Movie Nation

Reviews for “X-Men: Days of Future Past” have been excellent. Yes, mine, too. It’s on nearly 3,000 screens. It’s in 3D. So there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit $100 million over a long holiday weekend, right?

Box Office Guru thinks it has a shot to hit $110 by Monday night.

Box Office Mojo predicts $98 million by midnight Sunday, $119 by Monday.

“Blended” is earning scathing reviews for the too-bored-to-care Adam Sandler. Hated it. Truly. A whopping 15% positive reviews on the tomatometer, which only proves that 15% of the people published there are special needs.

Mojo figures “Blended” will manage $30 million or so by Monday night, $23 million Sunday night.

Guru thinks $26 million, all-in Monday night.

A fall-off for the Sandman? Maybe. Warners will probably break-into the Sandler business in the black. Not guaranteed.

Joe, the 400 pound Latino boy from Houston, weeps in fear and frustration. He’s not alone. Maggie, a 212 pound 12 year-old from Oklahoma, joins him. Wesley, an overweight 13 year-old in Houston, is desperate.

But Brandon, 15, a 215 pound South Carolinian headed toward diabetes, morbid obesity and being a member of “the first American generation to not live as long as their parents,” is documenting his on video life, reading up on his diet and the causes of his problem, determined to “not be just another fat kid.”

Those are the faces of “Fed Up,” the Katie Couric-backed documentary about America’s spreading childhood obesity epidemic. It’s a frank, dismaying and yet surprisingly upbeat look at a problem the country’s been wrestling with for decades.

The problem, as narrator Couric and the many experts she and director Stephanie Soechtig talk to put it, is that we’ve been looking at the causes all wrong. That business about exercise vs. “sloth” and “lack of willpower” and “sedentary lifestyles” and “poor choices” either is misleading, or is avoiding the bigger issue.

“It’s your fault,” our way of stigmatizing the victims of this epidemic, “is not accurate,” they say. Exercise isn’t enough to compensate for the diet we’re being offered. The caloric math doesn’t work.

The elephant-sized issues that we’re avoiding — the pervasiveness of processed foods, packed with sugar in its many forms, and the pervasiveness of the marketing of those foods to children.

In 90 minutes, Couric & Co. trace the first time the problem was recognized- the 1977 McGovern Report from the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs — to the years of efforts to reign in advertising, force food processors to produce more accurate content labels, or to simply get them to cut back on sugar. Those efforts, Couric’s retinue of a couple of dozen experts agree, have failed — thwarted, again and again, by Big Sugar, Big Corn, by Big Pizza, by multinational frozen food concerns.

Michael Bloomberg, demonized as New York mayor for promoting the “Nanny State” by pushing restrictions on sugar soft drinks, diagrams the battlefield. Michael Pollan, the food expert made famous by “Food, Inc.,” laments the powers of lobbies that can buy Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle. Bill Clinton, a Surgeon General and a USDA head, as well as academics and professionals from nonprofits tackling this issue lament the business influence that has co-opted even First Lady Michelle Obama’s innocuous “Let’s Move!” efforts to address this head on.

And kids struggle to understand why this is happening to them and what is within their power that allows them to do something about it.

Mrs. Obama is among those who declined to be interviewed for the film, putting her in the company of Big Cheese, Big Sucrose and their lobbyists as those who avoid talking about the politics of this national disaster. The real villains, captured in Congressional testimony footage and corporate propaganda, are the profit-obsessed titans of food business and their lobbyist lackeys. They provide many of the ironic laughs of “Fed Up,” saying Ronald McDonald isn’t “marketing to kids.” Fox News isn’t the only media enterprise to push the phrase “nanny state” out there. But, as the film makes plain, protect-big-business-from-criticism conservatives made it a rallying cry, perhaps with less than pure motives.

The ripple effects of unfettered processed food capitalism are felt as we see the impact of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of school lunch programs, which led to schools selling their stoves, mixers and the like and laying off real cooks. Next thing you know, processed food and fast food conglomerates are in the schools, offering cheap, unhealthy alternatives to take the place of cooked, healthier meals. Coke and Pepsi vie for exclusive deals with cash-starved school systems.

The film is less pointed in focusing on the obese parents whose lifestyles help create obese kids. It’s a little annoying that all the plump children here are from the South — South Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas. Are there no fat Minnesota teens, no obese New Yorkers?

What makes “Fed Up” a tolerable harangue is both the humor injected into it, and the hope it draws from the Battle against Big Tobacco analogy. In a simpler time, that seemed like a fight no one could win. Then tobacco companies were demonized, their CEOs depicted as heartless villains, their advertising restricted and teen smoking plummeted. Maybe it’s time, the “Fed Up” experts say, to demonize Coca-Cola, Big Sugar, KFC, Kraft and the whole alphabet soup of food conglomerates that created this deadly epidemic. This movie, not a watered-down/advertiser supported TV news feature, could be a second step.

The first one, Pollan reminds us, as he did over and over again in “Food, Inc.,” is to eat “REAL food.”

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements including smoking images, and brief mild language

Cast: Narrated by Katie Couric

Credits: Directed by Stephanie Soechtig , written Mark Monroe, Stephanie Soechtig. A TWC/Radius release.

Running time: 1:32

The story of “The Immigrant” is, for many, the American story — a struggle
to get to The Promised Land, to be allowed to stay and live the American Dream.
But few would choose to own this take on that epic narrative. A laborious,
dull and emotionally barren melodrama, this script is one downer after another,
flatly-written and heartlessly-acted.
Oscar winner Marion Cotillard has the title role, a young Polish woman whose
tubercular sister is taken from her at Ellis Island. It’s 1921, and Ewa herself
has trouble getting past immigration herself. There was an incident on the ship
on the way over. The address for relatives she gives to the INS doesn’t exit.
She’s penniless. They’re about to ship her home when a helpful fellow from
Traveler’s Aid shows up, and with seeming reluctance, offers to help.
Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) is compassionate but blunt, helpful but cagey.
“We’ve all been desperate,” he says, consolingly.
But Ewa is mistrusting from the start. When Bruno allows her to stay in his
apartment, she is on guard. When he changes her suggested profession from
seamstress to stripper, she isn’t shocked. Stripping is just the start of what
he expects. Bruno’s burlesque revue, “Bruno’s Doves,” is basically a smorgasbord
of female flesh that he serves to the howling all-male audience at The Bandit’s
Roost bar, burlesque house and bordello.
Phoenix, acting in his fourth film for director James Gray (“Two Lovers,”
“The Yard,” “We Own the Night”), tries to make Bruno the way the script sees him
— as lovesick and guilt-ridden for exploiting Ewa, as ruthlessly possessive of
her, as the very definition of a “confidence man” until he’s had a few drinks,
when he turns ugly.
And he does turn ugly, because “The Immigrant” is the sort of film where
everybody blurts out, “You’re so beautiful” on first meeting the leading lady.
Jealous rages follow. One of those men is the magician/dancer/hustler Emil
(Jeremy Renner). Taken with Ewa, he promises, like Bruno, to help her free her
sister.
Renner makes a nice emotional contrast to Phoenix, or would have, had this
performance had a hint of heart to it. There’s no passion to his connection to
Ewa, and that makes the two men’s struggle to possess her play like some sort of
sick boy’s game.
Cotillard gets most of the close-ups and it is Ewa’s point of view that we
follow and share. She is the heart of a love triangle without any hint of love. Accurate, in terms of the situation and the times? Perhaps. Cinematic? No. Somehow, Gray managed to get a lifeless performance out of the empathetic star of “La Vie en Rose,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Inception.” The character is a canny survivor, but Cotillard plays her as aloof and self-righteous, a front Ewa puts on because she knows what she’s been through,
she knows the shame of that certain unladylike “incident” that happened on the
ship.
Ewa is wronged, left and right, she struggles to believe “I am not a nobody,”
and she keeps her eye on her mission — freeing her sister from immigration
limbo. Gray lets us see little that suggests a sense of urgency at her dilemma.
The meandering muddle of a script takes us away from Ewa’s mission as we stumble
into the feud between Bruno and Emil — who have history.
Cotillard has two leading men, neither of whom sets off any sparks in their
scenes with her. Her performance is also problematic because Ewa is a
bewildered newcomer to America, at the mercy of this shark or that one,
dependent on the kindness of strangers. There is little kindness in this
America.
The performance dictated by the script makes Ewa passive. That flies in the
face of the legend of the immigrant experience in America. But worse still, it
makes for weak, watered down melodrama.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and some language
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner
Credits: Directed by James Gray, screenplay by Richard Menello and James
Gray. A Weinstein Co. release.

These days, Adam Sandler is a bottle of beer that’s lost all its bubbles — cheap, mass produced domestic beer.
So let’s focus on what works in his latest, “Blended,” because he sure doesn’t.
Drew Barrymore, in her third pairing with the Sandman, still brings energy and conviction to her performance as Lauren, a mother of two thrown together on an African vacation with this lump she met on the Blind Date from Hell — a blind date at Hooters.
Wendi McClendon-Covey, playing her best friend Jen, delivers a comically furious turn and either upstages Barrymore or forces Drew to play at her level. Watch and listen to the two of them berate an obnoxious, snarky loser-dad at Lauren’s son’s Little League game — shouting, talking over each other, name-calling. It’s Vince and Owen in “Wedding Crashers” good.
And then there’s Terry Crews, who steals the movie as the MC and singer of an African vocal group at the Sun City resort where Jim, the sad sporting goods salesman (Sandler) and Lauren, the professional closet organizer, and their five kids end up in an absurdly contrived joint vacation/safari.
The wild-eyed Crews, dancing and crooning, bumping and grinding, sings of the “blending” that will go on during this week of non-traditional families wildlife watching and bonding. He is the Greek chorus for this obvious, stale and stiff comedy, a shirtless jolt of life (the man’s pecs do a dance all their own) in this lesser entry in he career of the aptly-nicknamed “Sandman.”
We are deep into the “family comedy” stage of Sandler’s working life, families where the kids cuss and rhinos hump, where Jim urinating long and loudly outside of a tent is played for a laugh, where the past-expiration-date Kevin Nealon and a jiggly/funny Jessica Lowe (the new Anna Faris?) are the oversexed other “non-traditional family” that the Lauren-Jim ensemble pair up with.
Jim is raising three emotionally stunted daughters to be pseudo-jocks, like himself. Who nicknames his daughter Hilary (Bella Thorne) “Larry”? Who would name his troubled middle daughter, the one who “still talks to (dead) Mom” (Emma Fuhrmann) Espn?
Maybe the sort of guy who peoples his movies with jocks (Shaq) and jockcasters (Dan Patrick) in cameos, along with other washed-up comics of his generation.
Jim’s a widower, meant to explain Sandman’s sleepwalking demeanor. His daughters need a mom.
Lauren’s newly divorced, with a maddeningly rude and hormonal teen (Braxton Beckham) and tantrum-tossing tween (Kyle Red Silverstein), both of whom need a father figure, since their dad (Joel McHale) is a no-show.
Every set-up is an eye-roller. Jim and Lauren stumble into each other at the drug store. He’s cluelessly buying tampons for his teen, she’s replacing a porn mag she ripped up for her teen.
Gags and one-liners that would be discarded in a better comedy are trotted out and then underlined here. When Lauren gives the tomboy “Larry” a girlish makeover, she debuts hearing “I’m Every Woman” in her head, her possible new beau hears “I’ll Make Love to You” while her dad panics and hears “It’s the End of the World, and We Know It.” Hilarious. Let’s repeat that musical joke, shall we? They do.
The African scenes include digital ostrich riding and a digital monkey band performing “Careless Whisper.”
And in the middle of it all is Sandler, aimlessly going through the motions, a character others dismiss as “a buffoon,” “a chubby loser” in need of a fist-bump. Even Barrymore, who has gotten rich on “The Wedding Singer” and “50 First Dates,” has a hard time giving him one in this flat-beer farce.
　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual content, and language
Cast: Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Terry Crews, Kevin Nealon
Credits: Directed by Frank Coraci, written by Ivan Menchell, Clare Ser. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:59

Leave it to the X-Men to put the fun back in summer blockbusters.
Hugh Jackman, in the role he was coiffed to play, and the rest of the crew
from pretty much every film in this past, present and future franchise, deliver
the action and the laughs in “Days of Future Past,” an all-star/all-X-Men outing designed to transition from the aging first generation cast into their younger
selves. It’s too long and so cluttered with characters and exposition that if
you weren’t a fan of the comics, you may feel you’re being punished. But it
delivers the 3D thrills and the Wolverine (and Quicksilver) giggles, and
how.

In a “Terminator” future, the robotic Sentinels have all but wiped out
humanity and the mutants who love them. But with the aid of time-bending Kitty
Pryde (Ellen Page), the X-Men may be able to stop the mad — or at least greedy
and irritable — scientist (Peter Dinklage) who invented these machines back
during the Nixon administration. Future mutants send the greying Wolverine
(Jackman), or at least his consciousness, back to 1973.
And from the minute the guy wakes up in a world of lava lamps, Little Feat
and ‘Lectric Shave, things are popping. Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and
his nemesis-turned-MFF Magneto (Ian McKellen) need Wolverine to convince their
feuding young selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) to prevent a vendetta
by Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) that dooms the future. So Wolverine, Beast
(Nicholas Hoult) and the two mutant leaders contend with the Vietnam War peace
talks, Richard Nixon, as well as the young soldier who will age into the evil
Stryker as they chase Mystique hither and yon.
Because she’s seen the experiments this scientist has been doing on mutants.
She’s been to Vietnam, where a selection of them were used in combat. And she’s
got blood in her blue-green eyes.
History is twisted and sent up, from the Kennedy Assassination to “Star
Trek.” They need to bust into the Pentagon, so they track down a punk teen, the
future Quicksilver (Evan Peters, who just kills in this part). That break-in
scene, in 3D slow motion “bullet time,” may be the coolest action beat ever
filmed in 3D and packs the biggest giggles in any X-Men film. Quicksilver
hurtles through a sea of military police, misdirecting their guns, playing the
“stop hitting yourself” game, giving wedgies.
Meanwhile, in the future, Bishop (Omar Sy), Storm (Halle Berry), Blink
(Bingbing Fan) try to hold off the Sentinels using some of the most spectacular
effects (instant wormholes) you’ve ever seen in a fight scene.
Jackman has most of the one liners. He drops in on the past version of
Xavier’s school for gifted (mutant) kids, which has closed as the Professor has
lost his way and crawled into a bottle.
“Are you a parent?” Hank/Beast asks at the door.
“I sure as hell HOPE not!”
The acting is all you could hope for from this cast, with Page bringing the
empathy and Jackman delivering the cool. Dinklage could have brought a bit more
villainous glee, but McAvoy re-interprets Xavier nicely and Lawrence doesn’t let
down the side.
There’s no Stan Lee cameo, the onslaught of characters is a bit much and the
third act drags and drags before delivering a heartfelt payoff. But “Days of
Future Past” is most everything we’d hoped the summer’s earlier popcorn pictures
would be, most of all — fun.

MPAA Rating:PG- 13 for sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some
suggestive material, nudity and language
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Ellen Page, James
McAvoy, Peter Dinklage, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Omar Sy
Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, written by Simon Kinberg, Jane Goldman and
Matthew Vaughn, based on the Marvel comic books. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 2:12

“The Love Punch” is an empty-headed nothing of a caper comedy, a movie whose
moves are so obvious and obviously absurd that even a moment’s scrutiny lets the
gas right out of the balloon.
But darned if those high-mileage troopers Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan
don’t play the heck out of a flimsy plot. And even less-than-witty banter sings
when they’re flinging it at one another.
“You get me, Kate,” Richard (Brosnan) purrs to his ex (Thompson). “Or at
least, you used to.”

“That’s because I’m a trained child psychologist.”They’re divorced, but oh so cute together.</P>
“Come Ooonnnn,” old pal Jerry (Timothy Spall) pleads. “Get back
together!”
But split they are, amicably or not. They pack their daughter off to college,
and then the bottom falls out of their happy divorce. Richard’s company is
looted by a French takeover fiend. And since Kate’s retirement was swiped as
well, they’re in a pickle.
“How’s your FRENCH?”
“Non,” she says, seeing where this is going. “Non non non.”
But Richard knows how to get to “Oui,” and next thing they know, they’re
confronting the fiend (Laurent Lafitte, too soft to play the heavy). And then
they’re plotting to crash the guy’s wedding to a super model (Louise Bourgoin),
steal the $10 million diamond necklace he’s bought her and thus save the
retirement of everybody they know.

As if.
Writer-director Joel Hopkins, who never has lived up to the promise of his
“Jump Tomorrow,” ineptly stages car chases in a tiny Citroen through Paris, a
scene set to Free’s “All Right, Now” as chase music. That’s so obviously a
compromise choice for a chase tune that you’ll grimace. The tempo is all
wrong.
Hopkins has his heroes and heroines (they enlist Jerry and his wife Penelope
— Celia Imrie) get a fake version of the diamond fabricated, snorkel in scuba
suits, clamber up a cliff, pose as Texans invited to the wedding and attempt a
daring caper. None of which this bunch could possibly pull off.
But here’s what works –the running gags. EVERYbody wants Kate and Richard to
get back together, even the innkeeper (Marisa Berenson) at the pension where
they check in to plot their heist
“And you are holidaying together to see if the FLAME still burns?”
“The flame is out,” Kate corrects. “Snuffed. Gone.”
Thompson and Brosnan have chemistry. And Spall is a delight playing goofy
Jerry as a man with a past, one his wife of 35 years only learns about as he
keeps saying “I have a guy” or “I have contacts” with gun dealers, fake diamond
fabricators, blue print providers.
“When I was in the Legion,” he explains. Wait, the French Foreign Legion?
“Back when I was in the Merchant Marine…When I was in Saigon in ’64.” Or,
“Back when I was in Guam.” Imrie’s reaction to every new revelation is a giggle.
“When I was with the Australian paratroopers…”
They’re in an undercooked and under-plotted caper comedy, but you’d never
know it from these four. Perhaps they were just happy to be shooting on the
Riviera. They help “The Love Punch” land just enough blows to the funny bone to
be worth it.

MPAA Rating: :PG-13 for some sexual content, language and rude humor
Cast: Emma Thompson, Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie, Marisa
Berenson
Credits: Directed by Joel Hopkins, written , based . A Ketchup Entertainment
release.
Running time: 1:34

“Words and Pictures” is the cloying title of a cloying little comedy made by talented people who, not that long ago, deserved better than this, and knew it.
It’s a nearly two-hour long “meet cute” academic romance from the director of “A Cry in the Dark”, “Roxanne” and “Barbarosa” — rent them if you haven’t seen them.
“Words” would be English teacher Jack Marcus, a once-promising poet who has gone to seed — and bourbon — at an exclusive private school where the kids adore “Mr. Marc” (Clive Owen) even if the administration and the local barkeeps don’t.
“Pictures” is Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), the new art “honors” teacher, a semi-famous painter suffering a debilitating illness, forced to take teaching work because the brush no longer does what she wants it to do.
Mr. Marc, drunk and late for class, challenges his kids — “Who ARE you droids?” He assigns them to “write one sentence that elevates the human mind.”
Delsanto is cranky, exacting and just as challenging.
“I’m NOT the kind of teacher you’re going to come back to visit.” Her outgoing voice mail message echoes that.
“Please, get to the point.”
To Delsanto, “words are lies,” especially for an artist.
Marcus reads his students a snatch of “The Declaration of Independence.”
“WORDS did that, not pictures.”
And since she’s cute, with or without crutches, and a challenge, it is on. SO on. The teachers will feud and flirt, the kids will rise to the occasion, painting or purple prosing to great heights as we head toward a school assembly showdown which will decide if a “picture is worth a thousand words,” or vice versa.
Owen makes a decent drunk and a passably glib chatterbox. Marcus is outside his usual simmering comort zone. If nothing else, he and screenwriter Gerald Di Pego make this a very listenable script.
Binoche can play brittle, and their banter works, sometimes.
“You’re attracted to me? Why?”
“Same species, different sex.”
But it’s all pre-digested, a happy ending straining to find obstacles to get in its way. Director Fred Schepisi dawdles when he should sprint and adds on when he should have subtracted. The students, collectively, make no impression. Bullying is introduced and tossed aside, Jack’s former lover (Amy Brenneman) somehow has a say in whether he’ll keep his job, booze and all, there’s a son he keeps letting down, all ideas brought up and left to wither.
Enough already. Romantic comedy should be light on its feet as it falls trippingly off the tongue. “Words and Pictures” is a lead-footed, witty bore.
　
　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual material including nude sketches, language and some mature thematic material
Cast: Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, Amy Brenneman, Bruce Davison
Credits: Directed by Fred Schepisi, written by Gerald Di Pego. A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:51

He was one of the greatest of the greats from the Golden Age of cinematographers as painters, the American Sven Nyqvist or Vittorio Storarro.

Gordon Willis shot gorgeous looking Westerns (“Bad Company”), stunning mob epics (“The Godfather”) and the loveliest black and white and color comedies ever put on film (Woody Allen, from “Manhattan” through “The Purple Rose of Cairo”).

I’d make the case that one reason Allen is still taken so seriously as an artist himself was the handiwork of Gordon Willis, who died this weekend at 83.

But his “Pennies from Heaven” gorgeously evoked The Great Depression, his “September 30, 1955” beautifully captured the texture of rural America at the birth of teen culture (on the day James Dean died).

One of the great ones.

Audiences prone to going to a movie’s opening weekend are even more prone to dash off to a movie they’re dying to see late night Thursday or Friday.

Especially with regards to summer popcorn pictures.

So…”Godzilla” shot his wad Friday.

Saturday? A 20% drop off, despite having more people off from work and a whole day of screenings available.

It won’t hurt the film, but it does suggest that there is a finite audience for this big lizard blockbuster.

People were talking $100 million for the big guy in box office discussions Saturday afternoon.

Sunday AM? $90-92. (UPDATED — final estimate, $93.2)

Reviews, which tilted toward ecstatic on Tuesday have settled down to “It’s OK, especially if you’re a kid movie goer.”

“Neighbors” is still settled in at number 2, “Million Dollar Arm” is still looking like a $10 million opening weekend. Audience scores tracked leaving that one have been quite high, so word of mouth will help the Mouse in weeks to come.

“Belle” and “Chef” are doing very well in limited release, “Heaven is for Real” and “Mom’s Night Out” are still in the top ten.

“Godzilla” will only enjoy one weekend at the top. “X-Men Xterminate All Lizards” opens next week.