Culture Snob

Economical Storytelling in Movies: A Case Study

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:55:00 -0600

Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell exists mostly to remind the world that Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead and can still make The Evil Dead, which is good to know because Sam Raimi is re-making The Evil Dead.

But amid all the giggle-inducing grossness are a few grace notes — unnecessarily skillful business that reminds us that Raimi also made A Simple Plan. I'm going to talk about one of those bits.

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Box Office Power Rankings: October 16-25, 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:45:00 -0600

Should we consider Spike Jonze's and Dave Eggers' adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are a disappointment?

It is certainly not a miserable failure. It received good reviews, won the box office when it debuted, and also topped the Box Office Power Rankings in its opening weekend.

But its gross dropped 57 percent its second weekend. Thirty-five movies have opened in wide release atop the box-office top 10 this year, and 20 lost a lower percentage of revenue than Wild Things:

Movie: Debut weekend, Second weekend, Drop
Gran Torino: $29.5M, $25.6M, 13.2%
Taken: $24.7M, $20.5M, 16.9%
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: $30.3M, $25M, 17.4%
He's Just Not That Into You: $27.8M, $22.3M, 19.6%
The Hangover: $45M, $32.8M, 27.1%
Up: $68.1M, $44.1M, 35.2%
Zombieland: $24.7M, $14.8M, 40.2%
Knowing: $24.6M, $14.7M, 40.2%
Angels and Demons: $46.2M, $27.4M, 40.7%
Star Trek: $75.2M, $43M, 42.8%
The Final Destination: $27.4M, $15.3M, 44.2%
The Proposal: $33.6M, $18.6M, 44.8%
G-Force: $31.7M, $17.5M, 44.8%
Paul Blart: Mall Cop: $39.2M, $21.6M, 44.9%
Monsters Vs. Aliens: $59.3M, $32.6M, 45.0%
Race to Witch Mountain: $24.4M, $12.8M, 47.6%
Inglourious Basterds: $38.1M, $19.3M, 49.3%
Couples Retreat: $34.3M, $17.2M, 49.8%
District 9: $37.4M, $18.2M, 51.2%
17 Again: $23.7M, $11.5M, 51.4%
Where the Wild Things Are: $32.7M, $14M, 57.1%
Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself: $23.4M, $9.9M, 57.9%
Obsessed: $28.6M, $12.1M, 57.9%
Hannah Montana: The Movie: $32.3M, $13.4M, 58.5%
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: $54.7M, $22.3M, 59.2%
Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail: $41M, $16.2M, 60.6%
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: $109M, $42.3M, 61.2%
Fast and Furious: $71M, $27.2M, 61.6%
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: $77.8M, $29.5M, 62.1%
Funny People: $22.7M, $8M, 64.8%
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian: $70.1M, $24.4M, 65.2%
Watchmen: $55.2M, $17.8M, 67.7%
X-Men Origins: Wolverine: $85.1M, $26.4M, 69.0%
Bruno: $30.6M, $8.3M, 72.8%
Friday the 13th: $43.6M, $7.9M, 81.8%

Perusing the list, there's no obvious correlation between second-weekend performance and a movie's critical reception. There are poorly received movies that did better than Wild Things (Paul Blart and Couples Retreat, for example). And there are well reviewed titles that did worse (such as Funny People and Harry Potter).

But there is possibly a relationship: Above Wild Things, the average combined score from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritc is 115, and the median is 105. Below Wild Things, the average score is 90, and the median is 83.

The circumstances of each movie's release are unique, and it's dangerous to read too much into box-office numbers. But speaking generally, those steep drop-offs usually happen to disposable one-weekend movies (Friday the 13th) and first-weekend movies — those for which there is fervent anticipation (Harry Potter, Watchmen). First-weekend movies are often considered successes; one-weekend movies are successes only if they were cheap to make.

Surely, Where the Wild Things Are was a first-weekend movie: It is drawn from a book beloved by millions, it was not directed by Ron Howard, it does not star Jim Carrey or Mike Meyers, and it has the hipster cachet of Jones and Eggers.

Yet I think it's also a bit of a one-weekend movie. If audiences felt the film is, as Jim Emerson argued, about "the misery of being a kid," then they probably spoke of it with ambivalence at best. And that's precisely the sort of word-of-mouth that keeps folks away after the first weekend.

As for the other champion in this edition of our rankings, I offer an updated box-office comparison, with the additional context that the numbers are not adjusted for inflation.

The Blair Witch Project after five weekends: 5,713 theater weeks (the sum of all weekends' theater counts), $71.5 million gross (weekends only), $12,515 per theater.

Paranormal Activity after five weekends: 5,312 theater weeks, $49.2 million gross (weekends only), $9,264 per theater.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.

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Scares on a Frightfully Small Budget

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:10:00 -0600

Question: Which is your favorite among these low-cost horror movies?

Choices: Night of the Living Dead (1968; $114K). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; $140K). The Blair Witch Project (1999; $20K-$25K). Paranormal Activity (2009; $11K).

See the results (7 vote[s]) or vote.

Monster Mash

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:30:00 -0600

Instead of generating yet another list of 20 or 50 or 100 great horror movies for Halloween-viewing consideration, I tried to approach the task a little differently.

My original plan was to present many movies in various horror subgenres with different labels ("under the radar," "fashionable but worthy," "classic," and "could do without"), but I realized I was mostly repeating myself.

So instead, I offer one movie in each of 10 horror divisions, with some effort to avoid the obvious, everybody's-seen-them choices. A director can only appear once on the list.

The goal: Describe your personal, hopefully idiosyncratic taste in horror in only 10 selections. With the same rules and the same subgenres, what does your list look like?

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Box Office Power Rankings: August 28-October 11, 2009

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:05:00 -0600

Over the past seven weekends, Culture Snob's Box Office Power Rankings were won by Quentin Tarantino (twice), Tyler Perry, Meatballs (twice), and zombies (twice). No one could have possibly known that until now, however, because apparently I've been in a coma.

What did I miss? Well, there was a flood of new releases, with 24 movies debuting in the box-office top 10 over the seven weeks. Thankfully if inexplicably, only Couples Retreat opened wide this past weekend, allowing Paranormal Activity to grab the spotlight, earning almost $8 million at a mere 160 theaters.

The homemade, low-budget horror movie has drawn a lot of comparisons to The Blair Witch Project 10 years ago, and with good reason.

The Blair Witch Project: initial budget of between $20,000 and $25,000; Rotten Tomatoes score of 85; Metacritic score of 81.

Paranormal Activity: initial budget of $11,000; Rotten Tomatoes score of 86; Metacritic score of 68.

Blair Witch's rollout started at 27 theaters and increased to 2,142 by its fourth weekend, generating $11,000 per site by the time of that wide release. (Over the past seven weeks, only two top-10 movies had weekends with a per-theater average of more than $10,000.) Paranormal Activity's release is more gradual, with 760 sites this coming weekend — its fourth.

A key difference, though, is when each movie generated its buzz. Blair Witch's per-theater averages were $56,000, $64,000, $27,000, and then $11,000. In other words, anticipation was there before the movie opened anywhere. Paranormal has presumably built excitement more through word-of-mouth, with per-theater averages of $6,000 and $16,000 before last weekend's $49,000.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.

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Best Left Unsolved

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:25:00 -0600

While I still don't really understand the Twitter phenomenon, I've loved using the 140-character limit for extreme forced concision. The aim is always to pack these ridiculously short reviews with enough meaning that I don't feel guilty about never writing more about a particular movie or television show. I would never say that 140 characters is sufficient to discuss much of anything — let alone a feature film — but it's a great if arbitrary writing exercise: How much can you say within Twitter's confines?

For the most part, I've been happy with the results. But with Tell No One, I feel that I need to explain myself.

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Agonizing Anticipation

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:55:00 -0600

"He braced himself for this big fucking scream."

That's the final sentence of James Ellroy's American Tabloid, the first book in the "Underwold USA" trilogy that concluded with the release of Blood's a Rover last week. It's hard to believe that more than 14 years passed between these novels, because the memory of reading that line the first time feels a lot fresher than 1995. It's nearly seared into my brain.

It's easy to dismiss Ellroy for being lurid, coarse, and florid in his subjects and in his rhythmic, peculiarly pretty shards-of-glass prose, and for being an egomaniacal braggart in interviews. (I think it's an act, but that makes it only more annoying.) It's understandable to want a reprieve from his characters' black souls and the incessant violence, sex, and drugs. And it's only human to wish the guy some peace, even as each novel continues to reflect a man tortured by the personal history detailed in My Dark Places, about the murder of his mother.

Yet all that is essential Ellroy and given, and focusing on those things means we ignore his larger brilliance: how his style simultaneously beats and hypnotizes the reader into trance-like immersion; how that submission to the author forces the reader to accept the (frequently) ridiculous, and makes his alternative history more than plausible; and how he quietly manages a story underneath all that complicated verbal jazz, with chaotic, wide-ranging narratives converging beautifully, naturally, and correctly.

American Tabloid's closing sentence hints at all of that. By itself, it's an unremarkable collection of words, but it carries an almost agonizing anticipation. The whole novel has been building to this event — the book concludes in 1963, by the way — and in the final rush of pages, the reader wonders how it's going to go down.

And Ellroy, with what only seems like uncharacteristic restraint, pulls up just short, and leaves us on the sidelines, and lets it hang. There is a horror here, not in seeing, but in knowing what's about to happen. It's a great ending, and I smile every time I think about it.

Say Hello to My Little Stranger

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:25:00 -0600

The narrator of The Little Stranger would tell you that this tale is about grave misfortune, not a haunted house.

His name is Dr. Faraday, and in Sarah Waters' agonizingly patient gothic novel set in post-World War II Britain, he has a dismissal available for any odd happening at Hundreds Hall. You're tired. It's an old house. Those must have been there for years. He seems the opposite of the classic unreliable narrator — he's too reliable, and at points in the book he so tediously rules out the supernatural that you want some apparition to shove a hot poker up his ass.

If this sounds like a criticism, it's a mild one, as this is surely the effect that Waters sought, anatomical specificity aside. Faraday is so sane and logical that he has no credibility in the context of this story; rational explanations do not make for good horror fiction, and that's the baggage that readers bring to the book. His refusal to accept the supernatural as even possible is the novel's primary source of tension, and in the end is critical to its wickedly satisfying ending.

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Best of the Blockbusters

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:55:00 -0600

Question: Which of these summer 2009 blockbusters (the five highest-grossing movies of the year so far) is your favorite?

Choices: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Up. The Hangover. Star Trek.

See the results (27 vote[s]) or vote.

Box Office Power Rankings: August 7-23, 2009

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:15:00 -0600

District 9 rightly got a lot of attention. No stars! $30-million production budget! Good special effects! Great reviews! Strong word of mouth! A $37-million opening weekend!

It's a compelling story, and God knows the movie business needs constant reminders that funding six District 9s can be far more lucrative than bankrolling one G.I. Joe.

Of course, nobody creates the same movie six times. So let's imagine that instead of spending $175 million to produce G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a studio decided to make District 9, Julie and Julia ($40 million), Inglouirious Basterds ($70 million), and some piece of shit that cost $35 million and was never released in theaters.

Through August 26, G.I. Joe grossed $123.5 million, Julie and Julia (released the same day, August 7) $62.5 million, District 9 (August 14) $78.5 million, Basterds (August 21) $50.6 million, and Piece of Shit (N/A) $0.0 million. The total box office to date for our quartet: $191.6 million, or 55 percent more than G.I. Joe. And remember that none of our movies has been out longer than Joe, and that the widest release (Basterds) was in 21 percent fewer theaters than Joe at its peak.

In our Box Office Power Rankings, Julie and Julia won in its debut weekend, while District 9 did the same and then held off Basterds to retain its crown.

Yet even though District 9 is a great success story, one has to give credit to those other two films. They might have bigger budgets, actual stars, and familiar directors, but they are seriously hard sells compared to the alien-ghetto premise of Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi movie.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.

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Box Office Power Rankings: July 10-August 2, 2009

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:50:00 -0600

In nine weekends of release, The Hangover has finished in second place seven times in the Box Office Power Rankings. This past weekend, The Hangover passed Star Trek's $254 million — which means it's playing with the big boys.

It will gross less domestically than Transformers, Up, and Harry Potter, and its reviews were not as strong as Up, Potter, Trek, or Drag Me to Hell. But it's the movie of the summer because it's had great legs over a long period of time.

In their ninth weekends, Up and Star Trek were out of the box-office top 10. The Hangover was in eighth place with $5.2 million.

This past weekend, its third, Harry Potter grossed $17.9 million. The Hangover in its third: $26.8 million.

Compare The Hangover hanging around to the moment of Brüno, whose buzz lasted weeks longer than the post-release cultural conversation.

As for Harry Potter, it's telling that with relatively weak late-summer competition, the boy wizard only managed a tie for first in his third weekend. The movie will likely end up the second-highest-grossing Potter flick (behind Sorcerer's Stone), but I don't sense much enthusiasm.

Continue reading for the methodology and the full rankings.

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A Static Film About Transience (and Self-Involvement, and Blowjobs)

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:30:00 -0600

(A warning: If you're bothered by spoilers, images of fellatio, or discussions of fellatio, avert your eyes.)

The Brown Bunny gave Roger Ebert cancer, and it features a real blowjob. And the girlfriend is dead.

In 18 words, I've summarized the hullabaloo surrounding (and the post-climactic revelation of) Vincent Gallo's shockingly vain vanity project from 2003. I can even spare you from the "boring" parts of the movie — basically the first 80 of its 93 minutes — and help you indulge whatever prurient curiosity you might have by pointing to an in-depth description/analysis and video of the oral-sex scene.

But the film as a whole is actually oddly fascinating, especially in the context of its initial critical drubbing and the filmmaker's reaction to that reception.

Continue reading.

Canon Fodder

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:10:00 -0600

This week saw the debut of "The 50 Greatest Films," with the One-Line Review's Iain Stott compiling responses from 187 movie buffs, including me. The list made me wonder: Has the "film canon" become too ossified?

I was frankly shocked that the results were so ... ordinary. A top 10 of Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001, The Godfather, Casablanca, The Third Man, Taxi Driver, Seven Samurai, Psycho, and Dr. Strangelove is perfectly reasonable and respectable, but it's also merely reasonable and respectable. Given Stott's admirable democracy ("[I]gnoring thoughts of position or pedigree ... ," he wrote, "professionals and amateurs sit side by side"), I expected a tension between the canonical and the contemporary and the popular.

Nope.

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Potter Mouth, Part II

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:25:20 -0600

Question: Which director/writer pair has done the worst job translating J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for the big screen?

Choices: Columbus/Cloves (2001's "Stone" and 2002's "Chamber"). Cuaron/Cloves (2004's "Azkaban"). Newell/Cloves (2005's "Goblet"). Yates/Goldenberg (2007's "Order"). Yates/Cloves (2009's "Prince").

See the results (23 vote[s]) or vote.

Potter Mouth

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:05:00 -0600

Question: Which director/writer pair has done the best job translating J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for the big screen?

Choices: Columbus/Cloves (2001's "Stone" and 2002's "Chamber"). Cuaron/Cloves (2004's "Azkaban"). Newell/Cloves (2005's "Goblet"). Yates/Goldenberg (2007's "Order"). Yates/Cloves (2009's "Prince").

See the results (24 vote[s]) or vote.

The Slow Dawn of Surprise

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:15:00 -0600

It is a car salesman that carries writer/director Kirt Gunn's Lovely by Surprise on his shoulders until the movie blossoms.

To his credit, Bob doesn't actually sell cars. In the automobile-sales process, he dispenses hackneyed life advice, admonishing his customers that they need to spend more time with their families, and do they really want to part with that old clunker, filled as it is with memories? He is played with sincerity by Reg Rogers, in the sense that Bob means everything he says. But there's a fakeness, a performance, about Bob — a smiling, cheery devil-may-care mask that makes him both inscrutable and intensely compelling.

A genuinely independent movie, Lovely by Surprise hit DVD this week after playing the festival circuit, and what's surprising is that it's as successful as it is.

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Box Office Power Rankings: May 29-July 5, 2009

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:45:00 -0600

You have to feel a little sorry for the poor bastards of The Hangover. With all the trials they endured, in our Box Office Power Rankings they end up sniffing the ass of an old man. For a month. And when they finally get their shot at Culture Snob glory, Public Enemies sneaks in with numbers that are only across-the-board good — third place in each of our four categories.

Up was released on May 29, and The Hangover followed on June 5. Even though The Hangover has beaten the Pixar flick in every week of its release in terms of gross and per-theater average, in the Box Office Power Rankings it could never overcome its negligible critical-reception deficit. Todd Phillips' comedy had excellent Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 78 and 73, respectively, but with Up (97/88) and Star Trek (95/83) garnering stratospheric reviews and having legs at the box office, The Hangover was doomed from the outset.

Well, as doomed as any movie that has made more than $200 million domestically could be with a production budget of $35 million.

Up becomes the first movie to ever win the outright Box Office Power Rankings title for five consecutive weeks. Iron Man won for five straight weeks last summer, but it shared the crown once.

And I'm proud to say that the Transformers sequel hasn't been able to even see the top of the Box Office Power Rankings. When I devised this system two years ago, my aim was to counter the cultural box-office obsession by taking into account the fact that some very popular movies suck.

And speaking of sucking, how does Land of the Lost stack up to last year's biggest summer bomb, Speed Racer? One ill-conceived adaptation of a long-ago television show cost $100 million to make; had grossed $48 million domestically and had pretty much disappeared after five weeks; and had Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 28 and 32, respectively. The other had a production budget of $120 million; had grossed $42 million and had pretty much disappeared after five weeks; and had a score of 37 at both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The first is Land of the Lost, which in financial terms ends up looking slightly less embarrassing.

Continue reading for the methodology and the (six!) weeks' full rankings.

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Does Oscar Have a Growing Problem?

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:30:00 -0600

Question: Do you like or dislike the idea of expanding the number of Best Picture Oscar nominees from five to 10?

Choices: I like it. I don't like it. I'm reserving judgment until I see it in action.

See the results (19 vote[s]) or vote.

The announcement that the Academy Awards will double the number of Best Picture nominees this year has certainly generated buzz, although it has mostly led to jokes about the length of the awards telecast. (And while we're at it: What's the deal with airline peanuts?) The Film Experience's Nathaniel Rogers summarizes the reactions and remains doubtful that the move will broaden the appeal of the nominees:

"Mostly the expanded competitive field will just mean more slots for the type of movies Oscar likes to nominate — i.e., serious dramas, message movies, period pieces, war films, and films that smell of prestige in some way (lauded source material, famous auteurs, you know the type)."

I'm skeptical of his skepticism — at least looking backward.

Continue reading.

Box Office Power Rankings: May 1-25, 2009

Thu, 28 May 2009 15:22:51 -0600

The conventional wisdom says that among the early entrants in the summer 2009 sweepstakes, Star Trek is a hit (and a winner in its first three weekends in our Box Office Power Rankings), Wolverine is a disappointment, and nobody cares about Angels and Demons. Yet X-Men Origins: Wolverine had the biggest North American opening of the three: $85 million.

These evaluations are muddied by so many variables — buzz, expectations, marketing, screen saturation, critical assessment — that it's difficult to cut through the crap. This leads to some conventional wisdom that is anything but wise, such as the idea that the 2008 Hulk reboot was, in box-office terms, a triumph over its nearly identically performing 2003 forebear.

But I think we can say with some quantifiable certainty that our first impressions of the 2009 summer movie season are correct.

One simple measure is second-weekend drop-off, generally considered a reliable indicator of a movie's staying power.

So: Wolverine dropped 69.0 percent from $85 million; Star Trek dropped 42.8 percent from $75 million; and Angels and Demons dropped 53.0 percent (not counting the Monday holiday) from $46 million.

The combination of opening box office and relative performance in the second weekend seems to support the consensus. Solid openings for both Wolverine and Star Trek suggest excitement about the titles, and they diverge from there. Angels and Demons debuted 40 percent lower than The Da Vinci code, confirming apathy.

But you can't take either factor independent of the other. The Dark Knight's second-weekend percentage drop (52.5) is rubbing up against Angels and Demons', but you must consider the height ($158 million) from which it fell.

And these numbers probably work best in one-on-one comparisons. Last summer, both Iron Man and Indiana Jones had three-day opening grosses around $100 million; identifying which dropped 55.3 percent the next weekend and which dropped 48.1 percent would just confirm what you already know in your gut.

Continue reading for the methodology and the weeks' full rankings.

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A Life More Ordinary

Mon, 11 May 2009 15:55:32 -0600

(A submission to Counting Down the Zeroes, a project by Ibetolis at Film for the Soul.)

Much to my surprise, I can find no reference to the nearly universal cinematic "wedding-ring rule": Any time a wedding ring is a prominent prop or visual motif in a movie, infidelity will be a central theme. The obverse: Any movie with infidelity as a central theme will feature the wedding ring as a prop or visual motif.

I could offer dozens of examples, but the best might be Lantana, which is obviously about sexual straying but has a greater interest in marriage overall, especially the underlying, intertwined issues of trust and honesty. Although it's nearly too blunt in its themes, the movie feels continuously right, nailing not only relationship dynamics but interred grief and pain. Throughout, it gets the tone, nuance, and scale of life correct.

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