Movie Nation

Driss is handsome, young, black and brash. He’s the sort of bully who stomps into a room and impatiently storms to the front of the line because he doesn’t have the patience to wait his turn, and he has the build and bravado to back that up.

He lives in a housing project with his long-suffering mom, is a little too fond of his marijuana and is fine with the idea of living on the state’s handouts.

Which is why he’s gone through the motions of applying for a job. He has no idea what working for Phillippe will entail. Driss doesn’t sweat details, or see the necessity for good manners.

Phillippe (Francois Clouzet) may be rich. But he’s nobody to Driss (Omar Sy). And he’s a quadriplegic.

“That’s a bummer,” is the first French phrase Driss can think of. “Don’t get up” is the second.

“The Intouchables” is an amusing, touching and intensely likable French comedy about these mismatched men — the pitiless punk and the immobile, lonely older man who has no need for sympathy. He knows how bad his condition is.

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 A middling thriller wrapped around a compelling lecture about the child sex trade in Southeast Asia, “Trade of Innocents” gives us a peek at a sordid underworld, but a full view of the conditions that feed it.

“Inspired by real events,” it features Dermot Mulroney and Oscar winner Mira Sorvino as an American couple in Cambodia to do something about the burgeoning traffic in children sold into prostitution.

Mulroney is Alex, ex-military, a man with a mission — freeing children, capturing the Khmer traffickers and Vietnamese pimps who sell them and exposing the Western perverts who travel to that part of the world to pursue the “freshly picked flowers” of Asian girlhood.

He and his wife Claire have taken on this mission because of tragedy in their own lives. And their paths — Alex heads a team, working with government officials, in this crackdown — have them on a collision course with both the pimp who calls himself “The Duke” (Trieu Tran) and a little American-born girl who will, we’re sure, soon be in The Duke’s sights.

In classic melodrama fashion, events are set in motion by a sweaty American pedophile (John Billingsley), a supposed “family man” who uses his long stays in the Orient to fulfill a perverse lust.

“I said YOUNG girls,” he hisses to The Duke whenever anyone over the age of seven is paraded before him. His haggling over price, over “requirements” is easily the most disturbing thing in writer-director Christopher Bessette’s film.

Alex lectures the Cambodian authorities about this problem, stopping only to hear their complaints that culture and custom require children to be of financial use to their parents, that rural parts of the country (and Vietnamese refugee camps) are rife with this trade because families would rather sell one child than see all the rest starve. Mulroney, stolid and solid as ever, listens and ignores these protests. He’s on task.

Sorvino’s Claire is forever on the verge of tears, both from memory of her own loss and the horrors facing these children in the Third World.

The movie’s tone is rightfully serious, downright overwrought, at times. Girls who have escaped the trade tell their stories to Claire, who weeps. Sorvino gives Claire a grieving heart and a steely spine.

But when Mr. Pervert drags a child he has rented for a month to a bar and requests that the band play “Puppy Love,” the only proper response is guilty laughter. The sick becomes the silly. And when Alex interrupts a chase to harangue a DVD pirate that the same organized crime that his business supports is responsible for child sex slavery, involuntary eyerolls follow.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material involving sex trafficking of children, and some violence

Cast: Dermot Mulroney, Mira Sorvino, John Billingsley, Trieu Tran

Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Bessette. A Monterey Media release. 

Running time: 1:30

Writer-director Ti West goes where many — especially Stephen King — have gone before with “The Innkeepers,” a handsome looking but utterly flat-footed tale of a haunted hotel.

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There’s an adorable, cutesy vulgarity at work in “Hysteria,” a semi-serious Victorian era comedy about the liberating power of the first electrical vibrator.

And if you blushed on reading that, imagine the shades of crimson and snickering amongst cast and crew over all this — vibrating. The fact that so much of what we hear about onscreen is “true,” well…a body could be forgiven for “taking the vapors.”

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The Grimm fairytale returns to its grey and gory origins in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” the second “Snow White” remake of 2012. Unlike the gorgeous and dizzy “Mirror Mirror,” “Huntsman” is more sword and sorcery, a film of battles and sword fights, murder and revenge.

But for all the excitement of this visually striking action fantasy set in a land of mud and maggots, it’s the familiar story elements that work the best. Things don’t take on a workable tone until those devilish dwarfs show up, an hour into the proceedings.

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MIAMI BEACH — In the half dozen years that he’s been a movie star, Channing Tatum could be excused for skipping the exercise of reading his reviews.

He’s been in some big hits — “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Step Up,” but the good notices have been few and far between. “Tatum makes what use he can of his two expressions,” critic Derek Malcolm might crack about Tatum’s turn in “Dear John.” Or The New York Times might call his work as a guilt-stricken cop in “The Son of No One” “one of the year’s most wooden, expressionless star turns.”

The ex-model, onetime stripper seemed written off as just another big screen six-pack, a guy famous for turning up shirtless in almost everything he did.

But 2012 has changed all that. At 32, Tatum is on a roll, with commercial hits (“The Vow” and “21 Jump Street”), the attention of a name director (Steven Soderbergh) and critical acclaim for a newly discovered gift for comedy.

“It’s the ‘10,000 hour rule,'” he says. “It takes that many hours to master something. I don’t know if I’ll ever master it, because every role is a totally new experience. But you can understand the process more. And for me, in acting, times on sets, I’m closing in on 10,000 hours. I’m just starting to understand the whole thing.”

The cherry on the top of this year’s coming out party for Tatum is “Magic Mike,” a dramatic comedy that Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin built around Tatum’s first job in show business — taking it all off for screaming female fans at a Miami strip club.

“This has almost nothing to do with my experience in that world,” he says. “It’s a movie. It’s fictitious. I only danced for about eight months. But the stuff that happened was so crazy and outrageous that you couldn’t put it into a movie without somebody going, ‘You’re making that up just to sell tickets.’

“I was 18 at the time. I was living in Florida. I dropped out of college where I had played football. And I have a sister. That much of the film is true. But I never OD’d or any of that other stuff.”

In the film, Tatum plays the star stripper of an all male dance revue who takes an 18 year old (played by Alex Pettyfer) under his wing, courting the younger guy’s sister (Cody Horn) as he does.

“The first half of ‘Magic Mike’ really captures my experience of what exposure to this world was like,” Tatum says. “Soderbergh told me, ‘I can’t believe an 18 year old kid went into this world, where the other guys were grown men — guys who had been doing this dancing for years.’ This kid doesn’t know what he’s getting into. I didn’t. ”

Tatum had been talking up a movie on this subject for a few years, before his rising star power and the attention of Soderbergh made that dream a reality.

“The one thing I really wanted the movie to capture was the wildness of it all,” he says. “We know what the female stripping world is like, thanks to a lot of movies. But men go to see a strip show for different reasons than women. Men go for a carnal experience. Visual sexual stimulation.

“I think women just go to laugh, and embarrass the friend sitting next to them. Laughing at their friend’s red-face as she’s getting grinded on. That’s been my experience, anyway. They’re not there to get turned on.”

The secret to taking it all off, in public? It’s not just about the workout, about the dance moves (Tatum was an accomplished dancer, even at 18).

“Committing is the key,” he says. “It’s like acting, in a way. You’ve got to sell it.

My thing was the dancing part of it. I didn’t like taking off my clothes. I wasn’t very big, not some big muscle-bound meathead who could flash the muscles and everything. I could dance. So I got the younger girls.”

For the film, which was shot and set in Tampa, Tatum became the on-set truth-detector. He was the guy who had lived this life.

“There wasn’t a power point presentation that he gave or anything,” says co-star Joe Manganiello of TV’s “True Blood.” “But his experiences were in the script. He was open and frank about his past, with us. He says he did do this and there’s no shame to it. That was all the rest of us needed.”

And preparation? There was the gym time, of course. And rehearsing with a choreographer. And for some, getting used to appearing in the buff.

“I didn’t think I could get more naked in a movie,” Tatum laughs. “They proved me wrong!

“But it was more fun, this time. Stripping was my first performance. My first time up on stage. And it’s very funny that it’s come around to this, me stripping again, performing that way again, in a movie.”

“I don’t analyze myself, or what people think about me,” Christian Bale says, pretty much any time any conversation with him even hints at turning “personal.” He doesn’t

know how much his profile changed after he landed the lead in the Batman/Dark Knight movies. He can’t say if his actor’s actor reputation was burnished by adding an Oscar (for “The Fighter”) to his mantle. He isn’t self-reflective that way.

“From my own experience of watching movies, I don’t want to know too much about how it was made or much about the person acting in it,” he explains. “It depresses the [bleep] out of me to get into an actor’s head. Completely unnecessary. It’s a distraction, a thorn in the side of any performance.”

He doesn’t want filmgoers thinking about this bit of gossip or that snippet of viral audio about him. Obliterate his brooding take on The Dark Knight from your memory. He wants us to attempt what he himself shoots for, with every new film — to think about only “the work.”

And after his raw, moving and yet bemused Oscar-winning turn in “The Fighter,” maybe that’s his due.

The great directors, from Terrence Malick (“A New World” to Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn”), Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight”) to David O. Russell (“The Fighter”) have long been eager to get his attention and land him as their lead, even before “The Dark Knight” movies put him in the ranks of Hollywood’s elite leading men. And now that he’s in that top tier, he’s more than happy to let them use his name to get their visions on the screen. He has become that “rare…bankable star” willing to help get a movie made, as New York Observer critic Red Reed put it.

It’s how Bale came to star in his latest film, by the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou. “The Flowers of War” is set against the Rape of Nanking, the murderous, weeks-long rampage that Japanese soldiers went on after capturing the capital of China in 1937.

“The event was well-documented by Westerners who were there at the time, people supposedly safe in the international zone of the city,” Bale says. “I wasn’t going to play one of the real people — John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, the missionary John Magee — who wrote the famous accounts of this massacre. But when Zhang Yiimou reached out to me, he said he wanted to acknowledge those Westerners in his movie. But plainly, in a practical sense, in wanting to relay this story to the rest of the world, engage the rest of the world, he wanted a Western face near the center of his movie. So I was a practical consideration, too, and happy to be one.”

Bale put a Western face on the front of a $100 million Chinese production, a film whose sets were built “out of concrete — they’ll last 100 years” — outside of present day Nanking. He would work with a director who speaks little English on a huge production in a foreign land, “because why wouldn’t you make a movie that’s something of an adventure?”

The English actor, who turns 38 on Jan. 30, got the sense, working with the mostly-Chinese cast and crew, “that this story is something that carries great poignancy for many Chinese. And the fact that it is surprisingly little known in the outside world, the States, bothers them.” He had heard of the Rape of Nanjing and had even read Iris Chang’s best-seller about the atrocity, in which as many as 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered, and as many as 80,000 women and children raped by the Japanese Army. Bale was drawn to the idea that a down-on-his-luck American, a cynical, hard-drinking mortician, could be moved by what he saw to act out of character and try to help a convent school full of young girls escape the horror.
“The phenomenal thing about human nature is how surprising we can be, how we can surprise ourselves by being that person who will stand up and be counted,” he says. “You can’t simply predict it based on who a person has been. It’s not often clear who that will be. I wanted to be able to play around with this idea that the movie’s story is told through the eyes of Shu [Zhang Xinyi ], the twelve year old convent girl. She’s seeing my character through her eyes, and sees who I was and who I become.”

True to his nature, Bale pays no heed to reviews — notices for “The Flowers of War” have been mixed. And he won’t confess to any “grand strategy,” to collect credits from as many of the world’s greatest filmmakers as possible.

“You either enjoy getting to work with people you’ve had a good experience with in the past, or you get to enjoy having a whole new experience with someone you admire and have a great deal of respect for,” Bale says. No, he wasn’t revisiting his childhood (He starred in Steven Spielberg’s Chinese-set WWII drama “Empire of the Sun” when he was 13). No, he didn’t do it “just the see the country. But you know, all those things played into this — liking the story, admiring the director of ‘Raise the Red Lantern,’ making a big budget picture in China with a Chinese cast and crew, and being intrigued by the adventure of it all. It’s not every movie that offers an actor all that.”

First of all, “It’s KILL-ian,” says Kelly Macdonald of her friend, former London neighbor and onetime co-star (2003’s “Intermission.”) “You’d never want to pronounce” Cillian Murphy’s “name wrong.”

And why? What would he do?

“It’s those eyes,” she giggles. “You could lost in those eyes. Or be terrified of them. He’s well

cast in those roles where he’s meant to scare you half to death as a baddie. Oh yes! “

Murphy, 36, is the Irish actor who first came to fame in Danny Boyle’s zombie virus movie, “28 Days Later.” In the years since, he memorably menaced Rachel McAdams in “Red Eye,” turned up as Scarecrow, a non-starter villain’s role in “The Dark Knight” movies, and made a mark in films as diverse as “Inception,” “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” and “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.”

So he’s not copping to this “He’s a scary fellow” thing.

“I don’t get sent bad guys, only,” he says. “But there’s a difference between the huge American films that reach the world, and the smaller films back in Ireland or the UK, where I never find myself playing villains.”

It was Murphy’s “duality” that director Rodrigo Cortes was looking for when he cast Murphy in “Red Lights,” a new thriller that pairs Murphy up with Sigourney Weaver and Elizabeth Olsen as scientists trying to unmask a famous, cunning and ruthless psychic (Robert DeNiro).

“Cillian is the only actor in the world who can turn a horror film into a romantic comedy, or a comedy into a thriller, in just the blink of an eye,” Cortes says. “He has both natures. He can be so eager and interested, like a Boy Scout, which is what his character seems to be in the first half of my film, happy to be in the shadow of Sigourney Weaver’s characters. Or he can be so disturbing, seemingly obsessed.

“And yes, the eyes have a lot to do with it.”

Murphy was taken by the film’s surprises, the weighty subjects it wrestles with.

“I don’t know why we have this 21st century need to believe that we don’t have all the answers,” he says. “Religion isn’t as important in life, so maybe that’s why we cling to the hope that there’s amazing people, powers, that we don’t understand. Yet. People love the unexplained. People attach a great amount of importance to ‘coincidence.’

“And Tom [his character] gives equal credence to both sides of this debate. He doesn’t ridicule or point fingers, unlike his mentor [played by Weaver]. Any belief that becomes fanatical or dogmatic can be your undoing.”

Both director — Cortes previously did the Ryan Reynolds man-in-a-coffin thriller “Buried” — and star describe themselves as “skeptics” on the broad range of things from the paranormal to the supernatural.

“I am completely and boringly rational. None of this stuff for me,” Murphy says. “Any extrasensory power would be such a burden. I’ve played these super-intelligent characters in a couple of movies, and it always hits me what a bother that would be. People wandering around with these massive intellects, which means they see so much that we don’t. They look at things in so many other ways that you’d have to figure that is a torment that they’re living with.

“I’m so involved in the ‘now’ that the idea of knowing the future is just too much. Who’d want to know?”

The frenetic, comic and booze-assisted visit of King George and Queen (“Mum”) Elizabeth to the private home of President Franklin Roosevelt on the eve of World War II might make for a jaunty comedy of manners in the Downton Abbey vein.

Someday.

The movie Roger Michell (“Venus” “Morning Glory”) and writer Richard Nelson chose to make about this comical and pivotal point in the Anglo-American “special relationship” is more expose, more sordid than jaunty.

Even if “Hyde Park On-Hudson” had been about the witty, canny and empathetic womanizer FDR and his handling of the Great Brits, it might have worked. But Michell and Nelson, on whose play this is based, were more interested in the base and somewhat under-sourced suggestions of an affair revealed by the letters of Roosevelt intimate Margaret Suckley.

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A horror movie might seem an oddly unambitious choice for rising starlet Jennifer Lawrence at this stage of her career. She’s been in one franchise (“X-Men: First Class”), launched another (“The Hunger Games”) and is earning serious Oscar buzz for her turn playing disturbed in “The Silver Linings Playbook.”

But “House at the End of the Street” is a conventional thriller packed with jaw-dropping surprises. And Lawrence adds a few new wrinkles to her already impressive repertoire in a film that could have been just another scare-the-teens genre piece.

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