Movie Nation

The timing of the indie drama “Light of My Life” has the ring of atonement about it.

It stars a recent Oscar winner, Casey Affleck, who also wrote and directed it. But a tiny studio is releasing it.

The writer-director-star was caught up in the tidal wave of #MeToo.

And here he is playing a fanatically-devoted father on “The Road” with his endangered daughter, taking care to “Leave No Trace” as he protects her from the world after the viral apocalypse, the one that killed almost all of the women.

So yeah, there’s a hint of the offscreen world making its way, symbolically, onto the screen with this dystopian flipside of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

He calls the child Rag (Anna Pniowsky of TV’s “The Hot Zone”). And every night before dozing off in their tent, he tells Rag a story he makes up on the spot, stories that teach, about “listening to your inside voice,” about Noah and some foxes on the arc, borrowing a bit from the Old Testament when it suits his purposes.

Rag has short hair and dresses like a kid who has been camping with Dad ever since the disease struck (Elisabeth Moss plays the mother, seen in flashbacks). Rag is just entering her rebellious tweens, challenging Dad, and questioning him.

“Am I the only girl of my species?”

Probably not. But maybe. As they make their way through the depopulated anarchy of the rainy Pacific Northwest, everybody’s a stranger, everybody’s a loner, everybody’s a threat.

Some guy stumbles into their camp and gets the cold shoulder from Dad and “my son, Alex.”

“We’re not looking for any more company, sir.”

Keeping the child safe when she was younger was easier. She didn’t hesitate to hide when ordered to. She didn’t question his authority, his reasoning about every stranger.

“He’s a doddering old man.”

“Him, and everybody he knows.”

They’ve been on the run for a long time, we learn from their snatches of conversation as they evaluate whether to take shelter in an abandoned house

It’s “better than the barn,” she reasons.”Better than the greenhouse…the pond house.”

“I don’t think this is a safe place to be…I’m not going to be surprised by people like we were at the greenhouse.”

But they move inside out of the rain, and that’s where “Alex” or “Rag” makes her most rebellious decision, coming out as a straight girl, trying on girl’s pants and bedazzled jackets in the closets. She is getting too mature to keep her sexuality a secret from the world even if she’s still too immature to accept that maybe she should still heed her father’s fearful caution.

That conflict, within her and between her and her father, sets up the tense drama and confrontations to come.

Affleck ratchets up the suspense and raises the stakes with the film’s third act, but takes his sweet indulgent time getting us there. He establishes the relationship and the characters in a patience-testing twelve minute opening scene, almost a monologue — Dad telling Rag a story, her interrupting, correcting or questioning it as he does.

Her questions get harder than the simple math and spelling he’s quizzed her about, something any parent will recognize.

“What’s the difference between morals and ethics?”

Or the big one, “When will (the world) be right again?”

“When it’s balanced.”

“When will it be balanced?”

“When there are more women.”

That has a hint of “Handmaid’s Tale” about it. But Affleck’s film leans most heavily on the Cormac McCarthy adaptation “The Road” as it shows the absent mother’s illness, the wrenching decisions that packed them off and sent them off the disintegrating “grid.”

Dystopias and the rainy falls and winters of this corner of the Pacific Northwest fit together easily — grey skies, drab colors made more drab by all the damp. Spray paint “All hail the mothers” on an abandoned building, and viola, you’ve got your sci-fi dystopia.

The kid is affecting, the various men they encounter — even the kindly looking ones — have the taint of villainy and guilt about them.

“But not all men are sad and alone and angry.” Not even here.

And Affleck takes his brooding introversion to new levels here, a man wracked by grief and burdened with responsibility, a “moral” man eschewing violence and guns facing men with no such qualms.

In “Light of My Life,” he’s made an mournful and strikingly slow movie, one that allows us to ponder his reasons for making it even while watching it. Maybe it doesn’t atone for the harassment he was accused of, but it’s fascinating to see it that way as we watch his aching, conflicted desperation — a non-violent man living for one purpose, forced to not just explain the difference between “morals and ethics,” but to act on it — sometimes with violence.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence

Cast: Casey Affleck, Anna Pniowsky, Elisabeth Moss

Credits: Written and directed by Casey Affleck. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:59

Thrashing, hooning, beating transmissions. Putting off desperately needed oil changes…that poor McLaren! From The Onion
“Learning that these beautiful cars were subjected to such inhumane working conditions made me sick to my stomach.”

https://t.co/TSGYFwcXFj https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1157443965702017024?s=17

Exotic and apt casting, I say.

As any Hedy fan knows, she died in relative isolation– media shy, anyway — and one of my first assignments at the Orlando newspaper was to write this fascinating woman’s obituary. Documentaries have come out since her death focusing on her inventive mind, patent fights, etc. A pre Code bombshell (nude in her breakthrough European film), a Hollywood mainstay for a brief period.

This should be interesting, although it being a Showtime limited series, we may see more skin than deep dives into her formidable brain. https://t.co/goPU8sQ5qK https://twitter.com/joblocom/status/1157414302736777222?s=17

That darned Shia LaBeouf.

Every time he hits the headlines, you’re ready to write him off. Forget how to spell that darned name, he’s done. And every time he picks a winning film project, he writes himself back in again.

Dakota Johnson? A few more pictures like her latest and her penance for breaking into the big time with those meretricious “Shades of Grey” softcores will be paid.

“The Peanut Butter Falcon” is an unassuming winner of a summer odyssey, a low-cost and bittersweet “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with hints of “Rain Man” and “Mud” about it.

It’s not so much surprising. Not at all.

The situations and plot turns take on a taste of “far-fetched” more than once or twice.

But the effortless charm of the characters, the easy chemistry of their interactions and the loping pace of this stroll through the Outer Banks of N.C. (actually, the coastal wetlands of Savannah, Ga.) make this the “road comedy” of the summer.

Newcomer Zack Gottsagen plays a version of himself, a Down Syndrome man with a lifelong obsession with pro wrestling that drives his desire to escape the Brighthayven Nursing Home where he resides, or is “kept.”

In the backwater where he grew up, there is no room at a proper mental health facility. The state warehoused him with the very old and the dying, which drives his desire to flee.

Pretty college grad nurse’s aide Eleanor (Johnson) isn’t enough to stop this “flight risk” from flying.

“I don’t know why I am here” is a legitimate complaint. Making his roomie (twinkly old Bruce Dern) re-watch his old VHS of wrestler “Salt Water Redneck” (Thomas Haden Church, spot on) who runs a school for wrestlers Zack dreams of attending, is not.

Amusing, sarcastic and kind of crafty, Zack finally makes his getaway, and the boss of the joint (Lee Spencer, good ol’boy dry) sends Eleanor out to find him.

But coastal crabber Tyler (LaBeoeuf) finds him first. Actually Zack, slipping out with only his not-too-tidy not-so-white tidy whiteys to his name and stowing away on Tyler’s crab boat, finds him.

And as Tyler’s newly on the lam for running afoul of other crabbers (John Hawkes at his redneck scariest), well Miss Eleanor may have to wait. The outlaw (the law never figures into this) and the runaway set off cross-country; Tyler to sanctuary in Jupiter, Fla., with a promise to drop Zack at Salt Water Redneck’s Wrestling School in Ayden, N.C., along the way.

No, don’t try to trace this on a map, as Eleanor does while she pursues them. Don’t look up where her alma mater, “GW,” George Washington University is. One of the directors might be from N.C., but damned if he cares about getting stuff like that right. Geographically and topographically, the movie makes no sense.

But what does is the structure — a road comedy/buddy picture where the “buddies” are a reluctant couple, two converging outside forces are pursuing them and “over the rainbow,” in Ayden, promises them both deliverance.

“Maybe we could be friends,” Zack pleads. “Road dogs. Buddies. And hang and chill and have a good time…”

And when all else fails, he hangs out the BIG promise.

“Hey, you wan’come to my BIRTHday party?”

Gottsagen, in his mid-30s and playing a guy everybody calls “kid,” brings out the indulgent, attentive best in every co-star. He has a funny scene with Dern, warm or worrisome ones with Johnson and simply adorable exchanges with LaBeouf, who takes on accent, waterman wisdom and the suggestion of a guilty conscience (Jon Bernthal plays his brother, in flashbacks) as Tyler, too weak a fighter to keep poking the bear that is crab fishing rival Duncan (Hawkes).

You can smell Tyler from his unwashed fisherman’s attire to his sleeping out in the open hygiene. That beard looks like crabs could hide in it.

So it must be his smooth patter that bowls over Eleanor, when they finally meet.

“You like Mark Twain? You like Louis L’Amour? You got a phone number? You wan’give it to me? Got a name?”

Writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz populate their debut feature with adorable, backwater/backwoods eccentrics — the remote country store owner so alarmed by Tyler showing up and haggling for food, with a shotgun, that he gives him a bottle of whisky, but first “a little swig to calm m’nerves,” and a blind retired African American waterman/preacher who needs to know the guys are “God-fearing” and will accept baptism before he’ll help them, and maybe not shoot them for trying to steal his boat.

“Godfearing? Weh’goooood. Why‘on’t you come in here and let’s talk about JEEEeeeesus?”

Retired wrestlers Mick Foley and Jake Roberts play retired wrestlers.

Local color counts in movies like this, and “The Peanut Butter Falcon” — that’s Zack’s “wrestling name” — soaks in it. That, and a lot of funny lines and funny ways of performing them give “Falcon” wings.

“This is not ‘Lord of the Flies.’ There’s rules. There’s regulations!”

It’s a scruffy little movie that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny or over-thinking — at all. But its charm carries it a long way. And if we’ve learned nothing else from this summer of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” and “Hobbs & Shaw,” we will forgive a lot if the characters and actors playing them make the entire experience a pleasant “hang,” as “Peanut Butter Falcon” most assuredly does.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, violence, alcohol consumption,

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Dakota Johnson, Zack Gottsagen, John Hawkes, Bruce Dern and Thomas Haden Church

Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Nilson, Michael Schwartz. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running: 1:32

We probably don’t need a documentary to remind us that Anton Yelchin was the embodiment of Ferris Bueller, Hollywood’s young tyro of a talent, beloved by all — “a righteous dude.”

I remember thinking that when he died back in the summer of 2016. An actor of dazzling range — funny, articulate, passionate about…so many things, great at…so many things. And the best word for him (I interviewed him once or twice, when “Like Crazy” came out most recently) is the one a co-star, Jon Voight uses in “Love, Antosha,” the lovely film about his too, too short life.

“Angelic.”

You will cry at “Love, Antosha.” And you will laugh. Because as the stunning list of famous co-stars and others interviewed for this adoring portrait make clear, the kid was a mystic traveler and yeah, he liked to get his freak on.

Editor turned director Garret Price paints a picture of young Anton as ambitious, rushed, a competitive polymath. Actor after actor, from his “Star Trek” castmates to his indie film co-stars, from contemporaries like Jennifer Lawrence and Kristen Stewart to impressed veterans such as Oscar winners Martin Landau, Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, speak of feeling forced to reexamine their craft and their commitment to their work and their lives just from working with Yelchin.

“If he didn’t have the countenance he did, he would have been intimidating” by being so good at so many things, ” Bryce Dallas Howard suggests.

J.J. Abrams intimates that Yelchin was the soul of his “Star Trek” franchise, an on-set motivator and example who lifted the acting of everybody he did a scene with.

Zoë Saldana remembers thinking, “My God, this kid is so deep. I’ve got to…get myself together.”

He was in a band, Hammerhead, and a gifted songwriter, guitarist and singer. He piled up 69 screen credits in 27 years and had financing together to direct his first movie — “Travis” would have been an homage to his favorite character and favorite movie, Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver.”

Why the rush? He was born with cystic fibrosis, and every single day was a struggle to breathe, his parents, friends and doctor reveal in the film. Lung clearing, throat clearing – his cough, rarely caught on camera, even in interviews (where was a witty charmer, even as a child actor), could be alarming.

Yelchin knew that life expectancy was not something to be taken for granted (37-40 years), that time was nothing something to waste.

Price uses home movies of the exuberant son of Russian ice dancers who emigrated to America because of rising anti-Semitism in the then-U.S.S.R., clips from his many movies and TV appearances, archived TV interviews Yelchin did — and scores of testimonials from those who worked with him and loved the experience, and loved the person Yelchin was.

Nicolas Cage reads from Yelchin’s daily journal, and his adoring letters and emails to his mother Irina (“Mamoula”) and father Victor “Papoula”), gushing over all they went through to get him to America, to encourage his talent and indulge his passions. We hear Cage get choked up, either as Anton, emotional with thanks for his parents, or as an actor reading an emotional letter and losing himself at what a sweetheart this guy was.

We can’t tell which.

He showed off for the camera and was plotting and planning “movies” long before he went to his first acting class. That smart teacher told his parents “He doesn’t need to be here. He needs to be going to auditions.”

He got so into character on his first big TV break, a little boy who’s just lost his parents on TV’s “ER,” that he wept and wept even after the camera stopped rolling.

“Trek” co-star John Cho worked with him as a child, and stayed friends until they both assumed duties on the U.S.S. Enterprise, and noted how much “older” he seemed as a child actor, how he kept that childish enthusiasm and curiosity as an adult.

Zachary Quinto recalls how taken aback he was to be arguing about the relative folkie merits of Bob Dylan as opposed to Simon & Garfunkel, forgetting for a moment “he’s just a kid.”

And Chris Pine becomes our tour guide to Yelchin’s young, hormonal side — a “lurker” of a photographer who’d visit strip clubs and sex clubs for inspiration and models to use in his art. Mushrooms? He got into them for a while, too.

Simon Pegg adds, “He was a little dirt bird, he was. A naughty boy. As he should have been, at that age. And Ben Foster (they did “Alpha Dog” together) cackles and raises an eyebrow confirming those escapades, and those stories.

Early teen crush Kristen Stewart admits, “He kind of like, broke my heart.”

All of which humanizes a sweet spirit whom one and all canonize.

Frank Langella — “There’s nothing about him that wasn’t wonderful.”

All along the way, we’re treated to a startling filmography — “House of D” to “Like Crazy,” “Fierce People,” “Thoroughbreds,” “Delivering Milo,” “A Man is Mostly Water” and “Rudderless” among the less seen showcases, “Charlie Bartlett” and “Hearts in Atlantis,” “Terminator Salvation” and of course, “Star Trek” among the wider releases.

Every time things get too heavy, with Yelchin’s illness, his depth (check out his journal entry with a pointed and smart take on what the novel “On the Road” is “really” about) and the tragedy that hung over his health gets to be too much, something funny about him turns up.

Abrams recalls how “impossible” it was for the kid to do the “bad Russian accent,” which “doesn’t really exist in the real world,” for “Star Trek” is underscored with outtakes of Yelchin and co-stars busting takes by bursting out laughing at Yelchin’s line-readings.

“Enseeen Aught-or-iz-shun code: nine-five-wictor-wictor-two”

“Love, Antosha” doesn’t break new ground in the celebrity biographical documentary, but it scores over most other examples of the genre simply by virtue of its subject.

Yelchin was a real sweetheart, a deep thinker, a brilliant artist and an inspiration. As one-time co-star Martin Landau notes, in an interview shortly before his own death last year, “I just don’t want him to ever be forgotten.”

“Love, Antosha” helps ensure that won’t happen any time soon.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and nudity

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence, John Cho, Willem Dafoe, J.J. Abrams, Jodie Foster, Chris Pine, Martin Landau and Robert Downey Jr.

Credits: Directed by Garret Price. An mTuckman Media release.

Running time: 1:32

Check it out, podcast fans. I did. It’s good, and remember, I worked in public radio, so I know good audio production values when I hear them.

Reviews for the new “Fast & Furious” spinoff were a little better than your average “Fast” film, a tad better than “Lion King” for that matter.

Many echoed my own review, that whatever clunkiness the script serves up, dazzling production values and the spark of buddy picture chemistry between DJ and J Stathe makes this movie play. Boy does it play.

“A fun hang,” as a friend said of Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…” Plot and other quibbles don’t dent the appeal of hanging with the characters to see what they get into.

It did $4.5/5 Thursday night (Deadline.com) and should hit $65 by midnight Sunday. At least.

The big question for “In Hollywood” is what legs it will have? It barely vested QT’s best opening ever. I ducked into a showing of it on Tuesday afternoon, just to cast an hour and see if there was anything I missed, and a matinee showing in Orlando was 50% full.

“Hobbs & Shaw” is going to swallow a big chunk of its audience, especially the potential young male repeat viewers.

If “Hollywood” does left than $20 this weekend, I will be surprised. But if it does, it may fade too fast to be a major Oscar contender. Actors, sure. The rest? We’ll see.

“Dunkirk” opened in the exact same time of year and lingered into Sept. and was a major awards contender. Better movie, longer legs, not much in the line of acting nominations.

“Lion King” has been falling off quickly but should clear $30. If it doesn’t…

“Yesterday” is proving to have the best legs of the summer for smaller pictures. Still in the top ten.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4533&p=.htm

Gaffigan plays a ride share app driver who gets into hauling drug dealers around.

Jim Gaffigan as you’ve never seen him before?

“American Dreamer” opens Sept. 20.

The anniversary of its end was last year, but better late than never.

Looks impressive. Very “Dunkirk,” you think?

Firth, Strong and Cumberbatch head the cast of “1917,” a Dec. 25 release.

I have friends more into cars than I am who assure me the novel this is based on is “Marley & Me” from the dog’s point of view, and with auto racing.

I roll me eyes, I do.

I had that same reaction to the trailer first time I saw it.

But the gravelly Kevin Costner as dog voice over grows on you.

And nobody is more into dogs than me.

One more thing. Fox, now owned by Disney, must think this is an August winner. They’re screening it well in advance, looking for good reviews and word of mouth to lure people in.

So let’s see.