Movie Nation

Another big weekend for young adult science fiction, as “The Maze Runner” exceeded expectations and delivered a healthy $30-32 million opening. The folks who released “The Giver” would have killed for that. Indifferent reviews didn’t hurt it any more than the “Hunger Games” pictures.

“A Walk Among the Tombstones” opened feebly. People aren’t as “Taken” with Liam Neeson these days. Day late, dollar short, Universal. As usual.

“This Is Where I Leave You” must have skewed too old in its casting to have much appeal. A half-decent Shawn Levy R-rated comedy? It should have opened huge. Not so. A bit over $11 million by midnight Sunday.

“No Good Deed” took a dive in its second week, “Dolphin Tale 2” is lingering in the top ten.

“The Drop,” the best film of the early fall, is barely in the top ten.

“Tusk” opened in over 600 theaters, and those theaters didn’t draw any audience. Pitiful take, pitiful per-screen average. Back to the podcast, Kevin Smith.

The woeful “Let’s Be Cops” is closing in on $80 million, so there’s no accounting for taste.

It’s got Steve Carell as the unflappable “positivity” stay-at-home “fommy” dad, Jennifer Garner as the increasingly frantic breadwinner whose potty training book is about to get flushed, and kids hoping to get through a prom, opening night starring in “Peter Pan” and a birthday party with strippers, respectively.

And that’s leaving out the baby, who melts down eats a magic marker as Dad is trying to kill a big job interview.

Parents know the book, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No  Good Good Very Bad Day.” It’s in Disney’s hands. A “Wimpy Kid” with a Disney touch?

It opens Oct. 10.

Nothing blew up the tomatometer among this weekend’s new movie releases. There are no Oscar contenders in this lot, no potential blockbusters, but nothing as bad as “No Good Deed,” either.

The Kevin Smith “comeback” “Tusk” is the worst reviewed of the lot, and he’s earned worse reviews in recent years. Played out Canadian jokes, weak leads, grim shock value story that fails to shock. It doesn’t stand to make a dime, in any event.

“This is Where I Leave You” is probably the hit from this crowd, an all-star somewhat crowd pleasing R-rated comedy, it allows a lot of funny people to score even if it is dismayingly predictable and heavy-handed. I gave it 2.5 stars, metacritic and RT shows most reviewers fell below that mark.

“A Walk Among Tombstones” is another Liam Neeson hunting a missing person, hunting them with extreme prejudice, thriller. The tone is off, it has women stalked, tortured and murdered by characters once called “homo psychos,” that Leopold and Loeb era take on gays as murderous couples. “Compulsion,” “Diamonds are Forever” just two films where this stereotype played out. Passable reviews for this, but not from me. #univers-a-holes.

“The Maze Runner” is yet another variation of the teens save the future YA sci-fi model, a little “Lord of the Flies,” a little “Six Characters in Search of an Author” or its “Twilight Zone” equivalent, “Five characters in Search of an Exit.” Passing grades from some on this, with its giant spiders and spoon-feed-what-its-about finale. Meh.

“The Scribbler”, a horrific psychological thriller, is in limited release and is a tad better than that, I thought. The insane wonder if they’re the sane ones as they’re being killed off in a halfway house. Grim and grisly and sexually explicit.

“Autumn Blood” is a picturesque Austrian exploitation picture, perverse and arty and nonsensical. Bad. Sat on the shelf for years. Very limited release.

One very good genre film goes into limited release. “Fort Bliss” is another soldier-readjusting to home life — badly — drama. But Michelle Monaghan is terrific in it, an Army medic disconnected from her son, traumatized by war, and dying to get back to it. Sort of.

The effects aren’t much and the story is something of a confused psycho-muddle.
But the graphic novel adaptation “The Scribbler” travels to the screen in healthy doses of R-rated grit, gore and hedonistic sex. It’s about madness and sanity and the ways only the truly mad can grapple with the difference.
Suki, played by Katie Cassidy of TV’s “Arrow,” is the narrator/heroine, a bruised and bloodied beauty who “can’t talk without a pen.” Suki is new to “The Suicide Suites,” a strangely unmonitored halfway house for the supposedly “cured” insane, people working their way back into society. No sooner is she there than the suites start living up to their name.
We recover the stories of who has died, and how, in an interrogation. The cop (Michael Imperioli) thinks she’s responsible. The shrink (Eliza Dushku) isn’t sure.
And Suki’s tale points her ink-stained fingers — she writes everything backwards, by the way — at others in the “Suites.” There’s the promiscuous sex addict in a candy store (Garret Dillahunt) who sleeps with pretty much every resident of this run-down hi-rise. We also meet snake-loving Miss Cleo (Gina Gershon), psychotic Alice (Michelle Trachtenberg) and loony “Bunny” (Sasha Grey) who wears Bunny ears all the time to earn that nickname.
“You might as well jump,” Bunny purrs, “everybody does.”
Suki tells her story, about “the REAL crazy — anxiety and vomit.” And we learn about the doctor (Billy Campbell) whose experimental electro-shock treatment may be “curing” them all, or at least burning off the unpleasant aspects of their respective personalities.
Suki has plenty of those — alternate personalities, “alters” for short. One of those is “The Scribbler,” the compulsive backwards-writer who may be the most dangerous of her “alters.”
But others sense Suki’s real fear, being “cured.”
“You’re worried about becoming ordinary, aren’t you?”
Director John Suits stages a sex scene that fully feels like crazy people having at it — uninhibited, abandoned, urgent, as if they’re afraid they’ll lose the sane parts of their psyche that allow them to enjoy it. Then there’s Ashlynn Yennie, who drew the short straw among this cast, playing Emily, “pathologically afraid of clothing” with all the cheap exploitation you’d expect from that.
The “Siamese Burn” treatment, occasionally self-administered, produces a cheesy alien eyes effect. And they can’t find enough funny stuff to do with the English bulldog Suki hears talking to her in a Cockney accent.
But “Scribbler” is just daring and interesting enough that you can see why a fairly accomplished cast — from Cassidy to Dushku, Gershon to Campbell — was drawn to it, even if the execution underwhelms.

MPAA Rating: R for violent images, some strong sexuality/nudity, and language
Cast: Katie Cassidy, Billy Campbell, Eliza Dushku, Gina Gershon
Credits: Directed by John Suits, written by Dan Schaffer, based on his graphic novel. An XLRator Media release.
Running time: 1:28

This month’s “young adults save the future” film franchise is “The Maze Runner,” an indifferent quest tale about boys trapped in a gigantic maze with no idea how they got there.
A teen boy (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up, screaming, on a freight elevator soaring up to a field, where it promptly drops its “greenie” or newby into a clatch of rustic boys his own age. He doesn’t know his name or anything else other than the English language. But the other lads set him straight.
This is “Glades,” the glade. Some boys are “Builders,” some are “Runners.” They run through the vast walled maze that surrounds their encampment each day, coming home just before the huge walls creak shut on gigantic gears each night.
They’re careful to avoid “The Grievers,” supersized spiders with metallic legs, guardians of The Maze. Because Grievers sting, and their sting causes “The Change” — a poisonous delirium.
There are rules that have kept them alive under the counsel of Alby (Aml Ameen) and the bully Gally (Will Poulter). But the new guy, who recovers his name — “Thomas” — is impatient. He wants to find a way out. Now. He upsets the balance, breaks the rules and then “The Girl” (Kaya Scodelario) arrives and tosses things into a further tizzy.
Are they doomed to a slow death by isolation, or will the Grievers get impatient and storm in to wipe them out?
The big walled obstacle course and not-so-itsy-bitsy spiders keep one from confusing James Dasher’s “The Maze Runner” with last month’s “The Giver” or last spring’s “Divergent” or this fall’s latest “Hunger Games.” Plainly, these authors all picked up the same copy of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” or Vladimir Propp’s “The Morphology of the Folk Tale.”
That’s what the grumpy teen walking out of the theater ahead of me meant when she griped “Why do these things all look alike, and always need sequels?” Yeah, they’re all alike, just alike — simple quest tales with little wrinkles too make you think maybe THIS time things will be different.
The actors aren’t bad, with “Nanny McPhee” vet Thomas Brodie-Sangster standing out by being as skinny as a teen stuck in the woods, forced to fend for himself, and O’Brien, Ameen, Poulter and Ki Hong Lee (as a “Runner”) having decent screen presence.
Art director turned director Wes Ball gives us a convincing maze of towering, weathered and moss-covered concrete, and a woodland world where the boys have mastered shelter building and fire starting. The film has fine moments of claustrophobia as the moving walls threaten to squish assorted boys, the spiders are humongous and the lads disagree among themselves, violently, about what to do.
Very “Lord of the Flies.”
But all these literary underpinnings do not disguise a blasé, emotion-starved script, dialogue that ineptly repeats what the images have already shown us is happening, stagey scenes where characters poke each other in the chest to keep them from storming out of the camera frame.
And the resolution to this puzzle is so botched it’s insulting, as if they’re daring us to laugh at the notion that this is merely “the beginning.” You have to go all the way back to last weekend’s “Atlas Shrugged III” to find a sci-fi film promise that cringe-worthy.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, including some disturbing images
Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Aml Ameen, Ki Hong Lee, Kaya Scodelario
Credits: Directed by Wes Ball, scripted by Noah Oppenheim, Grant Pierce Myers and T.S. Nowlin, based on the James Dashner novel. A Fox release.
Running time: 1:52

With its latest thriller, Universal arrives a day late and a few dollars short in the Liam “Particular Skills” Neeson revenge sweepstakes.

“A Walk Among the Tombstones” has the veneer of high mindedness that the “Taken” movies lack. But it has Neeson’s Alcoholics Anonymous detective hanging out with a slang-cracking kid sidekick(Astro) and working for a drug dealer played by that “Downton Abbey” fussbudget, Dan Stevens, an effeminate Brit with nothing of the vengeful drug dealer about him.

So all the money was spent on Neeson. The plot has psych-homosexual elements straight out of the 1950s. The violence against women is horrific and the setting, for no serious reason, is 1999 as America braces for the Y2K bug.

Aside from that, though, it’s just great. Well, kind of OK.

Neeson’s Matthew Scudder was a hard-drinking cop in the early ’90s when an off duty shootout led him to quit the force. Now he’s an “unlicensed” problem-solver. Sort of like Denzel Washington in the upcoming and superior “The Equalizer.”

“Sometimes I do favors for people. Sometimes, in return, they give gifts.”

Stevens is Kenny, a “drug trafficker” whose wife was snatched and murdered. He wants the guys who did it.

So Scudder does the shoe-leather work he would have done as a cop, had the drug trafficker wanted cops involved. He asks around.

A weirdo cemetery groundskeeper (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) figures in the story. And he stumbles into the kid, T.J., a whiz at these newfangled personal computers. Every line out of Astro-the-actor’s mouth sounds like…a line.

Writer-director Scott Frank spares us actually seeing the bodies of these women — for the guys doing the killing are serial killers — hacked up. But there’s audio and graphic descriptions from the psychopaths, whom we meet early on.

Frank, who did the far superior thriller, “The Lookout,” objectifies one underage victim — setting her stalking to a golden oldie “Atlantis” by Donovan. His villains are sniggering caricatures out of an earlier age.

And he utterly fails to build Scudder’s AA mania into the plot until the third act, losing track of this aspect of his life to make room for more cutesie T.J. slang-jokes about how “I want to grow up to be a private eye like Sam Spade.”

Neeson is the rock anchoring all this, making the incredible at least passably credible as he lurches into the frame with his limping boxer’s gait. But you get the sense that he is no more “Taken” with this than we are.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, disturbing images, language and brief nudity

Cast: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, Astro, David Harbour

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Frank, based on the Lawrence Block novel. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:53

She’s one of the loveliest ladies ladies working in the movies.

But Michelle Monaghan has a thing about dressing down and playing working class. Think of her in “Gone, Baby Gone,” or “Trucker.”

And in “Fort Bliss,” she really delivers, playing a battle-hardened combat medic who comes home to a kid who is hard-pressed to bring out the “mommy” in her. Tough performance, subtle.

Questions for Michelle? I figure I’ll ask her about this manual labor/working class mien she’s shooting for, but I’m open to your suggestions. Comment away, thanks for the help.

Rumors of Kevin “Clerks” Smith’s retirement from the silver screen to spend his dotage doing podcasts for his aging fanboy fanbase were alas, grossly overstated. He has used that podcast to generate a tall tale, a serio-comic Canadian-joke of a horror film.
“Tusk” has “comeback” buzz coming out of the Toronto Film Festival. Perhaps that buzz came from the city’s crack happy mayor, Rob Ford.
Justin Long and Haley “Sixth Sense” Joel Osment play faintly funny co-hosts of “The Not-See Party,” a popular podcast built on accident videos in which they mock the unfortunate selfie-taking victims of those videos.
Wallace (Long) leaves his juvenile, sexual-fantasy-accommodating fanboy’s idea of a girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to fly to Manitoba to meet and interview “The Kill Bill Kid,” (Josh Gad, in an unspoken cameo), who injured himself on camera with a samurai sword.
That doesn’t work out. But in between humorous encounters with stereotypical Canadians, Wallace reads a note on a bar bathroom wall and sets out to find this aged sailor (Michael Parks), a geezer whose slurred tall tales about D-Day with Hemingway are illustrated in black and white flashbacks.
Doesn’t really fit the format of the podcast, but Wallace is enthralled — until he passes out, wakes up and starts to see his mortal peril.
The folks who care about him back in Los Angeles fly to Winnipeg to track him down.  And that’s where they run into the Quebec detective, Guy Lapointe, played with an amusingly irritating verbosity by an almost unrecognizable Johnny Depp.
“Tusk” resembles “Red State” in its attraction to and misuse of talent like Depp. Both he and Long sport ill-suited mustaches, and while Long is mainly misused as a slow-take reactor, Depp drags out a series of semi-amusing monologues about his serial killer quarry.
Parks has the most stories, and he botches line readings and generally bores as he and the script give away the direction this “Saw/Silence of the Lambs/Human Centipede” riff long before the “reveal.”
There is no suspense, no race against the clock to save Wallace, no moral lesson to his fate. This is what Smith thinks of the low-rent horror trade he has tried to reinvent himself in.
What he gets right is what his films have always managed, random riffs — a scene with a hilariously bearded border agent (Harley Morenstein) who explains “Cana-Dos and Cana-Don’ts” to Wallace, scenes with dopey-cute convenience store clerks who say “a-boot” instead of “about,” and “hate American guys.”
Because it all comes back to such clerks with Smith, sparring with customers, getting rude and getting crude. Jay and Silent Bob may have been put out to pasture, but in this not-even-faintly scary, rarely funny horror comedy, Smith is still sucking down big gulps of empty calories and hoping we’ll laugh at his belch.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violence/gore, language and sexual content
Cast: Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez, Johnny Depp
Credits: Written and directed by Kevin Smith. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:42

“The Zero Theorem” is director Terry Gilliam’s latest dazzling dose of sci-fi eye candy, and the third film in what some are calling his “Brazil” trilogy.
Like “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” it’s about human connections in a technologically warped world rendered lonely and unlivable by the lack of those connections.
Christoph Waltz is Qohen Leth, a bald loner who is sure he’s being worked to death. He pounds away at his keyboard in some vague, vain pursuit of “catching up” on his job. That entails using “memory vials” handed to him through a sliding panel on his work station as he 3D models the problems that these vials somehow are related to.
It’s a future of “divinely planned obsolescence,” where the bureaucrats (David Thewlis plays his boss, Ben Whishaw the company doctor) aren’t so much faceless as heartless buck-passers.
“We detest working here,” Qohen complains, with rising urgency, always speaking of himself in the plural. “We are dying!”
“That’s a Management issue, Qohen,” the doctor sniffs.
The buck-toothed ROM psychiatrist on his computer (Tilda Swinton) is no help. She just raps, Dr. Seuss style, some therapeutic nothingness. Qohen is going mad and his new task, finding “The Zero Theorem,” is sure to finish the job.
“At present, We feel no joy!”
This “zero theorem” thingy is some sort of 3D computer model problem that could explain the meaning of life, what it’s all about. Just make sure it adds up.
“Zero must be 100%!”
At least there’s the distraction of this come-hither hottie, Bainsley (Melanie Thierry), who overcomes Qohen’s “We prefer not to be touched” and convinces him that virtual vacations — sex on the beach — are just the ticket.
Looming over it all is Management, the cryptic puppet-master boss of bosses, played with aloof chilliness by Matt Damon in a succession of stunning suits that match the curtains, wallpaper or furniture that’s around him.
That’s where the mind focuses in “The Zero Theorem,” those visions of Gilliamworld. Everything, from the street graffiti to the mod sci-fi costumes, Qohen’s baroque monastery apartment (it was filmed in Romania) to the stunningly stuffed-with-electronics office where Qohen works, is simply dazzling. It’s a “tomorrow was another day” retro-future tech in the fashion of “Brazil,” with ancient cathode ray tubes and rotary phones mixed with high, rectangular-screened computers (essentially HDTVs turned sideways — clever).
Gilliam is some sort of cracked genius, and actors love working for geniuses, which explains the top-drawer cast. As for the story and themes? It’s hard to say Gilliam is any closer to solving life’s big puzzle than he was with 1984’s “Brazil.” The answer then may very well be the answer now, a Monty Python-Beatles era holdover, as befits its ageing filmmaker — “All you need is love.”

(Link to Roger Moore talking with Terry Gilliam and his screenwriter).
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexuality/nudity
Cast: Christoph Waltz, Matt Damon, Melanie Thierry, Tilda Swinton, David Thewlis, Ben Whishaw
Credits: Directed by Terry Gilliam, scripted by Pat Rushin, based on his novella. An Amplify Media release.
Running time: 1:47

“Love is Strange” is a sweet, random little nothing that pairs up John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a longtime couple whose lives change, for the worse, when they finally get married once gay marriage is legal in New York.

George (Molina) is promptly fired, in the nicest way, by the priest (John Cullum) who runs the Catholic school where George teaches music. Ben is a retired painter.

Which means they’ll have to sell their apartment, and finding another place to live in Manhattan may take a while, being older and on fixed incomes. Their summon friends and family to pitch in.

Uncle Ben goes to live with his favorite nephew (Darren E. Burrows of “Northern Exposure”) and the nephew’s author-wife (Marisa Tomei), and George moves downstairs with the party-happy young gay cop-friends (Cheyenne Jackson, Manny Perez).

And everybody’s miserable ever after.

This Ira Sachs (“The Delta,” “Married Life”) comedy is thin on laughs but long on charm. There’s real tenderness generated between the two leads, who started their film careers with wonderfully sympathetic gay performances decades ago — Lithgow in “The World According to Garp,” Molina in “Prick up Your Ears.” “Love is Strange” never goes far wrong when they’re sharing a scene; singing a duet at the piano at a party, embracing in tears over the separation.

Complications include the incessant partying of young gay men on the make where George lives, and Tomei’s Kate struggling to write with an elderly chatterbox under her roof, and her rebellious teen (Charle Tahan), who adores Ben, bristling at prolonged exposure.

Ben understands.

“Sometimes, when you live with people, you know them better than you care to.”

Sachs’ film has a lovely “New York is getting too expensive to live in” subtext, all the myriad rent control, regulated senior rent schemes that people who don’t work on Wall Street finagle to find a domicile in the city.

And through it all, George and Ben dread the thought of relocating to cheaper, roomier Poughkeepsie to live with Ben’s niece (Christina Kirk).

None of it adds up to much more than a chuckle or two, a smile or three and a lot of slow, poetically drawn-out moments of mild anguish or the simple delight of walking through Greenwich Village in the spring.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: John Lithgow, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Darren E. Burrows, Charlie Tahan

Credits: Directed by Ira Sachs, written by Ira Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:34