New Releases for the Week of August 12, 2016

PETE’S DRAGON

(Disney) Bryce Dallas Howard, Robert Redford, Oakes Fegley, Oona Laurence, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Marcus Henderson. Directed by David Lowery

Some of Disney’s films are better known than others. This 1977 film was from a period when their films weren’t as popular as they once were and, quite frankly, weren’t as good. This live action reimagining starts with the discovery of a young boy alone in a deep and dangerous forest. It turns out that the boy has been in there for years and experts are confounded as to how he possibly could have survived all alone. Then it turns out that he wasn’t all alone…

See the trailer and an interview here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Family
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG (for action, peril and brief language)

Anthropoid

(Bleecker Street) Jamie Dornan, Cillian Murphy, Toby Jones, Charlotte Le Bon. This is the true story of two Czech army-in-exile soldiers who are secretly parachuted into their occupied homeland near the end of World War II. Their mission: assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the top officers in the SS. In a city under brutal lockdown, with limited information and a deadline approaching, the two know that if they succeed it will change the war in Europe dramatically.

See the trailer and clips here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Historical Drama
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall, AMC Disney Springs, Regal Oviedo Mall, Regal Pointe Orlando, Regal Waterford Lakes, Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: R (for violence and disturbing images)

Blood Father

(Lionsgate) Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, Diego Luna, William H. Macy. An ex-con trying to re-establish a connection with his daughter and to ease into the straight life is sucked back into his past when his daughter runs afoul of a drug cartel and is being hunted by them. Using his criminal skills and connections from the past, he’ll have to stay one step ahead of some of the most brutal human beings on Earth to keep his daughter safe.

See the trailer and a clip here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Action
Now Playing: AMC Loew’s Universal Cineplex
Rating: R (for strong violence, language throughout and brief drug use)

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words

(Sony Classics) Frank Zappa, Gail Zappa, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr. One of the most influential figures in popular music of our time was taken from us far too soon. However, his 30-year career is chronicled exclusively through archival interview footage so we get to hear, in the maestro’s own words, what he did, how he felt and get a sense of his lasting contributions to music that reverberate through popular culture even today.

See the trailer and clips here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: R (for language, some sexual references and brief nudity)

Florence Foster Jenkins

(Paramount) Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Rebecca Ferguson. Some of you may have seen the French film Marguerite. You may or may not have known this, but she was based on a real person, the American heiress Florence Foster Jenkins. This is the true tail of a New York socialite who fancied herself an opera singer, but was perhaps the worst singer in history. She was apparently such a sweet soul that nobody had the heart to tell her, but when she determined to perform a concert at Carnegie Hall, it became obvious that the truth was going to come out one way or another.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Biographical Dramedy
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for brief suggestive material)

Gleason

(Open Road/Amazon) Steve Gleason, Michel Varisco-Gleason, Drew Brees, Mike McCready. Most football fans known Gleason as the all-pro defense back for the New Orleans Saints whose block of a punt remains one of the biggest plays in franchise history, getting them into a Super Bowl. But at 34 years of age, he was diagnosed with ALS – also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease – which gave him a life expectancy of only three to four years. With the same determination that made him an NFL star, he set upon living his remaining years as fully as possible and to leave a record for his newborn son that would give him the fatherly advice he wouldn’t be able to give him growing up.

See the trailer, clips and interviews here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: AMC Disney Springs, Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: R (for language)

Indignation

(Roadside Attractions/Summit) Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Emond. In 1951 a brilliant working class Jewish boy from New Jersey accepts a scholarship to a small, conservative college in Ohio, exempting him from service in the Korean War. However, he increasingly clashes with the school’s unprincipled dean and simultaneously falls for a beautiful WASP which puts his family’s plans in jeopardy. This is based on the novel by the late, great Philip Roth.

See the trailer and clips here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: AMC Disney Springs, Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: R (for sexual content and some language)

Mohenjo Daro

(UTV) Hrithik Roshan, Pooja Hegde, Arunoday Singh, Kabir Bedi. An adventure set during India’s Indus Valley civilization (although the graphics in the trailer place it before that era).

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Action
Now Playing: AMC Loew’s Universal Cineplex, AMC West Oaks, Touchstar Southchase
Rating: NR

Operation Chromite

(CJ Entertainment) Liam Neeson, Jung-jae Lee, Beom-Su Lee, Dean Dawson. A squadron gets set to fight in the Battle of Inchon during the Korean War. In the meantime, General Douglas MacArthur’s strategies are being developed that will have a critical effect on those going into battle – and irrevocably alter his career.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: War
Now Playing: AMC Disney Springs
Rating: NR

Sausage Party

(Columbia) Starring the voices of Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Salma Hayek, James Franco. In the supermarket aisle, all the various foods we bring home long to be selected. What they don’t know is that selection means they are eaten…alive. One brave sausage means to escape that fate and return to the market to warn his compatriots of their doom. Yes, this is animated. Do. Not. Bring. Your. Kids!

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Animated Feature
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for strong crude sexual content, pervasive language and drug use)

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Captain Fantastic

Viggo Mortensen points out from which direction the Orc hordes are charging.

(2016) Drama (Bleecker Street) Viggo Mortensen, George MacKay, Samantha Isler, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Shree Crooks, Charlie Shotwell, Trin Miller, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Frank Langella, Ann Dowd, Elijah Stevenson, Teddy Van Ee, Erin Moriarty, Missi Pyle, Gallen Osier, Rex Young, Thomas Brophy, Mike Miller, Hannah Horton. Directed by Matt Ross

 

This is not a world conducive to raising kids. We are forced to work jobs that take ever-increasing amounts of our time, forcing us to leave them at day care, in schools where getting an education is an uphill battle and with diversions and distractions guaranteed to change our kids from thoughtful, caring people into automatons parroting whatever the cool kids are saying and preferring to do things that require no thought at all.

Ben (Mortensen) has decided to chuck all of that aside. Something of a latter day hippie tilting at the same windmills of Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer did, he has removed his family – his wife and six kids – to the woods of the Pacific Northwest. There, they live off the grid; killing and growing their own food, making whatever it is they need, selling their crafts for the little money they do require and Ben both schooling and training the kids not only how to live off the land but to defend themselves from those who would take them off of it by force.

Ben has been doing this alone since his wife Leslie (Miller) has been hospitalized but when his worst fears come to pass and she dies, the entire family is devastated. Ben, a believer in transparency (when it suits him), tells his children in the bluntest terms possible. This of course precipitates a storm of emotion.

Nothing, however, when compared to what comes out of Jack (Langella), Leslie’s bereaved father who blames Ben and his alternative lifestyle for his daughter’s demise and forbids him and his children from attending her funeral. This, of course, inspires them all to pile into the family school bus and head to the services. Along the road, they’ll visit Ben’s sister Harper (Hahn) and her husband Dave (Zahn) who are far more in the normal meter with two sons of their own and predictably, things don’t go particularly well. When the confrontation comes, it will expose some raw wounds in what appeared to be a tight-knit family and call into question Ben’s methods and dearly-held philosophies.

Much of how you’re going to take in this film is going to depend on your attitudes towards the counterculture, both then and now. Those who look at the movement and find it to be self-righteous and arrogant will see those things in Ben; others who look back at that and see commitment and courage will see that in Ben. Curiously, there’s no drug use going on here, so far as I can tell. However, those who think that white rich people are getting the short end of the stick are likely to find this movie to be somewhat offensive.

Mortensen will probably always be Aragorn in my book; since he exploded in the public perception in Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth trilogy, he has stayed away largely from mainstream movies and typical roles. In some ways, Ben is as close to Viggo as we’re ever likely to see. Mortensen is a well-known iconoclast and besides being an incredibly handsome dude, has acting chops guys as good looking as he can only dream about. He is meant to carry the movie and he does.

The kids playing his kids managed not to get on my nerves, quite a feat when you get six child actors together for any reason. Occasionally I’d see a little bit of annoying little brat going on but for the most part the kids are interesting, thoughtful and bright. Ben’s oldest Bo (MacKay) has been accepted at some of the most prestigious universities in the country which isn’t the kind of thing that impresses his father, who disdains anything that has anything to do with the establishment, including education.

The first third of the movie has some beautiful landscapes from Washington State, and the cinematography is correspondingly lush. The middle third is essentially a road movie, largely taking place in deserts and plains and is as different a road movie as you’re likely to see. We get some glimpses of hypocrisy cracking through Ben’s veneer of moral rightness, as well as some of the conflicts going on within the family. In some ways, this is the most interesting part of the picture.

The final third is basically Ben and the kids coming to terms with the fall-out of Ben’s home schooling and attitudes towards mainstream life. There should be catharsis here (and the filmmakers sorely wants there to be) but the ending is such a letdown that any kind of catharsis just gets lost in the backwash. The ending feels arbitrary and inorganic and doesn’t seem consistent with what I thought the movie was trying to get across. Now, I might have misconstrued the filmmakers’ intentions and that’s okay, but quite frankly my wife and I looked at each other after the final credits started rolling and said in almost perfect unison “Really?” You don’t want to leave a movie with that kind of feeling.

Ross is best known as an actor in HBO’s hit comedy Silicon Valley turns out to be a fairly promising director. The timing here for the comedic parts are right on and the drama parts aren’t especially overbearing. While he could have used a better ending, he certainly has plenty to build on for a future career behind the camera if that’s the path he wants to take.

Even given all that, this is still an amazing, thought-provoking movie with one of the most charismatic actors in the business at the top of his form. In a summer full of disappointing blockbusters and run-of-the-mill sequels, this is a literal breath of fresh air.

REASONS TO GO: Mortensen is a powerfully charismatic actor. The film depicts an interesting conflict between alternative ideas and mainstream reality. It’s not your ordinary road movie.
REASONS TO STAY: The ending was a bit of a letdown.
FAMILY VALUES: There’s some profanity and a brief scene of graphic nudity (Viggo Mortensen fans, rejoice!).
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The group of children cast in the film came to call Mortensen “Summer Dad” throughout the shoot during the summer of 2015.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 7/27/16: Rotten Tomatoes: 77% positive reviews. Metacritic: 72/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Automatic Hate
FINAL RATING: 8/10
NEXT: Life, Animated

The Watch

 

Ben Stiller finds another teen who thought Night at the Museum sucked.

(2012) Comedy (20th Century Fox) Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade, Rosemarie DeWitt, Will Forte, Mel Rodriguez, Doug Jones, Erin Moriarty, Nicholas Braun, R. Lee Ermey, Joe Nunez, Liz Cackowski, Johnny Pemberton, Billy Crudup, Sharon Gee. Directed by Akiva Schaffer

 

There are things that define a neighborhood that we seem to have lost sight of for the most part in the 21st century. Neighborhoods were once places where neighbors looked out for one another; where we shared lives with those who lived around us. Those kinds of neighborhoods are becoming increasingly rare.

Not in Glenview, Ohio though and that’s why Evan (Stiller) loves it so much there. He and his wife Abby (DeWitt) emigrated from New York to escape the cold, impersonal big city life and find a place where they could raise their children the right way – not that they have any children quite yet but they’re working on it.

When a security guard (Nunez) is gruesomely murdered in the Costco that Evan is managing, that galvanizes Evan. He has already founded a running club and a Spanish club in his neighborhood; now it’s time for something a little more useful – a neighborhood watch. The police, in the person of Sgt. Bressman (Forte), are doing little to find the killer and in fact Bressman thinks Evan is a strong suspect.

However, his neighborhood is less enthusiastic – only three other guys show up to the meeting that he calls. Bob (Vaughn) is a contractor with an epic man-cave who sees the Watch as an opportunity to hang out with the guys and drink plenty of beer. Franklin (Hill) is a bit of a nutcase who failed the psychological tests in order to join the Glenview Police Department; he lives with his mom and longs for police-like action. Then there’s Jamarcus (Ayoade) who sees the Neighborhood Watch as a means to meet women. Not exactly the battalion of crime fighters Evan was looking for.

Still, they are at least willing to play along for the most part, although much of their crime work has beer involved, and much talk of male penises. Bob and Evan start to bond in an odd way; Evan confesses that the reason he and Abby haven’t been able to conceive a child is because he’s sterile; Bob expresses his frustration over his teenage daughter Chelsea’s (Moriarty) increasing infatuation for Jason (Braun), a super-arrogant teen with designs on just one thing – the thing most teenage boys have designs on.

In the meantime, their investigation is leading them to the killer – and that killer isn’t local. And by not local, I mean not of this earth. When their beloved Glenview looks to be ground zero for an alien invasion, can these four screw-ups suck it up and become earth’s last line of defense?

Veteran SNL director Schaffer has a script co-written by Seth Rogen to work from but this isn’t one of his better efforts. Mostly what the problem is here is the unevenness. The movie has some genuinely funny moments, but not of the sort that will leave you sore from laughter as the better comedies will. The sci-fi aspects are for the most part pretty cheesy; why does every alien have to have lime green goo dripping from them? Just saying.

In any case, the two don’t mix well. At times we have some pretty odd moments of a joke in the middle of a serious scene that cheapens the drama; at others, a more dramatic episode in the middle of some of the more really funny moments. The effect is to keep the audience off-balance and not in a good way.

Stiller, Hill, Ayoade and particularly Vaughn are some of the most talented comic actors on the planet and they actually perform pretty well here. Vaughn is memorable even though his shtick is pretty much the same one he usually uses – the loud and aggressive manly sort with a heart of gold – we see the latter most clearly in his relationship with his daughter which is, as most dad-teenage daughter relationships are is a bit on the love-hate side. However, the relationship is depicted here a bit simplistically.

And what’s the deal with all the phallic references? There are so many references to the male sex organ that you have to wonder if there’s some sort of fetish being played out here. Hey, I’m as proud of my equipment as the next guy but sheez, I don’t feel the need to mention it quite so often.

So what we have here is a sci-fi comedy with some talented people in it (and lest we forget, the very sexy DeWitt who has some nice moments here) and simply not living up to its own potential. As much as I like Vaughn, Stiller and company, I think that talent like theirs deserves more than just an onslaught of dick jokes to deliver. So do we.

REASONS TO GO: There are some funny moments. Vaughn is one of my favorite comic actors at the moment.  

REASONS TO STAY: Much of the humor feels forced. Serious and funny stuff don’t flow well, leading to some jarring moments.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s a lot of sexual content and a bit of sci-fi violence. The language is universally foul.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The movie was originally titled Neighborhood Watch but the title was changed due to sensitivity over the Trayvon Martin shooting.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 7/30/12: Rotten Tomatoes: 15% positive reviews. Metacritic: 35/100. The reviews are uniformly negative.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: A Night at the Museum

COSTCO LOVERS: Evan is the manager at the Costco and the climax takes place there; as you might expect there are several jokes about bulk buying throughout the film.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

NEXT: Sympathy for Delicious