Movie Nation

It says volumes about the state of Katherine Heigl’s on-and-off screen persona that casting her as a shrieking, shrewish control freak with murderous tendencies seems a bit on-the-nose.
The dark comedy “Home Sweet Hell” is about the marriage from Hell threatened by the homewrecker from Hell until the wife from Hell settles on getting rid of said homewrecker.
Obvious and jaw-droppingly bloody, it still gives Heigl her funniest role in years.
Patrick Wilson plays Don Champagne, who might have been a happy-go-lucky furniture dealer, if not for his wife, Mona. They have a luxurious home, luxurious cars and two privately schooled little Stepford Kids. All because Mona keeps a scrapbook — “Our Goals.”
“Focus,” she preaches. On the business plan, on vacation plans, on planning, in general. Don has had the fun and spontaneity beaten out of him.
“We will have sex on the ninth,” she barks. “As scheduled.”
Then he hires a new saleswoman. Dusty, played by the always kittenish Jordana Brewster, appreciates attention.
“I LIKE it when you WATCH me,” she purrs.”
And she likes her dresses tight.
“She must have a little harlot in her,” Mona growls. It doesn’t matter that she’s suspicious, Don tumbles for the fatal attraction on his payroll in a heartbeat.
Next thing you know, there’s blackmail afoot. And Don’s salesman/confessor (Jim Belushi) is no help. Only Mona is up to this challenge. She watches “The First 48.” She knows how this is done. And once things get going and get out of hand, it’s obvious she’s watched “Dexter,” too. She’s entirely too cold and organized.
“I’d write it down for you,” she snaps to Don, listing the necessities of body disposal. “But I’m just covered in that girl.”
Covered…in BLOOD. And guts.
Heigl throws herself into this with gusto, and Wilson, a good actor often too stiff in comedies, takes grinning cluelessness to new heights.
There are redneck co-conspirators and complications that don’t really complicate anything. The story takes several lurching turns.
But there are laugh-out-loud gags that will make you gag. And Heigl? If you’ve quit on the blonde diva, you may have given up on her too soon.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language, sexual content and some drug use
Cast: Katherine Heigl, Patrick Wilson, Jordana Brewster, Chi McBride, Jim Belushi
Credits: Directed by Anthony Burns , written by Carlo Allen, Ted Eldrick, Tom Lavagnino . A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:38

“Champs” is a quotably slick documentary about the social, psychological and economic underpinnings of boxing, a clear-eyed look at the deadly and dirty sport often rhapsodized as “The Sweet Science.”
There’s nobility in the boxers this is built around — ex-con Bernard Hopkins, hyper-violent Mike Tyson and gentle and gentlemanly Evander Holyfield. But in this Bert Marcus film, it’s hard to see their success in this sport as anything but a mixed bag, an act of desperation by men whose circumstances afforded them few other options.
“People who fight…fight their way out of poverty,” one insider explains.
“Rich kids don’t go into boxing,” offers another.
The sport is surveyed and discussed as the historic route of the underclasses to change their station in life. Marcus talks to fighters, trainers, journalists, a couple of actors (Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington) who have played fighters, a couple of film directors (Spike Lee, Ron Howard) and singers (Mary J. Blige, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) who have connections to the fight game. The superficial picture that emerges captures something of the guts it takes to go out and take and deliver a beating. You are “conquering not only your opponent, but yourself,” as one talking head puts it.
Marcus lets Tyson and his ghost writer/biographer, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, regale us with some serious image burnishing, breaking down the hard world he came from, the father figure/trainer (Cus D’Amato) who rescued him, his stunning rise to be the most famous athlete in America. But “Champs” doesn’t totally let Tyson off the hook, capturing his rapid descent in similar, if less thorough detail. Tyson has a producing credit in the film.
Holyfield comes off now as he did then, a humble, sportsmanlike man of violence. But Hopkins, who gained fame not as an Olympian but as a Pennsylvania prison system champion before his release and years-long reign in his weight division, is the real heart of “Champs.”
Hopkins figured that prison “is a business,” a system that he’d fallen into that would never let him go. He put on the gloves to “beat the system.” And did.
There are no Tyson skeptics interviewed. There’s discussion of how these famous men often tumble into financial ruin. But there’s nothing about the brain damage, the true personal and social cost.
Marcus has enough experts here to get at something deeper. But he seems happiest sitting down with celebrities who have a poetic take on the sport, barely balanced by a few more prosaic realists who find little poetic in the situations that drive men into it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, boxing violence, profanity

Cast: Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Bernard Hopkins, Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Mark Wahlberg
Credits: Written and directed by Bert Marcus. An Amplify release.

Running time: 1:31

With “Like Sunday, Like Rain,” sturdy character actor Frank Whaley (“Pulp Fiction,” TV’s “Ray Donovan”) steps behind the camera to present an elegiac, sweet romance between a boy and his nanny.
No, not THAT kind of romance. This is a relationship dramedy about a spoiled, smart but considerate little rich boy and the struggling young woman impulsively hired to be his substitute mom.
Leighton Meester is Eleanor, and when we meet her, she’s tossing her feckless boyfriend’s (Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong) guitar out the window of his apartment. She is now homeless, he gets her fired from her waitress job, but there’s hope. A friend hooks her up with a temp firm that doesn’t do much background checking, and next thing you know, there’s distracted, lazy rich mom (Debra Messing) asking a question or two, and giving her the job.
Reggie (Julian Shatkin) is a distracted student, a math prodigy, an accomplished cellist. And he’s 12.
Where Whaley flips the script is that Reggie, who pays off drivers, camp counselors and others just so he can avoid being distracted from his reading and study, isn’t obnoxious.
“I’m just trying to navigate a course toward safety and sanity the best way I know how.”
He humors the cook, speaking Spanish because it’s easier for her, and is nothing if not solicitous to Eleanor. He takes her out to dinner, asks her about her life, makes suggestions (involving his mob-connected driver) about what to do with her stalker ex-boyfriend. He’s kind.
He memorizes poetry, and is dismissive about his own talents for the cello.
“Art, as a language, is dead.”
Whaley keeps this odd relationship on the up-and-up, and Meester effortlessly steps into a sweeter, more vulnerable role than the movies generally give her. Eleanor has problems, growing pains of a different sort  from Reggie’s. Young Shatkin does OK by a role that has him reciting a lot of words he’s not that comfortable with.
“Like Sunday, Like Rain” is never broad. It punctures cliches and aside from a couple of swear words, has no reason to wear the idiotic R-rating that the MPAA saddled it with.
The tear-inducing musical finale to this simple and intimate movie will touch you, even if it didn’t get through to the tin-eared ratings board.

MPAA Rating: R for language
Cast: Leighton Meester, Julian Shatkin, Debra Messing, Billie Armstrong
Credits: Written and directed by Frank Whaley. A Monterey Media release.

Running time: 1:44

Take away an early barrage of fawning, Guiness and G & T enfeebled Brit critics, and Neil Blomkamp’s insipid “Chappie” would have experienced the consensus slaughter it so richly deserved.

I loved “District 9,” and was enthusiastic about “Elysium” in metaphoric Occupy politics and execution. But this was, as I said in my review, “Excruciating.”  Cutesie robot, carnage galore. It takes on “What the hell was he THINKING” overtones more than once. There’s a time-honored Hollywood law, I call it “The Elizabeth Berkley Rule.” Always announce your NEXT big project before a flop comes out. So Blomkamp’s attachment to direct the next “Alien” was timely and career-preserving.

Sony knew this POS was a POS, which is why they only screened it late Wed. Pity the Brits didn’t pick up on that. What a bunch of Empire Fanboys.

Perhaps French Canadian critics stuck up for Canadian Ken Scott’s latest team-up with Vince Vaughn. Probably not. “Unfinished Business” is an appallingly laugh-starved marriage of “Family Man” dramedy and “Hangover in Berlin” raunch — full frontal nudity, gay fetishism, all joked about, badly, by grinning Dave Franco. A nightmare. Tom Wilkinson saves a little dignity, Nick Frost, not so much. Vince gets beaten up a lot, unfairly I think. Scott did the wonderful “Starbuck,” it’s inferior Hollywood remake “Delivery Man” and the lightly charming “The Grand Seduction” (can’t remember if he did its antecedent, “Seducing Dr. Lewis,” also French and Canadian.

But he has no flair for Hollywood comedy, and Franco is an infuriating performer, a better looking Rob Schneider.

“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is weak tea, indeed. They made Maggie Smith NOT a racist and stripped whatever other edge the first one packed in from it. It earned passing grades, again built on fawning Brit critics, who are to movies what “Top Gear” is to cars — jingoistic in the extreme.

“Buzzard” is an overpraised film fest character piece about a nasty, weaselly petty thief office worker whose thievery is matched with a delicious paranoia. Good, not great, but others were more enthusiastic.

“Road Hard” is a fairly conventional but nasty comedy about a cynical, aging comic struggling to get one last break. Or realize it’s never going to happen. I am not a fan of Adam Carolla, but I dug it. Others were less generous.

“Kidnapping Mr. Heikeken” is a caper thriller about the kidnapping of the Heinken Beer Kingpin, a good cast wasted in an otherwise feebly executed action pic.

A couple of docs of note — “Merchants of Doubt” ties Big Tobacco’s Big Lie tactics to the global warming deniers, some of whom used to also lie about tobacco.

And “A Year in Champagne” is an informative but dry doc about how the bubbly is made.

The clash of cultures has been rubbed off the marigolds in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” Most of the characters are back — those who didn’t die off — in this sequel comedy about British retirees lured to India where their money goes further and the elderly are, as a general rule, revered rather than cast aside. But they’ve all turned so…nice.
Maggie Smith’s once racist retired maid has become the sweet mouthpiece for Exotic Marigold Hotel operator Sonny (Dev Patel) as they pitch their idea of outsourced old folks’ homes to an American conglomerate (David Strathhairn is the CEO).
Gentle Douglas (Bill Nighy) is finally rid of his shrew of a wife (Penelope Wilton). But he still hasn’t the nerve to confess his love for Evelyn (Judi Dench). Madge (Celia Imrie) is still flirting and dating with a mercenary eye toward being taken care of, Carol (Diana Hardcastle) is still carrying on with Norman (Ronald Pickup) at The Viceroy ex-pats club, though Norman has been thinking about commitment.
But the artifice shows, the cuteness strains to not become overbearing in this sequel, an overlong film filled to the rim with pithy advice from the elders.
“The distance between what we want and what we fear is the width of an eyelash.”
“You only make progress when you stick your neck out.”
That’s what Sonny is doing, sticking his neck out. He needs backing to buy a bankrupt second hotel, allowing him to expand. He is closing in on his long-planned wedding to Sunaina (Tina Desai). But a dashing, rich friend (Shazad Latif) of her brother’s is thwarting him at every turn. Sonny needs to impress someone the Americans have sent to inspect his operation. And Sonny is sure this secret inspector is the “writer” who checks in. He’s played by Indo-phile Richard Gere, which is probably why this writer immediately sets his cap for Sonny’s mom (Lillete Dubey).
The film is all contrivances, as Norman worries that he’s accidentally put out a hit on Carol with a confused tuk tuk (auto-rickshaw) driver, Sonny “pimps out” his mother and mistaken identities worthy of farce, but not that funny, are introduced.
The pall of death is cast aside for this sequel, as Evelyn considers a late-life career as a textile buyer, and Douglas, Madge and others keep their eyes on the future — future love, future security and the like.
Director John Madden and his crew make India the most alluring, scrubbing any hint of squalor from Jaipur, and filming in the cooler months. Nobody sweats.
That means that this time, this “Exotic” hotel is more a place to check into briefly, in passing, and not the sort of place you’d want to lose yourself in.

MPAA Rating: PG for some language and suggestive comments
Cast: Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Dev Patel, Bill Nighy, Richard Gere, Lillete Dubey

Credits: Directed by John Madden, script by Ol Parker. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:02

Spoiler alert . There’s no magic moment of hope at the end of “Merchants of Doubt.”
This documentary, the first to zero in on how and why the global climate change discussion became political and how that led to government gridlock, is just an account of the train wreck and how it happened, and continues to happen.
The “global warming denial” industry — a few well-fed, well-paid faces, amplified by constant TV exposure into a “movement” without numbers, “experts” without scientific credentials, have gotten their way. Decades of increasingly dire warnings and overwhelming scientific consensus — and America lags behind the rest of the world in taking action or even accepting that global warming exists.
As a smirking lobbyist Marc Marono, an acolyte of Rush Limbaugh puts it, “gridlock” means they “win.”
“Merchants of Doubt” has its moments when the professional deniars hem and haw about who pays them to do what they do. But mostly, they’re glib, smug, self-confessed and self-righteous tools of Big Coal, Big Chemical or Big Oil.
The movie exposing them can be glib, too. Director Robert Kenner (“Food, Inc.”) frames this as a big confidence game, inserting magician Jamy Ian Swiss’s card tricks and comments about getting angry when he sees his trade — misdirection, “fooling people” — used for ill. That gimmick doesn’t really work.
But Kenner presents a pretty convincing, utterly damning case that ties Big Tobacco and its decades of public relations chicanery to the “Playbook” — with many of the same players (mouthpieces) — is what got us here.
Kenner, in a not terribly methodical way, ties Big Tobacco to things like carcinogenic flame retardants for furniture, a “solution” to a tobacco-based ill (cigarette fires). “Experts” backing such retardants were exposed by the Chicago Tribune to be paid shills, frauds who lied to state and federal legislators in (not sworn) testimony. The subject has changed, the “playbook” of personal smears, demonizing and teller whoppers has not.
The ever-shifting line of scrimmage of Koch Brothers, Big Oil and Big Coal financed spokespeople are caught in their whoppers. But Kenner fails to acknowledge how much more effective these persuasive, theatrical short-term liars can be in the cable news era (no fact checking, facts framed as “opinion” up for “debate”).
Yes, Greenpeace is heard from. But so is the ultra-conservative South Carolina Congressman (Bob Inglis) voted out of office for suggesting action on climate change, so is “Skeptic” magazine publisher and lifelong Libertarian Michael Shermer, shouted down by angry old men who storm out of a debate over the issue at a convention of Libertarians. “Watermelons,” they’re called. “Green on the outside, red on the inside.”
“Merchants” presents this struggle as a last vestige of the Cold War dogmatic conservatism, “patriotic Americans” vs. “socialist liberals.” Scientists are being threatened, systemically harassed by “Merchants” like Morano, all for a paycheck and the power that comes from being a tiny, dishonest minority whom the media treats as neither.
So why see it? Science historican Naomi Oreskes suggests there’s satisfaction in being right, and loving irony.
As the climate warms and seas rise, conservatives — especially those who live on the coasts, will pay the price — evacuations, forced relocations, subsidies, hand-outs.
“People who don’t like big government,” Oreskes warns with a grin,” are going to get more of it.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Robert Hansen, Frederick Singer, Naomi Oreskes, Jamy Ian Swiss, Bob Inglis, Marc Morano
Credits: Directed by Robert Kenner. Liv Corfixen. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:36