Movie Nation

By this point in the virus’s decades-long mutation, we’ve seen pretty much everything zombies have to throw at us. They won’t die, even as their corpses rot and turn green, and they’re always on the (usually slow) hunt for brains and human flesh.
Which is why “Maggie” is so unexpected. This is a walking dead drama laden with doom, a young woman’s horrific and depressed death spiral in which she knows death is the least of her horrors.
And most surprising of all is the tender, sad companion and caretaker as she dies — her quiet, compassionate and mournful father, played with great sensitivity by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As you let that last sentence sink in, here are the basics. Maggie’s been exposed to what the news calls “the Necro-ambulist” virus. Because we can’t call them “The Walking Dead” here.
Society is functioning, hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, government is packing the infected off to quarantine camps where they wait for “the turn.” It’s not as if they’re being treated or cured. They just wait for the end.
Wade, a Midwestern farmer who has overseen the burning of crops which newscasts suggest were the cause of the infection (An anti-genetically modified organism/food slap?). The only time he picks up a gun is when he has to dispatch the neighbors, including a child, who have “turned” and hidden from the authorities.
And then Maggie (Abigail Breslin) comes home. She knows what’s happening to her, cannot stop picking at the skin that is going bad and whacks her own finger off as a desperate, impulsive effort to stop the disease.
“What good’s a finger if your arm is falling off?”
Breslin is as doom-laden as any zombie heroine of recent vintage, and quite good at it. Schwarzenegger, as Wade, isn’t a man of action here. He mostly reacts — on the edge of tears, much of the time — to the warnings and counsel of his stoic second wife (Joely Richardson), local sheriff and sympathetic doctor.
“Think about what you had to do today, and what you might have to do in the future. What happens when she gets close?”
Titles (opening credits) designer turned director Henry Hobson filmed “Maggie” in the muted browns and greys of fall, a world still functioning, but in mourning for the winter to come. The effects are good, better than what TV serves up weekly.
But the over familiarity and fatigue of this corner of apocalyptic cinema wears on “Maggie.” We know the awful choices she and her dad face as well as they do. Almost 50 years of zombie movies and TV shows, including a recent explosion of films in this genre, have beaten the living dead to death.
Sad and forlorn as “Maggie” is, there are no surprises left in Zombieland.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material including bloody images, and some language

Cast: Abigail Breslin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joely Richardson
Credits: Directed by Henry Hobson, written by John Scott 3. A Roadside/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:35

The problem with any screen romance between someone from the Hassidic community and an outsider is the limited range of outcomes.
Either the Hassidic character, say she’s a woman as in John Turturro’s comedy Fading Gigolo,” turns her back on her community and embraces the “real” or she doubles down on the family, religion and support system and rejects “forbidden” love.
One outcome is politically correct, the other grates in simpler, more moralistic ways.
The French-Canadian romance “Felix and Meira” teeters back and forth between those two payoffs. Co-writer/director Maxime Giroux tips his hand with an early scene in which the unhappily Hassidic Meira (Hadas Yaron) is challenged by her “Have more babies, it’s our duty” pal — challenged and threatened.
“What would you do without us?”
Here’s a movie, set among Montreal’s Hasidim, that comes right out and says it. Meira’s in a cult. She doesn’t get to just leave. She’ll have to escape.
But she’s not thinking about that when the charming Felix (Martin Dubreuil) tries to chat her up in a Jewish bakery. A married woman, she refuses to talk, won’t make eye contact.
But he keeps bumping into her, often as she’s pushing a stroller with her toddler in it. What are his intentions? Then again, what are hers?
Meira gets chewed out every time her traditional husband (Luzer Twersky, stiff and stern) catches her listening to blues or ’60s soul, corrupting the upbringing their daughter. Meira has taken to playing dead at these rebukes. She’s already dead, she hints, living this oppressive, sexist life.
Felix just lost his dad. A non-religious single man, his come-on seems both desperate and sincere.
“Maybe you can tell me something about God or death?”
Giroux makes the possible love affair so mild-mannered that there aren’t a lot of sparks when these cultures clash, just a “You’re strange, WEIRD,” vs. “I’m not strange. YOU are!”
“Felix and Meira” move forward, tentative and fearful, and make the viewer struggle with whether or not to root for them. Meira’s in a trap now, might Felix be the “trapped” one down the road?
How exciting can a hothouse flower like Meira, with her proscribed view of the world, be to  Felix? And for Meira, what is there beyond that magical moment when she puts on her  first pair of jeans?
As they flirt in English, French and Hebrew with English subtitles, “Felix and Meira” eventually go where we sort of figure they’ll end up, even though their low heat movie peters out long before they get there.

MPAA Rating: R for a scene of sexuality/nudity

Cast: Martin Dubreuil, Hadas Yaron, Luzer Twersky
Credits: Directed by Maxime Giroux, script by  Maxime Giroux, Alexandre Laferrière. An Oscilloscope release.

Running time: 1:44

Reputation suggests you could conjure a half-decent B-movie out of Dolph Lundgren and martial arts dynamo Tony “Ong Bak” Jaa. Especially if their supporting cast includes Ron Perlman as a Slavic mobster, Peter Weller as a Jersey-accented cop, Michael Jai White as a Fed and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (“Memoirs of a Geisha,””47 Ronin”) as a corrupt Thai official mixed up in the “Skin Trade.”
The subject and setting (Thailand, Cambodia, New Jersey) mean there are plenty of scenes of scantily-clad (schoolgirl stripper outfits) and unclad sex slaves and pole dancers to interrupt the shootouts, explosions and athletic Jaa-brawls.
But “Skin Trade,” a project Lundgren co-wrote and has been trying to film for years, feels so dated and over-familiar that “half-decent” always seems just out of reach.
Lundgren is Nick, a Jersey cop hot on the trail of a human trafficking ring led by Viktor Dragovic (Perlman) and his four sons. The death of one of those sons makes the fight “personal,” meaning that Nick’s family is doomed, and so is Nick, judging by the bullet hits he takes before his house is consumed in flames.
But Nick peels himself out of intensive care and sets off to track down bad guys.
For Thai Detective Vitayakul (Jaa), the case is a matter of personal and national pride. Southeast Asia’s shame — its sex trade, which parents sell children into — and the detective’s Vietnamese girlfriend/informant (Celina Jade) are in danger.
Nick is being hunted by the Feds (Michael Jai White) who enlist the Thais, as Nick himself hunts the Serbs who wiped out his family.
On finding a container ship full of dead skin trade immigrants, Lundgren’s Nick threatens to “wrap every dead body
from that container around your neck.” And Jaa’s detective spits “Negotiation is over” before one summary execution.
The one-liners are more obvious than pithy, and there’s something more unsettling than ever about cops pumping one last round into a disarmed bad guy. It’s as out of date as insisting that the bad guys are Serbian, “with no ‘code,'” when the Russian embassy is who they run to when arrests come down. Let them be Russians. They’re still recent history’s best villains.
Jaa is getting a little older, and the director is best known for the sensitive Thai fighter-who-wants-a-sex-change bio pic “Beautiful Boxer,” so Jaa’s always-amazing punch-outs are a tad muted.
But “Skin Trade” still benefits from the total commitment of the players. Even if we know it’s a B-movie and roll our eyes at every corny line, every obvious direction the action and story travel in, they never do.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence throughout, disturbing sexual content, nudity, drug use and language |

Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Tony Jaa, Celina Jade, Michael Jai White, Ron Perlman, Peter Weller, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Credits: Directed by Ekachai Uekrongtham, written by
Gabriel Dowrick, Steven Elder and Dolph Lundgren. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:35

She flips off the nuns who took her in and educated her, is fond of profanity and wasn’t above a little premarital sex.
It was the “Swinging Sixties,” after all.
By any measure, Christina Noble was not your average heroine of a faith-based film. By any measure, hers was not a life with your average share of suffering.
“Noble,” the film about her, is a veritable “Angela’s Ashes” of trials. Christina lost her mother to tuberculosis in 1950s Dublin, was betrayed repeatedly by her abusive-drunk father (Liam Cunningham), homeless more than once, raped and impregnated, her child stripped from her by the Catholic nuns who had once enslaved her to labor in their orphanage. And then there was the bad marriage she endured.
But through it all, Christina kept her faith, her prayers from childhood (Gloria Cramer Curtis) through adolescence (Sarah Greene) and into adulthood (Deirdre O’Kane) having a hint of bargaining about them, each a fresh challenge to the Almighty.
“I know you’ve got a much better future in store for me.”
That future, in this film told in the 1989 present, with progressive flashbacks detailing her hard upbringing, may be about her dream. Christina always could sing and uses songs, from childhood all through her life, to earn pennies on the street or persuade adults to support her charity. Because what she really wants to do is make better lives for orphans like herself. As an adult, she resolves to set up a compassionate orphanage and hospital for street children cast-off in Vietnam.
“An Irish gutter is the same as a Vietnamese gutter,” she tells callous officials in a way that lets them know that “No” is not an answer she’ll submit to.
Writer-director Stephen Bradley, best-known for the clumsy zombie comedy “Boy Eats Girl,” is unflinching in presenting this film’s harsh Irish reality. Christina is as tough as someone from her background can be, and as Earthy.
Veteran Irish character actress O’Kane, best known for “Intermission” and the TV series “Moone Boy,” shines as the spirited “Mama Tina,” leaning on Vietnamese bureaucrats, immersing herself in the poverty of Vietnam, browbeating an Irish oil mogul (Brendan Coyle of TV’s “Downton Abbey”) for support. But all of the Christinas cast here are inspiring.
Bradley only occasionally ladles it on too thick, and doesn’t make clear how Christina went from seeing the horrors of the Vietnam War on TV in the ’60s to believing setting up orphanages there was her calling twenty years later.
But if American faith-based audiences can plow through the Irish accents and distinctly European sensibility — coarse language and rough situations — “Mama Tina” might be just as nobly inspiring to them as she plainly was to Bradley and the producers of “Noble.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material, including some violent and sexual situations

Cast: Deirdre O’Kane, Sandra Greene, Brendan Coyle, Liam Cunningham
Credits: Written and directed by Stephen Bradley. A release.

Running time: 1:40

The world long ago figured out who this Arnold Schwarzenegger fellow is supposed to be on the big screen. And the actor has always been comfortable with this image.
“The most heroic guy in the biggest action movie of the day,” is how he puts it. “In the old days, I’d look for scripts, see how heroic the guy was, how many bad guys he kills, and how he kills them.”
He chuckles.
“That’s my baggage.”
That’s why his turn in the new zombie drama “Maggie” (May 8) is leaving film fans and critics slack-jawed. As Wade, a Midwestern farmer who watches his daughter become infected and go into decline during another screen version of the zombie virus apocalypse, Schwarzenegger is earning his best reviews in decades.
In a film that “may have the smallest budget of any film I’ve ever made,” in a role David D’Arcy in Screen Daily said “isn’t so much a father as a monument,” Schwarzenegger “plays Wade with a deeply earnest passion.”
The Austrian-born body builder turned action star and two-term governor of California turns 68 the day before “Terminator: Genisys” opens at the end of July. He has possible big budget sequels to “Twins” and “Conan the Barbarian” prepping. What else does he have to prove? Maybe that he can handle something more subtle.
“I don’t get offered dramatic roles, even in zombie movies,” he says from the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, where “Maggie” premiered. “It’s something I was more comfortable with today than maybe I would have been twenty, thirty years ago.”
Maybe that’s just spin from an actor at the tail end of his action hero career, though digital effects may give him “Terminator” turns for years to come. Maybe that’s just the born salesman in him talking. The guy didn’t get elected governor of the nation’s largest state on his accent.
Or maybe what his biographer, Ian Halperin, wrote in “The Governator” is true, that he’s “evolved considerably from the arrogant, insensitive bully he once was.” Hard-nosed politics, a trial and conviction by tabloids and the modest box office of his recent action pictures may have humbled him, just a bit. Perhaps he should start to think smaller if he wants to continue working.
“I look at scripts a different way today,” Schwarzenegger admits. “It will give me the chance to get more scripts like this. If people think I can do this, and that I will consider it, then more people will take a shot.”
But indie filmmakers take note. It would help if you have someone like former “Little Miss Sunshine” Abigail Breslin lined up to share the screen with him to get Schwarzenegger to sign on the dotted line.
In “Maggie,” Schwarzenegger pondered what it might be like to lose a child to a wasting illness, and “just acted out what I felt. But it was easy, thanks to Abigail Breslin…She never made me feel like she was acting. This was MY daughter and she was REALLY sick and scared. She made it easy for me to be this father, because she made me upset. Her seeming so totally confused and frightened, looking to me for some comfort, made my performance.”
Schwarzenegger is braced for the coming months of selling audiences on another “Terminator,” hopeful that the planned Hollywood movies on his calendar come to fruition. And if not, there’s always indie cinema.
“I’m not that analytical, but I do know that movies are not a science. Will people be surprised by ‘Maggie’? Will they see it? I don’t know.”
But don’t be surprised if a fellow who has reinvented himself more times than Madonna finds a new niche, even in the twilight of a very long and lucrative his screen career.

There’s an alien feel to “Slow West,” an unconventionally convention Western about a romantic tenderfoot provided safe passage to the frontier by a grizzled, unsentimental gunman.
Credit the New Zealand locations — fresh and convincingly Western with nary a hobbit to be found. Credit the German-Irish Michael Fassbender, who heads a cast that gives this immigrant era a distinctly international feel.
But credit most of all first-time feature director John Maclean, an old friend of Fassbender’s who brings brings a fresh eye to Western situations, shootouts and archetypes.
Young Jay Cavendish, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, matured from his boyhood work in “The Road” and “Let Me In,” is the hero of his own great romantic adventure. To the manner born, he dared to love fair Rose (Caren Pistorius) back in Ireland. But a misunderstanding that was “all my fault” forced her and her father to flee to America. And Jay has resolved to find her.
It’s 1870, and he’s content to think poetic thoughts and stare at the stars, a born victim on horseback. When he points his gun at the apparent desperado Silas (Fassbender, of the X-Men prequels), it misfires. Silas grabs it from him, and being a man of few words, gives his first advice.
“Clean it. Oil it.”
Silas sizes the kid up and senses a payday.
“You need a chaperon. I’m a chaperon.”
That’s a mighty fancy French word for a gunslinger in the Old West, and just the first clue that Maclean is seeking fresh ground here. They fend off ex-soldiers turned “Injun Slayers,” interrupt a desperate Slavic-sounding couple’s attempt to rob a trading post and hear the French patois of a random trio of Haitian singers they pass. Jay falls in with a German writer-philosopher fancy-camping his way across the frontier, and is stalked by a coed/multi-ethnic gang of bounty hunters led by the crude, absinthe-loving Payne (Ben Mendelsohn).
Bullets fly, bodies fall.  Jay is slow to learn, but unshaken in his quest. Silas has a secret. And Rose and her father (Rory McCann) carry on at their far western homestead, blithely unaware of the fate that is coming to them on the backs of many horses.
Fassbender makes a very cool, almost anachronistic highwayman. “Dry your eyes, kid, let’s drift,” Silas says when it’s time to ride off, leaving bodies or parent-less children behind.
Building your movie on archetypes and a time-worn initiation/quest plot means that there are  no real surprises to “Slow West.” But Maclean and his cast create a sound, tone and feel that makes even a moldy tale like this lean, mean and fresh, even if it never quite transcends the gun smoke of its genre.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and brief language

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Caren Pistorius, Ben Mendelsohn
Credits: Written and directed by John Maclean. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:23

“Avengers: Age of Ultron” did spectacular business late Thursday and all day Friday. It’s now projected to open just below the first “Avengers”, the second best opening weekend of all time at the U.S. box office.

Deadline.com suggests that Saturday night’s Big Fight will suck away enough business to keep it #2, all time. But over $200 million is expected and well within reach. If the fight doesn’t tear the fanboys out of line, it could be close. $200-205 million.

“Furious 7”, the first summer film — it opened a month ago — is over $331 million, or will be by midnight Sunday. So “Ultron” will need three big weekends to catch it. Reviews weren’t as breathless as they were for the first “Avengers,” but that won’t hurt. Much.

“Age of Adaline” is turning out to be a master stroke of counter programming, and a big breakout film for Blake Lively. It’s in third.

“Ex Machina” is hanging in the top ten. But then, so is “Get Hard.”

See Helen Hunt surf. Check out how well-preserved Helen Hunt looks in a wetsuit. Remember how good Helen Hunt handles biting, witty banter.
See Helen–or her character — try a little pot and get giggly.
Yes, “Ride” is the very definition of a “vanity project.” Hunt wrote and directed this pleasant-enough star vehicle, and it shows a refreshing self-awareness in the character she created for herself and the arc she created for her.
Jackie Durning is a brittle, smothering Type A New Yorker. Hard to see Hunt in helicopter mom mode? You haven’t been paying attention.
Jackie is in publishing. Her college-ready son (Brenton Thwaites) wants to be a writer, but all her feedback on his work is criticism.
They have a sophisticated, tetchy relationship. He calls her by her first name, she treats  him more like a spouse or boyfriend — constantly calling, supervising his admission to college.
A funny moment — he walks her from his college dorm to her front door, 85 steps and he’s “going AWAY to college?”
Then Angelo, the son, goes to L.A. to summer with his dad. His surfing hobby takes over, he withdraws from school and Jackie is on a plane, ready to risk career, savings and her dignity to stalk, nag and otherwise intervene on this would-be writer’s headstrong decision.
Hunt can’t avoid the L.A. vs. New York debate cliches. “You lose the ability to reason,” she gripes. “It’s…so…BRIGHT.”
But Angelo sees a different path, and all her banter can’t talk him out of it. She secretly takes surfing lessons in an effort to re-connect.
If Hunt casting herself as this highly-strung New Yorker is on-the-nose, making Luke Wilson the faintly dismissive laid-back surfer/surf instructor is even more so.
But Hunt and Wilson click, and the pratfalls in the surf, Jackie’s clumsy arrogance with her chauffeur (David Zayas) and her dabbling with the other part of surfer culture — she becomes “a woman who partakes” (pot) — is worth a giggle.
Thwaites does well by the interesting arc he has to play — discovering the allure of surfer life, and the trap it can become.
This isn’t that ambitious a role for the high-minded Oscar winner to tackle, but Jackie — whose actions have motivations — makes a journey that the testy-by-reputation and under-employed Hunt seems to relish. She travels from off-putting to vulnerable, lovable and charming, and all in just 93 minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some drug use

Cast: Helen Hunt, Brenton Thwaites, Luke Wilson, David Zayas
Credits: Written and directed by Helen Hunt. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:33