Movie Nation

Movie There’s something to be said for giving even tiny tykes a good, old fashioned fright all in the name of good clean fun. But Disney’s “Maleficent” still feels like a sour miscalculation on somebody’s part.

A dark, gloomy and quite violent riff on the “Sleeping Beauty” fairytale, this time seen through the eyes of the evil fairy who put this Beauty under a curse, it’s a lovely-looking thing with most of the joy left out.

In short, it’s the sort of movie we often get when somebody decides to promote a filmmaker from the visual effects ranks into the director’s chair. The 3D wonderland created here has the texture and tone of time-worn three strip Technicolor films from Hollywood’s Golden Age — think “The Wizard of Oz” or “Gone With the Wind.” But effects guru turned director Robert Stromberg rarely breathes life into the dazzling visuals he conjures up.

Angelina Jolie and her prosthetically augmented cheekbones have the title role, a fairy who grew up in The Moors amongst assorted pixies, trolls and sprites, only to have her heart broken by the human boy who, to win the right to claim the throne, avenges a malevolent king who has battled Maleficent by whacking off her fairy wings.

The gruesome surgery takes place off-camera, for the most part.

That gives the fairy queen a grudge like no other. So when young Stefan (Sharlto Copley of “District 9”) becomes king, marries and his queen has a daughter, Maleficent storms her ex’s baby’s christening. And she lays on a curse. Young Princess Aurora will, when she turns 16, have an accident and “fall into a sleep like death.”

Aurora will some day doze off and require a — wait for it — “True love’s kiss” — something the cynically wingless Maleficent doubts will ever happen.

The Disney spin on the story is that Aurora, played by assorted adorable babies and toddlers, is sent to be raised by three incompetent pixies (Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple, Lesley Manville) to keep her from harm. Maleficent looks over her, gets mistaken by the child (Elle Fanning plays her as she reaches her teens) for her “fairy godmother” and develops feelings for the rugrat, whom she nicknames “Beastie.”

That situation is ripe for comedy, which this Linda Woolverton (“Alice in Wonderland”) script rarely delivers. Jolie can handle a withering put down and a convincing Mistress of Mayhem, but rarely gets the chance to do either.

“I like you begging,” she hisses. “Do it AGAIN.”

The pixies have their moments. Which are few. And the humorless humans have none.

Stromberg instead treats us to pretty little mudfights amongst Aurora and the froglike trolls of the swamp and big set-piece brawls between human soldiers and a forest turned into tree demons battling to save the magic.

Impressive. And violent. Just not a lot of fun.

Rating: PG for sequences of fantasy action and violence, including frightening images

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sharlto Copley, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple

Credits: Directed Robert Stromberg, script by Linda Woolverton, based on the Grimm fairytale and Disney film “Sleeping Beauty.” A Walt Disney release.

Running time

If America hadn’t produced Gore Vidal, we’d probably have had to import him.
Novelist and playwright, wit and patrician-voiced politician, gadfly and scold, we might have been able to buy him at a British sale of surplus public intellectuals from the U.K. when they were selling off the rest of Britain after the war.
But as the delightfully flattering new documentary “Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia” reminds us, the late author of “Burr,” “The Best Man” and “Myra Breckinridge” was home-grown to the core, as passionately American as any public figure the republic has yet produced.
Nicholas Wrathall interviewed Vidal, traveled with him as he gave a few last talks, visited his cemetery plot in Washington, D.C. and closed up his Italian villa, winding down his life to his death in the summer of 2012. And thanks to a generous helping of archival footage, we’re treated to a nearly complete life, from his privileged Washington childhood to his emergence as a writer and his scandalous status as one of the first public homosexuals in American history. It’s almost a hagiography, and Vidal would have demanded no less.
He famously quipped, “I never miss the chance to have sex, or appear on television,” a line that says as much about American culture today as any prophesy in our history.
He cracked that “The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country, and we haven’t seen them since.”
Wrathall’s film is both a Vidal’s Greatest Hits — his political campaigns, his memorable political debates with the equally patrician William F. Buckley Jr., his put-downs of Jerry Brown and Reagan, Nixon, Carter and “Junior” (George W. Bush). It captures a hint of the feuds, the pettiness and the contradictions of the man, as well, but only hints.
Yes, he subscribed to “the Conspiracy Theory” of American history, which made him a cynic. His ready command of facts was daunting. Did anybody ever fact-check him? His self-mocking demeanor — “Greed and vanity,” he said, “drives my character.” — masked the way every anecdote or impersonation ended with him, in some way, coming out on top.
An expert witness interviewed here who positions Vidal midway between the humorist/novelist Mark Twain and the literary stylist Henry James might have been right. But there’s a lot of self-promotion, the fabulist about him, a touch of the showman. He was literature’s Orson Welles, a Hollywood peer who also never missed the chance to appear on television during that era.

His books may live on, or be forgotten. But the “Gore Vidal” focuses more on the bright star he was in the culture at large. Friends with Newman and Woodward, the Kennedys, Tim Robbins (in the film) and Gorbachev (likewise), Vidal lived a long life as a bon vivant and a Jeremiah, warning Americans about the National Security State we have built and the threats, from within, to our freedoms from “the ruling class,” which he was born into but rejected.
That he managed so much of this during decades of living abroad — in Italy — should come as little surprise. We didn’t have to import him. He turned out to be our cleverest export.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity
Cast: Gore Vidal, Dick Cavett, Joanne Woodward, Christopher Hitchens, Tim Robbins
Credits: Written and directed by Nicholas Wrathall. A Sundance/IFC Release.
Running time: 1:24

The young couple doesn’t say much when they visit the remote hydroelectric dam.
“No fish ladders,” she complains. “Wonder how they got around that?”
There’s not a lot of spark between them, even when they’re shopping for a ski boat. They have a pickup with a trailer hitch. So they close the deal — with greenbacks.
“Cash, the poor people’s money.”
What they plan to do with this boat and when they plan to do it is what the quiet, sometimes tense thriller “Night Moves” is about.
The latest film from the director of “Meek’s Cutoff” and “Wendy & Lucy” is set within the off-the-grid/love-the-land eco-terrorism movement. Kelly Reichardt is practiced in the art of storytelling with little dialogue/less music, and that gives “Night Moves” a serenity even amidst the rising suspense and paranoia that follows as this terror cell makes its plans.
Josh, given a deflated, sensitive veneer by Jesse Eisenberg, seems to be running the show. Dena, played by Dakota Fanning with a spoiled, smart impatience, is his sidekick, gifted at lying on the fly, should that become necessary.
And it does. Because the guy who can turn the boat into a bomb, Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) may be ex-military. But he’s careless, the sort of fellow who dismisses each new concern with “This is nothing.”
Good thing there’s a paranoid planner and talented liar on hand to take care of the details, like buying the fertilizer to mix with the diesel fuel to load into the boat so that Harmon, who doesn’t sweat details, can set the fuse. Because that’s just the sort of guy you want doing that.
Reichardt, who co-wrote the script with Jon Raymond, has never been very good at bringing urgency to her movies. They amble along, which both suits this film and hampers it. The Brit Marling eco-terrorism vehicle “The East” was better at creating tension. But Reichardt creates a more convincing subculture of Mother Earth activists — young people living on media-deprived co-ops, frequenting organic farmers’ markets and trying to live “off the grid” in the most cell-phone connected, privacy-menaced era in human history.
Then we follow Dena, code-named “D,” into the rural Oregon farm supply store and we understand the extreme corner of that world, another reason privacy is under attack. Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer, the McVeigh weapon of choice? And you want HOW much?
“Controlled substance,” says the hardcase store manager (James LeGros).
Sarsgaard brings a devil-may-care menace to his slacker and Fanning nicely transitions her character from headstrong idealist to someone who starts to realize that idealism has its limits and its consequences.
But Reichardt hangs her film on Eisenberg, who subtly suggests a loner whose primary gift for the cause is he whole in his soul where a longing or human contact should be. It’s a terrific performance and it holds the movie together even as “Night Moves” stumbles toward its foregone, and rather poorly handled, conclusion.
　
MPAA Rating: R for some language and nudity
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard, James Le Gros
Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, written by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt. A Cinedigm release.
Running time: 1:58

What were your first thoughts on seeing the snippets of video of Elliot Rodger, son of a Hollywood second unit director, as he gave his reasons for setting out on a killing spree?

Hollywood brat, I thought. Not ugly, apparently smart and articulate. Well put together. Smug. Entitled. He was sitting in a BMW daddy’s money paid for. Daddy’s money (presumably) also paid for the handguns and ammo he used on his spree.

The excuse “Asperger’s” had been applied to his social skills. Mentally ill, in any event.

Anne Hornaday, the Washington Post film critic, wrote an op ed suggesting that Hollywood’s spate of losers who get the girl comedies, and love of violence, created this monster.

“Sexist escapist fantasies”? Yeah, that’s a fair cop. Judd Apatow, who created a whole school of comedy built around that and around casting funny alter egos like Seth Rogen in his films (Rogen’s latest is “Neighbors”) is a funny schlub who married the gorgeous and funny Leslie Mann. If it can happen to Judd, his movies reason, it can happen to a “40 Year old Virgin”, a loser who can get Katherine Heigl (remember her?) “Knocked Up.”

Never thought of his films as connecting with violent male frustrations in any way, I must say.

Needless to say, mellow man Seth Rogen was not pleased. Nor was Apatow.

He ripped her a new one in a couple of tweets. Apatow pitched in.

Yes, she’s right, that the sexism in the focus of Hollywood films in general and romantic comedies in particular, is ongoing and defies belief. Apatow, however, is far from the worst offender. Women come off better in his films (especially when the woman is played by his wife).

But when you throw that ad hominem “white males on charge” stuff out there, you’re starting down a slippery slope. The Rogen/Apatow and by extension Sandler etc. tilt to rom-coms these days has more in common than just “white males” greenlighting the pictures, writing the pictures, directing the pictures and starring in the pictures. The slippery slope of “sexist” white males becomes more offensive to the ears when you say, “Jewish males” sexism, and attach broad sexist attitudes to the films attributable to their creators/studio champions. Doesn’t it?

Then again, the ONE Hollywood event Mr. Rodger was photographed at was a violent, youth-oriented film which his father did second unit photography on. And “The Hunger Games” is about a killer female, isn’t it, Anne? Doesn’t fit her thesis, doesn’t figure into her argument.

A better pop culture connection, I thought, was “Big Bang Theory,” where smart cute guys bemoan their inability to get dates, or did in the first few seasons. But that has nothing to do with a mentally disturbed child of privilege going out and buying guns either, does it?

Neither does the eat-or-be-eaten ethos of “reality” TV, where narcissistic video diary confessionals, like Rodger’s, are commonplace. But that’s a much closer connection than “Neighbors” or “Knocked Up.”

Social media is another arrow in that quiver, and perhaps the sharpest. That’s where this guy posted his threats and planned his posthumous famous. Social media’s built in “everybody has it better than me/has a girlfriend but me” angst, NRA guaranteed access to as many firearms as you can afford, an affluent micro-culture where his father was high but nowhere near the richest 1% of the pecking order, pathologically awkward socially…sounds as if movies have less to do with this than video games, and nobody’s even talking about video games.

My guess? Hornaday will end up apologizing. The piece is poorly argued and a sharper editor would have demanded more evidence. But op ed editors don’t go to the movies, so they just let her go for it. A swing and a very public miss.

Bobo and Klara, two 13 year-old Swedish girls, are having a debate by telephone. And the moment Klara (Mira Grosin) holds her phone through the cracked door, capturing a loud, pointless shouting match her free-spirited mother and father are having, “We Are the Best!” sets itself apart from other coming-of-age pictures.
“See?” she says. “MY parents are worse!”
“We Are the Best!” is a musical period piece, a winning tale of girls figuring out who they are, what their tribe will be and who they can depend on as they punch through whatever glass ceiling Sweden has to offer their sex in 1982.
The first ceiling? It’s the age of ABBA, but Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara are punks.
“Punk’s dead,” their derisive classmates might say, at their choppy hairstyles and tastes in music. “Don’t you know that?”
They don’t. And Bobo, a wallflower emboldened by the defiant Klara, is determined to be every bit the punk her more assertive best friend is.
They hate gym class, try to talk cashiers in the food court into the socialist idea of giving them free french fries, panhandle strangers and annoy their teachers and classmates.
“We have a band,” Klara lies. And so they do, borrowing instruments, demanding rehearsal time at the local community center and thus ticking off the heavy metal wannabes Iron Fist, who bullied them.
Klara will play bass, write a song and sing it. Bobo, eager to please, takes up the drums. They hate gym? “Hate the Sport” becomes their first punk anthem.
Lukas Moodysson’s film, based on his wife Coco Moodysson’s comic book, beautifully captures that last stretch of innocence in childhood. They’re obsessed with music, wearing out their favorite Scandi-punk tapes on their Sony Walkmen.
Klara and Bobo read about Swedish punk rockers close to their age in the newspaper, and Klara boldly calls them up and makes a hang-out date with them. Boys, of course, are what come between girls. They’ve got to learn that sooner or later.
They need a guitarist? Why not court the conservative, shy “Kumbaya” playing Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne)?
“We Are the Best!” is a scruffy, anarchic picture that gets better as it stumbles along. There’s just a hint of formula here — the “band” will make its debut at a coming community center Christmas concert. Will they humiliate themselves, or is that just a smidge of improvement we detect, rehearsal by rehearsal?
The point, for those who remember that era in America and Britain, is that “It’s punk. Who’ll know the difference?” It’s the brash attitude, the defiant haircuts and the rage that counts. Even when you’re 13 and Swedish and the best thing you have to rebel against is gym class.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult situations, profanity, teens partying
Cast: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne
Credits: Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, based on the Coco Moodysson comic book. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:38

It’s not unusual for a front-loaded popcorn blockbuster like “Godzilla” or a comic book movie to have world beating Friday numbers which fall off on Saturday.

People pack the theaters on date night to “be the first to see” these pictures, which explains why those Thursday night openings have become commonplace.

A lot of the demand for them is sucked away, but studios get to crow Saturday that “We have a winner,” creating a bandwagon for their marketing departments to pitch.

Still, Saturdays, even with most people off from work and a LOT more showings available, typically fall off. Pictures for older audiences — “Chef,” for instance, and “Belle” — do better on Saturdays.

Kids films do better on Saturdays and hold more audience on Sundays.

“X-Men: Days of Future Past,” lost about 15-20 % of its juice between Friday and Saturday —  a “Godzilla” sized Saturday swoon. It’s still on a pace to clear $90 million by Sunday midnight. And maybe $110 or more with Monday thrown in.

But that’s well below “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the standard bearer in that franchise. Seven films into “X-Men” (with “Wolverine” outings, to boot), this franchise is definitely showing its age, more so than Hugh Jackman.

“Godzilla” lost a big chunk of its opening weekend oomph and is fading fast — a 77% plunge on Friday, 66% by Saturday. Word of mouth wasn’t dazzling, no surprise to those of us who found the movie heartless and humorless and a a bit of a drag.

“Blended,” Adam Sandler’s Warner Brothers vehicle, fell off Saturday and will not have reached $18 by midnight Monday. MONDAY. That’s a bomb, figuring in costs and the fact that his movies don’t travel (overseas box office is weak).

“Neighbors” did more per screen all weekend, and it’s been in release for weeks, now. It cleared the $100 million mark this weekend.

“Chef” moved comfortably into the top ten, despite showing on fewer than 500 theaters. It chased the last of the spring’s faith-based films, “Heaven is for Real,” out of the top ten.

“Rio 2” has quietly owned the animation market for more than a month and has cleared $122 million. Not a blockbuster, not a bust.

1. X-Men – $110 million
2. Godzilla – $35 million
3. Blended – $18 million
4. Neighbors – $18.5 million

Based on late Thursday and all-day Friday’s numbers, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” will be on the list of all-time best Memorial Day Weekend hits. But not at the top of the list. $97 million seems to be its Thursday-Sunday take, and yes, they’re cheating to get that by opening in to an $8 million pre-weekend bounce.

It may hit $112-15 by midnight Monday. Those numbers are right in line with projections.

And that will be better than “The Hangover: Part II,” which is now the fifth best Memorial Day opener of all time. Eight years ago, “X-Men: The Last Stand” did $123 million, which gives us a faint hit of comic book blockbuster fatigue (4,000 screens, in 3D, and adjusted for inflation, that’s a pretty steep fall off from the best “X.”)

“Blended” is opening to the weakest numbers of any Adam Sandler comedy in memory. Well under $20 million by Sunday night, very low $20s by Monday midnight. Bad reviews, an audience aging out of Adam Sandler movies and his inability to truly make a “kid friendly” film are working against him. He’s Jerry Lewis. The kids know he isn’t cool.

“Chef” cracks the top ten as it gains theaters in an expanding release. Not sure if this strategy will pay off, in the long run. They might have gotten their biggest bounce with a wide opening, and steady fade. There are other chef movies on the way, and hanging onto theaters will be an issue. A “Grand Budapest” or “Exotic Marigold” run? Not the same audience.

“Neighbors” has cleared $100 million, “Godzilla” took a STEEP dive, “Million Dollar Arm” is holding most of its opening weekend audience and “The Other Woman” looks as if it will top out just under $90 million, all in. It will be under $80 by Monday night.

“Heaven is for Real” lost a lot of screens, but it is still holding on to top ten audience.