Monday Morning Quarterback Part II

By BOP Staff

October 27, 2009

This looks like a Dolphins zombies situation.

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So, did you hear that Amelia Earhart landed on a Pacific island and was eaten by giant coconut crabs? Now *that* would have been an awesome movie!

Kim Hollis: Amelia, Hilary Swank's latest theoretical Academy Awards contender, opened to $4 million in 818 locations and was met with resoundingly negative reviews. What do you think of its box office? Are you ready to dismiss it from the list of serious awards contenders?

Josh Spiegel: On the one hand, we're talking about a biopic starring Hilary Swank. That alone raises Amelia's Oscar credibility, as does the film's director, Mira Nair, and co-star Richard Gere. However, the reviews have been so bad, the marketing has been, I imagine, purposely small, and the amount of interest was very low. The story of Amelia Earhart is still fascinating, but it sounds like this movie was less interested in her mysterious final flight than everything else in her life (despite the fact that Earhart's known mostly for disappearing). This one's a disappointing failure, to be sure, and one that probably won't get Swank any awards buzz.

Sean Collier: I don't have words to convey how bland this movie was. It's out of award contention mainly because no Academy member will be able to watch the screener without falling asleep. Hilary's agent should update his resume.




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Jim Van Nest: We've seen over the years that box office (or lack thereof) will not stop the tom-notch films from cleaning up at the Oscars. By the sounds of the reviews, though, this is not a top-notch film and THAT is why Oscar season will come and go with little mention of Amelia.

George Rose: This is dreadful. I hate to say that because I really do like Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, but I never saw this as an awards contender. Not even a little bit. Was P.S. I Love You an awards contender because Swank was in it? No, and this shouldn't be either. What could have been so compelling about Amelia's life to warrant a movie? Affairs have been done before, planes have been flown before and Swank needs to stop cutting her hair off. Titanic was great for many reasons but I imagine one of them being that the movie showed what we didn't already know. If Titanic was about Leo and Kate falling in love while the ship was being built, nobody would have seen it. Instead, they showed us the devastating results of things that occured AFTER the ship left. All Amelia does is show us a visual interpretation of information we can find at a local library. Does anyone really care that she was in an open marriage before she disappeared? I'd rather see a fictional interpretation of the events after her disappearance.

Michael Lynderey: It's too bad because I really like Hilary Swank, but I'd say Amelia is officially cut from the Oscar class of 2010. If the pool of Best Actress contenders is shallow enough this year, Swank may sneak in with a nomination, but otherwise this one's got no real chance at any major awards - not with a RottenTomatoes rating lower than Saw VI's, that's for sure. The box office certainly doesn't help - there's little room for expansion here, and even a $15 million total seems out of reach at this point. Swank looked set on having a successful awards contender released exactly every five years, but it didn't quite work out this time. I've started crossing my fingers for 2014, though.


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