Movie Nation

The culinary culture clash comedy “The Hundred-Foot Journey” dawdles, like a meal that drags on and on because the waiter is too busy texting to bother bringing you the check.
Based on the Richard Morais novel, it’s a low-flame romance and low-heat feud about a family of Indian restaurateurs who set up their spicy, gaudy, and noisy eatery across the road from a posh, Michelin-endorsed haute cuisine establishment in rural France.
Lasse “Chocolat” Hallstrom directed, Helen “The Queen” Mirren is the imperious, snooty French restaurant’s owner, and the young leads — Manish Dayal as the aspiring Indian chef, Charlotte Le Bon as the winsome French one — are charming.
How did this smorgasbord turn out so bland?
It begins with promise. Hassan (Dayal) learns to cook from his mother at their family restaurant in Mumbai. Mom (Juhi Chawla) teaches him to cook with “all the senses,” that “To cook, you must kill. You cook, you make ghosts.” Meats and vegetables must retain their “spirits” for the dish to be great.
Violence in India kills the mother and sends her brood — led by Papa (Om Puri) — first to Britain, then to France, where the locals don’t know Indian food. Why would they? They have French cuisine, the world’s finest.
A road accident forces the Indian clan (Papa and five kids) to take a closer look at a charming village in the south of France, and Papa is drawn to an empty restaurant. The huffy Madame Mallory (Mirren) provokes him into sealing the deal. Maison Mumbai opens, a flurry of curries and riot of color and noisy Indian music, right across the road from Madame Mallory’s long-established, one-star fine dining institution.
Hassan tries to impress her, she’s not having it. He tries to make peace, and her signature dishes with a dash of Indian flavor, she won’t have it.
When the newcomers go to the market for fresh fruits, meats and vegetables, Madame Mallory has already bought everything up (she got a look at their menu). “War is war!” Papa declares, and it’s on like Avignon, a tit for tat fight that escalates around the ears of the town mayor, a gastronome who only wants to enjoy that next meal.
Meanwhile, Hassan is discovering French culinary tradition through the books lent him by the pretty sous chef at Madame Mallory’s place (Le Bon), and discovering love in her eyes. It’s a pity they work for sworn enemies.
The novel this is based on follows Hassan’s journey, from boy learning from his mother to the height of the Paris cooking establishment. Dayal and his character aren’t charismatic enough to carry the picture, so Hallstrom and his screenwriter focus on the fish-out-of-water elements of the tale, on the older character’s “war” and the sparks they set off. When he abandons that to follow Hassan deeper into his career, the movie lurches to a halt.
Mirren is regal as ever, and Puri, best known in the West for “Charlie Wilson’s War,” fumes up a nice blubbering rage. But nobody else gets much screen time. Ugly French xenophobia pops up, abruptly, and is dismissed just as quickly.
And all those sensual delights that great food films are known for “Hundred-Foot Journey” shortchanges. Close-ups of dishes are not enough. As Jon Favreau showed us with the far superior “Chef,” seeing the care a cook puts into the food requires an actor who is plainly doing his or her own chopping, mincing, filleting and stirring.
So this “Hundred-Foot Journey” seems to end several steps shy of completion, a bland romantic comedy where the actors don’t show us their characters’ love for each other or the food that supposedly is their reason for living. They merely talk a good game.
　
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some violence, language and brief sensuality
Cast: Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal, Charlotte Le Bon
Credits: Directed by Lasse Hallstrom, screenplay by Steven Knight, based on the Richard C. Morais novel. A Touchstone release.
Running time

The “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” earn a Michael Bay-produced 3-D re-boot that spares no expense in special effects and spares no decibel in the volume that is the soundtrack to all their new mayhem.
These digitally-animated super-sized turtles have real-world presence and weight, stumping onto the scene like teenagers who haven’t learned to do anything quietly. Their brawls with their trigger-happy foes from the Foot Clan are a blur of body blows and bullets. Their wise-cracks are up-to-date, their love of pizza unabated.
Their human friend is a fluff-friendly TV reporter played by Megan Fox. So yeah, Bay gave this production the full “Transformers” treatment. It’s entirely too violent, but teenaged turtles armed with ninja swords, knives and nunchucks have always been violent, from their origins in the 1980s comic books to assorted TV series and the films of the ’90s and an animated flop of 2007.
The new film, directed by Jonathan Liebesman (“Battle Los Angeles”) handles the back story — a lab experiment, a fire — quickly and gracefully — and puts shapely TV reporter April O’Neil (Fox) on their case right from the start.
The Foot Clan, led by the mysterious megalomaniac Shredder (voiced by Danny Woodburn) is trying to take over New York. But these masked vigilantes keep foiling their plans.
April starts to piece together a puzzle that points to her own past, the man her scientist father was in business with (William Fichtner) and the “mutagen” and other chemicals they were toying with.
The heroes are masked ninjas, mutant turtles who grew huge, learned English and trained in martial arts with the inscrutable rat, Splinter (Tony Shalhoub). Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo only occasionally act like teenagers, usually in their banter.
“Did you tell her his name?”
“Maybe she’s clairvoyant!”
“Maybe she’s a JEDI!”
April cannot convince her boss (Whoopi Goldberg) that she’s not crazy. And her on-the-make cameraman (Will Arnett, toned down and not nearly funny enough) is also a hard-sell regarding these “heroes on a half-shell.”
“So, they’re aliens?”
“No. That would be STUPID.”
The animated rat has a much bigger role in this film than is usual for this series, and the animaters give Splinter a few cute tricks to pull off with his tale, as well as an Asian martial arts master’s long, thin goatee.
The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not.
But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a film that aims younger (save for the die-hards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull.
And Fox, emoting as if her “comeback” depended on this, plays it all straight, which tends to rob the film of needed-playfulness. The turtle brothers are somewhat less distinct as character “types” — the tech nerd, the angry rebel, the boy on the make, the leader. Among the voice actors playing the Project Renaissance turtle brothers, only Johnny Knoxville stands out.
“Oh look, he’s doing his BATMAN voice!”
So even though they “did justice” to this beloved franchise, there’s nothing here that won’t be forgotten by the time you’ve gotten home — AFTER you stopped for pizza.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence
Cast: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Whoopi Goldberg, the voices of Tony Shalhoub, Johnny Knoxville, Danny Woodburn
Credits: Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, scripted by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty. A Paramount/Nickelodeon release.
Running time: 1:40

The romantic comedy recipe is so well-known and foolproof that the great mystery about them is how rarely the romantic fools in Hollywood get it right.
“What If” does. It’s a healthy serving of great “obstacles to romance,” generous helpings of cute, alluring leads, a dash of funny-sexy “best friends,” an enticing location filmed at its best and topped with bright, witty (but not precious) banter. It and its adorable stars — Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan — have us rooting for them from first frame to last.
Wallace and Chantry “meet cute” — at a party. He’s creating faintly forlorn poems out of fridge-magnets, she reshapes them into more hopeful odes to love.
He’s 379 days past his last, broken-hearted breakup. And her? She’s beguiling, an animator with big eyes, easy to talk to. They chat about the sandwich that killed Elvis — “Fool’s Gold” — and how much of that confection was found in The King’s colon.
“We should hang out,” she says as he walks her home. Great! Then, as she’s fishing for her keys, “My boyfriend will be worried about me.”
There’s the rub. She’s in a five year live-in relationship with a handsome, successful U.N. copyright attorney, Ben (Rafe Spall). Wallace is perplexed. Naturally, he turns to his hipster-Lothario best friend, Allan (Adam Driver, sort of “Justin Long: The Next Generation.”). What’s Allan’s rule?
“If it starts dirty, it ends dirty.” In other words, even if Wallace attempts to win Chantry — And what kind of name is that? — luring her away from a relationship means getting her to cheat. If that’s how they begin, that’s how they’ll end.
“What If” — a limp title for a movie based on the Canadian play “Toothpaste & Cigars” — is about Wallace’s longing, Chantry’s winsome doubts and the other people’s efforts to interfere with what might be happening as they attempt to “just be friends.”
Everybody in this is amusing, but not stand-up comic amusing. The cleverness feels unrehearsed and spontaneous. The first time Wallace meets Ben, he’s come over to dinner at their apartment and Ben stops chopping vegetables to wave his knife at Wallace and ask, “Are you trying to sleep with my girlfriend?”
Allan hooks up, for good, with Nicole, played by the willowy and edgy Mackenzie Davis (“That Awkward Moment”), and they animate every scene they’re in with a groping/kissing/pillow-talking hilarity. Megan Park scores snarky points as Chantry’s on-the-make younger sister, who sets her eye on Wallace because Chantry, plainly, is out of bounds.
Kazan, as she proved in “Ruby Sparks,” has a whimsical, quirky girl-next-door appeal. Radcliffe, wearing post-Harry Potter stubble and delivering toothy, jaw-jutting grins, makes it easy for us to believe he cannot get her out of his head.
As they “hang out/not date” through the many charming corners of Toronto, neighborhoods where 20somethings can gather for knitting parties in a yarn shop, or skinny-dip in the lake, “What If” keeps us guessing. The only real give-away is the walking sight gag these two are. Director Michael Dowse surrounds them with people who tower over them. Spall’s Ben has to bend over at the waist to keep his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s “friend,” in the frame and in eye contact.
But the recipe, fools slowly rushing in while joking about Fool’s Gold, works. It’s every bit as irresistible as that potentially lethal combo of bacon, butter, jam and peanut-butter ever was.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, including references throughout, partial nudity and language
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver, Mackenzie Davis
Credits: Directed by Michael Dowse, screenplay by Elan Mastai based on a play by T.J. Dawe and Michael Rinaldi. A CBS Films/eOne release.
Running time: 1:42

MIAMI BEACH — Chloe Grace Moretz is spending a lot of time pondering life’s transitions. At 17, it’s not too soon for her to wonder about that generally-awkward leap to more adult roles. For every Emma Watson, gracefully continuing her career into her 20s, there are five Amanda Bynes, and Moretz has to know that.
“I’ve done this (acting) for the past 12-13 years of my life,” says the star of “Carrie” and “Hugo” says. “It’s my love and my passion. It’s my one, true calling. I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world. But at some point in my life, maybe in the next two years, I would like to go to a film school and learn cinematography and editing. I am fascinated by the technical side of the business.”
And her new film has had her mulling over the BIG transition — life, to death, and what might come after. “If I Stay” (in theaters Aug. 22), based on Gayle Forman’s young adult novel about a comatose teen who faces the stark choices of life or death, forces issues of mortality on an age group that is famed for thinking itself immortal.
“You don’t think about how unexpected death is at that age, my age,” she says. “In this movie, we just get in the car and bad things happen…My character’s listening to music, the voice-over is a little ominous. And then BAM. It’s as quick as when it happens in real life…Life doesn’t usually have this big build up until death. It’s sudden.”
Moretz’s character, Mia, is an aspiring cellist with a shot at Juilliard, a teen girl in love for the first time (Jamie Blackley) with an adoring, indulgent family. But Juilliard damages the romance. A car accident leaves her in a coma, and as her spirit wanders through flashbacks and the halls of that hospital, she pulls together reasons for giving up as well as things that might make her fight to live.
“Bring it down to a baseline that we can all see — that common denominator of loss,” Moretz says. “We can all, no matter how young we are, connect with losing someone or something and grieving over it. Even a little kid gets that…In love, it’s so fleeting when you’re my age. You get that high, you’re in that romantic high, on the top of a mountain. And then it’s gone — just like that, in a flash, it’s suddenly gone. You’re careening down off that mountain on your way down to Earth.
“Tragic love stories pull us in because of that high and the low that follows. It gives them that much more impact.”
The daughter of an Atlanta plastic surgeon and a nurse, younger sister to an actor and acting coach, Moretz has seemed destined for at least child stardom from the start. Making her mark in films such as “Kick-Ass” and “Let Me In,” she officially became a talent worth following, meaning that even a misstep — last year’s stumbling “Carrie” remake — earned notices that declared how “unnervingly talented” (Cath Clarke, Time Out) or “fiercely talented” (The Guardian newspaper) she is, whatever the film she’s miscast in.
So it’s no surprise that she’s a very convincing cellist in “If I Stay,” or that she had never picked up the instrument before taking the role.
“It’s so intricate, so soulful,” she says of the cello.” You have to devote like 15 years of your life to it to be any good at all. It’s a very emotive, versatile instrument. It took me seven or eight months to get to the point where i could fake it. It was less difficult getting the technical side of it, the bowing and all, than getting the emotion right. You get this vibration, playing the cello, the physicality of it is kind of wild. Watch a cellist who is really into it playing it and they seem to express these big emotions.”
She knew, going in, that she’d have an edge in that regard.
“You have to have long hair to REALLY get across that effect!’
But when she wasn’t playing the cello, “If I Stay” had her running, barefoot, through the halls of a hospital set, a lost soul trying to decide whether life is still worth living. She figures her peers — her generation — will buy into that concept without hesitation.
“We’re pretty open-minded about spiritual stuff,” she thinks. “We’re smart enough that we don’t want to be spoon-fed a belief system, some sort of candy-coated philosophy. That’s why the movies that appeal to us are not just Christian or Buddhist or Jewish or whatever. We’re kind of open to looking at a broad spectrum of religions, beliefs and forms of spirituality. That’s why I think this movie will connect with people my age. We don’t want to be told what to believe, or to expect in an afterlife. ‘If I Stay’ doesn’t tell you. It lets you think about it.”

Forbes is out with its annual “How much Hollywood folks earn” stories, a summer “expose” which they don’t bother to carry over into other areas that might offend their “capitalist tool” readership. “Richest secret campaign donors”? You never see that, for instance. Hollywood “overpaid” folks turn up in another summer read, along with best paid actors, but the “over-compensated CEOs of failing companies” pieces — while not unheard of, are rare.

So Sandra Bullock is back on top of the pay mountain, earning $51 million from “Gravity” and “The Heat” and side deals. Angelina Jolie fell from first to fifth, where she and the always-employable Cameron Diaz reside.

Fresh-faced Oscar-winning up-and-comer Jennifer Lawrence earned over $34 million, with Jennifer Aniston making most of her money off TV endorsements these days.

That also explains Gwyneth Paltrow’s prominent place on the list. She is a brand, and she markets that brand well, even if she doesn’t do nearly as many movies as she used to. “Iron Man” was enough to secure that brand’s profile, and all the lifestyle, beauty endorsements, cooking stuff? Just gravy.

“This is like one of those ’80s movies,” wide-eyed Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) observes at one point in the later scenes of “About Alex.”
Yes, it is. More like “that ’80s movie” — singular. “About Alex” is “The Big Chill” — the one about a group of college friends who reunite, in their early 30s, at the big house in the country where one of them lived and just killed himself.
In “About Alex,” not-as-old college friends gather in the big house in the country where one of their number just tried to kill himself. While it’s entirely possible that these late twentysomethings would have run across 1983’s “The Big Chill” somewhere — Jeff Goldblum’s hipster appeal has never been greater — it’s far more likely that the writer-director son of Oscar winner Ed Zwick just figured he could get away with a knock-off, as long as he had a character joke about it.
Everybody had lost touch with Alex (Jason Ritter, the son of John Ritter), dodging his emails, text messages, etc. He was kind of needy. So he writes a poetic final note, paraphrasing Shakespeare.
“Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”
And then slashed his wrists. Newspaper copy editor and would-be novelist Ben (Nate Parker of “The Great Debaters”) and his girlfriend Siri (Maggie Grace), mouthy academic Josh (Max Greenfield), mergers attorney Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) and hedge fund success Isaac (Max Minghella, son of Oscar winning director Anthony Minghella) flock to his side. Or his house.
They haven’t had the time to clean up the bloody bathroom when Alex sashays back in, grinning, dropped off by a taxi. He’s the best-adjusted recent suicide survivor in the history of film.
Everybody in this group has history, everybody has issues and a lot of those issues have to do with crushes, love affairs, and the like. Alex is sort of peripheral to all that as that old gang from college sort through the messiness of their lingering connections.
“What happened to us?” they ask. “We got serious,” they answer.
Josh makes deep observations about “our parents’ music” (Springsteen) vs. “our music” (Arcade Fire), how people aren’t “close” any more thanks to social media, and how nobody goes deep into thought about relationships, events and their lives — “they just relate them to” this movie (“Wedding Crashers”) or that sitcom (“Friends”).
It’s all so shallow it’s tempting to dismiss this as “Nepotism: The Movie,” with all the Hollywood offspring, on camera and off. Really, Jesse Zwick, if the best idea you can script is a scene where the guys are in a group and all they can think to say is “What do you think the girls are doing?”, it’s time to suck it up and ask daddy for tips.
“About Alex” eventually finds some third act drama amid a sea of glib banalities. Plaza, of TV’s “Parks and Recreation,” is still over-reliant on eye-rolling as her go-to acting move. But Greenfield, Parker and Jane Levy, playing Isaac’s too-young/suicide hot line operator girlfriend (yeah, really) give decent performances.
As “Big Chill” knockoffs go, the world has seen worse. Someday, when future hipsters dig deep into the filmography of the guy we’ll be calling “The New Jeff Goldblum” (Greenfield), maybe they’ll stumble across “About Alex.” And wonder what ’80s movie the eye-roller is comparing this to.
MPAA Rating: R for language and drug use
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Nate Parker, Maggie Grace, Max Minghella, Jason Ritter, Jane Levy, Max Greenfield
Credits: Written and directed by Jesse Zwick. A Screen Media release.
Running time

There’s something about the idea of that quintessentially modern mensch Griffin Dunne (“After Hours,” “Dallas Buyers Club”) in a period piece that doesn’t connect.
But Griffin Dunne as an academic has-been, forced to dress in 19th century frontier wear to recreate the quest of Lewis & Clark to humor his crazy re-enactor father? That works.
“The Discoverers” showcases Dunne in a part he was born to play. Lewis Birch still sports an ’80s haircut, still wears the stubble, though all his hair is going grey. He’s a Chicago community college teacher who has to moonlight as a security guard, who still has standards when the school is all about keeping the student loan money coming in, and who keeps the last Volvo he could afford together with duct tape.
Newly split from his wife, Lewis drags the kids along to a Portland conference which could re-launch his academic career, a lecture based on his magnum opus about the expedition he was named after. His ground-breaking Lewis & Clark history runs to 6,000 pages, took him 20 years to write, years in which he failed his way down the academic food chain.
But just as snarky Zoe (Madeleine Martin) and stoner Jack doze off in the back seat, Lewis learns his mother is ill. Lewis, who hasn’t visited there in decades, drags the kids there only to find the old woman dead and the old man (Stuart Margolin) lost in a reenactment fantasy.
Next thing you know, the ever-put-upon Lewis and his too-modern kids are slogging along in buckskins, play-actors in an annual “Discovery Trek,” with politically incorrect locals recreating a portion of the quest of the “Corps of Discovery.”
Writer-director Justin Schwarz is covering a bit of “Little Miss Sunshine” on foot, here. Grandpa is catatonic, and armed with a musket. David Rasche plays a co-leader of their corps. Lewis may indulge their fantasy, even though he’s an expert. Zoe, sort of a Sarah Vowell smart-aleck, isn’t having it.
“Not to be a stickler,” she begins this criticism or that one, “But isn’t it a little gender-biased to give only the MEN weapons?”
Lewis is estranged from his father, who prefers his other son (John C. McGinley). Yes, Lewis and father Stanley are both deep into Lewis and Clark, but the script lets us pick up on what must have come between them.
The trek has father-daughter bonding moments, and a stoner-son/blonde teen re-enactor romance. And there’s yet another available potential mate (Carla Buono) for Lewis, should he have the wherewithal to not come off as bitter and martyred, and weepy when he smokes pot.
There are convenient coincidences, aside from the romantic possibilities, but not a lot of low points to this comedy. But the comic highs aren’t that high, and the whole is rather on-the-nose and unsurprising. Schwarz doesn’t discover much new about publish-or-slowly-perish academia, from the soapbox this teacher stands on to the Swedish car these fellows always drive (in the movies, anyway).
Still, “The Discoverers” can be relished for the novel setting, and for Dunne and Martin’s performances in scenes separate or together. Dunne has earned the right to play this loser. And Martin is so good that in Zoe, you can see, hear and dread the ex-wife that her mother is alleged to be.

　
MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, pot use, gun play, adult situations
Cast: Griffin Dunne, Madeleine Martin, Stuart Margolin, Carla Buono, David Rasche
Credits: Written and directed by Justin Schwarz. A Quadratic Media release.
Running time: 1:44

The casting of Matthew McConaughey looked promising, Jessica Chastain’s in it, and Michael Caine (of course). Christopher Nolan’s cautionary, hopeful film about a Global Warming doomed Earth in search of a replacement planet epic opens right after election day, where the Global Warming deniers are apparently set for big gains. Coincidence?

This promising fall romantic comedy pairs up Daniel Radcliffe with Zoe Kazan, a sort of meeting Ms. Right at the Wrong Time sort of farce.

Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis are the two “best friends” who show up to remind us how short the leads are.

This trailer seems to give away the whole movie, but as it’s homework (I’m interviewing Radcliffe about “What If”), I am heading into this with high hopes. Rom-com seems to be one genre Hollywood has forgotten how to make.

Saturday further boosted the fortunes of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and Marvel Studios, as the big Thursday night and huge Friday added another banner day to the film’s tally.

$95.5 million, by midnight Sunday, says deadline.com.

“Get On Up” is under-performing, but should be a stick-around-through-August performer, after opening with about $14 million this weekend.

“Lucy” lost 60% of its opening weekend take, but is still managing $18 million+. “Hercules” dropped 65% and is headed for a quick fade.

“A Most Wanted Man” has climbed into the top ten, for people who want a little something to chew on in their summer cinema, other than just jokes and special effects.

“And So It Goes” is holding audience and should play to the senior set through August, though it won’t make enough to bring Rob Reiner back to directing’s A-list.

“Calvary” did a whopping $19,000 on a single New York screen.

The top ten films this weekend, which do not count the “Transformers” among their ranks, added up to 50-60% more in total box office than the same weekend last summer. So “Guardians” may yet put a dent in that huge summer deficit the business has been dealing with since “Spider-Man” underwhelmed.