What did you see this weekend? (Besides gun-toting apes)

Given that Handsome Joe Canada (aka Amir) is too busy with World Cup mania to grace us with his presence today, I Nathaniel am here for your weekly look at the profit margin side of things. But mostly to ask you the sturdy comment question:

What did you see this weekend?

We're always curious. Your answer should be... well, there's so many good things in theaters right now it just better not be Trans4rmers. Your answer should also soon include Masters of Sex which returns tonight, my choice for Best Drama Series last season (sadly Emmy-snubbed in that category). Should we talk that up every week? Raise your hand if you're watching.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE
01 DAWN OF PLANET OF APES $73 *NEW* Review
02 TRANSF4RMERS $16.5 (cum. $209)
03 TAMMY $12.9 (cum. $57.3) Review
04 22 JUMP STREET $6.7 (cum. $171.9) Podcast
05 HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 $5.8 (cum. $152) best movie dragons
06 EARTH TO ECHO $5.5 (cum. $24.5) 
07 DELIVER US FROM EVIL $4.7 (cum. $25)
08 MALEFICENT $4.1 (cum. $221.9) Podcast
09 BEGIN AGAIN $2.9 (cum. $5.2) top ten thus far
10 JERSEY BOYS $2.5 (cum. $57.1) Review

You'll notice that Snowpiercer didn't make it despite its quality. This was probably at least somewhat informed by its decision to go VOD before the movie had run out of steam at the box office. There've been quite a few articles about this (like this one) and I can't help but read them with pesky asides. I don't trust anything anyone says. I understand that VOD gives you a wider audience. But I also think not being willing to support your movie in theaters rarely bodes well for long term health on VOD. So basically I am displeased with how they've treated this action film with a big star and special effects which has now groused $2.6 or roughly half a million less than a black and white indie about Polish nuns. Yes I'm going to keep mentioning Ida whenever I see fit. Deal with it!

Because there is always so much interesting stuff hiding in way too few theaters -- Boyhood and Land Ho! -- here is that chart

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE (UNDER 100 SCREENS)
01 BOYHOOD $.3 *NEW* 5 screens Review
02 IDA $.1 (cum. $3.1) 85 screens best of year's 1st half
03 A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964) 50th anniversary $.07 (cum. $.4) 56 screens
04 LAND HO! $.03 *NEW* 4 screens  Review
05 YVES ST. LAURENT $.03 (cum. $.1) 14 screens

Boyhood had a fantastic per screen average but IFC went a bit timid at only 5 locations. We'll see how wide they dare go with this one-of-a-kind feature, twelve years in the making, but I hope they make a big push. More on that one this week which I told you I loved at Sundance.

Tweet of the Capsule of the Dawn of The Planet of the Apes

Of the. of the. of the. Help, stuck in a prepositional loop! I regret to inform that there is no full review of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) -- you may have noticed unusually sparse off my game posting -- but I press on with this exhaustively multi-tasking post. It's a list. It's a tweet roundup. It's a review.

I can't go on. I'll go on."
-Samuel Beckett 

Were I to write a traditional review of the surprisingly strong sequel to the surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) it would essentially be some sort of fussy expansion and tangent filled detours of these 10 points:

Click to read more ...

Linkhood

Luise Rainer is now on Spotify with numbers from The Great Ziegfeld. And she's still alive to see it!
Vox this is why (well, one of the reasons) Emmy nominations are always so disappointing/strange: behold the labyrinthine nomination process
Overland Glenn looks back at Twin Peaks' influence on television's corpse littered playground 

Mash-Ups To Go
Have you binge-watched "Frozen is the New Black" yet? By which I mean watched it three times in a row like I just did. 

Oh i know you're not reading one of my books, bitch.

I love Belle's cameo so much.

APEHOOD trailer (Boyhood & Dawn of the Planet of the Apes mashup) from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo.

And in other mashup news, this trailer for "Richard Linklater's Apehood" is making the rounds, a cute fusion of two great movies that happened to share this very same opening weekend so I hope you're seeing both this year. Oh, and Land Ho!, too. It's a really really good movie weekend y'all.

Three Quickies: Caesar, Victor, Jared

Caesar
Have you ever considered the job of Location Manager? I can quickly confess that I have not despite often considering plentiful jobs that go on behind the scenes on motion pictures. The Credits discusses the complicated work with Catou Kearney the Location Manager of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It's a technically challenging movie, not least of which because they shot so much outdoors and needed a lushly overgrown forest.

The apes ... have created a vast forest utopia. Finding such a place, one that looks as abundant as the script demands, but that could also support a large crew and a ton of equipment, takes months of research, legwork, and a few thousand phone calls. Kearney is a seasoned location manager, and relishes the opportunity. “It’s like putting a ten-thousand piece puzzle together,” she says. “When that last piece falls into place, there’s nothing like it.” 

As it turns out the Vancouver rainforests got the job of portraying futuristic California wilderness.

Igor (Marty Feldman) in "Young Frankenstein"Victor
Since we're in an era wherein everything that is enormously familiar is being regurgitated nonstop, we're going to get a new Victor Frankenstein movie shortly after getting a new Victor Frankenstein on TV in Penny Dreadful. Next October to be exact. The new angle this time? The story will be told from the perspective of Dr Frankenstein's assistant Igor who will be played by Daniel Radcliffe. The mad doctor is James McAvoy. I've always felt a little bad for the Frankenstein Monster because of the classic monsters, he's the least popular... though that never stops Hollywood. My theory on this is because he's not thematically easy like the self-generating metaphor machines that vampirism and to a lesser extent lycanthrophy are. Maybe when science evolves to a point where we all have organ transplants and articifial limbs and cyborg parts and we worry about what we've become everyone will be really into him. 

Jared
Remember when I interviewed Jared Leto last year for Dallas Buyers Club and he was all 'don't expect me back in the movies anytime soon'. Liar liar pants on fire! He's being talked up for Doctor Strange. I think Cumberbatch & Hardy are great actors but I honestly like the idea of Leto so much more in that particular role. That's partially because he's less familiar as a screen actor and feels 'other' already which would help -  and he's just replaced Will Smith in the lead role in Brilliance.

As In Contention astutely points out

To those who say winning an Oscar makes no difference to one's career, here's evidence to the contrary. This time last year, news of Jared Leto replacing Will Smith on a major commercial project would have seemed like crazy talk ...

Brilliance is a thriller based on the novel by the same name by Marcus Sakey about a federal agent chasing a deadly terrorist. They're both "brilliants" which is a sort of human being with 'extras' if you will. Everyone's gotta be superpowered these days whether they get it honestly by mutations, under duress via bags of leaky drugs implanted in their stomachs, or they're airlifted in from other planets. 

Controversy, My Preciousssss

I've long had a deep respect for the work Andy Serkis has done in elevating the acting in visual effects. Serkis is, in many ways, the figure head of the fusion form or acting and animation known as performance capture, Hes already given us King Kong, Gollum, and Caesar. But in interviews he's beendownplaying the efforts of animation teams in bringing these highly memorable characters to life.  It's really pissing animators off. That's kind of a shame since film is such a collaborative medium. It's also a shame that he himself doesn't get as much credit as he should with his acting peers for how good his work is in these movies. So there's enough lack of credit to go around... deficent credit for everyone. Um... hoorah?

Here's an interview he did in March with i09 about his work on the forthcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and two responses, one angry from Cartoon Brew and one measured but annoyed from the Lord of the Rings animation director Randal William Cook. Cook makes an interesting comparison with Marni Nixon's voice work on 1960s musicals in his rebuttal...

Let me state that Andy really should be considered the principal author of Gollum’s performance, but there’s a hell of a difference between principal author and sole author. The Animators who helped shape Gollum’s performance are actors of a very special type, working at a high level of achievement. They’re not like Marni Nixon singing for Natalie Wood in WEST SIDE STORY, doing only the things that Andy couldn’t do: they were doing the same things Andy did, in concert with him...

Next up for Serkis is his debut in the director's chair, helming Warner Bros live action version of The Jungle Book in which all the animals will be performance captured. This is not, to be clear, the same Jungle Book movie that has been in the news recently with celebrity castings (the one that Lupita Nyong'o signed on for recently) which is an animated film. But with these types of feelings brewing among animators directing his first feature employing tons of them might be a tougher task than first features already always are.