Movie Nation

The young couple doesn’t say much when they visit the remote hydroelectric dam.
“No fish ladders,” she complains. “Wonder how they got around that?”
There’s not a lot of spark between them, even when they’re shopping for a ski boat. They have a pickup with a trailer hitch. So they close the deal — with greenbacks.
“Cash, the poor people’s money.”
What they plan to do with this boat and when they plan to do it is what the quiet, sometimes tense thriller “Night Moves” is about.
The latest film from the director of “Meek’s Cutoff” and “Wendy & Lucy” is set within the off-the-grid/love-the-land eco-terrorism movement. Kelly Reichardt is practiced in the art of storytelling with little dialogue/less music, and that gives “Night Moves” a serenity even amidst the rising suspense and paranoia that follows as this terror cell makes its plans.
Josh, given a deflated, sensitive veneer by Jesse Eisenberg, seems to be running the show. Dena, played by Dakota Fanning with a spoiled, smart impatience, is his sidekick, gifted at lying on the fly, should that become necessary.
And it does. Because the guy who can turn the boat into a bomb, Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) may be ex-military. But he’s careless, the sort of fellow who dismisses each new concern with “This is nothing.”
Good thing there’s a paranoid planner and talented liar on hand to take care of the details, like buying the fertilizer to mix with the diesel fuel to load into the boat so that Harmon, who doesn’t sweat details, can set the fuse. Because that’s just the sort of guy you want doing that.
Reichardt, who co-wrote the script with Jon Raymond, has never been very good at bringing urgency to her movies. They amble along, which both suits this film and hampers it. The Brit Marling eco-terrorism vehicle “The East” was better at creating tension. But Reichardt creates a more convincing subculture of Mother Earth activists — young people living on media-deprived co-ops, frequenting organic farmers’ markets and trying to live “off the grid” in the most cell-phone connected, privacy-menaced era in human history.
Then we follow Dena, code-named “D,” into the rural Oregon farm supply store and we understand the extreme corner of that world, another reason privacy is under attack. Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer, the McVeigh weapon of choice? And you want HOW much?
“Controlled substance,” says the hardcase store manager (James LeGros).
Sarsgaard brings a devil-may-care menace to his slacker and Fanning nicely transitions her character from headstrong idealist to someone who starts to realize that idealism has its limits and its consequences.
But Reichardt hangs her film on Eisenberg, who subtly suggests a loner whose primary gift for the cause is he whole in his soul where a longing or human contact should be. It’s a terrific performance and it holds the movie together even as “Night Moves” stumbles toward its foregone, and rather poorly handled, conclusion.
　
MPAA Rating: R for some language and nudity
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard, James Le Gros
Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, written by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt. A Cinedigm release.
Running time: 1:58

What were your first thoughts on seeing the snippets of video of Elliot Rodger, son of a Hollywood second unit director, as he gave his reasons for setting out on a killing spree?

Hollywood brat, I thought. Not ugly, apparently smart and articulate. Well put together. Smug. Entitled. He was sitting in a BMW daddy’s money paid for. Daddy’s money (presumably) also paid for the handguns and ammo he used on his spree.

The excuse “Asperger’s” had been applied to his social skills. Mentally ill, in any event.

Anne Hornaday, the Washington Post film critic, wrote an op ed suggesting that Hollywood’s spate of losers who get the girl comedies, and love of violence, created this monster.

“Sexist escapist fantasies”? Yeah, that’s a fair cop. Judd Apatow, who created a whole school of comedy built around that and around casting funny alter egos like Seth Rogen in his films (Rogen’s latest is “Neighbors”) is a funny schlub who married the gorgeous and funny Leslie Mann. If it can happen to Judd, his movies reason, it can happen to a “40 Year old Virgin”, a loser who can get Katherine Heigl (remember her?) “Knocked Up.”

Never thought of his films as connecting with violent male frustrations in any way, I must say.

Needless to say, mellow man Seth Rogen was not pleased. Nor was Apatow.

He ripped her a new one in a couple of tweets. Apatow pitched in.

Yes, she’s right, that the sexism in the focus of Hollywood films in general and romantic comedies in particular, is ongoing and defies belief. Apatow, however, is far from the worst offender. Women come off better in his films (especially when the woman is played by his wife).

But when you throw that ad hominem “white males on charge” stuff out there, you’re starting down a slippery slope. The Rogen/Apatow and by extension Sandler etc. tilt to rom-coms these days has more in common than just “white males” greenlighting the pictures, writing the pictures, directing the pictures and starring in the pictures. The slippery slope of “sexist” white males becomes more offensive to the ears when you say, “Jewish males” sexism, and attach broad sexist attitudes to the films attributable to their creators/studio champions. Doesn’t it?

Then again, the ONE Hollywood event Mr. Rodger was photographed at was a violent, youth-oriented film which his father did second unit photography on. And “The Hunger Games” is about a killer female, isn’t it, Anne? Doesn’t fit her thesis, doesn’t figure into her argument.

A better pop culture connection, I thought, was “Big Bang Theory,” where smart cute guys bemoan their inability to get dates, or did in the first few seasons. But that has nothing to do with a mentally disturbed child of privilege going out and buying guns either, does it?

Neither does the eat-or-be-eaten ethos of “reality” TV, where narcissistic video diary confessionals, like Rodger’s, are commonplace. But that’s a much closer connection than “Neighbors” or “Knocked Up.”

Social media is another arrow in that quiver, and perhaps the sharpest. That’s where this guy posted his threats and planned his posthumous famous. Social media’s built in “everybody has it better than me/has a girlfriend but me” angst, NRA guaranteed access to as many firearms as you can afford, an affluent micro-culture where his father was high but nowhere near the richest 1% of the pecking order, pathologically awkward socially…sounds as if movies have less to do with this than video games, and nobody’s even talking about video games.

My guess? Hornaday will end up apologizing. The piece is poorly argued and a sharper editor would have demanded more evidence. But op ed editors don’t go to the movies, so they just let her go for it. A swing and a very public miss.

Bobo and Klara, two 13 year-old Swedish girls, are having a debate by telephone. And the moment Klara (Mira Grosin) holds her phone through the cracked door, capturing a loud, pointless shouting match her free-spirited mother and father are having, “We Are the Best!” sets itself apart from other coming-of-age pictures.
“See?” she says. “MY parents are worse!”
“We Are the Best!” is a musical period piece, a winning tale of girls figuring out who they are, what their tribe will be and who they can depend on as they punch through whatever glass ceiling Sweden has to offer their sex in 1982.
The first ceiling? It’s the age of ABBA, but Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara are punks.
“Punk’s dead,” their derisive classmates might say, at their choppy hairstyles and tastes in music. “Don’t you know that?”
They don’t. And Bobo, a wallflower emboldened by the defiant Klara, is determined to be every bit the punk her more assertive best friend is.
They hate gym class, try to talk cashiers in the food court into the socialist idea of giving them free french fries, panhandle strangers and annoy their teachers and classmates.
“We have a band,” Klara lies. And so they do, borrowing instruments, demanding rehearsal time at the local community center and thus ticking off the heavy metal wannabes Iron Fist, who bullied them.
Klara will play bass, write a song and sing it. Bobo, eager to please, takes up the drums. They hate gym? “Hate the Sport” becomes their first punk anthem.
Lukas Moodysson’s film, based on his wife Coco Moodysson’s comic book, beautifully captures that last stretch of innocence in childhood. They’re obsessed with music, wearing out their favorite Scandi-punk tapes on their Sony Walkmen.
Klara and Bobo read about Swedish punk rockers close to their age in the newspaper, and Klara boldly calls them up and makes a hang-out date with them. Boys, of course, are what come between girls. They’ve got to learn that sooner or later.
They need a guitarist? Why not court the conservative, shy “Kumbaya” playing Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne)?
“We Are the Best!” is a scruffy, anarchic picture that gets better as it stumbles along. There’s just a hint of formula here — the “band” will make its debut at a coming community center Christmas concert. Will they humiliate themselves, or is that just a smidge of improvement we detect, rehearsal by rehearsal?
The point, for those who remember that era in America and Britain, is that “It’s punk. Who’ll know the difference?” It’s the brash attitude, the defiant haircuts and the rage that counts. Even when you’re 13 and Swedish and the best thing you have to rebel against is gym class.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult situations, profanity, teens partying
Cast: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne
Credits: Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, based on the Coco Moodysson comic book. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:38

It’s not unusual for a front-loaded popcorn blockbuster like “Godzilla” or a comic book movie to have world beating Friday numbers which fall off on Saturday.

People pack the theaters on date night to “be the first to see” these pictures, which explains why those Thursday night openings have become commonplace.

A lot of the demand for them is sucked away, but studios get to crow Saturday that “We have a winner,” creating a bandwagon for their marketing departments to pitch.

Still, Saturdays, even with most people off from work and a LOT more showings available, typically fall off. Pictures for older audiences — “Chef,” for instance, and “Belle” — do better on Saturdays.

Kids films do better on Saturdays and hold more audience on Sundays.

“X-Men: Days of Future Past,” lost about 15-20 % of its juice between Friday and Saturday —  a “Godzilla” sized Saturday swoon. It’s still on a pace to clear $90 million by Sunday midnight. And maybe $110 or more with Monday thrown in.

But that’s well below “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the standard bearer in that franchise. Seven films into “X-Men” (with “Wolverine” outings, to boot), this franchise is definitely showing its age, more so than Hugh Jackman.

“Godzilla” lost a big chunk of its opening weekend oomph and is fading fast — a 77% plunge on Friday, 66% by Saturday. Word of mouth wasn’t dazzling, no surprise to those of us who found the movie heartless and humorless and a a bit of a drag.

“Blended,” Adam Sandler’s Warner Brothers vehicle, fell off Saturday and will not have reached $18 by midnight Monday. MONDAY. That’s a bomb, figuring in costs and the fact that his movies don’t travel (overseas box office is weak).

“Neighbors” did more per screen all weekend, and it’s been in release for weeks, now. It cleared the $100 million mark this weekend.

“Chef” moved comfortably into the top ten, despite showing on fewer than 500 theaters. It chased the last of the spring’s faith-based films, “Heaven is for Real,” out of the top ten.

“Rio 2” has quietly owned the animation market for more than a month and has cleared $122 million. Not a blockbuster, not a bust.

1. X-Men – $110 million
2. Godzilla – $35 million
3. Blended – $18 million
4. Neighbors – $18.5 million

Based on late Thursday and all-day Friday’s numbers, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” will be on the list of all-time best Memorial Day Weekend hits. But not at the top of the list. $97 million seems to be its Thursday-Sunday take, and yes, they’re cheating to get that by opening in to an $8 million pre-weekend bounce.

It may hit $112-15 by midnight Monday. Those numbers are right in line with projections.

And that will be better than “The Hangover: Part II,” which is now the fifth best Memorial Day opener of all time. Eight years ago, “X-Men: The Last Stand” did $123 million, which gives us a faint hit of comic book blockbuster fatigue (4,000 screens, in 3D, and adjusted for inflation, that’s a pretty steep fall off from the best “X.”)

“Blended” is opening to the weakest numbers of any Adam Sandler comedy in memory. Well under $20 million by Sunday night, very low $20s by Monday midnight. Bad reviews, an audience aging out of Adam Sandler movies and his inability to truly make a “kid friendly” film are working against him. He’s Jerry Lewis. The kids know he isn’t cool.

“Chef” cracks the top ten as it gains theaters in an expanding release. Not sure if this strategy will pay off, in the long run. They might have gotten their biggest bounce with a wide opening, and steady fade. There are other chef movies on the way, and hanging onto theaters will be an issue. A “Grand Budapest” or “Exotic Marigold” run? Not the same audience.

“Neighbors” has cleared $100 million, “Godzilla” took a STEEP dive, “Million Dollar Arm” is holding most of its opening weekend audience and “The Other Woman” looks as if it will top out just under $90 million, all in. It will be under $80 by Monday night.

“Heaven is for Real” lost a lot of screens, but it is still holding on to top ten audience.

Reviews for “X-Men: Days of Future Past” have been excellent. Yes, mine, too. It’s on nearly 3,000 screens. It’s in 3D. So there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit $100 million over a long holiday weekend, right?

Box Office Guru thinks it has a shot to hit $110 by Monday night.

Box Office Mojo predicts $98 million by midnight Sunday, $119 by Monday.

“Blended” is earning scathing reviews for the too-bored-to-care Adam Sandler. Hated it. Truly. A whopping 15% positive reviews on the tomatometer, which only proves that 15% of the people published there are special needs.

Mojo figures “Blended” will manage $30 million or so by Monday night, $23 million Sunday night.

Guru thinks $26 million, all-in Monday night.

A fall-off for the Sandman? Maybe. Warners will probably break-into the Sandler business in the black. Not guaranteed.

Joe, the 400 pound Latino boy from Houston, weeps in fear and frustration. He’s not alone. Maggie, a 212 pound 12 year-old from Oklahoma, joins him. Wesley, an overweight 13 year-old in Houston, is desperate.

But Brandon, 15, a 215 pound South Carolinian headed toward diabetes, morbid obesity and being a member of “the first American generation to not live as long as their parents,” is documenting his on video life, reading up on his diet and the causes of his problem, determined to “not be just another fat kid.”

Those are the faces of “Fed Up,” the Katie Couric-backed documentary about America’s spreading childhood obesity epidemic. It’s a frank, dismaying and yet surprisingly upbeat look at a problem the country’s been wrestling with for decades.

The problem, as narrator Couric and the many experts she and director Stephanie Soechtig talk to put it, is that we’ve been looking at the causes all wrong. That business about exercise vs. “sloth” and “lack of willpower” and “sedentary lifestyles” and “poor choices” either is misleading, or is avoiding the bigger issue.

“It’s your fault,” our way of stigmatizing the victims of this epidemic, “is not accurate,” they say. Exercise isn’t enough to compensate for the diet we’re being offered. The caloric math doesn’t work.

The elephant-sized issues that we’re avoiding — the pervasiveness of processed foods, packed with sugar in its many forms, and the pervasiveness of the marketing of those foods to children.

In 90 minutes, Couric & Co. trace the first time the problem was recognized- the 1977 McGovern Report from the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs — to the years of efforts to reign in advertising, force food processors to produce more accurate content labels, or to simply get them to cut back on sugar. Those efforts, Couric’s retinue of a couple of dozen experts agree, have failed — thwarted, again and again, by Big Sugar, Big Corn, by Big Pizza, by multinational frozen food concerns.

Michael Bloomberg, demonized as New York mayor for promoting the “Nanny State” by pushing restrictions on sugar soft drinks, diagrams the battlefield. Michael Pollan, the food expert made famous by “Food, Inc.,” laments the powers of lobbies that can buy Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle. Bill Clinton, a Surgeon General and a USDA head, as well as academics and professionals from nonprofits tackling this issue lament the business influence that has co-opted even First Lady Michelle Obama’s innocuous “Let’s Move!” efforts to address this head on.

And kids struggle to understand why this is happening to them and what is within their power that allows them to do something about it.

Mrs. Obama is among those who declined to be interviewed for the film, putting her in the company of Big Cheese, Big Sucrose and their lobbyists as those who avoid talking about the politics of this national disaster. The real villains, captured in Congressional testimony footage and corporate propaganda, are the profit-obsessed titans of food business and their lobbyist lackeys. They provide many of the ironic laughs of “Fed Up,” saying Ronald McDonald isn’t “marketing to kids.” Fox News isn’t the only media enterprise to push the phrase “nanny state” out there. But, as the film makes plain, protect-big-business-from-criticism conservatives made it a rallying cry, perhaps with less than pure motives.

The ripple effects of unfettered processed food capitalism are felt as we see the impact of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of school lunch programs, which led to schools selling their stoves, mixers and the like and laying off real cooks. Next thing you know, processed food and fast food conglomerates are in the schools, offering cheap, unhealthy alternatives to take the place of cooked, healthier meals. Coke and Pepsi vie for exclusive deals with cash-starved school systems.

The film is less pointed in focusing on the obese parents whose lifestyles help create obese kids. It’s a little annoying that all the plump children here are from the South — South Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas. Are there no fat Minnesota teens, no obese New Yorkers?

What makes “Fed Up” a tolerable harangue is both the humor injected into it, and the hope it draws from the Battle against Big Tobacco analogy. In a simpler time, that seemed like a fight no one could win. Then tobacco companies were demonized, their CEOs depicted as heartless villains, their advertising restricted and teen smoking plummeted. Maybe it’s time, the “Fed Up” experts say, to demonize Coca-Cola, Big Sugar, KFC, Kraft and the whole alphabet soup of food conglomerates that created this deadly epidemic. This movie, not a watered-down/advertiser supported TV news feature, could be a second step.

The first one, Pollan reminds us, as he did over and over again in “Food, Inc.,” is to eat “REAL food.”

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements including smoking images, and brief mild language

Cast: Narrated by Katie Couric

Credits: Directed by Stephanie Soechtig , written Mark Monroe, Stephanie Soechtig. A TWC/Radius release.

Running time: 1:32

The story of “The Immigrant” is, for many, the American story — a struggle
to get to The Promised Land, to be allowed to stay and live the American Dream.
But few would choose to own this take on that epic narrative. A laborious,
dull and emotionally barren melodrama, this script is one downer after another,
flatly-written and heartlessly-acted.
Oscar winner Marion Cotillard has the title role, a young Polish woman whose
tubercular sister is taken from her at Ellis Island. It’s 1921, and Ewa herself
has trouble getting past immigration herself. There was an incident on the ship
on the way over. The address for relatives she gives to the INS doesn’t exit.
She’s penniless. They’re about to ship her home when a helpful fellow from
Traveler’s Aid shows up, and with seeming reluctance, offers to help.
Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) is compassionate but blunt, helpful but cagey.
“We’ve all been desperate,” he says, consolingly.
But Ewa is mistrusting from the start. When Bruno allows her to stay in his
apartment, she is on guard. When he changes her suggested profession from
seamstress to stripper, she isn’t shocked. Stripping is just the start of what
he expects. Bruno’s burlesque revue, “Bruno’s Doves,” is basically a smorgasbord
of female flesh that he serves to the howling all-male audience at The Bandit’s
Roost bar, burlesque house and bordello.
Phoenix, acting in his fourth film for director James Gray (“Two Lovers,”
“The Yard,” “We Own the Night”), tries to make Bruno the way the script sees him
— as lovesick and guilt-ridden for exploiting Ewa, as ruthlessly possessive of
her, as the very definition of a “confidence man” until he’s had a few drinks,
when he turns ugly.
And he does turn ugly, because “The Immigrant” is the sort of film where
everybody blurts out, “You’re so beautiful” on first meeting the leading lady.
Jealous rages follow. One of those men is the magician/dancer/hustler Emil
(Jeremy Renner). Taken with Ewa, he promises, like Bruno, to help her free her
sister.
Renner makes a nice emotional contrast to Phoenix, or would have, had this
performance had a hint of heart to it. There’s no passion to his connection to
Ewa, and that makes the two men’s struggle to possess her play like some sort of
sick boy’s game.
Cotillard gets most of the close-ups and it is Ewa’s point of view that we
follow and share. She is the heart of a love triangle without any hint of love. Accurate, in terms of the situation and the times? Perhaps. Cinematic? No. Somehow, Gray managed to get a lifeless performance out of the empathetic star of “La Vie en Rose,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Inception.” The character is a canny survivor, but Cotillard plays her as aloof and self-righteous, a front Ewa puts on because she knows what she’s been through,
she knows the shame of that certain unladylike “incident” that happened on the
ship.
Ewa is wronged, left and right, she struggles to believe “I am not a nobody,”
and she keeps her eye on her mission — freeing her sister from immigration
limbo. Gray lets us see little that suggests a sense of urgency at her dilemma.
The meandering muddle of a script takes us away from Ewa’s mission as we stumble
into the feud between Bruno and Emil — who have history.
Cotillard has two leading men, neither of whom sets off any sparks in their
scenes with her. Her performance is also problematic because Ewa is a
bewildered newcomer to America, at the mercy of this shark or that one,
dependent on the kindness of strangers. There is little kindness in this
America.
The performance dictated by the script makes Ewa passive. That flies in the
face of the legend of the immigrant experience in America. But worse still, it
makes for weak, watered down melodrama.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and some language
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner
Credits: Directed by James Gray, screenplay by Richard Menello and James
Gray. A Weinstein Co. release.