Movie Nation

　We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson.
His latest film, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details. From the purple velvet with red piping hotel uniforms to the drinks, colognes and artwork of Europe between the World Wars, Anderson ensconces his eccentric characters and us in a time of baroque, imaginary four-star hotels run on what used to pass for four star service.
It’s all about framing — the odd aspect ratios Anderson plays with in the shape of the screen, elongated — made to fit narrow rooms, tall elevators, funicular rail cars and tall actors like Ralph Fiennes, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton and Tilda Swinton. Fittingly, the story is a framework within a frame, a tale told by a long-dead novelist (Tom Wilkinson) about what inspired his famous novel, a tall tale he heard as a younger man (Jude Law) from the owner, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) of the gone-to-seed Grand Budapest Hotel.
And framed within that framing device is the long flashback to the old hotel owner’s youth, when Zero Moustafa was “lobby boy” to the famed concierge, Monsieur Gustave, played with hilarious relish by Fiennes.
M. Gustave is all about service and good manners, maintaining “the faint glimmer” of civilization as war is about to break out all around the imaginary Republic of Zubrowka.
“A lobby boy is completely invisible, but always in sight,” he lectures. He usually follows his lectures with a florid and overlong poem of his own composition, but no one pays attention those.
And M. Gustave? His attentions all go to the guests — little old ladies that this perfumed and flamboyant dandy beds during their stay at the Grand Budapest.
“I go to bed with all my friends,” he croons. It’s just part of the service.
But when a guest (Tilda Swinton, hidden in old age makeup) dies and Gustave is in the will, the concierge faces his ugliest foes — an heir (Adrien Brody) and that heir’s murderous henchman (Willem Dafoe). Before this tangled knot unravels, Zubrowka will be invaded, Gustave will steal a famous painting and be framed for murder, we’ll see a prison break, a snowy chase on skis and sleds (filmed with miniatures and dolls) and a noisy shootout.
And the old hotel owner Mr. Moustafa will remember the love of his younger self (Tony Revolori), the birthmarked baker (Saoirse Ronan, in Scots accent) who helped him try to save M. Gustave from the violence and bad manners and prison sentence threatening his happiness.
There are hints of many jaunty earlier Anderson films here — “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Royal Tenenbaums.” But here there are balalaikas and bursts of violence and profanity and sexual crudeness that jolt us into remembering the cruelty that M. Gustave is keeping at bay, and into realizing this sentimental world of rich dowagers drifting from spa to spa isn’t as genteel as it seems.
The Wes Anderson repertory company — from Jason Schwartzman to Bill Murray — went to Germany with him to film this funny fantasia. Harvey Keitel, Lea Seydoux, Mathieu Amalric and many other faces familiar from indie and European film turn up in the sets of the Hotel Borse (in Gorelitz, Germany) and Potsdam of this quirkier than quirky movie, which Anderson says in the credits was inspired by the Austrian Belle Epoch novels of Stefan Zweig. The Max Ophuls film of Zweig’s “Letter from an Unknown Woman” is one of the great triumphs of sentimental 1940s period piece production design, just as “Budapest” is the greatest expression of Anderson’s love of ornate buildings, old money, older furniture, tiny models and modish, saturated colors.
“He certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace,” Mr. Moustafa eulogizes M. Gustave, at one point. That could be turn out to be the deadpan Anderson’s epitaph as well, should this Tsar of Surreal Silliness ever be so gauche as to die. Or retire.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and violence
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F. Murray Abraham, Saoirse Ronan, Jude Law, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe
Credits: Written and directed by Wes Anderson, story by Anderson and Hugo Guiness . A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:39

Steve Coogan may have copped Oscar nominations for writing and producing “Philomena,” a film that offers Judi Dench another shot at an acting Oscar and Coogan a chance to re-invent himself as an actor.

But the reason Coogan’s always needed reinventing  is his greatest creation, the self-absorbed, tactless, book-smart but dopey Alan Partridge. He can make all the movies he wants, and in Hollywood he’s starred in “Hamlet 2” and stolen bits of “Tropic Thunder”, “The Other Guys” and the “Night at the Museum” movies. In Britain, he’ll always be that touchy, puffy-haired boob with the catch-phrase – “A-haaa” — born in his ABBA fixation, a toxic dunce they’ve been watching fail his way off TV and into local radio in 20 years of Alan Partridge TV series and specials.

Now “Alan Partridge”, the movie, a hit in Britain, earns a limited release in the U.S. It’s a hilarious 90 minute State of the Partridge project, and you don’t need to have seen the series and specials to get the scores of jokes. But they sting even more if you have.

Partridge, now 55, is clumsily hosting a show on North Norfolk Digital’s Radio Norwich. Quite the comedown from his days hosting a generic and inept chat show on the BBC.

“You know who I am. I haven’t been off TV THAT long.”

The big running gag here is his “Sunset Boulevard” vanity, the testy insistence that he used to be big, even if he just does local radio and voice overs for butcher shop commercials.

But Radio Norwich has been bought out by a new conglomerate, and when the layoffs come, self-preservation king Alan hurls his colleague (Colm Meaney) under the bus. Pat, the night DJ, doesn’t realize this when he seizes the station and takes the staff hostage at an office party. His old mate Alan is the one he trusts to be the go-between with the cops.

“There’s a madman! With a gun! He’s IRISH!”

So the cowardly Partridge has to cozy up to the Irishman with a gun, try to do the police’s bidding and, while he’s at it, curry favor with the new owners and turn this life-or-death situation into a kick in the rear for his career.

The situation, borrowed from movies like “Airheads,” is nothing special. But there’s warmth in Coogan’s scenes with Meaney, a couple of 50somethings for whom life is just different shades of disappointment.

What’s hilarious here are the scads of what could have been throw-away lines, every one a killer. Alan on guns — “I’ve never fired one in anger. Or at a cat.”

On cops rushing him to get to the point of an anecdote — “Why? Do you have another siege to get to?”

What’s it like, trapped with the others inside the station?

“Scary, stressful. Lots of shouting. A bit like being married again.”

Every record intro on the radio is a keeper — “That was soft rock cocaine enthusiasts Fleetwood Mac.” And “What a voice. You can keep Jesus. As far as I’m concerned, Neil Diamond will ALWAYS be King of the Jews.”

Fans of the TV series will spy Alan’s long-suffering assistant and would-be conscience, Lynn (Felicity Montagu) and the Geordie-accented buffoon Michael (Simon Greenall) who has long been Alan’s biggest fan.

It’s a comedy of sight gags, zingers and awkward pauses — lots of those. Sentimental at times, yes. But funny. Always.

Coogan can gripe about freeing himself of Partridge, and he even made the period piece “Tristram Shandy” into a “Steve Coogan runs from Alan Partridge” comedy. It’s great to see him embracing his inner oaf, this venal, petty middle aged media flop.

He has taken the advice his Alan gives poor Lynn in the film, “Enjoy me. Everyone else is.”

MPAA Rating: R for language, brief violence and nudity

Cast: Steve Coogan, Colm Meaney, Anna Maxwell Martin, Felicity Montagu

Credits: Directed by Declan Lowney, screenplay by Steve Coogan, Neil Gibbons, Rob Gibbons. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:30

　”Stalingrad” is a huge, old-fashioned combat spectacle, a war story told on a vast scale and shown on vast IMAX movie screens, in 3D no less.
It’s Russian — oh so very Russian, an epic of “The Great Patriotic War” that mixes vivid, blood and guts combat with chest-thumping patriotism and pathos.
And unfortunately, it’s more than a little clumsy, from its absurd framing device to the simple head count of the cast of “fathers” who saved a young woman, and the world, during the “bloodiest battle in history.”
In late 1942, Soviet reinforcements cross the Volga River and storm, literally, through a wall of fire to seize an apartment building on the front lines. They rescue a young rape victim (Mariya Smolnikova) and struggle to protect her from the Germans, led by a mournful, war-weary captain (Thomas Kretschmann), who are on the brink of throwing the Soviets out of the city.
Comrade Kapitan Gromov, played by an emotional Colin Farrell look-alike (Pyotr Fyodorov) worries that his tiny band will be too busy saving Katya to save Mother Russia. But in the symbolism of the cinema, she is both girl-victim and Mother Russia — traumatized by war, clinging to vestiges of civilization in her parents’ art and piano-filled apartment, hell-bent on hanging on and having her revenge.
Director Fedor Bondarchuk (the fine Afghan war thriller “9th Company” was his) stages the room-to-room, hand-to-hand fighting with a brutal, bloody brio. The thoroughly ruined sets, from the riverfront with its improvised rafts floating troops across, to the everything-is-burned-bombed-and-broken apartment blocks, put us inside the battle — in 3D.
But this film was plainly built for the Putin-esque Soviet — sorry, Russian — market. Every excess has an old fashioned hint of Soviet era propaganda about it. As interesting as it might be to get a whiff of how the Russians see themselves and their history, Bondarchuk keeps finding ways to turn off overseas audiences.
Take the frame in which the story is told. Bondarchuk’s famous actor-director father Sergei (“Waterloo”, “War and Peace”) plays an elderly Russian doctor telling the story of his mother’s survival to a bunch of injured Germans trapped in a building collapse in the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami. Heroic Soviet — sorry, Russian — rescue teams went there to save the day.
The old doctor tells the story of the battle through the eyes of his mother, who always told him he “had five fathers,” the men who saved her and perhaps fathered him during or after the battle.
The problem with that? There are plainly six, not five, men heavily invested in Katya’s survival. At one point, they even pose on the steps of the apartment building — six of them. Who was left out of Mom’s count; the kapitan, the silent opera singer turned killing machine (Alexsei Barabash), the piggish sniper (Dmitri Lysenkov), the gruff Navy warrant officer (Oleg Volku), the one they call “Angel” or the other they call “Sissy”?
Landing Kretschmann, whose big break was saving “The Pianist” at the end of Roman Polanski’s WWII film, meant building his character up, giving him a Russian “comfort woman” (Yanina Studilina) whom he holds hostage because she’s a dead ringer for his dead wife and treats as his lover-confessor — even though they don’t speak each other’s language.
Convincing digital dive bombers attack and missiles fired from German “Moaning Minnie” launchers streak through the smoke-filled skies. Jews are murdered, and back-talking Soviet sailors are summarily executed. Every so often, for the sake of a plot device, a soldier of this side or that one yells “Freeze” (in Russian or German, with English subtitles) rather than carrying on the killing spree, just so we have the hint of a foes taking prisoners and debating, face to face.
It’s a movie every bit as bloated as the biggest movies Bondarchuk’s dad made, in his heyday. In detail and combat spectacle, “Stalingrad” is hard to beat. And whatever its failings, one can’t help but be curious about a story as connected to national identity as this one, a film that like today’s Russia, feels more Soviet than Russian.

MPAA Rating:R for sequences of war violence
Cast: Pyotr Fyodorov, Mariya Smolnikova, Thomas Kretschmann, Yanina Studilina, Dmitri Kochkin, Dmitri Lysenkov, Aleksey Barabash, Andrey Smolyakov, Sergey Bondarchuk
Credits: Directed by Fedor Bondarchuk, written by Sergey Snezhkin, Ilya Tilkin. A Columbia release.
Running time: 2:11

Very sad to hear that funnyman, writer/director Harold Ramis has died. He was 69, the Chicago Tribune says in the story on his death.

He wrote “Caddyshack,” was famous for the “Ghostbusters” movies, reliable support to Bill Murray in “Stripes,” and the director of Murray’s best film — “Groundhog Day.”

Interviewing him several times over the years, he always came off as a mellow sort, very much like the guy we say in “Knocked Up,” playing Seth Rogen’s dad — sweet, kind, tolerant.

I remember him talking about the role he fulfilled in the “Ghostbusters” line-up, that point guard feeding the ball to Bill Murray. He is the screenwriter responsible for bringing fraternities back to popular approval among college kids with “Animal House.” His scripts (“Stripes,” “Meatballs’) made Bill Murray a star, and padded Chevy Chase’s bank account (“National Lampoon’s Vacation.”).

But to me, he’s the guy who figured out that ingenious use of “I Got You Babe” in “Groundhog Day,” a song playing on a clock radio that begins as a joke, turns into a taunt, morphs into a mournful place and then rings, as Murray’s character reforms enough to “get it,” into something triumphant.

Very sorry to see Ramis go. He was a good one.

　The better the obstacles to love and happiness, the more bittersweet the romance. That’s a reminder from “The Lunchbox,” an Indian film (in English and Hindi) that remembers it’s not sizzling sex scenes that make movie love stories work, it’s the longing.
Mumbai’s famous lunch delivery system — in which wives cook meals that are then picked up by bicycle delivery men to transport, in their hundreds and thousands, to the correct office worker husbands in buildings all over the city — has been studied and puzzled over in the West for years. Little or no paper work, bikes crowded with stacked cylindrical lunchboxes that are transferred to trains, trotted up to buildings where an office clerk drops them at the proper desks — it is a daily marvel of inscrutable efficiency.
First-time writer-director Ritesh Batra builds a sad-eyed romance around that rare mistake, a blunder that hurls two lonely people together.
Ila (Nimrat Kaur of “One Night with the King”) is a doting mother and wife who pours energy and her mother’s recipes into her husband’s daily lunch. But Rajeev, that husband, doesn’t notice. And then, her lunches start going to the wrong address.
Saajan (Irrfan Khan of “Life of Pi”) is a grim-faced accountant on the verge of retirement. Widowed, standoffish, his drudgery is only interrupted by the annoying appearance of Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a gratingly charming underling he’s supposed to train to take over his job.
Then these wonderful meals — eggplants and curries, rice and chapatis (flatbreads) to die for — start showing up. He figures his restaurant service suddenly got good, which his cynicism cannot explain.
“There’s no value for talent in this country.”
But Ila, seeing the licked-clean pots and questioning the husband who ignores her, figures it out. She doesn’t correct the mistake. At least a man appreciates her cooking. She writes him a note.
And that’s how it begins, a neglected wife, emptying her heart into food and notes that read like poetic diary entries, an emotionally dead older man lighting up, ever so slowly, at her attention, passing on marriage advice but plainly touched by her predicament and how her predicament makes him feel.

That’s where this film makes its home — the fantasy of flirtation, the romance of finding someone who listens to you and sympathizes. Batra goes to pains to fill this movie about love letters with retro-tech, Saajan doing his work by pen and calculator, watching old videotapes when he gets home. Ila confers with her never-seen upstairs aunt on recipes, life lessons and the like, shouting through the window, sending ingredients upstairs or downstairs via rope basket, listening to old-fashioned cassette tapes.
Will Ila and Saajan meet? Will things turn illicit? Can a fantasy survive a dose of reality?
Kaur is a vital, expressive actress who gives a compassionate performance here, and Khan, with the most mournful eyes in the movies, tells us far more about what he is thinking or feeling with his face than with his character’s few words.
It’s an intimate, quiet and slow-paced romance, a simple, richly rewarding movie in the classic style of India’s greatest filmmaker, the late Satyajit Ray. Batra uses Ray’s serene little slices of Indian life style to comment on the clash not of Old India against New India, but of Recent India colliding with Now India. His “Lunchbox” serves up a multi-course meal of life, love and the sort of coincidences that drive the best love stories.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material and smoking
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Credits: Written and directed by Ritesh Batra. A Sony Classics release.
Running time: 1:44

Producer Mark Burnett and his actress-producer wife Roma Downey are not just show business people. And not just Christians, Downey points out.

“We’re very noisy Christians. With good intentions.”

That’s how she explains their involvement in putting “The Bible” together for The History Channel. And that’s why they culled footage from that series and shot additional scenes to flesh out the story of Jesus for “Son of God,” a faith-based life of Jesus film that hits theaters Feb. 28.

“We believe this story and we believe that it will add value to the planet, that it will uplift and inspire, as it always has,” says Downey (“Touched by an Angel”), who also plays Mary, mother of Jesus, in the film. “We were tired of cursing the darkness, and wanted to create projects that added light to the world.”

It’s been 50 years since “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” 35 years since “Jesus” and a decade since “The Passion of the Christ.” Burnett, best known for TV’s “Survivor,” thinks the time is right for a feature film about Jesus of Nazareth. He wanted to humanize Jesus for the series and for the film, to go beyond the horrors of the crucifixion, which was the focus of Mel Gibson’s blockbuster “Passion.”

“In ‘The Passion,’ he gets arrested on his knees, in Gethsemane,” Burnett says. “If you don’t know his story, you haven’t had time to fall in love with the character. That’s what we wanted to show, this guy kids just loved, this smiling, kind man with all this love about him. He had a sense of humor, so I saw him as a real guy, in ADDITION to being God. You feel the humanity and the divinity in him. It’s a tough thing to try to show.”

They cast Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado as Jesus. He decided to tackle this as “just another role.” But that reasoning, he says, “was out of fear.” He was afraid of messing up.

Burnett wanted to capture the political thriller aspects of the story, as those entrenched in the power structure of ancient Jerusalem scheme to convince the Roman occupiers to get rid of this trouble maker in their midst. But Burnett knew that intrigues aside, Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” raised the bar on how the last days of Jesus are depicted — the excruciating violence of his death.

“We realized you cannot minimize the horror of that,” Burnett says. “Millions of human beings have died for this faith, martyred because they refused to deny their faith. You get that wrong, it’s ‘game over,’ in the eyes of a lot of church leaders and the faithful.

“But we didn’t make it as graphic as Mel Gibson did. We show you Mary’s reaction as the nail is pounded into his hand. You don’t need to see the nail penetrate the skin. We got a PG-13, which was a relief. Because that is a terribly violent way to die.”

And one should never end a “Life of Jesus” picture with his death on the cross, Downey insists. “If you don’t show The Resurrection, you don’t realize that’s just the beginning of the story. It’s a big part of what is so uplifting, hopeful inspiring about him.”

To defuse potential complaints about the project, they ran the film by over 40 religious denominations, from Christian evangelicals to Jewish theologians. “There are no stereotypes or caricatures in our film,” Burnett declares, a major criticism of Gibson’s 2004 film.

And Burnett is fulsome in his praise of the British TV documentary crew he used to shoot the series and the feature film, detail-oriented history buffs who “made sure that nothing, NOTHING looks out of place in our version of ancient Israel.”

It’s almost mean to bring it up, with their sincerity and good intentions and all. But Mr. Burnett, you’ve got Pontius Pilate riding a horse into Jerusalem.

“Yeah.”

He’s got STIRRUPS on the horse. The Romans didn’t saddle up with stirrups for at least 100 years.

“Listen,” Burnett says, laughing, “Greg Hicks (who plays Pilate), MARVELOUS actor. But we don’t put stirrups on his horse, he doesn’t STAY on that horse. So that detail, yeah. We got it wrong. To save the actor.”

Hiyao Miyazaki delivered a lovely, fanciful anime version of Japanese pre-World War II history with “The Wind Rises.” And it takes little away from the film to note that he scrubs Japan’s role in starting the war  out of this account of the life of the engineer who designed the famed Zero fighter plane. Some reviews noted the film’s tidy and sanitized way of treating the Japanese national obsession with denying its warmongering, enslaving ways. And some didn’t.

Luc Besson’s little Franco-phobic touches are much in evidence in the dark, violent and yet sometimes hilarious “3 Days to Kill.” Only M. Luc would think torture can be funny, that taking shots at immigrant rights and lazy French police would fit into a Kevin Costner riff on “Taken.” I thought it worked well enough. Most other critics did not.

“In Secret,” a period piece love triangle that includes a murder and stars Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, Oscar Isaac and Tom Felton, earned mixed reviews. Again, I erred on the side of “it’s watchable and well-acted.” Others dumped on it.

“Pompeii” was going to have to overcome Sony’s bungled, “damaged goods” handling of the release, keeping critics from it, and the awful rep of Paul W.S. Anderson. I thought it did, a majority of critics did not.

“Barefoot” is earning awful reviews, and while I’ve seen worse, you cannot get away with making the mentally ill (or possibly mentally ill) cute on screen. Evan Rachel Wood is the “Rainman” in this “Benny & Joon” road picture romance.

They’ve turned their History Channel TV series into a New Testament movie. “The Bible” has been boiled down to “Son of God,” or at least “Bible” elements have been added to this faith-based feature film.

Mark Burnett (“Survivor”) and his wife Roma Downey (“Touched by an Angel”) are behind this film venture, opening Feb. 28. Roma plays Mary Mother of God (Jesus) in it.

And Diogo Morgado, a Portuguese actor, plays Jesus.

Questions for them? I am interviewing the trio this afternoon. Post your queries as comments below, and thanks for the help.