MCN Originals Archive for February, 2013
Wilmington on Movies: Identity Thief
Up to that point, Identity Thief actually looks as if it might be a good movie, or at least a bad funny one. I was actually looking forward to it. (The more fool me.) But then, in a bewildering, mind-numbing plot twist that bewilders and mind-numbs me still…
Read the full article » 4 Comments »The Weekend Report
Americans were ready for a good laugh and Identity Thief tickled the funny bone to an estimated $36.4 million, readily topping weekend ticket sales. The session’s only other new wide release was dramatic thriller Side Effects that prescribed third with a decent bow of $9.6 million.
Also sorta-new was a stereoscopic version of 1986’s Top Gun that grossed $1.9 million at 300 venues. In the niches, activity was fierce among Indian imports. China box-office tsunami Lost in Thailand ($200 million box office) hardly brought in the New Year with a bang, grossing just $28,400 from 35 screens. The “Oscar Bump” seems to have been reserved for Silver Linings Playbook, though Argo‘s re-release is doing well.
Read the full article »Friday Estimates
Universal’s “Giant Heads Of Comedy” ad campaign for the not-well-reviewed Identity Thief worked like gangbusters, likely heading to the biggest opening of 2013 so far. Also opening, Soderbergh’s last pre-retirement theatrical release, Side Effects to a touch over $7 million. And Top Gun IMAX has an icy launch.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Side Effects
Mara has another role that, like her Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which paled next to the original by Noomi Rapace), may be a little too dark for her — though her Emily is enough of a cipher to let the story work.
Read the full article »20W2O: All Over But The “And The Oscar Goes To”ing
So what is The Academy Awards show? It is a celebration of film and everything that film means to people. People tune in because it presents itself as the definer of quality (however ridiculous that may seem at times). People are interested in the story behind the story… the glamor… what actors are really like behind the mask of performance. People tune in for the race of it all. And people tune in because they are hoping to be surprised in some exciting way in real time.
Read the full article » 2 Comments »The DVD Wrapup
House of Cards, Flight, Peter Pan, Cabaret, Narayama, Hello I Must Be Going, PA4, Vreeland, Side By Side and more…
Read the full article »Gurus o’ Gold: Voting Begins In 2 Days (1/2)
The Gurus are ranking all 24 categories for you, just a couple of days before the voting for the finals. From Best Picture to Best Documentary Short, our best guesses are here for you.
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on DVDs: Flight
Flight is also a very entertaining movie, and its very mutability and changeability — the way it hops from genre to genre, mood to mood, from high action and high entertainment to high seriousness, is a large part of what makes it so compellingly enjoyable.
Read the full article »The Weekend Report
In honor of the Super Bowl, no thinking today… just a chart.
Read the full article »Friday Estimates
The top of the chart remains a horror show, this time with a comic edge. Warm Bodies, Hansel, Gretel, and Mama take the #2 and #4 spots, with the still-growing Silver Linings Playbook stepping up into the #3 slot. SLP also passes Zero Dark Thirty, both in daily gross and overall domestic gross. Meanwhile, Lincoln passes $170m today, Django Unchained $150m tomorrow, and Les Misérables $140m today.
Read the full article »Sundance Review: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Lowery’s Texas, simmering, shimmering, altogether gorgeous, is a place of extraordinary ordinariness and the simplest details sing: Ruth’s simple white dress in an early scene, lightly cinched with thin rope, barelegged in boots with the tongues nearly loose; a second-story view of a street corner at dawn, similar to a quietly haunting shot in Badlands; a sandwich in wax paper folded just so; fingers tickling the dark under a bar counter, finding, of course, a sawed-off double barrel; shadows as deep as daylight is bright, the warmth of particular shadows that fall to black just past faces.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Bullet to the Head
Stallone and Hill both came in at the end of the ‘70s, they both hit their commercial peaks in the ‘80s. But I don’t think a lot of their latter movies in that decade did them much good, however rich those shows might have made them. In Bullet to the Head which shouldn’t be confused with John Woo’s Hong Kong 1990 bone-crusher, or with the German movie Knife in the Head by Reinhard Hauff, or with “Bullet in the Schnozzola,” which I just made up), they’re both back to fantasizing.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Farewell, My Queen; Ten Best Movies, 2012
We know she is doomed. Much of the tension of the film comes from our own wonderment at when the Queen and the King and the court will realize it too. Instead they act, in the few days (July 14-17, 1789) that we and Sidonie watch them, as if only a temporary disturbance—a tempest in a pastry shop—were underway, not the end of the world.
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