Movie Nation

“Movie 43” is a collection of one-joke short films strung together as a feature, movies built seemingly built around this guiding directive – find big name stars and see how far “out there” they’ll go for a laugh.

Thus, you have Kate Winslet on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, trying not to notice – or be utterly revolted by – the scrotum growing out of his neck. There’s another Oscar winner, Halle “I Never Get to Do comedy” Berry, caught up in a first-date game of Truth or Dare with Brit comic Stephen Merchant that involves tattoos, plastic surgery and sitting still while Snookie from “The Jersey Shore” gives an interpretive reading of Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

If you’re the sort who laughs at the title of that novel, this might be the movie for you – a dizzying array of actors in a wide variety of Oh-No-they-Didn’t sketches, almost all using male sexual organs and oral sex gags – the lame stand-up comics’ crutch – as their punch lines.

About a third of the short films land a few laughs. But even the weakest material is lifted by the actors. One bit that works, directed by Elizabeth Banks, has Chloe Moretz on an after-school date, having her first menstrual period, and having every male – including Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Patrick Warburton – freak out.

And after seeing this, you may be hard pressed to think of Gerard Butler as anything but a special effects leprechaun, cursing at being captured and tortured “for me Lucky Charms” by Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott.

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With his spot-on work impersonating Tony Blair (“The Deal,” “The Queen”), TV interviewer David Frost (“Frost/Nixon”) and soccer coaches (“The Damned United”), Michael Sheen has established himself as the cinema’s reigning King Mimic, an actor who gets under the skin of a character, but who also puts so much work in on the surface that you’d swear you’re seeing the real person up there on the screen.

He fixes on something — he once told me he figured out Tony Blair when he realized “His teeth are too big for his mouth.” — and builds from there.

The British comic actor Kenneth Williams is one of his more outlandish impersonations. He brings the flamboyant purveyor of funny voices and sissy shtick, an actor most famous for his work in the leering, lowbrow “Carry On” comedies of the ’50s-70s — deliciously to life in “Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa.” This little seen 2006 TV bio-pic is now on Netflix streaming, and it’s another tour de force for the formidable — and not too proud to do “Twilight” — Sheen.

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The Wrap is reporting that J.J. Abrams will do what no one has done before — cross-pollinate the “Star Wars/Star Trek” fan-verses by being the first filmmaker to do both a couple of “Trek” films, and a “Star Wars” film.

That seems like something a fan would post as a hopeful trial balloon. But with Disney having the rights to the George Lucas money-minter now, why wouldn’t they go for a big name like Abrams, a gunslinger with a dazzling record, to helm a film?

They could make him the producer and let him oversee the films, picking directors, casting it, etc., and that would be just as good as having him directing.

Either way, this seems too good to be true and thus a smidge far-fetched. The mother of all trial balloons. But we’ll see.

An R-rated horror action comedy fairytale — How’s that for genre bending?

“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” is more Gatling guns and grenades than The Brothers Grimm. It takes the kidnapped kiddies into adulthood, where they’ve parlayed their fame at cooking a witch’s goose into a business. Got a witch problem? Call H & G – the extermination experts.

High concept pitch or no, the movie doesn’t really work. Will Ferrell’s production team was behind this. They were shooting for sort of a witch hunting “Zombieland,” an f-bomb riddled “Van Helsing” packed with comical anachronisms – a Bavarian forest past with witch trials, pump shotguns and primitive tasers, where bottles of milk have woodcut pictures of “Missing Children” on the labels.

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The musical bio-film has undergone a renaissance and a transformation in recent years.

Bob Dylan earned an impressionistic/multiple actor-multiple interpretations of his character portrait in “I’m Not There.”

“Control” was an odd, mesmerizing look at the life of Ian Curtis of Joy Division.

Ian Drury earned an offbeat biopic, “Sex, Drugs & Rock’n Roll.”

“Telstar” is every bit as odd, a film set on the fringe — the story of crazed and gay British record producer Joe Meeks — and given an overwrought, overlong fringe screen treatment by director Nick Moran and writer James Hicks, who wrote the play on which this is based.

Meeks was an early ’60s pioneer in avante garde pop music studio production — coming up with strange effects and odd sounds to make his records stand out in the post-Elvis U.K. pop music crowd. He didn’t read music, but sounds would come to him in his head, he’d hum them onto tape and force — through threats and even at gunpoint — his musicians to make what was in his head a musical reality.

A great believer in the occult, the beyond and things “in the ether,” his most famous hit was the first British pop record to hit number one in the U.S. — the electronic instrumental “Telstar.”

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Around the world, ask movie-lovers where they saw their first movie witch and the answer’s the same.

“I was, like everyone, frightened by the witch in the Wizard of Oz,’” says English actress Gemma Arterton. “That’s who we all grew up with, right?”

Jeremy “Hurt Locker” Renner agrees. And he can top that.

“’Wizard of Oz was the very first job I ever had. On stage. I played the Scarecrow. So for me, there was always just one witch. That first witch. The Wicked Witch of the West.”

But, Renner adds, “We were going for something a little darker, a little different, with OUR movie.”

Their movie is “Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters,” a silly mashup of horror and hilarity produced by Will Ferrell’s team, and starring the guy carrying on “The Bourne Legacy” and the accomplished former Bond babe.

“They had me with that lead-line, the idea of taking the Hansel & Gretel tale we’re all familiar with into adulthood,” Renner, 42, says.

“It’s 15 years later,” Arterton, who just turned 27, adds. “And they’re NOT happy. They’ve become witch hunters.”

In the 3D “Witchhunters,” the kids were taken into the woods and left on their own by their father. They stumble into a candy-covered witch house, are taken prisoner and when they figure a way out of their fix – working as a team – they’ve found their calling. They’ll track, shoot, stab, behead and burn witches. Whatever it takes.

“You have to be very very flexible” to play an action heroine, Arterton says. She’s been in action films before – “Clash of the Titans,” “Prince of Persia,” “Quantum of Solace.” But never where she had to carry the action. “I had to do quite a lot of training just to get limber enough to be Gretel. You’ve got to get strong. You’ve got to look good in leather.”

Indeed. Renner’s done his share of onscreen brawling, but playing Hansel was “a little tricky, at first. It’s these tight outfits. But they’re wonderfully designed to not just look good, but be functional. So I figured it out.”

Playing siblings meant there’d be a different sort of onscreen chemistry called for, “that unspoken communication that brother and sister are supposed to have,” Renner says.

Making an action fantasy meant that they’d be working in a world filled with things no real person has ever seen. And since that wasn’t to be manufactured digitally, “most of what you see is real – a real place, real witches in costume, a real troll,” he adds.

“Having an animatronic troll, instead of a digital one, was a real blessing on the set,” Arterton says. There’s none of this look off camera in wonder at something they’ll digitally add later.

And having Ferrell & Co. producing it meant there’d be laughs – anachronisms like ancient Bavarian milk bottles with pictures of missing (kidnapped by witches) children, the odd blast of era-inappropriate profanity.

“We had to keep focused on what was serious for us and what was serious for the audience,” Renner says. “The jokes, they’ll come. But we had to treat our relationship seriously for the audience to buy into it, I think.”

Was it so much fun that they’ll do another, should the need arise? Arterton was killed off as a Bond character, and didn’t do the “Clash of the Titans” sequel, so she’s game. “This action heroine thing could open doors for me. We’ll see.”

And Renner, who might be called on to return to the Bourne movies, and certainly will be back in the various “Avengers” pictures (he’s Hawkeye)?

“Studios are always thinking that. But for that to happen, we have to win over the audience and take them for a ride. They get to decide if she’s Gretel and I’m Hansel again.”

The filmmakers who gave us the light Latino dramedy “Quinceneara” haven’t been heard from much in the years since. But they’ve landed Kevin Kline to play the late swashbuckler Errol Flynn in a bio-pic about his last days, with Dakota Fanning as among those in his life near the end.

Oscar winner Susan Sarandon joins the Oscar winning Kline, and she’ll play Florence Aadland.

Flynn was in his glory in the 30s, starring in the classic “Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Captain Blood,” and other swashbuckling adventures. Twenty years later, as Flynn’s dissolute life wound down, the years of boozing, pill popping, brawling and womanizing — occasionally with women absurdly young — caught up with him years before his time.

He’s a longer than long shot at the Oscars this year, but he’s nominated and he’s in that company.

He’s box office, having mostly a string of hits under his belt as leading man. Let’s forget about “The Words.”

And being buff and dashing and handsome and, if you saw “Silver Linings Playbook,” pretty damned good at the whole Roid Rage thing, capable of being intimidating — Bradley Cooper would make a great Lance Armstrong in the upcoming J.J. Abrams production about the fallen sports hero.

Cooper is starting to lobby for the part.

He said so in an interview with the BBC.

I can totally see it.

Who’d play Sheryl Crow?

No big surprise here. Adele gives a little Top 40 Pop oomph to a show that is always scrambling to find a “youth audience” tune in trick.

The real surprise would be if she did it as a duet with Seth MacFarlane, the “Family Guy” host.

This should tie a neat bow on the whole “Bond’s 50th Anniversary” (on the big screen) festivities, something that might have warranted a bigger chunk of the show — a few decent nominations, for instance, for “Skyfall.”

“Cold Weather” is a conventionally unconventional indie dramedy, one of those well-shot, thoughtfully-played movies that exists in the dead space that a Hollywood movie mystery would skip right past.

This new example of the European fad “Slow Cinema,” by Portland filmmaker Aaron Katz (“Dance Party, USA”) makes us work for everything –figuring out the relationships between the characters, even picking up the characters’ names — things more mainstream (and more polished) screenwriters see as needless obstacles to story. And modest virtues aside, “Cold Weather” is not really worth our getting past those obstacles.

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