“Hop” is a chip off the old munk — as in chipmunks, “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Like the Alvin movies, it has critters interacting with real people. The critter in question — a bunny — is all about music, just like the chipmunks.
And like the last chipmunk picture, about the best one can say for “Hop” is that it adheres to that Hippocratic oath of children’s entertainment — “First, do no harm.”
A few friends in the business have seen cuts of this and expressed appreciation.
“John Dies at the End” has drugs that allow people to travel through time and other dimensions. They return — not quite human.
Can a couple of losers, who have figured this out, save the world?
“John Dies at the End” opens in limited release Jan. 25.
“Zero Dark Thirty” goes into wide release this weekend (my review here) and looks to be the big weekend winner, pulling in some $25 million at the box office.
Other Oscar nominated pictures, including “Lincoln” and “Life of Pi,” saw a big Friday night spike in attendance as well.
“Django” took a pretty big Oscar dip. Does it finally seem like damaged goods?
“Gangster Squad,” dismissed by some, praised as a gangster Western by me (review here) is headed toward what may be a sub-$20 million weekend, based on Friday’s numbers. I doubt if the word of mouth will be that bad on it, so we’ll see what Saturday’s numbers show.
“A Haunted House,” a lumbering comedy in the “Paranormal Black-tivity” vein (Marlon W. would appreciate that, my review here) is doing quite well — upper -$teens.
Like an old friend whose mere memory brings tears, “56 Up,” the latest film in the greatest cinematic experiment in sociology and psychology ever attempted, returns to theaters. Every seven years, a new installment in “Seven Up!”, an updated feature film boiled down from the British TV documentary series, reminds us of our mortality even as we see the years pass for the British subjects of these films.
The world met them in “Seven Up!”, fourteen British children representing what was then, a pretty broad sample of British society – poor East End tykes, orphans, a child of mixed race, a country boy, and the posh-accented scion of landed gentry and the professional classes.
Every seven years we see how Jackie and Lynn, Tony, Suzy, Symon, Neil and the others have changed – how the attitudes and personalities they expressed as talkative seven year-olds have manifested themselves in adult life.
It’s an exploration of that Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Are we really fully formed at seven?
“It’s a win-win situation,” we hear people say, often to assure us that something they’re doing that’s counter to your interests is actually just as much to your advantage as theirs.
That’s what Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) tells himself when he signs himself up to be a new client’s legal guardian. He’s a struggling lawyer in rural New Jersey, a good guy who has also taken on the thankless job of coaching the high school wrestling team. The old man (Burt Young) forgets things and needs to be in a group home. The state thinks so. And since there are no living relatives Mike can track down, Mike takes on the paid job of looking after the man’s life and his affairs.
Mike gets paid, the old man gets to stay in his home, “Win Win.” Only Mike doesn’t let him stay in his house. He puts him in a retirement home — out of sight, out of mind. Sure, he lied to the judge and his wife (Amy Ryan). But they need the money, and at least he’ll look in on the client, right? The judge doesn’t need to know.
“Win Win” is about what happens after this unethical act by an essentially moral man. It’s the most entertaining and accessible film from the director of perfectly accessible and entertaining “The Visitor,” Thomas McCarthy. So that’s saying something.
Chanda doesn’t have an easy life. At 12, she has siblings to take care of. Her alcoholic dad has a habit of stealing the family cash and spending it on booze and hookers. Her best friend, Esther, is something of a village outcast, a tweenage girl hanging out at truck stops, supposedly selling herself to drivers.
And Chanda’s mom, Lillian, is sick. She is wasting away. Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka) wants to run to the hospital to get help.
“There is no help,” Lillian (Lerato Mvelase) says, turning her eyes away from her child. She won’t say what she has, and nobody there will utter the word “AIDS.” It is “this other thing,” the villagers whisper. Even when a blameless infant dies, this is the illness that can’t be named aloud.
The unlikely combination of funnyman Will Ferrell and the boozy “dirty realism” of the great short story writer Raymond Carver pays offs in “Everything Must Go,” a sardonic look at hitting bottom before you can start the climb back up. It’s a bleak yet optimistic film, and Ferrell perfectly underplays his Carver anti-hero and delivers a rich, layered and subtle performance.
The doctor comes to the remote clinic and tosses the chanting African children the gift of a soccer ball.
Then he sets to work. Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a surgeon, a member of Doctors Without Borders bringing medicine and healing to this remote, dusty part of the world. All around him he sees evidence of the brutality of the Men with Guns. He is patching up those he can, victims of the violence of a thuggish gang leader named Big Man, a bully protected by his fellow bullies.
“Jumping the Broom” is like a Tyler Perry movie with polish. An ensemble comedy about a wedding that joins a wealthy, Martha’s Vineyard family of African American professionals with the groom’s more down to Earth working-class Brooklynites, it is well-cast, well-played, passably written and filmed in the warm glow only the top drawer cinematographers can achieve.
This cinematic sociological experiment has been going on so long that director Michael Apted, who has Bond and Narnia credits under his belt, in addition to “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Enigma” and “Nell” and “Thunderheart,” might be thinking of handing the directing reins over to somebody new.
But he isn’t. After catching up with seven typical Brits every seven years since the first of these documentaries, “Seven Up,” in 1964, and learning how their lives are going, how they’ve changed, how much they’re like the seven year old version of themselves, he’s not stopping now.
It’s always fascinating to catch up with these people and see for ourselves how we’ve been molded, almost since birth, into the personalities we carry around with us. At least one of them is “getting the band back together.”
“56 Up” is in limited release, and opening wider over the next few weeks.
