Movie Nation

He broke big with TV’s “Crime Story,” and made his mark in movies playing a variety of tough cops, tough mobsters and wiseguys out to “Get Shorty.”

Dennis Farina, a great character actor and a genuine character — he started his working life as a Chicago cop –has died, suddenly, at age 69. A blood clot, his publicist says.

I talked with him a couple of times over the years. He had great presence, which played to his advantage even when he was cast against type — in “Saving Private Ryan”, “Bottle Shock” and as J. Lo’s dad in “Out of Sight.” He was, as his onetime co-star Cheryl Hines described him, “a real pussycat” in person. But with that voice and that face, the man knew how to come off like anything but that.
“Get Shorty” might have been his best role, but I loved the expression on his face in “Big Trouble,” playing a hitman sent to Florida to knock off a local, his face the very picture of stupefied annoyance as he was forced to listen to local sports talk radio and its inane “Gators vs. Hurricanes vs. Seminoles” blather. Hilarious.

“Fruitvale Station” is a tragedy as fresh as today’s headlines, as moving as losing someone close to you. A re-telling of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a young black man gunned down by a transit cop in front of scores of witnesses in Oakland on New Year’s Day in 2009, Ryan Coogler’s often wrenching film begins with that death — captured on cell phone video — and takes us back through a life of hot-tempered blunders but compassionate potential, an ex-con who might have turned the corner just as it all came to an end for him.
Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be. Coogler’s film is built on the mundane, routine actions of an ordinary New Year’s Eve. Oscar runs errands, buying crabs for his mother’s birthday party.
“You ain’t payin’ for nothin’ on your birthday.”
He charms the girlfriend Sofina (Melonie Diaz, warm beneath a brittle exterior) he has sometimes cheated on. He dotes on their daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal). He weeps when a roaming dog that he just petted at a convenience store is killed by a speeding driver. He sweet-talks a mistrusting store owner into letting strangers use his bathroom just as the man is closing up. Oscar gives every indication he’s a guy who gives people the benefit of the doubt.
But there are hints at the more complicated young man he was. He’s overly helpful to a pretty customer at that supermarket (Ahna O’Reilly), help that is both kind and kind of like flirting, Sofina’s worst nightmare.
He begs, then threatens, to get back a job he’s lost because he was always late for work.
“You want me sellin’ dope, bruh?”
He sells dope even as he wonders if it’s time for a “fresh start.”
And then we see flashbacks — to San Quentin, flashing his short temper at prison visits from his mom, confronting other inmates. His past and present, the film shows us, was under his control. The events of that fateful night? Perhaps not.
In one telling scene, Oscar and his friends — veteran hoodie-wearers — get nervous when other young black men in hoodies approach their corner of the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train. Say what you will, the movie suggests, but wearing clothes that hide your identity in public spaces makes others leery of you. Coogler’s way of defusing that moment is delightful, optimistic.
“Fruitvale Station” uses its spare 90 minutes beautifully, giving us a fairly even-handed review of a life still forming, but snuffed out. It touches on the myriad of accidental circumstances and underlying causes that underpin an awful event like this one — a lifetime of bad choices, wrong place/wrong time, racial profiling, high stress situations that spiral out of control and simple “testosterone poisoning.”
But Coogler and Jordan’s greatest achievements are in humanizing a statistic, putting blemishes on an icon — Oscar and his case became notorious — and letting us grieve for the tragedy that happened and the potential that was lost that fateful New Year’s at Oakland’s Fruitvale Station.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, language throughout and some drug use.
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie ,Octavia Spencer
Credits: Written and directed by Ryan Coogler. A Weinstein Co. release
Running time: 1:30

His camera is mostly stationary and his scenes are static, still mostly driven by dialogue. And Woody Allen’s recent movies have betrayed his increasingly pronounced disconnect from modern mores, culture and speech.
So it’s tempting to dismiss his latest, “Blue Jasmine,” as a melodramatic exercise in stale and stodgy. He’s that old fashioned.
But get past the chattiness of his heroine, the title character (Cate Blanchett). Yes, her name’s Jasmine. “I changed it. From Jeanette.”
Get past the pun in the title. Yes, she’s blue. Her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) was a Wall Street wolf who got caught, lost their fortune, went to prison and left her alone, something she blabs to her fellow passenger on a first class flight from New York to San Francisco.
Get past the fashion sense, the polished, patronizing accent, the temper, the weary lines Allen gives her.
“God, who do I have to sleep around here to get a Stoli martini with a twist of lemon?”
This is brittle and brilliant performance and Jasmine turns out to be one of Allen’s more interesting creations. In this flighty, rich woman brought low — she’s had to move in with her grocery store cashier sister (Sally Hawkins) in San Francisco — Allen makes a commentary on a class and the way we all over dramatize our lives, lives that most of us only narrate in our heads.
Not Jasmine. She’s the first to blurt that she ignored the slippery dealings that Hal was making, but the last to realize how intellectually lazy her bourgeois life of charity events, shopping sprees and weekends in the Hamptons made her. There is but one quarrel with sister Ginger — “settling.” Ginger divorced one working class oaf (Andrew Dice Clay) and seems anxious to marry another (Bobby Cannavale). Jasmine, the nervous, pill popping chatterbox, passes judgment on that and keeps her teary eyes set on a higher prize.
Ginger’s friends suggest a job — as a dental office receptionist. “Too menial.”
She insists she’d rather return to school. To study what, nursing? “God no.”
“You got something against nurses?”
Allen toys around with this tired pizza vs. Prada conflict in flashbacks, showing Jasmine’s aloof removal from Ginger when she was rich, painting a picture of her “phony” lifestyle with her “liar and thief” of a husband.
The biggest statement here is about character, not class. The haves are liars and poseurs, the working folks may be loutish but are true blue. Allen stole that from a dozen melodramas of the 1930s. Jasmine fends off a groping-grabby dentist-boss (Michael Stuhlbarg from “A Serious Man”) and sets her cap for a wealthy State Department higher-up (Peter Sarsgaard), situations so retro they’re almost hip.
The reason to fall into “Blue Jasmine” is Blanchett’s cagey, broken turn. Here is a female match for Jay Gatsby, a woman as set on living a higher life and asking no questions about how it’s achieved as Fitzgerald’s anti-hero. Blanchett makes Jasmine the heroine of her own tragedy, refining her narration, polishing her predicament, wallowing in her doom but hellbent on looking stylish in Chanel as she does.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for mature thematic material, language and sexual content .
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., Andrew Dice Clay
Credits: Written and directed by Woody Allen. A Sony Classics release
Running time: 1:39

“The Conjuring” sets a new standard for opening weekends for horror movies. Second best opening, all-time, after one of the “Paranormal Activity” sequels.
A ghost story with pre-“Exorcism,” pre-“Amityville Horror” historical touches — the Warrens were sort of the first semi-serious “ghost busters” — it’s not as scary as James Wan’s last ghost story, “Insidious.” But it didn’t take anybody by surprise. Good reviews helped it, but we’ve had one big horror picture a month (“The Purge”) this summer, so that audience was hungry for another.

“Despicable Me 2” out-drew “Turbo,” making the racing snail comedy a rare Dreamworks flop.

“Red 2” cleared $19 million. Probably a disappointment, considering what “The Heat” managed.

And “R.I.P.D.” did a paltry $13 million — epic fail.

This news came out of Comic Con, where the idea of pairing up DC’s comic kingpins on the screen in some version of “Batman: Year One” or something of that sort is the cause of many a soiled pair of underpants.

Zach Snyder announced it, he will direct.

A big deal for Warner Brothers, a challenge to Marvel and a race against time, what with Disney/Marvel filling the screen with pictures and Sony rushing Spider-MAn sequels out. Sooner or later, this binge has got to reach over saturation.

Let me pee all over that a bit. Zach Snyder? “Man of Steel” stank. And Christian Bale just said he won’t don the cape again to play the bat. Is Armie Hammer available?

After “The Others” and “Orphanage,” Hollywood all but ceded the genre of credible, chilling ghost stories to Spain. And deservedly so.
To cast its spell, a ghostly tale must take its time, build from recognizable reality to some moment when the incredible becomes credible. Spanish cinema still gets this.
“The Body” is a new entre from Espana, a creepy thriller about a murder, a missing corpse and the investigation that corpse seems hell-bent on helping solve.
Something happened in the city morgue, a striking building tucked away in some woods outside of town. Whatever the night watchman saw scared him to death. He ran off and got hit by a car, so he’s not telling his tale.
What detective Jaime Pena (Jose Coronado) and his team do know is that there’s a body missing. It’s as if wealthy pharmaceutical baroness Mayka Villaverde (Belen Rueda of “The Orphanage”) got up and walked away.
The coroner wants to rule that very possibility out (catalepsy, it’s called — a seizure that simulates). But when she reminds Jaime that “Every death is a homicide until proven otherwise,” they dig into who might have stolen the body, and why. That means dragging Mayka’s young, handsome chemist husband Alex (Hugo Silva) away from his lover (Aura Garrido) and in for questioning.
Of course he did it. But he didn’t steal the body. And as clues seem to hurl themselves at him and at the cops, he becomes convinced that there’s a corpse out there out for revenge.
Co-writer and director Oriol Paulo (he wrote “Julia’s Eyes”) takes his time unraveling this mystery, using vivid, brittle flashbacks to show the domineering relationship Alex lived through with Mayka and the reasons he put up with it. We see Detective Pena’s complicated past, too. We watch interrogations, which range from “just a few questions” to full on “You’re a suspect” in their intensity.
And clue after clue pops up — body bag tags, a missing cell phone, a vial of toxin, forcing Alex to tear up a revealing printed invitation and flush it down the toilet, only to have the toilet refuse to flush.
I like the way Coronado’s cop compulsively clicks his pen, the moody lighting (most of this takes place over one long night) and the sparing way the frights are doled out.
The ending is spoiled somewhat by a need for neatness. But “The Body” is a ghostly thriller that builds its chills at just the right pace. When the hairs rise on the back of your neck in this one, you know the filmmakers have earned it.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, with sex, some violence, frightening images .
Cast: Jose Coronado, Hugo Silva, Belen Rueda, Aura Garrido
Credits: Directed by Oriol Paulo, written by Oriol Paulo and Lara Sendim. A Sony release
Running time: 1:48