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Oscars: Hollywood’s war against itself (continued)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:09:00 +0000

I'm grateful to have been thoroughly and completely wrong about the best-picture race -- as were a great many other supposedly knowledgeable stooges -- for a whole bunch of reasons. First and foremost, Kathryn Bigelow's historic sweep was a genuinely moving and surprising capper to one of the most tedious Oscar broadcasts in recent memory. All that industry hand-wringing, a much-touted new production team, and what do we get? Interpretive dance numbers set to fragments of the nominated scores. Seriously? If they'd hired the Sparkle Motion dance team out of "Donnie Darko," it couldn't have been any lamer. (Actually, that would been a lot more fun to watch.)

Although I have mixed feelings about "The Hurt Locker" itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is "Hurt Locker" her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn't complicated Bigelow's big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.

How top Oscar Winners fared at the box office

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:49:00 +0000

Domestic box-office totals through February for the most-honored films at the 82nd annual Academy Awards:

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MOVIE: "The Hurt Locker," Summit Entertainment.

OSCARS: Six, including best picture and director.

RELEASED: June.

BOX OFFICE: $12.7 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Avatar," 20th Century Fox.

OSCARS: Three, including best art direction and visual effects.

RELEASED: December.

BOX OFFICE: $706 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Crazy Heart," 20th Century Fox.

OSCARS: Two, including best actor and original song.

RELEASED: December.

BOX OFFICE: $25 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire." Lionsgate.

OSCARS: Two, including best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay.

RELEASED: November.

BOX OFFICE: $47 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Up," The Walt Disney Co.

OSCARS: Two, including best animated feature and original score.

RELEASED: May.

BOX OFFICE: $293 million so far.

Jeff Bridges’ redemption song

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:01:00 +0000

In "Crazy Heart" Jeff Bridges -- who has never won an Oscar, despite the pleasure he's given audiences in a film career that's spanned more than 40 years -- gives a performance that's so comfortably lived-in, it makes you forget there's even such a thing as technique. All performances consist of two basic components: the things an actor does consciously and -- usually the magic ingredient -- the things that emerge as the result of not trying. With Bridges' performance here, as with perhaps nearly every performance he's ever given, it's impossible to locate the seams between the two. Bridges may be acting, but he always makes it look like living.

Box office report: “Dear John” takes down “Avatar”

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:09:00 +0000

"Dear John" opened at No. 1 this weekend, with a stellar $32.4 million debut weekend. That gives the picture a mediocre 2.3x weekend multiplier, but the first three days alone puts the picture well ahead of its $25 million budget. More importantly, this is the biggest weekend in Super Bowl weekend history, as well as the biggest opening weekend of all-time for a pure romantic drama. The film played to an 84 percent female crowd, and 64 percent of the audience was under 21. This is the first real test of opening weekend mettle for Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum, and both passed with flying colors. Of course, this number raises new questions about how much credit Tatum deserved for the $54.7 million debut of "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra." Conversely, as I mentioned last September, one wonders how much better "Jennifer's Body" could have opened had the marketing focused even a little on co-star Seyfried and not just Megan Fox. This also makes Nicholas Sparks the first brand-name author since the mid-'90s heyday of Michael Crichton, Stephen King and John Grisham. Regardless, this is a smashing debut and should weather the storm of "Valentine's Day: The Movie" as this far more serious love story will prove solid counter-programming to the overtly comedic all-star mush-fest (or as I've heard the film called: "Garry Marshall Calls in All His Favors Before He Dies: The Movie").

Box office report: “Avatar” hits $2 billion

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:32:00 +0000

"Avatar" won the box office derby for the seventh straight weekend, taking the record for the biggest seventh weekend gross ($30 million) from "Titanic" ($25 million). Dropping just 14 percent, the unstoppable monster has now grossed $594 million, meaning it will cross "Titanic's" $600 million gross in the next two or three days, perhaps on Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced. Early last week, James Cameron's amazing hit surpassed "Titanic's" worldwide box office gross to become the world's highest-grossing movie. This weekend it crossed the seemingly unfathomable $2 billion mark worldwide. You can babble all you want about inflation, 3D and IMAX ticket prices, and what have you, but check out this little statistic: When "Avatar" reaches $2.239 billion, which it will in the next two or three weeks, it will have doubled the worldwide take of every other movie ever made except "Titanic." It will also soon have a $1 billion lead over any movie not directed by James Cameron. There's not much more to say at this point than "wow" and "don't make a sequel," so let's move on.

The 10 greatest Golden Globes moments

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:18:00 +0000

The Golden Globes is supposed to be the fun awards show, the Hollywood Foreign Press's loose, sexy and possibly drunk cousin to our stiff, self-congratulatory Oscars. The evening celebrates our twin obsessions of television and movies and does away with all those boring prizes for sound editing and whatnot. And this year, for the first time in 15 years, it even had a host, the wry Ricky Gervais.

But as if to prove that anything NBC touches these days is sprinkled with FAIL dust, this year's show did not delight. An air of despair hung over the proceedings, as entertainers in designer clothes paused from time to time to evoke (in their solemn, frozen, Botox-faced way) the recent devastation in Haiti. As proved by Ellen DeGeneres, who pulled off the impossible feat of hosting the Emmys with grace and warmth following the tragedies of 9/11 in 2001 and Katrina in 2005, it's possible to still dress up and entertain the world even on the heels of inconceivable sadness. It's necessary, even. But instead the Globes floundered awkwardly, unsure how to behave. And compounding the weird vibe was NBC's recent and highly public embarrassments. After a very gentle joke from Gervais about moving along before the network replaced him with Jay Leno, the show mostly steered well clear of the topic, the way your family does about Uncle Joe's DUI at Thanksgiving.

“Crazy Heart”: Truck-stop romeo stripped down

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Nothing much happens in Scott Cooper's debut film, "Crazy Heart." There's no fast cutting, no motion-capture aliens, no excessively complicated plot -- in fact, there's barely a plot at all. But the movie offers a simple, unadorned landscape for actors to live in, and watching it, I was struck by how few filmmakers today, even when they're working with extremely small budgets, are willing to risk that kind of simplicity: For one thing, so many pictures of modest means (not to mention expensive ones) make a feature of their noticeably hand-held camerawork; sometimes it seems that young filmmakers believe the camera has to be moving every minute, lest the audience get bored and walk away.

The hand-held camera isn't an evil by itself. But the fact that I can't remember noticing the vagaries (if there were any) of the camera movement in "Crazy Heart" says something about Cooper's approach to working with actors. Because they're what I remember most about "Crazy Heart." Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, a hard-drinking country singer who rolls from town to town in his reliable, if distinctly shabby, '78 Suburban. (As the movie opens, he's pulling up to his next gig, at a bowling alley. One of the first things we see him do is empty his pee bottle in the parking lot.) Maggie Gyllenhaal is Jean, an aspiring journalist to whom he's granted an interview that he assumes will be cursory.