Opening
ThisWeek

Begin Again

Opens Wed., July 2 at Guild 45th and 
other theaters. Rated R. 104 minutes.

What songwriter hasn’t thought of moving to New York in the hopes of being discovered? What aspiring musician hasn’t at least considered auditioning for The Voice, or fantasized about what it would be like to date Adam Levine and be friends with CeeLo?

As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists—and original score—this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Yet unlike Once, with its frumpy clothes, dingy digs, and less-than-perfect looks, Begin Again’s bohemia is too contrived, its songbook too forced, its cast too well-known and practiced.

Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo).

After some late-night beer-fueled banter, Dan and Greta team up to make a record. Rebuffed by Dan’s partner Saul (Mos Def), the pair resolves to go the DIY route—with financial assistance from Dan’s former client TroubleGum (CeeLo Green). Meanwhile we learn of Dan’s difficult separation from his family and Greta’s struggles with Kohl.

Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall.

The film becomes too much the glossy, magazine-cover fantasy: Where in the known world would you find CeeLo, Levine, and Mos Def—who comes around in the end—all banking on one unproven songwriter’s raw talent? While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work—not simple luck, as is the case here. Gwendolyn Elliott

Hellion

Runs Fri., July 4–Thurs., July 10 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 109 minutes.

Although much of Hellion, set in southeast Texas, feels off-the-shelf and familiar, debut writer/director Kat Candler isn’t one to provide easy salvation for her characters. The situation here is very much post-recession, with a family struggling against forces large and small. Recently widowed Hollis (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) insists on repairing the family’s storm-ruined beach house home near Galveston, even though it’s obviously doomed to foreclosure. Meanwhile back home, his two sons are unsupervised and running wild: 10-year-old Wes and, particularly, the budding 13-year-old delinquent Jacob (Josh Wiggins), who’s fond of setting fires, skipping school, talking back, and riding motorcycles. Trying to intervene, but gently, is Aunt Pam (Juliette Lewis, once the hellion herself, refreshingly cast against type).

How did the mom die? That’s one of those annoying, looming secrets that Candler leaves to the end to answer (and it turns out not to matter very much). Her treatment of the Wilson family is more a sociological case study than a nuanced portrait. Everyone’s a predictable type, and the story similarly hews to template. Naturally Jacob is acting out, owing to grief and an absent father. And of course Child Protective Services comes calling. Aunt Pam swoops down for the younger boy, and a remorseful Hollis weeps manly tears in private. And, midway through the movie, one of Jacob’s pack members produces a stolen handgun—which we know must be fatefully fired in the third act.

Candler’s Hellion has the misfortune of following two much better stories about at-risk boys in the South: the recent Joe and last year’s My Name Is Mud (whose director, Jeff Nichols, helped produce Hellion). If it lacks their artfulness, this movie does get the blighted textures exactly right. The Wilsons are a family slipping ineluctably out of the middle class, with empty kitchen shelves, broken-down cars, and overtaxed parents (if they’re home at all). That decline drives Hollis to despair (and the bottle), while Jacob seems only to be gathering rage. Here’s a post-millennial kid bound for the Army, jail, or worse. There are no resources for him and his family, of course, because this is low-tax, low-service Texas, where there are plenty of good jobs in the prison industry.

In one memorable scene, Jacob and his pals smash shaken-up soda bottles with a baseball bat, surprised by the strength of their anger. They’ve got the green diamond to themselves—have no teams been organized? Are there no dads left to coach?—with a giant gas plant hissing indifferently in the background. Their urge to destroy echoes the socioeconomic wreckage around them. These kids are your future, Candler is saying, and don’t be surprised when they come creeping into your house at night with a gun. Brian Miller

Korengal

Opens Fri., July 4 at Varsity. 
Rated R. 84 minutes.

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington came to SIFF 2010 with their acclaimed war doc Restrepo, which they filmed at great personal risk at a forward U.S. military outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Those events were over two years past when we spoke; and the U.S. had just then withdrawn forces from the Korengal, to Junger’s dismay. Since then, further plans have been announced to withdraw all our troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. Also during the interim, Hetherington was killed while covering Libya’s civil war. (Junger’s tribute, Which Way Is the Frontline From Here, played on HBO last year.)

So how is it that we are back in the Korengal with the same motley assortment of soldiers, the same Taliban firing at them, the same patrols and pastimes, the same boredom and complaints, the same hilltop quagmire as before? Essentially because Junger—and this is not to impugn his motives—had plenty of footage remaining, and he got talked into it. And there are worse reasons for making a movie. Back in ’10, Junger had also written a companion book, War, about the lure of combat to men. This time around he has less to say. And the soldiers essentially say the same things.

After finishing his tour, “I’d rather be there than here,” one nostalgic ex-soldier declares. Another, while at Restrepo, envisions it as a ski resort: “This place could be sports heaven, if they’d just stop shooting at us.” Of their mission to draw fire, says a soldier safely back in Italy, “We were definitely bait.”

The problem here is that the geopolitical situation has changed too much for Junger since filming in 2007–08 (before Obama’s election). Now there’s Bowe Bergdahl, the VA scandal, the recent elections in Afghanistan, and the new Republican fantasy that we ought to be putting more boots on the ground there and in Iraq, not less. We need to be looking ahead at this point, not back. Junger and Hetherington got some invaluably candid post-combat confessions from these young soldiers; but where are they today, six years later? Working at Walmart? Re-enlisted? On drugs? Married and coaching pee-wee soccer teams in the suburbs? How have these men been changed by a war that was mostly pointless and—after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden—inconclusive?

Culled from the archives, Korengal isn’t exactly a failure of journalism. It’s merely a footnote to a superior, then-timely film. But there’s little reason to see it today.

(Note: Korengal veterans Jeffrey Thompson and Damon Wilson are scheduled to appear with current soldier Elliot Alcantara on Friday. Congressman Jim McDermott is scheduled to appear with Vietnam vet and author Karl Marlante on Saturday. See landmarktheaters.com for details.) Brian Miller

PLife Itself

Opens Fri., July 4 at Harvard Exit. 
Not rated. 116 minutes.

For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade—he died in April 2013—Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. Cancer altered his appearance and robbed him of the ability to speak and eat, but he was unleashed as a writer. Those last years—and his embrace of blogging and Twitter—steered him into feisty agitprop and mellow memory-writing (he published his memoir Life Itself in 2011).

This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James—whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed—had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The character we knew from the TV show (it had a lot of different titles) is right there: Before submitting to a brief but uncomfortable hospital procedure and needing some distraction/solace, Ebert insists on having “Reelin’ in the Years” play on his laptop for the duration. To the end, the man had a sense of art as a transforming element.

The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Although Siskel died in 1999, other observers are around to testify to the mutual dislike that eventually turned into a complex kind of closeness. (Whether or not you liked them as critics, there was something exhilarating about seeing people disagree so loudly in the cause of aesthetic passion.) Among the fascinating nuggets that emerge is Siskel’s longtime fear that Ebert would take another offer and leave the show; he was thrilled when Ebert married (at 50), because the demands of family and mortgages would tie his partner down.

Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. As for the people onscreen who keep asking how Ebert could possibly have written the screenplay to the 1970 Russ Meyer sexfest Beyond the Valley of the Dolls : Folks, you’re really not paying attention. Robert Horton

Tammy

Opens Wed., July 2 at Sundance and 
other theaters. Rated R. 96 minutes.

Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone (the talented comic actor who played the air marshal in Bridesmaids), and he directed. The movie gets a mixed grade, because it doesn’t answer the central question about her talent: Can McCarthy go beyond antic co-starring roles and carry a movie as the sole lead?

Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet.

Tammy does perk to life when McCarthy gets to play her signature scenes: charged situations featuring odd people, with enough space for her non sequiturs and improvisations. The early scene in which she’s fired is a dandy—Falcone plays her boss, a man whose heavy perspiration Tammy labels “medical.” She later robs a fast-food outlet, in an extended and funny scene played with a bag over her head. (You know a performer has defined her comic persona when she scores big laughs with her face covered.)

Occasionally McCarthy manages to make even a raunchy one-liner ring true, as when she aggressively and prematurely kisses Duplass and he backs her off: “I don’t want your tongue down my throat.” Her reply—“Where do you want it?”—is offered lewdly but also with a weird kind of innocence that catches something truly sad about the character. Of course the problem is that Tammy’s so extreme she’d be unbearably pathetic if taken straight. The movie can’t handle that, so—while McCarthy remains an interesting test case for defining a leading lady in Hollywood—this one’s a misfire. Robert Horton

E

film@seattleweekly.com