Movie Nation

When last we left Vincent Chase, he and his “Entourage” were moving on. Ari the angry agent was leaving the biz, Eric the manager was moving from LA to NYC, and Vince? He was jetting off the Paris. Of all the cast members of this series about the childhood pals a rising star, the “star” was the one we least worried about.
“He’s going to be fine,” joked Hollywood Reporter TV critic Tim Goodman back then, in 2011. Chase had learned that “being being good-looking, talented and lucky opened doors, which in turn made people fawn over your stardom, which in turn created power.”
But what about the actor who played him? Adrian Grenier had the unique perspective of being a good-looking 20something up-and-coming actor when he landed this plum role about a good-looking, up-and-coming 20something actor. What did “Entourage,” now a major motion picture (in theaters June 5) teach Grenier?
“The thing I learned, the thing we got right and the thing everybody who wants to make it in Hollywood should learn from the show and the movie is ‘You stick with your friends. They know you. They’re who you can trust.'”
The rest of Hollywood, with its wannabes, hangers-on, power trippers and other predators? Not so much.
“It’s nice to have people you know aren’t going to betray you around you.”
Grenier, who turns 39 in July, parlayed his HBO fame into just one major motion picture — 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada.”
But “‘Entourage’ gave me the leverage to do the things I’m passionate about off-camera,” Grenier says. He’s become a documentary filmmaker (“Teenage Paparazzo”), record company boss (Wreckroom Records) and co-founder of a sustainable living enterprise — SHFT.com, pushing “green” phone aps and the like. “Entourage” offered the role of a lifetime, Grenier knows it.
“It was an honor to create a show that resonated with viewers and with people in Hollywood,” he says. “The characters, the whole bromance of it all, defined the zeitgeist, I think, of the new millennium.”
He wasn’t shy about signing up for the movie, which picks up the quartet of cronies four years after we last saw them. Grenier didn’t lobby for big changes in Vince or his lifestyle. “Doug (Ellin, series creator and director of the film) was just…accurate — about Hollywood, about guys like Vince, worried about their ‘brand,’ about the people who want something from you. Vince sells out, and I have never been that guy. I just got to play that guy.”
The series was even accurate about a project Vince was shoved into — an “Aquaman” movie. Hollywood is actually doing that, after getting the idea from “Entourage.”
“Sometimes I wonder if Doug isn’t some sort of Hollywood prophet,” Grenier jokes.
He keeps the door open for possible sequels — “It all depends on the box office.” But Grenier does fret over the show’s impact on the culture, at large. How many more pretty faces will make the trek to Hollywood, dragging their friends along for support and comfort?
“I cannot tell you how many people have come up to me, over the years, and said they decided to become an agent, based on ‘Entourage,'” Grenier says, laughing. “Creating more Ari Golds? Got to be a bad thing, right?”

Posy Simmonds couldn’t have had actress Gemma Arterton in mind when she wrote “Gemma Bovery,” her darkly comic 1999 spoof of Gustav Flaubert’s classic tragic 19th century novel “Madame Bovary,” about a bored provincial housewife whose affair has tragic consequences. But the overripe Arterton (“Prince of Persia”) has long seemed like someone dreamed up by a graphic novelist.
And since Arterton’s winning turn as Simmonds’ “Tamara Drewe,” a modern take on the 19th century English novel “Far From the Madding Crowd,” she was fated to become “Gemma Bovery,” the object of desire, manipulation and conjecture in the small town in Normandy where she and her new husband (Jason Flemyng) move.
It is “a place where the art of living is taken seriously,” our narrator, Martin (Fabrice Luchini, of the imports “The Girl from Monaco” and “Potiche”) tells us. A droll one-time editor of academic books, he and his wife have taken over his father’s bakery. And knowing that Flaubert was from Normandy, he is frankly delighted at having a bored beauty whose name sounds like Emma Bovary move in next door. He abandons his “10 years of sexual tranquility” to fantasize over Gemma, a woman “waiting for something to happen.”
Martin, narrating in French (with English subtitles) feels “like a director” when Gemma, sure enough, is tempted by the rakish law student Herve (Niels Schneider). Martin is content to lust from afar, but he knows how “Madame Bovary” ends. He frets over her indiscretions and flips out when he sees she’s bought arsenic to contend with the mice who invade her tumbledown farm home.
Director Anne Fontaine (“The Girl from Monaco”) plays up the sensual pleasures of teaching a beautiful woman how to knead dough, and the adorably deadpan Luchini makes a wonderfully guilty near-omniscient narrator. A French baker must cope with foreigners with gluten allergies and assorted other bread phobias without rolling his eyes. Martin tries to manipulate events to change the outcome and stumbles into the occasional awkward encounter with the luscious Gemma — who knows her effect on men in general and Martin in particular. She finds the “Bovary” novel “wacky,” and needs the occasional rescue — a bee sting that must be sucked out, etc.
“Gemma Bovery” manages a few surprises, even if you know the Flaubert novel Simmonds was sending up. The Norman countryside, Luchini’s slack-jawed incredulity at the coincidence of having a sophisticated and sexy Gemma move to the land of Emma and Arterton’s guileless abandon in the role she was born/ — or at least named to play — desired by and desirous of men who will be her ruin — make “Bovery” a fun riff on “Bovary,” even if no one ever confuses it for the earlier classic.

MPAA Rating: Rated R for sexuality/nudity and language

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Fabrice Luchini, Jason Flemyng, Niels Schneider
Credits: Directed by Anne Fontaine, script Pascal Bonitzer and Anne Fontaine, based on a novel by Posy Simmonds . A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:46

For more than a decade, nothing has screamed “B-movie” louder than seeing Milla Jovovich’s name in a movie’s credits.
But even in the worst of those “Resident Evil” action pictures, the model-thin Jovovich delivered fair value, packing a lot of punch for one so slight of build and a lot of intensity into roles that sometimes seemed thankless.
“Survivor” is what happens when you give her a “name” director — James McTeigue of “V for Vendetta” — and surround her with A-listers, or former A-listers.
Jovovich plays Kate, the security chief for the U.S. embassy in London, a woman on the lookout for terrorists trying to passport their way into the U.S. Robert Forster’s her boss, a little too quick to allow the occasional iffy scientist (Roger Rees) through passport control.
And Angela Bassett’s the ambassador, the one who loses her temper if the wrong British feathers are ruffled in the name of “security.”
Kate gets too close to something big, people die, and even though her immediate supervisor (Dylan McDermott) has her back, the Brits and the CIA are after her.
“What am I now? A suspect? A target?”
Both, thanks to the assassin hired by terrorists to “make sure she doesn’t survive.” He is code named The Watchmaker, a talented bomber, sniper and all around killer, and he is played with ice and verve by Pierce Brosnan.
Thrillers like this have gone lazy in recent years, always giving the heroes and heroines “particular skills.” It’s always a more thrilling hunt if the quarry isn’t some Liam Neeson/Bruce Willis/Jason Statham superman. Jovovich’s Kate has some spycraft, but she isn’t wiping out legions of bad guys with “I’m coming to GET you” on her lips. Every time she tangles with The Watchmaker, she’s lucky to get out alive.
So “Survivor,” predictable, short and shallow ticking clock thriller that it is, is more “Three Days of the Condor” than “Taken.” And thanks to its stars, it’s more engrossing and fun than it has any right to be.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, some action and brief strong language

Cast: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Roger Rees, Frances de la Tour
Credits: Directed by James McTeigue, script by Philip Shelby. An Alchyemy release.

Running time: 1:36

The novelty of having a real homeless junkie play a version of herself drives “Heaven Knows What,” a gritty hand-held character portrait of heroin addict life in New York today.
The unblinking character study, shot in muted shades of grey, stars recovering addict Arrielle Holmes and is based on her memoir. Thanks to its subject and the contributions of electronic music artist Tomita to the film’s score, it plays like an awful flashback to an earlier age.
But kids these days, it’s not just vinyl that they’ve brought back. Heroin is in. Again. And here’s an indie-film era look at what their lives are like.
Harley (Holmes) has two great loves. One is Ilya (the actor Caleb Landry Jones). The other is heroin. Neither treats her with a hint of humanity.
Ilya is a cruel, selfish and childish junkie, laughing as he orders her to buy razor blades and open her veins.
“If you love me, you would’ve killed yourself by now.”
Harley writes him a love letter, gets the razor blades and tries to earn his attention long enough to prove herself to him.
“I’m about to die right now, and I really want you to BE there.”
She survives, endures the hospital and a little rehab. But on getting out, Ilya wants nothing to do with her. She clings to their skinny braggart-bully of a dealer, Mike (Buddy Duress). They drift from fast food joints where they shoot up in the restrooms, to snowy Central Park, to subway stations and street corners, begging for change or subway passes, stealing and living only for their next fix.
Sibling filmmakers Ben and Joshua Safdie, working from a script based on Holmes’ “Mad Love in New York City,” capture a colorful street life of sleepy-eyed stoners, drunks and junkies, prattling on about fights they’ve had, cops they’ve dodged and TV’s “Cosmos.”
Random? That’s the very definition of the lifestyle. Harley, heroin thin, blond and about 20, doesn’t plan for the future, be it a year from now or an hour from now.
“I need TWO to get straight,” she begs Mike. Any money she picks up is spent in an instant. Cheap booze, Dr. Pepper and DayQuil keep her and her whole crowd going between fixes. Food never seems to enter into it.
And truth be told, that’s about it. The filmmakers have contented themselves with the barest bones of a story, relying on local color and the nuts and bolts of being homeless and addicted in New York to carry the film.
But it doesn’t. The far superior “Animals” (released last month) captured a love story with an arc, a hazy fantasy life and the slim hope of living through the experience of heroin addiction — with real actors, and without the novelty of street people filling many of the roles.
See “Animals” and “Heaven Knows What”plays like more of a gritty snapshot than a movie.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use throughout, pervasive language, disturbing and violent images, sexuality, and graphic nudity

Cast: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Buddy Duress
Credits: Directed by Ben Safdie, Joshua Safdie, script by Ronald Bronstein and Joshua Safdie, based on a book by Arielle Holmes. A Radius/TWC release

release.

Running time: 1:34

“Results” is a random, generally pointless romantic comedy set in the world of personal trainers.
We have Trevor (Guy Pearce), the Aussie building his dream “Power 4 Life” gym in Austin, Texas, exercising compulsively, with only his big galoot of a dog for company.
Kat (Cobie Smulders) is one of his best trainers, but intense — wrapped-too-tight, just as compulsive about running, lifting, etc. Only she’s inclined to tear into clients who “quit” on her. Maybe she and Trevor could have a “thing,” if only she didn’t have that temper. Got to love her training regimen, though.
“Imagine there’s a wall right behind you, and you’re trying to knock it down with your butt!”
Into this world comes pasty, balding and doughy Danny (Kevin Corrigan). His wife just dumped him, and he’s suddenly come into money. So. Train him.
“I want to be able to take a punch.”
Something about Kat — her temper, the fact she’s played with the willowy knockout Ms. Smulders –– gets to Danny. But there’ll be no rich guy courting his trainer here, thank you. Money or no money, Kat won’t have it. And Trevor seems to take that attempt a tad too personally, as well.
Actor turned writer-director Andrew Bujalski has some promising angles he could have pursued. Trevor’s idol is a Russian kettle bell trainer living and running gyms and selling his own line of equipment. The joke is that he’s played by Anthony Michael Hall and Grigory runs his empire from… West Texas. Brooklyn Decker plays his adoring wife.
Giovanni Ribisi is a lawyer rich-Danny meets and hires in a dumpy bar. Ribisi usually makes such sleaze funnier.
A sharper comedy would have played around with the addictive nature of exercise, the roid rage that Kat seems to suffer from with no other evidence that she takes steroids. There’s little contrast between the unhappy six-packers with the equally miserable “pudgy and mellow” Danny.
So as nice as it is to see Smulders get offered something other than a S.H.I.E.L.D. jumpsuit in the “Avengers” movies after “How I Met Your Mother,” as interesting as Pearce and Corrigan usually are, “Results” is a comedy that never offers more than unsatisfactory ones — results, I mean.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and drug use

Cast: Cobie Smulders, Guy Pearce, Kevin Corrigan
Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

“Barely Lethal” is a fairly amusing rough draft for a high concept high school romantic comedy.

It’s “Agent Cody Banks” meets “Sixteen Candles” — with quotably snark one-liners, hormonal kids being hormonal, and a socially inept teen the mean girls don’t want to cross. Because she knows 66 ways to kill you.
Hailee Steinfeld of “Pitch Perfect 2” is #83, who has been trained as an assassin, pretty much since birth. But she longs to see “this whole other world I’m missing” and go to high school. Or at least the version of high school she’s seen on “90210,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “Mean Girls” and the films of John Hughes.
That’s why she fakes her death so her boss (Samuel L. Jackson, of course) won’t come looking for her. That’s why she passes herself off as an exchange student “from…Canada” at Newton High.
But those movies and dated TV shows are no guide for blending in — today. Let’s start with the fashions.
“You look like you had a one-night-stand with Mr. Potatohead!”
Then, there’s the labeling that those comedies tend toward. Calling the helpful Roger (Thomas Mann) “an A.V. Geek” is no way to make friends.
Megan, as #83 now calls herself, may be able to break into the school to change seating assignments and defend herself from a “kidnap the school mascot” (her) prank. She may have studied up via movies. But that doesn’t keep her from falling for the pretty and shallow boy with a band, known as “The Wrong Guy” in “Pretty in Pink” and its ilk.
Director Kyle Newman is entirely too tentative with a potentially terrific script by John D’Arco.
The best lines go to Dove Cameron, as the edgy, eye-rolling “sister” in Megan’s host family. Her put downs, long or short, are lethal.
“Jesus, Ringwald!”
Jackson has fun taunting the little orphan girl trainees as he teaches them martial arts and bomb defusal. And Jessica Alba, as a “rogue agent,” gets a nice fight scene.
Steinfeld (“True Grit”) is more at home here than among the Bellas of “Pitch Perfect.” But the film feels like a series of pulled punches, slow-footed and sluggish.
With the teen world crying out for this generation’s “Breakfast Club,” with teens swearing, drinking and narrowly dodging bad decisions, “Barely Lethal” suggests that movie is coming. It just needs more polish than this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 on appeal for sexual material, teen drinking, language, drug references and some action violence

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Samuel L. Jackson, Thomas Mann, Jessica Alba, Dove Cameron, Sophie Turner
Credits: Directed by Kyle Newman, script by John D’Arco. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:38