The Happening had a much better opening weekend than expected (or is it feared?), coming in at third place with $32.1 million domestically, and actually beating The Incredible Hulk overall overseas. Meanwhile, Universal and Marvel insist that their superhero movie is a hit, even though it mad six million dollars less in its opening weekend than Ang Lee’s supposedly disastrous Hulk five years ago.
Werner Herzog’s “don’t call it a remake” remake of Bad Lieutenant has found a female lead in Eva Mendes, who previously starred opposite new Bad star Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider. So, to recap: Werner Herzog is restaging an Abel Ferrara movie in New Orleans, with the cast of a comic book movie about a guy on a motorcycle with a fireball for a face. Sounds about right.
Everything is Fine, one of my favorite films from Cannes, won the grand jury prize in the New Directors sidebar at the Seattle Film Festival this weekend.
__Cukor’s original, released in 1939 and based on Clare Boothe Luce’s hit play, was basically a melodrama cranked up to the tempo of screwball; the performances today play as camp, but even the comedy is underlined with some kind of emotional truth. This new trailer plays broad, broad, broad throughout. The whole idea of the text is that it offers a glimpse into the way women behave when together in uncomfortably intimate spaces; going too big with the punchlines and the delivery seems like a tonal mistake.
–Where the original film had an ultimately cynical view of female friendships, depicting them as nuanced and unstable and constantly flipping between fingers-crossed faux sympathy, outright hostility and tentative trust, thisThe Women seems to be surrounding Meg Ryan’s Mary with a Sex and the City-like cadre of demographically varied Bestest Friends. The Annette Benning character, who I think is a stand-in for Rosalind Russell in the original film, seems annoying, but hardly the busy-body back-stabber that Russell made classic.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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The Happening had a much better opening weekend than expected (or is it feared?), coming in at third place with $32.1 million domestically, and actually beating The Incredible Hulk overall overseas. Meanwhile, Universal and Marvel insist that their superhero movie is a hit, even though it mad six million dollars less in its opening weekend than Ang Lee’s supposedly disastrous Hulk five years ago.
