Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl and Brendan Fraser as cartoon voices. Small furry animals and their love of nuts, stuck in the city, where nuts are in short supply. Until they find…a STORE.
“The Nut Job” opens next Friday, Jan. 17. A bit early to be in that Feb. “Gnomeo & Juliet” window, but “Frozen” should be pretty much spent.
It’s “Clash of the Titans,” pretty much without Titans, a “Gladiator” with nobody to root for and a “Samson” without a proper “Delilah.” At times, with its stiff, charisma-impaired cast, its digital sets and slo-mo slaughter, “The Legend of Hercules” has a whiff of the Augean Stables about it — if you catch my drift.
The rest of the time, this star vehicle for “Twilight” lesser light Kellan Lutz rises to adequate — an ancient Greece action pic that benefits by coming out before “Pompei,” before “300: Rise of an Empire” and long before Brett Ratner’s summer spectacle titled, um, “Hercules.” A parade of carnage without blood, romance without heat, stilted dialogue and male cleavage, at its best it is still vexing as all get out even to those with a high tolerance for the Cinema of the Gods.
Not to say that it contorts Greek mythology beyond recognition. It doesn’t. This Renny “Driven” Harlin picture is about Hercules before he knew he was Hercules. His mother Alcmene (Roxanne McKee) so hates her war-mad husband that she prays for a means of bringing him down. Hera, wife to Zeus, promises her a baby conceived by her husband. And that lad, called Alcides, doesn’t know that the cruel King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins) isn’t his real dad.
Dad had his suspicions, and lavishes his attention on the inferior first-born son Iphicles (Liam Garrigan). While Alcides (Lutz) falls for the bland but pretty Princess Hebe (Gaia Weiss). That’s the princess the king wants Iphicles to marry.
Hercules gets banished for trying to run off with the princess, and as she is to marry “three moons (months) hence,” he’d better get cracking, gladiating his way from Egypt to Sicily to the MMA Greek Octagon finals so he can win back the lady and avenge himself on those wayward relatives.
Armies besiege digital fortresses, digital triremes plow through the Mediterranean and slo-motion sword fights, with stabbings, impalings, and virtually no blood fill the screen.
And in between the fights, an utterly generic cast utters the blandest lines ever written as they court, conspire, fight and fume.
Lutz is built like a guy who would never get voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and bellows his lines in manly fashion. But he makes little impression. As do his foes. Weiss doesn’t inspire Helen of Troy comparisons, and the villains aren’t any threat to the guy with all the muscles.
There’s precious little sorcery to the “sword and sorcery” genre elements, and the story beats simply hit (and miss) the movies this borrows from that I mentioned at the opening of this review.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense combat action and violence, and for some sensuality
Cast: Kellan Lutz, Roxanne McKee, Gaia Weiss, Scott Adkins, Liam McIntyre, Liam Garrigan
Credits: Directed by Renny Harlin, written by Sean Hood, Daniel Giat, Giulio Steve and Renny Harlin. A Summit release.
Running time: 1:36
She was up for the lead in “Saving Mr. Banks.” And she would have been great in it, co-starring with Tom Hanks, being a bit more age appropriate for P.L. Travers, being bitchy as all get out.
But no, Meryl Streep chose to chew the scenery and pile on the ham in “August: Osage County,” an ensemble picture that lets her and Julia Roberts raise the volume in a film of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning play.
Which brings a whole new slant to her decision to do a press event where she rips into…Walt Disney, Hanks’ character in “Saving Mr. Banks.” While HANDING Emma Thompson an award for her performance in “Saving Mr. Banks.”
Ouch.
Nothing she says is far from the truth. Exaggerated and shrill, but not far off the mark. Was Walt anti-Semitic? Possibly. Sexist? No more than was normal for his era. Racist? Possibly, certainly racially insensitive, even though he tried to get civil rights leaders to sign off on “Song of the South.”
But seriously, going back over all this, while handing Emma an award, seems ill-timed, ill-considered and petty. It makes Streep look needy, like she needs the Oscar she so does NOT deserve for “Osage.”
This is very Weinstein of her, for those who know the rep of the film studio famed for managing their films’ Oscar campaigns, and snarky counter-campaigns. Tacky. And wouldn’t you know it, “August: Osage County” is a Weinstein Co. release.
Expect her to walk this bit of venting back within a day or two.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker sets out to explain it all away. Streep, who gives few interviews and fewer public speeches, has a “history” of taking public feminist stands about Hollywood subjects. Maybe so. But she’s not that public, which makes her decision to do all this on one of those rare-ish occasions when she does a little public speaking just amplifies it.
True confession, I’m a fan. I’ve interviewed her before. She’s been pretty good in most everything she’s done, post “High School Musical.” Well, nobody was good in “Sucker Punch.”
Vanessa Hudgens has been aggressively making that leap from teen idol to adult roles — in films from “Spring Breakers” to “The Frozen GRound” ( a teen hooker in that one) to her latest, “Gimme Shelter.”
We’re talking about that latest film and the transition she seemingly started the moment that infamous selfie turned up on the net years ago, and I’m looking for lines of questioning.
Any suggestions? Comment below, and thanks for the help.
The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in “The Wait.” Still, this movie about a family failing to deal with the death of the matriarch and the differing forms their denial takes is promising enough in premise that M. Blash’s solid script attracted actors of some repute.
Jena Malone and Chloe Sevigny are sisters who have gathered in their mother’s spacious home in a wooded subdivision in the mountains of Oregon. They’re there to say goodbye and watch mom die, which she does in the opening moments of the movie.
But Emma (Sevigny, of TV’s “Portlandia,” “The Mindy Project,” etc.) fields a phone call from a stranger, a woman with a folksy, re-assuring drawl.
“Love is in the air, darlin’. Things always happen for a reason.” And here’s the kicker.
“They will return. Have a good life, now.”
Emma is beside herself. She’s expecting a resurrection. Odd, seeing as how she’s a hospice nurse and there hasn’t been one of those in millennia. She refuses to surrender the body or even admit to a mortician that her mother has passed on. She enlists her young daughter (Lana Elizabeth Green) in her fantasy and starts planning a party.
Younger sister Angela (Malone, of TV’s “Dakota” and “Hatfields & McCoys”) is nonplussed, but apparently unwilling to challenge her elder sister. She finds ways to get out of the house and a reason to want to in the hunky would-be historian Ben, played by Luke Grimes of “True Blood”, just cast as the lead in “Fifty Shades of Grey.”)
And the sisters’ much younger brother, Ian (Devon Gearhart) wanders off, carrying a teenager’s priorities, and seemingly in shock at Emma’s decision to wrap the body in a sheet and wait for…something.
“You’re creepy.”
Everybody’s dealing with a secret something here, be it a troubled mind, a broken marriage or bisexual curiosity. And as they cope and try to avoid each other or learn about each other’s issues, a forest fire is working its way toward them.
“The Wait” is a quiet and austere picture, and the setting and tone are reminiscent of the Tilda Swinton thriller “The Deep End.” Except this isn’t a thriller.
Blash, who used the same two leads in his 2006 film, “Lying,” hints at mysteries within mysteries and maintains a faintly chilly tone. Is something sinister or supernatural about to happen? Are they all doomed by the coming blaze?
Striking landscapes — often with smoke in the background — and odd images prevail; a horse, accidentally doused in reddish-pink fire retardant, a viral video of a little girl yanking free of an adult to hurl herself in front of a train.
So Blash puts an awful lot of intriguing ideas and possibilities on the table. But he is plainly a filmmaker who hasn’t yet worked out that tricky business of making them pay off.
MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content, brief nudity, language and drug use
Cast: Chloe Sevigny, Jena Malone, Luke Grimes, Devon Gearhart
Credits: Written and directed by M. Blash. A Monterey Media release.
Running time: 1:37
A sense of mystery is a hard thing to create on film. So much so that discarding that sense, once you’ve created it, is almost always a mistake.
That’s the blunder of “The Truth About Emanuel.” It sets up a lovely psychological puzzle, things which we do not know about the title character, which the ensuing movie doesn’t really justify. And then it ruins the effect by over-explaining pretty much everything in the third act.
Emanuel uses the masculine spelling of her name.
“They thought I was going to be a boy.”
But this skinny, sassy and morbid beauty is anything but. Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario) is sexy, self-confident longer who lives with the knowledge that her mother died in childbirth. “It’s on my tab,” she narrates. “It accumulates interest with every passing day.”
Which may explain her dark take on the world, a persona she’s layered on top of the usual doses of teen sarcasm and self-absorption. She has the confident wit of a great beauty who knows she intimidates men — like the boy (Aneurin Barnard) she flirts with on the bus, or the boss at the pharmacy (Jimmi Simpson) who lets every rude remark slide, just to enjoy another day of her company.
Emanuel wants nothing to do with Dad’s newish wife (Frances O’Connor) or indeed Dad himself (Alfred Molina). But the fetching new neighbor, all bangs and long, diaphanous dresses, attracts her attention. Linda (Jessica Biel) is a new mom. And she needs a baby-sitter. Emanuel figures she can squeeze that in.
“I need the money. I’ve decided I’m going to become a collector of ‘Precious Moments.'”
But Linda has a secret, one which she’s apparently unaware of. Her baby, Chloe, is just a doll. And Emanuel cannot figure out how to process this or broach the subject with the “new mom.”
Co-writer/director Francesca Gregorini sets us up for something sinister, toying with Linda’s fixation on a static-filled baby monitor and Biel’s loopy interpretation of loony Linda.
Emanuel’s response — to keep Linda’s secret, to never point out to the crazy woman the obvious — suggests that she wonders if she’s hallucinating this reality, or merely bending that reality to suit her psychological needs. Somebody’s crazy. But who?
There’s a sort of “Juno” sass and swagger to Brit actress Scodelario’s interpretation of the character. She turns the over matched Claude, her bus acquaintance, into a “boyfriend” by fiat, shocking fellow bus-riders with whispered suggestions that she needs the seat next to her to tell her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. Her Emanuel gets away with rude eccentricity on her brass, her looks and her wit.
But the “Truth About Emanuel” that writers and director come up with is far too pedestrian for this catty, catwalk-ready monster. They had a couple of characters and a couple of actresses playing them who could have led us anywhere — into the dark recesses of guilt and insanity, or worse. Instead, they waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult themes an situations
Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Jessica Biel, Alfred Molina, Frances O’Connor, Aneurin Barnard, Jimmi Simpson
Credits: Directed by Francesca Gregorini, written by Francesca Gregorini and Sarah Thorpe. A Tribeca Film release.
Running time: 1:36
“Breaking Bad” fans will get a kick of out of seeing Bryan “Walter White” Cranston in beard and sunglasses, slinging a Slavic accent. As a hit-man/courier in “Cold Comes the Night,” he sets the film’s quiet, menacing tone with long silences broken by the occasional blood-curdling threat, delivered in venomous Vladimir Putin-ese.
“Leetle girl,” he purrs to the daughter of his kidnap victim (Alice Eve). “You haff JACKet?”
“Of course, everybody has a jacket,” the child snaps.
“Plizz, to get yours.”
Sometimes, it’s as if we’re seeing TV meth maker Walter White vamping it up, pretending to be a Russian meth mobster. Maybe you giggle. I did. And then you snap out of it and appreciate this simple, deliberate and atmospheric thriller for what it is — a genre piece that works.
Co-writer and director Tze Chun takes us to a rural motel in upstate New York where Chloe (Alice Eve) lives a miserly, miserable single-mom existence with daughter Sophia (Ursula Parker). Chloe runs the place, cleans the rooms and takes her cut from the hookers and lowlifes who frequent it.
Child welfare is on her case to move, but she has nowhere to go — limited savings, limited horizons.
Then a couple of bad men making a run for the Canadian border stop for a night, things go wrong and this man with the accent needs Chloe to help him retrieve something the cops — including Chloe’s married cop boyfriend (Logan Marshall-Green of “Prometheus”) — have seized.
Chloe is threatened, slapped around and dragged into a situation the average person would wilt in. But she, like other characters in this myopic tale, has layers and inner resources we can only guess at.
Even though it’s just a semi-predictable, quasi-illogical genre piece, “Cold Comes the Night” manages several nice moments of suspense and a couple of wonderfully-staged confrontations — fights and shootouts. Eve (“Star Trek Into Darkness”) is just cagey and formidable enough to make Chloe work. Marshall-Green makes the most of a playing a cliche — a small town cop who reeks of corruption.
But Cranston takes small bites of this Beef Jerky Tartar script and chews, chews chews — savoring every corny fake-Russian line like the voice actor he was before “Breaking Bad” made him a star.
“I ask one last time,” he growls, letting us taste the Borsht with him. “You vill get me dat Jeep, or I will put boool-et in leetle girrrrl.”
He’s having fun with this, and so should we.
MPAA Rating: R for violence and language
Cast: Alice Eve, Bryan Cranston, Logan Marshall-Green
Credits: Directed by Tze Chun, written by Osgood Perkins, Nick Simon and Tze Chun. A Sony/Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:26
“Divorce Corp” is a documentary that could have been required viewing for anybody getting divorced, or for that matter, getting married. Its cautionary message is that sobering.
But advocacy documentaries — be they about charter schools, Barack Obama’s parentage or the National Rifle Association — have conditioned us to wonder “Who’s paying for this?” and “What axe do these folks have to grind?”
Those questions hang over “Divorce Corp,” a ninety minute Dr. Drew Pinsky-narrated take down of the extra-Constitutional “family courts” and the unsavory connections between judges, attorneys and others. It is packed with anecdotal horror stories, cluelessly corrupt judges and unqualified “custody evaluators” who are so comfy within their insular universe they had no idea how they’d come off on film, talking about the conflicts of interest they — to a one — are willing to shrug off to the filmmakers.
Much of this stuff is accepted wisdom thanks to decades of reporting about the ways “domestic violence” has been turned into a generic courthouse threat, used against fathers, stories of high-handed judges throwing litigants in jail who question their verdicts in print or on blogs, divorces that drag out for years, bankrupting one or both parties seemingly at the whim of the lawyers and the judge who lets this happen.
We know we have an adversarial legal system, we know our courts and the lawyers who work in them aim to create a “winner” and a “loser” in every case, even ones involving ending a marriage and deciding where the children of that marriage live.
And maybe we’ve read or seen Dickens’ “Bleak House,” and recognize the motto distorted for use in “Divorce Corp,” “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.”
But that’s not enough for this film, which calls for reform of family law and for a system more like the less adversarial one in Scandinavia, to make its case. And it does this entirely with anecdotes and advocates, without hard numbers on virtually any issue it brings up.
Somewhere within the legions of lawyers, judges, legal advocates, reformers, a private investigator, TV judge (Lynn Toler) and notorious celebrity attorney Gloria Allred, filmmaker Joe Sorge should have found one expert who could explain how the system got this complicated and the reasons family court plays by rules that don’t seem Constitutional. Leaving that point of view out makes the film play as conspiracy-minded.
That undercuts what appears to be a perfectly credible timeline, the rising real estate market driving law firms to suddenly take a greater interest in family law, the invention of a self-contained world where judges can “retire” to these very law firms whose money the judge, while judge, makes certain that they get to collect. This “collusion” or potential for corruption stinks.
A Rolls Royce-driving private detective, John Nazarian, shakes his head at a system that’s made him rich. A Massachusetts lawyer can joke about kids in a divorce as “little bags of money.” And one and all can fume at the complexity that’s rendered this seemingly simple process too complicated for most people to navigate on their own in courtrooms where judges treat those who serve as their own counsel as “irritants.”
Many of the anecdotes beg for follow-up questions, as this case or that one is explained by one side of it in the most simplistic terms and even then the casual viewer can see holes in the story.
And without hearing exactly why things got this complicated — beyond the “given” that lawyers are “greedy” and have fixed the system — without viewing how parts of the world other than the legal “paradise” of Scandinavia have systems that contrast with our own,”Divorce Corp” is a lot pointed outrage that, damning as its seems, feels suspect.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with corporal punishment, adult situations, profanity
Cast: Gloria Allred, Lynn Toler, John Nazarian, narrated by Dr. Drew Pinsky.
Credits: Directed by Joe Sorge, written by James D. Scurlock, Philip Sternberg, Blake Harjes and Joe Sorge. A Candor Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:31
A few surprises in the nominated films the WGA figured noteworthy from last year — original script, adapted script and documentary script.
Woody Allen, Coen Brothers, “American Hustle,” Spike Jonze.Sure.
“Before Midnight,” “Captain Phillips,” “August: Osage County,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” Nebraska.” Expected.
Sarah Polley’s “The Stories We Tell” made the cut in the doc script field.
But “Lone Survivor,” a better than average actioner based on a true story of a Navy SEALs mission that went wrong, stands out. Not sure what I figure was left out of best adapted screenplay contender’s list by this odd inclusion (mixed reviews for the movie, good enough, but Peter Berg did “BAttleship,” for pity’s sake. Pick an action picture, sure. Why not pick a better one?).
American Hustle, Written by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell; Columbia Pictures
Blue Jasmine, Written by Woody Allen; Sony Pictures Classics
Dallas Buyers Club, Written by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack; Focus Features
Her, Written by Spike Jonze; Warner Bros.
Nebraska, Written by Bob Nelson; Paramount Pictures
August: Osage County, Screenplay by Tracy Letts; Based on his play; The Weinstein Company
Before Midnight, Written by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke; Based on characters created by Richard Linklater & Kim Krizan; Sony Classics
Captain Phillips, Screenplay by Billy Ray; Based on the book A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty; Columbia Pictures
Lone Survivor, Written by Peter Berg; Based on the book by Marcus Lutrell with Patrick Robinson; Universal Pictures
The Wolf of Wall Street, Screenplay by Terence Winter; Based on the book by Jordan Belfort; Paramount Pictures
Dirty Wars, Written by Jeremy Scahill & David Riker; Sundance Selects
Herblock – The Black & The White, Written by Sara Lukinson & Michael Stevens;
The Stevens Company
No Place on Earth, Written by Janet Tobias & Paul Laikin; Magnolia Pictures
Stories We Tell, Written by Sarah Polley; Roadside Attractions
We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks; Written by Alex Gibney; Focus Features
With “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones”, this found footage franchise abandons the lull you to sleep creepiness of found surveillance footage for full on shaky cam and an altogether more conventional horror movie plot.
But as exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.
Writer-director Christopher Landon Latinizes the tale, setting this installment among Angelinos in the barrio — teenagers, gang-bangers, abuelas and the like. And even as he recycles some of the funny stereotypes Marlon Wayans & Co. sent up in the “Paranormal” parody, “A Haunted House,” he finds frights and fun in that found footage.
Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) gets a camera for his high school graduation present. He and his pal Hector (Jorge Diaz) and Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh) play with it, taping parties, pickup basketball games and the like. That gets under the skin of the occasional gang banger, but that comes with the territory.
But the crazy lady downstairs in Jesse’s complex is truly out of the ordinary. They hear weird noises, slip the camera down the heat vents and tape a strange sexual ritual. And then Ana dies, killed by Jesse and Hector’s class valedictorian, Oscar (Carlos Pratts). Looking at Oscar, they can see, as we can see, that this boy isn’t right in the head.
The boys will be boys stuff is reasonably realistic. And the stumbling panic about what is happening with these people who knew the late Ana, whom all the kids called “bruja” (witch) is sharply realized. Call the cops!
“Call the cops and tell them WHAT?:
Jesse’s Spanish-speaking granny knows, and her approach to the problem is old school and old school horror.
The bottom line of any horror picture matches your neckline — as in, “Does it make the hairs of your neck stand up?” The answer here, as silly and weary as these movies are, is “Yes. A few times.”
But the jokes, intentional and unintentional, give away why “The Marked Ones” was dumped on the dead first weekend of January. It was never going to be much better than mediocre.
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some violence, graphic nudity and some drug use
Cast: Andrew Jacobs, Gabrielle Walsh, Jorge Diaz, Katie Featherston, Richard Cabral
Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Landon. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:24
