He’s not directing it, just producing.
Her star has dimmed considerably since her “Transformers” heydays. A Mickey Rourke credit or two will do that for a girl. She had small, shapely parts in “Friends with Kids” and “This is 40,” nothing to re-launch a career on.
So why not give the now-married Megan Fox another shot, in a throwaway franchise picture (a money maker that has no prayer of being any good at all)? Let bygones be bygones, even if she DID call you Hitler.
The description of “Song One,” which Hathaway is scheduled to produce as well as star in, has her playing an archeologist who falls for a Brit rocker, to be played by Johnny Flynn.
The Daily Mail says she’s having a song written for her for the film. There’s been talk of her reviving “My Fair Lady.” And she’s in “Rio 2,” which may call on her to sing as well.
“Identity Thief,” another rude comedy that rules the box office, week in and week out, is back on top Oscar weekend — a $13 million take, according to Deadline.com’s Friday estimates.
“Snitch” will just nudge past $10 million. “Dark Skies” won’t quite get there.
“Safe Haven” is holding far more audience that “A Good Day to Die Hard,” which has fallen off a cliff (down 61%, bad, not a Tyler Perry plummet, but bad).
The overall box office is 7% down from last year, which puts more pressure on the risky business of March — where “Jack the Giant Slayer,” “Oz, the Great and Powerful” and “The Croods” are the big releases — and none of them smells like a guaranteed hit.
A feature film recreating Thor Heyerdal’s wild-haired scheme to float across the Pacific, proving that Peruvians could have settled Polynesia (and to some extent, vice versa?) was an epic adventure, if not exactly the soundest scientific sailing experiment ever.
It’ll lose the Oscar to “Amour,” but still, it’s good to see this best foreign language nominee get the attention.
We used to hear apocryphal stories like this up in Alaska — usually involving lap dogs.
An eagle, in town for the salmon runs (I lived in Kodiak, salmon runs and round the clock fish canneries were a draw), swooped down and grabbed this Yorkie or Dachshund or whatever.
So the story about a similar snatching in Canada, with video, got my attention. And millions of others.
It didn’t happen. It was faked. The Canadian film students who did it were told to come up with a video that could garner 100,000 Youtube hits. And they did. With a hoax. Funny.
Here’s how they did it. Digital tricker is just part of the story.
It’s Oscar weekend, and no, none of the Oscar contenders expects to be in the top five when the dust has settled on all the moviegoing this Feb. 22-24.
Will “Identity Thief” have enough oomph to clear the finish line in first? Box Office Mojo thinks so. They’re calling it the winner, in its third weekend of release, and with no new comedies to suck audience away from it, a $13 million weekend seems within reach.
The Mojo call on the rest of the field has “A Good Day to Die Hard” beating “Snitch” and “Safe Haven” and “Escape from Planet Earth” in a crowd packed into that $10-12 million range.
Dwayne Johnson’s been hard-pressed to open a movie of late. A $12 million weekend would be a win, in this case. “Safe Haven” may have drawn every Nicholas Sparks fan it could hope to, so anything over $10 likewise would be a win.
The laughless “Escape from Planet Earth” has no competition in the kids’ picture field, so another $10 million is entirely possible.
The Box Office Guru thinks that “A Good Day to Die Hard” will fall far enough for this to be a real race — with “Snitch,” “Die Hard,” “Safe Haven” and “Dark Skies” all clustered around that $10-12 million range.
“Dark Skies” is, as Variety puts it, “tracking lightly.” Low awareness, a PG-13 horror picture with kids. They’re hoping for “Insidious” or “Mama” numbers, but $10 million may be a stretch.
I’d also guess that “Identity Thief” has the measure of this field. Melissa McCarthy is BO gold at this point, and this has “Stick around like “Bridesmaids” possibilities.
But I hope the superior “Snitch” does well enough to encourage more thoughtful action dramas like it, and that it clobbers “Die Hard.” I still enjoy Bruce, but nobody was even trying this time around.
A movie about hunger in America that also reveals the source of the obesity epidemic (subsidized, universally available super-cheap corn/soy/wheat “product” junk foods), “A Place at the Table” might cause a stir when it hits theaters next month. I’m talking to the folks who made it AFTER I chat with Ray Winstone about “The Sweeney” this AM.
Any questions you’d like to ask the folks who show us the face of hunger in America? Comment below.
Yeah, Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens are ALL hot and bothered to finishing growing up — and take on the violent and scantily-clad roles of young adulthood.
This is getting an awful lot of hype for a movie that a minor studio is releasing.
“Snitch” had the makings of another junky action hero shoot-em up/punch-em up. Most critics, myself included, were pleasantly surprised, or at least a little impressed by Dwayne Johnson holding his own with a pretty good supporting cast in a very straightforward guy-in-over-his-head with drug dealers tale.
“Bless Me, Ultima” is earnest, meticulous, deadly slow and borderline pointless. I mean, a “witch” comes to help her family and mentor a nephew, is accused of being a witch by the father of other witches, is shunned, hassled, but uses her witchcraftery to make a difference in her nephew’s life?
But it’s based on a landmark piece of Chicano literature, and is winning a lot of grade-on-the-curve praise. Roger Ebert gave it four stars. Must have taken a long bathroom break and assumed he missed the good parts.
“Dark Skies” isn’t awful. Not by a long shot. But this film which has “Insidious” producers behind it does a poor job of creating empathy for the children most under threat by alien visitations and probes.The earliest reviews are reflecting this.
The standard issue alien abduction thriller gains a few paranormal touches and a taste of the Living Dead in “Dark Skies,” a sometimes hair-raising riff on all the “Communions” that have come before.
It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.
Yes, the aliens are abducting us, but only those of us who didn’t heed the warning “Signs.”
Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play struggling suburbanites – she’s a real estate agent, he’s an unemployed architect – who suddenly have weird lights, weirder noises, nightly kitchen re-arranging and unseen threats to their two boys to go along with a battered marriage, long-term unemployment and a mortgage in arrears. “Dark Skies” is about how they and their confused kids handle all this.
Not very well, as you might expect.
Lacey (Russell) hears things and sees things. She’s at a loss to understand what took everything out of their kitchen cabinets and parked these things in precarious stacks, all the way to the ceiling. Daniel (Hamilton) is less credulous.
“We’re not those people who believe in crazy things!”
He’s fibbing to her about his job interviews, and she’s not telling him everything that’s going on at home, how little Sammy (Kaden Rockett) keeps having nightmares about “The Sand Man.”
The lies come out and the marriage earns its ugliest test when they come face to face with the impossible. The movie sinks or swims not on our belief that this is happening to them, but on the players’ beliefs, and neither adult gets frantic or worked up enough to be convincing.
At the very least, the first time Lacey spies a spindly alien from “Signs” standing over her child’s bed, her freak-out should be epic. Both actors play muted shock, not panic.
And panic was called for.
As episodes pile up – catatonic fits, mass bird collisions with their house, strange bruising on their kids (Dakota Goyo is Jesse, the oldest) that has the neighbors sure they’re nut-job child-abusers, you’d expect a mania to set in. Daniel and Lacey can only manage confusion, and solutions borrowed from “Paranormal Activity” (surveillance cameras), “Night of the Living Dead” (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie (Internet searches, where “The Truth,” or at least “The Conspiracy is Out There”).
That last step delivers the movie’s most fascinating character, an “expert” (J.K. Simmons) on “visitations” whose resignation and exhaustion at their fate, which mirrors his, seems earned. Lacey and Daniel seem beaten before they start.
Visual effects man turned writer-director Scott Stewart has turned away from the “Legion” and “Priest” D-movies with their angels and vampires and patched together something of an expertly shot and cut mash-up here. He’s very good at managing tension, and the script doles out the requisite shocks at decent intervals.
But what’s missing is that “Insidous” empathy, the sense of parents terrified for their kids, a terror that the viewer should and would share, if only we’d been given more reason to care or a surer sense that they do.
(Roger Moore’s Interview with Keri Russell is here.)
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror throughout, sexual material, drug content and language – all involving teens
Cast: Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons
Credits: Written and directed by Scott Stewart. A Dimension release.
Running time: 1:35
