R-rated 'Ted' and 'Magic Mike' aim for adult fun

Earlier this summer, just one wide release was opening every weekend. This week there are four. Each of these 2,000 to 3,000-screen releases, however, will have a hard time beating last weekend's Brave, which is in release on over 4,000 screens. The animated Pixar film opened to $66 million, so even a 50% drop will leave it above $30 million.

Ted (3,239 theatres) has the widest release of the bunch. I attended the screening with a Seth MacFarlane fan who was disappointed with the "Family Guy" creator's feature writing/directing debut. The fantasy concept of a foul-mouthed teddy bear and his adult best friend is pulled off with ease. The big surprise is that the comedy feels like a conventional rom-com, albeit with a talking teddy bear as the third wheel and romantic obstacle. FJI's Michael Sauter was more receptive to the "comedy, [which] wants to simultaneously shock, delight and knock you a little bit sideways," and predicts it will be a "smashing success." If its predicted opening in the high $20 millions counts, Ted may be just that.

Channing Tatum was actually a male stripper, and probably a good one too. He shows off his impressive dance skills and flips in Magic Mike (2,930 theatres). Steven Soderbergh directs the dance-fueled drama, which has received generally good notices from critics. FJI's David Noh disagrees. Except for Tatum, he wasn't intrigued by the dancers or their moves, and feels the whole movie has a "strange lack of sexiness." Cinema Blend's Katey Rich came out positively for the feature, noting that with its message "about dreams that curdle and get deferred, about how you need more money than what's stuffed in a G-string to make it in this world, but how those $1 bills can make it easier to wait" could have been "disastrous when combined," but "Soderbergh makes it look easy." During Thursday midnight screenings, Ted earned $2.6 million and Magic Mike $2.1 million, so both R-rated flicks are set to perform well over the course of the weekend.

A man finds out he has a half-sister after his father's passing in People Like Us (2,055 theatres). "Enough honest hurt pokes through to make it impossible to dismiss the film outright," FJI critic Daniel Eagan says of the "sentimental" film featuring soul-baring that's "simultaneously moving and manipulative." With a kind of generic premise and not a lot of marketing support, it could be tough for this drama to even crack $10 million.

Tyler Perry's signature funny grandma character returns in Madea's Witness Protection (2,161 theatres). Audiences have slightly tired of Perry's outings lately, but loyal fans should bring the comedy's opening above $20 million. The recession-influenced tale includes a church that was ripped off by duplicitous investors, a ripped-from-the-headlines premise that could pull in additional viewers.

Sundance prizewinner Beasts of the Southern Wild (4 theatres) opened on Wednesday, when it earned $6,700 per screen. That's not particularly high, but the weekend will be the true test for the unusual, expressionistic drama. Some are saying its box-office target will be similar to the one for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, another Fox Searchlight release which ended up with $13 million last summer.

Also in the specialty mix this weekend is Take This Waltz (2 theatres), an unwieldy exploration of a love triangle that left me with mixed feelings. I found most of the film boring but really liked the ending (when it finally happened). Moonrise Kingdom expands to 854 theatres this weekend. I've seen plenty of TV ads supporting the expansion, which I predict will unfold quite well for the strongly-performing release.

On Monday, we'll see which of the four releases broke from the pack, and if Beasts' debut adds more momentum to its critical buzz.

Jackie Chan signs up for another action-comedy

Recently, I was at the Egg Rolls and Egg Creams Festival, a Chinese-Jewish celebration in NYC that reflects the fact that the Lower East Side Eldridge Street Synagogue, is now considered to be in Chinatown thanks to that neighborhood's shifting border. For the crowds, performers trained in Chinese opera staged a comedic action sequence that involved lots of missed blows and bumbling performers--not to mention handstands and backflips (here's an acting class performing a similar scene--with only simple acrobatics). The kids in the audience had a serious case of the giggles, but the slo-mo performance required patience and imagination. Not exactly the thing for a video-game nation. As I finished off my egg cream, I reflected that the performance reminded me a bit of Jackie Chan. So imagine my satisfaction when I discovered that the actor was trained in Peking Opera as a child. A bit different than its European counterpart, Peking Opera requires performers to be proficient in acrobatics--the better to choreograph the fight sequences. That revelation adds to my respect of Chan as a performer.

Chan is returning to the action-comedy format that has brought him success in America. In a new English-language project, he will play a detective who is trying to track down an American who has stiffed a Macau casino. Described as a "two-hander," this means another action star with strong name recognition will play opposite Chan. But who? Chan has previously played opposite Chris Tucker in Rush Hour and Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon. I wonder which star will step up. Currently, the newbie writer/director Jay Longino, who doesn't have the most impressive IMDB page, will direct from a script he's writing.

Because this will be a Chinese coproduction, the action-comedy will have more-than-usual profit potential. China limits the number of Hollywood films that can release in the nation each year, but has special exemptions for coproductions. That will make it that much easier for the English-language film to recoup its investment. Now, courtesy of YouTube, here's Jackie Chan singing opera.

Remembering Nora Ephron

Celebrity passings don't usually get to me, but Nora Ephron's hit me harder on two accounts: She was too young, and she made such great contributions to film history. Ephron was one of the few female commercial directors out there. When her films were good, they were very very good. I count When Harry Met Sally... as one of my favorite films, and Sleepless in Seattle, the underrated You've Got Mail, and Julie & Julia are all up there.

With her romantic comedies, Ephron pulled off an increasingly rare achievement: making the audience believe and understand why the characters weren't together...yet. So often in romantic comedies, I think 'Just get together already.' Her characters had to grow and heal as individuals before they could be together as a couple. Their initial dislike or skepticism of each other burns as a slow simmer. Ephron was a remarkable filmmaker, a funny writer (I liked I Feel Bad About My Neck even though I'm decades away from a saggy neck), and as the New York Times obituary attests, a genuinely nice person. I hear there aren't too many of those in Hollywood.

Eprhon was a writer loved by writers, so it's no wonder the Internet has seen a flurry of articles commemorating her passing. Here are a few responses from around the web.

Slate compiles three memorable clips from her movies and their writer Emily Yoffe reflects on "Growing Up with Nora Ephron." Focusing on Ephron's writing career, Thinkprogress.org presents the piece "Remembering Nora Ephron, And How Her Essays Made Her Movies Better." New York Magazine talks about the Ephron-Lena Dunham connection and links to Ephron's pieces that appeared in the magazine.

There are too many great Ephron-written scenes to count, but I always think of the emotional whiplash present in the "Surrey with the Fringe on the Top" karaoke scene in When Harry Met Sally... One minute, Harry and Sally are a budding couple. The next, Harry shows himself to be still distraught over his ex, not to mention publically mortified over their bad karaoke skills. There's so much happening, but so little dialogue. Ephron may have written great back-and-forth exchanges, but she also knew when to shut up. Revisit that scene below.

 

Aruba Fest spotlights movies about movies

Claudio Masenza, the director of the Aruba International Film Festival, is not only a journalist and consultant to the Venice and Rome Film Festivals, he’s also the writer-director of several documentaries on Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and Alfred Hitchcock. Which may explain why there are several documentaries in the 2012 Aruba lineup about films and filmmakers.

With Aruba’s Dutch heritage, it should come as no surprise that two of those movies center on Dutch auteurs. On Sunday night, the fest screened Anton Corbijn Inside Out, an intimate portrait of the photographer and pioneering music-video director who graduated to feature films with the acclaimed Control and the George Clooney thriller The American. The taciturn, introspective Corbijn opens up about his emotionally withholding parents to director Klaartje Quirlijns; for him, salvation came from rock music, and before long he was photographing iconic images of icons like Mick Jagger, Miles Davis and Iggy Pop (naked in Central Park!). The next step was striking music-videos for the likes of Nirvana, U2 and Depeche Mode, and then his logical feature debut was Control, about troubled Joy Division leader Ian Curtis (whom he once photographed). Featuring excerpts from his classic videos and appearances by U2’s Bono, Lou Reed, Metallica and Arcade Fire, Inside Out (with a great Dolby Surround mix) offers a strong case for Corbijn’s talent and influence, despite his glum onscreen persona.

A much livelier filmmaker is Holland’s Pim de la Parra, the outspoken subject of In-Soo Radstake’s entertaining doc Parradox. A true bad boy of Dutch cinema whose films often feature graphic nudity (one of his actors complains, “You were usually naked by page three”), de la Parra made an artistic breakthrough with his 1976 comedy-drama Wan Pipel (One People), also screened in a restored print at the festival and reported on in our Monday blog post. But, with its black central character and its tale of racial culture clashes in Suriname, the film was a commercial flop and coincided with money woes at de la Parra’s production company and the end of his marriage. But de la Parra pressed on, pioneering “minimal movies” done on very low budget. (“Why not? Holland is a minimal country,” he argues.)

This volatile, immodest but utterly charming filmmaker lays his life bare for director Radstake, even orchestrating a reunion with Willeke van Ammelrooy, the Dutch star of Wan Pipel who’s been brooding for decades over his cruel treatment of her during the making of that film. In a unique ploy, Radstake actually films de la Parra watching the unfinished documentary, laughing and crying in close-up—scenes that are then included in the completed documentary. Despite its warts-and-all portrait, de la Parra seemed delighted with Parradox at last night’s Aruba screening.

The Aruba schedule also includes Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (unfortunately, the print had not arrived for yesterday’s first screening), and Hollywood Invasion, a one-hour assemblage of NBC news reports on Hollywood’s love affair with Europe, from the 1959 making of Ben-Hur through epics like Cleopatra and Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. Though essentially cobbled together, the doc does offer rare glimpses of some movie icons in their prime, with Sophia Loren winning Miss Congeniality.

Last night also saw the first screening here of James Franco’s Sal, his recreation of the last day in the life of Rebel Without a Cause star Sal Mineo, who was murdered at the age of 37 outside his apartment building in 1976. Those expecting more than a mundane slice of life will be streaming for the exits—Franco shows Mineo exercising at the gym, getting a massage, playing with his neighbor’s dog, rehearsing his play P.S. Your Cat Is Dead and making phone calls asking friends to come to opening night. But the film does have a sense of authenticity for the period and what this then-struggling gay actor’s daily routine was like, and actor Val Lauren, never off-screen, is surprisingly persuasive.

At the Aruba Fest: Ray Liotta on acting and the making of 'GoodFellas'

“I’ve never been in a fight,” Ray Liotta confessed at an often hilariously blunt public Q&A session (and earlier press conference) at the Aruba International Film Festival yesterday, demystifying his movie tough-guy image. “The guys I knew in high school just laugh their balls off.”

Liotta was in Aruba for a special screening of his 1990 gangster classic GoodFellas, a movie he hadn’t seen since it first debuted 22 years ago. The actor was proud to be accompanied by his 13-year-old daughter, who was viewing the film for the first time. “She thought it was the best movie she’d ever seen,” he beamed, “and she’s the first to say, ‘Dad, that was horrible.’”

For Liotta, memories of the making of GoodFellas are bittersweet, since his mother was dying of cancer during the shoot. To prepare for the part of mobster Henry Hill (who died last week), Liotta would drive around in his mother’s car listening to tapes Hill had made recounting his career in crime. “But he was always chewing potato chips,” the actor recalled. “It drove me nuts.”

Director Martin Scorsese discouraged Liotta from meeting Hill before the film, to avoid biasing his performance. But the actor later encountered Hill in a bowling alley in the San Fernando Valley. “He said, ‘Thanks for not making me a scumbag.’ I said, ‘Did you see the movie?’”

Many years later, Liotta saw Hill again, passed out on the lawn outside a Mexican restaurant. “He was a really messed-up guy,” his cinema alter-ego concluded. “Maybe he’s finally at peace.”

GoodFellas’ celebrated “You think I’m funny?” scene came out of a rehearsal improv, Liotta revealed, inspired by co-star Joe Pesci’s own encounter with a Mafia hothead. Liotta has recently worked with improv-loving comedy directors like Jody Hill and David Wain, but he cautioned, “Improv needs to be within a structure.”

Method acting and other navel-gazing approaches to the craft are not Liotta’s thing. “It’s all about playing pretend,” he said several times during the session. In the audience were a father and his 12-year-old aspiring-actor son who had watched GoodFellas the night before. (“You’re an irresponsible dad,” Liotta chided.) Asked to provide some acting advice for the youngster, Liotta reiterated, “All it is is pretend. Don’t let people say it’s more than what it is.” After a pause, he added, “You got that, little fucker?”

Liotta swore he never wanted to be an actor. He was a student at the University of Miami where “you just needed a pulse” to get accepted. “I took a theatre class just to fuck around,” he recalled, and he tried out for the school play (a musical, he soon learned to his horror) just to get closer to a cute co-ed. A decade later, his friendship with fellow student Steven Bauer helped him land his breakout role in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, which starred Bauer’s then-wife, Melanie Griffith. Liotta didn’t want to use his connections, but his dad, a politician, encouraged him to make the call to Griffith that got him his decisive audition.

Liotta has worked with such top directors as Scorsese, Demme and Ridley Scott, and he said the measure of a great filmmaker is that he’s “passionate about a make-believe situation.” Liotta never wanted to direct himself, but said he would now consider it “after a lot of half-assed directors I’ve worked with.”

Liotta said he feels bad for young actors today whose options are more limited to superhero parts and fewer films with an independent sensibility. (Indeed, when he first broke through in the late ’80s, he dismissed the idea of working in Tim Burton’s Batman with “How stupid is that?”)

The actor isn’t concerned that he’s best remembered for so many villainous or criminal roles; people tend to overlook Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s more sympathetic performances too, he argued. “There’s something about bad guys that stands out.” Still, he admitted, “I would like to kiss a woman [onscreen] without having to choke her.”

Another Monday highlight in Aruba was a screening of a restored print of Dutch director Pim de la Parra’s 1976 film Wan Pipel (One People). When the movie was introduced as “a masterpiece of Suriname cinema,” the filmmaker immodestly (but quite justifiably) corrected his host: “It’s a masterpiece of Caribbean cinema.” This wonderful comedy-drama concerns Roy, a young black Surinamese studying economics in Amsterdam and living with a white Dutch woman, who journeys back home to see his dying mother. There, he’s invigorated by the robust culture he left behind and soon begins an affair with a lovely Hindu woman. That relationship prompts outrage from both his rigid father and the girl’s devout parents. The clashing of the black and Hindu communities, complicated further when Roy’s Dutch lover arrives in Suriname, is handled with a light comic touch that doesn’t neglect the dark undercurrents exposing the tensions that keep Suriname’s many cultures from merging into “one people.” The very vocal Aruba audience loved this 36-year-old movie, which de la Parra argued is as timely as ever. “What you see still exists,” he declared, with a downbeat addendum: “It will never change.” Here’s hoping for some North American exposure for this masterpiece of not just Caribbean but world cinema.

How over-the-top can a movie trailer be? Check out the one for 'Alex Cross'

Actor/writer/director/producer Tyler Perry is best known for his funny grandma character, Madea, but has opted for something more serious by taking on the titular role in Alex Cross, an adaptation of James Patterson's crime novel series about an FBI profiler who tracks down serial and other demented killers. Morgan Freeman played Alex Cross in 1997's Kiss the Girls and 2001's Along Came a Spider. A decade later, Perry has stepped into the role, acting in a project he neither wrote nor directed--something he hasn't done outside of a small role in 2009's Star Trek.

The trailer for the October release from Summit Entertainment just hit the Internet. To say the movie is pulpy is an understatement. The often over-the-top dialogue sounds ripped from the pages of the source material, Patterson's Cross (the twelfth book in the series). Perry's character tries to parse a serial killer's motives, leading to ominously-delivered gems such as "He's ex-military. Special forces judging by his tactics. Trying to make someone hurt. Wants somebody to pay, wants the world to suffer." This is "Law & Order" kicked up several notches.

 

 

A nice pulpy crime thriller can be exactly what people need, especially during an off month like October. It's possible Alex Cross could have the success of Taken. In that film, Liam Neeson's daughter was kidnapped. In this film, Cross' wife becomes a target for the serial killer. The Lincoln Lawyer, a legal thriller starring Matthew McConaughey, crossed the $50 million mark last year with a similarly pulpy tête-à-tête between the good guy and the bad guy. These movies are generally in that "dead zone" of budgeting, $25-75 million. They need some effects, but no monsters destroying bridges or epic car chases. They're the kind of movies that some people save for an evening in rather than an evening out. As the trailer makes perfectly clear, by giving up twists that have to be in the third act (wife may be a target! killer uses scuba gear to get into building through pipes!), you'll know exactly what you're getting when you buy your ticket to Alex Cross. For a lot of people, that's a good thing.

 

Island pride: Aruba Film Festival cheers local Caribbean heroes

This week, Screener has the good fortune to be blogging from the third annual Aruba International Film Festival (AIFF), where the sun is baking but the breezes from the sparkling ocean are constant. AIFF was founded in 2010 by producers Jonathan Vieira and Giuseppe Cioccarelli, and it’s already used its destination appeal to attract such talents as Richard Gere, Jonathan Demme, Patricia Clarkson, Kim Cattrall, renowned editor Thelma Schoonmaker and Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. Its chief creative force is festival director Claudio Masenza, a veteran Italian journalist, screenwriter and documentary director who has served on the selection committee of the Venice Film Festival and consultant for the Rome International Film Festival.

AIFF’s 2012 schedule of 34 features and 10 shorts is an eclectic mix of offerings from Europe, the USA, South America, Australia, Canada, Japan and Lebanon, along with its most essential program, the “Caribbean Spotlight Series.” So many films from the Caribbean never surface in the States or other world markets that AIFF provides a rare chance to see what’s happening cinema-wise in this inviting part of the globe.

After three days, the most popular feature here in Aruba is surely Children of the Wind, Daphne Schmon’s documentary about how the tiny Caribbean island of Bonaire (with a mere 15,000 residents and no traffic lights) emerged as a powerhouse in the competitive sport of windsurfing. The film mainly focuses on brothers Tonky and Taty Frans and their cousin Kiri Thode—all incredibly photogenic—who brought dazzling new energy to the sport with their unprecedented freestyle maneuvers that left their previously dominant European rivals with mouths agape. The boys are now among the top five freestyle windsurfers in the world and huge celebrities in their homeland, an inspiration for all young people on this island that, one native jokes, outsiders often refer to as “Bon-Where?”.

Deftly edited, Children of the Wind provides a brief history of windsurfing’s evolution (it became an Olympic sport in 1984) and how, thanks to pioneers like Elvis Martinus and Patun Saragoza, Bonaire’s fishing community became so adept at it. But this is more than just a sports movie; it’s also a tale of race, class, deprivation and determination. The irresistible smiling faces of Tonky and Taty hide some traumatic childhood experiences which filmmaker Schmon sensitively reveals.

Bonaire’s local sports heroes were at the Saturday night screening, which took on the excitement of a live arena event from the enthusiasm of the Caribbean folks in the audience. The next morning, AIFF brought the visiting press out to sea in a catamaran to watch Tonky, Taty, Kiri and their compatriots in action; it was a thrilling sight. I have no doubt that North America will soon be seeing Children of the Wind for itself, at the very least as a staple of cable sports channels. The film, by the way, just won the Caribbean Spotlight Audience Award.

Another sports movie, Ballplayer: Pelotero, shared the Caribbean Spotlight Jury Award with Jamaican drama Ghett’a Life. Ballplayer, picked up by Strand Releasing for the U.S., explores the phenomenon of the Dominican presence (some 20% of total players) in Major League Baseball. Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jon Paley’s documentary focuses on two talented teenage aspirants among the thousands of mostly poor Dominicans in training camps, dreaming of that multi-million-dollar professional contract. Each seems to be on a smooth road to glory when complications set in, mainly due to MLB’s wariness over past instances of fraud. (Candidates are signed once they turn 16, but many applicants have shaved years from their resumes and even hidden their real identities.) Miguel Angel Sanó’s story is especially poignant—he’s a truly exceptional athlete but he looks awfully mature for 16, and MLB puts him through an unending battery of tests (bone scans, DNA) to certify that he really is that young.

One of the coaches likens these eager ballplayers to a harvest: “When it grows, you sell it.” This baseball-island connection goes back decades: Four outstanding Dominican players in the 1962 San Francisco Giants were signed for a total of $5,000, a pittance compared to what their American teammates were getting. Once again, it all comes down to race, class and power.

The jury gave a special mention to América, Sonia Fritz’s drama about a young woman (the compelling Lymari Nadal in the title role) who flees her abusive lover in Vieques (the small island east of Puerto Rico that was a U.S. Navy bombing test site) for a new life with family in New York City and as a nanny for a constantly bickering upper-class couple. Her exile is even more painful because she’s left behind a 14-year-old daughter who’s run off with a boyfriend. The scenes with América’s Bronx family (including “Ugly Betty” dad Tony Plana) are especially winning and warm, and Nadal effortlessly earns our sympathy for her struggle. The melodramatic climax, after América’s volatile ex-lover tracks her down, seems to belong in another, more genre-oriented film, but to be fair, that sequence was hampered by digital projection glitches at the screening.

In a Q&A after the screening, the engaging Fritz revealed that her film was shot in 18 days, a remarkable feat for a picture this stylishly directed. América played in eight theatres in Puerto Rico for two months, and surely has enough wide audience potential for a U.S. theatrical release, especially with our growing Latino population.

A standout attraction of the Aruba Fest is its intimate Q&As with visiting celebrities. Virginia Madsen, who co-stars with Morgan Freeman in the sweet opening-night film The Magic of Belle Isle, was refreshingly candid in her conversation with “Extra” correspondent Ben Lyons. The Sideways Oscar nominee laughed about her image as a voluptuous ’80s starlet (“The ‘girls’ walked in before me” at auditions) and advised that the attitudes towards actresses “of a certain age” are always “someone else’s perception.” She also confided a harrowing story about a low point in her career when her house was about to be foreclosed on and she considered taking a role in which she would be required to jump into a swimming pool filled with rats. Seeing that as a metaphor for her career, she turned it down, and within two weeks fate offered her a lucrative TV movie opposite Tom Selleck.

Madsen, still quite beautiful, confessed to gushing over Morgan Freeman at their first meeting at his American Film Institute tribute. The two stars have a lovely rapport in Rob Reiner’s movie, a chemistry that sparked, Madsen said, from their mutual love of Frank Sinatra songs.

Oscar-winning editor Pietro Scalia’s session was more of a tutorial on his approach to film editing. He called editing “the third stage of rewriting the film,” noting that “nothing is a given” at that stage. He showed the opening scene of Gladiator and shared how the first symbolic shot of a hand gliding through a wheat field came to him during the editing process. Scalia followed with the virtuosic opening sequence of JFK (which got a big round of applause) and a helicopter raid scene from Black Hawk Down inspired by alien-invasion thrillers.

Scalia is the editor of two big summer 3D movies, Prometheus and The Amazing Spider-Man, and he offered some extremely sensible advice on editing (and directing) for 3D. You need to be conscious of how long it takes the eye to settle, he declared, and “the proper geometry of space is something you can’t cheat.” For fast-cut action scenes, he recommends adjusting the convergence so that the images are shallower, closer to 2D. Scalia’s handiwork is there for all to see in the impactful visuals of Prometheus now on worldwide screens.

The Aruba International Film Festival is also a music festival, it turns out, and the first two nights featured 100-minute outdoor concerts from Latin music superstars Juanes and Marc Anthony. As the thousands of spectators sang along to nearly every song, this New Yorker realized there really is a whole other world of pop culture out there. When I get back, I’m ordering my first Juanes CD.