plus 4, Movie theaters provide popular holiday activity - Alexandria Daily Town Talk

Movie theaters provide popular holiday activity - Alexandria Daily Town Talk
Businesses ready for movie industry - Battle Creek Enquirer
Cruz basks in movie 'magic' - TheDay
Movie soundtracks of 2009 - Los Angeles Times
Three Idiots Movie Review - PRLog (free press release)

Movie theaters provide popular holiday activity - Alexandria Daily Town Talk

Posted: 26 Dec 2009 01:08 AM PST

In the days of old, popcorn's purpose at Christmas was to hang from the tree.

More recently, it's become more delicacy than decoration as people have lined up in greater numbers at theaters around the country than they have in years past.

Films that have been in the theaters on Christmas Day have seen single-day sales figures as high as $19.5 million, according to Web sites that monitor grossing statistics like Boxofficemojo.com.

The highest grossing movie to open on Christmas Day was last year's family film, "Marley and Me," which brought in $14.4 million.

While these figures are nowhere near the highest records for single-day ticket sales -- a list that received a new champion on Nov. 20 when teen favorite "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" made $72.7 million on opening day -- Christmas is still one of the busiest days of the year for The Grand in Alexandria, manager Patti Rachal said.

"People come because it's safe, fun entertainment," Rachal said. "And there's something for everyone."

Locally, family comedies like Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" and 20th Century Fox's "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" do particularly well during the day as families fresh from opening gifts flock to funny films, Rachal said, and more serious films like "New Moon," James Cameron's "Avatar" or the upcoming "Sherlock Holmes" film starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law will likely pull in teenagers and older audiences in the evening.

The reasons for why the movie theater is so busy on Christmas are the same reasons its busy on the weekends, Rachal said.

Most people have the day off and going to the movies is one of the most popular pastimes for people in the area.

One big difference, however, is the time the theater will open Christmas Day because The Grand will skip its first round of showings, Rachal said.

The first show will start at 3 p.m. with doors opening at 2:30 p.m.

"They figure no one is going to get up that early on Christmas and come to the movies," Rachal said.

For information and showtimes, contact The Grand's movie line at 1-888-943-4567.

Paragon Cinema at the Paragon Casino Resort in Marksville will also feature only later showings with the first movie starting at 6:15 p.m. For information and showtimes, call 1-800-946-1946 ext. 6600.

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Businesses ready for movie industry - Battle Creek Enquirer

Posted: 26 Dec 2009 01:08 AM PST

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Meanwhile, a nearby company has found its booming business in the middle of another flashback to the Reagan era: "Red Dawn," the '80s Soviet invasion flick.

Bryan and Megan Meganck, the owners and operators of an Auburn Hills craft services company, have been putting in 18- to 20-hour days on the remake's set providing food and drink to the cast and crew.

The Megancks were spending more time in Portland, Ore., in 2007, working on commercial shoots after similar opportunities in their home state had dried up. A year later, things changed dramatically for them.

Post-incentives, the Lake Orion couple hired four full-time employees and three part-timers and got called to work on almost every major film production that came to southeastern Michigan.

They've spent a half-million dollars upgrading their restaurant equipment and vehicles.

Rodney Ouellette was in a similar predicament. The party rental company he co-founded in 1991 with his brother was on the verge of moving to Pittsburgh when the tax incentives became a reality.

Now Harrison Township-based S&R Event Rental gets called by 70 percent of the movies that shoot in the Detroit area, said Ouellette, who has hired eight new full-time employees.

His company, which has worked on films from "8 Mile" to "Gran Torino," handles the "stuff people don't like to think about" such as supplying executive bathrooms, tents, air conditioning and heaters to movie sets. It also provides cleaning and other services -- S&R even power-washed snow off a roof and brushed it off the grass to make Michigan in February look like California for the film "High School."

"Hundreds and hundreds of people are being put to work because of these movies. The incentives are working," Ouellette said. "The residual effects are uncountable."

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Cruz basks in movie 'magic' - TheDay

Posted: 26 Dec 2009 01:01 AM PST

You're the only Spanish actress who's ever won an Academy Award. So what do you do for an encore?

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Although it was partially by chance, Penelope Cruz could not have engineered a more sublime follow-up.

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She was already well into "Broken Embraces" and "Nine" when she won the supporting actress Oscar for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" in February. The two new films' release this month looks like one big, multifaceted wet kiss to the medium that's given her so much.

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And that she loves.

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"There is a magic factor, sometimes, on a movie set that really can't be compared to anything else, if you are somebody that is really passionate about acting or directing or the world of movies," Cruz, 35, says. "And it's true that these two movies are, in a way, homages to the world of cinema."

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In "Broken Embraces," her fourth film with the renowned Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar, Cruz plays an executive assistant and sometime call girl who, after moving in with her much older, super-wealthy boss, catches the eye of a filmmaker - who puts her in his next production and becomes her life-changing lover.

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"Nine" is the adaptation of the hit Broadway musical. Itself derived from Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece "8½," "Nine" charts the creative and romantic confusion of an acclaimed Italian director, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who's about to start his next picture without a clue as to what it should be about.

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Cruz plays the married director's mistress, who has a husband of her own. She's already received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for best supporting actress for the role. She's joined by a cast of international stars who portray the other women in his life: Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren and Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie.

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Quite a movie-movie year for Cruz, then, who owes her love of cinema to a now-dead technology.

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"My parents bought a Betamax machine when I was, like, 6 years old," she recalls. "It was huge! They explained to me that I could watch movies on tape again and again, and I was like, 'Really?' The feeling of that ... I just didn't want to do anything else. I watched the movies that I loved every day for months, became obsessed. It was one of the things that made me aware of what acting was and how inspired I could get from movies."

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The often X-rated Almodovar inspired Cruz further when she got a little older. Although she made her start in other Spanish directors' sexually frank productions ("Jamon Jamon," "Belle Epoque"), she finally went to work for her idol in "Live Flesh" (1997).

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It was her second Almodovar film, "All About My Mother," that introduced Cruz's doe-eyed, uniquely askew beauty to a wider world. Hollywood had already discovered her; Cruz's first American film, "The Hi-Lo Country," was made a year earlier (and that despite the fact that she couldn't speak a word of unscripted English at the time).

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But she was amazing in her native language as "Mother's" pregnant, AIDS-infected, yet somehow convincingly pure-hearted young nun.

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Since then, Almodovar showcased her more mature, earthy qualities in his last feature, "Volver." And with "Embraces," he's enabled Cruz to portray a dazzling sampling of the world's collective screen dreams of women.

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A close friend as well as a high-wire collaborator, Almodovar has affected Cruz's life in more than strictly professional ways.

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"He just looks for the truth," she says of the writer-director's work. "I love his freedom and how he doesn't ever judge anybody in his writing. And I've met amazing people because of him and his movies.

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"When I was making 'All About My Mother,' my trailer was full of transvestites and transsexuals one night," she recalls. "There were, maybe, 15 of them and me in my little trailer in Barcelona. I will never forget that night because they shared with me stories of what their lives were like, their frustrations and their battles. When would I have otherwise heard these amazing stories from these incredible people?

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"Interesting things have happened in my life because of knowing Pedro."

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"Nine" was a different kind of immersion in new movie relationships. Although the actresses, for the most part, only worked together in the film's opening and closing production numbers, they bonded over the fact that many of them were singing and dancing for the first time in their professional lives.

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"We got along to the point where, although we all had our private rooms, nobody wanted to use them," reveals Cruz, who gave up ballet lessons to focus on acting not long after the Betamax arrived. "We all wanted to be together in the green room, we always had lunch together and talked. Everyone knew when someone's musical number was coming up; we were all nervous and everyone understood what the other one was going through."

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Meeting screen legend Loren was particularly special; Cruz based a lot of her work in "Volver" on the great Italian movie stars of the past.

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"She saw it and asked me a lot of things about Pedro," Cruz says. "I asked her a lot of things about (Vittorio) De Sica and (Marcello) Mastroianni and Fellini!"

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Directed by "Chicago's" Rob Marshall, "Nine" was filmed in Italy. It's mostly in English, but Cruz could've done it in the local language if she needed to.

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One of her most acclaimed dramatic performances was in the Italian film "Don't Move"; French is the fourth language in which she's now fluent.

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"I love working in all of these languages, but I will always be more comfortable in my own," she says. "For that reason, I will not stop pushing myself to keep working in these other languages, but I will never stop working in Spanish."

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Her rapid-fire delivery of Woody Allen's dialogue in both English and Spanish was no doubt a factor in Cruz's Oscar win.

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There was also that intimate interplay with "Vicky Cristina" co-star Javier Bardem, with whom she's worked off and on since her very first film, "Jamon Jamon."

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There was also the factor that Cruz and Bardem have been romantically involved for several years now - an open secret that they refuse to acknowledge publicly, perhaps due to the intense media scrutiny of Cruz's earlier relationships with "Vanilla Sky" co-star Tom Cruise and "Sahara" leading man Matthew McConaughey.

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Interestingly enough, Bardem was the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar, a year before Cruz for his terrifying performance in "No Country for Old Men."

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As for her own Oscar night at the Kodak Theatre, it was of course a dream come true for the lifelong film fan. But it was such an emotional moment, it's a fuzzy, dreamlike memory, too.

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"It was very special," Cruz recalls. "Amazing, amazing night. I don't remember a lot of what happened from the moment I was on stage because I just started crying backstage - and then they told me 'Please stop crying! You have to go do interviews.' So I had to do interviews for another hour, and then I said to my family, 'Just take me wherever you want.' I was a total zombie."

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Movie soundtracks of 2009 - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 26 Dec 2009 12:04 AM PST

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Three Idiots Movie Review - PRLog (free press release)

Posted: 26 Dec 2009 01:15 AM PST

PR Log (Press Release) – Dec 26, 2009 – In Rajkumar Hirani's latest film, a character steps to a blackboard and chalks up, for the benefit of a befuddled engineering college classroomful of students, the word 'Farhanitrate,' daring them to tell him what it means.

The word is a pun on the character's best friend, Farhan, and while it may be a non-existant gag word in the film, the compound seems to exist in real life -- Hirani's film is doused liberally with Farhanitrate (in an Akhtar sense of the word) and several other directorial scents -- including Hirani's own touch, which is why by the time the end credits eventually roll around, you have a 'been there, sniffed that' feeling about it all.

There's also a tragic, overriding feeling of futility. Why, you ask yourself, does a college film have to be made with middle-aged men playing the lead? Can we not trust younger actors to deliver, or has the insecurity of the star system blinded us to all reality?

Why must Aamir Khan , a man who told us of the last day of college 21 years ago, still play a fresh-faced student? He does adequately, and is impressively bereft of age-lines, but we really have seen it all before. For the actor, it's probably yet another disguise, that of the young man. But it's a role he can do in his sleep.

Ditto for Hirani and his partner in wordplay, Abhijat Joshi. 3 Idiots is a very average bit of fluffy Bollywood masala that tragically pretends, at times, to be making a profound point, one it loses in repetition. The result is a confused film, one that doesn't know exactly where it stands, torn between lump-in-the- throat filmmaking and amateurishly written juvenilia. There are a few moments which click, but coming from the duo that created the finest film this decade, this is a massive letdown.

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This is a film, as you have gleaned from the inescapably omnipresent publicity material, about three students in an engineering college. Yes, indeed. And while it borrows its principal cast from Rang De Basanti and a vibe from younger-voiced filmmakers like Nagesh Kukunoor and Akhtar, it never quite gets going. It sorely lacks that magic touch, that trademark broadstroke of Hirani sincerity. That lick of good ol' honest filmmaking is enough to gloss over many an underwritten scene or overwritten soliloquy, but this film remains washed up, without that all-absolving coat of paint.

Anyway, back to the story. Aamir, Sharman Joshi and a portly R Madhavan [ Images ] are students in an engineering college run by Boman Irani , the actor reduced to a caricature so unreal that shaving his cartoon moustache takes away even Irani's ability to keep a straight face through the farce. And what a stretch this farce is, as Hirani plays out his now-familiar tropes: college ragging with pants dropping down; cheering up a paralysed patient; and a short fellow given a length-deriding nickname. Stats are thrown in about college pressure and suicide rates, and they really don't fit into the narrative.

Nothing quite does, to be fair. There is ludicrous fun to be had every now and again but Hirani seems ill at ease, borrowing a Farah Khan-style old school flashback but refusing to go all-out funny -- and instead labouring really hard to make a point, the aforementioned one about college and suicide. I repeat it because he does, and he does it over and over again.

The film really tries too hard. A wonderfully endearing character named Millimeter shows off a group of pups, calling the little one Kilobyte and the bigger one Megabyte, and there is a pause before he calls the mother Gigabyte. Sigh. The principal is called Virus. It's an engineering college, get it? And so the jokes groan on, far more obvious than any of us Hiraniphiles would have liked -- even as the dramatic twists and reveals emerge inadvertently funnier than the gags.

The cast is strictly okay, nobody really sparkling except for Millimeter and the girl, who isn't around much, darn it. Kareena Kapoor [ Images ] dazzles with her brief role, and even though a lot of her spunk seems significantly Jab We Met [ Images ] in tone, she lights up the screen when she's around. Aamir manages to sell some scenes strongly enough to make you laugh, while Madhavan proves to be a really bad choice for narrator.

This isn't a bad film, though. By which I mean it conjures up a few moments, it will doubtless make some people cry, and every now and then we glimpse some heart. Yet it hurts to see that this is traditional Bollywood masala schlock, with scenes calculated to tickle and to evoke sympathy. It's not awful at all, but since when did 'not bad' become good? Dr Feelgood doesn't make the cut this time, and we need to measure him by the high bar his previous excellence has set -- by which degree this is a whopper of a disappointment.

Rajkumar Hirani's one of the directors of the decade, a man with immense talent and a knack for storytelling. On his debut, he hit a hundred. With his second, he hit a triple century. This time, he fishes outside the offstump, tries to play shots borrowed from other batters, and hits and misses to provide a patchy, 32*-type innings. It's okay, boss, *chalta hai*. Even Sachin has an off day, and we still have great hope.

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