Movie Nation

She landed the coveted role of Hollywood’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and she’s followed that up with a lead role in a Steven Soderbergh thriller — “Side Effects” — which opens in a couple of weeks.

Rooney Mara is part of that NFL New York Giants-owning Mara family. So she was never going to be hurting for money. But her film career has started with a bang and looks to have staying power.

She’s got a Terrence Malick “musical drama” in the can, dropped out of “Zero Dark Thirty” and has kept a full dance card since her big break.

Got questions for Rooney? Comment below.

“Mama,” last weekend’s better-than-average ghost story hit, looks like it’ll do another $12-13 million this weekend.

And other holdover hits — “Zero Dark Thirty” (review here) and “Silver Linings Playbook” (review here) and are claiming third and fourth place.

But “Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters” did a reasonably brisk Friday and is headed towards its predicted $20-22 million weekend. A 3D horror/action/fantasy/comedy that didn’t cost several fortunes to make and may break even or into the black, worldwide and is, at least, opening at number 1. Reviews are weak, but business is business.

“Parker” (review here)  looks to nudge out “Movie 43” (review here) in the battle for 5th and 6th places — doing $7-8 million, with “Movie 43” pulling in $6-7.

She dazzled in “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Kids are All Right.” She’s the formidable teen presence anchoring “Stoker” — a girl you don’t want to mess with.

There was “Jane Eyre,” “Restless,” “Lawless.”

Mia Wasikowska is definitely an acting force to be reckoned with. I’m talking with her about “Stoker,” the Chan-Wook Park thriller that has her playing the girl who becomes obsessed with the suspicious uncle (Matthew Goode) who comes to live with her and her mom (Nicole Kidman) after her father dies.

Got questions for Mia? Always looking for a new line of inquiry. Please post them as comments below.

“Transformers” really whetted Hollywood’s appetite for movies about gigantic fighting/flying bipeds.

But they don’t necessarily have to be Battle Bots with funny voices to qualify. Anime has a long tradition of soldiers/etc. inside gigantic fighting machines. “Pacific Rim” will have such gadgets battling dragons or some such this summer.

“Robotech” is an anime TV series adaptation that has been in feature film development for over five years. Warner Brothers hasn’t given up on it as it trudges through the development process.

Now THR says that they’ve line up a veteran of TV commercials — Nic Mathieu — to turn the 80s. vintage TV series into a movie.

“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” is in 3D. So if nothing else, it’ll have that higher ticket price going for it as it plays in theaters across America this weekend.

The Box Office Guru figures it’ll do $20 million or so. Better than say, “Red Riding Hood,” which wasn’t R-rated, didn’t have nearly the horror appeal or star line up. But not BIG opening good.

Box Office Mojo thinks that it could do $22 or so. Since neither Jeremy Renner nor Gemma Arterton are box office names, and since the studio didn’t preview it for most critics (I caught it early), it won’t be helped by reviews.

“Mama,” the best of last weekend’s openings, could do another $13-15, depending on how much horror audience there is left over.

FilmDistrict has generally botched the release, editing, etc., of “Parker.”

Nobody figures “Parker” will do much better than “The Last Stand” last weekend — which bombed. The same goes for the TV commercial’d to death “Movie 43,” sort of an “Epic Movie/Scary Movie” sketch comedy collection of short films starring BIG names — Oscar winners Kate Winslet and Hale Berry, Oscar nominee Hugh Jackman, Emma Stone, Elizabeth Banks, Jason Sudeikis, Kristen Bell, Uma Thurman, etc.

It wasn’t previewed either (my review is here) and could manage $8 or so.Some laughs, a lot of penis jokes.

The heist doesn’t go wrong. Five guys, some dressed as clowns, one wearing a priest’s collar and the getaway guy in a fire chief’s uniform – knock over the cash office of the Ohio State Fair.

But just afterward, four of the robbers – Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce and Clifton Collins among them — turn on the calm and collected fifth guy. They shoot him and dump him on the backroads of Kentucky.

And to “Parker,” that just won’t do.

“Civilized people need to follow the rules,” Parker (Jason Statham) insists. It’s not just his share of the loot that they took, “It’s the principle.”

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“Movie 43” is a collection of one-joke short films strung together as a feature, movies built seemingly built around this guiding directive – find big name stars and see how far “out there” they’ll go for a laugh.

Thus, you have Kate Winslet on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, trying not to notice – or be utterly revolted by – the scrotum growing out of his neck. There’s another Oscar winner, Halle “I Never Get to Do comedy” Berry, caught up in a first-date game of Truth or Dare with Brit comic Stephen Merchant that involves tattoos, plastic surgery and sitting still while Snookie from “The Jersey Shore” gives an interpretive reading of Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

If you’re the sort who laughs at the title of that novel, this might be the movie for you – a dizzying array of actors in a wide variety of Oh-No-they-Didn’t sketches, almost all using male sexual organs and oral sex gags – the lame stand-up comics’ crutch – as their punch lines.

About a third of the short films land a few laughs. But even the weakest material is lifted by the actors. One bit that works, directed by Elizabeth Banks, has Chloe Moretz on an after-school date, having her first menstrual period, and having every male – including Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Patrick Warburton – freak out.

And after seeing this, you may be hard pressed to think of Gerard Butler as anything but a special effects leprechaun, cursing at being captured and tortured “for me Lucky Charms” by Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott.

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With his spot-on work impersonating Tony Blair (“The Deal,” “The Queen”), TV interviewer David Frost (“Frost/Nixon”) and soccer coaches (“The Damned United”), Michael Sheen has established himself as the cinema’s reigning King Mimic, an actor who gets under the skin of a character, but who also puts so much work in on the surface that you’d swear you’re seeing the real person up there on the screen.

He fixes on something — he once told me he figured out Tony Blair when he realized “His teeth are too big for his mouth.” — and builds from there.

The British comic actor Kenneth Williams is one of his more outlandish impersonations. He brings the flamboyant purveyor of funny voices and sissy shtick, an actor most famous for his work in the leering, lowbrow “Carry On” comedies of the ’50s-70s — deliciously to life in “Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa.” This little seen 2006 TV bio-pic is now on Netflix streaming, and it’s another tour de force for the formidable — and not too proud to do “Twilight” — Sheen.

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The Wrap is reporting that J.J. Abrams will do what no one has done before — cross-pollinate the “Star Wars/Star Trek” fan-verses by being the first filmmaker to do both a couple of “Trek” films, and a “Star Wars” film.

That seems like something a fan would post as a hopeful trial balloon. But with Disney having the rights to the George Lucas money-minter now, why wouldn’t they go for a big name like Abrams, a gunslinger with a dazzling record, to helm a film?

They could make him the producer and let him oversee the films, picking directors, casting it, etc., and that would be just as good as having him directing.

Either way, this seems too good to be true and thus a smidge far-fetched. The mother of all trial balloons. But we’ll see.