Movie Nation

“Crazy Rich Asians” looks to finish the summer off with another stellar weekend. But will it really lose NO audience when compared to last weekend?

It’s entirely likely, says Box Office Mojo. That means another $25 million, $30 million when you add in the Labor Day holiday on Monday.

It’s not little in the line of real competition.

The midweek opening of “Operation Finale” didn’t set the world on fire, doing $1 million. It could collect as much as $10 million this weekend, over 4 days. But Oscar Isaac and Melanie Laurent will have to grow a lot more box office appeal for that to happen.

All you folks who don’t show up simply on hearing the news that Sir Ben Kingsley’s in a film are missing out. He’s fascinating almost every time out, and he gives us a vivid, studied take on Nazi fugitive Adolph Eichmann, kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli security forces. He plays Eichmann as smarter than your average Nazi (largely rednecks, racists, buffoons and oafs), but no Evil Genius — just an amoral thug with an education.

“Searching” goes into wider release this weekend, but that may prove to be a marketing blunder on Screen Gems’ part. It’s the best reviewed film that Sony studio has released…maybe ever. It’s not a horror film in the conventional sense, but a mystery thriller. It has little sense of ticking-clock urgency, but a father’s online search for his missing daughter, probing her online footprint, is fascinating. It may only earn $5 million, according to Mr. Mojo. 

As it got ALL its attention last weekend, perhaps that’s when they should have opened it. It did piddling per screen numbers in its few markets then, and the buzz has died down a bit. Hype the hell out of it the last week of the month, release it on the wave of that hype and it does double what they’ll end up with this Labor Day. Screen Gems Fail.

As for “Kin,” nobody’s bothering with this violent, tone-deaf and ill-conceived “kid finds a futuristic gun and uses it” thriller, not even the NRA. Because the kid is black. The NRA makes its bread and butter off scaring people about “black folks with guns.” That’s kind of why the Russians are such big NRA donors, too. 

Focus Features’ “The Little Stranger” won’t crack the top ten, and wouldn’t have even if the reviews hadn’t been indifferent. 

“Mission: Impossible” should clear the $200 million mark by tonight (Friday), “BlackKklansman” will hit $40 by Sunday, Monday at the latest, the sleeper “Alpha” will near $30 million by Monday.

But the biggest news will be “Crazy Rich Asians” clearing $100 million by midnight Saturday.

The “What happened to my daughter?” mystery “Searching” is like a poker game. Everything goes well until that last hand where you lose it all.

And leaving the table, you have the sneaking suspicion that the other guy cheated you.

John Cho may not be the most compelling lead, not giving us that rising sense of panic that is the normal human reaction to the shocking realization that your kid is missing, that you don’t know enough about her, her friends or her online profile to help the cops find her.

“I KNOW my daughter!” is played more “I uh, know my daughter.”

And Debra Messing may be the most helpful cop in the Western Hemisphere, a real Janey on the spot, always available, too patient when talking Dad through the sorts of scenarios and the sorts of places he can do that will help her to help him.

The “ticking clock” urgency of this search, its desperation, is missing. Filling the screen with hyped “missing teen” coverage is no substitute for fear and dread that the cop should impart or the fear and panic somewhat muted in Cho’s performance.

But the plot, the actual nuts and bolts of how you dissect a loved one’s digital life — phone to laptop to social media sites, search histories, etc. — is damned fascinating, a blend of “Lion,” the movie about an Indian orphan who finds his mother via Google Earth, and “Unfriended,” the Facebook murders movies.

The computer forensics that this digital “infrastructure management” consultant carries out is within the capabilities of any parent. And kids? We’re taking notes.

Margot (Michelle La) is a cute kid, 16, a gifted pianist and her daddy’s pride and joy. But in the opening montage we’ve seen, via their online posts, calendar, videos and photos, that he’s raising her alone. Mom (Sara Sohn) died just a couple of years ago.

Margot is carrying on, Dad seems utterly deflated by their loss.

Then one night, Margot tells him she’s pulling an all-nighter with her study group, and she doesn’t come home. She tried to call, Facetime, the works. But Dad slept through it.

And once he gets past the fifth “Young lady, you are in SO much trouble” text, he panics.  That’s when he calls the cops.

Det. Vick (Messing) is the one who sends David searching his kid’s laptop, looking at “Shedding light on who your daughter is, and who she talks to…I need to know a lot more about her.”

Thus begins David’s journey, getting around Facebook and Instagram passwords, discovering her “Youcast” (vlogging) presence, calling everybody on her “friends” list to try and track her movements.

“Friends” on Facebook, as if he didn’t know it, isn’t like “real” friends. One of the most biting messages of this film from director/co-writer (with Sev Ohanian) Aneesh Chaganty is the isolation of the digital age. Margot “knows” people, but connects with no one.

And David, aside from his younger brother (Joseph Lee), is just as bad.

People that lonely are ripe for catfishing, vulnerable to anybody who might pay attention to them, even online. When a story like this breaks, it can become a regional if not national phenomenon. And online comments on your tragedy aren’t always kind.

The script throws several plausible possibilities at us for a solution, and yanks us about in the best manipulative mystery-thriller tradition.

And then the payoff comes, and it’s the least plausible, the “How’d you draw to an inside straight?” last hand of poker you lose it all over.

It’s cool to see Cho (“Star Trek/Harold and Kumar”) get this sort of break, even if he’s not the most compelling parent — his meltdowns seem like pulled punches. There are a couple of great “Who I really am” jokes commenting on the difference between our online identity and how uncool we actually are.

There’s one sizzling “Could THIS be what happened” red herring. And the “Unfriended” way of making the screen — filled with Skype, Facebook, Google Search, and Google Maps searches — a character as well as a plot device is riveting.

Who hasn’t freaked out when “buffering” came up on their phone, notebook or PC screen at the worst possible moment?

But the end is too much like a “You may have already won” come-on, a poker game where the other player is using a 56 card deck, when you’re still counting on 52.

A cheat, in other words.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language

Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Sara Sohn

Credits:Directed by Aneesh Chaganty, script by Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:42

Jason Reitman directed this take on the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination for presidents, boots-wearing, boots-knocking Senator Gary Hart of Colorado.

Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga and Oscar winner J.K. Simmons star in this political drama about a politician brought low by his sexual appetite and indiscretion, back when we cared about such things as a measure of “Character.”

Sara Paxton is Donna Rice. Remember her?

Met Hart once, a before the fall meeting when he was working the rounds of civic groups, Chamber of Commerce lunches etc. in Charlotte, N.C.  All I remember was the hair, the boots and the confidence.

Reitman and Jackman, too, get one more shot at Awards Season, as “The Front Runner” opens Nov. 21.

“The Little Stranger” is a quiet, stately Gothic ghost story, an exquisitely observed British period piece built upon understated, reserved and stoic performances by Domhnall Gleeson and the formidable Ruth Wilson.

What is isn’t, despite a mood as chilling as an overdue English spring, is particularly frightening. Lenny Abrahamson, the director of “Room” and “Frank,” has conjured up everything but the tingles with this cerebral and slow story of a Great House, its Great Tragedy and the psychic repercussions that reverberate there decades later.

Gleeson is Dr. Faraday, our narrator, a self-described “ageing bachelor” who has returned to the Warwickshire community where he grew up, to a small town/small-time practice after the horrors and hustle of “The War.”

It’s the late 1940s, and a house call summons him to Hundreds Hall, a fabled estate that sat heavy upon his youth. Decades before, he was but “a common village boy.” His mother was a servant there, and it was her efforts that got him through medical school (Birmingham, not “Ox-bridge”). Now he has the posh accent and reserved manner of the class which he waits upon, the trusted healer and man-of-science dealing with the Ayres family, which has at long last lost its privilege due to death, progressive taxation and entropy.

Roderick (Will Poulton of “The Revenant”) is a badly burned RAF pilot and heir, charged with saving the estate. Caroline (the always earthy Wilson) is his hard-working, common- sensible sister. Charlotte Rampling is the regal matriarch, presiding over a slow descent into ruin and oblivion.

Because there’s something not quite right with this Hall, and the doctor — showing up to treat this or that, showing up to smile at Caroline and showing up just to revel in the glories that he remembers from long ago — is a necessary sounding board to them all.

“That house HATES me” Rod insists. The noises, the accidents, the queer occurences, they’re getting to him.

Dr. Faraday’s there to say, patiently but firmly,  “It can all be explained!”

And even though, as Caroline admits, “We’ve lost the trick of ‘company,'” Faraday finds himself almost welcome in their world. They can gripe about Labor tax policies, selling off land to “the rabble” and let their leaky, creaky house shame them in front of Faraday. Because he’s one of them…almost. Until push comes to shove.

A child died there decades before, and that might explain what’s happening, not that Faraday swallows that. The family and their last servant (Liv Hill) may accept the haunting as a fact of life, but not Faraday. He’s too busy sharing his memories of the place with them, batting his eyes at Plain Jane Caroline.

Abrahamson, working from a Lucinda Coxon script based on the Sarah Waters novel, loses himself in the whole Merchant-Ivory/Jane Austen features that might have better been observed on the fringes. Vast, empty, echoing rooms, drooping drapes and peeling plaster, land that is uncleared, held as a “park” which might have to be sold to make way for Britain’s post-war Baby Boom, the routine of a small-town medical practice at mid-century, a formal dance that goes on pointlessly, all decorate the story but distract us from the needed suspense, growing horror and genuine human reactions to facing the supernatural.

When a dinner party goes terribly wrong, even the blood-spattered shock of that is underplayed to the point of “Wake up, you lot.”

Wilson, as always, brings an unacknowledged soulful pain to her characterization — sensual as always (TV’s “The Affair” is her best-known role), but here with a bittersweet sting — sensuality withering away in solitude.

Gleeson, even in close-ups, rarely lets us see past the Good Doctor’s reserve, a not-quite-chilly bedside manner, just an MD keeping calm and carrying on.

There are two or three scenes that lift this above the still-life Abrahamson almost gives in to creating include a moment of romantic surrender and a tender, last-look-at-life through-living-eyes unblinkingly filmed as the family dog is put down.

It’s as if the whole enterprise — with moments, scenery and merit enough to be worth one’s while, but just barely — is, like Faraday himself, recalling that first time as a child he visited Hundreds Hall, “overwhelmed with admiration.”

MPAA Rating:R for some disturbing bloody images

Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson. Charlotte Rampling, Will Poulter

Credits:Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, script by Lucinda Coxon, based on the Sarah Waters novel. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:50

This second peek at Ryan Gosling’s Oscar bait historical thriller raises the stakes, ups the ante and pounds home the charisma of the cast.

Gosling as Neil Armstrong, Claire Foy FIERCE as his wife Janet, and Corey Stoll as the life of that lunar party, Buzz Aldrin. “First Man” opens Oct. 12, with Ciaran Hinds, Shea Whigham, Jason Clarke, Ron Livingston and Ethan Embry in other chewy supporting roles.

A horror film directed by a fellow named Kevorkian, with English xenophobia as its subtext?

We are…intrigued. “Await Further Instructions” played all the right (horror) festivals, and opens Oct. 6 in the US.

An ever-so-English ghost story starring the omnipresent Domnhall Gleeson and the always scary Ruth Wilson, opening Friday, only previewing last night in some cities and this AM in mine.

Horror films that hit tend to not be period pieces, brand name franchises of the slasher/torture porn variety.

But this could be good. Fingers crossed.

If there’s one thing August of 2018’s box office has underscored, it’s the growing position of Chinese money in film production and the impact the Chinese market, international and Asian-American audience at home have on Hollywood’s bottom line.

Everything from “The Meg” to “Crazy Rich Asians,” has benefited from Chinese production cash and content catering to Chinese and Asian audiences. Even “A.X.L.” and “Kin” have Chinese cash on their books on the production side.

That being the case, there is one story, a natural East/West tale culled from Chinese history, unlike that abomination “The Great Wall” — the movie, not the wall — that begs for Chinese production money and Hollywood know how.

Japan invaded China twice in World War II, actually kicking off the war by occupying Manchuria. The second Sino-Japanese war was fought by a Japan with imperial designs on conquering and enslaving Asia, and a fractious China ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek, but fought for by the communists led by the future Chairman Mao, as well.

And Americans helped with their war effort. First, Chinese American pilots left this country to aid the Chinese Air Force. This is a wholly untold, basically unknown story begging for a Chinese-financed movie, even if it does bring up troubling “where your true loyalties lie” questions about the nationalist-racist era that WWII was fought in.

Then there’s the more famous story, of America’s Flying Tigers, the American Volunteer Group who took to the skies to defend Chinese cities and the last supply route into the country, the Burma Road, from the Japanese. They were mercenaries, volunteers, allowed to resign from America’s military air arms and join Claire Chennault for a deadly, epic adventure in the Far East. Roosevelt encouraged them, under the table and let them have P-40 fighters to match up against Japanese bombers and Zero fighters.

History has us mis-remembering their story, largely due to a 1942 film starring draft-dodger John Wayne that wholly fictionalized not so much their exploits, but their timeline. They volunteered to go and got to China months before Pearl Harbor, but didn’t see action until after the Japanese attacked the United States and Britain.

Sam Kleiner’s new book on the Tigers refreshes our memory and corrects the historic myths, to a large degree. It covers what will be familiar ground to anybody who has read much on the Tigers. And it’s short. As nobody in Hollywood reads, that’s a plus.

Many filmmakers I have spoken with over the years have talked of getting a new version of this story on the screen. Producer/writer Pen Densham was the first.

And every time I talked with the great Chinese director John Woo, he or I would bring it up. The Hong Kong action auteur moved into Chinese epics, and longed to get his arms around this East Meets West story of heroism, sacrifice, Fish Out of Water Culture clash, all of it.

Perhaps it is the Nationalist (non Communist) part of the story that has always been the hangup. The seductive Madame Chiang figures into the tale, surely one of the great villains of Chinese history, according to the Communists who have ruled the place since the 1940s.

But Woo never got to make this film. And even though there’s been a version in pre-production, off and on over the years (including now), it never happened. Tom Cruise and John Woo were pushing competing visions and versions of it about 8 years ago.

If the time was ever right and ripe for making this project, it is now. Digital effects for the air to air combat, a cast of young actors and actresses (romance in the combat zone), a grizzled 40something leader, lots of Chinese pilots, officials, soldiers and lovers, remote Chinese locations — this thing pitches itself.

Why isn’t it happening?

“Stoner comedies” is one of those genre niches Netflix has been throwing money and titles at ever since the streaming service — which has price-hiked its way out of the skyrocketing subscriber growth that finances such whims — began making its own movies.

Teen films, horror, rom-coms, Spanish language fare and the occasional “let’s get baked and watch these dudes get baked” is a “let’s fling these at the wall and see what sticks” approach to a release slate. But as “The Package” proved, and “Dude” and “Game Over, Man” almost did, there’s an audience for this.

“Take the 10” is a rowdy, random and not-nearly-raunchy-enough misfire in that regard, a buddy picture with stolen money from work, stolen concert tickets, stolen drugs and one guy’s dream of flying off to Brazil and getting into the healthy rainforest nuts export business.

Writer-director and supporting player Chester Tam wisely hangs half the picture on Tony Revolori, whose humorous haplessness graced “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and not-so-wisely gave another shot to Josh Peck, something of a perma-grinning kiss of death to films from “The Wackness” to “Red Dawn.”

The ex-child-star Peck can’t make banter about where the “acting” kicks in for Chloe Sevigny in that infamous “Brown Bunny” BJ scene funny, can’t pull off the “lady killer” vibe his character Chris is supposed to be, and isn’t even that convincing as a pitiless pilferer whose assorted acts of thievery drive the “plot” to this “valley” to Joshua Tree romp.

Chester (Revolori) is allegedly the “sensible one,” the smart one, the guy who lectures Chris “Get your car out of the impound, grow up, get a life.”

But over the course of this hellishly short (kind of like the movie) weekend, Chester falls for a Craigslist creep (Carlos Alazraqui) who doesn’t really want to buy his “vintage” ’97 Corolla, just force him to take the wheel for a drive-by he’s arranged. Chester is caught stealing from the Wholesome Foods where he and Chris work. Chester says he’s done “all this research” on the natural grains and nuts they sell at the store and figures, with no money, no connections, no skills and no Portuguese (he’s listening to tapes), he can leap right into that export business in Brazil and make a mint off hipsters who frequent stores like Wholesome Foods.

Chris steals concert tickets from his ticket-counterfeiting older brother (Andy Samberg), swaps them with a Craigslist ticket seller who turns out to be a tattooed drug dealer (writer-director Tam) whose girlfriend (Cleopatra Coleman) has figured out his sexuality, even if he hasn’t.

Chris acts on impulse, Chester plans. They’re both idiots, but they figure they’d be lost without each other, which is why Chris tells Chester he’ll join him for the flight to Brazil AFTER they go to this concert on counterfeit tickets.

“‘Brazilian” is my favorite porn search word, before ‘drunk’ and ‘amateur!'”

A funnier actor might have made that line sing.

The lads have crude, coarse, chats about sex in front of  Wholesome customers, flinch at the threats of their crooked, corrupt manager (Kevin Corrigan, letting himself go) and in a series of timeline resets, show us how they get to the point where they’re being chased through Joshua Tree and getting shot at in the film’s opening moments.

Chris Rock’s younger brother Jordan shows up, and Fred Armisen of “Portlandia,” and pretty much nobody else funny.

“Random” is how this was pitched, I am guessing. “I can get Andy Samberg for one scene, two sets, playing ‘Rock Band’ with the family maid.” And “Fred Armisen says he’ll play a douche in a Bentley in traffic for one scene.”

Corrigan takes his shirt off and smart-mouths the cops about his criminal behavior, and that of his employees.

“I’m color blind when it comes to stereotypes.”

But the picture hangs on that central buddy pairing, and it just doesn’t click.

“When did you start smoking?”

“Since I decided to change things up. It was either this, or Scientology — and I can’t wear maritime style uniforms.”

Yeah, it’s like that. Eighty minutes never seemed so long or so wasted.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, brief glimpses of porn, profanity

Cast: Josh Peck, Tony Revolori, Kevin Corrigan, Chester Tam, Stella Maeve, Cleopatra Coleman

Credits: Written and directed by Chester Tam. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

It’s entirely possible to have lived a life outside of New York, removed from the world of avant garde fashion, drag queen Vogue-ing and “club life” and to have never heard of Susanne Bartsch.

But “Susanne Bartsch: On Top” posits the seriously self-involved query, “Why would you WANT to, dahlink?”

The Swiss-born, German-accented Zsa Zsa sound-alike Bartsch is a New York institution, a club promoter/party planner who moved from post-punk London to New York in the ’80s and brought her fashion sense, gift for self-promotion and ability to conceptualize, costume and cast circus-like Baccanales which blend widely disparate (so she says) corners of culture on a single festive night.

It might be at the Copacabana or whatever nightspot is downstairs in her longtime home, the Chelsea Hotel, or at On Top at the Standard, High Line Hotel, but her notorious soirees, which spread her sense of style and yen for inclusion, have been a worldwide magnet for party-goers, “club kids” — specifically gay men — for decades.

“Her elusive gift,” The New York Times” once opined of the 60something fashion icon/promoter, “is relevance.” She might lie about that age and boast of all manner of cosmetic surgery, but she’s still totally “a thing” in a city that ground up and threw away every other vestige of the late-disco pre-AIDS club life decades ago.

The debut feature by filmmakers who have branded themselves Alex & Anthony (Opie must be looking for a new on-air co–host) uses archival news footage, 35 years of party shots and home movies as well as testimonials from friends, family and followers to argue for that “relevance” in the days leading up to a 2015 Fashion Institute of Technology retrospective of “her work.”

That would be costumes, each more outrageous than the last (several new ones a week, at her party-planning peak), decor and footage from the epic, “orgiastic” blow-outs she has thrown over the years. Alex & Anthony follow the exhibitionist Bartsch around as she fusses with makeup and hair stylists, organizes the show’s collection of her costumes and reminisces about a life on the underground culture’s cutting edge, pre-AIDS to today.

She is the “Queen of the Night,” columnist and nightlife/gay life/gossip chronicler Michael Musto enthuses. “She picked up where Andy Warhol left off.”

Bartsch preached and preaches “Use the costume to push yourself,” and the world listened. “If it’s not a statement, what’s the point?”

She lured legions to the Big City where many acolytes, self-described “personalities” and “Night Club Legends,” mostly drag queens, yearned to impress her with their costumes, to get her attention like an underground Anna Wintour.

For many, the “Bartschworld” the New York newspapers and magazines reported on represented “my chance to be myself” for the first time — openly gay, flaunting it in the most out-there costume each could come up with in Bartsch’s assorted showcases.

If America today resembles, to a large degree, a narcissistic culture of Perpetual Halloween, Bartsch was its progenitor. She popularized Vogueing and drag fashion shows years before Madonna and “Paris is Burning” discovered them. She conceived parties, immovable feasts, and swanned through them, affirming those who got in, remembering names, encouraging.

Her son Bailey notes “It’s interesting to be around Susanne when she’s playing Susanne,” but “On Top” suggests that it’s quite rare to find her otherwise. Even out of uniform, she is imperious, impatient,but supportive, recognizing her 1989 AIDS fundraiser, the Love Ball, as perhaps representing her high-water mark as a taste-maker and culture-influencer.

The film parks her at the center of a universe that was and is all about gender tolerance and inclusion, even if one doubts her claims of a “post ‘velvet rope'” party ethos.

The film gets off track a bit as her fans get into “my story” too eagerly — another piece of American culture Bartsch adapted early on as her own.

You can make the case that she narrowed the definition of “frivolous” in a self-absorption sense, and “ridiculous” in a clothing sense — the lady never got over Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” period.

And her own son declares that “her contribution (to society) is “dust in the wind,” and that she knows it.

But “On Top” is still documentary history of value, capturing a “tipping point” of gay acceptance as it happened and honoring the woman who rode, like Lady Godiva, at the head of the a glittery victory parade.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexuality

Cast: Susanne Bartsch, Michael Musto, RuPaul, Amanda LePore, Kenny Kenny, Ryan Burke

Credits:Directed by Anthony & Alex (Anthony Caronna, Alexander Smith). An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:26