Movie Nation

We unplug our phone from the charger, pop in our ear buds and go out to seize the day. We text compulsively, post on Facebook obsessively, and when it comes time to shop, date or hook-up, we log on, boot up and tune out.
That’s the world we’re living in and the dilemma skewered in “Disconnect,” a “Crash” style polemic told through a series of interwoven stories about teens, couples and families strained by the lack of communication in this Golden Age of Information.
It’s a blunt instrument of a movie, and often melodramatic. But it sometimes moves and often hits its target square on the nose.
Paula Patton and Alexander Skarsgard play a broken couple, struggling with finances and grief. They lost a baby. She’s seeking solace in online chat rooms, maybe more than solace. Then, their identities are stolen and they tumble into the humiliation of full disclosure about what each of them has been doing online, and the helpless financial insecurity brought on by an online predator.
Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye (Aviad Bernstein) are 15 year-old kids with a cruel streak. Their practical jokes range from urinating into beer bottles they return to convenience stores so they can watch customers vomit, to inventing a fake online girlfriend to bully a sensitive loner, Ben (Jonah Bobo).
Ben lives with digitally distracted parents (Jason Bateman and Hope Davis) and an older, phone-obsessed sister (Haley Ramm), so an online girlfriend would be a blessing. If she was real.
Jason is acting out, doing something that would freak out his cyber crimes detective dad (FrankGrillo).
And speaking of cyber-crimes, Nina (Andrea Riseborough) is an ambitious and ethically suspect  TV reporter who solicits cyber-sex from a toy boy, Kyle (Max Thierot) pimped out in a house full of live teens on live sex cams. She wants a career-making story, and he’s intrigued by the chance to score with  “a puma,” a somewhat older woman who isn’t quite a “cougar.” But she is touched by his creepy, digital online life.
“Don’t you want something better than this?”
Loneliness runs through this cast of characters, and it’s only when tragedy or near tragedy strikes that these muted, removed people start to feel and behave in recognizably human ways. The aimless, clueless kids are tech savvy but infantile in their understanding of the world. Kyle asks a peer at his teen online sex-cam house what she wants to be, and “famous” is her only answer. How to get that way? “Be on a reality show or something.”
The adults are no better, lashing out with incomplete information, tuned out of each other’s and their kids’ lives.
Some situations in Andrew Stern’s script beggar belief and the connections between characters are often melodramatic coincidences. The whole online sex thing is played to the salacious hilt. But there isn’t a bad performance in “Disconnect,” and some (a brittle Bateman, and Ramm, as his character’s heartbroken daughter) are quite moving.
As is the movie. And the message, as heavy-handed as it is, is a winner. Go out, socialize, buy a ticket and see it in a theater. Don’t wait to watch this one on your smart phone.

(Roger Moore’s interview with Jason Bateman is here).

MPAA Rating:  R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language, violence and drug use – some involving teens
Cast: Jason Bateman, Andrea Riseborough, Max Thierot, Paula Patton, Alexander Skarsgard.
Credits: Directed by Henry Alex Rubin, written by Andrew Stern. An LD Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:55

The movie about Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran, “Hands of Stone,” was supposed to be a “go” project, with Al Pacino as the guy’s trainer and Gael Garcia Bernal as the famous fighter, famous quitter (“No mas. No mas.”).

Now it’s Robert DeNiro and Edgar Ramirez? Not a trade down, certainly (Bernal is far better known). But will this one go before the cameras, as is?

The news that Barbra Streisand, who came out of film retirement to make the limp comedy “Guilt Trip” with Seth Rogen, will direct again seems a little premature.

“Guilt Trip” didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, after all.

It’s not that she’s too old — she turns 71 April 24 — or that it’s been too long since her last directing gig (1996).

It’s not that the subject matter — a 1930s-40s period piece about a love affair involving a famous Life magazine photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, and Southern writer (Erskine Caldwell of “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre”) — which seems dry and commercially out of step with the times (“Out of Africa” ish). This feels more like an HBO project.

It’s that the slow to move Streisand, who made such a fuss over not making a movie outside of driving range of Malibu, seems as unlikely to get around to making it as her equally meticulous peer, Warren Beatty.

Will she? And how long will it take?

In the 19th century, there was a mad rush among the bone collecting paleontologists of the day to see who could scoop whom, who could uncover this species or prove that that one flew.

It was a bitter battle, and bitter battles often make for great, sly comedy. Madness, sheer madness.

Thus “Bone Wars,” HBO’s new film with Steve Carell and James Gandolfini as Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.

These chaps were serious Indiana Jones prototypes — real cowboys of the dig and dig deep set, inventing their science and its ethics (or lack of them) as they went along.

Plainly, this has limited commercial prospects, thus the trek to HBO. But I wonder what Carell’s future looks like post Burt Wonderstone. Is his quote taking a dive after that flop?

The music in the trailers for this one is contemporary, understandable, I guess. Getting younger people to come see a period piece about 1940s baseball when Jackie Robinson integrated America’s Pastime,” is going to be a hard sell to the hip hop generation. The Big Band Era “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit that Ball?” wouldn’t help.

Harrison Ford as the fast-talking, principled but hustling Branch Rickey could be interesting. Has Ford ever played a fast talker? Not that I can recall.

Not that accuracy has to be taken to that degree. Hope for a breakout performance by Chadwick Boseman (Jackie had a mousy, non-threatening voice). Get the basic facts right, show the racial hostility within the game and among the white American fanbase, tap into the icon Jackie became — instantly — to black America, and make the baseball convincing.

Those are my fondest hopes for Brian Helgeland’s “42.” The screenwriter (“Man on Fire,” “Conspiracy Theory”) turned director (“A Knight’s Tale”) succeeded where Spike and Denzel, who wanted to do a version of this story for years, could not.

Irish character actor Milo O’Shea’s death, like that of documentary maker Les Blank (“Burden of Dreams”) , got lost in all the Roger Ebert love last week. It completely escaped my notice.

But the actor, famous for starring in the movie of James Joyce’s “Ulysees,” for playing judges (“The Verdict,” promoted to the Supreme Court on “The West Wing”) and priests (“Romeo & Juliet,” “Cheers,” etc.) passed away last week.

He had a long career that featured a lot more stage and small screen appearances than ones on the big screen. But “Barbarella,” where he played Dr. Durand Durand, the mad scientist, and “The Adding Machine” and “Theatre of Blood” and Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

Great presence, versatile, epic eyebrows. He made his mark.

Wouldn’t Roger Ebert get a huge chuckle out of this?

His greatest tribute coming not from say, an Oscars “In Memoriam” or such. It comes from the notorious font of ignorance, the Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-gay hate group known for picketing funerals of soldiers, gay people, etc., to draw attention to the dangers of inbreeding.

Their own.

They’ve called Ebert, who died last week, a “f– enabler,” God bless their Red State rube hearts. And they’re going to picket his funeral.

“Enabler?” Well, I do recall him singing the praises of “Prick Up Your Ears” and “La Cage Aux Folles” and other groundbreaking dramas and comedies about gay life, way back in the ’80s.

The funeral is today in Chicago.
Funny how those most prone to fling gay epithets are the ones most deserving of the label “fruitcakes.”

And Ebert, a champion of free speech and a lover of the limelight, would be tickled by all this, you just know it.