I totally forgot to mention it in this morning’s post, but I’ll be introducing Adrienne Shelley’s “Waitress” tonight at 9 pm at Harbourfront Centre — the latest in this summer’s Free Flicks series, which concludes next week with a title selected by our very own audiences.
And what did the audience choose? Come down tonight and find out! Assuming the weather isn’t horrible, in which case I’d totally understand if you stayed home.
And here we have this week’s MSN DVD column, in which I consider “The Ghost Writer” and “A Prophet” as examples of smarter-than-average moviemaking. I’d only recommend one of them as essential cinema, but you’ll have to read the piece to find out which one …
… unless, you know, happened to be reading this blog back when both films were playing theatrically. I kinda gave it away then.
Also, remember when I went to the Hart House Craft Beer BBQ last year, and wrote about it? Well, I’ve done it again for the 2010 edition. It took a few days to put the piece together, but in my defense, on the night I was only really capable of scrawling “glug glug glug, nom nom nom” in my notebook. Do enjoy my more sophistimacated observations.
This week’s MSN DVD column has yet to go up because of the long weekend. I swear I filed it on time. I am not losing my mind at all.
In entirely unrelated news, does anybody know a good dog trainer?
“Inception” held the top slot at the box-office for a third straight week with a weekend gross of $27.5 million — not a huge haul, exactly, but still $4.2 million more than its closest competition, “Dinner for Schmucks”, was able to earn.
So there; the movie that people worried might be too smart for today’s mouth-breathing mass audiences, or a massive bomb, will break $200 million domestic sometime today. And the movie that’s actually tailored for those mouth-breathing mass audiences? That came in second.
Better still, the “Cats & Dogs” sequel placed fifth with just $12.5 million, demonstrating that (a) 3D will not automatically make your movie a hit and (b) no one wants to see a “Cats & Dogs” sequel. Everybody wins, really.
With “Dinner for Schmucks” looking to dominate the new-release conversation this weekend, it made sense that this week’s MSN Movies gallery should have something of a Continental feel to it. So it’s all about other English-language remakes of French features — including a few you probably haven’t thought about in a while.
Like, for example, “Pure Luck”.
I know, right? Why would anybody think about “Pure Luck”? Well, that’s why they get me to do these galleries. I can take it.
This is what a slow summer weekend looks like. Sequels, remakes, weird projects that never should have made out of development and a documentary used as counterprogramming. But I abide, dudes. I endure.
“Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore“: Bad sequel! Bad! Go to your box! (And the same goes for the anonymous Cineplex employee that approved the miserable screening conditions at the Queensway last Saturday morning — I know Warner was just as pissed about the situation as I was.)
“Charlie St. Cloud“: Zac Efron sees dead people in Burr Steers’ bizarre attempt to snap up some of that sweet “Twilight” box-office with a quasi-supernatural romance thing. Come on, tweens, show me you’re too smart to fall for it.
“Countdown to Zero“: In which Lucy Walker attempts to make the terror of sudden nuclear annihilation relevant to people who don’t even remember the ’80s. Which isn’t to say reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world isn’t a laudable goal; it’s just that shameless fear-mongering is no way to get it done.
“Dinner for Schmucks“: The appeal of seeing Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, together again after “Anchorman” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”, was enough to make me overcome my general impatience with Jay Roach and the work of Francis Veber … and I was mostly not disappointed. Fun fact: Jemaine Clement essentially reprises the character he played in “Gentlemen Broncos”, but this time it’s okay to enjoy it.
Oh, and TIFF Cinematheque is screening Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” as a farewell to the late director; I’ve got a piece about that going up later today on the NOW site, so check back here this afternoon for the link.
I tweeted about this yesterday, but figured everyone else should know about it as well: Lionsgate (distributed by Maple up here in has announced the Blu-ray release of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”, in a three-disc “Full Disclosure” special edition that will include both the original 1979 theatrical version and Coppola’s 2004 “Redux” edition, and also throw in Eleanor Coppola’s essential documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”.
The Digital Bits has all the details, as well as confirmation of the one element that makes this release an absolute must-buy for anyone who loves Coppola’s hallucinatory war epic: For the first time on any home-video format, “Apocalypse Now” will be presented in its intended aspect ratio of 2.35:1.
Previously, all widescreen transfers of the film — the laserdisc, both of Paramount’s DVD releases and the letterboxed television master — were framed at 2:1, the “ideal” aspect ratio cinematographer Vittorio Storaro calls Univisium. The idea of a single universal aspect ratio for television and film isn’t inherently terrible, but Storaro insists on retrofitting his earlier scope films to 2:1 whenever someone asks him to approve a transfer. (The only other one of which I’m aware is Paramount’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream”.) And since “Apocalypse Now” wasn’t shot at 2:1, the image has to be cropped (or panned) to fill the taller frame. That’s insane, someone else needs to stop him.
When I interviewed Coppola last year, he was kind enough to indulge me in a few fanboy/gearhead questions about the restoration of “The Godfather” and “One from the Heart”. Finally, we turned to “Apocalypse Now”, and I’m not ashamed to admit I literally begged him to make sure any future HD transfers were framed appropriately. A year later, it looks like I got my wish — and on October 19, we’ll finally be able to see Coppola’s purest cinematic work the way it was always supposed to be seen.
Yesterday was a newsy kind of day, starting with TIFF’s opening press conference and ending with me discussing the legacy of Maury Chaykin outside the former CHUM-City building on Queen West. Well, actually it ended with me seeing one of the most inexplicable major-studio releases of the year, but that’s story for another day.
So, to break it down: Here’s my take on the TIFF presser for the NOW Daily, and here’s my quick-turnaround memoriam for Chaykin, and here’s my CTV News Channel hit about Chaykin. (A quote from that interview ended up in Sympatico’s obit later that evening — corporate synergy is indeed a powerful force.) And if I got the next link right, you should be able to see me pop up in a Global Toronto news item about TIFF’s lineup.
And looking forward, if you’re in downtown Toronto this evening and want to catch some great world cinema, come on down to Harbourfront for a free 9pm screening of Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love“, this week’s entry in the Free Flicks series. It’s a weird choice for an open-air screening, which might make for a really unique experience. And who doesn’t want to have unique experiences?
My latest MSN DVD column looks at the unabashed, unapologetic entertainment of “Clash of the Titans” and “Operation: Endgame” — two movies that are just the right kind of dumb fun.
Join me, won’t you? And keep your head down; that Kraken’s got quite a reach on him.
Well, there you go: Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” held onto the top spot at the domestic box-office for a second weekend, fending off the challenge of Angelina Jolie’s “Salt” $43.5 million to $36.5 million despite being nearly an hour longer and, by all reports, much more thinky.
“Inception” — which has grossed a healthy $143.7 million in North America so far — is turning out to be the cinematic argument starter of the summer — as divisive, in its way, as Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” was two years ago. And the media is wise to it: Over at Salon, Sam Adams has written an excellent walk-through of the movie’s plot and discusses its potential interpretations, while the New York Times’ A.O. Scott mulls the critical response (and the inevitable interweb reaction to said response) in an interesting think-piece. And Roger Ebert focuses on the canted angles in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s epic fight sequence, because other movies have used canted angles. I’m not sure I get the point of that.
I enjoy reading other critics after I’ve seen a film and written my own review, and it’s been particularly entertaining to see people interpret the film in radically different ways. To return to the same joke I humped throughout my NXNEi panel, it’s so much more fun to read intelligent people argue back and forth over an interesting movie than it is to read a hundred pans of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”. There are only so many ways you can register disappointment; sure, three or four of them will be clever, but in the end you’ve still spent all your time reading about “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”. And who wants to do that every week?