Movie Nation

An eight year absence from the screen, a set of new stars and a confused, stumbling “leading up to” prequel narrative didn’t dampen enthusiasm for those “children killing children” “Hunger Games.” Much.

Reviews were mixed, with some critics plainly hitting the cineplex bar before endorsing this violent YA yawner, but the franchise is back. Ish.

A decent Thursday night and nearly $20 million Friday suggest “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” will do very nicely indeed, opening well under $50 million. Of course, the earlier films in the franchise often out-performed that.

You can spin that, saying that “The stars couldn’t promote it” for a month prior to release owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike, but the young stars are lesser knowns, and I’m not sure Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage and the the hilarious Jason Schwartzman are selling tickets by turning up on Fallon, Colbert and Kimmel.

Anyway you cut it, that’s less than half what the “Mockingjay Part 2” opened with in 2015. Well under half. Is the “franchise” reborn? Maybe not.

Rachel Zegler’s still destined to be a big deal, not yet a big deal herself. But getting her out singing on some TV shows might boost it next week. The film could have legs, and if it “sings,” that’ll be on her.

Speaking of singing, those animated “Trolls” are back with a narcoleptic sequel, “Trolls Band Together.” All the bubbly singing and voicing of Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Zooey Deschanel and some newcomers can’t exactly make this “new.” But it’s very very small children.

Chances are, fans of the first film have aged out pabulum and this pablum. A $28 million” opening for that one, a decent take, nothing special. Treat the kids, and yourself to a nap as this “story” plays out.

“The Marvels,” a female superheroine-centered comic book adaptation featuring a fanboy-shunning ($46 million opening) star, is falling off a cliff on its second weekend. It’s lighthearted and girl powered and empowering, and still only seems headed to just over $9 million this weekend. Ouch. a 79% “Five Nights at Freddy’s” sized fall-off.

I still say this is more proof of comic book fatigue/over-exposure than anything else. “Spider-Man” is immune to this. “Dr. Strange,” too. But the lack of star power is hammering the Marvel-come-latelies, and the DCU seems doomed to serious shrinkage. Move most of this content over to streaming.

Eli Roth’s return to Big Screen Horror didn’t do a damned thing for “Thanksgiving,” a seriously bloody/seriously silly horror comedy that gets gassed as it spills its guts. It could clear $10 million, very low opening, all things considered.

You’d think McDreamy’s fans and reviews generally more enthusiastic than mine would have helped. Nah.

That bounce has gone out of Taika Waititi’s step these days, as “Next Goal Wins,” a sputtering comedy that tries to make Michael Fassbender funny, is bombing. On a lot of screens, too. Just under $3 million for this Samoan soccer story.

“Priscilla” is heading towards a Sofia Coppola record in box office take. It’s already her second biggest hit, with a ways to go to catch “Lost in Translation.”

When more data comes in, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and maybe even Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” will do more business than this one this weekend.

“The Blind Swordsman” is figure of movie and myth who first came to life as a hero of a post-World War II novel by Japanese writer Kan Shimozawa. That sightless samurai popped up in Japanese films, with variations turning up on in other Asian cinema, Western TV, in “Star Wars: Rogue One” and “John Wick 4” as played by Chinese American martial arts star Donnie Yen. Even Denzel Washington’s “Book of Eli” is a variation on a “blind swordsman” theme.

The new Chinese thriller “Eye for an Eye: Blind Swordsman,” is another reminder that the character sort of belongs to the world now. But any slice-and-dice cinema fan knows there’s only one “real” “blind swordsman.” He’s a wandering masseuse in feudal Japan, and his name is Zatoichi.

In “Eye for an Eye,” this Chinese swordsman is named “Blind Cheng,” and he’s a “ghostkiller,” a bounty hunter in the Tang Dynasty. Cheng (Miao Xie) is a wandering grump, collecting bounties on malefactors the Dali Temple commissions him to bring in to the authorities.

What’s wrong with this suspect?

“I was afraid he might run,” he grumbles, in Mandarin with Engliish subtitles. “I broke his arms and legs.”

We meet him running afoul of the proprietor and henchmen of a gambling house — bad news for the bad guys. Later in the film, he finds himself entangled in a feud between families as a wine merchant maiden about to be married (Weiman Ga) barely survives her wedding party, after her rough customer
(Haosen Zhang) brother’s arrival invites the worst sort of wedding crashers.

Our swordsman is droll about his “special skills.”

“I have really good hearing.”

And he’s just as droll putting down a would-be challenger, grabbing the man’s blade out of his scabbard, noting “Your sword’s too sharp,” and advising the shocked goon to “be careful. You might hurt yourself.”

But as badass as the character always is, no matter what culture he emerges from, the action beats here tend to let “Eye for an Eye” down. The blur of blades and swirling capes don’t impress, the slo-mo punches and wirework martial arts pro forma and the odds never stack up so great that we ever fear for this fury’s safety.

Binjia Yang’s thriller is short and quick enough, with good production values and a great look. Martial arts period pieces always look cool in the snow. But it lacks the Spaghetti Western grace notes and tension that a picture with stand-offs and rising stakes and towering villains would have provided.

Miao Xie is quietly charismatic as the lead, but this never feels like more than an inferior Chinese copy of a Japanese classic.

Rating: unrated, sword-slicing violence

Cast: Miao Xie, Weiman Ga, Hao Xiang, Ben Liu and Haosen Zhang

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Bingjia Yang. A Hi-YAH!/Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:14

Walt Disney famously said for us to “remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.” But as omnipresent as mouse ears are in Disney’s identity, it is the sentimental “When you wish upon a star” that is the company’s aural identity, played under the ever-evolving logo that introduces every Disney animated film.

So it was only natural that Walt Disney Animation should try to do something with that “dream” of stars to wish upon and concoct a filmed fairy tale out of it.

But “Wish” is a fantasy musical of unfulfilled wishes, starting with “I wish this children’s animated film had been better.”

The market-researched/demographics-obsessed script is nothing that would have made the cut when the Brothers Grimm were publishing their fairytales. The animation has a polished blandness — every CGI film from every animation studio is starting to look the same. And while the Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice tunes are pleasant enough, giving stars Ariana DeBose and even Chris Pine moments to shine, there is be nothing here that will replace your children chirping along to “Let It Go” in the ride to preschool.

The Mediterranean island Kingdom of Rosas was founded by the benevolent, wish-loving/wish-granting wizard Magnifico, a ruler who keeps the peace and keeps his people happy with the prospect of having their fondest wish fulfilled.

It could be a life-defining wish, “the one that makes you who you are.”

But “most” do not get their wish, Magnifico (Chris Pine) reminds his subjects, and Asha (Ariana DeBose), who has an interview with the King for a job as his apprentice. Little flashes of the guy’s personality — a hint of vanity, a touch of megalomania, a temper — turn this loyal “cares too much” teen who wants to work for him/learn from him into something of a rebel.

Asha sees the unfulfilled wishes, hoarded in floating in bubbles in the dome of the observatory in Magnifico’s castle, and wonders why everyone shouldn’t get their wish, which are doled out once a year.

Magnifico’s touchy “I decide what everyone deserves!” confirms her fears about him.

And she sees the trap in this king’s contract with his people. Everybody gives Magnifico their wish on their eighteenth birthday, and then — by decree and by his magic — they forget it. Forever. Unless he later grants it and lets their wish come true, provided that it’s a wish that would be “good for Rosas.”

Why shouldn’t we remember our dreams and cling to them? Why would the preening monarch care if we remember, if the whole “wish coming true” bond between them is on the up-and-up?

And then a wishing star comes down from the heavens, giving Asha power to ask questions and organize her friends to resist, and granting the wish of speech to her ever-bleating baby goat, Valentino.

Oddly, when he speaks the goat sounds like Alan Tudyk impersonating Sir Ian McKellen.

Early Spanish touches in the music make one hope the score and the story will settle into something we can connect with a culture and its traditions. But that’s just part of the film’s all-inclusive “let every viewer see someone who ‘represents’ her or him” engineering.

The kingdom is unobtrusively, naturally diverse — until you notice the “types” parked in the beauty-in-braids Asha’s posse — a female Asian cook with a limp, a very short guy, the tall and skinny chap, a Black woman, etc.

“Frozen” writer Jennifer Lee and episodic TV drama/thrillers screenwriter (!?) Allison Moore are credited with this script. But a cursory understanding of the animation process and Disney’s corporate culture does more in explaining how “Wish,” an almost laugh-free and generally joyless project, made its way through Disney’s process, signed-off on by marketing folk with market research in their hearts, and no flair at all for “Once upon a time” tales.

Moments of “Wish” come off — DeBose’s big ballads, Pine’s delicious take on an “I’m bad” (semi) show-stopper.

But the story is off, the heart is missing and the laughs aren’t there. Even if you excuse “Wish” with the usual “It’s a Disney cartoon for VERY young children (Zygotes?)” this picture stands out among the Mouse House’s 62 animated features as one of the most pointless of them all.

And hearing that evocative, emotional “Wish Upon a Star” playing under the flashier-than-ever “Disney-100 (years)” logo that opens the picture just rubs Jiminy Cricket in the wound.

Jiminy and signed-off on

Rating: PG for thematic elements and mild action.

Cast: The voices of Arianna DeBose, Chris Pine, Alan Tudyk, Victor Garber, Jennifer Kumiyama, Niko Vargas and Angelique Cabral

Credits: Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn, scripted by Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:32

Sony works works works its Spidery side of the Marvel street, adding this to “Spider-Man” in all its incarnations (and “Venom” too).

A paramedic who starts “having visions” and takes a turn to the superheroic.

I like the way the trailer goes all “Let’s EXPLAIN” the unexplainable, “Spider-Man” origin story style.

Silly, but it’s worked every other time.

BTW, if Marvel is in its over-exposed/”Jump the Shark” moment, you had to figure Dakota Johnson would be the dead giveaway.

Feb. 14?

A film festival favorite from Searchlight pictures, this dreamy drama is about meeting someone, and having that trigger what appears to be a reconnection with parents who died years before but are back — frozen in time.

This trailer makes Andrew Haigh’s film, based on a Taichi Yamada novel, seemvery screenwriterly (Andrew Scott’s character, the one doing the falling in love and parental bonding, is a screenwriter) and romantic.

Paul Mescal, Jamie Ball and Claire Foy also the stars of this of Awards Season contender, due out in January.

“Forever” is a Swedish coming-of-age-in-soccer drama that breaks just enough of the conventions of the genre to feel new and novel.

There is a third act “Big Game,” but is takes a back seat to the human drama playing out between two 15 year old girls. There are personality clashes and “tests,” but they aren’t all “character/team building.” And there are a lot of decisions that, made rashly or rationally, don’t always turn out “for the best.

Kia and Mila are 14 year old besties when we meet them, teens who do almost everything together, including playing soccer for the 14 year-old girls’ club in their hometown of Linden.

They’re both good enough at the game to shout “You’re the BEST” (in Swedish), “YOU’RE the best” at each other as they bicycle home after every practice.

Kia’s supportive parents have Mila over for dinner, drive them both to practices and matches whenever Mila — who is often late — shows up. But Kia (Judith Sigfridsson) is almost 15, a good student and noticing boys.

But Mila (Flutra Cela) to a single mom, a Serbian immigrant (Eleftheria Gerofoka) who nags her about grades, excelling in the Swedish language and just doing her damned homework. Mom no longer has to remind her of “what we went through to get you out of Kosovo.” Milandra has that memorized.

The problem is, Mila doesn’t “give a f–k” about school or any that. Football is what she studies, on the pitch or in her room, manipulating the ball, polishing her footwork. And having rage and impulse control issues, she isn’t shy about sharing that opinion LOUDLY with anybody who crosses her.

When we see her play, we get it. There isn’t much in the way of special effects needed in showing us the girl’s got game — dazzling footwork, cultivated instincts, stamina, a desire to excell and star built on fierce competitiveness.

When Lollo (Agnes Lindström Bolmgren), a former pro and star of the Swedish national team shows up and offers to take over coaching the club, everybody’s thrilled, and Mila figures she and Kia are one step closer to realizing their dream.

But the headstrong, ball-hogging star is destined to clash with the establish-authority/instill-discipline coach. This will test the team, the coach, the players and the Mila and Kia’s bond.

Is it “their” dream, after all?

The Jessica Jankert script tells this tale almost wholly from Mila’s point of view, and that’s tricky. The girl is so focused she’s scary, and obnoxious.

“Benched” because she refuses to pass the ball? “But I’m the f—king BEST!?”

Forced to do laps for every minute she’s late? Bring it on. Forced to realize teammates don’t necessarily relish her as a teammate? She’ll play one against the entire team.

An injury due to her ego, a near ejection because of her temper and sense of grievance, shoes she needs more than the rich swell who owns them, she is a model of self-serving behavior living through an undisciplined childhood.

Her rage is “your worst enemy” and her “greatest asset.” Lollo sees great things, and maybe personal advancement in this teenager on the first club she’s ever coached.

Cela’s performance is so grating and rebellious and recognizable that any parent watching this should marvel, and be thankful you’re not raising this jerk. Cela makes her as convincingly testy, self-absorbed and lost off the field as on it.

I like the way it is implied that Lollo wants to force the submissive femininity out of her girls, bring out their aggression and (it is implied) make themselves less Swedish. The success of the Swedish national women’s team is a testament to that sort of club level training and indoctrination.

I also like the way adults and kids make bad decisions in this film. And consquences might be delayed, or forgotten altogether. Because if you want to make it into professional sports, everything else — family priorities and moral upbringing included — is going to take a back seat.

“Forever” is still formulaic, still a bit soft in its cause-and-effect behaviors, many of which seem to lack consequences. But it sits comfortably above other less engaging coming-of-age girls’ soccer stories like “Her Best Move” and “Gringa.”

And as how “Next Goal Wins” is more of a comedy than a “soccer movie” (and not particularly funny either), “Forever” gets my vote as the best soccer movie out there at the moment.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Flutra Cela, Judith Sigfridsson, Eleftheria Gerofoka,
Mustapha Aarab, Joel Forslund-Nylén and Agnes Lindström Bolmgren

Credits: Directed by Anders Hazelius, scripted by Jessika Jankert. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Before you write a script or even a plot, you have a “conceit,” and before you can make your movie, you have a “pitch.” And it’d better be a killer.

That’s all “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is — a conceit and a pitch without much of a movie as a result.

It a slasher thriller re-imagining of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a clever-enough conceit. Let’s see what life would be like if the girl who saved her family and her town from a Nut with a Knife “had never been born.”

That idea was enough to attract two “names” to the cast — Justin Long and Joel McHale. And that pitch, with them attached, got this half-baked project before the cameras and before it was fully baked into something that might be worth watching.

Jane Widdup of “Yellowjackets” plays winsome Winnie, perky Angel Falls High School junior with a boyfriend, a passion for photography, loving parents (McHale and Erin Boyes) and a gay star quarterback brother, Jimmy (Aiden Howard).

Dad works for the local rich guy/mayor (Long) who is gambling it all on a big development he just HAS to pull off. That’s how an old homeowner and holdout winds up dead, along with his granddaughter, Winnie’s bestie Carol (Hanna Huggins).

But plucky Winnie saves herself, her brother and the city from the white masked and cowled angel dolled up like the ornament on the top of the downtown Christmas tree. She kills and unmasks the mayor himself, a guy willing to murder to save his business.

One year later, everybody’s “moved on,” and that’s a tad maddening. Nobody, especially Winnie’s FAMILY, remembers and appreciates her Jamie Lee acts that saved the place? As she stares out into the Northern Lights, she wishes she’d never been born.

Just like that, she gets her wish. I love the “explanation” for this bit of supernaturalism. The lights are “a spirit of someone who died violently.”

They didn’t cover that in my Welcome to Alaska, Thanks for Moving to North Dakota brochures.

The Hell that Angel Falls has turned into is more surreal than realistic. That “Angel” is still going around knifing people, something the mayor’s dopey brother (Sean Depner), now the police chief, seems unconcerned about.

The mayor’s development went forward. And that alternate-timeline party Winnie shows up for is drugged-up and out of control. Nobody recognizes her, not even the town teen “weirdo” Bernie (Jess McLeod) she rashly dissed at the same sort of party one year ago.

But friendless Bernie might believe her, might buy in to her fantastical story, and could have some ideas about how to set this all right.

Director Tyler MacIntyre makes decent use of some wintry Vancouver locations and the script works in a bit of old downtown cinema into the action — a place to girl-bond and battle the bad guy.

But the narrative’s bend from reality to surreal is abrupt and head-scratching, a great leap beyond other “It’s a Wonderful Life” parodies, like the one in “Back to the Future II.”

Treating the entire enterprise as a blood-spattered goof doesn’t pay off, with only Long reading the screenplay that way. His choice to play this mayor as a gladhanding fraud with fake teeth and Dustin Hoffman’s affected voice from “Tootsie” is more curious than amusing.

The slashings are reasonably alarming even as the deaths are perfunctory. The murderers seem more or less properly motivated by the switches in the plot from one “life” to the next. But Winnie’s timeline-to-timeline “change” has an abrupt and weird lifestyle leap in it. The picture never shakes the feeling that this is all a hallucination or dream, one that looks like a made-for-TV movie.

“Yellowjackets” fanatics and horror devotees will excuse a lot, but “It’s a Wonderful Knife” doesn’t just slash through our expectations about what we’re going to see. It stumbles in managing the basics, starting with “Must make some kind of sense, surreal or otherwise.

Rating: bloody violence, drug use and profanity

Cast: Jane Widdup, Jess McLeod, Aiden Howard, Hanna Huggins, Erin Boyes, Katharine Isabelle, Justin Long and Joel McHale.

Credits: Directed by Tyler MacIntyre, scripted by Michael Kennedy. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:27

So he needs the guy’s ex wife to ID…the rest of the body so’s he can get paid?

A hitman that long in the tooth is going to forget things.

Not sure if and when this will see the light of day.

Is it just me, or

are all these CGI animated kids’ films starting to look alike?

The style, the color palette, the look of the characters, it’s a lot harder to tell Disney from Dreamworks from Illumination from Sony from Netflix, etc.

“Classic” traditional animation, done well, would stand out like an emerald in a sea of shiny zirconia right about now.

But this looks decent enough — Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine and Alan Tudyck voice the leads.

“Wish” opens next Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving.

No contest, right?

An Iron Man (ish?) competition involving a hyper-competitive guy and his team picks up a stray along the way.

Hankies come out all over. Bear Grylls cameo to follow.