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The Equalizer

Opens Fri., Sept. 26 at Sundance Cinemas 
and other theaters. Rated R. 128 minutes.

Yes, this is a movie nominally inspired by the old ’80s TV show. And yes, it’s essentially a Liam Neeson vehicle instead starring Denzel Washington as a grumpy old samaritan/vigilante/knight errant who defends the weak and defeats the bad guys. It is, down to the R rating and inevitable shot of Washington striding in slo-mo away from an exploding orange fireball (but never looking back, because that is the law with exploding orange fireballs), exactly what you expect. There are no surprises, precisely as the intended audience desires. And for that reason, only the slow first 30 minutes hold any interest, because we’re not sure where Washington and director Antoine Fuqua—who helped him earn an Oscar for Training Day—are headed.

The initial joke is that punctilious old widower McCall lives in a tidy Boston apartment and goes to work each day—by bus, like Jack Reacher—to a big-box store called Home Mart. His colleagues love him, but he’s a polite, affable mystery. He reads a lot, though. And at the late-night diner where he befriends a teenage Russian hooker (Chloe Grace Moretz), he conspicuously mentions that his reading list includes The Old Man and the Sea and Don Quixote. This is the kind of movie where everyone’s motives are precisely spelled out, where the bad guys are naturally Russian mobsters—Marton Csokas playing their tattooed chief enforcer—who sneer when McCall enters their den wearing comfortable New Balance running shoes and dad jeans, intending to buy the hooker’s freedom.

Briefly there’s some tension to The Equalizer, some uncertainty: Is McCall, like Don Quixote, a deluded nutcase? Is his rescue plan some kind of Walter Mitty fantasy? I’m giving nothing away to say that it’s not—because, well, the TV commercials and the exploding orange fireball. After that first encounter, the movie runs entirely according to form. McCall reveals himself to be a kind of Jason Bourne with an AARP card. And, because he works in a hardware store, you know where the final showdown will take place. Excuse me, Mr. McCall, but in which aisle could I find a nail gun? Brian

Miller

Hector and the 
Search for Happiness

Opens Fri., Sept. 26 at Seven Gables. 
Rated R. 114 minutes.

The title of this whimsical though ultimately conventional quest-com spells it out for you. (Though the underlying 2003 French novel spelled it differently.) Hector (Simon Pegg) is an upright British shrink with a committed girlfriend named Clara (Rosamund Pike), amusingly eccentric patients, and a very neat apartment. He’s also totally repressed and compartmentalized, the kind of guy who labels his sock drawer and flies model airplanes. What he needs is an adventure, very much like Tintin, so he embarks on a world tour to find out what makes people happy. (The final answer will be Clara, but you knew that already.)

Hector’s travels take him to Shanghai, the Himalayas, Africa, and Los Angeles. En route he meets a gruff business tycoon (Stellan Skarsgård), a gorgeous Chinese woman (Ming Zhou), a Tibetan monk, a drug lord (Jean Reno), an old flame (Toni Collette), and a sage neuroscientist (Christopher Plummer). There’s a lot of talent and international color here, and director Peter Chelsom (Hear My Song, Shall We Dance?) knows how to use both quite agreeably. Hector is nothing if not agreeable—to a fault, really—though it’s impossible to hate.

Chelsom keeps the mood insistently light (borrowing some handmade notions from Michel Gondry), and Pegg plays Hector with no more depth than this parable requires. Reality only intrudes during an ugly African kidnapping episode, where Hector shows his character by befriending the rat who shares his cell. It’s that kind of movie. Hector is a nice guy, and everyone repeatedly tells him so along the way. His trip is as much about self-validation—from nice to nicer—as it is a journey toward enlightenment. Back home, we can understand why impatient Clara keeps shutting off their Skype chats: So much virtue can be a bore. Come to think of it, too much Hector can be a bore, but that’s where Plummer’s scientist and his MRI machine finally intervene.

Before it chokes on its cloying aphorisms and sentiment, however, Hector does include a kernel of hard truth. When Skarsgård’s mogul ponders what, after a few hundred more million, he might do to be happy in retirement, he finally gives Hector this advice: “Don’t retire.” Plummer says the same thing later, only in greeting-card form. Brian Miller

Jimi: All Is by My Side

Opens Fri., Sept. 26 at Sundance Cinemas and Pacific Place. Rated R. 118 minutes.

To its credit, this is an inconclusive, narrowly focused biopic sure to confound fans of Jimi Hendrix. It forgoes his Seattle origins (but for a phone call) and stops short of his global breakthrough at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. John Ridley’s movie mostly takes place in a few smoky clubs and rooms in New York and London. Hendrix himself flits through these rooms like an enigmatic wisp, only a rumor of greatness, a guy who refuses to be pinned down (or to love just one bird—even the woman who secures his big break). He’s an ingrate and maybe a bastard. He’s mercurial, diffident, soft-spoken—nothing like his confident stage presence, which exists more in film than living memory.

You want Hendrix the rock god? There are the later albums for that, albums with the hits that Ridley—who recently won an Oscar for writing 12 Years a Slave—couldn’t license from the Hendrix estate. Instead we get the groping, tentative progress toward guitar-hero status. Underconfident Jimi is still going by Jimmy James, a mere backup player, when Linda Keith (Imogen Poots) talent-spots him in a New York club. She’s a model and the girlfriend of Keith Richards (Ridley has a lot of fun with this), very connected, and a blues connoisseur. Hendrix (Andre Benjamin) is flattered by the attention but wary of the limelight. He’s resistant to her suggestion that he sell himself, meaning put forth a bold stage persona—be a frontman who sings—unlike his shy nature. Go to London? he asks. That’s like going to the moon. But she’s got money, and he soon obtains a passport.

The era and suggested locations here (actually Ireland) recall the recent Inside Llewyn Davis. Hendrix plainly idolizes Dylan, as everyone did, and the movie buzzes along enjoyably with New Wave cutting and rambling conversational turns. (All the hippie talk, only 50 years old, now sounds like a lost language.) Over in London, too, it’s a time of new freedom and possibility: Hendrix likes talking about science fiction (he’s a reader) and listens with polite skepticism when a black radical (Ruth Negga) lectures him to be more militant—not to please the Lindas of this world.

Yet Hendrix remains fundamentally ambivalent to his many advisors (Linda gets him a manager and even introduces him to Andrew Loog Oldham). What kind of music should he play? What’s his musical identity—blues or rock? “I don’t want to get caught up in those labels,” he says. Hendrix seems to get along only with his fellow musicians; and the movie’s last third shows that he’s got some ugly issues with women. (Hayley Atwell plays Kathy, who becomes Linda’s rival.) Ridley shows us the good and the bad in Hendrix, the charmer and the brooder, but still one has to ask: If he’s unpacking the myth, putting the microscope to this one short period, what does he hope to reveal? Was playing guitar the most or the least interesting thing about Hendrix? Ridley can’t seem to find a position on that. Nor can the finely nuanced Benjamin, because of the script, get a lock on his elusive character. It’s frustrating, but it’s also a rather bold approach to the biopic genre. Here is a man who can’t be captured or defined, only suggested. Brian Miller

K2: Siren of the Himalayas

Runs Fri., Sept. 26–Sun., Sept. 28 at 
SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 75 minutes.

At any given backyard barbecue, you’ll meet scores of Northwest climbers who’ve done Rainier and McKinley, some who’ve bagged Everest, but only a handful who’ve been up K2. The daunting weather, remote location (in northwest Pakistan, very much a no-go area after 9/11), and death-to-summit ratio make it a grim trophy indeed. It’s far safer to go for Everest (or the Seven Summits—the high points on each continent) than chance a trip to the Karakoram. Mountaineers who flock to see this documentary by Dave Ohlson already know this, of course, and the film mostly traverses familiar ground.

Ohlson’s endeavor began in 2009, the year after icefall killed 11 on K2 and the centennial of the Duke of Abruzzi’s first attempt to climb it. The latter expedition’s movie footage and stills (by the great Vittorio Sella) are really the selling point here. Ohlson and the four climbers he profiles obviously respect that history, but it’s also padding for a project that clearly sat on the shelf too long. After the terrifying drive along crumbling roads, the long trek up the Baltoro Glacier, then the arduous process of setting fixed lines and camps for the summit push, all the HD footage and modern gear (right down to the satellite phones and espresso makers) gives you a sense of how much harder and more daring the Duke’s uncharted effort was in its day. A separate and more comprehensive documentary on that subject would’ve been a more fruitful approach for this first-time filmmaker. (He was assisted in the edit, entirely professional, by local director/producer Jason Reid.)

“The mountain looked sinister,” says one of the Duke’s journal entries (read aloud with an Italian accent), and it’s still infrequently climbed for that reason. Or as local mountaineering legend Ed Viesturs later described it, after pushing to the summit despite avalanche conditions (instead of turning around), “That was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my climbing career.” Brian Miller

PLast Weekend

Opens Fri., Sept. 26 at Sundance 
Cinemas. Not rated. 94 minutes.

Tom Dolby’s quiet dramedy starts as real-estate porn: shots of a mini-manor, with interiors that would make Martha Stewart moan with envy, set on a sparkling lakeshore (Tahoe, as it happens) for which most state tourism boards would sell their grandma. It morphs, gently as a sunset, into something like an A.R. Gurney play transposed west—an autumnal examination of upper-middle-class mores in the face of bittersweet change.

As her family gathers here over Labor Day weekend, as they have forever, Celia (Patricia Clarkson) is secretly mulling whether to sell the site of so much history. (The spoiler’s in the title.) This is only one secret in the web of possible emotional flashpoints connecting her, her husband, her two adult sons, their significant others, and a few other friends. (The characters include a TV actress played adorably by Jayma Mays, a sort of baby Heather Graham; also appearing are old pros Judith Light and Mary Kay Place in tiny roles that’ll leave you yearning to see more of them.)

This family’s usual mode of communication is unwitting (or are they?) put-downs wrapped in gentility; Last Weekend ’s subtext is how wealth becomes a cozy bubble that enables you not to have to consider whether your words sting. Clarkson, of course, from The Station Agent to Six Feet Under to Far From Heaven, can ring changes on subtly observed brittleness like no one else. Not everyone in the cast handles so deftly Dolby’s slightly pat script; they’re not completely able to build real people out of those characters given only plotlines in lieu of personalities. But this is Clarkson’s movie. They’re moons around her neurotic planet, all of whom raise the question: Does money make you this way, or does it merely let you get away with it? Gavin Borchert

The Notebook

Opens Fri., Sept. 26 at Sundance. 
Rated R. 104 minutes.

Nothing to do with Nicholas Sparks, this adaptation of a 1986 novel by Hungarian writer Agota Kristof is very much a World War II movie. More than that, however, it’s a parable of Europe about to be brutally divided in two—a post-World War II movie as well. Unnamed twin boys (Laszlo and Andras Gyeman), about 13, are sent from Budapest to stay with a hostile grandmother known as “the witch” (ogre is more like it.) She’s a gruff peasant built like a tree stump, pretending to be poor but keeping a secret trove of jewels and food (the latter she never shares with the boys, who are made to work for their gruel and bread). In outline, this Notebook is almost a fairy tale, albeit one filled with Nazis, collaborators, famine, dropping bombs, and the smoke from a nearby concentration camp.

In such a (mostly) heartless environment, the boys grow up fast and according to a peculiar moral code. Their father, a soldier sent to the front, gave them a notebook to record the objective truth of their dire situation. (Was he a philosopher? We never learn.) The boys, like little proteges of Nietzsche, embrace his lesson plan with a vengeance. They learn to steal and manipulate (between math and Bible studies), to condition their bodies to withstand pain and hunger, to depend on no one but themselves, to cast aside almost all notions of human attachment. In short, they’re creatures formed by the horror and cruelty of war: adaptable survivors, possibly monsters. (However, they do show feelings for a cleft-lipped village girl, played by Orsolya Toth; a Jewish cobbler; and finally the grandmother, actress Piroska Molnar. To their parents they extend less forgiveness.)

Innocence colliding with wartime atrocity is, naturally, an old theme in European cinema. One thinks of Forbidden Games here, of The Tin Drum and Europa Europa, only these two lads are self-made sociopaths. You can’t entirely blame the war for their conduct; though in director Janos Szasz’s version of the novel, the parents are both culpable and cursorily sketched. It’s axiomatic that war only brings out the worst in people, but where is the twin axiom that war also brings out the best in people? The Notebook has no interest in those pages. Its chronicle of cruelty and dehumanization grows wearying, even if we know it’s prophetic. By the war’s end (and the arrival of the Communists), you’re not sure the boys’ survival is a good thing. On whichever side of the Iron Curtain they end up, both sides lose. Brian Miller

Take Me to the River

Opens Fri., Sept. 26 at Varsity.
Not rated. 95 minutes.

The talent on display in this music doc is undeniable. Filmed in the storied studios of Memphis, it features the studio musicians and stars who helped define the blues and soul sounds of the ’60s and ’70s. And there is enough history here, both musical and social, to fill an entire Ken Burns documentary series, never mind the Roosevelts.

Still, this first directorial effort from Grammy-nominated record producer Martin Shore underserves its subjects, no matter how much he evidently loves them. Take Me to the River is simply too broad, lacking any sort of thesis or narrative thread. In opening narration (by actor Terrence Howard) about the Mississippi Delta and its astounding music history, we’re told, “Out of nowhere, hits began to spring from this integrated utopia.” That just isn’t true. And while we hear some telling anecdotes and see some rare archival footage cut among current performances (some good, some forgettable), the sum here is far less than its parts.

This is mostly due to the film’s structure, built around the the recording of a “historical” album with Memphis players old and young. (It’s a promo flick, in other words.) The doc is segmented into individual sessions, which at times shine with rousing performances from the likes of Charlie Musselwhite and Mavis Staples. But, early on at least, the younger artists get in the way of a film that wants to be focused on history. Booker T. Jones is, naturally, the first artist we meet, yet his considerable skills are overshadowed by collaborator Al Kapone’s. The latter’s verse seems dashed off, even artless—as when he raps about riding to the studio in Booker T’s van. Worse is the mismatch between R&B heavyweight Otis Clay and a child rapper named Lil’ P-nut. While Clay is busting a gut over lost love, P-nut is stealing the spotlight with novelty. When asked if he can relate to what Clay is singing, P-nut imparts that he doesn’t feel that strongly about women, but “I can’t live without toys.”

Thankfully those early album sessions are the most cringeworthy (the telltale sign of a rookie filmmaker), and later collabs with Frayser Boy (“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”) and Snoop Dogg are more respectful. But those who can stomach the initial awkwardness are also rewarded with moving historical explorations, particularly meditations on the Civil Rights movement, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the downfall of Stax Records. It is in these tantalizing, lucid moments that the story of Memphis music begins to unfold. Then the film moves on to the next track. Mark Baumgarten

P20,000 Days on Earth

Runs Fri., Sept. 26–Thurs., Oct. 2 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 97 minutes.

As the title indicates, this quasi-documentary starts on its protagonist’s 20,000th day on this planet. That protagonist is Nick Cave and—as the clever title sequence shows in flickering old video from childhood to his days as a frenetic frontman for The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds—those days have been full and fiery.

After that vivid prologue, Cave awakes on a mundane note in his Brighton bedroom. “I wake, I write, I eat, I write,” he says in his disquieting drawl. Yet as an equal partner in the project with filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, he divulges only so much about himself: Neither his life story nor his philosophy are easily understood. Rather, this is both a biographical sketch and a fanciful promotional art film, which documents the recording and live performance of 2013’s acclaimed Push the Sky Away. Throughout, Cave maintains his deadpan, oblique sensibility.

It’s a fresh, lyrical, and very welcome take on the well-worn rock-doc genre. 20,000 Days even puts Cave on the therapist’s couch to tease out his story. During this extended scene—shot, like the entire film, in a flattering and dramatic light that gives Cave’s universe a fittingly crisp and sinister air—we learn some secrets (unless they’re more of Cave’s fictions). He tells of his earliest sexual experience, his dalliance with cross-dressing, and the looming and loving presence of his father, who died when Cave was young. Asked what he most fears, he replies, “Losing my memory”—and that’s likely the film’s most important notion: The past informs all his writing.

Later, Cave enters a chamber of memory, his own personal archive where old photos and journals—handled with forceps and gloves—are examined, allowing him to reminisce about past band members and loves, to opine more broadly about the meaning of it all.

His growling narration dominates the film, and Cave is full of well-wrought philosophical axioms. “To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all,” he says, “because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it.” Beyond such aphorisms and snippets of memory, viewers may be frustrated by the lack of traditional biography here. But they will never forget this dazzling, dark film. Mark Baumgarten

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