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Grand Theft Auto Box Office: Trade Roughage 04/16/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 6 months ago
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  • Analysts are expecting opening week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. Why do we care? Because, as Ben Fritz puts it at Variety, that’ll be “close to, if not above, the No. 1 film bow of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which grossed $404 million worldwide in its first six days. For a taste of what the fuss is about, check out the game’s trailer above.
  • After the massive success on the site of the film’s soundtrack, Juno became the first Fox film to became available for download-to-own on iTunes yesterday, the same day as its DVD release.
  • Universal’s Vivendi Entertainment has made its first theatrical acquisition with New York, New York, that omnibus thing with the Natalie Portmans and the Scarlett Johanssons and the etcs.

BlogNosh 12/12/07

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 10 months ago
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  • “There are all these people who are like a non-people living here in caravans, 15 to a house in parts of England. Completely under the radar, completely unprotected. Like Dickensian England, it’s all here. These people are working for Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and ASDA, [they] all pretend they don’t know it’s going on. And the government pretends it doesn’t know it’s going on. They’ve designed everything so that those people can be used to keep the cost of living low. There like this sub-human race and I realized that this is really widespread.” From RCRD LBL’s “exclusive interview” with Nick Broomfield, whose narrative feature Ghosts just came out on DVD in the UK.
  • Coen Brothers blogathon alert: “Seeing as the Coen Brothers and their new movie haven’t gotten enough blogosphere attention, we here decided we would talk about the Coen Brothers and what their new movie has done to and in their body of work.” The show goes down Friday the 21st at Vinyl is Heavy.
  • “At the moment, it looks like a good chunk of my annual top-ten will be dominated by Westerns and Musicals,” writes Filmbrain. “Go figure.” I totally agree with him on Michael Clayton, which I finally saw on Monday and which is such a disappointment–if there was an award for the Best Final Reel Totally Undeserved By The 90 Minutes That Precede It, this one would win in a landslide.
  • Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is, according to Nathan Rabin, “unmistakably a coke movie. It has coke’s jittery, paranoid rhythms: the maddeningly repetitive circular conversations, the pummeling emotional intensity, the screaming matches, and ragged, overreaching ambition. It’s the kind of movie that shows up at your doorstep at four in the morning looking bleary-eyed and desperate and angrily demands $400 for something it doesn’t feel comfortable talking about.”

Kovacs, Toronto, Telluride: Trade Roughage 07/24/07

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago
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  • Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born master cinematographer who shot Paper Moon, Easy Rider and Ghostbusters, has died. A documentary about Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is currently in the works. Above: a clip from one of his most visually stunning works, Martin Scorsese’s batshit-insane 1977 musical New York, New York, via YouTube.
  • The Telluride Film Festival has invited Edith R. Kramer to serve as guest diretor of the 2007 festivities. Kramer served as lead curator at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive for two decades, and as Telluride’s Tom Luddy notes in this press release, “Her international reputation will result in Kramer bringing movies to Telluride that nobody else could get from archives.”
  • George A. Romero’s latest will debut in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival. The director promises that George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is “not a sequel or a remake, it’s a whole new beginning for the dead.”