Movie Nation

The answer to that has to be “probably.” “Wizard of Oz” took in decent money, owing to the lack of kid-film competition. And since the last theatrical cartoon was the limper-than-limp “Planes,” there is pent up demand. Lots of it.

But could the mediocre sequel “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” manage a $40 million+ weekend? Variety figures it could happen. Remember, the dreadful “Hotel Transylvania” pulled in that much opening at the end of September.

Box Office Mojo says “YES.”

$40 is kind of a benchmark for kids’ cartoons. The biggest ones open at $60-80, in the summer or over the holidays. But a sequel of this magnitude could do that, even in September.

Box Office Guru is even more generous, thinking that $44 million is closer to the mark. Sounds about right to me. I wasn’t crazy about the movie, (most reviews were tepid) but it’ll do some business, even if the trailers suck. Which they have.

The Guru and Mr. Mojo are in agreement on “Rush,” that great reviews and hype and the Ron Howard movie starring Thor (Chris Hemsworth) will only add up to $12 (Mojo) to $14 (Guru) at the box office. We’re Americans. We pay little attention to soccer or Formula 1,  much less to ancient F-1 history. I think this could do better. $15-20.

“Don Jon” may be good, but is too naughty to manage much more than $10 (Mojo says that, Guru goes for $12).

And “Baggage Claim” will be lucky to clear $7. It’s being advertised to death, and its target audience (Tyler Perry’s crowd) is not known for following the suggestions of critics. Who have, to a one, trashed it.

“Rush” is a terrific racing bio-pic, a real plum on Ron Howard’s resume. Everybody says so. Go see it. One of the best pictures of the year.

I thought the Metallica concert-and-more film “Metallica, Through the Never,” was self-serious and a trifle pretentious. And surely others who reviewed the film found the din of the music grating and the violent, 3D street life linking drug use and anarchy and violence to that music a turn off.

Apparently not. Unless you take into account pandering to that thrash metal audience. It is the ultimate fan’s experience of Metallica, but seriously, the “story” doesn’t do much for it. It’s the most over-praised movie of the weekend. I gave it 2.5 stars, and RT has it rated in the 90s. Which is a joke, unless you’re a serious fan.

I also think the mediocre sequel “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” is undeserving of any praise. There’s nothing to it, but there it sits, in the 70s on Rotten Tomatoes. A flawed system. Which is why Metacritic is better. A 60 there.

Joseph Gordon Levitt’s racy “Don Jon” is shockingly sweet, smart and hopeful — Jersey Shore romance with heart. Heart that arrives only in the third act. Good reviews, overall, for this “Don Juan” amongst the goombahs.

And “Baggage Claim” is taking a justifiable pounding, suggesting that unless Paula Patton pulls in a surprisingly large audience this weekend, her days of carrying a movie will be short lived. Pity.

Paula Patton fizzes and flounces through “Baggage Claim”, a romantic comedy about a flight attendant who gives herself “30 days and 30 thousand miles” to find some man to “put a ring on it” before her sister’s wedding.
No gesture is too big, no half-hearted punchline too weak to sell with some wide-eyed bit of mugging from the star of “Jumping the Broom.” An actress who showed blessed restraint in films such as “Precious” practically gives herself a hernia trying to make this exercise in “Haven’t I see this before?” fresh.
Patton plays Montana, flight attendant, doomed to make poor choices in men (see “Jumping the Broom”), so upset when her younger sister (Lauren London) announces her engagement that she resolves to have a wed-able date for that sister’s nuptials.
Her mother taught her “You’re not a lady until you’re married,” and her mother’s played by Jenifer Lewis, so that’s to be expected.
So Montana’s obligatory gay flight attendant pal (Adam Brody) and curvaceous, oversexed flight attendant BFF (Jill Scott) use their professional connections to hurl Montana in the path of her most promising (and successful) exes by tracking their every airline ticket. Yeah, it’s illegal and they know it, but she’s worth it.
With the help of ticket sales clerks, baggage handlers and a hilarious TSA security screener (Affion Crockett), Montana makes flight after flight, reconnecting with music producer Damon (Trey Songz), aspiring politician Langston (Taye Diggs), international businessman Quinton (Djimon Hounsou) and others.
All the while, she’s not quite grasping that the fellow she grew up with and now lives right across the hall from (Derek Luke) is her Forever Man.
The mechanics of getting Montana on the flights is the quickest and funniest part of the movie, with all the conference call plotting with her pals and the tricks her airport screener friend Cedric (Crockett) plays to get her through line quickly, or stall others who need to be held up.
“I have NO life,” Cedric announces as he “wands” another passenger, “which gives me ALL day to ruin YOURS.”
Writer-director David E. Talbert, in adapting his own book, feels free to put Patton in the same guise — playing ten years below her age, playing needy and marriage-obsessed — that she wore in “Jumping the Broom.” Scene after scene had me scratching my head, wondering if I’d seen this movie before. I have. Talbert borrows freely and often in concocting this thinly amusing bit of recycling.
Diggs, in playing a smooth Washington insider angling for a seat in Congress and looking for a submissive beauty to be his bride, feels darned familiar. Yes, his character has fashion sense and dotes on his Yorkshire terrier lapdog. But no, he’s not gay, saving Talbert from the most obvious case of plagiarism (Anthony Mackie in “What’s Your Number?”) here.
The supporting players score the occasional laugh, but hiring the tiresome Lewis to play another tiresome, brassy mom and making the rest of the cast play cliches and “types” give this romantic comedy too much baggage to overcome.

(Read Roger Moore’s Interview with Paula Patton here)

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sexual content and some language
Cast: Paula Patton, Derek Luke, Djimon Hounsou, Taye Diggs, Jenifer Lewis
Credits: Written and directed by David E. Talbert, based on his book.  A Fox Searchlight release
Running time: 1:38

The Herculean task of any sequel is repeating the experience of the original film, or improving on it. That’s nigh on impossible due to the simple fact that you only get to take the viewing public utterly by surprise once.
The out-of-nowhere novelty and delight of Sony Animation’s “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” based on Judi and Ronald Barrett’s children’s book, is missing in “Meatballs 2.” The design and color palette is as glorious as ever. But the laughs are few and innovations fewer in this generally winded knock-off.
Inventor Flint Lockwood’s cuisine-creating weather machine has come to the attention of his idol, corporate scientist and TV science show host Chester V (Will Forte), who worries that the island of Swallow Falls is too dangerous to live on — for now. The gadget is producing food animals — predators, “Taco-diles” and Cheese (burger) Spiders, Su-sheep and Shrimpanzees and Fla-mangoes.
So Chester convinces the town to evacuate and Flint (Bill Hader) to join Chester V’s “Think-quanauts,” scientists who work in Chester V’s invention factory. Eventually, Flint is commissioned to go back and turn off his errant weather-food machine, and his pals Sam the meteorologist (Anna Faris), her camera operator/scientist Manny (Benjamin Bratt), former baby model Brent (Andy Samberg), hyper-active cop Earl (Terry Crews replacing Mr. T.) and Flint’s sardine-fisherman dad (James Caan) venture back there to brave “an eco-system of living food.” Swallow Falls is a Jurassic Park of Bananostriches, Water Mellaphants and the like.
Hats off to production designer Justin Thompson and art director David Bleich, who conjure up a scary Tacodile Supreme and a syrup bog of slow-motion chases through the sticky stuff, where the dead swamp trees are actually strips of bacon.
The script is another collection of food puns — “Oh no! We’re toast! FRENCH toast!” “There’s a LEEK in the boat!” (cut to screaming onion-like vegetable).
The moral lessons, about science making the world a better place (or creating mayhem) and accepting that your children will not always emulate you or live up to your expectations, are muddier. There’s a villain rather than a runaway technology to battle, here. And the villain is bland as oatmeal without the raisins.
It’s all more cynical than silly, the sort of movie you get when the corporate desire for a sequel precedes the creative team’s “Have we got a great idea for a sequel.” Which, in this case, they didn’t.

MPAA Rating:  PG for mild rude humor
Cast: The voices of Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Benjamin Bratt. 
Credits: Directed by Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn, scripted by Erica Rivinoja. A Sony Animation release. 
Running time: 1:33

“Metallica: Through the Never” is something like the ultimate fan’s concert film. Expense and fire marshals be damned, these gents — James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo — and their extensive road crew put on a show — Tesla Coils, lasers, gigantic video-screened coffins, an electric chair, a statue of Lady Justice built on stage (and destroyed).
For non-fans? Perhaps “Tinnitus: The Musical,” fits. If the 3D glasses don’t give you a headache, the high-energy/higher decibel stage show by the world’s heaviest heavy metal band will pick up the slack.
“Through the Never” is a greatest hits concert set interwoven with a roadie/gofer’s experience of their music — anarchy, blood, riots in the streets — as the kid, Trip  (Dane DeHaan) is sent from the arena where they’re performing to fetch a truck that’s run out of gas, a truck that holds “something the band needs tonight.”
The kid pops a pill, cranks up his ancient Ford Econoline and drives off into the night. And director Nimrod Antal (“Kontroll,” “Predators”) sees to it that strange things start to happen — dream fugues where Trip thinks he’s floating in water, nightmares where the streets are alive with masked, hooded anarchists battling riot police, all set to the music of Metallica as we cut back and forth from the musical mayhem indoors to the real mayhem outside.
The situation seems ripe, at first blush, for a somewhat humorous misadventure on the order of that KISS movie about the theme park, or “Detroit Rock City” or “ABBA: The Movie.” But Metallica isn’t humorous. They’re as serious as a heart attack. Which works for them, because wherever else you absorb their music, you “feel” it in your chest — first.
The street stuff is given little screen time, with no dialogue and only a gas-masked horseman and the young gofer’s talismanic rear-view-mirror doll as characters. Which is just as well, because whatever message is implied in the violent brawls and chases, it probably means more to those who have memorized the set list and all the lyrics (mostly unintelligible, performed live) therein.
The nine-time Grammy winners cover thirty years of thrash metal success, from “Hit the Lights” and
“Enter Sandman” to “Cyanide.” The camera swoops in on their theater-in-the-round stage set and gives us plenty of close-ups and a full dose of their live show’s energetic playing.
But Metallica, here, don’t really interact with the audience, don’t stray far from their power-chords-played-fast style.
And since the movie’s street side dream doesn’t add much more than a gimmicky “interpretation” of their sound, you’re left with a deafening dirge –well-played, but really, no improvement on your basic concert film.

MPAA Rating: R for some violent content and language
Cast: Dane DeHaan, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, Robert Trujillo
Credits: Directed by Nimrod Antal, written by Nimrod Antal, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich and Robert Trujillo. A Picturehouse release.
Running time: 1:33

There’s barely a wasted moment in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hilarious and wise “Don Jon.” Well, as long as you don’t consider a guy obsessively watching porn and doing what follows “wasted.” The title character (Gordon-Levitt) certainly doesn’t.
“ALL guys watch porn, every day,” he insists to one and all. But as frenetically as he does?
“It’s not that I can’t stop. But why should I?”
That’s fine when you’re strutting through the bars with your buds (Rob Brown, Jeremy Luke), bagging and bragging about it. Then Jon, whose pals call him “The Don,” meets “a dime.”
Yeah, Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) is a “ten” all right. But this Jersey girl has her eyes on the prize. Not Jon as he is, but Jon as he could be. She teases and tempts and grinds on him and has him enrolling in night school, rounding up his friends to meet her friends and trying to make his parents behave when they meet her.
“You don’t think I could make you happy if I wanted to?” she purrs, and he’s putty in her hands.
So Jon faces his dilemma — giving up porn, or lying to Barbara, confessing his sins to the priest every week, doing his Hail Marys and “Lord’s Prayer” recital during his reps at the gym and raging at the world from behind the wheel of his 1972 Chevelle,
Here’s how tight this tale is. Gordon-Levitt wrote and directed this, and his spare script doesn’t squander a single second at Jon’s job (he’s a bartender, apparently). His friends’ names have to be parsed from a single reference, and we never hear the name of his always-silent, always-texting sister (Brie Larson), a great, deadpan sight gag.
Tony Danza is riotously funny as the sports-obsessed, foul-mouthed rage-aholic dad who lets us see the tree that Jon fell from. Glenne Headly lands lots of laughs as his Catholic, grandchildren-obsessed mother.
Gordon-Levitt does sort of a Young Matt Dillon thing here — all smirk and swagger and muscle shirts and goombah slang.
And Johansson,  “Jersey Shore” twanging, gum-snapping temptation incarnate, gives the best performance of her career as a girl who just knows what she wants. Watching her turn it off and on is to see a starlet in full command of her talent and her other asserts.
Gordon-Levitt wasn’t content to just create a world not far from the “Jersey Shore” and people it with funny characters. His brisk little comedy turns dark and deep in the third act. That’s when the great Julianne Moore shows up as Esther, a funny/tragic and non-judgmental classmate of Jon’s in night school.
Whatever Barbara promises to Jon if he cleans his act up, Esther is the one who might show this Don Juan that he’s not in heaven, logging into porn ten times a day. He’s in hell.
In “Don Jon” Gordon-Levitt hasn’t made a great movie. But he has made a fun one, short and sweet, with a third act punch that is so to-the-point it’ll take your breath away.   

MPAA Rating: R for strong graphic sexual material and dialogue throughout, nudity, language and some drug use
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Glenne Headly, Tony Danza
Credits: Written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. A Relativity release.
Running time: 1:28