I mean, it’s not really over until President’s Day, right?
So “Die Hard” (over $36 million) could give a little bit of ground to “Identity Thief” and “Safe Haven.”
“Warm Bodies” hung around in the top five, “Escape from Planet Earth” cracked $20 million, “Beautiful Creatures” not so much.
The plot of this indie dramedy reminds me a bit of that fantasy-thriller “The Box,” where Frank Langella is offering people this magical box with a button in it that allows you to collect big money, if you push the button which happens to kill someone you’ve never met. Somewhere.
“The Brass Teapot” is what Juno Temple swipes from an aged antiques dealer, and it’s what she discovers will feed her cash every time she experiences or inflicts pain.
Money problems with husband Michael Angarano? Solved. So long as they can take the beating.
The American Cinema Editors give out awards for the best edited films and TV shows of the year.
And this year, they went for “Argo,” “Silver Linings” and “Brave” in awards handed out Saturday night.
And yes, that’s another Guild award for “Brave,” which is starting to look like the sleeper in the best animated film field.
On the TV side, “The Newsroom” and “Breaking Bad” and that “Hemingway & Gellhorn” film won.
You’d swear there was this groundswell of support for Pixar’s summer animated film “Brave,” not the best-reviewed Pixar movie ever and far from Pixar’s biggest hit ever.
The Cinema Audio Society honored “Brave” along with “Les Miserables” as their best sounding and sound-edited pictures of last year last night.
The many “Brave” guild wins make me wonder if this isn’t some sign of a groundswell. Is it? Are there enough voting members of those guilds to make it an Oscar winner?
“Djesus Uncrossed.” The D is still silent. From the movie maker with the growing Messiah Complex. A hoot.
More whiz bang than the first, but what looks for the world like all too generic sci-fi post-apocalypse “The Man is trying to kill Mankind” stuff. Morgan Freeman, smoking a pipe. Does this feel like another chunk of the Cruise Comeback, or non-blockbuster filler from the director of “TRON: Legacy”?
“Oblivion” opens April 13, pre-Summer cinema season.
Jennifer Lawrence is the betting man’s favorite for the Best actress Oscar for that film, so why not re-team with Cooper and Russell for a movie about the FBI sting that faked out American members of Congress in the late 1970s/early ’80s, who thought they were dealing with rich Arabs wanting to buy influence on Capital Hill? Abscam, it was called, and it was a shameful episode that caught members of Congress stuffing cash down their pants.
It was also comical, because it caught members of Congress stuffing cash down their pants.
Joy Bryant, Regina Hall, Michael Ealy and Kevin Hart star in an updated “About Last Night,” based on the David Mamet play that was filmed in the ’80s with Rob Lowe, Elizabeth Perkins, Demi Moore and Jim Belushi.
This is a red band trailer, so children, no looking.
Keri Russell’s “comeback year” has the feel of a reinvention, a re-branding of the dainty young lovely who burst on the scene with “Felicity” back in the last century.
But as different as her flinty mom in the new film “Dark Skies” might seem, as dangerous and “out there” as her Born Again Bolshevik sleeper spy is in TV’s “The Americans,” she refuses to label her return to public view a career makeover.
“The great think about disappearing is that people forget about you a little bit,” Russell says. “Your past is forgotten. You can come back as something fresh and new. These past two years, I’ve come back to all these interesting things that people might not have thought about me for in the past. They just happened.”
She stepped away from film and TV half a dozen years ago, getting married and giving birth to two children, who are now one and five. At 36, she’s a different person – a mom, for starters. And it’s made her a different actress.
“Anything that opens you up emotionally is going to impact your acting,” she says. “Parenthood, becoming a mom, certainly does that. For one thing, you practice storytelling at its most basic.”
Basic, and maybe primal. Russell’s return to the big screen has her playing a suburban mom whose children are threatened by a supernatural menace. Her turn as Lacy Barrett in “Dark Skies” — in theaters Feb. 22 — was informed by her own motherhood – and by imagining real-life motherly terrors.
“The thing I kept in my mind doing those scenes where things got truly hairy for our characters was Katrina. It helped me to try to imagine what that would feel like, as a parent – to know something so enormous was coming your way, hitting you, something you have NO control over, and that you have these little precious kids in your charge who are looking to you to take care of.
“It’s heartbreaking to think of. They’re scared to death, and you have this terrifying, hopeless feeling, knowing that you might not be able to protect them. I kept that in the back of my mind in every scene where something extraordinary was happening to us all. You’re scared to death, but you’ve narrowed your focus to these kids and this one job I have – protecting them.”
Her “Mamma Bear” on television’s “The Americans” (Wednesday nights on FX) is an altogether different mom, a mother of a mother from Mother Russia, laying low in suburban DC with her fellow-agent husband (Matthew Rhys), ready to ratchet up the Cold War to match new president Ronald Reagan’s 1981 rhetoric.
“Elizabeth, the spy, is plainly more stunted in her emotional life,” Russell says of the TV series. “She’s very uncomfortable showing it. She is very hard to like, she’s not the most moral person and she’s not exactly a touchy-feely mom. She is a communist, after all.
“And we’ll find out, over the run of the show, just what made her the way she is.
“But she’s at a place now where she realizes she’s not going to survive if she doesn’t bend. It’s that period in the Cold War. She has to open herself up a bit, to be seen by life, it’s very hard for her. She’s pretty dogmatic.”
Russell is no stranger to good reviews, earning them for her TV debut, “Felicity,” back in 1998, for the sweet and sexy indie comedy “Waitress” a few years back. Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times loves the “novelty” of seeing her as a TV spy, and a “sexy superhuman fighting machine” in “The Americans.” And Maureen Ryan in The Huffington Post called it a “a thrill to see Russell’s steely side.”
But the real Russell? The one not defending her kids from evil or defending communism? Not steely at all.
“Scaredy cat,” she confesses. “Even the way I answer the phone. I’ll go ‘Um, hello?’ And my friends will go ‘What, you’re afraid to pick up?’ It’s part of why I couldn’t bring these roles home after work. My kids know me, and they know I’m not that tough. And if you’re spending all day crying and screaming and fighting, they’d think I’d lost my mind if any of that made it home.”
“Safe Haven” took the Valentine’s Day sprint, “A Good Day to Die Hard” may win the long weekend ahead — a $37-$35 win, if Deadline.com is right.
“Escape from Planet Earth,” a pretty but pretty much laugh free kids’ toon from The Weinsteins, may be headed towards a $21 million weekend — which would surprise me. It’s not awful, but something of a well-animated corpse.
“Beautiful Creatures” is headed towards a weak long weekend — $11 million or so. That’s the best of the new films.
“Identity Thief” is doing a brisk second weekend of business — over $26 million from V-Day to Sunday.
“Silver Linings” and “Mama” and “Hansel and Gretel” (close to $50 million, now) fill out the top ten.
