Culture Snob

In his “Great Movies” article on Caché, Roger Ebert teases that he found a key to understanding this ever-mysterious movie:

“How is it possible to watch a thriller intently two times and completely miss a smoking gun that’s in full view? Yet I did. Only on my third trip through Michael Haneke’s Caché did I consciously observe a shot which forced me to redefine the film.”

Great! In my single viewing, I was frustrated by the film; I enjoyed its coy, cryptic nature but still don’t get its critical reputation.

Ebert provides the following hint:

“Now I call your attention to the shot I missed the first time through. You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39. You tell me what it means. It’s the smoking gun, but did it shoot anybody?”

The trouble is that with different DVD versions in different countries, and with different DVD players, the 20:39 mark might fall on a different shot. I’m guessing that the “smoking gun” in question comes before the dinner party, but beyond that ... .

The Top 10

1. Memento
2. Pan’s Labyrinth
3. Requiem for a Dream
4. Oldboy
5. The Royal Tenenbaums
6. No Country for Old Men
7. The Mothman Prophecies
8. Mulholland Drive
9. Donnie Darko (original theatrical version)
10. The Descent (international version)

Christopher Nolan directed five movies released this decade; two of them are nearly perfect, one of them has unparalleled rigor for a superhero movie, and the other one has Heath Ledger’s Joker casting an enormous shadow over (and therefore obscuring) its many flaws. The unnecessary remake of Insomnia was the necessary bridge between Memento and Batman Begins — from independent to studio work — but beyond it Nolan has made nothing but winners.

To be clear, I don’t believe Nolan is a great filmmaker, and I’m skeptical he’ll ever equal any of these four movies, even though he hasn’t yet turned 40.

The goal: Make an album from favorite songs released in 2009, with special attention paid to the arc and to the relationships between songs.

The rules: one song per performer; artists featured in the previous three years of this project are excluded.

The caveats: I listen to a lot of music, and I estimate this list is culled from roughly a thousand songs from the past year. But I don’t hear everything, and my listening is constrained by both taste and work. These are merely favorites.

The results: I had a much easier time selecting and sequencing in past years; the order here is more random than I would like, and it feels like it’s missing some connective tissue. But these 16 tracks (totaling just more than an hour) do follow a path. This album puts up a defiant front before revealing its heart, and then it falls into a dark and cold place for much of its second half before recovering a little at the end. A line in the final song is “I believe in growing old with grace,” and I think that can be seen as a loose theme running through this collection.

A throw-away bit of connective tissue struck me in Jim Emerson’s announcement of his and MSN’s movies of the decade:

“That’s a pretty mainstream list (hey, it’s for MSN) — and so is mine.”

“Not really,” I thought. Unsurprising? Yes. Dominated by English-language films? Yes. But mainstream?

This is, of course, a matter of definition.

The Box Office Power Rankings do not like the Twilight movies. We are not fooled by the excitement or ticket-buying power of teenage girls. We are on Team No One. (Did I do that right?)

Neither movie has ever finished better than third place in the Box Office Power Rankings. We are confident that this validates our methods.

The first movie in the series was hammered by stiff competition. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 44, it was 10th in the top 10 its opening weekend. To put that in context, New Moon’s 28 netted it a seventh-place finish in the Rotten Tomatoes criterion its first weekend. (Thank you, Couples Retreat, The Fourth Kind, and Planet 51.)

But the reality is that neither of these movies, given Thanksgiving release, is ever really in the Box Office Power Rankings conversation, even though they’re mostly avoiding the end-of-year Oscar bait. They might be ATMs for the studio, but without even better-than-mediocre reviews, they’re DOA in this neighborhood.

And that means there’s lots of room for movies that are more ... colorful. These five weeks of rankings feature wins by Precious (twice), The Blind Side (twice), and The Princess and the Frog, and a second-place debut by Invictus.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.

The One-Line Review’s Iain Stott has followed up his The 50 Greatest Films project with Beyond the Canon, meant to address complaints that the first survey was too canonical.

The top five:

1. Eyes Wide Shut;
2. Mulholland Dr.;
3. The Killing;
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;
5. Shadow of a Doubt.

The list is here. A different list, weighted for obscurity, is here.

The introduction and methodology are here. The list of 155 participants is here. My ballot is here.

It’s great fun to see which movies I was alone on (Clockers, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Incident at Loch Ness, and Trees Lounge, among others), and those on which I had unexpected company. Iain has done a tremendous job coordinating the project, compiling the results, and building the site so that everything is cross-referenced.

As people tell us time and time again, box-office performance is in the eye of the beholder.

Box Office Mojo wrote that Michael Jackson’s This Is It, in its debut weekend, did “exceptionally well for a concert picture or music documentary.” On the other hand, Disney’s A Christmas Carol “stumbled a bit out of the gate.”

Guess which one made $30 million and which one pulled in $23 million in its opening weekend.

Yep. The stumbler made more.

The two movies are within a couple hundred theaters of each other. Michael Jackson had literally no new-wide-release competition, and as you might have heard, Michael Jackson died suddenly in June. Charles Dickens had to fight off Goats, aliens, and whatever Richard Kelly is selling in The Box. And again: A Christmas Carol made $7 million more than This Is It, even though it had significantly weaker reviews.

It also earned $7 million more in its opening weekend than The Polar Express, made by the same director with the same technique for the same holiday. But as Mojo helpfully adds: “Polar Express ... was muted by opening a few days after The Incredibles whereas Carol had no such direct competitor.”

The unstated premise here — and it is truly unstated in these weekend roundups — is the size of the gamble. A Christmas Carol cost $200 million to make ($35 million more than Polar Express, by the way), while the production costs of This Is It had been spent before the decision was made to turn those rehearsals into into a movie. So any revenue generated by This Is It is gravy, while A Christmas Carol has far to go before it’s in the black.

I’m no defender of Robert Zemeckis or these motion-capture animated things, but I refuse to consider a $30-million, non-Thanksgiving November opening a disappointment, either in absolute terms or compared to a postmortem cash-in. (Yeah, I know it was assembled with affection and skill, but it’s still a postmortem cash-in.)

Others might be harsh in their assessments, but cheer up, Robert! You did win the Box Office Power Rankings, and Michael didn’t.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell exists mostly to remind the world that Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead and can still make The Evil Dead, which is good to know because Sam Raimi is re-making The Evil Dead.

But amid all the giggle-inducing grossness are a few grace notes — unnecessarily skillful business that reminds us that Raimi also made A Simple Plan. I’m going to talk about one of those bits.

Should we consider Spike Jonze’s and Dave Eggers’ adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are a disappointment?

It is certainly not a miserable failure. It received good reviews, won the box office when it debuted, and also topped the Box Office Power Rankings in its opening weekend.

But its gross dropped 57 percent its second weekend. Thirty-five movies have opened in wide release atop the box-office top 10 this year, and 20 lost a lower percentage of revenue than Wild Things:

Movie: Debut weekend, Second weekend, Drop
Gran Torino: $29.5M, $25.6M, 13.2%
Taken: $24.7M, $20.5M, 16.9%
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: $30.3M, $25M, 17.4%
He’s Just Not That Into You: $27.8M, $22.3M, 19.6%
The Hangover: $45M, $32.8M, 27.1%
Up: $68.1M, $44.1M, 35.2%
Zombieland: $24.7M, $14.8M, 40.2%
Knowing: $24.6M, $14.7M, 40.2%
Angels and Demons: $46.2M, $27.4M, 40.7%
Star Trek: $75.2M, $43M, 42.8%
The Final Destination: $27.4M, $15.3M, 44.2%
The Proposal: $33.6M, $18.6M, 44.8%
G-Force: $31.7M, $17.5M, 44.8%
Paul Blart: Mall Cop: $39.2M, $21.6M, 44.9%
Monsters Vs. Aliens: $59.3M, $32.6M, 45.0%
Race to Witch Mountain: $24.4M, $12.8M, 47.6%
Inglourious Basterds: $38.1M, $19.3M, 49.3%
Couples Retreat: $34.3M, $17.2M, 49.8%
District 9: $37.4M, $18.2M, 51.2%
17 Again: $23.7M, $11.5M, 51.4%
Where the Wild Things Are: $32.7M, $14M, 57.1%
Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself: $23.4M, $9.9M, 57.9%
Obsessed: $28.6M, $12.1M, 57.9%
Hannah Montana: The Movie: $32.3M, $13.4M, 58.5%
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: $54.7M, $22.3M, 59.2%
Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail: $41M, $16.2M, 60.6%
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: $109M, $42.3M, 61.2%
Fast and Furious: $71M, $27.2M, 61.6%
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: $77.8M, $29.5M, 62.1%
Funny People: $22.7M, $8M, 64.8%
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian: $70.1M, $24.4M, 65.2%
Watchmen: $55.2M, $17.8M, 67.7%
X-Men Origins: Wolverine: $85.1M, $26.4M, 69.0%
Bruno: $30.6M, $8.3M, 72.8%
Friday the 13th: $43.6M, $7.9M, 81.8%

Perusing the list, there’s no obvious correlation between second-weekend performance and a movie’s critical reception. There are poorly received movies that did better than Wild Things (Paul Blart and Couples Retreat, for example). And there are well reviewed titles that did worse (such as Funny People and Harry Potter).

But there is possibly a relationship: Above Wild Things, the average combined score from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritc is 115, and the median is 105. Below Wild Things, the average score is 90, and the median is 83.

The circumstances of each movie’s release are unique, and it’s dangerous to read too much into box-office numbers. But speaking generally, those steep drop-offs usually happen to disposable one-weekend movies (Friday the 13th) and first-weekend movies — those for which there is fervent anticipation (Harry Potter, Watchmen). First-weekend movies are often considered successes; one-weekend movies are successes only if they were cheap to make.

Surely, Where the Wild Things Are was a first-weekend movie: It is drawn from a book beloved by millions, it was not directed by Ron Howard, it does not star Jim Carrey or Mike Meyers, and it has the hipster cachet of Jones and Eggers.

Yet I think it’s also a bit of a one-weekend movie. If audiences felt the film is, as Jim Emerson argued, about “the misery of being a kid,” then they probably spoke of it with ambivalence at best. And that’s precisely the sort of word-of-mouth that keeps folks away after the first weekend.

As for the other champion in this edition of our rankings, I offer an updated box-office comparison, with the additional context that the numbers are not adjusted for inflation.

The Blair Witch Project after five weekends: 5,713 theater weeks (the sum of all weekends’ theater counts), $71.5 million gross (weekends only), $12,515 per theater.

Paranormal Activity after five weekends: 5,312 theater weeks, $49.2 million gross (weekends only), $9,264 per theater.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.