Movie Nation

Truthfully, none of the movies opening this weekend is “Let’s Be Cops” or “Into the Storm” awful.

But the tomatometer was most ruthless about “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner’s overambitious dysfunction and drug abuse comedy “Are You Here?” It’s rating there and on metacritic suggest real consensus, which is fair. I was an outlier. I still find Owen Wilson funny, and Weiner loads him, Amy Poehler and Zach Galifianakis with quick, clever lines. But Wilson is in that can-do-no-right stage of his career, and there it is. 6% on the tomatomater, one of those positive reviews being mind.

“Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is so much like the first film, from a decade ago, that the reviews reflect fatigue with the graphic novel look and Frank Miller gore and sex. It’s recycled. Gorgeous, clever at times, but been there, seen it.

Then there’s a half-decent doomed teen romance weeper, “If I Stay,” the first film in which Chloe Grace Moretz seems to act on shaky ground. Dating? Love? Awkward. At least she got that and the cello playing right. Decent film adaptation of a popular YA novel, in any event. Weak reviews for that one.

The box office predictions are that “If I Stay” will eat “Sin City” for breakfast. Based on web traffic for my reviews of both films, I think “Sin City” has a chance to do much better than the mid-teens Box Office Mojo predicts or low teens that  Box Office Guru says will be taken in by midnight Sunday. “If I Stay” should clear $20, I think “Sin City” will better that.

“When the Game Stands Tall” soft-sells its faith-based message. This true story of a dominant football team whose Catholic private school character is tested by tragedy and its first losses in a decade is saddled to the stone-faced Jim Caviezel, and suffers for it. Not an awful film, just “Friday Night Lite.”

“When the Game Stands Tall” has been marketed to death among the faithful — many giveaway screenings among church and high school football groups. It’s only predicted to make $9 million. It is on a lot of screens and this audience is pretty forgiving. Maybe it’ll do better.

The best movie opening this weekend is in limited release. “To Be Takei” is a pretty thorough look at how George Takei came to be maybe the biggest winner among the “Star Trek” cast when it comes to his influence on the world. Funny, sweet, touching and blunt. Man, Takei really hates that Bill Shatner.

“Madagascar: Island of Lemurs” is a short IMAX 3D film that is flat out stunning to look at. It goes into wider release this weekend. Maybe wait for that one to show up at your local science center unless you’re starved for something to take the kids to this weekend.

Nauseating, disgusting, vile and vulgar, that much is obvious about “Septic Man” before the opening credits are done.
A horror story/survival tale set in sewers awash in condoms and corpses, this sets itself up as a monster comedy in the “Toxic Avenger” mold, for those who remember their ancient film history. But the screenplay produces little humor and makes less sense the further it progresses, even as it is assaulting our senses with every manner of vomiting known to man.
Collingwood is a town forced to evacuate due to its toxic soup of a water supply. Typhus, e.coli, dysentery — too many locals are coming to a bloody end in the loo. Since nobody there knows what to do “a-BOOT” it, we can assume they’re Canadians and we can understand why they’d flee.
Jack (Jason David Brown) is a local “civic minded” septic man with a high tolerance for the work, so he’s the guy the mysterious Prosser (Julian Richings) bribes to stay behind, go through the city’s sewers and figure out the source of the contagion.
Jack packs his pregnant wife (Molly Dunsworth) off and sets out, alone, through the massive plant, where he is promptly injured and trapped in a dank, underground tank. There are people who might help him, but they (Robert Maillet, Tim Burd) don’t seem human. Lacking even a cell phone, Jack must methodically go through the blueprints of the place, crawl down pipes and try to find a way to freedom, or negotiate an escape with the sewer dwellers before the sewage turns him into something less than human himself.
The Tony Burgess script is idiotically vague about what is the source of the contagion, and Jesse Thomas Cook directs this dawdling 83 minute movie as if he’s more interested in The Gore Brothers’ makeup work and his star’s production design.
That’s right. On tiny budget indie films, everybody does double duty, none odder than Jason David Brown’s leading man/production designer credits. Of the two, it’s the convincing, revolting city plumbing that’s more impressive.
Richings plays Mr. Prosser as a hissing, quietly villainous Bill Nighy impersonation. Veteran character player Stephen McHattie (“A History of Violence,””Seinfeld”) is the mayor, seen only on TV.
The title was right, but the premise needed tweaking. The picture lacks a sense of urgency, and a palpable villain. The filmmakers needed to re-watch “Toxic Avenger” before locking down the script.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing vile and gruesome images, violence and language
Cast: Jason David Brown, Molly Dunsworth, Robert Maillet, Julian Richings, Stephen McHattie
Credits: Directed by Jesse Thomas Cook, written by Tony Burgess. A Starz Digital Media release.
Running time: 1:23

In case you missed it, it’s George Takei’s America. We’re just living in it. And getting his autograph.

The man owns the Internet, through his wry Facebook memes and comical commentary on issues from gay rights to sci-fi omnipresence.

On film and his many TV guest appearances, he’s a brand — the booming voice, the winking gay self-awareness, the disarming ready laugh that he unleashes on fans and critics alike.

Long closeted himself, he made his “coming out” a party, and all of America was invited. Even his nemesis, William Shatner.

And with every baritone “Ohhh myyyyy,” he taught the world that “It’s OK to Be Takei!”

“To Be Takei” captures this droll 77 year-old as he is now, living the lie that F. Scott Fitzgerald promoted, that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Takei, actor turned gay Japanese-American icon, has never been more hip, more in demand and more beloved than he is right this minute.

Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary follows Takei and his longtime companion-turned-husband Brad, as they bounce from convention to speaking engagement, nature walk to TV and radio interviews.

He sings his favorite song as a child who lived through the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans who were rounded up because of fears they’d be disloyal, “Don’t Fence Me In.” And he prepares for a starring role in a stage musical about that tragedy, “Allegiance,” a guy whose husband admits, with some worry, “is not much of a singer” hoping for a shot at Broadway.

Kroot captures Takei’s perfectly-rehearsed and from-the-heart speeches about those years, uprooted from Los Angeles to Arkansas with his family, people who had everything taken from them and had to start over in a still-racist country after World War II ended.

“You determine your destiny,” he booms. “I don’t BELIEVE in negativity!”

That’s what preserved him during those early years, and the decades after he realized he wasn’t “normal” in his sexual orientation, decades in which he had to start his acting career playing stereotypes.

Then he landed “Star Trek,” and generations of Asian-Americans had a role model and he, typecast or not, had a career. And a comical nemesis, in William Shatner, the vain camera hog who starred in the show and lorded it over Takei, then and now.

The most interesting elements of “To Be Takei” are his moving accounts of those years of internment (he was very young), years remembered by other public figures (Norman Mineta, Sen. Daniel Inouye) who went through it and the political activism that Takei made into his post-“Star Trek” career.

“To Be Takei” is framed within a long Howard Stern Show interview, rightly placing Takei’s rise to his many appearances on the no-holds-barred shock jock’s radio show. That’s where “Oh MY” was born, where Takei hilariously insisted, for years, that he was heterosexual and where he had a home when he finally came out of the closet, outraged by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of California’s first gay marriage bill.

Takei corrects one and all, including husband Brad, on gay semantics. “It’s NOT a lifestyle, it’s an orientation.” He might debate gay rights on TV, but rarely loses his cool. He might be mobbed by fanboys and girls at conventions, but he is ever-smiling, ever-indulgent.

It’s a fun story, and yes, an inspiring one, a biographical documentary that will make you grin and think, “ONLY in America,” even if his catchphrase, “Oh Myyyyy” is what you say out loud.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: George Takei, Brad Takei, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, John Cho, B.D. Wong, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig

Credits: Written and directed by Jennifer M. Kroot. A Starz Digital Media release.

Running time: 1:34

“When the Game Stands Tall” is a solid if unsurprising and uninspiring melodrama built around high school football, faith-based but “Friday Night Lite.”
It’s the latest of that peculiar sub genre of sports films, where filmmakers bend over backwards to make a perennial powerhouse football factory look like an underdog. These stories, about a Permian High in Texas (“Friday Night Lights”) or T.C. Williams in Virginia (“Remember the Titans”) look at status as a burden, and claim to be about “more than a game,” even as they build towards their by-the-book “Big Game” finale.
“When the Game” varies the formula by being faith-based, about a pious coach (Jim Caviezel) who talks about building character as much as he worries about blocking schemes.
Coach Bob Ladouceur lectures his De La Salle Spartans about “love,” setting high standards, making “a perfect effort, from the snap to the whistle” on each play. They share “commitment cards,” pledging the extra strength training, the extra practice and high goals they want to achieve as a team.
They stand up at the end of team meetings and talk about their feelings. They hold each other accountable, and hold hands, symbolically, as they enter the field. Something worked, because this Concord, California school won 151 games in a row at one point.
“When the Game Stands Tall” is about the tests they face when that streak is broken.
The melodramatic stuff in this “true story” involves players dedicating games to this dying granddad or that sickly mother, the seniors who have to decide whether to stick together and attend the same college, or find their own way out of Richmond, California. As with most football factories, a rich community’s public school is an irresistible lure to top athletes from poorer communities nearby.
Coach, quietly obsessed with “The Streak,” has a heart attack. No matter how many time he says “It’s just a high school football game,” we don’t believe him.
His butter-fingered receiver son (Matthew Daddario) just needs a coach, and a dad. Tayshon (Jessie Usher) is the cocky, cynical underclassman reluctant to learn leadership from the seniors.
And then there’s the all-star running back (Alexander Ludwig) whose ex-jock dad (Clancy Brown, very good) is determined will set the career touchdown record.
Caviezel has become the Tim Tebow of American screen acting. Cloaked in Christianity, he’s been surrounded by success (“The Passion of the Christ”), but you wonder how much of that is a result of his talent. He rarely has a role that requires him to smile and his lines all have a stern authority about them. He’s “the hoarse whisperer.” That isn’t necessarily a wrong-headed way to play this coach, just a boring one.
Michael Chiklis makes more of an impression as a more openly passionate assistant coach who is on the same morality page with his religion-teacher head coach.
Director Thomas Carter, who did the Richmond, California high school hoops drama “Coach Carter,” covers many of the same bases here, but loses the thread and never really gets at the idea, pushed by Ladouceur’s wife, that he’s focused too much on the game and not on his family. Perhaps Carter was reluctant to give his acting Tebow the responsibility for the whole film.
There’s a big sin of omission in this faith-based film, too. It has to do with the strained efforts to make this school — this team — into plucky underdogs. De La Salle is a well-heeled private Catholic school, a rather important fact left out of the story.
And for all the naked manipulation of the music and the story that builds toward an only slightly unexpected climax, “When the Game Stands Tall” never delivers that lump in the throat that a “Rudy” or “We Are Marshall” or “Friday Night Lights” managed.
It’s as if everybody involved knows how less fulfilling it is to root for the favorites and not the underdogs. What’s inspiring about rooting for Florida State?

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, a scene of violence, and brief smoking.
Cast: Jim Caviezel, Alexander Ludwig, Laura Dern, Michael Chiklis, Jesse Usher
Credits: Directed by Thomas Carter, screenplay by Scott Marshall Smith. A Tristar release.
Running time: 1:55

“Sin City” is back in all its lurid, gory glory, a vivid and visceral graphic novel come to life in the capable hands of Robert Rodriguez and co-director and comic book creator Frank Miller.
If anything, it’s a more gorgeous experiment in green screen digital sets and black and white videography, complete with selective splashes of color — a green-eyed femme fatale’s lips here, a bloodied thug’s ugly mug there. The neon-and-shadows cityscape is stunning, with voluptuous nudes and startling plunges underwater.
But the characters in “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” are mostly the same, the situations basically a rehash of the bullets, blood and beatdowns of the first film. And the hard-bitten dialogue is jokier and softer, lacking the sucker punch prose of the original.
A couple of characters we saw die in “Sin City” are back — Marv, the avenging angel thug played by Mickey Rourke, with-prosthetic jaw, brow and nose, and the last good cop, Hartigan, played by a fatalistic Bruce Willis. Prominent newcomers are Eva Green, showing off her Bond Babe bod in her birthday suit, luring men to their doom, Josh Brolin and Dennis Haysbert as two of those men, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an unfortunately lucky gambler and Powers Boothe is a crooked Senator the gambler crosses.
Stacy Keach shows up in a full Jabba the Hutt blob mask, Juno Temple and Jaime King are fresh women of the night, Christopher Lloyd’s a demented mob doctor, Jeremy Piven and Christopher Meloni are ineffectual cops and Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson return as bustier-and-fishnet clad tough broads with a stripper touch.
The gambler (Gordon-Levitt) woos a lady friend (Julia Garner) with his hardboiled patter.
“A city’s like a woman, or a casino. Somebody’s gonna win.”
Marv is still dealing in revenge-as-justice, execution style.
“I did what any good citizen would do.”
And private eye Dwight (Brolin) is spying on the likes of Ray Liotta and Temple, who plays his paramour.
“She glides out of her coat like it was Christmas wrapping.”
Rodriguez, who shot this and shares directing credit with Miller, films “A Dame to Kill For” in extreme close-ups, through lingering digital clouds of cigarette smoke, staging stylistically fake classic car chases — a Tucker Torpedo, a tail finned Caddy.
The violence is grisly — impalings and beheadings and eye-pluckings. And the sex is explicit. Women take a back seat in these movies, though Alba’s stripper bent on revenge gets to narrate part of it. Dawson and Green are the ones who’re frightening enough to hold their own with the tough guys.
“A Dame to Kill For” isn’t the shock to the system “Sin City” was. But whatever its plot repetition and warmed-over tough talk cost it, this is still a movie like few others you’ve ever seen, a 3D slice of Nihilistic noir that will have you narrating your own guts and guns story on the drive home, chewing on a toothpick as you do.

MPAA Rating: R for strong brutal stylized violence throughout, sexual content, nudity and brief drug use.

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Eva Green, Rosario Dawson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dennis Haysbert
Credits: Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, written by Frank Miller and based on his graphic novels. A Dimension release.
Running

I guess it was looking over the box office take of “Boyhood,” the most acclaimed film of the summer and certainly independent cinema’s darling of the year, that prompted this perusal of the box office tallies of the offbeat.

Summer is dominated by studio blockbusters — action pics and cartoons and comic book movies. But there’s always a worthy documentary or French comedy or boutique studio drama or farce that punches through the ennui and leaves a mark.

“Boyhood” fills that bill on several counts. It almost cracked the top ten at the box office last weekend, adding a couple hundred theaters to flesh out its release to a robust (for indie film) 771 screens. But the per-screen average has plummeted, and increasing the screen count by a third only inched it up near the $2 million mark. That appears to be a topping out point, with the movie well over $13 million and August fading into the sunset. It could reach $20 million, which makes this $4 million pic a hit. But if it sticks in theaters well into September, that would be a miracle.

Then again, Woody’s Allen’s latest, “Magic in the Moonlight” is on a lot more screens and already peaked and fading, well shy of $10 million. He is back to where he was before “Midnight in Paris.” His movies used to be $10-20 million wheezers, until that one gave him his biggest hit.

“Boyhood”‘s $13 million take is in the ballpark of “Belle,” the slave era Brit period piece that opened the summer. It is still in theaters, but barely cleared $10 million.

“Begin Again” has a couple of name stars and has cleared $13, based on Keira/Ruffalo appeal.

“America: What Would Happen If I Had Never Come Here to Attend College and Stayed to Tell Tea Party Conservatives What They Want to Hear” was the biggest hit documentary of the summer, but it won’t reach $15.

The Roger Ebert doc, an actual Oscar contender, has been out almost two months and is nowhere within sight of its first $1 million. And “Supermensch,” the Whitey Bulger crime doc and the food expose “Fed Up” didn’t add up to $2 million, all together.

You don’t expect worthy little films such as “Happy Christmas” (Anna Kendrick, mumblecore rom-com), “Land Ho!” or “Obvious Child” to climb the charts in between releases of “22 Jump Street” and “Planes 2.”

“Filth” and those other films (“The Double” with Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska) operate under a different business model, though you have to wonder had they been released into more theaters in early spring or fall if they’d made more, theatrically. They make their cash on the home video/Netflix end of the equation.

“Snowpiercer” got a boutique release. With a cast built around Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton, that one seems to have suffered from a lack of love in the front office (director’s cut dispute) and won’t clear $5 million.

Here’s how to market a modest film — Open Road’s handling of “Chef.” It had pop appeal, it had Jon Favreau doing the rounds, drumming up interest in it in May. A small rollout, rapidly boosted to enough screens for everybody to have a chance to see it, and then word of mouth kept it around all summer. Closing in on $30 million.

And how will they top that? Just this afternoon, Open Road announces it is rolling the film back out into theaters in wide release the weekend of Aug. 29. So if you missed it, you have one last chance to catch it on the big screen.

“Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner takes his act to the big screen with “Are
You Here?” which turns out to be the most quotable Owen Wilson comedy since
“Zoolander.”

It’s a bit all over the place, a stoner comedy with heart, a glib mental
illness riff, a light romance with bite and a too-conventional spoof of small
market TV news.

There’s where Steve Dallas (Wilson, named for a “Bloom County” character?)
glides by as the weather anchor. He shows up on set at the last minute, stoned
half the time, but “smooth as silk” on the air.

His boss (Paul Schulze) disabuses Steve of any notion of moving to a bigger
market, “not with that nose.” And Steve acts like it, burning through pot as if
it was legal, running the same spiel on an endless succession of women.

“Honestly, I wake up happy. I’m THAT guy!”

Then, there’s Ben, his lifelong pal — a plainly unstable stoner he visits in
Ben’s ruin of a rural trailer. Ben is paranoid, neurotic and a bearded
man-child. So naturally he’s played by Zach Galifianakis.

Steve has to drive Ben to Ben’s father’s funeral, stopping for a joint, and
to allow Ben to rescue a baitshop-load of crayfish.

“They mate for life, you know.”

Late for the funeral, awkward with Ben’s sister Terri (Amy Poehler) at the
after-burial lunch at Outback, at least Steve is impressed with vegetarian Ben’s
blooming onion.

“Deep-fried onions, dipped in Ranch? Bet it tastes like…SPRING-time!”

It’s after the funeral that bonkers Ben and testy Terri set off sparks. Their
dad was a success in his corner of Pennsylvania Amish country. Terri, bitterly
trying to get pregnant, gets a lot of cash, but Ben is entrusted with the family
store and farm. Terri hates that, and she hates dad’s calm, earthy and beautiful
young widow, Angelina (Laura Ramsey). Terri is sure Ben will squander his
inheritance, and she’s pretty sure the righteous hippy Angelina is up to no
good.

Steve? He just notices how gorgeous and open-hearted the now-available widow
is. Not that she’s having him.

“Maybe you’d better run along and get high so at least one of us can forget
we had this conversation.”

Weiner didn’t so much create characters as “types” here, and then cast actors
who have mastered those types. Still, he makes up for that with delightfully
witty dialogue, much of it delivered in that off-hand way Wilson has.

Steve corrects Ben as his unstable friend announces grandiose
Amish-influenced plans for a post “Banana Republic” commune for the farm, and
that he’s “stressed.”

“I’M stressed, you’re CRAZY. Let’s use the word freely, as if it gives us
power.”

Some comedies come out in August because they just aren’t funny enough (see
“Let’s Be Cops”) to find an audience in the heart of summer. “Are You Here?”, from
its nothing of a title to its wayward length and broad embrace of ideas and
themes, seems to warrant August release simply because who could figure out how
to market it?

It’s smarter than your average Wilson farce and sweetly deviates from the
formula that made Galifianakis famous. But like “Sopranos” creator David Chase’s
trip to the big screen, “Not Fade Away,” Weiner’s “Are You Here” has good scenes
and clever dialogue, but is over-stuffed with a TV season’s quota of
not-that-original ideas.

MPAA Rating: R for language, drug use and some sexual content/nudity

Cast: Owen Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler, Laura Ramsey

Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Weiner. A Millennium release.

Running time: 1:52