David Gordon Green seems to be returning to something like his indie (“George Washington,””Undertow”) roots with this father-son “bonding” comedy. Maybe filtering his zero-box office days through a more commercial post-Apatow/”Pineapple Express” lens. “Prince Avalanche” is a two-hander, set in the boondocks where a father-son roadwork team battle and bond.
Michael Bay’s hyped and hopped up return to straight action didn’t do nearly as well Friday as he might have hoped, and doesn’t even appear to have a shot at reaching the decent but modest $20-22 million opening predicted for it.
It’s looking as if “Pain & Gain” will have to make do with s $19 million opening. Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson can’t really open movies on their names alone anymore, and the heavy advertising didn’t move that Friday night crowd into theaters.
Reviews were mixed, so they neither helped nor hurt it.
“The Big Wedding” earned terrible reviews, overall (a few condemnations, a lot of indifferent shrugs) and those might have helped it find its audience, such as it is. A foul-mouthed multi-generational sex farce? It will be lucky to hit $8 million.
“Oblivion” fell off 60% from its opening weekend and will come in second in the upper teens.
“42” had a shot at reaching $70 million this weekend, but probably won’t — $68,by midnight Sunday, sayeth Nikki Finke.
The teacher is a veteran of the French school system, not burnt out but resigned to the mediocrity of each new crop of high school sophomores. That first assignment — “Write about what you did last weekend” – confirms what he tells his gallery manager wife.
“This is the worst class I’ve had in my life.”
But one sixteen year-old boy, Claude, took it seriously. He describes a classmate he selected, a somewhat dim kid whose life he’d love to have, whose house he longed to gain entry to. And he did, taking in details — the sports-crazed dad beaten down by a job that includes petty humiliations from his boss and Chinese clients, and “the singular scent of a middle class woman,” his classmate’s fetching blond mother.
He’s ingratiating himself into their lives. He’s observing, passing judgment, telling their secrets. And he knows how to make the essay a cliffhanger.
“To be continued.”
French director Francois “Potiche” Ozon’s latest is an adaptation of a play, a satire of talent presented to those who don’t have it but recognize it, a spoof of mores and the writer’s craft, and a “bildungsroman” (coming of age tale) with hints of a creepy stalker-thriller about it.
Veteran character actor Fabrice Luchini (“Moliere,” The Girl from Monaco”) is Mr. Germain, the cynic stuck teaching the unwilling at Gustave Flaubert High School. Ernst Umhauer is Claude, the precocious boy whose literary bent intrigues his teacher, but alarms the teacher’s wife (Kristin Scott Thomas).
“He needs a shrink,” she warns (in French, with English subtitles). “He could be dangerous.”
But night after night Jeanne sits, utterly absorbed by her husband’s narrations of Claude’s tale of Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), his father (Denis Menochet) and his most fetching mother (Emmanuelle Seigner of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”). The boy violates their trust and spies on them. And that which he doesn’t observe directly, he imagines fancifully. Willing or not, the Germaines become voyeurs, just like Claude.
Germaine begins with “the boy deserves encouragement” and soon imagines himself in the scenes with Claude, adjusting the focus of the narrative, steering the boy away from melodramatic flourishes and “improving” (he thinks) this tale.
The acting dazzles (Thomas has a couple of amazingly unfiltered, flattered and flabbergasted reactions).
Ozon has some fun with this material, playing around with versions of reality, inserting characters in scenes that Claude re-writes and adjusts, serving up the odd comic twist. Ozon seems as willfully uncertain of its direction as Germaine. “Is it parody?” Perhaps a goof on the author of “Madame Bovary,” Flaubert, whose name graces the school?
“Flaubert doesn’t JUDGE his characters,” Germaine lectures. But he’s plainly titillated by the kid’s writing exercise. His job is threatened and his marriage turns testy as he grows more obsessed by how this chilling, sadistic tale will come out.
But for all its pleasures, as Germaine nudges Claude toward that “ideal” ending that will make the reader say “I never saw that coming” and “It could not have ended any other way” at the same time, one only wishes this absorbing but melodramatic film had taken that advice.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and language
Cast: Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner
Credits: Scripted and directed by Francois Ozon, based on a Juan Mayorga play. At Cohen Media Group release.
Running time: 1:44
It’s got three stars, two of them “box office,” and a stellar supporting cast. The commercials are giving the comic side of “Pain & Gain” the hard sell.
But as this movie, earning mixed reviews, will reveal to anybody who buys a ticket — it’s a very violent “true crime” action comedy. And that could work against word of mouth.
Box Office Guru is thinking Michael Bay’s cheapest movie since film school will do $20 million.
Box Office Mojo figures “Pain & Gain” will do a “modest” $22 million or so. “The Big Wedding” will be lucky to crack $10, the soothsayer there says. The Guru figures $9 will be that all-star comedy’s high water mark.
It’s a pretty foul-mouthed R-rated comedy aimed squarely at the”Something’s Got to Give/Big Fat Greek Wedding” audience. Will they show up? I see this one as a wild card that could do better than $10,and I’m not saying that because I gave it the only passing review I’ve seen posted anywhere.
Are old folks ready for a hint of “Hangover” in their rom-coms? If so, this could be a watershed picture– Oscar winners and other big names, nobody stretching that much, but playing well within the audience’s comfort zone and talking dirty as they do.
The Jackie Robinson bio-pic “42” will clear the $70 million mark by Sunday night. “Oblivion” should fall off a bit — maybe a lot. Figure it’ll come in a close second to “Pain & Gain,” unless one doesn’t open or the other doesn’t hold at least half its audience.
This looks to be a creepy account of a teen lit student observing — a little too closely — a classmate’s family and homelife — for a series of essays for a favorite teacher. Ozon (“Potiche”) plays up the playful, and the insidious.
It’s in limited release.
Canadian actress (“Splice”) turned director (“Away From Her”) Sarah Polley engages in a bout of navel gazing with her new documentary, “Stories We Tell.” It’s about her late mother, and she assembles her siblings and other relatives and family friends for “an interrogation,” as they recollect their memories of her in building a sometimes contradictory portrait of a woman who died when Sarah was a child.
It’s Friday AM, time for me to chat with Mike Bianchi about movies on “Open Mike” on 740 The Game.
We’ll discuss “Pain & Gain,” the new lower budget action comedy/true crime thriller from Michael Bay, is earning mixed reviews. I found it watchably amusing, discomfittingly violent. It’s like “Blow” meets “Raising Arizona.”
I haven’t checked this AM, but I may be the only critic on record admitting he laughed at “The Big Wedding.” Much of what the overwhelming tide of negative reviews are saying about it is true. Robin Williams has played a version of his narrow-minded priest before (“License to Wed”), Diane Keaton a version of her “first wife,” and there are no great stretches in the roles Robert DeNiro, Susan Sarandon, Katherine Heigl, Topher Grace or Amanda Seyfried play. It’s pitched at that “Big FAt Greek Wedding” demo, but the writer-director filled the mouths of his characters with F-bombs and the odd C-word.
It still has a lot of broad, low and high laughs and plays very much like the French farce it is based on. Maybe the language and winking/frank discussion of sex over 60 is a landmark. In any event, bad reviews overall for this one, a passing grade from me.
Robert Redford’s Shia LaBeouf political thriller “The Company You Keep,” about aged 60s radicals uncovered, decades after going on the run, has a fine cast — Redford, too old to be playing his character, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Sam Elliott, Brit Marling, Brendan Gleeson. The story’s engaging, too, with Shia playing the upstart small paper reporter who gambles on discovering who these people were and what their ideals were before the Feds (Terrence Howard) catch them.
And “Mud”, one of the best films of the new year, opens at Enzian in Orlando, and in theaters nationwide. Matthew McConaughey’s great in it, again — part of that whole post-“Lincoln Lawyer” roll he’s been on.
Tune in to 740 The Game at 745, or listen live here.
Three friends go back to their childhood haunt, a small island. Where three seemingly friendly hunters run across them. “Black Rock” opens in mid-May.
MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content and brief nudity
Cast: Robert DeNiro, Amanda Seyfried, Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigl, Ben Barnes, Robin Williams, Susan Sarandon, Topher Grace
Credits: Written and directed by Justin Zackman, based on the French film “Mon frère se marie.” A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:30
Sarah Polley’s new documentary is about how we tell the tale of our lives. Some of us bury the lead, some go on and on, fixating on the trivial and repeating themselves (I am related to a few of those). Others? Better at it.
