Friday Estimates

The Hobbit lands… and delivers the single biggest day in the history of film in the month of December, passing LOTR: Return Of The King by an estimated $2 million. That’s only the 58th best single day in history, but December box office is like no other month of the year. This includes a real question about whether this $36.5m opening will lead to a $100m weekend. It may. But in December, it may well not. After LOTR:ROTK broke the December record on opening day, it never saw a day over $27.5m again.

Gurus o Gold: And All That Was Left Were The Oscar Nominations…

There wasn’t a lot of movement in chart placement this week, though a lot of individual votes shifted.

For a slightly more expanded look at the race, The Gurus each voted for 11 Best Picture candidates and 7 candidates in each of the acting categories and director. Just how close do The Gurus think Javier Bardem, Emmanuelle Riva, and Nicole Kidman are to being nominees? Take a look.

The DVD Wrapup: 2 Days in New York, 360, Following, Black Like Me … More

It isn’t enough that Julie Delpy is as fine an actress in English as she is in French and, at 43, still one the world’s most beautiful women, but she’s also proven herself to be an exceptional writer, director and singer-songwriter.

20W2O: You’ve Been Globed

Given where this season is… these nominations are pretty much a non-event. Really, the one thing that turned up here that could move the meter a touch when Oscar voting starts on Monday (and ends in 3 weeks and a day) is Rachel Weisz, who has now been honored here and by NYFCC. But the rest… not really anything outside of the curve as has been laid out for weeks and months.

Willmington on DVDs: Following

A black-and-white British neo-noir shot on the cheap, with unknown actors, by a then-unknown co-writer-director (Christopher Nolan), Following is the often fascinating tale of a thief and a voyeur playing dangerous games. Nolan likes games and tricks, and the Wellesian magicians who play them, and the whole movie is something of a conjuring act. Though obviously the work of gifted youngsters and amateurs or semi-amateurs, done with scant resources and slender means, it’s a show that grabs you and keeps you guessing and rewards your attention and casts its own little spell. It‘s a real underground movie from a moviemaker just about to make his break into the mainstream — with another, more expensive, and even trickier film called Memento.

Wilmington on DVDs: The Bourne Legacy; Ice Age: Continental Drift

I miss Jason Bourne already — missed him, in fact, even before I saw The Bourne Legacy, fourth in the multi-million-dollar-grossing Bourne spy movies, based on Robert Ludlum’s books. That series, you’ll recall, initially starred Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, super-spy on the run, and now, with Damon gone (after three outings), stars Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross, another super-spy on the run. Cross, however, is not in any way related or connected to Jason Bourne, or to any other Bourne, beyond the fact that they were both involved in top secret “skill enhancement” programs that the government has now discontinued, and wants forgotten, along with Jason Bourne and anyone like him.

The Weekend Report

With strong Saturday showings, Skyfall took a definitive lead for the weekend, followed by Rise of The Guardians, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, Lincoln, and Life of Pi. The overall weekend is estimated to be up 10% from last year.

Wilmington on DVDs: Rio Grande

Among Ford buffs and aficionados, this has walways been the least admired of the three cavalry films—perhaps because it was shot quickly as a favor to Republic Pictures so Ford could go to Ireland and make his longtime pet project, The Quiet Man—but also because the script, by studio vet James Kevin McGuiness (who died in 1950, the year Rio Grande was released), isn’t as good as the ones Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings wrote for the other two. (All three movies are based on stories by James Warner Bellah, who wrote the screenplay for Ford’s masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).

Friday Estimates

It’s still vampires and secret agents and dead presidents, but this weekend, Bond leaps in front of Twilight and Lincoln gets $100m domestic in its sights (in the next week or so). The only newcomer is the Gerald Butler vehicle, Playing For Keeps, which seems to have crashed and left on the side of the road.

Gurus o’ Gold: Post-NYFCC/Pre-Globes Nominations

The Gurus patiently waited to opine this week, though about half of the group felt that waiting for Nation Board of Review to announce was completely unnecessary.

The big mover this week was Zero Dark Thirty and director Kathryn Bigelow. There was also a bit of a bump for Django Unchained. Otherwise, it was mostly tightening, including a 6-man race for Best Actor.

20W2O: The “They” In Award Season

You hear a lot about “Them” this time of year.

They don’t think this. They don’t think that. They don’t respond well to this, but they love that.

What continues to keep The Academy Awards the dominant award in film is that with nearly 6000 potential voters, there can be no They.

Wilmington on DVDs: Purple Noon

When the murder comes, it’s so swift, so unexpected, yet so oddly inevitable, that it’s hard to believe we’ve seen what we’ve seen. Whoosh! A knife thrust. A scream. “Marge!“ cries the victim, the knife stuck in his chest. He falls, dies, while his killer looks on, for a moment with seeming horror, as if he were witness to something awful, unimaginable — something that somehow doesn‘t even involve him. Did it really happen? Was it a dream? A fantasy? A lie? A movie? Yes, of course, we’re watching (and talking about) a movie: an exceptionally riveting and beautiful one about desire and cruelty and murder and malice and a game of make-believe by a psychopath/killer who is also an actor and an artist. A classic thriller called Plein Soleil, or Purple Noon, a movie shot in the adult playgrounds and mature pleasure spots of Italy and directed by a French filmmaker-artist, Rene Clement (who knew and understood sailing and the area well), from a classic novel-thriller by Patricia Highsmith, a brilliant American novelist who lived in France, and understood criminals well, if only in her imagination.

Review: Les Misérables

I can deal with building the factual reality in my head when the style of the film decides against being literal. But that is what is so much the failure of Les Misérables… it wants it both ways. It wants to be profoundly intimate, suffering in extreme close-up, the singing-on-the-set choice (the endless hype about which has turned it from “choice” to “stunt), and shooting almost completely in singles and tight doubles. Edit. Edit. Edit.

The DVD Wrapup: Beasts of Southern Wild, ParaNorman, Butter … More

Normally, come the first week of December, true aficionados of quality cinema – those who actually care about the Academy Awards, anyway — have entered into the annual ritual of predicting which deserving Best Picture candidates will be snubbed in favor of movies released after Thanksgiving. Last year, the Academy finally acknowledged the build-in frailty of its nominating procedure and doubled the number of finalists.

Wilmington on DVDs: Finding Nemo 3D, Up

Finding Nemo, the first one, was that epic 2003 Pixar computer-animated cartoon adventure about a boy clownfish named Nemo and his nervous father Marlin, and how they were separated on Australia‘s Great Barrier Reef, and how, they tried to find each other again, in an ocean world chockful of danger and delight. It’s one of the most popular movies ever made, and the second Finding Nemo, the new 3D version, doesn’t do anything to dampen that crowd-pleasing or diminish that delight.

The Weekend Report

Holdovers rule the roost, beginning with Twilight, Skyfall and Lincoln. The waning days of 2012 will be stuffed with a slew of award contenders vying to take the spotlight away from the likes of Argo, Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook. Additionally the late year entries suggest strong appeal across the quadrants with an eclectic mix that includes Les Miserables, Django Unchained and Guilt Trip. Light the Yule log and bring on the egg nog.

Wilmington on Movies: Hitchcock

The movie is a tribute to Hitchcock and his art; in some ways it treats the creation of Psycho almost in the reverent way Carol Reed and Charlton Heston treated Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But it’s a deconstruction of Hitchcock (and Psycho) as well, following the example of tell-all books like Rebello‘s and like Donald Spoto’s “The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock“ and even of the last revision of “Hitchcock/Truffaut“” Francois Truffaut‘s classic interview/celebration with/of one of his favorite directors.

Wilmington on Movies: Killing Them Softly

In Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Me Softly, a crime movie without alibis, people die suddenly and meanly, very meanly — sometimes with their blood and brains splattering like a Sam Peckinpah death ballet across the dark frames, sometimes after being kicked and beaten almost senseless, sometimes fast and straight up, with a shot in the head. We’re in Hell, U.S.A. It’s an ugly world, sometimes a funny one and a brutal one, even when Ketty Lester’s heart-tearing rendition of Victor Young‘s “Love Letters“ — with Floyd Cramer on piano — is on the soundtrack.

Friday Estimates

Vampires and Spies and Bearded Presidents (again), Oh My!