Marc Forster’s “Machine Gun Preacher” is all set for a Toronto bow next month. It could be an awards play for actor Gerard Butler, or for Chris Cornell’s original song “The Keeper,” or maybe it’ll just be some September fun. We’ll see. But it has the “inspiring true story” thing going for it out of the gate. The trailer just hit via Apple, so check it out by clicking the image below, or watch an embed after the jump.
Another day, another poster. Interesting that they’re selling this one less as The Ralph Fiennes Show (he is Coriolanus, after all) and more as a two-hander. It’s worth playing up Gerard Butler’s contribution — his performance here is a career highlight — but I maintain my broken-record position that Vanessa Redgrave is the real story here. Meanwhile, I’m slightly surprised at what a slick marketing push this one is getting: the film is more of a curio than you might think. Interested to see how this pans out. Full poster after the jump.
The cavernous Berlinale Palast theatre was packed to the gills for today’s noontime press screening of “Coriolanus” (***), and small wonder — in a Competition lineup heavy on oatmeal fare boasting comparatively unfamiliar names, Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut is one of the few entries that affords viewers a little star-gazing.
Fiennes, of course, takes the title role in his revisionist take on Shakespeare’s under-filmed tragedy, with Gerard Butler, Brian Cox and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain adding further name appeal.
As the crowd staggered out of the auditorium two hours later, the name being murmured most approvingly was that of the film’s oldest and most distinguished star. And with good reason. As Volumnia, the proud, politically-minded mother of the titular Roman general, Vanessa Redgrave gives one of “those” performances, an Olympian masterclass in classical acting that conjures spontaneous emotional fire upon a bed of immaculate technique.
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.
Forgive me if this entry seems a little rushed, but I’ve been flying most of the day and detoxing from South by Southwest. It was my first time attending since 2006 and the growth in scope, prestige and attendance since then was staggering. The quality and selection of films, however, has not suffered and there remains no better film festival in the United States to see unique, low budget independent films that may or may not make it to your local multiplex. “Cold Weather,” “Passenger Pigeons,” “Putty Hill,” “The Myth of the American Sleepover” and “Tiny Furniture” are just a few that you should keep your eyes on.
But enough about those itty bitty movies nobody cares about. How about “The Bounty Hunter?” Starring the only Friend to successfully craft a big screen career out of that small screen sensation and some Irish bloke that seems to really get off on playing chauvinists. And why not, since in Hollywood they get to treat the girl like shit and still win her in the end. One of three films coming out in the next few months with a hapless woman thrust together with a man of action (“Killers” and “Knight & Day” being the others), Sony was smart to push this one out first and should see something around $20 million for their troubles.
Fox adapts a famous (so I’ve heard) series of young adult books with “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and I heard it pitched as a PG-rated “Superbad” for middle schoolers. Truth be told, I think it actually looks pretty good and with no major kids product out there it may have a chance at some success. Unless it comes off as too raunchy for kids and too immature for teens and then Fox will be in trouble. I think it can give America $13 million worth of wedgies.
• James Rocchi sits down with Jason Reitman to talk “Up in the Air.” [AMC TV]
• Jeffrey Wells bangs the Best Picture drum for Rodrigo Garcia’s as-of-yet un-acquired “Mother and Child.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Michael Douglas talks “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” [Empire]
• John Campea rattles off a list of the six movies he’d love to see but that will never happen. [The Movie Blog]
• Patrick Goldstein translates Bob Weinstein’s classified in search of a new assistant. [The Big Picture]
• Chloe Fox talks to “The Ugly Truth” star Gerard Butler about “mixing the rough with the smooth.” [Daily Telegraph]
*All historical figures are adjusted to today’s dollars.
To the surprise of no one, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” was the number one movie at the box office this weekend with $79.5 million. The film made an additional $80.1 million on Wednesday and Thursday, so Daniel Radcliffe and company have just under $160 million in the bank after five days. Comparisons to other Potter flicks are pointless except the previous entry since it was the only other film to debut on a Wednesday in the summer.
“Order of the Phoenix” opened in 2007 to $80.5 million over three days and $146 million for five. This latest installment already seems a bit more front-loaded, so I think we might be looking at a total gross in the same ballpark as the $288 million for “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” which is currently the lowest earner of the franchise. But with worldwide sales, DVD and merchandise, every film in this 8-part series is worth about a billion dollars each to Warner Bros., so any scrutiny on the numbers is irrelevant.
“Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” holds on to second place for the third week in a row by dropping 36% to $17.7 million. A fourth film is already in the works where the three prehistoric friends get frozen and then thawed out in modern times for a museum exhibit. So, basically, it’s “Star Trek IV” with woolly mammoths. Where do I start the line?
“Bruno” dropped a brutal 73% to fourth place and $8.4 million. In terms of major wide releases, only “Gigli,” “Friday the 13th,” “Star Trek: Nemesis” and George A. Romero’s “Land of the Dead” have lost more of their opening weekend audience. As I mentioned in last week’s piece, though, this was not unexpected and won’t keep Universal from making a tidy profit on their investment.
Short of seeking or citing any legitimate critical opinion, the marketing team behind “RocknRolla,” the fifth feature from Guy Ritchie, have gone to much effort to portray it as a creative comeback for the much-maligned filmmaker.
Here in the UK, the words “return to form” are splashed prominently across billboards for the film (set to make its North American bow at the Toronto fest): a frank admission that Ritchie’s last two efforts, “Revolver” and “Swept Away,” were across-the-board disasters. They appear to be working the angle that this is something of a back-to-basics effort, a happy reunion between Ritchie and knockabout gangland comedy.
And indeed, for the first few minutes of “RocknRolla,” hopes are high that Ritchie has rediscovered the fleet-footed timing and lightness of touch that made his trend-setting 1998 debut “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” such a delight, and its lesser follow-up, “Snatch,” such a guilty pleasure. The animated credit sequence, as you may have heard, is a thing of considerable beauty. More importantly, the opening scene, which employs swift, sexy cuts between multiple actors and locations to maintain a multi-voiced monologue on the fortunes of present-day London (Ritchie presumably wrote this before the recession), is something to behold.
But then the pace settles, the actual narrative reveals itself — and the whole enterprise, shorn of these initial stylistic tics, steadily falls apart. Ritchie has dialed down his style of story construction since the incomprehensibly convoluted “Revolver,” but he may have overcompensated — the size of the ensemble notwithstanding, there is really very little storytelling motor here.