Movie Nation

No, the reviews weren’t good. They were mediocre to be generous, bad to be more accurate. Look at the Wikipedia page for the movie if you want to see fans spinning a  29% 27% Rottentomatoes rating and low 40s Metacritic tally into “mixed.” Hah!

But do not cry for Warner Brothers, as the makers of the film are headed into Marvel millions for this, the film’s opening weekend. Box Office Mojo is calling it as a $145 million opening. Box Office Guru is hedging his bets and thinking $128 million is more in order.

It earned over $20 million late Thursday night, giving it the chance to jumpstart the process. Word of mouth could be bad, but you never know about that.

August has never had a $100 million opening before, so either way, a record will fall. It used to be a dumping ground for films without the budget or stamina to make back that budget before kids head back to school. But in the front-loaded world of today’s box office and Hollywood budgeting, when films are engineered and marketed and released with the idea that they will make most of their money within three weeks, a “Signs” or a “Guardians of the Galaxy” can blow up.

And with the weak sisters this summer has served up having zero staying power — “Star Trek” is in steep decline, “Bourne” isn’t good enough to hold 50% of its opening weekend audience — big numbers are in order.

It is to laugh, roll on the floor and laugh. And laugh again. A generation raised in the Fox News “never see anything I don’t agree with” era rises up, out of its parents’ basements, for a fine pout.

“Suicide Squad” has fanboys, all over the English speaking world (and a few Germans and Indians, judging from my metrics) up in arms.

The hate mail has been epic. Suggestions that “Disney paid him” are all over my comments on the review. Disney representatives are howling at that one (Look up my reviews of the last “Captain America” or “Star Wars,” kids).

This Seth Burtis loser from Seminole State College even went to the trouble of sending me a Facebook message — “You sir are a fag.”

Hilarious. But yes, Seth, I will want fries with that. Just don’t spit on them. Stay classy, Seminole.

Yes, but some fans, or fan from Egypt, is/are demanding Rottentomatoes.com shut down for gathering hundreds of reviews pounding the latest comic book piffle out of the DC universe. Hilarious. Variety has the story. 

Hundreds of critics, apparently working in collusion, are spoiling their empty headed popcorn picture fun. No, RT doesn’t cherry pick bad reviews to make a movie seem worse than it is. But that’s the gist of their “campaign.”

Wonder how they feel about Metacritic, which is more accurate, more nuanced but almost as mean to “Suicide Squad”? MRQE.com is more discriminating still, and when they get a review up, perhaps it’ll be more to their liking. Otherwise, it’s back to the books. Tiny books with easy words and lots of dark and pretty pictures.

C’mon guys. The cat’s out of the bag. The movie’s a mess, and hearing or reading that from people who see hundreds of movies a year comes along with that. Deal with it like grownups. And stop messing with the Wikipedia entry. “Mixed reviews?” No. @30% on Rottentomatoes is getting hammered. BAD reviews. Overwhelmingly, predominantly negative.

Losing your cool over that isn’t being an adult. It’s being a tantrum tossing child, a sissy.

“Suicide Squad” hits theaters as the most hotly-anticipated popcorn pic in what has been a fairly disappointing cinema summer.

Hyped as this year’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and positioned in that coveted early-August “Guardians” release window, a darkly-comic comic book movie about “bad guys who do some good,” it’s franchising friendly, a way for Warners to recapture the mojo that their darker-than-dark “Batman v. Superman” took away.

But they made that movie by fanboy request, to fanboy-dictated parameters. Keep it dark, because, you know, this is a comic book — serious stuff. This one? They at least tried to lighten things up. “Tried” is the operative word.

“Suicide Squad” is part of that whole dystopian DC comic universe, where Superman’s dead and The Joker (Jared Leto, more dentistry than performance) isn’t. And Batman is Ben Affleck. So the studio was hemmed in there, as well.

And what they’ve given us is a formulaic, blood and bullet-riddled David Ayer (“Training Day/Fury”) superhero thriller starring a high-mileage Will Smith and Margot Robbie‘s butt-cheeks.

There’s a big laugh, about 25 minutes in. Will Smith lands a couple more, and Ike Barnholz adds levity to a corrupt comic relief prison guard. But otherwise, this is a joyless exercise in paint-by-numbers mayhem. Bad guys are rounded up and flung against demons who have taken over some city we won’t call New York and who — like aliens and ghosts and others we’ve seen in too many  recent movies  — are dismantling the center city and spinning the debris into the clouds on an arc of psychotronic light.

Who ya gonna call? Yeah, that.

Viola Davis is Amanda Waller, the murderously unethical government bigwig who rounds up these “meta-humans” just in case there’s a situation caused by someone with Superman’s powers and without his scruples. So the ultimate sniper, Deadshot (Will Smith), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), guilt-ridden fire-flinger Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Aussie thief Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Harley Quinn (Robbie), Joker’s shrink whom he’s made over into his demented darling of a girlfriend, become “Task Force X.”

And they’re needed right away because Waller’s already lost one recruit. The archaeologist Dr. June Moone (Cara Delevingne) was consumed by an evil witch spirit (Enchantress), and she goes rogue, the first chance she gets. The rest of the self-named “Suicide Squad” seems likely to do the same.

Joel Kinnaman is Col. Rick Flag, the Navy SEAL who has to ride herd over this mob. He’s given a meta-human ninja (Karen Fukuhara) whose sword absorbs the soul of every one she slays as a sidekick.

And there’s a LOT of slaying going on in here. Deadshot litters the streets with the bodies of people turned into zombie soldiers. Harley Quinn wields a bat, but picks up a custom pistol when the need for killing speed arises. SEALS and demon soldiers shoot it out on subways, in high-rises and on the streets.

The one-liners must have played better on the comic book page. “Nice ta’meetcha,” Robbie’s psycho-Fran Drescher burbles. “Love your perfume. What IS that? The stench’a death?”

Deadshot negotiates with the Feds for his daughter’s future, his price for becoming a good guy. Private education, all the way to the Ivy League. And if she’s not sharp enough to get in on her own?

“I need you to ‘white people’ that thing.”

Ayer is a good, gritty action director, and absolutely the wrong choice to adapt this. The action beats are taut, but the story arc crumbles under the weight of all the movies it steals from. The casting fails to pop, in most instances. The heavily-hyped Robbie doesn’t dazzle, which explains why she’s photographed from behind, more often than not.

Delevingne fails to register at all. But Kinnaman stands out as the weakest link.

Giving every character a classic rock theme song — a touch swiped from Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” — doesn’t lighten the load. It feels like a desperate retro-fit –more pandering.

“‘Normal’ is just a setting on a dryer,” Harley Quinn declares. But the “normal” the movies in this new comic universe are pushing is bleak and not much fun. “Dark” does not equal “deep,” and even if it did, you have to wonder if all this pandering will actually be embraced by the audience it is pandering to.

If not, mental health counseling for the studio execs who bet the bank on the Dead Superman DC universe is in order. They’re worrisome candidates to become the real “Suicide Squad.”

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language

Cast: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Jared Leto, Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez, Joel Kinnaman, Karen Fukuhara
Credits: Written and directed by David Ayer. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:00

You have to strain in the first few scenes to figure out that the omnipresent, labored, slurred — let’s just say it — aged narration of Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society” is being delivered by Woody himself.

That’s fitting, as this is as decrepit and tone-deaf as any movie he’s ever made, a corpse of a period piece, production-designed to the hilt, distractedly directed, a failure that hints at The End of Woody.

This is “Radio Days” without the sharp wit, “Hollywood Ending” without the intelligence and charm, “Sweet and Lowdown” with none of the um, warmth of Sean Penn.

Yeah, I’m going for irony here.

It tells an overtly Jewish story of Hollywood in the late 1930s, when young Bobby Dorfman quits dad’s New York jewelry shop and shows up at Uncle Phil’s swank Hollywood talent agency. Steve Carell plays Phil, an over-scheduled shaker and mover who doesn’t name-drop, he name-carpet bombs.

“I’m expecting a call from Ginger Rogers!”

Yeah, he’ll take the kid on — eventually. But don’t call him “Uncle.” Hate to think Hollywood runs on nepotism or anything.

After a botched encounter with a prostitute — “You’re a Jew? A Jewish hooker. That’s a first!” — Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) falls for one of his uncle-boss’s secretaries (Kristen Stewart, his “Adventureland” co-star). And they court, strolling the beaches, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a favorite taco joint.

Only Veronica, or “Vonnie,” already has a lover, an always “out-of-town” beau. Turns out, it’s Bobby’s uncle. So Bobby flees back East and marries the next Veronica (Blake Lively) to come along.

Bobby runs a nightclub owned by his brother Ben, played by Corey Stoll in the film’s sole believable/halfway amusing performance. He’s a mobster who settles every disagreement with a murder and a corpse disposed of in the cement foundation of this building or that one. The bodies pile up — hilariously. To some.

Eisenberg, in doing yet another leading man’s version of the Woody Allen stammer, has never seemed more flighty and mannered, gesticulating so much he calls extra attention to the lovely outfits hanging off his stringbean frame.

“Sorry, I’m a little drunk. I’ve never mixed gin with bagels and lox before.”

Stewart cannot ably fake an interest in him and is flatter-than-flat in all but one or two scenes. She’s nobody’s idea of what a 1930s beauty would look like, out-of-place in bobby socks, evening wear and gloves. Without the gloves, she shows off the gnawed-down fingernails of a nervous teenager, not exactly cafe social.

Characters occasionally stumble through the wrong name — Karen becomes “Carol” — or forgetfully talk about the $10 they owe a $20 hooker. It isn’t done for comic effect. Well, it certainly doesn’t play that way. Woody Allen is letting blown takes onto the screen.

Jenny Berlin and Scottish actor Ken Stott kvetch their way through their roles as Bobby’s observant New York Jewish parents, letting Woody wallow through hoary stereotypes spouting the Wisdom of God’s Chosen folk.

“Live every day as if it’s your last. And some day, you’ll be right!”

Allen, plugging along, making a movie a year whether it needs to be made or not, should take his own advice. It would be a shame to go out on a dog like this. But the longer he works, the more likely that seems.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some violence, a drug reference, suggestive material and smoking

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Blake Lively, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll
Credits: Written, directed and narrated by Woody Allen. A Lionsgate/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:36

With all the books and documentaries about the state of American comedy and how those who succeed at it must first make their mark at “Saturday Night Live,” there isn’t much we don’t know about that path to showbiz success.

Some make it, some don’t. Friends, partners, colleagues and lovers are left behind.

And sometimes, those who do make it step all over/steal from those who don’t. But what matters most, the moral of every story you hear from that world, is making it. You do, and you don’t look back. You don’t think twice about those you left behind.

Comic turned writer-actor-director Mike Birbiglia’s “Don’t Think Twice” is a behind-the-laughter essay in the hard lives of those who try to make a living making us laugh. It’s predictable, downright conventional, considering how much more “out there” his breakout film, “Sleepwalk With Me” (also about a struggling comic) was.

But the tale takes just enough turns off the well-worn path to hold our interest, and finds just enough laughs between the morose “never gonna happen for me” epiphanies of the comics in question.

They call themselves The Commune, and a brief introduction places them within the tradition of Chicago’s Second City. They are six improvisers who act, write, concoct winning characters or bits that they can squeeze into the improvised scenarios shouted out by the audience each night at their Chicago theater.

But they’re losing the theater, some “Trump buyout” of the real estate. Their future has a ticking clock, a race to A) get discovered by “Weekend Live” (Guess which show that is?), B) find a writing gig and/or C) find a new place to perform.

Birbiglia is the group’s leader, Miles, a grizzled veteran of the improv wars, seeing to it that The Commune is “a group working together in the moment.” He teaches classes in improvisational comedy, and pushing 40, he’s still bedding students gullible enough to be impressed by the sad self-built college dorm “loft” he’s concocted for his sleeping quarters.

Lindsay (Tami Sagher) is a 30something trust fund baby who can squire them all around in a Cadillac Escalade.

Allison and Bill (Kate Micucci of “Garfinkle & Oates” and Chris Gethard), Jack and Sam (Keenan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs) work at dead-end day jobs just so their nights can be free to chase their dream.

It’s meant to be obvious that only two of this sextet have a prayer of making it to “Live, from New York…” Key, of TV’s “Key & Peele” and the recent romp “Keanu,” is handsome, quick-witted and possesses a killer Obama impression, which he works into the oddest improvised places if he’s heard there might be a talent scout in that night’s audience.

His castmates, by the way, HATE him for that.

His girlfriend, Sam, has TV-star looks and a perky persona, even if we’re never convinced she’s remotely as funny as the movie suggests.

Naturally, they’re the only two offered TV tryouts. The best moments in the movie come from the way their castmates, those “left behind,” react. Their pride and happiness that the troupe is being recognized is almost buried beneath jealousy and resentment.

I like the way Birbiglia shows Jack’s dilemma. He has star potential, but loyalty. He is determined to give his friends every chance to get a break, help them achieve what he is on the brink of achieving. But the backstabbing politics of the TV show get in the way. It’s a paranoid workplace run on a “be funny or you’re gone” model by its version of Lorne Michaels, a soft-spoken tyrant and genuine terror.

“First year? Don’t get fired.”

It’s a movie built on “types” and there’s no surprise when those types behave according to type. But Birbiglia’s underlit, intimate backstage dramedy is overflowing with killer details — the way they buck each other up with a sort of group hug pre-show, everybody telling everybody else, “Got your back. Got your back. Got your back.”

The improvisations don’t often gel, but there’s an epic rescue of an awkward moment when a heckler cuts to the bone with a shot at Jack’s success and the hapless future facing the rest of them.

Watching the players study old movies and TV talk show moments (Hepburn on “Cavett”) to cook up impersonations and surreal bits that might land a laugh is fascinating.

Birbiglia, the sort of comic storyteller that “This American Life” would embrace (as they have), gives Miles a disproportional chunk of the story, forcing him to face the adulthood he’s put off as he tries to impress his high school crush (Maggie Kemper) and fails. Yes, we get that “another one of my students gets my dream job.”  But that, and the last-chance romance hinted at here, are melodramatic cliches.

But he has ably condensed much of what we hear about this world and those in it into an intimate, if conventional portrait of dreamers seeing their dreams deferred when in reality they’ve been shattered, troupers given hard truths about where they stand on the comic totem pole and yet refusing, even then, to give up.

MPAA Rating:R for language and some drug use

Cast: Keenan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Mike Birbiglia, Kate Micucci, Chris Gethard, Tami Sagher
Credits: Written and directed by Mike Birbiglia. A Film Arcade release.

Running time: 1:32

Comic books and the ultimate movie nerd. A marriage made in hell.

The champagne is popping over at STX, the new kid on the smaller-distributor block (“The Gift,” “Free State of Jones”, “Hardcore Henry”) that thought an R-rated comedy in the “Bad Teacher/Bad Santa/Bridesmaids/Hangover” mold, one about Modern Motherhood, would hit.

They were right. “Bad Moms,” despite lacking big box office leading ladies — Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett-Smith — may clear $27 million on its opening weekend, the studio’s biggest opening ever. 

Universal has to be feeling relieved at its decision to pay Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass and Julia Stiles to come back for another batch of Bourne. “Jason Bourne” is on track to win the weekend, based on late Thursday/Friday numbers, with a $60 million+ opening.

A few years ago, Emma Roberts announced she was walking away from the family business (Julia Roberts and Eric Roberts are aunt and uncle) in frustration. Playing too many teenagers, apparently. Well, she had one more in her (she’s an ageless 25) and “Nerve”is turning out to be her biggest hit outside of “Valentine’s Day.” It’s headed toward a healthy $16-17 million opening since Wed. Not dazzling, but something.

“Ghostbusters” is fading, and has lost over 600 screens, but will still be over $105 million by Monday AM. A flop? It’ll top out at $120 million domestic, so adding in foreign and post-theatrical, if they make a sequel, it’ll have to be cheaper. Re-establishing the brand may indeed convince Sony to re-up. Maybe shoot in someplace cheaper.

Flops that don’t even come close to not being flops  were “The Infiltrator” and especially “The BFG” which are plunging with no prayer of recovering even a large fraction of their production costs.

“Cafe Society” added screens, but is still doing piddling numbers, even for a Woody Allen comedy. “Ab Fab” added screens, still not enough to bounce into the top 10.

“Lights Out” is holding audience, as is “Hillary’s America,” bringing in an audience that normally doesn’t go to the movies any more.

“Logic,” the great thriller director Alfred Hitchcock once intoned, “is dull.”

So don’t try to pin down the geography of the long chase that is “North by Northwest,” don’t question too deeply how “The Birds” were able to pin down an entire rural California town of Bodega (Bay) and don’t waste a moment of your life fearing for the safety of Cary Grant or James Stewart in any Hitchcock film they did.

Janet Leigh, of course, was another matter.

The moment Hitch made this declaration was a mid-1960s interview, and the person he made it to was the French critic turned director, Francois Truffaut. Truffaut was largely responsible for raising Hitchcock’s “action/mystery hack” reputation to the pantheon of artist of “the pure cinema.” And once he became a director himself, the two formed a mutual admiration society that Truffaut immortalized with the taped interviews that became the seminal book on Hitchcock and one of the great pieces of cinematic deconstruction in book form — “Hitchcock/Truffaut.”

Now “Hitchcock/Truffaut” has become a documentary film about “The Master of Suspense,” one built on those long-ago audio tapes. The two talk as peers, with Truffaut getting Hitch to defend his infamous “Actors are cattle” put-down, and dig into the layers of his lifetime of learning to make “pure cinema,” a filmmaker whose inner demons made it to the screen in movies visualized as perfect expressions of this most visual of arts.

“There’s no such thing as a face,” Hitchcock theorizes. “It doesn’t exist until the light hits it.”

He over-planned his pictures, visually, with storyboards. By the time he had to actually show up on set with actors hired to fulfill his vision, he was already a little bored with the story he was determined to tell with visual archetypes, tropes and clues.

Every so often, as he talks about the sexual subtexts of scenes and situations, he playfully orders Truffaut, the translator and the sound tech with them to “turn off the machine,” to say something more off-color than his image let on.

There’s Hitch, “acting” and cutting up on with double entendres camera with a starlet for a screen test in the early days of sound.

Trained as an engineer, he dipped his feet into silent cinema as a designer, composer of inter-titles and then director as visual “writer,” the “auteur” or author of his films. It didn’t matter who the collaborating screenwriter was or who was credited with design and editing. Hitchcock’s movies bear his distinct signature, and are as instantly recognizable as “his” as any movies ever made bear the trademark of their creator.

The Kent Jones documentary adds a number of new interviews with filmmakers from Scorsese to Fincher, James Gray to Richard Linklater (perhaps the most astute analyst of Hitch), men inspired to pursue cinema as their means of expression by this watershed book.

I say “men” because this doc is something of a boy’s club. All the famous scenes sampled, from “The Lodger” to “Psycho,” “Notorious” to “Vertigo,” may lean heaviest on Hitchcock’s women — his great female stars. But no female critics appear, and even the surviving “Hitchcock blondes” were not interviewed for this film.

Truth be told, the new interviews don’t add much except for words of admiration for this Holy Text of film appreciation. And as the book was largely in a question and answer (transcribed from the tapes), the film offers no fresh revelations.

He was one of the first directors to become a “brand name,” like Capra and Ford and later Spielberg and Fincher (“Se7en”, “Zodiac”). We hear Hitch remark, in answer to a 1965 question, that his movies “aren’t old-fashioned,” something you could certainly say during his lifetime.

But even though none of the director/fans interviewed come out and say it, you have to wonder how true that is fifty years later. The sampled clips remind us of how Hitch handled foreshadowing (obvious enough for everybody in the audience to get it) and his simplistic (in step with the times) takes on psychology. They’re dated. They’d have to be.

The better filmmakers of today are much more subtle. Nobody interviewed here would have ended “Psycho” with Simon Oakland offering a paint-by-numbers psychological breakdown of Norman Bates. His movies might still resemble dreams (his dreams), but they can seem ham-fisted and entirely too on-the-nose in the casting, in the sexual predilections of his villains.

“Hitchcock/Truffaut” remains an influential book because the movies still resonate with nascent film buffs, and this documentary serves to remind us that we underestimate the creators of popular entertainment at our peril. All it takes is a Frenchman “discovering” the genius behind the work to make see the popcorn pictures of any era in a new light.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material and violent images

Cast: Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, James Gray, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Balaban
Credits: Directed by Kent Jones, script by Kent Jones, Serge Toubiana. A Cohen Media Group/HBO release.

Running time: 1:19

Matt Damon isn’t winning universal praise for returning to “Jason Bourne,” nor is director Paul Greengrass. Weak reviews won’t give a boost to the spy who fears his government franchise.

But it won’t need reviews to make money.

Box Office Mojo figures “Bourne” will clear $50, but not come as close to $60 as “Star Trek Beyond” did last weekend. Franchise to franchise, the fanbase is thinner and “Jason Bourne” is riding worse reviews.

Box Office Guru ignores Bourne’s bad reviews (and conversely thinks “Bad Moms” will suffer due to reviews) and predicts a $57 million weekend for Damon/Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander. Vincent Cassel makes a wonderful if under-motivated villain.

Mojo thinks “Moms” will manage $25, perfectly respectable for an R-rated comedy and the biggest hit that infant studio STX has ever had. Guru calls it a $23 million hit.

And Box Office Mojo figures “Nerve” did its briskest business Wednesday and is headed for a $12-13 million opening. The Guru expects $16 million by Sunday night. I think it’ll do better. Word of mouth should be decent.

“Star Trek Beyond” will lose north of 50%, as a fading franchise. “Ghostbusters” will start losing screens, big time, as it clears $100 million today, darkening its prospects of finishing in the $120-130 million range in the US.

Actually, when you add up the notices, all three wide releases this weekend sit right on the cusp of widely endorsed.

The dislike is lukewarm, the endorsements likewise.

That goes for “Jason Bourne,” an all-chase, no character-development return to the franchise for Paul Greengrass (director) and Matt Damon (star).

It should make some money, though reviews won’t help it. Not at all.

“Bad Moms” has a likable cast that isn’t entirely at home delivering a mommy track “Hangover.” That sort of R-rated comedy requires more than an under-paid bit player’s nudity, a few joints and whippets and a lot of F-bombs.

You need tigers and Mike Tyson and humiliation. These ladies want to make nice, with their makeup and hair in place even in moments of wild abandon. Only Kathryn Hahn delivers the goods. Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell (to a lesser degree) lost their nerve and compromised the comedy.

Weak reviews for this one. But not beat-downs. It doesn’t quite come off.

“Nerve” has a killer premise — young people suckered into a privacy-stealing/life threatening online game through peer pressure, naivete and greed. And it’s got compatible co-stars — Emma Roberts (one more teenager, dear, that’s all you get) and Dave Franco. It works well enough It works well enough, and again, even the pans aren’t of the scorched earth variety.

“Bourne” could displace “Star Trek Beyond,” and “Bad Moms” could suck more audience away from “Ghostbusters.” In theory. If teens can put down their phones long enough, “Nerve” could do some business.