Movie Nation

As Wayne might say to Garth…”Whooaaaa.” And “Bu-whaaaa?”

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” riding the best Thursday night “preview” sales in recent musical history and staggering weekend pre-sales, is set to clear $50 million on its opening outing.

The movie that blew up the British box office first, is opening 15-20% better than the hyped to hell and back “A Star is Born.”

What do we do in the stadiums, kids? After singing along to “We will ROCK you?” We chant “OVER-RATED” at the other um, musical.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” had been tracked to a $38 million opening. Or $40, as Deadline.com was saying. Now Deadline is projecting a $49 or so bow and as they tend to lowball Saturday numbers and over-shoot on Sunday, I’m saying $50 is what we will see.

The film earned mixed reviews. It was a years-in-the-making “troubled” production, changing stars and directors, and too many critics reviewed it accordingly. It’s not the R-rated version with more explicit depictions of Freddie Mercury’s not-quite-closeted lifestyle. It’s not heavy into his drug use. Both turn up, but it’s a musical bio-pic about an iconic band, beloved by generations. Fox wanted a PG-13 movie and that’s the one I reviewed. It’s fun.

Director Bryan Singer is a notorious #MeToo violator. It’s too conventional. But it’s delightful Queen comfort food and the dorks too up their own bums to see that can suck it. “Rhapsody,” riding Rami Malek’s insanely spot-on recreation of Freddie, is rhapsodic.

Disney’s “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is on track to hit its expected $20 million opening, which is as underwhelming as this singularly underwhelming as a cinematic experience. Also a troubled production (rewrites after completion, a month of re-shoots), it’s never going to break even in the US but could be in the black abroad.

Tiffany Haddish’s first real star vehicle (She’s the star in the ads, second banana in the movie), “Nobody’s Fool,” is heading towards $13.8, falling below its meet $14-15 projections. It’s not on her. Tyler Perry has never seemed more inept at the keyboard or behind the camera. 

The grossly-over-rated “Halloween” reboot finally FINALLY took a DIVE and will barely clear $10 million this weekend. It’s still earned over $150 million, or will have by midnight Sunday.

Check out Deadline’s chart and note “The Hate U Give” is cruising along, still in the top ten. No way “Bohemian” will have the legs of the Lady Gaga/”Star is Born,” which will reach $165 by Sunday.

There’s something about fall that suggests secrets, covering up. It’s the conspiratorial season, the perfect time of year for espionage pictures and movies about infidelity.

That’s what “The Delinquent Season” is, an Irish melodrama about cheating, how it happens and the fallout from it. What makes it different from a thousand other (mostly fall) films in the same vein are the occasional sharply written exchange, the smart, vulnerable characterizations and its Irishness.

Cillian Murphy and Eva Birthistle are Jim and Danielle, married with two tweenagers, comfortable together in that their pillow talk includes “You put the bins (trash) out?”

A dinner with Yvonne and Chris (Catherine Walker and Andrew Scott) shows a very different sort of marriage. She’s sweet and vulnerable, he’s short-tempered and not at all sociable. Tetchy as the meal turns, everybody there and we viewers know that the real row will come after they get home.

We can only hope their two young daughters don’t hear it.

Jim’s a writer who works at home and Yvonne is a housewife. But when events conspire to throw them together by chance, they have to fight off the awkwardness by chatting and chatting.

Yvonne relishes adult, friendly conversation with a man who seems a lot kinder than her husband. And when her marriage turns violent, it’s her best friend Danielle and Danielle’s husband who comfort her. Jim even goes over to have a heart to heart with Chris.

But throwing bored Jim and lonely Yvonne together can only lead to trouble, and as bourgeois as it might be, these middle class marrieds think the maritally unthinkable.

Writer-director Mark O’Rowe scripted “Boy A” and Colin Farrell’s “Intermission,” and he writes a lovely, patient and touchy-tentative seduction scene that includes tears, fears and the sudden realization that what each was thinking is on the other’s mind, too.

“If this was an Updike novel, we’d be having an affair by now.”

Yvonne and Jim’s second moment of adultery is every bit as fraught as the first. This time they go to a hotel.

“But we’ve already done it.”

“This is the premeditated version, though.”

The camera lingers over Yvonne’s look of alarm and guilt, huddled under the covers in bed waiting for him. It captures Jim’s look of loss, gutted and distracted sitting with his kids watching TV.

That’s fine screen acting.

O’Rowe plays around with expectations, setting Jim up as emasculated but impulsively prone to defending his manhood. He’s so polite that when a rude waitress doubles down on bad service by cursing in front of Jim’s kids, he confronts her but winds up meekly asking for “common courtesy” from her. Fistfights aren’t out of the question (He is Irish, after all.). But he’s the sort who loses them.

Yvonne has classic blame-myself abused woman traits, but the film takes pains to create a backstory explaining Chris’s outbursts, and to suggest the violence is a one-time thing.

The sneaking around isn’t given much suspense — furtive calls and texts — punctuated by touching guilt-ridden conversations with their spouses, who don’t know about them or what’s going on.

Danielle is Mrs. Pragmatist — a working realtor who practically breaks out her appointment calendar (she doesn’t) when she notes “The flames of our marriage could do with a bit of fanning lately.”

There’s sex and even riskier behavior, a health crisis and confrontations, a progression from helping each other through a rough patch to this seems real, a tried and true path for a film about autumnal infidelity.

But the performers and performances sell “The Delinquent Season.” The male leads are mainstays of Anglo-Irish TV and film. But Walker and Birthistle, who have “Leap Year” and “Brooklyn” roles in their credits, impress enough to make one hunt down their lower profile credits on video.

They make this fateful journey down the primrose path of passion and pain, familiar and seasonal as it is, worth the trip.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence (fistfight), sex, nudity profanity

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Eva Birthistle, Catherine Walker, Andrew Scott

Credits: Written and directed by Mark O’Rowe. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:43

Reviews for “Bohemian Rhapsody” have been the very definition of “mixed,” with plenty of critics craving a harder-edged R-rated take on Freddie Mercury’s sexual and pharmaceutical misadventures. But heck, it’s trending “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes now.  For what that’s worth.

Metacritic? Not yet.

As conventional as it sometimes is, I reviewed the generally fun PG-13 movie Fox made and not the more daring take promised when Sacha Baron Cohen and Stephen Frears were involved. As he lived as a not-quite-closeted gay man, don’t LECTURE me that “THAT’s the movie Freddie would have wanted.” We don’t know that.

And the studio’s gamble that letting the band dictate a more upbeat and still gay, still used drugs, still died of AIDS Freddie is paying off. It made more money in US Thursday night previews than either “Mamma Mia” or “A Star is Born.” Presales for the weekend are through the roof.

Deadline.com says it’ll be in “Star is Born” territory — $40 million plus — by midnight Sunday. Box Office Mojo hedges that a bit by saying $38.Box Office Mojo hedges that a bit by saying $38. As it is a fan pleaser (And who doesn’t love Queen?) with generations of moviegoers loving the band, I’d say it’s a $40 million cinch.

Disney spent a lot of money, and spent even more reshooting the shinola show that is “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.” Terrible reviews, and the damned thing won’t clear $20, according to Mojo. I’m guessing that’s low, with it being for kids and showing in 3D on a lot of screens. Who knows what the budget was?

Reviews are just rolling in for the abomination known as “Nobody’s Fool.” It may be the worst Tyler Perry movie ever. No kidding. I’ve liked some of his worth, appreciated his ambition here and there. For the first time, he’s made a movie that feels downright incompetent. Dramatically, comically, structurally, what have you.

But Tiffany Haddish took Paramount’s money and the chance to work with Whoopi Goldberg in her least funny performance ever, and there you go. If it clears $14 million this weekend, they’ll call it a win but Haddish is staring down the barrel of irrelevance with this one. Kevin Hart and “Night School” was bad, but a sure fire hit. This is just a dog that few will show up for on its second weekend. Will there be a crowd on its first?

“Halloween” and “A Star is Born” will make most of the money ($13-15) these screen newcomers leave on the table when all is said and done Sunday night.

Several things separate the year’s second “conversion therapy” drama, “Boy Erased,” from the first (“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”) is sincerity.

Every character, from the parents of the boy sent to a church boot camp for preaching, teaching, shaming or beating the “gay” out of him, to the people who run “Love in Action,” to the boy (Lucas Hedges) himself, seems genuine about their concerns, their beliefs and their suggested “treatment” for this kid seemingly at the tail end of his “sexually confused” years.

And that’s alarming and occasionally a little funny in Joel Edgerton’s sober and brilliantly acted version of Garrard Conley’s memoir. Unlike “Cameron Post,” there’s little sarcasm and no snark to this story, little eye-rolling about what those in the middle of it all had to know was rank ignorance, even if they didn’t know the word “homophobic” at the time.

Edgerton keeps the camera close to his players who let us see how distressed the Arkansas preacher (Russell Crowe) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) are that their son Jared might be on the verge of becoming a living “abomination” to their faith.

And Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”) gives us every shade of confused, angry, desperation as the “upstanding and honest son” his father has praised him as from his Baptist pulpit.

“I wish none of this had ever happened,” Jared honestly narrates, “but sometimes I thank God that it did.”

Jared played basketball, cusses on occasion and has a high school girlfriend who is more into him than he is into her. He’s also a preacher’s son, an attentive one. But his first days in college mean steps into a new life. No more girlfriend and jogging with the Fundamentalist hunk down the hall Joe Alwyn make Jared’s gaydar operational.

And that’s what leads his father to “seek the counsel of wiser men,” elders in his faith. The family doctor (Cherry Jones at her Earth Mother best) may be small town Red State, but these testosterone pills she’s asked to prescribe by these not-clued-in old men? She knows those won’t help and tells Jared so, affirming her own faith even as she is laying out the science.

That’s how Jared ends up at the big city church’s gay conversion day camp. Mom stays at a nearby hotel with him, but Jared isn’t to talk about what he goes through, isn’t to share the 12 day or possibly longer “treatment.”

Victor Sykes (Edgerton) insists on it. The young woman and young and old men of The Refuge Program cannot visit the restroom unsupervised, cannot access their phones and take a vow that says “I am using sexuality and sin to fill a God-shaped void in my life.”

The “patients” fill out family trees, hunting for deviant (drugs, booze, same sex attraction, “gang activity”) behavior in their family genetics.

The viewer is allowed to smirk at the suggestion that science and genetics are being used by science deniers to make the case that, as Lady Gaga sang, “I was born this way.”

Jared doesn’t allow himself to smirk, even at the misspellings in the dim-witted and unedited brochures Sykes and his team hand out. Jared is only upset that “this doesn’t seem to be working.”

“This” is some of the silliest (and true to life) “treatment” ever documented. The ethos is “Fake it until you make it.” If you can learn to stand like a man (hands on hips, “thumbs BACKWARD!”), sit like a man (“UNCROSS your legs!”) and hold your own in the batting cage, you’ll form the butch appearance that this crowd craves and it’ll somehow sink in.

Edgerton’s film is split between the fictive present in The Refuge and flashbacks, showing Jared’s traumatic introduction to gay sex, his angry, then tender confrontation with his loving parents — “God help me.” — and the dating life and parental supervision that pointed him towards the path his religion, his family and his ambition laid out for him.

The other patients are the usual collection of “types,” most of them under-developed. The most interesting one is a repeat enrollee at Love in Action, hellbent on changing, but showing up every day with a cut or fresh black eye. Gay bashing? A cruising outing gone wrong?

The staff are also “types,” poorly-educated men ready to use force to keep patients there for a full course of “treatment.” Scariest of these is the ex-addict/ex-con (Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) who sees homosexuality as like any other weakness/addiction.

Edgerton (“The Great Gatsby,” “Black Mass”) makes Sykes earnest to the point of fanatical, but somebody who needs the secrecy he insists on because he lets us see the man’s doubts. He’s making this nonsense up as he goes, and the last thing he wants is scrutiny or second-guessing.

I wish I could get through one movie on this subject or dancing around the edges of it without a suicide attempt. But as melodramatic as that always seems, “It gets better” is a relatively new concept, and tragedies like that were all too common in more primitive times.

We know where this story is going, and the film fails to move along quickly enough to make us forget that destination. But “Boy Erased” all but closes the book on this concept as thoroughly as anything anyone who isn’t irredeemably backward could wish.

And Kidman, playing the subservient wife who is compliant right up to the moment she isn’t, Crowe (impressively buttoned down and conflicted), nervous Edgerton and the always soulful young Hedges make this argument and tell this story with all the warmth and sensitivity you could hope for, and then some.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content including an assault, some language and brief drug use.

Cast: Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and Joel Edgerton

Credits: Written and directed by Joel Edgerton, based on the Garrard Conley memoir. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:52

Oh joy! Rapture!

OK, it looks kiddie-amusing enough. Kurt Russell has this sort of “Captain Ron With a Sleigh” vibe. Nov. 22, Ho Ho Oh No…”Does my butt look that big to you?”

This “new” doc, years in the making, chronicles a policing system that much of America is more than happy to turn a blind eye to.

Tiffany Haddish has understandably been acting like a kid in the comic candy shop since finally breaking out in “Girls Trip” last year.

She’s taken on a TV series, which she’s complained about signing for before her quote went up.She took the co-star role in a low quality but sure-fire hit Kevin Hart comedy. And she took a flyer on the indie-ish satire “The Oath,” with Ike Barenholtz.

She’s just announced a short but certain-to-be-lucrative stand up tour, where she can do her “Saturday Night Live” and talk show guest monologue about the hard road she had to travel to get here.

But one thing she shouldn’t have done was get into the Tyler Perry business. Whatever his entrepreneureal skills as a producer and brand, Perry’s day of having anything funny to say in a screenplay is long past. The proof is in “Nobody’s Fool,” the unamusing mess he ostensibly cooked up for Haddish, a movie in which she’s a has-to-try-way-too-hard supporting player to prop up another lame, misshapen Perry placeholder — a movie he figures black folks will go to simply because it has his name on it.

It’s a meandering, clumsy and inept attempt at making an R-rated raunchy comedy from a guy most at home with sentimental PG-13 sermons delivered by himself in drag.

There’s barely a laugh in it. And Haddish does lasting damage to her brand and suggests “time’s up” on her 15 minutes as she mugs, vamps, overplays and over-reaches in a vain attempt to give what she HAD to see was “not funny on the page” a laugh or two.

It’s really a Tika Sumpter vehicle, moving her from “Ride Along” support to the lead. She’s Danica, a high-powered Atlanta advertising exec whose boss jilted by her pretty young thing fiance, and now carrying on a long-distance online romance with Charlie, an oil rig worker who fills most of the boxes on her “list” of what her ideal mate would be.

That handsome hunk who runs her favorite coffee shop, Frank (Omari Hardwick)? He’s not in her league, not on her list.

She’s got an Oprah-sized colleague/assistant/confessor, Callie (Amber Riley) who follows her professional life and love life and is full of “Girl” advice. That’s Perry’s idea of edgy, hip dialogue, Callie explaining “Girl, if you get this account” and “Girl, if you get this promotion” and “Girl, I can’t even with you” every time she hears about this Charlie guy who emails and calls, but never visits or Skypes.

Momma (Whoopi Goldberg) interrupts this reverie by sending Danica to pick up her weed-loving, trick-turning sister Tanya (Haddish) from prison, and stuff gets real and real-R rated in a heartbeat. She’s uninhibitedly sexing up some random in the back of his pickup truck in the parking lot — a loud, lewd and rough tumble. When she’s done, she climbs in Danica’s M-series BMW with “I didn’t kill him. I just choked him out a little.”

Tanya gawks at Danica’s success and affluence and begs for weed and “club” hookups. The job she’s supposed to get, the drugs she’s supposed to avoid and the AA meetings she’s supposed to attend barely cross her mind.

A painfully unfunny moment — Haddish as Tanya pretending to struggle with walking on higher than high heels for the first time in five years. A second — Tanya turning every question on her job application at Frank’s coffee shop into a lewd and crude sexual come-on.

As for Danica’s mysteriously unreal love life, Tanya’s got a prison TV room solution to the mystery — “You got ‘Catfished.'”

Perry brings in the hosts of MTV’s “Catfished” for Tanya to convince and hit on. Not funny.

He gives Oscar winner Goldberg a lot of scenes as a weed-growing little old lady and nothing the least bit amusing to say or do in them.

And he uses Sumpter and Hardwick to deliver his homily, his little sermon on “Is there no (datable) black man who hasn’t been to prison?” The object lesson being, in Perry World, that shouldn’t rule out a good man as an eligible mate.

There’s a lot of affluence, swank apartments, designer clothes and perfectly made up and groomed men and women, an aspirational trademark of Perry pictures. Haddish? She looks rough, more often than not.

Plenty of sophomoric dope jokes are another trademark, and they’re no help.

And here is poor Haddish, collecting a check, figuring out that just because a writer-director needs her a lot more than she needs him doesn’t ensure that he won’t embarrass her with a role and presentation in that role that uses up her peak earning period with every minute she is or isn’t on the screen in it.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and language throughout, and for drug material.

Cast: Tika Sumpter, Tiffany Haddish, Whoopi Goldberg, Omari Hardwick, Miss Pyle

Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:50

Mateusz lays out two of the biggest obstacles facing someone with cerebral palsy in just a sentence, a line of interior monologue that serves as narration for the Polish drama, “Life Feels Good.”

“When you’re a vegetable, no one understands you.”

Communication when you have no command of speech or the limbs it takes to write or even to gesture to the right word on a page is a high hurdle to climb.

And by the time you think of yourself as a “vegetable,” having absorbed that from everyone around you since you were old enough to understand, life can feel permanently circumscribed — the world, fenced off.

They’ve given up, but Mateusz, played with energetic, gnarled physicality by Dawid Orgodnik, is very slow to come to the same conclusion in this true story in the “My Left Foot/Diving Bell and the Butterfly” tradition.

We meet him in his late 20s, as he’s to be evaluated by a panel of medical experts. It’s not his favorite situation. The long flashback that tells his story begins with him resisting testing, even as a child.

Born with cerebral palsy, his limited means of communicating come off as acting out throughout childhood. Everyone from doctors to faith healers in 1980s Poland tells his patient and hopeful, but overwhelmed mother (Dorota Kolak) and indulgent, loving father (a soulful Arkadiusz Jakubik) that he is “mentally deficient” and to learn to accept it.

But Dad includes Mateusz in all the home projects he does with the boy’s brother, Tomek. He shows the kid the stars, talks to him as if he’s sure he understands because he is and becomes the kid’s co-conspirator.

Only they know he’s a normal guy trapped in an abnormal body.

Naturally, considering his luck, his dad dies young, leaving Mateusz with a supportive but not truly able to help him brother and mother, and an older sister, Matylda (Helena Sujecka) who resents him and calls him “idiot” (in Polish, with English subtitles).

As Poland transitions to democracy and Mateusz reaches young adulthood, he takes his takes his first real shot at learning and starts narrating — wryly.

“My favorite class was anatomy,” he smirks without smirking (he can’t) and we see what he sees — disrobing women of all shapes.

He takes to curling up in the apartment window, taking in the world outside and what’s happening inside the windows of the neighbors’ apartments.

Anka (Anna Karczmarczyk) is a new neighbor whose mother “every night invited in a new man to help her sleep.” One of them stays, becomes the abusive stepfather and Mateusz, helpless, looks on. Anka has become his first crush, and trapped in a body that won’t allow him to do much of anything, not able to communicate beyond the simplest ideas to even his own family, he has to find a way to help, to intervene.

One of the most romantic moments you’ll see this year is in a 2013 Polish film only now getting North American release — a severely disabled man, a grateful young woman who doesn’t under-estimate him, touching a single finger beneath a locked door.

If there’s a quibble with this straightforward, overcome-all-odds drama it is that Hollywood cliche — it’s the return of that “crippled” and all-but-mute man is catnip to lovely young women plot contrivance. Anka is merely the first. Magda (seriously sexy-rebellious Katarzyna Zawadzka) is the next.

When even his ever-hopeful mother treats him as if he’s having a fit when he tries to communicate or reach for something, how this cinema romance trope survives is a mystery for the ages.

Writer-director Maciej Pieprzyca (the Polish import “Splinters”) lets us hear the man’s sense of humor and see the raging hormones that no disease that puts him on the floor or in a wheelchair could suppress.

When his brother visits with a girlfriend, Mateusz can hear what he’s missing out on.

“They made worse noises than I did.”

There aren’t a lot of dramatic incidents in the film, not enough to justify its running time. His interior life isn’t that much different from anyone else’s.

But “Life” is broken into chapters, inter-titles with symbolic signs and Polish words (“Wizard,” how he thought of his father, “Boyfriend,” how he started to think of himself) that hint where it’s going, even if it takes its sweet, overly-familiar time getting there.

For all the turmoil going on around them in Poland, the revolution in attitudes towards the disabled — Mateusz is moved to a mental hospital — were just as dramatic.

And even if we’ve picked up on those clues and recalled the opening device — that “evaluation” by skeptical medical professionals — that doesn’t lessen the impact of the breakthroughs to come.

These scenes are incredibly moving, and you don’t have to have had your first conversation with a cousin suffering from this disease via computer when he was in his 30s, to get a bit choked up at where “Life Feels Good” takes you.

But I do, and did.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:  Dawid Ogrodnik, Dorota Kolak, Arkadiusz Jakubik, Katarzyna Zawadzka

Credits: Written and directed by  Maciej Pieprzyca. An Under the Milky Way release.

Running time: 1:52

No, Paramount didn’t see fit to preview this for critics. It’s not usually a good sign, but there’s no law that says a company selling a product has to give the public any warning about its quality before they buy tickets to see that product. So it will be what it will be.

And I will catch it on opening night.

I’m curious to see if Haddish can maintain the last vestiges of her “Girls’ Trip” SNL hostess Emmy buzz. A bit over-exposed, a bit played in terms of her bag of comic tricks.

A fan, but looking for something fresh from her, more than “The Oath” let her show.

I dunno Will. You had me until the whole pigeon transformation thing. You’ve got until Sept. 19 to convince me Blue Sky didn’t ruin your kid-friendly Black James Bond movie, “Spies in Disguise,” with another bird picture.