Fresh off her second consecutive Academy Award nomination for Zerk Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain is attached to play the title role in The Zookeeper’s Wife, which, surprisingly, is an adaptation of a 2007 Diane Ackerman book, and not a spinoff of We Bought a Zoo. Do you remember that movie? I only saw the first half, but frickin’ Matt Damon couldn’t do anything right.

Niki Caro (Whale Rider, North Country) has come aboard to direct the World War II story, which Panorama is financing and producing.
Wife is the true account of keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, who helped save hundreds during the Nazi invasion.
When the Nazi army overran Warsaw, destroying the city and its zoo, Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. The Zabinskis also took about a dozen Jews into their home.
While danger was always present, and her husband was part of the Polish resistance, Antonina Zabinski kept a mix of humans and surviving animals (lynxes and hyena pups, among them) humming in a one-of-a-kind community that included socializing and even the occasional piano concert. [THR]

No word on whether Kevin James will reprise his role as The Zookeeper. Either way, I feel like they missed a golden opportunity to call it “Jew Zoo.” Or perhaps “A Zoo for Jews.” What? I like the rhyme.

I just hope this is more Oscar-caliber material for Chastain, whose lines will hopefully include “Who am I? I’m the motherf*cker who raised the hyenas.”

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After his incendiary interviews with Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Lawrence, Anne Hathaway, and Amy Adams yesterday, Zach Galifianakis is back between two ferns with Jessica Chastain, Sally Field, and Brad Cooper. I won’t ruin any of the lines in this edition for you this time, but suffice to say, they’re pretty good. By the way, I refuse to call Brad Cooper “Bradley.” You’re already ridiculously rich and charming and handsome, you don’t get to act like your name’s not Brad by lengthening it. Your name is Brad, Brad. It’s not my job to enforce your artistic affectations.

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Oh hey there, Jessica Chastain’s boobs

The Guillermo Del Toro-produced Mama debuted at number one over the weekend, once again proving that modestly-budget horror movies are the closest thing to selling legalized crack. It also benefited from the lead actress’s Oscar nomination coinciding with its release. I didn’t see it, but I’ve been sneaking up behind all my friends and whispering “…mama.” all weekend. Meanwhile, Broken City, Allen Hughes’ first solo-directed film without his brother, Albert, with whom he directed Menace II Society, Dead Presidents, and Book of Eli, landed down at number five, with a fairly uninspired nine million. Let’s face it, you dump a movie starring Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe into a mid-January release, it’s a pretty good indication that that movie is a fartbomb.

Estimated domestic box office totals for Friday to Sunday.

1. Mama (Universal/Entertainment One) NEW – Cinemascore: B-; Metacritic score: 58

$28,100,000 in 2,647 theaters; PSA (per screen average): $12,530; Cumulative: $28,100,000

2. Zero Dark Thirty (Sony) Week 5; Last weekend: #1

$17,600,000 (-28%) in 2,946 theaters (+9); PSA: $5,974; Cumulative: $55,945,000

3. Silver Linings Playbook (Weinstein) Week 10 ; Last weekend: #10

$11,351,000 (+126%) in 2,523 theaters (+1,713); PSA: $4,499; Cumulative: $55,310,000

4. Gangster Squad (Warner Brothers) Week 2; Last weekend: #3

$9,100,000 (-47%) in 3,103 theaters (unchanged); PSA: $2,936; Cumulative: $32,220,000

5. Broken City (20th Century-Fox) NEW – Cinemascore: B; Metacritic score: 49

$9,000,000 in 2,620 theaters; PSA: $3,435; Cumulative: $9,000,000

But perhaps the biggest story of the weekend is that The Last Stand, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to the movies after a nine-year hiatus spent banging maids and governing states, which had all the country’s most obvious-minded critics shouting “Arnold Schwarzenegger is back!”, debuted all the way at number 10, with an estimated $6.6 million.With its $45 million production budget, Indiewire estimates that Lionsgate could be looking at a $50 million loss, unless it makes it up internationally. Though that doesn’t factor in The Last Stand‘s Corvette sponsorship money. But not only did hardly anyone see it, the ones that did gave it a fairly lukewarm B cinemascore. Which is odd, because the Rex Ryan-esque man sitting next to me at my screening kept yelling “HA!” so loud at every joke I thought he was going to shake loose a molar. I didn’t like it that much, but… I don’t know, it seemed like a crowd-pleaser. It does seem weird to have so many hyper-violent, R-rated movies that otherwise seem to be aimed at 10-year-olds.

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It’s impossible to review Zero Dark Thirty without having to infiltrate a room full of political lasers like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (much nicer metaphor than a mine field, isn’t it?). But you invite that when your movie screams “THIS IS TRUE” at the beginning, like Zero Dark Thirty does in its opening “real events” title card. You can’t just forgive everything in the guise of “but it’s a movie!” when the movie is so clearly telling you that it’s fact. Thus, whether Zero Dark Thirty correctly depicts torture isn’t nitpicking, it’s relevant. So is it “pro-torture,” as John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and others have alleged? Mark Bowden, who wrote a book about the search for Bin Laden, says it’s not. Alex Gibney, who directed a movie about torture, doesn’t quite say Zero Dark Thirty is pro torture, but says it’s irresponsible.

To make a long story short and an answer predictable, they’re both right. Zero Dark Thirty is not immoral because it depicts torture as it was (something that happened, a context, a small part of the story but not a major player) without taking a particular stance. But it is a little amoral that it doesn’t seem to take any stance. It even omits key events to keep from having to. From an artistic standpoint, it doesn’t seem particularly concerned with humans. It feels like an attempt to create suspense with no soul. Bowden’s rule of thumb for dramatizing a true story responsibly is that you can invent, but you have to “color inside the lines” of the truth. That is, you create fictions within the unknowns without altering the shape of the facts. Zero Dark Thirty mostly does that, but it also omits big chunks of them (we’ll get to that). Artistically, another problem is, who is Jessica Chastain’s character? I watched the whole movie and I still know nothing about her. Zero Dark Thirty invents a character with no apparent personality to tell a story the broad strokes of which we already know. How does that help? It even makes the movie dull at times, like a dry and talky procedural. The lady next to me was snoring loudly.

The Hurt Locker, for all the massive liberties it takes with actual military tactics, had a compelling protagonist and a clear perspective. “War is a drug.” What’s Zero Dark Thirty‘s perspective? Redheads are smart? Incorrectly or not, people jumped to “torture is good” because there’s a vacuum of anything else.

Gibney says ZDT is wrong because it doesn’t use its opportunity to argue against torture:

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Courtesy of Columbia Pictures, it’s the first trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, starring Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, and Mark Strong, and re-teaming the Hurt Locker’s writer-director team, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow (the latter of whom also directed Point Break – NEVER FORGET). The hunt-for-Bin-Laden subject matter is already pretty fresh in our minds, and the trailer doesn’t show much beyond b-roll and graphics, so it’s hard to know quite what we’re looking at just yet. But hopefully it adheres closely to the facts of the case, because that’s going to be the most gloriously anti-climactic villain death since Pan’s Labyrinth.

“We tracked the fugitive for more than 10 years! He was the most wanted man in the world! We weren’t even sure he was still alive until we caught a break – his driver! We followed him for months until he led us right to him!”

“WOW! And then what happened?? Did you have to foil a high-tech security system? Drill through the vault from underneath? Rappel from the ceiling by wires to avoid setting off the motion censors?”

“Nah, we just kicked down the front door and shot him in the face while he was sitting on the couch. Then we left.”

“Oh. ”

Cue right-wing pundits claiming this was carefully orchestrated by the liberal Hollywood conspiracy to coincide with the election in 5… 4… 3… 2…