Movie Nation

“Stuck in Love” seems, on its surface, like another male wish fulfillment fantasy masquerading as a romantic comedy.
Women in the film seem to have more figured out. And characters played by Jennifer Connelly, Kristen Bell, Lily Collins and Liana Liberato — alternately hurl themselves at, misuse, toss aside, and yet maintain their hold over the hapless menfolk, played by Greg Kinnear, Nat Wolff and Logan Lerman.
And the men? They pine away — “stuck” as it were, in a love that was or can never be.
But it’s the variations in this seemingly trite collection of set-ups that unstick “Stuck.” And the performances add poignancy to the coming-of-age/coming-to-grips-with-divorce situations and lift the picture to something more than a romantic time-filler.
Wolff (“Admission”) is Rusty, a teen living at home, on the beach with his semi-brooding divorced Dad (Kinnear). Dad’s a well-regarded author who hasn’t written since Mom (Connelly) walked out on him. He sneaks up to the windows of her house and peeks at her new life. Which drives his kids, especially his sharp, college-age daughter, Sam (Collins),batty. Dad still sets a place for Mom at Thanksgiving dinner.
“She’s coming back.”
“LOOK what you’ve let her do to you, dad.”
Rusty longs for the attentions of classmate Kate (Liberato), but smart and cynical sister Sam has has him pegged. He’s like Dad, one of those “hopeless romantics” in a world that goes easier on realists.
“Put your heart on the line,” the father urges his son. “A writer is the sum of his experiences. Go get some.” He’s been pushing both of his kids to write, and both have taken it up. Rusty writes moony poetry that might win the girl. But Sam?
“Life is only as meaningful as you fool yourself into thinking it is,” Sam declares, announcing that she is about to become a published author herself — at 19. How will her catty cynicism — she’s big on rough and tumble one-night-stands — stand up to the ardent attentions of the pure-hearted Lou (Logan Lerman)?
“You reek of romance and good intentions,” she sneers. “We’re not even in the same species.”
But Lou, like all suitors in romantic comedies, persists.
First-time writer-director Josh Boone juggles a lot of characters and a lot of hurt in “Stuck in Love.” Sam won’t speak to her mother, Kate has problems Rusty is slow to pick up on, Lou has a hidden burden and Dad copes with divorce by having regular rolls in the sack with a married neighbor (Kristen Bell, amusingly on task and brazenly abrasive).
That juggling lets the picture drift into melodrama more than once. It loses track of Sam and Lou, the most interesting characters, which makes their story arc seem more abrupt than the others. Wolff is an engaging lead, but his story thread is the most maudlin and melodramatic of all. Kinnear has played so many mopey guys that it’s become his “thing.” And Connelly, a dead ringer for the woman we’d expect to be Lily Collins’ mom, has an Oscar winning gravity about her that makes her tough to buy in comic situations.
All of which stick to “Stuck in Love” and weigh it down. It’s just romantic enough and barely funny enough to qualify as a romantic comedy. But it works, despite never being graceful or unstuck enough to take flight.

MPAA Rating: R for language, teen drug and alcohol use, and some sexual content
Cast: Lily Collins, Nat Wolff, Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connolly, Logan Lerman, Kristen Bell
Credits: Written and directed by Josh Boone. A Millennium release
Running time: 1:37

The legend of the band Big Star was born back in May of 1973, when a promoter flew legions of young rock critics into Memphis for a “convention” that was essentially a stunt to get them to hear Big Star perform.
Big Star, a Memphis group built around former BoxTops singer and songwriter Alex Chilton (“The Letter”), were a bit out of step with the music of their day, a power pop quartet just a little ahead of their time. Most people know them for creating the song “In the Street” that was adapted and covered by Cheap Trick as the theme to “That ’70s Show.”
With their jangly Byrds-inspired guitars and close harmonies, Chilton, Chris Bell, Andy Hummel and Jody Stephens were already earning glowing reviews, if not great record sales. But that May ’73 junket stunt cemented them in legend. As the fame never came and the decades of musical experimenting by the leading lights of the group went on, the myth only grew.
“Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me” explores that legend through interviews with surviving members of the group, vintage radio tapes of those who haven’t survived and scores of testimonials by those influenced by this band with the outsize impact on the music to come. Robyn Hitchcock describes the band as like “a letter posted in 1971, that arrived in 1985.” Members of R.E.M., The Flaming Lips, the dbs and Yo La Tengo marvel at their sound and that they never lived up to their name, copped from a Memphis supermarket chain.
The Drew Nicola/Olivia Mori film explains why. Producers, recording engineers, band members and others talk their certainty that “this thing was going to take off.” Botched distribution by Stax Records meant that the LPs never were in stores as the rave reviews came out. And with their reviews going to their heads, the group wasn’t touring and promoting itself in a way that would ensure success, eventually.
As several observers note in the movie, they were stuck in the fantasy of fame even after it failed to materialize. But as the years went by, the records inspired a cult of Big Star fandom. Chilton kept playing, experimenting and reviving the name Big Star, feeding off the legend.
But the music — on ample display here — only occasionally hints at what all the fuss was about. The filmmakers were plainly true believers. They’ve made an overlong and often repetitious movie, dragging out a “Behind the Music” story arc to just shy of an unsustainable two hour length. There isn’t much in the way of “live” Big Star performance footage to make their case. And lacking context — maybe clearing the use of music that was influenced by them to demonstrate how far ahead of their time that they were — would have helped.
It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that “Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me” won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for drug references and brief strong language
Cast: Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Andy Hummel, Mitch Easter, Chris Stamey
Credits: Directed by Drew Nicola, Olivia Mori. A Magnolia release.
June — Limited

The big box office story of the weekend was not that another Pixar movie is a two weekend hit. “Monsters University” had a solid holdover on its second weekend, but its Saturday dropped it well below $50 million on its second go round and left it with a not-shabby/far from epic $44 million.

And the big story isn’t that another R-rated buddy comedy blew up — “The Heat” bought Sandra Bullock another three years of real box office clout and fame, and solidified Melissa McCarthy’s status as the go to comic for box office success.

No, the story is that “White House Down,” a $150 million repeat of “Olympus Has Fallen,” bombed. It opened winded on Friday and utterly ran out of gas on Saturday. It’ll be lucky to clear $26 million, and will be fading fast by the time “Pacific Rim” and “Lone Ranger” and the July films that serve that same audience open.
Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark. On Sony.
It’s a shame, because it’s the better of the two Terrorists Take Over the White House movies. Did the public get its fill of that with “Olympus,” did they hear too much about the movie’s plot (quite similar to Olympus, but with right wing militia movement villains) and similarities to politics in D.C. to want to see it? As I mentioned in my review, there’s something dispiriting about both of the films. The idea that so much could go wrong — and be made to go wrong, just for a laugh and an action beat — may play better in the parts of the world where America is a punching bag. But not at home.

Sam Rockwell’s reliably scruffy, irreverent swagger is much in evidence in his latest film — “The Way Way Back.” It’s a serio-comic coming of age tale which has Rockwell playing Owen, the slacker manager of a water slide park who teaches our young hero, Duncan (Liam James) about girls, love and self-worth.
Rockwell’s performance has critics contorting this way and that to find analogies.
“Rockwell makes Owen his version of “M*A*S*H”’s Hawkeye Pierce,” ventured The New York Daily News. No, Owen’s “a combination of the Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield characters in “Caddyshack,” cool but with an anarchic streak,” declares The New York Post.
But think of Rockwell’s self-described affinity for the work of Bill Murray. Might Owen be his version of Tripper in Murray’s breakout film, 1979’s “Meatballs”?
“Bingo,” Rockwell says. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that guy in him. I was thrilled to play Owen — mentor, lover, slacker, goofball. What a great character, a no brainer for me to play when they offered me the part.”

Like “Meatballs,” “Way Way Back” features a lost kid who befriends an offbeat, rebellious older man for the summer. As in “Meatballs,” the mentor is a would-be ladies man who pines for a colleague (Maya Rudolph) who is more mature and won’t give him the time of day. And as in “Meatballs,” “Way Way Back” lets the kid learn from both the patter of the mentor, and the mentor’s obvious shortcomings.
“Owen chases Caitlyn (Rudolph) because she’s this grown woman who can kind of set him straight,” Rockwell says. “There’s a maternal thing going on there, a maturity. She’s the one person who can make him give up all his nonsense. The kid, Duncan, is kind of abused — mentally — by his mom’s boyfriend. He needs a male role model, even a goofy one.”
“Way Way Back” is about a 14 year-old Duncan’s summer at a Massachusetts coastal resort town. Mom (Toni Collette) is dating a creep (Steve Carell) who owns a beach house there. The creep belittles the boy, the adults are all wrapped up in recreating their drunken-cheating adolescence, leaving Duncan to find something to do and someone to mentor him doing it. That’s where Owen and the Water Wizz water park come in. It’s time for Duncan to “come of age.”
“We’re all entitled to a ‘coming of age’ summer,” says Rockwell, 44. Even guys like him, a former child actor, a guy who has “never been to a water park before in my life?”
“Even child actors. I spent my summers in New York with my mom and all her crazy actor friends. I learned a lot about life from that crowd, acting with them, and off stage. Guys like (playwright) John Jiler, Wade McDonald and Tom Edwards took me under their wing, showed me the acting ropes and other stuff, too.”
Rockwell’s formidable screen reputation — in dramas such as “Conviction,” thrillers like “Moon” and dark comedies such as “Seven Psychopaths” or “Choke” — spin out of his smart mouth, his disreputable screen appearance and his sheer unpredictability. A Variety critic noted that only the knowledge that “Way Way Back” is a comedy keeps the feeling that Owen might be a pervert at bay.
“The magic on film comes from those moments where something feels spontaneous,” Rockwell says. “Hard to do, because you’re working from a script and you’re doing more than one take. You’ve got to throw things in there — a LOT of things in there — to make it seem this moment is happening for the first time, with every take. I do the same thing on stage, trip it up a little.”
And it takes effort to find each character’s off-the-thrift-store-rack appearance.
“Every guy’s wardrobe is key. For instance, Owen has got to look kind of trapped in the past, in the ’80s — from his shirts and sunglasses, to his car (a Cavalier convertible).”
Another element of the Rockwell mystique is the films he turns up in.  “Cowboys & Aliens” “Iron Man 2” or “Frost/Nixon” seem like exceptions to his rule of thumb — he always find the small film where he can make a bigger impression. He tends to do a lot of ensemble pictures with a small, juicy part for himself in it.
“I particularly like to work with directors who’ve been actors or are still actors. I’ve made a couple of films with Clark Gregg (“Choke,” “Trust Me”). These guys from ‘Way Way Back’ (writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) are actors. It helps. They have compassion for what you’re doing. They get it, and they give the actors the room to play around a bit, make a part their own.”

“The Heat” opened with a robust Friday that suggests it’ll do a whopping $40 million over this last weekend before July 4. Call that a win, right? The reviews weren’t bad, the teaming of Bullock and Melissa McCarthy works.

“White House Down” is headed toward a healthy but not epic $30 million opening. Not bad considering the reviews and the fact that it’s the second movie on the same subject in less than six months. It will NOT make back its $150 million budget in the US, though. Getting beaten to the box office by the marginally inferior “Olympus Has Fallen” was a fatal blow.

But “Monsters University,” which is GROSSLY inferior to “Despicable Me 2” opening next week, BTW, is following its $82 million opening LAST weekend with another $47-50+ this weekend.

And that’s just based on Friday. Saturday, even in the summer, is the bigger day for kiddie toons.

“World War Z” is in the $20s, “Man of Steel” keeps making money right behind it.

The interesting thing about this summer, especially June, is the few films are truly sucking all the air out of the room. A new film opens big, the earlier hits still draw their share of warm bodies. “This is the End” is doing better than the last several Seth Rogen movies, and the last several films of his mentor, Judd Apatow, too. It’s over $75 and closing in on $100.

“Now You See Me” cleared $100 million this week and will be well north of that by Sunday night.

Irony isn’t a recent invention. But a savvy popular culture watcher would have to notice that for the past 20 years or so, American culture has enjoyed — or endured — a sort Golden Age of Irony, as if the whole country has a permanently raised eyebrow, a tongue perpetually buried in its cheek.
So how does one turn one of the most unironic characters in screen history into a modern movie? You start with an actor who suggests unironic to the core. That actor is Armie Hammer.
“You can’t make a movie now with the sort of story, characters and action that a 1950s TV show had,” says Hammer, the earnest young star cast as the masked lawman in the new Gore Verbinski/Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster. He worried that if he played The Lone Ranger’s humorless rectitude straight that “the audience’s snores would drown out the soundtrack.”
We are, Hammer notes, “too hip for the guy the way he was. Audiences are more discerning, today  — more sophisticated in terms of what they expect from a Western, a story like this. We had to give these two men a fresh twist and I hope we pull it off.”
Who today would want to “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” where, “from out of the past come the thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver”? How can “The Lone Ranger” ride again?
Hammer and the production team deliver a masked man in a white hat on a white horse. Their Ranger still uses a silver bullet as a calling card. But his “sidekick” and faithful Indian companion, Tonto, is the sharp one, whom Johnny Depp makes an eye-rolling commentator on the gee whiz earnestness of his “Kemosabe.”
“There was such care taken in assembling the iconic elements of the original show,” Hammer says. “We just wanted all those elements there, but given a fresh, modern twist.”
So the new “Lone Ranger” has a robber baron as well as a darker, more violent reprise of the Masked Man’s original nemesis back when he got his start as a radio character in the 1930s, outlaw Butch Cavendish. The U.S. Cavalry doesn’t just “ride to the rescue.”  It does Big Business’s bidding. Tonto is the wry observer to all this. But the Ranger? As straight an arrow as ever, with just a hint of self-awareness.
The chiseled Hammer, who first gained notice playing evangelist Billy Graham (“Billy: The Early Years”) and as a member of the cast of TV’s “Reaper,” seemed a natural choice for this role. Director Gore Verbinski speaks of Hammer “not having a cynical or jaded bone in his body” and “boyish.” So if you’re planning on re-launching The Lone Ranger as a possible film franchise, you could do worse.
“After I got the role, I found the TV shows on DVD, the old radio serials, old comic books, books based on him,” says Hammer, who was too young to have ever seen the Clayton Moore/Jay Silverheels TV series, even in reruns. “There’s this whole culture around this character that I wanted to tap into. Who he was and how he came to be that masked man fascinated me.”
After boning up on the legend, Hammer would have to elbow his way into the established “Pirates of the Caribbean” team of Verbinski and Depp and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
“This project had been around so long that all the big decisions, and the grunt work on the script and the characters had been done before I got there,” Hammer says. “I’d never fired two pistols while riding a horse through a moving train. So, something new, every day on the set. There might have been a time when actors learned this stuff over a career. I had to pick up all the cowboy skills straight away — lassoing, riding, roping, how to use a six-shooter. Not much call for those skills these days.”
And the actor, who has done time on other big budget productions (“Mirror, Mirror”) marveled at the no-expense-spared attention to detail that the veteran “Pirates” team brought to the Old West.
“Jerry Bruckheimer wanted to make sure we were THERE. So they built railroads, built towns that we then burned down. The more set they build, the less you, as an actor, have to imagine in your head. You can see and react to a real world that the movie has created for you to act in. Imagine standing in the desert in Monument Valley, Utah, in the middle of the night, a New Moon, PITCH black. And there’s this barn they’ve built just for the purpose of burning it to the ground.”
Armand Douglas Hammer, who turns 27 in August, is the son of a publisher and owner of a TV production company, and great grandson of oil magnate and philanthropist Armand Hammer. No, playing the privileged Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network” was not the biggest stretch of his career. “The Lone Ranger”? Maybe a bit of a stretch, though he was more than happy to be Depp’s straight man — the entire movie’s straight man.
And apparently, it’s whetted Hammer’s appetite for unironic characters from TV shows. Next up, he’s the Russian sidekick-spy Illya Kuryakin in the big screen “Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
“I just started working on my Russian accent, doing a little Cold War spying research. Yeah, having fun with another TV show that’s years before my time. But who wouldn’t love to make a movie with Guy Ritchie (“Sherlock Holmes”) on a spy movie?”

It’s Friday AM, almost time for me to chat with the crew at Open Mike on 740 The Game about movies.

Brian Kravitz and I will talk up “White House Down,” parse the hidden meaning of “The Heat,” turn sports talk fans onto the Israeli Orthodox Jewish melodrama “Fill the Void”, embrace backup singers in “20 Feet From Stardom” and mention “The Kings of Summer.”

The Enzian’s weekend booking of the Sommelier documentary “Somm” will be discussed. What wine experts have to know before landing the label and high-end restaurant job of sommelier.

All that at 745 AM on 740 AM, The Game. Or listen here online.