Now as much as ever, Hollywood comedy is heavily preoccupied with pandering to the median. Something like Bruno is clearly designed to make the viewer feel good about their own brain power and education — each laugh is equivalent to an “I’m smart enough to behave better than that” statement, whether it’s “I’m smart enough to not hate gay people” or “I’m smart enough to not get suckered by Sacha Baron Cohen in the first place.” And nobody in the audience of a Judd Apatow film has to work very hard to get the jokes in it, although inevitably it’s suggested that most or all of the protagonists on screen weren’t gifted with the same innate intelligence. So the first thing that marks In The Loop as a break from the norm is its refusal to flatter the viewer’s intelligence; the second, is the way the film forces them to use it.
Thursday was somewhat like Wednesday as far as Sundance deals go. Only one film was picked up, and IFC Films did the buying. This time, the patient distributor acquired U.S. rights to Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a British political comedy starring James Gandolfini.
There are only a few more days left in the festival, but sales may continue through Sunday (and likely beyond). So keep checking SpoutBlog’s Sundance deals chart for any further updates over the weekend.
Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns made $20 million this weekend, which wasn’t enough to beat Horton Hears a Who at the box office. Drillbit Taylor opened with just $10 million; Variety vaguely says it’s “the second lowest” opening for Owen Wilson after The Big Bounce, but that statistic must exclude every Wes Anderson film and anything else that’s opened in platform release. Speaking of platform releases, The Weinstein Company has finally has a successful one to speak of: Under the Same Moon broke the record for the biggest opening of a Spanish-language film in the U.S. this weekend with $2.6 million on 266 screens.
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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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