Movie Nation

An artist, the old saying goes, is someone who pound the same nails, over and over again.

For the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, those nails include the boundaries of sexual identity and sexual perversion, and his “mommy issues.” All are touched on and one gets quite the going over in “The Skin I Live In,” a rare unpleasant evening at the movies from the director of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.” It’s as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence — sexual and otherwise.

Antonio Banderas plays a brilliant plastic surgeon and scientist with “issues” all his own. He has developed a way of growing artificial skin that threatens to cross the lines of medical ethics. But in his suburban Toledo mansion, he has his own lab where he can experiment far away from the prying eyes of his peers. That’s where he keeps his greatest creation, Vera (Elena Anaya) under what resembles house arrest. There appears to be an intense attraction between them. No, he’s not at home when his thuggish half-brother drops by and rapes her. But the attraction is discomfitingly still there in Almodovar’s world.

In a long flashback, Almodovar, adapting a Thierry Jonquet novel, tells us the Gothic story of how this bizarre situation came to be, of the tragedies in the doctor’s past, the first time he crossed paths with Vera. It’s a real eye-roller of a personal history.

In the present, Vera flirts with the doctor with “I’m made to measure for you,” while the housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) casts dark warnings — “If you don’t kill her, she will kill herself.”

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“Happy Feet Two” is to 2006’s “Happy Feet” what “Babe: Pig in the City” was to “Babe,” a clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

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At long last, “The Twilight Saga” sinks utterly into camp with “Breaking Dawn: Part 1.”

When you’re not giggling at the jokes — and this is the first film in this absurdly self-serious series to take itself lightly — you’ll be rolling your eyes at the dull melodramatics, or rolling on the floor at the big doggie debate amongst the digital wolves.

Bill “Dreamgirls/Kinsey” Condon has a budget that original “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke would have wept for, but he treats it all as a big joke. And maybe he’s right. Boiled down to its essence and wending its way to a conclusion, Stephenie Meyer’s novels are all about the perils of sex and the evils of abortion — even to save the human momma’s life.

One thing the movies have added is that wish fulfillment fantasy that the sheen of product placement gives “Breaking Dawn.” Bella is marrying well, because let’s face it — the Cullens are the one percent.

“Breaking Dawn” begins with a white wisteria wedding and ends with blood. And in between there’s a lot of discussion of an unplanned pregnancy that all concerned seem to believe is the demon seed. All but Bella, that is.

The tone is flippant through the nuptials — Anna Kendrick gets to toast the couple with how Bella was “totally mesmerized by Edward, or the hair” — and on into the island-off-Rio honeymoon. Kristen Stewart is sort of a bystander to the jokes, and gives Bella a serious case of wedding day terror, enough to make us wonder where the heat is that helps her overcome that fear of vampire sex and vampire conversion. But the heat left this teenaged romance after the first movie.

Edward (Robert Pattinson) is as pretty and soft-spoken and passive as ever. But it’s interesting to see Taylor Lautner, as Jacob, the jilted werewolf who never really had a shot with her, mature into his own. He’s not buying anything Bella says under Edward’s influence.

“You can spout that crap to your bloodsuckers,” he declares. He sees right through it.

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Michelle Williams doesn’t so much impersonate Marilyn Monroe as suggest her in the entertaining new bio-drama “My Week With Marilyn.” She doesn’t have Monroe’s overripe figure, Kewpie doll cheeks or ‘C’mere and kiss me’ lips. There’s va-va without the voom.

But in scene after scene, Williams “gets” Monroe — the sex appeal, the vulnerability, the sense of fear of discovery behind all that out-there sexual bravado. When she’s singing about starting a “Heat Wave” by “making my seat wave,” friends you will believe it.

“My Week” is based on a memoir by Colin Clark, an upper class lad who used family connections to land a go-fer job on the set of Sir Laurence Olivier’s film, “The Prince and the Showgirl,” a 1956 comedy that co-starred Monroe, then at the height of her fame. He was 23, Clark (Eddie Redmayne) narrates, and “I wanted to be a part of their world.”

Clark ingratiates himself with Olivier, played with a flint-edged gleam by Kenneth Branagh. Olivier turns on the charm, puts on his most gracious face and fumes fumes fumes as his new co-star upstages him and keeps one and all waiting, on the set, while she works through her moods and is consoled by her enabling acting coach, Paula Strasberg (the wonderful Zoe Wanamaker).  Clark is willing to endure Olivier barking “Boy!” at him just for the chance to be near Monroe.

Next thing he knows, the director and fading star has brought him in as third assistant director. Over the course of the film’s production, Colin Clark became the go-to intermediary in various Brits’ dealings with the mercurial, difficult and neurotic blonde bombshell.

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Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” is a children’s film for grownups — grownup film buffs.

It’s a charming and quite gorgeous exercise in thew few corners of the medium where the Oscar-winning filmmaker has next to no experience — children’s stories, comedy and 3D. And even though it is too long and the master has yet to develop much of a comic touch, this adaptation of Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is a stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese’s lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives in the bowels of a Paris train station in between the World Wars. He is an orphan who hides out, carrying on the job a drunken uncle left him with — servicing the huge clocks there. He slips in and out of the station, getting by on stealing food and drink, hoping not to be noticed by the station inspector, Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Hugo’s a tinkerer, something he picked up from his late father (Jude Law). His favorite project is an old clockwork automaton, a wind-up man he tries to fix with parts stolen from the toy shop run by a cranky old man played by the great Ben Kingsley. When the old man catches Hugo, he seizes the boy’s notebook, full of his father’s drawings and fixes for the automaton. Hugo must work in the shop to win the notebook back, and even then, the mean old man may turn him in to the meaner wounded war vet Gustav, who patrols the station with a Doberman.

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The big screen revival of The Muppets, cleverly titled “The Muppets,” is a generally charming exercise in nostalgia. The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly  revisits the characters, their shtick and and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

British TV director James Bobin, a veteran of the wonderfully dry “Flight of the Conchords” comedy with music, and world’s biggest Muppet fan Jason Segel have concocted a winning walk down memory lane that’s about a walk down memory lane. Times have changed, character after character says in the film. “You’re relics.”

“I guess people sorta forgot about us.”

But they’re getting the Muppets back together for one last show, a telethon to save their tatty old theater and their old movie studio from a rapacious Texas oilman named Tex Richman, played without the requisite glee by Oscar winner Chris Cooper — “Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh.”

Forget that subplot. It’s stolen from “A Prairie Home Companion.” What’s cute here is the frame that Segel (who co-wrote the script) built for it. He plays Gary, a goofy guy who grew up with a Muppet brother. Walter (voiced by Peter Linz) never really fit in, couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t growing like his brother, until the day when he saw his first “Muppets Show.” Here were his people. Here was his kind of entertainment — corny, dated, self-aware.

cut to their adult years, and Walter comes along with Gary and Gary’s longtime bestest gal Mary (Amy Adams, perfect) as they sing and dance their way to Hollywood for a visit to Muppet history. That’s where they see how forgotten they are, how their studio tour is a wreck.

“Is this Universal,” the clueless Japanese tourists want to know. “Yes, it is,” cracks the tour guide, played by Oscar winner Alan Arkin — one of scores of cameos in the picture.

Tex Richman diabolical plans and “maniacal laughs” must be foiled. Let’s get the gang back together. Which isn’t going to be easy. Well, actually, it is. Kermit’s almost a hermit, living in a fading mansion in Bel Air. Fozzie is fronting a tribute band, The Moopets, in Reno.

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“Arthur Christmas” is a spirited, comically chaotic and adorably anarchic addition to the world’s over-supply of holiday cartoons. It’s very British, in other words — from its producers (Aardman, the folks who gave us “Wallace & Gromit”) to its voice casting to the slang slung by the assorted Santas in this 3D computer-animated farce.

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In the Oscar-buzzed film of “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne turns his “Sideways” eye on Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel about family dysfunction in Hawaii. It’s a lovely, heartfelt character study of common, everyday people trapped on the horns of an uncommon but not unheard-of dilemma.

George Clooney stars as Matt King, a lawyer and absentee dad living what “my friends on the mainland” assume is a “permanent vacation,” a life in paradise.  But he’s quick to tell us (by voice over narration), that they’re not “immune to life,” living in the land of the never-ending luau.

First, his wife’s in a coma, so brain-injured in a boating accident that she’s not likely to recover. Then, there’s his family’s landed-gentry status, the thousands of acres of Hawaiian farmland that they own in a collective trust which his many relatives want him to, as trustee, sell for development.

But about that coma wife. Matt’s been “the back up parent” for years, “the understudy” in that family role. Now he has daughters to communicate with — ten year old Scottie (Amara Miller)  has to be told her mom is going to die, and rebellious boarding school brat Alex (Shailene Woodley) has to be fetched, brought home and convinced to behave herself as dad breaks it to friends and relatives that his life-of-the-party spouse isn’t going to make it.

Matt, however, is so out of the loop that he’s missed the obvious. The wife (Patricia Hastie), glimpsed only in an unspoken, day-of-the-boating-accident flashback, was cheating on him. Alex knew. Others did, too. Now Matt wants to know who the guy is, wants some sort of closure. And he needs Alex’s help for that.

Payne stirs all this into a rich, wistful brew. “Descendants” has a wake, sad family get togethers and family confrontations and hopeless moments in which the only thing Matt has to cling to are thoughts of revenge on the guy his wife was cheating with, a man he’s determined to stalk.

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Eye-contact is how it begins — a shared glance on the subway, maybe followed by a smile but always cranked up from a glance to a penetrating stare.

Brandon, played with a chilling allure by Michael Fassbender, is an old hand at this game — hands touching, not by accident, a gaze so nakedly predatory that a pretty woman might be moved to shift in her seat, cross her legs and get off at the next stop. But not always. Sometimes — oftentimes — there’s sex.

And when there isn’t, Brandon is compulsively going at it in front of his porn-playing laptop, in the shower or the restroom at the office. This isn’t sex. This isn’t normal. He knows it, and this is his “Shame.”

The latest collaboration between British artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen and Fassbender — their “Hunger” was as close to the IRA prison hunger strikes as anyone would care to get — is a creepy but poignant descent into sexual dysfunction. Brandon must have conquests, must find hookers he can hire by the pair, must have voyeuristic assignations in high-rise hotel windows. Sex is beyond compulsion, beyond obsession for him.

It’s interfering with work, causing him to prey on women who reject his womanizing boss (James Badge Dale), worried all the while about what manner of porn others will spy on his work computer.

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