Movie Nation

Ricky Gervais set the tone.

“Fifth time…I don’t care…I’m over it.” The jokes were amusingly mean, but the entire 77th Golden Globes were more of a shrug than usual, this in spite of the fact that several genuine surprises upset the apple cart last evening in Hollywood.

A couple of heartfelt speeches about abortion, politics, assorted shots Mark Zuckerberg, Weinstein etc. A promising night kind of flattened by the tone.

The show always seems perfunctory, despite the free-wheeling nature of “I’ve had a few drinks” acceptance speeches. The HFPA makes the trains run on time, and if not for Joaquin Phoenix praising the group for taking HIS suggestion about a Vegan menu during his long acceptance speech, they’d have gotten off the air “on time.”

But will last night’s winners be repeat winners at the Oscars next month?

The Earliest Ever Oscars mean that the nomination ballots are already out, the guilds are deciding as the studios, PR folk and stars lobby. The shorter turn-around suggests, to some, that the Golden Globes — which the Academy has been trying to strip of influence for the past 20 years, moving their telecast up and back, trying to take the business of honoring “our own” out of the dubious hands of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association —will have an even greater influence on the Oscars this year.

That means“1917” and director Sam Mendes are in the game,that “Joker” and Joaquin Phoenix will be taken seriously, and that Netflix can put a cap on spending for Oscar lobbying right now.

The streaming service got pummeled Sunday night on NBC. “Dolemite is My Name” and “The Two Popes” and “The Irishman” came up short. “Marriage Story” picked up an acting award for its best performance (Laura Dern, supporting actress).

Netflix came into the night with a dominant presence, figuring it had four legitimate contenders. But it did only as well as A24 (Awkwafina for “The Farewell”) and Neon (“Parasite”) and never-a-contender also-ran Roadside Attractions (Renee Zellweger’s win for “Judy”). Realistically, Netflix has two legitimate contenders this year, and The Globes are probably the only place they will spend and push “The Two Popes” and “Dolemite.”

Good enough movies, not quite contenders. Sorry, Eddie.

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” and “Joker” had the feel of contenders upon release. “1917” just elbowed its way in. Maybe. It faces a “Dunkirk” headwind of not having any actors impressive enough to nominate.

Will the Oscars pay more heed to Adam Sandler and “Uncut Gems?” Almost certainly. But one thing I took away from the Golden Globes was how there was a perfectly crowded field withOUT that film as a “best picture” nominee, or Sandler in the acting field. And if you’re leaving out Eddie Murphy, how do you justify shoehorning Sandler in?

It’s not something The Academy gets together in a room and plots, it’s all lobbying and voting and popularity contests and Hollywood insiders’ “tastes,” and one think I’ve picked up from decades of asking the “What have you seen lately in a cinema?” question is that these folks don’t get out and watch the product of the factory they work in.

That partly explains the excessive length of all these Netflix movies. Why cut it? We’re watching it at home, as is everybody else?

Will “The Lighthouse” find some traction? “Just Mercy?” “Dark Waters?” Probably not.

Did Jennifer Lopez just lose all her Oscar momentum to second generation Hollywood Laura Dern, who has never won an Oscar but should be a best supporting actress nominee for either “Marriage Story” or “Little Women?”

Speaking of “Little Women,” if you want to diversify that best director field, is that the film and director (Greta Gerwig) for the Director’s Guild and Hollywood to get behind if they want to include a woman nominee in a year of impressive female directing? Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and Marielle Heller (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) are worth considering. But plainly, “getting behind” one woman/one female-directed film is what it’s going to take to break into the Tarantino/Mendes/Scorsese/Baumbach/Bong Joon-Ho/Todd Phillips and James Mangold tier (at least TWO of THOSE worthies will be left out) field.

Is ANYBODY under the illusion that critics and Hollywood hold Elton/Bernie and Taron Egerton from “Rocketman” in the same adoring light that the HFPA do? Or Renee Zellweger? Those two acting wins — Taron and Renee — fall under the “Golden Globe winner, why not?” rubric. I have doubts either of them gets an Oscar nomination.

I have wondered all fall just what film the Academy would honor with “Best Animated Feature,” as there simply wasn’t a dazzler from Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, Sony or Blue Sky to consider. “Missing Link” (Laika/Annapurna) was a tad more original than what the big boys were offering. Perhaps THIS is a category Netflix should be lobbying harder in, as“I Lost My Body”was their stand-out animated offering, and “Klaus” was more original than any Disney or Dreamworks sequel.

This list reveals the slim pickings — and it doesn’t even mention “The Addams Family” and other even lesser titles.

In any event, Oscar nominations voting ends TUESDAY, Jan. 7, the WGA and other guilds are sprinting into their final voting and the only way to know how any of this impacts the Oscars is to tune in Jan. 13 to ABC to see WHO is nominated, and plan your wagering for the Feb. 9 Academy Awards.

Wyld Stallions: The Next Generation?

No. Not this image. The one below

The Good news? “Little Women” managed another $13.5 million. “Uncut Gems” collected nearly $8.

Big bloated “Jumanji” added another $26, losing only 25% of it’s take from last weekend.

The “last” “Star Wars” movie added another $34.5 million.

“Knives Out” added another $9 million, a less than 10%drop, week to week.

“Bombshell” took in somewhat less.

“Cats” enjoyed it’s last weekend in the top ten, taking in $2.3 million.

“The Grudge” was made on the super cheap — lots of good actors, few effects, a $10M budget, “no doubt the studio was hoping for more than one-and-done with their horror reboot,” per Exhibitor Relations.

It only earned $11.3 million, low forba horror franchise, even a long dormant one.

“Like Paramount’s RINGS remake before it…this is a dead end.” https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1213850463939907585?s=20

With Hollywood pandering to the Chinese market in every action film tailored for international release, it’s worth taking a look at the fare prepared at home for domestic consumption. In China. Here’s an actioner about a battle late in the Chinese civil war. Perhaps only Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Uyghers will be rooting for the other side in “Liberation.”

We may get a limited North American release of this one.

Jan. 24, an investigation into a potential Medal of Honor recipient talking to the old men who knew him.

Here’s a French farce along the lines of “The Hangover,” where the bachelors — instead of Vegas — venture to the scenic, sinful “Wild West” of Budapest, Hungary.

The twist here is that two guys fed up with their MBA desk jobs take the advice of a 50something expat stripper who said of her home city’s hedonism, “It’s not hard to get in. It’s impossible to get out!” They resolve to set up a bachelor party/travel agency that takes Frenchmen about to marry to a place where it’s “anything goes,” and “vodka’s cheaper than Coke (Coca Cola).”

“Budapest” is a comedy that goes for “giddy gonzo ‘Hangover’ romp” and settles, entirely too quickly, for tedious. A couple of “out there” laughs, one of them right before the closing credits, is what you get for your 100 minutes of investment.

Still reading? OK, here’s the plot.

A busted bachelor party where the lads, led by Arnoud (Jonathan Cohen) and Vincent (Manu Payet), are denied entry to a swank club, gives these two an epiphany. They are never going to be “in the club,” hanging with the high-rollers.

But the aged stripper (Tamar Baruch) who lapdances on them at the dump where they wind up talks up Budapest. That sticks in their minds as their work bludgens the life right out of them. Over some protests from their wives (Alix Poisson, Alice Belaïdi), they decide to set up “Crazy Trips,” a bachelor experience in Budapest.

The film’s first act is mostly the two guys’ scouting trip to the city, with the stripper’s son-in-law Giorgio (Monsieur Poulpe) as their trippy tour guide and intermediary. 

Giorgio is an homage to a rich tradition of crazed locals leading innocent foreigners through the crazier corners of a strange land. He’s like a Hunter S. Thompson version of the Ukrainian guide played by Eugene Hutz in “Everything is Illuminated.” Never seen it? Rent it. It’s better than this.

You want hookers? Giorgio offers up his wife (Henrietta Edvi) in a French maid’s outfit. No? Then let’s see what else we can stir up for your guests’ “experience.”

One of the best sequences in “Budapest” is the guys’ hallucinogenic trip through an “Eyes Wide Shut” of lurid clubs — “That’s Wolf Blitzer’s favorite seat!” — depravity, prostitutes, drugs and general hedonism. But Vincent is more impressed with the prices of everything — massages, hotels, booze, “the world’s longest Humvee limo.”

“It’s Berlin,” he chortles (in French with English subtitles, if you wish), “but FREE!”

The guys come up with some distinct touches which they pass off as “The Hidden Pleasures of the East.” Want to shoot all manner of Eastern Bloc army ordnance? Drive a tank? THIS is the bachelor party trip for you!

It’s just that the script, co-written by co-star Payet (Vincent), then gets bogged down in the logistics of it all, how this “real” business would work — the debacles that turn into international (news) incidents, learning the maxim attributed to P.T. Barnum — “There’s no such thing as BAD publicity.”

The story also dwells on the cost all this sophomoric, sexist “fun” has on actual relationships — with their wives, and between the two partners.

BO-ring. Perhaps necessary as an obstacle the characters must overcome, but still BO-ring.

The things that go wrong aren’t on a par with the shenanigans of “The Hangover,” the “shocks” aren’t shocking enough and the skin — after a while — becomes just wallpaper behind a lot of unfunny scenes or moments.

The French comic Poulpe, as Giorgio (or Georgio), is the life of this party. Watch him blithely supervise the first clients, blazing away on a makeshift firing range as shell casings bounce off his shirt. Listen to him encourage the haggling the grotesque tank and machine guns owner Gabor (Arthur Benzaquen) wants to do over how much “extra” he’ll charge should they actually want to “kill somebody.”

His starting position, BTW, is 800 euros.

“Budapest” strikes me as a comedy that could have worked, with snippets and snatches, here and there, coming off. But the structure is all wrong, the pacing deathly slow and not everybody pulls his or her comic weight.

Build an 85 minute movie with Giorgio and his funny wife and Arnoud (Cohen has the funnier partner to play, and is funnier in playing him) and we’ll talk.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drugs, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Manu Payet, Jonathan Cohen, Monsieur Poulpe, Alix Poisson, Alice Belaïdi

Credits: Directed by Xavier Gens, script by Manu Payet, Simon Moutairou. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

“José” is an intimate character portrait depicting the struggle between responsibility and love in a gay teen in modern day Guatemala.

What was the last movie you saw set in Guatemala? Director and co-writer Li Cheng loses himself in the milieu, the street life of Guatemala City, as much as he does in the story, and “José” is all the richer for it.

Cheng’s camera captures street food, street commerce, street festivals and street protests in an old, worn working class city where struggle takes the form of very hard work for very little pay. Down here, it really does take two to make ends meet.

At an age when we’re all at our most hormonal, longing to follow love, opportunity and optimism wherever they take us, José, tenderly but cryptically portrayed by Enrique Salanic, is a young man trapped in poverty, responsibilities and a culture that isn’t accepting of his sexual orientation.

From this simple plot Cheng (“Joshua Tree”) weaves a near-perfectly-observed character study with a vivid and novel sense of place.

Cheng uses images, not a lot of dialogue, to set the tone and tell an over-familiar tale of love in the shadows, a furtive romance and the crushing burden of life on the edge of poverty.

José has a job, waiting tables and working the curbside business — hustling up customers driving by on the street for a dobladas restaurant..

And he has a boyfriend, Luis (Manolo Herrera), a construction worker he sneaks off to hour-rate hotels whenever he can. It started as a pick-up and turns into something passionate.

But burning through cash for assignations and blowing off work isn’t smart. He’s letting down his mother (Ana Cecilia Mota), a street vendor barely able to keep a roof over their heads.

“What would I do without you?” she pleads (in Spanish with English subtitles). And she’s serious. She is that close to homeless and starving.

She is a pious Christian woman in a culture of bus preachers, street preachers and Protestant pastors, and what she doesn’t know about José she’s starting to suspect.

Luis can’t talk José into running off with him, some place they can be “normal…anywhere but Guatemala.”

José internalizes all of this and clings to that late-teens denial as long as he can — motorbike rides in the country, making out in the sugar cane, lying to his mother well past the point it works.

Something has to give.

In Cheng’s version of Guatemala, men leave women. José is the son of a single mother who was the daughter of a single mother. This weighs on José. He’s giving pep talks to Carlos (Esteban Lopez Ramirez), a cook at the restaurant dating waitress Monica (Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez), telling him what she needs and expects, trying to head off yet another man-runs-off scenario.

But can he break the pattern with his own mother? Can Luis?

The scenario here is soapy and a tad familiar. But Cheng’s vivid depiction of the life going on all around his characters — bus rides and sermons, a traditional parade for the Virgin Mary, Alka Seltzer, Coca-Cola and Advil signs, businesses with “Siguenos en Facebook” posters — enriches the story and makes José, his life, his world and his predicament something anyone can relate to.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity and sex

Cast: Enrique Salanic, Manolo Herrera, Ana Cecilia Mota, Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez, Esteban Lopez Ramirez

Credits: Directed by Li Cheng, script by Li Cheng, George F. Roberson.  An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:28

Love Michael Peña, and I’ve interviewed him a few times over the years, beginning with his break-out in “World Trade Center.”

He’s made fine comic foils and a first rate Cesar Chavez, is always credible as star or co-star, playing cops and BFF to “Ant Man” and the like.

But there’s a half-joking crack I’ve parked in reviews of maybe a dozen movies where he’s a co-star. Is he the ONLY Latinx actor Hollywood thinks of when they want to diversify the cast of this thriller, that comedy or action film? Because it sure seems that way.

Look at the trailer to “Fantasy Island.” Does he suggest exotic sophistication, romance and inscrutable menace the way aged “Latin Lover” Ricardo Montalban did? How LONG was the list of people the studio considered for the role of Mr. Rourke? It sure looks like the usual “Just get Michael Peña” ethos prevailed.

And the guy just looks off in this setting.

Banderas might not have been available, but he was the more obvious choice. Watching “The Grudge” the other night (which followed this trailer), I thought “Demián Bichir could have shaved and purred his way through that role and been more interesting in it.”

The trailer I posed earlier today stars another more interesting choice — Andy Garcia. He’d be in that Banderas ballpark. Jimmy Smits? Esai Morales? Benjamin Bratt?

Make Mr. Rourke “Ms. Rourke” and Salma Hayek would have delivered something I’m not seeing in that clip below. She would have KILLED it.

I have no issue with grabbing an aged TV brand and conjuring something dark out of it. But I think they’ve blown Big Screen “Fantasy Island” by showing an unwillingness to hunt for the best linchpin actor to hold it all together.

As I’ve said many times in jest, let me now say in all seriousness, “Guys and gals, there’s more than ONE Latin leading man out there. Peña can be on your short list, but when he’s the ONLY one on the list, you’re missing out.”

Films set in Puerto Rico are as rare as hurricane aid to the storm tossed island. This is worth seeing just for the novelty.

A healthy but underwhelming first weekend for “The Grudge” is the box office news open this New Year.

The younger audience that knows horror movies mean “date night” is reliably showing up for the reboot of this J-Horror inspired franchise.

Terrible movie, but hey. Something ro do, right? A $13 million opening is on the high end of projections.

“Star Wars: The Ride of Skywalker” is managing another $37 million or so.

But the still overperforming “Jumaji” is closing that gap — low $20s this weekend.

“Little Women” is adding $12M, with “Frozen 2” taking on $11, “Spies in Disguise” around $10 with “Knives Out,” “Bombshell” et al hanging around at a few million less.

https://deadline.com/2020/01/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-the-grudge-uncut-gems-weekend-box-office-2020-1202820066/