Carnage at home in ‘Civil War’

   A bit of background on director Alex Garland's Civil War before we plunge ahead. When the movie opens, Texas and California already have seceded from the Union. Florida lags closely behind.

  Armed conflict has broken out between the two-state Western Forces and the US government which is led by a president who has violated the constitution by taking a third term and disbanding the FBI.

  As a result, a brutal civil war has pitted American against American in ways so chaotic it has become difficult distinguish friend from foe or even to tell what's at stake.

   What exactly caused this catastrophe and what has turned parts of the country into battlefields remains a mystery. Garland evidently wants us to see the movie's vicious conflict as a warning, a flashing red light about the dangers of venomous division.

  What transpires is startling. If I had to pick a single word to describe Civil War, it would be "shock." 

   The movie chronicles the horrors of war by following a quartet of journalists: a battle-hardened war photographer (Kirsten Dunst), her reporter partner (Wagner Moura), and an aspiring young photographer (Cailee Spaeny) who regards Dunst's Lee as role model. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a grizzled New York Times reporter, rounds out the quartet.

  The journalists drive from New York toward Washington, DC., taking a roundabout route through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. A disquieting variation on familiar genre ensures, a road movie -- only this with bullets and blood.

   Henderson's Sammy wants to reach Charlottesville, VA, the front line in this ill-defined war. The others want to interview the president (Nick Offerman) who has avoided the press for 14 months and who opens the movie rehearsing a duplicitous speech about the government's impending victory.

    Evidence of war and plunder scar the countryside. Garland deftly creates the kind of ravaged landscapes we've become accustomed to seeing in movies set on foreign soil: a badly damaged JC Penny's, a football stadium housing refugees, and a roadside attraction called Winter Wonderland, now the setting for a sniper fight.

   In its most disturbing scene, the journalists encounter a uniformed soldier (Jesse Plemons) whose eyes are hidden behind red sunglasses. The solider terrorizes them in ways that suggest a rogue form of extreme right-wing insanity. 

  Generally, though, the movie has little to say about politics or political views. Garland must be betting that a series of horrific episodes will establish the movie's bona fides as a cautionary, anti-war tale that's sufficient unto itself.

   Asking a movie to explain a Civil War might be too much. But asking "how" the events of the movie came about seems fair. How did the Western Force become a well-equipped and well-trained army? Is it composed of  rebellious members of the US military who have seized everything from armored vehicles to helicopters?

   Rather than dealing with such questions, Garland  focuses on the journalistic psyche. Dunst's Lee tries to school Spaeny's Jessie about the dangers of emotional involvement, even as her defenses begin to crumble. Moura's Joel craves the adrenalin rush of combat, and Sammy functions as the movie's sage.

   The performances strike the right notes, notably Dunce's. Lee tempers her cultivated disengagement from horror with concern for Jessie, a young woman who quickly loses her innocence. Jessie learns to accept the job's prime mission: Get the photograph.

   When it comes to fear and tension, Garland's movie proves devastatingly effective but the violence has some of the same impact on us as on the movie's journalists; it holds our emotions in check.

  I wondered about another aspect of the movie. These journalists are witnesses to horror. But for whom? Infrastructure has been impaired. Internet connections surely have become patchy. Who will see  the photograph we see, Lee's in color, Jessie's in black-and-white?

   Or is that the point? Are we watching journalists running on automatic pilot because they don't know what else to do? Are they covering the war or are they action junkies who have no convictions about the fighting? Do they use press credentials to shield themselves from harm while leaving questions of moral responsibility to others?

  Garland goes all-in on vivid depictions of the havoc wrought by an ill-defined war in which nearly everyone seems armed with an automatic weapon. 

   But to achieve anything approaching greatness, the movie needed to do more than turn familiar American geography into scenes of horror and estrangement. 

    Garland's vivid picture of war culminates with shattering action in the streets of Washington, but we probably should have learned more about the people who are fighting and the journalists who are covering them.

    Civil War has undeniable attention-riveting power. Maybe it's asking for more than is possible from a movie that lives in a world of disordered immediacy,  but I wish I hadn't found Civil War more harrowing than heartbreaking.

Little guys want to get rich, too

   

      Some subjects don’t lend themselves to movies. The GameStop stock craze might be one of them. 

      Dumb Money — a movie about the short squeeze that hit GameStop stock in 2021— doesn't always clarify its complexities. The result: A lot of conversations about financial matters that aren’t likely to find a place in anyone's encyclopedia of great movie dialogue.

     Paul Dano plays Keith Gill, an obscure financial analyst who turned buying GameStop stock into a cause. With help from his YouTube channel, Gill created a legion of acolytes who followed his lead.

      The movie's supporting characters divide into small investors and big-time market movers. 

       The small fry struggle to outwit the big money and are represented by America Ferrara, as a single mom and hard-working nurse; Myha’la Harold and Talia Ryder, as college students who took a gamble; and Anthony Ramos, as a worker at a GameStop store.

      Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella) sketches in several big-ticket investors: Vincent D’Onofrio plays hedge fund manager Steve Cohen; Nick Offerman appears as hedge fund manager Ken Griffin; and Seth Rogen portrays Gabe Plotkin, the financier who ran an investment company called Melvin Capital. 

     Sebastian Stan signs on as Vlad Tenev, a co-founder of  Robinhood, the trading app that became an important part of the saga.

     Gill comes closest to giving a scattered movie its center. We meet his wife (Shailene Woodley), his parents (Kate Burton and Clancy Brown) and his brother (Pete Davidson). Davidson provides comic flavor, adding a dose of cynicism and snark to the proceedings.

      Gillespie bolsters the movie’s authenticity with news clips, and uses graphics to show the net worth of each of the main characters perhaps to highlight major disparities between the rich and the wannabes.

        Dumb Money remains watchable, perhaps because it sweeps past us without worrying too much about dotting every "i'' and crossing every "t.'' You may want to do some googling about short squeezes or you simply can get the story's gist:  Based on their assessment that online purchases during a pandemic would push GameStop to the edge of bankruptcy, the Big Boys started short selling the stock. 

    The little guys kept buying, driving the stock price upward. Until trouble struck, the dumb money — Wall Street’s derogatory name for individual investors — seemed to be winning.

       Basing his movie on The Antisocial Network, a book by Ben Mezrich,  Gillespie gives the characters more quirks than depth.

         Gill calls himself Roaring Kitty and wraps a bandana around his forehead before positioning himself at his computer. He's also a compulsive runner.

       Cohen, who now owns the New York Mets, tosses food at the pet pig who shares his house, and Plotkin nervously juggles two homes while watching his investment company slide down the drain.

      But here’s the thing: These aren’t the most intriguing characters ever to reach the screen. The rich guys are pompous, callous and often avaricious. The little guys hope to better their lives. Everyone wants to emerge a winner.

        Sans an overriding  point of view, Dumb Money plays like a footnote to a larger story that's left untold. The movie asks us to root for the average folks without wondering why a nurse must struggle to pay her mortgage or why two college students at the University of Texas spend all their time thinking about money.

      Credit Dumb Money with generating a few laughs but the movie  doesn't leave us with much reason to invest additional thought in a story that rehashes yesterday's news.

A relaxed, enjoyable father/daughter tale

Heart Beats Loud is one of those laid-back movies that isn't out to oversell you on anything. Set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the movie tells the story of a father and daughter who make music together. The twist: The daughter (an appealing Kiersey Clemons) has ambitions that go beyond music. She's about to start college and wants to be a doctor. Dad (a relaxed but sometimes dour Nick Offerman) thinks the two should try to pursue a musical career together, particularly because Clemons' Sam has an obviously potent talent. But it’s Offerman's Frank who dreams of striking musical gold. A hit record could liberate him from the failing, vinyl-only record store over which he presides. He'd like to make music, not sell it. The songs -- pleasing enough -- are interrupted by whispers of a plot involving Offerman’s character’s mom (Blythe Danner); his landlady (Toni Collette) and his bartender friend (Ted Danson). A romance between Clemons' character and a young woman played by American Honey's Sasha Lane doesn't add much, but the movie is relaxed enough to accommodate a bit of meandering. Offerman has a sly way of commanding the screen, avoiding any of the ingratiating gestures that would have turned Frank into an off-beat role model. Director Brett Haley (I'll See You in My Dreams) may not dig deep, but his movie wanders into summer buoyed by the odd couple chemistry of a father who may have more growing up to do than his brightly ambitious daughter.

A ribald sex farce set in a nunnery

Inspired by Boccaccio's The Decameron, The Little Hours is an unapologetic sex farce built around a 14th Century nunnery where the sisters are anything but pious. In the hands of director Jeff Baena, Little Hours attempts to banish the shame that often surrounds repressed desire, particularly in a convent to which many of the women have been sent because their families don't know what else to do with them. Three nuns (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci) connive under the supervision of a mother superior (Molly Shannon), who's no saint, either. The plot kicks into a higher gear when the resident priest (John C. Reilly) introduces a hunky runaway (Dave Franco) into the mix. Franco's Massetto has taken flight because a nobleman (Nick Offerman) caught him dallying with the lady of the household (Lauren Weedman). Reilly's father Tommasso deceives the nuns, telling them that Massetto is deaf and mute, a complication that adds to the movie's cleverly calculated misunderstandings. Fred Armisen plays a bishop who shows up late in the proceedings to condemn everyone's behavior. Baena makes his intentions clear from the outset with ample use of the "F" word as he pushes (perhaps too hard) toward irreverence. Avoiding period language, the movie genially embraces the all-too-human pursuit of pleasure. Put another way, Little Hours seems to be saying that, despite admonitions to the contrary, bawdy isn't necessarily bad. Amusing when it's working, which (alas) isn't all of the time.

He saw the future: It was hamburgers

Michael Keaton excels in The Founder, the story of how McDonald's became McDonald's.

Everyone knows McDonald's, the ubiquitous hamburger chain. Not everyone knows the story behind one of America's -- and now the world's -- premiere fast-food operations. Founded in 1940 in San Bernardino, Ca. by the McDonald brothers (Mac and Dick), the restaurant revolutionized the drive-in food business by doing away with car hops and anything else that might slow the delivery of burger to customer. The McDonald's slogan: Buy 'em by the bag.

After some meager attempts at franchising, the brothers decided to focus on perfecting their formula.

But in 1954, Ray Kroc entered the brothers' lives. It was Kroc who grew McDonald's into a national phenomenon through an increasingly slick franchise operation.

According to the new movie, The Founder, the brothers were a couple of burger nerds who brought a high ethical standard to their work. Kroc ... well ... not so much.

In The Founder, Michael Keaton gives a terrific performance as Kroc, a man who always seems to be calculating the odds. Kroc doesn't just have ideas; he has bursts of inspiration, and he prides himself on his persistence, which he regards as more important than talent.

Keaton registers Kroc's thoughts with the quickness of a pin ball bouncing off bumpers; he makes Kroc a burger evangelist who understood that no ambition is too grand, and who eventually wrested control of the company from the brothers.

In some other era, an epiphany was something spiritual; as the '50s turned to the '60s, an epiphany shrunk in size. It was the light that dawned in Kroc's eyes when he first saw the San Bernadino McDonald's with its 15 cent hamburgers. You almost can hear Keaton thinking Kroc's thoughts: This, by God, is the future.

At one point, Kroc tells the McDonalds -- beautifully played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch -- that he envisions McDonald's as part of a small-town trinity: Church (with its cross); town hall (with its flag) and McDonald's with its patented Golden Arches serving as a bridge between the secular and the holy.

Lively direction by John Lee Hancock takes us from Kroc's days selling milk-shake mixers to the peak of his corporate success, which -- of course -- left the McDonald brothers bobbing helplessly in its potent wake.

Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) understands that few of us go to movies for moral lessons, so he makes sure to entertain. A sequence in which the McDonald brothers perfect their fast-food assembly line by drawing various positions in the McDonald's food chain on a tennis court becomes exactly what one of the brothers calls it, "a burger ballet."

As Kroc ascends the ladder built by his dreams, his ruthlessness becomes clearer; he sheds his first wife (Laura Dern). Before that he meets the woman (Linda Cardellini) who'll become his next wife. Gradually, he grows into the image he has created for himself, and it's exciting to watch Keaton expand Kroc's ego to match his achievements.

In a powerful scene toward the movie's end, Kroc explains to the exasperated Dick McDonald that the thing he most wanted to appropriate from the brothers was their name. He figured McDonald had an all-American ring that forever would elude a man named Kroc. He wound up taking not only their burgers, but their identity.

I can't say that Hancock, working from a screenplay by Robert D. Siegel, has made the Citizen Kane of fast food, but he's made an entertaining movie with enough substance to give you pause.

Let me summarize with something that may sound familiar in these days of ascending Trumpism:
The McDonald brothers were about burgers; Kroc -- in what probably could have been an even tougher movie -- was about being hailed as a conqueror.

A teen movie that's not just for kids

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl effectively mixes humor and heartbreak.

If I told you that the movie I'm about to review revolves around a high school senior who establishes a relationship with a female classmate who has been diagnosed with leukemia, you'd probably tune out.

Who could blame you? I could be talking about a zillion and a half teen movies in which annoying, pop-culturally savvy kids crack wise before discovering some slightly deeper meaning to life.

But consider: The movie I'm talking about is called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a title that suggests that you might not be in for the expected mixture of jejune antics and tear-jerking sentiment that too often define the genre known as YA fiction.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon brings visual creativity and smarts to the story, which -- in outline form -- follows the path I've just described. But with movies (as with many other pursuits) it's not always what happens, but how it happens that matters.

Working from a Pittsburgh-based novel by Jesse Andrews, who also wrote the screenplay, Gomez-Rejon brings us into the world of a high school senior who has discovered what he considers to be a viable survival strategy: Greg (Thomas Mann) gets along with everyone, but gets close to no one. He's floating through life.

Greg refers to his one real friend (RJ Cyler's Earl) as a co-worker. That's because Greg and Earl have been collaborating on movies since they were little kids.

These films (some of which we see) may not be brilliant, but they reflect more than a passing knowledge of cinema. They also have shrewd, parodic titles: Sockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Butt, Senior Citizen Kane and The 400 Bros among them.

What sold me on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl begins with the way Gomez-Rejoin respects his young characters.

Greg is smart, slightly underachieving and reasonably observant. He can be honest, although he's also capable of self-delusion.

The girl of the story (Olivia Cooke of TV's Bates Motel) is appealing because she isn't looking for anyone to join her in a pity party.

Many of the scenes between Mann and Cooke take place in Rachel's bedroom. No, it's not what you think; it's the movie's way of telling us that Greg is being drawn into a world outside his own. He's violating his own rules about keeping his distance.

Greg doesn't do this willingly. He's forced into a relationship with Rachel when his mother (Connie Britton) insists that he make contact with the "dying girl," even though he's barely aware of her existence.

Greg's father, by the way, is played by Nick Offerman, who brings oddball spin to his character.

Molly Shannon portrays Rachel's mother, a woman who's dealing with her calamity by drinking a little too much wine.

No one goes totally off any rails as Gomez-Rejon develops the story, which ultimately finds Greg and Earl trying (without much success) to make a film for Rachel.

The film also makes room for an astute aside about the racial component of the relationship between Greg and Earl.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl won the Grand Jury prize at January's Sundance Film Festival, and likely will win over audiences, as well.

That doesn't mean it's a masterpiece, but Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has a knack for keeping Greg's self-absorption from getting on your nerves, and -- for me at least -- that counted for a lot.

Boys seek indepedence in the woods

The Kings of Summer doesn't quite rule, but it has its charms.

Every summer, a small movie looks as if it's poised to be the season's sleeper hit. Put The Kings of Summer into that aspirational category, but don't bet the rent that it will fulfill any record-breaking ambitions.

That's not to say that The Kings of Summer -- the story of three teen-agers who leave home and build a ramshackle cabin in the woods -- is charmless, but rather to caution that
the movie's overall impact matches its modesty.

Besides, it must mean something that the most interesting performance in this movie about teen rebellion is given by Nick Offerman, an adult best known for his work on NBC's Parks and Recreation. Offerman's deadpan style, wry delivery and willingness to portray a less-than-admirable dad helps spike the movie's adolescent punch.

It's just that kind of mildly mordant touch that keeps Kings of Summer from falling into a sink pit of teen-movie cliches.

The movie begins in earnest when 15-year-old Joe (Nick Robinson) gets crosswise with his dad during an aggressively competitive Monopoly game. We understand why Joe and his dad channel emotion into Monopoly. They're both having a rough go after the death of Joe's mother.

Joe's embittered dad slams the boy with withering verbal assaults, delivered without inflection by Offerman who knows how to play a guy who's fed up with life and seems to expect nothing much from it.

What's an aggrieved 15-year-old to do? Joe decides to round up a buddy and head for the woods. He convinces his friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso) to join him. Patrick is eager to escape the clutches of his self-absorbed parents (an amusing Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson).

Another youngster, the oddball Biaggio (Moises Arias) worms his way into the group, providing what every movie about teen-agers needs: the unashamedly weird kid.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, working from a screenplay by Chris Galletta, finds humor in the fact that the boys aren't natural woodsmen. When they hunt for food, a self-sufficiency pledge goes by the boards: It doesn't hurt that the boys' foray into the wilderness takes place within walking distance of a chicken restaurant. So much for living off the land.

The alliance between buddies is challenged when Patrick and Joe square off in the game of love. Joe has a crush on Kelly (Erin Moriarty). She likes Joe, but might be more inclined toward Patrick. When Kelly shows up, the boyhood paradise begins to crumble, something we knew would happen all along, possibly because the house the boys build looks as if it's been engineered for collapse.

The young actors give strong performances, and Vogt-Roberts makes room for a couple of scenes in which the boys get in touch with their primal selves.

It's a bit of a stretch to believe that three kids could pull off this kind of disappearing act, but unless they do, there's no movie. And maybe Vogt-Roberts means to suggest that, to some degree, the adults are allowing these kids room to fail.

Whatever its deficiencies, Kings of Summer earns points for understanding what it's like to be 15 and fed up with life at home -- but not entirely prepared to leave it.