Memorial Day Long Weekend Champs

It's not the story that the media will cover but it looks like the winners of Memorial Day weekend are... limited releases. Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman's funny Jane Austen adaptation cracked the top ten list on just 500-ish screens. The Lobster also had a great weekend on just over 100 screens. 

The other significant happening: Captain America: Civil War overtook Deadpool this weekend to become 2016's biggest hit.

 

Otherwise the long weekend was disappointing with two underperfoming blockbusters as the big tickets. Though Apocalypse's $80 million would be spectacular for many films its still a disappointment as its a far lower opening gross than that of its X-Men predecessor Days of Future Past. Meanwhile Alice Through the Looking Glass, a sequel no one was clamoring for from a film that was a fluke phenomenon based mostly on its absurdly lucky timing post-Avatar back in 2010, opened to $34 million. With a $170 million budget that's rough. Not as rough as Johnny Depp's offscreen trouble though, as an ugly divorce from Amber Heard is brewing. She's accused him of domestic violence and obtained a restraining order, his friends have rushed to defend him, the internet is circling him with torches. That's how these things go.

What did you see this weekend?

Arrows indicate losing or gaining screens

TOP TEN
🔺01 X-Men Apocalypse $80 NEW  Review
🔺02 Alice Through the Looking Glass $34.1 NEW
▫️03 Angry Birds $24.6 (cum. $72.2) 
🔻04 Captain America: Civil War $19.7 (cum. $377.1)  Review
🔺05 Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising $11.4 (cum. $40.6) 
🔻06 The Jungle Book $9.2 (cum. $340.7) Articles
▫️07 The Nice Guys $8.1 (cum. $23.5) Shane Black, Review
🔻08 Money Monster $5.5 (cum. $35.2) Jack O'Connell
🔺09 Love & Friendship $3.1 (cum. $4.1)  Review
🔻10 Zootopia $1.1 (cum. $336.1)  Reviewish

TOP TEN LIMITED
Excluding previously wide & Love & Friendship which remarkably hit the top ten!
🔺01 The Lobster $942K (cum. $1.7) Reviewish, Podcast
🔻02 The Meddler $700K (cum. $3.1) Review
🔺03 The Man Who Knew Infinity $630K (cum. $2.4)
🔺04 A Bigger Splash $530K (cum. $1.4) Reviewish, Podcast
🔺05 Weiner $216K (cum. $344K) Review
🔻06 Sing Street $154K (cum. $2.8)  Review, Who's the MVP?, Podcast
🔺07 Maggie's Plan $136K (cum. $225K) Review
🔻08 Hello My Name is Doris $87K (cum. $14.2) Review, Sally Field
🔻09 Dark Horse $44K (cum. $139) Review
🔻10 A Hologram for the King $44K (cum. $4.1) Review

The Furniture: Design Heralds Doom in The Witch

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

The Witch has a lot in common with Black Narcissus. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if the 1947 Powell & Pressburger classic weren’t still on my mind from last week’s column, but it’s very true. Thomasin’s family of fanatical Puritans and Sister Clodagh’s nuns both find themselves on the edge of their known world, motivated by faith to make a new life. Yet both groups are doomed from the start. They’re overwhelmed by their environments and fall in the face of doubt, sexual temptation and the power of nature.

Of course, Thomasin isn’t bedeviled by gorgeous matte paintings of the Himalayas. The Witch was shot in the very real wilderness of Ontario, in the former town of Kiosk. That’s “former” because the population starting leaving after the fire at the lumber factory in 1973. Now there’s just some abandoned railroad tracks and a towering forest. If that’s not the perfect place to shoot a horror film, I don’t know what is. 

The landscape dwarfs the solitary 17th century farm where the bulk of the film takes place. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke takes advantage of this as frequently as possible. There are countless shots in which the cast seem like helpless children at the mercy of the trees...

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On this Day in history as it relates to the movies...

Happy Memorial Day my peoples. Let's have another history lesson via showbiz

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

1431 Joan of Arc is burned at the stake. If you've never seen The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), one of the best movies of all time containing hugely powerful actressing by Falconetti you must repent. Save your soul and watch it.
1536 King Henry VIII, whose wives all tended to die prematurely (funny how that happens) marries Jane Seymour (not to be confused with the Dr Quinn Medicine Woman & Somewhere in Time actress). 477 years later Oscar Isaac sings about Queen Jane's tragic life in Inside Llewyn Davis's very best scene. 
1896 Howard Hawks is born. Makes so many great films but my favorites are: Bringing Up Baby (1938), Red River (1948) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) 

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013): The Death Of Queen Jane (The Movie Title Song) from dky6dcnQbL dky6dcnQbL on Vimeo.

1899 Movie titan Irving Thalberg is born. The craziest actressexuals (*raises hand*) know him as Mr. Norma Shearer but mostly people think of him as "another name for an Honorary Oscar" though the prize is actually a bust of the man himself. 39 people have won this at the Oscars for bodies of work that "reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production". All 39 of them have been men.
1920 Franklin J Schaffner is born in Tokyo to American missionary parents. He'll eventually direct motion pictures like The Stripper, Boys from Brazil, and Planet of the Apes and win the Oscar for Patton (1970). 
1928 International treasure Agnès Varda is born in Belgium. Anne Marie wrote about her work last year so check that out.
1941 Blood and Sand, Tyrone Power's matador pic, is released. Wins Best Cinematography at the Oscars. Happy 75th Anniversary!
1971 "Adele Dazeem" is born, shatters the ear drum of the doctor who spanks her newborn tush.
2003 Finding Nemo opens in movie theaters. Begins its gargantuan box office swim through movie theaters 
2014 Maleficent opens in theaters, desecreating the beautiful wickedness of one of the all time great screen villains by making her a misunderstood victim.  

Will you be making history today? What's your plan?

Review: X-Men Apocalypse

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

If you experience extreme deja vu at the movie’s this weekend, don’t panic – that’s just how summer movies play. Take X-MEN APOCALYPSE for example. The sixth film in the X-Men franchise will feel very familiar if you’ve seen any X-pictures before. And maybe even if you haven’t. So let us begin (again) with a short detour.

Oscar Isaac is the internet’s current boyfriend and an amazing actor and as is required by the law of desire he’s in everything now. He was used sparingly but potently in The Force Awakens last Christmas as dashing pilot Poe Dameron and he’s in theaters again in a much larger role as the big bad of X-Men Apocalypse...

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Swing, Tarzan, Swing! Ch.3: Lex Barker... and Queen Dorothy Dandridge?

As we approach the release of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) we're ogling past screen incarnations of the Lord of the Apes...

After Buster Crabbe filled a loincloth beautifully and Johnny Weissmuller & Maureen O'Sullivan gave us the deservedly definitive Golden Age Tarzan and Jane, the franchise had to recast or close shop. O'Sullivan left first and by the late 40s Weissmuller was feeling too old for the role and also called it quits. The producer Sol Lesser wasn't about to let the profitable franchise go, though, and led a search for a replacement. The winner was Lex Barker, a then little known blue blood actor from New York who had been disowned by his family for choosing an acting career (!) and he took up the loincloth in 1949 for Tarzan's Magic Fountain.

I opted to watch Barker's third go at the character in Tarzan's Peril (sometimes called Tarzan and the Jungle Queen) because it was the first Tarzan film to actually shoot some scenes in Africa (Kenya to be exact) and six actors down the call list was the curio factor of a young Dorothy Dandridge as "Melmedi, Queen of The Ashuba".

Dorothy & Lex after the jump...

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