Week One in a new and unfamiliar post-Charlton Heston universe.

Spring is as slow to come to the national box-office as it is to New England: The weekend take was down 9% from last week and 25% off this time last year.

The top movie was "21" with $15 million its second weekend, beating out newcomers "Leatherheads" ($15.5 million), "Nim's Island" ($13.3 million), and "The Ruins" ($7.8 million). Please note that a football movie starring George Clooney almost got its clock cleaned by a kiddie film featuring a character named Nim.

"Shine a Light," the Rolling Stones concert movie directed by Martin Scorsese, managed a soft $1.5 million at 276 theaters; if I can dig up the IMAX subtotal anywhere I'll post it. The most striking limited-release returns were from a pair of Chinese filmmakers: Wong Kar-wai's first English-language film "My Blueberry Nights" (starring Jude Law and Norah Jones, above) averaged $12,000 per screen in six theaters and Hou Hsiao-hsien's "The Flight of the Red Balloon" made $18,600 per screen in two theaters. Boston gets both films April 18th.

More box office musings from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone to the cinema to watch a stereotypical rom-com, but there was something about the trailer for 27 Dresses that appealed to me. Perhaps it was the two attractive male stars in it, James Marsden and Edward Burns. Maybe it was the fact that a couple of the jokes had actually made me laugh. Generally, romance films that label themselves comedies fail to contain anything remotely amusing. Fortunately 27 Dresses was not one such film and did actually have some funny moments, which was quite refreshing and shows that this genre doesn’t always fail to be amusing. (more…)

After a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, the great movie star Charlton Heston has died. He was never the best actor (although his Oscar for 1959's "Ben Hur" says otherwise) but he was something the movies hadn't seen before: a flamboyantly macho man with an amazing flair for the melodramatic. If Bette Davis had been born a strapping outdoorsman from Michigan, she would have been Heston. It didn't matter whether he was playing Moses, John the Baptist, Michelangelo, El Cid or the last man on Earth, he was always Chuck - this sexy, intimidating American with a surprise righteous streak.

Gregory Peck and Spencer Tracy had their crusader moments, but Heston was the movie's freedom fighter. He and Sidney Poitier were two of the great moral stars - the force of their conviction could be shaming. Heston, too, was a Civil Rights man, having called Martin Luther King a "20th century Moses" and walking with the reverend in 1963's march on Washington. His admiration for King was evident in his acting. At both his best and his most shameless, he was a preacher, railing against this injustice or that. What made him such a surprise to watch, especially when he was sermonizing - and the screenwriters never seemed to run out of things for him to sermonize about - what made him an entertainer was the bang he gave the preaching. Heston succeeded at playing these courageous, imposing, appalled, beleaguered, almost classically handsome men (too much forehead, too many teeth) by overplaying them. This manly man's secret weapon was his histrionics -- it was camp. Even at his most ridiculous, Heston was hard to resist.

His lugubrious outrage distinguished him from the Gregory Pecks, John Waynes, Glenn Fords, and later the Clint Eastwoods and Arnold Schwarzeneggers. Heston needed to raise his voice. And, oh, the things would that come out of his mouth. He was the most reliably quotable movie star - every line finished with a exclamation point. He even became the face of the NRA like it was another of his Hollywood parts.

"Repent!!" -- "The Greatest Story Ever Told," 1965

"You did it! You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!" -- "Planet of the Apes," 1968

"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them.
You've gotta tell them!" -- "Soylent Green," 1973

"Climb baby, climb!" -- "Airport 1975," 1975

One of Heston's favorite of his own performances was the ranch hand he played in "Will Penny" (1968), a so-so Western that let him do a little romance and little comedy and enter John Wayne territory. But he'd already out-Wayned Wayne -- with a kind of subtlety, too -- three years earlier with the title part in "Major Dundee," Sam Peckinpah's very good revisionist calvary western, whose production Heston gallantly fought to keep alive. He also used his cachet to get Orson Welles hired to make "Touch of Evil," where Heston gave my favorite of his performances. He played a Mexican narcotics detective looking for his girlfriend, Janet Leigh. The part should have been a joke, but Heston played it straight. This was a slim, tight deliberate piece of acting. Welles gave him a style to keep, and Heston played within its bounds. Not even that mustache could upstage him. He was sexy here. He was under control, even as the world appeared to be spinning in the opposite direction.

As the Hollywood production paradigm shifted from biblical-historical epics to post-biblical ahistorical disaster pictures, there he was as peeved as ever. By the 1970s, the world he was trying to preserve, better, or overcome in the 1950s and 1960s had collapsed on itself. The people he was trying to save or set free were gone. At the end of the end of everything, it was alway just Chuck. And somehow that seemed fine.

For the kids: "Nim's Island."

If you want a good, healing art-house cry: "Under the Same Moon"

If you want a shake-your-bootiethang classic rock experience, courtesy of Mr. Martin Scorsese: "Shine a Light" (And if you really want your dentures rattling, see it on an IMAX screen).

If you have to see every movie George Clooney or Renee Zellweger make, no matter how tame: "Leatherheads"

If you want to waste time in seriously demented ways with a roomful of strangers: The "R. Kelly 'Trapped in the Closet' Sing-along" at the Coolidge tonight at midnight.

If you're so charged up by that that you just have to keep going: The Brattle's unmissable "Schlock Around the Clock" program on Saturday. ("Poor White Trash" alert!)

If you're serious about European cinema: Two films by German director Robert Thalheim -- and Thalheim himself -- at the Harvard Film Archive. Also, the last few days of the Turkish Film Festival at the MFA.

Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Scripts, George Clooney

No sooner do I write an adulatory post about George Clooney than I come upon this story about the trouble he's been having with the Writers' Guild of America over credit for the Leatherheads screenplay. He's so upset at the way he's been treated that he's gone "financial core" at the Guild, which is an irreversible decision making him a limited, non-voting, dues-paying member. He says he would have quit altogether, but that would have basically prevented him from working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

According to Clooney, the original Leatherheads script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly had been bouncing around for almost two decades before he took it, rewrote it as a screwball comedy, and got the project greenlit. He believes that he wrote all but two scenes of the resulting film. But when the credit squabble went to arbitration before the WGA last fall, the guild determined that Clooney didn't deserve screen credit for his work. That was the end of the line for him (he declined to appeal), though he kept the matter quiet at the time because of the ongoing writers strike.

Continue reading George Clooney and WGA Have a Falling Out

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