MCN Originals Archive for June, 2016

The DVD Wrapup: Aferim!, WTF, Rams, Family Fang and more

Although slavery hasn’t been a taboo subject for exploitation by Hollywood filmmakers, it took Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave to fully dramatize the brutality and dehumanization inherent in the long-accepted practice for a new generation of viewers. From Romania,Aferim! tells a completely unexpected story about slavery, this time as practiced against Gypsies, Tartars, Jews and Muslims in Eastern Europe from the mid-1300s to the mid-1800s.

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Rush to Judgment: The Legend Of Tarzan

The things that are wrong, or wrong-headed with the latest incarnation of The Legend of Tarzan, are myriad and numerous.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Shallows

The Shallows is a genuinely scary movie thriller that spooks you because, in a way, it seems so real — this tense, taut movie manage to get by without ghosts, monsters, supernatural maniacs or The Devil, indeed without almost anything that absolutely couldn’t happen (maybe) in the real world. Like Jaws, it’s the white-knuckle, full-throttle story of a battle between human vs. shark: a visually voluptuous thriller, set in a mostly deserted stretch of Australian coast, about a great white shark that traps a young surfer and medical student on an ocean-bound rock and buoy only about 200 yards from shore — a deserted beach near an ocean that is mostly empty except for that trapped girl and that toothy shark and one other creature we‘ll introduce later. (You’ll like him.)

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Pride, Unprejudiced: The Look Of Silence

“The films avoid a kind of journalistic or historical account. They provide only enough information as required for the viewer to understand the next scene. The film doesn’t become a primer about Indonesian history. I think the films avoid being about Indonesia as such, by focusing on the perpetrator and the men around him in The Act of Killing, and one family in The Look of Silence. Instead of becoming smaller, they grow, because they could be your brothers.”

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The Weekend Report

The story was Dory as the Blue Tang clan of Finding Dory boop boop ditem whatem an estimated $73.2 million in its second weekend. That was bad news for Independence Day: Resurgence that settled into second with $41.6 million. The session’s other two national openers saw upbeat results for The Shallows , churning $16.2 million, while Civil War lesson Free State of Jones struggled to $7.5 million.

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Reviews: Free State of Jones and Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Free State of Jones harkens back to the Civil War era and its aftermath for an arcane and fascinating piece of time that eluded even Ken Burns. Set in Jones County, Mississippi, It centers on disaffected Southerners struggling through a war and a cause unrelated to their daily existence but nonetheless demanding sacrifice they find unduly oppressive.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

The world is under attack again… this time, it’s a blue fish swimming right through and past a Will Smith-less ID4-2. Finding Dory is way out in front of any animated film in domestic and will actually be the biggest 10-day grosser of the year at the end of this weekend, passing Captain America: Civil War. Dory is pretty much guaranteed to pass BvS: Apology Tour 1 to give Disney the Top 4 grossers of the year worldwide before August 1. Jaume Collet-Serra’s latest, The Shallows, opens right between his last two films, which starred Liam Neeson. Decent, but hardly a bell-ringer. Free State of Jones is another soft opener for STX, a company filled with veterans with smarts that picks hard-to-market movies that prove, repeatedly, to be hard to market. Swiss Army Man blows away all the other indie openers with a per-screen on three that looks to top $40k.

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The DVD Wrapup: Knight of Cups, Greek Wedding 2, Wondrous Boccaccio, Anesthesia and more

Knight of Cups couldn’t have been made by anyone less contemplative or obsessed with the dialectics of beauty than Malick. Before capturing the attention of the film world with the visually stunning and deeply moving Badlands and Days of Heaven, he apprenticed under some of the industry’s savviest professionals. His stellar education in the humanities would only come to the fore, however, after three individual hiatuses, totaling 32 years.

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Wilmington on Movies: Central Intelligence

Central Intelligence surprises you — or surprised me, at any rate.

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Pride, Unprejudiced: Knight Of Cups, Anomalisa, Embrace Of The Serpent

Guilt as gossamer, memory as wraith, woman as other, love as labor lost: Terrence Malick’s seventh released feature, Knight of Cups, years in the shaping, is dense yet featherlight, elusive yet specific, a wonderment comprising one once-worldly man’s memories, the tide of a single life pummeled by remorseless undertow.

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The Weekend Report

Finding Dory propelled to a record estimated $136.4 million. There was also good news for the other national debut—pumped-up action comedy Central Intelligence—with a  finish of $34.4 million. The frame’s only significant expansion was Genius , which maintained its bottom line. Lobster continues to be a surprise success with a current cume of $6.7 million, rivalling its international run of $8.5 million.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Finding Dory opens with a 34% bump over the previous best Pixar opening ever (Toy Story 3). Buy how will this be reflected in the 3-day gross, given the 2010 marketplace vs today’s? Based on last summer’s Minions, Dory is swimming towards $137m opening… but no one will know for sure until later today. A little Hart and a big Johnson pays off with an opening day slightly off of Hart’s top showing, Ride Along. Still, it should give WB its second weekend in a row with a $35m+ opening, its third such launch in a year with 5 titles opening between $9m and $20m. And Tickled has a shot at $10k per screen on two.

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Wilmington on Movies: Genius

Thomas Wolfe was an American literary phenomenon: a North Carolina-born novelist and prodigy who hoped to write books of Shakespearean verbal grandeur, of Tolstoyan dramatic scope and Dickensian humanity, and to live a life to fit those vast ambitions. He’s also an artist who tends to be ignored or underrated these days. A pity, because whenever you read one of his huge novels (especially “Look Homeward Angel” and “Of Time and the River”), his talent and his mixed but munificent literary gifts flame right off the page at you.

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The DVD Wrapup: 45 Years, 10 Cloverfield Lane, London Has Fallen, Wenders/Franco, La chienne and more

Once upon a time in Hollywood, movies that featured elderly characters played by venerable stars could be counted on to attract a decent-sized slice of the box-office pie and command the attention of awards voters.

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Pride, Unprejudiced: A Brighter Summer Day; Hail, Caesar!

Its multitude of astonishments include a sure, novelistic mastery of accruing details in an expansive shape that is built upon observation of the smallest moments, gestures, blood-boiling fixations, fetish objects, mortal desires, moral frustrations.

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Weekend Estimates

The Conjuring 2 manifested an estimated $40.4 million, with game-inspired Warcraft at $24.3 million, while Now You See Me 2 prestidigitated $22.8 million.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Conjuring 2

People who like scary ghost horror movies, from Frankenstein to The Haunting, probably are partial, at least a little, to that awesome, icky sensation of being plunged into sucking swamps of cinematic dread, then rescued (maybe spuriously, maybe not) at the very last possible millisecond—a sensation you may feel quite a few times in The Conjuring 2.

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Friday Estimates

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DVD Wrapup: Zootopia, Hail Caesar, 13 Hours, Anomalisa, The Confirmation, Touched With Fire, One More Time, Tom Waits and more

The messages in Disney’s new animated gem, Zootopia, are so overtly liberal, I’m surprised none of the Republican candidates for president didn’t it condemn it during their debates for being subversive. Of course, there’s still time for Donald Trump to propose constructing a wall around the Burbank studios, lest undocumented-alien bunnies, sheep and foxes attempt to enter the country illegally. On that count, anyway, politicians who choke on words like inclusivity, empowerment, diversity and co-existence are several days late and at least a billion dollars short.

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Los Angeles Film Festival 2016 Wrap

The good news for LAFF is it emerged with a relatively strong program, albeit based upon my limited personal experience. I’ll just add the fact that I didn’t see as many films as was my intention. Still, such films as Blood Stripe, Kicks and 11:55 fulfilled a mandate of diversity without employing it as a crutch.

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MCN Originals

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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