Movie Nation

A big carryover Friday points toward “A Quiet Place,” that rare critically-acclaimed horror blockbuster, pulling in another $34 million this weekend at the box office.

Deadline.com is notoriously light in predicting the Saturday take for “family” oriented movies of every stripe, so they figure “Rampage” still has a shot at overtaking “Quiet.”

Early projections had “Rampage” earning a solid $34 million, sort of holdover “Jumanji” audience for the film’s star. That was the consensus.

But if families are reading reviews of Dwayne Johnson’s jokey, incredibly violent thriller, they might stay away. “It’s every bit at stupid as it looks.”

Families should be pouring into theaters for “Isle of Dogs,” a wonderful Wes Anderson stop-motion animated film that added 1400 or so screens and is earning another $4-5 million in its third weekend of platformed release.

“Truth or Dare” is the other wide-wider-widest release opening this weekend, and is doing a more respectable (for horror) $18.5 million. Bad reviews didn’t hurt it. 

“Beirut,” a more grown up thriller about the Middle East, spies, terrorists and an alcoholic negotiator trying to keep the lid on things, got good to great reviews. It’s opening on enough screens to crack the top ten, but isn’t. Under $2 million. As I’ve said before, Bleecker Street is where good movies go to die.

“Chappaquiddick” added 85 screens and has lost half of its opening weekend audience, but still made the top ten.

“Blockers” is holding audience and headed towards another $10 million, “Ready Player One” is well over $100, but probably won’t reach much more than $150, when all is said and done.

“I Can Only Imagine” has been the week-to-week indie blockbuster of the spring, clearing $75 million in medium sized bites.

“The Miracle Season” isn’t quite making it.

A period piece with feminist cred and that classic sci-fi horror hook hanging over it, the very young lady who wrote “Frankenstein.”

This feels like an award’s season moment for Elle Fanning. Probably not, timing and all. But “Mary Shelley” has a sheen about it that feels like a classic. Yeah, I’m talking through my hat, so we’ll see.

The late Stanley Kubrick all but disowned his first attempt at making a feature film, saying “I finished it” was its singular achievement.

Something one keeps in mind with every first effort at making a movie. Even one as dismal as “The Escape of Prisoner 614.” You never know when you’re seeing the first flailings of “genius.”

The writing-directing debut of Internet phenom and self-published cookbook author Zach Golden, he of “What the F*@# Should I Make For Dinner?” fame, it is a comedy as free of laughs as any film that’s landed Ron Perlman in its cast and rented a train for its finale has a right to be.

It’s sort of a “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil,” without the evil, without charismatic leads, without any joke that plays like the first draft ATTEMPT at a joke.

Seriously, unless that cookbook is filled with hash brownie recipe variations, I defy even Golden’s fans and family to name one laugh-out-loud moment in it. It just leans on the screen, winded and motionless without anybody involved hinting that they’ve burned any calories to make it better.

Jake McDorman (“American Sniper”) and “Silicon Valley” vet Martin Starr are Thurman and Jim, two upstate New York rubes, sheriff’s deputies in a county with so little crime they spend their down time playing sheriff and robbers.

The sheriff (Ron Perlman) lays them off for never arresting anybody. But when the warden of Adirondack State Prison (Ralph Cashen) calls as they’re cleaning out the desks in their log cabin office, well, here’s their chance. Prisoner 614, “a cold blooded cop killer,” has escaped. If they can catch him, maybe the sheriff will give them back their jobs.

With these yokels target practicing away their ammo as they trek up the mountain where 614 has fled, dealing with insecurities, phobias and general stupidity as obstacles to their accomplishing this mission, what could wrong?

But in the “even a blind pig” logic of the movie, of course they catch the guy. All they have to do is convince him (George Sample III) to come along and not make any fuss.

“You’re a prisoner. Prisoners belong in prison.”

What do THEY know about it?

“Well, I seen ‘Cool Hand Luke’ a coupla months back. Seems alright. Lotsa eggs.”

OK, I grinned at that.

Perlman, sheepishly wearing the costume cooked-up for this 1960s period piece — Western cowboy-cut fedora, boots, dime-store “Sheriff” badge — has nothing remotely funny to say or play. The sheriff’s all about holding a newspaper photographer hostage so he can get a shot of himself holding the suspect in the paper.

Sample (of “Person to Person”) plays a guy blandly protesting his innocence and suggesting there’s a racist motivation for his imprisonment.

And McDorman and Starr mug for the camera, let their facial hair get away from them and try not to act disappointed that their lines never get any better than this.

“If we’re not deputies, then what ARE we?”

“Nothing.”

“We’re WORSE than nothing. We’re CIVILIANS.”

In Los Angeles and New York, it’s not uncommon for well-heeled student filmmakers to line up “name” stars for their projects, and that’s what this looks and plays like — a student film with a couple of gettable-movie “stars” in it.

Still, it got distribution. That’s almost more than Stanley Kubrick was able to say about his first film. Of course, he had more sense than to try for a comic period piece his first time out.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for smoking throughout, and for language

Cast: Martin Starr, Jake McDorman, Ron Perlman, George Sample III

Credits:Written and directed by Zach Golden. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:37

Yeah. Holly Hunter’s Elastigirl is the breadwinner, Mr. Incredible is stay at home dad and the family is blowing itself apart.

Literally. Looks like a lot of fun. June 15.

Holocaust documentaries are often filled with numbers — the staggering death toll, the percentages of Gypsy, Jewish or homosexual populations wiped out.

Here’s one that doesn’t make it into “After Auschwitz” — 66% of Millenials don’t know what “Auschwitz” is, over 20% have never heard of the Holocaust. A majority of Americans polled now think, in the current American and global political environment, that  “Something like that could happen again.”

So maybe we need to retire the “Holocaust fatigue” at the movies cracks, the “Get yourself into a Holocaust movie if you want a Golden Globe/Oscar” Ricky Gervais jokes. For now, anyway.

Jon Kean’s “After Auschwitz” is a different take on the familiar subject, an almost-upbeat recounting, by survivors, not just of the horrors, but of the lives they made for themselves afterwards.

Kean’s years-in-the-making film (some interview subjects have since died) lets six women tell their stories and remember what they endured. And then they talk about what all they witnessed in the hours, days, months and years after their liberation from near certain death.

They speak of their intense hatred for Germans and Germany, hatred which quickly cooled just enough for them to feel pity for the homeless, starving refugees wandering through ghost cities that they themselves hiked through after being freed from camps.

Over archival newsreel footage, they talk about the horrors they’ve seen, their rage at their Allied liberators for forcing Storm Trooper guards haul Jewish, Gypsy and other bodies for mass burials, and so dishonoring the dead.

They remember well-meaning soldiers saying “You can go home, now,” only to face more ugliness and reprisals upon their return to Poland looking for relatives and their former lives.

“You want your stuff back? You can FORGET it!”

And then these six left the devastated, anti-Semitic Old World behind. They beam as each recalls this first trip to a New York deli, that first-ever plane ride, “My first, and last, Coke.”

Renee Firestone cannot stop smiling as she remembers her life as a fashion designer, Rena Drexler recounts how she met her husband, moved to California and opened a North Hollywood deli.

Most fascinating of all, Kean gets them to connect their lives to the history passing by around them, from their own children and peers, who rarely got them to open up about their experiences, to their grandchildren and generations of curious school kids, who were the key to many survivors bringing back those awful memories and beginning the process of Bearing Witness.

For years, it was “You’re now in America. Forget it,” Firestone recalls. Then came the books, the “Holocaust” TV series, “Shoah” and “Schindler’s List.” People wanted to know, and those with a gift for speaking and a desire to share were suddenly in demand. I’ve interviewed a few survivors over the years, and have yet to meet one who wasn’t steeled by the experience, turned into a moving storyteller simply by the need for others to remember.

There have been hundreds of Holocaust documentaries, so many that I could name several, right off the top of my head, that this supposedly “complete” list mentions. “After Auschwitz” doesn’t cover enough new ground to be among the very best.

But in focusing on the lives lived AFTER living through a genocide, co-writer/director Kean has made a most accessible documentary, one built around compelling characters giving eyewitness testimony to both the worst moments in human history, and some of the most inspiring.

MPAA Rating: unrated, images of graphic violence, corpses

Cast: Renee Firestone, Erika Jacoby, Rena Drexler, Eva Beckmann, Linda Sherman, Lili Majzner

Credits:Written and directed by Jon Kean. A Passion River release.

Running time: 1:22

It’s a stoner romance, apparently another period piece, about a lad “coming of age” (“Such a cliche.”) one summer at Cape Cod.

Dullard becomes “cool” or at least not as dull when he’s schooled in the ways of weed (Alex Roe is his sensei).

Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) is the love interest, William Fichtner is in it. Nothing sexier than making out over a freshly-used public urinal. At least there’s no peaches involved.

“Hot Summer Nights” goes into limited release in mid-summer.

Theo James has the poise if not the gravitas to carry the new skullduggery-at-the-U.N. thriller “Backstabbing for Beginners.”

The “Divergent” hunk has to animate a generally dull account of the hopelessly corrupt, sadly-necessary “oil for food” program the United Nations ran during the years Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was under international sanctions for its aggression and pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Danish director Per Fly (“The Inheritance”) and screenwriter Daniel Pyne (“The Manchurian Candidate”) have made a film of meetings, office politics, underworld connections, murder and romance. But mostly meetings. It’s all James and the always entertaining Ben Kingsley can do to get it up on its feet, much less sprinting forward.

James plays Michael Soussan, a Danish born son of a diplomat whose father was killed in Lebanon, and who can’t see squandering his high-priced education on a lucrative career in finance.

“I want to make a difference,” he tells his U.N. interviewers, every time he interviews there. That’s where he wants to work. At 24, he lands work as the Assistant to the Undersecretary General the way jobs are landed by those of his class.

“I knew your father,” the undersecretary, “Pasha,” purrs.

Kinglsey’s Pasha schools the impressionable kid with a blend of fatherly indulgence and testy profanity. His blurted f-bombs and oddly-timed curses are disarming and amusing. But the previous assistant died in a car accident in Iraq. The “accident,” whatever Pasha says, deserves to be discussed in skeptical quotation marks.

It’s 2002, in the months leading up to the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, and Pasha is in charge of Oil for Food program. That was supposed to keep money out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, funneling cash straight into food, medicine and the stuff of life for the Iraqi people. But with all that money and oil at stake, Iraqi thugs, international hustlers and con artists and highly-placed Bad Actors in assorted countries and within the U.N. itself were suspecting of “gaming” the system.

Michael’s warned of that  by a C.I.A. agent (Aidan Devine) before his first trip to Baghdad. Will he do the right thing? You know, pass on any funny business he observes?

The trouble is, everybody’s got their agenda. The C.I.A. is hunting for an excuse for Bush to order an invasion. The Iraqis, under a leader they’ve nicknamed “The Angel of Death,” bristle at international control and are murderously intent on breaking free. The oil profiteers are hellbent on getting cheap crude they can flip on the open market. The big contracted suppliers don’t mind selling expired medicines that they’re sure no one will check.

And everybody, at every step of the process, is taking a cut. That leaves the people, most particularly the Iraqi Kurds, starving and dying. Just not in the numbers they were in the days before this program was cooked up. Progress!

“The first rule of diplomacy, kid, is ‘Truth is not a matter of fact. It’s a matter of consensus.'”

Pasha is part cynic, all-realist. He’s jockeying for position with an inter-U.N. foe (Jacqueline Bisset), trying to get Michael to “chose your facts carefully” in reporting the “success” of the program. Photo ops and reports that maintain funding, “our continued existence,” is job one, he says. His rationale?

“What’s the alternative? Doing nothing?”

A pretty, sad-eyed young translator for the program (Belcim Bilgin) is closer to Michael in idealism. She wants the world to know the truth. But even she might be “a honey trap,” someone with an agenda all her own.

Bisset makes her French official officious, blunt and furious. Kingsley is an old hand at making even those we know are villains twinkly as well as imposing.

“Backstabbing” makes an interesting run at painting the many shades of grey in this corner of diplomacy. The mature U.N. under Kori Annan was hidebound and corrupt, largely a consequence of filling its ranks with opportunists and pocket-liners, some from the First World, many many more from the Third.

But as Pasha, a Cypriot whose real name is Benon Sevan, points out, there are things that have to be done and awful, corrupt places where they need to be done. And what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

This Danish/Norwegian/Swedish/Canadian production muddies the waters of Soussan’s expose of the U.N. culture and the program. Soussan’s title promises a more flippant treatment than the subject will allow. Sadly, for all the murders, the threats and intimidations, Fly’s film takes barely a moment to show the real victims of the crimes — starving, sickly people under the thumb of a dictator it took a president with impure motives of his own to take out.

Miscast, bland “Bad Actors” abound. Pasha? Kinglsey does his best to make us think this guy could swing either way.

And washed away in this sea of shades of grey is the colorless Mr. James, not emotive enough to suggest the passion Michael is supposed to have for “making a difference,” under-reacting to seeing Iraqis in his employ murdered right before his eyes, under-selling the fear Soussan must have felt, underwhelming us with his sense of love and concern for the lovely, passionate Nashim (Bilgin).

Like Pasha, who got the blame for the scandal when it erupted, James make take the hit for “Backstabbing” not coming off. But like Pasha, he’s just part of the problem, a figurehead on an international production rife with dramatic, scriptural and casting compromises.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, and some violence

Cast: Theo James, Ben Kingsley, Belçim Bilgin, Jacqueline Bisset

Credits:Directed by Per Fly, script by  Daniel Pyne. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:49

No matter how adult, rational and organized you think you are, you cannot save somebody from himself. And yet we try. If only to prove to ourselves we’ve made an effort, we try.

“6 Balloons” is a short, sharp and contemplative drama about addiction and the one person who thinks she can prop her brother, the addict, up.

Abbi Jacobson of TV’s “Broad City” shows her dramatic chops as Katie, finicky, organized, the sort of person who listens to self-help books on tape — “You had a chance to stay on dry land, but you’re going to the boat again…You never asked for help, even when it was offered to you” — to get her through whatever.

She’s got a new boyfriend, an adoring dad (Tim Matheson) and a manic mom (Jane Kaczmarek) all-too-eager to binge-shop to help her plan a surprise birthday party for that beau and all their friends.

But somebody’s “got to pick up your brother.” They keep mentioning it and Katie, checking off things on the Post-it note tacked to the car radio, is trying to put it off.

Dave Franco is Seth. He’s usually “the grinning Franco brother,” but here he’s the sleepy-eyed one. He’s got that sibling thing of picking on his sister’s choice in men.

“Jack is such a B-minus.”

Katie’s noticed he hasn’t answered his mail.

“You stopped opening your mail last time, too.”

She knows. “Could you just roll up your sleeves? Show me your arm!”

Seth is a single dad (“You picked THIS moment in your life to become a parent?”) and an addict. Katie finds herself, on the night of this very important party, dealing with a brother she needs to get into rehab and a talkative toddler (Charlotte Carel) on her hands.

Writer-director Marja-Lewis Ryan squeezes nothing but truth into her 76 minute movie. Real situations, hard real-life dilemmas. Seth’s insurance doesn’t cover this rehab place. Maybe this other one, downtown? Little Ella needs attention and a bathroom.

And there’s this party Katie is desperate to get back to. She’s going to take care of everything. She can have what she needs and put a band-aid on Seth, too.

As dramas go, “6 Balloons” is compact to the point of “slight” —  in ideas, themes and length. It begins melancholy, spirals into dread and despair and makes a grab for hope.

Franco veers from somnambulistic to hyperactive. But it is Jacobson we identify with, the one who wants to do the fixing, the one desperate to get and keep something normal in her life, the one who tries and the one who still cares.

As much as you want to slap this Franco (too), it is Abbi Jacobson’s Katie that you want to give a hug and give a hand to.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse subject matter, profanity

Cast: Abbi Jacobson, Dave Franco, Jane Kaczmarek, Tim Matheson, Charlotte Carel

Credits: Written and directed by Marja-Lewis Ryan . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:16

Historian John Man’s “Searching for the Amazons: The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World,” started life as a primer on the historical and mythological antecedents for the comic book icon and film phenomenon of last year, “Wonder Woman.”

Having traveled, researched and written authoritative and imminently readable biographies of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, Man has produced a fascinating history of the myth of Amazons, warrior princesses living in a matriarchy of their own creation.

From the Scythians of the Steppes, who inspired Greek accounts and led the historian Herodotus, who accepted Amazons as real, to centuries of quests, research and scholarship since, Man details the ebb and flow of belief, debunked belief and the lingering impact of this proto-feminist universe upon culture and the arts.

Tribes in Africa, South America and North America were considered candidates to be the “real” Amazons of myth.

Modern day horse archers have sought to recreate the fighting skills these women were endowed with.

Female warriors from Joan of Arc to the Soviet Air Force’s “Night Witches” — fighting female pilots of World War II, Qadafi’s female bodyguard corps and the Kurdish women doing much of the fighting against Syria and ISIS are given chapters.

As is the Wonder Woman herself. Man goes into greater detail than “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” at showing how this odd duck psychologist and the brilliant, unconventional women he shared his life with led to one of the most popular comic book characters, became a feminist heroine of the liberating ’70s on TV and a princess fighting for peace, justice and equality on the big screen.

Man was writing with an eye toward LAST year’s film phenomenon, but he could very well have shifted his attention to this year’s Big Thing — “Black Panther” — with its army of warriors supporting their king and guarding Wakanda against discovery, invasion and enslavement. Man goes into detail about the “Amazon Army” of the African state of Dahomey, a 19th century force of vital influence upon affairs in that West African state.

Yeah. They looked a bit like this.

Films become culture-shifting events in all sorts of ways — branding, connecting to the political, ethical and moral zeitgeist.

But one important way, as Man’s book illustrates, is tapping into ideas that have always been with us, simmering much of the time, bubbling to the surface at crucial junctures. Amazons may have never truly existed, but plainly women warriors have been around for thousands of years. Graves in the borderlands of Mongolia and the assorted “Stans” of the former Soviet Union prove it.

Timing makes this idea of avenging angels topical again. Who better to turn the tide in the “War on Women” than a woman warrior for justice, equality and truth, arriving just after an electoral eruption of sexism, racism and nativism — not just in America?

Who better to ensure T’Challa gains his people’s rightful place at the table than an Army of Amazons?

John Man, in short, is onto something deep with “Searching for the Amazons.” That he’s able to relate so much of this history in such a breezy, entertaining way, connecting it all to the present day, makes this book (Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton) an edifying delight.

Jason Statham is the butt of Rainn Wilson’s jokes in this trailer, a “Sharknado” ish Mega Shark (Megalodon) thriller.

Ruby Rose shows up with a new haircut, Li Bingbing is the love interest and Cliff Curtis and Page Kennedy and Masi Oka play straight men — got to have every race represented, right?

A fun shark assault summer escape comedy? Kind of.