Movie Nation

Mr May the Fourth Be With You” suggests the SlDC press corps should be reminding voters of re Nov. Fifth.

The Scott Turow novel made for a pretty good Alan Pakula big screen thriller back in 1990, a rare villainous turn by Harrison Ford, with Greta Scachi and Raul Julia on board.

June 4, Apple TV+ gets a deeper dive into this murder mystery, whose mystery might be “Will he get away with it?”

One of the 231 arguments I got into on the outrage engine formerly known as “Twitter” Friday was in interpreting the $3 million or so that Universal’s hyped-all-to-heck “The Fall Guy” earned on its opening night.

“Soooo, good not great” I says, to which a wet-behind-the-ears wag countered with “No, that’s actually very good for a Thursday night preview.” The dear.

I posted a link that showed what REAL blockbusters have typically done, before and after COVID, and noted “You are incorrect” to junior box office interpreter.

A $3.15 million Thursday was probably met with genuine alarm at Universal. A high concept reboot starring the dizzyingly popular (or so we thought) Ryan Gosling, a big budget ($130 million?)  built-to-be-a-blockbuster co-starring Emily Blunt, big laughs, big explosions, big stunts? Surely this would open over $40, maybe $50 million?

No. Deadline.com reports that Friday was more underwhelming news for the latest from “Bullet Train” director David Leitch. Now $28 million is the projected take. Ouch. If A24 had rounded up that much cash for their far cheaper “Civil War,” they’d be popping champagne to this day. It earned $26 million on opening. But this is The Big U — Universal — a BIG pic on a LOT more screens, etc.

So consider…”swooned over” at the Fanboy/fangirl confab known as SXSW is not a guarantee of wide public acceptance. Fans at film festivals are susceptible to group think on a grand scale. I know. I’ve fallen into that at Toronto, New York, etc. The early reviews of “Fall Guy”  seemed over the top, until a larger sample of critics (moi, for instance) got around to seeing it.

The picture’s hype may have gotten out of hand. Maybe people feel they’ve already “seen” the movie thanks to the clips, trailers and Gosling and Blunt press appearances. Stuntmen faking out and out-fighting villains? “FX” is a dated titled, as are “The Stunt Man” and “Hooper” and other variations on that theme. But they’re in the collective memory.

“The Fall Guy” TV show skewed old, even when it was new in the ’80s. There’s been no afterlife for it on TV. Recent generations have no recollection/connection to it.

And maybe David Leitch, a stuntman turned producer and director, as perfect as he was for this material, wasn’t the guy to make this THE popcorn pic of the early summer.

“Bullet Train” and “Fast and Furious Present: Hobbs & Shaw,” “Deadpool 2” and “Atomic Blonde” are his big previous credits. Anybody thrilled to bits over anything other than “Ryan Reynolds” in any of those titles? Still talking up those movies? No.

I found “The Fall Guy” to be something considerably short of that “out of body experience” you want your big popcorn pic to be, and so it is. Lurching pacing, meandering narrative, Blunt seemingly immune to the charms of Mr. Gosling, obvious “stunt-men” performing Gosling’s stunts, lots of quibbles emerged watching it. There are attempts at representation mixed-in with all the macho stunt-man’s-code content. This should be reaching a wider audience, or so you’d think.

And then there’s the news that this weekend’s horror underwhelmer –– “Tarot” — could be pointing to a wider problem. Sure, the people who have reviewed it (Why bother?) panned it. But horror used to be critic proof, and no horror movie this year, from franchise reboots like “The First Omen” to Sydney Sweeney not wearing a bikini as a nun in “Immaculate” to the very amusing and bloody “Abigail” has made bank.

Horror used to open routinely in the $18-25 million range, $-12 even right after COVID. “Tarot” will barely clear $6 million. Has the horror audience “outgrown” the genre? Has the big screen audience in general slipped back into its post-COVID malaise?

This weekend is full of evil box office portents for the post-strike summer cinema to come.

The second weekend of “Challengers” will clear $8.5-9 million, pretty good, showing what a movie with larger female appeal and more modest intent can manage. It will be over $30 million by Monday or Tuesday of next week.

Re-releasing “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” the “episode one” prequel from a long time ago, in a galaxy pre-Luke Skywalker, has paid off by rolling up $8-8.5.

“Godzilla x King: A New Empire” is coming in at fifth for the weekend (after “Tarot”), with another $3-4 million taking it closer to the coveted $200 million mark, domestic take. At $187 million, it may not have the screens to get there once the next “Planet of the Apes” opens in a few days.

As always, I’ll update these figures as the weekend progresses and more numbers from Box Office, The Numbers, etc. roll in.

“Unfrosted” is “The Right Stuff” filtered through the “Bee Movie” and TV-honed shtick of Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld’s comic riff on “the breakfast wars” that Post and Kellogg’s fought in his youth is an amusing wallow in boomer nostalgia, a broad farce about the mostly-fictionalized battle to be the first to get a “shelf stable” (Yummm, extra PRESERVATIVES!) breakfast pastry to the market.

Maybe you have to be a baby boomer to get into a Pop Tarts lampoon. But as we watch a “Barbie” colored send-up of everything from the space program to JFK — the president and the Ollie Stone movie — with a tipsy Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan), cereal mascots and a fanciful Hugh Grant take on Tony-the-Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft as a Master Thespian, I laughed.

Hey, anything to keep Old Man Seinfeld from whining about “woke culture” or he and his cookbooks-for-fellow-goldiggers wife from financing “counter” protests against anti-genocide protests, right?

Yeah, Jerry has aged into Uncle Leo, looking for anti-Semites under every contrary opinion and laughs in the diabetic coma of 1960s breakfast cereals.

Where “Barbie” made a modern feminist statement out of a ’60s doll, “Unfrosted” wallows in the “Mad Men” ethos and tooth decaying breakfast offerings of the mid-century-modern past.

Director and co-writer Seinfeld stars as Bob Cabana, a Big Ideas Man at Kellogg’s, reveling in the company’s dominance of arch-rival Post at the 1963 Bowl & Spoon Awards, honoring Battle Creek, Michigan’s industry town industries.

But Bob doesn’t rest on his laurels or dream of a “sod” lawn as he drives that Car-that-Killed-Ernie-Kovacs to and from work. Post, and its crafty chairwoman Marijorie Post (Amy Schumer), are onto something new. He’s sure of it.

Bob soon figures out what it is, a stolen abandoned idea that he himself pushed, a “shelf-stable” fruit (ish) filled toaster pastry.

The race is on, with Bob begging Edsel Kellogg (Jim Gaffigan) to let him lure his old ideas-partner (Melissa McCarthy) back from NASA.

“Men on the moon? Hah!”

They assemble an all-star team of “Taste Pilots” — guys like a Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), a Carvel (Adrian Martinez), Chef Boy-ar-dee (Bobby Monaghan) and a “Never a member of ze Nazi Party) type German fop (Thomas Lennon, a strudel-accented hoot).

They bring in “Mad Men” to help sell it. Real “Mad Men.” You know, Hamm and Slattery.

But Bob’s got unruly mascots to contend with — quarrelsome Snap, Crackle and Pop, that pretentious Ravenscroft squeezing in “King Lear” rehearsals between appearances in the Tony-the-Tiger felt suit.

He’s getting pressure from “The Milk Syndicate,” with Christian Slater playing the muscle and Peter Dinklage stealing the movie as the ruthless dairy mafia don.

And there are these two precocious, dumpster-diving Post sugar-junkie moppets (Eleanor Sweeney and Bailey Sheetz, insufferably fun) who might be his ace in the hole at this pivotal moment in America’s breakfast wars. They’ve tasted “the hot fruit lightning that THE MAN doesn’t want you to have” that Post has cooked-up. So Bob knows what he’s up against.

Seinfeld recycles his best acting tricks from “Seinfeld. Every time a new ingredient is discussed — barking “PECTIN!” “Xantham Gum!” and “RIBOFLAVIN” like he’s seen his nemesis “NEWMAN” one more time.

The cameos pile up like the one-liners about “There’s always a surprise in the box” and “Vietnam? That looks like a good idea.” Bill Burr plays JFK, Cedric the Entertainer is the Bowl & Spoon Awards emcee, and “Seinfeld” regulars and many an unemployed “Saturday Night Live” alumnus shows up for a scene or two.

Yes, most every joke churned out here has a “low hanging fruit” or “fruit food colored” air about it. But Gaffigan, Schumer, McCarthy, Grant and most everybody here has a chance to score. And so they do.

There’s also whimsy in the casting — Grant as a strike-leading mascot actor quoting Shakespeare, James Marsden as “bulging” fitness guru Jack Lalanne, Dan Levy as Andy Warhol?

That’s GOLD, Jerry! Or, you know, a honey-shaded high fructose food coloring version of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, “Uncle Leo.”

Rating: PG-13, profanity, innuendo, smoking

Cast: Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan, Cedric the Entertainer, James Marsden, Jack McBrayer, Adrian Martinez and Hugh Grant

Credits: Directed by Jerry Seinfeld, scripted by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten and Andy Robin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Not sure of the release date, yet. But this looks solid and speedy.

Gabriel Leone has the title role, Brazilian driver Aryton Senna, with Kay Scodelario in the supporting cast.

It’s great that after all his years before the camera, Aussie actor Eric Bana is finally in a franchise that plays to his considerable strengths as an actor and a screen “presence.”

“Force of Nature” is a sequel to “The Dry,” a top knotch mystery thriller from a couple of years back set in the Outback. Bana reprises his role as Federal Detective Aaron Falk for a jungle Australia story of women lost in the rainforests of Giralang in this latest Jane Harper novel to be made into a movie.

As in “The Dry,” which took the character to his hometown during a drought to solve a crime, Falk has a past connection to this place — a childhood trauma. As in that film, there is a crime to unravel in classic mystery novel adaptation fashion, a few hoary tropes included.

And as in that film, we see Australia at its most tourist brochure-striking — scenic forests, clouds of bats, lovely waterfalls, and a “raging” river for somebody to fall in while trying to retrieve a map that will get her and her “Executive Adventures” retreat group out of the woods and out of a jam.

Falk and partner Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie) show up after four women come out of the woods, wet, lost and in one case — spider-bitten. But one of their “team building exercise” participants did not get out.

Alice (Anna Torv), we learn, wasn’t popular. She was high up in the Bailey Tennants development (just guessing) firm, an ill-tempered bully. She might be romantically involved with the company founder (Richard Roxbourgh). Alice’s boss and wife of the founder Jill (Deborra Lee-Furness) might have known about it. Lauren (Robin McLeavy), the one backpacker with “bush skills,” has “history with Alice. And sisters Beth and Bree (Sisi Strong and Lucy Ansell) had their issues with her as well.

“Alice didn’t like me, and she never pretended to hide it.”

Even Falk wasn’t all that crazy about Alice. But he had to deal with her. She was his “inside source” at Bailey Tennants, which Falk and his partner were investigating for financial crimes. That’s why they’re there to “assist” with the search. Strange coincidence, their source being the only one to not make it out of the woods.

Falk knows this remote place, with its lovely Mirror Falls, is forbidding, where “one small mistake could change everything.” He knows it because of something that happened during his childhood.

So as he and Carmen question the women, and almost question Bailey himself, we see not just the flashbacks of that ill-fated hike for “problem employees,” and the melodramatic chain of events that put them all in peril, we glimpse young Aaron’s (Archie Thomson) experience there with his parents (Ash Ricardo and Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) decades before.

The script throws in a storm, a complication that’s treated as an afterthought. Another complication is that the woods were long ago the haunt of an infamous Aussie serial killer. The Robert Connolly film — he did Bana’s “The Dry” and “Blueback” — is a bit by-the-numbers in terms of those complications and the nature of the withheld details later revealed in the many interrogations.

“That’s why I wasn’t surprised when she lied to us,” lines like that, abound.

At one point, Falk gathers the women in the lobby lounge in front of a resort hotel fireplace for a group questioning to “Reveal what REALLY happened,” a gimmick straight out of Agatha Christie and all who would film her books or imitate them.

But through it all, Bana is a brooding, soulful presence, a man who takes this situation seriously, who is more interested in saving his source’s life than whatever information she can provide their investigation, someone who doesn’t let the local cops’ mission creep — Hey, we could wrap up more of this serial killer story with this “search!” — go unchallenged.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

And Bana as Aaron Falk? Good on ya, mate. Hang on to this franchise as long as they’ll let you.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Torv, Lucy Ansell, Deborra Lee-Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Strong, Jacqueline McKenzie and Richard Roxbourgh

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Connolly, based on a novel by Jane Harper. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:52

“There is nothing new new in the world except the history you do not know,” Harry Truman said at the beginning of one of the more infamous wars on free speech in these “free” United States.

That’s a big part of the value of “Storm Center,” a McCarthy Era drama starring Bette Davis, about an attempt to ban a book filled with “preposterous ideas” by people afraid of the idea of “ideas,” aka that generation’s crank fringe conservatives.

It’s a modest “it could happen here/it is happening here/it could happen again” drama about a beloved librarian taking a principled stand in the middle of “communist witch hunt” America.

Dated, quaint, well-acted and reasonably well-argued, it overcomes fairly pedestrian direction on its march towards a fine, seething flourish of a finish, much of it provided by She Who Seethes, the Oscar-winning icon Davis.

Mrs. Hull (Davis) is a bullwark against illiteracy and ignorance in her hometown of Kenport, a widow who devoted her life to founding a Free Public Library and who runs it with efficiency and an eye towards the future. The Baby Boom generation of new children tell her it’s time for a “children’s wing.” That’s what she figures the city council wants to meet her about when old friend Judge Ellerbe (Paul Kelly) calls.

But she might have gotten a clue about this “problem” book Ellerbe checked out that very morning — “The Communist Dream.”

When she meets with the “five foghorns from city hall, each trying to out-toot the other,” she finds one in particular (Brian Keith) more than happy to join the rest in a unanimous endorsement of her “children’s wing,” but determined to lead the lot in strong-arming her to remove that book.

Quid pro quo or no, Mrs. Hull agrees. But as she sits and ruminates with her assistant (Kim Hunter), she cannot get over the very idea of “getting rid of a book” over its “ideas.”

The lady’s got a gauntlet and it’s about to be tossed.

Sallie Brophy and Joe Mantell play parents — she’s “cultured,” plays Chopin at the piano, he’s a loving working class mug — whose little boy Freddie (Kevin Coughlin) has fallen under the reading spell. Like all the smart kids in town, he worships Mrs. Hull. Everybody knows the boarding house she lives in, and kids stop her on the street every morning on her way to work, selling raffle tickets for charity, asking about books, letting how know how beloved she is.

But with five “foghorns” fretting over electoral challenges from commie-fearing/blacklist happy voters, with much of the town gripped by the fear of communist infiltration and “grooming” and the nuclear threat that hangs over that, Mrs. Hull may find herself wearing a new label — “communist sympathesizer.”

The script, by director and Oscar-winning “From Here to Eternity” screenwriter Daniel Taradash and screenwriter Elick Moll (“The House on Telegraph Hill”), may be preachy at times. But the writers take pains to show a town divided, with the louder elements (conservatives) shouting down and intimidating everybody else, even those figures (Edward Platt) inclined to stand up for real American values.

This plays out, in microcosm, in little Freddie Slater’s house, where his piano playing mother goes toe to toe with her unread husband, who can’t understand why his son has “his head always buried in a book” when he should be playing baseball. Danged commie in the making. Dad’ll fix that.

You don’t have to know the movie or read the headline to this review to know Bette D. is saving up that “over my dead body” line for the third act.

The “quaint” label I slapped on the picture earlier comes in the Disney-esque Americana of the setting, a lily white Mayberry where the opening of a library wing calls for a “library anthem,” speeches and another confrontation.

Keith makes a fine villain. No mustache to curl, no sermons about communism, just insidious myopia and unprincipled opportunism, very representative of an era where Republicans rode McCarthyism into the White House, and then professed to be “shocked SHOCKED” when the demogogue came after Eisenhower’s beloved military.

If there’s a line from this solid, polished “programmer,” very representative of Hollywood’s modest budget efforts during TV’s first “golden age,” that rings through the ages, the co-writers give it to Davis, a sentiment worth remembering as a divided America re-divides over every new “issue” that confronts us.

“You can’t run a library or a town council to please everybody.”

A little less time fretting over what pleases the fearful, the hate-filled and the ignorant is always in order.

“Civil liberties” and “intellectual freedom” are always faced with the challenges of “censorship” and  demagoguery. If we’re lucky, a new Mrs. Hull shows up and shames us all into remembering what we’re supposed to stand for. And if we’re really lucky, she’ll be a Bette Davis, because nobody messes with Bette Davis and doesn’t get as good as she or he gets.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG

Cast: Bette Davis, Brian Keith, Kim Hunter, Kevin Coughlin, Sallie Brophy, Joe Mantell and Edward Platt.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Taradash, scripted by Daniel Taradash and Elick Moll. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:23

May 8, Disney gets a little deeper into the Beatles business with Disney+ showing a newly-restored print of the making of their “Let It Be” LP.

Lovely film. Haven’t seen it in years. Bully for them for helping get this out there.

Gaby Hoffman, McKinley Belcher III and Jeff Hefner also star in this six episode series coming to Netflix May 30.

Note the interesting use of ABBA’s “SOS” to underscore what is at first alarming, then despairing, then sad and then long-shot “hopeful.”

Lovely trailer makes this one a promising Memorial Day weekend binge.

There’s a noble tradition in the acting profession, and the indie cinema. When the work isn’t there, you create something for yourself worth starring in. It’s how Billy Bob Thornton and others made their own “big break.”

There’s also a well-established route for actresses finally breaking through, getting themselves “taken seriously” by seriously dressing down for a part. Ask Charlize Theron what “Monster” did for her.

But both of these time-honored traditions are strained and stained in whatever the hell nobody’s-idea-of-struggling Nicola Peltz Beckham thought she was doing with “Lola.”

It’s a gritty and lowdown “showcase” in slumming, an attempt at a sort of Riley Keough re-invention for the well-heeled/married-well “Bates Motel” alumna. She wrote, directed and stars in this sordid and misshapen star vehicle about a small town Texas teen struggling to get her and her very young and feminine kid brother out of the hellhouse they’re being raised in.

Bonus points for casting indie icon Virginia Madsen as the monstrous mother who drinks, smokes and takes up with whatever rapist will have her as she ignores and berates stripper Lola and “home schools” a kid (Luke David Blumm) she will never understand.

It’s such a shame your Dad didn’t take you with him when he left!”

Everything else, from the nightly stripper make-up ritual to the “back room” where extra cash is collected for sex work — “Do you party, Angel?” — to the no-good high school boyfriend (Richie Merritt) she keeps around to keep her in drugs, to the Black best friend (Raven Goodwin) at the convenience store where they work and which Lola steals from, to an unplanned pregnancy is straight-up formula, the sort of down-market Southern Gothic downmarket Tennessee Williams wallow we saw in 174 indie films that preceded it.

“I’ve always thought I needed a reason to be good,” Lola narrates in the film’s opening. “But what does ‘being good’ even mean?”

Judging from Peltz Beckham’s writing her way through struggle and death and self-help group and strip club cliches, and donning all that makeup to act “cheap,” she never did figure that out.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex and profanity

Cast: Nicolas Peltz Beckham, Raven Goodwin, Richie Merritt, Luke David Blumm and Virginia Madsen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicolas Peltz Beckham. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:23