Movie Nation

Simon Bolivar had traits from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Napoleon, all in one titanic personality.
Born to wealth, he came to champion equal rights for all South Americans. A military dilettante, he fought in over 100 battles and had a hand in liberating much of Latin America.
Statesman, warrior, “Enlightenment Man” and lover, that’s a lot of Bolivar to squeeze into one movie.
So “The Liberator” is an ambitious overreach, a Latin epic with Spanish court intrigues and battles, epiphanies and seductions, at two hours barely sketching in the mythic man for whom Bolivia is named and much of South America owes its independence to.
Edgar Ramirez (“Zero Dark Thirty”) makes an earthy, muscular impression as Bolivar, a man we meet as he comes home to his last lover (Juana Acosta), Manuela, who only wants to liberate him from his uniform. This is the night, late in his career, when his enemies came closest to seizing him, but first things first.
In a long flashback, we see the life and career that brought him to that defining moment. A member of Venezuela’s late 18th/ early 19th century landed gentry, Bolivar was raised by a black slave woman, educated and yet slow to see the need to reform a system which placed him at the top, from birth. But an outspoken teacher who has embraced The Enlightenment principles that fired the American and French Revolutions has his ear. And young Simon is moved to action.
“The noble savage has finally awakened!” teacher Simon Rodriguez (Francisco Denis) declares. And so he has. Bolivar first commissions an experienced but aged General Montverde (Imanol Arias) whose motives he questions, and then takes on the mantle of leadership himself, first enduring a sojourn in the wilderness where he comes to realize who this revolution is really for.
Danny Huston is deliciously duplicitous as a British backer of the revolutionaries.
“It’s not every day that an entire continent comes into play,” his Torkington (a fictional figure) purrs, hoping Bolivar won’t dig too deep to consider why the Brits want the Spanish colonies independent.
“The Liberator” may be a Cliff Notes version of South American history, but Ramirez breathes life into it and makes us care, even as we dash from this bloody struggle on the field to that debate and compromise in the legislature.
But Ramirez hauls this entire truncated Timothy Sexton script (he wrote the recent Cesar Chavez bio-pic) through the Andes, into decades of battles, into Spain and across the finish line, giving a charismatic, impassioned performance in Spanish and English. He suggests an impulsive, frustrated man straining to achieve the impossible, to be both a liberator and leader, a visionary and pragmatic soldier.
So even though “The Liberator” is no more successful in achieving its goals than Bolivar was — he wanted a United States of South America — Ramirez lets us appreciate a film, like its subject, whose reach exceeds its grasp.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, sexual situations
Cast: Edgar Ramirez, María Valverde, Danny Huston, Gary Lewis, Imanol Arias, Juana Acosta
Credits: Directed by Alberto Arvelo, written by Timothy J. Sexton. A Cohen Media release.
Running time: 1:58

It says something about us as a culture that the moment that provokes gasps of shock in “Men, Women & Children” comes when a media-paranoid mother deletes text messages from her teenage daughter’s phone.
We’re shocked at this parental betrayal, the invasion of privacy. It’s only later that we remember, “Oh yeah, Mom PAID for the phone” and that everything else in this ensemble social media soap opera underlines how that shrill mother (Jennifer Garner) is right to be scared to death of how children, women and men are abusing this new hand-held god we worship.
It’s too bad this broad, heavy-handed tragi-comedy undercuts many of its most though provoking moments, further evidence that after this, “Young Adult” and “Labor Day,” director Jason Reitman may never come close to “Up in the Air” again.
The opening blunder of this social media sermon is the ironic, dry and sometimes jokey-profane narration that begins the film and deflates it throughout. Emma Thompson voices that miscalculation, connecting events in and around East Vista Texas High School with Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” view of the “pale blue dot” planet that we live on and the Voyager spacecraft.
Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler are drifting through a marriage that has him obsessed with online porn and her bored enough to visit a “have an affair” dating site. Their teen son (Travis Tope) is so deep into web porn that his adolescent desires may be permanently warped.
Judy Greer plays a single mom whose failed acting career means she’s willing to exploit her aspiring-floozy of a daughter (Olivia Crocicchia) on a website filled with provocative poses. The kid, Hannah, is a cheerleader anxious to come off as a tramp. Both she and mom call her web devotees “fans” when “perverts” is closer to the mark.
Allison (Elena Kampouris) is also a cheerleader, one who spent the previous summer tapping into the online eating-disorder underground, starving herself into a stick figure. Somehow, her parents (J.K. Simmons is the dad) fail to notice her emaciated state and the walls covered with photos of rail-thin models, egging on her anorexia.
Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever of TV’s “Justified”) is the bookish girl whose mother (Garner) oversees her social media activities and organizes other parents to do the same. That could put a damper on the attentions of sensitive, sweet football dropout Tim (Ansel Elgort of “The Fault in Our Stars”).

This is the “normal” relationship here. They actually talk, try to connect. They touch, in a nonsexual way. Everybody else is constantly staring down at their phone or tablet, cutesy thought-bubbles showing what they’re typing pop up over their heads.
Tim’s quitting the team in football-obsessed Texas is a sign of crisis. He’s deep into Sagan’s “pale blue dot,” and figures football is pointless and “doesn’t matter.” Blasphemy.
“Something about sitting down and talking with Brandy DID matter, and this was enough,” the narrator drones.
That’s as quotable and as deep as “Men, Women & Children” gets. There are a TV season’s worth of soap opera betrayals, melodramatic traumas and blundering efforts to learn from and escape this media miasma.
And standing, tearful and fearful, in judgement is Garner’s mother figure, ridiculed and mockable and proof positive that Reitman just doesn’t get his own point.
“Before you go, I’m going to give you a pamphlet on the dangers of selfies!”
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content including graphic dialogue throughout-some involving teens, and for language
Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer, Ansel Elgort, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner
Credits: Directed by Jason Reitman, written by Erin Cressida Wilson and Jason Reitman, based on the Chad Kultgen novel. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:54

Seeing this one in prep for an interview with the title character. I remember interviews with Michael Keaton in the ’90s as being singularly unpleasant. He made people cry. Not me, but other journalists.

It was all because of where he was, how far he had fallen from what he had been. That’s why “Birdman” has everybody so worked up. He takes on this has-been/used-to-be “Batman” thing pretty much head on.

Or was given a vehicle to do just that by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

An all-star supporting cast (Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Zach Galifianakis, Emma Stone) helps realize this take on hasbeendom, subtitled “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”).

“Birdman” opens in a gradual rollout in a couple of weeks.

As I have said several places and at several times, Laika’s animated offerings are, to a one — hard sells. Let’s hope so, because the very fine “Boxtrolls” will need a healthy month long run to overcome a weak ($17.2 million) opening in order to ensure Laika gets to make another “ParaNorman,” “Coraline” or “Boxtrolls.” It’ll be lucky to hit $50, not nearly enough to keep the lights on.
“The Equalizer” could become a Denzel Washington franchise, seeing as how it’s based on the TV series and make a whopping $35 million, the best Denzel opening in ages. If he’s in it for the money these days, we should see a sequel or two.

“The Maze Runner” had a healthy second weekend, but “This is Where I Leave You” held a very high portion of its opening weekend audience and should linger in the top ten until November.

Nothing else opened wide, though “Pride” shows signs of being a seniors-oriented sleeper.

Reviews for “The Liberator,” or “Libertador,” the ambitious Latin American film that tries to tell the story of Simon Bolivar, the general and statesman often called the “George Washington of South America,” have been more respectful than enthusiastic.
“The man himself remains elusive,” Variety said of the two hour epic. Bolivar is perhaps too much “an icon” to be easily rendered “a flesh and blood human being.”
Fortunately, as the Hollywood Reporter counters, “The Liberator” has “the charismatic and capable Edgar Ramirez” in the title role. The star of the acclaimed terrorist biography “Carlos” and “Zero Dark Thirty” is Venezuelan, as was the 19th century president and military genius.
We caught up with Ramirez, 37, in New York.
Q: Unlike most people in the United States, you learned much about Bolivar in school, growing up in Venezuela. What surprised you in researching him for the film?
Ramirez: “Even in South America, when we were taught about Bolivar, we were never told how intertwined American independence, the French Revolution and Latin American independence were. They came from the same Enlightenment ideas and values. Those ideas traveled from the birth of the United States to the French Revolution to Latin America — Washington and Jefferson to Napoleon to Bolivar.
“We all learn our history, on both sides of the border, in isolation. And they were connected!”
“Bolivar’s ideas were similar to Jefferson’s, and by extension Lincoln’s ideas about freedom were similar to Bolivar’s. Bolivar was the first Western head of state to set out to abolish slavery.”
Q: What sort of pressure did you feel having to portray an icon, a man who has a country named for him (Bolivia), who was so important to the independence of so many countries in South America?
Ramirez: “He was a brilliant statesman and a brilliant strategist. Being Venezuelan, it was a great privilege to portray a character so complex, with so many contradictions — the fighter, the thinker, the lover. We’ve made an action film with great social debates and two interesting love stories.”
Q: The film shows him as a son of wealth who spent much time in Europe, and a little slow to embrace the idea of abolishing slavery, despite being raised by Hippolyta, a black slave he called his mother. A contradiction in the man?
Ramirez: “Bolivar’s ideas, some of them, would seem transgressive, even today. He was a product of his time, but a black woman raised him and that had to impact his views on slavery. As he says in the film, ‘We want this project to free all men — not just landowners, but brown men, black men and white men.’ He was a very special figure in history
“A biopic is not a photograph. It’s a painting. It’s an approximation. Who knows how he sounded? Who knows what was deep in his heart? We were inspired by the size of his personality, the scope of his saga. And we wanted to include his flaws, his impulsiveness, and show him changing.”
Q: Historians often fault him for having Napoleonic tendencies, for staying in power and on the stage too long, unlike George Washington, who stepped aside. Does that explain Latin America’s slow movement to stable, representative democracies?
Ramirez: “The ways independence came to North and South America were entirely different. The British colonies already had been allowed to participate in continental politics. They paid taxes to Britain, but their political life was run by Americans. You were prepared to govern.
“In Latin America, everything ran out of Spain. No Spanish subject born in the Indies could hold any significant political post. Only Spaniards from Spain could be appointed, not elected, to those jobs. We did not know how to govern. We only knew how to obey a strongman.
“Bolivar and the revolutionaries were trying to bring The Enlightenment to a system straight out of the Middle Ages.”
“We have been dealing with that for 200 years, now.”

The telling day for any kids’ cartoon is the Saturday take, opening weekend, at the box office. It’s a full day when parents take their kids to the movies, and estimates from outfits like Deadline.com are always low, coming in Friday, because nobody there seems to take this into account.

And this movie’s commercials show just how hard it is to market. The trailers and TV spots don’t sell it, do it justice. As with “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” the texture of the stop motion animation, the dry wit of the writing and vocal performances, don’t lend themselves to a slapstick sales pitch. And it’s delightful.

So, low $20s, based on my read of the Friday take. Upper teens says Deadline.

Denzel Washington has a big hit, and a franchise-launch (a first for him) with “The Equalizer.” It cleaned up Friday and looks to clear $30 million by midnight Sunday.

This, despite the fact that Universal opened the similar but inferior “A Walk Among Tombstones” last weekend. Liam is cool, but past his “Taken” expiration date. And whatever business that film did Denzel just took away.

“This is Where I Leave You” is holding audience, thanks to the lack of competition.  Better comedies like “The Skeleton Twins” have not opened widely enough to crack the top ten.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” lingers, “Let’s Be Cops” is turning into one of the biggest comedies of the year. Go figure.

Somehow, the culture has twisted the hunt for happiness into a need to travel…the world.
Maybe that’s just Hollywood shorthand, but every Walter Mitty seems to think that “the answer” lies in an effort to “Eat, Pray, Love” your way through a lot of stamps on your passport. The movies spun from this idle, indulgent conceit are always self-satisfied excuses for movie stars and producers to span the globe for a working vacation.
Which brings us to “Hector and the Search for Happiness,” a glib and overlong tale of a frustrated London psychiatrist who sets out to do “research” to ostensibly help his patients, who are getting no happier under his care. Nor is he.
Actually, Hector (Simon Pegg) has taken to snapping at the rich housewife who whines about having to cut the number of days a week she employs a nanny. And he wonders why he’s unable to commit to his marketing guru girlfriend (Rosamund Pike). So he takes off.
He flies to China and Tibet, Africa and America, meets everyone from rich businessfolk and a Chinese “student” (Ming Zhao) to an African warlord and South America druglord (Jean Reno). He reconnects with college pals (Toni Collette among them) who have got on with the business of living.
And he takes notes.
“A lot of people think happiness means being richer or more important.” That he picks up from a rich guy (Stellan Skarsgard) who teaches him the pleasures of first class travel and exotic indulgences.
“Happiness is answering your calling.”
“Many people only see happiness in their future.”
That one seems to apply to Hector, putting off commitment when all he really needs is the simple advice from a passenger on an African flight.
“Does that person bring you predominantly A) Up or B) Down?”
These “rules” are strictly fortune cookie philosophy, and the travels — odd moments of slapstick or offhanded Pegg one-liners, exchanges with a young Buddhist monk who tells him the monastery he’s trekked to is “closed on Monday “– are trite, tried and true.
But a couple of co-stars animate the search. Jean Reno’s paranoid druglord is not the sort of fellow you want to run into in a bar, in Africa or anywhere else. He asks questions, one of which stands out.
“What’s in it for you?”
And Collette, as a college girlfriend, gets a dandy read-the-Brit-the-riot act scene.
Hector freely acknowledges he is experiencing a #richpeoplesproblem, both personally and professionally. Africans who “know how to celebrate” and embrace a really good “sweet potato stew” may have it right, fortune cookie philosophy in a nutshell.
The one touching moment is a gimme — a chance encounter with a cancer patient (Chantel Herman).
None of which add up to the catharsis the quest promises or the comedy the film supposedly is. Hector might have been better off staying at home and reading a book, which also pretty much applies to the audience, in this case.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some brief nudity
Cast: Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard, Ming Zhao, Christopher Plummer
Credits: Directed by Peter Chelsom, screenplay by Maria von Heland, Tinker, Lindsay and Peter Chelsom, based on the novel by François Lelord. A Relativity release.
Running time: 1:40

There’s something about stop motion 3D animation — the not-quite-real textures of skin and hair, the quite real cloth and metal, the subtle gloomy lighting effects — that says “spooky.”
All the best animated films with a hint of Halloween have been stop motion animation or digital efforts that duplicate that hand-molded model look — “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline.”
“The Boxtrolls” is from Laika, the studio that made “ParaNorman” and “Coraline.” This adaptation of an Alan Snow novel (“Here Be Monsters”) is inventive and fanciful and almost certainly the best animated film of the year. It’s spooky and funny and a little twisted, with a little social commentary in the “ParaNorman” style. Start to finish, it’s a delight.
The title characters are pointy-eared trolls who live in abandoned cardboard boxes and rummage through the garbage cans of Cheesebridge at night. They collect geegaws and such; door knockers, busted alarm clocks, abandoned toys. When the lights come on, they skulk inside the boxes that they wear. When the sun comes up they flee below ground where they speak Minions-style gibberish, compare notes on what they’ve collected, tinker and invent.
But they’re feared. They’ve stolen a human baby, so that must be in their diet.
“Hide your cheese,” purrs the red hatted exterminator the townsfolk have hired to wipe out the trolls. “Hide your tender and delicious babies!”
Archibald Snatcher, voiced with malevolent glee and Brit-villain intonations by Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, wants to swap his red hat for a white hat. The men who wear those white hats, led by Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris), are an exclusive lot, rich members of a secret society who do exotic cheese tastings behind closed doors.
But Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter Winnifred (Elle Fanning, with a plummy English accent) spies the Boxtrolls at work, and sees a boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright) in their ranks. There’s more to them than Snatcher is letting on, and as she gets to know the boy, “Eggs,” she and we learn something of their true nature and their history.
Animation vets Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi and their design team make the most of this 3D world. We see the light through the thin cloth brim of Snatcher’s red hat, the mangled angles of his crooked teeth, the smoke and cinders from his assorted steam-powered vehicles and the wriggling leeches one of his henchmen (voiced with great relish by Tracy Morgan, Nick Frost and Richard Ayoade) treat “The Boss” with when he’s had too much cheese.
There are grownup jokes — street names are all cheese ingredients, cheese jokes and cheese references — “What the Gouda?” And small children will delight in the gross gags; bug eating and the like.
The plot is as clockwork as the many gadgets the trolls swipe and Snatcher uses to hunt them, with hints of class warfare and fear-mongering slipped in.
The story’s English fairytale tone, English accents and setting (late Victorian) call to mind Aardman’s “Wallace and Gromit” films. Laika’s earlier efforts hinted that they’d learned from those masters of this animation style. “Boxtrolls” suggests that they’ve mastered it.

MPAA Rating: PG for action, some peril and mild rude humor
Cast: The voices of Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Jared Harris, Toni Collette, Nick Frost, Tracy Morgan
Credits: Directed by Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi , screenplay by Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, based on an Alan Snow novel. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:37

“The Equalizer” serves up Denzel Washington at his coolest.
Eyes weary with experience but still taking it all in, skull shaved to hide the advancing years, he still carries himself with that feline stride — the greatest, most masculine movie star walk since John Wayne’s.
He’s almost too cool for this film based on the ’80s TV series starring Edward Woodward as an ex secret agent who uses his retirement years to make the world a better place, righting one wrong at a time. Washington’s “Training Day” director treats him worshipfully, reminding us just what a treasure this Oscar winning screen hero has been for the past thirty years.
Robert McCall is a meticulous man, from the way he neatly shelves concrete mix at the home improvement warehouse store he works in to the ordered, spare apartment of shelved books and freshly-washed dishes where he lives.
He brings his own tea bag, carefully wrapped, to his favorite Boston diner when he can’t sleep, a place to read “The Old Man and the Sea” or some other novel from the list of 100 greatest books in English.
And he notices things. Like the fresh black eye that aspiring singer/teen hooker Terri’s wearing. We’ve seen he’s helpful guy, physically coaching an obese colleague to prep him for a physical for a security guard job. He tries to help Terri (Chloe Grace Moretz). And that’s when we discover the past this fastidious, working class man has been hiding.
“Got to be who we are in this world,” he says with a shrug. He sizes up a room full of Russian mobsters, the camera catching the engraved knife one thug is fingering, the bottle next to another, the corkscrew a tattooed, muscle-bound bartender is using. If we’ve seen the Robert Downey Jr. “Sherlock Holmes” movies, we know he’s working out the geometry of a brawl. We what’s coming. And it’ll be bloody.
Washington’s McCall rarely lets us see pangs of guilt, a promise he made to not return to the life of violence. And he never lets us see McCall lose his cool. He gives bad guys –crooked cops, the Russian killer (Marton Csokas) tracking him down — folksy options.
“When you pray for rain, you’ve got to deal with the mud, too.”
The villains, as they do in such morality tales, never do what’s good for them, never take the option that won’t leave them with a corkscrew in their windpipe.
Through it all, Washington’s stillness is emphasized, so much so that the film slows down just to make sure we appreciate the presence and the talent behind it.
And Fuqua, building on material even thinner than last week’s slightly inferior Liam Neeson vengeance-thriller “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” draws this out, announcing “Equalizer” as a franchise in the making.
Which is a shame. He almost turns Denzel, an invited, warmly embraced dinner guest into that guest who doesn’t know when to leave.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas
Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Richard Wenk, based on the TV series. A Columbia Pictures release.
Running time: 2:11

“Good People” is the cinematic equivalent of a page turner, a thriller that leaves no thriller trope unused, no melodramatic stone unturned, no foreshadowing un-shadowed.
Heck, it’s even got bad guys driving a Jaguar — just as the TV commercials promise.
But a good cast, some solid if gruesome action beats and a short running time mean we’ll stick with it, turning those predictable pages right up to the grand predictable finale.
James Franco and Kate Hudson are an American couple trying for a “fresh start” in London. She’s a school teacher, desperate to get pregnant. He’s a contractor/laborer who has spent their last cent restoring his grandmother’s run down house. His business in Chicago went bust, she had a miscarriage, so they moved.
But they’ve sublet the basement of their apartment to a thug, a guy who double-crossed the wrong people while robbing a Euro-drug lord (Omar Sy) of his “Liquid O” — heroin. When the double-crosser dies, the couple finds the body. And his cash stash.
That means the drug lord, who calls himself Genghis Khan, is making threats. The psychotic mobster (Sam Pruell) whose brother was one of those double-crossed and killed in the robbery is making more threats.
And the cop (Tom Wilkinson) who has been warned away from pursuing those assorted villains by his possibly corrupt boss is sure these Americans know more and possess more than they’re letting on. The cop’s daughter died of a drug overdose, by the way.
That’s a big feature of this script, based on a Marcus Sakey novel — that need to wholly motivate everybody involved. Khan wants revenge, Jack (Spruell) wants the cash, Anna (Hudson) needs in vitro fertilization money and Tom (Franco) needs to get them out from underwater, financially. And the cop wants closure.
Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.
“Don’t you know when you find a pot of gold, there’s always a monster guarding it?”
Omar Sy stands out in this cast, smacking his lips with every Genghis Khan pun. He is “expanding my empire,” he cracks. Spruell is frightening in every second of screen time.
The beatings are fierce, the blood flows and everybody acts exactly the way characters in thrillers act, with undue bravado, blind lust for cash and easily disregarding the pain of this broken nose or that flesh wound.
Silly stuff, but you can’t help but turn the page to see if your guess as to how this all will come out is as on the money as you just know it is.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence and language
Cast: James Franco, Kate Hudson, Tom Wilkinson, Omar Sy, Sam Spruell
Credits: Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz , written by Kelly Masterson, based on the Marcus Sakey novel. A Millennium release.
Running time: 1:26