You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2008.
“The Dark Knight” took in a record $155.34 million in its first weekend, topping the previous best of $151.1 million for “Spider-Man 3” in May 2007 and pacing Hollywood to its biggest weekend ever, according to studio estimates Sunday.
“We knew it would be big, but we never expected to dominate the marketplace like we did,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros., which released “The Dark Knight.” The movie should shoot past the $200 million mark by the end of the week, he said.
|
Hollywood set an overall revenue record of $253 million for a three-day weekend, beating the $218.4 million haul over the weekend of July 7, 2006, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers.
“This weekend is such a juggernaut,” said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal, whose musical “Mamma Mia!” debuted at No. 2 with $27.6 million.
Factoring in higher admission prices, “Spider-Man 3″ may have sold slightly more tickets than “The Dark Knight.”
At 2007’s average price of $6.88, “Spider-Man 3″ sold 21.96 million tickets over opening weekend. Media By Numbers estimates today’s average movie prices at $7.08, which means “The Dark Knight” would have sold 21.94 million tickets.
Revenue totals for “The Dark Knight” could change when final numbers are released Monday.
The movie’s release was preceded by months of buzz and speculation over the performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, Batman’s nemesis. Ledger, who died in January from an accidental prescription-drug overdose, played the Joker as a demonic presence, his performance prompting predictions that the role might earn him a posthumous Academy Award nomination.
“The average opening gross of the last five `Batman’ movies is $47 million. This tripled that, and for a reason,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers. “A big part of that was the Heath Ledger mystique and a phenomenal performance that absolutely deserves the excitement surrounding it.”
Dark as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind — including “Batman Begins,” Mr. Nolan’s 2005 pleasurably moody resurrection of the series — largely by embracing an ambivalence that at first glance might be mistaken for pessimism. But no work filled with such thrilling moments of pure cinema can be rightly branded pessimistic, even a postheroic superhero movie like “The Dark Knight.”
Apparently, truth, justice and the American way don’t cut it anymore. That may not fully explain why the last Superman took a nose dive (“Superman Returns,” if not for long), but I think it helps get at why, like other recent ambiguous American heroes, both supermen and super-spies, the new Batman soared. Talent played a considerable part in Mr. Nolan’s Bat restoration, naturally, as did his seriousness of purpose. He brought a gravitas to the superhero that wiped away the camp and kitsch that had shrouded Batman in cobwebs. It helped that Christian Bale, a reluctant smiler whose sharply planed face looks as if it had been carved with a chisel, slid into Bruce Wayne’s insouciance as easily as he did Batman’s suit.
The new Batman movie isn’t a radical overhaul like its predecessor, which is to be expected of a film with a large price tag (well north of $100 million) and major studio expectations (worldwide domination or bust). Instead, like other filmmakers who’ve successfully reworked genre staples, Mr. Nolan has found a way to make Batman relevant to his time — meaning, to ours — investing him with shadows that remind you of the character’s troubled beginning but without lingering mustiness. That’s nothing new, but what is surprising, actually startling, is that in “The Dark Knight,” which picks up the story after the first film ends, Mr. Nolan has turned Batman (again played by the sturdy, stoic Mr. Bale) into a villain’s sidekick.
That would be the Joker, of course, a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger. Mr. Ledger died in January at age 28 from an accidental overdose, after principal photography ended, and his death might have cast a paralyzing pall over the film if the performance were not so alive. But his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once. When the Joker enters one fray with a murderous flourish and that sawed-off smile, his morbid grin a mirror of the Black Dahlia’s ear-to-ear grimace, your nervous laughter will die in your throat.
A self-described agent of chaos, the Joker arrives in Gotham abruptly, as if he’d been hiding up someone’s sleeve. He quickly seizes control of the city’s crime syndicate and Batman’s attention with no rhyme and less reason. Mr. Ledger, his body tightly wound but limbs jangling, all but disappears under the character’s white mask and red leer. Licking and chewing his sloppy, smeared lips, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth like a jittery animal, he turns the Joker into a tease who taunts criminals (Eric Roberts’s bad guy, among them) and the police (Gary Oldman’s good cop), giggling while he-he-he (ha-ha-ha) tries to burn the world down. He isn’t fighting for anything or anyone. He isn’t a terrorist, just terrifying.
Mr. Nolan is playing with fire here, but partly because he’s a showman. Even before the Joker goes wild, the director lets loose with some comic horror that owes something toMichael Mann’s “Heat,” something to Cirque de Soleil, and quickly sets a tense, coiled mood that he sustains for two fast-moving hours of freakish mischief, vigilante justice, philosophical asides and the usual trinkets and toys, before a final half-hour pileup of gunfire and explosions. This big-bang finish — which includes a topsy-turvy image that poignantly suggests the world has been turned on its axis for good — is sloppy, at times visually incoherent, yet touching. Mr. Nolan, you learn, likes to linger in the dark, but he doesn’t want to live there.
Though entranced by the Joker, Mr. Nolan, working from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan Nolan, does make room for romance and tears and even an occasional (nonlethal) joke. There are several new characters, notably Harvey Dent (a charismaticAaron Eckhart), a crusading district attorney and Bruce Wayne’s rival for the affection of his longtime friend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, a happy improvement over Katie Holmes). Like almost every other character in the film, Batman and Bruce included, Harvey and Rachel live and work in (literal) glass houses. The Gotham they inhabit is shinier and brighter than the antiqued dystopia of “Batman Begins”: theirs is the emblematic modern megalopolis (in truth, a cleverly disguised Chicago), soulless, anonymous, a city of distorting and shattering mirrors.
From certain angles, the city the Joker threatens looks like New York, but it would be reductive to read the film too directly through the prism of 9/11 and its aftermath. You may flash on that day when a building collapses here in a cloud of dust, or when firemen douse some flames, but those resemblances belong more rightly to our memories than to what we see unfolding on screen. Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion. Still, that a spectacle like this even glances in that direction confirms that American movies have entered a new era of ambivalence when it comes to their heroes — or maybe just superness.
In and out of his black carapace and on the restless move, Batman remains, perhaps not surprisingly then, a recessive, almost elusive figure. Part of this has to do with the costume, which has created complications for every actor who wears it. With his eyes dimmed and voice technologically obscured, Mr. Bale, who’s suited up from the start, doesn’t have access to an actor’s most expressive tools. (There are only so many ways to eyeball an enemy.) Mr. Nolan, having already told Batman’s origin story in the first film, initially doesn’t appear motivated to advance the character. Yet by giving him rivals in love and war, he has also shifted Batman’s demons from inside his head to the outside world.
That change in emphasis leaches the melodrama from Mr. Nolan’s original conception, but it gives the story tension and interest beyond one man’s personal struggle. This is a darker Batman, less obviously human, more strangely other. When he perches over Gotham on the edge of a skyscraper roof, he looks more like a gargoyle than a savior. There’s a touch of demon in his stealthy menace. During a crucial scene, one of the film’s saner characters asserts that this isn’t a time for heroes, the implication being that the moment belongs to villains and madmen. Which is why, when Batman takes flight in this film, his wings stretching across the sky like webbed hands, it’s as if he were trying to possess the world as much as save it.
In its grim intensity, “The Dark Knight” can feel closer to David Fincher’s “Zodiac” thanTim Burton’s playfully gothic “Batman,” which means it’s also closer to Bob Kane’s original comic and Frank Miller’s 1986 reinterpretation. That makes it heavy, at times almost pop-Wagnerian, but Mr. Ledger’s performance and the film’s visual beauty are transporting. (In Imax, it’s even more operatic.) No matter how cynical you feel about Hollywood, it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a shot of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels. He’s just a clown in black velvet, but he’s also some kind of masterpiece.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Roberta Reardon, Aftra’s national president, and Alan Rosenberg, president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists approved their new contract with Hollywood’s major production companies by a solid margin on Tuesday.
Leaders of the federation said members ratified the deal with 62.4 percent approval in a vote that concluded late Tuesday evening. The margin of approval was smaller than the overwhelming endorsements typical of union ratification votes. The federation declined to give an exact vote count, citing longstanding practice.
But the margin was large enough to create a migraine for the Screen Actors Guild, the dominant actors’ union with some 120,000 members. The guild has been demanding higher pay, an increase in payments connected to DVD sales, restrictions on the placement of commercial products in shows and movies and a bigger take from the use of their work in new media.
About 75 percent of Aftra’s 70,000 members are actors. Those figures suggest that a large number of actors are weary of Hollywood’s labor unrest and are not eager for a new strike. About 40,000 actors belong to both Aftra and S.A.G.
Alan Rosenberg, S.A.G.’s president, said in a statement: “Clearly many Screen Actors Guild members responded to our education and outreach campaign and voted against the inadequate Aftra agreement.”
He added, “We will continue to address the issues of importance to actors that Aftra left on the table.”
On Tuesday, S.A.G. was dealing with what two board members described as deepening internal dissent. More moderate members, which include many top-earning actors, were arguing that an Aftra ratification by any margin erased S.A.G.’s bargaining power, while more militant leaders held fast to the position that a contract approval by the smaller union was not a death blow.
Regardless, S.A.G.’s leaders are now left with a set of tough choices: They can risk a strike authorization vote that might not pass, concede points they have been pressing for months or prolong the current uncertainty despite the growing impatience of many union workers whose income is evaporating as production slows down.
A guild spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment. In brief statements on Tuesday, the guild and the producers’ alliance said the actors would respond to the companies’ latest offer at a meeting on Thursday.
Prominent performers weighed in on all sides. Tom Hanks spoke for the Aftra deal, Sean Penn campaigned against it, and George Clooney had a middle response, proposing that actor pay be reviewed annually by a panel of big stars.
While the cut-and-thrust continues, Hollywood has been edging forward on makeshift production schedules aimed at suspending movie and television shoots should the actors strike.
Viewers of the Sundance Channel who may have worried that the sensibility of its founder, Robert Redford, would be lost with its sale in mid-June to Cablevision, take note: Mr. Redford is staying on as a consultant.
“We’re going to construct an office for him, right near mine,” said Josh Sapan, president and chief executive of Rainbow Media, the Cablevision unit that will operate Sundance. “I don’t think he’s done yet.”
Mr. Redford, sounding very much engaged, said he was “interested in new technology” but “ultimately interested in whether we’re providing stories well told.”
Sitting alongside Mr. Redford at Sundance’s soon-to-be-former offices at Broadway and 50th Street (it is moving to Rainbow’s, at 11 Penn Plaza), Mr. Sapan said he had no plans to upend the programming lineup of the channel, which Mr. Redford founded in 1996 as an offshoot of his film festival in Park City, Utah. It reaches about 30 million homes.
Independent films, at least some drawn from the festival, will still be its core, Mr. Sapan said, along with original series like “Iconoclasts” (in which visionaries from seemingly unrelated worlds talk to one another), “Live From Abbey Road” (a music series) and the forthcoming “Architecture School” (about students competing to design a low-cost house in a devastated section of New Orleans).
Under Rainbow Media’s direction, Sundance Channel will also continue a block of programs dedicated to telling compelling stories about the environment, including “Big Ideas for a Small Planet,” which has showcased eco-friendly innovators and their projects.
For Cablevision, best known for its cable systems and its ownership of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, the acquisition of Sundance is an attempt to give cachet and credibility to its constellation of channels, which, until recently, has been decidedly low-profile. Rainbow Media also oversees AMC — which last year introduced the series “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” both favorites of critics — and IFC, which has “independent film” as part of its name.
Mr. Sapan said he hoped each channel would have an individual identity, with IFC continuing to pursue younger male viewers with original series like “The Whitest Kids U’Know,” featuring a comedy troupe, and AMC seeking to mount television series with cinematic ambitions.
The 62nd EIFF’s closing ceremony saw concluded saw Somers Town winning the Michael Powell Award, and Robert Carlyle walking away as best actor for his performance in Summer.
Bittersweet drama Somers Town scooped EIFF’s top prize this year at today’s awards ceremony presented by patron Sir Sean Connery.
The Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film quadrupled in value this year.
The Michael Powell Jury, led by actor Danny Huston, recognised Shane Meadows’ latest as “the freshest, most imaginative maverick work, deserving of the Award.”
“After viewing an impressive selection of films and a long deliberation we, the Jury, unanimously agreed that the award would go to Somers Town.”
The prestigious PPG Award for Best Performance in a British Feature Film was handed to the multifaceted Robert Carlyle for his striking rendering of a man in conflict with his past in Summer. The Jury commended his work as “a flawless performance in a great, uncompromising film that touches the heart.”
The champion that emerged from the historically hefty documentary strand was Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. The Best Documentary Award Jury, chaired by Seamus McGarvey, commented: “the documentaries competing for this award were, in many cases, exemplary.”
“It was a powerful shortlist of contrasting styles and experience, but in the end there was one film which we all agreed was the outstanding entry, a poetic vision but one with an unflinching gaze focusing on an area which should concern us all.”
But it was another documentary that won over the public’s heart and the Standard Life Audience Award.
Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh, is a thrilling reconstruction of daredevil Philippe Petit’s scheme to walk a high-wire strung between the twin towers of the former World Trade Centre.
Its first European screening on Thursday received a standing ovation and it was with equal enthusiasm that its audiences rewarded the film in their votes.
See below for the full list of award winners.
Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film sponsored by the UK Film Council Somers Town (dir. Shane Meadows)
PPG Award for Best Performance in a British Feature Film Robert Carlyle for Summer
Standard Life Audience Award Man on Wire (dir. James Marsh)
Best Documentary Award Encounters at the End of the World (dir. Werner Herzog)
Skillset New Directors Award Marianna Palka for Good Dick
UK Film Council Award for Best British Short Film Son (dir. Daniel Mulloy)
European Film Academy Short Film 2008 – Prix UIP 2 Birds (dir. Rúnar Rúnarsson)
Scottish Short Documentary Award supported by Baillie Gifford Christmas with Dad (dir. Conor McCormack)
McLaren Award for New British Animation in partnership with BBC Film Network Space Travel According to John (dir. Jamie Stone & Anders Jedenfors)
Mirrorball Best British Music Video Award Happiness by Goldfrapp (dir. Dougal W
