Movie Nation

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

Kevin Hart brings his “A” game to “About Last Night…” For those of us despairing that we’d ever see the little man at his antic best, after that lame second concert film and half-speed blockbuster “Ride Along,” that’s good news.

Paired up with Regina Hall, who gives as good as she gets, in the raunchy romantic African-American remake of the 1986 Rob Lowe/Demi Moore romance based on David Mamet’s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” Hart knocks back drinks and blasts out one-liner observations about the opposite sex and relationships.

“Whoever says ‘I love you’ first cares more!”

And Hall, as Joan to Hart’s Bernie, throws it right back at him and anybody else within range.

“You are making a brief cameo in a very tragic porno.”

Their banter is so sharp and so well-timed that in many of their scenes, this ill-matched but perfectly-suited couple are shouting funny stuff at the same time. And they’re so good they do what other versions of this once-cutting edge piece only flirted with. They overwhelm the romantic leads.

That would be the “serious” couple, played by Rob and Demi back in the day, here performed with a minimum of pathos and comic pop by Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant. Theirs is the relationship we track in this story, one so predictable and bland that the movie is waiting on Hart to show up again and Hall to march into the scene and take him down.

Danny (Ealy) meets Debbie (Bryant) in the middle of a drunken, out of control outing with Bernie and Joan. Over the months, as the louder couple feud, break up and drunkenly hook back up, Debbie and Danny get close, closer then domestic.

The boys and girls debrief each other in assorted LA bars (Sexual Perversity in Los Angeles, this time), where it’s always “About Last Night…” — explicit, blow by blow accounts of seductions, pick ups and the wrong moves each thinks the other is making. One commits, the other “knows when to get out.”

One puts on “relationship weight,” the other is looking to adopt a dog with her man.

Break-ups are abrupt and kind of half-hearted in Leslye Headland’s updated script, though girl bonding over Bruno Mars and Nutella straight out of the jar is funny. Career stumbles, taking a stand on principle over a bar owner’s beer bill (the guys are in restaurant supply) seem flimsy in the current economy.

Which is a problem the whole film — funny as it sometimes is — struggles with. How can you break new ground on “rules” and relationship “tells” after “Friends” and “Seinfeld” and “Rules of Engagement” and scores of films and TV Shows have covered that ground and re-covered in the ensuing decade?

The sex scenes are less romantic and generally played more for laughs. And the conclusions are obvious shortly after the opening credits.

But what keeps us around until the closing credits, where Hart and Hall bust each other up, is the electrical charge between those two. They’re the Wimbledon Finals of sexy, sassy, drunken comic banter — two pros, evenly matched enough to put on a great show, even if they make us forget about the rest of the movie around them as they do.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language and brief drug use

Cast: Kevin Hart, Regina King, Michael Ealy, Joy Bryant, Christopher MacDonald

Credits: Directed by Steve Pink, scripted by Leslye Headland, based on the play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.” A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:40

Kids, this is not your parents’ “Endless Love.”
Scott Spencer’s novel of romantic obsession so strong that it flirts with
mental illness has had its sharp edges rubbed off, its dramatic weight lifted
and its focus shifted in this adaptation from the director of “Country
Strong.”
There’s nothing dangerous about this teen love on steroids. There’s no
showcase sex scene, the selling point of the infamous 1981 Brooke Shields/Franco
Zeffirelli adaptation. The kids here come off as perfectly reasonable, the
adults are the problem — but even their efforts to separate the lovebirds are
watered down.
Still, even without that tragic Romeo/Juliet edge or the hit theme song by
Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross, it does have a stellar cast who keep things real
even if the lighter touches turn this into a far more conventional teen
romance.
Alex Pettyfer is David, the car mechanic’s son who falls — hard — for the
gorgeous Jade, played by the super-model skinny “Carrie” co-star Gabriella
Wilde.  So we get it.
They graduate from high school together, never having spoken. But David, he’s
seen “the possibility of us.” And Jade, shut-off from her peers, smothered by a
family still mourning a brother who died two years before, is simply swept off
her feet.
He rescues her ill-planned graduation party, and when he gets off on the
wrong foot with her stern surgeon dad (Bruce Greenwood, terrific), mechanic boy
David finds an automotive way to make it up to the doctor, fixing up the
family’s ancient MGB.
Jade’s mom (Joely Richardson) is touched. Jade’s brother (Rhys Wakefield of
“The Purge”) is charmed.
Only Dr. Hugh (Greenwood) is seeing red. He’s got his daughter’s future
planned, and those plans start with a summer internship. The boy is
interfering.
“Does he know this is going to end in a couple of weeks?” he snaps to
Jade.
The way this story is supposed to work is that Dad’s threats and efforts to
keep the kids apart works on David’s fragile, lovesick mind and makes him
desperate. Pettyfer (“Magic Mike”) doesn’t suggest that, as this David is
written as all lovesick and moon-eyed. He’s harmless.   Jade is in love for the
first time, but Wilde doesn’t get across the breathless yearning that raises the
stakes of their affair when Daddy pulls more than a few tricks out of his bag to
try and split them up.</P>
Robert Patrick is winning as David’s gruff but indulgent dad, and Dayo
Okeniyi scores as David’s goofy, lovable pal “Mace.”
Director/co-writer Shana Feste concocts what could have been an engaging if
stunningly predictable “Endless Love,” from the pop music montage courtship
sequences to Dad’s drive the boy out on a boat to set him straight about what’s
not going to happen with his daughter.
Greenwood and Richardson make a fine, discordant couple and the young leads
have a certain chemistry. If only Feste had realized she’d stripped almost all
the conflict out of the story, that you can’t flip motivations and turn
everybody into “reasonable” people and have anything like an interesting drama
left over.
Even the Brooke Shields version got that right.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, brief partial nudity, some language
and teen partying
Cast: Alex Pettyer, Gabriella Wilde, Joely Richardson, Robert Patrick, Bruce
Greenwood
Credits: Directed Shana Feste, written by Shana Feste and Joshua Safran,
based on the SCott Spencer novel. A Universal. release. >
Running time: 1:43

These past few years, it’s been pretty hard to get Kevin Costner off his back porch. It’s in Aspen, so we kind of understand. He’s been raising three children under the age of 10, with his second wife, Christine.

“Half my life is driving kids to practice,” he jokes.

There were the business ventures — one of them Ocean Therapy Solutions, an oil spill cleaning system — became famous thanks to the BP oil spill. Another, ArmStar, is a non-lethal weapon he’s selling to the Pentagon that could allow the military and police to pacify violent situations without killing anybody.

“A lotta fascinating $#%& happens on my back porch,” Costner says with a laugh. “And I’ve never been a guy who makes movies back to back to back. I love movies, love acting, love directing. Hell, I even love rehearsing. But I have a more full life than that.”

He still, at age 59, fits that description film scholar David Thomson gave him in 2002’s “Biographical Dictionary of Film” — “He is not like others — he has resolved not to be.”

But 2012’s cable series, “Hatfields & McCoys” reminded us he’s out there. He gave heart to the special effects-burdened “Man of Steel,” and grizzled gravitas to Chris Pine and “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.”

April has the sports movie veteran in another sports movie — “Draft Day.” There’s “McFarland” and a film with his “Upside of Anger” director — Mike Binder — “‘Black and White.'”

“I financed it, and it deals with racism,” he says. “You don’t do it just for the money, because God knows you don’t put your own money up for movies about racism.”

But first, there’s this gonzo action comedy from the writer-producer of “The Transporter” movies, “3 Days to Kill.” Costner plays a C.I.A. contract killer, a “cleaner”, who learns he’s dying of cancer. His new control agent (Amber Heard) bribes him with a serum that might prolong his life, providing he carry out one last series of hits, in Paris, where his estranged wife (Connie Nielsen) and the teen daughter he barely knows (Hailee Steinfeld) live.

“I like Ethan’s directness — in his job, and how discombobulated he becomes trying to deal with the women in his life,” Costner says. “We played those scenes fun, because he’s struggling.”

He likes, he says, the fact that this character hasn’t a clue about women — especially teenage ones.

“Welcome to the human race,” Costner laughs. “If you know a lot about women, please write that book. For the rest of us. Give us a hand.”

Costner shows every wrinkle, every gray hair in “3 Days.” He may be “a national treasure,” as his director, McG (“Charlie’s Angels) declares. But he’s not shy about showing his age, in character and out of it.

Costner wanted to play a man “wed to his job,” who has paid the price for that. He wanted to play a dying man who does what guys sometimes do in that situation — “He wants to earn a lot of money, doing these last few jobs, so he can leave his family something. If he can’t leave them memories, he’ll leave them money.”

Not that this explains Costner’s own suddenly full movie dance card. He’ll admit he’s in “the second half of my career,” but don’t go measuring him for a coffin just yet. And don’t write off “3 Days” as a morose thriller. No, it’s got laughs. Ethan Renner is so out of his depth with his daughter that he interrupts “enhanced interrogations” to question family men from the terrorist underworld for child-rearing advice.

“I try to get my hammer without winking,” Costner says. “I try to get the laugh with my physical movement, in those scenes with Mitat (The Driver) or The Accountant. By making it quiet, you make it work. And asking parenting questions of those guys? It’s already funny.”

McG, who has a “Terminator” movie and the emotional sports film “We Are Marshall” in his credits, wanted “a partner” on this venture in writer-producer Luc Besson’s Paris, with Besson’s French crew, French stunt drivers and French sensibilities.

“Costner’s got an Oscar (for directing ‘Dances With Wolves’), so he’s a pretty good director himself,” McG (Joseph McGinty Nichol) says. “So I wanted a collaborator, somebody I could listen to. We’re two American filmmakers, standing on Montmartre with an all French crew, trying to find our way in a French-style action film — two fish-out-of-water making a fish-out-of-water story.”

The director and his star rewrote some scenes, giving a more tolerant American sensibility to Besson’s bemused shots at French immigration policy (African squatters have taken over Ethan’s apartment, and French law and the French cops give them more rights than the property owner), turning would-be torture scenes into low comedy. Again, these scenes don’t play out the way you expect.

Costner’s love for the unconventional continues with his next film, a dramedy about a general manager trying to get through NFL “Draft Day.”

“If somebody said,’Make a movie about a single day in the NFL draft,’ you’d laugh,” he says. “But it’s the same thing as saying ‘These guys are walking out of a cornfield and onto a diamond wanting to play baseball. And they’re dead. Make a movie about THAT.'”

In a career that has had as many near classics as misses, the man who will be remembered for “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham,” “No Way Out” and “The Untouchables” is not about to stop gambling. Nobody saw “Swing Vote”? Maybe you should have. Missed his earthy working man turn in “The Company Men”? Netflix it.

“Movies are supposed to make you glad you made them” Costner says, “because they’re not what anybody expects.”