Why bitchy 'fanboys' are the film fan equivalent of Bill Kristol.

I'm not going to get into the misogynistic aspect of the trolling centered around a few on-set photos of Shailene Woodley from The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  To those saying that she's not 'pretty enough' to be Mary Jane Watson, I'll simply extend a hearty 'f*ck you' and merely offer to be, wedding vows and relative current marital bliss aside, the next guy in line at the bar after you turn down her advances. But while others will justifiably focus on the offense at the trolling of a young actress having the gall to walk around without make up, I'd like to offer a bit of silver lining to this whole affair.  Now thanks to the Internet trolling, I can absolutely guarantee that not only will Shailene Woodley be insanely attractive as Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man, but she will also be a terrific character, in terms of acting and all of that 'less-important' stuff too.  Why do I know this?  Because the trolling fans have told me otherwise.  Trolling fans have been around for as long as I can remember.  And they have become the Bill Kristol of film fans.  They make noise, they attract attention and 'serious discussion', and they are always always wrong.

Funny or not, The Onion's Quvenzhané Wallis tweet was effective satire that reflected back at us.

That so many were so outraged this morning is precisely the point.  Satire at its best highlights the lesser parts of society, using amplification to reflect it back at us and make us take notice of our own behavior.  Those decrying The Onion, a satirical newspaper, for running an offensive tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis are possibly missing the point.  Obviously this wasn't someone online expressing an honest opinion about how they felt about a nine year old actress celebrating her first Oscar nomination.     It wasn't Rex Reed calling Melissa McCarthy a hippo or Brett Easton Ellis whining that Kathryn Bigelow wouldn't be considered a great director if she wasn't a hot white woman who made manly war pictures (essay).  This was an intentionally offensive, knowingly disruptive statement intended to provoke outrage and offense sent out by a technically 'fictional' twitter avatar.  Sadly, it wouldn't have been as shocking if an even slightly older woman had been called a "cunt".  Because we do *that* all the time.

Weekend Box Office (01/20/13): Chastains's Mama and Zero Dark Thirty top while Walhberg, Crowe, and Schwarzenegger bomb.

This weekend provides a fascinating lesson at the would-be star system and the extent to which it exists in Hollywood today.  Jessica Chastain indeed reigned as the star of the top two movies of the weekend.  Mama (review), which was sold more on executive producer Guillermo Del Toro than anyone in front of the camera, debuted with a terrific $28 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the weekend, with $33 million expected by the end of the four-day Martin Luther King Day weekend (or twice its $15 million budget).  Zero Dark Thirty (everything I've written about that one thus far...) is projected to earn another $21 million by Monday, with $17 million of that coming from its Fri-Sun second weekend, a solid hold of just -28% from last weekend.  The film's ten day total is now $55 million and will be about $59 million tomorrow, or almost identical to what Black Hawk Down had after its first ten days.  It opened on *this* weekend eleven years ago, ironically grossing exactly what Mama made over the four-day holiday and dropping 40% in weekend two for a $17 million second weekend.  Even compared to the usual slate of early year (January/February) supernatural horror, Mama's debut is the strongest yet, besting the $24 million debut of Michael Keaton's White Noise back in January 2005 (that would be about $29 million today).  So does this mean that Jessica Chastain is a new movie star?  Not quite.

2012 in film: The female-driven blockbuster is no longer a surprise, no longer written off as a 'fluke'.

2012 isn't just the year where we saw one female-starring and/or female-centric blockbuster after another.  2012 was the year when such a thing no longer merited any real surprise.  Back in 2008, we also had a solid run of female-centric smash hits.  Sex and the City, Mama Mia!, and finally the initial Twilight installment.  But we also had endless hand wringing about what these successes meant to the industry and/or how these various films (especially the first and last) were oh-so harmful for their target demographic.  What a difference four years can make.  This year we had The Hunger Games, Snow White and the Huntsman, Brave, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part II, and what looks to be a surefire smash in Les Miserables in a couple weeks.  And you could certainly make the case for the likes of the male-stripper dramedy Magic Mike, The Vow, and Prometheus (which of course starred Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron), as well as the rather successful Pitch Perfect which slowly grossed $65 million.  What's important isn't that these female-centric films all were pretty huge hits, with several achieving genuine blockbuster status.  What's important is that nobody really gave a damn.

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.

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

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    

How a severe lack of 'cause and effect' undoes all that is good about The Dark Knight Rises, and why its alleged political underpinnings are merely a smokescreen.

It's not the plot holes or periodically silly coincidences.  This will not be a list of 'things that don't work in The Dark Knight Rises' but rather an old-fashioned essay (shocker!) concerning what I feel are the overall screenwriting flaws that tear down and ultimately destroy what otherwise is a technically fine motion picture.  Obviously it's pure unapologetic spoilers after the jump, so tread no further if you don't want to know.  But the short version is that, aside from certain logic issues, almost nothing that occurs during the first 150 minutes of the film truly matters in regards to how the story ends.  And moreover, the unwillingness to focus on the people actually being affected by the (mostly off screen) chaos renders the film's token topicality not only politically irrelevant but dangerously close to exploitation.  To wit...

Weekend Box Office: Seemingly affected by frontloaded anticipation more than tragedy, The Dark Knight Rises opens with $160 million, good for third-best debut ever.

When a heavily-anticipated film debuts alongside a mass murder that takes place during a midnight showing of said film, it's difficult to know how to analyze the opening weekend figures.  Under normal circumstances, the fact that The Dark Knight Rises (trailer/review/spoiler thread) debuted with $160 million over the weekend would lend itself to the usual analysis, dealing with weekend multipliers, midnight-percentages, comparisons to The Dark Knight and other recent blockbusters, and a guesstimate in regards to final domestic outcome.  But it is impossible for now to know what the effect of the shooting had on the film's short term or long term box office performance. So for the sake of this calculation, we will basically presume that the shooting had little quantifiable effect on the numbers.  Quite frankly, looking over the data, I'm inclined to believe as much.  The film did about as well, give-or-take, as it would have been expected to do.  But the numbers, presuming little-to-no effect from Friday morning's tragedy, means that the third Chris Nolan Batman film was a slightly less anticipated affair than the last go-around, which will likely bode (comparatively) ill for long-term grosses.  Basically, horror of horrors, The Dark Knight Rises might just perform like a normal quick-kill mega-blockbuster.

The Dark Knight Rises spoiler discussion thread...

So it's midnight on the West Coast, which means the first midnight showings are just letting out on the East Coast.  Okay, you know the drill.  Here's hoping I have more comments here than I did for The Amazing Spider-Man.  Anyway, I'm actually going to be away from my keyboard for a couple days, but I'll *try* to do a weekend box office write-up on Sunday morning.  Until then, it's officially open season for anyone who saw the third and final Chris Nolan Batman film.  You've heard my thoughts, now time to share yours, in as much detail as you desire.

Scott Mendelson

Review: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) is the least of the Nolan Bat-films, continuing the curse of the comic book threequels.

The Dark Knight Rises

2012
165 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson


First and foremost, I cannot decide at the moment if The Dark Knight Rises (trailer) is a 'better film' than Spider-Man 3, Batman Forever, and/or X-Men: The Last Stand.  The fact that I have to outright state as much should tell you what a comparative disappointment this film is.  Overall, its many storytelling flaws bring the picture down, offering only engaging acting, entertaining character interaction, and the kind of empty-headed (but oft impressive) action spectacle associated with more conventional blockbusters.  It is a hodgepodge of several classic Batman stories squished into one chaotic narrative that ends up resembling a mash-up of Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Rocky III. There are moments of emotional engagement in the first third and the final moments pack an appropriate wallop.  But the film frankly drags for much of its middle 90 minutes on its way to a surprisingly unremarkable climax.  Save for mostly fine performances, including a terrific supporting turn by Anne Hathaway, and some wonderful character beats scattered throughout, this is sadly the very definition of an unnecessary sequel.

Watch/Discuss: The Dark Knight Rises panders to the 'I want it now!' crowd, gets one more (generic) trailer.

This smells desperate, folks.  With just a month to go, Warner Bros. drops a third full-length trailer for The Dark Knight Rises. This bothers me on two levels, neither of which are related to the film itself (the film is what it is and we'll know soon enough).  First, the near-daily stream of television spots, some of which are quite spoiler-y, followed by a release of a third trailer, reeks of desperation.  Not about the film per-se, but about the apparent need to stay relevant on the film blogs (which in theory translates into mainstream interest by playing the 'show them everything 30-120 seconds at a time' game that has been the status-quo this year for tentpoles.  Next I assume Warner Bros. will start releasing clips to boot.  Point being, they don't need to play in the mud with everyone else.  The Dark Knight Rises would have been a mega-smash if they didn't realize anything other than a teaser and a one-sheet.  To see the marketing department unwilling to follow their own pitch-perfect template from The Dark Knight is not a little dispiriting, akin to Michael Jackson's later albums not breaking new ground but rather aping the younger musicians who followed in his footsteps in a bid to stay relevant.  This new trailer represents a lack of faith and I'm disappointed.   My second gripe is with the trailer itself.

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

The Dark Knight Rises gets a pretty solid theatrical one-sheet and six rain or snow-soaked character posters..

I seem to be in the minority, but I rather like this poster.  Unlike the two key posters for The Dark Knight, there are no nonsensical tag-lines ("Welcome to a City Without Rules"), no odd imagery of Batman standing in front of a burning building as if he's claiming credit for said explosion, and no odd placement where the point of visual focus is a giant wheel from that silly Bat-Pod.  It's just Batman himself, appropriately brooding with the unofficial logo for the film (the buildings of Gotham collapsing into a bat-symbol) and a variation on the "The Fire Rises" would-be catchphrase (doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "Why So Serious?").  Of note, Anne Hathaway gets billing above Tom Hardy implying either Hathaway is the obvious bigger star or Bane's role is smaller than has been let on.  I remember being shocked when Tommy Lee Jones got billing ahead of red-hot Jim Carrey in Batman Forever only to realize that Two-Face was actually the primary villain as opposed to The Riddler.  UPDATE - Warner Bros. dropped three moody and rain-soaked character posters and three less impressive snow-drenched character posters this morning, so I'm adding them below the jump.  Anyway, there isn't much left to do but speculate until this starts screening toward the very end of June, with junket screenings likely falling before July 4th weekend and regular press screenings starting about 1.5-2 weeks before July 20th.  Am I as excited for this as I was for The Dark Knight four years ago?  Not even close, but I have no reason thus-far to believe that The Dark Knight Rises won't be an awfully good action-drama.  As always, we'll see...

Scott Mendelson

The final trailer for The Dark Knight Rises finally sells me. I'm officially excited again. It feels good to be back on board.

I'm frankly a little disappointed that Warner Bros. didn't have the courage to just wait a few days and debut this thing in theaters attached to The Avengers.  This is a big-scale trailer and deserves to be seen in theaters before dissecting it on a computer-screen.  Unless they were trying to slightly chip away at The Avengers's opening weekend (re - repeat viewings from those who've attended press/preview screenings), I really don't know why they chickened out at the last minute.  But having said that, this is a pretty terrific trailer.  Yes, much of the material in the first 2/3 is merely extended glimpses of what we've seen before, but this looks like exactly what it needs to be: an emotionally-powerful, socially-relevant action-drama that happens to take place within the world of Batman.  The clip uses the slow rising towards the familiar Batman Begins theme to literally raise goose-bumps.  Bane looks more imposing in action, Hathaway's Catwoman feels surprisingly appropriate and at home in Nolan's Gotham, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt seems to be filling the role of the 'hope' that Jim Gordon has apparently lost (his lack of screentime here makes me all-the-more concerned that he dies in the first act, which in-turn spurs Bruce out of retirement).  Kudos to Warner and Nolan for crafting three trailers that, like The Dark Knight four years ago, only reveal the barest bits of plot and story.  I don't expect this to be a game-changer like The Dark Knight, and I don't expect it to appeal to the inner-Bat geek in me as much as the last iconic Batman/Gordon vs. The Joker epic did.  But there now seems little doubt that The Dark Knight Rises should at least be a damn-good motion picture and a hell of a series finale.  This one drops July 20th.  As always, we'll see, but I'm back on the 'happy train'.

Scott Mendelson 

For those who care - a truckload of The Dark Knight Rises photos...

I'm shocked... SHOCKED that Time Warner's biggest summer movie has made the cover of Time Warner-owned Entertainment Weekly's annual summer movie preview issue.  I'm just happy that I don't have to keep using that same 'Batman aims his laser-gun' shot every time I write about the movie.  Anyway, I'm not going to dissect these to death, and I presume that Nolan and company aren't releasing anything that could be over-analyzed anyway.  But I will say that Bane looks not terribly intimidating in action and it's a little silly to see Batman wielding what appears to be an IPad (minor carping I know...).  Anyway, while most of the Internet was buzzing about Anne Hathaway's ass earlier this week (the promo image was an apparent unauthorized leak and has been removed), I was all about that 'Ella-Enchanted-quality' hair.  But that's no surprise if you know me well enough.The rest are after the jump.   Enjoy.

Scott Mendelson

3 of a Kind: Mirror Mirror and two prior fractured fairy-tales that end on a song.

Why Relativity saw fit to release this climactic dance number from Mirror Mirror well-ahead of its theatrical release, I cannot say.  But while it's pretty disconnected from the film, it does reveal a pretty big spoiler involving the fate of a major supporting character (and also ruins one of the biggest 'wtf?' cameos in recent memory).  It may not be fair to continuously compare Mirror Mirror to the somewhat similar Ella Enchanted, but it is worth noting that they actually end in pretty much the same way, albeit with an established song as opposed to an original Bollywood-ish tune.

The Dark Knight Rises gets a moody and refreshingly cryptic trailer. It stills seems to be pointing at Chris Nolan's version of The Dark Knight Returns.

There was absolutely no way that this trailer was going to excite me as much as the first glimpse of The Dark Knight four years ago.  As I've written before, that was basically THE Batman movie that we had been waiting our entire geek-lives to see, a street-level crime epic pitting Batman, Gordon, and Dent against The Joker for the moral soul of Gotham.  So what is this one exactly?  Well, Nolan is obviously going for a pretty grand-scale finale, and the scope is relatively impressive thus far.  I could carp that the attack on the football field is the kind of implausibly weird thing that happens in a C-rate episode of Justice League or in a Transformers movie, but oh well.  Football fanatics, does that still count as a legitimate touchdown?

Weekend Box Office (08/21/11): The Help tops in second weekend, crushes four new releases. Summer of 3D ends with three 3D flops.

As expected, the summer reached its climax this weekend with an ugly pileup, as four new releases failed to achieve anything resembling success, with three of those releases being in 3D and two of them chasing the exact same demographics.  Why oh why did Lionsgate and Disney open Conan the Barbarian and Fright Night on the same weekend?.  With the new releases eating each other alive, The Help snuck into the number one slot during its second weekend.  Dropping just 21% compared to the Fri-Sun portion of its opening weekend, The Help earned $20.4 million and now sits with a twelve-day total of $71.8 million.  This is the very definition of an old-fashioned leggy hit, but in today's front-loaded marketplace, it almost qualifies as a sensation.  $100 million is guaranteed at this point, the question now merely remains how far over/under $150 million it ends up and/or how much the film will factor in the year-end awards races.  Viola Davis is a lock for an Oscar nomination (but will her lead performance get placed in the leading or supporting category) and the film is in a pretty good place for a Best Picture nomination.  It would be a lock under the old 10-nominees system, and said two-year experiment was dismantled partially out of the desire to keep such 'popular entertainments' (IE - well-reviewed films that mainstream audiences actually enjoyed... horrors!) out of the field.