Movie Nation

“The Most Dangerous Game” is one of the more enduring thriller formulas. About a big game hunter who longs to take a shot at human beings, “the most dangerous” of all game “animals,” it’s been adapted every few years since Richard Connell’s short story first appeared, back in 1924.
The hunter’s unarmed prey must outwit and turn the tables on the rich psychopath. You mess with that can’t-miss formula at your own peril, something the novelist Robb White knew when he “borrowed” the plot for his novel “Death Watch,” which in turn led to a 1974 TV movie (“Savages”) starring Andy Griffith as the crazed hunter.
But the folks re-adapting White’s book for “Beyond the Reach” tamper and tinker with perfection — a little overly convenient cheating here, a contrived finale that goes wrong and then goes more wrong. The film staggers under these blows and never really recovers.
Jeremy Irvine (“War Horse”) is Ben, “the best tracker in the county” in his corner of the desert Southwest. The sheriff (Ronnie Cox) swears by him, which is why Ben is summoned to take super-rich businessman Madec out into the wastelands, beyond “The Reach” (a geographic feature) in search of a trophy bighorn sheep.
Madec (Michael Douglas, in “Greed is Good” mode) makes a little metaphoric show of “establishing a dominance hierarchy” with his new employee, much as bighorn sheep do in their herds. Ben is leery of this guy with the over-equipped six-wheel Mercedes SUV, his sat phone, portable espresso machine, imported rifle and imported scope. But the kid needs the cash. His girlfriend (Hanna Mangan Lawrence) is off at college, and Madec is quick to crack about how easy it will be for her to move on from a poor uneducated hick like Ben.
A big business deal is in the offing. Madec is impatient and trigger happy. There’s an accident. And before Ben can respond to it, the hunter, “a fast thinker,” has covered his tracks and figured that lone eyewitness Ben needs to run off into the desert, with nothing but his watch and his underwear, and die.
Irvine makes a convincing Ben, a wary kid a little slow on the uptake, but a man with skills and the physique to scamper up rockfaces and stay alive as Gordon Gekko with Guns tracks him.
Douglas makes a good villain out of a cardboard construction, a cutthroat businessman with a weakness for piano concerti on his truck stereo and dry martinis in his cooler.
But French director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti (“Carre blanc”) and producer/screenwriter Stephen Susco (the American remake of “The Grudge”) trip over themselves trying to invent fresh wrinkles in this Man vs. Man vs. The Elements tale. Ben has flashbacks. His dream the night before the hunt is prescient, with comically obvious foreshadowing. They give Ben wildly improbable assistance and tumble into that tired crutch of every screenwriter of a hack Western — dynamite.
And that’s before a finale that goes completely off the rails.
But this “Dangerous Game” formula has outlived Faye Wray (a 1932 film) and Andy Griffith and survived Ice-T (“Surviving the Game” back in ’94). It’s too bad the filmmakers couldn’t figure out this “game” has rules that made it work and that you violate at your own peril.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence

Cast: Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine, Hanna Mangan Lawrence, Ronnie Cox,
Credits: Directed by Jean-Baptiste Léonetti, scripted by Stephen Susco, based on a Robb White novel. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:32

She’s the original “Gossip Girl,” and a charter member of “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”

She’s made an impact in dramas such as “The Town” and “Savages.”

But “The Age of Adaline” is Blake Lively’s biggest big screen splash ever, a star vehicle romance that has her playing an accidental immortal who has to look good in the clothes of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and today.

The last time we spoke, I think, was for the “Traveling Pants” movie. It took a while, but she’s finally come into her own — successful TV show, a growing film resume, a marriage to Ryan Reynolds, parenthood.

Questions for Blake Lively? We’re talking about “Adaline,” but I’m always open to suggestions. Thanks for the help, and comment your query below.

UPDATED: Here’s how the interview with Ms. L. came out.

When she read the script for “Desert Dancer,” her latest film, Freida Pinto says she didn’t truly fathom how literal that title was until well into rehearsals.
A dancer of some experience, as evidenced by her breakout turn in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire,” the Mumbai-born Pinto put in a year of preparation for “Dancer,” “just to get the stamina” required.
“You think, ‘Learn the choreography, and when the camera’s rolling, show off your moves.’ But this was more physically and emotionally daunting than that.
“We did not realize how difficult it was going to be to dance on sand. It’s like moving through water — very hot, heavy water.”
“Desert Dancer” tells the true story of Iranian dancer Afshin Ghaffarian, played by Reece Ritchie in the film. He taught himself to dance in revolutionary/reactionary Iran, where dance is “not illegal, just forbidden,” as his character is told in the movie.
Pinto plays  Ghaffarian’s love interest, a sensuous siren secretly trained by her ballerina mother. When the underground dance troupe Ghaffarian forms wants to perform, they and their audience have to sneak out of town, into the desert, to dance.
“The arts are truth,” Pinto says. ” The arts can’t lie. And the arts have opinions, opinions that repressive, thought-controlling regimes don’t want to hear. That’s why they fear the arts.”
“Desert Dancer” is earning mixed reviews, but even bad notices have praised the dancing, with critics echoing Sara Stewart of the New York Post’s opinion that “the film takes off during its own dance sequences, especially those between Ritchie and Pinto.”
The dance in the film was choreographed by Akram Khan with an eye toward suggesting the sensibilities of modern day Iran.
“We were told, ‘They should NEVER touch.’ Our characters should express their feelings in ways that don’t violate the edicts against public touching.

“But that means we can’t use each other’s body weight to support one another, to play off one another. It took some getting used to. Sensuality is harder to convey when you don’t touch. Our choreographer decided that.”
But sensuality has never been difficult for Pinto to get across. From the day the world first saw her in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog,” the model-turned-actress has been hailed as one of the screen’s great beauties. Great directors from Woody Allen (“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”) and Michael Winterbottom (“Trishna”) to Terence Malick (“Knight of Cups”) have come calling.
Still, the roles she’s offered can too often seem exotic or “antiseptic,” San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle suggests. And Pinto knows it.
“There are many roles I’d love to be considered for, but producers or whoever look at me ethnically, when actually the role could be a woman of any race. It’s ambiguous on the page.
“I’m just not on their radar, and if I show it and they’re looking for a white girl, they’re still going to give it to the white girl.”
But at 30, Pinto keeps knocking at those producers’ doors, and has an action adventure picture that could play on her exotic looks in the works. She has plans to produce her own film project later this year. And she’s not losing hope that “this art form with such power to change people’s minds, will change its mind about women and minority women.”
Which moves her to quote a line from her “Slumdog” co-star and ex-beau Dev Patel’s movie, “Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,:” one that she suggests is something she took as a life lesson she’ll carry for years.
“‘Everything will be all right at the end. And if it’s not all right, it’s not the end.'”

“So you are an artist,” an Iranian member of the Basij, the country’s paramilitary morality police, hisses at the hero of “Desert Dancer,” who is about to be punished.
“Beat him…artistically!”
You have to get by the occasional risible moment of melodrama to get into “Desert Dancer,” another account of personal and artistic repression in modern day Iran. It’s a film as predictable as its title. But this “true story” of a dancer longing to express himself in a fascist theocracy is still affecting, and finds its surest footing in several vivid scenes of interpretive dance.
Afshin (Reece Ritchie) got his first beating in middle school for imitating what he saw on a “Dirty Dancing” video. Early scenes show him studying in an ever-threatened arts school in his hometown.
It’s only when he attends university in Tehran that he runs into like-minded artists, and friends with the skills to get past the electronic censors and into Youtube. That’s where Afshin learns his moves, and that prompts him to start a super-secret underground dance ensemble.
The beautiful, talented and apparently trained Elaheh (Freida Pinto) crashes into the group and into Afshin’s life. She makes him want to attempt a public performance in a country where dance, like many, “isn’t illegal, technically. It’s forbidden.”
The backdrop here is Iran’s abortive “Green Revolution,” the youthquake that threatened the theocratic regime with its votes, its underground raves and its flouting of fundamentalist dogma.
Simon Kassianides is a Basij thug who arm-twists his college kid brother into giving up the members of the group so that they can be beaten and stabbed into submission.
Pinto (“Slumdog Millionaire”) does well by a young woman whose passionate, if chaste, dancing complements Afshin’s dance as defiance. Elaheh, alas, has problems which feel contrived, until you start to think about the limited horizons of Iran’s college age generation and what they might do (short of taking up arms) to escape it.
First time feature director Richard Raymond never quite lifts this above generic in tone and message. Still, the 2009 street scenes have an energy and a childhood flashback delivers a rare moment of humor. But it is his performers and their arresting, almost simplistic “message” dances make “Desert Dancer” worth its sand.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for thematic elements, some drug material and violence

Cast: Reese Ritchie, Freida Pinto, Tom Cullen,  Simon Kassianides,
Makram Khoury
Credits: Directed by Richard Raymond, script by Jon Croker. A Relativity release.

Running time: 1:38