In Contention

Tag: Taking Woodstock

  • SUNDAY CENTS: ‘Halloween’ suffers ‘Final’ cut

    The Final Destination*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    When it comes to a death match, would anyone bet against death himself? Two high profile horror franchises released their latest installments on the last weekend of the summer and the winner is “The Final Destination.”

    $28.3 million is a new high for the series and proves the value of 3D, at least as far as body parts flying out of the screen are concerned. There’s no other explanation as to why these movies would continually improve since they are, quite literally, the exact same plot done again and again with only the most minor of tweaks. Now the only interesting thing about the series is trying to guess what they’ll call the next movie. “The Real Final Destination: Honest”?

    “Halloween II” could only muster up $17.4 million for third place, which is a steep drop from the original film’s showing, most likely because everybody hated that movie. Rob Zombie seemed to offer nothing but more of the same and if uncomfortable glasses and flying body parts coming straight at me aren’t in the equation, then there’s nothing else to say.

    It’s interesting that the Weinsteins chose to release this only one week after their other big summer film and against competition they should have known they would lose to.

    Sandwiched between those two is Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” A respectable 48% drop to $20 million for the weekend and $73.8 million so far means that Tarantino and his film have to be taken a little more seriously by Oscar. I mean, it’s got World War II subject matter, a return-to-form director, critical and public approval, Mike Myers. Three of those four things, the Academy can’t resist.

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  • Alec Baldwin on ‘Taking Woodstock’ and the event itself

    Taking WoodstockI saw Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock” some weeks back and it landed okay for me.  It’s not top tier Lee, it’s not a powerful piece of work.  It features a rather over-the-top supporting performance from Imelda Staunton that, had it been reined in a bit, could have been in the awards discussion.  But on the whole (despite being too long — like most movies these days) I was taken in by its atmosphere.

    I don’t hold Woodstock in any real reverential light, of course.  I wasn’t there.  I don’t know the impact.  And I in fact find myself relieved to read some revisionist reactions to the event that have attempted to shake some of the poignancy out of the thing.

    But still, Lee captured something with the film and I think it was brave to willfully ignore the concert itself and focus on the way a moment affected one guy and his family.  That’s what Lee is best at, after all.

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  • SUNDAYE CENTZ: Glory for ‘Basterds’

    Inglourious Basterds*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    An advertising campaign built around aggressive violence and the reputation of a polarizing director, a late August release date and mixed early word coming out of Cannes were all factors working against “Inglourious Basterds” leading up to its release. All for naught, however, as the film took in a fantastic $37.6 million, marking a new career high for the director.

    Films opening at this point in August simply aren’t supposed to do this well, with the previous high debut on this particular week in the year belonging to “Blade” with $26.1 million in 1998. For The Weinstein Company, this is very welcome news and serves as only the company’s second number one film and first since “Scary Movie 4” in 2006. It is bad news, however, for 2nd grade spelling teachers.

    Interestingly enough, the debut is a near mirror image of last week’s “District 9,” which dropped a very respectable 49% to $18.9 million and second place. The running total stands at $73.5 million and the film continues to generate talk around the water cooler. And by water cooler, of course I mean anonymous virtual chat rooms.

    “The Time Traveler’s Wife” dipped 46%, probably because people realized that a movie about the person who travels through time would have been way more exciting than the movie about the person who sits around waiting for him to come back.

    Tarantino’s old partner in crime, Robert Rodriguez, tried to one-up him with pandering children’s fantasy but “Shorts” came up short (ba-zing!) at $6.6 million and sixth place. Rodriguez loves to throw one of these kids movies in every few years or so and that’s cool, but maybe he should come up with something a little more clever than a rock that grants wishes next time.

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  • 8/18 Web Round-up

    Metropolis• “District 9” and the legacy of high-brow sci-fi. [Film School Rejects]

    • Roger Ebert talks “Inglourious Basterds” with Quentin Tarantino. [Chicago Sun-Times]

    • Patrick Goldstein weighs in on the Redbox brouhaha. [The Big Picture]

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Whittling further as convention flees

    Max Records in Where the Wild Things AreAnother month, another step closer to the awards season.  As the summer winds down and the industry slowly begins to square itself with the off-season’s bombshell Oscar news, the picture becomes a little clearer.  Kind of.

    Universal Pictures, in a move speculated upon endlessly by now, shuffled two of its contenders — Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” and Joe Johnston’s “The Wolf Man” — off to 2010.  As Anne Thompson shrewdly noted in a recent item, the decision likely has everything to do with a numbers game.  The studio has experienced a rocky two quarters this year and things aren’t necessarily looking up.  Some think, in the case of “The Wolf Man,” the shift was made to avoid another box office misfire in 2009 (as by now, with push after push, the film is beginning to smell fishy).  Others say the “Green Zone” shift had a lot to do with “The Hurt Locker”‘s release pattern.

    Whatever the case, the evacuations change the Oscar landscape ever so slightly, giving us just a few more talking points in the vacuum of August before we have anything of value worth discussing when the fall festival season hits in less than a month’s time.

    Universal is now left with two critically divisive, commercially dubious titles in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” and Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” to hawk for awards consideration, effectively (if you’re asking me, though I realize no one is) taking the studio out of the game this year — or, at the very least, making the hill steeper.

    But taking note of the studio awards landscape, it doesn’t seem to me that anyone else is on surer ground.  As I look out at the many contenders and the campaigns being prepared for them, it appears the entire industry will be dealing with unconventional approaches and product to go along with the new changes in the Best Picture category (and all the headache that comes with them) this season.

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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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  • OFF THE CARPET: Taking the temperature

    Jeremy Renner in The Hurt LockerIt’s somewhat surprising that our year-in-advance Oscar coverage is only three months old.  That now ancient list of predictions seems so long ago, and yet, even with Cannes behind us and this or that indication of a few of the contenders, I have no idea how to offer an educated update beyond general housekeeping.  The season, it seems, will remain elusive for just a little while longer.

    Here’s what we know: Critics didn’t respond to Universal’s “The Boat That Rocked” across the pond.  But the Brits hardly have a soft spot for Richard Curtis.  Along similar lines, Stephen Frears’s “Chéri” hasn’t exactly inspired either.  But both films, from awards savvy studios, could find a second wind when they eventually open Stateside.

    The biggest Oscar hopeful to emerge from this year’s Cannes fest is, in my opinion, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.”  Heralded in some quarters as a return to form for the director, and snatched up by the intrepid Bob Berney (formerly of Picturehouse and now closing in on a name for his distribution company with partner Bill Polhad), the film could be a nominations hog, anywhere from six to 10 possibilities.  You’ll note all of my ponderings in that regard in the latest chart update below.

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  • Mendes hiccup

    (from left) John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph in Away We GoI’ve been on board for most every Sam Mendes film since the director made his heralded debut in 1999.  Even “Jarhead,” which was a big disappointment, had a lot of interesting ideas concerning the alienation of war and its effects on soldiers.

    I still think  last year’s “Revolutionary Road” (DVD coverage from John here) was a sublime work of art, but “Road to Perdition” probably remains his best work to date.  It’s an intriguing portfolio.  But “Away We Go” has been a troubling speed bump for me.

    I saw the film weeks ago and wanted to give it another go before committing to an opinion, but I don’t know.  The desire to wallow in its stereotypes and weirdly skewed view of the world just hasn’t been there.

    Variety’s Dennis Harvey has written a review that kind of sums up my feelings, for the most part.  I might not have been as harsh, but I understand feeling the need to do so:

    …the protags are essentially blank slates, despite the skill and charm Krasinski and Rudolph bring to the roles. It’s their job simply to represent “normal” against so many illustrations of bad parenting, worse marriages and damaged adulthood. But given they’re such harmlessly pleasant folk, why don’t they have any non-messed-up friends?

    Because that would un-stack the deck in a script that needs to paint them as two lonely souls in a hostile world. But in positing normal as special, the pic requires caricaturing almost everyone else.

    While handled by resourceful actors, the foibles of the supporting characters are less funny than they are forced and unpleasant. Janney and Gyllenhaal in particular play figures venomously conceived.

    Meant to amp up the pic’s indie-quirky cred, the soundtrack, papered with lyrically trite soundalike cuts by Scottish singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch, instead makes progress seem more meandering and monotonous. Other design/tech contributions are solid. Still, this alternately condescending and hazy material doesn’t trigger the kind of sharp aesthetic choices Mendes and collaborators made in response to past projects from “American Beauty” to “Revolutionary Road.”

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Antichrist’ and action

    Willem Dafoe in Antichrist• Scandalising media and polarising critics, Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist” emerged as the undisputed talking-point of the Cannes Film Festival.

    • That firestorm even managed to overshadow the Cannes debut of Quentin Tarantino’s divisive “Inglourious Basterds.”

    • In other news from the Croisette, “A Prophet” impressed critics, while “Taking Woodstock” took a hit.

    • We celebrated the start of summer (and provoked some argument) with a list of the all-time Top 10 action sequences.

    • Unfortunately, our review deems “Terminator Salvation” unlikely to earn a place on any such future lists.

    • In the wake of that disappointment, “Up” happily lived up to expectations.

    • In box office news, “Angels and Demons” turned out to be a pale shadow of its predecessor.

    • This week’s edition of Page to Screen reviewed the literary source for Jason Reitman’s upcoming comedy “Up in the Air.”

    • John delved further through his personal cinematic treasure trove, returning to the 1990s, and reappraising last year’s “Revolutionary Road.”

  • ‘Taking Woodstock’ fizzles at Cannes

    Demetri Martin in Taking WoodstockAng Lee’s “Taking Woodstock” appears to have provided Cannes with its first high-profile disappointment. While it doesn’t appear to be a disaster by any means, the general consensus appears to be that it doesn’t meet the very high standard Lee set for himself with his last two features.

    Allan Hunter at Screen Daily finds much to like in the film, calling it a “sweet, meandearing tribute” to the eponymous festival, he ultimately declares it inconsequential:

    Taking Woodstock is accessible but very lightweight and should enjoy moderate commercial success as a specialised domestic release. The very American, softly sentimental nature of the film will make it a harder sell internationally … While the wider themes are persuasive enough its the smaller human stories that are disappointingly banal as Woodstock becomes a form of therapy for Elliot and his parents. Enjoyable in places and merely humdrum in others, Taking Woodstock ultimately feels like a minor Ang Lee digression in between more memorable works.

    Hunter finds the film’s ensemble an equally mixed bag:

    (Demetri Martin’s) gentle, guileless manner makes him perfect casting for Elliot without settling the matter of whether he is charismatic enough to have a sustained cinema career. Liev Schreiber brings dashes of sass and style to cross-dressing Vilma but Imelda Staunton’s dowdy, embittered Sonia is overcooked and all too reminiscent of  Shelley Winters in full flow.

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  • Cannes: sizing up the Competition, part one

    Penelope Cruz in Broken EmbracesWith the Cannes Film Festival only two days away, it’s time to take a long hard look (or just a look, if you prefer) at the 20 films in contention for the Palme d’Or, a typically eclectic bunch married by only one factor: all but one are from directors who have been in the race before. (And people accuse the Oscars of playing favorites.)

    Cannes is a notoriously tricky (and often well-nigh impossible) contest to predict: partly because the voting body is an ever-changing template, but largely because there’s been no time ahead of the festival for any kind of critical or popular consensus to build around the mostly unseen films on the shortlist.

    This may mean that in some cases the jury is susceptible to a film’s auteur cache — think “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” in 2006 — but it also allows for surprise attacks by less heralded titles on the basis of quality alone. Though it may seem an obvious winner in retrspect, few were talking about “The Class” last year before it snuck up on the last day and slayed the competition.

    With those caveats on the table, here’s a film-by-film (10 today, 10 tomorrow) rundown of this year’s lineup, detailing the Cannes credentials of each director, and offering some thoughts as to where they may sit in the competition. I make no promises — except that at least half my speculation will likely be proved wildly wrong in a fortnight’s time.

    “BROKEN EMBRACES” (Pedro Almodovar)

    The pitch: Already widely seen and reviewed, the film marks a return to film noir territory for the Spanish master, a complex melodrama headed by Penelope Cruz as an actress trying to rid herself of an aging lover. (Spanish dialogue)

    The history: On his two previous Competition appearances, for “All About My Mother” in 1999 and “Volver” in 2006, Almodovar entered the race as the bookies’ favourite, only to land the consolation prizes of Best Director and Best Screenplay, respectively.

    The outlook: Reviews so far have been kind, if reserved; several critics appear to delight in Almodovar’s trademark color-saturated visuals and off-kilter humor, but few have suggested that this ranks among his finest works. Almodovar is surely overdue for the festival’s top honor, but if a more unanimously lauded work like “Volver” couldn’t do the trick, my guess is that “Broken Embraces” won’t either. I think the jury may pass altogether.

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  • One from the vault

    No, it’s not a vintage Grateful Dead gig poster, but it’s close enough. I love that this new one-sheet for Ang Lee’s upcoming “Taking Woodstock” made its first appearance on the Rolling Stone site. I love that they’ve fully embraced the fabulous-slash-hideous design possibilities of its era. And I love that a relative prestige picture isn’t disguising the tongue-in-cheek element in its marketing approach. Good work.

    Taking Woodstock

  • Ang Lee’s ‘Taking Woodstock’ gets a trailer

  • OFF THE CARPET: Handicapping 2009 a year in advance!?

    Ewan McGregor and Hilary Swank in AmeliaAhh.  The dust is settling.  And on the horizon, just visible through the mist and waiting to drive us all up the wall once again: the 2009 Oscar season.

    I’ve been writing this year-in-advance column for probably six years now, and I always look forward to gazing ahead.  No one dives in so pathetically deep this far out as yours truly, but in exchange for not having a life for the past few months, I get to unload this burden the day after our annual season’s peak and forget about little gold men entirely for a few months.

    It’s quite liberating.

    The most interesting thing about the season to come, from my vantage point, is the lack of a dreaded “frontrunner status” for any of the contenders.  Some might say Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela project (which is not called “The Human Factor,” mind you — the director says the film is currently untitled and is based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy”).

    Others might say Rob Marshall’s “Nine” (coming from a money-tight company hoping to avoid echoes of “Memoirs of a Geisha”).  But I don’t see a “Geisha” from here, or a “Charlie Wilson’s War,” expected heavies waiting to miss the mark.  The field is curiously flat, and as a result, excitingly broad.

    Let’s get to it, shall we?

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  • Ang Lee takes on ‘Pi’

    Few film projects in recent years have come with as formidable a chain of prospective directors attached than Fox 2000’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling 2002 Booker Prize winner “Life of Pi.”

    First M. Night Shyamalan was on board — which, admittedly, might have been a more appealing prospect five years ago. The next name attached was a considerable step up: “Amelie” helmer Jean-Pierre Jeunet would have been a pretty natural fit for Martel’s brand of surreal whimsy. I seem to recall Alfonso Cuaron being mentioned in connection with the project at one point too. Like I said, an impressive roster.

    In the end, however, it looks like Ang Lee will ultimately accept the challenge, and I do mean ‘challenge.’ For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, it’s an allegorical fantasy about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives by sharing a raft with a Bengal tiger, among other wild animals. It’s a tricky film premise to say the least, but Lee has proved time and again that he knows his way around delicate, potentially uncinematic literary source material. I think his visual grace and lightness of touch is just what is required here. Smart choice.

    I do love how busy Lee is keeping himself, compared to many other auteurs of his calibre. “Lust, Caution” is a fresh, searing memory still, and it was only a few months ago that we heard he was beginning work on “Taking Woodstock,” an ensemble piece centred around the eponymous music festival. With that film already wrapped and due for release in August (perhaps a title set for discussion in our upcoming 2009 Oscar preview), Lee is ready to move on, with yet another wholly different proposition for his filmography. Good on him.

  • Ang Lee takes Woodstock

    Here’s what I love about Ang Lee: there is simply no way of anticipating what his next project is going to be. So far, the decade has seen him bounce from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” to “Hulk” to “Brokeback Mountain” to “Lust, Caution” – a group arguably linked by thematic concerns of outsider identity, but with precious little in common besides. If there’s a more adventurous filmmaker at work these days, I don’t know his name.

    Now Variety confirms that his next project sees him revisiting Nixon-era America, the period having served him well in “Brokeback” (part of it, at least) and what I believe to be his finest work, “The Ice Storm.” Not that “Taking Woodstock” – Lee’s third film in a row for Focus Features – sounds like anything he’s done before either.

    The project, which enters production this month, has been adapted by James Schamus, Lee’s regular cohort, from the memoir of Elliot Tiber, a Greenwich Village interior designer who wound up in the creation of the biggest rock concert of all time when he lent his family’s motel to the event organisers.

    In an inspired piece of casting, Tiber will be played by “The Daily Show”‘s Demetri Martin, while other members of an interesting, and evidently complex, ensemble include Imelda Staunton as Tiber’s mother, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Tiber’s closeted lover, Emile Hirsch as a Vietnam vet, Paul Dano as a hippie concertgoer, Liev Schreiber as a transvestite, and Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, the owner of the farm where it all took place.

    Sounds like a suitably broad canvas for Lee to paint on – this should afford him plenty of room for a typically nuanced investigation of class, sexuality and popular culture, while offering him another completely new story world to explore. I can’t wait.