Movie Nation

IMAX showings are selling out.

Ticket buyers started showing up early Thursday afternoon (when I caught it) and kept lining up until midnight.

“The Odyssey” scored the year’s best Thursday night “preview” take, Deadline.com reported.. Some $17.6 million (mostly premium priced) worth of tickets sold to this ancient epic based in the first great work of Western literature. That jump-started a Friday “opening day” to blockbuster status — $51 million+, Thursday night and Friday.

For the weekend? Try $124.5 million, per The Numbers.

Christopher Nolan, the most bankable film director of his generation, has the public lining up to see his latest, breathlessly hyped for the past couple of years as the Matt Damon/Anne Hathaway/Himesh Patel/Lupita Nyong’o/John Leguizamo and Robert Pattinson star vehicle made its stately way through production.

Viewed another way, a public yawning through “Supergirl” and a sea of sequels is voting with its feet in the name of “Show us something NEW.”

Disney spent $250 million+ on a live action “Moana,” and is losing Mickey Mouse’s shirt over gambling waaaaaay too much on shirtless AARP member Dwayne Johnson and lesser known co-stars.

Nolan rounded up Oscar winners Matt Damon, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway and Charlize Theron, took them to Greece and Morocco, Sicily, Iceland and Scotland and spent the SAME $250 million and got a genuine epic out of it.

Maybe it’s the movie Steven Spielberg should have made instead of “Disclosure Day.”

“Project Hail Mary” may be cutesy and derivative and more science fantasy than science fiction in many ways, but it was different enough to become a phenomenon it took at “Toy Story 5” to unseat.

Granted, if you remember the outlines of a story told for thousands of years, and in films starring Kurt Douglas and Brad Pitt (just the Trojan War part of “The Odyssey”) and in TV miniseries, “Odyssey” is anything but “new.”

But Nolan’s critically-acclaimed take, one seeking relevance in an alarmingly unstable world lurching towards fascism and the violence that comes with it, is pulling them in.

Other films that had Thursdays like that did brisk Fridays and Saturdays and cleared $136-145 million. Filmgoing is down. Again, lots of these tickets are higher priced than general admission.

If you’re tired of sequels, reboots and superhero shlock, vote with your feet and your ducats, kids.

Nolan’s raised the bar, so let’s see if the latest “Spider-Man,” a proven property and frankly worn-out comic book franchise, can top it.

“Moana’s” meek opening is being chased by a $19 million second weekend, and for a family film to lose over half its audience, week to week, that’s another sign that this one will be a big’ol bust. It’s over $80 million, all-in, and will lose the rest of its IMAX screens to “Odyssey” and “Spider-Man” before month’s end. It’s #2 this weekend.

The latest animated “Minions,” “Minions & Monsters,” is holding more audience week to week and will finish third with $14.8 million or so.

“Toy Story 5” added $14.8 itself, and has cleared the $430 million mark. See ya, Minions. .

“Evil Dead Burn” is managed $5 million, losing most of its week-to-week audience. And that’s a pitifully low mark for a summer film to win fifth place bragging rights with.

“The Invite” is making some waves and bucks, hitting sixth this weekend with a $3.9 million take.You haven’t seen it? GO.

“Young Washington” is hanging around, clearing $3.7 million and coming in seventh. It’s in the black with a $41 million take on the bank by midnight Sunday. Are they convincing a lot of people to buy tickets for filmgoers who don’t go and see it?

“Obsession” is still the horror date movie of choice, earning another $2.5 in eighth. It will clear the $260 million mark all in early next week.

Ninth place belongs to the comic book bomb “Supergirl” whose pulse has weakened to $1.5.

And “Disclosure Day” takes tenth, $1.25 million closing in on $115.

“Jackass Forever and Ever” exits the top ten.  

Let’s hope the “Odyssey” stars — all the way down to Zendaya, Patel and Holland, Leguizamo and Remar, got a little profit participation from C. Nolan’s epic. Champagne for everyone!

The prolific Barcelona screenwriter and director Cesc Gay gave us the man and his dog dramedy “Truman,” and the edgier “The People Upstairs,” aka “Sentimental,” just remade by Olivia Wilde as “The Invite.”

So when you see his name on the credits, you expect sophistication and wit that crosses borders and transcends language barriers.

But his “53 Sundays” feels like an unstaged play he plucked out of a seldom-opened drawer and sold to the deep pocket content-cravers at Netflix.

“Unstaged” for a reason is a given. As is “suckers” at Netflix, because their mad rush to create films that play in many markets has them spending mad money on has-been or never-quite-were stars and indulging big name filmmaker/storytellers in their “dream” projects, with decidedly mixed results.

Cesc Gay has a track record. That was good enough for them.

In theatrical terms, “53 Sundays” is a four-hander, four characters in search of a laugh or at least a better story.

One, Carolina (Alexandra Jiménez), is Ms. Exposition, our narrate-to-the-camera “host” for a “fight” between three siblings — one of whom is her partner.

Carolina spends the first seven minutes of the bad play film explaining the family dynamic — the oldest brother Victor (Javier Gutiérrez) who married money and wants little to do with his siblings, the writer/college professor older sister Natalia (Carmen Machi) who workaholics through life as a way of coping with a cheating spouse, and Carolina’s half-broke, under-employed actor partner Julián (popular Spanish character lead Javier Cámara) who is the youngest and feels put upon and taken for granted by his not-wholly-estranged siblings.

The next 70 minutes show us the ways they avoid each other, promising an epic “fight” that never comes, a debate about their 89 year old father who is “forgetting” things, getting lost and “showing his penis” to the neighbors and anybody else within reach.

The pointlessness of this interminably pointless exercise is built in, structural. Consider, the first act is all Carolina and Julián prepping for a dinner party “meeting” between the siblings that doesn’t come off because Victor would rather dash off to Marbella for a little getaway.

The second act is Victor and Julián halfheartedly bickering and waiting for Natalia, who’s a no-show.

And the third act is the Big Fight over “What to do about Dad” that never reaches the level of “fight” much less “big.”

The dialogue is quotably dull, in Spanish or dubbed into English.

“I thought we’d wait an hour before we start arguing.” “Telling the truth is in poor taste.” Victor’s best put-down of his “dumbass little brother” is the script’s only biting line.

“I keep wanting more and more and you keep settling for less.”

The actors aren’t bad. They just have nothing to play. The film never overcomes the low stakes involved, low stakes which the tepid arguments barely address. And it never manages to surprise us from the moment we hear what the “real” beef they have is.

Their father is complaining of a flickering light bulb. WHO will deign to visit Dad and change it? Whose responsibility/JOB is that?

Cesc Gay will of course write and direct again. Maybe next time he’ll spend a little more time on the material, workshop it, figure out it needs more heft and maybe a few laughs.

Maybe next time Netflix will have somebody read this “content” before writing the check.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, smoking

Cast: Javier Cámara, Carmen Machi, Javier Gutiérrez and Alexandra Jiménez.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Cesc Gay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18

For a preachy, unevenly-acted thriller about the threat of a school shooting, the indie “Honor Student” certainly punches above its weight.

Director and co-writer Tamika Miller gets into the messy politics of gun control, references earlier school massacres, from Columbine to Sandy Hook to Parkland, and takes inspiration from Aurora (a cinema shooting). Characters pay lip service to “movie” and “video game violence.”

And still one character clings to the hope that one more shooting, as awful but no more awful than many others, will awaken American moral outratgdemocracy and provoke action.

As if the Russian-financed National Rifle Association couldn’t bribe that to a halt. Again.

Kelly Jenrette of TV’s “All American: Homecoming” stars as Mrs. Hill, a single mom/school teacher with a pressing appointment at the end of this particular workday.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have time for the upper class kids of Kingsley Academy, where she teaches. You’d be hard-pressed to find a “public” school teacher who’d let herself get lured into a chat about a boy this girl (Olivia Simmons) hopes against hope he will ask her to the prom.

And rushed as she is, she’ll make time for Harvard-bound Jeremy Chue (Hudson Yang), an over-achiever whose father’s (Kelvin Han Yee) expectations are “class valedictorian,” because anything less just won’t do.

Jeremy is popular, nobody’s idea of a social outsider. But he’s carrying a burden most everybody knows about. What they don’t know is what he’s got in his cello case this particular school day.

It takes a couple of agonizing minutes for the rushed Mrs. Hill to get the kid past his explanation of a chess “gambit” and figure out what he means by “sacrificial pawns.”

“I think someone’s going to shoot up the school,” he says. And then, our comes the gun.

Jeremy’s got a silencer-tipped 9mm, for starters. And he’s got his reasons for locking her in this classroom with him until that moment when school lets our and he plans to make all hell break loose.

Flashbacks to formative moments each character’s earlier life are animated, an interesting choice.

Miller — “The Christmas Lottery” and “Undercard” were hers — and co-writer Joe Rechtman squeeze a lot of teen “logic” and racial politics into their script, folding many of the thought exercises and screeds into Yang’s character.

“Ever get tired of the knee on your neck,” the minority kid asks his African-American teacher? A fair question.

But Yang blurts much of his dialogue, which sounds recited and rushed rather than acted and lived.

Jenrette takes a LONG time to register the proper degree of shock and terror.

And the logic of the whole talking villain exercise, which the teacher spends her energy trying to puncture, is malignant wishful thinking of the worst sort. As smart Jeremy himself says, if this country didn’t take drastic steps to curb gun ownership and machine gun sales after the mass murder of little kids at Sandy Hook, well…

The film, shortened by ten minutes for its Amazon release, only achieves the proper pitch in the clock-ticking-down third act. But there are provocative ideas, stances and “solutions” packed into this preachy picture. For a simple two-hander, with basically one setting, it certainly does punch above its weight, even if it never manages more than a glancing blow or two.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Kelly Jenrette, Hudson Yang, Kelvin Han Yee and Olivia Simmons.

Credits: Directed by Tamika Miller, scripted by Joe Rechtman and Tamika Miller. A Deskpop release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:24

It may be a cliche, but there are few more “liberating” images in the cinema than having your heroine toss aside convention and decorum and dunk her head in the public village fountain in some eternally sunny corner of Provence.

When the woman doing the dunking is a shy, unhappy and more-uptight-than-average Swede, more the better.

That’s a payoff moment in “Je M’appelle Agneta,” an ever-so-slight, not really “funny” midlife crisis rom-com.

A repressed, depressed, newly-laid off empty-nest Swedish mom pops down to Provence to cure what ails her in this Swedish version of “It’s My Turn,” “Eat Pray Love,” “How Stella GotHher Groove Back” or “Under Tuscan Sun.”

The film is as predictable as a Swiss watch and as adventurous as a romance novel or its Hallmark Channel equivalent. But it’s set in Provence, so there’s that.

Eva Melander has the title role, that of a dowdy 50ish mom whose kids have reached an age where they only make contact if they want money and whose husband (Björn Kjellman) has become an exercise freak who always exercises with a cute younger neighbor.

She’s just lost her job and resents “my whole life of useless labor” (in Swedish or dubbed into English) as she ties one on and voice-over narrates her frustrations to the world.

Agneta is a serious Francophile. She adores, she narrates, all things French. But as she’s had a few, that narration is what she’s putting in an application for a job she’s seen in a classified ad.

An “au pair” is needed to “look after an older Swedish boy who needs help.” In small-town Provence. Cleaning and cooking are required. As is accompanying this “older boy” to the bar every Friday afternoon.

Sounds like heaven. Her husband laughs it off. Maybe he’s not having an affair with his exercise partner, but he’s a big source of Agenta’s oppresion. She won’t make it a week away from home, he scoffs. She LOVES France, but never tried to learn the language?

That criticism is what puts her on the next trains south.

Pan-Europeanism aside, there may have been some language barrier issues with that ad. Meeting the swarthy restaurateur who placed it, Fabian (Jérémie Covillault) underscores how out of her depth Agneta is. There are no English speakers in town, much less Swedish.

Except, that is, for the “Swedish” “boy” the ad speaks of. Einar (Claes Månsson) is an ever-shirtless bon vivant of advanced years. A Swedish expat, he lives in a former monastery, and has since the days when being gay could be illegal or called for “a cure,” thanks to the social mores of the ’60s.

He awakens each day with a shout at the sun. “Good morning, my libido!” Just the thing a menopausal mom from Volvoland wants to hear.

Einar doesn’t “need help,” he insists. And as he complains about her (Swedish) cooking and presence, he adds bits of judgemental interrogation that drive this aged gay blade to his own conclusion.

“Apparently, I’m not the one who needs ‘help.'”

What Agneta needs is a good “molting,” shedding her feathers and her Swedish obsession about “what others think of you.” Before you know it, she’s cooking French, standing up for herself, submitting to an undergarment makeover by the town’s aged undies seamstresss (Anne-Marie Ponsot), meddling in Einar’s estrangement from a relative, dunking her head in that fountain and entertaining thoughts of leaving her husband.

Unsurprising cinema like this adaptation of Emma Hamberg’s bestseller plays as comfort food to fans, and Melander and Månsson don’t make bad company in their performances. They’re just not novel enough to be surprising or particularly funny.

“Je M’appelle Agneta” takes us to Provence and lets us see that transformative dunk in the fountain. But it can’t make us feel it.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Eva Melander, Claes Månsson, Jérémie Covillault,
Anne-Marie Ponsot and
Björn Kjellman

Credits: Directed by Johanna Runevad, scripted by Isabel Nyland, Emma Hamberg and Johanna Runevad, based on a novel by Emma Hamberg.

Running time: 1:53

That cast. That director. That gut!

This October, we’ve got ourselves a Hail Mary for an Oscar nomination for the movies’ Most Valuable Player.

A grab bag of thriller tropes and action beats is tossed at another “human trafficking” thriller, this one from Spain, in “The Marked Woman.”

We’ve got an amnesiac with Jason Bourne skills. Because one never forgets one’s martial arts training. Apprently. She uses “Memento” Post-It notes to piece together clues from bits of memory. We’ve got shipping containers stuffed with human beings, “coded” bank accounts, dirty cops and a dogged loner detective soldiering on despite recent tragedy.

The film’s big takeway is that this modern day slave trade is not just a North American cinematic obsession.

Women kidnapped to be sex workers, refugees smuggled from Africa and Asia and South America into Europe or North America at their own peril, Chinese smuggled to staff (in indentured servitude) the world’s Asian eateries and the whole Trumpstein scandal — enveloping America’s and the world’s richest in a conspiracy involving pedophilia and blackmail, with Israeli intelligence involvement — all point to a global problem and the most predatory practices of “capitalism.”

Director Gabe Ibáñez and screenwriter Lara Sendim, adapting a novel by Rosa Montero and Olivier Truc, never quite get this beast up and running. It takes 24 minutes to get to the first action beat, and when our heroine (Ana Rujas) isn’t fighting, the picture struggles to hold our interest.

Rujas plays a woman found chained and tortured in a shipping container at the port of Barcelona.

We’ve met our victim as she furtively talked to another woman (Kira Miró) just after that second one has given testimony against a trafficking task force cop. under suspicion for being a mob “mole.” All this took place in Algeciras, the Spanish city adjoining Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, months earlier.

The smugglers and the cops — clean ones and dirty ones — are in a race to find and question this anonymous amnesia victim, covered in car battery torture burns, before she remembers things that will bring this crime ring down, dragging a lot of people with it.

She has “something valuable,” (in Spanish or English or subtitled), “somehing ‘they’ don’t want you to share.”

The formidable Candela Peña (“All About My Mother,””Princesses”) is the 50ish detective sergeant, fresh off a tragedy and too anxious to get back to work. She draws this “case that nobody wants” and starts to work the clues with a reluctant junior partner (Carlos Troya).

There’s DNA at the crime scene, phone records to vet and a survivor to interrogate.

Meanwhile, the accused cop from Algeciras (Pol López) elbows his way north and into the investigation, even though nobody seems to trust him. An impending Internal Affairs hearing will do that to a guy.

The under-protected survivor has to kill her way out of being kidnapped again, and we’re off on a movie that blends the implausible (the amnesiac is dragged along on stakeouts) with the cliched, all of it covered at a snail’s pace.

“The Marked Woman” finds some suspense by the third act. It’s well-cast and a couple of the fights are first rate. But if you haven’t figured this clunker out an hour before the characters onscreen do, you’re not seeing enough thrillers.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Candela Peña, Ana Rujas, Pol López, Luka Peros, Manolo Solo and
Kira Miró

Credits: Directed by Gabe Ibáñez, scripted by Lara Sendim, based on the novel by Rosa Montero and Olivier Truc. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

One of the cinema’s great talents, grand figures and a gentleman in full, Sam Neill has died. He’d fought a deadly cancer off, but that battle must have taken a terrible toll to get him to “cancer free.”

He was 78.

His iconic turn in the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” — mocked by he and his co-stars above — is what most people remember him for. I interviewed him when “Sirens” came out, a winking turn in a titillating comedy, and one or two other times in later years.

My favorite films of his might have been “Dead Calm,” but he never gave a bad performance on the big or small screen. He was in the Down Under thriller series “Untamed” last year, twinkled in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” “Rams,” “A Cry in the Dark,” ‘Children of the Revolution,” “Sleeping Dogs,” My Brilliant Career,” devilshly regal in “Restoration,” Russian in “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Piano,” and more than one “Jurassic.”

During COVID, a recovering Neill regaled Youtube viewers with a little out-of-character ukulele playing and singing, something I’d forgetten about. A lovely gesture in that “Entertainers entertain” tradition.

Neill was latterly a rancher, a winemaker (Who wasn’t?), an acclaimed memoirist, a gentle soul and a real charmer. I recall Gabriel Byrne telling me the story of how he introduced his little boy to Neill somewhere in Hollywood once. The kid was overawed, and had just one question he sputtered out about “velociraptors.”

Neill grinned, pulled out a prop raptor claw he kept on his person during his Jurassic years for just such encounters, and demonstrated to the lad how a dinosaur like that would gut a little kid like him. Straight out of the movie. And then he’d wickedly chuckle, as Byrne rememembered it, giving a child a memory that would last forever.

Don’t meet your idols, they tell you. But what a bloke, what a twinkling talent. Whar a sweetheart. He will be missed.