Movie Nation

Fans of serious cinema do not give a rat’s left bum cheek about “Predator,” in any incarnation.

With good reason. The hilariously arch original produced two delusionally macho and feckless governors, and a slew of Godawful sequels.

A new reboot? Meh. Wait, Shane Black directed it? Ever see “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang?”

The idol of generations of Hollywood hacks, machismo with a cool John Milius never quite managed. He’s got Olivia Munn and Boyd Holbrook and Sterling K. Brown, Thomas Jane and Jacob Tremblay to slaughter.

And in September, we’ll see what he has in mind for “The Predator.”

“Whiplash” and “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle’s take on the intensely private, brave and astrophysicist-smart First Man on the Moon promises something more than nostalgia for the age when America was Truly Great.

When we did Great Things, took Giant Leaps.

Will it have modern day resonance, anything topical to say about a country that shrank away from Big Endeavors and focused on the “practical” and the “commercial,” a national present that is forced to dream its big dreams in escapist sci-fi fantasy on TV or the big screen?

Gosh, I hope so. For our sake. “First Man,” “First Man,” co-starring Claire Foy, Kyle Chandler and as fellow astronaut Pete Conrad, Ethan Embry (Corey Stoll is Buzz Aldrin) opens Oct. 12.

All those Clooney, Pitt, Damon et al “Oceans 11” remakes.

And all it took to best their best opening weekend was Sandra Bullock, Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett and Rihanna — and Helena Bonham Carter, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina and Sarah Paulson.

A $4 million Thursday night — I was at one of the busiest cinemas in the country that night, and management was a bit underwhelmed by the turnout at that point — led into a huge Friday and what looks like a $42 million opening, per Deadline.com.

That’s in line with pre-release projections — all that star power, Year of the Woman hype, etc.

Good on them. The movie’s reviews weren’t stellar. In thinking about it further after writing my review, I wonder if Bullock didn’t exercise too much control and set the tone. She’s not as funny as she used to be, tried too hard to play it Clooney cool and that put a damper on any hopes of snappy banter, wisecracking chemistry among the rest.

A good actress, paired with a great one (Blanchett), but the players who make the funniest impressions — Helena Bonham Carter (best player in this cast), Anne Hathaway, Awkwafina and Sarah Paulson — have fewer scenes with Bullock. No, the script doesn’t pop — you’ve got to give the chemistry and comic tension among the leads as much emphasis as the caper — and NOBODY wanted to be the villain. Spend some money on that role — create something for the likes of say Alan Cumming — and the movie works. Better, anyway. The direction, at least, was OK.

Bullock, and this is mean but I am dead serious about this theory, is incapable of cracking a smile or cracking up. Too much “work done.” Collagen kills your twinkle.

Sequels? Almost certainly. Less Sandy next time, amp up the others.

“Hereditary,” the best horror movie in ages, is fighting neck and neck with the fading “Solo” for second place. It looks to hit the $14 million mark or so. The horror crowd should be showing up in much larger numbers for this one, but they gravitate toward proven “brands.” Maybe it’s just too sophisticated for them.

“Hotel Artemis” is a watchable dog, and as such is bombing at the box office. Under $4 million? I hope Jodie Foster got more than that, just in her salary. Because this could have been hipper, meaner, smarter and funnier, and is just unworthy of her.

Shailene Woodley’s sailing tour de force “Adrift” is having another decent weekend and will be over $20 million by Sunday night.

“Upgrade,” sci-fi smart enough and horrific enough to pack a late matinee Thursday when I caught it (late) is fading away without catching fire. Disappointing.

Saw this as a preview for “Hotel Artemis” last night and was at least a little intrigued.

A Golden Age of Reno/Vegas period piece with Jeff Bridges as a preacher, Chris Hemsworth as someone straight outta Hell, just two of “seven strangers with secrets to bury” at a state-line hotel with a weird, twisted vibe.

“Martian” and “The Good Place” screenwriter Drew Goddard wrote and directed this, Nick Offerman is in it. Feels like an over-reach, reads like a glossy period piece version of this one (So many movies about secretive strangers in hotels, pick your own.)/

“Bad Times at the El Royale” opens Oct. 5.

So what can we read into this trailer for the upcoming thriller “Siberia,” starring Keanu Reeves?

Reeves, like Nic Cage and Cusack and a few others of his generation, is still getting some sort of decent quote. That’s why a lot of his films — not the “John Wick” comebacks — feature one “name” in the cast and are filmed overseas.

That one name? Keanu. Of course, Molly Ringwald is in the cast. Did I miss her in the trailer? Not enough here to generate the interest in watching it again, frankly.

This looks like a smuggling job gone wrong thriller with plenty of “John Wick” styled violence. Writer-director Matthew Ross did the incendiary “Frank & Lola,” so there’s probably more here than the trailer gives away.

“Siberia” opens July 13. 

Bittersweet is such a tricky thing to master in a movie that you cherish it when you find it, even if the movie delivering it is a bit on-the-nose, corny even.

But all those traits have become a niche for Brett Haley, director of the last chance romance “I’ll See You in My Dreams” and the wistful old Western star romance “The Hero.”

“Hearts Beat Loud” is a charming, gently-unsurprising love story — several love stories — tucked into the sentimental end of a New York record store and never-say-die dreams of its lonely, failing owner.

Nick Offerman is Frank, who’s run out of gas and out of cash running Red Hook Records. He can’t compete with Amazon and he knows it, so no more effort at being the charming old coot with the encyclopedic knowledge of pop music. He tells his landlady (the warm side of Toni Collette) that “It’s time…seventeen years was a good run.”

He’s a single dad whose beautiful smart cookie of a daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons of “Dope,” “Flatliners” and TV’s “Transparent”) is pre-med, and heading to UCLA in the fall. His mom (Blythe Danner, co-writer/director Haley’s good luck charm) is getting forgetful and shoplifting. Clumsily. She always gets caught.

And his bar owner pal (Ted Danson, quite funny) is full of sage advice…for a pothead.

Frank’s one escape? The nightly “jam sesh” with the kid. Sam is focused on getting that  knowledge-edge for UCLA and doesn’t want to, but when she relents, they make beautiful, soulful twangy synth-pop together.

Dad records what they work out, on a whim uploads her song “Hearts Beat Loud” to Spotify, and the Rest is History –in an even more predictable movie.

Maybe things will turn around now. Maybe he gets one last shot at his dream (he recorded a record in his youth). Maybe this will give him the confidence to court that landlady. Maybe med school can wait?

“I don’t want to be in a band,” the kid — the GROWNUP in the relationship — scolds. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t be in one with my Dad!”

But as Sam envelopes herself in that tender, first love — with Rose (Sasha Lane) — it all gets much more complicated, bittersweet as promised.

Haley doesn’t do enough to service every character, but the teen romance is warm and fuzzy and everything you’d hope for in a movie. The father-daughter love plays out in the “jam sesh” and on-stage (Offerman can really play, Clemons can really sing).

A random moment I adored, showing the way an artist first hears his or her song “on the radio” has changed. It’s not as special as it was for generations (Spotify, in that one coffee shop that plays “Indie Mix”), but there’s a little “That Thing You Do” magic in Frank’s delight. Offerman kills it.

And the songs by Keegan DeWitt have enough going for them that you could totally buy into them catching on with the right corner of the insanely fragmented music audience of today.

“Hearts Beat Loud” is, as I said, on-the-nose, as in not particularly ambitious or challenging for those involved. Haley’s movies have an old-fashioned comfort food quality, and this sits happily on the menu with his earlier works.

But the unsurprising surprises have their own rewards and the movie and its music could touch you if you, like the film, are in a bittersweet mood.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some drug references and brief language

Cast: Kiersey Clemons, Nick Offerman, Toni Collette, Blythe Danner, Ted Danson

Credits:Directed by Brett Haley, script by Brett Haley, Marc Basch. A Gunpowder & Sky release.

Running time: 1:36

It’s clever, but we’re not talking “Memento” here, plot-wise.

It’s droll, even in its violence, but Leigh “Saw” Whannell is no Noel Coward.

And even if it’s not a prophetic equal to “2001” or “AI,” it’s vivid and horrific in its depiction of an an ever-so-near future when we’ve ceded just enough control over our freedom and our lives to be looking at our doom, even if we can’t quite see it yet.

“Upgrade” is an entertaining and at times troubling riff of man and machines from the creator of the “Saw” series, horror visionary Leigh Whannell. It’s an American tale set in Australia — because the Future is Australian in sci-fi (“Matrix,” etc.). The time? Just a few years down the road, when the tech we’re relying on to save us apparently has.

That’s the world Asha (Melanie Villalobos) and her husband Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) live in. Their gorgeous, austere and roomy high-tech house runs off its own batteries, the cars are self-driving electro-wagons and the streets strangely under-crowded, as perhaps we’ve finally gotten a handle on over-population.

(Australian sci-fi always looks that way.)

She’s an exec with a robotics firm, he’s an old school muscle car restorer.

One of his clients is Eren, a tech visionary (Harrison Gilbertson) with an effete Dane DeHaan haircut and a thing for a “Smokey and the Bandit” Firebird Trans Am. He shows off his latest superchip, “STEM,” which promises to revolutionize neural computing. And then he sends them off.

But self-driving computerized cars can be hacked, and the drive home diverts the couple into “The Underground,” where the unwashed, under-fed and under-policed masses dwell. An ambush, a murder and Grey is left a quadriplegic, “Someone who liked to get things done with (his) hands, and now you can’t.”

That’s how Eren sweet-talks Grey into submitting to off-the-books surgery. He could be a test-cast for STEM. As the guy has been suicidal and helpless to accomplish even that, why not?

The “miracle” of his motor skills recovery hasn’t even sunk in when Grey, who has been hounding the cops (just one cop, Betty Gabriel) to track down his wife’s killers means he can start to dig into that himself.

But he’s supposed to keep this “illegal” surgery secret. He’ll have to pretend he’s still in that wheelchair. STEM, which guides his movements (jerky, robotic), anticipates threats and gives him speed, agility and fighting skills he never had. And crime-investigating computing power, I might add.

Oh, and STEM talks to Grey. In his head. Grey has to speak out loud to STEM, but STEM doesn’t need the amplification. He’s soft-spoken. Yeah, he sounds just like the HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Gimme a second.”

“One second has passed.”

You know what’s coming. Grey goes underground, and gets into it with the killers and is troubled by what he’s capable of. STEM?

“I can do it for you. You don’t even have to look.”

Marshall-Green, of “Sand Castle” and TV’s “Damnation,” has a touch of the young Mel Gibson in the playful way he plays this character, jerking up his physical movements, Robocop style, handling the tried and true war-for-control-of-my-body moments passably.

The script gives us a lip-smacking villain who smacks his lips over lines that require lip-smacking.

“Let my superiority over your kind be the last thought that crosses your mind, before a machine tears it apart.”

There’s little of the harrowing, agonizing tension of “Saw” here. And if you haven’t figured out where this is going (No, I didn’t give that away) by shortly after the shooting (earlier than that is you’re real sharp), you need to see more movies.

But “Upgrade” manages to entice and provoke, impress and terrify, if you let it. Whannell, to his credit, delivers that terror not so much in the movie as you watch it as on the ride home…in a car that you still “have” to drive, following directions that you entrust to a computer and bought through a bank whose computers you let control your money.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images, and language

Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie, Melanie Vallejo

Credits: Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. A Blumhouse release.

Running time: 1:40

Of all the blood-and-whisky-soaked dystopian thrillers peddled to all the Chinese financiers by all of Hollywood, why on Earth would Oscar winner Jodie Foster return to the big screen with “Hotel Artemis?” 

She plays “Nurse,” who runs an underworld hotel-hospital in the LA of very near future, where class war has turned ugly as the poor finally start to fight back, when water riots over the privatization of the elixir of life make the city a combat zone.

And everybody, wounded hoodlums in need of her robot-assisted surgery to mob bosses and their sons and her own orderly (Dave Bautista) refers to her as “Old Woman.”

So yeah, even if it had worked, it was never going to be slapped on her Hollywood Royalty resume.

Writer-director Drew Pearce has tarted-up a dullish action comedy that finds laughs hard to come by and its moral underpinnings shaky in a future where medicine is largely a one or two person operation, with the aforementioned surgical robots and nanotech injections that can patch up even the most badly shot up.

Got a “ventilated liver?” She’ll 3D print one, have it installed and park you in one of the suites of the aged but upgraded Hotel Artemis, suites named “Honolulu, Waikiki, Nice, Niagara” and the like.

A bank robbery gone wrong puts Sherman (Sterling K. Brown) in need of the hotel, a members-only establishment where if you’re not prepaid, you’re not saved. Sherman’s brother (Brian Tyree Henry) is the guy in need of a liver.

But before brother Lev screwed-up the robbery get away and aired out his liver, he stole this outsized pen from the Alfred Hitchcock “Macguffin” collection. That’s either their ticket to easy street, or their doom.

And it’s not like the other patients at the Artemis, the mouthy arms dealer (Charlie Day) or French assassin (Sofia Boutella) will be any help or comfort.

Foster plays Nurse as a harried professional at this “dark house” (gangster slang for no-questions-asked hospitals), and a stickler for “the Hotel rules” — no weapons, “no killing the other patients.”

That’s going to be tested as the bank robber and the assassin have history, and there’s an A-list patient, “the guy who runs LA” being rushed in through a city night torn by the worst riot in LA’s history. That would be “The Wolf King of LA.”

“Such a dumb nickname,” Nurse chortles, critiquing the silly script for the audience.

It’s the sort of film where “You work with what you’ve got, not what you hoped for” is a good line, though more often we hear “How long has it been?” “You know EXACTLY how long it’s been!” is more common, a script trafficking in trite hardboiled dialogue and a plot that seems to spin out of that mythic hotel run by Ian McShane in the “John Wick” movies.  Pearce wrote the lesser “Iron Man” and “Mission: Impossible” sequels.

What “Artemis” has going for it are Foster, Bautista, and especially Jeff Goldblum as that Wolf King fellow, with an over-the-top Zachary Quinto, insufferable Charlie Day and Jenny Slate in a “Let’s find somebody for Jenny Slate to play” afterthought.

Boutella, the titular “Mummy” of Tom Cruise’s nightmares, has the best fight scene. But “Hotel Artemis” isn’t really about that. As it’s not funny, and the Nurse has a past that is barely worth pondering as the source of her haunted, hard-drinking demeanor and many, many MANY flashbacks, the picture all boils down to politics and futurism.

So there’s a crack about escaping “South of the Wall,” and some grim socio-economics on the streets outside, where the peons have finally gotten Stinger missiles and started shooting down police helicopters.

Is that enough? Hell no. Foster isn’t funny old or sweet old or curmudgeonly old. She’s just a 50something made up to look like a 60something. Yawn.

Bautista gets the few good lines, Boutella the best outfit and Goldblum the best scenes.

None of which make “Hotel Artemis” a destination hostel for film lovers of any genre or of any actor in this cast.  Foster has never let us know she’s taken a role solely for the payday. Not until now.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, some sexual references, and brief drug use

Cast: Jodie Foster, Dave Bautista, Sterling K. Brown, Zachary Quinto, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Charlie Day

Credits: Written and directed by Drew Pearce. A Global Road release.

Running time: 1:33

Hugo Weaving is the heavy?

Sure? You can’t do sci-fi, or rather you shouldn’t, without Hugo W.

Very steampunk “Howl’s Moving Castle” YA adaptation with a mostly no-name cast, “Peter Jackson Presents” but does not direct. His Tolkien adapting screenwriters are on board.

“Mortal Engines,” based on the Philip Reeve novel, opens Dec. 14.

No, it’s not the “Serenity” the fanboys and girls want to see.

But you’ve got two Oscar winners and two Oscar nominees in this cast, a sultry tropical setting for violence, sex and shark infested waters. So chances are, when this gets distributed this fall it won’t be “Aviron Pictures” that gets the job done.

Matthew McConaughey kind of ruined voice-over narration for himself with those damned Lincoln commercials. But he’s well-cast as yet another beach gypsy, man on the lam from…something.

Anne Hathaway goes blonde to play the femme fatale. Djimon Hounsou reunites with his “Amistad” co-star to play MM’s conscience. Diane Lane serves a similar function.

And Jason Clarke is the abusive husband who is, as we say in the nautical trades, “excess ballast.”

Intriguing. Oct. 18.