Friday Estimates: June 30

It’s a stripper and teddy bear weekend! While Merida and her Brave friends will no doubt capture more of the family market, Ted and Magic Mike are at the top of the box office charts on Friday.

Wilmington on Movies: The Graduate

Sometimes a movie comes at exactly the right time. Like The Graduate — director Mike Nichols’ and screenwriters Buck Henry’s and Calder Willingham’s marvelously edgy and arousing romantic comedy about plastics and family affairs and life in California, with one of those heroes, or anti-heroes, who strike a chord: young, nervous, recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who’s a little worried about his future and also torn between his clandestine affair with a married lover, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and his seemingly genuine open-air love for her beautiful college-age daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).

Wilmington on Movies: Ted

Listen, I’m like almost everybody else. If you make me laugh, I’ll forgive you. I’ll forgive almost anything. In fact, I feel here like the priest with the Mafia guy on the other side of the screen. There’s a lot to forgive and expiate: a lot of Hail Marys here. But what the hell. It made me laugh. I forgive it. Bring it in, yuh bastid. Where’s the brewskis?

Box Office Hell — June 29

Our Players|Coming Soon|Box Office Prophets|Box Office Guru|EW|Box Office . com Brave |36.3|42.3|40.0|39.0|33.0 Magic Mike |31.3|35.7|30.0|34.0|29.0 Ted |27.5|27.6|24.0|28.0|26.0 Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection |23.5|24.0|18.0|22.0|24.0 Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted|11.0|11.4|12.0|11.5|11.5

Critics Roundup — June 28

Magic Mike |Green||Green||Yellow People Like Us |||Green||Yellow Beasts of the Southern Wild (NY, LA) |Green||Green|Green|Green Ted |Yellow||Green||Yellow Take This Waltz (NY)|Green||Green|Green|Green Neil Young Journeys (limited) ||||Green| Unforgivable (limited)|Green||Green||

Wilmington on DVDs: The 39 Steps

CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC THE 39 STEPS (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars) U.K.: Alfred Hitchcock, 1935 (Criterion Collection)  Back in 1985, I wrote these liner notes for one of the earliest Criterion Collection releases: a videotape, in a silver-colored box, of Alfred Hitchcock’s love-on-the-run spy-story masterpiece, The 39 Steps. (The original is still on their website.)…

Pride’s Friday 5 (June 29, 2012)

Sarah Polley’s “lucid and lucent” “Take This Waltz”; “Magic Mike” and the love of “Saturday Night Fever”; the modern dance between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in “The Amazing Spider-Man”; Mila Kunis, in a towel, in “Ted,” and the grave beauty of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia.”

Wilmington on DVDs: 21 Jump Street; Spider-Man; Spider-Man 2; Spider-Man 3; Erin Brockovich; Sister Act; Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit

The first two Spider-Man movies were such smash critical hits (Spider-Man 2, co-scripted by Alvin Sargent, has been hailed as the acme of the whole genre, until The Avengers), that an inevitable backlash plagued the vulnerable and tearful Spider-Man 3. (Seen by itself, most critics would have probably liked it fine – just as the public liked all three). But some smasheroos deserve their popularity and this is one (excuse me, these are three) of them.

Wilmington on DVDs: Deliverance

   CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC DELIVERANCE (40th Anniversary collector’s edition) Four Stars U.S.; John Boorman, 1972 (Warner Bros.) Four Southern businessmen, searching for the joys of youth, join together for a Georgia canoe trip on the beautiful but often dangerously turbulent Cahulawassee River. Soon however, after a violent confrontation with two evil backwoodsmen, they find themselves…

Wilmington on DVDs: The Artist

It’s a cinematic feast in the style of the old time silent movies that flourished from the time of film‘s invention in 1895 — or at least since Georges Méliès started telling stories with them before the turn of the century — until 1927, when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer made the screen speak and croon and told us we ain’t heard nothing yet and, unmaliciously of course , drove a nail in the coffin of the old technology, while ushering in the new.

The DVD Wrapup: Oranges & Sunshine, Bullhead, Spalding Gray, Deliverance … More

Michaël R. Roskam not only uses steroid smuggling as a device to advance the plot, but his protagonist is addicted to them physically and psychologically, as well.

The Weekend Report, June 24, 2012

A decade ago you couldn’t have a better brand than Disney for animation and family fare. Today, Pixar is comparably peerless and under the same corporate banner. While no one doubted the opening strength of the Scot princess of Brave, industry b.o. trackers predicted a reduced virility between $55 million and $60 million. Otherwise opening exit demos were predictably female skewing with 57% of viewers; 55% aged 25 years or younger and 66% composed of families.

Brave also opened day-and-date in 10 international territories including Australia, Russia and China (Scotland will have to wait) with initial estimates of $13 million. With soccer finals in full swing and the Olympics in July the upcoming summer blockbusters won’t be blanket bombing foreign openings for the remainder of the summer.

Wilmington on Movies: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

The whole movie is nervous and over-loud and expensive-looking, full of tacky jump-at-you 3D effects; and watching it sometimes makes you feel as if the country was under attack by a conspiracy of blood-sucking idiots. Even though it was shot by the sometimes marvelous Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, The Black Stallion), the film’s visual style seems like a mistake.

Friday Estimates: June 22, 2012

Brave scores the 3rd best opening day in Pixar history, Abraham Lincoln chops modestly at the box office, The Avengers hovers as it aims at getting to $600m domestic before all Spider-Man breaks lose, and Focus finds the end of the box office world.

Box Office Hell — June 22

Our Players|Coming Soon|Box Office Prophets|Box Office Guru|EW|Box Office . com Brave |64.7|59.7|58.0|53.0|59.0 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter |22.1|15.3|16.0|15.0|14.0 Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted|18|19.4|19.0|17.0|16.5 Prometheus |9.0|10.3|9.0|9.0|10.7 Snow White and the Huntsman|7.6|8.4|n/a|11.5|n/a Seeking a Friend for the End of the World |6.7|6.7|6.0|7.0|8.5

Critics Roundup – June 21

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter |Yellow||Green||Red Brave |Yellow||Green||Green Seeking a Friend for the End of the World |Yellow||Yellow|| The Invisible War (limited)|||Green|Green|Green Nate and Margaret (NY) |||Green|| To Rome with Love (limited) |Yellow||Yellow|Yellow|Green

Pride’s Friday 5 (June 22, 2012)

The tangled red of “Brave”; the sensation of “Gerhard Richter Painting”; gentle geek fable “Nate & Margaret” and its light, platonic “Harold and Maude” vibe; the family dynamics of “Declaration of War” and the bop Italiano of Woody’s latest late-career ensemble comedy.

Wilmington on Movies: Brave.

“Brave” is a beautifully visualized, sometimes blisteringly funny and exciting Pixar cartoon fairytale about a wee Scottish lassie who grows up into a feisty, flame-haired young adventuress who shoots off great big arrows and battles bears and witches and boisterous clansmen.

Wilmington on DVDs: And Everything Is Going Fine; Sex and Death to the Age of 14.

He’s dead now, and his friends suspect he threw himself off the Staten Island Ferry and drowned, took his life because he was suffering the pain from a bad traffic accident on a lonely road in Ireland that left him with a smashed skull and some brain damage, and, according to Nell Casey “an orbital fracture, a broken hip, and a permanent limp“ — unable to swim, unable to ski. Unable… So he jumped, maybe. Drowned, maybe. As the Manhahttan skyline approached or receded — maybe. Unless he was on the other side of the ferry. We don’t know because he isn’t around to tell the story.

The DVD Wrapup: Jeff at Home Project X, The FP, Nine Muses … More

A decade ago, Mark and Jay Duplass helped create a niche in the indie world commonly referred to as “mumblecore.” Generally speaking, these are low-budget, largely improvised productions, populated by characters that would be considered unexceptional and treated as invisible, unless, perhaps, they lived in the apartment next door, occupied a cubicle beside you at work or dated one of your kids. This isn’t to imply these people lead meaningless lives; only that almost everything they do falls under the loose heading of “normal.” If there’s been a hipster cachet attached to mumblecore titles, it’s because what’s considered commonplace by most mainstream standards can be revelatory when observed by viewers in similar circumstances and when photographed in credibly natural fashion.