Beauty vs Beast: Running Mates
Monday, August 6, 2018 at 11:28AM Jason Adams from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" query -- when I saw it written in my calendar that today is the 25th anniversary of The Fugitive my first thought is I must have done that movie for this series before, but a quick skim tells me I hadn't, and so here we are! I vividly remember The Fugitive coming out in the summer of 1993, a banner year for this movie-lover - I had gone to see Jurassic Park a dozen times by then and I needed something fresh and new to feed this newly awoken beast inside me; Harrison Ford leaping out of a train-crash did the trick.
I went to see the film several times after that, but save a few minutes here and there on TV I don't think I have seen it since? Still it's an easy enough film to remember, especially after we spent that entire year's awards season getting the clip of Tommy Lee Jones saying "gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse" hammered into our heads over and over and over, until he got his Oscar for it the next spring.
PREVIOUSLY Two weeks back we had you tackling PTA's The Master - turns out that Joaquin Pheonix holds that title, taking a precise 2/3rds of your vote. Said Devin D:
"This performance truly cemented Joaquin Phoenix as one of the irrefutable greats, and it was very nice that Philip Seymour Hoffman got to work yet again before his untimely passing with Paul Thomas Anderson in a role so sizable."
Ranking Tully's Figures of Speech
Monday, August 6, 2018 at 8:00AM ;)
Seven years after fucking up Charlize Theron’s silk, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody teamed up again to fuck up just about every other fabric in her house in this year’s Tully. Here Theron plays Marlo, a soon-to-be mommy of three struggling to find any room for excitement or naps in her caffeine-deprived days. Enter Tully (Mackenzie Davis), the night nanny she hires to add some hours of sleep to her frustrations.
From the opening scene, Cody assures the audience she has no intention of grounding these characters in the reality that corresponds to them. Her script keeps this up throughout by frequently using figures of speech and occasional underwater reveries to buoy up the characters in their imagination. She reinforces the fantasies her script's players construct and dress themselves up in (from Tahitian home bars to cat ears headbands) with an equally rhetorical language. We've ranked enough of our favorite metaphors and similes from Tully that we can already hear the wheels of your high school English teacher’s TV cart rolling up to your classroom.
Ten of our favorite lines and very wet spoilers after the cut...
Supporting Actress Smackdowns, All Episodes
Sunday, August 5, 2018 at 10:38PM by Nathaniel R
The Supporting Actress Smackdown began at StinkyLulu's dearly departed blogspot many years ago. We revived the series here for summertime airings with his blessing a few years ago, and get this, there are only 25 years that haven't been visited. If you axe the years that are too recent for retrospectives and remove the years that have a missing film (neither streaming nor available on DVD) than we're down to only 12 years that we can visit!
In total 56 years have been reviewed. In those Smackdowns, the rotating panel has agreed with Oscar 48% of the time (if you count ties that included the Oscar winner as agreement. Though Oscar has never had a tie in a Supporting category there have been six ties at the Smackdown.) Herewith an index of where we've been and where we might go next...
What did you see this weekend?
Sunday, August 5, 2018 at 3:00PM by Nathaniel R
This weekend looked much the same as last weekend with Mission Impossible - Fallout still dominant and the same limited release hits going strong (Three Identical Strangers and Blindspotting and Eighth Grade... though the latter has now gone wide - yay!). Disney's Christopher Robin opened slightly below expectations but family friendly films sometimes have staying power and audiences reportedly like it...
| Weekend Box Office Estimates (August 3rd-5th) |
|
| W I D E 800+ screens |
L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide |
 Mission: Impossible - Fallout |
 Three Identical Strangers |
| 1. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT $35 (cum. $124.4) REVIEW |
1. THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $1 on 405 screens (cum. $8.4) REVIEW |
| 2.🔺 CHRISTOPHER ROBIN $25 *NEW* REVIEW | 2. BLINDSPOTTING $660k on 523 screens (cum. $3.1) |
| 3.🔺 THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME $12.3 *NEW* |
3. 🔺 ALONG WITH THE GODS 2 $329k on 48 screens *NEW* |
| 4. MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN $9 (cum. $91.3) REVIEW |
4. LEAVE NO TRACE $266k on 169 screens (cum. $5.1) TRAILER DISCUSSION |
| 5. EQUALIZER 2 $8.8 (cum. $79.8) |
5. 🔺 MCQUEEN $181k on 34 screens (cum. $491) REVIEW |