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Both Evil Dead And Jurassic Park 3D Bring In Big Friday Box Office
10 hours ago | cinemablend.com | See recent Cinema Blend news »
The huge blockbuster opening this weekend was made 20 years ago, and the horror film is a remake of a classic from the 80s, but the box office is humming as if both of them were brand new. According to the early numbers at Deadline, both Jurassic Park 3D and Evil Dead had huge Fridays, with Evil Dead at the head of the pack. The horror remake from director Fede Alvarez made $11.5 million on Friday, setting it up for an estimated $27 million weekend and an easy first place. Right behind it was the 3D re-release of Jurassic Park, already one of the biggest blockbusters in history. The original opened to $47 million in 1993, but the 3D re-release of course won't get quite that close-- it made $7 million on Friday and is estimated for a $18 million weekend. The rest of the top 10 is rounded out by holdovers, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation holding »
Jj Abrams: the man who boldly goes… | profile
1 hour ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
The director has covered most genres in his wildly successful work in the cinema and on TV. But it is as king of the blockbuster that he will reign with the release of the new Star Trek, before he turns his talents to the latest Star Wars movie
Hollywood loves to categorise people. As every actor and director knows, it is all too easy to get pigeonholed on the back of a single successful film or an early role taken purely to pay the bills. Inside many daytime soap stars are Shakespeareans longing to play Hamlet. Perhaps some of the best action film directors, in their dark moments of the soul, will be kept awake at night by a gnawing urge to direct a low-budget independent film of deep artistic worth.
This is, after all, the industry that developed the star system, whose scripts are ruthlessly fine-tuned to appeal to »
- Paul Harris
9/11 taboo over
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Twelve years after the terror attacks, directors are daring to film the Capitol in flames
It has been a long time coming but American moviegoers are now ready to watch the White House being blown up again.
Twelve years after the 11 September terrorist attacks, and long after audiences shed a similar reticence about viewing New York being destroyed, at least three major films will now feature America's most famous address being attacked, shot up, set on fire or taken over by terrorists.
None of the destruction is subtle, or limited to the White House. A trailer for the coming blockbuster White House Down features dramatic scenes of the entire Capitol building exploding, Air Force One being shot out of the sky by a rocket, and then – almost as an afterthought – a shot of the White House bursting into rubble and flames. That follows on from the current box-office hit Olympus Has Fallen, »
- Paul Harris
Spring Breakers – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
The beach party film featuring bikini-clad girls and beefcake guys became a B-movie Californian genre in the 1960s and ultimately led up to TV's vacuous Baywatch. It's generally thought to have been launched in 1960 with MGM's highly popular Where the Boys Are, based on a sober, sociological novel by Glendon Swarthout about a quartet of female midwestern students spending their spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It had a title song by Connie Francis and was produced by the prolific Joe Pasternak, now best remembered for saying of Esther Williams, "Wet she was a star."
Camille Paglia regards Where the Boys Are as a significant and truthful comment on changing social and sexual mores in the 1960s, and Harmony Korine's brash homage to Pasternak's film has attracted similar, if rather more equivocal tributes. Korine made his name as screenwriter on Larry Clark's dubious 1995 film Kids about the spread »
- Philip French
A Late Quartet – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Fine performances enliven a moving drama about a group of classical musicians whose uneasy harmony is put at risk by illness
Musical groups, coming together, working harmoniously, splitting up, reuniting, provide one of the great metaphors for human activity. In the cinema we encounter them in such different forms as the real-life bandleaders Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey feuding and going their different ways in The Fabulous Dorseys; Bing Crosby's inner-city priest reforming delinquents as a choir in Going My Way; Fellini's allegorical Orchestra Rehearsal presenting Italy as a musical rabble that can only function when submitting to a firm conductor; or Dustin Hoffman's recent Quartet, which sees elderly singers burying old differences to recreate their celebrated quartet from Rigoletto.
A Late Quartet, written and directed by the American documentarian Yaron Silberman, is a major contribution to this continuing cycle. A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title, »
- Philip French
The Servant
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
(Joseph Losey, 1963, StudioCanal, 15)
Half a century ago, British cinema had a great year. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life took local film-makers into radically different directions. Two resident Americans – the self-exiled Stanley Kubrick and the McCarthy refugee Joseph Losey – established themselves as world figures. Kubrick made Dr Strangelove (though its release was postponed to 1964 due to the Kennedy assassination). Losey, after a difficult period, often working under pseudonyms, had three films released: the dazzling Hammer thriller The Damned, the Franco-Italian psycho-drama Eve (both shown in versions re-edited by their producers) and the complex, fully achieved The Servant.
Influenced by Marx and Brecht, The Servant was the first part of a trilogy scripted by Harold Pinter about class warfare, sexual conflict and struggles for power in 20th-century Britain, involving a whole society from the working class to the aristocracy.
Exquisitely made »
- Philip French
Mark Kermode's DVD round-up
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
What Richard Did; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; Mission to Lars; TinkerBell and the Secret of the Wings
The Irish director Lenny Abrahamson really is a remarkable film-maker. His debut feature, Adam & Paul, updated the existential black comedy of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, with two addicts scraping their way through the underbelly of Dublin to grimly comic effect. Garage built upon the acting promise of its predecessor as Abrahamson drew exceptional performances from an ensemble cast including Pat Shortt and Anne-Marie Duff. Both films are eclipsed, however, by What Richard Did (2012, Artificial Eye, 15), a tale of youth, privilege, denial and tragedy that confirms Abrahamson as both a major cinematic talent and a distinctive directorial voice.
Adapted by screenwriter Malcolm Campbell from Kevin Power's book Bad Day in Blackrock (which drew inspiration from real-life events still fresh in the minds of many), this deceptively low-key drama centres on Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor), a handsome, »
- Mark Kermode
Ian McCulloch's cultural highlights
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
From Classic FM to Spiral, Ian McCulloch reveals his cultural picks of the moment
Best known as the frontman of post-punk rockers Echo & the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch was born and raised in Liverpool and formed the band in 1978. Their 1980 debut album, Crocodiles, garnered both critical admiration and chart success and McCulloch was nicknamed "Mac the Mouth" by the press for his outspoken comments aimed at the likes of Bono and the Smiths. The Bunnymen released four more albums, including 1984's Ocean Rain which spawned singles such as The Killing Moon and Silver, but in 1988 McCulloch quit to go solo, releasing two albums under his own name before taking a break from recording. In the mid-1990s he resumed his creative relationship with the band but continued to work on his own material, recently featuring on Some Kind of Nothingness by Manic Street Preachers. Holy Ghosts, a double CD combining orchestral »
- Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy
Mike Birbiglia's worst nightmare
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
When comedian Mike Birbiglia gets anxious, he starts sleepwalking. Now, as he stars in a film about his condition, he recalls the dramatic night he turned into the Incredible Hulk…
It's 20 January 2005, and I'm in Walla Walla, Washington – which is a place. I'm staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn. It's 1am and I'm lying in bed. But I'm not going to sleep because I'm an insomniac. I'm sitting up in my bed with my laptop warming my thighs. I'm Googling myself. I'm watching the news. And I'm eating a pizza. At the same time.
And I fall asleep.
I have a dream that there is a guided missile headed towards my room and there are all these military personnel in the room.
I jump out of bed and say: "What's the plan?"
And the general in charge turns to me and says: "The missile co-ordinates are set specifically on you. »
Matt Damon: man of the people
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Nobody does the everyman better than Matt Damon. His common touch has made him one of the world's most bankable stars. He tells Tim Lewis about offending Barack Obama, his love for Ben Affleck and marrying outside the Hollywood elite
'I got the fortunes of heaven
in diamonds and gold
I got all the bonds baby
that the bank could hold'
'Ain't Got You' – Bruce Springsteen
In 1987, when Bruce Springsteen wrote the song "Ain't Got You", he was the biggest rock star in the world. He had vast estates in New Jersey and Beverly Hills, and he had not long returned from a honeymoon at Gianni Versace's villa in Lake Como. "Ain't Got You" was Springsteen's attempt to make a self-aware nod to his outrageous fortune, the Rembrandts on his walls, and how he had come a long way from his working-class upbringing.
Before he released it, Springsteen played »
- Tim Lewis
Home – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Home is the slow, unremarkable directorial debut of an actor who had prominent roles in several early films by Turkey's most prominent director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Its protagonist is Dogan, an architect experiencing a mid-life crisis who's told by a senior colleague to dispel his depression by revisiting his native northern Turkey, taking with him a camera to photograph the landscape and document it for environmentalists. Rather poor advice for him and us. Dogan visits his married sister for the first time in 15 years, has an encounter with suspicious local officials who are on the lookout for terrorists, drops in at a fish farm and meets a somewhat worldly imam. His brother-in-law tells him to accept the necessity of change, but Dogan, not surprisingly, finds the place somewhat run-down, its Greek inhabitants now gone and the local streams (referred to in the inadequate subtitles as "brooks") despoiled by hydroelectric schemes. »
- Philip French
Papadopoulos & Sons – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Written and directed by a Greek Cypriot, this flat, feelgood family story transposes the cliches of Zorba the Greek to the present day. The dull Alan Bates character becomes Harry, an anglicised Greek Cypriot multi-millionaire (Stephen Dillane) bankrupted by the current economic crisis; Anthony Quinn's Zorba becomes Spiros, his ebullient older brother and embodiment of the life-force (Georges Corraface). The widowed Harry and his three kids are rescued when they reopen the family fish-and-chips bar, make friends with the Turkish family running a kebab shop across the street, discover their eastern Mediterranean roots, turn their backs on capitalism and start dancing to the strains of a Mikis Theodorakis song in a suburban London street.
ComedyDramaPhilip French
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds »
- Philip French
Thursday Till Sunday – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
This promising debut is a deceptively uneventful Chilean road movie in which the break-up of a middle-class marriage is seen through the eyes of the sensitive 10-year-old Lucía as she accompanies her parents and seven-year-old brother on a long weekend drive north from Santiago. There are warning shots when they steal some fruit overhanging a garden fence, a meeting with two girl hitchhikers, a stopover at a dreary motel, a family reunion at a dusty camp site, and a devastating night in the desert. The takes are long, static and not always rewarding, but Santi Ahumada's performance as Lucía has the qualities we used to associate with Italian neo-realism.
DramaWorld cinemaPhilip French
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds »
- Philip French
Dark Skies – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Best known as a special effects expert on horror and sci-fi films, Scott Stewart's is a moderately effective supernatural tale, an allegory for our anxious times in which a suburban American family appears to be targeted by some malign force that is, as we used to say, "not of this world". It seems that aliens pick on households with problems, and Dad has lost his job as an architect, Mom is having troubles in the real-estate business, and one of their teenage sons is watching porn and keeping bad company.
HorrorDramaPhilip French
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds »
- Philip French
The War of the Worlds Alive on Stage! – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Jeff Wayne's rock music version of Hg Wells's 1898 novel brought together at the O2 arena in Greenwich a giant widescreen, a 45-piece orchestra energetically conducted by Wayne, five on-stage actors and Liam Neeson as narrator in holograph form (a novel way to telephone in a performance). It was filmed there last December, and the resultant documentary record may be a useful aide-memoire to those who saw it but it's not much of a film.
MusicalJason DonovanDramaDocumentaryPhilip French
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds »
- Philip French
The Odd Life of Timothy Green – review
2 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
This painfully sentimental, would-be magical tale centres on a small-town couple (the husband works in a pencil factory, his wife is a tour guide at a pencil museum) whose desperate prayers to be parents are answered one stormy night when a lovable 12-year-old climbs out of a hole in the garden and greets them as Mom and Dad. The only magical aspect is the golden glow provided by cinematographer John Toll.
DramaPhilip French
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds »
- Philip French
New Posters Revealed for The Hangover Part III, Cbgb, Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters, and Fast & Furious 6
2 hours ago | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »
As of today, a few new film posters have been released online. Briefly: The Hangover Part III – A new poster for director Todd Phillips’s third franchise installment, featuring the tagline “It Ends,” has arrived five days before the next theatrical trailer. The film, which is set for release on May 24th, features returning stars Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, Heather Graham, Jeffrey Tambor, and a newly featured John Goodman as the Wolfpack’s official antagonist. Cbgb – A few new posters for Randy Miller’s new film based on New York’s eponymous club, reveals that the film will feature music from artists including The Police, The Talking Heads, and many more. Featuring a cast that includes Alan Rickman, Malin Akerman (Watchmen), Johnny Galecki, and Ashley Greene, the poster reads “50,000 Bands And 1 Disgusting Bathroom,” as if we needed any reminders about the criminal lack of hygiene at music festivals. »
- Gabe Chase
International Profile: Argentina Offers Reminder of Basic Business Model
3 hours ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
Habemus un megastar. Argentina got its most recognizable media icon March 13 when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named Pope Francis, replacing soccer idol Diego Maradona as Argentina’s most famous export. Latin America is key to the Catholic Church, but it’s increasingly important to the global showbiz industry as well. In 2012, Argentina’s box office grew faster than China’s, spiking 35%. It boasts some of the world’s most aggressive movie buyers, such as Sun Distribution; and crossover talent, such as Pablo Trapero, now signed up to direct an English-language film for Working Title. More than anything else, however, Argentina offers a reminder of a basic business model. If Hollywood — or any other player elsewhere — wants to increase market penetration, that success will come most easily by collaboration with local players and talent. In Argentina, Disney is showing the way.
(Pictured Above: Bridge in Puerto Madero.)
Biz Opportunities
Creatively, it’s a gold mine. »
- John Hopewell
Aamir Khan: International Star You Need to Know
3 hours ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
Claim To Fame
The 48-year-old Bollywood star has 43 films to his credit. And his 2012 daytime talkshow “Satyamev Jayate” reached an audience of 500 million each day via Rupert Murdoch’s Star India network and government pubcaster Doordarshan. Season two is in the pipeline.
(From the pages of the April 2 issue of Variety.)
Social Impact
On the talkshow, he addresses issues including killing of female fetuses, child sexual abuse, honor killings and domestic violence. He successfully campaigned for the Indian government to pass a long-pending child protection bill.
Fans
Steven Spielberg sez he’s watched “3 Idiots” three times (from the Hindustan Times).
Controversy
On “Satyamev Jayate,” Khan highlighted malpractice in the medical profession. This earned the ire of the Indian Medical Assn., which demanded an apology. Khan refused, saying those medical professionals troubled by his whistle-blowing were likely the cause of the problems in the first place.
Other Credits
He starred in 2009’s “3 Idiots, »
- Variety Staff
Spanish director Bigas Luna dead at 67
3 hours ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
Spanish film director Juan Jose Bigas Luna, a colorful chronicler of sexual and social excess, died Friday near Tarragona, Spain, after a long battle with cancer. He was 67.
It was typical of Bigas Luna, a larger-than-life bon vivant who soon became a one-man-brand, that when Spain followed up the 1975 death of dictator Francisco Franco with a splurge of tits-and-bums quickies, Bigas Luna’s second feature, 1978’s “Bilbao,” rolled off the new sexual liberties to portray a hen-pecked husband who kidnaps a prostitute to slake his sexual frustrations, hanging her from his ceiling like a religious martyr.
“Bilbao” initiated Bigas Luna’s long-term exploration of sexual and emotional inadequacy, set in the context of social repression. This inspired the 1990’s sexual awakening drama “The Ages of Lulu,” whose S & M orgy was cut by the British Board of Film Classification.
These obsessions also lends weight, however, to Bigas Luna’s finest film achievement, »
- John Hopewell
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