Movie Nation

Those sneaky French — turning a romantic comedy into a trilogy, maybe even a
franchise, without even telling us.
It started in 2002, in Barcelona, with a bunch of foreign exchange students
— meeting, flirting and falling into one another’s arms in “L’Auberge
Espagnole” (“The Spanish Inn”).
It continued in London, Paris and St. Petersburg with “Russian Dolls” (2005).
And now, as the characters and the actors playing them — Romain Duris,
Audrey Tautou, Kelly Reilly, Cecile de France — push 40, they collide once
more. This time they’re in New York, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, in “Chinese
Puzzle.”
“I love the idea of following these characters in their 20s, 30s and 40s,”
says writer-director Cedric Klapish, who is 52. “You don’t cover the same
subjects you would in an ordinary movie. You’re talking about time passing,
getting older, how a person changes from his 20s to age 40. The dreams you have
when you’re 25 that change when you’re older — what you want to become versus
what you actually became.”

Klapisch doesn’t really call the films a trilogy, and never really warned the
actors that he’d be coming back to them and taking the story further. But they
all signed on. Duris, who turns 40 May 28, was lured back by the parallels he
saw between the script and real life.
“This business of not growing up until you’re 40, that must be universal,
yes? Your decisions and choices have consequences that they did not have at 25,”
Duris says. He plays Xavier, the writer who has split from his Irish wife
(Reilly) but who follows her to New York to be near their children. “At 25,
you’re full of youth and pursuing a career, a lover, but maybe not for life. We
see Xavier making decisions in ‘L’Auberge Espagnole’ that seem, to him, to be
very very important. But we, the audience, know how tiny his problems are, how
insignificant his decisions are.”
Xavier struggles to settle into New York, find an apartment, to master the
moods of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to raise his kids and meet
the needs of his needy lesbian friend Isabel (Cecile de France) and her
partner.

Writing in The Village Voice, Heather Baysa says that “with each of these
movies, Klapisch reiterates a core sentiment behind all the romantic comedy:
that lives are continuously pieced together, broken, and rearranged in different
settings.”
With each location, the characters — mostly French — cope with a new city
and a new pace of life. From laid back Barcelona, to go go London, the
long-lunches, longer-vacations of Paris, to patience-testing St. Petersburg, the
scene shifts to the City that Never Sleeps — New York.
“They are two cities that dream of each other,” Klapisch says. “Paris dreams
of New York, New York dreams of being more like Paris.”
“The electricity of the streets, that magic energy the city has like no
other,” Duris adds. “When you go out, there’s just something in the air. It was
great to play with that in the movie, the rhythm of the streets, and of the
people, working in Chinatown, wherever. The pace of life is fast in Paris, and
has gotten faster since I was a child. It is the most electric city in France.
But New York? It’s on another level. The whole world is here, young and old, all
these different cultures. And they’re all moving.”
Not that either Frenchman doesn’t prefer Paris, which can be “stimulating,
and yet, peaceful where you don’t hear noise all day and all night,” Klapisch
says. “You can have a long lunch, and long vacations. I love that about the
French life. You can enjoy food more, leisure time more. Maybe the best would be
a mix of the two, half New York, half Paris.”
“Maybe something like Hong Kong,” Duris offers.
Wait, that sounds like another movie. Will we be seeing this quartet again,
at 50? Duris is game. And Klapisch?
“Conceptually, I like following them further, maybe at 50,” he says. “I am
not sure they will have much to tell me then. . But to work with good actors, to follow them in real life as the years pass and they become successes, is a once in a lifetime experience.”

Hats off to the Warner Brothers marketing department.

They assessed that there was a hankering for a monster movie in epic scale. They shook off the weaker returns of “Pacific Rim” and plowed onward. They didn’t spend a lot on cast or director and put it all on effects.

They tamed the tendency to go for bloody, R-rated action and made a kid-friendly PG-13 Creature Feature.

And they sold it. “Godzilla,” the latest version of the Japanese King of the Monsters, piled up the money Thursday night and all-day Friday.

$90 million, maybe more. Wow. “Spider-Man” numbers. Impressive. More impressive than the movie itself. Could another franchise be launched here?

“Million Dollar Arm” is opening below expectations — $10-11 million. That’s not a bomb. But it’s a “You’re no movie star” slap at Jon Hamm. Not yet, anyway.

“Neighbors” is still doing decent business — a 40-45% drop from its opening weekend.

“Spider-Man” took another dive, but not a death plunge. $16 million.

“Chef” opened in more theaters and seems headed for wider and wider release.

James McAvoy has played the odd scoundrel, here and there. Think of his break-out turn in “The Last King of Scotland,” his fanatical cop in “Welcome to the Punch” or wily con man in the art world turn in “Trance.”
But in “Filth,” his latest, he’s bad. Very bad.
“You get a chance, as an actor, to explore a side of yourself that you’ve never tapped into, to do things you’ve never done before, so there’s an educational payoff there,” he says. “It’s nice to surprise yourself, and that means you can surprise the audience as well.”
He plays a Scottish cop, Bruce Robertson — a sleazy, corrupt hedonist who never met a drink or a drug he didn’t want, never saw a comely female suspect or the willing wife of a friend or colleague he wouldn’t bed.
“Filth,” based on an Irvine “Trainspotting” Welsh novel, is the sort of film “You’ll be scraping this film out from under your fingernails for weeks,” critic Dave Calhoun wrote in Timeout London, praising the Scottish McAvoy’s “possessed…sheer caution-to-the-wind energy” in the leading role.
Bad boy Bruce is earning the 35 year-McAvoy some of his best notices ever. But the actor admits that he’s the sort of character that can spill over into an actor’s after-hours persona, and seep into other performances — say, McAvoy’s duties as the young Professor Charles Xavier in the long-running X-Men franchise.

“In the new (“X-Men: Days of Future Past”) film, Charles is weirdly, insanely like Bruce Robertson in ‘Filth.’ He’s a cornered animal, spiteful, fearful, full of hate and anger. That’s not the Xavier we know. He has to work through that to become the sort of man who can help the X-Men win the day. It’s quite nice to be able to do that in this movie with all these externals — epic effects, action-based conflict. But there’s still this reflective side that lets us see this guy’s broken heart. That’s an interesting journey for a character to take.”
The lower-budget/limited release “Filth” is rolling into theaters as the blockbuster “X-Men: Days of Future Past” comes out (May 23), with the one threatening to utterly overwhelm any attention for the other. But as much as McAvoy declares his pleasure at “redefining Charles Xavier, not just back-engineering him from the Patrick Stewart performances,” his most fervent hope is that film buffs find the little film based on “the best script I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading,” “Filth.” Because Bruce Robertson is a narrator with a demonic wit and a character with demonic demons.
This “working class, alcoholic drug-addicted Scottish policeman with mental health problems” could have easily been a “boring, kitchen-sink realistic, wise and informational movie,” McAvoy says. But writer-director Jon S. Baird has tapped into the “surreal, colorful, dynamic and funny” side of the novel, giving McAvoy an unforgettable character to play. Think of Robert Carlyle’s Begbie or Jonny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy from “Trainspotting.” Bruce Robertson would be a boon companion to either of them.
“We all have moments where we feel inferior to those around us. That’s one of the major things that drives Bruce. He’s this larger than life personality, sure. He’s all bluster, nobody’s better than him, and so forth. But that’s all in response to the fact that he’s got a raging inferiority complex and that he’s terrified that everybody around him is better than him. They’ll see he’s weak and take him down, you know?
“We’ve all felt like that, in times, in our lives. We don’t let them prevail, but we can’t help but have those feelings. We master that fear. His fear has mastered him, and it’s created this person who is constantly projecting this fake version of himself — all-powerful, content, confident — when actually he’s anything but that.”
After taking the character home with him during filming — “My wife was a bit shocked, and then perplexed by the guy I was while I was playing Bruce.” — and maybe bringing some of his darkness to “Days of Future Past” — “I was constantly apologizing to the other members of the cast, even though they were probably up for a little abuse.” — McAvoy was ready to leave the depravity behind. To cleanse the palate, he signed up for another potential blockbuster. Will he give the world a new mad scientist spin in the new “Frankenstein”?
“Finally! A Dr. Frankenstein with a SCOTS accent! The way he was meant to be played! The characterization that cinema audiences have been waiting for, for GENERATIONS.”
He laughs and admits that might be a tad too daring.
“Victor Von Frankenstein is English in it. He’s not from the Continent. He’s English, since the whole story is set in London, this time round. So I do my posh English accent. Alas.”

So as I said in my review, “Godzilla” is very kid friendly. It plays to me like a lot of the “Godzilla’s our friend” kid-friendly movies in this long running franchise,a “Godzilla vs. Mothra” sort of outing, without any laughs, intentional or otherwise. Those Godzilla Fiat commercials have more wit.

The violence isn’t graphic or bloody, also kid-friendly.

And a kid-friendly rating should give it a hand at the box office, exposing it to a wider audience. Will the fanboys, who prefer dark R-rated essays in ultra-violence, line up? One audience often means you sacrifice another in getting it.

Box Office Guru says $68 million, a pretty healthy opening, but not in the “Spider-Man” ballpark. Not at all.

Reviews, which were of the fanboys wetting their pants variety on Monday, have cooled off considerably by week’s end. Still well into positive territory, but my hate mail has tapered off. Reviews won’t hurt it.

Box Office Mojo says $70, and that it will “crush” numbers like the $338 million “World War Z” made overseas.

I think it could get easily into the $70s. It’s on nearly 4,000 screens, in 3D.

But it’s an inferior movie and for that reason alone I figure it won’t do nearly as well next weekend, though worldwide, you never know.

“Million Dollar Arm” is two hours of your life Jon Hamm will never, ever give back. Disney is banking on this sticking around after doing low-teens this weekend. That may be a stretch.

I see it doing maybe $12 this weekend. Weak reviews won’t help. Guru says $14, Mojo echoes that.

“Spider-Man” should plummet into the low $teens, “Neighbors” should hold in the $25-30 million range.

In his latest film, “A Night in Old Mexico,” Robert Duvall rages, as the poet
put it, “against the dying of the light.”
As Red, a crusty old rancher who has lost his land, who has no close family
left and is headed for a retirement community, Duvall cusses, complains and
lassos the grandson he’s never met (Jeremy Irvine) for one last romp across the
border. He’s still got “pleasures to go,” he insists. Those include driving,
drinking, dancing and raising a little hell in Old Mexico.
Not unlike the actor himself.
“Yeah, we’ve got a little in common,” he laughs. “But my ‘pleasures to go’
these days are work, tango and riding. </P>
“I love gettin’ the girl, a YOUNG woman, one last time. Mighty pretty,
wonderful actress (Angie Cepeda, playing a stripper/singer that tags along with
the boys).”
He gets to speak some of the tastiest, funniest dialogue of his long career,
and trot out a few vintage pick-up lines.
“Better an old man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave,'” Duvall recites. “I
love that.”
He even got to see a part of Texas he’d never visited.
“Brownsville…That was another good reason to make this one, just to see
more of the country. Supposed to be the most corrupt town in Texas. Haha. That’s
saying something, right? But I don’t know, I don’t know.”
He chuckles. At 83, the Oscar winning screen legend takes his jokes and his
delights where he can find them. Some are at home, in Virginia’s horse country,
with his gorgeous tango-dancing Argentine wife, Luciana Pedraza, his co-star in
2002’s “Assassination Tango.”
“I still tango. A man’s got to have his hobbies.”
Other pleasures from having a busy year in front of the camera. “A Night in
Old Mexico” is the first film he’s in this year.
“We’ve been trying to get this movie made for thirty years, ever since
‘Lonesome Dove.’ Red is sort of descended from Gus McRae from ‘Lonesome Dove,’ I
figure. Same screenwriter (William D. Wittliff adapted Larry McMurty’s novel for
the TV mini-series). He kept at it, the whole time we were trying to get this
made, polishing the script and polishing it. Some great lines in that thing,
great lines.
“I brought in a little to it — improvising. Not much, though. It’s that
good. ‘Am I right, or Amarillo?'”
With a Spanish director and Spanish crew, they had 23 days to shoot “Old
Mexico”, which Duvall confesses is “Kind of an old fashioned story, except for
maybe the language in it…Love the idea of this last hurrah kind of tale. This
guy’s all Texas, that’s for sure. A little of that Texas swagger, that sense of
self-reliance. A little hell-raiser. Go out with your boots on, all that.”
Duvall’s screen appearances have been further apart in recent years, but the
reviews are as glowing as ever, with Variety opining that he is “perfectly cast
as a robustly cantankerous” Texan on a cantina bender south of the border.>
Duvall has “The Judge”, co-starring Robert Downey Jr. coming in the fall,
which is about the time he’ll start production on another film, a movie that
will have him on horseback.

“Oh, I still ride,” he says. “But when I do, it’s got to be a horse that’s
pretty much bomb proof. I have one a fellow down the road lets me ride who’s
bomb proof. I can ride, but I don’t need any surprises. No sir. Not from the
horse, not at my age.”

Nothing opening wide this weekend has taken a critical beating. “Godzilla,” despite being kid-friendly and PG-13, which the fanboys usually turn up their noses at (darker and more violent tends to be their taste), is winning generous reviews — overly generous, say I, but I’m an outlier on this one — for director Gareth Edwards. I thought the low-budget creator of “Monsters” got lost with all that money and all those actors he wastes. The only actor who makes an impression is Bryan Cranston, and he chews more scenery than the big lizard.

Curious to see what kind of business “Godzilla” stirs up. Should be big, with that kid-friendly rating.

“Million Dollar Arm” is not a promising start to Jon Hamm’s career as a big screen leading man. He’s cool and rather dull in the part, which is kind of what was asked for. But you’d kind of hope the “Mad Man”, who can be funny, would have brought something more engrossing to the table. This ain’t “Jerry Maguire.” He doesn’t seem to get that. Weak to mixed reviews for the Indo-American fish out of water comedy.

Most critics agree that Robert Duvall is better than the movie that surrounds him in “A Night in Old Mexico.” How much better is where we disagree. Weaker notices for that one.

“Chinese Puzzle” is the third film in the French series of romances that began with “L’Auberge Espagnole.” Cute film, heartfelt, foreigners in New York. That sort of thing. Decent to good reviews for that one.

The Nigerian epic “Half of a Yellow Sun” is pretty good, if not as epic as one might have hoped. Decent overall reviews, but no more. “Epic”, when it concerns Nigeria’s bloody 1960s civil war over the separation of Biafra from the state, costs a lot more money than this Thandie Newton/Chewitel Ejiofor drama had available. Very educational, for those who want a better understanding of the tribalism that still leads to kidnappings, power struggles and the like in the oil-rich nation.

He dazzled in “Leon: The Professional” and “Ronin,” was in the LAST “Godzilla” and assorted French films and Hollywood ventures in France (“Flyboys,” for instance).

Jean Reno co-stars in the French comedy “Le Chef,” which is earning a U.S. release just as Jon Favreau’s “Chef” hits theaters here. So we’ll talk about food and the French relationship to it, and his own.

But what would you ask Jean Reno if you had the chance? I’m looking for other promising directions to take the conversation. Got a thought? Post it as a comment below, and thanks for the help.

Jon Hamm plays the straight man to a trio of young Indian actors and
Oscar-winning curmudgeon Alan Arkin in “Million Dollar Arm,” a comically thin
“true story” of a sports agent trying to turn Indian cricket bowlers into Major
League Baseball pitchers.
J.B. Bernstein (Hamm) is just another shark in the sea of LA sports agents,
better at keeping up appearances than attracting or hanging on to talent. But he
may have to give up his swank house, his Porsche, his office and his partner
(Aasif Mandvi) if he can’t hurl a Hail Mary pass that will save them all.
Channel surfing one night, he has a brain storm. Those guys who hurl cricket
balls at the wicket in India look just enough like pitchers that maybe they can
be taught America’s National Pastime.
J.B. pitches a billionaire sponsor on the idea of cracking the Indian market
— holding tryouts, all over India, televising it as an “India’s Got Talent”
show, only for baseball. All he needs is one or two prospects, one “Million
Dollar Arm,” and with a bit of coaching, maybe he can get baseball’s first
Indian star signed to a major league team.
So J.B. drags a retired, cranky scout (Alan Arkin) and a radar gun to India,
and they both sweat and steam and learn how things work — or don’t work — in
the chaotic capitalism of India.
A cricket bowler must keep his arm straight, unbent. That’s why they sprint
as they throw the ball, to achieve velocity. It’s a totally different motion
from pitching a baseball.
That’s why Arkin brings exactly what you’d expect to the grizzled Ray. Ray
dozes through this dubious hunt. He doesn’t even open his eyes at the various
regional tryouts.
“I can HEAR it.”
Hear what? The thump of ball into mitt. Ray is the skeptic who needs to be
convinced, finally, by a few live arms, that the whole enterprise isn’t a fool’s
errand.
“You know what they call that?” he growls, at the sound of something over 80,
85 miles per hour. “Juice!”
Director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) goes out of his way not
to offend in the Indian scenes, courting the Indian market the way J.B.
envisions baseball reaching out to the Subcontinent. But comedy is meant to
offend, so that’s a problem. And once three Indian lads come home to live with
J.B. and train with a college coach (Bill Paxton), the strain of not being
patronizing shows.
Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal play the best prospects, and a funny,
diminutive actor named Pitobash plays Amit, brought along as translator. The
culture clash in India gives way to the REAL fish out of water stories as the
lads gawk at empty American opulence, from J.B.’s sports car to his luxurious
home to the sweet, gorgeous med student (Lake Bell) renting his guest
cottage.
As in “Jerry Maguire,” the callous, eyes-on-the-dollar-prize agent has to
learn responsibility and compassion (from the med student), to understand that
“this game is supposed to be fun” and figure out their Eastern ways.
“That’s our shrine, Mr. J.B., sir,” Amit explains when J.B. bristles at the
candles, icons and incense. “Where do you pray, Mr. J.B., sir?”
Hamm plays J.B. too buttoned down to make him interesting. Even when things
go badly, the guy keeps it together — admirable in a human being, or agent, bad
for comedy. Arkin is barely in the film. And the Indian guys are never more than
cute borderline caricatures.
And dawdling along as it does, “Million Dollar Arm” rarely shows us the
“juice,” a baseball comedy that is as tentative as a base on balls.

MPAA Rating: PG for mild language and some suggestive content
Cast: Jon Hamm, Lake Bell, Alan Arkin, Aasif Mandvi
Credits: Directed by Craig Gillespie, screenplay by Thomas McCarthy. A Walt
Disney release.
Running time: 2:04

Let’s see if we remember how this goes.
“With a purposeful grimace and a terrible scowl, he pulls the spitting high-tension wires down.”
And soon enough, “Oh no, there’s go Tokyo.” Well, not this time. It’s “Oh no, there goes (San) Francisco.”
“Godzilla” belches back to life in a new Warner Brothers film that harks back to the kid-friendlier versions of these Japanese “Kaiju” (big monster) movies. It suggests that in  an increasingly radioactive world menaced by radiation-eating beasties, the return of the almost cuddly “King of the Monsters” may be the least of our troubles.
The opening credits cleverly revisit the 1940s and ’50s atomic testing that awakened Godzilla once. Gareth Edwards’ film then jumps to the late ’90s, where mysterious goings on in mining operations in the Philippines and near nuclear plants in Japan hint that something bad is about to go down.
Bryan Cranston is an American engineer working with his wife (Juliette Binoche) when a tragic accident means their little boy Ford will grow up without a mom.
Years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of “Kick-Ass”) is a Navy bomb disposal expert, and Dad’s still hanging around the ruins of that Japanese reactor, a wild-eyed loon determined to get to the bottom of a cover-up. Something is awakening. Call it a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). And call in the military.
Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) has been following developments all these years. He knows what’s up. He’s seen the Toho movies. He’s heard the Blue Oyster Cult song.
Visual effects master turned director Gareth Edwards impressed Hollywood with his low-budget version of this sort of story,”Monsters.” Given a huge budget and hours to tell the tale, he delivers a lumbering movie that’s as bloated as this new roly-poly version of the Big Guy, whom we only see in all his glory in the later acts.
Cranston blubbers with emotion — “Something KILLED my wife, and I have a RIGHT to know!” He chews more scenery than the lizard. Taylor-Johnson doesn’t break a sweat or make any impression as beasts try to keep him from making it home to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and child in San Francisco. Watanabe runs through a panoply of “stricken” looks as he sees the menace, understands it and fails to convince the Admiral (David Strathairn) in charge that the natural world needs “order” and perhaps the giant lizard “will restore it.”
Sally Hawkins was wastefully cast to simply stand behind Watanabe as Dr. Serizawa makes another “What fresh hell is this?” face.
The effects are decent — warships tossed about like bathtub toys, trains trashed and torched, nuclear missiles munched. The movie’s never less than competent. But the fatigue of over-familiarity curses this franchise like few others. We’ve seen Japanese men in monster suits. We’ve seen digital kaiju, and gigantic robot-armored soldiers fighting them (“Pacific Rim”).
So in a tale this timeworn and a film this devoid of humor, with only a few moments of humanity, with tension frittered away by the tedious repetition of the fights, anybody who has ever seen “Godzilla” in any incarnation can be forgiven for asking the obvious.
“What else have you got?”

(Read Roger Moore’s interview with Ken Watanabe here).

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins, Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn
Credits: Directed by Gareth Edwards, written Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham, based the Toho Studios “Godzilla” movies. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:03