Movie Nation

When Hollywood sizes up Canadian actress Cobie Smulders, the model gorgeous/ model thin star of TV’s “How I Met Your Mother,” they envision her as “some tough chick,” she says with a laugh.” I do all these things where I like guns, and I’m kind of a guy’s girl.
“I have NO idea where that comes from.”
It must have started with the sitcom. Even her winsome, romantic but thick-skinned TV anchor, Robin Scherbatsky, has been toughened up by a dad who would have preferred having a son. And Robin likes her guns.
As agent Maria Hill in “The Avengers,” Smulders is packing. Surrounded by unstable super-heroes and the occasional super villain, who can blame her? Even in her new movie, “Delivery Man,” she carries heat. She’s a New York City cop, pregnant by a boyfriend (Vince Vaughn) who “needs to grow up and be the man she’s always hoped he could be.”
That’s another niche the Vancouver native has made her own. As “How I Met Your Mother” winds up its run, her character ties the knot with the womanizing Peter Pan, Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) during a wedding weekend that takes up the entire final season of the CBS show. Smulders, 31, is used to playing an adult woman in a world of childish men.
“For some of us, it hits us in our late 20s or early 30s — with some men, it’s in their ’40s — that moment where we realize, ‘Oh, shoot, I need to grow up, don’t I?’ For women, that seems to happen sooner.”
For Emma in “Delivery Man,” that realization hits when she becomes pregnant. Her character sizes up the beau and finds him wanting. And just as she’s sent him packing, with an implied “come back when you’ve grown up,” he learns of more evidence that he’s a bit of a childish flake. The sperm donation for money thing he did to make ends meet 20 years ago blows up on him as his surrogate kids want to know his identity — all 533 of them. He hides this from Emma, but starts to grow up as he secretly tracks down and lends a hand in these many and varied young adults’ lives.
“I get to play the audience, in a way,” Smulders says. “I watch this change in him unfold, these big revelations that change his character that are kept from her. Emma’s reacting, but she’s a pretty complex character.”
Smulders had seen “Starbuck,” the acclaimed French-Canadian comedy that “Delivery Man” (opening Nov. 22) is based on and was willing to audition for the part to get it. In just a few scenes, Smulders has to embody a serious woman with a sense of humor, someone who has the warmth and patience to be the perfect mate for a disorganized screw-up. Getting that across takes more than acting. It takes presence.
“What comes across on camera is not just impeccable timing,” says actor Will Forte, who has worked with Smulders on the sitcom and a Broken Lizard big screen comedy (“The Slammin’ Salmon”). “She seems, on camera, like someone you’d want to know — just nice, friendly and funny,” a pretty woman who’d tolerate a few quirks — maybe because she’s got a few herself.
Jacoba Francisca Maria Smulders started turning up on TV and in films a dozen years ago, and had recurring roles on a couple of shows before “How I Met” gave her that big break.

“Most shows, you’re on the set shooting when you hear you’ve been canceled,” she says. “We’re really lucky to have the chance to wrap this up the way the creators wanted. When they first told us this entire last season would be set the weekend of Robin and Barney’s wedding, I didn’t know how that would work. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised. And I think when people binge watch a whole season together it’s going to play as long long, funny episode. Pretty good.” She has been “relishing every minute, every final surprise on set,” this year as that show finishes shooting in February. That means her years of squeezing in movies between seasons are over.

And even though she has a starring role in the comedy “They Came Together” with Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon, even though she sees “a long, life and career, I hope, in the Marvel Universe,” with a couple of “Avengers” projects in the can (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and “The Avengers: Age of Ultron”) or in the future, the end of “How I Met Your Mother” will herald a major life change for Smulders. The married (to actor and “Saturday Night Live” regular Taran Killam) mother of a little girl is pulling up stakes.
“I’m moving to New York and hope to do some theater there. I’m not going to impose myself on musical theater. Why try and take a job from somebody who can actually sing? But dramas and comedies? I’m up for those, original plays and classics with a new spin? Call me.”

(Roger Moore’s review of “Delivery Man” is here)

The ever-changing media consumption landscape lost 300 Blockbuster Video today, the last big video store chain.

The mom and pop “Be Kind, Rewind” stores mostly bought the farm years ago. Blockbuster held out, like the death-ratting big bookstore chains, shedding stores, fiddling with the offerings of food, video and games.

They were big spaces, for those who remember them. The selection sucked, but they employed a lot of people in those days pre-streaming. I haven’t been in a video store of any sort in five years. But I still rent videos — for free, from assorted libraries.

With Amazon, NEtflix, Hulu, et al., the world has changed and a brick and mortar neighborhood video store could not compete.

But Blockbuster fed, in its way, the “binge watching” fad that Netflix perfected. Selling or renting whole seasons of TV series, etc.

So long, Blockbuster.

Sequels, misfires and stuff that should have gone direct-to-video,

That was 2013 in animated feature films. At least those from Hollywood.

Most years, this corner of the Oscars would be a battle between Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks. But if ever there was a year that Fox (“The Croods”) or a foreign language lower-budget picture could break through, this is it.

Look at this list of submitted contenders. Weak sequels (“Monsters U.,” “Cloud-Meatballs 2”), a passable sequel (“Despicable Me 2”), a Disney musical (“Frozen”) not scored by anybody who will make us forget Alan Menken and Howard Asher, or Randy Newman.

“Epic”? Meh. “Planes”? An embarrassment to the Disney brand.

I think last March’s “The Croods,” which was well-animated and wonderfully voiced, with lots of wit and pathos, has a shot. “Frozen” is the best contender from “the usual suspects” of contenders.

And the foreign animated film field is mostly a string of little ballyhoo’d titles. Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises” is about a fighter plane designer from Japan’s fascist years. Is that going to be Oscar worthy?

Here are the films eligible to be nominated, submitted by their producers. Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 16.

“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2”
“The Croods”
“Despicable Me 2”
“Epic”
“Ernest and Celestine”
“The Fake”
“Free Birds“
“Frozen”
“Khumba”
“The Legend of Sarila”
“A Letter to Momo”
“Monsters University”
“O Apóstolo”
“Planes”
“Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie – Rebellion”
“Rio: 2096 A Story of Love and Fury”
“The Smurfs 2”
“Turbo”
“The Wind Rises”

“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2”
“The Croods”
“Despicable Me 2”
“Epic”
“Ernest and Celestine”
“The Fake”
“Free Birds“
“Frozen”
“Khumba”
“The Legend of Sarila”
“A Letter to Momo”
“Monsters University”
“O Apóstolo”
“Planes”
“Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie – Rebellion”
“Rio: 2096 A Story of Love and Fury”
“The Smurfs 2”
“Turbo”
“The Wind Rises”

Watching the latest “Great Expectations,” one can’t help but think Helena Bonham Carter has spent her entire career auditioning for the role of Miss Havisham. The jilted, wilted bride whose bitterness and lust for revenge on men she carries into her dotage is the very picture of the wild-eyed, wilder-haired Carter.
Mike Newell, who gave us one of the most sumptuous looking Harry Potter pictures (“Goblet of Fire”) conjures up a lush, period-perfect version of the oft-filmed Charles Dickens tale of a poor boy, Pip, whose act of kindness as a child is repaid, with interest — and with a catch.
Newell and screenwriter David Nicholls move beyond the familiar “spoiler alert” beats of this over-familiar story — a more definitive BBC/PBS mini-series aired just two years ago — and aim for the periphery. We dwell on the dissipation of Pip, the lad plucked from his brother-in-law’s blacksmith shop, told he has come into money and “Great Expectations” and that he will now be set up as a “young gentleman.”
And by spending more time on Pip (Jeremy Irvine) carousing in the gentleman’s club called the Finches, he seems less the victim and more a Dickensian cautionary lesson. As he lusts for the always-out-of-reach Estella (Holliday Grainger), the manipulations of Miss Havisham seem more like something he deserves. His supposed benefactor, a woman bent on making him fall for Estella, and breaking Pip’s heart when he can’t have her, is teaching the lad to know his place, “Expectations” or not.
That robs the tale of some of its heart, and the young would-be lovers leads aren’t compelling enough to render their big moments poignant.
Ah, but that’s what the rest of the cast is for. Newell cast the great Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch, the convict tiny Pip (Toby Irvine, Jeremy’s younger brother, no more sympathetic than his sibling) helps that fateful day on the moors. Fiennes is everything you want in a Magwitch — terrifying, mercurial, sentimental and loyal. His threats to the child have a chill that transcends the ages.
“Who d’ye live with, supposin’ I LET you live?”
Robbie Coltrane makes a thoroughly corrupt Jaggers, the lawyer who feeds Pip his benefactor’s money and merely tut tuts at the way the boy goes through it. Ewen Bremner is a mildly amusing Wemmick, Jaggers’ more kindly clerk. David Walliams of “Little Britain” tickles as the creepy family friend Mr. Pumblechook, who teaches us what the phrase “raised by hand” (slapped about) meant for a child of the dad. Olly Alexander does a great turn as the not-all-young-gentlemen-are-rich-jerks confidante, Herbert Pocket. Jason Flemyng does well by the one character to truly pluck at the heartstrings here, Pip’s adoring blacksmith brother-in-law, Joe.
But the real revelation is how sweet, bubbly Sally Hawkins of “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Blue Jasmine” transforms herself into a shrieking harridan as Mrs. Joe, Pip’s corporal punishment loving sister.
Whatever chemistry and pathos the back and forth among the romantic leads lacks, this stellar supporting cast and the handsome production values that bring back 1830s ad 40s England makes up for it. So even though this isn’t the greatest of “Expectations” — David Lean’s black and white version in the ’40s will your heart — it’s still a pretty grand one.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence including disturbing images
Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Toby Irvine, Jeremy Irvine, Holliday Grainger, Robbie Coltrane, Sally Hawkins, Jason Flemyng.
Credits: Directed by Mike Newell , scripted by David Nicholls , based on the novel by Charles Dickens. A Main Street Films release. 
Running time: 2:08

It would be too easy to dismiss Alex Gibney’s “The Armstrong Lie” as a two hour and three minute exercise in moral relativism and rationalization, too late to the party about a cheating athlete we’ve already made up our minds about — again.
But the Oscar winning Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) had access to Lance Armstrong before he was caught cheating, and after. His cameras captured the seeds of Armstrong’s undoing. And while he allows plenty of screen time to condemn the corrupt, arrogant, bullying Tour de France champ, he is just as interested in bringing back the context, the “everybody was doing it” argument that Armstrong has fallen back on himself. It may be the truest thing the compulsive liar Lance has ever said.
Built on the ruins of an abandoned 2009 documentary that was to celebrate Lance’s comeback in that year’s Tour de France, Gibney goes back to Armstrong just as he was forced to fess up to Oprah in 2012, figuring a guy “who lied to my face” “owed it to me.”
And he did.
What Gibney brought to life is here a tale of “power,” of a hyper-competitive control freak who, even now, is wrestling for control of his story, his myth.
The myth? An arrogant, under-achieving young cyclist from Plano, Texas, gets testicular cancer in the ’90s, comes close to death, is cured and roars back to win seven Tour de France titles, beginning in 1999. His yellow leader’s jersey for that event becomes an iconic color as legions of cancer patients and those who love them rally to his Livestrong Foundation.
Glory, endorsements, “celebrity” and a cause — Armstrong had it all. The constant whispers about cheating, blood doping, that his success was “too good to be true” — all dismissed as Armstrong passed drug tests and sued, threatened and bullied former teammates and journalists who dared accuse him.
Gibney admits “I got caught up” in Lance-mania, too, working on the film where he followed an older Lance “racing clean” on that “comeback” Tour de France. But Gibney had his suspicions and as that tour ended and the accusations piled up, he gave up that film only to come back to the subject years later, to give Armstrong a chance to come clean and maybe own up to what a jerk he was.
“He just can’t stand to lose,” one former supporter says of him. And what do competitors like Armstrong crave above all else? An edge.
Gibney, with footage from 2009 and fresh interviews with his victims, shows the intimidation Armstrong used to keep his myth intact and keep those rumors at bay. Most despicably, Armstrong was never shy abut playing the cancer card, suggesting that there was an “ends justify the means” logic to his chicanery and self-righteous pose.
Gibney, knowing what to look for in that old footage, plays a wonderful game of catch-up,here. He is never less than blunt about the scope of the cover-up and the corruption of the sport and those who monitored it.  This is a real inside-cycling “How they did it” expose, with teammates like George Hincapie laying out the MO for the program of injections, blood transfusions and private jet flights (to hide their activities from the world) that propped up Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team.
Armstrong’s candor, at long last, is refreshing, though grudgingly given. He doesn’t come off as a good guy here, even if the data is there to show that yes, “everybody” pretty much WAS doing it. He was just better at it.
But the absence of fresh interviews with two of Armstrong’s fiercest critics — teammate Floyd Landis is seen in archival interviews with other journalists, and the only legitimate American Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond, is nowhere to be found —  makes you wonder if, even now, Armstrong is controlling his story.
And at this point, with lawsuits going after his ill-gotten millions, and lost endorsements, stripped of his titles and with even his most die-hard fans disillusioned, the question that shouts from the cheap seats as “The Armstrong Lie” reaches its closing credits is “Is there anything new here?”

(Find Roger Moore’s interview with director Alex Gibney  here.)

MPAA Rating: R for language.
Cast: Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie, many others
Credits: Directed by Alex Gibney. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 2:03

What’s been missing from all the movies about AIDS and the history of the AIDS crisis is that Matthew McConaughey swagger. And we never would have realized that if he hadn’t made “Dallas Buyers Club.”

Here’s a film about the early years of the crisis packed with a healthy dose of evolving attitudes about AIDS and homosexuality and good ol’boy get’er done optimism. And if McConaughey and his co-star Jared Leto don’t earn Oscar nominations for “Buyers Club,” I’ll eat my ten gallon hat.

We meet Ron Woodroof as a sweaty, scrawny sex machine — profane, homophobic, coke-snorting, whiskey-drinking and gaunt gaunt gaunt.

It’s not a good look for McConaughey, who lost a lot of weight for this film. It’s not a good look for anybody.

This being 1985 Texas, Ron, a card-playing electrician working on oil rigs, is all about honky tonks, rodeos and living in the moment. We see his unprotected sex, watch him share drinks and pass a joint. When he gets in a tussle, we see his blood get all over everything. We fret because we know what’s coming.

An accident puts him in the hospital, where they figure out his other health issue.

“Frankly, we’re surprised you’re still alive,” the doctors (Jennifer Garner, Dennis O’Hare) tell him. He probably has just thirty days to get his affairs in order.

Woodroof storms out, committed to denial. Jean-Marc Vallee’s film counts off the days — “Day 1, “Day 8” — waiting for him to come around.

The first grand twist in “Dallas Buyers Club” is learning that Ron Woodroof isn’t some ignorant hick. He goes to the library, does some research and when he can’t get on a drug trial that guarantees him the “miracle” drug, he buys stolen AZT. He winds up in Mexico, where a doc who lost his license (Griffin Dunne, very good) is on the front lines of the AIDS war, and is sharing, with his patients, everything and anything that the world’s researchers can come up with. Woodroof starts smuggling the stuff to America. The FDA doesn’t approve?

“Screw the FDA,” he drawls. I’m gonna be DOA.”

The great conflicts set up here are Woodroof’s efforts to fool the Border Patrol, the FDA, the DEA and the doctors who put regulations before the slim hopes of desperate, dying patients.

An utterly unrecognizable Jared Leto plays a cross-dressing gay AIDS patient who sees Woodroof’s traveling/smuggling pharmacy as a lifeline, and ignores Ron’s homophobia long enough for them to team up and steal an idea that’s worked elsewhere. They’ll set up a drug “Buyers Club” that protects them from drug dealing charges and gives AIDS patients a fighting chance with the latest promising drugs from abroad.

A great touch — the way this friendship of convenience builds. McConaughey delivers the brazen, foul-mouthed laughs and Leto tugs at your heart. Vallee (“The Young Victoria”), working from a script by Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack, may be taking things in heart-warming directions, but he’s in no hurry to do it.

The doctor who will be tempted to do the right thing resists doing that right thing. Woodroof and Rayon (Leto) try to change the lifelong habits that might doom them, with limited success.

“Dallas Buyers Club” can be faulted for hiding the death sentences that AIDS handed out in the ’80s, for casting things a tad too on the nose — with Steve Zahn as Woodroof’s cop pal and Dallas Roberts as his drawling, sympathetic lawyer.

But that takes nothing away from this pro-active, uplifting and thoroughly entertaining jaunt through AIDS history, and the epic commitment of its actors to do right by it. “Dallas Buyers Club” is one of the best pictures of the year.

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

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto

Credits: Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, written by Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack . A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:57