Movie Nation

From time immemorial, romantic comedies have but one rule one they dare not break. We must root for romance, for love to triumph, for those two crazy kids (or adorable geezers, or every age in between) to make it work out and give us “The Hollywood Ending.”
So hand “I Give it a Year” props for having the guts to turn that convention on its ear.
This not-quite-romantic/not-terribly funny rom-com flips so many tropes from such stories — a courtship, wedding, embarrassing wedding toast by the best man, post-marital temptation — that even after writer-director Dan Mazer has taken a stab at going down the primrose path less traveled, it’s still a shock that he thinks so little of his couple (Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall) that he doesn’t care if we root for them. Because he plainly doesn’t.
Nat and Josh are young London professionals. He’s a writer who focuses on noble causes in the Third World, she’s a marketing director and PR consultant. “I’m a thinker, you’re a doer” is how Josh sums her up at their wedding.
There are other things they don’t have in common. She likes being out of the limelight, he’s a showboat, a loud drunk and the sort of guy who makes his wholly inappropriate mate, Danny (Ricky Gervais’s sidekick, Stephen Merchant) his best man.
Nat’s cynical sister (Minnie Driver) stops insulting her husband long enough to pass judgment on the couple as they exchange vows — “I give it a year.”
Anna Faris is the foreign aid worker Josh loved until she went off to save the Third World. Simon Baker is the callow, dashing Yank who hires Nat’s firm to re-brand his company. Josh carries a torch, Nat slips off her ring and lets the Yank flirt and flirt and come on absurdly strong.
Her ticks — singing the wrong lyrics to song after song on the radio — and his (a lack of boundaries, an inability to hold his liquor) become major bones of contention.
And next thing we know, they’re telling their troubles to a psychotically maladjusted marriage counselor.
Driver gets to be the sharp-tongued voice of wisdom who confesses that Justin Bieber videos are the only thing that turn her on in her marriage these days.
“I’d RUIN Bieber.”
Merchant goes off and makes his own movie playing a sort of Asperger version of every wedding comedy sidekick ever — missing every “You’re going too far” signal, crossing every line with his goggle-eyed crudeness.
It all might go down more easily if the leads had more chemistry — we’d feel their pain — and if the jokes piled around them weren’t so broad and insistent. Their minister has a coughing fit mid-ceremony, their attorney draws up their will and end-of-life wishes and cannot pronounce “persistent vegetative state.”
“I Give It A Year” grows pretty tiresome pretty quickly. And even if we understand the things each is doing to drive the other crazy, it still seems like a flimsy foundation to build a happily-divorced-ever-after comedy on.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language and some graphic nudity.
Cast: Rose Byrne, Rafe Spall, Simon Baker, Anna Faris,  Stephen Merchant
Credits: Written and directed by Dan Mazer, A Magnolia release
Running time: 1:37

Denzel Washington has a fresh hit on his resume, and Mark Wahlberg’s Icelandic “Contraband” director has a Hollywood future. “2 Guns” is doing a solid but un- spectacular $28 million on its opening weekend.

“Smurfs 2” stepped into a pile of Smurf as they managed only $17 million or so for the weekend, $25 since Wednesday.

“Wolverine” faded — quite a bit. “Fruitvale Station” fell out of the Top Ten. “Pacific Rim” may yet hit $100 million. Barely. Next weekend.

And July, thanks to the breakout hit “Despicable Me 2,” the biggest animated hit of the summer, was the second biggest July on record, according to Box Office Mojo.

“Wolverine” didn’t help (weakest performing X-Men film yet), but “Conjuring” and “Grown Ups 2” did.

The reviews of actress Lake Bell’s debut film as a writer-director-actress have a swooning quality to them.
“To call Lake Bell a magnetic, intelligent, blithely screwball leading lady in the Carole Lombard tradition might be selling her short,” John Anderson enthused in Variety.
She “holds the thing together through sheer charisma,” gushes Oscar Moralde in Slant Magazine.
It would be a reminder that most movie critics are male, and that only the intervention of an editor keeps some of these fellows with tossing a phone number and “call me” at the bottom of a review of a particularly attractive woman’s film.
It would, that is, if the film, “In a World…” wasn’t a delight, and if Bell’s movie wasn’t the gorgeous actress’s way of making the case actors “shouldn’t be limited by our looks.” Making a movie about voice-over actors was her way of exploring “the ultimate acting,” a film that suggests even for those blessed with beauty, “all looks are limiting, in some capacity.”
Bell, 34, has experienced that first hand. She’s had a solid career, mostly stuck in good-looking-best-friend roles (“What Happens in Vegas”) (“No Strings Attached”). But if she wanted to take charge of her career, she’d have to do what scores of actors have done since the dawn of indie cinema — write and raise funds for a movie starring herself.
“The movie came from an organic place of being curious about this world and why there are never ladies’ voices on movie trailers,” she says. The film pays tribute to the late Don LaFontaine, the voice-over actor famed for turning the phrase “In a world where…” into a movie trailer cliche.
“In a World…” has Bell’s character, Carol, a voice coach, long to break into the elite club of male voice-over actors. Her father (Fred Melamed) and his peers are all vying to be the guy to inherit the phrase “In a World…” and rule the “voice of God” corner of the voice-over trade. Carol wants to crash that party.

“I’m not an expert feminist, but I am a woman tuned in to women’s concerns. This seemed like a cool way to poke my head, and my movie, in this world.”
Bell slung a few accents and even voices the disembodied phone voice of an elderly agent in the film. And she gave some thought as to why women rarely turn up as the voice-over artists on movie trailers, outside of “A Lifetime Original Movie” promos.
“Scientifically, maybe, a female voice has more trouble punching through the tornado of film score, special effects and everything that is on the soundtrack of a trailer,” she says. “Or, more controversially, maybe it’s because The Bible says of God — ‘He created the Heavens and the Earth.’ So maybe when you want a Voice of God, it’s got to be a guy,  by that logic.”
In a profession where people reinvent their looks, their pasts and so on to get ahead, Bell freely admits her own sexy lower-register voice “is lower than my natural voice, so who am I to talk? I want to sound cool, and I admit that. Maybe I want to sound more sophisticated, or be taken more seriously. Maybe I watched too many Lauren Bacall movies as a kid.”
She spent four years getting the movie made, into film festivals and now (Aug. 9) into theaters. She had to add another voice, “a director’s voice,” to her repertoire. “But everybody has one of those. It’s just more authoritative.”
And when you write your own movie, you get to make fun “of this VIRUS infecting young women, in Hollywood and all over the country.”
Call it the Kardashian Curse or the more technical term, “vocal fry,” “it is an EPIDEMIC — that ‘sexy baby’ voice, that Valley Girl upward inflecting affectation,” Bell says, laughing. It drives her, like her voice-expert character Carol, “crazy! The dialect, the pitch, that little girly growl in it? Upper talking inflection, like every sentence is a question? Vocal Fry. ‘Sexy Baby.’ And girls? STOP IT.”

Universal’s “2 Guns” paired up Oscar winner Denzel Washington with buddy picture king Mark Wahlberg, was directed by Wahlberg’s “Contraband” director and cost only about $60 million.

Projections for how well it would do ranged from $25-30, and that’s where it’s landing — on a pace for $27 million according to Thursday late night and all-day Friday showings.

Saturday is more important to kids’ cartoons, but the Wednesday opener “Smurfs 2” is fizzling already. An $18 million weekend, $25 since Wed. It’ll do better overseas, but seriously, enough already.

“The Wolverine” has lost a big share of audience and will manage about $18-19 million. Summer comic book movie fatigue has set in, at long last.

Friday night’s nationwide midnight showings of the intentionally awful $2 million SyFy Channel movie “Sharknado” were pretty robust — in NYC, LA and Boston. A communal “Snakes on a Plane” experience had it selling out in many theaters.

Paul Schrader calls on his background as a one-time film critic and film scholar when he talks of the travails of his latest film, “The Canyons.” At 67, the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” and writer-director of “American Gigolo” has been through his share of cinematic controversy. But he’s never worked with Lindsay Lohan before.
“There’s a kind of hurricane force to her celebrity,” he discovered. And as tales circulated of how difficult it was to get her on the set, on time and sober enough to make the sexually charged thriller, based on a Bret Easton Ellis script, you could forgive Schrader for quoting Danny Glover’s catch-phrase from the “Lethal Weapon” movies.
“I’m gettin’ too old for this —-.”
Not Schrader.
“I like to quote John Huston about working with Marilyn Monroe on ‘The Misfits’ (another notoriously difficult star on an infamously difficult film shoot). Every day I wonder why I put myself through all of this. Then I go see dailies.'”
Schrader’s glory years were the ’80s, when “Cat People” and “American Gigolo” were sensations, films of taboo-tackling sex and box office buzz. In more recent decades, he wrote and directed the film that won James Coburn his Oscar (“Affliction,” 1997) and the kinky Bob “Hogan’s Heroes” Crane bio-pic “Auto Focus” (2002). But being over 60 and far removed from a hit, he is, as the New York Times put it, “still begging for coins,” still scrambling to find even the money to get low budget movies made.
Enter Bret Easton Ellis. The “American Psycho/Less Than Zero” novelist, no stranger to erotically charged, controversial material himself, and Schrader teamed up for a no-budget movie aimed at the video-on-demand market. They put in their own cash, raised some funds through the crowd-financing site Kickstarter, landed Lindsay Lohan and porn actor James Deen as their leads and “The Canyons” was born.
A thriller about a manipulative rich film financier (Deen), his one-time actress girlfriend (Lohan) and their infidelities, schemes, lies and crimes in the high-rent district in the hills above L.A.’s canyons, the film was notorious by design and even more notorious by buzz. A New York Times Magazine piece on the movie this past spring detailed Lohan’s poor work habits, Schrader’s outspokenness and stubbornness and the film’s lurid content — an orgy, assorted other group sex situations.
“We created a volatile stew, here,” Schrader says with a laugh. “Lindsay polarizes just about everybody. Bret polarizes the ones that she doesn’t. And the idea that (porn star) James Deen can cross over to mainstream movies (ticks) some people off. Some people. I’m the least polarizing ingredient in this whole stew.
“Was it difficult? I’ve been on films where we ran out of money, shut down, and never started back up again. I’ve had films where the weather ruined everything, or where people got injured.
“When you’re doing a story with high intensity people who are exploring their emotions, you are always going to have an element of melodrama.”
Schrader has been outspoken in talking about his star’s drug problems and reliability issues. Lohan, fresh from her latest stint in rehab, has signed up to guest host on Chelsea Handler’s E! TV show, to sit down with Oprah and to star in a reality documentary series about her rehabilitation. She’s getting a career bounce out of “The Canyons.”
But “The new Lindsay didn’t show up” to make “The Canyons,” Schrader notes. “The old one did.”

The movie isn’t winning the acclaimed writer-director good reviews, but it is doing wonders for Lohan, “who taps a vulnerability beneath her dissolution to remind you why she’s still a movie star.” ( Entertainment Weekly). And Schrader, who has his next film project lined up and can afford to be generous, is happy for her.
“She’s saying and doing all the right things. She’s 27 now, it’s time to step up. But only she can do it.”
As for him, his experiment in micro-budget movie-making is already a financial success, thanks to the movie being picked up by distributor IFC.
“The appeal, here, in making a movie with little money and doing everything through social media, was in landing on Terra Incognita, an unknown shore where you forge your way inland to see what you find.”
Schrader laughs, remembering the scramble for cash, the efforts to attract and then keep his cast “on $100 a day, doing their own hair, makeup and wardrobe,” and get a movie out of them.
“I don’t think it would be as exciting the second time around.”

(Roger Moore reviews “The Canyons”)

She was, in my opinion, the best Oscar host(ess) in recent memory. The Quincy Jones/Whoopie Goldberg year is my gold standard of the past 20 years, but Ellen worked the crowd, got stars and Steven Spielberg to go on mike, off script, and blush. That was in 2007.

And now she’s coming back for the 86th Academy Awards next March.

She is in the Johnny Carson tradition — funny, TV polished, an inside/outsider poking fun at the movies. She’s better live than virtually anybody you can think of, doesn’t need produced bits and her opener will be sweetly snarky and hilarious. Guaranteed.

Perfect.

I am shocked nobody thought to go back to her. I mean, Seth MacFarlane? WTH? She was ready, willing and eager to get back in.

“After ‘The Descendants,'” says filmmaker James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”), “about the best thing a director could hope to hear is that ‘Shailene Woodley is interested in your movie,’ or loves the book it was based on.”
The 21 year-old actress is a lot more than “Hollywood’s next big thing,” adds director (“Stuck in Love”) Josh Boone. “She can project this vulnerable sort of self-confidence, which is magical. Off screen, she’s self-assured, sweet and quite kind. That shows up in her performances, too.”
Woodley, star of TV’s “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” is just now dropping into the eye of the showbiz hurricane, a serious young woman “who makes your movie serious, the moment she shows up,” says Ponsoldt, who directed Woodley and Miles Teller in “The Spectacular Now,” the most critically-acclaimed coming-of-age tale in a summer packed with such movies.
Woodley plays Aimee, the smart, makeup-shunning, working class plain Jane working class who falls under the spell of the popular, charismatic and often-tipsy Sutter (Teller) in this serious and seriously offbeat teen romance.
“I’ve always been the extroverted girl, very outgoing, you know?” Woodley — “Shai” to her friends — says. “That’s my nature — sitting at the front of the class, right in front of the teacher. And Aimee isn’t that way and seemed like a new acting challenge. Shy, not confident. None of the characters I’ve played have been like her.”
Woodley was interested in the script based on Tim Tharp’s novel, and in the previous work of director Ponsoldt, who has made alcoholism his specialty through such films as “Off the Black” and “Smashed.” And she liked the story’s take on teens and booze. “Spectacular Now” has teens drinking, living “in the now,” and struggling with it. The life of the party falls for the smart girl and “they DON’T reform each other,” laughs Ponsoldt. “It’s like a hundred other teen partying movies, but kind of their opposite.”
Woodley says “I don’t struggle with those issues — alcohol, partying, — myself. It was something that, when I was in high school, it was easier for me to be the serious, studious one than being the girl who sort of ignored responsibility and went out and had fun all the time.
“At Aimee’s age (the character is 18), I dated somebody who introduced fun into my life. In a way. And even though that relationship was fun, it turned quite toxic. But after that and through that I was able to go out and kind of find myself. I took stock and discovered my self-worth. That age is when I discovered who I am, and I guess that’s true of a lot of kids at 17, 18.”
In Woodley’s hands, Aimee is “a tender, moving creation,” raves Alan Scherstuhl in The Village Voice, and Woodley “radiates an eager uncertainty” in the part, a view echoed in many of the film’s reviews.
She’s making canny choices, too, taking her time moving from supporting roles to leads. Woodley says she stills gets advice from her “Descendants” pals, director Alexander Payne and co-star George Clooney. “They’re the best. But I’m getting comfortable taking my own advice about which movies to make.
Boone is prepping to direct Woodley on “The Fault in Our Stars,” which Woodley calls “my favorite book,” whose “messages are too important to NOT be talked about — important on a giant level.” The director sees “a spectacular career ahead of Shailene.”
And Ponsoldt, a serious student of film who references classic movies and famous directors as the touchstones of his work, is more specific.
“She’s got this grounded reality about her that the camera picks up on. I see her having this wonderful Barbara Hershey, Sissy Spacek sort of career. And what do they have in common? Very long careers.”

(Roger Moore’s rave review of “The Spectacular Now” is here)

Mark Wahlberg brought his “Contraband” director in for this buddy picture/action comedy. Do Denzel and Mark W. have what it takes to cook up a box office hit?

Reviewers aren’t exactly swooning over it. (58% on Rottentomatoes).

The Box Office Guru figures that even as the summer winds down, this picture has $30 million in the tank.

Box Office Mojo doesn’t figure the film will open under $30. He’s saying more — closer to $40, maybe.

That’ll best “The Smurfs 2,” which as Ray Subers at Mojo says, will make most of its money overseas. That one should have a Wed-Sunday opening in the $30-35 million range. It was on a pace to do worse than “Turbo” as of Wed/Thursday, so we’ll see.

Will “Fruitvale Station” stay in the Top ten? It did a whopping $4.7 million or so on its opening weekend. If this critically acclaimed drama is to have awards buzz, it needs to be a summer phenomenon and stick around until Sept. It’s already at $9 million.

“The Spectacular Now” opens in limited release. If it’s in your town, see it. Like Fruitvale, one of the best pictures of the summer.

As you can tell from the photo, in casting “Jobs,” the filmmakers found actors pretty darned close, in appearance to the real life Apple braintrust Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Josh Gad plays the Woz, the soldering savant and hardware guy who designed and built Apple’s first computers and got the company off the ground. Ashton Kutcher plays Jobs, the visionary who took Woz’s work and changed the world with it.

It’s Gad’s second tech nerd turn of the summer. He was “headphones,” the wise but overlooked and anonymous genius at Google in “The Internship.” Gad first broke out in “Love & Other Drugs” and has a lot of TV credits, to boot. Questions for Mr. Gad? I’m talking with Kutcher on Monday.

Post your queries as comments, and thanks for the help.