Gurus o’ Gold: At The End Of November…

The Gurus are going for it in all of the Top 8 categories this week, having seen all of what seem to be the top BP candidates. And for the first time this week, Original and Adapted Screenplay. The game changers are, as you might expect, Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty.

The DVD Gift Guide

Now that we’ve put Black Friday and Cyber Monday in our rear-view mirrors, it’s time to consider the gift that keeps on giving: entertainment. The DVD/Blu-ray economy is such that the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas no longer is reserved for the release of special and collector’s editions, boxed sets and videos with toys attached to them. Neither did one need to wait until Black Friday for the best deals. Here are few titles that have arrived recently or didn’t arrive for the normal consideration. If the recipient of your generosity doesn’t yet own a Blu-ray player, however, I recommend starting there.

20W2O: 14 Weeks To Go – Consult THAT!

Where are we now in this Oscar race?

Well, this is the moment when all of the serious BP candidates have been shown, voters for other awards are going to start voting next week, and the field is clear and clearly spread.

This is when Awards consultants make their money.

Wilmington on DVDs: ParaNorman; Lawless; The Apparition

    PARANORMAN (Also 3 or 2 Disc Blu-ray/DVD and/or 3D Combo) (Three Stars) U. S.: Chris Butler/Sam Fell, 2012 (Focus) ParaNorman, a.k.a. Norman Babcock, mini-hero of the entertainingly creepy new 3D stop-motion animated feature that bears his name, not only has three dimensions but a sixth sense to boot.  He sees the dead —…

Wilmington on DVDs: Umberto D.

Italy. The early ‘50s. The Post-war era. On a crowded Roman street, a group of old men who live on pensions from the Italian government, try to demonstrate for a raise in their meager incomes. Police break up the march, and the old men scatter, including the neatly-dressed, white-haired man whom we will follow for 88 minutes in the story that has just begun. He is an elderly ex-government worker named Umberto Domenico Ferrari, or “Umberto D.“ for short. Umberto has a threadbare dark suit and sad, watchful eyes and he takes with him, almost everywhere, his little white-and-brown-haired dog, Flike. Like most of the other old men, his situation has become desperate.

The Gronvall Files: To Canada (And Beyond?): PIXAR Canada Creative Director Dylan Brown

“Steve Jobs used to say, “Do one thing, and just make it great.” And John Lasseter says that quality is the best business plan. When you go to see a Pixar movie in a theatre, you will get, first, the trailer for one of our upcoming movies, then a short, and then the feature attraction. [To make a comparison,] the way they package objects in stores in Japan is as careful, thoughtful, and artful as the gift itself. We are a well vertically integrated company.”

The DVD Wrapup: MiB3, Lawless, Beijing Punk… More

Seven years ago, director John Hillcoat collaborated with writer-composer Nick Cave and actor Guy Pearce on the excellent Outback Western, “The Proposition.” They combined their talents again on “Lawless,” a slick hillbilly gangster flick set during America’s Prohibition experiment. Like “The Proposition,” “Lawless” is a smart and exciting genre that isn’t afraid to ratchet up the violence when things get too contemplative and self-consciously hip. Even more so than Hillcoat’s revisionist Western, though, his moonshine drama probably would be a better fit at a drive-in theater than an arthouse.

The Weekend Report

Overall revenues rang up roughly $210 million for the three-day slice of the holiday frame and just shy of $300 million for the five-day section. Either proportion set new benchmarks with the box office up 27% from 2011 when the prior Twilight’s sophomore session grossed $41.7 million and the debut of The Muppets opened to $29.2 million.

Wilmington on Movies: Silver Linings Playbook

Chemistry isn’t lacking here. Cooper plays Pat Jr. with a mix of obstinacy and nervous intensity, plus a phony bravado and a disguised vulnerability that belies the qualities he put into the unshakably self-confident stud he played in The Hangover. As for Jennifer Lawrence, she adds naturalistic comedy to her resume to go along with the mastery of naturalistic drama she showed in Winter‘s Bone and the heroic young womanhood she put into The Hunger Games. And she does it with a panache that justifies at least some of the critical mash notes she’s received for this movie.

Wilmington on Movies: Red Dawn

Red Dawn, a thoroughly idiotic movie, is an amazingly daffy remake of John Milius’ Cold War bang-bang fantasy of the same title. That 1984 jaw-dropper was an action teen movie about high school guys and footballers turned anti-Red guerillas: a band of letterman brothers led by Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell, battling a Soviet invasion in Colorado. 1984, in the height of the Reagan era, was probably a good time for the original movie. I doubt a good time exists for its feckless, dopey, off-the-wall cinematic progeny.

Friday Estimates by Gobble Gobble Klady

It’s funny how unimpressive Thanksgiving seems next to the big summer openers. As is, there will be at least one movie that will be in the Top 10 all-time for the Thanksgiving 5-day… probably two.Of course, neither of those films launched this weekend… because like Christmas, distributors have learned that big movies are better off being in Weekend 2 or 3 when Thanksgiving comes.

Gurus o’ Gold: Thanks, About To Be Given The Last 4 Films

Coming up this weekend, Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty come out to be seen by the media and guilds. Next week, Django Unchained and The Hobbit. And at that point, all the mysteries will be unfolded and voting for many groups will begin. So to give you a proper “before” and “after,” one last spin with the Gurus’ Top Ten lists for Best Picture…

Things I’m Thankful For 2012

In 16 years, we have seen the end of the daily trade magazine, the creation of web logs (aka Blogs), and the deterioration of entertainment journalism – for better and worse – as we knew it.

We have seen five owners at Universal, the first DreamWorks-distributed release, the last DreamWorks-distributed release, the rise of the Dependents at the major studios and the fall of 4 of those Dependents (leaving 3), the birth and death of subscription DVD, the birth of streaming, and the resurrection of 3D.

And through it all (and a lot more), I have been lucky enough to be here, on the internet, doing work that I love or like, and only rarely hate. Whether I have earned your indulgence or simply been in the right place at the right time to receive it, I appreciate the opportunity.

The DVD Wrapup: Nicholas Ray, Rolling Stones, Dust Bowl, Speechless… More

Whenever the roll of movie mavericks is read up yonder, no one has to wait very long before Nicholas Ray’s name is called. Like Sam Fuller, he stuck out like a sore thumb in Hollywood, if only because he’d already lived a hugely eventful life before committing to film and understood the power of the medium to separate the truth from fantasy. In what some of his peers probably considered a fatal flaw, Ray had very little interest in compromising his artistic vision for the sake of commercial and personal gain. Even so, he made movies for mass consumption, not strictly for the arthouse crowd familiar with his past connections to architect Frank Lloyd Wright, folk-music archivist Alan Lomax, Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie, producer John Houseman, director Elia Kazan and other key players in the progressive New York theater scene in the 1930s. If he somehow managed to avoid being rounded up in Red Scare dragnet, his sentiments remained clearly on the side of outcasts, the downtrodden and rebellious youth.

Wilmington on Movies: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2

Some movies become mass cultural lollapaloozas and pop ultra-phenomena — and they assume an importance they may not quite deserve. So it is with the cinematic Twilight Saga, a series that zillions adore, but to which some critics (including me) remain unhappily immune.

The Weekend Report

Anticipation … The finale of The Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn – Part 2, had the fans lining up around the block and circling the globe with a domestic estimate of $141.5 million. As with last weekend’s Bond launch the competition steered clear of the onslaught … kinda. Lincoln expanded nationally, taking on bloodsuckers (déjà vu?) and carving out a sizeable $20.6 that ranked third in the lineup.

Friday Estimates

Twilight is the only wide opener this weekend… for 69 million reasons. The two Oscar-touted films opening this weekend are each on 16 screens, one managing just $7500 per screen on Friday and the other, $5625. One shouldn’t read too much into these numbers, but they suggest that opening slowly was a good idea.

Wilmington on Movies: Holy Motors

As far as I could glean or remember, M. Oscar impersonates, with Celine’s help — and thanks to a well-stocked supply of makeup and costumes in the back of the limo — a financier, an old beggar-woman, a motion capture lover/dancer in a black unitard, a wild sewer-dwelling hooligan named M. Merde, a dying father, a charismatic accordionist, a hired killer and his victim/double, and the lover of a heart-breaking chanteuse played and sung (to the hilt) by Kylie Minogue.

20W2O: 15 Weeks To Go – Who Really Wants It?

This weekend, Anna Karenina and Silver Linings Playbook arrive in theaters and Lincoln expands. Next week, Life of Pi, Hitchcock and Rust & Bone. And then, in the last two weeks of the year, spread around the holiday, are Amour, This is 40, The Impossible, Not Fade Away, Zero Dark Forty, On The Road, Django Unchained, and Les Miserables.

But who wants it?

Wilmington on DVDs: The Queen of Versailles

Of all the amusing, depressing and jaw-dropping things in The Queen of Versailles — Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about the construction and deconstruction of the largest one-family dwelling in the United States, a domicile modeled on both the French Palace of Versailles and the Las Vegas Paris Hotel and built by time-share resort hotel czar David Siegel — one of the things that bothered me most was the seeming fact that in this entire massive, outlandishly ornate yet fundamentally cheesy edifice, intended as a glorious Got-rocks celebration by Siegel and his family (including wife Jackie, seven children, one niece and 19 servants), I did not spot a single book.