Movie Nation

The film version of “The Giver” is briskly directed in bright, confident strokes, scripted to emphasize its thought-provoking qualities and acted by players, young and old, who are “all in” on the future they’re portraying.
As adaptations of Young Adult sci-fi go, it holds its own against the many successes of this Teens Save the Future genre.
But coming after “Divergent,” “The Hunger Games,” “Ender’s Game” and “The Host,” it underlines the paucity of original ideas in this genre. Seriously, if Hollywood serves up one more spotless jump-suited crypto-fascist future where only a “Chosen One” can make us remember the humanity we have lost, I’m screaming “Logan’s RUN” and fleeing the theater.
Lois Lowry’s novel is about Jonas, played by Aussie actor Brenton Thwaites (“Maleficent”), a teen who, with his “best friends forever” (Odeya Rush, Cameron Monaghan) is about to graduate from childhood. They’re to be told what they’ll spend their lives doing, what they’re suitable for — everything from “Drone Pilot” to “Nurturer” (childcare specialist).
The Chief Elder (Meryl Streep) thanks each “for your childhood” in a big ceremony, and since they’re all medicated at the start of every day, nobody questions this. Everyone sees the world monochromatically — literally. “Sameness” rules their rules.
“I don’t want to be different. Who would?”
But Jonas is different. He’s got the mark on his wrist, and he’s to be a “Receiver.” In a world without strife, struggle, rudeness or even bad grammar — “PRECISE language!” — Jonas will be given that gift that few share — memory. He has to be strong enough to handle this collective history of the World before The Ruin.
It was a time, the sage “Giver” (Jeff Bridges) intones, “when things were different. When there was more.” More, we learn, can mean everything from races and religions to emotions and sensations (love, pain, music, dance) and even real estate. These perfect planned “communities” on the top of this cloud-shrouded plateau are the only world any of these people know. The Giver is the keeper of memories he passes on because his class is responsible for advising the elders on matters that keep this politically correct/strife-free Utopia Utopian.
Jonas absorbs the history and starts seeing the world in color, as it truly is. He gains a whole new appreciation for his “friend” Fiona (Rush). And he starts to develop morality, independent thinking and rebellious thoughts.
Streep plays the villain of this world, intent on preserving the order of things, the “Sameness.” She reminds us that the best villains don’t see themselves that way. Her Chief Elder is assisted by, among others, her Chief of Security, Jonas’s mother (Katie Holmes). No, she didn’t give birth to him. She and Father (Alexander Skarsgard) just raised him. Maybe that’s why she has no trouble ratting out her kid’s increasingly human tendencies. Doctor Dad, however, has flashes of humanity.
I love the literalness of it all, the Orwellian euphemisms Lowry cooked up for death (“elsewhere”) and the once-playful plush toys that quiet noisy babies (“comfort object”).
Bridges gives his voice age by making The Giver jowly-growly. But he’s never a cute old coot. He is a haunted man with an official mission, and a secret one — to make Jonas see beyond this world and what it lacks.
Philip Noyce (“Salt”, “Patriot Games”) reminds us of what hiring an accomplished director brings to one of these cookie-cutter movies, creating vivid flashbacks of memory — sledding from when there was snow, sailing from when they knew the ocean, the horrors of combat when the world was at war.
But all that said, this 96 minute long, self-contained drama is flatly undramatic. Lowry’s dystopia — she did four books set in this future — is richly allegorical (she won the Newbery Medal for this) but derivative, much imitated but imitative.
Everything from the costumes to the circumscribed PC speech (“I apologize.” “I accept your apology.”) feels over-familiar, and the quest summons up sci-fi deja vu.
So while “The Giver” scores points for being smarter and deeper than “The Hunger Games” or its inferior photo-copy (“Divergent”), coming after all those other versions of this plot does neither it, nor us, any favors. “The Giver” has nothing new to offer.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a mature thematic image and some sci-fi action/violence
Cast: Brenton Thwaites, Jeff Bridges, Odeya Rush, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, Taylor Swift, Alexander Skarsgard.
Credits: Directed by Philip Noyce, based on the Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide. Based on the Lois Lowry novel. A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 1:34

The laughs are loud, lewd and low in “Let’s Be Cops,” a spoof of cop “buddy pictures” that is pretty much the definition of “an August comedy.”
The last month of summer is typically a dumping ground for titles studios don’t have high hopes for. Sometimes, that’s due to the lack of marketable stars. Sometimes, they’re just too hard to market period. And sometimes, if they’re comedies, it’s because the belly laughs are few and far between. All of those apply here.
Jake Johnson of TV’s “New Girl” is paired up with another generation of Wayans — Damon Wayans Jr. — in this farce about two Ohio losers losing their way through Los Angeles, a tough place to be a single guy with zero status.
Justin (Wayans) is a meek and mousy video game developer who is so passive that he gives off a feminine vibe. Ryan (Johnson) is an ex-jock who once quarterbacked for Purdue, but now spends his days roughing up kids in pick-up games on a local playground. Nobody gives either of these guys a second look.
Justin’s cop-centric video game may have been rejected by his bullying boor of a boss, but the police gear he has around the house is handy to have when he and Ryan want to drop in on an alumni “costume” party. People there mistake them for police. Women eyeball these manly men in uniform. And Ryan, who used to feel the love of the crowd, gets hooked.
“Let’s be cops!”
Next thing you know, they’re walking the streets, in uniform with fake guns and fake nametags — Justin is ‘Officer Chang.” The cute waitress he’d like to reveal his true identity/sexuality to (Nina Dobrev) checks him out, so he’s in. But Ryan is WAY in — trading his battered ’80s Camaro for an eBay police cruiser, adding decals and lights, boning up on police procedure, listening for real police calls on a scanner.
“The plan is we CONTROL the situation,” he growls. “That’s what the Youtube video says!”
Things get more and more out of hand, from domestic disturbances that turn out to be spirited sorority girl brawls, to tangles with the Russian mob. The psychotic head mobster Mossi (James D’Arcy) is not amused as “the new sheriffs in town.”
Co-writer/director Luke Greenfield (“Something Borrowed”) lets what few laughs there are in the script land. Johnson’s timing is sharp, and Wayans has that Wayans way with dopey under-reactions to crazy situations. Ask that raging sorority girl her name.
“Precious.”
“NOT your gang name. Or your stripper name. Your REAL name.”
The pairing of these two sometimes works, but Wayans has more of the name and the look than the edge or charismatic comic spark of his dad or his dad’s funnier family members.
Johnson has made a number of smart indie film choices that allowed him to shine — “Drinking Buddies,” “Safety Not Guaranteed.” This one is far more conventional and seriously short of zingers.
“What’s the WORST that could happen?”
The answer to that is, you could end up in a summer comedy that’s barely funny enough to warrant — ahem — release in the summer.
　
MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, some graphic nudity, violence and drug use
Cast: Jake Johnson, Damon Wayans, Jr., Nina Dobrev, James D’Arcy, Rob Riggle, Andy Garcia
Credits: Directed by Luke Greenfield, written by Luke Greenfield and Nicholas Thomas. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 1:44

Lauren “Betty” Bacall died today, TMZ just confirmed. She was 89 years old, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s film noir era, Bogie’s widow.

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?”

We do. “Key Largo,” “The Big Sleep,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” and “Pret a Porter,” a  career that peaked with her years with Bogart, classics with John Huston, she was the very model of elegance, reason enough for Robert Altman to cast the ex-model and late-life TV pitch woman in his film about fashion.

I met her when that film came out, got her fashion advice (for the profile I wrote of her, mind you).

“First,” she intoned, in that regal, deliciously haughty voice she had later in life, “you DON’T want to scare the horses!”

She never did. What a doll.

He just turned 25. So there’s no calling Daniel Radcliffe “kid” any more.

But there is something of the “kid in a candy store” to his wide-ranging
choice of roles in the short time since he hung up Harry Potter’s invisibility
cloak.

He played a lawyer contending with a vengeful ghost in “The Woman in Black,”
gay poet Allen Ginsburg during his formative college years in “”Kill Your
Darlings,” and paired up with Jon Hamm for the short TV series about physicians
in Revolutionary Russia in “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.”

Every so often, he devotes a few months to the theater, most recently
starring as “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”

“Kid in a candy store — that’s pretty much how I’m looking at it,” he admits
with a chuckle. “I’m …kind of trying a little bit of everything. Playing one
part for a long time builds up in you a desire to play lots of different roles,
see what you’re like, what you might be good at.”

So he donned “Horns” to play a young man who grows horns after his
girlfriend’s mysterious death, a film due out this fall. And he took on his
first-ever romantic comedy leading man role, in “What If,” starring opposite Zoe
Kazan, now in theaters.

“I’m still finding out who I am as an actor, what I like doing and what I’m
best at,” Radcliffe says. “That’s how I have the most fun, facing the unexpected
every time out. If I have the chance, at this stage in my career, I’m going to
do the widest variety of roles.”

He has that “chance,” that freedom of choice, because he was in “the most
commercially successful film franchise of all time.” There’s no pressure to find
another film franchise, or even to star in another blockbuster.

“I’m never going to get that level again, for starters,” Radcliffe says. “But
financially, I only have to do things that I’m passionate about. I don’t have to
do stuff I’m not interested in just to make a living. For as long as I’m in this
position, that’s what I intend to do.”

Estimates of his vast Harry Potter earnings vary widely, but suffice it to
say he doesn’t sweat the Monday morning box office figures. If a “Woman in
Black” hits and a “Kill Your Darlings” doesn’t, it was the interesting work that
mattered to Radcliffe.

“What If” began life as a script titled “The F-Word,” as in “friend,” as in a
young man who meets young woman he clicks with (Kazan) only to discover she’s in
a long-term, committed relationship. She values his company, but he’s smitten
and condemned to “the friend zone.”

“It’s an odd term, a very modern term — ‘the Friend Zone,’ he says. “In a
way, being in a relationship with somebody who is your best friend is kind of
the ideal. You want that person you fall in love with and marry to be your best
friend.

“But if somebody says, ‘That girl put me in ‘The Friend Zone,’ it implies
that the only attraction you have for that person is sexual. I don’t think all
men are like that. To be honest, we’re not all that shallow.”

So, decades of living with that “When Harry Met Sally” rule, “Men and women
can’t be friends,” was a mistake?

“I just don’t believe that’s the case any more. But the movie’s more about
‘Is it ever right to maintain a relationship that’s a denial of your own
feelings?’ My character meets this girl, finds out she has a boyfriend and
instead of going, ‘I’ll just move on with my life,’ he chooses to torture
himself by being around her because she makes him so happy he can’t NOT spend
time with her.”

Critics have been enthusiastic about Radcliffe and Kazan’s obvious chemistry,
their way with witty/flirtatious banter. Peter Rainer of The Christian Science
Monitor praised their “nerds-in-clover rapport,” and even though she found “What
If” “too cute for its own good,” The Village Voice’s Stephanie Zacharek said
“it’s so enjoyable from moment to moment that it’s easy to forgive.”

One thing the Michael Dowse film uses, to great effect, is a sight gag. The
5’5″ Radcliffe and 5’4″ Kazan are forever being paired up with Adam Driver
(6’3″), as Radcliffe’s character’s best friend, and Rafe Spall (6’1″) as Kazan’s
character’s live-in beau.

“I didn’t care,” Radcliffe says, declaring he’s not touchy about playing a
sight-gag. “I have met tall people before. The shot of me and Adam walking down
the street, it takes a special lens to keep us both in the frame!”

But ask him who he looks to as a career role model and there’s no hesitation.
It’s one of his “Horns” co-stars, a man of similar stature.

“As I neared the end of Potter, I started paying a lot of attention to what
James McAvoy was doing. He’s having an extraordinary career and it’s still only
just getting started. He’s done it his own way.”

Radcliffe has a turn as “Igor” in a new film about Frankenstein, and has
another movie project or two in the planning stages. He longs for that next
chance tread the boards in London’s West End or on Broadway.

“I love the theater, because it forces you to be accountable. You have to be
on, every second you’re on the stage. Because the audience can tell if you’re
not.”

But those lingering rumors of J.K. Rowling having more to say with Harry
Potter, the young wizard now grown to adulthood, and possible films that might
come from that do not interest Radcliffe. The role that made him rich and famous
is over, as far as he is concerned.

“I cannot envisage a scenario where I would be going back into that world,”
he says. “Maybe you’ll be confronting me with that answer in a few year’s time,
if I say ‘Yes.’ But at the moment, I am having too fun to see what would be gained by me going to Harry.”

I was in a screening tonight when I learned Robin Williams had taken his life. It was for “The Giver,” and the screening format was a red carpet telecast of the NYC premiere, to be followed by nationwide preview showings of the movie. “Giver” star Jeff Bridges, interviewed on the red carpet, broke the news, said “He was a fantastic cat,” and burst into tears. His “Fisher King” co-star finally gave in to the demons. Drugs, depression, decades of wrestling with stuff he never let you see when he was “on.” Which was most of the time. Met Williams a few times over the years, manic sometimes, somber others. A funny man who talked about loneliness more than was normal for somebody in his position. The last time we were to talk, it was about that Armistead Maupin adaptation, “Night Caller.” His pal Christopher Reeve died, so naturally he canceled. A tender soul. A hilarious man, a wonderful actor. But depressed. So yeah, Robin, we get it. Sad, but we get it. Rest in peace

Some movies are built for mass appeal, and some aim smaller, “festival films” they’re called.
“Frank” feels like a “festival film” aimed squarely at one festival, the one that is the setting of its third act. Here’s an eccentric tragicomedy, with music, built to play like gangbusters at Austin’s South by Southwest music-movie fanboy/fangirl festival.
The title character is a singer/songwriter who performs and lives his entire life wearing a gigantic plastic head over his skull. The fact that the great Michael Fassbender is the talking, fuming, rambling and singing man-behind-the-mask makes this wildly improbable film all the more intriguing.
Domnhall Gleeson is Jon, an office drone and aspiring songwriter whose banal observations of life-observed, set to music, aren’t getting him anywhere. And then, as he’s watching this keyboard player go mad and try to drown himself in the Irish Sea, opportunity knocks. Don (Scoot McNairy), the manager of the band (called Soronprfbs), asks Jon to fill in.
Their music is madness incarnate — wild trills of guitar, drums, synthesizer and theremin. Frank, his mask containing a built-in microphone, croons on about “screeching frequencies of pulsing infinity.” The women in the group (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Carla Azar) are protective of Frank, and enraged at the universe. Carla (Gyllenhaal) is violently toxic and takes an instant loathing to Jon.
“You are fingers being told which keys to push,” she hisses, dismissively.
But Frank appreciates Jon’s unflappable nature and his seemingly incompetent songwriting. Jon could be the missing ingredient as they go “all the way out there,” to “the furthest corners” of music, and remote Ireland, where they endlessly rehearse for an album Frank is never ready to put on tape.
Jon’s in,but he’s got a lot of questions. Who IS Frank? Does he ever take the mask off? (No.). Is he mad?
“Jon, you’re just going to have to go with this,” Don says. Frank, he assures Jon, is the “100 percent sanest cat I’ve ever met.”
It’s where Don and Frank met that’s the key to this jarring jewel of weirdness.
The “real” Frank was this British comic named Chris Sievey, who wore an identical head for a character he played named Frank Sidebottom. Add in a band that summons up memories of Devo, The Residents, Captain Beefheart and others off the sonic beaten path, and you’ve got a story not unlike a hundred “band trying to make it” tales, with more than a whiff of insanity about it.
Gleeson, son of Irish actor Brendan and star of the warm “About Time” in his own right, is well-cast as the innocent trying to hold his own with the cranky weirdoes he tossed his lot with. Gyllenhaal is on-the-nose alarming as the scary Clara.
And Fassbender, his face hidden in a mask, singing and charming when Frank isn’t off-the-rails despairing and naive even in his sanest moments, is a hidden delight. He makes Frank both a puzzle at the center of the picture and the heart of its humor. Frank has to either get his emotions across with his speaking or singing voice, or give you a hint of what his face is doing inside that mask.
“Underneath, I’m giving you a welcoming smile.”
And that “welcoming smile” goes not just for Frank, the character, but this puzzling, beguiling comedy of the same name.
　
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Fassbender
Credits: Directed by Lenny Abramson, written by Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan. A Magnolia release.
Running time

Mixed Sundance notices for the film, but not for K-Stew. Put a girl in uniform…