'Church & State'

One of the biggest surprises people in the state of Utah ever got came on Dec. 20, 2013, when a federal judge ruled that an amendment to the state’s constitution — defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, no exceptions — violated the U.S. Constitution.

That afternoon, LGBT couples in Utah suddenly realized that they could be married legally. So dozens of them high-tailed it to the Salt Lake County Clerk’s office to get hitched while they still could.

How this moment — one that left national pundits picking their jaws off the floor (Rachel Maddow, for one, couldn’t believe it would happen “in freakin’ Utah”) — came to pass is chronicled in an absorbing new documentary, “Church & State.”

It’s difficult for me, a Salt Lake City resident, to gauge how well the documentary will play for an audience who doesn’t live in Utah — because I watched much of the story unfold in real time. (Full disclosure: I also know some of the people involved in the film. The movie’s story consultant, Jennifer Dobner, used to be a colleague at The Salt Lake Tribune, where I work. And the movie’s producer, James Huntsman, is the brother of Paul Huntsman, the Tribune’s publisher and my boss.)

But for a local, “Church & State” spins a good yarn, giving depth and correcting some misconceptions about the case — and providing context about the influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that infuses everything in Utah.

The movie begins with Mark Lawrence, an irascible gay activist who fought not only that Mormon influence but national LGBT organizations to mount a legal challenge to Utah’s Amendment 3. Lawrence talks about being on the sidelines during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and how he didn’t want to let others do the fighting this time.

Lawrence and his group, Restore Our Humanity, tried to raise money to hire a lawyer to start a case against Amendment 3. He found Peggy Tomsic, a sharp and tenacious litigator who also is a lesbian, raising an adopted son with her partner. Tomsic and her law firm took the case, and found three couples to be plaintiffs. 

The case became known as Kitchen v. Herbert. Derek Kitchen and Moudi Sbeity, who run a Middle Eastern foods company, were two of the six plaintiffs. (Kitchen later became a city councilman in Salt Lake City, and is now running for a seat in the Utah Senate.) Herbert is Gary Herbert, then and now the governor of Utah.

One of the running themes of “Church & State” is how the Mormon influence on Utah’s government not only led to the passage of Amendment 3, but also how the arrogance of the state’s lawyers hastened the ruling that undid it. An example of the state’s overconfidence: The lawyers for the Utah Attorney General’s office neglected to write up a motion asking for a stay of the judge’s ruling in case they lost. By the time they did, 17 days later, hundreds of Utah LGBT couples were already married, further complicating the case.

Directors Holly Tuckett and Kendall Wilcox synthesize a wealth of information about the case proper and Utah culture in general, taken from interviews and on-the-scene footage, into a cohesive narrative. They do so by shining a light on Lawrence, who became a forgotten hero and a bit of a pariah as his uncompromising temperament led to a rift among the principals. “Church & State” is an engaging look at justice winning out over prejudice, and the ripples that can spread from a single act of defiance.

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★★★ (out of four)

‘Church & State’

Opens Friday, July 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 84 minutes.

'The Night Eats the World'

A psychological study in the cloak of a zombie movie, the French-made “The Night Eats the World” is an engrossing little tale of what isolation and impending doom do to the mind.

The Danish actor Anders Danielsen Lie stars as Sam, a Parisian who just wants to get his tapes back from his ex-girlfriend, Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz). He goes to her apartment, where a party is underway, and she tells him to go into a back room to wait for her. He falls asleep there — and when he wakes up, he finds the walls splattered in blood, and hordes of zombies are in the streets and the stairwells.

Sam manages to lock up the doors and barricade himself from the living dead, who only attack when they see movement or hear loud noises. So Sam learns to be stealthy, as he forages for supplies from the other apartments in the building, and figures out how long he can hold out before having to evacuate.

Director Dominique Rocher, who adapted Pit Agarmen’s novel with co-writers Jérémie Guez and Guillaume Lemans, focuses much of the action on the different ways Sam learns to survive the boredom and isolation of his makeshift fortress. Activities include turning kitchen supplies into percussion instruments and shooting a paintball gun at zombies in the street. 

Sam also traps a zombie, formerly a professor who lived in the building, in the elevator — and he becomes the equivalent of the volleyball in “Cast Away,” something that Sam can talk to and maintain his sanity. The elevator zombie is portrayed expertly by the great French actor Denis Levant (“Holy Motors”). 

Late in the film, Sam gets an unexpected visitor (played by Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani), but by then Sam can’t necessarily trust his sanity. (Despite the French setting and director, and the international cast, the movie is in English.)

Danielsen Lie, who played a drug addict in Joachim Trier’s 2011 drama “Oslo, August 31,” has the tricky job of keeping our interest for nearly an hour by himself. His performance encapsulates the range of Sam’s emotions, from existential terror to random boredom, and holds our attention. “The Night Eats the World” isn’t above borrowing from other zombie movies — the frenzy of “28 Days Later” here, the dark humor of “Shaun of the Dead” there — but it does so in an engaging way.

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★★★ (out of four)

‘The Night Eats the World’

Opens on Friday, July 13, at selected theaters — including the Tower Theatre in Salt Lake City. Not rated, but probably R for violence and gore. Running time: 90 minutes.

'Sorry to Bother You'

Peel back the surface of a lot of great comedies and you’ll find a core of righteous anger — whether it’s the war cries behind “Duck Soup,” the racial tension within “Blazing Saddles,” the distrust of religious fervor in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” or the political cynicism of “Wag the Dog.”

Add to that list Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You,” a screaming satirical missile aimed at the heart of American capitalism and exploitation.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Leave No Trace'

In the three feature films she has made in the last 14 years, director Debra Granik has excelled at creating tight, character-driven dramas about individuals at the edge of society and the end of their ropes.

She did it with her 2004 debut, “Down to the Bone,” about a suburban mom trying to maintain her life amid a wicked cocaine addiction. She did it again with “Winter’s Bone” (2010), about a Kentucky teen trying to keep her family together while hunting down her drug-dealer father. And now she does it, in beautifully rendered strokes, in the father-daughter drama “Leave No Trace.”

Adapting Salt Lake City-born author Peter Rock’s “My Abandonment,” “Leave No Trace” begins with Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), his 13-year-old daughter, camping in the woods. It soon becomes clear that this isn’t some weekend adventure, but the way they live all the time — picking mushrooms, tending the campfire, and practicing being unseen to the human eye. It also becomes clear that their forest shelter is actually in a park, not too far from civilization in Oregon.

One day, park rangers and police find Will and Tom, and their forest idyll is over. Will is arrested, and both are treated to the county’s hospitality — until a kindly counselor (Dana Millican) sets them up with living quarters on a Christmas tree farm, with Will finding work for the farm’s owner (Jeff Kober). Tom tries to adapt to this new life, of 4H meetings and regular school hours, even though Will’s teaching has put her several grades above her age group. But Will wants to hit the road, outrunning demons about which Granik and writing partner Anne Rosellini need only drop hints.

Granik and her regular cinematographer, Michael McDonough, let the tranquil, but sometimes menacing, woods of Oregon infuse the film. The locations, starting in the wild but coming back to pre-fab suburbia, become a fever chart of Will’s melancholy — he’s at peace outdoors, restless in artificial light — and a battleground for Tom’s rapidly growing independence.

Foster (“Hell or High Water”) seems incapable of giving a bad performance — bad choices, maybe, like “Warcraft,” but never a bad performance. Here, he subtly conveys Will’s internal mental imbalance and his fierce determination to make right by his daughter.

But Granik’s other strength is in finding new talent — “Down to the Bone” was the first starring role for Vera Farmiga, and “Winter’s Bone” gave the world its first good look at Jennifer Lawrence — and she’s got a winner in McKenzie. The New Zealand native shows a vulnerability and a coltish spunk that grows as Tom emerges from her father’s shadow. McKenzie will be a name people remember, as  “Leave No Trace” will leave an indelible mark on audience’s memories.

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★★★1/2 (out of four)

‘Leave No Trace’

Opened June 29 in select markets, opens Friday, July 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City and the Megaplex Thanksgiving Point in Lehi. Rated PG for thematic material throughout. Running time: 109 minutes.

'Boundaries'

Shana Feste’s “Boundaries” found my last cinematic nerve and jumped up and down on it mercilessly.

It’s a shrill comedy about a dysfunctional family, made of characters one would cross the street to avoid if one encountered them in real life. Feste calls upon the oldest of tropes, the road movie, and deploys it in the most predictable laugh-cry-laugh-cry cycles possible. And she squanders two of the best actors we have, Vera Farmiga and the legendary Christopher Plummer.

Farmiga plays Laura, a trainwreck of a woman whose character is summed up in the literal metaphor that plays over the opening credits: She takes in stray dogs and cats, who have overrun her Seattle house and her life. She’s so messed up, she says right out, that she lies to her therapist about how messed up she is.

Aside from the many pets, Laura lives with her 14-year-old son Henry (Lewis MacDougall, from “A Monster Calls”). Henry quietly mocks his mom’s string of short-term boyfriends by drawing their portraits — always nude, based on his perception of their souls, and invariably, the guys’ “souls” have small penises. When Henry applies his art techniques to his teachers, he gets himself expelled from school.

The guy who causes Laura the most grief, though, is her father, Jack, played by Plummer. Jack, at 85, has a history as a con man, liar and petty criminal, and his unreliability is at the heart of Laura’s abandonment issues. When Jack is thrown out of another nursing home for illegal activities, namely growing marijuana in the tool shed, Laura is pressed into driving the old man from Seattle to Los Angeles, so he can live with Laura’s sister JoJo (Kristen Schaal).

Thus begins a road trip down the Pacific coast in Jack’s beat-up Rolls Royce — in this movie, even the car has to be eccentric — with Henry and several dogs in the back seat. What Laura doesn’t know is that Jack has stashed in the trunk about $200,000 worth of marijuana, which he plans to deliver to “customers” in Oregon and California along the way. Jack enlists Henry to be his “business partner,” and moviegoers can set their watches to the moment when this secret blows up in everyone’s faces.

If anything I have described above sounds the least bit pleasant or entertaining, I have failed as a critic and wordsmith. Feste (whose “Country Strong” is an underappreciated gem) saddles her cast — which briefly includes Christopher Lloyd, Bobby Cannavale and Peter Fonda — with more quirks than anyone should have to bear, and dialogue so riddled with cliches that it feels like a computer wrote it.

Worst of all, “Boundaries” gives Farmiga and Plummer, actors so talented and with screen personas that exude charm and intelligence, roles so grating that the viewer will want to slap them. They deserve so much better than what they get here, and so do audiences.

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‘Boundaries’

zero stars (out of four)

Opened June 22 in select cities; opens July 6 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City. Rated R for drug material, language, some sexual references and nude sketches. Running time: 104 minutes.

'Whitney'

There is the Whitney Houston we know from music videos, the model-thin singer with the soulful voice and the bright smile.

There is the Whitney Houston we know from tabloid headlines and reality television, battling addiction and spiraling out of control.

And there is the Whitney Houston of history, who charted more No. 1 singles than any woman ever, while blazing a trail for African-American artists to follow.

Director Kevin Macdonald ambitiously tries to capture all of these Whitney Houstons in his documentary, “Whitney,” and if he’s unsuccessful, he can lay blame at the people who didn’t want to talk about her.

Macdonald starts with the jarring juxtaposition between Houston’s sunny early hits, and the Reagan-era optimism they represent, and the unrest of the late ‘60s, which Houston witnessed first-hand as a little girl growing up in Newark, N.J. Houston’s refuge from the streets was music, singing in the church choir and driven by her mother, Cissy Houston, a longtime back-up singer to everyone from Aretha Franklin (Whitney’s godmother) to Elvis Presley. Whitney could also boast that her cousin was the singer Dionne Warwick.

Whitney’s musical career was pushed by Cissy’s ambition, and aided by her father, John Houston Jr., a Newark city administrator and political fixer. She soon signed with Arista Records, guided by the legendary Clive Davis, and her ‘80s stardom was nearly instantaneous. What the public didn’t see, according to Whitney’s brothers, was her hard-partying habits and her reliance on her best friend, Robyn Crawford.

The movie walks right up to the line of suggesting a more-than-platonic relationship between Whitney and Robyn, but backs away just as quickly. Crawford isn’t interviewed in the film, so we don’t hear her side of the story.

Silence is Macdonald’s enemy repeatedly through the documentary. Cissy Houston appears toward the beginning of the film, but talks only about Whitney’s church singing. Pop star Bobby Brown, Whitney’s husband for 14 tumultuous years, refused to discuss Whitney’s drug abuse even when Macdonald asks him point-blank. Their daughter, Bobbi Kristina, died in 2015, taking what she witnessed with her.

Macdonald — who won an Academy Award for his 1999 documentary “One Day in September,” and guided Forest Whitaker to an Oscar in “The Last King of Scotland” — has some success getting past the tabloid struggles to pinpoint the impact Whitney Houston had on the culture. 

For many, her best years were 1991 and 1992, when she wowed the nation with her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV, and made her movie debut opposite Kevin Costner in “The Bodyguard” — a movie that produced the mega-hit “I Will Always Love You.” The movie was particularly important to African-American audiences, as it pivots on an interracial love affair between Houston’s pop singer and Costner’s title character. (Houston only acted in three more movies: “Waiting to Exhale” and “The Preacher’s Wife” in the ‘90s, and a thwarted comeback role in “Sparkle” in 2012, the year she died.)

These high points in Houston’s career also reveal why “Whitney,” as a documentary, doesn’t have the same gut-punch impact that, for example, Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 film “Amy” does. “Amy” showed how Amy Winehouse mined her personal life, including her troubles with men and heroin, through her raw, confessional lyrics. Houston didn’t write her own music (the two songs that defined her in the ‘90s were penned by Francis Scott Key and Dolly Parton), and music was how she hid her problems from the world and herself.

Macdonald does provide some depth to our knowledge of Whitney Houston’s life — including a bombshell revelation about a childhood trauma — and tries to put her life and music into a broader context. Alas, “Whitney” leaves viewers with as many questions as answers, which may be exactly how the image-conscious Whitney Houston would have wanted it.

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★★1/2 (out of four)

‘Whitney’

Opens Friday, July 6, at theaters nationwide. Rated R for language and drug content. Running time: 120 minutes.

'Ant-Man and the Wasp'

The movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe contain multitudes, and can cover any genre: war movie (“Captain America: The First Avenger”), political thriller (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”), planet-hopping science fiction (the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies), fantasy (“Thor: The Dark World”) and even action comedy (“Thor: Ragnarok”).

What the newest entry in the franchise, “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” does is even more daring: It’s a mix of buddy comedy and romantic comedy, showcasing three strong women characters in a series known for boys playing with their toys.

Read the rest of the review at sltrib.com.

'Sicario: Day of the Soldado'

Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan revisits the murky world of Mexican drug cartels and American off-the-books lawmen in “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” an exercise in movie machismo that can’t hold up to the original.

Sheridan serves up a scenario that feels like it was adapted from a Trump rally speech: A link between the Mexican cartels, immigrants crossing the border, and extremist Muslim suicide bombers. After we see one suicide bomber cornered by U.S. Border Patrol agents while attempting to cross into the States, the movie shows four more bombers hitting a Kansas City grocery store — bringing terrorism to the heartland.

Enter Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), the grizzled CIA fixer from the first movie. He gets an off-the-books assignment is to set the cartels at each other’s throats, without the U.S. government’s fingerprints being seen. The Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) and Graver’s CIA boss (Catherine Keener) give him carte blanche to gather equipment and a crew — which includes his old partner Alejandro, the vengeance-seeking assassin, again played by Benicio Del Toro.

“You want to start a war with a king, kidnap a prince,” Graver says — or a princess. He launches a plan to abduct Isabel Reyes (Isabela Moner, from the last “Transformers” movie), the 16-year-old daughter of one of the cartel bosses.

Like other recent plans involving the U.S./Mexico border, this one isn’t thought through too well — and when it goes south, Graver and Alejandro are left with an impossible ethical dilemma. And, if there’s anything we learned from the first “Sicario,” it’s that these guys lost their moral compasses a long time ago.

That’s the essential problem with this sequel: It’s missing the moral high ground that Emily Blunt’s FBI agent character brought to the first movie. It’s also missing the melancholy dread director Denis Villeneuve unearthed in every tense moment. Here, Italian director Stefano Sollima, who overcompensates with a lethal dose of macho posing from Del Toro, Brolin and Elijah Rodriguez, who plays Miguel, a Mexican-American kid who gets drawn into the cartel’s business plan.

Sheridan — recently relocated to Utah to make the New West melodrama “Yellowstone” for the Paramount Network — seems to be caught in the sequel trap of trying to outdo the predecessor, but losing the handle on what made it special. The sense of place that Sheridan invests in his best scripts (like “Hell or High Water” or “Wind River”) is absent, replaced by anonymous U.S. military warehouses and a vaguely stereotyped Mexico.

There are a few intriguing moments, mostly between Del Toro and Moner. But they are lost in a stew of blood, testosterone, repellent politics and sketchy plotting that leave “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” far behind its more thought-provoking predecessor.

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★★ (out of four)

'Sicario: Day of the Soldado'

Opens in theaters everywhere June 29, 2018. Rated R for strong violence, bloody images and language. 122 minutes.