Review: Bridget Jones's Baby

by Eric Blume

Everyone’s favorite contemporary British heroine is back:  Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) is now successful, at her ideal weight, and alas still single.  In Bridget Jones’s Baby, she has two surprising one-night stands with different men:  an American dating guru (Patrick Dempsey) and her former flame Mark Darcy (Colin Firth).  Then she’s pregnant:  who could the father be?  Will we see misunderstandings and shenanigans along the lines of a typical Three’s Company episode?  Unfortunately, yes…yes, we do.

The original 2001 Bridget Jones’s Diary remains a mini-classic of its kind:  one of the most dignified and intelligent of its genre (romantic comedy), yet it also transcends the genre, truly plumbing some depth (as mainstream movies go) about accepting who you really are, and understanding what love actually is.  It went beyond your typical “boy and girl like each other because they’re in a movie together as leads” mentality and went to the heart of the characters’ specifics.  With sharp, interesting acting from its three leads (Zellweger, Firth, and Hugh Grant), the film had snap and verve; it felt vital.

Diary’s skilled director, Sharon Maguire, didn’t return for the first sequel (Beyond Reason) but is back in the chair for Baby...

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Review: "Blair Witch"

by Chris Feil

Revamping The Blair Witch Project for a new generation comes with a lot of baggage. The 1999 horror benchmark delivered unforgettable chills for some, though it's still debated by others for just how scary it actual is. More importantly, the film was the original viral sensation, catching the zeitgeist just as the internet first exploded. Recalling Cannibal Holocaust's faux documentary aesthetic, it also all but invented the found footage genre the moment before documenting our every movement with a recording device became commonplace.

Simply, Project was orchestrated in the right way at the right time. Unfortunately, this Blair Witch is a shadow of the original's terror and cultural relevance...

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Box Office Bourne Again

Off blog my weekend was rough so I didn't make it to the movies. But here's to hoping you did. Nostalgia for Matt Damon's return to the Bourne franchise was greeted with enthusiam by moviegoers and what suffered as a result was nostalgia for another return over at Star Trek Beyond which took a big tumble in its second weekend. Meanwhile yet another nostalgia play (it's all about revivals these days) Ghostbusters became yet another $100 million domestic hit for Melissa McCarthy (she has six of them now) though the problem with this one is that it cost far more than her other films to make.

In other box office news: Cafe Society is about to outgross Woody Allen's last feature (Irrational Man) and it's only been out for a week; The Legend of Tarzan is now the 11th most popular film of the year (but with its hefty price tag will it get a sequel?); and if you want to see Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic (which you really should because it's quite good) get to it in the next couple of days because it's per screen average didn't fare too well with this weekend's significant expansion so it's unlikely to stick around much longer; and we can maybe finally say goodbye to the Ice Age franchise on their fifth outing. Their international box office is what's been keeping the series afloat but the fifth film is significantly underperforming so cross your fingers if you're screaming "enough already" every time that once funny squirrel bounces across your movie theater screens chasing a nut in a trailer. 

TOP TWENTY
🔺01 Jason Bourne $60 NEW Review 
▫️ 02 Star Trek Beyond $24 (cum. $105.7) Review
🔺03 Bad Moms $23.4 NEW
🔻04 Secret Life of Pets $18.2 (cum. $296.1) 
🔺05 Lights Out $10.8 (cum. $42.8) 
🔺06 Ice Age Collison Course $10.5 (cum. $42.1)
🔻07 Ghostbusters $9.8 (cum. $106.1) Review
🔺08 Nerve $9 NEW 
🔻09 Finding Dory $4.2 (cum. $469)  Review
🔻10 Legend of Tarzan $2.4 (cum. $121.8) Review
🔻11 Hillary's America $2.3 (cum. $8.6)
🔺12 Cafe Society $2.2 ($3.9) LIMITED RELEASE Review
🔻13 Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates $1.4 (cum. $43.9) Review
🔺14 Captain Fantastic $1 (cum. $2.4) LIMITED RELEASE Review
🔻15 Central Intelligence $910K (cum. $125.3)
🔻16 The Infiltrator $817K (cum. $14.3)  Review
🔺17 Absolutely Fabulous $800K (cum. $3.3) LIMITED RELEASE Review, Production Design
🔻18 Purge: Election Year $703K (cum. $78.3)
🔻19 BFG $416K ($52.1) Review
🔻20 Hunt for the Wilderpeople $350K (cum. $2.9) LIMITED RELEASE Review 

What movies did you catch this past weekend?

Next weekend Suicide Squad opens and will surely dominate the conversation and may well feel like the end of summer movie season though there are a few weeks left of that. The really interesting contest is the following week when Florence Foster Jenkins battles both Pete's Dragon and those anthropomorphic R rated food items from Sausage Party.  Tough to say which film might survive that brawl.

Review: Jason Bourne

It’s Eric, returning to talk about the fifth chapter in the popular Jason Bourne franchise.   Judging from the discussions I heard coming from the exit of an early screening of Jason Bourne, your enjoyment of this latest installment of the venerated action spy films probably rests in your expectations.  

Because the level of artistry involved with these films has been so high, some out there are naturally hoping that the creative forces behind Jason Bourne found a way to ratchet things up even further.  The main grumble outside the theater seemed to be that the films have gotten repetitive in form and content (Bourne finds himself in a huge public space, uses the natural crowd to escape, etc.).   

I find myself in a different camp:  to me, it’s exactly these set-ups, and specifically the skillfulness with which they’re executed, that fuel the enjoyment...  

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Review: Star Trek Beyond

It’s Eric, an admitted non-Trekker, with some reflections on Star Trek Beyond.  

Is there a better rebooter in the industry than J.J. Abrams?  His last directing effort, a little film called Star Wars: The Force Awakens, expertly combined the franchises’ original charm and simplicity with a new sparkle that made it the best in the series since 1983.  And when Abrams kicked off Star Trek in 2009 for a new generation, he seemed similarly to balance many of the qualities dear to Trekkers’ hearts while introducing a new audience (of which I was one) to the series.   

Abrams also directed the next installment, Into Darkness, but here on Beyond serves as producer only while the director reigns go to Justin Lin.  Lin is an expert action director and has delivered some killer set pieces in volumes three through six of the Fast and the Furious franchise...

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