New in Theaters
(Playing at the Gaslight Cinema)
August: Osage County.
(Rated PG-13)
Each awards season, there’s one film that just looks like it was made to be considered for the Oscars. Someone’s crying, someone’s dying, it’s set in the past, there’s a big, sweeping orchestral score, etc. It’s usually an extravagant period piece or emotionally draining drama.
Those who saw the trailers of the fall movie releases might have predicted “The Butler” and “August: Osage County” as the this year’s Oscar bait. They’re both star-studded and deep to the point of being melodramatic, but “Osage County” actually manages to have a few tricks up its sleeves by the end.
When the father of the Weston family, Beverly (Sam Shepard) dies, his daughters Barbara (Julia Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Karen (Juliette Lewis) return to Osage County, Okla. for the funeral and to console their erratic and sickly mother, Violet (Meryl Streep). Other relatives who tag along are Violet’s flamboyant sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and her husband Charlie (Chris Cooper) and their slow son Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch); Barbara’s soon to be ex-husband Bill (Ewan McGregor) and their daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin); as well as Karen’s bigshot Miami fiancé Steve (Dermot Mulroney).
“August: Osage County” is produced by the Weinstein Company, which has a great track record at the Oscars – “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “Chicago” (2002), “The Aviator” (2004) and “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) are just a few of the most famous ones. For whatever reason, “August” hasn’t been getting as much notice as some of its competition. It could be because, unlike the previous winners, John Wells’ adaptation of Tracy Letts’ hit stage play is a little uninspired and dull for the first hour. Letts, famous for his sardonically dark and twisted themes like those seen in “Bug” (2006) and “Killer Joe” (2011), seems to have let his latest adaptation go a little too Hollywood. This time he has big-time producers like the Weinsteins who love a happy ending rather than an indie production from director William Friedkin.
The film’s big star and token nominee for Best Actress, Streep, is playing one mean and self-centered old woman who doesn’t hold back on her contempt for her family. We should feel about as much empathy for her as we do Nurse Ratched, but the problem is Streep is so showy and animated in the part that it takes audiences out of the picture. Her on-screen daughters, on the other hand, are a revelation. Roberts gives us the best acting of her career as Barbara, the oldest sister who just wants to break away from Osage for good. Nicholson and Lewis break audiences’ hearts as the two younger sisters who just want someone to love them and are finding it in the wrong arms.
Though the first and second acts of the film drag, by the time we’ve reached the third act with the Weston family, the wheels started rolling in motion and all hell breaks loose. Roberts nails it and a scene between Streep, Roberts and Nicholson almost make up for the rest of the movie. Streep and Roberts have been getting a lot of hype for their performances in “August: Osage County,” and if there’s anything wrong with that, it’s because Roberts isn’t receiving all of it.
Megan Bianco, Special to the Herald
(Playing at the Durango Stadium 9)
Devil’s Due.
(Rated R)
After a mysterious, lost night on their honeymoon, a newlywed couple find themselves dealing with an earlier-than-planned pregnancy. While recording everything for posterity, the husband begins to notice odd behavior in his wife that they initially write off to nerves, but, as the months pass, it becomes evident that the dark changes to her body and mind have a much more sinister origin.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.
(Rated PG-13)
Having clung to the Russians as go-to villains long after the Cold War thawed, the movies find themselves current again with their favorite arch-enemy.
Cooling Russo-American relations have yielded an opening for the return of Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst, just in time for the Sochi Olympics. In the Jack Ryan reboot, “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” Chris Pine takes over as the spy who was played by Alec Baldwin (“The Hunt for Red October”), Harrison Ford (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger”) and Ben Affleck (“The Sum of All Fears”).
It’s a decent legacy of a dark-haired, intellectual action hero. Ryan is a navigator of murky, reasonably realistic, international espionage worlds. He has neither James Bond’s preternatural suavity nor Jason Bourne’s visceral butt-kicking skills, but instead anxiously finds his way with patriotic cunning.
“Shadow Recruit,” which was scripted without a Clancy book by Adam Cozad and David Koepp, tells a new backstory for Ryan. Inspired by Sept. 11, he joins the Marines and is heroically injured in Afghanistan. During his recovery, he meets his eventual fiancee (a doctor named Cathy played by Keira Knightley) and is lured to the CIA by a mysterious recruiter (Kevin Costner, unconvincingly trying to exude a Donald Sutherland-like gravitas).
He’s covertly embedded at a Wall Street bank where he uncovers a Russian plot to buy up U.S. Treasury bonds, which he suspects will be sold off in a coordinated act of terrorism and currency devaluation. Surely, if Ronald Reagan (whose endorsement of Clancy’s first novel, “The Hunt for Red October,” propelled his fame) was still around, he’d swoon over a spy thriller based on the harrowing threat of inflation.
Ryan’s investigation leads him to the Russian oligarch Viktor Cherevin, played by Kenneth Branagh, who also directed the film. Certainly, it takes a bite out of the nationalistic politics when the movie’s villain is played by a knighted British actor known for his Shakespeare work.
Branagh endows his film with (mostly) old-fashioned competency – something often lacking in today’s action films – but little to distinguish it from superior thrillers that have come before. The best thing here is the sleekness of modern Moscow, where much of the action takes place. The film is filled with a nighttime mix of neon and taillights set against the Kremlin and other monuments – a handsome enough rendering to send a viewer back to the recent Bond, “Skyfall,” for those elegant Shanghai scenes.
But “Shadow Recruit” is also disappointingly formulaic, relying on the familiar set piece-driven story of an implausible heist and a time-bomb finale. Knightley is too strong a force for this girlfriend role. And when the global scheme is figured out in a minute with a bank of computer-searching analysts, one foresees the obsolescence of the action film: sprawling plots undone with a few keystrokes.
“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” is perhaps most significantly a test for Pine as a movie star. Early in the film, when Ryan is forced to defend his life in a hotel room battle, he ably depicts the shock and horror of a man encountering such a circumstance for the first time.
But Pine also fails to make his Jack Ryan more than an afterthought to Baldwin’s know-it-all or Ford’s reluctant hero. As Costner’s character says, he too much resembles “a Boy Scout on a field trip.”
One unlikely cameo should be noted: New York’s famed repertory art-house theater, the Film Forum, appears early in the movie when Ryan swaps information at a screening of “Sorry, Wrong Number.” At least in “Shadow Recruit,” the interior has finally been upgraded to plush stadium seating.
“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” a Paramount Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and intense action, and brief language.” Running time: 105 minutes. HH out of four.
JAKE COYLE, AP Film Writer
Ride Along.
(Rated PG-13)
What a junky, sloppy movie this is.
With the exception of a single scene, “Ride Along” never tries to do anything original with the mismatched buddy-cop format perfected by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in “Lethal Weapon” and Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in “48 Hrs.”
The first “48 Hrs.” movie was released 32 – that’s THIRTY-TWO – years ago. The first “Lethal Weapon” came out in 1987. Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of variations on the same theme – and few have been as uninspired and depressingly dreadful as this one.
Ice Cube is in full snarl-and-growl mode as James, a streetwise and sometimes unorthodox Atlanta cop. We suspect “Ride Along” is going to be on cruise control from the get-go, what with James facing off with generic, Euro-trash, gun-wielding thugs, which leads to a shootout, which leads to a wild car chase, which leads to a barely contrite James in the office of his supervising lieutenant (Bruce McGill), who of course reads James the riot act and tells him he’s on a short leash.
Where have we seen all this before? Oh, that’s right – in a hundred other movies.
Actor/comedian Kevin Hart, who can be fall-down funny at times and just trying-too-hard funny on other occasions, at least gets points for infusing boundless energy into his role as Ben Barber, a pint-sized school security guard and video game enthusiast who’s living with James’ gorgeous little sister, Angela (Tika Sumpter), who, like most girlfriends in buddy-cop movies, wears skimpy outfits around the house and seems to have no life other than expressing her love for her man, worrying about her man, and waiting around in case a villain needs to take her hostage.
(If “Ride Along” tells us what Angela does for a living, I missed it. What I do know is she and Ben are cohabitating in a fabulous, spacious, beautifully appointed loft, and I’m thinking Ben’s security guard salary wouldn’t cover the assessments.)
The best scene in the film comes early, when Ben stops a young basketball player from ditching school and drinking with some delinquents by laying out the way things are going to play out if the kid doesn’t get back in the gym. Hart delivers his monologue with razor-sharp precision and a perfect payoff, giving us small hope “Ride Along” just might continue to surprise us along the way.
Nope.
Here’s the contrived setup. Ben wants to become a cop so he can impress James and win his blessing to marry Angela. James thinks Ben is a clown – mostly because Ben IS a clown – so he comes up with a plan to scare Ben away from becoming a cop and from marrying Angela: He’ll take Ben on a “ride along.”
Not so sure James has thought this plan all the way through. With the help of some of his cop buddies, James creates some scenarios designed to annoy and frustrate Ben -- but in the meantime, James also is closing in on a mythic gun runner known only as “Omar,” so it might not be a great idea to take the kid sister’s video-game-obsessed boyfriend on a ride along when you might find yourself in, you know, potentially fatal situations.
I know. This isn’t supposed to be “Copland” or “Serpico.” It’s a live-action cartoon, with Hart trying to milk laughs by wrestling with a half-naked giant of a man who’s covered in honey (don’t ask) or trash-talking his way out of tense confrontations. The script, which is credited to four writers and feels like something written by committee, has Ben behaving like a whimpering coward in one scene and a decisive hero in the next. It’s not so much character arc as character whiplash.
Time and again, “Ride Along” comes up with a cliched setup – and then blows the payoff. Even the easiest of confrontational scenes, with the fun-sized Ben facing off against a crew of towering bikers, just ... fizzles out. When in doubt, “Ride Along” simply has James and Ben jumping into the car and zooming off to the next scene.
(About that car. When Ben first sees it, he launches into an adoring description of its characteristics that would seem over the top in a commercial. Talk about your dual-cam product placement -- lingering visuals AND the star touting the car’s assets.)
Kevin Hart has plenty of talent. Director Tim Story knows how to make a terrific movie; he helmed the first “Barbershop,” which featured one of Ice Cube’s better performances. Supporting players McGill, John Leguizamo and Laurence Fishburne are more-than-capable performers. We’ve got a good team here.
But what a terrible game they played this time out. Even the comedic epilogue is embarrassing.
Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
The Nut Job (in standard format and digital 3-D with surcharge)
Not all rats look exactly alike, even animated ones. But there’s a real resemblance between a rat in “The Nut Job,” the new film by Peter Lepeniotis, and Remy, the main character in “Ratatouille,” that wonderful 2007 Pixar film.
And that’s not a good thing for “The Nut Job,” because anyone who makes that connection will be likely also remembering how “Ratatouille” showed so beautifully that an animated film, done with the right skill and imagination, can be equally enchanting to kids and adults. Something that “The Nut Job,” a decent but frankly forgettable entry to the animal-centered animated film oeuvre, does not.
The movie certainly looks nice. Colors are vibrant, particularly the reddish autumn shades of trees in Liberty Park, in fictional Oakton City, where much of the action takes place. There’s a lovely moment where shimmering water reflects the leaves above. And the whole thing has a period feel – mid-20th century – which is appealing, though confusing, too, when you see characters break into what looks like very 21st-century dancing at one point.
Like most animated films these days, “The Nut Job,” a joint Canadian-South Korean-U.S. production, trades on its celebrity voices, which here include Katherine Heigl, Brendan Fraser, Will Arnett, Maya Rudolph and, most recognizably, Liam Neeson, who sometimes sounds like he could be on a Shakespearean stage.
Not that you could call this dialogue Shakespearean. Or even witty. This being a film about squirrels and their nuts, kids will enjoy the “nut” puns, and parents will groan. “Let’s not get too nutty about this,” one character says. “Sorry, I went a little nuts,” says another. The movie’s slogan: “No nuts, no glory.”
Well, at least there’s an interesting digression on the existential nature of peanut brittle. Is it, someone asks, a nut or a candy?
“Both,” comes the considered reply.
The story, based on Lepeniotis’ short film, “Surly Squirrel,” is simple: The animals in Liberty Park, ruled by a gruff raccoon (Neeson, of course) ominously just named Raccoon, are facing a severe nut shortage just as winter is approaching. Surly the squirrel (Arnett), who thinks only of himself, has somehow set fire to the winter stockpile. (Watch for the nice shot of popping corn kernels from an exploding tree – it will remind you there’s a reason you’re wearing those 3-D glasses.)
But Surly doesn’t seem willing to help solve the situation, and he’s banished from the park to the city.
There, he discovers a nut shop – cashews, peanuts, hazelnuts, you name it. If he can snag that booty, he’ll be golden for the winter, though that won’t necessarily help out his furry friends in the park, led by the feisty Andie (Heigl).
Of course, there’s a big complication. A group of human lowlifes plotting a bank heist have their own connections to the nut stash, for reasons unrelated to nutrition.
So who’ll win out, the human criminals or the park animals? And will Surly remain, er, surly and uncooperative, or will he work with the others? And what about Raccoon? Is there something menacing in that deep, husky voice?
Parents may concern themselves with these issues, while kids may simply be focusing on the puns, and, oh yes, the fart jokes.
And if they get tired of those, there’s always the animated PSY – yes, that PSY – at the end, singing and dancing his way through “Gangnam Style” as the credits roll. Never mind that this movie is supposed to take place some 50 years before the song came out. It’s all mildly entertaining – if slightly nuts.
“The Nut Job,” an Open Road Films release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America “for mild action and rude humor.” Running time: 86 minutes. HH out of four. Rated PG.
JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National Writer
Still Showing
Animas City Theatre
(128 E. College Drive, 799-2281, www.animascitytheatre.com)
Philomena. The true story of one mother’s search for her lost son. Falling pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena was sent to the convent of Roscrea to be looked after as a “fallen woman”. When her baby was only a toddler, he was taken away by the nuns for adoption in America. Philomena spent the next 50 years searching for him in vain.
Then she met Martin Sixsmith, a world-weary political journalist who happened to be intrigued by her story. Together they set off for America on a journey that would not only reveal the extraordinary story of Philomena’s son, but also create an unexpectedly close bond between them. Rated PG-13.
Gaslight Cinema
(102 Fifth St. Next to the railroad depot, 247-8133, www.allentheatresinc.com)
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Ben Stiller directs and stars in James Thurber’s story of a daydreamer who escapes his anonymous life by disappearing into a world of fantasies filled with heroism, romance and action. When his job along with that of his co-worker (Kristen Wiig) are threatened, Walter takes action in the real world embarking on a global journey that turns into an adventure more extraordinary than anything he could have ever imagined. Rated PG.
Saving Mr. Banks. Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney as he negotiates for the movie rights to P.L. Travers’ “Mary Poppins.” Rated PG-13.
Durango Stadium 9
(Next to Durango Mall, 247-9799, www.allentheatresinc.com)
Kill Your Darlings. (Wednesday only) The previously untold story of murder that brought together a young Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster) at Columbia University in 1944, providing the spark that would lead to their Beat Revolution. This is the true story of friendship and murder that led to the birth of an entire generation. Rated R.
Lone Survivor. The more or less true story of four Navy SEALs on a covert mission to neutralize a high-level Al-Qaeda operative who are ambushed by the enemy in the mountains of Afghanistan. Faced with an impossible moral decision, the small band is isolated from help and surrounded by a much larger force of Taliban ready for war.
The four men find reserves of strength and resilience as they stay in the fight to the finish. Mark Wahlberg stars as Marcus Luttrell, the author of the first-person memoir that has become a motivational resource for its lessons on how the power of the human spirit is tested when we are pushed beyond our mental and physical limits. The other members of the SEAL team are played by Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster. Rated R.
The Legend of Hercules. Betrayed by his stepfather, the King, and exiled and sold into slavery because of a forbidden love, Hercules must use his formidable powers to fight his way back to his rightful kingdom. Through harrowing battles and gladiator-arena death matches, Hercules embarks on a legendary odyssey to overthrow the King and restore peace to the land. Rated PG-13.
American Hustle. A con man and woman are forced to work for an FBI agent during the ABSCAM era in the 1970s. Rated R.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Bilbo Baggins journeys with the Wizard Gandalf and 13 Dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield, on an epic quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain and the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor. Having survived the beginning of their unexpected journey, the Company continues East, encountering along the way the skin-changer Beorn and a swarm of giant Spiders in the treacherous forest of Mirkwood. Rated PG-13.
Frozen. Inspired by the 19th-century fairy tale, “The Snow Queen,” by Hans Christian Andersen, “Frozen” marks another Disney film modernizing one of the Danish author’s stories.
Ted Holteen and Associated Press
