Movie Nation

I had to bail out of an interview with her once, the last time “Belle du jour” was re-released in America, I think. I had a plane to catch and she was almost two hours late when I said, “Sorry,” and fled to the airport.

But we make up for it now, yes?

Catherine Deneuve has been one of the screen’s greatest, most enduring beauties — a French actress of talent, sex appeal and a self-effacing sense of playfulness. At 70, in films such as “Potiche” and “Beloved” and her latest, “On My Way,” she is still playing romantic figures, women wronged or women with overly complex love lives.

“On My Way” has her aimlessly wandering through Brittany, jilted by her married paramour, looking for cigarettes. And as this road comedy progresses, we learn just how complicated this ex-beauty queen’s life has been as she picks up the bi-polar grandson, the child of her angry, semi-estranged daughter.

Questions for the great Deneuve? Post them as comments below, and thanks for the suggestions.  

With “Mr. Peabody & Sherman,” Dreamworks Animation sets its Way Back Machine to the early 1960s and charmingly revives one of the most popular features of the old “Rocky & Bullwinkle Show” — the one about a dog, and his boy.

This winning, witty and warm cartoon captures the flavor, the tone and some of snappy pace of the TV shorts that began with the droll voice of Bill Scott intoning, “Peabody here, my boy, Sherman…”

Mr. Peabody is a Nobel Prize-winning pooch who “invented the fist-bump, auto-tune and Zumba,” and then adopted Sherman. He’s given he boy, now seven, a head-start on school by taking the kid time-traveling. The Way Back Machine has, we can see from the photos decorating their apartment walls, allowed Sherman to meet everyone from Gandhi to Einstein, Leonardo to the Wright Brothers. He’s given Van Gogh painting suggestions, caught a Jackie Robinson home run and short-circuited Ben Franklin.

“Where are we going today, Mr. Peabody?”

“Not where, Sherman. When.”

As long as Sherman keeps this a secret, nobody will be the wiser as to why he knows, for a fact, that George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree. Of course, Sherman can’t keep a secret, not even from the mean girl, Penny, who bullies him.

And that’s when the trouble starts. Actually, the first “when” is ancient Egypt. Then they check in on Leonardo Da Vinci and try to make Mona Lisa crack a smile. The movie drops in on The Trojan War.

“Sherman, I absolutely forbid you to fight in the Trojan War!”

“Awww, but all my FRIENDS are!”

Fans of the old Jay Ward TV show may take longer in adjusting to the new voices — Ty Burrell of “Modern Family” is a droll-enough Peabody, Max Charles (“The Neighbors”) is Sherman. But the witty word play and the pull-out-all-stops supporting cast start to pay off.

Patrick Warburton is WAY over the top as the Greek King Agamemnon, Stanley Tucci’s fractured Italian make him the perfect Leonardo, Mel Brooks is Einstein, and so on.

The movie takes a while to find its footing, but then the laughs come fast and furious.

“Who died and made you Pharaoh?” in Egypt.

If only Marie Antoinette has stopped licking the icing long enough to make an edict giving bread to the peasants of France.

“But you can’t have your cake, and EDICT, too.”

The animated details of this Rob Minkoff (“The Lion King”) comedy are an animated 3D feast for the eyes. The canvas wings of a Da Vinci glider ripple in the breeze, and when Peabody entertains Penny’s parents (Leslie Mann, Stephen Colbert, a hoot) with a little Jimi Hendrix, he even plays Jimi’s Fender upside down.

MPAA Rating:PG for some mild action and brief rude humor

Cast: The voices of Ty Burrell, Max Charles, Patrick Warburton, Stephen Colbert, Leslie Mann, Stanley Tucci

Credits: Directed by Rob Minkoff, written by Craig Wright, based on the Jay Ward cartoons. A Fox/Dreamworks Animation release.

Running time: 1:28

She got her first acclaim on TV’s “The Secret Life of an American Teenager,” and burst out on the big screen as the rebellious daughter in “The Descendants.”

Then, there was a spectacular turn in “The Spectacular Now.”

And now, Shailene Woodley is on the brink of Jennifer Lawrence-sized stardom, should Woodley’s “Hunger Games-ish” sci-fi franchise “Divergent” take off. She plays the heroine, “Tris,” a kid who doesn’t fit the mold and is therefor “dangerous” to the powers that be.

Sounds familiar, I know.

Questions for Ms. Woodley? Post them as comments below, and thanks.

　King Leonidas slipped into legend at the Battle of Thermopylae, martyred with 300 Spartans for the sake of Western Civilization and Spartan glory.
“Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
So it was too much to hope that someone with Gerard Butler’s charismatic, bellowing swagger would be around for the sequel, “300: Rise of an Empire.” His Leonidas and his oiled-down eight-pack are sorely missed, as are the quotable quatrains of that famous fight, the Spartan trash talk that sings through the ages. So many Persian arrows will rain on them that they will “blot out the sun”?
“Then we shall fight in the shade.”
There’s nothing that moving in “Rise of an Empire,” a more visually stunning but less thrilling epic with bloodier slo-motion swordfights, this time at sea. It lacks the contorts history, and lacks the heroic proportions and poetry of “300,” mainly thanks to a less impressive cast and murky, forgettable script.
Sullivan Stapleton (“Gangster Squad”) is Themistokles, the Greek general who took the oracle’s prophecy that Greece could only be saved “by a wall of wood” (i.e., ships) to heart and fought the enormous Persian fleet at Artemisium and Salamis. That prophecy, by the way, isn’t shown — a clever and quotably theatrical moment discarded as Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) relates this oral history.
The movie opens at the end of Thermopylae, flashes back to the earlier Battle of Marathon, then flashes forward to the fictive present as Themistokles rallies the city states and prepares for battle at sea as Leonidas marches to his fate at Thermopylae.
The Persian fleet is led by the she devil Artemisia, played by one-time Bond babe Eva Green, a seductive swordfighter in jet black hair, Egyptian eye makeup and ancient Persian fishnet stockings. She purrs about “the ecstacy of steel” and demands of her admirals, “Is it too much to ask for victory?”
It is. The clever Greeks foil her and crush her huge war galleys at every turn.
Things get so bad that Artemesia summons Themistokles for a mid-Aegean parlay. And things turn so hot and heavy there that Themistokles has to teach her a little Latin — coitus interruptus.
Director Noam Murro did the college professor romance “Smart People,” in no way a recommendation for directing a red-blooded digital epic of an ancient sea battle. Zack Snyder, who directed the original film, had a hand in the tin-eared script. It’s not graphic novel creator Frank Miller’s fault that Thermopylae, the basis for his “300” book, made for more elegiac history than Salamis.
But the design — a sea of greys and whites covered with heaving digital black ships and black sails and Persians clad in black battling Greeks in tiny brown boats — is stunning, an improvement over 2006’s “300.” And the action never disappoints.
It’s a pity this colorless cast doesn’t hold a candle to the Butler/Headey/Michael Fassbender/David Wenham crew of the original, that the writers couldn’t conjure up thrilling speeches to match the original.
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that these pretenders spoiled their franchise, and here their movie lies.

MPAA Rating:R for strong sustained sequences of stylized bloody violence throughout, a sex scene, nudity and some language
Cast: Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey, Jack O’Connell, Andrew Tiernan, David Wenham
Credits: Directed by Noam Murro, scripted by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad, based on the Frank Miller graphic novel. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:42

“Grand Piano” is a nail-biting thriller in the classic Hitchcock style. And the best word to describe it is one that went out of fashion long before Hitch’s death, over 30 years ago.
This tale of a concert pianist performing under a sniper’s threat — “Call for help and I’ll shoot you right between the eyes!” — is a real corker.
You’ve got the famous, nervous wreck of a pianist (Elijah Wood) pounding away at a work everybody calls “the unplayable piece.” You’ve got John Cusack’s voice in his ear, whispering threats to him about his actress wife (Kerry Bishe). And the pianist is stage whispering pleas, complaints and the like back to the sniper. While playing, mind you.
A laser sight dances across his fingers as he tickles the ivories. There are cell phones ringing in the concert hall, a jovial conductor (Don McManus) who breaks classical music concert decorum — repeatedly — and a pianist who dashes off stage between pieces and movements of pieces.
This just isn’t DONE, you know.
It’s all rather daft, but cleverly so. And the occasional jaw-dropping moment will make you wonder, “Who says classical music is dead?”
Wood is Tom Selznick, a long-dormant concert pianist who is giving a concert in tribute to his late mentor using that mentor’s massive Bosendorfer concert grand piano. His nerves made him give up performing five years before, but conductor Hugh (McManus) jokes around and puts him at ease.
“You’re going to hit a wrong note. And you know what? They (the audience) never know.”
The actress-wife is pushing him to get back on the stage, and even pushier radio interviewers urge him to “break a leg.”
If only.
The trouble starts when Selznick strolls onstage to join the orchestra. He opens his score, and there,in bright red Sharpie marks, is “Play one wrong note and you die!” As he works through the program (Wood is a pretty convincing pianist) and the threats mount, you think of “Phone Booth” and “The Call.” And as Selznick fights panic and sprints offstage to try and out-think his adversary, maybe you think of Bugs Bunny and the classic “Rhapsody Rabbit.” This is that nutty.
“Now you know the meaning of ‘stage fright,'” the unseen sniper hisses, a play on both the bane of any performer and a 1950 Hitchcock film. And a producer named Selznick was the bane of Hitchcock’s early career, so we know who was on screenwriter Damien Chazelle’s mind as he concocted this.
While your eyes may roll at the far-out aspects of “Grand Piano,” you need not fear that Hitchcock himself is rolling in his grave over this tribute. The execution is far from flawless, but I think Sir Alfred would approve.
“What a corker,” he’d say. And he’d be right.

MPAA Rating: R for some language
Cast: Elijah Wood, Kerry Bishe, John Cusack, Don McManus
Credits: Directed by Eugenio Mira, written by Damien Chazelle. A Magnet release.
Running time: 1:37

Three Oscars, as of 1010 pm. Maybe.

Ellen DeGeneres is owning the show, which is funny and relaxed and offhand and a bit clumsy. Like Ellen. Lots of stumbling. Teleprompter issues? A late script?

The music’s been showcased nicely. But stumbles stumbles stumbles.

“After Earth” was honored in a way that befits its derisive reviews, taking home Golden Raspberries for star Will Smith, his spawn Jaden, and worst picture.

“Movie 43,” which is really not worth nominating or berating, took worst script.

Kim Kardashian took a worst prize for daring to turn her preening self-absorbtion lose on whatever Tyler Perry movie she made her “debut” in.

And “Lone Ranger” took a worst remake/sequel prize.

No, Will and Jaden didn’t show up to collect.

A very big weekend for a very big actor as Liam Neeson’s “Non-Stop” continued his run of action hits released in the spring. Over $30 million came in for this far-fetched but moody and entertaining thriller. You’ll never guess the ending.

“Son of God” might have beaten it at the box office, but we already KNOW the ending to that one, yes? Over $26 million for a movie made from recycled footage from a cable TV series. Not bad.

“American Hustle” is doing the best of the remaining best picture contenders, not as well as “Frozen,” not as well as an “even dirtier” version of “Anchorman 2” re-issued to theaters. But well enough.

Weak reviews haven’t stopped “Non-Stop” from giving Liam Neeson another action hit on his post-“Taken” resume. The airborne thriller is headed towards a $27-28 million opening, based on a robust Friday.

“Son of God,” mostly clipped together from scenes from the cable TV series “The Bible,” is laughing all the way to the money changers — $24 million, or so. It had a very good Thursday night, and a decent Friday. Saturday will be telling.

“The Lego Movie” will clear $200 million by end of business Saturday, a most impressive run at #1, the upshot being that a franchise is born. It’ll do nearly $20 million this weekend.

“3 Days to Kill” is doing OK, but not nearly as much for Costner as Neeson’s “Non-Stop.” It’ll make half as much money as the Neeson film, when all is said and done.

“Monuments Men” has sneakily found its way over $65 million and looks to hit $75-80 by the time its run ends.