Movie Nation

I first noticed Brit actor Hugh Bonneville in the 90s, in films such as “Notting Hill” and “Iris.” He’s been plugging along on film and (British) TV for 25 years or so.

But it wasn’t until “Downton Abbey” needed a proper Lord Grantham that Bonneville became a household name. How has “Downton” translated into BIG paydays, movie roles?

Well, he’s the actuary/risk expert father whose wife (Sally Hawkins) and kids agree to take in the homeless, accident-prone Peruvian bear whom they name “Paddington,” in a new kids’ film. Savvy move? You bet. The film is an adorable marvel of sentiment and very British fun.

Questions for Bonneville? I’d love some suggestions. Comment away, and thanks for the help

The Oscar winning Ms. Hathaway doesn’t figure in the Oscar mix this year. She was in “Interstellar,” one of the big hits of the fall and was good in it.  She’s filming a sequel to “Alice in Wonderland,” with most everybody save for Tim Burton on board.

And she has an indie film, “Song One,” due out this week. So yeah, she still does small films, perhaps more eagerly, now that she’s got that Academy Affirmation.

Questions for Anne Hathaway? Post them as comments, please. And Hathahaters? Spare me the bile.

The last and least of the “Taken” movies may hit $35-38 million, thanks to a big Friday and those filmgoers insufficiently warning everybody who might go Sat. or Sunday.

Poor reviews, which came late because Fox knew it wasn’t very good, didn’t hurt it.

“Selma” has weak Oscar buzz, but Oprah and its subject and quality (a good movie, not a great one) drove it to a $14 million.

“Hobbit” hos shot its quiver, as “Unbroken” finished ahead of it. “Unbroken” will be just a smidgen  over $100 million when all the money is counted after tonight’s “Golden Globes.”

“The Imitation Game” is giving Benedict Cumberbatch a certified hit and a serious Oscar push. He’s winning the Brit scientist bio pic sweepstakes, as “The Theory of Everything” has fallen out of the top ten.

“Boyhood” may get an Oscar nominations bounce, but it too is way out of the top ten.

Kanye West never cut a duet with Orson Welles. But younger people should know him, and Chuck Workman’s fine, brisk and thoroughly entertaining overview of Orson, “Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles,” easily makes the case why.
In brilliant, light-handed strokes, Workman’s documentary captures the “boy genius,” the young tyro who was coddled through what could have been a traumatic childhood, indulged as he bluffed his way onto the stage and celebrated as he revolutionized the Depression Era theater, almost overnight, in his teens.
Then there was radio, which he conquered by Martian invasion, leading to Hollywood. That’s where he reinvented the movies.
“I had the confidence of ignorance,” Welles intones, delivering a well-polished one-liner to yet another crowd of adoring fans in his twilight.
It’s been almost 30 years since Welles died. His most famous film was already late late show filler in the day of most kids’ grandparents, because “Citizen Kane” will be celebrating its 75th anniversary very soon. But “Magician” makes his case as the most important figure in film with ease. It’s built on half a century of Welles spinning his own myth in interviews on radio, film and TV, and buttressed with the greatest authorities on his colossal presence in the culture — biographers like Simon Callow, friends like actress Jeanne Moreau and director Peter Bogdanovich, and others who idolize him such as Julie Taymor, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and William Friedkin.
“There wasn’t, before him, an Orson,” intones director British director Peter Brook, who directed Welles in a celebrated TV production of “King Lear,” “and there’ll never be a second.”
The dazzling thing in “Magician” is how Workman breezily covers the various periods in Welles’ career, periods worthy of entire books, from his childhood as “The Boy Wonder,” to his post-“Kane” “Gypsy” years, when Hollywood was sure it had plenty of reasons not to hire him as a director, on up to today, as Richard “Boyhood” Linklater dubs him “the patron saint of indie filmmakers.”
There are generous samples of Welles’ acting, which could be hammy but rarely was boring. We remember his raconteur years in a jaunty montage of film and TV chat show appearances where his performance never failed to amuse, his polished interview anecdotes never failed to get laughs. The man was a master at playing to his audience.
Callow, the British actor best known for dying in “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” turned out to be his best, most sympathetic biographer. He cuts through the bluster to remind us what a fabulist and unrepentant self-promoter and liar Welles was, and that this was a great part of his charm.
And then there are the films, every one — from “Kane” and “The Stranger” through “Touch of Evil” and “Chimes at Midnight” — a masterpiece. Because if a movie is the sum total of our vivid memories of its electric moments, every Welles film — “Macbeth,” “The Trial” and “Othello” among them — is so stuffed with them as to make him the cinema’s ultimate touchstone.
Scores of scenes from movies that paid tribute to him, from “Ed Wood” to “Get Shorty,” are sampled. Charlton Heston, Norman Lloyd, William Alland, Tony Perkins and Richard Benjamin recall their unforgettable moments working with him.
And Marlene Dietrich, in that punch line from “Touch of Evil,” still sums up the actor, director, writer, magician, bon vivant, lover of women, food, music and wine, better than anybody.
“He was some kind of a man.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief language, some suggestive images/nudity and smoking

Cast: Orson Welles, Simon Callow, Jeanne Moreau, Martin Scorsese, Charlton Heston, many others
Credits: Written and directed by Chuck Workman. A Cohen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

Take away the Paris, Marseilles and Istanbul settings of the earlier “Taken” films and you get that most generic of thrillers — the LA action picture.
Take away the last vestiges of Liam Neeson’s action hero early middle age and you get a shriveled, older man not-quite-shown making one improbable escape after another, because they now we’d never believe it.
Take away the ticking clock of a kidnapping plot line and you remove the urgency, turning Neeson’s ex-CIA agent into just another guy “with particular skills” out for revenge.
“Taken 3” takes all those vital ingredients out of the formula that gave Neeson a nice third act for his career and Luc “Transporter/The Professional” Besson another unlikely action franchise, full of shootouts punchouts and spinouts in the middle of epic car chases. “Generic”  is the nicest thing one can say about it.
This time, mild-mannered, methodical retiree Bryan Mills (Neeson) is framed for the murder of his still-flirtatious ex-wife (Famke Janssen). The cops are sure he did it, so he beats a few up, makes his first wildly unlikely getaway and sets out “to find the real killer.”
Daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is the one character who stops to actually mourn Mom’s death. Maybe it’s hormonal. The perpetual college student has just learned she’s pregnant, and she won’t tell dad.
Forest Whitaker is the twitchy detective always one or one and a half steps behind Mills, snapping rubber bands, playing with a knight from a chess set, tics borrowed from a dozen earlier pictures to try and distract us from the limp plot and lame dialogue.
Mills still has those retired comrades in arms who can help him “go down the rabbit hole,” supplying him with info, weapons and safe houses.
And he still has those “particular skills” which he turns loose on generic Russian mobsters whom he is sure slit his wife’s throat.
Mills is so clever, he has the cops utterly outfoxed. But he can’t guess where this story is leading as early as the audience does — which is almost instantly.  Yet Neeson, collecting a check here, makes the most of his one good dialogue exchange, lines which could serve as a shorter review of “Taken 3.”
“This isn’t going to end well for you,” one cop warns him as Mills gets the drop on him.
Neeson fixes him with a skeletal glare.
“Don’t be such a PESSIMIST.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violent action and for brief strong language

Cast: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Forest Whitaker, Famke Janssen

Credits: Directed by Olivier Megaton, script by Luc Besson and  .Robert Mark Kamen. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:48

“Predestination” is a clever, quotable twist on that age-old sci-fi trope, “time travel.” This Spiereg Brothers adaptation of a Robert A. Heinlein story touches on love, death and morality as it ventures back and forth with a time traveling Ethan Hawke.

It spins out of the phrase “Never do yesterday what should be done tomorrow,” and begins — in one of the film’s fictive “present days” — with a barfly promising to relate “the most incredible story you ever heard.”

Hawke is the bartender who wants to hear it. But we know he’s being cagey, that he’s not a real bartender. He’s some sort of time traveling secret agent, out to foil the 1970s “Fizzle Bomber” and jumping back and forth through the 1940s to 1963, the 1970s 1985 and 1992, in that effort.

Does he suspect the storyteller? You bet. Do he or the barfly fret over the morality of terrorism, or summarily executing a terrorist before that terrorist acts? Not really.

“Some people just gotta go!”

The story is the movie’s long, set-up, a tale of a bullied childhood told by one who was bullied, a romantic rendezvous that may or may not happen, a single mother exploited by science and the debris, scattered through time, of every wound, ordeal and heartbreak that a single life has to endure.

Hawke and the amazing Sarah Snook (star of the horror picture “Jessabelle”) zip back and forth on the timeline, relating or avoiding each other (or earlier versions of themselves), unraveling a complex plot that suggests “some things are inevitable” and “luck is the residue of design.”

Will “The Bartender” find his prey and prevent a tragedy? Will he be able to pull the trigger, one last time? Will “The Unmarried Mother” improve her lot or change her destiny?

The Spierigs, Michael and Peter, are the Australian siblings who cooked up “Daybreakers,” a surprisingly sophisticated vampire sci-fi tale that was a minor hit for Hawke a few years back. Here, they ladle on the atmosphere — lovely period-perfect cloths, furniture, cars, etc., and let their two leads — along with Noah Taylor, as The Bartender’s time-travel-spy-agency boss — sell this premise.

And they pretty much do. Hawke is never less than reliably real and Snook is a revelation, convincing in a variety of guises.

We’ve seen far more variations of this story than most of us can recall, from “Timecop” and “Source Code” to “Deja Vu.” And the Spierigs work perhaps a little too hard at the “don’t give the audience hints” thing to make “Predestination” as much fun as it could be.

But it takes talent, in front of and behind the camera, to create something engrossing and new in the timeworn time-travel odyssey. Whatever its shortcomings, “Predestination” is never at a loss for surprises.

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

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, Noah Taylor

Credits: Written and directed by The Spiereg Brothers, based on a Robert Heinlein story. A Stage 6/Sony release.

Running time: 1:37

The best indie cinema is regional in nature, films with a strong sense of place. And the further that place is from the over-filmed Southern
California or New York, the better. The rural setting of a “Winter’s Bone,” “Ulee’s Gold” or “Beasts of the Southern Wild” becomes the main
character, shaping the people and events whose stories the film sets out to tell.
“The World Made Straight” is a flawed but vivid Southern Gothic melodrama set in an isolated community in the mountains of North Carolina.
And whatever shortcomings this over-boiled adaptation of a Ron Rash novel serves up, its setting overcomes them — making seemingly miscast
players pay off and overwrought, theatrical characters feel right at home.
“Bloody Madison County” came by its nickname honestly. The lingering bitterness of a Civil War massacre hangs over the hills and
hollers like the smokey blue rain and fog in Tim Orr’s cinematography. The trouble is, the kids, especially Travis Shelton (Jeremy Irvine), don’t
know that history.
Travis is a 17 year-old drop-out who’d rather fish than work at an honest job. When he stumbles across a pot patch and steals a few plants, his
pal (Haley Joel Osment) puts him in touch with Leonard, an ex-teacher and burnout played with marvelous conviction by Noah Wyle.
Leonard grew up here, but he never fit in. He may sell pot, keep dogs and tote a rifle, but his trailer is neat, filled with artifacts from the Civil War,
and books. Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” plays on the stereo.
“Never heard of’em.”
“Used to open for Skynyrd,” Leonard cracks.
Leonard opens Travis Shelton’s eyes to family history, his people and the bloody past that gave Madison County its reputation. Leonard has the
journals of his own ancestor, a Civil War era doctor. He is the very guy to teach Travis about the Shelton Laurel Massacre, about the circular, self-
sustaining nature of mountain violence, about how “time don’t pass. It’s all just layers.”
Country singer Steve Earle shows up as a murderous but musically-minded pot grower and thug and Minka Kelly is the drug-addict beauty traded among the growers and dealers.

“World Made Straight” has the makings for a lean and mean revenge thriller. But N.C. native David Burris takes his time, letting the production
design and David Gordon Green’s N.C.-educated cinematographer, Tim Orr, set the tone and the pace with lovely, distinct images of hazy
mountains, houses where paint is barely a memory and mud-spattered late-model cars and trucks tell the hard life story of each person driving
them.
So it’s a slow film, and almost painfully melodramatic in its obvious twists and turns.
But the performances are finely tuned, and the story arc and situations — aside from a few pauses for a song — quietly gripping.
Burris hasn’t created a film that’s on a par with “Shotgun Stories,” Scott Teem’s “That Evening Sun” or Green’s early films, “George Washington” or “Undertow.” But with this debut feature, he’s shown he’s another regional talent whose sense of his “World” warrants the attention of anyone bored to tears by yet another tale of the mean streets of New York or L.A.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, drug content and violence

Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Noah Wylie, Minka Kelley,  Steve Earle, Haley Joel Osment

Credits: Directed by  David Burris, script by Shane Danielson based on the Ron Rash book. A Millennium release.

Running time: 1:59