Movie Nation

The running tally from Friday has now firmed up at $26.8 million, including Thursday’s previews.

So now the ceiling on Dwayne Johnson’s supervillain/superhero project “Black Adam” looks like $62 million. Earlier predictions were well north of $70.

Indifferent to angry reviews didn’t boost it, but word of mouth seems OK, so it should hit this new lower mark without a problem. At least the theaters are full. Ish.

The George Clooney/Julia Roberts rom com “Ticket to Paradise” is pulling in an older audience to the tune of $16 million.

“Halloween Ends” is streaming and it is falling off over 70% in box office take on its second weekend — under $9. “Smile” will end up doing better in theaters, overall.

The things some people will go to avoid watching the damned Yankees.

Stumbling across “Eight Men Out” last night brought back memories of the film, what it represented — a turn towards mainstream by indie film icon John Sayles — and how it came off in an era when “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural” put America’s game on the screen as a backdrop for all manner of screen stories.

I remember thinking at the time that the play of the cast was about two thirds to three-quarters the speed of “real” big leaguers. It’s generally a mistake to assume athletes of the past were wholly inferior — conditioning standards notwithstanding — to their modern counterparts. But that seems to matter less, seeing it now.

Sayles found an excellent “Shoeless Joe” Jackson for this account of the 1919 World Series-fixed by gamblers crime that came to be called “The Black Sox Scandal.“D.B. Sweeney played more than one jock in his prime, and he hit left-handed (unlike the “other” Shoeless Joe in “Field of Dreams”) and carried himself like a baller. Acting workshop kids like John Cusack or Martin Sheen’s son Charlie Sheen (who’d go on to do the “Major League” comedies) and future Broadway clown/mime Bill Irwin did a decent enough job of faking it, with a little editing help.

The director was coming off a celebrated period piece, the mining town drama “Matewan,” that turned him in an “I can hire established actors now” direction. James Earl Jones was in that one, and the former TV star, Kevin Tighe (“Emergency!”) was in it, and he and Sayles’ muse David Strathairn would appear in “Eight Men Out.”

Sayles, working from an authoritative book account of the scandal, shows the “greatest team” of its era embittered by its stingy owner, Charles Comiskey (Bond “Sheriff” Clifton James), who cheated them out of promised bonuses for wiping the floor with the rest of the American League that season, and screwed-over star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (Strathairn) in particular.

Enter some gamblers with different financiers and the same agenda (Tighe, and Christopher Lloyd and Richard Edson). All they needed was the backing of gangster Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner) and the ear of one disgruntled player, first baseman Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), who’d bring on a few other players, a couple of all-important pitchers included, and the fix was on.

Sayles treats the story as a “loss of innocence” parable, with cynical, predatory owners, predatory gangsters, cynical sports journalists (historian Studs Terkel played Hugh Fullerton, and Sayles himself was the legendary Ring Lardner) and naive but corruptible players misused by one and all.

A couple of the White Sox — (Cusack’s third baseman Buck Weaver) and illiterate outfielder Shoeless Joe– were wise to the scheme and even considered part of it, but played their guts out instead of dogging it in the best-of-nine World Series with the Cincinnati Reds. As reporter Fullerton makes his suspicions known and baseball decides to get to the bottom of it, the “Eight Men Out” and part of the scheme wind up in court, a trial that tramples all over the simple ballplayers’ rights thanks to baseball’s first “commissioner,” the power-drunk Kennesaw Mountain Landis (legendary character actor John Anderson).

Sayles made a modern old fashioned baseball movie that may have lacked the gloss and grandeur of “The Natural,” but still found glory in the historical game, and tugged at the heartstrings by reviving the corniest bit of Black Sox lore, a devoted newsboy fan catching Jackson’s eye as he left the courthouse and uttering the immortal line, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The film holds up beautifully largely because of that cast. John Mahoney, later a star on “Frasier,” is the perfect pick for “Kid” Gleason, the manager who has his suspicions and is at a loss about what to do. Strathairn makes Cicotte a villain with motivations — his career was winding down, his style of pitching (spitballs and “shiners” would be banned) and the “dead ball” era was about to end, so he needed his promised bonuses.

Sweeney’s forlorn presence as Shoeless Joe anchors the picture in pathos. Cusack and Sheen show the sparks of stars in the making and Irwin and Rooker make great contrasts as an aloof “college boy” star (Eddie Collins) and a working class mug ready to pocket easy money.

Sayles makes the most of his screen time here, even crooning a made-up version of the period hit “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” with the lyrics “I’m forever blowing BALL-games.”

One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema, Sayles still turns out the occasional screenplay, but hasn’t directed a movie in nearly a decade. “Matewan” and “Eight Men Out” started a run that included such gems as “The Secret of Roan Inish,” “Lonestar,” “City of Hope” and “Men With Guns.” His more recent films include a few that didn’t work and didn’t find an audience, and “Honeydripper,” which did but which came out 15 years ago.

Watching this account of one of baseball’s darkest hours is –with a few historical quibbles — almost as good as seeing an authoritative documentary on the subject. “Eight Men Out” still stands out as one of the best baseball movies ever, and watching it again beats watching the damned Yankees or cheating Astros any day.

Rating: PG, some profanity

Cast: John Cusack, David Strathairn, D.B. Sweeney, Charlie Sheen, Michael Rooker, Bill Irwin, Studs Terkel, Christopher Lloyd, Nancy Travis, John Sayles, Maggie Renzi, John Anderson, Michael Lerner, Clifton James and John Mahoney.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Sayles, based on a book by Eliot Anisof. An Orion release now streaming and showing on various sites, PositiTV, etc.

Running time: 1:59

Interesting stunt, pairing Hoffman and his son and Spacek with her daughter for a comically curmudgeon romance.

Vertical has this one.

It’s only when you spend five minutes on your favorite search engine that it becomes obvious how much of what we in the West believe or known about the Buddhist offshoot, meditation-oriented religion Falun Gong is what the Paranoid People’s Republicans want us to believe.

They’re hellbent on labeling this newish faith-“practice” a “cult,” and hoping like Hell the outside world will conflate it with the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo “doomsday” cult that attacked Japan’s subways with a nerve agent in the mid-90s. Because, I guess, most Westerners won’t know the difference.

So pervasive is China’s communist party’s anti-Falun Gong propaganda and well-publicized efforts to wipe Falun Gong out that you barely here about China’s Uyghur genocide or policy of crushing Tibetan Buddhism and bad-mouthing the Dalai Lama.

All of which I bring up as a preamble to reviewing the terrific animated documentary “Eternal Spring,” about the brutal and sometimes fatal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, which reached a peak after some members of the religion decided to fight back against Chinese propaganda about their worldwide religious movement.

This Jason Loftus film is a part straightforward documentary, following Falun Gong member and Chinese expat Daxiong as he travels from Toronto to New York to Seoul to talk to co-religionists from his hometown, the Chinese city of Chang Chun. But Daxiong is a famous comic book illustrator and artist. So using his storyboards and drawings, the film recreates landmark events from China’s crackdown and takes us back to the late ’90s and early 2000s, letting us meet the people and in some cases hear their accounts and stories, with animated illustration.

What triggered the even-tougher crackdown, mass arrests, beatings and deaths in custody was a caper that the film recreates. Some Falun Gong adherents in Chang Chun decided they’d push back against the relentless state-controlled TV criticism and “hijack” the signal to broadcast the “news” to Chinese people that this condemned and persecuted “cult,” born in China, was Buddhism-based, and had spread all around the world.

Residents watching their evening newscast got treated to the shocking sight of people meditating and doing proscribed exercises in front of the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere. When this event is animated, we see people at home and in restaurants slack-jawed in awe at what they’re watching, the mere idea that some religious minority could fight the totalitarian state and get its message out.

That would make a feel-good caper comedy in the right hands, you’d figure. But s Daxiong and others who fled China relate in the film, they paid a staggering price for fighting back.

“They’d kill a thousand people just to catch one,” one survivor says.

The small group that pulled off this stunt helps Daxiong and Loftus recreate the labor camp “indoctrination,” the police beatings, escape attempts and the like.

And through Daxiong’s vivid and realistic drawings, rendered into mid-grade animation in assistance of a gripping story, we get to know not only persecuted Falun Gong survivors, but those who perished opposing the one-party dictatorship.

The film can be accused of imparting martyrdom on those arrested and killed because of their faith. But those doing the accusing would either being CCP mouthpieces or their online trolls and trollbot supporters.

In any event, “Eternal Spring” makes for an informative and riveting addition to the ranks of animated documentaries, films that have included “Waltz with Bashir” and “Chicago 10.” It’s an engaging way to tell a compelling story that, as Daxiong puts it, makes “art based on shared memory” when live action footage is simply not an option.

Rating: unrated, animated depictions of violence

Cast: Daxiong

Credits: Scripted by and directed by Jason Loftus. A Lofty Sky release.

Running time: 1:26

Director and co-writer Dina Amer’s film festival favorite just finished a year and a half long festival run and reaches US theaters in Nov.

This New Year’s Eve, revered screen star, Oscar winner, Knight Bachelor of the British Empire and CBE Anthony Hopkins will turn 85. So one always checks to see how many films he has in the can awaiting release when one reviews his latest.

You never know when he’ll hang it up and which film will be his last. But he has three more due out, as of this writing.

That’s worth noting in writing about “Where Are You,” his latest, just now going into limited release. Because even at this late stage of the game, Hopkins is still managing to break new ground on screen, and we’d hate for this fiasco to be his last.

“Where Are You,” a comically-pretentious, artless and yet self-consciously arty dream drama than bends into an inane missing person mystery, is the worst film of Anthony Hopkins’ career.

He’s not barely in it, more of a featured player with what I counted were three scenes or so. He gets top billing, because whatever else filmmakers Valentina De Amicis and Riccardo Spinotti don’t know, they’re not stupid enough to think that having Georgian hunk Irakli Kvirikadze, a bunch of runway beauties and Jack Nicholson’s son Ray topping the credits would sell one ticket.

Hopkins plays the mysterious “Thomas” who narrates as he scribbles away in the opening, pondering how “all the loves dance and completely disappear.”

He serves no discernable function in the narrative.

The film is about smoldering fashion photographer Nicolas (Kvirikadze) who has a new book of art photography out and sits down for a bizarre TV interview that is intercut with scenes of him in his idyllic, privileged life with his “muse,” the gorgeous and willowy Matilda (Camille Rowe).

They make love, frolic and caress each other in their seaside villa, but Matilda narrates in voice-over the trouble on the horizon. “We’ve always been a team, but the artist is nothing without his muse.”

Of course he had other loves before her. He’s even pondering temptations while they’re together, giving credence to the old saying “No matter how gorgeous she is, there’s always some dude tired of waking up next to ‘that.'”

The interviewer (Christopher Ashman) rudely challenges him with “Is this the last gasp of a dying artist?” and “Don’t you see how empty all of this is?” questions. But Nicolas has it all and can’t see it.

Then his BFF the surfer (Ray Nicholson) dies. And Matilda disappears with a “Don’t call, don’t look for me, forget me” note. Nicolas is led to believe that she’s been kidnapped. His search for her takes him to the ends of the Earth — which as U2 taught is, Joshua Tree, California.

“Where Are You” is largely a collection of beautiful people doing beautiful things in beautiful places, gorgeous women and stunning flowers, gorgeous women framed by stunning flowers. It’s all beauty without dramatic form right up to that mid-point, when melodrama — badly-written and acted melodrama — takes over. Think I’m exaggerating?

“The greatest sadness is being unable to kiss an invisible woman.”

I’m not familiar with the works of the co-writers/directors, but checking their IMDb page, this appears to be a reworking of a movie they couldn’t get released three years ago under the title “Now is Everything.” Unlike fine wines, films don’t improve simply by leaving them in a dark, cool place for a few years. And whatever they did to make this sellable didn’t “fix” it.

As for two-time Oscar-winner Sir Tony, one holds out hope for “The Son,” “Zero Contact” or “Armageddon Time,” which are rolling out over the new few weeks and months. Because nobody wants to, as Sean Connery put it, “exit with a stinker, which was “The League of Extraordinary Gentleman” in his case.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity, off-camera violence

Cast: Irakli Kvirikadze, Camille Rowe, Madeline Brewer, Angela Sarafyan, Ray Nicholson, Mickey Sumner and Anthony Hopkins.

Credits: Directed by Valentina De Amicis and Riccardo Spinotti, scripted by Valentina De Amicis, Matt Handy and Riccardo Spinotti. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

The buzz I’ve been reading suggests that DC’s “Black Adam” box office domination won’t be as robust as earlier hopes — $73 million or so — had projected. Maybe $60 I was hearing this AM.

They started Thursday previews in the afternoon (3pm) to add shows and pad its opening night numbers. It paid off as it pulled in $7.6 or so.

Friday numbers tell a more complete story, $25 million including Thursday night. Somewhere between $60 and $70? Closer to $60?.

Reviews have been mixed to sharply negative. So we’ll see. As Deadline.com reminds us, awful reviews didn’t ding “Jurassic Whatever,” and this number is a Dwayne Johnson career best.

Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s “Utama” is a stark, elegiac memento of a vanishing culture, a way of life dying as our planet’s dry places dry up completely and vulnerable populations stare down their future as climate refugees.

Telling this story with non-actors (mostly), Grisi creates a somber, sad and documentary-real eulogy for the Quechua families facing the stark choices that changing circumstances have handed them.

Each day Virginio (José Calcina) awakens at dawn to the sight of his wife Sisi (Luisa Quispe) arising to start their day. She gives him buns to take out the door as he releases the llamas that are their livelihood from the stone corral behind their stone house, stone shed and outhouse. He will graze them in desert highlands where almost nothing is still green. She will plant beans and potatoes, water them from their well, and cook for when he comes home.

But their well has gone dry. She will have to trek to the village to fill a couple of buckets. The river is but a creek, and a long way to herd the llamas for a drink. They need it, as do Sisi and Virginio.

And then there’s the worrisome tubercular hack Virginio tries to hide from his wife. They are very old. Their burdens aren’t easing. And there is no water.

At some point, the women and men of the village (Chuvica is where this was filmed) of the arid plateau gather to talk about their crisis, the fact that it hasn’t rained for a year, that their wells and their llamas are dying of thirst.

Younger people gave up on this village some while ago, not necessarily with the blessings of their families. Now, the old women say that it’s time to “migrate to the city.” The old men grouse, deny and complain in Quechua and Spanish, with English subtitles.

“If we leave, our land will be left alone in silence.”

And Sisi and Virginio’s grandson Clever (Santos Choque) has shown up, “to deliver a message” from his father, Virginio gripes — “It’s time to move to the city with us.”

Grisi does a wonderful job of getting at just how difficult this decision is. Think of every aged relative you’ve had to take the car keys from or move into assisted living. Multiply that by an entire village, people who have lived, worked and died the same way for hundreds of years, and imagine the shock of what’s happening and the reluctance to accept it.

He immerses us in a world where the menfolk even turn to the old ways to try and “solve” this problem, “sowing” the mountain with water and an animal sacrifice in the hopes of bringing the rains back.

Virginio seems the most stubborn of all, refusing advice from a grandson who “doesn’t know how to read the signs,” the ones Virginio hopes will show that “the rains come and go, and will come again.”

The acting is natural, unaffected. And that goes for the storytelling as well. The first music we hear in this silent landscape is downbeat and dire. It underscores how the “solutions” presented here solve nothing.

The life disruption is borne through gritted teeth, a determination to hold out just a little longer, to make it to the finish line (death) before the other inevitability becomes unavoidable. And as we read between the lines, we can envision older generations worldwide facing this ugly future with the same denial, obstinance and dismay, a “change” that no one wants forced on everyone by the actions and inactions of a few.

Grisi has made a simple parable for life on Earth and the consequences the most remote people face from climate change, and a film that’s worth rooting for as “Utama” is Bolivia’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature competition at the Oscars.

Rating: unrated

Cast: José Calcina, Luisa Quispe and Santos Choque

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:28

This Feb. 23 release also stars Joel Courtney.

I’m still trying to get my head around Grammer’s presence in what appears to be a faith based film. He’s done hardcore right wing political pictures before, but now he’s found Jesus?

You don’t have to know the guy’s tortured history to find that a big LOL, but it helps.

Glancing at other reviews, “Meet Cute” can definitely be labeled “a mixed bag” and “not for everyone,” although one is sorely tempted to ask some of these reviewing schlumps “where the bad woman/bad man touched you and ruined your capacity for joy” based on their high dudgeon.

Here’s what I got out of this “time travel” “50 First Dates/Groundhog Day” riff. Kaley Cuoco is a superheroine. Her superpower? She humanized and made me give a damn about the professionally-annoying Pete Davidson for like, the first time ever.

As a woman who hits on “stranger” Pete in an outer-boroughs sports bar, tells him “I come from the future” and that she’s been taking her shot at him, over and over again, via a time-travel tanning bed behind a Chinese American nail salon, Cuoco runs through her perky repertoire.

She is cute and beguiling, forward and impulsive, impatient and “scary Kaley” over the course of this romantic comedy about loneliness, “messiness” and “our pain is what shapes us.”

Yeah, it’s a time travel rom-com, “Safety Not Guaranteed” meets the Cinematic Canon of Drew Barrymore. But there’s a little heavy lifting going on. All you have to do is carry half the weight yourself.

As Sheila, Cuoco shows up at the bar dressed like an Iowa librarian and drinks and swears like a battle-weary Queens queen. And gun-shy Gary — “We both have old timey names!” — is helpless in her hands.

But as she bowls him over with a dinner invitation, pretends to let him pick from a collection of adjacent Indian eateries and listens to his “a real ‘Sophie’s Choice’ kind of decision,” she laughs and says “I love when you make that joke,” and gives away the game.

Time to “Come clean,” about meeting him every night like this, the sarcastic manicurist (Deborah S. Craig, funny) who lets her time-travel in her tanning bed, and the fact that she knows what he drinks (Old Fashioned) and what he’s going to say…because she’s gone back 24 hours to reset this “perfect” night with a “perfect” guy, an endless “Meet Cute” first date.

Over the course of this Alex Lehmann film (the Duplass-scripted “Blue Jay” was his), Sheila will stumble from perky and bubbly to dark, testy and broken. And poor Gary might never be the wiser, because every night is a “Meet Cute” first date. It’s only when Sheila starts trying to “fix” this insecure, fragile, just-got-out-of-a-relationship loner who folds up like a wet napkin at the merest hint of a mistake, that Gary grows an edge and the “pain” that he’s been through becomes an issue. As does hers.

The sitcom-polished Cuoco barrels through her one-liners, “living life to the fullest, just like ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County,” and makes the cautionary slip “I’m about to ruin your life” land.

Davidson dials down his Dead End Pete Persona, cleans up from his usual “Staten Island stoner” look and ably conveys Gary as a deer in Sheila’s headlights for the early scenes, and the angry, more assertive jerk her “changes” turn him into later.

The couple delivers real pathos in the third act, and for all the comic pop of her manic patter and his strangely subdued responses, it’s Craig’s deadpan manicurist who delivers most of the laugh-out-loud moments here.

Kevin Corrigan as a sympathetic/flirty bartender and Rock Kohli, as an Indian restaurant street hawker with insights into relationships — that he might have read from a Chinese fortune cookie — provide solid support.

Not all of screenwriter Noga Pnueli’s ideas work, and some — how one deal’s with an alternate “me” in the same timeline — are tonally off.

But “Meet Cute” makes for an offbeat spin on its titular rom-com convention, and Cuoco and Davidson give it just enough heart to pay off, something I attribute to Kaley C. because on his own, Davidson can be funnier, but he’s usually as warm as refrigerated cod.

It’s nothing we’d call great, but in an era when no one seems to “get” how to make a rom-com work, it’s bad either.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, adult themes

Cast: Kaley Cuoco, Pete Davidson, Deborah S. Craig, Rock Kohli and Kevin Corrigan

Credits: Directed by Alex Lehmann, scripted by Noga Pnueli. A Peacock release.

Running time: 1:29