The Hot Blog Archive for December, 2012
Friday Estimates by Klady The Gray
Not a lot of time to write this morning… off to cookie decorating… that time of year.
But I want to note that the Hobbit opening is a December record, passing Return of The King. It is also fair to note that this film has a 3D advantage in pricing. And I think it’s also important to note, before the knives are sharpened out there, that once ROTK opening to its $34.5m record day, it never did as much as $28m on any subsequent day. That still led to $377m domestic. But it suggests that Hobbit may not make it to $100m this weekend… and to suggest that this is a problem would be idiotic, at best… either ignorant or malicious.
The best 3-day December opening in history is $77.2m for I Am Legend. This opening will be a huge leap ahead of that. (ROTK opened on a Wednesday and the 3-day was $72.6m. The highest grossing movie in history, by over $1b, opened to $77m.)
This is all WB or MGM or The Jacksons could have asked for…. and at this point, the 48fps is a discussion point, not a box office issue.
More on the rest later, but I would expect Rise of The Guardians to end up at #2 for the weekend, given the weekend arc of kids movies vs adult movies.
27 Comments »Jane Mayer vs Zero Dark Thirty
I really don’t want to go through every line of Jane Mayer’s inflammatory, inaccurate piece on ZD30. But it’s much like the many other flavors of inaccuracy and overhype we are seeing in many “thinking” outlets regarding the film. So I will.
“At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.’s treatment of a terror suspect during the Bush years as “torture,” a Hollywood movie about the agency’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty—whose creators say that they didn’t want to “judge” the interrogation program—appears headed for Oscar nominations. Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?”
1. Is the ruling that torture occurred not in direct step with the first moments of the film?
2. Who said this was meant to be neutral? What has been said is that the filmmaking is meant to be neutral, not the experience, aka “the entertainment.”
“Zero Dark Thirty, which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.’s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg’s new film, Lincoln; by contrast, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.”
1. So what does the FBI’s position on torture have to do with this film? (Apparent answer: She expects a film that includes torture to be about torture. ZD30 is not about torture.)
2. Lincoln? Huh? Lincoln is an excellent movie about an important debate coming to a head. ZD30 is not about the debate over torture or any real debate at all. It is about events, which are not debated on moral grounds, but on tactical ones… as they tend to be in real life.
3. The slap mocking that if Bigelow “were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.” Oh, bullshit. 100% lazy and cheap. It’s unlikely that it would be a film set in Congress where words, not action, rule the day. But my guess would be that the Bigelow slave-era movie would be about some group of blacks and white supporters who fought back.
Skipping forward…
“…by ignoring the full weight of the dark history of torture, her work falls disturbingly short.”
Well, that’s the whole thing in a nutshell, no? Jane Mayer wanted to see a different film… nothing remotely like ZD30… nothing that could be “fixed” by even significant changes to the screenplay. She’s taking charge of the idea of a bin Laden film and turning it into a Frontline episode, because that is what she wants, it seems, ANY discussion of torture by the US to be.
“It doesn’t include a single scene in which torture is questioned…”
False.
There is not a single scene of debate about the value and/or effectiveness of torture. But torture is question by behavior (Mayer will mock this later) and by the primary torturer, who is having some form of post-traumatic stress from doing this work and repeatedly in the film by clear arguments that much of the torture leads to worthless information—including the failure of the specific torture shown in the film to get the information they are trying to retrieve—or information coming out of torture sessions going back to “the terrorists” via lawyers.
If the argument is that ZD30 says they get critical info via torture, shouldn’t there be an acknowledgement that the torture in question fails completely before a nugget of information—which is not the focus of their interrogation—starts the ball rolling towards the courier?
“…even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue—again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.”
Interest? I think it reflected through the film. But even if not, this is not a movie about human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers or even internal discussions about the morality or effectiveness of torture within government offices.
24 Comments »DP/30: Promised Land, co-writer/actor John Krasinski
DP/30: Zero Dark Thirty, actor Jessica Chastain
The Arrogance Of A Critic… Me.
It’s an odd thing.
I spend a couple of hours yesterday with the sound team that worked with Quentin Tarantino to put together Django Unchained. And I can’t say that it change my opinion of the film.
But as I listened to these men, all of whom are seasoned veterans, most of whom have worked with QT on multiple films, I saw Quentin in a way I had never seen him. I saw him through the eyes of pros who are incredibly loyal to him and incredibly motivated by the man… pushed to the limits of their creativity in a way that seemed to thrill each and every one of them.
It’s a connection that I have seen with Steven Spielberg’s crew and PT Anderson’s and a few others. But I had never really seen Quentin through eyes like that. I always see The Quentin Show. It always seems to be The Quentin Show. And indeed, the conversation was about a director who knows almost exactly what he is looking for in the work. But through their eyes, he is in service to that vision, much as they are, not to his ego.
So while I may appreciate the pieces of the Django puzzle and enjoy the film, but not be as thrilled by this ride as some of his others, I liked Quentin Tarantino after talking to these 5 guys more than I ever have. No matter how much I love some of his films, I never saw the man without the iconography. And so I am sorry that I have ever suggested, for instance, that he wasn’t giving it is all… or that he was working off of ego. Of course, we all have ego and we all miss the mark of our very best sometimes. But I quite respect the man I met, without him anywhere nearby, yesterday.
My work is to look behind the screen… behind the curtain… and I am pretty good at my work. But sometimes you need a reminder about the simple humanity of it all.
27 Comments »Review-ish: Django Unchained
I don’t think I have a ton to add to the conversation about Django Unchained.
It is not a special film. It feels a lot like Tarantino playing out a contract. (No, there is no contract to which I am referring.) Or maybe someone with some real talent, but with no real ambition beyond imitating Tarantino.
It has laughs. It has a ton of violence. It has well over 100 uses of the word “nigger.”
I’d sit through it again and not suffer. But if I don’t, I don’t think I’ll be missing anything of note.
But for me, it was missing the curve ball that makes Tarantino interesting, even in his lesser works. It’s a 2 or 3 joke film. And those jokes repeat over and over and over again. Most of the audience seemed fine with that. I found myself oddly bored in a film that is so relentlessly in the audience’s face… perhaps the most aggressive piece Tarantino has ever made, even more so than the Kill Bills.
The tech side is excellent. No complaints. Robert Richardson is still a master. Acting performances are also uniformly strong. But I preferred the character Chris Waltz plays the first time I saw Robert Culp & Bill Cosby doing that schtick on “I Spy.”
The only exceptional element in this film, for me, was Samuel L. Jackson who is transformed into Uncle Ben – I mean, right off that old box – to the point where his head seems to be another shape. And he balances attitude and rage and a surface calm in the one thing in this film that seriously deserves Oscar consideration.
For a movie I didn’t love (and certainly didn’t hate), I didn’t mind the looooong running time. But the film lives on a hamster wheel of repetition that I wish someone had been able to get Tarantino to cut down. And really, I wish there was a point. Comparisons to Inglorious Basterds make no sense to me, as there were a load of interesting, subversive ideas in Inglorious Basterds. I can’t think of a single one in this film. And a love story? It’s a long story like Eraser is a love story.
I look at the trailer and TV spots and I see what this film was meant to be… good, fun, mostly brainless pulp. But it hangs around so long that the failure of QT to find anything to say becomes all too apparent.
I could pick the thing apart, but that would be silly. It’s not that kind of movie. Either you get on the ride and give yourself to it or not. That doesn’t mean that the film has no responsibility to entertain, but it does try. It literal pulls down its pants… or Jamie Foxx’s… and like so much in the film, it leads nowhere… except for a cool moment out of context.
This is the first Tarantino film that could have been made by Robert Rodriguez. Good or bad. You make that call.
11 Comments »DP/30 Sneak: Zero Dark 30’s Jessica Chastain & Jason Clarke on “The Torture Controversy”
DP/30 : The Paperboy, actor Nicole Kidman (via Skype)
Weekend Estimates by Klady
The only real chance from the Friday numbers to today’s estimates is the move of Rise of the Guardians from #4 to #2 and the strong Saturday showings being estimated amongst all of the top pictures.
Seems like a good time to pull out a list of Best Picture contenders and to consider that… though recent years since the expansion to 10 or as many as 10 nominees have clearly changed the game in terms of box office results as a factor in the nominating process. Still unreleased are Zero Dark Thirty, Les Misérables, The Hobbit, The Impossible, and Promised Land.
With Argo having been in release the longest of this group, it’s now losing screens, but all of the grossers over $15m are or have been in wide release. All are in stable, good domestic gross deterioration mode now.
The second group, all in under 450 screens, has been poked at a bit in the media, but assuming continuing efforts by each studio and perhaps a few more cities added, Anna Karenina and Silver Linings Playbook are both likely to better the domestic gross that The Artist was at when it got nominated last season. Silver Linings is already bigger than that number ($12.4m) and looks like it will be at double The Artist’s nominations morning when this year’s noms are announced (2 weeks earlier than last year). So, let’s not be too dramatic about box office at this step.
Obviously, the box office on The Hobbit will be top of the group… if it gets nominated. Les Misérables is opening wide on Christmas Day. Of the five best opening weekends coming off of a Christmas Day opening, four were on a Thursday or Friday. Only Catch Me If You Can was earlier… on a Wednesday. What does this mean for Les Mis? Who knows? My guess would be in the mid-20s for the weekend with $22m or so in the bank Tu-Th and maybe another $8m on New Year’s Day. So when Oscar nominations close on January 3, they could be around $60 million at the box office. That’s a great number, especially considering that it would put it in the class of musical winners immediately. Even if the number is more like $50m, it would be a very successful number for a musical.
This may all be irrelevant to the Oscar nominating vote, however, because the profoundly confused leadership at The Academy have made voting a confusing mess this year. So I don’t expect a large percentage of the vote will come in on the 2nd and 3rd this year. They are already having problems with the new procedures over there, trying desperately to educate those who have been understandably confused, and I fear a significant percentage of potential voters will miss out on nominations as a result. (I have been told by one young, tech-savvy Academy member about their problems trying to sign up for the electronic voting.)
Anyway…
Zero Dark Thirty is skipping the Christmas surge and going NY and LA only on Dec 21, waiting until January 11 to go wide… the day after nominations are announced. This is actually a fairly unique play. Dreamgirls, for instance, expanded to 800+ screens on Christmas Day. There Will Be Blood expanded a bit 10 days in, but remember, back then, there was a much longer wait for nominations. My guess is that Sony is looking at the model they used in 2001/2002 for Black Hawk Down, which opened on 4 on Dec 28 and expanded 21 days later and had a $28.6m opening weekend. They’re expanding ZD30 21 days after opening day as well. The question is, do they have a more commercial movie than they think they do? Or are they doing the smart thing and protecting the film by wrapping it in Oscar nominations? If things keep going the way they have been with critics groups, I think Sony should probably be looking at some kind of expansion for its second or third weekend… maybe to a few hundred screens. Word of mouth has to be a winner before going wide. Oscar nominations – by then expected for weeks – are not the big play here. And remember, Black Hawk had a commercial release, not an awards-focused release.
And so it goes…
47 Comments »
