Movie Nation

Randall “Randy” Moore got the Disney bug early. The son of divorced parents who grew up in Chicago, he’d spend summers with his dad, in Winter Park, Fla., just outside of Orlando.
“I’d get off the plane,” Moore remembers, “and we’d drive straight over to Disney’s Polynesian Resort and hop on the Monorail into the park. We spent most of our time in EPCOT, in that vision of the future.”
Those Disney World visits stuck with him, “but more as paternal memories” he says than Memories of the Mouse. Not all of them good. Then, years after his relationship with his father grew strained, Moore came back to Disney World as a parent himself. Seeing things from that point of view inspired his surreal take on the Theme Park Weekend from Hell — “Escape from Tomorrow.”
“The idea for my movie came from those trips there as a child, with my father,” Moore, now 37, says. “As a parent, I came to appreciate what my dad went through.”
Moore decided to make a movie at Disney World about one family’s nightmarish visit — a film with heated arguments, broken dreams and sexual misadventures, badly behaved kids and a corporate conspiracy. No way Disney would go for that.
“It is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission,” as the old saying goes, and that became Moore’s credo.
“I didn’t feel like they’d give us a permit to film there. So, we just did it.” “Escape from Tomorrow” became the ultimate act of guerrilla filmmaking. Just a tiny cast and crew, conventional, off-the-shelf cameras, a collection of Disney World annual passes and a lot of invention and patience and they’d shoot their movie, out in the open but on the down low, without Disney knowing about it.
“It wasn’t like we were sneaking special equipment into the park or disrupting patrons there. We had the same cameras that a lot of tourists bring into the park…We respected the signs that said ‘No flash photography’. We were just a small group of people who just came in, went to our locations, filmed, got what we needed, and left.”
Planning was paramount. Moore didn’t want “found footage” (“Blair Witch” style shaky cameras) or a “home movie” look. So they shot in black and white and worked out ways to make the camera look locked down and cinematic even when they were capturing the family boarding the monorail or It’s a Small World ride. A blown take — a missed line or botched focus or framing in the camera — meant getting everyone to the back of the line and waiting for the next monorail or Thunder Mountain train.
“Cast and crew rode those rides ten, eleven times to get the take right,” Moore says, laughing. “We probably rode Small World 25 times, just me and the camera guys.”
They filmed in a hotel room at the Contemporary Resort. For some scenes, “where I wanted more control, more time to work with the actors on performance,” they shot footage without actors which was then used as backdrop for the cast, which acted in front of a special effects green screen.
And through it all, Moore, a filmmaking alumnus of Winter Park’s Full Sail University, maintained strict secrecy — never getting caught or even asked what he was doing. He took “Escape” to Korea for editing and post production work.
“It’s a tiny, surreal indie black and white movie that I figured would exist in the festival circuit and maybe lead to bigger and better things,” Moore says. He never heard from Disney. No threats. No complaints or compliments, either. Not even when he sold the film for theatrical distribution. It goes into limited release this month.
He can thank critics for that. At Sundance, “Escape from Tomorrow” was hailed as “wholly original” (IndieWire) and ” a great gimmick-dependent story and a remarkable piece of filmmaking” (Film.com).
The experience of making the movie, spending all that time in the theme park, gave Moore a new appreciation for Walt Disney’s vision. The “American rite of passage” that visiting a Disney park has become, fans reacting to attractions in the parks “with an almost religious awe,” suggests that “what Walt built has transcended ‘theme park’ and become this magical tradition, passed down from generation to generation.”
And that’s why he just had to make his movie there.
“When people think about America, they’re not thinking about the Statue of Liberty or the White House,” Moore says. “Well, maybe they are. But Cinderella’s Castle is a close second.” Moore wanted that icon, that classical American vacation, as the jumping off point for one father’s warped, and wholly atypical experience of “The Happiest Place on Earth.

An all-star cast of singers become actors for “Angels Sing,” a wan little holiday film that manages to show a little heart once it finally gets going.
Harry Connick Jr. stars as an Austin, Texas history professor who doesn’t put much stock in Christmas. Michael is always angling to dodge doing both Thanksgiving and Christmas with his parents (Kris Kristofferson, Fionnula Flanagan) for reasons he’s reluctant to tell his granny-loving son (Chandler Canterbury). His wife (Connie Britton) is understanding. Eventually, the kid finds out — dad lost a brother over the holidays, years ago. Kind of ruined the day for him.
But Michael’s ongoing house-hunting throws him in the path of this chuckling old man (Willie Nelson) with a McMansion for sale.
“How much, Mr., uuhhhh?”
“Call me ‘Nick.'”
They seal the deal and Michael finds himself with the showplace of Live Oak Lane, one of those Christmas-crazed corners of America where house decorations draw fans from far and wide. Neighbors stop by, sing a song on their stoop and drop off decorations. To be helpful, you see.
There’s a jazzy sax solo of this Christmas carol, and gospel take on that one. Darned if Lyle Lovett doesn’t play one particularly pushy neighbor who favors us with his version of “Jingle Bells.”
“Is everyone in this neighborhood a musician?” Michael cracks.
Only he doesn’t — crack. He’s a regular Grinch, fending off every appeal that he join in the fun. Heck, neighbor Griffin (Lovett) points out, even the Jewish family and the Muslim one decorated their houses. Why not you?
This might have been a lighter, faith-based “Christmas with the Kranks,” with the family trying to resist “the holiday spirit” in a part of the world where that’s impossible, or a “Deck the Halls,” with Michael amusingly being swallowed by the holidays. To that end, director Tim McCanlies (the sentimental “Secondhand Lions” was his) peppers this world with bar singers and buskers, everybody belting out a little taste of Christmas.
But the humor is thin and the players — many of whom have had their funny moments over the years — cannot find a laugh or even a smile in much of this. Connick’s character is a stiff, and Nelson’s twinkle is muted.
The treat is hearing Willie Nelson’s Nick sing “Silent Night” or “Amazing Grace,” in imagining Lyle Lovett as a Christmas addict and jazzing up “Jingle Bells.”
“Angels Sing” takes a while to throw a reindeer in front of Michael and suggest “there’s holiday magic afoot,” and a much longer while to get to its point, with Nick and others nudging Michael to open his heart to the holiday.
It’s only 87 minutes long, but the pace makes this feel like the day after Thanksgiving — like Christmas will never get here.

MPAA Rating:  PG for mild thematic elements and brief language
Cast: Harry Connick Jr., Willie Nelson, Connie Britton, Chandler Canterbury, Kris Kristofferson, Fionnula Flanagan, Lyle Lovett
Credits: Directed Tim McCanlies, written by Lou Berney, based on the Turk Pipkin novel. A Lionsgate release. 
Running time: 1:27

You don’t have to be a parent who has survived dragging small children through the wonders of Walt Disney World to “get” the Gothic vamp “Escape from Tomorrow.” But it helps.
A demented black and white acid trip through bad news in a bad marriage with bad parenting, all experienced at “The Happiest Place on Earth,” “Escape” is “Breaking Bad” without all the cooking and meth dealers.
But middle-aged man crisis? “Escape” has that. Jim (Roy Abramsohn) gets the news that he’s been laid off by phone — standing on the balcony of the Contemporary Resort (the hotel that the Disney monorail goes through) so that he doesn’t wake his family.
His creepy little boy (Jack Dalton) locks the door so he can’t get back in. That is just the first sign of Elliott’s six-year-old Aedipus Complex.
Jim, staggered by his secret bad news, is off his game. He tries to make out a little with his shrill wife, Emily (Elena Schuber) on assorted tunnel rides and only gets a “Not in front of the kids” from “Debbie Downer.”
The parents separate, alternate taking the two kids (Katelynn Rodriguez is Sarah, even younger than Elliott) onto rides and into lines. But Jim just grows more distracted by the two fetching French teens in short shorts, ogling them from one side of the park to the other.
He’s drinking, and he’s hallucinating through awkward encounters from menacing park visitors to a weeping, paranoid nurse in the park’s infirmary, to “the Other Woman” (,Alison Lees-Taylor), a seriously over-ripe seductress who uses her kid, and his, as a way of scoring a little Magic Kingdom nookie. Before it’s all over, Jim will be convinced of a vast conspiracy that Disney seemingly knows nothing about. And we’ll never look at Spaceship Earth the same again.
The humor spins out of very real situations — dragging a motion-sickness prone kid onto Space Mountain (vomiting time) — twisted into surreal fever dreams.
“Escape” has a notoriety that tends to overshadow its cinematic virtues. Writer-director Randy Moore shot it without permits and without Disney persmission. He smuggled cast and crew onto monorails, onto Thunder Mountain and other rides, into a Contemporary Resort hotel room, sometimes capturing scenes live on tape, sometimes shooting generic video cover footage that his actors could be inserted in front of through green screen trickery. It has its amateurish touches, but this is not a shaky-cam cheapie, but a scripted, well-photographed monochromatic nightmare.
This ingenius take on the family “dream vacation” is the ultimate guerrilla film — a piece of brand-name American iconography, ripe for satire, satirized on the sly.  You’d have to go back to the ’60s (“The President’s Analyst,” where the villains are “The Phone Company”) to find satire this amusingly off kilter. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, “Escape from Tomorrow” is so cosmically cracked that it feels like home movies of a Disney World trip — the home movies playing in your heat, hiking and Heineken-altered mind after one nightmarish day in the park.

(Roger Moore’s interview with filmmaker Randy Moore is here.)

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, sex, nudity and profanity
Cast: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Jack Dalton,  Alison Lees-Taylor.
Credits: Written and directed by Randy Moore. A Mankurt Media/PDA  release.
Running time: 1:30

The most optimistic projections for Johnny Knoxville’s “Jackass Presents Bad Grandpa” were for it to open at a robust $30 million+, not as good as the last “Jackass” movie — which was 3D and blew up to $50 million on its opening weekend a couple of years back, but quite good.

Lacking “Jackass” castmates (one of whom died) and much of a “Jackass” touch, this prank comedy in the “Borat” vein has very funny commercials and a works well enough. So word of mouth would be good, if Knoxville wasn’t a bit played out as a selling point. It looks to hit, based on Thursday and Friday numbers, about $25-27 million. Not too shabby for a comedy that cost virtually nothing to make.

“The Counselor” is supposedly a $25 million Ridley Scott/Cormac McCarthy drug and death thriller. With Oscar winners JAvier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, and Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Michael Fassbender, John Leguizamo and Ruben Blades in the cast, for that figure to be true, everybody had to work for scale.

“Gravity” is on track to earn another $20 million, edging it up to $200 million — close — by weekend’s end.

“Captain Phillips” is doing another $12 or so and is on track to fall just short of $100 million as it loses screens and steam next weekend.

Because it’s not going to make much at the box office. A paltry $9 million opening seems just out of reach at this point. Word of mouth won’t be good, as the plot has holes in it, it’s overlong and overly talky.  Interesting failure.

It’s hard to get past Cameron Diaz’s sex-with-a-sports-car scene in “The Counselor.” Not “IN” the car, but “with” it. The twisted Cormac McCarthy wrote it, the visually indulgent Ridley Scott directed it and Diaz acted the heck out of it. And once viewed, there’s no way you can un-see that.

But it’s an indulgent moment in an absurdly indulgent thriller. That phrase, “murder your darlings,” drummed into writers long before William Faulkner and later Steven King popularized it,  never crossed McCarthy’s fevered mind as he wrote and overwrote this murky drug trade tale about murky characters with murkier motives and the murkier-still deal that goes wrong with their fingerprints all over it.

It’s so gosh darned quotable! Almost every static scene before the inevitable murderous McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”,”The Road”) violence boils up is big-name actors swapping pithy bon mots about the bad things they do for a living or to each other in bed.
The corrupt lawyer in the title role (Michael Fassbender) doesn’t deliver these zingers. He listens as people like the diamond merchant (Bruno Ganz of “Downfall”) explains his stones and philosophy of life.
“This is a cynical business. We seek only…imperfection.”
The lawyer’s buying his ladyfriend (Penelope Cruz) a very expensive diamond, even though he’s got unexplained money problems. Flying to Amsterdam for jewels and driving home from the airport in a Bentley convertible means they need no explanation.
He talks women with his nightclub-owner/drug smuggling client (Javier Bardem), a Texan who keeps pet cheetahs and the wicked Malkina (Cameron Diaz).
“The truth about women,” Reiner (Bardem) declares, “is that you can do anything but bore them…I’ve always liked smart women, but it’s been an expensive hobby.”
Which explains her and the Ferrari and that scene you can’t erase from your mind.
Reiner is leading the lawyer into the trade, but he’s not alone. The Counselor consults with the drawling Westray (Brad Pitt). Who’s just as quotable.
“You don’t know someone until you know what they want.”
There’s a Mexican septic truck hauling drugs across the border to points north, and everybody seems to have an angle on it or connection to its fate, even if they don’t know it.
“The Counselor” is a film of chewy scenes which piece together in a less than wholly coherent fashion. Throw-away moments abound. Send Malkina to a priest, even though she’s not Catholic. Send The Counselor to Mexico. Stage meeting after meeting that doesn’t advance the plot, but which does have the kind of McCarthy dialogue that lures “names” to even smaller roles.
“You are the world you created,” intones Ruben Blades in the film’s third act. McCarthy keeps introducing new characters and giving them lovely things to say, all the way to the closing credits.
It’s a bloody film — as you might expect — and a bloody cluttered one, with relationships under-developed and characters sent hither and yon — Juarez, Boise, Amsterdam, London, El Paso — running in place as they get in deeper or sprint away from the bloody mess that their actions have led to.
Scott and McCarthy have concocted a tone poem to the current state of the bloody border country, with its ruthless and generally faceless cartels infiltrating America and American “entrepreneurs” not realizing the Pandora’s Box they open when they let their greed get the better of them and dip a toe in this deadly trade. There are no good guys, here. Not a one.
Among the players, the wild-haired Bardem stands out, and a vampy Diaz sets the stage for an uninhibited future in villain roles, or deadly-sexy car sales.

As Reiner so aptly puts it after telling the story of her character’s Ferrari fornication, “You see a thing like that, it changes you.”

MPAA Rating: R for graphic violence, some grisly images, strong sexual content and language
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Natalie Dormer, John Leguizamo, Ruben Blades
Credits: Directed by Ridley Scott, written by Cormac McCarthy. A Fox release.
Running time: 2:00

I get the distinct impression that all the buzz about this no-name movie, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which plainly no actor, writer or director of great repute wants much to do with, is built around trolling for traffic among the millions who read the badly-reviewed dirty book.

So now Jamie Dornan is the “Wait, who?” set to star in it, instead of Charlie Dunham (“Wait, who?”).

TV actors, with only Jennifer Ehle, who broke out in “Pride & Prejudice” in the 90s (on TV) as a seriously recognizable name in the cast.  Dornan’s on “The Fall” on TV, a few other shows.

WordPress isn’t letting links work, for some reason. Go to IMDb if you want the guy’s credits.

Irish, hunky, kind of generic. But we’ll see.

Kristen Bell is Disney’s newest princess, the vocal star of “Frozen.”

And she inspired that “Veronica Mars” Kickstarter phenomenon.

She’s been a reliable co-star in comedies such as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Stuck in Love” (very good in that, playing “the Other Woman”).

And we’re having a chat Saturday. She and I swapped emails about her then beau (now husband) Dax Shepard re: his car mania and car picture “Hit and Run.” Anybody got burning Kristen Bell questions they’d like me to ask? Comment below, and thanks.

(My interview with Kristen Bell, in which she talks about “Frozen,” “Veronica Mars” and naming her kid after a car, is here.)