Box Office Dies. Nightcrawler Shoots It.

Amir here, reporting to box office duty. It was a dead weekend at the multiplex, deader than the dead in Ouija, deader than zombies. Though it was not, strictly speaking, the worst weekend of the year – that honor belongs to the weekend of September 5th, when Guardians of the Galaxy, in its sixth week, topped the chart and the biggest new release was The Identical, a musical with Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd!!! – it was still a terrible weekend.

 

TOP DOZEN
01 NIGHTCRAWLER $10.9 NEW
02 OUIJA $10.9 (cum. $34.9)  
03 FURY $9.1 (cum. $60.4) Michael's Review
04 GONE GIRL $8.8  (cum. $136.6)  Jason's Review
05 THE BOOK OF LIFE $8.3 (cum. $40.5) Interview
06 JOHN WICK $8 (cum. $27.5) Michael's Review
07 ST. VINCENT $7.7 (cum. $19.5) Michael's Review
08 ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE... $6.4 (cum. $53.6)
09 THE JUDGE $3.4 (cum. $39.5) 
10 DRACULA UNTOLD $2.9 (cum. $52.8)
11 THE BEST OF ME $2.7 (cum. $21.9) 
12 BIRDMAN $2.5 (cum. $5) Nathaniel's Review

Nightcrawler, the critically acclaimed crime film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, opened at the top spot, but at the estimated $10.9m, it’s the lowest grossing new release to top its weekend in this entire decade so far. By all accounts, the film deserves a bigger audience, but the number isn’t exactly a surprise because a) Halloween weekend is never a great time for non-horror films and b) Gyllenhaal hasn’t really opened a film big on his own. The other new wide release Before I Go To Sleep with Nicole Kidman finished outside the top ten with 2 million. Birdman, still platforming at 231 screens now but almost cracking the top ten, maintained the best screen average for the third weekend in a row. It will surpass Iñarittu's own Biutiful and Amores Perros in total sales sometime today. 

UP NEXT: November will bring us some of the year’s biggest box office hopefuls. Here are each week’s major openings for the remainder of the month: Interstaller and Big Hero 6 (7) ; Dumb and Dumber To (14);  Hunger Games: Mockingjay (21) a sure bet to take Guardians of the Galaxy’s #1 of year throne; Penguins of Madagascar and Horrible Bosses 2 (26) -- oh, c’mon you know you’re waiting for this one! More exciting times are ahead.

What did you watch this weekend?

'Nightcrawler' and L.A. in the Digital Age

Glenn here to offer a rebuttal to my own work.

When I reviewed David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars at the New York Film Festival, I was highly critical of the film’s look. It’s the ugliest film of 2014 so far and will likely remain a recurring staple of my anti-digital rants for some time to come. Fair is fair, however, and lest I get the reputation of somebody who is strictly against digital, I wanted to sing the praises of Robert Elswit’s work on Nightcrawler. Neither a horror film as befitting its Halloween release date, nor a superhero film like many people have thought due to its title. Yet, in spite it this, the film works as both an unsettling work of urban and moral decay and a portrait of a man who, in his own eyes, is a bit of a hero.

Nightcrawler is a film that has a visual point of view, finding interesting compositions to tell a story that in the grand scheme of things is fairly conventional in its narrative beats and structure. It takes the familiar image of Los Angeles and twists it into a city where at night it becomes a muddy-skied haze. This is a film that is both gorgeous to look at and repugnant to the eye at the same time. The Los Angeles of Nightcrawler seethes and creeps and Elswit’s camera shows just what can be achieved with the medium.

Directed by Dan Gilroy - not to be confused with brothers Tony Gilroy (the film's producer and director of Michael Clayton) or John Gilroy (the editor) - it's certainly very much inspired by the form-pushing work of Dion Beebe (Team Film Experience’s Top Ten Greatest Working Cinematographers) and Paul Cameron on Michael Mann’s Collateral. I don't consider this much of an issue given that film had perhaps my favourite cinematography of the '00s, and what’s the point of groundbreaking work in the industry if it can’t be adapted and played with by future filmmakers? In a way it's the same as how another Jake Gyllenhaal film, End of Watch, appropriated the look made famous by found footage horror and supplanted it onto the streets of gangland L.A.

Despite what some people may think, I am very much capable of falling head over heels for digital camerawork. I just appreciate it when filmmakers do something with the format that you otherwise can’t with film. What’s the point of the conversion if not to do something unique that sets it apart? I have no doubt celluloid would have worked amazingly for Gilroy's film, and in fact he did film the daytime sequences on 35mm highlighting how different the two mediums can be. I enjoyed watching that disparity taken advantage of, an aesthetic choice that entirely works for Nightcrawler as it captures Gyllenhaal’s sunken face as he films the aftermath of the city’s violence, pawning his footage to bottom-of-the-barrel TV networks. Leaving my screening and I couldn’t help but think of what Maps to the Stars could’ve been if they’d had anything close to resembling Nightcrawler’s keen sense of craft. That the film is partially about the alarming ease that we can capture the world within which we exist, it makes it incredibly relevant piece of work, too.

Beauty Vs Beast: A Table For Two At Dorsia

JA from MNPP here with this week's new drug (sorry I've been listening to a lot of Huey Lewis and the News these days - I consider their album Sports to be their finest acheivement, don't you?) aka another round of "Beauty Vs Beast."

Here's the deal - tomorrow's my birthday and it wasn't exactly planned this way but since there's a screening of American Psycho happening this weekend here in NYC my week's taken on that movie as a sort of non-official theme. I'm not murdering homeless men or stuffing kittens into ATM machines, mind you - don't get too freaked out. It's just a sort of general thing. But with the specter of Patrick Bateman hanging in the air I figured what better time to give you what I think might be one of the toughest picks between two bad apples (Christian Bale and Jared Leto) that we've had so far in this series.

I speak of...

poll by twiigs.com

A vote for Paul Allen is a vote for that whole Yale thing! Yeah you know, that whole Yale thing. So per usual you've got seven days to make with the picking and the commenting - in seven days our masks of sanity will slip and we'll crown a winner.

PREVIOUSLY And speaking of slipped masks of sanity, last week's competition was a literal face off between the two Jake Gyllenhaal's in this year's best-picture-so-far-says-me Enemy - since this choosing was slightly arbitrary (either way you win, with Jake) the competition remained close but in the end the "nice" guy won first - we all decided to let Adam stay on. Carmen honed in on the peculiars of this decision:

"I'm voting on blueberries alone. It's Jake Gyllenhaal vs Jake Gyllenhaal, I can afford to be frivolous."

Beauty Vs Beast: The Two Jakes

JA from MNPP here - The year 2014 is halfway over and since Nathaniel seems to be having fun listing his picks for "the best of so-far" I felt like joining in - my favorite movie of the year here at the half-point is Denis Villeneuve's doppleganger creep-fest called Enemy, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal as two men (maybe?) who find each other (maybe?) through chance (uh... maybe?) and the destructive effect that this has on their lives (definitely).

If you didn't catch the film in theaters (I managed to twice but I realize I am extraordinarily priviledged for that; its release was a puzzler) it came out onto DVD and so forth two weeks ago, so hopefully you've set aside the time - as I said when I reviewed it way back when this movie is the dream of a movie I would be able to make if I were a movie-maker. It hits all my buttons and then some, including ones I never even knew about -- Jake Gyllenhaal ordering another Jake Gyllenhaal to take his clothes off? Sure!

On the surface this week's "Beauty Vs. Beast" might seem a trick question (and maybe it is, just like the whole movie might be a trick movie) but Jake's performance in the film does make Adam (the teacher who's with Melanie Laurent) and Anthony (the actor who's married to Sarah Gadon) two distinct men - it's usually not hard to tell who's who because of posture alone, and the differences only seem to branch out (and yes, perhaps double back...) from there. So have at 'em...

poll by twiigs.com

If you haven't seen the film now before voting my point is go watch the movie right now! And then vote. Of course a vote for Jake, any Jake, is a winning vote all the same. And on top of telling me which Team Jake you prefer in the comments I'd love to hear y'all's theories about the movie. This movie brings them forth!

PREVIOUSLY Last week we got ourselves pre-juiced for Showtime's Masters of Sex, which returns on July 13th, by asking y'all to choose between the Masters & Johnson at the show's heart - I can't say I was surprised to see that Lizzy Caplan bounces the highest on the bedsprings of most of our hearts. She walked away with a full 85% of the vote. Said par, getting a hearty chuckle outta me:

"I love her so much I'd even invite her to a pool party... even if there were going to be girls in bathing suits there."

Lupita Lives To Fight Another Day

JA from MNPP here. If you don't count doing voice-acting the wolf-mother in the upcoming Jungle Book CG-stravaganza, we're blasphemously still waiting for Lupita Nyong'o to find her follow-up to her Oscar-winning role in 12 Years a Slave. But now we've got a whisper - she might be taking a role in Southpaw, the upcoming "Jake Gyllenhaal is a boxer (and then JA blacks out thinking about Jake Gyllenhaal as a boxer and misses the rest of what the movie's about)" movie written by Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter and directed by Antoine "Training Day" Fuqua.

She'd be playing a social worker keeping track of Jake's young daughter. Dunno how substantive the role is - are we talking Mariah Carey in Precious or Brie Larson in Short Term 12? Whatever the case let's once again say a humble yet firm prayer to the Hollywood Gods that they do right by Lupita. We're watching you!

Also in talks to join the film are Forest Whitaker as Jake's coach and Rachel McAdams as Jake's lady. And in case you missed the pictures of Jake getting into prime boxing shape for the movie click on over here - they're worth your time and effort, I guarantee it.