Movie Nation

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

James Charm is obsessed with death. We meet him scribbling an obituary for a dead crow he spies in a cornfield.
He narrates his life story in an enervated, depressing drone, always quoting his father.
Dad loved the wilderness, he says. “It’s a place where all things go to live, and all things go to die.”
Turns out, his dad is dead. And James (Kodi Smit-McPhee) isn’t coping well. He’s developed the habit of predicting deaths. That’s sad when you’re talking about your pet hamster. But that’ll get you beaten up when you send notes to classmate Cory that he “will die in 279 days.”
Writer-director Michael Johnson covers a lot of familiarly morbid teen ground in “All the Wilderness,” a film with touches of “Ordinary People” and a hint of “Harold & Maude.” But touches and a hint aren’t enough to lift this morose movie into anything any of us need to see or hear to deepen our understanding of teen depression, grief and love.
James’s mother (Virginia Madsen) can only pay lip service to his condition, home-schooling him to keep him out of the reach of school bullies who won’t understand what he’s going through.
Danny DeVito is Walter, apparently his shrink. It’s one of the movies cleverest touches that Walter makes his sessions more like distracted conversations with the kids. He carves and sands wooden chess pieces as they chat. Less intimidating, if a little insulting.
James is that classic movie-awkward teen, smart enough to quote Carl Sandburg poems, clueless enough to try this as a pickup line, noticing a pretty girl’s ring.
“Did you that turquoise isn’t actually from Turkey?”
Val (Isabelle Fuhrman) works in the family bakery concocting odd donuts and eclairs — dipped in Tang, the breakfast drink, for instance. Accessible and beguiling, she’s also seeing Walter.
And then there’s Harmon (Evan Ross), a hip black teen musician who takes James under his wing. Dancing, chasing a girl and hanging out — just what James needs.
The money moments in Johnson’s film aren’t the overworn teens flirting, fighting and shoplifting scenes. It’s when his demons literally get the best of James. He finds himself chased down dark alleys, onto buses, by hooded wraiths straight out of “Ghost.” Chilling.
McPhee and Fuhrman are child actors best known for “The Road” and “Orphan,” respectively. They have good screen presence. And even if this slight movie never quite finds its way out of the you-know-what, each at least shows his and her potential for finding better roles as teens, maybe even sticking with acting into adulthood.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult themes and situations, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Virginia Madsen, Evan Ross, Isabelle Fuhrman, Danny DeVito
Credits: Written and directed by Michael Johnson. A release.

Running time: 1:22

Costner knew McFarland, California, growing up.
“I was down the road, about 45 miles, in Visalia,” he says. “When I was in high school, my baseball team played those guys. I knew a little about that world, I had this little connection, and I was moved by the story and I wanted to help tell it.”
“This story,” in the new Disney sports drama “McFarland, USA,” is the true tale of how a dead-end town, surrounded by farm fields, whose population has transformed into migrant Hispanic laborers and their descendents, was transformed by its high school cross country team. Kids who worked with with their families, mornings, nights and weekends, became the star long distance runners in a state where, as in much of America — cross country is a prep school sport.
“The miraculous thing about this story was this town wasn’t growing anything but vegetables and this prison, where a lot of young men there ended up finding themselves locked up,” says Costner, who first heard about McFarland’s farmworker kids and their nine state titles in a Sports Illustrated article over a dozen years ago. That was the endgame for a lot of these kids, because they couldn’t find meaningful work to get out and advance themselves. The idea of a high school and a prison co-existing the way they do, in a community this size, was a really interesting backdrop…That team gave this town a new identity.”
The sports lover, star of “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and “Tin Cup,” saw another “gee whiz” factor in the McFarland story.
“To win one championship is hard enough. To win nine, you’ve got to wonder, ‘What’s in the WATER down there?'”
Costner plays Jim White, a Caucasian physical education teacher thrust into an alien, Hispanic world in 1987 McFarland. Though the script “takes a little license with the real Jim White” (think “Hoosiers”), he was a man who looked out at kids bent over tomato plants all day and saw stamina and stoicism.
“These kids on that team back in the ’80s, they’d wake up at 4:30 in the morning to pick in the fields,” says Carlos Pratts, who plays Thomas, the star of McFarland’s team, a boy whose family needs his picking income to make ends meet. “They’d pick, then go to school, then come home, go to sleep and do it all over again. Add in the running, and you have to wonder if these kids were machines. They were our inspirations.”
The flat farm country around McFarland isn’t the best place to train for meets in the nearby mountains and foothills. So, in the movie, Coach White has the kids run up and down canvas covered mountains of almonds, picked by farm labor from the local trees.
“They really did that, and those mounds are still there, real people picked them and real kids ran up and down them to train,” says Hector Duran, who plays another runner on that first McFarland team. “Amazing. It’s about using the resources that you have.”
“McFarland, USA” is earning glowing reviews, with critics suggesting that as formulaic as the story can seem, Costner’s “slyly enjoyable lead performance” (Variety) makes it work. ”
Costner’s name got the movie made, and one reason he decided to sign on was recognizing “the coaches, the teachers who stay. These kids won nine championships, and Jim White’s journey was to immerse himself in a community so thoroughly that this triumph could happen,” Costner says. “In the psychology of success, you do something, you master it, you move on and up. And out. Jim didn’t do that. He stayed.
“There was an important coach in my life who did the exact same thing…There are teachers that just stay. It’s not just because it’s more comfortable. It’s because they have something to give this place and they see how important that is.”

It’s playing in the provinces, doing best in those places Mel Gibson’s Jesus picture made most of its money — Red States.

And that added up to a $31 million Friday for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the woman exploiting/borderline abusive S & M “romance novel” movie starring a couple of unknowns, directed by another unknown. A $91 million President’s Day Weekend is in sight.

“Kingsman: The Secret Service” managed a very big late Thursday and all-day Friday and looks to beat “Spongebob” into second place, over $35-39 million.

“Spongebob” will tally another $36 million or so, over four days. “Paddington Bear” is close to $65 million, and will be around $70 by weekend’s end.

“Imitation Game” has cleared $80 million, overall.
“American Sniper” has cleared the $300 million mark ($307) and will be around $320 by weekend’s end.

just turned 80, has lost much of her vision and is thus scaling back her film career. But what a career Judi Dench has had.

From the Bard to Bond, with an Oscar in between. Seven Oscar nominations, in all, in a storied career that put her on everything from British sitcoms to every great work the stage has to offer a woman.

I’m talking with her about her turn in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

Questions for Dame Judi? I’m serious, I could use the suggestions. Comment below, and thanks for the help.