Bentonville: Fearless stuntwomen, retiring post-masters, and troubled schoolgirls

Part 2 of 3

Playing in traffic... (Captain America: Winter Soldier) one of the daily jobs of Hollywood stuntwomen

Aside from the very first opening night activities at Bentonville, the first film I attended was a work-in-progress doc called Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story. The director April Wright is still working on the final cut so there's still time to get more focused (it was easy to imagine this as an even fuller miniseries as it's trying to covering a lot!) but whatever it'll be in its final form will be entertaining...

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Box Office: "Get Out" Won't and "Fate of the Furious" Grows

Get Out, now in its 8th weekend, just refuses to enter the sunken place i.e. the lower echelons of the box office charts. That's a long run already with enormous returns ($183 million worldwide on a $4.5 million budget? It's what all scrappy films dream of!)

But the story of the weekend was the return of the Fast and Furious franchise with film #8 The Fate of the Furious. It grossed an estimated $100 million out of the gate which is significantly lower than its previous Paul Walker farewell entry. But don't cry for it. $100 is still a big big opening weekend and its foreign gross quadruples the American haul so it's already broke a half billion in that first weekend. If the estimates hold it will just barely edge out The Force Awakens as the biggest global opening ever.  I'll just be over hear pretending that that $100 million in the US is audience excitement about Charlize Theron wreaking havoc because we love that badass bitch. The charts are after the jump...

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The Fast and I'm Furious: Ranking every film in the franchise

by Spencer Coile 

Dating back to 2001 with the premiere of The Fast and the Furious, the Furious franchise has become something of a centerpiece of the action genre. Watching the shenanigans of Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and company across the span of seven films in sixteen years is quite the rollercoaster ride of quality. Ranging from the good, the bad, and the ugly, it is especially interesting to note the progression of the film series; they initially started as mindless entertainement to... well, even more mindless entertainment, but with some awe-inspiring action sequences with a blatant theme of family and togetherness. Even after the death of Paul Walker, the franchise continues. 

In preparation for the latest foray into the canon, the eigth film (they aren't all numbered) The Fate of the Furious, I decided to sit down with each of the seven preceding movies and evaluate each on their own merits, but also how they function in the series as a whole. I'd seen a whopping zero of them before this marathon! How many have you seen?

Ranking the Fast and the Furious Franchise...

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On this day: Jungle Book's First, Dolly's Near Last, and Annie Hall vs. Star Wars

on this day in history as it relates to showbiz...

1882  The titular event in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) happened on this very day in Missouri
1893 Leading man of the 1930s Leslie Howard (Gone With the Wind, Of Human Bondage) born in London
1921 Jan Sterling born in NYC. (We recently discussed her Oscar nominated performance in The High and the Mighty )
1922 After years of "which year is it?" it's finally settled... Doris Day was born on this day 1922. So happy 95th birthday to the icon, still with us, today. 
1924 Another cinematic icon, Marlon Brando, born in Omaha

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Charlize in F8 of the Furious

Manuel here to kick off this week with a question all of you may be better equipped to answer than I: how good slash bad does Fate of the Furious (aka F8) look? I have to admit I haven't seen a single one of those films so all my knowledge of them comes from other people discussing them as either the best in post-modern Hollywood spectacle or the worse in contemporary shoot-em-and-'splode-em style Baytastic blockbusters. But even I couldn't resist seeing what Ms Charlize Theron was bringing to the table. 

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