Movie Nation

Octavia Spencer has spent the years since her 2012 Oscar night cashing in on the success “The Help” brought her.
She was the mother of a police shooting victim in the critically acclaimed “Fruitvale Station,” an alcoholic helping a much younger drunk change her life in “Smashed,” the fatalistically brave Tanya in the fanboy favorite “Snowpiercer,” the formative aunt in James Brown’s childhood in “Get on Up” and an enterprising mom who somehow raised a crackhead in “Black or White.” She headlined the cult TV series “Red Band Society.”
That’s a pretty good career, and that’s just the last three years.
“I’m very lucky to have great representation at WME (William Morris Endeavor),” the Best Supporting Actress winner says, as if giving another Oscar speech. “That’s their charge, to procure the most interesting work for me. That’s all I want. And they’re doing it, aren’t they?”
Critic fans such as Jackie Cooper of The Huffington Post admire her ability to “not rest on her laurels” and take low-paying, challenging films which “keep her relevant” and ensure she’ll “be around for a long time to come.”
But her newest film? Not low budget, not “indie.” She did “Insurgent,” the second film in the “Divergent” series, for love.
“Listen, there is no bigger fan,” Spencer admits. “I didn’t care what I played. I was just excited to be doing a part in a series that I really enjoyed as a reader. Not quite ‘Erudite’ of me, I know. But I’m such a fangirl!”
Spencer is Joanna, motherly leader of “Amity” in a post-Apocalyptic future where society has re-started, organized into “factions.” The smart, rational types are in “Erudite,” the truth-tellers are “Candor,” the fearless fighters are “Dauntless,” and so on. Spencer, the 44 year-old Alabama-born fangirl, has given some thought as to what Faction this future might sentence her.
“If they forced me into a Faction, they might give me credit for enough wisdom to be in Erudite, the selflessness of Abnegation. You hope that you can be Dauntless in your most fearful moments. And yes, I have Candor. Oh YES. Funny, but that was Joanna’s first Faction, before she moved to Amity. I have Amity. I can be easy to get along with.”
Spencer laughs at her intimate familiarity with the jargon and the world set-up in Veronica Roth’s novels.
“We’re all a little too complicated, as people, to fit into one Faction, aren’t we? And me? I must be DIVERGENT! Or ‘Factionless.'”
She’s too busy to be pigeon-holed, too much the polymath. The end of March sees her second children’s novel in the “Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective” series come out. And she was an unexpected star of last month’s Oscars, even though she wasn’t nominated. Host Neil Patrick Harris enlisted her to watch a locked briefcase where he allegedly hid his picks for all the Oscar winners.
“Not planned, at least on my part,” Spencer laughs. “That was fun, getting all that camera time for that ‘bit.’ I thought it was hilarious.”
So she’s not leery of getting that seat a little too close to the stage on future Oscar nights? Even if none of these critically-acclaimed performances find their to an envelope?
“Honey, if you go to the Oscars and you’re NOT sitting in the front row, that’s a reason to stay home.”

George Lucas was once quoted as saying “Figure out what 11 year old girls want, and you’re set for life.” Or words to that effect.

That’s certainly true in the land of Disney Princesses. “Cinderella” opened huge Friday and seems headed for a $70 million weekend.

Sure, it’s a laugh-starved, stately stiff of a movie. Reviews were respectful (I thought it a 2 hour bore), but unless word of mouth pounds it, and little girls don’t tweet hate like teen girls do, it will perform.

Liam Neeson has one more “hard man rescues his kid” thriller in him as “Run All Night” jogs to a respectable $11-12 million.

The new film with the killer per screen average is TWC/Radius’s “It Follows,” a horror film that will only see limited release before switching to VOD. That’s a mistake. It’s good, it’ll draw since the word is out. The Weinsteins, leaving box office money on the table? They’re losing their touch.

The crappy “Chappie” is falling off, and the Vince Vaughn comedy “Unfinished Business” has fallen off the table.

It’s possible to tell a sci-fi story about the coming age of sentient machines without a “Chappie” size budget, or turning “Chappie” insipid.
“Eva” is a modestly chilling if predictable Spanish science fiction film about “emo” robots. A 2011 vehicle for poly-lingual leading man Daniel Bruhl (“Rush”), it’s obsessed with that one great robotic concern in sci-i — the ineffable extra “something” that makes us human.
Bruhl plays Alex, a robot scientist who returns home to the northern Spanish university town where he grew up, a city that’s become a center for robot research and production.
He’s there to help the local college, where his brother (Alberto Ammann) and ex-girlfriend (Marta Etura) teach.
His mission? Help finish a prototype child robot that the school has been fiddling with. In a world where Alex’s “pet” cat, secretaries, drivers and the valet that the school with its Big Tech ties sends to look after him are robots, people still want a child that won’t grow up.
The plan is to model this ninth iteration of a sentient robot on a real boy. But Alex thinks “Boys are boring,” and boring boys make for boring robots.
Then he spies Eva. Played by Claudia Vega, she is anything but boring. Precocious, beguiling and playful, this ten-year old notices Alex staring at her and flings an instant nickname at him.
“Pervert.”
She’s perfect, if he can get her permission and her parents’ permission to study her, if he can get her to stop turning cartwheels through the snow and answer a few questions.
It turns out she’s his niece, the child of his ex-lover and his brother. That makes for an interesting dynamic as the robotics professors ponder the idea of the robot builder, a guy with whom they have history, modeling a machine after their spirited, smart kid.
The future captured by director Kike Maíllo’s crew is snowy (climate change), a world where people still smoke and SAABs have been reborn as zero emissions vehicles. The robot cat is a digitally animated add-on, and a feeble one.
Bruhl has a nice way of brooding, Etura (“The Impossible”) suggests the hurt and longing of a love that wasn’t meant to be. And young Miss Vega is a pleasant mix of enchanting child and future prom queen of the Children of the Damned. A teasing tantrum tosser, and a little scary.
It gives up its secrets so easily that we can guess where this is going from the opening (literal) cliffhanger. But this film, in Spanish with English subtitles,has one utterly brilliant conceit, one the film returns to, again and again.
What one question would constitute the difference between a person, with memories and emotions, and a machine?
“What do you see when you close your eyes?”
“Eva” isn’t surprising enough to break new ground. But the cast, the gorgeous wintry setting and suggestion of a tech future that is closer than we fear make it a most watchable variation on a well-worn sci-fi theme.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Daniel Bruhl, Marta Etura, Alberto Ammann, Claudia Vega, Lluís Homar
Credits: Directed by Kike Maíllo, written by Sergi Belbel, Cristina Clemente, Martí Roca, Aintza Serra. A Radius/TWC release.

Running time: 1:35

“Run All Night” is a first-person shooter thriller for the Just for  Men/Grecian Formula generation.
Old men — cops and mobsters — sit in bars, drink their Scotch on the rocks and talk about the “old neighborhood,” their long history and the blood they’ve spilled. And then they spill some more — stabbings, beatings that end in strangulation, and shootings. Lots and lots of shootings.
It makes a fine vehicle for those weather-worn beauties Liam Neeson, as an alcoholic retired hit man, and Ed Harris as his friend, his boss, his brother-in-arms.
Sean (Harris) looks after Jimmy (Neeson). Back in the day, Jimmy’s nickname was “Jimmy the Gravedigger.” He solved problems for Sean. They’ve shared secrets and history, and a body count. Their afterlife fates are sealed, and joined.
“Wherever we’re going,” Sean re-assures Jimmy, “when we cross that line, we’re crossing it together.”
But Sean’s hothead son (Boyd Holbrook of “A Walk Among the Tombstones”) makes a deadly mistake, and Jimmy’s estranged limo driver son, Michael (Joel Kinnaman of “Robocop”) witnesses it. Jimmy kills Sean’s kid to protect his own, and it’s game on. Over one long night, Jimmy tries to keep his tough, mob-hating son alive, and Sean sends his minions out to do them both in.
Neeson is very much in his latter career comfort zone with this brutal, brooding thriller. This is his third film with director Jaume Collet-Serra (“Unknown,” “Non-Stop”), and it’s a stylish series of set-pieces that are like a series of heavyweight bouts.
There’s the Brawl in the Bathroom, the Bloodbath in the Bar, the Assassination in the Apartment and the Table Leg Light Sabre Duel in the Tower. Throw in some well-worn New York locations, a visceral car chase and you’ve got something above your standard Neeson thriller.
The script is loaded with cliches — mobsters threatening “LOOK at me,” a mob boss too principled to move heroin, a veteran Jimmy-chasing cop (Vincent D’Onofrio) trash-talking Jimmy.
Common shows up as another cliche, that hit-man hired to hit a hit man. But he’s as menacing as the rest of this stellar cast.
There are plenty of pleasures in watching these old pros — Harris and Neeson, D’Onofrio, Nick Nolte and Bruce McGill — playing old men of the mob wars trying to summon a young man’s bravado for the dirty job each must do.
“Run All Night” doesn’t re-imagine a worn out genre so much as drop a quart of Marvel Mystery Oil into the crankcase of that vintage V-8 for one last ride through the Mean Streets before “crossing that line” to the eternal damnation most everybody in this story has earned.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language including sexual references, and some drug use

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ed Harris, Joel Kinnaman, Boyd Holbrook, Genesis Rodriguez, Common, Nick Nolte
Credits: Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, written by Brad Ingelsby. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:54

“Mr. Kaplan”, Uruguay’s contender for the best foreign language film Oscar, is about an elderly Jew who ponders whether he “inspired” anyone, if he’s “accomplished anything memorable.” Jacob Kaplan (Héctor Noguera) decides the answer is “no,” and results to do something about it.
Jacob is 76. He’s long retired, not safe behind the wheel, is a little unsure of just what his two sons have
amounted to and is haunted by his father’s “inspire people” edict when young Jacob was shipped off, alone, as a child, from pre-World
War II Poland to America.
The solution to his shortcoming comes to him on the evening news. It’s 1997, and another Nazi war criminal has been discovered, hiding out all these years
in South America. When Jacob hears his teen granddaughter (Nuria Flo) refer to an old man she and her friends see on the beach as
“The Old Nazi,” Jacob has his mission. Stalk this guy, uncover his guilt and spirit him away to Israel to face justice.
“Just like Eichmann!”
Jacob is entirely too feeble to manage this, but his sons have hired Wilson (Néstor Guzzini), a lump of an ex-cop, to be his driver.
But the slovenly, drunken Wilson’s story is more complex than that. He’s unemployed, a pinball addict with five kids to support. He
didn’t leave the police force by choice. Can he sober up enough to redeem himself? Can he smarten up enough to be of any use at all?
Álvaro Brechner’s film, in Spanish with English subtitles, walks a tightrope between light farce and tragi-comedy. Jacob and Wilson are
all kinds of inept, botching stake-outs, stumbling into a funeral and a strip club, getting arrested by the cops and chased by
descendants of German ex-pats. It’s amusing to see the clumsy ways they “investigate” this old man (Rolf Becker) and leap to
conclusions. He changed his name, he knew other Germans in Uruguay and he wears long-sleeve shirts, even on the beach. He MUST
be a Nazi!
But this is a Holocaust story, so the stakes are high. What could have been another melancholy comedy of old age has lessons to
impart and history to relate.
The veteran Chilean actor Noguera (“El Regalo”) lets Jacob teeter between canny and delusional, a character who hallucinates the Voice
of God one minute and seriously declares how important what his granddaughter does for him is “to 4,000 years of Jewish history” the
next.
The movie meanders a bit, mainly to throw us off the scent. But despite the loose threads “Mr. Kaplan,” the character and the movie,
follow, Brechner finds surprises to weave into it, from the hilariously forgotten French ditty by Serge Gainsbourg (“S.S. in Uruguay”)
that opens the movie to its cryptic, fitting and unexpected finale.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity

Cast: Héctor Noguera, Néstor Guzzini, Rolf Becker ,
Credits: Written and directed by Álvaro Brechner. A Menemsha Films release.

Running time: 1:38

A film crew hoping to shoot a killer pilot for a TV series on “Cannibals of the 20th Century” — no doubt Discovery is interested — heads into rural Ukraine to document a mass murderer and cannibal who survived Stalin’s attempt to starve Ukraine into oblivion.
They get more than they bargained for. But, as always, their footage survives, even if not all of them did.
“Ghoul” is a semi-subtitled variation on a “Blair Witch” theme — with dogged Ryan (Paul S. Tracey) hell-bent on getting the footage and the interviews they need, no matter what, and girlfriend/interviewer Jenny (Jennifer Armour) freaking out as Ukrainian things start going bump in the night.
There’s a translator ( Alina Golovyova) trapped with them, a “guide” who ditched them in the run-down farm house of this killer and a “psychic” who may or may not be tricking them as a drinking glass slips back and forth over a Russian version of a Ouija board, a pentangle carved into the killer’s dining room table.
“You can’t leave here,” she warns. “We’re going to die,” Jenny assumes.
Nothing new to see here, just a trapped day and night and so on as the two locals and three Americans face their fate, or try to reason their way out of it. With their shaky camera documenting all of it, night and day. The performances don’t register, the filmmaking produces a couple of hair-raising images and a few ghoulish/gross ones. Otherwise? There are scarier pictures of fresher Russian atrocities in Ukraine on the evening news.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Isabella, Jennifer Armour, Debra Garza, Paul S. Tracey, Alina Golovlyova
Credits: Directed by Petr Jákl, written by Petr Bok and Petr Jákl. A Vega, Baby! release.

Running time: 1:26