It's what we say we want: The Oscar case *for* Argo.

Argo (review) is not my favorite film of the year.  It didn't even make my best-of-2012 list.  It had to settle for the Runner-Ups section along with fellow nominee/front-runner Lincoln, a choice that caused no end of consternation from my mother-in-law who considers both to among her favorite films of 2012.  My favorite film of 2012 is Cabin In the Woods, a film that had about as much of a chance of winning Best Picture this year as Kung Fu Panda 2 did last year.  My favorite film among those nominated is Zero Dark Thirty, which went from front-runner to also-ran after Sony made the financial choice to not fight back against the frankly shameful 'this film endorses torture!' arguments until after the film's wide release.  There are a few films that are nominated that I don't care for (Les Miserables, Silver Linings Playbook), but I'd have to say that if we're picking a Best Picture on a the basis of what film most positively represents the year that was 2012, Argo is the best and most logical choice.

Weekend Box Office (01/06/13): Texas Chainsaw 3D tops the first weekend of 2013. Promised Land tanks.

Texas Chainsaw 3D topped the box office this weekend with a robust $23 million.  That's a bit behind the $33 million opening haul for The Devil Inside, but it's still easily the top horror debut for January.  Moreover, the picture earned more, even adjusted for inflation, than the last go around, the painfully underrated Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (retrospective essay).  The 2003 remake took in $28 million way back in October 2003 ($36 million in today's dollars, not even accounting for the whole 3D bump), but this under-hyped and frankly somewhat undersold quasi-sequel to the original 1973 film was never going to reach those heights. Said Platinum Dunes remake was exceedingly well-marketed, with a pioneering trailer (think how often it gets ripped off ten years later), and it basically kicked off the return of the hardcore horror film (along with the mostly ignored Wrong Turn from that May). Of course, the best weapon a new horror January film has is the October release of a new Paranormal Activity sequel, as it's a piece of prime demo-friendly marketing.  The Devil Inside attached its trailer to Paranormal Activity 3 back in October 2011 while Texas Chainsaw 3D had its trailer viewed by those attending Paranormal Activity 4 this October.  Of course, the fourth entry made about half what the third one did, so that probably didn't help.

Weekend Box Office (12/30/12): Les Miserables and Django Unchained neck and neck while The Hobbit tops again.

It's frightening sometimes how accurate the math can be.  Before this year, there were only a handful of movies that have opened on a Christmas day that happened to land on a Tuesday over the last decade (Ali and Kate and Leopold in 2001, Alien vs. Predator: Requim, The Great Debaters, and The Waterhorse).  Ali, AvP2, and the Denzel Washington drama The Great Debaters were pretty front loaded ($10m/$34m and $9.5m/$26m, and $3.5m/$13m respectively) while the smaller films (Kate and Leopold and The Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep) had smaller opening Christmas days but longer legs over the six days ($2.5m/$17m and $2.3m/$16.7m).  I use these prior examples because the three major wide releases this weekend pretty much matched up those patterns to a tee.  So when I tell you that Les Miserables opened on Christmas Day to $18 million but did "just" $28 million for the weekend and "only" $66 million for the six-day holiday (a 3.67x weekend multiplier), that doesn't mean anything other than it played like a normal high-profile film that happened to have opened on Tuesday the 25th.  Or that Django Unchained pulled in $64 million off a $15 million Christmas Tuesday opening, that means that it's actually the biggest legs of any would-be blockbuster to open on this specific Tuesday the 25th date (4.2x weekend multiplier).

2012 in Film: The Overrated...

I wrestled with even doing an 'overrated' list this year.  First of all, the very idea of such a list is to merely tell other critics and/or the masses that they are dead-wrong for liking something, which I'd argue is very different from telling someone they're wrong for disliking something.  Second of all, the Internet has become such a vast land of film criticism that few films completely escape the wrath of critical scrutiny even if the popular consensus happens to lean in the "wrong" direction.  Nonetheless, in the end I enjoy writing about the year in film, so far be it for me to cheat myself out of some arbitrary concern for maintaining the proverbial higher ground.  So, in alphabetical order as always, let's dive right in...

Brave (review/guest essay):
Had this not been Pixar's first animated feature with a female lead, had this not been marketed within the context that Princess Merida was a kind of sword-wielding/bow-clutching warrior, the the film would have been seen for what it is: a deeply problematic character drama that ignores the icky realities at the center of its tale in order to tell an audience-reassuring mother/daughter story.  The film basically tells the same character arc as The Little Mermaid but was declared a feminist milestone because the female lead A) carried a weapon and B) didn't want to get married.  But good intentions cannot get past a story line that treats mother and daughter as equally culpable even when one party is advocating forced marriage.  Make no mistake, say what you will about 'customs of the time' or 'arranged marriage versus forced marriage', the film tells a story of a child who doesn't want to get married to (and yes, have sex with) a man she doesn't know and treats it like a minor inconvenience.  There is a clear right and wrong here, but the film absolves the father of any responsibility while basically stating that the mother (who again, wants her daughter to have sex against her will) kinda-sorta has a point and that the daughter really needs to have empathy for her dear-old mum.

Christmas Box Office: Les Miserables and Django Unchained blast off, but how frontloaded will they be?

The box office for Christmas day is huge (Les Miserables $18 million, Django Unchained $15 million, The Hobbit $11 million), but the best day may be behind them. The last time Christmas fell on a Tuesday, the major releases (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Sweeney Todd) opened the Friday before while leaving Christmas day for relative lightweights like Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem and The Great Debaters. I don't recall any recent times when a major film opened on Christmas Day which was a Tuesday (when Christmas fell on a Tuesday in 2007, nothing opened that day) since the severely front-loaded Ali back in 2001.  Looking over those two respective weekends, the pattern is clear.  Even with six days to play with, all three of the above films saw massive front-loading, doing anywhere between 38% (Alien v. Predator 2) and 28% (Ali and The Great Debaters) of their business on Christmas day.  So for the respective debuts of Les Miserables, Django Unchained, and Parental Guidance (which earned $6.5 million), the bad news is that it's probable that none of these films will make more than 3.5x their Christmas number by Sunday, to the extent that it's "bad news".  The outlier among Tuesday Christmas openings is the Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman rom-com Kate and Leopold, which did 6.8x its $2.5 million Christmas debut by the 30th of December for a $17 million long weekend (it did 15% on Christmas day).  A relative lightweight like Parental Guidance is likely to benefit more than the far-more anticipated (read - front-loaded)  major openers.  So doing the math, Les Miserables and Django Unchained is looking at a six-day opening of $48 million-$63 million and $41 million and $53 million.  Parental Guidance is much harder to peg and could land somewhere between $20 million and $40 million, with obviously a lot of wiggle room in between.

Scott Mendelson

Review: Les Misérables (2012), via rigid source fidelity, sadly makes us question our love for the original show.

Les Misérables

2012
155 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

The harshest thing I can say about Tom Hooper's Les Misérables (teaser/trailer) is that I can only imagine those who have not seen the original show wondering what the fuss has been all about.  The film is painfully faithful, but film is a wholly different medium than live theater and the translation doesn't quite work.  The picture is full of fine performances, almost too good in fact. The film's much-discussed live on-set singing pretty much works, but it only yields inherently different results in a few occasions.  But still, the overall production feels akin to seeing the show for the first time, and that's not a good thing.  What perhaps felt epic on stage comes off onscreen like a rushed and overstuffed story with occasionally inexplicable narrative choices and occasionally misplaced character emphasis.  It comes off feeling less like one of the great epics of Broadway and more like a simplified and audience-pleasing version of the original Victor Hugo novel.

A rediscovered joy: Why Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 2 was one of the best movie-going experiences in years...

It's probably my favorite movie-going moment of 2012. There is a scene towards the end of the final Twilight Saga picture (vague spoilers...) where two sets of enemies meet on a snow covered hill, both prepared to do battle if necessary. At one point, one of those on the side of the Cullens charges towards the head of the evil Volturi clan (Michael Sheen) as the fiendish leader stands his ground. Without going into spoiler details, the two foes meet and briefly skirmish in mid-air, before both sides crash to the ground. One of them stands tall and smirks as we realize that (highlight to reveal) Aro is holding the detached head of a major character in his hands. At which point, the audience absolutely exploded with horror and tittering shock, blowing the walls off the auditorium with a deafening shriek and following it with nervous giggling (this was *not* how it happened in the book and the audience now knew all bets were off). At which point, I smiled even wider, impressed both by the apparent chutzpah on display and the audience's reaction, and said to myself "This* is why I go to the movies!".

Les Miserables trailer continues to bring the awesome...

If this thing is even half as good as it looks, if the 'singing on location' is half as effective in the film as it is in the marketing materials, if it's even half as powerful and soaring as its source material... Anyway, enough hyperbole, you have now idea how disappointed I am at having to wait an extra twelve days to see this thing, unless I'm lucky enough to get an invite to the first wave of screenings (which start up November 24th, natch).  So yeah, this dropped a day or two ago but I waited until we got an official HD version that actually was worth savoring.  So savor away.  The only qualm is the lack of billing for Samantha Barks even while relative nobody Eddie Redmayne gets his moment during the roll-coll.  Nonetheless, Les Midersables opens on Christmas Day and I can't friggin wait.

Scott Mendelson

Les Miserables gets character posters and a very familiar theatrical one-sheet. Can't friggin wait...!

The four character posters, highlighting the four lead actors/characters (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfriend, and likely Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway) are after the jump.  I have little to add only to repeating my foaming-at-the-mouth excitement from earlier discussions of this project.  December 25th, or whenever Universal lets me see this thing, can't come soon enough.  The above comparison, which basically speaks for itself, came from Average Film Reviews.

Scott Mendelson

Release date musical chairs: How to fix the upcoming November/December clusterf**k...

I mentioned this briefly last night, but taking a look at the release date calendar of the last two months of the year, it is clear that something is quite amiss.  It's not just a matter of too many movies being released at the end of the year, nor even a matter of too many "Oscar bait" pictures drowning each other out as is sometimes the case.  No, when you look at the release calendar for November and December, you notice an odd pattern.  There are nine weeks in the last two months of the year, during which we have a total of twenty-one (21) wide releases, counting the November 16th expansion of Spielberg's Lincoln.  Now you might think "Oh, that's about two per week, that's not so bad".  But the problem is the scheduling itself.  There are five of those nine weeks with just a single new release, leaving the fifteen other movies to fight it out over the remaining five weeks.  It gets even more dire when you look at the specific release schedules in question.  You've got four weekends with one (1) new release and one weekend with two (2) new nationwide releases.  That leaves fifteen movies fighting it out over four weekends, four weekends which now average 3.75 films a weekend.  Something's gotta give and/or someone has to have the good sense to move around a bit and spread the wealth.

An extended look at Les Miserables. It still looks wonderful.

This four minute featurette goes into detail about the gimmick of allowing actors to sing live on set as they are filmed.  As if I wasn't anymore excited by the project on principle, this sounds like a wonderful experiment that seems to be working very well.  And the discussion about Hathaway's performance of "I Dreamed A Dream" (around 3:20) is one of those wonderful moments where you realize that the filmmakers indeed made the right artistic choice for exactly the reason you hoped (in this case, doing the song less as a triumphant ode to resiliency and more as a rock-bottom admission of defeat). I know the disappointments of Phantom of the Opera and The Producers have quieted Oscar talk for this one, but this still feels like the one to beat.  It's a fantastic and wrenching drama filled with obscenely good songs performed by some of the best musical actors in the film industry.  In the words of William Hurt in A History Of Violence, "How do you fuck *this* up?".  Anyway, I'm not thrilled about Universal moving the film to December 25th, mostly because I want to see it sooner and there are already a bazillion releases during the last two weeks of the year as it is.  Let's hope one or two of them take refuge in the now nearly vacant December 14th slot (yes, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be huge, but there is room for viable counter programming). Les Miserables opens on December 25th.  If it's as good as I want it to be, this may be the first film in 4.5 years that I end up seeing twice in a theater.  At the very least, I will certainly be buying the soundtrack.

Scott Mendelson    

Good movie news in 2012: The return of the "movie".

I've written a bit about this over the last couple years, but this weekend is surely as shining an example as anything about how the mainstream film landscape has somewhat self-corrected.  This weekend sees the release of four wide releases.  We have two R-rated films, one a vulgar (but surprisingly smart) comedy about a talking bear and the other a $5 million indie dramedy about male strippers directing by one of our most successful experimental filmmakers.  We've got a bawdy PG-13 comedy aimed primarily at African-American audiences and a PG-13 star-driven drama.  Ted, Magic Mike, Madea's Witness Protection, and People Like Us are all coming out tomorrow in wide release.  What we've seen over the last year or so and what we will continue to see throughout the remainder of 2012 is the return of what can only be called the old-fashioned 'movie'.  In a time when it seems that every week brings another $150 million male-driven action tentpole based on a comic book or action figure series, a glance at the release schedule shows something very different.  Amid the big-budget animated films (which I generally like), the mega-budget comic book films (which are sometimes very good) and the various remakes and reboots, there exists a plurality of old-school, often star-driven dramas, comedies, and often adult-skewed fare being released by major studios on thousands of screens every weekend.  It seems that Hollywood is getting the message that one cannot subsist on a diet of nothing but tentpoles.

Watch/Discuss: Les Miserables teaser delivers the awesome, shoots the film to the top of my 2012 must-see list.

Holy shit. I got goosebumps just watching this thing.  It's no secret that Les Miserables is my favorite stage musical, however unoriginal a choice that may be.  So the source material is golden, you've got an all-star cast of actors who damn-well can sing, plus an Oscar-winning director who A) has complete artistic freedom and B) arguably has to prove that his Best Director Oscar win wasn't merely a bunch of older voters screwing over David Fincher.  And if I may offer a note of cautious optimism, it's all-too easy to craft a winning teaser for a popular Broadway show.  This follows the same template as the first Rent teaser, where you take the most iconic song of the show and set a visual montage to it for 90-150 seconds.  But we know that Anne Hathaway kills her big number (like that was ever in doubt) and that everyone else at least looks authentic while Tom Hooper seems to be emphasizing the period-specific poverty and squalor in a way that's a little tough to do on stage.  It's no secret that the film will feature live on-set recordings rather than lip-syncing to pre-recorded studio sessions, and it's too early to know if that intriguing gamble paid off.  Although that heart-wrenching closeup and vocal break-up at 1:05 suggests it did.  But yeah, this is probably the film I most want to see after The Dark Knight Rises opens.  Hell, if given the choice to see one of them right now, I'm not sure which I'd pick (okay, I'd pick Dark Knight Rises simply because I don't have the script memorized by heart).  One minor marketing nitpick, the onscreen text 'The Dream Lives' is borderline tasteless considering both the obvious text of the song in question and Fantine's character arc.  Anyway, Tom Hopper's Les Miserables opens on December 14th.  If my wife doesn't like it, she can stay home with the kids while I take whichever of her family members wins the straw game to the press screening.  If Universal has truly pulled this off, then Battleship is completely forgiven.   But, for the sake of cautious optimism, I'm including the dynamite first teasers to Rent and The Phantom of the Opera after the jump.

Scott Mendelson