Movie Nation

The standard issue alien abduction thriller gains a few paranormal touches and a taste of the Living Dead in “Dark Skies,” a sometimes hair-raising riff on all the “Communions” that have come before.

It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

Yes, the aliens are abducting us, but only those of us who didn’t heed the warning “Signs.”

Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play struggling suburbanites – she’s a real estate agent, he’s an unemployed architect – who suddenly have weird lights, weirder noises, nightly kitchen re-arranging and unseen threats to their two boys to go along with a battered marriage, long-term unemployment and a mortgage in arrears. “Dark Skies” is about how they and their confused kids handle all this.

Not very well, as you might expect.

Lacey (Russell) hears things and sees things. She’s at a loss to understand what took everything out of their kitchen cabinets and parked these things in precarious stacks, all the way to the ceiling. Daniel (Hamilton) is less credulous.

“We’re not those people who believe in crazy things!”

He’s fibbing to her about his job interviews, and she’s not telling him everything that’s going on at home, how little Sammy (Kaden Rockett) keeps having nightmares about “The Sand Man.”

The lies come out and the marriage earns its ugliest test when they come face to face with the impossible. The movie sinks or swims not on our belief that this is happening to them, but on the players’ beliefs, and neither adult gets frantic or worked up enough to be convincing.

At the very least, the first time Lacey spies a spindly alien from “Signs” standing over her child’s bed, her freak-out should be epic. Both actors play muted shock, not panic.

And panic was called for.

As episodes pile up – catatonic fits, mass bird collisions with their house, strange bruising on their kids (Dakota Goyo is Jesse, the oldest) that has the neighbors sure they’re nut-job child-abusers, you’d expect a mania to set in. Daniel and Lacey can only manage confusion, and solutions borrowed from “Paranormal Activity” (surveillance cameras), “Night of the Living Dead” (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie (Internet searches, where “The Truth,” or at least “The Conspiracy is Out There”).

That last step delivers the movie’s most fascinating character, an “expert” (J.K. Simmons) on “visitations” whose resignation and exhaustion at their fate, which mirrors his, seems earned. Lacey and Daniel seem beaten before they start.

Visual effects man turned writer-director Scott Stewart has turned away from the “Legion” and “Priest” D-movies with their angels and vampires and patched together something of an expertly shot and cut mash-up here. He’s very good at managing tension, and the script doles out the requisite shocks at decent intervals.

But what’s missing is that “Insidous” empathy, the sense of parents terrified for their kids, a terror that the viewer should and would share, if only we’d been given more reason to care or a surer  sense that they do.

(Roger Moore’s Interview with Keri Russell is here.)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror throughout, sexual material, drug content and language – all involving teens

Cast: Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Stewart. A Dimension release.

Running time: 1:35

You’d expect a movie about a song that has become the Hebrew “Hokey Pokey” to be playful. And “Hava Nagila (The Movie)” is that, in spades. That wedding, party and bar mitzvah staple, a song that the whole world knows and virtually no one knows anything about, is a ready punch-line, a musical eye-roller for some and a no-brainer for any band or singer that works the wedding circuit – Jewish or Gentile.

“Something lights up in your DNA” when you hear it, one expert witness interviewed in the film, declares.

But Roberta Grossman’s cute documentary gives weight to the tune, tracing its lineage to a town – Sadagora, in the Ukraine – and the 19^th century. It bubbled to life as a “Nigun,” a wordless hymn or prayer, more hummed than sung.

It became THE song to dance The Hora (that hand-holding circular group folk dance) to.

A Jewish music scholar in Palestine co-opted it and wrote lyrics to it for a celebration of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. It became a favorite there, and was front and center when Jews in Palestine, after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, embraced it’s jaunty tune and celebratory lyrics, “Let us Rejoice,” is how the title translates, and that turned eyes from a terrible past toward a hopeful future.

And then American Jews got hold of it. And Harry Belafonte. And Connie Francis. And Elvis. And Glen Campbell. And Jo Anne Worley.

Grossman spins all this history, sacred and silly, into a movie that skips by, using generous samples of everything from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to “Fiddler on the Roof,” performed by everyone from The Muppets to The Simpsons.

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The signs have been there for weeks — we’re adding this bit of music, that tribute. And more. And more.

There are nine best picture nominees. There’s a new host who’s never done this sort of show before.

It’s all adding up to an Oscar show that could drag on into the wee hours — 8 p.m. ET to, what, 1230? 1?

Veteran Oscar watcher/show insider Steve Pond suggests as much here. Having talked to Steve before (he’s written an Oscar backstage book), what he said then sticks with me. They’ve got so many awards to hand out, on the air, that anything they do to spruce the show up ends up dragging it out — time-wise.

It’s Sunday night, a work/school night.

Unless the Oscars are moved to President’s Day weekend, there’s no way most Americans will have the patience for a program that long, even if it has the odd dazzle or surprise.

Joining Mike Bianchi & Co. on  740 The Game this AM to talk a little Oscars.

We’ll do a little handicapping. I’ll plug the best place to watch the Oscars (The Enzian’s annual Oscars on the Big Screen evening), and take a few wild-arsed guesses.

And maybe we’ll mention “Snitch” and “West of Memphis,” which open this weekend.

All that’s at 745 AM on 740 AM, or you can listen in online here.

At the end of a chat about her new film, “Stoker,” which opens in early March, I asked Mia Wasikowska about two upcoming films on her IMDb dosier — “Madame Bovary,” an adaptation of the classic Flaubert novel, and “Tracks,” a project set and shot in her native Australia.

On Emma Bovary, the depressed, daydreaming and hopelessly romantic 19th century housewife “Madame Bovary” —“In a way, she’s ahead of her time. Any woman of that era would have felt voiceless, in a way. It’s an incredible tragedy, watching her life unravel. But that’s what makes her exciting to play, that unraveling.”

And in “Tracks,” she plays a another woman ahead of her time — the adventure-minded Aussie Robyn Davidson, who  went on a walkabout through the continent’s Western deserts, 1700 miles, with only a dog and a couple of camels for company.

“I had read the book and connected with Robyn’s story in a very personal way. It was such a radical thing to have done, as a woman, in the ‘70s in Australia. To up and leave and go into the desert and walk across it on your own, attempting something that even men hadn’t done at that time.

“It was quite the daring adventure. And since I had wanted to work at home again, it felt like the right film at the right time. It was wonderful to be there.”

Producer/director J.J. Abrams has brought back “Star Trek/TOS” villains the Klingons.

Again.

He had to edit them out of his reboot of the sci-fi franchise. So he’s given them a central presence in the new film,“Star Trek Into Darkness.”

So, we’ve got Benedict Cumberbatch as a version of the engineered superhuman, Khan.

And we’ve got Klingons, source of “The Oooooold Klingon proverb,” Ricardo Montalban purred back in “The Wrath of Khan.” “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

Will we see “classic” Klingons (below), the hideous looking later incarnations, or the nobler, cleaned-up Klingons of TNG?

“Silver Linings Playbook,” a November release that picked up steam after landing some of the biggest and bestest Oscar nominations, will finally clear $100 million today.

And “Identity Thief,” which opened to weak reviews and a big fat controversy a couple of weekends ago, should clear that benchmark by next week. Melissa McCarthy can open a movie. That’s the only controversy that counts.

It’s seemed over for weeks now.

But is it?

The 85th Annual Academy Awards will go to “Argo,” Jennifer Lawrence (“Silver Linings Playbook”), Daniel Day-Lewis (“Lincoln”), Anne Hathaway (“Les Miserables”) and Tommy Lee Jones (“Lincoln”), right? All the pre-Oscar hoopla, the earlier awards from critics’ groups and guilds, point toward those conclusions.

Not so fast.

Anne Hathaway has had best supporting actress socked away since the day she was cast as Fantine in “Les Miserables.” Cynical critics and heartless punters claim they didn’t cry when she sang “I Dreamed a Dream.” They’re liars.
Daniel Day-Lewis gave us a once-in-a-lifetime interpretation of Abraham Lincoln, historically accurate and wonderfully human. Best actor belongs to him. Period.

But Jennifer Lawrence, the front-runner for best actress – forever – in the somewhat over-rated “Love cures mental illness” dramedy “Silver Linings Playbook” – may give way to the sentimental favorite, the legendary Emmanuelle Riva from “Amour.” I’m still pulling for Naomi Watts, who tears your heart out in the under-appreciated “The Impossible.” But Riva will win.

Tommy Lee Jones (“Lincoln”) and Robert DeNiro (“Silver Linings”) are the toss-up choices for best supporting actor, two venerated icons of the silver screen. Since everybody else in the category is, like them, already an Oscar winner, there are no real dark horses here. If it’s an “Argo” kind of night, doesn’t Alan Arkin have a shot? Oh, give it to Jones, see if it softens his mood.

“Best directors direct best pictures,” as the Oscar wags know. And since Ben Affleck, who has taken Clint Eastwood’s place on the Warner Brothers backlot – a hitmaker who acts in and directs prestige pictures — cannot win best director, “Argo” is facing a headwind in pursuit of best picture. He isn’t nominated for best director. But “Argo” has won everything in sight.

And “Zero Dark Thirty” and the hit “Django Unchained” have that same shortcoming. No best director nomination.

People respected “Amour” and “Life of Pi.” But where’s the love? “Beasts of the Southern Wild” would rank with the biggest best picture upsets in history. The “Lincoln” blowback –historical shortcomings — is severe enough to suggest Spielberg won’t win best director or best picture.

So the movie in which Hollywood saves the day AND the hostages, “Argo,” will win.

Best director is a tossup. Ang Lee may be the favorite now, for “Life of Pi,” and the venerable bad boy Michael Haneke (“Amour”) may have bit of buzz. But the MAD money has to be on Benh Zeitlin of “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” He will never, ever make a movie as novel as this one.

“Brave” has won a LOT of pre-Oscar guild prizes, but I still figure “Wreck-It Ralph” will win best animated film, “Searching for Sugar Man” best doc, costume and production design prizes for “Anna Karenina” and/or “Les Miserables,” and screenwriting awards for “Argo” and probably “Zero Dark Thirty.”

But big surprises Oscar night? First-time host Seth MacFarlane may have to provide those.