Movie Nation

Take away the British actors, accents and settings and “Welcome to the Punch” would still be a perfectly serviceable if utterly generic cop thriller.
A tale of corruption, gun play and murder, it takes a few unpredictable turns before reaching at a conclusion we can see coming miles before its arrival.
James McAvoy is Max, a headstrong cop chasing after a master criminal who has just pulled off a slick robbery in the film’s opening moments. Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong) may get away, but not before Max has risked life and limb to stop him.
“You’re obsessed,” his dispatcher shouts on the radio. “You’re not thinking straight.”
That’s how Max gets shot. Three years later, he’s still draining fluid out of his bad knee, still testy at any suggestion by his partner, Sarah (Andrea Riseborough) that his short fuse and fanaticism are going to end badly.
“Catching Sternwood is not going to change the past.”
“It HAS to!”
The cops catch a break when the crook’s crooked son (Elyes Gabel) is shot and makes a weepy call to Dad in his Icelandic hideout. The hoodlum will move heaven and Earth, and shoot anybody who gets in his way, to get to his son.
Max, we learn, is obsessed with “being a nobody,” while a robbing/shooting/kidnapping thug like Sternwood is “a legend.” His department chief (David Morrissey) is running for higher office on a platform that cops need guns as exotic as the criminal classes. A wave of shootings sweeping the nation seems to back him up. This case, this Sternwood, would be a coup to catch just before election day.
“Welcome to the Punch” can be appreciated for some new twists on an old formula. The crooks want to get word on “the street” to set a trap, and consult with a barber who moonlights as an underworld social media “viral” info expert. As Max follows the clues and confers with Sarah, Sternwood relies on an old comrade (the great, grizzled Peter Mullan) and follows those same clues.
Yes, they’re both trying to figure out who shot Sternwood’s kid, and what that connects to.
The action beats are by-the-book, the shootouts are straight out of a Bruce Willis movie — high caliber AK-47s and other machine guns mow down bit players, but only wound those with speaking parts.
McAvoy is overwrought much of the time, bellowing in pain at the bad knee, a real contrast to his less convincing turn as a tortured art dealer in the upcoming “Trance.” Strong is stone-cold stoic,  Morrissey spitting with vehemence and Riseborough steady in a role that requires her to do nothing but look like she’s thinking this thing through as she writes notes on her hand.
Like the recently-imported “The Sweeney,” the novelty here is in the Britishness of it all. That’s not really enough to make this one stand out.
And the diminutive McAvoy, trying his hand at all manner of action, may be hoping to become the Scottish Tom Cruise. But “Welcome to the Punch” shows he’s still more of a Scottish Michael J. Fox, an actor better served by roles with more charm and less grimacing than this one.

MPAA Ratings: unrated, with lots of gun violence and blood and guts
Cast: James McAvoy, Mark Strong, Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey
Credits: Written and directed by Eran Creavy. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:38

It’s James McAvoy VS. Mark Strong, two of my favorite Brits going at it in a thriller about a cop (McAvoy) who seemingly will stop at nothing to get his man (Strong).

Andrea Riseborough and David Morrisey, durable character players, help fill out the cast to this one. “Welcome to the Punch” goes into limited release Friday.

The money moment in the French-Canadian dramatic comedy “Starbuck” is set in a hotel conferance room. Over 140 young people, co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit aimed at revealing to them who the sperm donor was who is the father of them all, have gathered for a pep-talk and lawsuit update.
And unbeknownst to them, sitting in the crowd is the befuddled 42 year-old slacker/butcher-shop deliveryman, David Wozniak, the anonymous donor who would prefer to remain anonymous.
“I wanted to show how overwhelmed David was, and show that overwhelmed feeling shifting into pride,” says actor Patrick Huard. “He’s proud of seeing all those kids together, working toward something. That moment David changes, from a man in shock to a man overcome with pride and emotion. It must be stunning, to live through something like that. It’s one thing to know that you’re the father of all these kids. But to see them all together? I hope that shows on my face — shock and pride.”

That’s the moment viewers either go along with “Starbuck” — which takes its title (David’s code name with the sperm bank) from a prolific and famous Canadian breeding bull — embracing the film’s “bleeding heart humanity” (Wall Street Journal) or dismiss its “twee preposterousness. (New York Daily News).
And co-writer/director Ken Scott knows it.
“We wanted to stretch the reality as far as we could in writing it,” Scott says. “We gave David 150 or so kids. But we struggled with that. The number was great for comedy, but are we stretching reality too much? And then, weeks later, the news came out that a guy had had 250 kids this way. Then, a guy in the UK turns out to have had 500.”
So preposterous? Not so much.
“Starbuck” became a Canadian sensation, and has been a hit wherever it has traveled. That’s why Hollywood has already remade the film. “Starbuck,” in French with subtitles, is playing for audiences who don’t mind subtitles this spring. “The Delivery Man,” with Vince Vaughn in the role Huard originated, comes out this fall, again with Scott writing and directing.
“My co-writer and I felt this would be a great way to explore fatherhood,” Scott says. “There was this case, these scandals, with sperm banks, in New York and elsewhere. This would be a good situation to build a dramatic comedy around. In building this character, we wanted a likable guy, but an irresponsible guy. Guys like this, they hit 40-42 and are still adolescents.”
Huard found much to love in a character who grows up, in a hurry, thanks to fatherhood times 533. He sees David not just as an arrested development case study, but as representative of men who need to rediscover their place in parenting.
“There are qualities in people that are undervalued, I think. Some of us have the gift of being able to love a lot of people. David has a lot of heart. Even if he doesn’t say or do the right thing, you sense that his heart is working its way toward the right place.
“Men see problems as in need of solutions. But a lot of guys realize that the main thing a dad should be is being there — being present while you’re looking for a solution. That’s what David is going through, this understanding that he needs to care, to be there.”
That, says Scott, is the movie’s message, “a universal one, I hope,” in French with Patrick Huard and hopefully, later this year, in English with Vince Vaughn.
My review of “Starbuck” is here.

The earliest reviews are leaning positive, though they seem fanboy heavy at this point.

We know it’s almost two hours long, and that there’s a BIG cast to service, giving everybdy his or her screen time. Dwayne Johnson now has two (“Fast/Furious”) franchises that he’s a part of. Bruce Willis is collecting checks, hither and yon.

And Channing Tatum bows out with this one, right? “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” opens in 3D Thursday, not Friday.

You sit in a darkened room and images on a screen in front of you connect you to a story that is not your own, but that becomes yours. And if it’s working, you lose yourself in it.
That sounds a bit like hypnosis. When a movie has you, it puts you in a trance.
“The act of cinema is hypnotic in itself, isn’t it?” says “Trance” director Danny Boyle. “It’s got a lovely interface with cinema.”
A hypnotist captures the totality of your attention and tells you a story, leading you through a narrative that, as you react to it, reveals something of yourself. That sounds a bit like acting.
“Actors lead people on kind of guided meditations, or trances,” says Rosario Dawson, star of “Trance.” “Therapists lull you into a state where you can go into the depths of your subconscious.”
It makes sense to Boyle that a film story that used hypnosis and trance could be a new spin on the classic heist thriller. “Trance” is about a heist, a head injury that causes amnesia in an art auctioneer (James McAvoy) who can’t remember where a stolen painting was stashed, the gangsters (Vincent Cassell leads them) who want that information and the hypnotherapist (Dawson) who may help them uncover it. Or not.
Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “127 Hours”) spent years trying to get “Trance” made, and then delayed finishing it while he staged ceremonies at the 2012 London Olympics. Thre reasons he persevered? It has a woman (Dawson) at the heart of the story, something that Boyles’ “guy movies” have never had. It has “an unreliable narrator (McAvoy’s character).” We never know if he’s telling us the truth.
“And I love this idea of ‘trance,’ this mental condition that’s a surface value that, when you use it, it lets you tell a story in a non-linear way. It interferes with the characters’ and the audience’s perception of reality. We tend to think it’s ‘perception VERSUS reality,’ when in this film they cross over.”
Dawson went under hypnosis to prepare for the role, but Boyle says “I’m too much of a control freak to ever do that.” But she did her prep and he did his — learning about the great works of stolen art, and about hypnosis. Director and star became a couple while making “Trance.”
“When you cast her you get a kind of Californian therapy thing,” Boyle says. “To me, anyway.  Soothing voice, talk us through our problems, she’ll find a safe route through them. And of course, that can be deceiving.
“She’s a very beautiful girl who understands her allure. She can play the femme fatale, which within the mechanics of the film, is important. She isn’t one, because her story is deeper than that, emotionally.”
And Dawson reacted right-off to Boyle’s “love of actors. He asks a lot of questions. He wants to know our impressions of the character, the scenes.”
“Trance” went on much longer than your average film shoot, mainly due to Boyle’s side job at the Olympics. By the time he came back to it, finishing it up (“We had to go back and insert clues to the mystery into it,” he says. “My first heist picture, and I realized we’d forgotten to do that.”
And by the time all the re cutting, prepping for premieres and publicity was done with, the finished film opened to decent, but not stellar reviews, with some dismissing “Trance” but others, such as a London Times critic, calling it “a psychedelic ride into the blackest pits of the subconscious.” What’s more, during that interval, the couple – Boyle, 57, and Dawson, 33 — broke up.
For Boyle, it was on to his next project, “a period piece, which WON’T be like ‘Downton Abbey.'” And for Dawson? There’s a “Sin City” sequel, among other projects on her plate. Not that “Trance” didn’t give her ideas.
“I visited an institute founded by a man who married Florence Henderson — you know, Mrs. Brady from ‘The Brady Bunch.’ She became a hypnotherapist. It makes sense that actors would be good at that. And I could totally see myself trying it, too.”

Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, “The Place Beyond the Pines” is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.
The director of “Blue Valentine” has that film’s star, Ryan Gosling, do a motorcycle bandit version of the character he played in “Drive” in an engrossing story of a carnival stunt cyclist who takes to robbing banks to support the infant son he didn’t know he had.
Where things turn cumbersome is when Cianfrance grafts on what happens after the bank robberies, the tale of the cop (Bradley Cooper) from a political family, who also has an infant son.
And it all wends its way toward an eye-rolling “sins of the father” generational mash-up that is well-acted but eye-rollingly ludicrous.
Cianfrance has made a fine audition for a TV mini-series, but a frustratingly top-loaded movie.
Gosling, his insouciant pout wrapped around an omnipresent cigarette, is a study in tattoos, tattered inside-out t-shirts and carny-tough cool. He travels the land, riding motorcycles in a Sphere of Death stunt-show, hurtling around a metal cage in concert with other dirt bikers.
He may have a woman in every town. But in Schenectady, New York, the short-shorts bra-less bombshell Romina (Eva Mendes) stuck in his memory. She drops by his show and wears a resigned, depressed “what might have been” face when he offers to give her a ride home.
She knows what happened, and she knows there’s no future here. “Awesome Luke,” the daredevil, is too immature to deal with the blond boy he fathered last time through town.
Luke impulsively quits his job and makes plans for the baby and Romena that her life right now can’t accomodate. That’s when he falls into bank robbing.
“I want to take care of you, of my son. That’s my job.”
And that’s where rookie cop Avery Cross (Cooper) enters the picture. As Cross takes charge of the narrative, involving police corruption, political wheeling and dealing, a clever screenwriter might have said “but that’s another story.” Cianfrance & Co. don’t, and they add yet another narrative to the first two.
The motorcycle chases (sped up to make Gosling’s riding more stunt worthy) are arresting. Gosling’s ability to play brilliant in one film, simple and naive in the next, is a modern marvel. He’s also a mannered, fussy actor who puts bits of business into most every shot.
Mendes adds walking wounded to her repertoire and does well with it. And Cooper makes a nice, uncluttered contrast to Gosling’s fidgeting.
But “The Place Beyond the Pines” loses its momentum when the narrative shifts. The script contorts every time it changes narrators and grows less interesting with every passage of time.
Whatever is in that “Place Beyond the Pines,” Cianfrance has squandered our interest in it long before it arrives.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some violence, teen drug and alcohol use, and a sexual reference.
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Ray Liotta, Rose Byrne
Credits: Directed by Derek Cianfrance, written by Cianfrance, Ben Coccio and Darius Marder. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 2:20

In “Trance,” Danny Boyle’s new films, thieves conspire to swipe an El Greco from the middle of the London auction where it is expected to fetch many millions.

When an auctioneer (James McAvoy) loses track of the painting, the thieves (Vincent Cassell among them) commission a hypnotherapist to help him remember where he stashed it. So Boyle had to learn about trances for his movie “Trance.”

But he also had to dig into the underworld of stolen or missing masterpieces. As the FBI goes to new efforts to recover art stolen from Boston’s Gardner Museum over 20 years ago, the legends of the works grow.

“It is fascinating to think of these famous, missing paintings.

“The Rembrandt (The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee) is the Holy Grail of missing paintings. A lot of people think it has been destroyed, because surely there would be some sign of it. There’s this sort of cinematic myth, that evil tycoons pay to have these things stolen who want it for their bunkers – you know, like Doctor No.”

“The truth is, they’re collateral. They’re used in lieu of cash and gold in the Underworld
A couple of them have been found, recently, in Serbia. Weird. They obviously move around.

“It’s part of the economics of the art world. Often, a ransom will be paid to get them back. A painting will be stolen $2 million is paid to get it back. But nobody loses, because the fact that it’s been stolen adds cachet and another 20% in value. Insurance premiums go up, so the insurer doesn’t lose.

“There are art detectives out there tracking these paintings and negotiating with the thieves. But it’s a dirty little business.”