Movie Nation

Funny story, I had a small town relative asking me if I’d seen this Halle Berry movie, “Kidnap,” a month or so back. She’d watched it at home. Some neighbors out in the sticks have assorted streaming services that they share. Apparently.

As I hadn’t paid much attention to titles a month off, it didn’t register.

But I’m seeing it tonight. A month after whoever helped my relative to pirated streaming screening of it.

Yeah, the digital revolution at the movies paid off for Hollywood, didn’t it?

Anyway, Halle gives fair value in thrillers like this, so I have high hopes. My relative certainly loved it.

And unlike, say, the much-hyped/bandied about Stephen King adaptation “The Dark Tower,” “Kidnap” is being screened for critics.

All the back and forth over who would be in “Tower,” who would direct (Ron Howard, at one time).

And now Sony, which also hid “The Emoji Movie” from critics pre-release, is hustling this 96 minutes Idris Elba/Matthew McConaughey vehicle (Nikolaj Arcel of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” directed) into theaters Friday without a peep.

Oh, lots and lots of TV and online advertising. That helped the awful “Emoji” earn $25 million or so from the unsuspecting. But the expectations bar on that babe has been buried.

Playwright turned writer-director Neil LaBute works inside the Hollywood system, more often than not these days. He was show runner for the Netflix series “Van Helsing,” and many of his recent films have been studio pictures — “Lakeview Terrace,””The Wicker Man” among them.

But twenty years ago, he was an outsider struggling to get his breakout indie feature “In the Company of Men” some attention. As a playwright and a writer-director, he typically focuses on human cruelty, particularly as it is directed at those who do not fit in. Plays like “Fat Pig” and that first feature, “In the Company of Men” fixated on men’s reaction to women who don’t fit society’s standards of beauty.

“The Shape of Things” (like “Men,” a play he made into a film) is about the “victims” of others’ makeovers.

So it’s not surprise to see LaBute’s name on the credits to “Some Freaks,” an indie romantic dramedy about high school misfits — a taunted boy with only one eye, an overweight girl — who meet, connect and then hit the wall with each other as each choose to alter his or her appearance. alter their appearance

It’s a movie LaBute could have written and directed. But this time, he produced it.

“I love characters like this, and could certainly see myself having directed this,” LaBute says. “They don’t fit the mold.”

“But my connection to this is Ian MacAllister McDonald. He interned with me years back, went off to grad school, and wrote this feature he wanted to direct. He asked me if I’d be willing to executive produce it, I said ‘Why not?’ That gave me access to the script, and I saw these characters I totally identified with, personally and as a writer. My play ‘Fat Pig’ dealt with this sort of relationship — a plus-size girl, a guy who has a hard time accepting that. The transformation the characters go through here are fascinating, and we don’t get to see them on screen.”

Playwright turned director McDonald, pictured above, had made a movie that is like his mentor’s best work, is “refreshingly grounded, unsentimental yet empathetic slice of D-list teenage life,” as Variety’s Dennis Harvey noted in his review.

LaBute wouldn’t characterize this as a mentor seeing himself in his protege. He wouldn’t presume to use those words, nor would he admit to blushing at seeing another filmmaker’s version of a LaBute world peopled with LaBute characters.

“That’s for other people to notice,” he says with a laugh. “I was just happy to see somebody look at the world in a similar way, and see characters from the population that we just don’t see on the screen. I hope people see Ian’s movie and recognize characters that are a lot more real, more like you or me, than Hollywood typically gives you. Refreshing and honest in its relationships, really sharp in seeing how relationships at that age can turn in just a single moment.”

Hollywood is very good at giving us monsters — over-the-top mean girls, frat boys and the like. But the casual, juvenile off-the-cuff cruelty that has been a LaBute specialty and that we see in McDonald’s “Some Freaks” is rare.

“Cookie cutter studio movies about high school tend to give us exaggerated characters, more beautiful, more mean or whatever versions of real people. Ian’s movie gives us people we know, people we are or people we were back in high school.”

The culture that “Some Freaks” arrives in is different from the one that LaBute’s “In the Company of Men” burst into in 1997. Cruelty, politically incorrect insults and the like seem more out in the open. Or are they?

“These behaviors have always been out there, but it does seem like they’re more in the open. I told a very particular tale about a certain kind of white collar jerk. ‘Freaks’ taps into bits of that behavior much younger. And we see people on the receiving end of this, in high school, and experience it through these kids who are just like people we know.”

And as with most of LaBute’s films, the world captured is far removed from Los Angeles or New York, a “fly over state” story with fly-over state characters.

“That’s the great thing about independent film. Guys like me or Ian try to tell stories, often in our home state. Indie film is a great x-ray of the country in that way. This is how the ‘other half lives,’ and as we know, the other half is the biggest part of the country.”

“Some Freaks” (my review is here) opens in limited release on Aug. 4, and is worth remembering and tracking down when it makes its way to your part of fly-over country.

Here’s just a hint of what happens when you turn a top-flight director, “Black Swan” maestro Darren Aronofsky — and two Oscar winners (Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem) loose on the horror genre. Can “Mother!” survive the inevitable build-up of expectations that such potential generates? The first teaser trailer, here, gives us a hint.

A best-seller some years back told us “How the Irish Saved Civilization.”

Bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of evidence that a lot of Western culture and more to the point Christian culture was preserved in the monasteries of Ireland where monks copied ancient texts and saved traditions and relics during the Dark Ages.

That’s what “Pilgrimage” is about; a remote monastery, filled with penitent men and boy apprentices, labor on the land and guard a holy relic from Vikings, Normans and other infidels in the 13th century.

Then a papal envoy arrives — “The Cistercian” (Paris-born actor Stanley Weber). “The Grey Foreigner” is arrogant and high-handed. Rome needs the relic. There’s a Crusade coming, and relics are good for recruiting. And he’s taking it.

“Rome has spoken…there is no debate.”

But just getting it out of Ireland will be a chore. “Infidels surround us…heretics.”

He’s not just talking about Irish pagans. Just a hundred years have passed since the Norman conquest of England, and they’re still galloping all over the Emerald Isle, divvying up land and rounding up Irish serfs.

So a small entourage is assigned to convoy the holy object, including the herbal healer Brother Ciaran (John Lynch), a brooding mute (Jon Bernthal) and a novice monk, Brother Diarmuid, played by Tom Holland (the new Spider-Man).

On their journey they will face superstitions, clan infighting and treachery and each will be severely tested. As “No one but the pure of heart can touch the relic and live,” you see where the boy Diarmuid comes in.

A Norman knight (Raymond Armitage) may help or hinder their quest. There are runes to be understood, a haunted forest to traverse and much blood will be spilled.

As an aficionado of films set in this superstitious, factional and dystopian corner of history, I appreciated the obscure Gaelic the Irish monks speak (in early scenes), the grim, grimy and short lives depicted and the way Jamie Hannigan’s script lets us see ways that superstitions held long ago can be explained through natural phenomena that we understand today.

Faith, of course, is another matter. If you believe a holy relic has great power, you may have your reasons.

Weber is perfectly oily as Brother Geraldus, the Cistercian, who has a flexibly expedient collection of beliefs, edicts, dogmas and myths that  he lives by — whatever gets this relic to Rome.

Holland is earnest enough as young Diarmuid, a boy who grows into himself as he grasps this mission. But it is Bernthal, playing a man who no longer speaks but who surely must have awful secrets he’s keeping, who captures us. The “Baby Driver,” “Sicario” and “Walking Dead” star has a ferocious screen presence, a menace we can sense even if he is standing stock still.

Bernthal’s mute is like Liam Neeson’s divorced dad in “Taken.” He’s got “particular skills.”  You just know it.

It’s not one of the great Middle Ages movies, not on a par with “The Name of the Rose,” “The Advocate,” “The Reckoning” or “The Secret of Kells.”

But this simple quest tale recreates a primitive era when Christians believed as Islamic terrorists believe today — that salvation and eternal life comes from self-sacrifice. And Bernthal’s resolute, fearsome and touching performance make this “Pilgrimage” well worth the journey.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Cast: Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Richard Armitage, Stanley Webber, John Lynch

Credits: Directed by  Brendan Muldowney, script by Jamie Hannigan. An RLJ Entertainment release. 

Running time: 1:36

The hard-living, grizzled playwright, actor and director Sam Shepard has died. Complications of Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to the New York Times. He was 73.

His plays — “True West,” “Fool for Love” and “Buried Child” among them — won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama, with a couple of extra nominations to spare. The plays always worked better on the stage than adapted for the screen, but “Curse of the Starving Class” and “True West” stick in the brain — brittle icicles of human hurt and dashed dreams.

Then, there was the song he co-wrote with Bob Dylan — “Brownsville Girl.”

He was involved with Jessica Lange for years and years.

But the public at large will remember him for laconic, iconic work in a lot of films — character parts, mostly. 

He simmered and seethed in some tasty, hard-boiled supporting roles in indie films such as “Midnight Special” and “Cold in July” in recent years.

He played a lot of military officers, cops, senators and men of power, in everything from “Blackhawk Down” to “The Pelican Brief,” “Swordfish.”

With that lanky frame and Okie face (he was born in Illinois, lived for years in Va. horse country and died in Kentucky) he was born to play cowboys and outlaws, but he rarely got the chance. Check out “Blackthorn” if you’ve a mind to.

But to me his truly stand-out performance was as the pilot’s pilot, sound-barrier-breaking man’s man Chuck Yeager (above, right). He embodied Tom Wolfe’s portrayal of Yeager in “The Right Stuff”— a drawling West Virginian whose calm, southern-fried demeanor could be heard in every laid-back Southernized and cool “This is your captain speaking” in commercial aviation for decades.

That line Levon Helm gets to deliver at the end of the movie, after Yeager has touched the edge of space, and crashed? Hey, uh, is that a MAN?”

“You’re damned right it is.”

That fit Shepard to a T.

He’s best known for his acrid breakthrough film, “In the Company of Men.” But Neil LaBute’s made a career out of telling difficult truths about the human condition and human cruelty. “The Shape of Things,” “”Dirty Weekend,” “The Wicker Man” — even the films that don’t work out have challenging themes.

Tough subjects (“Lakeview Terrace” and racism, “The Shape of Things” — cruel parameters of physical beauty) have never scared him off. He’s done taboo TV (“Billy and Billy,” an incest comedy) and most recently the Netflix series “Van Helsing.”

He’s producer on one of the indie marvels of the summer, “Some Freaks,” and we’re talking about that picture.

But as always, I’m looking for suggested lines of questioning from you, “crowd-sourcing.” Got one? Comment below, and thanks for the help.

The most critically-acclaimed movie of the summer, a pulse pounding historical action picture with high exit-polling scores as well, may very well repeat at the top of the box office this weekend.

But a movie every critic and pundit has trashed, which exit-polling shows even the dopes who ignored all the warnings don’t care for, is drawing just as big an audience.

Yeah, the stakes are lower, but this last weekend of July at the box office is playing out like something Mitch McConnell,  Steve Bannon and Vlad the Puppeteer cooked up. Wildly unpopular and bad for you always has a chance with targeted marketing — the “Fake news” of the film biz.

“Dunkirk” appears to have edged “The Emoji Movie” at the box office. But Christopher Nolan’s smart, arty and intense war epic is barely clearing its $28 million projected take, with about $28,130,000 expected at this point.

“Emoji Movie” — a bad Sony animated knockoff aimed at kids and their gullible parents — is exceeding expectations, thanks to a big Friday, and may hit $26. It fell off dramatically Sat. and looks to hit $25+, which is impressive. Sunday will tell. 

Could be, it’ll lose the popular vote and pundit vote and win the weekend.

Ahem.

Tentative take is $25.530,000.

Interesting side-bar, I had been wondering what was driving all this traffic to my review of “Emoji,” aside from a very cleverly turned blurb on Rottentomatoes (the more discerning and nuanced Metacritic review aggregator typically drives most of my traffic). And I see all these links from far-right political websites in my metrics.

I had forgotten comic T.J. Miller, of “Silicon Valley” (he quit) and voice star of “Emoji,” was a vocal Trump trasher. The gleeful ultra-conservative webmasters were tickled that his movie was going down in flames and linking to the review.

Only it isn’t going down in flames. It’s not doing great, but it is wildly exceeding expectations. So no, America wasn’t rejecting the Trump-hater’s cartoon. They embraced it, because “Nobody ever went broke under-estimating the tastes of the American public.” Explains who’s in the White House, too. Just blew your minds, didn’t I?

Universal’s Focus Features release “Atomic Blonde” is giving Charlize Theron a nice kick in the quote. It’s opening just over $18.6 million, right in line with projections. The movie didn’t cost much, and it’ll easily be in the black once US and International BO is all tallied — maybe in a couple of weeks. Theron can open a movie. Might even get a cut-rate franchise out of this.

“Girls Trip” did another $20something. It’s rolling through mid-summer like absinthe through Jada Pinkett-Smith’s character’s urinary tract.  “Spider-Man” is sticking around.

“War for the Planet of the Apes” faded another 50%.

And by next weekend, “Wonder Woman” will have cleared $400 million, and “Baby Driver” will have taken in $100 million.

All of those pictures are shedding screens by the hundreds, and will shed hundreds more next weekend.

“Dunkirk” is now over $100 domestic, $200 million worldwide. It cost in the low $100s, so figure it to hit real black ink by mid August.

“The Big Sick,” which has done quite well in a low-key under-the-BO-radar way for the summer way, fell back out of the top ten and probably won’t return as it loses screens and a few more big ticket pictures are unloaded in August.

Decades into an ongoing fascination with Japanese cinema, I can still say the most revealing portraits I’ve seen of the home front there during World War II are animated — anime, cartoons.

It’s not as if the country’s cinema has never fully grappled with The War and its role in it. OK, that is pretty much true. Treating WWII with animation is in keeping with the culture’s reputation for distancing itself from the guilt of Japan’s genocidal aggression and treating even a sanitized, apologist take on the era at arm’s length — with drawings.

Hiyao Miyazake’s innocent-seeming biography of a feared warplane’s designer, “The Wind Rises,”  was far more loaded with nationalism and denial than “In this Corner of the World,” a somber, wistful look back at one young rural woman’s life from 1938, through Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and ignominious defeat and occupation. But there’s a hint of the same reluctance to truly tackle the subject, even in a film as kitchen-sink circumscribed and detail-oriented as this one.

Suzu, our heroine and narrator voiced by the actress Non (the film is Japanese with English subtitles), grows up in Ebo, on the outskirts of Hiroshima. She’s a working-class daydreamer who loves to draw the sights — locals wandering across tidal flats, the hills, streets, waves and birds of her prefecture.

She takes care of her little sister and at 18, hasn’t given much thought to her future prospects. But as Japan girds for a widening war (Manchuria is mentioned), she finds herself betrothed to a sailor in distant Kure.

“They say a girl who holds her chopsticks long (from the short end) will marry far away,” Grandma always said. And so it is. Suzu is stuck with a city family intent on giving her much of the domestic work, and a haughty sister-in-law whose little girl she adores.

Working from the Japanese comic this is based on, director Kutao Katabuchi (“Princess Arete”) loses himself in the sights and settings of a lost, still partially-industrialized Japan. Wood and paper houses, homey markets, simple meals of sardines and herbs, rice and yams are Suzu’s world, so much so that she gets lost easily. Once she stumbles into this Navy town’s red light (Geisha) district, too innocent to wholly understand what she’s seeing.

The ebb and flow of an awkward, faintly affectionate marriage (to Shusaku, a Navy clerk) is captured, as is Suzu’s regret over the handsome childhood crush — on the rude, teasing Tetsu.

“The past and the paths we did not chose, there are like a dream,” her husband says, consolingly.

And then, isolated as they are — not totally kept in the dark by their government, but close — the war comes to them — Pearl Harbor, food rationing, military police crackdowns, dead friends and relatives, and then air raids.

There’s Japanese pride in depicting the battleships (Yamato, among them) and carriers stationed in the bay, and the one solid piece of apologia in the script is remembering the “hardship” that disarmament brought to the local shipyard workers. Yes, Japan had to arm, invade and commit the Rape of Nanking to save the economy!

Truth be told, “In This Corner of the World” takes a very long time to get going. But like the animators, I found myself lost in the details of a world gone with the wind — street cars, sail-powered fishing boats, the “Fireless Stove of the Japanese Empire” (a way to conserve fuel). The combat scenes have a water color majesty, with violence as a shocking consequence of the beautiful planes suddenly dropping bombs, the flower-like blooms of anti-aircraft bursts raining shrapnel on neighborhoods.

And that water-color palette and carefully observed cityscape is a lovely distraction for the name we’ve heard is Suzu’s hometown, a place she longs to return to — Hiroshima.

Intended for domestic Japanese entertainment, “In This Corner of the World” is an eye-opening experience for those not of that corner of the Pacific. And it’s a reminder that making  pretty pictures out of painful history is just a tentative step toward actually grappling with that history, no matter how hard politicians and revisionists fight to keep that from happening.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including war-related images

Cast: The voices of Non,  Yoshimasa HosoyaEnglish subtitles

Credits: Directed by  Sunao Katabuchi, script by  Chie Uratani and Sunao Katabuchi, based on the manga by Fumiyo Kono. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 2:08

Sony didn’t preview “The Emoji Movie” for critics. They knew it was crap, though how they failed to figure that out from the first, stupid, cynical pitch is a mystery.

I saw it at its first showing in Winter Park, Fl., with about a dozen folks — family filmgoers. And we collectively watched it in silence. Reviews for this dog have been uniformly dreadful. Yeah, MovieFone misquoted me on that there link.Here’s my actual review, which is funnier and maybe meaner.

But being animated, with some showings in 3D, and being for children — it’s the advertising campaign that matters. That should put $22 million into Sony Animation’s emptying coffers, according to Box Office Mojo.

Box Office Guru is saying $21. Awful, budget-busting bad. But not the humiliation this deserved.

“Atomic Blonde” is based on a comic book series, but there are no Men in Tights, just Charlize Theron in 1989 short skirts, undies and her altogethers as a spy taking beatings and delivering them in chaotic “The Wall is Falling” Berlin. Not bad for what it is.

But not being an established brand will crimp its box office upside. Maybe $19 million, besting “Girls Trip” in its second weekend. Maybe $20 million, says Box Office Mojo. 

That means that the historical thriller from the brand-name director will own yet another weekend at the summer box office. “Dunkirk” could flirt with $30 million, thought $28 seems a safer guess (both Mojo and Guru predict that).

I am guessing the upper teens guesses for “Girls Trip” are a bit low, as the comedy’s lowbrow appeal could extend past the female and African American-centered audience it drew opening weekend. It’s the “Girlfriend, you won’t BELIEVE what they did” watercooler comedy of the summer. I’m guessing $20 million or so, second weekend.

Almost a millennium has passed since Medieval manuscripts codified a “lusty wench,” and Aubrey Plaza has become that archetype personified.

Sleepy-eyed, foul-mouthed and carnality incarnate, whatever TV (“Legion,” “Parks & Rec”) has found for her to do, the movies (“Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates”) have her perfectly pigeon-holed. And yeah, she could make that phrase sound dirty without even trying.

So it is no stretch at all to see Plaza as a profane, promiscuous Middle Ages nun in a film based on Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” The Italian, and his English contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, could have had her in mind in composing their novelettes — dirty interludes in the first works history declares are modern fiction.

“The Little Hours” is a comically-bastardized adaptation of a couple of bawdy tales from “The Decameron,” and Plaza — as producer and the film’s anchor-tart, Sister Fernanda — holds this unholy romp together.

You don’t wish the nuns in this 14th century convent “a nice day” without hearing about it. Sister Fernanda leads a screeching, screaming and pummeling Greek chorus of cursing. Sister Ginerva (Kate Micucci) is in her thrall. Novitiate Alessandra (Allison Brie) is new, so she joins in to fit in.

They’re tough broads in a sweet spirited convent, presided over by kindly Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) and a quite-tolerant Mother Superior (Molly Shannon). But their abuse chases off the convent gardener/handyman (“About a Boy” director Paul Weitz). And if the sisters are to have time to do the elaborate embroidery that the priest sells to support them, if they’re to have more than turnips to eat, they’ll need a replacement.

Fortunately, there’s a lusty manservant (Dave Franco) on the run from his murderous master (Nick Offerman) who needs a place to lay low. Father Tommasso gives Massetto shelter, tells him to feign being a deaf-mute, and hopes he’ll keep his mitts off the nuns.

Um hum.

Alessandra, waiting for her father (Paul Reiser) to arrange a marriage, despairs that “There’s no hope in the world!” to the hunk who can’t hear her, or protest when she drapes herself over him. And the other nuns, no matter which way they swing, long to taste that forbidden Franco fruit.

Lots of “Bless me Father, for I have had IMPURE thoughts” confessions ensue.

The characters are distinct, if broadly drawn, with Aubrey, Micucci, Reilly and Franco making the strongest impressions.

But writer-director Jeff Baena stages everything in first-year film school simplicity, and the verdant Italian settings have a “shot on a camcorder for Youtube” quality about them.

Truth be told, this plays like an extended comic sketch, which in all fairness is all many of the “Canterbury Tales” and their Italian “Decameron” cousins amount to.

And once you’ve heard Plaza launch into her colorful vocabulary with gusto once or twice, the shock of nuns cussing and fornicating in a period piece wears off.

Throw in witch rituals, nudity and a disapproving bishop (Fred Armisen) and you still can’t get over the notion that this was a clever way to finance a paid vacation in Italy to this tightly-interconnected crew. Franco and Brie are married, Weitz directed Reilly in “The Vampire’s Assistant,” Shannon and Reilly go back to “Year of the Dog,” Plaza and Offerman were “Parks & Rec” castmates, and so on.

But I was pleasantly surprised at how malleable the material was, how much of Boccaccio makes it past the anachronistic cursing and what not.

And simple plotting or not, there’s still something hilarious in that rooster loose in the henhouse scenario. See “The Beguiled” for proof of that. Here, at least, the laughs are intentional.

MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity, sexual content and language

Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Allison Brie, Kate Micucci, Dave Franco, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Nick Offerman.

Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Baena, based on “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio. A Gunpowder & Sky release.