Movie Nation

The lads of Hollywood’s “Pot Pack” get together for a riotous riff on The Rapture in “This is the End,” an often hilarious/generally irreverent comedy about the Biblical Apocalypse as seen through the windows of a movie star’s mansion.
Seth Rogen & Co. cooked up this all-star romp, a much funnier, less preachy and just as credulous take on New Testament accounts of  The End than the equally blasphemous “Rapture Palooza.”
Inventing versions of their real selves to play, “End” begins with old Rogen pal Jay Baruchel visiting him in Los Angeles, getting baked and complaining about Rogen’s running mates — James Franco, Jonah Hill and their ilk. Baruchel (“She’s Out of My League) is then dragged to a rowdy party at Franco’s Architecture Digest showplace of a home, where Franco can’t remember his name, Hill fawns all over him, unconvincingly trying to persuade Baruchel that they shouldn’t be enemies. And Craig Robinson (“Peeples”) entertains one and all by leading the mob in a few choruses of “Take Yo’ Panties Off.”
The first thing that works here is this madcap party, where Jason Segel rips his undemanding, formulaic TV comedy (“How I Met Your Mother”) to Kevin Hart, where Emma Watson endures the ogling of the lads and Rhianna ups her cool quotient by slapping Michael Cera, who consumes mass quantities of coke and sex and generally punctures his effeminate nice-boy image. The party is so funny it could be its own movie.
And then The End begins. Baruchel is the surrogate for the audience, the one who sees the beams of light pulling the righteous up into heaven. Since nobody at the party was “Raptured,” nobody believes him. When the earth quakes, the fires begin and doom rains down — “Tsunami? Zombie invasion?” — most partygoers are quickly consumed. The five leads, in various states of outrageous denial, are left to fend for themselves.
“It’s like a sleepover!”
Baruchel reads the Bible to them and points out the signs and the pictures of Satan.
“I know that dude. He’s from ‘Where the Wild Things Are!'”
And then Danny McBride shows up. Everybody in this movie sells the concept and works up a fine lather over their peril and their petty personality conflicts. But as he did in “Pineapple Express,” McBride takes things to a new level. His redneck rage, contempt for the “sell-outs” and career stumbles and the very profession they all share blasts from his lips — every line a killer, no line quotable in polite company. When he’s in it, “The End” is the living end of rapture spoofs. When he leaves, the energy plunges.
Rogen, who co-wrote and directed this, lets the fun go on too long. But the effects are grand and often R-rated, and for a movie as over the R-rating line as this one often is, there’s a surprisingly sweet message about the road to redemption.
So if you see only one End Times movie this summer, make it the Pot Pack’s installment. “This is the End” is the going away party of Apocalypse movies.

MPAA Rating: R for crude and sexual content throughout, brief graphic nudity, pervasive language, drug use and some violence
Cast: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Emma Watson
Credits: Written and directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen. A Columbia  release
Running time: 1:47

This Superman settles scores. And takes his shirt off.
This “Man of Steel” flies up, up and away, with his teeth bared and his fists clenched.
This Lois Lane knows his story, straight off. There’s little mystery about him.
If every generation gets the Superman it deserves, “Man of Steel” suggests we’ve earned one utterly without wit or charm, a grim, muscle-bound 33 year-old struggling to reconcile the past he is just learning about, trying to fit in with a military that may or may not consider him a threat but that needs his help when his fellow Kryptonians come to call.
“Man of Steel” is a radical re-interpretation of the Superman myth, no sin in itself. The Zack “300/Sucker Punch” Snyder version, scripted by David S. Goyer (story by Christopher Nolan), dwells much longer on Krypton and re-arranges the story, hurling us into the adult Kal-El’s Wolverine-like loner life as an American adult, showing us his formative childhood with the Kents (Diane Lane and Kevin Costner) only in flashbacks.
It gives his Kryptonian nemesis, General Zod, a mission — however misguided. And a point of view. So Michael Shannon, who plays him, isn’t all that scary,
Without the wit, winks, flirtation and old-fashioned sentiment of the “Truth, justice and the American way” take on the character, all Henry Cavill (“Immortals”) has to do is mix it up in a lot of “Transformers” inspired brawls with armored-plated aliens and occasionally agonize over it all.
Yes, most of the far sillier “Transformers” movies were more fun.
From its production design — ugly, black, insectoid spaceships — to its instantly forgettable Hans Zimmer musical score, this movie goes out of its way to remove itself from the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies. And it is the poorer for it.
Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer play the parents who pack their baby up and ship him off their doomed planet. The sad resignation of the Marlon Brando version of Father Jor-El is lost because General Zod stages a coup, mid-planetary meltdown, giving this overlong prologue shoot-outs and armored brawls. And Crowe’s Jor-El never quite goes away.
We spend far too little time with the story’s heart, the ways the baby is embodied with good old fashioned heartland virtues. Costner and Lane have the film’s best scenes.
“Decide the kind of man you want to be,” Clark Kent’s dad tells him, urging him to keep his ID secret, to use his powers sparingly, with care. The grown-up Clark wanders the bars and crab fishing fleets, committing the occasional supernatural act of compassion and the occasional supernatural fit of pique.
Amy Adams is an over-achieving Lois Lane, totally clued in on the evidence of an alien among us by the military. Laurence Fishburne is a dull Daily Planet editor Perry White.
Take away the antecedents (Lois Lane has no Jimmy Olsen, boy photographer), strip the character’s Americanness (to make it easier to sell overseas) and it’s still a competent movie — state of the art explosions, implosions and what-not.
But take away the whimsy, the fun, and one has to wonder why Snyder, Goyer, Warners and Christopher Nolan bothered.

(LINK: Did “Sucker Punch” predict “Man of Steel” would suck?)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, and for some language
Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane, Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Lawrence Fishburne
Credits: Directed by Zack Snyder, scripted by David S. Goyer. A Warner Bros. release
Running time: 2:23

A $34 million opening weekend against a $3 million production cost? OF course they do.

It must be tough, being “average” and “middle class” and living within sniffing distance of L.A.’s rich and beautiful people. The designer clothes, the pricey homes, flashy cars and flashier jewelry must seem just within reach, especially to the young and avaricious.
That’s the temptation of “The Bling Ring,” Sofia Coppola’s scintillating followup to the sleep-inducing “Somewhere.” Coppola’s film, based on a Vanity Fair article about the crimes, the criminals and the world they ran in, is a winking condemnation of a generation of naive, covetous privacy-abandoning teens — and their victims, celebrities so vapid they leaves doors unlocked, so vulnerable in an age where the Internet tracks their every out-of-town trip, every red carpet appearance.
Because if there’s one thing these dizzy L.A. larcenists have a handle on, it’s social media. They don’t wear gloves, don’t rush through the houses they enter and pilfer, don’t realize that the gate camera (which they walk towards backwards, wearing hoodies, so that their faces are hidden) isn’t the only camera in a multi-million dollar hillside Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom or Lindsay Lohan abode. But they can track their prey online and Facebook photos of their haul.
Becca (Katie Chang) worships Lohan and a few other staples of “Access Hollywood” and “TMZ.” She links up with the new kid in her Calabasas high school, Marc (Israel Broussard) because of his fashion sense. He’s gay. And when she says “Let’s check some cars” after hitting a party, he’s down for anything — pulling on car doors, seeing what can be snatched from a vehicle that isn’t locked.
Chloe (Claire Julien) is Becca’s blond bombshell pal, also down for anything. Nikki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga) are the rest of this pot-smoking, Kanye and M.I.A. listening posse. They discover that the celebrities they long to emulate are as careless about locking their doors as “The Bling Ring,” as the media came to call them, are about hiding their activities.
As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows. We’re allowed to giggle at Nikki and Sam’s (all names were changed) insipid self-help home schooling mom (Leslie Mann, on the nose) and her “teaching,” inspired by “The Secret.” The homes of the rich are often expensively tacky. The girls all have that mousy/sexy Kardashian growl and a thorough knowledge of high end brands — Chanel, Rolex, Louboutin, Herve Leger.
All it takes is a text — “Let’s go to Paris.” — and they’re off, “shopping” at the Hilton home, or Megan or Lindsey or Audrina’s house.
The performances capture the utter amorality of it all, with Harry Potter’s pal Watson scoring with her dizzy rationalizations of her crimes — “Karma cleanses my journey.” — Broussard’s ease at showing Marc’s increasing comfort in his sexuality and Chang’s unflinching turn as the fearless/reckless and unfeeling Becca.
They’re an amusingly hateful bunch, their sole redeeming quality being the real and really gauche people they’re robbing — many of them glimpsed in TV news coverage edited into the fray.
If Audrina “The Hills” Patridge was their inspiration, showing a lifestyle achieved by virtue of looks, shamelessness and a willingness to abandon privacy and “sell” anything, why should anyone be surprised that the Ring’s imitation of that life went this far?
And if a Kardashian and a Hilton can become paragons of style by virtue of a sex tape, why not those who ransack the Hollywood Hills homes of L.A.’s rich and beautiful? After they’re all out of jail, of course.

MPAA Rating:  R for teen drug and alcohol use, and for language including some brief sexual references
Cast: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann
Credits: Written and directed by Sofia Coppola An a24/NALA  release.
Running time: 1:30

There are filmed adaptations of plays and plays, in essence, staged for the film camera. “Between Us” is, sadly, closer to the latter. Joe Hortua’s four-handed melodrama about the arc of a relationship between two couples feels stagy, claustrophobic, despite filmmaker Dan Mirvish’s efforts to “open the play up” with varied settings and outdoor footage. What’s worse is, it’s performed theatrically, built to play in the back rows.
Grace and Carlo (Julia Stiles and Taye Diggs) are newlyweds, visiting the Midwestern home of their college buddies, Sharyl and Joel (Melissa George and David Harbour). Whatever “seems like old times” nostalgia they might share is troubled by simmering resentments, jealousies and old grudges.
Carlo is a photographer, a struggling artist. Joel was also a photographer, but he sold-out (or turned practical) and now he and Melissa live in a McMansion. Where they aren’t happy. Carlo and Grace try to endure, support.
“Kiss your wife. I think she needs it.”
The McMansion couple’s unsettling bickering is just getting started when we switch to another scene a year later. We’re privy to a second meeting, this time in Grace and Carlo’s dingy, crowded New York apartment. Carlo is still struggling, social worker Grace is bitter. And who shows up but Joel and Sharyl.
“It’s great to see you guys!”
“Is it? After last time?”
“Between Us” teases out what happened at that first reunion, testy banter and debate among the foursome, who split up into pairs and condemn each other in their best “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” impression.
“There’s such a thing as privacy. We can’t all go around dangling our Ids!”
Occasionally, we flash back to bar scenes, college years much earlier in the relationship, and to a wedding.
“I’m not judging” means, yeah, he’s judging. “You must be enjoying this” means no, no one is enjoying the direction the evening’s taken.
There are surprise revelations and ugly memories, and the battle over the shifting class difference between these two couples plays out in an epic confrontation over a milk shake delivery tip.
This is a good cast, but it’s all played at a rather shrill pitch that must work better on the stage. The intimacy of the screen makes it all uncomfortably in our face. And as movies often do, the play “Between Us” is deconstructed by the act of filming  — showing its holes, its obvious devices and that most fatal flaw of all, characters we would run from if we encountered them at a dinner party.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, adult situations
Cast: Julia Stiles, Taye Diggs, Melissa George, David Harbour
Credits: Directed by Dan Mirvish, scripted by Dan Mirvish and  Joe Hortua, based on his play. A Monterey Media release.
Running time: 1:30