Movie Nation

Broadly speaking, awful movies fall into two categories — awfully bad in a funny way, and awfully bad period.
“Approaching Midnight” staggers into the latter category, an excruciatingly dull, badly written, badly-acted vanity project for writer-director-star Sam Logan Khaleghi.
A tale of an Afghan War vet who sees his best friend die in an ineptly-staged bit of combat, who then returns home to a rural Louisiana town where nobody has a Louisiana accent, where all the women are stunning and to a one, warm for his form, “Midnight” is 86 minutes of your life you will never get back.
Wesley Kent (Khaleghi) lost his best friend in Afghanistan and his girlfriend while he was in combat. We see the gorgeous but bland Aspen (Jana Kramer) in flashbacks. We have to. She died while Wesley was serving his country. She was the daughter of the mayor (Jeffrey Stetson, dreadful), a man who is running for governor, a fact that casts a “mysterious circumstances” shadow over Aspen’s death.
Her unutterably beautiful sister (Mia Serafino) trusts their daddy and is more interested in picking up with Wesley where Aspen left off. The mayor’s campaign manager (Michelle Lynne Balser) likewise is more interested in the soldier than the soldier’s questions about how Aspen died. Wesley keeps drifting into flashbacks — of combat, of his boring first few dates with Aspen.
In the movies, one sure sign of a vanity project is the sort of people the vain one surrounds himself with on screen. Khaleghi’s ladies are lookers with limited screen presence. Even the woman playing his sister (Jessica René Hilzey) could stop a clock.
Another giveaway of a vanity project is pretentious, preachy dialogue. “Approaching Midnight” has no conversations in it — just characters, mainly Khaleghi’s — delivering long monologues at one another.
“Remember, Mr. Mayor, after the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.”
“Approaching Midnight” has no urgency that propels the story forward. Scenes falls flat, the performances are universally stiff, the relationships and character names are confusing and under-explained and the production values lacking. When a barmaid pours beers out of a pitcher, you know they’re not shooting in a real bar, with taps. When a character mutters “I’m not sure much (sic) of us have use for a VHS,” there must have been nobody on the set to correct the writer-director-star’s grammar.
Which goes for the entire movie, which needed rewrites and script doctoring a lot more than it needed that Louisiana filmmaking incentive money that got it made.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, language, some action violence and brief smoking
Cast: Sam Logan Khaleghi, Jana Kramer, Mia Serafino, Jeffrey Stetson, Michelle Lynne Balser
Credits: Written and directed by Sam Logan Khaleghi. A Monterrey Media release.
Running time: 1:26

The buzz is “Oscar worthy” on Steve “Shame/Hunger” McQueen’s film of “12 Years a Slave.” And some of that heat is on Chiwetel Ejiofor, a very good actor who gives another breakout performance as a free New Yorker kidnapped and sold into slavery in the 1840s.

Moving, harrowing, not at all the blaxploitation burlesque that “Django Unchained” was.

Got questions for Steve or Chiwetel?

Well, at least of the summer.

Fall film season gets underway Sept. 20, at least as far as major releases go. “Prisoners” and the 3D conversion of “The Wizard of Oz” roll out next week — wide, among other titles.

This weekend? They dumped “The Family,” which could do some business thanks to its cast. Middling to poor reviews for that one at Metacritic. I thought it was more violent than funny, not French enough in feel or setting. Mobsters in witness protection in France? What country would allow murderous thugs to hide out in it? That’s just the first question you ponder as you sit, waiting (sometimes, long waits) between laughs or beat-downs. DeNiro is fine, Pfeiffer is quite funny. Tommy Lee Jones is just cashing a check.

And “Insidious: Chapter 2,” the second and inferior installment in the latest franchise from the guys who gave us “Saw” and all that followed. Weak to middling reviews for that one, as well, according to the tomatometer. Again, you can kind of see Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson waiting for this to be over in their performances. Checks cleared? Good. I’m outta here.

More interesting by far is Billy Bob Thornton’s Southern Gothic period piece, “Jane Mansfield’s Car.” It’s a little kinky, pretty funny, very Southern. Not to every taste, but I liked it.

“Blue Caprice” is one of the best films of the year, a harrowing, minimalist account of the making of the D.C. Beltway snipers. Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond are terrific as mentor and mass murderer. Very good reviews for that one.

More silly than its sinister forebear, “Insidious: Chapter 2” is entertaining for the contortions the script takes to incorporate both a brief prequel and highlights from the first film into a new 105 minute package.
This is a Mobius strip of a movie, looping in on itself with ghosts from “The Further” and parallel existences interwoven into the lives of the lost Lamberts of sunny Somewhere, California.
Those “Saw/Insidious” guys James Wan (director) and Leigh Whannell (co-writer, co-star) throw their pretty good cast — Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Barbara Hershey — at a sort of “later that month” follow-up to the “Poltergeist”-ish tale of the gutsy, long-haunted dad, Josh (Wilson) who goes “to the other side” to fetch his kidnapped boy (Ty Simpkins) from the demonic spirit that snatched him. And if the result isn’t nearly as hair-raising as the first film, at least they’ve set the table for more sequels, spinoffs, a sort of “Lone Gunmen” TV series even.
A ten minute prologue tells us of how younger Josh was first visited by a spirit, and first “treated” by ghostbuster Elise ( Lindsay Seim as a younger version of Lin Shaye’s character). Back in the present, adult Josh and wife Renai (Byrne) have fled to grandma’s house after the harrowing events of “Insidious,” which ended with Elise dead.
Renai doesn’t know for sure that Josh didn’t kill the medium, and neither do the cops. It doesn’t help that Josh has a faintly demonic bent to his denials that the spooky apparitions, a piano that plays by itself, etc.
“You have to relax,” he purrs. “Ignore them and they will go away.”
Of course, “they” don’t. That’s when Granny (Hershey) summons Elise’s old partner (Steve Coulter), along with her younger “Big Bang Theory” ghost-hunters, Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson).
That’s when the joking begins. In white shirts and black ties, the youngish ghost hunters have everything but the sunglasses and sportscoats of the “Men in Black.” They’re credulous when all around them are INcredulous.
That’s the sly comfort in this “feel good” horror franchise. Out there, in the Yellow Pages, there are “experts” who can help you deal with the supernatural. And even after death, a good ghost hunter is still on the clock.
The techno-props — ranging from baby monitors (been there, heard that) to old found video, to tin-can telephones — convey the ghostly voices from beyond. The Ouija board substitute here is a Boggle bag of letter dice that pass on messages from the dead.
The beastly things we see are nothing you wouldn’t recognize from “Mommie Dearest.”
And everybody keeps a straight face.
“Chapter 2” isn’t as clever as the screenwriters seems to think, and the movie isn’t remotely as scary as the film it is sequelling. But that’s not to say that it isn’t entertaining, on some level, even if you can tell the “name” actors are waiting for the checks to clear, ready to hand off this “franchise” to lesser lights, and the sooner the better.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of terror and violence, and thematic elements
Cast: Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson, Ty Simpkins, Barbara Hershey.
Credits: Directed by James Wan, written by Leigh Whannel and James Wan.
A FilmDistrict release.
Running time: 1:45

Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones revisit some blasts from their past in “The Family,” a violent action comedy about a mob family in France, thanks to the witness protection program.
DeNiro does a little “Analyze This” as Gio Manzoni, who ratted out his mob pals back in Brooklyn and now has a $20 million price on his head. He is, he narrates, “a nice guy” who just has to control “my sadistic urges” better. He’s prone to beating people senseless or to death over things like poor service, “disrespect” and the like.
Funny.
Pfeiffer tones down her “Married to the Mob” persona as Maggie, the long-suffering wife, moving to yet another town where these people — “The Blakes,” they’re called this time, need to fit in. Her encounters with rude French salesclerks bring out the pyromaniac in her.
Their kids — Belle (Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D’Leo) — have another high school to reconnoiter, master and have their way with.
And Jones is a milder-mannered version of his U.S. Marshal as the F.B.I. agent who tries to keep these four alive, and keep the incidents with the locals to a minimum.
As they set up shop in small-town Normandy, Gio, or “Fred,” decides he’ll write his memoirs. His cover story now is that he’s “a writer.” Silly Fred, he says he’s doing a D-Day book when he doesn’t know a thing about the subject.
“It’s about the Marines.” Every Frenchman in Normandy knows there were no Marines there.
Maggie finds a charming, ancient church, and curdles the blood of the local priest with her confession (which we don’t hear).
Warren, 14, is bullied, but born to work the angles until he’s had his revenge. And Belle is a streetwise bombshell who sets her sights on a student teacher as her first-ever sexual conquest.
Gio narrates as he types up his book, detailing his family history, papering over his sadistic impulses, impulses he won’t control when he sets out to find out why their old house has brown water coming out of the tap.
“Like Al Capone said, asking polite with a gun in your hand is better than asking polite with nothing.”
Everybody speaks English, which helps the kids and their “fuggedaboutit” parents adjust. Except they don’t. The movie lacks much in the way of “Frenchness,” which is a pity.
And even though the cast is first rate, “The Family” tends to lurch between laughs, with the most reliable humor coming from their over-the-top violence as a way of solving every problem.
Director Luc Besson established his action cred decades ago with “La Femme Nikita” and “The Professional,” and he wrote and produced “The Transporter” and “Taken” movies. But nobody ever accused Monsiuer Luc of having any flair for comedy. The backhanded slaps at French snootiness, softness and over-rated cuisine (“The land of cream”) and his idea of this sort of mob folk — adept at violence and quick to use it — aren’t particularly funny.
Whatever the source material (Tonino Benacquista’s novel “Malavita”), this feels inspired by Netflix’s “Lilyhammer,” about a mobster hiding out in Norway. Besson & Co. should have learned from that series that the fish out of water/culture clash stuff is where the fun comes from. The violence is rare, for shock value.
Here, the mayhem is personal and plentiful and graphic enough to make you wince. Just a bit. The beat-downs are funny enough in their excessiveness, but nobody in this film “gets what he deserves.” And none of the bystanders in the film’s quite-high body count earn their fate.
But DeNiro is the funniest he’s been since “Analyze That,” and one scene — he’s invited to be a guest speaker at a film society — manages huge laughs based on his past filmography.
Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, “The Family” has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.

(The best films of 2013 — so far)

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and brief sexuality
Cast: Robert DeNiro Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianna Agron, Jon D’Leo
Credits: Directed by Luc Besson, written by Michael Caleo and Luc Besson, based on a book by Tonino Benacquista. A Relativity  release.
Running time: 1:48

The moment Natalie Dormer sashays onto a screen, big screen or small, my first thought it is — “Oh, it’s Her Hotness from the ‘Henry the Eighth’ TV series.”

My second thought is “When will she strip?”

And the third thought is, “So how explicit will her sex scene be this time?”

Something about Dormer, a plainly talented actress who has yet to break through, just screams “sex” to filmmakers casting supporting parts in their movies. Dormer never gets the boy. He gets her, and then moves on.

Is she in a trap? Watching “Rush” last night, I began to think so. She’s in it early, she is a hotter-than-hot nurse, and then she exits. Early.

Would she even be considered for a larger role, say Olivia Wilde’s part in the film? They have similar chops and reputations. They’re equally beautiful. Wilde has also done her share of hot and heavy stuff, but she’s branched out with indie comedies and the like.

Dormer? She hasn’t gotten that sort of break, hasn’t turned up in a promising indie comedy that broke out. And maybe she’s not holding out for roles that don’t cash in on her man-eater eyes and other proven attributes.

I’m not complaining, but I’ll bet she is. Or she should be.

The fabulous films of fall are just starting previews, and soon we’ll be mercifully free of that annual late summer swoon of slop (“Riddick,””Two Guns,” “The Family” et al).

So where do we stand as a tentative best of the year list goes? Have we seen any Oscar contenders from spring and summer? Because I know I’ve seen a few these past two weeks.

Here’s where I place things at the moment.

“12 Years a Slave”

“Fruitvale Station”

“Mud”

“The Spectacular Now”

“Rush”

“Blue Caprice”

Anything I’m leaving out?

I don’t think “Blue Jasmine”, “The Butler” or “42” will cut it on my list. But they could figure in the Oscar mix. The first has a killer Cate turn, the latter two have good performances and $100 million box office takes to give them awards season legs. For that matter, Michael Shannon’s “Iceman” turn makes that movie worth keeping in a tentative top ten. For now. Will Oscar remember him, too?

A weak year for animation, and I can’t tell if any of the year’s remaining cartoons will improve on a weak summer. None of the documentaries I’ve seen have been slam dunks, either.

Will “Dallas Buyers’ Club,” “The Monuments Men” and “Gravity” crack through? We might get to ten best picture nominees this year, but will there really be “ten best” worth arguing over at year’s end?

Overlong and comically broad, the Mexican-made “Instructions not Included”, a surprise late-summer box office hit, is still not without its charms. A Spanish-language (with subtitles) comic weeper about single parenting and the immigrant experience, it makes a fine showcase for Mexican co-writer/director/star Eugenio Derbez, who finally has his better-late-than-never introduction to American audience.
Derbez, who appeared in such English language dramedies as “Girl in Progress,” may be entirely too old (he’s over 50) to pull off the young Acapulco “player” whose dalliance with an American woman (Jessica Lindsey) leads to her dumping their baby girl on his bachelor pad doorstep. But he’s engaging enough, he clicks with the little girl and he’s quite adept at the slapstick that the movie uses to show that with kids, instructions really should be included.
Valentin womanizes his way through Acapulco, fighting off his fears — which his father, in flashbacks, told him were his “wolves” — such fears as commitment and growing up.
He has to face those fears when Julie (Lindsey) drops a baby in his lap. He has only Julie’s old Los Angeles address and a single photo of her teaching an aerobics class to go on. And he has no clue how to cope with a baby.
The funniest scenes in the film involve his clumsiness — stuffing the baby in his shirt as he races his scooter to the airport, refusing to dive into diaper changing, relying on his goofy friends for advice.
“You’ll have to learn English, otherwise, when she starts talking, you won’t understand her.”
A cross-country trek, hitchhiking, gets him to the border and a friendly coyote smuggles him into the U.S. But getting to L.A. is not enough. Julie has disappeared, and not having a Green Card, the only work Valentin can stumble into is reckless movie stunt work.
A lovely montage covers the seven years that quickly pass. Valentin leans on little Maggie (Loreto Peralta) to translate for him on the set, to negotiate his deals, even. He cannot learn English after seven years in the U.S., but somehow, she has managed it.
And he tells her wonderful fairytales in the form of letters from her mother, letters he writes and which she illustrates, in her mind, in delightful 3-D animated interludes, felt cut-outs of trips to Africa, Australia or the moon.
“Instructions” lazily leans on the funny business that Valentin copes with on movie sets too much, with over-familiar character types peopling that part of the picture. The father/daughter home life stuff, living in a toy-filled loft, is more engaging.
And then the mom returns and the whole affair switches to a sort of Mexican vs. American “Kramer vs. Kramer.”
The kid’s adorable, and the flashbacks to the tough love Valentin received from his dad work comic wonders — hurling the kid off an Acapulco cliff, teaching him to be brave and not really succeeding.
Derbez manages some marvelous bits of business — using the baby’s bottom to squash a spider, another of Valentin’s phobias.
And the ending of the movie is a real grabber, the sort of thing that lifts and improves a tediously long and otherwise mediocre film and tricks you into thinking it was better than it really was as you leave the theater.
Sentimental in the extreme, “Instructions” doesn’t reinvent a very tired genre and the things Derbez skips past — the language barrier contrivance, the obviously high-mileage actor pretending to be a young swinger — hamper the film, too. At its best, it has a touch of Tyler Perry about it. At its worst, it reminded me of the many Bollywood “comedies” built around wild implausibilities, starring actors 25 years too old for their characters.
But it’s clever and inventive enough to suggest that Derbez could have a future north of the border, too.

(“Instructions” becomes the highest grossing Spanish language film in US history).

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, thematic elements and language
Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Karla Souza, Loreto Peralta, Daniel Raymont
Credits: Directed by Eugenio Derbez, written by Guillermo Ríos, Leticia López Margalli and Eugenio Derbez. A Pantelion release.
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Running time: 2:00