Box Office: Ant-Man Grows, Mr Rogers Moves In, and LaKeith Stanfield Phones In

by Nathaniel R

I've been reading mixed things on the success level of Marvel's latest superhero flick The Search for Michelle Pfeiffer in the Quantum Realm. Some say it's opening weekend of $76 million is a big step up from Ant-Man's debut, others think that that's all too low for a Marvel film at this juncture in their history. It does work as a nice after-dinner mint for the heavy meals of Black Panther/Infinity War (though I could've done without the bitter aftertaste of its post credits sequence.) At any rate this is the last Marvel Studios film for awhile. We now have a eight-to-nine month break from Marvel heroes unless of course Black Panther becomes a big Oscar conservation. The next Marvel Studios film is Captain Marvel (March 8th, 2019) which will be followed by the as yet untitled Infinity War Part Two (May 3rd, 2019). 

Weekend Box Office Estimates (July 6-8)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
Ant-Man and the Wasp	Sorry to Bother You
1.🔺 ANT MAN AND THE WASP $76 *NEW*	1. 🔺 WHITNEY $1.2 on 452 screens *NEW*
2. INCREDIBLES 2 $29 (cum. $504.3)	2. SANJU $1.2 on 359 screens (cum. $5.9)
3. JURASSIC WORLD FALLEN KINGDOM $28.5 (cum. $333.3)  REVIEW	3. 🔺SORRY TO BOTHER YOU $717k on 16 screens *NEW*
4. THE FIRST PURGE  $17.1 *NEW*	4. 🔺 THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $717k on 51 screens (cum. $1) REVIEW
5. SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO $7.3 (cum. $35.31) REVIEW	5. 🔺 LEAVE NO TRACE $425k on 37 screens (cum. $800k) TRAILER DISCUSSION

In other box office news, the LaKeith Stanfield starring comedy Sorry to Bother You opened to very full houses (albeit only 16 of them) which bodes well for significant expansion and the popular Mr Rogers doc Won't You Be My Neighbor? went wide...

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Soundtracking: "Love, Simon"

by Chris Feil

Love, Simon is chasing the ghost of John Hughes, a brand of uplift where teen woes are packaged conventionally and without condescension for maximum warm fuzzies. Naturally that package must include an anthemic sound, music that connects with the generation it depicts and becomes part of the fabric of what we remember about the film. But if Love, Simon is supposed to be a gay alternative on Hughesian comedy, does the sound also have its gay twist?

Simon’s signature sound comes from Jack Antonoff and his band Bleachers, bookending the film. Instead of the singular force of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” as Hughes employed in The Breakfast Club, it’s more like the film uses Antonoff as the artist to hang its headphones on instead of one song. He’s a straight musician, but Bleachers is fairly embraced by the queer teen set - at least the kind that the film depicts. Though in an age where Troye Sivan can produce hit bops about bottoming, is that really enough for the film to define itself musically?

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Soundtracking: "The Bodyguard"

Whitney: Can I Be Me debuts this Friday on Showtime. Chris Feil takes a look at the icon's biggest soundtrack...

The Bodyguard doesn’t deserve its iconic mega-selling soundtrack. Granted, most of us have never pretended that that the film was even a whiff as good as all that glorious vocal dexterity Whitney Houston lays into her six tracks. But rest assured: the movie itself is even worse than you remember.

Among its many sins, the most egregious is how it ignores its own musical assets. The Bodyguard exists in a world where you can enter someone’s home and just happen upon an extended dance sequence being shot for a music video - but it also presents a world where that isn’t anywhere near as fun as it sounds. It spends the first act under the illusion that we give a crap about five or six things more than we do about Whitney’s voice. Why go to the creative effort to cast one of the biggest music acts of the era (and in a quasi-musical!) if you don’t know how to use her?

No sweat for Whitney, even if her acting performance netted her some harsh reviews. As ever, her musical contribution remains untouchable...

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The Winner of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 9 Is...

Chris here. The ninth season of RuPaul's Drag Race came to a close last night with the series's most dramatic conclusion ever. At last week's reunion, Mama Ru teased that a sudden death lipsync battle would crown America's Next Drag Superstar from our beloved top four. This curveball was another shakeup from the show's formula, and feels like how the winner should have been chosen all along. While past seasons' crownings have been dull slogs to awarding an obvious winner, this kept the competition alive until the very second - and gave us two all-time great lipsync performances from the ultimate champion.

Trinity Taylor was the randomly selected first queen and chose Peppermint as her opponent, pitting a potential frontrunner against underdog lipsync assassin. But that meant leaving besties Sasha Velour and Shea Couleé to duke it out...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Whitney: Can I Be Me'

This month for Pride Month we're looking at four documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week it is Whitney: Can I Be Me, the latest in a long line of musical documentaries.

There is no need to introduce Whitney Houston; we all know her and her songs. I also have no doubt that people reading this know her story of soaring talent and troubled downfall due to drugs. Hers was an arc that is rooted in the blueprint of great cinematic tragedies, a story that we have seen play out plenty of times before (in life as well as in in the movies), that it would be easy to roll our eyes at how cliched it was if it weren’t so painfully true.

If it feels somewhat curious then that director Nick Broomfield has turned his documentary eye to her story then that’s because it is. Unlike his earlier music doco Kurt & Courtney (or even his pair of Aileen Wuornos docs in which he takes an antagonistic role with his subject), there isn't an antagonist to go after. Whitney: Can I Be Me’s central conflict is predominantly between Whitney and herself. The title, “Can I Be Me”, was a phrase used often by Whitney – at times in the backstage footage, her team are even seen joking about it – as a means of apologising for being herself rather than the perfect pop creation crafted by Clive Davis and her mother.

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