It is another busy week in the cinema with up to half a dozen movies opening . The biggest of the new releases is Rush, a film set in 1976 which covers the rivalry between Formula One race aces James Hunt (Liam
Hemsworth) and Nikki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), a rivalry that saw the badly burned Austrian driver returning to the track in 41 days following a devastating crash in the Italian Gran Prix.
It is a polished affair, with expertly shot and edited race sequences but it is also typical of director Ron Howard in hinting at insights but never really delivering on them.
Although the background is vivid and impressively rendered, the story of the rivalry is neither deep or rigorous enough. The women in it, Olivia Wilde plays Suzy Hunt, gets short shrift and the politics of Formula One are generally ignored.
White House Down – A Washington city policeman, John Cale (Channing Tatum) is on a tour of the White House with his daughter when the complex is taken over by a heavily armed paramilitary group. Cale, who is separated from the girl, has to find her, rescue the president (Jamie Foxx) and overcome the invaders – who have a variety of motives.
White House begins with a traditional disaster movie structure, introducing each of the characters and explaining why they happen to be in or around the West Wing at the time of the attack. From there it becomes “Die Hard in The White House,” replicating elements of the Bruce Willis movie , ranging from the hero’s broken marriage to him fighting off the paramilitaries in a dirty white vest at the end .
White House down is a “B” movie with an “A” movie budget ($130m) and production design .There is very little originality or invention in it and the similar, less-expensive Olympus Has Fallen, although hardly more ambitious, is a more credible thriller. With James Woods, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jason Clarke.
Also out on Friday is the hilarious comedy In A World, starring and directed by former Boston Legal star Lake Bell (who will be on The Picture Show on Saturday night); Justin And The Knights of Valour – a young boy is mentored by three monks in his efforts to become a knight and Insidious: Chapter 2, a daft sequel to the 2010 ghost story about a family’s attempts to prevent their son from being lured into the spirit world. In this one the boy’s father (Patrick Wilson) seems to be caught between the two worlds in a script that uses elements of Psycho as its basis.
Low budget horror: this seems to be one sure-fire way of making money in the cinema just now. The Conjuring was one of the major successes of the summer – on a budget of $20m., it took $243.8 at the world-wide box office. It had a big opening in the US ($41m) and like many horrors it didn’t nosedive after the first weekend, thanks to great word-of-mouth. The Purge became the least expensive movie to top the box office in the US in 25 years. It cost $3m and ultimately grossed $85m. It was made by the producer Jason Blum who has struck it rich with The Paranormal Activity movies, Sinister, Insidious 1 and 2 and The Purge on tight budgets.
Irish director at the centre of a dramatic rights auction at the Toronto Film Festival: Half a dozen major distributors took part in an all- night auction at the weekend for the North American rights of Can A Song Save Your Life, the new movie by John Carney who did the award winning Once. The rights eventually went to the Weinstein Company for an $7/8m minimum guarantee and a $20m commitment for prints and advertising. After the American rights had been claimed, several other companies vied, territory by territory, for the rest of the world.
These auctions don’t happen much any more but the interest in Can A Song Save Your Life was unusual. The Deadline Hollywood website said the movie “ played through the roof” at its premiere. The film stars Keira Knightly as a songwriter who comes to the US with her boyfriend only to catch him philandering with a record company executive .When she plays one of her songs for a bar crowd, she is heard by a former hotshot record producer (Mark Ruffalo) who helps the songwriter and heals his own shattered life in the process. The supporting cast includes Hailee Steinfeld (the girl from True Grit), Catherine Keener, James Corden and Adam Levine (in his film debut).There has been speculation that it could be rushed out before the end of the year for Oscar consideration- especially for Ruffalo as best supporting actor- but it is more likely that it will be held back for 2014 (partly because there is so much competition for Oscar noms.)
A listener asks if we know anything about a new movie called Prisoners. We do, indeed. In fact, I saw it this afternoon and it will be opening here on 27 September. It is a dark child-kidnap story that has been compared to the work of David Fincher and has been getting rave reviews at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals. The trade paper Variety called it “ a spellbinding, sensationally effective thriller with a complex moral centre.” Hugh Jackman heads an ensemble cast as a carpenter who decides to take the law into his own hands when his 6 years old daughter and a friend are abducted after a Thanksgiving dinner. I won’t say any more, except to assure you that it is riveting stuff and we’ll return to it in a fortnight .The director is French/Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Paul Dano, and Melissa Leo are also in it.
Justified: We’ve talked about Justified several times but I’m not sure that it has really been “discovered” by the Irish public yet. So I went down to the re-opened HMV in Henry St. yesterday and one of the things I did was to check on it. Series’ one and two are selling at €17.99 each or both for €30. That is a total of 26 episodes for $30, which seems to me to be particularly good value. And it is a relatively cheap way of getting into the show – or deciding whether you want to get into it.
Another listener wants to know if it is true that Jack Nicholson has retired because he can’t remember his lines. Well, Denise he has denied it but it is certainly a fact that he is not working as much as he used to – and at 76 that may be understandable. In denying the reports about memory loss last week, he said he wasn’t interested in making the kind of movies that young people seem interested in. He recently turned down the role in Alexander Payne’s Alaska that won his old friend Bruce Dern the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes film festival and plans for a movie with Warren Beatty and Clint Eastwood haven’t materialised. His last film was How Do You Know in 2010. Nicholson has won three Oscars- and, with 12, he holds the record for the highest number of nominations for a male actor.Anyway, the answer to your questions is that we won’t know unbtil we see him in something else- he claims he had a “ mathamaticians brain” and he says there is nothing wrong with his memory.
DVD Releases: The main new release is Fast And Furious 6. We’ve had several inquiries about Peter Jackson’s plans for The Dam Busters remake over the past few weeks. First of all, we should say that he has finished filming the third of The Hobbit movies- There And Back Again and it will be released in December 2014 (after The Desolation Of Smaug next Dec.) but Jackson is then committed to two new Tintin films as producer and possibly director (he is certainly directing one of them, Red Rackham’s Revenge).
2015 would be the 60th anniversary of The Dam Busters – the Richard Todd/Ml. Redgrave movie- but 2016 looks more likely shooting date for The Dam Busters. As things stand Jackson owns the rights to The Dam Busters, he has a completed script by Stephen Fry and he’s had 10- Lancaster bombers built in News Zealand in preparation for the movie.
