Movie Nation

An $82 million Friday suggests that millions of Americans forgot the plot of 1992’s “Jurassic Park.” Or ignored scads and scads of warnings that “Jurassic World” is exactly the same movie.

Well, anything to sell the popcorn. It is a popcorn movie. Not like “San Andreas” or “Mad Max” reinvented the wheel. “Jurassic World” will pass “San Andreas” on its very first weekend, and catch “Mad Max: Fury Road” by Tuesday or Wed.

Then again, in the time it took you to read this, “Jurassic World” made more money than the far superior (only on 15 screens) “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” It’s made $70,000 thus far, will be lucky to manage $165 K this weekend.

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Jason Bateman and Ginnifer Goodwin provide the voices, Disney has set this one for release in March of 2016.

“All poets are mad,” the 16th century scholar observed. And so they have been, at least in the movies — mad and mercurial and of course, entertaining drunks.
Dylan Thomas is the patron saint of this stereotype, and it’s his boozy, reeling first visit to America, as “the purest lyrical poet in the English speaking world,” that is the subject of “Set Fire to the Stars,” a Welsh co-production celebrating and illuminating the great Welsh poet.
By 1950, Thomas, in his mid-30s, was both celebrated and notorious. He’d come to fame reading his poetry on the BBC during World War II. But it was his bawdy, rude and riotously ripped personal reputation that gave America’s academics pause before they’d agree to sponsor a U.S. tour.
Elijah Wood plays John Brinnin, the New York poet whose idea this tour was. The first scene in “Set Fire to the Stars” is Wood, flippantly trying to put his fellow academics at ease about Thomas. His reputation as a drinker “must be inflated,” surely. “How much trouble can one poet be?”
Quite a bit, if you turn him loose on the tavern capital of North America.
Thomas, played by Welsh actor and Thomas look-alike Celyn Jones (who co-wrote the script), is the life of every party, the barfly’s barfly. He’d rather listen to the music in a waitress’s jargon-jazzed order than recite a poem. But give him enough to drink and he’ll break into song, or obscene limericks.
“A frustrated lady named Alice,” he bellows, “used a dynamite stick for a phallus.” And that’s as printable as that poem gets.
But Brinnin, straining to keep Thomas sober enough to perform and polite enough to rub elbows with college faculties, is in over his head. Even dragging the poet to a cabin in Connecticut doesn’t help, when there are fans/neighbors (Shirley Henderson, Kevin Eldon) willing to flirt and drink into the poet’s good graces.
Wood is well-cast as the closeted, repressed Boswell to the Great Man, ill-used and put-out at the poet’s many indiscretions.
Jones is lively as Thomas the drunk, predictably maudlin and morose as the man behind the partier. He makes his best impressions as the poet, summoning up the voice that turned Thomas into a recording star, reading his work for others.
“I may without fail,” the poem that provides the film’s title goes, “Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.”
“Set Fire to the Stars” is shot in a period-perfect but video-flat black and white, with Welsh locations nicely doubling for New York.
Co-writer/director Andy Goddard delivers lovely grace notes — in a roadhouse where Rosie, the slangy-waitress (Maimie McCoy) presides, and near the end, where those who have met Thomas on his travels perform that titular poem, “Love in the Asylum.”
This film, based on Brinnin’s memoir, “Dylan Thomas in America,” could easily have become a tragi-comic “My Favorite Year” with poetry. But Goddard and Jones never quite turn it loose, never let us forget the haunted man who couldn’t have just one drink/one woman (Kelly Reilly plays Caitlin Thomas, the wife, in a vision). The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol abuse, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Celyn Jones, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Reilly, Steven Mackintosh
Credits: Directed by Andy Goddard, script by Celyn Jones and Andy Goddard. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:37

Touching and wise, cute and occasionally cloying, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is a dramedy that taps into both real teen angst and behavior, and our fantasies of what we hope teens are thinking and feeling and doing.
It’s about a couple of high school movie makers and the “dying girl” one of them is forced to befriend. From tha set up, the film leans heavily on high school comedies of the past. It then proceeds to go out of its way to trip up our expectations about cliques, jocks, geeks and the prettiest girl in school.
Awkward Greg (Thomas Mann) is our narrator, a camera geek who lives outside the cliques with his “colleague,” Earl (RJ Cyler). They kill lunch hours watching classic cinema (“Fitzcarraldo,” “Burden of Dreams”) on youtube in the office of the “cool” teacher. After school, they make parodies of those films — using stop-motion animation and costumes of their own creation that they wear in playing the stars of “My Dinner With Andre the Giant” or “A Sockwork Orange.”
Then Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) gives him bad news. His classmate, Rachel, just learned she’s dying of cancer. Greg, to his credit, reacts the way we’d expect a teen to react. Bummer. Too bad for her. But Mom wants more. Go talk to this girl.
“Do one nice thing for another person.”
What’s worse, Rachel doesn’t “need your stupid pity.” But Greg has just a little charm, and thanks to his parents (Nick Offerman is his sweetly eccentric college prof dad), empathy he didn’t know he’d developed. With disarming tactlessness, he insists on sticking around, and the story begins with the title “Day 1 of Doomed Friendship.”
Cooke, a winsome veteran of the other genre of “dead teenager” movies — horror (“The Quiet Ones,””Ouija”) — gives Rachel a vulnerable beauty. She lets us see the terror at what is coming behind whatever brave front Rachel puts up.

Mann (“Project X”) manages the sensitive insensitivity Greg has to project. He’s scared, too. He needs pep talks from that cool teacher (Jon Bernthal), and from a Wolverine poster in Rachel’s room. Wolverine (the real voice of Hugh Jackman) chews Greg out for botching the empathy thing. Make a dying girl feel worse with your jokes?
“Not on my watch, pal.”
That’s one of many cute and funny touches director and “Glee!” veteran Alfonso Gomez-Rejon slips into what should be the saddest movie since “The Fault in Our Stars.”
The films within the film are hilariously awful. And the assorted high school “types” amusing as ever. But it’s where “Me and Earl” departs from the old John “Breakfast Club” formula that distinguishes it.
The adults — Molly Shannon is Rachel’s weeping, crawl-in-a-bottle divorced mom — are sympathetic and they remember what it was like to be teens. The “hot girl” isn’t a “mean girl.”
Earl is given stereotypical poor black kid street smarts and oversexed teen dialogue. But Cyler makes Earl soulful, deep and smart, something the whole school seems to already know as Greg, and we the audience it out.
Cooke and Mann carry the film, her making great use of Rachel’s cancer-makes-you-wise perspective, Mann playing up the slow and steep learning curve Greg endures. “I have stage four cancer” ends any argument, and the accusation, “You’re only hanging out with her because she has cancer” makes him try a little his soul searching.
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” isn’t deep. But this sure-to-be-a-crowd-pleasing laugher/weeper reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with a romantic comedy that reaches for inspiring and cathartic between the laughs.

MPAA Rating: PG – 13 for sexual content, drug material, language and some thematic elements

Cast: Thomas Mann, Olivia Cooke, RJ Cyler, Moolly Shannon, Connie Britton, Nick Offerman
Credits: Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, script by Jesse Andrews, based on his novel. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:45

Handsomely mounted, period perfect and starring the empathetic Mia Wasikowska in the title role, the new “Madame Bovary” narrows the scope and finds a different focus within Gustave Flaubert’s novel.
But stripping away complexity doesn’t just undo decades of politically correct efforts to add justifications for the actions of the bored, repressed 1840s French housewife. Director Sophie Barthes (“Cold Souls”) dares to see her acquisitive, shallow heroine as a villain. That should raise some eyebrows.
We meet Emma during her convent training (poise, posture), followed by her wedding day. Her father is happy to marry her off to a handsome and reasonably well-off doctor (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). But dad lets slip something of Emma’s nature in a toast that mentions “all these ideas in your head.”
Emma has just enough knowledge of the world to feel that the provincial life they settle down to in tiny Yonville is depressing. The sylvan forests and bucolic farms and cottages may enchant us today. She sees them as her trap. Dinner chat limited to “Any patients of interest today?”, consultations with a priest — her only sounding board — who doesn’t see or hear her desperation — that’s her future.
But Emma has a rescuer. The pushy shop owner Monsieur Lheureux, played with a greedy purr by Rhys Ifans, labels her “an elegant woman of taste” and proceeds to show her the fine dresses, curtains and furnishings a lady of her refinement must covet. Put it all on her account.
She isn’t flighty enough to fall for the romantic but callow law clerk Leon (Ezra Miller, more at home in a boy band than a period piece). But Emma is still doomed. And not just because of the attentions of the dashing Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green). Her desperate desire for a richer life will impact her marriage, her husband’s practice and others as the house fills with the finer things and her neediness leads to affairs.
Barthes, who co-wrote the script, emphasizes Emma’s isolation (no peers or girlfriends) and her gullibility. She leaves out the passion for romantic novels that fed Emma’s fantasies and taught her there was a wider world out there. But the film also omits some of her affairs and the daughter she had with Charles, which made her social striving seem even more selfish on the page. Paul Giamatti plays the pharmacist Homais, charming, pushy, but stripped here of his ulterior motives.
Still, Wasikowska nicely gets across Emma’s boredom and dullness. This is a character who can’t quite articulate her ennui, who sees things as Monsieur Lheureux tells her to, “possess what you love.”
Perhaps it’s the “Real Housewives” era that conjures up thoughts of the original “realist,” Flaubert, and his greatest novel, as we’ve already been treated this summer to the tarted-up dark comedy, “Gemma Bovery,” inspired by his book. This latest “Bovary”, sumptuous as it is, only hits the tragic highlights and connects her, firmly, with the Culture of Acquisition. It still plays, but doesn’t really move us. So purists have every right to look down their noses at it.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Rhys Ifans, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Laura Carmichael, Logan Marshall-Green, Paul Giamatti
Credits: Directed by Sophie Barthes, script by Felipe Marino and Sophie Barthes, based on the Gustave Flaubert novel. An Alchemy release.

Running time: 1:58

You can’t make a movie out of the tragicomic novel “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” without the perfect, terminally ill final third character in that title. The film’s director, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon cast about and found someone in a genre that both he and she are well-versed in — horror.
“It’s a very expressive genre,” says Gomez-Rejon, who directed episodes of TV’s “American Horror Story” and the big screen “The Town That Dreaded Sundown.” He found his “Dying Girl” on TV’s “Bates Motel.” But young Brit Olivia Cooke’s resume includes the British horror thriller “The Quiet Ones,” as well as “Ouija” and the supernatural thriller “The Signal.” Gomez-Rejon saw talent and a kindred spirit in the 21 year-old Cooke.
“Horror has allowed both of us an opportunity to show what you can do,” he says. “This film let us both show something deeper. She had to be someone who could be funny without trying to be funny. She’s confident, like Rachel, her character…She commands her scenes, and handles even the toughest emotional moments with such grace.”
Cooke, whose character is diagnosed with terminal cancer and is reluctantly befriended by two high school filmmaker/classmates, chose to shave her head for her chemo scenes.
“There are plenty of young actresses who wouldn’t dare to be seen bald, and a whole other group who would have made a big fuss of it, but Cooke approaches the role with quiet dignity,” critic Peter Debruge wrote in his rave review of “Me and Earl” in Variety. But when your first leading lady role had you crazy, disheveled, in various states of self-injured undress in “The Quiet Ones,” shaving your head’s nothing, right?
“I don’t think horror taught me much of anything,” Cooke says with a laugh, noting how “Quiet Ones” was the one great experience she’s had with the genre. But “I never went to drama school. I’m winging it, doing my own thing. So maybe I ‘went to school’ in those films. Horror certainly taught me to be patient, and to appreciate a really good script and the chance to do something that proves I can do other things.”
Cooke’s close enough to her teens that she respected the characters in Jesse Andrews’ script (he also wrote the novel this is based on) for “how real they feel. I liked the fact that as written, Rachel was a young woman who liked herself — not this stereotypical teenager who hates her looks, her whatever.
“These movies are too often conceived by 50 year-old men writing in their swanky apartments in Burbank. They make girls like this riddled with insecurities and self-deprecation. The girls never seem to like themselves. I was a girl who liked myself.”
While Cooke can be excused for the 21 year-old’s view that 50 year-old-men write teen romances in Hollywood (50 year old studio execs pay 28 year-old screenwriters to write these movies), her observations about her peers seem on the money.
“I know the thing with teenagers, with me back then and with my 15 year-old sister now, is there’s no filter. At that age, you’ve not had to use tact or put empathy into practice. That’s what Rachel teaches Greg (Thomas Mann). She’s already come of age, grown up a little, by the time we meet her. What she gives him is the chance to care for another person in a way that’s not self-serving.”
Greg doesn’t so much fall in love with Rachel as make a friend, and learn from her. And Rachel makes real friends at a time in her life when she fears people are just taking pity on her.
The rapturous praise that “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is earning from critics suggest this could be a game changer for an actress who might have been destined to become a “scream queen.” Cooke has “Katie Says Goodbye,” a drama about an Arizona waitress so desperate to leave her small town that she turns to prostitution, in production.
Her unfiltered age and newness to the business make this the perfect time to ask what she wants out of this career. A flip “To challenge myself, to not be found out!” is followed by something more thoughtful, Olivia Cooke’s list of “no nos.” She doesn’t want to become “a brand. Not the least bit interested in that. All this social media nonsense, where’s the mystery? I want to remain a little mysterious! I’m not up to being funny on all the chat-show interviews. It’s just a job, at the end of the day.”
But her director thinks she’s selling herself short. Just a little.
“All these things that Rachel is, brave and scared, lonely and real — Olivia was able to do it all, right in the audition,” Gomez-Rejon says. Her future could not be brighter, after this film.
“Because, it turns out, she’s not just a ‘horror girl.'”

It’s “Aloha” for “Aloha,” which opened feeble and is fading out of the top ten.

But it didn’t fade enough for “Love & Mercy” to crack the top ten on its opening weekend. On under 500 theaters, the Brian Wilson bio pic, critically acclaimed, is well under $1 million for its opening weekend.

“Spy” of course is the big news, a very good $31-32 million opening weekend, based on a robust Friday night.

“San Andreas” is still making oodles of money and should finish the weekend in the ballpark of $100 million.

“Insidious: Chapter 3” is managing a very solid $21 million+ for its opening weekend. Will it catch the inferior “Poltergeist” any time soon? Maybe. Horror movies have a limited overall take, as a general rule.

“Entourage” opened Wed. and looks to be at $18 million by Sunday night — that’s a $10 million weekend. Movie couldn’t have cost that much.

“Pitch Perfect 2” will be at over $160 for the summer by weekend’s end, “Mad Max” over $130, ““Tomorrowland” is running out of gas and may not reach $100 million.

So here’s how director and his muse guarantee uniform good notices for their latest comic teaming. Get collectively bent out of shape when critics abuse you for your over-reliance on “fat jokes.” Make people feel sorry for Melissa McCarthy, when we’re just supposed to find her funny.

Then flip that script, eschew Weight Watchers humor, spend some money on a supporting cast and a stunt team, and make Melissa simply underestimated, not roly poly and in denial about it.

“Spy” is a perfectly amusing comedy every time McCarthy’s out-of-her-depth desk jockey agent is paired up with Jason Statham and Miranda Hart and Peter Serafinowicz. It’s never less than watchable with her opposite Jude Law and her “Bridesmaids” bud Rose Byrne.

The 94% positive rating on Rottentomatoes is misleading. Check out the grade of 74 on Metacritic. More accurate. I gave it 2.5 stars — funny, WAY too long, more hit than miss, but still hit or miss. It turns into more standard issue swagger and swearing McCarthy, throwing her weight around, in the third act. But it’s a refreshing riff on Bond and Bourne.

“Love & Mercy” is a very good Beach Boys biopic built around the peak years, and late life comeback of Brian Wilson. Paul Dano dazzles as the younger genius, cooking up “Pet Sounds.” John Cusack is good enough as the later life Wilson, messed up, under the thumb of a mental health quack/bully  (Paul Giamatti). Great reviews all over for this one.

“Entourage,” the movie nobody asked for based on a TV show that ran its course years ago, got a few good reviews. Those people must’ve seen it at theaters that serve alcohol. Stale, played, actors moving at half speed playing characters that have nothing new to say. Meh.

“Insidious: Chapter 3” got just enough good notices to merit “fresh” on rottentomatoes. I liked it, found the finale moving and enjoyed Lin Shaye’s moment in the spotlight.

“Testament of Youth” is a quietly compelling anti-war film based on Vera Brittain’s famed WWI memoir. It’s how pacifism, in its modern sense, was born. Another amazing turn by Alicia Vikander.