The first film had its fans (Me) and detractors.
Growing up in the South, I recognize in Billy Bob Thornton the true exemplar of cotton picking cussing, with every politically incorrect profane tirade delivered in a Drawl for the Ages.
Hell, if Angelina Jolie’s secret dream is to UN her way into Britain’s House of Lords, Billy Bob ought to one-up his FIFTH ex-wife with a few trial balloons aimed at a Senate run.
Why not?
“Bad Santa 2” will be here Nov. 23, just in time for Christmas.
The latest from the director of “Beginners,” Mike Mills, puts Annette Bening and Billy Crudup and Greta Gerwig in the late 1970s, right in the middle of our “national malaise.” And finds heartfelt fun and wisdom in it.
An odd trailer, but a politically prescient one.
Stand-up comic, impressionist and actor Kevin Pollack steps behind the camera for “The Late Bloomer,” a sweet-spirited if slightly rude rom com masquerading as a sex comedy.
It’s a little flat-footed, with the script-by-committee lacking the nimbleness you want in your stand-up comics or comic films.
But there are lots of laughs – throw away lines, daft cameos. It’s a shame none of them come from the supposedly funny central premise.
Johnny Simmons of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” stars as Dr. Peter Newmans, a psychotherapist specializing in sex — specifically, all the things you can accomplish if you avoid it. Hes written a book, “From Sex to Success,” about it. His agent (Jane Lynch) has him booked for a NED Talk (TED Talk was taken). He could be “The New Tony Robbins!”
“Instead of copulating, try COMMUNICATING,” he prescribes.
Peter has not just written the book on how much of our lives is wasted thinking about sex and having it. He’s practiced it. He’s a bit of a hermaphrodite.
Even his cuter-than-cute neighbor (Brittany Snow) can’t seem to, um, get a rise out of Peter.
Turns out, there’s a medical reason for this. He’s had a tumor on his pituitary glands that arrested his development. Take that tumor off, and it’s off to the races — with voice-cracking/zit-creating hormones and erections at the drop of a hat.
The sitcom-cute scenerio gives Pete pals he’s given keys to his apartment (which they abuse) and mismatched parents — Maria Bello is the hippie mom, J.K. Simmons the lovably gruff dad who is awfully proud his 30ish boy is suddenly a Man in Full.
“Whoops! He could put an eye out with that thing! Looks like you’ve got the Sunday Times rolled up in there!”
It’s a comedy with six credited writers, and is very much what you’d expect from guys who do stand-up. It’s all-verbal.
The doctor who treats Pete suggests “a CAT scan,” and asks him “How’s your insurance?”
“I’m a Phd!”
“Yahtzee! Make it a CAT scan AND an MRI!”
Laraine Newman channels Terry Gross to play a public radio show hostess, Ileana Douglas shows up as a sexually frank lesbian and Brian Doyle Murray turns up as a stage hand — each with her or his share of “ba-da-BING” zingers. Paul Wesley is the inattentive, sports-betting beau who pays too little attention to Michelle (Snow), whom Pete pines for.
“Worst officiating since The Kennedy Assassination!”
Young Simmons makes a threadbare farceur, and the characters closest to him — his buds, Luke and Rich (Beck Bennett and Kumail Nanjiani) fail to register. But Bello and J.K. click, and Lynch reminds us that she deserves better than TV’s “Angel from Hell,” or this.
Pollack is obviously persuasive enough to land a lot of big names for this film’s bit parts. As an actor himself, Pollack has been most at home in small parts with just a hint of charm, heart, edge and comic flash. That’s kind of how he directs “The Late Bloomer.” Unfortunately, his leading man is basically a wan cameo in his own movie, not funny enough to hold his own with the big girls and big boys.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and language
Cast: Johnny Simmons, Brittany Snow, Jane Lynch, J.K. Simmons, Maria Bello
Credits: Directed by Kevin Pollack, script by Kyle Cooper, Austyn Jeffs, Paul A. Kaplan, Joe Nussbaum, Gary Rosen, Mark Torgove. A Momentum/eOne release.
Running time: 1:35
“King Cobra” is “based on a true story” about a rivalry between two online porn video producers — played by Christian Slater and James Franco — feuding over a hot new “discovery” one of them controls.
With those leads, and Alicia Silverstone and Molly Ringwald in the cast for nostalgia value, you might expect this to get something resembling a better-than-token release.
But no. “Gay porn” means that IFC Midnight is the only distributor that would touch it. Well, that and it might not be that good.
We’re entitled to a little skepticism when a movie titled “Deepwater Horizon” pitches itself as about “the heroes” of the worst oil spill disaster in U.S. history.
Somebody, a lot of somebodies, screwed up. The consequences were dire for the environment and deadly for many of the working class Joes the film depicts.
But as all hell is breaking loose on the drilling ship way offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, you see a name tag, Burkeen, and the guy wearing it (Jason Kirkpatrick). The rig has had a blowout that’s turned into an inferno, and the survivors’ only way off is by lifeboats that a burning, teetering crane is almost sure to destroy.
The crane operator, Aaron Dale Burkeen, sees that, and even as his mates are yelling “What are you DOING?”, clambers up behind the controls and renders it harmless at the cost of his own life.
And that’s when you realize, maybe we don’t know the story here.
Peter Berg’s film is a Mark Walhberg/Kurt Russell action picture that takes you inside the exploding rig, with sound effects so real that you’ll hunch down in your seat to dodge the rivets and debris shrieking past your ears.
If has a villain — BP, a multi-national multi-billion dollar corporation only too eager to take shortcuts — and the villain is personified by John Malkovich as the guy in charge of the drilling, a drawling Louisianan determined to get this “hole from hell” back on budget. He’s authorized skipping a crucial pressure test that rig boss Jimmy Harrell (Russell) and electrician and eyewitness to this all Mike Williams (Wahlberg) are shocked to discover when they return to the ship for their weeks-long shift.
“No mud, no flow. We got to go!” Vidrine Cajun-coos, and so they do.
Berg and the screenwriters set up a neat class conflict, cavalier bosses worried only about their higher-ups vs. the working men and woman, Andrea Flytes (Gina Rodriguez), one of the pilots steering the “ship” to keep it over the bore-hole, who suffer the consequences.
Wahlberg’s Mike is an ex-Marine with a wife (Kate Hudson) and kid and an ex-military way of looking at BP’s wishful thinking, which he calls the “hope as a tactic” delusion.
“Hope ain’t a tactic, Don.”
Yes, the foreshadowing is overt — not subtle. As in “Sully,” we know what’s about to happen. But unlike that true story, we don’t know the specifics, and Berg recreates both the massive rig (“Anything that big ought to be made by God.”) and its state, held together by “band-aids and bubble-gum,” mud-covered crews overworked and disaster lurking.
The chaos of the blow-out and specifics of the injuries and fatalities are as harrowing as any action picture, and too close to real for comfort. We don’t get to invest in many characters, and we await that moment when the star yells at somebody “I am NOT gonna die on this rig!”
But Berg (“Lone Survivor,””The Kingdom,””The Rundown”) finds the humor in the banter of clock-punchers, the eye-rolling sarcasm that’s your only defense when somebody in a higher pay grade gives orders that are an accident waiting to happen.
He makes “Deepwater Horizon” a disaster movie that works by putting us there, letting us second-guess along with the experts and shake our heads that justice and responsibility for the guilty is different when they’ve got the money and the backing of a gigantic company to soften that blow.
And Berg reminds us that even in the worst disaster, people can be selfless, heroic, and in the case of Aaron Dale Burkeen, professional even if those who gamble with their fates are not.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for prolonged intense disaster sequences and related disturbing images, and brief strong language
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Ethan Suplee
Credits: Directed by Peter Berg, script by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand. A Summit release.
Running time: 1:47
On the surface, it looks like the most cynical kids’ cartoon since those godawful “Barbie” straight to videos your little girls adored.. Still, “The Lego Movie” — they’d had years of practice making spoof videos — came off, so maybe “Trolls” won’t be as bad as the trailers.
Just because a studio played brand-leech and made a movie out of kids’ toys doesn’t mean it has to suck.
But this musical package comes with a Justin Timberlake tunes, and a soundtrack. And now that people are hearing that soundtrack, well, it’s not pretty. It’s a shark-jumping moment for JT, according to Jezebel.
Ouch.
Denzel Washington still packs an action picture punch, and Chris Pratt has another hit under his belt as “The Magnificent Seven” gallops off to a $37 million opening weekend, right in line with projections of what this remake built around those two and a name director (Antoine Fuqua) would do.
Reviews were mixed, but the movie went for multiple demographics in the casting and emphasized the action, if not the smarts, heart and soul of the original films — “Seven Samurai” and 1960 “Magnificent Seven.” That’s a great opening for a Western, by any measure.
I think the true story action drama “Deepwater Horizon” will eat this middling “epic” for lunch next week, but we’ll see.
“Storks,” the Warner Animation cartoon won’t be setting any records. Opening in the same window as such hits as “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Hotel Transylvania,” it felt like a hard sell and Friday’s numbers back that up – $20-21, for the weekend is what they indicate.
As with all animated fare, Saturday will be the most telling. It’s not dazzling enough to blow up —reviews have been middling — but mid$20s seems within reach.
“Sully,” which opened at $35 weeks ago, remains a big draw, “Bridget Jones’s Baby” remains a let down. Fringe fare such as “Snowden” and “Hillsong” are fading away.
Killing time before a recent screening, I ducked into a Big Box Book Store and found myself stopping short at the vast collection of fiction and graphic novels bundled near the entrance.
With every given week carrying news of some new deal that Marvel/Disney or DC/Warner Brothers or not-to-be-left-out-Fox has made, some fresh comic book property on its way, the mind reels as the eye wanders over titles.
In comic book terms, Den Of Geek has listed 69 titles (and counting), with “Doctor Strange” leading the way and a sea of sequels to earlier films close on its heels. “Bloodshot”? That’s a new one on me.
Interviewing the fellow who wrote “Men in Black” and the creator of “Surrogates,” to say nothing of Frank Miller, Robert Rodriquez (“Sin City”) and Zack Snyder (“300,””Watchmen,” “Batman v. Superman”) long ago disabused me of the mistaken and widely held notion that comics/graphic novels are easily adapted because the narrative, characters and zingy one-liners are already in storyboard form. But “Sin City” and its ilk seemed to prove the contrary. They ARE easier, because the storyboards ARE already done for you.
But the reason we’re seeing a sea of such titles is because so few comic book/graphic novel adaptations bomb. They’re money in the bank. Why? They’re branded, pre-sold to a ready-made audience that knows the title/characters/basic plot.
No, there’s no new “Lord of the Rings” out there, beloved by generations. The closest thing to that, the C.S. Lewis “Narnia” books, ran out of gas pretty quickly.
The recent abandonment (more or less) of the cut-and-paste YA (young adult) ripoff series “Divergent” suggests Hollywood has realized that as yet, it has no replacement for “The Hunger Games,” with even “The Maze Runner” series not coming close to the films that made Jennifer Lawrence famous.
Stephen King is back in the Big Picture game, thanks to “Dark Tower.” But for…how long?
Titles are always bubbling up as Hollywood is starved for fresh material, but what has this fall’s book to big picture buzz?
Care to bet on any of them? Over at sportsbettingdime.com they’re putting decent odds on the world suffering through another Nicholas Sparks adaptation.
“Mortal Engines” (by Philip Reeve) may be on Hollywood’s YA radar for a franchise.
Could there be interest in other Judy Blume kids’ books adapted for the screen?
I read mostly non-fiction, but would you bet that anybody would take another shot at a Hemingway biopic, another “Desert Fox” WWII ? If people will line up for a new Spider-Man every six years, why not?
Russell Crowe has lobbied, after his fall from grace, for Fox to leap back into the “Master & Commander” series by the late Patrick O’Brian. I remember his cheekiness when the first film came out. I asked Crowe if he’d signed on to do sequels, and he laughed like a man who had leverage and didn’t want to give any of it away. The leverage is long gone, but that series could easily, if expensively, brought back to life. Any chance of that happening?
Writers, especially these days, often get their first decent paycheck not from their publishers but from Hollywood (per Kate DiCamillo of “Because of Winn-Dixie.” She told me she bought a Mini Cooper with the cash). So they’re eager to sell.
Who can we turn up the buzz for, other readers out there in movie loving land? Any titles that leap to mind? Famous writers, new talents? Non-fiction? Comment below.
I’ve worn out this line, using in virtually every review of a film or TV series based on his work, but it’s worth trotting out one last time.
In spy fiction, there is a master, John LeCarre, and then there’s everybody else. I mean, check out the links at the bottom of this review to see further proof of my LeCarre lust.
The author of “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Little Drummer Girl” and “The Constant Gardener” and “The Tailor of Panama” and that most recent adaptation, “Our Kind of Traitor,” is all alone in capturing the grays and shifting morality of the Cold War and the spy game that both predates it and survives ever onward, a relic of conflicts past and the insurance policy for conflicts to come.
Take away “The Tailor,” a darkly comic vision of The Game of Nations as played out by a con man and the blackmailing British agent new to the country with the canal (Geoffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan faced off in the movie) and you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of humor in his ouevre.
Not so LeCarre’s memoir, “The Pigeon Tunnel.” I can’t recall a collection of memories and anecdotes that made me laugh out loud this much. It’s not just the odd funny story — LeCarre, the pen name of ex-British Intelligence agent David Cornwell, worked with Alec Guiness over two TV series and just nails the man’s talent and dry wit — but the ludicrous situations he injects himself into.
He shares the inspiring inspiration — a French aid worker in Cambodia and elsewhere — whom he based the heroine of “The Constant Gardener” on, and assorted other real life people he noted, carefully, before spinning their lives as journalist spies or idealists or what have you into fictional creations.
But he also lets on that his wasn’t much of an MI5/MI6 career, and that the real danger he’s gotten himself into came after writing fame, when he had the cheek to research his books, meeting Arafat and a German leftist terrorist in a secret Israeli prison, the grizzled Beirut war correspondent who dragged “the war zone tourist” (himself) into harm’s way to meet real Palestinian fighters and victims of the fighting. The reporter, “Mo,” calls and addresses everyone as “Ass’l,” so that the various Arabs they run into sound like the profane acolytes of some latter day Lawrence of Arabia.
“Ass’l David, you are most welcome!”
He recalls falling under the spell of Hollywood director/emperor Sydney Pollack, who wasted a lot of his time promising to make movies that the distraction of learning how to ski (Cornwell owns a Swiss chalet) or a Tom Cruise blockbuster kept him from doing. George Roy Hill of “The Little Drummer Girl” acknowledges, “I f—-d up your movie, David.” The great Fritz Lang wanted to make a movie from one of his early books (Lang was nearly blind, no longer a Hollywood player, never happened).
And then there were his visits to Russia, which he’d battled as a lower-level spook himself, and then skewered in legions of books which, to be fair, ripped the British and U.S. spy apparatus just as severely. Somehow, Cornwell got it into his head that he needed to meet a genuine Russian mobster after the Fall of the Wall had turned the USSR from a tyrannical communist state into one run by robber barons and their protector, Mr. Putin. The interview, fearlessly blunt and darkly comical, is an intimate (nightclub) scene of foolish bravado and hilarious low farce.
A tempting tidbit? His hints at what he learned about DIN, a secret Jewish assassination squad that went around hunting down and summarily executing Nazis after World War II. Unofficial, off the books, privately financed, in business for 30 years, at least.
That’s a book I’d like to read and a movie I’d love to see. I hope it’s on his plate.
For that matter, “The Pigeon Tunnel” itself would make a roaring good film — mild-mannered lower-level spook turns novelist, gets reamed by enemies left and right, and is only shot at AFTER he leaves spying and starts researching his later books.
Morris Gentry is 13, can’t dance or play basketball and is just too young to make being the only black American kid in Heidelberg, Germany, work for him.
“Morris from America” is a puzzle to his classmates, whose language he barely speaks and who see nothing but a stereotype sitting on the playground, hiding behind his ear-buds — “Hey, Kobe Bryant!”
His tutor (Carla Juri) sees the “charming” kid underneath the tough guise he’d like to wear.
“Forget charming, I’m a gangsta!”
“Because? ‘Gangstas drink hot chocolate, with one marshmallow?”
“That’s TOTALLY gangsta!”
Soccer coach Dad (Craig Robinson) respects the music, won’t listen to warnings from others that the kid’s attempts at lyrics are profane and misogynistic, and understands the loneliness.
“We’re the only two Brothers in Heidelberg. We’ve got to be on the same team!”
“Morris From America” is a slight, sweet and somewhat unconventional coming-of-age dramedy from the director of “This is Martin Bonner.” It rarely surprises, but it leans on some winning performances to make even the weariest moments of adolescence pay off.
Morris, played by newcomer Markees Christmas without a trace of guile, crushes on a 15 year-old fraulein (Lina Keller), all sunglasses and cigarettes, long curly hair and short skirts. She’ll use him to annoy her shocked mom, invite him to raves as a novelty, treat him as an adult when neither one of them is.
And Morris, like millennia of young men before him, will fall for that.
There’s a wonderful rapport between Robinson (TV’s “The Office,” “Hot Tub Time Machine”) and Christmas, an informal and sometimes profane banter that would be at home in much of African America, but feels like their own secret language in Deutschland.
“You got no taste in music!” “You can’t grind me with that!”
“First you get the high-top fade, THEN you get the girl!”
Christmas is very natural on camera, and easily gets across a kid who has to realize “This isn’t Richmond any more,” trapped in a world of racists and racial profilers — adults and kids — all twisted up in their techno/electro-swing music, dying to spit out some rhymes and stir things up.
As with “Martin Bonner,” writer-director Chad Hartigan is content to set a somber tone, reach for sensitive moments and reveal his characters’ secrets in tiny doses. Robinson lets us see the out-of-his-depth loneliness the father feels and transmits to his son.
The novelty of the setting and the situations wears thin after a bit, but “Morris From America” has a warmth and wit will stick with you, rather like that Dampfnudel you ordered for dessert — just unusual enough to be memorable, just sweet enough to be a pleasant memory.
MPAA Rating:R for teen drug use and partying, sexual material, brief nudity, and language throughout
Cast: Craig Robinson, Markees Christmas, Carla Juri, Lina Keller
Credits: Written and directed by Chad Hartigan. An A-24 release.
Running time: 1:31
