Movie Nation

A good news/not-so-good-news weekend for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Studios.

“Alien: Convenant” is opening big — not huge, but safely near the high end of expectations, probably giving it a win at the box office over the long-released “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.”

Deadline.com is projecting, based on late Thursday and all-day Friday sales, that “Covenant” will lure in 3 million or so ticket buyers, good for a $39 million opening. The best guesses for it had the film coming in at $42, the worst $32 or so.

Conversely, the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” version of “National Lampoon’s Vacation” reboot — new cast, no middle school hijinks — is tanking. It may clear $7 million, which suggests it won’t earn back its meager budget.

“Everything, Everything” isn’t setting teen girls’ hearts’ aflutter, either. The new WB release is riding weak reviews (not nearly as bad as Wimpy’s) to an $11 million plus weekend.

Saturday is the telling day, so if anything shifts due to word of mouth, these numbers could rise or fall. But that’s close to what we’ll see as the final tally Sunday night.

“Guardians 2” adds another $33 million, which puts it over $300 million by midnight Sunday. The Mexican-American car culture saga “Lowriders” added just 70 screens and sits just outside of the top ten. A big weekend for Demien Bichir (He’s also in “Alien”).

“Snatched” added screens and held onto almost 50% of its opening weekend audience, “King Arthur” drops 63% which won’t change its “bomb of the summer” status. Fate of the Furious” looks to hit about $225 before it loses most of its screens, “Boss Baby” will top out at $175, and “Beauty and the Beast” will hit $500 million by NEXT Friday. Wow.

There’s plenty of pushback at the latest iteration of “Alien,” a movie that reaches for something deeper and forgets to provide surprises or frights. But most reviewers are endorsing it. The children.

It could earn over $40 million, though I’d be surprised. Box Office Mojo wouldn’t.  Their prediction is that this latest entry in a long-running sci-fi horror franchise will beat “Guardians Vol. 2.” Box Office Guru is more in line with my hunch, that “Alien” will do $32 million or so and lose the weekend to “Guardians.”

The other wide releases this weekend won’t put a dent in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the bomb “King Arthur,” the under-performing “Snatched” and the fading “Fate of the Furious.”

“Everything, Everything” has built-in teen girl appeal, if there still is such a thing. It could blow up, weak reviews be damned. Because you never know. It works well enough, right up to the point where it lost me, anyway.  Mixed to negative Mixed to negative reviews, overall.

 $10 million seems like a low prediction, but in this wired age, “the hit YA novel” doesn’t mean as much, without vampires. “Fault in Their Stars” being the exception. Box Office Mojo posits that it’ll be lucky to clear $8.  I have to figure this’ll do $15-18.

The latest “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” is a road trip comedy, “The Long Haul.” Recast, funny in bits and pieces, tween-poop gag friendly. Poor reviews won’t help, but kids’ movies are critic proof. They have earned as much as $22 million upon opening. This one? Lucky to clear $8. 

“Wakefield” is the best new release, opening  opening in one theater, a real tour de force for Bryan Cranston. As if he needed another.

Kind of surprised “Lowriders” didn’t grab a lot more screens, considering how it made out in just a few hundred last weekend.

You can lock the world, with its bacteria, viruses and pathogens out, but you can’t lock raging teen hormones in. That’s the big message of “Everything, Everything,” a terminal teen romance of the “Fault in Our Stars/Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” persuasion.

Amandla Stenberg didn’t survive long as “Rue” in “The Hunger Games.” But how long can Maddy, her immune-system deprived teen, live without first love? Especially when first love is hunky Nick Robinson of “The Kings of Summer?”

Nicola Yoon’s YA novel becomes a charmingly gooey but somewhat gutless adolescent romance all highlighted and underlined with “forbidden love” semiotics. She’s a pretty black girl, always dressed in white. He’s a white SK8Rboi always dressed in black.

She has SCID — severe combined immunodeficiency. He’s living in an about-to-be-broken family next door. There are glass walls between them. Literally. Maddy hasn’t been outside in 17 years.

“I feel like an astronaut, stranded in space.”

But then Olly’s family moves into the mansion next door. They “meet cute,” through hand-written messages held up to glass — posters with digits on them.

Novice features director Stella Meghie handles the chaste courtship with warmth and wit.

“I’m sick.”

“Are you dying?”

“Not right now.”

Mere text messages — no, not sexting — are all it takes to set Maddy’s teen imagination off. She’s lived her whole life vicariously, schooled online, studying architecture, designing diners, etc. where she inserts a symbolic astronaut into each model.

And she dreams of the sea. Three miles away from her hermetically-sealed prison, and she’s never been to the beach, never learned to swim. She’s “Princess Madeleine in her Glass Castle,” Olly (Oliver) jokes, a play on her situation and Maddy’s love of “The Little Prince.”

Her online review of that novel? “Love is everything. Everything.”

There’s a nurse (Ana de la Reguera) willing to facilitate things — as far as that goes. Maddy’s doctor mom (Anika Noni Rose) doesn’t seem like an ogre, though she doesn’t explain her standoffishness to the new neighbors.

The rules of such romances are generally pretty arbitrary, and “Everything, Everything” makes these up as they go along. She can’t see anybody new. Until she does. She can’t go outside. But she will. And so on.

That disembowels the story’s pathos, and the further we get into this brisk but unhurried love story, the more featherweight it seems.

But the leads, perfectly cast and coiffed, have lovely teen magazine chemistry even if the characters seem to have nothing in common. Did that ever stop young love?

And girls have to learn the nature of boys somewhere — “He’s not for you.” And he’ll move on. FAST.

It’s not for you, the movie I mean. Not if you’re oh, over 21. But 15 year -girls traditionally eat this stuff up. And they could do worse.

So it doesn’t add up to “Everything, Everything.” What terminal teen romance does?

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements and brief sensuality

Cast: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose

Credits:Directed by Stella Meghie, script by J. Mills Goodloe, based on the novel by Nicola Yoon. A Warner Brothers/MGM release.

Running time: 1:36

Depression is a serious illness that can hit anybody. Even a rich Massachusetts teen who travels into the Amazon seeking a cure through the “ancient tribal secret” fad du jour, Ayahuasca.

So there’s no mocking James Freeman’s personal journey, his search through a sea of Amazonian hustlers, one of whom might be just the shaman he’s been looking for, the person who can help him cleanse his body of “bad energy,” feed him the  entheogenic brew, put him through ceremonies filled with smoke, trances and being buried alive. No mocking, no matter how tempting mockery might be.

But here’s what is missing from the indulged and indulgent documentary about James’s vision quest. There’s not one medical expert, not related to him, willing to endorse any of what follows or transpires as his “cure” as James moves from self-described suicidal teen to seemingly-adjusted young man.

Did the psychoactive drink cooked up from the caapi vine make him self-aware, forgiving and happy? Or was it simply the trip, getting away from family, school, expectations, pressures and the competition that the Real World was hurling at him?

The actor-turned-director Rez Degan asks him, perhaps on behalf of the audience, the stupidest question in the midst of all this.

“Am I happy? I’m SICK, dude,” the kid re-assures him.

Freeman tumbled into depression while at an exclusive prep school, and gives perhaps the most succinct definition of clinical depression ever.

“You hate yourself. And you hate yourself for hating so much.”

He looked forward to nothing, dumped his girlfriend (“Kate”) and gave thanks that “You can buy guns in Wal-Mart in America.” James wanted to end it all.

Then he picked up on the celebrity-endorsed Ayahuasca treatment, spent his parents’ money on the trip and endured many months and burned through untold clots of cash weeding through incompetent, predatory or less indulgent “healers” until he found “The Last Shaman.” The ones named in the film, in no particular order, are Ron, Pepe and Guillermo.

Degan — Was he hired by James to document “my story?” — ably imitates drug trip experiences with the visuals and editing. But he also captures a rich, sick boy detoxing from therapeutic drugs and a corrosive-to-some culture, a process that covers many months. James lives among the less materialistic and evolves. He also gets caught up in the drama of the materialism that he and celebrities like Tori Amos, Paul Simon, Sting and actor Penn Badgley have brought to the corner of Amazonia where this drug and its attendant rituals are indulged.

It’s not “The Razor’s Edge,” though there are hints of this “Eat, Pray Love” journey of self-discovery attached to James’s search for a cure to what ails him. Something appears to have helped him, given him perspective, if nothing else. The malaise he professed fades away.

But you don’t actually have to sample “the worst thing I’ve ever tasted,” as James describes the brew, to smell the BS in here.

The Razor’s Edge”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, alternative medicine including hallucinogens, smoking.

Cast: James Freeman, Pepe, Ron, Guillermo, Kate

Credits: Directed by Rez Degan. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:18

“Lowriders,” the last sleeper hit of the spring, is an engaging if over-familiar Latino melodrama about fathers and sons, embracing one’s culture even as you stretch it and love triangles.

Corny? Si. But set as it is against the East LA locus of Latino car culture, it is also a delightful appreciation of and history primer for anybody not familiar with where those shiny, bouncy custom cars one sees from sea to shining sea came from.

The great Demian Bichir — of “A Better Life,” and utterly wasted in “Alien: Covenant” — is the patriarch, Miguel. He owns a garage in East Los Angeles, and like his father before him, he’s a car customizer, laying on adding the flash, wiring in effects, loading the hydraulics and layering on “30 coats” to create lowriders with his Coasters car club.

Miguel is a widower who remarried Gloria (Eva Longoria), a proud man fighting for his sobriety and wrestling with guilt.

Because Miguel has two sons. Danny (Gabriel Chavarria) is a talented artist. But he works in graffiti, which could land him in jail. And Miguel cannot have that. He’s already lost one son (Theo Rossi) to the dark side. Francisco has taken on the nickname “Ghost,” because that’s what he is to his dad.

“When they’re your kids, you don’t stop trying,” Miguel’s wife counsels. But that may be too little too late. Ghost wants to have an impact on his baby brother’s life. That’s the first “love triangle” of the story. Who will win Danny’s loyalty?

But being talented, Danny draws the attention of the hip Anglo photographer (Melissa Benoist of “Glee”). She can interpret his art (through white entitled eyes), hook him up with the LA art scene, help him sell out.

“You don’t have to be poor to be real.”

Of course there’s the college bound neighborhood sweetheart (Yvette Monreal), also tugging at his heartstrings. That’s love triangle #2.

The various tug-of-wars play out in the most predictable ways in this melodrama, a term that sums up the conventions of a conventional genre story, with all the shoehorned-in relationship issues, gang fight and cop interventions the picture can manage. There’s as sure to be a kid named Chuey (Tony Revolori) caught in the middle of it all as there is a “Big Chevy” (pronounced “Tchev-ee”) car show where it all can reach a climax.

Bichir is wonderful, young Chavarria is solid in what could be a break-out role and Rossi (“Sons of Anarchy”) gives nice shading to the shady “Ghost,” a gangster with grievances, a son with a heart.

And as predictable as all that is, the film has utility and charm, letting Miguel explain the connections of lowriders to pre-automotive Latin American culture, letting Danny learn that history — the racial profiling that puts laws on the books about how low cars could sit on the road (thus, the retrofitting of aircraft hydraulics to “lift” the cars when the cops drove by).

So for all the corn, “Lowriders” can be appreciated for its rolling stock and serving a criminally under-served audience — Who do you think makes the “Fast and Furious” movies monster hits? — a film with fine performances and teachable moments amidst all the melodrama.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, some violence, sensuality, thematic elements and brief drug use

Cast: Gabriel Chavarria, Demián Bichir, Theo Rossi, Eva Longoria, Melissa Benoist, Yvette Monreal, Tony Revolori

Credits:Directed by Ricardo de Montreuil script by Cheo Hodari Coker, Elgin James. A BH Tilt/High Top release.

Running time:

Alfred Hitchcock almost saves “Diary of a Wimpy Kid — The Long Haul.”

Keeping in mind, of course, that the movie’s for pre-tweens — children who might not have been exposed to any of the scads of “family vacation disaster” comedies that preceded it — and is thus graded on a curve bending towards the unsophisticated.

But for parents, and parents who have imposed Hitchcock on their pre-teen children, there’s a saving grace amidst all the poop/mudhole/piglet/parental sing-along-to-the-Spice Girls gags.

“The Long Haul” has the best “Psycho” shower scene send-up ever filmed. Well, after “High Anxiety.” And this one, at least, is utterly unexpected.

This is a “Wimpy” reboot, with a new look-alike “kid” (Jason Drucker of TV’s “Every Which Way”), a new, dopier-funnier drummer/brother Rodrick (Charlie Wright of “We’re the Millers”) and a couple of big-name upgrades as parents — Alicia Silverstone (“Clueless”) and Tom Everett Scott (“That Thing You Do”).

It starts with our Wimpy narrator becoming the victim of a viral video when he tumbles into a kiddie foam-ball playpit and freaks out as he comes up with “diaper hand,” and then it puts the lad on the road for four days with his family as they drive to granny’s 90th birthday celebration in Indiana. Or to a nearby video game convention, if Greg can figure out how to pull that off.

There are more of moronic Rodrick’s efforts to torment/mentor his kid brother and disappoint his parents. Mom (Silverstone) sends the lads into a store with a shopping list.

“I couldn’t read your curly/oldie fashioned writing!”

“You mean CURSIVE?”

And when they stop for a country fair, Greg gets stuck with his toddler littlest brother, and eventually, a piglet.

The shower scene in question kicks off a livelier third act, as Greg — covered in mud — is trapped in the hotel bathroom shower of their nemesis family as their “Beardo” patriarch (Chris Coppola) uses the facilities. The wimp’s discovery — after a gross and kid-friendly bowel movement — is a shot-by-shot recreation of Hitchcock’s most famous screen sequence, from ripped shower curtain hooks to mud circling the drain. Kudos to Brit director David Bowers for the effort.

The scattered laughs that precede it (Rodrick lines, mostly, Silverstone and Scott singing along to “Wannabe”) don’t add up to much, and the movie lacks the wince-with-recognition middle school spark that marked the first film in this tweenage franchise.

But even if you drop the kids off, come back in time to duck in for a quick shower. It makes “The Long Haul” totally worth it — almost.

MPAA Rating:PG for some rude humor

Cast:  Jason Drucker, Alicia Silverstone, Tom Everett Scott, Charlie Wright

Credits:Directed by David Bowers, script by Jeff Kinney and David Bowers, based on Kinney’s book. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:30

If you need a “name,” even a little-known one, to get your D-movie financed, filmed and released, you want want who’s going to give you fair value.

You want a leading man with a sense of urgency, a dynamism that captures the shock and awe of the supernatural events going on around him. You want an actor who doesn’t look downcast for being cast.

That’s the overwhelming impression Christopher Denham gives in “Camera Obscura,” a thriller which sees its shellshocked war-photographer “hero” stunned by the realization that this pieced-together vintage camera “photographs the future,” then mindlessly accepting its prophecies, which he is heedlessly willing to kill to keep from coming true.

The plot is a spin on the sci-fi/fantasy trope “gadget that sees the future” (See “Time Lapse.” Actually, don’t.).

Denham (“Argo,” TV’s “Billions”) is Jack, a combat photojournalist who saw one too many dying kids and is determined to use what he’s seen as an excuse to never pick up a camera again.

“Life is just a game,” he philosophizes. “Death always wins.”

His shrink (Carol Sutton) may hear him out. But his fiance  She (Nadja Bobleva) wants to end this funk in a flash. She gets him a vintage German 35mm camera that a collector has pieced together from broken bits of other cameras. And as Jack bores the last photo lab in town about how “exciting it is be shooting again,” he can’t help but notice — as do the photo techs — that weird, black and white crime scene photos are what the camera is producing.

And they’re of murders, violent deaths, that haven’t happened yet!

All of a sudden, Jack is blacking out, losing track of what he’s done and what he’s photographed, and in the film’s best (only good) line, he complains he’s “living in an episode of ‘Goosebumps.'”

Jack quickly wonders if he can he intervene, change the course of the future. And when he starts seeing dead shots of Claire, that curiosity becomes a mania and takes on urgency.

Or it would, if Denham gave us any hint of either of those emotions. Denham never gets past “tentative,” never commits to headlong panic. Jack’s descent into a personal hell never feels like more than an actor dipping his toes in tepid water.

The film is framed in a flashback, Jack at his wit’s end, robbing a pizza delivery guy who turns out to be an old friend. That doesn’t really work.

What does pay off is the odd moment of dark comedy — Jack asking the wrongest of the WRONG questions of a hardware store clerk (he’s seeking knock-out drugs, and doesn’t know those are peddled by the neighborhood pharmacist). The cops who keep seeing his connections to various crimes are incredulous, save for the detective in charge (Catherine Curtin). That alone is good for a laugh.

There’s little backstory about the source of Jack’s shellshock, little chemistry with Bobyleva, little here that we haven’t seen in assorted TV and movie horror tales with that “know the future” sci-fi twist.

All of which might matter less if Denham had studied the works of Nicolas Cage, Rutger Hauer, Natasha Henstridge or the late Powers Boothe — players who knew you have to bring that A-game every day, even when you’re earning D-movie money.

“MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Christopher Denham, Nadja Bobyleva, Catherine Curtin

Credits:Directed by  Aaron B. Koontz, script by Cameron Burns, Aaron B. Koontz. A — release.

Running time: 1:35

A weak weekend for May movies, as everything new out of the gate gained no traction. Well, a couple of limited releases made inroads, but the big bucks fare flopped.

“King Arthur,” as seemed obvious Thursday night, is tanking. Sixteen million seems on the high end of expectations as Mother’s Day unfolds.

Then there was “Snatched,” whose reviews weren’t nearly as awful. But Amy Schumer’s reign of naughty narcissism may be over — $16 million? That’s awful for an R-rated comedy follow up to “Trainwreck.”

Nobody NOBODY went to see “The Wall.” Reviews were mixed, but it was on over 3,000 screens and didn’t make a million. Iraq War? Old news.

Lowriders” cracked the top ten, despite only being on 300 or so screens. But Latin youth audience turnout for this generational gang picture with Demian Bichir as the only big name in the cast.

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” plummeted from a $146 million opening to abut $62 — to be expected, but steep. Very steep — over 60%. Not quite a Tyler Perry Plunge (70%). It will make its money until “Alien” eats into it next week.

Yes, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” owns another weekend at the box office. Sure, it fell off well over 60%, which would be news, if it weren’t for what is happening on the email accounts of senior Warner Brothers execs.

“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” an eight years in the making Guy Ritchie goof on the Camelot myth, is DOA. A $14-16 million opening weekend, based on late Thursday (nothing) and Friday turnout.

As it cost $175 million, that’s gonna hurt. No movie stardom for Charlie Hunnam, no post-“Sherlock” special effects success for Ritchie. The reviews didn’t give it much of a chance, and as the source material isn’t “Suicide Squad” and there is no real female lead or love interest or any reason for anybody other than guys who love Guy to show up, well, there you are. Why didn’t they see that coming? Deadline.com tries to break it down, but seriously, at Warners, they err on the side of giving talent (directors) free rein. And occasionally pay a huge price for it (see the filmography for Zack Snyder).

Amy Schumer’s sophomore sophomoric comedy “Snatched” may manage $20 million. Considering the “Trainwreck” expectations and her team’s determination that she should continue her “I’m plump, like Melissa McCarthy, so I should follow her lead” and make a limp buddy comedy, that’s got to be a major let down. She’s not an actress, and her endless Vagina Monologues humor is pretty limiting. Will she get another starring shot?

Details are sketchy on “The Wall” and the rest of the week’s openings, and the internet is wagon train slow today and I have a “Wimpy Kid” reboot to catch. So I will update this later.

“Who hasn’t at least thought about it?” Howard Wakefield narrates, pleading his case.

The idea of just…checking out, fleeing the scene, disappearing — Howard makes it feel like a logical alternative to participating in and walking through “the slow trajectory of a collapsing civilization.”

But Howard (Bryan Cranston) isn’t content to flee a testy, turbulent marriage. No. He’ll drop out of sight, simply not show up at work or at home. More self-absorbed than self-aware, he’ll park his Mercedes in the suburban New York home’s detached garage. He’ll close the garage door.

He’ll hie it to the rarely-used attic of the garage, and like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, see what happens with those he left behind.

That’s the simple, revealing and darkly comic premise of “Wakefield,” a film by writer (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) turned writer-director Robin Swicord, a movie meditation on marriage, family and surviving both by taking the time to examine what’s wrong.

“What is so sacrosanct about a marriage and a family that you should have to live in it — every single day?”

Howard’s wife, the one-time ballet dancer Diana (Jennifer Garner, regaining her edge), makes him jealous — or so he claims — by strutting around in her dancer-bod-nudity in front of open windows, by paying too much attention to other men who cross their paths at parties and the like.

“All I want is to get through the day,” she sighs, in a flashback. “That’s all I think about. ‘Just get through the day.'”

Married 15 years, they have two daughters entering their teens. They, too, tolerate Howard. Do any of them love him? Will they miss him in the least?

Slipping off to hide in that attic is one impulsive way to find out.

There are just a couple of flashbacks with dialogue exposing the nature of the marriage and the guilt-ridden courtship in which Howard stole Diana from his best friend (Jason O’Mara of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”).

The rest of the film is Howard’s odyssey, his lengthy (too lengthy) interior and exterior monologues — mimicking the voices of others, losing himself in his own head and scavenging like the raccoon who “inspires” his exile, “surviving…literally, on garbage” like a “castaway.”

Or a homeless bum, like the ones he competes with for left-overs.

Swicord wrings every last dramatic possibility out of this thin premise, and then some. It’s still an 84 minute movie straining to escape a 108 minute one.

Cranston treats Howard like the tour de force he is, man-of-means, solitary philosopher and man-of-action scrambling to avoid detection, asserting himself on “the streets,” losing his humanity but not himself as he descends into bearded madness.

The one deft bit of directorial cleverness (dictated by her script) has Swicord playing out Diana’s saga — from the first moments of annoyance that Howard isn’t on time, to the inept police visit to the grief, and then flinty way she resolves to let life go on — in pantomime. Garner defty navigates this emotional journey without us hearing a word she says — to colleagues and others who might want to comfort her, to her mother (Beverly D’Angelo), to her dealings with her seemingly un-impacted twin daughters.

Garner makes us see what Howard must see for himself. Girlfriend will be fine without you around, the “trap” of a disappearance (not death or divorce, with monetary settlements) notwithstanding.

“Wakefield” is a sometimes funny, always smart movie that never quite finds the depth to be brilliant. But Cranston and Garner give it life beyond the narrow concept and make us care about this selfish man and bitter woman, something few screen romances — even the ones where the characters share scores of scenes together — can manage these days.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual material and language

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner

Credits: Written and directed by Robin Swicord. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:48