03/18/10

Tops at the Box: That Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was once again the No. 1 film at the box last weekend, bringing in another $34.5 million, tells us much about the Spring 2010 film season. While most studios use this post-awards/pre-blockbuster season time of to dump the projects they we’re least happy with, some studios keep a promising film or two aside to suck up as much money as possible. This year we get Alice, a stellar enough children’s crossover film that’s already made over $565 million across the world. Needless to say, the competition hasn’t been too strong. Coming in at No. 2 last weekend was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which brought in about $22 million over its first three days. Last weekend’s No. 3 film, The Bounty Hunter, a date night comedy crapper, brought in about $21 million. Films No. 4 and No. 5? Meh, who cares. Hang on, things will get better soon. 

Out this Week: Dreamworks’ animated feature, How to Train Your Dragon, could actually make some decent bread for a few weeks. Not only is it in 3D (very hot right now), but it’s voiced by It-Boy Jay Baruchel, It-Man Gerard Butler, It-Nerd America Ferrera, Kristen Wiig, McLovin and the hilarious Jonah Hill. It’s also somehow scoring very stellar reviews thus far. The new film this week that we’re most intrigued by is Hot Tub Time Machine, staring John Cusack, Crispin Glover, Chevy Chase and the always awesome Craig Robinson. If you’ve not yet heard the premise of the film, it’s about four dudes, all bored with their adult lives, who travel back to their 80s glory years. How do they do that, you ask? Word is that all you have to do is dump a few cans of Red Bull into a bubbling hot tub. Early reports are that this is a new camp classic, but we’re not quite sold. Stay tuned.

New to Home Video: Plenty of great releases this week, starting with the DVD and Blu-ray release of Wes Anderson’s excellent stop-motion classic, Fantastic Mr. Fox and season three of the very good “Mad Men” series. Also out: The Blind Side; The Men Who Stare at Goats; reissues of the first two Toy Story film; Jim Sheridan’s Brothers; Jet Li’s Red Cliff; a Blu-ray two-fer issue of Akira Kurosawa’s excellent Yojimbo and Sanjuro films; and, most importantly, the long awaited Blu-ray transfer of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Why, you ask, does ScreenTime keep making a stink about Days of Heaven? As far as cinematography goes, we consider it to be one of the very best – if not the very best – films we’ve seen. Also, the fine folks at the Criterion Castle have been very excited about this release, claiming that this is the best the film has looked since the first print was made in 1978.

Triple Feature: Before writing this week’s column, we at the ScreenTime offices sat down and watched three consecutive films. All three films were released in 2009 and, at some time or another, something of a hot item in the press. We began with The September Issue, a stellar documentary about legendary Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Word is that Wintour wasn’t too pleased with The Devil Wears Prada, a 2006 film based on a roman a clef written by a former Wintour assistant who didn’t much like her former boss, and thus agreed to this documentary project, hoping to clear her reputation. In the film we see Wintour and her staff putting together what became Vogue’s biggest issue ever, at 840 pages. The filmmaking here isn’t that great, but it’s a fun peek into the top-level of the publishing world that at times feels like a lost episode of “Fashionista” or even “The Hills.” Not a bad film, but far too small in scale to warrant the hype it saw.

Next we drove to the dollar theater for a viewing of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones adaptation. For starters, it should be said that we at ScreenTime are not Lord of the Rings fans. In fact, we consider Jackson’s trilogy to be some of the most overrated films ever made, all things considered. New age-y, cheesy, and full of bad fillmaking decisions. All that said, we were pretty happy to see how hilariously awful The Lovely Bones was. Easily one of the worst big budget films ever made – a shame, considering the decent Alice Sebold novel it’s based on. Considering the Brian Eno score, stellar source material and great cast (particularly Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Michael Imperioli and, mostly, Stanley Tucci), we really wanted to like this film. We really did. But all though the film we were laughing. Out loud. While watching the Rings films we’d notice cheesy filmmaking decision after cheesy filmmaking decision, all masked behind the great source material. But those films do work to some degree, but likely only because Jackson had so many producers and studio people keeping a close eye on the production. Bones, his second film since winning 11 Oscars for LotR: The Return of the King, sees Jackson with about as much creative control as a director working with a major budget can get. In some cases that kind of freedom makes for epic, groundbreaking cinema, but not here. Here we see all of Jackson’s LotR cheeseball creative moves amplified, in doing so exposing him for what he is: a semi-talented director who scored a sure-thing franchise. I hope LotR junkies everywhere see Bones and gain some perspective.

To finish out our triple feature we watched director Mira Nair’s big studio biopic Amelia, staring Richard Gere and Hilary Swank. We always root for Nair and were excited when she signed on for this film (which seemed like a Ron Howard sort of project), hoping that she’d finally get some of the credit long due to her. And the trailer looked somewhat promising. Then the reviews came in, almost every single one of them negative. We watched regardless, fingers crossed, hoping that – despite being a biopic – the film would work. No such luck. Weak screenplay. That’s all there is to it. The acting was okay and the cinematography and editing was strong … but the film never stood a chance. Bad pages make for bad movies, even when in the hands of a great filmmaker.

Written by G. William Locke