Movie Nation

But for…how long? And more importantly…why?

Showings will be Sept. 15th at an AMC theater near you, a Fandango/AMC event.
https://t.co/Dq1NWf0t9Y https://twitter.com/EW/status/1155795764813152257?s=17

Mark Hamill shared this “Star Wars” screen test on the love-in we call his Twitter feed. It is…adorbs. See for yourself.

“My screen-test for @starwars w/ Harrison on the 1st day I ever met him. Neither 1 of us had read the script at this point, only this 1 scene. I asked George what kind of movie it was-“Let’s just do it, we’ll talk about that later” We never did talk about it later-we just did it.” https://t.co/e7cHWoLmJk https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/1155549281324953601?s=17

A tricky thing, making a colonial-era rescue mission thriller in our post-colonial age.

Do you pay heed to political correctness, or do you just let the visceral action, suspense and “us vs. them” violence work on that more primitive part of the brain?

“15 Minute War” is a tense, tight Franco-Belgian action picture that could have been made in the 1970s, and in some sense should have been. Along with split-screen montages, reggae and blues-rock on the soundtrack, military bravado and the never-dying myth of the “surgical strike,” “War” has political incorrectness is in its very DNA, along with classic action hero “types” and hostage-rescue thriller tropes.

Heavily fictionalized, but based on a true incident, director and co-writer Fred Grivois sets our scene with an opening title, days when “terrorism strikes Europe and the Middle East daily. Welcome to 1976.”

In Djibuti, the last French colony in Africa, revolutionaries are trying to force the French out. The terrorists/”freedom fighters” have the support of Somalia, the neighboring former British colony that had, since its independence, fallen under Soviet influence.

One day, four heavily-armed men storm onto a school bus and take the white children of diplomats and French Foreign Legionnaires on board, and the bus driver, hostage.

Twenty-one kids are taken, the driver is released to tell the French what has happened.

The kids speak French, the terrorists speak English –“NOBODY MOVE! No TALK!” But they make their best threats in French.

“Sit down and be quiet , otherwise (he drags his finger across his throat)!”

But their dash to the border, through beautiful rolling desert-scapes, falls just short. The kidnappers expect sanctuary in Somalia. But they and their prey sit in no man’s land, between the two country’s border guard stations.

Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) plays a teacher in the school who dashes to the border to “volunteer” to help. She evades the French, who have denied her request, and gets on board the bus to aid and comfort the children.

“I don’t care about the French,” American teacher Jane hisses to the head kidnapper (Kevin Layne). “I care about the children.”

“The WHITE children?”

Meanwhile, in France, Captain Andre Gerval (Alban Lenoir) gets word of the incident while visiting his little girl, with his pregnant wife, in the hospital. He assembles his team.

Lorca (David Murgia ) shows off the ring he’s gotten his girlfriend, Campére (Michaël Abiteboul) his new quick-draw “Dirty Harry” shoulder holster. They and cynical Pierre (Sébastien Lalanne) join Gerval as he threatens their way onto a Cairo-bound commercial jetliner at the airport.

Larrain (Guillaume Labbé)? He’s “the best.”

They’re snipers, a special police squad whose bluff, chain-smoking boss (Josiane Balasko) wants them to “prove what’s so ‘special’ about your ‘special unit.'”

There’s a “CIA Cowboy” or “CIA hippy” (Ben Cura) there to, um, “observe.” Some of the kids were American, and by the time they’re in-country, the American teacher is a hostage with them. So the U.S. is pressing for a solution.

The team is confronted not just with their mission, a “synchronized” five shots-at-once hit on the kidnappers from a vantage point they’ll have to crawl to reach, but with the usual “Well, if Paris grows a spine” political interference from home that such movies traffic in.

And the French Foreign Legion is there, with its macho brawlers looking down on the “gendarmes” (the team is civilian, “cops”) and cigar-chomping general (Vincent Perez) “waiting for orders” (always in French, with English subtitles).

The kidnappers are wired on khat and waiting for help from Somalia, and maybe the U.S.S.R.

The tough-guy talk is just as hard-bitten in French as it reads in the English subtitles.

“Diplomacy? Is Giscard (the French president at the time, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing) sending sweets?

The Foreign Legion general isn’t impressed.

“Do you even believe your own bull-merde?”

“L’Intervention” this was called when it opened in Europe, and it’s a film that lives on the conventions of its genre. We see tense countdowns as the snipers try to track their targets (the camera floats over targets, a bullseye in the rifle scope trying to keep the head in the shot). We hear bickering over orders. And we take the occasional trip inside the bus to see how the meek and worn children, their teacher and their tormentors, are faring.

Grivois, who directed “Tempus Fugit,” maintains a modest hold on tension. He narrows the film’s point of view so tightly that we don’t get much of a sense of the kidnappers’ motivation. This isn’t “Captain Philips” or any of the movies about Entebbe. The desperation doesn’t show, the aspirations of the revolutionaries are ignored.

Perhaps that’s understandable when you’re dealing with people willing to shoot or grenade children. But more fleshed-out villains make for better thrillers.

And actions movies’ default “The military knows best” ethos has not been treated kindly by history. They don’t. “Snipers who never miss” is another myth that dies hard in these “surgical strike” pictures.

In the real world, especially with 1970s firearms, triage and technology, “surgery” is and was damned messy.

Still, it’s entertaining to see worn Hollywood tropes trotted out and acted-out in French. And the action finale, the actual “15 Minutes of War,” atones for many of the sins this solid B-picture tallies up until then.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Alban Lenoir, Olga Kurylenko, Sébastien Lalanne, David Murgia and Guillaume Labbé

Credits: Directed by Fred Grivois, script by Fred Grivois, Ileana Epsztajn and Jérémie Guez. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:38

This looks like a solid kidnapping/attempted rescue-assassinate the kidnappers thriller.

Somalia, Sudan, countries we NEVER see in the news today, the setting for this Franco-African incident.

Another movie incompetently marketed into Oblivion by Bleecker St.

No, Jesse Eisenberg isn’t box office. He makes indie films, mostly. And the subject matter and rest of the cast was no automatic draw.

But people should have found it. That’s marketing.

Their Florida PR rep is the worst I deal with, blackballs me from their screenings. I still see their movies. Never had a beef with Bleecker St. She is blackballing me over some Film Arcade grievance from years ago. A real grown-up.

So I laugh a little at every bomb they release. The movies are sometimes good. But they never find their audience. Incompetent marketing. Especially here in Florida.

From Exhibitor Relations Co.

“Bleecker Street’s THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE took a finger through the forehead, dropping -71% in just its 3rd week with $311k on 541 screens, $2M total.” https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1155486640590032896?s=17

The best opening for a Tarantino movie ever. One of the steeper fall offs for a Disney blockbuster remake.

That’s the take away, here. “Once” opened wider than Tarantino’s other pictures under Weinstein distribution. It was on track to clear $41, but $40 is still his personal best.

“The Lion King” went from a $192 opening to a $75 second weekend.

That’s a 61% dive, week to week. Not good by Disney standards, even if the opening was staggeringly large.

Oh, and “The Farewell” cracked the top ten on just 135 screens.

https://variety.com/2019/film/box-office/box-office-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-quentin-tarantino-biggest-opening-weekend-lion-king-1203282402/

There are a lot of points to chew on in “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” — issues from the pedestrian (maddeningly indulgent pacing, rewriting history) to political (labeling the Manson cult “hippies” is more reactionary than point blank accurate) to the weird.

What is the director’s deal with women’s feet?

His glib treatment of violence has long been a hangup of mine, and not just against women.

Here’s a Heat Vision column that tears into his murderous, torturous treatment of women, with the sole exception of the utterly objectified Sharon Tate/Margot Robbie.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/once-a-time-hollywood-quentin-tarantinos-violence-women-problem-1227406

In the espionage game, your only loyalties are personal.

That’s been drummed into us in a century of spy movies, so why would “The Operative” have it any other way?

Here’s a solid, simple spy tale about a Mossad recruit, her handler and the Iranian who becomes her mark, her target and her lover.

Diane Kruger stars in this chilly Israeli/Franco-German production, playing a “rootless” London-born German recruited into the ruthlessly efficient Israeli spy agency by Thomas (Martin Freeman of TV’s “Sherlock”).

The story, based on the novel “The English Teacher,” is framed within a debriefing that plays more like an interrogation. Thomas, pushed out of the spy corps, is summoned back.

A room full of brutish, bluff and blunt interrogators — even the men — want to grill him about “Rachel.” She just made contact with Thomas. But her bosses know more about where she isn’t. She slipped out of Israel. She did this and that in London, and hit another European city or two.

“Is it possible she was ‘doubled?'”

Thomas will only talk to his old handler, another personal relationship with someone he can trust. Joe (Yohanan Herson) hears the flashbacks that take us back to when Thomas turned a woman “who wanted to belong to something” from a sympathetic asset, willing to do a little of this or that, into a full-blown agent.

The script emphasizes relentless questioning, the building blocks of all the best spy fiction. Thomas peppered her back then just as Joe and others are peppering him in their German “safe house.”

Skipping past Rachel’s training is a plus. She is put into service in Tehran, first as a facilitator for a hit squad — which murders a Russian scientist, his bodyguard and an innocent bystander. Rachel then becomes the bait/agent helping the Israelis infiltrate a Tehran tech firm.

Her cover? She’s an Australian-born Canadian French and English teacher, moving from Germany to Iran. Her entré? Company manager Farhad (Cas Anvar of TV’s “The Expanse”) has an eye for European women.

Yuval Adler’s script takes its time with this set up. Farhad is pushy, rude, creepy and bullying to women in a lot of those stereotypical Middle Eastern ways. At first. Rachel puts him on his heels, correcting his English at every turn.

She asks questions, and he warns her. That’s not safe in the Islamic Republic. Everybody keeps everything secret — their Ramadan diet (sneaking food), their drinking.

“Keep it secret…It’s a way of life here. Second nature.”

Even the insiders, those doing well, grate at a country that has “too many rules.”

In a flash, he’s taking her to an underground party filled with drinking, drugs, miniskirts and gambling.

“Drinking is illegal here, right?”

“Your Ecstasy deal is also your alcohol dealer.”

The spycraft in “The Operative” — another simplistic, vague and over-used title in a summer of those — is solid. Rachel does a coded-channel version of Skype to send documents, befriends security guards, finds ways on her own to be of use to her handlers.

Also a plus, the spies themselves are callous, jingoistic jerks. Mossad is depicted as unconcerned about what it asks Rachel to do, ramping up her risks without regard to her growing value or increasingly tenuous situation. Why? She’s “not really Jewish” and she’s not Israeli.

“Little Drummer Girl” got there first, but then, Le Carre always does.

Freeman’s soft-spoken, testy intensity is much in evidence here, and Kruger — building a nice over-40 career in tough-minded thrillers like “In the Fade” and “The Operative” — gives Rachel brittle vulnerability masked by steely stoicism. Her paranoia never gets the best of her, but we never lose track of the fact that Rachel is human, facing moral dilemmas at every turn that would give a human being trained to be a spy pause.

Bourne and Bond rarely have such qualms.

Still, Freeman’s role is mainly as Mr. Exposition — peeling away the layers of Rachel’s psyche by remembering, in startling detail, her work career in Tehran. Anvar’s gullible businessman has only hints of the charm that is supposed to get into Rachel’s head as she performs her duties.

That’s the “Notorious” trap. No spy movie about a female agent can be without sexual lines crossed, romantic entanglements added for spice. It’s a cliché of the genre, and tends to muffle the drama’s impact and deflate its finale.

But for a genre picture, this one is better than average, letting us see what two fine actors saw in the script and not leaving them or us disappointed in the result.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug use, sex

Cast: Diane Kruger, Martin Freeman, Cas Anvar

Credits: Written and directed by Yuval Adler, based on the novel “The English Teacher” by Yiftach Reicher Atir. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:57

Molly Ivins had a method, a way of looking at the world, at Texas and later American politics, when coming up with an idea for her magazine and newspaper columns.

She’d raise an eyebrow, maybe let her jaw drop in advance of the words of incredulity she was about to Texas-drawl out.

“Do what?”

One of the great gadflies, wits and champions of the underdog America has ever known gets her due in documentary form in “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins.”

You can get a sense of her lingering impact — she died of cancer in 2007 — by the famous peers who get choked up in the film’s final interview clips, marveling at the marvel she was and remains in the journalistic memory.

But mostly, “Raise Hell” is a movie of laughs, because nobody ever popped the balloons of political pretense like the hard-drinking, chain-smoking six-foot permanent “outsider” Molly Ivins.

On covering Dan Quayle in 1992 — “I found him dumber than advertised. Put that man’s brain in a bumblebee, and the bee’d fly backwards.”

Newt Gingrich? “You,” dramatic pause, “speak of the draft-dodging, dope smoking deadbeat dad who divorced his dying wife?”

She labeled her beloved Texas, “the national laboratory for bad government.”

Yup. Still scathing after all these years.

Prescient and pointed, skewering and sending up the powerful, Ivins cut a wide swath through American political coverage in a career that took her from The Texas Observer to The New York Times, then back to Dallas and Fort Worth. She was the modern political equivalent of Mark Twain with a column, an on-stage humorist and wit following that ancient credo of great newspaper reporters — “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

Director Janice Engel reminds us that Ivins started life as the former and ended her days as the latter. Born into Texas oil wealth, private school-educated with a year in France as part of that, college at one of the prestigious Eastern “Seven Sisters” (Smith College), Ivy League grad school, Ivins rebelled against that privilege when she discovered, in the late 1950s, how wrong she found her rich, racist “authoritarian” father’s views to be.

That led to civil rights protests, where she was arrested, and confrontations with the old man. It also led her into journalism, taking her fellow Houston Chronicle interns out sailing on Daddy’s yacht, launching her career in Minneapolis where the local police adopted a pig as a mascot (in the late 1960s) and named it “Molly” because of her coverage.

She went home shortly after that to become a loud liberal voice in a state not known for them.

“I’m a Texan. I drive a pick-up truck. I drink beer. I cuss. I hunt. I’m a liberal. So what?”

Using Willie Nelson tunes and ZZ Top riffs to underscore her words, Engel tracked down legions of Ivins’ peers to celebrate her life and work, as if Ivins’ words alone are not enough.

Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Dan Rather — as well as relatives, old friends and less famous colleagues remember the take-no-prisoners writer, the hard-drinker who rubbed elbows at the bar with many of the people she took down in print, the imposing smart aleck who found advantages to “towering over editors” such as the snooty, imperial Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times.

Her politics were liberal populist, something she decided it was best and “honest” to get out there as “there’s no such thing as impartiality” in journalism. She was optimistic beyond her droll, “Cheer up. Things could be worse. You could be in Texas.”

Her view that “politics aren’t left to right, they’re top to bottom,” she preached like America’s Texas-born/Columbia U. grad-school educated civics teacher.

“We are the board of directors. We own it. They’re just the people we’ve hired to drive the bus a little while.”

Engel samples the decades of hate mail, death threats included, the irate calls that came in whenever she was plugging a book (“Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” was the most famous) on CSPAN.

All part of that “outsider” thing, making her life and her living in one of America’s most reactionary states where, as more than one friend put it, she “went after people who had power who were abusing that power.”

She wrote Elvis’s obituary, and then covered the funeral for the Elvis-ignorant New York Times, went back to Texas again and became nationally famous as the Bush Dynasty took hold of America. Ivins was Bush II critic in chief, and an authoritative deflater of Texas Exceptionalism.

“The reason the sky is bigger here is…we’ve got no trees.”

“Texas is not a civilized place. They shoot one another. A lot.”

For 90 minutes, Engel lets us swim in Ivins salty, sarcastic, scathing and very funny words — getting serious about “holding a grudge” against Bill Clinton for going along with welfare reform that would take food from hungry children, rolling her eyes at the many moments of public doltishness of “W.”

Political “targets” don’t turn up in Engel’s film. None of them, even though we hear “Clinton loved her” despite her withering columns on that welfare “reform.”

As prescient as Ivins could be about “dark money” taking over American government via politics, maybe the best advice she could pass on for today’s general (liberal, centrist, sane) gloom is the way she looked at her world, something her friend (and Texas Gov. Ann Richards’ daughter) Cecile Richards says kept Ivins sane.

“If you were a progressive in Texas, if you couldn’t laugh you weren’t going to last.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity, smoking and drinking

Cast: Molly Ivins, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, Dan Rather, Sara Ivins Maley,Ann Richards

Credits: Directed by Janice Engel, script by Janice Engel and Monique Zavistovski. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:33

“The Lion King” owns another weekend and probably won’t lose the top spot until “Hobbes & Shaw” come along — another $78 million this weekend, a steep drop from its opening.

But Sony opening “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” super wide has paid off, a $41 million opening weekend.

https://deadline.com/2019/07/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-quentin-tarantino-box-office-lion-king-weekend-1202654606/