Movie Nation

There’s a hint of incredulity to the rave reviews for the alcoholic love story “Smashed.” And since its director, James Ponsoldt, made a previous film about an alcoholic baseball umpire (“Off the Black”), that slack-jawed shock is aimed at his leading lady.

Even when a critic like Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly is praising her “empathetic performance of appealing transparency,” she can’t help but refer to Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the “former horror-movie scream queen.”

Winstead, who turns 28 in November, has a string of horror credits — “from “The Ring Two” and “Final Destination 3” to “The Thing.” But even the role she’s best known for, as the face that launched a string of vengeful lovers after new beau Scott Pilgrim in “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” doesn’t suggest the staggering, confused and amused at the idea of 12 Step help young drunk she plays in “Smashed.”

“I didn’t know I had it in me, either,” she confesses.

But Ponsoldt did. It’s one thing to cast Nick Nolte as an aged alcoholic in “Off the Black.” But something in Winstead’s “Scott Pilgrim” turned convinced him she could pull off a younger version. Even in a “live action cartoon” like “Scott Pilgrim,” “she’s this cool, still, stoic center,” Ponsoldt says. “She’s like Henry Fonda or Jean Gabin or Robert Duvall. She doesn’t over-act, whether she’s playing Scott Pilgrim’s girlfriend, or the woman with the flamethrower in ‘The Thing.’ The demands were different. She was still good.”

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There’s always been something that screamed “CARTOON” about that potty-mouthed pixie, Sarah Silverman. Even at her most outrageous, the edgy comic’s disarming, Betty Boop by way of Betty Rubble voice intentionally softens that edge.

Silverman’s demeanor and material, in which as the Los Angeles Times and many others have proclaimed “almost nothing’s off limits” — race, religion, sex and celebrity — can be jaw-dropping. Think of her stand-up documentary “Jesus is Magic,” her sexualized political ads and what she once sang to ex-boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel that she was doing to Matt Damon.

But coming from a voice built for babytalk, with a touch of phone sex, she gets away with it.

Her most outrageous stunt yet may be her first-ever turn as an animated character in a Disney film. She’s voiced more adult animation — “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” “Futurama,” “Bob’s Burgers.” “Wreck-It Ralph” is a Disney toon (review here) in which she plays a sassy, sugary exiled video game imp named Vanellope Von Schweetz. And if Vanellope has a certain Silverman edge, the comic-turned-actress says that’s Disney’s doing.

We reached her in Los Angeles.

Q: So, who called whom? Did you approach Disney, or did they pitch you?

Silverman: “Disney called me. They did. I have NO idea why. I was like, ‘Do they only know me from ‘Monk’ or ‘Yo Gabba Gabba’ or something?

“I was thrilled. Everybody loves Disney and Pixar. And when I thought of it, the filthiest comedian working as I was coming up was Eddie Murphy. And he’s found a home with Disney. So if he can do it, why not me?

“I mean, I have the perfect voice for animation, and a great face for radio! Haha! I’ve always had a voice, a pretty distinctive one — pleasing or displeasing, depending on who you are. When I hear it, I’m like ‘Eeeewwww, it’s so NASAL.’ But early on, I got a voice-over agent, and I’d go to voice-over auditions constantly — commercials. I never got booked. NEVER. Then, people started hiring me for me and I started getting all this cartoon work

“A lot of people are asking me about this choice, and I’m like, ‘Do you think I’m going to sneak (expletitive deleted) into their cartoon? NO. I’m an adult. There’s more than one side of me and I can certainly curb myself if they give me a script. Come on!”

Q: Well, you’ve provided so little evidence, up to now, that you are, in fact, able to curb yourself.

Silverman: “Yeah, I know. Disney’s REALLY smart releasing this in an election year when I’m at my most tippy-top polarizing self! But they’re still cool about it.”

Q: Anything about Vanellope that you could identify with, as a character?

Silverman: “I feel so close to her. Yes, she’s a ‘Her.’ She’s an EveryWoman — obnoxious and precocious and annoying, at first. She’s this little tough girl. When people are tough, it’s because they’re protecting this fragile interior. She was this little rejected girl covering it with being a tough guy. A lot of people can relate to that. I know I could.

Q: And there are these Sarah Silverman touches to her lines. A video game character with a learning disorder, she says she has ‘pixlexia?’

Silverman: “I LOVE that! I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s in the script. We improvised and came up with alternative lines. ‘Milk My Duds.’ But stuff like ‘Why did the hero flush the toilet?’ ‘Cuz it was hit DUTY’? Straight out of the script. And I LOVED it.”

Q: So is ‘Going Disney the sign that this the beginning of a mellower Sarah Silverman? (She turned 42 in December).

Silverman: “This comes out sandwiched between a filthy political video, and a movie (“Take This Waltz”) that I’m nude in (review here). So SURE. I’m getting a LOT mellower.

“I’m kind of daydreaming, right now. I’m doing another stand-up special. It’s been seven years, and I’m focusing on that after ALL these interviews Disney makes you do — a world tour — ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ mania. That, and getting people to vote.

“I’ll know what I want to do next — a song, a show, a movie — when it comes to me, but right now, I’m undecided.”

Two hardened criminals drop in to rob a store. They beat the daylights out of the proprietor, his wife. An employee cowers behind a counter, until he summons up his guts and hurls himself at the brutes. And as others look on, he bungles and stumbles his way into killing them both.
But was he stumbling? Were those misplaced blows and sword-slashes accidents? Or does this fellow have skills, “A History of Violence”?
That’s the killer opening of “Dragon,” a fun collision of that David Cronenberg film, traditional over-the-top Hong Kong martial arts pictures and sort of a “C.S.I.: Yunnan Province.” Because even in 1917 China, there are investigators working for the government who can examine physical evidence, draw logical scientific conclusions and recreate in their minds what really happened.

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A couple of producers on board Gareth Edward’s “Godzilla” project with Warners have “departed.” But the film supposedly now has a pretty firm start date.

Seriously? It occurred to me on first hearing about this that Warners announced it to keep anybody else from having the bright idea of getting something into the pipeline to pre-empt their summer spectacle, Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim,” whose first trailers reveal it to be a sort of “Transformers” (manned by humans) battling giant lizards.

Then again, if the technology to make a convincing beastie is further perfected by Team del Toro, why not get further use out of it with another, more straightforward take on Mr. “Oh No, There Goes Tokyo”?

They’re getting Frank “Shawshank Redemption” to rewrite it, and they’re still saying March is when they’ll begin production.

Here’s one thing the movies get wrong pretty consistently — the reaction of seemingly rational people upon seeing the supernatural, the impossible, the miraculous.

“Red Lights” is a promising psychological thriller that gets that detail just right.

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Canadian actress-turned-director Sarah Polley landed Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman for her first directorial outing since the Oscar-nominated “Away From Her.” Unfortunately, the mopey anti-romance she stuck them in didn’t take advantage of their full talents, and the wispy “Take This Waltz” barely earned a release.

With due cause.

It’s a conventional “meet cute” romance as Margot (Williams), who writes Canadian tourism brochures, stumbles into the flirtatious Daniel (Luke Kirby) at historic Louisbourg. They stumble into each other again on the flight home, and he’s pretty forward.

She, after a little hesitation, is intrigued — all the way through the shared cab ride from the airport home.

“I’m married.”

Oh. Daniel, it turns out, lives just across the street. He’s an artist who pulls a rickshaw for money. She’s married to a cookbook writer (a subdued Seth Rogen) who is all about different recipes for chicken. They have an adorable marriage of shared jokes, wonderful meals and parties that Lou (Rogen) caters to test out his latest culinary experiments on.

Something, however, is missing. How else do you explain Margot’s continued flirtation with the unscrupulous Daniel? She meets him for coffee, for a swim at the local pool. She wants to know “What you’d do to me” if she succumbs to his seduction. And he tells her, in graphic, not gushily romantic detail. She doesn’t exactly confess to her desire for a little passion to her filthy-mouthed alcoholic sister-in-law (Silverman). But in a shared shower at the gym, the idea of liking “something new” comes up. Older women sharing that shower advise her, “New things get old.”

Not that Margot listens. She keeps testing the waters — and swimming in them with Daniel, waiting for that moment to pull away.

Polley is famous for testing the boundaries of tone in her movies, keeping the viewer on his or her heels as the story and characters shift and manoeuvre and stake out this or that piece of ground.

Canadian actors flesh out the cast, songs by Canadian songwriters (Leonard Cohen’s title tune among them) score the melodrama. Lovely Canadian locations — the unfilmed corner of Toronto — grace the screen.

But “Take This Waltz” starts from a fairly unsavory premise with characters seemingly more curious than seriously motivated, and stumbles downward from there. It’s hard to find somebody to identify with — the bored (and boring) Margot, the perhaps-to-be-cuckolded Lou, the opportunistic Daniel?

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A decent-enough opening weekend of the year at the box office, with the lone “new” wide release doing $23 million, at 3D ticket prices. “Texas Chainsaw 3D” wins with a $23 million take.

“Django Unchained” is holding audience better than the other holiday films and sits in second with $20 million. “Hobbit” and “Les Miz” did OK, in the upper $teens.

Among limited releases, “Zero Dark Thirty” has earned over $4 million already — on just 4 screens. Yowza. “Silver Linings,” “Anna Karenina” and “Amour” are doing well in that corner of the marketplace.