Movie Nation

“I Hate Reboots” reads a funny T-shirt that comic book/movie superhero nerd Dave Lizewski wears in “Kick Ass 2,” an obvious shot at “Spider-Man”, “Superman” and other franchises that wind down, then return to life entirely too soon on the big screen.
But how do you feel about superhero sequels that pretty much nobody asks for, Dave? And we’re not talking about “Percy Jackson” here.
“Kick Ass 2” comes three years after the modest ($48 million) success of “Kick Ass.” Covering much of the same ground, with a lot of the cute worn off or aged out of — Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) is no longer a pre-teen, Kick Ass himself (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) strains to look like a high school senior — the sequel is notable for some amusing bits, a few cool scenes, and its wince-worthy violence and staggering body count.
“This is the real world,” Dave’s long-suffering dad (Garrett M. Brown) lectures. “It has consequences.”
So Dave suffers terrible beatings and and Hit Girl delivers worse ones, with blood and bullets and worse. And the mobster’s son once known as Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) rounds up a posse of evil henchmen, becomes a super villain and kills or maims scores of cops and civilians.
And there are no consequences.

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Sweeping in ambition and sometimes moving in execution, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is an epic that more closely resembles a made-for-TV movie or mini-series, albeit one from the high-minded heyday of TV movies, the ’70s. “Backstairs at the White House,” for instance.
Covering over eighty years of American history through the eyes of a White House butler and his family — decades of strife and conflict, from segregation to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency — “The Butler” features Oscar winner Forest Whitaker in the title role, Oscar nominee Oprah Winfrey as co-star, and Oscar winners Robin Williams, Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Vanessa Redgrave in supporting roles.
We follow a sharecropper’s son who saw his father murdered by a white landowner (Alex Pettyfer) in 1920s Georgia, a boy raised to know service, that “The room should feel empty with you in it” by the matron of the house (Redrgave), who rose from N.C. and then D.C. hotel waiter and butler to the White House, just as Eisenhower (Williams) is deciding to send troops into Little Rock to integrate the schools.
No matter how careful the instructions from his peers (Lenny Kravitz, Gooding) about how he should “never listen or react to conversations,” Cecil hears all and sees all. And every now and then, Kennedy (James Marsden, a dead ringer for Bobby, too short for Jack) or Nixon (John Cusack) or Reagan (Alan Rickman, the most presidential of the lot) will actually ask his opinion, Cecil being the handiest black voter these seven presidents whom Cecil served know.
Meanwhile, at home, Cecil’s wife Gloria (Winfrey) drinks and tries to raise their two sons in the absence of a husband who lets his job come first.
“I don’t CARE what goes on in THAT house,” she grouses. “I care what goes on in THIS house.”
And well she should, because their college-bound son (David Oyelowo) is traveling through the ’60s and ’70s like an African American Forrest Gump — jailed as a Freedom Rider, fan of Malcolm X, a man in the hotel room with Martin Luther King Jr. just before his murder and later a Black Panther militant.
The strains of the times play out in pop music montages, news footage of assassinations and riots and Walter Cronkite detailing the horrors of the Vietnam War and annoyances of gas rationing.

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The year is just two thirds over, but already one Hollywood studio is popping the bubbly. Universal has had two monster hits — “Fast & Furious 6” and “Despicable Me 2” — and a few solid hits (“The Purge” “Identity Thief”) which outweighed its misses (“Oblivion,” “R.I.P.D.” “2 Guns”), outweighed them so much the studio has already raked in over $1.8 billion at the box office.

“Kick Ass 2” could tank and the rest of their release slate underwhelm and they’d still be golden.

As with most Hollywood studios, the bulk of that take is coming from overseas, now. So movies that travel well — a Formula 1 bio pic “Rush” is due out in September — is of Paramount importance, even to Universal.

The new bio-pic “Jobs” is a solidly informative and entertaining “Brief History of Apple,” as seen through the eyes of its co-founding genius. We experience thirty years of Steve Jobs’ mercurial life and times, with plenty of tastes of triumph plus a few dashes of comeuppance.
Arrogant, selfish, obsessive, an idealistic, perfectionist credit-hog who rolled over friends, adversaries, colleagues and lovers with a single-mindedness that fit his lurching, forward-leaning gait, the movie about him only has time to hint at what made the man tick, and can only touch on Steve’s Greatest Hits and Shortcomings.
It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher. His reputation as a screen lightweight doesn’t suffer here. But the impersonation, starting with that famous walk, the famous explosions of temper, and the hissing, spitting, insulting take-downs the man was famous for, are spot on.
The film is framed within the crowning glory of Jobs’ and Apple’s comeback, the 2001 arrival of the iPod, a music delivery device that was as “revolutionary” as every product Jobs pushed for and hyped. “Jobs” flashes back to the hippy kid who recognized talent, and then inspired, nagged, badgered talent to accept nothing less than products — personal computers, onward — for which “the market doesn’t exist yet.”
Director Joshua Michael Stern (“Swing Vote”) working from a Matt Whitely script, is most at home underlining — complete with soaring violins on the soundtrack — the red letter moments in Apple’s history, especially early ones. The film captures the sad arc of the love affair between Jobs and the tech whiz and soldering savant Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), a nerd’s nerd with a lot of interests who invented the personal computer and went into business with Jobs not just for the challenge, the money and the adventure, but for the chance to hang out “with the coolest” guy he’d ever met.
“Jobs” details the odd diets, fast cars and Bob Dylan mania of its hero, but never really gets under the skin of this orphan-craving-acceptance. We understand his passion for design but his “Eureka” moments — realizing portable CD players are “junk,” the unveiling of the Macintosh “1984” TV commercial — play as bland.
The saga makes note of but doesn’t dwell on the daughter Jobs refused — for much of his life — to acknowledge. Yes, he named the troubled “Lisa” project after her, but only mellowed enough to accept her much later in life. And the story ends before his last great act of stubbornness — relying on diet and other ineffective holistic means to battle a perfectly treatable cancer.
The board room intrigues (Dermot Mulroney, J.K. Simmons and Matthew Modine turn up as Apple bigwigs here) are also given short shrift.
It makes for a decent but rushed film, and makes you wish this team and their effort had been aimed at a cable TV mini-series. Nothing less than the history of the modern world can be gleaned from this one life, and squeezing it into two hours makes “Jobs” more of a chore than it should be.

(Roger Moore’s interview with Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad is here)

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for some drug content and brief strong language .
Cast: Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, J.K. Simmons, Lukas Haas
Credits: Directed by Joshua Michael Stern, written by Matt Whitely. An Open Road release
Running time: 2:02

“Tron: Legacy”, a showcase for her otherworldly beauty, won Olivia Wilde attention. “Cowboys & Aliens” was her reward for that. And “In Time” and “The Words” and “The Change-Up.”

But those big-ticket pictures didn’t show us how good an actress she is, her vulnerable side and how funny she can be. Check out “Butter” (she’s hilarious in it), “Deadfall” and the new film “Drinking Buddies” if you want to see that she’s much more than just a pretty, nearly perfect face.

Questions for Ms. Wilde? I have a few “Drinking Buddies” (she produced it, dropped the glam for the role and is terrific in it) queries, but I’m always looking for suggestions.

Post them as comments below.

But

At the end of this year, America’s most embattled corner of the film exhibition biz faces its toughest test since the rise of the suburban shopping mall. Back then, and for decades, the biggest pressure on drive-in cinemas has been the demand for the land.

But at the end of 2013, celluloid distribution of movies will end in the US. And drive-ins, a marginal business in most places, face the prospect of a ruinously expensive conversion to digital projection, something that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in indoor theaters. And drive-ins demand much longer booth-to-screen luminosity. Some will be able to afford that, most will not.

Honda has set up Project Drive-In to get film fans to pick five cinemas, nationwide, that Honda will pay to convert to digital.

Having written that “last drive-in” story in cities where I’ve worked, from Virginia and Tennessee, North Dakota to North Carolina, and having visited every drive in remaining in Florida, I’m hoping people vote for the Silver Moon in Lakeland to make that cut. But I hear they’re already digitized, and they’re pretty successful, so they could afford the switch, apparently.

But the Ocala Drive-in is treating this as a matter of life and death.

Go. Vote.