Black Sheep @ The Box Office

The mad party continues this weekend at Paramount Studios. Not only have they replaced themselves at the top of the Box Office but they now lay claim to both the best and fifth best October openings of all time. Now, I was under the impression that audiences would have found a sequel to PARANORMAL ACTIVITY to be a little too much but audiences have once again proven that I don't know them at all. Instead, the film opened to $41.5 million and an impressive per screen average of more than $12K. JACKASS 3D follows in second with a strong second week take of $21.5 million for an $87 million haul. It has already outgrossed both of the previous JACKASS films.

I saw the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. I admired what they were able to accomplish on such a small budget but truly felt the gimmick was pretty thin. Whatever they did to beef up the scares in the sequel must have worked because the $41.5 million take is almost double what the first film did on its biggest weekend. So now that the film has proven its franchise possibilities, the only question remains whether it will repeat its other greatest feat from last year - stealing all the Halloween gore freaks away from SAW, which bows in its supposedly final installment next weekend. Question: If it isn't Halloween if it isn't SAW, and SAW is gone after this year, does that mean this Halloween will be our last?

There is very little activity, paranormal or otherwise, below the Top 10 this weekend but Clint Eastwood's HEREAFTER makes its inevitable leap from 24th place on just 6 screens last week to a modest fourth place finish. Mixed reviews seem to have left audiences almost as cold as the film itself. Still, at $12 million, HEREAFTER is $4 million ahead of what Eastwood's last directorial effort, INVICTUS, did on its opening weekend on a similar amount of screens. (Click the film title for the Black Sheep review.)

NEXT WEEK: Even though the SAW franchise crashed and burned last year, the last installment, SAW 3D, opens unopposed next weekend on 2700+ screens. I'm betting the 3D element and the closing of the series will give the franchise the edge it needs to beat PARANORMAL ACTIVITY this year. And sneaking onto 130 screens is that pesky girl again. You know the one I'm talking about. This time, she's THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST.

Source: Box Office Mojo

HEREAFTER

HEREAFTER

Written by Peter Morgan

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Bryce Dallas Howard and George McLaren

Billy: A life that is all about death is no life at all.

It’s no secret that Clint Eastwood is getting up there in years. He has been churning out films on an almost yearly basis in the last decade as if he is trying to cram as much work as possible into his legacy before he can no longer do so. It seems then a natural choice for Eastwood to take on the afterlife in his adaptation of Peter Morgan’s screenplay, HEREAFTER. In many ways, it is one of his most organic works but aside from acknowledging that an afterlife exists, Eastwood is nowhere closer to any insight on the subject.

It is also no secret that I am not a big fan of Eastwood’s work as a director. I find he often oversimplifies the problem and renders complicated scenarios into clichéd lessons about what it means to him to be a good human being. The idea of him tackling something as complicated as the passage between life and death was frightening at first, even if the writing was in Morgan's hands, THE QUEEN and FROST/NIXON scribe (click the titles for full reviews). In HEREAFTER, Morgan tells three separate stories about three different people around the world who are dealing with death in different ways. A French reporter (Cecile de France) is recovering from her brush with death; a young twin boy in England (George McLaren) has just lost his brother; and Matt Damon plays a genuine psychic in San Francisco who has retired in hopes of finding a normal life. While all reasonably compelling separately, their plights never come together, which leaves the film feeling cold and detached.

There are moments in HEREAFTER that are genuinely engrossing and memorable, including an opening so intense, I felt I might soon know my own afterlife. Eastwood lets go of his ordinarily tight grasp on the picture to allow its characters to speak for themselves and its often-haunting imagery to be just that. At first, I was pleasantly surprised but then I realized that without Eastwood playing God that there was really no direction in HEREAFTER at all. Subsequently, I wasn’t able to connect with a film about an experience that connects us all.

Really? GRAN TORINO?

Someone needs to explain to me right now why GRAN TORINO is considered the #77 best film of all time according to Internet Movie Database readers. Better yet, someone needs to explain to me why Hollywood trips over itself every time a Clint Eastwood picture comes along. I get it; he’s an icon. He’s probably even a very likable fella. The man has been directing films since the early 1970’s. He’s even won two Oscars for directing (one for UNFORGIVEN and again for MILLION DOLLAR BABY). I’m not saying he isn’t talented; even I lavished him with praise for LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. But for every one of those, there is another FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. Or worse yet, there’s MYSTIC RIVER – God, that one was particularly painful. Just because Clint is a legend does not mean everything he touches will be legendary.


Had I caught GRAN TORINO in theatres upon its release, I would have likely named it among the worst films of 2008. I am so thrilled the Academy Awards ignored this embarrassment. Audiences did not ignore this picture though; the film went on to gross just under $150 million in North America. Many people saw this picture as a retired reincarnation of Eastwood’s iconic Dirty Harry character. Personally, I saw his character, Walt Kowalski, as the kind of old white guy who is generally seen as the generation that needs to die off in order for America to become open minded. He leers in judgment at everyone he crosses – from his pierced, ungrateful granddaughter to his inexperienced priest to his Korean neighbors who won’t get off his lawn. His wife has just passed and now that he is totally alone, all he has to keep him company is his misery. Well, that is until he ends up befriending the Korean neighbors and they subsequently change his whole outlook on other cultures. Apparently, it isn’t so tricky to teach an old dog new tricks.


Pulling double duty as director and lead actor must have taken a lot of Eastwood’s focus. I can think of no other explanation why he didn’t notice that nearly all the other performances in GRAN TORINO are distractingly laughable. It’s all about Walt though. He is an old crank who spouts out racial obscenities to passersby or to himself while he incessantly mows his lawn or sits on his porch downing canned beer and hating everyone. Focusing all his attention on Walt meant leaving all the secondary characters to rely on nothing more than racial stereotypes to establish themselves. In the end then, Walt has to resolve his ignorance with a society that is written from an already ignorant perspective and we’re supposed to commend him for his progress. Thank goodness that the old, angry white guy was able to open his mind in time to see that he had to come to the rescue of all the unruly foreigners. Very progressive indeed.

CHANGELING

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan and Colm Feore


Captain J. J. Jones: Yours is a story with a happy ending, Mrs. Collins. People love a happy ending.

The truth is a tricky construct. Words are uttered and, depending on who says them, they are afforded a certain level of belief. Sometimes the truth is so entirely outlandish that believing it is a struggle. And sometimes that struggle is worth it because the truth has the potential to enlighten and call for change. The truth in a movie is almost inherently a falsehood. The intention of telling the truth may be genuine but film requires reconstruction and subjectivity in order for its message to be told. So when Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort, CHANGELING, announces at its very start that what we are about to bear witness to is a true story, a certain weight is lent while a certain caution is exercised. The truth here is that a boy by the name of Walter Collins was abducted in 1928 and the boy that was returned to his mother, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), five months later was not her son, but rather a boy claiming to be her son. The thought that no one believed her truthful claims is a wide stretch to begin with and Eastwood, despite setting a complete scene, did not ultimately convince me that any of this actually happened.


Of course, to some extent, much of the story did happen. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Los Angeles played home to an atrocious set of serial murders known then as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. Walter Collins was said to be a victim of these horrible crimes, in which a man by the name of Gordon Northcott (played in the film by Jason Butler Harner), would lure young boys back to his run down ranch, lock them up in chicken coops and torture them before ultimately killing them like helpless animals and burying their bodies in his backyard. At the same time, a boy by the name of Arthur Hutchens Jr. claimed to be the missing Collins boy in order to get a free ride from Iowa to California. When Christine Collins told the police that this was not her son – something Jolie says repeatedly in the film like a beautiful but busted record – they tried to convince her that she was mistaken and confused. She pushed and was eventually incarcerated in the psychiatric ward of the L.A. county hospital for her supposed delusions. She was released ten days later when Hutchens finally admitted he was not Walter Collins.


The facts are what they are but yet somehow, when Eastwood tells the story, it seems ridiculous and CHANGELING becomes a disappointing experience because you want for it to be better than it is. Cinematographer, Tom Stern, shoots Patrick M. Sullivan Jr.’s delicate and detailed art direction with a soft sensitivity that births an encompassing sense of nostalgia for a time I never knew. And it always surprises me just how breathtaking Jolie is. As the single mother at the center of this controversy, she is composed and determined one moment and fragile and frightened the next. Sometimes, she is all of these things and more at the same time. Unfortunately for Jolie, she seems to keep picking prestige projects where she outshines the material itself. J. Michael Straczynski’s script is overly facile as it chalks up all of Collins’ difficulties to her being a woman, that ever-emotional creature that cannot possibly function with reason. And Eastwood has all of her male aggressors adopt that same mentality. So when a doctor tells Christine Collins that of course it is possible that her boy shrunk three inches after this ordeal and that she cannot see this because she is a woman and has no objectivity, we chuckle at how ludicrous this is instead of recoil at the horror.


Throughout CHANGELING, you can feel Eastwood’s sense of accomplishment. There he is behind the lens, standing up straight and proud. He is the champion of women’s rights, exposing injustices and not afraid be the man that does so. What he doesn’t see on the other side of his smug sense of accomplishment is that he is actually detracting from Christine Collins’ plight by oversimplifying the whole affair. The specific details can never truly be exposed but this truly happened and by trying to tell his limited take on the truth, Eastwood has turned the truth into a bad joke.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: SAW Gets Schooled - Musical Style!

For years now, it wouldn’t be Halloween if it wasn’t SAW to begin with. The consistent Lionsgate moneymaker would come out on or around Halloween, rake in the quick dough and get out before Thanksgiving came creeping. They’ve always opened at number one and have somehow managed to hold on to their core audience each year despite each installment being less interesting than the last. There was some concern the franchise was losing its edge on the market but no one would have guessed last year, it would be outdone by a bunch of squeaky clean teens singing and dancing it up at the prom.


After the record breaking cable success and subsequent soundtrack success of the first two HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL installments, Disney got the bright idea to launch the latest in the series in theatres. Clearly, there was money to be made exploiting these attractive young people and their limited singing and dancing talents. And money they did make. HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR opened to $42 million, the third biggest October opening in history, behind SCARY MOVIE 3 ($48 million) and SHARK TALE ($47 million). When the film opened to $14 million on Friday, it seemed as though the film would easily surpass these two hits but Friday accounted for 33% of the full weekend take while people expected the kid friendly pic to soar even higher on Saturday. Still, it was an impressive haul and it won’t be long before we start hearing about “Community College Musical”.


The SAW folks don’t have anything to cry about. With an estimated budget of just over $10 million, who cares if your $30 million take is slightly less than SAW 4’s opening weekend? This sequel continues to perform year on year but its legs get shorter and shorter in the long term, and not because they were hacked off. It also wouldn’t be Halloween it seems if it weren’t for TIM BURTON’S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. The film was re-issued yet again this year in 3D and in many cases with brand new digital projections. The film was also recently released on DVD though so this year’s ritual only mustered an average of $1,310 per screen for a total of $372K.


The Top 10’s only other debut was PRIDE & GLORY, starring Edward Norton and Colin Farrell as boys in blue. The unoriginal premise wasn’t fooling anyone and the film played to a mediocre take of just over $6 million. Audiences were more interested in holdovers like BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA and EAGLE EYE, which saw their declines hold solidly.

The art house scene was all a bustle this weekend. Fall is like the art house’s summer. The most notable debut was Clint Eastwood’s CHANGELING, starring Angelina Jolie in a role that might finally nab her another Oscar nomination. Playing on a mere 15 screens, the film pulled in half a million dollars, for a stellar per screen average of over $33K. The next highest average of any film playing is a bit surprising. Adapted from the popular Logo series, NOAH’S ARC: JUMPING THE BROOM appealed to gay audiences desperate for fare. On just five screens across the nation, the film collected $32K per screen. Meanwhile, Charlie Kaufman’s first time at bat as a director, SYNECDOCHE NEW YORK, was unleashed on 9 screens worth of unsuspecting people, for an average of $19K. The film has been getting mixed reviews so the future is as unpredictable as well, a Charlie Kaufman film.


NEXT WEEK: ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO. The title says it all folks and they do it on over 3000 screens. THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY will try to scare audiences away from SAW V. Guy Ritchie’s ROCKNROLLA has been struggling in limited release but hopes wider audiences will go for his supposed return to form. And Angelina and Clint go wide (from 15 to over 1800 screens) with CHANGELING.