$600 Million. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? That's what Titanic made at the end of 1997 and the first half of 1998 in North American ticket sales. They didn't even make $602 Million, they made $600 Million even, like as if they waited for the 1 Millionth customer at the local grocery and closed the store after he made his purchase. Did the producers pull the movie from theatres after breaking this milestone? I wonder. Director James Cameron is a pretty nutty guy.
While we all know this is a lot of money, to give you an idea of how much it is for a movie, NO OTHER MOVIE HAS EVEN MADE $500 MILLION. The closest was the first Star Wars, which made a combined $461 Million between all its releases over the years. But Star Wars was made for kids and mostly boys. Girls saw it to see what all the fuss was about, adults saw it because they took their kids. Not like now, when many adults are still kids.
But Titanic had a huge potential audience. Women from 8 to 80 wanted to see this movie. Young women and especially teen girls wanted to see it many times. And boyfriends and husbands took their significant others to see what all the fuss was about and to see half a great disaster movie.
In the 10 years since, a challenger comes out of the gate it seems every year, to lay claim to Titanic's throne, only to come up short. The Spidermans and Shreks seem to give it a great ride, but are hurt by all the matinee and children tickets that are sold. When you are looking for the big prize you have to sell Twice as many $5 tickets as you do $10 tickets to come up even. But in this our most interesting hour is there a hero who can come to slay the mighty Titanic beast?
Perhaps, The Dark Knight? It's broken every record it's crossed so far. Biggest Opening Day Ever. Biggest Opening Weekend Ever. Fastest to $200 Million, fastest to $300 Million, now $314 M. It's AVERAGED $31.4 Million a DAY in 10 days. Step Brothers made $30 Million in its Opening Weekend and that's considered a hit.
I read a very interesting statistic. Women made up 49% of the audience for The Dark Knight, it's opening week. And on the same weekend Mamma Mia came out. That's an incredible number for a comic book movie. Comic book movies have very loyal customers, males 7 to 35. If you want women to go you have to have a great love story attached, but The Dark Knight doesn't. At least not with Bruce Wayne. But it does have two matinee idols in Christian Bale and the deceased Heath Ledger. I bet you even in creepy clown makeup, Ledger is pulling in these female fans.
I know Ledger's death has some ghoulish appeal to certain people, but it's his performance that should make you want to see him. Everyone is right. His Joker is the best madman since Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs or at least the bad guy in No Country For Old Men.
But as for the money. Can it keep up this level of dominance? Other than WALL-E, it is the best reviewed movie of the year. It's getting Huge word of mouth. It's getting all sorts of Oscar attention, which is the most amazing thing of all considering it's the 6th Movie in a movie franchise that George Clooney left for dead back in 1997. It made $75 Million in its second weekend. What's coming out to beat those kinds of numbers? The Mummy?
I looked at the movies coming out the rest of the summer and The Dark Knight should end up in the Top 5 every week until the kids go back to school. $286 Million to Tie in 7 Weeks. $287 Million to win. Sure ticket prices are much more than they were in 1998 and thus it would lose on pure ticket sales, but Titanic isn't even close to being the winner on ticket sales.
That prize belongs to one other behemoth. Gone With the Wind.
The Freditor
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Does The Dark Knight have a shot at overtaking Titanic as Hollywood's biggest moneymaker?
The Wackness: Bittersweet romantic comedy with a lot of heart & a Great Ben Kingsley
* * * * (out of 5)
Even great actors have to remake themselves sometimes. Ben Kingsley won an Oscar early on in his movie career as Gandhi and seemed to take on Gandhi's mantle of seriousness as well. But great actors need not always play stern, upright, serious parts. Sometimes the best acting comes from playing a goofball or a carnival barker. When Kingsley was named a knight, there were rumors that he insisted that everyone call him Sir Ben after that. That kind of behavior pushes fans away.
Plus, the kinds of movies that Kingsley was known for started to become rare and his parts started drying up. So he took on a very funny role playing himself on The Sopranos and something must have clicked for him, because he's been in more comedies recently than any other time in his career. After playing a Polish hitman from Buffalo in You Kill Me, he's now playing a pot-smoking, ex-Deadhead Manhattan psychiatrist named Jeff Squires. I'm not sure it was intended, but I found the name Squires funny, since a squire is a knight in training.
Dr. Squires is addicted to pot and feeds his addiction by having free sessions with his teenage dealer Luke Shapiro. For a quarter gram Shapiro gets an hour with the doctor to apparently make up how he's feeling. Through his half-lies the truth does sneak out and Squires gives him some therapy that's half helpful and sometimes contradictory. Shapiro is not really "depressed, you're just sad," as Squires puts it and Luke has a reason to be. His parents are always fighting and acting like teens themselves while his father is doing something that is costing the family fortune and jeopardizing their home.
Since the story is sort of told from Luke's and Dr. Squire's point of view we're never quite sure what this father is up to, but it's not good. So Luke sells pot around Manhattan to "help his family", but really he's stashing the cash. And he is doing well. Using an old Italian ice cart to haul his pot around town, he's a favorite to a lot of depressed yuppies and younger types. As his new friend says, he is either "the most popular of the unpopular kids or the most unpopular of the popular kids." Whatever he is, he's alone and is focused on Squires' stepdaughter, Stephanie.
Stephanie is played by Olivia Thirlby (Juno's best friend Leah) and she's a real find. She's only been acting for two years, her first part was in 2006's United 93. I thought she was so cool as Leah, acting every bit like a fun teenage girl. Here she seduces Luke as much as the audience. Like Luke we never know where we stand with her. Is she a great girl, is she a bitch, is she some combination of the two? Her mother is played by Famke Janssen and she has that same quality, so the parts are written well.
I've never seen Josh Peck (Luke Shapiro) before, but he's quite good. He's apparently a child star having had his own TV show called Drake and Josh. It's a lot to ask a young actor to put a whole movie on his shoulders, but he carries the load and is almost as interesting as Kingsley. Well almost. Kingsley does bong hits in this movie, tags (graffitis) a store window, makes out with a girl old enough to be his granddaughter and speaks in Ebonics. Peck does all this too, but it never draws the laughs that Kingsley does.
For some reason it takes place in the summer of 1994, but for no other apparent reason than to take many jabs at Mayor Guiliani. Hey if Rudy made it harder for drug dealers to do business that's a good thing.
Anyway, after half a summer of watching things get blown up, it's nice to see a movie about friendships that pays attention to the little things.
The Freditor
Space Chimps is a fun, adventurous animated sci-fi comedy
* * * (out of 5)
Puddy from Seinfeld is fast becoming the Mel Blanc of his time. It's becoming hard to find an animated movie his voice is not in. But unlike Blanc, he never changes his voice. It is always that alpha male, aggressively confident, but less than intelligent voice that made us love him as Puddy and makes kids love him in various animated roles. Here he is again as the commanding chimp in the space program, Titan. He's not the star of the movie, but he certainly thinks he's the star of the NASA chimp squadron.
Space Chimps is a cute story that plays off the first "manned" space flight around the Earth. On January 31, 1961 a chimpanzee named Ham was secured in a Project Mercury capsule and launched into space. He died in Africa in 1983. Now in 2008, Ham III his grandson, plays off his family name to be a "human" cannonball in a sideshow circus. The chimp who still lights the fuse for him is his grandfather's old partner, Houston.
When an unmanned space probe gets caught in a wormhole, there's a possibility that it landed on a planet that might sustain life. NASA wants to send a search party after the probe to see if this is true. If there is another planet in the solar system that is habitable, we might be able to colonize it in the future, or as one NASA engineer thinks, place another NFL franchise. "Just think of the possible T-shirt sales."
For such a dangerous and unknown mission NASA doesn't want to risk human astronauts, so they tap into their reserves. A group of chimpanzees that have been training for some time. The only problem is they feel the monkeys need some kind of star power to gain the press' attention, so they turn to Ham III for assistance.
Ham III (played by SNL's and Hot Rod's Andy Samberg) is a traditional goofball in Looney Tunes fashion. At times he's pretty funny, and sometimes the jokes fall flat, but overall the movie is an enjoyable ride if you don't go in looking for Pixar-type quality. The children in the screening I was at were laughing a lot and seemed to be having fun. But one little non-chimp character might have a future ahead. Kilowatt (Kristen Chenoweth) is one of the cuter animated characters in a while.
It's a shame this movie didn't find its audience. The critics ripped it apart, but I found it just as funny as Kung Fu Panda if not as artistic.
The Freditor
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Mamma Mia is an ABBA Yabba Good Time
* * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Can Pierce Brosnan sing? Whew, no. But neither can some of the other cast members in this
high energy tribute to the music of ABBA. But that doesn't stop them from throwing themselves wholeheartedly into their performances as a wedding party on a Greek island.
A young American girl is the daughter of a single woman who runs a hotel on a picturesque island in Greece. Twenty-plus years ago, the mother had three affairs in one summer and any of those men could be the father of her girl. Now the girl is getting married and has sent invitations under her mother's name to all three hoping to find her father and the man who can walk her down the aisle. The men are unaware of who really sent them the invite or the reason they are really there. The mother is oblivious to the whole charade and is more worried about her daughter being too young to marry.
Stories used to mean more in musicals and carry more weight (like The Sound of Music), but a frivolous story doesn't matter when the music is this good. ABBA is often called a guilty pleasure, but I think that's unfair. Their songs are joyous and why should something that makes you feel happy and doesn't hurt anyone else also make you feel guilty? I don't own their records and I don't play them in jukeboxes, but I'm happy when someone else does.
That said, this movie is an interesting way to make a musical. Unlike the old days when musical performers were trained to become actors, like Fred Astaire, now the movie musical is such a rare phenomenon that you have to hope that traditional movie stars can also sing and dance. Sometimes it works (Chicago) sometimes it doesn't (Painted Wagon). This movie leans a little bit more toward Painted Wagon. There are several songs where I winced when the lead actor was singing and was looking desperately for the background players (the local Greek workers) to join in as the chorus. The chorus of no-names saved many a song from being butchered. Meryl Streep is a decent singer, but in this movie she sounded like Beverly Sills. When Pierce Brosnan starts singing S.O.S. on his own, I heard some chuckles in the audience but muffled my own, in hopes that this was going somewhere. Streep saves him in the duet.
But this movie is obviously not about musical proficiency but the joy of the music. Which you can see in the exuberant way the cast members belt out their songs and dance gayly. And I mean gayly. When women are dancing in such a flighty way that you say to yourself, "that's even too gay for them," you know you are going to have to pull the shirt out of your pants. Why? Because when things start to become too embarrassing for me my butt scrunches up and sucks the shirt tale right up with everything else. I saw this movie by myself and was able to enjoy it in anonymity, but if I was with a friend there were times when the waves of Douche Chills would have hit me like a tsunami.
But this movie was not made for me, but for young girls and their 50+ year old grandmas who took them. I heard them singing along, so I'm sure they've seen Wednesday matinees of the Broadway musical in the city together.
The Freditor
Here are some of the songs, some of which I never heard of before:
1. Dancing Queen
2. Knowing Me, Knowing You
3. Take A Chance On Me
4. Mamma Mia
5. Lay All Your Love On Me
6. Super Trouper
7. I Have A Dream
8. The Winner Takes It All
9. Money, Money, Money
10. S.O.S.
11. Chiquitita
12. Fernando
13. Voulez Vous
14. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
15. Does Your Mother Know
16. One Of Us
17. The Name Of The Game
18. Thank You For The Music
19. Waterloo
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Vantage Point tells story of assassination from 5 different points of view
* * * (out of 5)
After a great buildup and some layered story telling, done in Rashomon style, the payoff is too quick, a little inconclusive and kind of ordinary. The first time director, Pete Travis, mixes in these really cool visuals like a big terrorist bomb going off and a great car chase that rivals The Bourne movies, but then has a script that seems like a throwaway from "24".
Some of the surprises are dulled by the fact that the bad guys look like bad guys and the good guys seem to be good. There was one big surprise in the second half, but I don't think I bought it. Not since the '70s have I have seen this many good, big name actors in a movie that was beneath them. Dennis Quaid, Forrest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt. This was the 21st Century version of Airport '75. Are all these people that hard up for work?
The Freditor
Monday, July 7, 2008
Great Praise for the Blogs
HEY FRED,
I think it is very very good. You give good background information about your life and share your interests. I GIVE YOU 4 GOLD STARS. I LOVE THAT MONKEY. Looks kind of like the Ralley Monkey the L.A. ANGELS used in the 2002 season.
SEE YAA NICK
