Movie Nation

I’ve been arguing with people online all week about building up box office expectations for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first big musical, “In the Heights.”

It’s also showing on HBO Max, and TV is a good place for it.

It’s a watchable film lacking stars, breakout tunes, lump on the throat moments, real drama or much that would bolster its appeal. Inclusive, a cute moment or two and great dancing can’t overcome those missing selling points. And selling the Dickens out of it can’t overcome that lack of pop and pizazz.

It always looked like “Rent” and that’s how it opened $11.4 million. Jon Chu’s directed an underwhelming movie that this time, audiences ignored.

I just caught “Peter Rabbit 2” and while Sony can be pitied for not getting it out on Easter, last year and this year, judging from the joyless Sequel they should be happy with $10.4 million.

New openings let down aside, it’s
not like “A Quiet Place 2” ran away with the weekend. $11.65 million.

https://www.boxofficepro.com/weekend-box-office-in-the-heights-peter-rabbit-2-a-quiet-place-part-ii/

It rallies for an almost-boffo finale, with James Bond movie rescues and a James Bond Astin Martin — if spies ever drove convertibles.

But “Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway,” is a curiously perfunctory affair, a laughless comedy based on the Beatrix Potter animal darlings of scores of dainty little books created when the world was less cynical, in which the new “Bea” (Rose Byrne) wrestles with selling out to Big Business.

So in a meta sense, it’s a kids’ movie about the cynicism and salesmanship that goes into producing “children’s content.” Hilarious, and ever-so kid-friendly? Not bloody likely.

Bea and rabbit-leery, screams-like-a-teen-girl Thomas (Domhnall Gleeson) marry in the opening scene, in which Peter (voiced by James Corden) fantasizes about lashing out at his former tormenter Thomas at the merest hint of being “triggered.”

As a new publisher (David Oyelowo) woos the newlyweds with promises of riches, and the input of “marketing types” on Bea’s second book, Peter decides to follow his impulse — as usual — and run off to the city.

That’s how he falls in with some artful animal dodgers and their own rabbit Fagin, voiced by “Walking Dead” regular Lennie James. Peter wants to prove he’s not a “goody goody,” that he’s a “baddy baddy.” So naturally he enlists his old farm friends to help with The Big Farmer’s Market Heist.

The slapstick has one moment that made me chuckle, a clever Gleeson-and-stuntman stunt that involves chasing the family Land Rover down a hill. “Screaming like a teenage girl?” That’s a given.

Other laughs are very hard to come by, with the story turning dark as Peter and pals are nabbed to be sold as pets, and we look out from inside the cage as they do, at the horrors of clumsy or ill-intentioned human “owners” who have their lives in their hands.

“THIS is what it’s like to be a pet?”

Little kids will appreciate the drink-seltzer-and-belch gag. Adults will get a chuckle out of a Sony production taking an amusing cheap shot at Disney. Other than that…

COVID-delayed or not, this production has a half-hearted/half-arsed feel, something Corden’s Peter all but admits in the curtain call. Why reward them for that?

MPA Rating: PG for some rude humor and action

Cast: The voices of James Corden, Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki, Lennie James, with Domhnall Gleeson, Rose Byrne and David Oyelowo.

Credits: Directed by Will Gluck, script by Patrick Burleigh and Will Gluck, based on the books of Beatrix Potter. A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:33

People asking me “Any movies you’re looking forward to this summer?” can stop asking.

My friends know when I’m Being sarcastic.

Not Disney. Not Pixar. 20th Century Studios releases this defective robot pal comedy this fall.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that the curious, expressive and exceptionally smart husky may be the dog who truly “gets” us, and will most likely be the first canine to carry on a conversation with her or his human companion.

One is reminded of this eventuality in the new film “Siberia,” when our soul-and-psyche searching hero Willem Dafoe beds his team down for the night in a cave, where figures from his past and his nightmares visit him by firelight.

As the naked dwarf woman labors into the light in her wheelchair and utters “I just wanted to save the best. I just wanted to save the best,” we cut to the pack, staring at her and Dafoe in a quizzical way any critic or film fan will recognize. Their expression says the same thing I’ve heard shouted in cinemas or film festivals, and not always shouted by me.

“WTF Abel Ferrara?” they unmistakably wonder. “W? T? F?”

Dafoe has become the muse for the “Bad Lieutenant/King of New York” director and once-and-always bad-boy of American indie cinema, Ferrara. We’re allowed to read “director’s alter ego” into Dafoe’s performances here and in “Tommaso,” and “4:44 Last Day On Earth,” and maybe in “Go Go Tales,” if not in “Passolini.” The fact that Dafoe’s character, Clint, literally faces off with his own alter ego, and the ghost of his surgeon father (also Dafoe) in this film tends to underline that viewers’ “permission” to leap to conclusions.

So what is Ferrara putting on the screen that he might be better off telling to his psychotherapist this time?

Dafoe’s Clint is in a sort of mental Siberia, a loner running a bar “in the far north,” Canada we’re told (it’s an Italian co-production, so no, the Alps). He serves Eskimos who tell him their drink order and we assume how their day went and what not in untranslated Inuit dialects.

A Russian grandmother babbles in untranslated Russian before showing off her granddaughter’s nude, pregnant torso, which Clint reacts to in ways that suggest this is his doing.

An ex-wife vision here, a grizzly attack nightmare there, Clint has issues that go beyond knocking back shots with his customers.

Ferrara’s Clint gives an ex-wife and a child the same trite rationalization that thousands of marriage counselors have rolled their eyes at and 400 middling playwrights and screenwriters have recycled before him.

“The only thing I’m guilty of is loving you too much.”

He’s come to this remote place to get away from civilization, although this could be all in his mind. When he hitches his team of huskies up for a run through the snow, past some sort of home invasion/mass execution, into that cave and eventually to an oasis in a north African desert, that “in his head” notion seems on surer ground.

I’ve found Ferrara’s cryptic, navel-gazing bent of late both tedious and yet fascinating in what he’s trying to get across about where his head’s at when he makes this or that self-reflective film.

“Siberia” is gorgeous to look at, taking in bits of Inuit culture and id/ego psychobabble and the forlorn romance of “escaping” civilization, running a bar in the middle of nowhere.

Clint arguing with himself over “You don’t live in the world” seems to be the point, assuming that we’re meant to find one. There’s a whole “search” for “the black arts” bit (Simon McBurney plays an alleged magician) that feels like a tangent a filmmaker who never met a tangent he didn’t pursue might have avoided.

Still, even though I didn’t much care for the movie, and took up the huskies’ question for them more than once — “W.T.F. Ferrera?” — I can say I didn’t mind the “escape” of it all. We can leave the “solutions” to this existential crisis on film to the shrinks, if indeed this ballsy, indulgent head-case of a filmmaker ever bothers to see one.

MPA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity/graphic nudity, some disturbing violence, and bloody images 

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Fabio Pagano, Valentina Rozumenko and Simon McBurney

Credits: Directed by Abel Ferrera, script by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois, A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Former photojournalist and cinematographer Liam Le Guillou brings a lot of Werner Herzog drama and breathless, narrated suspense to his feature documentary debut, “An Unknown Compelling Force.”

“Nature calls the shots out here,” he emphasizes, speaking of the snowy Ural mountains above the Siberian Arctic Circle. He went there to solve a mystery he stumbled across on Google, and he isn’t shy about striking just the right Herzogian Heroic pose and tone as he does it.

“I don’t like ‘We don’t know’ as an answer!”

What got his attention was a sort of Soviet era “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” only not fiction. A group of mostly-student hikers, members of a university “explorer’s club,” died near a peak known as “The Dead Mountain” in 1959. The deaths, investigated at the time, were “mysterious,” no matter what the Soviet authorities said.

The hikers were ill-clothed and a great distance from their tent, in sub-zero temperatures. The tent was sliced up, and the victims had various evident and even bizarre injuries. There was evidence of radioactivity on some of their clothes. They’d been taking photos on this trip, one was of a fuzzy image of a two-legged figure in the distance, and in a “Grizzly Man” touch, the last shot was a blur of bright lights, seemingly in the night sky.

This is the famous Dyatlov Pass Incident, with a piece of little-visited geography named for the leader of their expedition, one of the victims — Igor Dyatlov. It’s been the subject of many a Russian “Unsolved Mystery/In Search Of…” program, and even a mini-series.

As Le Guillou asks around, various Russian authorities on the incident suggest he come see for himself and take an outsider’s look at this mystery. So he does.

Was it an avalanche, mass hysteria, an animal attack or an assault by a “Soviet Yeti” (abominable snowman)? Was it aliens, or a military cover-up of something the “tourists” saw? Did the hikers turn on each other? Might the indigenous tribespeople living in this remote part of the world have had a hand in what happened?

Every scenario, Le Guillou finds, has its backers, even the wackier ones. As he and a camera operator make their own trek — as part of a team — to the still-unpopulated area where this occurred, he and we get a feeling for how hostile and unforgiving that environment remains, and how difficult it will be to find answers to a 60 year-old mystery.

Interviewing Russian authors, “Dyatlov Society” fanatics and a criminologist, and an American coroner and a retired FBI agent, Le Guillou revisits the case, looking at files released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, hunting for inconsistencies, hints of a cover-up directed from higher up, sealing up blind alleys as he seeks new interpretations of the facts-as-we-know-them.

Using extensive still photos, both from the hikers and the later “official” search and discovery of their bodies, readings from the autopsy, investigation and even from the hiker’s field diaries, the film personalizes the young victims, shares (censored) post-mortem photos, hears from people in the original search party and scholars studying those indigenous people as Le Guillou tries to shoot down hypotheses, one by one.

The filmmaker/narrator maintains our interest in this admittedly fascinating forensic documentary with stretches of breathless narration, underscored with dramatic music. Le Guillou’s odd Anglo-European (he’s British) accent is rendered more Werner Herzog-like with his cadences, his earnest way of leaning in to emphasize danger from the elements or…finding the REAL truth.

Reading the Wikipedia summary of the latest turns and findings on the case — which has been reopened and closed and reopened again — you can see that although our filmmaker is sure he’s got the answer, others are still seeing evidence pointing in other directions.

“An Unknown Compelling Force,” which takes its title from the original case’s noncommittal conclusion, makes a case for “case closed,” backed up by experts and the filmmaker’s entertaining sense of dramatic hype. Has he solved it? Watch it and see.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic scene photos

Cast: Liam Le Guillou, Svetlana Oss, Ken Holmes, Mick Fennerty, Natalia Sakharova, Yuri Kuntsevich, others

Credits: Directed, written and narrated by Liam Le Guillou. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:47

Like the Italian footballer who is its subject, “Baggio: The Divine Ponytail” leaves one feeling unsatisfied, as if we’ve seen a life and a movie that are incomplete.

A biography of one of Italy’s most beloved soccer stars, but one who never took The Big Brass Ring (winning the World Cup), “Ponytail” sets out to chart his many journeys — professional, psychological and spiritual. Letizia Lamartire’s 90+ minute film doesn’t really do justice to any of them.

We’re left with a perpetually poker-faced Baggio (Andrea Arcangeli) with “please my unencouraging father” issues, an injury-and-confidence-plagued star who takes up Buddhism as a way of coping, and a legend frustrated by the asterisk attached to his storied career.

The film poorly dramatizes his youthful embrace of Buddha, thanks to a proselytizing record shop owner (Riccardo Goretti) and leaves hints of what he might have gotten from a later spiritual advisor (Thomas Trabacchi) without sinking its teeth into the subject.

Was the filmmaker, like Catholic Italy, keeping Buddhism at arm’s length? The film doesn’t even make much of his adoption of his signature look — the ponytail that he wore in dreads even as he turned grey over his decades of playing.

His stern, remote father (Andrea Pennacchi) was the one the boy of three promised to atone for Italy’s loss in the 1970 World Cup by winning “the World Cup, against Brazil, for you” some day. That’s a big goal, and Dad never let him forget it. But “tough love” was his way.

“You’re not better than your brother,” he reminds the 18 year-old who’d signed the biggest contract ever seen. “He busts his ass at the factory!”

His home life with his first and only love, Adreina (Valentina Bellè) is glimpsed, but little more that that.

The right word for Arcangeli’s performance, which sets the tone for the film, is “mopey.”

The little snatches of soccer recreated for the screen are half-speed (there are more shots of fans at home or in bars watching the games on TV) and the Baggio Arcangeli gives us is melodramatic — “If you love me, kill me,” he tells his parents after his first (teen) injury. He is also nonplussed at his World Cup coach (Antonio Zavatteri) who is “crazy” for not exploiting his open-field “skills in dribbling” and misuses his star, who is, he assures Baggio, “like Maradona (of Argentina), fundamental to the team.” But his “temper” is more Buddhist resignation than fury.

Which is to say this isn’t so much an unflattering portrait of a great “artist” of the soccer pitch, as one that isn’t the least bit flattering either.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Andrea Arcangeli, Valentina Bellè, Thomas Trabacchi, Andrea Pennacchi, Riccardo Goretti and Antonio Zavatteri

Credits: Directed by Letizia Lamartire, script by Ludovica Rampoldi and Stefano Sardo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Pity the fools who can’t appreciate the magnificent mayhem of “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” the screaming, bustierre-busting glories of Salma Unleashed.

Whatever middling “charms” the carnage-packed caper “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” wrung out of pairing up Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson in 2017, casting Salma Hayek seriously ups the comic ante in this slaughterhouse of silliness. SERIOUSLY ups the ante.

And you can’t cast Salma without bringing in her Brother from a Spanish Mother, Antonio Banderas.

Stuff them all into a veritable travelogue of scenic Europe — Trieste to Tuscany, Zagreb to “Capri, like the pants” — with epic melees of stunning stuntwork, all breathlessly shot and cut together by director Patrick Hughes’ team, a “CAR CHASE” or three, often a called-shot by Reynolds’ bodyguard-in-therapy character, and you’ve got unfiltered, uninhibited popcorn pic escape, albeit with a staggering body count.

Reynolds’ Michael Bryce is on the couch, recalling his recurring dream, one in which he wins “Bodyguard of the Year” and gets his “AAA” bodyguard license back, which leads to orders from his therapist. Give up guns and bodyguarding. Take a “sabbatical,” maybe on an Italian island, “Capri, like the pants.”

But there is no R&R and reading “The Secret” for our metrosexual security expert. This short, buxom stranger with the filthy vocabulary and mad fighting and firearm skills blows in, screams and shoots a lot of people who might mean “BREECE,” as she calls him, harm. There’s a plot to “punish” Europe, and her “hoooosband” has been “keeeednapped.” By God, BREECE is the one may who can help. Under duress, mind you.

“Your mouth needs an EXORCISM!”

Hayek plays Sonia, wife of hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L.), hellbent on freeing her man, being held by the Mafia. And that runs them afoul of the nefarious designs of Greek supervillain Aristotle Papadoplous, purred by Banderas. He is about to bring Europe to its knees over the way it has treated Greece, and his bottom line.

INTERPOL’s token American (B-action king Frank Grillo) wants to “work with the bad guys to get to the worse guys,” and these three will do nicely. And we’re off. “CAR CHASE!” Nightclub fracas, assassinations, shootouts, the works.

Perhaps it’s out of date, but if anybody can make the “Latin Spitfire” stereotype cool, funny and scary again, it’s Hayek, who all but takes over the movie with her loud, brassy and delusional confidence. Giving a name to Reynolds’ “POWERFUL asexuality” on screen, exaggerating the hell out of her accent, swearing like a Mexican sailor and fighting her way to her beloved “cucaracha” Darius while setting off sparks with Bad Guy Banderas one more time, she is “over-the-top”defined.

I laughed at almost every broad gesture and at every word out of her pretty dirty mouth.

The stuntwork is most impressive in the chases, but Hughes stages this nightclub fight/shoot-out (set to a mariachi score) that is just jaw-dropping if you pay attention to the shot selection, edits, stunts, blasts, bullets and blows in between the laughs. Bond-film level spectacular.

And Mr. “POWERFUL asexuality” nebbishes this thing up, wearing bloodspattered clothes, nicked-up face, scabs and scars in scene after scene as his straight-man takes every blow the bad guys, and Sonia and Darius, dish out. Reynolds is a great reactor, and a guy who can make even PBS underwriting ads funny gives us “sensitive” and misused and ever-so-pissed about it well.

“I’m not doing guns right now.”

Was that his own copy of the BS self-help book “The Secret?” Just curious.

We’re not talking “The Taming of the Shrew” or “The Iceman Cometh” here. What you see if what you get, and even a wind sprint like “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” gets gassed here and there.

But be grateful some sticks in the mud are panning this amusing mayhem. They’re just making social distancing easier at the multiplex. It’s a hoot.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language, and some sexual content

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Antonio Banderas, Frank Grillo, Caroline Goodall, Richard E. Grant and Morgan Freeman

Credits: Directed by Patrick Hughes, script by Tom O’Connor, Brandon Murphy and Phillip Murphy. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:39

Texas filmmaker Ty Roberts, whose “The Iron Orchard” was a period piece about the post-Depression Era boom in the Texas oil industry, takes on another piece of Texas lore with “12 Mighty Orphans,” about a scrappy, undersized football team of the 1930s.

He takes care to get the dust, blood and hardscrabble grit right in this story, and attracted a “name” cast this time, with Luke Wilson, Martin Sheen, Vinessa Shaw, Wayne Knight, Treat Williams and no less than Robert Duvall showing up for a cameo. It’s a somewhat fictionalized, sentimental, old-fashioned “Big Game” football tale aiming for the heartstrings and occasionally hitting them as it tells a familiar story of pluck, deprivation and “heart.”

No, it’s not a huge improvement on “Iron Orchard.” But it should play in Texas, where football is one of the icons of the state religion, right up there with cattle, cowboys, The Alamo and oil harvested in “Iron Orchards.”

As the title says, they were orphans, players for the Fort Worth Masonic Home, “perennial underdogs in their tattered uniforms,” as Sheen’s folksy, tippling medic and assistant coach “Doc” narrates. The movie depicts them as Seabiscuits of the gridiron, a media phenomenon inspiring a weary, downtrodden America as it climbed out of the hard times via Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Wilson plays a very successful Texas high school coach who drags his wife (Shaw) and two little girls to Fort Worth for a teaching job at a school which didn’t even have a football team. He and his wife would teach multiple subjects, and on the side, he’d give the boys “self respect” through the game he knew so well. His wife would teach the girls to be “young ladies.”

The kids were older orphans, the teens “that no one ever takes home,” and the film (based on journalist Jim Dent’s book) gives us little bits of the trauma some of the boys experienced before arriving there. Many were abandoned by their families, but Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker of TV’s “Stargirl”) is dropped off by the sheriff (comic Ron White) covered in his father’s blood. The old man was killed by shotgun, something the movie doesn’t go into much detail about.

The experience made Hardy furious and broken, with that rage eventually focused on football, where he became “the toughest sumbitch” coaches and players on every team he met had ever seen.

Wilson’s Russell experiences World War I flashbacks watching the “combat” on the football field. But the actor gets some nice scenes inspiring the players and sticking up for the kids, defending them from the sadistic manager (Wayne Knight) of the home and its for-profit printshop business, rallying them against “the city boys” who made up their foes in that storied 1938 season.

“It’s tough to get you to believe when all you’ve known is hurt, loss and abandonment.”

The movie suggests this huge career step backward for Rusty Russell was because he himself was an orphan. As the movie has him arriving at the school in 1938, when Russell actually came on board in 1927, our buy-in to the story includes accepting that this is “the Hollywood version.”

The players — Hardy, Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), Wheatie (Slade Monroe), Chicken (Sampley Barinaga) and Fairbanks (Levi Dylan) et al, were real. As was the Fort Worth newspaper tycoon Amon Carter (Treat Williams) who championed them.

But little touches like having the “Doc” a “Hoosiers” style boozer and letting Coach Russell, after a season-opening beatdown, invent the “spread offense” thanks to a drawing by his daughter encourages eye-rolling. Profanity in the dialogue aside, the film feels sanitized and borderline whitewashed — “Texas history” as Texans like to remember it.

There’s a big cast, and hints in the closing credits of much that was cut out in editing — orphanage romances, Hispanic players on the team, etc. Good actors are cast and kind of left in the lurch with nothing much to play.

When you’re bringing in a second villain, a rival coach (a hammy Lane Garrison of “Iron Orchard”) hellbent on stopping these “orphans” by hook or by crook, a rich Masonic benefactor (Duvall, in one scene) and no less than FDR (Larry Pine) enlisted as a fan, “kid in the candy store” casting hurts the movie.

As a director, Roberts comes off as more of a producer. He can get a movie made, he’s just damned artless in making it.

A few jokes dress up some seriously dull dialogue, topped with the colorless “Seabiscuit” imitating voice-over narration by Sheen — “Rusty knew that life inside the orphanage held little promise…”

The script lets few of the player characters stand out, and the film has an “assembled” rather than written and directed feel. The simple story has no flow to it beyond the inexorable march through that “magic” season.

Leave this one to Texas, because even if you’re starved for football this summer, “12 Mighty Orphans” don’t quite fill the bill.

MPA Rating: PG-13, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Luke Wilson, Martin Sheen, Vinessa Shaw, Jake Austin Walker, Wayne Knight, Treat Williams, Ron White, Larry Pine and Robert Duvall

Credits: Directed by Ty Roberts, script by Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer and Ty Roberts, based on book by Jim Dent. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:57

This looks great and comes our way July 23.

Ever heard of Alvin Ailey? The dance company named for him? Prepare to learn.