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Archive for the ‘Movie News’ Category
Monday, June 25th, 2007
"Evan Almighty" made $32.1 million over the weekend, which is $32.1 million more than you have. Still, as Box Office Mojo points out this morning, the film cost twice as much to make as the original "Bruce Almighty" and made half as much its opening weekend. That's not the kind of math Hollywood likes.
What "went wrong"? Beautiful weather on the East Coast and elsewhere kept a lot of people outside, but that's only part of it. I think people realized a broad family-friendly comedy is not the kind of movie they want to see Steve Carell in. Eddie Murphy, maybe. Tim Allen, if you must. But why hire Carell and refuse to let him bare his teeth?
Meanwhile, the John Cusack/Stephen King room-service freakshow "1408" (in photo above) had a smaller opening-weekend -- $20.1 million -- and a less impressive per-theater-average ($7,533 vs $8,910 for "Evan"), but it cost $25 million to make versus "Evan"'s $175 million, so guess who'll be in the black by next week?
"A Mighty Heart" opened in fewer theaters (1,355) and performed wanly ($4 million), which makes depressing sense: It's an important (if not wholly successful) film about real-world events that audiences should be paying attention to. Why would anyone want to watch that when you can see Steve Carell in a fake beard?
Michael Moore's "Sicko" played in one Manhattan theater -- and made 70 grand. That may be the highest per-theater-average on record. Reports of scalped tickets and patrons turned away, etc. Moore plans to project the film on the sides of major HMO headquarters today. You'll have to wait until Friday to see it in a proper Boston theater, but it'll be worth it. Bring your doctor.
The weekend charts are here and here.
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007
As I recently wrote, the PC version of social causality (with respect to Aborigines) is that the ‘legacy of oppression’ by white colonialists has caused the race’s complete social dysfunctionality in 2007. Take the infant mortality problem. The issue is not the lack of available medical resources but the lack of rationality and logic in […]
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007
Last week, the American Film Institute celebrated ‘100 years… 100 films’ with a new list of their top 100 movies of all time. To coincide with this, they contacted us to ask us to write about our favourite film as part of a pulse of the online community. Just one? Screw that, we said. We can do better. So we sat down to compile our list of ‘1000 films… 1000 years.’ This proved difficult, both because 1,000 films is a lot and not much happened in cinema for 900 of those years. So realising that we don’t have the same resources as the AFI, we have created our list of ‘50 films… 50 years’. So here it is. How it works is that we split the 50 years evenly between five of us and have compiled a personal top 10 list in each of the given time periods. And it wasn’t easy. Tears were shed and hair was torn as we were forced to narrow down our extensive lists to the final 50. The results are… quite interesting. Stay tuned as we’ll be revealing a top 10 each day until we’ve made it all the way up to 2007.
1957-1966
Ian Carey
10. Spartacus (1960)
Supposedly Stanley Kubrick was bitch slapped so hard by the Studio in the making of Spartacus that he had little or no creative input into the project. All the same he managed to put together a compelling film that will stand as one of the greatest epic movies ever made. Spartacus is eye candy. And it did give us the infamous ‘spartacus ending’ (or maybe the story gave us that, who cares). I’m still holding out for the Harry Potter films to end Spartacus style. ‘I’m Harry Potter… No, I’m Harry Potter…’
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007
Lawrence Auster breaks it down to the essentials:
(A) Bush democratizes Iraq, which (B) liberates true Islam, which (C) results in systematic Muslim attacks on Christians (who had been protected from Islam under Saddam Hussein), which (D) forces Christians by the thousands to flee Iraq. Bush never acknowledges D, let alone the connection between A […]
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007
Filed under: Classics, Critical Thought & Trends, Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom, Home Entertainment, Out of the Past .jpg) I've only read two memorable movie star biographies in the last year or so. One of them was Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing, by Lee Server. I highly recommend this book to anyone -- it's one of the rawest and most insightful bios of a movie star from the old-timey days that I've ever read in my life. The writing, research and overall focus is exceptional from start to finish. The other memorable bio I read was Nicole Kidman, by David Thompson. This was a book so eye-popping that I actually wrote up a full review of it for Cinematical, which you should read. It's not extraordinary for uncovering new information or for being a notably detailed biography of the actress -- no, it's extraordinary because the author, a known film critic, is in love with Kidman and writes the book from the point of view of the lovelorn. He actually gives the reader page after page of his Nicole Kidman fantasies, including one in which she's a high-class prostitute and he visits her brothel -- I kid you not.
I doubt that Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, a forthcoming 500-page biography, will be as entertaining as either of those books, but it is expected to be a definitive portrait. The writer, Ed Sikov, has previously written biographies of Billy Wilder and Peter Sellers, as well as a book about screen comedy in the 1950s. I'll probably check out the book because of the buzz surrounding it, but I've never been a huge fan of Bette Davis. I don't feel she was terribly astute in her choices, and benefitted a lot more from luck in her career than from any kind of major, unstoppable talent. Anyway, Bette Davis fans should mark October 30 on their calendar -- that's when the book will be hitting shelves. Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
From an interview with Mahmoud Zahar, one of the founders of Hamas (link via LGF):
“There are naturally very many weapons around now. Two years ago, one bullet in Gaza cost around €3.50 — now it would cost 35 cents. The American aid money has been translated into weapons. Thank you, America!â€
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is a very radical Islamist. One domestic political ‘enemy’ of his is former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who is a run of the mill radical Islamist. Here is the sort of domestic political scandals that characterizes Iran today (“Crackdown on Dissent Is Under Way in Iranâ€).
Equally noteworthy is how little has […]
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
 When I read this movie’s plot outline I couldn’t help but notice similarities to Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Shichinin no samurai. Seven swordsmen rush to the aid of a village under attack… sound familiar. Hark Tsui, the director of Seven Swords, as this movie is called internationally, has said in interviews that although he admires Kurosawa, any resemblance is purely coincidental. Yeah right.
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
This week we have some misc pop-psych on the Jukebox. Idle Race was Jeff Lynne’s group before ELO. The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, which included Michael Kamen, were classically trained musicians who decided to work in a pop-rock mode. The Marmalade were a very underrated pop-psych group.
Idle Race – On With The Show […]
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
 After seeing the very mediocre martial arts drama Wu Ji a few days ago I thought it was time to give Chinese cinema a chance to redeem itself. This movie, called Curse of the Golden Flower internationally, had been on my list of things to see for a while, and I was not disappointed. But Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia is definitely not for everyone.
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