Movie Nation

The only folks toasting the “good news” of the box office take from the first weekend in November are over at Focus Features, where “Harriet” — opening wide — is sprinting to an impressive $11 million or so debut.

It was projected to earn $8 or 9 million, tops. But the marketing of it worked, even if it made the film look like “A Lifetime Original Movie.” I caught it in the only multiplex in “The Last Capital of the Confederacy,” with a decent sized audience, who talked back to the screen and laughed at the most moving moments. The heroine deserved a better movie.

“Terminator: Dark Fate” should end this franchise, even though that was never the intention (damned finale hints at more “story,” the greedy bastards). It was projected to clear $35-44 million, with one prognosticator noting that $30 million would be the definition of “bombed.”

It is staggering towards $28 million and change. A deathly dull sci-fi thriller, it deserved even worse. It will make enough money overseas to tempt Paramount to release another. But they shouldn’t.

Edward Norton spent 20 years getting this New York version of “Chinatown,” “Motherless Brooklyn,” adapted and on the screen. Truth be told, he’s a little old to be playing the young gumshoe with Tourette’s, trying to solve the murder of his mentor and boss (Bruce Willis). Not the biggest failing of the picture (rubbing some of the villainous edge off its version of New York “planning” overlord Robert Moses, played by Alec Baldwin, hurts), but Norton is not the star he was 10 years ago and the box office reflects that.

“Motherless Brooklyn” will be lucky to bank $3 million by midnight Sunday. That’s one third of the already lowball projected take.

Entertainment Studios threw together an animated film with a big-name voice actor cast, and the result looks it. Audiences are avoiding “Arctic Dogs” for the dog it is. It won’t clear much more than $2, maybe close to $3 million.

The fourth weekend of the middling “Addams Family” cartoon will do triple its business, and it’s not like that one was made by a major animation house.

The grace notes almost outnumber the grimaces in “Harriet,” an insistently melodramatic and sometimes affecting film biography of Abolitionist and heroine of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.

Edit out the theatrical, eye-rolling third act, and Cynthia Erivo‘s fiery, righteous turn as the escaped slave who led scores of other enslaved Negroes to freedom in the mid-19th century, would stand tall — or at least taller than she does in the closing credits of director and co-writer Kasi Lemmons’ film.

The fact that the enterprise never looks as epic as its heroine, that too many supporting roles show a production short of cash to hire “names” and charismatic villains, wouldn’t matter as much. The speechifying, predicting the near future (the Civil War) and other excesses of Lemmons’ (“Eve’s Bayou,” “Talk to Me”) and Gregory Howard Allen’s (“Ali,” “Remember the Titans”) script only truly grate in that never-ending finale.

We meet Araminta “Minty” Tubman (Erivo, of “Widows” and “Bad Times at the El Royale”) just as her husband (Zackary Momoh) is presenting their claim, drafted by a lawyer, for freedom to their Maryland “massa.” John Tubman was a free man who’d hired a lawyer, seeking to enforce a will that should have granted Minty and her parents freedom.

Their owner (Mike Marunde) isn’t having it, and his cruelest son Gideon (Joe Alwyn) counsels selling Minty off to head off the trouble she was stirring up.

“Harriet,” the film and the heroine who will wear that name, leaps into action, putting her on the run to avoid “being sold South.” The local Negro preacher (Vondie Curtis-Hall, best of the supporting players) may lead hymns about keeping “your hands on the plow,” and sermonize Biblical obedience. But when Minty shows up at his door, he is the man with the plan.

Illiterate Minty sprints into the night, makes her way 100 miles (via the preacher’s connections) and escapes to discover the “colored” elite of Philadelphia, where “The Committee” runs the Underground Railroad, William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.) publishes their Abolitionist broadsides and the prim and ladylike Marie Buchanan (Janelle Monae) shows escaped slaves how to fit into white society.

“Walk like you got a right to!”

Minty takes a new name, her mother’s real name — Harriet. And before too long, Harriet, a pious woman who has “spells” in which she communes with the Lord (a head injury may have caused these), decides those she loved must experience the freedom she has claimed.

She starts making treks South to free her husband, her family and others.

The grandest conceit of this telling of her epic story is the way Harriet, who wore disguises and used fake papers to make her way into the South, came by her nickname “Moses.”

It wasn’t just the fact she was leading her people to “the promised land.” In the film, she hides in the woods just off the fields where the hands are working, and sings (Erivo played a jazz singer in “Bad Times at the El Royale,” and is Aretha Franklin in the upcoming TV miniseries. Yeah, she’s got pipes.). She sings “Go Down, Moses,” with its lyrics demanding the Pharaoh “let my people go.”

The field hands hear her, drop their tools, and follow her.

These moments are electric, up to a point. Repetition eventually wears out even this intensely moving and magical device.

Erivo runs as if her life depended on it, flashes her eyes as if she Talks with The Lord and “The Lord talks back,” as one convert to her cause puts it. And that’s a good thing.

Because the villains here are almost silent-movie dastardly, with Alwyn looking like he took time off from a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band to blast us with some Old Time Racism.

“Having a favorite slave is like having a favorite pig. You can play with it, give it a name. But one day you might have to sell it or eat it!”

The word “Negro” never figures in the script. Everybody, Abolitionists and Harriet herself, labels the black folks they’re dealing with by the Biblical-age term for less than human property — slaves. That’s tin-eared screenwriting, and you would have expected much better, given the credentials of the writers.

Slave hunters and slave owners keep staking out the same wooden bridge to intercept their escapees on their flight north across the Mason-Dixon Line. It never works. They never learn.

Versions of Frederick Douglas and John Brown turn up, the rising tensions and Congressional stop-gaps that pushed the country toward Civil War are addressed.

And while there’s a historical exclamation point to one event depicted in the third act, it all plays as dramatically-flat, subtlety-abandoned theatricality, and takes the wind right out of whatever forward motion the first two acts had.

Tubman’s case to be on the $20 bill, as a heroine straight out of American myth, is made, a brave Christian woman sprinting down the path of the righteous. “Harriet” stumbles when it makes her more mythic than human, and less the woman of action than she was.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, violence, racial epithets, profanity

Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Janelle Monae, Vondie Curtis Hall, Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn and Tim Guinee

Credits: Directed by Kasi Lemmons, script by Gregory Allen Howard and Kasi Lemmns. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:05

Competently animated — OK, competent “ish” — and heartlessly scripted, “Arctic Dogs” plays like an Entertainment Studios production not written and drawn so much as engineered, contrived by market necessity.

Give theaters something animated to drag kids and parents to in between Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, Laika and MGM (“The Addams Family”) releases.

Terrible? Kind of. “Joyless” is much more apt, though. That’s usually what you get when you try to fix an awful animated script by hiring big names to read it into a microphone for your cartoon.

Jeremy Renner voices an Arctic Fox who dreams of being “Top Dog” in the Arctic Circle overnight delivery business. Michael Madsen voices one of those delivery huskies.

“Swifty” the white-camoflaged and too-tiny-to-pull-a-dogsled fox is consigned to package sorting at ABDS, Artic Blast Delivery Service. His boss, Magda the Moose (“I am CARIBOU!” she hisses in an Anjelica Huston Russian accent) will never let him move into deliveries.

Until that day all the huskies quit. Actually, they were dog-napped. And it’s not until Swifty realizes the red fox he crushes on (Heidi Klum), an inventor, has been taken that he figures out that they’re all being held in an evil Doc Oc styled walrus (John Cleese) in his self-described “lair.” Evil walrus has minions — puffins — and a big mouth, barely concealing “the secret of my nefarious plans.”

Swifty may be “just a fox” to the other residents of Taigaville, where “the only thing I’ll be remembered for is not being memorable.” But he’s on the case, and PB, his Polar Bear pal (Alec Baldwin) might help, even if dimwitted slacker-albatross Lemmy (James Franco) can”t.

There’s precious little action, and beavers with Italian accents, weasels with German and French ones (“Vive l’resistence!”) and zero laughs spread over 92 minutes.

As I said, “Joyless.” Any questions?

MPAA Rating:PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Jeremy Renner, Heidi Klum, Alec Baldwin, John Cleese, James Franco and Anjelica Huston

Credits: Directed by Aaron Woodley, script by Bob Barlen, Cal Brunker and Aaron Woodley. An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:32

Good cast, properly dramatic, poetic and action-promising trailer for this 2018 film, earning a Nov. 22 release.

Well, the “Fast and Furious” thing was never going to last forever. Close, but not forever.

So Vin Diesel is going down the “Universal Soldier” route with the comic book based “Bloodshot.” Guy Pearce? Man.

Once more, dear friends, once more, cast and crew, once more — ACCOUNTANTS — let us return to “Jumanji” for a little more Kevin Hart/Dwayne Johnson cold hard buddy-teen movie cash.

Four titles open wide this weekend, with yet another “Terminator” movie headlining, Edward Norton’s passion project “Motherless Brooklyn” and a Harriet Tubman bio-pic vying for the crumbs.

And something called “Arctic Dogs” is on the docket as well.

At least Paramount’s latest incarnation of the venerable vengeance from the future franchise will own its opening weekend. “Joker” is still around, but no way will “Terminator: Dark Fate” not do “Maleficent” numbers, or higher.

Deadline.com figures “Dark Fate” should clear $40, but could tank at $30. Noncommittal, much?

Box Office Mojo thinks it could challenge “Terminator 3’s” franchise record of $44 million. The advertising and hype could help.

As they gave away the entire movie in the trailer, and what they gave away was recycled, maybe marketing hype won’t help. Other reviews? Mixed, in the “meh” range, at best.

The “Harriet” Tubman film from Focus wasn’t widely previewed for critics, and those who caught it early shrugged it off (I will get to it today.). It should do $8-9 million, per both Mojo and Deadline. That seems high, as the film looks like a straight to Lifetime (production values, no name cast) project. But we’ll see.

“Motherless Brooklyn” could do anywhere from $3 to $8, various tracking prognosticators say. Norton is a movie star, but “an older Ryan Gosling” is his box office status, and that’s not a selling point. Box Office Mojo says this very wide release won’t crack the top ten. Period pieces like “Motherless” seem more of a Netflix “Let’s get an Oscar nomination” gambit these days, and the reviews for this one have been mixed, too. I found it lacking.

The animated “Arctic Dogs” has a better shot at cracking the top ten, Mojo says. $5 million, which from Entertainment Studios and a multi-national production with Indian and Chinese money, animation farmed out hither and yon, would count as a win.

North American audiences an be forgiven for scanning past this title on Netflix, “Revenge of the Pontianak,” and wondering if the first half of is missing.

Shouldn’t it be “Aztek II: Revenge of the Pontiac?”

No, nothing to do with the former GM home of the Bonneville, the G8 and the GTO. This is a Malaysian vampire tale (in Malay, with English subtitles), a soapy horror melodrama that’s very similar to Hollywood’s “Ghost Story” of some decades past.

It’s pretty tame, by Western horror standards. But it plays by the rules, it’s in an exotic setting and it’s a period piece — colorful costumes from Malaysia’s swinging ’60s clothe the cast, all characters trapped in a sylan village in the mountainous suburbs.

It’s 1965, and everybody’s gathered to celebrate the wedding of Siti (Shenty Felizaina) and Khalid (Remy Ishak).

He has a little boy from an earlier relationship, but she’s pretty and the locals seem to take to her. But check out the look on Khalid’s face when his best man Rais (Tony Eusoff) serenades the newlyweds with a song that seems to mean something to Khalid, and maybe to Rais.

And the dirty look he casts towards the stage presages what happens later. Rais has a car accident, gets out to check the damage, and is gutted by something that also attacks his date.

When new bride Siti sees Rais next, his bled-out corpse is hanging from a very tall tree overlooking their classy village bungalow on stilts. Of course she screams.

But the locals instantly wonder what curse Siti has brought upon them. The local imam (Namron) who has shaman qualities (he touches people and sees montages of what’s happened to them) shares a prophecy, and a warning.

“Darkness has descended upon this village!” he intones. “CLEAN YOUR HOUSE!”

He’s not just lecturing Siti, who has all this blood on the porch. It’s the whole village that must “clean.” And as seizures and sickness start striking locals, they amp up the superstition and point their fingers at the outsider, this “demon woman.”

But we, being sophisticated horror viewers, know better. That look Khalid and Rais shared had meaning.

And others know their secret.

The frights are fairly routine, up until the finale, which has blood and fury and meaning and comeuppance.

I liked the look and the tone of Glen Goei and Gavin Yap’s picture, the foliage of the rainforest framing the world they’re showing up, beautiful people in exotic clothing dealing with problems any vampire film fan (or “Ghost Story” fan) will recognize.

A long flashback gives away the mystery, which we’ve already guessed if we read the opening credit, that a “Pontianak” is a woman who dies in childbirth but who isn’t given a proper funeral. A “Pontianak” she is called.

And who is bringing a child into this marriage?

It’s all a trifle murky and underscripted (for foreign, not Malaysian audiences) to follow, but if you watch a lot of horror, you’ve seen worse. The acting is solid all up and down the line with Namron, as the seer or whatever his real title is (he dresses like a Malaysian Imam, and the Muslim call to prayer is heard in one scene), the stand out.

It’s not a hidden gem or anything like that, just another culture’s take on plot points and themes Hollywood has beaten into the ground. Just interesting enough to wish all involved “Better luck next film.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations

Cast: Nur Fazura, Remy Ishak, Hisyam Hamid, Shenty Felizaina, Tony Eusoff and Namron.

Credits: Written and directed by Glen Goei, Gavin Yap.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

You can see why Edward Norton held onto the rights to make “Motherless Brooklyn” for years and years before he finally got his chance to film it. It’s his shot at making a “Chinatown,” a film noir about the brute force that created New York the way forces beyond Jake Gittes’ control shaped modern Los Angeles.

And Norton, who made characters with tics and afflictions, or who were affecting afflictions, a mainstay of his early repertoire, would play a detective with Tourette’s.

But one can appreciate the ambition, the scope the actor was going for, while acknowledging the material isn’t “Chinatown” and the actor/director’s reach exceeds his grasp when it comes to realizing it.

In mid-50s New York, Lionel (Norton) doesn’t call his tendency to blurt out sounds, words, phrases and profanity Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s “like having glass in your head,” he narrates, the implication being that the glass is broken and keeping your thoughts to yourself cuts and hurts too much to manage it.

Being asked “How’d she take it?” might get a “Tim-buck-TAKE it” response, and a lot more blurted words to boot.

He’s obsessive compulsive, too, worrying a sweater thread until he ruins it, opening and closing doors, repeatedly patting someone on the shoulder after initially making that gesture out of compassion.

And for the love of God don’t ask him to light your cigarette.

Lionel works in a small private eye agency that doubles as a car service. He lives with a cat his tics and blurts scare, and copes with gum (at work) or marijuana (to sleep), anything to occupy or dull his mind.

And aside from his off-putting condition, which everybody he meets excuses with “That’s OK” (New York is very tolerant, in this way, in the movie), Lionel’s got a fine mind. It’s why Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) employs him. Lionel, nicknamed “Freak Show” by his colleagues (Dallas Roberts and Bobby Cannavalle and Willis), has one of those total recall/video-rewind memories that only appear in the movies.

In 1954, Frank relies on Lionel to listen to a meeting where he’s left a phone off the hook so that Lionel can “record” it, at least in his mind.

And that’s important, because this meeting, a bit of finagling and working the angles with mobsters and connected “types,” is what gets Frank killed.

We know what that means in private eye tales (Jonathan Lethem wrote the novel this is based on). You solve the case “cuz he’d have done it for us.” Ignore the not-grieving-enough widow (Leslie Mann, the perfect blonde shrew), and figure out why Frank was following this “colored girl,” who turns out to work for a housing agency and advocacy group for the working poor.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is Laura, and even she doesn’t know how she fits into whatever’s really going on here. Like her boss (Cherry Jones), she knows “What happens to poor people in this city wasn’t news yesterday and it won’t be news tomorrow.”

There’s an all-powerful city planner with his fingers in various “authorities” and commissions that made things go in the days when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. He’s plainly based on the megalomaniacal “visionary” Robert Moses, who steamrolled people and neighborhoods reshaping the city in that era, and he’s played by the menacing and mesmerizing Alec Baldwin.

Michael Kenneth Williams plays a scarred, scary jazz man with a sweet side, based on Miles Davis.

And Willem Dafoe is Mr. Exposition, the gadfly who knows how “things get done in this city,” the wild-eyed one who fills Lionel in on the sorts of stuff that’s about to happen that the dead Frank might have been wise to, which is how he became Dead Frank.

Norton makes the most out of his classic gumshoe with a tic, and plays those blurted insults, confessions or profanities for laughs. It’s not the most sensitive portrayal, but he never lets Lionel’s condition render him less than competent. And nobody under-estimates him because of it.

It’s a movie that lingers over its clues, and lets Lionel’s total recall reset them and slowly and deliberately figure this puzzle out.

That “slowly” business is a hindrance, because the picture follows the noir “Chinatown” template to a fault. That makes it predictable. That makes it play SLOW.

Lionel gets beaten up, repeatedly. Bad guys are always getting the drop on him. But even with Frank dead, they let Lionel live.

Scenes that don’t drive the action dress up the city in its post war grime and slums. The narration is borderline incessant, the sax-flavored jazz score de rigeur.

And the payoff seems almost quaint as it reaches for “Chinatown” shock value and scandal.

The upshot of all this, two hours and 24 minutes of vintage car chases, fire escape chases, punch-outs and puzzling over clues? “It’s NOT ‘Chinatown,’ Jake.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including some sexual references, brief drug use, and violence

Cast: Edward Norton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Written and directed by Edward Norton, based on the Jonathan Lethem novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:24

It’s a Warner Brothers release, a studio that probably isn’t sweating the mixed early reviews or modest prospects of Edward Norton’s adaptation of a novel that harks back to film noir.

“Joker” cured all WB ills from now until Christmas, at least.

But this one looks introguing, even if Norton has gone to that odd tic/affliction well more than once (just re-watched “The Score” the other night. It’s like a dress rehearsal for every “Of Mice and Men/I Am Sam” he’d love to have taken on, back then.