Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Bonnie And Clyde's Gift For Humanizing Legendary Bank Robbers Still Resonates Strongly Today

Before they were known as being the presenters caught up in the middle of a massive Best Picture Oscar snafu, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway's most notable collaboration in American pop culture was in their portrayal of real-life criminals Bonnie & Clyde in the 1967 motion picture of the same name. Directed by Arthur Penn, the film is not interested in chronicling who Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) were prior to their criminal escapades, the feature begins with the two meeting outside of Bonnie's house with Clyde managing to coerce Bonnie to join him in his assorted robberies while trying to impress here.  Conversely, its story comes to an intentionally sudden halt once the duo meet their grisly end, solidifying this as a movie squarely focused on just the romance that blossomed between these two legendary criminals.


Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The Exciting Potential In A New Interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 Is Never Fully Realized

Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 has received a pop culture resurgence in recent years thanks to its relevance to modern-day political issue, making it an inevitability that someone would try and take another swing at giving the novel a feature film adaptation (Francois Truffaut was the last person to tackle this material in a 1966 motion picture). Taking on this material now is Ramin Bahrani, director of one of 2015's most underappreciated titles 99 Homes, who writes and directs the film which stars Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon. Now that's a dynamite assemblage of creative artists! What a shame, then, that this new take on Fahrenheit 451 is more middling than captivating.

Monday, May 28, 2018

High School Musical 3 See's This Musical Franchise Jogging In Place, But At Least The Music's Still Aces

And now it is time for the High School Musical saga to reach their own Return of The King, their own Toy Story 3, their own Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, the moment where they close out a trilogy and bid farewell to the world that turned their stories into such massive successes. Granted, like all those three aforementioned franchises, the seemingly dormant High School Musical would eventually return (a 2011 spin-off centered on Sharpay and a forthcoming TV show specifically) but this was the conclusion of the tale of Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) and their fellow Wildcats as they navigate High School with accompanying musical numbers and elaborately choreographed dancing.


Sunday, May 27, 2018

Werner Herzog's 1973 Feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God Is A Masterclass In Cinematic Minimalism

Though I had never watched a Werner Herzog directed movie prior to seeing Aguirre: The Wrath of God, I've been well aware of Herzog's reputation as a filmmaker who takes on harrowing material who speaks in a distinctive German-accented voice and has a devout love for the art of cinema. The high level of acclaim his works have received makes it difficult not to be aware of his impact on the world of movies, though his enjoyable appearances on programs like Rick & Morty and Parks & Recreation also helped ensure he was on my radar and his presence on my mind has only further increased having now seen what an outstanding achievement in filmmaking his third feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God is.


With A Disappointing Memorial Day Box Office Debut, Solo: A Star Wars Story Isn't Feeling Like A Star Whose Shine Can't Be Stopped

Note: All box office figures discussed in this article are three-day weekend figures.

Well, pull up a chair folks, because we've got a box office debacle to dissect. And not just any box office debacle, no, this is the kind of surprise box office misfire that us box office geeks will be talking about for eons to come. Such a box office performance came in the form of Solo: A Star Wars Story, a feature everyone knew would be the lowest-grossing of the new Star Wars films, but did anyone even imagine it would go this low at the domestic box office? Solo grossed only $83.3 million this past three-day weekend, 46% below the opening weekend of Rogue One and about 62% below the opening weekend of The Last Jedi from just five months ago. It's also only 4% ahead of the opening weekend of Attack of The Clones from 2002 and that's without taking inflation into account. Taking inflation into account, however, Solo is revealed to be the first Star Wars movie since Return of The Jedi in 1983 to sell less than $100 million worth of tickets over its opening weekend. While I'll be refraining from talking about four-day holiday weekend projections in this article, Disney is also saying Solo will barely get over the $100 million mark by Monday with a $101 million four-day haul. And just a few days ago it was thought of as a certainty that this would dethrone Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End's $139.8 million four-day gross for the biggest Memorial Day weekend haul in history.

Friday, May 25, 2018

Kill Bill Slays Thanks To Thoughtfully Realized Characters And Uma Thurman's Formidable Lead Performance

In retrospect, it's nuts that Quentin Tarantino had a whopping six years separating the release of his third film, Jackie Brown, and his fourth film, Kill Bill (which was split into two individual movies upon its initial release). In every part of his career, Tarantino has only taken three or four years maximum in between projects, but then again, he hasn't really done anything as large in scale as the expansive Kill Bill saga in the rest of his filmography, perhaps that extensive break between films was necessary for him to properly prepare for a motion picture of this magnitude. Whether that's true or not, that extensive wait was totally worth it as Kill Bill is a terrific feature that gathers up depth as it goes along like a snowball picking up snow as it travels down a snow-covered mountainside.


Solo: A Star Wars Story Is Better Than You'd Expect A Han Solo Origin Movie To Be But Still Suffers From A Derivative Nature

Ever since Harrison Ford shot his blaster through a mosquito alien in a seedy extra-terrestrial tavern in 1977, people have loved Han Solo. Why wouldn't we? He's got bad boy charm, he's got Harrison Ford's immense charm and he gets to serve as a grounded point-of-view in the original Star Wars as a guy who just doesn't care about all of this alien mumbo-jumbo in this universe. Even as a guy who thinks Han Solo is cooler than a morning on Hoth, do we really need a whole movie detailing the man's background? The fact that he carried an aura of mystery was always a big part of Han Solo's charm after all. Well, Disney marketers, er, master storytellers have seen fit to give us a Han Solo movie in the form of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second stand-alone Star Wars Story following 2016's Rogue One.


Thursday, May 24, 2018

Season Two of A Series of Unfortunate Events Excels In Production Design But Struggles With Tone

Heading into he ten-episode long season two of Series of Unfortunate Events, my big question for this TV show was how they would juggle the programs previously established heavily comedic tone with the darker books they were about to adapt. Just like Harry Potter, those Series of Unfortunate Events books got more complex and bleak as they went on and trying to merge that aesthetic with the joke-heavy Wes Anderson meets Tim Burton style of the show was gonna be a tricky proposition. Interestingly, having now seen the entire second season (which took me nearly two months to complete because I'm the worst binge watcher ever), I'm not sure if they did fully succeed in organically merging the two tones of these individual properties, but they did manage to make an entertaining second season nonetheless.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Blood Simple Is A Sublime Inaugural Directorial Effort For The Coen Brothers

Though Blood Simple may be the very first feature-film directorial effort from The Coen Brothers (like all their earliest works, only Joel Coen is credited due to DGA regulations), this movies does not come off as some sort of watered-down version of the duo's later filmmaking. There's already a noticeably assured hand behind the camera that brings to life a Texas-set noir with real flourish. To boot, it's interesting to note how Blood Simple feels like a combination of two of the Coen Brothers best works that would arrive more than two decades after Blood Simple arrived into theaters. Specifically, Blood Simple combines the grim Southern crime aesthetic of No Country For Old Men with the inexperienced criminals getting out of their element aspect of Burn After Reading.


Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Robert Redford And Dustin Hoffman Take On A Subdued And Compelling Crusade For The Truth In All The President's Men

A recurring sentiment in the middle of the daily deluge of Earth-shattering political news transpiring in the modern era is that all these events are so unbelievable that they'd be thought of as too far-fetched if they were to occur in a piece of fictional media. Alas, reality tends to be stranger than fiction and it isn't just the current political affairs of the United States of America that are prime examples of this trend. There are numerous real-life events from the past to choose from if you want to look at just how outlandish reality can become and, especially the 1972 Watergate scandal and the ensuing conspiracies surrounding this event, conspiracies that were uncovered by studios investigative journalists.


Monday, May 21, 2018

Nicolas Cage, John Travolta And John Woo Come Together To Create Unhinged Action Movie Fun In Face/Off

Water is wet. The sky is blue. Nicolas Cage is a whole heck of a lot of fun when doing go-for-broke performances. These are all universal truths of this world and the fact that Nicolas Cage imbues even his most peculiar performances with full-bodied commitment should be something more people should recognize instead of reducing this wonderful actor down to just a meme. You know who else is no stranger to eccentric performances? John Travolta. I'm nowhere near as convinced that Travolta is something special as an actor as I am about Nicolas Cage, but he's had his share of memorable oddball turns playing various man-animals.


Melissa McCarthy Can Only Do So Much To Improve The Scattershot Comedy of Life of The Party

The good news about Life of The Party is that's it's a drastic improvement in quality from the last two movies Ben Falcone has directed. Between his directorial debuted Tammy and The Boss, Falcone has not had a great (to put it gently) track record as a filmmaker, but he is showing growth as a director from film to film and that's most profoundly felt with Life of The Party. Unfortunately, even at its best, Life of The Party can only rise to the level of serviceable, but at least the clunky dark comedy that was the modus operandi of Falcone's prior two motion pictures has been replaced by frequently agreeable yuks revolving around an overly affectionate mother returning to college.


Sunday, May 20, 2018

Deadpool Has Big Number Two At The Domestic Box Office While A New Book Club Is Solidly Attended And Show Dogs Is Put To Sleep

Blockbuster movies that open to massive $100 million+ opening weekends seemingly have it all, but there is one disadvantage to your original movie opening to such high numbers: there's nowhere to but down. Only five movies have managed to open to over $100 million and then have their immediate sequels score bigger opening weekends: Shrek 2, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows- Part One, Iron Man 2, The Hunger Games and The Dark Knight. Otherwise, the default is that a $100+ million bow indicates your next movie will be opening to smaller numbers simply because it's hard to recreate the kind of momentum that got you to that $100+ million bow. It was widely thought that Deadpool 2 could be the sixth movie to buck this trend, but in the end, the Merc With A Mouth will have to "settle" for a $125 million bow.


Friday, May 18, 2018

Once Deadpool 2 Get Rolling, It's A Surprisingly Entertaining Raunchy Comedy

VERY VERY MILD SPOILERS ARE INSIDE THIS REVIEW.

We've been having a pretty good run of comedies in 2018 so far. Not everything has been golden of course (remember Game Over, Man! or Super Troopers 2?) but in just the span of nearly five months, there has been a solid list of well-made comedic films emerging that remind us all of the age-old versatility that this genre has. Comedies can be mystery thrillers (Game Night), heartfelt coming-of-age tales (Blockers), thoughtful family movies (Paddington 2) and thought-provoking political satire (The Death of Stalin), they don't just have to be run-of-the-mill vehicles churned out on the cheap and quick so that David Spade can buy a new condo this coming summer. Surprisingly, Deadpool 2 comes up as the newest 2018 comedy to deliver both further evidence of how expansive the genre of comedies can be and a large supply of laughs.


Thursday, May 17, 2018

Back To The Future: Part III Show A Million Ways To Have Fun In The West

Since watching Back To The Future: Part III for the first time and then discussing the film and the larger franchise it belongs to, I've learned something extraordinary: the low esteem I hold Back To The Future: Part II in is considered a "hot take" of sorts. While I love the first Back To The Future to pieces, the second entry in this series just never clicked for me, Marty McFly's journey into the future and various events of the first movie never filled me with all that much excitement. Back To The Future: Part III doesn't get things back to the quality level of the first movie but it does manage to create a movie that's actually fun to watch and fun was certainly something in low supply in the prior Back To The Future outing.


The Richly Written First Season of Barry Is Incredible

SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST SEASON OF BARRY FOLLOW 

Back in 2014, Bill Hader got to prove his dramatic acting chops in the high-quality film The Skeleton Twins. An excellent dramedy also starring Kristen Wiig, Hader delivered a terrific performance that redefined what I thought he was capable of as an actor. Nearly four years later, Hader's got another sublime dramatic performance to reinforce his versatility as a performer, and even better, it's a completely different character than the one he portrayed in The Skeleton Twins. The character is Barry, the star of the HBO comedy Barry. Who is Barry? Well, he's a hitman, a former Marine and...that's about it. Barry doesn't have anything to his life beyond just being a guy who kills people, his Uncle Fuches (Stephen Root) makes sure of that.


I Feel Pretty Has A Thoughtful Moral And An Abundance of Lackluster Comedy To Impart

I Feel Pretty is your basic middle-of-the-road comedy, but I do want to give it props for conveying an important message that more films need to carry. The idea of making a whole film dedicated to the idea of reminding women that who they are should define what they think is "pretty" instead of narrowly defined conventions of American society is way a more admirable thesis to pivot your movie around than what you would find in your typical disposable Adam Sandler or Kevin James comedy. Good on I Feel Pretty for having such a considerate theme fueling its whole story, though that story itself, and especially how it's executed, is woefully paint-by-numbers in too many respects.


Wednesday, May 16, 2018

There's Just Enough Gusto Goofiness In Mom And Dad To Make It Reasonably Diverting

Mom And Dad is kind of like an episode of The Twilight Zone. A really demented disgusting episode of The Twilight Zone, but an episode of The Twilight Zone nonetheless. One can practically hear Rod Sterling provide the introduction to said episode as he lays out how something has gone awry in the world and is leading parents to kill their own children ("They say it takes a village to raise a child, but today, these parents will learn it takes only one person to end a child."). Of course such an unhinged vision would emerge from writer/director Brian Taylor, the man who helped bring to life the two well-liked Crank movies and who also helped bring to life the widely-despised Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.


Tuesday, May 15, 2018

The Last Picture Show Fully Commits To A Melancholy Tone, Resulting In A Haunting Movie

Teenagers finally got to be widely recognized as a source of both revenue and storytelling in American pop culture in the 1950's which meant, because nostalgia is such a cornerstone of our pop culture. it was only a matter of time before art depicting teenagers inhabiting that specific pivotal era were created. The 1970's were bursting with pop culture that depicted teenager characters getting into adventures from Grease to Happy Days (American Graffiti was another 1970's pop culture entity that exploited nostalgia for teenage years, though that one was set in the 1960's). Most of these films were upbeat happy-go-lucky fare that looked back on 1950's teenagers with rose-colored glasses.


Monday, May 14, 2018

John Mulaney Is In Rare Inventive Form In His Hilarious New Comedy Special John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous At Radio Hall

For his fourth stand-up comedy special, John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous At Radio Hall, comedian/tall child John Mulaney decides to take the old adage "If it ain't broke it., don't fix it" to heart for various aspects of the show. His cadence, which is best described as the voice of a crisp radio announcer from the 1920's, that was abundant in past specials is very much kept intact, which is a delight to listen to simply because of how well Mulaney uses that natural voice of his to his advantage to help punctuate numerous jokes. His observational style of humor from prior stand-up specials is similarly prominent here as is his tendency to delve into extensive and hilarious stories about his childhood experiences.


Drunken Angel Works As Both A Post-WWII Parable And A Universally Compelling Tale In Its Own Right

SPOILERS FOR DRUNKEN ANGEL ARE AHEAD!!!

By the time Akira Kurosawa's 1948 film Drunken Angel begins, World War II has concluded, but the actions of said war are constantly being felt by so much of the population of Japan, who are just trying to adjust to some form of conventional reality. One person looking to just get by is Sanada (Takashi Shimura), a doctor who finds solace in helping patients and even more solace in consuming copious amounts of alcohol. Typically against his own better judgment, Sanada can't give up on any patient in need and that includes local ruffian Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune), a young man who Sanada discovers has tuberculous, a condition that can only be cured if Matsunaga slows down his life.


Sunday, May 13, 2018

Mother's Day Weekend See's Avengers: Infinity War Gobbling Up More Cash While Life Of The Party Has Underwhelming Box Office And Breaking In Has Decent Start

It was yet another big weekend at the box office for Avengers: Infinity War, as this smash hit blockbuster grossed another $61.8 million domestically, a 46% drop from last weekend. That's the fourth biggest third weekend in history and gives it a $547.8 million domestic haul. It's also worth noting that Avengers: Infinity War bowed at the Chinese box office this weekend and grossed $200 million over the weekend, the second biggest opening weekend in history in that marketplace. Such a mammoth gross brought Infinity War's overseas gross past the $1 billion mark, making it only the seventh movie in history to gross over $1 billion overseas. With a $1.6 billion worldwide box office haul, Avengers: Infinity War is already the fifth biggest movie ever at the worldwide box office and it's very likely this ends up becoming only the fourth movie in history to crack $2 billion at the worldwide box office.


Saturday, May 12, 2018

There's Real Potential In Bad Samaritan That Fails To Get Realized


Despite being a dopey B-movie thriller from the director of Geostorm, there's actually an interesting sociopolitical idea at the center of Bad Samaritan that deserves a more thoughtful movie to inhabit. When one boils down Bad Samaritan to its most basic elements, what we have here is a cat and mouse game whose protagonist is an Irish immigrant while our villain is a white male American who acts arrogantly to everyone who comes near to me and who has his status as a foe reinforced by how he threatens to report immigrant workers to immigration services. This is an intriguing hero/villain dynamic built on real-world elements that, unfortunately, becomes a background detail (and one undercut in effectiveness by certain elements in the film we'll talk about later) for a far more generic thriller.


Friday, May 11, 2018

Agnes Varda and JR Go On A Road Trip Packed With Engrossing Kindness In Faces Places

Iconic director Agnes Varda started out her filmmaking career with La Pointe Courte, a sobering look at a relationship in crisis, but her newest film is a complete 180 from 1955 feature in terms of tone. That newest directorial effort of hers is called Faces Places and one just feels pure joy from watching it. There are few movies I could say this about without some kind of caveat (The Muppets is one of the only other scant few titles I can think of to earn that distinction), but Faces Places really is that enjoyable to watch. From its humorous opening sequence establishing various ways that it's two lead characters did not meet to its heartfelt conclusion, Faces Places keeps a smile on your face and a sincere sense of kindness emanating from every fiber of its being.


Proud Mary Wastes Taraji P. Henson On Listless Action Fare Disturbingly Light On Action

Centering a whole movie on Taraji P. Henson as an assassin should be one of those guaranteed recipes for success like letting Taika Waititi make a wacky science-fiction comedy about the long-term effects of colonialism or letting Katherine Hepburn act in any movie ever. Tragically, Proud Mary totally squanders the idea of Taraji P. Henson as an action hero by refusing to give either Henson or the audience anything fun to do. The fact that the plot finds bizarrely little time for shoot-out's and other staples of action movie cinema is a key example of how Proud Mary fails to live up to it's potential, though it's far from the only way this motion picture manages to come up short, not by a long shot.


Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Peter Rabbit The Movie Is Decent, Though The Titular Character Is A More Flawed Creation

The marketing for Will Gluck's live-action/CGI Peter Rabbit movie made the feature it was advertising look like a nightmare. Loads of pop songs, rampant slapstick and Peter Rabbit tossing out lettuce like it was dollar bills at a strip club, this looked like a parody of DreamWorks Animation movies from 2004-2007, not an actual motion picture coming out in 2018. Thankfully, Peter Rabbit is nowhere near as bad as its trailers would suggest, which is a good thing because 90 minutes of just that initial teaser trailer would likely be classified as a form of torture. The actual movie isn't anywhere close to a Paddington level success but it does register as a decent family movie that works way better at comedy than one would expect.


In Laman's Terms: Older Films Are Not Immune To Criticism Over Potentially Offensive Content

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Last month, actor Molly Ringwald penned an essay for The New Yorker detailing her experiences with revisiting the assorted 1980's teen comedies she starred in over thirty years ago. Looking back on the works of that era like The Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles, she pinpoints numerous instances of troubling or outright sexist behavior on the part of male characters towards female characters which are most notably demonstrated by Bender in The Breakfast Club who treats Ringwald's character, Claire, "...with vicious contempt..." throughout the motion picture. Despite Claire being sexually harassed by Bender throughout the movie, Bender and Claire end up together at the end of the movie in a moment that audience is supposed to cheer for.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Thank You For Smoking Squanders Its Potential On Derivative Storytelling

Juno was the movie that took director Jason Reitman to a whole new level of fame, but it wasn't his very first foray into the world of feature-length movies. After directing a large number of short films, Reitman made his inaugural foray into this type of directing with Thank You For Smoking, a political satire that establishes the kind of character-informed dark comedy that would be omnipresent in his subsequent works. Unfortunately, the kind of quality that would be found in Reitman's next three features is nowhere near as prominent in Thank You For Smoking, which is a more erratic and frequently frustrating type of Jason Reitman movie.

West Side Story Mostly Holds Up Today As Superb Musical Filmmaking

By 1961, the golden age of Hollywood musicals was in high swing as numerous musicals scored major box office success and secured countless prestigious awards. This was a period of glory for the genre that lasted roughly from the 1950's to 1960's and perhaps its highest point came in 1961, when West Side Story came out and became a pop culture phenomenon that ended up scoring a Best Picture Oscar win as well as creating numerous tunes that have become iconic over the years. Thankfully, watching West Side Story today reveals that this is one highly-famous musical from the past that manages to (mostly) hold up, unlike, say, Grease (though that Grease soundtrack is still amazing).

Monday, May 7, 2018

Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis And Some Skillful Diablo Cody Writing Are The Champions of Tully

Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody reunite once again, following their collaborations on Juno and Young Adult, for Tully, a new meditation on motherhood that also brings back the star of the duo's aforementioned project Young Adult, Charlize Theron. Theron gets the chance to play a wildly different character in Tully than the one she portrayed in Young Adult, with her character in Tully being Marlo, a woman who has two children and one more on the way and is feeling...unfulfilled. Life's not awful, she and her husband, Drew (Ron Livingston) get along fine, money's not even too much an issue, but there does seem to be an endless succession of mundane problems every day that she feels like she can never properly address.


Before They Directed Avengers: Infinity War, The Russo Brothers Directed A Subversion of Heist Movies Titled Welcome To Collinwood

Between placing Captain America into a political thriller or filtering a paintball battle between the lead characters of the show Community through the prism of a spaghetti Western, it's clear directors Anthony and Joe Russo enjoy juxtaposing specific genres with characters you might not expect to inhabit those specific genres. This recurring fixture of their work can be clearly seen in their 2002 directorial effort Welcome To Collinwood, which takes the premise of a typical heist movie and has it led by a gaggle of unorthodox characters that are the polar opposite of conventional lead characters in traditional heist movies.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

A Night At The Opera Has The Marx Brothers Changing The Studios They Work For But Not Changing The Quality of Their Comedy

A Night At The Opera signaled a new change of pace for the acclaimed Marx Brothers in that they were now making their comedic motion pictures at a studio that wasn't their longtime home of Paramount Pictures. They were now working at MGM, who dictated some changes to the brothers work compared to their prior efforts. In contrast to their earlier films, A Night At The Opera has, among other differing factors, a much more elaborate plot, one that involves a love story between two protagonists who aren't The Marx Brothers. While recent years have seen many claim the film to be wildly inferior to their earlier efforts, for my money (as a relative newbie to the world of Marx Brothers comedy, to be fair), A Night At The Opera more than maintains the high-quality of the Marx Brothers.


The Best Aspects of Ferdinand Stand In Sharp Contrast To Its More Derivative Elements

Blue Sky Studios has been producing animated movies for sixteen years now and they're currently occupying what one might call an awkward phase in their history. The studio's big cash cow, the Ice Age movies, has finally run out of gas and their second attempt to create a big franchise in Rio never really took off after puttering out after two movies. Meanwhile, they're still producing only one movie a year, far less than even PIXAR who've been able to do two movies a year twice now, and their recent films that aren't The Peanuts Movie have failed to really take hold of the general public. They also seem to be struggling creatively with recent films like Rio and Epic that aspire to be bold and unique but end up succumbing to some of the more conventional traits of modern-day American animated fare.


Avengers: Infinity War Continues to Rule The Box Office As Overboard Sets Sail On Smooth Waters And Tully Struggles

Thanos was able to rule over the box office once again this weekend as Avengers: Infinity War seized its second weekend at the top of the box office, grossing $112.5 million this weekend, the second biggest second weekend of all-time, only behind the $149 million second weekend haul of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This was a 56% drop from its record-breaking opening weekend, a slightly better hold than the 59% drops that recent early May MCU efforts Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, as well as the 58% drop of Iron Man 3, all faced in their second weekends of release. With $450 million amassed domestically after ten days of release, it'll surpass the entire domestic lifetime gross of Avengers: Age of Ultron by Tuesday and looks to be on track for at least $650 million domestically. Basically, it's doing OK at the box office.


Thursday, May 3, 2018

In Sharp Contrast To It's Predecessor, Ocean's Twelve Is a More Monotonous Kind of Heist

Ocean's Eleven made so much money at the box office that it might as well have been the haul the lead characters managed to grab after a successful heist. With all that dough in the bank, it was inevitable that a sequel would arise. Interestingly, for the follow-up project entitled Ocean's Twelve, the decision has been made to make this a direct sequel to Ocean's Eleven that basically starts off right where its predecessor left off and, instead of having everyone get away scott free after pulling off a heist, the guy who they robbed in the first film, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), is looking to get every penny back that the eleven main characters of the first film stole from him.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

What A Twist!: Avengers: Infinity War Spoiler Discussion

OMG THERE'S SO MANY SPOILERS AHEAD

DO NOT GO FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT MASSIVE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR SPOILERS

HERE WE GO