‘Anchorman 2’ to have a classy weekend

The man who managed to make the trinity of obnoxiousness – misogyny, dimwittedness and frustratingly perfect hair – hilariously lovable in 2004 is back for another crassly classy good time. Will Ferrell has reprised his role as ‘70’s newsman Ron Burgundy for Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which opened wide in 3,450 locations on Wednesday.

Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s first Anchorman was by no means a box-office success, earning roughly $85 million domestically and failing to generate any international business to speak of. The film only found a dedicated audience once it was released on DVD, quickly becoming the kind of cult favorite many a high-schooler spent his, and her, lunch period quoting.

Hollywood, however, was a little slow to catch up. Anchorman may have found new life post-theatrical release, but given its tepid b.o. performance, studio execs at Paramount were initially hesitant to green-light a sequel. The fact that several of the film’s stars have become more popular over the last decade – most notably Steve Carell, who helmed his own cult hit, TV series “The Office – probably played a large role in overcoming the kind of bottom-line hesitancy that kept Anchorman 2 in limbo for years. Not that Paramount, once committed, minded waging an expensive marketing campaign on the movie’s behalf. Have all those Dodge Durango commercials piqued viewers’ interest? The weekend before Christmas is notoriously tough for new releases, but Anchorman 2 is still expected to earn between $40 and $50 million for the five-day spread.

Actually, so is The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Few pundits have been able to discuss Smaug without mentioning its inability to generate the same kind of boffo revenue as its predecessor, last year’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (even though Smaug has earned superior reviews). Yet Peter Jackson’s second Lord of the Rings prequel is still drawing sizable crowds. It wouldn’t be a Christmas miracle if Smaug managed to out-gross Anchorman 2 this weekend.

CG-animated kids’ film Walking with Dinosaurs will likely land at the bottom of the weekend’s list of top earners. Frozen continues to pose fierce competition, and will probably keep Dinosaurs from grossing more than $10 or $12 million.

Specialty enthusiasts who do not live in either New York or LA (a tough position for a specialty enthusiast) will be treated to Christmas-come-early today. Both American Hustle and Saving Mr. Banks are expanding, to 2,500 and 2,200 locations, respectively. David O. Russell’s Oscar favorite had the fourth-best per-theatre average when it opened in limited release last weekend. Given the loud buzz surrounding the flick, it should earn upwards of $15 million.

Last but by no means the least interesting, Spike Jonze’s Her, about a man who falls in love with a computer operating system (not as crazy as it sounds, considering the computer’s voice belongs to Scarlett Johansson), also bows in six locations today. The film is on track to expand wide on January 10^th.   

The ‘Hobbit’ to tower over ‘Madea’

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas will go head-to-head at the box office this weekend, although the matchup is not exactly a nail-biter. As the second prequel in the incredibly popular and successful Lord of the Rings franchise, Hobbit is pretty much guaranteed a stronger bow. Last year, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Smaug’s predecessor, earned $300 million domestically and an unearthly $1 billion worldwide. Critics, however, didn’t love it, and even fan reactions were mixed, certainly in comparison with the kind of accolades heaped upon director Peter Jackson’s Rings trilogy. Journey’s success was largely due to its ability to leverage the popularity of these films, while Smaug has a more difficult road ahead of it as it works to prove it’s better (more fun, less dragging) than its predecessor. Luckily, critics seem to think it is. The Desolation of Smaug will probably earn $15 million less than Journey and open to around $70 million or so. The fact that such a staggering gross would still be considered a qualified success speaks to the ridiculous earning potential of – and ridiculous expectations surrounding – these movies.

Though it isn’t expected to trump The Hobbit, Madea’s box-office odds are still looking pretty merry. Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas is the director’s 14th movie in the past eight years. Eight of Perry’s 13 movies have opened to $20 million or more. A more fun fact: The only other directors to have had as many $20 million openings are Robert Zemeckis, who has had nine, and Steven Spielberg, who can boast 11. In total, Perry’s oeuvre has earned $674 million domestically, with his top three films all featuring his Madea character, or Perry dressed up as a smart-mouthed granny. Odds are Madea will chuckle up a little less than $30 million.

Frozen and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire are still going strong and will probably land at nos. three and four, respectively. Specialty enthusiasts and Academy Awards speculators, though, are more concerned with Disney and Jennifer Lawrence’s other movies opening in limited release this weekend: Saving Mr. Banks and American Hustle. Viewers are expected to be drawn in like moths to the Oscar-gold flame surrounding these two. Awards buzz is thick around Lawrence, who plays a broadly cockamamie housewife in Hustle, and Emma Thompson as the persnickety Mary Poppins author, P.L. Travers, in Banks. The latter film is opening in 15 locations ahead of its wide release next weekend, while Hustle will screen in six theatres.

Audiences pack bags for 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey'

The incredibly anticipated The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will roll out in 4,045 theatres this weekend, including in 3D. The adventure (which clocks in at nearly three hours, especially once you factor in trailers) already earned $13 million from midnight screenings, which is impressive given the long running time. It's also a December record. Harry Potter fans may notice that The Hobbit has a lot more in common with the popular series than Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is funnier and
lighter, and includes giant spiders and a wizard (Gandalf) that look suspiciously like creatures and characters (Dumbledore) in J.K. Rowling's novels. The downside is that every character looks like Hagrid--J.R.R. Tolkien has but one female character that shows up for the first installment. "Flaws and all, The Hobbit is too big, and too well-made, to
ignore," weighs in critic Daniel Eagan. I actually wish I had seen the gentler Hobbit first, and Lord of the Rings after. I'm sure a marathon trilogy session will be able to fix that.

Film geeks will definitely want to check out one of the 461 theatres showing the high-frame-rate version. Yes, there are criticisms of the format, but admire the fact that director Peter Jackson is putting himself out there.

The Hobbit will open big, but won't approach the levels of a Twilight. This is the kind of movie that's going to play well for weeks all the way through the holiday season. December actually isn't even known for huge openings. The biggest December opening was $77 million for I Am Legend. With estimates coming in for $75-95 million, and even over $100 million for the weekend, that's a record that will most likely topple.

No other big movie dares to release opposite The Hobbit, so this week the box office will be driven entirely by its performance.

Revenge of the sequels

The next few years are going to see a lot of the same films cropping up with colons appending their names, and "2's" and "3's" or part I and part IIs tacked to the end. First up, The Hobbit is being expanded from two films to three films. To those who aren't in the know, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is a single, 300-page book. How could that possibly cover the ground for three movies? THR notes that "production cost of the third could run between half and two-thirds as much as one of the other two films thanks to work that's already been done" [emphasis added]. That means that director Peter Jackson is essentially stretching out the book into three films instead of two, so fans will have to wait two and a half years to see the series complete. The first installment opens this Christmas, with the two after planned for the fourth quarter of 2013 and summer 2014. This isn't that different than what Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games did or plan to do: chopping the final book into two parts. Although I've never read Tolkien's books, there must be an awful lot of material to turn such a short book into three movies. In Jackson's official statement, he notes that the Hobbit movies include material from other Tolkien works, and that the decision to add another movie was made after watching preliminary cuts of the first and second films. But did the filmmakers really see a gap in the story, or simply an opportunity to turn two movies into three when presented with a long, unedited first cut? I wonder if the films will end up with lagging pacing, or if the three movies will be filled with just the right amount of action sequences and plot.

Besides The Hobbit, there will be plenty of other multi-film franchises of this summer's films, which THR compiles in a lengthy and slightly depressing list. With the exception of Prometheus, which may not even get a sequel, there have been very few films I've seen this year that have warranted a repeat. However, the success of Ted and Magic Mike, along with Snow White and the Huntsman (star Kristen Stewart's affair with the director notwithstanding), Men in Black 3, and The Amazing Spider-Man means these films will be the first of many. Get ready, because the next couple of years will bring plenty of déjà vu.

 

Weighing in on 'The Lovely Bones'

By Sarah Sluis

Many of the people turning out to see The Lovely Bones on Friday will have read Alice Sebold's haunting book. Told from the perspective of a dead girl, Susie Salmon, after she is raped and murdered, the book brought insight into the aftereffects of such a misunderstood and shrouded crime. Profoundly nuanced, its shaded morality gave its characters emotionally complex reactions to the tragedy.

After reading Alice Sebold's memoir of her own brutal rape, Lucky, I felt I understood The Lovely Bones even more: being a victim of such a terrible crime leads you to experience events as though they are outside yourself. You can easily lose a sense of agency. Instead, you often feel as though you are watching things happen from above. Susie narrating the events going on in her family from heaven is not much different than how she might have experienced life had she been raped but not murdered.

Sadly, much of this is lost in Peter Jackson's interpretation of The Lovely Bones, which completely misses the tone of the book. Most grating is his vision of heaven. He seems more interested in giving his special-effects company a lot of work than motivating the move to fantasy. The surroundings, rich and lush and detailed, stick out from the rest of the movie.

Many people have praised the performances in the movie (and I agree with the assessment that Stanley Tucci has a standout role), but some lines sounded really, really bad and misdelivered to my ears. I saw the actor instead of the character. I suspected part of this was related to the tone. When you're trying to make something wispy and ephemeral, and fail, it can lead to dialogue that feels quite odd.

Finally, there's the rape and murder scene. Given that a child is involved, and the movie's PG-13 rating, it's not surprising that this vicious act is omitted. But instead, Jackson moves quickly from the terror of anticipation to a confusing scene where at first she's actually fleeing, and then she's fleeing in her mind, before finally pausing for a brief moment when she realizes what's happened to her. It missed the mark for me, to the point where I was sitting in the movie theatre in disbelief about how the movie was skipping over one of the most painful, but necessary, moments of the story. What I really wanted was a still moment where the audience was forced to dwell on what was happening. Though I already thought the tone was messed up by then, this really sealed it for me.

This omission will be a comfort to some, and for others it may be all they need to conjure up enough horror. Hollywood Elsewhere, for example was happy with the decision, explaining "I really, really didn't want to go there, even glancingly," and liked Jackson's "decision to show her escaping from her own death, running away from something that has happened but is so horrible that she instantly imagines or wills herself into a fantasy-escape mode." For me, it was not enough to carry through the rest of the movie. In the book, the rape and murder is always on your mind, and it's always on the characters' minds. I didn't feel that way watching the movie.

Given the subject matter, this is the kind of movie that people will see only if motivated by must-see reviews touting its artistic merit. Not many people want to be subjected to a Schindler's List if critics are coming out calling it "so-so." By comparison, Precious has garnered glowing reviews. It, too, shows the rape of a child (much more graphically) and her escaping to a fantasy world. Compared to the elaborate world created by Jackson, her escapist moments are downright spare, but the movie works by keeping us grounded in Precious' dismal reality. Translating Alice Sebold's prose to film, which requires depicting these events on-screen instead of in one's head, is a tall order, so it's not a huge surprise that Jackson didn't succeed. Those that have read the book should skip it or go in with managed expectations.

First peek at Peter Jackson's 'The Lovely Bones'

By Sarah Sluis

Alice Sebold's 2002 novel The Lovely Bones was the kind of book you could never imagine being adapted for the big screen: its main character is a young girl who has been raped and murdered. From her perch in heaven, she observes her family and the killer in the aftermath, narrating both her story and theirs. It's told in a non-sequential structure, with plenty of digressions, flashbacks, and flashforwards that tightly control the reading experience. Despite these challenges, the novel was acquired before it even became a bestseller.

Paramount, it seems, feels it has a winner, and moved up its release from March to awards season, December 11th. After a preview on "Entertainment Tonight," the trailer was just released online, and will be shown before screenings of Julie & Julia, to a suitably female, literary-oriented audience.

My initial reaction to the trailer was mixed. They start with the first line from the book, "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie," giving readers an assurance of the film's literary authenticity. But the images of Susie's heaven are surprising, much different from what you'd imagine from reading the book. Still, I trust Peter Jackson to interweave fantasy with the narrative. Elijah Wood's intermittent visions of himself with the ring in Lord of the Rings worked quite well, often contrasting a high-energy sequence with the more dreamlike vision, and I anticipate Jackson will be able to accomplish a similar feat in Bones.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the disconnect between the horrible tragedies in the book (the murder, grieving family, etc.) and the distant, ethereal, wise tone with which Susie narrates. While the trailer abandons the voice-over halfway though, instead showing us images of the family making passionate but amateur attempts to track down Susie's killer, I hope that Jackson makes a point to include Susie's voice throughout the movie, despite the tonal difficulties that may cause.

The cast includes two Oscar winners and two nominees. Mark Wahlberg (nominee) and Rachel Weisz (winner) star as the Salmon parents, Susan Sarandon (winner) plays the Grandma, and Saoirse Ronan (nominee, Atonement) plays fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon. If the movie plays like the book, it will be strongly female-oriented. However, Wahlberg's character has the same protectionist instinct that appealed to viewers of Taken, the surprise kidnapping hit that starred Liam Neeson, which I think improves the movie's commercial prospects. While The Lovely Bones doesn't scream "Oscar" the way an old-fashioned costume drama does, if it delivers on its trailer I expect it will be among the ten nominees for Best Picture at the Oscars, along with a healthy smattering of nominations for its cast and crew.