Movie Nation

Deadline.com is reporting that “Arrested Development” returns to the loving embrace of its fans on May 26 (midnight the 27th for us East Coasters) on Netflix. These are the new episodes — Netflix is ordering more — that will lead to an “Arrested Development” movie on the big screen.

Late Wednesday, I was talking with Jason Bateman about his new film, the drama “Disconnect,” which hits theaters April 12, and I asked him if he ever got tired of the years of AD questions, the way fans (among them, many journalists) constantly harp on the canceled but not forgotten series and have never let it go.

“You know, I owe this whole second career (after his child acting career ended, followed by many dormant years) to that show. Those people are the favorites among all the people I’ve worked with. To do anything with them is a question you don’t have to ask me twice.

“So no matter what happens with movies, no matter how many good things have happened in recent years or what the future holds, I am very loyal to that and will continue to be. People wouldn’t still be talking about it if it wasn’t good. IF you’re ever in something good enough, that people respond to and want a sequel to (He’s doing ‘Horrible Bosses II’), you’re flattered and you kind of want to do it.”

The reviews weren’t scathing. Just indifferent, generally.

As were the crowds. THR reports that Warners/Legendary’s Bryan Singer fairytale epic “Jack the Giant Slayer” never packed them in and Warner Brothers will take a $140 million bath on this first epic fail of 2013.

It’s earned just over $60, domestically, and doesn’t figure to get anywhere near production costs/marketing costs with overseas, TV and video sales.

The cast only had “names” in tiny supporting parts — Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane, Stanley Tucci and the voice of Bill Nighy. The leads were bland, and the direction competent but without much wit or spark. The script’s best gag is just before the closing credits.

Everybody went fairytale mad after Disney broke the bank with “Alice in Wonderland.” Dueling Snow Whites, an Oz prequel. How’s that worked out?

“Evil Dead” is earning the best horror film notices since “Mama,” maybe since “Insidious.” Not that it’s in their league, or that of the Sam Raimi film it is based on.

Raimi’s film was his debut, with the Coen Brothers involved as fellow filmmaker wannabes. Bruce Campbell was introduced to the world. Yeah, it was scary, as is this remake. But it had that bizarre Raimi horror humor about it, something he realized after it was done and relied on more heavily for “Evil Dead 2.”

Steve Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” endures its conversion to 3D well enough. It still has corny script moments and kid in jeopardy plot lines and digital dinosaurs. But it works. Most reviews for the original, and the conversion, are pretty good. Not one of his very best.

“Trance,” Danny Boyle’s latest, is not one of his very best either. But it still gives you a lot to chew on, some great acting (and some not up to snuff), packaging hypnotism into a heist picture — an art heist — is inspired.

“The Company You Keep” goes into limited release, and it’s very close to form for Robert Redford — well-cast, beautifully acted. Shia holds his own with some serious cinema heavyweights. I got hung up on all this “30 years ago” radicalism, which when we’re dealing with late 60s-mid 70s actors in several of the roles, and the fact that this history was 40 years ago, just doesn’t compute.

“The Brass Teapot,” a dark little parable that I liked more than most, opens in select cities, too. Love that Juno Temple, because that girl — who realizes this magical teapot gives out cash whenever somebody gets hurt, and thus starts injuring herself and her husband — is OUT there.

Robert Redford delivers one last lecture on ’60s idealism and passes another baton to Shia LaBeouf in “The Company You Keep,” an engrossing thriller about the last anti-Vietnam War radicals still underground.
Redford, along with fellow Oscar winners Susan Sarandon, Chris Cooper and Julie Christie and the cream of the cinema’s current crop of character actors — Brendan Gleeson, Terrence Howard, Nick Nolte, Stanley Tucci and Richard Jenkins — make this “No Country for Old Radicals” a feast of performance, with many of those illustrious stars sharing scenes with LaBeouf, who plays an obsessed newspaper reporter on their trail.
And once again, “The Kid” holds his own.
Sarandon plays a former member of “The Struggle” who has laid low for decades, raising kids and carrying guilt. She wants to turn herself in for her part in a bank robbery that got a guard killed some “30 years ago.” But the FBI (Terrence Howard) catches her first.
LaBeouf is a hotshot reporter at a struggling Albany paper sent to do the followup story. And what he starts to uncover gets him on the front page, and puts another fugitive, a local civil liberties lawyer (Redford) on the lam, dragging his 11 year-old daughter with him.
As reporter Ben fends off his downsizing/budget cutting editor (Stanley Tucci) and follows the scent, others from that underground group — people still using “Hey, man,” and “Hang tight, brother” in their dotage — come up for air — Nolte (whose voice is pretty much shot), a profane and comically combative Jenkins, and the elusive idealist Mina, given a radiant flintiness by Julie Christie.
As the lawyer’s true identity comes out, as “people who know how to hide” prove it by eluding law enforcement members one-third their age, as Ben clings to his story “like a life raft,” the puzzle pieces fall together and characters have their say about who they were and what they did back then, and who they are now. Sarandon gets a lovely speech explaining ’60s radicalism in a single scene — “It wasn’t abstract. There was a (worldwide) revolution. I wanted to be a part of it.”
And Jenkins, whose “struggle” now takes place in academia, sums it all up.
“Now, we’re just a story told to children.
Redford aims barbs at the “dying press,” about “accuracy, agenda” and the like. And LaBeouf’s reporter breaks a few rules, slipping money to sources, lying to get his foot in doors.
The biggest problem with “The Company” is more obvious. It is mathematically inept. The vast majority of the events described and portrayed here happened in the late ’60s and early ’70s, during the war they were protesting. “Thirty years ago” would not fit in the last the latest of the trials of that era, nor would it accurately reflect the ages of the mostly-aged cast. Redford was 35 in 1971. Pretending he’s not 70+ is both vanity (His youthful-for-his-age character doesn’t feel the need to disguise his ginger hair while on the lam, either) and insulting. What, we can’t add?
But it’s harder to engineer the idealistic young cast (Anna Kendrick and Brit Marling join LaBeouf) into the story’s rabbit warren of blind and not-blind alleys if events fell 40 years ago, so let’s just hope people don’t notice.
That clumsiness doesn’t wreck it, but it does tend to undercut this nicely-cast and very well-acted “story told to children” about the ’60s.

MPAA Rating: R for language
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Brit Marling, Brendan Gleeson, Nick Nolte, Stanley Tucci
Credits: Directed by Robert Redford, scripted by Lem Dobbs based on the Neil Gordon novel. A Sony Classics release.
Running time: 2:02

Forget blowing the images up to IMAX size and converting the lunging velociraptors and T. Rexes into 3D. The best reason to revive “Jurassic Park” for its twentieth anniversary is Jeff Goldblum.
Yes, children, there was a time when Jeff Goldblum was sci-fi’s “ultimate explainer,” as producer Dean Devlin labeled him in “Independence Day.” Goldblum’s bug-eyes said “scientist-smart,” and his mannered, considered and hesitating line-readings reinforce that. His very presence in movies from “The Fly” onward screamed “complicated science, made understandable and plausible.”
As “chaos theory” expert Dr. Ian Malcolm, Goldblum is the “Jurassic Park” skeptic in a cluster of greedy entrepreneurs and spellbound paleontologists (played by Laura Dern and Sam Neill).
Goldblum, as Malcolm, asking all the “What if things go wrong?” questions. And when they do, he utters this line, in that distinct, silky Goldblum purr.
“Boy, do I hate being right all the time!”
“Jurassic Park,” adapted from Michael Critchton’s conceptually brilliant novel, is a horror movie wrapped in the trappings of early ’90s speculative science. Back then, kids were dino mad,  the magical letters “DNA” were on every research grant, and the wonders of genetic code were just beginning to unravel.
What a great time for a scary movie about a tycoon (Sir. Richard Attenborough) whose efforts have led to the breakthroughs that enable him and his backers to open an island theme park where dinosaurs have been back-engineered back to life.
Not that they should have been.
Things, as Dr. Malcolm predicts, will go wrong. Storms happen, cages fail, “unable to reproduce” dinosaurs turn out not to be. And people, who never walked the Earth at the same time as these beasties, are now the main item on the menu. Chaos theory incarnate.
Steven Spielberg’s film — it still looks like glorious celluloid — captures the terror in thunderous approaching footsteps that could only belong to something bigger than King Kong, in breathy sniffs from a nose the as powerful as an air compressor. The dinosaurs, impressive in their animated actions and leathery digital texture in ’93, haven’t lost much of their moist, tactile menace over the decades. When they start messing with the theme park’s SUVs, we still shudder in the knowledge that those on screen “are going to need a bigger truck.”
The script (by Crichton and David Koepp) is still burdened with pacing issues, vintage Spielberg kids in peril and melodramatic flourishes. Having Wayne Knight of TV’s “Seinfeld” as the greedy programmer who sets the chaos in motion is comically “too on the nose.”
But casting Bob Peck as the gamekeeper and “Great White Hunter”  because of his shared silhouette with the velociraptors he so admires was inspired. The frights still work, supersized and turned into 3D for your viewing and recoiling-from-the-screen pleasure.  It’s not nearly as scary on TV as it is in theaters.
If anything,  science has closed the gap from the impossible to the merely improbable in the 20 since this movie reminded us of “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.” Australians are close to bringing back a recently-extinct species of frog, and others are working to bring back the day When Dodos Ruled the Earth.
Good idea? Maybe to some. But that’s where Jeff Goldblum comes in handy. Nobody explained the improbable, and the risks involved in it, like Goldblum’s Dr. Malcolm.
“Oh, yeah. ‘Oooh, ahhh,’ that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for intense science fiction terror
Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough
Credits: Directed by Steven Spielberg, scripted by and based on the Michael Crichton novel. A Universal release.
Running time: 2:07

Relentless, pitiless, bloody and intense – that’s the remake of Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead.”
But is this “Evil Dead” (no “The”) any good? Yes and no. It has several genuinely hair-raising moments and presents, for your edification and enjoyment, some of the most graphic horror violence ever presented on the screen.
But Fede Alvarez’s homage to the ORIGINAL “Cabin in the Woods” movie lacks the offhanded goofiness, the brittle jokes – visual and otherwise – of young people, in a cabin in the woods, facing death at the hands of something supernatural. Sure, they’re scared, and some of the cast of this new “Dead” – Jessica Lucas and Elizabeth Blackmore, in particular – get across what utter terror feels like. But the sardonic wit is lost in a sea of blood and guts.
Above all else, “Dead” misses Bruce – Bruce Campbell, who graduated from “Evil Dead” and its sequels to become a B-movie legend.
The set-up is similar. Friends and family of Mia (Jane Levy) have dragged her from Michigan State U. to a cabin in the woods to clean her up, get her off drugs. Her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), who rarely sees her, is a reluctant intervener. But he’s brought his new girlfriend (Blackmore) along, because nothing bonds a couple like detoxing one’s sister.
The nurse Olivia (Lucas) and bookish school teacher Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci of “The Chumscrubber” and “Thumbsucker”) are there to help, though there’s friction because mechanic brother David hasn’t been involved in any of their lives, and here they are, caring enough to clean up a mess he should deal with himself.
There’s a stench in the semi-trashed cabin. It turns out there isn’t room to swing a dead cat in the basement because it’s full of dead cats and blood stains. We’ve seen the prologue. We know what’s coming.
They’ve only seen the dead cats. But that would be enough to make a sane person leave. And they don’t.
That gives bookish Eric a chance to find the skin-covered book of witch curses and spells and stir up The Other Side. As Mia is menaced by the forest, and possessed, as the rains come and wash out the road and as others are injured, brutalized and tested by their first encounter with the supernatural, Eric is the one who doesn’t think everything will work out in the end.
“Everything’s going to be fine? I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but everything’s been getting worse. Every second.”
The makeup effects, with piercings, scaldings, dismemberments, and the like – are spectacular. You will believe that’s a human face, peeled off with a sharp object. Characters are chased, by the camera, through the woods and through this oddly roomy tiny cabin. They reach for the camera and are yanked back out of the frame, a favorite horror movie staging trick these days.
And occasionally – not often – you feel something for the dead and the doomed. None develop real empathy, and those we mourn for we do simply because nobody deserves their fate. David, in particular, is under-developed and blandly played in spite of all the tragedy and trauma happening around the character.
That transforms “Evil Dead” from a cut-rate romp through horror conventions into a by-the-book bloodbath, chilling at times, not the sort of film that invites a cult following the way Raimi and Campbell did way back in 1981.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence and gore, some sexual content and language
Cast: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Jessica Lucas, Elizabeth Blackmore, Lou Taylor Pucci,
Credits: Directed by Fede Alvarez, written by Diablo Coy and Fede Alvarez, based on the Sam Raimi movie. A Tristar/FilmDistrict release.
Running time: 1:32

The last time we talked, I had t confess that I’d never been much of a fan, that “Arrested Development” never did much for me (the Ron Howard “Wonder Years” narration killed it for me) but that I was slowly coming around.

People like Judd Apatow had lectured me, “Oh man, you’ve gotta love J. Bates!”

So I’m there.

Jason Bateman was in one of the year’s first hits, “Identity Thief.” He’s in “Disconnect,” which is a dramatic version of the same abandonment of privacy/loss of privacy issues that “Thief” covered comically.

And for one of the few times in his career, the dude is a little scary on screen. Not just “put upon.”

I have some Internet Age privacy stuff to ask him, maybe an “Arrested Development” on NEtflix query, but I’m always looking for new lines of questioning.

Suggestions? Things you’re dying to know from J. Bates/Jason Bateman? Comment below, and thanks for the help.

Deadline.com is reporting that “Kick-Ass” starlet Chloe Moretz is in talks to join the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel “Dark Places,” about a woman forced to reexamine the massacre of her family 20 years before. Charlize Theron has been set to star, and since Moretz could pass for a younger Charlize (her character testified that her brother committed the murders), might she be the flashback version of La Theron?