MCN Originals Archive for October, 2014

20 Weeks To Oscar: Sell Short

In the real world, where studios are just selling movies with massive marketing campaigns, the marketing windows have shrunk in recent years. Big TV buys can wait for 3 weeks out if the awareness has been pumped up via publicity for the months and months before. Have Oscar campaigners taken this lesson to heart? Are the early September festivals just an awareness play, followed by a 6-to-8 week window of lingering, and then the real campaign in the course of just a few weeks?

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Wilmington on Movies: Gone Girl

Even if you’ve never read the book or seen the movie (which may well be the case), you probably think you sort of know what’s going to happen next. But you probably don’t. Gone Girl, which Flynn has cunningly imagined and craftily, stunningly wrote, and which Fincher has visualized with all the eerie expertise which usually marks his high-style crime movies (including Fight Club, Se7en, The Game, Zodiac, Panic Room, and even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), is, like many another thriller of its type, dependent on how far we’re willing to suspend disbelief. But, in the realms of bestseller-turned-moviedom, Gone Girl is a cut or two above and definitely better than most — full of not always guessable tricks and twists, told in a tense, taut, racy, mostly engrossing style and boasting a lot of tangy, sharply drawn characters, very well played by a very good cast.

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Halloween Gift guide: Universal Monsters, Vincent Price, Pee-wee, Nightbreed and More

Even Charlie Brown couldn’t have imagined the extent of the violence caused by pumpkin fanatics in New Hampshire and, traditionally, by students in Madison and Carbondale. I can think of several better ways to kill time while waiting for dawn to rise on All Saints Day or, if you prefer, Día de Muertos. It is in this spirit that DVD Wrapup presents the first of its annual gift guides.

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Review: Interstellar (non-spoiler)

I don’t really want to write this review.

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The Weekend Report

Audiences proved game for Ouija and placed it at the top of the charts with an estimated $20.1 million. That left the session’s other incoming wide release, actioner John Wick, with the consolation prize of $14.2 million. In regional release, inspirational high school football yarn 23 Blast failed to score with a $347,000 tally from 617 scrimmages. Another flood of incoming exclusives provided a few encouraging (and better) results including Swedish Oscar submission Force Majeure that entered with $23,400 from two screens. The American indie comedy Laggies also opened well with $81,700 at six sites and the Edward Snowden affair provided Citizenfour with an excellent $117,000 box office from five engagements.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Ouija will probably be the sole $20m-grosser for the weekend, though it is possible—as is often the case with horror films—that it drops so quickly that it comes up short. Good holds for Gone Girl And Disney’s Alexander, etc. Nice expansion for St. Vincent. And strong exclusive launches for Laggies and Citizenfour.

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20 Weeks To Oscar: Surveying The Board

Interstellar lands this week.

That leaves Unbroken, The Gambler, Selma, American Sniper, A Most Violent Year, Into The Woods, Big Eyes, and Exodus: Gods & Men

That’s a lot of movies, given an already pretty narrow field.

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Larry Gross on the Passing of L. M. Kit Carson

Kit Carson’s passing really got me.

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The DVD Wrapup: Le Chef, For a Woman, Canopy, Snowpiercer, Sexina, Sleeping With Fishes, Johnny Thunders, Dorothea Lange … More

In a setup that could have been written by climate-change deniers, Snowpiercer describes what happens after an untested cooling agent – think, Ice-nine from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” – is introduced into the upper atmosphere. In 20 years, it turns what might have been an inconvenient loss of beachfront property into a global catastrophe. Survivors of the freeze-out have been packed on a very special “miracle” train, in which passengers are divided into haves and have-nots, and frozen seas allow access to global destinations. Those in the rear half of the train look has if they had been shoved aboard the 1:10 to Siberia, while the passenger in front enjoy privileges commonly reserved for the ruling elite.

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The Weekend Report

The Second World War thundered into multiplexes in the form of Fury and topped the charts with an estimated $23.6 million opening salvo. The two other national bows included Guillermo Del Toro-produced animated fiesta The Book of Life slotting third with $16.9 million and three-hankie The Best of Me striking few Sparks, remaining a few sniffles behind at $10.2 million. Platformers ranged from a drop dead $310,000 result for Jason Reitman’s sixth moral tale, Men, Women & Children, at 608 theaters to a tempo-setting $202,000 bounce for percussive stamina test Whiplash at 21 venues.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Fury rolls out to $8.8m on Friday, including over $1m on Thursday night. The two other openers are soft, though Book of Life could get a boost to a near-$19m weekend as family audiences land on Saturday. And Birdman soars on 4 screens, looking at $100k+ per-screen for the weekend. Also pulling more than $10k per screen for the weekend in exclusive release are The Tale of Princess Kaguya and Listen Up Philip.

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Gurus o’ Gold: After New York…

This week, the Gurus take on Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, and Director. And if The Gurus are right at this point, all five of these individual honors would got to first-time winners and 3 of the 5 would have never been nominated before.

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The Gronvall Report: Theodore Melfi On St. Vincent

From the opening scene of the new movie St. Vincent, where he’s telling a joke in a bar, all the way through the closing credits, Bill Murray creates yet another memorably flippant curmudgeon.

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The DVD Wrapup: Venus in Fur, Witching & Bitching, Chinese Puzzle, Persecuted, Bill Morrison, Kingpin, Courage the Cowardly Dog … More

Say what you will about Roman Polanski–now 81, believe it or not–the man still knows how to make a movie.

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The Gronvall Report: Damien Chazelle on WHIPLASH

Artistry plus adrenaline proves the winning formula for Whiplash the pulsating new musical drama and second feature from French-American writer-director Damien Chazelle. The Sony Pictures Classics release won both the Grand Jury Prize (Dramatic) and the Audience Award (Dramatic) when it premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, setting off a chain reaction of kudos that is reverberating months later, well into awards season.

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The Weekend Report

Despite considerable heat from new releases, Gone Girl held onto the top spot for the current frame with an estimated $26.8 million. Four new films entered the marketplace with Dracula Untold coming closest with $23.4 million. The remaining trio included family-friendly Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day that grossed $18.9 million, courtroom/bedroom drama The Judge at $13.3 million and the steamy Addicted fogging up an impressive $7.5 million.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Drac takes a bite out of Amazing Amy with an Untold $8.9 million to Gone Girl‘s $8.1. Sundance fave Whiplash brings the tempo with over $6,000 per at six jazz rooms. Feel-good pop-doc Meet The Mormons makes a surprising entry at number 10 with a $1.2 million gross.

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The DVD Wrapup: Million Dollar Arm, Edge of Tomorrow, Million Ways to Die, Sleeping Beauty, To Be Takei, Zappa, Dusk Till Dawn, Hemlock Grove, Houdini … More

Because of baseball’s unique learning curve, Million Dollar Arm probably could have been set in any country where cricket, soccer or, even, camel racing are king. The only thing known about baseball by the boys who participated in the contest is that it requires a player to throw an orb covered in horsehide toward an opponent with a bat in his hand, pretty much like cricket.

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21 Weeks To Oscar – Carlos & Joey & Cash, Oh My! (Part 2 of 2)

Should anyone really care that Joey Berlin has built a “critics” group that now affords him a rather significant annual payday? Does it matter than Carlos de Abreu made up awards out of nothing but the contents of his giant scrotal sack and now has gotten rich on the money that returns virtually nothing of value to the studios? Eighty-something foreign-language speakers have made themselves seem worth much, much more than the time of day because they have a TV show that has been successfully and inaccurately positioned as an Oscar precursor… should we care? The Academy has made The Oscars less and less about movies and more and more about being like the Jimmy Fallon show with statues (Oscar nominee beer pong, coming this spring!) because they are obsessed with being cutting edge, when the only real distinction of the organization is the many years it takes to get invited to join, thus given its awards real weight… does it matter?

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21 Weeks To Oscar – Carlos & Joey & Cash, Oh My! (Part 1 of 2)

How could I write about what a con the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was – and is – with its eight-something barely-employed writers puffing up with self-importance and raping studio coffers all year long while showing no semblance of journalistic integrity whatsoever, and be charmingly amused by Carlos who made up awards, chose winners by himself in negotiations with distributors, with no other purpose than to line his own pockets? I was being a hypocrite.

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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