Movie Nation

The box office success of the ongoing “Fast & Furious” franchise is a marvel of modern Hollywood marketing — identifying an audience and giving them what they want.

These are heist pictures, bordering on caper comedies (Tyrese Gibson gets most of the laughs in the new one), impossibly expensive, impossibly impossible tales of a “team” that’s more like “family” which pulls together — each with his or her role to play — to steal something or (in the case of the newest film) keep something from being stolen.

They’re “Ocean’s Eleven,” with cars, less sophistication (Steven Soderbergh is Hollywood’s smartest director), but with a rainbow cast of Hispanic, Asian, black, white and “other” actors to add to their appeal. The audience for these films, personal experience has told me (feature stories on the tuner crowd which comes to the local premieres) is largely Latino. And the latest film is no exception — a majority of the moviegoers are Latin, with African Americans, Asians and Caucasians filling out the theaters.

There’s Michelle Rodriguez, killed off in an earlier film, brought back to life for this one. Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson and Sung Kang have their moments. Paul Walker is solid set-dressing.

And back when they were first heralded as “The next Generation of Action Stars,” Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson were pitched as pan-racial. They further flavor the ethnic mix.

The capers are drab and “Road Warrior” repetitious. Justin Lin has settled into a routine, directing them — shots of impossibly noisy gear shifting, tires bawling smoke billowing. Laws of physics, as I said in my review, need not apply. The villains are fairly generic, now that we’ve gotten past the whole Paul Walker/cop infiltrates the gang thing.

But it’s the “family” of it all,  “familia,” the community, that makes these movies work. The inclusiveness, the gender role defying casting. You could make the case that there’s no more American movie franchise this side of “Captain America.”

The new film, opening to huge numbers here and overseas, teases to the seventh film in the franchise, and as long as young men and couples drive their tuned up Hondas, Hyundai’s, etc. to the movies, this beast may never die. And with the villainous actor showing up in that final tease, the driving stuff and action beats can only get better.

She made a great impression, sort of all at once, this year with “Oblivion” and “Disconnect,” “Welcome to the Punch” next month’s “Shadow Dancer.”

Andrea Riseborough, 31, first got most people over here’s attention as Wallis Simpson in Madonna’s “W.E.,” but memorable supporting turns in “Made in Dagenham” and “Never Let Me Go.”

In “Shadow Dancer,” she plays a northern Irish woman traumatized since childhood, an IRA supporter/informant whom Clive Owen sets out to turn, Cary Grant-“Notorious” fashion.

Here’s what she has coming up, according to IMDb. Questions for the fair Ms. Riseborough? Comment below. Thanks.

Back in 2011, Hollywood thought things were pretty when the collection of movies in theaters managed a whopping $276 million over the course of the weekend.

But that fell by the boards as “Fast & Furious 6,” “Hangover 3” and “Epic” joined “Iron Man 3” and “Star Trek II” and piled up over $317 million over the weekend.

Best  4 day weekend ever. Best Memorial Day Ever.

Movies!, a new broadcast source for free movies for the cheapskates among us, goes live Memorial Day on the digital subcarriers of assorted Fox affiliates associated stations nationwide.
What time? They won’t say. It’s Memorial Day, 8 am, and they’re still running promos.
Weigel Broadcasting out of Chicago is pushing this classic film channel. Titles teased — hundreds of them — include the original “M.A.S.H.,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “The African Queen,” “Lords of Flatbush”, “An Affair to Remember” and “From Here to Eternity.” Not sure who owns this library — “Planet of the Apes,” “Poseidon Adventure,” “The Seven-Ups.” They own the rights to some good stuff.
That makes Movies! a direct challenge to MGM-centric This TV, the way MeTV competes with RTV (Retro TV) on some station’s subcarriers. This TV has a big but plainly not unlimited catalog — days and days of nothing but B-pictures that somehow MGM got its hands on. Tribune took over ThisTV from Weigel, thus competition kicks in, Weigel adding its stations to the mix.
In Orlando, Movies! are on channel 65.2. The local Fox affliliate, channel 35, doesn’t have any digital subcarriers, which are always lower resolution than typical HDTV 1080. Here’s the nationwide affiliate list.

Here’s their schedule, and here, at 810 AM Eastern, is their first Fox movie — Lee Van Cleef playing the harmonica, Jim Brown, Fred Williamson in “Take a Hard Ride.” Look for Harry Carey Jr. and “Ronald” Howard in it.

It wasn’t a race. Not at all. “The Hangover Part 3” has earned $54 million since its soft opening Wednesday night, but “Fast and Furious 6” has cleaned up — $98 million and counting.

The official “weekend” tally for “Hangover” is $42. Which isn’t as bad as “Epic,” which never caught fire and has managed a middling (for 3D animation) $34 million.

“Star Trek” lost a solid (not bad, not great) 45% of its opening weekend audience and fell into the $30s.

“Iron Man 3” has crossed into “insane” money territory — $1.142 billion, top 5 US all time, top seven international all-time.

Far more interesting to me is seeing “Mud” hang on to audience and in the Top Ten and clear $14, “42” clinging to the slim hope that it can make it to $100 million ($93-94 by next weekend, and fading fast), and that “Frances Ha” opened pretty well for a Greta Gerwig indie film.

“Fast & Furious” and “Hangover” and even “Epic” should do decent business Monday, but the weekend seems pretty much spent and projections of a $120 million full holiday weekend opening (projections made Saturday) were just a tad optimistic.

Mr. Cruise’s planned fifth “Mission: Impossible” picture is interfering with the much-delayed, long-planned similar origins film of 1960s TV spy series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” He’s bailed out of it, as George Clooney did before him. Armie Hammer was to play the Russian sidekick, with Cruise going Napoleon Solo.

Who could take his place? Guy Ritchie is itching to direct this. Maybe somebody from his stable of stars? Gerry? Jude? Or a Clive Owen?

Nathan Fillion is the star of a popular TV show — “Castle.” And every show has its share of fanatical fans. He was on a soap opera for years, whose enthusiasts take “fan” to a “whole different level.” But that’s nothing compared to the devotion that comes from a TV show (“Firefly”) he briefly did with Joss “Buffy the Vampire Slayer/The Avengers” Whedon.
“Joss Whedon fans NEVER go away,” Fillion says. “They will follow you from project to project, supporting you every step along the way… I don’t try to understand it. I just enjoy it.”
Whedon knows it, too. When the 48 year-old phenom puts his name on a horror picture (“Cabin in the Woods”), he brings an audience to it that might not otherwise go. And when he takes on a major comic-book film franchise like “The Avengers” and knocks it out of the park, at least part of the audience is guaranteed to smugly cross its arms, look around the theater and say “We TOLD you he was special.”
But can Whedon and his onscreen muse, Fillion, lure that elusive fanboy audience into watching a Shakespeare movie? There’s the rub, as the Bard’s marketing department might say, behind Whedon’s low-budget but sexy take on “Much Ado about Nothing.”
Whedon joins some of the screen’s greatest storytellers — Welles and Olivier, Polanski and Branagh — filmmakers who love Shakespeare and who, as Whedon puts it, “try to get the audience to see what you see in it.
“Everybody who loves Shakespeare wants the chance to step up and say, ‘This is what it did for me.’ It’s a little affirmation for Shakespeare. He touched me, and he’ll touch you.'”
And if the audience comes, all the better.
“Nobody ever does Shakespeare for the screen for any other reason other than they love it,” adds Whedon, lowering box office expectations for the film. “In high school, we’re forced to do it. When you’re an adult, if you’re doing it, it is out of love.”
Whedon and his wife (Kai Cole) would host Sunday “Shakespeare” brunches in the big, rambling LA home that Kai designed. They’d invite many of the Whedon repertory company of actors he’s worked with on TV, “have some mimosas and perform a play,” Fillion recalls. That combo really worked on the comedies, and “Much Ado About Nothing” in particular.
“The drunker we got, the better the play went,” Whedon jokes.
The writer-director, known for being fiercely loyal to his actors, had been longing to find a way to showcase his friends Amy Acker (“Angel”) and Alexis Denisof (“Angel,” “Dollhouse”). That became a project that Mrs. Whedon convinced Joss to film as a “soul restoring” way of spending his break between filming “The Avengers” and settling down to edit it. In just 12 days, over two weekends, using actors such as Acker, Denisof and Clark Gregg, Fillion (who plays Dogberry, the comical constable) and Ashley Johnson, in modern dress and in a perfectly modern house, they transformed “Much Ado” from a mimosa-soaked revel into a movie.
“This was his version of a vacation,” Fillion says of Whedon. “He loves the language, the stories, the themes… I think high school teachers will rejoice at this film, because it proves that anybody can enjoy Shakespeare. I was one of those kids who tuned out whenever somebody said ‘Shakespeare.’ If this had been around when I was a kid, things would have been different.”
Catherine Shoard of Britain’s Guardian newspaper is among the critics praising the film and Whedon’s “keen ear for comedy…no-nonsense approach to ditching the gags that don’t work” and “deft hand for slapstick and an eagerness to use it.”
For his part, Whedon notes that “Nothing” is “not idiot proof. I’ve seen bad productions of it. But it is beautifully constructed in a way that people don’t often understand.” The screenwriter in him loved analyzing, deconstructing and figuring out why this 415 year old play works.
“It’s this richly textured ensemble comedy-drama. I saw ‘noir comedy’ in it,” he says, which is why he shot it in black and white. “For me, there’s a real darkness behind the comedy that makes it much more than ‘Hey, watch these people have a good time and flirt.'”

Whedon’s soul is restored and now work on “Avengers II” continues apace. But since he confesses that “Ado” is “a gateway drug of a play,” tempting one to tackle more Shakespeare, and since no Joss Whedon film is complete without talk of sequels, might there be more Bard in Whedon’s future filmic canon?
“Hey, I’m not the BBC,” he cracks. “You do these out of love, not to make money.” But if the Whedon faithful show up, all bets are off.
(LINK: Roger Moore reviews “Much Ado About Nothing.”)