Burlesque Archives - Movie City News Movie City News

Posts Tagged ‘Burlesque’

WILMINGTON ON DVD: 127 Hours, Bambi, Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy, Burlesque, Faster

Monday, March 14th, 2011

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW & BLU-RAY

127 Hours (Four Stars)
U.S.: Danny Boyle, 2010 (2oth Century Fox)

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is a great real-life survival story — horrific and inspirational, stunningly crafted, and loaded with suspense, even though most of us already know all or part of the film’s story, and most probably its shocking climax. It’s about climber/explorer Aron Ralston (James Franco), trapped and alone for five days in a crevasse in a little-traveled area of Utah‘s Canyonlands National Park, his cell phone unusable, his arm stuck between stretches of rock, and ultimately forced to make a terrifying choice in order to have a chance at survival.

Ralston did survive of course. He also wrote a book about the experience called “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” and most people within range of a TV — or not actually caught between rocks themselves — know what he had to do to get himself free. That doesn’t lessen the tension here. As Alfred Hitchcock often said, suspense depends not on surprise but on our strong identification with characters trapped or in crises — which is certainly what director Danny Boyle, co-writer Simon Beaufoy and a marvelous crew (including editor Jon Harris and cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak) manage to set up and execute, stunningly, here.

Wonderfully told by Boyle, it’s also searingly well played by James Franco, in the second of his two top-of-the-line 2010 lead performances. (The other was a wholly dissimilar but equally brilliantly done assignment as beat poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl.”)

Watching Franco here, as he plunges himself into a part so taxing physically, psychologically and even spiritually, and does it so brilliantly, you tend to forgive him for that awful, howlingly embarrassing turn he gave as co-host (with the equally sabotaged Anne Hathaway) at the last Oscar Show. Not their fault. After all, Franco and Hathaway didn’t pick themselves as hosts. Or write those empty, fatuous lines. Or get hung out to dry by the whole bankrupt Looks and Youth Uber Alles philosophy of many current movie and TV execs.

Memo to future Oscar producers: Don’t keep engaging in the great American media masturbation fantasy. Think of those two guys your writers referenced on the Oscar Show to try to excuse yourselves. Think of Bob Hope. Think of Billy Crystal. Think of what they brought to the table. Think of Robin Williams, whom you guys keep mistakenly passing over as the Oscar Show host. (He’s unpredictable? He’s dangerous? He’ll be bleeped? Bleepin’ great!) For the Oscars, you need for your hosts comedians or comedy-minded actors, funny guys and gals who can think on their feet, ad lib if necessary, generate good times, swiftly respond to everything, milk sentiment when needed, and above all, keep things going and recover from catastrophes. Witty, not pretty, is what you want in your host. (That said, Jeff Bridges, with nary a laugh, had the best line deliveries of that whole awful evening. Not that Jeff is all that pretty. And he is, after all, The Big Lebowski. Dude!)

Here, Franco has a damned good script, a damned good director. And damned good fellow moviemakers who know what they’re doing. Forget the Oscars. (127 Hours, by the way, probably deserved some statuettes it didn’t get.) Here, Franco makes the most of what he’s got. So did Ralston.
Extras: Commentary by Boyle, Beaufoy and producer Christian Colson; Deleted scenes, Featurette.

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC & BLU-RAY

Bambi Diamond Edition (Blu-ray and DVD Combo) (Two Discs) (Four Stars)
U.S.: David Hand, 1942 (Walt Disney)

Walt Disney‘s Bambi is one of those classic family movies that children never forget, that adults still love, and that tends to make children of us all as we watch it.

I don’t want to come across as too much of a softie, or as an easy mark for Disneyfied sentiment. But aw shucks, how can you help it? This lush 1942 film adaptation of the classic Felix Salten book — now released in Blu-ray, with every color shimmering, every brush stroke gleaming, every animal character (from Bambi, his regal dad and his loving and lovable mother, to that fussbudget old owl and Bambi’s charming, stalwart chums Thumper the bunny and Flower the skunk) absolutely aglow with life — plays just as well and just as beautifully, as it did nearly 70 years ago, on its first release.

SPOILER ALERT

It’s one of the great movie nature stories and one of the great rite-of-passage children’s tales — and like Lassie Come Home, The Yearling and The Red Pony, it’s one of a great cycle of animal movies in the ‘40. Thanks to Disney and his matchless ‘30s-‘40s animation team — headed here by director David Hand — the movie unforgettably gives us the times and seasons in the life of the princely little deer Bambi: his widely celebrated birth (as the new Prince of the Forest), his first faltering bent-legged steps, the tenderly wise tutelage by his mother (while his royal stag dad is busy King-ing it up elsewhere ), his meetings with his forest friends and future wife, the russet-colored falling leaves of autumn, the cold snows of winter, crisis and tragedy, and finally, poetically, the new spring. There we find the problems of “twitter-pation” (a Disney term for emerging sexuality), and finally, the renewal and birth of the next Prince.

END OF ALERT

Of course, Disney’s classic feature cartoon tale of animals in the forest, the cycles of life, of mothers and fathers and their young, has a pro-ecology theme that’s gotten even more powerful and topical through the years — especially when we watch the movie’s lovely, painterly forest ravaged and burned, and Bambi’s parents and friends threatened or harmed, by the carelessness and brutality of the movie’s chief villain: that shadowy, menacing, rifle-toting, mostly unseen but always dangerous figure whom the animals shudderingly call: “MAN!”

The movie, of course, is an animal‘s-eye view of the beauties of nature and the threats to it, and of the hunt, and it‘s probably done as much over the years to make movie audiences conscious of that beauty and those threats, as any nature-loving film endeavor up to those other great popular masterpieces of the whole ecology cinema canon: the wondrous David Attenborough-Alistair Fothergill BBC documentaries Planet Earth, Life of Birds, Life of Mammals and Blue Planet. (If you haven’t seen these movies on TV or DVD, you’ve missed a cinematic revelation.)

But those British movies, splendid, educational and knowingly and enthusiastically narrated (by Attenborough) as they are, don’t have, as Bambi does, a guaranteed pipeline to our heartstrings: characters we feel we know, life experiences that become our own, a great sacred natural cartoon domain that becomes our spiritual homeland as well as Bambi‘s. They don’t have the little spotted fawn Bambi hiding behind his mother from his first (and last) crush Faline, or the bashful little self-conscious skunk Flower (Uncle Pepe Le Pew’s unlikely American nephew?), or Bambi’s great self-sacrificing mom nestling and protecting him and calling for him frantically as the hunters go on their rampage in the Great Meadow.

They don‘t have the little deer‘s groovy, chubby smart-alec little sidekick Thumper to keep thump-thump-thumping and wise-cracking away, offering pearls of forest wisdom like his defiantly non-correct version of his dad’s doggerel homily “Eatin’ greens is a special treat. It makes long ears and great big feet …But it sure is awful stuff to eat!” (“I made up that last part myself.”)

Bambi was the last of the five great animated features with which Disney impressively kicked off his and his studio’s feature cartoon filmography, and which, in many ways, Disney and the studio have never surpassed (or equaled) since. And, like the others — 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (also directed by Hand), 1940’s Pinocchio and Fantasia, and 1941’s Dumbo — it’s a still-luminous showcase for the genius and craft of all his artists, their talents meshing back then in a grand synergy that still seems amazingly personal (Walt’s personality, of course), staggeringly ambitious and amazingly accomplished.

It took barely a decade, after all, for the Disney studio to go from the “primitive” black and white line drawing style of Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy to the incredible color, detail and lushness of “Snow White” and the others. A decade!

Bambi is a movie that has never lost its own youth, even as the ages and seasons pass inevitably in the movie itself. For many years, Bambi and most of the rest of the great first five, were regularly re-released to succeeding generations of children and their parents, until we all seemed to know them, and until the relative financial failures of some of those movies on first release (notably Pinocchio and Fantasia) were finally wiped out. Like the cycle of nature, the theme reworked in the Bambi-like 1994 hit The Lion King, these movies were always renewed and renewing, always returning, forever young.

I first saw Bambi as a child (with my mother, of course) in the ’50s. I saw it again, for this column, as an older (old?) man in a brand new restored 35mm print at Chicago‘s Museum of Contemporary Art, accompanied by a Q&A session with a current Disney Studio animator and by the actor who, as a boy voiced young Bambi, the still vigorous and sharp retired U.S. Marine Donnie Dunagan.

It will probably be the last time I ever see Bambi in a 35 print in a theatre, maybe the last time I‘ll see it ever. (I always hoped I’d see it some day though, with kids of my own.)

But the movie, unlike the Prince of the Forest, hasn’t aged. Most of it never will. And what has aged in it has become sometimes even more precious. Bambi, whether in 35 mm, DVD, Blu-ray or not, whatever the format, whatever your age, whatever the season, is a picture that should be seen and re-seen — especially by us, humanity, MAN.

Extras: Both DVD and Blu-ray versions; Introduction by Diane Disney Miller; Deleted scenes; Deleted song; Inside Walt’s Story Meetings; Game; Interactive galleries; Disneypedia: Bambi’s Forest Friends.

PICK OF THE WEEK: BOX SET

Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy (Three Stars)
U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2003-2008 (Walt Disney)

Avast, ye lubbers! Here are three salty-dog adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp at his most playfully anti-heroic), on the high seas and in the Caribbean colonial digs, battling it out with stuffy snobs and nabobs (Jonathan Pryce, at his most playfully icky), ghostly buccaneers (led by Geoffrey Rush, at his most playfully villainous), and incidentally aiding two not exactly star-crossed lovers, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom. (Actually they’re more like stardom-blessed lovers).

I didn’t much like the first of these movies, I enjoyed the second, and I would have enjoyed the third, if writing about it hadn’t been such a horrible experience, if a group of bloodthirsty pirates hadn’t attacked and boarded me old ship, maties, and made many of my old friends (and many of the best of them) walk the plank, and then sent the ship on an orgy of brutal high jinks, inane new navigation charts, sadistic abuse, inhuman and ruthless cutting and slashing, and gross dim-witted piratical revelry that made the place a living if sometimes outrageously comic Hell.

Soon the once proud old tall ship started sinking, sinking…But the word is that on spooky moonlit Caribbean nights, you can see that high-masted old vessel, its sails in tatters, its poopdeck in ruins, still drifting forlornly on cold dark waves, and you can hear, ever so faintly, wild mad laughter and the distant ghostly voices of that pirate crew, singing of fifteen execs on a dead man‘s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of (very expensive) rum, of the joys of bankruptcy, of looted pension funds and of grave-dancing grave-robbers from Hell.

Avast, ye lubbers! Keelhaul the swabs! It’s too bad Errol Flynn wasn’t there to retake the ship.

Enough of horror stories. Actually, in the old days, when I lived in Los Angeles, and used to visit the original Anaheim Disneyland regularly, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” boat trip was my absolute favorite. (I suppose that stamps me as lowbrow and somewhat lower-class. So be it. Ya swabs.) The movies, which came later (which were, in fact, inspired by the Ride) are pale reflections of the wondrous ultimate 3D spectacle of that boat trip itself — a masterpiece of theme park grandeur that sends you cruising through the waves and an inky Caribbean night, with pirate automatons (smarter than the ones I knew) attacking ships, stealing treasure and then wine-wenching-and-wassailing it in their orgiastic pirate haunts. I made sure we took the ride every time we were there. The movies aren’t as good, although they do offer Depp in his best Keith Richards impersonation, as Jumping Jack Sparrow. And you can play these in your living room, without getting wet or running the risk of being lashed to the mast or slashed by a cutlass.

Speaking of Flynn, since it’s obvious that Michael Curtiz‘s classic 1935 Captain Blood lies partly behind this Pirate trilogy (and the pirate ride before it) , and since TCM/Warners recently re-released “Blood” on a Flynn box with The Sea Hawk and the dry land swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood, you should know that the Flynn box is cheaper, and a better box than this — though less of a high tech wonder. But high tech isn’t everything, especially on the high seas.

Includes: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2003) (Two and a half Stars) Captain Jack starts chasing spooks and ships. With Depp, Rush, Bloom, Knightley, Pryce.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2007) Three Stars.

Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) climbs on board. With the above cast, plus Nighy and Stellan Skarsgard.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2008) Three Stars.

More sea battles: a wearing experience for some, fun for others. With the above casts, plus Chow Yun Fat, and, as Jack’s dad, the great Keith Richards. (“Good to be in the Caribbean! Good to be anywhere!”)

Extras: Featurettes; Blooper reel, game, Interactive tour.OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

Faster (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: George Tillman, Jr., 2010 (CBS Films)

DRIVER. COP. KILLER.

Those three stark titles flash over the grim visages and grimmer physiognomies of the unholy trio of main characters in Faster — stamping them on our consciousness just like the iconic intros for Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. (Waaa-wa-wa!) Here, they’re the nicknames for three deadly foes in the new road-runner neo-noir thriller Faster: Three murderous players spinning around a race track of death, hatred and revenge, in a vintage 1970 black Chevy Chevelle (Driver’s), a Bakersfield police car (Cop‘s) and a Ferrari (Killer‘s). The fast. The faster. The fastest. The Good. The Bad. And The Ugly.

Cast as the threesome in this visually snazzy but whacked-out neo-noir, are three actors trapped in parts that expose them to constant danger, frequent ridicule and sometimes make no sense at all. Dwayne Johnson is Driver, the ex-con on a mission from Hell. Billy Bob Thornton is Cop, the dissolute, disheveled fuzz who’s on the case and on the skids. And Oliver Jackson-Cohen is Killer, a stylish Brit hit man who looks a bit like Jake Gyllenhaal and does yoga.

Or should we get into the terse, monosyllabic spirit of things encouraged by writers Tony and Joe Gayton (The Salton Sea) and director George Tillman, Jr., (Soul Food), recall Johnson’s superstar wrestler heyday and I.D. them as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Billy “The Bob” Thornton and Oliver “The Jackson” Cohen?
The Rock, The Bob. The Jackson. Driver will kill you, Cop will collar you. Killer will teach you the lotus position.

According to Faster — a sometimes exciting, sometimes really silly thriller that would like to be the new Point Blank, The Driver or Kill Bill, but can‘t quite make it into third gear — this deadly trio of characters are three existential pawns in a wild game of murder, revenge and redemption, waged on the bloody streets, oily oil fields and desolate deserts of Bakersfield.

The Rock’s Driver is on a mad, monomaniacal revenge spree after being sprung from a ten year prison sentence. The Bob’s Cop is Loser Number One, it seems: a slovenly, unshaven detective, with parenting problems, a skeptical partner, Cicero (played by Carla Gugino), a heroin habit, and — always a danger sign — only weeks to go until retirement.

And the Jackson’s Killer is a retired financial whiz, and self-improvement nut who takes on assassinations for a lark, has been hired to whack Driver by one of his potential victims, but has promised his supermodel-looking girlfriend, Lily (Maggie Grace), that he’ll settle down to smell the roses and all the good things in life — great sex, target practice, financial chicanery, and yoga — after this one last job (another danger sign).

Oh, I forgot the other lead characters: the cars. Or CARS. They’re pretty damned important here too, especially that constant scene-stealer, the Chevy Chevelle that Driver uses to do 180 degree skid turns, speed against the traffic flow, and outrace other muscle cars while in reverse.

Driver loves to drive, sometimes in the wrong lane. But mostly he‘s hell-bent on revenge, from the moment at the beginning when he marches down the cell block floor, sneers at the Warden’s (Tom Berenger) good wishes, races to a local junkyard, pops into the Chevy, gets a list of his enemies and stoolies and betrayers from a crooked investigator and starts wreaking havoc on all the murderous vermin who double-crossed him in a heist job. On the slime beyond slime and the scum beneath scum who killed his brother and got Driver sent off to prison where he apparently became a millionaire, selling contraband cigarettes or porn or advertising or something. (Maybe it was bootleg DVDs of Point Blank and Escape from Alcatraz.) .

SPOILER ALERT
Like Lee Marvin‘s Walker in Point Blank (called Parker in Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s original novel, “The Hunter“) Driver wants to find the rats who screwed him. But, unlike Walker (who’ll settle for his money) Driver won’t stop until each one of them suffers and dies, in as photogenic a way as possible. Telemarketer. Dirty Old Man. Bathroom Thug. And all the rest, including Evangelist (Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje), screaming for mercy and supplying the author’s message. (I shouldn’t josh. That was the best scene in the movie.)
END OF SPOILER

Faster, well-photographed by Michael Grady, tries for a neo-noir-gone-Leone kick. But it’s undermined by its own would-be heartfelt sleaze factor. Billy Bob is always pretty good (though I wish he’d use a French or German accent some time) and he manages to keep a straight face here (it must have been hard), despite playing a Cop who has survived even though he shoots up in johns, comes to work unshaven and in need of a fix and has trouble getting his kid to Little League games.

Johnson plays Driver with few words, the usual ripped physique, a constant glower, and lots of hammerlock charisma. Hell, it’s a better part than Tooth Fairy.

Jackson-Cohen — whose Killer calls his therapist between hits — is sometimes upstaged by his own cell-phone, whose ring tone is, you guessed it, the Ennio Morricone title theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

One thing bewildered me, and has bewildered others. How can Driver — a six foot plus bald muscle-bound hunk of a hulk, scowling and marching around like The Terminator with an upset stomach — keep whizzing around the town, blasting victims before surveillance cameras, killing people right and left, have his mug shot plastered everywhere on TV as Suspect No. One in a crime wave, constantly engage in high speed chases and massive traffic violations everywhere, and yet never seem to get fingered by the public or a stray cop? Is everyone in Bakersfield on heroin?

Despite myself, I enjoyed part of this. I like it sometimes when the slime beyond slime gets iced on screen. And this movie, for all its sadistic folderol, has a smidgen of humanity. I liked Tillman‘s Soul Food,” a good-hearted ensemble family movie, and I appreciated the occasional humanity Tillman tried to mix in with the standard brutality and melodrama here.

But one of the reasons film noir became so classic, is that the writing and the original stories back in the ‘40s were often so damned good. Hammett. Cain. Chandler. Woolrich. Hughes. Hecht. Polonsky. Huston. Thompson. Most of the ‘70s neo-noirs were well-written too. (Hard to beat Bob Towne‘s Chinatown.) But, script-wise, it’s been a crapshoot since the ‘70s, and that’s a word I’d apply here too. Crap. Shoot.

The scripts for the post-70s neo-noirs are sometimes absurd and often have happy endings. (A lot of the classic noirs did too, but darker is always better.) I won’t tip the hue here. I don’t want spoil any (absurd) surprises. Unfortunately, Faster is nowhere more absurd than it is at the finish, when it springs three twists so preposterous, you almost wish they had opted instead for, oh I dunno, having the three guys make nice and decide to open up a yoga school together instead. Called “The Good, the Bad and The Ugly: Yoga Masters.”

Love that Chevy Chevelle though. Does it really steer that well in reverse?

Burlesque (Two Stars)
U.S.: Steve Antin, 2010 (Screen Gems)

Cher: Boy can she sing! Christina Aguilera: Boy can she sing and dance! Stanley Tucci: Boy can he act! Burlesque: What a crock of high-gloss…crud. (I‘m aware that kids sometimes cruise the Internet.)

This is one of those “Oh, My God!“ movies. (Excuse me, “Oh my Gosh!“) Even if you don’t say it out loud, you’ll be thinking it every ten minutes or so, maybe every five minutes.

Steve Antin wrote and directed. (Wrote? Directed?) Christina Aguilera is Ali, from Iowa, a girl with a dream. She makes it to L. A. (Oh, my God.) She gets robbed. She finds the Gosh-darnedest place I ever saw allegedly in Hollywood — and I used to live there. It’s a show bar called “Burlesque,“ modeled on Cabaret and Chicago, with that great “Cabaret” alum emcee Alan Cumming as a greeter. He‘ll be wasted here, and I don’t mean on booze or coke.
Up on stage, somewhere in Hollywood (or maybe in Oz), there are barely dressed sexy girl dancers, without poles, lip-synching songs. Cher is up there as owner Tess, lip-synching Cher (herself), in a pretty good tune called “Welcome to Burlesque” (the last time I had any hope for the movie). Soon we find that the club is full of sort-of striptease dancers who wear elaborate costumes, and lip-synch to, say, Marilyn Monroe’s great “Diamonds are a Girl‘s Best Friend” number and other classics, while sort of stripping. Everybody seems to have a number except Cumming, who doesn’t strip and who maybe couldn’t clear the “Cabaret” rights. (Oh, my God.)

Ali watches. She is entranced. (Oh, my God!) She wants to sing, to dance, to take it all off (or maybe put it all on) — which she did back in Iowa in the first scenes, all by herself, in a deserted bar. Tess is skeptical. (Why? Ali sings great.) But Ali, indomitable, just picks up a tray and just starts waitressing and gets hired. Meanwhile Tucci, as Sean the dresser/cohort/“Burlesque” jack-of-all-trades (especially rough), deals out snappy patter while zipping everyone up. Or down. For a brief fleeting minute or so way back when, he was a heterosexual and once even bedded Tess, who still loves him. (Oh, my Gosh!)

Ali still has no home. Never fear. To the rescue comes cutie-pie bartender Jack (Cam Gigandet, trying to Brad Pitt it up). Jack offers his digs, recently vacated by his fiancée. Ali moves in, takes the couch. They don’t sleep together. (Oh, my God!) Somebody is about to foreclose a mortgage on Burlesque, and the evil studly rich guy Marcus (Eric Dane) wants to buy the place, put up condos. He also wants to sleep with Ali and he dates her up and takes her to his swanky digs in the hills, but she’s too busy occupying the couch and not sleeping with Jack. (Oh my gosh and golly!)
One fateful night, another dancer tries to sabotage Ali‘s lip-synch act, but Ali saves the day by actually singing. She sounds just like Christina Aguilera! She becomes a smash hit! (Oh, my God!) Tess, inspired, throws together a new show , with live singing and the house band, in about a day. (Oh, my God!) It’s hit after hit, smash after smash, though there’s not much room in the club, and they chopped up Alan’s one song. But the editors put Ali on the cover of the L. A. Times Calendar section anyway, a venue so prestigious and exclusive they once nixed a cover pic of Robert Altman for a location story on The Player. (I swear.)

Despite this howling success, the mortgage is still due. Ali is still on Jack’s couch. Marcus is still hot to trot and he‘s furrowing his brow and bragging about his millions and his philanthropy. Tess’s old partner throws a drunken fit. Tess yells “I don’t want to put any more tequila on your cornflakes!“ (Savor that line; It’s the best they’ve got.) But one other fateful night, Jack puts on red jammies with little white things, does a strip for Ali, and holds a box of Famous Amos cookies over his thingie. (Oh, My God!)
Well, you get the drift. So, if you want to see this, go ahead. As Mad Magazine used to say all the time, “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.“ (Or words to that effect.)

The music is by Christophe Beck. The songs are all pretty good (though I‘d like more Cher), but not worth suffering through the rest for. Wait for the DVD, so you can just play the songs and skip the drama, the comedy, the mortgage foreclosure, the tequila and cornflakes, Tucci’s zipper technique and Jack‘s red jammies. And Jack’s hidden thingie.(Oh my God!) As they say in Chinatown, I’m doing you a favor — and that’s even if you love Cher, Christina, Tucci and Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. Lip-synched. (Oh, my God!)

Extras: Commentary by director-writer Steve Antin; Alternate opening; Alternate musical numbers; Blooper reel.

Tags: 127 Hours, Bambi, Burlesque, Faster, Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy
Posted in Columns, DVD Reviews, MCN Originals, Movie City News, Reviews, Wilmington | 1 Comment »

Weekend Box Office Report –January 2

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

Haply New Year

True Grit closed the gap with Little Fockers but couldn’t quite overtake the seasonal gag fest. Fockers emerged at the top of the charts with an estimated $26.2 million with Grit a trot behind at $24.5 million.

The closing frame of 2010 provided no new national releases and just two additions to the last gasp of the awards season. The searing drama Blue Valentine provided an opening weekend of $174,000 from four screens while the acclaimed Brit import Another Year bowed on six screens with $117,000.

Estimates for the year peg domestic box office at $10.52 billion, which translates into a 1.5% downturn from 2009. Admissions declined by a more sizable 7% drop largely as a result of premium pricing for 3D and large format movies. Eight of the top 10 top grossing movies of the year fell into that category and 2011 promises even more stereoscopic offerings.

Theater owners are scrambling to convert screens to digital 3D to capitalize in what no one can yet proclaim as either a temporary craze or the future of film going. The enhancements have been a finger in the dike of the eroding audience but with the arrival of 3D home entertainment this year that nagging recession may not abate. And there’s little doubt that the “windows” issue — the time between theatrical and ancillary release — will intensify with exhibition making grudging concessions that can only ramp up bad blood with major suppliers.

This year’s New Year weekend box office experienced a 13% uptick from the Christmas holiday session. However, it was 29% less fulsome than the same period last year when weekend three of Avatar grossed $68.5 million with Sherlock Holmes and Alvin: The Squeakquel adding $36.6 million and $35.2 million respectively.

Adult/awards fare, which includes The Fighter, Black Swan and The King’s Speech — all likely Oscar contenders — held their own with the holiday frivolity. That still leaves seven slots for films as diverse as Toy Story 3 and Blue Valentine in year that most film reviewers have characterized as overall sub-par.

True Grit has already become The Coen Brothers biggest grossing domestic release and actor Jeff Bridges can claim the rare distinction of having two holiday films (Grit, TRON: Legacy) that will gross in excess of $100 million. He’s easily the comeback kid in a year where seemingly more audience-friendly performers (and filmmakers) have taken it on the chin.

__________________________________________________

Weekend Estimates – December 31-January 1, 2010

Title	Distributor	Gross (average)	% change *	Theaters	Cume
Little Fockers	Uni	26.2 (7,380)	-15%	3554	103.1
True Grit	Par	24.5 (7,960)	-1%	3083	86.7
Tron: Legacy	BV	18.4 (5,480)	-4%	3365	131
Yogi Bear	WB	12.6 (3,580)	62%	3515	65.7
Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader	Fox	10.3 (3,500)	9%	2948	87
The Fighter	Par/Alliance	10.0 (3,960)	32%	2534	46.4
Tangled	BV	9.9 (3,820)	53%	2582	167.9
Gulliver’s Travels	Fox	9.0 (2,910)	42%	3089	27.1
Black Swan	Fox Searchlight	8.4 (5,420)	35%	1553	47.3
The King’s Speech	Weinstein Co.	7.5 (10,760)	67%	700	22.7
The Tourist	Sony	6.7 (2,420)	25%	2756	54.7
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows, Part 1*	WB	4.5 (2,580)	32%	1732	283.4
How Do You Know	Sony	4.5 (1,800)	28%	2483	24.9
Megamind	Par	.57 (750)	56%	764	144.1
Unstoppable	Fox	.53 (1,180)	61%	450	79.5
The Social Network	Sony	.47 (1,890)	71%	249	93.2
Burlesque	Sony	.42 (1,270)	19%	330	37.8
Due Date	WB	.31 (770)	10%	404	98.8
127 Hours	Fox Searchlight	.27 (2,620)	42%	103	10.4
Red	Summit	.26 (860)	44%	303	89.5


Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films)		$153.60
% Change (Last Year)		-29%
% Change (Last Week)		13%


Also debuting/expanding
Blue Valentine	Weinstein Co.	.17 (43,500)		4	0.27
Another Year	Sony Classics	.12 (19,550)		6	0.17
Somewhere	Focus	.14 (17,870)	20%	8	0.44
Rabbit Hole	Lionsgate	.13 (3,850)	52%	34	0.42
Casino Jack	IDP	79,700 (4,430)	63%	18	0.23
The Illusionist	Sony Classics	50,200 (16,730)	30%	3	0.13
Country Strong	Sony	42,600 (21,300)	40%	2	0.12

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 23, 2010)

Distributor (releases)	Gross	Market Share
Warner Bros. (30)	1900.7	18.30%
Paramount (20)	1684.9	16.20%
Fox (20)	1470.5	14.10%
Buena Vista (17)	1408.5	13.50%
Sony (26)	1258.5	12.10%
Universal (19)	844.2	8.10%
Summit (11)	522.8	5.00%
Lionsgate (16)	519.6	5.00%
Fox Searchlight (8)	119.5	1.20%
Overture (8)	87.5	0.80%
Focus (8)	75.3	0.70%
CBS (3)	72.7	0.70%
Weinstein Co. (9)	72	0.70%
Sony Classics (22)	59.7	0.60%
MGM (1)	50.4	0.50%
Other * (324)	257.5	2.50%
	10404.3	100.00%
* none greater than .04%

Tags: 127 Hours, Another Year, Black Swan, Blue Valentine, Burlesque, Casino Jack, Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader, Country Strong, Due Date, Gulliver's Travels, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, how do you know, Little Fockers, Megamind, Rabbit Hole, Red, Somewhere, Tangled, The Fighter, The Illusionist, The King's Speech, The Social Network, The Tourist, Tron - Legacy, True Grit, unstoppable, Yogi Bear
Posted in MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News, The Weekend Report | Comments Off on Weekend Box Office Report –January 2

Weekend Box Office Report — December 26

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

Grit and Bear It

Little Fockers and True Grit led the Christmas charge with respective opening debuts estimated at $34 million and $25.5 million that topped weekend movie going. The session also featured a Christmas day bow for the animated Gulliver’s Travels, which netted a two-day gross of $6.9 million.

Bollywood’s seasonal offering Tees Maar Khann rang up an impressive $700,000. However, several other Hindi, Telegu and Tamil releases were non-starters. China’s If You Are the One 2 opened up day-and-date (a first) with its Mainland release and chimed in with a potent $208,000 launch.

The frame also featured a clutch of last-minute releases for award season consideration. Best of the bunch was Venice-prized Somewhere with $148,000 from seven venues. The animated The Illusionist displayed comparable strength with a two-day tally of $52,600 on two screens and a four screen push for Barney’s Version in Canada proved effective with $64,400 (a single U.S. Oscar qualifying run was unreported). Lastly, Country Strong lilted $33,800 from two sneak peeks.

Overall the Christmas session got clobbered with calendar positioning that landed the eve on Friday (expect something similar with New Years). And while an estimated $155 million weekend provided an 11% boost from the prior weekend it translated into a pounding 45% drop from 2009. As the door quickly closes on the year, box office gross has slipped behind the prior year and admissions are approaching close to double digit erosion. A year ago Avatar’s second weekend grossed $75.6 million and debuts of Sherlock Holmes and The Alvin Squeakquel added $62.4 million and $48.9 million respectively.

All that said, tracking wasn’t exactly on target for new entries and holdovers. The third in the Fockers series was expected to render a first weekend of between $40 million and $45 million while the sophomore edition of TRON: Legacy was pegged at $25 million. Conversely True Grit outperformed pundits soothsaying that had it shy of $20 million.

Holiday crowds clearly voted for The Fighter, Black Swan and The King’s Speech as their Oscar favorites. Still there are seven additional slots to fill and the campaigning is apt to intensify in the upcoming weeks.
__________________________________________________

Weekend Estimates – December 24-26, 2010

Title	Distributor	Gross (average)	% change *	Theaters	Cume
Little Fockers	Uni	34.0 (9,610)	NEW	3536	48.2
True Grit	Par	25.5 (8,360)	NEW	3047	36.6
Tron: Legacy	BV	20.6 (5,960)	-53%	3451	88.7
Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader	Fox	10.9 (3,240)	-12%	3350	63.9
The Fighter	Par/Alliance	8.6 (3,430)	-29%	2511	27.7
Yogi Bear	WB	8.4 (2,380)	-55%	3515	36.3
Gulliver’s Travels *	Fox	6.9 (2,700)	NEW	2546	6.9
Tangled	BV	6.7 (2,590)	-24%	2582	143.8
Fox Searchlight	6.4 (4,390)	-23%	1466	28.9
The Tourist	Sony	5.6 (2,020)	-35%	2756	41.1
The King’s Speech	Weinstein Co.	4.6 (6,530)	317%	700	8.4
How Do You Know	Sony	3.7 (1,480)	-51%	2483	15.1
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1*	WB	3.3 (1,920)	-34%	1732	273.1
Tees Maar Khan	UTV	.70 (6,780)	NEW	103	0.7
Due Date	WB	.37 (910)	-71%	404	98.3
Unstoppable	Fox	.36 (920)	-80%	393	78.5
Megamind	Par	.35 (460)	-49%	764	142.6
Burlesque	Sony	.33 (660)	-77%	501	36.7
The Social Network	Sony	.31 (1,230)	9%	249	92.3
If You Are the One 2	China Lion	.21 (9,040)	NEW	23	0.21
127 Hours	Fox Searchlight	.20 (1,720)	-64%	115	9.8
* Christmas Day opening


Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films)		$145.90
% Change (Last Year)		-45%
% Change (Last Week)		11%


Also debuting/expanding
Somewhere	Focus	.15 (21,140)		7	0.2
Rabbit Hole	Lionsgate	88,700 (2,610)	65%	34	0.16
Barney’s Version	eOne	64,400 (16,100)		4	0.06
Casino Jack	IDP	60,500 (4,030)	75%	15	0.11
The Illusionist *	Sony Classics	52,600 (26,300)		2	0.05
Country Strong	Sony	33,800 (16,900)		2	0.05
The Tempest	Miramax/Maple	32,700 (2,520)	-44%	13	0.19
Toonpur Ka Superhero	Eros	9,600 (400)		24	0.01
Isi Life Mein	Rajshri	4,500 (250)		18	0.01

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 23, 2010)

Distributor (releases)	Gross	Market Share
Warner Bros. (30)	1861	18.40%
Paramount (19)	1634.7	16.10%
Fox (19)	1442.4	14.20%
Buena Vista (17)	1349.1	13.30%
Sony (26)	1239.1	12.20%
Universal (18)	798.7	7.90%
Summit (11)	522.2	5.20%
Lionsgate (16)	519.3	5.10%
Fox Searchlight (8)	105	1.00%
Overture (8)	87.4	0.90%
Focus (7)	75.2	0.70%
CBS (3)	72.5	0.70%
Weinstein Co. (9)	65.5	0.60%
Sony Classics (22)	59.5	0.60%
MGM (1)	50.4	0.50%
Other * (317)	253.5	2.50%
	10135.5	100.00%
* none greater than .04%

Top Limited Releases * (Jan. 1 – Dec. 23, 2010)

Title	Distributor	Gross
Hubble 3D	WB	19,359,509
The Ghost Writer	Summit	15,569,712
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Music Box/Alliance	11,287,817
The Young Victoria *	Apparition/Alliance	11,131,232
127 Hours	Fox Searchlight	9,321,571
Get Low	Sony Classics	9,106,802
Fair Game	Summit	8,650,388
A Single Man *	Weinstein Co.	7,935,872
The Girl Who Played with Fire	Music Box/Alliance	7,848,496
Cyrus	Fox Searchlight	7,461,082
Babies	Focus	7,444,272
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus	E1/Sony Classics	7,394,171
Conviction	Fox Searchlight	6,768,063
City Island	Anchor Bay	6,671,036
The Last Station	Sony Classics	6,617,867
Waiting for “Superman”	Par Vantage	6,410,257
The Secret in Their Eyes	Sony Classics	6,391,436
It’s Kind of a Funny Story	Focus	6,362,514
Winter’s Bone	Roadside Attraction	6,237,371
Under the Sea 3D *	WB	5,732,362
* does not include 2009 box office

Tags: 127 Hours, A Single Man, Babies, Barney's Version, Black Swan, Burlesque, Casino Jack, Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader, City Island, Conviction, Country Strong, Cyrus, Due Date, Fair Game, Get Low, Gulliver's Travels, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, how do you know, Hubble 3D, If You Are the One 2, Isi Life Mein, It's Kind Of A Funny Story, Little Fockers, Megamind, Part 1, Rabbit Hole, Somewhere, Tangled, Tees Maar Khan, The Fighter, The Ghost Writer, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Illusionist, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The King's Speech, The Last Station, The Secret In Their Eyes, The Social Network, The Tempest, The Tourist, The Young Victoria, Toonpur Ka Superhero, Tron - Legacy, True Grit, Under the Sea 3D, unstoppable, Waiting For 'Superman', Winter's Bone, Yogi Bear
Posted in MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, The Weekend Report | Comments Off on Weekend Box Office Report — December 26

Weekend Box Office Report — December 19

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

Da Doo Tron Tron

TRON: Legacy commanded the multiplex with an opening salvo estimated at $43.4 million. The movie stocking was stuffed with two other new releases plus a couple of platform films that went wide to significant response.

Yogi Bear filched $16.6 million to rank second in the marketplace while the star-laden romantic comedy How Do You Know struggled to position eight with $7.5 million.

The Fighter proved itself a contender with a $12.1 gross and Black Swan spread its wings with an impressive $7.9 million. Meanwhile there were two freshmen titles tossing their hat into the ring for award season. The starkly dramatic Rabbit Hole had an encouraging $51,700 from five venues while Casino Jack failed to beat bank with $32,100 at seven tables. In Quebec, local action comedy L’Appat had a soft debut of close to $170,000.

Overall weekend revenues saw a significant boost from the early December doldrums, but couldn’t quite overtake 2009 box office when Avatar arrived at the multiplex. Friday domestic box office inched past $10 billion (4 days faster than last year) and through the weekend it stands just 1% better than at this point last year.

The current session promised an even better result than transpired with new entries appealing to different demographics. Only TRON: Legacy conformed to tracking that predicted a result between $40 million and $45 million. The 28-year hiatus from the original has allowed the 1982 movie to accrue a cult status and brought out an avid young male audience. Stereoscopic engagements accounted for an unusually strong 80% plus, though their numbers accounted for 55% of its screen count. Its ultimate potency will be determined by building a wider audience.

The animated-live action Yogi Bear was expected to gross in the low $20 million but came up short several pic-a-nic baskets. It won’t expand beyond the family market and should limp through the holiday season. How Do You Know is already hobbled and while there were low expectations of $10 million to $12 million it failed to meet an already low bar.

The session generated roughly $135 million for a 47% bump from the prior weekend but dipped 4% from 2009. Last year’s Avatar bow of $77 million led the frame with The Princess and the Frog trailing behind with $12.2 million and Did You Hear About the Morgans? limping into theaters with $6.6 million.

Black Swan shows early signs of becoming the season’s adult hit. Though the film has divided critics and the public, it has generated fierce debate that’s translated into sales … an asset in short supply for the likes of such films as 127 Hours and Fair Game. The Fighter, while not a knockout, looks likely to get traction from awards season recognition in a race that seems — despite already announced critics awards and the Golden Globe announcement — a bit amorphous.

__________________________________________________

Weekend Estimates – December 17-19, 2010

Title	Distributor	Gross (average)	% change *	Theaters	Cume
Tron: Legacy	BV	43.4 (12,580)	NEW	3451	43.4
Yogi Bear	WB	16.6 (4,710)	NEW	3515	16.6
The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader	Fox	12.5 (3,530)	-48%	3555	42.9
The Fighter	Par	12.1 (4,850)		2503	12.6
Tangled	BV	8.7 (2,720)	-39%	3201	127.9
The Tourist	Sony	8.4 (3,040)	-49%	2756	30.5
Black Swan	Fox Searchlight	7.9 (8,260)	140%	959	15.3
How Do You Know	Sony	7.5 (3,030)	NEW	2483	7.5
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1*	WB	4.8 (1,690)	-43%	2860	265.5
Unstoppable	Fox	1.8 (980)	-51%	1874	77.4
Burlesque	Sony	1.3 (880)	-58%	1510	35.4
Due Date	WB	1.2 (1,060)	-52%	1157	97.3
Love and Other Drugs	Fox	1.1 (970)	-64%	1093	30.2
The King’s Speech	Weinstein Co.	1.1 (24,880)	81%	43	2.9
Megamind	Par	.69 (680)	-73%	1025	141.6
127 Hours	Fox Searchlight	.51 (1,660)	-49%	307	9.3
Faster	CBS	.41 (620)	-76%	660	22.5
Red	Summit	.31 (710)	-28%	439	88.4
The Social Network	Sony	.29 (1,270)	2%	228	91.9
Fair Game	Summit	.23 (860)	-59%	268	8.7


Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films)		$129.60
% Change (Last Year)		-4%
% Change (Last Week)		47%


Also debuting/expanding
L’Appat	Alliance	.17 (2,350)		72	0.17
I Love You Phillip Morris	Roadside	.14 (2,830)	-10%	49	0.51
The Tempest	Miramax/Maple	52,400 (2,490)	22%	21	0.12
Rabbit Hole	Lionsgate	51,700 (10,320)		5	0.05
Casino Jack	IDP	32,100 (4,440)		7	0.03
La Rafle	Seville	28,200 (2,170)		13	0.03

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 16, 2010)

Distributor (releases)	Gross	Market Share
Warner Bros. (29)	1837.8	18.40%
Paramount (19)	1622.6	16.20%
Fox (19)	1427.1	14.30%
Buena Vista (16)	1296.2	13.00%
Sony (25)	1221.2	12.20%
Universal (18)	798.5	8.00%
Summit (11)	521.7	5.20%
Lionsgate (15)	518.9	5.20%
Fox Searchlight (8)	96.1	1.00%
Overture (8)	87.3	0.90%
Focus (7)	75.2	0.70%
CBS (3)	72.1	0.70%
Weinstein Co. (9)	64.5	0.60%
Sony Classics (22)	59.4	0.60%
MGM (1)	50.4	0.50%
Other * (315)	251.4	2.50%
	10000.4	100.00%
* none greater than .04%

Top Domestic Grossers * (Jan. 1 – Dec. 16, 2010)

Title	Distributor	Gross
Avatar *	Fox	476,899,300
Toy Story 3	BV	415,071,937
Alice in Wonderland	BV	334,191,110
Iron Man 2	Par	312,445,596
Twilight: Eclipse	Summit	300,551,386
Inception	WB	292,485,544
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1	WB	260,701,257
Despicable Me	Uni	250,322,315
Shrek Forever After	Par	238,667,087
How to Train Your Dragon	Par	218,685,707
The Karate Kid	Sony	176,797,997
Clash of the Titans	WB	163,214,888
Grown Ups	Sony	162,171,789
Megamind	Par	140,950,962
The Last Airbender	Par	131,733,601
Shutter Island	Par	128,051,522
The Other Guy	Sony	119,534,389
Tangled	BV	119,142,932
Salt	Sony	118,485,665
Jackass 3D	Par	116,857,736
* does not include 2009 box office

Tags: 127 Hours, Alice in Wonderland, Avatar, Black Swan, Burlesque, Casino Jack, Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader, Clash of the Titans, Despicable Me, Due Date, Fair Game, Faster, Grown Ups, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, how do you know, How to Train Your Dragon, I Love You Phillip Morris, Inception, Iron Man 2, Jackass 3D, L'Appat, La Rafle, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Part 1, Rabbit Hole, Red, Salt, Shrek Forever After, Shutter Island, Tangled, The Fighter, The Karate Kid, The King's Speech, The Last Airbender, The Other Guy, The Social Network, The Tempest, The Tourist, Toy Story 3, Tron - Legacy, Twilight: Eclipse, unstoppable, Yogi Bear
Posted in MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News, The Weekend Report | Comments Off on Weekend Box Office Report — December 19

Weekend Box Office Report — December 12

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Weekend Estimates – December 10-12, 2010

Title	Distributor	Gross (average)	% change *	Theaters	Cume
Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader	Fox	24.3 (6,840)	NEW	3555	24.3
The Tourist	Sony	16.8 (6,110)	NEW	2756	16.8
Tangled	BV	14.4 (4,040)	-33%	3565	115.5
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1*	WB	8.6 (2,400)	-50%	3577	257.8
Unstoppable	Fox	3.7 (1,260)	-37%	2967	74.3
Black Swan	Fox Searchlight	3.4 (37,778)	134%	90	5.7
Burlesque	Sony	3.2 (1,120)	-48%	2876	32.6
Love and Other Drugs	Fox	3.0 (1,330)	-48%	2240	27.6
Due Date	WB	2.5 (1,260)	-39%	1990	94.9
Megamind	Par	2.5 (1,020)	-50%	2425	140.2
Faster	CBS	1.7 (820)	-56%	2106	21.3
The Next Three Days	Lionsgate	1.0 (720)	-60%	1426	20.3
127 Hours	Fox Searchlight	1.0 (2,360)	-39%	416	8.2
The Warrior’s Way	Relativity	.91 (560)	-70%	1622	4.9
The King’s Speech	Weinstein Co.	.58 (30,530)	78%	19	1.5
Fair Game	Summit	.55 (1,260)	-43%	436	8.2
Morning Glory	Par	.51 (510)	-70%	1004	30.2
Red	Summit	.41 (730)	-45%	564	87.9
The Fighter	Par	.33 (81,850)	NEW	4	0.33
The Social Network	Sony	.27 (1,190)	-35%	227	91.4


Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films)		$88.65
% Change (Last Year)		-5%
% Change (Last Week)		9%


Also debuting/expanding
No Problem	Eros	.20 (2,400)		84	0.2
I Love You Phillip Morris	Roadside	.16 (4,490)	39%	35	0.31
The Tempest	Miramax	44,700 (8,940)		5	0.04
Band Baaja Baaraat	Yash Raj	43,700 (1,370)		32	0.04
Hemingway’s Garden of Eden	Roadside	11,600 (830)		14	0.01
And Everything is Doing Fine	IFC	6,400 (6,400)		1	0.01
You Won’t Miss Me	Factory 25	4,200 (4,200)		1	0.01
Love, In Between	CJ Entertainment	2,600 (2,600)		1	0.01

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 9, 2010)

Distributor (releases)	Gross	Market Share
Warner Bros. (28)	1821.5	18.40%
Paramount (18)	1617.9	16.40%
Fox (18)	1387.3	14.10%
Buena Vista (16)	1277.9	12.90%
Sony (24)	1193.7	12.10%
Universal (18)	798.1	8.10%
Summit (11)	520.3	5.30%
Lionsgate (15)	517.1	5.20%
Fox Searchlight (8)	89.3	0.90%
Overture (8)	85.9	0.90%
Focus (7)	75.2	0.80%
CBS (3)	69.6	0.70%
Weinstein Co. (8)	63.6	0.60%
Sony Classics (22)	59.1	0.60%
MGM (1)	50.4	0.50%
Other * (306)	249.5	2.50%
	9876.4	100.00%
* none greater than .04%

Tags: 127 Hours, And Everything is Doing Fine, Band Baaja Baaraat, Black Swan, Burlesque, Due Date, Fair Game, Faster, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows, Hemingway's Garden of Eden, I Love You Phillip Morris, In Between, Love, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Morning Glory, No Problem, Part 1, Red, Tangled, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Fighter, The King's Speech, The Next Three Days, The Social Network, The Tempest, The Tourist, the warrior's way, unstoppable, you won't miss me
Posted in MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News, The Weekend Report | 3 Comments »

Weekend Estimates — December 12

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader|24.3|NEW|24.3
The Tourist|16.8|NEW |16.8
Tangled|14.4|-33%|115.5
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 1|8.6|-50%|257.8
Unstoppable|6.1|-47%|68.9
Black Swan|3.4|134%|5.7
Burlesque|3.2|-48%|32.6
Love and Other Drugs|3.0|-48%|27.6
Due Date|2.5|-39%|94.9
Megamind|2.5|-50%|140.2

Tags: Black Swan, Burlesque, Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader, Due Date, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Part 1, Tangled, The Tourist, unstoppable
Posted in Estimates, MCN Weekend | Comments Off on Weekend Estimates — December 12

Friday Estimates — December 11

Saturday, December 11th, 2010

Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader|8.1|3555|NEW|8.1
The Tourist |6.1|2756|NEW|6.1
Tangled |3.3|3565|-35%|104.4
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 1 |2.4|3577|-50%|251.6
Unstoppable|1.2|2967|-38%|71.7
Burlesque|1|2876|-48%|30.4
Love and Other Drugs|1|2240|-49%|25.7
Black Swan|1|90|137%|3.3
Due Date |0.85|1990|-39%|93.2
Megamind|0.55|2425|-54%|138.2
Also Debuting
The Fighter |98,500|4||98,500
No Problem|56,700|84||56,700
The Tempest|15,400|5||15,400
Band Baaja Baaraat|10,600|32||10,600
Hemingway’s Garden of Eden|3,500|14||3,500
And Everything is Doing Fine|1,900|1||1,900
You Won’t Miss Me|1,500|1||1,500
* in millions

Tags: And Everything is Doing Fine, Band Baaja Baaraat, Black Swan, Burlesque, Due Date, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hemingway's Garden of Eden, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, No Problem, Tangled, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Fighter, The Tempest, The Tourist, unstoppable, you won't miss me
Posted in Friday Box Office Estimates, MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News, Old MCN Blogs | Comments Off on Friday Estimates — December 11

Weekend Box Office Report — December 5

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

The Warrior’s Weigh

The first weekend of December has the ignominious tradition of being one of the lowest moviegoing periods of the year. This year is no exception with but a single new wide release and holdover titles generally experiencing declines of more than 50%.

The newcomer arrived from the re-constituted Relativity Media with the martial arts actioner The Warrior’s Way. It barely squeaked into the top 10 with an estimated $3 million. Industry trackers hadn’t expected much for the picture but even their estimates were pegged significantly higher at roughly $5 million.

The frame leader was the animated Tangled with an estimated $21.5 million with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 taking the consolation prize with $16.9 million. The rest of the holdovers were indeed the deathly hallows.

However, there were a couple of spectacular exclusive debuts. The controversial and intense drama Black Swan bowed to $1.4 million, which translated into a jaw dropping per engagement average of $76,670. And the left-for-dead black comedy I Love You Phillip Morris hit the target with $109,000 from six locations and an $18,200 average. Also encouraging was the two-screen bow of the ironically titled All Good Things with $37,500.

The rest of the new niche crowd ranged from fair to poor including several new films on the Indian circuit, the independent Night Catches Us and the documentary Bhutto.

All added up, revenues amounted to about $86 million and a 54% drop from the weekend slice of Thanksgiving. It was also off 15% from the 2009 edition when the top new entry was third-ranked Brothers with $9.5 million. The 2009 leader with $20 million was The Blind Side.

Domestic box office should push past $10 billion next weekend and register a slight gain for the year when the dust settles in 26 days. It also unquestionably marks another year of theatrical admission declines; likely between 5% and 7%.

As to award’s contenders, it remains anyone’s game and last week’s announcement of honors from the National Board of Review provided scant indication of what’s to follow from major critical groups or the Hollywood Foreign Press. Apart from James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know, the anticipated upcoming releases have been seen and left prognosticators fumbling to identify leaders in any of the talent categories.

__________________________________________________

Weekend Estimates – December 3-5, 2010

Title	Distributor	Gross (average)	% change *	Theaters	Cume
Tangled	BV	21.5 (5,970)	-56%	3603	96.5
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows, Part 1*	WB	16.9 (4,090)	-66%	4125	244.4
Burlesque	Sony	6.1 (2,020)	-49%	3037	27
Unstoppable	Fox	6.1 (1,930)	-47%	3152	68.9
Love and Other Drugs	Fox	5.7 (2,310)	-42%	2458	22.6
Megamind	Par	4.9 (1,550)	-61%	3173	136.6
Due Date	WB	4.2 (1,720)	-41%	2450	91
Faster	CBS	3.8 (1,550)	-55%	2470	18.1
The Warrior’s Way	Relativity	3.0 (1,870)	NEW	1622	3
The Next Three Days	Lionsgate	2.6 (1,150)	-45%	2236	18.3
Morning Glory	Par	1.7 (760)	-56%	2263	29.1
127 Hours	Fox Searchlight	1.6 (3,790)	-4%	433	6.6
Black Swan	Fox Searchlight	1.4 (76,670)	NEW	18	1.4
Fair Game	Summit	1.0 (2,320)	-27%	436	7.3
Red	Summit	.75 (960)	-45%	779	87.2
For Colored Girls …	Lionsgate	.45 (930)	-67%	485	37.3
Lance et compte	Seville	.43 (4,480)	-31%	96	1.3
Skyline	Uni/Alliance	.42 (730)	-63%	578	20.9
The Social Network	Sony	.41 (1,580)	-42%	260	91
The King’s Speech	Weinstein Co.	.32 (53,000)	-10%	6	0.8


Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films)		$81.25
% Change (Last Year)		-15%
% Change (Last Week)		-54%


Also debuting/expanding
I Love You Phillip Morris	Roadside	.11 (18,200)		6	0.11
Raktacharitra 2	Viva/Happy	94,200 (4,100)		23	0.09
Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey	Viva	65,300 (960)		68	0.07
Nutcracker 3D	FreeStyle	45,700 (1,040)	-31%	44	0.14
Made in Dagenham	Sony Classics	39,600 (3,600)	-37%	11	0.18
All Good Things	Magnolia	37,500 (18,750)		2	0.04
Dead Awake	New Film	31,400 (570)		55	0.03
Mar Jawan Gur Khake	Punjabi	18,800 (6,270)		3	0.02
Night Catches Us	Magnolia	12,100 (3,020)		4	0.01
Bhutto	First Run	7,800 (3,900)		2	0.01

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 2, 2010)

Distributor (releases)	Gross	Market Share
Warner Bros. (27)	1792.9	18.40%
Paramount (18)	1609.2	16.50%
Fox (18)	1371.7	14.00%
Buena Vista (16)	1252.3	12.80%
Sony (24)	1185.4	12.10%
Universal (18)	797.2	8.20%
Summit (11)	517.9	5.30%
Lionsgate (15)	512.4	5.20%
Fox Searchlight (7)	84.7	0.90%
Overture (7)	81.9	0.80%
Focus (7)	75.2	0.80%
CBS (3)	64.2	0.70%
Weinstein Co. (8)	63.1	0.70%
Sony Classics (22)	58.7	0.60%
MGM (1)	50.4	0.50%
Other * (301)	246.6	2.50%
	9763.8	100.00%
* none greater than .04%

Top Global Grossers * (Jan. 1 – Dec. 2, 2010)

Title	Distributor	Gross
Avatar *	Fox	1,955,694,414
Toy Story 3	BV	1,065,128,004
Alice in Wonderland	BV	1,024,537,295
Inception	WB	840,550,911
Shrek Forever After	Par	738,351,966
Twilight: Eclipse	Summit	699,325,617
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1	WB	634,033,738
Iron Man 2	Par	622,718,600
Despicable Me	Uni	534,415,944
How to Train Your Dragon	Par	495,921,283
Clash of the Titans	WB	489,778,913
Sherlock Holmes *	WB	367,796,599
The Karate Kid	Sony	359,429,551
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time	BV	335,816,141
The Last Airbender	Par	319,062,129
Robin Hood	Uni	312,207,159
Shutter Island	Par	301,977,955
Sex and the City 2	WB	301,158,934
Salt	Sony	293,955,694
Resident Evil: Afterlife	Sony/Alliance	292,972,689
The Expendables	Lionsgate	272,550,235
Grown Ups	Sony	271,417,359
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel	Fox	264,341,533
Knight and Day	Fox	261,206,060
Percy Jackson & the Olympians	Fox	226,497,298
* does not include 2009 box office

Tags: 127 Hours, Alice in Wonderland, All Good Things, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Avatar, bhutto, Black Swan, Burlesque, Clash of the Titans, Dead Awake, Despicable Me, Due Date, Fair Game, Faster, For Colored Girls …, Grown Ups, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows, How to Train Your Dragon, I Love You Phillip Morris, Inception, Iron Man 2, Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, Knight and Day, Lance et compte, Love and Other Drugs, Made in Dagenham, Mar Jawan Gur Khake, Megamind, Morning Glory, night catches us, Nutcracker 3D, Part 1, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Raktacharitra 2, Red, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Robin Hood, Salt, Sex and the City 2, Sherlock Holmes, Shrek Forever After, Shutter Island, skyline, Tangled, The Expendables, The Karate Kid, The King's Speech, The Last Airbender, The Next Three Days, The Social Network, the warrior's way, Toy Story 3, Twilight: Eclipse, unstoppable
Posted in MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News, The Weekend Report | Comments Off on Weekend Box Office Report — December 5

Weekend Estimates — December 5

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

Tangled|21.5|-56%|96.5
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 1|16.9|-66%|244.4
Burlesque|6.1|-49%|27
Unstoppable|6.1|-47%|68.9
Love and Other Drugs|5.7|-42%|22.6
Megamind|4.9|-61%|136.6
Due Date|4.2|-41%|91
Faster|3.8|-55%|18.1
The Warrior’s Way|3.0|NEW |3.0
The Next Three Days|2.6|-45%|18.3

Tags: Burlesque, Due Date, Faster, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Tangled, The Next Three Days, the warrior's way, unstoppable
Posted in Estimates, MCN Weekend | Comments Off on Weekend Estimates — December 5

Friday Estimates — December 4

Saturday, December 4th, 2010

Tangled|5.1|3603|-74%|80.1
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1|4.8|4125|-77%|232.3
Burlesque|2|3037|-57%|22.8
Love and Other Drugs|1.9|2458|-49%|18.9
Unstoppable|1.9|3152|-59%|64.7
Due Date |1.4|2450|-52%|88.1
Faster|1.2|2470|-63%|15.5
Megamind|1.2|3173|-78%|132.8
The Warrior’s Way |1.1|1622|NEW|1.1
The Next Three Days |0.8|2564|-57%|16.5
Also Debuting
Black Swan|0.42|18||0.42
Raktacharitra 2|35,700|23||35,700
I Love You Phillip Morris|30,400|6||30,400
Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey|19,900|68||19,900
All Good Things|11,100|2||11,100
Dead Awake|10,700|55||10,700
Mar Jawan Gur Khake|5,300|3||5,300
Night Catches Us|3,900|4||3,900
Bhutto|3,200|2||3,200
* in millions

Tags: All Good Things, bhutto, Black Swan, Burlesque, Dead Awake, Due Date, Faster, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows 1, I Love You Phillip Morris, Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, Love and Other Drugs, Mar Jawan Gur Khake, Megamind, night catches us, Raktacharitra 2, Tangled, The Next Three Days, the warrior's way, unstoppable
Posted in Friday Box Office Estimates, MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News | Comments Off on Friday Estimates — December 4

Weekend Box Office Report — November 28

Sunday, November 28th, 2010

Tangled Up in Blues … and Reds

A quartet of new releases for Thanksgiving failed to topple Harry Potter from the top of the charts during the gobble, gobble fest. The first part of the Potter finale — Deathly Hallows — grossed an estimated $51.2 million for the weekend portion of the holiday frame. Just a cluck behind was the animated Rapunzel of Tangled with $49.2 million ($69.1 million for the 5-days).

The other three wide release freshmen clustered in positions five to seven with indifferent results. The glitzy musical Burlesque crooned $11.4 million, rom-com Love and Other Drugs ingested $9.6 million and Faster added a tortoise-paced $8.2 million.

The big noise of the session proved to be the well positioned awards contender The King’s Speech that amassed a heady $86,000 screen average from just four venues. There was also an impressive $610,000 for local hockey comedy Lance et compte in Quebec, but a dull $212,000 for Bollywood entry Break Ke Baad. And a new seasonal Nutcracker in 3D was virtually D.O.A. with a $62,700 tally from 42 screens.

Adding it all up, Thanksgiving box office was a smidgen less than last year’s result.

Industry trackers generally predicted that Deathly Hallows would prevail at the box office but few anticipated that Tangled would be truly competitive with the Hogwart’s grad. They also generally over estimated the strengths of the remaining trio of new entries; especially Faster, which was given the edge over Love and Other Drugs.

Overall weekend numbers added up to roughly $187 million that translated into a 6% decline from the immediate prior session. It was also a slight 1% decline from Thanksgiving weekend 2009 when The Twilight Saga: New Moon and The Blind Side led with respectively $42.9 million and $40.1 million. The top new entry, Old Dogs, ranked fourth with $16.9 million.

The current session also saw expansions for 127 Hours and Fair Game that were encouraging but nonetheless displayed signs of fatigue. Still with critics groups just weeks away from announcements both films could well experience second winds. The potent arrival of The King’s Speech however has put that film in the forefront and its now vying with a real royal wedding as well as a smattering of pictures yet to be seen for late year honors.

__________________________________________________

Weekend Estimates – November 26-28, 2010

Title	Distributor	Gross (average)	% change *	Theaters	Cume
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows, Part 1*	WB	51.2 (12,420)	-59%	4125	221.2
Tangled	BV	49.2 (13,660)	NEW	3603	69.1
Megamind	Par	12.9 (3,770)	-20%	3411	130.5
Unstoppable	Fox	11.7 (3,670)	-10%	3183	60.6
Burlesque	Sony	11.4 (3,740)	NEW	3037	16.8
Love and Other Drugs	Fox	9.6 (3,920)	NEW	2455	13.8
Faster	CBS	8.2 (3,360)	NEW	2451	11.8
Due Date	WB	7.2 (2,830)	-19%	2555	84.9
The Next Three Days	Lionsgate	4.8 (1,860)	-27%	2564	14.5
Morning Glory	Par	4.0 (1,630)	-24%	2441	26.4
127 Hours	Searchlight	1.7 (5,900)	89%	293	4.4
Fair Game	Summit	1.6 (3,960)	8%	396	6
For Colored Girls …	Lionsgate	1.4 (2,360)	-38%	605	36.6
Red	Summit	1.4 (1,540)	-43%	914	86.2
Skyline	Uni/Alliance	1.1 (900)	-70%	1189	20.1
The Social Network	Sony	.73 (2,510)	-22%	291	90.4
Secretariat	BV	.66 (1.310)	-32%	502	57.6
Lance et compte	Seville	.61 (6,930)	NEW	88	0.61
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest	Music Box/Alliance	.36 (1,970)	-10%	184	4.2
Despicable Me	Uni	.35 (1,320)	31%	266	249.7
The King’s Speech	Weinstein Co.	.34 (86,030)	NEW	4	0.34
Inside Job	Sony Classics	.31 (2,330)	-9%	132	2.6


Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films)		$179.40
% Change (Last Year)		-1%
% Change (Last Week)		-6%


Also debuting/expanding
Break Ke Baad	Reliance	.21 (2,500)		85	0.33
Nutcracker 3D	FreeStyle	62,700 (1,490)		42	0.09
Made in Dagenham	Sony Classics	62.500 (5,680)	64%	11	0.12
The Legend of Pale Male	Balcony	11,400 (11,400)		1	0.01
The Unjust	CJ	7,200 (7,200)		1	0.01
Tere Ishq Nachaye	Eros	4,200 (200)		21	0.01

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Nov. 21, 2010)

Distributor (releases)	Gross	Market Share
Warner Bros. (27)	1674.1	17.80%
Paramount (18)	1578.1	16.70%
Fox (17)	1333.8	14.10%
Buena Vista (15)	1174.6	12.50%
Sony (23)	1161.6	12.30%
Universal (18)	793.9	8.40%
Summit (11)	512.7	5.40%
Lionsgate (15)	500.4	5.30%
Overture (7)	81.8	0.90%
Fox Searchlight (7)	81.4	0.90%
Focus (7)	75.2	0.80%
Weinstein Co. (7)	62.6	0.70%
Sony Classics (21)	57.8	0.60%
MGM (1)	51.2	0.50%
CBS (2)	50	0.50%
Other * (296)	242.7	2.60%
	9431.9	100.00%
* none greater than .04%

Top Limited Releases * (Jan. 1 – Nov. 21, 2010)

Title	Distributor	Gross
Hubble 3D	WB	18,355,494
The Ghost Writer	Summit	15,569,712
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Music Box/Alliance	11,282,938
The Young Victoria *	Apparition/Alliance	11,131,232
Get Low	Sony Classics	9,080,285
A Single Man *	Weinstein Co.	7,935,872
The Girl Who Played with Fire	Music Box/Alliance	7,837,823
Cyrus	Fox Searchlight	7,461,082
Babies	Focus	7,444,272
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus *	E1/Sony Classics	7,394,171
City Island	Anchor Bay	6,671,036
The Last Station	Sony Classics	6,617,867
The Secret in Their Eyes	Sony Classics	6,391,436
It’s Kind of a Funny Story	Focus	6,350,058
Winter’s Bone	Roadside Attraction	6,225,414
Waiting for “Superman”	Par Vantage	6,130,466
Under the Sea 3D *	WB	5,504,062
Precious	Lions Gate	5,085,319
I Am Love	Magnolia	5,002,411
An Education *	Sony Classics	4,963,224
* does not include 2009 box office

Tags: 127 Hours, A Single Man, An Education, Babies, break ke baad, Burlesque, City Island, Cyrus, Despicable Me, Due Date, Fair Game, Faster, For Colored Girls …, Get Low, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hubble 3D, I Am Love, Inside Job, It's Kind Of A Funny Story, Lance et compte, Love and Other Drugs, Made in Dagenham, Megamind, Morning Glory, Nutcracker 3D, Part 1, Precious, Red, Secretariat, skyline, Tangled, Tere Ishq Nachaye, The Ghost Writer, the girl who kicked the hornet's nest, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus, The King's Speech, The Last Station, The Legend of Pale Male, The Next Three Days, The Secret In Their Eyes, The Social Network, The Unjust, The Young Victoria, Under the Sea 3D, unstoppable, Waiting For 'Superman', Winter's Bone
Posted in MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News, The Weekend Report | Comments Off on Weekend Box Office Report — November 28

Weekend Estimates — November 28

Sunday, November 28th, 2010

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 1|51.2|-59%|221.2
Tangled|49.2|New|69.1
Megamind|12.9|-20%|130.5
Unstoppable|11.7|-10%|60.6
Burlesque|11.4|New|16.8
Love and Other Drugs|9.6|New|13.8
Faster|8.2|New|11.8
Due Date|7.2|-19%|84.9
The Next Three Days|4.8|-27%|14.5
Morning Glory|4.0|-24% |26.4

Tags: Burlesque, Due Date, Faster, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Morning Glory, Tangled, The Next Three Days, unstoppable
Posted in Estimates, MCN Weekend | Comments Off on Weekend Estimates — November 28

Friday Estimates – November 27

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1|20.8|4125|-45%|190.8
Tangled|19.9|3603|New|40.3
Megamind|5.3|3411|43%|123
Unstoppable|4.5|3261|12%|53.5
Burlesque|4.4|3037|New|9.8
Love and Other Drugs|3.7|2455|New|7.9
Faster|3.2|2451|New|6.8
Due Date |2.8|2555|-3%|77.7
The Next Three Days |1.9|2564|-15%|11.7
Morning Glory |1.6|2441|-1%|24
Also Debuting
Lance et compte|0.25|88||0.25
The King’s Speech|0.12|4||0.12
Break Ke Baad|70,400|85||70,400
Nutcracker 3D|25,100|44||25,100
The Legend of Pale Male|3,300|1||3,300
The Unjust|1,900|1||1,900

Tags: break ke baad, Burlesque, Due Date, Faster, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1, Lance et compte, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Morning Glory, Nutcracker 3D, Tangled, The King's Speech, The Legend of Pale Male, The Next Three Days, The Unjust, unstoppable
Posted in Friday Box Office Estimates, MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News | Comments Off on Friday Estimates – November 27

MW on Movies: Tangled, Burlesque and White Material

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Tangled (Three Stars)

U.S.: Nathan Greno, Byron Howard, 2010

I don’t know: Maybe I’m going though my second childhood. But, these days, very often, the kids’ movies coming out of the big studios (and I mean mostly the cartoon features) seem and look to me so much brighter, funnier, more entertaining — hell, so much more adult — than the supposedly adult comedies, concocted and targeted for supposed adults. (Don’t get me started.)

That goes for Pixar, for DreamWorks, for Warners, and it even goes for some French language knockouts like Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville, and Michel Ocelot‘s marvelous African-set Kirikou and the Sorceress and Kirikou and the Wild Beasts. (Of course, in France, they take care of the adult audiences too.) And it also goes for the long time American animation champ, Walt Disney Studios, which wipes up the new adult U. S. competition this week with their new 3D fairytale feature Tangled.

It‘s the latest movie for part of the team from Bolt, writer Dan Fogleman, director Byron Howard and Howard’s new co-director Nathan Greno (who was story supervisor on Bolt), a funny-animal road comedy that was brassy and sassy in a Looney-Tunesish way and made a lot of money. This one, the Disney Studio’s 50th cartoon feature, which tries to bend the best of the old classic Disney with the three-dimensional, digital, computerized new, is far more ambitious.

Tangled has a ripe, rounded, ultra-colorful look — like the Pixar movies, it’s both playful and expert — and it’s all about that sturdy Grimm Brothers lass, Rapunzel (Mandy Moore). It‘s about her 70 flabbergasting, glorious feet of golden hair and the huge imprisoning tower in which she‘s spent 18 claustrophobic years, with her witch of a “mother” Gothel (Donna Murphy).

And it hauls on stage an Errol Flynnish handsome rogue of a dashing rascal named Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi), and all the funny animals and grotesque but lovable thugs and daffy creatures of the enchanted forest whom Rap and Flynn meet on her magical quest to reach and revel in the beautiful lights and castle of the kingdom‘s distant and beautiful city.

Unbeknownst to Rap is the fact that she was kidnapped as a babe by the woman who now masquerades as her mother: evil, glamorous Gothel, a second cousin to the evil, glamorous witch-turned crone of Disney’s 1937 classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.“ Gothel here becomes a show-stopping villainess, with Broadway pipes (Murphy has won two Tonys), and she covets the restorative powers in Rapunzel’s magic hair, a secret ingredient that has kept Gothel young (or so we learn from the prologue) for ages.

That’s the Grimm/Disney setup. Among the other Disneyfied elaborations are two fellow rogues, the Stabbington Brothers (one Stab voiced by Ron Perlman), burly thieves who are chasing Flynn for the loot they all stole and that he ran off with; some ogre-ish but warm-hearted thugs and brutes pounding their ale-mugs in the nearby boisterous tavern (including a “Big Nose Thug,” voiced by Jeffrey Tambor, and a “Hook Hand Thug” spoken by Brad Garrett); a persistent white stallion who keeps pursuing Flynn even when the horse’s Palace Guardsman falls off; and Rapunzel‘s silent, nameless but very frisky chameleon.

There are also a brace of snappy, poppy, semi-showstopping songs, composed by Alan Menken (a perfect Disney composer), with words by Glenn Slater (Home on the Range), who proves a reasonable substitute for Menken’s late lyricist-partner, Howard Ashman, a master of wordplay and Menken’s collaborator on the great kiddie Rodgers-and-Hart-ish song scores for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

I was grateful for the songs, even though they‘re not as memorable a bunch as some Disney scores of the past. Recent cartoon features — Toy Story 3 and its Randy Newman numbers marvelously excepted — have tended to jettison song numbers and replace them by piling on more slapstick, jokes and action scenes. But cartoon features are a really splendid venue for songs and musical sequences — and that would seem particularly true for Disney, the studio that brought us “Someday My Prince Will Come” (later covered by Miles Davis) in Snow White, “When You Wish Upon a Star“ in Pinocchio, the “Pink Elephants“ Dance and “When I See an Elephant Fly“ in Dumbo and all those wondrous Leopold Stokowski-conducted Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Dukas or Mussorgsky sequences in the 1940 Fantasia.

Some current critics, I’ve noticed, have argued that the song sequences in “Tangled” are unnecessary, and I suppose you could snip them out without sabotaging the story much. But you could excise all the songs and all the orchestral sequences in all the classics above (Fantasia excepted, of course), and still keep track of the story, and of whatever Pinocchio or Snow or little Dumbo was doing. Does anybody want to?

That’s why the seemingly against-the-trend casting of Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi and Donna Murphy in the three leads works so well here. Instead of the kind of movie actor superstars that have lately been popping up in cartoons, they’re all singers here (Murphy is a fantastic singer), and they all put across their numbers with style, pizzazz and lots of show biz verve.

I like it when a star actor gets a virtuoso shot in a n animated feature — a Steve Carell in Despicable Me, or an Ed Asner and a Christopher Plummer (in Up, or a Tom Hanks and Ned Beatty in Toy Story 3 — but it’s highly enjoyable too when a Moore (who has a scrumptious voice), or Levi (who’s dashing and roguish) or a Murphy (who has killer delivery) gets down to musical business.

After all, the entire modern cartoon resurgence, probably started the night that Roy Disney brought them back and that Ashman and Menken’s “Under the Sea” brought down the house in The Little Mermaid, at the previews. You had to be there to sense the joyous whoop and sheer wave of exhilaration that welled up in that crowd that night, greeted that song, and cheered on that fine crustacean band, led by Sam Wright as that swinging crab Sebastian (“Each little snail here, knows how to wail here…“)

Anyway: Tangled. Good lineup. Good tunes. Good hair day. Admittedly all this may not sound like such promising fare for anyone whose favorites movies are Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, Fanny and Alexander, Vertigo and The Godfather Trilogy, or anyone looking for something political or arty — but the latter should hie themselves off to White Material and as for the former, the Disney guys tangled me up anyway — and will probably entangle lots of paying customers as well.

I saw Tangled right before screenings of Burlesque a supposedly adult musical comedy with stripteasers, sex, booze and big hot numbers (and a good cast, topped by Cher and Christine Aguilera, to sing them) and Faster, a supposed adult neo-noir thriller, with multiple murders, an ex-con on the rampage, and a heroin-addicted cop on his trail (with a good cast, topped by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Billy Bob Thornton, to kill each other) and, by comparison, both movies seemed under-written, shallow and sometimes childish and, in Burlesque’s case, pretty dopey. Aw, like I said, don’t get me started.

Tangled, on the other hand — for all its jokes about its cutie-pie heroine’s multi-purpose hair (used variously in the movie as manacles, whip, lash, escape-rope, mop, blanket, hideaway and erotic come-on), is cleverly written and visualized (much cleverer than that recent promising but disappointing live-action romantic comedy, ), visually inventive (well, “Faster“\cener was sometimes snazzy too), well-acted, and mercifully devoid of cute little bunnies, and tricksy little pixies. Or of cute little strippers and tricky little killers either.

This movie — which was produced by Roy Conli (who pops up in the cast list as an “additional voice”) and executive produced by Mr. Pixar himself, John Lasseter, and Glen Keane (whose name is on lots of Disney animation from 1977‘s Pete‘s Dragon on) — tries to live up to its landmark position as Disney cartoon Feature Number Fifty, attempting to be a culminating work, a fusion of Disney‘s lucrative digital present with its glorious classic-animation, line-drawing past.

Tangled is both a reprise of the formula Walt and The Disney Studio had down pat in the ‘30;s ‘40s, and ‘50s — the style that resulted in the heyday of the prime fairytale or storybook features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty” — and a clever, but never too consciously showy, display of the techniques and technology that hook audiences now.

For me, it works. The Princess and the Frog, last year’s Musker-Clements Disney throwback, used line-drawing again, and I thought it looked and played fine too. (I’d like to see more, and nobody is in a better position to experiment in all directions now as the Lasseter-led Disney.) There’s 3D in Tangled, but it doesn’t slam you in the eyes, even though it still bleeds off a lot of screen brightness. Some of the effects, like the glowing lights Rapunzel yearns for, hovering dreamily above the water by the castle, have an almost impressionistic, Debussyesque softness.

There’s digital stuff, but it melds seamlessly with the old style archetypal Disney character gallery of princess/hero/witch/funny-animals/villains/boobs-and-buffoons. The dialogue has a storybook lilt, but it also sports a wise-acre Tonight Show edge — with that last piece courtesy of the Warner Looney Tunes’ trademark anti-Disney bite and sarcasm that the studio gradually assimilated, kicked off by Roy Disney‘s studio renaissance on The Little Mermaid.

Anyway, if you’re good and stuffed by this Thanksgiving, and the days after and you don’t want any more turkey (or turkeys), and especially if you’re a family (of some sort), Tangled may be the perfect post-feed movie snack for you. Me, old Disney cartoon (and Looney tune) lover that I am, I liked almost everything about it. Except the title.

“Tangled?”

SPOILER ALERT

What the…heck is that? (It’s Thanksgiving, I know. Kids. Grandparents. No swearing.) This gal’s hair is almost always lush, endlessly versatile, rarely messed up. Tangled? What? What? It doesn’t mean a…darned thing. Why not Rapunzel, for … Pete’s sake. Rapunzel may sound weird or Germanic or something to some marketing ace somewhere. (“It won’t work, guys. ‘Rapunzel’ sounds like a Nazi hooker…I mean, like a Nazi lady.‘”) But, in this case, it’s the movie that makes the title, not vice versa.

You want people to think of Rapunzel, remember Rapunzel, fixate on Rapunzel. If not, why not call it “Rap?” Seriously. Or anything else. Tangled sounds like a, like a — I don‘t know — like a…flipping horror movie franchise or something. “The Tangled, Tortured and Twisted Trilogy.” “Night of the Unkempt Dead.“ What if they get spillover from Saw 3D, for Pete’s sake! Tangled! Ah, it’ll probably work anyway. Don’t me started …

END OF SPOILER

_______________________________________________

Burlesque (Two Stars)

U.S.: Steve Antin, 2010

Cher: Boy can she sing! Christina Aguilera: Boy can she sing and dance! Stanley Tucci: Boy can he act! Burlesque: What a crock of high-gloss … crud. (It’s still Thanksgiving. Remember. At least for me.)

This is one of those “Oh, My God!“ movies. (Excuse me, “Oh my Gosh!“) Even if you don’t say it out loud, you’ll be thinking it every ten minutes or so, maybe every five minutes.

Steve Antin wrote and directed. (Wrote? Directed?) And Christina Aguilera is Ali, from Iowa, a girl with a dream. She makes it to L. A. She gets robbed. She finds the Gosh-darnedest place I ever saw allegedly in Hollywood — and I used to live there. It’s a show bar called “Burlesque,“ modeled on Cabaret and Chicago, with that great Cabaret alum emcee Alan Cumming as a greeter. He‘ll be wasted here, and I don’t mean on booze. (Oh, my God!)

Up on stage, somewhere in Hollywood (or maybe in Oz), there are barely dressed sexy girl dancers, without poles, lip-synching songs. Cher is up there as owner Tess, lip-synching Cher (herself), in a pretty good song called “Welcome to Burlesque” (the last time I had any hope for the movie). Soon we find that the club is full of sort-of striptease dancers who wear elaborate costumes, and lip-synch to Marilyn Monroe’s great “Diamonds are a Girl‘s Best Friend” number and other classics, while sort of stripping.

Everybody seems to have a number except Cumming, who doesn’t strip and who maybe couldn’t clear the Cabaret rights. (Oh, my God.)

Ali watches. She is entranced. (Oh, my God!) She wants to sing, to dance, to take it all off (or maybe put it all on) — which she did back in Iowa but all by herself, in a deserted bar. Tess is skeptical. (Why? She sings great.) But Ali, indomitable, just picks up a tray and just starts waitressing and gets hired. Meanwhile Tucci, as Sean the dresser/cohort/”Burlesque” jack of all trades , deals out snappy patter while zipping everyone up; for a brief fleeting minute or so way back when, he was a heterosexual and once bedded Tess, who still loves him. (Oh, my Gosh.)

Ali, still has no home. Never fear. Cutie-pie bartender Jack (Cam Gigandet, trying to Brad Pitt it up), to the rescue, offers his digs, recently vacated by his fiancée. Ali moves in, takes the couch. They don’t sleep together. (Oh, my God!) Somebody is about to foreclose a mortgage on Burlesque, and the evil rich guy Marcus (Eric Dane) wants to buy the place, put up condos. He also wants to sleep with Ali and he dates her up and takes her to his swanky digs in the hills, but she’s too busy occupying the couch and not sleeping with Jack.

One fateful night, another dancer tries to sabotage Ali‘s lip-synch act, but Ali saves the day by actually singing. Just like Christina Aguilera! She becomes a smash hit! Tess, inspired, throws together a new show, with live singing and the house band, in about a day. (Oh, my God!) It’s smash after smash, though there’s not much room in the club, and they chopped up Alan’s one song. But the editors put Ali on the cover of the L. A. Times Calendar section anyway, a venus so pretsigious and exclusive they once nixed potential cover subject Robert Altman for a location story on The Player. (I swear.)

Despite this howling success, the mortgage is still due. Ali is still on Jack’s couch. Marcus is still hot to trot and he‘s furrowing his brow and bragging about his millions and his philanthropy. Tess’s old partner throws a drunken fit. Tess yells “I don’t want to put any more tequila on your cornflakes!“ (Savor that line; It’s the best they’ve got.) But one other fateful night, Jack puts on red jammies with little white things, does a strip, and holds a box of Famous Amos cookies over his thingie. (Oh, My God!)

Well, you get the drift. If you want to see this, go ahead. As Mad Magazine once said, “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.“ (Or words to that effect.) The music is by Christophe Beck. The musical numbers are all pretty good (though I‘d like more Cher), but not worth suffering through the rest for. Wait for the DVD, so you can just play the songs and skip the drama, the comedy, the mortgage foreclosure, the tequila and cornflakes and Jack‘s red jammies. As they say in Chinatown, I’m doing you a favor — and that’s even if you love Cher, Christina, Tucci and Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. Lip-synched. (Oh, my God!)

________________________________________________

White Material (Four Stars)

France: Claire Denis, 2009

We are somewhere in West Africa. A slight, pretty Frenchwoman in a thin pinkish-white sundress with a spray of freckles on her pale face, scurries from place to place as her world shatters and falls apart around her. Government troops are massing or leaving; gangs of boy soldiers roam the woods, the local mayor (William Nadylam) has turned mean and opportunistic, a charismatic rebel leader named the Boxer (Isaac de Bankole) has been found dead and then …

And then puzzlingly, we see that the woman’s white dress has changed to a dark-and-light patterned blouse and skirt, the present to the past (or to the future?). Things keep changing. The local soldiers, as they depart in helicopters, tell her in utter exasperation to escape with them and save herself. (She refuses). The Boxer is suddenly alive, meeting the woman at her coffee farm, staying there. A complex, off-kilter network of flashbacks and flash-forwards and flashes-sideways-in-time, begin pushing the story on.

This endlessly energetic woman jogging, walking, running, driving through it all, in seemingly constant restless motion, propelled forward and back by the crises around her and by the non-linear leaps of the story, jumping on busses packed with the frightened citizenry, or whizzing back and forth in a truck from her farm to the town, is Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) — whose family owns a coffee plantation in that unnamed African country.

Her father-in-law Henri (Michel Subor, who long ago was in Godard‘s Le Petit Soldat and Hitchcock‘s Topaz) is old, ill-looking. Her handsome beaten-looking husband, Andre (Christophe Lambert) has given up, and unbeknownst to Maria, is trying to sell their farm to the mayor. Her son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is an indolent, selfish, worthless pretty boy, with Oblomovian bed habits, whom fate will turn into a monster. Most of her servants and workers have left (in the past), and she pluckily recruits new bean-pickers. Ominously, the soldiers, and a local jabbering disc jockey, keep repeating the phrase “white material,” which refers to the trinkets and belongings and property of the settlers, and also to the settlers themselves, to her, Maria.

As this little world plunges toward chaos or rebirth or both, the “white material,” like the coffee, is more and more at risk, ripe for the picking. What drives Maria on — in this perilous, crumbling hell, where child soldiers sleep with stuffed toys, rebels swarm though the woods, soldiers flee in helicopters, a friendly pharmacist and his wife lie slaughtered on the floor of their store, and Maria’s own son Marcel shaves his hair, stuffs it in a servant’s mouth, and runs amok with a rifle, laughing — is partly the inertia of the constant runner, partly some weird optimism and determination, partly a seemingly unshakable sense of entitlement, and maybe partly madness.

How can she believe, with such crazy awesome resolve, that she will be able to still function and thrive, even harvest a coffee bean crop, in this world gone crazier than she?

Things Fall Apart, African author Chinua Achebe once titled a book. Yes. They do. Whatever happens here, we know — as Maria apparently does not — that things now will get worse, things will fall apart, perhaps more will suffer and die, as — defying all reason, all sanity — she continues to jog, to walk, to run, to drive, to hop aboard, to clutch at the world whirling past, and eventually …

SPOILER ALERT

… to stand appalled in the wreckage, in an unseen fire of hatred that will envelop and maybe consume her.

END OF SPOILER

That great French actress, Isabelle Huppert, and the superb French filmmaker, Claire Denis, have made one of the film masterpieces of the year in White Material, a movie experience so moving, frightening and fine, that watching it puts your nerves on edge, your heart on ice, and your mind on fire. This is probably my favorite Claire Denis film, and I‘ve seen almost all of them (though I’d like to see again Chocolat, her other film on an African coffee plantation). And this is one of my favorite Huppert performances as well. I haven’t seen all of them, of course — one wonders if Huppert has herself — but I‘ve seen dozens. She‘s never bad, often great. Here, she surpasses herself. I will never forget Maria Vial, her tense, frayed face and her thin summer dress.

Huppert is one of France‘s most famous actresses, a critic‘s darling. Denis is a critic‘s darling too — like Huppert, trapped in the art-houses (under art-house arrest, in a way) and ignored by the larger public. It’s a shame. White Material has the texture, narrative drive and experimental structure of a fine, offbeat, hallucinatory novel — by a Duras, a Celine, or a Faulkner. Denis, who renders her various worlds like a painter with a keen sense of good and evil, has always been wonderful with people in between, people splintering apart in quiet relentless crisis — such as the African immigrant family in the Paris of 35 Shots of Rum, the Melvillean desert soldiers of Beau Travail, or the white French family and black African servant (played by Bankole) of Chocolat. And these people, trapped in hell, here.

Inhabiting Maria, slipping inside her complex persona without artifice or strain, Huppert gives a performance sublimely real, memorable and riveting. Playing this brave, energetic, perhaps foolish woman, she‘s as scary as she was as Chabrol’s Violette Noziere, as real and raw as she was with Depardieu in Pialat’s Loulou, as vulnerable and poignant as she was in Goretta‘s Huppert hasn’t gotten any prizes for White Material yet, but, in a way, no prize is enough for what she does here. Easily, un-self-consciously, immaculately, she pulls us headlong into Maria‘s reckless self-absorption, her mad run-around with revolution and death, her rapprochement with chaos — creating a fascinating human being in extremis. She stuns us.

Easily, un-self-consciously, immaculately, she pulls us headlong into Maria‘s reckless self-absorption, her mad run-around, her rapprochement with chaos.

White Material deals, of course, with race, and it’s directed and co-written by Denis, a white woman who lived in this type of environment (not necessarily in this kind of crisis,) and who interacted with the Africans that her country and her class had robbed and pushed aside. The film though betrays no sign of racial bias, condescension or over-compensation; it treats the color differences without polemic or special pleading. This is what might happen, we feel, from both sides: the white (material) and the black.

Denis’ co-scenarist here is a French woman of mixed French and African (Senegalese) descent: the Prix Goncourt winning novelist Marie NDiaye. (NDiaye is a literary virtuoso, who wrote, at 21, a novel of 200 pages composed of a single sentence.) What the two writers have managed together is a portrait of a white woman, a French colonial (with whom they both obviously emphasize) and of a world of African people of color (with whom they also sympathize) that she thinks she knows, but doesn’t.

Maria remains a sympathetic character though, even if her husband Andre is not (he lacks Maria‘s spine and stamina) and even though their son, Marcel, proves rotten indeed, a psycho and sadist. It takes one act of violence to curdle Marcel’s soul, and though his mother both adores and maybe secretly deplores him, she also obviously helped make him what he is. When we see her trying to coax him from the bed in which he seems to have taken root and buried himself — and doesn’t even berate le petit con, the little jerk — we know why he’s gone wrong, and why others of his privileged generation, leeching off their parents, holding their “social inferiors“ in contempt or in “benign neglect,” have gone so wrong as well.

SPOILER ALERT

White Material is not an obviously preachy move, which is why it’s so powerful. The story, since we don’t feel a nudge or sense an agenda, keeps surprising us. Things happen that we don’t expect — such as the betrayal of Maria, the first spasms of violence, and the transformation of Marcel from lazy rich bum to murderous skinhead creep. Afterwards, it may seem inevitable; as we watch, it hits like a knife-thrust.

END OF SPOILER

And because the writers don’t preach, but instead make their landscape and people come alive, the film ends by conveying an awful sense of alienation and despair. We feel for the Africans, the French, the helpless citizens and bystanders, even for the soldiers, rebels, officials, the children with guns, even perhaps for a fleeting second or two, for that bastard Marcel, all caught in a crucible of revolution.

We feel for the French, even though we know why they’re hated, because they’re people swimming and floundering in the maelstrom, and because Maria keeps trying so hard, chasing so ceaselessly, that we can’t help but admire and even love her. The movie is beautiful as a fine painting, haunting as a fine poem, yet real as a slap in the face. Bravo Claire Denis! Bravo Marie NDiaye! Bravo Isabelle!

Well, have I persuaded you to see this film? Listen: trust us all. Because it’s an arthouse movie, White Material probably won’t last long in your city. So find the film, find the theatre, draw a circle around the title. Why? Because few actress gave a better performance in a movie this year than Isabelle Huppert as Marie. Because few scenarists wrote better scripts than Denis and NDiaye. Few directors of photography caught the world and its sunlight and nightfall with such clarity as Yves Cape. And few moviemakers directed as well — as damned perfectly, shatteringly well — as Claire Denis.

Go see White Material while you can — because it’s great, its rare, because it might not be around too long, because it has the feel of today and a quality of timelessness. And see it because this movie shows us something very well, that we should all remember better: That sometimes things — inexorably, inevitably — fall apart.

(In French, with English subtitles.)

Tags: Burlesque, Tangled, White Material
Posted in Columns, MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, MCN Weekend Reviews, Movie City News, Movie Review, Reviews, Wilmington | 2 Comments »

Critics Roundup — November 26
Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Burlesque|||Green||
Tangled|||||
Break Ke Baad|||||
Faster |||||
Love and Other Drugs |||Green||
The Nutcracker in 3-D |||||

Tags: break ke baad, Burlesque, Faster, love and othe drugs, Tangled, The Nutcracker In 3D
Posted in MCN Critics Roundup, MCN Weekend | Comments Off on Critics Roundup — November 26

Box Office Hell — November 25
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Our Players|Coming Soon|Box Office Prophets|Box Office Guru|EW|Box Office . com
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1|76.5|80.7|50|53|55
Tangled|41.5|30.4|45|35|32
Megamind|20.5|14.8|13|12.5|13.5
Burlesque |20.0|7.4|19|13|12
Faster|16.5|14.5|18|n12|10.5
Love and Other Drugs|13.6|11.2|12|10|11.5

Tags: Burlesque, Faster, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Love and Other Drugs, Megamind, Tangled
Posted in Box Office Hell, MCN Originals, MCN Weekend, Movie City News | Comments Off on Box Office Hell — November 25

Steve Antin Spies His Burlesque Stars
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Steve Antin Spies His Burlesque Stars

Tags: Burlesque
Posted in MCN Curated Headlines, Movie City News | Comments Off on Steve Antin Spies His Burlesque Stars

When The Woz Met Cher And Christina
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

When The Woz Met Cher And Christina

Tags: Burlesque
Posted in MCN Curated Headlines, Movie City News | Comments Off on When The Woz Met Cher And Christina

Review: Burlesque
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

It’s a Xerox of a Xerox of an Original. Steve Antin imitates Rob Marshall imitating Bob Fosse.

Cher plays… “Cher”. Stanley Tucci queens it up to great effect, The Magic Homosexual, really. Cam Gigandet plays The Boy. Kristen Bell is objectified as The Villain. And a series of cardboard cutouts posing as actors turn up, including Julianne Hough and Eric Dane, who previously managed to be boring even in a sex tape three-way. Peter Gallagher is wasted, but compared to the abusive (to the audience) non-use of Alan Cumming, he got off light.

And Christina Aguilera doesn’t so much act as glow… assisted mightily by the permanent gauze from Cher’s camera that the somehow infected every frame of the film. I am conscious of Ms Aquilera, but had no idea how many ways there were to photograph her hair and boobs until this film. Seriously. I expect there to be a website dedicated to the passion Steve Antin shows for his starlet’s bust and the many ways he features it in frame, from loosely hanging to practically strapped down. Is she an A-Cup or a C-Cup? I don’t know. But the framing constantly demands high torso attention. And her face is equally unpredictable in the angles from which it is shot. At one point, I thought she was a new character I couldn’t remember. Generally, a director and a DP figure out how they want to shoot an actress and strive for consistency. Here, Cher and Tucci are very consistent… and the novice seems to be shot from every angle known to man.

But back to the boobs…

Seriously… I would be fascinated by the behind-the scenes documentary on The Underwear of Burlesque. It manages to be the most exposed, least threatening display of flesh I have ever seen in a film. Even more fleshy than Showgirls, really, though none of the naughty bits ever turn up. Because of the way Antin shoots and cuts, it’s something like a PG-13 pornographic butcher shop… parts and parts and parts and parts, but the only real hint that anyone has used them successfully is a third act pregnancy. With shot after shot of beautiful body parts, I found myself wondering how these painted on outfits worked… were they comfortable… how were they lined? I don’t think that was the goal… their goal or mine. i just wanted to be able to stare at something sexy for more than 36 frames at a time. Even the central romantic relationship is so much tease and so little please that in the real world this character – who spends as much if not more time obsessing on himself as the girls in the bar and the girl in his home – he have either thrown her out or become a violent asshole.

Then the script manages to be so much more complicated than the 3 ideas that Mr Antin seems to have in his head for this film that it becomes either laughable or infuriating. The entire movie has a case of blue balls. Just get on with it!

And did I mention that the original songs are stunningly forgettable? For the first act of the film, the dancers lip sync covered standards. Why? Don’t know. But at least the songs are good. All of a sudden, when they start singing for themselves, they inexplicably start singing new material that is desperately trying to sound like standards. Was it budget? Was it ego? Was it the need for album cash flow? Don’t know. But a musical with songs you can’t remember… oy.

And yet…

I can’t say that Burlesque is a painful movie experience. It is a little sexy. It is a little funny. It is a little compelling. It isn’t any of these things to the degree that the films clearly intends. But in the end, it is a series of music videos. Not original ones. Not special ones. But the film asks so little of you and changes speeds so relentlessly that it’s hard to ever get serious about disliking it. It’s like a bag of Halloween candy. Kids are willing to eat it all even if the bag isn’t filled with their personal favorites. Coffee Nips? For a 7-year-old? Okay… there are some Sour Patch Kids just a grab away,

Don’t get me wrong. This movie is crap. But it’s the kind of crap that does actually get to BETBF (Bad Enough To Be Fun).

Tags: Burlesque, Cher, Christina Aguilera
Posted in MCN Blogs, MCN Originals, MCN Weekend Reviews, Movie City News, The Hot Blog | 11 Comments »

Dargis Does Burlesque
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

“There’s a suggestion of a more interesting movie in the rapturous look on Ali’s face when she watches these women, something that registers as more forceful than mere admiration and edges close to a visceral sense of desire.”
Dargis Does Burlesque

Tags: Burlesque
Posted in MCN Curated Headlines, Movie City News | Comments Off on Dargis Does Burlesque

« Older Entries

Posts Tagged ‘Burlesque’

WILMINGTON ON DVD: 127 Hours, Bambi, Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy, Burlesque, Faster

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW & BLU-RAY

127 Hours (Four Stars)
U.S.: Danny Boyle, 2010 (2oth Century Fox)

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC & BLU-RAY

Bambi Diamond Edition (Blu-ray and DVD Combo) (Two Discs) (Four Stars)
U.S.: David Hand, 1942 (Walt Disney)

PICK OF THE WEEK: BOX SET

Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy (Three Stars)
U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2003-2008 (Walt Disney)

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

Faster (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: George Tillman, Jr., 2010 (CBS Films)

Burlesque (Two Stars)
U.S.: Steve Antin, 2010 (Screen Gems)

Weekend Estimates — December 12

Friday Estimates — December 11

Weekend Estimates — December 5

Friday Estimates — December 4

Weekend Estimates — November 28

Friday Estimates – November 27

MW on Movies: Tangled, Burlesque and White Material

Tangled (Three Stars)

Critics Roundup — November 26

Box Office Hell — November 25

Steve Antin Spies His Burlesque Stars

When The Woz Met Cher And Christina

Review: Burlesque

Dargis Does Burlesque

Quote Unquotesee all »

Indie Bloggers see all »

Awards see all »

MCN Writers see all »

Contact MCN Editors & Writers see all »

Posts Tagged ‘Burlesque’

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW & BLU-RAY

127 Hours (Four Stars) U.S.: Danny Boyle, 2010 (2oth Century Fox)

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC & BLU-RAY

Bambi Diamond Edition (Blu-ray and DVD Combo) (Two Discs) (Four Stars) U.S.: David Hand, 1942 (Walt Disney)

PICK OF THE WEEK: BOX SET

Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy (Three Stars) U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2003-2008 (Walt Disney)

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

Faster (Two and a Half Stars) U.S.: George Tillman, Jr., 2010 (CBS Films)

Burlesque (Two Stars) U.S.: Steve Antin, 2010 (Screen Gems)

Haply New Year

Weekend Estimates – December 31-January 1, 2010

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 23, 2010)

Grit and Bear It

Weekend Estimates – December 24-26, 2010

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 23, 2010)

Top Limited Releases * (Jan. 1 – Dec. 23, 2010)

Da Doo Tron Tron

Weekend Estimates – December 17-19, 2010

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 16, 2010)

Top Domestic Grossers * (Jan. 1 – Dec. 16, 2010)

Weekend Estimates – December 10-12, 2010

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 9, 2010)

The Warrior’s Weigh

Weekend Estimates – December 3-5, 2010

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Dec. 2, 2010)

Top Global Grossers * (Jan. 1 – Dec. 2, 2010)

Tangled Up in Blues … and Reds

Weekend Estimates – November 26-28, 2010

Domestic Market Share (Jan. 1 – Nov. 21, 2010)

Top Limited Releases * (Jan. 1 – Nov. 21, 2010)

Tangled (Three Stars)

Quote Unquotesee all »

127 Hours (Four Stars)
U.S.: Danny Boyle, 2010 (2oth Century Fox)

Bambi Diamond Edition (Blu-ray and DVD Combo) (Two Discs) (Four Stars)
U.S.: David Hand, 1942 (Walt Disney)

Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy (Three Stars)
U.S.: Gore Verbinski, 2003-2008 (Walt Disney)

Faster (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: George Tillman, Jr., 2010 (CBS Films)

Burlesque (Two Stars)
U.S.: Steve Antin, 2010 (Screen Gems)