Movie Nation

Universal’s “The Boy Next Door” is almost so bad it’s good. Well, at least they got the “bad” part of that equation right.
A risible stalker thriller predicated on the absurd notion that Jennifer Lopez is still a movie star, it’s “Fatal Attraction” without the rabbit. And mostly without the fear.
Ryan Guzman of the later “Step Up” movies is the man candy who moves in next door to an about-to-divorce suburban school teacher Claire (Lopez) and her shy, allergy-riddled teenage boy, Kevin (Ian Peterson).
Dad (John Corbett) is a midlife crisis cliche, driving the purple Dodge Challenger, promising to never sleep with his secretary again. So he’s not quite still-in-the-picture. Enter Noah, the kindly, helpful 19 year-old taking care of his aged uncle next door.
Noah helps fix a garage door, helps Kevin score points with the cute kid in high school and helps himself into Claire’s classics literature class. Noah is all about “The Iliad,” quoting it, strutting like Achilles through the high school halls.
And Noah is “hot for teacher,” or to go more modern, he’s all about Claire, so he’s “all about the bass.”
Barbara Curry’s clumsy script concocts a bad blind date to irk Claire, and a hysterically mature seduction when Noah gets Claire alone.
“No judgements, no rules,” he purrs. “Just us…You can TRUST me.”
Of course she can’t. But since she’s had a little wine, has peeked at him stripping at night and isn’t shy about her own assorted skimpy pieces of underwear or sleepwear, Claire is ripe for the plucking. Because, you know, that’s the way women were depicted in the 1950s — helpless in the face of assertive caressing, sweet-talking and such.
Her instant regret leads to a lame excuse. “I got caught up in the moment.” He’s not having it.
And since we’ve seen flashes of Noah’s temper, watched him take her son out for pistol target practice and seen Claire wonder if someone is sneaking into her house, we know what “The Boy Next Door” is capable of. We know his moves before he makes them. So we just sit and wait for the pot to boil and some poor bunny, or its equivalent, to get cooked. This isn’t natural material for director Rob Cohen, who peaked with “Dragon” back in the last millennium (“Stealth” is kind of where he’s been ever since). The seduction scene plays and is photographed like softcore porn, the jokes are clunky and every punch is telegraphed, given away long before the fist is balled up.
Lopez is a gorgeous woman with the same mousy voice she came into the movies with 20 years ago. She’s all about the makeup, the hair, the clothes. She plays the part like someone imitating a TV teacher, from her classroom posture to her delivery.
Guzman is an equally fine specimen, though he’s a bit light on the menace and over-the-top in his playing of anger mismanagement.
No, don’t start picking apart the logic here, the clues everybody misses, the reactions that fly in the face of reason when Noah starts showing his hand. It’ll give you a headache.
The basics might be tried and true — a creepy, young, obsessive hunk who has an insidious influence on her son, her body and her life. But they’d have to be perfectly executed to work. And they aren’t.
Thus, “The Boy Next Door” is condemned to the movie equivalent of a bad neighborhood — January — where flops like this and Universal’s equally disastrous “Blackhat” are not so much released as written off.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, sexual content/nudity and language

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, Kristin Chenoweth, Ian Peterson, John Corbett

Credits: Directed by Rob Cohen, screenplay by Barbara Curry. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:31

Three downed Navy airmen stuck on a raft in the middle of the Pacific in World War II for weeks on end. It’s a familiar movie narrative, at least in part, because it happened more than once, even happened to a future president (George H.W. Bush) and happened to the hero of “Unbroken.”
“Against the Sun” doesn’t reinvent this mini genre, with its yellow life raft, men slowly starving, sun-blistering and dying of thirst. But its light moments, pallid highs and emotional lows show how this sort of movie is supposed to work. It sometimes moves us, where the admittedly more arduous ordeal of Louis “Unbroken” Zamperini failed to move, at least on the big screen.
Garret Dillahunt of TV’s “Justified” stars in this low budget “true story,” playing the torpedo bomber pilot who got lost in those pre-GPS days of early 1942. The Chief, his Ohio bombardier (Tom Felton, Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy) and the frustrated Missouri radioman (Jake Abel of “The Host”) drop into the sea. They have time to prepare, gather gear they’ll need.
But much of that gear goes down with the rapidly-sinking plane. And they have no idea where they are.
The life raft becomes a crucible for conflict, starting with recriminations. The ad hoc crew blames the confused pilot, the Chief vainly re-establishes the chain of command, and lashes out at the radioman. And every single step they must take to survive is shown in all its difficulty. Just flipping the raft over the middle of a steep swell is excruciating.
“We’ve got procedures for this,” they reassure one another about their chance of rescue. “Come early mornin’, they’ll be on us like an old houn’dog.”
That’s never the case. Next thing you know it’s “SHARKS!” and “Do they have hurricanes in the Pacific?”

“Affirmative.”

“Why do I keep asking these questions?”

Director Brian Falk and cinematographer Petr Cikhart wash out the colors with the sun, limiting our field of view to that of the crew. The story the film tells crosses the same bridges most such stories traverse — hallucinations, that first desperate rain shower, fishing for food, sharks. The last of those is rather too-obviously faked.
But the players never let on that they didn’t have an “Unbroken” budget, with Dillahunt nicely interpreting the Chief’s journey from blame to acceptance, and Felton suffering like he means it. Abel does well playing the defiant one, ready to join in the class war his officer/pilot seems to want to start.
However, much of the edge is rubbed off these potential conflicts. And noble as this struggle was, it’s still an overly-familiar one, as far as the movies go. Still, even with its digital bomber crash and phony sharks, “Against the Sun” lets us put ourselves in the place of these three, something “Unbroken” never managed. The simple, myopic setting and uncluttered story help.

MPAA Rating:  PG for thematic material involving peril and hardships, and for language

Cast: Tom Felton, Jake Abel, Garret Dillahunt

Credits: Directed by Brian Falk, screenplay by Mark David Keegan and Brian Falk. An American Film Company release.

Running time: 1:39

A comedy that barely flirts with funny and a grim weeper that never quite raises a tear, “Cake” has one thing going for it — Jennifer Aniston. And if she didn’t get the Oscar nomination that might have seemed certain when she took on playing this physically, emotionally scarred and suicidal pill-popper, that’s of little consequence. The work is good enough to stand on its own, to stand with the best acting she’s done since graduating from TV sitcoms.
Claire Bennett wears her bitterness like the healed cuts that mar her face. A bad thing has happened to her, so bad that she’s in group therapy. But she doesn’t fit in with Annette (Felicity Huffman) and the other walking wounded. They lash out, as an exercise, at a dead woman (Anna Kendrick) from their group who killed herself. Not Claire. She notes the manner of death, the horror and humiliation and inconvenience Nina caused her widowed husband and little boy.
“Way to go, Nina! I hate it when suicides make it easy on survivors.”
The one continuity in Claire’s pained, dazed life is her housekeeper, Silvana (Adriana Barraza). She’s the one who drives Claire to physical therapy, where she curses a blue streak. Silvana indulges Claire, goes above and beyond and tries to encourage healing. But she tends to a woman in such pain she cannot sit up in the car seat when riding, cannot help but mix wine and Oxycontin, which she cons one of her doctors (Lucy Punch) out of.
The presence of Punch, Huffman, Judy Greer and Chris Messina (as Claire’s estranged husband) suggests a tone that this script never quite rises to. Claire is acerbic, occasionally amusing, occasionally getting a rise out of those she interacts with. But the dead Nina (Kendrick) becomes her main sparring partner as this lonely woman, six months after whatever put her into this state, drinks and drugs herself to death. And those chats aren’t funny.
Nina’s ghost is in her pool, on her ledge, in her room and in her head. Nina is the one who wonders “Why?” Why would this atheist-loner kill herself?
That seems obvious. Less obvious is Nina’s reasons for offing herself. Claire starts asking around, questioning the highway worker who called out “Don’t jump,” the last person to see Nina alive. Claire even starts in on Nina’s husband, given marvelously human dimensions by Sam Worthington.
Kendrick is bubbly and on-the-nose, Barraza puts flesh and bone on a character written as a “Dios mio!” cliche — Catholic, kind-hearted, loyal.
But Aniston sells this movie, delivering the few one-liners with sitcom timing, packing a wallop in a third-act meltdown and making us believe that yes, there are reasons to check out and Claire has them, or would if she’d sober up and gutcheck herself into going  through with it. It’s a terrific performance, and makes “Cake” worth seeing, even if Aniston won’t get an Oscar for it.

MPAA Rating: R for language, substance abuse and brief sexuality

Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Adriana Barraza, Sam Worthington, Felicity Huffman,
Anna Kendrick

Credits: Directed by Daniel Barnz, screenplay by Patrick Tobin. A Cinelou/Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:42

His hair is thinning and his features are thickening, and Jude Law is evolving into a more interesting actor as this happens. He’s more at home in
tough guy roles such as “Dom Hemingway.” The gritty submarine thriller “Black Sea” is his latest one of those. But in this case, it’s a salty performance that seems just beyond his grasp.
Law plays Robinson, a newly-laid off submarine pilot whose marine salvage company has no more use for sub pilots. He’s a Royal Navy vet who
“lost my family to this job.” And now he doesn’t even have that.
But a sickly ex-colleague knows of a score, a way to get even with “the bankers” and “people who get filth like us who get them to do THEIR
dirty work.” It’s a Nazi submarine, lost in the Black Sea in the early days of World War II. And it might be full of Soviet gold.
All Captain Robinson has to do is procure a sub, recruit a crew, sidle up to it, send divers over and pluck out the Nazi bullion. Simple, right?
Of course, there’s the matter of who actually owns the gold rights, and the Russian Black Sea fleet that’s based close by.
Director Kevin MacDonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) doesn’t do much with the “gathering the team” sequence. They need Russians and
Brits, old salts — retirees. We learn that this diver (Ben Mendelsohn) is “a psycho,” and that Russian sonar recruit (Sergey Veksler) has “the best
ears in the Russian navy.”
To a one they’re misfits, hotheads, “penguins,” graceful and at home under water, “useless on dry land.”
Robinson, rather inexplicably, brings a kid (Bobby Schofield) along. More explicably, the mysterious financier behind the venture sends his land
lubber American aide (Scoot McNairy) to watch after his investment.
Their sub? A retired Soviet “Foxtrot Class” rustbucket. The handful of Russian hires know how to operate it, but only Blackie (Konstantin
Khabenskiy of “Nightwatch”) speaks English. The Brits are short-tempered and greedy, the Russians superstitious and fatalistic. We can guess
how this will go wrong.
The sets are impressively corroded, damp and dank, from the worn wooden paneling in the crew quarters to the rusty big red stars that adorn
each torpedo tube. The movie morphs from a heist picture to a sub survival movie to a Greed Gets to You thriller and is more convincing in its
first two modes than in the last. The thrills in this thriller are few and far between, and the tense moments are either utterly predictable or arrive, out of the blue.
Mendelsohn, of “The Dark Knight Rises,” makes a creepy, mercurial impression. McNairy (“Argo”) makes a fine
management weasel, and young Schofield generates a little sympathy.
But this is Law’s vehicle, and he seems more concerned with keeping Robinson real than in turning up the temperature on the performance. We
may see the family he lost in flashbacks, but little of what motivates him is obvious. He hates “them,” i.e. “The Man.” He is determined to get
that gold, come what may. But Captain Robinson is no Captain Queeg. His bitterness and a rage that is meant to suggest madness just aren’t
there.
That contributes mightily to a third act that sinks this overlong, drifting thriller deep into the sea that is its title.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some graphic images and violence

Cast: Jude Law, Scoot McNairy, Bobby Schofield, Ben Mendelsohn, Konstantin Khabenskiy, Grigoriy Dobrygin

Credits: Directed by Kevin MacDonald, script by Dennis Kelly. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:54

You’ve never seen Ewan McGregor quite like this — all sadistic, ruthless and what not.
In “Son of a Gun,” he plays Brendan, an escaped convict who busts out of the joint, does a job and is double-crossed. And Brendan isn’t pleased with what he must do to the henchmen of the guy who double-crossed him, all that “shouting” and pleading.
“It’s all, ‘Oh please Nooo,'” he purrs in that once-sweet Scottish burr. “‘NOT the thumbs! I’m just learnin’ the piano!”
Brendan, as we’ve seen, is capable of just about anything.
“Son of a Gun” is a quite conventional Australian prison thriller that morphs into a heist picture. McGregor isn’t the lead, that’s the young Brendan Thwaites of “Maleficent,” an Aussie hunk who plays a kid, J.R., whom Brendan takes under his protection in prison. Upon getting out, J.R. finds himself drawn into the criminal underworld where Brendan was more at home, where the Russian mobster Sam (Jacek Koman) presides.
The kid and the older con are hurled into a not-quite-impossible heist. And the kid falling for Sam’s skinny Euro-stripper arm candy, Tasha (Alicia Vikander) will be the least of their difficulties.
Writer-director Julius Avery put much of his energy into cooking up character traits and illustrating them. Brendan and J.R. are both avid chess buffs. No real explanation how or why, they just know all about “sacrificial pawns” and Bobby Fischer’s use of the “Son of My Sorrow” strategy.
J.R. cannot swim, which makes his courtship of the streetwise Tasha wet and salty.
Thwaites is OK in a role that demands mostly passivity out of him, and Vikander (“Anna Karenina”) is slinky temptation incarnate.
But McGregor is the one with his work cut out for him here, looking tough amongst veteran Australian screen toughs, swapping hardbitten lines with the best of them.
“When’d they let you out?”
“They DIDN’T.”
The milieu — coastal-industrial Australia — is interesting, with its stoner arms dealers and crazed thugs of every age. But what sells “Son of a Gun” is McGregor’s presence and performance, a guy using and mentoring a gullible but gutsy young man, trying to impart the wisdom of the wizened con to the kid.
“You do NOT bend the rules for a piece of skirt!”
Start to finish, tattoos to two-fisted punchouts, we totally buy him as a hardcase. And to think he’s always seemed so…sweet.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with bloody violence, nudity and profanity

Cast: Brendan Thwaites, Ewan McGregor, Alicia Vikander

Credits: Written and directed by Julius Avery. An a24 release.

Running time: 1:48

It’s common Hollywood practice to follow an Oscar win with a trip to big budget land, where the paychecks, the trailers and and the impact on the culture are potentially huge. So Sandra Bullock did “Gravity” right after “Blind Side,” and so Anne Hathaway did “Interstellar” not long after picking up an Oscar for “Les Miserables.”
But Hathaway tried something altogether more modest and intimate in between paydays. “Song One” is a low-budget New York romance set against the backdrop of the city’s small-clubs/singer-songwriters-performing-in-them scene.
Hathaway stars as Franny, an anthropologist whose estranged brother Henry (Ben Rosenfield) has become obsessed with songwriting, filling notebooks with tunes, performing them as a guitar-playing busker. But a car accident has left Henry in a coma, and a guilt-ridden Franny comes home to an irate, self-involved writer-mom (Mary Steenburgen) and a brother who won’t wake up.
The novelty in writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland’s debut feature is Franny’s way of coping with this tragedy. A scientist by training, she immerses herself in Henry’s notebooks, listens to the mix tapes he had been sending her and, traipsing through Brooklyn’s busker underground, she discovers Henry’s world. Henry’s unconventional songs are Franny’s soundtrack as she visits Henry’s haunts. She starts making natural sound recordings, hoping for audio cues that will wake her sibling up. She’s trying to help.
It’s on this odyssey that she meets Henry’s absolute favorite artist, a British singer-songwriter of one-time repute named James Forester. He’s played by British singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn.
Hathaway and Flynn have minimal chemistry, but she makes Franny beguiling enough to persuade the near-has-been James to visit the comatose Henry. That means he’ll be close to Franny, and that sets us up for a little romance.
Hathaway sets off most of her sparks in her scenes with the great Steenburgen, whose character’s nagging doesn’t mask her own guilt at what has happened to her son.
“You came out of my womb having all the answers!” Mom bellows. But Franny gives as good as she gets.
The magical thing that Hathaway accomplishes here is in getting this film made and this look at the New York music scene out there. Barker-Froyland’s script makes knowing observations about “stardom” in the age of pirated downloads, when most musicians have to make most of their money off live performance, and “fandom” in the age of selfies.
Tunes by everyone from Nina Simone to America — whose “I Need You,” Hathaway sings — turn up on the soundtrack, with Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley providing much of the music Flynn’s James Forester sings in the film. Sharon Van Etten, The Felice Brothers and Cass Dillon are among those seen in the various indie music clubs captured for the film.
It never rises to the level of say, a “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,” a romantic comedy that wandered through a different corner of New York music subculture. But Hathaway and a legion of musicians make this musical time capsule a pleasant enough time-killer, a film that seems to get what it is that turns people who play as a hobby into obsessed creatives looking to start a long shot career with “Song One.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a scene of sexuality, and brief language

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Johnny Flynn, Ben Rosenfield, Mary Steenburgen
Credits: Written and directed by Kate Barker-Froyland. A Cinedigm/Film Arcade release.

Running time: 1:26