Well, it's a new month and it's time for new movie picks to go with it. The theme for September is "Back to School," and we pick ten great school movies to catch up with all this month as the school year begins. Head over to the Movie of the Month page for the description and then check out the list for September (including the recent classic and a personal fave of mine, Juno). Happy Movie Watching!
TRAILER: "RoboCop"
Hmm. Don't know about this one. Set to come out next year, but I'm very skeptical that it could ever live up to the original 1987 RoboCop, which was a great sci-fi movie that really needed no updating. The only thing I can say is that its cast makes it look just slightly better than last year's remake of another one of my favorite Paul Verhoeven movies, Total Recall. But that's a pretty low bar to set. Here's hoping.
Toronto Starts Today
With Venice and Telluride now over, it's time for Toronto to step up, and with most of the heavy Oscar favorites having already been seen in one of the other festivals (or waiting until the New York and AFI Fests later this month and next), that leaves Toronto pretty much left out in the cold this year, with not a lot to premiere. They have three buzzed about movies set to open for the first time- The Fifth Estate (the Julian Assange movie with Benedict Cumberbatch), August: Osage County (the Meryl Streep/Julia Roberts drama) and Dallas Buyers Club, with Matthew McConaughey as an AIDS victim. I'll be posting the reaction to all of them, along with any new responses from other critics on movies that didn't quite hit with the other festivals (such as Labor Day and The Wind Rises). Still to come later on, the Paul Greengrass action drama Captain Phillips and Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty at the New York film festival, and Disney's Saving Mr. Banks is set to open the AFI Fest on November 7th.
TRAILER: "Kill Your Darlings"
Daniel Radcliffe stars as Allen Ginsberg in this film about the beatnik poets of the 1950's, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. It got great buzz out of Sundance and has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score so far, set to come out Oct. 16th in limited release.
Angelina Jolie and Steve Martin get Honorary Oscars
Today the Motion Picture Academy announced the recipients of several honorary Oscars they bestow at the annual Governor's Awards. In a surprising choice, Angelina Jolie will be receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, while Steve Martin, Angela Lansbury and costume designer Piero Tosi will all receive honorary Oscars. They used to give out these awards on the actual Oscar ceremony of course (they're usually lifetime achievement honors), but a few years back they moved these categories out of the televised ceremony to its own separate show, called the Governor's Awards, which is neither televised nor webcast (as of yet). If you ask me, it's way too early to be giving Angelina Jolie an award that's been mostly intended for lifetime achievement, even if it is the Humanitarian prize, but the others are all good choices.
FINAL TRAILER: "Gravity"
Finally! The first full trailer for Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, and it looks crazy intense. I can't wait. Out Oct. 4th
FEATURETTE: "12 Years a Slave"
A behind the scenes look at the movie featuring interviews with the cast and crew. This film was extremely well-received in Telluride and set to be a surefire Oscar contender throughout the fall.
TRAILER: "Under the Skin"
The appropriately creepy and weird teaser trailer for Under the Skin, which received comparisons to David Lynch's Eraserhead after its debut in Venice.
More From Venice: Reaction to 'Philomena,' 'Under the Skin' and 'The Wind Rises'
More reactions have come in from the Venice Film Festival, and starting with Philomena, the consensus seems to be that director Stephen Frears (of countless good movies over the years, including Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things and The Queen) is back in form with the heartwarming story of an old woman who teams up with a journalist to find her long lost son. Judi Dench delivers a knockout performance (of course) and is likely to get her seventh Oscar nomination, while Steve Coogan charms with a script he co-wrote. The crowdpleaser is slated for limited release by the Weinstein Co. on Christmas Day, but set to expand nationwide in early January. I'd watch out for this one, because the Oscars have a long history of embracing feelgood, funny, yet emotional movies that will make you laugh and cry, and this seems to fit that slot this year.
"Coogan and Pope's script tenderizes you with keenly judged comic asides before landing its big, emotional body-blows...This is a heartbreaking story- how could it not be? But Frears' film breaks your heart and then repairs it." (Daily Telegraph)
"Frears gives the story a slick makeover, blending melodrama and comedy with brisk professionalism and a hearty helping of schmaltz. But Dench and Coogan sell it well." (The Atlantic)
"Its main focus is the sparky, shifting relationship between its two protagonists and its trump card the startling chemistry between its two main stars. 'Philomena' is an ongoing, confounding delight of a film." (The Guardian)
Meanwhile, Under the Skin debuted to very divisive reaction (half the audience booed) but early reviews indicate rapturous reception from some critics at least. Jonathan Glazer has been polarizing before (his last film was 2004's creepy Birth), but this one is drawing comparisons to the surreal images of artists like David Lynch. Starring Scarlett Johansson, it's based on the novel by Michael Faber, where an alien in the body of a woman comes to Scotland to hunt men for dark purposes. Oscar seems unlikely to go for this, given the weirdness of it, but I'm sure curious.
"Glazer's astonishing film takes you to a place where the every day becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same. You stare at the screen, at once entranced and terrified, and step forward into the slick." (Telegraph)
"It's an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, unusual special effects, and a sharp atmosphere of horror with the everyday mundanity of a woman driving about rainy Scotland in a battered transit van." (Time Out)
Finally, the arrival of The Wind Rises came with some sad news for fans of the great Hayao Miyazaki, who announced his retirement practically concurrent with the film's premiere. His last feature seems to have received respectful but fairly muted reaction so far, so we'll have to wait until further screenings have occurred to get a handle on the response. Still, there are some admirable notices of this first Miyazaki film set in the real world (in this case, pre-WWII Japan) which dramatizes, in partly fictionalized fashion, the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the A6M Zero, one of the deadly fighter planes used in the second World War. Unfortunately, the film's subtitled release will only be seen in NY and LA this December, while Disney re-dubs the film for wider release some time next year.
"There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki's studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction...the real love story here is between a creator and his creations, which Ghibli's team of animators render in head-spinning detail." (Telegraph)
"The ambitious 'The Wind Rises' is something of a special case that will divide audiences into two camps, those who find it an unforgettably beautiful and poetic ode to life, and those who tune out to its slow moving second act, which can wear down the patience of even the well-disposed." (Hollywood Reporter)
Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie" (1996)
A guilty pleasure maybe, but still funny. Pick this one up if you can and check out what made this cult series so beloved. Featuring human Mike and his robot cohorts Tom Servo, Gypsy, and Crow T. Robot, they mercilessly skewer 1955's This Island Earth to hilarious results (I always preferred the heckling alone over the bookend "plot" stuff outside the theater). Extras include the making of, deleted scenes, and behind the scenes footage and interviews with the cast and crew.
Original trailer from 1996:
TRAILER: "Rush"
Ron Howard's latest film about Formula 1 racers premiered at Toronto to surprisingly good reviews so far, with many calling it a thrilling and unconventional race car movie, the best one ever made. Is this just one of those years where everything's going to be good? Starring Thor's Chris Hemsworth and Inglorious Basterds' Daniel Bruhl as the real life rivals James Hunt and Niki Lauda, the movie is set to be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and released wide on September 27th.
BOX OFFICE 8/30- 9/2: 'The Butler' Tops 'One Direction' Over Labor Day
Over the long Labor Day weekend, The Butler rallied to a first place finish for the third week in a row, amassing $20 million over 4 days for a $79 million total. It's holding up very strong and will cross $100 million over the next two weeks, boosting its Oscar hopes as the fall season arrives. Over the 3 day weekend, the concert documentary One Direction: This is Us had topped, with $15.8 million, although the film was extremely frontloaded, meaning most of that money came from Thursday shows alone. It'll probably finish with about $30-33 million, more than the recent Katy Perry and Jonas Brothers documentaries, but not nearly as high as say, Michael Jackson's This is It ($72 million) or Justin Bieber: Never Say Never ($73 million). The biggest concert documentary ever remains Woodstock, from 1970, with $50 million, which of course, adjusted for inflation would be about $290 million today.
In other new releases, Getaway, one of the worst reviewed films of all time, crashed and burned, with just $5 million over the weekend, and the limited release Spanish comedy Instructions Not Included earned an amazing $10 million on just 347 screens, showing that there is a significant Hispanic audience out there for films targeting them.
Top 5:
- Lee Daniels' The Butler- $20 million
- One Direction: This is Us- $18 million
- We're the Millers- $15.9 million
- Planes- $10.7 million
- Instructions Not Included- $10 million
In holdovers, We're the Millers has now made $112 million and is one of the major hits of the summer, and Pacific Rim finally crossed $100 million in the U.S. while reaching $400 million worldwide, so the movie can definitively be labeled a success thanks to overseas grosses. Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine has $21 million total and still going strong, while Disney's Planes has $70 million domestic, which is now considered a hit for the made-for-DVD film, as it's holding on well due to a lack of family audience competition. Next week, we're officially out of summer blockbuster season, as the only major releases are Riddick, with Vin Diesel and the much anticipated documentary Salinger, from Shane Salerno, that will reveal several soon to be published new works from the famed author.
