How to Spend $20
By Eric Hughes
April 19, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Pick of the Week
The King’s Speech
I managed to see The King’s Speech twice in theaters. A feat, I’ll say, that doesn’t happen very often because a) I rarely do this and b) I find I like renting movies much more than seeing them in theaters. It’s cheaper, of course, and a simple way to digest movies when you want to digest them -- while at the same time staving off ads for Coca-Cola and when to mute my cell phone.
Anyway, the second time I saw it was with my aunt, who, God bless her, treated me to an afternoon matinee. Nearby her place is one of those theaters -- maybe it’s become a bit more prevalent -- that has a full food and drink menu. You’re not required to stuff yourself, but you must order something when the server comes ‘round. We both got sandwiches because we hadn’t had lunch yet and settled into The King’s Speech.
The whole idea of a meal at a movie theater -- a wait staff, table bussing, free refills without leaving the seat -- felt very foreign to me. What happened to popping over to CVS before your show begins, buying sweet and salty treats and then packing them into your lady friend’s purse? It’s a fun game.
The King’s Speech, the movie, is a polished piece of cinema that had that distinguished air about it that movies like The Social Network kind of lacked. (And it isn’t solely because The King’s Speech was a product of the UK). I wouldn’t say it was better -- in fact, Aaron Sorkin’s drama was my favorite of 2010 -- but while watching King’s Speech, you got the sense that a lot of the people who joined the production did so because they thought it would be the movie that would win them Oscar.
Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter were all great, and in a perfect world -- or, at least, in a year that didn’t have Christian Bale’s stunning achievements to celebrate -- Rush would have gained a little more recognition than mere nominations. He, and his relationship with Firth’s character, were my favorite parts about the movie.
For me, The King’s Speech was a fine film that could have been even better had it not been so repetitive. King George would fail a lesson with Lionel and it’d be the end of the world. And yet he did the same a day ago, and would probably do the same the next day. I would have liked for there to have been a little more variety.
Disc includes: Audio commentary, Making Of featurette, cast and crew Q&As, Speeches from the Real King George VI featurette, The Real Lionel Hogue Highlights
Gulliver's Travels
I don’t know that Jack Black has had a flop quite like Gulliver’s Travels. Costing over $100 to make -- and that’s just the production side - the film earned back less than half of that in the States. Foreign grosses ($175 million) tallied a bit better, but studios generally don’t see all of that money anyway.
Figuring out what may have gone wrong is easier to pick out at a time like now than at any point before a movie releases. Otherwise, bombs would never happen and the suits would get their way every time. (Scary thought.) So, my quick understanding is this: It usually comes back to marketing, and that’s what I’ll blame here. Specifically, it failed to pin down a target audience.
Watching the trailer a second time, I didn’t get a sense of who’d be excited about Jack Black towering over a colony’s worth of Lilliputians. Younger people wouldn’t necessarily care that Amanda Peet snagged a prominent role, and older folk probably didn’t so much as smirk at the silly humor. Literature hounds also would poo poo it, considering Gulliver’s Travels originally published in 1726, and I don’t think the text had any good fart jokes.
Disc includes: Gag reel, I Don’t Know… with Leumel Gulliver featurette, deleted scenes, Little and Large featurette, Jack Black Thinks Big featurette, Gulliver’s Foosball Challenge featurette, War Song Dance featurette, In Character: Jack Black featurette, In Character: Jason Segel featurette, Life After Film School: Rob Letterman featurette, World Premiere featurette
Somewhere
Sofia Coppola’s first movie since Marie Antoinette also happened to win her a Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival -- a real honor to some, since just three Americans have won the prize outright since 1949 and exactly zero women, of any nationality, have done the same in as many years. This is Coppola doing the family name proud.
I can’t really speak for Somewhere because I haven’t seen it, though the same is probably true of your neighbors because really nobody saw this thing. Debuting in seven theaters a few days before Christmas, the movie climaxed at the of January with 83 engagements and, as of early March, left theaters completely.
The story, I think, is a fictionalized account of some of the ideas I had just been reading about in Toby Young’s entertaining memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Having worked for two years at Vanity Fair in the mid to late ‘90s, Toby didn’t seem to do much actually reporting, but he did face the industry’s underbelly rather head-on. One musing I remember fondly is his idea that A-listers must be so freakin’ hungry since any munching done outside the confines of a trusted home would probably be snapped at by the pap.
So, Sofia Coppola’s narrative intrigues me, in that it covers a day in the life of a miserable movie star. He has money and women, but spends a lot of his time alone, and lacking much emotion because he doesn’t get any to begin with. We forget they’re people sometimes, yeah?
Disc includes: Making Somewhere featurette
April 19, 2011
Blu-ray
Born to Raise Hell
Breed / Day Of The Dead
The Code / The Contract
Command Performance / Direct Contact
Earth From Above: Amazing Lands
Earth From Above: Life
Earth From Above: Stunning Water
Fubar: Balls to the Wall
Glee: Encore
Goemon
Gulliver's Travels
Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster (Collector's Edition)
Kes (Criterion Collection)
The King's Speech
The Last Legion
Monamour (Special Edition)
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat Annihilation
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Pushing Daisies: The Complete Series
Rabbit Hole
Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure
Short Circuit 2
Somewhere
Street Kings / Street Kings 2: Motor City
Street Kings 2: Motor City
Sweetie (Criterion Collection)
Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Series
The Way Back
Zombie Holocaust
DVD
About Adam (Widescreen)
American Dad: Volume 6
Born to Raise Hell
Darkness (Special Edition)
Duplex (Special Edition)
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air: Complete Sixth Season
Glee: Encore
Gulliver's Travels
Ingrid Bergman: Swedish Film Collection (Boxed Set)
Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster (Collector's Edition)
John Leguizamo's Freak
Justin Bieber: Rise to Fame
Kes (Criterion Collection)
The King's Speech (R Rated Version)
Monamour (Special Edition)
Princess Blade (Special Edition)
Pushing Daisies: The Complete Series
Rabbit Hole
Short Circuit 2
Somewhere
Sweetie (Criterion Collection)
Tennessee's Partner (Special Edition)
The Way Back