The week's top stories: 3/7-3/14

Each Friday afternoon moving forward, we will compile and post a list of the week's top film stories. Between casting updates, features, breaking news and other industry highlights, we aim to provide a comprehensive mix of stand-out headlines. The following is a breakdown of those stories that piqued our interest between 3/7 and 3/14. Let us know what we've missed in the comments section below!

Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney, NYT Magazine

2 Killed When Suspected Drunk Driver Plows Into Crowd at SXSW, CNN

Disney Shocker: Top Exec Anne Sweeney to Exit to Become TV Director, The Hollywood Reporter

Rooney Mara Cast as Tiger Lily in 'Pan' Sparks Backlash Over Native American Role, New York Daily News

Stefan Zweig, Wes Anderson, and a Longing for the Past, The New Yorker

The Divergent Challenge: Rally Teen Books and Movies, The Wall Street Journal

 

BONUS: First published in 2005, longform.org re-posted the true story behind The Hurt Locker this week:
The Man in the Bomb Suit: The Story that inspired The Hurt Locker, Playboy

'Bourne Legacy' trailer shows a Jeremy Renner you don't want to mess with

Although $1 billion proves me otherwise, I never warmed to the Bourne series. It felt so--sanitized--with none of the swagger of a Bond spy thriller or the gritty realism of a French Connection. It's true that Jason Bourne was an amnesiac, which could make someone a bit bland. That's pretty much how Matt Damon, who I like in almost any other context, played him. Jeremy Renner, the star of The Bourne Legacy, takes his character, who is a product of the same program, in an entirely new direction. He's angry.

The opening scene of the trailer, released today, shows him beat up and looking not downtrodden, but pissed off. It's in this moment that he agrees to become part of the "program." In later scenes, his foes appear to be sincerely frightened of him. It's like he's an animal who's been let loose from his cage.  The trailer, which uses some of that moody brass that became so popular with Inception, showcases Renner's flashiest spy skills. He runs down a corridor, pursued by security, then halts in his tracks and whacks the guy behind him. It's like he decided running wasn't worth the effort. He also uses a fire extinguisher to create some kind of air pellet, and appears to have his hand in blowing up a cabin and possibly using a sniper bullet to fell a small plane. I like that there's some weapons creativity along with a more emotive hero.

 

It's great to see Renner, who proved himself in The Hurt Locker, land himself a starring role in one of the most profitable action-spy franchises out there. I'll also give a brief nod to Edward Norton, who plays the enemy so, so well. The Bourne Legacy looks like it will inject the franchise with some real spunk. Count me in when it releases on August 3, 2012.

Audiences don looking-glasses for 'Alice'

By Sarah Sluis

Alice in Wonderland continued its boffo box office with another first-place finish. The 3D fantasy dropped less than 50% to bring in $62 million. Despite more middling reviews, this 3D blockbuster is way ahead of last year's failed Big March Film, Watchmen. Alice has already done twice the business of that movie's cumulative gross, making the March slot a more profitable time for exhibitors. This week's top ten movies grossed over 50% more than their counterparts in 2009. Tickets from more expensive 3D and IMAX venues added to the bump. IMAX screens for Alice in Wonderland, for example, accounted for 2% of the screens but 13% of profit.

Green Zone debuted in second place with $14.5 million. The open was far less profitable than the last Matt Damon-Paul Greengrass effort, The Bourne Ultimatum, and offered yet another example of Iraq War-related movies doing poorly at the box office. With over $100 million in production costs, this movie definitely won't break even in theatres.

Under-the-radar comedy She's Out of My League opened to $9.6 million, slightly above expectations. By comparison, Fox Searchlight's Our Family Wedding debuted with $7.6 million.

The tale of a Hispanic woman marrying a black man, to predictable and

comedic family strife, drew mainly Hispanic and black audiences.

Though the comedy earned less than its competitor, Wedding boasted a higher per-screen average ($4,700 vs. $3,200 for League)

thanks to its smaller, more targeted release.

Despite the presence of Twilight star Robert Pattinson, Remember Me opened at an unimpressive $8.3 million. Women comprised about 80% of the audience, but apparently a Twilight star alone does not a blockbuster make. I'll be watching to see if The Runaways, starring Twilighter Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, draws more eyes.

On the heels of its Best Picture win at the Oscars, The Hurt Locker earned $828,000 in 349 theatres. Combined with last week's $439,000 gross, the movie has racked up over $1 million from its re-release, even though the DVD is already in stores. Overall, the Oscars didn't give much of a bump to winners' grosses, with many films showing substantial drops from the previous week (The Blind Side was an exception.) The Oscars were scheduled later this year to avoid conflicting with the Olympics, so most of these movies' wins will spike DVD rather than ticket sales.

This Friday, adult comedy The Bounty Hunter, a comedy for the elementary set, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and sci-fi action movie Repo Men will compete for audiences and try to unseat Alice from the top spot.

Predicting the Oscars: Bigelow vs. Cameron

By Sarah Sluis

Right now, the race for the Best Director at the Oscars (this Sunday!) has narrowed down to two front runners: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. Formerly husband and wife, a relationship they refuse to turn into any kind of rivalry, the duo have both won their fair share of awards leading up to the event. Bigelow won the Directors Guild Award (the first woman to do so), an award that has correctly predicted the Oscar win all but six times since 1948. Cameron won the high-profile Golden Globe award for Best Director, but that has correlated only 60% of the time with the Oscar win. Based on that information alone, anyone but Bigelow winning will be an upset.

Even Cameron seems to want Bigelow to win--as long as Avatar gets Best Picture. On both "60 Minutes" (clipped here) and "Charlie Rose" (clipped here), Cameron has rooted for Bigelow in the hopes that the grand prize of Best Picture will go to Avatar and not The Hurt Locker. It's kind of a weird strategy, making him seem magnanimous while at the same time publicly giving up a less valuable award as a way to gun for the big one. While I loved Avatar, I think this commentator gets something right: the story is not original at all. It's well done, but not original. When your movie draws comparisons to Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest, and not just old legends like Pocahontas, that shows that you didn't transcend the age-old story but merely offered another iteration of it. Every movie has a flaw, and this is Avatar's biggest one.

Awards time also leads to lots of potential "firsts." Bigelow would be the first female director to win. Cameron would be the first person to win for back-to-back directing projects. Lee Daniels would be the first black person to win the Best Director award. However, his lack of other prominent "Best Director" awards puts him out of the running. So when it comes to Oscar pool time, here's my recommendation: pick Bigelow for Best Director, and Cameron if you want to go for the dark horse.

Academy's expanded Best Picture category rewards 'top 10' films

By Sarah Sluis

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it was expanding the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten, most people speculated two things would happen: 1) crowd-pleasing, high-grossing movies would receive nominations. 2) smaller, independent movies would receive nominations. Well, the answers are in: the first thing happened, and the second not so much.

Three of the ten Oscar nominees for Best Picture were in the 2009 box-office top ten. Avatar is currently #1 for 2009, Up is #4, and The Blind Side is #8. If any movie was a long shot for Best Picture, The Blind Side was it. Many critics would have preferred to see Bright Star, a tiny but well-reviewed film, in that spot.

The last time a top ten film was even nominated was at the 76th Academy Awards, when Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (the #1 film of the year) swept the awards in Titanic-like fashion. That means that before this year, five years passed where no movie in the top ten received a Best Picture nomination. If the goal of expanding the number of nominees is to boost ratings and make more average, non-eclectic moviegoers feel the Academy Awards reflect their own "Best Films," it appears the Academy has succeeded.

That's not to say these movies are bad or don't deserve to be nominated. Last year seemed to be a particularly strong one for blockbusters. I'm right there with Avatar and Up. District 9 (#27) was good, but it didn't make my top ten and I don't think it's quite original enough (beyond its opening sequence) to deserve the nomination. But with a heavy-handed look at racism a la Crash, I guess I shouldn't be surprised it was nominated.

On the other hand, movies at the other end of the spectrum haven't entirely been neglected. The Hurt Locker (#130), A Serious Man (#142) and An Education (#144) all received nominations. Last year, the lowest-ranked film was #120 (Frost/Nixon), so not only are these films a bit lower on the list, there are also three of them instead of the expected two you would get when you double the amount of nominees.

Overall, I think the inclusion of ten nominees better reflects the amount of quality movies out there, and does allow for more commercial (to a greater extent) or more specialized (to a lesser extent) films to receive nominations. At least when a so-so movie squeezes in, there are nine, instead of four, other movies there to balance it out.

Golden Globe nominations a mixed bag for female directors

By Sarah Sluis

Today the Golden Globe Nominations were announced, and, as usual, there weren't quite enough nominations to cover all the great performances (in particular, Nicolas Cage's crazy-amazing performance in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans). Inspired by New York Times critic Manohla Dargis' recentdocumentation of the lack of female directors in Hollywood, particularly for studio films, I also decided to tally up the nominations for female-directed movies. Results and analysis follow.

The Takeaways

* Golden Globes reward more female directors, but this is because its picture and acting nominations are genre-specific: "Best Drama" and "Best Comedy/Musical." More females direct in the latter category, allowing them to rack up more nominations. When it comes to the Oscars, however, the majority of the nominees usually come from the more prestigious "Drama" category.

*Of the twenty films nominated for a form of Best Picture (Drama, Comedy/Musical, Animated, Foreign Language), three were directed by a female. Kathryn Bigelow recieved a nomination in the Drama category, and Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers were nominated in the Comedy/Musical category. This is slightly higher than the 60 females out of 600 directors (10%) that Dargis figured for 2009, but given the small sample size, this isn't significant.

*Zero of the ten "Best Actor" nominees were directed by females. Four of the ten "Best Actor" nominees were directed by females, including two directors not nominated in the "Best Picture" categories. Sandra Bullock was nominated for her performance in Anne Fletcher's The Proposal and Carey Mulligan for Lone Scherfig's An Education. This correlation is difficult to judge, but it could reflect a well-known Hollywood bias that female directors are only offered women's films.

*One female, Kathryn Bigelow, was nominated for "Best Director." She's running against her ex-husband, James Cameron (Avatar).

Bigelow, the sole director to receive a nomination for "Best Director," was highlighted by Dargis as an example of Hollywood's unequal treatment of female directors. Before Hurt Locker, she hadn't directed a film since 2002.

Dargis compares her to director Michael Mann, who was in a similar

standing to her at the time. Both directed films (Ali and K19: The Widowmaker, respectively) in the early aughts that underperformed.

Dargis writes, "What

did a $22 million difference in box office mean for the directors

of "Ali" and "K-19"? Well, Ms. Bigelow didn't direct another feature

until 2007, when she began "The Hurt Locker," a thriller about a bomb

squad in Iraq that was bankrolled by a French company and is said to

cost under $20 million." Mann, by comparison,

directed three big-budget movies, and produced several more--all a mix

of hits (Collateral) and misses (Miami Vice). She goes on to say,

"I

imagine there are a host of reasons why Mr. Mann has been able to

persuade executives to keep writing such large checks. He's a dazzling

innovator, and big stars keep flocking to his side, despite his

reputation for difficulty. But Ms. Bigelow is one of the greatest

action directors working today, and it's hard not to wonder why failure

at the box office doesn't translate the same for the two sexes."

Dargis seems to have drawn the conclusion that women are held to higher standards than men, and have to be that much better in this position in order to succeed.

The other key to equality in film direction is making projects open to both

male and female directors. Lee Daniels directed a great film (Precious) with a female cast, just as Kathryn Bigelow has distinguished herself for her "testosterone" action film. Besides Bigelow, Scherfig (An Education) and Jane Campion (Bright Star) have been mentioned as the standout directors of the year, but their films' lack of nominations could push them out of the running. Bigelow's nomination for The Hurt Locker makes her chance of being nominated for Best Director at the Oscars that much more likely.

'Bruno' gets his 15 minutes (and million) on Friday

By Sarah Sluis

Sacha Baron Cohen's comic persona Bruno did big business on Friday, but dipped through the weekend, sparking concerns that Cohen's brand of shock comedy has run its course. After Friday's $14.4 million debut, Bruno dipped 39% on Saturday, taking in just $8.8 million, and another 18% on Sunday ($7.2 million). While it brought in $30.4 million, $4 million more than Borat, it opened in three times as many theatres, making its per-screen average one-third of Borat's. Critics have generally liked the film, giving it a 69% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but that's far short of Borat's 91% rating. Part of the appeal of Baron Cohen's characters has been the guerrilla-style humor. With that element of surprise already played out in Borat, the humor of Bruno grows old more quickly. I enjoyed Bruno, but it was much more evident that the events were staged. While Borat had that "Blair Witch Project" sense of authenticity on its side, Bruno may suffer the same fate as Blair Witch Project 2. Needless to say, Baron Cohen is a talented comedian and there is a chance its second-weekend grosses could show only a slight dip.

I Love You, Beth Cooper, the other new release of the week, opened to $5 million at the #7 spot. With lackluster reviews and little marketing support, it appears this movie will fade fast. While Beth Cooper didn't open big, the other comedies in the top ten held strong, even with a comedy at #1, which might be another sign of Bruno's limited appeal. The Proposal dropped just 18% to bring in $10.5 million, and The Hangover fell 11.9% for a $9.9 million weekend gross.

Opening in just New York and Los Angeles, Humpday made a solid debut of $14,500 per screen. The Hurt Locker, which added 51 locations to up its release to 60, increased 324% from last week and crossed the $1 million mark. Both of these films have received extra attention for having females at the helm of a bromance and a war film, respectively. In an interview with The New York Times, The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow revealed to the reporter that "after she made The Loveless, a postmodern motorcycle movie in which she stretched narrative to the limit, she started receiving scripts for high school comedies, which she quickly realized was considered a suitable subject for her gender." In the indie world, however, it appears easier for these females to work outside of these genre ghettos, to box-office success.

This Wednesday, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will open. According to MovieTickets.com, the film has already sold out 350 screenings, including 216 midnight sellouts, making this film one to watch.