Though the third Fast and the Furious installment, Tokyo Drift, wasn’t a huge box office disappointment with its $63 million domestic gross, it was significantly less successful than its predecessors, The Fast and the Furious ($145 million) and 2 Fast 2 Furious ($127 million). A fourth film would normally see an even bigger drop in box office receipts, but next week’s Fast & Furious has a good chance of actually being the highest-grossing film in the series yet, due to the return of original cast members Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordanna Brewster and, most importantly, Vin Diesel.
With the expectation that Fast & Furious will be enough of a hit to save the franchise, we take a look at ten other films that similarly kept their respective series going, either because of an increase in profits or a surprising increase in quality, following one or many disappointing installments. …Read more
The 2009 Sundance Film Festival will open with the claymation feature Mary and Max from Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot. Featuring the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, the film tells the story of a 20-year pen-pal correspondence, though Variety’s synopsis makes it sound creepier by noting that the friendship is initially between an 8-year-old girl and an obese, 42-year-old man.
Sony is making a movie about an African-American who spends 34 years in the White House. No, it’s not a hopeful prophesizing biopic of an 8½-term Obama. The adaptation of A Butler Well Served by This Election will tell the true story of Eugene Allen, who served Presidents Truman through Reagan.
Another film based on a true story is being made at Paramount about a journalist who blows the lid on a con man posing as a federal agent assigned to clean up a drug-ravaged Missouri town.
Twilight has now prematurely sold out more than 2,000 shows scheduled for tonight and this weekend, which Variety claims has given all the major studios “Twilight envy.” Really? All the studios? Because Warner Bros. seems pretty well-endowed these days.
There’s a bit in The Anatomy of Melancholy about the “madness” common to critics, artists, and philosophers, and by extension anyone who remains so lost in thought or creative action that they’re rarely actually fully present in life. “Is not he mad that draws lines with Archimedes, whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged, when the whole world is in combustion, or we whilst our souls are in danger … to spend our time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth?” And then author Robert Burton jumps straight into describing a similar sort of madness: “That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.”
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad. It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where pleasure from either is unattainable. But it’s also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, “It’s about everything.”
The Circuit points to the news that a Los Angeles art gallery has mounted a show of the paintings of Adele Lack, the estranged wife of Caden Cotard, whose portrait graces the catalog for the show. Which is interesting, because both Lack and Cotard are fictional characters, played by Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, which not coincidentally opens in New York and LA on Friday.
Even more interesting, a number of art and culture blogs have written up the opening of the show without noting even the connection to the film, never mind the fact that the paintings themselves are movie props and the artist to which they’re credited doesn’t actually exist. One site even includes an image of Keener from the film, without indicating that they’re aware that it’s a publicity still not of an artist, but of a sort-of famous actress playing an artist.
It certainly seems like clever surreptitious marketing for the film — especially for this film, which resists relegraphing its intent or meaning –– but maybe it’s *too* clever? If the show itself is as free of Synecdoche signage as many of the blog posts about it, at what point are patrons of the show (which ends on Sunday) going to make the connection?
If John McCain doesn’t become the next President of the United States, perhaps he could take a completely different sort of gig, as The Penguin in the next Batman movie. Of course, there’s already a worthy candidate for that role, too, but if Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t want the job, Christopher Nolan should give it to the senator. That is, if Nolan actually decides to include the villain in his next installment, and so far it hasn’t seemed likely that he would.
The idea of McCain as The Penguin sparked from a campaign speech the presidential candidate gave last Friday in which he inadvertently channeled Burgess Meredith while congratulating his running mate, Sarah Palin, on her performance at the VP debate the night before. Since then, YouTubers galore have sampled the speech, whether using the audio to redub a scene from Batman Returns, as you can see in today’s Clip (and here), or intercutting the audio and video with footage from Meredith’s portrayal of The Penguin on the old Batman TV show, or simply drawing in the necessary accessories and props to make McCain look like Meredith’s Penguin.
The whole trend may have actually begun with a little joke on The Young Turks talk show. But how about it? Ehh? Throughout the Town Hall debate last night, while watching McCain waddle around that stage, I couldn’t get the Penguin thing out of my mind. He’s perfect for the part. Ehh?
Everybody remembers the bigger name Coen Bros. regulars, such as John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Frances McDormand, Billy Bob Thornton and now George Clooney. And of course, there are the one-shot stars, like Nicolas Cage, Gabriel Byrne, Jeff Bridges, William H. Macy, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Julianne Moore, Paul Newman, Albert Finney, Woody Harrelson, Tim Robbins and now Brad Pitt and John Malkovich. But who ever talks about Michael Lerner? He received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Barton Fink, yet he never seems to get the same kind of respect that Javier Bardem gets, and it’s not just because Bardem won the award for No Country for Old Men.
With their new film, Burn After Reading, the Coens have again recast some lesser known character actors that I hope get the recognition they deserve. Both Richard Jenkins and J.K. Simmons have previously appeared in the Coens’ films, but each has seriously risen in notability since their last collaboration with the filmmakers. Hopefully, they’ll continue to be cast by the brothers.
Obviously, all my favorite Coen Bros. actors can’t be in every Coen Bros. movie (especially since some of them are dead). And interestingly enough, the brothers’ next film, A Serious Man, is being cast with (so far) only actors they’ve never employed. So, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the less-recognized actors and actresses who have done tremendous work for Joel and Ethan, not so much in the hopes that they’ll be re-employed (some can’t be) but in the general interest of giving them some much-needed praise.
The rite of passage into taking responsibility of another life–having a baby–has been the topic of a lot of popular movies. We don’t see very many movies about another rite of passsage, taking responsibilty over death. Specifically, the death of a parent. Prenatal wards are fun, nursing homes are not. The death of a parent brings far more complexity and reflection. So, when I saw the logline for Tamara Jenkin’s new film, The Savages, I thought this is a movie that will either be great or awful.
Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman)–both struggling playwrites–are unexpectedly given the responsibility to care for a father (who was not much of a father) as he suffers from dementia in his last few months of life. I don’t know if it’s an easy film to connect to if you’re not somebody who has admitted a parent to a nursing home. Or if you don’t have siblings choosing divergent paths in dealing with a tragi-family. But if you fall into one of those two categories, The Savages is a really rich movie, and it’s full of dark humor you have to develop when things aren’t funny. (Linney and Hoffman have unexpectedly amazing chemistry to pull this off.)
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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