MCN Weekend Archive for March, 2013
The Weekend Report

G.I. Joe fights off The Croods, while Tyler Perry’s dragless drama is estimated right in the middle (#7) of the Perry’s 13 above-the-title releases. The Host entertains a soft opening.
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G.I. Joe conquers the top spot with similar firepower to the first film. Tyler Perry has his second-best non-Madea opening. And The Host finds an audience about 1/6 the size of opening day for the first Twilight.
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Killing Them Softly, Royal Affair, A Man Escaped, Monsieur Verdoux, Parental Guidance, Comedy, Dead In France and more…
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Andre de Toth, a second-row master of the Western (Springfield Rifle), the war movie (Play Dirty), and the film noir (Pitfall, Crime Wave), directed this interesting example of the post-Stagecoach 1940s “adult Western.”
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The Croods lead at the box office, but the opening leaves questions. Olympus Has Fallen opens okay for a big action movie, but great for FilmDistrict and Spring Breakers‘ expansion to 1,104 sunscreens leads to a solid but not spectacular $4.6m at $4,190 per motel room.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Croods

It’s a millennium-old clash. Grug lies to cuddle up to a nice warm rock after an evening of watching cave drawings. But Eep believes there’s a great big wonderful non-Neanderthal world out there, and she doesn’t want to spend so much of her life huddling in the cave while the sun sets, and listening to Grug’s cautionary bed-time tales about how you should never not be afraid.
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The Croods, DreamWorks Animation’s first release under Fox, gets off to an okay start, just slightly above such animation releases as Fox’s Rio and just behind their own Megamind. Will this one find legs or will journos throw eggs? Olympus Has Fallen, in 2nd place, is easily FilmDistrict’s best opening ever. Admission didn’t get in. And Spring Breakers expands to 1,100 screens and gets almost the same per-screen results as The Master‘s expansion (though TM was on 350 fewer screens).
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Heaven’s Gate

It’s past time to resuscitate the reputation of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Remember how they shot it down? It was known after its release (before its release too, actually) as Cimino’s Folly, Cimino’s Trainwreck, the out-of-control, over-expensive epic that all but bankrupted United Artists and made a laughingstock out of its Oscar-winning filmmaker.
Read the full article » 2 Comments »Wilmington on DVDs: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

You read the words and they bathe you in smiles, echo in your imagination — as they probably did when J.R.R. Tolkien first conjured up, as a bedtime story, the land of Hobbits and Bag’s End and Middle-earth’s mountains and the dragons and elves and, of course, that precious ring, all in his great fantasy story, “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again”the saga with which he enraptured his home audience as he began to weave it, all those decades ago, back in the 1930s.
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Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miz, Hobbit, Rust Bone, Other Son, Life Of Pi, The Sessions and more…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Ministry of Fear; It’s In the Bag!;Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
l MINISTRY OF FEAR (Three Stars) U.S.: Fritz Lang, 1944 (Criterion Collection) Graham Greene called them “entertainments.” That was the slightly ironic moniker he gave to those of his novels in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s (usually spy or crime thrillers) that were written with a more populist eye and intended less seriously than the…
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Oz the Great and Powerful continued to live up to its moniker with an estimated $42.2 million second weekend that handily led session titles. The frame saw two new releases open tepidly behind it. Slender thread drama The Call bowed to $17.3 million and the sleight-of-hand The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was less than magic with $10.3 million.
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Oz held pretty well, though hardly great or powerful. No matter how hard WB tried, audiences are rejecting the wizards of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, coming in third behind Halle Berry as a 911 operator in The Call.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

They may call Steve Carell ” The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,” the title character in his new movie, but he‘s really part of a team, like Dean Martin or Jerry Lewis. Carell and Steve Buscemi play a pair of fancy pants superstar Las Vegas magicians in this mostly misfiring comedy—roles that should have been slices of cake for both of them, but wind up looking and playing like Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis leftovers.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVD: The Blob; Hitchcock; Rise of the Guardians

Back in 1960, about 40 minutes into Alfred Hitchcock’s new movie Psycho, co-star Janet Leigh flushed the toilet, took off her towel and stepped into the shower in Room Number One of the Bates Motel—and the movies changed forever.
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No matter how well-intentioned, it’s tough to love movies in which the ravages of alcoholism are put on full display early on and repeated throughout most of the next 90 minutes.
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About 56% of weekend moviegoers turned out for the debut of Oz the Great and Powerful and that translated into an estimated $80.2 million opening. The frame’s only other new wide release, Dead Man Down, did little for the notion of counterprogramming, with a $5.3 million tally. Quirky romantic fable Somebody Up There Likes Me generated $43,200 from a single screen in Chicago.
Read the full article »Wilmington On Movies: Oz The Great And Powerful

You clutter up the landscape with Munchkins and Winkies and more flying monkeys and colors vaguely reminiscent of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds turned into a video game.
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It’s Oz by a country mile. With a likely strong Saturday bump for the family-oriented film, $80m and change seems a likely outcome. Third-best March opening in history. And still, the movie will look to international box office to see profit. Even if it gets to $250 million domestic (which is not assured), that will only cover marketing costs for Disney. The film will need about $550m worldwide + post-theatrical markets to meet profit. Reporting on Dead Man Down‘s opening is redundant with that title. Decent opening for Emperor and in-person appearances by Nick Offerman power Somebody Up There Like Me to a strong showing on a single Chicago screen.
Read the full article »Police; The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2; Red Dawn; The Lincoln Lawyer
POLICE (Three and a Half Stars) France: Maurice Pialat, 1985 (Olive) i Louis Magnin is a brash tough French cop, or flic — played by the brash, tough, earthy and likably thuggish French movie superstar Gerard Depardieu. Simon is a somewhat slimy-looking Tunisian-French drug trafficker, played by Jonathan Leina. For about ten minutes, in just…
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