Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
February 1, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Man on a Ledge, the first film where Sam Worthington was not a Terminator, a Titan or a giant blue guy, opened to $8.0 million. It also had $6 tickets available (on Living Social). Why do you think this project failed? Also, why do you think these cheap ticket deals were not particularly enticing?
Reagen Sulewski: Hey, hey! He was also completely miscast in The Debt this year, so don't forget that. But it's funny how blockbusters don't lead to consistent careers anymore. Thirty years ago, Harrison Ford turned the kind of run Worthington had into one of the best box office records ever. Now it's, "Hey, you know that guy who was in the biggest film ever? Yeah, I'll pass."
These high-concept films seem to be a favorite of Hollywood when they're not throwing out endless sequels - I think they must sound like a good idea and they're usually made relatively cheaply since the sets are limited, but you really need a guy in the lead who's made his name by people coming to see him, rather than him being coincidental to the film.
Matthew Huntley: Man on a Ledge screamed "Generic!" and seemed like a substandard combination of The Negotiator and The Inside Man, albeit with no interesting angle. The whole "man on a ledge who's threatening to jump" premise has been done before in action movies (Lethal Weapon) and comedies (The Other Guys), and while audiences might not be conscious of it, something in them probably said, "Been there; done that." Even with $6 tickets available, people are becoming more selective with their time.
Max Braden: Jeff Goldblum had a similar box office conundrum, though he wasn't the lead. And even Harrison Ford had The Mosquito Coast box office doldrums at the height of his career. The blockbuster has changed a bit since then, but I think the difference is that Ford was always memorable. Audiences could be looking at a photo of Worthington and not remember what movie they just saw him in. As for cheap tickets, I just found out that Johnny Rockets sells $6 AMC tickets with purchase of a burger and drink. I may be doing lunch & a movie every weekend from now on.
Tim Briody: I think the bubble has burst on the Groupon/Living Social type deals. I do remember hearing about the deal with last year's The Lincoln Lawyer, but the deals on One for the Money and Man on a Ledge are new to me. And even still, I don't think such offers are going to prop up a movie that's not going to do well anyway. At least Lincoln Lawyer benefited from Matthew McConaughey. Also, Sam Worthington should stick to Call of Duty commercials.
David Mumpower: Tim makes a good point in that the Call of Duty commercial seems like more fun than anything in Man on a Ledge. What I find interesting about this turn of events is that Worthington seems to be getting no bump from Avatar. Even though he starred in the biggest film of all time, he was blue for most of it. And his other big starring roles are in the forgettable yet somehow franchised Clash of the Titans and in Terminator: Salvation. He hasn't distinguished himself much yet he keeps getting parts in titles that border on being automatic successes. This was the first test of something new and different and while I loved the trailer, I found myself wondering how interesting it would be for an hour and a half. The Next Three Days, a movie we have frequently used for comparison, had similar problems and perhaps it is no coincidence that they have similar opening weekend failures. My final thought here is that if you break this down to a basic component, what about the title "Man on a Ledge" is interesting? It's marginally better than Dark Water but certainly not a strong descriptor for a marketing project.
Hey, everybody, it's movie time!
Kim Hollis: What movies have you seen lately and what are your thoughts?
Matthew Huntley:
Albert Nobbs: Strong performances highlight a mostly dull and uninteresting story. Needed to take a stronger stance on its themes (lesbianism, transgender, entrepreneurship, patriarchal societies, etc.).
The Grey: Uncommonly powerful thriller that goes against the grain of convention by making us NOT want to be the characters. Film has at least half a dozen scenes that are compelling, tender and nuanced.
Underworld: Awakening: Eighty minutes of noise. The action is so outrageous that it's amusing, but it eventually runs around in circles and we grow numb to what we're seeing and hearing.
The Iron Lady: More a history book manifest than a fully realized narrative with drama. Despite Meryl Streep's embodiment of Margaret Thatcher, it doesn't tell us anything about the U.K.'s first female prime minister we couldn't haven't read about in a high school textbook.
A Separation: Ceaselessly watchable and hard-hitting drama that makes us feel deep empathy for the characters. Reminds us how important it is to be patient, attentive, truthful and communicable with our family and neighbors.
Brett Beach: A select few from the past few months of (mostly) library rentals -
The House of the Devil: The payoff isn't up to what precedes it, and it really doesn't matter. Writer/director Ti West has fashioned a near facsimile of a low-rent late '70s/early '80s American horror film and the 75 minutes of buildup that precede the denouement studiously avoid parody and any wink/winks at the audience. I watched it with the lights on and still got near-nauseous with dread. I am now excited for his latest The Innkeepers.
Paradise Alley: Stallone's reward for Rocky, his 1978 debut as a writer/director. It takes place in Hell's Kitchen in the late 1940s and switches out boxing for wrestling. Thanks to the climactic grappling that takes place indoors in the middle of a torrential downpour (!) I now know where part of the inspiration for the insane ending of Staying Alive comes from.
Bronson: Nicolas Refn's films from Fear X on to Drive all seem to suffer/profit from the same dichotomy. He wants to keep things as mysterious and unsettling as Lynch and spell (almost) everything out like Nolan. The subject of this unconventional biopic (a man who has spent most of his adult life in prison, much of it in solitary) is brought to unsettling life by Tom Hardy - who seems to be on Val Kilmer's career trajectory which would indicate flameout by 2025 - and the moments when he singularly commands the screen are the most effective.
The Best Years of Our Lives and Magnolia: My picks for annual Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve viewing (I've seen them each about three times on those dates alone) The former is my choice for the most well-deserved Best Picture winner ever, a 1946 film that offers a sentimental and sobering view of WWII Vets returning to their lives in small-town America, and the latter, P.T. Anderson at his most ridiculous and sublime. I cry during the prologue and then about every 20 minutes or so thereafter.
Fright Night: Colin Farrell and David Tennant are both having way too much fun here and it's hard for some of that not carry over to the audience. Was surprised at how early the narrative starts rolling and how it barely pauses to breathe after the first 8 minutes. Enjoyable but not enough comedy or horror for me.
It's Always Fair Weather: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's followup to Singin' in The Rain and a very iconoclastic musical at that. It's cynical and although it wrings a happy ending out by the final fade, it also does its best to hold it off for as long as possible. There's a musical number in thought bubbles, another in triptych, and two delightful sequences where Cyd Charisse dances with a gymful of broken-nosed pugilists, and Kelly tap dances on roller skates. Like all the musicals I love, it makes my heart beat as fast as any well-choreographed action scene.
And in theaters: I saw A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas and am happy to report that all the usual noses were tweaked, stereotypes reinforced and mocked, and that it did a great job of reinforcing the ridiculousness of nearly all of the 3D films that have been released in the last several years.
Max Braden: I just rented One Day, which was boring, predictable, and offensive. I hated Hathaway's character, and if I'm going to hear a dialect tour of the British Isles, I'd rather have Michael Caine do it.
Albert Nobbs was like Remains of the Day meets Brokeback Mountain. I was only vaguely aware of Janet McTeer going into the movie. Coming out, I think she's my favorite supporting actress performance of the year.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is one of those movies that I think looks interesting in release, but pass up, and regret it later. The upside of the documentary is the amazing artwork itself. These are drawings thousands of years before Perspective was developed, and I couldn't see a draft/touchup *anywhere*. It's amazing. The downside is that Herzog gets all touchy feeling and assumes all this mystic interpretation. You can just as well enjoy the film on mute.
Margin Call reminded me of David Mamet movies like The Spanish Prisoner, where there characters talk up how big something is to give you the impression that it's very important, without ever showing it to you. And that the setting is so insular it could have been filmed on a single stage without props or backdrops. I dislike both of those things in movies. Irons also plays a caricature of a dim-but-intimidating one-percenter. There may be plenty of congressional testimony to indicate that that's not far from the truth, but it comes across as too on the nose in this movie. The documentaries Inside Job and I.O.U.S.A are far more riveting depictions of the financial crisis.
Samuel Hoelker:
Albert Nobbs: My God, after ten years of trying to get this movie made, THIS is the movie they get out of it? It reminds me of Blue Valentine - 35 rewrites and the screenplay is still terrible. Albert Nobbs is exactly what you'd expect in a period piece (slow, boring, etc), but gets the extra layer of incompetency on top of it. It's so unintentionally hilarious, helped out by Glenn Close's performance that's so incredibly earnest (which is not the same as good). She puts her heart into this performance, but her heart doesn't realize that it would be impossible to look at her as a man. And her character is so childish and, well, stupid, that it's hard to really sympathize with her, since the film doesn't believe that she is. Oh, but Janet McTeer's good.
A Separation: If this movie were an American film, I don't see how it couldn't be an Oscar front-runner. Well, it still should be. It's one of the most harrowing movies of 2011. It's tense, incredibly well-acted, and almost reminds me of Carnage in some ways (except that instead of everyone being just plain wrong, everyone is part right). I feel like this is a part of middle Eastern life that's rarely shown - the middle class. It's fascinating to see how religion is used in every day life, as well as this story. It's what a good domestic drama should be - with an ending that will annoy old people for a good while.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: I liken this movie to picking up a very drunk girl at a bar. Sure, you're technically correct when you brag to your friends that you scored, but is it really ethical? Do you feel good about it? It's the same with ELIC. You feel the emotions that it wants you to feel, but...it's because of 9/11. Even Stephen Daldry's not THAT terrible of a filmmaker to be able to mess that up. Thankfully, it doesn't really overshadow the fact that the rest of the movie's not very good. Whatever may have worked in the book just...doesn't. The kid is one of the most annoying protagonists in recent memory - his idiosyncrasies don't make him endearing, they make him an ass. I hesitate to really speak ill of child actors, but I will in this case, all he does is yell and steal Haley Joel Osment's whisper-acting from The Sixth Sense (which, um, doesn't work in this case). Surprisingly, though, the rest of the cast, including Sandra Bullock (!) is excellent. Maybe they realized they wouldn't be in this manipulative movie for very long and were so happy about it that they decided to actually try.
Max Braden: You know, on Albert Nobbs, I keep hearing complaints that Close wouldn't pass as a man or that it could never happen. In point of fact, one of my issues of American Ancestors detailed a case in the 1800s where the bride didn't know she was dating a woman until after they were married (and there were legal consequences to the ruse). And Close may have over/under acted, but she doesn't look *that* far off of Red Buttons.
David Mumpower: I'm finishing up the 2011 release schedule right now, which is a grueling project I undertake every January. Out of the titles I've seen recently, Priest did the least with the best concept. What is frustrating about the film is that with Paul Bettany, Maggie Q and Karl Urban, it has three of my favorite actors yet little of note otherwise.
I saw Sanctum at roughly the same point in time that the news of the 20 million year old lake is about to be uncovered, which made the project somewhat more interesting to me. Unfortunately, it has 45 minutes of quality build-up followed by an hour of predictable, annoying events focused upon one of the actors I like least in the world, Ioan Gruffudd. His character is so ill considered and predictable that I understand why James Cameron took his name off the project.
The Eagle genuinely surprised me at the start as I had not expected the lead character to become a civilian so quickly, but there isn't a lot of meat to the plot beyond that. I did very much like the idea that Roman soldiers were so loyal to the office that they would risk their lives in order to attain an emblem symbolizing their order. There is someone heroic about having that much respect for an ideal as well as its physical representation.
I found The Beaver to be absolutely gripping for 75 minutes. Then, there is a climactic series of events that largely undoes everything leading up to it. Still, I admire the idea as well as the performances of Jennifer Lawrence (who is less than two months away from becoming one of the five or six biggest female stars in the industry) and loath as I am to praise Mel Gibson, he really went for it in this role. Director Jodie Foster brings out the best in him, which is something we learned with Maverick.
The Conspirator is one of those movies where you can reasonably guess everything that will happen in the film well before it happens yet the entertainment value of it remains the same. This is the type of role in which James McAvoy excels and I hope he gravitates toward more of this than the Wanted garbage he has been choosing lately. Robin Wright is also tremendous in what is one of my favorite female performances of the year. The Conspirator is very well acted as we should expect of a Robert Redford film.
An entirely different type of movie I absolutely loved is Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. It completely blindsided me with its slapstick humor. This is a relatively unheralded project that strikes me as the modern equivalent of Tremors. It's a hyper-violent Three's Company, and oh so much better than it has any right to be.
Get ready for a magnificent football feast.
Kim Hollis: Super Bowl is next Sunday! Who ya got?
Reagen Sulewski: I think the Patriots win even if Belichick has to use Force Lightning on Eli Manning himself.
Matthew Huntley: Unfortunately, this year's Super Bowl is like a sequel no one was really asking for. OK, maybe Patriots fans were, but I'm still pulling for New York, mostly be default.
Max Braden: The Giants will come back from behind to just barely lose, the halftime show will make people want the Black Eyed Peas to come back, and a car commercial will be everyone's favorite ad of the night.
Samuel Hoelker: Living in Boston means that no one will be at a screening of We Need To Talk About Kevin that night. I'm a lucky man.
David Mumpower: I pick New England by a lot. If you look at it analytically, the Giants needed a fluke involving a David Tyree catch and a media maelstrom surrounding Spygate the last time around to have a chance. I think this Patriots team, while less explosive is better rounded. The Giants remind me of Arizona a few years ago in that they have overachieved to reach the Super Bowl. Simply getting there is their reward.