Movie Nation

“The Conjuring 2” had a good Saturday to go with its great Thursday night and Friday, enough so that the ever-inching-up estimates for the film’s opening weekend now stands at about $42 million. Good reviews may have helped. They certainly didn’t hurt. 

“Warcraft”, a true #2 movie, in every way, will open at #2 as well. $26 million is how it looks when all the dollars are counted Sunday night. It’s HUUUUUGE in China, an even bigger opening than “Star Wars.” 

And they didn’t even pander to the Chinese market with this “story.”

“Now You See Me 2” is up to about $24, not an awful opening. But it’ll be gone in a thrice.

A pretty good weekend, considering most of the movies out and opening this weekend are crap.

On paper, it looks like one of the worst weekends for movies of the summer.

But darned if a horror sequel, a failed video game adaptation and a Jesse Eisenberg magic caper dramedy (sequel) didn’t push to the top of the box office mountain.

Kudos to Box Office Mojo for calling “Conjuring 2” right on the money. I figured that horror ceiling of upper $20s was working against it. But no. Based on late Thursday and al-day Friday numbers, it will hit $37 million. Not a bad picture, either.

“Warcraft” sucks. A dreary orcs vs. humans war bore that has what look like elves and dwarves peopling the edge of several scenes, it seems to hit the high spots of the enduring game franchise, push for pathos here and there, and spend an absurd amount of time with wizards and warlocks and portals and other supernatural jiggery pokery upsetting the balance of things. All animated orcs and dwarves and elves and Paula Patton as a sexy “half-breed.” Not my thing. It’s headed toward $26 million.

“Now You See Me” was an unlikely hit a few years ago, and the sequel opened big enough to not be labeled a flop. But this Eisenberg, Harrelson, Caine, Freeman, Ruffalo and Dave Franco franchise won’t come near earning what the original did. A $22 million opening, it’ll be lucky to hit $40.

Last week’s box office leader, those “Mutant Ninja Turtles,” fell off a cliff — a 70% plunge in receipts. Their finale tally, when they lose all their screens within a week or two, should be in the $75 range.

That’s about where “Alice Through the Looking Glass” will wind up. Dying quickly.

“Angry Birds” will clear $100 million by Tuesday at the latest.

“Popstar,” “Neighbors 2,” “Lobster,” all dying off.

Horror director James Wan’s latest trick is to morph his “The Conjuring” franchise into a supernatural love story.

Both as a director and as a producer, Wan is mining the rich “true story” vein provided by Lorraine and Ed Warren, those original “Amityville Horror” ghost-busters. After casting formidable actors Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as the couple, he and screenwriter Chad Hayes let them show their chops as a committed couple, compassionate people and passionate lovers in “The Conjuring 2.”

And every now and then, they get Farmiga to widen her eyes and scream until she’s out of breath. Because this is a horror movie, after all. And Vera? She sells it. And how.

“The Conjuring 2” has the Warrens a bit rattled, with the psychic Lorraine ready to step back  a little. One seance too many, y’understand.

“This is as close to hell as I ever want to get.”

But there’s trouble overseas, in gloomy punk rock era Britain. That’s where the Hodgsons — mother Peggy (Frances O’Connor of “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”) and the four kids she’s raising by herself in a creepy, creaky rowhouse — are being visited by a presence.

“This is MY HOUSE!” he bellows. Sometimes in his own voice, sometimes in a voice blurted out by middle daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe). A toy firetruck has developed a mind of its own, a magic lantern/music box is providing more magic than anyone counted on.

And Janet, then her siblings, her mother, the neighbors and finally the police constables, all get the message. Something is tossing furniture about and menacing the whole family.

The good Catholic Warrens are sent over by The Church to investigate. There’s already a British scientist/believer (Simon McBurney of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy”) and a skeptic (Franka Potente of “Run Lola Run” and one of the Bourne pictures) on site.

Wan may be decades removed from his “Saw” stardom, but he still lets splashes of morbid wit make their way in — cops, seeing a chair slide around a corner, across the floor and into place at a dinner table, mutter, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about THAT.”

The period detail is perfect, from the worn out furniture in this worn-out working class house to the fashions, posters on the kids’ walls (“Starsky & Hutch,” The Bay City Rollers and Joanna Lumley) and vintage British cars under the muddy-gray skies.

The movie is a vexing, patience-testing two and a quarter hours, and takes a full hour to get the Warrens on a plane to the UK. But the few, well-spaced out scares are real spine-tinglers.

Whatever the real Warrens were — and the word “hoaxers” comes up often in discussions of their “cases” — Wan and his various writers (and in the case of the movie “Annabelle,” another director) are taking the license to make them more credible, more real and more empathetic as screen characters.

Watch Wilson as Ed pick up a guitar and croon a little Elvis to put the Hodgson kids at ease, and try not to be moved. The two leads have the gravitas and sense of play to make these movies watchable. Wilson is making a nice name for himself in films like “Insidious.” And Farmiga (“Bates Motel”) is also finding a nice career second wind in the genre.

You don’t have to believe in the Warrens to believe in Wilson and Farmiga. They never let on that this is anything other than all in a scary day’s work. And that they’re more than happy to leave the ghost busting at the office and go home for a nice cuddle and brandy afterwards.

MPAA Rating:R for terror and horror violence

Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Frances O’Connor, Madison Wolfe, Simon McBurney
Credits: Directed by James Wan, script by Chad Hayes . A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 2:14

Another video game makes a branded transition to the big screen, and Hollywood blows it, yet again. That’s “Warcraft.” And seeing as how this tripe just wasted two hours and three minutes of my life, with the threat of sequels to come (Yeah, right), I’m tempted to leave it there.

But no. I didn’t get up and leave. Which I thought about. Might as well have a go at it.

A CG-reliant sword and sorcery fantasy that owes an awful lot (a LOT) to Tolkien and even more to the generations of fans that made World of Warcraft a gaming phenomenon, it has two things the vast majority of such fare lacks — characters, and moments of pathos.

It’s that old bugaboo “STORY” that lets it down.

Orcs, those gigantic, blood-and-battle loving beasts of myth, have ruined their world. But thanks to their wizard-leader, they have this portal that can bring their war parties to a human world.

They take prisoners, because their magic is fed with human life force (literally). And they’re preparing the whole Horde for an invasion.

But the Orc chieftain Durotan (voiced and motion-captured by Tobey Kebbell) of the Frost Wolf clan has a new baby on the way, and wonders if things could be different.

Can’t we call just get along, he asks? Or words to that effect, muttered through his bejeweled tusks.

The humans respond to the threat. Dominic Cooper wears a lot of pretty armor and a lot of hair — facial and otherwise — as their king, Llane. His  brother-in-law, named Lothar (without SNL irony) and played by Travis Fimmel, is their champion, humanity’s Achilles or Lancelot.

He will require the aid of The Guardian, a member of a sacred wizard class, played by Ben Foster. And he’s certainly going to need the help of the skilled flunked-out wizard, Khadgar (Ben Schentzer). If they can get past their trust issues.

“What are you doing in my city, spell-chucker?”

Paula Patton plays a fetching “half-breed,” half-human and raised by Orcs, she speaks both languages and has tusks, in addition to everything leather shorts and a halter top offer.

Orcs and humans battle and scheme, digital brawls set in digital wastelands in between visits to digital cities and digital fortresses. The backdrops and roughly half the characters are animated.

David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones (“Moon”) was an odd choice to direct this time-and-space-wasting oddity. His great accomplishment was keeping a reasonably interesting cast from looking embarrassed every time they have to spout tendentious jibbering or don armor or tusks to stage fights with guys in motion capture suits in front of green screens.

Assuming they went to that much trouble.

Every actor involved with this — Foster, Cooper, Patton and Fimmel (“Maggie’s Plan,” TV’s “Vikings”) — is better than this movie lets on.

If you’ve loved the game, you might appreciate the visuals cooked up for this fantasy universe. As it’s not interactive, and there’s no chance of playing one’s way into a better story, it doesn’t mimic the game experience or improve on it. The plot, subtexts and acting are a hash.

Put another way, I was bored out of my skull, from the “Lord of the Rings” opening to the Old Testament/Moses Afloat finale.

MPAA Rating:PG – 13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy violenc

Cast: Travis Fimmel, Ben Foster, Paula Patton, Dominic Cooper, Ben Schnetzer,
Credits: Directed by Duncan Jones, script by Duncan Jones and Charles Leavitt. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:03

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