Quentin Tarantino's Top 10 of 2013

It's only October, but auteur/personality Quentin Tarantino has unveiled his top ten of the year, or at least so far.  It's a very Tarantino-like list, but there's something to said for filmmakers who dole out their personal favorites and an enduring fascination to that.  A fun experiment for all prolific filmmakers, me thinks.

In alphabetical order:

• Afternoon Delight (Jill Soloway)
• Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
• Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
• The Conjuring (James Wan)
• Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg)
• Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
• Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
• Kick Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow)
• The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)
• This Is the End (Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogan)

Things I Learned On My Summer Vacation

The summer movie season came and assaulted the senses and poof, it's gone.  The Labor Day weekend signals the end of that special parcel of time when Hollywood throws all its bombast in our faces, but the sign posts have been there for a few weeks now, evident by the dominance of Lee Daniels' The Butler solid box office play and three week straight strangle hold as the number one film of the nation.  It's not so much that the Forest Whitaker-Oprah Winfrey Civil Rights drama has posted the most significant numbers in the stratosphere (they certainly are impressive, especially given the subject matter) but more so because the dog days of August are when Hollywood typically gives up and regroups for fall.  It may be too early to tell how the cinematic offerings of the past few months will hold up and where there legacy lies, but first impressions are typically all that matters (especially in today's climate where a film lives or dies based on opening night grosses), but there's always takeaways, residual damages and lessons to be learned.  Here's Musings and Stuff's rundown of the good, bad and ugly of the 2013 Summer Movie Season.

First off, seventeen of Hollywood's offerings raked in over $100 million at the box office, which is a healthy sign that the theater-going habit isn't quite dead yet.  The top of the charts, unsurprisingly is Iron Man 3, which joined the worldwide billion dollar club and started summer 2013 with a bang, thanks to The Avengers afterglow.  The Marvel machine is healthy enough it hardly matters the film, strangely critically accepted, wasn't all that.  The real test, however, should be found in the grosses and the critical impact made by lesser Marvel standalone vehicles Thor and Captain America as each will have individual offerings in the next 365 days.  The remaining sixteen films tell a startlingly different story.

Box Office Fireworks

The minions outlawed The Lone Ranger over the grandly profitable Fourth of July week/end extravaganza.  The story isn't so much that it was surprising that Despicable Me 2, the sequel to 3-D animated 2010 hit, led the box office with such robust numbers, it's that Disney's overly expensive $215+ Ranger utterly failed.  Badgered by bad buzz that stems from while the film was still in production, deadly reviews, Armie Hammer's lack of movie star charisma and Johnny Depp ennui, the Gore Verbinski directed western based on the radio and television classic that nobody under forty has the faintest clue of, has taken the summer movie season's preeminent punchline prize from past bombs After Earth and White House Down.  That sounds harsh, but there's a valuable comeuppance that needs to be bridged from time to time when studios shell out hundreds of millions of dollars on wannabe franchises that nobody wanted to begin with.

1. Despicable Me 2- $82.5 / $142.0 total (new)
2. The Lone Ranger- $29.4 / $48.9 total (new)
3. The Heat- $25.0 / $86.3 total
4. Monsters University- $19.5 / 216.7 total
5. World War Z- $18.2 / $158.7 total
6. White House Down- $13.5 / $50.4 total
7. Man of Steel- $11.4 / $271.2 total
8. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain- $10.1 / $174 total (new)
9. This Is the End- $5.8 / $85.5 total
10. Now You See Me- $2.7 / $110.4 total
11. Star Trek Into Darkness- $1.3 / $223.0 total
12. Fast & Furious 6- $1.0 / $235.4 total

LIMITED RELEASES

Fox Searchlight's Sundance success story led the limited engagements this holiday weekend with The Way, Way Back netting a $30,000 per screen average in its first weekend of play.  The dramedy stars Steve Carell (whose had a pretty stellar week), Toni Collette, Sam Rockwell and newcomer Liam James and was written and directed by Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants.  In other news, 20 Feet From Stardom, a documentary centered on back-up singers, expanded nicely in its second week and will be one of the highest grossing docs of the year, surely, and a potential Oscar candidate thanks to its glowing reviews, while Before Midnight officially became the top-grossing film in the series, topping the $5.8 million that Before Sunset earned in 2004.

The Way, Way Back- $0.5 (new)
Before Midnight- $0.5 / $6.6 total
20 Feet From Stardom- $0.5 / $1.1 total
Much Ado About Nothing- $0.4 / $2.9 total
The Bling Ring- $0.3 / $5.0 total
Mud- $0.1 / $20.7 total
I'm So Excited- $0.1 / $0.3 total
Frances Ha- $0.1 / $3.6 total
The Kings of Summer- $0.09 / $1.0 total
Stories We Tell- $0.04 / $1.4 total