them. But the frights aren’t of the standard assaultive nature so many movie depend upon. Rather, it’s the graphic physical violence that repulses here, the things humans do to other humans with saws, knives and cleavers.

As I said, the tale itself is too easy to unravel and the mystery rather obvious in resolution. Technology is used as a deus ex machina, allowing Edith to solve the mystery in ways Mr. Edison might have provided. The meandering third act is a foregone conclusion and might have stung more had del Toro just gotten on with it.

Old fashioned ghost stories with a healthy helping of gore might not tickle the terror bone of the found-footage/torture porn generation. But del Toro reminds us just how chilling bumping into the supernatural is supposed to be, just how stomach churning violence is and just how many shades of red blood shows us, from first spurt to crusty dust.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, some sexual content and brief strong language

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam
Credits: Directed by Guillermo del Toro, script by Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:59

The record store chain Tower Records anchors a pretty good history of the rise and fall of the American music business in “All Things Must Pass,” a documentary by the actor Colin Hanks — son of Tom.

Here was a concept — “The largest record/tape store in the known world” — a record store whose departments (classical, jazz, rock, rap, pop, country, etc.) were as large, by themselves, as most record stores. Here was a slogan, “No Music, No Life,” that captured music lovers the world over, encouraging them to shop and in the process, find their tribe.

And up until the day that stolen or purchased online downloadable music killed it, that’s what Tower created — a place for the tribes to gather, where the clerks were the cognoscenti, the clerics of their genre.

Hanks, building the film around interviews with founder Russ Solomon and his son Michael, traces Tower from its origins, as a corner of Solomon’s father’s Sacramento drugstore, to the boom days when gigantic stores were at the center of the music universe — on Sunset Blvd. in LA, in San Francisco, Broadway and 4th in New York.

And everybody made a pilgrimage to these stores where music lived. Elton John haunted the L.A. location, his “ritual” consisting of coming in with long lists of LPs he wanted and an assistant to help him collect. There’s vintage footage of him doing just that in the ’70s.

“I spent more money in Tower Records than any other human being.”

Musician Dave Grohl and music mogul David Geffen wax enthusiastic. But leave it to Bruce Springsteen to find the poetry of the place.

It was where Springsteen said a music fan could find one’s “family” in a place imbued with “the thrill of being surrounded by music.” Tower — which hadn’t made it to the East Coast when Bruce first visited the Sunset store — was “that place where your dreams meet the listener. THERE are your listeners,” lining up, thumbing through the stacks, buying the music.

Alas, the film is not all poetry.”All Things Must Pass” bogs down in the trend-chasing, the rapid expansion, the conquest of Japan (where Tower Records is still going strong), the free spending. Hanks lets interview subjects trash corporate overseers who never have the chance to respond. He touches on the magazine the place put out, “Pulse,” but doesn’t sample it. He gives famous customers a voice, but not the faceless millions who kept the stores open and vital.

And he wastes an awful lot of time on interviews with company insiders who get to tell their climb-the-corporate ladder stories, but whose stories seem routine and repetitious. Their griping is very much of the “In OUR day, we had RECORDS and we SOCIALIZED at record stores, not on social media” variety. Kind of fuddy-duddy.

But there are some amusing anecdotes about the kids who came in the door, became clerks and went on to run the company as it grew almost in spite of the lax attitudes about on-the-job drinking, smoking and snorting. Many a sick day was related to “cocktail flu,” many a company invoice included “handtruck fuel,” their code for cocaine.

And the film, for all its shortcomings, does give us a taste of a world that was lost when such stores disappeared. Much the way bookstores have vanished in the same period of time.

A lot of things killed Tower — record company greed, customers disconnected with the in-store retail experience and the rise of an amoral Internet music culture.  That provides the movie’s money quote about music, then and now. The speaker is talking about the late music “sharing” (theft) service Napster, and shaking his head.

“How’re you gonna compete with ‘free?'”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol is consumed on camera

Cast: Russ Solomon, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl
Credits: Directed by Colin Hanks. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:34

“Bridges of Spies” is a Cold War thriller freighted with all the gravitas that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks can give it. Long, patient and chilling, it vividly captures a time in America and the feel of divided Berlin in the muted blues and greys that color our memories of that “duck and cover” age.

But there was always something absurd about the paranoia, the policies and the people in charge on both sides. And leave it to the Coen Brothers, who co-wrote the script, to find that in this true story of a terrifying time.

Mark Rylance, a star of the British stage who only scores character roles in the movies (“The Gunman,” “The Other Boleyn Girl”) adds a laconic, career-defining dash to Rudolf Abel, a quiet, English-accented New York loner and painter nabbed for being a Soviet Spy in 1957.

Hanks does his best Atticus Finch as Jim Donovan, a wily Brooklyn lawyer adept at parsing words in insurance policies, suddenly summoned to be Abel’s defense attorney. We’ve seen Donovan calmly turn opposing counsel in a car accident case inside out over drinks in Manhattan. It turns out he was on the team that prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. He’s a serious man.

But he’s facing a nation on edge over fears of nuclear war, a city calling for Abel’s blood and a judge (Dakin Matthews) determined to give it to them. Even Jim’s wife (Amy Ryan) questions his decision to accept this hopeless case, where the American rule of law will be on trial, with the rules bent to ensure conviction.

“Everyone will hate me,” Jim enthuses, “but at least I’ll lose.”

And lose he does, but not before gaining an appreciation for the “honorable” and stoic way his client carries himself — not surrendering information, not fretting over the electric chair that might await him.

“You don’t seem alarmed.”

“Would it help?”

That’s the movie’s one running gag, Abel’s deadpan “What, me worry?” shrug at the huge events spiraling around his actions.

Meanwhile, Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell of “Whiplash”) is learning to fly the U-2 spy plane. And if you remember your 1950s-early-60s history, you know how these two tales will connect. Donovan finds himself in wintry East Berlin, a wall going up to separate the city, trying to horse trade with the Soviets (“Let’s keep it simple by calling them Russians.”) and their East German puppets.

The Atticus Finch comparison to Donovan works not just because they are legal men of principle and character, but because of the place Hanks occupies in our moviegoing psyche. He’s this generation’s Gregory Peck, an icon of American values and our sense of decency and fair play.

And Hanks has his finest scenes as he and Spielberg and history take Donovan in over his head, into a ruined city where the rule of law has broken down (he’s mugged, amusingly) dealing with duplicitous, callous vipers who hold life cheap and cannot be trusted. Mikhail Gorevoy and Sebastian Koch ably play Donovan’s foils in this legal wrangle.

The pacing is, at times, too sedate. The script cheats us and Hanks of the big moment where Americanism is explained by the hero, or the hero loses his cool and reminds the East German of the “types” he sent to the noose at Nuremberg 20 years before (I really missed that). And the supporting cast is more capable than star-studded, with Spielberg spending the money on Alan Alda as Donovan’s senior partner but filling every other role with lesser-knowns.

But “Bridge of Spies” is a worthy American answer to the brilliant British “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a Golden Age of Espionage portrait of the flinty foes facing off across the Iron Curtain that doesn’t sentimentalize them or their times.

With a paranoid, desperate and perhaps simply bored Russia re-starting the Cold War, Spielberg & Co. do yeoman’s service in reminding us of the stakes and the Russians of how ugly being on the wrong side of history looks, in retrospect.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence and brief strong language

Cast: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda
Credits: Directed by Steven Spielberg, script by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Touchstone/Dreamworks/Fox release.

Running time: 2:22

R.L. Stine has long been the last guardian at the gate of a culture being turned, generation-by-generation, into a nation of “Dragon Tails” neutered ninnies.

The “Goosebumps” writer (and TV series creator) was willing to strip-mine horror formulas and flirt with time-and-“Twilight Zone” proven set-ups to give coddled kids a chance to beg mommy to leave the lights on all night. You know, because otherwise the monsters, ghosts, ghouls and the occasional killer clown or venal ventriloquist dummy might get them.

So it’s a delight to report that the new “Goosebumps” movie is pretty much the perfect scary movie for kids.  A lot of jolts, a lot of laughs, a dose of “adults just don’t GET it” and a little facing one’s fears, this one bubbles out of the ooze of low expectations and manages to be, on several levels, a hoot.

And, like the TV series, Stine himself — or a version of him — plays a part.

Cute teen Zach (Dylan Minnette) moves with his widowed mom (Amy Ryan) to Madison, Delaware. He’s shy and his mom’s a vice principal, so forget about fitting in. The nerdy Champ (Ryan Lee) is his only instant friend.

Then, there’s the girl next door, Hannah (Odeya Rush). She’s sarcastic, confident, flirtatious, maybe a little reckless. And home-schooled. If only her dad, Mr. Shivers (Jack Black) wasn’t such a pill.

“You STAY AWAY from my daughter. You stay away from me!”

That would work, if Zach didn’t hear the occasional blood-curdling teen scream coming from next door. The goofball cops are no help. Is Hannah in danger?

Maybe. Maybe not. But sneaking into her house, Zach and Champ stumble across locked “Goosebumps” manuscripts. And cracking one open lets all Hell break loose.

A clever touch — having Shivers, actually the famous writer R.L. Stine as interpreted by Jack Black — guard these books and their magical powers to become real. Black gives Stine a brittle, nervous, prissy edge.

And the first book opened is the one about the ventriloquist dummy come to demonic life, “Night of the Living Dummy.” Slappy (also voiced by Black) threatens to open all the other books, with their zombies, invisible boys, aliens and what-not, and unleash them on the town.

“ALL of your children are coming out to play!”

When they do, the now-outed Mr. Shivers/Stine and the kids try to wrestle his creations back into their books.

Director Rob Letterman (“Monsters vs. Aliens”) and screenwriter Darren Lemke (“Turbo”) are animation veterans, and keep the action and the gags coming, but cannot quite manage to keep the energy from flagging as the effects grow bigger and bigger.

But the “Jumanji/Zathura” approach to the terror was the right tone to take, and the throw-away lines and gags pay dividends, time and again.

Champ was “born with the gift of fear,” and shrieks like a pre-teen girl at every new menace.

“Don’t JUDGE me!”

Best of all is Black, the kid-friendliest comic of his generation, all wild-eyed and put-out, selling the special effects, not overreaching for laughs.

The frights are nothing adults or horror-crazed teens will recoil from. This is PG-mild. But if you’ve raised your kids on a steady diet of Disney/Nickelodeon and PBS pablum, don’t be surprised at that request for a bigger night-light. And that you lock those garden gnomes in the backyard shed. Otherwise, you know, R.L. Stine and his minions will get them.

MPAA Rating:PG for scary and intense creature action and images, and for some rude humor

Cast: Dylan Minnette, Jack Black, Odeya Rush, Amy Ryan, Ryan Lee
Credits: Directed by Rob Letterman, script by Max Joseph, script by Max Joseph, Meaghan Oppenheimer and Richard Silverman. A Sony Animation/Sony Tristar release.

Running time: 1:43

Relentlessly bloody, stupidly long and laugh-out-loud funny, “Yakuza Apocalypse” is as good an introduction as any to the warped samurai sword stylings of Takashi Miike.

He is Japan’s Tarantino, a gonzo genre specialist who mashes up yakuza (gangster), swordfighting and supernatural horror cinema into something unique and oh-so-Japanese.

“Apocalypse” has tattooed, sword-swinging gangsters, wacko gory visual effects and all manner of slicing/hacking squishy sound effects, gang molls in sailorboy schoolgirl outfits, rape, and cops who only work when bribed.

And that’s not even getting to the vampires vomiting up tadpoles and “monster” martial artist who shows up in a plush theme-park frog suit and proceeds to kick yakuza and take names.

There’s this old-school yakuza boss (Lily Franky, yeah that’s his name) who lives by a code. Fists and swords are preferable to guns, “I won’t touch civilians” in gang wars, and he won’t join “the syndicate.”

That’s why this assassin confronts him. The killer is dressed as a Japanese Old West interpretation — in black hat, cowboy boots, spurs, and wearing a coffin as a backpack — of a Spanish Inquisitor (No one EVER expects the Spanish Inquisition!). The Inquisitor confronts him and distracts him as a henchman kills him.

But with his dying breath, Kamiura (Franky) passes on his wish, and his secret to a green but trusted protege (Hayato Ichihara). Avenge me, he suggests, as he bites Kageyama in the next. Become “a yakuza vampire!”

Things go utterly mad from here on out as Miike (“One Missed Call, and “13 Assassins” are his most famous titles in America) hurls blood and archetypes at the screen while yakuza try to figure out how to stop this unstoppable and seemingly unkillable foe.

The laughs are big and broad — mainly coming from the loony characters Miike throws at us. But there are scenes with real, um, bite, too. He lets the camera linger on Kageyama as the new vampire holds a gun in his mouth, weighing which fate would be worse.

It’s all close to incomprehensible, and a lot sillier than most Miike films you run across. And there just isn’t enough story to sustain the long waits between epic brawls, and that finale with the guy in the big frog suit.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, a rape and language

Cast: Hayato Ichihara, Yayan Ruhian,

Credits: Directed by Takashi Miike,  script by Yoshitaka Yamaguchi.An eOne/Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:55

If there’s one phrase guaranteed to chill a movie studio executive to the marrow, it has to be “passion project.” Because for every one of those that pays off at the box office, the disasters are the ones we remember.

Steve McQueen was the biggest box office star in the world in the late 1960s. “Bullitt” and “The Thomas Crown Affair” secured that. And what did he want to spend all that Hollywood capital on? A movie about sports car racing, his biggest passion at the time.

His production company got financing, he hired his “Great Escape/Magnificent Seven” director, John Sturges, recruited a cadre of drivers and rounded up cars and went to LeMans to film the 1970 24 Hours of LeMans race. But they went without a script.

The resulting movie was a glorious, documentary-like muddle, and not the final word on racing films, or even the best racing movie of the era. James Garner and John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix” was better. And McQueen was never the same after the debacle — his power in Hollywood diminished, his fervor for the sport nearly gone.

“Steve McQueen: The Man & LeMans,” revisits the project and the iconic star behind it, and makes for a revealing and thoroughly entertaining peek into Hollywood history. Using audio taped interviews, including some from the last months of McQueen’s life — he died of cancer in 1980 — archival interviews and fresh conversations with those who were there, as well as “lost” footage from the one million feet of film McQueen & Co. shot at LeMans, veteran car-racing filmmakers Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna dissect a fascinating failure that stands tall, decades later, as a moment captured in time.

“I just wanted to get it down on film,” McQueen said at the time, “what I thought it was all about.”

So he and his SOLAR Productions set up camp and started filming. They came up with all sorts of camera rigs to capture filming, no mean feat two generations before tiny ProCams and GoPros made shots inside, beside and all around the car routine.

“Grand Prix,” about Formula 1 racing, got to some of these innovations first, as well. And don’t think McQueen didn’t realize this. One and all relate how jealous and resentful he was that Garner & Co, made their racing movie and got it into theaters ahead of him.

We hear about the dangers of the sport back then from the drivers — Jonathan Williams and David Piper among them.

And we get a taste of who the “King of Cool” was and is, the Missouri boy who became the biggest film star of his day. The actor did a lot of his own motorcycle and car driving stunts, took crazy risks on tracks in between movies, drove a Porsche with a broken clutch-foot to a second place finish at Sebring, and lived on guts and adrenaline.

His favorite screenwriter, Alan Trustman, talks about where McQueen was, post “Thomas Crown” and “Bullitt,” and of his efforts to “save” “LeMans” by concocting a script to fit around all that marvelous footage they were getting.

McQueen wasn’t having it. Eventually, Sturges, the director, quit. McQueen bullied the studio-imposed replacement, womanized at will, crashed a car after hours with a starlet and possible conquest on board (Louise Edlind is a little vague on that).

McQueen’s widow, Neile, talks about that, and the marriage that finally unraveled during the filming. McQueen took up with Ali MacGraw while making “The Getaway,” his next film.

And McQueen’s adoring son Chad dominates the film as the former kid who remembers, in vivid detail, much of what happened back then — wrecks, racecar rides, the works. He and others marvel at what the film really cost his father. Insurance issues meant McQueen couldn’t actually race at LeMans while making the movie. He lost his one chance at the pinnacle of his sport making this movie.

The film? I’ve seen it recently, and it’s still more striking to look at than engrossing to sit through. But “The Man & LeMans” is a great documentary for explaining his ambitions and passions, and all the trouble the arrogance of Hollywood power can get you into.

LIMITED RELEASE: Nov. 13, VOD and DVD, Dec. 1

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Steve McQueen, Chad McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Neile Adams McQueen, Louise Edlind, John Sturges, David Piper
Credits: Directed by Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:42