Movie Nation

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.

It starts with a simple request.
OK, it’s a horror movie. So maybe not so simple.
“I want to talk to somebody who’s not around any more.”
Of course, warning young Quinn (Stefanie Scott) that trying to talk with her mother isn’t a great idea, doesn’t work. Mom died of breast cancer. Quinn is finishing high school, wants to be an actress and needs her mother’s advice, because there are some things electrician dad (Dermot Mulroney) just doesn’t understand.
Psychic Elise Rainer is retired “from all that.” But when Quinn reaches into the spirit world on her own, the little old lady has to give up being a shut-in, roll up her sleeves and leave her trusted dog behind. It’s back to “The Further” for her, to rescue a teen, foil a demon and save the day.
Welcome to “Insidious: Chapter 3,” in which horror icon Lin Shaye explains the afterlife to us, faces her own fears and graduates from mascot, in many a horror movie, to leading lady. It’s a movie with its fair share of scares. But thanks to the pathos of the story (dead mothers) and the veteran Shaye, it’s that rare horror movie that could also make you cry.
This “Insidious” prequel takes us back to a time before Elise appeared in the original film, back to show why she got out, then got back into the spirit guide business. She had her reasons.
Actor/writer turned writer-director Leigh Whannell, who gave us “Saw” and “Insidious,” doles out his frights sparingly. They’re shadowy figures — a man in a hospital gown, waving from the distance, noises from the vents of an old apartment building, an apparition in the theater where Quinn auditions for an acting conservatory.
There’s the “crazy old cat lady” in their building who seems to know something. But Elise, with her “Book of Seeing,” is the one who has the answers.
Shaye shines, front and center, in this sensitive haunted (apartment) house tale. She ties the thread of these movies together, makes this version of the afterlife make sense (sort of) and lands the one-liners. She gives Elise fear and trepidation, replaced by a defiance born of experience.
Whatever else Whannell, making his directing debut, manages in this third chapter of this soon-to-be-beaten-to-death series, casting Shaye and giving the actress who dates back to the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” her due pays off. In a genre known for its callous heartlessness, Shaye reminds us that there’s nothing scarier than grief and regret, nothing more horrific than a child losing her mother, nothing more terrifying than the horrors she’s already seen and knows too well.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, frightening images, some language and thematic elements

Cast: Stefanie Scott, Lin Shaye, Dermot Mulroney
Credits: Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. A Focus/eOne release.

Running time: 1:37

Writer-director-actor Jason Trost’s “How to Save Us” is a clever mash-up of the zombie apocalypse thriller and ghost story genres. But this lean indie picture runs out of surprises early and never overcomes flat, uninvolving acting, primarily by the eyepatch-wearing filmmaking in a tour-de-dull performance.
Trost gives us an empty world — actually the island of Tasmania — abandoned by people thanks to a “virus.” That’s the government cover story. His brother says otherwise. But brother Sam (Coy Landreau), seen mostly in flashbacks “39 days earlier,” is missing.
Sam was on solo walkabout in Tasmania when he noticed the phones weren’t working and there was no one around. He missed the “Evacuate Now” posters, radio and TV broadcasts.
He somehow managed to mail a parcel to brother Brian (Trost), with a composition notebook filled with “research” about what’s REALLY happening. “How to Save Us” is on the cover.
What we learn –aside from postal workers being the last to flee (apparently) — is that “The radio can hear them.” That “they” are “attacted to electricity.” The “ashes of the dead” are a shield, and “graveyards are safe” havens.
Brian hires a boat to get him to the empty island and tries to follow in Sam’s tracks. He keeps a radio on, which plays eery oldies — scratchy folk, country, pop and jazz records, Winston Churchill speeches. Brian’s self-narrated explanation for this is balderdash, but it’s a cool effect.
As are the empty streets, beaches and forests. The reason dystopias about the collapse of civilization — viral, nuclear or zombie disasters — often work is that it’s incredibly unsettling to see yourself as alone in a hostile world.
Brian isn’t alone. The “ghosts” are visible through the infrared filter on a camcorder, an arresting and chilling effect. He must cover himself with the ashes of the dead, avoid electricity (save for the camera and radio, apparently), spray paint messages for Sam and hope they cross paths.
Brian coping with the recent death of his father feels like a plotline shoehorned in to add “meaning” to it all. But there isn’t much. Trost, whose “The Fp” and “All Superheroes Must Die” enjoy “cult” status (at least in his biography), has aimed for another cult film.
But he’s his own weakest link, competent on screen — but dull.
“How to Save Us” has enough novelty in it that you could see Trost selling the script, or at least a pitch for the script, to a studio. Making his own movie about it wasn’t a bad idea, either. But starring in it was.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, scenes of supernatural terror

Cast: Jason Trost, Coy Landreau, Kate Avery
Credits: Written and directed by Jason Trost. A Parade Deck release.

Running time: 1:18

“Freedom” is nothing if not ambitious. An indie period piece about the Underground Railroad and the English slave ship captain whose change of heart led him to compose “Amazing Grace,” it covers enough ground to fuel a TV miniseries.
And it’s so musical it would have been better-titled “Song of Freedom.”
But while over-reaching is no great sin, “Freedom” doesn’t have the budget, the running time or script to do justice to either of its interwoven tales.
Samuel (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Vanessa (Sharon Leal) lead their family in flight from a Virginia plantation in 1856.
David Rasche is Jefferson Monroe (Hah!), the rabid plantation owner who wants them back, figuring that he “took the idea of Christian charity too far” with his leniency.
William Sadler plays Plimpton, the veteran runaway slave hunter.
“I’m retired.” He is having misgivings about the work.
“Don’t let your conscience get in the way of business!”
So as Samuel and Vanessa are aided, stage by stage, by assorted Abolitionists — Quakers and other church folk — into the north, Plimpton tries to keep his assistants from violence as he reconciles his profession with his morals.
Samuel mistrusts the various white people who help the runaways, and rejects the churches enlisted in their cause. It’s up to the grandmotherly Adira (Phyllis Bash) to tell him, and us, of the slave ship and the Captain Newton (Bernhard Forcher) who was so appalled by what he’d done that he wrote one of the greatest Christian hymns, an appeal for forgiveness titled “Amazing Grace.”
It’s a heavy-handed movie that feels rushed and yet lumbering at the same time. An entire film (“Amazing Grace”) was built around the events that led to the composition of the hymn and the movement (first in Britain) it inspired. The Underground Railroad, given a spare treatment here, is also worth its own film.
Packing both tales into one movie, and pausing for a song here and there, robs the story of its urgency and pathos.
“Freedom” aims high, and attracted some good, underused talent (Broadway regulars Phillip Boykin and Terrence Mann show up). And it feels, start to finish, like a worthy cause. But cause and ambition aside, the movie they got out of this is a letdown.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence

Cast: Cuba Gooding Jr., Sharon Leal, William Sadler, David Rasche, Bernhard Forcher
Credits: Directed by Peter Cousens, script by Timothy A. Chey. An Arc Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:34

Writer-director Paul Feig and his “Bridesmaids” muse, Melissa McCarthy, flip the script and ditch the fat jokes for their latest. And “Spy,” a bloody-minded spy spoof, is all the richer for it.
A profane pistol-packing riff on the Bond formula, it makes McCarthy more empowered than delusional, more under-estimated than her go-to pity party, loneliness.
Yes, as CIA Agent Susan Cooper she (and her stunt doubles) are still graceful pratfallers. And yeah, she’s still a potty mouth, especially in an overlong third act that seems more like “The Heat” than “Live and Let Die.” But they’ve built a character that’s more real and likable, and they’ve found yet another foil for her to swap insults with.
Cooper is a “basement” agent, one of the computer desk jockeys who talks the real secret agents, including her debonair crush, Bradley Fine (Jude Law, a hoot) through every potentially deadly Bulgarian dinner party.
Fine dies at the hands of an arch-villain, played by McCarthy’s fellow Bridesmaid Rose Byrne. So the boss (Allison Janney, corrosive) lets Cooper go into the field to observe the terrorists (Bobby Cannavale among them) trying to sell a briefcase A-bomb.
From Paris to Rome and beyond, Cooper is in over her head, something she’s reminded of every time rogue Agent Ford (Jason Statham) interferes with her surveillance, usually by bragging about all the poisons he’s survived and the shootings, impalings and dismemberments he’s endured.
“Nothing kills me!”
Byrne, slinging and swearing through a Slavic accent, tartly taunts Agent Cooper’s “abortion of a dress” and other shortcomings.
A smart move — building the humor around Cooper’s insulting cover identities — dowdy Midwestern moms and Mary Kaye saleswomen. Another, hurling Statham, straight-faced, bug-eyed and furious, at McCarthy, in a raging back and forth that ignites the movie every time they’re paired up.
Peter Serafinowicz (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) shows up as a hilarious Italian agent, all moon-eyed and groping in the presence of La Bella Cooper.
The fights and deaths are somewhat comical, the one-liners hit or miss and the stunts faked with less sleight of hand than a director experienced in action might have managed.
And Feig can’t bear to end this thing, which goes on far past the point of endurance.
But he’s done better by McCarthy here, and she has delivered a performance that’s more deft than her usual daft. That makes spy a “Johnny English” that works, a Bond movie where the empowered women have it all over the Bonds — and the Bond babes.

MPAA Rating:  R for language throughout, violence, and some sexual content including brief graphic nudity

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Rose Byrne, Jude Law, Allison Janney
Credits: Written and directed by Paul Feig. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:04

Here’s how you create a pacifist.
Show her a world of beauty, promise and expectations.
Give her a brother she loves, gentleman callers who vie for her attention.
And then start a war, the silliest and most tragic war of all. Have her talk her father into letting that beloved brother join his mates in enlisting.
“It’ll be a short war. Let him be a man!”
That’s how the memoirist and novelist Vera Brittain became a pacifist. We see that process play out in the new film of her acclaimed account of civilian life during World War I, “Testament of Youth.”
It’s a quiet, thoughtful and handsomely mounted film, offering another plum role to Alicia Vikander (“Ex Machina”) as Brittain. Vikander and the film take Britain, and Brittain, from idealism and hope to grim reality and regret.
The story is framed within the Armistice Day celebrations of 1918. Everyone is smiling, celebrating. Not Vera. She ducks into a church, spies a painting and thinks back before the war, before all that she and everyone she knows lost.
Vera, a nascent feminist, had plans of becoming a writer, joining her brother at college. After he enlists, she goes through with those plans. But she comes to hold in contempt all those who insist on life as normal, while the flower of youth of Europe were dying by the thousands, pretty much daily, on the fields of Flanders. She fumes at patriotic fervor, and later at calls for post-war revenge on the Germans who started it.
Pre-war, she snapped “I don’t want a husband. I’m not getting married. Not now, not ever,” to family (Dominic West and Emily Watson) and friends. She rebuffs the attentions of one possible beau, but falls for another. And then he enlists, with tragic results.
British TV director James Kent confines his depictions of The Great War to close-ups of muddied faces in muddied trenches, to blood-stained hospitals where Vera joins up as a nurse.
She grapples with the dying and wounded, and sees apparitions of the dead. She witnesses the changes in friends and family when they’re home on leave
The “true” story here has its moments of eye-rolling melodrama. The supporting players, while perhaps familiar to British TV viewers, are a rather colorless lot — white, posh, same hair colors, same upper middle class manners.
But Vikander creates a compelling portrait of a “privileged provincial upstart” who has her eyes opened. She and Kent conjure up a before-and-after picture of Britain that explains all the hardening of attitudes about “patriotic” wars, the weariness that made them avoid a second World War for so long and the rise of people like Vera Brittain, a writer with the clear eyes and writing talent to take it all in and make sense of the senseless slaughter and resolve to never be a party to such a thing again.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material including bloody and disturbing war related images

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Taron Egerton, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Dominic West, Kit Harington
Credits: Directed by James Kent, script by Juliette Towhidi. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 2:09

“San Andreas” didn’t manage better than middling reviews. But it blew up the box office. Great effects, The Rock in the lead, all the usual disaster pic formula ingredients — $53 million+, almost $54. A very nice weekend for a popcorn pic with a good cast and really good effects.

Dwayne Johnson has a fine boost to his new HBO series, and a bigger quote in his disaster movie future.

“Picture Perfect 2” nudged past “Tomorrowland,” which is starting to smell like an actual debacle. It’s made money overseas, but it won’t make $100 in the U.S., against a misguided overblown $180 million budget.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” came in fourth, and has cleared $115 million thus far. Not exactly turning Tom Hardy into a U.S. superstar. But he’s got a Sam Worthington shot, if nothing else.

The critically reviled “Aloha” did just $10 million — pretty poor returns for an  all-star cast Cameron Crowe romantic comedy.

“Far From the Madding Crowd,” a lovely, spunky period piece based on the Thomas Hardy novel, has cracked the top ten. Earnings of $8.4 million suggest it won’t reach $20, all in..