Movie Nation

The first hit film of the fall is an utterly generic, totally predictable stalker thriller aimed at an African American audience.

Sanaa Lathan is the super-successful lobbyist Leah, parking her Caddy in front of her designer house, stepping out in her designer wardrobe with her live-in lawyer beau (Morris Chestnut).

But Leah wants it all, and that includes married. And children.

“I’m dated out.”

Dave (Chestnut) doesn’t.  So that’s that.

Enter the guy she locks eyes with at the coffee shop. Carter (Michael Ealy) has those dreamy Michael Ealy bedroom eyes, just the right stubble, a vintage Dodge Charger he borrowed from Vin Diesel and just the right lines.

He loves kids, charms her friends and parents (Charles Dutton is her dad). Even his job sounds “perfect.” He’s a corporate Internet security expert. He “makes people feel safe.”

He doesn’t need to ask for her number.

“It’s 2015, and I’m an IT expert!”

Leah melts, gives in to passion in a club bathroom, and is all warm and fuzzy over Carter. Until he snaps. And snaps again.  He’s got a temper for the ages.

And trying to get away from an obsessive, grudge-carrying IT expert in 2015 is every bit as difficult as you’d expect.

“You’d expect” is the key phrase here, as in every line pops into your head a few seconds, or minutes, before it pops out of a character’s mouth.

“I’ve never done anything like that before…You know I’d never hurt, you, right?”

Seriously, there’s an app that can whip up this crap.

The foreshadowing (an elderly, busybody neighbor is played by Tess Harper, and Leah has a cat) is laughable formulaic.’

The most original writing scripter Tyger Williams came up with was inventing that adorable first name. The direction (David M. Rosenthal, me either) is pedestrian in the extreme.

The cast is solid, game, competent. And the you can’t fault an audience for seeking a little female victimhood/female empowerment in their romantic thrillers.

But really, everybody involved should hold out for something better than this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, menace, sexuality and brief strong language.

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Michael Ealy, Morris Chestnut
Credits: Directed by David M. Rosenthal, script by Tyger Williams. A  Sony Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:44

The young Walt Disney’s struggles to start his career in animation seems like promising fodder for a bio pic.

Seeing the young man fail and fail again at something his father disapproved of, fight his personal demons, meet and team up with animators Ub Iwerks, Friz Freleng, and those Harmon and Ising chaps, that sounds like a movie, maybe even one those “dreamers” at Disney might tackle.

Perhaps all the chain smoking keeps The Mouse from making it.

“Walt Before Mickey” is a seriously malnourished, talent and charisma-starved look at those years, when a small town boy tried to make a go of it, first in Kansas City, then in Hollywood itself.

The cast has hints of competence, if not a lot of experience smoking or wearing (each man’s first) mustaches. But the script offers no places for them to shine. It was a troubled production — director replaced a week into shooting, etc. The replacement director (Khoa Le) doesn’t seem to give anyone, ANYONE, a second take that allows them to do anything. Time constraints? Not enough to excuse the bloodless/lifeless performances.

And the whole period piece, shot in and around Deland, Florida, looks like it was lit by a wedding photographer. If ever a movie screamed out for sepia toned treatment (hiding some of the lack of production polish), this was it.

See Walt (Thomas Ian Nicholas, recently seen in “Red Band Society”) start and lose his first company, and fall so low in his spirits and finances that he takes on a pet mouse. Which he can’t afford to feed. Disney dumpster diving isn’t exactly in the company biography of the man.

“This story is drawn in my own blood!”

See his sickly WWI vet brother Roy (Jon “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder) take on running the nascent fresh start Disney Studios’ finances.

See their struggles to make those “Alice in Movie Land” semi-animated shorts with almost no money, an assortment of less- than-talented live action girl stars playing “Alice,” and little precedent for everything they were trying in this still-new medium.

Meet the team — Iwerks (Armando Gutierrez, who barely registers — Did they mike him?), Freleng (Taylor Gray), Hugh and Fred Harman, Rudy Ising, names attached to many an animated short over the ensuing decades.

Meet Lillian (Kate Katzman), the secretary/inker Walt hires and falls in love with.

“You will never be a failure! You have too much goodness inside of you!”

Watch Walt get screwed over by the Mintzes, his distributors, which savvy viewers will see as the moment his anti-Semitism hardened into something the “official” biographies don’t like to acknowledge. There’s also a smidge of his future anti-union/anti-taxes ethos.

And keep an eye peeled for the “Eureka” moment, when Walt finds the character and business approach — total control — that would make Disney famous.

“I wished upon a star and look what it gave me!”

It’s a tough subject to, um, animate — just guys, sitting at drawing boards, making magic. There’s a reason Disney World’s Animation tour closed, and not all of them have to do with shipping those jobs to Asia. The film begs for more and livelier scenes of the DIY nature of the work, sketches becoming moving characters, characters turning into moving pictures. A few snippets of pre-history Disney films liven up the film, many more were needed. Copyright issues?

The dialogue is dull, boilerplate corn, the performances are flat, the cinematography is flatter.

Walt would have never become DISNEY if he and his wish upon a star had been this modest.

MPAA Rating: PG for period smoking throughout, mild thematic elements and language

Cast: Thomas Ian Nicholas, Jon Heder, Kate Katzman

Credits: Directed by Khoa Le, script by Arthur Bernstein and Armando Gutierrez. A   Voltage release.

Running time: 2:00

Gambling’s allure as drama isn’t hard to dissect. It’s a lifestyle few of us would have the nerve to attempt, a world of smoky, dimly-lit casinos, back-rooms and bars — crippling hours, crumbling priorities and all manner of bad habits and bad choices driven by an addiction.

“Mississippi Grind” drew Ryan Reynolds, Sienna Miller, Alfre Woodard and Ben “Killing Them Softly/Bloodline” Mendelsohn with its seedy, sordid blend of fatalism, violence and melodrama. It’s a rambling, random, shambolic affair with little logic other than the geography of going from here to there — “here” being Dubuque, Iowa, where the gamblers Jerry and Curtis meet, and “there” being New Orleans, where the “big buy-in game” awaits.

And if it seems, in the end, pretty much pointless, that’s sort of the point. Few gambling tales have captured the masochistic self-destruction, the manic mood swings build on the flip of a card, a spin of the wheel or a dog or horse making the turn at the track as well.

Jerry’s (Mendelsohn) let his addiction take over his life. Surely Curtis (Reynolds) sees that. Curtis plops down at a table at one of those sad prairie-state casinos, starts chattering and sizes up the players. “I’m from all over,” he explains, in between stories and jokes.

Jerry, he’s decided, is a nice guy. And Jerry? He’ll take that offer to buy him a drink.

“Curtis. Like Tony?”

“No, Curtis, like Mayfield.”

Gamblers are on the lookout for signs, little messages from the universe. Curtis keeps talking about this atmospheric spectacle he caught earlier that day.

“Best. Rainbow. Ever.”

They notice a dog racing the next day with a rainbow connection. The University of Hawaii (Rainbow Warriors) are playing Gonzaga the next night. These are “signs.”

And they’re off, Curtis itchy to stay on the move, says “It’s Machu Pichu time.” That’s code for leaving a person, place or game. Jerry? He’s smitten by this stranger who takes an interest in him, even though Curtis won’t say (right away) what we all see.

“Some guys are born to lose.”

As they motor southward, layers peel away from this mismatched pair. Jerry skips out on his job and flees a bookie (Alfre Woodard, surprisingly), Curtis has a stop to make, with his hooker ladyfriend (Sienna Miller, earthy and inviting and needy).

The guys base their trip on fate, making decisions based on whether the “next guy outta the bathroom” is wearing glasses or not.

Filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck built a career in features out of a pretty good documentary about Dominicans trying to make it in the North American minor leagues (“Sugar”). But like their debut feature (“It’s Kind of a Funny Story”), they show a better grasp of milieu and character better than they do of story.

“Mississippi Grind”‘s couple makes little sense as a couple. Is Curtis using Jerry, betting against this “born loser,” or is Jerry to help Curtis on his own path to self-destruction?

The ending feels like a cop-out, the coda doubles down on that shortcoming.

But Mendelsohn, playing another version of the guy you want to sit farthest from at the bar, and Miller and especially the charming, smarmy Reynolds, make this a game we’ll sit through, even if we’re never all in.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Ryan Reynolds, Sienna Miller,  Alfre Woodard
Credits: Written and directed by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck.  An A24 release.

Running Time: 1:48

M. Night Shyamalan hated being called a one-trick-pony, so he took on “Last Airbender,” “The Happening” and “After Earth.” And proved he has just that one trick.
So he turns back to the formula that made him famous with “The Visit,” a faintly-creepy, lightly amusing horror comedy that promises a surprise twist and a hint of heart.
He’s gotten quite rusty at this, what with the clumsy and (hopefully) humbling fiascoes that preceded it. And truth be told, he took that formula and himself so seriously that he’s still not able to deliver a clean, lean and briskly-paced picture.
But even if this “Over the river and through the woods, there’s something WRONG at Granny’s house” is not particularly scary and only funny in too-obvious ways, its novel touches lift it beyond much of the sausage churned out by the Hollywood Horrorworks.
Mom (Kathryn Hahn) is long-estranged from her parents. But she’s got a new love in her life, and teen daughter Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and 13 year-old Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are more than happy to go spend a week in snowy, rural Pennsylvania with the grandparents they never knew, just to give Mom a shot at happiness.
Becca’s an aspiring filmmaker, and even though Dad fled the family and Mom works at Walmart, she can afford got a two-camera set-up for her documentary tribute to her mother, a project she hopes will bring the estranged back together. If only Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) weren’t so…strange.
The kids are banned from the basement. “Mold,” they’re told. Pop Pop is always skulking off to the shed…for something. Bedtime is 9:30 p.m. — sharp. No leaving your room until dawn.
And Nana? She has spells. She wants Becca to climb into the oven to clean it. She snaps at any mention of their mom, her daughter. And the things Nana does in the dark would give any child the willies.
Here’s what works. The kids, especially Becca, are concerned for their mother. They Skype, and they’re reluctant to share their concerns with her at the risk of ruining her latest chance at love.
“I hate you spoiled brats,” Mom always signs off. “We hate you, too!” Cute.
The boy is an aspiring whitebread rapper, and a smart aleck. Wrong guy to have behind camera two. (And as tired a movie trope as shaky hand-held cameras in a horror movie.)
Random strangers they meet see the camera and share, “I used to be an actor myself,” and launch into soliloquies.
The grandparents, and their mom, keep passing off what’s the kids see happening to old age. And the kids, not knowing any better, buy it. “Confused old fools” and “Sundown Syndrome” make just enough sense to the precocious and very adult Becca. They’re scarred by their father’s abandonment of them, and a little slow to be scared over Nana’s late-night (Yikes!) nudity and Pop Pop’s episodes.
But the kids are too-perfect, pretty little models/child actors who never let us forget that. Becca’s pretentious tinsel talk is grating.
“This is the PERFECT cinematic image to open the documentary!”
Shyamalan has so few frights up his sleeve that his deliberate, portentous pacing gets away from him here. Again. It’s a 94 minute movie that plays much longer. It doesn’t build towards a breathless, violent climax.
It’s all over-explained, more like the deflating coda to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” or the “Yeah, and?” “surprise” of “The Village” than the gotcha of “Sixth Sense.”
The mystery isn’t deep, alas. And neither, as we’ve long suspected, is the filmmaker.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material including terror, violence and some nudity, and for brief language

Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn
Credits: Written and directed by M. N ight Shyamalan. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36