Here's an easy formula to get attention for your Worst Movies of 2012 list. Take the unfathomable big-budget box-office failure that's likely to top a lot of these year-end thumbsuckers — and make it number two. Next, single out an ambitious film by a trio of filmmakers with a passionate following. Put it at the top (or is it the bottom?) of your list and wait for their fans to scream. more »
Another Monday morning, and thus another look at what carnage The Avengers has wrought at the weekend box office. And while things aren't as bad as they may look at first for Battleship and the rest of the competition, they're not what you'd call pretty. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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After months of humiliating posters and destabilizing trailers, the big-screen "adaptation" of Heidi Murkoff's megahit advice tome What to Expect When You're Expecting has finally arrived at multiplexes nationwide. Critical reactions are about as chilly as you might expect for a film that turns one of the most influential books of the last quarter-century into a kitchen-sink ensemble romcom; while director Kirk Jones's film does seem to have its following (21 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes! Even A.O. Scott is into it! Sort of!), the overriding sense seems to be one of vague — or maybe not so vague — loathing. Let's cool off with a refreshing dip in the bile.
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Hollywood, a humble request? I realize that abortion is has become too divisive a topic these days to drop into a mainstream movie product like What To Expect When You're Expecting, especially in what's an overall innocuous ensemble comedy based, somehow, on a bestselling pregnancy guidebook (between this and Battleship, it's one strange week for source material). It's also a tough topic from which to wring laughs. And in something carefully calculated to be as broad in appeal as possible, any mention of the option of terminating a pregnancy is just going to be one more thing that could isolate potential movie audiences, like an ugly poster, being in a foreign language or attempting analysis of the Iraq War.
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"[C]ompare the breaking-water scenes in What to Expect and Showtime's Shameless. In the former, when a character's husband steps in a puddle in the hospital, she responds, 'That's my water, you idiot!' In the latter, a young woman in labor unleashes a string of curses before wondering whether she just urinated on herself. True to that spirit, the Shameless birth scene leaves nothing to the imagination, and the show's props workers devised what co-executive producer Mark Mylod calls a 'prosthetic rig' to simulate crowning: 'It was almost like part of a small tennis ball, really.' [...] 'There wasn't any debate,' Mr. Mylod says. 'It just seemed the obvious thing to do, just because of the whole tenor and tone of our particular show and the liberating circumstances of being on pay cable. If we want to do that, we can do that.'" Now you know. [WSJ]
Neither the ladies nor the guys have emerged from the What to Expect When You're Expecting marketing miasma unscathed, but at least now we can get all of our ensemble humiliation out of the way in one convenient new one-sheet.
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I know we were kinda just talking about this, but at a point in time when women's rights and representation are threatened at seemingly every turn by bureaucrats, ideologues, campaign financiers and bald-faced misogynists, how predictable should it have been that the new trailer for What to Expect When You're Expecting — the best-selling, most influential maternity guide in the known universe — would marginalize the actual mothers and focus almost entirely on the guys? Don't change, Hollywood! Actually, yes. Maybe change just a bit.
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Signs continue to emerge suggesting that What to Expect When You're Expecting is a real movie with real stars and a very real prospect of opening theatrically, as opposed to one of those mock all-star trailers that the Funny or Die crew coughed up over bad Chinese food at the end of a 14-hour day. The latest indication: Character posters! It's like The Avengers of maternity anthologies! If, that is, the Avengers labored superhumanly on behalf of the beleaguered population of Cringe City.
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