Movie Nation

It’s a female centric R-rated comic book thriller directed by a Sundance winner.

And it has been hyped to the moon and back, with Warners feelings it DC muscle after “Aquaman” and “Joker.”

Fangirls have to show up. Will the fanboys join them?

Thursday night’s previews of “Birds of Prey” cleared only $4 million, a fraction of what we can expect from your typical comic book film, even the R-rated ones. That’s less than “Shazam,” which pulled in $5.9 not that long ago.

It is fan friendly, although praise has been muted. Check the Metacritic rating, not Rottentomatoes, for confirmation of that. Take away Margot Robbie and there is not much here to latch onto.

Insanely violent. Leave the kids at home.

Exhibitor Relations is saying $60 million this weekend is within reach, Variety guessing $50 and Warners $45.

Saner heads suggest a $40-50 million weekend for the opening, right on the bottom edge of “healthy.” And will it have “Wonder Woman” legs?

Anything below $40 and you’re allowed to whisper “bomb.”

This looks a lot more like fans are leery of that “Suicide Squad” hangover, even if the pandering pileup on Rottentomatoes doesn’t share that justifiable skepticism.

In any event, it will own a weekend or two in February and fans will probably get it into the black. But maybe not.

Warners needs to find funnier script doctors and directors with a little more experience and clout and feel for the genre.

The fights and the violence and the gloom are here, but the wit and spark of life? Not so much.

https://deadline.com/2020/02/birds-of-prey-weekend-box-office-margot-robbie-1202853768/

Will F., taking on a wee bit of Irish brogue just to fit in, y’see, stars in this comedy about ghosts, Satanic rites and a washed-up rock star (Will) who makes his pact with the you know who to come back from “show business death.”
Mar. 6 we see it.

It seems like only yesterday that I was rolling my eyes at a faith-based “comedy” that surrounded its no-name/unfunny stars with famous actors from the big and small screen.

OK, it WAS only yesterday. And here we go again, another movie with “faith” in the title, the odd sprightly turn by big names brought in for small supporting roles, a clever line here and there and the germ of an idea.

And if there’s barely a laugh in “Faith Ba$ed,” it can’t come as much consolation that there aren’t many in most Christian films, including“Faith, Hope & Love.”

At least“Assassin 33 A.D.” was funny — if unintentionally so.

“Faith Ba$ed” is a send-up of faith-based films, scripted by a preacher’s son, directed by a Christian. Co-writer and star Luke Barnett has concocted a stoner comedy where the stoners cynically figure the way to break into the movie biz is by making a church-financed movie with faith and belief as its subject and subtext.

The stoners are Luke (Barnett) and Tanner (Tanner Thomason), two dead-enders in Reseda, California who come to the conclusion “It’s time we DID something with our lives!”

Luke just lost his job cleaning pools (Danny Woodburn, “Mickey” in “Seinfeld,” plays his boss). His side hustle is a “miracle tea” pyramid scheme promoted by his idol, ex-con/millionaire Nicky Steele (Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld”).

Tanner’s a bartender and a womanizer who uses “Schindler’s List” to get his lady-loves in the mood.

The guys have been pals since childhood, long-obsessed with the TV and film work of “Rambo” impersonator Butch Savage (David Koechner of “Anchorman”). This wild scheme sounds like merely their latest wild scheme.

But as Luke’s stepdad is a pastor (the wonderful Lance Reddick) who is about to lose his church, he figures he can start a new career and make enough cash to save the church and impress his Dad. Besides, his father’s noticed how some churches (such as Sherwood Baptist, in Georgia) have gotten into the film business for proselytizing and profit. He inadvertently gave them the idea.

“Fireproof,” “God’s Not Dead,” “War Room,” “Courageous” — all are cited as inspiringly profitable ventures in the faith-based film field. And there  are jokes about who these films line up as “stars” — Kirk Cameron and Kevin Sorbo. Hilarious.

Here’s the only scene in the film with real satiric sting. The guys take a meeting with the equally-cynical head of acquisitions (Margaret Cho) of “ChristFlix,” a play on Pureflix, a faith-based distributor. And the foul-mouthed studio hack has the magic formula for their movie.

Number one, “You need an A, B or C-list celebrity who is also a Christian. Or at the very least, a Republican.” Number two, put “key words in the title — faith, prayer, heaven, Huckabee…” Number three, add “peril” and number four, “You’ve got to talk about God — JC. Bonus points if God is IN it!”

The lads, newly resolute, set out to learn the film business, come up with a concept (“A Prayer in Space,” because “You never heard a prayer in ‘Alien!'” ) and learn about fund-raising, casting, green screens, post production, the works.

All of which has been covered in other films, funnier films without the whole “faith-based” hook. The DIY casting and filmmaking scenes haven’t got one decent sight gag.

The obstacles, potential romances and rifts between the two best friends that get in their way are desultory and haphazardly injected into the proceedings. And the leads? If only this description rang the least bit true.

“If this was ‘Dumb & Dumber,’ Tanner would be ‘Dumb’ and Luke would DEFINITELY be ‘Dumber!'”

It’s not. A bigger problem with this comedy of bong-hits and profanity is one of tone. The actual movie in between those anti-faith-based film moments — one of the reasons the picture generated controversy before they ever rolled camera — is mild-mannered and bland — in the extreme.

That’s right. This “cynical” comedy isn’t the least bit cynical, and certainly not cynical enough. Remember “Saved” with Mandy Moore? That’s your touchstone.

If you’re a preacher’s kid making a movie about getting Christian “suckers” to finance your new movie venture, there is no pulling punches. Go big, ridiculing the whole “There’s a sucker born every minute” mockery of Christianity, play up who you’re hustling and why you think you can hustle them, or don’t bother.

Reddick and Alexander acquit themselves, as can be expected. Koechner’s performance is a series of over-the-top inserts that don’t deliver. And nobody else so much as registers.

It’s so dull and flat that maybe the producers’ best bet is starting a campaign for Fox viewers to buy it and shelve it to prevent “this blasphemy” from spreading. But I just ruined that scheme, didn’t I?

As a “faith-based” film spoof, this one is basically a 90 minute swing-and-a-miss.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, pot and alcohol abuse

Cast: Luke Barnett, Tanner Thomason, Margaret Cho, Danielle Nicolet, Jason Alexander, Carly Craig, Danny Woodburn, David Koechner and Lance Reddick.

Credits: Directed by Vincent Masciale, script by Luke Barnett. A Lone Suspect release.

Running time: 1:32

Not talking about James Earl Jones or Billy Dee Williams, here.

No, this is the marketing whiz who figured out how to market the quirky, pricey Fox release so that it would dominate the summer of ’77.

Ashley Boone was his name.

He went on to run the studio after Alan Ladd was chased out, the first African American Hollywood studio chief, and find glory marketing box office phenomena like “Chariots of Fire” and “Thelma & Louise.”

Here’s a nice Hollywood Reporter remembrance of the brains behind polishing the little that George Lucas wrote and directed into a global blockbuster, brand and “universe.”

VERDICT, Charlotte Rampling, Paul Newman, Sidney Lumet, 1982, directing the actors

“Network” is one of those movies that I cannot channel surf past without stopping. If I’m lucky, I catch it from the very beginning because like all movies, it casts its spell in the opening moments, this one more than most.

I stumbled across it again the other night just as I was finishing the chapter on filming it in “Sidney Lumet: A Life,” Maura Spiegel’s new biography of this almost peerless “actor’s director,” one of the biggest names behind the camera in the ’60s on into the ’80s.

There aren’t a lot of filmmakers in the know who wouldn’t give their eye teeth to call Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” his last film, made when he was 83, their own. Going out on a high note. Not many get to pull that off.

He was a child actor on Broadway, making one film appearance in the 1930s, a struggling young stage director lured by Yul Brynner to dive into the then-budding medium of television, where he quickly made his mark.

Smart, a WWII vet whose assignment was teaching others how to use and field-repair the most complicated technology of its day — radar — and organized — he became famous for making live TV complicated and cinematically artful during the first “Golden Age of Television.”

He dropped into film with the minimalist classic “Twelve Angry Men” where those organizational skills and that acting background made him famous for generating Oscar-nominated performances and movies that always came in under budget — “The Pawnbroker,” The Anderson Tapes,” “Serpico,” “Prince of the City,” “The Hill.”

Spiegel had access to two invaluable resources when putting together “A Life” — Lumet’s definitive (for its day) “how to make a movie” manual, “Making Movies” (1995), Lumet’s unfinished and abandoned autobiography, and the memoirs of his womanizing father, Baruch, a Polish emigre and mainstay of New York’s Yiddish theater after coming to America.

Spiegel, a New York film academic, gets a little carried away with the post-mortem psychoanalysis of her subject, gets WAY off topic here and there, and seems a tad out of her comfort zone talking about early TV and how it worked.

But she never goes far wrong when leaning on Lumet’s own memories, the sometimes revealing interviews he gave over the decades and the “opening up” he almost did in the book he never finished.

And there are just enough anecdotes from the movies he made, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s empassioned pursuit of him to direct “Network,” and Lumet’s care in grooming Beatrice Strait’s one big scene in that movie — nine takes (Lumet rarely did more than a couple) that enshrined her supporting actress performance as the shortest (on screen) Oscar winning performance in Oscar history.

His own acting history is little-known except by film buffs, and his various marriages (once, to Anderson Cooper’s mama, Gloria Vanderbilt) were not something I’d ever heard much about. His child-actor childhood wasn’t idyllic, his war experiences traumatic (even though he never saw combat) and his reputation as a New York Filmmaker never as great as Scorsese’s or Woody Allen’s.

Blame Pauline Kael for that. A major New York critic who guts your every movie with a review could ding a reputation, back in the day.

But the movies, with their spare artistry, intricate but never flashy compositions and career-defining performances, speak for themselves.

And Spiegel, breaking the highlights down, does a pretty good job of speaking up for them as well.

Sidney Lumet: A Life. St. Martin’s Press, 401 pages. $29.99.

When “street fashion” photographer Bill Cunningham died in 2016, he was New York Famous for being the photographer who documented what the stylish wore on the city’s streets, for decades, for The New York Times.

He’d been honored in Paris for his contributions to fashion photography (he also shot runway shows) and celebrated in a lovely and popular documentary, “Bill Cunningham: New York,” in 2011.

People in the wider world knew who he was thanks to many TV profiles that spun out of that film, and the legions of fans and peers from his “world” that sang his praises in the movie.

“We all got dressed for Bill,” Vogue editor and fashion influencer Anna Wintour famously intoned.

But filmmaker Mark Bozek was sitting on a long filmed interview he had with Cunningham before that “fame” came his way, before he’d been profiled and interviewed to death, before AIDS retreated from the obituary pages, where it had decimated Cunningham’s world and taken so many he knew and worked with.

And that 1994 interview paints an even more revealing, more intimate portrait in “The Times of Cunningham” than the more authoritative earlier documentary. This is the famed street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham at his lightly-guarded, offhand, charming and modest best, telling his life story, having the various now-obscure figures who made him who he was today defined and described by a narrator — Sarah Jessica Parker.

Here is Cunningham, at 65, sitting with Bozek, cinematographer Jeff Hodges and sound recordist Bob Rodriguez, open and smiling and charming, still a wide-eyed enthusiast, a man at the peak of our current expression — “Living his best life.”

“I just go out and enjoy myself with the camera,” he gushes. “I don’t think of it as work!”

“I’m not a real photographer,” he corrects his off-camera interviewer (Bozek). “I’m a fashion historian.”

He grew up a Boston postal worker’s son who always had an eye for fashion and a thing for hats. His early years had him working as a milliner —  a hat maker — selling his wares as “William J.” while supposedly working in the advertising department of Bonwit Teller.

He made hats in his spare time in the Army — “I kept that quiet, you bet!” — and took weekend passes to dash off to Paris to see fashion shows. His long journey towards his eventual life’s work let him see that “I wasn’t getting the answers from the fashion shows…I wanted to see the way women dress in their own lives…how people dress every day,” what they put on and accessorize with before hitting the streets of New York or Paris.

He’d ride his bike, dismounting to snap a shot or two, marveling at so much he saw.

He had jobs with Women’s Wear Daily and later freelanced for The New York Times, always living simply in a small apartment (eventually in the Carnegie Hall Towers), wearing a French laborer’s blue coveralls as a uniform, never getting health insurance, quietly earning, saving and giving away MILLIONS as he did.

The first camera Cunningham was given — an Olympus Pen half-frame (half a full frame of film exposed for each photo — came with an edict. “Use it as a notebook.” And that’s what he did.

He gets emotional in the interview about his “charmed life,” the sadness of AIDS devastating the communities he held dear. And he kept working. The night “Bill Cunningham: New York” premiered, he hung out outside, snapping the fashionable folks going in to see it. He never saw the film himself.

But as the “Nostradamus of fashion” (from Bozek’s written narration performed by “Sex and the City” star Parker), he had a higher calling.

“He helped people ‘see’ in a new way.”

Indeed he did. And “The Times of Bill Cunningham” helps us see him in a new way.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill Cunningham, narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker

Credits: Written and directed by Mark Bozek.  A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:14

The horror of a boat trip to Hell. Oh yes.

“Dead Sound”comes to theaters/streaming March 3.

I interviewed Benh Z. when his Oscar-nominated indie marvel, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” came out. That was eight years ago.

He obviously has a knack for working with kids, and an interest in telling stories with a child’s eye view, looking at even a decayed, impoverished landscape with wonder.

Aside from “What about ‘Wendy,'” his “Southern Wild” take on “Peter Pan,” took seven years (he announced it in 2013), what other questions can you think to ask him?

Comment below and thanks, as always, for the help.

What to make of this burlesque in blood, “Birds of Prey?” All these fights, all that fight choreography, all that bloody violence and mildly-amusing mayhem should ensure another hit, cementing Warners’ command of their R-rated comic book adaptation niche.

But where does it does it sit on the sliding Warners/DC Comics adaptation scale? It’s not remotely as good as “Joker,” positively inconsequential when you hold it up against the best “serious” comic book adaptation ever and a legitimate Best Picture contender. Maybe that comparison’s not fair.

It’s an improvement on “Suicide Squad,” a tad better than “Aquaman,” not quite up to “Wonder Woman.”

There’s no sense comparing it to any Marvel Studios product, as apparently all the “funny” dialogue writers for comic book movies migrate there. The laughs in “Prey” come from Margot Robbie’s Betty Boop/Marilyn Monroe vamps as Harley Quinn.

“I have all my best ideas drunk!”

Ewan McGregor is aptly cast as Roman Sionis, a murderous mob boss with just a hint of whimsy about him. I laughed at one or two things he did, but at nothing he said.

The funniest line comes from Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), the under-age pickpocket whom the Birds of Prey defend.

“You’re not the ONLY one who makes money off dumb, rich white people!”

That was generous, because Basco is the weakest link in an uneven cast.

Judging from the audience reaction at the showing I attended, the killer moments here are the killer moments here — applause and laughter at this leg snapping, that body exploding.

And whenever a new character to this big screen DC Universe demonstrates her superpower, the fanbase is thrilled.

But I’m on the fence about this somewhat heartless exercise in ultraviolence. There are interesting bits and cute riffs, some actresses I generally enjoy lending their presence to a superhero movie that dabbles in trying to be about “empowerment.” The look is that eternal DC-post-“Batman” gloom, so a tip of the hat to Art Director Kasra Farahani (“Black Panther,” “Captain Marvel”) and production designer K.K. Barrett (“Where the Wild Things Are”).

And those stunts (Jonathan Eusebio stunt coordinator) and fights (Jon Valera, fight coordinator) are impressive. You will believe these willowy ladies can outbrawl the biggest heavies in the business. Kind of. Some of the action was acted at half speed and sped up for projection.

But “Birds of Prey” relies on incessant voice-over narration from the psychiatrist turned Joker moll turned jilted lover out for attention, Harley Q.

“Nothing gets a guy’s attention like violence!”

And as any casual movie fan knows, voice-over is the laziest crutch in movie narrative.

The story is a shrug and the action arc ends where too many movies of this genre seem fated to end — in an epic fight in a derelict amusement park.

Again, there are more broken bones than laughs. An oversized CGI hyena for a pet? Right.

And it’s a little too close to “Suicide Squad” in one all-important regard. Take away Harley Quinn, and you’ve got no movie.

Harley has just been dumped by “Mister J,” the villainous patient she fell for who twisted up her mind and amped up her appetite for violence. Her days of breaking up bars and robbing supermarkets at will are numbered without her “master’s” protection.

“A harlequin’s NOTHING without a master!”

As she tries to adjust, a club owner/mob boss (McGregor) makes his play for Big Boss by getting his hands on a big diamond that has a code on it. The pickpocket (Basco) nabs it, a henchmen (Chris Messina, abandoning “nebbish” roles for once) and the club chanteuse Dinah Lance, aka “Black Canary” (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) are sent to fetch her, and it.

A veteran cop (Rosie Perez), who always has some guy stealing credit stolen for her big busts, is on the case. And this mysterious, skinny crossbow-wielding murderess (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) keeps popping up and killing people.

“They call me…” The only running gag in the movie? Woman can’t figure out her masked vigilante name, even if  “Crossbow Killer” is how everybody knows her.

Perez’s Detective Montoya keeps muttering cheesy “lines from every bad ’80s cop movie,” McGregor’s psychotic boss, aka “Black Mask,” keeps skinning faces off victims — or threatening it.

But “Birds of Prey” is never airborne when Robbie’s Harley is off the screen. Fantasizing a Marilyn-ish “Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend” production number in mid-torture, gleefully dispatching hired guns with sticks of dynamite, a baseball bat or a carnival “strong man” mallet, she’s the lifeblood of the movie.

Director Cathy Yan (“Dead Pigs,” “According to My Mother”) has a career-making blockbuster on her resume. But her big break is an empty whirlwind of mayhem, with a sloppily inconsistent narrative not entirely due to Christina Hodson’s (“Bumblebee”) script.

If it weren’t for all the fights, there’d be no forward motion to this movie at all. Very “Transformers” that way.

“Empowered” these women may be, but Perez should have been given funnier, cooler things to say and do, Winstead’s turn flattens out and Basco is just green.

Smollett-Bell is the only sidekick to pull her weight, and Robbie’s one-note take on Harley isn’t enough, by itself.

Fans will eat this up and probably forget it — save for the odd body blowing up — before the next comic book movie comes along.  But “Birds of Prey” is all empowered with no idea what to do with that power, nothing of consequence, anyway.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout, and some sexual and drug material

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Rosie Perez, Ali Wong, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Messina and Ella Jay Basco .

Credits: Directed by Cathy Yan, script by Christina Hodson A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:49

Elijah Wood plays a DJ, music producer and pop impresario WAY out of his depth in “Come to Daddy,” a gonzo, gory and goofball B-movie about fathers, sons and killing or being killed.

It doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny — nonsensical coincidences abound. But a couple of pulse-pounding fights-to-the-death, several great big twists in the plot and a befuddled “Everything is Illuminated” turn by Wood make the best “midnight movie” option for fans looking to stay out late and howl at the screen.

Wood is Norval, an LA hipster — you can tell by the mustache, the Hitler haircut and the gold plated cell-phone “designed by Lorde” — who deposits himself on the stoop of his father’s remote, cliffside “like a UFO from the ’60s” bungalow on the Oregon shore.

“I got your letter.”

Dad (Stephen McHattie) seems nonplussed. Long-estranged from his ex-wife and his son, he’s a bluff and blustering ex-limo driver who doesn’t want to hear the kid’s stories about the music biz, about being “discovered” by Elton John.

“I like fight stories,” the old man growls. No intimate father-son chats here, oh no.

“I don’t want to discuss it.”

That is, of course, before the meat cleaver comes out, before the old man charges him, before the cop (Garfield Wilson) grills the kid and notes that “bad guys have eyes that look like raisins,” and that his old man had “raisin eyes.”

And then there’s the coroner (Madeleine Sami) who suggests — as his father is now a corpse and Norval has to “store him” due to a backlog at the morgue — that “You should talk to him,” dead “him.” “It helps.”

Producer (“ABCs of Death II”) turned-director Ant Timpson makes sure to take a “story by” credit here, because that first “twist” is just the first of many. The whole damned movie, from here on out, is twists.

We’re led in one direction, only to have events turn on a dime in another direction.

And at every turn, Norval takes another step in his journey from vulnerable and fragile enough to have attempted suicide to wounded and bludgeoned and toughened up by the experience to not be as hapless as he is when we first meet him.

The deadpan locals get all the funny lines and few actors working in the movies are better “reactors” than Wood.

Graphic, stomach-churning violence, grotesque nudity and the occasional witty line don’t add up to much of a movie. But they do add up to just barely enough to make this one fumbling, fearful and fun.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley, Ona Grauer, Garfield Wilson and Madeleine Sami.

Credits: Directed by Ant Timpson, script by Toby Harvard. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35