Movie Nation

As late as October or so, Jason Reitman’s “LAbor Day” had Oscar buzz. A melodramatic novel with thriller elements, Oscar winner Kate Winslet held hostage (hostage in LOVE) by Josh Brolin, a Joyce Maynard best seller adapted with care and skill.

Then the studio thought better of that and moved it to the dead zone of late January.

“Labor Day,” a romance novel more in the mold of the works of Nicholas Sparks (set over a holiday weekend, Brolin’s character is a vet, and a convicted murderer, the Sparks touches are there) will be lucky to earn $6 million on its opening weekend. Thousands of screens, nobody’s buying. Poor reviews didn’t help.

“Frozen: Sing Along” is giving the Disney toon a little new life. It’s still in the top three.

“That Awkward Moment,” a racy romance from the bro’s point of view with Zac Efron, Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan as the guys and Imogen Poots as the female lead, will hit $10 million or so, just behind the slow-to-fade “Ride Along.” Weak reviews didn’t help this one, either.

I remember a college costume party where a bunch of frat boys I knew showed up as Devo.

And then, lo all those years later, Mark Mothersbaugh turns into a film and video game music composer and “Rugrats” character. Couldn’t be the same character, I thought. “Can’t be two people with that name and a music background” I counter-thought.

He does the music to “The Lego Movie,” which looks like the sleeper hit of February.

“Fanboys,” “Catfish,” “22 Jump Street” — dude has a looooong list of of credits. And since Danny Elfman is such a fun interview, I took a flyer. Let’s talk to the movie’s composer, for once.

Questions for Mark as Devo celebrates its 40th anniversary? Comment below.

“So” is how “That Awkward Moment” begins every “awkward moment.” As in “So, what are we doing here?” Or “So, where do you see this relationship going?”
That’s the dating man’s lesson of “That Awkward Moment,” that “For girls, nothing good ever comes after ‘So.'” It’s a chatty romantic comedy in the modern mode — rude, nude and crude — with some funny, writerly riffs on relationships and how to avoid them.
There are laughs, in the lead couple’s “meet cute” moment in a bar, when she (Imogen Poots) trots out that fortune telling trick common to sex-obsessed sitcoms, rebuffing a suitor by forecasting an entire failed relationship based on how a guy is dressed, the manner of his approach and his lame pick-up line.
But the movie, like its star Zac Efron, and its writer-director, never lets us forget that it’s trying too hard, straining to spit out sexy, silly patter, reaching for that raunchy costume failure at a dinner party, grasping for gross takes on trips to the toilet.
Efron, Miles Teller (“The Spectacular Now”) and Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) play three New York pals who vow, when the doctor of the trio (played by Jordan) is dumped by his wife, to stay single and enjoy the mingling. Together, they will build “a roster” of booty calls. And the moment a woman starts “the talk” with “So,” they’ll bail. That’s the plan.
Which all of them ignore. Jason (Efron), a smart-aleck designer of book covers, falls for this cute one-night-stand, Ellie, who works for a publishing house (Poots). The hilarious chatterbox Daniel (Teller) starts to realize that his gorgeous, able-bodied lady wingman (Mackenzie Davis) is all the woman he’d ever need. And Mikey (Jordan) clings to the hope that his cheating lawyer wife (Jessica Lucas) will hear his reasoned, “We checked off all the boxes” appeal to maintain their partnership masquerading as a marriage.
“That Awkward Moment” is a writer’s comedy, and it’s easy to see why this cast was drawn to writer-director Tom Gormican’s script. It’s a less emotional, less consequential updating of “About Last Night,” the David Mamet play (“Sexual Perversity in Chicago”) turned movie which, coincidentally, has earned an urban/African American remake this Valentine’s Day. The quips and riffs are sharp and sometimes spot-on.
“Giving up eye contact,” Daniel cracks, watching how Jason acts around Ellie. “He’s ENGAGED.” Some of the women talk this way, too. A sensitive moment mid-copulation?
“You’re gonna go all GIRL with it?”
As Ellie and Jason stroll through the upscale neighborhood around Gramercy Park, with its locked “private” park, we hear “New York’s charm is you’re surrounded by things you can’t have.”
Efron never quite holds his own with the much funnier Teller, whose swagger and confidence always seem to be compensating for his knowledge he’s nobody’s idea of a hunk. Poots, a British actress whose real accent only pops up in the outtakes at the end, is game but never quite achieves “You had me at hello.” Jordan has few demands made on him, dramatically.
The quirkiest “awkward moments” in the picture come from Josh Pais, as the pathologically shy and clumsy boss who re-introduces himself to his creative team (Jason and Daniel) every time he meets them. “Hi, it’s Fred.” Squirm inducing and funny. The rest of “That Awkward Moment” isn’t awkward at all. It’s over familiar, a movie that plays like recycled, R-rated outtakes from “Rules of Engagement” or “How I Met Your Mother.”

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content and language throughout
Cast: Zac Efron, Imogen Poots, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Mackenzie Davis, Jessica Lucas
Credits: Written and directed by Tom Gormican. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:34

The funniest unintentional laugh in “Labor Day” is the way adaptor/director
Jason Reitman treats this eye-rolling, melodramatic romance novel as if he’s got
his hands on the works of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.
A genteel escaped convict hides out with a grieving divorcee and offers
another chance at love? It’s “The Prisons of Madison County.”
Kate Winslet conveys a quivering, emotionally crippled vulnerability as the
single mom and Josh Brolin suggests the proper balance of menace and chivalry as
the convicted murderer. And young Gattlin Griffith is the 13 year-old who
realizes, his adult self narrates, that he is never going to be adequate as
mom’s substitute husband.

The boy Henry (Griffin) is the one the goateed and bloodied Frank approaches
in the small town supermarket. The pitch for a getaway, first to him then to his
mother, is polite with just a hint of threat.

“Frankly, this needs to happen.”

Frank assures them he just needs to lay low until the law passes by their
house, just until he can hop a freight train in the morning. But he sees Adele’s
shaky hold on sanity, the ruin she’s let the house fall into, her loneliness.
Before you know it, he’s cleaning the house, cooking dinner and — ever so
lovingly — tying her up to keep up “held hostage” appearances.

Henry, who narrates this story as an adult (voiced by Tobey Maguire), is
confused. He bonds with the new man in their house, is impressed by Frank’s
masculine tenderness and consideration. Henry might even learn a thing or two
about the fairer sex, useful tips he can try out on the pushy-edgy big city girl
who’s new to town (Brighid Fleming).
Reitman, for whom the glories of “Up in the Air” are but a fading memory,
ladles on the sap in scenes where Frank grabs Adele’s hands and shoves them into
the pie he’s making, or cradles her as he teaches her to hit a baseball. Adele
teaches Frank to rumba and cha cha and over the course of a Labor Day weekend in
1987, dares to think they have a future.
Skip past the eye-rolling unlikeliness of this scenario, the fact that nosey,
personal-space violating neighbors never notice that the guy whose picture is
all over TV is cleaning the gutters of the divorced woman’s house, and treasure
the film’s tense moments of kidnapping and near discovery. Reitman, using a
pulsing, quietly pounding Rolf Kent score and a lot of silence, tightens the
screws in these scenes like an old pro.

But as with “Young Adult,” he’s chosen material too thin to support a deeper,
more ambitious story.

Whatever the gifts of memoirist, J.D. Salinger paramour and novelist Joyce
Maynard, here her work comes off as a slightly more masculine Nicholas
Sparks.
And “Labor Day”, for all its filmmaking care and care-worn performances, is
nothing more than a beach book, inconsequential and utterly out of place in
January.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, brief violence and sexuality
Cast: Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin, Gattlin Griffith, Tobey Maguire, Clark
Kellogg
Credits: Written and directed by Jason Reitman, based on the Joyce Maynard
novel. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:45

The news that Quentin Tarantino’s legal eagles are going after gossip websites that linked to those who posted/published his “Hateful Eight” script, which was leaked by the agent of an actor he was trying to cast in it, is a bit chilling and a lot silly.

Tarantino is right to vent about not knowing who to trust with a script anymore. But he should sue the agent who leaked it, run that person out of the business. NDAs work for “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.” Agents are above that?
Going after those who report and link to the leaked script is going to get him nowhere.

Steve Coogan’s face slips easily into a sneer. Too easily, he worries. A British actor famed for his snark, his doltish snobs such as the failing TV host Alan Partridge, cynicism has become his stock in trade, his persona. He toys with it in films such as “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” or the recent road comedy “The Trip.” It spills into his personal life as he feuds with the British media — journalists, or the hosts of TV’s “Top Gear.”

But a simple human interest newspaper story made him weep, convinced him that story should be a movie and, he says, changed his life.

“We live in a cynical world,” he says. “I’ve made my living from being cynical. But you get tired of it. If everyone’s cynical, how about I try being SINCERE? What would that be like?”

The Guardian newspaper story was about a woman who had her baby stolen by Irish nuns in the 1950s. “The Catholic Church Sold My Child,” the headline screamed. But what moved Coogan was a photo of the reporter, Martin Sixsmith and the woman, Philomena Lee.

“She was laughing,” Coogan says, still marveling at the idea. “I wanted to explore how she got to a place where she could laugh again. Her grace, her serenity, her ability to forgive a church that did this bad thing to her…that piqued my interest.”

“Philomena,” the film Coogan co-wrote, produced and co-stars in, has earned four Oscar nominations and has become something of a game changer for Coogan, 48, whose movie work in the U.S. has mostly been in independent films (“Hamlet 2”) or supporting work in ensemble comedies (“Tropic Thunder,” “Night at the Museum”). He may be “a gifted actor who’s been striving valiantly, but somewhat in vain, to be taken seriously,” as Elizabeth Weitzman declared in The New York Daily News. But his performance opposite Oscar-nominated Judi  Dench is “understated, watchful, his jokester reflexes in check (mostly)” raves Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“There was a sneering quality to a lot of the criticism about me doing this,” Coogan recalls. “‘Who’s he think he is? What, he’s not happy making people laugh? Got to be taken SERIOUSLY? Get OVER yourself!'”

Coogan laughs.

“Yeah, you have to get past that. They might not take me take me seriously on my own. But we pitched it to the BBC, and Gabby (Gabrielle) Tana, my co-producer, who did ‘The Duchess,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘The Invisible Woman,’ held my hand. We showed the script to Judi, and (director) Stephen Frears. So it wasn’t just the funny guy who wants to be taken seriously knocking on doors.”

Coogan realized, from that photo of the real Philomena laughing, that he had license to find the humor in this very sad story. That’s why he allowed himself to be arm-twisted into co-adapting the screenplay, protecting the humor in the situation. He says he sort of backed into co-starring in it. Once that was agreed on, he was well into the movie before he realized that he had a chance to take a few shots at the favorite foil — the British press.

“I didn’t set out to play him because ‘He’s a journalist and I don’t like journalists and this is my CHANCE.’ I like good journalists. The bad ones? They try to caricature me as someone who doesn’t like journalists.”

And he didn’t want the film to be “anti-Church.”

“I learned to respect the Church more. I was raised a Catholic, like Martin in the movie. And I’m not religious. Like Martin. But for all my criticisms of the Church and what it did, that there are people of faith who I can still learn from. I left the film with a lot more self-doubt.”

Coogan & Co. know that “Philomena,” up for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best actress and best musical score prizes, is an Oscar underdog. Category by category, more showy or more cynical fare seems to have the edge. But Coogan? He’s got his fingers crossed.

“I think we’ve got a shot,” he says. “The cynic in me says ‘No chance.'”

And the cynic in him got back to work with a “broad, drop my pants, literally” Alan Partridge farce and a soon-to-be-released sequel to “The Trip,” which has snooty Coogan and his down-to-Earth foil Rob Brydon driving down the Amalfi Coast of Italy in a Mini Cooper convertible, quipping and bickering the whole way. But is Hollywood finally calling, now that “Philomena” is a hit?

“Well, my fans have stopped calling me. Rob (Brydon) still calls. Who else is he going to call? But yes, I am getting my calls returned, in Hollywood, for at least a few weeks more.”

　It’s not, as its title implies, the “Best Night Ever.” It’s not as funny as “Bridesmaids” or as dark as “Bachelorette.” But the latest bridesmaids-behaving-badly comedy, a raunchy, found footage (“Are you really going to film EVERYthing?”) romp, tops even “The Hangover” for crudity.
It’s got half a dozen decent laughs and just as many “Oh no they DIDN’T” gags packed into 80 or so minutes of depravity, debauchery and comically criminal mischief.
Claire (Desiree Hall of TV’s recent “Teen Wolf” series) is getting married in a week. Party girl BFF Zoe (Eddie Ritchard of “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), married mother of two infants Janet (Crista Flanagan) and prissy killjoy Leslie, Claire’s older sister (Samantha Colburn) pile into a mini van for a trek to Vegas for that “one last night of freedom.”
They’re playing punch buggy and other childhood games in the car, taking turns shocking each other with their language. Except for Leslie, who married money and is treating them to an opulent penthouse suite, a gourmet dinner and a Celine Dion show.
And Claire? “I’m in LOVE!”
What could go wrong?
Begin with a credit card mix up, work your way into a male revue strip club “misunderstanding” and then turns as victims of and then perpetrators of armed robbery, a little gelatin wrestling, a stolen limo and…saying more would be spoiling it.
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer graduate from “Scary Movie/Date Movie” sequels to something far dirtier and more outrageous here, as they hurl our bachelorettes into the ultimate off the Vegas Strip experience. A few clever situations deliver laughs — a black light cell-phone option that shows you just how “stained” your hotel room is, a sisterly effort to calm a panic attack by singing 4 Non Blondes “What’s Going On.” The hunky stripper’s outrage (“You essentially RAPED me!”) at the “misunderstanding” is laugh out loud silly. Give the filmmakers credit for not taking things down a predictable road when feisty Janet resolves to Jello wrestle for gas money, and for not springing for a Celine Dion cameo.
The uninitiated can learn about such stripper experiences as “the unicorn”, what an “Eiffel Tower” is in the gay male vernacular, about the comic possibilities of a breast pump and the existence of a sex toy tiara ready-made for bachelorette blowouts.
“I’ve only read about this in CHATrooms!”
But the saving grace of this more-rude-than-funny film is its cast. They’re just a quartet of Simi Valley “Woohooo” girls in the opening, but the players make each member of this motley crew distinct, human and out of her depth.
And Janet (Flanagan)? You’ll want to party with her.

MPAA Rating: R for strong crude and sexual content throughout, language, graphic nudity and drug use
Cast: Desiree Hall, Samantha Colburn, Crista Flanagan, Eddie Ritchard
Credits: Written and directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:22

Realistic painting reached its golden age with the 17th century “Dutch Masters,” painters whose mastery of detail and recreation of faces and light were unmatched until the advent of photography hundreds of years later.
But what if they had help? What if the technology of the day gave them shortcuts to perfectly rendering colors, scale and detail onto canvas?
Tim Jenison, a rich inventor of video gadgets and lifelong self-taught tinkerer, read a book by modern artist David Hockney, “Secret Knowledge,” which suggested they “cheated.” Jenison went to the trouble of testing Hockney’s theory, back-engineering 17th century-style technology to do it. He figured out a way to paint his own Vermeer. And since Jenison is pals with the media savvy illusionists Penn & Teller, his effort is documented for “Tim’s Vemeer,” a fascinating documentary experiment in fathoming the heretofor “unfathomable” genius of Johannes Vermeer.
Jenison was struck by the technical “accuracy” of the paintings of the man who left posterity “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, “The Music Lesson”, “The Astonomer” — some 35 masterpieces, despite being relatively unheralded in his own lifetime.
Jenison, working from Hockney’s suggestion, delved into the Delft master’s access to mirrors, lenses and that new image reflecting device of Vermeer’s age — the camera obscura. He came up with a way Vermeer might have painted. And despite having no art training at all, Jenison resolved to replicate Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” by recreating the room where Vermeer did most of his painting, from the light conditions (northern exposure) down to the furniture, ornate Persian rug, the clothing, filigreed musical instruments and models used in that painting.
It took him years.
“Tim’s Vermeer” captures every step of the process — visiting The Netherlands, ducking into London’s Buckingham Palace to see the original “Music Lesson”, Tim’s failed experiments and refinements, his demonstrations to Hockey and others who believe, as he does, that gadgets were used to “cheat” and paint so accurately.
It’s a fascinating look deep into the work of a great artist, a story told with flashes of humor and more than a little tedium. Jenison makes a reasonably compelling (mildly eccentric) character to build a movie around. And the film is a wonderfully convincing counter-history.
Even though, as Tim points out on several occasions, “There’s no documentation that he did this,” “Tim’s Vermeer” wins its own argument with the evidence presented by the pictures and the fact that this detail-oriented tinkerer could mimic the master stroke for stroke.
But here’s the rub. The movie lacks that thing that Penn & Teller have built their latter careers on — skepticism. For guys who rolled their eyes at global warming on TV back in 2004 (only to walk that back, or pretend it never happened), they seem reluctant to track down an artist or art historian who asks some fairly obvious questions that might puncture Tim’s experiment and Hockney and “Vermeer’s Camera” author Philip Steadman’s theories.
How practical is this? Granted, it would have taken a trained painter somewhat less time to create a painting this way than the hundreds of days it takes Jenison. But seriously, who could make a living with his brush spending months staring at the same image, tracing/matching it by mirror? Would models have agreed to devote so much time to this? These weren’t famous personages, so who would foot the bill for that obsession?
And are the optical clues so convincingly presented by Jenison and seconded by Hockney unexplainable by any other means?
“Tim’s Vermeer” doesn’t settle the argument, but it feeds that theory that “unfathomable genius” sometimes can be fathomed. And it entertainingly makes the case that this mirror method could be used to create photo-real images of people, places and things, for anyone who has a year or so to try it.

　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language
Cast: Tim Jenison, Penn Gillette, David Hockney, Philip Steadman
Credits: Directed by Teller, written by Penn Gillette and Teller. A Sony Classics release.
Running time: 1:20

You’ve been seeing Ice Cube on every TV show, hearing him on every national radio show, plugging away, taking care of business re: “Ride Along,” the biggest hit of his career.

Kevin Hart? He’s too big to be bothered about that. It’s Chris Tucker: The Next Generation. The little man will be the biggest of big deals if “About Last Night” blows up Valentine’s Day. Good luck getting him to check that ego at the door. A few more fat, lazy, limp comedies like “Ride Along” and he’ll wear that out and take an early retirement.

“Ride Along” is having another boffo weekend. But it dropped some 60% from last weekend, down to $20 million. Not bad, but that’s a sign folks have seen it, passed on the word, moved on.

“I, Frankenstein” is opening at $9 million, despite having IMAX and 3D screens galore.

“Lone Survivor” and “Nut Job” are in the $11-12 million range.

“Jack Ryan” lost half its audience and stays in the top ten, not much better. Rebooted? Not really. It will only have reached $30 million/US by Sunday night, after two weeks. Weak.

Aaron Eckhart bears a distressing resemblance to the not late/not great Christopher Lambert in “I, Frankenstein,” a graphic novel movie goof on the man-made monster. Gaunt, scowling, covered in scars and sporting fingerless gloves, a tattered hoodie and biker boots, this “I” is an avenging brawler, sort of “Blade” in a blender, with “Underworld” and “Highlander” elements tossed in.

Rejected by his creator, we meet the Big Guy in a striking, Gothic past in which he avenges himself on Dr. Frankenstein, and just as he’s burying the guy — demons and then gargoyles show up to fight over the corpse — his corpse.

Why would they want this creation “of a dozen used parts from eight different corpses”, this living thing without a soul? The demon legions and their boss (Bill Nighy) have in mind some sort of demon reanimation project, a factory — DemonWorks SKG.

And the Godly gargoyles, led by Leonore (Miranda Otto), aim to stop them. Their battles, often around the Gothic cathedrals where the gargoyles sit in stony silence watching over an unsuspecting humanity, are special effects extravaganzas, with demons “descended” (killed) into disintegrating piles of hot coals and gargoyles getting
“ascended” Raptured (killed) in beams of Rapture light straight out of “This is the End.”

The whole affair goes straight to hell about four minutes in. The idea of a seemingly immortal monster, wandering the forests of central Europe, shedding the archaic English or German accent or whatever he would have learned to speak (No grunting for this Frankenstein’s monster) for the modern vernacular, is abandoned for non-stop battles and endless, tedious pages of exposition.

“Adam,” as the monster is named, mentions a bit of his past. Then the gargoyles spend the rest of the movie explaining who they are, what the demons are, how their world works and how much they love explaining things.

Most of this Endless Story takes place in a modern-ish EveryCity, where Adam stomps the darkened streets, an angry pawn looking for another demon or gargoyle to fix.

Yvonne Strahovski (of TV’s “Dexter”) is the fetching doctor who presides over modern day efforts to replicate the late Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimation work — pretty enough to be a “companion” to Adam, an actress given nothing to play, just a wardrobe. It’s great seeing Otto all these years after “Lord of the Rings,” and Nighy does his usual well-dressed villain thing, only less so.

Eckhart? His only job is to keep the makeup stitches from popping, to maintain a straight face when Leonore intones, “You’re only a monster if you behave like one.” Sounds like a job for…Christopher Lambert.

Mel Brooks had a lot of fun with this story, once upon a time. And another, straight version of the Mary Shelley story is due in theaters shortly. The humorless, generic, and chatty Frankenstein served up here makes you wonder if the good doctor, in all his patching-together of parts, didn’t forget the brains.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense fantasy action and violence throughout

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Yvonne Strahovski, Miranda Otto

Credits: Directed by Stuart Beattie, written by Beattie and Kevin Grivioux, based on the graphic novel by Grevioux. A Lionsgate release

Running time: 1:33