Movie Nation

Summer sequel season is long since in full swing. This weekend’s crop is quite representative — one solid sequel that might please the faithful, one limp one to a movie nobody thought merited a sequel in the first place.

Jesse Eisenberg could have gotten a franchise out of “Zombieland.” Because no one was interested in “The Further Adventures of Mark Zuckerberg.” But the lame “magic” caper dramedy “Now You See Me” is the one that laid the egg. Middling reviews, but it made bank. So back come Jesse, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo and Michael Caine — no Isla Fisher this time. Lily Caplan has “the girl role.” Daniel Radcliffe is on board, for villainous measure. Poor reviews, as to be expected, from “Now You See Me 2.” Not even clever enough to make the title “Now You See Me Too.”

Hollywood’s unblemished record in adapting video games earns no “exception that proves the rule” with “Warcraft.” Getting a story out of a game is always tough. And they didn’t do that here. 

Travis Fimmel is much better in “Maggie’s Plan,” Dominic Cooper needed the work, as did Paula Patton and Ben Foster. A blip on their resumes, and a paycheck.

“The Conjuring 2” is that almost-unheard of horror sequel that’s earning reviews almost as rapturous — OK, I oversold that — as the original. Those widely discredited spook hunters Lorraine and  Ed Warren, the “Amityville Frauds,” are back (Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson), this time in London. Because nobody in America takes them seriously any more?

Director James Wan is the closest thing horror has to a modern Hitchcock — reliable, stylish frights, time and again.

“Maggie’s Plan” is Rebecca Miller’s version of a Woody Allen rom-com — smart, witty, top-drawer cast. Going into wider release today. See it. 

“Conjuring 2” may have the edge at the box office, being a sequel to a  horror hit. Horror, however, has a definite ceiling. I don’t think Box Office Mojo is on the money, here. $36 million? We’ll see.

Box Office Guru is more in line with my thinking on this. “Warcraft” has the brand name edge — $24 million should win the weekend. “Now You See Me” should clear $20. “Conjuring?” Around $20-24 seems about right. 

Either way, those “Ninja Turtles” are done at the top of the box office mountain. Top four is their fondest hope.

“Maggie’s Plan” is the best romantic comedy Woody Allen never made.

A tale of pretentious academics in love, infidelity, and “Let’s get you two back together” manipulations, with plucked guitar jazz in the score and oodles of Manhattan locations, director Rebecca Miller had to be expecting that inevitable Allen comparison.

Which is why she improved on the exhausted Allen formula. The performances are funny, but err on the side of natural — not the arch, stagey inventions of Allen’s last 30 years. They talk like real people. The romance, when it hits, hurts. And when love ends or takes a detour, there’s bite to the bitterness.

Greta Gerwig has the title role and toned down her “Mumblecore” affectations for her most touching performance. Maggie’s “plan,” outlined to her onetime college beau (Bill Hader,  is to have a child. No husband because, “Let’s face it,” she hasn’t ever taken a relationship past the six month mark.

That “Let’s face it” line may be the lone cliche in the Karen Rinaldi/Rebecca Miller script. We’re only subjected to a single scene of “I’m just facing the truth about myself” retreads, which Tony (Hader) isn’t buying, and the “Plan” is set in motion.

There’s a “pickle entrepreneur” (Travis Fimmel of TV’s “Vikings”) she has in mind for the donor. There’s a gawky chivalry — he’s a little smitten — to Guy that Maggie rejects out of hand. An academic at The New School, she’s too organized and into a life of the mind to consider this awkward hipster.

Which is how she falls for her colleague, the”ficto-cultural anthropologist” John. He’s given a faintly-downtrodden air by Ethan Hawke, playing another “blocked novelist.”

They meet, she takes an interest in his interest, and reads his novel-in-progress. And from that autobiographical book and John’s complaints, she picks up on his unhappy marriage. His self-absorbed Scandinavian academic wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore) undervalues him, lets him raise their two kids.

There goes the guilt when Maggie lets herself fall for John’s damaged desperation. She’s already become his muse. Soon, she’s his wife, raising their adorable daughter and stabilizing John’s disordered life.

“Maggie’s Plan” becomes “Maggie’s Back-Up Plan” thanks to what happens after that.

The story hangs on a series of Shakespearean manipulations and under-estimations. Maggie, for starters, is never given any credit. Gerwig’s “adorable ditz” baggage may have been kicked to the curb for this performance, but we instantly do what Tony, John and Georgette, and John and Georgette’s kids (who speak Danish when they insult Maggie to her face) do. We take her lightly, figure she’s naive at best.

“”You are such a hall monitor!” John complains of the organized young woman he nicknames “”Little Miss Quaker two-shoes,” riffing on her childhood religion.

“Am I so capable that I never deserve any attention?” Maggie wonders.

The Oscar winning Moore slings just enough of an accent for her lines to be funny. Her top-knot hairstyle says everything about the character we need to know — frosty, severe.

“I detest ze role of ze spurned wife. I von’t play it!”

Miller knows the rules of a romantic comedy, so the “surprises” here are more twists that shocks. But Moore, Hawke, Gerwig amd Hader and for that matter Maya Rudolph (as Tony’s wife) all play this as if they’ve never read a play, never heard that there’s an inevitable happy ending for all these complications.

They never let on that they know that in life, as in this movie, it that ending won’t be the one we’ve planned.

MPAA Rating:R for language and some sexuality (nudity)

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph
Credits: Directed by Penelope Miller, script by Rebecca Miller, Karen Rinaldi . A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:39

Luis Guzman, for decades one of the funniest character actors in the movies (“Waiting…” “Yes Man”) hilariously steps into the spotlight in a comedy whose title is as deep as it ever gets — “Puerto Ricans in Paris.”

It’s a cop buddy picture that suffers from a serious imbalance in the partnership. But Guzman lands laugh after laugh as a Boricua out of water in the City of Light.

There are giggles and grins in the opening, when Guzman, as an NYC fraud detective, poses as a Born Again Texas tourist (Miriam Shor scores as his “wife”/boss) who wants to buy Louis Vuitton handbags from a Times Square counterfeiter.

The scene’s a cliche — rube tourists, an Indian hustler (Ravi Patel, a hoot), “New York Rolexes, “New York Vuittons,” etc. — but it zings.

Then Luis’s partner, played by Edgar Garcia (TV’s “How to Make it In America”) lumbers in. From here on out, the movie teeters between funny and dull, between working and not-quite, between Guzman and Garcia.

A French fashion team (Alice Taglioni, Frédéric Anscombre) commission these real New York cops to solve the case of a stolen designer bag, which has been ransomed by counterfeiters who threaten to flood the market with fakes before Colette (Taglioni) can release her latest creation.

There’s a big reward involved. The catch? The two Puerto Rican NYC cops have to go to Paris.

Luis, from the moment he sets foot in France, lights it up. Literally. He hits up a generic Frenchman, “Heeeyyy, man” for a smoke.

“It’s Paris, baby. The cigarettes are HEALTHEIR. Google that s–t!”

Luis is on the case and on the make — hitting on every skinny mademoiselle he meets, swaggering into meetings with suspects posing as a Saudi prince or Colombian drug lord. The jokes are entirely too on-the-nose, but no matter. Guzman finds the laughs in even the most weary scenes in the Ian Edelman/Neel Shah script.

Garcia? Not so much. The character is supposed to be the straight man, the one Colette flirts with (because…he looks like Vin Diesel?). But even as a straight man, Garcia’s a stiff. His line-readings are the very definition of that phrase — “line reading.”

He’s such dead weight that you can’t help but ponder how much funnier this might have been by pairing say, Guzman with Rosie Perez or Rosario Dawson, who play the two NYC cops’ love interests with gusto. Heck, putting the tantrum-tossing Perez with the smoldering slow-burner Dawson in Paris would make a pretty funny movie, too.

You figure out the “mystery” long before the “Puerto Ricans in Paris” do. But Guzman makes even the most trite moment — hailing a taxi in oh-so-tolerant Paris — amusing.

“What? You don’t pick up Puerto Ricans here, either?”

MPAA Rating:R for language including some sexual references

Cast: Luis Guzman, Edgar Garcia, Rosie Perez, Alice Taglioni, Rosario Dawson
Credits: Directed by Ian Edelman, script by Ian Edelman, Neel Shah. A Focus World release.

Running time: 1:22

Clark, the smart, judgmental teen at the heart of “Quitters,” has a reason for being that way.

His mother (Mira Sorvino) is a medicated mess, weepy, unstable and needy. She insists on driving him to a friend’s house after she’s canceled a family getaway at the last minute. She’s in her bathrobe. She’s fawning over him, utterly distracted despite his “Watch the road, Mom,” pleas.

When she plows into a stop sign, it’s her turn to plead. “Let’s keep this between us.”

Whipping out his cellphone tells us he’s not having it. “I’d like to report an accident.”

Clark quits on her, once and for all, it seems.

“Quitters” plays as a downward spiral that plainly has been underway for a while.  Mom is off to rehab, where they’ll try to get her medications right. Because she needs them. Clark, given the loathsome certitude of the self-righteous by Ben Konigsberg (“Anesthesia”), hears his dad (Greg Germann) beg him to “keep this quiet.”

But Clark is above that kind of reasoning. The girl (Kara Hayward) that he most wants to impress gets an earful. And when she dismisses his romantic overtures — with extreme prejudice — she gets Clark’s unfiltered take, too. He starts a whispering campaign about her “depression,” and informs her, by condescending email, that he’s A) “concerned” and B) can no longer “be your friend.”

He’s the sort of teen who debates his hip, young English teacher (Kieran Culkin, quite good) about his grade on an essay, and bullies the guy to get his way.

The kid finds Dad’s “chipper” (small marijuana pipe) in the glove compartment, and wrecks it. He sees a receipt for a massage parlor, and in front of his father, calls the place to catch the old man in an indiscreet lie.

First-time feature writer-director Noah Pritzker has created a near-classic anti-hero in Clark, a kid who wins our sympathy, then our fury and finally, something resembling our pity in this 93 minute film.

We wince at Clark’s infuriating mix of tactlessness and cluelessness. “Awkward” doesn’t begin to cover it. And we grimace at his every misstep, because we see them coming long before he does.

He ogles a hot mom (Saffron Burrows), only to ingratiate himself with her daughter, a classmate (Morgan Turner) he barely knows. He joins them for dinner and angles his way into their lives and into classmate Natalia’s bed, even though she seems to see through him.

He punishes his father, and watching Mom’s narcissistic approach to rehab, we wonder if Dad actually deserves any of this. He sees his son as “a mean spirited little s—.”

We will, too.

Konigsberg is deftly infuriating as Clark, Hayward and Turner make their vulnerable characters more insecure girls next door than beguiling teen sirens, Burrows suggests a deep soul with a dark side and Germann just looks….guilty. Of something.

Set in San Francisco’s tony Presidio, idle affluence permeates Pritzker’s picture. The title “Quitters” signifies relationships that one and all are quick to abandon — the parents cheat or have cheated, the kids abandon this or that significant person in their lives on an impulse. The parents have quit on their kids, too. Sorvino’s May is merely the last to do that.

There’s an abruptness to the conclusion that makes “Quitters” feel incomplete. But Pritzker has conjured up a world and peopled it with believable co-dependents, no mean feat in a 93 minute film.

The adult “Quitters”, caught up in their own melodramas, never ponder how their kids turned out this way, which is funny. Narcissists, by nature, are never that far from a mirror.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with pot use, teen sex, exploitative sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Ben Konigsberg, Kara Hayward, Morgan Turner, Mira Sorvino, Kieran Culkin, Greg Germann, Saffron Burrows

Credits: Written and directed by Noah Pritzker. A Monument/eOne release.

Running time: 1:33

If you’re a film fanatic you’ve seen or heard of them — “fan films,” homages, remakes of or tributes to movies that fans are so crazy for that they want to put themselves into the experience of that world and try to recreate it on the screen.

They tackle “Star Wars” with fast food toys as the stars, recreate the bridge of this or that starship in their house, and act-out and videotape their efforts at playing their favorite characters and recreating their favorite filmic universe.

“Son of Rambow” was a decently-budgeted indie film about British kids making such a movie — (“Rambo”), “First Blood.”

As a film critic, I’ve seen a few of these enthusiastically cheesy efforts over the years. I recall one that a bunch of Orlando area theme park employees — set builders — made in a guy’s house, styrofoaming every room into a different corner of a space ship. At least the sets were impressive. They made a documentary about their filming this back in the ’80s. But an hour’s dogged research and memory crunching have failed to turn up that title, or the title of any other fan films I’ve checked out over the years. They’re forgotten because, well, they’re forgettable.

“Raiders! The Adaptation” got itself billed as “The Greatest Fan Ever Made” in the capital city of geekdom — Austin, Texas. It was a  1980s attempt by a bunch of Mississippi kids to do a shot-by-shot remake of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Think for a minute what that would require. No wonder it took them seven years to complete it. Or almost complete it.

Steven Spielberg’s film, based on a story dreamed up by Philip Kaufman and George Lucas, hit little boys where they live. I remember some college friends dressing up as Indy and running around doing semi-dangerous stunts — sneaking into an unclimbable  bell tower on a college campus — videotaping their derring do.

Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala  and Jayson Lamb were 11 and 12 year olds who set out in 1982 to recreate not just the movie, not just every scene, but every SHOT Spielberg & Co. created. The  storyboards alone, detailing hundreds and hundreds of camera set-ups, angles and edits, were as thick as a Manhattan phonebook.

Their goal was to film it, using up every summer vacation from school to do it, then show it to Spielberg, and maybe jump start careers in the movies with it. They dream big in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

The boys, and the girl they talked into playing Marion Ravenswood (Angela Rodriguez), shot in their parents’ homes, setting up DIY SFX (special effects) that could have injured them or burned down those houses.  Yeah, they were unsupervised, and there are outtakes of every accident.

They saved their allowances and made every Christmas and every birthday about the movie. Please, Santa, bring me a Stetson fedora? A bullwhip? A leather jacket? Money to buy an old truck without an engine that I can turn into a 1930s German Army Mercedes?

And they kept at it. For seven years. They shot out of sequence. They outgrew costumes. They turned into teenagers on camera. They never quite finished. How DO you fake the big fight in front of a Nazi Flying Wing?

But their project got discovered and championed by Eli Roth, made its way to Austin and online film geek Harry Knowles’ film festival. And Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen made this documentary about the guys, 30 years later, raising money to shoot that last 124 shot, six minute sequence.With a flying wing.

“Raiders!” is a movie with a better back story than finished product. Kids did this. That’s the hook. The kids fell out, and only reunited, decades later, for the finishing scene. Things went wrong when back then. Things go wrong today. That happens on amateur movie shoots. And life got personally messy in the intervening decades.

Yeah, the kids weren’t ordinary. One’s mom was a local TV anchor married to the owner of a TV station. None of them, not one, has or had (back then) a Southern accent. They apparently had one black friend, cast as the the friendly ship captain who helped Indy. The “personal struggles” anecdotes pale in comparison to the obvious advantages they had that allowed them to do this. Indulgent, distracted parents were a help.

Lamb, the effects guy and cinematographer back in the ’80s, comes off as cocky and geekish, with a hint of bitterness. Zala is the committed, organized one (he directed) and Strompolos the one with an arrogant edge, a well-off but unhappy childhood, followed by a lot of indulged child’s problems as an adult.

But “Raiders!” will make any movie buff laugh out loud at the sheer chutzpah and kiddie problem-solving that it took to, for instance, recreate that boulder chasing Indy out of a South American temple.

Getting permission to show the original footage, side by side, with their “adaptation” of it was a coup. So was getting John Rhys-Davies –Sallah, in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — to sit for an interview about their passion, then and now.

But in keeping with this little boy’s attempt at movie-making, it takes a kid to put it all in perspective. Zala’s kids are around, watching Dad finish up his dream project, and his son gets off the movie’s best line.

“Why did Steven Spielberg need $20 million to make ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’? My dad only needed his allowance.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, drug abuse discussions

Cast: Chris Strompolos,  Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb, John Rhys-Davies, Eli Roth, Harry Knowles
Credits: Directed by Jeremy Coon, Tim Skousen.  A Drafthouse release.

Running time: 1:35

The second “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie could have done with more laughs and a shorter running time.

It is, after all, a comic book movie for kids and not fanboys.

Thursday night and Friday, it set a pace that failed to exceed its predicted middling blockbuster opening ($33-34 million) and may be on track to do $31 or less.

Word of mouth Saturday will be telling. Reviews didn’t help. No no not at all. 

On the other hand, the popular lady lit novel “Me Before You” is doing much better than projected. An $18 million+ weekend for a sad romance with middling reviews and no big name stars is not a bad opening. Projections had it in the $12-14 range.

“Popstar” was never going to have the heat, or the screens to clear $5 million. And it won’t. Based on Friday’s numbers. Decent reviews didn’t do much for a movie that half-heartedly mocks that which is beyond mocking — Justin Bieber and his ilk.

“X-Men” are facing their apocalypse. A 67% plunge from opening weekend numbers doesn’t signal that this is long for this world. Or the multiplex.

“Alice Through the Looking Glass” is enjoying a steep drop off from its opening weekend. Not off a cliff, but 60% is on the “over and done with” side of the spectrum.

The reviews of Andy Samberg’s 86 minute SNL sketch “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” have been generous. And it’s not a bad time killer.

The parody plays like a pulled punch, lots of raunchy semi-outrageous music videos and concert sequences that keep slamming up against off-stage moments that fall utterly flat.

Everybody liked it well enough, a few doltish raves, bit mostly a lot of “Meh, why not?”  I was on the fence. Which is reason to point you to the metacritic rating for it, a sober but solid 69% positive. The Tomatomater lacks the nuance to capture a lightweight movie’s shrugging endorsements.

Those dreadful Ninja Turtles are back. Small kids — OK, small BOYS — will titter at the profanity (somewhat mild) and ogle Megan Fox’s assorted tight, midriff baring outfits. There’s barely a laugh in it, but the action beats play. Poor reviews for this one.

“Me Before You” is a female wish fulfillment fantasy that panders to a demographic that isn’t male comic book nerds. Condescending, patronizing, with a comically over-animated performance by “Game of Thrones” eyebrow mistress Emilia Clarke. As many pans as as positive reviews.

Is there still an audience for those mutant reptiles? Box Office Guru says there is, but only to the tune of $33 million. Not bad, considering the cost to the Chinese backers who financed it. Not a smash, though.

Box Office Mojo suggests a slightly higher take ($34).

Everybody is predicting no money at all for “Popstar,” which is what Samberg gets for tying his fortune to Adam Sandler — if only briefly. $5 million is the top end of predictions, with most people figuring the best bits are in the trailer (they are). It ought to do better than that, though.

“Me Before You” could have been a decent date movie. Nah, who’m I kidding? A romance between a guy in a wheelchair who wants to die and his fetching day nurse? You’d have to waterboard most guys to get them to see that one. Predictions are $12-15 million for that one.