Movie Nation

Over $53 million — not bad for February.

“The Spongebob Movie: Sponge out of Water” is not out of cash, not by a long shot. A huge Friday points to a $53-55 million weekend for the 3D cartoon. The reviews weren’t bad, which doesn’t hurt. But parents starved for a movie to drop the kids into have lept on this one, giving Antonio Banderas his biggest hit since…”Puss in Boots.” The simmering Spaniard does well in kiddie fare. What can we say?

“American Sniper” is still making boatloads of money for Warner Brothers, another $20million plus weekend.

That’s good, because “Jupiter Ascending” isn’t — ascending. $18-20 million is not humiliating, but it points to a film that won’t earn back one fifth of what the studio has invested in it. Figure it’ll manage $35, all in. And they allegedly spent $175 making it. Back to “Bound” budgets, Wachowskis. It’s a blessing in disguise.

“Seventh Son” is part of a near year-long write-off for Universal, Home of the Flops. It won’t even hit $7 million. If nobody sees it, Julianne Moore’s Oscar is safe. I figure.

Kevin Costner’s “Black or White” is sticking around, holding enough audience for another weekend in the Top Ten. Go see it.

The striking desert around Joshua Tree National Monument inspired U-2 to title an album after it and his friends to take the body of singer Gram Parsons there to cremate him. But it’s the uninspired setting for “3 Nights in the Desert,” a wan, soapy love triangle reunion of the “Big Chill” genre.
Travis, Anna and Barry had a band in college. We meet them on an old college radio interview tape, where they speculate on where they’ll be, as a band, in ten years.
Making good music? Maybe, Anna (Amber Tamblyn) wonders. “Making good choices,” Barry (Vincent Piazza of “Jersey Boys”) suggests.
“We’ll either be famous or dead,” Travis (Wes Bentley of “Interstellar”) dramatically declares.
A decade later they meet up at the pieced-together homestead Travis (Wes Bentley) has in the desert, just to catch up, reminisce and open old wounds.
Barry had a thing for Anna. Anna and Travis were an item. Barry’s “good decisions” have made him a tax attorney, with a wife and a future settling in around him. Not that he doesn’t carry a tacky, masturbatory torch for Anna. Anna has taken her music to Europe, turned pop and become enough of a Youtube phenom to have a career.
Travis? He’s not dead. But he’s got a few scars and walks with a limp. He lives in the desert. I’ll bet there’s a story behind that.
Not much of one, it turns out.
Travis has this cave he wants the others to step into, to “learn something” of themselves. He’d love to “get the band back together.” In the worst way. Anna shrugs that off because of the way they broke up. “It was always on your terms.” And Barry sees that for what it is, “a fantasy.”
That’s easy to believe, here, because the rushed nature of this indie film means there’s not a convincing musical moment in “3 Nights in the Desert.” Nobody proves he or she can play or sing.
Tamblyn (or TV’s “Two and a Half Men”) has nothing of the singing siren about her, Bentley is entirely too well-groomed and under control to suggest the wild-eyed artist. Piazza, the most musically tested of the three, has no hint of a “Jersey Boy,” drummer or otherwise, about him.
The result is a love triangle that feels invented, theatrical and artificial and a musical history that we never, ever believe. There’s no commitment there, no idle strumming, little singing and none of the all-consuming passion for music that decades cannot dispel. In Gabriel Cowan’s film, Joshua Tree fails to work its musical magic.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Amber Tamblyn, Wes Bentley, Vincent Piazza

Credits: Directed by Gabriel Cowan, screenplay by Adam Chanzit. A Monterey Media release.

Running time: 1:22

Mark Hamill is guarded, a little hesitant to talk.
“I want to be very careful here, because I have no interest in getting back in the spotlight,” he says. “I’m enjoying my ‘elderly recluse’ years.”
He’s joking, of course. Because that’s who he is — The Joker. At 63, the once-and-always Luke Skywalker is wholly immersed in the universe that swallowed him, a fanboy’s fanboy who went from fan to “Star Wars” hero, cultural icon and in-demand animation voice-over star. He was The Joker in the animated Batman series, and is Alvin the Treacherous on “Dragons of Berk,” the “How to Train Your Dragon” TV series, and just added Gadfly Garnet from the new Disney series “Miles from Tomorrowland” to his absurdly-full plate.
On screen acting gigs? He does that, too. Of course he’s in J.J. Abrams’ new “Star Wars” trilogy, back to Luke. And then there’s his turn in “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” a comic book adaptation by Matthew Vaughn (“X-Men: First Class”) that opens Feb. 13.
“It’s just a fluke, fell in my lap,” Hamill says with a laugh. It all started with the comic, in which writer Mark Millar asked Hamill’s permission to use “Mark Hamill” in the book, “and kill me off, after eight pages! THAT appealed to my perverse sense of humor, so I said ‘Sure.'”
When the film came along, Millar wanted Hamill around, even after a rewrite of the script did away with the need for celebrity kidnap victims. The story concerns a privately run, discrete and super-secret British spy service out to foil a supervillain (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who is kidnapping and coercing the rich and famous for his planned environmental apocalypse. Hamill was cast as a Brit.”I love the sound of the human voice, the music of dialects. Professor Arnold, being a British climate scientist, has more of a mid-Atlantic accent. Not too pronounced. This character is just a plot device for Samuel L. Jackson’s meglomaniacal villain to use.”
Hamill’s decades-long total immersion in fanboydom paid off with first a comic book plug, then a paying film role. Hamill has been stunned, of late, to find that he’s in demand from “that first generation” of “Star Wars” fans — from his “Star Wars” director, J.J. Abrams, to the producer of TV’s new version of “The Flash,” where Hamill reprised a character he once played in animated form in the ’90s.
“The fans know I’m one of them, which is helpful,” he says. “They’re suspicious of civilians. But I was doing conventions LONG before ‘Star Wars.’ I remember when I was a young actor on a soap opera, Kerwin Matthews (Ray Harryhausen’s “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad”) showed up to play one of the doctors and I was so thrilled that I asked him if I could take him to lunch and interview him. He let me do that, and the story got published in a fanzine called fxRH, Film Effects by Ray Harryhausen. Hey, THERE’s a real collector’s item! I later met and interviewed Ray for ‘Comic Book: The Movie,’ which I directed, this mock-documentary I did about ten years ago.”
Hamill has “always seemed comfortable in his own skin, and aware of his place in pop culture history without being pompous or aloof about it,” says Tim Clodfelter, an entertainment journalist for Media General Newspapers.Others might bristle at the idea of being typecast, turning up at conventions full of fans who adore things you did in the ’70s. Not Mark Hamill. He made it cool.
And another onslaught of attention is knocking at his door. “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens” opens in December.
The fanboy in him popped out on the set of “Kingsman” when he shared a scene with Samuel L. Jackson, who gives his billionaire enviro-villain a funny lisp in the movie.
I didn’t hear him speak until he came up to me, held down in that chair, in our scene,” Hamill recalls. He’s always good, but I’ve never heard him good doing THAT voice. Haha!”
He’s put “Kingsman” co-star Michael Caine “on notice.” They had no scenes together, “but I am COMING for you!” Hamill’s been a fan of Caine’s since childhood. Hamill gushes over the younger actor, Devon Graye, who has taken over his “Trickster” character on “The Flash.” And even though “I like to think of myself as ‘semi-retired’ — then, anything I get asked to do is a bonus ” — as regards his on-camera acting, he says “I still pinch myself” at being relevant and getting to do the work he does, “right up to the time when I have to become that little old guy painting watercolors in the backyard.
“I get paid to go to work and do these things that I’ve loved, from comics to Broadway, TV to movies. I’ve never understood the concept of a second childhood, because I’m not finished with my first.”

“Jupiter Ascending” got the beat-down it so richly deserved among critics — eye candy without much of consequence, and much that is unintentionally funny. BOOM. Wachowskis? Done.

“Seventh Son” is a classic early Feb. action picture — sword and sorcery genre. A stinker unloaded at the first of the year. A classic Universal picture, too, which has a string of bombs thanks to its awful lineup over the last year or more, and its hostile relationship with the reviewing press. “The Boy Next Door,” a bad Michael Mann movie, the list rolls backward and onward and it stinks. Do the shareholders know the culture that’s producing these bad movies that big bad reviewers mock, openly? Apparently not. #universasshats.

Maybe “Pitch Perfect 2” will break the string. If not, there’s always that Steve Jobs bio pic slated for the fall.

“The Spongebob Movie” isn’t earning plaudits for its 3D “Spongebob steps into the REAL world” gimmick. “The Simpsons” did that, among others. But it’s funny enough, passing grades in most places.

Poor reviews for Nick Cage’s latest, “Outcast.” It’s no worse than “Seventh Son,” but that’s not saying anything. I wish he’d get a cable deal and re-start his career.

Middling reviews for the drama free ballet doc “”Ballet 422.”

“Love Rosie” reviews rip Lily Collins a new one, and her choice of movie roles.

Bad reviews for a Cenk Uygur doc that’s borderline hagiography. I thought it accurate and honest, but “Mad as Hell” has no contrary voices suggesting he’s a showboating opportunist.

The only question that’s worth considering in “Seventh Son” is whether this all-star B-movie is bad enough to cost Julianne Moore her “Still Alice” Oscar. And the answer to that is, “Not really.”
A sword-and-sorcery epic built around Jeff Bridges, Bridges’ curmudgeonly accent, Bridges’ “Wild Bill\R.I.P.D.” goatee and Ben Barnes, it has Moore as the villain, a witch whom Bridges’ character must kill.
Playing a witch, as Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon will tell you, calls for “big.” Moore is the queen of small — intimate, internal. So as Mother Malkin, out to avenge herself on the “spook,” Gregory (Bridges), Moore is miscast.
That’s OK, though, because Bridges is big enough for the both of them. Gregory is a grizzled, Falstaffian knight, all tight-lipped boozy bluster and wit. He’s in need of a new apprentice, a “Seventh Son” of a seventh son. That’s where Tom (Barnes of “Prince Caspian”) comes in. He’s a pig farmer’s son, handy with a knife, carrying a magical amulet from his mother (Olivia Williams) as his protection.
The old knight is full of wisdom, which he shares. They’re entering a world “where legends and nightmares are real.” There are all sorts of spirits, monsters and witches, and Gregory knows all their names.
“Stone chuckers,” he mutters. “Cattle rippers. The names are fairly…self-evident.”
He exorcises children and vanquishes monsters — for a price.
“Flattery is fine,” he growls, “gold is FINER.”
The plot, taken from a Joseph Delaney novel, drives spook and apprentice toward a final fight with the witch queen, her allies (Djimon Hounsou among them) and their minions. Alicia Vikander of “Anna Karenina” is Alice, a temptation to Tom, and possibly a witch. She’s a looker with little screen presence.
Sergey Bodrov (“Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan”) directs and stages some splendid if repetitious fights and flights,  most of them involving digital dragons and such. This is strictly by-the-numbers movie-making, genre work that makes the most of our lowered expectations.
Still, it’s great seeing Bridges give fair value in a part befitting an aging warhorse reduced to pitching, on the Super Bowl, a “Dreaming with Jeff” album designed to put us to sleep. Gregory, gumming his zingers like a classic coot from any number of Westerns, manages to keep us awake for the 104 minutes of “Seventh Son.” Barely.
“When you deal with dark,” he says, “dark gets IN you.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense fantasy violence and action throughout, frightening images and brief strong language

Cast: Ben Barnes, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander

Credits: Directed by Sergey Bodrov, screenplay by Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight, based on a Joseph Delaney novel. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:44

The myth of Cenk “Young Turk” Uygur gets a serious burnishing in “Mad as Hell,” a cheerfully angry and yet upbeat documentary about the creator and host of online’s “Young Turks” Youtube show. Uygur’s journey, from Turkey to America, from conservative law student to progressive firebrand, and all the stops (local TV, Sirius satellite radio, MSNBC, Current-TV) along the way are given a sympathetic airing in film. “Mad” is a showcase for the opinions and impact of a media figure whose mantra is speaking “the truth” and refusing to sell-out to corporate media and the corporate-financed politicians .
Archival footage shows Uygur’s first appearance on TV, as a back-row audience member interrupting Johnnie Cochran on Greta Van Susteren’s CNN show at the end of the O.J. Simpson trial, to his quitting his corporate law job and pursuing a TV career against absurd odds.
He’s thick-featured, dark and foreign-looking. He’s abrasive, crude and loud when he gets worked up. But over a billion viewers have watched his Youtube videos complaining about politics, politicians and “the rigged system” in America.
Andrew Napier’s camera was there for the later highlights in this journey, his dabbling with MSNBC (he claims he was too incendiary for the cable network, that they wanted him to tone down his criticism of Obama and Democrats), his longer-lived show for the now-defunct Current-TV.
He’s never toned down his act, even as he shifted from irate Republican to infuriated Democrat. He won’t shut up, “because I think I’m right and I think you need to hear it.”
Napier interviewed scores of friends and colleagues, but wastes no film on real critics of the guy. There’s no time for a counter narrative, that he is just copying Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck’s angry-man shtick and serving it to a liberal audience. Thus, we hear plenty of “He’s unbearable” or “a blowhard,” but always from smiling pals, from childhood, law school (Georgetown) or his fellow “Young Turks.” Nobody with any real authority is here to suggest that Uygur might be just an opportunist or a professional contrarian.
And any suggestion that his progressivism is making a difference seems laughable, as we see him latch onto the Occupy Wall Street movement (not start it), that his WolfPAC aimed at overturning “Citizen’s United” has gotten nowhere, or simply look at the makeup of the new Congress.
The overarching message is here is the familiar “follow your dreams, follow your passions.” We see how bad he was on TV; clumsy and rude, how awful his team’s earliest shows were –“like something out of ‘Wayne’s World.'”
So ignore the self-generated hype about “largest online news show (by video views) in the world,” and take him, and the documentary’s title, at face value. Uygur is the fuming, fulminating embodiment of the prophetic movie character Howard Beale from “Network.” He is, indeed, “Mad as Hell” and he isn’t “going to take it anymore.” But the jury’s out on exactly he’ll do about that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Cenkl Uyguyr, Ben Mankiewicz, Connie Chung, Keith Olbermann, Jill Pike

Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Napier. An Oscilloscope release.

Running time: 1:22

The Wachowskis cash their last blank check from Warner Brothers with “Jupiter Ascending,” an excruciatingly empty chunk of eye candy that spends over two hours trying to convince us they’re not ripping off “Dune.” It’s “Dune” without the desert, all exposition and back story and alternate history — as inconsequential as the weakest Young Adult sci-fi, but without the pretty young teens who populate those “Maze/Hunger/Giver/Divergent” casts.
It’s not that the Wachowskis don’t reach for some Big Ideas here, the notion that “Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe,” that one thing the super-rich and entitled have over the rest of us. Time equates not just to faster travel and no waiting in line at the doctor’s office or DMV. It’s longevity, a near-immortality length and quality of life that the oligarchs of this universe are playing with.
A seriously miscast Mila Kunis is this YA version of “The Chosen One,” a poor Russian emigre, daughter of an astronomer forced to clean toilets and change beds in Chicago. Aliens are looking for the woman her dad named Jupiter, seeing her as their reincarnated “Queen.” There are bad aliens, led by Balem (a whispering Eddie Redmayne), and possibly a good one, Caine (Channing Tatum) who comes to her rescue — in the nick of time, every time. And there are a lot of times.
Watch the way Kunis minces through the complicated digital sets when she’s supposed to be running for her life. Even her stunt double looks bored.
The endless chases and shootouts are about fetching her or killing Jupiter — the often-cloaked alien minions get mixed messages from their overlords. Jupiter is always falling — out of buildings, spaceships or, in from towers in the vast alien city complex hiding inside Jupiter. The pointy-eared Caine has these neat hover-boots that make Tatum, frequently shirtless, look like Pan or a centaur as he skates through the futurescapes, dodging fire and falling debris, waving his digital shield, shooting to kill.
Kunis is most at home in the film’s few flashes of humor, such as when Jupiter takes a shine to her protector, or when the Queen-to-be deals with the Kafkaesque nightmare of the alien super-race’s bureaucracy.
“I will never complain about the DMV again!” And she speaks for the audience when she later asks, “Could this get any weirder?”
Sean Bean plays Stinger, a serious-minded ex-comrade of Caine’s (they’re both warriors who have lost their wings, literally). He takes over the endless explaining of exposition when Tatum’s Caine runs out of breath — something about the way aliens populated the universe, Earth being a gene-spliced colony. Stinger’s been hiding out on Earth in a ramshackle farmhouse honeycombed with bees.
“Bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty,” Bean growls, offering the film’s first giggle. “Bees don’t LIE.”
Look for Gugu Mbatha-Raw, James D’Arcy and the eye-candy junkie Terry “Brazil” Gilliam in bit parts.
If you didn’t catch on with the sell-out “Speed Racer” or the sugary idiocy of “Cloud Atlas,” if you haven’t reconsidered your affection for the one decent installment in the murky “Matrix” trilogy before now, “Jupiter Ascending” should seal the deal. The Wachowskis — Andy and Lana — are trapped in their own matrix, burdened with inflated budgets and the need to visually try and top themselves, losing track of actors, story and emotions, all in pursuit of that next fanboy film fix. After “Jupiter Ascending,” Warners should put them into rehab. They need to quit this drug, cold turkey.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence, sequences of sci-fi action, some suggestive content and partial nudity

Cast: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, James D’Arcy, Tuppence Middleton, Douglas Booth

Credits: Written and directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:07

“Outcast” is what happens when stunt men direct.
The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.
Essentially a Hayden Christensen vehicle with Nicolas Cage, Chinese scenery and swordsmanship to recommend it, “Outcast” is another variation on “The Hidden Fortress.” That’s the 1960s samurai film that George Lucas leaned on for the original “Star Wars.”
A Chinese king has died, his chosen heir, protected by his sister (Yifei Liu) is on the run. An opium-addicted knight, fleeing the demons that committing mass murder in the Middle East has given him, takes on the quest to get them to safety.
That would be Jacob (Christensen), whom we’ve seen slaughtering Muslim occupiers of the Holy Land, and then getting lectured about it by his sad-eyed mentor, Gallain (Cage).
“The blood we spill here is on OUR blades, on our soul’s, not God’s!”
The old knight suggested they get away from it all, head east. And that, apparently, is what they’ve done.
But in China, Shing (Andy On) is determined to get rid of us younger brother, the heir, and take the royal seal from him. So his Black Guards are hot on the trail of the young prince and his hot older sister. Help us, Jacob-wan, she pleads. You’re our only hope.
Christensen returns to the swordplay that launched his career with gusto and a seriously Bieberish haircut. He suffers slings and arrows and wields his sword like an enraged Land Rover owner waves his dipstick. He’s only happy when it’s covered in red.
Cage disappears for an hour of the film, returning as a bandit the Chinese call “The White Ghost.” He, too, is haunted by his bloody past.
“What do the dead whisper?”
“What is owed must be paid.”
It’s all impossible fights, unlikely rescues and Jacob waking up in the care of this or that exotic woman tending to his wounds and getting him off the opium.
“Tears of a poppy dull a man’s senses.”
As will “Outcast,” though it never pretends to be anything more than what it is — an English language B-movie ready to be dubbed for the Chinese market.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with bloody swordplay, opium use, profanity

Cast: Hayden Christensen, Nicolas Cage, Yifei Liu, Andy On

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Powell, script by James Dormer. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:39

A lovely new ballet is followed from creation to rehearsals to opening night in “Ballet 422,” a documentary that celebrates the rising star that is choreographer/dancer Justin Peck.
It’s an intimate movie, with the camera so close it’s as if it’s having a whispered conversation with one and all. Everybody speaks in the calm, quiet voices of a well-behaved golf tournament gallery. No one loses his or her temper, no one weeps at criticism or some last-minute injury. No one has to give that lump-in-the-throat speech that “The show must go on.” There’s no drama, no conflict, and apparently no one told director Jody Lee Lipes that even documentaries require some of that to be rendered watchable.
What she delivered instead was an narrow-focused look at professional dancers and a professional company putting on its 422nd new ballet.
Peck, the only member of the corps de ballet (bottom of the ballet company food chain) to leap straight into choreography, created a lovely classical ballet, “Paz de la Jolla,” set to the music of Bohuslav Martinu’s “Sinfonietta La Jolla.” Lipes tells us this much in an opening title, and then lets her camera do the rest.
We look in on rehearsals, overhear conversations between “the girls” and “the boys,” see them practice and discuss movements, see costumes proposed and then produced and watch the lighting designer figure out the desired effect.
None of these talented artists are identified by name. Mostly, the camera just gawks as lithe, muscular young people do run-throughs, over and over, mastering a physically demanding art form and a reasonably difficult new work.
Peck is so caught up in it that he has to be reminded to give his prima ballerina a rest break, is gently urged to compliment and urge on the orchestra (a bit clumsy at that) and deals with physical therapy for what dance does to his ankle. Lipes’ film reminds us that yes, he’s a big-shot choreographer now, but he’s still in the corps. He’s needed as a dancer (one of 91 employed there) in other performance pieces.
Maybe everyone was on their best behavior because the camera was around. And no one is suggesting that the shrill over-dramatics of reality TV or stereotypical “ballet movie” melodrama should intrude here. But something more needs to happen to justify our investment in time (the whole ballet is not shown in performance) or a studio’s decision to release “Ballet 422.”

MPAA Rating: PG for brief language

Cast: Justin Peck and the dancers, designers and musicians of the New York City Ballet company.

Credits: Written and directed by Jody Lee Lipes. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:15