Movie Nation

“Divergent” had a banner Saturday to go with a healthy Friday, and should come close to $56 million by midnight tonight (Sunday.).

The weekend’s biggest surprise might be “God’s Not Dead,” another indie Christian studio (FREE) release that opened mostly in the South, features “Duck Dynasty” appearances, and looks to pull in $8 million. That’s almost as much as Tyler Perry’s last movie.

“Muppets Most Wanted” had a weaker Saturday than expected and will be lucky to make it to $18 million for Disney. It’s a pity, but the disconnect between today’s kids and those puppets is huge.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” did another $6-7, and is in the top ten, still. “Veronica Mars” isn’t. Both expanded their release this weekend, “Mars” is now up to $2.7 million, according to deadline.com. Hardly worth releasing it into theaters.

Hand it to Summit. Te “Twilight” co., which cranked up “Hunger Games” as it was swallowed by Lionsgate, knows its demographic.

Teenage girls are buying everybody in the office Bentleys. Again.

“Divergent,” which critics panned and felt like a soft pitch for a blockbuster a month ago, is now the latest smash to come out of the teen screen factory. It’s hitting the high end of predictions for its take this weekend, based on huge Friday numbers – $55 million or so.

When you think of how many franchises aimed at that demo have been tried, from “Golden Compass” to “Ender’s Game,” “Percy Jackson” to you name it, Summit’s ability to get a good director to make a plausible, workable picture out of a cut-and-paste formula book, well, that’s impressive. If I ran Sony or Fox or Paramount, I’d be all over Summit, trying to hire away the execs who keep making money out of dross like this.

But the biggest upside has to be audiences discovering the wonders of Shailene Woodley. I have interviewed her a few times, based  on her work in “The Descendents,” “The Spectacular Now” and “Divergent.” She’s the real deal, and to me, a more empathetic actress that Jennifer Lawrence. And now she’s going to be world famous and get the A picture offers. Here’s my latest chat with her re: “Divergent.”

“Muppets Most Wanted” is living down to the low end of expectations — $19 million. Reminds me of an interview I had with Frank Oz a few years back when he directed the Brit version of “Death at a Funeral.” I had kids and we were looking at the latest DVD re-issue of “The Muppet Show” and I asked Oz why the Muppets have endured.

“Have they? I don’t know. I doubt it.” Kids, far removed from the vaudeville-ish buffoonery of the TV series, disconnected from movies and with way more choices than just “Sesame Street” weren’t an automatic audience for this rebooted franchise. Their parents will dig the new film, but kids aren’t demanding to see it. Jim Henson is long dead and gone, and the charm has kind of worn off the puppets. It’s a shame, but there it is. They spent a lot of money on this, not comic book effects picture money, but I don’t see another film coming out of the Muppets any time soon

The studio releasing “God’s Not Dead” didn’t want their picture reviewed, just unleashed on the public. It’s doing quite well on 700 or so screens. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” opens much wider this weekend, and isn’t improving its numbers that much, which backs up the strategy of platform release for Wes Anderson pictures. No point in sending it out everywhere at once. The top end isn’t that promising.

That’s what the prognosticators says. The latest femme-friendly YA (young adult) action film in the “Hunger Games” mold will do do Katniss-sized business, at least on its opening weekend.

“Divergent” is a pre-ordained franchise. There appears to be nothing in the studio’s playbook that says it will fail, so they’re already prepared to to do the other films in the series — “Insurgent,” “Indulgent,” “Indifferent,” I forget the titles.

Box Office Mojo says “Divergent” will skip past weak reviews and do a boffo $53 million or so this weekend — 3D, lots of screens, spring break for a lot of the 12-18 year old girl target audience.

Box Office Guru agrees — well over $50 million.

The Hollywood Reporter figures those numbers are low. High interest, lots of hype, new book series (apparently commissioned to be a formula cut and paste job JUST like “Hunger Games”), THR says $60 million by midnight Sunday.

I am wondering if those numbers, tracking and research based, aren’t high. Reviews and Katniss loyalty could tamp down interest, big time. “The Host” and other pretenders to this audience bombed. I’m thinking below $40.

Nobody is thinking “Muppets Most Wanted”, funny as it is, with much better reviews, will connect with kids too young to have any memories of anything older than the last film in this series. Will it clear $20? Mojo thinks “no.” Mid-20s guesses “Guru.” I think low $20s.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” opens wider this weekend, so expect it to bump further up the top ten ladder. Maybe. There’s a crowded top ten ahead of it, and last weekend’s movies will slide, but not all the way out of the list.

Before you go popping off here, all snarky and such, quick question — Have you seen “The Frozen Ground”? How about “Joe,” his latest?

He wasn’t bad in “Bad Lieutenant”, was he? And he killed in “Kick-Ass.”

So none of this generic “seen him, hated that” stuff about Nicolas Cage. He’s doing some good work. He just turned 50, and perhaps his darkest decade, full of bad thrillers, bad sci-fi and bad comic book films may be behind him.

Is he in Russell Crowe/Mel Gibson/Kevin Costner territory, a guy the audience has tuned out? If so, they’re missing out. He’s still one of the most interesting leading men in the movies. And “Joe” is one of those Southern Gothic re-inventions, a “Mud” or “Shotgun Stories” from the director who made “Undertow” and “Prince Avalanche.”

Dark, primal, very Southern.

Questions for Nicolas Cage? Serious questions? Comment below, and thanks.

“Muppets Most Wanted” is funnier than the last Muppets movie, with far better songs (by Bret McKenzie), punnier puns and all manner of geo-political gags, cultural wisecracks and star cameos.
Sure, you can take the kids. But will they get the Swedish Chef in a remake of Ingmar Bergman film “The Seventh Seal” joke? Will they know who Celine Dion is, and why Miss Piggy wanting to sing a duet with her is funny?
And clocking in at a kid patience-testing 1:52, you have to wonder if Disney doesn’t realize, after the 2011 Muppet revival, that it’s making these films not for children, but for the people who loved the TV show back when Liberace and Liza Minnelli were guest starring with Jim Henson & Co. Lady Gaga and Usher may need no 10-and-under introduction. But Salma Hayek, Josh Groban, Ray Liotta, Saoirse Ronan, Danny Trejo, “Thor” villain Tom Hiddleston (in light red hair), Tony Bennett and Frank Langella? They’re going to give grown-ups a giggle.
Kermit and the Muppets have barely reunited as a group when a predatory manager (Ricky Gervais) lures them into a world tour with promises of sold-out shows and worldwide Muppet adoration. But the tour is basically a plot by Dominic Badguy (“It’s pronounced ‘Bad-gee.’ It’s French.”) to put a criminal mastermind and Kermit look-alike in charge of The Muppet Show.
Constantine, “the world’s most dangerous frog,” breaks out of a Russian gulag, covers his facial mole in green makeup and tries to twist his Russian accent into Kermit speech to make the switcheroo work. Somehow, almost everybody is fooled, even the insistently lovesick Miss Piggy.
“Peeg, vas I wearink sign dot sez BOTHER ME?”
Constantine and Badguy schedule Muppet shows in Berlin, Madrid and Dublin in an effort to rob next-door museums. And with the villains indulging every lunatic vanity project of every lunatic in the company — Piggy’s Celine songs, Gonzo’s “indoor running of the bulls” and the like — nobody’s the wiser. Interpol’s silliest Frenchman (Ty Burrell of “Modern Family”) and the CIA’s Sam the Eagle are slow to catch on as well.
Meanwhile, Kermit’s the one dragged back to the Gulag,where fellow inmates Ray Liotta, Jemaine Clement and Danny Trejo accept him as their murderous leader — sort of. And camp commandant Nadya (Tina Fey, terrific) puts him to work casting and planning the prison’s musical revue.
The production numbers are epic — from the “everybody knows a sequel is never quite as good” opener, to a Gervais duet with Constantine, Miss Piggy sharing a song with her idol Celine and Tina Fey’s ’60s girl group style prison show stopper, “Big House.”
The Boris & Natasha accents that Fey and the hilarious Clement (“Dinner for Schmucks,” TV’s “Flight of the Conchords”) sling are just hilarious, as is much of what pops up here.

The new voices don’t quite match your memories of the original cast, a good reason to keep Kermit off camera for much of the film. And “Most Wanted is entirely too long, which puts a strain on the slight sight gags (Towering Ty Burrell and Sam the Eagle stuffed into a tiny Interpol police car) and time-worn puns.
There’s a Pixar “Monster’s University” short, “Party Central,” that has about as many laughs as last summer’s feature length snoozer, to make the trip to the cinemas even longer.
But “Most Wanted” is amusing enough to make you think, “So what if the kids don’t dig it? Hire a sitter!” This is what PG comedy was meant to be, with the giggles mixed with the groans, something only “Macarena” dancing Muppets can deliver.
　
MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action
Cast: The Muppets, with Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell, Jemaine Clement, Celine Dion, Ray Liotta
Credits: Directed by James Bobin, written by James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller. A Walt Disney release.
Running time: 1:52

When an esteemed director refers to the movie he’s about to make as a “porn film,” he creates an interesting dilemma for those he’d like to cast.

“I was a bit, oh, hesitant,” admits Charlotte Gainsbourg, star of Lars Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac,” parts I and II. The 42 year-old Anglo-French actress is no stranger to Von Trier controversy, having been in his “Antichrist” as well as “Melancholia.” But on hearing the subject matter of the new film and his flippant description of it — Von Trier is famous for his flippancy — she could have been forgiven for letting her cell phone go straight to voice mail.

“But I admire Lars very much,” she says.

So she read the outline of a script, the story of a self-loathing nymphomaniac who tells her sad history to a kindly stranger (Stellan Skarsgard) who rescues her from the gutter. And Gainsbourg was sold.

“It wasn’t going to be a porn film at all,” she says. She was struck by “what Lars put of himself in the characters, how honest he was.” And he educated her on the very illness the film is about.

“For me, nymphomania was, very stupidly I must say, this life of sexual pleasure — having sex all the time,” says Gainsbourg, best known for “21 Grams” and “Jane Eyre.” “Learning about its true nature, how sad it is, was eye-opening.”

She took the job. Actress-model Stacy Martin, a film neophyte, was cast as the younger version of Gainsbourg’s narrator character, “Joe,” the young woman having all the sex – explicit sex.

“I knew what the film was,” Martin, 23, says. “Before shooting, there this whole frenzy around it, and then press was all wanting to know ‘Who’s having sex with whom?’ Hilarious!”

The “Who’s having sex with whom” stuff spun around the romantic lead in the cast, American actor Shia LaBeouf. With Von Trier ready to cross ratings boundaries in the film’s depiction of intercourse, there’d be little left to the imagination in the clenches. Martin and LaBeouf would be nude and their copulation would be “Deep Throat” real. Or seem that way.

“We’d never call those (sex scenes) pleasant,” Martin says. “They were fine. Don’t get me wrong. We talked SO MUCH about them, days of this. ‘How would we do this? Should we use prosthetics?’ And positions and camera angles and all that.

Making the film, Gainsbourg focused on the character’s journey through “a life of suffering, the whole frustration of wanting something (love, romantic sex) she never can have.”

And Martin?

“At some point, you just want to get ON with it. It’s all technical and mechanical and professional and that makes it less tense than it would be while you’re there with no clothes. A very reassuring way to approach those scenes. You don’t want to feel used.”

Ask the actresses from last year’s equally explicit lesbian romance “Blue is the Warmest Color” about that. But with “Nymphomaniac,” there was one bit of insurance the actors leaned on more than others.

“At some point in those scenes, we go, ‘OK, time to get the porn doubles in!'” Martin says with a laugh. So no, they say. It’s not “really” them. Martin kept laughing all the way through the film’s reception at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where catcalls did not quite drown out the cheers, but came close.

“They had no idea what was coming their way,” Martin says. “And when it was finished, there was another frenzy, because it was completely unexpected.”

Gainsbourg admits to having her second wave of doubts after shooting the movie and before it premiered. She’d made this very long, very sexually explicit film — Von Trier’s first cut was five and a half hours, and he ended up releasing it in two halves. Many scenes, and not just the flashbacks of Gainsbourg’s character as a libidinous teen and young adult, were “quite extreme” (Gainsbourg’s sex scenes are in “Part II”). And the stars didn’t know just what Von Trier would be showing to the public.

“It had gone in all sorts of directions, sexually,” Gainsbourg says. “I knew the scenes I had done and how extreme the film was going to be, I was even more nervous. And it took him a very long time to edit… Through that time, not seeing what he was doing to shape this — I was thinking, ‘What have I done? What IS this going to be like?'”

But Gainsbourg has been through the Von Trier shock cycle before, with his provocative “Antichrist.” She tempered her fears with that memory and found herself relieved when the finished film premiered.

“The extremeness of it was underlined with a lot of beauty,” she says. “And humor.”

The reviews were mostly kind, some enthusiastic, many of the “both dumber and more entertaining than anyone had a right to expect” (David Edelstein, New York Magazine). And the stars’ reaction?

“I still have nothing but admiration for Lars” Gainsbourg says.

Martin, whose career begins with this two-part cause celebre, is even more content with the finished film.

“To sort of launch yourself into this world by working with one of your favorite directors? I could retire very happily having just done this.”

“Divergent,” the latest outcast-teen-battles-The-System thriller, is similar enough to “The Hunger Games” that hardcore Katniss fans may dismiss it.
But it’s a more streamlined film, with a love story with genuine heat and deaths with genuine pathos.
And director Neil Burger (“The Illusionist”, “Limitless”) inserts us into this world with a lack of fuss that the stiff, exposition-stuffed “Games” films have never managed.
So let’s skip past any suggestions of novelist Veronica Roth knocking off the formula of Suzanne Collins’ wildly successful “Games” novels. Remember, one has “Katniss” for a heroine, the other “Tris.” World of difference.
Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) lives in a post-war future in the semi-ruined city of Chicago. Fenced in against the devastated outside world in battered but still habitable wind-generator equipped skyscrapers, the El trains still run and society still functions thanks to “factions.”
We have the Candor faction, famed for popping off without self-censoring, and Amity Faction, the earnest, workers and land-loving farmers. The Erudite, let by imperious Kate Winslet, are the scientific, smart class, and Dauntless is the reckless “soldier” faction of young fighters who dive off the El rather than waiting for it to stop.
And then there is Abnegation, which, if you look it up, means “self-denial.” They are the self-sacrificing public servants. Tris, or Beatrice, as her parents (Tony Goldwyn, Ashley Judd) know her, grew up in that class — redistributing food, governing by consensus, liberal. It’s an easy fit. Abnegations may “reject vanity” and wear drab clothes in shades of gray, but that doesn’t mean a girl can’t have makeup, lip gloss and high-lights, never a hair out of place.
When teens hit a certain age, they go through “The Test” and are told where their strengths lie. And like a college kid declaring a major, there is a “Choosing Ceremony” where you cut your hand and with a drop of blood, declare your faction — for life.
Tris is confused; empathetic but fearless, smart but earthy. Her “Test” doesn’t take. The tester (Maggie Q) tells her she’s “Divergent,” and that the other factions fear Divergents. So Tris has a secret she keeps as she declares “Dauntless” and undertakes Darwinian training with the leather-jacketed jocks, learning to fight with guns, knives and her fists, learning to conquer her fears.

Woodley is a wonderful, transparent actress who lets us see her thoughts, especially when it comes to the hunky stand-offish Dauntless lad (Theo James) who trains her. No, she doesn’t have any memorable lines. And yes, she seems too dainty and fragile to be up to this soldiering thing.
Especially when you compare her to the raw-boned and gangly Jennifer Lawrence of “Hunger Games.” But Woodley makes Tris vulnerable and cunning as she is given drugs that play tricks on her mind to test her.
What novelist Roth was aiming for here was a parable about creating well-rounded, compassionate adults in a world where The System is literally inside your head. As science fiction, it’s no heavier than Stephenie Meyer’s “The Host,” or “Ender’s Game” or any of the other Young Adult fare in this genre — a world we recognize, sliced up into stark metaphors of social strata.
But “Hunger Games” fans shouldn’t feel superior in looking down on this sci-fi variation on a rebel teen theme. This latest franchise is not inferior. It’s pretty much the same “Games,” give or take a bow and arrow. And by not diverging from that simple formula for a Young Adult sci-fi hit, the author and filmmakers reveal the shallowness of both series.

(Shailene, Ansel and Veronica talk “Divergent” in this interview with Roger Moore)
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense violence and action, thematic elements and some sensuality
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Kate Winslet, Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwyn, Miles Teller
Credits: Directed by Neil Burger, written by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor, based on the Veronica Roth novel. A Summit release.
Running time: 2:15