Movie Nation

The short answer to that headline question is, of course, “No way.”

“Black Panther” opened so huge and is doing enough repeat business — patrons coming back to re-immerse themselves in the Wonders of Wakanda — that it should do well over $100 million on its second weekend.

Box Office Mojo predicts $120 million, slightly more than half of what the film took in on its extended opening weekend ($235), as it has been over-performing during the week as well. Staggering numbers, and by comparison, it is expected to hold a much bigger percentage of its opening audience than “The Last Jedi,” which fell off 67% on its second weekend. So we shall see. It would have to drop to close to $100 million or under to be considered a “Well, we’ve seen THAT and what’s the fuss about?” hit.

“Last Jedi” made most of its money that first weekend, “Jumanj” held onto audience for six weeks plus. Which will “Panther” emulate?

“Game Night” is a February comedy (low expectations) and an R-rated comedy (higher expectations) opening to good reviews, pretty much across the board including mine. The team behind it isn’t known for dazzling comedies, but this cast — especially Rachel McAdams –– finds the fun in the dangerous and the bloody. It could do $20 or more, though Mojo is predicting only $18. Lots of advertising, I figure it’ll better that.

Science fiction, like R-rated comedies and horror, tends to do well, though “Annihilation” is opening in an environment where that crowd is still pouring into the comic book sci-fi of “Black Panther.” The Natalie Portman picture is a sci-fi horror movie and has good reviews pushing it, it just isn’t a “brand” like Marvel’s movies or the YA hits of the recent past. It’s not really scary, I thought , and not all that entertaining, either. Mojo figures it’ll be lucky to manage $10 million, so we’ll see.

“Every Day,” a fantasy teen romance, is an Orion picture distributed by MGM and could crack the top ten. It’s on a lot of screens. Zero buzz in my world (I’m not a teen) for that one, but you never know what’s going to get teen girls excited.

As if Oscar favorite “The Shape of Water” didn’t have enough headwinds facing its breathless march toward Best Director and Best Picture honors.

It’s built around bestiality, for “Hollywood’s agenda is PERVERSE” protesters.

It’s a violent, predictable and hilariously over-rated genre pic which offers few surprises,. The villain is, well, Michael Shannon — WASP old school White Male Dominance. The heroes are everybody who stands in opposition to him — black, Jewish (committing Rosenberg espionage and treason), gay and mute. Subtle. And yet it still collected 13 Oscar nominations from the credulous.

Then, there’s the short film it seems inspired by.

And now, there’s a 1969 play that might have been more on-the-nose source material for this “Creature from the Black Lagoon” “love” story. Paul Zindel’s 1969 play “Let Me Hear You Whisper” is about the same subject — janitor falls for imprisoned aquatic creature. His estate is suing Senor Del Toro. 

It’s an idea that feels timeworn in the film, as in we’ve seen this before, right? No? Are you sure?

Kind of low-hanging fruit, but if anybody can prove Gullermo del Toro saw any of these “inspirations,” well, it’s “How much will it take to make you go away?” check-writing time.

A fundamental rule of thrillers is that you can’t give away too much too early and still expect anybody to hang on the tenterhooks of suspense.

  “Annihilation,” the screen adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s alien infestation novel, almost has enough going on to get away with that. It’s framed within a dour, standing-room-only debriefing of the only survivor of a science team that went to investigate an asteroid-delivered phenomenon that has engulfed a state park.

Yeah, we know who survived. But the glum fatalism that hangs over her interviewer (Benedict Wong) and all the other haz-mat suit attired scientists suggests that there might be hope of dealing with whatever’s happening. Or maybe there’s just a scant chance of even understanding what is bringing doom to the planet, and that will have to be enough.

This is “Arrival” without any hint of Amy Adams optimism, something Alex Garland’s film smothers, from first frame to last. An academic biologist and ex-Army doctor (Natalie Portman) is grieving for her Sgt. husband, who was sent into this growing, living protoplasmic biosphere that scientists have taken to calling “The Shimmer,” as perfectly descriptive a name as you could imagine.

That husband (Oscar Isaac) and their love affair is detailed in flashbacks, as is his sudden and inexplicable return. That was when the Black Helicopters and Black SUVs swooped down on them and Lena was taken prisoner by people who could use her help, people who also need to isolate that strangely-altered and seriously confused soldier-husband.

Portman’s big scene and the most emotional moment in the movie comes during that shock-reunion. That’s another structural difficulty in this cryptic, cerebral and bleak thriller — it’s emotionally flat save for that one moment. Most of the emphasis is put on the nature of this phenomenon and everyone’s dismayed resignation at dealing with it, and trying to understand what or who it is and “What it wants.”

“I don’t think it wants anything.”

Lena signs up to join the latest team sent in to investigate, along with a fresh-out-of-college physicist (Tessa Thompson), a flirtatious paramedic (Gina Rodriguez), an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny) and the sad-faced psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who “cleared” every member of earlier teams for enlistment of what appear to have turned into suicide missions.

But maybe not. Lena, concealing her motives from the others, is really after answers about what happened to her man.

Behind the gossamer curtain of this growing “Shimmer” is something akin to Pandora, the world of “Avatar.” Familiar creatures have taken on alien traits. Mold grows into vast, all-consuming patches, flowers evolve in rapid spurts and whatever evidence the scientists stumble across of earlier teams ranges from grisly to deeply disturbing — some of it archived on video.

We can fill in the blanks as to the differences between the new team — all women, mostly women of science — and their male predecessors. Perhaps something like “Alien” went down, or “Predator” — elite commandos, isolated from the outside world, failing to understand what they’re up against before reflexively fighting back.

The  women, it must be said, are sorely lacking in any sense of urgency. The world-threatening stakes have been laid out, and even if they were the only ones to volunteer out of a vast assembly of scientists, they seem more resigned than panic-stricken or frantic to solve this puzzle and find a way to defeat this threat before total “Annihilation.”

We know the survivor, who tells the tale. That robs some of the surprise of the attacks to come. They’re jumped by a hybrid alligator, and promptly pile into flat bottom boats to travel across the very waters the beast just lunged out of.  So, “book smart” but maybe lacking common sense and woodlore.

There’s a lot of puzzling over the clues, discussions of the science that drives what’s eating them. Literally.

Portman is good at playing this weapons-savvy scientist with an obsessive need to know about what happened to her husband inside this glimmering fog world he marched into. Isaac has to play his post-return self as mentally and emotionally gutted. But there’s not much to their “romantic” flashbacks that suggests a Great Screen Love Affair. Maybe that’s the way the guilty-conscience Lena remembers them.

There’s a tendency in science fiction movies, even sci-fi horror, to conflate “quiet” with “smart and deep.” This plays as a soft-spoken, contemplative, less-action-packed version of “Avatar,” though its tonal sci-fi sisters are the melancholy “Solaris” and fatalistic classic “On the Beach.” There are allegories in play here, but nothing as potent or easy to sink your teeth into as there was in Isaac’s previous collaboration with writer/director Alex Garland,  “Ex Machina.”

Conversations are thoughtful, but shot in the most static way imaginable. Even the horrific attacks feel muted, generic, with the screams of the endangered but emotionally damaged and depressed sounding exhausted and lacking resonance.

All of which add up to a movie worth seeing, worth mulling over, but not necessarily enjoyed.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality

Cast: Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Jennifer Jason Leigh,Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Benedict Wong

Credits:Written and directed by Alex Garland, based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:55

Since time immemorial, or at least since 1978’s “The Driver,” getaway drivers in the movies have been portrayed one way — stoic, silent, professional, guys with a “code.”

Often, they don’t have real names. They’re just “The Driver” or “Baby Driver” or “Wheelman.”

That much is standard issue in the new Netflix thriller, “Wheelman.” That’s the only name anybody calls our wheelman (Frank Grillo). You’re a bank robbing “crew” getting into his car and want to talk on the way to the job?

“I don’t chit-chat unless it’s about the job.”

One hood is black, his partner hood (Shea Whigham) is mighty hard, and a little long in the tooth.

“That’s Clint Eastwood up there behind the wheel. Brothers into Clint Eastwood?”

But when a job goes “sideways,” this Wheelman is anything but calm. He doesn’t know the crew. He doesn’t know who this unknown “handler” is who keeps calling him, jazz playing in the background, making threats and changing arrangements. He didn’t pick out the BMW he’s tearing through the mean streets in.

“Where’s the drop?”

“You’re not headed for the drop.”

And hell, he’s got a 13 year-old daughter at home who has invited a 17 year-old boy over, against Dad’s wishes. His only control over any situation he’s in is by phone.

“”Ryan, I want to talk to you about being in my home alone with my daughter.”

Our driver hurtles around town (Lawrence, Massachusetts and environs), through tunnels, chased by motorcycles and “the Philly mob,” with the haul of ill-gotten cash in the trunk, increasingly frantic as he tries to get the people he knows — the ones who set this up — to help him extricate himself from a life-threatening crisis mostly of their creation.

I first sat up and paid attention to Grillo, a TV and bit parts in film veteran, in “Warrior.” He’s got a gritty, edgy presence put to good use here.

Writer-director Jeremy Rush and his crew mix the usual wheelwell’s eye-view shots of chases, feet jumping from brake to clutch pedal and backseat over-the-shoulder shots with endless close-ups of Grillo, claustrophobically trapped in this increasingly shot-up car, growing more manic by the minute, angrier by the second.

I love this sub-genre of crime pictures, and while this isn’t on a par with the true classics of the type, it’s in the conversation. A little of Tom Hardy’s cellphone in the car myopia “Locke,” a little of Gosling’s “Drive,” and a lot of Grillo goes a long way.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Frank Grillo, Caitlin Carmichael, Garret Dillahunt, Shea Whigham

Credits:Written and directed by Jeremy Rush. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

I take no pleasure, none, in tracking the downward spiral of the Great John Cusack‘s big screen career. Nicolas Cage either.

Katherine Heigl and Steven Seagal? Sure. I mean, I’m human.

But Cusack’s decline to “black baseball cap” roles in a string of C-D grade thrillers is fascinating, nevertheless. You can’t point in any serious way to him being wholly responsible for his own fate. Still, here he is, playing the heavy — a runaway extortionist who purses a trio of trio of river rafters who have gotten their hands on his haul — in “Blood Money.”

“Hey, I LIKE Metallica!”

And I’m betting the leading lady (Willa Fitzgerald of TV’s “Little Women”) was contractually obligated to recite this line.

“Kinda sexy, for an older guy.”

Needy, pathetic.

Three high school friends — Fitzgerald, Ellar Coltrane (“Boyhood”) and Jacob Artist — with little in common save for collective sexual history, reunite for a river trip through Deliverance Country, Georgia.

Dude in black bails out of an airplane with black bags full of loot. The rafters find it. And two of them, especially the emotional, shrill, scheming and occasionally ruthless Lynn (Fitzgerald) vow to keep it. A track star nicknamed Cheetah, she once had a thing with stuck-in-his-hometown Victor (Coltrane), and may be having a thing with Jeff (Artist, of TV’s “Quantico”).

“It’s MY money!” she says after finding it. One of the guys is too righteous to take it, one bends to her will. And when the bad guy gets on their trail, a chase begins.

Wikipedia conveniently describes “A melodrama  as a dramatic work in which the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Characters are often simply drawn, and may appear stereotyped.”

That’s what we have here. The villain isn’t the sharpest at woodlore, isn’t really a killer or a crack shot or anything like that. He seems shocked when somebody gets hurt/killed. The stereotypical sadism of such characters only emerges later.

The chase pauses for characters to work out their issues, or explain themselves. The whole “Treasure of the Sierra Madre/Trespass” of what people, even friends, do to each other when big money is involved is handled perfunctorily.

Structurally, director Lucky McKee (Hah!) chooses to tell this story in flashback so we know the scope of the final conflict. The finale is unsatisfying in the extreme — suggesting nobody here actually watched “Sierra Madre.”

Fitzgerald’s hysteria/mania here adds a little to her “reel,” and Coltrane should probably find a series — like Artist.

And there’s Cusack, the man in (dyed hair) black, there to judge, to improv a one-liner, here and there — “Man, you are a…TERRIBLE person.” “You really LEANED into it, didn’t you?”

I wish he’d get better offers, wish he had the option of turning down crap like this. I wish he’d stop supervising his own wardrobe and stop dying his hair and transition to 50somethings of greater variety.

Not holding my breath, though.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including sexual references, and for some violence

Cast: Willa Fitzgerald, Ellar Coltrane, Jacob Artist, John Cusack

Credits:Directed by Lucky McKee, script by Jared Butler, Lars Norberg. A Saban Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

So, is every critic in the world seeing this controversial and supposedly smart sci-fi thriller tonight? Or at least this afternoon?

Nah. Showed it in NYC last night, or earlier, apparently.

A few reviews on Metacritic or RT. 

Withholding access from all but a cherry-picked few suggests maybe they’re afraid of the backlash facing Natalie Portman over the “whitewashing” (her character was Asian in the source material) of her being cast, as a scientist whose soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) went missing in this alien “shimmer” fog, with her out to find him.

That’s of no consequence to me. Not sure how much outrage is due a casting call that was made to give the picture the best, most commercial actress available (Hollywood is making the movie, not the People’s Republic) to give it a chance of becoming a hit.

Color blind casting cuts both ways, as I always say. Name an Asian actress who is a top box office draw. In the Western Hemisphere. Maybe those protesting buy into cultural stereotypes. “She’s supposed to be very smart. Has to be Chinese.” Maybe they’re anti-Semitic, anti-Natalie or something else and they just don’t want to admit it.

Anyway, let’s hope its as good as its talented star can make it.

Burt Reynolds plays a more humble version of himself in this A24 release, playing a past-retirement-age fossil who once owned the box office and the public’s heart reduced to showing up at a film festival (Ariel Winter plays his handler, Clark Duke runs the fest) in Nashville. Chevy Chase plays his aged manager, and to be honest, I’d never have given this the time of day had not A24 picked it up.

It seems worth ignoring because writer-director Adam Rifkin has never scripted or directed anything worth a moment’s notice. Well, he did script “Mouse Hunt,” which was more about the production design, casting and delirious direction of rising star Gore Verbinski.

Nobody was a bigger diva back in the day than Burt. And I’m not saying that to be kind.

“The Last Movie Star” opens in limited release March 30, too early in the year for “awards consideration” for next year. One more indignity.

First of all, do NOT try this at home. If somebody suggests “Let’s kick ‘Game Night’ UP a notch,” change the subject. Maybe suggest a nice sophomoric drinking game instead.

And at the first mention of “You know what I hear the super rich do? ‘Fight Club’ with homeless guys!’ — run. Go home and break out Scrabble and be glad you did.

“Game Night” is “Date Night” with blood and bullet wounds and beatings and blood stains that you will never ever get out of the rug, the white Maltese or what have you on the day AFTER “Game Night.”

It’s a gonzo spin on what happens when SOMEbody suggests “kicking things up a notch,” when Jenga isn’t enough anymore.

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams strike comic gold — or at least silver plate — as a hyper-competitive game-crazy couple whose suburban couples gaming party goes way off the rails when an equally competitive globe-trotting/high rolling brother to the husband (Kyle Chandler, cast against type) comes home, initiates a murder/kidnapping mystery game that is in turn hijacked by real hoodlums who play for keeps.

Only the couples — McAdams/Bateman, Kylie Bunbury (“Under the Dome”) and Lamorne Morris (“New Girl”), and Sharon Horgan (“Catastrophe”) and Billy Magnussen (“The Big Short”) don’t know things have turned real. Not at first.

What screenwriter Mark Perez (“Herbie Fully Loaded”) and co-directors John Francis Daley (“Vacation”) and  Jonathan Goldstein (“Horrible Bosses”) put them through is an absurdly complicated, violent and self-aware farce — a night-long chase through the mean streets, often in conflict with real bad guys whom they don’t realize aren’t just “actors” with Murder We Wrote, the mystery staging party company.

  Jeffrey Wright does his version of “bad dinner theater” as the Murder We Wrote “FBI Agent,” Danny Huston and Michael C. Hall (“Dexter”) are “real” villains and Jesse Plemons just slays as the lonely, newly-divorced creepy cop neighbor who cares too much, observes too much and is never asked to come to game night any more because he’s a serious stiff.

Characters have varying skills at charades and Pictionary and “Never Have I Ever.” And they’re ALL good at nailing comic movie quotes. None is funnier than McAdams, who gets to hilariously act out the hostages in the diner opening to “Pulp Fiction,” never realizing she’s waving a real gun at real bad guys who really need to be taken hostage.

“And the Independent Spirit Award goes to…”

The banter crackles, here and there, with Bateman’s Max toting around resentment of his better looking, more successful brother Brooks (Chandler), and everybody else knowing it.

“He’s like the Mark Wahlberg to Max’s Donnie!”

A clever running gag — establishing shots, street scenes and traffic scenes and cul de sacs are illustrated in detailed models which dissolve into the photo-real scenes the action takes place in. Another? The woman are the bright ones, the guys seem to stumble through clues and strategies.

Ryan (Magnussen) has a thing for dopey models. “Where’d you find her? TED Talk?”

And Kevin and Michelle (Morris and Bunbury) have let Denzel come between them. Maybe.

There’s even a game of “hot potato” that involves a chase through a mansion, frantically passing off a prop, one character to another, managed in one sweeping, breathless take.

Way too much of “Game Night” is given away in the trailer, the violence is a bit much and truth be told — the folding in on itself plot gets in its own way, especially in the third act. But Bateman makes the big bucks for being the best put-upon “hero” in comedy.

And McAdams, doing an epic Amanda Plummer (“Pulp You Know What,” remember?) absolutely steals the picture. At gunpoint.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual references and some violence

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Kylie Bunbury, Danny Huston, Jesse Plemons

Credits:Directed by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, script by Mark Perez. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:40

Movies in the streaming era have to meet one very basic requirement for a film buff. Are they worth sitting through, start to finish?

All this choice among services, all those titles on inventory. Why waste more than 15 minutes on anything that doesn’t grab you?

“A Perfect Day,” a flawed, even faintly-sexist tale of aid workers in the Balkan war zone, passes that threshold. It’s got a fascinating setting, a tunnel vision story — trying to get a body out of a rural well so that the water won’t be poisoned. A good cast, a retro-hipster soundtrack (Velvet Underground, Buzzcocks, Marlene Dietrich) and striking scenery.

No, they didn’t actually drag Benicio del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko and Melanie Thierry into the open-sore of Bosnia, Serbia and associated war-turn states. The south of Spain was exotic enough.

Oscar winner del Toro is Mambru, a veteran fixer for Aid Across Borders. He’s not a bureaucrat, a fund-raiser or motivational speaker. He’s a roll up his sleeves and get a dirty job done guy. And he is in need of a rope strong enough to lift a bloated corpse out of a well.

Thierry (“Babylon A.D.”) is Sophie, an idealistic water quality expert new to all this war zone “respect protocol” stuff. Dealing with war-weary and combat zone-wise locals, superstitions and age-old feuds, competing agendas with predatory water capitalists is new to her. They have their orders. Wind this mission down.

“What about the fat guy?”

“Fat guy stays, we leave.”

Tim Robbins is B, another old hand at NGO work in war zones. He’s a little gonzo, something of a hippy who keeps his own hand written notebook of survival tips — which side of the road mines are typically planted by the militias that drag dead cows to block the road and kill anybody who tries to get around it.

“Intuitive, maybe. But not crazy.”

Damir (Fedja Stukan) is their translator in this land known for “its yogurt and its sense of humor.”

And Katya (Olga Kurylenko) is the assessment officer assigned to see if their work here, negotiating with UN Peacekeepers and murderous local checkpoints, grinding out a day of tracking down a rope from suspicious Bosnians of this side or that one, wondering what version of the truth about why they need it will score them something too many people want to use for hangings, flagpoles and restraining scary war-refugee dogs.

They pick up a little kid who tips them off to a rope in the pidgen English of all war zone kids in the movies.

“Rope ees there. Dog is your problem. Not Nikola’s. Nikola is leetle boy.”

The picture settles into its long, frustrating metaphor for getting ANYthing done in a place where the enmity stretches back hundreds of years. But the script cannot let that happen without a heaping helping of melodrama.

Katya and Mambru have history — sexual history. And Sophie? She completes the cliche, freaking out as an aid worker in a WAR ZONE. Where there are corpses everywhere.

“It’s an important memory, your first corpse,” B cracks.

So we have two women, insisting that reality conform to their sense of justice, right and compassion, and two grizzled old Oscar winners shaking their heads and trying to keep them all alive until they muster out.

Co-writer/director Fernando Leon de Aronoa doesn’t make much of the movie’s opportunities for suspense. This is closer in tone to Richard Gere’s “The Hunting Party” than “Welcome to Sarajevo.” We get a sense of the stakes, the grim thankless nature of the work, chuckle here and there at the oddballs drawn to this Quixotic cause.

It’s never less than watchable, but I can’t say it’s particularly memorable (save for that soundtrack). Perfectly Netfixable adventure in a minor key.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast:  Benicio del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko, Melanie Thierry

Credits:Directed by  Fernando León de Aranoa, cript by  Fernando León de Aranoa, Diego Farias. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:46

Meant to post this a few days ago, but in any event…

Pixar’s mining one of its richest veins by returning to this franchise. Listen for the voices of Samuel L. and Bob Oedenkirk in this one.

And Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson. And of course, John Ratzenerger!

Sophia Bush, Isabella Rosellini, Catherine Keener — so many big female names in the cast of “Incredibles 2,” which turns dad loose on raising baby while Mom goes out and gets the job done.