Movie Nation

Critics often talk of “courageous” performances, historically those actors who play commit to giving their all to difficult characters — emotionally, by playing someone far beyond their experience, or physically — gaining weight, going bald, uglying up.

Oscar winner Julianne Moore goes the full Charlize “Monster” Theron in “Freeheld,” playing a haggard, high-mileage chain-smoking lesbian cop whose cancer and death benefits case became a major milepost in America’s shift toward legalizing gay marriage.

But there are other guys with guts, here. They play the villains, and not lip-smacking, charismatic evil geniuses or colorfully demented wackos. Dennis Boutsikaris, Kevin O’Rourke, Tom McGowan and  William Sadler are county commissioners with homophobic, or at least unsympathetic tendencies, and Anthony DeSando is a fellow police detective ready to toss his longtime colleague under the legislative bus because she’s in love with and lives with a woman. They’re on the wrong side of history, more backward than hateful, cowardly than charismatic. That’s tricky to play.

“Freeheld” is a moving and inspiring account of that detective’s dying wish, a test case of almost a decade ago that made this reluctant, closeted cop an activist and an icon. It’s a film that flirts with stereotypes, and is somewhat derailed, or at least sidetracked, by one over-the-top performance that borders on caricature. But it works.

Freeholder is the name New Jersey gives its county commissioners. They’re the ones who would decide Lauren Hester’s case, and they had that choice because the state had already decreed that legally recognized domestic partnerships qualified for survivor benefits of state employees.

Laurel has been a loner, dedicated to the job, aloof enough to avoid the trap of sex with her fellow cops. When she sets out to “meet someone,” she crosses state lines. She plays volleyball. Badly. That’s where Stacie Andree (Ellen Page) meets her.

Moore is utterly believable as this weary, wary woman whose name and photo might be in the papers, but who keeps the rest of her life on lock down. She is full of “rules.” “Don’t ever answer my phone.” Closeted.

Page is the one who sells this May-October relationship, lets us feel the attraction and the much younger woman’s confidence in approaching the shy older one.

Michael Shannon gives a caring integrity to Dane, Laruel’s bluff, no-nonsense divorced partner, but just another guy she won’t share her secret with.

Director Peter Sollett — the wonderful “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” was his) and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner paint the relationships in broad, stereotypical strokes. Stacie wears a lot of flannel — a LOT. She’s a mechanic and owns a motorcycle. Anybody who knows what rhymes with “bike” will remember that gay cliche.

But “Freeheld” finds surer footing once the lovers have domestically partnered through  the state, moved in together and Laurel gets sick. Up until then, they’ve only endured the odd grimace of tactlessness from strangers and officials, most of whom quickly regroup and adjust to this new legal reality. Gay bashing is harder to pull off with a woman armed trained by the state to pull a pistol.

Laurel’s simple request, that her partner collect her pension benefits in the event of her death, is dismissed by those villains mentioned before. Her fellow cops, save for Dane, don’t rally around her. But a local newspaper reporter (Adam LeFevre) sees the controversy and the hypocrisy.

And that’s when the activist arrives. Steve Carell lays on the “faaaabulous!” as this gay Jewish firebrand, and whatever somber sobriety “Freeheld” could claim flies out the window. He’s a risible stereotype, and to be fair, Carell was probably doing the production a huge favor, diving in after Zach Galifianakis had to drop out. That helped the film get made.

But he almost breaks the movie. Read any bad review attacking the film, and he’s the big sticking point. The earlier stereotypes fall by the wayside in the face of Carell’s onslaught.

Earnestness and good intentions wouldn’t have been enough to rescue the picture from Carell’s comic instincts. But the story, told in an Oscar winning documentary of the same name, carries us along and the other performances — Moore, Page and Shannon — move us.

And don’t forget the villains. In those character players mentioned above, America can see where we used to be, get a whiff of how unfair we might have been. Those guys let us see our mirror image ten years ago, even if a certain Pope and Kentucky county clerk cannot.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements, language and sexuality

Cast: Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Michael Shannon, Steve Carell
Credits: Directed by Peter Sollett, script by Ron Nyswaner, based on Cynthia Wade’s Oscar winning documentary short of the same title.  A Summit release.

Running time: 1:43

This may be the best opening weekend for movies in 2015…thus far. Winners are everywhere, must-see pictures litter the cineplex. Heavens.

“The Martian” is Ridley Scott’s best-reviewed film in this millennium, his best sci-fi film since “Blade Runner.” And it’s funny, thanks to Matt Damon’s jokey to-the-camera narration, and Team Nerd back on Earth, scrambling to help him rescue himself from the Red Planet. Good popcorny fun. Go. Enjoy.

“Sicario” is an outstanding drug wars thriller that’s been opening in a platform release. Much of the country gets to see it this weekend. And it should. See it. It’s practically a Donald Trump campaign ad, with its depiction of Mexican drug murders, illegal immigration and the “war” underway on our southern border. Aside from that, it’s got breathless suspense, brutal violence and that favorite of Hollywood DEA/military thrillers, “surgical strikes.” Brutal picture, terrific reviews for that one.

“The Walk” is being hyped as one of those movies that will cause some people to get dizzy and leave the theater, thanks to the CG wire walking scenes in the finale. Hogwash. It’s well-done and tautly played, a bit nerve wracking. The 3D intensity isn’t anything anybody who goes to the movies more than rarely should be impressed, but not overwhelmed. Terrific reviews for this one, too.

In some markets (including Orlando), “Finders Keepers” opens, an amusing and engaging doc about a couple of Carolina hicks who fight over a sawed-off human foot. Seriously. Enzian has it in Orlando. Very good reviews for this one.

Sometimes it seems that rural white southern males are the last permissibly mockable group in these United States. Good’ol boys living all along the NASCAR belt drawl some bit of rural rube ridiculousness, and America giggles. And tunes in, when they hit “reality” TV.

I was prepared to grit my teeth over “Finders Keepers,”  a documentary about two Carolina rednecks fighting over custody of an amputated foot. And  filmmakers Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel never hesitate to let these two put their, um, feet in it. The laugh-out-loud moments come mainly their bumpkins’ lack of self-awareness.

Such as when pot-bellied “entrepreneur” Shannon Whisnant scratches his goatee and declares, “Ah’m purty smart. I’m sure y’all figured that out by now.”

But Carberry and Tweel take this story, which made national “news of the odd” waves when it happened, and go deeper. And “Finders Keepers” makes that nearly impossible journey from mockery to understanding. Not all the way to sympathy, mind you, just “Maybe this is how they got to BE this way.”

John Wood lost his foot in an airplane accident near his hometown of Maiden, N.C. He told the doctors he wanted to keep his foot. He did, in all its gruesome, gory glory. He wanted the “meat” stripped off it, but couldn’t find anybody to do it. Thought about “mummifying it.” That didn’t really work.

But then he got evicted and packed everything he owned into a storage unit — the foot stuffed into a barbecue grill. And that’s how Shannon Whisnant got his hands on it, at auction, the kind you see on TV’s “Storage Wars.”

Whisnant did the right thing. He called the cops, and they took it to a mortuary and figured out who it belonged to. Then Whisnant did the wrong thing. He demanded the foot back. He made T-shirts. He pushed himself into the media and made a spectacle as “the Foot Man,” telling his story and promising to sell peeks at the foot when it was returned.

And Wood? He was dismayed, then irked at this fellow who thought “he was gonna be the next Billy Bob Thornton!”

Let the Foot Fight begin.

“It’s a funny story,” Wood’s tough, sage mother Peg says, but one “borne of tragedy.”

The filmmakers then tell us each man’s back story, and “Finders Keepers” transcends its “Look at the silly hillbillies” opening.

Wood’s father died in that plane crash. Wood has drug problems. And Whisnant? He resents Wood’s relatively privileged upbringing. And more than anything on Earth, Whisnant wants to be famous. He seizes this foot as his main chance.

“Finders Keepers” manipulates the stories like reality TV, pushing the viewers’ allegiance away from this man and towards that one, back and forth. Layers peel away. Each man seems to get the absurdity of their situation, but never how absurd they seem in it.

Naturally, it all comes down to TV’s “Judge Mathis” to resolve this, and the robed entertainer never seemed more Solomonic than with this case.

But that’s not the end, just the beginning of the end. Each man’s motives suggest that each will get pretty much exactly what he deserves. And along the way, we get to sit back and laugh in judgement, because as clever as it is, “Finders Keepers” never can quite turn the mirror away from the pride of Maiden, N.C., and back on us, the rubes sucked into this story in all its many incarnations.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: John Wood, Shannon Whisnant, Peg Wood,
Credits: Directed by Bryan Carberry and J. Clay e. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:22

It doesn’t take too much away from “The Walk,” the frothy new caper dramedy about the World Trade Center high-wire walk of Philippe Petit, to say it’s inferior to the delightful 2008 documentary, “Man on Wire,” about the same event.

Robert “Forrest Gump” Zemeckis has concocted a flip, funny Hollywood version of that stunt, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a Frenchman, Ben Kingsley as his tough-but-wise Czech mentor and state-of-the-art 3D and effects that recreate the WTC, the sense of staggering height and the zen thrill Petite got from his “coup.”

Where James Marsh’s documentary was poetic, tense and exultant, Zemeckis, who co-scripted “Walk,” is content with bemused, wry and sentimental. But he delivers some 3D thrillers. And every so often, he comes close to joyous.

Petite (Gordon-Levitt) narrates his own story, start to finish, playfully standing on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. “This is life,” he says of his high-wire walks. For him, walking between the Twin Towers of the then-new World Trade Center became a fiercely held dream, to stage “the most audacious work of art that has ever been done.”

The film shows us this dream taking hold in Paris, where the young Petit was a mime, juggler and street entertainer. He fell in love with wire-walking after seeing “Les Diables Blancs,” the “White Devils” aerialist act. Their patriarch, Papa Rudy (Kinglsey) grumpily tries to teach the kid (for a fee) safety, technique and showmanship.

You must “compliment” the audience, he purrs. Put a little grace, flair and gravitas in the act. “You cannot lie on stage. The audience will know what is inside you.”

The puckish Petit doesn’t lie. He tells everyone he meets he plans to walk between the Twin Towers, once they’re topped off in 1974. Among them, Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), the gorgeous street musician he meets and courts (via mime) in Paris.

Gordon-Levitt gets laughs with this audacity, as Petit assembles a “team” of amateurs to help him pull this off. There’s a clumsy photographer and a hanger-on who’s afraid of heights, an American “insider” and an electronics store “fixer” (James Badge Dale), along with a couple of quasi-stoners.

Petit boldly tells even the customs inspector on entering New York what he plans to do. Trespassing, dangerous, illegal as all get out? Meh. What does New York care? The city was already labeling the sterile, boxy WTC just “two filing cabinets” on their skyline.

I love the way composer Alan Silvestri sets all the team-assembling, intel-gathering and caper carrying-out to “caper comedy jazz,” that sneaky, brassy, tee-tuh-te-te high-hat percussion that’s underscored films from “The Pink Panther” onward.

But when the mop-topped Frenchman takes to the wire, Beethoven’s serene “Fur Elise” ripples through the silence of “an island floating in mid-air, on the edge of the void.”

Gordon-Levitt is long on charm, as always. He speaks French and slings a French accent as characters always find a reason to switch back to English, even in Paris.

Like “Everest,” “The Walk” is a film that justifies its use of 3D, and not just with cheap gimmicks. We sense “the void,” the scary nature of what was being attempted, and we’re  jolted by wires and props falling off the screen and into our laps.

But Zemeckis, who never makes “deep” films, shows his glib side time and again, including that use of the over-familiar “Fur Elise.” The movie is melodramatic and cocksure, flippant but often funny.

And the sentimental stuff about hated buildings that became something else in New Yorkers’ eyes with this stunt has a nice melancholy tone.

We don’t have the World Trade Center anymore, “The Walk” reminds us. They came from a more innocent time, when a foreigner could sneak into the country for mischief and mean us no harm.

Yes, “Man on Wire” gets at all those big themes and did it better. Netflix that extraordinary documentary, if you can’t seen it.

But give Hollywood its due, too. “The Walk” is the movie that takes us up there, gives us the jitters and makes us titter along the way.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements involving perilous situations, and for some nudity, language, brief drug references and smoking

Cast: Joseph Gordon Levitt, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale
Credits: Directed by Robert Zemeckis, script by Robert Zemeckis and Christopher Browne. A Sony Tristar release.

Running time: 2:03

Nobody is going to confuse the first passable cartoon to hit theaters since “Shaun the Sheep” for an Adam Sandler comeback.

Hopefully.

But the established brand “Hotel Transylvania 2,” whose most generous reviews (like mine) used phrases like “not awful,” blew up Friday and looks to have an opening weekend in the $45-48 million range. Saturday’s always the biggest day for tiny tot toons, so we’ll see. But the gags work, and there’s nothing else for this audience out there.

“Maze Runner 2” fell off over 50%, but that’s normal.

“Everest” opened wider (see it in IMAX), and more than doubled its business, to almost $13 million.

“Black Mass” fell off 46%.

“The Intern” found an older audience, or will have, by the end of Sunday night, to the tune of $18 million.

“War Room” continues to rake in the cash for the preachers turned filmmakers, The Kendrick Brothers. $56 million and counting.
Their biggest hit ever.

“Sicario,” in relatively few theaters, cracked the top ten. Impressive.

And Eli Roth’s long-awaited horror pic “The Green Inferno,” opening wide, squeezed pictures like “Pawn Sacrifice” out of the top ten.

Th full list of the box office take this weekend is here.

It’s a great weekend…for panned movies opening wide in these United States.

“Pawn Sacrifice” opens wider. So there’s that.

But “The Intern” is a creaking, edge-free rom-com without the rom. Robert DeNiro is the stiff, nice  senior citizen intern brought on board a Manhattan women’s fashion Internet startup.

Anne Hathaway is the nerdy/weepy entrepreneur who keeps crying at the board of director’s efforts to hire a CEO over her head, and her Napoleon Dynamite look-alike husband who is cheating on her. On ANNE HATHAWAY.

Not away, just retro and limp. Weak shrugs dominate the reviews for this one.

Adam Sandler’s leading man days are winding down. He can only find any audience at all in these crummy ensemble comedies he’s been inclined toward for years and years. “Pixels” didn’t deliver, and suggests he’s not worth any big budget gamble. So a lot of his cronies are going to have to find other jobs.

“Hotel Transylvania 2” isn’t half bad, for all that. OK, half-bad about covers it. More laughs than the animated original. Good sight gags. VERY small kid friendly. Reviews are DOA, however.

“Mississippi Grind” opens today in limited release. It’s been out on various VOD platforms for weeks, so they didn’t figure Ryan Reynolds was a good enough box office gamble to reverse the order of that release. Not bad. Not bad at all.

It’s a great weekend…for panned movies opening wide in these United States.

“Pawn Sacrifice” opens wider. so there’s that.

But “The Intern” is a creaking, edge-free rom-com without the rom. Robert DeNiro is the stiff, nice  senior citizen intern brought on board a Manhattan women’s fashion Internet startup.

Anne Hathaway is the nerdy/weepy entrepreneur who keeps crying at the board of director’s efforts to hire a CEO over her head, and her Napoleon Dynamite look-alike husband who is cheating on her. On ANNE HATHAWAY.

Not away, just retro and limp. Weak shrugs dominate the reviews for this one.

Adam Sandler’s leading man days are winding down. He can only find any audience at all in these crummy ensemble comedies he’s been inclined toward for years and years. “Pixels” didn’t deliver, and suggests he’s not worth any big budget gamble. So a lot of his cronies are going to have to find other jobs.

“Hotel Transylvania 2” isn’t half bad, for all that. OK, half-bad about covers it. More laughs than the animated original. Good sight gags. VERY small kid friendly. Reviews are DOA, however.

“Mississippi Grind” opens today in limited release. It’s been out on various VOD platforms for weeks, so they didn’t figure Ryan Reynolds was a good enough box office gamble to reverse the order of that release.

It has a little over 20 laughs — or at least mild chuckles. Most courtesy of quick-cut sight gags, pratfalls and the like.
And the animation is sharper, deeper, more refined.
So yeah, we can call “Hotel Transylvania 2” a minor improvement over the first film, an Adam Sandler animated comedy about a hotel for vampires, werewolves, zombies and other monsters, run by a doting vampire dad.
As Sandler’s career as a Hollywood leading man winds up, he’s got this franchise ahead of him — doing the almost-funny voices, keeping his cadre of cronies (Spade, Samberg, assorted out of work “SNL” veterans) employed a little longer.
The first time, single-dad Dracula (Sandler) was trying to keep with wayward teen (Selena Gomez) from falling for a nerdy human backpacker (Andy Samberg). This time, they’re married. They’ve produced a little boy. He may or may not be a vampire, and “Vamp-pa” Drac is dying to know.
He babysits, sings a version of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” sure to keep the kiddies up at night.
“Suffer, suffer, scream in pain, you will never breathe again.”
He takes the kid on a little coming-of-age treck with his monster pals (Buscemi, Spade, Kevin James and others do the voices), revisiting his reckless past and hoping to jolt the kid into growing some fangs.
Meanwhile, the in-laws (Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly, not given one funny thing to say) are trying to convince Mavis (Gomez) and Jonathan (Samberg) to move to California.
Sandler vamps it up — a little. He sings a cute ukelele wedding song in the wedding scene. He lisps like a vampire, “stake my heart and hope to die.” He makes vampires all warm and cuddly.
“We don’t need to kill any more. We love PopTarts!”
The animation owes a lot to the ghoulish “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” the sight gags –many involve the Jello-mold monster “The Blob” — find laughs through quick cuts. “SNL” vet Robert Smigel took a pass at the script, so credit any non-Sandler singing gags to him.
It skews very young, and for that crowd, “Hotel Transylvania 2” works well enough. If this is Sandler’s sentence for all the awful, lazy live-action fare he’s fed his fans over the years, he and we can say he got off easy.

MPAA Rating: PG for some scary images, action and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Adam Sandler, Selena Gomez, Andy Samberg, Steve Buscemi, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally
Credits: Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, script by Adam Sandler and Robert Smigel. A Sony Animation release.

Running time: 1:29