If you enjoyed watching Liam Neeson battle territorial wolves in Joe Carnahan’s The Grey — and plenty of moviegoers have — then you'd be well-advised to look into Lee Tamahori's 1997 thriller The Edge. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin and perhaps best characterized by screenwriter David Mamet's trademark clipped dialogue, the film is an unusually strong entry in the survival-story tradition — and one to which The Grey owes at least a spiritual debt (if not more).
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New to the distribution arena, Alamo Drafthouse co-founder Tim League became enamored of a small Belgian crime drama called Bullhead at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Less than a year later, he and his Drafthouse Films operation have an Oscar contender on their hands. Not too shabby for a company younger than the Obama administration.
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File under "Duh": Summit and new overlords Lionsgate say they'd totally be interested in making a sixth Twilight movie, y'know, if author Stephenie Meyer is into it. I get it! It's hard to pass up another shot at making hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention fortunes in merchandising. And it's not like we didn't see this coming; with a first trailer for Breaking Dawn Part 2 set to be attached to Lionsgate's Hunger Games in theaters next month, the studio's pushing hard to make the most of its newfound YA synergy. How can it not try and keep the Twilight cash train rolling?
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Films about geniuses are so numerous that they almost constitute their own genre. One seems to pop up every few years, always with a few distinct markers. We usually see a brilliant character whose ideas are a little crazy, a couple of “normal” characters against whom the genius’s difference can be easily identified, and a Very Important Project that puts those crazy ideas to the test and ultimately validates the lead character’s oddball behavior. Most informed movie-goers can set their watches by these plot developments, but to me, even the worst ones have a certain appeal. Watching great ideas brought to life is thrilling, and the really good ones, like The Social Network or Good Will Hunting, seem to tap into something universal.
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Quick quiz: If you were made to wait two months in order to rent say, Final Destination 5, are you going to be more likely to purchase the DVD, or is it more likely you will forget it was on the saturated home-video market? An easy enough answer, maybe, but not for some of Hollywood's major studios. They continue banking on the former scenario, despite your continued insistence on renting movies at affordable rates. As it turns out, a number of Hollywood’s companies are trying to revitalize their revenues and expand their scope -- but those plans are getting screwed up by your viewing and spending habits.
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Critics will argue over whether or not Joe Carnahan’s latest, The Grey (currently holding at 76 percent at Rotten Tomatoes), succeeds as the latest nature-as-killer yarn to hit the action genre, but it’s worth taking a closer look at what Joe Carnahan is attempting beyond the survivalist thrills and chills. In the age of the metrosexual, and in an industry inundated with juvenile comedies and mind-numbing blockbusters, what does this Liam Neeson vs. the wolves pics have to say about modern masculinity?
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“I’m retiring,” Star Wars media emperor George Lucas recently told the NY Times, having toiled through today's difficult indie film climate to get his ambitious Red Tails into theaters. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.” Or, as Lucas producer Rick McCallum put it: “Once this is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do. He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.” Say it ain't so, George! Wait, what's that? It's not really the end? Oh, you tease.
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If you've had enough of the 2011-12 awards season by now (and sweet Jesus in a pie-eating contest, who hasn't?) can the NY Times interest you in next year's race? That's where filmmaker Baz Luhrmann has turned to continue his early stumping on behalf of The Great Gatsby, the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring megabudget adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Era masterpiece. Er, sorry -- the megabudget 3-D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Era masterpiece. Which, in 2012, is probably redundant, but hey.
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In 1865, actor and Confederate loyalist John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in the balcony of Ford's Theatre, committing one of the most notorious crimes in American history. In 2013, Fox News talking head Bill O'Reilly will team up with Tony and Ridley Scott for a two-hour National Geographic documentary exploring the events surrounding Lincoln's death, adapted from Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, co-written by O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. But with so many previous Lincoln assassination projects in the ether, what new ground can O'Reilly and the Scott brothers tread in Killing Lincoln?
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"Weak." "Lackluster." "Underwhelming." "Less-than-stellar." Such are the general characterizations of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's box-office earnings to date from observers, insiders and pundits around the Web. And now for an equally appropriate one-word response to those perceptions: "Huh?"
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Hollywood has a long history of sending white dudes to Japan to A) fall in love with a local hottie and B) somehow save Japan itself, and that irksome trend shows no sign of ending, to my dismay. The latest Caucasian hero set to do so is LOST’s Matthew Fox, who’s signed on to play real-life figure General Bonner Fellers in Peter Webber’s Emperor, a “nail-biting political thriller” about post-World War II diplomacy…and Fellers’ love affair with a Japanese woman. Sigh. Of course.
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The problem with Taylor Swift’s Hunger Games single “Safe & Sound” is – sorry, Swifties – Taylor Swift. Taken on its own it’s a perfectly lovely slice of discordant Americana pop that wisps beautifully with Swift’s reedy warbling as she sings about protecting loved ones as a war rages outside. But as a Hunger Games song… as what promises to be the Hunger Games song associated with the movie (besides Rue’s iconic ditty within the film), it leaves something to be desired precisely because Swift is singing in the spirit and voice of Katniss Everdeen. And you, my adorable little Taylor, are no Katniss Everdeen.
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There is a group of individuals whom Movieline would like to salute: The passionate, faceless people who lovingly record, in surprising detail and with confounding care, the full plot summaries for horrible movies on Wikipedia. Wikipedia movie plot historians, your day has come.
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The key to a list of moviegoing disappointments is the element of expectation: I am prepared to say I watched more suicidally bad films in 2011 than in any other year in my life; to be merely disappointed suggests a certain relativity.
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Surprises too are often tied to expectation, or lack of it. The first film I saw in 2011 surprised me in part because it was the first film I saw in 2011 -- that is, a film shunted onto the whistling heath of the January release schedule.
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