Before we push ahead into the present, aka The Silly Season of Spandex & 3D, I'd like to do a brief recap of this Spring's hits/misses and everything in between.
The month of March began promisingly enough, with the March 4 releases of the delightfully off-kilter Rango, and the not-nearly-off-kilter-enough The Adjustment Bureau, which, apart from the chemistry of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, was pretty forgettable. Did anyone else just assume The Man Upstairs was this guy?
The weekend of March 11 brought us the crapfest that is, was and will always be Battle Los Angeles, or as I call it, Battle Louisiana, as that's the only LA featured in it (it was filmed in Baton Rouge). The best part of that was print screening (with audience) the opening midnight show and the peals of laughter during Aaron Eckhart's painfully hokey "inspirational" speech, which literally culminates with the line "But none of that matters now." People were howling. March 11 brought two other howlers, Amanda Seyfried in the pointless Red Riding Hood (why Red, what big... eyes...you have) and Mars Needs Moms, the dismal $21M box office performance of which (against a budget of $150M) finally killed off horrible, dead-eyed motion-capture 'animation' that Robert Zemekis has been foisting on us for years.
Then The Boys of Spring blew into the theater: Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper, in The Lincoln Lawyer and Limitless, respectively, both of which opened on March 18 and kept going, week after week, like the Energizer Vibrator. Yeah, guess what -- turns out that 51% of the population find Messrs. McConaughey and Cooper very easy on the eyes. (My friend Melinda and I watched them back-to-back one afternoon, an event I dubbed a Dirty Manwich Double Feature.) The Lincoln Lawyer made $83.5M against its $70M budget, and Limitless a whopping $78.5M against its $27M budget, which showed that Bradley Cooper can now call himself a bonafide movie star, capable of opening a movie, and that Relativity could finally release a movie that didn't stink like a dead man's balls (see Season of the Witch, previously reviewed here. Better still, see it not.) Both films lasted until almost May, unheard of in the churn-and-burn release patterns these days.
It also helped that the films they were in either featured some other, actually good actors and meaty plot (The Lincoln Lawyer) or enough drug imagery/photographic pyrotechnics to keep eyes of all genders interested (Limitless). Personally, I've always considered Matthew's entire acting range to consist of shirt on or shirt off, but the supporting cast (William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei, etc.) helped prop this one up. Matt's actually wearing a shirt and a tie during most of The Lincoln Lawyer, so perhaps it's an Oscar bid.
I've liked Brad's looks since he popped up on the TV series Alias years ago. Plus he resembles someone else I'm inordinately fond of, prior to his conversion to a scaly heavy (every other Brit thesp has done Potter -- why not hold out for the best role?)
March also brought two strong indie films, a new adaptation of the classic Jane Eyre and the fantastic Win Win. Jane Eyre starred Mia Wasikoska, who starred in Alice in Wonderland, and Michael Fassbender, currently starring in a different kind of literary adaptation as young Ian McKellan (aka Magneto) in X-Men First Class. In Win Win, Paul Giamatti gave us yet another flawed but redeemable human being in the form of Mike Flaherty, a small-time lawyer and coach in the suburbs of northern NJ (where I grew up) wrestling with making the ends meet without losing what's important. Bobby Cannavale as Mike's divorced friend was hilarious and touching. As a special treat, my theater's rep series was celebrating the Academy Awards during March by presenting films that received Best Picture nominations (but did not win) and we got to show a beautiful 35mm print of Sideways on the big screen. Talk about a win-win.
The month ended badly with the release Suck-It...er...Sucker Punch, a movie with a trailer so sexist and just plain incomprehensible that 51% of the population were uninterested in ever seeing it. Let's see, as near as I could tell from the preview, the lead girl is in some sort of dream landscape she's imagining to free herself mentally from the women's prison she's in and she chooses to dress like the pervy Japanese schoolgirl archetype from a manga series? Um, no. It was director Zack Snyder who took the spanking -- a paltry $19M opening and a $36M gross against its cost of $82M -- after this and Watchmen he's practically the go-to guy to make big money-losers out of incomprehensible material. The only film he made real money on was 300, which I find unwatchable. Best 300 joke ever, from Sarah Silverman: it was called 300 because that's how gay it is on a scale from 1-10.
We get no April showers in Los Angeles, but we do get a dull drizzle of middling film releases. Come April Fool's Day, I was very keen to see Source Code, the second film of Duncan Jones, who directed the superb Moon. Source Code was just okay, kind of a sophomore shrug, if you will. It moved along at a good clip for one of those looped, time-rebooting thingies, and some good moments with of acting, but my memory's been wiped nearly clean of it two months later. Maybe that was their plan...in some alternate universe with meta-plots.
Insidious, which I have not seen, also opened on the first and has gone on the be the biggest grossing film relative to budget this year. Made for a very un-scary $1.5M, it managed to frighten up $52.7M. The heavily-hyped Scream 4, which opened on April 15, hasn't even recouped its $40M budget yet. Low budget horror, provided it offers some real, imaginative jolts, is still a thrill for audiences to discover. More-of-the-same horror reboots, sequels, etc., not so much.
Speaking of thill-less, and pointless, reboots, April 8 brought us a new Arthur. I was always fond of the original, with Dudley Moore, Liza Minelli and John Gielgud, but it seemed to be very much a film of its time (1981). Drunk driving was still funny back then, with Dudley weaving out in his Rolls to meet his future in-laws. This new Arthur stars Russell Brand, some mumblecore indie chick and Helen Mirren. Russell Brand was both too tall and not nearly drunk enough throughout. Also, having his dim chauffeur drive him around Manhattan in the Batmobile is belabored, not funny. There were a few laugh-out-loud moments (I do like Russell Brand, even though he's quite a limited performer), but the thing was generally a sodden mess, with Helen Mirren no match for the memory of John Gielgud. The girl lead, played by Greta whose-last-name-I-feel-not-like-looking-up, was changed from the notably, vividly lower class Liza Minelli (who meets Arthur as she's shoplifting a tie for her father's birthday gift) to a waify little thing who gives tours of Grand Central without [gasp] a permit. Wow, how edgy.
Other second weekend of April releases include Hanna, a violent exercise in style with a propulsive score by the Chemical Brothers that takes you on a high-energy trip that goes nowhere. Your Highness, another unfunny stoner comedy, lasted less time in theaters than an ounce would at Snoop Dog's house.
Tax day brought Rio, a pleasing G-rated musical romp set in a cleaned-up Rio with birds of many colors. It was no Pixar film, but then again, it wasn't hyperkintic dreck like Hop, with an Easter Bunny heir who poops jelly beans [sigh] that kids had to settle for the first two weeks of April. Also on the 15th, a purportedly long-awaited, Tea Party-hyped first installation of a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. With free market grosses of $4.6M against a $20M, Atlas wasn't the only one shrugging. Also, selfishness is not a philosophy, it's a character flaw.
April 22 brought the annual Disneynature release on Earth Day. This year was African Cats, which I enjoyed immensely. It featured gorgeous photography and two family sagas, one about a cheetah mom and her cubs, and the other about an aging lioness and a pride that's about to get jacked by a new male lion and his four strapping sons (those were some good looking lions -- don't tell my cat.).
Speaking of African mammals, Water for Elephants released on the 22nd as well, starring Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz (the scary Nazi from Inglorious Basterds) and that sparkling piece of wood from Twlight, Robert Pattinson. Holy shit, can that guy not act. The elephant had more acting chops, and she was way cuter than RPutz -- she had the most adorable freckles. And Reese got to wear some pretty Depression-era clothes. A meh time was had by all.
But the biggest hit of spring came the last weekend in April with another film set in Rio de Janiero, Fast Five. It found a 6th gear to shift into, opening to $86M and grossing $199.7M in the U.S. (so far, my theater just dropped it 2 days ago) and $556M worldwide. It cost $125M before it even backed out of the garage, but it seems to be a straighforward enough genre film that it can translate well into any market. (I'm curious to know how much of that $125M was spent on steroids and body oils for The Rock. The dude was so enormous in this movie that next to him, Vin Diesel looked like some tiny turd he propulsion-shat while lifting weights.)
That big opening for Fast Five got the industry all lathered up about summer, falsely assuming that the months-long box office doldrums were over. Sadly, it stoked the foolish fantasy that this summer's seeming weekend-after-weekend of flaccid superheroes was going to be boffo, that Thor wouldn't rhyme with snore, bore and Anthony Hopkins is a big whore. But that's a tale for another day in the near future...
So just how long WOULD an ounce last in Snoop Dogg's house?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reviews; I've got a pretty good idea of what films not to see now, which is of course most of them. Funny how, though film was once very important to me, it's a habit I rarely indulge any more, except for the occasional indie release. Perhaps if the big studios would ever release anything worth seeing, I'd go back to the theaters. It's hard not to be nostalgic for the sixties and seventies, when you could see real art on a regular basis in your neighborhood movie house. I'm gonna have to wait for a while for the next Francis F. Coppola film ("'Twixt Now and Sunrise," now in post-production).
Well, "Tree of Life" is now playing in Los Angeles, so you could check that out. And I'm quite hopeful for an indie called "Another Earth" that's opening at the end of July.
ReplyDeleteSparkling piece of wood! High-sterical. This was a fun post...I was amused to see how much fun it was to follow along on the recap!
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