Movie Nation

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

The enthusiasm for the “Avengers” franchise has waned a bit. At least among critics, perhaps even among cast and crew. Not that they so much show it, but you can sort of feel a “do my bit, do it well, collect a check” ethos in the performances.

The reviews aren’t bad (mine, 2.5 stars, is here). But the glee that arrived with Josh Wheedon’s first installment of the series has evaporated. The novelty has worn off.

Not that audiences will be discouraged. This thing will make a mint, and has already exploded in other countries where it opened first. If that crap “Furious 7” can clear $1 billion worldwide, “Avengers” is sure to make bank.

“Welcome to Me” is earning decent, but not uniformly positive reviews, a Kristen Wiig comedy that seems overly indulgent, cutesie and just…off. A mentally ill woman wins the LOTTO, gets a TV show and becomes a viral sensation? You kind of feel you’ve seen it, even if you haven’t.

The romantic period piece “Far from the Madding Crowd” was far more to my liking, and earns the best reviews of all the films opening reasonably wide this weekend. CArey Mulligan, Mathias Schoenarts, Michael Sheen, a Thomas Hardy novel. Lovely 19th century period recreations.

The documentary “Iris” is about a fashion icon few outside of New York have ever heard of, a little old rich lady who dresses gaudily and collects (hoards) couture accessories. And has for decades. Cute, one of the last films of Albert Maysles.

I rather liked “Soul Boys of the Western World,” too. Spandau Ballet? Who knew?

Spandau Ballet launched the “New Romantics” movement in
pop’s New Wave, the music that blended punk and disco and
fashion and paved the way for the “hair metal” and hip hop that
followed as reactions to it.
But Duran Duran, Culture Club and Rick Astley followed and stole
their thunder and outlasted the Islington quintet.
So “Soul Boys of the Western World,” the documentary about
their rise and fall, serves as a corrective, as well as a time machine
trip without the hot tub back to the era of jackboots and jodhpurs,
berets and ballads, an era in pop much derided for its MTV
friendly fashions, its “soaring synthesizers,” synth drums and
synthetic fabrics.
George Hencken’s documentary, produced by band manager
Steve Dagger, uses home movies, vintage TV news clips, early
performance video and decades of taped interviews to tell the
story of the band, best-known for that worldwide smash, “True.”
A clever strategy — Hencken has them remember their story in
voice over. We aren’t jarred into seeing how they look now until
the very end. Not a bad idea for a band of ear-ringed, exotically-
attired matinee idols.
The guitar-and-bass Kemp brothers, crooner Tony Hadley,
drummer John Keeble and guitarist/synthesizer/sax player Steve
Norman were just another band inspired to form by the Sex
Pistols, working London clubs. They were The Cut, The Makers
and Gentry, and not really standing out.
Then, just like The Who a generation before them, they picked up
on the fashions of their fans and reinvented themselves. They
ditched their songbook and started over. They took a name
someone had seen on the walls of a Berlin restroom — Spandau
Ballet, with its “Cabaret” echoes.
With the electronic elements in their music, they “sounded like
the future,” and as Martin notes in the narration, their
“wedge haircut, peg-pants” fans gave them a leg up.
“We could be the band for this scene.”
Androgyny, Atom Ant and all that would follow. Spandau Ballet
was “a creative manifesto for the ’80s,” an escape into excess in
Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
Starting out in punk, with its “built-in obsolescence,” they never
thought it would last. And with Gary Kemp as songwriter and
band bully, it didn’t. The Kemps got offered career-making roles in
the true crime movie “The Krays,” playing notorious twin British
gangsters. And since that happened just as music was changing, it all came apart.
Hencken’s film hits the highs and papers over most of the lows.
Lots of boozy sing-alongs, suntanning in Saint Tropez or Freeport,
earning their 15 minutes at Live Aid. One funny moment of
despair, losing on a pop music quiz show to their rivals, Duran
Duran.
“Soul Boys” lets the band of “True” get its due, and the last laugh
— at least until Duran Duran earns a similar screen treatment.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, profanity, discussions of drug
use

Cast: Tony Hadley, Gary Kemp, Martin Kemp, John Keeble, Steve
Norman, Steve Dagger

Credits: Directed by George Hencken. An IFC/Sundance Selects
release.

Running time: 1:52

Charlotte Gainsbourg has always had a flinch in her acting, a twitch that suggests she’s bracing for that next blow — physical or psychological.
It made her the perfect Jane Eyre, perfect as Sean Penn’s I-know-he’ll-leave-me wife in “21 Grams,” and well-suited to Sylvie, the morose, can’t-get-a-break lover in “3 Hearts.”
This is a French love triangle melodrama with a few twists, and one moment of jaw-dropping emotional power, courtesy of Gainsbourg, playing another character who takes a metaphoric kick to the gut.
It doesn’t start that way. A gasping, middle-aged Frenchman misses the last train back to Paris. He stumbles around town looking for a hotel, and shares a smoke break with a woman outside a bar. He senses something about her, a wounded humanity. In an instant, they’re sharing intimate questions and revelations. He likes to meet women at funerals, he confesses.
“I’m entering her private life, right away.”
That’s what he’s done here, without the funeral. They walk and talk all night, he asks her to meet him at the fountains in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris on Friday. We haven’t caught their names, because they haven’t offered them. He lost his cell, so there’s no exchange of phone numbers.
And we all recall how such meetings worked out, pre-cell phones. We’ve all seen “An Affair to Remember.” He has a bad day at work, his weak heart gives him fainting spells, and since she’s been stood up, she goes home, goes back to the lover she doesn’t love and plans her move to Minneapolis with Mr. Wrong. Fate is hard on love affairs.
Sylvie is her name, and she’s never been separated from her sister, Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni), who co-inherited the antiques business their mother (Catherine Deneuve) started.
So when Sophie panics over the accounting that Sylvie used to do and needs a tax professional, she meets Marc (Benoît Poelvoorde of “Coco Before Chanel”). Marc is the man her sister was ready to drop everything and run away with. Forever.
Naturally Marc and Sophie fall in love. How long before he discovers just whose sister he married, and how long before Sylvie figures out the same?
The melodrama is fairly thick at times, but co-writer/director Benoît Jacquot teases the situations out nicely, a Skype revelation narrowly averted, the clues Marc starts to piece together that suggest the relationship between his one-night-walk and his new wife. An intrusive, omniscient narrator clumsily shows up, but just a couple of times.
One great bit of business is vintage Gainsbourg. Sylvie puts her fingers on her lips to force the corners into a smile, a trick she shared with her sister.
Gainsbourg plays this one the verge of tears, and Mastroianni — the real-life daughter of Deneuve and Italian film icon Marcello Mastroianni — is actually in tears until that fateful day she met the soulful Marc. He is her happiness, and he might have been Sylvie’s.
But we have to take these women’s word for this attraction, because there’s little to this balding, anxiety-attack prone smoker and tax official to suggest that. Deneuve has the slimmest of supporting parts, and Mastroianni the lesser of the leads.
But Gainsbourg masterfully lets us see Sylvie’s pain, read between Sylvie’s lines to understand the life she wanted, the hopes she held and the dreams that ill-fated brief re-encounter shattered.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, brief nudity, thematic material, and smoking throughout

Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve
Credits: Directed by Benoît Jacquot, script by Julien Boivent, Benoît Jacquot. A Cohen Media release.

Running time: 1:48

Glowing reviews are nothing new to English rose Carey Mulligan. The star of “An Education,” damsel in distress of “Drive” and Daisy Buchanan of the recent “Great Gatsby” is used to the sort of notices she’s earning for her turn as Bathsheba Everdene in the film of Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd.” Her Bathsheba is “intense, compelling and modern” David Sexton raved in This is London, with Variety’s Scott Foundas finding “an appealing wistfulness” in Mulligan’s interpretation of the 19th century heroine.
But Mulligan as “the face of 21st century British feminism,” as proclaimed by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, thanks to her turns as Bathsheba and as one of the title characters in the upcoming “Suffragette”? That’s a new one.
“Would Bathsheba have been a suffragette?” Mulligan wonders, connecting her 1870s plucky, reluctant-to-marry farm woman with the women who fought for the vote in early 20th century Britain and America. “That conversation was really getting started in Bathsheba’s day. Perhaps not in rural life, but in London, women were talking about getting the vote.
“But it’s just incredible good luck getting two roles like this, back to back. That other stuff? ‘Face of feminism?’ No idea. I am genuinely excited at having the chance to be a part of films that put more women on screen in more complex characters than we’re typically offered.”
Mulligan turns 30 at the end of May, but already has a fairly illustrious career under her belt. Fair skinned and daintily feminine, with a voice that suggests there’s metal beneath that soft exterior, she’s been most at home in period pieces — Dickens (“Bleak House”) and Jane Austen adaptations for TV (“Pride & Prejudice”, “Northanger Abbey”), Chekhov (“The Seagull”) on stage, Fitzgerald (“Gatsby”) and others (“An Education”, “Inside Llewyn Davis”) on screen.
Thomas Hardy, best known for the romantic/tragic 19th century novels “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “Far From the Madding Crowd,” seems right up her alley.
“For a heroine written by a male writer 150 years ago she’s an incredibly well-drawn female character,” Mulligan says. “Modern, foreward thinking. But I don’t think Bathsheba’s aware of it. She’s not precocious about it. She’s just the way she is, sees the world through these no nonsense, matter-of-fact eyes. That’s her greatest quality and her biggest downfall, how open she is to the world. She hasn’t decided how she feels about anything, and she’s not inclined to let others make her mind up for her.”
Mulligan was drawn to a post-Austen heroine who “turns down an offer of marriage, right in the first scenes,” she says. “She’s not going out into the world LOOKING for marriage at the age of 18. Very UN-Austen, in that way.”
Hardy’s character’s name — “Bathsheba” — chosen from a Biblical temptress, is also unlike anyone you’d encounter in Austenland.
“She’s not the same as other girls of her era, but she’s not some Biblical seductress type. Even in the book, she’s not like that.
But she is, more than anything, vain, and she’s aware of her effect on people.”
In the book and the film, men are so smitten as to propose marriage, almost from the moment they meet Bathsheba.
And there’s one last characteristic to Bathsheba that Mulligan found “un-Austen” — those early scenes that show the wispy Mulligan out in the fields, helping an aunt grub up potatoes. She laughs at being teased about this incongruous image.
“The best piece of advice I was ever given was to ‘trust your casting.’ If they’ve cast you, you’re right for the part. If they’re not, all you can do is try your best. It’s not my responsibility to decide whether or not I’m suited to a part. It’s theirs. Their decision.
“If I’m seen as this dainty little thing, they’re just basing that on some earlier character I’ve played. I guess my job, on meeting the filmmakers, is to prove that I do something. I haven’t got a certificate from anywhere saying that I can ride a horse or use a hoe or do anything that a particular character knows how to do. But I always feel a particular duty to prove myself by not repeating myself. And I certainly didn’t do that here.”

Thomas Hardy’s romantic Victorian novel of class, labor and the fickle finger of love, “Far From the Madding Crowd,” earns a stately yet earthy and full-blooded film treatment from the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg.
The film makes a fine showcase for Carey Mulligan (“The Great Gatsby”), Mathias Schoenaerts (“Rust & Bone”), Michael Sheen and Juno Temple. And if it isn’t as decorous and deft as the Jane Austen romances of an earlier literary (and cinematic) age, the longing is still there in a story that feels more lived-in, brutish and realistic.
Mulligan is Bathsheba Everdene, who, as an orphan, grew up well-cared for but penniless. Digging potatoes on her aunt’s farm, her delicate features capture the attention of neighboring Farmer Oak (Schoenaerts), a shepard of some skill. He blurts out an abrupt proposal. The posh-accented Bathsheba isn’t having it. She doesn’t see herself as “being some man’s property.” And she’s not that much of a catch, she reminds the brawny Oak — “I have an education, and nothing more.”
As Oak’s life goes into a manly tailspin, Bathsheba’s takes a turn for the better with an inheritance. Mulligan gives her some flint when Bathsheba takes over a rundown farm and proceeds to clean house of the lazy, corrupt staff.
“I am a woman,” she announces. “It is my intention to astonish you all.”
That includes her fellow farm folk, the men’s club who sell their goods on a local commodities exchange, which Bathsheba integrates. The smitten, chilly, painfully shy Boldwood (Michael Sheen) seems cut straight out of Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” or “Sense and Sensibility.” But Bathsheba isn’t swept away by this brusk, rich and handsome neighbor.
A side story concerns young Fanny (Juno Temple), who falls on hard times when a mixup of churches keeps her from marrying Sgt. Troy (Tom Sturridge). The arrogant dandy Troy turns bitter and that, in turn, turns Bathsheba’s head. Will she give her heart to the bad boy, with all these nobler men pursuing her?
Vinterberg, who directed the Danish Oscar contender, “The Hunt”, does well by the tragic (Oak’s ruin comes from the loss of a flock of sheep) and the drawn-out romantic longing. Neither Oak nor Boldwood are men who bend. As sturdy and steadfast as their suggestive names, they nobly pine for Bathsheba, named for King David’s adulterous conquest in the Bible.
Get past this overt symbolism and this oft-filmed story (most recently, in the tarted-up and modernized “Tamara Drewe”) delivers rewards in classic period piece fashion. It’s a love quadrangle with pretty period costumes and muddy period farm labor.
Mulligan makes a fine fiesty, ahead-of-her-time object of desire, Sheen captures a sort of dewey-eyed suffering and Sturridge is the very picture of Imperial moustachioed haughtiness.
Best of all is the Belgian Schoenaerts, making his farmer of few words a noble ideal, a man worthy of a woman as spirited as Bathsheba, if only she will relent to seeing that.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexuality and violence

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Juno Temple, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge
Credits: Directed by Thomas Vinterberg, script by David Nicholls, based on the Thomas Hardy novel. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:59

A one-hundred year-old German children’s book earns a fresh big screen treatment in “Maya the Bee Movie,” a joint German/Australian/Belgian production that fills a few screens in the lull between major studio computer-generated cartoons.
“Maya” is about a plucky, non-conformist bee who pops out of her waxy egg and upsets the ordered world of the hive where she’s born.
Maya is a dreamer.
“Bees don’t dream.”
Maya, voiced by Coco Jack Gillies, is playful.
“Bees don’t have fun.”
Not fitting in, she ventures out into the world near the hive, on her own, taking care to avoid “Gorgo’s Hedge,” the boundary that no bee or bug dares cross. It’s where a “giant, bug-eating monster” dwells.
She befriends the wimpy bee Willy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a grasshopper, a dung beetle, even a boy hornet. Hornets are the sworn enemies of bees, calling them “pollen pinchers” and “syrup suckers” and “daisy sniffers.” “Paper-chewers” is the bees’ best comeback to those insults.
There’s a queen (Miriam Margoyles) and a possible hive-palace coup plotted by the lady in waiting (Jacki Weaver). Will Maya save the day?
Even for a movie aimed at a very young audience, the laughs are hard to come by. There are also a couple of songs of the “Grass is always greener” variety. The animation won’t be keeping Pixar, Blue Sky, Dreamworks, Sony or anybody else up at night pondering “How’d they DO that?” The detail and texture of the anthropomorphic bugs aren’t there, although their world is every bit as floral and colorful as “A Bug’s Life.”
And the politics buried in Waldemar Bonseis’s pre-World War I book, about “well-ordered society” and other hints of the totalitarianisms that followed its publication, are mercifully removed.
But “Maya”, which has been filmed a few times, turned into video games and was even a Japanese anime TV series, is more harmless than entertaining, a limp exercise in cinematic baby-sitting for the six-and-under set.
MPAA Rating: G.

Cast: The voices of Coco Jack Gillies, Noah Taylor, Miriam Margoyles, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit-McPhee
Credits: Directed by Alexs Stadermann, script by Fin Edquist, translated by Martin Quaden, based on the book by Waldemar Bonseis. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:27