Movie Nation

As undeniably cynical as it was for Disney to further monetize it’s 1991 cartoon “Beauty and the Beast,” you cannot fault the financials.

Reviews were a LOT more mixed for the live action (with lots of animation) remake. And it’s not like people don’t know the story, the songs by heart, thanks to the film and the stage musical based on it.

Deadline.com is reporting a $169-175 million opening weekend for the new “Beast,” a pre-summer record, a stunning take for a movie that has zero surprises, despite Disney’s announcement “Whoa, we’ve got a GAY character in here.”

Filmgoing audiences are all about comfort food films these days, proven brands with built-in expectations and no jarring surprises. “Logan,” “Kong,” now “Beast” have dominated this winter — before them “Star Wars.” Maybe it’s the times we live in.

“Beast” will pass “Logan” as the biggest hit of the new year by say, Wednesday.

“The Belko Experiment” bombed, “The Shack” lures in a few more of the faithful, “Before I Fall” has another week in the top ten.

“Kong: Skull Island” managed another $26 million this weekend, “Get Out” has cleared $130 million (a rare surprise and non-franchise blockbuster), “John Wick” Chapter Two” is closing in on $100 million.

It’s unnecessary. The animated “Beauty and the Beast” that led to the stage musical and now a (more or less) live action adaptation is a cultural touchstone, the pinnacle of the animated musical art and a work which “live action version” cannot improve upon.

Putting that slip of a thing Emma Watson in the lead, with her thin voice to match, and then surrounding her with similar strangers-to-musicals (save for the great Audra McDonald) isn’t really an improvement, either. Nobody’s lining up to hear Luke Evans, Ewan McGregor, Oscar winners Emma Thompson and Kevin Kline perform show tunes, and with good reason.

But “Beauty” still has those unforgettable Alan Menken/Howard Ashman (and Tim Rice) songs, deft mini-masterpieces of the art form. They’re malleable enough to endure any number of stage revivals of the show that owned Broadway for years and in many ways rescued the American musical. And damned if that third act waltz of this “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme” doesn’t get me, every time.

Watson’s version of Belle is as bookish and plucky as ever, more a “future is female” icon. She’s still rejected by her “provincial” French village.

“Teaching another girl to read. As if ONE isn’t enough!”

Dad’s still a dotty tinkerer, played her by the great Kevin Kline, who has no real moment to shine.

And the boorish soldier Gaston (Luke Evans) still sets his cap for her and only her. His soldiering sidekick LeFou (Josh Gad) still crushes on Gaston, a bit more obviously this time around (amusingly). If you know the show (And really, how can you have avoided it?), the one number that is improved on from the animated original is “Gaston,” which borrows from both animated and stage versions to create a raucous romp through the town tavern, with Gad crooning and Evans vamping his various manly attributes.

“In a spitting match nobody spits like Gaston…I’m especially good at EXPECT-orating!”

Evans doesn’t have the plummy/hammy voice that made Richard White’s burly animated version so over-the-top back in 1991, but he and Gad pull it off.

Belle’s “crazy” father Maurice gets trapped by the Beast, she rides to his rescue and sacrifices herself as prisoner in his place. And the Beast, cursed and condemned to a crumbling castle where he is hairy and hideous and his staff has been transformed into furniture and cookware, can only be saved if he and that staff can convince the once-vain prince to love him.

They added songs, bits of back-story. The Beast sings a song of longing. The “curse” scene is made more vivid, the prince is seen as an unhappy child, and we learn the fate of Belle’s mother.

They made the film longer, and “announced” there was a gay character — as if we’d missed it the first or second time. And for all the “live action version” hype, it’s a strikingly digital enterprise, with animated sets and set-piece fights and digital wolves to go with the digital title character. No. Not “Beauty.”

The filmmakers tried to top “Be Our Guest,” and don’t.

But Watson is a wonderfully affecting actress, and Stevens, the bland pretty boy beau of “Downton Abbey,” is unrecognizable under all that animation. The same goes for everybody else transformed from actor into animated “thing.” Stanley Tucci, the singing McDonald and Emma Thompson (Mrs. Potts) you may recognize. Ewan “Lumiere” McGregor? Not at all.

It still all comes back to those wonderful tunes, songs that tell the story of a smart girl being trapped in “this provincial life,” of Gaston’s ego, a service staff with no one to serve and a love story where two people have to learn to look “beneath the surface” to find true beauty and true love.

This “Beast” will never replace the original, but that’s not really the idea. It’s a nostalgia trip for a generation that grew up on the animated film, a reminder that for a fairy-tale, it’s packed with adult themes and lessons to live by.

I can’t say I loved it, as it drags and drags and only occasionally springs to life. But this “tale as old as time” resonates as well as it ever has, and its songs still stick with you long after the closing credits.

MPAA Rating:PG for some action violence, peril and frightening images

Cast: Emma Watson, Luke Evans, Dan Stevens, Kevin Kline, Audra McDonald, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci

Credits:Directed by Bill Condon, script by Stephen Chbosky (screenplay), Evan Spiliotopoulos. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:09

The late Bill Paxton got his start in no-budget thrillers. He figured out, early on, how to give you fair value, even playing a heavy in a genre picture.

He managed that one last time with “Mean Dreams,” an abused teens-on-the-lam road picture that packages drug money, dirty cops, and an abused girl the smitten, overmatched and neglected boy on the run with her.

Paxton plays Deputy Carroway, who has taken a job in a corner of farm country just as fall hits Canada. And even his sympathetic promises to his pretty daughter (Sophie Nelisse of “The Book Thief”) have a flinty aftertaste.

“I’ll get us outta here as quick as I can.”

But maybe Casey isn’t keen on cutting out. She’s stumbled into the sensitive kid working the ranch next door. Jonas (Josh Wiggins of “Max”) works like a dog for his disapproving dad, endures his hostile, shut-in mother and has grown up too sweet to kill a snake. Casey meets him just as he’s let one loose in the woods, well away from the livestock.

“You know people can see three miles over flat land?” she offers, making small talk.

“That’s pretty far,” he says.

“Not far enough.”

Casey has a secret, and seeing the over-familiar way the new deputy Single Dad purrs, “Baby girl” at her, the latch lock she installs on her bedroom door, we wonder.

Not to worry. Jonas is so taken with this first-ever potential “girlfriend” that he gives her a walkie-talkie. You know, so they can stay in touch at all hours. Cell phones don’t exist in this world, so the most obvious piece of movie foreshadowing ever is necessary.

The deputy and his daughter’s suitor tangle, and instantly we see how over-matched Jonas is. He’s witnessed the abuse, but he can’t convince his father (Joe Cobden) or the sheriff (Colm Feore) that “he’s a bad guy.”

So he hides out in the covered back of a pickup, and finds out the hard way.

After some creaky and predictable touches in the opening act, the Kevin Coughlin/Ryan Grassby script finds better footing in the middle acts — with Jonas dragging Casey on the run with him on impulse.

Naive kids, under threat of deadly violence, trying to make their way to “the ocean” without a clue or a cell phone to guide them. Teenagers stumbling through a remote part of the world, with Casey’s dog in tow, unable to get far enough off the grid that law enforcement can’t find them in a heartbeat.

Director Nathan Morlando makes the most of Canadian autumn — lovely scenery, rural grit, just enough unscrupulous people to help or hinder the young couple.

There’s some chemistry between the leads, none of it sexual. They’re just embattled young people clinging to each other to get out of a jam, without a real sense of how to do it. You’d swear their moves were choreographed based on what they’ve seen on Canadian TV. They’re almost totally unprepared.

But Paxton makes a marvelous menace. The picture’s biggest failing is losing sight of him for the middle acts, and its second biggest failing is giving the equally valuable Colm Feore too little to do. We know, by his casting, that this sheriff is key to the plot.

Actually, Paxton and Feore suggest a more interesting tack for the picture to take. Their story has more tension and offers the promise of more down-and-dirty-and-violent rewards.

But both of them, no strangers to indie film, showed up. Their presence got “Mean Dreams” financed and made. And both of them, especially the gone-too-soon good ol’boy from Fort Worth, know how to deliver fair value and chills in even limp, under-developed thrillers like this. Give him one or two good lines, and Paxton was always golden.

“It’s a mean world, and the angels left us to fend for ourselves.”

MPAA Rating: R for some violence and language

Cast: Sophie Nelisse, Josh Wiggins, Bill Paxton, Colm Feore

Credits:Directed by Nathan Morlando, script by Kevin Coughlin, Ryan Grassby . A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:48

The luminous Shailene Woodley was always going to find work after the abortive “Divergent” divergence. A blatant cut-and-paste “Hunger Games” knockoff, it didn’t even come to term.

She’s on HBO’s “Big Little Lies” opposite Oscar winners Reese and Nicole and the great Laura Dern.

But co-star Ansel Elgort? Soft spoken, sweet-faced Ansel? Perfectly cast as a guy named “Baby.”

“Baby Driver” is another getaway driver thriller with Elgort in the title role. Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey, Jon Bernthal and Jamie Foxx are the bad guys who need his services. Lily James is the waitress he’d love to “take away from all this.”

It’s an August movie, so low expectations.

It doesn’t help “The Sense of an Ending” when we see that ending from a mile off.

It is a mystery, after all, meant to maintain a certain level of suspense, promising a surprise.

But it’s not a fatal flaw in this often captivating “character study “that lives up to that description. Characters are studied, and their character is judged — misjudged at first and second glance.

And captivating? That’s Oscar winner Jim Broadbent‘s turn in the lead role.

Tony Webster is semi-retired, a divorced self-absorbed semi-grump who runs an antique camera shop and barely tolerates the customers who waste his time.

He gets on well enough with his lawyer ex-wife (Harriet Walker), and is sort-of present in the life of their pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery of “Downton Abbey”), who is about to embark on single-motherhood.

But a letter from his past upends his equilibrium. It’s from the late mother (Emily Mortimer) of a girlfriend of his youth. It hints at affairs of the past, unresolved relationships and a tragedy. And it is supposed to come with the diary of a college pal. Only that long-ago girlfriend refuses to surrender what her mother bequeathed Tony.

Something about all this “memento of long ago” has Tony agitated — in that mild-mannered, insistent English way. His ex-wife is curious. So he starts relating the story of his past, the old girlfriend (Freya Mavor), the old chum (Joe Alwyn), letting drips and drops of it come out, filtered by time, filled by false clues, augmented by flashbacks.

Director Ritesh Batra lets us see images of a tub, a line of razor blades, and blood. There are flirtations, a memorable weekend with the girlfriend’s family, examples of the cleverness and sensitivity of that friend in school, memories of their teacher (Matthew Goode). Batra doesn’t so much give away the mystery as spoon-feed the clues, weighting the real with the false equally, hoping we don’t guess and get ahead of her. Which we do.

 Walker makes a properly curious and cagey foil for Broadbent. What is Tony not telling his ex? Is he a reliable witness?

Charlotte Rampling gives an icy old age to Veronica, the aloof and dismissive girlfriend of long ago. And Dockery manages to turn a set-dressing supporting role into something slightly meatier.

But it is Broadbent, who refuses to make Tony broad or easy to read, who holds the floor, here. He suggests the self-righteousness memory affords us, perhaps protecting us from some unpleasant memory or cruel truth about ourselves we’d rather forget. It’s a performance of light shadings, hidden motives, injury and guilt.

He’s as marvelous as he always is in playing it.

And even though this “ending” is a lot less surprising than it must have been on the pages of Julian Barnes’ novel, Broadbent humanizes the mystery and makes us care long past the point where we’ve solved it.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, a violent image, sexuality and brief strong language
Cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery, Harriet Walker
Credits: Directed by Ritesh Batra, written by Nick Payne, based on the Julian Barnes novel. A CBS Films release.
Running time: 1:48

Shirley MacLaine has made a wonderful curmudgeon in her dotage. That covers pretty much every movie since “Terms of Endearment.”

“Bernie” was something of a high-water mark in this third act of her storied career, playing a woman so unpleasant a whole town is reluctant to punish her adorable murderer.

So “The Last Word” is no more of a stretch than say, “Guarding Tess,” which had her playing a reviled former First Lady back in 1994.

The idea was to throw Shirley, as a somewhat hip, very self-aware old lady facing her twilight with a determination to control things to the end — including her small town paper’s obituary — and Amanda Seyfried as that bullied obit writer, and just profanity to earn an R-rating (give it some AARP-approved “edge”) and let this Force of Nature make it all worthwhile.

She almost does. But this cutesie collection of confrontations, musical montages and half-based homilies about it’s “never too late” to make your life matter lets her down.

Harriet Lawler ran a local advertising agency in her younger days. She must have been a terror. Because nobody still there has anything nice to say about her.

Her ex-husband (Philip Baker Hall) is more circumspect. “Control is very IMPORTANT to her.”

Her Japanese gardener (Gedde Watanabe, in a role out of the 1940s), her hairdresser (Sarah Baker), even her gynecologist (“the angriest vagina this side of China”) can attest to that.

Her estranged daughter (Anne Heche) won’t even comment.

But those opinions, that view, just won’t do. Which is why the lonely, bitter Harriet insists that her Bristol, California’s best obituary writer (Seyfried) get on the job now, and write one that suits Harriet.

The researching part is amusing enough, with young Anne realizing who “put the ‘bitch’ in obituary.” But Harriet, who has her suicidal moments, has a solution. She’s analyzed Anne’s obits, and those of others, and summarizes the form thusly.

Every obituary says that the deceased was “loved by their family.” They were “admired” by colleagues and business associates. They “touched someone’s life unexpectedly.”

And then there’s “the wild card,” what journalists would call the “hook.” It’s that quirky, unexpected something that makes reading about someone’s life a pleasure.

Harriet and Anne set out to find those four ingredients, manufacturing them if they have to.

Seyfried gives Anne a casual, coarse informality that the hard-drinking (and capable of cursing) Harriet pretends to find grating. MacLaine is properly imperious, flinty and mean.

But the things these two have to put across are just cut-and-paste adorable, knocking the life right out of the money. The “hooligan” moppet whose life Harriet decides to “touch in an unexpected way” (AnnJewel Lee Dixon) screams “CHILD ACTOR” in all the worst ways. “At-risk kid” never crosses or mind.

The idea that elderly Harriet, with seemingly a very limited record collection (The Kinks are the octogenarian’s fave), can bully her way into a drive-time job on the local alternative/college radio station is cute, but a stretch.

Rapprochement with her estranged relations makes for scenes that go nowhere.

But the stars play believable story arcs, and Seyfried never lets herself or Anna seem cowed or awed by the Great MacLaine. And Tom Everett Scott (newspaper editor eager to please) and Joel Murray (former employee of Harriet’s) make solid impressions.

It’s no use wishing “The Last Word” had come out better. But with plenty of examples of failed-films aimed at an older audience to compare it to, an “I’ve seen worse” makes for some consolation.

MPAA Rating: R for language.
Cast: Shirley MacLaine, Amanda Seyfried, Tom Everett Scott, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Heche, AnnJewel Lee Dixon
Credits: Directed by Mark Pellington, written by Stuart Ross Fink. A Bleecker St. release.
Running time: 1:48

Of course, that’s how they get you. Warners/DC anyway. They manage the hype fine, but their comic book movies, of late, have been miss, miss-or-hit, or worse. Keeping expectations low wasn’t an option, I guess. The actress is still more a dazzling, physically fit model who can handle the fight choreography, and some of the dialogue makes one wish they’d brought in somebody for a polish.

But as we never get World War I movies with this sort of budget, let’s expect good things this June.

Warner Brothers managed the near impossible — hurling a bunch of respected character actors, including an Oscar winner, at a giant monkey that has been filmed to death — and made money on it.

A $52 million opening weekend take for a movie that bashes the Vietnam Era US military, tries to lift Brie Larson out of Indie filmdom and lets Tom Hiddleston take a stab at playing an action hero? Call that a win. I found the effects impressive but the “Apocalypse Now” riff grating and a stretch. But no matter. Most reviewers swooned over “Skull Island,” and audiences have bought in.

“Logan,” which got even better and better deserved reviews, fell off quite a bit on its second weekend. A $36 million take, if Saturday and Sunday don’t turn it around. Not bad, but not epic. Fox was wise to get out of the Wolverine business when it did.

“Get Out” continues to be the phenomenon of this late winter, doing another $21 (projections were around $18-19). It’ll be over $111 by Monday AM, and will pass Universal’s other Feb. hit, “Fifty Shades Darker” by late in the week.

Teenagers are barely getting around to “Before I Fall,” but it held audience on its second weekend. Kids these days. Another $3 million, anyway.

“Table 19” is fading away, “Moonlight” will make another million or so and then head to video — about $27-28 million in total for a Best Picture winner. Not great.

So it’s “John Wick” meets “Lucy,” James Bond finally played by a woman, and Charlize Theron the toughest she’s been since “Fury Road.”

“Atomic Blonde” (unrestricted trailer below) co-stars John Goodman, James McAvoy and Toby Jones, features a leggy, strip-when-she-needs-to gay heroine, and lots and lots of violence. Oh yes.

This October, Warner Brothers finds a new way to Apocalypse. Technologically manipulated weather. Check out the multi-national cast. Got to cash those Chinese checks, make that Middle Eastern moolah. Smart. Because this needs all the international help it can get.