Movie Nation

Reviews are calling “Blue Caprice,” the new thriller about the D.C. Snipers, “the most frightening monster movie of the year,” (New York Observer). And the praise for the film’s star, Isaiah Washington, is even more rapturous, praising his “mesmerizing authority and conviction” as John Allen Muhammad, the teacher, father-figure and monster who created a monster.
And more than a few critics and journalists are calling it “a comeback” for the former “Grey’s Anatomy” star.
“I don’t know what I’m coming back to,” Washington, pretty much out of the spotlight since his firing from that show. “Hey, if it works in a headline, I’m down with that. I;m a producer on this movie, too. If it gets them to come and see it…”
Washington, 50, knows his work will still be filtered, by some, through the memory of how he handled a heated argument and a homophobic slur on the “Grey’s” set half a dozen years ago. Since then, he’s continued to work — a one-off TV appearance here, an indie film there. And now he’s in one that’s gaining attention and making people remember how good he is.
“I’m wiser, stronger, a little faster,” he says, keeping it light. “I didn’t NEED this part. I made no money on it. What I took from the experience was useful, to my career. But I didn’t do it for that. I didn’t have Hollywood in mind. No disrespect. A studio wouldn’t have rolled on a film like that and they certainly wouldn’t have cast me in it.
“I did it because I’m a character actor, and this guy — he was a challenge. I had nothing to hold onto, nothing to work with, other than R.L. Porto’s script, Alexandre Moor’s direction and John Muhammad’s wife Mildred’s book (“Scared Silent”). I had to infuse him with some form of humanity, that you could feel even if you couldn’t see it.”
As luck would have it, Washington was reluctant to take on a role that has already led to numerous other opportunities — including a return to episodic TV (“The Hundred”) this fall. Washington recoiled at the memory of this weeks-long shooting spree and the boy and man who carried it out.
“Oh man, you know, in MY community, whenever something (messed) up happens, we’re always hoping ‘Please don’t let it be a black guy.’ When it came out, after three weeks of insanity and terror, that the killer was NOT a Caucasian male with a lot of guns, that this ‘In Cold Blood’ character did NOT look like Robert Blake, but like me, I was not happy. It would be easier for my psyche to handle it if he looked like Timothy McVeigh,” as experts and profilers at the time of the shootings (fall, 2002) predicted. And he wasn’t flattered when unproven director Moors, known for music videos, sent him a letter.
“My knee-jerk reaction to (producer) Isen Robbins was ‘Ooooh, no no no no.’ My humanity resisted this character’s inhumanity. But Isen’s very smooth and sharp and talked me into taking a phone call with Alexandre. We had no script, bro.  Just a letter and a phone conversation.”
The actor sensed the opportunity, and the risks in a role that people might start to associate with him.
“You guys write, ‘Isaiah’s prickle reputation makes him PERFECT for this part.’ But that’s not how I played him…If I don’t do my job right, people will say ‘He was a psychopath,’ and not give Muhammad another thought. He has characters flaws — infidelity, arrested development. What does that look like? He walks around with a little teenager named Lee Malvo (Tequan Richmond who thinks he’s The Man. Because he needs that. Muhammad was a very flawed, horrible human being who needs to be respected by someone or something.”
And Washington accepted his own trial by media as preparation for this role, and others he has planned for the near future.
“I don’t think it’s an accident that these films are coming to me. I went through a media thing where I was painted this way and was supposed to be that way. Have you heard anything of that (homophobic) nature in six years? I’ve been going on with my life. Hopefully, people will realize ‘That’s not who he is.’
“So if nothing else, dealing with that means that I’m attracting these stories that suggest we have to give a little more thought to the way we label somebody and the sorts of things.”

(Roger Moore’s review of “Blue Caprice” is here)

Billy Bob Thornton was an actor who used his distinctive voice as a screenwriter to kick-start his movie career. But as the acting jobs piled up, the Oscar winning screenwriter of “Sling Blade” and “A Family Thing” gave up writing and directing, content to be a hired gun actor in demand for all manner of faintly menacing Southern eccentrics.
“Jayne Mansfield’s Car,” his first co-writing/directing job in over a decade, is full of just the sort of characters Thornton has made his screen trademark — menacing Southern eccentrics. It’s too long and wildly uneven. And the longer it goes on, the more uneven and oddball it seems. But it’s a welcome return for one of the cinema’s few regional voices and an entertaining jumble of ideas, themes and performances.
In 1969 Morrison, Alabama, the Caldwells are a family divided. Conservative patriarch Jim (Robert Duvall) lords over the family’s antebellum estate where his word is the law. A World War I vet and a bit of a brute, he has no patience for his World War II vet son Carroll (Kevin Bacon) who has, in his 40s, gone “hippy” and leads the tiny protests against the Vietnam War.
Jimbo (Robert Patrick) compensates for his lack of combat experience by echoing his daddy’s opinions in most everything.
But Skip (Billy Bob Thornton), like Carroll, a veteran of WWII, seems to share Carroll’s point of view about the “pointless” war now going on. He’s a bit touched, driving his collection of sports cars too fast, breaking out his old Navy whites a bit too often.
And they’re all tested when their long-absent mom, who ran off to England and married a Brit, dies. She wanted to be buried at home. Even Jim, whom she ran out on, softens.
“Lord’a mercy, she deserves to be buried with her people. Don’t matter what she done to us.”
Her English family — her widowed husband (John Hurt), his brooding son (Ray Stevenson) and wild daughter Camilla (Frances O’Connor) — accompany the body. And Donna (Katherine LaNasa), the uninhibited former Miss Alabama member of the Caldwell clan, rolls in as well.
Thornton and longtime co-writer Tom Epperson have a rich collection of characters to pair off in all sorts of dramatic, tragic, sexual and political debates. Skip is smitten with Camilla’s accent, and she can’t get over how “random” his thoughts are and how much the plantation is “like ‘Gone With the Wind.'”
Drugs and the draft menace the next generation of Caldwells — wayward teens — face, are aired. The kinkiness of the  uninhibited Southern aristocracy is hurled against repressed Englishness, the scars of war that live on long after combat and Southern Gothic eccentricities all share screen time in this drama, which veers between amusing and darkly-touching, hitting every troubling emotion in between.
But Thornton allows so many grace notes in — poetic touches such as when Skip reveals that it’s not “unpleasant memories” that keep veterans from talking about combat — it’s the fact that “Nobody wants to hear it.”
And the performances make up for some of the film’s willful pursuit of the sordid, the over familiar (war protests) and the overripe.
“Jayne Mansfield’s Car” — the title comes from the vehicle the blond bombshell actress was killed in, a vehicle that toured fairs and sideshows for years afterward — is melodramatic hokum, with just enough false moments to stagger the viewer. But this tale of generations fumbling to connect, of old rivals bonding over shared experience and of families that feud and endure has such a distinct voice and tone that you almost wish the acting work would dry up enough for Thornton to let his freak-film flag fly more often. Whatever his other quirks, the man has an ear.

(Roger Moore profiles and interviews Billy Bob Thornton here)

MPAA Rating:R for language, sexual content, nudity, drug use and some bloody images .
Cast: Robert Duvall, Kevin Bacon, John Hurt, Billy Bob Thornton
Credits: Directed by Billy Bob Thornton, written by Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton. An Anchor Bay release.
Running time: 2:02

The shootings were so random — a parking lot, at a gas station, a guy mowing grass, a baby-sitter reading a book on a bus stop bench.
They happened in a spree — in Maryland, Virginia, greater Washington, D.C. — and set off a frantic man hunt and car hunt. He had to be a “disaffected white male.” He called in threats and warnings.
“Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time”.
Was the shooter driving a van? Or white truck?
No, it was a “Blue Caprice.” And the “shooter” was two black men, John Allen Muhammad and a teen he treated as his “son,” Lee Malvo.
“Blue Caprice” is a chilling portrait of motive, manipulation and mass murder. As Muhammad — never called by name in Alexandre Moors’ film — Isaiah Washington paints a portrait of brittle charm and embittered, bloody-minded grudges. We meet a doting father, see him take in a teen who has been abandoned by his mother, and then watch him use people, claim victimhood and eventually create a monster as his tool for revenge on a country this Army vet felt had done him wrong. Washington is brilliant in the part — scary, mysterious, but not the least bit unfathomable.
The grown man meets the boy Lee (an intense yet vulnerable Tequan Richmond) in Antigua, and eventually takes him to Tacoma, Washington, where the ex-Army mechanic renews his friendship with an old Army buddy.
Tim Blake Nelson is a rough, working class gun nut — heading off into the woods to “let off some steam” by shooting any one of his large, unsecured collection of guns. Pistols are fine and hunting rifles have their place. But “If you really want to make a difference in the world,” there’s nothing like an assault rifle, he glibly tells the boy. And the kid, taking his first shots — is “a natural.”
Washington, Moors and screenwriter R.F.I. Porto let us see the wheels begin to turn in Muhammad’s head. He’s under a restraining order, kept away from his ex-wife and kids. With a “Do you love me?” he starts indoctrinating the teen with his vision for their exploits, the terror they will strike at the whole “house of cards” that a random shooting spree Muhammad feels will topple.
“Blue Caprice” can be faulted for its dry take on these characters and their actions. Moors is engrossed by the heist picture elements here, how they trained, Muhammad’s rationale for picking totally random victims, part of his strategy that “If it could be anybody” carrying out these crimes, for any of a number of reasons, “we can be invisible.”
We get nothing of the longer version of Muhammad’s own radicalization — his separation from the Army, his involvement with the Nation of Islam. And we see little hesitation, confusion or remorse in the boy, who curled up in the trunk of that late model blue Chevrolet that they bought with money stolen in a murder/robbery, and picked off targets with a high-powered rifle. Richmond gives us the arc of needy and unwanted to cold-eyed and cold-blooded without much humanity in between.
And there’s no dwelling on the victims, when  picking out even one of them for profiling would have added impact and emotion to the story.
But “Blue Caprice” is as complete a portrait as the movies have given us of the disaffected among us, people whose sanity is as shaky as a house of cards, and the easy access to weapons and cultural anonymity that allows them to act out their dark fantasies of revenge on the unsuspecting.

(Roger Moore’s interview with Isaiah Washington is here).

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, language and brief drug use.
Cast: Isaiah Washington, Tequan Richmond, Joey Lauren Adams, Tim Blake Nelson
Credits: Directed by Alexandre Moors written by R.F.I. Porto. An  IFC/Sundance Select release.
Running time: 1:27

Deadline.com reports that Vin Diesel sank some of his “Fast & Furious” millions into reviving this franchise, which was Code Blue back in 2004, when “The Chronicles of Riddick” came out and tanked.

So he made it and Universal (“Fast/Furious” connection 2) decided it wasn’t up to summer snuff, so they slipped it out in early Sept. — the movie island for unwanted toys.

And it did maybe as much as $19, more likely $18 or so. Not awful, but not break-even money. Since it cost under $50, it’ll make its cash overseas.

“The Butler” closed in on $100 million. “We’re the Millers,” a dog of a hit, reached $123 million.

“Salinger”, the new doc about the reclusive “Catcher in the Rye” author, opened OK in a few theaters.

“Instructions Not Included” added hundreds of screens but made considerably less money than its opening weekend, despite that.

“One Direction” took a dive. A one-weekend wonder for the one or two hit wonders pre-fab Brit boy band.

He was a staple in one era of Spike Lee films, gained greater fame on TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” and was dismissed from that show for intemperate remarks about a gay castmate and repeated bungling of how he apologized for that.

You could call his stellar turn in “Blue Caprice,” playing the D.C. sniper mastermind John Muhammad. He is fierce, manipulative and frightening in the part, a man aggrieved taking out his rage on a culture that he blames for his woes.

Questions for Isaiah? Comment below.

The late summer swoon at the box office — no breakout hits since July, no decent opening weekend since “The Butler” — continues as Vin Diesel’s “Riddick” opened weak Thursday night and Friday and is headed for a $17-18 million weekend.

Not exactly a healthy start for a sci-fi film, an established (albeit, dated) franchise and a “star” who seemed to have gotten his mojo back.

“The Butler” is hanging around and closing in on $100 million (it’ll be in the 90s by the time the weekend ends).

“Instructions Not Included,” Pantelion’s Spanish language comedy, is in third place and doing another $5 million or so this weekend.