Movie Nation

“Neighbors” is an “Animal House” for “The Hangover” era, a frat boy comedy that pushes the rude and raunchy envelope into daring and dirty new territory. Hilariously coarse, reasonably shrewd and clumsily sentimental, there’s no reason it won’t earn a billion and inspire a whole new generation of party hearty “bros” to go Greek when they go to college.

The hook here is not just the appeal of this band of brothers — drinking, dope-smoking, hard-living loverboys — to their peers. They’re also the sorts of guys Mac and Kelly used to be and wish they still were.

But Mac (Seth Rogen) has a office job that is pure drudgery. Kelly (Rose Byrne) is staying at home with Stella, their newborn. They have to lie to convince themselves that the obvious hasn’t come true.

“Just because we have a house and a baby doesn’t mean we’re old people.”

They strain to keep their old lives– sharing the occasional joint, spontaneous sex (in front of the baby), club hopping.

“We can have fun AND a baby! Baby’s first Rave!”

The trouble is, they can’t. And having the up-all-night kids of Delta Psi Beta move in next door just rubs their noses in it.

The kids, led by Teddy (Zac Efron) and Pete (Dave Franco), may feign neighborliness and high fraternity ideals.

“Chivalry above self!”

But they’re hedonistic beasts, living to make their legends with a fraternity that claims it invented the toga party, beer pong and the like. Telling them to “Keep it down” will never work.

And despite the “invite the old people in” flattery, despite Mac’s taste for the magic mushrooms, booze and other substances the Deltas have in mass quantities, this means war.

The random laughs are sprinkled throughout this Rogenesque comedy — the shock value profanity that the parents use in front of the toddler, the college dean (Lisa Kudrow) who will only do something about the fraternity’s behavior when they make “headlines.”

I love the stuff about the older couple straining to still seem “cool” to these kids who have no regard for anybody who isn’t at their frat house, partying like it’s 1979. The fun is supposed to build from the elaborate plots the marrieds and the bros engage in to foil each other. Only, it doesn’t.

Whoever the screenwriters, the Judd Apatow-trained Rogen makes sure there are a dizzying array of killer one-liners, such as Mac’s reaction to the first time he sees Teddy shirtless.

“He’s like something a gay guy designed in a laboratory!”

Byrne, as she proved in “Bridesmaids” and REALLY proved in “Get Him to the Greek,” can hang with the bad boys in terms of laying it all out there and cursing like a sailor.

But for such a short comedy, “Neighbors” drags. Director Nicholas Stoller (“Get Him to the Greek”) creates little momentum between the schemes and counter-schemes. Peripheral characters, while funny, show up and stop the action. Some of the “I love you, man” riffs between the bros are meant to be funny because they go on forever.

The outrageous stunts and boundaries-pushing gags are as riotously funny as anything in any “Hangover” movie. And telling this story from both the frat brothers’ and the indignant nearly-adults next door’s point of view broadens the appeal. Yeah, we used to be like that. In our dreams.

But in between the belly laughs, “Neighbors” feels like a pulled punch, a mean comedy with a soft streak, a “Hangover” that never delivers the buzz.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, strong crude and sexual content, graphic nudity, and drug use throughout

Cast: Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron, Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Lisa Kudrow

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Stoller, screenplay by Andrew J. Cohen, Brendan O’Brien. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

Sports agents, as “Jerry Maguire” taught us, make their mark by finding value where others don’t see it.
That’s the hook to “Million Dollar Arm,” a Disney movie about a real-life agent — J.B. Bernstein — who decides the answer to his bottom-line is finding future Major League Baseball pitchers amongst the millions of young cricket bowlers of India.
No, they don’t play baseball in India. There’s no system set up to scout for baseball talent. And the simple mechanics of hurling a cricket ball, a straight-armed (no bent elbow) motion augmented by taking a running start, isn’t much like a pitcher’s motion at all.
But Bernstein found an investor, created an “India’s Got Baseball Talent” type contest and brought in a baseball scout to find out who might have a “Million Dollar Arm.”
“What he realized was that in a country that big, there was talent out there — athletic ability,” says Jon Hamm, who plays Bernstein in the movie, which opens May 16. “The problem is simply that there isn’t a value, over there, placed on being able to throw this ball the way we do over here. What he figured out, wisely, was that there are a billion kids in India and you’ve got to figure that are some who have the build, the raw athletic ability, to be able to throw a baseball at major league speeds.”
In other words, “Juice’ (pitching velocity) is juice. It’s quantifiable,” Hamm says. “This guy can bring it, or he can’t. ‘We can teach you the rest’. The reality of the story was a guy thinking so outside of the box, and having his gamble pay off.”
The guy he’s playing in the film, the real J.B. Bernstein, was beyond flattered that a guy with Hamm’s Hollywood heat elected to play him in the movie. The Access Group sports agency founder got to relive his story — with all its wince-worthy moments — with a rising A-list star driving his Porsche, making his same mistakes, makes him shake his head. Especially that first, thrown-together big league showcase for his Indian stars, staged in a parking lot in Arizona,
“I watch that scene and I am right back there in Arizona watching the train wreck I created
unfold,” Bernstein says. ” By far, the worst day of my life. Jon really captured what I felt like that day.”
Another gamble in “Million Dollar Arm” is the one the actor is taking. Hamm, 43, is trying to set the table for his post-“Mad Men” career with a culture clash comedy in which he plays straight man to Alan Arkin (playing the jaded scout) and a trio of Indian village boys thoroughly lost when J.B. brings them to Los Angeles to prep them for a big-league tryout.
“The tone of the film helps me out, and this guy is significantly different from Don Draper (from “Mad Men”),” Hamm says. “The emotional journey that he takes is beautiful and uplifting and inspiring, even. Heartwarming. Not one of those words has ever been used to describe Don Draper. Ever.’
Hamm laughs. Even though his “sexiest man alive” chiseled good looks convinced Hollywood that “straight arrow” characters — cops and federal agents (“The Town”) — might be his future, he’s drawn to comedy. He’s been in a long-term relationship with comic actress, writer and director Jennifer Westfeldt (“Kissing Jessica Stein”). His turns on “30 Rock” and appearances on “Saturday Night Live” show he can find the funny. And he laughed at the idea of playing Bernstein.
“I get to play a ‘fish out of water,'” Hamm says of his high-living agent out of his depth in India. “You go to India, you can’t figure out how anything works. You’re in the middle of this sea of people and cars, in traffic. And it works. Wow. J.B.’s reaction to that is like any Ameican’s reaction to things working in that chaos — pretty funny.”
A third gamble? Disney, reaching for that huge Indian market with a film about an agent who sold MLB on the same idea — that there’s money to be made on those Bollywood-loving billions in South Asia.
“Our biggest concern was, we didn’t want to offend anybody,” Hamm says. “We didn’t want the Indian characters as cartoonish cliches. Craig (Gillespie, director) walked a very fine line with that. . But you can say that and show that without offending people…You want to be culturally sensitive at all times. Bollywood films and Indian cinema is a lovely art form, beautiful. It’s also very specific to that culture. But plainly there is a place for Hollywood in India.”
No Indian player recruited by J.B. Bernstein has yet made it to the Major Leagues. But given time, the odds are that one could. “Million Dollar Arm.” Visit any major league ballpark this year and it’s pretty obvious the game need to find fresh pitching blood — somewhere.
Hollywood’s product makes inroads into the Indian marketplace, even with films that aren’t tailor made for that audience.
And Hamm’s gamble? It’s hardly an all-or-nothing shot. A summer comedy about India and baseball might not seem like a sure thing, and a James Franco-directed adaptation of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”, which Hamm has finished, seems even less commercial. Heck, he might even do another TV series, limited run or otherwise.
“I would never say ‘No’ to doing another TV show. I love doing it and the opportunities there are more exciting than they’ve ever been.”
And if his lady friend and in-demand muse Westfeldt can squeeze in the time, “I’m sure she”ll put something on paper and we’ll pour our energy into making it. As hard as it is being a sports agent, or getting an acting career going, getting an independent film written, cast, financed, made and distributed is even harder.”

Jon Favreau looks the part, is behind the camera for this cooking comedy with Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett J., Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Bobby Canavale and Oliver Platt as a food critic.

“Chef” goes into limited release this weekend, wider later in the month.

It would have been too much to expect Jerome Sable’s “Stage Fright” to live
up to its positively giddy first 15 minutes. But sooner or later, the gore was
coming to the fore of this blend of backstage musical, and “Scream 1, 2, 3 4.”
The fun just bleeds out of it.
Opening night for the musical “Haunting of the Opera” is marred when the star
(Minnie Driver) is brutally butchered in her dressing room by a killer wearing
the “Ghost of the Opera” mask and cowled cape.
But ten years later, Camilla (Allie MacDonald), the daughter of that star
hasn’t forgotten Mom’s singing credo — “All of life’s a song, so sing with all
your heart!” It’s just that standing out at the Center Stage summer camp for the
performing arts is going to be tough.
Busloads of singing, primping divas — some of them girls — show up at “the
place where we can be ourselves, at least for once a year!”
They sing through the list of nasty nicknames they get from bullies and
lament their lot in life — in song.

“I got beaten up a dozen times, just for singing Stephen Sondheim!”
Sam (Ephraim Ellis) croons, “I’m GAY, I’m gay, but not in that way.” He’s just “gay for musicals.”

Ex-producer Roger McCall (Meat Loaf) runs the camp. His only hope for holding off the creditors? Getting the kids to revive that “Haunting” show of long ago, with wunderkind director Artie Getz (Brandon Uranowitz) staging it as a kabuki musical.

Camilla? She knows she could be a star, just like mom, if she can win the
lead role. But she’s not even enrolled at Center Stage. She and her twin brother (Douglas Smith) are stuck in the kitchen, cooking for all the Broadway brats.

But Camilla is fated for that role — Sofia. And as the kids storm through
rehearsals, getting ready for their “Limelight” showcase performance, somebody is watching, sharpening his knives and readying his own repeat performance.

The body count is strictly routine, but Sable does his best to keep “show
must go on” camp element in the mix. That side of things — gay jokes, divas tossing tantrums, the lecherous director’s casting couch — is supposed to produce the laughs. But after that promising opening, those laughs are few and far between.

“Why am I even TALKING to you? You’re just an…ALTO!”
The cast is bland, the voices far too thin to have any pretensions of
Broadway. So that just leaves us with a horror film, an Axl Rose-sound-alike screeching through murders set to a heavy metal beat. “Break a leg!” he cracks.
“Nailed it” is the punch line to another murder.

There’s promise, here — in the goofy improvisations the cast attempts when the night becomes a fiasco — “The more that goes wrong, the more we need for the show to go on!”
But opening night never lives up to those opening minutes. As horror musicals go, “Stage Fright” is never more than an out-of-town tryout.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody horror violence, language and some sexual
references

Cast: Meat Loaf, Minnie Driver, Allie MacDonald, Brandon Uranowitz

Credits: Written and directed, music and lyrics by Jerome Sable. A
Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:28

James McAvoy wallows in it in his new film, “Filth.” He embraces the sexual depravity, the drug and alcohol abuse, the bullying, vile language, racism and rank sexism of being a Scottish cop on the loose.
“There’s nooo place like home,” he narrates in his natural burr. And for
detective Bruce Robertson, truly there isn’t. Scotland is where this cop knows he can get away with most anything.
Bruce wants a promotion, wants to make inspector. And he’s willing to lie, blackmail and set his rival cops in the department against each other to get it.
“I’ve always believed it’s the winning that’s important,” he cracks, giving his version of the Olympic creed, “NOT the ‘taking part.'”
A Japanese student has been murdered, and Bruce and his department are on the case. Not that there’s any rush.
“A wog’s a wog, for all that, eh?” That generic catch-all British Empire slur still carries weight with this lot. Jamie Bell plays a fellow cop who’s a real threat to Bruce’s promotion, so he’s got a ready supply of blackmail material on the lad. Brian McCardie is a racist homophobe detective, Emun Elliot a “metrosexual” ripe for undercutting through sexual preference jokes, Imogen Poots plays the possibly competent female detective, Gary Lewis the aged simpleton and John Sessions the clueless would-be screenwriter chief who plans to hand the promotion to the detective who solves this crime.
Bruce may have the inside track, being a good cop. But he can’t leave the coke, pills, booze and inhalers — anything he comes across — alone. He can’t NOT sexually harass suspects. And he can’t bury deep the demons that make him hallucinate a dead boy’s image, even as he lies abut his mental health to the departmental shrink (Jim Broadbent).
Bruce co-narrates his story with his randy, “open marriage” preaching wife (Shauna Macdonald) and gets his jollies corrupting his straight arrow Masonic Lodge pal (Eddie Marson) whose wife (Shirley Henderson) Bruce treats to a never-ending supply of obscene and obscenely funny phone calls.
And through it all, as he narrates the foibles of his peers and runs amok
through Edinburgh and Glasgow (and Hamburg, Germany, for a laugh), McAvoy revels in being bad — very bad.
It’s “Easy, peasy Japanesy” for his Bruce to share every ugly thought and social theory that pops into his demented head. Bruce likes his porn, his auto erotic asphyxiation games, his assorted hookers, paramours and depraved
pursuits. And McAvoy lets us see him enjoy it all.
Because the moment this experience or that transgression ends, Bruce is lost — a mess, a man with secrets, too many of which are easily guessed, even if  others revealed only is due course. McAvoy makes us feel Bruce’s emptiness, even if we never once feel for him.
Writer-director Jon S. Baird , working from the Irvine Welsh novel, doesn’t water down the thick accents, the slang or the sexual deviancy here, turning McAvoy loose on this loose, louche louse and letting his star get so down and dirty that you wonder how he’ll ever shake off his role.
He will. But not without a thorough scrubbing.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use, language and some violence
Cast: James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Imogen Poots, Eddie Marsan, Shauna Macdonald, Jim Broadbent
Credits: Written and directed by Jon S. Baird, based on the Irvine Welsh novel. An e release.
Running time: 1:33

Identity and our ability to control our own is very much in the zeitgeist,
which goes a long way in explaining why there are two current films built around
the confused search for identity, both adaptations of novels titled “The
Double.”
The muddled puzzle of “Enemy” has a college professor (Jake Gyllenhaal)
stalking, and then confronted by a man who seems to be an alternate version of
himself. It’s based on a book by Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. “The
Double,” the classic take on this question of identity and the madness that
obsessing about it too much can reveal, was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and is
the basis of a cerebral thriller starrying Jesse Eisenberg.
For all of both film’s surreal touches and stylistic flourishes, “The Double”
is the one that makes more sense.
Eisenberg plays a clerk trapped in a gloomy corporation run by a distant
Colonel (James Fox). Simon James is the sort of nobody that nobody notices —
pushed around, bullied.
“How long you been here, son?” the boss (Wallace Shawn) wants to know. “Just
started, eh?”
“Yes sir. Seven years.”
Even the sliding doors, omnipresent in this retro-future of adding machines,
cathode ray tube computer screens and permanently dim lighting, torment Simon.
He’s living in a world where nobody knows his name.>
Not even the lovely Hannah, who runs the photocopying room, gives him a
thought. But he thinks about her. She puts a spring in his step, even as he
spies on her in her apartment with his spotting scope, puzzling over the torn
bits of bloody paper left over from the drawings she makes by pricking her
fingers.
Then the unnoticed Simon is confronted with the very noticeable James
(Eisenberg, too). He is confident where Simon is tentative. James is aggressive
where Simon is nebbishy. Simon would be the only person who realizes they look
exactly alike, but James does, too. The more assertive James begins to offer
life, love and dating advice to Simon. But Simon and we suspect James of more
sinister motives.
“This is NOT me!” Simon protests. But no one listens.
Richard “The IT Crowd” Ayoade, who directed the dark and dense teen romance
“Submarine,” concentrates on externals, here. “The Double” looks like science
fiction, a “Dark City” built around a Kafka-esque nightmare of a Dostoevsky
story. Ayoade’s background means he plays up the humor inherent in this
scenario, at least partly through casting. Shawn is perfect as a grating boob of
a boss, Sally Hawkins makes a dry, contemptuous receptionist, one of many who
refuse to acknowledge that Simon exists.
But Eisenberg, perfectly, pliably put upon, is the engine that drives this
picture. Simon’s inept longing for Hannah, for human connection of any sort,
shows in his hurt eyes. And Eisenberg is just as convincing as James, whose
cocky patter and arrogance seem a natural extension of Eisenberg’s turn in “The
Social Network.” One guy we fear for, the other we fear.
It’s not a great or a deep take on identity, or even that novel as a concept.
Dostoevsky wrote “The Double” in 1846, and the timeless theme is mostly what
resonates here, not the muc- imitated sense of future past that Ayoade & Co.
borrow (see “Brazil”). But as with “Enemy,” what’s worth the price of admission
is the acting exercise, the subtle wonders of seeing a great talent create two
versions of the same man with just downcast eyes, stooped shoulders and a
difference in walks — one confident, conniving, the other hesitant, just
waiting for that next hurt and humiliation.

MPAA Rating:R for language
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, James Fox, Sally
Hawkins
Credits: Written and directed by Richard Ayoade, based on a novel by Fyodor
Dostoevsky. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:33

Aging indie hipster Jim Jarmusch finally gets around to making his vampire movie with “Only Lovers Left Alive,” a droll, dry and atmospheric character study in the Jarmusch style.
The director who brought us “Night on Earth,” “Mystery Train” and “Broken Flowers” tells the story of a couple of undead lovers, together through the centuries, now separated by an ocean and half a continent.
Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a musician. And having had several lifetimes to practice, he’s mastered guitars, violins and lutes. He once passed a string quartet to Schubert.
“Only the adagio” movement, he sniffs. “Just to get it ‘out there.'”
Now, he’s holed up in an abandoned Detroit mansion where the Addams Family would have felt right at home. He collects old records and rare guitars and plays his morose, metal dirges onto vintage recording gear, all with the aid of Ian (Anton Yelchin).
Ian doesn’t know Adam’s secret, just his musical notoriety. Adam is hiding from his fans. All Ian knows is that the guy is a messy housekeeper, that he seems depressed and that he pays for everything with cash, lots of it.
Eve (Tilda Swinton) stays in a Tangier apartment cluttered with books of every language — poetry, plays, novels. She devours them, and occasionally goes out to collect a goody bag of blood from her aged friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt, perfect). Yes, THAT Christopher Marlowe, “Kit” to Shakespeare’s “Will,” alleged author of some of the Immortal Bard’s immortal works. Kit knows Adam, too.
“How I wish I’d met him before I wrote ‘Hamlet’!”
Adam gets his goodies by masquerading as Dr. Faust, slipping into the hospital where Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright) is his blood-supply connection. Watson, a regular Dr. Feelgood for the blood-craving, calls Adam “Dr. Strangelove” and “Dr. Caligari,” for laughs.
Eve senses Adam’s state of mind, Skypes him (vampires prefer iPhones, wouldn’t you know it) and travels first class (Air Lumiere) “only at night” to be with him.
The Jarmusch touches here are the self-aware little jokes, Eve hanging out in the Moroccan Cafe Mille et Une Nuit (Cafe A Thousand and One Nights), flying on a Daisy Buchanan (“The Great Gatsby”) passport. His characters pass judgment on the human race, “zombies,” they call us, and on the human history they’ve observed over the hundreds of years.
“Did you play chess with Byron?”
Jarmusch loves ruined towns, and Detroit offers a smorgasbord of an urban desert — empty neighborhoods, collapsing factories, all part of Adam’s nightly tours in his ancient Jaguar XJS. A biting joke — Detroit “will bloom” when America’s “Southern cities burn” — a global warming prophecy.
The effects are very limited, but so is the story’s dramatic tension. Only the arrival of Eve’s bratty younger sister, Eva (Mia Wasikowska) stirs thing up. Wasikowska is the most animated player in it, with Swinton and Hiddleston (“Thor”) playing everything on a low simmer.
The lack of urgency may bore those unused to Jarmusch’s style and pacing. But his languor is his calling card. The deliberate pacing makes the offhand jokes and dry observations seem funnier than they are, at least in this case. This borders on being “cute.” And dull.
You’d think, post “Twilight,” that the guy was just selling out, as if that could ever happen.
　
MPAA Rating: R for language and brief nudity
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, Jeffrey Wright, Anton Yelchin, John Hurt
Credits: Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 2:03

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” didn’t suffer much of a fall-off from Friday to Saturday. But no fall off, on most people’s first full day off to go see it, might have been expected. It’s still on track to hit $90-91 million, but Sunday’s numbers will be the final arbiter.

“The Other Woman” is on track, after Friday and Saturday, to take in just under $15 million on its second weekend.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” cleared the $50 million mark, the very definition of a long-running low-budget hit. It’s done 2.5 times the business of “Transcendence,” the very definition of a big budget “blockbuster” bomb.

“God’s Not Dead” is finally out of gas and losing screens. The no-cost indie hit will still end up just under $60 million, a major win or the filmmakers.

“Heaven is for Real” is still making money, clearing the $65 million mark this weekend.

The experts, professional box office watchers, predicted a 30% improvement in the take for this “Spider-Man” sequel. The last film opened at $62, and this would should clear $90 — Box Office Mojo, Deadline and Box Office Guru opined.

And they appear to be right on the money. Based on Friday’s numbers, that’s where this film will be Sunday night $91 million richer. Reviews aren’t helping, but they sure aren’t hurting.

“Belle,” opening in limited release, has a healthy (not epic, though) per screen average.

“The Other Woman” is holding over 50% of its opening weekend BO, close to $15 million,

The season’s big faith-based hits — “Heaven is for Real” and “God’s Not Dead” are hanging around the top ten. They may pass “Son of God” by the weekend’s end — both are at close to $60 million. “Noah” is closing in on $100 million.