Movie Nation

“Captain Phillips” has its doubters. But they are few. Great performances, a compelling and largely true story, with surprising bits of it that we haven’t heard before. The great Paul Greengrass directed, Hanks has an Oscar nomination sewed up, this is the MUST see movie of this weekend.

“Machete Kills” is more grind-housie than the first film and isn’t as bad as I’d feared. The studio, Open Road, earned a bit of ill will for it by hiding it until Wednesday night. Not very good, but I’ve seen worse. Danny Trejo is like the big, leather-clad hulk standing in the middle of it all as stuff blows up and actual acting (he’s a stiff, a sweetheart, but a stiff) happens around him. Reviews reflect the fact that Robert Rodriguez has worn the joke out.

“Romeo & Juliet” is a lovely looking, beautifully set take on the Shakespeare play with a Juliet who generates zero heat. The pretty boy Romeo could be straight or gay, but stirring his loins over this too-young, cute but no hottie Juliet was too much to ask. Poor reviews for this one. Any “R&J” where Friar Lawrence (Paul Giamatti) steals the show is a failure.

“All the Boys Love Mandy Lane” is an Amber Heard horror picture made before she was a star, by the director who went on to do “The Wackness” and “Warm Bodies.” It sat on the shelf for seven years. Now it’s coming out, with Amber in “Machete” and with her name supposedly able to sell tickets. Not terrible enough to abandon, but not that good, either.

There’s also this little film that director George Tillman Jr. did, “The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete.” Sort of a more precious “Precious,” two inner city kids struggling to survive when their hooker/junky moms abandon them. Reasonably compelling, some decent performances, a lot of very good actors in the supporting cast — Jennifer Hudson, Anthony Mackie and Jeffrey Wright (Jordin Sparks was sort of written into it, pointlessly). Good to very good reviews, overall, for this one.

“The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete” is a rough and rough around the edges tale of children growing up on the mean streets of the wrong side of Brooklyn. It’s a coming of age story of a self-absorbed, downtrodden punk with a dream who learns about the love that comes with responsibility.
“Mister” Winfield (Skylan Brooks) is a movie buff and a skate boarder, but not an easy kid to like. Sullen, foul-mouthed and scrawny, he must be the smallest kid in his class. He’s just failed eighth grade, and his response is to lash out at the one caring teacher who gave him the deciding F.
Mister has issues. And he’s got real problems. That graffiti scrawled on the bathroom wall — “For a gud time, call Misters Mom”? It’s accurate. She (Jennifer Hudson) is a junky and a hooker who can’t keep him fed, spending her hustled money on drugs, tattoos and clothes.
She shoots up right in front of him, and right in front of Pete (Ethan Dizon) the son of a fellow hooker whom she’s babysitting. Mister doesn’t care for Pete, feuds with the local Pakistani mini-mart owner and scowls in hatred at mom’s pimp, played by Anthony Mackie in a Mohawk and King Nebuchadnezzar beard.
When mom is busted, Mister resolves to keep himself and Pete fed and afloat until she gets out. Then, he’ll go to a kid actor casting call where fame, fortune and Beverly Hills are his for the taking.
“We can’t tell anybody,” he says. “We’re on our own.”
Director George Tillman Jr. (“Notorious,” “Soul Food”) and screenwriter Michael Starrbury hurl every temptation and impediment in these kids’ paths that you can think of — petty theft and illness, burglary and starvation. The story staggers from bleakness to bleakness as Mister struggles to keep both of them out of the dreaded children’s detention center.
The best scenes feature young Skylan Brooks (a TV regular, and he was in “Our Family Wedding”) swapping bitter lines with the Oscar winner, Hudson, or Mackie or Jeffrey Wright, playing a panhandler the kid also feuds with.  Jordin Sparks plays a character set up as some sort of guardian angel who pops up, from time to time, to rescue Mister.
It’s a film as untidy as its title — with slow transitions separating the winning moments of tension, drama or just kids being kids. Brooks, whose character memorizes lines from “Trading Places” and “Fargo,” has more to play and is a far better actor than young Mr. Dizon, and that imbalance works against the film.
But as “inevitable” as this tale of woe sometimes feels, there’s just enough novelty in the script to let us see what all these very good supporting players saw in it. And that makes us root against the “Defeat of Mister & Pete,” which is all this modest film asks for.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some drug use and sexual content
Cast: Skylan Brooks, Ethan Dizon, Jennifer Hudson,  Jeffrey Wright, Anthony Mackie, Jordin Sparks. 
Credits: Directed by George Tillman Jr., written by Michael Starrbury. A Lionsgate release. 
Running time: 1:46

It’s heartening to see how gorgeous the Italian cities of Verona and Mantua still are in the new “Romeo & Juliet,” so well-preserved that the Immortal Bard himself would recognize them — if he actually traveled through Europe.
Those stunning locations — Renaissance ballrooms and porticoes, squares, bridges, gardens and parlors —  almost make up for the rather disastrous casting at the heart of this production. How 17 year -ld Hailee Steinfeld managed to look younger and more romantically innocent than she did in “True Grit”, which filmed four years ago, is anybody’s guess.
Almost as big a mystery as to why they cast this overmatched actress as the teen who inspires this immortal line — “I never knew true beauty until this night.” Romeo (Douglas Booth) doesn’t get out much. Apparently.
The callow boy has tossed aside his infatuation for one forbidden girl from the Capulet clan for another, and as cruel as it is say so, Steinfeld doesn’t justify it. She rushes her lines, kisses like a rank amateur (which kind of fits, she’s supposed to be quite young) and tries not to shiver in all the unheated rooms where we see her breath as she wonders “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
Booth is the real beauty here, a model-pretty toy boy who doesn’t have a lot of camera charisma, either. The two of them make for a bland, lines-mumbling couple in an otherwise lovely and lively take on the classic play.
Paul Giamatti steals the picture as the helpful Friar Lawrence, trying not to stand in the way of love, aware of how funny he is when he tries to fight the hormones that draw the Montague boy to the Capulet girl.
“I pray you were not playing in Satan’s game,” he purrs. Not until they’re married, anyway.
Damien Lewis manages some fury and fun as Juliet’s father, and Natasha McElhone is his too-sexy wife, too understanding of Juliet’s reluctance to enter into an arranged marriage at such an early age.
Ed Westwick and Christian Cooke are matched hotheads Tybalt and Mercutio, practically foaming at the mouth to take the Capulet-Montague feud, the thing that keeps our young couple apart, to a new, bloodier level.
Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”) did this adaptation, with Italian director Carlo Carlei, best known for the dead-guy-comes-back-as-a-dog dramedy “Fluke” ,utterly in over his head as director. It’s not that the movie isn’t great looking, with stunning sets, sword fights and a nice serving of horse play. But getting his baby-faced actors comfortable or compelling was beyond him.
So as much as every generation deserves it’s own “Romeo & Juliet,” this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence and thematic elements
Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Douglas Booth, Paul Giamatti, Damien Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard. 
Credits: Directed by Carlo Carlei, written by Julian Fellowes, based on the play by William Shakespeare. A Relativity release. 
Running time: 1:58

James McTeague is slated to direct this new thriller about a government agent (Milla J.) on the run and trying to prevent a terrorist attack on Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Much of the picture is set in the UK, so they’re about to start filming in London. Jovovich has been pretty good, outside of the increasingly lame “R.Evil” pictures. This looks like her biggest test in years.

Millennium has landed Pierce Brosnan, Angela Bassett and Emma Thompson as her co-stars, according to Deadline.com

It wasn’t that long ago and we remember how it turned out. So there’s no way that “Captain Phillips”, the movie about the 2009 pirate attack on the M.V. Maersk Alabama, should be as surprising and entertaining a sea tale as it is.
What happened was more heroic than you’d expect. The resistance of the crew, the resilience and craftiness of the pirates and the guile, level-headedness and bravery of the title character is so Hollywood that you half expect Bruce Willis heroics and an exchange of pithy trash-talk catch-phrases.
But this thrilling retelling was directed by Paul “United 93” Greengrass, an unfussy director with a talent for tension. And it was adapted from the real Capt. Richard Phillips’ book by Billy “Breach/Shattered Glass” Ray.
They’ve cooked up an engrossing, sober-minded, fact-centered account, telling the story from parallel points of view — the “two” hard case captains here. There’s Phillips,  a veteran no-nonsense sailor, and the Somali pirate named Muse. Phillips has his job, his pushy bosses, his ways of dealing with an attack “by the book.” But so does Muse, a smart thug who has to answer to a murderous war lord if he doesn’t seize a ship and ransom it and its crew.
“No Al Quaeda here,” Muse  grins, pointing his battered AK-47 at Phillips. “Just business.”
Tom Hanks has built his career on a mastering the details that signal “competence” in any character, and he disappears into Captain Phillips. Even in the informality of a cargo ship hauling relief supplies up and down the African coast, his captain is all business, demanding professionalism from the crew he’s just met.
Barkhad Abdi is the Somali “captain” Muse, a gaunt figure with expressive eyes who lets us see the wheels turning, just as Hanks does. Their performances never let us forget, as entertaining as their cat and mouse game becomes, that these men knew life and death were the stakes.
Greengrass and Ray sketch in the shore side life of both men — Phillips splitting his time between sailing assignments and a Vermont home with his wife (Catherine Keener) and kids, Muse, sleeping one off between hijackings in a shoreside fishing village whose fishing dried up thanks to the Asian factory trawlers that vacuumed up Somalia’s coast.
Then comes the nerve-wracking chase. It starts with radar blips, a “security drill” that is “not a drill.”
“I don’t like the look of that. They didn’t come here to fish.”
Music makes its first appearance beneath the action as the big bulk carrier turns to and fro, blasts geysers of water off all sides to repel boarders and the pirates bicker as they crash through the huge ship’s wake in a battered skiff with a balky boat motor.
Then the boarding, a crew in hiding and the gamesmanship that kicks in even as one captain fears for his life and the other, wild-eyed on the mild narcotic khat, fears failure. Before you know it, the Navy’s involved and things turn even messier.
Last summer’s Danish film “A Hijacking” did a great job of breaking down what happens when a ship is taken by a captain and crew ill-prepared to resist. Hanks is terrific at showing the ways this captain had the presence of mind to tip his crew to his every move, to counter the badly-outnumbered pirates’, keeping his head even as he lied, time and again.
“No tricks. The ship is BROKEN.”
Greengrass fills his cast with so many unemotional, professional military folks that “Captain Phillips” can seem like a recruiting ad for Navy SEAL Team 6. There’s a sense of people knowing what they’re doing with Max Martini, as the SEAL negotiator, embodying the  the physique and the calm, firm jock baritone of a soldier who has a procedure for how this will go down and the confidence to stick to that plan.
Akbi, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali and Barkhad Abdirahman are utterly convincing as hardened pirates, wide-eyed with macho rage and just stoned enough to have the courage to take on this deadly work. Akbi plays no lip-smacking villain or doltish thug, but he lets us see Muse smirk as he tells Phillips “Look at me. I’M the captain, now.”
And Hanks lets himself get so deep into this ordeal that you believe the beatings, the horrific stress, the numb terror of that indentation on his forehead where the pistol barrel was pressed.
The performances and Greengrass’s way with action immerse us and make “Captain Phillips” a tight, taut,edge of your seat thriller even if you remember the ending. With a film well over two hours long, that’s high praise indeed.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sustained intense sequences of menace, some violence with bloody images, and for substance use
Cast: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Catherine Keener
Credits: Directed by Paul Greengrass, scripted by Billy Ray. A Columbia Pictures release.
Running time: 2:14

As a rule, movie studios never hide movies they’re proud of. So when Fox last week showed, to crowds of New York and LA critics, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” their big holiday Oscar bait, they at least THOUGHT the Ben Stiller movie was going to hit top ten lists.

It didn’t work out that way, and the studio cannot have been happy the movie got savaged by a lot of premature reviewing. But they thought it was good, they let people see it, and they discovered otherwise.

Fox knew how bad “Runner Runner” was, so they only screened that in Australia and in the US on the Wed. before opening. Beaten to a pulp.

Now Open Road is conceding this weekend to “Captain Phillips” by hiding “Machete Kills” from most American critics.  They’re showing it at 9 p.m. Wednesday night, WAY after paid critics’ deadlines. And the earliest reviews, from the premiere and perhaps a SXSW or some other fan fest screening, have no endorsements by legit, discriminating reviewers. A few hacks gave it a pandering thumbs up. Otherwise, universal derision is greeting this latest Robert Rodriguez/Danny Trejo vehicle.

When studios are really ashamed of a movie, they don’t show it at all. When they don’t want you to know how bad it is,  they show it at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday in a theme park theater way out in the boonies (Disney World, Universal Studios). They’re sending a message. “We know how this is, and we don’t want you to know until after the last minute.”

I can hardly wait.