Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts

22 Nov 2014

4 New Ways Movie Theaters Are Filling Seats and Upselling Patrons

The next time you go to a movie theater, you may be coaxed into spending a little extra money—perhaps for a beer, a toy your kid is begging for, or the right to watch the film you just saw over and over.

Even with the blizzard of ticket sales for Frozen starting the year, 2014 has been less than stellar at the box office, with a summer of few blockbusters and overall sales that are down 4% compared to last year. In previous years, theaters and movie studios have resorted to raising admission prices (often using IMAX or 3D screenings as a justification) as a way to offset declining ticket sales.

This is not a rant about anything. I need to clarify that up front, because 2014 has been a horrible year for ranting. But it’s also been great year for very good things that straddle the line between how we used to define television and how we used to define movies.

Is True Detective a miniseries or an 8-hour movie? Should The Knick rank in Steven Soderbergh’s filmography? Fargo and Hannibal transformed well-trod source material into a new kind of remake—half greatest hits compilation, half concept album. Not for nothing, 2014 was also the year that Shonda Rhimes claimed Thursday for old-fashioned weekly TV, with three flavors of throwback procedural (doctor show, politics show, lawyer show) infused with soap operatics.

Robin Williams' Death Sparks Shortage of Comedian's Movies

BUCKTOWN — If you're looking to rent or buy a copy of "Dead Poets Society" or other movies starring Robin Williams, chances are you'll end up empty-handed due to a huge demand for his movies at local stores and nationally after the comedian took his own life last week.

"We are averaging around five or six requests a day," said John Davies, a clerk at Odd Obsession Movies, 1822 N. Milwaukee Ave., in Bucktown.
Before Williams' death, Davies said he couldn't "recall any requests" for Williams' movies at the rental shop, which specializes in rare movies but does offer some of the more mainstream comedies starring Williams.
Davies said that on the day after Williams' death, a copy of the comedian's "Live on Broadway" 2002 standup special that was in the store's $5 sales bin was stolen.

The lineups for the Mavericks, Discovery, and TIFF Kids parts of the Toronto Film Festival were announced, wrapping up a series of lineup announcements for the Toronto International Film Festival.

With the added films, the festival’s entire slate is now a whopping 393 movies. Two hundred eighty-five of those movies are feature films, of which 143 are world premieres.
The Mavericks portion of the festival includes onstage discussions following the screening of each film. Do I Sound Gay? will be followed by a talk between director David Thorpe and sex-advice guru Dan Savage. Also premiering in that space is The 50 Year Argument, directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, about The New York Review of Books, and Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of her staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, shot in Brooklyn last year.

Johnny Depp made $1 million for a week of Into the Woods. Meryl phoned in her turn in The Giver. Boarding, or flying in big actors to shoot for a few days, is bad for the big picture.

Texting and tweeting are a fundamental part of our everyday lives. Hunching over our phones and tapping with our fingers has become second nature to us. What we don't often think about, though, is how that looks to an outside observer, or how a director and actor would try to depict this action in the movie.

Quite simply, it's hard — harder than you think. It's really easy to make texting, tweeting, and the internet look dopey or unrealistic:

The 9 most unconvincing Canadian characters in movies

Maybe the accent is just a bit off

Sometimes when non-Canadians play Canadians, you can’t believe it. Maybe the accent is off. Maybe someone that famous just can’t be Canadian. Like these people:

Outside in the parking lot it is 90 degrees and not yet noon. Inside the Premier Orlando 14 theaters at Orlando Fashion Square, it's cool, dark and half-price admission.

Little boys are chasing each other around the lobby like unchained dogs. A man holds his granddaughter in his arms while waiting in line for concessions. A busy young couple with tickets to see Lucy makes the Sunday morning matinee their date night.

I hate 3D movies. I mean, I really, seriously hate them.

As a movie junkie, I despise them so much that I have stopped going to see movies, because too often the only option on a Saturday night is to subject yourself to this abuse of the cinematic art form. So-called traditional showings have been relegated to midday presentations.

Holdover tent-poles Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Guardians of the Galaxy maintained the top spots at the weekend box office, while the new openers trailed behind. But, while it was expected that Let’s Be Cops and The Giver would open in the teens, the biggest surprise of the weekend was The Expendables 3, a franchise pic which should have easily opened in the $20 to $25 million range, but instead floundered with an estimated $16.2 million.

LUC Besson has been dubbed the most “Hollywood” of French film-makers.

With good reason. None of the 80 or so movies made by his firm EuropaCorp has registered particularly highly on the scale of Gallic dreariness.

In Taken, nobody ever stared pensively out of café window while smoking a fag. There were no kooky girls with bobs in The Transporter, no long debates about the meaning of human existence in Hitman.

Sylvester Stallone still blames his rivalry with fellow action man Arnold Schwarzenegger for his movie flops, because he only signed on for roles in Rhinestone and Stop or My Mom Will Shoot over fears the Terminator star would grab the parts if he didn't.

The movie veterans have become great friends and they co-star in the Expendables film franchise but Stallone admits there was a time he hated the Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor.

The opposite of time-lapse photography would seem to be slow motion, but there is an alternative: elision. You can lose time or hide it, put it away for two years or nine years, and then invite it back for a visit. Movies (and novels) do this regularly as a matter of narrative efficiency: you cut out the ‘and then and then’ and go straight to the next chosen moment, from the take-off to the landing say, without the details of the long flight. But they don’t always invite you to ponder the missing minutes or years, as Richard Linklater’s films do.

This week in movies you missed: Perhaps you noticed that Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac: Vol. I played for a week at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas this past spring. Perhaps you didn't. Anyway, the theater never booked Vol. II of the Danish provocateur's new duology about sexual obsession, so those who hoped for a big-screen experience were left, er, hanging.

Well, now Netflix Instant subscribers can stream the rest of Nymphomaniac (or the whole thing, at least till the director's cut comes out). It's also available for rental at Amazon and other VOD outlets. So I gave myself the two-night von Trier immersion experience.

In this week’s new releases, Jeff Bridges stars in "The Giver," the film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning young adult novel. The film receives three stars. "Let’s Be Cops" fails to capitalize on the chemistry between its two comedic stars, Damon Wayans, Jr. and Jake Johnson.

5 new movies out this weekend

Looking for a good movie this weekend? Here are the four latest releases and reviews from our movie critics Claudia Puig and Scott Bowles.

The Expendables 3
Despite its star wattage, the action-packed flick might be the most dismal movie of the year. Expendables tries to trick viewers into thinking they're being entertained just by watching all of these famous grizzled action stars in one explosive place. But it forgets to give these geezers a reason to be gathering for the detonation fest. (* out of four stars)

'The Giver' took many turns on way to movies

The Washington Post

Somewhere, on a VHS tape probably sitting in a family member's garage, there's an amazing artifact from decades ago: actor Jeff Bridges directing a homemade movie version of Lois Lowry's best-selling young-adult dystopian novel "The Giver." Veteran actor Lloyd Bridges, his father, plays the title character. Dylan Bridges -- son of Emmy-winning actor Beau Bridges, Jeff's brother -- is the main character, a 12-year-old boy. Beau's other son, Casey, films it. The whole thing is narrated by "Harold and Maude" star Bud Cort.

Simon Cowell is producing Betty Boop's feature-length film

Right about now, Betty Boop is probably reapplying her lipstick to prepare for her big-screen debut.

Last seen in a cameo during 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Boop is about to get her first feature-
length film, and Simon Cowell’s Syco Entertainment is part of the production team behind it. Teaming with Animal Logic Entertainment and Fleischer Studios, Syco Entertainment is finally giving the 1930’s cartoon flapper the movie she deserves. A press release describes the film as “a music-driven hybrid animated comedy.”

Robin Williams possessed the swiftest of wits, the gift of voracious speech, and an endless Rolodex of characters to summon. In every medium he worked, the late entertainer’s mastery of improvisation knew no equal.

For movie actors, going off script is generally a fireable offense. Williams, however, got a rare pass from Hollywood and encouragement to test his own material. Some of Williams’s most famous characters — including the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin — developed as products of his impromptu experiments.

Predictably, the Michael Bay-produced new adaptation of the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" ruled the box office this weekend and has already been given the greenlight for a sequel set to be released in summer 2016 despite being panned by critics.

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" is the epitome of a summer blockbuster with its huge budget, gratuitous special effects, and plot that doesn’t ask for much in terms of brain power from its audience.

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