Movie Nation

In a future where families are encouraged to not over breed, Ender Wiggin is “a third,” the third child born to his family. “An extra.”
Skinny and pale, he is bullied at school. But he’s been observed, singled out by the state. How he problem solves during video games, how he copes with bullies — his cunning, ruthlessness and measured compassion — are assets.
“The world’s smartest children are our best hope,” military leaders tell each other. And Ender (Asa Butterfield) is such a “best hope,” chosen for Battle School, selected to be a leader because Young Adult fiction desperately needs another “chosen one.”
“Ender’s Game,” based on Orson Scott Card’s 1980s novel, is a glossy, humorless march through a future where kids are our best warriors, able to multi-task combat duties and reason out strategies for battle success in an instant. Card’s military meritocracy, on the screen, plays like “Starship Troopers” without a tongue-in-cheek touch to its fascism, “The Last Starfighter” without the wit.
But in the hands of South African Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) the story’s moral quandary, about kids learning to kill before they learn compassion, stands front and center.
“Game” follows Ender into Battle School, where his ability to master the skills of combat command are on display at every turn.
“We need a Julius Caesar, a Napoleon,” growls Col. Graff (Harrison Ford).
They’re all still children, argues the yin to his yang, Major Anderson (Viola Davis).
Indeed they are — martial, militaristic kids culled from the population, formed into teams and trained for battle in weightless simulations where they learn tactics that will serve them in Earth’s war for survival against the Formics, bug-eyed space-travelers who almost conquered Earth decades before.
Ender is not the heartless killer his older brother (Jimmy ‘Jax’ Pinchak) is, not the empathetic pacifist his sister (Abigail Breslin) turned out to be. Threatened by a rival, he out thinks, out negotiates or outfights each one in his turn.
Butterfield (“Hugo”) makes a fine all-business soldier-in-the-making, but barely suggests a mind that is broadening in spite of the narrow, kill-or-be-killed focus of his training. Moises Arias and Hailee Steinfeld are well-cast as part of this distinctly multi-cultural school of the best and the brightest, and the movie perks up quite a bit when Ben Kingsley shows up as that last-stage-in training instructor. Performances up to that point feel uniformly flat.
But even taking into account the limitations of an “introduction to a franchise” film, “Ender’s Game” is pretty stiff. Shiny spaceships, vivid space battles (simulations for the trainees) and kids who don’t quite fill out their jumpsuits and cool combat games are all fine. With all the bullying and kids turned into killers stuff, the film never feels less than heavy handed.
So sure, it’s good-looking, cautionary and clever enough. But there’s not much in this “Game” that you’d call heartfelt, thrilling or fun.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for some violence, sci-fi action and thematic material.
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, Ben Kingsley
Credits: Written and directed by Gavin Hood, based on the Orson Scott Card novel. A Summit release.
Running time: 1:54

A sullen, angst-ridden and hormonal teen struggles to filter a hostile world through the voices in her head in “How I Live Now.” Funny that Saoirse Ronan decided to take, basically, another crack at “The Host” in tackling the lead in this film of the Meg Rosoff novel.
“How I Live” is another dystopia about a world under siege and a teen-age girl trying to survive war and find a little love along the way. But this Kevin “Last King of Scotland” MacDonald film scores over the earlier Stephenie Meyer mess by being more plausible in every measurable way, with Ronan a much more recognizably real teen.
Elizabeth, she is named, a vision in pale-faced scowls and torn fishnet stockings. A New Yorker, she’s come to the UK from America to visit her step-cousins, the British children of her mother’s sister. And she makes friends, right off the plane.
“Nobody calls me ‘Elizabeth.’ It’s ‘Daisy.'”
“Are you a vampire?” tiny cousin Piper (Harley Bird) wants to know.
“No. I don’t do wheat. Or cow cheese.”
Sullen Daisy does her darnedest to not fit in, which is easy, since 14 year-old Isaac (Tom Holland) was the one who drove the family’s ancient Land Rover to pick her up at the airport and then delivered her to their rural, self-sufficient farm in the idyllic English countryside. Talk about culture clash.
Aunt Penn (Anna Chancellor) is a well-connected peace activist, so naturally, the place feels like a hippy commune — all farm animals, organic vegetables and dishes left unwashed because it’s summer and the swimmin’ hole is just too inviting.
Darned if there isn’t an Edmond (George MacKay) to tempt Daisy and distract her. And with Aunt Penn suddenly summoned to Geneva, now’s her chance.
But about all those soldiers she didn’t notice as she got off the plane, those TV news reports they’re all ignoring? Seems somebody has The Bomb, somebody uses it and Britain falls under martial law as a defense against internal terrorists (ill-defined) who might control this corner of the island or that one.
The “Now” in “How I Live Now” is about life under those conditions — forced re-locations, forced labor to feed the country, not unlike what happens in civil wars in other parts of the world. How would a spoiled American teen react to those conditions?
The film is full of absolutely chilling moments, creatively suggesting — not showing — a distant nuclear bomb blast, the horrors that await civilians in the power of uniformed, trigger-happy men with guns. The splendid Ronan skillfully handles Daisy’s arc, from self-involved and delicate to steely, and ferociously committed to this family she just met.
But “How I Live Now” is entirely too brief and too front-loaded to fully engage. Too much time is spent, pre-collapse, for us to feel the deep bond Daisy and Edmond form. Young Mr. MacKay has the same problem that the two male leads of “The Host” faced. He’s just not in Ronan’s league when it comes to developing empathy, creating a feeling of romance beyond mere teens-in-heat.
And too little time is spent in the dystopia that details “How I Live Now” after the fall. The film stumbles into a cross-country odyssey that dominates its last third.
That is fascinating, but not properly set up, much like the film itself. “How I Live Now” skips over the “How,” loses itself in the “I” and never lets the pathos of “Live Now” pay off.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with explicit violence and somewhat explicit sex
Cast:Saoirse Ronan, George MacKay, Tom Holland and Anna Chancellor. 
Credits: Directed by Kevin MacDonald, written by Jeremy Brock, Tony Grisoni and Penelope Skinner, based on the Meg Rosoff novel. A Magnolia release. 
Running time: 1:41

It’s “kind of a nothing, a throw-away moment” in the middle of the new big screen comedy “Last Vegas.” But for just a single short scene, director Jon Turteltaub stuffed five Oscar winners into a minivan, bickering, joshing around and glorying in each other’s presence.
“A LOT of giggling, that day,” Turteltaub says.
“That was my favorite day,” gushes Mary Steenburgen, 60, who won her Oscar for “Melvin and Howard.” “We just sat in there telling our best movie stories, talking about people we knew in common, first getting to New York, our first jobs. If you’re going to be thrown into a cab crammed with that many people, I can’t imagine four more delightful companions to share the experience with. Those men!”
“Those men” are Oscar winners Morgan Freeman (“Million Dollar Baby”), Kevin Kline (“A Fish Called Wanda”), Robert DeNiro (“The Godfather””Raging Bull”) and Michael Douglas (“Wall Street”). And yeah, they were having a good time.
“I think what you see on the screen is the security of actors who know who they are, who have been doing this a long time and enjoy and are not threatened by other good actors,” says Douglas, 69. “They put their arms around them, embrace them and thank their lucky stars that they’re finally working with them.”
Call it the cinematic equivalent of “The Dream Team” — five Oscar winners, comedy veterans and actors flirting the with the phrase “legendary,” all gathered for a comedy about old age, old friends, old grievances and last chance romance in Las Vegas.
But “Last Vegas” was a project fraught with peril. There’s not a shrinking violet in that cast. DeNiro, 70, has a scary screen persona, and Freeman, 76, isn’t known for suffering fools gladly. Kline, who turned 66 last month, is quite shy off camera, and Douglas has been and continues to be a producer, a guy who knows how to throw his weight around to get what he wants.
“People think The Dream Team head coach’s job is to go win the gold medal,” Turteltaub (“National Treasure”) says with a chuckle. “But the head coach is thinking his job is to not get fired.”
Douglas laughs at that ,and suggests that the best posturing and posing on the set might have come from the director’s chair.
“Jon’s got this self-effacing thing, where he always makes you feel like you want to HELP him. He fools everybody into trying harder. So we did.”
For Douglas, that included recognizing when “You’ve got actors having a love-fest,” which prompted him to sidle up to a producer and say, “‘My advice is to stay out of the way. Don’t try and control things. Just let it happen.'”
“Last Vegas” is about four childhood pals, now retirees, who gather in Las Vegas for the bachelor party and wedding of the Malibu member of their “Rat Pack” (Douglas). He’s about to marry, for the first time and to a much younger woman. They meet a former lawyer trying her hand at lounge singing (Steenburgen). Gambling, partying and sexual hijinks ensue — a few  “HangOver-the-Hill” gags. And characters mend fences, take stock and come to conclusions about their lives.
It is “likable, amiable, fast on its feet,” says Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells. “It’s always pleasant when a film doesn’t do the expected thing.”
One thing film fans won’t see as unexpected is that Steenburgen, a beaming presence in Hollywood comedies since Jack Nicholson’s “Goin’ South” (1978) pretty much steals the picture.
“We had this debate with the studio over who to get,” Douglas recalls, with CBS Films holding out for “a few names that were maybe better known. But Jon and I were concerned that the names had kind of a toughness about them, a slight bitterness, a sardonic sort of humor to them. But Mary? She doesn’t have that. She’s just a sweetheart, vulnerable. So a lounge singer, at this stage in her life, who’s still optimistic? That’s Mary.”
And how. Steenburgen has been plugging away at a second career in recent years — as a songwriter, working with a Nashville team that has placed tunes in a few movies and on a Tim McGraw album. But she’d be the first to tell you she has “a songwriter’s voice,” and that tackling lounge singer standards of the Great American Songbook “scared me to death. But you’ve got to do that, discover new things, even when you’re older. It’s what keeps you young.”
Turteltaub had to figure out that Freeman is brilliant on the first take, that DeNiro “likes to do a line ten different ways, all with the camera rolling” to get it right, that Kline “is the real wild card, the guy who surprises you” and that Douglas would be his go-to guy, the one who attracted the other talent and who kept the studio off their backs.
Steenburgen, who has appeared in her share of “all star casts” (“Parenthood”,”Philadelphia”), marvels that “there were no ‘princes’ in this cast. Part of the beauty of this moment in our lives is you’re not doing it to get your next job. You’re not competitive with each other. You’re not trying to outshine each other. You take delight in being a part of a team.”
Even when you’re crammed into a mini-van with four other Oscar winners in a Las Vegas hotel parking lot.
“The thing that makes that even crazier was that we did that shot in a parking lot outside a funeral home in Atlanta!” Turteltaub says. “A little movie magic there, in more ways than one.”

(Roger Moore’s review of “Last Vegas” is here)

There’s a myopia to “Diana,” the new film about the divorce and last great romance of Princess Diana’s life, that fits its subject like one of Diana’s signature, custom-tailored gowns.
Isolated, focused on her image, her few contacts with the outside world and her work, when this lonely and lovelorn woman (Naomi Watts) zeroes in on something or someone, it seems obsessive, smothering and all-consuming.
And dismiss it as worthy of a Lifetime Original Movie if you want, this film from the director of the Fuhrer bunker drama “Downfall” gives us insights into this poor little royal plaything that Americans, at least, will find eye-opening.
Based on “Diana, Her Last Love,” by Kate Snell, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film depicts a manipulator practicing her most withering lines about her failed marriage to Prince Charles in front of a vanity mirror.
“There were three of us in this marriage,” she famously told her TV interrogator. “So it was a bit crowded.”
She milks her victimhood, frets over how seldom she gets to see her princely sons and manages to seem both vulnerable and cunning at the same time. “I’m very good with the press.”
A trusted aide (Charles Edwards) feels she’s maneuvering behind his back and offers to resign, and her cool reaction stuns him.
“Well, Patrick, you’ve been a rock.”
“What will you do?”
“Get a new rock.”
Outcast from the royal family and not close to her own, she only takes counsel from a trusted confidante (Juliet Stevenson) and  Oonagh Toffolo, her acupuncturist/confessor (Geraldine James).
But she has a gift for empathy, and it’s much more than just her image. Dashing into a hospital to visit Oonagh’s ailing husband, she ignores the nurses who swoon in her presence and the doctors who ogle her. But that empathy leads her to cool, handsome and charming heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan.
Their love affair, the tricks each used to see the other, the strains of celebrity and of being “the most famous woman in the world” in love with a Pakistani Muslim, sucks up the bulk of “Diana.” The film shows us a nocturnal creature in hot pursuit of the one man underwhelmed by her celebrity until he is overwhelmed by the press, the culture clash and the demands of a woman who can have whatever she wants.
Hirschbiegel and screenwriter Stephen Jeffreys (“The Libertine”) frame this quiet, doomed love story within that last walk out of a Paris hotel, that last car ride with playboy Dodi Fayed (Cas Anvar). That much we know. What the movie wants us to remember is the misery of being stalked by a fanatical gossip press (which Diana manipulates, from time to time), the gutsy way she used her fame to do good, pushing for an international ban on land mines, and her instinctual, almost superhuman ability to respond to people in pain.
Watts masters Diana’s look — the way she carried her head and used those wide, coyly expressive eyes — but is only passable at impersonating the voice. It’s a studied performance that doesn’t give away the wheels turning as Diana plays the angles to try and get what she wants out of the royal family, the press, her doctor-lover and her life.
It is too superficial and flattering to pass muster with the British press, which had both an ownership stake and a hate-love affair with her. But “Diana” vividly captures the shrinking world she lived in of public appearances, midnight escapes in her butler’s car, donning a long black wig to make this deal-with-the-devil life she bought into work, even as she desperately wanted to remain “Princess of Our Hearts.”

(Watts and director Hirschbiegel defend “Diana” here).
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language, some sensuality and smoking
Cast: Naomi Watts, Naveen Andrews, Juliet Stevenson, Geraldine James
Credits: Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, written by Stephen Jeffreys . An eOne release.
Running time: 1:51

Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple (“Wild Man Blues,” “Harlan County, USA”) gives herself over to Oprah Winfrey’s vision of the world in “Running from Crazy,” a movie about the Hemingways and their troubled family history of mental illness and suicide.
It has celebrity and self-help, beautiful people overcoming tragedy, allegations of child abuse and the redemption of “coming out the other side.” No wonder Winfrey produced it and her OWN media company is releasing it.
“Crazy” is built around the model-turned Oscar-nominated actress Mariel Hemingway, who has taken to speaking out about depression and suicide in a very public way. An idealist will see that as her means of coping with “The Hemingway Legacy,” suicides that seemed to start with the father of her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, and continued through her sister — seven, that they’re sure about. Mariel has two daughters and she wants them to know the family history and be on the lookout for signs of mental trouble and to be OK with seeking help.
A cynic might note that this activism comes as the still gorgeous Mariel clears 50 and the demand for her work has dried up. And the cynic will not be shaken in that belief by all the shots of Mariel exercising, bouncing on the trampoline, rock-climbing and swinging Kettlebells between her legs, always in shape-flattering leotards.
“I learned how to play in the last two years,” she explains.
It’s enough to make you wonder how much Kopple herself bought into the project, as the film is scattered, random — part Hemingway history, part advertisement for Mariel’s gifts and her beautiful daughters’ futures as models and/or actresses.
But it benefits most from its generous inclusion of footage from Mariel’s sister’s documentary, “Hemingway: Winner Take Nothing.” Margaux Hemingway did an Ernest Hemingway pilgrimage, visiting the places he made famous, interviewing family and Papa’s surviving friends, experiencing what he experienced — bullfights, fishing, hunting — in the 1980s. She did not finish that film before taking her own life in 1996.
“Running from Crazy” lets Mariel lay it all out there, her decades of fad diets and self-actualization, her testy relationship with her now-dead sister and her guilty refusal to stay in touch with a mentally ill older sister, still living near the family’s Sun Valley/Ketchum, Idaho home. You appreciate Mariel’s guts for coming off as superior — a better actress than her “dumb” party-animal sister Margaux. She lets us meet her ex-husband and lets us see a comical meltdown as her latest toy boy beau, a stuntman-personal trainer type, stupidly races offroad to a rock climbing site and trashes two non-offroadable Mini Coopers in the process.
It could have been a TED Talk on mental illness and suicide, with Mariel declaring “You think you know me…People think I’ve lived this charmed life…But I’m scared, too.” But Hemingway wins us over and, in the end, comes off as earnest in her desire to use her celebrity to help shine a light on the maladies that have shattered her family, time and again. That she does it in between Kettlebell workouts is a bonus that feels Oprah approved.

MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Jack Hemingway, Mariel Hemingway, Margaux Hemingway 
Credits: Directed by Barbara Kopple. An OWN release. 
Running time: 1:40

Asa Butterfield is “a massive science fiction fan,” he says. Which is a good thing, considering Martin Scorsese plucked him from relative obscurity to take the title role in the fanciful “Hugo,” which turned into a decent sized hit a couple of Christmases back.
But Butterfield’s love of the genre really paid dividends as he landed the second title role of his young  career. He is Ender Wiggin, the hero in the film of Orson Scott Card’s popular young adult sci-fi series that begins with “Ender’s Game.”
On an Earth which has survived one interstellar invasion, Ender is identified as a potential Caesar or Napoleon, a child-general with the reflexes, cognitive skills and tactical instincts to be a great warrior and potential leader of other young warriors into combat. “Ender’s Game” is about this video-game trained killer growing up during his training and baptism of fire, and the empathy, compassion and guilt that develop as he trains to do what Earth needs him to do for humanity’s survival.
“He’s the most complex character I’ve played, because he’s pure, but there’s so much going on internally,” Butterfield says. “He’s pure at the beginning and someone I’d call kind of broken at the end of the film.
“For me, because the character has such great instincts, such great understanding of himself and others around him, he has kind of reached this stage of development that no one else has.”
Precocious, in other words. Much like Butterfield himself. The London (Islington) native has been acting since seven, and got his first big break in the cinema by landing the naive son of a Nazi concentration camp commander who befriends a Jewish boy his age in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”
“Ender’s Game” is a nearly 20 year-old novel, and director Gavin Hood wonders if a big reason that sci-fi crazy Hollywood hasn’t made a film of it before now was waiting on that “perfect” actor for the part.
Ender is “highly intelligent and deeply empathetic, but he also has within him the capacity to be frighteningly aggressive when pushed into a corner,” Hood (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) says. “This tension between his capacity for great compassion and his equal but opposite capacity for aggression required that we cast an actor with great emotional range.  Asa Butterfield has that range.”
At 16, the thin, pale Butterfield has had to hold his own opposite the likes of Vera Farmiga and David Thewlis (“Striped Pajamas”), Emma Thompson (“Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang”) and Sacha Baron Cohen and Sir Ben Kingsley (“Hugo”). Kingsley co-stars with his again in “Ender’s Game,” along with Harrison Ford and Viola Davis. So even though Butterfield sees few parallels between his acting career — begun in childhood — and Ender’s being groomed for military life, there is one.
“People mature at different ages,” Butterfield says. “Ender is very advanced, for his years. I don’t think that is any reason, however, for him to be called on to do the things he is has thrust upon him. There’s a big difference between being more mature than your peers and being asked to do things which no one your age should be asked to do.”
The film has opened in his native Britain, where reviews have been mixed. Total Film says it “hums along on its own gravitational pull, driven by funky combat in the zero-gravity room and Butterfield’s terrific performance.” Will the box office be good enough to warrant taking on the sequels, beginning with “Speaker for the Dead”? Butterfield has learned to be cagey. He is not “signed up to do sequels, not yet.”
But he’s game, should the need arise. And unlike Ender Wiggin, he’s not yet had second thoughts about the career he chose quite young. Working with Scorsese and Hood settled that for him.
“As of now, acting is all I ever want to do,” he says. “I might have a change of heart. But meeting the people I have been able to meet, having the experiences I’ve been lucky enough to have, flying in the air 40 foot above the ground with Cirque du Soleil trainers for this movie, all the other wonderful experiences I’ve had on sets, this does look like the life for me.”

Here’s a faith-based film that has the hint of a “Hail Mary” pass about it. A cast of mostly has-beens or never-weres takes its shot at reinventing itself in a feebly written fable aimed down at an audience they don’t figure will see through them.

Jeff “Ja Rule” Atkins never developed acting talent beyond the scowl he wore to convince hip hop fans how hard he was. He plays Miles Montego, a rich “retired” drug dealer turned concert promoter who falls hard “a church girl” (e-time “Cheetah Girl” Adrienne Bailon).

She’s the sort of girl that church-going mom would have approved of.  Yeah, you know Mom’s going to get sick.

But even as Miles is throwing his A-game at Vanessa, the church girl — rubbing elbows with the rich, athletic and famous, like wide receiver Jerry Rice, taking her on dates by private jet — his “boys” are still getting into trouble.

And that means the Feds (Stephen Baldwin and Michael Madsen) are all up in his business.

“This Agent McDaniels dude? He got it real bad for you, man.”

The setting gives “I’m in Love with a Church Girl” more edge than your typical faith-based film. Not much, but a little.

“You wanna send me to Hell? BOOK the flight!”

It’s a film of limp police procedures — stake outs that aren’t really clandestine, interrogations by underlings because maybe, the lead actors weren’t all available for the full day.

Miles bonds a bit with his new pal, the mega-church preacher, who charms him with “We spend half our days waiting for the Lord, the other half waiting on our wives.”

It’s a film of limp police procedures — stake outs that aren’t really clandestine, generic prison scenes, interrogations by underlines that suggest the leading players weren’t available on set for the entire day.

The supporting cast is packed with players from mob and cop movies going way back — Vincent Pastore, Martin Kove.

None of which adds up to much since Ja Rule never for a second convinces us of his conversion, his sudden life-changing devotion to one woman when “women” were more his speed before. He may claim he’s “turned in my playa card.” We don’t believe it, not for a second.
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, a scene of violence, some suggestive content and brief language
Cast: Jeff “Ja Rule” Atkins, Adrienne Bailon, Stephen Baldwin, Michael Madsen.
Credits: Directed by Steven Race, written by Galley Molina. A Reverence Gospel Media release.
Running time: 1:58

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/new-horror-trailer/n42349

A dead on Owen Wilson impersonation by Edward Norton, an on-key Alec Baldwin voice over (needed script editing) and an ever-so-twee tone. I’d pay to see this.

Oh, and “The Counselor”? Ridley Scott’s all-star Cormac McCarthy yak-and-kill fest bombed. Under $8 million.

The last “Jackass” movie was in 3D and earned over $50 million on its opening weekend. The new one only has Johnny Knoxville and a “Jackass Presents” label, but “Bad Grandpa” still managed decent enough reviews and a $33 million opening weekend.

Impressive.

“Carrie” and “Escape Plan” plunged, “Enough Said” (now over $13 million) keeps hanging around the top ten.

And opening wider, the Oscar buzzed “12 Years a Slave” cracked the top ten for the first time this weekend. It’s only earned $3.5 million, and frankly needs to collect a lot more cash and bring in a much broader audience to be the Oscar cinch it seems to be. Tough subject matter, will that hold it back? I wonder.