Movie Nation

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

A decade in the making, “The Wrecking Crew” took almost as long to make it to theaters. But Danny Tedesco’s “unknown musicians who cranked out the hits” doc, which predated and inspired the Oscar winning “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” finally gets its due and a big screen run.
“Twenty Feet” was about backup singers, “Crew” is about studio musicians. These were the guys — and one woman — who dominated Los Angeles music studio session work from the late 1950s well into the ’70s.
Sax man Plas Johnson honks out the unforgettable first notes of “The Pink Panther Theme,” Carol Kay picks up her bass guitar and plays the bass line that “made” Sonny & Cher’s iconic “The Beat Goes On.”
“The Wrecking Crew” — they weren’t really called that until after their era had passed — fleshed out Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” and played most, if not all of the instruments on Beach Boys LPs and “Monkees” singles.
Those who took advantage of this elite aggregation of 20-30 in-demand players, from Herb Alpert of Tijuana Brass fame to Cher, call them “the best.” Members of this exclusive club such as Leon Russell, drummer Hal Blaine and Glen Campbell recall how “tight” and “professional” they were — showing up, knocking out somebody’s charts or improvising sounds that defined an era.
But Campbell’s presence poignantly reminds us how hard it was for filmmaker Danny Tedesco, whose Wrecking Crew guitarist dad, Tommy, died in 1997, to get this movie on the screen. It turned up in film festivals six or seven years ago. Dick Clark was still living when it started, and was interviewed. Tommy Tedesco himself led a round table gab session that was the film’s first footage back in 1996.
Glen Campbell showed no signs of the Alzheimer’s that has robbed him of much of his mind in recent years.
That’s a shame, because this movie, fascinating as it is, suffers in comparison to the more touching and uplifting “Twenty Feet.” Those of us who caught “Crew” in a late 2000s film festival showing cannot help but see it as being diminished by that later film’s artistry.
Still, it’s a fascinating slice of rock and pop archeology and well worth your time.

MPAA Rating: PG for language, thematic elements and smoking images

Cast: Cher, Glen Campbell, Tommy Tedesco, Herb Alpert, Plas Johnson, Carol Kaye, Earl Palmer, Hal Blaine
Credits: Directed by Danny Tedesco. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:44

It says volumes about the state of Katherine Heigl’s on-and-off screen persona that casting her as a shrieking, shrewish control freak with murderous tendencies seems a bit on-the-nose.
The dark comedy “Home Sweet Hell” is about the marriage from Hell threatened by the homewrecker from Hell until the wife from Hell settles on getting rid of said homewrecker.
Obvious and jaw-droppingly bloody, it still gives Heigl her funniest role in years.
Patrick Wilson plays Don Champagne, who might have been a happy-go-lucky furniture dealer, if not for his wife, Mona. They have a luxurious home, luxurious cars and two privately schooled little Stepford Kids. All because Mona keeps a scrapbook — “Our Goals.”
“Focus,” she preaches. On the business plan, on vacation plans, on planning, in general. Don has had the fun and spontaneity beaten out of him.
“We will have sex on the ninth,” she barks. “As scheduled.”
Then he hires a new saleswoman. Dusty, played by the always kittenish Jordana Brewster, appreciates attention.
“I LIKE it when you WATCH me,” she purrs.”
And she likes her dresses tight.
“She must have a little harlot in her,” Mona growls. It doesn’t matter that she’s suspicious, Don tumbles for the fatal attraction on his payroll in a heartbeat.
Next thing you know, there’s blackmail afoot. And Don’s salesman/confessor (Jim Belushi) is no help. Only Mona is up to this challenge. She watches “The First 48.” She knows how this is done. And once things get going and get out of hand, it’s obvious she’s watched “Dexter,” too. She’s entirely too cold and organized.
“I’d write it down for you,” she snaps to Don, listing the necessities of body disposal. “But I’m just covered in that girl.”
Covered…in BLOOD. And guts.
Heigl throws herself into this with gusto, and Wilson, a good actor often too stiff in comedies, takes grinning cluelessness to new heights.
There are redneck co-conspirators and complications that don’t really complicate anything. The story takes several lurching turns.
But there are laugh-out-loud gags that will make you gag. And Heigl? If you’ve quit on the blonde diva, you may have given up on her too soon.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language, sexual content and some drug use
Cast: Katherine Heigl, Patrick Wilson, Jordana Brewster, Chi McBride, Jim Belushi
Credits: Directed by Anthony Burns , written by Carlo Allen, Ted Eldrick, Tom Lavagnino . A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:38

“Champs” is a quotably slick documentary about the social, psychological and economic underpinnings of boxing, a clear-eyed look at the deadly and dirty sport often rhapsodized as “The Sweet Science.”
There’s nobility in the boxers this is built around — ex-con Bernard Hopkins, hyper-violent Mike Tyson and gentle and gentlemanly Evander Holyfield. But in this Bert Marcus film, it’s hard to see their success in this sport as anything but a mixed bag, an act of desperation by men whose circumstances afforded them few other options.
“People who fight…fight their way out of poverty,” one insider explains.
“Rich kids don’t go into boxing,” offers another.
The sport is surveyed and discussed as the historic route of the underclasses to change their station in life. Marcus talks to fighters, trainers, journalists, a couple of actors (Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington) who have played fighters, a couple of film directors (Spike Lee, Ron Howard) and singers (Mary J. Blige, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) who have connections to the fight game. The superficial picture that emerges captures something of the guts it takes to go out and take and deliver a beating. You are “conquering not only your opponent, but yourself,” as one talking head puts it.
Marcus lets Tyson and his ghost writer/biographer, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, regale us with some serious image burnishing, breaking down the hard world he came from, the father figure/trainer (Cus D’Amato) who rescued him, his stunning rise to be the most famous athlete in America. But “Champs” doesn’t totally let Tyson off the hook, capturing his rapid descent in similar, if less thorough detail. Tyson has a producing credit in the film.
Holyfield comes off now as he did then, a humble, sportsmanlike man of violence. But Hopkins, who gained fame not as an Olympian but as a Pennsylvania prison system champion before his release and years-long reign in his weight division, is the real heart of “Champs.”
Hopkins figured that prison “is a business,” a system that he’d fallen into that would never let him go. He put on the gloves to “beat the system.” And did.
There are no Tyson skeptics interviewed. There’s discussion of how these famous men often tumble into financial ruin. But there’s nothing about the brain damage, the true personal and social cost.
Marcus has enough experts here to get at something deeper. But he seems happiest sitting down with celebrities who have a poetic take on the sport, barely balanced by a few more prosaic realists who find little poetic in the situations that drive men into it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, boxing violence, profanity

Cast: Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Bernard Hopkins, Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Mark Wahlberg
Credits: Written and directed by Bert Marcus. An Amplify release.

Running time: 1:31

“Unfinished Business” will pull in about $5 million over this weak March weekend for movies. That’s pretty bad for a mainstream R-rated comedy, and signals the end of Vince Vaughn’s comic leading man days. He needs a Kevin James to have a prayer of opening a picture. Even Will Ferrell needs a team-up to make his movies marketable, so this comes as no great surprise. Dave Franco? Not a movie star.

Neill Blomkamp’s “Chappie” got terrible reviews, but the fanboys showed up. $13-14 million worth of them, anyway. Not a disaster, although Sony spent money on Hugh Jackman and Dev Patel and on location shooting in South Africa. It looks like a flop, if not a career-killer.

The sequel to “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” will have to show a lot of leg to match  the original’s take, as a $9 million opening suggests $25-30 million, total over the course of its run. The first film hung around as the older audience got around to seeing it. Maybe they’ll luck out again.

“The Duff” is holding audience like a champ, only a 30% drop week to week. “Focus” is losing 50-60 percent.

“Fifty Shades” has cleared $150, closing in on $160 million now.

With “Like Sunday, Like Rain,” sturdy character actor Frank Whaley (“Pulp Fiction,” TV’s “Ray Donovan”) steps behind the camera to present an elegiac, sweet romance between a boy and his nanny.
No, not THAT kind of romance. This is a relationship dramedy about a spoiled, smart but considerate little rich boy and the struggling young woman impulsively hired to be his substitute mom.
Leighton Meester is Eleanor, and when we meet her, she’s tossing her feckless boyfriend’s (Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong) guitar out the window of his apartment. She is now homeless, he gets her fired from her waitress job, but there’s hope. A friend hooks her up with a temp firm that doesn’t do much background checking, and next thing you know, there’s distracted, lazy rich mom (Debra Messing) asking a question or two, and giving her the job.
Reggie (Julian Shatkin) is a distracted student, a math prodigy, an accomplished cellist. And he’s 12.
Where Whaley flips the script is that Reggie, who pays off drivers, camp counselors and others just so he can avoid being distracted from his reading and study, isn’t obnoxious.
“I’m just trying to navigate a course toward safety and sanity the best way I know how.”
He humors the cook, speaking Spanish because it’s easier for her, and is nothing if not solicitous to Eleanor. He takes her out to dinner, asks her about her life, makes suggestions (involving his mob-connected driver) about what to do with her stalker ex-boyfriend. He’s kind.
He memorizes poetry, and is dismissive about his own talents for the cello.
“Art, as a language, is dead.”
Whaley keeps this odd relationship on the up-and-up, and Meester effortlessly steps into a sweeter, more vulnerable role than the movies generally give her. Eleanor has problems, growing pains of a different sort  from Reggie’s. Young Shatkin does OK by a role that has him reciting a lot of words he’s not that comfortable with.
“Like Sunday, Like Rain” is never broad. It punctures cliches and aside from a couple of swear words, has no reason to wear the idiotic R-rating that the MPAA saddled it with.
The tear-inducing musical finale to this simple and intimate movie will touch you, even if it didn’t get through to the tin-eared ratings board.

MPAA Rating: R for language
Cast: Leighton Meester, Julian Shatkin, Debra Messing, Billie Armstrong
Credits: Written and directed by Frank Whaley. A Monterey Media release.

Running time: 1:44

Take away an early barrage of fawning, Guiness and G & T enfeebled Brit critics, and Neil Blomkamp’s insipid “Chappie” would have experienced the consensus slaughter it so richly deserved.

I loved “District 9,” and was enthusiastic about “Elysium” in metaphoric Occupy politics and execution. But this was, as I said in my review, “Excruciating.”  Cutesie robot, carnage galore. It takes on “What the hell was he THINKING” overtones more than once. There’s a time-honored Hollywood law, I call it “The Elizabeth Berkley Rule.” Always announce your NEXT big project before a flop comes out. So Blomkamp’s attachment to direct the next “Alien” was timely and career-preserving.

Sony knew this POS was a POS, which is why they only screened it late Wed. Pity the Brits didn’t pick up on that. What a bunch of Empire Fanboys.

Perhaps French Canadian critics stuck up for Canadian Ken Scott’s latest team-up with Vince Vaughn. Probably not. “Unfinished Business” is an appallingly laugh-starved marriage of “Family Man” dramedy and “Hangover in Berlin” raunch — full frontal nudity, gay fetishism, all joked about, badly, by grinning Dave Franco. A nightmare. Tom Wilkinson saves a little dignity, Nick Frost, not so much. Vince gets beaten up a lot, unfairly I think. Scott did the wonderful “Starbuck,” it’s inferior Hollywood remake “Delivery Man” and the lightly charming “The Grand Seduction” (can’t remember if he did its antecedent, “Seducing Dr. Lewis,” also French and Canadian.

But he has no flair for Hollywood comedy, and Franco is an infuriating performer, a better looking Rob Schneider.

“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is weak tea, indeed. They made Maggie Smith NOT a racist and stripped whatever other edge the first one packed in from it. It earned passing grades, again built on fawning Brit critics, who are to movies what “Top Gear” is to cars — jingoistic in the extreme.

“Buzzard” is an overpraised film fest character piece about a nasty, weaselly petty thief office worker whose thievery is matched with a delicious paranoia. Good, not great, but others were more enthusiastic.

“Road Hard” is a fairly conventional but nasty comedy about a cynical, aging comic struggling to get one last break. Or realize it’s never going to happen. I am not a fan of Adam Carolla, but I dug it. Others were less generous.

“Kidnapping Mr. Heikeken” is a caper thriller about the kidnapping of the Heinken Beer Kingpin, a good cast wasted in an otherwise feebly executed action pic.

A couple of docs of note — “Merchants of Doubt” ties Big Tobacco’s Big Lie tactics to the global warming deniers, some of whom used to also lie about tobacco.

And “A Year in Champagne” is an informative but dry doc about how the bubbly is made.