The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
- 'Puss in Boots' surprises with second box office win
- Scorsese embraces early cinema and 3D tech in 'Hugo'
- Eastwood, DiCaprio unveil top-cop biopic 'J. Edgar'
| 'Puss in Boots' surprises with second box office win Posted: 06 Nov 2011 09:43 PM PST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Animated film "Puss in Boots" held on to the domestic box office crown with a surprisingly strong second weekend performance that beat new Eddie Murphy comedy "Tower Heist." "Puss in Boots" brought in $33.0 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters to finish first in the weekend box office race, according to studio estimates released on Sunday. "Tower Heist," which was favored to win going into the weekend, took second place with $25.1 million. Another new comedy, "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas," earned third place with $13.1 million. "Puss in Boots" was produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc. Universal Pictures, a unit of Comcast Corp, released "Tower Heist." Time Warner unit Warner Bros. distributed "Harold & Kumar." Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Scorsese embraces early cinema and 3D tech in 'Hugo' Posted: 06 Nov 2011 05:09 PM PST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - This was supposed to be a weekend when ground zero for Southern California movie lovers was Hollywood, site of the AFI Fest. But Martin Scorsese exerts a gravitational pull all his own. So on Saturday afternoon, the action shifted to downtown Los Angeles for a couple of hours, where the Regal multiplex drew nearly 1,000 fans and industryites eager for a look at Scorsese's 3D adventure ''Hugo,'' which had previously screened only in a work-in-progress version at the New York Film Festival. Throw in a post-screening Q&A with Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, cinematographer Robert Richardson, composer Howard Shore and visual effects superviser Robert Legato, moderated by director Paul Thomas Anderson, and you had a three-hour slice of movie nirvana (plus 39 Oscar nominations and a dozen wins on one stage). And in a way, movie nirvana is what ''Hugo'' aims to be. An adaptation of ''The Invention of Hugo Cabret,'' a children's book by Brian Selznick, in Scorsese's hands it is less a children's story than a knowing and glorious tribute to early cinema from a master moviemaker who also happens to be a master movie-lover. The film will be an odd duck to market: It's partly an adventure tale about a kid who lives in a huge Paris train station, and partly a (fictionalized) story about the silent film pioneer Georges Melies (played by a marvelous Ben Kingsley). Not a kids' movie, not an art film, not a typical Scorsese effort and not necessarily an Academy movie (more on that in a minute), ''Hugo'' is instead a big shiny ball of imagination, invention and cinematic wonder. And a few hours after the downtown screening, a big room full of folks who presumably love the movies gave ''Hugo'' their own stamp of approval. The film had its official Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screening Saturday night - and according to a couple of members in attendance, the response was extremely positive, with sustained applause and a strong buzz in the room afterward. (Attendance, though, was not as high as it had been for some other recent Academy screenings, including ''The Help'' and ''Moneyball.'') Back at the downtown screening earlier in the day, Scorsese was introduced by Anderson as ''the heavyweight champ.'' The director used some of the 40-minute Q&A to detail the intricacies of filming in 3D, which he said was ''arduous but most of the time a good deal of fun.'' Shooting in 3D slowed down his usual workflow, Scorsese said, though he and Schoonmaker ended up editing the film switching between 3D and 2D monitors,. He dismissed worries about the move toward 3D, and said that the technology is ''just another element to tell a story.'' And, he added, it'll likely be followed by more and newer elements. ''We're all headed, if everything moves along and there's no major catastrophes, we're basically headed toward holograms,'' Scorsese said. ''Why can't you have (a) 3D (movie where) Hamlet comes out into the middle of the audience and does 'to be or not to be?' They do in the theater. Why can't you have it in a movie theater, or at home?'' In the meantime, he said, he's simply using the tools that are now available to deliver what moviegoers always wanted to see. ''The first time images started to move, immediately people wanted color, sound, big screen and depth,'' he said. ''And that's just what we're doing now.'' Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Eastwood, DiCaprio unveil top-cop biopic 'J. Edgar' Posted: 06 Nov 2011 05:01 PM PST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Clint Eastwood's ''J. Edgar'' is no longer stamped Top Secret. The movie, whose intended debut at the Carmel Film Festival in October was hampered by power outages, had a couple of high-profile Los Angeles unveilings in recent days. The first, its official premiere, took place Thursday night, where Eastwood's biography of the controversial FBI director was the opening-night attraction at the AFI Fest in Hollywood. The following night, ''J. Edgar'' came to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a screening and post-film Q&A with Eastwood, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer. ''J. Edgar'' is a classic biopic, big and old-fashioned and a little lumbering. It has weight and gravity, with a spirited central performance by DiCaprio all but certain to receive recognition from Oscar voters - but it's also a commercial gamble, a film unlikely to engage young moviegoers and one that certainly isn't a slam-dunk Best Picture nominee. At the LACMA screening Friday, the film was greeted with raucous applause; the audience at the Bing Theater gave Eastwood a standing ovation when he walked onstage for a Q&A that was part of the New York Times' Times Talk series. Discussing the film with the Times' Charles McGrath, Eastwood was typically matter-of-fact: ''I just have grown up with J. Edgar Hoover as the top cop - I thought it'd be very interesting.'' On the casting of DiCaprio: ''Leo called up and said 'I'd like to play that guy,' and that sounded great. The studio certainly didn't object.'' Eastwood and Black also said they found parallels between the anti-Bolshevik frenzy of 1919-20, which in Hoover's case turned into a lifelong paranoia over communism, and the post-9/11 atmosphere in the United States. ''I think there are Hoovers out there today,'' said Black (''Milk''). ''If it doesn't speak to today, there's no point in making it.'' DiCaprio said he found the character to be ''a crock-pot of eccentricities'': Hoover lived with his mother until he was 40, worked to overcome a stuttering problem, was obsessed with cleanliness and never married or had a serious relationship, except for the one with aide Clyde Tolson (Hammer), which may or may not have been sexual. Eastwood's film touches lightly on some of these traits and comes down hard on others; it spends lots of time exploring Hoover's lust for celebrity and his use of the media to paint himself as the ultimate G-man, but mostly looks away from the issue of whether Hoover and Tolson were lovers. ''The story goes beyond whether they culminated (their relationship) on a sexual level,'' DiCaprio said. ''It's not really our business what happened behind closed doors.'' The problem with this reasoning, though, is that a good chunk of the movie does consist of showing us (or speculating about) what happened behind closed doors - between Hoover and his mother (Judi Dench), Hoover and his assistant (Naomi Watts) and many others. In the end, it feels squeamish to back off in front of this particular door. At the reception afterward, reaction to the film was decided mixed, with one person saying, ''I knew nothing about the story, and I was fascinated,'' and the next calling it a missed opportunity undermined by an overly programmatic script, in which Hoover tells his life story - or runs through his greatest hits - to a succession of would-be ghost writers. One subject that was the subject of extensive post-screening discussion was the old-age makeup that DiCaprio and Hammer wear for much of the movie. At times, particularly on Hammer, the heavy prosthetics were inevitably distracting - and DiCaprio said the process created challenges to the actors that went beyond sitting still for the five or six hours it took to apply. ''It's incredibly claustrophobic,'' said DiCaprio in the Q&A. ''You had to animate yourself in that makeup, because it tends to stiffen you as an actor.'' Hammer agreed that the process was laborious, and said he was less patient than DiCaprio - so at the post-screening reception, I reminded him that on last year's ''The Social Network,'' David Fincher used computer graphics to put Hammer's head on another actor's body so that he could play twins. As he was sitting in the makeup chair for all those hours, I asked, was he thinking about how Fincher could have done the transformation with CGI? ''Absolutely,'' said Hammer, laughing. ''Any other director would have done it with CGI. Clint is the only guy who could get away with doing it the old- fashioned way, and it was great to surrender myself to that process. ''That's what I love about this movie: it could have been made in the '50s in black-and-white, and it probably would have looked almost exactly the same.'' Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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