An FBI hunt for white supremacists

  The Silent Brotherhood, a foray into the ranks of right-wing extremism, was written by reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. I remember the book’s 1990 publication because its authors were then co-workers of mine at The Rocky Mountain News, a now defunct Denver daily.

   Gerhardt passed away in 2015, and Flynn went to become a Denver City Council member after the News’s demise. 

  I don't know when I first heard that The Silent Brotherhood would be adapted for the screen and that it would star Jude Law, but the movie based on Flynn and Gerhardt's book -- now called The Order -- finally is reaching the nation’s theaters.

    The Order tells a story triggered by the murder of outspoken Denver talk show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron in a brief performance). I didn’t know Berg well, but I’d met him and had been on his show a couple of times, talking movies, I guess.

   Berg was gunned down in front of his Denver condo in 1984, a crime that, in The Order, becomes the catalyst for a penetrating look at the criminal activities of violent neo-Nazis operating in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s, often supporting themselves by robbing banks.

  Australian director Justin Kurzel takes a no-frills approach to a true crime story with frightening political implications, providing insight into people attracted to the furthest corners of the American far right. 

  Law plays Terry Husk, an FBI agent who’s drawn into the investigation when he’s assigned to an office in a remote corner of Washington state. He’s had big cases in New York and elsewhere, but seems to be on the downside of his career.

  Law creates a character who's worn, dogged, and sad. But he perseveres.

  Tye Sheridan plays Jamie Bowden, a local cop who knows some of the gang members from when they were kids. Bowden serves as a guide for Husk; in return, he's schooled by Husk in the ways of cops who know the ropes.

   Jurnee Smollett joins the cast as another FBI agent who contributes to the investigation, a fraught task for a Black woman working to bring white supremacists to justice.

  Set during the 1980s, The Order finds its principal outlaw in neo-Nazi Bob Matthews, played with charisma by Nicholas Hoult, soon to be seen in Nosferatu. 

   Matthews, who founded a group called The Order, relies on his likability and persuasiveness to attract others to his foul cause. He creates a sense of belonging among his followers, a brotherhood of the disaffected united by bonds of hatred for the federal government and anyone who isn't white.

   Bombings, an armored truck heist, and other violent incidents light the movie’s action spark; they're part of The Order's disruptive tactics, some motivated by their obsession with The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel and white supremacist influencer.

   Not every supremacist believes in Matthews's approach. At one point, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), the head of the Aryan Nations, tries to control Bowden, who he views as a dangerous rogue. Butler comes off as a neo-Nazi institutionalist who’s willing to bide his time.

  The Order has been classified as a crime thriller. Heaven knows, we've seen plenty of them. But in a divided, fearful country, The Order acquires renewed  urgency. It has been 40 years since Matthews died in a fiery confrontation with the FBI. I wish his story felt more like a footnote than a precursor. 

A writer's journey begins at a bar

 

    Some thoughts after watching The Tender Bar, the big-screen adaptation of JR Moehringer's 2005 memoir about growing up in Manhasset, NY: I'll get to a review of the movie in a bit, but I left s preview screening with two thoughts I couldn’t shake.

   First, Ben Affleck is getting better and better as an actor. He was terrific as the flamboyant Pierre d'Alencon in The Last Duel and equally good as a beer-soaked alcoholic in The Way Back, the story of a high school basketball coach wobbling toward redemption.

   In The Tender Bar, Affleck scores again as Uncle Charlie, a bartender who schools his nephew JR, the story's ostensible main character, in a variety of arts -- thinking, reading, drinking, and the behavior of men.

   A bachelor and barroom philosopher, Uncle Charle proves vital to young JR's survival -- and also to the movie's.

    Observation two: I wish I could say that George Clooney was getting more interesting as a director.

   Clooney started with the brilliant Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and followed with the solid Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) but his Midnight Sky (2020) foundered (at least in my view) and The Tender Bar, with a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed), doesn’t meet expectations, either.

  Moehringer, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, wrote a well-received memoir but the movie feels cut from pieces of variable interest. 

   Played by Daniel Ranieri as a nine-year-old boy and as a young man by Tye Sheridan, JR wants to be a writer but the movie never persuades us that we should care whether he achieves his goal. 

  It's not JR's dream that made his book enjoyable; it was his practice of the writer's art, which he brought into play when dealing with the bar -- named the Dickens. Uncle Charlie presided over the Dickens and its  cast of oddball characters who gathered for fun, solace, and moments of commemoration.

   On screen, the story becomes a collection of episodes joined by several themes: The absentee father, the devoted Mom, and JR's initiation into the world of love. None of these land with much force.

   JR's biological father (Max Martini) is barely a presence in his life. He's a New York disc jockey who JR's family calls "The Voice." Abusive and prone to drink, he's hated by JR's mom (a warm Lily Rabe). 

    Rabe's Dorothy has one dream for young JR. He'll attend either Harvard or Yale. He's going to get a first-rate education.

    JR, by the way, attends Yale, where -- in the movie version -- he tells friends that he wants to be a writer. He also meets a young woman (Briana Middleton), a biracial student whose snooty architect parents make it clear they have little use for someone of JR's low breeding.

   The movie works overtime trying to establish JR's working-class bona fides; he may be a Yalie, but he's more a graduate of the bar and of his unruly family than of the prestigious university. 

   Christopher Lloyd portrays JR's grandfather, a grump who comes through for JR when it counts.

   The picture loses focus as JR steps into the "real" world, landing a job as a copy boy at the New York Times and trying to figure out next steps.

    Sheridan may be stuck with a thankless job. If JR entertained as a writer; Sheridan can't entertain by telling us he wants to be a writer.

   The story weakens whenever Uncle Charlie isn't around and feels far more comfortable with scenes in the bar than anywhere else.

   Enough. The Tender Bar generates neither antagonism nor deep affection. Put another way: If you haven’t read the book, you’d do well to start there.

'Voyagers' travels a familiar route

    Once again, humanity faces extinction.

   In the year 2063, Earth's resources have been irretrievably depleted. As a result, a project to colonize a far-off planet begins. 

   The difficulty: It will take 86 years for the crew to reach humanity's potential new home. That means the colonists probably will be the grandchildren of the original crew, which is composed of 33 test-tube babies who, when the movie reaches the depths of space, all have become teenagers.

   Only one adult (Colin Farrell) makes the trip, a volunteer who feels compelled to protect the crew until it reaches its destination.

   Surviving on a spaceship for 86 years requires that the crew drink a substance called The Blue, which dulls their aggressive impulses and also inhibits their ability to experience pleasure. The designers of the voyage worried about what might happen should 30 hormonally charged teenagers be left to their own devices.

     It takes director Neil Burger, who also wrote the screenplay, a while to reach the story's pivotal moment. Two of the crew members (Tye Sheridan and Fionn Whitehead) learn about The Blue's effects.

     They stop drinking it and Whitehead's Zac begins seeing the ship's medical officer (Lily-Rose Depp) in a new light.

     It's hardly surprising that trouble looms. Nor is it much of a shock that none of the movie's characters achieves stand-out prominence. 

     Anyway, the story relies on a trick as old as Lord of the Flies,  putting a group of young people into an isolated situation, stripping them of ordinary stimuli, and trying to discern something about their essential nature. 

    Farrell doesn't display much personality as the adult in the room. It hardly matters because the movie ultimately belongs to the young actors who are pushed into a scenario that poses questions about how lies can be used to promote fear by those seeking power. Sound familiar?

    The possible arrival of an alien further amps up the stakes, which never seem especially high, and, truth be told, there’s only so much visual imagination that can be applied to the interior of a spaceship. 

    It doesn’t help, either, that all the crew members dress alike.

    After his initial bout with rebelliousness, Sheridan's Christopher matures, allying with Depp's Sela. Whitehead supplies the villainy as a young man in whom adolescent rebellion, hormonal turbulence, and envy fuel aggression.

   Can these young people control themselves for the sake of accomplishing something good; in this case, the continuation of the species?

    Intermittent moments of tension can be found, but the movie's desire to see what happens when characters are freed from restraints never feels dangerous, edgy, or fresh enough to find new life.

     So, yes, Voyagers is like Lord of the Flies -- only without the buzz.

She wields power. The movie, not so much.

Dark Phoenix may be the final X-Men movie but it falls short of a grand finale.

Billed as the final chapter in the X-Men series, Dark Phoenix doesn't exactly qualify as the fondest of farewells.

By no means awful, Dark Phoenix nonetheless fails to make a major splash with a concluding chapter that revolves around Jean Grey (Sophie Turner of Game of Thrones fame). Although Jean acquires great powers, she never totally dominates a story that becomes the wobbly foundation on which an uneven variety of set pieces and side trips are built.

A mind-reading mutant, the young Jean (Summer Fontana) falls under Charles Xavier's (James McAvoy) protection after her parents are killed in an auto accident in which she was a passenger and also the cause.

The story then leaps ahead. Now-grown, Jean (Turner) is still learning how to navigate the X-world. An early-picture outer-space rescue mission brings Jean into contact with a force that super-charges her powers in ways she isn't prepared to handle. She leaves the X-Men estate to search for background about her pre-X-Men childhood. She also unleashes terrible destructive powers as she morphs into Phoenix.

With Jean on the verge of raging out of control, the movie begins to question Charles' motives. Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) wonders whether Xavier isn't more interested in bolstering his ego than in maintaining the integrity of the X-Men force. Lawrence, whose superhero alter ego goes by the name Mystique, doesn't seem especially engaged, but she's given the movie's best line.

A rebellious Raven tells Charles that the women always seem to be saving the men in these stories. She wonders whether a name change isn't in order: How about X-Women? Good idea.

Nicholas Hoult's Beast also begins to wonder about Charles' motives. Is Charles putting X-Men in danger to maintain his growing status with humans who, at this moment, are happy to rely on X-Men to save them from whatever disaster happens to loom?

Meanwhile, aliens led by Vuk (Jessica Chastain) try to control Jean whose powers are so great they can be life-giving -- or some such. She might help them revive their moribund civilization, hardly the freshest of ideas.

Tye Sheridan portrays Scott Summers/Cyclops, an X-er who's romantically involved with Jean and who can't accept the fact that she might have become a world-threatening menace.

Michael Fassbender turns up as Erik/Magneto, bringing gravitas to the proceedings, which are dotted with action and special effects, some of them well executed by director Simon Kinberg. CGI and physical combat blend nicely in an extended sequence on a speeding train.

Dark Phoenix doesn't come close to the best and most serious of all the X-Men movies, 2017's Logan. You can also throw in X-Men: First Class (2011) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), if you're looking for more of Phoenix's betters.

In general, I've liked the X-Men movies with their devotion to talented outcasts. If Phoenix really marks the end of the series, I'll fondly remember the movies I enjoyed, forget the rest and move on to something else.

Trying to conquer a virtual world

Steven Spielberg brings plenty of visual spark to Ready Player One. The story? Less than spectacular.

In Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ready Player One -- Ernest Cline’s popular 2011 novel -- almost everyone obsesses about virtual reality.

Why are so many in need of so much escapism? Because the movie takes place in the dystopian year of 1945 and reality sucks: Suffering from all manner of deprivation, folks are forced to live in the Stacks, trailers piled atop one another in tenement fashion.

Not surprisingly, the downtrodden residents of Columbus, Ohio -- the movie's main real-world setting -- don headgear and special gloves as they try to experience excitement through personal avatars that travel around a virtual universe known as the Oasis.

The book has major fans and I'm guessing that they'll mostly enjoy Spielberg's movie.

Speaking for myself, I’d put it this way. In Ready Player One, the side trips are significantly more rewarding than the main story, which puts a youthful resident of Columbus (Tye Sheridan) in the middle of a high-stakes video game inside the Oasis.

Sheridan's Wade Watts -- make that his avatar Parzival -- sifts through clues as he searches for three keys. Should Parzival acquire all three, Wade will inherit ownership of the Oasis, thus saving everyone's favorite synthetic playground from the clutches of IOI, an evil corporation that wants to monetize the Oasis experience. A greedy corporate shark (Ben Mendelsohn) runs IOI.

I should point out that these side trips really are the point of a movie that tells a story that never seems all that momentous. Minute-by-minute, the stakes in Ready Player One feel significantly higher than what happens at the end of the movie's 140 minutes.

It’s also possible to look at Ready Player One as Spielberg's chance to command a broad swath of the pre-summer market. Visually sophisticated and full of invention, the movie harkens back to one of Spielberg’s career sweet spots: the 1980s.

Conveniently, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) -- the man who designed the Oasis -- was deeply immersed in ‘80s popular culture, so much so that he loaded his virtual creation with references to it. You'll find nods to Back to the Future, The Shining (one of the movie’s best and most amusing set pieces), Duran Duran and … oh, well … you get the idea. There's lots of '80s stuff.

When the story kicks off, Rylance's Halliday, who set up the game in the first place, has been dead for five years. A skilled Oasis gamer, Wade wants to own the Oasis, not just for himself but for all who would resist IOI's insidious corporate intrusion into everyone's personal headspace.

Inside the Oasis, Wade meets Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a sexy, spunky avatar who immediately captures his heart. He also has other virtual allies, notably the gruff but inventive Aech, a giant-sized man who looks like he wandered into the movie from a Marvel Comic.

Some of the movie's action is fun, notably an early-picture car race that Spielberg mounts with tipsy fury. Imagine speeding along a road when the road suddenly comes to an abrupt end or when King Kong leaps off a building and tries to crush your vehicle.

For me, Ready Player One's third — and needlessly protracted final act — took a bit of the gleam off the movie’s virtual shine. Spielberg brings real life and virtual reality together. Real-life gamers must meet people they've known only as avatars. All of this builds toward massive battles as Wade seeks his triumph. Really? Noisy battles are the best the movie can do?

As difficult as it must have been to create Ready Player One's teeming visual environment, it’s also true that the movie lacks the sophisticated spin of the best sci-fi, something that couldn’t be said of Spielberg’s work in A.I. or Minority Report.

In the end, Ready Player One predictably endorses reality over virtual fantasy, although almost nothing about the movie suggests that anyone involved with this massive project really believes that.

Obviously, Spielberg is no slouch when it comes to handling gigantic projects. He keeps the action coherent, jams images with information without getting lost in them and propels his characters through the movie's effects.

So enjoy the side trips for as long as you can. This is one movie in which the ride definitely beats arrival at the final destination.

Not the best of 'X-Men' movies

Fear Apocalypse? Not with the X-men around.

For some reason, X-Men: Apocalypse was screened for critics a couple of weeks back. Normally, early screenings are welcome, but with a movie as diffuse as this one, the details already have begun to blur into a miasmic haze of mutants and overblown action.

As for those mutants, their powers can be kept straight only by devotees with an addiction to Marvel Comics or those willing to keep a scorecard.

Best as I can recall, X-Men: Apocalypse boils down to this: Another bad-ass villain -- this one more than 5,000 years old -- must be fought by a bunch of X-men with idiosyncratic powers.

Of course, both the bad guy and X-Men are crammed into a high-stakes battle of one sort or another. You already know the drill; a digressive plot is punctuated with lots of wanton destruction.

Call this a medium-grade helping of X-men, another Marvel Comics movie that's glutted with mayhem and characters from Marvel's over-populated universe.

In this case, the story centers on Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), a character who was entombed in ancient Egypt. A terrific actor, Isaac is buried under lots of make-up. He's recognizable, but I half wondered whether it mattered who was playing this powerful villain.

Once revived from millenniums of slumber, Apocalypse assembles a posse consisting of rogues. These are (wait for it), the proverbial Four Horseman, and they're led by Pole Magneto (Michael Fassbender). Magneto, we learn, has been living a quiet life after his family was destroyed in Auschwitz.

The Holocaust as a comic-book plot device? Best not to think about it.

Years after World War II, Magneto experiences new injustices. He's then reborn as an angry mutant with an abiding grudge against humanity.

Olivia Munn plays Psylocke, a woman with telepathic powers, a chip on her shoulder and a costume that enables her to moonlight at an S&M festival.

Meanwhile, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) schools fledgling mutants in the art of putting their powers to good use rather than destroying civilization. He's assisted by Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult).

Additional mutants include Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), a mutant whose brother Alex/Havoc (Lucas Till) already understands his powers. And you'll find a bunch of other mutants including Quicksilver and Nightcrawler, characters I mention only because I like the names.

By the way, the ability of some of these mutants to shoot destructive rays from their fingertips or eyeballs created waves of low-rent nostalgia for me, echoes of the old Flash Gordon serials.

This time, X-Men keep appearing in what seem to be droves, including Jennifer Lawrence's Raven.

Despite the man X-Men, director Bryan Singer, can't quite elevate this one into the superhero stratosphere. Too bad, he's done better X-Men work before, notably in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I can't say that I hated watching Apocalypse. It unreeled with the usual fury, but its playbook evolves over two-and-a-half hours without finding much that's inspired.

And really, after Hunger Games and other X-Men movies, can't Jennifer Lawrence find something better to do with her time and talent? Et tu Michael Fassbender.

The dud called 'Dark Places'

Like Gone Girl, Dark Places is an adaptation of a novel by Gillian Flynn. But unlike Gone Girl -- no masterpiece, either -- this one has little to recommend it. Charlize Theron pulls a baseball cap over her beauty to play Libby Day, an emotionally bottled, blue-collar woman. Libby's distinction: As a child, she witnessed the murder of her mother and sister. An eight-year-old at the time of the crime, Libby told police that her troubled brother (Tye Sheridan) committed the crime. Sheridan's Ben Day has been in the slammer ever since. When a nerd who studies murders (Nicholas Hoult) shows up, Libby is dragged into the past -- presented in uninspired flashbacks by French director Gilles Paquet-Brenner. Corey Stoll plays Libby's imprisoned brother in the present. We also get a turn from Chloe Grace Moretz as the grown-up version of a young woman who Libby's brother fell for when he was a teen-ager flirting with devil worship. The performances are mostly drab, as is the movie's look, and the wrap-up is as preposterous as it is unilluminating. Dark Places has had a VOD run, which is how I saw it. It now reaches theaters.

A worthy Nicolas Cage performance

Joe takes us into a world of southern misery.

Joe has spent time in prison, drinks way too much and earns his living working for a lumber company that poisons trees to make room for more lucrative growth.

It should come as no surprise that Joe lives in a rural southern backwater where trouble breeds like mosquitos and staying on the good side of life's ledger requires effort.

Joe is the title character of a new drama in which Nicolas Cage finally finds a character with an internal conflict big enough to fill several of the actor's recent junkyard movies, say Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Trespass or Drive Angry.

Like Cage, director David Gordon Green also appears to be reconnecting with his artistic past in this grit-laden adaptation of Father and Son, a 1991 novel by the late Larry Brown.

Green began his career with the much-admired George Washington (2000) and other smaller movies, digressed with big-ticket comedies such as Pineapple Express (2008) and The Sitter (2011) and went indie again with last year's Prince Avalance.

It's always dicey to separate a role from the movie its in, but I'd say that Cage scores higher than Green, which is another way of saying that the performance proves more memorable than a movie that can feel derivative and in which the squalid elements seem belabored.

Cage's every move embodies Joe's conflict, which goes something like this: Joe tries to be decent, but keeps tripping over himself, mostly because of an anti-authoritarian streak that seems almost inbred.

The story in Joe centers on the relationship between Cage's Joe and Gary (Tye Sheridan), a teen-ager who idolizes the older man.

Joe may be dissolute, but he prizes physical labor, and he appreciates young Gary's desire to work his way out of his miserable surroundings, to earn his redemption with sweat.

When Gary joins Joe's tree-poisoning crew, he begins looking to Joe for the kind of guidance his own dad (the late Gary Poulter) can't supply.

Poulter's Wade is irredeemable, a drunken degenerate so cruel he tries to pimp his own daughter to another of the town's mean bastards (Ronnie Gene Blevins), a character with whom Joe finds himself at constant odds.

Joe probably falls into the realm of raw-boned movies that, like their literary counterparts, might be dubbed "grit lit," say last year's Mud or 2010's Winter's Bone.

Those two movies were significantly better than Joe, but Joe can be viewed as a sign of progress for Cage, who last gave a great performance in 2009's little-seen Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

I hope the actor, who won an Oscar for 1996's Leaving Las Vegas, plans to make room for more of these kinds of roles in the future, if only to balance his work in movies such as the National Treasure films, another of which apparently looms.

Oh well, one always hopes.