Movie Nation

Hiyao Miyazaki delivered a lovely, fanciful anime version of Japanese pre-World War II history with “The Wind Rises.” And it takes little away from the film to note that he scrubs Japan’s role in starting the war  out of this account of the life of the engineer who designed the famed Zero fighter plane. Some reviews noted the film’s tidy and sanitized way of treating the Japanese national obsession with denying its warmongering, enslaving ways. And some didn’t.

Luc Besson’s little Franco-phobic touches are much in evidence in the dark, violent and yet sometimes hilarious “3 Days to Kill.” Only M. Luc would think torture can be funny, that taking shots at immigrant rights and lazy French police would fit into a Kevin Costner riff on “Taken.” I thought it worked well enough. Most other critics did not.

“In Secret,” a period piece love triangle that includes a murder and stars Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, Oscar Isaac and Tom Felton, earned mixed reviews. Again, I erred on the side of “it’s watchable and well-acted.” Others dumped on it.

“Pompeii” was going to have to overcome Sony’s bungled, “damaged goods” handling of the release, keeping critics from it, and the awful rep of Paul W.S. Anderson. I thought it did, a majority of critics did not.

“Barefoot” is earning awful reviews, and while I’ve seen worse, you cannot get away with making the mentally ill (or possibly mentally ill) cute on screen. Evan Rachel Wood is the “Rainman” in this “Benny & Joon” road picture romance.

They’ve turned their History Channel TV series into a New Testament movie. “The Bible” has been boiled down to “Son of God,” or at least “Bible” elements have been added to this faith-based feature film.

Mark Burnett (“Survivor”) and his wife Roma Downey (“Touched by an Angel”) are behind this film venture, opening Feb. 28. Roma plays Mary Mother of God (Jesus) in it.

And Diogo Morgado, a Portuguese actor, plays Jesus.

Questions for them? I am interviewing the trio this afternoon. Post your queries as comments below, and thanks for the help.

Kevin Costner and the director McG are plunged into the madcap mayhem of
Monsieur Luc Besson in “3 Days to Kill,” a serio-comic thriller about mortality,
murder for hire and fatherhood.
This being a Besson script and production, it’s also about car chases and
epic shoot-outs, torture played for sadistic laughs, Paris locations and Peugeot
product placement.
Besson, who morphed into a producer after “The Professional” and before “The
Transporter”, gives Costner the full Liam Neeson in “Taken” treatment, cashing
in on a career of cool in a movie that moves almost fast enough to keep us from
noticing how scruffy, discomfiting and absurdly over-the-top the whole thing is.
Costner is Ethan, a veteran C.I.A. agent diagnosed with cancer. But his new
control agent, a vamp named ViVi and played to the stiletto-heeled hilt by Amber
Heard, wants him to finish one last massacre — taking out a nuclear arms dealer
and his associates in the City of Light. She flirts.
“You’re not my type.”
“I’m EVERYbody’s type.”
The carrot? She has an experimental drug that might give Ethan longer to
live. And that could mean more time with his estranged wife (Connie Nielsen) and
the daughter he barely knows, played by “True Grit” teen Hailee Steinfeld. They
live in Paris. The girl doesn’t know what dad does for a living, or that he’s
dying. She’s a teen. She probably wouldn’t care.
“You might want to take something for that cough. It’s REALLY
annoying.”
McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “We are Marshall”) stamps his signature on Besson’s
Euro-action vision with running gags. “Dad” keeps trying to get his rebellious
teen to ride this cool purple bike he brought her, her ring-tone on his phone is
“I Love It (I Don’t Care)” which always goes off just as he’s about the rip a
guy’s armpit hair off with duct tape. Everybody’s always trying to high-five
Ethan, and the French, Germans and others he runs into keep calling him
“Cowboy.” 

Ethan’s clueless about how to deal with a teen, so he’s always stopping the
torture to ask one underworld guy (Marc Androni, funny) how to cope, what to
do, how “to balance work and family.”
Heard, all lipstick and lingerie, long eyelashes and leatherwear — has
little to do here, something of a waste. Steinfeld’s Zoey is a bit of a drama
queen, but not a caricature of one. She is one transgression after another,
which Ethan seems loathe to punish and unable to reign in.
Besson co-wrote the script, and he works in shots at absentee parents, lazy
French cops and a legal system that allows cute African squatters more rights to
Ethan’s apartment than he has. But that turns out to be a warm and fuzzy cul de
sac, one of many in this movie, which veers from shocking shoot-outs to rank
sentiment.Ethan’s illness is forgotten for long stretches, but Costner, a hacking,
weathered study in wrinkles and violence, never lets on that the whole affair is
more of a lark than “Taken” ever was. A canny touch, the old-fashioned
split-screen opening credits, scored to the old R & B tune “Old Man
Trouble.” It fits.

A tone-deaf touch? Having father teach daughter to dance to “I Want to Make
It With You.” Seriously?

Daft and sloppy as it is, “3 Days” rarely fails to entertain. From the bike
riding lessons on Montmartre to dopey interrogation of the Italian “Accountant,”
interrupted for a marinara sauce recipe, it’s all part and parcel of the madness
of Besson, “From Paris, With Love,” filtered through McG and slapping a new
stamp of “cool” on the aging Oscar winner, Costner.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some
sensuality and language
Cast: Kevin Costner, Amber Heard, Hailee Steinfeld, Connie Nielsen
Credits: Directed by McG, written by Luc Besson and  Adi Hasak. A Relativity
release.

Running time: 1:53

Pity Paul W.S. Anderson. He’s directed so many awful movies, most of them with “Resident” and “Evil” in the title, that Sony-Tristar ineptly elected to dump his “Pompeii” at the end of February, to hide it from movie critics until after the last minute.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it. “Pompeii” has a first rate effects team that recreates the living hell of Pompeii as it is buried under ash, pumice and fire. It has a fight choreographer from “300.”

And though I thought I’d never type these words in association with a P.W.S. Anderson picture, it’s not half bad. The acting is flat, the story is corny and old fashioned and takes too long to get going. The dialogue is a tad old school, too.

“Is this the end of the world?”

That’s when Milo, the Celt (Kit Harington of “Game of Thrones”) is shipped off to Pompeii, to fight in the arena and become smitten with a young noblewoman, Cassia (Emily Browning). Her parents (Carrie-Anne Moss and Jared Harris) would never approve. But since she’s being pursued by the evil Senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), maybe Milo has a shot.

“I will break you,” the Senator sweet-talks her, “and you will STAY broken.”

Too bad that Cassia’s dad is a developer in need of the backing of a prominent Roman for his grand planned remaking of the city. Yes, he’s beholden to the Senator. And yes, 2,000 years ago developers were still trying to make a fast buck on land no sane person would build on.

Because with every rumble, every “Vulcan is speaking to us” belch from the volcano, Vesuvius lets us know that the third act is coming and it’s going to be a doozy.

Anderson, a graceless and heartless filmmaker on most projects, lets only a hint of humanity make its way into “Pompeii”. The opening shots are of body molds, preserved by ash, pitiful images of suffering that humanized this historical tragedy. The film also makes us feel something, here and there — a child separated from her mother, lovers having a last doomed embrace.

Jean Frenette’s fights, hurling Harington against the charming hulk Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, are first rate.

And Sutherland makes a perfectly venal villain.

“Pompeii” isn’t anybody’s idea of high art or flawless history. It’s too long, there are few light touches and the leads don’t have enough moments to set off sparks that aren’t volcanic in origin. But it has more heart than your average sword and sorcery piece (“Immortals”,”Clash of the Titans”) and effects that could have lifted Anderson out of the Z-grade “Resident Evil” sequels he’s been churning out since Hollywood gave him his Green Card.

He could have escaped his past, if only his studio had let him.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense battle sequences, disaster-related action and brief sexual content

Cast: Kit Harington, Kiefer Sutherland, Emily Browning, Carrie-Anne Moss, Jared Harris

Credits: Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, scripted by Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, Julian Fellowes and Michael Robert Johnson. A Tristar release.

Running time: 1:45

　”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