Movie Nation

Writer-director Rian Johnson, of “Brick” and “Looper,” briefly escapes the stranglehold the “Star Wars” universe has on him with “Knives Out,” a cutting and clever “Clue” murder mystery treated as a lark and played for laughs by a Big Name cast.

It’s the kind of movie where the cinema’s James Bond, Brit Daniel Craig, slings one of those “MO-lasses” Southern accents that Brit actors adore, and is openly mocked for it by others in the movie. On camera. In character.

Playing “the last of the gentleman sleuths,” a private investigator with the unlikely (except in New Orleans) name Benoit Blanc, he is called “CSI: KFC” and “Foghorn Leghorn” by the rich New Yorkers he’s treating as suspects in the murder of their family patriarch. To his face.

The indulgent cop (Lakeith Stanfield) who is ostensibly in charge of the case announces, at the end of a hot pursuit, “That was the DUMBEST car chase of all time.” Yes, there’s a Hyundai Elantra involed, and yes, he is correct.

The patriach’s nurse (Ana de Armas of “War Dogs” and “Blade Runner 2049”) has this condition, a “regurgative reaction to untruths” is how Benoit Blanc puts it. Ask her a question, and if she tries to lie or let another’s lie stand, she throws up.

That may be the silliest plot device ever parked in a whodunit — and the funniest. Johnson deposits a human lie detector in the midst of a family with motives for murder, and an aversion to the truth.

And for politics, there is the pale, Hitler-haired grandson (Jaeden Martell of “St. Vincent”) who sits in the background, staring at his phone, trolling the “snowflakes” and every so often hissing a little anti-immigrant rhetoric — “Dirty ‘anchor baby!'”

Famed mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, of course) had gathered his family in his suburban Massachusetts mansion, a Victorian estate decorated with all manner of lethal bric a brac and other souvenirs from his decades of publishing.

The centerpiece might be his “throne” of knives, a chair with a gigantic fan of cutlery spread out behind it. Nobody points this out. It’s just there.

Harlan was found in his bed with his throat cut the morning after the party. And even though son (Michael Shannon) and daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis) might have motives, and his son-in-law (Don Johnson) and widowed and dependent daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her daughter (Katherine Langford) could as well, the police have ruled the death a suicide.

But I guess when the famous (thanks to a New Yorker profile) Benoit Blanc shows up, it’s “Let go through that night once more” time.

A clever touch — Johnson gives Craig’s sleuth a hidden “star” entrance. He is in the background of the re-interrogations conducted by Lt. Elliott (Stanfield). Every time the questions or the answers drift off topic, we hear a single note struck on the piano. Benoit is interrupting without interrupting, disapproving and redirecting the questioning.

“Who IS this guy?”

As motives start to pile up and various members of the family cast suspicion on each other, we see Nurse Marta — “like a member of the family” the family insists, although each has her or his own idea of where she moved to this country from — Paraguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay. She’s a walking ball of nerves, and her immigrant mom watching “Murder, She Wrote” in Spanish isn’t calming her at all.

It’s “Columbo” that Johnson takes his story structure from. Flashbacks show us what REALLY happened that night. We know “whodunit,” and what we’re watching is the famed detective, who could be a dolt, try to figure this out via interrogations and magnifying glass walks around the grounds of a writer “who practically lived on a ‘Clue’ board.”

Blanc is forever drawling about “the inevitability of truth” and the “trajectory” of how the crime unfolds as he ever-so-politely grills the gathered family.

“Ah’m sorry t’press, buuuut…”

The plotting here is iffy, and it takes a whole new level of suspension of disbelief to accept the reality (ish) of this scenario. But the cover-up, as with most crimes, is far more interesting and suspenseful. The flurry of jokes, delivered as a blizzard of throw-away lines about what “the reading of  (a) will” is REALLY like, for instance, tickle.

And Johnson keeps finding new players to sprinkle over the proceedings and deliver a smirk or chuckle.  M. Emmet Walsh plays a technophobe caretfaker and Frank Oz a comically-dismayed but firm-handed lawyer.

He’s managed a couple of neat tricks, luring us in and amusing us so that we don’t notice over two hours have passed, letting us see “the crime” and puzzle out how it will be covered up, exposed or unraveled implicating others.

And he’s given free rein to our once and future Bond, who wrings every laugh he can out of a detective trying to find what fills not just “tha hoooole at the center of this donut” of the mystery, but the “hole in the middle of the DONUT hole,” to boot.

That adds up to “Knives Out” as a proper whodunit, as twist-turny as you might expect, and as amusingly edgy and cutting as its title suggests.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements including brief violence, some strong language, sexual references, and drug material

Cast: Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Lakeith Stanfield, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Katherine Langford and Christopher Plummer

Credits: Written and directed by Rian Johnson. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:10

Here it is, that “lost” chapter of “Love, Actually” that we’ve been rummaging through the vaults for. “Last Christmas,” they’re calling it. “Dull, Actually” is more accurate.

It’s a mopey holiday romance leaning heavily on the “Game of Thrones” charms of Emilia Clarke and the music of George Michael.

And if you’re not ready to question her ability to play comedy and second guess the value the world puts on the George Michael songbook by the time this has burned through 102 minutes you’ll never get back, you never will be.

Clarke tries to sparkle every line the Emma Thompson/Bryony Kimmings screenplay gives her. She laughs. A lot. But she’s the only one guffawing and showing a lot of teeth as she does, because there’s virtually nothing here that will tickle anybody else.

Clarke stars as Kate, “Katerina” to her Croatian family. She’s 30ish, has just moved out of her parents’ duplex and is schlepping her suitcase all over London Towne, still wearing her costume for work. She’s unintentionally made a career out of being an elf-clerk at Yuletide Wonderful, owned by the Chinese emigre who goes by the name “Santa” (Michelle Yeoh).

“Time to sparkle,” Santa growls.

It’s a tacky yet quirky shop, and it doesn’t pay enough to let Kate set up housekeeping on her own. So she imposes on one friend after another, thoughtlessly and clumsily breaking this and sullying that, and picking up guys in bars that she brings “home” for a little pre-Christmas coitus.

We’ve seen her as a child, warbling a George Michael song with her choir back in pre-breakup Yugoslavia. That’s her goal — singing on the London stage. The auditions she tumbles into suggest how unlikely that dream is — pleasant (ish) but untrained voice, pathologically tardy, self-absorbed. Maybe delusional.

Hell, she should try New York.

Santa seethes at Kate’s carelessness on the job. Her thick-accented mother (Emma Thompson) leaves her voice mails by metric tonne. And losing one more set of friends by being the roommate from Hell might be her wakeup call.

Ours? Well, we’re going to stick around to see how she ever made friends in the first place.

Then the tall handsome stranger, Tom, strolls into her life. Henry Golding of “Crazy Rich Asians” plays this patient, eccentric and very-interested-in-Kate Londoner. He’s obsessed with getting her to take a walk with him. She chuckles how much he’s “not my type” and how the places he wants to walk have a “serial killery” vibe.

But he’s always looking up. And as she looks up with him, she notices the glories of London in all its holiday splendor, and its quirky architectural history. He shows her his secret garden. And even though she’s still doing the barfly-hookup thing after they meet, she continues to take walks with Tom — appreciating the beauty, checking in at the homeless shelter where he volunteers.

“Might as well have ‘SAINT’ tattooed on your forehead!”

She takes an interest in the only way she knows how. She comes on to him. Tom brushes that off in a “we just met” way, and the walks continue.

Kate, of course, has a secret. She’s been sick, we’re told. She meets her doctor with her mum and gets read the riot act over her unhealthy lifestyle.

Tom has his own secrets. And if you sit there pondering, as I did, “WHY are they together?” well, you’ll figure both secrets out before the first one is revealed.

Golding has an effortless charm here that we haven’t seen in his other performances. But his inability to spark chemistry with any leading lady is an ongoing issue, and that makes the gears grind in this syrupy Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids,” “Ghostbusters”) confection. It’s why we sit and wonder why these two are “together,” because the script and performances don’t make their connection organic or believable.

Clarke’s character arc is that she develops compassion being around Tom, starts helping with the shelter, going easier on her mom, matchmaking for her lonely boss. She’s not awful as Kate, but the strain shows. At least her green eyes match her elf costume, damn near perfectly.

But like a lot of Feig’s recent work, it’s the “woke” elements of “Last Christmas” that seem to get more attention than the BASIC dramatic/romantic/comic/sentimental stuff. Anti-immigrant bigotry (a subtext in a couple of movies this holiday season, “Knives Out,” for instance), the ugly underpinnings of Brexit, and a gay couple just needing family acceptance, all are here and designed to deliver the warm fuzzies.

So is the heavy reliance on the George Michael Songbook. Repeating his “Last Christmas” title tune ad nauseum does him no favors, and removing his performance from many of the songs emphasizes his inadequacies as a lyricist — with that song, in particular, standing out as insipid. And the ultimate spoiler.

After a while, though, we get ahead of the editors, recognizing “Oh, this’d be the PERFECT place to use ‘Faith,'” etc. Kate, of course, dozes off and we ALL know what song will awaken her before she go goes.

The banter is, first scene to last, awful. Delivering bad dialogue at top speed doesn’t make it better, Ms. Clarke. Why does she keep saying she’s from “The Former Yugoslavia?” NO emigre would refer to her homeland that way. Her mother doesn’t.

Yeoh looks perplexed enough to mutter “This is supposed to be FUN?” between takes.

Still, there’s one great thing Tom and “Last Christmas” have to teach us. Kate wants to give him her digits. “Where’s your phone?”

He locked it in a cubbard, he says. And once he did, he stopped looking down and started looking up at the city. A lovely sentiment. Not the only one in the film, mind you. But the only one that stuck with me from this instantly forgotten treacle.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual content

Cast: Emilia Clarke, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Emma Thompson

Credits: Directed by Paul Feig, screenplay by Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:42

And will “Playing with Fire” light up?

So many BO headline questions.

But if there’s anything the post “It” universe has taught us, don’t bet against Stephen King. His “Shining” sequel has good reviews, real horror and a few frights and could clear $30, some say. Box Office Mojo says $25.

Deadline.com is throwing a $23 to $30 rabge out there. CYA much?

“Last Christmas” is testing how much we want to see a holiday romance in early November. Emilia Clarke of “Game of Thrones” and Henry Golding of “Crazy Rich Asians” pair up. Indifferent reviews won’t hurt it, but Mojo says $18 million is its ceiling. Maybe. I am about to tap out my review and can’t wait to use the phrase “Dull, Actually” in it.

“Midway” may find an audience, but World War II movies have iffy BO prospects. A CGI driven Naval battle epic, it should clear $10, $13 says Mojo.

And John Cena paired with kids has limited prospects. Terrible reviews won’t help “Playing With Fire” and Mojo saying it will make $8 million seem a tad generous.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed3798991876/?ref_=bo_at_a

Yeah, Starz cable channel is a part of the equation. But cheap movies that out perform expectations do, too.

A winning formula.

Via Variety.

Lionsgate Beats Wall Street Forecasts for Revenue, Operating Income https://t.co/28E5kjUQUu https://t.co/I5eOLcbCem https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1192558113317982208?s=17

“I’m not…CRAZY!”

A February movie, Moss lets her late spouse get in her head. Or maybe he really is “The Invisible Man.”

“Soul” has a little jazz, and a little “Inside/Out” metaphysics. Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey are the voice acting stars of this June 20 release, which looks like a fairly significant departure for the animation house.

A good departure.

What’s the afterlife like?

We never like to see our movie stars “trying too hard” in a screen comedy. But sometimes, the effort itself is worth a few laughs.

I mean, they’re suffering for their art, trying to wring laughs out of thin material, adding value, giving the studio paying them fair value, no matter how silly they look doing it.

“Playing with Fire” takes wrestler turned action star (“The Marine”) John Cena where Vin Diesel (“The Pacifier”) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (“The Game Plan”) have gone before.

Put this prime slab of action hero machismo in a scenario that forces him to deal with little kids, and fail. Haplessness and hilarity ensues, right? Except that it rarely does.

It’s a topical comedy about the heroes of the moment — Smoke Jumpers, the elite parachutist firefighters deployed into blazing forests, saving lives and homes as they struggle to contain the consequences of drought-stricken forests in a hotter, dryer and “changed” climate, and people who like to live in the middle of such tinderboxes.

Jake Carson (Cena) is station superintendent (“Sup”) in the woodlands of Redding, California, a no-nonsense firefighting son of a legendary fire fighter who died in the line of duty.

He’s got no time for flirting with the cute biologist (Judy Greer) obssessively studying toads by the lake down the mountain, and no time for shenanigans, even though Keegan-Michael Key, John Leguizamo and the lumbering “Lurch” of a fireman, “Axe” (Tyler Mane) are his kinda-goofy crew.

“Where’s my REDDING CREW AT?” he bellows.

“EVERYWHERE!”

That changes when he has to airlift three kids out of a blazing cabin, and the weather and the weekend means nobody can come take them off he and his Redding crew’s hands until Monday.

He’s just had the other half of his crew quit on him. There’s a big promotion coming, with the super-hero-sized division commander (Dennis Haysbert, having a laugh) about to retire. The last thing Jake needs is unruly, unmannered kids messing up his firehouse, playing with his fire extinguishers and flare guns, demanding bedtime stories.

The kids — played by Brianna Hildebrand, Christian Convery and Finley Rose Slater — are unrestrained, unschooled, prone to pilfering and petty vandalism. Well, not little Zoey (Slater). She’s the lovable one.

He may think of himself as “a father figure, only way cooler.” But Jake’s about to learn a hard lesson.

“Kids. You can’t control them. You can only contain them until they burn themselves out.”

“Race to Witch Mountain” director Andy Fickman finds most of the movie’s laughs via slapstick — detergent accidents, oil spills, flares and fire extinguishers used IMproperly.

The funniest sight gag might be Jake’s attempt to pull the kids out of that burning cabin via helicopter. Rodrigo, the pilot (Leguizamo) keeps misunderstanding Jake’s commands, yanking him up into the ceiling — hard — over and over again.

Key and Leguizamo mug for the camera and trip through some grownup one-liners. Rodrigo is from “San Quentin.” Can’t tell the kids what that really is. “A small college in Vermont” is the quick explanation Mark (Key) comes up with.

A running gag is Rodrigo’s quick way with a homily or anecdote, and inability to process the facts of his quotes.

“As Lance Armstrong once said, ‘That’s one small step for man. And WATCH out for the next one!”

Cena is a funny guy, as he’s proven in “Trainwreck” and those kiddie “Fred” movies of about ten years ago. Here, he’s got too little to work with, even if the poking the uptight guy is the surest way to laughs that there is.

Attempted one-liners aside, the only character and performance to generate giggles is Mane’s turn as the always axe-toting “Axe,” a lumbering menace who turns out to be a soft touch around toddlers.

Everybody else — the sprightly Greer included — tries too hard. Because they have to.  Every wrinkle in the plot is nakedly contrived, an obvious screenplay convenience. Every gag is given away. Every one-liner vanishes into the void.

Kids may love projectile poop gags, but even they should be able to smell the odor “Playing with Fire” puts out there.

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor, some suggestive material and mild peril

Cast: John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Brianna Hildebrand, Dennis Haysbert, John Leguizamo and Judy Greer

Credits: Directed by Andy Fickman, script by Dan Ewen, Matt Lieberman. An Nickelodeon/Paramount release

Running time: 1:36

The Big Race didn’t finish exactly the way it’s depicted in “Ford v. Ferrari.”

And the Money Moment, the hilarious scene previewed in the trailers and TV commercials where racing driver and race-car building legend Carroll Shelby delights and then frightens to the point of tears the Ford heir and CEO of the Motor Company on a mad lap in the company’s Ferrari-fighting GT40 racer? Never happened.

But damn, it feels right — dramatically, comically and thematically. And in James Mangold’s epic, bracing and breezy spin around a piece of motorsport legend, if it didn’t happen, it sure as hell should have.

Want a lesson in how a two and a half hour period piece can just fly by? Mangold (“Walk the Line,””Logan”) gives a master class in it, using the struggle, the titanic figures engaged in it and the pedal-to-the-metal setting to plunge us into American motorsport’s equivalent of The Moon Landing.

Here’s Shelby, a hustling hard-selling Texan given a compact, cunning and comic understatement by Matt Damon. He was the first American to win the prestigious 24 Hours of LeMans, and when he was forced to stop racing himself, he put a Ford V-8 into tiny British AC Ace sports car and created a world beating racer, and one of the most valuable collectible automobiles in history — the Shelby Cobra.

At Ford in the early ’60s, Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) has just innovated the company out of the doldrums with the young-motorist-magnet Mustang, and convinced the boss, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), amusingly nicknamed “The Deuce,” that what Ford REALLY needs, image-wise, is to buy the great European sports car builder Ferrari, which runs the fastest cars in the races that have cachet among the young — sports car races.

Bernthal gives us a taste of the Great American Salesman and cheerleader that Iacocca would become.

“James Bond does not drive a Ford, sir!”

The Deuce is sold. Sure, let’s cut a check. Even if the CEO thinks James Bond is “a degenerate.”

But the Italian-American Iacocca gets hustled by the real Italian, Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), who finishes his “NO deal” tirade (Fiat bought an interest in Ferrari instead) with a flurry of insults about the “fat” Ford and his “ugly factory” putting out millions of “ugly cars.”

The bluff and deadpan Ford — we’re introduced to him shutting down an assembly line to chew out and motivate the work force during a downturn — has had enough of “getting it in the tailpipe from a Chevy Impala.” And he’s not going to take this insult from some snooty Italian slur. Oh no.

Build a car. Form a team. Win LeMans. And do it quick.

That’s how they come to Shelby. But Shelby comes with baggage, an ornery Brit who owns a garage that services British sports cars like the MGA in Southern California, a champion SCCA race car driver with a test pilot’s feel for tweaking, adjusting and turning a car into a world beater.

“Brilliant, but difficult” is the label Ken Miles wears. Christian Bale wouldn’t be insulted by noting how on-the-nose casting him as Miles is. Yeah, they have a few things in common.

Shelby has to “handle” Miles and please his Ford masters, including Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), Director of Special Vehicles at Ford, basically the “suit” in charge of its racing teams, set up as the villain of the tale.

The Italians are the exotic foreign menace, arrogant again a mere two decades after their World War II humiliation. But the “enemy” in this 90 day sprint to put a car on the track that will humble them is ponderous American Corporate Culture, and Beebe becomes a thorn in Shelby and Miles’ side — hated, always putting “the company” and its culture and “image” first.

We don’t see the Brits who hastily designed the GT40, just them delivering it to Shelby and Miles and Shelby’s ace in the hole, engineer Phil Remington (Ray McKinnon). The movie focuses on that trio’s efforts make this burly beast hold the corners, hug the track and “go like hell” when she does.

The car is iconic, and gets that “Right Stuff” sort of star entrance here. Brits designed it, but it feels American — bluff, muscular and aggressive. Put a Ford V-8 in it and you can’t wait to hear her get angry.

Casting Bale pays dividends in all the scenes with the car being tested, through Remington’s DIY wind-tunnel on-the-track idea of figuring out why it’s trying to go airborne, through engine changes, brake issues, all the racing failures leading up to “The Big Race.”

Bale’s Miles is in the car for all this, thunking through gears, talking to himself and the car in his no-nonsense Cockney cheerleader accent. “Oh YES,” at everything he likes in the set-up. “I’ll have some more of THAT, if you please!” Inevitably punctuated with a disappointed “Bloody hell!”

Characters show their emotions in “Ford v. Ferrari” in fits of recklessness — ex-Air Force pilot Shelby taking the controls of a Ford company plane to land at the big announcement ceremony, Miles’ venting his fury at Shelby on the track, Mrs. Mollie Miles (Caitriona Balfe) scaring Ken half to death careening their Ford station wagon through backroads as she chews on him for not telling her he’s getting back into racing.

And then there’s that Shelby drives Hank the Deuce in the “$9 million car you paid for” moment.

Letts, a playwright and actor who has made deadpan authority figures something of a specialty in his film career, gets a laugh every time he turns up in the film. He’s got Ford-during-World-War II anecdotes to underscore his “just win” lectures. He’s peevish at failure, and you could believe this man would spare no expense just to get even with somebody who insulted him. This is a great supporting turn.

Damon’s take on Shelby is colorful and canny, letting us see the wheels turning as he sizes up people and summons up the appropriate, drawled “My Daddy used’t tell me” anecdote to get what he wants — from Miles, Remington or Ford. His Shelby is a compromised hero, never quite living up to “larger than life,” but still a Western archetype whose laconic narration puts the film on a man-finding-out-what-he’s-made-of footing.

Bale’s Miles has just enough manners to not tell off customers who don’t know how to drive the British sports cars they bought and that he services. He never loses his suffer-no-fools-gladly demeanor, even as he faces corporate shunning and other disappointments.

Mangold and his screenwriters didn’t make this movie just for gearheads and racing fans. Including Miles’ son Pete (Noah Jupe) lets Ken explain to him and the audience the danger, performance requirements and other tests of LeMans.

The racing sequences are low-camera-angle montages passing by at a whiplash-quick blur. Suspense builds, humor defuses it, and the thrills feel hard-earned, deserved and well, patriotic.

It stands with the greatest racing movies ever, and it’s certainly the most entertaining. But there is no doubt about one last superlative. “Ford v Ferrari” is one of the best pictures of the year.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and peril

Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Caitriona Balfe, Tracy Letts, Jon Bernthal, Josh Lucas

Credits: Directed by James Mangold, script by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Henry. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:32

All star cast, funny trailer, great buzz.

Here’s a holiday movie that has it all — Jamie Lee C and Toni Collette, Chris Evans and Christopher Plummer.

Don Johnson, Michael Shannon.

Murder most foul, a dead rich guy, a house full of suspects.

Daniel Craig trotting out a Foghorn Leghorn Southern accent, Suh!

Something came down here, via meteorite.

The South African writer of “Hardware,” one of the great indie dystopian sci-fi thrillers of the ’90s, directed this adaptation.

Joely Richardson, Q’rianka Kilcher and Tommy Chong co-star with Nicolas Cage. Looks trippy enough.