Movie Nation

Whatever his other gifts, Justin Timberlake has a hard time playing “hard.”
Ben Affleck has no hint of “sinister” about him.
For director Brad Furman, “The Lincoln Lawyer” is looking more and more like a fluke, and even bringing in someone with gambling movie moxie — the screenwriter from “Rounders” — doesn’t help.
So the problems of the Internet gambling thriller “Runner Runner” are many and manifest.  A thrill-free thriller with no urgency, scanty wit and limited sex appeal, plays like just a paycheck for A-list actors who should know better.
Timberlake is Richie Furst, a Wall Street dropout whom we meet as he tries to hustle his way to a graduate degree at Princeton. But the online gambling he’s using to finance college fails him, and a little number’s crunching tells him he’s been cheated. Somehow, he scrapes together the cash and the moxie to go to Costa Rica and confront the online gaming kingpin, Ivan Block, played by Affleck.
Block likes that moxie and next thing you know, Richie’s his right hand man, crunching numbers, recruiting “affiliates” to their Internet empire and making eyes at the boss’s babe — Gemma Arterton.
He has”everything you ever thought you wanted, when you were 13.” And then a rules-bending F.B.I. agent (Anthony Mackie, funny) kidnaps him and we wonder whose loyalty Richie will honor — Ivan’s, the Feds’ or his own.
“Runner Runner” is the sort of movie where the “hero” narrates his tale so thoroughly that there’s little mystery as to what’s coming. It’s a static picture about a sexy world that robs that world of sex and pizazz with student film staging and camera blocking. Actors stalk into a shot, hit their marks, make eye contact and recite (weak) lines.
“You forgot the eternal truth. The house always wins.”
A couple of scenes in this choppy, glumly edited-picture work, but they involve “real” gambling, not the online kind — which is uncinematic. There’s barely enough gambling slang to dress up the script. Timberlake’s best moments come in scenes with Richie’s apple-doesn’t-fall-far-from-the-tree dad (John Heard), who is the very picture of addiction.
Affleck? You never believe a word he says, not a gesture. This is the sort of acting he did in the sort of movies he made before he started writing and directing his own movies — bad.
Let’s hope this was just a quickly-forgotten bump in the career path of our stars. And Furman had better hope Matthew McConaughey someday feels indebted for the launch “Lincoln Lawyer” gave him. This “Runner” goes nowhere. Fast.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Cast: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton, Anthony Mackie, John Heard. 
Credits: Directed by Brad Furman, written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. A 20th Century Fox. 
Running time: 1:30

Josh Trank of “Chronicle” is slated to direct Fox’s reboot of the comic book franchise “The Fantastic Four.” Simon Kinberg (“Sherlock Holmes”) is rewriting the script and collecting a producer credit as he does.
I was never one of those who beat up the first version of this franchise. The films were under-performers largely because they were kid-friendly. The casting was decent, the tone was light, but that’s not what the fanboys want so the films took a beating and whimpered off into the cinematic sunset.

“Now Muscle Shoals has got The Swampers,” Ronnie Van Zant sang on the Southern Rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” “And they’ve been known to pick a song or two.”
For many, it was the first time they’d heard of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, or the studio band that made first Fame Studios, and then the competing Muscle Shoal Sound Studios legendary locales in American music.
This dinky little berg on the Tennessee River was the home to musicians, producers and studios that launched everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Allman Brothers, Percy Sledge to Jimmy Cliff. Everybody who was anybody in music from the ’60s through the ’80s did transformative work there. And even today music’s best and historically brightest make the pilgrimage to the little town on the Alabama/Tennessee state line to record and soak up a little of that gritty, funky “Muscle Shoals Sound.”
Director Greg “Freddy” Calimier” cleverly saves the “Sweet Home Alabama”anecdote for the closing credits of “Muscle Shoals,” his elegiac, picturesque documentary about a place that rivals any in North America in its importance to popular music, then and now.
“Muscle Shoals” tells the hard-luck life story of Rick Hall, a poor sawmiller’s son who discovered Percy Sledge and changed the world when he recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman.” The film sketches in how Hall founded Fame studio amid the kudzu and cotton fields, and focuses on the local white boys he turned into a backing band for the ages, the fabled “Swampers” immortalized in the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
“You never knew when you were making history,” backup singer Donna Jean Godchaux says. But they did, quarreling with Aretha Franklin’s entourage even as they improvised and scratched out “I Never Loved a Man” and turned her into a legend with a single track.

The band was funky, and “all funky was, was we didn’t know how to make it smooth,” drawls drummer Roger Hawkins.
Wicked Wilson Pickett weighs in on how the brittle interplay between black singers working with white musicians in the Deep South created “Land of 1,000 Dances” and “Mustang Sally,” and Aretha herself acknowledges that her time there was brief, but the key moment in her career.
Then, as the film details, just as Fame Studio reached its peak, the house band upped and moved across town, setting up Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and giving the martyred perfectionist Rick Hall competition. Southern rock was born there. Hall, meanwhile, turned the Osmond Brothers into platinum record superstars, always evolving with the music.
No music documentary is complete without rock’s reigning poet-historian Bono showing up to connect music to river towns and declare that in this sound, “we felt the blood in it. It’s like the songs came out of the mud.”
Hip hop may be wandering into middle age and looking back on its own history, and rock history curdles into sentiment in films like this one, “The Wrecking Crew”, “Sound City” and last summer’s wonderful background singers doc, “20 Feet From Stardom.”
But to fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two. 

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements, language, smoking and brief partial nudity
Cast: Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Bono, Percy Sledge, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Steve Winwood. 
Credits: Directed by Greg “Freddy” Camilier. A Magnolia release. 
Running time: 1:52

“Pulling Strings” takes a bit of a hit by being the third Latin single-dad comedy to roll into American theaters in a month. And though it is funnier and out-charms “Tio Papi,” it lacks the whimsy, magical realism and kid-friendly sentiment of the sleeper hit, “Instructions Not Included.”
But this tale of a mariachi singer denied a visa, who then tries to trick and charm the American embassy staffer who turned him down, is a winning vehicle for singer/actor Jaime Camil.
Alejandro (Camil) is raising his nine year-old daughter alone, and fears that what the Catholic school nuns are telling him is true — that he’s botching the job. She needs to go spend time with her grandparents. In Arizona.
Having no property, permanent address or passport, he gets little more than the no-eye-contact dismissal from U.S. Embassy functionary Rachel (Laura Ramsey of “No One Lives” and “Kill the Irishman”). Rachel’s mind is on her next assignment, a transfer to the London embassy.
But as coincidence would have it, her colleagues hire Alex’s superb mariachi band for her going away party. Lots of shots of Jose Cuervo later, he winds up taking her home, in only the most gallant sense. It’s just that he hides her top-secret laptop computer as leverage for a days-long “search” and “get to know you” mission that he figures will win her over and get his daughter the visa.
What works here is the mariachi milieu of Mexico City. Alex cooks up an elaborate scheme to drag Rachel from one “contact” to another, tracking down the missing laptop. There’s Cosme the taxi owner, Margarito, the “underworld” sage, Gus, Alejandro’s “manager.” As they trek back and forth through the city, mariachis play “La Bamba” and the diplomatic “gypsy” finally samples the cuisine and the life of the city she’s never bothered to get to know.
The mariachi scenes come close to taking off — a delightful romantic serenade here, a traditional birthday party there. More could have been done with this whole big band in big hats and costumes, piling into a single ancient Chevy Suburban.
Alejandro and his wise-cracking bandmate (Omar Chaparro) convince relatives to mob the band to convince Rachel that they’re a big deal — “Like eh, Justin Bieber-Mexican!”
Hollywood veterans Tom Arnold (playing Rachel’s boss) and Stockard Channing (her mother) have little funny to say or do.
“Did you know there’s no 911 in this country!?”
Third act complications in the plot — obstacles to the computer recovery — are both tedious and entirely too obvious.
And the lovely Ramsey, who can manage a decent drunk scene, doesn’t bring much heat or set off comic or romantic sparks with Camil, who is most at home in his offhanded scenes with Chaparro.
But “Pulling Strings” scores sentimental romantic points about the difference between “meeting lots of people” and actually getting to know them, and the simple idea that whatever shortcomings a musician single-father has, a child belongs with her dad.
And the bilingual, handsome, musically and comically gifted Camil shows us charisma that could have Hollywood calling. If you manage to get studio executives to show up for a movie about mariachis.

(Read Roger Moore’s interview with Jaime Camil here)

MPAA Rating: PG, for language and brief smoking
Cast: Jaime Camil, Laura Ramsey, Omar Chaparro, Tom Arnold, Stockard Channing.
Credits: Directed by Pitipol Ybarra, written by Issa Lopez, Georgina Riedel, Gabriel Ripstein and Oscar Orlando Torres. A Pantelion/Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:49

If you’re not of Latin heritage, you may not know the handsome pop-singing actor Jaime Camil. With three albums and numerous stage and telenovela (Mexican soap opera) appearances, Camil, 40, is just starting to pop out of the Univision corner of North American culture by turning up on more mainstream networks (Lifetime’s “Devious Maids”) and now, on the big screen.
“Pulling Strings” is about single dad (Camil) and a culture clash. Here, it’s Americans (Laura Ramsey, Stockard Channing) discovering the “real” Mexico City. And “Strings”, from the same studio (Pantelion) that released “Instructions Not Included,” has a secret weapon — mariachi. That is Camil’s character’s profession.
We reached Jaime Federico Said Camil de Saldaña Da Gama in Los Angeles.
Q: In the States, mariachi bands are used as kind of a punch-line, a musical joke, in the movies. What about in Mexico?
Camil: People in the U.S. or other countries see a mariachi band, hear them tuning up, and they think it’s time to break out the tequila. ‘Get wasted! Hey boys, play ‘The Macarena!’ Please. Mariachis don’t do ‘La Macarena.’ It’s hilarious. ‘La Bamba,’ yes. ‘Macarena,’ no.
Mariachi IS Mexico. Look at the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, black and white films with Jorge Negrete, Agustin Lara or Maria Felix, the beautiful musical movies we used to make, you realize it’s this long and honorable musical tradition.

Q: Nobody can fall in love in Mexico without mariachis, right?
Camil: Oh, from Quinceañera (sweet fifteen) parties to serenading a woman outside her window, you want to win the heart of a lady, you have to serenade her. There’s a plaza in Mexico City — Plaza Garibaldi. On Friday on Saturday night, if you’ve had a fight with your girlfriend, you can drive by Garibaldi where mariachi bands are giving out cards. ‘I need a serenade. Come on, guys!’ They pile into your car, or follow you in their van, and they help you out. We had to show that in ‘Pulling Strings.’ A band, on the street, for hire — rescuing romance. What woman wouldn’t forgive you if you brought a band to serenade her? We had to show that part of mariachi culture.
Q: You’re not a mariachi singer. What was it like to put on ‘the uniform?’
Camil: You put on the mariachi’s suit and you feel like a superhero, empowered, like putting on Superman’s cape. You have the power to make people fall in love, to inspire, to amuse. to thrill. I feel honored to represent my country in the most iconic way a Mexican can — as a mariachi. We tried to avoid the stereotypes, this whole ‘mariachi loco,’ the music as an excuse to get drunk and go a little crazy. No, it’s a culture, a way of life.
These suits — they’re hand-tailored. They measure you in places you’d never THINK to be measured. SO MANY parts of your body. I’m wondering what the studio did with my costumes, because it is so precisely fitted for me,because who ELSE is going to wear it? Just me. I want them those suits.
Q: And the singing style, how much of an adjustment for you?
Camil: All these years I’ve been a singer, and I never realized that mariachis don’t have to shout above the music, don’t have to scream. Sometimes, all it takes is a whisper. They caress the songs. I’m a pop singer, not a mariachi. But we went old school, with this movie, and the styles are very similar.
Q: “Pulling Strings” shows us a Mexico City far removed from the dramas and thrillers set there.
Camil: Recent Mexican films dwell on the bad realities of our country. Crime, drug dealing, gun fighting, cursing bad guys. That reality exists in Mexico, especially along the border, and in other Latin American countries.
But we have a lot of other realities. It’s a very optimistic place, a colorful country where we love our happy endings as much as Hollywood does.
We show the city without the mean streets that the newscasts like to show. All that emphasis on crime is why people are afraid to come to Mexico. I look at the news, and I’M scared. But I live there, I know it’s not like that. Stockard Channing and Laura Ramsey come down to make the movie, and they’re afraid they’re going to be beheaded if they leave their hotel. Yeah, we have conflict in the border cities. But not in MY city. I worked hard to get them out and help them relax and enjoy the city. I think they did.
Q: This is kind of your introduction to Hollywood, and it is coming just as the industry is paying closer attention to the Latin market, thanks to “Instructions.” What do you hope this does for your career? 
Camil: Over ten  years ago, I figured out my place in the Mexican entertainment industry. I’m an actor who can sing. It’s an added value, as I see it. They don’t have to hire a singer to dub me for this movie. I’m a bargain
We are sister films with ‘Instructions Not Included.’ That movie did well in Mexico, and it is doing crazy business here in the U.S. I love the Variety headline about it — ‘Hollywood gets ‘Instructions’ from the Latino Market.’
I hope we can surf that wave, too.

(Read Roger Moore’s review of “Pulling Strings” here)

Gravity” is not meant to be experienced by iPhone, iPad or the box where you watch Robin Williams and Michael J. Fox try to turn back the clock. No, director Alfonso Cuaron says. Part with a dime for “Gravity,” get yourself immersed.
“You’ll want to find an IMAX screen, 3D, Dolby Atmos sound,”  says Cuaron,  “The visuals and the sound are most immersive in this setting. This is a film that was created for depth and scale. I want audiences floating in space, partaking of the journey with the characters.”
And judging from the ecstatic reviews for Cuaron’s film, in that he has succeeded. The “hypnotic” (Entertainment Weekly) science fiction movie about an accident in space is “one of the most awe-inspiring achievements in the history of special-effects cinema,”(Time Out), a movie that sends the viewer “into free fall” (The Village Voice) along with its marooned astronauts.

(Roger Moore’s review of “Gravity” is here)
Cuaron, the director of “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” “Children of Men” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” spent years setting this project up, years planning effects, years waiting for his stars, Oscar winners Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, to become available “because I could not imagine telling this story without them. The challenges that they had to endure just to get across a performance — intense, pre-programmed shots with computers and robots, actors strapped into very restraining harnesses. On top of that, the exercise of abstraction that is required for an actor to convince you that they’re going through this terrifying thing is truly their gift, as performers.”
Cuaron knew it took great, empathetic stars to win our sympathy with only their presence, their voices and their history. Bullock and Clooney would be only faces and voices, seen through the visors of space helmets as they faced the terror of a collision in space and its aftermath, the fear of dying alone “up there.”
“This film takes place, entirely, in micro-gravity,” Cuaron says. “‘Apollo 13’ got across the sense of micro-gravity with just a few, brilliant scenes. Ron Howard took his actors up into the Vomit Comet (NASA training jet) for transitional scenes, and those convinced you. Here, our entire movie is outside, in the micro-gravity of near Earth space. Long, continuous takes in this environment. We had lights and computerized cameras and actors in rigs and we created the illusion of floating and spinning.”
The “Gravity” of the film’s title is both literal and metaphorical, Bullock told Space.com, with the “lack of gravity” being “the perfect way to describe not being able to ground yourself.” Cuaron says that is by design.
“It’s what bonds us to Earth. It’s fundamental to human life…We have a character drifting into the void because she has lost her ground, a victim of her own inertia. She is literally drifting further from human communications and connections. She has to learn to fight her inertia, to come out of her bubble and find the grounding that she has lost.”
But beyond the metaphor, beyond the film’s emotional depth, Cuaron wanted his first film in seven years to be a tense, edge-of-your-seat thriller, which is why there are no apologies for the barrage of worst-case scenarios that pile up on our hapless space-walking astronauts — space junk, crashes, decaying orbits and shrinking oxygen supplies.
“All these worst-case scenarios are things we never virtually never saw in fifty years of space exploration,” Cuaron, a self-confessed “space nut,” says with a laugh. “It’s extraordinary that sending people into the most hostile place you can think didn’t produce disaster after disaster. But that didn’t happen because of the wisdom and the brilliance and commitment of the people who sent astronauts up there. But their space suits? Probably not as tough and durable as we make them out to be.”
The Mexican director, who turns 52 in November, has a long-established reputation for making emotional moments work. As concerned as he was to get the stunning effects and as insistent as he is that viewers get the primo-immersive, digital 3D experience out of “Gravity,” he was skeptical that this big-budget sci-fi picture would bring viewers to tears. But that response in early screenings “has been the happiest surprise. My co-writer (his son Jonas) insisted, from the start, that people would react this way. He thinks if you tell a tense story, put people on the edge of their seats and make people invest in the characters, audiences will be disarmed — rationally. And being disarmed, they let in emotions.
“I hope he is right.”

The reviews, from overseas, mostly (a peculiar  Fox releasing strategy), are not good for “Runner, Runner,” a gambling/crime/betrayal thriller starring Ben Affleck as the criminal gambler mastermind in Costa Rica or someplace as Justin Timberlake as the guy who gets close to him, are not good.

But before “Runner Runner” comes out Friday, and gets the socks beaten off it by “Gravity” (a no win proposition, even if “Runner” was an Oscar contender), director Brad Furman’s announcing that next project, a film about body building empire builder (his ads used to fill comic books) Joe Weider. “Bigger,” it’ll be called.