Box Office: Under the Skin & What We Watched

Nathaniel stepping in for Amir this week to look at What People Are Seeing. If you've already seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and you should) there wasn't much to get excited about at the mainstream box office this weekend with films like Oculus, Rio 2, and Draft Day not looking much like inspiring new entries in their shopworn genres. So let's shift our focus to the platform films out there. Frankly, I consider it a huge failing of the planet in general that an art film about Scarlett Johansson as an alien trolling for manflesh in Scotland isn't opening wide and selling out at 3,000+ theaters. Where are the world's movie consumption priorities? You disappoint me, Earthlings. 

Scarlett Johansson tops both the mainstream box office and the platform box office

PLATFORM BOX OFFICE
01 (54 theaters) UNDER THE SKIN $.3 (cum. $.5)  Posters
02 (37 theaters) ISLAND OF LEMURS $.1 (cum. $.4) 
03 (20 theaters) FINDING VIVIAN MAIER $.1 (cum. $.3) Amir liked it
04 (48 theaters) JOE $.1 *new* 
05 (04 theaters) ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE $.09 *new*  Michael's Review
06 (42 theaters) DOM HEMINGWAY $.07 (cum. $.1)  Jude's New Face 
07 (80 theaters) THE UNKNOWN KNOWN $.06 (cum. $.1) Glenn's Review
08 (04 theaters) THE RAILWAY MAN $.06 *new* Brief Thoughts
09 (79 theaters) CUBAN FURY $.05 *new*
10 (23 theaters) PARTICLE FEVER $.04 (cum. $.6) 

Of the newbies only Only Lovers Left Alive and The Railway Man had strong per screen averages (which is usually what you need to expand). I loved Under the Skin but am still collecting my thoughts about it so I'm not ready to write about it yet. I urge you to see it quickly since it benefits from your own interpretation and it's difficult to write about without spoilers. We'll discuss it on next Sunday's podcast.

Otherwise this weekend I goofed off in that I watched things I had no intention of writing about which is, for me, like playing hookie or calling out sick. I mainlined more Archer (which I basically worship) and watched four episodes of "The Fosters". Regarding the latter: I blame Emily Nussbaum's influence over The Boyfriend. He will watch anything she recommends . I  also goofed off by watching Lilies of the Field (1963) when I was supposed to be watching a Bette Davis double feature for articles that are due here in a hot minute.  I was all caught up in that 1963 flashback so I was helpless before it "♪ AaaAaaAaaymen. AaAYaymen. Aaamen. Aaamen Amen ♫." I actually think it's underrated today because it's so square but it "plays" as they say.

What did you watch this weekend? And was it out of obligation, habit, or pleasure?

Link of All Media

big screen
Towleroad James Franco to plan an ex-gay activist in a new Gus Van Sant film
Guardian Russell Crowe meets with the Archbishop of Canterbury for Noah. The things people will do for movie promotion, I tell you
Empire Cake, a Jennifer Aniston movie about a pain support group, lines up a huge cast of acclaimed actors including Anna Kendrick (highly in demand lately... so many new projects)
AV Club talks to former child star Haley Joel Osment who is apparently in the next Kevin Smith picture

In Contention very minor new details emerge on Meryl Streep's Ricki & the Flash (which we were just discussing)
Empire Brad Pitt is doing yet another World War II movie after that upcoming tank drama. This will be his third in a handful of years.
THR reports on casting for Monster Truck, which is described as having a "Transformers meets Gremlins vibe". Yikes. One of those is pleasurable at least
Coming Soon Toby Kebbell wins the Doctor Doom role in the upcoming Fantastic Four
/bent rumors flying that producers of the upcoming Belushi biopic are panicking about Ellen Page's coming out. Dumb. Seriously people do not care about this. They don't. They only care in a think piece on the internet kind of way which is to say it's not going to affect anyone's ticket purchase.
Pajiba and Film School Rejects both have cute articles about body-swapping yesterday (I musta missed the memo that this was a thing connected to April Fools Day?) via Face/Off and Freaky Friday and more. Sadly there's no gif for Tom Hanks in Big but I do still remember his reaction to waking up in an adult body
Forbes on why Warner Bros/DC doesn't need to do like Disney/Marvel does with its superhero universe. This article is 4 times as long as it needs to be since you get literally all of its points in the first few hundred words (but it's good to fight against common wisdom) but maybe it's actually a satire about the repetitiveness of padded franchise culture?

no screen
Slate I don't know music theory (though, as previously noted, I can play the piano) but I thought this article about Lady Gaga's enduring "Bad Romance" was interesting. 
NME Courtney Love thinks a Kurt Cobain Broadway musical is very likely to happen
/Film Yes Wicked still wants to be a movie. Spring Awakening, too. An update.

⇐ Towleroad and can I say I'm thrilled that Harvey Milk finally got a stamp. "Forever" is right, US Postal Service! The gay rights pioneer and awesome subject of not one but two Oscar-winning films (The Times of Harvey Milk and Milk from 1984 and 2008, respectively, was super deserving thanks for asking)

small screen
i09 first commercial for Extant, Halle Berry's new TV project
Variety Peabody Award winners include Scandal, Orphan Black, and House of Cards
Sorta That Guy and The Wire and The Wrap and seemingly EVERYONE else online on the series finale of How I Met Your Mother. A lot more people in the universe seemed interested in that I could have ever imagined. I've seen only 6 or 7 episodes over the years from varying seasons and thought none were anywhere better than "okay"

Today's Must Love
This one took me a split second to get but it gave me such lol'ing joy. Hat tip to Rufus Mayhem and Hayden Wright... 

"The Last Days of Mad Men" (I'll Just Be Over Here Crying)

In 17 days the final season of Mad Men begins. 

Time Magazine is already prepping us for the end though the final season will be annoyingly severed at the center and stretching well into 2015. We live in such extreme pop culture times, right? Movies and televison both are now in the habit of splitting endings into two parts. On the other side we have binge-watching. Sensible pacing, somewhere inbetween, may well soon be extinct. 

I'll just be over here in the corner crying when the show wraps up whenever it does. Generally speaking when a successful show wraps up we should be happy to say goodbye. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, was part of my soul but it was time for Sunnydale to crater. Too many shows overstay their welcome (shows that maintain their quality past season 4 or 5 are as rare as unicorns) but Mad Men. Are you ready? I am not. Maybe by 2015?

Which shows were hardest for you to say goodbye to? 

Scream Queens, Rusicals, and Snatch Games

If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love someone else? Amen. I love myself therefore I forgive myself for being three weeks behind my promised RuCapping. I hate calling tv posts recaps, though that's the web's preferred terminology, because I'm not about to recount everything that happened. That's for the contestants themselves to do on reality television. That's the whole structure, right? Step 1: Talking head commentary on clip you're about to see from contestant involved. 2: What you actually see from the contest. Step 3: A recap of what you just saw via the same or different talking heads. Then the next day on the internet everyone who is not on the show recaps again. We're a very redundant pop culture, we are!

But I do feel bad for going AWOL because these three weeks of RuPaul's Drag Race were really movie friendly and you know how I love my TV at the Movies. After the jump brief notes on the queens forays into celebrity impersonation, horror movies, and off-key musicals.

6.3 SCREAM QUEENS

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Women's History Month: Laura Dern as Katherine Harris

Women's History Month continues with Adam Armstrong on Laura Dern in "Recount"  

Katherine Harris and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris

Born: Katherine Harris clawed her way into this world on April 5^th, 1957 and, presumably, crawled to her mother’s boudoir to try her first crack at putting on lipstick and dabbling in the different shades of foundation. Rose to prominence as Florida’s Secretary of State during the 2000 election. 

Death (in politics): Still kicking, albeit no longer Florida’s Secretary of State. After a failed 2006 senate election run, she still combats jokes regarding her unfairly ridiculed makeup techniques during the 2000 election recount fiasco. 

In the 2008 HBO film Recount, we are introduced to Harris when she is awoken, startled, at 3:52 a.m. by a phone call on the night of the election. She groggily answers the phone while the voice on the other end heatedly asks who the winner of Florida’s Electoral College votes is. Clad in a frumpy William Shakespeare caricature illustrated t-shirt and a pleather wannabe biker jacket, perhaps from an earlier time when she envisioned Harleys and assless chaps instead of pant suits and podiums, she sprays a puff of breath freshener and walks into the midst of electoral chaos, ripe for the feast that’s to begin. [More...]

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