The Last 365 Days of Cinema

Do you know what movie this is from?  Hint- it was released in the last 365 days. Guess in the comments.

Boozing Drivers in Space

The Memorial Day Weekend has come and the 2013 box office has finally bent thrust alive after a string of successes in the merry month of May and a gangbusters, franchise-fueled holiday weekend.  Here's the four day results:

1. Fast & Furious 6- $120 million
2. The Hangover Part III- $51.2 million / $63 million total
3. Star Trek Into Darkness- $47 million / $155.8 million total
4. Epic- $42.6 million
5. Iron Man 3- $24.3 million / $372.4 million total
6. The Great Gatsby- $17.0 million / $117.7 million total
7. Mud- $2.4 million / $15.0 million total
8. The Croods- $1.6 million / $179.6 million total
9. 42- $1.6 million / $91.4 million total
10. Oblivion- $1.0 million / $87.5 million total
11. Oz: The Great & Powerful- $0.8 / $232.4 million total
12. Pain & Gain- $0.8 / $48.7 million total
13. Frances Ha- $0.7 / 0.9 total (60 screens)

Further down:
Before Midnight- $0.3 (5 screens) --> per screen average of $64,400
Stories We Tell- $0.1 / $0.3 total (27 screens)
Fill the Void- $79,000 (3 screens)
We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks- $34,300 (4 screens)

Behind the Candelabra

The flamboyance, the excess, the grandeur, the more of it all is as much a part of the story of Liberace as the man beneath the sequined clothing.  Mr. Showman, the piano man, played up to the heavens with a decadent splendor that positively demanded that any screen treatment that could ever be conceived to paint his picture be the biggest, the flashiest and the most colorful.  Mere 3-D wouldn't be enough to showcase the all the glitter and jewels he bespectacled and properly do it justice.  On that note it is slightly surprising that a filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh, with his muted palette and fly on the wall choreography, would be such a natural to create such a vivid, potent, subtly multifaceted biography of his life and bizarre romance with a man much younger than he.  Ever more surprisingly and sufficiently saddening is the continuing announcement that this may in fact be Soderbergh's swan song from filmmaking.  With the seemingly non-congruent pieces of puzzle in place it only makes sense, I suppose, that Soderbergh's long in development Behind the Candelabra enters the fray with a bittersweet taste to go along with its unorthodox release.  Premiering on HBO instead of the three-thousand screens that typically befits a starry-eyed Soderbergh production-- the main players here are Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, both of whom have ample experience with the filmmaker-- and coming off its in-competition berth at the Cannes Film Festival.

For a subject so peculiar and a film so fascinating, it's both a joyous and sad event that Behind the Candelabra couldn't fashion itself into movie screens.  A subject as big and brash and colorful as Liberace (and the performance that Douglas creates to match it) deserve it, but more so, seemingly demand it.  The small screen almost comes across as an insult for an entertainer who always dreamed a bigger dream than the last.  "To much of a good thing is wonderful," is a clever and cheeky line of dialogue, but Douglas devours it as a mantra.  On the other hand, Behind the Candelabra is a rarefied film in itself-- refined but bawdy, delicate but complex, unrestricted but classy, and one suggests that the practice of the Hollywood machine may have diluted Soderbergh's soulful vision to point of worthless dither, on top of the choice reasoning that the filmmaker states that the film was "too gay" for the focus testers in the film industry.  Of which may very well be true, but to deny a story of Liberace of its "gay-ness" for the sensitivity of weary consumers would be, well, to lie.  On this end, it's for the films betterment that every major studio, as reported, passed on Behind the Candelabra.

Woe is Cotillard

What does raven-haired French beauty need to do to be taken seriously?  Last year, around this exact time, critics were under the spell of her performance as the amputee in Jacques Audiard's Rust & Bone.  Many expected an award from the Cannes Film Festival to be nearly a done deal for the international actress.  And in beat-- it didn't happen.  No worries, the bar was raised when Sony Pictures Classics gave the darkly sensual film a prime awards bait release date.  At the very least the middlebrow mensches at the Academy would approach the skill, technique and tragedy that Cotillard was offering-- she had no legs, for crying out loud.  Nudges and murmurs and this is going to happen vibes started breaking when she earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her work, and in a thud, the Academy didn't catch the bait.  No worries, she would up the ante with two films at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival-- one as a sign of solidarity to her Frenchman (and beau)-- Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties, which premiered out of competition-- and the other to finally grasp the throngs of Cannes victory that eluded her one year ago.  For in James Grey's The Immigrant, the ever-busy and industrious actress plays a Polish immigrant turned prostitute in 1920s Manhattan alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner.  Period film, check.  Tragic backstory, check.  She even learned Polish for the part-- a French woman playing a Polish woman speaking English, she's trying to Meryl Streep her way into movie awards land.  Alas, wasn't meant to be.

It would be foolish to really feel to sorry for the talented and vibrant actress.  She already does have an Oscar to keep herself cozy, the one she won for her 2007 breakout film La Vie en Rose, becoming only the second woman in Academy history to win for a foreign language performance.  However, considering all that, that beauty and the certain ambition, the awards bodies haven't paid much attention to her since then.  Surprising for a post-American-ified career that's translated into Oscar-friendly territory and made her a favorite on Oscar watchdog lists ever since.  Since La Vie en Rose she played a gangster's moll in Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009)-- too divisive for Oscars taste, okay...then came Nine (2009), for which see received best in show reviews for and a Golden Globe nomination-- the film was too terrible, got that, even though Penelope Cruz scored a bizarre afterglow nomination, okay...then Inception (2010), which earned multiple nominations, winning four awards-- the film was more a visual achievement, okay...then Midnight in Paris (2011), which earned a Best Picture nomination-- that one was a Woody Allen joint, not a performance piece, okay...Rust & Bone (2012), also-ran status.  In between she found time to join Steven Soderbergh's ensemble in Contagion (2011), cultivate a fanboy base with The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and star in a few movies from her native France.  What more does she have to do?  I fear she may become the female equivalent to Christian Bale if awards bodies don't honor her with something in the near future... 

The Last 365 Days of Cinema

Know what movie this image is from?  Hint-- it was released in the last 365 days.  Guess in the comments.