Movie Box Review

John Carter traveled to Mars; the movie with his name also looks beyond the US for some help.

OPENINGS:  JOHN CARTER (Disney) may or may not have grossed over $30M this weekend--we'll find out for sure tomorrow.  (Disney is claiming a not-unreasonable 31% Sunday drop, but it would take only a small slip to push the number below that threshold.)  The more important number, though, in terms of whether it'll be remembered as a historic flop or a mere financial disappointment, is the $71M (which includes pre-Friday grosses in certain territories) being reported overseas.  $17M of that was from Russia alone, but apparently Europe was generally not strong.  On the other hand, the picture is doing well in Asia, and has yet to open in China and Japan.  If Carter can get to a global total of $300M, it won't reach breakeven, but would avoid the embarrassment of a total failure.

A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount), playing as a family comedy (which it really isn't), also had a good Saturday, but that only got it to a pitiful $6.4M.  However, that did beat Meet Dave and Imagine This, so this studio, as well, dodged complete ignominy.  SILENT HOUSE held even on Saturday despite the dreadful CinemaScore grade and is claiming (for now) slightly over $7M for the weekend.

HOLDOVERS:  THE LORAX (Universal) ended up with a Saturday that, while huge, wasn't quite up to the initial report (an 80% bump rather than 100%), so it's down 44% for the weekend, still extremely good.  More remarkably, PROJECT X (Warners) was almost in the same place with a 45% drop, excellent for a picture aiming at the teen-male demo.  SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) and THIS MEANS WAR (20th) continued to have very low drops in the low 30% range, while WANDERLUST (Universal) and GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) were heaved out of theatres as quickly as contracts allowed.

OSCAR WINNERS:  THE ARTIST (Weinstein) is claiming a mediocre 37% drop that, as with last week, relies on an very high Sunday estimate (a drop of only 25%)--last weekend's total was reduced on Monday, and the same may well happen tomorrow.  THE IRON LADY (Weinstein), with a more reasonable 35% estimated Sunday drop, is holding well, down only 31% for the weekend.  THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) and HUGO (Paramount) are both on their way out of theatres.  A SEPARATION (Sony Classics) widened again to 281 theatres, and while it still dropped for the weekend as its per-theatre number fell, it's at $4.8M, a superb total for a subtitled Iranian film.  

LIMITED RELEASES:  For an R-rated comedy, FRIENDS WITH KIDS (Roadside Attractions) had a terrific Saturday bump of 53%, suggesting very strong word of mouth.  That pushed it to $2.2M in 374 theatres, with a per-theatre number that was below only The Lorax and John Carter in the top 20.  Roadside will widen the run next weekend to 600 theatres.  SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN (CBS) had a $13K average. but that was in only 18 theatres, which is only mildly promising.  FOOTNOTE (Sony Classics) and JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI (Magnolia) had strong NY openings, averaging over $20K per theatre each.  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Oscilloscope) went from 40 to 60 theatres, and had a decent $2600 per-theatre average.  BEING FLYNN (Focus), though, tripled its theatre count to 12 and still fell for the weekend, as its per-theatre number collapsed.

Deadline's preliminary numbers for Friday have JOHN CARTER (Disney) at around $10M for the day, which depending on how much it plays as a family movie on Saturday, should mean a $25-30M weekend.  That's not a horribly low number--it's one of the half-dozen highest openings of the year so far--unless you're trying to earn back a $350-400M investment, in which case, oops.  In any case, it's clearly 2d place for this weekend, behind Weekend 2 of THE LORAX (Universal), which also had a $10M Friday, but which will definitely ramp up with weekend matinees to a likely $40M total.  PROJECT X (Warners) is headed for a $10-11M 2d weekend with a $3.5M Friday, which means a standard 50% weekend drop--really better than average, considering the movie's fast-burning teen genre.

The weekend's other openings are well behind.  SILENT HOUSE (Open Road) has around a $2.5M Friday en route to a $6-7M weekend, unimpressive even for a low-budget thriller.  And as expected, the long-delayed Eddie Murphy flop A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount), riding an extraordinary 0% from Rotten Tomatoes (that's 34 straight bad reviews), should pull in $2M on Friday for a $5-6M weekend on its way to oblivion.

We live in a pop culture where the recent Emmy Award nominees are so clearly superior to the films up for this past year's Oscar that it's not even worth arguing about. (Mad Men vs The Artist?  Game of Thrones vs The Help?  Modern Family vs War Horse?  Seriously?)  So the days when one could look down at a movie comedy by calling it "sitcom" are pretty much done--comparing a movie to Parks & Recreation, Louie or New Girl is, if anything, high praise.

Calling Jennifer Westfeldt's FRIENDS WITH KIDS akin to a sitcom, then, is more descriptive than critical.  The romantic-comedy-drama involves the inter-group relationships of 6 old friends who live in and around a major city (New York in this case), much as Happy Endings and How I Met Your Mother do.  The group includes 2 married couples:  Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd), and Ben and Missy (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig).  The story centers, though, on the 2 who are single:  best buddies Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott), who have been inseparable since college, but never romantically involved.  (They love each other unreservedly, but aren't physically attracted.) 

The movie's title has double meanings, and the first is that as the story begins, Julie and Jason are feeling like the odd friends out, since both married couples are raising babies and/or toddlers, changing the dynamics of their marriages and the group in general.  Both Julie and Jason want children, but as they watch what parenthood is doing to their friends, and with each of them so far unable to find "the one" with whom they want to have it all, they eventually come to the title's second meaning:  they decide to have a baby together, just as friends (outside dating encouraged), with responsibility and custody split down the middle and no change, they vow, in their own relationship.

You don't need to have watched Ross and Rachel for all the years of Friends to figure out very quickly where all this is going to end up.  Nature may abhor a vacuum, but that's nothing compared to the way romantic-comedy feels about 2 good-looking unattached pals who've considered romances with everyone on earth except each other.  The issue with a movie like Friends With Kids is just how enjoyable and insightful the journey to that destination is.

This is where Westfeldt, making her directing debut (she previously wrote Kissing Jessica Stein and Ira & Abby) acquits herself well.  Her script may be glib and, in the end, predictable, but it's also marked by some sharp, bawdy humor, and later in the proceedings by more than a little surprisingly searing drama.  (A New Year's Eve gathering for the group prompts a particularly scorching monologue from Hamm, who in his day job is not unacquainted with characters who bare dark undersides.)

It's tempting but misleading to label Friends With Kids as trendily influenced by Bridesmaids, featuring as it does the same kind of 4-letter humor--much of it from the women characters--and half the same cast, but as it happens, Friends debuted at Toronto last fall, shortly after Bridesmaids hit theatres.  The similarities are superficial anyway, since Friends mostly eschews wacky slapstick for more of a concentration on relationships.  But the overlap in casts is all to the good, because these actors continue to be great together.  As for the newcomers:  Scott, who has been very dark indeed in indie movies like The Vicious Kind, brings a little of that edge to a less idealized romantic role than the one he plays in his own day job on Parks & Recreation.  Westfeldt makes a marvelous, funny pair with him, although one wishes that as a writer she'd resisted the cliche of having Julie be the sensitive one who's the first to become overwhelmed with true emotion.  In the smaller roles of Julie and Jason's significant romantic interests (think of them as the guest stars brought in for sweeps), Edward Burns effectively turns on the charm, and the much-maligned Megan Fox deserves some credit for completely holding her own with this high-powered ensemble.  

Friends With Kids isn't any kind of cinematic event--in terms of sheer quality, it's not better than 2 hours of TV's best comedies--but it provides the kind of self-contained 2-hour satisfaction that isn't TV's stock in trade (along with the kind of sex jokes confined to HBO and Showtime).  If you've been sitting on your couch long enough and want a smart, sophisticated and sometimes moving comedy on a bigger screen, this is the right movie to see.

All signs suggest that JOHN CARTER will be a financial failure of historic proportions, mostly because of its colossal cost (Disney admits to $250M, which almost certainly means close to $300M when reshoots and last-minute CG are included--and that doesn't count the $100-150M of a big-time global marketing campaign).  It would be fun to pile on and lambaste the movie as an embarrassing fiasco, or alternatively to be contrarian and point to it as an overlooked, underrated pop masterpiece, but the truth is much more tedious:  it's just a mediocre time-waster that happened to cost a ton of money.

John Carter may run short in some areas, but no one can accuse it of lacking plot.  The script by director Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews and (separately) novelist Michael Chabon is based on the novel "Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it incorporates Burroughs himself (Daryl Sabara) into an elaborate framing device, in which he's a young relative of Carter's (Taylor Kitsch), summoned home after Carter's sudden death in 1881.  The story is instantly fishy--Carter's body is in a tomb that's been specially rigged to open only from the inside--although we have to wait for the end of the movie for it to pay off.    

Meanwhile, Burroughs reads the journal Carter left for him (cue the voice-over narration), and the main body of the story begins.  Carter, a former Confederate soldier, was prospecting for gold--and had actually found a lot of it--in 1868 when he was dragooned by an evil Army officer (Bryan Cranston) into fighting Native Americans.  He goes exploring in a cave where he happens to touch a magic crystal just as the mysterious, dying other inhabitant of the cave finishes saying some magic words, and instantly finds himself--

On Mars, of course,  Or Barsoom, which he discovers is the natives' name for the planet.  (Earth is Jarsoom, in case you were wondering.)  Where Carter, thanks to lower gravity and different bone density, can leap whole buildings in a single bound (or two at most).  He finds himself embroiled in a war between 3 factions of the natives:  the green 4-armed warrior Tharks (CG creations with the voices of Willem Dafoe as their leader and Samantha Morton as his daughter); the humanoid Heliums, led by King Tardos Mos (Ciaran Hinds) and his daughter, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), who's a scientist the way Denise Richards was a nuclear expert in The World Is Not Enough; and the bad-guy Zodangas, whose leader Sab Than (Dominic West) wants to destroy the Tharks and Heliums or marry Dejah, whichever comes first.  Actually, the real villains are the non-Martian (I think) Therns, who are led by Matai Shang (Mark Strong), and who are meaner versions of the Watchers from Fringe who can change identity at will and feed off warfare and planetary destruction (don't ask).  Oh, and there's a friendly giant hippopotamus/dog creature who seems to have wandered in from one of Stanton's Pixar movies and likes to lick Carter's face and rescue him.

You can appreciate the ambitions of Stanton and his team--they were honestly trying to tell an epic story much classier than, say, Prince of Egypt--but the narrative is overlong, tiresome and uninvolving.  The script is loaded with one howler line of dialogue after another (even after Carter has sipped a magic potion that enables him to understand and speak Martian, all the characters sound like they're being translated from the Tharkan).  Stanton doesn't seem to want to acknowledge how silly all this is, and playing it straight just makes the movie even campier than it had to be.

There are fine actors in the cast, but Stanton, whose first live-action movie this is, handles them badly--the Burroughs books were an acknowledged influence on the Star Wars movies, and Stanton seems have absorbed that in the worst possible way, drawing clunky, flat line-readings from almost all his performers.  (That's not what you're supposed to steal from George Lucas, man!)  Kitsch can act, we know that from Friday Night Lights, but his low-key, naturalistic strengths don't lend themselves at all to big-scale action-movie performing, and he and Collins couldn't have less chemistry (Kitsch only seems comfortable acting with the 4-armed green Tharks).  As the villains, Strong and West both look like they're mentally on their respective bank websites, paying some bills.

Stanton has achieved some CG feats:  the Tharks are wonderfully done, and there are Martian landscapes with genuine grandeur (of course, these are the parts of the movie most akin to the animation world from which Stanton comes).  The action sequences, though, are a mess, confusingly edited and mistaking rushing for rousing.  

John Carter isn't a shameful failure; it's just a failure.  It's Disney and not the filmmakers that has to take the blame for the size of the hole the movie going to make in the studio's earnings.

SILENT HOUSE isn't the first feature-length film to provide the illusion that it's all been shot in a single continuous take.  The most famous was Hitchcock's Rope, but in his era, it was technologically impossible to actually shoot for 90 minutes straight, because rolls of film were only so long, and cameras had to be reloaded.  Digital video, however, has made the stunt doable, and recently Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark apparently pulled off the feat, with extraordinarily complicated content that included battle scenes and banquets as part of its history of Russia.  

Even though technology now permits genuine feature-length takes, Silent House cheats--a few cuts are hidden in moments where the screen goes dark or blindingly light and in sudden camera movements.   Still, one has to give directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (and cinematographer Igor Martinovic) credit for sustaining graceful, lengthy shots in constant motion that must have been enormously challenging to light and continuously reframe.  

When discussing Silent House, the emphasis is always going to be on the movie's camerawork, because there's not much else there.  The picture itself is an increasingly muddled haunted house thriller.  Sarah (Elisabeth Olsen) has come back to the house where she grew up, which she and her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) are cleaning out in preparation for selling it.  The windows are boarded over, most of the doors are padlocked, and there's no electricity, so when Dad goes missing a short time into the story, what remains is an awful lot of Elisabeth Olsen stumbling from one room to another, armed much of the time with little more than a (not to be relied-upon) flashlight and becoming increasingly frazzled as creaks and slammed doors give way to bodies.

This is all fun for a while, and Kentis and Lau, who previously directed the legitimately terrifying Open Water, know how to draw out moments of suspense.  Olsen, alone on screen for most of the movie, does a terrifically charismatic job of finding gradations of fear, determination and hysteria that have to be sustained for the extended length of each very long shot.  Things become monotonous, though, because the limitations of the movie's gimmick and its content mean that not very much can actually happen, just a lot of unexpected noises and shadowy figures glimpsed in the corner or background of the frame scurrying about.  Although the movie provides explanations for why Sarah doesn't just leave the damn house, one gets progressively more impatient with her.  And eventually, even a low-budget horror movie has to be about something, and that's where the script by Lau (based on a 2010 Uruguayan film that was barely released in the US) really falls apart.  The last reel or so grows increasingly confused in that hey-what's-really-going on here? kind of way that's become its own cliche, raising more questions than it answers.

As cinematic stunts go, Silent House is reasonably fun--it's certainly a nice change of pace from the endless "found footage" thrillers pouring in these days, and Olsen again proves herself a magnetic presence on screen.  The movie's attic, however, is ultimately empty.

Now the only question is when they announce the start of  pre-production on LORAX 2.

OPENINGS:  It turned out THE LORAX (Universal) wasn't frontloaded at all.  Quite the contrary, its 80% Saturday bump put the movie through the roof, a triumph of great marketing over cruddy filmmaking.  Lorax is currently the 3d highest March opening ever, but only $185K behind 300 at #2, so even a slight overperformance on Sunday could lift it up.  PROJECT X (Warners) slipped a bit on Saturday, but even if its Sunday is overestimated, it should still be safely over $20M for the weekend, a very good score for a relatively low-budget studio release.  (The result, unfortunately, will be more lousy "found-footage" movies.)

HOLDOVERS:  Thanks to a nice spread of genres in the Top 10, most of the older movies are holding quite well.  The only 3 movies in the Top 12 to dip more than 45% were JOURNEY 2 (Warners), which was direct competition for Lorax, GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit) with a 55% drop that was in keeping with Tyler Perry's pictures, and GHOST RIDER 2 (Sony), which was already mid-collapse.  Particularly notable were the tiny respective drops for SAFE HOUSE (Universal) - 34%, THIS MEANS WAR (20th) - 33%, and the (deservedly) much-maligned GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) - 36%.

OSCAR WINNERS:  THE ARTIST (Weinstein), the 2d least popular Best Picture winner of the last quarter-century (and the lowest among films still in theatrical release when the awards were given out) raised its post-awards theatre count by 80% and could only manage a 34% bump.  And even that number is shaky, because Artist is claiming by far the lowest Sunday decline of the weekend's top movies, so it may well slipi down (and fall out of the Top 10) tomorrow.  Similarly, its stablemate THE IRON LADY (Weinstein) is claiming a 30% weekend increase that relies on a tiny estimated Sunday drop.  Back in the non-Weinstein world, THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) lost many of its theatres and fell 36%, and HUGO (Paramount) dropped 14%.  A SEPARATION (Sony Classics) tripled its theatres off its Foreign Language Film win, and gratifyingly went over the $1M mark for the weekend in 243 houses.  

LIMITED RELEASES:  BEING FLYNN (Focus) created little excitement with a $11K average at only 4 theatres, and TIM & ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (Magnolia) could only get to a $4K average in 24.    IN DARKNESS (Sony Classics) lost the Foreign-Language Oscar but tried increasing its theatre count by 50% anyway--the result was a 17% drop for the weekend.  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Oscilloscope), another picture that was hoping for Oscar love it didn't get, more than doubled its theatres to 40, and averaged a decent $3300.  

How is it that no one has yet produced a 3D found-footage movie?  You'd think the combination of the most (usually) mind-numbing gimmicks of the past decade would be a commercially sure bet, but so far it's an untapped market.

Meanwhile we have PROJECT X, which advances the found-footage genre in a particularly banal way.  The original concept of the "found-footage" movie (which, in a sense, dates all the way back to epistolary novels that purported to be mere reprints of actual letters) was that it increased the "reality" of the stories it was telling, and thus it's mostly been used to make the supernatural more convincing:  in horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and more recently with the science-fiction Chronicle.  Project X, though, is just a dumb teen party movie, rife with cliches and completely unremarkable other than its bare nod to being "filmed" by a couple of the participants.

The very basic set-up is that Thomas (Thomas Mann--several of the characters bear the same names as the actors who play them, presumably to boost verisimiltude) will be alone for his birthday weekend in his family's big North Pasadena house, because his parents are out of town.  Thomas is too much of a bland nice guy who do anything illicit on his own, but that's what troublemaking best friends in movies are for, and here that's Costa (Oliver Cooper), who likes to wax nostalgically about the glamor of his old life in Queens (has anyone associated with this movie ever been to Queens?) and who talks Thomas into a birthday party for the ages.  Also along for the ride is JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown), whose character consists of being fat, and we occasionally glimpse Dax (Dax Flame), who's theoretically recording all this on video.

One of Project X's selling points is that its producer is Hangover director Todd Phillips, but the promise of shocking  scandal or genuine envelope-pushing is unrealized.  This party goes out of control in all the most predictable ways--drugs, drinking, topless girls, bodily functions--until the last 10 minutes, when things go ludicrously over the top thanks to a crazy character who reappears from earlier in the story.  Even though the picture is a "hard R," it's notable--and characteristic of American movies--that our 3 protagonists are only seen drinking to excess, their drug use limited to a comic interlude and none of them managing to get laid.  In fact, Thomas is such a good, sweet guy, and the movie is so devoted to cliches, that although he supposedly wanted the party to have sex with hot girls, and has the chance to do so with the school's official Babe, in the end he realizes that the (equally gorgeous) girl he's known since childhood (Kirby Bliss Blanton as "Kirby") and since ignored, even though she banters with him while casting cow-eye glances his way, is really the girl of his heart.  In other words, we know the writers have seen Some Kind of Wonderful. 

There's nothing dramatically interesting or even mildly subversive in Project X, and it's certainly not worth seeing for the quality of the filmmaking.  The "found-footage" genre permits less talented directors to have an excuse for letting their movies look like crap, and first-timer Nima Nourizadeh makes ample use of that license, resulting in 88 amateurish minutes of shaky footage, periodically interrupted by music video montages that resemble outtakes.  While many found-footage pictures are, or at least try to appear to be, heavily improvised, Project X is clearly shot from a full script by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall; their dialogue makes improv look good. 

If Project X were shot in a conventional way, it would probably go straight to homevideo.  Filmed with what still, to some audiences, seems like a new "cool" style, it's likely to make millions this weekend (it's already grossed over $1M in midnight shows on Thursday) and turn a decent profit on its low $12M budget.  There may not be one born every minute, but there's certainly one buying a movie ticket.