Movie Nation

It begins with a 90 minute fashion show masquerading as a sci-fi epic, and ends abruptly.
Because “Hunger Games:  Catching Fire,” is the most female-friendly/runway ready sci-fi franchise ever, and we’re not above pandering to that audience, are we? And the latest film in the four film trilogy is meant to a cliffhanger, after all.
But once things get going, FINALLY get underway, this humorless chatterbox of intrigues, rebellion and a love triangle that seems “Twilighty” in its lovelessness, packs in some real pathos. And while it may leave fans begging for more, and right away, the rest of the universe can be excused for rolling its collective eyes and snapping, “Oh, for Peeta’s sake, get ON with it.”
The victors in the 74th Hunger Games are touring the land, sharing their “love story for the ages” at the behest of The Capital, and The President, played by Donald Sutherland.
President Snow knows all, including the fact that Katniss and Peeta don’t click as a couple.
“At what point did he realize the depth of your indifference towards him?”
Katniss also knows too much and senses the unrest in the land, which worries the daylights out of Snow. Perhaps she’ll use her manufactured celebrity to inspire a revolt.
“Remember who the REAL enemy is.”
And they cannot leave her and Peeta to their dull District 12 mining lives, where Katniss can share her REAL feelings with hunky miner Gale (Liam Hemsworth).
So the “next” Hunger Games, the 75th, the “Quarter Quell” event, will round up lots of recent winners/survivors of the Games to go at it, to the death, to get these symbolic young lovers/would-be revolutionaries out of the way. Aiding President Snow’s designs are Plutarch, the Game builder (Philip Seymour Hoffman). He envisions turning the public against Katniss.
A favorite moment –the president tells Plutarch, “This is what you predicted,” as the games unfold. Except that ISN’T what he predicted.
They spent more on production design for this wintry, woodsy sequel to “The Hunger Games.” Jennifer Lawrence has since won an Oscar and has grown into a formidable young woman, and Josh Hutcherson’s voice has deepened and has real screen presence, now. The acting is better, with Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer, Jenna Malone and Sam Claflin brought in as games players.
Lionsgate hired an Oscar winning screenwriter (Simon “Slumdog” Beaufoy) and “Constantine/I Am Legend” director Francis Lawrence to handle both this film and the upcoming pair of “Mockingjay” movies. Which doesn’t exactly pay dividends. Beaufoy was rewritten by Michael “Oblivion” Arndt. Francis Lawrence is nobody’s idea of an A-list sci-fi director.
Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch, the veteran of the Games who conspires to keep our two Mockingjay lovebirds alive, evolves into a nobler if still boozy mentor. Elizabeth Banks has even more outlandish costumes and makeup as Effie, the couple’s PR consultant, but nothing funny to say or play.
Only Stanley Tucci, all teeth and purple hair in a ponytail, wrings laughs from this grim slog through the middle acts of  novelist Suzanne Collins’ YA opus.
Not that it’s supposed to be that amusing, but something is needed to break up the glumness. Deep thoughts about re-directing cynically manipulated celebrity, lump in the throat moments at people rising up against their oppressors, a couple of memorable deaths and attempts at sacrifice play as flat when there’s nothing around them to serve as contrast.
“Catching Fire” has promising themes where young people trapped in a cutthroat competition question authority and try to reason their way out of a kill-or-be-killed fate.
But the sad realization sinks in, just as the fashion show is ending and the action movie is beginning, that this is as good as Lionsgate cares to make these pictures. The die is cast for the rest of the series.
Maybe “Divergent,” the March, 2014 “Hunger Games” knockoff starring Shailene Woodley, will be better.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some frightening images, thematic elements, a suggestive situation and language .
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Jeffrey Wright
Credits: Directed by Francis Lawrence, written by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on the Suzanne Collins novel. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 2:26

A big weekend for “The Best Man Holiday” — it actually won Friday’s face-off — was not enough to get the God of Thunder off the top of the box office heap one last time before “Hunger Games” comes along to have him for lunch.

“Thor, The Dark World” added $38million+ to its US box office total for the win.

“The Best Man Holiday,” the first big holiday release with holiday decorations and sentiments actually in it, did over $30 million,maybe $31.Established brand, a likeable ensemble, decent reviews and no Tyler Perry pictures in sight? This was a no brainer. The biggest bounce from it could go to writer-director Malcolm D. Lee.

“”About Time” and “12 Years a Slave” stayed in the top ten, “Nebraska” opened strong on just a couple of screens, “Gravity” cleared $500 million worldwide and “Captain Phillips” closed in on $100 million, which is where it will sit by next weekend.

By which time “Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” promises to boost the 2013 box office to something resembling a normal robust fall/holiday level headed into Thanksgiving.

There are things her most devoted fans know about Kristen Bell that people who didn’t help fan-finance her big screen “Veronica Mars” movie might not.
She can sing, for starters.
“When you’re too small to play sports, you compete in solo and ensemble singing competitions,” the diminutive Bell says. “At least, that’s what I did. It turned me into a musical theater junkie. I sang only in Italian, for a while. Then I discovered musical theater.. I studied that in New York in college. Musical theater is what led me into the ocean that is film and television.”
She sings, and more than holds her own with Broadway star Idina Menzel in the animated Disney musical “Frozen,” which opens Nov. 27.
“Any time music is a part of my performance is a good time, in my book. This was a really ‘lucky get.'”
The 33 year-old Michigan native is an alumnus of New York University, and a Broadway veteran in her own right. She was in a revival of “The Crucible” and the musical “The Adventures of Becky Thatcher.”
She just got married — to longtime love and “When in Rome” and “Hit and Run” co-star Dax Shepard. She had a baby this year, and they named her Lincoln.
But even hardcore fans might not realize that she let Shepard talk her into naming their child after his “baby” — his 1960s vintage souped-up Lincoln Continental.
“Well, FIRST of all, he’s BIG. I don’t LET him do anything. He just does what he wants,” Bell says with a laugh. “I think it was a combination of the president and the car we just liked the sound of it. ‘Lincoln.'”
And Bell counts herself VERY lucky that she had her daughter just in time for her most kid-friendly movie ever. “Frozen,” a Disney cartoon based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, lets Bell become a Disney princess.
“This was a dream for me, ever since I was a toddler, really. But I knew if I was ever going to be a Disney heroine she’d have to be someone I wanted to see, I could relate to.
“I wanted to make her very adventurous, to not be a ‘typical’ animated heroine. I wanted her to talk too quickly and too much. I wanted her to put her foot in her mouth, to be clumsy and awkward and have all of these characteristics that I feel I had as a kid. I was always talking too much and too fast, speaking before I thought.”
So her character Anna, younger sister to the ice-cursed Elsa (Menzel) doesn’t so much talk as blurt. She acts before she thinks, and when her sister heads off into self-imposed exile because everything she touches freezes, plucky Anna sets out to find her and bring her home.
“Anna’s such a goofball — sincere, an eternal optimist but just weird. I really like that, because I have been weird and proud of it forever.”
Reviews of the film are full of praise for the movie, for Bell’s surprising singing and her “vigorous” vocal performance (The Hollywood Reporter), which fills Anna with Bell’s own personality.
” I hit those lines the way I hear’em and they sort of fall out,” Bell says. “I did study music in college and music is such a big part of my life that I hear dialogue at a certain tempo.”
The other big project in her crowded life is the “Veronica Mars” movie that she and Rob Thomas (writer of the series) pulled together and turned into the most famous Kickstarter (crowd-financed) movie ever. They raised millions from fans of the teen private investigator TV series, which aired from 2004-2007, They reunited much of the cast and filmed a movie that is due out next year.
“Veronica is so much a part of who I am that it wasn’t hard to get back into character,” she says. “It was everything I wanted it to be. We have talked about the movie we’d want to do pretty much since the day the TV series got canceled. We’d all allowed ourselves to dream of doing it. But I’m not sure any of us ever dreamed it would ever be a reality.
“But throwing it out on Kickstarter and asking the fans if they wanted it, and if they wanted it enough to fund it? That was surreal… We were so lucky to have fans that loyal. One day we were still wishing, the next day we had a green light to go make the movie.”
She’s sensitive to the criticism that suggested this wasn’t what Kickstarter projects — typically tiny-budget affairs from aspiring filmmakers, musicians and artists — are supposed to be. But “we didn’t force anyone to give money to this idea…We wanted to give as much back to the fans as we could because they’ve been very good to us. It’s their movie. They wanted it.”
And if they’d all had to wait on a studio to finance it, “Veronica Mars,” the movie, never would have happened. It’s just another way Bell goes about her life and her business along the road less traveled, from marrying the gawky car nut co-star to naming their child after his car to becoming a Disney princess over 30.
“I’m not a very conventional person. And that bleeds into everything I do.”

A VERY big Friday for “The Best Man Holiday,” which rode 14 years of goodwill, video-reviewings and the ensuing careers of a generally likeable and successful cast — Nia, Sanaa, Morris, Terrence, Taye, et al — to a $17 million Friday.

It could finish up with about $34 million for the weekend, and that is in the ballpark of “Thor 2,” which is also set to pull in mid-$30s. I, for one, saw this coming. This movie, sweet and sad and maudlin and melodramatic and sacred and profane, plays.

“About Time” has cracked the top ten and is doing better than I’d feared.

“12 Years a Slave” is sticking around, riding “Best picture of the year” acclaim to a solid showing.

“Gravity” looks to top out just north of $250, all-in.

Whatever virtues turned “The Book Thief” into an acclaimed and honored international best seller are strangely absent from the film adaptation. A sad orphan’s story bereft of emotion, a paen to books that does precious little to pass that on to the viewer, a Holocaust tale where the Holocaust has been sanitized and washed out of the story, it’s a flat exercise in recreating a place and time but not really “getting” the point of it all.
Brian Percival, a veteran of the TV soap opera “Downton Abbey,” tips his hand early. Little Liesel (Sophie Nelisse) is on her way to a new family with her younger brother. The brother dies, en route — and she, and we feel…nothing.
Since the tale is narrated, ironically by “Death” (Roger Allam), we wonder if that’s not perhaps the point.
“When the time comes,” Death says of his arrival, “don’t panic. It doesn’t seem to help.”
“The Book Thief” is about Liesel’s life living in an unnamed small German city from 1938-45. She arrives, eleven years old and illiterate. Her kindly stepdad, Hans (Geoffrey Rush, at his twinkliest), an accordion-playing house painter and handyman, gently tricks “Your majesty,” as he calls her, into learning to read. Her grumpy new stepmother Rosa, (Emily Watson) tolerates this, and not much else.
But neighbor boy Rudy (Nico Liersch) is smitten. And no amount of bullying, no number of brush-offs can keep him from Liesel’s side. They witness Germany’s slide into World War II together, from Kristallnacht to utter defeat, giving us a child’s eye view of what they see.
“Did the Fuhrer take her away? I HATE the Fuhrer!”
Liesel’s past comes out and the Nazis show their true colors as Jews flee or are rounded up. A few chilling moments come from Liesel’s Hitler Youth uniform and their child anthems, about rejecting “non-Germanic” citizens and the book burning. The Nazis liked to burn books. Liesel, instinctively, sees this for the crime it is.
Percival, working from a Michael Petroni script of the Markus Zusak novel, finds fun in Liesel rescuing a book from a bonfire ( smoke, wisping through her coat, alarming Hans). But Percival is at a loss about what to do with the Holocaust and a major character, Max (Ben Schnetzer), a Jew whom we see flee the country, yet somehow come back and require sheltering by Liesel’s new family.
While the portrait of everyday life, ordinary people expressing tiny, fearful kindnesses in the face of totalitarian bigotry and a nation being led to doom, is novel, Percival fails to stage scenes suggesting the popular support of Hitler with any conviction. He paces this like a TV soap opera, the kids never age, the sick and starving never look less than hale and healthy. The evil is remote, impersonal and even villainous characters feel like pulled punches.
It’s too watered down for adults — lacking the satiric bite you might expect from a tale narrated by Death — and too grim for kids.
And everybody speaks a sort of old fashioned Hollywood hybrid of German and English. Gott im Himmel!
Still, “The Book Thief” falls somewhere on the “Life is Sweet/Boy in the Striped Pajamas” scale of WWII tales, never exactly trivializing the war, the suffering and the Holocaust.  Rush and Watson make strong impressions, but no one else does.
But whatever kudos it deserves for historical accuracy are lost in a tedious parade of cliches, a flat film experience served up in an overly generous, two hour-plus helping.

(Roger Moore’s interview with the star, director and author is here)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence and intense depiction of thematic material .
Cast: Sophie Nélisse, Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, Nico Liersch, Ben Schnetzer
Credits: Directed by Brian Percival, scripted by Michael Petroni, based on the novel by Markus Zusak. A Fox  release.
Running time: 2:11

“Thor, the Dark World” should lose 50-60% of its opening weekend audience on this, its second week of release. That means it could do $33-40 million. Anything less than that suggests that perhaps audiences weren’t keen on the similarities between the first film and the second — same story  beats, etc. Word of mouth will tell.

Universal is banking on the 14 years of memories of “The Best Man,” a black college pals gathered for a wedding dramedy that did OK in theaters in 1999, much better on DVD and other forms of home video in the years since, to boost “The Best Man Holiday.”

Variety says the sequel is tracking best with black females over 25, which points to a “Jump the Broom” opening (@$20 million).

And since reviews were actually pretty good for this overlong, occasionally maudlin romp — the cast makes it — it could do over $20 million, maybe WAY over $20 million. It should, by rights, do Tyler Perry ten years ago numbers ($30+). But $24 seems the safe prediction. 

Having seen it with an audience, I know that movie PLAYS. So if word of mouth is any help, and audiences outside of the black demographic that made the first film a hit take an interest (As a book agent played by Michael Higgins cracks in the movie, “It’s not just ‘Black smart.’ SMART.”), it could do well.

The Box Office Guru thinks “Thor” will add about $38 million to its total and that “Best Man” won’t hit $20.

“The Book Thief” rolls into a few more markets this weekend. It has strong per-screen numbers and middling reviews going for it.

“Nebraska” goes into limited release. And “Charlie Countryman,” a half-decent Shia LaBeouf thriller set in Romania, sees the light of day in a few cities.