"By 2013, film will slip to niche status, shown in only a third of theaters. By 2015, used in a paltry 17 percent of global cinemas, venerable old 35 mm film will be mostly gone." The epic life and death struggle between film and digital rolls on, and in LA Weekly's cover story must-read Gendy Alimurung details the sobering -- and imminent -- sea change in film production and exhibition with insights from figures at every stop on the cinematic food chain: Filmmakers, arthouse/rep theaters, film curators, projectionists, preservationists, and even the cold, lonely (and increasingly studio-blocked) vaults that house the dwindling ranks of cinema's remaining 35mm prints.
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In a new interview over at The Hollywood Reporter, Jeremy Renner gets real about his on-the-brink career and personal life -- like, so real you'll want to give him a hug and then buy all the tickets for Bourne just to help him on his humble way towards megamillionaire action hero status. He's either a calculatedly brilliant PR strategist or a walking country song. Either way, this dog-loving, single dude, does-his-own-stunts part-time house-flipper is sure to endear himself to all four quadrants with this profile-boosting piece. Oh Jeremy Renner, don't be so sad!
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Mirror Mirror is about as postmodern as a postmodern version of a fairytale gets these days – “It’s been focus-grouped!,” the prince protests, as the princess defies tradition and sets out to save him. So why is it so very white? It’s especially jarring when Indian director Tarsem Singh ends the movie with a Bollywood-inspired dance number – it’s a Technicolor celebration of cultural diversity by a cast that doesn’t seem to have any, save a dwarf or two who barely stand out from their pack.
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After years of foisting dashed-off 3-D — and its inflated ticket prices — on movie audiences, studios may have found their most reliable ally yet in shoring up box office: IMAX. And not just the punch and potential of the brand's own 3-D, either, but good old conventional 2-D as well.
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It's easy to pile on Hollywood for its craven cash grabs, sequelitis and other low-hanging fruit harvested and passed off in the name of popular entertainment. It's also fair, after a glance at the top 20 or so openings of all time, to acknowledge that mass audiences have tended to let studios get away with such output over the last decade in particular. But if we're to take anything from the huge opening-weekend success of The Hunger Games, it might be to look at its place on that list — squarely in third place, below even better-regarded cinematic efforts Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and The Dark Knight. With this development, could crowds and critics alike have proven what the sheer volume of lesser hits would seem to contradict — that quality matters?
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Suzanne Collins can start her victory lap now. The film version of her first Hunger Games novel is on the brink of blowing up box-office records – and critics and fans like it, too. Other young-adult fantasy authors haven’t been quite so successful in dealing with Hollywood. Some of Collins’s success was luck and good timing: her first Hunger Games book was released a month after Stephenie Meyer’s final Twilight novel appeared, sending publishers and studios alike scrambling for the next young-adult franchise. But Collins also skillfully played the game with and for the filmmakers, making deliberate choices about how she wrote the novels and how she helped market them to the books’ fierce fans. Forget teenage love triangles or wizards vs. werewolves; here's a far more practical list of dos and don'ts for when your popular young-adult fantasy book is being adapted by Hollywood. (Spoilers for lesser movies ahead.)
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I don't ask a lot. I don't really ask anything. Absurdities come and go. I roll with what I can and let the rest fade away. We're similar in that regard, aren't we? We won't agree on everything, but we're adults who ultimately respect each others' tastes and accept — resentfully or not — that in this destabilized, hyper-reductive cinematic climate, even such fare as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot has a place in our culture. It's big enough for all of us! So with this in mind, and in light of the vicious media sparring currently underway among the TMNT establishment, can we please, please just lay down our nunchucks and let this skirmish go?
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With Lionsgate's big screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ teen-centric sci-fi survival-adventure The Hunger Games hitting screens this week, it’s kind of impossible not to draw comparisons to that other YA juggernaut series, which concludes its billion-dollar run on pop culture this fall. So how does The Hunger Games measure up to Twilight?
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For an independently produced comedy that mostly revolves around adults talking to each other — sometimes with child accessories — in varying degrees of inebriation, Friends with Kids is finding a modest amount of success. It’s not perfect, but somehow it manages to be funny without any accidental drug trips, grandmas shooting guns at the dinner table, or Tom Cruise rescuing Cameron Diaz from a crashing plane. Writer-director-co-star Jennifer Westfeldt has returned us a bit to the days of comedies of manners, instead of the awful dichotomy between shrill “romantic” comedy and Apatovian gross-out comedy where Hollywood seems stuck these days. In that spirit, here are four lessons future adult comedies should take from Friends with Kids.
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You might have noticed a glaring omission in this morning's Weekend Receipts, but probably not: Even I couldn't be bothered to remember that an Eddie Murphy movie not only opened on Friday (to catastrophically bad reviews; the Rotten Tomatoes "fresh" rating remains at a super-rare 0%) but also concluded the weekend with a brutal $6.25 million gross &mdash making for a sixth-place finish and a $3,360-per-screen average. This would make A Thousand Words the third straight Murphy-led film to open under $7 million — quite the opposite from last fall's reasonably successful ensemble effort Tower Heist and his voice work in the blockbuster Shrek franchise. Factor in his Oscars-hosting debacle, and you kind of have to ask yourself: Is this it for Eddie?
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In February, a federal court threw out a suit filed by Stan Lee Media Inc. against Paradox Entertainment — a failed attempt for the plaintiff to regain the intellectual-property rights of the Conan comic character. It might seem odd enough that a company sues for a claim to the proceeds of a film that lost tens of millions of dollars last summer, but odder still is that Stan Lee himself — the comic-book mastermind responsible for The Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man, and hundreds of other iconic characters — was neither the plaintiff nor the defendant in that suit.
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Two teen-oriented comedies this season share much in common, from a gleeful embracing of the spirit of youthful recklessness to the idea that geeks will indeed inherit the earth. One is among the better comedies we’re likely to see this year; the other is by far, on its face, the sleaziest. Both were penned by the same actor-turned-screenwriter, Michael Bacall, who also captured the slings and arrows of slacker youth heroism in 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So why are Project X and 21 Jump Street so diametrically opposed when it comes to depicting the youth of today?
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Film narration carries the dubious reputation of being a fallback trick for lesser directors, a device to trot out when other more classically visual narrative devices fail. In the same way that long, unbroken takes supposedly signify expertise, the use of narration often serves lazy critics with an easy indication that the director has lost the plot. Still, even the most anti-narration snob would have to concede that the larger film canon contains some pretty notable exceptions to this rule. The Naked City, A Clockwork Orange, Sunset Boulevard, GoodFellas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption — all use narration, and far from stalling story or characterization, with them it pushes everything forward.
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You know this movie, and chances are that you loved this movie -- except for that one role that almost ruined it all. Miscast Roles is where Movieline and its readers swap out those roles to make it right.
One of last year’s surprise critical and commercial darlings, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, wowed audiences, stoked many an awards-season debate and revitalized an important science fiction franchise — all while still managing to appeal to moviegoers unfamiliar with the original 1968 film (or that film's 1963 source novel). As chief chimp Caesar, Andy Serkis’s performative collaboration with the motion capture geniuses from WETA was a great spectacle, presenting viewers with a gorgeously rendered CGI-animated character.
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A new batch of Battleship stills show singer-turned-actress Rihanna in Navy gear manning all manner of combat machinery as the resident weapons specialist in Taylor Kitsch's crew. But can her feature debut in Peter Berg's summer blockbuster counteract the criticism she's getting from reuniting, at least professionally, with Chris Brown?
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