Movie Nation

Last year this weekend, the last full weekend in August, represented an historic box office low with the top dozen titles drawing filmgoers at a rate not seen in decades.

It’s always one of the weakest moviegoing weekends of the year.

This year, “Crazy Rich Asians” is here to stanch the bleeding, heading towards a second weekend scarcely missing a beat from its opening frame. The upbeat family rom-com with an all-Asian cast and Chinese diaspora setting did $26 million and change last weekend, and is doing over $25 million in business this weekend, per Deadline.com. That’s a 4% falloff, at this point.

Perhaps every Hollywood exec should cancel that Labor Day vacation, or come back to work early (a safer bet) and push the whole studio system into beating the bushes looking for the next “Asians.” Yeah, that will produce sequels (Kevin Kwan wrote a trilogy of books, and is about to get J.K. Rowling rich, or close to it).

Deadline calls “Crazy Rich” the “Black Panther” for the Asian community. I still say it’s a “Big Fat Greek Wedding” for that corner of the audience, a picture with general interest amusement as well as cultural significance to its subject audience.

The Chinese-financed robot dog movie “A.X.L.” suggests that the Exotic East’s financiers need protection from Hollywood hustlers when it comes to picking material. The fact this is earning over $2 million is something of a miracle, a real “Dog of August.” Who talked
Global Road into this? Suckers.

Keeping with a theme, the other big Warner-distributed/Chinese financed hit of the month, “The Meg,” is maintaining audience and will clear $100 million Sunday –– another $11 million this weekend. This pic is a real triumph of marketing. It’s not as funny as its trailers, not that entertaining. But people are very slow to catch on when TV commercials stretch the truth.

Which brings us to August’s new nickname — “STX month.” A newish distributor whose biggest hit was “Bad Moms,” Chinese-backed Hollywood operation that produced “Edge of Seventeen” and “Adrift” and a lot of fare virtually nobody saw, now has “Mile 22,” a Mark Wahlberg bomb, and “The Happytime Murders,” a Melissa McCarthy bomb, in theaters at the same time.

“Happytime” cost $40, a lot when you consider its a dirty Muppet movie. It was projected to do $13-15 this weekend, and will barely clear $10. 

But STX has a deal with Jason Statham, and “The Meg” just boosted his stock again. So stay tuned.

Screen Gems has what might be another Asian-influenced winner on its hands with “Searching,” good reviews, a career kick for John Cho? But platforming the opening, 9 theaters in a couple of cities, is proving to be a bust with a $4,000 per screen average for the weekend. Keep it out of the way of “Crazy Rich” and even “Happytime” might pay off. Or maybe this was going to be an impossible sell — father searching for his daughter, discovering her online “life” — at this time of year.

Bleecker Street was right to abandon “Papillon” in late August. Not on a huge number of screens, this misfire could have cracked the top ten on the weakest weekend of the year, and won’t.

He’s got a face made for horror films, the voice, too. This Brit thriller (They ‘ave no possums in Jolly Olde, guvnah!) looks perverse.

“Possum” opens in the UK in time for Halloween. Alun Armstrong also stars.

The toughest action pic ever filmed in Cincinnati? VOD and limited theatrical next weekend.

Peter Hedges is that rare screenwriter and director whose movies are about character and emotion and family, old grievances and new hope, a sense of place.

He scripted “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” based on his novel, and wrote and directed “Pieces of April” and “Dan in Real Life,” and hasn’t had a big screen project since the resonant but unsuccessful, honestly-titled “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.”

Look at his emotionally-available movies and it’s easy to see how Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges is a chip off the old block.

And when your son is Lucas, fresh off the Oscar-nominated breakout turn in “Manchester by the Sea,” and “LadyBird” and everything he touches gets noticed, Dad can get his calls returned and land Julia Roberts, who is rumored to be behind the awards-season push of this prodigal son tale — “Ben is Back.”

The trailer doesn’t give away much, but pedigree speaks volumes, here. A good cry? Put money on it.

Look for “Ben is Back” Dec. 7. 

Perhaps one has been too hasty when one has declared “Is there anything worse than Imitation Tarantino, than Guy Ritchie Lite?”

Because when wild card and now Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell’s involved, and Simon Callow and a bevy of screwy British character actors, all wrapped up in a cascading catastrophe of carnage-covered capers titled “Blue Iguana,” all bets –as we are given to say –are off.

Producer turned writer/director Hadi Hajaig (“Cleanskin”) gives away the game by having a character, the chatterbox ex-con Paul (Ben Schwartz of “Parks and Recreation”) dream of making “MY indie film. Do you like LENS FLARE?”

Hajaig doesn’t give us much of that, but he takes a shot at filling the screen with “the cool parts” — slo-mo shootouts, blood spray played for laughs, one-liners, Brit-vs-American slang and mob mores.

“Shambolic” is the perfect word for it, even if he does have one of his dopes wonder, “What’s shambolic?”

And if it gives you the creeping feeling that he’s some hack spending a lot of mummy’s money making himself a movie career, it’s still laugh-out-loud funny as often as not.

Eddie (Rockwell) and Paul (Schwartz) are ex-cons riding out parole in a New York chain restaurant/diner when in strolls England’s Plain Jane — aka Katherine, a British lawyer referred to them by a fellow hoodlum “English Tommy.”

She’s got a job for them In London. Travel arrangements, pay, parole? She’ll take care of it. Even though she’s frumpy, clumsy and seemingly out of her depth, the boys buy in.

Phoebe Fox (“Eye in the Sky”) plays Katherine with kind of posh-accent, dressed-down guile. She knows just which screws to turn because she’s not just a lawyer, she’s a barrister with an ear for illegality she can leverage in her favor.

She needs the Yanks to intercept this satchel that’s to be handed off in a natural history museum. They can be armed, but “no violence.” Naturally, with Paul a bit high-strung and Eddie plainly careless and/or rusty, much that can go wrong does.

That pursuit of the package leads to another heist, this one involving the “Blue Iguana” of the title. Katherine is mixed up with Mr  Big, with a name referencing an Orson Welles thriller (Peter Polycarpou), and he’s got Deacon (Peter Ferdinando of “Tommy’s Honour” and other films, hilarious here) as his “muscle.”

Deacon minds his mum’s pub, The Prince of Wales, loves double-crosses, his ’70s vintage mullet and denim jacket.

“They were me Dad’s.”

He hates Katherine and REALLY hates his mum. As she’s played as a braying, insulting, over-sexed harpy with a smoker’s laugh by Amanda Donahoe (a stitch), we can see where his “issues” come from.

“You stink of ketchup and…farts.”

The more complex the caper becomes, the more competent Eddie seems. Maybe he’s just trying to impress Katherine. Hard to tell. Lose the glasses, the shapeless sweaters, ’60s school teacher hair…anyway.

That rising list of plot complications is where Hajaig rather loses the plot. Fortunately, he’s got a lot of funny people on set riffing around some amusing twists.

Paul wonders just where one’s prostate is, and somehow takes a shine to Deacon’s mom, filling the pub with lies as he stakes her out.

“I work for NASA. It’s crazy, Stephen Hawking got me the job…Name’s Teddy Roosevelt.”

Eddie takes an interest in Cockney slang — “‘Throw a pint down my Gregory.’ What’s that mean?” Gregory Peck, and what rhymes with Peck? “Preh-ey good, innit?”

The shootouts in enclosed spaces create an awful mess, and a chance for Paul to try out his tampon-as-bullet-hole-plug theory.

And so on.

As the Americans, with the erudite and fey English Tommy (“We know what we are, but not what we would be.”) stake out the pub, they enlist Tommy’s thespian uncle (Callow, amusing) and his “old gang” — old actors who take notes in the bar and plummily recite the profane clues they overhear in Royal Shakespeare Company English.

Like lesser Ritchie and most Tarantino, there’s a lot of “just go with it” to “Blue Iguana.” There are built-in ’80s pop conceits that reward the viewer on the same wavelenth, “Private Idaho” era B-52s and the like.

Rockwell does this sort of ditzy cool as well as anybody, and as shocking as the violence is, it’s as funny and not as horrific as the stuff we saw him win the Oscar for in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

“Blue Iguana” could fall on either side of the sliding “whatever” scale, probably more Netflixable than something to run out and see. But Rockwell, Schwartz, Fox, Ferdinando and Callow make it engaging in between its darkly-funny bursts of slow-motion violence — be their characters expertly menacing, or just mean and inept.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Phoebe Fox, Ben Schwartz, Peter Ferdinando, Amanda Donahoe, Al Weaver, Simon Callow,  Peter Polycarpou
Credits: Written and directed by  Hadi Hajaig. A — release.

Running time: 1:40

Two strangers dressed in black arrive by train at a small Hungarian town.

It’s August 1945 and this little corner of Hungary seems all but untouched by the World War that is just now winding up in the Pacific. Aside from the sparsity of motorized vehicles and the presence of bullying, loutish Russian occupiers and the bursts of pro-Soviet propaganda on the radio, the locals would seem to have few complaints.

They’re plump, almost prosperous, especially István, the town clerk, landowner and drug store operator. His son Arpi is about to marry the farmgirl Rozsi, and he’s finishing the day’s arrangements.

But something about these two strangers rattles István and almost everybody around him. Who are they, what’s their business here and what’s with those outfits?

“Jews have arrived!”

The cinema has never seen the likes of “1945,” a Hungarian Holocaust Western, a “High Noon” testing a complacent, complicit town, pricking the guilty consciences of most of the people.

Because their prosperity put blood on their hands, and any Jews who “return” or just show up with packing cases for luggage are a potential threat — unwanted business competition, legal action, reclaiming property taken from them or just plain revenge could be on their minds.

No wonder the station master (István Znamenák) tells the wagoneer hauling the old man and his son’s cases to “take your time” (in Hungarian, with English subtitles) getting them to town. The officious railwayman has to dash in by bicycle to alert the village.

No wonder István, played to small-town fat-cat perfection by Péter Rudolf, has a drink at every stop he makes after he gets the news. No wonder he’s sweating, blustering and chain-smoking his little cigars. He bullies his depressed, drug-dependent wife (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) and his panic-stricken flunky (Jozsef Szarvas), “Bandi.”

“We have to give it back,” Bandi drunkenly declares, “ALL back.”

Nobody else thinks that way. The folks they took their houses, businesses and money from all those years before made their lives better by their absence, so the burning of evidence — promissory notes, etc. — commences in earnest. Venomous mistrust and hostility are the orders of the day.

Co-writer/director Ferenc Török (“Isztambul”) teases out the suspense here, folding in layers of melodrama on top of the tension. The would-be bride (Tünde Szalontay) never got over the handsome farmer (Tamás Szabó Kimmel) who went off to war and came back an ardent socialist. Her would-be groom (Bence Tasnádi) isn’t half the man Jancsi is.

The Russians are not shy about throwing around their weight in an occupied Axis country. Any moment we expect a beating, robbery or rape, or just a summary arrest.

And nobody, not the priest, the spouses of the various guilt-ridden men or the local constable, is able to keep his or her darkest feelings about Jews buried for long.

“You just can’t get rid of them.”

The spare, black and white cinematography won’t take anybody back to the golden age of monochromatic films. But the compositions are simple and succinct and the score — the rattling of coins in a pocket punctuating scene after scene, like spurs clattering down a dusty street — underlines the Western vibe Török was going for here.

Few subjects have dominated film to the extent history’s worst genocide has, resulting in the “Holocaust film” becoming a cultural punchline, a way of backhanding Jewish Hollywood with its obsession with the 20th century’s darkest hour.

But “1945” takes a familiar subject and well-worn theme — collective guilt — and finds a new way to bring us into that story, to connect us to that crime and its aftermath. Here’s a clever, sideways take on the grimmest of human horrors, a clever parable that delivers the same heavy message, but with mordant wit and originality.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: Péter Rudolf, Bence Tasnádi, Tünde Szalontay, Tamas Sabo Kimmel

Credits:Directed by Ferenc Török, script by Gábor T. Szántó, Ferenc Török. A Menemsha Films release.

Running time: 1:31

How do you film a movie about the infamous jungle prison colony of French Guiana in Serbia and Malta, which have no jungle?

Badly and cheaply, it turns out.

“Papillon” was a best selling if largely discredited autobiography of French criminal and escaped convict Henri Charrière, one of the publishing sensations of the ’70s.

A tale of endurance, survival and inhuman cruelty, I must have read it 25 times in my high school years. It became a sturdy Franklin J. Schaffner epic starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and every character actor Hollywood had on hand back in 1973.

The new “Papillon” was directed by the Dane Michael Noer (“R”), who is no Franklin J. Schaffner (“Patton”) it turns out. And it stars Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, who know they’re no McQueen and Hoffman and should have avoided this pointless, note-for-note, almost scene-for-scene photocopy of the original film.

Hunnam has the title role, and in the film’s unneeded opening scenes, we see him in the life that put him in the French prison system. He was a safe cracker, with a hooker-girlfriend (Eve Hewson), framed for a murder he did not commit.

The original script left some mystery about Charriere, who had a butterfly tattoo on his chest (“Papillon” in French), who was a criminal and pretty much a pathological liar. But no, let’s strip that mystery away from him.

Malek of TV’s “Mr. Robot” and the upcoming “Bohemian Rhapsody” Freddie Mercury bio-pic, is Louis Degas, a forger who got rich selling fake government bonds, which made him enemies far and wide.

You remember the set-up, the shrimp who lived well and avoided jail needs protection from the hardened criminal Papillon, and they stick together, more or less, through decades of imprisonment, murderous assaults and escape attempts, winding up on Devil’s Island, the most notorious of the prisons of French Guiana, a remote, shark-surrounded rock from which there was no escape.

Well, not according to Charrière.

The book’s shock value, its vivid depiction of the violence and the novel way inmates had of storing their valuables (a tube, called “a plan,” shoved up your rectum, because “A man had to have a plan.”) has been updated in the new film.

And to be absolutely fair, the rocky isles off the northern coast of Latin America can be desert-dry, like Malta. Curacao, which I’ve visited, is not far removed from from Cayenne (Devil’s Island) in geography and climate, and is arid and rocky.

But that’s about all one can say for this malnourished remake, a real Bleecker Street debacle.

The supporting cast, aside from Tommy Flanagan as a grizzled fellow inmate, is seriously cut-rate, folks who wouldn’t mind a Serbian/Maltese vacation. Yorick van Wageningen, for instance, plays the callous warden. Funny in “The Way,” a not-quite-horrific heavy in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” he doesn’t eviscerate hope with his wooden, half-hearted threats.

“Keeping you is no benefit, destroying you is no loss.”

Hunnam is game enough, a tough guy from TV’s “Sons of Anarchy” who has made plenty of regrettable big screen choices (“Pacific Rim” was a woebegone hit, “King Arthur” and pretty much every thing else deservedly a bomb). He isn’t the most charismatic screen presence, however — blandly pretty, inexpressive.

Malek is a dull big screen presence in this, none of the twitchy nervousness Hoffman brought to this part makes it into his interpretation, none of the guile or hard life-and-death calculations cross his bespectacled eyes when he says “I have trouble seeing hope in hopelessness.”

For all the period detail, characters are a little too healthy and well-scrubbed to be convincing and the actual look of the film is video-flat and dull — ugly. Cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski did “The Young Victoria” and “The Physician,” but here — there’s no contrast to the lighting, no menace in the darkness. It’s a real “throw up your hands and collect a check” job, as if he saw the production design and gave up.

My over-riding gripe with this is that they relied so heavily on the original film’s script by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and didn’t really dig into the books (“Banco” was Charrière’s further tales of Papillon memoir).

And by “they” I mean screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski, who when he rewrote the Icelandic hit “Contraband” for Mark Wahlberg, at least got a decent thriller out of it. This is the laziest cut and paste job imaginable. Why even take the credit?

MPAA Rating: R for violence including bloody images, language, nudity, and some sexual material

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek, Eve Hewson, Tommy Flanagan, Yorik van Wageningen

Credits:Directed by Michael Noer, script by Aaron Guzikowski, based on the Dalton Trumbo/Lorenzo Semple Jr. 1973 film script and the book by Henri Charrière. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 2:13

Two men try to keep themselves and their families alive during the Rwandan Genocide and a rich Nashville businessman reaches out to his rape-victim daughter in “Beautifully Broken,” a not-inspirational-enough real-life drama directed by music video veteran Eric Welch.’

You can guess what’s wrong with it from that plot summary. Flatly-scripted, unevenly acted and pointlessly patriarchal, it clumsily ties three three grossly-imbalanced stories together and basically loses its way every time it leaves Africa.

The tragedy of a teenage girl’s rape is somewhat muted, and suffers in scale when you’re comparing it to mass murder by machete in 1994 Rwanda.

Benjamin A. Onyango of “God’s Not Dead” is William Mwizerwa, a righteous, pious husband and father whose middle-class life (he’s a manager with a coffee exporter) is disrupted by the explosion of tribal violence that turned Hutu against Tutsi.

The radio reveals the call to arms, and thugs take to the streets in gangs piled into pickup trucks — “The cleansing has begun!”

William has no sooner said “We’ll be safe here” when he, his wife (regal Eva Ndachi) and little girl have to flee their home and make for the coffee company compound. They face execution in the streets until a timely, heaven-sent explosion spares their lives.

Tezan and Mugenzi (Sibulele Gcilitshana, Bonko Khoza) are a farm family with a toddler daughter when the fighting begins. Mugenzi is “not a soldier, not a fighter” his wife insists. But when neighbors are butchered at their front door, he joins the gang of murderers just to go along, and draw them away from his family.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, workaholic businessman Randy (TV veteran Scott William Winters) is keeping daughter Andrea (played by Emily Hahn as a teen) in riding lessons and on the cheerleading squad in their little corner of affluence.

The men’s lives cross in mysterious ways involving violence, refugee sponsorship, daughters-as-pen pals and faith. One saves another one’s life.

“The life you spared will not be wasted.”

And another is drawn into this world by a kid who is learning altruism at an early age.

“Helping those in need gives you back twice the love!”

The five-handed script goes to some pains to level the playing field of pain, suggesting that great hurt is an equalizer. “We are all equally broken” a mother counsels her child, and that makes us all merit redemption.

But I have to say the flatness of the Nashville scenes sucks the energy and heart right out of “Beautifully Broken.” Bland characters acting in mostly mundane moments of melodrama, relying on emotionally-lacking performances.

Heck, Eric Roberts was cast as the Nashville dad’s father, and given absolutely nothing to play. You get a name, you need to give him something value-added to do.

The African story has tragedy as well, and guilt and forgiveness. It’s a modern parable about great crimes and the greatness of spirit it takes to get over them and move on. Frankly, the acting in the Rwandan scenes is more compelling as well. The Nashville scenes are patronizing and tepid in comparison.

You cannot fault “Beautifully Broken’s” message. It rejects Christian conservative xenophobia and embraces immigrant outreach in the form of sponsoring the less fortunate, charity that is taught and reinforced at an early age. There’s even an “action step” at the end of the sermon that this film almost wants to be.

It’s the movie-making, the acting, that let it down. One lump in the throat moment with all these trials, all this tragedy and the path to uplift the story takes is hardly enough, considering the subjects engaged here.

Faith-based cinema has had its financial successes. But the brutal truth of the genre is that it rarely attracts charismatic, accomplished talent behind the camera or in front of it, people who can transcend the genre and lift it to the next level. Until that happens, you’ll get hackwork like this, a music video director content to preach to the choir, and a choir content to buy tickets to inferior work just because they agree with its proselytizing.

Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving violence and disturbing images, and some drug material

Cast:Benjamin A. Onyango, Scott William Winters, Emily Hahn, Bonko Khoza, Sibulele Gcilitshana, Eva Ndachi

Credits:Directed by Eric Welch, script by Brad Allen, Chuck Howard, Martin Michael, Eric Welch. An ArtEffects  release.

Running time: 1:48

If you or your child ever shed a tear when yet another Roomba bit the dust, then “A.X.L.” may be the movie for you.

A misguided kiddie action pic that combines motocross and a fetching, tail-wagging, howling robotic military dog that chews on pieces of pipe instead of bones and can keep up with you no matter how fast you drive your motorbike thanks to JATO — Jet Assisted Take-Off, it has no laughs, no thrills and little that would distract, much less entertain a child.

Unless that child is inclined to go “Awww” at anything resembling a dog, even a digitally-created metal Skeletor like A.X.L. He’s a prototype whose name means “Attack, Expedition, Logistics,” “the War Dog of the Future” from Craine Industries and mad scientist Andric (Dominic Rains) and his whiny tech assistant Randall (Lou Taylor Pucci).

A.X.L. has busted out of the desert Southwest lab where the $70 million killing machine was being developed. Why? Not getting enough walks and trips to the dog park, apparently.

That’s where motocross master Miles (Alex Neustaedter) stumbles across it…”him.” He’s just been conned by a conniving rich rival Sam (Alec MacNicoll) who urged him to “rip some gnarly whips” (get his bike airborn) before causing him to crash.

And the robot dog, hiding from search drones, finds him. The lad says the same thing boys always say to strange dogs in the movies.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Thus, the motorized, macerator-mouthed mutt is “tamed” by the kid who electronically imprints on it. “HIM.”

The too-hot/midriff-baring girl his rival has under his thumb Sara (Becky G) becomes Miles’ partner-in-crime as he resolves to not give the machine back to its owners, as “He’s been abused.”

Thomas Jane shows up to collect a check as Miles’ dad, and Ted McGinley defies all logic by continuing to find work playing Sam’s rich jerk of a father.

We’re meant to get all gooey and fear for the “dog” as assorted cruel threats present themselves to it — “Him” — but good luck with that. “A.X.L.” the film and A,X.L. the War Dog is as cuddly as a Battle Bot, with and all the warmth of the Craftsman section of your neighborhood Sears.

MPAA Rating:PG for sci-fi action/peril, suggestive material, thematic elements and some language

Cast: Alex Neustaedter, Becky G, Thomas Jane, Dominic Rains, Lou Taylor Pucci

Credits: Written and directed by Oliver Daly. A Global Road release.

Running time: 1:40

Her momma could’ve warned her, about that deal with the Devil you make when you get yourself marked with that “sexual” label.

Granted, a “Suspira” remake (sort of) with Tilda Swinton and erotic modern dance is not “Fifty Shades Shakes It.” But that’s dull actress Dakota’s specialty these days.

Amazon Studios made this and unleashes this Dance of Death on Nov. 2.