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 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          

Weekend Box Office (01/22/11): Underworld: Awakenings and Red Tails score. while Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Haywire falter slightly.

 Like clockwork, the fourth entry in the ongoing Underworld franchise debuted in the third weekend of January to take the top spot at the box office with a $20 million+ debut.  While the original opened in September of 2003, the rest of the films have all used the mid-January berth every three years.  As so it is that Underworld: Awakenings (trailer) debuted with $25.4 million this weekend.  In pure numbers, that's the second biggest debut of the series, behind the $30 million opening of Underworld: Evolution back in 2006.  But in terms of inflation/tickets sold/etc, it's actually a bit under the $22 million debut ($28 million adjusted for inflation) of the original Underworld.  Considering the last entry, Rise of the Lycans, was a stripped-down prequel lacking franchise star Kate Beckinsale, it's arguably more fair to compare this fourth entry to the first two films in the series.  As such, it's slightly lacking. The budget was $70 million (way up from parts 1 and 3, which cost just #22 million and $35 million respectively, and a bit up from the second film's $50 million budget) and the film had a theoretical 3D price-bump, yet the results weren't even up to the series's peak.  Still, Sony is playing a different game this time around...

Underworld: Awakening gets a trailer. Won't be seeing this one either...

After a detour into 'new director' and 'new star' prequel land, it appears that the Underworld series is returning to its.. uh... roots?  Anyway, Kate Beckensale and director Len Wiseman are back, for those of you who care about such things.  I will say that I saw this trailer before Fright Night and the 3D work was pretty solid, and the images were suitably brightened up so you could actually see what was going on (unlike Fright Night, which was like watching a VHS copy-of-a-copy taped off of an antenna-feed UHF airing).  The film also looks like it has been shot with the brightest blue filter ever created for cinema.  I had not seen any of the Underworld films until just a couple months ago.  How bad is the first Underworld?  Well, not only is it an insanely long 134 minutes, it was so dull and uninspired that I have thus far resisted my OCD-completest urge to rent the rest of the franchise.  It's hard, strolling through Blockbuster with my mail-order DVD/Blu Ray rental... with the other two films in the franchise just sitting there on the shelf.  I have thus far resisted, and hopefully I can stay strong.  If you've seen any of the sequels, are they worse than the original?  Anyway, this one comes out January 20th, 2012.  As always, we'll see.  Well, you're see.  I certainly will not see.

Scott Mendelson