Review: 'The Wild' is an absorbing documentary that melds the personal with the political in a fight to preserve a wild salmon run

In his return trip to the world’s last pristine wild salmon run, filmmaker Mark Titus turns his film “The Wild” into something unique: A mix of the environmental and the emotional, the political and the personal.

In his 2014 documentary “The Breach,” Titus described the battle for Bristol Bay, Alaska, where the wild salmon run — the only one left in the world that hasn’t been altered by humans — was under threat by the proposed Pebble Mine. The proposed open-pit mine would extract gold and copper from the ground, but likely leave behind environmental damage that would never be completely fixed.

The good news at the end of “The Breach” was that the efforts of those opposed to the mine — an alliance of fishermen, activists, artists, native Alaskans and others — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put a permanent ban on mining in Bristol Bay. All seemed right with the world.

“The Wild” explains what brought the mining plans back from the dead: The election of Donald Trump, and his appointment of Scott Pruitt, the climate-change denier and former Oklahoma attorney general who was picked to head the EPA. Suddenly, the Pebble Mine was back in play, and the opposition had to start all over again.

Trump’s election also put Titus in a personal tailspin. He talks about becoming an alcoholic, and how his decline coincided with his grandmother’s death and his mother’s cancer diagnosis. As the movie starts, Titus is 55 days’ sober, and questioning his decision to grab his cameras and return to Bristol Bay.

Titus soldiers on, reacquainting viewers with the people battling against the mine, and introducing us to celebrities — including actors Adrian Grenier and Mark Harmon, and restaurateur and “Top Chef” judge Tom Colicchio — who are taking up the cause. He even snags an interview with the mining corporation’s reasonable-sounding CEO, someone Titus couldn’t get near in his first film.

Titus weaves his personal story into his goal of saving Bristol Bay, and hits on a touching metaphor: Just as he deluded himself into thinking his life and his drinking could co-exist, so the mining company has lied to itself (and to Alaskans) that the salmon run and the mine can co-exist. Titus’ human-sized perspective gives “The Wild” an emotional clarity some environmental documentaries lack.

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‘The Wild’

★★★

Available Friday, June 26, as a VOD rental on most platforms, and through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for mature themes. Running time: 64 minutes.

Review: Musical wackiness of Will Ferrell's 'Eurovision' sometimes gets in the way of a sweet love story

Will Ferrell’s innate wackiness gets an international stage in “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” a goofy and scattershot comedy that tries to lovingly satirize something apparently impervious to satire: The Eurovision Song Contest.

Eurovision is one of those things, like soccer and Kylie Minogue, for which the rest of the world shares a deep fondness while most Americans have no clue. It’s an annual singing competition, started in 1956, in which one musical act from each participating country performs a hit single — big voices and campy theatrics are favored — with winners chosen by juries and fans worldwide. Only a few winners ever became superstars: Lulu (a co-winner in 1969), Katrina and the Waves (1997), Celine Dion (1988) and, most famously, ABBA in 1974, with their classic “Waterloo.”

It’s seeing ABBA on TV that fuels the dream of Lars Erickssong, a boy from the small fishing village of Husavik, Iceland. In adulthood, Lars (played by Ferrell), dreams of competing in the Eurovision Song Contest — earning him scorn from his fisherman father, Erick (Pierce Brosnan). His friend since childhood, Sigrid Ericksdottir (Rachel McAdams), believes in Lars’ dream, and has a long-standing crush to which Lars is oblivious. Together, under the name Fire Saga, they play their synth-pop songs in hopes of someday competing at Eurovision.

The folks at Icelandic Public Television think the super-talented Katiana (Demi Lovato) will not only represent Iceland, but could win the whole contest — a prospect that worries one of the network’s board members, Victor (Michael Persbrandt), because he fears Iceland would be bankrupted by having to host next year’s contest. (Tradition holds that one year’s winning country is next year’s host.) However, in a twist of fate (and, perhaps, a nod to “The Producers”), Fire Saga ends up as Iceland’s entry.

The excitement of competing at Eurovision threatens to overwhelm our Icelandic heroes. Besides the pressure of performing, and surviving the mechanics of a big production number, there’s the intrigue brought by the competition. The favorite, the Russian showman Alexander Lemtov (played by “Downton Abbey” hunk Dan Stevens), starts flirting with Sigrit — while the sultry Greek entrant, Mita Xenakis (Melissanthi Mahut), has her eye on Lars.

Ferrell and co-screenwriter Andrew Steele (a writer on “Saturday Night Live” during Ferrell’s tenure there) try to cram too much into their script, and the bloated two-hour running time suffers for it. The parts about Lars and Sigrit, finding their musical voices and figuring out their feelings for each other, are delightfully earnest and quite sweet. The jokes about the contest itself, and the odd behavior of Icelanders (for example, Sigrit believes in elves), don’t wear as well.

Since the backdrop is a musical contest, director David Dobkin (who worked with McAdams making “Wedding Crashers”) amps up the song cues to a ferocious degree. Dobkin uses his music-video background (he’s made videos for Tupac Shakur, Elton John and Maroon 5 over the years) to make the Eurovision competitors as over-the-top as possible. And he borrows from the “Pitch Perfect” playbook for a lively impromptu sing-off that features several past Eurovision winners — though most Americans won’t recognize any of them.

Ferrell is funny — no surprise there — but he also brings a wide-eyed enthusiasm for the sincerity underneath the silliness of Eurovision. (Reportedly, he’s been a fan ever since his Swedish wife, then girlfriend, introduced him to it in 1999.) The movie filmed some parts backstage at last year’s competition in Tel Aviv (this year’s contest in Rotterdam was postponed to 2021 because of COVID-19), and the organizers seem happy to let Ferrell and company make fun of them. The real punchline, one that most Americans won’t get, is that what the movie treats as parody isn’t that far removed from the real contest.

McAdams shines brightest in “Eurovision,” though. She’s a strong comic foil for Ferrell, and a charming object of Lars’ affection — and, in the movie’s sweet finale, an artist finding her own voice. (Never mind that McAdams’ singing voice is dubbed, by Swedish singer Molly Sandén, once a Junior Eurovision competitor.) McAdams also brings out the romantic in Ferrell, and when the movie is focused on them, and not the spectacle of the competition, there’s some real magic at work.

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‘Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga’

★★1/2

Debuts Friday, June 26, streaming on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for crude sexual material including full nude sculptures, some comic violent images, and language. Running time: 122 minutes.

Review: Jon Stewart's gift for political satire is watered down in the both-sides-ism of 'Irresistible'

Jon Stewart could have not predicted that his new movie, “Irresistible,” would be released when we are months into a global pandemic and weeks into a nationwide protest movement.

However — considering the political divisiveness of the last four years, if not longer — what made Stewart think a plague-on-both-your-houses political satire would play in 2020?

Jon, buddy, read the room.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: Hijack thriller '7500' is a one-room tension machine, lifted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's well-grounded performance

Thrillers don’t get tighter, or more economical, than “7500,” a terrorist nail-biter where the action takes place almost entirely in real time in one space: The cockpit of a hijacked airliner.

Things seem to be starting normally as the flight attendants get the 85 passengers on board a nighttime Berlin-to-Paris flight, while the German pilot, Michael Lutzmann (Carlo Kitzlinger) and his American first officer, Tobias Ells (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), go over the pre-flight details. Before takeoff, one of the flight attendants, Gökce (Aylin Tezel), talks to Tobias about where their 2-year-old son should go to kindergarten. (They keep their relationship quiet at work, Tobias tells Capt. Michael.)

Shortly into the flight, men force their way into the cockpit, using shivs fashioned from glass shards and duct tape. They stab Capt. Michael in the gut and put a big gash in Tobias’s left arm, before Tobias can close the cockpit door on one attacker and knock another unconscious. Tobias radios in the situation, a 7500 — air-traffic code, we’re told, for a hijacking in progress.

Tobias must follow a strict protocol: Land the plane safely at the nearest available airport, and under no circumstances open the cockpit door. Those instructions become complicated when he looks at the monitor into the cabin, where the other hijackers are threatening to kill a hostage if he doesn’t let them in the cockpit.

Director Patrick Vollrath, making his feature debut, puts the viewer in the cockpit with Tobias, letting the natural claustrophobia caused by that dark, intense space do the work to create extreme tension. Working off a script he wrote with Senad Halilbasic, Vollrath makes even the mundane act of working dials on a jet console seem exciting.

Gordon-Levitt is tightly coiled here, perfect as a regular Joe who knows he has to keep his cool if he or his passengers have a chance to survive. Gordon-Levitt is particularly good in scenes with Omid Memar, who plays a naive young hijacker who Tobias thinks can be persuaded to surrender. The touches of humanity in those moments help elevate “7500” above the standard ticking-clock thriller.

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’7500’

★★★1/2

Debuting Friday, June 19, streaming on Prime Video. Rated R for violence/terror and language. Running time: 92 minutes; in English, and in German and Turkish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Miss Juneteenth' is a winner, thanks to Nicole Beharie's winning performance as a former beauty queen struggling to get by

There’s a grand tradition of independent movies about plucky strivers, fending off poverty and juggling the bills to make their American dream come true — and such films work, as writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ “Miss Juneteenth” does, if the details and the actor at the center are perfect.

Turquoise Jones, played beautifully by Nicole Beharie, won the pageant title of Miss Juneteenth back in 2004, but never got to make good on the boost it’s supposed to provide young black women. Turquoise wants her own about-to-be 15-year-old daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), to enter the contest, to win the full-ride scholarship to a historically black college or university and make the escape from Fort Worth, Texas, that Turquoise didn’t.

To make that happen, Turquoise has to navigate a financial minefield. She works double shifts at the barbecue joint owned by the avuncular Wayman (Marcus Mauldin). She wheedles money out of her unreliable estranged husband, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson). She foregoes the power bill to pay Kai’s pageant fees, and so on.

Along the way, Turquoise dismisses Kai’s interest in trying out for the school dance/drill team. She also tries to counter her daughter’s lack of enthusiasm for Miss Juneteenth — a pageant named for the holiday among African Americans marking when word first arrived in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation, two years after Lincoln signed it.

Peoples has an eye for the details of the Jones family’s life, scraping by on her wits while trying to touch the upper class life the pageant represents. That split is emphasized when Wayman snorts at Turquoise’s evocation of the American dream. “There ain’t no American dream for black people — we just try to hang on to what we have.”

Without Beharie at the movie’s center, though, all of Peoples’ details would be for naught. Beharie (familiar, to some, for her role on the series “Sleepy Hollow”) captures Turquoise’s optimism that she can make her life better, the tenacity that she will do it without a man, and the frustration at the obstacles in her way. Beharie overcomes those obstacles, and makes “Miss Juneteenth” a winner. 

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‘Miss Juneteenth’

★★★1/2

Debuting Friday, June 19, as a video-on-demand rental on ‘virtual cinema,’ including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some sexual content and language. Running time: 103 minutes.

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This review ran previously on this site on Jan. 24, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'My Darling Vivian' movingly puts Johnny Cash's first wife back in the narrative

The documentary “My Darling Vivian” is a love letter, from the four oldest daughters of Johnny Cash to their mother, Vivian Liberto — the woman who the music world and the movies have largely erased from the Man in Black’s legend.

Vivian Liberto was a vivacious young woman with “dark eyes and dark hair,” raised in a strict Catholic family in San Antonio, Texas. One night in 1951, at a roller rink, she met a handsome young airman who was just finishing his training. He was Johnny Cash, and their courtship was short and fast before he shipped off to Europe — but they sustained their romance through hundreds of letters, and some audio tapes in which Johnny professed his love in words and, occasionally, in song.

Shortly after Cash returned from the military, in 1954, he and Vivian got married and moved to Memphis. That’s where, nine months after their wedding night, their eldest daughter Rosanne was born. A second daughter, Kathy, came less than 11 months later. Eventually, Vivian and Johnny had four daughters — and the four, including Cindy and Tara, are the only people that director Matt Riddlehoover interviews for this film.

The four sisters recall the ups and downs of their parents’ relationship. Vivian didn’t handle Johnny’s fame well, as it meant he was gone from home for long periods of time — and when he was home, he often brought reporters, cameras and fans. A move to Encino, Calif. (they bought Johnny Carson’s old house), took Vivian away from her circle of friends in Memphis. And as Johnny tried to break into Hollywood, he also started doing drugs, particularly amphetamines.

The four Cash girls also recall some bizarre moments from their parents’ 13-year marriage. The strangest may have been when Vivian came to Texas in 1967 to stand by Johnny when he was arrested for smuggling amphetamines in from Mexico. The photographs of her beside Johnny made her skin tone appear dark, fostering a rumor that Vivian was African American — a rumor that, in the Klan-dominated South, lost him his concert bookings and radio play. It also brought death threats to Vivian, who took to carrying a pistol around the house at night.

What the Cash daughters are most angry about — and why they agreed to make the documentary — is how Vivian was left out of the Cash legend once Johnny fell in love with country singer June Carter.

On talk-show appearances, June would talk about “our daughters,” a constant pain in Vivian’s heart. At a memorial concert after Cash died in 2003, all of Nashville gushed about the love story between Johnny and June, but when singer Rodney Crowell dedicated a song to Vivian (who was in the audience), his words were cut from the broadcast. Some of the daughters say they have never watched the 2005 biography “Walk the Line,” which depicted Vivian (played by Ginnifer Goodwin) as a shrill, desperately needy woman — and they’re never going to.

Through a wealth of old photos and the voices of the four daughters, “My Darling Vivian” succeeds in its mission of putting Vivian back in the narrative of Johnny Cash’s legend — not as a spurned first wife, but as a woman in her own right.

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‘My Darling Vivian’

★★★

Debuting Friday, June 19, as a video-on-demand rental on ‘virtual cinema,’ including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'You Should Have Left' is a deceptively quiet thriller that gives Kevin Bacon a place to shine in the dark

The haunted-house thriller “You Should Have Left” is a mind twister from the old school, and a showcase for Kevin Bacon to quietly give a viewer goosebumps.

Bacon plays Theo Conroy, whose backstory is best left to screenwriter-director David Koepp to unspool a bit at a time. What you need to know going in is that he’s the much-too-old husband of Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), a movie actress with whom he shares a cushy house in the Hollywood hills, a robust sex life, and a very perceptive six-year-old daughter, Ella (Avery Essex, who’s eerily grounded for a child actor).

Something, a reminder of Theo’s past, prompts both Theo and Susanna to want to get out of L.A. for awhile. So they find a cool rental house in Wales, and the three head off for a vacation in the green hills, far from cellphone reception and other cares, with only their suitcases and emotional baggage — which turns out to be the key to what happens the rest of the way.

Koepp, adapting a novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann, sets up the traps, jump scares and dank recesses of a solid horror film. As a veteran screenwriter (he’s had a career of blockbusters from “Jurassic Park” to the last version of “The Mummy”), Koepp knows the clockwork timing needed for a script, and when to drop each morsel of exposition and when to hold back secrets for maximum effect.

He’s nicely teamed with Bacon — a reunion from the 1999 horror thriller “Stir of Echoes,” which Koepp directed — and gets good mileage out of the veteran actor. Bacon, still lean and hungry at 61, conveys the fear, resentment, fatherly love and Catholic guilt that bubble up inside Theo, each emotion surfacing when called upon to propel the movie’s tension.

“You Should Have Left” is a slow build, and Koepp ratchets the suspense so gradually a viewer may be lulled into thinking there’s not much happening. But, at a certain point, the realization comes how much Koepp as been toying with us from the beginning, to get us to a satisfying and chilling conclusion.

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‘You Should Have Left’

★★★

Debuting Friday, June 19, as a video-on-demand on most streaming platforms. Rated R for some violence, disturbing images, sexual content and language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: Frenetic fantasy 'Artemis Fowl' fits on Disney+ — so you can hit 'pause' on the overstuffed narrative

You can see, through the morass of visual effects and narrative short cuts in “Artemis Fowl,” what the folks at Disney were trying to get out of Eion Colfer’s book series: A fast-moving fantasy adventure franchise that could become the next “Harry Potter.”

That’s why Disney invested nearly 20 years in development, after buying the rights to Colfer’s first book before it was published in 2001. Such producers as Robert De Niro and Harvey Weinstein have been attached at different points. (De Niro’s name is still in the credits; Weinstein’s was removed when sexual assault allegations surfaced in 2017.) It was finally to be released in theaters two weeks ago, until the coronavirus pandemic shut down the theaters, and the film was shunted off to the Disney+ streaming service.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.