Movie Nation

An R-rated horror action comedy fairytale — How’s that for genre bending?

“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” is more Gatling guns and grenades than The Brothers Grimm. It takes the kidnapped kiddies into adulthood, where they’ve parlayed their fame at cooking a witch’s goose into a business. Got a witch problem? Call H & G – the extermination experts.

High concept pitch or no, the movie doesn’t really work. Will Ferrell’s production team was behind this. They were shooting for sort of a witch hunting “Zombieland,” an f-bomb riddled “Van Helsing” packed with comical anachronisms – a Bavarian forest past with witch trials, pump shotguns and primitive tasers, where bottles of milk have woodcut pictures of “Missing Children” on the labels.

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The only new movies opening this, the last weekend of January, are truly “January movies,” films with limited prospects at the box office, movies essentially dumped here by studios who don’t want to waste a holiday weekend or even a February weekend on product they have no faith in.

There’s “Parker,” a Taylor Hackford film built around a famous fictional tough guy (think “Point Blank” with Lee Marvin, and “Payback” with Mel Gibson — same character), a movie starring reliable B-movie action hero Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez. FilmDistrict decided it wasn’t good enough to preview for most critics, branding the film as garbage without anyone else saying so. Micky Mouse move on their part. No, it’s not very good (my review). But people might have cut it more slack had they shown some pride in it. It’s Taylor Hackford working from a Donald Westlake novel, after all.

And all these names and faces attached to the sketch comedy ensemble piece “Movie 43,” a movie with Oscar winners doing what Oscar winners never do — get down and dirty and supposedly funny. Also not previewed. The trailers looked outlandish. I saw it in the middle of the night — not the best time to assess a comedy, but that was Relativity’s call. Surely they should have taken a chance and screened this for critics. Otherwise, it has zero buzz. Ten short sketch films with big name stars? The Terrence Howard bit about a racist basketball coach giving a racial pep talk to his all black team feels played.

“Hansel & Gretel” didn’t screen for most critics. The “Witch Hunters” horror comedy, produced by Will Ferrell and his boys, pairs up Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as adult versions of the famed witch-cookers and candy lovers. I saw it, and here’s my review.

Thank the Maker for “John Dies at the End,” a trippy semi-successful horror comedy/reality-bender that almost works.  It goes into limited release Friday.

So set your expectations bar low and brace yourself and maybe use this as a weekend to catch up on Oscar contenders you’ve missed. Because otherwise, the odds are good that the goods are odd.

The musical bio-film has undergone a renaissance and a transformation in recent years.

Bob Dylan earned an impressionistic/multiple actor-multiple interpretations of his character portrait in “I’m Not There.”

“Control” was an odd, mesmerizing look at the life of Ian Curtis of Joy Division.

Ian Drury earned an offbeat biopic, “Sex, Drugs & Rock’n Roll.”

“Telstar” is every bit as odd, a film set on the fringe — the story of crazed and gay British record producer Joe Meeks — and given an overwrought, overlong fringe screen treatment by director Nick Moran and writer James Hicks, who wrote the play on which this is based.

Meeks was an early ’60s pioneer in avante garde pop music studio production — coming up with strange effects and odd sounds to make his records stand out in the post-Elvis U.K. pop music crowd. He didn’t read music, but sounds would come to him in his head, he’d hum them onto tape and force — through threats and even at gunpoint — his musicians to make what was in his head a musical reality.

A great believer in the occult, the beyond and things “in the ether,” his most famous hit was the first British pop record to hit number one in the U.S. — the electronic instrumental “Telstar.”

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Around the world, ask movie-lovers where they saw their first movie witch and the answer’s the same.

“I was, like everyone, frightened by the witch in the Wizard of Oz,’” says English actress Gemma Arterton. “That’s who we all grew up with, right?”

Jeremy “Hurt Locker” Renner agrees. And he can top that.

“’Wizard of Oz was the very first job I ever had. On stage. I played the Scarecrow. So for me, there was always just one witch. That first witch. The Wicked Witch of the West.”

But, Renner adds, “We were going for something a little darker, a little different, with OUR movie.”

Their movie is “Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters,” a silly mashup of horror and hilarity produced by Will Ferrell’s team, and starring the guy carrying on “The Bourne Legacy” and the accomplished former Bond babe.

“They had me with that lead-line, the idea of taking the Hansel & Gretel tale we’re all familiar with into adulthood,” Renner, 42, says.

“It’s 15 years later,” Arterton, who just turned 27, adds. “And they’re NOT happy. They’ve become witch hunters.”

In the 3D “Witchhunters,” the kids were taken into the woods and left on their own by their father. They stumble into a candy-covered witch house, are taken prisoner and when they figure a way out of their fix – working as a team – they’ve found their calling. They’ll track, shoot, stab, behead and burn witches. Whatever it takes.

“You have to be very very flexible” to play an action heroine, Arterton says. She’s been in action films before – “Clash of the Titans,” “Prince of Persia,” “Quantum of Solace.” But never where she had to carry the action. “I had to do quite a lot of training just to get limber enough to be Gretel. You’ve got to get strong. You’ve got to look good in leather.”

Indeed. Renner’s done his share of onscreen brawling, but playing Hansel was “a little tricky, at first. It’s these tight outfits. But they’re wonderfully designed to not just look good, but be functional. So I figured it out.”

Playing siblings meant there’d be a different sort of onscreen chemistry called for, “that unspoken communication that brother and sister are supposed to have,” Renner says.

Making an action fantasy meant that they’d be working in a world filled with things no real person has ever seen. And since that wasn’t to be manufactured digitally, “most of what you see is real – a real place, real witches in costume, a real troll,” he adds.

“Having an animatronic troll, instead of a digital one, was a real blessing on the set,” Arterton says. There’s none of this look off camera in wonder at something they’ll digitally add later.

And having Ferrell & Co. producing it meant there’d be laughs – anachronisms like ancient Bavarian milk bottles with pictures of missing (kidnapped by witches) children, the odd blast of era-inappropriate profanity.

“We had to keep focused on what was serious for us and what was serious for the audience,” Renner says. “The jokes, they’ll come. But we had to treat our relationship seriously for the audience to buy into it, I think.”

Was it so much fun that they’ll do another, should the need arise? Arterton was killed off as a Bond character, and didn’t do the “Clash of the Titans” sequel, so she’s game. “This action heroine thing could open doors for me. We’ll see.”

And Renner, who might be called on to return to the Bourne movies, and certainly will be back in the various “Avengers” pictures (he’s Hawkeye)?

“Studios are always thinking that. But for that to happen, we have to win over the audience and take them for a ride. They get to decide if she’s Gretel and I’m Hansel again.”

The filmmakers who gave us the light Latino dramedy “Quinceneara” haven’t been heard from much in the years since. But they’ve landed Kevin Kline to play the late swashbuckler Errol Flynn in a bio-pic about his last days, with Dakota Fanning as among those in his life near the end.

Oscar winner Susan Sarandon joins the Oscar winning Kline, and she’ll play Florence Aadland.

Flynn was in his glory in the 30s, starring in the classic “Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Captain Blood,” and other swashbuckling adventures. Twenty years later, as Flynn’s dissolute life wound down, the years of boozing, pill popping, brawling and womanizing — occasionally with women absurdly young — caught up with him years before his time.

It’s another Thursday — a chilling one here in Orlando. A good AM to turn the heat on in the car and listen to a little sports talk radio if you’re here.

Or listen online if you’re stuck somewhere even colder.

I’ll be on the Open Mike show with Mike Bianchi and Brian Fritz, and we’ll be talking about the new releases on this, the lamest weekend on the movie release calendar.

How lame? “Parker” and “Movie 43” weren’t previewed.

“Hansel & Gretel” was barely previewed.

And Oscar long shot “A Royal Affair” is here and in a few other cities.

“Holy Motors,” now at the Enzian, was swooned over by critics’ groups, ignored by Oscar and will earn a riff or two. I wasn’t nuts over it, but it has its moments.

745 AM on 740 AM or listen online here.

He’s a longer than long shot at the Oscars this year, but he’s nominated and he’s in that company.

He’s box office, having mostly a string of hits under his belt as leading man. Let’s forget about “The Words.”

And being buff and dashing and handsome and, if you saw “Silver Linings Playbook,” pretty damned good at the whole Roid Rage thing, capable of being intimidating — Bradley Cooper would make a great Lance Armstrong in the upcoming J.J. Abrams production about the fallen sports hero.

Cooper is starting to lobby for the part.

He said so in an interview with the BBC.

I can totally see it.

Who’d play Sheryl Crow?

No big surprise here. Adele gives a little Top 40 Pop oomph to a show that is always scrambling to find a “youth audience” tune in trick.

The real surprise would be if she did it as a duet with Seth MacFarlane, the “Family Guy” host.

This should tie a neat bow on the whole “Bond’s 50th Anniversary” (on the big screen) festivities, something that might have warranted a bigger chunk of the show — a few decent nominations, for instance, for “Skyfall.”

“Cold Weather” is a conventionally unconventional indie dramedy, one of those well-shot, thoughtfully-played movies that exists in the dead space that a Hollywood movie mystery would skip right past.

This new example of the European fad “Slow Cinema,” by Portland filmmaker Aaron Katz (“Dance Party, USA”) makes us work for everything –figuring out the relationships between the characters, even picking up the characters’ names — things more mainstream (and more polished) screenwriters see as needless obstacles to story. And modest virtues aside, “Cold Weather” is not really worth our getting past those obstacles.

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