August 19, 2018

Netflix Is Now Playing Ads for Its Original Series While People Are Binge-Watching

The day you all feared has finally arrived: Netflix is now playing ads for its original series in between episodes of other shows. After reddit users complained about the change, the streaming giant confirmed that some viewers will now be seeing brief trailers for the likes of “Insatiable” while binge-watching.

“We are testing whether surfacing recommendations between episodes helps members discover stories they will enjoy faster,” Netflix said in a statement to Ars Technica. “A couple of years ago, we introduced video previews to the TV experience, because we saw that it significantly cut the time members spend browsing and helped them find something they would enjoy watching even faster.”

A rep for the company stressed that this is being done on a trial basis so far, but the implication appears to be that more and more users will see ads if they prove successful in increasing viewership for Netflix’s original series and movies.

No word yet on how long this testing period will last or how many customers are actually seeing ads already, but initial reaction has been expectedly negative; whether that ultimately makes a difference remains to be seen.

Source: IndieWire film

August 19, 2018

Glenn Close as ‘The Wife’ Leads Specialty Box Office; Two Ethan Hawke Films Pull Crowds

The rekindled enthusiasm for narrative specialty film continues. Sony Pictures Classics opened TIFF 2017 premiere, Glenn Close vehicle “The Wife,” to strong response, while Sundance 2018 debut “We the Animals” (The Orchard) led conventional two-city openings. Another Sundance movie, Texas native Ethan Hawke’s musical biopic “Blaze” (IFC), opened in Austin, Texas to strong initial results before heading to other cities.

And the torrid box office for documentaries has turned “Three Identical Strangers” (Neon) into the fifth specialized release since late spring to pass the $10 million mark. And that’s before any of these films have started awards campaigning.

Opening

The Wife (Sony Pictures Classics) – Metacritic: 75; Festivals include: Toronto 2017

$111,137 in 4 theaters; PTA (per theater average): $27,784

Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce both nabbed raves for their performances in this drama set around the Nobel Literature Prize. This family drama opened in four prime New York/Los Angeles theaters, led by the Paris in Manhattan. This is SPC’s best platform opening since “Call Me By Your Name.” With Close overdue for Oscar consideration, this adult-appeal feminist story will appeal to arthouse crowds and grab attention just as the awards season begins.

What comes next: Five more cities begin the national expansion this week.

Cinereach

We the Animals (The Orchard) – Metacritic: 82; Festivals include: Sundance, Seattle 2018

$66,261 in 3 theaters; PTA: $22,087

Opening in three New York/Los Angeles theaters, this novel adaptation centering on three boys (played by unknowns) growing up in a volatile household got a boost from strong reviews.

What comes next: This will expand slowly, with wider exposure expected in September.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute, photo by Alex Bailey.

Juliet, Naked (Roadside Attractions) – Metacritic: 62; Festivals include: Sundance 2018

$60,922 in 4 theaters; PTA: $15,230

This rare specialized romantic comedy, from a Nick Hornsby novel, features Ethan Hawke as forgotten musician Tucker Crowe, who is uber-fan Chris O’Dowd’s obsession, to the disdain of his long-suffering wife (Rose Byrne). She begins a romantic dalliance with Crowe, with unexpected complications. This earned mixed to favorable reviews, but with strong New York/Los Angeles theater placement reached an initial result good enough to give this a chance for word of mouth and continued presence as it expands.

What comes next: Five more cities open this Friday.

Sundance Selects/Screenshot

Blaze (IFC) – Metacritic: 76; Festivals include: Sundance, South by Southwest 2018

$45,342 in 3 theaters; PTA: $15,114

And now for something quite different. Texas-born Ethan Hawke’s third narrative outing as a director is a biopic about cult 1970s Austin singer/songwriter Blaze Foley. This opened in three Austin theaters ahead of its upcoming dates, with the local setting and filmmaker appearance bolstering the cause. These are strong numbers in a mid-sized market, more so without the benefit of national attention so far.

What comes next: Dallas and Houston open this Friday, with New York on September 7, Los Angeles the following week, before a wider national release.

screencap

Minding the Gap (Hulu) – Metacritic: 93; Festivals include: Sundance 2018; also on Hulu

$(est.) 7,000 in 4 theaters; PTA: $(est.) 1,750

Rockford, Illinois documentary “Minding the Gap” boasts the best Metacritic score of any 2018 film so far, quite a bit ahead of similar successes out of Sundance. It is playing on Hulu as well, with the company trying to gain theatrical attention for a rookie filmmaker’s breakout work. It opened in four cities, with only the Metrograph in New York getting any kind of response. If it gains traction with the Academy documentary branch, it could be an Oscar contender.

What comes next: Hopefully this will get attention on Hulu.

Memoir of War (Music Box) – Metacritic: 65; Festivals include: Angouleme 2017

$10,710 in theaters; PTA: $5,355

Based on a World War II French resistance novel by Marguerite Duras, this opened in two New York theaters to modest reviews. For a subtitled film without a well-known director or actors, this is predictable launch.

What comes next: Los Angeles is among the new openings this Friday.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute, photo by Ryan Parilla

Week Two

Skate Kitchen (Magnolia) – also streaming

$(est). 60,000 in 24 theaters (+23); PTA: $(est.) 2,500; Cumulative: $(est.) 89,000

Crystal Moselle’s fiction follow-up to documentary “The Wolfpack,” about a Long Island girl joining a New York skateboard gang, went from its Manhattan exclusive to more cities plus streaming this weekend. New positive reviews should help gain attention.

Madeline’s Madeline (Oscilloscope)

$19,450 in 2 theaters (+1); PTA: $9,725; Cumulative: $46,273

This experimental theater-world drama added a single Los Angeles theater to its initial New York house. The results remain decent for this well-reviewed unconventional drama. Los Angeles expands with new dates in San Francisco this weekend.

A24

Ongoing/expanding (grosses over $50,000)

Eighth Grade (A24) Week 6

$740,000 in 542 theaters (-542); Cumulative: $11,644,000

This lost exactly half its theaters after a very rapid expansion that didn’t quite sustain the initial momentum. The remaining ones held on to about the same modest average as last weekend. This looks like it will top out somewhere around $14 million.

Three Identical Strangers (Neon) Week 8

$498,400 in 273 theaters (-53); Cumulative: $10,564,000

The third of the Sundance documentaries to pass $10 million, this non-famous person subject is as impressive a result as “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and “RBG,” and will come close to the gross of the latter.

Sorry to Bother You (Annapurna) Week 7

$246,500 in 143 theaters (-61); Cumulative: $16,290,000

Boots Riley made news this week with his analysis of “BlacKkKlansman.” His own film has made an impact. It currently sits as the third-biggest grosser to debut at Sundance 2018 (after wide release “Hereditary” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”), well ahead of major successes like “Eighth Grade” and “Three Identical Strangers.”

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (Focus) Week 11

$220,000 in 206 theaters (-23); Cumulative: $22,082,000

Fred Rogers’ enduring appeal as well as the skill in which this documentary tells his story has sustained a run nearing the end of its its third month. Here’s how impressive this has become: despite playing outside the awards period, its gross is now better than prime contenders last year such as “The Disaster Artist,” “The Phantom Thread,” and “Call Me By Your Name.”

Puzzle (Sony Pictures Classics) Week 4

$217,987 in 108 theaters (+64); Cumulative: $733,605

Kelly MacDonald plays a sheltered stay-at-home Catholic mom who finds herself transformed by jigsaw puzzles.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (FilmRise) Week  3

$138,000 in 72 theaters (+47); Cumulative: $404,676

This gay conversion drama more than doubled it theaters with a small increase in total gross this weekend.

McQueen (Bleecker Street) Week 5

$111,346 in 95 theaters (+42); Cumulative: $979,061

The latest fashion-world documentary to get theatrical attention is pulling modest response as it widens nationally.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Blindspotting (Lionsgate) Week 5

$110,000 in 47 theaters (-91); Cumulative: $4,023,000

Squeezed by fellow Oakland movie “Sorry to Bother You” as well as Spike Lee’s mighty “The BlacKkKlansman,” this well-reviewed Daveed Diggs Sundance drama expanded too wide to over 500 theaters. Now that it has settled down to a smaller core, the per theater average is much higher.

Leave No Trace (Bleecker Street) Week 8

$81,092 in 93 theaters (-30); Cumulative: $5,702,000

Debra Granik’s off-the-grid drama is winding down with a $6-million total in sight. That would place it above most specialized drama releases this year with appeal to older core audiences.

Also noted:

Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich) – $42,082 in theaters; Cumulative: $253,979

Dark Money (PBS) – $10,305 in 10 theaters; Cumulative: $164,047

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Source: IndieWire film

August 19, 2018

‘Deadpool 2’ Would Have Had a ‘Fantastic Four’ Cameo If Tim Miller Had Directed It

“Deadpool 2” features its fair share of cameos — the reveal of who actually played the Vanisher was a moment unto itself, as was a brief glimpse of who’s in the X-Mansion — but at least one didn’t make final cut. Tim Miller, who directed the first film and was eventually replaced on the sequel by David Leitch, wanted to give the Fantastic Four some screentime in a climactic fight against the Juggernaut.

The intel was revealed by concept artist Alexander Lozano, who shared a picture of the Thing on Instagram. According to him, Miller “wanted to make sure that I orient myself in the design as close as possible to the comic template to finally give us, the fans, what we always wanted to see on the big screen.”

Ryan Reynolds had more creative control over “Deadpool 2” than he did with the first film, and Miller departed the project due to “mutual creative differences”; he’s said to have wanted to cast Kyle Chandler as Cable, which Reynolds opposed. The role ultimately went to Josh Brolin.

Source: IndieWire film

August 19, 2018

Love in Fractured Times: New Films Speak to the Power of Memory as a Means of Survival

A scent takes us back to childhood. A flavor transports us to the strange dish tasted during the course of a trip. The memory always works by interconnections. It is easier to access memory through the senses than through intellectual means.

As a result, it is inevitable that this phenomenon is strongest felt in reminiscences of our childhood, when our senses were more vivid. Old memories can be surprisingly vivid. Dominga Sotomayor, the winner of the Leopard for Best Director for her film “Too Late to Die Young,” understands that perfectly. In her film, memory is always related to the atmosphere of a particular time and a particular place; the film is brilliant for the way Sotomayor creates a complex network in which these details interact.

The film is set in the early nineties in Chile, just after the fall of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Sotomayor quickly introduces us to a universe where at each moment, through the use of complex framing and lighting schemes, she transports us to a dream space — a kind of memory limbo.

It is an identifiable non-place for all of us who have experienced the doubts inherent in the sometimes painful transition from childhood to youth. We observe as this happens to the movie’s three adolescent main characters, representations used by Sotomayor to talk about a society in perpetual loss of, innocence.

Similar work is carried out by the Argentine actress—known for Lucrecia Martel’s “The Holy Girl”—and now director María Alché with her debut feature “Immersed Family.” Alché’s film is much less political than the work of Sotomayor; she focuses more on introducing us through plastic formal tools to the psychological space of Marcela, a woman who surrenders to an emotional breakdown after the death of her sister.

As in “Too Late To Die Young,” the physical space in “Immersed Family” is a character in itself and is, at the same time, an extension of the characters’ psychologies. Both films are able, through sensory immersion, to make us not only companions within the historical moment of their subjects, but also clinical observers of their characters’ states of mind.

For two Asian representatives of the International Competition, family universes are understood in quite the opposite way. On one hand, the South Korean master Hong Sangsoo’s “Hotel by the River” also transports us to a physical space standing in for the inner limbo in which Younghwan (Ki Joobong, who won one of two top acting prizes at Locarno this year), a poet in partial self-exile, finds himself. Staying at the hotel, Younghwan decides to summon his children and meet with them again after a long time, now that he recognises that he is close to death.

The film, a swan song and a winter story, is permeated with a curious melancholy. The use of black and white—a favored tool of Hong’s—places “Hotel by the River” in this last period that we could already call the trilogy of remorse.

Faithful to Hong’s tradition, memories have a presence through dialogue. But now more than ever, the filmmaker decides to use actual flashbacks. These illustrations, always from times neither in the distant past nor the relative present, work to bring us closer to a perspective of a present broken by a past. This is a past that, through this flashback structure, intervenes and blockades the flow of the characters’ lives, while  illustrating a disunion similar to the existential one between this poet and his descendants.

Ying Liang’s “A Family Tour” is a similar case. The filmmaker, who’s now working from exile after the political conflict generated by his previous film, “When Night Falls,” places us in an atomized universe, physically and generationally unconnected beings and victims of a social politics that forced them to seek a space for union that seems impossible to reach.

One of the triumphs of this film lies in its ability to make us share in this family trip, to make us feel part of this experience. Still, its greatest success lies in Yian Liang’s ability to express the discomfort of an individual and artist whose punishment for free expression is to have memory as a recourse to connect with another time, with a family universe.

 

Opposite to the kind of hopeless panoramas envisioned by the filmmakers of “A Family Tour” and “Hotel by the River,” Locarno showcased another perspective on family as a dismembered organism in “Yara,” the most recent work of the Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel, internationally recognized for his monumental documentary “Homeland: Iraq Year Zero.”

 

Diametrically opposed to “Homeland,” “Yara” invites us to participate in the daily life of the eponymous teenage girl, who lives only with her grandmother in the Lebanese mountains.

With a minimum of narrative contrivance, Fahdel is able to craft an idyllic fable of the state of the world, in which wars in the Middle East and the economic and social policies that accompany them—as well as the massive intercontinental migrations that happen as a result of them—have no devastating consequences on the individual. On the contrary, Yara and her grandmother represent for Fahdel an opportunity to makes us believe in the possibility of beauty and love in fractured times.

Source: IndieWire film

August 19, 2018

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder Might Be Legally Married, and We Have Francis Ford Coppola to Thank

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, who star together in both the new rom-com “Destination Wedding” and the collective imagination of the entire internet, might not actually need to tie the knot. In an Entertainment Weekly interview occasioned by their new film together, Ryder revealed that the two “actually got married in ‘Dracula.’ No, I swear to god I think we’re married in real life.”

“In that scene, Francis [Ford Coppola] used a real Romanian priest,” she added. “We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.” This apparently came as news to Reeves, whose memory of the joyous occasion wasn’t as clear as that of his co-star/potential wife: “We said yes?” he asked.

Ryder responded, “Don’t you remember that? It was on Valentine’s Day.” To that, Reeves could only say, “Oh my gosh, we’re married.”

Whether their nuptials are legally binding outside of Romania was unclear as of press time. In any event, “Destination Wedding” will continue Keanu and Winona’s decades-long relationship when it’s released theatrically on August 31.

Source: IndieWire film