Box Office: Wild Tales of CG Mice and Mike Leigh's Success
Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 1:45PM For today's box office charts, since there isn't much news beyond Cinderella's expected but terrific opening, here's two charts. 1) The unavoidable movies and 2) the movies you have to seek out. The quality differential is damn frightening. Every single one of the platform toppers are really good! If only audiences could have better taste... sigh... but it's not all their fault. The studios have trained moviegoers to not seek quality since quality is harder to sell and easy marketing hooks are a far more fail safe option with which to run a business since quality (a tough job) is neither here nor there. And once people stopped seeking quality, it got harder and harder to find even if you were seeking. The story of the dwindling of the American arthouse. Well, that and the fast turn-around to DVD and On Demand.
Erica Rivas in WILD TALES. Her wedding doesn't go as well as CINDERELLA's.
WIDE RELEASE
01 Cinderella $70 NEW Review
02 Run All Night $11 NEW
03 Kingsman: The Secret Service $6.2 (cum. $107.3) Review
04 Focus $5.8 (cum. $44)
05 Chappie $5.8 (cum. $23) Review
PLATFORM RELEASE
01 Wild Tales (68 Theaters) $.2 (cum. $.8) Review
02 '71 (65 Theaters) $.2 (cum. $.3) Review
03 It Follows (4 Theaters) $.1 NEW Review
04 Mr Turner (89 Theaters) $.1 (cum. $3.7) Review & Interview
05 Red Army (58 Theaters) $.07 (cum. $.4)
Oscar nominated Dick Pope and Mike Leigh on the set of Mr TurnerIt Follows, the latest buzzy horror had the week's best per screen average. More artistically leaning horror films have been on a real roll lately creatively but the public interest hasnt yet been piqued so they haven't peeked. Mr Turner is closing out its run soon but it did well... Mike Leigh movies tend to gross right below that region in the US. The ones that Oscar likes do best which probably isn't a surprise: Secrets and Lies (5 nominations, all in top 8 categories) grossed roughly quadruple what his films usually gross; Topsy-Turvy (4 nominations... mostly in craft categories and his only film to win Oscars, 2 of them) is his second most popular; Vera Drake (3 Oscar nominations, all in top 8 categories) and Mr Turner (4 Oscar nominations, all in craft categories) grossed slightly more than his usual releases. This explains why SPC is so obsessed with releasing them in December but it's a pity because some of them without obvious Oscar hooks need more time to build. Another Year, I maintain, would have been far more successful if released in the fall because it's quiet and contemporary and its power sneaks up on you.
TFE Recommends: Do yourself a huge favor (if you haven't yet) and take a group of friends to see Argentina's Oscar nominee Wild Tales. It's so funny and comedies are always best with a group. Super accessibly entertaining too as long as your friends know how to read or can speak Spanish. I'm dying to hear which is your favorite from the six short films within the film. I'm partial to "The strongest" (#3) and "Until death do us part" (#6) but they're all good.
What did you see this weekend? If you saw Cinderella chat about that here. I liked it but I really wanted Lucifer to eat those damn CG mice.
Reader Comments (18)
Finally saw "Song of the Sea" which was so beautiful!
Saw Craps...um, MAPS to the Stars. A must-see for Juli completists -- she's absolutely wild and fearless here -- but other than that, it's pretty clear why the film didn't get distributed last year. What a mess.
Thank you for constantly promoting Wild Tales, Nathaniel!
I finally got the chance to see Mommy and boy was it worth the wait. My favorite film of 2014 hands down.
My favorite 'Wild Tale' is also The Strongest. Fast-paced blockbusters wish they had this much to say about masculinity...
My second favorite is the opening. What a great introduction to the humor that's about to be unleashed in the rest of the film.
I saw two high-profile "vanity productions" this weekend: The Gunman, starring, produced and co-written by Sean Penn, and Effie Gray, written by and featuring Emma Thompson and starring her husband, Greg Wise.
The Gunman was disappointing, given that the cast includes Penn, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone and Jasmine Trinca. Guy Lodge's review in Variety is spot on. But damn, after that gun display (not referred to in the title, I'm guessing), I envy Charlize even more than I already did.
Effie Gray I'm still processing. I think I liked it a lot, and I imagine it would be catnip to the Academy. It's one of my favorite (restrained) Dakota Fanning performances (although I have questions about her choice of accent), and it made me wonder why Greg Wise hasn't had any career on this side of the pond since Sense and Sensibility. I knew Julie Walters was one of the leads, but I forgot, not recognizing her at all onscreen. It's so rare (for me anyway) to see her playing an unsympathetic, upper-class woman in period attire. Thompson plays a small but key role, and is delightful as always. (Blink and you'll miss Russell Tovey's ears.) The creative team (full of BAFTA, Oscar and Emmy nominees and winners) does excellent work. It opens April 3, and I look forward to the discussion here.
Wild Tales is amazing. I love the wedding episode. I just love it.
Argentinian actors are super good. They come in all shapes and sizes and they're all great, especially on stage.
My favorite from best to "worst":
1. The Wedding
2. The Proposal
3. The Strongest
4. Bombita
5. The Restaurant
6. Pasternak
I enjoyed Wild Tales, but I also kind of agree with Joe, who (if I remember correctly) said on the podcast that it's maybe been overpraised because of the "look, foreign films can be fun too!" aspect.
I agree that the third and the last short are the best. The fourth one, with Ricardo Darin, had a weirdly cuddly ending compared to the others.
My favourite wild tale was the car one followed by the wedding. Erica Rivas and Rita Cortese (from the restaurant tale) were two of my supporting actress nominees this year.
"wild tales" is terrific, yes! my two favorites are also the ones you mentioned... and erica rivas is absolutely fantastic.
almodóvar should get érica to work in spain with him. he obviously knows her.
marcelo -- she'd be so great in one of his movies. I love that this feels Almodovarian (he produced) without feeling like Almodovar if that makes sense. Szifron seems to have his own voice but one that harmonizes well with Almodovar's.
That's a crazy good number for It Follows. Amazing what happens when distributors don't undermine an ecstatically reviewed horror indie with an immediate VOD debut (aka, IFC and The Babadook). WIll be interesting to see if the Weinsteins put real money into building this into a hit.
As for me, I did a NYC double feature yesterday of Ballet 422 and the Wim Wender's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick at MOMA. Ballet was very well shot and has some lovely moments, but I wish the film had been a little more expansive in its narrative scope. Goalie, meanwhile, is an excellent suspenser with heavy overtones of Patricia Highsmith and Antonioni. I haven't seen much Wenders yet, so this was a very pleasant surprise.
Today I finished Agent Carter, which was just so much fun (amazing how much more connected I feel to the Captain America stuff in the Marvel Universe than anything else) and watched the second and third episodes of Better Call Saul. The 3rd ep is the best of the lot, the first time the show hasn't just felt like pretty good fan fiction.
I saw Cinderella at the cinema, where I hadn't been for several weeks. Box Office Mojo claims that the audience was 66% female and 66% families -- as a male without accompaniment, I wonder what percentage I fell into. Anyway, I liked it quite a lot.
At home, I watched Malcolm X and The Iron Giant for the first time, as well as rewatching Elmer Gantry (Shirley Jones scorches the screen in her comparatively brief screentime in that one).
good news for 'cinderella' - apparently the world is round, people
A screening of Danny Collins, a suprisingly charming, well-paced film, with terrific performance by Pacino, Cannavale, Plummer, Bening, and Jennifer Garner. Despite some plot cliches, quite enjoyable for an older viewer. At the director Q&A following, I was so surprised to learn that the youngish, first time director, Dan Fogelman, was also the writer of Tangled, Crazy Stupid Love, and Galavant!
Nat, I saw "Pride" based almost solely on your recommendations on your site and am so glad I did. So earnest in a refreshing way that also felt perfectly '80s, able to balance a large ensemble and make you care for so many characters, cast with actors who can do a lot with small moments (like Andrew Scott fitting 16 years worth of pain, regret and love into two words upon seeing his mother, Russell Tovey capturing recklessness, sexiness, danger and self-loathing sadness into one short scene, etc.), tense, funny, moving - all the things! It made me feel all the things!
So yeah, thanks for the rec.
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