Movie Nation

The Wachowskis cash their last blank check from Warner Brothers with “Jupiter Ascending,” an excruciatingly empty chunk of eye candy that spends over two hours trying to convince us they’re not ripping off “Dune.” It’s “Dune” without the desert, all exposition and back story and alternate history — as inconsequential as the weakest Young Adult sci-fi, but without the pretty young teens who populate those “Maze/Hunger/Giver/Divergent” casts.
It’s not that the Wachowskis don’t reach for some Big Ideas here, the notion that “Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe,” that one thing the super-rich and entitled have over the rest of us. Time equates not just to faster travel and no waiting in line at the doctor’s office or DMV. It’s longevity, a near-immortality length and quality of life that the oligarchs of this universe are playing with.
A seriously miscast Mila Kunis is this YA version of “The Chosen One,” a poor Russian emigre, daughter of an astronomer forced to clean toilets and change beds in Chicago. Aliens are looking for the woman her dad named Jupiter, seeing her as their reincarnated “Queen.” There are bad aliens, led by Balem (a whispering Eddie Redmayne), and possibly a good one, Caine (Channing Tatum) who comes to her rescue — in the nick of time, every time. And there are a lot of times.
Watch the way Kunis minces through the complicated digital sets when she’s supposed to be running for her life. Even her stunt double looks bored.
The endless chases and shootouts are about fetching her or killing Jupiter — the often-cloaked alien minions get mixed messages from their overlords. Jupiter is always falling — out of buildings, spaceships or, in from towers in the vast alien city complex hiding inside Jupiter. The pointy-eared Caine has these neat hover-boots that make Tatum, frequently shirtless, look like Pan or a centaur as he skates through the futurescapes, dodging fire and falling debris, waving his digital shield, shooting to kill.
Kunis is most at home in the film’s few flashes of humor, such as when Jupiter takes a shine to her protector, or when the Queen-to-be deals with the Kafkaesque nightmare of the alien super-race’s bureaucracy.
“I will never complain about the DMV again!” And she speaks for the audience when she later asks, “Could this get any weirder?”
Sean Bean plays Stinger, a serious-minded ex-comrade of Caine’s (they’re both warriors who have lost their wings, literally). He takes over the endless explaining of exposition when Tatum’s Caine runs out of breath — something about the way aliens populated the universe, Earth being a gene-spliced colony. Stinger’s been hiding out on Earth in a ramshackle farmhouse honeycombed with bees.
“Bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty,” Bean growls, offering the film’s first giggle. “Bees don’t LIE.”
Look for Gugu Mbatha-Raw, James D’Arcy and the eye-candy junkie Terry “Brazil” Gilliam in bit parts.
If you didn’t catch on with the sell-out “Speed Racer” or the sugary idiocy of “Cloud Atlas,” if you haven’t reconsidered your affection for the one decent installment in the murky “Matrix” trilogy before now, “Jupiter Ascending” should seal the deal. The Wachowskis — Andy and Lana — are trapped in their own matrix, burdened with inflated budgets and the need to visually try and top themselves, losing track of actors, story and emotions, all in pursuit of that next fanboy film fix. After “Jupiter Ascending,” Warners should put them into rehab. They need to quit this drug, cold turkey.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence, sequences of sci-fi action, some suggestive content and partial nudity

Cast: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, James D’Arcy, Tuppence Middleton, Douglas Booth

Credits: Written and directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:07

“Outcast” is what happens when stunt men direct.
The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.
Essentially a Hayden Christensen vehicle with Nicolas Cage, Chinese scenery and swordsmanship to recommend it, “Outcast” is another variation on “The Hidden Fortress.” That’s the 1960s samurai film that George Lucas leaned on for the original “Star Wars.”
A Chinese king has died, his chosen heir, protected by his sister (Yifei Liu) is on the run. An opium-addicted knight, fleeing the demons that committing mass murder in the Middle East has given him, takes on the quest to get them to safety.
That would be Jacob (Christensen), whom we’ve seen slaughtering Muslim occupiers of the Holy Land, and then getting lectured about it by his sad-eyed mentor, Gallain (Cage).
“The blood we spill here is on OUR blades, on our soul’s, not God’s!”
The old knight suggested they get away from it all, head east. And that, apparently, is what they’ve done.
But in China, Shing (Andy On) is determined to get rid of us younger brother, the heir, and take the royal seal from him. So his Black Guards are hot on the trail of the young prince and his hot older sister. Help us, Jacob-wan, she pleads. You’re our only hope.
Christensen returns to the swordplay that launched his career with gusto and a seriously Bieberish haircut. He suffers slings and arrows and wields his sword like an enraged Land Rover owner waves his dipstick. He’s only happy when it’s covered in red.
Cage disappears for an hour of the film, returning as a bandit the Chinese call “The White Ghost.” He, too, is haunted by his bloody past.
“What do the dead whisper?”
“What is owed must be paid.”
It’s all impossible fights, unlikely rescues and Jacob waking up in the care of this or that exotic woman tending to his wounds and getting him off the opium.
“Tears of a poppy dull a man’s senses.”
As will “Outcast,” though it never pretends to be anything more than what it is — an English language B-movie ready to be dubbed for the Chinese market.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with bloody swordplay, opium use, profanity

Cast: Hayden Christensen, Nicolas Cage, Yifei Liu, Andy On

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Powell, script by James Dormer. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:39

A lovely new ballet is followed from creation to rehearsals to opening night in “Ballet 422,” a documentary that celebrates the rising star that is choreographer/dancer Justin Peck.
It’s an intimate movie, with the camera so close it’s as if it’s having a whispered conversation with one and all. Everybody speaks in the calm, quiet voices of a well-behaved golf tournament gallery. No one loses his or her temper, no one weeps at criticism or some last-minute injury. No one has to give that lump-in-the-throat speech that “The show must go on.” There’s no drama, no conflict, and apparently no one told director Jody Lee Lipes that even documentaries require some of that to be rendered watchable.
What she delivered instead was an narrow-focused look at professional dancers and a professional company putting on its 422nd new ballet.
Peck, the only member of the corps de ballet (bottom of the ballet company food chain) to leap straight into choreography, created a lovely classical ballet, “Paz de la Jolla,” set to the music of Bohuslav Martinu’s “Sinfonietta La Jolla.” Lipes tells us this much in an opening title, and then lets her camera do the rest.
We look in on rehearsals, overhear conversations between “the girls” and “the boys,” see them practice and discuss movements, see costumes proposed and then produced and watch the lighting designer figure out the desired effect.
None of these talented artists are identified by name. Mostly, the camera just gawks as lithe, muscular young people do run-throughs, over and over, mastering a physically demanding art form and a reasonably difficult new work.
Peck is so caught up in it that he has to be reminded to give his prima ballerina a rest break, is gently urged to compliment and urge on the orchestra (a bit clumsy at that) and deals with physical therapy for what dance does to his ankle. Lipes’ film reminds us that yes, he’s a big-shot choreographer now, but he’s still in the corps. He’s needed as a dancer (one of 91 employed there) in other performance pieces.
Maybe everyone was on their best behavior because the camera was around. And no one is suggesting that the shrill over-dramatics of reality TV or stereotypical “ballet movie” melodrama should intrude here. But something more needs to happen to justify our investment in time (the whole ballet is not shown in performance) or a studio’s decision to release “Ballet 422.”

MPAA Rating: PG for brief language

Cast: Justin Peck and the dancers, designers and musicians of the New York City Ballet company.

Credits: Written and directed by Jody Lee Lipes. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:15

A good screen romance frustrates us, throws up comical or tragic obstacles that keep the lovers apart, and then provides a lovely release when those obstacles are surmounted.
But “Love, Rosie” overdoes that. It would be a maddening experience thanks to the many ways the hero devastates the poor heroine, if we cared enough to get mad.
Lily Collins plays the title character from Cecelia Ahern’s novel, a narrator we meet on a wedding day where she advises herself, “Tell them that this is, that this HAS to be, one of the happiest days of my life.”
She’s convincing herself, because she isn’t convincing us.
Alex (Sam Claflin) was the first boy she held hands with, practically her intended since they were in elementary school. In a years-long flashback, we see the ways miscommunications, unstated intentions, the weddings and funerals that have kept these best friends from being more than that.
There was the high school party where she had to get her stomach pumped, and the night she pretty much dared the virginal Alex to ask the flirty blonde classmate out.
He did, and lost his virginity. Rosie, meanwhile, had a sexual encounter with a condom accident. Their big plans, to jet off to Boston — him to med school, her to train to be a hotel manager — come to nothing. She can’t bear to tell him she’s pregnant, and holds off telling him she has a little girl.
“Love, Rosie” tracks them over a star-crossed dozen years (only the child ages) of bad timing, failed outside relationships, hard feelings and wedding toasts that reveal a bit more than the toaster should about his or her feelings for the other.
Collins (“Mirror Mirror”) and Claflin, of the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, do well by the mooning over each other across a crowded dance floor stuff. But they have to keep us believing in “the dream” and hoping for their romance. They don’t.
There’s a little funny business, here and there, some of it provided by the “funny best friend” (Suki Waterhouse). Alex going to America changes him and his way of communicating with Rosie.
“Can we just forget the psychobabble and talk like ENGLISH people?”
But the watery chemistry, the on-the-nose choice of pop tunes to illustrate moments (An infamous Lily Allen hit, and “Alone Again, Naturally” turns up, naturally) keep “Love, Rosie” in the “Maybe we’d be better off as friends” zone.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Lily Collins, Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse

Credits: Directed by Christian Ditter, script by Juliette Towhidi, based on the Cecelia Ahern novel. A Film Arcade release.

Running time: 1:42

“American Sniper” may very well set a Super Bowl weekend box office record, as Friday’s take suggests it is on a pace to better the $31.1 million that a “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus” concert film did a few years back.

I could see “Sniper” doing just that, as I sense a somewhat muted response to this Super Bowl — overexposed, tainted teams, etc.

Could Spongebob Squarepants be the movie hero to take down Eastwood’s first-person shooter movie? Or will that be “Fifty Shades of Grey?”

“Paddington” is bearing down on $50 million, and will be close by Sunday night.

“Project Almanac” is managing a middling $7 million or so, poor for a teen centric sci-fi shakey cam picture. “Black or White” won’t hit $7.

Open Road’s “The Loft,” released with zero fanfare or press coverage, finishes off a desultory January by bombing, big time. A $1-2 million take is all Karl Urban & Co. can manage. None of the new openings are truly awful, but there’s no reason to turn off the game to go see “Almanac” or “Loft.” “Black or White” could appeal to non football fans.

“The Imitation Game” is having the longest legs of any lower-budget Oscar contender. It’s closing in on $70 million.

Ask actor Jonny Weston what he’s been up to while he’s been waiting for what could be his “big break” to hit theaters. Go ahead.
“Twiddling my thumbs,” he says, laughing. “I’ve been waiting what, a year and a half for (“Project Almanac”) to come out? It’s your whole future on hold, basically.”
He had supporting parts in such little seen gems as “Chasing Mavericks” and “John Dies at the End,” which virtually no one saw. So don’t bother trying to bum him out that reviews for “Almanac,” a teen time travel (in “Blair Witch” shaky cam) thriller are decidedly mixed. “Could have been a lot worse,” The Boston Globe opined. Even The New York Daily News endorsement has this zinger — “Every generation gets the time travel it deserves.”
“All this time,” Weston says. “Now, one last bit of waiting. I’m waiting for all my friends to call me and tell me what they thought of it.”
And that past year wasn’t exactly thumb-twiddling. He’s in the “Divergent” sequel, “Insurgent.” He just finished with “We Are Your Friends,” set in the world of LA’s EDM (electronic dance music) DJs. So it’s all good.
“Research” for playing the “Almanac” genius-nerd consisted of watching Youtube videos of time travel theories giving seminars. But what the self-confessed “‘Twilight Zone’ geek,” “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” and “Back to the Future III” fan can do, with authority, is list his favorite time travel movie conventions, ideas he knew he and his cast mates would have to play when “Project Almanac” went into production.
“You’ve got to explain the science. (“Interstellar,” “Star Trek IV”). Or try to (“Looper”). Or ignore it. (“Safety Not Guaranteed,””Peggy Sue Got Married”). We explain it, but we don’t take up the whole movie doing that.
“You’ve got to go back and meet a dead loved-one. (“Peggy Sue Got Married”, “Looper”).
“You probably want to win the lottery. You get the girl of your dreams. Seriously, what would you do if you had access to a time machine? Get a girl. Get the money.”
What about Weston? Suppose the 26 year-old got access to a “Hot Tub Time Machine”?
“I can’t even begin to think about what I’d do over — THOUSANDS of auditions I’d take or do over, for starters. Life gets you off on tangents. You change the past, those tangents change. I might not even be an actor.”
And nothing stifles creativity like winning the lottery.
“Exactly!”
But what about consequences?
“You go back and save somebody in the past, and that person might save someone who ruins a thousand lives “(The Butterfly Effect,” et al). That’s too much responsibility for one person. Would you use that power if you had it? I invariably say ‘Yes,’ because, let’s be honest. It’s human nature to want to try to change your life.”
But it’s the message of the movie that “There are no ‘second chances.'”
Right, Weston says. But you’ve got to give audiences what they want from a time travel movie. So that “message” can be fudged.
“Maybe, if you take that second chance, make sure you get it right this second time. This time, remember to say ‘I love you.'”

OK, maybe you missed his winning work in the surf bio-drama “Chasing Mavericks.” Or “Taken 3.”

But you’re going to catch Jonny Weston’s winning turn as a sweet, smart kid who finishes up a time machine based on his late DARPA inventor father’s blueprints in “Project Almanac.”

I’m talking to Jonny this AM. Got a question? Post it as a comment below, because I’m looking for suggestions. Thanks!