Movie Nation

Costner knew McFarland, California, growing up.
“I was down the road, about 45 miles, in Visalia,” he says. “When I was in high school, my baseball team played those guys. I knew a little about that world, I had this little connection, and I was moved by the story and I wanted to help tell it.”
“This story,” in the new Disney sports drama “McFarland, USA,” is the true tale of how a dead-end town, surrounded by farm fields, whose population has transformed into migrant Hispanic laborers and their descendents, was transformed by its high school cross country team. Kids who worked with with their families, mornings, nights and weekends, became the star long distance runners in a state where, as in much of America — cross country is a prep school sport.
“The miraculous thing about this story was this town wasn’t growing anything but vegetables and this prison, where a lot of young men there ended up finding themselves locked up,” says Costner, who first heard about McFarland’s farmworker kids and their nine state titles in a Sports Illustrated article over a dozen years ago. That was the endgame for a lot of these kids, because they couldn’t find meaningful work to get out and advance themselves. The idea of a high school and a prison co-existing the way they do, in a community this size, was a really interesting backdrop…That team gave this town a new identity.”
The sports lover, star of “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and “Tin Cup,” saw another “gee whiz” factor in the McFarland story.
“To win one championship is hard enough. To win nine, you’ve got to wonder, ‘What’s in the WATER down there?'”
Costner plays Jim White, a Caucasian physical education teacher thrust into an alien, Hispanic world in 1987 McFarland. Though the script “takes a little license with the real Jim White” (think “Hoosiers”), he was a man who looked out at kids bent over tomato plants all day and saw stamina and stoicism.
“These kids on that team back in the ’80s, they’d wake up at 4:30 in the morning to pick in the fields,” says Carlos Pratts, who plays Thomas, the star of McFarland’s team, a boy whose family needs his picking income to make ends meet. “They’d pick, then go to school, then come home, go to sleep and do it all over again. Add in the running, and you have to wonder if these kids were machines. They were our inspirations.”
The flat farm country around McFarland isn’t the best place to train for meets in the nearby mountains and foothills. So, in the movie, Coach White has the kids run up and down canvas covered mountains of almonds, picked by farm labor from the local trees.
“They really did that, and those mounds are still there, real people picked them and real kids ran up and down them to train,” says Hector Duran, who plays another runner on that first McFarland team. “Amazing. It’s about using the resources that you have.”
“McFarland, USA” is earning glowing reviews, with critics suggesting that as formulaic as the story can seem, Costner’s “slyly enjoyable lead performance” (Variety) makes it work. ”
Costner’s name got the movie made, and one reason he decided to sign on was recognizing “the coaches, the teachers who stay. These kids won nine championships, and Jim White’s journey was to immerse himself in a community so thoroughly that this triumph could happen,” Costner says. “In the psychology of success, you do something, you master it, you move on and up. And out. Jim didn’t do that. He stayed.
“There was an important coach in my life who did the exact same thing…There are teachers that just stay. It’s not just because it’s more comfortable. It’s because they have something to give this place and they see how important that is.”

It’s playing in the provinces, doing best in those places Mel Gibson’s Jesus picture made most of its money — Red States.

And that added up to a $31 million Friday for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the woman exploiting/borderline abusive S & M “romance novel” movie starring a couple of unknowns, directed by another unknown. A $91 million President’s Day Weekend is in sight.

“Kingsman: The Secret Service” managed a very big late Thursday and all-day Friday and looks to beat “Spongebob” into second place, over $35-39 million.

“Spongebob” will tally another $36 million or so, over four days. “Paddington Bear” is close to $65 million, and will be around $70 by weekend’s end.

“Imitation Game” has cleared $80 million, overall.
“American Sniper” has cleared the $300 million mark ($307) and will be around $320 by weekend’s end.

just turned 80, has lost much of her vision and is thus scaling back her film career. But what a career Judi Dench has had.

From the Bard to Bond, with an Oscar in between. Seven Oscar nominations, in all, in a storied career that put her on everything from British sitcoms to every great work the stage has to offer a woman.

I’m talking with her about her turn in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

Questions for Dame Judi? I’m serious, I could use the suggestions. Comment below, and thanks for the help.

“The Spy Who Amused Me,” James Bond, has abdicated that title. That’s the gap the Mark Millar/Dave Gibbons comic “The Secret Service” leaped into, and it’s territory that feels most at home in the film from that comic, “Kingsman: The Secret Service.”
Often, it’s a droll riff on spy movies and what “makes a gentleman,” fine tailored (bespoke) suits and the clash of classes evident by the posh accents the movies so often attach to British secret agents.
But almost as often it’s an atonal, hyper-violent action comedy that goes on too long, tries far too hard, spills far too much blood and relies more than it should on Samuel L. Jackson’s character’s lisp for laughs.
A super secret spy agency, privately financed, is run out of a British tailor’s shop. They’re not numbered, MI-6 style, but given names from Camelot — Lancelot, Galahad, Arthur. When one of their number is killed, Galahad (Colin Firth) gives a medal to the fallen man’s son, promising him one big “favor.” If the kid, who grows up street tough, bullied in a troubled home, ever finds himself in over his head, call this phone number. The “service” will get him out of his fix.
That’s how Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, falls in with the men of Kingsman. Much of the movie is a sluggish set-up — Eggy’s recruitment, training for “the most dangerous job interview in the world,” attempts to fit in with the Oxford/Cambridge men (and women) who comprise this private secret service. Michael Caine is “Arthur,” who runs the show, Mark Strong is the Scottish fixer/gadget guru, Merlin.
Samuel L. shows up as a billionaire environmental activist, wearing a grin, an assortment of NY Yankees hats (worn askew) and a speech impediment.
“Tho thorry you had to deal with this…unpleathanneth!”
If you’ve ever seen the least of the Bond films, “Moonraker,” the plot will seem familiar. Famous personages are disappearing, then reappearing, and the eco-fanatic supervillain, who speaks of himself in movie super villain terms, may be behind it.
Yes, it’s one of those spoofs where characters say stuff about what happens in a “typical” spy movie — the drinks served, the elaborately planned murders, the give-the-whole-plot away speeches the villain makes before those murders. Hilarious. And not even remotely novel.
Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn (“Kick Ass”) doesn’t turn the genre conventions on their ear so much as celebrate them. Sofia Boutella plays a colorless yet deadly assistant to the billionaire, a kick boxer with curved sword blades for feet. Firth wears his suits impeccably, sips his whisky impeccably and purrs his posh-accented lines most impeccably of all.
“Manners maketh man,” Galahad says gallantly, quoting a 16th century head of the exclusive Eton prep school.
Firth makes a fine case for the James Bond he could have been, edited into action heroics worthy of JB (“James Bond? Jason Bourne? Jack Bauer?”). Strong does yeoman’s work in support, but the young lead — adept at parkour and slinging that Cockney accent — doesn’t inspire much of anything. Caine’s role is borderline set-dressing.
Fans of Vaughn (“Layer Cake” was his break-out film) and the genre will find much to grin about, but little that warrants a bigger laugh. Something about the Tarantino-ish bloodshed, the crass F-bombs, just feels off. The villain’s point of view seems both reasonable and elitist. Even though Galahad professes an anti-elitism, the service, the milieu, all smack of the privilege of educated weak-chinned aristocracy.
And truth be told, the movie never recovers from its most violent scene, played as slo-mo “cool” but simply a massacre, and a damned gory one.
Still, as February comic book movies go, this works well enough to make you glad they didn’t cook up another “Ghost Rider.”

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong violence, language and some sexual content

Cast: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Samuel L. Jackson, Sofia Boutella, Michael Caine, Sophie Cookson

Credits: Directed by Matthew Vaughn, script by based on the Mark Millar/Dave Gibbons comics. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:09

It wouldn’t be a bad thing if “Pitch Perfect” Anna Kendrick spent the rest of her film career doing nothing but musicals. Her pleasant, Broadway-polished alto was right at home with Sondheim in “Into the Woods,” had a pop star sheen for “Pitch Perfect” and is given its best showcase yet in “The Last Five Years,” a romantic musical about the ups and downs of two young lovers struggling to stay together as they pursue artistic careers in Manhattan.
No, it’s not deep. But the film, a sung-through (virtually no dialogue) musical by Jason Robert Brown, is sweet and sunny and occasionally funny. And it’s sad and pitiful in equal measure, with both Kendrick and co-star Jeremy Jordan (TV’s “Smash”) bringing passion and pain to Brown’s tunes in the New York settings where Richard Lagravenese parks his camera.
We meet Kathy, sitting on the floor of an under-lit apartment, a woman emptied out by grief.
“Jamie is over and where can I turn?” she sings. “Covered in scars I did nothing to earn.”
A five year relationship seems at an end. Over the course of 94 minutes, their story skips back and forth through time, from passionate make-out moments, to career interludes, from painful cheating to giddy pre-marital bliss.
Jamie is an aspiring writer who gets his novel published and becomes a best-selling author and literary star. And, in a publishing district song and dance number, he brags that he “got all this and more, before 24!”
Kathy swoons when the Jewish boy tearing her clothes off croons “I’m breaking my mother’s heart” for his “shiksa goddess.”
The signs of trouble come from her realization that “True, I tend to follow in his stride instead of walking side by side.” And he has this wan little ode to temptation after they’re married, “It’s Fine.” Kathy auditions and auditions and auditions, singing about the cattle calls of a young actress’s life.
“I suck, I suck I suuuuuuuuuuck,” never sounded so self-doubtingly sweet.
Kendrick and Jordan make us forget they’re singing and engage with their acting, which is all you want from most musicals. The tunes are fairly generic, in the modern Broadway idiom (the stage show only made it to off-Broadway). But Lagravenese (“P.S. I Love You”) gets laughs and romantic anticipation out of Kathy’s backstage showstopper, with backing dancers and a snake for company.
The brisk production makes these “Five Years” pass quickly, and Kendrick, with able support from Jordan, makes one long for her to get a shot at other intimate romantic musicals on the big screen. Here’s a film that reminds us that every cinematic song cycle doesn’t have to be as big and meaty as “Chicago” or as effects-packed as “Into the Woods.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, brief strong language and a drug image

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan

Credits: Written and directed by Richard Lagravenese, based on the Jason Robert Brown musical. A Radius/TWC release.

Running time: 1:34

There’s something in exploitation movies that should bring out the parent in us all.
All these gorgeous, nubile young women stripping and simulating sex acts, and submitting themselves to be slaughtered on camera — who ARE their parents?
In “Girlhouse,” a sexploitation-meets-slashploitation thriller, the only cast member with the good sense to go by an assumed name is the hip hop MC Slaine, the hefty fellow playing the beady-eyed pervert-killer.
The women to be slain here are inhabitants of one of those online voyeur “dorms,” fetching coeds sexing it up for the cameras in most every room in their multi-bedroom McMansion in rural North Carolina.
Girlhouse is where Kylie (Ali Cobrin) takes her new job. She’s broke and she needs the cash. She seems a little demure for all this, a little reluctant to admit she’s dipping her toe in porn.
“It’s not skanky ‘Boogie Nights’ porn,” she rationalizes.
And her new boss (James Thomas) insists “I’m no pimp. I’m the Hugh Hefner of the 21st century!”
Kylie declares that she’s “thought this through completely,” and that “I really don’t see how anything bad could happen.” Because, you know, she’s never seen a “Friday the 13th” movie.
Kylie just has to get along with Mia, Kat, Devon and the rest, and get it on –on camera, for the bored businessmen, oversexed teens and college boys on the make that the film shows paying for membership in this “technologically safe and secure” home, via cameras and computers.
But we’ve seen the prologue. We know how a little fat boy was tormented by neighbor girls, and how a murderous creep was born. And now “Loverboy” (Slaine) is an obsessed regular online at Girlhouse.
The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too nature of the script is that it lectures us, in the opening credits, with a Ted Bundy quote tying pornography to violence against women. Director Trevor Matthews then dives, with gusto, into scenes of masturbation, moaning, lesbian make-out sessions and what can only politely be referred to as coitus.
He brings just as much gusto to the killing, as Loverboy breaks the rules, is mocked by the girls, and IT-sleuths his way into the hidden house to have his revenge — also, on camera.
A clumsy wrinkle to the script — Kylie’s discovery by a guy (Adam DiMarco) who crushed on her in high school. Ben is delighted to find her online and on camera, reluctant to tell her how he knows where she went to college and determined to start a relationship with her, never judging her choice of after-school job.
The morality tale element is a joke, the love story is feeble and there’s no tension to what’s about to happen or what then begins happening. The script gives away its mysteries. And the slaughter here is not for the squeamish, ugly, raging, pitiless violence.
So do their parents a favor and skip this picture where Ali Cobrin, Alyson Bath, Alice Hunter, Chasty Ballesteros, Nicole Arianna Fox and others turn up in and out of Victoria’s Secret’s latest. Something tells me they’d happily write-off those acting school expenses rather than encourage their daughters to do this for a living.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic, bloody violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Ali Cobrin, Adam DiMarco, Alyson Bath, Slaine, Alice Hunter, Chasty Ballesteros

Credits: Directed by Trevor Matthews, screenplay by Nick Gordon. A Phase4 Films release.

Running time: 1:41

Hugh Grant doesn’t flutter his eyes and stammer for comic effect any more. The long forelock that bounced over one sparkling blue eye was victim of that middle-aged man trim from the hair stylist.
But the guy still has that stoop-shouldered, arms-bowed walk that his ex, Liz Hurley, famously labeled “simian.” And he still has a way with an offhandedly witty, cutting line.
So in “The Rewrite,” his is perfectly nonplussed as a once-hot screenwriter forced to pitch his ideas to the mere “embryos” who run film studios today, and perfectly misplaced in the upstate New York college town of Binghamton, a British ex-pat Hollywood sophisticate forced to take a screenwriting teaching job because that’s all that’s left to him.
“I hate teachers,” Keith Michaels gripes to his agent. “They’re frustrated losers who haven’t done anything with their own lives so they want to to instruct other people” in theirs. And now he’s one of them.
The students and some of the other faculty (Chris Elliott is a Shakespeare scholar) are ever-so-impressed that the writer of the Oscar-winning “Paradise Misplaced” is in their midst.
“I wish I could do what you do,” one gushes.
“So do I.”
The culture clash here is Michaels bringing his Hollywood ethics, sexism and work habits to a nearly charmless college town with a student body of modest ambitions. The kids just want to “get high,” grumps the faculty chair (J.K. Simmons, funny). The teachers — especially the resident Jane Austen scholar (Allison Janney,, perfectly snippy) — just do their best to get through to the kids, and pray for the meager rewards that publishing their research offers.
“Rewrite” is the fourth Grant collaboration with writer turned writer-director Marc Lawrence (“Two Week’s Notice,” “Words & Music”), and while he plainly has an ear for the way Grant talks, “fresh ground” is an alien concept to him. Thus, the 50something Grant plays a man utterly clueless about the social, moral and legal edicts against dating students. The predatory Karen (Belle Heathcote) angles to get to him and get into his class.
Marisa Tomei is the SOTA — student older than average — single mother of two, working multiple jobs, aspiring screenwriter, willing to make a pest of herself to get into that same course.
And Michaels, being backwardly sexist, proceeds to “cast” the class the way crass producers populate their pictures — with nubile young women, and the occasional nonthreatening nerdy male. He doesn’t even bother to evaluate their work.
The funny stuff here has to do with the myopia of Hollywood “types.” Every pitch meeting is with very young people, one of them a young woman, insisting on “empowered” female characters being shoved into every screenplay. Michaels relates every life obstacle to a movie, because that’s easier than thinking or observing and learning or reading a book. How does one teach?
“I’ll watch ‘Dead Poets Society’ to prepare!”
And the screenwriting kids are self-absorbed dreamers who believe their mundane autobiography is the perfect jumping-off-point for a script.
There’s a nice sense of place, as Michaels learns about the town from Wikipedia and Tomei’s perky, age-appropriate flirt. Lawrence ties in Binghamton’s most famous writer — Rod “Twilight Zone” Serling — into those teachable moments of the script, when the hero-screenwriter starts to warm to the pace of the place, to teaching and to the promising minds he is meant to mold.
It probably never had a prayer of being a wide release, with Lawrence and Grant’s co-mingled careers shrinking in ambition and appeal. But there’s charm here, and Grant is engagingly disengaged playing somebody who knows the fickle finger of Hollywood fate no longer points his way. He just has to decide not to be miserable about that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations, mild profanity, drug references

Cast: Hugh Grant, Marisa Tomei, Bella Heathcote, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Chris Elliott

Credits: Written and directed by Marc Lawrence. A FilmNation release.

Running time: 1:46