Movie Nation

“Instructions Not Included” was smuggled into theaters (no previews), weakly reviewed when critics finally got around to it, and seemingly limited in appeal. It’s a foreign language subtitled comedy with no prestige picture label attached to it.

Even though reviews were far from “awful,” it’s still safe to bet that the audience for it is largely Latino.

But last weekend, “Instructions” cleared the “Pan’s Labyrinth” record and hit the $38 million mark at the box office in the U.S. It’ll have competition when “Pulling Strings” opens shortly, similar in theme, less broadly comical, less fantastical. “Instructions” is the biggest hit of Lionsgate’s Pantelion division, and could easily hit $45 million at the US box office, maybe $50 if it hangs onto its screens. It’s holding that much audience, week to week.

Technically dazzling and emotionally gripping, “Gravity” is a space-age science fiction thriller grounded in something pretty close to reality.
A space shuttle/space junk accident picture, Alfonso Cuaron’s movie gives us Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, space-walkers whose ship is wrecked forcing them to face the ultimate human fear.
No one wants to die alone.
Filmed in a stunning “How’d they DO that?” weightlessness and the chilly silence of space, we meet chatty Matt Kowalsky, testing a new jet pack, and Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock), who is wrenching away on the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a routine spacewalk, with a barely-glimpsed third astronaut outside the shuttle “Explorer (NASA typically didn’t allow three space walkers out). Just another day of work for STS 157, with Kowalsky cracking jokes and telling stories.
“Houston, I have a really bad feeling about this mission.”
Mission Control (the unseen Ed Harris) indulges him.
Then, ten minutes in, word of a Russian satellite destruction exercise that’s gone awry. A cloud of deadly debris is racing for them. And before they can get inside the ship and get away, it is trashed, their third spacewalker is killed and they’re stranded, with mere minutes of oxygen in Dr. Stone’s suit standing between her and an even quicker death than the one facing them both.
Clooney’s soothing voice is used to wonderful effect as he calms the space-rookie down. His Kowalsky is Mr. “Right Stuff,” coming up with a plan (jetting over to the International Space Station, which had to be abandoned because of the coming debris assault) and making Stone tell him chunks of her life story to still her panic.
Oxygen? “Sip, not gulp. Remember, wine, not beer.”
The movie plays out in something like real time as they have 90 minutes before the next space junk pass to get to safety. But everything, and I do mean everything stands, stands in  their way — save for “Aliens” and “Predators.”
Bullock’s Dr. Stone speaks for all of us as she deals with each fresh horror with a “What now?” She does some of her best acting in years, and is well-cast as someone vulnerable, overmatched but with a backbone that surprises.
Cuaron, who did “Children of Men” and the best Harry Potter movie (“Prisoner of Azkaban”) uses the silence of space brilliantly — muffled, distant radio transmissions, shockingly violent, but silent crashes, with only the sound of panting and faint yelping (in Bullock’s case) from our intrepid space explorers underscoring the disaster. They’re hurled, yanked and thumped, and all we hear is their gasping, their crackling radios and a thunk if they hit compartment of a space ship that has oxygen in it.
The parade of accidents takes “Gravity” close to the realm of melodrama, and the physics of it all isn’t flawless. But you’d have to go back to “Apollo 13” and such ’60s space epics as “2001” and “Marooned” to find a film this determined to dramatize the very real perils of spaceflight.
Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

(Read Roger Moore’s interview with Alfonso Cuaron  here)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense perilous sequences, some disturbing images and brief strong language
Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, and the voice of Ed Harris.
Credits: Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, written by Jonas and Alfonso Cuaron. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:30

And Vancouver. And probably, soundstages in the U.S. Probably.

PFW, one of the companies invested in Robert Rodriguez’s long-awaited “Sin City” sequel, “A Dame to Die For,” is shipping a lot of the special effects work to Mumbai, which RR no doubt approves of. The king of “Doing it on the cheap”, the guy whose mom catered meals on his no-budget first film, “El Mariachi,” has to appreciate outsourcing SFX work (2000 shots required) to save a dime or three.

RR has “Machete Kills” in theaters first — in October.

Well, that $40 million+ weekend that “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” seemed headed for Friday disappeared Saturday, the big day of the week, traditionally, for family cartoons.

Word of mouth and weak reviews pummeled the Sony Animation product — “product” being the best word for it. Barely a laugh or a decent idea in it, so Sony will take that $35 million it actually did earn and run.

But Sony wasn’t alone is feeling no love — or too little love. “Rush” is riding a wave of Oscar  buzz and good reviews right into the wall of “It’s a Formula 1 racing period piece” and “it stars Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl and Olivia Wilde.”

Not one thing in that sentence adds up to “Box Office,” and “Rush” barely cleared $10 million as it opened wide. Perhaps Universal should have done more to promote it. I only had four interview requests in for it and got the usual brush off from the little “u.”

“Don Jon” ended up coming close to expectations, about $9 million. But “Baggage Claim,” widely seen as a $7 million opener and thus a flop, did over $9.3 so those folks can clap their hands and hope to make their money back.

Overall, box office was done almost 10% this weekend compared to the same weekend last year. Over $40 million worth of rubes bought into “Hotel Transylvania” the last weekend of Sept. of 2012.

Melissa and Hugh divorced decades ago, but the heat never left their hate. They still go at it, hammer and tong, voices shrieking, threats rising and profanity flying. And they’re every bit as funny as old pros Catherine O’Hara and Richard Jenkins can make them.
Their eldest son, Carter (Adam Scott) may not be able to “Make the madness stop.” His oft-married dad is still a serial philanderer, and mom is still the harpy who never lets him forget it. But Carter manages them as only an “A.C.O.D.” can.
That’s “Adult Child of Divorce,” an acronym for a very real subculture that earns a movie comedy that is funnier in performance than it ever was as a script. Scott (“Step Brothers” “Guilt Trip”) plays the sane corner of calm in the sea of storms his parents thrive on. When Carter’s younger brother Trey (Clark Duke) announces his engagement, Carter is the one Trey trusts will make peace between the warring couple that gave birth to them. Fat Chance.
“If I’m paying, SHE can’t come!”
“What about a SURPRISE wedding? Your father wouldn’t even have to know about it!”
Carter is a restaurateur who has used a lifetime of calming the waters as training for dealing with irate customers. But this last, great throw-down has him questioning how he’s turned out, how he can soothe the hurt feelings of his parents’ latest spouses (Amy Poehler and Ken Howard), how he can mollify his more-than-patient girlfriend (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
Maybe a visit to his childhood shrink will help. But chatting with Dr. Judith (Jane Lynch, on-the-nose casting) reveals that she’s not a real therapist, merely a researcher who used the young Carter and several others to write a best-seller about children of divorce. Seeing him now, she can barely contain her glee at the idea of doing a follow-up book — about Adult Children of Divorce.
Scott is the rather staid center that a stellar crew of zanies surrounds, and there’s just enough movie here to give most of them moments to shine. Jessica Alba, in perhaps her finest performance ever, is sexy, aloof and amusingly damaged as another former Dr. Judith “subject.” Poehler dials it up as Hugh’s latest trophy wife, a harridan hated by the rest of the family. And Howard is sweetly non-plussed as Melissa’s mild-mannered counterpoint of a husband.
But Duke, so hilarious in films such as “Kick Ass,” is given nothing funny to play. Winstead plays a female version of a straight man, as well.
Veteran TV writer turned co-writer/director Stu Zicherman sees to it that Jenkins and O’Hara more than cover those shortfalls. Their characters are nothing short of maddening, and the duo pull out all the stops in their fights and what comes after those fights.  Lynch, self-absorbed and superior as ever, delivers the lines (some of them narrated) that connect the comedy to the zeitgeist, the truths behind the farce.
“You are the least parented, least nurtured generation” in American history, she consoles Carter and his A.C.O.D. peers. They’ve become adults who “walk around like victims,” “shells of insecurity” who cope by negotiating over everything. No wonder they’re so screwed up.
The promise of the premise and the gift of this cast is sort of wasted in a thinly-scripted film that’s too brief to let everyone have moments to shine, too focused on its straight-laced lead (Scott) to allow more big laughs. With a wedding on the way, parents behaving badly and messed up kids coming to grips with their legacy, this should have been a manic 90 minutes.
“A.C.O.D.” should have been a lot more A.D.H.D.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief sexual content
Cast: Adam Scott, Catherine O’Hara, Richard Jenkins, Jane Lynch, Amy Poehler, Jessica Alba, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clark Duke 
Credits: Directed by Stu Zicherman, written by Ben Karlin and Stu Zicherman. A Film Arcade release. 
Running time: 1:27

The earliest box office numbers in from Deadline.com always underestimate kids’ films and how much they take in on Saturday.

So take this $38 weekend and add a couple, unless parents find something better to do with their kids’ SAturdays. It still looks to hit $40 million.

Surprises further down the chart — “Rush” isn’t going to hit $12 as it expands into the rest of America this weekend. Lots of screens, not that much interest in these stars and those (F1) cars.  That was pretty much as predicted. They hope it has awards legs, and if so, it’ll stick around and make some money in the US while doing much better in the rest of the world.

“BAggage Claim” is giving Paula Patton a boost. Poor reviews haven’t stopped it from closing in on a $10 million weekend. $9 million may be right on the mark. Hard to keep a gorgeous woman married to a pop star down.

“Prisoners” is holding some of its opening weekend audience. Not all of it, by a long shot. A Top Three finish ain’t bad.

“Don Jon” and its racy R-rating and subject matter and lack of box office stars (JGL, Scar-Jo and Julianne Moore and Tony Danza won’t sell it) is about to clear $8 million.

History hasn’t let us think about the blood.
It was all over Jackie Kennedy, the Secret Service Agents and especially the doctors and nurses crowded into that emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
“Parkland” is a fascinating insider’s view of those fateful two days in November of 1963, when a president was murdered, his assassin was gunned down in custody and generations of conspiracies were born.
Journalist turned filmmaker Peter Landesman and a cast of character actors get across the chaos, confusion, the “rush to judgment” and the fearful but determined people who were on the front lines, eyewitnesses to and participants in history.
Zac Efron is the tired and overawed resident on duty when JFK is frantically wheeled in. Colin Hanks (father Tom Hanks’ company produced the film) is the chief surgeon, Dr. Malcolm Perry, summoned from a meeting to join him.
“What is that, a trach?” Dr. Perry says, pointing to the apparent tracheotomy hole in Kennedy’s neck.
“No, it’s a wound.”
Marcia Gay Harden is the cool-under-pressure nurse, Doris Nelson, keeping the doctors focused, rushing to her locker to fetch a crucifix when they have to summon a priest (Jackie Earle Haley).
Paul Giamatti is Abraham Zapruder, the proud, patriotic Kennedy fan who filmed that awful moment on the motorcade route and realizes, through the shock and sadness, that his and his family’s lives will never be the same.
Billy Bob Thornton is Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels, on task and professional, but furious at what has happened. Ron Livingston is the F.B.I. agent whom Lee Harvey Oswald had threatened just weeks before Kennedy’s arrival and whose actions fuel many “cover-up” conspiracies.
Two stand-outs among all these personalities — Jacki Weaver as Oswald’s nutty, imperious mother, who chooses this moment to point out how important she is, and James Badge Dale as Oswald’s stricken brother, anxious to confront Lee (Jeremy Strong) in jail.
With all the familiar faces and different story threads to follow, Landesman, famous for a magazine article on the sex slave trade that was turned into a movie, relies on our knowledge of this overly-parsed piece of history to carry the movie along. So even though it’s cluttered, it works. Actors make their impressions, then the film changes scene — Zapruder and the Secret Service taking his film to one lab after another to try and process it, the doctors and nurses still in shock over Kennedy’s death suddenly summoned to save Oswald’s life.
Landesman’s film is most revealing in the turf wars that burst forth over those two days, how the various Feds were enraged any time some ten gallon hat wearing Texan tried to assert jurisdiction over the crime or the corpses.
He might have simply kept the famous figures’ faces out of the frame, which he does for many scenes involving First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy (Kat Steffens) and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. In giving them both face time and lines of dialogue, he avoids the most famous line, one that gets at the disconnect between Washington and Texas. Jackie refused to change her bloodied suit — “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”
But “Parkland” is still a sometimes moving and more sober-minded take on the Kennedy Assassination than Oliver Stone’s bracing but conspiracy-crazed “J.F.K.” It won’t settle any arguments among the “community” of conspiracy buffs. It simply shines a light on the very fallible, quite human people who were caught up in those fateful days, the epic tragedy and the mistakes that were made that haunt us still.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for bloody sequences of ER trauma procedures, some violent images and language, and smoking throughout
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden, Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston
Credits: Written and directed by Peter Landesman. An Exclusive Media release. 
Running time: 1:33