MCN Originals Archive for April, 2012

The Weekend Report

Cusp of summer box office experienced a lull with weekend revenues of roughly $115 million that amounted to a 17% decline from the prior frame. It was a steeper 30% downturn from 2011 when the bow of Fast Five blew away the competition with an $86.1 million launch. The weekend’s big noise was happening overseas with The Avengers getting a jump start on domestic with a 39 territory debut estimated at close to $180 million. Also heaping up advance gelt internationally is Battleship with $150 million to date prior to its North American bow on 5/18.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Raven

But wait a minute. This isn’t the kind of horror that puts money in your pockets. A loser roaming the streets and expiring in a hospital? Not in our bottom-line, money-obsessed, failure-hating age. Let’s imagine something more horrible — and certainly more modern, more suitable to contemporary tastes.

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The DVD Wrapup: Contraband, Camelot, Return, Young Goethe, Innkeepers, Hollis Frampton … More

Like JFK’s legacy, the movie version of “Camelot” hasn’t aged well in the succeeding nearly 50 years. In fact, after knocking ’em dead on Broadway in the early 1960s, the movie version failed to overwhelm Oscar voters or attract nearly the same number of fans as “My Fair Lady.”

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Picturing Ebertfest 2012 Day 2

Edifices, blue skies, books for sale, karaoke, Life Itself…

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Wilmington on Movies: Headhunters

Slick and fast and gorgeously shot—if sometimes almost criminally over-the-top.

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Review: The Five-Year Engagement

The successful rom-com never overestimates its own charms – or the charms of its superstar leads, for that matter. Rather than resting on their laurels, Segel and Stoller take inspiration from the best of the genre. They turn to the gags and goofiness of “There’s Something About Mary,” the darkness, neediness and commitment-phobia of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the sheer buffoonery of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” and the earnest poignancy of “Until Sunrise” to form a story that’s at once heartfelt and packed to the brim with hearty laughs.

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Is Crossmedia Film’s Next Wave?

At the forefront of one of the film narrative’s many reinventions is a next wave of software developers, gamers, filmmakers, writers and composers; a confluence of independent talent dedicated to creating entertainment which employs a variety of mediums and crosses all media platforms, in order to create immersive story experiences for the general public. Think Steve Jobs meets James Cameron, who meets Joe Papp, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and then Maya Deren. Together…

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Picturing Ebertfest 2012

Looking at opening day and night of the 14th annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, Champaign, Illinois, March 25, 2012.

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Wilmington on DVDs. Godzilla

I’ve never visited Japan, and probably I never will. But if I get there, I know I’ll dream of seeing several things, all of which, to me, signify “Japanese cinema“ and “Japan.” A furious Kurosawa swordfight caught by three cameras. Two Ozu characters sitting on tatami mats, musing on the sadness of life. A geisha or wife suffering while Mizoguchi’s camera tracks slowly and beautifully around her. Something tragic or transgressive caught lucidly by Ichikawa or Imamura. And, rising up from the ocean, while the sun sets, Honda’s Godzilla (excuse me, Gojira), staring toward Tokyo and licking his chops.

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Wilmington on DVDs. The Innkeepers

Ti West’s movie is loaded with seedy atmosphere and cracked wacko personality, and I much preferred it to the over-expensive blood-drenched massacres they usually give us. Paxton’s Claire and Healy’s Luke are engagingly scarable protagonists. The cellar is a doozy.

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Wilmington on Movies: Darling Companion

The movie has its flaws — that outlandishly implausible ending chiefly among them — but compared to most of the un-naturalistic, unfunny, unserious, totally phony and sometimes obnoxiously ageist and condescendingly smart-ass gloppy stuff that often passes for American movie comedy-drama these days (and that sometimes gets a pass from the same people who pile on movies like “Darling Companion”), it’s a movie that deserves some encouragement.

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The Weekend Report: April 22, 2012

“The Hunger Games” finally moved out of the top spot to make room for newcomers “Think Like a Man” and Zac Efron’s “The Lucky One,” both performing better than expected. Disney’s nature doc “Chimpanzee” turned in a respectable fourth with $10.2 million.

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Gross Behavior: It’s All Business in Showbusiness

Cinemacon, the annual convention of movie theater owners, gets underway Monday in Las Vegas. And you might want to ask that age old Eskimo truism: Why is this Cinemacon different from all other Cinemacons?

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Cannes Slate

(Editor’s Note: Welcome to Jake Howell, who will bring a young, new, and sometimes Canadian perspective to our Cannes coverage this year.) Cannes Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux has revealed the full slates of both the Competition and Un Certain Regard programs, and the film world has been officially enticed for the glamorous film spectacular this coming May.

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Friday Estimates: April 20, 2012

Screen Gems reminds the industry why they are still the strongest niche distributor in the game. And WB has a strong launch of their entry into Screen Gems’ (formerly New Line’s) “Aren’t The Pretty… Who Will Die & Who Will Cry?” romance genre. And monkeys do the trick for Disney’s strongest DisneyNature launch.

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A Brief History Of Disney OR Welcome To Uncle Bob’s I-Disney 3.0

The elephant everyone sees in the room is John Carter. But the real angle has to be Uncle Bob’s I-Disney 3.0.

It will be ugly no matter what. But John Carter was survivable for Rich Ross, even without pointing fingers at Team Pixar and trying to throw them – The Uncrushable – under the bus. That is, if Iger’s Disney 2.0 was working. But it was not.

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The DVD Wrapup: Ghost Protocol, Shame, Last Rites of Joe May… More

Even if “Shame” doesn’t offer many answers and fewer resolutions, it can’t be said that we don’t know these people after 101 minutes in their presence. It feels like a fully realized short story or novella. The acting is terrific and McQueen’s direction delivers a real punch. It’s not an easy movie to watch, though, so viewers not looking for a challenge may want to think twice before renting it.

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Wilmington on DVDs. A Streetcar Named Desire

The young Adonis-like Brando was the actor whom critics and Britons believed would be the American stage and screen’s great Hamlet. (But he never even tried.) He was the player for whom Tennessee Williams wrote play after play year after year. (But Brando turned them all down, except for the Sidney Lumet movie of “Orpheus Descending,” retitled “The Fugitive Kind)”.

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Wilmington on DVDs. Shame

I can’t recall a single smile crossing Brandon’s mouth, or a single joke passing his lips (if there were, they were lonely), or much tenderness at all, during the course of the movie.

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Wilmington on DVDs. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

This is the best action movie out this year not just because it has the best action, but because the characters are interesting too.

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MCN Originals

Quote Unquotesee all »

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