Movie Nation

“Mission: Impossible, Rogue Nation” won another weekend, nipping “Fantastic Four” on its opening weekend — $29 million and change to $26 million+.

“Vacation” added theaters, and lost audience. It will not clear $50 million, all in. It’s at $37.

“The Gift” will manage $12 million for its opening weekend.

“Ricki and the Flash” did just $7 million. Sort of an indie film opening for Meryl.

“Shaun the Sheep” did a measly $4 million. Compare that to “Minions,” which just cleared $300 million, or “Inside/Out,” over $335 now.

“Pixels” is fading fast — over $50, but not likely to reach $75. A failure, not a huge flop.

“Southpaw” is at a respectable $40 million.

“Mr. Holmes” is over $12.

When it’s all counted up Sunday night — late — we will know for sure who nudged out whom in the box office race this first full weekend of August.

Shockingly, “Fantastic Four” has overcome terrible reviews and appears headed to $28 million or so, so sayeth Deadline.com.

The superior but not-all-that latest “Mission: Impossible” is holding right at half of its opening weekend audience, and should be in the $27-28 range as well.

“The Gift” is a modest hit, at $10-11 million. Jason Bateman fans rejoice.

“Ricki and the Flash” is doing rather meekly — over 50 women are showing up, and that adds up to just $7 million or so.

But that’s a lot better than “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” another blow to Aardman Animation. Stop motion sheep in a kids’ comedy where nobody talks? It’s a hoot, has wonderful reviews pushing it, and it won’t even crack the top ten. It opened Wednesday.  It’ll have maybe $5.5 million, in toto, since Wed., by Sunday night.

That’s about a single average day’s take from “Minions.” Pity.

“Vacation” is dying, “Trainwreck” is closing in on $100 million.

The weekend reviews are in. And it’s August. So even the well-reviewed pictures have their work cut out for them.

But for what it’s worth, the thriller “The Gift” collected top drawer reviews, as did the smaller narrower release “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Effusive.

Meryl Streep earns her usual plaudits for her Classic Rock Generation musical melodramedy — “Ricki and the Flash.”

“Shaun the Sheep Movie” won lots of love, on all fronts. Not much story, ZERO dialogue, very SMALL kid friendly, stop motion animation antics at their best.

But “Fantastic Four” didn’t aim for the kiddie audience this time. And the reboot, cynical and stupid and dark and dim, with no money spent on villains and just one KILLER effect (a black hole moment where trees and what not are sucked into space, you’ve seen it in the trailer) is getting killed. KILLED. Heartless, not a smart move on Miles Teller’s part. Yeah, he collected a big post-“Whiplash” check, but man. Worth it? No.

The movies preach that we should never let go of our dreams, and some of us never do, no matter what the universe tells us.
“Ricki and the Flash” celebrates such pigheadedness, and gives Meryl Streep her one and only chance to strut like a rock-star-wannabe, playing a California supermarket cashier who struts her stuff, weekends, at The Salt Wheel, a Tarzana roadhouse where her clientele is as ancient as the band.
Jonathan Demme’s pleasantly predictable family melodrama sends 60something Ricki, in delusional bangles and braids and tattoos, back to the life and family she left behind for her classic rock dreams.
Her ex, played by Kevin Kline, settling nicely into sweater-vested old age, is well off. But their daughter is going through a divorce and cracking up in the process. She needs her mother.
Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer plays her kid, and beyond the physical resemblence, the nepotism pays off in the fearless way she lets herself go. Julie is a wreck, for much of the movie — medicated, unbathed, enraged at the mother who left her.
“I can see you still put in the effort,” she growls, seeing Mom’s eye shadow and ’80s-inspired wardrobe. Mother struggles to connect, daughter struggles to not be suicidal.
And then Julie’s siblings show up — one is getting married, the other gay and not up to date on the headlines about his marriage options. Later, the second wife (Audra McDonald) makes an appearance.
Things go pretty much as you’d expect here, as Demme revisits “Rachel Getting Married,” peopling his picture with tolerance — gay characters, an interracial marriage, an emotional wedding. This is more like his version of “Elizabethtown,” a film that wears its heart on its sleeve and is far too happy letting Streep and a band of real musicians (Rick Springfield is quite good as her guitarist/lover) perform entire songs — “American Girl,” a Jenny Lewis cover, a Springsteen tune here, an Edgar Winter tribute there. Demme’s decades of concert documentaries serve him well, though he does nothing fancy with the camera or the concert staging. And do we really need to re-hear all these covers, start to finish, in Meryl’s voice? Editing would have helped.
But Streep is positively effervescent in the part, sassy and in good voice (the acoustic Jenny Lewis cover is spot-on). And for all its overly-familiar notes, “Ricki and the Flash” rarely seems out-of-tune.

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for thematic material, brief drug content, sexuality and language

Cast: Meryl Streep, Rick Springfield, Kevin Kline, Audra McDonald
Credits: Directed by Jonathn Demme, script by Diablo Cody. A Sony Tristar release.

Running time: 1:42

The movies are such a man’s world that lobbying for more “coming of age” stories from a female point of view has long been a given. But when “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is what you get, the lobbyist can be forgiven for having misgivings.
A brazen, twisted and discomfitting dramedy about growing up too fast in 1976 San Francicso, it’s centered on an insecure 15 year-old’s affair with her mother’s 34 year old boyfriend.
The sex is explicit and frequent and pretty much covers the spectrum. The drug use that accompanies it cringe-worthy. No man could have ever gotten away with adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel in such frank terms.
We meet Minnie Goetze, fearlessly played by British actress Bel Powley, on a fateful day in her fifteenth year.
“I had sex today!” she announces in her narration. It’s an event worth preserving on her handy monaural cassette recorder, one she wanted commemorated with a Polaroid.
Hey, it was the ’70s, after all.
She’s sure her mate wasn’t lured in by her looks — cute enough, but shapeless in that lumpy pubescent way.
“I’m lucky he was attracted to my youthfulness.”
Indeed. Mr. First Time was Monroe, her mom’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard).
Minnie, who figures she’s “a woman now,” has to blab to her promiscuous best friend (Madeline Waters). She barely notices her growing allure with her age-appropriate but safe-sex-ignorant classmates.
And Mom, played as a blissed-out/wasted ’70s free spirit by Kristen Wiig, doesn’t catch on. As the affair progresses, Minnie starts to piece together the finishing touches of her personality even as she’s the last one to figure out that what she’s doing is wrong on every level.
Writer-director Marielle Heller makes the most of Minnie’s era and her passion — drawing underground comics in the raunchy-funny R. Crumb style. Her idol is Aline Kominsky, Crumb’s wife and fellow artist. When Minnie isn’t fantasizing butterflies, penises and her own body image, she walks and confides with animated Aline.
Heller, an actress (“MacGruber”) turned director, thus manages wonderful flourishes in a story as predictable as any superhero comic book movie. But her movie doesn’t just revel in sexuality and forbidden “love,” it wallows in it. Minnie, and Powley’s interpretation of her, become less interesting with each lurid new “experiment — from bisexuality to threesomes, pot to LSD.
Thankfully, the period and Minnie’s navigation of it aren’t glamorized. But they aren’t judged, either. And that neutrality makes Minnie’s coming of age seem abrupt and awarded rather than earned.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content including dialogue, graphic nudity, drug use, language and drinking-all involving teens.

Cast: Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgard, Kristen Wiig,
Credits: Written and directed by Marielle Heller, based on the Phoebe Gloeckner novel. A Sony Pictures Classics releaserelease.

Running time: 1:42

The earnestness drips off Nicolas Cage’s “The Runner” like the sweat of good intentions. But you have to appreciate that rare high-minded effort from an actor who has been frantically collecting paychecks for mostly bad, often lowbrow pictures, for years.
Cage plays a Bayou Congressman trying to get some relief for his Gulf of Mexico constituents, embattled and going under after the BP/Deep Water Horizon oil spill.
An emotional speech earns Colin Price some attention, causing his advisor (Wendell Pierce) to suggest “This speech is going to have legs.”
But is Price ready for his moment in the sun?
Passionate, yes. But a complicated marriage (to Connie Nielsen) of political convenience gets exposed when his affair with a fisherman’s wife becomes public.
“Louisiana has always been one big family,” his politico Dad (Peter Fonda) tells the press. “And we don’t abandon family when they make a mistake.”
But even Colin’s decades of sobriety, his still-beloved-but cynical drunk of a dad and a favorite advisor (Sarah Paulson) cannot save him.
It’s back to local organizing, back to grass roots legal work helping these same embattled fishermen and coastal business women, for Price.
There’s a lot of political double-dealing and romantic finagling and the like, with Cage gamely trying to get across a very flawed man with the best political intentions.
Writer-director Austin Stark’s film crams a lot into 90 minutes, leaving no room for grace notes, little time for the heart that this truncated story cries out for.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some

sexual material

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Connie Nielsen, Sarah

Paulson, Peter Fonda, Wendell Pierce
Credits: Written and directed by Austin

Stark. An Alchemy release. An Alchemy

release.

Running time: 1:30

Perhaps the only way to turn Kahlil Gibran’s romantic, trippy and uplifting “The Prophet” into a movie is to animate it. The actress and producer Salma Hayek got that, and talked Roger Allers (“The Lion King”) into directing the film, actors like Liam Neeson and John Krasinski into providing the voices and acclaimed animators such as Tomm Moore and Nina Paley (“The Secret of Kells”) and Bill Plympton (“Guard Dog”) to visualize the abstract positivism of Gibran’s homey aphorisms, and composer Gabriel Yared to set some of the poetry to music.
They turn this “inspirational fiction” about how to the live the well-lived life, his musings on love, work, children, grief, joy and pleasure into colorful animated fantasias backing his words.
Liam Neeson has the title role, a famed poet named Mustafa living under house arrest on an island in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Salma Hayek is Kamila, the widow who comes to clean his house and is inspired by him as she does. Quvenzhané Wallis of “Annie” voices Almitra, Salima’s rebellious, pilfering daughter, who refuses to speak.
Mustafa doesn’t have that problem. Even when he’s offered the chance to end his house arrest by sailing off into exile, he fills the locals’ eager ears with his warmth and wisdom.
“You can only be free… when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal…Rise above your cares and fears.”
“Your children are not your children,” but “sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.”
When The Prophet compares parents to bows and children to the arrows they send into the world, animation by Nina Paley shows that. Literally.
Yared (he did the score to “The English Patient”) turn poems about love into music videos.
At every step of his journey from house arrest to the docks, Mustafa teaches, blesses and challenges. To newlyweds — “Fill each other’s cup. But drink not from one cup…Give you hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.”
To working folk who worship his higher calling — artist, poet — “All work is noble…To be idle is to become a stranger to the seasons.”
Allers has nicely condensed the sentimental prose poems on each subject the Lebanese-American Gibran weighs in on, and Neeson’s soothing brogue makes a warm vehicle for poetry.
The animation varies from cut-out style shadow puppets to lush impressionism, expressionism and Plympton’s signature pencil drawings.
As with the book it is based on, “The Prophet” is only as deep as you make it. Animating it infantilizes the “teachings” and points to the clunky, Platonic dialogues style of the narrative.
But it’s a lovely work, imbued with all the sweetness a Who’s Who of great animators can give it and all the wisdom generation of college coeds have embraced, scribbling “How true” in the margins of their dog-eared copies of “The Prophet.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements including some violence and sensual images

Cast: The voices of Liam Neeson, Salma Hayek, John Krasinski, Alfred Molina
Credits: Directed by Roger Allers, script by Roger Allers, based on the Kahlil Gibran book. A GKids release.

Running time: 1:24