Movie Nation

Here on the cusp of Thanksgiving, various Oscar races are shaping up as the field narrows and potential contenders either join the mix or fall by the wayside.

Best actor seems like a Redford, McConaughey, Dern, Ejiofor, Hanks and possibly Forrest Whitaker field. Dern might be the odd man out. Oscar Isaac could sneak in there, but “Inside Llewyn Davis” isn’t a best picture contender. Not in my book.

Actress has Bullock, Emma Thompson and Cate Blanchett and whoever else can hold a candle to those three Oscar winners. Seen “Philomena,” not sure if it ranks as top drawer Judi Dench.

McConaughey could land a best supporting nomination, too. Maybe they’ll pitch “Mud” that way. Sam Rockwell in “The Way, Way Back,” maybe Stacy Keach or Will Forte in “Nebraska. ” Why not Tom Hanks or Jason Schwartzman from “Saving Mr. Banks”? Paul Giamatti has a sweet, undemanding role in that one. Could a make-good nomination be in order for him? Tobey Maguire in “Gatsby.” Spitballing, here.

Best supporting actress is more “Well, who can we remember?” than usual. June Squibb in “Nebraska” kills. Carey Mulligan, maybe, for “Inside Llewyn Davis,” otherwise, drawing blanks there.

And best picture?

“Gravity,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” “Saving Mr. Banks,” “Captain Phillips,” maybe “Nebraska,” “The Butler,” “Mud,” possibly “Blue Jasmine” (uh, no) or “Inside Llewyn Davis” (again, less likely), maybe even “The Great Gatsby,” a movie nobody is talking about but had the necessary requirements — big stars, great performances, a hit and prestige.

“August Osage County” may have nominations, but the best picture buzz is nil.

A couple of friends and a few Oscar bloggers are talking up “Before Midnight.” Long shot, worthy film.

“American Hustle” and “Wolf of Wall Street” are wild cards, at this point. I don’t see “The Butler” as being best picture worthy, but it still gets talked up that way. A bit less than this summer. Same with “Blue Jasmine,” which seems like a Cate contender, but not a best picture one.

“Her” I see today. A long shot? Longer than “Walter Mitty”? Perhaps.

Forget the eight forgettable tunes and Disney’s “Frozen” finds a pleasant home in the ranks of Disney’s animated “princess” musicals. The tunes may place it closer to “Tangled” than “The Little Mermaid,” but there’s wit and whimsy in this 53rd Disney cartoon, a distant cousin of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale, “The Snow Queen.”
Broadway star Idina Menzel voices Elsa, the girl with the gift of ice about her, cursed with an X-Men like ability to freeze things. It’s great for entertaining her baby sister.
“Do the magic, do the magic!” little Anna insists. Until it all goes wrong.
Which is why she can’t play with Anna any more, even after Anna grows up to have the voice of Kristen Bell.
Elsa’s powers reach the point where she’s a danger to their kingdom of Arendel. But fleeing to the North Mountain won’t help, and Anna sets her mind to venturing out to find this Snow Queen, bringing her home and lifting the curse. Because “only an act of true love can lift the curse.”
Bell plays Anna as a girl who blurts, giving every line reading a cute teenage girl/Christopher Walken cadence, especially “Wait, WHAT?” Bell also sings, for those who don’t know her background, and more than holds her own with the formidable Menzel (“Wicked”, “Enchanted”).
A moving montage early in the film, shows Anna’s enduring connection to Elsa, even after they’re separated because of Elsa’s dangerous powers. It’s set as a duet, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”
Josh Gad is an enchanted, chatty snowman named Olaf who “loves warm hugs,” and who sings an ode to a season he’ll never know, “In Summer.”
“Forgettable” may be too harsh a label to slap on the tunes by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (“Winnie the Pooh”, with “Avenue Q” and “Book of Mormon” connections), though it’ll take the entire Disney indoctrination machine to make even the best songs — “For the First Time in Forever”, “Let it Go” — stick in the Disney songbook.
But the co-directors, “Surf’s Up” vet Chris Buck and “Wreck-It Ralph” writer Jennifer Lee, make sure the sight gags work and the jokes — cracks about yellow snow and the like — land laughs. A goofy, dog-like reindeer hangs around with the hunk, Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) who helps Anna in her quest.
Alan Tudyk voices a fine, foppish if generic villain.
And the magical 3D production design will make you forget all about those earlier movies about the prehistoric squirrel and his wooly mammoth pals.
“Frozen” isn’t on a par with Disney’s best musicals or even its best recent animated offerings outside of the Pixar banner. “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Tangled” were both better entertainments.
But if they’re determined to find a new princess and make her sing, they could have done far worse than “Frozen.” And thanks to the delightfully retro new Mickey Mouse 3D short “Get a Horse” that precedes it, this “nice try” heralds bigger, more inventive things to come.


MPAA Rating: PG for some action and mild rude humor
Cast: The voices of Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Josh Gad, Alan Tudyk, Ciaran Hinds, Jonathan Groff

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, inspired by “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen. A Walt Disney release. 
Running time: 1:42

The Jason Statham vehicle “Homefront” is such a generic tough-guy-against-the-odds ’80s style actioner that you’d swear Sly Stallone starred in it. He did, back in the day. Or versions of it.
This one, Stallone just scripted.
From the set-up — ex DEA agent who just wants “to be left in peace” in a Meth-mad town where they just can’t let sleeping DEA agents lie — to the finale, it’s all recycled and over-familiar, a formula picture right down to the line ex-agent John Broker’s 10-year-old daughter (Izabela Vidovic) cries about her dead mother.
“I miss her so much my stomach hurts!”
But let’s get to the GOOD part. Friends, you have never seen actress/bombshell Kate Bosworth like this, not in a movie. Too often filmed in girlfriend-in-swimsuit roles, Bosworth (“Blue Crush” “Superman Returns”) goes shrieking redneck harpy here, a regular Maury Povich/Duck Dynasty nightmare essay in trash. Gaunt, with dark sockets for eyes, she’s the methhead mom enraged when her chubby bully son gets his butt kicked by Broker’s daughter Maddie in her first weeks at Rayville (Louisiana) Elementary.
“I want an APOLOGY!” she screams, in between profanities. Broker, new to town after a lifetime of undercover work in nearby New Orleans, doesn’t get that.
“It’s a bit like Appalachia,” the pretty schoolmarm (Rachelle Lefevre) explains. “Feuds. They still exist.”
Indeed they do. That incident throws Broker into the field of fire of local meth mogul Gator, played with not quite enough of a demonic wink by James Franco.
You see the problem with “Homefront” right off. As good as Bosworth is (her character is Gator’s sister), as reliable as Statham always manages to be in these butt-kickers, as bracing as it is to see Winona Ryder as a meth moll gone to seed, the idea that Franco, even with legions of henchmen, could be anything other than a minor nuisance to Statham is laughable. Franco’s performance, which starts off broad and drawling and amusingly cruel, seems to reflect that. A good actor, he literally shrinks in Statham’s presence as the movie unfolds.
Beatdowns so intense they make you avert your eyes, threats to kid and her cat and the hero’s amusingly likable sidekick (Omar Benson Miller), all standard issue in this sort of film. Ryder is perfectly cast as the high mileage biker chick who figures Gator is the business and rough sex partner she’s been working toward all these years, and Clancy Brown is spot-on as the see-no-evil sheriff.
Director Gary Fleder (“The Runaway Jury,””Imposter”) never lets things fall below competent. There just isn’t enough to work with, here. Hero and villain are as thinly drawn as in any Arnold/Sly pic of the ’80s. We have a right to expect more, even from an actor who chooses his roles based on who the fight choreographer is.
But Meth Mama Bosworth? There’s a movie in her, and a series. The junkie-thin arms and tallow-colored skin are just the start of her commitment to the part. She’s so strung out that we can’t wait to see what happens to her teeth.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug content and brief sexuality..
Cast: Jason Statham, James Franco, Kate Bosworth, Izabela Vidovic , Winona Ryder, Clancy Brown
Credits: Directed by Gary Fleder, scripted by Sylvester Stallone, based on a Chuck Logan novel. A Millennium/Open Road release. 
Running time: 1:40

“Black Nativity” is a musical updating of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ play, based loosely — very loosely — on the way Jesus of Nazareth entered the world in a manger in Bethlehem. And once it finds its footing, this Harlem variation on the Nativity story manages to be sweet enough to touch people the way this “Greatest Story Ever Told” always has.
Credit the cast, especially the supporting players, and a sympathetic handling of the material by writer-director Kasi Lemmons (“Talk to Me” and “Eve’s Bayou”). They ensure that the sentimental never turns maudlin, and that even the sermonizing goes down lightly.
Jacob Latimore is Langston, a Baltimore teen who narrates his biography in rhymed couplets, but whose mom (Jennifer Hudson) is about to lose their home.
“Ain’t no miracles,” the kid figures out. “Just money.
Mom packs him off to live with her estranged parents, a preacher (Forest Whitaker) and his wife (Angela Basset). Rev. Cobbs could have been just a judgmental stiff, mistrusting the 15 year-old who is no sooner off the bus than he’s robbed and accused of robbing someone else. In the masterful Whitaker’s hands, the Reverend is an emotional man betraying moments of guilt and a need to connect with this grandson he’s never known. The character could not be more different from Whitaker’s turn as “The Butler,” a proud, Afro-centric Harlem preacher who fills their Harlem brownstone with art and reminders of and Harlem’s African American past.
“I like to remember where we’ve come from.”
Bassett gives a busier performance, the very picture of a grandmother trying too hard to connect with the boy in the hopes he’ll lead to a reunion with his mother.
Tyrese Gisbon has his best role in over a decade, playing a street thug who nicknames the kid “Lunch Money” while they’re in jail, whose life reconnects with Langston’s throughout the story.
The great Vondie Curtis Hall is a wise and streetwise pawn broker who says he knew Langston’s dad. And Mary J. Blige plays an angelic parishioner at Rev. Cobb’s Holy Resurrection Baptist Church.
Langston has shown up on the eve of Christmas, and that church is famous for its “Black Nativity” pageant — a Kwanzaa Meets New Testament spectacle that the kid, hung up on coming up with mom’s mortgage money, isn’t interested in.
“Church tonight? You trippin.’ I don’t DO church.”
This being a musical, and one featuring the Oscar winning Hudson, characters break into song, lamenting their lives, their lost childhoods or lost child. The music, by Laura Karpman and Raphael Saadiq, is forgettably generic modern soul with hints of hip hop. But it is nicely integrated into the story and the production uses polished singers Hudson and Latimore to buttress the less-known-for-their-singing Bassett and Whitaker. Gibson more than holds his own, and Blige is just — Blige.
The best sequence is the most fanciful and poetic, with young Langston imagining Harlem as modern day Judea, with Times Square electronic billboards advertising “Visit Gomorrah” and “Bank of Judea.” Now, as then, a pregnant Mary (Maria, Grace Gibson) and Joseph (Jo-Jo, Luke James) can find “no room at the inn.”
The sermon is never less than obvious and gets downright heavy-handed, but Lemmons wisely keeps the film brisk and brief, not allowing it to overstay its welcome. It may not reach the status of “holiday classic,” but the high-minded “Black Nativity” is still a modestly entertaining and uplifting version of a “greatest story” that has proven as malleable as it is timeless.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, language and a menacing situation.
Cast: Jacob Latimore, Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Angela Basset, Tyrese Gibson, Mary J. Blige
Credits: Written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, based on the Langston Hughes play. A Fox Searchlight release. 
Running time: 1:34

Homer’s “The Odyssey” was the inspiration behind the Coen brothers’ “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.” And that ancient epic provides the loose structure and coded, contemplative essence of their latest, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a brooding folk-music-on-the-brink-of Dylan period piece built around a heroic quest.
Not that “heroic” leaps to mind when watching Llewyn, beautifully underplayed by Oscar Isaac. He may sleep on a succession of friends’ and acquaintances’ sofas and not be able to afford even a winter coat. But at least this folk music failure is doing more than merely “existing,” which is what the “squares” of 1961 did.
Llewyn is a soulful, melancholy member of that ever-so-brief folk “craze” that peaked with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary making their marks in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
“If it was never new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song.”
Llewyn has a new “High Fidelity” LP to his name and no one is buying it. He plays a Greenwich Village “basket joint,” where if he’s lucky, his rapt, turtlenecked audience will drop enough in the passed basket to allow him to eat, smoke and hang on another day.
And from the minute he leaves the stage and is subjected to a back-alley beat-down, we know Llewyn is his own worst enemy, a chilly embittered jerk who keeps making wrong-headed decisions and keeps wondering why things don’t work out for him.
He was half of an up and coming folk duo, but the partner is gone. He’s mooching off friends, slept with Jean (Carey Mulligan), even though he’s pals with Jim (Justin Timberlake). And Jim and Jean are a folk duo, on and off stage.
Llewyn is  rude to his sister (Jeanine Serralles), has an abortionist on standby in case of “accidents,” and is little value to his small-time record label. And he keeps seeing earnest, WASPy, clear-voiced newcomers get the breaks he’s never had.
But he’s trying to do better. The cat of some friends gets out as he’s leaving their apartment, and he totes it all over New York, waiting for the chance to give it back. He wants to make peace with a furious, foul-mouthed Jean (Mulligan has never show us this). Because whatever he wants to call it, this unhappy life is just existing and it is not working out.
The Coens, perhaps inspired by the life story of their fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, impeccably re-create that era, from the seedy venues to the perpetual winter of the best folk music record covers. Davis (“10 Years”) performs several folk classics in their entirety, another layer of “authentic” in a movie all-too concerned with that.
But “Inside Llewyn Davis” goes nowhere, even when Llewyn joins a dope-addled jazz player (John Goodman) and his “valet” (Garrett Hedlund) on a cross-country drive straight out of “On the Road” — which starred Garrett Hedlund. It’s like the too-perfectly groomed “down and out” Llewyn is living through a Coens’ version of purgatory. The movie is so “interior,” it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens — a studio session with Jim (Timberlake) cutting a parody ditty about John Glenn, or a Goodmanesque rant about “real music” (jazz, where “we play twelve notes, ALL the notes on the scale”) vs. folk.
“Folk singer? I thought you said you were a musician.”
A few fine performances (F. Murray Abraham plays a folk impresario) burnish a lot of seemingly random scenes, many of which place choices in front of Llewyn, who is sure to make the wrong one. And with all the brooding that goes on “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the movie, which never has much momentum, stops cold with every bit of perfectly-recreated music on a stage.

MPAA Rating:  R for language including some sexual references
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham
Credits: Written and by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. A CBS Films release. 
Running time: 1:46

A huge Thursday night and Friday led to a big Saturday and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” now looks like a record breaking (for November) opening weekend.

$160 million. Very impressive. Predictions were in the $170-180 range, but the film isn’t in 3D and it’ll have a nice long run. And it did best the last “Twilight” movie to take the record for November openings.

That’s almost as much as “Thor” The Dark World” has earned in three weeks of release.

“The Best Man Holiday” did another $12 million and is over $50.

“Delivery Man” did $8. It bombed.

“12 Years a Slave” and “Dallas Buyers Club” are still in the top ten.

“Bad Grandpa” will clear $100 million by Thanksgiving, “Free Birds” will hit $50 before “Frozen” chases it off screens.

“Gravity” will clear $250 domestic by the time Thanksgiving weekend is done.

“The Book Thief”, the new World War II/Holocaust film based on the Markus Zusak novel, isn’t a children’s movie.
“Though it is about children, during the war,” says its star, 13 year-old French Canadian actress Sophie Nelisse. But “movies like this are important to help people remember who fought, who died, and so that it doesn’t happen again. I hope kids see it.”
Director Brian Percival notes that “It’s a PG-13, and I think that’s about right. Some younger children have seen it, though maybe they didn’t understand it as an adult would. But 13 and upwards seems the right age to see it.”
And it’s not really “a Holocaust movie, if that’s even a genre,” says Percival. “I didn’t set out to make a film for a cultural elite. I set out to make a populist film…The audience that would see such a genre film already know all about the Holocaust.”
What the film turns out to be is an earnest effort to bring back both the context and the consequences of growing up in Nazi Germany, both for children who know little of this history and adults who may have tuned it out or forgotten it.
At its center is Liesel, the illiterate young girl whose communist parents send her to live with strangers (Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson) in 1930 Germany. Liesel (Nelisse) learns to read and to love books just as a regime that burns books and murders millions solidifies its hold over Germany.
“In Liesel’s day, books had the symbolism of words,” the author, Markus Zusak says. “Hitler never fired a gun, but he destroyed whole cultures with words and propaganda and words of hate.
In this story, you’ve got a girl who is stealing the words back, and writing her own story.”
Books have both literal and symbolic in the movie, as Liesel’s first act of defiance against the Nazis and the tide of public opinion is to rescue a book from the ashes of a bonfire, a bonfire she attended with everyone else in her town.
“It was weird being there, seeing all the swastika flags, seeing the extras, who had a kind of shame in their eyes at what they were seeing,” says Nelisse, who won Canada’s Genie Award for her performance in the drama “Monsieur Lazhar” a couple of years back. “It felt awful throwing a book into a fire, and thinking that there were people who agreed with that, hearing speeches about why books should be burned. It is hard for me to imagine that time.”
Getting “into character” for the film had one short-cut for her — a Hitler Youth uniform.
“We’re making this movie, and we’re having so much fun doing it,” Nelisse remembers. “My character is sweet and kind of feisty. And then I have to put that uniform on. I’m acting, I know. But wearing that, with Nazi swastikas on it? It felt like I was agreeing with what was happening, with those people.”
Percival, the “Downton Abbey” director with a yen for period perfectionism, says “we saw photographs of three year-olds in Hitler Youth uniforms. That struck me of the ultimate expression of how innocence can be corrupted.
“You see Liesel and Rudy (Liesel’s best friend) and they’re just a couple of cute kids. They don’t understand what this is all about. I am sure that many children at that age didn’t understand it either. It was just the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts to them.
“We see an image of a child in a Hitler Youth uniform, it really gives us a conflict in our minds. We know one is intrinsically good and the other is intrinsically evil. That contrast I tried to bring out as many times as possible.”
The moste telling contrast for Percival was a Hitler Youth choir scene.
“To a non-German speaker, that song, anthem, sounds lovely, angelic almost. Then you read the subtitles and realize how anti-Semitic and how hateful it is. The reality of what that song signals, Kristallnacht, genocide, a country being led to war, is what comes next.”
It was never going to be an easy sell, but the tightrope walk “The Book Thief” takes has earned it mixed reviews, with The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr summing up the ways many critics found it lacking — “too frightening for kids, and too childish for grownups.”
But Nelisse still hopes her peers let themselves learn a little history and check it out.
“The Holocaust, World War II, they really weren’t that long ago,” she says. “And it really does seem people are starting to forget what happened.”

(Roger Moore’s review of “The Book Thief” is here)