Box Office Fault Lines

I didn't see the latest disaster epic this weekend - but maybe you did? How many people did The Rock save with his giant arms and helicopters and diving (the three techniques he used from the trailer - I'm just guessing). San Andreas the movie may have killed off Californians but it was spectacle enough to attract the nation at large with a $50+ million opening weekend which makes this his biggest opening weekend outside of the Mummy and Fast & Furious franchises.

WIDE RELEASE
May 29-31 Weekend
01 San Andreas NEW $53.2
02 Pitch Perfect 2 $14.8 (cum. $147.5) Review
03 Tomorrowland $13.8 (cum. $63.1) Review
04 Mad Max Fury Road $13.6 (cum. $115.9) Review & Podcast
05 Age of Ultron  $10.9 (cum. $427) Review & Marathon & Podcast
06 Aloha NEW $10 Review
07 Poltergeist $7.8 (cum. $38.2)
08 Far From The Madding Crowd $1.4 (cum. $8.3) Review 
09 Hot Pursuit $1.3 (cum. $32.3) Review
10 Home $1.1 (cum. $170.4) 

Meanwhile Aloha, Cameron Crowe's latest had a dismal $10 million opening (That's a dismal opening when you've got three mostly bankable A list stars) and terrible reviews - many critics calling it his worst yet. I was curious to see it despite the reviews until I heard that Emma Stone was playing a character that was meant to be half Asian American and then I was like...'you know what Hollywood? Just not doing this anymore. ENOUGH.'

In better news Mad Max and Far From The Madding Crowd (the two we're rooting for at the moment from genre quality and "make more movies like this" concerns) held fairly well in their third and fifth weekends respectively. Fury Road's exorbitant price tag isn't going to make it one of the most profitable films of the year but at least it will eventually make its money back! I had the laziest weekend ever as you probably sensed from the unusually quiet blogging... but I'm hoping you found excitement. What did you see?

NYC Readers Take Note:
I will be appearing in a show at UCB in the East Village called "So Into It" on Tuesday night (June 2nd) this week. It's a comic variety show that changes themes each month and this month the topic is 'awards shows'. I'm not totally sure what to expect but I will be interviewed on stage at some point during the show. Please note: I am not the one bringing the comedy -- not a comedian. I'm just being interviewed but I'd appreciate support from anyone reading who is So Into The Film Experience (and also non-judgmental) as I'm terrified of being on stage. 

Julie Harris, Costume Designer (RIP)

One of the oldest costume designers passed away this weekend. Julie Harris, not to be confused with the legendary stage and screen actress of the same name, died in London at the age of 94. Though she was well loved at the BAFTAs with five nominations and a win, she only had one brush with Oscar. But if you only get one shot, make it a zeitgeist moment.

And boy did she. She designed the mod classic, John Schlesginger's Darling (1965) which won her, Julie Christie, and the screenwriter golden statues 50 years ago, in a year otherwise Oscar-dominated by a certain other Julie in an Oscar winning musical. Harris had quite a streak in the 1960s. It didn't get much hipper then than designing for the original Bond girl (Ursula Andress in Casino Royale), Julie Christie (Darling!) and The Beatles themselves (A Hard Day's Night, Help!). About the Fab Four, Harris famous quipped

I must be one of the few people who can claim they have seen John, Paul, George and Ringo naked.

Other famous films included The Swiss Family Robinson (1960), The Chalk Garden (1964), Goodbye Mr Chips (1969), Rollerball (1975), The Slipper and the Rose (1976) and Dracula (1979). She retired from the cinema at the age of 60 with an unusual assignment - The Great Muppet Caper (1981). 

costume sketches for Alfred Hitchcock's FRENZYJulie Christie & Dirk Bogarde on location for DARLING

Have you ever seen Darling? We keep meaning to write about it for the blog but have never quite done so.

1979 Look Back: Bette Midler and "The Rose"

By 1979 Bette Midler was already a star. She had a Grammy (Best New Artist), an Emmy (for her televison special Ol' Red Hair is Back), and a Special Tony award for "adding lustre to the Broadway stage". (She performed in a show called Bette Midler's Clams on the Half Shell Revue). Naturally the next entertainment medium to conquer was film and become an inevitable movie star as well. Despite uncredited small parts (including 1966's Hawaii, which filmed in her home state) and underground film, Midler made her official film debut as a lead with her electrifying performance as a troubled rocker in The Rose - which, of course, brought her a Best Actress nomination, a Golden Globe, and a film career to add to her impressive résumé.   

The film earned a total of four Academy Award nominations (Midler plus Best Supporting Actor for Frederic Forrest, Best Sound, and Best Film Editing). Just recently the film scored another honor when it was released through the prestigious Criterion Collection. In addition to a gorgeous restoration (I had previously only seen the film on grainy VHS and I was amazed at how sharp and bright the colors are - especially during the stage numbers), there are new interviews with Bette Midler, director Mark Rydell, as well as archival footage from a day of shooting that aired on the Today show.

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May. It's a Wrap

Summertime is here. May done flew by. Okay okay. There's technically two days left but I was eager to share my latest photoshop frenzy. Isn't it a sad beauty?

So May departs leaving us with excessive anticipation for Cannes titles, summer blockbuster excitement at its peak (that tiny window before the supersizing fatigue hits sometime around July 4th), but let's take a quick look back at the Month that was...

Most Popular Articles:
Gold: The New Best Actress Field (& all things Carol)
Silver: Revenge of the 80s: Now With More 10s Sexism
Bronze (+ Most Discussed): Yes No Maybe So: Ricki and the Flash

Important Singular Events ICYMI
David Dastmalchian Guest Blog -What he learned from Paul Rudd & more...
Cannes Closing Ceremony - Who won, what the jury said going in
Mad Men Finale - "Person to Person" 
Orson Welles Centennial - a special 'best shot' episode  

Other Highlights:  
Dubbing Movies for Foreign Markets - Yuck!
Best Action Acting Ever? Besides Sigourney in Aliens... Hmmm? 
George Miller's Triptych Career - Talking Animals + Susan Sarandon + Mad Max 
Bette Davis, Mother's and Tell-Alls - Now Voyager discussed 
The Bening - announced her sure-to-be triumphant return 
The Podcast -we really dug into Ex Machina 
"It's For People" - have a cup of joe with David Lynch 

Series
As ever we love a good theme / project. Manuel began his HBO LGBT series, Anne Marie looked at the work of Sofia Coppola, and the team looked at 1979 as well as a few sex scenes.  

Reviews - Catch Up!
Fury Road (A), Carol (A), Age of Ultron (B), Far From the Madding Crowd (B), Welcome to Me (B-), Pitch Perfect 2 (C+), Tomorrowland (C+), Irrational Man (C+), Maggie (C+), Hot Pursuit (C), Chocolate City (D+) 

COMING IN JUNE: Cara Seymour (American Psycho, The Knick, An Education) will guest blog!; 'Best Shot' returns with Dick Tracy, Amadeus, and Magic Mike; Anne Marie's "women's pictures" looks back at the career of Agnes Varda, mother of the French New Wave; we'll surely talk dinosaurs and emotions with Jurassic World and Inside Out arriving; Two big Smackdowns headed your way as we finally get to 1979 next weekend and 1948 at the end of the month; and Team Experience sounds off with some FYCs for Emmy Voters since they'll be turning in their nomination ballots in June

... Any requests?

"I'm trying to help you!"

What's Better Than Sex? David Wenham in 'Better Than Sex'!

For The Lusty Month of May, we're looking at a few sex scenes. Here's Glenn...

 Can we take a moment to appreciate David Wenham as a sex object? I mean, I’m sure most of you have already done so, probably around the time he threw his clothes off and replaced them with abdominal-enhancing body make-up on 300, but for me it’s all about sex. Better than Sex, I mean, his 2000 romantic comedy with Susie Porter that marked the directorial debut of Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man). The entertaining box office hit came on the heels of the television series SeaChange that saw him embrace the handsome, charming personality that he imbued in real life after a series of film roles that screamed Thespian with a capital T, bringing proper David Wenham appreciation to the (locally, at least for the time being) masses where it belonged.

He was the type who’d bake you scrambled eggs for breakfast in the buff and make you laugh at dorky jokes before sending you to heaven. Amen to that! 

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Anne Goes Overboard

Jason from MNPP here with a look at some of the new hot movie news! Okay it's a day old but I feel as if y'all might have THOUGHTS on this: Anne Hathaway's been set to star in The Lifeboat, an adaptation of a 2013 book by Charlotte Rogan, for awhile now. It apparently tells the tale as old as Titanic of a sinking luxury liner and some Sophie's Choices that must be made regarding one's ultimate survival.

Does it make me an old person or just a person with a very nearly unbearable slash extraordinary sense of refinement that I first picture Tallulah Bankhead using diamonds as a fishing lure before I see Kate Winslet hocking a loogie when I read that plot synopsis? Either way it's a fertile playground for a filmmaker and they just went and hired one of the fertile-est around: Joe Wright is going to direct the thing, making it his post-Pan project. He's really into boats right now!

Anne is slowly but surely manuevering her way back in front of the public after The World decided we all - her included! - needed a break after that very loud Oscar win of hers. She's received good notices OffBroadway and she's got that beige-fantasia by Nancy Meyers coming out in September. I'll be skipping that, but the words "Joe" and "Wright" put next to each other are an immediate "yes whatever I'll watch whatever, Rooney Mara as a Colorform Sprite, sure" for me. You?

Smackdown Summer - Revamp Your Queues!

We're just 9 days away from the launch of another Smackdown Summer. Rather than announce piecemeal, we'll give you all five lineups in case you'd like more time to catch up with these films (some of them stone cold classics) over the hot months. Remember to cast your own ballots during each month for the reader-polling (your 1979 votes are due by June 4th). Your votes count toward the final Smackdown win so more of you should join in. 

These Oscar years were chosen after comment reading, dvd searching, handwringing, and desire-to-watch moods.  I wish we had time to squeeze in a dozen Smackdowns each summer! As it is there will be TWO Smackdowns in June, a gift to you since this first episode was delayed.

Sunday June 7th
The Best Supporting Actresses of 1979

Meryl Streep won her first of three Oscars while taking her co-star Jane Alexander along for the Oscar ride in Kramer vs. Kramer. The delightful character actress Barbara Barrie was nominated for her mom role in Breaking Away, Mariel Hemingway as Woody Allen's preternaturally wise teenage lover in Manhattan, and Candice Bergen played a singing divorcee in Starting Over - a role that supposedly helped win her Murphy Brown a decade later.

PANELISTS: Nathaniel R (TFE), Bill Chambers (Film Freak Central), Kristen Sales (Sales on Film), Brian Herrera (StinkyLulu) and novelist K. M. Soehnlein ("The World of Normal Boys," "Robin and Rudy")

Sunday June 28th
The Best Supporting Actresses of 1948

1948's roster has a genuine movie star and one of the most iconic character actresses of all time in Jean Simmons who didn't get to the nunnery in Hamlet and Agnes Moorehead in Johnny Belinda respectively. Also nominated were two women from the immigrant family drama I Remember Mama, Barbara Bel Geddes and Ellen Corby. But taking home the gold was Claire Trevor in the Bogart & Bacall noir Key Largo. Will the panel agree with Oscar's decision? 

PANELISTS: TBA

Sunday July 26th
The Best Supporting Actresses of 1995

The Oscar went to one-hit wonder Mira Sorvino (okay, two hit wonder: hi Romy & Michelle!) for her hooker with a heart of gold in Mighty Aphrodite but then no one knew what her future had in store. No one knew that for any of the contenders since they were all first timers. Sorvino was up against two familiar ensemble players Kathleen Quinlan in the popular hit Apollo 13, and critical darling Mare Winningham from Georgia, and two "new" faces who'd continue on to future Oscar glories and Great Actress reputations in Kate Winslet (Sense & Sensibility) and Joan Allen (Nixon).

PANELISTS TBA

Sunday August 30th
The Best Supporting Actresses of 1954 

Eva Marie Saint dropped a glove and won an Oscar for On the Waterfront opposite Marlon Brando by any margin the most famous of 1954's Oscar nominated films. But what will the panel make of her competition? There's also the formidable Nina Foch in the all-star corporate drama Executive Suite, Katy Jurado, the first Mexican actress ever nominated, for the western Broken Lance and rounding out the category were two women from John Wayne's airline thriller The High and the Mighty, Jan Sterling and Oscar regular Claire Trevor.

PANELISTS TBA

Sunday September 27th
The Best Supporting Actresses of 1963 (Season Finale!)  

Since the 2015 film year really heats up in September with the Toronto Film Festival (10th-20th) and Prestige Season Kick-Off, we're taking it easy for the finale with the one of only two years when only three films were nominated in the Supporting Actress category. Margaret Rutherford won the Oscar for The VIPs, a Liz & Dick show, Lilia Skalia was also popular in nun mode for Lilies of the Field but it was the Best Picture winning sex comedy Tom Jones that was the informal star of this category with three of Albert Finney's co-stars nominated (the all time record in this category): Diane Cilento, Joyce Redman, and '60s Oscar fixture Dame Edith Evans (nominated shortly thereafter for both The Chalk Garden and The Whisperers) 

PANELISTS TBA

 

Queue up those DVDs, readers, and play along at home! Unless you're a semi-famous star or accomplished character actor, oft-employed industry professional, best selling novelists, popular film critic, or AMPAS member in which case, tell me which panel you want to be on! (Shameless Plug). You know you want to join in the movie merriment !!!