Movie Nation

Here’s a fascinating piece of history that escaped much of the world’s notice, when it happened back in 1988.

That’s the year that international pressure finally caused the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to hold an election in Chile, the country he and his fellow generals took over in a bloody coup in 1973. They offered Chileans the chance to endorse the current regime or reject it. Vote “Si” if “stability” and “order,” at the cost of political executions, “disappearances” and one party rule works for you. Vote “No” is you’d rather take a chance on that great unknown – “democracy.”

“No” is about how that “No” campaign was concocted.

Gael Garcia Bernal (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) gives a poker-faced performance as Rene, an ‘80s hip advertising executive who was educated abroad and builds every ad campaign around pop music, “Chile is ready for the future” and mimes. The son of a politician, and a single dad whose estranged wife (Antonia Zegers) is a radical Rene is constantly having to rescue from jail, he comes off as apolitical.

When he’s approached by “an old family friend,” a socialist leader, to take on the ad campaign for “No,” Rene has plenty of reasons to say “No” himself. “The election’s fixed,” insiders complain. They only have 27 days to come up with 15 minute blocks of infomercials to convince voters to side with them. His ad agency boss (Alfredo Castro, menacing, cynical) is against it. Rene’s radical wife is contemptuous of the effort, which will just “legitimize” a murderous regime.

And Rene has all this work – commercials for soap operas, microwave ovens – employing actors, dancers, singers and mimes. He has no time.

But Rene changes his mind. Maybe he likes a challenge. Maybe he wants to convince the wife to come back to him. Maybe he sees this as his legacy, or a great way to boost his career. If he can pull this off, he argues with his boss, “We’ll be famous.”

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The diminutive Broadway/TV star Kristin Chenoweth was full of love for EVERYbody on the red carpet Oscar night, anchoring the red carpet “Who are you wearing?” silliness, looking way up at pretty much every star she waved a microphone at.

I’m a fan of the pixie-voiced hoofer. But “Annoying” and “cloying” were the adjectives hurled her way for making live TV look as hard as it really is. The fact that there were all these “Official face of Carnival Cruises” commercials starring her during the coverage made the whole thing smell like an ABC payoff from a cruise line, a way of getting around advertising rules.

And there’s a movie she has to shill for, too. “Family Weekend” is a comedy co-starring Matthew Modine, and now it’s got a release date. March 29. THR says it goes VOD today, releasing in a few theaters March 29

That was the allegation of a lawsuit filed by those who put the film into production, a suit they filed a year before the film — rewritten and reshot to death — a year before it went into release.

Brian Inerfeld and Tony Leech didn’t get a credit (at least on IMDb) for the project they’d shepherded, but they did end up getting a settlement for the $50 million suit in which they alleged the Weinstein Brothers “sabotaged what should have been a highly profitable movie through a potent combination of hubris, incompetence, profligate spending and contempt for contractual obligations,” according to Deadline.com.

The film, a hodgepodge of ideas from other kids’ cartoons of recent vintage (“Planet 51,” “Toy Story,” “Monsters vs. Aliens”) seems to have been written and rewritten by committee, has barely a laugh in it and yet still managed to make $35 million (it cost $70 million, the suit says) in that kid-friendly February film desert where “Gnomeo & Juliet” cleaned up a few years back.

Was it stillborn and ill advised from the start, with the Weinsteins trying to patch it up to make it saveable? Or did they make a hash of it? We’ll never know.

One thing this current run of blockbuster fairy tales inspired by Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” has taught us is how very hard it is to be Tim Burton. Multiple versions of “Snow White,” a comic spatter film “Hansel & Gretel,” some have attempted Burton’s visual whimsy, all have failed to find his tone.

Bryan “X-Men/Valkyrie/Usual Suspects” Singer takes his shot with “Jack the Giant Slayer,” a genial, watchable and somewhat violent version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” that lacks much in the way of magic, romance or wit.

The best two jokes are in the opening credits, with Singer’s “Usual Suspects” inspired production company logo rendered into a police lineup – of giants – and at the final curtain, suggesting the story’s connection to modern “Englishmen” whose blood those rhyming giants smell after they’ve started their “Fee, Fie, Foe” and “Fum.”

Notice I said “giants.” As in legions of them. The familiar tale of the farmboy who loses the family horse (in this case) for a bag of magic beans, the towering stalk that reaches into the heavens and a giant’s lair, the magic harp, goose that lays golden eggs, etc., has been given a video game framework here.

The boy (Nicholas Hoult of “Warm Bodies”) is still gullible. He still finds the beans. But there’s a spirited princess (Eleanor Tomlinson, who was in “Alice in Wonderland”) who needs rescuing, a power-mad Lord High Constable (Stanley Tucci) to foil, a soldier (Ewan McGregor) to befriend and all those giants to slay.

It’s “The Princess Bride” without the laughs.

A charming prologue has young Jack and young Isabel hearing the rhyming legend of the land of giants from their respective parents.

Ten years later, Jack’s injunction to “take responsibility” is ignored when he loses the farm horse to a monk with a mission – to get those magic beans to a safe place. Accidents happen, the stalk grows, taking the princess skyward with it. The king (Ian McShane, in a silly suit of armor) is at a loss. He sends an expedition up the stalk to find her.

That’s where Jack meets Elmont, the dashing captain of the guards given a World War II, “Tally ho” fighter pilot’s swagger by McGregor. Pity about the haircut.

And that’s where Jack runs afoul of the scheming Roderick, given a mildly malevolent glee by Tucci. The moment he flashes that gap between his teeth, older movie fans will see who he’s going for, an old school Terry-Thomas style “rotter,” somebody the giants can “deal” with.

“It looks like mankind is OFF the menu this evening!”

There are moments of “Shrek-like” playfulness in the carnival set up at the base of the stalk as our heroes and villains climb it. But the vast array of writers (Christopher McQuarrie among them) can’t find anything funny for McShane to do or say. And the hilarious Bill Nighy is lost inside an expensively animated two-headed behemoth.

Which is the lot of the film as well. For all Singer’s expertise at making the fantastic real, all we’re left with here is an expensive-looking bauble – worth looking over, but not really anything to treasure.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense scenes of fantasy action violence, some frightening images and brief language

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Ewan McGregor, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ian McShane, Stanely Tucci

Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, written by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, Dan Studney and David Dobkin. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:53

I called it “the worst animated film ever to wear the Dreamworks label,” or some such, when I reviewed the lifeless “Rise of the Guardians.”

But it earned over $300 million, worldwide. Not too shabby.

That didn’t keep the studio from having to write off $87 million against its bottom line due to the film’s relative failure and high budget. It flopped.

They’ve sent some productions back to the drawing board because of this (They knew it smelled when it went into release, unlike some of the clueless hate mail writers I heard from). And they sincerely hope that “The Croods,” about cavewomen and men (March) and “Turbo” (summer) about a snail, which were too far along to get delayed and tinkered with, do better. They do.

Angelina Jolie wants to direct and Universal would like to release a film based on Laura “Seabiscuit” Hillenbrand’s biography, “Unbroken.”

But first they need a workable script. That’s where Joel and Ethan Coen come in. They’re taking the money to pound out a script, based on an inspiring book (I’ve read it), about an Olympian who was lost at sea during World War II, captured by the Japanese, but who survived and lived to tell his dogged tale of endurance.

Louis Zamperini was a sprinter in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and SOME lucky actor who can pass for a sprinter of the period is looking at a tour de force role. Jolie proved herself a decent director with “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” But she’d have to fit this in after making “Salt II,” an action picture that revives her spy-on-the-lam character, Ms. Salt.

One Oscar winner was played off stage when he was “about” to start talking about the disastrous financial shape the VFX industry is in, with the “Life of Pi” effects house Rhythm & Hues shutting down, and Digital Domain expecting the taxpayers of Florida to keep it going.

Here’s a pretty good rundown of what did and did not go down Sunday night, where Ang Lee failed to thank the now out of work folks who did the work.

In sports and the military, “professionalism” describes people who go about their work, their duty, with a calm, dispassionate efficiency – no fuss, no panic when things go wrong, few mistakes, little attention paid to the odds, the chance for glory.

You can apply that word to movie actors, too. The great cast of character actors of “Phantom,” a solid Cold War era submarine thriller of modest ambitions, never let on that this isn’t “The Hunt for Red October” or “K-19: The Widowmaker.” Ed Harris, William Fichtner, David Duchovny and Co. show up, hit their marks, give their lines some punch sand play the heck out of this B-picture, which could easily have been just a prop (submarine) in search of a movie.

Writer-director Todd Robinson (He scripted “White Squall”) has cooked up an alternative big of Cold War mythology. In 1968, in a tense time when U.S. and Soviet subs were tangling and occasionally sinking, a Soviet sub went missing. Here’s a far-fetched explanation.

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