Movie Nation

　”The Wind Rises” was a dream project for the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, and this gorgeous film makes a fine capstone for his career.
But even though it has fanciful dream sequences and some of the most lovely hand-drawn imagery of the Emperor of Anime’s career — the subject matter and his treatment of it is a puzzlement. It’s basically a bio-pic about Jiro Horikoshi, who designed planes for the Japanese military before and during World War II.
This Jiro dreams of Zeroes.
And Miyazaki, famed for “Ponyo” and “My Neighbor Totoro” and a whole genre of animation that spun out of his Studio Ghibli, chose to tell a story and tell it from such a distinct point of view that had he shot it with live actors, “Wind Rises” would have had zero appeal outside of Japan.
We meet young Jiro in a dream, a student who takes flights of fancy in his sleep, visiting his favorite Italian airplane designer, Giovanni Caproni (voiced by Stanley Tucci).
“Airplanes are not for making war,” Caproni purrs to the kid he calls “Japanese Boy.” “Airplanes are beautiful dreams.”
Thus Jiro (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) pursues his own dream, to become an engineer and design such aircraft. He lives through the great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, stunningly recreated here, and the militarism that came to dominate Japan in the days and years after it. The heroic Jiro rescues an injured nanny and the little girl she cares for, with long term romantic consequences.
And with his pal Honjo (John Krasinski) he starts designing planes for an unidentified company — Mitsubishi. Since the military is doing all the buying, that means they’re designing fighter planes and bombers.
Thus begin Miyazaki’s strained efforts to treat World War II in that arm’s length way official Japan has long treated it.
“We’re not arms merchants,” the engineers rationalize. “We just want to build good aircraft.” That little matter of the war? That just sort of happened.
Jiro and Honjo travel to Germany to study the Junkers way of building warplanes — but we never see a swastika or Teutonic Cross. A German tourist (voiced by the great German director Werner Herzog) warns Jiro of the doomed path both Germany and Japan are taking. And Miyazaki skips past almost all of the unpleasantness of WWII, focusing on flawed bombers easily shot down rather than the innocent Chinese civilians they were bombing, for instance.
The planes depicted here are lovely things, from the impractical dream craft of Caproni to the various successes and failures of Mitsubishi. Their deadly use? Let’s not think about that, rather like celebrating the life of the fellow who invented the AK-47 without mentioning the butcher’s bill.
But the sentimentalist in Miyazaki lovingly recreates a Japan he has his engineer characters criticize as “backward” — the steam trains, “penny ferries” and gorgeous (and flammable) wooden architecture that dominated the country in the years between the world wars. Oxen laboriously tow each prototype airplane to the airfield before its test flight.
A love story comes to dominate the this highly fictionalized version of Jiro Horikoshi’s life, as he falls for a young woman (Emily Blunt does her voice) whose health is the stuff operas and soap operas are made of. Touching, but it makes the movie drag.
Martin Short provides comic relief as a blustering boss, Krasinski and Tucci were well-cast for roles that demanded a lighter touch.
And as any fan of The History Channel and its clones can verify, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating a triumph of engineering and thing of beauty like the Zero. But not addressing the way it was used and the war the country started so that it could use it just reminds us that Japan still dreams of denial, where World War II is concerned.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some disturbing images and smoking
Cast: The voices of Joseph Gordon Levitt, Emily Blunt, Martin Short, Werner Herzog, John Krasinski, Stanley Tucci
Credits: Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. A Touchstone release.
Running time: 2:05

Think of “Therese Raquin,” the Emile Zola novel that is the inspiration for “In Secret”, as the original film noir. It has an illicit love affair, a murder and the guilt and fear of discovery that comes with it.
Filmmaker Charlie Stratton, working from Neal Bell’s stage adaptation of the book, delivers a moody, melodramatic and somewhat overwrought version of the tale, sort of a 19th century Paris “Postman Always Rings Twice.” It benefits from brooding performances by the leads and another fierce turn by Jessica Lange in an unpleasant in every way supporting role.
Elizabeth Olsen is Therese Raquin, a tragically illegitimate child whose father leaves her with distant relatives after her mother dies.
“Illegimates have been dealt an unlucky hand,” Madame Raquin (Lange) purrs. She then she sets out to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therese is forlorn and unloved in the present, and Madame has her future planned in ways that won’t change that. She will marry Madame’s pampered son Camille (Tom Felton), a sickly lad who has grown up with Therese, more of a coughing brother than a potential lover.
They move from the country to Paris, and that’s where Camille re-connects with childhood pal, Laurent (Oscar Isaac of “Inside Llewyn Davis”), a smoldering rake of an artist who awakens the woman in Therese.
“Save me,” she pleads to him. And he does. Often.
As the clueless Camille frets that “I don’t know how to make Therese happy” to his “friend,” Laurent is making her happy every day over lunch.
And as the lovers get comfortable keeping their secret, even in the weekly dominoes parties that Madame throws with family and friends, the idea comes to them that Camille is just in the way. They should kill him. Perhaps they get the idea from the police inspector (the amusing Matt Lucas of TV’s “Little Britain”).
“There is nothing but murder and lust,” Inspector Olivier opines after relating the details of yet another grisly murder investigation in the 1860s City of Light.
“People have accidents every day,” the lovers realize.
“In Secret” is a genuine “bodice ripper” of a thriller, with the requisite heavy breathing that comes after said bodice is ripped. The sex isn’t explicit, but Olsen and Isaac suggest the heat that gives this doomed affair its momentum. Olsen’s version of Therese is a lovelorn Madame Bovary who decides to take things further than Flaubert’s Emma Bovary ever would.
Lange makes a delicious, fearsome hysteric and former Harry Potter foil Felton is properly foppish and tubercular as Camille. And Stratton, who directed a stage production of this earlier, does well with shifting our sympathies from Therese to Camille to Madame Raquin over the course of the tale.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to back-date this original noir to keep us from seeing where it’s going long before it gets there. We’ve seen too many variations of this story. The overwrought 19th century melodramatic conventions of the plot creak like the springs and joints of a worn out stagecoach.
And as what happened “In Secret” unravels in the harsh light of day, some of what we’re supposed to feel when the curtain falls is missing because we saw it coming long before it gets there.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and brief violent images
Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, Oscar Isaac, Tom Felton
Credits: Written and directed by Charlie Stratton, based on the Neal Bell play based on a novel by Emile Zola. A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:47

Filmmakers have to know in this day and age that they’re going to take some hits for even hinting that the mentally ill are “cute” in a movie. Writers should know it, directors and the actors playing such parts as well.
So credit cast and crew of “Barefoot” for nerve, for daring to wander into “Benny & Joon” territory. They produced a romance on-the-road-comedy about a lying, womanizing gambler who takes a woman freshly escaped from a mental hospital with him to his brother’s wedding.
Scott Speedman is Jay, an L.A. love’em and leave’em loser who is in Dutch to a loan shark for his gambling debts and on probation for…a variety of things. The scion of wealth, he’s reduced to janitorial work at a mental hospital as part of his probation. Even there, he breaks the rules, befriending the adorably ill, slipping them booze and nudie magazines.
Daisy is new to the place, arriving barefoot (Shoes “hurt my feet”) and in shock.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“I guess…voices.”
Jay saves her from a first-night-in-the-ward rape, and when he skips off to go to a family wedding in Louisiana where he hopes to get money from his dad, Daisy follows him. And since she looks like Evan Rachel Wood, we see why he allows it.
“Barefoot” is “Rainman” meets “Benny & Joon,” a mental child experiencing the world and love for the first time while on the road. Daisy is utterly naive to the ways of the world. She’s prone to blurting out her first impression of someone, such as Jay’s brother’s bride at the wedding.
“God, you’re so skinny! I can see your bones!”
She picks up petals after the flower girl in that wedding — “You dropped these.” Wood makes Daisy’s doe-eyed innocence engaging and very funny between the moments when she breaks down, as disturbed people inevitably do.
Speedman (of the “Underworld” movies) makes his easy-going rogue character work, even as we’re scratching our heads at the ways Jay seems to be in denial over Daisy’s condition — whatever that is. He takes her on her first ever airline flight where the toilet frightens her, he wants her to share driving duties, sends her into a store to buy food even though we can see almost every outside world experience is new to her.
I mean, serving the girl foie gras at a wedding rehearsal dinner should have tipped him off.
Sniff, sniff — “It’s FANCY Feast!”
Director Andrew Fleming (“Dick,” “Nancy Drew”) gets everything he can out of this slight, sweet and sentimental material. Casting J.K. Simmons as the blustering, threatening medical chief of the mental hospital and Treat Williams and Kate Burton as Jay’s parents, confused by this weird beauty their son has brought into their lives, works.
And “Barefoot” dodges that sentimentalize-the-schizophrenic trap by having Jay not flirt with Daisy, and by giving her very real problems that could be caused by any number of things — things that don’t necessarily call for institutionalization.
But for all its quirks and efforts to immunize itself from criticism, “Barefoot” is never much more than utterly predictable and conventional. You can say that about any movie where rich dad (Williams) shows off his new, restored collectible antique RV to his son, mid-movie, giving away the third act road trip we know is coming.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual content including references, partial nudity, brief strong language and a scene of violence
Cast: Scott Speedman, Evan Rachel Wood, Kate Burton, Treat Williams, J. K. Simmons
Credits: Directed by Andrew Fleming, written by Stephen Zotnowski. A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:30

Elizabeth Olsen got her start in the theater and her big break — all her
breaks — in independent films.
From “Martha Marcy May Marlene” to “Liberal Arts,” “Kill Your Darlings” to
the new period piece “In Secret,” the younger sister of the Olsen twins has put
commercial considerations on the back burner, even as she dipped her toe in
potentially more commercial films such as last fall’s “Oldboy.”
But now, with “Godzilla” due in theaters and a the role of Wanda Maximoff,
aka “Scarlet Witch” in the “Avengers” sequel which shoots this spring and
summer, “Lizzie” Olsen is stepping into the big budgets and big paydays of
mainstream Hollywood. Not that she sees it that way.
“I look at ‘Avengers’ as this amazing ensemble piece,” she says. “All these
wonderful actors, a fun character to play, and I shouldn’t have to do any
rigorous extra training for her. How could I say ‘No’?”
She thinks that “every job informs the next job.” And stardom is still new
enough to Olsen that every film is a “first.” Maybe she’s not checking off hash
marks on her movie making life list, but “In Secret” was, in a way, prep work
for taking on a comic book adaptation.
“I was in period costumes for ‘In Secret,’ I’ll be in something just as
elaborate for ‘Avengers.’ And ‘In Secret’ was the first time I’ve ever filmed on
a sound stage. That experience, acting in a space where your world is not 360
degrees around you, that’s got to be good preparation for an effects movie.
Right? I feel like every film is, whatever the rewards, a new experience and a
stepping stone for me.”
“In Secret” is based on the 19th century Emile Zola novel, “Therese Raquin,”
that was later a play. Olsen is at the center of a French love triangle,
unhappily married to a sickly cousin — a marriage arranged by her aunt — but
in love and lust with a rogue, an artist and friend of her husband.
The French novelist Zola, who died in 1902, has never enjoyed the popularity
or reputation of Dickens or Austen. Such works as “Germinal” have been filmed,
in French, but in the English speaking world he grows more obscure by the year. 
“I read the script right around the time I was taking an academic theater
class at school (NYU), ‘Realism and Naturalism,'” Olsen says. “Our first
assignment was to read the (1867) book and the play. Just a coincidence that I
had studied the play, academically, and looked at its structure and how the
story works. I am amazed we even got to study it. But that made me excited to
try and do it, so the offer was a case of perfect timing.”
“Therese,” as the planned film was called, would be directed by Charlie
Stratton, who had directed a play based on the novel. At one time, Kate Winslet
was set to star. At another time, Gerard Butler was to be the hunky artist and
Jessica Biel would be Therese, with Glenn Close as the cruel aunt who forces
Therese to marry her son.
Olsen came on board, despite that tortured production history, with Tom
Felton (Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter pictures) as the cousin/husband,
Oscar Isaac (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) as the tall, dark artist and Oscar winner
Jessica Lange as the heartless aunt who becomes Therese’s mother-in-law.

“The fact that Kate Winslet was originally attached to the film, and that she
ended up reading the book on tape, made me even MORE interested in it,” Olsen
says. “If somebody as good as her wanted to do it — and I listened to an
interview of her talking about why she wanted to make it — I had to make this
film. I have such huge respect for her and her taste.”
Early reviews have given the film’s “atmosphere of caged heat” a thumb’s up,
with The Playlist raving about Olsen and Isaac getting across the
“passions…brewing beneath the corsets and vests.”
Olsen, who laughs at the idea of doing her first “bodice ripper,” loved her
character’s “impulses” and romantic “cravings. She’s referred to as ‘beastial’
in the novel. Zola talks about her as being someone of this wild, natural
African descent. We don’t play that up, but the idea that she has this inner,
unexpressed life force about her that she can’t express really drives the
character.”
And just three years into her screen career, Olsen is “learning to appreciate
the feeling of safety I get from a good leading man.” In an overheated romantic
thriller like “Inner Secret,” “You have to know that everyone is respectful and
respected. There’s so many (romantic) moments on a film set that you have to
make sure it’s all just fun and games. You need to be able to rub off whatever
you were doing all day at the end of the day.”

“The Lego Movie” is doing another $50 million this weekend, based on Friday’s numbers.

Among the remakes opening before this President’s Day weekend, “About Last Night…” is the one cleaning up — $34.5 million, at this rate.

“Robocop” isn’t even outperforming “The Monuments Men” on its second week. “Monuments” isn’t losing ANY of its opening week momentum, another $22 million+. That’s a win, and a real statement on older audiences’ buying power and the result of endless promotion by Damon and Bill Murray.

“Robocop” just under that, “Endless Love” at about $20.

“Winter’s Tale” is headed towards $12 million or less. It only cost $40, according to the director. But it doesn’t look to break even in the U.S.

Everybody expects “The Lego Movie” to do another blockbuster weekend this President’s Day.” Another $39 million, Box Office Mojo figures.

Everything is STILL awesome.

No way “Robocop” or “About Last Night…” top that, right?

“Robocop” will be lucky to have cleared $25 by midnight Sunday. And it opened (meekly) on Wed.

“About Last Night…” should cash in on Kevin Hart mania. I’d like to see Regina Hall, his foil in this remake, score some career traction after the film. She more than holds her own with the mouthy Mr. Hart. It opened later Thursday, and unless weather beats down its expectations, it could be in the mid $30s by Sunday night, according to BO Mojo. Box Office Guru is lowballing the little man, figuring he’s only got $24 million in appeal. I don’t see that, but Guru is taking into account the low screen count (2,000) so he may be right.

“Endless Love” is looking at $14 million, if teenage girls still have a thing for Alex Pettyfer. And they may. Any less and it’s a big old bomb.

“Winter’s Tale,” based on a 30 year old novel, starring Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, the first girl to die on “Downton Abbey” and Jennifer Connelly, will be lucky to do $10 million. Terrible reviews are going to kill that one.

Your best bet for a date movie this Valentine’s Day, or this whole weekend — if you HAVEN’T seen “Her” — is the spirited if somewhat sexually muted remake of “About Last Night…” Not as romantic as the Rob Lowe/Demi Moore original, with less explicit sex scenes. Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant don’t have the chemistry to pull that off, which is why the movie plays heavy on the comic supporting cast. Kevin Hart and Regina Hall are even funnier than Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins were in the original. Most critics agree, it’s a winner — Hart’s best movie in years.

Get your tickets now.

“Endless Love” has had its drama and some of its romantic yearning stripped from it in a remake from the director of “Country Strong.” Yeah, not the best choice to get behind the camera, and the script is a serious bastardization of the edgier novel. That said, it works some of the time, as a simpler teen romance where HER parents don’t approve. VERY good cast, everybody in it deserves a better film — Joely Richardson, Bruce Greenwood and Robert Patrick, the parents of the two kids, are outstanding. Weak reviews, overall, for this one.

“Winter’s Tale” was a labor of love and grief for Oscar winning screenwriter (and sometime director) Akiva Goldsman, as he told me when I interviewed him. The movie is a generally unsatisfying mess — touching moments, a few lovely touches. But magical realism in that “House of the Spirits” sense rarely succeeds on the screen. Terrible reviews for this one, humbling reviews.

If “Adult World” opens in your neck of the woods and you’re a John Cusack fan, catch it. Mildly romantic, smart, sassy, decent performances by JC as an aging hipster poet and cynic and by Emma Roberts who longs to study at his feet. She has little chemistry with her love interest in the film, who happens to be her off camera love interest. Middling reviews overall, but it works.

And “Robocop”? Not exactly a “date movie,” not a Valentine’s Day weekend movie — counter programming? Maybe.

Mystified how that got any critic to endorse it. But this humorless, mostly heartless (one touching scene) remake of Paul Verhoeven’s satire of America, violence, media and technology is sitting with just under half America’s listed critics giving it a thumb’s up. The lesser half. I was bored to sleep.

“So much is missing from the “RoboCop” remake that one scarcely knows where to begin.
A doomed Detroit, plunging into a crime-ridden abyss, is turned suburban and blase here. That robs the film of the desperation, the “We’ll try anything to make ourselves safe,” even armed machines among us, that the plot is supposed to hang on.
Lip-smacking, mustache-twirling over-the-top villainy? Gone. We’ve got corporate Michael Keaton and his hireling (Jackie Earle Haley) and a cut-rate crook who couldn’t hold a candle to Kurtwood Smith’s career-making turn as a bad, bad man in the ’87 original.
The pathos, a good cop, left for dead but just human enough when he’s brought back to life — gone.
The mordant wit of the violence, the satiric tongue-in-cheek charge that Paul Verhoeven’s had, commenting on crime, dying cities, technological solutions to social problems? That becomes a strident commentary on drone warfare and killing by machine, a commentary voiced by a TV talk show host (Samuel L. Jackson) who is in FAVOR of bringing armed machines to our streets and the skies above them.
The Brazilian director Jose Padilha brings none of the energy of his “Elite Squad” films, and he wastes $100 million and a cast that includes Keaton and Jackson and Haley and Abbie Cornish and Jennifer Ehle and the Great Gary Oldman, as the scientist who masterminds what his boss (Keaton) describes as “a product with a conscience.”
Every performance is enervated, starting with the star, Joel Kinnaman from TV’s “The Killing.” The effects that make this cop, disembodied and disemboweled by a bomb, a convincing human heart and head on a machine’s frame, confine Kinnaman and limit his performance. Peter Weller didn’t have that problem in ’87, but never mind.
The story — Detective Alex Murphy, on the trail of a bad guy, suspecting corrupt elements of his own department, is blown up in front of his wife and kid (Abbie Cornish, John Paul Ruttan). Drone-builder Omnicorp’s CEO (Keaton) and his not-quite-mad scientist (Oldman) talk Murphy’s wife into letting them “Save” him by putting him into a robot.
Omnicorp wants America to buy and use drones and killer robots in the U.S., which is against the law. Murphy could give them a way around that.
Haley (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”) plays the skeptical security expert and mercenary who doesn’t want human beings involved in this sort of work. He tests the remade Murphy’s combat skills to the tune of “If I Only Had a Heart,” and calls him “Tin Man.”
And every so often, Jackson shows up as Pat Novak, fear-mongering icon of TV talk, complaining on his show of America’s “robo-phobia.”
There’s barely a laugh in this thing. The cast is shockingly decaffeinated, with the animated Jay Baruchel (marketing creep) the dullest he’s ever been, Keaton going at half speed and the wonderful Jennifer Ehle looking bored playing the boss’s assistant.
From it’s inception, this felt cynical, even by the usual standards of a Hollywood remake. There are points to be made about drones and taking the human element out of war. But this script — aside from Jackson/Novak’s lectures about that, never scores satiric points in that argument.
Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie.

Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action including frenetic gun violence throughout, brief strong language, sensuality and some drug material
Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earl Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Michael K. Lewis, Jay Baruchel
Credits: Directed by Jose Padilha, scripted by Joshua Zetumer, based on the 1987 film. A Columbia/MGM release.
Running time: 1:43