Movie Nation

So The Weinstein Co. rounded up an all-star cast for “The Current War,” a piece of history about the DC vs. AC battles of Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the Tesla-Westinghouse (Nicholas Hoult, Michael Shannon) of the late 19th century.

Bragging rights and future billions were at stake in this struggle by titans over how America and the world would electrify.

Matthew McFadyen is J,P. Morgan, Tom Holland is an Edison acolyte, Tuppence Middleton and Katherine Waterston are the female leads.

And yet Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s film was a bust at film festivals (Toronto, 2017 among them). And Harvey Weinstein, well, you know what happened there.

Weinstein scrapped this Oscar bait picture’s release. Two distributors later, 101 now has it. And Gomez-Rejon have recut it.

“The Current War: Director’s Cut” opens Friday.

Disney’s “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” genocidal war movie masquerading as a kids’ fairytale had been predicted to clear $42 million on its opening weekend. That ain’t happening. A $35.5 million first weekend will be enough for it to claim a win, but it won’t sit at the top long.

Another sequel — “Terminator: Dark Fate” — is coming. Soon.

And “Joker” is still making $30 million a weekend. Or it will this weekend.

A big Thursday night and solid Friday gave “Zombieland: Double Tap” a boost towards a $26-27 million opening weekend. Not bad for a middling movie that’s a sequel ten years removed from its original October Surprise.

Pre-weekend projections suggested the aged, no longer up and coming cast and long dormant title meant a $20-23 million opening was the upper end of what Sony could expect from the zombie killing comedy. I still say it’ll do all its business opening weekend. Not strong enough for word of mouth to keep it around.

“The Addams Family” is losing audience to the “Maleficent” steamroller, and won’t clear $14 million on its second week.

“Gemini Man” has fallen off a table.

“Hustlers” has been the break-out of the fall for STX, a $100 million (and counting) strippers rob Wall Street winner.

That’s being given as the reason why the summer blockbuster was pulled from China’s release slate for next weekend.

Can’t understand why the Maoist Kingdom would be bothered by depicting an early Hollywood Chinese hero as a poseur of the Summer’s Eve variety.

Apparently, the undemocratic, high-handed totalitarian state wanted Quentin Tarrantino to cut the Bruce Lee abuse from his movie.

He said no. Lebron James probably has an opinion on that. 

Like any longtime Hollywood film fan, I’ve noticed the American film industry’s eagerness to pander to the Chinese market in everything from “Great Wall” projects starring Matt Damon, “Meg” shark films with a big Chinese presence, to Obligatory Chinese Casting add-ons in virtually every franchise or action film (“Gemini Man” to “Rogue One”) coming out.

Sometimes, it pays off. Other times, it’s like “Who is Hollywood kidding with this tokenism?”

But this? This is just funny all the way around. I wrote last summer that I thought QT was out of line, or at least out of left field, in making the Real Bruce a short douche.

Interesting time to be taking “A Few Good Men” tack on the big screen about police work, that it’s a rough, dirty job “but somebody’s gotta do it.”

You know, with the rash of “I shot because I was scared” police killings.

“Crown Vic” has Thomas Jane as the grizzled veteran of the force, the unfortunately-named Luke Kleintank as his “new partner,” and opens in November

Everything about “Street Flow,” a coming-of-age parable about two brothers wrestling over the future of a third sibling, is familiar.

It’s in the “projects,” called “suburbs” here.

The young men are black. One brother is a gangster, the other in law school. The “kid” they’re trying to help raise is their youngest sibling.

And their long-suffering mother is caught, like the kid, in the middle of this. Hollywood has pounded this theme since the beginning of cinema, in urban dramas, Westerns, the works.

The twist in “Street Flow” is the setting — Champigny-sur-Marne, outside of Paris — the language (French) and the framework and overt politics of the struggle. That makes this tried and true formula work reading a few subtitles and watching.

Co-writer/director Kery James is Demba, the eldest, the brother who “made good.” He drives an Audi SUV, impresses the teens when he drops baby brother Noumouké (Bakary Diombera) off at school.

But there’s a reason their mama (Kani Diarra) wants nothing to do with Demba, and wants her youngest to stay away from him. Demba runs a drug gang and is always mixed up in something violent. The middle brother, studious law student Souleymaan (Jammeh Diangana) is the one who has to keep reminding Demba to stop stuffing cash into the kid’s mitts. The last thing they want is for the kid to act tough, act-out and get in trouble, like Demba.

“Act like me?” he protests (in French, with English subtitles). “You and Mom are always saying that…Life is about making choices. He does what he wants!”

That gets Noumouké suspended from school for fighting, trying to impress a girl. And that’s the last thing Souleymaan needs as he’s prepping for a big law school debate with the “blonde bourgeouis” Lisa (Chloé Jouannet).

I’m not kidding when I emphasize how worn and over-familiar the storybeats of this “struggle for the kid’s soul” are. There’s the hothead in Demba’s gang who is sure to start something, betrayals in the offing, a kidnapping, the tit for tat war that escalates around their housing projects, Moma crying over the uncertain fate of her Malian immigrant children.

The tentative romance between Lisa and Souleymaan is just as predictable.

But what’s novel here is how the debate, which we see them practicing for (speaking their arguments into their phones, etc) interspersed with examples of what the subject they’re debating is.

Resolve — that the problems of French colonial citizens, crime and lack of opportunity, racism and poverty, are the fault of The State. Or The State isn’t to blame. The latter is the side Souleymaan must argue, even as he sees and experiences the exact opposite every day.

He wears a white shirt and tie every day, and damned if the thuggish cops don’t roust him, call him “Sambo” and bait him.

The path to wealth Dembo took is the one that most readily presented itself to him, crime — a criminal serving drugs to his neighbors, who crave them.

The film’s climactic debate is the best thing in it — witty, with sharp edges that cut as the two might-be-lovers get personal in their attacks.

The rest of “Street Flow” — the French title is “Banlieusards (Commuters)” is as generic as its title. Good acting or not, the scenes are tropes that the cinema wore down to the stump before any of these players were born, much less old enough to “commute.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Jammeh Diangana, Bakary Diombera, Kery James, Chloé Jouannet, Kani Diarra

Credits: Written and directed by Kery James and Leïla Sy  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Michael Moore (@MMFlint) Tweeted:
Here’s a clip from the opening scene of my film, “Bowling for Columbine”, which will have a special nationwide screening tomorrow night (Saturday) at 9pm ET on MSNBC…

“You Open a Bank Account, You Get a Free Gun!”
https://t.co/SxjrawMqwU https://twitter.com/MMFlint/status/1185259761262120961?s=17

Apparently, PBS fans just can’t quit “Downton Abbey.”

The pre-Depression soap opera, a costume-and-wealth-bedecked period piece that opened over a month ago, just became the biggest hit in the history of Focus Features. It passed the cowboy romance “Brokeback Mountain” when it cleared the $84 million mark.

I still figure it has a shot at $100 million, maybe falling just shy of it as the picture loses screens the next two weekends.

The big picture this weekend will be Disney’s violent fairytale “Maleficent,” pitting Angelina Jolie against Michelle Pfeiffer in a tale of war, fairy genocide, chemical weapons attacks — fun for the whole family!

Mixed reviews from critics and whoever Team Rotten Tomatoes watered down their ranks with won’t hurt it (I hated it), won’t dampen the turnout. Box Office Mojo figures $42 million or so for the sequel.

“Joker” will pile on another $32 or so.

“Zombieland: Double Tap” looks to earn $23 million or so out of nostalgia. I caught a late show last night, less than half full (A lot more people were walking out of “Hustlers” at closing time, and it opened a month ago), so that guess about its take might be a little high.

Reviews for this one were on the so-so side as well. Me? Meh.

“Judy” is showing some legs, re-entering the top ten.
“The Lighthouse” isn’t opening wide enough to become a contender. Yet.

“Addams Family” continues to outpace “Abominable,” adding another $18 million this weekend. That’s an interesting sprint to watch. Dreamworks’ China panderer is over $50 million, MGM’s Canadian-animated “Addams” reboot is over $39 already and closing the gap fast.

Who would have guessed that Robert Pattinson would turn out to be the daring one, the “Twilight” star who filled his post glitter-makeup career with the most fascinating projects?

“Good Time,” High Life,” “Damsel,” “The Lost City of Z,” “The Rover” — the guy the fangirl mags labeled “R. Patts” has challenged himself and managed a nice Daniel Radcliffe second act to his career — daring indie fare.

“The Lighthouse” is a Pattinson tour de force, which it has to be because he’s paired with the great GREAT Willem Dafoe in a mythic horror tale about two lighthouse keepers, “wickies,” trapped on a rocky island with each other, a testy relationship tested by alcohol, and the horrors that a mermaid represents.

Pattinson is Winslow, the new assistant to the keeper, Thomas Wake (Dafoe). The old man is a bossy bully, ordering the newcomer about on their one month shift on this desolate island off New England.

Winslow totes the coal that runs the steam-engine-powered foghorn in this late 19th century station, hauls the whale oil that fuels the light, fixes the roof, whitewashes the tower and “swabs” the floors in this weather-worn outpost of shipping.

The old Yankee Wake limps about, filling the wind-whipped air with tales of his sailing past, with poems about “pale death,” and sea chanteys, most of it fueled by the vast supply of booze he brought with him.

“Man what don’t drink best ‘ave his reasons,” he growls to the tee-totaller Winslow.

Wake takes the “dog watch,” the night shift that keeps the wick lit and the fresnel-lensed light steering ships clear of the rocks. He guards this duty as a sacred rite. And he won’t share it, won’t hear of training the new guy in operating the light. He keeps keys for the lens-deck on the lighthouse, and locks himself in there every night.

Winslow can only guess what the old salt does up there. But he has hints, which his dreams, and a carved whale tooth mermaid he found stuffed in his mattress, flesh out.

Might the seas surrounding their island have shrieking sirens or selkies? Mermaids?

Robert Eggers, who gave us this splendid, understated and primitive horrors of “The Witch,” brings us another gritty period piece, this one shot in black and white and in the old silent film “Academy Aperture” (square picture) aspect ratio.

He pounds us with the silences and the noise — from the incessant foghorn and shrieks of the sea to Wake’s incessant Yankee blarney and farts.

And he parks two very good actors, deep in character, in a claustrophobic space, fuels their characters with fear, jealousy and alcohol and lets the chips fall where they may.

“The Lighthouse” has an oppressive dramatic weight about it, like a Samuel Beckett play with misery and magic, bodily fluids and violence enveloping two men “Waiting for Godot,” or God or rescue or waiting for some explanation or confession about what’s really going on around there, or between them.

There are ranting monologues and chanties sung in drunken duets, dances and brawls.

And always, there’s the near-silence interrupted by the clockwork lighthouse gear, the THUMP thumping of the steam engine, the howl of the wind and the tearing/exploding sea all around them.

Madness? It’s a pretty safe bet we’ll get a taste of that. It’s just a question of who cracks first.

“The Lighthouse” has another thing in common with “The Witch.” It plays and feels longer than its 100 minutes. The picture’s relentlessness takes on an aimlessness in the latter acts. It wears you out.

And then there’s the myopia of the setting and the characters, and an ickiness that surpasses anything anyone mocked the Oscar-winning “Shape of Water” for. Some of the same folks pushing that one into a Best Picture Oscar are making the same arguments here.

Perhaps not. But with another grand turn by Dafoe, menacing and vulnerable, experienced and apprehensive, and the new gravitas of Pattinson as a brand name for “challenging cinema,” “The Lighthouse” stands apart as one of the beautifully composed, shot and acted films of the year, as well as the most harrowing.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, violence, disturbing images, and some language

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman

Credits: Directed by Robert Eggers, script by Max Eggers, Robert Eggers An A24 release.

Running time: 1:49

“Zombieland: Double Tap,” the ten-years-later sequel to “Zombieland,” turns out to be one tap too many. And a tap way-heyyy too late.

The returning cast is less interested, the new characters less interesting. The violence is less shocking, the only laughs anybody appears to be going for are the cheapest ones the script provides — f-bombs.

All the freshness has gone out of it. It smells as stale as ten year-old living dead corpses.

As the voice over, by the ostensible author of “rules” to survive the zombie apocalypse, shows self-awareness, speaking directly to the audience in the theater, we might have expected a bit more honesty in advertising, or at least in break-the-fourth-wall narration.

“Zombieland 2: We Came Back for the Money.”

Jesse Eisenberg, the actor with the second most pressing need for this project, returns as Columbus — remember, everybody’s named for their hometown/state — long involved now with Wichita (Emma Stone), big brother figure to Little Rock (former child star Abigail Breslin, the actress who needed this the most) and son or “sidekick” to the redneck Dale Earnhardt fan/father-figure, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson).

Their “family” has set up shop in the ruins of the White House, but Little Rock’s itchiness to meet somebody her own age and Wichita’s efforts to flee the clingy Columbus (he proposes with the Hope Diamond) split them up. Again.

We barely have time to get used to Columbus meeting “Miss Forever 21” Madison (Zooey Deutch, on her game) in a derelict mall, when the need for a new quest arrives. Little Rock ran off with a patchouli oil musician who’s seen “Yesterday” and figures he can get away with claiming Bob Dylan’s songs as his own.

Berkeley (Avan Jogia, playing a dull cliche) and Little Rock are on the run.

To Graceland? That’s where the family meets “Hound Dog Hotel” operator Nevada (Rosario Dawson, as tough as you’d expect) and doppelgangers for Tallahassee and Columbus named Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch).

If Woody Harrelson can’t make Elvis jokes land, you know your movie’s in trouble. Wilson and Middleditch seem like the stars of the movie this one’s limited ambition wanted it to be — a direct-to-Netflix sequel with dull substitutes cast in the leads.

Deutch does dizzy and annoying quite well. “I’m getting a real anti ME vibe.”

The best sight gag might be a White House Christmas tree decorated with Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.

Oscar winner Stone and Eisenberg have grown apart, and there’s no retrieving what little chemistry they had in the first film. The direction is flat and listless.

Even the graphics denoting Zombieland “rules” (“Double tap,” shoot the zombie twice, is one of those) seem a lot less clever and are generally botched in presentation, here.

Harrelson’s Tallahassee has moved on to a less cool ride (a Pontiac Transporter) and a far less cool hat.

And the action climax has more in common with “Hobbes & Shaw” than it does with the original film.

It’s enough to make you wish they’d tapped out before they cut that first check, buying a sequel the cinema did not need or even ask for.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, language throughout, some drug and sexual content

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Zooey Deutch, Rosario Dawson, Luke Wilson, and Woody Harrelson

Credits: Directed by Ruben Fleischer, script by Rhett Reese, Dave Callaham and Paul Wernick. A Sony/Columbia release

Running time: 1:39

The journalist, memoirist and writer-director Nora Ephron kept this phrase as the creative person’s mantra — “Everything is copy.”

In an artist’s life, everyone you meet, everything you hear and see, everything you experience is fair game to be used in your creative process.

So when the Franco-American sculptress, performance artist and art video creator Prune Nourry was diagnosed with breast cancer, her first reaction was the one any woman would have.

And the second? She was going to use it in her art.

“Serendipity” is a career retrospective documentary she’s made, framed by her fight against cancer, all the way up to and including surgeries.

“Everything is connected,” she says. “I don’t believe in ‘coincidence.” So titling her film/journey “Serendipity” is a little French irony for the art consuming masses.

In her case, considering the fallopian/female fertility-centric nature of her art, she could do nothing else.

“Serendipity” shows her working with large-form sculptures, wandering through stick tunnels meant to suggest fallopian tubes. She gives  us a laugh with her video of a staged sculptural demonstration she once did of a five course meal at a four star restaurant where babies are made.

“The Procreative Diner” begins with the “cocktail” course — in vitro fertilization — and plunges on until we reach the finale, the “Cheese Course,” delivery.

There’s the street food cart “Sperm Bar” interactive installation, where passersby can check the “menu” of sperm donor traits they’d like.

Meanwhile, she’s braided her long black hair one last time, and invites friend, the late filmmaker Agnes Varda, to talk with her and photograph her as she chops it off.

“Am I still a woman with short hair and only one breast?” she asks the director of “Le petit amour.”

Later, she shaves her head. We’ve begun with her videoing her trip into surgery, a hospital gurney’s eye view of what she experiences. And we end with meeting her doctor as he marks her up for restorative surgery to fix the skin around the implant she had when her breast was removed.

We revisit her most ambitious works, seeing the Ganges River mud harvested and packed on straw frameworks for an installation called “Holy River.” Then there’s her optimistic piece,”Terracotta Daughters,” which she began in 2012 and plans to finish by 2030. Because she plans to survive.

“I had just realized I was a human being and I could die,” she says, undergoing chemo. She has no time for death.

You’ve heard and seen pictures of the ancient Chinese Terracotta Army commissioned by an emperor of the distant past. Nourry is photographing Chinese girls and designing and sculpting and commissioning her own terracotta army around them. This army is of girls, less valued around the world, even by her own French grandmother.

“Terracotta Daughters” is an immense piece, blunt in message and clever in execution.

Every artist has a hint of the self-obsessed navel-gazer about her or him. And “Serendipity” has its share of that.

And suffice it to say, if you’re not into modern conceptual art, this isn’t for you. But if you are, there’s something celebratory in this artist obssessed with female sexuality, fertility and the female form taking this potentially deadly diagnosis and making art out of it.

“Serendipity” isn’t necessarily what Nourry will be remembered for, but it makes a fascinating primer on her work, her obsessions and how she turns around breast cancer into a disease she was meant to have all along.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast:  Prune Nourry, Agnès Varda

Credits: Directed by Prune Nourry,  script by  Prune Nourry, Alastair Siddons. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:15