Movie Nation

It’s got financial chicanery, Vanessa Bayer and Jason Schwartzman and polka music — lots of oom-pah-pah.

And Jack Black, whose quote may go up if “Jumanji” hits it big next week.

Jan 12., you will worship “The Polka King.”

So here’s where we are with regards to Woody Allen.

You’ve got the black screen, the white credits in what looks like Clarendon font.

There’s the scratchy record playing classic jazz, The Mills Brothers, in this case.

A “Who’s Who” blend of the hot and the offbeat make up the cast.

The words coming out of their mouths don’t sound like human conversation. Theatrical. A little Tennessee Williams, a lot Eugene O’Neill.

“I’ve become CONSUMED with jealousy!”

Long before the Allen surrogate fesses up to an O’Neill obsession, we’ve guessed that’s where he’s going with his latest, “Wonder Wheel.” Sure, there’s a disturbed, freckled redheaded kid who lives in the middle of the Coney Island amusement park, a favorite bit of fake Allen autobiography. But the kid is a tweenage pyromaniac, his mother’s pushing 40, an unhappy actress “playing the part” of a waitress at a clam restaurant.

Her second husband is a two-fisted drunk whose mob moll daughter is on the run, and comes to stay with them.

And there’s a narrator, that pretentious Would-be Woody, playing the Lothario (a lifeguard, in this case), leading on the mother in an affair not rendered less tawdry by their banter about “Hamlet,” Chekhov and “The Ice Man Cometh, toying with the step daughter and pontificating and self-justifying in some Woody-written-variation of his infamous “the heart wants what the heart wants” press conference confession of some decades back.

“The heart has its own hieroglyphics.”

Like too many Woody movies that preceded it.

Yes, he’s Big Game hunting with “Wonder Wheel,” a love triangle melodrama set in a stunningly-recreated Coney Island of 1953. He’s aiming for O’Neill in what can only be called Weak Woody/Cut-rate Eugene kitchen sink theatrics.

Justin Timberlake is Mickey, the narrator/hunk who tumbles with Ginny (Kate Winslet) and falls for stepdaughter Carolina (Juno Temple).

And if these ladies can afford it, they should both keep cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and his lighting crew on retainer for the rest of their careers. The honeyed glow of backlit sunsets frames them in most every scene. Winslet is getting Oscar buzz for this well-acted, over-written but perfectly photographed performance, and one suspects all that buzz is mostly from the look. The movie borders on abhorrent.

Jim Belushi has the Andrew Dice Clay role, a classic O’Neill drunk, a doting father and broken man almost-redeemed by a woman who will probably break him anew.

Timberlake, having the Cusack/Eisenberg/Jason Biggs role — Mickey — is given to letting a flirtatious Carolina off the hook for not having anything in common with him but good looks — “Ignorance is no sin. It just means your experience hasn’t brought you into contact with certain things.”

Winslet gets the big emotions, the big speeches describing broken dreams, broken promises and broken spirits. Yeah, she cheated on her creepy, indulged kid’s father, “a drummer whose rhythm pulsated with life.”

Unlike this stiff of a movie, whose every scene — even on the beach, under the boardwalk or on Staten Island’s Scholar’s (Chinese) Garden — feels as dusty and stagebound as that little speech.

Perhaps that’s where the future lies for the prolific and increasingly tone-deaf Allen — the New York stage. This might work better there, and would certainly confine his hit-or–miss-miss-miss-miss-miss scripts to the audience that hasn’t stopped adoring him, doddering director that he’s become, pedophilia accusations be damned.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic content including some sexuality, language and smoking

Cast: Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Jim Belushi

Credits:Written and directed by Woody Allen. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:41

No, the years of pent-up demand for another “Star Wars” film aren’t there. “The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One” have opened in the past two years.

And this December weekend promises to be perhaps the second biggest opening weekend for a holiday release — ever. Projections are still in the $210-220 range. 

Thursday night is how these pictures kick-start their big weekends, and “The Last Jedi” appears to have edged past the biggest Harry Potter opening ($43.5, for “Deathly Hallows Part 2”) for second best all time.

Saturday is when parents and families will flock to theaters, and those numbers could be epic. But “Force Awakens” blew up with a $57 million opening night (Thursday evening showings). “The Last Jedi” appears to have hit $45.  That’s 22% below “Force.”

In “Humor Me,” star Jemaine Clement plays a once-successful playwright whose inability to finish his latest play costs him his marriage and conceivably, his career.

Nate is getting the “Don’t let yourself become irrelevant” lecture. Because he’s about to.

Art consultant Nirit (Maria Dizzia) has just taken their son and run off with a French billionaire. She’s not paying his rent any more. Fours years of never-finding-an-ending for a play he’s actually taken to rehearsals is enough for her. And for his producer (Bebe Neuwirth).

There’s nothing for it but to move in with Dad. In a retirement community. In New Jersey.

The good news? Dad is played by Elliott Gould, given his best role in decades. Bob is a shtick-slinging joke teller with an endless supply of “Zimmerman” jokes.

“So Zimmerman, just an ordinary guy, is in a car wreck.” The stories, presented in black and white flashbacks (Joey Slotnick is the hapless Zimmerman), crack up Bob’s pals at the senior center. Nate? He just cringes.

Bob wastes little time being defensive — “SOME people think I’m funny.” Look, he says, “Life’s going to happen, son, whether you smile or not.”

And that’s all writer-director Sam Hoffman’s little comedy is about. It’s a character study in shades of mopy, with the often-hilarious Clement dialing down his goofiness and making himself the foil for the old farts around him. Because those farts are funny.

Gould’s Bob power-walks, has a near live-in girlfriend and a lot of too-basic ideas for getting Nate out of his funk. Be productive, he says. He makes a list of household repairs and chores, sets him up in a custodial job. Ivy League drama degree or not, Nate’s going to snap out of his funk.

Of course there’s one “job” that’s perfect, and that’s taking over as director of a senior ladies production of “The Mikado.” Actually, there are just three ladies. Actually, all they want to do is a funny version of the “Three Little Maids” song. Actually, one of them is on a walker and simply refuses to sing.

But Dee (Annie Potts, adorable as ever) is game. Helen (Le Clanché du Rand) is a grand old lady of the arts convinced she has a shot with Nate. And Dee’s daughter (singer/writer Ingrid Michaelson), the piano accompanist, is cute and sassy and we think we know where that’s going.

Clement suffers amusingly, Gould remains a comic force of nature and Potts tickles as Dee and, in character, as Yum-Yum — Or was it Peep-Bo or Pitti Sing? Gilbert and Sullivan is hard to keep straight. Or keep a straight face through.

“Humor Me” is never much more than a comfort food comedy — funny people, given mildly funny situations and just enough funny things to say, find a few laughs and a lot of grins. And Clement, his years of daft character turns carried in his every action, is funny in his bones — even when he’s playing the straight man.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Jemaine Clement, Elliott Gould, Ingrid Michaelson, Annie Potts, Bebe Neuwirth, Joey Slotnick

Credits: Written and directed by Sam Hoffman. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:33

Will “The Last Jedi” open over $200 million this weekend? It’s the last blockbuster of the year, but will it bust the block? Box Office Guru figures $212 million, maybe $700 million during its entire US run.

Box  Office Mojo opines that $220 is within reach.

Reviews has been absurdly generous, a form of cheerleading for a movie audience that hasn’t made the year a banner one for ticket sales. Check out Metacritic.  Then go to Rotten Tomatoes.

Then ask yourself, “Did ‘It,’ ‘Logan,’ ‘Thor,’ ‘Alien Covenant,’ or ‘Wonder Woman’ make many — or any — Top Ten Lists?” They weren’t all that, and “Last Jedi” isn’t all that. And their reviews were just as over-the-top, swooning, you name it.

I’d call “Jedi” another case of “rating” inflation. The editor of  Variety thinks too many critics are scared to pan a Big Studio picture the public is dying to adore. I don’t disagree with that, either.

But not mine. The general public starts seeing it right now. What’s everybody think? Am I just an outlier, or is this another Disney/Lucasfilm letdown?

Fox’s “Ferdinand” also opens this weekend. As the “Star Wars” movies have been trending younger (in the “Force Awakens” continuum, anyway), it’s not like the animated adaptation of the story of “Ferdinand the Bull” will be all alone as a new “kids” or “family” film this weekend. But it should do well. Everybody’s seen “Coco,” after all. And it’s not bad. Lost me for the middle acts (sloooow). But still…

Guru figures it’ll only manage $15 million (disastrous). Box Office Mojo is figuring $17 million. Also terrible news. The reviews for this one are pretty good, too. Surely it’ll clear $23-25.

Oscar winners Bullock, Blanchett and Hathaway, with Rihanna, Mindy Kaling. Sarah Paulson, “Awkwafina” and…Helena Bonham Carter in the Elliott Gould role?

As the cast list includes Olivia Munn, Jatie Holmes, Dakota Fanning, Hailey Baldwin, Kylie Jenner, James Corden and Kim Kardashian…well, this could go either way. A few of those names only Tyler Perry would dare cast.

The conversation among movie lovers and fellow critics (Sometimes those do overlap, ahem.) at this time of year turns towards “best lists” and “Who or what will be nominated for an Oscar?”

And from there, the talk descends to that one overarching question, “What kind of movie year was it?”

The box office was in free fall for much of 2017, and just judging from online chatter,  debate and website traffic, there weren’t a lot of movies people were worked up over for more than a week or three — two weeks before release, then a week after.

It was the Year of the Over-Rated, with hyped hooey from “Alien Covenant” to “It” to “The Last Jedi” earning rapturous reviews, or at least high Tomatometer marks (if far more measured Metacritic scores). Shocking how many of those breathlessly endorsed “must see” and “event of the spring/summer/fall” pictures are simply forgotten now, out of the conversation for “year’s best.” Grade inflation at its worst, but more on that in another post.

And it was a year of abominations. 

But memory is fickle, and it’s only through browsing the hundreds of reviews I’ve filed this year that one gets a sense of the debacle unleashed on cinemas, Netflix, Youtube and Direct Cinema. What a shower of rhymes-with-fit.

So what follows is a compendium of the worst of 2017 at the movies. You have my pity if you wasted ticket money on more than a couple of those.

And full disclosure, here. I have not seen “Fathers Figures.” Yet.

Cartoon Crap

Every studio wants a piece of that weekend parents-with-kids business. And while the cynical practice of converting every “toon” to 3D so as to gouge parents over ticket prices has faded, a lot of forgettable junk is still being shoved out in the name of “family entertainment.”

I attribute the sinking quality to a serious shortage of animation gag writers. Nobody knows how to do it anymore. Even “Coco,” the best kids’ cartoon of the year, is a little thin on the sight gags.

“The Emoji Movie” — A Roe vs. Wade cartoon, an absolute abortion, from conception to laugh-free execution.

“Cars 3” — When Disney/Pixar announced John Lasseter was being sent to the woodshed, I was sure it was over his obscene insistence on sequeling this bad idea for a movie, great pitch for selling toys. Oh. It was just for sexual harassment.

“The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature” — Not a cute idea or a laugh in it.

“Rock Dog” — How do you say, “There’s a sucker born every minute” in Chinese? Because a lot of bad movies were produced by hustlers suckering Chinese investors into “a sure thing.” This is just the worst of them.

“Smurfs: The Lost Village” — At least nobody showed up for it.

“The My Little Pony Movie” — Yeah, “Bronies,” I’m coming for you.

The Horror, the Horror

“Aaron’s Blood” — We’re still doing the vampire thing?

“Friend Request” — Social media will kill you. Again.

“The Belko Experiment” — The most unpleasant “Ten Little Indians” (stick a crowd in a confined space, kill them off) variation in years. Ugh.

“Rings” — Ah, let it go already. Once you’ve seen one hairy girl crawl across the ceiling…

Big Budget, and Bad

“The Dark Tower” — This is what happens when you let fanboys convince you that this collection of Stephen King titles simply MUST be made into a movie. Years and different studios, different directors and a different cast, and this is what they got out of it. Stephen King’s “Moment,” when this movie came out, the remake of “It” followed it (a smash) and “Mr. Mercedes” hit TV, seems spent.

“The Great Wall” — Chinese agitprop, unleashed by Universal. At least Matt Damon and U got paid for this mess, a ludicrous period piece packed with “The Chinese Way”  propaganda. Again, nothing Hollywood likes better than gullible, new money coming to town. This time it’s Chinese cash.

“The Space Between Us” — Sappiest young love weeper of the year.

Make It Stop

“Kingsman: The Golden Circle” — They took a bloody-minded, tone-deaf spy spoof and made it worse. Golden “Circle” was it? Golden “something” going down the drain.

“Transformers: The Last Night”“Transformers: The Last Night” — Mark Wahlberg is burning through his brand faster than you can say, “What’s Will Ferrell doing next month?”

“Fifty Shades Darker” — Fortunately, the acting is so bad and the sex so dull and sterile that none of the little old ladies who flock to these fiascoes are attempting the bondage, S & M games, etc. depicted here. Or are they?

No Seriously, Stop

“Resident Evil: The Final Chapter” — Action Lady Needs One More Easy Paycheck, but let’s move these bombs to January and forget them.

“Underworld:  Blood Wars” — Ditto.

Indie Awfulness

“Mike Boy” –– If you think “The Room” was the worst, most delusional I-financed-this-myself movie ever, Netflix or Youtube this. I dare you. And yes, this is it, the WORST film of 2017.

“A Family Man” — If this hadn’t been terrible, it could have rescued Gerard Butler from a life of “Outhouse Down” and “Geostorm” sequels.

“Alina” — What was this one again? Oh, right. Russian immigrant drama, “trite” and “melodramatic” and “badly-acted” are putting it mildly.

“Song to Song” — You can blame recent years of crummy Terence Malick “art” mopes on critics, who endorsed that POS “Tree of Life” and let him think his POS didn’t stink. His head’s so far up his arse these days he might actually be smelling a clue.

“Birth of the Dragon” — If you don’t have the money for a vigorous re-write, a decent cast and a better director, leave Bruce Lee in his damned grave.

“Liza Liza, Skies are Grey” — Coming of age in the ’60s was never this dull.

“Battle Scars” — A lot of hucksters and con-artists play the “It’s for the VETERANS” card. Some get elected president. Others make bad movies about PTSD.

“Black Rose” — Absolutely awful “Red Heat” riff. Some of the worst acting of the year is in this one. You’d never know a Russian (Stanlisvsky) invented “The Method.”

“Diamond Cartel” — I’m relieved and forever grateful the Academy gave Peter O’Toole an honorary Oscar while he was still living. It’d be a shame if he was remembered for this, his last and worst film. If only they’d done it for, say, Peter Sellers, too.

“Pray For Rain” — A right wing oil tycoon financed this torpid drama, in which environmentalists are the cynical, nasty villains responsible for California’s drought and water shortage. And not big polluter oil tycoons. Skip the movie, boycott Lucas Oil.

Foreign Fiasco

“Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back”  — Bad enough to give you acid flashbacks if you duck into it say a half hour after the opening credits. As I did. And I never did acid. Sitting through it again didn’t make it any more sensible.

This won’t be adjudicated here, unless the screenwriters want to fess up in the comments. Or make a blanket denial.

And it might not ever go before the Writers Guild of America or the courts. Even if it made that far, who’s to say that the striking similarities between two films, books, etc. aren’t just a coincidence? There are only so many ideas in fiction, and only so many variations on any given plot, and as few as seven (and as many as 36) basic plots.

Two films show up at Sundance, one about a TV news crew that goes missing, another about student filmmakers who disappear in the woods of the Blair Witch? It happens.

So unless you’ve caught Jim Jarmusch red-handed stealing your script for “Broken Flowers,” or you’re Art Buchwald, willing to go to court to sue Paramount and Eddie Murphy for “Coming to America,” well…

But with all the over-heated awards buzz for Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” the video below has been making the rounds. You don’t have to see “Water” to realize the startling similarities (just watch the trailer) to make the connection that at the very least, they’re movies operating from the same font of inspiration.

A romance spun off “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

“The Space Between Us” (nothing in common with the lame teen romance of last spring with that title) is a widely-circulated 2015 student film from The Netherlands. It was actually released in June of 2015, but had been festivaled, etc. before that.

Marc S. Nollkaemper‘s film is strikingly similar in look, story, themes, setting and tone.

“The Shape of Water” has had Oscar buzz since Toronto. Film festival/fanboy groupthink makes it another of those wildly over-rated effects-driven features on a par with “Logan,” “Wonder Woman,” “Alien Covenant,” “Colossal,” “Thor: Ragnorak” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

Only nobody is calling those popcorn pictures Oscar contenders.

Every single one of those movies earned effusive reviews upon release, but are mysteriously absent from top ten lists and awards season buzz. Call it pandering to the audience’s tastes or simple grade inflation from the new generation of critics, but a four star review doesn’t mean what it used.

I enjoyed but was underwhelmed by “The Shape of Water,” with its broad archetypes, obvious plotting, even more obvious casting, with unnecessary violence, superfluous scenes and characters speaking painfully phonetic “Russian” as part of its Cold War subplot.

The thought that this obviously not-the-most-original picture isn’t even as original as might first appear doesn’t help.

And now there’s a lawsuit over a 1969 play, “Let Me Hear You Whisper,” with the estate of the playwright making claims that the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence.

All, of course, making my case that this fable is unsurprising and over-familiar, genre to the point of “generic.” I guess I wasn’t feeling the magic.

Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is a lovely but hard-edged romantic fantasy,  a thriller built on a sentimentalized science fiction fan’s memories of the Cold War, the Space Race and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

The director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone” has turned some of his “Pacific Rim” clout and effects expertise loose on a 1960s parable of science, humanity and loneliness.

And while it doesn’t really work as a parable and suffers from an uneven, contrived script riddled with violent, jarringly bloody shifts in tone, it’s a great showcase for a quartet of the finest character actors in the movies and a vivid recreation of a time via the lens of the movies that era produced.

Sally Hawkins (“Happy-Go-Lucky”) is Eliza, a lonely mute living above a movie theater in Baltimore in the early 1960s. She boils her eggs, lives in her head and masturbates in the tub, her limited life revolving around looking in on her aged, laid-off illustrator neighbor, “the proverbial starving artist” (Richard Jenkins), a gay alcoholic with too many cats and a misplaced passion for pies.

By night she’s a custodian, listening to the amusing prattle of her pal Zelda (Octavia Spencer) as they clean a secret, baroque government lab where the scientists and government functionaries would never give them a second look, and they themselves would never think to ask questions about what goes on there.

And then “the asset” arrives, something aquatic, locked in a tank. And with him comes a cruel security chief (Michael Shannon) and curious, quiet and sensitive scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg) in charge of experiments.

Just in case the archetypes and symbolism aren’t clear to all, the uptight sadist is named Strickland, and he carries a bloodied “Alabama how-de-do,” a cattle prod. He’s not sentimental about the “asset,” and he doesn’t want the cleaning crew getting attached to a science experiment with manatee eyes.

“That thing in there is an affront!”

Strickland’s a racist thug given to explaining commonly used words — “affront” and “trivial” to the woman who doesn’t talk and her black colleague, when he isn’t telling threatening tales from the Bible.

But Eliza isn’t dissuaded. She connects with the creature, which Strickland tortures. And as she does, teaching him (actor Doug Jones wears the rubber suit) sign language, she resolves to do something about his inhumane situation.  Cold War intrigue and an old-fashioned, officious “What we don’t understand, we vivisect” ethos complicate that.

I love the world the film conjures up, all tail-fins, neon, oppression and cathode ray tubes. Melding a save-the-cute-critter caper — “Turtle Diary” or for that matter, “Free Willy” — to a romance is inspired, if not a wholly original idea. 

That “romance” has a certain “ick” factor. But then, this is del Toro, and he’s felt the need to show our heroine masturbating in the tub to an egg timer and our villain brutishly getting “satisfaction” from his obedient wife. No, this isn’t del Toro’s “Starman.” It’s alternately touching and off-putting.

The cast is very good, with Shannon throwing everything he has at his menacing Role Model for Old Fashioned White Male Privilege. He’s so good he throws the picture out of balance. Hawkins may be getting the Oscar buzz, but for what? Learning sign language? This is Shannon’s movie and he is so ferocious you almost forget about the plot implausibilities that keep putting this character in that spot at a particular time.

The casting overall is so unimaginatively on-the-nose as to muzzle the effect of seeing great character actors play so deep within their comfort zones.

Oscar winner Octavia Spencer as a sassy maid? Michael Shannon as a scary-eyed brute?

Michael Stuhlbarg as the intense, sensitive scientist with a secret? Richard Jenkins as a lovelorn neighbor?

Even Sally Hawkins, a wonder in many a movie, seems no stretch at all as our lonely spinster who makes the leap to interspecies romance with no more thought than “That’s what the script perfunctorily calls for.” Watch her in the grim primitive artist bio-pic “Maudie.” No sign language, but there’s a performance that sticks with you.

Whatever its larger goals, remembering how myopic and hateful the culture was before “tolerance” became the norm, “The Shape of Water” is first and foremost a genre picture. And as that, it’s a loving homage to cinema from an age where movies couldn’t be as obvious about this forbidden subject or that unspoken sexuality. It’s a good film of its type, just not a great one.

(Is “Shape of Water” borrowed from this student film?)

(The most over-rated movies of 2017? They’re here.over-rated movies of 2017? They’re here.)

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity, violence and language

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg

Credits:Directed by Guillermo del Toro, script by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:03

Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, “It” girl Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac and a mysterious alien “shimmer” that threatens humanity itself.

It’s from the people who gave us “Ex Machina.” Smart sci-fi, got to love it. Feb. 23.