No, I don’t recognize Mickey Rourke in his current guise. But then again, Burgess Meredith had acquired the cauliflowered features by the time he was “Mick,” in his “Hit’em, ROCK. Give’m the LEFT!” years.
Mickey Rourke is entering that phase of his career.
But this is a movie about civil rights and boxing and the discrimination Sikhs face in America, and the trailer pushes all the right buttons.
Nov. 2 we will see if it does.
Early projections had “Venom” rolling in with a decent $46 million opening, with nobody really wanting to go as far as thinking $70 million might be within reach for a Sony comic book franchise-starter with piss-poor reviews and weak buzz.
We/They/Everybody was wrong. There’s no such thing as a comic book flop.
It looked like a $77 million hit Sat. AM. Now, everybody’s all-in on the Tom Hardy picture pulling in $80 million.
Pre-sake sell-outs of “A Star is Born” had pushed the predicted $42 million take for that one up to $44 on Saturday AM. But the sell-out showings have passed, and $42 it is.
So much Gaga’s Little Monsters sabotaging “Venom” at the BO.
If “Venom” falls off a cliff its second weekend, and it will, “Star” will move ahead of it in next week’s race, perhaps doing well enough to take first place. Perhaps not. But it’ll stick around as long as the hype doesn’t fade too fast.
“A Simple Favor” still has legs, “Smallfoot” is still owning “Night School” (a 63% plunge on its second weekend).
“Crazy Rich Asians” is still in the top ten for another week, maybe two. It will clear $175, maybe $180 before it loses most of its screens.
Acting brothers Alex and Nat Wolff have a cute rapport that made for pretty funny banter on TV’s “The Naked Brothers Band,” back in the day. They pick up right where they left off with a more PG-13 version of their um, antics in Polly Draper’s “Stella’s Last Weekend.”
They’re competing for the same career and same girlfriend, playing hardball at the local arcade, sharing smart-assed banter with their on-screen mom as siblings reunited for their beloved dog’s farewell, a party their mother is throwing for the only dog they ever had growing up. “Something wrong with that, right? Mom celebrating our dog’s death.”
They’re New Yorkers, with older brother Jack (Nat Wolff) in college studying marine biology and younger brother Ollie (Alex Wolff) already over-achieving in the same field in high school. Their reunion includes friendly bickering over “Why’re you in my room?,” and way too many sentences that begin with “Dude.”
“Dude, that’s MY James Brown T-shirt! “No, it’s OUR James Brown t-shirt.!”
Ollie is outgoing, a hyperactive vulgarian, the kind of dude who swaps S-shots with his girlfriend — dropping trou at the flower shot to Snapchat his butt. He’s super-quick with a retort. He’s dating a ballerina and isn’t taking guff from any of the mean girls in the corps de ballet. “How’s high school, Ollie?” “Fine. How’s In-a-Few-Years-You’ll-Be-Too-Old to Dance School?”
But that ballerina, Violet (Paulina Singer of “The Wilde Wedding”) has history with Jack. Not much. “No big deal,” she says. It’s just that Jack has obsessed about her ever since. So even crashing and trashing a pretentious ballet party has a bittersweet sting as he tags along with the happy couple. Ollie’s mouth knows no filter, and “You are one bats— crazy b—h, Mom” may amuse Mom (writer-director and “thirtysomething” vet Polly Draper), but her chicken franchise-owning boyfriend (Nick Sandow) sees it as just proof that these two “aren’t becoming men.” To the boys, Ron’s just a “Scoob” with a combover. As we hear them do cutesy alternative character voices, teasing and taunting about everything, from their dog’s death to their father’s (Mom had him “put down,” too is one joke), we can see Ron’s point. 
But as they dote on the dog, tugging terminally ill Stella around in a red wagon, dragging Violet along as they trek to town, to Coney Island in the off season; as Mom recites the litany of all the dogs she’s had and how they died,; as Violet faces the dilemma of realizing she might have broken up with Jack under false pretenses, the lads and their young lady friend let go of grating (Alex tries WAY too hard) and fall into charming.
It’s a formulaic dramedy with a little pathos, some wit, some unusual-in-real-life-but-not so-much-in-rom-coms situations.
But with a several warmly predictable story beats and the occasional twist and a lot of lightly amusing lines, Draper (She was in “The Naked Brothers Band Movie”) and the kids make it come off. “Violet? This is everyone I love…and Ron.” 
MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity Cast: Nat Wolff, Alex Wolff, Paulina Singer. Polly Draper Credits: Written and directed by Polly Draper . An Orchard release. Running time: 1:42
The character actors who burn into the memory are most often the colorful kind, the Christopher Walken/Wilford Brimley/Harry Dean Stanton school, Ed Harris-Giancarlo Esposito intense, Margo Martindale-Jenifer Lewis colorful and quirky.
Scott Wilson gave us more by showing off less. From “In Cold Blood” to “Hostiles,” Wilson seemed to speak volumes with just a line, a soulful look, a crinkle of pain. He died Saturday at 76.
He was a recurring on “The Walking Dead,” working right up to the end.
Robert Blake got all the attention from “In Cold Blood,” but you remember Wilson. Colder, less sympathetic.
He’s the sober, sane, long-suffering father and husband in “Junebug,” Scott Crossfield, the test-pilot-of-even-fewer words than Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) in “The Right Stuff,” the victim that lets us see Aileen Wuornos has no trace of humanity left when his Good Samaritan instinct puts him in her path in “Monster.”
I once spent a day riding all over Kennedy Space Center with members of the cast of “The Right Stuff,” there to commemorate the movie for a DVD re-release. Wilson, even then, was the unassuming one. Shy, in the background, taking it all in and remembering the movie (all his scenes were set at Edwards AFB.).
But I sidled up to him and we chatted, about “The Right Stuff,” about making “Junebug,” written by my friend Angus MacLachlan and shot in Winston-Salem, where I got to know Angus and director Phil Morrison, and about “Monster.”
He said he had gotten in the habit of looking for roles with few lines, trying to do more with less. He’d done that most of his career, but his moments in “Junebug” and “Monster,” which I covered as it was filmed in Greater Orlando, have the power of a character who picks his spots, uses words sparingly and when he has something to may, makes them count.
You see a little of that in “Hostiles,” bigger than many he played — but making his words count.
Not every character actor chews the scenery. Some put their effort into coloring the edges, drawing attention when it’s called for, inhabiting the space.
Scott Wilson was great at it.
“Sadie” is a very dark girl, even for 13.
The more violent the video game, the better. She’s into horror films and takes in the world through the jaded eyes, her bleak connection to violence pouring out into the compositions she writes for English class.
She’d scare people, if they only knew. But when you’ve grown up in the dumpiest trailer park in Greater Seattle, when your Dad escaped from the family by constantly re-upping his military service, who’s going to notice a kid like her and wonder what’s going on in her head?
Writer-director Megan Griffiths’ Sundance-produced “Sadie” is a domestic melodrama with working class grit and concerns. Poverty is never mentioned, because the poor don’t talk about the horizons that have closed in around them. We can see it, and so can they.
Sadie, given a poker-faced seriousness by Sophia Mitri Schloss of TV’s “Kicks,” writes letters to her father expressing longing and a tender connection. But even those have an edge.
“I think adults just get nervous when kids are smarter than they are…Adults are so pointless.”
She’s talking about her teachers, who keep red-flagging her bloody-minded essays and ignoring the constant bullying her pal Francis (Keith L. Williams) endures. She might also mean her nurse mother (Melanie Lynskey) and the guidance counselor (Tony Hale) who gives her extra attention because he pines for her mother.
She cuts him down with all the sophistication a movie 13 year-old can muster. She tolerates Bradley, but not his seeming concerned questions about her father, “considering you’re over here trying to sleep with his wife while he’s off defending his country.”
The Shady Plains Mobile Home Park accepts anybody and anything passing for a “mobile home,” and is entirely too close to a junkyard, where Sadie and Francis hang out.
But those days may be winding down. They’re getting sexually curious. Well, she is. And while the director dresses her in mid-winter frumpiness, Sadie’s emerging sexuality is something she’s aware of even if she can’t articulate it to her father figure and whittling mentor, grumpy Deek (Tee Dennard).
To Deek, Francis’ grandpa, Sadie is “an old coot at the ripe age of 13.”
“What’s a coot?”
“I’m a coot.”
The free electron introduced into this atomized world is Cyrus (John Gallagher Jr. of “The Belko Experiment”). He’s cagey about his past and his present, wary about how much to say in front of anybody. Used to be a pilot. Works as a mechanic. Living in a battered, undersized Winnebago.
Lynskey inhabits a working class world as well as the best of them and has hit “The Mom Years” of her career by giving performances both tragic and funny (“Goodbye to All That,” “I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Any More” “Happy Christmas”), but always suffused with realism. She lets us see the neediness in her character, Rae, even as she refuses to compromise on her “type,” her idea of what a man should be.
“So, you lived here long?”
“You could say that.”
“Change of scenery?”
“Something like that.”
“Pretty sad view.”
Gallagher suggests similar down-and-out desperation, a working class self-awareness that is he rationalizes just to get by.
“If everybody got to do what they love, there wouldn’t be any janitors or fry cooks. And the world would be a very messy place without any fried food.”
But this is Schloss’s show, and even though everything from her eyebrows to her wiser-than-her-years cynicism screams “CHILD ACTRESS,” she colors Sadie in shades of grey, the eternal color of Greater Seattle.
Deek gives her the Big Life Metaphor in whittling form — “I’d keep it simple — frogs and squirrels and stuff. Men are tough.” Sadie is too sophisticated for that — canny, looking for angles to play to create solutions to her problems, and Francis’.
Schloss lets us see that Sadie is savvy enough to see her friends bully issues and Cyrus’s seriously rough redneck edges, that she’s cunning and nervy enough to think up solutions, too childish to see the consequences of her actions.
Director Griffiths never lets reality slip too far beyond her film’s grasp, though the sexual complications, all of them, play like melodramatic conventions, some less organic than others.
She’s still delivered a convincing portrait of a world and how its limited horizons shape those who might never escape it.
MPAA Rating: unrated, substance abuse, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Sophia Mitri Schloss, Melanie Lynskey, John Gallagher Jr., Danielle Brooks, Tee Dennard, Tony Hale
Credits: Written and directed by Megan Griffiths. An Electric Dream Factory release.
Running time: 1:36
A huge weekend is underway for both a critically-scorned comic book pic and the fourth version of “A Star is Born” as Sony’s “Venom” is overcoming bad reviews to set the October record for its opening and “A Star is Born” is pulling them in as well.
A $10 million Thursday night preview pushed into a big Friday and sets the stage for a $77-80 million “Venom” take. No, the trailers don’t entice and the reviews have been red flag warnings. But the fangirls and fanboys are swarming out to see for themselves.
The upper end of projections pointed to a $60 million take. So there is a franchise here after all.
“A Star is Born” is benefiting from vast reservoirs of Lady Gaga love — from fans and most critics — and has easily overcome its long run time to manage a $44 million opening.
The previous record for an October debut was “Gravity,” which did $55 million and change a few Octobers back. So you can see the scale of this, a sea of film fans flooding theaters to escape the news or what have you.
“Night School” experienced a steep week to week plunge to end up in fourth place, “Smallfoot” is holding its own as the lone kiddie film for parents to lean on for another weekend. It might hit $70, 60 anyway.
There’s a new “Goosebumps” coming, which should end “The House with the Clock in its Walls.”
“A Simple Favor” has had legs and will clear $50 million by Sunday, Monday at the latest.
Most people don’t give a lot of thought to rock climbing. It’s a demographic thing, a racial thing, a “Because it’s there” thing that doesn’t connect with the average person without the upper body strength, the skill and determination or the free time.
But for a few weeks in late 2014 and early 2015, America and much of the world were riveted by images from Yosemite’s El Capitan, to two tiny dots climbing “The Dawn Wall.”
At night, the blackness, with El Capitan outlines in dark blue, captured the tiny dot of a camp light, two guys in a tent dangling a 1500 feet up.
Filmmakers Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer weave a fascinating, upbeat story of obsession, pain, exertion and achievement in getting up close on the cliff-face with Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgesen and into the lives that put them there, attempting an ultimate free climb, The Dawn Wall of the 3000 foot high El Capitan rock in the park.\
It’s mostly about Caldwell, 37 at the time he made the attempt, widely acknowledged as the greatest climber of his generation. Trying to free climb (just hands and feet, ropes only to limit his fall)
“The Dawn Wall” begins with the guys hanging in a cat’s cradle of ropes holding men, gear and tents, where Caldwell takes a “Tommy, what’s the point of all this?” cell call from the New York Times.
El Capitan is “the Mecca of rock climbing,” and the bald, seemingly featureless “Dawn Wall” is its Black Stone in the Grand Mosque, rock climbing’s ultimate achievement.
Caldwell, a developmentally-delayed son of a climber and body-builder who took climbing by storm in his teens, set this impossible task as his goal.
Friends, family and fellow-climbers profess their amazement at his dexterity, infinite patience for reasoning out a climb, muscling through pain and making history.
Jorgesen was a less experienced climber when they met, but a king of “bouldering,” flying up and over smaller faces.
They took years to plan their route, sketched out in graphics in the film, each stage called a “pitch” where they could stop and rest for the next pitch — places with colorful names, the Muir Wall, The Mushroom, The Dyno, The Traverse, Wino Tower.
But Caldwell’s life had plenty of drama before then, meeting a woman who shared his passion for climbing, joining her and others for a once-in-a-lifetime climb in the Kara Su Valley in Kyrgyzstan.
They were kidnapped by Islamic rebels, caught up a firefight with government troops, forced to take matters in their own hands to survive. Other pieces of Caldwell lore are woven into the narrative.
Climbing legend John Long is among those interviewed in “The Dawn Wall,” and his commentary becomes the narration of the film’s main body, the big climb itself. He expresses skepticism, amazement and sober analysis of the effort, the frustrations and every difficulty the two encounter (with roped off camera operators capturing the effort as they do).
Caldwell resolves that “We’re not coming down until we’re done,” and as we see the bloodied, chalked fingers hammered and nail-busted toes, the dozens of tries it takes to accomplish some moves, we know caught up in a wait….wait for it…cliff hanger.
Filmmakers Lowell and Mortimer were there to document every excruciating inch, with stunning Yosemite scenery as their backdrop for almost every striking frame. the film they got out of it is, like the experience they were documenting, one of a kind.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Tommy Caldwell, Kevin Jorgesen, John Long, John Branch
Credits:Directed by Josh Lowell, Peter Mortimer. A Red Bull Media release.
Running time: 1:40
“This is the last one,” Clint Eastwood’s character says in “The Mule,” a movie he directed and stars in, perhaps the last time he will do that for his beloved Warner Brothers.
And damned if this isn’t the most touching trailer to a Clint movie in ages — even more moist-eyed than the ones cut for “Million Dollar Baby.”
He plays an old man using his age as a cover for smuggling drugs — big paydays, huge risks, but maybe not so for a man who regards his life as a waste and essentially over. It’s an elegy to old age, “last rides,” crime and those chasing the criminal.
Oscar winner Dianne Weist, Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, Lawrence Fishburne, Tessa Farmiga and Alison Eastwood are also in the cast.
It’s a holiday release, according to IMDb, but as the trailer says “Next Year,” it seems headed for a limited Oscar-qualifying run in late Dec. with wider “American Sniper” sized release coming in January.
The common refrain from all the filmgoer comments directed my way about “Venom” has been “I could see it was bad, just from the trailer.”
As a film’s trailer is comprised of its best, most audience-enticing moments, that’s a fair shot. The best Sony’s Marvel movie has been able to drum up is a shrug from most folks.
But it’s still supposedly going to open HUGE. Deadline.com is saying “others” are hinting it could go to $70, but $60 seems safer. That’s a CYA attempt on Deadline’s part.
Box Office Guru is betting low and I’m with him. Maybe $46 million.
It could open in “Ant-Man” territory — upper $50s — or in the realm of Tom Hardy’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” (mid-40s), Box Office Mojo opines. Then the site sticks its neck out and says $60 million.
As the movies everybody is comparing its chances to earned GOOD reviews, it could be they’re inflating the expected take in the hopes of smearing egg on Sony’s face.
Lady Gaga fans have been trolling “Venom” in the hopes of creating a depressed box office and a real horse race, with the longer, better reviewed “A Star is Born,” a date movie that should make money into November or award’s season, depending on how its buzz fares.
Mojo and Deadline.com are figuring the critically-boosted and all-media hyped “Star” will hit the low $40s. Box Office Guru is lowballing that one, too — $36.
THURSDAY’S take put “Venom” at $7 million, a strong is not epic start to the weekend. “A Star is Born” managed $2.5, and stuffed “preview” showings in on Tuesday and Wed. nights as well. (Warner Brothers is winning the fall marketing wars with this one).
“Venom” is on so many screens (4250) that it should win the weekend easily, but we will see what we see. “A Star is Born” is the one that’s selling out early showings on Fandango.com. I’m guessing the $45 for and up predictions are on the mark. And if “Venom” only manages the $45-50 that quality and pre-release attention suggest, the Gaga Monsters may have their way.
The Brits loved this black and white take on “Cold War” era Poland, jazz and love in a time of oppression, limited freedoms and dictatorship.
Might resonate with American audiences come Dec. 21.
Movie Nation 