Movie Nation

If I’m honest, and I strive for that in every review, I think I cut the last “Avengers” movie the same slack I cut the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” picture. The last “X-Men” outing? Maybe not as much.

I’m just grateful that the whole shooting match is over, and I summon up every good feeling I’ve had over the run — from the terrific early efforts, to the desultory, repetitive finales — for that one last review of farewell.

Those obsessed with these elaborately back-engineered universes get a lot more out of these filler-filled exercises in fan-service. Like Jon Favreau and Gwyneth Paltrow, I can get a little lost. Unlike them, I’m not inclined to blame myself for the convoluted chaos I’m having to sift through on the screen.

I never bought a superhero comic and despite liking that grand huxter, Stan Lee (interviewed him a few times, delightful), never bought into this Nobel-worthy BS hype attached to all he and his ilk hath wrought.

Honestly, if Joss Whedon and Joe Johnston weren’t involved, if there’s no empowerment messaging in Gal’s character, no convincing WWI recreation, no Kenneth Branagh flourishes in “Thor,” no Paul Rudd or Robert Downey Jr. ways with a witty line, no Jason Momoa self-mocking machismo, I’m fighting boredom in your typical digital barroom brawl from the DC or Marvel SuperheroWorks.

Favreau directed “Iron Man” and has acted in these films and hopes they push Robert Downy Jr. for a superhero movie Oscar nomination, this time out. I wouldn’t be shocked if he landed one.

But all I can think about, as the credits roll and we wait for that silly “Coming NEXT time” movie plug after them, is how I’d much rather see Downey, Don Cheadle, Rudd, Mary Elizabeth Olsen, ScarJo or virtually ANY of these actors in something else.

Chadwick Boseman was in a culture-shifting blockbuster. But has he ever been worse in a movie? Have you SEEN “42,” “Marshall,” “Get on Up?”

Downey tossed away a third of his acting prime on indulgences and drugs, and much of the rest wearing an Iron Man suit. Maybe that upping of his quote and polishing of his “brand” extended his career. Or maybe he’s wasted his leading man window on movies that aren’t fated to age well.

Chris Evans? He’s getting out just in time to remind us of the light comedian he has been and can be, a leading man who can handle romances, dramas, etc.

Nobody should worry about Scarlett Johansson. But she has burned through some good years doing these mindless glorified cameos. Olsen had a great career staked out in indieland. That’s probably gone forever.

Cobie Smulders hasn’t turned her “Avengers” fame into anything non-Marvel worth watching. Samuel L. Jackson has found some side benefits from wearing the eyepatch, but his career’s at that “Any work is worthwhile” stage. Patrick Stewart is likewise benefited greatly from his attachment to the genre, cementing his fanboy status, becoming a pop culture icon (like Jackson) in the bargain.

People know who Tom Holland, Danai Gurira and Zendaya are. Ryan Reynolds has become a household name. Nicholas Hoult may owe his “Tolkien” turn to X-Men, but one is hard-pressed to think of others who have really blown up thanks to their years of service in S.H.I.E.L.D. or Professor Xavier’s school or the “Justice League.”

Michael Fassbender doesn’t need Magneto to make the rent or make his big screen mark. Margo Robbie need never revisit “Suicide Squad.”

Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo and Don Cheadle are interesting cases — turning themselves into household names with these movies. But being in “The Avengers” for them all has been like being drafted was for the WWII generation of actors. Only back then a leading man could have a screen shelf life right up to his 60s. That’s not the case, now.

I follow these fine actors on Twitter, and watch them hustling up return viewers to “Endgame” so it can break the all time box office record. Well, not Cheadle. He’s one of Twitter’s great troll-killers. Follow @DonCheadle if you don’t already.

Renner’s finding good parts, and bad ones, trading on his man-of-action persona. More “Kill the Messenger” and less “Avengers/Mission: Impossible/Hansel & Gretel” would be nice. Instead, there’s a “Hawkeye” TV series. Ugh.

Ruffalo? Man, invest the money, but get back to making movies about something.

Have these guys gotten any sort of career bounce out of tiny parts in time-consuming superhero movies?

Hugh Jackman has made more out of his Wolverine turn than virtually anybody else in any of these movies. But at what cost? He can get a “Prisoners” or “The Front Runner” made, but how many of those did he pass on to grow the sideburns back?

I wonder if there’s a life lesson for actors and agents in these now-aged-out franchises, and the sorts of contracts the players submit to.

Maybe the next James McAvoy won’t agree to anything so open-ended, maybe the Halle Berry/Jennifer Lawrence and yes Ben Affleck model will prove more attractive.

Even the best superhero actors let on how bored they are with their franchises. Jackman, again, might be the exception.

Even if audiences have shown little sign of tiring of these pictures, surely actors who value variety, acclaim for their work above the adoring pre-pleased fanbase and challenges, will want to look at all these names and faces, all that money that changed hands and all those years that were the price of that cash and want something more.

The villains, from Keaton and McKellen all the way to Pfeiffer and Jim Carrey, always had the better deal. One movie, in and out, cash the check.

What could the great Jake Gyllenhaal be thinking?

The one person one can say, without reservations, has taken nothing but benefits from his superhero “Avengers” years is Mr. “Swingers,” Jon Favreau.

His directing career as Disney’s go-to Big Budget guy, his face on screen in most every Iron Man/Avengers movie, it’s been win-win-win for him.

Everybody else, though, might rightly wonder if these were years and movie-making windows well-spent. Is that Comic Con special guest until the day you die status worth it?

Coincidence? This looks…terrific. And empowered and real “year of the woman/Decade of women” sharp.

And how many yuan do you think The Mouse will haul out of China by making it and releasing it there?

A young lady who was born to be much more than “a good wife.”

Next March, we will see what we see.

The latest Tom Holland Web Slinger outing has earned $185 million since Tuesday.

Spider-Man is as bulletproof a franchise as there is. No getting around it.

The decision to open the graphic but only faintly nightmarish “Midsommar” opposite it didn’t help the heavily hyped follow-up to “Hereditary.” Probably didn’t hurt.

I wonder how audiences are taking to it. Reviews have leaned HEAVILY on statements from the director “interpreting” his intent.

Yeah. Caught Justin Chang on NPR doing that, and misstating a plot point or two.

Whenever critics do that, I cringe.

Understandable when the work we see in the screen is challenging, and maybe not remotely as blunt as the director seems to think. But using his “spin” in a review is cheating. The film, as Kubrick always said, has to speak for itself, stand on its own.

“Midsommar” doesn’t.

Note that “The Secret Life of Pets 2” has made twice as much as the very last “Men in Black” we will ever see –$140 to $71, “Aladdin” makes bank, “Avengers” inches toward that “Avatar” record and “Annabelle” is firmly established as the big horror bit of the summer; early summer, late summer and “Midsommar.”

The girl doll has cleared twice as much as Chucky, $50 to $26.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/

Interesting read from The Hollywood Reporter. It used to be cable that gave the Glenn Close/Kyra Sedgwick generations fresh opportunities. Now it is streaming video that has “lifted women of over 40, 50 or 60”

https://t.co/3nWj7Kncsk https://t.co/pYh12zLUng https://twitter.com/THR/status/1147774015794274304?s=17

Let us focus, on this day of its death, on the good Movie Pass did, not on its unsustainable business model.

Theater chains came up with their own discount mass consumption of movies model.

Young people got back in the movie going habit.

So there’s that. via Variety.

“MoviePass on hold amid cash woes” https://t.co/jjoIicbyCV https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1147445082791931906?s=17

Much has changed in the decades since the French Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand first cast a satiric eye on Western Civilization, especially its North American practitioners, in chatty, thoughtful films such as “The Decline of the American Empire,” “Jesus of Montreal” and “Barbarian Invasions.”

The history we know about and are living through. And Arcand? He’s gone from chatty to long-winded in his late 70s.

“The Fall of the American Empire” has another French Canadian philosopher bemoaning how out of place thinkers are in the modern age, scoring clever points about what’s troubling about Canada and what “destroyed” — emphasis on the past tense — The United States.

It’s the value system that emphasized money over all, something of a running thread through Arcand’s work, that displaces men like deliveryman Pierre Paul (Alexandre Landry). He is, he tells his longtime banker-girlfriend (Florence Longpré), “too intelligent” for most jobs in modern life.

“It’s a handicap,” he says, dismissing whole classes of very smart people which she brings up to counter him.

Novelists?

“The great writers were dumb as mules,” he declares. Hemingway thought he could box, for starters. He rattles down a list of authors and their foibles.

And don’t get him started on politicians. Bush, Blair, Sakozy — Pierre Paul charts the decline in thinking, morality and the intelligence of public life through the lot of them.

“Trump?”

“Imbeciles worship cretins!”

Pierre Paul quotes philosophers (also flawed, he notes) by the dozen in an enervated despair. When Linda questions their relationship and says “I can’t go on,” there’s not a hint of shock, heartbreak or meanness in his curt reply.

“Then don’t.”

Writer-director Arcand will test this too-smart-for-this-world misanthrope by hurling him into the conventions of a hoary, dope-who-comes-into-money thriller.

Pierre Paul drives his express delivery truck into the middle of an armed robbery. The money is plainly dirty, which puts Pierre Paul on the horns of a dilemma as the robbers, and the folks they’re robbing, kill each other or flee, wounded.

Bags of money are dropped at his feet. And on an impulse, this moral man in an amoral world does what people always do in such tales. He grabs those bags.

In short order, Mr. “Too Intelligent” is making every idiotic blunder we’ve ever seen in a “Nobody knows I have stolen dirty money” thriller. One of them is hiring, online, the most expensive hooker in Montréal (Maripier Morin) just because she quotes Racine and Aristotle on her website, and in the assumed name she takes on — Aspasie.

Another blunder? He instantly falls for this outlaw woman who arrives at their appointments in a bodyguard (not pimp) driven Jaguar.

And thirdly, the first person he seeks advice about his newfound stash is a famous criminal (Rémy Girard of “The Barbarian Invasions,””Jesus of Montréal” and “The Decline of the American Empire”). Yeah, tell a money launderer, fresh out of prison (where he was on college-work release, studying tax evasion) your ENTIRE story, and trust him to help you hide the money.

“Too intelligent” to ever go to the movies. Apparently.

There are mobsters in search of the cash, willing to gruesomely torture the one surviving and on the lam robber (Patrick Abellard). And the cops (Louis Morissette, Maxim Roy) are onto the hapless Pierre Paul in a flash.

He doesn’t even have the presence of mind to know his rights, blow off their blunt accusations and keep them from simply barging into his apartment.

Arcand gives Pierre Paul a righteous avocation. He connects with the West’s soaring population of homeless people, volunteering in a soup kitchen, listening to the stories of the displaced workers and Inuit who live on Montréal’s streets, handing out cash when he can.

The writer-director scores points on the broken capitalist system with Pierre Paul’s mild-mannered diatribes and in college lectures, where we’re reminded that “money has its own language,” that “poor people need the money, but corporations (and the super -rich) get all the handouts”

But “The Fall of the American Empire” may be the most sloppily plotted thriller to come along in decades. Why? Because Arcand would rather score his meek satiric points than sweat the details.

It’s great seeing very good actors we recognize, in the dim recesses of memory, from his earlier films. But we can’t help but notice this one is almost half an hour longer than the others.

And hell — who watches “The Decline of the American Empire,” “The Barbarian Invasions” (a post 9-11 summation of the state of the world) or “Jesus of Montréal” any more?

It’s not so much that they aren’t “holding up,” as we say. They may be prophetic, in a lot of their discourse and debate (in French, with English subtitles). But they were achingly of their time.

Arcand wastes too much of our time with this stumbling, dry, unfunny satire of thrillers, money and how to launder it. If you thought Netflix’s “Ozark” was long…

The filmmaker literally loses himself in the arcane “Panama Papers” business of how money is shuffled around, off-shore, or swapped out among the ranks of those eager to avoid taxes and hasten the end of Western Civilization as they do.

And like many a first-time filmmaker, his veteran of a half century of film can’t figure out when to drop the mike, how to extract himself from the talky-tangle he’s chatted his characters into.

“Fall of the American Empire” isn’t an awful film, and it probably will prove as prophetic as “Decline of the American Empire.” But it never lets you forget that its filmmaker identifies too closely with his hero, that he’s “too intelligent” to make a thriller, or bother with getting one right.

And in so-doing, his blunders are just as obvious as Pierre Paul’s.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, sexual content/nudity and language

Cast: Alexandre Landy, Maripier Morin, Rémy Girard , Florence Longpré, Louis Morissette, Pierre Curzi, Maxim Roy

Credits: Written and directed by Denys Arcand. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:07

“Spider-Man: Far From Home” did a vigorous $27 million+ on Wed., breaking the record for Marvel properties Wednesdays. Yes, that’s a record they’re keeping track of

Add that today to the stupid money the latest webslinger outing pulled in on Tuesday — $39 million — and Sony is looking at having $150 million in the box office bank by midnight Sunday.

Yes, it’s tailing off, but not before it comes out of the gate at a dead sprint. An $80 million weekend to go with the $66 million first two days and it’ll clear $150 with ease.

The grisly but not that frightening horror tale “Midsommar” had middling Tuesday night previews numbers — $1.2 million — and a decent Wed. and looks to have about $13 million in the bank by midnight Sunday. Not a dazzling take for a creepy movie that’s more about grief and haplessness in the face of cultish groupthink, it’s generating some of the more loopy, off-message reviews of the summer.

“Yesterday” is generating decent word of mouth and expects to have a strong second weekend — maybe $10 million or more.

For decades, four words invoking his name so inspired fear in the hearts of public figures that they became a cultural punchline.

“Mike Wallace is Here.”

The famous and the infamous were said to dread the thought of defending themselves, on camera, to the vaunted, veteran TV interrogator. His dogged insistence on asking those questions others avoided, not generally without tact — he always threw in a  “Forgive me!” after the bluntest queries — became Mike Wallace’s reputation, his legend.

Sure, it’s an exaggeration, which is the best reason to open “Mike Wallace is Here,” Avi Belkin’s documentary celebration of Wallace in the words of Wallace himself and colleagues and interview subjects who occasionally turned the questions around on him, with a sampling of his combative chat with disgraced Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.

O’Reilly professes to admire and emulate the aged Wallace (he stayed on TV for most of his 93 years on Earth), “the driving force behind my career” that to his “gotcha” and “don’t let him off the hook style.” Wallace, in that clipped bark of a voice that never failed him, has his producer play O’Reilly a sampling of O’Reilly’s shout-down style of “interview,” and corrects him.

“That’s not an interview, that’s a lecture!”

Maybe he was, as O’Reilly insisted, “a dinosaur.” But Wallace endured in a business that sheds most of its stars long before they’re ready to leave the stage, used his clout to achieve some of the biggest “gets” in TV history (Ayatollah Khomeini, Putin, Bette Davis) and became as big a celebrity as anyone he ever interviewed.

The proof of that is this film, more an editing job than a directing one, which is built around many interviews the notorious Wallace sat down for with his own colleagues — Lesley Stahl, Morley Safer and others.

Television talker Dick Cavett in the ’70s hosted the man whose name had already come to “strike fear in the hearts of brave men.”

We see Bette Davis, as tough as they come, called “difficult” to her face. We see Barbra Streisand comically bristle at being called “impossible,” and hear his equally prickly, more accomplished journalist co-star Safer ask Wallace the ultimate Wallace-style question.

“Why are you sometimes such a prick?”

Myron Leon Wallace, a Massachusetts son of Russian-American Jewish immigrants (“Wallik” was the family name, which Belkin and generations of Wallace interviews don’t bring up), graduated from the University of Michigan at the post-World War II peak of radio, and got into announcing and acting on that medium. He jumped straight into the newly-born medium that fast-displaced radio.

But he didn’t arrive as an interviewer. He was a voice-over announcer, a game show host, talk show producer, actor and TV pitchman.

And when the chance presented itself, he recognized a gaping hole in the TV interviews of the ’50s, even when they were conducted by the great Edward R. Murrow. “Softball” questions were the order of the day. He would be “nosy” “and insistent.”

He’d ask hard questions. His first series to attempt this style was “Night Beat,” a bracing slap in the face of puff piece profiles of the 1950s. Blunt “unrehearsed” interviews with klansmen, political figures (Eleanor Roosevelt), great artists and others.

Wallace, as the wrinkles piled upon wrinkles and he became the eminence grise of the medium, would hold later interviewers Oprah Winfrey, Larry King and others to the standards that became his reputation.

“People say you’re a patsy,” he snipped to Larry King.

He’d take people aback, make not-really-famous people, the accused and convicted by TV footage caught in a “gotcha,” cry, and shrug it off with “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

We get a peek at the person behind the persona, the father who lost a son, Peter, who died touring Greece in the 1960s, the four-times married “married to my job” workaholic.

And we sample decades upon decades of interviews, from America’s most celebrated playwright, Arthur Miller, to a then-young self-promoting New York real estate heir who achieved his greatest fame after Wallace died in 2012.

“Mike Wallace is Here” is too celebratory to be a genuine dissection of his legacy, the awful stumbles at “60 Minutes” merely touched on (sued by General William Westmoreland, hanging Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand out to dry, the embarrassing sports profiles that were the ultimate puff pieces on later-caught cheaters like Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods and (fawningly interviewed by Wallace himself) Roger Clemens.

His “gotchas” were widely criticized for coming down hardest on the relatively powerless.

But Lester’s film underscores how few TV talkers today have the stature, much less the spine, to ask questions that people don’t want asked, much less be required to answer. Wallace might have been a “dinosaur” at a TV show that has become known, in its latter years, for becoming a virtual TV interviewer museum. The door is open for somebody else to step into those shoes, even if most of today’s imitators limit themselves to barely trying them on.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, some violent images, language and smoking.

Cast: Mike Wallace, Bette Davis, Lesley Stahl, Morley Safer, Oprah Winfrey, Salvador Dali, Arthur Miller, Barbara Walters, Jeffrey Wigand

Credits: Directed by Avi Belkin.  A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:31

Don’t recognize any of the faces in this conceptual comedy.

It comes our way (VOD, etc.) July 30.

From the moment they meet, Stu the Uber driver in “Stuber” is a smart-ass.

Doesn’t matter that he’s a Pakistani-American pushover driving a Nissan Leaf in the evenings for extra cash, and his new passenger is a roided-up, tattoo covered LA cop. Stu, played by “Big Sick” comic Kumail Nanjiani, instantly wises off.

“Lemme guess, you want to me to take you to aaaaaall the Sarah Connors in town!”

Stu has little compassion for the Lasik surgery glasses Vic (Dave Bautista of “Guardians of the Galaxy”) has to wear.

“You going to a racketball game later?”

Nanjiani just kills when he’s grabbing stereotypes (meek, moral South Asians, overly-polite drivers) and shaking them to their senses. But the wisecracks thin out and grate when the violence takes center stage. And “Stuber” is stupidly violent.

Canadian director Michael Dowse, who did the hockey comedy “Goon” and the romance “What If,” kind of lost me sometime after the torture, maybe in the middle of the insane first act shoot-out in a critters-in-cages crowded veterinary clinic.

We’ve seen versions of this hapless civilian tied to an ultra-violent cop before, with Bruce or The Rock or DeNiro as the tough guy. And the chemistry between this mismatched couple isn’t awful.

Bautista can be funny, but mainly he’s here for the mayhem — which he delivers, first scene to last. And Najianni makes a memorable ninny, bullied by his sporting goods store boss, forever in “the friend z)one” with his college crush (Betty Gilpin of “Glow” and the recent “A Dog’s Journey”), lured into business ventures just to be near her and still not listening to advice from “Douche Lundgren,” the Uber client who hires/”kidnaps” him for an evening-long pursuit of a murderous martial-artist/drug dealer (Iko Uwais).

“You know, I really don’t remember signing up for this TED talk!”

“Stuber” has one running debate, about “manhood,” with the sensitive male getting unwanted “Man Up” lessons from Mr. Raging Testosterone, and the brutish cop earning quasi-feminine lectures on being a better father to his artist-daughter (Natalie Morales).

The film makes its obligatory visit to a strip club, and utterly upends that #MeToo moment in most action movies. “Full frontal” was never sillier in a shoot-em-up.

But aside from that,this is strictly cut-and-paste formula filmmaking, from the off-the-books “Doc” (Scott Lawrence) who can patch up people, even though he’s a veterinarian, to the heroin dealer house in the barrio that Vic the half-blind cop cracks up to get his next lead.

Bautista makes what he can of a character who squints through his anger-management issues, and Nanjiani can be a funny foil, probably riffing lines like “That’s a hard ‘no'” at every suggestion he buy into this cop/customer’s ethos and mission.

But how funny can that fifth or 25th exploding head shot be? The shooting, the gun shopping, the body count don’t just pile up. They slow the picture down and break the flow of what’s funny.

Still, you’ve got to hand it to filmmakers with the guts to gut Uber, and the wit to make a “silent but deadly” electric car a plot device.

If only they’d been quicker to the punch line, and a lot less quick to pull the trigger.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, some sexual references and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Kumail Nanjiani, Dave Bautista, Natalie Morales, Karen Gillan and Betty Gilpin

Credits: Directed by Michael Dowse, script by Tripper Clancy. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:33