Movie Nation

Clocking in at over two hours, a “troubled” production, a director under a #MeToo cloud, a movie that managed mixed reviews, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was still supposed to pull in $38-40 million on its opening weekend.

Because, well, who doesn’t love Queen? God save them and all that.

But Fox took this brand to the house playing to the film’s crowd pleasing strengths. A $50 million weekend, so sayeth the bean counters. It’s official.

Well, take that with a grain of salt, as that nice round figure it mimicked by the safe $20 million the very pricey “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is estimated to have earned (by midnight Sunday, so it’s a guess), and $14 million for Tyler Perry’s Tiffany Haddish flop, “Nobody’s Fool.”

Amazon’s supposed Oscar contender “Beautiful Boy” more than doubled its screens and still didn’t crack the top ten.

Similarly, Amazon’s “Suspira” opened in slightly more limited release and failed to register with audiences. Check out the per screen numbers. They couldn’t market merlot to a wino, as I like to say.

“Mid90s” and “First Man” and “Night School” fell out of the top ten.

“Boy Erased” did stunning per-screen numbers in extremely limited release. Look for that Oscar contender in much of the country Nov. 9 and 16.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me” opened much wider, had decent per screen numbers but still seems destined to not attract widespread attention, despite its darkly funny turns by Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant. If that one hits 800 screens, it should do well.

“Walk a mile in my shoes,” the old saying and song go. “Everybody’s dealing with something” is a similar, more modern plea for compassion and empathy.

Because who among us could deal with the burdens of Jheri Jones of Pearl, Mississippi?

“The Joneses: Every Family Has a Story to Tell,” lists them.

Jheri is 74 in the film and lives in a double wide in a trailer park on the buckle of America’s Red State poverty belt. She shares it with two adult sons, one diagnosed special needs, the other pushing 40 and depressed about a life that has amounted to little that he can count as a contribution.

She has a third son in an assisted living facility, and a fourth who has teenage kids who do not know grandma’s secret.

Grandma used to be Grandpa. Jheri used to be Jerry, married Doris and had four kids. In 1980, they divorced and he began his transition.

All this in that oasis of tolerance and open-mindedness that America knows is  Mississippi.

Moby Longinotto’s film gets close to Jheri, and by extension her family, and captures a flamboyant free spirit who salsa dances all by herself, speaks frankly about her sexual history and hints at the murderous atmosphere she came out in and “the closed, segregated Mississippi” where she was raised — a place where it was “a scary time to be different.”

She says grace before every meal, never misses a Sunday at Mt. Gilead Primitive Baptist Church and talks about her difficulties, over the decades, “looking for a good, solid relationship…How far do you go before telling them about your situation?”

As upbeat and refreshingly blunt as Jheri is, “The Joneses” is more broadly a depressing portrait of Dead End America, far removed from big, sophisticated cities. Three of her four sons have mental issues, and the one who is “only” depressed — Trevor — cannot win the argument with her that her dumping the family and changing her gender (operations and all), her ego and vanity, weren’t easy to grow up in.

“I TRY to understand you,” Trevor says. “THIS is why we don’t grow as a family.”

There is collateral damage for being forced to live a lie, and this is never more obvious than when preening, dishing Jheri criticizes her late wife for the depression, anger and weight gain that led her premature death — as if Jheri had nothing to do with any of that.

“The Joneses” is like a Southern Gothic reality TV version of “Baskets” — dysfunction and hardship all around, lost souls (save for married, runs-his-own-business Wade), and a transgender woman at the vortex of it all.

“She’s been there,” Wade declares. “Sometimes, that means more than anything.”

Once she reconnected with her kids, Jheri went full nurture — housing two, visiting the one in the home and doing the books (she has been a teacher, accountant and other professions over her working life) for the third.

Jheri may kvetch about “My nerves” (the older Southern lady’s favorite complaint), but she keeps looking on the sunny side, modeling her 74 year old post-transition bod in a swimsuit, singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

The film could use more of Jheri’s struggle, the years when the wrong bar pickup could end in “murder,” to take some of the edge off her narcissism. That ceases being cute after about twenty minutes.

Her family is pretty acceptant in the film’s opening, more so by the final credits. How’s she taken by her church? Her neighbors? Where are her friends?

It’s as in Longinotto chose to leave those queries out, because she and we probably figure we know the answers. But maybe we don’t.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, sexual subject matter

Cast: Jheri Jones, Wade Jones, Brad Jones, Trevor Jones, Trent Jones,

Credits:Directed by Moby Longinotto . A Bunny Lake release.

Running time: 1:20

We all have our favorite character actors, right?

One of mine — I have many — is Man Mountain of the Great White North Ron Perlman, of “Quest for Fire,” “Hellboy” and too many too indie and B-movies to number.

He’s the title character in “Asher,” yet another hitman wants to retire thriller in the droll and dramatic vein.

Famke Janssen is the love interest, Peter Facinelli the younger guy in “the life,” and Oscar winner Richard Dreyfus reaches for another Eastern European accent as the boss who needs this one last job, you know, “contracted.”

“Asher” opens on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7.

“Weightless” is a downbeat, off-his-meds dip into magical realism, a somber drama about a guy wholly unfit to be a full time father put in charge of the son he’d never met.

It won’t be to every taste, but director Jaron Albertin’s cryptic, quiet and intimately suspenseful film paints a vivid portrait of a broken life trapped in denial and the fragile child we fear for the moment “Dad” gets the call from his ex sister-in-law —
“Your boy. Not my responsibility, he’s yours.”

Alessandro Nivola (“American Hustle,” “A Most Violent Year”) is Joel, and his introduction is as mysterious as it is alarming. He’s stumbling out of a lake in upstate New York, punching rocks on the shoreline in an outburst of impotent rage.

He drives trucks and bulldozers at the Fulton County dump. He’s just set up housekeeping, a dump that he puts a TV and mattress into, that his been-around-and-everybody-knows-it girlfriend Janeece (Julianne Nicholson, a marvel) adds a goldfish to.

He’s settled into a working class life of pool hall bars, blue collar jobs, Walmart shopping and low expectations.

Then Joel gets the call. His ex-wife Sarah disappeared — ran off. Her sister (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) is done with the kid. Will (Eli Haley) is obese, diabetic and all-but-mute. Mom running off was a trauma he’s never overcome, and his shrewish aunt has had enough.

Joel has been ignoring the meds and the counsel of his doctor (K. Todd Freeman, quite good), and you can see the doctor’s “A ten year old boy needs looking after” advice ignored as well.

Joel’s boss, played by Johnny Knoxville in a compact, compassionate and earthy turn, gently hits this “special” employee with simple, practical questions which the spacey Joel never considered. “He in school? Got his medical records?”

Joel has childlike qualities himself. He’s responsible enough to show up at work on time every day and do his job, utterly clueless about childcare, disconnected and knowing any better. We fear for the kid and seethe at Joel’s idiotic response to having a boy under his roof.

Will? He’s used to solitude, envisions himself through the eyes of a bird he spies over the dump, peering down at them and the ruin and unspoken tragedy and pain all around them. He sits with a bag over his head, fondles his Littlest Pet Shop fish toys and watches the same video, over and over again.

That video will take your breath away and break your heart.

Nicholson (“I, Tonya,” “Black Mass”) gives Janeece this brittle but warm bottom line bluntness and nurturing instinct that brooks no nonsense, doesn’t wait for explanations and reaches out to the kid before Joel can alibi his way out of not having met a child he’s known about since birth.

“You’ve been carrying around his name, and you wouldn’t even visit him?”

“Weightless” gives us glimpses of hope as we realize Will can talk and will — but only to peers, at first. Carla (Phoebe Young) is the only neighbor kid in redneck bullytown to be nice to him.

Nivola and the screenplay give us hints of Joel’s issues, his personal pain. There’s impulse control and bottled up rage (he collects old pop bottles he finds at the dump), drifting through the oblivion inside his head, avoiding any contact that could put him in conflict.

Guys like that, conflict comes to them.

Albertin keeps the camera close on his stars and lets them speak volumes with their eyes. A tearful breakup is seen, not heard, through a kitchen window, a child teeters on the brink of having one life-altering or ending accident while his dad aimlessly drifts here or is distracted or waylaid by a passersby there.

Frankly, Albertin, whose story Enda Walsh turned into a script, needs to tell us more, put more of what’s going on in the open where it’s easily understood.

But the mystery, the drift of “Weightless” still makes for a captivating indie film experience, tension without melodrama, mistakes with consequences, a world where people are facing the future and accepting responsibility even as Joel, and his chip off the old block kid, live in denial of it.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Alessandro Nivola, Julianne Nicholson, Johnny Knoxville,Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Meryl Jones Williams, Phoebe Young

Credits:Directed by Jaron Albertin, script by Enda Walsh. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:37

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.