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  • SUNDAY CENTS: Box office ‘Trans’-stormed!

    Transformers: Revenge of the FallenAfter a critical mauling the likes of which is usually reserved for Uwe Boll, Michael Bay’s mega-budget sequel “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” opened to the second largest five day opening of all-time behind “The Dark Knight.” Is that surprising? Not really.

    The original film is one of only two non-sequels in the last three years to make over $300 million at the box office and was the highest selling DVD of 2007, beating the much-higher profile third films in the “Spider-Man,” “Shrek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises. In short, for whatever reason, people loved that film and the two years that passed was short enough to strike while the iron was hot, but long enough to significantly improve effects and get bigger, badder robots on screen for longer.

    $112 million for the three days and $201.2 million since opening Wednesday are the official estimates and that is astounding. Word of mouth could be absolutely poisonous and the film would still out-gross the original and collect over a half billion worldwide. This was the blockbuster that summer has been waiting for and it will take less than 10 days to pass “Up” as the highest grossing film of the year so far.

    The only other new action came from “My Sister’s Keeper” at number five with $11.8 million. For a cancer drama, that’s a fine start, but a troubling amount of it came from Friday, indicating some kind of fanboy rush. Are there groupies for this book like there are for “Twilight?” Just couldn’t wait to see if they added a cancer-free twist at the end? Very odd.

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  • Oliver Stone talks ‘Wall Street 2’ on Real Time

    Bill Maher is taking a brief mid-season break from live “Real Time” shows for the next couple of weeks.  Friday night’s show, when not an awkward schmooze fest on some of his guests’ part, made for a delightful three-part one-on-one discussion.  The guests were Cameron Diaz, Oliver Stone and Billy Bob Thornton, but as you’d imagine, the most fascinating discussion was the Stone segment.

    The director talked about religion, “the death of journalism” regarding the current administration’s decision to withhold images from Abu Ghraib, and, most applicable to what we do here, the forthcoming sequel to his 1987 film “Wall Street.”  Stone says he plans to start filming in August for an early 2010 release.  The “Wall Street” talk begins around the 7:00 minute mark:

  • ‘Moon’ takes top prize at Edinburgh

    Sam Rockwell in MoonThe Edinburgh International Film Festival closed today with an awards ceremony that culminated in Duncan Jones’s sci-fi debut feature “Moon” landing the fest’s most coveted prize, the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature. The jury, headed by Joe Wright and including Oscar-nominee Frank Langella, said of the film:

    We award “Moon” for its singular vision and remarkably assured direction as well as for the inspired manner in which it transcends genre. The central performance by Sam Rockwell embodies the film’s emotional complexity and compelling philosophical perspective.

    The award is an aupicious one; recent winners that have gone on to considerable international success include “My Summer of Love,” “Control” and Oscar-winner “Tsotsi” (yes, it’s British). I suspect Jones might land a few more citations, particularly of the Best First Film variety, before the year is out.

    (More details, and a full list of awards, after the cut.)

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  • Live action Luxo Jr.

    (Courtesy: Gizmodo, via Cinematical)

  • Miyazaki’s ‘Ponyo’ closes LAFF

    Hayao MiyazakiI’ve come to the awkward, “I’m the only one” conclusion that, despite my best efforts, the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki just doesn’t paddle my boat.

    Looking back over the animator’s past works again throughout the week in preparation for this write-up, and having taken in his latest, “Ponyo,” just a few weeks back, I still find myself struggling to maintain an interest in these films.  “Ponyo” is probably more in line with “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service” than the director’s more ambitious fare, but it nevertheless represents an imagination that, despite my aversion to the work, is a welcome dose of creativity in a business sorely lacking it year after year.

    “Ponyo” is a loose adaptation of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” though Ariel’s mermaid has been swapped for Ponyo’s gold fish and there isn’t a villain within earshot.  But a narrative lacking an antagonist is par for the course for Miyazaki, perhaps one of the reasons I never warmed to his work but still a brazen way to go about visual storytelling business.

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  • Deepak Chopra on his friend, Michael Jackson

    This Keith Olbermann interview with doctor and author Deepak Chopra, one of Michael Jackson’s closest friends and confidants, is required viewing for anyone wanting to get past the knee-jerk “a pedophile is dead” stupidity flooding the net, the air waves, etc., in the wake of the entertainer’s untimely demise Thursday.  The interview comes on the heels of a Huffington Post op-ed Chopra penned early Friday morning, worth more than any cheap dime-store speculation from misanthropes and uneducated buffoons.

    Thankfully the interview briefly gets into the issue of Jackson’s lupus condition, which obviously speaks to the plastic surgery that eventually became an obsession with health that so many are quick to forget or ignore, choosing instead the line that he was attempting to transform himself into a child or some other such nonsense.  There is a Wolf Blitzer interview with Chopra that was even longer, which kick-started his many media appearances this weekend.  If you can find that, give it a look, too.

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  • Contest reminder

    If you haven’t already, don’t forget to take a stab at our “Public Enemies” poster contest.  We’ll accept captions throughout the weekend.

  • Oscarcast nixes honorary awards

    Jerry Lewis accepting the Jean Hersholt Award at the 81st Annual Academy AwardsAnyone know the reason why the Academy is so restlessly change-happy this week? Not content with doubling the Best Picture field and potentially eliminating the Best Original Song category, they’ve also decided go ahead and cut all honorary awards from the March telecast.

    Instead, the hitherto irregularly awarded Honorary (AKA lifetime achievement), Irving G. Thalberg Memorial and Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards will be announced in September and handed out at a private dinner in November. AMPAS  president Sid Ganis explains in the press release:

    “For some years now, the Board has struggled to balance the desire to truly honor worthy individuals with the time limitations that the Oscar® telecast imposes on these honors … By creating a separate event for recognizing these outstanding people in the movie industry, we’re insuring that each honoree will be given his or her full due, without compromise.”

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  • Could Focus be priming ‘Boat’ for Oscar?

    Rhys Ifans in The Boat That RockedVariety’s Pamela McClintock and Ali Jafaar are reporting tonight that Focus Features will distribute Richard Curtis’s “The Boat That Rocked,” rather than parent Universal, and instead of the originally planned August 28 release date, the studio has pushed it to November, right in the middle of the Oscar season.

    The article notes the fact that Focus is “more adept at marketing less commercial fare” as reason behind the move, but it also notes “Focus prexy James Schamus said his team is working with Curtis to trim about 20 minutes from the film, which originally ran 129 minutes. A chief complaint from critics was the film’s length.”

    You’ll recall, the film took a pretty big critical shellacking upon release in the UK in the spring.  It also failed to light up the international box office, pulling in, as McClintock and Jafaar note, a mere $25.1 million against a $50 million budget.  But while everything is certainly a business maneuver in this industry, one can’t help but wonder whether Focus is thinking, with a thin Oscar slate going into the fall (though animated feature “Coraline” is sure to pop up in the animated field), “Boat” could be whipped into an awards contender.

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  • Johnny Depp pitches ‘Enemies’ on Letterman

  • WEEKLY WRAP: Bombshell upon bombshell

    Michael JacksonWeird, unsettling week, this. Here’s how it went down:

    • In the week’s biggest movie news, the Academy threw us all for a loop by announcing a 10-nominee slate for the Best Picture category.

    • But even that shock was dwarfed in scale by the stunning news of Michael Jackson’s passing.

    • And in a rather bleak week for losing talent, we also said goodbye to Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

    • On a happier note, we laid eyes on two of our most eagerly awaited films of the year — “Public Enemies” and “Antichrist” — and liked what we saw.

    • AMPAS continues its tinkering, this time in the Best Original Song category.

    • The “Transformers” sequel opened to critical scorn even accusations of racism, but is the film totally indefensible?

    • With “The Hurt Locker” finally going public today, we caught up with the film’s breakout star Jeremy Renner.

    • We revealed our age by celebrating the 20th anniversary of Tim Burton’s “Batman.”

    • Continuing the reflective mood, this week’s list considered the greatest directorial debuts of the decade.

    • Speaking of debuts, “The Proposal” gave Sandra Bullock the biggest of her career.

  • Original ‘Batman’ producer looks back

    Michael UslanOn Tuesday we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Tim Burton’s “Batman” around these parts with a personal retrospective.  There are a number of similar remembrances around the web, many of them linked in that entry, but one guy who really deserves a “huzzah” this week is film producer, pop culture professor and all around comic book geek Michael Uslan.

    Uslan, as he notes in this interview piece with Batman On Film’s Bill Ramey, is actually celebrating his 30th anniversary where “Batman” is considered this year.  After all, he toiled through the Hollywood system to see his vision of the character to the screen for 10 years before anyone would take him, and the Caped Crusader, seriously.

    20 years later, of course, the rest is history.  Uslan exchanges a number of anecdotes with Ramey, specifically the marketing frenzy around the film that would really only be topped by “The Dark Knight” 19 years later.  One memory in particular, an intersection of commerce and political struggle, was particularly amazing, I thought.

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  • Bruno on Conan

    Here’s part one. Part two after the jump:

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  • ‘Bruno’ cut out of respect to Jackson

    LaToya JacksonWell, that was quick. The Guardian reports that, following the coinciding events of last night’s “Bruno” premiere and Michael Jackson’s tragic passing, a hasty — and possibly permanent — cut has been to the film. The scene in question pits Sacha Baron Cohen against Jackson’s sister LaToya:

    The offending scene features Cohen, in the guise of Brüno, attempting to find Michael Jackson’s phone number on LaToya’s BlackBerry. After Brüno reads aloud what he claims to be the singer’s number, an apparently enraged LaToya terminates the interview and storms off the set. Reports suggest that the scene will not be restored for its official release on 10 July.

    It would appear that the scene isn’t particularly derogatory about the late superstar, but the powers that be at Universal decided to remove it “out of respect to Jackson’s family.” Fair enough.

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  • Weinstein threatens more ‘Basterds’

    Harvey Weinstein and Quentin TarantinoThe jury may still be out on Quentin Tarantino’s latest opus following a rocky Cannes premiere, but don’t tell that to Harvey Weinstein. Resurrecting the talk that surfaced over a year ago that Tarantino had designs on more than one instalment of “Inglourious Basterds,” the producer claims to be ready for seconds:

    “Brad wants to do Inglourious II. We all want to do it. And the movie hasn’t even come out yet!” the movie mogul told GQ magazine. “But unfortunately I cannot give away the plot.”

    Weinstein reports that Tarantino has so much material mapped out for the “Inglourious Basterds” universe that there was talk at one point of making a Band of Brothers style TV series.

    “We could do two movies, three movies. I was begging for the movies, but Quentin wanted to do the TV series, Bob [Weinstein, Harvey’s partner in The Weinstein Company] wanted to do the TV series, so it was like two against one, you know?

    “And I was getting outvoted all over the place, so I just figured, All right, forget it, I’m not gonna be a loser, I’ll jump to the winning side. And then Quentin turns it into one movie. Go figure.”

  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Stoning of Soraya M.’ director Cyrus Nowrasteh

    Cyrus Nowrasteh on the set of The Stoning of Soraya M.Those seeking a cinematic escape from this week’s barrage of “Transformers” silliness couldn’t find a much more sober alternative than Cyrus Nowrasteh’s “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” an adaptation of the non-fiction bestseller by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam.

    A spare, moving study of gender persecution in 1980s Iran, as frank and unpretentious as its title, Nowrasteh’s fact-based drama may pivot on the eponymous ritual killing, but builds its larger narrative on more cathartic themes of storytelling and silence-breaking. As such, while it may sound like a grim night at the movies, it’s an oddly hopeful film – one whose accessibility was proved with the runner-up Audience Award at last year’s Toronto fest.

    Shohreh Aghdashloo (whom you’ll remember from her deservingly Oscar-nominated work in 2003’s “House of Sand and Fog”) plays Zahra, a senior resident of a remote desert village seeking retribution against the town’s male elders for their collective murder of her niece, the Soraya of the title.

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  • AMPAS says there might not be an original song presentation

    A.R. Rahman at the 81st annual Academy AwardsThe headline is slightly misleading, but not entirely untrue.  Following Wednesday’s big shake-up regarding the addition of five more slots in the Best Picture category (which has spurred considerable debate in John’s column today), the Academy has issued this press release indicating that, if no song receives the agreed-upon score minimum, then the category will be nixed for that year and an Oscar for Best Original Song will not be presented.

    The release, in part:

    The governors approved the Music Branch Executive Committee recommendation that if no song achieves a minimum average score of 8.25 in the nominations voting, there be no original song nominees and thus no Oscar presented for the category. If only one song achieves the required minimum, it and the song with the next highest score will be deemed the nominees. If two or more songs achieve the minimum score, they will be the nominees though no more than five nominees can be selected. Previously, the rules dictated that there be no more than five but no fewer than three nominees in the category.

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  • INTERVIEW: Jeremy Renner

    Jeremy Renner at the 2008 Venice Film FestivalJeremy Renner doesn’t have one of those handy “I always wanted to be an actor” stories.  His journey to the screen was, much like the man, a rather unpretentious, play-it-by-instinct series of events that began to unfold in college.

    “I was fumbling around with different majors like most people do,” the actor says, calling from somewhere on the road to Los Angeles in Northern California.  “I was a criminology major and I was interested in science.  I took an elective, which was an acting class, and that was a pretty wonderful place for me to express 19 years of repression, and I fell in love with it.  I fell in love with the stage.”

    Even though Renner is making his screen impact felt in films like “28 Weeks Later,” “The Assassinantion of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” opening in limited U.S. release today, he says he still holds a special place for theater.  “There’s something that you can’t get anywhere else,” he says, “that living, breathing sort of synergy that kind of happens on stage and with your audience, it’s a wonderful cohesive feeling.”

    Nothing he had performed could serve as any sort of preparation for his role as an Army bomb squad officer, a cog in the wheel of the military’s Explosive Ordinance Detail (EOD).  Mark Boal’s thoroughly researched screenplay first crossed Renner’s path when he was in London filming Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s “28 Weeks Later.”  Producer Greg Shapiro approached him with the material and the character leapt off the page at the actor.

    “It wasn’t one of those things that I needed to decide to do it or not,” Renner says.  “There was no choice in the matter to me.  I’ve never been so affected or so interested in a project.  I just thought that EOD was a whole world that had never been explored in cinema.  On paper, he was one of the best-written characters I’d seen in a long time.  I had so many questions and answers, at the same time, to what made this guy tick and I was just so curious I couldn’t wait to figure it out.”

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