Movie Nation

One the of more established guilds, American Cinema Editors, have released their nominees for best edited films and TV series. And the 65th Eddies have a few surprise inclusions and omissions.

Among the ten dramatic and musical/comedy nominees, you’ll see “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “American Sniper” and “Inherent Vice” and “Nightcrawler.”

Some of those could carry over to Oscar nominations and be, perhaps, one of the few “technical” nominations a film like “Galaxy” or “Sniper” lands. Or they could suggest a widening of the field. “Vice” is off most people’s radar, as is “Sniper.” Just not good enough. “Nightcrawler” could be, “Whiplash” and “Gone Girl” are already in the larger conversation.  “Grand Budapest Hotel” has awards season momentum.

“Boyhood” and “Birdman,” the two front runners, are represented. “Mr. Turner” and “The Theory of Everything” (better than “Imitation Game,” I thought) are not.

I like the animated field here — “Boxtrolls,” “Lego Movie” and “Big Hero 6” feels like the Oscar field.

And the Roger Ebert doc, “Life Itself,” endorsed by his fellow critics and seemingly an Oscar front runner, was left out of the documentary editing field, with the superior “Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me,” the even lesser seen “Finding Vivian Maier” and the critically lauded “CitizenFour” making up that field.

NOMINEES FOR 65th ANNUAL ACE EDDIE AWARDS

BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (DRAMATIC): TIE!
American Sniper
Joel Cox, ACE & Gary Roach, ACE

Boyhood
Sandra Adair, ACE

Gone Girl
Kirk Baxter, ACE

The Imitation Game
William Goldenberg, ACE

Nightcrawler
John Gilroy, ACE

Whiplash
Tom Cross

BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (COMEDY OR MUSICAL):
Birdman
Douglas Crise & Stephen Mirrione, ACE

Guardians of the Galaxy
Fred Raskin, Hughes Winborne, ACE & Craig Wood, ACE

Into the Woods
Wyatt Smith

Inherent Vice
Leslie Jones, ACE

Grand Budapest Hotel
Barney Pilling

BEST EDITED ANIMATED FEATURE FILM:
Big Hero 6
Tim Mertens

The Boxtrolls
Edie Ichioka, ACE

Lego Movie
David Burrows & Chris McKay

BEST EDITED DOCUMENTARY (FEATURE):
Citizenfour
Mathilde Bonnefoy

Finding Vivian Maier
Aaron Wickenden

Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me
Elisa Bonora

BEST EDITED DOCUMENTARY (TELEVISION):
Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey: Standing Up in the Milky Way
John Duffy, ACE, Michael O’Halloran, Eric Lea

Pauly Shore Stands Alone
Troy Takaki, ACE & Joey Vigour

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History: Episode 3 / The Fire of Life
Erik Ewers

BEST EDITED HALF-HOUR SERIES FOR TELEVISION:
Silicon Valley: “Optimal Tip to Tip Efficiency”
Brian Merken & Tim Roche

Veep: “Special Relationship”
Anthony Boys

Transparent: Pilot
Catherine Haight

BEST EDITED ONE-HOUR SERIES FOR COMMERCIAL TELEVISION:
24: “10pm to 11am”
Scott Powell, ACE

Mad Men: “Waterloo”
Christopher Gay

Madam Secretary: “Pilot”
Elena Maganini, ACE & Michael Ornstein, ACE

Sherlock: “His Last Vow”
Yan Miles

The Good Wife: “A Few Words”
Scott Vickrey, ACE

BEST EDITED ONE-HOUR SERIES FOR NON-COMMERCIAL TELEVISION:
True Detective: “Who Goes There”
Affonso Goncalves

True Detective: “The Secret Fate of All Life”
Alex Hall

House of Cards: “Chapter 14”
Byron Smith

BEST EDITED MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE FOR TELEVISION:
Fargo “Buridan’s Ass”
Regis Kimble

Olive Kitteridge: “A Different Road”
Jeffrey M. Werner, ACE

The Normal Heart
Adam Penn

BEST EDITED NON-SCRIPTED SERIES:
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown: “Iran”
Hunter Gross

Deadliest Catch: “Lost At Sea”
Josh Earl, ACE & Johnny Bishop

Vice: “Greenland is Melting & Bonded Labor”
Joe Langford & Nick Carew

The first wide release of 2015 is a deathly dull affair, a pointless, passionless ghost story sequel that lacks the one big thing the original film’s star provided — empathy. There’s no Daniel Radcliffe in “Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death,” and thus no reason for it to be made.
This time, the horrors are set in World War II, when a group of British children are evacuated from London during The Blitz. Lucky them, eight of them are sent beyond the reach of Nazi bombers. But they’re deposited in Eel Marsh House, where a ghostly woman still covets the living, luring them to various creative deaths, often in the tidal marshes that surround the island.
Phoebe Fox plays Eve Parkins, a pretty young teacher who shares the duty of looking after the kids with Mrs. Hogg (Helen McCrory). They haven’t even made it to the house when Eve is spooked, and sparked by a young pilot (Jeremy Irvine) from the nearby airfield.
“Don’t look, you MUSTN’T look,” the last crazed local in the village shrieks.
“How on EARTH are you going to stay sane here?,” possible new-beau Harry (Irvine) cracks.
How indeed?
Little Edward (Oaklee Pendergast) was so traumatized by the bombing that killed his parents that he won’t speak. He just draw creepy pencil sketches, which tip us and Eve that someone is after the boy. Eve, of course, has her own issues  — nightmares that take her to a bloody hospital ward. Everybody has something to fear at Eel Marsh, as the kids start wandering off and dying off.
For a gloomy, fog-shrouded ghost story, “Black 2” is entirely too bright. A dank dark cellar, a spooky hallway or street lose their terror when too much light is applied.
Young Ms. Fox, a veteran of British TV, plays Eve as blandly matter of fact about the supernatural goings on at Eel Marsh. There’s little pathos in this performance, even when we learn about her “secret.” The kid doesn’t generate much automatic sympathy, the potential love story has no spark. And the disbelieving Mrs. Hogg is thinly drawn, not irritating or hateful enough to root against or hope she is served her comeuppance.
A few cheap jolts is all director Tom Harper can manage in this minimal gloom, nothing that suggests there was any more reason to make this other than a hit brand-name title and return access to a location whose frights were used up in “Woman in Black I.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some disturbing and frightening images, and for thematic elements

Cast: Phoebe Fox, Helen McCrory, Oaklee Pendergast, Jeremy Irvine
Credits: Directed by Tom Harper, screenplay by Jon Croker. A Relativity release.

Running time: 1:38

I was finishing up a chat with Ethan Hawke, star of the Oscar contending “Boyhood,” and of the January sci-fi time-travel thriller “Predestination.” We’d talked about “people finally GETTING (“Boyhood” writer-director) Richard Linklater,” about the notion of lives that seem predestined, and his long-gestating plans to play jazz great Chet Baker, a film which he finally got to do and just finished in December.

So in parting, I hit him with how cool he looks, sucking cigarette smoke through his nostrils and the assorted other tricks of the smoker’s trade. It’s very much on display in “Predestination,” which opens in mid January. Does he worry about kids wanting to imitate him?

“I do worry about it a little bit. But you have no IDEA how cool smoking can look until you see how Chet smokes!”

He laughs.

“It makes you wonder if you are impacting people in some ways you don’t expect. I was in a taxi a couple of weeks ago and the taxi driver recognized me. He launched into a diatribe about the way I smoke in ‘Brooklyn’s Finest.’ ‘The COOLEST,’ he says. Somehow, this guy had spent months thinking about this. He was so excited to talk to me about the way I lit that cigarette after I shot some guy. ”

Hawke chuckles, and then as he often does, gives a considered answer, and a funny one.
“So, it’s not my fault if your children smoke. But maybe it is.

“The Battle of Five Armies” is sending “The Hobbit” franchise off with a bang, winning another weekend, cleaning up all over Christmas week.

“Unbroken” is the biggest of the new releases to come out Christmas Day. Not a great film, but Angelina Jolie’s movie of the Laura Hillenbrand book about Louis Zamperini and his Olympic and WWII POW experiences, earned close to $50 million, Christmas Eve to Dec. 28 midnight.

“Into the Woods” has opened well, falling just behind “Unbroken” ($48.7-47.7).

“Night at the Museum 3” did a brisk $21 million, second week, “Annie” is closing in on $50 million, “The Gambler” opened in the low teens.

And “The Interview”? It did much of its business Christmas DAy, when people went to thumb their noses at North Korea. It is just shy of $3 million on 331 screens. Not bad. Not a money maker, even though it dominated streaming services Xmas day.

“The most cruel dictators are usually, in private, quite charming people,” purrs Christoph Waltz in that gloriously precise, Oscar-winning Austrian accent. Not that he’d know. He’s not met any, or played a dictator in a movie — yet. But give him time.
In just a couple of years, Waltz has become the cinema’s go-to villain. Quentin Tarantino unleashed him on the world with “Inglourious Basterds,” for which Waltz won an Oscar. Then “Django Unchained” earned him another. He smiled to hide a violent streak in “Water for Elephants,” grinned and stabbed Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day in the back in “Horrible Bosses 2.”
He’s to be the heavy in the next Bond picture, “Spectre.” And he’s alternately charming and abusive to America’s Sweetheart, Amy Adams, in “Big Eyes.” So he knows a little something about the villain’s point of view.
“You need to consider the whole, and his role in the story,” Waltz says. “You can’t say ‘I want Walter Keane (in “Big Eyes”) or whoever to be this and that.’ Maybe he has some interesting evil aspects, but if those aspects don’t serve the story, it doesn’t make any sense in this context.”
Walter Keane is depicted as a hustler who “rescued” painter Margaret Keane (Adams) in “Big Eyes,” a man who charms his way into her life, discovers the novelty in her “big eyed waifs” paintings and markets them to fame and glory. It’s just that he stole the credit for the works as he did.
“His charm, his charismatic and attractive traits are very important to the story. If he’s just an ogre, you think ‘Margaret is just a plain idiot to fall for that.’ You want to be on her side. You want to understand what she sees in him. And you want to identify with her and not just be scared off, as in a horror movie. That charm and attraction is how these characters go about their business in real life.”
“Real life” is of no concern to Waltz, even when he’s playing a real person. The real Keane actually could paint and the chronology of the Walter and Margaret story is seriously compressed in Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes.” Waltz is all about the script, “the world the screenplay” creates for the film.
“I’m not saying I refuse to think further than the script. But I like think INTO the script rather than AWAY from the script. Sometimes, detours are helpful. But I like to bring the discussion of a character back to what the actual job is – the screenplay, by the screenwriter…
“A life is not really a story. The screen writer, one could say, distorts a life into the shape of a movie. Hitchcock said ‘What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?'”
Waltz is famously blunt in interviews, griping about how Johnny Depp keeps getting the musical roles Waltz craves. A lyric baritone, he’s directed opera in Europe and loves to sing. But nobody in Hollywood has asked. There’s an art critic in him too, it would seem. Margaret Keane’s paintings? He remembers them from Austria and Germany during the ’60s.
“Kitsch postcards, really, not real art. I remember very well how ubiquitous they were. They were everywhere. Just not in galleries and museums — like Norman Rockwell, only not as well-painted. So you’d see these…on calendars you got for free from your bank manager once you had more than 1500 in your account — not art.”
And “Big Eyes” as commentary on the American contemporary art scene?
“In America, it’s about whatever you can turn into money,” Waltz says. “I think the art world here, as depicted in the movie, is not so much embracing ‘the new’ for novelty’s sake as embracing ‘the new’ for mercantile purposes. So,money has a different importance in America than in Europe.Or it did then. America was about 15 years ahead of Europe in that regard for money back then.”
That cynicism serves Waltz well in film after film, especially in “Big Eyes.” Even in what Forbes critic Scott Mendelson calls “a grandiose showboating turn” the actor insists that we “see the fakery in every hard sell and the underlying shame of a man who thought we would be great but only achieved success on the (not-entirely-willing) back of his wife.”
In person, Waltz can be a fascinating raconteur, waxing eloquent on the rapidly evolving San Francisco of the late ’50s-early ’60s that Burton’s film recreates (“Humankind was still striving for enlightenment in the ’60s, especially in San Francisco. Unfortunately, that’s gone away.”), on co-star Amy Adams (“She may be America’s Sweetheart and have big eyes, but…she’s so practical, so to-the-point…unpretentious. There’s none of that superfluous sideways motion that sometimes gets in the way, you know, because people are ‘stars.'”).
But he’s known, far and wide, as a tough interview. See him on TV, read interviews where he strains to not give a straight answer, look at accounts of his taking over this or that question and answer session for preview audiences in New York or Los Angeles, and you spot a pattern.
Perhaps we just need for the bad guy to get his way, to transition from an “operatic villain,” as all James Bond’s foes are, he admits with a laugh, to musicals.
“The field of music that I am interested in might not be the most popular right now,” he says, of his fondness for opera and Stephen Sondheim musicals, two of which (“Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”) that dastardly Depp nabbed. ” But that cannot sway me and keep me from trying to make that happen.”

I have been following, with a mixture of interest and annoyance, the whole “Interview” release/threats kill the release/released in spite of the threats saga, much of it on vacation in the remote wilds of rural Va.

The “interest” part was just morbid fascination that a mere movie could turn into a Def Con 3 International incident, thanks to the terrible violation of Sony Pictures’ computer networks, an assault on privacy, personal finance as well as a major movie studio that saw enormous losses thanks to stolen and downloaded films. Every slam at leaked emails re: Adam Sandler or Cameron Crowe or Amy Pascal or Scott Rudin was funny, until you remember how Gawker and others got this private info and distributed it with such glee.

Then there’s the stolen property. One of those swiped films, formerly titled “Rene,” now back to a title that works “To Write Love on Her Arms,” starring Kat Dennings, was made in Orlando and has sought distribution for a couple of years. Now, a March release seems wrecked because thousands of trolls think stealing a movie online is like stealing music online — a “victimless” crime. My auto mechanic, for instance, loves telling me this is how he gets his movies.  God forbid I walk off with assorted Mini Cooper parts from his shop. He wouldn’t get the distinction, or lack of it. He probably doesn’t realize what a s— he is, and how he’s doing North Korea’s dirty work (and that of other content thieves).

My personal annoyance at this debacle is how tricky it turned out to be to see “The Interview” in a theater. Contrary to what the manager of The Plaza, one of the flagship indie cinemas to insist that they’d show the film, causing Sony to change its mind, told the BBC on a broadcast I heard Xmas Day, it showed all over the country, and all over Georgia. I was driving from Va. to Florida and checked in with showtimes in Martinsville, Va., assorted N.C. theaters, Charleston, Savannah and Jacksonville before finally settling on a late afternoon showing at the Satellite 10 in Titusville, Fla., within sight of the Kennedy Space Center. It sold out in larger cities, not in smaller ones. Small town folks weren’t as curious to see what all the fuss was about.

The Satellite booked it into their largest theater, and had about 100 folks in a 350-400 seat cinema for their first showing of the movie.  Ironically, for a movie set in and making fun of North Korea, the Satellite 10 is decorated with gigantic red-star neon lights (see above). Hilarious. I don’t think I was the only one to notice. The film drew a lot of older viewers (probably not their cup of tea), no doubt lured by the patriotic appeal of seeing the movie the Commie dictator didn’t want America to see.

Who came out of this the winner? Sony, which might have gotten the benefit of the doubt from reviewers and patrons thanks to the flagrant assault on free speech that pulling this movie meant, behaved badly. I don’t blame them. The cyber attack was unprecedented and they have been on their heels for weeks, playing defense, doing damage control.  They surrendered, in essence, getting the major theater chains, starting with Carmike and working its way up to Regal, Cinemark and AMC to make the decision to pull the film for them. Cowardly on several counts, so Sony isn’t the winner or the hero here, nor are the theater chains, which would have been on the legal hook for any deadly incident blamed on the movie in their cinemas. Other studios, as George Clooney pointed out in an interview with Deadline.com, failed to back them up. They were ALL worried about people staying away from ALL movies on Xmas Day, not just Sony’s “The Interview.” Cowards.

The movie itself scored a few points and will be seen, deservedly so. The idea that nothing brings down dictators quicker than ridicule that gives hope to those they rule isn’t a new one, but it is sharply underlined here. Kim Jong-un has never looked sillier, and that’s saying something for a Buddah-faced baby with a bowl-cut.

Seth Rogen and James Franco made a passably funny R-rated comedy, but you have to figure whatever “Freedom of Speech” medal we hang on their necks won’t get their phone calls returned the next time they set out to provoke — maybe a movie mocking Islam and its Prophet Muhammad, the last “threat of death” taboo in world culture.

The only participant in the making of the movie to pop out of this as a winner is Randall Park, whose hilarious, subtle and human portrait of The Dear Leader/Supreme Leader/Beloved Leader (who can keep track?) is the best thing in the movie.

But the winners were those small businesses, from Alamo Drafthouse to the Eisenhower 6 (Savannah), from Key West to Caribou, Twin Falls Idaho to Titusville, Fl. They said they’d show it, and did, and reaped rewards. These cinemas are not typically the biggest multiplex, the newest theater. They’re in markets that Regal, AMC and other big boys don’t bother with. Theaters like the Alamo and Plaza in Atlanta, Cinema Village in New York, the Fargo in Fargo, North Dakota, carry indie films, art cinema and foreign movies.

And they cleaned up Christmas Day. Some were equipped to cash in on this, such as the Sun Ray in Jacksonville (midnight showings Christmas Eve). Others just looked a gift horse square in the mouth and went about their business, not over-screening the film (showing it too many times on too big a screen), not hyping it. Just putting in on their website and letting the chips fall where they may.

Early reports say that “The Interview” earned over $1,000,000 on just 250-300 screens. Impressive. That’s more per screen than I would have expected it to earn on ten-15times that many screens, which would have been a normal opening, a $20-30 million weekend would have been a big win for Sony, even before the hack.  But it wouldn’t have made nearly that much without all this buzz. It’s also huge on Youtube and the other streaming sites that released it VOD. But people who watched it at home were lazy and curious. They weren’t supporting the small businesses — indie theaters — under threat. They were padding the bottom line of a company that took a huge business hit but acted rather cravenly when its back was up against the wall.

Regal, AMC and Sony could learn from this experience. As shocking and costly as this was, and not really anything they could have anticipated, I was dismayed, start to finish, by Sony’s reaction to their corporate crisis, and by the lack of soul searching by media entities in gobbling up those “leaks” from the Sony data dump (Who exactly was the intermediary, I wonder? The facilitator of all this personal stuff getting to Gawker, Gannett and CBS?).

I even thought of Sony as I watched Universal’s Xmas Day release “Unbroken” last week. A movie about a WWII POW, it shows haggard, tortured Louis Zamperini in Japanese hands the day WWII ended. Not that the Japanese admitted they surrendered. No more than Japanese Sony Corp did just last week.

So if you see “The Interview,” and if you liked “This is The End,” you should, see it in a THEATER. They’re the ones who deserve your support.

Round up a handful of top drawer character actors, cast them as veteran cops who gather to pass on the wisdom of their years to a single new recruit during weekly poker games, and have then new detective draw on their stories — “lessons” — during a harrowing showdown with a serial killer.
That’s the premise behind “Poker Night,” a solid and well-acted if overlong and overly tricky thriller from Greg Francis, a TV veteran with such shows as “A Haunting” among his credits.
Beau Mirchoff of TV’s “Awkward” is Stan Jeter, the hero/narrator of this grisly tale. We meet him, bloodied, collapsing on the ground at what we figure is the end of some ordeal, narrating about the differences between wisdom and hindsight.
“Here’s the problem with wisdom,” he says. “You only get it AFTER you need it.”
Det. Jeter works for the Warsaw (U.S.) P.D., which is trying to find a shortcut to wisdom. The force has all these grizzled cops from all over the country. Foul-mouthed, two-fisted and incorruptible, they’re played by the likes of Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito and Ron Eldard. During their poker nights, each tells stories — flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks — of some telling case from their past, a lesson Jeter needs to learn to keep him alive on the job and help him solve his most difficult cases.
These lessons involve serial killers or simple murderers each has pursued, doggedly, for years, and the strategies employed in tripping up the bad guy and keeping him from killing whoever was chasing him as they did.
All manner of (movie) killer was faced down — a kid accused of murdering his parents is the case Esposito’s cop solved, the most interesting of the flashbacks.
But in the fictive present, Stan has left the game, gone on a call and seen a terrorized and underclothed young woman (Halston Sage) sprinting through the dark. Stan is tased, tied up and face to mask with a monster-masked kidnapper, a smooth-talking villain who tells his own story in flashbacks, the “normal” life with the “normal” wife and office job. The joke here is that his flashbacks show him in this leathery mask, which is the only way Stan knows him.
Stan must use what he’s learned on his own, and from the various lessons of his elders (Titus Welliver and Corey Large are the other poker players) to survive this ordeal, reason it out and find a way to turn the tables on his captor, who it turns out is a serial killer.
Writer-director Francis stages passable chases and shootouts, and spares us little of the gore of these gruesome killings by gruesome killers. A clever touch, transforming the aged cop telling the story into young Stan in the flashbacks, which are shot in washed-out colors, either over-exposed or underexposed and dark.
But Francis outsmarts himself, groping around for twists to toss our way, losing track of the clean lesson-to-its-application throughline of the plot. With so many flashbacks, even he seems to lose the thread, and he veers sharply in the end to try and defy our expectations one last time, utterly violating the logic of this “world.”
The players are good, with Mirchoff earnest and young as a nice contrast to the salty, rough-and-tumble elders, especially the iconic screen heavy, Perlman.
It’s just that when the last card is dealt on this “Poker Night,”  Francis isn’t content to let the best hand win.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence, profanity, sexual situations

Cast:  Beau Mirchoff, Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito, Halston Sage, Ron Eldard, Titus Welliver, Michael Eklund

Credits: Written and directed by Greg Francis. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:44