'Becoming Nobody'

When one becomes frustrated with one’s guru, the reason usually circles back to the person asking the questions — and having outsized expectations about the answers, expectations the guru has no obligation to fulfill. 

That’s a lesson the spiritual teacher Ram Dass learned from his guru. It’s one the filmmaker Jamie Catto learns from Ram Dass, and it’s one anyone seeing Catto’s documentary about Ram Dass, “Becoming Nobody,” will learn as they watch.

Catto’s documentary handles the basics of biography, of Dass started his life as Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist and author looking for ways to expand his mind. His first experience was when Timothy Leary, the famed advocate for hallucinogenics, first gave Alpert psilocybin. From then on, as Ram Dass describes in lectures preserved in his archives, he tried all manner of chemicals to replicate that high — but every time, he came back down.

On a trip to India, Alpert finally met someone “who never came back down.” That man, Neem Karoli Baba — whom Ram Dass calls “Maharaj-ji” — became his teacher, and gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning “servant of God.” Ram Dass brought Maharaj-ji’s message to America, and became a leading figure of the counterculture movement.

Catto doesn’t give more than a brief synopsis of Ram Dass’ biography. More prevalent here are the reams of footage of Ram Dass’ many years giving lectures and teaching his philosophy.

He talks of acceptance of what life brings, noting the Hindu belief that “you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you.” He talks of unconditional love, and how so few of us are able to avoid putting conditions on it. He talks of how people strive to become somebody in this world, but that “the game is … about becoming nobody.”

It’s all very deep, and one probably needs to be in the right frame of mind to take it all in. A viewer might wish Catto was doing more to help, like augmenting Ram Dass’ words with images that could broaden one’s understanding of them. On that level, “Becoming Nobody” is a movie that works better as an audiobook.

Catto’s main role is to interview Ram Dass now, living in Maui, in his 80s. Ram Dass appears quite frail, and talks about being ready for death — a topic he has studied for decades, in his hospice work helping others prepare for death. Even in his suffering, though, Ram Dass says he has found a kind of grace that helps him understand what’s going to happen next.

Catto’s interviews, unfortunately, boil down to the filmmaker spouting his opinion about some part of Ram Dass’ philosophy, only to have Ram Dass — like the psychologist he once was — reply something akin to “Is that what you think it means?”

One might hope, watching “Becoming Nobody,” that Ram Dass would berate Catto for his ignorance, like Marshall McLuhan telling the blowhard in “Annie Hall” that “you know nothing of my work.” But Ram Dass instead smiles, displaying that unconditional love toward his acolyte, which may be the point of it all anyway.

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‘Becoming Nobody’

★★1/2

Opened September 6 in select cities; opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and some sexual content. Running time: 82 minutes.

'Maleficent: Mistress of Evil'

If giving The Joker a sympathetic backstory was tough, that’s nothing to what Disney has been doing for the past five years with Maleficent, the satanic sorceress who put Sleeping Beauty under.

First in “Maleficent” (2014) and now in a daring and sometimes dark sequel, “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” the dragon lady with the black horns dances on the line between the light and the dark — and, thanks to star Angelina Jolie, makes each step captivating.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'The Addams Family'

Considering how often it’s been done — including a TV series in the 1960s and two movies in the early ′90s — making another version of “The Addams Family” shouldn’t be that hard.

Somehow, though, directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan miss the mark, with a rendition of Charles Addams’ macabre characters that’s the movie equivalent of safe-and-sane fireworks: harmless for the kiddies, but with no sizzle.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Gemini Man'

Every superhero eventually faces his or her doppelgänger — even Will Smith, who confronts himself in the action-packed but narratively sketchy thriller “Gemini Man.”

Meeting one’s double is a great storytelling device, because it allows the main character to muse on the roads not taken, the what-ifs of one’s life — as well as letting the actor ham it up by playing variations on the character. Throw in the new technological wonders of de-aging, something such cool actors as Samuel Jackson (in “Captain Marvel”) and Robert De Niro (in “The Irishman”) have tried, and the lure is irresistible for a star like Smith.

Here, Smith plays Henry Brogan, an assassin who terminates the people the U.S. government tells him to terminate. (There’s always a euphemism, and the one here is so good I won’t spoil it.) But, at age 51 and with 72 kills to his credit, Henry tells his boss, Del (Ralph Brown), he’s going to retire to a fishing boat in Georgia.

What Henry doesn’t know at first is that the grad student now managing the marina is really a Defense Intelligence Agency minder, Dani Zakarewski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), assigned to run surveillance on Henry. The higher-ups suspect Harry’s motives for retiring, especially when he meets an old military buddy, Jack (Douglas Hodge), who knows a big secret and shares a bit of it with Henry.

Soon commandos are showing up trying to kill Henry, who drags Dani along to find someone to trust — namely, another military buddy, Baron (Benedict Wong), a hotshot pilot with a home in Cartagena, Colombia.

It’s there that Clay Verris (Clive Owen), a shady military contractor, unleashes the ultimate assassin to take down Henry. If you’ve seen any of the movie’s advertising, you know that this assassin is a 23-year-old clone of Henry, who has all of Henry’s fighting skills and instincts — but not, as yet, his demons.

Director Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) stages some hellacious action sequences. Take, as just one example, that first encounter in Cartagena, which builds gradually from a multi-leveled courtyard shootout to a high-speed motorcycle chase to a mano-a-mano battle where the younger Will Smith is pretty much throwing motorcycles at the older Will Smith. (Lee works a lot of mirrors and reflective surfaces into the scene, to drive home the theme of duality.)

Lee, continuing a habit that started with “Life of Pi” and continued with “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” has been fascinated with the technical side of filmmaking — like still using high frame rates (in this case, 120 frames as opposed to the normal 24) to heighten the crispness of the image. 

But Lee seems, like fellow director Robert Zemeckis, to embrace the high-tech aspects of filmmaking while neglecting the narrative problems. And there are problems aplenty in this tag-teamed script — credited to Darren Lemke (“Goosebumps”), David Benioff (“Game of Thrones”) and Billy Ray (“Captain Phillips”) — in terms of character motivations and dumbed-down plot exposition, not to mention an idiotic late-inning twist. But as long as it looks spectacular, and Smith looks cool even when he’s literally beside himself, nothing else matters, does it? 

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‘Gemini Man’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence and action throughout, and brief strong language. Running time: 117 minutes.

'Lucy in the Sky'

You can’t blame Noah Hawley for trying, for wanting to cram every metaphor and visual device the innovative TV producer — the mind behind “Fargo” and “Legion” — can pack into his movie directing debut, “Lucy in the Sky.”

The problem is that from space, the problems down on earth, even for an astronaut wrestling with real life upon returning home, seem small and inconsequential — no matter how much polish Hawley and a talented cast apply to them.

Hawley introduces us to that astronaut, Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), while on a spacewalk, with only a tether keeping her from floating away from the International Space Station into the limitless reaches of outer space. The feeling of being in space, on her 13-day mission, is unlike anything she has experienced in training at the Johnson Space Center with fellow mission specialist Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz), or going home to her sweet but dull husband, Drew (Dan Stevens).

Down on earth, we also get hints about the hard life Lucy lived to get where she is. Her nana (Ellen Burstyn), who raised Lucy and her never-seen older brother, is a tough old gal who drinks Crown Royal and smokes while using her oxygen machine. Lucy and Drew are also caring for Lucy’s teen niece, Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson), left behind again by Lucy’s irresponsible brother.

And we get a view of the danger on Lucy’s horizon: Hunky astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm), who knows what it’s like to be in space — and offers Lucy an escape from the humdrum.

Hawley and screenwriters Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi took inspiration from real-life astronaut Lisa Nowak, whose 2006 cross-country drive to confront her lover’s astronaut girlfriend torpedoed her NASA career. This highly fictionalized version eschews the cheap tabloid details of Nowak’s story, presumably because Hawley wants to consider the weightier issues of love, obsession and the siren call of life in zero gravity.

Alas, Hawley doesn’t bring a lot of profound insight into the astronaut’s breakdown. He instead clutters the screen with visual tricks, like constantly shifting the screen’s aspect ratio — widescreen pans for Lucy’s space mission, a more boxy frame for the stifling claustrophobia of earth living, and other ratios just for the hell of it.’

Portman nearly overcomes those distractions to give a fearlessly unhinged performance as Lucy, who acts like she’s keeping it together even as it’s all falling apart. But we’ve seen Portman go crazy before, and better, in “Black Swan,” and “Lucy in the Sky” doesn’t do much to make us forget Portman’s Oscar-winning performance in that movie.

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‘Lucy in the Sky’

★★

Opened October 4 in select cities; opens Friday, October 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 124 minutes.

'Monos'

In its depiction of child soldiers growing up in a hurry, the Colombian drama “Monos” is as grim, stark and surprisingly moving as the high mountaintop where the action happens.

On a mountain in an unidentified South American country, these eight teens — five boys, three girls — perform exercises under the watchful eye of their commander, called The Messenger (Wilson Salazar), who visits occasionally to drill the individuality out of them. All that matters, they’re told, is loyalty to “The Organization,” which is engaged in a running battle with troops down the mountain.

Atop the mountain, this unit is given two assignments. The most recent one is to protect and care for Shakira, a milk cow recently conscripted by The Organization. The other is to keep their hostage, Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), an American engineer they call “Doctora,” alive and available to record ransom videos.

When The Messenger isn’t around, the kids have trouble maintaining their discipline. Romances, petty jealousies, drunkenness and boredom all take their toll, threatening the children’s sanity, and the lives of their hostage and the cow.

Director Alejandro Landes, working with writing partner Alexis Dos Santos, creates a spare, intense drama of foot soldiers struggling with the chains of conscription in a war they don’t understand. It’s a story that echoes with strains of “Lord of the Flies” — or perhaps the jungle oppression of “Apocalypse Now,” without Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz in charge.

Landes captures this unforgiving world with cinematographer Jasper Wolf’s beautiful images of the mountainscapes, so high up that the clouds lay below them. The score, by Mica Levi (“Jackie,” “Under the Skin”), pierces the high-altitude situation with intensity.

The wonder of “Monos” is the talented cast, almost all of them unknowns making their movie debut. (The exception is Moisés Arias, who a decade ago played Rico, comic foil to Miley Cyrus on “Hannah Montana,” and here plays Bigfoot, a pretender to leadership in the unit.) The young actors reflect both the brutality that they have endured and the vulnerability that still hasn’t been drilled out of them, and give “Monos” its depth.

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‘Monos’

★★★1/2

Opened September 13 in select cities; opens Friday, October 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence, language, some sexual content and drug use. Running time: 103 minutes; mostly in Spanish, with subtitles.

'Farmer of the Year'

One may forgive the independent comedy-drama “Farmer of the Year” its many faults — it apparently never met a cliche it didn’t like — because it’s just so gosh-darn charming, as if “Minnesota nice” were bottled and poured into a projector.

The character actor Barry Corbin — still familiar as the astronaut-turned-entrepreneur Maurice Minnifield on “Northern Exposure” — gets a rare chance to be a leading man, playing Minnesota farmer Hap Anderson. At 88, Hap is finally ready to semi-retire, selling his farm to his son Wayne (Robert Berdahl) and his hard-charging daughter-in-law Nancy (Michelle O’Neill). Hap offers to continue to work the farm, but Nancy is not-so-subtly pushing him toward retirement.

When Hap, living alone since his wife died, gets an invitation to the 65th anniversary reunion of his Army battalion from World War II, he makes a plan to get his RV out of mothballs and drive cross-country, with Hap’s younger brother Virgil (Terry Kiser, always and forever the cadaver from “Weekend at Bernie’s) as his traveling companion. When Virgil can’t make the trip, Hap enlists his granddaughter, Ashley (Mackinlee Waddell), a recent college graduate whose lack of employment is driving Nancy, her mother, up the wall.

The husband-and-wife directing team of Vince O’Connell (who’s also the editor) and Kathy Swanson (who wrote the screenplay) use the road trip as a chance to see such cheeseball attractions as the Mitchell Corn Palace in South Dakota. It’s also a way to peak into Hap’s emotional state, as he is confronted with his own mortality and the annoyances of old age.

Corbin and Waddell make a pleasing odd couple, the curmudgeon who blanches at dating apps up against the cellphone-addicted Millennial who trusts Google maps over talking to the locals. Their sweet-and-sour chemistry helps smooth over the bumps in Swanson’s episodic script, and makes “Farmer of the Year” a pleasant reminder that young and old still have a lot to learn from each other. 

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‘Farmer of the Year’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 4, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language and mature themes. Running time: 103 minutes.

'Joker'

There’s a lot to unpack in “Joker” — about the roots of psychopathy and the thrill of violence, topics director Todd Phillips is unprepared to handle in his oppressively gritty and emptily self-important take on Batman’s greatest nemesis.

Let’s start with the positive, which is Joaquin Phoenix’s no-holds-barred performance as Arthur Fleck, a forgotten man in Gotham City. Arthur feels ignored by his social worker (Sharon Washington), who prescribes the meds he takes ever since being released from Arkham State Hospital, and covers his pain by convulsive, involuntary laughter. He even has a laminated card to explain this condition to strangers.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.