Movie Nation

You don’t have to be Ridley Scott or have $100 million to make a Trip to Mars movie.

A couple of minimalist sets, video monitors to bring other settings/characters and a desert you can film in reddish filters and voila — we’ve got our Mission to Mars.

But whatever Paramount’s modest intentions in green-lighting “Approaching the Unknown,” losing the race into theaters to “The Martian” renders it superfluous.

Some good actors make it worth checking out, but it feels like the rough draft for a prequel to the Matt Damon movie. It’s meditative without being deep, brief without feeling taut and tense. The most important thing it shares with “The Martian” is a sense of “We’re going to Mars. It’s time. Might as well get on with it.” Everything it does — survival space science, etc. — “Martian” does better, and with humor.

“Approaching the Unknown” is something of a tour de force for the great British character actor Mark Strong. As Captain William Stanaforth, an American on his way to be the First Man on Mars, he is all interior monologues about his suitability for solitude and the nature of the challenge.

“Nothing lives there. Nothing has ever died there,” he narrates. “But I’m going to bring it to life.”

Stanaforth is a biologist who has concocted a reactor that renders rocks and soil down to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which it then links up for H2O — water.

NASA (never mentioned by name) has shipped some habitat units and supplies to the Red Planet. And since there’s now  a deep space two-man space station, Stanaforth and his ship, the Zephyr, will stop there to collect more supplies. That way not everything he needs has to be lifted from Earth by the same Heavy Lift rocket that will carry him to Mars.

It’s a “one-way mission,” but he’s not going there to die. He will set up camp, crank up his reactor, make water and grow plants. You know, like Matt Damon in “The Martian.” And others will follow.

The Big Idea here isn’t a new one. The pilot of TV’s “The Twilight Zone” was also spun off the conceit that the solitude facing one-man missions in space might drive an astronaut mad. And when things go wrong for Stanaforth, his Mission Control cap-com (capsule communicator), played by Luke Wilson, harangues  him about that from long distance.

“Keep it together. Stay sane. Stay focused.”

For a biologist, Stanaforth has mad engineering skills. He’s brought an old wooden tool box he no doubt inherited from his grandfather, and his trouble-shooting and tinkering talents are well-established in flashbacks (inventing the reactor) and fixing early issues.

But the one mission component that doesn’t have a backup is him. Even though there’s another astronaut following him a few weeks later (Sanaa Lathan) in another ship.

His supply stop at the space station tips him, and us, that this isn’t going to all go according to plan. The two man crew there is jittery, testy and nothing like the all-business/gung-ho astronauts we met from “The Right Stuff” generation. They’ve gone metaphysical thanks to the loneliness and prolonged pairing up.

That’s the main novelty of Mark Elijah Rosenberg’s debut film. The casual, caustic and curse-filled conversations, blame-slinging and blame shifting and disobeying of orders seen here has been pretty much winnowed out of the astronaut pool from the start by NASA’s rigorous psychological testing in the real world. Lathan has only a couple of (video monitor) scenes, and she shows human defensiveness and sass that we’ve never heard from real astronauts.

The Zephyr’s interior looks like the inside of the Space Shuttle (especially the Shuttle’s cargo bay), and Wilson’s Mission Control video images could have been filmed in a storefront office in any office park. Much of the effects budget was spent on dreamy Hubble Space Telescope-mimicking imagery.

I liked the practicality of the spaceship, and Strong’s performance. But “Approaching the Unknown” feels incomplete. The drama comes from situations that are old hat — “Approaching the Overfamiliar.” The third act is straight-up recycling which any classic sci-fi film fan will recognize. Rosenberg is nobody’s idea of a “Star Child.”

Still, if you want another lesson about why we should be going to Mars and what we’ll encounter and maybe find out about ourselves, “Unknown” will do until we have an actual liftoff.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast:Mark Strong, Luke Wilson, Sanaa Lathan
Credits: Written and directed by Mark Elijah Rosenberg. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:30

Children’s cartoons from most every film studio these days adhere to the Pixar model — especially in terms of themes and messages.

“You’ve got a friend in me,” and “friends stick together” and the like seems to be as deep as such movies’ screenplays go. They’re following the Hippocratic Oath of children’s entertainment — “First, do no harm.”

But there’s something unsettling about the film based on the popular “Angry Birds” video game — something almost sinister, and I’m not just talking about the game’s smart phone app reputation as “leaky,” as a data-mining tool used against those who download it.

In a sea of kids’ TV and films that preach diversity and pound an emasculating wimpiness into tiny noggins — think everything that came after “Arthur,” “Clifford, the Big Red Dog” and “Dragon Tales” on PBS, for instance — here’s a movie that embraces tantrums, lack of self-control, cynicism, violence and fear of “the other.”

Is it just about greedy pigs swarming over Bird Island and stealing all the birds’ eggs, and about slow-to-catch-on birds being shot into a pig fortress — missile, style — to retrieve them?

What are we to make of these invading/migrating pigs? What is the intellectual underpinning of Bird Island’s icon, the slovenly, inept and vain “Mighty Eagle” whose followers lose faith in him? An analogy for America, with this movie a commentary on a gullible but happy, peaceful Europe/West threatened by gauche, marauding “pigs”?

Nothing in any film is truly “here by accident,” and that’s especially true of animation. What was the veteran TV producer/writer who scripted this, Jon Vitti (“The Simpsons”, “The Office,” “The Larry Sanders Show”), trying to say or to slip in as subtext?

Unlike say, “Wall-E,” whose sermon about slothful, destructive consumption was out in the open, or “Inside Out,” which treated every facet of a personality as valuable and what makes us human, or “Zootopia,” with its blunt message of tolerance, “Angry Birds” (the film) is harder to deconstruct and parse.

The story concocted from the game concerns “Red” (the voice of Jason Sudeikis), who never really fits in on Bird Island because of his temper and eagerness to think the worst of others. He’s insulting, abrasive and a loner.

“Anger is  weed growing in our garden,” he is lectured. So something must be done about Red.

He’s sentenced to anger management therapy for one blow-up too many, and that’s where he meets the speedy but snarky Chuck (Josh Gad) the explosive Bomb (Danny McBride) and hulking, simmering Terence (Sean Penn). Matilda (Maya Rudolph) presides over them and runs their group therapy, to no avail.

Then the pigs show up. The pig everybody meets (Bill Hader) is amusing and charming and obsequious. He comes bearing gifts. All the flightless, conflict-avoiding birds let the pigs — there are others the head-pig isn’t admitting came with him — flatter them, entertain them with their country music hoedowns and the like.

But the pig ship hit Red’s house, and he’s not falling for them. He gripes, protests and embarrasses all the birds with his rudeness to their guests, who wear COEXIST bumper stickers on their polluting vehicles, but have this “Twilight Zone”-“To Serve Man” eagerness to their actions and “consume everything” lust in their eyes.

Red seeks counsel from the legendary Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage), a pot-bellied icon who caresses his many trophies and pees into his own “Pool of Wisdom” at the top of Bird Mountain. He’s no help.

But when the pigs reveal their true nature, Red must lead the birds out of their complacency and into the fight that the video game is famous for.

“We’re birds. We’re descended from dinosaurs. We’re not SUPPOSED to be nice!”

Sight-gags — a woodpecker is the courtroom artist/newspaper photographer, pecking out images on wood. There’s a Birds & Bees Fertility Clinic, and the pigs are into Pig Latin, Ham Radio and DVDs (“Kevin Bacon Is “Hamlet”!”).

Sudeikis is well-cast as a bird whose “cardinal sin” is cynicism, but he has virtually nothing funny to say. The thinly-disguised avian profanity, “Well, pluck my life” is about it. Gad, McBride and the rest of the voice cast is similarly wasted.

There’s a funny 3D gag or two (never enough to warrant the higher ticket price). And the combat finale is visually inventive and explosive.

But if it’s not about the laughs, and this isn’t, then what is this exercise in brand marketing really going for?

The “Twilight Zone” episode that this ties to, based on a Damon Knight short story, had an anti-communist subtext. Was Vitti trying to turn Red into an anti-Red, or something broader? Anti-consumption/anti-capitalist? Anti-immigrant?

Children’s entertainment has long had more going on than is obvious on first blush, from Babar the Elephant to Peanuts to “Wall-E.” “The Angry Birds Movie, disquieting as it feels, is certainly trying to shove something between the lines.

But the effort is so clumsy and the lines themselves so limp that the entertainment that’s supposed to be the vehicle for this murky message fails, and with it the movie.

MPAA Rating:PG for rude humor and action |

Cast: The voices of Jason Sudeikis, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader and Peter Dinklage
Credits: Directed by Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly, script by Jon Vitti. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:37

If horror movies are meals, “The Darkness” is one that takes the smorgasbord approach.

It’s got demons, a haunted house, portals to “the Third World,” a demon-targeted autistic kid, Native American rituals, an alcoholic mother who sees things but whom no one will believe, and a Mexican American exorcist.

The “Darkness” effects — shadows and ghost handprints and underworld storms projected onto a suburban bedroom ceiling — are decent.

Kevin Bacon and horror vet Radha Mitchell (“Silent Hill”) anchor a solid cast. Director Greg Mclean did the primal Aussie horror pic “Wolf Creek” and its sequel.

But it’s a lumbering affair, a fright-fest with no frights, a scary movie with zero sense of urgency.

A family vacation into the desert parks of the American southwest puts their tweenage autistic son, Mikey (David Mazouz) in touch with Native American spirits, thanks to his stumbling into a ritual religious cave. He puts some engraved stones into the backpack he never lets out of his Autism-focused sight.

And when they get home, all Native American hell breaks loose.

Only it doesn’t. This patchwork script meanders and dawdles. The neighbor’s canine barks an insistent warning.

“What is UP with that dog?”

And Mikey communes with the spirits, letting them and their menacing ceremonial masks and sooty footprints into Mom’s nice, clean house.

Too much time is spent establishing this family’s dysfunction. Mom used to drink, daughter (Lucy Fry) has rage and eating issues, architect Dad acts awfully guilty about…something.

It takes a good hour for anybody to catch on, and even longer to seek any sort of help. Of course, their first call is to a supernaturalist.

The frights have not punch to them and the slow pace — see Radha Mitchell in the tub, see Radha swim laps — is the result of a film stuffed with filler scenes that don’t advance either the plot or us to the edge of our seats.

The scariest thing about “The Darkness” turns out to be the trailers to this summer’s more promising horror offerings, “Lights Out” and “Don’t Breathe.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, some disturbing violence, brief sensuality and language

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, Lucy Fry, Paul Reiser
Credits: Directed by Greg Mclean, script by Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause, Greg Mclean.

Running time: 1:32. A High Top/BH Tilt release.

“Captain America: Civil War” still owns the box office this weekend. But it’s falling off over 60% from its robust $179 million opening frame. A 60% drop is a little steeper than average with a blockbuster with great reviews and audience enthusiasm. You’d expect a 40-50% fall-off, mainly because of the staggering numbers tallied on opening, and the fact that Thursday night tickets count in that mark.

That means it’ll hit $70 million, not the $80 million that was predicted. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that should have scared every other studio from opening anything close to it.

Thus, “Money Monster” opens in the $15 million range, reaching a different (older) audience, out-performing its predicted $12 million ceiling. Mixed reviews didn’t help it, but they aren’t killing off that Clooney/Roberts appeal either.

“The Darkness” tried to wrench away some of that comic book movie audience, the horror fans subset of it. And failed. It’s only managing about $5 million for the whole weekend, based on Friday night’s numbers.

“Captain America” will surpass Disney’s latest “Jungle Book” by early next week. The Kipling classic is just over $300 million now, and “Civil War” will be at $295 or so Sunday night.

No explanation required.

The pedigree for “Fathers and Daughters” suggests there were great expectations for this melodrama at one time.

Oscar winners Russell Crowe, Jane Fonda and Octavia Spencer, Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis and reunited “Big Love” lovers Amanda Seyfried and Aaron Paul are in the cast.

The director, Gabriele Muccino, helmed two blatant grasps at Oscar nominations for Will Smith, “Seven Pounds” and “Pursuit of Happyness.”

It has Crowe, who has never recovered the fans he lost eleven years ago when he infamously tossed a phone at a hotel clerk, playing a novelist and doting daddy who is losing his mind, a sad, sick man who may lose his daughter to evil in-laws in the process. That’s what’s called “softening the image.”

It has Seyfried as that daughter, all grown up and dealing with intimacy issues by bedding and abandoning every man she fancies. What might happen if she finds Real Love (Paul)? She’s also a psychotherapist in training, trying to help a speechless child (Wallis, of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”) overcome her own “trust” issues.

Spencer is Katy the future-shrink’s mentor/adviser, Fonda is Jacob-the-cracking-up writer’s stoic literary agent.

And for good measure, there’s Diane Kruger as the brittle, drunken sister-in-law who can never forgive Jacob for being at the wheel in the accident that killed his wife, her sister and Katy’s mom. Bruce Greenwood plays her hatefully rich, heavy-handed husband, determined to wrench young Katy (the adorable Kylie Rogers) from her daddy.

But the sum of “Fathers and Daughters” is so much less than each of its individual parts. A misshapen attempt at maudlin (not unlike Muccino’s other Hollywood films), it enrages, here and there, but rarely touches or moves us.

Crowe is at his most sympathetic, a man having seizures, committing himself to a mental hospital in the film’s 1989 opening. He fetches six year old Katy from the in-laws upon getting out, but they’re all over him, determined to adopt her out of his life. He needs money. He needs a hit book. And he’s losing his mind.

Cut to the present, 27 years later, where Katy is pursuing her psychology degree. No, that college math doesn’t really add up. Seyfried, whatever wildly uneven career she is pursuing these days, is quite sympathetic as a broken woman whose psychic injuries date from decades before.

“I don’t love,” she tells her own therapist. “There’s nothing in here.”

The “Why is she still in college at 32?” math is just one of the lapses in the movie’s logic. Katy is constantly defying orders to break through to the child she’s treating, with no consequences. Greenwood and Krueger’s characters are insufferable caricatures of the worst in human behavior.

And the novel that the “blocked” writer frantically types away at is apparently inspired by the simple banalities of his own father-daughter relationship. That’s a best-seller?

Muccino should have thinned this out, picked up the pace to give urgency to the novelist’s impending madness and literary quest, spent less money on peripheral characters so that he’d feel less guilt about trimming their scenes to quick sketches that make the plot work. Fewer sex scenes (We get the point.,), fewer over-the-top seizures (Ditto), fewer father-daughter idylls.

Without those trims, “Fathers and Daughters” — The banality of the title is telling. That, and it makes no sense in the story as edited and presented here. — amounts to a lot of dead space with the odd great moment, a lot of plot and characters and dead-end scenes that add nothing to a story we have been twenty minutes ahead of after the first half hour.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content/references

Cast: Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Diane Kruger, Quvenzhané Wallis
Credits: Directed by Gabriele Muccino, script by Brad Desch. A Voltage release.

Running time: 1:56

Gennadiy Mokhnenko is a two-fisted Pentacostalist pastor who sees himself as a character he remembers from a children’s cartoon.

He is “Gennadiy the Crocodile,” friend to children everywhere, and a friend with teeth.

Steve Hoover’s documentary “Almost Holy” follows this Ukrainian force of nature as he rescues child addicts from the streets, from those exploiting and abusing them, from a broken disinterested “system” and (ex-Soviet) culture and from the very pharmacists who sell them the drugs that take their youth, their health (some have lost limbs) and often, their lives.

In broken English, Mokhnenko describes the street kids of his city, Mariupol, Ukraine. And then he fearlessly shows you what he’s doing about them.

His methods are heavy-handed — kicking in doors, dragging kids away from their “vagabond” lives. For a pastor, he’s pretty blunt and foul-mouthed. He confronts sexual abusers with profane frankness. He shames pharmacists. On camera.

“I hope my life leaves a mark,” he says. And he is. He is making his corner of the world a tiny bit better, emptying the streets and Ukrainian version of “crack houses” of kids, intervening in the most “Scared Straight” ways.

“Why should I blow a fortune on your unlikely recovery?” he barks at one boy. Some, he gets adopted. Many, he takes into his own family. His wife Lena will bring tears to your eyes as you see both the overwhelming burden their family faces, and the unbending resolve they both have to do this work.

Hoover (“Blood Brothers”) gives voice to the controversy surrounding these “Pilgrim Republic” orphanages, the laws Pastor Crocodile breaks. And he lets us see how this work has been impacted by the Russian invasion of Crimea and assault on the rest of Ukraine. Not every child can be saved. Many want to escape back to the seeming horrors of their old lives.

Structurally, the film skips back and forth, from the “present” — a long cautionary speech at a women’s prison — to the recent past, with interventions, “raids,” counseling sessions — to the more distant past, when Mokhnenko got his start and stirred up enough controversy to wind up (repeatedly) on Ukrainian TV.

That doesn’t help the movie’s coherence or impact.

But this Ukrainian Crocodile Preacher makes an arresting subject, someone you’ll want to meet just to hear his story and see the past that put him on the path to being his country’s “Catcher in the Rye,” saving children from an ugly world and a doomed future.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing content involving drugs and alcohol, sexual references and language

Cast: Gennadiy Mokhnenko
Credits: Written and directed by Steve Hoover. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:49

But but but…

I thought “The Curse of Sleeping Beauty” was a children’s film!

Not animated? In 3D? No true love’s kiss, and all that?

Well, sort of.

It’s a haunted house story, though it doesn’t start that way.

Thomas (Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory) is having nightmares. He’s in a desert, walking up on this canopy bed that’s surrounded by ancient Egyptian totems.

There’s a girl (India Eiseley), impossibly pale sleeping in a bustier to die for.

And just as he’s about to impose a smooch on her, Thomas always wakes up.

“Sleep paralysis,” his shrink advises. OK.

Maybe he’d buy that, but Thomas then inherits this rural, antebellum-styled mansion. His Uncle Clive, whom he never knew existed, left it to him. And did him no favors. Kaiser Gardens is a ruin. People disappear there — and have for years.

His uncle killed himself. Good luck finding a realtor who can sell that.

Linda (Natalie Hall) shows up with a grudge. She lost her brother and that house had something to do with it. She links up with a paranormal investigator (Bruce Davison of “Willard” fame). And they in turn link up with a computer -nerd researcher, stereotypically played by an Asian American (James Adam Lim).

Cobwebs and shadows aren’t enough to make a house spooky on the big screen any more. Adding manikins? Been there, seen that.

The effects — monsters, demons — are mildly chilling.

But Josh Nadler’s script is amateurish in the extreme. A dead give-away? Establishing/explaining locations with words, not images.

“Welcome to my home!” “Welcome to my SECRET lair!”

Welcome to my eye-roll.

The mansion has a basement, but there’s no use yelling “DON’T go in the BASEMENT!”

No point of anybody asking “Is that blood?” Because, you know, we can SEE it.

A couple of non-horror related amusing lines wither and die of loneliness. The actors have nothing to draw on and little to play, so they just mimic expressions and gestures they’ve seen in other horror movies.

There’s nothing at all here to hold your interest, nothing out of the horror movie trope ordinary to see and “Curse’s” utterly generic story and execution offer no object lesson in “What NOT to do when making a horror movie.”

Except maybe look a little deeper than the Brothers Grimm for your source material. The whole Sleeping Beauty connection is lame and forced and adds nothing except “public domain” to your screenplay.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence

Cast: Ethan Peck, India Eisely, Natalie Hall, Bruce Davison, James Adam Lim
Credits: Directed by , script by . An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:26

Everybody pretty much abandoned this weekend to “Captain America: Actually an Avengers Movie.” It could manage another $80 million at the box office (any less than that is a sign of audience fatigue).

So there’s not a lot of new stuff rolling into theaters.

HOWEVER. I was chatting with a theater manager friend and he was asking about “Money Monster.” Lots of grownup patrons have been asking about it, he said.

“Great marketing,” he added. TV ads in all the right places. So “Money Monster” could have a decent weekend.

The reviews aren’t glowing. This is Jodie Foster’s weakest film as a director. She’s rusty, she’s not a thriller or satire or comedy specialist. All of that shows.

But it should do pretty well, pairing up Clooney and Roberts, with Dominic West as the possible heavy and some nice work around the fringes. The Box Office Guru figures $12 million for the weekend. But with that pedigree and cast, it should do better. It’s not bad, just not great. 

“High Rise” based on a J.G. Ballard novel, is set in the ’70s and feels as if it was shot in the ’70s, pre-“Star Wars” — when sci-fi was intellectually ambitious.

It’s not a classic, but it is thought-provoking, dark and features the omni-present Tom Hiddleston.

There’s a “Pele” movie about the soccer star. Casting a Pele proved to be nigh on impossible. The lead can play, but can’t act. 

“Queen Mimi” is a doc that hits limited release. ALL good reviews for this story of a homeless LA woman adopted by the community that meets her at the local laundramat. Not deep, but upbeat. 

Nobody saw “The Darkness” pre-release, so we’re all getting to it as we can. Studios never want to hide their movies, so when they do, it’s for good reason. Horror is smart counter-programming to a comic book blockbuster, though those audiences do overlap a bit. The Box Office Guru predicts $6 million on its opening weekend, which seems low. Quite low.

Another video game turned into a movie? I thought they’d all but given up that pitch? But no, Hollywood “branding uber alles” and such. Ubisoft is a big reason I never got addicted to video games. Glitchy titles in the games that interested me.

Michael Fassbender takes on the lead role in this modern-guy-goes-to-the-15th century to learn “mad skillz” to help him with present day battles.

Like Jeremy Irons, Fassbender will show up for a high paying gig and has no issues with “commercial” projects, even though he’s one of the best actors to not win an Oscar. He classes up this first trailer for the movie, which opens in December.

This cultural meme “Exceptional skills from the past we’ve lost” is a favorite of film and fiction in general. Since the passing on of such information generation to generation is the chief difference between those days and now (We’re no smarter, we just have easy access to all this acquired knowledge), that makes a certain amount of sense. But as the passing on of info was the chief barrier to advancement of any skill in any field, how these wizard warriors are supposed to have learned what they know is a comical mystery. One person’s knowledge, passed person to person, would be seriously limited.

But it’s a video game and I’m over thinking it.

What matters is the thinly credentialed behind the camera talent and a trailer that has some eye candy, and two Oscar winners (Irons and Cotillard), but no sizzle.

December, “Assassin’s Creed.”