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.

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.

Weekend Box Office (12/16/12): The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens with an expected (and record) $84 million.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (review/teaser/trailer) basically opened like a Lord of the Rings film, give or take various variables.  Its $84.7 million estimated debut clobbered the December record, which is the $77 million earned by Avatar ($77 million, $80 million adjusted for inflation) and I Am Legend ($77.2 million, $89 million adjusted for inflation) in 2009 and 2007 respectively.  It soundly thumps the various other Lord of the Rings films, but this is where it gets tricky.  The prior Peter Jackson Middle Earth pictures opened on the weekend before Christmas week, which I've long argued is the best weekend of the year to open your picture.  So the fact that The Hobbit opened a week earlier makes this number a little more impressive, although the pre-Christmas weekend is more about legs than opening weekend.  On the other hand, the prior films all opened on a Wednesday, meaning that their would-be opening weekend was spread out of five days.  And of course, we have to take into account nine years of inflation and the whole 3D/IMAX price bump. So purely looking at inflation and comparing the Fri-Sun portion, this opening is about on par with The Two Towers ($62 million, but $84 million adjusted for inflation) and well ahead of Fellowship of the Ring's ($72 million, but adjusted-for-inflation $66 million) and King Kong ($50 million, and $62 million adjusted for inflation) for what that's worth. It's a bit behind the $72 million/$95 million opening of The Return of the King.  

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.

Better roles for child actresses than adult actresses? Jennifer Lawrence graduates to 'adult' roles by playing the token girlfriend/manic pixie dream girl.

Yes, this started as deleted material from my Silver Linings Playbook essay from Saturday. I don't want to get into another 'roles for women' rant, but it's interesting that Jennifer Lawrence may win an Oscar for arguably the first role of her career where she exists purely to support the male lead's arc (even her token girlfriend role in The Beaver had a character arc for *her*). She has not a single scene in this film where she exists as a character outside of her role as Bradley Cooper's girlfriend/spiritual healer. She is basically a glorified manic pixie fuck toy who exists purely to support the male lead's emotional journey, not fit for even a single scene disconnected from Cooper's story. This parallels the career trajectory of the likes of Shailene Woodley and Blake Lively, solid actresses who did film and/or television work as leads who only earned real acclaim after they took supporting roles in more automatically prestigious 'manly dramas'. Blake Lively was a lead in films like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the television show Gossip Girl.  But she was written off as a kid-friendly television star before she played a strung-out junkie with romantic feelings for Ben Affleck's oh-so-conflicted bank robber in The Town. Shailene Woodley was a lead actress in ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but critics only started taking her seriously once she played supporting fiddle to George Clooney in The Descendants. It's a great film and Woodley is terrific in it, but would critics have even noticed the picture had it been told from her point of view? I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this as the newer crop of child actresses 'come of age'.

Weekend Box Office: Rise of the Guardians stumbles as most everything else (Life of Pi, Red Dawn, etc.) flies.

As I wrote yesterday, this weekend was a perfect example of the issue with reporting cumulative box office as if it means anything.  Yes it was the biggest Thanksgiving weekend on record ($295 million total over the five days), but such a thing tends to happen when you have three strong holdovers and three relatively strong new releases in one frame.  As always, it's the movies.  More importantly, total weekend box office success is only important if your film is among the ones doing well.  

Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians basically flopped.  There's really no nice way to say it.  In five days, the $145 million animated film earned $32.6 million while earning just $24 million over Fri-Sun.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is the lowest opening weekend, by a very large margin, for Dreamworks Animation since Flushed Away back in Fall 2006 ($18 million).  Even the film's five-day total ($32.6 million) puts it as the lowest comparative three-day opening weekend since 2006 and their 17th lowest total out of 25 films.  The reasoning for this actually pretty simple.  The film didn't look very visually appealing, the marketing didn't promise anything beyond a painfully generic story (both sadly true about the film itself), and the campaign was based upon the idea that having three holiday icons that everyone knew (Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny) and two that were far less well-known in pop culture (Jack Frost and the Sand Man) engaging in a riff on the first X-Men picture was automatically appealing. It wasn't, and with Lincoln and Skyfall winning out as consensus choices for large families, and with Life of Pi  coming out far stronger than expected as a family film choice, plus the still-strong Wreck It Ralph ($149 million thus far, making a go at Tarzan's $171 million finish), Rise of the Guardians just couldn't muscle out of the pack.

Weekend Box Office (11/18/12): Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 scores $141m while Lincoln impresses with $21m.

The Twilight Saga ended as it began, kicking James Bond's ass to the curb with a massive opening weekend.  The fifth and final Twilight film debuted with $141 million over the weekend.  That's a touch higher than the $138 million debut of Breaking Dawn part 1 and just under the $142 million opening of New Moon over this weekend in 2011 and 2009 respectively, but we're still talking the kind of consistency that the Saw franchise would envy.  There are just ten films that have opened above $135 million and three of them are Twilight films.  Twilight 2, 4, and 5 now holds the 7th, 9th, and 8th biggest opening weekend respectively. Yes it was possible that Breaking Dawn part 2 (review/essay) would get a sort of series finale-bump over opening weekend, but in retrospect it was not entirely realistic.  This series frankly only plays to the fans at this point, with even casual fans coming out on opening weekend.  This isn't a series like Harry Potter, where fans who maybe missed an entry or two along the way and/or saw the prior films in theaters later in their respective runs rushed out to catch the finale on opening weekend.  If you wanted to see the newest Twilight, you were probably a hardened fan who absolutely ventured out on opening weekend every time.  So yeah, this isn't a series that gained new fans after the second installment so there wasn't much room for growth even for this caper (it played 79% female and 50% over 25 years old).  There also isn't much to discuss in terms of domestic totals.  The series has infamously short legs, and so it's probable that the picture did 50% of its business already.  So let's presume a $285-295 million domestic total.  Worldwide, the film has already grossed $340 million globally putting it on track to equal the over/under $700 million totals of the last three pictures.  

The Twilight Saga comes to an end in John Gosling's weekend movie preview.

This weekend, after only four years, the Twilight saga comes to a close with the release of Breaking Dawn Part 2.  Based on the books by Stephenie Meyer, it has become a global phenomenon, creating its own literary sub genre with many imitators (the multi-million selling 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction). Primarily, the series concerns the romance between 17 year old Bella Swan and the eternally youthful vampire, Edward Cullen. Like Harry Potter, the series has also spawned all manner of related (and not so related) merchandise, along with gaining a fervent fan base. The first book, Twilight, had not been an easy sell for Meyer, and had been rejected a number of times before securing a publishing deal with Little, Brown and Company, who paid $750K as part of a three book deal (LBC originally offered $300K, Meyer had wanted $1M). Published in October 2005, the initial print run of 75,000 sold out, and the book debuted at number five on the New York Times Best Seller's list within a month of its release and would eventually reach the top spot. In September of 2006, a follow up was released, entitled New Moon. Like its predecessor, the book was incredibly successful, selling out of its entire 100,000 hardback print run and making the top spot on the USA Today best sellers list (as well as the NY Times one again).