Cinematical

Oliver Stone's W. has screened for the more important among us, and I am pleasantly surprised to report that people are not openly laughing at it. Some seem downright impressed. Here, for example is David Poland on The Hot Blog:

"[Josh] Brolin should be nominated for the Oscar. We'll see whether the crowd around Best Actor is too big for him to crack, but it is a letter perfect performance that looks much, much easier than most critics and audiences, I think, will understand . . . . The only downside is that the movie doesn't offer the massive supporting cast a lot of big awards-style moments. They are just really, really good. And that really should be enough."

Variety's Todd McCarthy is a bit more mixed than Poland, but concedes that W. "offers a clear and plausible take on the current chief executive's psychological makeup and, considering Stone's reputation and Bush's vast unpopularity, a relatively even-handed, restrained treatment of recent politics." And Kirk Honeycutt over at The Hollywood Reporter says that though the film is more bold than it is good, "Stone goes out of his way to give Bush a fair hearing."

Over the summer, I guffawed at the notion that Stone was going to be fair and sympathetic to Bush in W., but it looks like I may be eating those words before too long. Apparently the problem people are having with the film isn't its politics but its lack of formal audacity, which is the opposite what I expected to hear. But it's certainly good to learn that Stone at least attempts a serious treatment of the subject -- those script pages that Slate "leaked" a while back could have fooled me.

Man is M. Night Shyamalan ever a strange dude -- and this is coming from probably one of the biggest fans he has left.

In this interview with Sci-Fi Wire, the filmmaker announces that he is still contemplating making a sequel to Unbreakable, his 2000 comic book genre-bender. He doesn't quite have the story, but says that "I know me: As soon as I give up on it is when the idea will come to me." Fantastic! Seeing as Unbreakable is one of my favorite movies of the decade, I'm obviously excited about any prospect of Shyamalan returning to that universe. And maybe it's just the ticket to restore his suddenly-struggling career.

But then I read the rest of the article, and... uh... he needs to hire a (better) publicist. Discussing how he felt after Unbreakable's mixed reception, he says that he was heartbroken, lamenting: "God, I took so many incredible risks." And then, as he describes his (quite correct) realization that the film actually has a good number of admirers, he relates this anecdote: "I'll be on the street, and some kid will run across traffic with it in his backpack--he just is carrying it in his backpack--and he'll be running [saying], 'I can't believe it's you!' Will you sign my Unbreakable DVD?' And quoting the thing and all that stuff."

This summer's Get Smart reboot, with Steve Carell as Maxwell, was far from brilliant, but sweet Jebus, Carell is funny. His improvised dance with a bewildered-but-willing overweight partygoer is one of this year's comic highlights -- a perfect blend of good-natured mockery and non sequitur. So the official announcement of the inevitable sequel strikes me as a good thing. I doubt they'll ever come up with any sort of finely tuned masterwork, but I figure it's guaranteed to have a bunch of great moments. Big budget comedies are often so dire that "uneven with flashes of inspiration" is music to my ears.

Even better, the success of Get Smart has earned Carell a three-year deal with Warner Bros., giving him a chance to develop both starring vehicles and projects for others. It's good to see the right people take off like this, y'know? On the other hand, it's kind of unfair: why do today's teenagers get to inhabit a comedic landscape dominated by the likes of Carell, Judd Apatow, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen, etc., while I got Adam Sandler and Mike Myers? Kids these days, they don't know how good they got it.

I guess I liked Mike Myers back when; I was 13 when the first Austin Powers came out. I still kind of like him. But he's certainly overshadowed by the crop of comics in today's mainstream.

Eric D. Snider tried his best to trick me into watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua this week. It didn't work on me, but it worked on millions of Snider acolytes all over North America, who joined forces to give the talking-animals kidflick a strong $29 million, first-place debut. I didn't see it, as I say, so it would be wrong for me to bemoan the decline of civilization that this surely (if unsurprisingly) represents. Feel free to do so in the comments.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist opened to $12 million and third place, which I'd have to say is okay for the low-profile, borderline-niche film. That number, though not terribly impressive, is actually a fair testament to Michael Cera's star power, since his presence was literally the only mass-marketable aspect of the movie. So the debut is at least a draw for Sony.

It was an interesting weekend in that there were several films opening in, or expanding into, semi-wide release. The biggest winner of that bunch has to be Religulous, Bill Maher's aggressively anti-faith documentary, which did $3.5 million on around 500 screens for $6,972 per screen. Given the preaching-to-the-relatively-small-choir quality of the film, I don't expect it to hold up too well in the weeks ahead, but this level of interest is a mild surprise. Facing off against Religulous ideologically was David Zucker's conservative spoof An American Carol which, according to the estimates, edged out Religulous with $3.8 million on over 1,600 screens.

Ed Harris's lightweight western Appaloosa expanded to roughly 1,000 screens and took in $5 million -- which is okay, but seems like a missed opportunity. Faring worse were Flash of Genius (1100 screens) and Blindness (1700), with $2.3 and $2 million respectively, both landing outside the top 10. The grim Blindness was a no-sale from the beginning, especially since the critics never got on board, but the unabashedly populist Flash of Genius underperformed. Maybe the ads emphasized windshield wipers too much.

A bit more plus the weekend's top 12 after the jump.

Somehow I missed this on Thursday, but apparently so did everyone else, since I didn't see it linked anywhere. Roger Ebert was hanging out at a post-production studio in Chicago, watching the restored new print of The Godfather, when he was unexpectedly joined by Larry and Andy Wachowski, the famously inaccessible duo behind The Matrix, Speed Racer, and (people forget) Bound. Afterward, he got a chance to chat with them -- not in a conventional interview setting, complete with a hovering publicist (the brothers don't do that, remember?), but over a beer.

Ebert was impressed with the "zillionaires": "Nice people. Friendly. No Hollywood attitude." He writes that "[t]he blogosphere paints them as mysterious recluses, which may add to the legend but doesn't match the reality." But their being nice and friendly doesn't make them any less mysterious and reclusive: I'd wager that Ebert only ran the piece because of their reputation for not giving interviews or talking to anyone in the press.

Anyway, it's really interesting to "hear" them speak, though they mostly talk about the difficulties of keeping a moving 35 mm shot in focus and the brilliance of Coppola's Godfather shot selection. It's funny how keeping silent for a while will make such brief, mundane snippets into objects of arcane fascination. (Though since I think the Wachowskis are pretty formidable visual artists themselves, I find their perspective on that sort of thing interesting in its own right.)

No photo, of course; all you get is that old shot of the two admiring a Matrix comic book.

I defended the Saw franchise long past the point where most self-respecting cinephiles and even genre geeks abandoned it. It was only after the moronic, baffling Saw IV that I got off the bandwagon. But as someone who thinks the franchise has (had?) something to offer beyond the admittedly questionable thrills of what smug know-nothings call "torture porn," I'm anticipating this month's annual installment with an ever-so-slight glimmer of hope. The first three films took a gimmicky serial killer concept and expanded it to something big and increasingly baroque, piling on twist after twist that, to me, consistently seemed bold rather than (merely) ludicrous. They were gruesome, yes, but they were also moody and visually exciting; Darren Lynn Bousman, in particular, seemed to take painstaking care in the second and third films to construct a cruel, self-contained universe around the crazy-ass story.

So here, briefly, are three things Saw V -- which sees the franchise's production designer David Hackl take over directing duties from Bousman -- could do to avoid the pitfalls of its immediate predecessor and restore my faith in the series.

Not a lot of people liked Eagle Eye (I thought it wasn't bad, myself), but at least it broke up the box office monotony a bit. Its $29.2 million finish is the highest weekend gross for any movie since the first weekend in August (The Dark Knight's third week at the top). A combination of strong marketing and Shia LaBeouf's draw probably did the trick for the film, which had a slew of bad reviews to overcome.

The Nicholas Sparks weeper Nights in Rodanthe took in $13.6 million for second place. That is actually almost precisely in line with Sparks' hit The Notebook, but that film hung around for weeks back in 2004, buoeyed by strong word-of-mouth. That seems unlikely for the more soap opera-ish Rodanthe.

Sneaking its way to fourth place on just over 800 screens is a movie called Fireproof, which you may not have run across unless you're a regular churchgoer. (We literally have not mentioned it here on Cinematical.) The Christian-themed movie starring Kirk Cameron had the second best per-screen average in the top 10, demonstrating the continued potency of marketing to religious audiences. Spike Lee's more obliquely religious Miracle at St. Anna, on the other hand, flopped with $3.5 million and 9th place.

A bit below the top 10, in semi-wide release, the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke performed unspectacularly with $1.3 million on 435 screens. Still further down you'll find one of the year's most undignified crash-and-burns: Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones, about three soldiers returned from Iraq, which landed in 25th place with $208,000 on 425 screens, for $489 per screen. Ouch.

Find the full weekend estimates after the jump.

It would be nice to be able to say that the Coens are finally getting some drawing power, but I suspect the insane cast of Burn After Reading -- Pitt, Clooney, Malkovich, Swinton, McDormand -- had something to do with its exceptionally strong $19.4 million bow, the Coens' strongest ever. It barely beat out The Family That Preys, which opened to $18.02 -- slightly below par for Tyler Perry, though still nabbing the highest per-screen average in the top 10 on just over 2000 screens.

The third-place, $16.5 million take for Righteous Kill seems about right: a compromise between the draw of De Niro and Pacino, and the toxic buzz surrounding the film. As for The Women, $10 million isn't exactly gangbusters, but probably more than Picturehouse had any right to expect given that the movie came out of nowhere.

Anna Faris's The House Bunny has turned into a minor hit; it took a 22% drop from last weekend, and has passed the $40 million mark. Not bad for a late-August release with no real star power. Bangkok Dangerous is dead in the water, dropping from 4th to 8th place; it will top out at around $15 million.

And I can't resist noting what happened to Proud American, the patriotic half-doc that was dumped into 750 screens this weekend by Slowhand Cinema. It landed below the top 25, with $135,000 and a $180 per-screen average. That's for the whole weekend. If you take $6.50 as an average ticket price (a bit below the actual average, but probably reasonable given that the interest for this film was probably not in major metropolitan markets), that's comes out to an awesome 28 people per theater, and around 2 people per show. Whoo!

The full estimates after the jump.

I am pretty sure I saw at least two, and possibly three, future Oscar nominees in the new trailer for John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, now available over here. If nothing else, you'd be a fool to bet against 1) Meryl Streep, 2) playing a righteous nun, 3) in an adaptation of a Pulitzer-Prize winning play. There are few sure things in Hollywood, but come on. I'd almost say the same for Philip Seymour Hoffman as a (possible) child molester, and I think the oddly unrecognizable Amy Adams has a sporting chance as well.

Streep's role here -- a stern nun who accuses a priest of sexually abusing a young boy -- looks like a variation on Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, if The Devil Wears Prada had been serious business instead of silliness. "I was not inviting a guessing game, Sister Raymond." Her response to Hoffman's hateful "I can fight you" is basically the greatest line delivery of all time. "The dragon is hungry," indeed.

I can't wait to see this; I really wanted to see the play on Broadway, but never got around to it. Watching Streep and Hoffman face off, with strong material backing them up, is a dream come true. Doubt is set for a December 12th release.

About a week ago, word spread that Robert De Niro had walked off the set of Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness. A spokesman for De Niro explained it to us like idiots: "Sometimes things don't work out; it's called creative differences." De Niro would have co-starred with Mel Gibson as an agent tasked with cleaning up evidence of a murder Gibson's homicide detective is trying to investigate.

It seems that Campbell has found his replacement: the great Ray Winstone, who is currently in negotiations to step into the role. Winstone obviously doesn't have De Niro's profile, which is a loss for a film that's benefited from a considerable amount of hype before even starting principal photography (most of it having to do with Mel Gibson's return to acting after six years). But he certainly has the chops.

De Niro, meanwhile, faces a test of his drawing power this weekend with the release of Righteous Kill. The marketing campaign has concentrated exclusively on the presence of De Niro and Al Pacino, so the question will be how many people the two of them can get into the theaters. Not that De Niro has anything to prove, as evidenced by his walking off the set of a major film two days into shooting.