Movie Nation

A huge holiday weekend at the box office for “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” and Disney’s latest non-Pixar cartoon.

The princess musical “Frozen” will have cleared $92 million by end of business today (Sunday).

“Hunger Games” cleaned up the rest — some $110 million, maybe a little more, by midnight Sunday.

“Black Nativity” edged up as the weekend went on. A piddly $5 million is all it will manage. So much for that “Best Man” bounce. A harder sell, and America doesn’t remember who Langston Hughes was. Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson, not box office. Alas.

“Oldboy” tanked and did not crack the top 15.

Paul Walker felt the need to remind us that, in between “Fast & Furious” movies, he didn’t have to play second banana to the likes of Vin Diesel.
So sure, he did the occasional offbeat ensemble picture (“Pawn Shop Chronicles”). But he was more drawn to filmswhere he shares the screen with pretty much no one.
“Vehicle 19” had him dashing through South Africa in the wrong rental car.
And “Hours”, a film that opens just days after his tragic death, is just Walker and a big, empty New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a slackly-paced thriller about a father struggling to keep the ventilator his newborn baby is in powered up until they can be rescued or she can breathe on her own.
Wife Abigail (Genesis Rodriguez) goes into labor early, just as Katrina is about to hit New Orleans and St. Mary’s Hospital.
The staff is unhurried and unworried. Even as the winds blow out the windows in the waiting room, there is no chaos, no huge influx of patients and no panic. That’s a nearly fatal flaw in writer-director Eric Heisserer’s handling of this can’t-miss situation. There’s no urgency to it.
As the winds howl (actually, we don’t hear them)  and the lights flicker, the doctor (Yohance Myles) ineptly breaks the news to Nolan (Walker) that A) he has a little girl and B) by the way, we lost your wife.
This may be the worst written scene in an American movie this year. No pathos, no guilt, no worry about a lawsuit that this bungling will do nothing to discourage. The doctors and nurses put the “Easy” in Big Easy and never suggest being overwhelmed enough to leave bodies on the floor outside the morgue.
Nolan staggers into grief and shock. And slowly, VERY slowly, he discovers purpose. He’s lost his wife. He can’t lose their baby.
As the waters rise, and the TV news reports (which Nolan doesn’t see) document the REAL catastrophe of Katrina, the hospital evacuates. But there’s no way to move the baby, and Nolan has to stay and see to it that her ventilator keeps working. The next 48 hours are critical.
“You’ll know you’re out of danger when she starts crying.”
Nolan hallucinates flashbacks with his wife, the way they “met cute” way back when. He talks to the baby, telling her the life story of her parents. He struggles to find batteries and IV fluids, to keep the batteries charged with a hand-cranked generator when the lights go out.
“I can DO this.”
Time passes very slowly when you’ve got no cell service. Will they be rescued? Will the anarchy that spread through the ruined city reach the hospital?
There’s not a lot of suspense until the film’s third act, when the pace picks up and the number of obstacles to their success rise. We never learn what Nolan does for a living, and there are no real “MacGuyver” moments of jury-rigged problem solving. Surprises are few and far between.
Earnest and heartfelt as his performance is, Walker has few “big” scenes, no memorable dialogue and plays up the exhaustion, which tamps down the emotions of his performance. So even an action packed finale can’t rescue this dramatically thin exercise in one-man showmanship. At 96 minutes, “Hours” only seems like it’s hours longer than that.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, violence and drug material
Cast: Paul Walker, Genesis Rodriguez
Credits: Written and directed by Eric Heisserer . A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:36

Damn.

Here’s what I remember about Paul Walker, “Fast & Furious” star, “Eight Below” bro, etc.

He called you “Bro.” You talked to Walker, that’s what he called you. And he seemed to mean it.

He spoke Surfer Speak because he looked and lived the part. And as self-serious as he could be, it was all good. Good films, bad films, all good.

He was 40 years old, not having the easiest time of it, despite having those “Fast/Furious” pictures to pay the bills. I just reviewed his latest film, “Hours”, due out in a week or so. He appears to have one, maybe two pictures in the can.

And now he’s dead, killed in a California car crash in a speedy Porsche driven by a speed-freak friend.

That’s too young, and a chilling reminder that all the physics-defying stunts of those “Fast/Furious” movies cannot compete with real life.

I chatted with him about the sled dog movie, and a couple of other pictures over the years. A nice fellow, lived a bit of the roles he played. Apparently, including the car pictures. But he was a passenger in the Porsche he died in.

Roger Rodas was driving the hopped up Porsche Carrera GT when they hit a pole and the car burst into flames.

He did a lot of cheesy C-movies outside of the “Fast” movies, the gist of my review of “Hours.” He liked not having to share the screen with Vin Diesel. “Vehicle 19” and “Hours” both had that solo performance thing working for them. Paul, in a van in one, all alone in an abandoned hospital with his baby girl during Hurricane Katrina in the other.

He was good in “Pawn Shop Chronicles” last summer. Out there.

And now he’s gone. Shocking. And sad.

In a weak year for animated films, the third best animated feature for kids (after “Croods” and “Despicable Me 2”) is feeding pent-up demand for a watchable cartoon. “Frozen” isn’t an instant classic, but it’ll do. $80 million, Wed–Sunday is the new projection.

“Hunger Game” Catching Fire” will have padded its paddock with another $100 million during that stretch to win Thanksgiving.

“Homefront” is doing a middling $9-11 million. “Black Nativity,” unless it blows up Saturday and Sunday, will have only managed a paltry $3 million. Almost a disaster. The black audience for “Best Man Holiday” hasn’t shown up, the white audience hasn’t shown up, Asian, Latino. Nobody. Not a bad movie, mixed reviews overall. But it’s failing.

“The Book Thief” cracked the top ten and looks to have pulled in @$6 million by Sunday night. Not awful, but not a contender.

Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” is bombing big time. Not on as many screens, but even with a set of tired films to compete against, he’s barely got it into the top 20. Not top ten, top 20. Number 17, with weak per-screen averages. Not his worst film, but in fiddling with the material, he and his soon-to-be-forgotten screenwriter seemed to over-explain and overreach for new ways to be twisted.

Maybe we don’t like revenge pictures for the holidays. Or maybe Spike Lee should take his act to HBO. His features record the past ten years has been dismal.

A $23 million Wed. means that “Catching Fire” has plenty of fuel for a second weekend at the box office.

But Disney’s “Frozen” looks to bring in the kids and families by the droves. A $17 million Wed. points to a huge holiday weekend for that one. As big as “Tangled”? Maybe not. $60-70 million.

Box Office Mojo says “Black Nativity” could manage $19 million over five days. And “Homefront” will add up to $13-15.

Box Office Guru is leaning towards lower numbers for all  three — “Frozen,” which is getting good audience response scores, $65 by Sunday night, “Homefront” under $10 and “Black Nativity” around $13. Not learned anything from “Best Man Holiday,” I see.

Spike Lee’s take on “Oldboy” is opening on under 600 screens. Bad reviews or no, it is predicted to manage $4 million this weekend.

With all the idiotic new-to-releasing posturing by FilmDistrict over Spike Lee’s “Oldboy,” forcing critics to sign embargo agreements, etc., you knew that old boy had botched it.

And sure enough, reviews for the remake of Chan-wook Park’s Korean mystery-thriller have been weak. It earns points for being, if anything, more twisted than the original. But this script over-explains, adds prologue and epilogue touches and amps up the violence and kinkiness, botching the mysteriousness of it all.  Screenwriter and director didn’t get why it worked in the first place.

Disney earns a pass on “Frozen,” a CG animated musical that benefits from great voice talents, cute, kid-friendly comedy and weak story and forgettable tunes. As with “Hunger Games,” the reviews all being mixed to positive tend to hide the fact that it’s far from a classic.

The poorly reviewed Jason Statham’s “Homefront” is solid enough, and baldly predictable, a formula action picture straight out of the ’80s. Sly Stallone adapting the script had something to do with that. I think I liked them better when Stallone was going around saying Rocky or Rambo “could kick that British guy’s” you know what. They made up and have been “Expendable” pals ever since. James Franco isn’t the strongest villain, either.

“Black Nativity” suffers a little from the same things “Frozen” has working against it. The songs — the new ones — in this adaptation of Langston Hughes’ resetting of the Joseph/Mary/Baby Jesus story in modern day Harlem, are forgettable. Coming after “Best MAn Holiday,” Which ALSO climaxes with Stevie Wonder’s “Always,” doesn’t help. But as faith-based holiday pictures go, it’s a winner. You will be surprised at actors singing whom you never would have known could sing. Two Oscar winners in the cast, a nice setting, wonderful pathos-laden payoff. Not great, not bad.

So many movies about “The Beat Generation,” so few that have the rhythm.

“Kill Your Darlings” joins “Howl” and “On the Road” and “Big Sur” in the recent run of offbeat and off-the-beat indie films taking aim at that post-World War II literary revolution. It’s sort of a prequel to all the rest, the movie about how the would-be literary lions whom Allen Ginsberg labeled “The New Vision” met, fed each other drugs and fed into each other’s manias in the New York of the early 1940s.

Yes, The Big One –WWII– was going on overseas. But young Ginsberg, played by Daniel Radcliffe, was off to Columbia University to find his voice and take his place alongside that earlier rhyme-and-meter eschewing revolutionary, Walt Whitman.

And while he was at it, he’d check out the Harlem jazz scene, the Greenwich Village gay bars and whatever hallucinogens trust fund baby William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster, serpentine and stoned) passed along.

“Darlings” is about a great love of Ginsberg’s, the lazy rich bisexual flirt Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), a future editor who lets his infatuated lover David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) write his school papers and provide him with booze even as “Lu Lu” dismisses the older man’s attentions.

Carr is one of those figures in history doomed to be not a creator nor even really a muse. He’s just a hip, happening fellow who wants all the cool kids to hang with him, the would-be instigator of a revolution.

“This is just the beginning, you know,” he says, several times in several different ways. “It’ll be us together, at the beginning.” And the lovesick Ginsberg takes it to heart.

The hyper Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston, spot on) shows up, a merchant seaman returned to his Columbia haunts to bar hop, dig jazz and infuriate his lady love, Edith (Elizabeth Olsen).

They raid the sacred stacks of Columbia’s library, putting banned writers like Henry Miller on display in place of Beowulf and and a First Folio of Hamlet. They drink and drink and play at sharing suicide pacts. The lads do speed and take a “First thought, best thought” ethos to their writing. Kerouac is their hero, because he’s already got “a million words” under his belt. Punctuation? Not so much. Were they good words? Not yet.

It’s an “Allen in Wonderland” view of this Beat pre-history, a giddy gay man’s coming of age (explicit sex, of course) framed within a grisly death that opens the film and is explained in the third act.

First time feature director John Krokidas shoots everyone in loving, sensual close-ups. Yes, Radcliffe makes a splendid, swooning homosexual (Ginsberg is always portrayed as such), though there’s not a lot of chemistry with DeHaan. Foster has what always turns out to be the chewiest role in such tales — the drug addicted sage Burroughs, who went on to write “Naked Lunch.”

Krokidas runs footage backwards, now and then, aiming for a jumbled, jangly movie capturing the energy of the speed-freak Beats. But the movie is one long sag, lacking the momentum of “On the Road” and the soulful moments that “Howl” managed.

It’s more a half-hearted Ginsberg bio (David Cross plays his poet father, Jennifer Jason Leigh his mentally ill mother) than a “How they learned the Beat” piece. And for all its character’s talk of how they will “make the world wider” with their work, it’s too scattered and narrow in focus. There just aren’t enough scenes of Allen testing his teacher (John Cullum) or samples of that writing to give this film the feel of history written on Benzedrine. Which is what was called for.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language, drug use and brief violence .
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C. Hall, Jack Huston, Ben Foster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Elizabeth Olsen
Credits: Directed by John Krokidas, scripted by Austin Bunn and John Krokidas. A Sony Classics release.
Running time: 1:44

The problem with remakes is that you can’t “un-see” the original film. And that’s especially true of Chan-Wook Park’s searing 2003 hit, “Oldboy.”
The new Spike Lee/Hollywood version deviates in a lot of minor and a few important ways. But try as you might, a viewer who cannot shake memories of the righteous and horrific violence and the shattering twists of the original.
It’s still the story of a man drugged, kidnapped and locked up, with no human contact, for 20 years. He still gets out, furious and foaming at the mouth for revenge.
But this new “Oldboy” has a much longer prologue, suggesting  that Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) is enough of a drunken lout to actually deserve his life-altering fate. And there’s a Hollywood style spoon-fed epilogue that goes beyond merely “explaining” the reasons for what came before.
It doesn’t so much ruin the movie and misunderstand certain fundamentals about why the first version worked.
Joe drinks on the job and then, in an insane touch, comes-on to a big client’s wife. Then he wakes up in a room with no phone, a rotating painting of an outdoor scene rather than a window, and a TV which shows him the decades passing him by in his solitary confinement — the Clinton years, the Bush era, Obama’s election and second inauguration.
He has been framed for the murder of his hated ex-wife. He tries to atone for this in scores of unsent letters to his daughter Mia.
“I deserve your hate,” he scribbles.
And in between meals (always Chinese dumplings), gassings and shaves, he goes mad.
Then, just as he’s about to make a break for it, he’s released. That’s when the revenge starts.
Lee, working from a Mark Protosevich script, gleefully dives into the violence and depravity here. He’s been waiting decades to torture Samuel L. Jackson (a mysterious mohawked figure). And he re-stages the epic hammer brawl from the first “Oldboy” with brio and brute force.
Elizabeth Olsen plays the kindly nurse who tends to Joe’s wounds after each knife fight and teaches him how to use this newfangled iPhone’s applications to help him work through his list of suspects — the who and maybe the why of his confinement.
It’s film that embraces ugliness — vomit and blood and bodily functions — “Oldboy” does a better job of showing the victim track down his tormenter, but a much worse job at teasing out suspense and intrigue as he does.
Olsen’s beguilingly sexy empathy plays well, and Brolin wholly commits to the part even if he’s never been made to look more slovenly and homely on the screen. Lee peppers the supporting cast with black characters actors and has his cinematographer toss in a few of Lee’s trademark camera tricks.
It was a dubious enterprise all along, remaking a fairly infamous movie that depends a lot of its surprises. If anything, the new version is even more twisted, with Sharlto Copley, Pom Klementieff, Michael Imperioli and Max Casella filling in around the edges.
But Lee, in a sort of humorless send-up of Tarantino, substitutes kinky for mystery, explicit sex and violence for sex and violence with real shock value. When it comes to this remake, you plainly can’t teach an oldboy like Lee new tricks.

MPAA Rating: R for strong brutal violence, disturbing images, some graphic sexuality and nudity, and language  .
Cast: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Sharlto Copley
Credits: Directed by Spike Lee, written by Mark Protosevich, based on the Korean film and manga comic. A FilmDistrict release. 
Running time: 1:34