Movie Nation

Quiet, cryptic and never less than creepy, “Under the Skin” is sci-fi that doesn’t do the work for you. There are no explanations. No character rattles off a paragraph or three of exposition and back story.

There are no names. Nobody talks at all for the first 14 minutes, and there’s not much that would even pass for conversation. Just Scarlett Johansson, driving a utility van around Edinburgh and other points Scottish, stopping and asking directions from the indecipherably-accented locals.

“I’m looking for the M-8,” she asks in a soft, posh British accent, only to get an earful of a dialect that only Craig Ferguson, Gerard Butler or Kelly MacDonald could make out.

She only talks to men, and to a one, they’re a motley lot — ranging from odd to ugly, and occasionally reaching grotesque.

“No girlfriend, really?”

She’s not looking for a mate or even a date. She’s hunting for strays, stragglers and loners. And since she’s Scarlett Johansson and they’re not, sooner or later they get into the van, follow her “home”, strip in a dark black room with a shiny, reflective floor and as they reach for her loveliness, they sink into the pool of whatever that floor really is, another victim of aliens up to no good.

Jonathan Glazer (“Sexy Beast,” “Birth”) tells us nothing right from the opening minutes, where vague shapes carry out what could be a “docking” or teleportation, and disembodied, distorted voices run through a cascade of sounds. Somebody is mastering the accent for some purpose we can only guess.

“Under the Skin” is an overcast film of glum, early winter days and a string of encounters, mostly at twilight. An unnamed assistant on a motorcycle helps Johansson’s “bait” in the day to day operation of this man-trap — a menacing presence in full road bike suit and helmet.

The alien, in tight jeans, jet black hair and a faux fur jacket, ventures from city to seaside and through the hills and mountains, on rainy roads and chilly days. In the streets, bars and other cars, they all notice her. They’re all solicitous, helpful to her. But even the crowds are peopled with the full array of human unattractiveness — scars and bad beards, the morbidly overweight and young women with ratty, ineptly colored hair. Whatever Glazer is saying about the Scots, it isn’t flattering.

Johansson spends much of the film putting on lipstick and driving with the same blank expression of someone unfamiliar with human interaction. Flirt with her or threaten her with assault, it doesn’t change.

But as with John Carpenter’s classic sci-fi “visitor” film, “Starman,” and others like it, she gets curious, perhaps based on remorse. We’ve witnessed a couple of the cruelest scenes sci-fi has ever produced, one involving the efforts of a family, and then a stranger, to save a dog who has ventured too far into the undertow.

“Under the Skin” isn’t conventional, thrilling or particularly satisfying in a sci-fi aliens-are-hunting-us sense. But it manages something far more sinister and fascinating. It gets under your skin and imprints on your memory. And not just the scenes where ScarJo strips. It would be hard to imagine a less sexual use of voluptuous actress nudity than the one served up here. It’s the tone, the silences and the cruelty that you can’t scrub off.

MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity, sexual content, some violence and language

Cast: Scarlett Johansson

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Glazer, screenplay by Walter Campbell based on the Michel Faber novel. An A24 release.

Running time:

Mickey Rooney had so many careers that it’s easy to lose track.

He broke out in MGM’s Andy Hardy movies in the ’30s and 40s, teaming with the likes of Judy Garland. He became a character actor and made a mark in films such as “National Velvet” through “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (an infamous turn, playing the Japanese neighbor as a broad, screeching stereotype, and doing it with gusto). He played jockeys and mobsters, soldiers and song and dance men. He was in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World.” He had a TV series in the ’60s, a “comeback” in “Bill” in the ’80s. He toured with “Sugar Babies” with Ann Miller well past most people’s retirement age.

I caught up with him a couple of times, talking about a small role in “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” and later, touring with a one-man show of some sort. He was very much Dana Carvey’s impersonation of him by that time — hard to keep on topic, determined to sell a line of food products he was hoping to launch — “MR Popcorn, M.R. Popcorn, get it? For Mickey Rooney?”

He went through more careers, more money (he gambled, and drank, and married – often) and more women and wives than anybody, a small man who lived large and turned up in over 340 films and TV episodes. And he died at 93. Well done.

　”A Farewell to Fools” is a thin — very thin — Romanian fable dressed up by an international cast, a Romanian countryside that could pass for Provence or Tuscany and a World War II setting.
Ipu, played by Gerard Depardieu, took a bullet to the head in “The Great War” and has never been the same since. He’s a little slow, but the Romanian village where he’s settled indulges him. He’s a farm laborer, he’s married and gets to spend his lazy days fishing or playing war with his little friend Alex (Bogdan Iancu, in a modern moptop).
The Germans have occupied Romania for years, so long that Alex has even made friends with some of them. But when a trusting young trooper is murdered outside of town, there will be heck to pay. Either the murderer comes forward, the Nazi officer declares, or the “leading authorities” of the village will be shot at dawn.
An effective moment — ten chairs are dragged out of shops around the main square, ten black blindfolds set on them by the Germans. Yes, they’re serious.
No one will confess. The local police have no clue who was to blame. And with only hours before they’re shot, the “authorities” — the mayor, the doctor, the notary and the preacher (Harvey Keitel) and their wives frantically search for a solution.
Ipu! He won’t know any better. His life’s not worth much. Let’s talk him into confessing! They wine and dine him. They sugar coat it.
“It’s your birthday!” they say, a pretext for a party.
“I don’t have a birthday. I was never born.”
He could be “a hero” who “sacrifices himself for everyone.”
Ipu is confused. Then Ipu starts to bargain, and that’s when “A Farewell to Fools” is at its most engaging.
Depardieu plays this fellow as slow, but plainly not as slow as the script or the townsfolk suggest. They’ll rename the town square, give him a monument, give land to his family, pray in his name every day. For starters.
And as he bargains, the “authorities” grow more frantic. Time’s running out, and they see their own mortality slipping away. “Sure, anything you want, Ipu! Anything, Ipu!”
Things take a Tom Sawyerish turn as the best way to ensure your funeral will be as epic as they promise is to make them do a dry run — in the middle of the night.
But blame it on the script, the rushed direction by newcomer Brogdan Dreyer (the movie’s too brief to really settle in) or the mismatched cast, “Farewell to Fools” never takes flight. It’s never the bittersweet comedy it aims to be, with Ipu not being convincingly “simple” enough and the movie around him never quite finding the sweet spot that would have made it winning.
It’s good to see Depardieu in an English-speaking role again, but he can only carry “A Farewell to Fools” so far by himself, especially when he never commits to “simple” heart and soul. But if any film can make you change your plans for Provence this summer, “Fools” might be it. Romania is lovely, as we can see, in August.
　
　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a violent image and brief strong language
Cast: Gerard Depardieu, Harvey Keitel, Laura Morante, Bogdan Iancu.
Credits: Directed by Bogdan Dreyer, written by Anusavan Salamanian. A Monterey Media release.
Running time: 1:24

The previous April opening weekend record take at the box office was held by “Fast Five,” a “Fast and Furious” installment of a few years back. Right around $88 million or so.

But “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” rode good reviews and a pent up demand for summer film fare, a huge pre-sale and BIG Thursday night ($10 million) to what looks like an opening weekend in the $95 million range. Deadline.com suggests it could go as high as $98. Saturday will tell.

“Noah” fell off pretty steeply from its opening weekend of $44 million, into the $17 range. “God’s Not Dead” keeps adding hundreds of screens every weekend, so its take is holding steady — in the $7-8 million range.

“Divergent” Is doing OK, “Grand Budapest” is doing top ten business, and Jason Bateman’s “Bad Words” cracks the top ten.

A decade and a half removed from his Oscar winning turn in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Nicolas Cage was an actor on a treadmill of ever decreasing returns.
Years and years of cut-rate sci-fi (“Knowing”), bargain basement action (“Bangkok Dangerous”, “Stolen”) and lesser comic book fare (“Ghost Rider I & II”) had done a number on his reputation in Hollywood, and among film fans. And the ongoing tabloid attention and tax problems didn’t help.
So on the cusp of turning 50, Cage took a year off.
“He’d done a ton of movies, and was finally stopping for a while to think about that,” director David Gordon Green says.
“I knew I was going to be very selective about what I would do next,” Cage says.
He was. Cage’s comeback — which he won’t call a “comeback” — would be a movie with Green, who is famous for “Pineapple Express,” but whose career was built on indie films (“All the Real Girls”) and whose passion is Southern Gothic cinema (“Undertow”). And unlike some in Hollywood, Green is still a fan.
“He’s fascinating to me,” Green says of Cage. “He’s gone off in so many different directions, switched gears so many times in so many different genres, that I loved the idea of creating this role that was unlike anything he’d ever done.”
Green wrote Cage “a sweet-talking letter” with this screenplay adaptation that Green’s college professor had written based on a hard boiled, Southern fried Larry Brown novel. “Joe”, if Cage took the part, would be “unlike anybody I’ve ever played before. In some ways he’s an amalgamation of different sorts of roles I’ve taken on in the past,” Cage says. A quiet working class train wreck in rural Texas with a taste for alcohol and a violent streak that shows itself, despite his fervent efforts at restraint, Joe would mash up Cage’s tragic “Leaving Las Vegas” drunk and his vengeful “Drive Angry” avenger and put the actor through the ringer.
“He has this Robert Mitchum quality,” Green says. “That’s who I was thinking of as I read the novel. Something kind of creepy about Joe, something kind of scary. You want that dude to be your friend, because if he was on your bad side, you’d be scared.
“Cage is the only actor I can think of who won an Oscar for drama, has been a leading man in lots of successful comedies and who has really manhandled action scenarios. He has that dramatic quality that heroic leading men have. He’s the only living actor who can say that.”
Cage says he felt an instant connection to the character. What he doesn’t say is that working with Green on an indie film could be a way of setting his career’s re-set button. Green has made a few Hollywood hits (“The Sitter”). But his indie credibility is built on such movies as the recent “Prince Avalanche” or “Snow Angels.”
“No one can really tell how a movie will come out,” Cage says. “But this, to me, seemed like the best chance to be something special. You look at David’s previous work, his talents and his vision of this South that we never see on the screen, and you figure this is a pretty good bet to make.”
“Joe” lives in a dump of a house in a corner of East Texas where “dump” is redundant — filled with hard country folk battered by hard lives, prone to skinning a deer that they “just got” in their ruin of a kitchen, where guns and bourbon and knives are the essentials of life. Joe runs a work crew for a timber company, a pick-up labor force of people even lower on the economic ladder than him. And he drinks.
“I’ve never thought of him as an alcoholic,” Green says. “But I guess he does have a beverage in hand. In pretty much every scene.”
It’s hard not to see Cage himself in this guy — a man with demons, a substance abusing past, but a man with a strong work ethic and ” a code,” kind-hearted enough to take a homeless kid onto his crew because the boy needs a break. Joe is a man in search of redemption. The movie, which goes into limited release April 11, and the role are causing critics such as David Rooney (The Hollywood Reporter) to see Cage’s portrayal as “bone-deep,” with Eric Kohn (Indiewire) suggesting that the film “marks a new beginning for some of its characters…and (its) star.”
“I always want to take negatives and turn them into positives,” Cage says. “Being blessed with this career and this life in the arts has enabled me to channel my dreams and my frustrations, my problems and my bad times, into something positive, I hope, on the screen.”
To him, Joe is “a man who is trying to succeed, and live a life of restraint. But life won’t let him. Life takes its toll. Yeah, something about that resonates with me.”
Cage wanted a part “where I didn’t have to act as much.” Green says that Cage told him that Joe was “the character closest to the real him,” and he believes that. The kindness and the “code” were just like Joe’s.
Cage “knows everybody’s name on the set. We filled the cast with mostly untrained actors and he was patient and kind and treated them like everybody else — professionals. He’s always looking at you, to see himself through your eyes. That’s part of who Joe is, too, this guying looking, even in the darkest scenes, into your eyes to see if there’s a friend in there.”

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” should break the opening weekend record for April by midnight Sunday. Everybody says so.

It’s already broken the advance ticket sales record.

$98 million+, says Box Office Mojo.

Box Office Guru is a little more circumspect, predicting $90 million.

The movie’s already sold that many tickets in advance, so no. Over $100 million seems more likely.

Reviews have been universally positive (a bit more than warranted, I figure). But summer starts earlier and earlier, thanks to Global Climate Change. Here’s our first summer blockbuster, no doubt about it.

“Noah” should do another $20-25 million.

“Divergent” should fade, “Grand Budapest” has peaked but should earn another $6 or 7.  “God’s Not Dead” will do business until “Heaven is for Real” opens Easter.

Decades after Ross McElwee invented the navel-gazing school of documentary
filmmaking with “Sherman’s March,” Tom Berninger adds a new wrinkle to the genre
with “Mistaken for Strangers.” Berninger is hero and villain of this comic essay
in ineptitude masquerading as a rock band on tour doc.
Berninger is the hapless and unintentionally hilarious younger brother of
Matt Berninger, lead singer/leading light of The National — critical darlings
and hot indie rock band of the moment. You’d never put the dopey, slovenly Tom
together with long, lean and motivated Matt as spawn of the same Mom. But there
you are. They’re “Mistaken for Strangers.”

Tom is hired as an unschooled roadie for The National’s European and North
American tour, which he decides he’ll document with a cheap camcorder.
“That is NOT in your job description,” the road manager, named Brandon,
gripes. Brandon plainly resents the dead, drunken weight that is Tom added to
his road crew.
And with every awkward interview, Tom, who has made some DIY sword and
sorcery and horror pictures, seems to suggest that no, not just any idiot can
make a movie. Especially not this one.
He blunders through his tour responsibilities. He’s the guy who must make
sure Matt’s onstage at the right moment. Tom misplaces him, and we see him dash
out to find the singer.
“Matt? MATT?”
He interviews his brother surrounded by indie rock groupies in London.
“So, how famous do you think you are?”
“Not ‘Us Weekly’ famous,” cracks Matt, who indulges his brother far more than
mere mortals would. We also see Matt lose his temper, lecture his brother on his
drinking, on missing the bus, on screwing up even the simplest jobs.
“How many drugs have you done?” Tom tactlessly asks the drummer. “I don’t
want to pry.”
The guitarist gets “I’ve always wondered, do you carry wallets? Do you have
ID on stage with you?”
The band rocks out from Krakow to Berlin, then crosses the States —
appearing at an Obama rally here, a New York or LA showcase there.
The band’s management team starts to express “concerns. Because Tom records
it all, and whines. A lot. He is, at his best, a self-absorbed doofus tagging
along on a tour, embarrassing the band.
And if you don’t think that’s a new and kind of cool perspective, you’re
underestimating him and his little film. This is as intentionally haphazard as
any band-on-tour documentary since that cracked Kiefer Sutherland one, “I Trust
You to Kill Me.” And most miraculous of all, by the finale, Tom and Matt an we
figure it all out. Maybe any idiot can make a movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, alcohol consumption, drug humor.

Cast: Matt Berninger, Tom Berninger, members of The National

Credits: Directed by Tom Berninger. A Starz release.
Running time: 1:15

He’s half of Britain’s funniest comic duo since “The Two Ronnies.”

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg clicked in “Spaced” and “Shawn of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” and “Paul” and last summer’s “The World’s End.”

And the portly Frost has funnied up “Pirate Radio” and “Attack the Block” and was in “Kinky Boots” and “Penelope” without Pegg’s able assistance.

His latest, “Cuban Fury,” has him playing a competitive salsa dancer who went to seed decades before, but who finds himself drawn back on the floor by the cute American boss (Rashida Jones) who shows up at work. Chris O’Dowd (right) is the villain, the rival for her attention. Ian McShane is the dance guru who can get our lad back in fighting shape.

Questions for Nick? Yes, Simon’s got a cameo in the picture.

Post any queries you have for Mr. Frost below.