By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

In 1997, the first Men in Black movie offered a clever blend of comedy, extraterrestrials and action, heightened by the amusing pairing of the chatty Will Smith and the laconic Tommy Lee Jones.

A sequel followed five years later. It was neither as amusing nor as successful as the original film, and it seemed as if all concerned realized they should not push the idea any harder.

Tommy Lee Jones (left) and Will Smith star in Columbia Pictures' Men in Black 3. (Wilson Webb/Columbia Pictures)

Now, a decade after the second film, we have Men in Black³. It has some laughs, but there is also a great deal of melancholy in the affair, and not only because Smith looks startlingly old in the early scenes. It’s not a bad film, and it ends with a nice flourish. But I expected something livelier and funnier.

Men in Black³ finds agents J (Smith) and K (Jones) still dealing with alien misbehavior on Earth. Their now long partnership has become frustrating to J because K never reveals his emotional self, and J cannot understand what closed K off so completely. But his attempt to understand his partner is interrupted when the dreaded Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords) escapes his lunar prison and heads to Earth, bent on revenge against the man who caught him: K.

Boris’ scheme involves going back in time to 1969 and his last confrontation with K and killing the agent. It appears at first that he has succeeded — J’s many years with his partner have been erased — so J must also go back in time to stop Boris and save K. That allows him to meet a much younger K (played by Josh Brolin) and to get a peek at what the man was like before events turned him into the sorrowful K.

Men in Black³ should have had a great opportunity in the 1969 scenes, and it takes advantage of some, including its showing of earlier versions of the agents’ gear. But there are even more moments when the movie is uninspired. A visit to Andy Warhol’s studio lasts far longer than necessary. And while Brolin — who has worked with Jones — knows how to replicate his older co-star’s moves, the young K is not that much more open than the older version, so Brolin and Smith fall into rhythms we have already seen often enough via Jones and Smith.

Indeed, in the latter stages of the movie, the most watchable part involves Griffin, an alien who can not only see the future but multiple futures, depending on which course people take. Griffin is played by Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man, Boardwalk Empire) as a sweet presence who rejoices in the good paths the future follows — but is tinged with sadness at seeing the tragic turns life may take.

And Griffin’s view of life fuels the movie as a whole, especially in an ending that, touching though it may be, explains K’s emotional journey a bit too well.

In the end, there were just enough good bits in Men in Black³ to keep it from being just an attempt to rake in more money from an old, beloved franchise. But there were not enough to make me recommend it wholeheartedly. And the use of 3-D, while good at times, is so sparing that you should skip paying the 3-D premium and get what you can from the 2-D’s comedy and drama.

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and Ohio.com, and in the HeldenFiles Online blog (www.ohio.com/blogs/heldenfiles). He is also on Facebook and Twitter. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or by email to rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

What to Expect When You’re Expecting is a Valentine’s Day take on impending parenthood. Assorted couples cope with pregnancies, planned and unplanned, adoption and the epic change that is coming to their lives.

It’s wafer-thin, but it has plenty of laughs — a lot of them involving pregnant women’s bodily functions, the rest coming from Chris Rock, who unloads lots of daddy-to-be wisdom on one prospective father. But what’s surprising is how touching this film from the director of Waking Ned Devine manages to be. Kirk Jones and the screenwriters found real pathos in adapting the Heidi Murkoff self-help book, dubbed America’s “pregnancy bible.”

Cameron Diaz stars as Jules in What To Expect When you're Expecting. (Melissa Moseley/Lionsgate)

Elizabeth Banks plays Wendy, a self-help book author, a pregnancy expert who has never been able to get pregnant herself. Until now. She and hubby Gary (Ben Falcone) are all set to glow with the angel’s kisses of this miracle. And then her husband’s ex-race car driver dad (Dennis Quaid) and his trophy bride (Brooklyn Decker) one-up them. Father and mother-in-law are expecting twins.

Anna Kendrick is the food-truck chef whose one-night tumble with a high school flame (Chace Crawford), also a food-truck cook, put her in a family way.

Cameron Diaz is a super-fit TV fitness guru newly pregnant with her Celebrity Dance Factor partner (Matthew Morrison of TV’s Glee.). Sure, she found out she was pregnant by throwing up on live TV. But she figures as fit as she is, she can do this pregnancy thing in her spare time.

And Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro are buying the house and prepping for an adoption. Santoro’s Alex is the guy his wife sends to a dudes group, daddies with toddlers who trundle their kids through the parks of Los Angeles. And that’s where daddy Chris Rock presides.

“Ready? There’s no such thing as READY,” Rock’s character, Vic, bellows. “You just jump on a moving train, and DIE.”

He and his crew make a lot of death jokes about what life is like after a baby enters the house. And cracks about the man’s loss of parity when there’s an infant in tow.

“Women pretty much control the baby universe,” so yeah, you’re buying a house, yeah, you’re deferring on every major decision regarding the baby. And yeah, babies “are where happiness goes to DIE.”

In montages, couples visit obstetricians or explain their state of mind to friends or colleagues. Couples bicker over matters big — circumcision, the baby’s name — and small. Couples struggle to endure, as couples, the strains of unplanned pregnancies.

Every so often, the “dudes group” (Thomas Lennon is a member, and the very funny Joe Manganiello is the single, womanizing photographer-jock they idolize) gathers to dispense more warnings to Alex.

And then we return to Wendy, who has built a career out of romanticizing this experience, but who has no more clue about what she’s facing than her daft assistant (Australian comic Rebel Wilson, who is OUT there). If Rock is the voice of comic wisdom in What to Expect, Banks is its heart. She brings pathos and humor to a character who is hell-bent on loving this circle of life thing, until she’s overwhelmed.

Interestingly, the actresses involved in this movie all chose to play characters outside their own parenting experience. Lopez has children, and plays a woman who can’t. Banks, playing a woman determined to love pregnancy, had her baby through a surrogate. Kendrick and Diaz and model-turned-actress Decker aren’t moms — yet.

That doesn’t hurt the film, which is basically a light, superficial and frothy little romp through the pregnancy experience. It’s choppy and episodic, and funny — especially when Rock, a veteran dad in real life — is holding court. But the overarching message is both moving and amusing.

Expecting a baby? You have no idea what to expect.

By Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune

For most of its quick and extremely dirty running time, the new Sacha Baron Cohen offender The Dictator wages war with itself, crude nonsense up against crude nonsense that’s really funny. Then comes the golden ticket, the speech of speeches, the scene in which the fictional North African dictator General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen addresses a gathering in New York City, recanting his barbarous ways with a heartfelt confessional.

You Americans don’t know how good you have it here, he states. Where he comes from, he says, the top 1 percent controls most of the wealth. Leaders can’t wait to wage war on the wrong country. And on and on he goes. The joke is both predictable and familiar, yet it kills. At the Dictator screening Thursday night, the scene started out one way — scoring easy points with its target audience of liberals — but by the end, with Cohen finessing the loutish Supreme Leader’s spiel just so, the applause in the theater sounded positively bipartisan.

Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator.

This was the old Borat stuff! And I wish director Larry Charles’ third outing with Cohen had more of it. It’s maddeningly uneven, though a step up from the wearying Bruno. Since Borat, something has happened to Charles’ comic technique: The way he films simple dialogue exchanges has grown weirdly artless and often mistimed (the editing is mighty hacky), halfway to Adam Sandler territory for broadness. I stuck with it, though, because Cohen at his best is both brazen and sly. As is The Dictator.

This one’s plottier than Borat or Bruno, for better or worse. When one of Aladeen’s doubles is assassinated, the leader’s longtime adviser (Ben Kingsley, looking a little uncomfortable) hatches a scheme involving a new double (also played by Cohen), a visit to the dreaded America and an unlikely romance with a vegan/feminist/Rush Limbaugh nightmare, played by Anna Faris.

She’s game and a strong sparring partner for Cohen’s unending misogynist wisecracks.

Like Faris, Jason Mantzoukas lends valuable support, in the role of Aladeen’s former nuclear physicist presumed assassinated (by Aladeen). He turns up as one of countless refugees from Aladeen’s country, Wadiya, now living in the Manhattan subsection known as Little Wadiya.

The better gags in The Dictator move fast and get on with it, as when we hear a news announcer intone, “He did not know his mother, who died in childbirth,” while we see two or three seconds of footage of an armed guard smothering Aladeen’s mother with a pillow. (Harsh, but amusing.)

In contrast, when Aladeen’s clueless goat-herder double-swigs urine out of a pitcher and pours it, inadvertently, on Israeli council members … harsh but un-amusing. It’s not filmed correctly. Re-watch Borat sometime to see how fearless satirists get away with murder.

This movie’s more conventional. But it’s worth catching for Cohen’s brief shining Camelot moment at the podium.

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

The Perfect Family is at best a moderately entertaining movie, one that tries to grapple with some big ideas about faith and doctrine, but which seems unwilling to make either its characters or its audience too uncomfortable.

Written by Claire V, Riley and Paula Goldberg and directed by Anne Renton, the film stars Kathleen Turner as Eileen Cleary, a good Catholic and charitable soul who is one of the contenders for her parish’s Woman of the Year award. Eileen would seem to be a shoo-in for the prize, but it is based on more than good works; the process also involves Eileen’s family, and that is where the doctrinal waters get muddy.

Eileen Cleary (Kathleen Turner) and Monsignor Murphy (Richard Chamberlain) in a scene from The Perfect Family. (Oana Marian / Variance Films/The Perfect Family)

Her daughter Shannon (Emily Deschanel) is pregnant and unmarried, but plans to change that latter situation — by marrying her live-in lover Angela (Angelique Cabral). Eileen’s son (Jason Ritter) is married to a woman, but the marriage is crumbling and he is involved with a local manicurist. Eileen has a secret of her own which may hurt her chances — and which is rather too broadly hinted before its revelation.

In that context, Eileen’s husband Frank (Michael McGrady) is something of a paragon. He’s an alcoholic, but one who has been in recovery for years.

The Perfect Family follows Eileen’s pursuit of the parish prize, and how her actions affect the people around her. The film refuses to treat Eileen as a fool; there are reasons for her beliefs and, even if you disagree with some of them, they do not make Eileen a fundamentally bad person. Indeed, while the movie’s antipathy for some Catholic doctrine is clear, it allows for positive people within the church. Still, Eileen is forced to question her beliefs when they run up against her feelings about her family — and what does or does not make it perfect.

Turner is quite good as Eileen, and she is well matched by Deschanel. (At times it does look as if they have the same eyes). The cast, which also includes Richard Chamberlain as the local monsignor and Elizabeth Pena as Angela’s mother, is for the most part capable; Ritter and Sharon Lawrence, as Eileen’s parish rivai, drift some into caricature.

But in spite of some excellent individual scenes, The Perfect Family struggles with a certain cheapness in its look and a script that is too obvious at times, and too easy in its conclusion.

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels. ohio.com. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

The years, gray hairs and wrinkles fade away from Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the cobwebs are brushed off Dark Shadows in director Tim Burton’s campy and dark take on the late 1960s vampire soap opera. The cheesy and cheap but beloved TV program takes an affectionate ribbing in the film, which has more in common with That ’70s Show than its actual source.

But it’s a fun flashback to the days when jilted witch Angelique (former Bond babe Eva Green, in fine fury) cursed the Byron-haired Barnabas Collins (Depp) to eternal damnation as a vampire, his immortality granted “so that my suffering would never end.”

Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows.

The evil Angelique killed his parents, turned the seaport village of Collinsport against Barnabas and had him entombed. And when he is accidentally awakened in 1972, he discovers that was just the beginning of her revenge.

The descendants (Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloe Moretz, Gulliver McGrath) are living in the cluttered ruins of Collinwood, their vast mansion. Angelique now dominates the fishing industry that made the Collins clan’s fortune. Tragedy has visited the family on a regular basis. Little David (McGrath) lost his mother, and requires a live-in shrink (Helena Bonham Carter), who is also a pill-popping drunk. And they’re about to hire a governess (Bella Heathcote) who is the spitting image of Josette, the long-lost love of Barnabas Collins. First, though, she has to answer some questions about the leading controversies of the day. What do you think of the president, the war?

“Do you think the sexes should be equal?”

“Heavens, no. The men would become unmanageable.”

Depp is wonderfully adept at playing this sort of fish out of water. Barnabas spies the miniskirt of his teenage descendant (Moretz) and wonders why a streetwalker lives among them.

He shouts, “Show yourself, Satan,” at his first sight of an automobile’s headlights. And there’s a bit of a language barrier.

“Are you stoned, or something?”

“They tried stoning me. It did not woooooork.”

The daffiness extends to Collinwood, where secret passages are now “where I keep my macrame,” matriarch Elizabeth (Pfeiffer) informs him.

Depp and Green set off real sparks as ex-lovers, with Green vamping up her vintage man-eater role and Depp’s Barnabas harrumphing that he will never fall for “a succubus of Satan.”

Also see: Rich Heldenfels: Let’s shed some light on ‘Dark Shadows’

It’s all done in the name of good, slightly off-color fun. Burton relishes the time-period pop so much that he plays entire songs on the soundtrack, lacing Nights in White Satin under the opening credits, the Carpenters, Barry White (the big sex scene, of course), Black Sabbath and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock under other moments. He brings in Alice Cooper for an extended cameo-concert.

The effects are grand, the settings, shadowy and digitally enhanced for your enjoyment. One bit, having a character turn into an eggshell caricature of herself, is something we’ve never seen before.

But all is not Anne Hathaway-size grins and tasty one-liners in Collinsport. Heathcote (In Time) is woefully out of her depth, faintly mysterious but unable to suggest the passion that Barnabas carried for 200 years in a coffin. Jackie Earle Haley, who takes on the Renfield role in this Dracula parody, is hilarious. But Miller is wasted, given little to play and thus bringing nothing to the party.

At nearly two hours, this two-joke comedy is entirely too long. But Burton neither dishonors the show nor disappoints generations of fans of that series, people inspired to pass their vampire love to their children and now grandchildren.

And if nothing else, he is to be commended for the makeup and effects that strip decades away from his older cast members, including Bonham Carter.

“Every year, I get half as pretty and twice as drunk,” her character, Dr. Julia Hoffman, complains.

In Dark Shadows, Burton has made at least half that line a lie.

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

Movies draw into theaters in different ways. They may offer what look to be spectacular stunts. Or a big star. Or a reworking of an old concept. But regardless of the promise that gets us to buy a ticket, a movie still has to deliver on that promise once we are in our seats.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s implied promise is that its cast reflects the overall quality of the movie. And the cast sets the bar high. It includes Judi Dench, who is both an Oscar winner and a regular in James Bond films. Bill Nighy, the adept character actor whose credits range from the artsy to the blockbuster. (Among other things, he’s Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.) Maggie Smith, who has two Oscars and of late has been part of the public-TV hit Downton Abbey. And Tom Wilkinson, who rivals Nighy in frequency of screen appearances, his including supporting roles in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol and playing Joseph Kennedy Sr. in the miniseries The Kennedys.

Judi Dench as Evelyn, Tom Wilkinson as Graham, and Bill Nighy as Douglas star in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. (Ishika Mohan/FOX Searchlight)

So there is a lot of acting weight brought to Marigold, so much that you would think any script would be improved by it. And there is no doubt that the cast helps Marigold. But it is not enough help to overcome the flaws in the story, which is laced with platitudes, strained in its optimism and at crucial moments more interested in talking about key events than showing them.

Dench, Smith, Nighy and Wilkinson — along with Penelope Wilton, also of Downton Abbey, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup — form a group of British seniors who, for different reasons, go to India to stay in what they think will be a fine residential hotel. They are mistaken. In fact, it is a rundown affair perilously near closing, with its young operator (Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire) hoping that it may yet be restored to its former glory.

The group is also for the most part an unhappy lot. Smith, for one, has an outspoken and unapologetic distaste for Indians. Dench is trying to get over several losses. Wilkinson lived in India when he was younger and is trying to recapture a moment from the past. Nighy and Wilton, long married, have very different points of view about their Indian sojourn. Imrie and Pickup hope that new territory also means new romantic adventures.

And, while all that is going on, Patel is trying ever more desperately to keep the hotel going.

Based on the novel These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach and directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), Marigold wants to be an agreeable and uplifting rite-of-passage film for people who are not likely to be attending The Avengers or Dark Shadows. It has occasionally entertaining moments (some of them spoiled by the movie’s advertising) and a view of India that is neither overly bleak nor excessively glamorous. And it has that cast, full of seemingly effortless performances.

Would that more effort had gone into the writing. More than once, jokes are broadly telegraphed, putting the audience well ahead of the characters. There’s a dramatic moment in Wilkinson’s visit that he describes after the fact; Wilkinson is fine with the monologue, but the audience would have been better served by seeing what he describes. And one of the characters undergoes a personal transformation in the movie that is hardly justified by the way that person is first seen, and what happens over the course of the movie.

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels.ohio.com. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

Marvel’s The Avengers is big, generally satisfying entertainment: a contemporary equivalent of one of those World War II movies where a scrappy, seemingly mismatched bunch becomes a team united in common cause.

It works best when it moves, in the epic battle that is the climax of the movie (with Cleveland standing in for New York City). Director Joss Whedon ably and excitingly juggles multiple situations and characters and makes us care about every one of them.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans) join forces in Marvel's the Avengers. (Zade Rosenthal/Marvel)

Whedon, who also wrote the film, further keeps fans engaged with his expected tossing-in of references not only to the Marvel canon but to other parts of pop culture, such as the film Independence Day. It also seems at times that Whedon is determined to out-Lucas the mighty George in special effects. And the 3-D version (which I saw) is especially well presented, aside from the excessive darkness that commonly afflicts night scenes in 3-D.

The movie is also helped by a new addition to the Marvel cast: Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, also known as the Hulk. Ruffalo brings a woebegone sweetness to his scenes as Banner; he is not the brooding loner of some Hulk interpretations but a lost soul — as, indeed, are the other characters in this band.

For those of you tuning in late, The Avengers — based on the Marvel comic that began in 1963 — brings together a group of Marvel characters: the Hulk, Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), head of the secret agency SHIELD, needs them after a source of enormous power is stolen by Thor’s brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who clearly wants it for more than turning on lights.

Fury has pursued the idea of a team-up before — at the end of 2008’s Iron Man, he approached Stark about an “Avengers initiative” ­— but it did not work. As the movie repeatedly makes clear, especially through Stark’s wisecracks, these heroes do not fit well together: Stark’s modern sensibilities clash with Rogers’ World War II attitudes, for example. Each also carries a personal burden. So a great deal of the movie involves the heroes’ slow movement toward a shared understanding — though not without trouble. One of the best scenes has the heroes arguing among themselves, ever more intensely, at the worst possible moment in a crisis.

But eventually the heroes are going to have to face Loki and the horrible horde he has enlisted in his evil deeds. That is especially good news for the audience.

With so many characters to serve in the two hours and 20 minutes of the movie, Whedon’s script often sacrifices character development, or even character detail. Renner’s Hawkeye is especially sketchy, and Downey’s Stark seems to have regressed emotionally since the end of Iron Man 2.

Dialogue is also a problem. Whedon is good at the jokey sound-bite here, but not so good when trying for grandeur; many early lines clang, and a scene in Stuttgart (also played by Cleveland) is heavy-handed in its message-sending.

But the action is marvelous. Scenes aboard a helicarrier — a flying battleship — are good, and then topped by the pace and excitement of the New York City battle. It doesn’t always make sense (the villains display a marvelous lack of tactics), but I couldn’t keep the grin off my face.

The acting varies considerably. Much as I admire Ruffalo, Downey, Hiddleston, Renner and Johansson, they contend with the more wooden Evans and Hemsworth — and a Jackson performance that too often seems reduced to rigid line readings.

Indeed, where some are making extreme claims for The Avengers as, say, the best superhero movie ever, I don’t want to overpraise it. Superman II, for one, lingers wonderfully in my memory. And, among comic-book movies, this is no match for the tragic beauty of The Dark Knight. (In fact, if The Dark Knight Rises lives up to its trailer, The Avengers may not even be the best comic-book movie of this summer.) But The Avengers is a grand piece of popcorn moviemaking. And I was not at all disappointed by the closing promises of a sequel.

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels. ohio.com. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

By Cory Bennett
Columbia News Service

NEW YORK: Left Behind: The Movie is filled with drama: sudden disappearances, a vitriolic Russian Antichrist bent on global domination, and fireballs raining down during the Apocalypse.

“The future as foretold by the Bible has come to pass,” a grandiose voice proclaims in the trailer. “Seeing is believing.”

Its producer, Cloud Ten Pictures, a Christian film company in Ontario, Canada, called it the most ambitious Christian movie of its time. Between 2000 and 2005, the company poured roughly $12 million into three profitable Left Behind movies, which are based on the best-selling novels of the same name.

Fiery explosions rain down during the Apocalypse in "Left Behind: The Movie." (Movie still courtesy of Cloud Ten Pictures)

But this year, Cloud Ten is quadrupling down on Left Behind. It plans to spend roughly $15 million to remake just the first of the series, nearly four times the budget of each of the original three. Not many movies get a complete reboot at four times the original cost just a few years after being released.

The move by Cloud Ten reflects an appetite for Christian cinema that has grown significantly in the last five years. “We really just wanted to be reaching a wider audience,” said Andre Van Heerden, the company’s chief executive. The first films had a “movie-of-the-week” feel and no big-name stars and focused myopically on religious themes, he said. He believes a sleeker, refocused film could cross over to the mainstream.

Over the last five years, independent Christian movies — films with overt proselytizing — have been among the most profitable independent releases across all genres. Several “faith-based” movies from major studios — films with redemptive messages or Christian characters — have also reaped larger-than-expected profits, causing the big studios to take greater notice of the market.

Todd Juenger, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research of New York City, said that after the major studios reduced their production slates to focus more on big-budget franchise films, the door opened for a variety of smaller budget religious films. “Faith-based films offer the benefit of an identifiable, relatively efficient-to-reach target audience, which provides marketing advantages,” Juenger said.

The boomlet in Christian films dates to 2008. Fireproof, the story of several firefighters struggling with marriage and religion, was that year’s highest grossing independent film, taking in $33.5 million on a $6 million budget. That is tiny compared to a major studio blockbuster but it is still a tidy profit.

Things picked up with last September’s Courageous, a redemption story with inspiration from the Bible about policemen reconnecting with their families. The film brought in $35 million on an $11 million budget. Then in March, October Baby — a heavily pro-life film, which opened on only 390 screens — placed in the top-10 its first weekend, beating out mainstream fare that played in 10 times as many theaters.

October Baby, Courageous and Fireproof featured no stars. In fact, Courageous and Fireproof relied largely on volunteers from the church affiliated with the films’ producer, Sherwood Production Co.

“Religious audiences have felt marginalized by cultural changes,” said Craig Detweiler, director of the Center of Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University. “Rallying around a particular film is a way to vote with their feet and say, give us more.”

The surge has not been missed by major Hollywood studios who have seen mainstream audiences increasingly gravitate to faith-based movies. The Blind Side, a film about a Christian family taking in an impoverished and talented high school football player, was a surprise hit in 2009. It grossed more than $300 million, was nominated for the best picture Oscar and won for best actress (Sandra Bullock).

All six major movie studios have recently started divisions dedicated to acquiring and producing overtly Christian movies, as well as more mainstream faith-based films. Affirm Films, a division of Sony Pictures, was originally founded in 2007 to acquire Christian movies for distribution on DVD. But the success of Fireproof and Courageous, which Affirm acquired, led Sony to expand the division into production.

“There was some trust and desirability to stretch a little bit and see what else we could do,” said Rich Peluso, Affirm vice president.

Last year, Affirm developed Soul Surfer, based on the true story of a teen who returns to competitive surfing after losing an arm in a shark attack. The film starred Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt and teen Anna-?Sophia Robb, who starred in the popular children’s films Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Bridge to Terabithia. It was released on 2,000 screens — more than double the exposure that most independent films get — and grossed nearly $44.5 million on a $37 million budget.

“If we can just get these movies in the theaters and put them in front of people, they will respond because they’re hearing about it and they want it,” Peluso said. “They just can never find it.”

Which is why Van Heerden of Cloud Ten is targeting 2,500 screens and is aiming to land a name director and star actors for the new Left Behind film, slated for 2013. The 16-book series — hugely popular in the Christian community but largely unknown outside it — follows people battling with their faith during the Apocalypse. First, Christians and children ascend during the Rapture, then an Antichrist rises in the form of a United Nations dictator. Van Heerden sees the remake less as a Christian parable and more like a mainstream end-of-the world flick like Armageddon.

But Ted Baehr has seen it all before. He might even be the most well-versed authority on the history of Christian cinema. In 1986, he founded the Christian Film and Television Commission, which encourages media outlets to produce wholesome content, and Movieguide, a publication and now website that reviews movies based on their Christian-friendly content.

“These things always go in waves,” he said. “They’re going to get tired of it eventually.”

By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

There’s an inviolable law of animated films — the more “names” you have in the voice cast, the weaker you know your film is.

The people at Aardman, those meticulous Brits who build clay models and painstakingly animate them into Wallace & Gromit cartoons and the hit Chicken Run, tip their hand that way with The Pirates! Band of Misfits. A pirate picture that’s entirely too late to the party to have much in the line of fresh pirate gags, it is stuffed with name voice actors, from Hugh Grant as the Pirate Captain to Salma Hayek, Brendan Gleeson, Imelda Stanton, Anton Yelchin and Jeremy Piven.

And all of them sat in a recording booth and struggled to find funny things to say or funny ways to say the not-so-funny things in the script. Amusing in small doses, Pirates is the first Aardman film to suffer a serious shortage of sight gags, the first where the whimsy feels forced and the strain shows.

Grant’s Pirate Captain (that’s his name) is all Grant stutter and “glittering eyes and glorious beard.” As a pirate, he’s something of a bust, even though his crew adores him. He figures he’s due for the Pirate of the Year award. But he’s always come up short in the booty and pillaging department. There’s always a Cutlass Liz (Hayek), Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry) or Black Bellamy (Piven) to beat him to the podium.

And so it appears it will be in the 1837 awards, until he captures Charles Darwin (David Tennant), a scientist who craves fame as much as the Pirate Captain. And Darwin recognizes the Captain’s pet “parrot,” Polly, as something altogether more amazing. She’s the last Dodo bird.

Darwin talks the Pirate Captain into sailing to Britain, under the nose of pirate-hating Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton), where Darwin hopes to present the bird to the Royal Society, whose entryway is marked “Playing God since 1807.”

So you’ve got pirates roughly 120 years after their heyday, and a scheming Darwin paired with his evolved chimp pal, a “Man Pan Zee,” he calls him. You’ve got other scientists, hoping to win acclaim with everything from airships to a Rubik’s Cube. You have competing pirates, all swagger and swordplay.

What you don’t have is a lot of laughs. Backing the ship up, we hear the “beep beep beeps” of every modern minivan. There are hints passed from pirate to Darwin about this new idea, evolution, which he never picks up on. The Pirate Captain amusingly attacks all manner of un-lucrative prey — a ghost ship, a school “field trip” ship, a plague ship (changed from a leper ship after leprosy-advocacy groups complained). Most of which amounts to a grin, a chuckle.

Those of us who love Aardman will appreciate the gorgeous attention to detail, made sharper (not much sharper) by 3-D. But Pirates plays like a fussy film made by fussy little fussbudgets, clever chaps all wrapped up with making perfect Plasticine trees, but who lose track of the forest — the funny movie that is supposed to be animated around all this detail. Where’s the invention of Wallace & Gromit, the genre-goofing glee of Chicken Run?

Fans know that the weakest Aardman films (Flushed Away wasn’t a laugh riot either) are still richer and more rewarding than any Shrek, Cars or Ice Age picture.

But as long as these films take to make, as expensive as they are to do, it’s almost tragic when they spend their efforts rounding up big-name misfits, and then give them so little mischief to get into.

By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

The Five-Year Engagement plays like a five-episode, R-rated story arc from How I Met Your Mother. With more profanity and more explicit sex. And considerably less drinking. And no Neil Patrick Harris.

Jason Segel, right, and Emily Blunt are shown in a scene from "The Five-Year Engagement." (AP Photo/Universal Pictures, Glen Wilson)

And all that adds up to is an occasionally engaging romantic dramedy that never blows away that “Where have I seen this before?” feeling.

Emily Blunt and Segel are Violet and Tom, young lovers in San Francisco planning a wedding. Until she gets a fellowship to study and work at the University of Michigan, in that “Water Winter Wonderland” that’s better suited for wolverines than big-city folk.

He gives up his job as sous chef at a trendy restaurant and the wedding, a big wedding, is postponed. He’s resigned to it, and supportive. She’s distracted, even after the pep talk with her ditzy sister (Alison Brie, a stitch).

Much of the comedy here is built around the funk that Tom goes through far away from his dream life in his dream city and his dream job. He gets a little too into hunting, becomes a little too fond of dining on deer and dons Ted Nugent facial hair.

His first faculty cocktail party in Ann Arbor tells him all he needs to know. He mentions he’s a chef, and all anybody can think of to ask is if he saw the Pixar cartoon Ratatouille.

Violet is spending too much time at the office, running psychological experiments with her “bad decisions” specialist mentor (Rhys Ifans, funny enough) and judging Tom by what she’s learning.

And the wedding plans keep tumbling backwards.

Segel, so wonderfully lost in Jeff, Who Lives at Home, suffers a serious case of Zach Braff-itis here. He’s content to warm over what he does on TV, spend more money on the soundtrack and hire HRHotness, Ms. Blunt, to compensate.

As with every Judd Apatow production, there’s nothing here that wouldn’t have been better at a shorter length and quicker pace. At two hours, the drawn-out gags, scenes that leisurely run far past their punch line or payoff, and the overdose of supporting players burden the film.

Chris Pratt is Tom’s chef pal, straining for laughs. Animal Kingdom Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver is a hoot as the bride-to-be’s mom, but fellow psychology department researcher Kevin Hart is MUCH funnier in Think Like a Man. Mindy Kaling lands a few laughs; Chris Parnell, fewer than her.

But any chef knows that the more you add to the soup, the more watered down you make it. Whatever spicy moments it manages, The Five-Year Engagement is still just broth — weak broth — in the end.

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

There are movies meant to be seen on a big screen. Casablanca is one of them. In the past, now and as long as theaters show movies.

Its 70th birthday is in November, and the anniversary has been marked by a new release on Blu-ray, theatrical showings in March and another round of big-screen presentations on Thursday, including at the Regal Montrose.

Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman with Humphrey Bogart in a scene from the classic 1943 film "Casablanca." (AP photo)

You should go to a theater even though this movie has long been repeated on TV and has been available for decades on just about every home-video format, including the now-abandoned HD DVD and Laserdisc.

And why should you go? Because it’s Casablanca.

Yes, to some it is merely a piece of ancient movie history. The story takes place before America entered World War II. And it premiered as war raged — first in New York City in late 1942, and in Akron’s Warner Bros. Strand Theater in February 1943.

While that theater is long gone, the movie endures. The American Film Institute’s periodic lists of great films have placed Casablanca in the top five for all movies, movie heroes (Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart), songs (As Time Goes By) and movie quotes: “Here’s looking at you, kid,” in fifth place, but with five more Casablanca quotes in the top 100. Its romantic tale put it in first place on AFI’s list of great love stories.

Lines from it have inspired the titles of two other movies: Play It Again, Sam (which is not actually said in Casablanca) and Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects. It was also the basis for a Bugs Bunny cartoon and two television series: one in the ’50s starred Charles McGraw, who grew up in Akron and had been an usher at the Strand; a second series, in 1983, put David Soul in Bogart’s shoes.

And all this came from a movie that could have been a shambles. It was based on what a critic called “one of the world’s worst plays.” The co-author of said play told writer Doug McClelland that she did not like either of the leads; instead of Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, she wanted Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. The screenplay was only half done when production began. The racism of its time — now close to 70 years ago — is discomfiting, with the middle-aged African-American Dooley Wilson called “the boy” by Bergman. (Wilson was even more poorly served by contemporary film critic James Agee, whose naming of cast members ended with “a colored pianist whose name I forget.”)

But it’s Casablanca.

Twenty-first century audiences also have to contend with the staginess of some of the sets, the old standard-frame picture instead of the now-common widescreen format, and the black-and-white image. The latter should not bother film buffs, especially after the black-and-white, silent The Artist swept up an armload of awards at the latest Oscars. But The Artist’s acclaim was not matched by box-office success; among the nine nominees for the Oscar for best picture, The Artist ranked seventh in revenues.

Nostalgia for young people is something applied to entertainment from a decade ago, not a movie that would have been fresh for their grandparents.

But it’s Casablanca!

Consider the richness and complexity of the story — which many of you know, and I’ll try not to spoil for the rest. There is a saga of war, and how people must stand up in troubled times — with Rick the one most obviously put on the spot. Laid over that is a romantic triangle involving Rick, the freedom fighter Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) and Ilsa Lund (Bergman), who is both Lazlo’s companion and Rick’s former lover.

Love and politics are entwined. Idealism and cynicism are tested. The cast has great character actors like Claude Rains, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. The music includes not only Max Steiner’s score, and Wilson’s singing As Time Goes By, but a scene with the French national anthem that should still make audiences cheer.

So, if you have not seen it, do so. If you have, see it again. And not just on a DVD or Blu-ray — or on your tablet or, heaven forbid, on your phone.

This is a movie made before anyone had to imagine that the pictures would get small. When it was understood that you would be sitting in the dark, the quiet broken only by the occasional chomp on popcorn — or the crowd responding to the screen’s events together. The first time I remember seeing Casablanca was on a college campus, on a large screen. I have seen it many times since, but it’s that first time that stays in my memory — Bogart, and Bergman, and the movie itself, bigger than life.

“Casablanca” will be shown at 7 p.m. Thursday. For a list of theaters and to buy tickets, see www.fathomevents.com/casablanca.?Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels.ohio.com. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal pop culture writer

Two men sit next to each other at an academic honors ceremony. As the announcers list the accomplishments of the honoree, one looks blandly ahead while the other slips deeper into a scowl, his head bowing. The rivalry is clear, the winner too obvious.

But what we learn soon enough is that these two men are also father and son — Talmudic scholars Uriel Shkolnik (played by Lior Ashkenazi) and his father, Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba). And it is the son who is being honored, whose reputation has eclipsed his father’s. And however much Uriel pays public and private tribute to Eliezer, the professional gap between them seems unbearably wide.

Shlomo Bar Aba as Eliezer Shkolnik in a scene from Footnote. (Ren Mendelson/Sony Pictures Classics)

This is where the drama (and comedy) lie in Footnote, the Israeli film written and directed by Joseph Cedar — and Oscar-nominated for the best foreign-language film (although Iran’s A Separation won the award), The characters are well drawn, and the story takes both expected and unexpected turns. And both main actors are quite good, especially in their silences. Eliezer’s are a defense mechanism of sorts, as if he knows what will pour forth if he ever unleashes his rage into words, and Bar Aba is a master of the nuanced frown. Uriel, meanwhile, is so accustomed to persuading and charming with his words, that his silence and Ashkenazi’s long, sad face are a declaration of defeat.

For most of the movie, though, it is Eliezer who has tasted defeat. He spent decades of research on a seemingly revolutionary idea in scholarship — only to see someone else publish first. He is virtually unknown outside a small circle of scholars, and has enemies within that circle, not least because of his well-known contempt for some of what his colleagues do. For all his hard work, Eliezer’s greatest triumph has been a renowned scholar acknowledging him — in a footnote.

Uriel, in contrast, is a public figure whose writing has been embraced by a wide audience, and who has come to expect praise for himself and his work — although he never seems to have his father’s respect.

It appears that, at last, Eliezer can get past his bitterness when he receives word that he is receiving the Israel Prize, a top award for scholarship, and one for which he has long been passed over.

After being told, he offers a smile that seems like a crack in a long, long winter’s ice. And it may finally put him on better footing with Uriel.

But Footnote has a long way to go after Eliezer’s news, and on that way are still more looks at the relationship between father and son, and the way academic rivals often think about each other.

The film, in Hebrew with English subtitles, may seem a bit talky in places. But the talk is often illuminating, since the people at the center of this movie are all students of language. Indeed, the movie pivots repeatedly on the choice of words, and what the characters believe has been said.

At the same time, Cedar gives the audience a little shake here and there — for example, pausing the story to present a list of key facts about Uriel and Eliezer — to keep attention from wandering. But Cedar’s best achievement here is in showing how character is tested in all sorts of ways, in situations where the course seems obvious and ones where there appears to be no way out.

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels. ohio.com. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Disney’s 2012 movie offering for Earth Day is a gorgeous and technically dazzling look inside the world of chimpanzees — their use of tools, their nurturing instincts, their means of organization during fights and hunts for smaller monkeys, whom they sometimes eat.

But Chimpanzee is also a throwback, a documentary that follows a baby chimp named Oscar as he struggles to learn the ways of his tribe and to survive in the dense rain forests of Africa’s Ivory Coast. It’s moving and entertaining as well as informative.

And as Tim Allen narrates and the chimps themselves provide moments of low comedy and high pathos, you might be reminded of the studio’s popular True Life Adventures nature docs of the last century — films which humanized, sometimes to the point of cloying, their wild and untamed subjects.

In a vast, fog-enshrouded jungle, we meet baby Oscar, his mom, Isha, and the chimp in charge of this tribe — Freddy, an alpha male tasked with keeping order and keeping other chimp packs from invading their turf, eating their figs and taking over the grove of nut trees that keeps Oscar’s extended family fed, even in the jungle’s lean months. They’ve learned to use rocks and sticks to open the nuts. But despite this advantage, the vast “army” of chimps led by one-eyed Scar (of course) threatens to chase them to the hinterlands, where the food promises to be more scarce.

If you see allegories in human behavior among our primate cousins — battles over resources, clannishness — take that as purely intentional, too

Allen’s narration makes this kid-friendly film even more so, though the script does tend toward underscoring that which is made obvious by the images on the screen. “Yum yum” at meal time, and the like. And since these chimpanzees use tools, you know “Tool Time” Allen will join them in a healthy grunt or two.

But that doesn’t spoil what is a lovely film, all extreme close-ups of chimps grooming, eating (with their mouths open), working out which rocks or sticks are good for cracking nuts and which aren’t. Watching the chimps hunt tiny monkeys (nothing remotely graphic is shown) for food is a lesson in role-playing, teamwork and elementary tactics. We see them build their intricate “sleeping platforms” at night, wash their food and pass down knowledge from parents to children. The detail presented here is amazing.

Nature itself makes a glorious set as we’re treated to stunning shots of fluorescent mushrooms and dazzling little-known waterfalls.

After the omnibus documentary Earth and the broader African Cats (by the same filmmakers), Disney may have hit on just the right mix of information and entertainment with Chimpanzee, the best Disneynature film yet.

By Manohla Dargis
New York Times

Like the classic runaway bride, the skittish lead character in Nanni Moretti’s emotionally generous and moving tragicomedy We Have a Pope wears a sumptuous gown, has the aspect or at least symbolic air of the unsullied and suffers from severe commitment issues.

Soon after the film opens, Moretti’s runaway, Melville (Michel Piccoli), a French cleric elected pope, dons ceremonial white, sits in the Vatican forcing smiles and rapidly sags under the weight of the billion souls he’s charged with leading. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown and so too the miter. What haunts Moretti’s character is whether he can embrace his role as pontiff.

Michel Piccoli in a scene from We Have a Pope. (Philippe Antonello/Sundance Selects)

We Have a Pope is the story of a specific crisis of conscience with larger reverberations, if not necessarily those you might expect from Moretti. (The film’s English title suggests auctions and game shows, while the Latin original, Habemus Papam, comes wreathed in incense-perfumed mystery.)

An Italian leftist best known for films such as Caro Diario and The Son’s Room, he has said that he isn’t a director but one who makes movies “when he has something to say.” At times what he has to say is overtly political, as in Aprile, when he implores, comically, desperately, a tongue-tied opponent of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is monopolizing a TV show, to “say something, answer, say something left wing, say something even not left wing, something civilized.”

Politics initially appears to have gone on hiatus in We Have a Pope, which opens with unidentified news images from the funeral of Pope John Paul II. The ceremony and the sight of thousands of bodies pressing into St. Peter’s Square instantly shifts the movie into a serious register that continues when Moretti cuts to lines of chanting old men in red, presumably the College of Cardinals, entering what looks like the Vatican. It’s all very exotic and solemn, or would be if the cardinals didn’t then pass a scrum of reporters who, separated from the clerics by ropes and stanchions, look as if they were covering the red carpet at the Oscars.

“Cardinal,” demands one TV journalist, thrusting a microphone at the clerics, “could we have a statement?”

None of the cardinals dignify the question with a response, but with this scene Moretti, with characteristic efficiency, makes his own quiet statement about the connections among religion, spectacle and the media. These associations have already been implied in the opening funeral images, but Moretti’s touch is so light here that it feels as if he’s making an offhand observation about the church instead of building an argument. (He’s doing both.) And so it goes as the cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel (by way of Cinecitta Studios) and, after a few ballot rounds, select Melville. As the faithful wait for him publicly to acknowledge his new role, an openly uneasy, increasingly unsure Melville hesitates and then abruptly runs off, seemingly leaving his flock hanging.

Except that Melville, wearing civilian clothing and still an unknown to the outside world, doesn’t abandon the faithful but walks among their numbers, at first with some confusion and then with mounting confidence and openness.

In Rome stores and on buses he discovers people — notably, some of his first encounters are with gently ministering women — whose humanity helps awaken something human in him. Piccoli, a giant of European cinema, brings dignity to the role and an innocence that’s less childlike than unworldly. As he awkwardly navigates through Rome’s streets and stumbles into the chaos of its traffic, his body lurching and stumbling and sometimes almost toppling over, Melville seems as confused as a stranger or perhaps just a man newly awakened from a dream.

Moretti doesn’t turn that dream into his own dogma, and in truth there’s something so unforced about We Have a Pope that its assertion of papal humility and humanity rather than infallibility might be easy to miss. But it’s there, tucked in a story about a pope who describes himself with bittersweet self-knowing as an actor and meets a troupe rehearsing Chekhov’s Seagull. The Chekhov underscores Melville’s disappointment in his life and also works as a melancholic counterpoint to the volleyball matches at the Vatican arranged by a psychiatrist (Moretti) who’s been hired to guide the pope through his crisis. Moretti finds broad comedy in the antics of some clerics, who can seem as sweet as children, but in Melville there is pathos and there is tragedy, and not his alone.

By Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune

Gamers will be slain, over and over, by the insanely violent multilevel bash The Raid: Redemption, in which a skeezy 15-story tenement complex serves as the setting for a series of stabbings, slicings and a showcase for the Indonesian martial art known as Pencak Silat.

Pencak Silat to the untrained eye combines the punches, kicks, jabs and krrrrrunches of karate, judo and aggressive Black Friday shopping. Early in the film, Welsh-born writer-director Gareth Huw Evans has a character describe a drug lord henchman whose acquaintance we’re about to make as “a maniac of feet and fists.”

The whole film is. The Raid is maniacal in its pacing and assault tactics. It’s also, absurdly, rated R. Fantastic. I love that a film this gory secured the same Motion Picture Association of America rating as The King’s Speech.

It’s that “kinetic” part that makes Evans’ follow-up to the action film Merantau impressive, at least when Evans has the sense to hold his shots. Somewhere in the slums of Jakarta, an underworld boss, Tama (Ray Sahetaphy), is to be extracted, against his will, by a SWAT team that includes the rookie Rama, played by Iko Uwais. Evans and Uwais previously teamed on Merantau; he was driving a truck when Evans discovered him.

Mr. Big has wired his building for heavy surveillance, so he learns in a flash how many cops he’s up against. The Raid pits Rama and company against Tama’s cadre of killers, level by level. We care about Rama, in theory, because he has a pregnant wife and, it turns out, a long-lost brother who has ended up in the mobster’s lair.

The shots don’t merely ape the Resident Evil gaming aesthetic; they replicate it. Rama runs down one hallway, slaughter ensues, he pivots, runs the opposite direction, more anonymous psychopaths pop into view, and there’s blood all over the walls in no time.

Many adore the film. I felt ground down by it after a while. But then, near the end, the fight choreography grows more impressively complicated, and the camera takes in more of it as the shots stretch out in length.

With a physical performer as formidable as Uwais, why not show what he can do, ungoosed by the editor? Even if the editor happens to be the writer-director?