Movie Nation

“The Spy Who Amused Me,” James Bond, has abdicated that title. That’s the gap the Mark Millar/Dave Gibbons comic “The Secret Service” leaped into, and it’s territory that feels most at home in the film from that comic, “Kingsman: The Secret Service.”
Often, it’s a droll riff on spy movies and what “makes a gentleman,” fine tailored (bespoke) suits and the clash of classes evident by the posh accents the movies so often attach to British secret agents.
But almost as often it’s an atonal, hyper-violent action comedy that goes on too long, tries far too hard, spills far too much blood and relies more than it should on Samuel L. Jackson’s character’s lisp for laughs.
A super secret spy agency, privately financed, is run out of a British tailor’s shop. They’re not numbered, MI-6 style, but given names from Camelot — Lancelot, Galahad, Arthur. When one of their number is killed, Galahad (Colin Firth) gives a medal to the fallen man’s son, promising him one big “favor.” If the kid, who grows up street tough, bullied in a troubled home, ever finds himself in over his head, call this phone number. The “service” will get him out of his fix.
That’s how Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, falls in with the men of Kingsman. Much of the movie is a sluggish set-up — Eggy’s recruitment, training for “the most dangerous job interview in the world,” attempts to fit in with the Oxford/Cambridge men (and women) who comprise this private secret service. Michael Caine is “Arthur,” who runs the show, Mark Strong is the Scottish fixer/gadget guru, Merlin.
Samuel L. shows up as a billionaire environmental activist, wearing a grin, an assortment of NY Yankees hats (worn askew) and a speech impediment.
“Tho thorry you had to deal with this…unpleathanneth!”
If you’ve ever seen the least of the Bond films, “Moonraker,” the plot will seem familiar. Famous personages are disappearing, then reappearing, and the eco-fanatic supervillain, who speaks of himself in movie super villain terms, may be behind it.
Yes, it’s one of those spoofs where characters say stuff about what happens in a “typical” spy movie — the drinks served, the elaborately planned murders, the give-the-whole-plot away speeches the villain makes before those murders. Hilarious. And not even remotely novel.
Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn (“Kick Ass”) doesn’t turn the genre conventions on their ear so much as celebrate them. Sofia Boutella plays a colorless yet deadly assistant to the billionaire, a kick boxer with curved sword blades for feet. Firth wears his suits impeccably, sips his whisky impeccably and purrs his posh-accented lines most impeccably of all.
“Manners maketh man,” Galahad says gallantly, quoting a 16th century head of the exclusive Eton prep school.
Firth makes a fine case for the James Bond he could have been, edited into action heroics worthy of JB (“James Bond? Jason Bourne? Jack Bauer?”). Strong does yeoman’s work in support, but the young lead — adept at parkour and slinging that Cockney accent — doesn’t inspire much of anything. Caine’s role is borderline set-dressing.
Fans of Vaughn (“Layer Cake” was his break-out film) and the genre will find much to grin about, but little that warrants a bigger laugh. Something about the Tarantino-ish bloodshed, the crass F-bombs, just feels off. The villain’s point of view seems both reasonable and elitist. Even though Galahad professes an anti-elitism, the service, the milieu, all smack of the privilege of educated weak-chinned aristocracy.
And truth be told, the movie never recovers from its most violent scene, played as slo-mo “cool” but simply a massacre, and a damned gory one.
Still, as February comic book movies go, this works well enough to make you glad they didn’t cook up another “Ghost Rider.”

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong violence, language and some sexual content

Cast: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Samuel L. Jackson, Sofia Boutella, Michael Caine, Sophie Cookson

Credits: Directed by Matthew Vaughn, script by based on the Mark Millar/Dave Gibbons comics. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:09

It wouldn’t be a bad thing if “Pitch Perfect” Anna Kendrick spent the rest of her film career doing nothing but musicals. Her pleasant, Broadway-polished alto was right at home with Sondheim in “Into the Woods,” had a pop star sheen for “Pitch Perfect” and is given its best showcase yet in “The Last Five Years,” a romantic musical about the ups and downs of two young lovers struggling to stay together as they pursue artistic careers in Manhattan.
No, it’s not deep. But the film, a sung-through (virtually no dialogue) musical by Jason Robert Brown, is sweet and sunny and occasionally funny. And it’s sad and pitiful in equal measure, with both Kendrick and co-star Jeremy Jordan (TV’s “Smash”) bringing passion and pain to Brown’s tunes in the New York settings where Richard Lagravenese parks his camera.
We meet Kathy, sitting on the floor of an under-lit apartment, a woman emptied out by grief.
“Jamie is over and where can I turn?” she sings. “Covered in scars I did nothing to earn.”
A five year relationship seems at an end. Over the course of 94 minutes, their story skips back and forth through time, from passionate make-out moments, to career interludes, from painful cheating to giddy pre-marital bliss.
Jamie is an aspiring writer who gets his novel published and becomes a best-selling author and literary star. And, in a publishing district song and dance number, he brags that he “got all this and more, before 24!”
Kathy swoons when the Jewish boy tearing her clothes off croons “I’m breaking my mother’s heart” for his “shiksa goddess.”
The signs of trouble come from her realization that “True, I tend to follow in his stride instead of walking side by side.” And he has this wan little ode to temptation after they’re married, “It’s Fine.” Kathy auditions and auditions and auditions, singing about the cattle calls of a young actress’s life.
“I suck, I suck I suuuuuuuuuuck,” never sounded so self-doubtingly sweet.
Kendrick and Jordan make us forget they’re singing and engage with their acting, which is all you want from most musicals. The tunes are fairly generic, in the modern Broadway idiom (the stage show only made it to off-Broadway). But Lagravenese (“P.S. I Love You”) gets laughs and romantic anticipation out of Kathy’s backstage showstopper, with backing dancers and a snake for company.
The brisk production makes these “Five Years” pass quickly, and Kendrick, with able support from Jordan, makes one long for her to get a shot at other intimate romantic musicals on the big screen. Here’s a film that reminds us that every cinematic song cycle doesn’t have to be as big and meaty as “Chicago” or as effects-packed as “Into the Woods.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, brief strong language and a drug image

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan

Credits: Written and directed by Richard Lagravenese, based on the Jason Robert Brown musical. A Radius/TWC release.

Running time: 1:34

There’s something in exploitation movies that should bring out the parent in us all.
All these gorgeous, nubile young women stripping and simulating sex acts, and submitting themselves to be slaughtered on camera — who ARE their parents?
In “Girlhouse,” a sexploitation-meets-slashploitation thriller, the only cast member with the good sense to go by an assumed name is the hip hop MC Slaine, the hefty fellow playing the beady-eyed pervert-killer.
The women to be slain here are inhabitants of one of those online voyeur “dorms,” fetching coeds sexing it up for the cameras in most every room in their multi-bedroom McMansion in rural North Carolina.
Girlhouse is where Kylie (Ali Cobrin) takes her new job. She’s broke and she needs the cash. She seems a little demure for all this, a little reluctant to admit she’s dipping her toe in porn.
“It’s not skanky ‘Boogie Nights’ porn,” she rationalizes.
And her new boss (James Thomas) insists “I’m no pimp. I’m the Hugh Hefner of the 21st century!”
Kylie declares that she’s “thought this through completely,” and that “I really don’t see how anything bad could happen.” Because, you know, she’s never seen a “Friday the 13th” movie.
Kylie just has to get along with Mia, Kat, Devon and the rest, and get it on –on camera, for the bored businessmen, oversexed teens and college boys on the make that the film shows paying for membership in this “technologically safe and secure” home, via cameras and computers.
But we’ve seen the prologue. We know how a little fat boy was tormented by neighbor girls, and how a murderous creep was born. And now “Loverboy” (Slaine) is an obsessed regular online at Girlhouse.
The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too nature of the script is that it lectures us, in the opening credits, with a Ted Bundy quote tying pornography to violence against women. Director Trevor Matthews then dives, with gusto, into scenes of masturbation, moaning, lesbian make-out sessions and what can only politely be referred to as coitus.
He brings just as much gusto to the killing, as Loverboy breaks the rules, is mocked by the girls, and IT-sleuths his way into the hidden house to have his revenge — also, on camera.
A clumsy wrinkle to the script — Kylie’s discovery by a guy (Adam DiMarco) who crushed on her in high school. Ben is delighted to find her online and on camera, reluctant to tell her how he knows where she went to college and determined to start a relationship with her, never judging her choice of after-school job.
The morality tale element is a joke, the love story is feeble and there’s no tension to what’s about to happen or what then begins happening. The script gives away its mysteries. And the slaughter here is not for the squeamish, ugly, raging, pitiless violence.
So do their parents a favor and skip this picture where Ali Cobrin, Alyson Bath, Alice Hunter, Chasty Ballesteros, Nicole Arianna Fox and others turn up in and out of Victoria’s Secret’s latest. Something tells me they’d happily write-off those acting school expenses rather than encourage their daughters to do this for a living.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic, bloody violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Ali Cobrin, Adam DiMarco, Alyson Bath, Slaine, Alice Hunter, Chasty Ballesteros

Credits: Directed by Trevor Matthews, screenplay by Nick Gordon. A Phase4 Films release.

Running time: 1:41

Hugh Grant doesn’t flutter his eyes and stammer for comic effect any more. The long forelock that bounced over one sparkling blue eye was victim of that middle-aged man trim from the hair stylist.
But the guy still has that stoop-shouldered, arms-bowed walk that his ex, Liz Hurley, famously labeled “simian.” And he still has a way with an offhandedly witty, cutting line.
So in “The Rewrite,” his is perfectly nonplussed as a once-hot screenwriter forced to pitch his ideas to the mere “embryos” who run film studios today, and perfectly misplaced in the upstate New York college town of Binghamton, a British ex-pat Hollywood sophisticate forced to take a screenwriting teaching job because that’s all that’s left to him.
“I hate teachers,” Keith Michaels gripes to his agent. “They’re frustrated losers who haven’t done anything with their own lives so they want to to instruct other people” in theirs. And now he’s one of them.
The students and some of the other faculty (Chris Elliott is a Shakespeare scholar) are ever-so-impressed that the writer of the Oscar-winning “Paradise Misplaced” is in their midst.
“I wish I could do what you do,” one gushes.
“So do I.”
The culture clash here is Michaels bringing his Hollywood ethics, sexism and work habits to a nearly charmless college town with a student body of modest ambitions. The kids just want to “get high,” grumps the faculty chair (J.K. Simmons, funny). The teachers — especially the resident Jane Austen scholar (Allison Janney,, perfectly snippy) — just do their best to get through to the kids, and pray for the meager rewards that publishing their research offers.
“Rewrite” is the fourth Grant collaboration with writer turned writer-director Marc Lawrence (“Two Week’s Notice,” “Words & Music”), and while he plainly has an ear for the way Grant talks, “fresh ground” is an alien concept to him. Thus, the 50something Grant plays a man utterly clueless about the social, moral and legal edicts against dating students. The predatory Karen (Belle Heathcote) angles to get to him and get into his class.
Marisa Tomei is the SOTA — student older than average — single mother of two, working multiple jobs, aspiring screenwriter, willing to make a pest of herself to get into that same course.
And Michaels, being backwardly sexist, proceeds to “cast” the class the way crass producers populate their pictures — with nubile young women, and the occasional nonthreatening nerdy male. He doesn’t even bother to evaluate their work.
The funny stuff here has to do with the myopia of Hollywood “types.” Every pitch meeting is with very young people, one of them a young woman, insisting on “empowered” female characters being shoved into every screenplay. Michaels relates every life obstacle to a movie, because that’s easier than thinking or observing and learning or reading a book. How does one teach?
“I’ll watch ‘Dead Poets Society’ to prepare!”
And the screenwriting kids are self-absorbed dreamers who believe their mundane autobiography is the perfect jumping-off-point for a script.
There’s a nice sense of place, as Michaels learns about the town from Wikipedia and Tomei’s perky, age-appropriate flirt. Lawrence ties in Binghamton’s most famous writer — Rod “Twilight Zone” Serling — into those teachable moments of the script, when the hero-screenwriter starts to warm to the pace of the place, to teaching and to the promising minds he is meant to mold.
It probably never had a prayer of being a wide release, with Lawrence and Grant’s co-mingled careers shrinking in ambition and appeal. But there’s charm here, and Grant is engagingly disengaged playing somebody who knows the fickle finger of Hollywood fate no longer points his way. He just has to decide not to be miserable about that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations, mild profanity, drug references

Cast: Hugh Grant, Marisa Tomei, Bella Heathcote, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Chris Elliott

Credits: Written and directed by Marc Lawrence. A FilmNation release.

Running time: 1:46

The faith-based romance “Old Fashioned” is a slow, preachy romantic comedy opening Valentine’s Day week opposite “Fifty Shades of Grey,” counter-programming “love” that’s kinky with love from Corinthians.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud…”
But pride, or pricing is the film’s worst enemy. The writer-director, perhaps for reasons of economy (surely not vanity) cast himself as the romantic lead. And Rik Swartzwelder, competent behind the camera, is an utter stiff on screen.
Elizabeth Roberts is Amber, bubbly and upbeat, even as she and her cat run out of gas in small-town Ohio. Her hand’s in a cast, and she uses her last cash for fuel to get her ancient Jeep Cherokee off the road. There’s an upstairs apartment above Old Fashioned, an antiques store where the meticulous and quiet Clay (Swartwelder) presides.
He’s an odd one. Her heart-melting smile don’t seem to move him. He won’t do a walk-through of the apartment with her. Clay has resolved to “never be alone with any woman who’s not my wife.” While that kept Billy Graham a televangelist beyond reproach, it’s incredibly off-putting for an eligible bachelor. That’s not “Old Fashioned,” that’s…Catholic priest, Islamic fundamentalist, Orthodox Jewish, something beyond “traditional.”
Clay quotes the Bible, starts a lot of sentences about dating, love and romance with “I have a theory” and is a general stick-in-the-mud. Naturally, Amber is intrigued. “Dating,” he lectures, just teaches us how to act “witty, romantic and charming.” He doesn’t believe “dating trains us to be husband and wives.”
Amber bumps into him at the market, wears him down a bit, and then starts breaking stuff in the apartment that he’ll have to come fix.But on that first date, he drags her to his pastor and picks up copies of a Christian relationship workbook. He’s firing off questions from the book that predict compatibility — “Do you believe in the death penalty? How many sexual partners have you had in the past ten years?”
When Amber doesn’t run run run from this self-righteous bore, we cannot help but think “It’s only a movie.”
To his credit, Swartzwelder doesn’t people this world with anyone as one-dimensional as his character. There’s the ex-classmate shock jock (Tyler Hollinger) leaving town for the Big Time. Best friend David (LeJon Woods) and Lisa (Nina Hadjis) are an interracial couple “living in sin,” and have a child. People have wine with meals, and Amber can hit the local bar with her hot hot colleague (Lindsay Heath) from the florist shop where she finds a job, and not be painted as a harlot.This is a faith-based romance set in something like the real world.
Even Clay’s behavior has real world underpinnings. He’s a prime example of the Big Mistake Theory — people who do some great wrong or perceived wrong who suddenly embrace religion, and a little more firmly than the rest of us.
But Swartzwelder’s Clay lacks the charisma, charm or animation that would catch anybody’s eye. And it doesn’t help that the actor dresses and wears the haircut of a 40something charismatic preacher trying too hard to look younger and hipper — mop top combed-forward over his hairline, shirt tails out, relaxed fit jeans that are a little too long.
Roberts, Woods and Heath are good in lighter roles, and Dorothy Silver, playing outspoken Aunt Zella, has the funniest lines. She makes a big production of “Let us give thanks” before a meal. Everybody pauses, holds hands and closes their eyes. “Thanks” is all she says.
A shorter, slightly faster-paced version of this with a better lead might have worked. But that sounds like every maudlin Nicolas Sparks novel ever adapted for the screen. Who’d go to that?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material

Cast: Elizabeth Roberts, Rik Swartzwelder, LeJon Woods , Lindsay Heath, Tyler Hollinger

Credits: Written and directed by Rik Swartzwelder. A Freestyle/Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:55

Bing Crosby croons “White Christmas” on Armed Forced Radio in Vietnam, the same station where Adrian Cronauer bellowed “Good Morning, Vietnam,” as the Robin Williams movie reminded us.
But this wasn’t the holidays. It was a signal. It was time for American contractors, diplomatic and military personnel, and time for the South Vietnamese closely connected to America’s long involvement there, to pack a bag, meet at a pre-designated spot and flee the country.
That’s one of the marvelous details of “Last Days in Vietnam,” an Oscar nominated PBS documentary getting a limited theatrical release before it airs on TV in late April, the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Director Rory Kennedy’s film is a history lesson, but it plays as a refresher course on long occupations and American military commitments. Because every generation struggles with its own dilemma about where to commit the country and its armed forces, and where to sit back and watch what happens without us.
Kennedy (“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib”) narrows her focus to the war’s End Game, the 1973 treaty trumpeted as “peace with honor” by Richard Nixon, violated within months of Nixon’s resignation from the presidency. The talking heads in Kennedy’s film link the two events, suggesting fear of Nixon and what this “madman” might do kept the North Vietnamese out of the South. They only hint at the fatigue and expense of the war, something that made Congress reluctant to commit more treasure and effort when, in 1975, the North rolled through the South in a dash to conquer Saigon in time to honor the late revolutionary Ho Chi Minh’s birthday.
We see the scramble to get things in motion, logistically, in the face of an ambassador (Graham Martin, of N.C.) who refused to allow such “defeatist” and “alarmist” planning to go on for fear of panicking the South Vietnamese.
After the last minute, he relented, and the panic he’d expected (inevitable) happened, with the vast embassy compound swamped by South Vietnamese trying to flee, with helicopters a last resort escape as the waiting had kept Americans from moving people out by big planes and ships. The movie rightly marvels at the tens of thousands spirited out of the country, heroic efforts by assorted soldiers and intelligence officers, sailors and pilots.
We hear from Vietnamese who escaped and a few of those left behind, facing possible death (Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars had been slaughtering “collaborators” for decades). It’s good to be reminded of Vietnamese treachery and savagery.
But the Americans chosen to appear on camera come from a very narrow section of opinion from that era. To a one, they’re Republicans — from revisionist dissembler Henry Kissinger (Secretary of State, at the time, architect of the peace treaty) to GOP senators. The context is missing. It’s fine to criticize civilian leadership, but leaving out the years of military blunders and distortions (the reason the ambassador insisted on seeing the airport, under siege, himself) tilts the film toward that discredited “We could have won/arms tied behind our backs” view that prevails, in certain quarters, to this day. Only one journalist — and scores of them were eyewitnesses to the war and its last days — shows up, and Jim Laurie’s arrival, late in the film, doesn’t rectify the sense that “Last Days” is either pandering or afraid of offending.
Details are what “Last Days” manages best, disarming Vietnamese refugees by tossing their guns into the pool at the embassy, other famous photos explained anew. That image of a line of people, streaming down a rooftop, trying to climb on a chopper, was not at the embassy, but an employee’s house. Those helicopters tossed overboard from U.S. Navy vessels assisting in the airlift? South Vietnamese Army and Air Force property, pilots flying their families to safety without permission to land, their vehicles discarded to make room for more aircraft.
A careful viewer might connect that fact to the insistence of South Vietnamese military vets who complain of broken or inadequate equipment during the Army’s collapse, America’s “abandonment” of them. The American-provided helicopters seemed to work, held back by South Vietnamese officers planning their personal exit strategy.
“Last Days” is an important slice of history presented as part of the best documentary series on television. But it’s omissions mean that it’s simply not the last word on the subject.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violent war images

Cast: Stuart Herrington, Henry Kissinger, Dam Pham, Juan Valdez, Pete McCloskey, Jim Laurie, Richard Armitage

Credits: Directed by Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Keven McAlester. An American Experience Films release.

Running time: 1:38

Here’s the link, one of the best documentaries of the past year was filmed by PBS (released to theaters, first) and is up for the Oscar.

Watch it for free, from their website, through Saturday.