My fondness for Addison Timlin knows no bounds. I loved her in Odd Thomas, endured Fallen for her, and will undoubtedly watch the new social media thriller Like Me for her, despite it looking a little too weird for my tastes. The general premise is solid, though, with Timlin playing a loner who is obsessed with being seen on social media. She launches into a crime spree that she broadcasts online, which sounds a little bit like Natural Born Killers meets Ingrid Goes West. That I can definitely dig.
The film is directed by Robert Mockler and he’s filled this trailer with wild, seemingly random images with very little sense of the plot. Clearly he’s got the goods in setting a hazy, psychedelic atmosphere for Timlin to go nuts in. I just hope this isn’t so dark and experimental that it makes no sense. Timlin is joined in the cast by Ian Nelson, horror vet Larry Fessenden (Stakeland), and Nicolette Pierini.
From all of us here at Punch Drunk Critics, we want to thank you for another awesome year! Your continued support all of these years makes all of the hard work myself and the rest of the crew put in worth it. This was our biggest year yet and it was all thanks to you, taking the time out of your day to read what we have to say, and sharing us with your friends.
I think I touched on most of this is a Facebook Live a couple of weeks ago, but going into 2018 we want to take things even further. More content, more video, more contests, more interaction with all of you. I love the emails you send me with ideas, comments, support, and criticisms. Please keep it up. You can either find me at screenings where I’m happy to talk to any of you, or shoot me an email at punchdrunktrav@gmail.com.
So that’s it. Hopefully you’re not standing around in the middle of that 10 degree weather in Times Square, and are comfortable in your homes drinking champagne and watching movies.
1. Star Wars: The Last Jedi– $52.4M/$517.1M
In barely over two weeks, Star Wars: The Last Jedi has already hit $517M domestic, making it the top U.S. earner of the year. Did I mention it hasn’t even been three full weeks yet? Overall the middle chapter of this latest Lucasfilm trilogy has $1.04B, and it doesn’t open in China for a few days yet.
2. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle– $50.5M/$169.8M
The Dwayne Johnson effect is still…well, effective. The long-awaited sequel Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle had an obscene 39% jump from last week, same number of theaters mind you, for another $50.5M. Given the box office success of its stars Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan, part of me thinks this was inevitable. But reviving long dormant properties is no sure thing. Sony played it right, balancing the Jumanji nostalgia and star power to appeal to the widest possible audience. Of course, it helps that people actually like the movie, and at this point I’m thinking maybe it’s time I go ahead and buy a ticket.
3. Pitch Perfect 3– $17.7M/$64.2M Pitch Perfect 3 kept on singing in its second week, falling only 10% and earning $17.7M. It’s creeping up on $100M worldwide which is a pretty good way to say goodbye to the Bella gals.
4. The Greatest Showman– $15.2M/$48.7M
Hugh Jackman’s P.T. Barnum musical The Greatest Showman may have just pulled its greatest trick. The film jumped a massive 73% after a modest debut, earning $15M and bringing the domestic total to $48M. That is a record-breaking hold for a movie in over 3000 theaters, and one of the best holds period for a major wide release. So right now its prospects are looking pretty good, especially if overseas numbers come through. If only it hadn’t been so darn expensive.
5. Ferdinand– $11.6M/$53.8M
6. Coco– $6.5M/$178.9M
7. All the Money in the World (review)- $5.4M/$12.6M
There has been so much talk surrounding Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, about Kevin Spacey, about the reshoots that replaced him with Christopher Plummer, to the speed in which those reshoots took place, that we forgot it actually has to perform. To that end, the film opened with a modest $12.6M since the Wednesday debut. The $50M kidnapping drama should get a nice Oscar boost as Plummer and Michelle Williams are at least in the hunt, but let’s hope all of the Spacey stuff isn’t keeping people away.
8. Darkest Hour– $5.2M/$17.9M
9. Downsizing- $4.6M/$17M
Alexander Payne’s sci-fi “comedy”(?) Downsizing is staying on the small-ish side with $4.6M and $17M overall. That’s not great, and with a cost of roughly $68M I’m not sure Matt Damon’s name will be enough to save it.
10. Father Figures– $3.7M/$12.7M
Speaking of movies that big name can’t save, the apparently-dreadful Father Figures is a dud with only $12M in two weeks. It won’t go up much further from there.
Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut Molly’s Game (review) opened strong, earning $5.2M while only in 217 theaters. I’m curious to see if the Jessica Chastain-led drama can pick up some Oscar buzz and ride the wave to bigger numbers.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s “final” film, P.T. Anderon’s critically-acclaimed Phantom Thread (review), hit $531K in only 4 locations. A much broader expansion doesn’t happen for two weeks which is when we’ll really get a sense of how the film does.
And finally, Annette Bening’s latest bid for an Oscar, the Gloria Grahame biopic Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (review), opened in 4 locations and earned $36K. This one may prove too under the radar for Bening to get her usual amount of awards attention, but she’s really good as the Oscar winner and Hollywood Walk of Famer.
The Latest Movies you Absolutely Definitely Don’t Want to Miss
While Star Wars may be grabbing all of the headlines at the movies recently, let’s not forget that there are other movies that exist for those who prefer their flicks to be Jedi-free. Here are three selections that you absolutely, definitely don’t want to miss.
The Post
In an age where the media has come to be known as the no.1 scapegoat – Trump blames it for “fake” news and his opponents blame it for Trump – The Post is a welcome throwback to a time when Americans were content with the freedom of the press. Set in 1971, the movie dramatizes real-life events when the Washington Post risked the prospect of being closed for its publishing of the Pentagon Papers, which were classified documents copied illicitly by Daniel Ellsberg. The documents proved that every president who assumed office since WW11 had lied about Vietnam. Publisher of the Post, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), is an unassertive socialite who typically follows the lead of her editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). However, when the Post acquires the papers, Bradlee decides to publish them – despite the fact that it could draw the wrath of President Richard Nixon.
Many of the reviews of The Post have overpraised it. Most of anything newsroom-related is too broad and the Josh Singer and Liz Hannah-penned script avoids tackling anything complicated. The movie grows into something more moving and richer when we follow Kay Graham, however. Streep’s performance, which provides exquisite depth and subtlety, culminates in a moment of decision, which allows the actress to reveal her character’s inner growth, learning how to take control and exercise her values in a world still dominated by men.
Downsizing
The story dreams up an alternative reality in which individuals can be reduced to just a few centimeters tall and reside in artificial enclaves that enable them to live lavish lifestyles while using up limited resources. Paul and Audrey (Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig) star as a middle-class couple who are struggling financially and so decide to improve their lifestyles and downsize. When Audrey has a last-minute change of heart, the downsized Paul is forced to live his new life alone. He soon becomes involved with Eurotrash neighbour (Christoph Waltz) and his Vietnamese dissident house cleaner (Hong Chau).
The first 40 minutes of Downsizing are wonderful and witty, as Payne establishes the premise, cleverly touching on a number of topical issues, such as American consumerism and the decline of the middle class. Its work and detail are brilliant but, after a while, the ambition of the movie begins to get in its own way. It begins by performing a balancing act between too many topics: underclass living and the state of the planet included. The movie’s heart is pure – it teaches the importance of learning compassion, but it’s just too over-preachy in places.
We’re Almost There
Before we tell you about the no. 1 movie that you absolutely don’t want to miss, you may be wondering about the latest flicks you can watch in the comfort of your living room. Fortunately, if there’s nothing in TV Guide to tempt you, Netflix has a whole host of movies recently added to its catalog for you to sit back and enjoy, such as Bright and Mr. Roosevelt.
For those wishing for a movie break, there are plenty of other mediums of entertainment that are always fun, like the Xbox. There are no shortage of new games to try, with Wolfenstein II and Final Fantasy XV setting their respective worlds alight. If you like your games fun and simple though, there are numerous titles available at online casinos such as Vegascasino.io. If you know how to play Solitaire, you’ll be fine with any of the 300+ games that include the likes of Fortune Panda and Deep Sea Danger.
Speaking of games, here’s our final movie that you won’t want to miss.
Molly’s Game
If you’re a fan of Aaron Sorkin, you will find it almost impossible not to fall in love with his directorial debut. The movie is based on a memoir by Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), which tells the story of a young woman’s journey from an Olympic-level skier to a host of high-stakes games for financial geniuses, Hollywood actors, and even Russian mobsters. After she is caught by the FBI, she receives help from honest lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba), who manages to see her basic decency.
In typical Sorkin style, Molly’s Game shows the protagonist’s journey using snappy scenes, witty banter, and narration in spades. Sorkin has previously been accused of portraying his leading ladies as, while intelligent, basket cases. This certainly isn’t the case with Molly: she’s an independent woman with a tempered steel soul. Chastain puts in a stellar performance, delivering Sorkin’s dialogue as if she was born with the words coming out of her mouth.
There will be a whole host of movies that you’ll want to see throughout 2018, including Ocean’s 2018 and Mamma Mia! Here We Are Again. For now, however, the above selection should keep you well and truly entertained.
*NOTE: This is a reprint of my review from the Middleburg Film Festival.*
As the era of the classic movie stars comes to a close in Internet celebrities or whatever, our fascination with the romantic lives of those Golden Age stars is endless. The latest, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, focuses on the brief romance between Oscar winner Gloria Grahame, and her young lover Peter Turner, from whose memoir the film has been adapted. Grahame, best known for her role as Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life and for her award-winning performance in The Bad and the Beautiful, is the perfect example of how we shouldn’t assume every celebrity’s life is exciting, because hers wasn’t, and the film struggles to compensate.
What makes Grahame’s story eminently watchable, and even fascinating in spurts, is the magnetic performance by Annette Bening, who always seems to shine right around awards season. If there are classic old school stars left, Bening is certainly one of them, and she tackles the role of Graham like she was always meant for it. When we first meet Grahame she’s in her dressing room before a show, meticulously applying her makeup, working on her diction…, like someone who has done this thousands of times before. But just before she’s to go on stage, she collapses and is rushed away. Grahame had been a huge star in the black & white era, not so much with the move to color. It’s 1979 and now she lives in a tiny London flat, which is where she first meets Peter (Jamie Bell), a struggling actor who stays next door. “She always played the tart” the landlord says as a means of introducing her to him. What’s funny is that Grahame still seems to be playing that role, flirting with the much-younger Peter shamelessly in their first encounter.
But it’s now 1981, and when we see them in that context things are very different. She’s arrived at his home, where he lives with his mother (Julie Walters), father (Kenneth Cranham), and brother (Stephen Graham) looking very sickly. She wants to stay with them and recover, with her and Peter in denial about the seriousness of her illness. The film leaps back and forth between 1979 and 1981, reflecting back on their relationship which looked a lot like love, but was perhaps more of a performance for them both. Grahame had been through multiple marriages, and a scandal in which she was accused of having an affair with her 13-year-old stepson. That ended in disaster, the utter destruction of her career, and psychological therapy. All of that baggage crowds the room whenever Peter is there, and the clueless young man is often at a loss when she suddenly stops acting like a breathless teenager and turns ugly.
There is affection and love there, though. Clearly they care for one another, and director Peter McGuigan luxuriates in their happy moments. Oftentimes these blissful memories bleed over from scene to scene, literally, as if we are walking through Peter’s daydreams, creating quite the surreal effect. But far too often the screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh fails to make Grahame’s story unique, especially once her sordid past has been revealed and promptly papered over. Whatever her issues were, Grahame lived a life far too exciting for any film to try and gloss it over it. Bening gives another wonderfully complex performance, depicting Grahame as a woman stuck playing a role because her reality is too tough to endure. She does Grahame justice, but Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is merely watchable when it could have been so much more.
When Disney purchased Lucasfilm a few years ago for a whopping $4.05B, there wasn’t anybody who sat around saying “OH yeah they totally overpaid for that.” Because that would have been a foolish stance to take given the money machine that is Star Wars. And here we are just two years removed from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and already Disney has recouped on their original investment.
With Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi blasting towards $1B worldwide, Disney has now hit $4.06B in Star Wars ticket sales. Okay, there are other factors that add to the cost, like marketing, distribution, and production, but the money the Mouse House laid down to have the rights to Star Wars has proven to be well worth it. And we haven’t even begun to look at how much they are raking in on merchandising. Cha-ching!
And we’re only five months away from Disney’s next cash grab with Solo: A Star Wars Story. While there may be some serious question marks about it, is there anybody who is seriously considering not going to see it? I didn’t think so. [THR]
During the most recent episode of Cinema Royale, I went off on a small rant about the critical reaction to Bright, Netflix’s hated-by-critics (but loved by audiences and John Boyega) fantasy cop thriller starring Will Smith. The film makes a slippery allegory to race relations using orcs, elves, and humans, but overall I found it to be a pretty fun flick. Even with the poor critical reviews Netflix was banking on it being a hit, and I posited that we would soon learn it was one of their biggest, if not the biggest, original movie they’ve ever had.
Well, the numbers are in and it looks like I was right.
Netflix doesn’t usually make official numbers available, but ratings giant Nielsen has apparently figured out that 11 million U.S. viewers took in Bright over its first three days in release. Damn. And that’s before it goes international, where Will Smith is still a screen superstar. At this rate we may see Netflix lock Will Smith into an exclusive deal, and before you chuckle at the idea just look at what they’ve managed to pull off with Adam Sandler. His movies suck but Sandler’s terrible comedies are among the streaming service’s most popular.
In the recent trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, we didn’t get to see much of Thor. He gets a few words in the beginning, where he seems to be aboard a spaceship. In other he seems to be holding open some kind of power grid or something. Well, in the footage revealed at Comic-Con last summer he had quite a different entrance, one teased in the latest official image courtesy of USA Today.
In the unseen footage, Thor first appears when his unconscious body slams into the windshield of a ship belonging to the Guardians of the Galaxy. So it stands to reason that Thanos, or perhaps one of his children in the Black Order, destroyed the ship Thor found himself on at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. In the new image we see Thor, still out of it, being tended to be Rocket and Mantis. Probably not the way the the Avengers or Guardians were intending to make one another’s acquaintance, but a power like Thanos throws all plans out of wack.
The sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney comes at a time when the X-Men franchise is in the middle of a youth movement. While we don’t know where things will stand once the deal goes through, sources say Disney is being super selective on any Fox properties they may carry on, for now we still have X-Men: Dark Phoenix and TheNew Mutants right around the corner.
New images have emerged for both films, which are taking the franchise in different directions. X-Men: Dark Phoenix hopes to move on past the dismal X-Men: Apocalypse with a story that tries to get right the classic “Phoenix Saga”, which Fox attempted to adapt (badly) years ago. New images from Empire reveal Jessica Chastain’s mysterious shape-shifting alien confronting James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier. Another looks like the potential demise of Magneto (Michael Fassbender), although I doubt it’s that simple, and the final image show Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) getting close. Considering she killed her former lover the last time she got all imbued with dark phoenix energy in X-Men: The Last Stand, maybe this is his way of staying on her good side.
Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt) looks to be in mortal danger in the new photo from Josh Boone’s New Mutants. A superhero horror film that will potentially launch an entire trilogy, the film also stars Charlie Heaton as Cannonball, Anya Taylor-Joy as Magik, Maisie Williams as Wolfsbane, and Henry Zaga as Sunspot, all seen here trying to revive their fallen comrade.
Boone spoke to USA Today and talked about his approach to making an X-Men genre flick, by dialing back on the superheroics and ramping up the scary stuff…
“These kids could care less about being X-Men. They’re so (messed) up and have had such horrible things happen, they’re just trying to figure out how to get out of this situation,” said Boone. “We just tried to pull this back and make it performance- and character-driven, and more grounded and credible than X-Men movies ever are.”
The New Mutants opens April 13th, followed by X-Men: Dark Phoenix on November 2nd.
One of the many drawbacks to the freedom provided by the Internet is that it makes it easier to turn everything into a sports match. The same way that politics has devolved into “my team vs. your team”, so too has pretty much every argument ever fought online, and that goes double when it comes to movies. The importance given to Rotten Tomatoes scores doesn’t help, as it encourages a mentality of consensus rather than individuality. Want to know who just found that out? John Boyega, who dared to tell the world that he liked Bright.
It’s funny, because I got some nasty emails for my semi-positive review of Bright, also. But if you look at Rotten Tomatoes it was audiences that gave it 89% Fresh, while critics had it down around 30%. Maybe it’s fellow critics blowing up my Inbox?
Obviously, Boyega shouldn’t have to defend his enjoyment of the movie, but you can bet Netflix loved the free publicity. Don’t be surprised if they quote his tweet when the Bright sequel bets going.
