Movie Nation

Spike Jonze is reluctant to call his new film “Her”, a melancholy romance about a man who falls in love with a sentient, learning and loving operating system, “science fiction.”
He doesn’t want to talk about technology and the modest leap it makes from our cloud and smart phone-obsessed present to a digitally romantic future.
“It’s not about technology,” he says. Then he corrects himself. “It is, obviously, ‘about’ technology. Just not to me. It’s such a big idea — that you could, one day, have a relationship with a computer operating system– that I worry it will overwhelm what the movie is really about.”
So he soft-sells his vision of the future. Everybody wears what appear to be stretch pants and Hush Puppies.
“The future is comfortable!”
Jonze, director of such challenging, genre-defying films as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” offered his film to festivals (where it has won awards, at Rome, for instance) and to critics. The National Board of Review named “Her” best picture of 2013. (Roger Moore’s review of “Her” is here).
And he’s been dealing with the praise, and the differing interpretations ever since.
“One person says, ‘It’s about relationships. Or ‘It’s about evolution.’ I like that. It’s about our species and our society evolving. And on a micro level, it’s about one man evolving in his life and growing a little bit. We all try to evolve.”
Is “Her” also about loneliness, the electronic isolation of the tweeting/texting age taken to a new level?
“We’ve always had ways of hiding from really connecting with each other,” Jonze says. “There’s always been things that we used to avoid close contact. The technology is all that’s changing.
“This (handheld worldwide communication, social media, etc.) is a powerful thing that we can use right now, but we’ve always found a way to be lonely and avoid revealing ourselves to each other.
“All the ideas in the movie — artificial intelligence, the direction society is heading — were just a way of writing about relationships now, relationships forever. I wanted to look at the micro, this one strange romance, and the bigger picture, the macro — the struggle for intimacy, the longing for love, wrestling with the things inside ourselves that prevent real intimacy.”
His own take aside, Jonze is reconciled to the varying interpretations and appreciations of “Her,” from “wryly funny (Variety) to “warm all over (Time), “probing, inquisitive” (The Hollywood Reporter) to “screwball” (Slant Magazine).
“I like anybody who reads something into it that makes my movie look smart.”
“Her”,which goes into limited release Dec. 18 and wide release Jan. 10, didn’t come easily. Whole characters (one played by Oscar winner Chris Cooper) were cut in the final edit, much the way Jonze, who sometimes acts, was pretty much edited out of “Bad Grandpa.” And while he zeroed in on Joaquin Phoenix as his soulful, sad hero, Theodore, the voice Theodore that falls in love with, “Samantha,” started out as actress Samantha Morton. She was on set, the “Samantha” Phoenix responds to in all the flirtatious, funny, and romantic interactions. Then Jonze decided Morton’s voice didn’t deliver all he wanted out of the character, and he brought in Scarlett Johansson.
“We learned a lot about voice acting on ‘Where the Wild Things Are,'” Jonze says. That film had gigantic puppets voiced by actors like James Gandolfini. Despite Morton’s yeoman’s service on the set, what Jonze wanted out of “Samantha” was something only Johansson could bring.
“Scarlett is a force, this woman with a self-possessed charm that’s all about intelligence and wit. When she makes fun of you, it’s a badge of honor. She’s that smart, and that leads to confidence and that comes through in her voice…Having that kind of self-possession was key to her performance, I think. It’s a lot of what makes her sexy and so very attractive, that confident voice.”
Jonze — he was born Adam Spiegel — came to film from the music video universe, and every movie he’s made — hit or miss (“Where the Wild Things Are”) — has been challenging and amusing, romantic with the sting of loneliness. Divorced from Sofia Coppola, linked at various times to actresses Michelle Williams and Rinko Kikuchi, he still describes himself as a “very private person.” “Her”, a film he both wrote and directed, is his biggest statement on loneliness yet. It’s tempting to watch Theodore, who falls in love with a disembodied voice that “gets” him, as autobiography. Is Jonze a lonely man?
“I don’t know how to answer that. No idea. Especially in the context of an interview.
“But I guess, to be fair, there’s a lot of me in all the characters. Lonely, flirtatious, whoever. That’s the hope of writing, that you empathize with all the characters you create. You are both sides, all sides, in every conversation. So I am Theodore. But also Samantha. And everybody else.”

It’s a Hollywood legend that Walt Disney felt some sort of malevolent glee in killing Bambi’s mom, and what that animated death would do to the children who saw it. But that’s only a legend.
P.L. Travers, the woman who wrote the glorious “Mary Poppins,” was a brittle, snobbish martinet and a humorless control freak. And that’s a fact. Stay through the credits of “Saving Mr. Banks” and hear for yourself.
Emma Thompson brings Travers to prickly life in “Saving Mr. Banks,” Disney’s amusingly testy and emotionally rich telling of Walt Disney’s courtly struggles with the dismissive writer as he and his dream factory turned her “Mary Poppins” into one of the most beloved children’s musicals ever.
The courtship — Tom Hanks plays  patient, long-suffering Disney — was not an easy one. She is in the habit of barging into the movie, TV and theme park mogul’s office. He is all charm and informality. He calls her “Pam.”
“It’s so discomfiting to hear a complete stranger call me by my first name.”
We meet Travers in London, her agent telling her she needs the money and must finally sell the screen rights to her most famous book.
“You don’t know what ‘she’ means to me.” “She” meaning Mary Poppins.
Travers flies to Los Angeles and disapproves — of everything. The flight, the scent in the air, the hotel.
“Let’s make something wonderful,” Walt purrs.
“I won’t have her turned into one of your silly cartoons!”
Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”) keeps this courtship center stage, and tells the story of Walt’s figuring out why Travers (real name, Helen Lyndon Goff) is the way she is and what he can do to make this unpleasant and miserable woman happy. That discovery is in the film’s many flashbacks, to young Helen Goff’s childhood in rural Australia, where her overwhelmed, worried mother (Ruth Wilson) was dependent on her tippling father (Colin Farrell, very good), a drinking banker who would rather play with his kids than show up for work.
The flashbacks give the story its pathos. The battles in the early ’60s in Burbank deliver the laughs, and lots of them. Travers came to “supervise” the planned film, basically threatening to back out of the deal over letting Dick Van Dyke co-star in it, over the inclusion of an animated sequence, over the silly, made-up-word songs of the beloved Disney house composers, the Sherman Brothers (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novack, a hoot), and other irritants.
“She doesn’t want the color RED in the film.”
Hanks wears Walt’s moustache and comfortingly plays Walt’s Midwestern drawl (and smoker’s cough). And this always-reliable leading man ably suggests the gentle but firm never take “No” for an answer movie mogul as he lays on the folksy charm to a woman who is, in every way, immune to it.
“I could just eat you up!” he says, and she recoils. “You have got to share ‘her’ with me,” he pleads.
Travers will not have this story, forged in a dark childhood which desperately needed a magical nanny to rescue her and her family “careening towards a (Disney) happy ending, like a kamikaze.”
Thompson plays Travers as a Fairy Godmother who have given up the sweet act to show her Cruella De Vil side. She is hilariously unpleasant, downright rude. But we, like Walt and her Disney-provided driver (Paul Giamatti), can sense that it’s all an act, and that this pose has deep-rooted, painful underpinnings. It’s a great performance and an exclamation point on Thompson’s career.
The film’s a trifle long, especially for a story whose ending, we know, was a happy one. But with “Saving Mr. Banks”, Hancock, Thompson and Hanks find that holiday film sweet spot, blending the poignant with the unpleasant, the grim with the giddy.
It was never going to be “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Reserve that honor for the film that inspired it. But “Saving Mr. Banks” is still one of the best pictures of the year.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including some unsettling images
Cast: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Farrell, Paul Giamatti, Rachel Griffiths, Jason Schwartzman
Credits: Directed by John Lee Hancock, written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith.  A  Walt Disney Studios release.
Running time: 2:05

Bilbo turns tougher and more cunning and “The Hobbit” turns altogether more entertaining in “The Desolation of Smaug,” Peter Jackson’s livelier, funnier and action-packed middle film in his trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s slight delight of a novel.
It looks more like a fantasy — fantastical, with more murk and the otherworldly light of those mass produced Thomas Kinkade paintings. Characters feel more distinct, with Martin Freeman’s Bilbo making the transition from mere passenger on this dwarf’s quest “beneath the Lonely Mountain” to the brains of this motley crew.
And there’s just more going on. Jackson & Co. wisely tamper with the Holy Writ of Tolkien to invent a lady elf and find Orlando Bloom’s elf Legolas a part to play. They’re more concerned with making this all a prelude to “The Lord of the Rings,” so foreshadowing and the suspicions of Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen the Great) step to the fore.
That ups the ante, creates urgency and sets up a love triangle, just one of several elements that become cliffhangers before “The Desolation of Smaug” ends.
The company of quarrelsome dwarfs led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) stumble through Mirkwood as they make their way through spiders, suspicious elves and Lake-town toward the Lonely Mountain, where they have a date with a dragon who wiped out their kingdom and stole a vast treasure. Bilbo, who found this magical ring he refuses to tell them about, saves their biscuits, time and again as they do.
Gandalf, worried about the fact that “The enemy has returned,” leaves them on their own, of course. So they stumble into Wood-elves, which is where Legolas and the lovely-but-deadly Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly of “Real Steel”) enter the story. Tauriel takes a shine to the tallest of the dwarfs. No, it’s not who you think.
Fans of the novel will be impressed with the gloom of Mirkwood (“Fell things creep beneath these trees.”) and the vast complex of the dwarf’s city beneath The Lonely Mountain. Lake-town, the community of men at the base of the mountain long terrorized by the dragon Smaug, is a Teutonic fairytale Venice, a watery city of canals and wood and downtrodden residents, all in leather and dirty shades of brown. Stephen Fry is the town’s dictator, The Master, one of the few “name” players in this semi-obscure cast. Luke Evans is Bard the Boatman, another Lake-town resident destined to play a key part in the third film.

Jackson stages a splendid chase and a few stirring brawls with legions of digitally-augmented goblins. And he lets the dwarfs and their sometimes incredulous hobbit “burglar” be funny. They’re greedy, petty and far more in need of help than they’d ever admit. And Bilbo, given Freeman’s exquisite double-takes, can only shake his head and endure their put-downs and suicidal orders.
Quibbles? The landscapes mostly look like matte paintings, the murk can be a bit too much, Jackson costumes the soldiers of Lake-town in battle gear from the Wicked Witch of the West Collection. And Jackson’s use of the 48 frames per second filming speed does nothing to smooth out digital action beats, which have a jerky video game graphics quality.
The dumbest voice casting stunt ever — Benedict Cumberbatch, utterly unrecognizable as Smaug, the synthetic-voiced digital dragon. The BBC/PBS Sherlock Holmes gets to team up with his Dr. Watson (Freeman), but any voice actor could have done that and we’d have been none the wiser.
And the padded scenes that allowed them to stretch this brief book into three films show.
But “The Desolation of Smaug” is engagingly desolate and absorbingly back-engineered to prefigure “The Lord of the Rings,” a movie that clips along and amuses as it does. Look for Jackson’s cameo in the opening, which sets the tone. Call it another visual triumph for New Zealand’s vision of Middle Earth. Still, the national tourism board shouldn’t start counting the cash from another uptick in visitors, thanks to this. The Land of the Kiwis never looks so digitally desolate.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images
Cast: Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ian McKellen, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans, James Orlando Bloom, Stephen Fry
Credits: Directed by Peter Jackson, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro.  A  Warner Brothers/New Line/MGM release.
Running time: 2:39

A depressed weekend tally at the box office that most are attributing to the Great American Ice Storm might also have a day-long/night long college football “Championship Saturday” element.

“Frozen” held more of its audience than “Catching Fire” and will win the weekend, taking in about $28 million, with “Hunger Games” getting by on $26-27. Both did well but had very steep drop-offs from their heady openers. VERY steep. 70%+

Among the Oscar contenders and potential contenders…

“Philomena” is piling up the cash, gaining hopes that it will be a serious awards contender, and “Dallas Buyers Club” already has enough box office attention to be a real Oscar best actor/supporting actor/picture hopeful already. You’ve got to make at least $5-10 million or so before the awards consideration turns serious, so all this talk about “Before Midnight” seems futile. “All is Lost” hasn’t made much of a dent, either. Even “Nebraska” is failing to make enough of a grubstake to warrant high Best Picture hopes.

The idea is that you’ve got a certain groundswell — at least a tiny one — that merits a best picture push. Oscar’s never been generous about unloading big honors on movies that haven’t performed at least a bit. At least a couple of million people should have seen you — $5-10 million — to give you a chance.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” is earning $89,000 per screen in two city release. It’ll lose that cachet when it opens in the Real America.

I first noticed her as the bartender/cynical mother confessor to Paul Newman in the comedy “Nobody’s Fool.”

And Margo Martindale’s been making a big impression ever since. Like her fellow Actor’s Theatre of Louisville pal KAthy Bates, Martindale has found plenty of work in a business that doesn’t have much use for women who couldn’t make it as cover girls.

She plays Meryl Streep’s sharp-tongued sister in the film of “August: Osage County,” a natural bit of casting. The character’s from Oklahoma, Margo’s from Texas.

Got questions for the Emmy winner? Comment below.

If you wanted to wait a bit to see “Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” so you could miss the rush, this is the weekend for you. It’s fallen off big time. So much that “Frozen” may edge it at the box office in both films’ second week of release. They’re both headed towards a $30 million weekend.

“Frozen” will be well over $100 million by weekend’s end, “Fire” in the $340 range.

The new drama “Out of the Furnace” has Oscar winners Christian Bale and Forest Whitaker and Oscar worthies such as Woody Harrelson and Casey Affleck in it. But weak reviews show it to be the classic first weekend after Thanksgiving opening — low expectations. You don’t open a potential hit (i.e. “good film”) wide the weekend after the blockbusters of Thanksgiving, which will still be sucking all the oxygen out of theaters. “Furnace” looks to reach $6 million, if it’s lucky.

Nice try and all that. But all it will accomplish is pushing “12 Years a Slave” out of the top ten.

Deadline.com reports that the limited release (four theaters) of the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” is giving CBS Films chills. $110,000 weekend. It won’t blow up unless it gains awards momentum (it has only a hint of that).

It’s already doing better than “Nebraska,” the superior film with the better Oscar buzz. But we’ll see.

“Mandela” opened in a few theaters last weekend and the South African icon’s death hasn’t helped the box office for that one. It opens wide next weekend.

For those curious, look down the charts and see how poorly “Oldboy” did and how much “Gravity” looks to finish up with.

It’s not cleaning up at the early awards presentations, so the acclaim for “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen Brothers’ brooding, dark comedy set in the early 1960s folk music scene of Greenwich Village, hasn’t been rapturous or universal. But reviews have been overall, positive. Oscar Isaac may have his breakout role.

“Out of the Furnace,” Scott Cooper’s follow-up to “Crazy Heart,” an all-star Steel Country story of brothers, blood and bare-knuckle brawling, looked as if it was going to collect mostly good reviews. Then reality set in and this muddled mess has settled into middling notices.

I rather liked “Twice Born,” with Penelope Cruz and Emile Hirsch in a romance set against the Serbian/Bosian war. Overlong, but surprising twists finish it off. Poor reviews for that one.

In posters, comic books and in “girlie magazines,” hers was a truly iconic image — jet black hair, bangs, and a beaming, accessible smile that said “girl next door” even if those nude or semi-nude poses screamed “BAD girl next door.”
Bettie Page was a Victoria’s Secret model before there was a Victoria’s Secret, a sex kitten’s sex kitten, posing in lingerie or in the nude for magazines or creepy “camera clubs” where “enthusiasts” would hire her for the day to strip and pose so that they could photograph her.
Yes, she was an “inspiration” to generations of models who came after her (many interviewed her), and to women who realized they could find fame and fortune based on little other than their looks and their willingness to exploit them.
She could have been the first Kardashian.
But as “Bettie Page Reveals All”, the new documentary about her, explains, it was a tough life of contradictions. She was naive yet very smart, religious, and became “fanatically” so in her later years. But she never saw what she was doing as “wrong,” even if society disagreed. And if she lived long enough to see and even profit from her huge impact on the culture, we still don’t believe her suggestion that she had few regrets.
Filmmaker (“Building Bombs”) and Page enthusiast Mark Mori taped interviews with Bettie Mae Page in the late ’90s, ten years before she died. And that allows the candid Page herself to narrate her story — Southern bombshell “discovered” in New York and turned into a fetish film and nude photo “star” of the 1940s and 1950s. Swimsuit shots on postcards, magazine shoots in lingerie and bikinis of her own design, posters, she enjoyed a sort of “notorious” fame, even if she hated that word.
Uninhibited and upbeat, she was “this combination of naughty and innocence,” Hugh Hefner says.
“She smiled with her whole body,” a fan who knew her enthuses.
And she showed off that body in photos and films that were often called “pornographic” in her day, but seem quaint and cute now.
“Bettie Page Reveals All” lets us hear her speak of an unhappy childhood, failed marriages, mental illness and exploitation — but without ever a trace of bitterness. She wouldn’t sit for a filmed interview with Mori. Like Garbo she “closed the door” to preserve the beautiful images of her youth. So Mori covers the chat with other interviews, an endless supply of cheesecake shots, old family photos, and clips from her silent, 16mm blue movies (pretty tame, by today’s standards).
The most recent photo of her is a grim police mugshot from the ’70s. The fact that this is included tips you that the story takes plenty of dark turns.
But Mori, like Page herself, emphasizes the positive and lets us see the playfulness in photos that stirred up such a sexually repressed stink in the buttoned-down 1950s. We learn of the villains in her life, but also the unlikely heroes.
And we’re taken back to a naive era, when the boundaries of “smut” were narrower, when even the images of an unlikely “adult” star (she never did sex films or “real” porn) seem now like good, clean fun.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and graphic nudity throughout
Cast: Bettie Page, Dita Von Tease, Todd Oldham, Hugh Hefner
Credits: Directed by Mark Mori, written by Doug Miller.  A  Music Box release.
Running time: 1:41