Those “There’s Something About Mary” Farrelly Brothers try to get their edge back with “Hall Pass,” a rude and seriously crude riff on taking a vacation from marriage.
But as they get older, they’re having more and more trouble balancing the sentimental with the outrageously vulgar. They’ve made a mature comedy about immature men acting immaturely. It’s “The Hangover” without that movie’s sucker punches.
Finally going into WIDE release on a lot of screen, “Silver Linings Playbook” cracked the top three, with a $10 million weekend.
“Mama,” a better-than-average horror tale with Jessica Chastain and the imprint of producer Guillermo del Toro, did a dazzling $33 million.
“”Broken City” barely cleared $8 million. “Gangster Squad” lost half its opening weekend audience and is doomed to die a flop’s death.
“The Last Stand” barely cleared $6 million, which suggests reports of Arnold Schwarzenegger having a fanbase that still goes to the movies was GROSSLY exaggerated.
“Life’s not always kind, is it?” a sympathetic character says, trying to comfort a friend in “Another Year.”
But in the films of Mike Leigh, there are almost always kind people, sympathetic even — generally working class and always always wonderfully acted by his ensemble of improvisational collaborators.
“Another Year” gives us four seasons among an extended circle of friends of the long-married Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen). They’re professionals — he’s a geological engineer, she’s a counselor at a local clinic. They have a grown son (Oliver Maltman), an old family pal now sweaty, overweight, divorced, and drinking too much (Peter Wight).
And then there’s Mary, needy, clinging, abrasive Mary, given an awards-worthy turn by Lesley Manville. Manville makes Mary a vast catalog of tics, twitches and mannerisms, a fragile soul a bit too fond of her wine, impulsive, prone to hysterics. Mary doesn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve. She wears every thought that flits through her bitter, clingy mind on it. She is still recovering from a long-ago affair with a married man. And Tom and especially Gerri don’t know what to do with her except let her crash on their couch after she’s polished off another bottle.
Leigh (“Happy-Go-Lucky,” “Vera Drake”) shows us the lonely indignities of middle age, a working class that has aged out of an era when one could wear that label. Now the pubs, the vacation destinations, they’re all for “the young,” Ken (Wight) protests. As the seasons pass, Mary tries her hand at buying and keeping her first car, in her late 40s, harbors romantic hopes that Tom and Gerri’s 30something son will renew a childhood crush on her, and Ken tries his hand at making a pass at this shrill and plainly unstable woman.
The late French filmmaker Claude Chabrol, who died in September at 80 after a long career in movies and TV, will be remembered for his place within the 1950s French New Wave (“Le Beau Serge, “1958) and such later movies as “Story of Women” (1988) and a nearly definitive French-language version of “Madame Bovary” (1991). His final finished film, “Inspector Bellamy,” won’t figure in conversations considering his legacy.
But this quiet and cryptic mystery holds enough interest to stand as reasonably representative of Chabrol’s work, a dry and moody piece built on closely-observed characters, not on thrills or an unraveling plot.
At one point in her quiet and downright languorous Hymn to Hollywood, “Somewhere,” Sofia Coppola points her static camera at her star, Stephen Dorff, as his head is encased in goo. He’s a movie star who needs to have a head-cast made for some old age makeup for a film he’s about to shoot.
We watch him gooped up. Then we watch him, for one minute and 40 seconds, left alone as it dries. His character, lazily named “Johnny Marco,” dozes off. And we’re tempted to join him.
Ugliness earns the label “art” in “Biutiful,” a film so gritty, grungy and depressing as to stand alone in a cinema built around beauty. Lovely but downbeat in the extreme, this seemingly personal project from Alejandro González Iñárritu (” Amores Perros,” “21″ Grams,” Babel”) is the biggest movie downer since “Never Let Me Go,” and less hopeful, less focused than the Mexican director’s earlier films.
And if that hasn’t scared you off, here’s what this movie is about.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directing debut (he stars in it, too) is “Don John’s Addiction,” and Relativity Media has reportedly paid a staggering price for the indie comedy about a porn-addicted “playa” who tries to mend his ways. They must sense another “(500) Days of Summer” in it.
Stephenie “Twilight” Meyer produced “Austenland,” a comedy about a woman who goes to a Jane Austen theme park to find her ideal man. Jerusha Hess, wife of Jared (“Napoleon Dynamite”) Hess, directed it. Sony bought it.
Fox Searchlight appears to have won a bidding war for “The Way Way Back.” It’s a teen coming-of-age picture (summer at ‘the club’) with Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Maya Rudolph, Sam Rockwell, Amanda Peet and Annasophia Robb in the cast.
The Weinstein Co. has picked up the buzzed-about drama “Fruitvale,” about the last day in the life of a young man tragically shot to death by a trigger happy Bay Area Transit Officer, a notorious case from a few years back.
And “Concussion” is also a Weinstein pick-up, about a woman who copes with head trauma through prostitution.
A film, a famous wag – OK, it was a comic strip character – once said is “a movie we don’t quite understand.”
Thus we come to “Holy Motors,” a trippy celebration of cinema history and an episodic series of bizarre, sometimes comic/ sometimes touching/ often angelic interludes and inside jokes from the filmmaker – Leos Carax. It is, most self-consciously, a “film” above all else. Not a movie.
Framed within the image of an audience watching, mesmerized by the flickering 19th century footage of a nude strong man demonstrating the “lifelike” potential of this new invention – cinema – Carax presents a willfully, maddeningly obscure collection of episodes that hint at a kind of “It’s a Wonderful Life” series of literal and symbolic visitations to the dead or about to die.
A mysterious businessman, Mr. Oscar — played by Denis Lavant, the former circus acrobat whom Carax turned into something of a star with his 1991 film “The Lovers on the Bridge” — says good-bye to his kids, steps into his stretch white Lincoln limo (escorted by body guards in a BMW) and sets out for a day of Paris “appointments.” Those entail him changing clothes and disguises, time and again, as his on-task limo driver (French screen veteran Edith Scob from 1960’s “Eyes Without a Face”) drives him to each meeting in that day’s dossier.
He dons a red mask covered in barbed wire and attempts to assassinate a banker (also played by Levant). He takes on the clothes and stooped walk of a poor old homeless woman – “Nobody loves me, but I’m alive,” she/he thinks in an interior monologue.
Oscar dons fake nails, a red beard and hair and becomes a sewer troll, wandering beneath the streets (where processions of the walking dead – dead-eyed Parisians, pass him with their shopping carts) only to emerge in the tourist trap Pere Lachaise cemetery, where Jim Morrison, among others are buried. The tombstones no longer have names, but jokey exhortations to “visit my site at www…”
That’s where the troll, named Merde (a character from an earlier Carax film), kidnaps a model (Eva Mendes) from a photo shoot, the photographer burbling “Beauty, beauty beauty” at her all the way.
Oscar puts on a motion capture suit and acts out the “future of cinema,” including graphic simulated sex with a blonde contortionist.
And so on. Little is clear and nothing is explained.
“Quartet” is the aging opera singer retirement home comedy by Dustin Hoffman, with Maggie Smith et al still hitting the high notes — if not as singers. Michael Gambon, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins — Dustin put a lot of Brits and others to work. Americans? Not so much.
“Stoker” is causing a stir at Sundance, and stars Mia Wasikowska who becomes infatuated with the “Uncle” (Matthew Goode) who comes to stay with her and her mentally unhinged mother (Nicole Kidman) after her father dies.
And “Side Effects” is a four-handed thriller about the wife (Rooney Mara) of a convict (Channing Tatum) whose prescription drug treatment (Jude Law is her doctor) has, um “Side Effects.” Medical ethics, drug dependency and the changing nature of oversight of physicians and drug companies are subtexts in this one, with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Polly Draper and Vinessa Shaw also in the cast.
Deadline.com reports that worldwide Movie Business revenues for 2012 were up 2.1% from the year before, some $62.4 billion.
That’s box office sales, DVD, BluRay and download sales, satellite, cable and network TV revenues, some 37 countries reporting in.
Revenues had dropped when DVD sales fell through the floor a couple of years back, and they’re recovering, according to IHS Screen Digest Cross Platform Movie Market Monitor. Discs sales continue to fall, though not as precipitously. But box office and other places movies can be sold rose.
