Movie Nation

The “One Direction” concert film seems about a summer late, in terms of peak appeal for a pop boy band that blew up last summer and is still around this summer.

But the film made a decent — borderline middling –– $17 million and won the last weekend of the summer, beating “The Butler.”

“Closed Circuit” opened Wednesday and proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that Eric Bana is not a draw at the US Box Office.

“Getaway” was another gamble by low-budget gambler Ethan Hawke. Unlike “The Purge,” or his other horror outings, this limp chase picture didn’t manage $5.

An import titled “Directions Not Included” from Lionsgate opened on less than 400 screens and cracked the top five. Not bad.

The kids are back in school, the popcorn poppers are cooling off and the theaters they operate in are back on fall hours. So that’s a wrap on this year’s summer cinema season, that First of May to Labor Day epoch when movie budgets are big and movie theater soft drinks are bigger.
The domestic box office was up, to over $4.6 billion, a new record, according to Box Office Mojo. The international audience, which Hollywood has been pandering to of late (“Pacific Rim”), is flat.
“Iron Man 3” made the most money ($408 million), “Despicable Me 2” made over $350 million and “Man of Steel,” not a sequel, took in $290.
The Academy Awards are handed out in the dead of winter, and typically honor only those films that are still fresh on everybody’s mind — prestige pictures, the fall and winter “Awards Season” movies. Summer movies deserve their own Oscars — S’moscars, we call them. Sort of like S’mores, without the marshmallow.
And here they are.
Best picture — “Fruitvale Station,” one of just a handful of summer dramas, this one could make the real Oscars best picture short list.
Best actress — Cate Blanchett, so broad, so theatrical, so frail and Blanche DuBois-like in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.” Another “real” Oscar favorite.
Best actor — Forrest Whitaker reminded us that the greatest weapon of the Civil Rights movement might have been “dignity” in “The Butler.”
Best supporting actor — Steve Carell, playing bad in “The Way, Way Back.” Loved Sam Rockwell in that one, but Carell was the one who stretched.
Best supporting actress — Shailene Woodley, who turns the high school drinking dramedy “The Spectacular Now” serious the moment she shows up.
Best movie you missed — See above, “Spectacular” about covers it.
Worst movie you all saw — “Man of Steel.” Yeah, I went there.

Best documentary — Enjoyed “20 Feet From Stardom” and “Stories We Tell.” But I’m going with “Blackfish.”
Best make-work project for his pals — Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Worst make-work project for his pals — Adam Sandler’s “Grown Ups 2.”
Most riotous performance in a bad movie — Jeff Bridges in “R.I.P.D.,” edging Johnny Depp in “Tonto: The Motion Picture.”

Coming of age comedy you hope your kids won’t emulate — “The To Do List.”
Comedy you hope they do — “The Way, Way Back”
Best libation — Beer, so vital to saving humanity in “The World’s End,” such a grand social lubricant for romance in “Drinking Buddies,” and a sea monster repellent in “Grabbers.”
Best horror picture — “The Purge,” “You’re on your own” politics debunked by science fiction.
Sequels nobody asked for — “RED 2,” “Smurfs 2,” “Kick-Ass 2,” “Percy Jackson 2.”
One drink over the line — “Hangover Part 3.”
Worst timing — “White House Down,” too soon after “Olympus Has Fallen,” and “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones,” good enough for April, a disaster in August.
Best popcorn pic — “World War Z” with its ant-piles of zombies scrambling over walls.
Most violent — “You’re Next.”
Best car — The Jensen Interceptor Michelle Rodriguez wheels through “Fast & Furious 6.”
Best farewell tour — The “Shaun of the Dead” team takes one last bow together with “The World’s End.”
Worst Product Placement — Google in “The Internship.” Some say a passable Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy was still-born thanks to its celebration of the hydra-headed tech company.
Greatest Gatsby — Leo, he made this one work and made it a hit.
Best Rapture Picture — “This is the End,” co-starring Craig Robinson.

Worst Rapture Picture — “Rapture-palooza,” co-starring Craig Robinson.
Worst Picture — Disney’s “Planes,” worst of a weak summer for children’s animation.
Biggest bomb — “R.I.P.D.” lost even more money than “The Lone Ranger.” Which is saying something.

And thus does a summer that started with a silly car chase picture end with a sillier one.
“Getaway” has some of the elements of a good gear grinder — a B-movie where a car takes a pivotal role in the cast.
It’s got Ethan Hawke, doing enough of his own driving to pass muster with the likes of Ryan Gosling (“Drive”) Dax Shepard (“Hit and Run”) or Paul Walker (“Fast & Furious”).
It’s got a cool car — a Shelby Super Snake version of the Ford Mustang.
It has an unusual city setting — Sofia, Bulgaria.
And then Selena Gomez shows up as the mouthy, tech savvy sidekick dragged along for a long, Christmas season chase through the not-quite-generic (tramlines, train tracks) mean streets of Sofia.
That’s where the silly kicks in. The improbable set-up — disgraced racing driver’s Brent Manga’s Bulgarian wife (Rebecca Budig) has been kidnapped, he gets a call and is told to steal a particular armored, camera-packed Mustang which he will drive on a series of “tasks.”
The villain, whose chin stubble and martini slurping lips are all we see, if played by Jon Voight mit a German accent.
“You’re runnink out off time — tic toc, tic toc, he purrs, and we’re off.
Having a car covered with cameras raises the variety of shots and sometimes amps up the pulse-pounding nature of the chases, choreographed by Charlie Picerni. Until you notice that door mirrors that popped off in the last chase magically return to the magical Mustang in the next scene.
“I can’t believe that worked,” Magna confesses after one escape. Too often, neither can we, despite the non-digital/real-cars-having-real-crashes nature of the beast.
A guy having his wife kidnapped and threatened with death should be a lot more worked up and manic than Hawke plays this fellow. And a young woman snatched for a ride-along you would think would be freaking out a bit at this or that hair-raising chase, the streets filling with wrecked Bulgarian cop cars, the machine-gunning motorcyclists and what not. The leads don’t turn up the requisite adrenalin-jacked pitch of their voices or the acting.
Director Courtney Solomon (“An American Haunting”) is plainly out of his depth, and when the always reliable Hawke plays a character in the wrong key, that points back to a director who doesn’t have the stature or standing to suggest the proper reactions to this scenario.
Maybe they all took a gander at that random, ridiculous scenario and hoped that the car would be cool enough to bail them out. It isn’t.

(Let’s sum up the summer movies with “Summer Oscars”)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense action, violence and mayhem throughout, some rude gestures, and language
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight, Rebecca Budig
Credits: Directed by Courtney Solomon, written by Sean Finnega, Gregg Maxwell Parker. A Warner Brothers.
Running time: 1:28

Naomi Watts, Stupor Mondi, to you Latin speakers, is in a couple of the most controversial films of the fall.

The first is “Adore,” based on a Doris Lessing novella about two lifelong pals (Robin Wright is the other) and neighbors who seduce each other’s hunky teen sons.

Not controversial enough? She’s also playing Diana, Princess of Wales in “Diana.”

Yeah.

Fascinating woman, and since there’s no tactful way to bring up how far from Texas her husband’s LBJ accent was in “The Butler,”  I need some suggestions for questions. Got an idea? Comment below, and thanks.

It’s a favorite gripe of mine — movies that all are set in or look to have been shot in greater Los Angeles.

As if corrupt cops, cute couples, daring detectives, adorable dogs or whatever genre, plotline or situation is in vogue at the moment don’t exist anywhere but between the I-5 and Venice, Santa Monica or Malibu Beach.

If there’s anything worse than the tide of movies that are oddly set in or were too-obviously shot in Louisiana, New Mexico, Toronto, Vancouver or (these days), Atlanta, it’s that tiresome amber early morning L.A. light that shows up in film after film, and has for almost 100 years.

“Runaway production” to me means “Studios finally spending the money to shoot on location again.” But in Los Angeles, it’s been a “crisis” to people who long to live there, work in the industry  and sleep in their own beds after work.

And now the new Angelino mayor is making noise like he’s going to focus on this problem of jobs going to whichever state is giving away the most incentive money this year.

I’m not keen on incentive cash going to any private business. The car plant that leaves town the minute that money runs out, the “Film Studio” in Fort Pierce that fled the moment they didn’t get state money to prop up their business further — no difference. It’s a con job played by a lot of industries, and Louisiana is simply too corrupt to do the math to figure out how they’ve been played for suckers for much of the last decade — giving away money so that horror, action, sci-fi  (“Battle: Los Angeles”) pictures can come in, shoot, collect a check and leave.

But “runaway production” hurts the way movies look, the reality, the novelty of a “Prince Avalanche” or “Drinking Buddies” or “The Internship” or “World War Z” or “The To Do List” or “The Way, Way Back” — movies with a palpable sense of place. L.A.? We’ve seen it. Rare is the film (“Cyrus,” “The Big Lebowski”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”) that discovers a corner of the city that hasn’t been film permitted to death.

Long live the revolution, and God bless runaway production!

Variety is reporting that NBC is going after Tina Fey, who is in between TV projects and not really established in the movies, and Amy Poehler, still an NBC star, to host the next Golden Globes. They did a bang up job with the last one, why not?

If NBC wants to further the Globes’ rep for sucking all the wind out of the Oscar sails, this would be the way to go. Ellen DeGeneres is hosting the Academy Awards, and as quirky and different and she is from Tina/Amy, the hostesses vs. hostess thing will give at least a few viewers the feeling “We’ve seen that” and another excuse to tune out the Oscars.