Movie Nation

Another opening weekend, another epic turnout for another “Fast and the Furious” film.

Jeebus, what’s it going to take for “you people” to get over this damned franchise? Eight films, a new villain (and an Oscar winner,this time) and you show up, expecting things to be different? $100 million Easter weekend for “The Fate of the Furious.”

I had a modest interest in a couple of these, always liked Michelle Rodriguez and Paul Walker, Statham and The Rock. Vin Diesel? Luckiest man in show business. He won’t stop making these until they pry the steering wheel from his cold, dead hands.

Year-long hype, a load of box office draws in the supporting cast (Dwayne Johnson, “here for the paycheck,” Jason Statham,  and for the old folks, Kurt Russell. Luke Evans? Nothing better to do?) and a lot of car stunts that involve a lot of digital assistance in defying the laws of physics. Same old, same. Old.

These movies are like four-corner check boxes of movie marketing. “Hispanic actors? (biggest share of the audience) Check. Ex-rappers and falling stock African American actors? Check. Another generation of hot new ‘starlets’ to stand next to the cars? Check. Asian actors? Well, not this time. But again. And soon. Can Donnie Yen drive?”

I come for the cars, the vintage ones are my favorites. But once they took Rodriguez out of that Jensen Interceptor, that was enough for me. Even though there’s are an Aston, Bentley, Rolls and Lada and Lambo in this one. An old Chevy or three (’60s Corvette), that tasty ’70 or so Dodge Charger. But Car Porn. Just say no, people.

Anyway, $100 million (US) is a 50% drop off from the last Paul Walker “Fast,” so there’s hope. The franchise is so top heavy at this point that any plummet in the take the second weekend means the “next” one could be in jeopardy. All those actors, all those locations and all those effects cost money, international take be damned.

Meanwhile, not to get all high road on Universal, Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” remake is closing in on $500 million, “Boss Baby” is well over $100 million in the US.

“Smurfs” officially bombed, in the US. “Get Out” looks as if its final take will be in the $175 million range, which is outstanding.

“Power Rangers” won’t reach $100, “Gifted” opened wider and still only hit the $3 million mark, “Going in Style” didn’t tear the AARP set away from Fox News, “Case for Christ” is slow to fall off, but one week past Easter, it will lose screens and fade. It should clear $10, but no more than $14.

Dry, unemotional and — considering the subject matter — uninspiring, Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ” is a faith-based drama about one atheist’s research-driven conversion to Christianity.

It’s got a great hook. An accomplished, skeptical journalist investigates the “case” for Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the dead as a means of turning his just-found-Jesus wife away from religion. If it “really happened,” well…

But the film, based on Strobel’s book, is so emotionally flat and slow that it forces you to pick up on its ridiculous circular logic and pick apart the half-hearted “reporting” and questioning its hero undertakes. The “case” he makes is all rhetorical tricks aimed at the gullible, and seriously unconvincing.

In the film, Strobel (Mike Vogel of “The Help” and TV’s “Under the Dome”) is a rising star at the 1980s Chicago Tribune, top dog on the paper’s reporting on Ford’s exploding gas-tank econo-box, the Pinto. He even got a book out of it.

At a celebratory dinner, his daughter (Haley Rosenwasser) almost chokes to death. A nurse, dining at the restaurant, intervenes. 

But don’t credit Nurse Alfie Davis (L. Scott Caldwell). “Jesus” did it, she insists. And Mrs. Strobel (one-and-only “Swimfan” Erika Christiansen) believes her. She doesn’t believe in coincidences, or in the odds that a crowded restaurant in any big city would have one person who knows the Heimlich maneuver.

Lee cannot accept her rejection of their shared atheism. And taking guidance from a fellow skeptic on the newspaper staff (Brett Rice) and an editor/believer (Mike Pniewski), decides to follow the edict taped to the newsroom wall.

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

And then he makes his first misstep. He lets the believer on staff define the parameters of the story. Debunk the Resurrection, “and the whole thing falls like a house of cards,” he is told. So that’s where he hunts.

“Experts” throw figures like “there were 500 different witnesses” to the dead Jesus returning to life, according to “ancient texts.” Unlike Homer’s “The Iliad,” (a spurious comparison), there are thousands of those texts, all hearsay dating from some time after the events described. And while the movie has Strobel blurt out “Just because I write something and bury it in dirt doesn’t make it true,” and pays lip service to whether they’re “reliable” eyewitness accounts (all women) or not, that’s a weaselly way of avoiding the hard questions.

The movie Strobel explores assorted skeptic hypotheses, the favorite “skeptic arguments” cited by Christian apologists. The “Swoon Theory” (Jesus wasn’t dead, he fainted and woke up) takes a whipping, courtesy of a doctor/scientist (Tom Nowicki of “The Blind Side”). “Mass psychosis” among these witnesses is dismissed by a famous psychologist (Oscar winner Faye Dunaway).

And Dr. Waters doesn’t leave it there (or consider, for instance, the “mass psychosis” of thousands who testify that they’ve been abducted and probed by aliens). Do you have Daddy issues, she wants to know? Because all the great skeptics (as defined by the movie’s Christian apologists) did! Attack the fellow asking the hard questions, why don’t you?

Well, sure, Strobel says. He’s semi-estranged from his dad (Robert Forster). And the “arrogant” reporter, given to drinking and flying off the handle about sharing his wife with Jesus, is about to wreck his marriage over this as well. That’s a favorite trope of the “angry” corner of faith-based cinema, the “angry” committed atheist.

But what’s any of that got to do with rounding up the provable and separating it from the un-provable or provably false?

A parallel story follows Strobel’s blundering into a crime story where he reached his conclusion before thoroughly finishing the reporting. That’s one of the ways he convinces himself that he’s been looking at this Christianity thing all wrong, that “mind already made up” thing.

But that’s not logical. Reporters make mistakes, but botching that story doesn’t “prove” the false conclusion of another. And “The Case for Christ” is riddled with such fallacious reasoning.  The mini-debates here sound like versions of the climate change “debate,” where one side is operating with facts and the other is forever barking, “case CLOSED,” based on this or that not-quite-germane theory or assertion or gut feeling.

“Case” is a movie built of straw men. That’s a classic propaganda/PR trick where you win an argument by defining the other point of view according to your own prejudices. Goebbels, O’Reilly and Limbaugh are famous for this.  False equivalencies and phony syllogisms abound.

The film makes astute, unimpeachable observations about people who find Jesus in times of crisis — a tragedy or near tragedy or a big mistake (See Colson, Chuck).

But Strobel’s book and the movie based on it limit the parameters of the debate in an effort to fix the outcome of that debate. Strobel’s pre-Internet hunt for experts is circumscribed. He maintains that as a reporter they were telling him what he didn’t want to hear. Balderdash. These are cherry-picked authorities. The man made a fortune and built a family business out of this “Case,” but pointing that out isn’t fair, is it? See how that works?

There are plenty of modern scientist debunkers, but the best his fellow skeptic/editor/mentor can toss out is Bertrand Russell? I was shocked the movie waited almost two hours before trotting out that favorite Christian apologist of them all, C.S. Lewis, an academic who knew a good fairytale when he read one, or published one.

Vogel’s performance lacks spark, or much of anything beyond a lovely 1980 vintage mane of hair. Christiansen seems a little lost, searching for the pathos of this woman. She manages scenes calling for a scolding tone, but nothing with any heart built into it pays off. The Jon Gunn (“Like Dandelion Dust”) direction is perfunctory, by-the-numbers and slack.

The historical Jesus is fascinating to many, and each reference and tidbit discovered about his real life by legitimate, credentialed researchers adds to the picture that a book pieced together from oral histories, written and re-written and edited by committee hundreds of years after his death falls short of delivering.

Let’s leave The Council of Nicea out of this, shall we? No sense muddying the waters. Strobel was a reporter, used to dealing with editors at one of America’s most reactionary newspapers and seeing texts altered by committee, compromised, changed to fit expediencies of what is known or what will get you sued. He never made the leap to “They were this political religious group compiling this book hundreds of years after the events depicted in it, based on oral traditions altered and finagled to fit dogma?”

The mists of time conceal much, which benefits every religion (save Scientology and Mormonism). Faith is meant to fill in the blanks that hard, factual truths leave can’t reveal. Biblical literalists trip over this time and again. Why waste energy and credibility trying to “prove” that which cannot be proven and has never been duplicated in recent (more documentable) history? The Shroud of Turin? Seriously? If your faith is strong, why try to twist “facts” to make these homilies, life lessons and sermons more than they provably are?

The tropes it trots out, the arguments it repeats, the circular logic that it relies on, make the movie feel like one we’ve already seen. “The Case for Christ” won’t convert any critical thinker, but more disappointingly, it fails as faith-based entertainment. It’s a heartless house of cards built to defend a house of cards, with meek-inheriting-the-Earth acting in the bargain.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements including medical descriptions of crucifixion, and incidental smoking

Cast: Erika Christiansen, Robert Forster, Faye Dunaway, Rus Blackwell, Tom Nowicki

Credits: Directed by Jon Gunn, script by Brian Bird, based on the Lee Strobel book. A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:52

The formula for movies about “special” kids is given a clever flip on its head with “Gifted,” a cuter-than-cute comedy about a very smart child and the people wrestling over control of her future.

Usually, the parent figure is over-matched, somebody who needs to be convinced their child is brilliant. See “Little Man Tate.” Catch the upcoming “The Book of Henry.”

And Frank (Chris Evans), the marine mechanic/father-figure to young Mary (the precocious Mckenna Grace) absolutely, positively REFUSES to let educators use the “G” word about his young ward.

But it’s not because he’s not smart enough to know “gifted” when he sees it. It turns out, he’s a well-educated deep thinker who home-schooled her until he saw the need for her to socialize, “try being a kid,” grow up to “have compassion for others.” It turns out, she’s the child of a math prodigy, grandchild of other top flight academics.

Frank’s fight for Mary, and with her teacher (Jenny Slate), her grandmother (Lindsay Duncan) and the courts, is over Mary’s one shot at having a balanced “normal” life. His mother knows “the price you pay for greatness.” Frank isn’t willing to make Mary pay it.

And they will go to court over that disagreement.

Evans has such a light charm about him that it’s a wonder Hollywood hasn’t found more for him to do outside of thrillers and tights-wearing comic book pictures. As “the quiet, damaged hot guy” in this Florida coastal town (that looks like Georgia, because it is), Evans’ Frank rarely loses his cool, never hits a laugh line too hard.

Mary’s fretting over being sentenced to regular elementary school, but Frank has a winning argument. “You’re gonna meet kids today you can borrow money from for the rest of your life.”

Director Marc Webb of “(500) Days of Summer” gives Slate an earthy warmth through her young teacher wardrobe and some incredibly revealing close-ups. Bonnie, the teacher, is put-off by the rude kid who is disrupting her class, and plainly rattled when she challenges Mary with math problems the seven-year-old can do in her head.

But with just one look, a flash of “Oh, THAT’S what this little girl is,” Slate gets across Bonnie’s memory of her higher calling. She will find extra work for Mary. She will pay a little extra attention to her. She will bond with the brilliant, mouthy brat. And  she will talk to “Dad” (actually uncle) and try to convince him of what she sees as the right way forward.

Mckenna is capably adorable as something of an impertinent caricature of a gifted child, and she’s not alone in the “caricature as cast member” in “Gifted.” Mary’s profanity and wise-beyond-her-years impatience and compassion are meant to buttress the film’s most troubling thesis — the “nature over nurture” thing. Mary’s mal-adjustments aren’t limited to rudeness. She’s not above defending the bullied and praising classmates whose work she recognizes as superior. Yes, she “learned” that. Somehow.

Duncan’s British-born Eastern elite grandmother is so broadly drawn as to be laughably arch. Why not give her a mustache to twirl? Would’ve livened up the lengthy courtroom scenes that dominate the last third of the picture.

Conversely, Oscar winner Octavia Spencer‘s Earth Mama neighbor, teaching the little girl to sing along with the greats of Soul music, is entirely too on the nose. Love Octavia, but this role gives her nothing but likability and a paycheck.

Evans is convincingly rugged, convincingly smart and convincingly wearied from the weight of deciding this child’s future. But Webb seriously lets him down in the big “boat mechanic” scene. Watch Evans vigorously work a screwdriver on a power boat, keeping his hands, the product placement outboard motor (It can’t actually be BROKEN, can it? That would entail taking off the engine cover.) and Mckenna in the frame of the shot.

He’s screw-drivering empty air. There’s nothing on a boat to screw, hammer or wrench within his reach.

But Evans is so lovable –so striking in the profiles Webb constantly frames him in — you understand why an adoring child would climb her uncle like a jungle gym. He has an ease about him that almost makes you forgive the movie’s first HUGE misstep. Yeah, it involves his child’s teacher and sex. Like so much else about “Gifted,” that’s pre-ordained and easily guessed.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, language and some suggestive material
Cast: Chris Evans, Mckenna Grace, Jenny Slate, Octavia Spencer, Lindsay Duncan
Credits: Directed by Marc Webb, written by Tom Flynn. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:41

An interesting thought experiment I apply to every animated film I see is “Did they NEED to animate this story to tell it?” What justifies telling the story this way?

The vast majority of animated movies pass that test. But the anime marvel “Your Name.” gives that premise a severe workout. For much of its length, Makoto Shinkai’s movie, based on his novel, is a quirky Japanese body-switch comedy.

Mitsuha (voiced by Mone Kamisharaishi) is a small town girl who wakes up in the body of a Tokyo boy, Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki). And the script has these naive, pimply teens reacting in ways we’ve seen in such “classics” as “Switch.”

The virginal Taki cannot believe he has “boobies,” and in Mitsuha’s body, Mitsuha’s sister is constantly interrupting “him” having his first grope.

Mitsuha is similarly shocked at what’s below her waistline. “I have to PEE” has never seemed, um, sadder.

But Shinkai’s tale takes on layers of meaning and explanation, and a modern means of communication. There’s magic in “twilight time,” by Japanese tradition. A comet is making a close pass by Earth.

And as these confused kids keep waking up, one day in their own skin, the next day in somebody else’s, they’re not just alarming their peers and parent figures. They’re determined to find answers.

A “Memento” touch. They magic marker their real name onto the hand of whoever’s body they’re in. An iPhone era twist. They can check phone logs, and one of them keeps a cloud diary on his phone. The mystery starts to unravel.

But Shinkai never spoon-feeds us the details, never over-explains what’s happening. You pick it up by paying attention, just like the protagonists.

“We’re switching places in our dreams!”

Maybe.

The plot twists into something more pulse-pounding as each figures out that they’re not just connected by body, disconnected by distance. There’s a time element, a ticking clock. That comet is a threat.

The body-switching gives Taki a “feminine side” that appeals to a sexy older employee at the restaurant where he works. Mitsuha, a mousy, put-upon mayor’s daughter, finds the masculine bravado to take baby steps, and assertive steps, when that comet threat is revealed.

And every morning’s forgetting means that there’s less and less of a chance that each will actually find the other.

Anime has a distinct, stereotypical look — wide-eyed urchins, bright, detailed water-colored imagery, slightly jerky movement and legions of Japanese school girls in their short-skirted uniforms.

“Your name.” stands out for its marvelously sketched-in views of modern Japanese life, of the city mouse/country mouse mores and traditional gender roles (donning the makeup of the Noh theater for dance enactments in a village festival).

Shinkai did not need to animate this. The big special effects are perfectly manageable in any Hollywood thriller.

But the shimmering, layered water (glistening splashes of added-light in the foreground of the scenes), the uncluttered city and idealized countryside of most anime depictions of Japan serve the film well.

There’s never been much more than a fringe audience for anime in the U.S., which suggests that Hollywood might not be long in taking a live-action shot at this story. But whatever the budget, whoever the stars, they’ll have to go some ways to top the magic managed by artists and their brushes spelling out “Your name.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, suggestive content, brief language, and smoking
Cast: Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryûnosuke Kamiki
Credits: Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, English script by Clark Cheng. A FUNanimation release.
Running time: 1:46

Billy Joel says he remembers three things about 1969.

“Led Zeppelin’s first album. Woodstock. And Joe Cocker.”

And why did he fight the traffic, the crowds, the mud and an endless succession of earlier acts to go to Woodstock?

“Joe Cocker.”

Netflix’s new documentary about the British blues singer doesn’t dive deep into the psyche of a man who is mostly remembered for his much-mocked stage antics. But John Edginton’s film, with interviews from childhood friends, longtime bandmates, producers, engineers, admiring peers and backup singers, does create a marvelous tribute to a singer who, like James Brown, left it all onstage every night– hundreds of stages, thousands and thousands of nights.

He was “consumed” by the music, totally giving himself over to the songs, songwriters Jimmy Webb and Randy Newman testify. He was “in a trance” during every show, his longtime tour manager Ray Neopolitano adds, and backup singer Rita Coolidge backs him up.

And he was so into every note of every song “that he was playing ‘air guitar’ before there was such a thing as air guitar,” offers veteran Rolling Stone writer Ben Fong Torres.

The film’s best tour guide through the Cocker epoch is hometown friend and long time bandmate Chris Stainton, who remembers the origins — he composed Cocker’s first English hit, “Marjorine,” which Joe wrote the lyrics to.

Stainton was there for the rise, the break out in America, and the drug-induced fall. And he was on that epic “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour, scores of cities, scores of shows, post-Woodstock, when Cocker turned over assembling his band to the great Leon Russell, who proceeded to create an event (filmed for a concert doc) that was so stuffed with musicians that every hit of that Cocker era — “The Letter,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Feelin’ Alright” — earned a definitive “Wall of Sound” treatment every night.

As Coolidge, later a star solo singer, and A & M Records boss Jerry Moss note, “nobody made any money on that.” But damn, what a sound.

Cocker is heard on old taped interviews, many with Fong Torres, and comes off the way those closest to him describe him — gentle, easy-going. The deranged stage presence, which could make him intimidating, even scary? Just the facade of a man losing himself in every song, not fretting over his attire, his hair or the alarming glint in his bugged-out eyes.

If the film itself is just a surface gloss, that’s because we don’t get a sense of what drove him into drugs and liquor. Coolidge suggests the crazy pressure his management put him under (threats, she says). But others think he was a guy who could give up his vices, but once he took that first drink/pill/etc., he wouldn’t stop until he was incoherent.

A forgotten hero in this tale — remember, Cocker staged an epic comeback in the 70s, recorded a Oscar-winning hit song and played to packed venues to the end of his life — is Michael Lang. The always-grinning, always upbeat co-creator of Woodstock took over Cocker’s management, started him on the road to manageable sobriety and remade him as a star, only to be discarded as Cocker’s star reached its apex.

“Mad Dog With Soul” is most to be treasured for its music, from that first hit to “You Are So Beautiful” to the last (“When the Night Comes,” a memorable song from a forgettable Tom Selleck prison picture), all given life-and-death urgency by Cocker. The live performances and the plaudits of his peers deliver a whole new appreciation for his genius.

Songwriter Randy Newman, whose “Guilty” and “You Can Leave Your Hat On” Cocker burned into a generation’s brain, deserves the last word, and gets it.

“Wait. He’s NOT in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes
Cast: Joe Cocker, Billy Joel, Rita Coolidge, Pam Cocker, Vic Cocker, Randy Newman, Chris Stainton, Ben Fong Torres, Jimmy Webb
Credits: Written and directed by John Edginton. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

I like to think Kenneth Branagh, who directed the lighthearted first film, and Chris Hemsworth set the tone, here. But that decision was made higher up, to be sure. Different director, but Marvel had to see that light is what works with Norse gods. Casting Jeff Goldblum as a new heavy kind of gives away the store. But if you, like me, were wondering where on Earth they could have taken Thor in any serious vein, this provides a welcome answer.

Yeah, Doctor Strange will be there, and The Hulk and yes, that’s Cate Blanchett and Karl Urban turns up, too. Bless’em. Bless’em all. Nov. 3.

“Diamond Cartel” bills itself as “The final film of Peter O’Toole.”

There are worse ways to draw interest to your blood-soaked, nonsensical Kazakhstan-filmed war between warlords debacle. Probably.

But there is no worse way for an actor to make his exit from the screen which he lit up for fifty years. Yeah, O’Toole wanted one last check so he took a tiny role in this silly slaughterhouse.

When he finally appears, as the veteran smuggler “Tugboat,” late in the third act, that plummy voice he was famous for is long gone. And even the gravelly one which his last films featured is denied us in this atrocity, a film which he no doubt died before he could loop and at least let his final character sound like him.

So they dubbed somebody else in doing a poor impersonation of Peter O’Toole.

And aside from that, and oh, dying before it came out, he got off easily. It’s Armand Assante, no stranger to D-movie disasters, and Michael Madsen and Tiny Lister and their fellow character actors Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa who stuck around long enough to be humiliated by this picture.

“Cartel” is a badly-scripted thriller that lays bare the compromises and petty indignities of acting for the movies, and getting your movie financed. All those Western (and Eastern-Western) names were attached to Salamat Mukhammed-Ali’s film so he could get it financed.

They, in turn, shot on location in one of the garden spots of the planet (cough cough) and were paid (no doubt) peanuts to share the screen with local actors who had to be dubbed into English, in a movie that required start-to-finish voice-over narration to make a lick of sense.

Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova plays a one-time assassin, on the run with her lover (Alexey Fradetti) from the warlord/casino-owner/painter/horse lover/pianist Mussa, improbably played by Armand Assante.

Nurlan Alteyev is the perfectly menacing mass murderer paid to track them down. Tagawa is a rival warlord, Madsen and Lister show up for a single scene each, early on.

There’s this diamond, The Star of the East, that Mussa wants. We don’t actually see it.
We do, however, see the briefcase full of greenbacks that were supposed to buy it, which is what our lovers are on the run with.

There are vast gunfights, desert road car-chases and one scene of slaughter involving a shovel that is novel, not something we see in A, B or C movies. Usually.

It’s all just awful, with Assante abusing bit players (hair grabbing, stage slapping) and foaming at the mouth, and our narrator/heroine trying to make sense of it all with pithy voice overs.

“What you call a massacre, we call a Day at the Zoo!”

O’Toole, who left us in December of 2013, who began his big-screen career with a bit part in a passable version of “Kidnapped” before becoming a star in “Lawrence of Arabia” a couple of years later, makes his exit without any of the dignity he was due.

I hope they believe in ghosts in Kazakhstan, because there’s a chain-smoking English coot about to haunt everybody who so violated him, post mortem. He said “Yes” to the role, and he made a lot of movies that didn’t do his legacy any favors. But they certainly didn’t pay him enough money to leave him this ill-used.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Cast: Armand Assante, Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova, Nurlan Alteyev, Alexey Fradetti, Michael Madsen, Tiny Lister, Peter O’Toole

Credits:Directed by Salamat Mukhammed-Ali, script by Magamet Bachaev and Salamat Mukhammed-Ali. A Cleopatra release.

Running time: 1:37

Noomi Rapace is an old hand at making us fear for her, root for her to escape dire circumstances and keep the faith that whoever she’s playing, the woman is intrepid and not to be under-estimated.

The one and only “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is in jeopardy again in “Rupture,” a sci-fi tale of terror and torture porn whose title just might be a pun on “Rapture.”

Renee (Rapace) is just a single Kansas City mom with a temperamental tweenage son and a jerk of an ex husband. But “they” are watching her. They have hidden cameras all over her house. And one day, one of them (Michael Chiklis) sets her up for a tire blowout on the way to sky-diving.

An efficient yet not quite professional-looking team kidnaps her and drives her to an abandoned factory — somewhere. Others are there. She can hear their screams.

Enraged and terrified, “What do you WANT from me?” is what she yells when the alarming (How can she breathe?) plastic tape gag is peeled off. They covered her mouth and nose, lashed her to a bench in a delivery truch, but left her eyes free. They want her to see what she’s going to get.

“Are you the government? CDC? Do I have a virus?”

Nope. They’re the ones asking the questions, firm, clinical and unsympathetic. Lesley Manville and Kelly Bishe play two of Renee’s captor/tormentors. Chiklis, donning funny magnifying googles, does the interrogating.

“Any food allergies? Fear of snakes? Fear of SPIDERS?”

It’s a rhetorical question. They, and we, have seen her freak out over a spider in her house. So that’s to be it. This woman, who bragged to her child “I’m capable of ANYthing” as she headed skydiving, is being tested. And the test will involve spiders.

The script, by two guys who gave us “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus” and “Secretary” and most tellingly, “Hard Candy,” between them, has a lot of first-time screenwriter clumsiness.

Never has foreshadowing in a film felt more obvious than when Renee stuffs an Exacto knife in her pocket.  Rarely is an elaborate three “clank” door lock given so much screen time, visually and aurally. Never has a big, roomy ventilation shaft felt more like a plot device.

Rapace makes Renee’s escape attempt as harrowing as you might expect. Her slight size builds “She’ll never it” into every role that puts her in harm’s way. The presence of veteran bad guy Peter Stormare (“Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski”) makes us fear the worst.

But the genre ID “sci-fi” unravels much of the suspense of “Rupture.” Her captors want to hasten her own “rupture,” and promise her release. “Why would they do that?” we wonder, distracted by this layer of the story. Are they alien brainwashers?

The middle acts are fraught with tension, the finale an utter cop out. Kind of makes you realize why we haven’t heard much from director/co-writer Steven Shainberg or co-writer Brian Nelson in years. They’ve outsmarted themselves, here.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, scenes of torture

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Chiklis, Peter Stormare, Kerry Bishe, Lesley Manville

Credits:Directed by Steven Shainberg, written by Brian Nelson and Steven Shainberg. A — release.

Running time: 1:41

April is shaping up as its usual placeholder in terms of the Hollywood box office. Big summer movies are just a week or so away, animation and kids’ fare is dominating, and the older audience was thrown a bone this weekend in “Going in Style.”

“The Boss Baby” is headed toward a $26 million+ weekend, and should clear $100 million by next Thursday night. That’s enough to nudge it past “Beauty and the Beast” this weekend, which based on a big Friday, will hit $25 million.

The new wide release newcomers of note, “Smurfs: Lost Village” and “Going in Style” are reaching the low teens.   “Smurfs” will clear $14, “Going in Style” figures on hitting just over $12.

“The Case for Christ,” a faith-based polemic, cracked the top ten but isn’t blowing up in that “God’s Not Dead” way. Not yet.  A big Easter Sunday/Monday holiday boost could help it clear $5 million, but that doesn’t figure in Deadline.com’s projections. 

“Beauty and the Beast” will have earned $430 million by midnight Monday.

“Power Rangers” won’t reach $100 million, but considering the low-cost cast, it may be close enough. “Ghost in the Shell” is, like so many films already this year, a bomb.

The unworthy “Kong” is over $150, “Logan” will finish its run close to $230.

Channel surfing any service that specializes in classic films, your eye can’t help but be seized by the merest flash of a film by Max Ophüls. A master of mise en scene and a filmmaker who single-handedly expanded the boundaries of what came to be called film noir, Ophüls made 30 movies in Germany, France and Hollywood , most of them acknowledged masterpieces and every one of them a black and white feast for the eyes.

Maximilian Oppenheimer was born in Germany, a Jewish stage actor who took on the new last name to avoid shaming the family name.  His years of stage work, acting and then directing, inform his films, which have a theatrical quality — sets densely packed with layers of imagery, concentrated lighting and intense energy jammed within the frame.

Famed for his foggy, crowded nightlife scenes, his daylight exteriors, seen mostly in his French films, are just as brimming over with life, the lighting contrasts just as startling.

Every so often I stumble across one I haven’t seen, and instantly recognizing its origins, I’m drawn in. TCM recently ran “Le Plaisir,” a postcard pretty conceit rounding up three clever stories by Guy de Maupassant.  Nightlife scenes capture a fury of activity and smokey atmosphere, a church funeral in the last episode is practically a Dutch Master painting with its use of skylights stained glass (in a black and film) and candles.

“La Ronde” is his most famous film, similarly rococo in style, anecdotal and capturing a broad swath of life, this time in turn of the 20th century Vienna.

“The Earrings of Madame de...” recreates 19th century Paris high life again. This time, we meet a cavalcade of characters thanks to a pricey pair of earrings.

And then, there was my first unforgettable exposure to Ophüls, his Hollywood masterpiece, “Letter from an Unknown Woman.” The faint air of doom, broken romance and a lost place and time vividly come to life in this melodrama about a cowardly rake of a pianist (Louis Jordan) who gets a letter that may unravel the source of his downfall. Just gorgeous in its recreation of 19th century Vienna, it has as much Stefan Zweig bite as a Hollywood film of 1948 could have managed.

Does anyone today put as much care and craft into mise en scene (“putting in the scene”), fussing over framing, set dressing, decor, shadowy lighting and camera movement — through windows, street fog, smoke or snow? The texture of the images is what marks an Ophüls film, frame by frame. Who else is that visually particular?

Aside from Wes Anderson, a fluffier master of modern mise en scene, nobody comes to mind. He shares the maestro’s mania for detail in depth, the touches that make a world feel lived in, and at in films such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” least some of Ophüls’ passion for making his camera seem it is eavesdropping, slipping through windows, curtains and the like, uninvited, to deliver us to a world long gone.