|
|
GTBP CONNECT
Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 10:05AM Kick-Ass certainly didn't live up to expectations this weekend, managing just under $20 million at the box office, despite a lot of marketing in the past couple of weeks and mostly positive reviews. In fact, according to Box Office Mojo's early weekend numbers...it didn't even win.
Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 10:19AM There will be no out-of-the-box explosion for Kick-Ass, although it should win the weekend by a comfortable margin. If you'll recall, on Thursday I said I wouldn't go over $30 million, but with the way fan reaction had buoyed Paranormal Activity, Avatar, Shutter Island, and Alice in Wonderland in the past few months, it was hard to tell how well this fanboy movie would do. The answer: Not over $30 million.
Friday, April 16, 2010 at 2:10AM | Death At A Funeral
Starring Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, and James Marsden  |
Let's suppose you were going to make a farce, excuse me -- remake a farce. There are certainly directors who can do
this sort of thing well, but instead, you hire Neil LaBute, best known for a couple caustic social dramas about a decade ago (In the
Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors), but a director who has remake experience. Unfortunately, that remake is The Wicker
Man.
The good news, if there is any, is that LaBute has experience in the theatre, so he should have a knack for keeping the farce on its very
specific case. He should have. But he doesn't.
It's hard to blame LaBute for Death at a
Funeral, but his presence here is a microcosm of what's gone wrong with this nearly identical remake
of a blisteringly funny 2007 British film. The original was extraordinarily specific on the page and on the screen. It was well-cast and
never, not once, slowed down. The English just do farcical comedy better than the rest of the world.
In the remake, LaBute has the original writer, Dean Craig, and sets about to essentially recreate the first film with a different cast.
Well, mostly different. What's the point of doing what seems like a shot-by-shot remake so soon after the original, which is better,
anyway? It really doesn't matter outside of the small audience that saw Frank Oz' Funeral, and maybe that is the point:
What better film to remake as closely as possible than a movie nobody saw the first time?
On its own merits, the new Death at a Funeral tries, and then tries to hard. Because a British comedy will necessarily have
different laughs at different times than an American remake, some things here are too broad for what surrounds them, and that's saying
something. Is it funny? Sure, quite funny at times. But more than that, it's just messy.
Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 3:05PM Before we get to this weekend's box office derby, we need to amend last weekend's results. I'll stop short of saying we need to correct them because we did give Clash of the Titans some wiggle room to recapture the top spot since Sunday's results are just estimates. That's what happened - Titans beat Date Night - but it wasn't by a healthy percentage and the theme is still the same: Titans took a major hit in the second weekend.
Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 8:52PM Death at a Funeral is one of the best British farces in a long time. Please rent it. When I heard they were remaking it, and that the "they" involved the movie-murdering talents of Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence, I was deeply concerned. Oh, Rock's very funny...just not in movies.
