Movie Nation

“Ana Maria in Novela Land” is a comedy spoof introduces us to the wonder that is Edy Ganem by hurling her into the world of Latin
soap operas — Telenovelas. She plays both an obsessed young fan and blogger about one such soap, and the vampy diva pursued by
two men on the small screen in “Pasion sin Limites” (“Passion without Limits”), a show she is so obsessed by that it’s cost her more
than one job.
Ana Maria dreams of turning this broadly acted, comically melodramatic show into a zombie series. Her dreams and fantasies get in
the way of her work and her life. Her sister (Mercedes Mason) is about to marry, her mother (the late Elizabeth Pena, in her final film
role) doesn’t know what to do with her.
And then, something magical and electrical happens and Ana Maria is trapped in the soap, over-dressed, overly-made-up, over-
emoting.
Now, instead the dashing, rich Eduardo (Juan Pablo Gamboa) and his over-sexed son Armando (Michael Steger) competing to see who can bed and impregnate the vivacious Ariana (Ganem, again), it’s Ana Maria they want.
Georgina Garcia Riedel’s Spanish-and-English comedy mocks telenovela conventions, such as the florid guitar solo that accompanies
every seduction.
“Do you hear that?”
Only Ana Maria does. Her co-stars don’t, and are equally puzzled at her switch to English and Spanglish.
“Gringos!”
Their semi-chaste courtliness is no match for her hip hop twerking and grinding in a party scene.
“Is it the brain tumor again?” Eduardo wonders.
Luis Guzman is comically diabolical as the soap opera’s resident villain.
“You will know TRUE pain if you cross me!”
And Ana Maria has to cope with a TV world so unrealistic that it’s never shown a toilet. Try taking a home pregnancy test without one.
Meanwhile, the fictonal, shrill, slap-happy Ariana is trying to cope the “Real World” that she’s been dropped into, her new mother
(Pena) and the sister she never knew she had. She must have amnesia.
“This isn’t a gimmick where I come from,” she explains. “EVERYone has suffered from it!”
Check out the poses Ariana strikes, the dainty way the soap starlet runs and the real world consequences of dramatically slapping every person who crosses you.
“Ana Maria in Novela Land” is over-the-top, but not far enough over the top to fully pay off. But Ganem makes the title character, and
her soapy doppelganger, enough of a hoot to make it worth staying through the credits.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult situations, sexuality, soap opera violence
Cast: Edy Ganem, Luis Guzmán, Mercedes Mason, Elizabeth Peña, Michael Steger

Credits: Directed by Georgina Garcia Riedel, script by Jose Nestor Marquez, Georgina Garcia Riedel. A Synthetic release.

Running time: 1:33

Heart attacks might seem a mundane subject for a documentary. They kill suddenly. And they’re so depressingly common as to make one wonder how you get a movie out of them.
But Patrick Forbes’ “The Widowmaker” has the makings of a thriller, with heartbreaking loss captured in wrenching 911 calls from loved ones to calm, collected operators, a little comic relief provided by heart attack survivor and professional talker Larry King — and heroes and villains, possibly motivated by greed.
Gillian Anderson narrates this story of statistics — 600,000 dead Americans per year, one fourth of them dying without showing any signs they were headed for heart failure, often due to coronary blockage.
“You don’t know you have it until you’re dead.”
We hear from surviving spouses and children, see their obituaries (“Died, age 42.”) in white graphics on black screens as somber music plays in the background.
And we hear that the “vast majority of them, men and women, could have been saved.”
Forbes hunts down the principals to tell two histories –that of the heart stent, invented by Dr. Julio Palmaz, the folding tubular structure that forces open closed arteries — and the CT heart scan, the “mammogram of the heart” that identifies the calcium deposits in the heart that predict future heart problems.
These two histories, which began in 1970s San Francisco where both procedures were born, set up the film’s central conflict. Stent surgery, expensive (as much as $50,000) mass-production medicine that has made a lot of surgeons and investors rich and put many a hospital in the black, is contrasted with a non-invasive scanning that, with lifestyle and dietary changes, might head off a heart attack before it happens.
Miami “South Beach” diet Dr. Arthur Agastston is among those in “the calcium club,” championing scanning. And notable cardiologist/opinion-makers such as Dr. Steven Nissen and Dr. Martin B. Leon are stent sticklers, leaders in the big push back against the cheaper scanning protocol that might cut into the stent business.
That’s how the film paints America’s stent-mania. One surgeon boasts of how many procedures he can do in a luxuriously short work week. And we visit Dr. Palmaz in the winery he was able to open from his stent invention.
But lives have been saved by the stent, among them retired CNN host Larry King, who tells great anecdotes about a guest on his show (former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop) telling him to see a doctor, simply based on his pallor.
And the scanning folks have made many a PR blunder as they fight against powers that seem to change the rules just to keep them down.
If you haven’t been following this debate, you might not know how it came out. But Forbes makes this story compelling, moving and provocative enough to prompt outrage, never more so that when Anderson periodically updates the death toll from heart attacks in the years since both these miraculous procedures were first developed.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Narrated by Gillian Anderson, with Larry King, Dr. Julia Palmaz, Dr. Steven Nissen, Der. Martin B. Leon, Douglas Boyd, Dr. Arthur Agatston
Credits: Directed by Patrick Forbes. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:35

Director Yann Demange doesn’t want people to pigeon-hole his pulse-pounding Northern Ireland chase picture “71” as, well, “a chase picture,” or simply another tale set amid “The Troubles,” the decades-long civil war in Northern Ireland.
“When people call it ‘The Troubles,’ it feels a bit patronizing,” says Demange, a London native.  “‘Troubles’ is like a bit of spin, that we cannot really come to grips with what happened or was happening there. It was a CIVIL WAR, man. And people are still trying to find out what happened, find out what happened to their loved ones.”
And the son of a French mother and Algerian father, who calls the classic French army vs. insurgents thriller “The Battle of Algiers” his chief inspiration in making “71,” didn’t want to make “just a genre” picture — a young British soldier, separated from his unit, hunted by IRA gunmen, by more peaceable IRA members, unionist paramilitaries, the British army and British intelligence.
“You have a certain responsibility, treating a subject from recent history as divisive as this,” he says. “You can’t just exploit it and make it into a simple-minded chase movie that ignores the context that all this is happening in.”
The main sensibilities that Demange, working with a Gregory Burke screenplay, wanted to avoid offending were those of his star. Derbyshire native Jack O’Connell is Irish Catholic. He says he had to rethink his dogmatic attitudes about the conflict to play Private Gary Hook.
” I had to make myself know LESS about the situation, the context,” says O’Connell.”In Gary Hook’s generation, he wouldn’t have known a lot. He was a recruit being stationed on what he was told was a peace-keeping mission. If anything, working on this film helped me take a more impartial view. I won’t be as quick to point fingers, because the film doesn’t allow anybody to point fingers. It was a warlike situation, with heinous wrongdoings on either side. And there were innocents on both sides, which is true of any war and it’s what makes this film universal.”
Demange met with veterans of all sides of the conflict and has taken great care to show the film where it was set. He says that when you tell someone you meet in Belfast that you’ve”made a movie about ‘The Troubles,’ “they just roll their eyes. There’s a long legacy of films, from ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley,’ to ‘Bloody Sunday,’ both about Northern Ireland and ‘The Troubles’ specifically, that I thought about. But those earlier films freed me of the responsibility of giving a history lesson.”
He could use that historical legacy as backdrop for a horrific day and night in the life of a green British recruit, on the run and threatened from all sides. The resulting thriller, named after the year the violence truly escalated (“71”) is earning the best reviews of the new film year, “a lapel-grabbing, immersive viewing experience likely to shake up audiences” Trevor Johnston said in the film journal “Sight & Sound.”
Demange may be concerned with the delicate politics and opening of old wounds that his film might lead to. O’Connell, 24, starved and tested star of the POW drama “Unbroken,” was all about the “freakish heat wave” in part of shooting (he was in full combat gear for the daylight scenes) and “freeezing cold” night sequences, shot later.
In one night sequence, he overran his mark and “careered, right into the camera. Knocked myself out. Cold. I felt fairly hard done by,” says a chuckling O’Connell, who as a teen trained as a military cadet and gave some thought to a military career.  But does he, like Demange, worry about opening “old wounds” with a film about the conflict?
“I hope people see that the blame goes all around,” O’Connell says.  “I hope we’ve moved on. Yann may say he’s worried about that. But I think he’s got an Algerian passport, so he’s not THAT worried. If ‘Troubles’ start up again, he”ll be LONG gone!”

Never liked predicting the Oscars, and I have never obsessed over them the way some corners of filmfandom do.

But I do watch them, every year.  I don’t watch them for the fashions, the dance numbers, the broken English best foreign language acceptance speeches. All I want out of an Oscar night are those little magical moments when great work is recognized and the winner says something gracious and delights us in other ways.

The gold standard? Adrien Brody’s win for “The Pianist.” Laying a big shock-smooch on Halle Berry (well-played), then delivering a speech that moved and put that little victory in a global context.

Kevin Costner had a nice line on his “Dances with Wolves” night — that the voters might forget that night, “But me, my family and nobody we know EVER will.”

Anna Paquin’s breathless shock, Martin Landau’s sentimental victory and botched speech (cut off by the orchestra, thanks Bill Conti!).

So here’s what I want out of tonight.

I want J.K. Simmons to wax on the character actor’s life, and NOT read a thank you list (the way he did at the Golden Globes).

I want Patricia Arquette to weep. I want Michael Keaton to get choked up, but I won’t weep myself if Eddie Redmayne wins. Bradley Cooper? I hope he wins for a better film.

Julianne Moore should be given a regal amount of time to reflect on a stunning career.

I want a standing ovation for Indie Cinema’s undisputed King, Richard Linklater.

He should get best director, “Birdman” should win best picture.

Give Wes Anderson a writing Oscar, laud “Grand Budapest” for design, costumes, etc.

The reason I never get too worked up about the Academy Awards is the fact that the winners don’t matter, that those are not the films that endure — typically. And too many actors and others stand up there and timidly run through a laundry list of people they want to thank. Bad form. Thank your spouse, thank everybody else later that night, personally and sincerely.

Drinking games? Backless dresses, “thank my agent” lines. You know the drill.

Let this Oscars be less disappointing than the norm.  Please please.

The HEADLINE here could have read “Spongebob” soaks up $125 million. Because that’s where the kiddie comedy will sit by the end of the weekend. Quite impressive for an overexposed Nickelodeon cartoon shot on the cheap in Georgia. Big hit with LEGS for Antonio Banderas.

But the biggest news is  the STEEP plunge “Fifty Shades of Dull” is rounding up on its second weekend. It opened huge, so it was bound to fall off dramatically.  But over 70%? That’s what I call a Tyler Perry Tumble, 50% being OK, 60% being “We who ignored the critics just realized this movie sucks” and 70% suggesting filmgoers who feel the need to repent and never ever admit they spent their cash on this softcore S & M POS.  It’ll still do $25 million. Unless people get a LOT smarter by Sunday.

The new openings “McFarland, USA” and “The DUFF” are fighting it out for box office position in the $11-11.5 million range. Critically endorsed, a feel good movie and a smart, funny teen romance. And yet more people are still going to “Shades” than either of them.

A pity.

No pity is being shown “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” a cynical dog of a comedy — not laugh free, just dumb and dull.

“American Sniper” continues to make its Oscar case ($318 million and counting). Why not give the Best Picture to a hit? Maybe Bradley Cooper as a dark horse best actor? I doubt it, but it would be a popular choice with the ticket buying public.

I was pleasantly surprised by “The DUFF,” a witty, snappy teen comedy well-acted by plenty of actors entirely too old to play teens. I wasn’t alone, but critics weren’t universally in love with it. Good reviews, not great, for “DUFF” and its star, Mae Whitman. Good script by Josh A. Cagan, too. Positive messages for girls.

“McFarland, USA” is earning better reviews, a good looking feel-good Kevin Costner vehicle. I liked it, and chatted with Costner and two of the films stars (the link to that is here).

We all hated “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” a movie so cynical that they knew better than to ask John Cusack to be in it. He would have just made fun of the very idea. I guess it did well enough post-theatrical to warrant being made, but if Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson are your stars, maybe you need to find a higher profile villain or something.

“All the Wilderness” is a morose teen navel gazer. Some grabber moments, a pleasant love story — unsurprising in the extreme.

John Cusack has been reduced to Z-grade action comedies, shot in Australia and co-starring Thomas Jane, at this stage of his career.
And he STILL turned down the payday that “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” promised, which tells you all you need to know about this half-baked sequel.
It’s just as well, as Cusack was basically the aging straight man in the first version of this stoner time travel comedy. Craig Robinson walked off with the picture, about three friends and a young guy who turns out to be the son of one of them, guys who travel back to a pivotal 1986 ski weekend from their past in what appears to be a hot tub electrical accident.
The sequel is dominated by Rob Corddry, a fearless funnyman best taken in tiny doses. The doses aren’t tiny enough and the laughs are few and far between this time in the tub.
Lou (Corddry) and Nick (Robinson) have used the time travel hindsight to “invent” Google (Lougle) and steal every pop song between 1986 and the present, hits by Lisa Loeb to Nirvana. They got rich and famous.
Jacob (Clark Duke), who found out Lou was his dad, just got bitter. He was the smart one, after all, the one who could keep track of the time travel “science.” He just failed to cash in.
But their trip was no accident, “Time Machine 2” tells us. Actually, Chevy Chase, playing the dopey repair man, does.
“The hot tub doesn’t take you where you want to go. It takes you where you NEED to go.”
Since Lou’s been shot and the guys want to foil that assassination attempt, they “need” to go back in time again. So naturally, they go into the future.
“Like in ‘The Terminator,'” they crack. “Like ‘Back to the Future.’ Like ‘Looper.'”
As running gags go, this one runs straight into the ground.
“Like in ‘Lawnmower Man.'”
In 2025, Neil Patrick Harris is in the White House, Jessica Williams still hosts “The Daily Show” and Jacob is now the rich genius in charge of the Internet. They need to set things right by finding Lou’s assassin, but cocaine, booze, pills and a murderously smart Smart Car might get in the way.
The “out there” stuff here includes full-frontal nudity, forced gay sex on TV and nose candy jokes. The funniest bits involve Nick’s music, his rip off  of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay,” a big burly black man singing a woman’s romantic lament, mimicking the music video that went along with it.
Adam Scott shows up as Cusack’s character’s son, a dull, dopey FutureMan who tags along with the guys and goes on a fish-eye lens drug trip for comic effect.
There aren’t long dead stretches, but “Time Machine 2” doesn’t have much in the line of high points, either. It sort of bubbles along, one crude running gag after another, the sort of film, like the original, that will play better on home video where fans can indulge in altered states themselves, just like their heroes.
And whatever regrets Cusack may have for not returning — he says he wasn’t even asked — the proof in his omission is 93 minutes of a movie whose closing credits have the most laughs. Even at that, he didn’t miss much.

MPAA Rating:  R for crude sexual content and language throughout, graphic nudity, drug use and some violence

Cast: Rob Corddry, Craig Robison, Clark Duke,Bianca Haase
Credits: Directed by Steve Pink, written by Josh Heald. A Paramount/MGM release.

Running time: 1:33

His name is Jim White. He’s a coach. But that last name is all the students — his prospective athletes — need to know at McFarland High School.
“White. That an acceptable name where you come from, Holmes?”
Why sign up for his cross country team? Why even try?
“Nobody wins around here, ‘White.'”
McFarland is in the heart of California farm country, a town of “pickers,” Hispanic descendants of migrant workers who have settled there, many of them still picking and barely getting by. The kids have a fatalism about their future that seems at odds with their stamina and stoicism. That’s what Coach White (Kevin Costner) picks up on. If only he can get them to stop calling him “White,” or “Blanco” or “Jefe.”
As in, “I’m not running, Jefe.” (Chief).
“McFarland, USA” is an earnest feel-good sports dramedy, a simple culture clash story that is well-intentioned to a fault. The fact that it works can be laid at the feet of Kevin Costner, who plays another unfussy, flawed and totally real white guy who makes a journey past stereotypes to understanding another people, another culture.
Flawed? We’ve already seen the stone-faced White throw cleats at an unruly football player in Idaho. There’s a temper there, one that’s gotten him fired before. As in “Hoosiers” and a handful of other coach stories, White needs redemption.
That’s not what he thinks he’s found at McFarland. The town is so Hispanic and poor that he worries about his daughters, frets about how soon he can get out. It’s 1987, but his principal knows his past. It doesn’t take much to get him demoted from the football team staff.
But White hears that cross country is a coming sport in California. And he can’t help but notice the endurance of his stoop-shouldered students. If they can survive the hard field work that they do with their parents, they sure as shooting can run over hill and dale with the prep school kids who will be their main rivals.
Thomas (Carlos Pratts) makes the strongest impression among the kids, short and scowling — a no-nonsense boy who is the key recruit to this fool’s errand of a team. Niki Caro’s film spends the most time with his back story — his family struggles. But every family needs their boys working, not running.
The predictability of this “true story” works against it, as we see the over-familiar “big game” story arc play out — disrespect and losing, to “turning it around,” making it to the state championship. There’s melodramatic gang violence, mistrustful parents and fellow teachers and desperate kids who see running as their “way out.” The coach figures out a way to provide hills for the flatland kids to practice running on, covered mountains of empty almond shells.
The prejudice mostly comes from the opposing coaches and runners.
“I hear they can’t run without a cop behind’em or a Taco Bell in front of them!”
Costner makes it all work. Caro (“Whale Rider”) has us see this world through his character’s eyes, and Costner makes White’s story arc — from pre-judging this place and its people, to understanding both — compelling. He conveys a kind of decency that seems sanitized and idealized, until you notice that at every point, kind and whimsical Hispanic townspeople surprise the Whites (Maria Bello is the Mrs.) and broaden their “white” horizons.
“McFarland” is old-fashioned without being dull, pandering without feeling cloying or racist. As with “Black or White,” in which he plays a narrow-minded man who has his eyes opened when he sees past racist stereotypes, Costner plays a person whose ignorance of other people and other cultures is his greatest sin. He does not make these guys caricatures. Caricatures cannot change. Real people, Costner’s performances suggest, can.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, some violence and language

Cast: Kevin Costner, Carlos Pratts, Hector Duran, Maria Bello

Credits: Directed by Niki Caro, written by Christopher Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, Grant Thompson. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:08