Movie Nation

So this is 50? Meh.

Lots of wine, personal crises dismissed or dealt with by your BFFs and a rigorous travel and “fun” timetable that would make Patton’s Third Army wince.

Amy Poehler‘s new Netflix comedy “Wine Country” is a distaff dance through California’s Napa Valley, just a bunch of female friends who came of age working together at a Chicago pizzeria decades before.

Just Amy and “Saturday Night Live” buds Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and Ana Gasteyer, and writers turned actresses Paula Pell (“SNL,” “Sisters”) and Emily Spivey (“Parks & Rec.”), with a guest appearance by Tina Fey, drinking and bonding, wining and whining through showcase vineyards and Architectural Digest wineries.

It’s a little raunchy, a bit rude, occasionally funny and entirely predictable. But as Netflix time-killers for grownups go, it’s not half-bad. Or exactly half-bad.

Poehler plays Abby, who herds the five cats that are her best friends into a trip to celebrate their pal Rebecca’s 50th.

She’s booked the AirBnB, made all the reservations, printed the t-shirts and arranged a drone. She turned the itinerary into a glossy-covered booklet for all to study and stick to.

Lesbian gal pal Val (Pell) needs to “try out my new knees…I cannot WAIT to see all your guys and pinch your butts! With consent!”

Naomi (Rudolph) is trying just a little too hard, with her “Mama needs to rock out and whip her c–k out!”

Catherine (Gasteyer) is a pizza entrepreneur with a TV deal pending, entirely too cell-phone busy to be there.

Jenny (co-writer Spivey) has issues, but nothing like Abby’s, of which her C-PAP machine is but a symptom.

And Rebecca (Dratch) is a therapist trying to convince herself “age is just a number” and prone to over-compensating with psychobabble buzzwords (“feedback”) and catch phrases such as everybody’s favorite, denoting the aging process.

Every groan, admission of weakness or compromise is this “thing we say now.” Because, you know, they’re all 50 or getting there. Fifty may be the new thirty, but mileage counts, too.

Tina Fey is the flannel wearing butch AirBnB owner who mocks them mercilessly, if with a pang of empathy, as she leads them through the house, their “toxic jibber jabber” possibly re-directed by the house’s fire pit.

“Stare into the flames and contemplate why the hell you came up here in the first place.”

The formula is thus set. Some will look for love, or at least release. Most have secrets. Some are succeeding and others failing. And when you apply day long bus trips to various locales offering truth serum (wine) tastings, the ugly words describing how you REALLY feel will come out.

Jason Schwartzman shows up as a cook, chauffeur and bearded doofus who “comes with the house,” Cherry Jones makes a beautifully bitter Tarot card reader, ironically named Lady Sunshine.

The script has plenty of time for dance-offs and “DUI Songs,” their nickname for whatever they belt out when they’re drinking — tunes from their Chicago youth by The Bangles, Bel Biv Devoe and Kim Wilde.

“OK, let’s play ‘paths not taken.'”

They weep over their lost prince, Prince Rogers Nelson, confess to this or that, fall down and insult assorted windbag wine-tasting hosts.

“Jeez, people REALLY love to talk about wine around here!”

Rudolph lands the biggest laugh and there’s some fun riffing involving Naomi and each of the other characters. Fey shows up, sticks her jokes, and leaves, only to come back and stick another joke or three.

Pell has been around comedy writing for decades, and is gifted with some of the funnier lines here, which she handles with skill.

But too often, in too many scenes, the strain of it all shows. “Trying too hard” isn’t a cardinal sin in screen comedy, but it’s always a little off-putting when you witness how much effort is going into making piddling inconsequential moments pay off, necessary effort since so few big moments do.

“I feel like the universe is gently nudging you to CHILL.”

“Wine Country” is no “Sideways,” even if the contrived stakes are supposed to be greater. It’s built for a particular audience and some of the laughs will hit home for anybody who’s gotten that AARP “invitation” in the mail.

But Poehler’s film never crosses the tipping point of being worth 100 minutes of your time.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language and some drug material

Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, Rachel Dratch, Paula Pell, Emily Spivey, Jason Schwartzman, Maya Erskine and Tina Fey

Credits: Directed by Amy Poehler, Liz Cackowski, Emily Spivey   A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Joy. Rapture.

https://www.slashfilm.com/atlas-comics-movies/

A big opening weekend keeps getting bigger as a high performing Thursday led to an explosive Friday for the R-rated action picture “John Wick: Chapter 3.”

Those $50 million opening weekend projections went by the boards quickly, and deadline.com is now saying it’s on track to do $56.9 — which means it’ll do $60.

Keanu has promoted the heck out of it, just as Ryan Reynolds was everywhere doing everything the week before LAST week’s blockbuster.

“Wick” is out performing what “Detective Pikachu” did on its opening weekend, and unlike that pokey Pokemon pic, this one had good reviews.

At this rate, Keanu may never shave or wash his hair again.

“Pikachu” is dropping off in the 60% range its second weekend, as word of mouth spreads, repeat business was never going to be a huge deal and it started shedding screens (over 400) quicker than any real blockbuster would. “Pikachu” will clear $100 million by late next week.

“Avengers: Endgame” has passed “Avatar” as the second biggest box office performer of all time. It’s at over $769, or will be by midnight Sunday.

“A Dog’s Journey,” the third sentimental canine reincarnation (ish) picture to come from the keyboard of novelist W. Bruce Cameron in the past couple of years (“A Dog’s Purpose,” “A Dog’s Way Home” were done by different studios) is showing signs of over-exposure. It’s managing $8.75 million, not even reaching the low $10 million it was projected to earn its opening weekend. Cameron has more books that could be adapted, but probably won’t be.

“The Sun is Also a Star” isn’t making movie stars of its stars, the young lady from “Black-ish” and the lad from “Riverdale.” It may not earn $3 million, and its pro-immigrant message won’t even reach the teens it is aimed at.

“The Hustle” is out hustling “Long Shot” as the summer’s biggest comedy, so far, and neither is going to reach $40 million. “Booksmart” is coming, and that could light it up.

Watching the work of a great filmmaker in his or her later years is akin to following your favorite big league ballplayer on his “farewell tour.” Not so much because you’re eagerly anticipating the performer’s retirement. You pay attention because you’re looking for little hints of the greatness that was their prime.

Brian DePalma gave us “Dressed to Kill” and “Blowout” and “The Untouchables” and “Snake Eyes” and a “Mission: Impossible” picture. People stopped calling him a “Hitchcock Impersonator” decades ago.  But he’s going to be 79 next Sept. 11, and even though he’s got a “Predator” movie in the works and another thriller in pre-production, his last film that truly impressed probably came out 20 years ago.

But like a slugger taking that last trip around the circuit, he can still deliver one of his trademark bravura action sequences. “Domino” is a drab, implausible and melodramatic terrorism thriller showing his ongoing interest in the post 9-11 world of “Redacted (2007). Drab, that is, until he gets to one of those famous set-pieces.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Danish star of that TV show all the homebodies are talking about, “Game of Thrones,” takes another shot at a big screen action picture (he did “Shot Caller,” which did well on video among “GoT” fans) with this story of Danish cops, the CIA, a grieving immigrant seeking vengeance and an ISIS connected terror cell operating in Europe.

Christian may be one of Copenhagen’s finest, but on the fateful day that our story begins, we see him leave his gun behind on his post coital nightstand.

DePalma’s overuse of shrill Hitchcockian strings underscore “FORESHADOWING,” because wouldn’t you know it? That contributes to Christian’s partner (Søren Malling) getting his throat slit.

Very DePalma, BTW.

Christian covers up his ineptitude with his boss as he stays on the trail of the perpetrator (Eriq Ebouaney), a Libyan immigrant. The crime scene had a terrorist’s body already slumped in a chair, along with guns, explosives and produce. Hey, you’ve got to smuggle that stuff in somehow.

Dutch actress Carice van Houten, who broke out with “Black Book” and who also was on HBO’s most popular show, plays Alex, another cop assigned to the case.

As they chase clues south from Denmark into The Netherlands, Alex feels the need to stop the car for a little weeping session at the base of a windmill. And thus do we see how “international” productions finagle their financing, and get another serving of coincidence in a plot that leans on them far too much.

Their prime suspect was nabbed by guys in suits with tasers. The moment Guy Pearce drawls his first questions to the Libyan, we know he’s CIA, y’all.

“How’d you know?”

“We’re Americans! We read your emails!”

So the CIA is using the Libyan to get close to ISIS while the Danish police hop, skip and jump from “fairyland” (Pearce’s CIA designation for Denmark) to the south of Europe, while a pack of generic movie Islamists plot big suicide attacks, complete with machine guns, gullible suicide bombers, drones and streaming two-way video giving the head man (Mohammed Azaay) a first-person shooter video game thrill.

The dialogue is unquotably bland, the situations soap opera melodramatic and the performances perfunctory, although Pearce smacks his lips and chews up his few scenes and Ebouaney, new to films, gets across a hint of his character’s malice born of desperation. Coster-Waldau gets by on good looks and presence, here.

No, what we”re here for are the homages to Hitchcock, a rooftop nod to “Vertigo” and a finale that conjures up memories of “Stagefright” and Doris Day’s turn as a Hitchcock blonde in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

DePalma interjects random bits of up-to-the-minute surveillance tech into a movie whose clumsy, cut-and-paste script sees Danish cops having basic European geography and geopolitics explained to them. And to us.

But that payoff “bravura sequence” has multiple points of view, a crowd, lots of slo-mo and the threat of violence on a vast scale, all of it set to a bolero — not Ravel’s “Bolero,” just a pastiche of it.

And friends, if the entire movie had been as good as this Spanish last act, they’d have had something here.

Almost everything that comes before it is as generic as its title.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, some language and brief nudity

Cast: Carice van Houten, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce and Søren Malling

Credits: Directed by Brian DePalma, script by Petter Skavlan.  A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:29

“John Wick Chapter 3” did three times the Thursday night “preview” business that the last “John Wick” installment did.

That means it’ll best “Pikachu” this weekend, and take in more money than “Avengers: Endgame,” which will finally be knocked off the top of the box office mountain after weeks and weeks up there.

Good reviews, mostly. Kind of martial arts/first person shooter video-gamish, but fun.

A $50 million weekend is within reach for Keanu and “John Wick 3,” “Endgame” will pass “Avatar” by Sunday, “The sun is Also a Star” seems poised to become a bomb ($5 million) and “A Dog’s Journey” may open in the low teens. Or only earn about $10 million, depending on whether the audience has had enough of these maudlin mutt adaptations.

This will be the third in less than two years, but who’s counting?

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4513&p=.htm

Pattinson? Brooding, not particularly
Butch. Hoult, as “Tolkien” demonstrates, is just dull.

https://deadline.com/2019/05/rob-pattinson-nicholas-hoult-batman-short-list-matt-reeves-1202616908/

Tough crowd.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bruce-willis-booed-throwing-first-pitch-at-phillies-game-1211213

For profit Full Sail University’s most famous director alum is a veteran of the “Saw” franchise and Lionsgate has him attached to the comoc’sb”twisted” new pitch.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/16/saw-movie-reboot-chris-rock-twisted-promise

It’s no great surprise that the great Australian director Bruce Beresford wrings every ounce of sweet out of “Ladies in Black,” an upbeat Down Under tale of women who work in a prestigious department store back when there were such things.

He made “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Tender Mercies” and “A Good Man in Africa,” so this slight, sugary confection set in his homeland didn’t present much in the line of difficulties. He makes the characters distinct, their trials easily overcome and keeps the soap opera aspects in check in adapting Madeleine St. John’s novel for the screen.

And if there’s this charming subtext about the world-broadening vitality of immigrants, refugees, derisively labeled “REF-os” back in old Oz, that’s just an Old Master keeping his tale topical.

Goode’s is the posh multi-story Macy’s of 1950s Sydney, a city block of elegance where culture and couture meet in a country just then discovering them as it comes into its own not far removed from World War II.

There’s a uniformed doorman, a dapper greeter and floor manager (Nicholas Hammond) in tails, and a pianist playing Chopin as the customers pour in.

And there’s a locker room out back, where the saleswomen put on their “war paint,” change into their personal black dresses, earrings and heels and become “Ladies in Black” for the day.

Lisa (Angourie Rice, “Spider Man’s” Betty) is the new girl, gawky and 16 and brought in for the Christmas rush, a teen ready for “the leaving.” That’s what they call graduation in Australia.

The staff veterans, Fay and Patty (Rachael Taylor, Alison McGirr) are to show her the ropes, which they do. They’re nice enough, and posh as all get-out in appearance. But they’re working class, through and through, and they’re awfully quick to warn Lisa away from the “REF-o” Magda, a regal foreigner in charge of the “Model Salon,” where one-off designer dresses are sold.

“Soon you veel come to me,” Magda (Julia Ormand) sniffs to Lisa. “Some help I kan use.”

Our girl longs to be a poet. Or an actress. Or perhaps a novelist. The other ladies may raise an eyebrow, her parents (Susie Porter, Shane Jacobson) may range from “Let her dream” to “No daughter’a mine’s goin’ t’university!” But not Magda.

Over the course of that holiday season, Magda will give Lisa a makeover, the polish she’ll carry into adulthood, and expose her to The Big Wide World by way of her life experience and meals with her husband, Stefan (Vincent Perez).

Lisa, who is trying to outgrow her parents’ hand-me-down provincialism as sweetly as she can manage (“Lisa” is the name she’d prefer, not the one Mum gave her), reads “Anna Karenina” over lunch and exposes Fay to Great Books and Big Thoughts. Fay’s xenophobia is about to be overwhelmed, her horizons forever broadened beyond “the cocoon” Australia, at the time, was.

And Patty struggles to make her ranch worker husband (Luke Pegler) more “attentive,” so that they can have a baby.

There’s nothing particularly dramatic in any of this, but some of that is how gently Beresford handles this admittedly old-fashioned story and well-worn characters. All the rough edges, if there ever were any, are rubbed off every situation and every character.

Still, he never leaves his heaping helping of corn stuck in our teeth.

The perfectly-appointed store is home to many a recycled situation; the drudgery of the work, dealing with women who say “This has ALWAYS been my size” in the changing rooms, and cleaning up after vomiting little boys whose mothers dragged them shopping in this oasis of The Good Life in the middle of a city of streetcars and lunchpail jobs.

The players are well-cast, but the screen veteran Ormond (“Sabrina” and “First Knight” were her break-out films in 1995) has the most to play and the most fun, it would seem, playing it.

She purrs in a Croatian accent that “the Amerikins are sooooo modern,” that her fashion line is all gowns “too small for zees beeg Australian girlz,” that dresses made in Britain are ugly because they are cut to fit a nation of women “shaped like pears.” Lisa she takes under her wing, telling the others she wants to “steal your leetle slave girl” — just for a minute.

“Be heppy, ALL-vays! Eese goot choice!”

The European “REF-os” all have the whiff of displaced nobility (men in cravats), the Aussie men are either dandies or “manly” beer-swilling dullards, and Lisa, her mind broadening, has one piece of encouragement to carry with her into the liberating (even in Australia, to some degree) 1960s. Dated, yes, but worth remembering, Beresford suggests.

“A clever girl…That’s the most wonderful thing in all creation.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some suggestive material, mild language, and smoking

Cast: Julia Ormond, Angourie Rice, Rachael Taylor, Susie Porter, Alison McGirr and Celia Massingham

Credits: Directed by Brcue Beresford, script by Sue Milliken and Bruce Beresford, based on the novel by Madeleine St. John. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:48

Charm and wit count for a lot in romantic comedies, and they compensate for the many sins of “Funny Story.”

It’s a darkly funny “romance,” but only in the broadest terms.

The film covers familiar ground, and not just in the sense that it’s yet another tale set in scenic, over-filmed California.

And it traffics in cliches and stereotypes, or at least widely accepted tropes common in same-sex romances on the screen.

Walter, given a wry twinkle by Matthew Glave (of TV’s “Angie Tribeca” and “Better Things”), is a semi-retired TV actor with that one, goldmine of a hit under his belt. Decades before, he starred as a sword-and-sorcery “space Viking” in the popular series, “Youngblood.”

Set for life? Ask Shatner, Lynda Carter or Lucy Lawless. “Conventions” and residuals keep him flush.

Which is why he’s all set to dump the too-young/too-ditzy second wife (Daisye Tutor, yes that’s how she spells it.). She puts down her phone and her e-cigarette just long enough to blurt “I’m pregnant,” and put a stop to that.

That’s not news he’s looking forward to telling his adult daughter (Jana Winternitz), who is “always a bit standoffish” when he brings up “the girl that ended my marriage to her mother.” Can’t do it on the phone, and Nic just bailed on a weekend they were to spend together to be with friends up at Big Sur.

No worries, Walter can “drive up.” But Dad, one last thing. Could you pick up a friend, Kim (Emily Bett Rickards) whose car just died? You know, give her a lift up here?

We’ve met Kim as she skulked into her mom’s funeral, trying to shrug off the judgmental “Sorry that I never ran into you at the hospital” relatives.

Kim’s got issues that she might be working out with promiscuity.

Walter? We get a hint that he’s cut a wide swath through highway and byway barmaids and hoteliers.

These two may meet brusque, with brittle conversations about the “boob cancer” that took her mother and the like. We know “OK, do you have a PROBLEM with me?” and Kim’s testy recounting of Walter’s shortcomings as a father aren’t the end of it.

“For someone so small, you wear a huge layer of ‘bitch.'”

Not when he croons a little karaoke. Not when she offers, “Will you do a shot with me?”

Yup. “The best hair in daytime television” has a romp with a woman young enough to be his daughter.

And when they get to Big Sur, Walter figures out how wrong that was. His daughter comes out to him, Kim is her longtime love and oh yeah, this is the weekend they’re getting married.

“This is WONDERFUL. I think.”

I was amused by Walter’s over-the-top efforts to be “cool” with all this, his flippant reaction to his latest “stranger in a strange land” situation, the lone straight male in a fallopian jungle of California lesbians.

Glave gives this guy a light charm, witty and droll about just about everything, including the gulf between himself and the “My cell phone is more interesting than you” generation he’s dealing with.

He’s still popular with the fanboys, and the ladies he weekends with could consider him a sage, if they wanted to.

“Sometimes, regrets are our blessings.”

Rickard’s Kim is clearly a neurotic mess, life not working out on any level, the sort of woman you’d want your child to steer clear of, even if you hadn’t mounted her on a B & B’s armoire. Rickard walks the fine line between villain and basket case with her performance.

But man, the California cliches threaten to overwhelm this sort of faux Woody Allen (black screen intertitles, ancient jazz in the score) “awkward weekend” sex comedy.

Whatever popular culture says about gay men, in movies and on TV, gay women have long been portrayed with this “fluid” sexuality that is the politically correct norm for our more trans-friendly era.

“There are no doors,” one woman explains, cryptically satisfying Walter’s curiosity.

But in the movies, at least, you can’t be a lesbian without being a foodie/vegan, with all the crystals and teepees and shakra cleans uping cliches and wedding ceremonies that “commune with our friends in nature.”

Yeah, one woman plays the autoharp.

And that’s not even taking into account the whole promiscuous indiscriminate, on-the-spectrum sexual omnivore thing that gay women characters are in too many movies to count. What’s that mean? They’re still “available” to the hetero male hero, right?

That’s another thing this Michael J. Gallagher/Steve Greene script has that feels like an homage to Woody Allen — dated stereotypes.

These knocks don’t ruin “Funny Story,” and Glave sees to that. He makes Walter a soulful heel, so we don’t have to strain to believe he’d be attractive to women in general, bisexuals included.

But the trite tropes do make a pretty “Funny Story” a little less funny, I have to say.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, marijuana use, vaping, profanity

Cast: Matthew Glave, Emily Bett Rickards, Jana Winternitz

Credits: Directed by Michael J. Gallagher, script by Michael J. Gallagher and Steve Greene. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:25