Movie Nation

“Gwen” has the tenor of a spooky folk Welsh folk legend and the grasping, gasping punch of an Industrial Revolution parable.

Dark, helpless, grim and bleak? It’s all a part of the windswept and gray setting of this period-perfect period piece from writer-director William McGregor.

Eleanor Worthington-Cox of “Maleficent” and “Action Point” is the title character, a Welsh teen struggling under the thumb of her mother (Maxine Peake of “Peterloo,” TV’s “Little Dorrit”) and the conditions of the day.

It’s the early 19th century. Father is “away in the fighting” and their corner of Wales is transitioning from farms to “quarries,” open-pit coal mines to fuel the steam engines that have come to rule Britannia.

Gwen keeps their sheep, tends their vegetables and dreams of the day, with her doted-on little sister (Jodie Innes) when their beloved father returns.

But Mother being a stern taskmaster isn’t enough. Strange, lethal goings-on around them soon visit their farm as well. Gwen hears sounds on the farm in the night.

Mother’s reassurance, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” isn’t reassuring at all.

As their livestock die and the woes pile up, Mother starts having seizures and Gwen tries to pick up the slack even as the helplessness of it all falls entirely on her shoulders.

McGregor is a TV director who cut his teeth on “Poldark,” “The Missing” and “One of Us/Retribution.” He’s most concerned with mood, here — foggy, gloomy hillsides, lowering skies, a girl in her nightgown wandering into the dank dark with a lamp, pleading “Who’s there?”

Britain’s eternal class wars flicker in the subtle threats and intimidation the family faces. There’s not a lot of mystery about what they’re up against — not when a sheep’s heart is found nailed to their door after the local coal baron (Mark Lewis Jones) leans on Mother to sell out, after church service.

McGregor fleshes in period detail, the ivory pin used to prick one’s finger so that blood can add a little blush to one’s cheeks, the simple, candle-lit meals, the mud, muck, life-and-death nature of farmwork and the feeble hopes that the local mine’s doctor (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) can offer Mother some relief from what ails her.

Worthington-Cox has the pluck to pull off Gwen, and McGregor’s handling of the admittedly thin material is expert and artful — flashbacks showing that things there were always thus, but at least the family laughed and loved before Father went off to fight some rich man’s war for empire and markets.

Narrow in focus it may be, and it could certainly use a few more spooky touches to animate the “mystery” part of all this — Mother scattering sheep bones to ward off, what? Screeching animals in the night suggest The Cat of the Baskervilles might be on the prowl.

But “Gwen” is still a fascinating, immersive period piece that captures the helplessness of the working poor and the callousness of those who aren’t as aptly as, well, “Peterloo,” without getting the militia involved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Maxine Peake, Jodie Innes, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Mark Lewis Jones

Credits: Written and directed by William McGregor. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:24

Short answer? No. Milo Ventimiglia a is a bland, if pretty, non-presence in the film.

Nobody went to see it, and anybody looking for star power and charisma won’t see any sign of it from him in the movie.

Whatever he gets across in the TV show, he was a huge hole in the center of this movie built around him and a dog voiced by Kevin Costner.

The very premise of this LA Times piece is laughable. Did the reporter see the movie?

“Milo Ventimiglia, after a decades-long successful career in television, is trying his hand at leading man status in the film “The Art of Racing in the Rain.” https://t.co/gA48E53MPJ https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1160747760817229824?s=17

Every cable operator, all the dish services, losing subscribers to the tune of a million and a half last quarter alone.

They are the newspapers of video content, profitable but dying. Quickly.

Dead media walking.

https://deadline.com/2019/08/u-s-pay-tv-subscriber-losses-more-than-triple-to-1-5m-in-q2-report-1202666232/

A rain-soaked forest and mountain top, kids being kids, until the guns come out, the kidnapping happens and the helicopters come looking for them.

This striking Alejandro Landes feature opens Sept. 13 from Neon (of course)

Haunted by rural farming class poverty, terrorized by…

Writer-director William McGregor’s “Gwen” looks perfectly gloomy, properly spooky as only “an old folk tale” can be. It opens Friday.

I dare say Paramount is taking this $17 million opening weekend for “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” as, if not a win, at least a minimized loss. They were late realizing this tween adventure had no natural audience and were scared to death of reviews.

CBS Films has never had as big a hit as “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” — $20.8 million. CBS Films will be no more as of the end of the year. Mystified as to the watered down Rotten Tomato reviews for this dull fright fest with training wheels on. They added 200 younger, greener critics, and voila — 80% positive for anything empowered and Del Toro’d.

“The Kitchen” bombed, a genre picture which had a lot going for it in terms of cast and screenwrirer bonafides. Andrea Berloff got a shot at directing her own script and blew it. Maybe a little TV directing seasoning would help. She deserves another shot. $5.3 million for that one.

That’s almost $3 million below Fox”s “Art of Racing in the Rain.” $8.1 million for that dog dies at the end drama.

“Brian Banks” bombed. Could not crack the top ten. “The Farewell” is dating, adding hundreds of screens and falling out of the top ten.

A K Pop doc, “Bring the Soul,” cracked the top ten.

“Peanut Butter Falcon” win the per screen average race, over $12k. Maybe Roadside Attractions will give it wider release.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/

It’s another version of “Most Dangerous Game” (humans as “game”), and I’m not sure it is so politically touchy that it needed to be pulled.

Trump wanted it yanked, and it was.

https://t.co/F3KuM5x3hc?amp=1

Love this.

https://www.thewrap.com/jason-momoa-says-he-cant-shoot-aquaman-2-because-he-got-run-over-by-a-bulldozer/

Good performances and a healthy dose of earnest righteousness go a long way in atoning for the choppy structure and shortchanged characters that mar the telling of the inspiring true story of a life interrupted by a crime that never happened.

“Brian Banks” is about an All American high school football player racing towards a potentially glorious and lucrative future, but who lost years of his life to a laughably unjust accusation, trial and arm-twisted “plea deal” that was no “deal” at all.

That story is interesting enough, in a “Dateline: NBC” sense. But what this Tom Shadyac film is really about is discovering inner peace and resolve in prison, finding a mentor who helps you “get over” and forgiving those whose grievous sins against Banks have the audience muttering for blood, but not the hero.

Emerging star Aldis Hodge of “Straight Outta Compton,” “Hidden Figures” and TV’s “City on a Hill” plays Banks in high school, when the alleged rape at the center of this story occurred, then in prison, and ten years later when he’s trying to clear his name so that he can fully restart his life.

But we get to know him just as it’s all unraveling — again. Just after getting out, he’s playing college football at a smaller school than U.S.C., which recruited him, pre-prison. A change in the law takes even that away from him. Registered sex offenders lose more and more rights, over time, as every “get tough” measure under the sun makes its way through states and localities.

He needs the help of the California Innocence Project, whose founder, Justin Brooks (Mr. Tears, Greg Kinnear) just doesn’t see this case — Banks is out on parole, and he took an awful plea deal rather than go to trial, thus limiting his options — as a winner.

Brooks, his team and his law school students in San Diego must find something “extraordinary” — new evidence, new testimony — that will persuade the prosecutor’s office and judge who railroaded the 16 year-old Banks into prison to take it all back.

Good luck with that.

The movie here is what happened to Banks in prison, something the screenwriter and director seem to have missed. Prison is where the big, strong kid is tested and embittered, only to be redeemed by a prison teacher who counsels “All you can control in your life is how you respond to it” and “The path to happiness begins and ends in the mind” and “Given the right perspective, prison can set you free.”

The filmmakers seem to think that casting Morgan Freeman in the part and giving him those lines (and virtually no others) to intone was enough. It isn’t. This is a redemption tale, a broken hero’s internal journey to the light. The hero and his mentor need more screen time together.

Ex-con Banks dating an art major/personal trainer (Melanie Liburd) who is thrown by his startling personal history, is of little consequence. His never-losing faith-mother (Sherri Shepherd) is a given.

At least the many life-interruptions engineered by the hardass probation officer (Dorian Missick is amazing and hateful in the part) give this story the sort of twist — how “paying your debt to society” is never done when “a broken system” keeps renewing that debt — that the movie’s formulaic story craves.

Even those who aren’t football fans know where this story is headed, at least in the courtroom. What’s interesting is that interior life-change that Hodges gets across, but that could use a lot more setting up via scenes with Freeman’s character.

And for a movie that decries a “broken system,” “Brian Banks” lets a plea-bargain-busting judge, bums-rush DA and inept defense lawyer off too easily.

The villain played up here is a veritable stereotype, a caricature of a young African American woman, cleverly and hatefully made flesh and blood by Xosha Roquemore.

All of which makes “Brian Banks” much more of a mixed bag of a movie than you’d hope. A “broken system” isn’t going to be driven to change by pulled punches like this one.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content and related images, and for language

Cast: Aldis Hodge, Greg Kinnear, Morgan Freeman, Sherri Shepherd, Xosha Roquemore

Directed by Tom Shadyac, script by Doug Atchison. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:39

You will tear up a little at the animated short film “Hair Love” that Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr. and Bruce W. Smith whipped up, via Kickstarter, and Sony attached as the opener to “The Angry Birds Movie 2.”

It’s a mostly silent tale of a hapless African American father doing battle with his little girl’s violently mussed hair, with instruction assistance from an online video.

He’s got to manage this because Mom’s not there. And as much as you’d think a man who has to attend to the care and feeding of his own dreadlocks would have to know about taming an unruly Afro, he’s out of his depth.

It is adorable, poignant and about something — African America’s love-hate relationship with hair. It is everything that the generic, laugh-starved sausage factory production that Sony Pictures Animation slapped on AFTER it is not.

“Angry Birds 2” has hints of empowerment, of “work together” and “don’t steal credit from smart women” to fend off a female supervillain.

All that in a comedy with barely a chuckle in it. The script is so thin that the best lines lean HARD on speech impediments to work.

“Oh Kwap!” “Awe you fweakin’ kiddin’ me?”

It starts out weak and is coughing up blood by the third act.

“Birds” is a Chatty Cathy of a cartoon comedy, relying on three screenwriters to provide lines that virtually never deliver, a plot that is generic “add a new villain to the sequel” piffle and a voice cast that can’t compensate for those shortcomings.

Jason Sudeikis returns as the non-heroic “hero” bird with the “angry” eyebrows, again forced to deal with a threat to Bird Island from abroad.

The Pig Islanders, plump and green and mischievous, in or out of thongs and tankinis, call for a truce when they recognize a new common threat, a third island, is hurling volcanic snowballs onto their respective paradise islands.

Quick, call in “Squeal Team Six!”

Red and the head pig Leonard (Bill Hader) must “assemble the team,” including a porcine gadget guru (Sterling K. Brown), and the smart ladybird (Rachel Bloom) who wrote off Red (or vice versa) in a bird colony round of speed-dating just the day before.

The early promise of the movie is in their testy exchanges, her rattling off a list of his shortcomings and “issues,” professional jerk Sudeikis — as Red — responding in kind.

“Talks to herself…Doesn’t answer her own questions. Left-handed, probably a witch.”

But those sparks disappear as the picture slacks off into a couple of other settings — hatchlings trying to rescue the eggs they have endangered (“Oh Kwap” comes here.) and the villain’s lair, where we discover how little humor Leslie Jones can wring out of a villain with no funny lines, and how Tiffany Haddish maybe needs a better agent (playing the villain’s daughter).

Scores of pop tunes, courtesy of everyone from Sarah McLachlan and Paula Cole to Lionel, Bowie, Buffett and, wait for it — Europe — are slapped on as comic kickers to many scenes. They do not help.

I won’t say it’s excruciating, but viewers of every age will be keenly aware of the passage of time and this colossal waste of it.

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor and action

Voice Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Leslie Jones, Tiffany Haddish, Awkwafina, Josh Gad, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Danny McBride and Eugenio Derbez

Credits: Directed by Thurop Van Orman and John Rice, script by Peter Ackerman Eyal Podell, Jonathon E. Stewart. A Sony Pictures Animation release.

Running time: 1:36