Movie Nation

I never warmed to, and barely even checked out the TV series “Veronica Mars” during its run. With Kristen Bell being the only cast member to truly break out into movies, and not exactly setting the box office or the critical world on fire, it doesn’t seem like something I’ll drop everything to catch up on, now, either.

So I see the news that Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell raising over $2 million through the crowd-funding site Kickstarter for a “Veronica” feature film as a bit of a yawner.

It’s got people up in arms, because basically, this is Kickstarter money for “a Conglomerate.”

Yeah? And? $2 million seed money for a feature film is nothing, these days. It’ll get them started and going. Kickstarter typically is used on much lower budget novice filmmaker projects, albums by starving artists and the like.Short films, including an Oscar winner, can boast of Kickstarter backing.

The headline here is the amount.

As a model for fan-based film production, it’s far more interesting. Pass the hat at any film fan/comic book/gamer convention, and I dare say you could raise money or fresh installments of a beloved TV show, a sequel to a movie or a prized vehicle by a particularly beloved singing or acting star who no longer is box office.

Could Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany and Peter Weir raise enough for another “Master & Commander” movie? No. But “Jonah Hex II,” et al? A new “Serenity/Firefly” movie, or “Buffy” on the big screen? It could happen. If the fans are fanatical enough, that takes the guesswork out of the financing game. Let them underwrite it. Why not?

“Veronica Mars” could, in that way, be the start of something big.

In his salad days, Aussie director P. J. Hogan specialized in daft, edgy comedies about wildly eccentric characters, people so giddy they’d burst into song when words failed them.

And the world fell in love with Toni Collette’s ABBA obsession in “Muriel’s Wedding,” with Rupert Everett launching into “I Say a Little Prayer” in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”

Hogan, lately consigned to the likes of “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” takes a stab at recapturing that past with “Mental,” an Australian dramedy built around mental illness and the loony “nanny” who takes it on herself to torment those who torment a mentally ill woman. And if “Mental” it doesn’t quite come off, it’s at least comforting for us and Hogan to see that, to some degree, you can go home again.

“Home” in this case is Dolphin Heads, a little slice of Australian suburbia, probably not far from the Porpoise Spit of “Muriel’s Wedding.”

Shirley Moochmore (Rebecca Gibney) is a nightmare to her neighbors, keeping an unkempt house and a cluster of neurotic and unruly daughters. How does she cope? By singing “The Sound of Music.” All of it.

She could be hanging laundry, and then spin into “The hills are alive…”

“Mom’s gone off again.”

“Gone where?”

“Off her head.”

Shirley “always wanted to be a Von Trapp,” where her kids could “act like a real family.” That way, her absent husband, the mayor (Anthony LaPaglia) would come home. Finally.

As it is, her five girls, often in matching Von Trappist outfits, wear “the disgrace,” and cower every time the chorus to “Edelweiss” comes back around.

The kids – Coral (Lily Sullivan) have taken to self-diagnosis – “I’m pre-psychotic.” “I’m schizophrenic!”

And dad, who long ago moved out, only comes home long enough to quiet things down so he can get re-elected.

But Shirley, bullied by neighbors, her doll-collecting sister and even the mean girl teens at the donut shop, finally snaps and is off to the hospital. Coral, a hormonal teen working in the shark exhibit of a water park, is in no position to run the house. So Dad plucks a 40ish punk chick (Toni Collette) off the street. But they all get more than they bargained from the sassy, blunt and profane Shaz.

Collette vamps through this part as if she was another personality from her TV series, “The United States of Tara” – gum-snapping, insult-hurling and justice administering.

“You’re only as crazy as you let people say you are,” is her motto. Since she has a battered copy of a psychological diagnostic manual as her guide, she sizes up Mom, the kids, the neighbors and others who make Mom manic.

Not all movies that make mental illness cute are Oscar winners, and “Mental” isn’t a noble member of that company. But Coral’s singing, surfing would-be boyfriend, Trout (Sam Clark) is a stitch. Deborah Mailman (“The Sapphires”, my interview with her is here) shows her zany side as an unstable friend of Shaz. And Liev Schreiber hilariously shows up as the sullen shark expert whose expertise was that he’s tough enough and nutty enough to survive a Great White attack (the stuffed shark is the centerpiece of his exhibit). The kids are troubled, but charming.

Alternately touching and seriously silly, “Mental” is good enough to make us want to “Climb Every Mountain,” or at least this one.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult subject matter

Cast: Toni Collette, Anthony LaPaglia, Rebecca Gibney, Lily Sullivan, Liev Schreiber,

Credits: Directed and written by P.J. Hogan. An Arclight release.

Running time: 1:54

He first gained notice in “Bridesmaids,” as the inexplicably Irish Wisconsin State Trooper.

She’s been a mainstay of Australian film since “Rabbit Proof Fence,” one of the most accomplished Aboriginal actresses ever — “Bran Nue Day,” “Mental,” and now, as the leader of a soul singing Aboriginal quartet in ’60s Australia, touring Vietnam during the war.

Questions for Chris O’Dowd and/or Deborah Mailman of “The Sapphires”? Comment below.

Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as “The Call” does at almost precisely the one hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour, this is a riveting, by the book kidnapping, an “Amber Alert” with a Hollywood budget and a director with a sense of urgency and camera lenses that put the action, the fear and horror right in your face.

Brad Anderson (“Transsiberian”, “The Machinist”) turns this novel procedural, a serial killer hunt set inside LA’s 911 Call Center (“The Hive”), into a real edge-of-your-seat thriller. Given Halle Berry, as a veteran 911 operator whose mistake months ago haunts her, and Abigail Breslin as a kidnapped teen on the cell phone from a darkened car trunk, and a half decent tale of horror, guilt, problem solving and redemption, Anderson couldn’t go far wrong.

Until he, and the movie do.

But up until then, from the moment Casey (Breslin) makes the frantic, gasping, tearful call to the moment logic takes a holiday, “The Call” works.

Berry’s character, Jordan, is the daughter of a cop, dating another cop (Morris Chestnut), somebody whose dad taught her that she has to be able to handle the knowledge “that you might be the difference between somebody living and somebody dying.” She’s been struggling with that since her blunder led an intruder to a victim six months before.

Now, on an afternoon when she’s walking recruits through training at The Hive, explaining the technology to them (and to the audience), another girl is grabbed. This one has a phone and she’s calling from the trunk. Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) makes us feel her terror, mainly in her voice. Berry wears the dread that panicked voice gives her on her face. She can’t help herself. Jordan breaks the cardinal rule of 911 operators — “Never ever make promises. Because you can’t keep’em.” She promises this girl she’ll live.

“The Call” lets us reason along with the operator and the caller, figuring out options. They are a mix of by-the-book details, and amusing examples of thinking outside the box. And unlike last fall’s found footage 911 kidnapping tale, “Amber Alert,” it shows us the kidnapper, another in a long line of Norman “Psycho” Bates twitchy psycho-killers (Michael Eklund).

Anderson teases out solutions, tempts us with bystander help and shows how the system can work in a case like this – linking calls, triangulating cell phone signals (Not easy with a disposable phone), dispatching cops, trying to beat the clock that they’re racing against.

It’s only when the story needs to string out its finale that the film goes wrong, only when our Oscar winning heroine puts down the phone and sets out to do some sleuthing of her own that “The Call” disconnects, and this turns into something far more generic, far more routine and far less exciting.

(Box Office: Halle Berry beats “Burt Wonderstone”?)

MPAA Rating: R for violence, disturbing content and some language

Cast: Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin, Morris Chestnut, Evie Thompson

Credits: Directed by Brad Anderson, scripted by Richard D’Ovidio. A Tristar/Sony release.

Running time: 1:30

Obsession, defined by Merriam-Webster, is“ a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” One of the more benign things people can get obsessed with is a movie, watching and re-watching it, memorizing it, poring over its details — unless, of course, you’re John Hinkley Jr. and the movie is “Taxi Driver.”

The documentary “Room 237” is an ostensibly thoughtful deep reading, a deconstruction of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s 1980 novel “The Shining.” What it really is, is a bunch of obsessives obsessing about an obsessive movie maker’s obsessive movie.

The “experts” here are never seen on camera. Under-identified as a way of hiding their “credentials,” they talk over footage of the film, other Kubrick films such as “Eyes Wide Shut,” and snippets from random other films whose footage helps “tell” their stories and give us their theories on what this horror film is “really” about. The result is a movie that’s disquieting, summoning up hints of the dread that hung over Kubrick’s movie from the moment the credits came up.

Some of them – the ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore comes off reasonably well – are convincingly onto something. And some are plainly barking mad. Even Blakemore sounds so certain of his “interpretations” that he can seem a tad unbalanced by it all.

They have all watched the film – many times. They have done floor plans to the hotel that is its setting. They have examined the film, frame by frame, parsing its images like a cinematic “Da Vinci Code.” And the reason they can do this is that Kubrick was just as obsessed as they are.

That chair that appears and disappears behind Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) as the frustrated writer sits at the typewriter, stuck in a mothballed-for-the-winter mountaintop hotel with his family, his personal demons and whatever haunts the hotel, in some shots? Probably not your typical movie continuity error.

Jack’s typewriter, which changes color at various times in the movie? The TV set that has no power cord on it? Kubrick wanted those things there.

And when you think about the various “impossible things” that turn up, the impossible geography, architecture, the blood-red production design flourishes, you can see it as they do, as “a masterpiece, but not for the reasons most people think.”

Is it about the destruction of American Indians, the Holocaust, the Apollo Moon landings, or Kubrick’s favorite bugaboo, sexuality? Some wild notions make more sense than others.

But seeing Rodney Ascher’s film, another more plausible and just as entertaining notion takes hold. Kubrick was messing with us – keeping the horror movie viewer off balance, enriching every frame with the sort of puzzles that unsettle us, much the way that Ascher does, teasing us along, making the incredible credible, and then undercutting this witness or that theory by letting them talk until their obsession gets the better of them. And us.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with violence and nudity as depicted in “The Shining.”

Cast: Bill Blakemore, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Geoffrey Cocks, Jay Weidner

Credits: Directed written by Rodney Ascher . An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

An all-star comedy that leans on its stars to conjure laughs out of thin air, “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” is about veteran magicians who find themselves suddenly less relevant when Mr. New and Edgy shows up and upstages them on the Vegas Strip.

An art-imitating-artist moment for Steve Carell and Jim Carrey? Maybe. But when you’ve got those two, Oscar winner Alan Arkin, Olivia Wilde, Steve Buscemi and James Gandolfini in your cast, the four guys you paid to write this thing should have no trouble finding a laugh a minute.

We meet Anthony and Albert as bullied ten-year olds who find escape, and purpose, in a “Become a Magician” kit — VHS instruction tape included — featuring veteran prestidigitator Rance Holloway (Arkin). Thirty years later, Burt Wonderstone (Carell) and partner Anton Marvelton (Buscemi) have their own theater at Bally’s, a steady fanbase, gullible groupies (for Burt) and a boss (Gandolfini) who puts up with Burt’s diva-demands and lifestyle.

They go through assistants like candy, and Burt is so arrogant that he calls them all “Nicole,” even after the latest Nicole quits and fetching backstage assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde) is pressed into service. First good gag of the movie? The skin-baring bombshell Wilde (“TRON,” “Butter,” “Deadfall”) going all stumbling, demure and embarrassed by the skimpy stage costume.

“Poor, sweet Nicole.”

“My name’s JANE.”

The crowds still come, even though this act is as stale as its “Abra Cadabra” (Steve Miller’s last bit hit) theme song, even though Burt hurls insults at Anton backstage after every “impossible feat of impossibility.” Until the day that Steve Gray rolls into town.

Jim Carrey turns Gray into a long-haired guru of the gross – a magician/stuntman who rolls up with a guerrilla film crew and stuns bystanders with routines that involve self-injury, followed by self-stitches. Carrey, sporting an “Escape from What?” tattoo and a zen master meets street thug ethos – “Bad things don’t happen to us, they happen FOR us” – makes this guy so scary and fun that you wish his “Brain Rapist” TV show was real. Because we’d watch it.

But to Burt? Gray’s not a real magician. “He doesn’t even have a costume.”

“Burt Wonderstone” lets us see the rise, and then fall of Burt and Anton, their changing hairstyles and unchanging act. It takes Burt from the man with the “biggest bed in Las Vegas” – “Would you like to see it, nakedly?” – to a drunk reduced to entertaining the seniors at a retirement home.

That’s where he meets Rance, and tries to get his old magic mojo back.

The laughs come fast and furious for about 30 minutes, then they fade into occasional chuckles of recognition and the odd hear-Carell-make-funny-whimpering-sounds gag, or see clueless Anton deliver unwanted magic kits (along with tasty bunnies) to starving Third World kids. Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

(Was “Wonderstone” the final humiliation that drove Jay Mohr into talk radio?)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, dangerous stunts, a drug-related incident and language

Cast: Steve Carell, Jim Carrey, Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin, James Gandolfini

Credits: Directed by Don Scardino. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:40

Deadline.com is reporting that Disney is talking to Danny Boyle’s “Trance” screenwriter Joe Aherne about yet ANOTHER rendering of the “Beauty and the Beast” myth.

It’s been animated, musicalized. It was on TV in the ’80s and brought back to TV a year or so ago.

Vanessa Hudgens co-starred in a high school updating of the story. “Beastly.”

This story seems beyond played out, especially considering that the acknowledged masterpiece on the subject was made by Jean Cocteau in 1946.

For a moment, I thought that Steven Spielberg was leaving his Hollywood comfort zone WAY behind to try something edgy, political, current in the extreme.

He’s making a movie that’s set on the volatile border between India and Pakistan, where Islamist state meets Infidel state, up close and dangerous.

But he’s just producing it. He talked obliquely about the production with The Times of India during a long visit in which he met with the biggest single financier of “Lincoln,” who is Indian.

He also mentioned a Martin Luther King picture which may have an Indian connection (King admiring Gandhi, etc.). Maybe he was serious, as this is where his money is coming from. Maybe he was just being nice to his hosts.