Movie Nation

What George Lucas once said about girls — something along the lines of “If you figure out what 12 year old girls will like, you’re set for life” — is true in spades this weekend. It’s an estrogen-owned box office, with last week’s leader, “Maleficent” holding onto over $30 million in audience.

And “The Fault in Our Stars,” a tragic teen romance starring new “It” girl for for under 20s, Shailene “Divergent” Woodley,” is opening so big she could just about bail out of “Divergent” sequels.

The low end, based on a big Thursday night and theaters crowded with teen girls off for the summer on Friday, is $48 million by midnight Sunday. The high end could be low $50s.

Word of mouth won’t hurt it. While my review was one of the more negative ones, the things that will grate on adults won’t be an issue to teenagers. And as I’m a big Shailene Woodley fan (interviewed her too many times — including for “Divergent” — to do another one for this film), Vaya con suerte, sister. Cash those checks. Glad to see her hit it big.

“Edge of Tomorrow” is giving Tom Cruise the best reviews he’s had for a new film outside of a “Mission: Impossible” picture. The jokey tone of a sci-fi time travel piece in which he is killed — dozens of times — works. Not a performance that stands out, but the picture works. And it’ll do $30 million. Tops. Half of what the “chick picture” will do.

“Million Ways to Die in the West” will end up with “Blended” bucks — maybe slightly more — $36 million total after this weekend, maybe $45 or so when it finishes its run.

“Chef” continues to hang around the Top Ten, and clears the $10 million mark by Sunday night, Deadline.com predicts. It is this summer’s “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” a feel-good picture that grownups and seniors can embrace. VERY slow going for this one, though, I must say. I would have figured, with the added theaters, this thing would be doing $7-10 million a weekend. No, not yet. It may not have the oomph to do $40-50, the way movies hitting this demographic have performed in the past.

Favreau ought to keep doing press for it, helping it build.

MIAMI BEACH — Canadians are easy to spot in Florida. Guys like Jay Baruchel don’t have to open their mouths and drop an “a-boat” or “I’ve never BEAN here before” to give away the game. They’re pink.
“I’m like a Jane Austen character,” the skinny, big screen funnyman admits. “I need a parisol when I’m down here.”
The 32 year-old Ottawa native has made his mark in indie films (“Fanboys”,” “I’m Reed Fish”) and as a part of the ensemble of some of the biggest comedy hits in recent film history — “Tropic Thunder,” “Knocked Up”, “This is the End.”
But the one part he truly owns is Hiccup, the hero of the “How to Train Your Dragon” movies, an animated character who is “the Jay Baruchel of the Viking World,” Christine Champ noted at Film.com. The character has Baruchel’s “angsty sarcasm”, his distinct, high-pitched voice, and his speaking style, which Time Out/London compared to “the beguiling delivery of a young Christian Slater.”
In “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” Hiccup becomes downright — Dare we say it? — Canadian.
“He’s a peacemaker,” Baruchel says of Hiccup, based on the hero of Cressida Cowell’s “How to Train Your Dragon” books. “He wants reconciliation, across the board. He IS Canadian. In a way. He’s a great moderator. He wants cooler heads to prevail and he knows we’re better off if we can all find a way to get along.”
Baruchel revels in talking about the “Dragon” movies — “Dragon 2” opens June 13, and “Dragon 3” is already in the planning stages. He bought into the franchise right away because of the character, who “represents people who are earnest in their beliefs, and who refuse to accept things the way they are. Just because this is how things have been doesn’t mean this is how they have to be or will be forever and ever.”
He connects Hiccup, a quirky tinkerer, blacksmith’s apprentice and dragon-loving dreamer amongst the pillager Vikings of his family and village, to his own life.
“Hiccup is a great emblem for anyone who is wired differently. He’s still all Viking, even though he’s the least Viking of them all. So he’s loyal. But I had a dad whose sole ambition for me was that I play hockey and live exactly the same life that he did. And that was never going to be an option…
“There’s a lot of kids out there who face that…Hiccup tells these kids that the things you’ve been told are failings can actually be virtues, and will be, if you give them time.”
A Canadian child actor summoned to Hollywood by Cameron Crowe for a role in “Almost Famous,” Baruchel picked up on how he sounded — slightly nasal-voiced — and looked different from the standard issue movie stars or even character actors of his generation.
“They’d say ‘You’ve got such a distinct voice!’ And I was never sure how to take that. Maybe because they’d IMITATE me when they said it. But it’s just another thing I’d have thought was a failing that has become a virtue.”
And the beanpole appearance might make him a great foil for his beefier Canadian pal Seth Rogen, and a natural to star in a movie titled “She’s Out of My League.” But it can be limiting.
“I know. I KNOW. I’ve tried. I am working enough to eat. I swear. At some point, I’ll just say ‘tapeworm’ and leave it at that. I weighed myself two days ago. I got up to 157. I was so proud, a new record!”
His preferred manner of working is diving into a new project with his extended family of funnyman friends — Rogen, Dan Fogler (for whom he just made “Don Peyote,” another stoner comedy), Judd Apatow and director Cameron Crowe, “who wrote me a small part, playing Bradley Cooper’s step-brother, in his next movie. Who WOULDN’T want a job where you get to hang out with your friends all day? Movie days are like 14 hours long, so having friends on the set, that’s an important consideration when I’m looking for work.”
Guys from that extended community — Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse — flesh out the voice cast to the “How to Train Your Dragon” movies. But that’s not why Barcuchel does these and will continue to do so, as long as Dreamworks keeps making them.
“I have stumbled to my ‘Star Wars.’ Most actors can spend an entire career and never have even a chance of being in something as impactful and positive as ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’ I am on board these until they’re sick of me, until they fire me.”

By day, Donna Stern works in Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books sin Brooklyn. By night, the cute 28 year-old has a few drinks — and a few more — and gets up on stage at her favorite dive and does stand-up.
It’s not the observational, “Didya ever notice” comedy of the Seinfeld generation, but the over-sharing personal narrative of the narcissistic, lay-it-all-out-there and hope some of it is funny of the no-privacy era. She talks about her sex life, her sex parts, her boyfriend — the works.
Think Sarah Silverman, and just as Jewish.
It’s no great shock when the boyfriend ditches her. Donna is plainly not an adult. She’s a Paul Simon song we hear later in her story — an “Obvious Child.” But the beau has been cheating — with a friend of hers. He dumps her in the club’s unisex bathroom. And like a lot of people his age, he’s an addict.
“Looking at your PHONE while you’re dumping me?”
“Obvious Child” is a quirky, funny and quite gutsy comedy that “goes there” — in the vernacular of five minutes ago. It’s the funniest unplanned pregnancy romantic comedy since “Knocked Up,” and FAR more daring.
Jenny Slate is Donna, and she plays a couple of drunk scenes for the ages in the early scenes of this indie-budgeted romp. Watch her plead, tease, insult and binge-share as she drunk-dials the guy who left her. Sympathize as she crawls into a box as she packs up inventory, because the book store is closing and she’s losing her job, too. See her drown her sorrows and turn decidedly unfunny on stage as she talks about how crushing this was to her, how betrayed this boyfriend and her friend who cheated with him made her feel.
“I would love to just murder/suicide them,” she jokes. We hope. “Murder-sui them.” Pause. “A lot of people say I look like Anne Frank.”
And see her be charmed by the preppy computer game interface designer, Max (Jake Lacy), an uber-Gentile who looks like James Marsden and sounds just like Ben Affleck. She mocks his Docksiders.
“Welcome to Brooklyn,” he cracks back, “where they judge you by your SHOES.”
Their boozy one-night stand produces a pregnancy, one Donna is in no place to handle.
“I would like an abortion, please. Sorry, that sounded like I was ordering in a drive-through!”
Donna has the obligatory gay friend (Gabe Liedman), a supportive best friend (Gaby Hoffman, who could pass for her sister), a no-nonsense business professor mom (Polly Draper), an adoring TV puppeteer dad (Richard Kind). She should be able to handle that coming Planned Parenthood appointment, right?
Sure, but then things get more complicated.
Abortion has been so cast out of the entertainment sphere that it is a jolt to hear it joked about or even discussed frankly in a movie (TV is scared to death of it). But when Donna’s mom let’s slip the funniest Alzheimer’s zinger ever, you know nothing is off limits and whatever else this obvious child with the potential child is going to do, it will be her first adult decision — maybe ever.
That makes this Gillian Robespierre film and its bright new star a comic slap in the face — a turn-off for some, but a refreshing new point of view and new way of looking at that point of view, something only the rarest comedies ever pull off.

MPAA Rating: R for language and sexual content
Cast: Jenny Slate, Gaby Hoffman, Polly Draper, Richard Kind, Jake Lacy
Credits: Directed by Gillian Robespierre, written by Karen Maine and Gillian Robespierre, based on a short film by Anna Bean. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:23

Let’s hold this truth to be self-evident. Nobody ever changed his or her deep rooted political beliefs by watching a political documentary. Ever.
Such films, from the Jerry Falwell backed attacks on the Clintons to Michael Moore’s Jeremiads, to “Hillary: The Movie” that led to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, to “Citizen Koch,” a film about that ruling’s consequences, preach to the choir. They reinforce what people already believe.
“Citizen Koch” started out as an expose of the power of the ultra-conservative Koch Brothers, Charles and David — billionaires who inherited a $100 billion company and the John Birch Society politics of their father. This film, about how the Kochs have become the poster boys (for the Left) for the rich subverting American politics with secret donations to push their not-so-secret agenda, was to have aired on PBS. But the Kochs are big PBS donors, so the rumor goes. So PBS bailed out.
To be fair, the film also suffers from a serious “mission creep” that undercuts its purpose. It starts out about the Kochs, and then settles for much of its length on the battleground of Wisconsin, where Koch-backed Tea Party conservatives seized power and used the legislature to start a national crusade to break the backs of the one money bloc with the cash to at least compete with the huge conservative political cash machines that “Citizens United” unleashed — unions.
Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal try to pack the myriad arguments against that Supreme Court ruling, and legions of people from both sides of America’s political aisle who saw it as a disenfranchising disaster, into 90 minutes. But they got lost in Wisconsin.
It’s easy to see why. This came across, in 2011-2012, as a test case. Would voters — public employees and other constituencies — be able to recall a wildly unpopular governor who made what most called a naked “power grab” to break the state’s unions, and by extension, subvert the will of a Democratic majority state? The answer, for those who don’t remember, was “No.”
As Dee Ives, a public employee who does home health care for elderly veterans that the film follows puts it, “The rest of America? They’re coming for you, next.”
Deal and Lessin contrast the small money, door-to-door efforts of the under-funded recall backers with the gargantuan checks written by the Kochs and others that flooded the TV airwaves and brought in busloads of drawling out-of-state phone bank activists to keep Scott Walker governor. Unions lost, and memberships plunged.
The filmmakers contrast the populist rallies of both sides of this heated debate that seemed like a crucible for the future of American politics. They highlight the violent, racist, anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Koch backed Tea Party enthusiasts. When a John Birch Society “instructor” speaks to aged, rural white voters in Wisconsin, none of them seems to notice his thought-thread about where “the Jews” that Hitler chased out of Germany ended up — “Here, as the teachers of today’s teachers.”
This was, after all, the home state of Joseph McCarthy.
Lessin and Deal don’t make this an activist film, despite the fact that their subject limits the audience it will appeal to. Such films are usually hopeful. They are relentlessly downbeat about this threat to democracy, letting failed GOP presidential candidate and former Louisiana governor and Congress Buddy Roemer sound the soberest alarm.
“Listen to me, America. You’re unimportant. Because you don’t bring a check…They’ve stolen your government.”
It’s too much to stuff into 90 minutes, from the concerted GOP “voter ID” effort to suppress voter turnout nationwide to “limit the electorate to the benefit of Big Business,” to union busting, to solidifying the right wing grasp of the Supreme Court so that this permanent, monied minority can continue to call the shots.
And by reaching for all those threads of this far right wing web, “Citizen Koch” loses track of the Big Oil/Big Pipeline billionaires who finance elections, underwrite global warming denial and stand to gain even more in another low-turnout election this fall — the Kochs.
Deal and Lessin might have been better served finding a couple of Koch expert witnesses to anchor the film and tie all these issues together. As it is, “Citizen” is a sermon that may have the choir shaking its heads, not singing along.
　
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Buddy Roemer, Floyd Abrams, Tim Phillips, Dee Ives, Mari Jo Kabat, David Koch, Charles Koch
Credits: Directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. A Variance release.
Running time: 1:29

The reviews, if you look closely at them, are closer to lukewarm endorsements than “Gotta see this!” raves. But “Edge of Tomorrow” has Tom Cruise, dying, comically, dozens of times. Played for laughs. Head shots, impalings, crushed in accidents, etc. etc. Who cannot get behind that? “A Million Ways to Die in the Future.” Yeah. That’s what it is.

Time travel, the oddly justified “start the day over” in a war with aliens (“Groundhog D-Day,” I said. Cleverly.)

But overall, the best notices for a Tom Cruise movie in this century, I dare say.

“The Fault in Our Stars” plays like YA Nicholas Sparks. John Green was the novelist, but hurl two sick teens together in a doomed romance and you’re in beach book territory. The love for this one cooled off from the breathless, childish early reviews. Still, decent notices for a collection of cancer romance cliches that promises to do quite well this weekend, if young women have anything to say about it. Shailene Woodley may best Jennifer Lawrence in something, for once.

“Borgman” opens in a few markets. Inscrutable is a great word for this odd, engrossing, unexplained supernatural (ish) Dutch thriller.

“The Sacrament” is a pointlessly fictionalized account of the Jonestown cult mass suicide back in the Disco era. Not terrible, but not the least bit compelling. And why change the facts? Do the homework, use real names, tell the story.

“Anna” has Mark Strong trying to figure out if Vera Farmiga’s younger sister Tessa is a cunning killer or a child victim of an unhappy rich upbringing. Not that good.

Shailene Woodley, who can do no acting wrong, brings a welcome reality to “The Fault in Our Stars,” a perfectly serviceable teen date picture that teenage girls will have to bribe teenage boys to sit through.
Sweet, cute to the point of cutesy, it’s a weeper about doomed teenagers who meet in a cancer patients support group, and dare to fall in love.
Adults can be forgiven for rolling their eyes at any movie about cancer whose narrator mocks the conventions and cliches of the genre and then declares, “This is the truth.” Because what follows is almost always those very cliches she was ridiculing.
Hazel (Woodley, of “Divergent”) is 17, and totes an oxygen tank around with her, a byproduct of the experimental drug that keeps her cancer at bay but fills her lungs with fluid, from time to time.
Hazel is leery of the new guy at this Jesus-centric support group her ever-smiling/ever-positive mom (Laura Dern) makes her attend. Augustus (Ansel Elgort, Woodley’s “Divergent” brother) gives her the playboy’s smile and the playboy’s stare. He charms her and the group with his bubbling personality.
“I’m on a roller-coaster that only goes up!”
Hazel isn’t buying it, but is won over by his wit, his bad driving, his habit of calling her by her first and middle name.
“Hazel Grace!”
Thus begins a chaste but adorably sweet romance between two people who have that ONE THING in common, and are just old enough to know better than to let this happen. But they can’t spend all of their energy worrying about their parents’ worrying about them, trying to be brave for the grownups’ sake.
One cliche of such movies is how healthy the sickly look — up until that moment that we know is coming, when they do actually look sick. Another familiar touch, Hazel forcing her favorite book on her new beau, and them communicating with the author (Willem Dafoe) who turns out to be the way authors in such scenarios always are.
The cancer jokes keep it light — “I love it when you talk ‘medical’ to me.”
And the stars hit it off well enough. Woodley, dazzling in “The Descendants” and “The Spectacular Now,” is merely a convincing lure for Elgort, who lifts his game to hang with her, though not quite enough to make the literary locutions of Gus come out sounding natural. Dern took the role for one or two good scenes and the rest of the supporting makes little impression.
But this long Josh Boone (“Stuck in Love”) film based on a John Green novel isn’t meant to be a movie for people who remember when TV had “disease of the week” weepers. It’s for teenage girls, and the boys they can wrangle into coming to see it with them.
Maybe they’ll find the stunningly obvious plot to be surprising and fresh, maybe they’ll take stock of their young lives the same way the characters do, without the sword of cancer hanging over their heads.
And they’ll learn the cliches, even as a nice, metaphoric lecture about cigarettes is tucked in between the dates, the animated text messages, the wish fulfillment fantasy and the tragedy that may be the only “true” thing “The Fault in Our Stars” actually manages.
　
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, some sexuality and brief strong language
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe
Credits: Directed by Josh Boone , written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, based the John Green novel. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 2:05

Jean Reno was born Juan Moreno y Herrera Jiménez in Casablanca to Spanish parents. But he is as French as a guy who moved to France at age 17 can be, as French as his stage name.
At home for decades in action films from “Leon (The Professional)” to “Ronin,” and in comedies from “French Kiss” to “The Pink Panther,” Reno, 65, has become Hollywood’s idea of what a French authority figure looks like, turning up in “Couples Retreat” or “The Da Vinci Code” – whenever someone quintessentially French is called for.
The fact that he’s maintained a thriving career in French films even though he’s moved to New York tells us the French look at him this way, too. His comedy “Comme un chef”, in French with English subtitles, makes its way here under the title “Le Chef” or “The Chef,” a foodie comedy that is earning variations of Australian critic Jim Schembri’s review — “souffle-light.”
We figured that being French, Reno was a gastronome. We had no idea how true that was until we caught up with him in New York.
Question: So, you play a famous, brand-name chef with his own TV show in this movie. How did you create the character?
Jean Reno: I am a friend of a lot of chefs, and I’ve watched them work the kitchen and work the dining room for years and years. They move a certain way, they approach the plate a certain way. Their relationship with the rest of their team is this way or that way. I observe because this world fascinates me. These people are artists, creative cooks. Sometimes, a little pretentious. Not very welcoming of suggestions from others, people like me who say, ‘Maybe you could do this that way, or whatever.’ No no.
Q: The French sometimes appear, to the rest of the world, as if you think you invented cooking. True?
Reno: The French cuisine was invented by chefs. It doesn’t come from the family, like Italian cuisine. Italian cuisine was made by “la mama,” from the house, food everyone grows up with. French food, almost every thing that makes up French cuisine, was developed by chefs, somewhere, at some time.
But today we can say that cuisine, that food culture, is a worldwide thing. In the north of Europe, in America, Japan, everywhere you have fantastic restaurants.
I live in New York, and I can take you to, let’s say FIFTY restaurants that would leave you more than happy. I have on my iPhone to guide me — my favorite dining apps. I don’t like to take big chances with finding a place, just go and oh, EAT something. I like to eat well. Not expensive. Well. I use these apps all over the world, at work, on holiday, at home. I swear by Michelin New York. Another app I love is LocalEats.
Q: The big debate at the heart of your film is over this newfangled “molecular cuisine,” food broken down to its essence, its scent and taste at a molecular level. How do you feel about that?
Reno: Oh, I am like my character in that regard. I don’t like the idea of having a syringe spritzing in a color, a scent, to fool you into thinking of something other than the food. I like regular cuisine, food that has been transformed by the talent of the chef — not by chemists. To me, that is a battle between the past and today. I like to respect the past.
We had the term nouvelle cuisine some years back. It turned up and everybody was like, ‘WOW. It is new! It is coming to us! They were doing something AMAZING and new!’ In fact, it was just a mar-KET-ing term to sell you more food, different food. I didn’t believe in it, and I still don’t.
Q: How do the French learn about great food?
Reno: I was very lucky. When I did my first tour with a play in France, I had this old character actor with me. He loved great food. And he knew the whole of France, addresses, chefs. Any time we had a stop on the tour, he had two or three great restaurants he knew. I caught on quickly. I started eating with him and I never went back.
To me, discovering fine food is like discovering opera. You need a guide to introduce you, to help you find your way.
Q: Your first reaction to American cuisine?
Reno: When I first came to America to promote “The Big Blue” (1988) with (co-star) Jean-Marc Barr, we traveled to 28 cities in 23 days. Very fast. But we used our time well. We tasted the hot dogs in every city we visited. Airports, street vendors. Hot dogs. I knew the best hot dogs, at least back then.
Q: Hollywood films are famous for their huge budgets, even for food. You work in both Hollywood and France. Who has the best catering on set?
Reno: No sense lying. The catering on French film sets is wonderful, even though the budgets over there are so very very small. Catering is suffering on sets over here and over there, too. The budgets, they cut down on the food. It is sad. So sad.
But you, in France, you have beer with your lunch, or pastis (a very alcoholic aperitif) even. Sparkling champagne. In America? It’s forbidden on the set!

Some weeks back a few friends asked me about the movies I was most looking forward to this summer.

And I found that a head-scratcher. The staggering list of sequels, reboots, desultory formula comedies and the like had me giving up on this summer in April.

A new “Captain America”? Meh. Another “Godzilla”? Why? Middling animation (“Legends of Oz,” “How to Train Your Dragon 2”), another “Spider-Man,” “Superman vs. Batman”? “More “X-Men”? OK, but really, enough already. Guardians of the Galaxy”? Who green lights this drivel?

May’s numbers at the box office tend to bear this out. Several films opened big and then took a dive as word of mouth on their “Been there, seen this” plots, characters, etc., got around. Worst May since 2010, and 2010 can be seen as more of a fluke.

As a movie lover, I worry at the long-term trends. Demographics drive those, and as America’s teens-to-20somethings age thin out as a group, moviegoing drops. When moviegoing drops ahead of that curve, people are breaking the habit of going to the movies.

It’s great when Hollywood suddenly discovers it needs to make more films appealing to Christians, women, older viewers who have given up the movies, for the most part, etc. But there’s no learning out there. Will the system build on the Christian audience gains it saw this spring? Every summer needs that one film over-50s will buy into. Is that “Chef” this year, or “Belle”? Why only one film for that audience?

There are more films being released every week than in years past — indie dramas, thrillers, horror pictures,documentaries and comedies. I see 4-6 of these per week. Few leave an impression, none break through at the box office.

These megabudget comic book adaptations travel well, another big reason they’re an outsized presence at the US box office. They do well in China and India and Australia and Finland. But fatigue is setting in, and this summer could make all of 2014 a major blow to the long term box office and make the movies another “fabulous invalid,” an art and entertainment for the few and fewer.

We all lose if that happens.

The mass suicide of Reverend Jim Jones and his Jonestown cult must seem
fantastical, like something straight out of a horror movie to those too young to
have any memory of the story.
So that’s what director Ti West (“The Innkeepers”) turns it into with “The
Sacrament,” a modernized/fictionalized account of a charismatic preacher and the
people who follow him to a new way of life in some remote corner of an unnamed
Caribbean basin state.
It’s a found footage approach to this story. A trio of outsiders, two of them
with cameras, visit and by their mere act of visitation, threaten to cause this
“paradise” to unravel.
Patrick (Kentucker Audley) is a fashion photographer who has gotten this odd
letter from his junkie sister. She’s cleaned up and “found” herself, thanks to
this community she’s joined. He should come visit.
Even though that community has now moved to an undisclosed location reachable
only by a mysterious, secretive helicopter pilot, Jake agrees. And since he has
ties this this “New Age” “immersionism” journalism enterprise called Vice, he’ll
bring along skeptical reporter Sam (AJ (“You’re Next” Bowen) and photographer
Jake (“Drinking Buddies” actor-director Joe Swanberg). There just might be a
story in all this.
hey discover an interracial village where the old and the young live
together “free, as God intended” according to a voice on the public address
system. Artists and hood rats, the abandoned elderly and small children have
carved a community out of the wilderness and found hope in their lives.</P>
<P>They owe it all to “Father,” a folksy-homespun old man, the voice on that PA
system, played by Gene Jones, who was a convenience store owner in “No Country
for Old Men.” Father rails, ever-so-gently, about racism, poverty and
imperialism. And he gives the “Outsiders” the hard sell.
“We can live our lives” here, he drawls, disarmingly. “TRULY live.”
Patrick spends all his time with sister Carolina (Amy Seimetz, also in
“You’re Next”) and seems to be kind of won over. Jake is just photographing
folks, and Sam, a bit put on his guard by the sometimes fearful members of the
cult, accepts what he’s being told, if not quite at face value.
And then they’re handed a note.
“Please help us.”
West is plainly relying on an audience with no knowledge of Jonestown or what
happened there, because for all his efforts to pointlessly update this story and
fictionalize it, those efforts don’t cover his tracks. He even has Gene Jones
were Jim Jones-style sunglasses, day and night.
The performances are effective enough, and the writer-director makes the most
of that first jolting moment — Jake and Sam being handed that note. They’re
surrounded by true believers, some of them armed with AK 47s. There’s only a
small helicopter coming to pick them up in the morning. And here is a child,
pleading for rescue. That’s a deadly dilemma and drives home what happened in
Guyana 36 years ago.
The finale — chases, chaos, confusion and Kool-Aid — is competently if not
compellingly handled.
West either needed to come up with a truly modern spin on this mass
hypnosis/cult thing, or come clean and admit whose story he was telling and
stick to the facts. “The Sacrament” has only graphic shooting/immolation and
poisoning Hollywood effects to recommend it. The characters don’t earn our
empathy. There’s little pathos. It is horrific without delivering the punch or
punchlines of a horror movie, a formula guaranteed not to satisfy either the
historically minded or the horror fan.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing violent content including bloody images,
language and brief drug use
Cast: Amy Seimetz, AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, Gene Jones,Kentucker Audley
Credits: Written and directed by Ti West. A Magnolia release.
Running time:1:39

In this year’s annual Tom Cruise sci-fi epic, he plays an over matched future soldier condemned to repeat the same botched D-Day invasion until he triumphs against the alien beasties who keep killing him and forcing him to start this waking nightmare over.
Titles worth considering — “Groundhog D-Day”? Or maybe, “”A Million Ways to Die in the…Future?”
“Edge of Tomorrow” could have been another “Next” or “Knowing,” lame variations on a Nic-Cage-knows-the-future theme. But it’s almost as good as Jake Gyllenhaal’s earlier take on this sort of plot, “Source Code,” a thriller about a time traveler dealing with a steep learning curve as he frantically tries to work through variations of who set off a bomb on a train.
“Edge,” based on a Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel, script partly credited to Christopher “Usual Suspects” McQuarrie and directed by Doug “The Bourne Identity” Liman, gets its juice from its action and its life from its humor. No kidding, almost every time Major Cage (Cruise) dies, it’s a laugh. That’s because he figures out that he’s going through this nightmare for a reason, and there’s one soldier in it with him, the “Angel of Verdun” (Emily Blunt) who knows what he’s experiencing and knows if he makes a mistake, she can shoot him in the head as a way of hitting this battle’s reset button. Yeah, that’s funny after a bit.
Cage an Army media relations officer, is a confirmed coward in the film’s opening scenes. The general in charge (Brendan Gleeson) has condemned Cage to embed with the first wave hitting the French beaches as the world’s armies converge on spider-like aliens called “Mimics.” So Cage wakes up every day to the sound of a sergeant bellowing “On your feet, MAGGOT.”
It’s a version of that dream where you’re speaking in public and you forgot to put on your pants. Untrained for combat — he doesn’t even know how to switch the safety off on the ordnance attached to his exoskeleton armor — Cage is hurled into a chaotic lost battle where he meets the heroine, Sgt. Rita (Blunt). With reasoning and a LOT of practice deaths, he and she work out how to survive the fight just a little longer each time out with an eye toward foiling these aliens before they do what Hitler never could — cross the English Channel and end human civilization.
The script has Cage taking stupid chances, sure in the knowledge that he will get a do-over if he screws up. It has him dreading each version of the mission’s failure, the array of explosions, impalings, or head shots by Sgt. Rita that punch that reset button.
And like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” and Gyllenhaal in “Source Code,” and even Sigourney Weaver in “Alien 3,” it has Cage dealing with his own coming death and the futility of fighting it. “Edge of Tomorrow” gets its heart from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief from “On Death and Dying.”
Cage is in frantic “denial” this is happening. He rages in “anger” at his circumstances. He starts “bargaining” his way through it, trying to convince others they’re in the nightmare with him. He hits the wall — “depression.” “We’re done.” And, as Kubler-Ross predicted, he reaches “acceptance” — making the best of his fate.
Liman lays a solid hour of brisk, brutal and brutally funny action on us — introducing and re-introducing the demoted and humiliated Cage to his Sergeant (Bill Paxton), who serves him the same bromide — Combat is “the fiery crucible in which true heroes are forged” and introduces him to J-Squad, the jump team he will watch die all around him as they try, again and again, to win this unwinnable scenario.
Cruise and Blunt have only as much chemistry as the script allows, which becomes plain as the film finally slows down enough to catch its breath one hour in. Cage has met Rita, time and again, and has an over-familiarity with her that she understands, but doesn’t like.
The constant re-sets after working one’s way through another section of the battlefield is straight out of video gaming, something fans will pick up on right away. But unlike the rest of this cinematic deja vu, the more somber Five Stages of Grief stuff sneaks up on you. That gives this popcorn-weight action pic some nice gravitas to go with the “Million Ways” Tom Cruise gets to die jokes.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and brief suggestive material
Cast: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Paxton
Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, written Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, based on a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. A Warners release.
Running time: 1:53