Once Upon a Time & The Farewell are wins for adult programming, thank god.
Sunday, July 28, 2019 at 7:00PM What did you see this weekend?
| Weekend Box Office Estimates July 19th-21st 🔺 = New or Expanding / ★ = Highly Recommended |
|
| W I D E |
PLATFORM / SPECIALTY TITLES |
 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood |
 The Farewell |
| 1 The Lion King $75 (cum. $350.7) REVIEW |
1 🔺 The Farewell $1.5 (cum. $3.6) PERSONAL & UNIVERSAL, INTERVIEW ★ |
| 2 🔺 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood $40.3 *NEW* REVIEW ★ |
2 Art of Self Defense $311k (cum. $2) REVIEW |
| 3 Spider-Man Far From Home $12.2 (cum. $344.4) TOM HOLLAND, REVIEW |
3 🔺 Maiden $204k (cum. $1.1) REVIEW ★ |
| 4 Toy Story 4 $9.8 (cum. $395.6) PODCAST, REVIEW |
4 Super 30 $189k (cum. $2.1) |
| 5 Crawl $6 (cum. $23.8) REVIEW |
5 🔺 Pavarotti $135k (cum. $4.2) |
numbers on that chart are pulled from boxofficemojo
Unless you wanna talk about The Lion King (why? it's bad!) the big story this weekend was the strong opening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Making movies for adults is now an endangered business so we're happy that the film had such a healthy opening, the best ever for a Tarantino picture. (Given the movie's defiantly leisurely pacing, though, we have trouble imagining great word of mouth to keep it going for a long time.) Meanwhile The Farewell continued to do great business, so much so that it entered the regular top ten this weekend despite being at only 135 theaters. Go Lulu Wang and Awkwafina! Next weekend continues the annoying trend of Hollywood refusing to compete with itself with the third straight weekend with only one new wide release: Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. After that the floodgates open with lots of new films per week as the summer movie season begins to wane.
Reader Comments (24)
I saw both Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Farewell. The latter I was not prepared for, either emotionally or comedically. Seriously, I doubt I'll see a funnier movie this year (and one that didn't resort to cheap, ethnic humour like a lot of comedies do). And the more dramatic scenes fit in perfectly tonally, without getting too sentimental; all of those scenes are well- earned. The cast is uniformly excellent other than Awkwafina. Not that her performance was poor by any stretch, but her part so well-written I felt like she was lacking in a few scenes. A small nitpick, but I'm guessing I'm in the minority on this one.
Best movie of the year so far for me.
I saw Isabelle Huppert on stage playing Mary Stuart in a Robert Wilson play and now my eyeballs and the rest of my holes are overflowing with BEAUTY.
In cinema I saw THE BEST OF ENEMIES (not bad, but I assume they distanced themselves from BLAKKKLANSMAN for a reason, as the latter movie is far superior in quality and they would've been compared (as I am doing here) unfavourably), and DEFEND, CONSERVE, PROTECT (a routine, unremarkable Australian documentary that was nevertheless compelling in its subject (the Sea Shepherd boats on one of their anti-whaling missions)).
Also saw a couple of older films: 49TH PARALLEL at one of my film societies (best Pressburger script? I am thinking so now) and (to get myself game-ready for a week of art-house movies at the Melbourne Film Festival next week) Nuri Bilge Ceylan's CLIMATES (watched on a medium-size screen from an old video tape! So not the best format for a Ceylan, but still enough to appreciate yet another masterwork from him).
I'm glad to see "Art of Self Defense" also doing well. That movie was LOL hilarious. One of my faves of the year so far-- a really nice surprise. In a just world, would get a screenplay nod.
I tried to see "Once Upon..." in 70mm on Friday, but the the theater was having technical difficulties with the projector. They made getting a refund easy though and hopefully it will all work tomorrow.
Has anyone seen Sharon Tate's "The Wrecking Crew"... is it worth seeking out?
"Once Upon a Time..." is another bloated, fetishistic ego trip from Tarantino. Excellent DiCaprio and Pitt performances plus mouth-watering production design, but too many flabby scenes and a structure that can, if we're generous, be called shapeless. I'm kind of done with this director's juvenile fantasies?
I saw The Lion King and... unfortunely will be a box office hit, because if the movie deserves what he deserves, Disney would stop making reboots and sequels right now!!
Looks like a NatGeo / Discovery documentary with great voice casting doing Shakespearean in voice over. Don't look like a film with the pathos as the outstanding and masterpiece animation. Timon and Pumba should be in the scene the entire 90 minutes and would be so much better!!
But the visual effects are outstanding. Pole position for the Oscars. Thank god only in this category.
First-timers in Descendants and Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood and a re-watch of Descendants 2.
SFOTroy- The Wrecking Crew is a silly Matt Helm (Dean Martin) spy spoof with Day-Glo colors and beautiful women being objectified in the fashion of films of the time.
But what else it has is one of Sharon Tate's best performances as the klutzy Freya Carlson, an agent who is supposed to be assisting Helm but causes him no end of trouble. She's the best thing in the film, it's a rare chance to see what a nimble comic performer she was and a nice spotlight for her.
Don't go into it expecting anything but a bit of silly fluff and you won't be disappointed.
I am halfway through the final season of Orange Is the New Black - what a surprise. It is as good as the first few seasons. They are closing out character lines so well, and it is interesting to think about how some characters have been rehabilitated over the course of the series, while others are so much worse off. If you had given up during the last couple years, I highly recommend giving it a try.
I also enjoyed Penny Lane's documentary Hail Satan? which had me laughing out loud at the Church of Satan's efforts to remind religious groups that inviting Christianity into our public spaces might also mean inviting Satanisn into them.
I saw "Crawl" and it did exactly what a good Summer creature feature should do made me jump.
But I was really impressed by Kaya Scodelario who gives a star making performance. Barry Pepper is also good as her father.
Saw ONCE UPON A TIME... and I surprised myself for liking it since I've been mostly neutral on Tarantino's last films. I wished it was 40 minutes shorter though, but I enjoyed spending most of it with some of the best roles that Pitt/DiCaprio have done recently. Plus I actually appreciated those last 20 minutes or so.
I then saw LION KING and technological wonder aside as well as some perfect voice work from Eichner and Oliver, it was a bit underwhelming. It's certainly the least adventurous of Disney's "live action" films in terms of actually adding something NEW and switching things up. Even ALADDIN had some new, fun twists. At least the next two (Mulan and Little Mermaid) seem to be more in the mold of doing things differently.
I finally saw TOY STORY 4 which I enjoyed and was better than I expected. It's the first Pixar film I've seen in a cinema for a while.
At home I watched THE HAUNTING (Robert Wise, 1963) which sadly is a bit too dated to be scary though it's still a bit unsettling. I also watched KIN (for Jack Reynor) a rather odd but good enough sci-fi pic from last year.
We also finished off STRANGER THINGS 3, which is the best series yet, and I am partway through AMERICAN ANIMALS, which is excellent. Loving the documentary crossovers and Barry Keoghan is becoming one of my favourite young actors - his work is consistently good from what I've seen and often outstanding.
i hope Kathy Griffin's movie cracks the top 10 next week
thanks joel6!
@Peggy Sue -- so envious of you. I missed Isabelle's show in Paris and I don't think I can justify going to Lisbon to catch her play. I read all reviews of this Robert Wilson-directed production and I am melting with envy to see la reine Isabelle playing la reine Mary. Bob Wilson said a few things comparing Huppert to American actresses in relation to Huppert's ability to think abstractly, formally (don't really know how that goes).
I watched Mrs Dalloway again. This time I noticed a few things I am sure I didn't catch the last time. Considering that they were drawing from the same material, the Clarissa Dalloway of this film and the fictional one in The Hours followed the same path but diverged in the subtlest of ways: the way Vanessa Redgrave's delight in anticipation of the party was tinged with a melancholy that would later be expanded wonderfully in her monologues and Meryl Streep's own quietly joyful moments from buying flowers to telling the audience what was interior without words. I thought Redgrave totally captured Clarissa's neurosis with a touch of incipient madness.
Redgrave, Rupert Graves, Lena Headey, Alan Cox and the marvelous Natascha McElhone were all wonderful. McElhone and Redgrave as the younger and more mature Clarissa got the same gait and sensibility it is easy to see how they are one and the same.
The leisurely pacing of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is brought up so often it’s starting to feel like a true criticism that the fanboys are scaring you into holding back on.
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I haven't seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet because it hasn't been released yet over here in the UK, but I'll be there on opening night.
However, I did catch up with Long Shot (overpraised), Spider-Man: Far from Home (meh), A Private War (Pike good/film dull) and The Clovehitch Killer (very good). Also saw The Hitcher for the first time to commemorate the passing of the great Rutger Hauer.
Owl -- I hope they recorded it so we can watch over and over again!
I saw Judy Collins sing Both Sides Now and Dolly Parton sing I Will Always Love You and Jolene during the final female-centric mystery set of the Newport Folk Festival. So now I can die happy. (Plus, Dolly sang 9 to 5, so that’s the film experience tie-in.)
^ Pam, I was reading about the Newport Folk Festival, and it sounds like it was amazing. So many incredible artists! Besides Dolly Parton and Judy Collins you had Kacey Musgraves, Sheryl Crow, Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlile … I wish I was there! Who else did you catch?
I do not understand the criticism of OUATIH's pacing or run-time! I mean I do I suppose, technically, since I'm (hopefully) not an idiot and know that it's literally just shy of 3 hours and often feels still and leisurely. But I realized when I saw it a second time yesterday that it'd just flown right by for me, and I was actually angry that I knew the ending was about to come. It doesn't feel anything like 3 hours to me. It feels luxurious, lived in, whole.
Yeah, I saw 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood' yesterday, and it didn't *feel* over-long to me. It certainly is languorously paced, but not lugubriously so. If anything, I sort of wished we had spend a bit more time with the so-called Manson family to get a better sense of how that world worked (or didn't, as it were). All in all, it was a pretty satisfying experience (minus poor Brandy) — Tarantino's best since at least Inglourious Basterds.
Suzanne - I can’t tell if I liked the last season. Part of me feels like once the show left Litchfield it lost all its heartz