Review: Friends With Kids (2012) sacrifices unconventional family drama for conventional romantic comedy cliches.

Friends With Kids
2012
110 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

There are few things more dispiriting than an engaging and thoughtful film slowly ditching that which made it unique and instead traveling down the road of convention.  Yet such is the case for writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends With Kids.  What starts as a strong and painfully honest look at how adult relationships are affected when said adults start having children gives way to a somewhat conventional romantic comedy set-up where two leads spend the movie looking for love everywhere but with each other.  That the film still maintains its entertainment value is due to is strong cast and slice-of-life details.  But while the film is mostly engaging and occasionally thoughtful, it loses points for ditching the very components that made it stand out among the pack in order to trade on genre conventions.    

Edward Burns and (especially) Megan Fox need to fire their publicists. Friends With Kids gets a poster, with only six of the eight billed stars.

There are six top-billed actors in this film, and six of them appear on the poster.  The two missing actors are, of course, Megan Fox and Edward Burns.  Should we take any particular meaning to Fox's exclusion from the poster?  Burns hasn't been a 'name' since the mid-1990s, but Fox, come what may, remains a publicity machine.  I could speculate on whether or not Lionsgate is afraid that Fox's presence will scare off the older moviegoers that this film is surely targeting, but it would be just that - speculation.  Anyway, the film drops on March 9th, so we'll see.

Scott Mendelson

Weekend Box Office (07/04/11): Transformers 3 crushes July 4th records, Larry Crowne underwhelms, Cars 2 crashes, Bridesmaids and Pirates 4 hit milestones.

As expected, Transformers: Dark of the Moon (review) dominated the long Fourth-of-July holiday frame this weekend.  The film had a Fri-Sun debut of $97 million and thus far sits with $161 million since opening late Tuesday night.  It netted a 6.25-day opening of $180 million, with a worldwide six-day opening weekend of $418 million.  There are those who will scream "DISAPPOINTMENT!" because Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened with $200 million in its first five days two years ago.  If $180 million in six days is disappointment, sign me up for failure anytime.  The film played 62% male and 55% under-25.  Oddly enough, the picture scored an A- from males and an A from females in Cinemascore polling.  I'm sure pundits will find sexist explanations for that finding ("Oh, the girls just LOVED that LeBeouf goes into a war-torn Chicago to save his girlfriend."), but I'll just chalk it up to the fact that any woman who walks into a Transformers movie likes robot-smashing and explosions as much as the stereotypical guy.  The picture sold 60% of its tickets in 3D, which is an uptick from the usual 45/55 2D advantage over the last few months.  Point being, if you give teens and older audiences something worth seeing in 3D (as opposed to families with really young kids), they will make the choice to plunk down the extra $3.

Box Office (06/29/11): With 60% sold in 3D, Transformers: Dark of the Moon nets $42.7m first day (including Tues-sneaks). It's looks like a $180m 6-day weekend.

Okay, so my arbitrary predictions stemming from yesterday's $13.5 million worth of advance-night and midnight screenings was off by about $10 million.  The third Transformers picture grossed $37.2 million on its first full day, which accounts for $8 million worth of midnight shows but not $5.5 million worth of 9pm advance screenings the evening before.  So the official 'first day' total for Transformers: Dark of the Moon is $42.7 million.  By itself, the $37.2 million number is the sixth-biggest Wednesday of all-time, and the biggest single day of 2011 so far.  That is about $24 million behind the $62 million opening day (with $16 million worth of midnight grosses) for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  And it is about $6 million ahead of the first day ($27.8 million opening Tuesday plus $8.8 million worth of advance-night sneaks) of the first Transformers back over this same long holiday in 2007.  The first Transformers had a six day opening weekend of sorts, opening on Monday at 8pm and plowing through the whole Fourth of July week with about $155 million in the can by the time Sunday night rolled around.  Dark of the Moon has a similar situation, opening on a Wednesday, but having that holiday Monday that Transformers apparently did not have (I say apparently because the Monday gross plummeted 55% from Sunday, which is unusual for a holiday Monday).  The film scored an A from Cinemascore, with 55% of the audience being under 25. It also played 62% male.  With audience satisfaction higher this time around (Revenge of the Fallen had a B+) and those IMAX (more in number than for Revenge of the Fallen) and 3D screens (which made up a whopping 60% of the tickets yesterday) factored in, we should see a similar long-weekend multiplier to the first Transformers (4.3x its opening 1.25 days).  So offhand, we're looking like a six-day weekend total of about $180 million.  Although Paramount would love to get it over the $183.6 million six-day mark, so as to become the third-biggest six-day total ever (behind Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with $214 million and The Dark Knight with $224 million).

Scott Mendelson

REVIEW: Transformers: Dark of the Moon (3D) is the Transformers movie you've always wanted (for better or worse), complete with political subtext.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon
2011
154 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

On a relative scale, the third time is the charm for the Michael Bay robot-smashing series.  This second sequel  basically gives us the apocalyptic Transformers epic we've been waiting for since 2007.  That which was annoying about the previous two films is still present here, but in more sensible doses.  We still have needlessly campy humor.  We still have Shia LeBeouf trying to wring sympathy from a genuinely obnoxiously-written lead character.  We still have a needless female lead who exists purely to be ogled.  But this time we get a story that takes itself seriously.  We get a narrative that makes a token amount of sense and shows something almost resembling discipline.  And when the action comes, it does deliver the goods.  At long last, Michael Bay gives us a healthy helping of robot-on-robot smackdowns.  The problems with the previous two films are still there, but they are that much easier to forgive because we finally get what we actually came for in a Transformers movie.

Three mediocre human actors kill time before the robot attacks in new Transformers: Dark of the Moon clip.

Not much to offer here.  The only reason this clip is noteworthy is because it is the first time we've seen Rosie Hunginton-Whiteley do anything other than cower in fear and/or stand and look sultry.  She even speaks one or two expositional lines! Of course, the big question remains: Will critics automatically assume that Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is a better actress than Megan Fox because of her British accent?  Either way, Patrick Dempsey is at his Scream 3 worst, leaving us to hope that John Malkovich and Frances McDormand pick up the pre-robot invasion slack for the first 2/3 of the movie.

Scott Mendelson

Review: Passion Play

Passion Play
2011
94 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Passion Play is a film that asks you to watch its lead character make one terrible decision after another and sympathize with him anyway. From the first frame of the film until the last, Nate (Mickey Rourke) exhibits atrocious judgment and a painful selfish streak, yet we are supposed to be on his side for the entirety of the picture. The opening scene of the picture has him about to be shot dead in a desert for sleeping with the wife of a known mob boss. As Passion Play unfolds, one can't help but wonder if everyone involved would have been better off if Nate had just taken two in the head.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon gets a dynamite second trailer, full of long, fluid takes. Although it will make you miss Megan Fox.

Although it's not surprising, it's still impressive just how massive the third (and final?) Transformers picture seems to be. Granted, I'm betting most of the action footage in this trailer is from the last act of the film, but it still is a truly eye-popping piece of marketing. Bay swears up and down that this latest installment is (pick one or all) better, darker, less campy, better written, etc than Revenge of the Fallen, and at this point we have no reason to doubt him. This does appear to be the full-on alien invasion/monster movie epic that many of us thought we were getting with the first sequel, and there is nary a hint of camp or even much humor of any kind in this 150 second clip. One promising thing, which Bay has hinted at, is that shooting in 3D has forced Michael Bay to use longer and more fluid takes, and the results are readily apparent. The best part of the trailer is how long Bay seems to be holding his takes, so we really get a sense of geography and can actually appreciate his full-scale destruction.

2010 in Review: The Underrated

Let us continue our look back at the year in film with a token acknowledgement of ten films that were not quite as bad as their critical reputations. For the record, not all of the films below are good pictures. In a film criticism world that follows the sensationalized political landscape more and more, films are often judged as either unqualified masterpieces or pure failures. We have lost the ability to acknowledge that some films are just 'good', 'okay', or 'not that bad'. The following are in alphabetical order.

Death at a Funeral
This Neil LaBute comedy got hammered for daring to remake a seemingly untouchable 2007 Frank Oz picture, all while critics couldn't decide if said original was any good in the first place. I have not seen the original, but this American variation works as a genuinely funny family comedy. Chris Rock makes an excellent and sympathetic straight man, James Mardsen is a fine clown, Zoe Saldana looks dynamite while getting to be funny, and the cast is filled with notable character actors (Loretta Devine, Keith David, Danny Glover) who just happen to be African-American. The first third is sharper than the rest, but it's a consistently entertaining piece of filmmaking.

Jonah Hex gets a second trailer.

Considering how long it took Warner Bros to put out an initial trailer, I'm a little shocked that we already have a second preview less than a month later. Still, they trailers are different enough to perhaps justify each other. The first trailer for the famously troubled production emphasized plot and the ensemble cast. This new trailer, which is forty-seconds shorter, has a lot less Megan Fox, almost no John Malkovich, and a whole lot of Josh Brolin. Point being, this one is about explaining who or what Jonah Hex actually is. Fair enough, but I still think the first trailer was a better marketing tool. In emphasizing action and random spectacle, the new trailer makes Jonah Hex look like a run-of-the-mill action picture. Yes, that probably sums it up the final film pretty well, but if you're going to get anyone outside of action nerds, comic geeks, and western-buffs to buy tickets, the film has to look like something better. The film opens on June 18th, and I don't expect to see many press screenings until two or three days prior to opening. As always, we'll see...

Scott Mendelson

Why do we care about, let alone hate, Megan Fox?

News broke yesterday that Megan Fox would in fact not be a part of Transformers 3, which is set to be released on July 3rd, 2011. Before any real details could be articulated, the media at large jumped on the idea that Fox had been fired by Michael Bay in relation for various statements that Fox had made over the last several months that appeared to criticize Mr. Bay. Needless to say, word soon spread, via HitFlix and People, that Fox had actually chosen not to return to the rampaging-robots franchise of her own accord. I have no idea which version is true, and I imagine we'll know in the coming weeks. But the sheer outpouring of joy that greeted the allegation that Fox had been canned for trashing Michael Bay in public was more than a bit obnoxious. The same geeks and entertainment columnists who called co-star Shia LeBeouf honest and gutsy for criticizing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) were basically applauding the idea that Fox had been fired for basically doing the same thing. Why do so many people hate Megan Fox? Who do they even care?