WORCESTERMOVIES.COM’S
TOP 12 MOVIES OF 2007
12. KNOCKED UP
11. GONE BABY GONE
10. HOT FUZZ
9. MICHAEL CLAYTON
8. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
7. ATONEMENT
6. THE LIVES OF OTHERS
5. SWEENEY TODD
4. BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD
3. JUNO
2. ONCE
1. RATATOUILLE
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It would be a bit obvious for us to say that “National Treasure: Book Of Secrets found gold at the box office this weekend,” but we’re very tired from a busy, busy month, and we’d like to go home and spend the day off tomorrow with our families. The Disney sequel starring Nicolas Cage cinched the #1 spot at the box office, though last week’s #1 and #2, I Am Legend and Alvin and the Chipmunks, were close behind with respectable takes at #2 and #3 this week. The next charting releases were a far-behind trio of new titles – the Tom Hanks political comedy Charlie Wilson’s War (#4), the dark Tim Burton/Johnny Depp musical Sweeney Todd (#5) and the unconventional romantic comedy P.S. I Love You (#6). Disney’s self-spoof Enchanted is still hanging on a month later, this week at #7, with the only other new movie, the music biopic lark Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story coming in at #8. The big budget fantasy The Golden Compass barely added to its disappointing take, landing at #9, though it has done considerable business abroad, prompting talk of the two sequels based on author Philip Pullman’s other two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy. In limited release (and opening in Worcester on Christmas Day) is the dark horse comedy Juno at #10. Don’t expect too much of a change next week, as also-rans The Great Debaters, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem and The Water Horse are the only new movies opening this week.
•••WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: December 21-23, 2007•••
1. NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS - $45.5M ($45.5M total)
2. I AM LEGEND - $34.2M ($137M total)
3. ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS - $29M ($84.9M total)
4. CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR - $9.62M ($9.62M total)
5. SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET - $9.35M ($9.35M total)
6. P.S. I LOVE YOU - $6.5M ($6.5M total)
7. ENCHANTED - $4.15M ($98.4M total)
8. WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY - $4.1M ($4.1M total)
9. THE GOLDEN COMPASS - $3.98M ($48.4M total)
10. JUNO - $3.4M ($6.38M total)
To those readers who celebrate Christmas, we all wish you and yours a joyous one. Please enjoy this video Christmas card: “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”… played on Tesla coils!
WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY [R]
It’s impossible to keep a good comedy writer down. Judd Apatow has seen three projects hit the screen this year: hot on the heels of Superbad and Knocked Up comes Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a riff on musical biopics that both celebrates and annihilates its source material.
Walk Hard follows the fortunes of musical legend Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly), who rises from a tragic, impoverished childhood (complete with machete incident, dead brother, and embittered father whose favorite line is the great running gag, “The wrong kid died!”). Cox attains fame, fortune and everything that goes with it: promiscuity, a wrecked home life, and an angel-dust fueled public rampage. This is Walk the Line on harder class-A substances, with a side dish of deliberate absurdity: we expect to see a child actor play the 8-year-old Dewey, but when John C. Reilly pops up as the 14-year-old version, we know Apatow and his co-writer Jake Kasdan, who also directed the film, aren’t going to allow little things like logic or realism to get in the way. Showing 8-year-old Dewey (Connor Rayburn) how to position his finders on a guitar to make a chord in the key of E, Honeyboy Williams hardly blinks when suddenly the kid starts playing a complex blues riff and singing in a whiskey-soaked voice, “I done a bad thing.”
JUNO [R]
On the page, Juno resembles a Lifetime movie: 16-year old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) becomes pregnant after impulsive sex with her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and decides to bring the baby to term. But she has no plans to keep it; instead she finds a well-tended couple interested in adoption.
It sounds earnest, doesn’t it? Yet this teen comedy is a disarming coming-of-age story, largely due to a perfect conjunction of talents: newbie screenwriter Diablo Cody, whose dialogue get under the skin of the teenage world she depicts; actress Ellen Page in one of those head-turning performances that leads to talk show appearances and award nominations; and director Jason Reitman, who shows breadth in this 180-degree turn from his satirical debut Thank You For Smoking.
The Boston Society of Film Critics (BSFC) is an organization of film reviewers from Boston are publications, formed in 1981 to make “Boston’s unique critical perspective heard on a national and international level by awarding commendations to the best of the year’s films and filmmakers and local film theaters and film societies that offer outstanding film programming.” Every year the Boston Society of Film Critics give their Boston Society of Film Critics Awards, many of which go on to acclaim at the Golden Globes (in January) and the Oscars (in February). [NOTE: Those titles below without links have not opened in Worcester yet.]
Best Picture - No Country For Old Men
Best Actor - Frank Langella for Starting Out in the Evening
Best Actress - Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose
Best Supporting Actor - Javier Bardem for No Country For Old Men
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Ryan for Gone Baby Gone
Best Director - Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Best Screenplay - Brad Bird for Ratatouille
Best Cinematography - Janusz Kaminski for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Best Documentary - Crazy Love
Best Foreign Language Film - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Best Ensemble Cast - Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
This year’s Best New Filmmaker, a category added in 2004 to memorialize late Boston critic David Brudnoy, was awarded to Ben Affleck for Gone Baby Gone. This year’s awards will be officially given out at a ceremony at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA on Sunday, January 13, 2008. The ceremony, open to the public, includes a cocktail reception at 5 p.m. that will provide attendees with the opportunity to meet and mingle with Boston’s top film critics. A screening of one of the BSFC honored films follows at 7 p.m. An invited guest, to be announced, will engage in a post-screening Q and A with the audience.
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET [R]
Fans of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street have no doubt been chewing their nails the last few weeks. After all, not a single Sondheim show has been sent to the big screen to critical acclaim, so heady are his music and lyrics, so theatrical his ambitions. But Sweeney has found a dark, compelling home at the cineplexes this Christmas thanks to Tim Burton’s cinematic modus operandi and tour-de-force performances by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. This Sweeney is gory, dank, romantic and hopeless – a far cry from the moral certainties of Sondheim’s operatic, and comically grandiose, stage play. This is Burton’s translation entirely – and it’s bloody great.
NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS [PG]
Having missed the first installment of the National Treasure franchise, I wasn’t sure if I was at a disadvantage seeing its sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets. But if this is anything like the first, I would have gladly missed it and this witless sequel altogether.
Not that there isn’t some popcorn fun in this mix of Indiana Jones, high tech sleuthing, old-fashioned puzzle solving, and deep-seated family rivalries; but the inanities of the plot joined played out by its bland, though highly energetic characters makes for a very long adventure yarn.
For those whose interest in world politics waxes and wanes with the evening news, the fact that after 9/11 the nation came to abrupt grips with the fact that America’s enemies were fighting us utilizing weapons with which we ourselves armed them likely led to incredulity. The story of those weapons is told in a sassy, ironic and entertaining way in Hollywood veteran Mike Nichols’ utterly engaging Charlie Wilson’s War – and it might just be the smartest film of 2007.
Tom Hanks plays Charlie Wilson, who, for those who don’t know, was a liberal congressman from Texas in the late 1970s when the American government was flustered and frustrated by the Soviet Union’s Afghani invasion. A career philanderer and boozer, Wilson was popular, suave, and internationally effective in foreign affairs. When prompted by the buxom, sharp-tongued Houston debutante Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) to covertly get the United States involved with the situation, Charlie convinces Congress to surreptitiously dedicate $5 million to helping the Afghans eject the Russians. The result is a tremulous relationship with the CIA over the situation, fronted by sharp-cracking, droll agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Gust tells Charlie that in order for the local freedom fighters, the Mujahideen, to shoot down the Russian helicopters that have been ravaging the country, the Afghans would need more money. Like, a lot more money.
P.S. I LOVE YOU [PG-13]
Fresh off his stint as the ripped King Leonidas in 300, Gerard Butler sheds his armor in favor of amor and jumps feet first into P.S. I Love You, a Richard Gravanese (Freedom Writers) film based on the Cecelia Ahern novel. It sounds like a chick flick, and it is; but it’s also got its moments of comedy and heartbreak, a sympathetic turn from Hilary Swank, and some great supporting work from Kathy Bates and Harry Connick, Jr.
Swank plays Holly Kennedy and Butler plays her husband Gerry Kennedy, a happy-go-lucky Irish charmer who has moved to New York City after meeting and marrying Holly nine years ago when she was an American college girl on a trip to the Emerald Isle. When we first see the pair of them, it’s during a long scene in which the couple fight, trade accusations, scream, storm out, and then throw themselves into one anothers’ arms.
WHO WILL SHAVE YOUR SOUL?
Tonsorial talk with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
Interview by Robert Nesti
At the onset of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, there’s a short clip that highlights the collaboration between director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp. In a series of quick cuts, scenes from Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, The Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory flash across the screen, making viewers aware of the remarkable artistic relationship between these two artists.
Sweeney Todd, though, may be their most challenging project to date. Adapted from Stephen Sondheim’s landmark 1979 Broadway musical, it follows the bloody exploits of a serial killer in Victorian London who dispatches his victims by cutting their throats and, in an unholy alliance with an enterprising baker, turns their remains into meat pies that become the toast of the town. On stage the musical was a shocker – an exercise in Grand Guignol melodrama melded with Sondheim’s highly romantic, cinematic score and Harold Prince’s Brechtian staging. The result was as if “The Threepenny Opera” starred Freddy Krueger. The show was a prestige hit, winning a slew of awards, but losing some 40% of its investment; but has had a considerable life since then – turning up in smaller versions in resident and regional theaters throughout the world. Most recently, it premiered in Iceland; and an innovative British regional theater production (directed by John Doyle) was a hit in London and New York.
