MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Klady By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

The Weekend Report: March 27, 2011

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules! not only beats Sucker Punch, but moves over 25% ahead for the weekend. Strong holds for indies from Relativity and Lionsgate also lead the box office news, along with Rango and Just Go With It each passing $100m domestic. At the art house, Miral and Potiche are the weekend leaders.

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The Weekend Report: March 20, 2011

The erosion of the under 25 crowd continued this week with only Paul registering a 50/50 split for that line in the sand according to exit polling. Limitless was 56% attended by plus 25s and The Lincoln Lawyer had a staggering 85% older audience – 49% of which was 40 years old or greater.

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The Weekend Report: January 30, 2011

The debut of the ExoRcIsT-lite The Rite possessed the top of the weekend box office charts with an estimated $14.7 million. In another soft film going frame the other national opener The Mechanic ranked fifth with an $11.1 million bow.

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Weekend Report: January 23, 2011

Zonk Went the Strings of My Heart  The debut of rom-com No Strings Attached led weekend box office sales with an estimated $20.3 million. It was the session’s only national debut in what proved to be a depressed marketplace. Also new were several late year Oscar hopefuls. The endurance saga No Way Back struggled to…

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Weekend Box Office Report – November 14

Take the A Train The animated Megamind with an estimated gross of $29.9 million again topped the weekend viewing charts despite a trio of new contenders in the marketplace. Second on the rails was the kinetic Unstoppable with $23.2 million while the District 9 homage Skyline slotted fourth with $11.5 million and echoes of Broadcast…

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Weekend Box Office Report – November 7

The latest from DreamWorks Animation, Megamind, was generally pegged to debut in a mid-$40 million arena though some felt it could have performed better on a less competitive weekend. Though that contention is dubious, the rest of the year really doesn’t offer that option with both pre-sold and award titles beginning to open up the multiplex floodgates.

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Weekend Box Office Report – September 26

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps topped the weekend box office charts with a logy estimate of $19.5 million. The new batch of national releases generally underperformed based on tracking including second place Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga Hoole, which hooted up $16.3 million.

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Perspectives

C’est fini le fete international de film de Toronto. To be honest, the eleven days of the somewhat revamped Toronto International Film Festival are a blur. Three or four films a day, three or four hours of writing a night, one reception, innumerable dangling conversations and what do you get. The best I can come…

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Weekend Box Office Report – September 19

Though The Town was clearly out-pacing its competition in advance ticket sales, tracking pundits pegged the latter day Ridgemont High antics of Easy A as the box office leader for the frame. Devil was expected to be very close behind the duo.

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The Weekend Box Office Report

  Weekend Estimates – September 10-12, 2010 Title Distributor Gross (average) change Theaters Cume Resident Evil: Afterlife Sony 26.9 (8,390) New 3203 26.9 Takers Sony 5.9 (2,710) -45% 2191 47.9 The American Focus 5.7 (2,020) -57% 2833 28.2 Machete Fox 4.1 (1,520) -64% 2678 20.7 Going the Distance WB 3.8 (1,260) -45% 3030 14 The…

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie

One anticipated film that Toronto received the very first look see is Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. It screened yesterday for press including the army of junket scribes that attend about 20 interview roundtables during TIFF’s opening weekend. They were grumbling about the filmmaker only doing two interviews during his stay and having to go to New York in October for the official press junket.

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie

Toronto has also evolved along these lines. It runs arguably the best programmed cinematheque in North America, touring film programs and underwrites scholarly research and publications that otherwise would be marginalized. The Lightbox marketing employs the catch phrase: The House That Film Built and, considering past good works, it should be a home base that’s both state of the art and sturdy.

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Bang Bang Man Moron

It was déjà vu all over again as funny buddy cops and stereoscopic hip hoppers joined the summer box office fray. The cruiser bruisers of The Other Guy debuted at the top of the movie charts with an estimated $35.7 million while the foot stompers of Step Up 3D slotted third overall with a disappointing…

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Guillaume Canet’s Series of Most Fortunate Events

Considered one of the most versatile leading actors of contemporary French cinema, Guillaume Canet self-confesses that stardom –even the prospect of becoming a working performer — was a series of accidents. Canet, 37, is ostensibly in Los Angeles for a few days to promote the film Farewell, a fact-based thriller about a French functionary in…

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The Weekend Report: July 11, 2010

Despicable Me animated weekend movie-going and easily outpaced the competition with an estimated debut gross of $60.3 million. The frame’s other national freshman, the sci-fi Predators, also posted impressive initial returns of $25 million to rank third, with The Twilight Saga: Eclipse weathering the onslaught quite well with a 50% hit that translated into an…

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The Weekend Report: July 5, 2010

Weekend Estimates: July 2-5, 2010 Title Distributor Gross (average) % change * Theaters Cume Twilight: Eclipse Summit 84.3 (18,870) New 4468 177.1 The Last Airbender Par 53.4 (16,860) New 3169 69.8 Toy Story 3 BV 42.3 (10,510) -49% 4028 301.2 Grown Ups Sony 26.6 (7,520) -53% 3534 85.2 Knight and Day Fox 14.1 (4,540) -49%…

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Toy Boys and the Billion Dollar Babies

To no great surprise Toy Story 3 retained top position in weekend ticket sales with an estimated $58.7 million. The frame’s two national freshmen also landed in anticipated order with the arrested development comedy Grown Ups performing better than expected with $40.5 million and the star driven action comedy Knight and Day underwhelming with $19.4…

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To Finity … And Beyawned

June 20, 2010 The highly anticipated Toy Story 3 arrived right on target with an estimated $110.2 million debut, which marked the biggest (unadjusted) opening for a Pixar movie. The week’s other incoming title Johah Hex wound up with an accursed $4.9 million that ranked it seventh in the weekend lineup. The session also featured…

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If You Build It, Will They Come?

The Los Angeles Film Festival kicks off Thursday night with a curtain raiser of The Kids Are All Right, which won awards and commercial distribution following its premiere at Sundance in January. And despite its relative nascence, LAFF is attempting to do a bit of re-imagining. The most obvious change is its location. Following home bases in Hollywood and Westwood,…

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Chop Chop

June 13, 2010 Industry trackers were virtually unanimous that The A-Team would be top dog among weekend movie goers with the re-imagined The Karate Kid a competitive but distinct runner up. However, whether it was a poor sampler or respondents were too embarrassed to divulge their honest sentiments, ticket sales provided a radically different conclusion….

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Klady

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon