The box office: what's there and what's already fallen off astounds me. Still Alice, boasting an Oscar winner, creeps past the $11 million mark, and apparently Julianne Moore deserves the statuette, though almost nobody has told me it's a must-see. Fifty Shades of Grey creeps toward the $150 million despite a steep dropoff in sales, showing what a weak story does on a not-often-used-but-reliable formula. Then there's...Jupiter Ascending? Already out of the top ten and below Hot Tub Time Machine 2, which fell from the number two spot to ten without John Cusack? One would expect a few more people to see the latest Wachowski sibling outing, but this is ridiculous. The new Will Smith/Margot Robbie thriller Focus debuted fine at almost 19 million, but watch: it'll drop off to net around forty million eventually. This might all be because just now Netflix announced even more A-list talent set for this summer, which could be the summer of streaming and not multiplexes.
We need wit. Boldness. Sincerity, not surface banter. Or real cinema, such as Birdman and Boyhood that take stories in new directions, and unique ones. It may be a while, but there always seem to be surprises in spring.
We need wit. Boldness. Sincerity, not surface banter. Or real cinema, such as Birdman and Boyhood that take stories in new directions, and unique ones. It may be a while, but there always seem to be surprises in spring.
