Movie Nation

Amira is a walking contradiction. She wears a hijab, but isn’t shy about showing a little cleavage. She came from Iraq to America, but she hates American soldiers. She is cranky but flippant, profane but still Muslim, pretty when she smiles. Which is almost never.
“I do what I want,” she hisses, in English or Arabic, whenever confronted with these facts. Usually, that happens when she’s on a Lower East Side street corner, hustling pirated DVDs.
“Hey man, have you seen Bridget Jones’s amazing ‘Diary?'”
Sam is an Army veteran who just lost his job as a security guard. Friends tell him his deadpan way with a funny story or joke would work in stand-up. Only it doesn’t.
“Amira & Sam” pairs these two unlikely loners up for an “Only in New York” style romance — with bench side views of the sun setting on the Hudson, combustible teasing, cultural, financial and legal obstacles that stand in the way of love. And somehow, writer-director Sean Mullin’s short, far-fetched love affair comedy charms and works more often than not.
Martin Starr (“This is the End”) is Sam, just done with a multi-year hitch, returned to civilian life with an idealism that doesn’t fit in with the yuppies who insult him out of his security guard job, or the hedge fund crowd that his overly-helpful cousin (Paul Wesley) wants him to run with. Cousin Charlie sees Sam’s military service as a magical connection to potential clients, fellow veterans (David Rasche plays one).
Amira lives, illegally, with her uncle (Laith Nakli), a man who once worked as a translator for Sam’s unit in Iraq. Their connection has a poignant backstory, but Amira isn’t hearing it. She’s hostile from the start, won’t laugh at Sam’s jokes or eat food he has prepared.
Events conspire to throw them together, and while it would be stretching it to say “Hilarity ensues,” the cuteness in their interaction and not-quite-gradual warming does.
She wonders if he’s on Facebook, his questions are more direct.
“Are you bald under that thing?” he says, of her head-covering. “Do you shower in it? Do you shave your pits? Is that an Arab thing? Or just a French thing?”
Mullin crams a lot of melodramatic touches — immigration issues, Charlie giving Sam a sailboat, Charlie’s ethical problems — into 87 minutes. These two would-be lovers leap from hostile and mistrusting to kissing and hugging and showing up at an engagement party, him in his old uniform, her in a stunningly low-cut red party dress, in the most abrupt fashion.
But Starr and especially screen newcomer Shihabi smooth over most of those, and the modestly predictable arc of their story with winsome wit and warmth. We root for them, which is a bottom line must for any romantic comedy, especially the culture clash ones.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, adult situations

Cast: Martin Starr, Dina Shihabi, Paul Wesley, Laith Nakli, David Rasche

Credits: Written and directed by Sean Mullin.  A Drafthouse Films release.

Running time: 1:27

“Selma” wasn’t the only film about race to get short shrift from Oscar voters this past year. “Black or White” is a frank, touching and very well-acted melodrama about child custody and cultural perceptions of “blackness” and “the race card,” and could have earned Octavia Spencer and Kevin Costner fresh Oscar nominations.
Mike “The Upside of Anger” Binder’s latest teaming with Costner has more anger, mixed with alcoholism and a bitterness that may mask racism.
Elliot Anderson (Costner) tells his granddaughter Eloise (Jillian Estell) “We had a bad night last night.” Turns out, the little girl’s grandmother died. Granddad’s been drinking pretty much ever since.
A couple of days pass, with him drinking and driving her to school and stumbling through tying a ribbon in her hair.  She needs him to ease off the sauce, to be tough with her, the way grandma was. He needs to remember to make her brush her teeth.
“Say it like you MEAN it,” the seven-year-old pleads.
Eloise is of mixed race. Her mom’s gone and her African-American dad isn’t in the picture. But those phone messages Elliot is ignoring? Not returning that call is going to cost him.
Grandma Rowena (she goes by “Wee Wee”) wants to see her grandchild. Elliot’s kept them apart, and his reassurances “Come by any time you like” aren’t sincere. Wee Wee (Spencer) has a brother (Anthony Mackie) who is, like Elliot, a high-powered corporate attorney. The custody fight to come will be about “support, community, history.” She doesn’t think her not-quite-in-law is raising the kid “black” enough.
“She’s NOT black!” he counters. “She’s HALF black!”
Binder and Costner soften whatever racial attitudes that Elliot keeps under wraps, in between drinks. Elliot hires a math tutor for this kid (what he really needs help with is combing her hair), and the tutor is an African over-achiever (Mpho Koaho) who becomes the ever-drunk Elliot’s driver and comical confidante.
The script sets us up to buy into stereotypes, then flips those on their head. The rich suburbanite isn’t some cross-burner, though we start to wonder. And Wee Wee may live in South Central Los Angeles with a vast brood of kids and grand-kids surrounding her, but she’s a successful entrepreneur. Her son (Andre Holland) seems like a crack-smoking cliche, but Spencer’s innate intelligence and fight make Wee Wee a nurturer, upbeat, positive, even if one of her kids is a bad apple.
“I’m just lookin’ out for my babies.”
Binder’s film decidedly tilts toward his (white) point of view, but the games he plays with expectations are fun — a black female judge (Paula Newsome) who stares down the outspoken Wee Wee in court, the conservative white guy who rolls into South Central with the ne plus ultra of rapper rides, a black Escalade. Having Elliot hallucinate his dead wife (Jennifer Ehle) but get no advice from her is a twist. As with “Anger,” Binder’s characters fire off glib, politically incorrect insults and characters make some pretty solid arguments in favor of their political incorrectness.
Maybe it plays it too safe, and Costner, an actor doing some of his best work decades after “Dances With Wolves,” should have found more testy edge to this guy, just to make us uncertain about his darkest feelings. But “Black or White” makes a very entertaining movie for a post-Obama America, a smartly observed story that recognizes we may never be a post-racial America.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for brief strong language, thematic material involving drug use and drinking, and for a fight

Cast: Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer, Jillian Estell, Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Ehle

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Binder. A Relativity release.

Running time: 1:39

We Jason Statham aficionados accept grace notes in his films where we find them. And there’s a gem tucked in the middle of “Wild Card,” his
latest.
The scene — a diner, where veteran Vegas bodyguard and luckless gambler Nick Wild (Statham) is collecting information on somebody who beat
up a gal pal of his. Statham shares the table with Daviena McFadden, playing hotel housekeeper Millicent. Like everybody else Nick is friends
with, he “did something for me once.” So she owes him.
He asks her, and the plump/sassy Millicent goes off on how fine he is, what she’d do to Nick in the sack. Even though he’s English. Because
honey, she’s in housekeeping. She knows those people “smell.”
And British director Simon West’s camera catches the British Statham cracking that cool facade, almost breaking character. The lines are laugh-out-loud funny,
and his reaction (McFadden must have been mugging and riffing to him for his close-ups, too) is a first in a Statham film, and hilarious.
“Wild Card” is a meandering, scatterbrained Vegas character thriller written by one of the greatest screenwriters of all time, William “Marathon
Man/Misery/The Princess Bride” Goldman. So even though it’s more random than riveting, only clever and coherent in fits and starts, even
though Statham has long told interviewers (myself included) that he chooses projects based on who the fight choreographer (Cory Yuen) is, “Wild Card” is a cut above the generic Jason.
Nick crosses swords with a standard-issue rich hoodlum (Milo Ventimiglia) who likes to beat up hookers, and much of the movie has his hour of
reckoning, when the mob guy’s hoods show up, hanging over it.
There’s a young rich dork (Michael Angarano) who hires Nick for protection, and to absorb some of his toughness and cool. There’s a waitress
(Anne Heche) who always seats him near the diner’s resident male hustler, so they can overhear his sexual come-ons and laugh at them. Hope
Davis plays the blackjack dealer with the heart of gold. Every Nick winning streak ends with her saying “Black Jack! I lose more friends that
way.”
Jason Alexander is Nick’s one-scene lawyer-friend, the guy who shares an office with him.
The opening has Nick bullying around Max Casella so he can impress his girlfriend (Sofia Vergara). And the finale features Stanley Tucci. All
these stars, taking on a single scene or two in a Jason Statham film, just to do Goldman’s golden lines.
Statham gets most of them, like when he feels “the weight” of “all the gamblers in all the casinos in the world” on what will be, “one way or
another…my last night in Vegas.”
The fights — three big ones — are the usual Statham specials. Nick closes his eyes and dreams of sailing off Corsica, before launching into each brawl. A neat trick, stabbing a knife into the trigger guard of a bad guy’s pistol to keep it from firing. Director Simon “Con Air/The Mechanic” West and the editors cut these fights to Nick’s favorite R & B tunes. Since this is Christmas time, one brawl is set to The Drifters’ swinging cover of “White Christmas.”
Still, “Wild Card” is somewhat less than the sum of its many amusing or at least unusual parts. But with Goldman, West and all these classy co-stars, he’s at least kicking butt in better company these days.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Jason Statham, Hope Davis, Anne Heche, Michael Angarano, Stanley Tucci, Max Casella, Sofia Vergara

Credits: Directed by Simon West, script by William Goldman, based on his novel. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:32

Kevin Macdonald has done his Roman Army thriller (“The Eagle”), his sci-fi apocalypse (“How I Live Now”), his political journalism thriller (“State of Play”). But what the Oscar-winning documentarian (“One Day in September”) really had a hankering to try was a submarine movie. Something to do, he says, with the confined spaces on a boat and the restrictions of the genre.
“There are a limited number of moves on the chessboard. All you can do is come up with a different order for them. But you still have to have the same moves. If you do that, the story feels more unexpected.”
So, “Black Sea,” an underwater heist picture involving a retired Soviet sub, a motley crew of laid-off British and Russian sailors let by Jude Law, and sunken Nazi gold, is a veritable checklist of submarine picture conventions.
There’s the thrumming of propellers of a hostile ship overhead.
“Check,” Macdonald says with a laugh.
The crash dive, in which the depth gauge inevitably cracks?
“Oh yes!”
Watertight doors cracked shut?
“Got it.”
Moisture dripping from rusty valves, valves that rupture at extreme depth?
“Have to have that, don’t we?”
He was inspired to pursue this project by the Kursk disaster, when a Russian sob sank, much of the crew survived, only to die slow deaths because of the slow speed of rescue efforts.
“That’s a horrible death, an awful way to go,” he thought. He figured out a reason for laid off salvage workers and sailors to be stuck on the bottom and handed the idea off to screenwriter Dennis Kelly. The result is “a grippingly efficient job of trapping its audience amid the pumping pistons and clanging pipes of its inhospitable setting,” Britain’s Observer newspaper enthuses, even if it “tend towards the predictable.” (Britain’s Daily Express).
Macdonald shot much of “Black Sea” on a rusting, retired Soviet era Foxtrot Class sub because “the price was right, and there’s nothing like having real red-star labeled torpedo tubes for authenticity.”
And while shooting a film, with a cast that did not all speak English, Macdonald had an epiphany. He realized the true source
for every submarine thriller, from “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” to “The Hunt for Red October,” “Das Boot” to “K-19: The Widowmaker.”
“All submarine movies are ”Moby Dick.’ There’s always some sort of Captain Ahab. The threat of disunity, disloyalty, is very keen when you’re under the sea. And if you’re in the crew, the fear of the captain doing something wrong has to make you paranoid. That’s in all these films. If the captain goes wrong, you die. That’s just as true in ‘Black Sea’ as it in every other film of the genre.”

“Above and Beyond” is a moving and entertaining documentary about the young international volunteers who dashed to Israel in 1948 to create an Israeli Air Force.
They were World War II vets from the U.S., South Africa, Britain and elsewhere. Most, but not all, were Jews, and virtually none could speak Hebrew. The only aircraft they could get their hands on were smuggled out of American scrapyards or obsolete, poorly-assembled German ME-109 fighter planes built in Czechoslovakia.
They risked losing their lives and their citizenship in what most regarded as a hopeless, lost cause, fending off “a second Holocaust,” which newspapers and Arab leaders in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq had threatened.
“It was the dumbest thing I ever did,” one survivor says now, laughing.
It wasn’t a lost cause, and although many died, the survivors remember it as “the greatest thing I ever did.” Many, like future screenwriter Harold Livingston (“Star Trek: The Motion Picture”), discovered their Jewishness through the experience.
“It made me a mensch,” he quips in the film.
Guys like Livingston, Lou Lenart, Coleman Goldstein and Gideon Lichtman may not have been able to find Palestine on a map. Most remember coping with American anti-Semitism, hiding their heritage and enduring their parents’ sniping that they weren’t observant “Good Jews.” But when Britain announced it was withdrawing from Palestine and the Arab world threatened to destroy the Jewish community there, its ranks swelled by the emptying of Europe’s concentration camps, they had to act.
Plus, “We had a lot 0f testosterone,” one admits. “We didn’t want to waste it.”
Roberta Grossman’s film is one-sided and triumphalist, to be sure. The expert witnesses here are all Israelis, Jewish academics and the like. This isn’t a movie that debates the sort of state Israel became or whose land it was founded on.
“Above and Beyond” is a jaunty recollection of the clandestine means a handful of people used to raise money, buy aircraft and arms and recruit pilots, “going through (stolen) military records, looking for Jewish-sounding names” of ex-pilots and aircrew. Every time they got a taker, it was “meet Swifty” or some guy wearing a flower in his lapel on west 47th in Manhattan. They formed a fake Panamanian airline, smuggled planes to Czechoslovakia and got their first look at the clumsily assembled German fighters many of them would take into combat.
It’s fascinating, hearing from these still-swaggering flyboys and their descendants, one of whom reads his dad’s mission debrief from a 1948 crash. Having crashed a German plane, surrounded by armed Jews, wearing a Luftwaffe surplus flight suit and not speaking the language, Milton Rubenfeld just shouted the names of every Jewish food he knew to keep his captors from shooting him — “Matzo! Gefilte fish!”
The guy proudly reading that comical yet “official” account? Rubenfeld’s son, Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with some profanity, violent combat images

Cast: Harold Livingston, Lou Lenart, Paul Reubens, Gideon Lichtman, Coleman Goldstein.

Credits: Directed by Roberta Grossman, screenplay by Sophie Sartain. An International Film Circuit release.

Running time: 1:25

The PGA is widely regarded as the surest of sure fire Oscar indicators, and if so, that means “Birdman” is the favorite come Academy Awards night. It took the two top awards at Saturday’s Producers Guild honors.

But “The Lego Movie” won best animated feature, and “Life Itself,” the Roger Ebert bio-boc, won best documentary. Both worthy winners, but not even up for an Oscar — “snubbed” by the Academy.

So make of all that what you will. “Boyhood” isn’t the Best Picture favorite, but an “upset” is more likely than usual. 75% of the time, PGA awards reflect future Best Picture Oscars.

“American Sniper” looks to have tallied another 50-$61 million this weekend, after yet another massive Friday. It’s a certified smash, a rare one in Clint Eastwood’s canon, and should have cleared $150-$175 by the end of its run.

“Wedding Ringer” is showing Kevin Hart’s box office heft — both it and “Paddington” should finish the weekend at about $35 million, total.

“The Boy Next Door” was crucified by critics, but Jennifer Lopez still has fans who show up for her movies. It will tally $14-15.3 by weekend’s end.

But “Mortdecai” is a massive flop for Johnny Depp, whose “Pirates” stardom rarely translates into hits, unless Tim Burton is involved. Under $5 million.

And Disney and George Lucas treated “Strange Magic” like it was radioactive. It’s not very good, though as proof of concept, the animation is “Avatar” level, even if the story is thin fantasy gruel. “Star Wars” visual references abound in this world of fairies, elves and goblins. It opened on over 3000 screens and barely registered on any of them. Under $2 million.

“Imitation Game” is turning into the biggest hit among the serious best picture contenders, lingering in the Top Ten. “Boyhood” and “Theory of Everything” are in the second ten, with “Cake,” in modest release. “Black Sea” and “Song One” did OK biz for films opening in a few dozen theaters each.

“Strange Magic” is a cartoon fantasy cooked up from a half-baked idea from George Lucas.
The hook in that this tale of fairies fighting goblins over a love potion is that every minute or three, some fairy, elf or goblin bursts into song. Those songs cover over sixty years of pop music history, from Elvis to ELO (the title tune), The Four Tops to Lady Gaga. And since they’re covered by everyone from Evan Rachel Wood to Alan Cumming and Broadway baby Kristin Chenoweth, parents will have a “Who WAS that?” puzzle, something to while away the time with as their kids doze off in the seats next to them.
The story, cooked up by Lucas and allegedly based on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” concerns fairy princess Marianne (Wood), who has caught her intended, the warrior Roland (Sam Palladio) cheating on their wedding day. She’s over men, and sings a little Kelly Clarkson to prove it.
She armors up, so any chance the smarmy Roland had is gone, unless he can get some primrose-based love potion from The Dark Forest. That’s where the goblins, led by The Bog King (Cumming) have imprisoned the Sugar Plum Fairy (Chenoweth, natch), who knows how to make Love Potion #9.
The short, trollish elf Sunny (Elijah Kelley) pines for Marianne’s sister Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull) and takes the quest for the potion in the hopes of wooing her with it.
And that’s all there is to it, aside from the Bog King’s mommy (Maya Rudolph) issues, and a sea of songs.
Wood singing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” is better than Bull’s take on “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch (I Can’t Help Myself”), and Kelley’s rendition of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds (Don’t Worry About a Thing”) works. A wan version of  “I Can’t Live, If Living is Without You” makes you wonder why they wasted a song with so much urgency on a situation and performer simply not up to it.
There isn’t a laugh in this thing, not one. Shakespeare is nowhere to be found or felt in its inspiration.
However, it does play as a nice proof-of-concept reel for Industrial Light and Magic. The animation — butterfly winged fairies of great detail, skin so translucent you can see light through it, skin with freckles — is impressive.
The character design, however, never achieves “cute.” It’s creepy, pretty much across the board — just human enough to be a turn off. .
And that story is a reminder that when you’re as big a deal as Lucas, it’s hard to find somebody who will tell you that new idea for a movie needs more time in the mixing bowl, and oven, before filming begins.

MPAA Rating:  PG for some action and scary images

Cast: The voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Alan Cumming, Elijah Kelley, Kristin Chenoweth, Alfred Molina

Credits: Directed by Gary Rydstrom, script by David Berenbaum. A Touchstone release.

Running time: 1:39

As you might have guessed from the daft and something-short-of-hilarious TV ads, “Mortdecai” is an extended inside Anglo joke that most of us aren’t in on. Rather.
But for a certain sort of Anglophile, one who recognizes the attempted homage to ’60s comedies, the late comics Terry-Thomas and Dudley Moore and other inspirations for Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” pictures, it’s something less than awful.
I mean, if watching Johnny Depp mince and curl his “Kaiser Bill” mustache and quip in his most foppish upper-class twit Brit accent for 100 minutes is your cup of Earl Grey, have at it.
Charlie Mortdecai is an English lord, an inbred art dealer, tax dodger and, by his own admission, “a rogue, a scoundrel.” But when the Crown calls on him to find a missing Goya painting that was stolen when an art restorer was murdered, duty calls. That, and he owes $8 million in taxes and his bullying beauty of a wife (Gwyneth Paltrow, on the money) might leave him if they’re broke.
Ewan McGregor plays a former Oxford classmate, now an MI-5 agent who wants this painting back and who pines for Mortdecai’s wife. Paul Bettany is Jock, the Kato to Depp’s Clouseau-like klutz. Jock takes punches and bullets for his boss, who always asks his driver, “manservant and thug” one thing — mid-calamity.
“Will it be all right in the end?”
Jock refuses a straight answer. With reason, it turns out.
The movie rather pointlessly jets from London to Moscow, Hong Kong to Los Angeles. Others want the painting, a colorless lot of Russians, Chinese and an American. Jeff Goldblum has too little to play to give the film a decent comic foil and a much-needed arch villain.
What director David “Premium Rush” Koepp was shooting for was something on the order of those Peter Sellers “Pink Panther” movies, unlikely over-the-top adventures endured by a reluctant anti-hero goofball. What he settled for is Depp twitching and mugging, in close-up, enduring an endless parade of mustache jokes.
“What IS that infernal thing on your lip?” is the cleanest.
Depp’s English accent makes an amusing setting for his scripted one-liners. The government has a hefty file on him, “fat and well-handled, like a Welsh barmaid.” His euphemisms for luring his wife to bed are a stitch, a “quick session of congress, ‘Sink the Bismarck’ if you will.”
The story is nonsensical and the action tepid. So if you don’t find the Brit-quips funny, there’s not much for you in “Mortdecai,” just vintage British motorcars, foppish gibberish and Depp curling and re-curling that mustache, punctuating every line with “Right!” or “Quite!” That makes for a quite watchable mess.

MPAA Rating: R for some language and sexual material

Cast: Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Bettany, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Goldblum

Credits: Directed by David Koepp, script by Eric Aronson, based on a Kyril Bonfiglioli novel. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:46