Movie Nation

Consider the phrase “Rockwell crackles.” It’s often turned up in reviews of Sam Rockwell’s film performances over the years, in Amber Wilkinson’s plug for his latest, “Laggies,” in London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, for instance.

All that crackling comes by design — a raised eyebrow, a laid-back, Christopher Walken-esque way with a line, a deftly-delivered put down, all “part of the souffle” of a performance, Rockwell says. And once he’s worked out the ingredients he wants to use, his character’s entrance is where he shoves that dish into the oven.

“I love a great entrance,” he says. Craig, his divorced lawyer/single dad in “Laggies” has one. The film is about a woman (Keira Knightley) who hides from the adult life she’s not quite worked out by hanging out with high school kids — one kid in particular — for a week. Chloe Grace Moretz plays the kid, Rockwell’s Craig is her father.

“Craig comes on at just the right moment in the film,” Rockwell says. “Because it changes when Keira’s character has an adult to confront with what she’s doing. That’s why the entrance is a big deal. Like Kramer on ‘Seinfeld,’ right?

“So you work on it. Every little detail makes a difference in how you regard the character. He’s got to be a little guilty, being a single parent. Over-compensating, maybe. He’s trying too hard to be the cool dad. But he’s the lawyer dad.”

So Craig bursts in on daughter and daughter’s new grownup pal with an “A-HA!” Cool Dad, joking around with his kid. Forgetting to knock. He sees who she’s with and blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.

“Wow,” he says, looking Knightley up and down. ” High school students are looking rougher and ROUGHER these days.”

In just a line, Craig establishes himself as the cool dad, but the concerned and involved father. He’s raised an eyebrow at something inappropriate and insulted a beautiful woman. Because, who knows? She might be a drug dealer luring his kid to her doom.

“Hey, did you hear about the grown woman who started hanging out with a bunch of pubescent kids? No, I’ve never heard of that either.”

In “Laggies,” Rockwell, the king of quirky since way before “The Way, Way Back,” plays an adult.

“Yeah. A totally new thing for me, being the ‘adult.’ First time for everything, right?”

The novelty in that didn’t mean extra prep time, because “I’m kind of at that age now where I sort of AM this guy, you know? A little bit. He wasn’t that big of a reach. Aging yuppie? I can do that. Not far at all from who I am.”

Director Lynn Shelton, of “Your Sister’s Sister,” makes chatty, touchy-feely comedies like “Touchy Feely” and “Your Sister’s Sister.” She relies on actors who can analyze a script and bring more than what’s on the page to her films, part of that “mumblecore” genre of talkative, insightful romances.

“I like rom-coms that make you think,” Rockwell says. “This reminded me of ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ with Keira as a version of Susan. Or a John Cusack movie, where he’s gone off in ‘Grosse Point Blank’ to figure his stuff out. In our movie, it’s a chick. Keira’s doing that. And I get to be a sort of eyewitness to that. Kind of the Tom Hanks part, or the Paul Rudd role. You know, the straight man. The adult. I like being the adult.”

At 45, Rockwell is in his four-films-a-year prime. He likes jumping back and forth, from lead roles to supporting parts. He likes making a cool entrance. Watch for him doing that in an upcoming remake of “Poltergeist,” He turns everybody he plays, serious or comic, into someone a little off center. And he likes characters whose function in the film is pivotal, clearly defined, even if the role seems small. He only shows up in “Laggies” half way into the film, but Craig and Rockwell change it.

“I like to think she brings out the kid in him, and he makes her think adult thoughts. Oh yes.”

“Gone Girl” has the Oscar hype. “Annabelle” is a reliably scary horror picture.

“Gone Girl” had a good Friday. “Annabelle” had a HUGE Friday.

And now, as the Oscar contender pulled in its huge audience for the weekend on Saturday, and “Annabelle” didn’t tail off as expected, we’ve got a bonafide Box Office race to the finish.

By midnight Sunday, we could be looking at a $37 to $37 million tie.

Not bad. I saw “Annabelle” with an audience of folks young enough to not be jaded by its tired horror tropes and weak acting. They shrieked in all the right places. It works. Simple effects, simple frights, yeah we have our umpeenth haunted doll story (“The Simpsons” made fun of that chestnut on a “Halloween Treehouse of Horror” episode in the early ’90s).

But people are getting their shrieks out.

“Left Behind” isn’t drawing the Rapture crowd the way the people who can Nic Cage in the lead expected. That audience is staying home, watching church and Ebola Scares on Fox News.

“Boxtrolls” is having a big second weekend, “Equalizer” didn’t fall off as much as it should have. “Maze Runner” is still in the top five and turning into a franchise.

Yes, we know who he used to be married to.  But there’s considerably more to Ryan Phillippe than who his ex is.

He’s been in ensemble hits such as “Gosford Park” and “Crash,” “The Bang Bang Club,” “Stop Loss,” he was the villain of “The Lincoln Lawyer.” The guy works. A lot.

He makes his directing debut with a nasty little movie-biz-savvy kidnapping thriller, “Catch Hell,” which he also stars in.

He plays an actor, a bit on the downward side of the career arc, forced to take a job on an indie thriller to be shot in Louisiana. And just as he’s gritting his teeth to get through it, he’s taken hostage, dragged out into the bayou, chained up and tortured.

A comment on movie making in Jindaliana? On the fickle nature of fame? What it takes to get attention these days as an actor?

Questions for Ryan Phillippe? Comment below.

Based on late night Thursday and all-day Friday returns, we’re looking at a  big weekend for a thriller pitched as a possible Oscar contender, and a solid opening for a no budget horror flick that works well enough.

“Gone Girl” is riding the hype machine and good reviews (metacritic) over $30 million, according to Deadline.com. Saturday will be the key. The curiosity factor — Ben Affleck’s full frontal (fleeting) — may help drive this.

“Annabelle,” a horror film with Alfre Woodard in a key supporting role (biggest name in the cast), looks to clear $20 million, and do “Conjuring” if not “Insidious” business.

“Left Behind” seems to be having a hard time keeping up. Terrible reviews aren’t helping this Rapture Remake. People prefer Kirk Cameron’s version? Maybe $5-8 million.

“The Good Lie” opens in limited release and Warners expects a healthy $2-3 million on that one.

“Gone Girl” should swipe most of the audience from “The Equalizer,” but Denzel’s crowd may have some late arrivals — a $12-14 take is expected.

I figured I’d be a bit of an outlier as far as reviews go for David Fincher’s latest. “Gone Girl” is a fairly tricky thriller in which the director of “Zodiac” and “Social Network” never really grabs because he gives away the twists too easily. A little miscasting — No, Neil Patrick Harris CANNOT pull off EVERYthing. As a comment on relationships and women, the film based on Gillian Flynn’s novel has surprises, but those are around the periphery. Not one of his very best — just pretty good. Reviews are leaning heavily into the Fincher swoon territory, but I’m not alone in seeing it as more like his “Dragon Tattoo” remake — uninspired.

“The Good Lie” also has a hint of Oscar buzz about it, but the Reese Witherspoon consideration seems grossly overstated. She’s not in the movie that much, it’s not about her, etc. etc. Good reviews for this one, too. I was OK with it, but the people who didn’t like it REALLY didn’t like it. “Dishonest” a couple of reviewers said.

After “Labor Day” And “Young Adult,” and now “Men, Women & Children,” it may be time to send Jason Reitman back to indie world. The “Up in the Air” director isn’t pulling off his ambitious, well-cast relationship dramas any more. He’s like Cameron Crowe or Lawrence Kasdan. And far too young to write off. But something isn’t working, and a return to indie film may keep him employable. Otherwise — more bombs, more bad reviews. “Men, Women” is getting worse pans than “Labor Day,” and that’s not good.

“Annabelle,” an old fashioned ghost story with “Conjuring” connections, should do some business. Most critics, like me, thought the lead was just bad enough to not recommend it. But it’ll make you jump.

“LEft Behind” isn’t going to please Christian Rapture buffs or those who ridicule them. A straight-laced thriller that never uses the “R-word,” it’s not a humiliation for Nic Cage or anybody else involved. It’s just not that interesting or gripping. Some grabber moments, here and there. Better director would have gotten something out of a movie about the Saved disappearing from the Earth in a flash. Terrible reviews for this one.

“Left Behind” is Rapture-fiction as a dull zombie movie where the living dead are non-believers. The Christian faithful have disappeared, all over the world.
That moment, 32 minutes into director Vic Armstrong’s film, is this remake’s lone grabber. A college coed (Cassi Thomson) loses her little brother in mid-hug — empty clothes, baseball hat, glasses and backpack tumble to the floor of the mall where she’s hugging him. The screaming starts and anarchy instantly sets in as nonbelievers start rifling through the purses of those taken and quickly move on to looting.
Meanwhile, coed Chloe’s airline pilot dad (Nicolas Cage) finds his alone time with that shapely stewardess (Nicky Whelan) interrupted when some of his passengers vanish. He ducks back into the cockpit and his co-pilot is gone. An empty uniform, a watch and ring are all that’s in his seat.
Buck Williams (Chad Michael Murray), an investigative reporter and passenger on the jet to London, loses his cameraman. In a ironically newsworthy coincidence, a weeping mom (Jordin Sparks) loses the daughter she was spiriting away, fleeing life with an abusive NFL player.
Buck starts questioning passengers — the angry dwarf (Martin Klebba), the Muslim everyone now suspects of something, a junkie who figures it’s a flashback.
And on the ground, frantic Chloe tries to get home through the abandoned cars and buses and dazed or demented survivors. Home is where Chloe expects to find the fundamentalist mother (Lea Thompson) whose proselytizing drove her away and her father into the arms of a willing stewardess.
“If she’s going to run off with another man,” Dad cracks to Chloe in the prologue, “why not Jesus?”
A little early mockery of the faithful is as close to “edgy” as this film, based on the Tim LaHaye-Jerry B. Jenkins novel, gets. There’s nothing pointed about it — no politics. The judgement here is more implied than overt — Muslims, philandering pilots, TV reporters and college kids aren’t getting into heaven. But there is one preacher left on duty.
But not even preacher man uses the R-word. No one in the movie says “Rapture,” or for that matter swears, and some SERIOUS swear-worthy phenomena is going down. It’s as if none of the non-believers has ever heard of “The Rapture” or puts the pieces of the puzzle together.
It’s inoffensive, unless you take umbrage at the idea that the only people who know not to steal are True Believers and all that keeps society from an instant meltdown are the Faithful.
All this bland action remake (Kirk Cameron’s first Christian films were versions of “Left Behind”) has to do is reunite father and daughter, to get that jet safely on the ground and for Captain Cage to get a refund for those U2 tickets he was planning on taking sexy stewardess to. Because everybody knows that when The Rapture comes, U2 won’t be around to fulfill their contract. “Left Behind,” bigger budget or not, manages most of those without much excitement or mystery.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements, violence/peril and brief drug content.
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Cassi Thomson, Chad Michael Murray, Jordin Sparks, Lea Thompson
Credits: Directed by Vic Armstrong, scripted by Paul Lalonde and John Patus, based on the Tim LaHaye-Jerry B. Jenkins novel. An eOne/Freestyle release.
Running time: 1:50

“Pride,” the feel-good movie of the fall, is an utterly charming British reminder that there’s nothing scarier to politicians than when seemingly incompatible electorates discover their common interests. Those who want us divided don’t want us to remember that “united we stand.”
In Thatcher’s Britain, the the war of organized labor came to a head with the 1984-85 miner’s strike. The Conservative government sought to try and lift the country out of its economic funk by closing down factories and coal mines all over the country. And if a by-product of that was to break unions and throw hundreds of thousands of Labor voters out of work, so much the better.
Miners went on strike, riots ensued.
In London, Mark (Ben Schnetzer) is a young, headstrong gay activist who realizes the cops are too busy busting miners’ heads to hassle him and his friends. He impulsively decides to show solidarity with the miners at London’s 1984 Gay Pride parade.
“It’s not been planned. It’s not been thought through. But it’s a really good idea.”
Maybe it is. Realizing that the right wing press, the Thatcher government and the police are common enemies, Gay Britain has a lot to gain by sticking up for Labor.
But it’s a hard sell. Miners are rural, conservative — subterranean rednecks. They harass and bully homosexuals. First Mark has to convince his community to accept these one-time enemies as friends. Only half a dozen or so join Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners — including flamboyant actor Jonathan (Dominic West), spunky lesbian Steph (Faye Marsay) and closeted pastry chef-in-training Joe (George MacKay). They raise money, enduring abuse from their fellow gays as they do.
Then Mark has to convince miners to accept it. This proves to be even more difficult. But then they stumble onto the idea of adopting a town, helping feed the families out of work because their men are on the picket line. That’s where the small Welsh town of Onllwyn comes in.
The fun in this comic historical drama is in the culture clash, the dated prejudices trotted out by screenwriter Stephen Beresford one more time for more enlightened, modern audiences to giggle over. No, every miner is not a gay-bashing thug, the gays must learn. And the miners have a ways to go themselves. Only a little get together and dancing to Culture Club can bridge that gap.
That comes when the gay activists pile into a bus and force the town — in the nicest way — to accept them by dealing with them as people, face-to face, people at war with the same enemy as the miners.
Paddy Considine plays Dai, the first miner to figure that gays and their disposable incomes, experience with police misconduct and history of agitating are natural allies. Considine, Bill Nighy (as the painfully shy union secretary) and Imelda Stanton, as the local no-nonsense female organizer of the logistics — feeding people — of the strike, are the heart of “Pride.” Director Matthew Warchus makes their scenes of acceptance downright inspiring.
Schnetzer is properly earnest and dogged as Mark. But we see the film through the eyes of Joe, and young MacKay is adorable as the wide-eyed innocent who finally finds his tribe and his purpose, if only he can come out to his parents.
And West, the teller of the tale in “300,” has the Guy Pearce/Terrence Stamp role in this “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert” meets “Brassed-Off.” Jonathan is the older gay man, cynical and embittered, who can only keep his flamboyant persona under wraps for so long. Of course he’s the life of the party. We just have to wait for it.
The joy of “Pride” is that it delivers so many easy laughs — little old ladies discovering leather bars, sexual appliances and the like — that when it hits you with a lump in the throat moment, and there are plenty of those, too, it’s unexpected. Even people far removed from the coal fields of Wales can take pride in just how far the world has come in the decades since this romanticized alliance in service of a lost cause.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief sexual content
Cast: Ben Schnetzer, Imelda Stanton, George MacKay, Faye Marsay, Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Jessica Gunning
Credits: Directed by Matthew Warchus, written by Stephen Beresford. A CBS Films release.
Running time: 2:00

The Weinstein Co. has been going longer and longer stretches between breakout hits. Even a niche studio needs the occasional “King’s Speech” to boost that bottom line, and they aren’t getting them.

So their deal with Netflix to distribute what seems like a dubious sequel to their years and years ago hit “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” putting it in a few IMAX theaters (86) and streaming it on Netflix, seems natural. The box office gamble on this film is shaky, Netflix will cover that.

But the theater chains, abused constantly by Hollywood’s ever-changing business model, have revolted. No IMAX showings at AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike, for starters. That’s always all of the nation’s cinemas. Why should they give a screen to a studio trying to cut them out of the picture?

I think this says more about the fading fortunes of TWC, which joins the ranks of tiny distributors — scores of whom already distribute their films this way. Nobody sees or hears of the movies when they play in a scattered dozen or so theaters. The films show up on VOD and Netflix and if anybody finds them, it’s by accident. I see 10-15 movies a month that fall under this release pattern.

But theaters, in need of the occasional blockbuster themselves, are right to fight back. Attendance isn’t going up, prices are.

Ridley Scott recreates ancient Egypt, perhaps fudging or blundering the dates of Jewish enslavement there, and pits Christian Bale as Moses vs. Joel Edgerton as Pharoah, with Ben Kingsley as the one who recognizes “The Chosen One.” Or in this case, the “First” chosen one. “Exodus” looks pretty good, even if it covers the same ground as earlier films.

A child’s crayon rolls across a floor. Curtains fly back from a window you thought was closed. A TV-distracted seamstress looks at her late model sewing machine less and less as the camera zooms closer and closer to that naked needle whirring at her fingertips.
And the most alarming looking child’s doll this side of “Chucky” stares, with dead eyes, out of the corner of the frame as a puzzled, haunted young mother steps through a door in the background.
Sometimes, the best effects are the cheapest.
“Annabelle” is another tale of a doll possessed, a horror movie of such hoary conventions that we meet the “knowing priest” (Tony Amendola) in the first scene and we’re introduced to the helpful, occult-curious bookstore owner (Alfre Woodard) before the first act is through.
There’s nothing surprising about this late ’60s tale, including its connection to the modern ghost stories told in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Conjuring.” But what it lacks in originality it makes up with in hair-raising execution. You will scream like a teenage girl.
Mia (Annabelle Wallis) and John (Ward Horton) may be the blandest Catholics late-’60s California has to offer. She’s a pregnant housewife, waiting on their first baby. He’s a young doctor and man of science.
A Manson Family-like slaughter hits the couple living next door and spills into their lives. That’s where the murderous cultist Annabelle got her hands on one of Mia’s antique dolls before she died. And that’s when stranger things than a Satanic murder cult attack start to happen.
Father Perez (Amendola) has a theory that feeds Mia’s growing suspicions about a doll so alarmingly grotesque it could only exist in a horror movie.
“Evil is constant. You cannot destroy what was never created.”
And Evelyn (Woodard), an Earthy widow who lost her child years before, is laughably matter-of-fact about the vintage books she sells.
“I think my family’s being haunted by a ghost.”
“Aisle four!”
Wallis (TV’s “The Tudors”), thanks to good luck, or bad, shares the name of the title character, which isn’t really the doll but the evil cultist who inhabits it. But Wallis gives a performance so flat, low-heat and soft-voiced that you wonder what the director was telling her. Surely the sound crew was shouting “She needs to SPEAK up.” If the meek are going to inherit the Earth, Wallis and Mia will surely be landed gentry.
Her underplaying almost works as a counterpoint to the rising terror of cinematographer-turned-director John R. Leonotti’s vintage effects — baby carriages that roll on their own, noises in the attic, dudes dressed like Satan. We’re lulled to sleep by the acting, jolted when something we’ve seen a million times happens.
“Annabelle” delivers nothing new, delivers a mild surprise in the closing credits which sharp-eyed “Conjuring” fans will have already picked up on. The performances don’t ensure empathy, though the young mom nature of the heroine does.
But like “Insidious” and “The Conjuring,” the only goal here is to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. And “Annabelle” does, more than once, before that dolly is done.

MPAA Rating: Rated R for intense sequences of disturbing violence and terror
Cast: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard, Tony Amendola
Credits: Directed by John R. Leonetti, written by Gary Dauberman . A New Line/Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:38