Movie Nation

“Noah” was going to be a hard sell, even without the whispers of a director’s cut/studio cut haggle, even without a few names you see on the IMDB cast list not actually in the movie due to that cutting.

Paramount seems scared of their big budget Bible epic, and with some cause. It cost a lot. It’s got Evolution, environmentalism and vegetarianism, none of which is a selling point to the Evangelical Christian crowd.

And it stars Russell Crowe, whose big box office days are nearly a decade behind him.

That said, it’s pretty good and reviews have reflected that.

Will it do mid-$30s, as Box Office Mojo figures? I worry that’s too high, for the reasons I mentioned.

The Box Office Guru figures $36. So we’ll see. I’m thinking under $30. But I’d be pleased if it did better.

“Sabotage,” the latest serenade of suck from the aged Arnold Schwarzenegger, is getting terrible reviews and will be lucky to clear $8, both Mojo and Guru figure. I say $6.Terrible reviews for that one.

“Divergent” could lose 60% of its opening weekend audience and still clear $22 million, so that may happen. Any lower than that should scare Summit to death, with a franchise in the making and all.

“Cesar Chavez” is opening at few theaters, but predictions are for it to hit $6-7 million, thanks to the Hispanic market’s interest in a weakly reviewed (I liked it, others less so) story of a Latino icon.

Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t strut through action films these days. And no amount of editing can hide that no, grandpa can’t kick doors down any more. Or fake it.
Even his line-readings have a fatigue that suggests he’s kind of over it.
“Aye trust you mitt my life! Ve are still a family!”
A once-bulky big boy of Hollywood’s steroid era, these days he just lumbers into scenes, chomping a cigar, and tries to let the younger, bigger actors carry the load.
Especially in “Sabotage,” a stupidly-titled actioner that, like its star, lumbers along between shoot-outs, gory crime scenes and glib, off-color one-liners. This dark turn in the Arnie oeuvre is by the guy who did “Training Day” and “End of Watch.” But watching this head-slappingly stupid movie is an exercise is seeing David Ayer sucked into the drain that Arnold’s been spiraling down ever since his “comeback.”
Schwarzenegger plays Breacher, the head of a DEA Special Operations Team, a gonzo gang of buff thugs with big guns and cute nicknames that they trot out in every slow-footed operation they mount.
When we meet Breacher, Monster (Sam Worthington), his macho wife Lizzy (Mireille Enos), Sugar (Terrence Howard), Grinder (Joe Manganiello Tripod, Neck, Pryo and Smoke, they’re shooting their way into an Atlanta mansion run by a drug lord. And they’re robbing him.
They stash the cash, but it disappears. Their bosses know there’s missing money. A long investigation (lots of grainy interrogation video) later, nobody’s charged. They get off with a scolding.
“The only thing anybody in law enforcement has is their credibility.”
That’ll teach’em. But then, the members of the team start meeting gruesome, spectacular deaths — by train, by nail gun. The movie spares us nothing, from the crime scenes to the grisly autopsies.
An Atlanta cop, played by British actress Olivia Williams (“An Education”) slinging a Georgia accent, may be out of her depth. But she persists in trying to get the surviving members to tell her who is doing this, and why.
“Assume ah’m stupid,” she drawls. “Paint me a picture!”
Ayer plays around with time lines, having the cop and the not-exactly-disgraced Breacher enter crime scenes which flash-back to the actual events of the murder. Ayer throws a loopy chase through downtown Atlanta into the mix.
And he and co-writer Skip Woods pour an enormous effort into the Budweiser, bullets and strip bars milieu that this “team” wallows in. Enos, of TV’s “The Killing,” aquits herself well — a tough broad amongst tough guys.
“Why don’chew go play Daddy somewhere else?”
Manganiello, all tattoos and corn rows, stands out as well. “We could be drinkin’ beer an’ throwin’ dollars at something NAKED!”
Worthington has elaborate biker facial hair and an accent (He’s Australian) that comes and goes. “Avatar II” may not rescue his career after all.
It’s more a botched Ayer movie than a retro Arnie adventure, but there are elements of both dragging this down. Extreme, graphic violence and a serious anti-law enforcement ethos mixed with flippant gun slingers executing bad guys and dropping the occasional bystander, giving more thought to their “zingers” than the body count.
“Clean-up on aisle three!”
“Sabotage” makes you wonder, with nothing but flop star vehicles made for smaller and smaller studios since he turned 65, when this worn out Austrian war horse will be put out to pasture.
　
MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some sexuality/nudity and drug use
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Olivia Williams, Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello, Harold Perrineau
Credits: Directed by David Ayer, written by Skip Woods and David Ayer. An Open Road release.
Running time: 1:37

Variety reports from the convention that used to be called ShowWest that the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) that that 18-24 audience dropped 21% last year.

The main “frequent moviegoer” demo, 39 and under, dropped 16%.

Too many choices? Too little disposable income that they’re aiming at gadgets, games and aps for those gadgets? Probably.

Maybe they’re not dating as much. That age group is also toting around less cash.

The thing is, that’s the audience movies pander to. And if they’re not going, if they’re not developing a lifelong (until they’re 30ish, anyway) habit, Hollywood is making a lot of crappy horror movies, comic book epics and teen-centric supernatural romances. For nothing. “Divergent” could be a last hurrah.

Hispanics are a disproportionally large part of the frequent filmgoer class. More films that have Hispanic inclusion? “Cesar Chavez” won’t make a dime. But if it does, there’s data to tell us why. That same data points to why “Need for Speed” tanked. No “Fast & Furious” diversity for its car-crazy cast.

Hollywood has been trying for decades to get that older audience back into theaters, and it now looks like that audience might be a partial lifeline. In 2015, we’ll see a sequel to “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” So, there’s that. Frequent movie goers only comprise 11% of the overall audience, and growing that group will be a challenge, young or older.

What I predict will happen will be a bigger push toward interactive movie experiences, twitter contests and other things that allow the distracted to distract themselves with gadgets while they should be losing themselves in the world the film they’re watching is supposed to create.

Hopefully, it’s just a downward bump — temporary.

There are hundreds of film schools with thousands and thousands of students who are gambling on the wrong horse, otherwise.

Dr. Watson to Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes, dapper leading man or Cockney villain, Jude Law may be entering the most interesting phase of his career.

He’s 40, and the comic character drama “Dom Hemingway” sees him an a volcanic ex-con whose hair-trigger temper may or may not be of use to him as he seeks to “get what’s owed to me” for his prison stretch, and make up with the daughter he didn’t see grow up.

He put on weight — and not just facial hair — for Dom. And he’s amazing in the part. Dangerous, a sort of Ben “Sexy Beast” Kingsley conversion that changes how you will think about him in the future.

Questions for Jude? Comment below, and thanks for the help.

Big, beatific and (more or less) Biblical, Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is a mad vision of a movie, an action adventure take on The Flood that cleansed the Earth.
Aronofsky (“Black Swan”) envisions this epic through the lens of Hollywood, interpreting the Bible as myth and telling one of its most fantastical tales as a grand and dark cinematic fantasy — a Lord of the Rains.
And with Russell Crowe as his Master & Commander & Shipbuilder, Aronofsky has concocted an accessible, modern and mythic version of this oral history that may make purists blanch even as it entertains the rest of us.
A prologue tells of the spawn of Cain, who spilled blood, left the Garden of Eden, populated the world and made a mess of things. Ten generations later, Noah (Crowe) and his small family (Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth) wander the wastelands, waiting for…a sign.
Noah’s dreams tell him The End is nigh. By fire, his grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) wants to know?
“Fire consumes all,” Noah prophesies, “water cleanses.”
The wicked world “which men have broken” will be flooded, the pure will rise and float above it. The rest? Drowned.
“The storm cannot be stopped. It can be survived.”
More visions, and Noah starts building an ark, first, by planting the forest that will be hewn into that ark. Stone creatures straight out of “Lord of the Rings,” “The Watchers” (angels) help him.
But out there, in the world begat by Cain, his descendant (Ray Winstone) is offering up an alternative theology.
“A man isn’t ruled by the heavens. A man is ruled by his will.”
Tubal-cain’s violence, meat eating (Noah’s people are vegetarians) and weapons are attractive to Noah’s son Ham (Lerman, aka Percy Jackson), who has no female companionship in their tiny circle. Shem (Booth) has the foundling they raised, Ila (Emma Watson). Ham is tempted to change sides to find himself a woman.
Still, animals gather and are sedated, the ark nears completion, and then the skies darken and empty.
It took guts to change Noah from the pious original naval architect into a two-fisted man of action, and then to cast Crowe in the part. But it works. Noah’s fanatical devotion to his faith and his task make him capable of anything.
Aronofsky serves up images of lyrical beauty — stark sunrises, time-lapse versions of the Story of Creation — and terror. Hieronymus Bosch would be pleased by the sight of the victims of the flood clinging to a rocky mountaintop, awaiting the wave that will punish the unjust as well as a few innocents.
Hopkins and Watson and Connolly provide the tale’s moving moments — scenes of heart and humility and hope. The acting is of the first rank, as you’d expect from a cast with three Oscar winners and some of the brightest rising stars in film in it.
But the gutsiest move on Aronofsky’s part is in the film’s interpretation of this tale through modern eyes. Here is a myth that allows Creation and Evolution to live in the same film, a touch of “Cosmos” with just a hint of “In the beginning,” as oral tradition. Effects assist the telling at every turn, but so does arresting geography.
Maybe it’s a little too sci-fi (check out the costumes, the metallurgy, the pre-historic boots). It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But “Noah” makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The Biblical literalists can always go argue over “God Isn’t Dead.” The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, disturbing images and brief suggestive content
Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson
Credits: Directed by Darren Aronofsky, written by Darron Aronofsky and Ari Handel. A Paramount release.
Running time: 2:18

　”Breathe In” is a romantic melodrama that’s so well-cast and acted and made with such loving care that you could almost forgive how long it takes to get to its obvious conclusion, how melodramatic the whole “sordid” affair is.
“Sordid” may be overselling it a bit. This forbidden romance is about a tempting British exchange student who attracts the attentions of the husband/father in the suburban house where’s she’s spending a semester. That’s about as racy as this Drake Doremus (“Like Crazy”) romance gets. There’s nothing here that merits the film’s R-rating.
Felicity Jones, who is becoming the director’s muse — she was in “Like Crazy” — is Sophie, the gorgeous Brit who comes to live with Megan (Amy Ryan), her husband Keith (Guy Pearce) and their teen daughter Lauren (Mackenzie Davis of “That Awkward Moment”).
From the moment she steps off the plane, there’s an unease about Sophie. She’s holding Keith’s gaze a little too long, keeping her lips permanently pursed.
And since Megan is forever taking little digs at her teacher-husband’s “hobby,” his past life as a working musician, Keith notices. His cookie-jar collector spouse can’t see the trap that their lives have become to him. With a symphony audition coming up and the chance to go back to performing as a cellist, Keith may be up for acting like a kid again.
What’s delicious here is the way Doremus drags out this potential romantic collision. Sophie, a pianist, instantly picks up on something from Keith that makes her keep her distance. She drops out of his high school class (he is taken aback) and avoids being alone with him. For a while, anyway.
She’s 18 and she has a clue about how she affects men.
“You don’t seem as young as you actually are.”
Lauren does. She’s a star swimmer at school, about to turn 18 and confused and troubled by boys. Naturally, she’s the one who picks up on the sparks between her cool dad and the new girl sharing her bedroom.
The script presents a marriage that has a lived-in feel about it, sharing the little ways one spouse can put down another to keep him in line, his futile efforts to feel young and “creative” again, the way they did when they were just starting out.
“We had a life that got cut short.”
But basically, what we’re looking at here is a screenplay version of the old Police song, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” From the dangers of a lesson on a shared piano bench to a rainstorm that ends with “his car is warm and dry,” “Breathe In” traffics in cliches.
A favorite? “We’ll just get in the car and start driving.”
Davis creates a convincingly vulnerable, open-hearted and stumbling teen. Watch the way she shrieks when she learns her birthday present is a used car, how she crumbles when a boy who broke her heart rejects her. Ryan sells a slow-to-catch-on wariness with just her eyes. And Pearce is always good at playing men barely keeping control of their passions.
Jones doesn’t have the smoldering, knowing sexuality that a Gemma Arterton would have brought to this role in her teens. She makes Sophie mysterious, guarded, a teen who must be running from something we never hear about.
But even though she dials down the heat, that doesn’t obscure the easily-guessed twists and turns in “Breathe In.” And it doesn’t change the innately creepy connection that they’re making here — a 40something man drawn to his daughter’s classmate — something that only your pervier men’s magazines would approve.
　
MPAA Rating: R for some language
Cast: Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Amy Ryan, Mackenzie Davis
Credits: Directed by Drake Doremus, written by Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones. A Cohen Media Group release.
Running time: 1:37

“Cesar Chavez” is a Mexican-American “42,” a quietly inspiring and well-acted
tale of a civil rights icon whose story isn’t nearly as familiar as Jackie
Robinson’s. But then, Chavez wasn’t a ball player. He was a union organizer. And
while Robinson, with some reluctance, had nobility and greatness thrust upon
him, Chavez was a humble farm laborer who set out to be an agent of change.

Mexican actor turned director Diego Luna has made an emotional movie with
simple human dimensions. Chavez wasn’t a dynamic speaker or necessarily that
charismatic. He looked and sounded very ordinary, a modest man driven by simple
righteousness. So it’s appropriate that Luna’s film (based on a Keir
Pearson/Timothy J. Sexton script) stumbles a little with the sweeping moments in
this intimate biography passed off as larger than life epic.
Chavez’s struggle to unionize exploited farm workers — his long marches, his
hunger strike — make for moving moments, but rarely achieve grandeur. It’s the
commonplace organizational struggles, the Gandhi-like obsession with on-violence
and the stubborn refusal to be bullied by the bigoted, the rich, the armed and
the powerful that stands out in “Cesar Chavez.”
Michael Pena (“End of Watch”) has the title role, a farm worker whose family
once had land but lost it in the Depression. He has labored in the fields. He
knows the back-breaking, knee-bloodying work of grubbing up onions or cutting
grapes. He knows the campesinos who do that work, with few breaks provided by
the growers, and no toilets “because Mexicans don’t know how to use’em,
anyway.”
The film picks up his story in the early ’60s. He’s already trying to
organize the pickers.
“Do you own anything?” he asks one, in Spanish. “Can you read or write?” And
finally, the tipping point question, “Do you want more for your kids?”
His union bosses in Los Angeles (Rosario Dawson plays one) have been trying
and failing to get headway by leafleting and the like. Chavez says, “I wanna get
my HANDS dirty.” And with his wife Helen (America Ferrara), he loads their eight
kids into a tiny Volvo and moves to Delano, California. They work in the fields
by day and have meetings, trying to convince workers to hold out for better pay,
better working conditions and “human dignity,” by night.
Pena, a low-heat actor in most films, uses that to his advantage here. Chavez
was famous for holding his temper, following Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s
ethos of non-violent protests, legal obstruction (pickets, boycotts) and
passive resistance. The reserved Pena finds humor in the confrontations with
billy-clubbing cops, who call him and the union “communists.”
“Communists? We’re Catholic. How can Catholics be communists?”
Ferrara gets to be the fiery one, playing a willful woman who brushes aside
her husband’s patriarchal sexism, vowing she can get herself arrested just as
easily as the next organizer. When California makes it illegal to say the word
“huelga” (strike) in the fields, Ferrera’s Helen screams it with a wild-eyed
passion that is positively chilling.
John Malkovich plays the face of the opposition, a rich, landed grape-grower
who is passing his business on to his son and who leads grower opposition to
“giving in” to “dirty foreigners.” He himself is an immigrant, but he’s willing
to ally himself with his more bigoted peers to get his way.
A lot of the names of the companies and foes of this civil rights movement
have been changed. But not the politicians. Ronald Reagan, then governor of
California, does all that he can to break the union, and is seen on camera
calling the grape boycott “immoral.” Richard Nixon finds slippery ways to
undercut the nationwide boycott and keep the workers from winning a living
wage.
Like “42,” “Cesar Chavez” lacks the budget to feel truly epic in scope. The
violence is scattered, shocking and personal, the struggles within the union
muted but the outrage — cops rioting against picketers, thugs shooting and
running over organizers, sheriffs arresting protesters because they “fear for
their safety” — is palpable. Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Jack Holmes) shows up
midway through the movie, ostensibly to grandstand for the cameras and give the
growers cover. Holmes, in a spot-on impersonation, shows that rare politician
who dared lose his temper, expressing the audience’s fury at the Constitutional
rights we see being violated by a legal system that the growers own and control.

Luna wrestles this story into shape and in the process, much gets
shortchanged. Chavez’s neglected family is further neglected to make way for
more in the long “pilgrimage” march from Delano to Sacramento.
But Pena, in the title role, finds the simple dignity in a very basic
struggle, to give “these people” faces and names, to make America notice them
and to teach a culture one simple, elemental lesson.
“Once a social change begins, it cannot be reversed.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some violence and language
Cast: Michael Pena, Rosario Dawson, America Ferrara, John Malkovich
Credits: Directed by Diego Luna, scripted by Keir Pearson and Timothy J.
Sexton. A Lionsgate/Pantelion release.
Running time: 1:58

The average new release on Metacritic or Rottentomatoes.com has a healthy sampling of America’s reviewers weighing in on its merits. Chances are, you can find a review to your liking or that fits your tastes — since a lot of people actually look at reviews to find somebody who agrees with them about the movie they just saw — justifying their tastes, in other words.

But there aren’t even half a dozen “God Isn’t Dead” reviews up there. Why?

Well, I tried to reach Freestyle Releasing and Pure Flix last week to get a screener or screening of the film. Never heard a peep. Some studios aren’t really set up to make that happen in time for newspaper or others’ deadlines. Others don’t make the effort. I suspect something just slipped through the cracks, here. Freestyle I’ve had good luck with in the past.

On the other hand, faith-based filmmakers often don’t want criticism. For a movie that supposedly is about Christians welcoming an intellectual debate about their beliefs, this is the coward’s way out. Sure, you worry about getting a fair shake, especially when you have, as this film did, all sorts of prejudices about “elites” and the educated and media people. But there are a couple of positive reviews out there, none of them worth taking seriously (Variety’s just reacting to the box office, and pandering. They do that.).

Then there’s the backlash you get from criticizing a Christian film in this country. I can pan “Divergent,” which reached 10-12 million people this weekend, and maybe a dozen people will complain in the comments here on my blog (where I aggregate all my wire service reviews). Pan something like “Son of God” (I didn’t) or “The Nativity Story” (I didn’t) or “Courageous” (I did) and you get endless tirades about Godless media, and “liberal bias” and every other cant rant under the sun.

Is it worth it?

You tend to have to overwrite the review, covering a lot more theology and logic and the like than you’d prefer. The review feels labored as  a result.  All because you know the brimstone storm that’s coming your way from the Duck Dynasty set.

So maybe some people tried and the studio wouldn’t accommodate them. Maybe some critics didn’t note that “God’s Not Dead” had opened in their market. And maybe some said, “Simply not worth it,” because seriously, you can’t “debate” people who treat facts, reason, science and education as “opinions.” And who weight the pandering words of a TV preacher the same way they’d credit a Nobel Prize winner.

And speaking for myself, there is no point in arguing with people who use circular logic to try and argue that “You’re just angry with God” when you take issue with their name-calling because, well, shoot, everybody believes what they believe and disagreeing with them is disagreeing with a supernatural deity. That’s the way of madness.

“The Raid 2: Berendal” is the most violent movie ever made. The exploding heads, slit, gurgling throats and claw-hammer crunches and tears are so excessive as to make the works of Pekinpah, Tarantino and torture porn king Eli Roth seem almost quaint in retrospect.
Excessively complicated and excessive in length, it stands in stark contrast to writer-director Gareth Evans’ original film, a tight, visceral martial arts thrill ride that had one good cop (Iko Uwais) battling his way out of a mob-controlled apartment complex filled with villains. Rama (Uwais) was the last man standing, as corrupt police officials refused to send back-up and mobsters sent wave upon wave of cutthroats, kickboxers and gunmen to finish him off.
“Raid 2” still has Rama, but is more interested in viscera than the visceral, more wrapped up in confusing subplots than streamlined simplicity. It’s more about the blood and injuries sustained by hammers, machetes, box cutters and shotguns than about Rama or his latest quest. And that’s a serious shortcoming.
Our hero is sent deep undercover, into prison, where he does two years time, cozying up to and protecting Uco, the pretty boy son of a mob boss (Arifin Putra). Once out, he’s accepted into Uco’s dad’s gang. The idea is he’ll help ferret out corrupt cops who protect Bangun and his gang, the Japanese Goto gang, and the “half-Arab” wild card, the glove-wearing, cane-carrying opportunist Bejo (Alex Abbad).
Simple enough. But gleaning that from the panoply of characters played by unfamiliar actors while reading subtitles (it’s in Indonesian) takes some work. And that’s not really where Evans’ strength lies.
“Raid 2” is best regarded as a series of epic set pieces, fights that could be labeled and promoted the way prize fights often are.
There’s the Slaughter in the Snow. Then, the Punchout in the Prison Yard, where convicts kick, chop and stab as they’re writhing in the mud of a torrential rain.
The Butchery in the Bar introduces the skills of an older shaggy and unkempt hitman (Yayan Ruhian) who must take on all comers once he’s outlived his usefulness. Ruhian is the fight choreographer for this picture, and the best things in it are to his credit.
Murder on the Metro involves the petite, hammer-wielding “Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle), a ballerina when it comes to hammer-blows.
And so on.
The brawls are always crowded, but always broken down to individual combat. None of the villains seem clever enough to figure out, “Let’s RUSH him.” Rare is the engagement where guns play a big part. Those usually turn up in the car chases — a couple of dazzling ones — where Rama dodges assassins with shotguns and the like.
Evans cuts the fights into visually striking blurs of sound and fury. And there are so many fights that he had a lot of practice editing them into coherent, heart-pounding engagements.
But there are too many. And everything between the brawls is dull exposition, older gangsters trying to keep the peace, cops straining to stay a step or two behind the mob and bungling their loose reins on their man inside the mob, and younger gangsters plotting to turn this Indonesian world upside down.
Anthony Burgess’ phrase, “the old ULTRA-violence,” from “A Clockwork Orange” comes to mind at about the tenth gory stabbing, grisly slashing or gruesome bludgeoning that Evans serves up here. This is eye-averting stuff for all but the most hardened and emotionally disconnected. It is explicit video-game style violence, with Rama enduring beatings and hammer blows and deep cuts and yet somehow, fresh enough to tackle the next Clash in the Kitchen or Taekwondo in the Taxi (a particularly inventive and memorable fight).
“The Raid” was a great action film in which the violence, excessive though it was, served as obstacles in the hero’s simple quest. In “Raid 2” the violence is the movie, its excess used to cover for an inept story, thinly-drawn characters and dead spots. Cut this by 45 minutes and it would be no less confusing, but at least it would be a movie with all “cool scenes,” gory as they are.

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong bloody violence throughout, sexuality and language
Cast: Iko Uwais, Arifin Putra, Alex Abbad,Yayan Ruhian     Yayan Ruhian,  Julie Estelle
Credits: Written and directed by Gareth Evans. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 2:28