“Social media creates buzz for low-cost horror movie - Daily Oklahoman” plus 4 more |
- Social media creates buzz for low-cost horror movie - Daily Oklahoman
- Movie Review: LAW ABIDING CITIZEN - SpoutBlog
- Ray Romano pays big bucks to have dinner with the creator of ... - News1130.com
- Around the Nation - Arizona Daily Star
- A different beast: 'Where the Wild Things Are' ambles from page to ... - Bismarck Tribune
| Social media creates buzz for low-cost horror movie - Daily Oklahoman Posted: 16 Oct 2009 06:03 AM PDT LOS ANGELES — The critics have spoken. Here's what more than a few have to say: "Scariest movie of my life." For Hollywood studio flicks, such raves usually are no more than icing on top of a marketing campaign that cost tens of millions. For "Paranormal Activity," the raves are the marketing campaign. Distributor Paramount Pictures so far has spent only a few million dollars promoting the movie, a fraction of the marketing budget for big releases. "This movie doesn't lend itself to a big, giant marketing campaign. This movie is an old-fashioned word-of-mouth movie," said Rob Moore, Paramount vice chairman. Shot by writer-director Oren Peli for a reported $15,000, the movie was acquired by former Paramount partner DreamWorks at 2008's Slamdance Film Festival. In keeping with the movie's do-it-yourself indie spirit, Paramount started with midnight-only screenings in 13 cities, then let the online community decide where the movie would play next. Fans continued to vote, deciding the movie's next destinations as it went into all-day release in 46 markets this past weekend. The studio plans to continue rolling it out to more theaters based on what towns request it the most. The film opens today in Oklahoma City. "On the social-networking sites, everybody's talking about how freaking scary this movie is," said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. "This does not happen every day. This is literally capturing lightning in a bottle." Another indie horror tale, 1999's "The Blair Witch Project," became the biggest hit ever discovered at the Sundance Film Festival as months of online chatter pushed it to a $140 million haul. Could "Paranormal Activity" be the new "Blair Witch," joining the $100 million hit club? "That would seem highly improbable, since it hasn't happened this decade," Paramount's Moore said.Share with a friend
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| Movie Review: LAW ABIDING CITIZEN - SpoutBlog Posted: 17 Oct 2009 01:37 AM PDT "Evil will always win because Good is stupid." That line comes from Spaceballs and illustrates one of the only problems in cinema and in Law Abiding Citizen in particular. When the "bad" guy is so diabolically intelligent Assistant District Attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) never manages to get one step ahead of Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) until the script demands it. Rather, he plays catch up for a majority of the film's runtime. See, throughout the action thriller, Shelton is able to mastermind outrageous killings without anyone being the wiser after the imperfect justice system fails to deal with his wife and daughter's murderers. And how does he do this? Because he's smarter than Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA and the Philadelphia Police Department put together. For a good hour-maybe more-Citizen is a rollicking story, deftly combining explosions and exposition to keep the audience engaged. Butler and Foxx support their own dueling storylines, criss crossing one another and intersecting sporadically. It is in these times, when the city of Philadelphia is in Shelton's grip, that the movie fires on all cylinders, both literally and figuratively. Director F. Gary Gray puts us into the center of the action, watching all corners of the screen to see where the next attack comes from, making us as tense as the characters. These isn't normal violence; no, it's calculated, planned and exacting, designed to "get" only certain people. In a way, the film works like a Saw flick in that Shelton takes it upon himself to be the voice of morality for the government and judicial system. Jigsaw sees himself as an arbiter of morals in that series, too. Shelton and Jigsaw have something else in common: the over-the-top manner in which they teach their lessons. Without spoiling anything, how Shelton is behind this plan is...how do we say it...fantasy? But good fantasy since it could be plausible in the real world. Take, for instance, a scene early in the film featuring a botched lethal injection. It is grotesque and undauntingly disgusting, yes, but asks a very pointed question. Why is it someone who showed no mercy or compassion toward another human being being offered either of those things? Even later, when Shelton takes apart the other attacker is a gruesome display of engineering prowess, he's not doing so to be a sociopath. It's not even revenge, really. It's all about a lesson. Unfortunately, innocent people are caught in the crosshairs of the lesson, though it could all have been avoided. And here's the biggest gripe against Law Abiding Citizen comes in: the stupidity of the good guys, particularly Rice. From the beginning of the film, he's shown to be arrogant and considered only with his conviction rate. To put it bluntly, he has no people skills-not even for his own wife and daughter-nor does he "get it right." In an early conversation with Shelton, Rice makes the assertion that some justice is better than no justice at all. Frankly, for a husband and father who is grieving, those words are of cold comfort. It's humanity at its most basic level. Yes, it is job of the DA's office to put people behind bars and to make deals. Viewers see that every week on Law & Order. There are several other times through the film Rice will make a statement along these lines and the audience knows it should have been softened in some way. In a way, Rice is the reason this movie even exists. (Running about 108 minutes, the film does have room to flesh out a couple things. First and foremost is the old axiom of "show, not tell." It's especially crucial here since the entirety of the film rests on feeling the relationship between Shelton and his family and the court proceedings. We're privy to neither of them, outside of a five minute scene with his daughter at the beginning. I'm sure Gray wanted to get to the action as soon as possible, but that doesn't mean it has to come at the expense of valuable exposition. Writer Kurt Wimmer-he did the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair-does wisely chooses to stay away from the cliche of Shelton confessing in a voice over montage sequence. In this case, at least, telling is better than showing.) Imagine the following hypothetical situation. Person X has demonstrated, at least once, to be very shrewd and smart, carefully parsing his words to great effect. This same person has similarly shown a devotion to time and agreements...something law enforcement knows about. Why, then, do the same law enforcement personnel not follow the letter of any future agreement to the exact second? Why is it they feel the need to flaunt their own authority when, in reality, they have no control at all? And how does one man turn into Andy Dufresne without a single person knowing about it. I venture to think these are all questions Gray and Wimmer hope the audience doesn't think of. That's what I mean by stupid good guys. Perhaps I'm overselling this one point. Citizen does a number of things right in its 108 minutes on the screen. Above all else, it's simply engaging. Gray is able to mask most of his punches, allowing them to hit the audience and characters fast and furiously. Even after the first one, the second still comes as a complete shock despite the fact we should be ready for it. And then there's the choices in casting. Butler is instantly compelling as both grieved and an "evil genius" despite a lot of the exposition leading to both emotions is missing. He also gets the audience to sympathize with him, at least at first. Foxx is in the same boat, buying completely into the arrogance of Rice immediately. Even if we don't necessarily buy the moment the proverbial light bulb goes off in his head as being organic, his moves are always keeping in line with the character, not to mention the actor playing him. There is always a slight arrogance, an ego, if you will, to Foxx in all his performances. Here, it works to great effect to create the character of Nick Rice. The director also manages to stage a beautiful blaze at the end of the picture. Shot in slow motion, with rich deep colors and never betraying the tricks used to create the scene, it is simply awe inspiring. Too bad it's been spoiled in some of the promotional material. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
| Ray Romano pays big bucks to have dinner with the creator of ... - News1130.com Posted: 16 Oct 2009 03:57 PM PDT BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Ray Romano is spending big money to have dinner with the man who created "Everybody Loves Raymond." Romano bid a winning US$16,000 in a live auction Thursday for the chance to share a meal and a movie with "Raymond" creator Philip Rosenthal. The auction was held as part of a fundraiser for Inner City Arts, a school that teaches art to children in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. The school is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Thursday's event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel honoured Rosenthal and his family for their contributions to Inner City Arts. Romano's new show, "Men of a Certain Age," premieres in December. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
| Around the Nation - Arizona Daily Star Posted: 17 Oct 2009 01:22 AM PDT "); w.document.close(); } This content has passed through fivefilters.org.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| A different beast: 'Where the Wild Things Are' ambles from page to ... - Bismarck Tribune Posted: 17 Oct 2009 12:03 AM PDT CHICAGO - The promotional materials for Spike Jonze's long-gestating new film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" kick off with this quote from the director: "I didn't set out to make a children's movie; I set out to make a movie about childhood." Warner Bros. has reason to emphasize this distinction: Although Jonze's "Wild Things" reveres the spirit of Sendak's 1963 picture book, it's quite a different beast. Max, the troublemaking kid at the center of the action, is older. So, presumably, will be the film's audience. Dave Eggers, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jonze, said the movie's influences certainly went beyond the standard kiddie fare. "The movies that we talked about at the very beginning - 'Wizard of Oz' and 'Black Stallion' and 'My Life as a Dog' and '400 Blows' - were about childhood and did it from a child's-eye view as opposed to more like, I call them confections," Eggers said over lunch recently with the director and actors Max Records (who plays Max) and Catherine Keener (who plays his mom) in a downtown hotel. "It wasn't like we were making this anti-kids movie," said Jonze, whose bright green crew-neck sweater was as pristine as Eggers' San Francisco Giants' baseball cap was dirty. "We were working from the inside out in terms of what we wanted it to feel like, as opposed to the outside in in terms of what shelf it was going to go on in the video store." But Jonze's approach launched him onto a journey at least as long and perilous as Max's. Although a seven-minute, animated "Wild Things" was made in 1973 (and updated in the 1980s), Sendak later spent years trying to launch a feature-length film and eventually approached Jonze, whom he'd befriended on a project before the director made his 1999 breakthrough film "Being John Malkovich." At that point, the movie was set up at Universal, though disagreements would prompt its move to Warner Bros. (Pixar founder John Lasseter had even worked on a computer-animated version for Disney before he made "Toy Story.") Eggers, the author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and "Zeitoun" and founder of the independent publishing house McSweeney's, had been friends with Jonze since writing him a fan letter about "Malkovich," and Jonze didn't care that Eggers had never written or even read a screenplay when he asked him to collaborate about five years ago. "I think Spike has a fondness for untrained or self-trained people," said Eggers. He noted that Jonze also hired Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as a first-time composer. "Yeah, and Max had never acted in a film before," Jonze said of his now-12-year-old star, who previously had appeared in a Death Cab for Cutie video. "To me, it's not so important finding somebody that has had the experience. It's more finding somebody who has the right taste and qualities, because I feel like you can't teach somebody taste, and I want to be with somebody whose taste is going to teach me something." To Keener, who wound up with an associate producer's credit after relocating to Australia to keep working with Records long after her scenes had wrapped, Jonze's working method fostered great camaraderie. "It's not like a proprietary group of people," she said. "Everyone's excited about what you're going to show me. It's like a bunch of dogs who come back with stories of their walks, you know?" Jonze and Eggers cracked up. "You know what I mean," sighed the good-humored Keener. By the time Eggers signed on, Jonze had fleshed out a back story that had Max living with his divorced mom and older sister, who was losing interest in him. "I started thinking about who the Wild Things were and the idea that they were wild emotions," said Jonze, who wanted to make a movie "that felt like being 9 in the world, trying to navigate this new place you're in." That the movie Max was older than the one on the page was something Jonze said he never considered "until I started telling Maurice about what I was writing. I was like, 'OK, Max is like 8,' and he said, 'Oh, wait. Max is 5.' As I was thinking about what the story was, it just felt like 8 or 9 was the right age." "If you're going to really put a kid on a boat in an ocean, 5 isn't going to cut it," Eggers said. "It's just too young." The iconic, 81-year-old author-illustrator Sendak, who retains a producer's credit, was OK with that change but took more convincing on another one: Instead of having Max's room turn into the forest where he encounters the Wild Things, the movie sends Max in his wolf costume storming out the front door and onto his adventure. "That was the one thing that he really couldn't believe we wanted to do, and he really fought it," Eggers said. "He kept coming back to it." "(He'd say) 'This is your movie - you've got to make it however you feel it needs to be - but why can't the bedroom turn into a forest?"' Jonze recalled as Eggers laughed. The writers said that, although they love that transition in the book, the film needed that extra shot of realism. "If you're going to watch a whole movie, and if it seems like the whole thing's a dream or all in someone's mind," Eggers said, "I think it feels like a cheat." Eggers was less successful in selling another of his ideas. "I wanted to have Max light the whole forest on fire. That didn't happen," said Eggers, who grew up in Lake Forest, Ill. "In the suburbs here, that's what we did for fun - not lighting the whole forest, but there was a lot of fire-oriented activity. Maurice didn't like the fire part. And I think it might have been impractical." "I started trying to figure out, 'How do you burn a whole forest?'" Jonze said. Eggers stressed he wished to show that "it's not always good to get everything you wish for ... not that you should be burning down forests." At any rate, the director and co-writer said Sendak proved to be supportive of their artistic freedom and a more astute critic than the studio reps. "Sometimes me and Dave would try to put something in there that was maybe a little bit pandering or cringy or a little on the nose, and it was always the thing that the studio loved and Maurice hated," Jonze said. "And, of course, we had to go with Maurice." Perhaps Jonze's riskiest decision was to make the movie live-action in a multipart process: The actors who played the Wild Things (including James Gandolfini and Catherine O'Hara) performed their voice work on a soundstage before the production moved to Australia, and Records acted alongside local actors in oversize puppet costumes whose mouths eventually were computer-animated. Such a strategy was bound to be tricky, though Jonze said he had no idea the film would take so long to complete and release. "I knew it was going to be complicated," said Eggers, who went on to co-write "Away We Go" with his wife, Vendela Vida. "I was the voice of reason." "He kept trying," Jonze said, "and I was like 'N-n-n-n-n-n-not listening.'" Jonze said he took director/friend David Fincher's advice and didn't respond to the gossip, though he admitted that he and the studio were in conflict. "It wasn't fun, but we made it through it," he said, noting that the delay turned out to be a blessing because now the studio is giving the film a wide, well-promoted release. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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