Movie Nation

Cartoon Network alumni Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim bring their awkward, amateurish and lower-than-lowbrow “style” to the big screen with “Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie.” It’s such an inept exercise in infantilism that you wonder where these guys got the $47.08 it must have cost to shoot their “Billion Dollar Movie.”

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Kid-friendly funnyman Kevin James is at his cuddliest in “Here Comes the Boom.” And he has to be. This amusing bu sometimes unsettling comedy marries the teacher-turns-to-mixed martial arts mayhem of “Warrior” to that wholesome family dramedy “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

It works, after a fashion. But that doesn’t mean you won’t wince.

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You don’t need Matt Damon to revive the Bourne film franchise. And you probably don’t need Paul Greengrass, the quick-cutting action auteur who directed the best of the Damon films about Jason Bourne, the trained and chemically altered super-spy who has lost his memory and is being hunted by the very people who made him.

But if you’re bringing back Treadstone, introducing a new spy and new government overlords searching for him, moving on from Bourne, hoping to build on his “Legacy,” you darned sure better grab us, straight out of the box. An epic chase for your finale, two hours later, isn’t enough.

Tony “Michael Clayton” Gilroy burns through half an hour of “The Bourne Legacy” without much happening. He takes a good, solid hour before getting this sequel-reboot on its feet. And an hour of Edward Norton, Stacy Keach and Donna Murphy and company sputtering dense spy agency jargon in a dimly-lit “sit rep” room full of computers, phones and TV monitors is more than a test of patience. It’s a test of whether this franchise deserves to go on.

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There are so many rules for a Disney princess. Too many for Disney’s newest princess, the Scottish heroine Merida in “Brave” to remember.

“A princess does not doodle,” her mother lectures in a light Scottish burr. “A princess does not chortle.”

“A princess does not stuff her gob.”

“A princess does not raise her voice.”

But here’s the one that makes the fiery redheaded archer snap.

“A princess should not have weapons.”

Pixar’s first “Disney Princess” completes the evolution of the studio’s distinctly American take on young womanhood. Princesses have evolved from sailor-obsessed mermaids to Merida, a spunky, self-assured lass who’d rather eat an arrow than take up with some guy her parents point her way. She has duties, obligations, an arranged marriage to endure. Her mother,Queen Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson), may insist “We can’t just run away from who we are.”

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Model turned actress Famke Janssen turns writer-director for “Bringing Up Bobby,” a lightweight drama about a gone-wrong mom who wants a better life for her going-wrong son. It has a novel setting — rural Oklahoma — a “name” cast and a potentially touching story in the “Stella Dallas/Paper Moon” vein.

But as Janssen (The “X-Men” and “Taken” franchises) should have learned, there’s more to directing than getting all the components of a picture together and placing the camera in the right spot. At some point, you have to reign in an actor, tone down the mugging and maybe get the accent that comes and goes to stick around from one scene to the next.

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Whatever happens before it, the finale is a doozy, almost certain to be satisfying to fans and impressive even to the casual “Twilight” viewer.

But so much of what comes before that payoff in “Breaking Dawn: Part 2,” the conclusion to The Twilight Saga, is mundane, dull, all talk and no action.

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The title isn’t an exaggeration. It was something of a “Big Miracle,” the way the plight of a family of gray whales, stranded under the Alaska ice, captivated the country and forced oil men and environmentalists, natives and Cold War foes to team up back in the waning days of the Reagan administration.

And it’s no small miracle that the movie about that nearly-forgotten moment made for a delightful family movie. Political cynicism, media opportunism, dogmatic native “tradition,” corporate greed and environmentalist obstinance are each, in turn, dashed against this sunny Ken “”He’s Just Not That Into You” Kwapis confection.

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The movies haven’t shown much grace when dealing with matters of faith in recent decades. Hollywood steers clear of the subject altogether, and faith-based filmmakers tend to avoid reality to avoid letting their movies become too “edgy.”

“Blue Like Jazz” is an occasionally witty, generally thoughtful attempt to bridge that chasm.

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Rob Reiner’s late-career return to the sentimental youth-oriented films of his early days as director is a welcome one for any parent who longs for movies that you can watch with your children. But much of the magic of “Flipped” is missing from his latest, “The Magic of Belle Isle,” a contrived idyll set in a summer resort community in upstate New York.

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