Weekend Box Office (12-09-12): Playing For Keeps bombs as the moviegoing world awaits the Christmas rush.

The decision by Warner Bros. to move The Gangster Squad (trailer) to January, 2013 and Universal's choice to move Les Miserables from next weekend to Christmas day should have caused a giant game of musical chairs.  It didn't, and now we have the second December weekend in a row (with one more to come) with just a single new release).  Meanwhile the last two weekends of the year are going to be jam-packed with major films (Jack Reacher, This Is Forty, DJango Unchained, The Guilt Trip, etc.), all of which could have *easily* topped the box office and/or dominated the competition had they opened this weekend or last weekend.  But weekends that are barren of new releases save for a Gerald Butler vehicle tend to be very boring box office weekends indeed.

Playing For Keeps versus... well everything that's already out in John Gosling's weekend movie preview (12-07-12).

The first weekend in December is generally noted as being one of the quietest of the entire cinema-going year. Studios are loathe to see a major release lost to people opting to get their Christmas shopping started (or finished). In 2011, there wasn't a single wide release on this weekend, while 2010 saw The Warrior's Way, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared. This year is no different, with just one solitary release in the guise of romantic comedy, Playing For Keeps. The story follows George, an ex-soccer player who returns home and ends up coaching his son's team, while at the same time trying to get his life back in order. As the new, good-looking guy in town, he finds himself having to contend with the not so pure intentions of the gorgeous soccer mums while attempting to reconcile with his ex-wife, who is about to get re-married. There's also a potentially life-changing job at ESPN in the offing, if George is willing to leave his son behind once more. Director Gabriele Muccino got his start in Hollywood on the 2006 Will Smith drama, The Pursuit of Happyness, but had been directing in Europe a number of years prior that. 

Review: Hitchcock (2012) thinks you can't handle the truth.

Hitchcock

2012

95 minutes

rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

It is telling that the opening frames of Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock don't even give us the usual 'based on a true story' text as its allegedly non-fiction story begins.  It's the only honest moment of the entire picture, which is so gloriously full of shit that it can't bear to even pretend that the story it's presenting is remotely truthful.  Technically based on Stephen Rebello's 1990 book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the film alters history, dilutes the contributions of talented individuals, commits outright libel against others, while basically ignoring its central subject (the, um, making of Psycho) in favor of a contrived would-be romantic conflict between Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and Alma Reville (Helen Mirren).  Worse yet, the story is told in broad, on-the-nose strokes that resembles the kind of writing found in bad childrens' cartoons and the picture revolves around hindsight-superiority that renders it potently obnoxious.  It plays less as an adult drama and more like a Hitchcock biography blandly written for first-graders.

Hitchcock (IE - The Making of Psycho) gets a trailer.

Well this looks like good fun, even if it tries to sell the making of a popcorn entertainment as an epic "Us vs. the World!" underdog story.  Based purely on the cast alone, this is one of my top must-sees of the Oscar season, as I can't imagine it not being a gold-star acting treat.  I could carp that it follows the standard biopic trailer, even to the point of trying to sell the story of the world's most famous director making his next pulp fiction as a grand David vs. Goliath story.  But the actors all look grand and this looks like a good bit of inside-baseball fun.  I don't know how much general moviegoers will care about this one (when I was twelve, would my friends and older relatives flocked to a film about the making of The Treasure of Sierra Madre?), but if it's cheap enough if should be a solid investment.  I do wish we had gotten a glimpse of Michael Wincott as serial murderer Ed Geinn, but I hope his apparent absence doesn't mean he's but a cameo. Anyway, Hitchcock debuts on November 1st as the opening film of the AFI Film Festival before debuting in limited release on November 23rd.  As always, we'll see.  Your thoughts?  

Review: The Tall Man (2012) subverts genre expectations.

The Tall Man

2012
105 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

At its best, writer/director Pascal Laugier's The Tall Man is an examination of our expectations when it comes to the horror genre.  It almost playfully plays with our knowledge of the cliches and the templates, telling what seems to be a conventional story while  slowly pulling the rug out from under us.  While the picture is not a complete success, and while it intrigues and unnerves more than it explicitly frightens, it earns points for telling a story right up to its climax.  This is not a film that runs out of narrative by the 2/3 mark and descends into an action sequence or a violent spectacle, but rather a slow-burn drama that holds some of its cards as long as possible.  It's a cliche/generic pull-quote to say that a movie 'keeps you guessing to the end', but it applies in this case (as an objective fact more so than an exclamation).

John Gosling previews the week's new releases (08/03/12).

Staring this week, Mendelson's Memos is proud and pleased to be presenting weekly new release previews from John Gosling.  Mr. Gosling is a fellow box office nerd who does a fine weekly write-up from www.boxofficevoodoo.com. He has generously agreed to give this site his obscenely detailed previews of each of the week's major new releases. The essay below will be less about box office and more about historical context for the films being released. Each weekly piece will hopefully go up sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday night, depending on our respective schedules.  Feel free to chime in below and if you feel like offering your box office predictions, this would be the place to do it.  Gosling's contact information will be at the bottom of this piece.  Enjoy...

Total Recall trailer reminds you that you already saw this damn movie 22 years ago, and it was just fine, thank you!

Yes this trailer looks every bit as bland and generic as the teaser from early April.  And yes the lack of creative imagination that would cause Sony to spend $200 million on a painfully similar remake of a 1990 sci-fi thriller is disturbing and perhaps a sign of the end times.  But I'm not going to whine.  First of all, I damn-well have the choice to not see this thing when it drops on August 3rd.  Second of all, and I'll be getting into this tomorrow if time allows, but we're slowly entering an era where studios seem to be remembering that not every film in the tent can or should be a tent-pole.  So for now, feast your eyes on the raging mediocrity that is the trailer for Total Recall.  Is there really any one who is honestly excited for this?

Scott Mendelson  

First look at Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock.

I wrote a piece last month detailing ten films I was eagerly anticipating post-Dark Knight Rises.  Had I waited just a few weeks, I damn-well would have included Fox Searchlight's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (or Hitchcock, as its allegedly been renamed).  The film is an adaption of the Stephen Rebello book detailing um... Alfred Hitchcock's making of Psycho back in 1960.  It's a fascinating bit of old-school film history, and its lined-up one of the coolest casts in recent memory.  You've got Anthony Hopkins as the 'master of suspense' himself and Helen Mirren as his wife.  You've got Scarlett Johansson (as Janet Leigh), Jessica Biel (Vera Miles), Toni Collette (Peggy Robertson), Danny Huston (Whitfield Cook), Kurtwood Smith (Geoffrey Shurlock), and James D'Arcy (as Anthony Perkins).  And that's not including my two favorite bits of inspired casting.  Aside from the much-appreciated hiring of Michael Wincott to play infamous serial murderer Ed Gein (essay), they've also brought on Ralph Macchio as Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano (no word yet if the author of the novel Psycho, Robert Bloch, will show up). Wincott and Macchio are both highly under-appreciated actors who have struggled to get steady work over the last decade, and neither of 'obvious choices'.  The film has no release date as of yet, but it's easily one of Mendelson's Memos' most anticipated films over the next couple years.

Scott Mendelson

Total Recall remake gets a trailer not worth remembering, wholesale or otherwise.

I've seen this movie.  Several times in fact, and it has aged surprisingly well considering the reliance on 22-year old special effects and a lead performance from an action star not known for his thespian skills.  So while Len Wiseman and company may have claimed that they were merely re-adapting the original Philip K Dick short story (titled "We Can Remember It For Your Wholesale"), this trailer reveals the fraud of that argument.  This is a bloated, ugly, and seemingly weightless remake of the original Paul Verhoeven film, plain and simple.  There is quite simply no reason to remake this particular film because it has barely aged a day.  If I want to watch Total Recall, I'll damn-well watch the 1990 version in all of its head-spinning and gore-filled R-rated glory (has there ever been a more grotesquely violent R-rated film outside of Verhoeven's own Starship Troopers released by a major studio?).  The story beats in this remake seem identical, the characters seem pretty similar (except a love-interest character who was once played by a racial minority is now lily-white), and the $200 million (!!!) future world seems like a mash-up of Minority Report and The Fifth Element.  Even the big 'single-take' shooting sequence looks *exactly* like a moment from the Dead to Rights video game series.  Why bother even spending such an obscene amount of money if you're not going to actually try to create anything new or unique?  You want to play around with the story?  Great!  You want to create an original future world using state-of-the-art special effects? Fine!  But Sony and the filmmakers seem to have merely decided to remake a popular and continuously-relevant genre film purely because of its built-in brand awareness and then spent $200 million merely ripping off the future worlds from other original pictures.  This one drops August 3rd, ironically against The Bourne Redundancy.  Maybe I'll take my daughter to Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days instead (or perhaps just read a book).  Your turn, folks.  Am I being too hard on this one, or is the lack of imagination depressing to you as well?

Scott Mendelson