Eye Nosh: Is This the Best Pastrami in America?
The Creepy, Yet Beautiful Street Art of Dan Witz Now in L.A.
Does Traffic Get Worse After the End of Daylight Saving Time?
Silver Lake Art Crawl: Also a Food Truck Crawl?
Thomas Keller Comes Home: Book Signings and a Recipe(!)
After mostly being given up for dead as a legitimate box-office attraction, Sandra Bullock roared back to prominence this weekend as she carried The Proposal to a surprising box-office triumph ($34.1M). Last week's champ The Hangover had yet another powerhouse weekend ($26.8M/$152.9M) as did Pixar's wonderful Up ($21.3M/$224.1M). Sony probably had high hopes for Year One several months ago, but the pic disappointed in its debut ($20.2M). Lack of "funny-ness" and an abundance of "shitty-ness" seemed to be the culprits there.
After that, everything pretty much played out as expected: the very good Pelham 1 2 3 was fifth ($11.3M/$43.3M), followed by the crappy Night at the Museum 2: Taking Advantage of Dumb Americans ($7.3M/$155.9M), the excellent Star Trek ($4.7M/$239.4M), the decent Land of the Lost ($3.9M/$43.6M), the awful Imagine That ($3.1M/$11.3M) and the loud Terminator Salvation ($3M/$119.5M). The limited release crowd was led by Whatever Works ($31,222 per theater) which trounced Dead Snow ($6000 per.)
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Why when someone writes a smart, funny script (and yes, you can totally tell *good* scripts from the read), and then the director and the actors and the whole creative team create a solid, fun movie, is it always a surprise when it does well?
Particularly in this day and age when peeps who see screenings immediately hit the web to say if it's good. I am a huge fan of these sorts of movies, but I won't go see a romantic comedy/screwball comedy until I hear that it's not sexist, stereotypical drivel and it doesn't suck. The days of trusting trailers are long gone.
The idea of The Proposal was interesting, the characters were DIFFERENT and reflected new types of people we know in real life but rarely see on a movie screen, and then so many people started saying it was good... and people went to see it. I don't think that's much of a surprise.
Forget being surprised that it does well; knowing the development, production, and distribution processes leaves me in utter shock that they get made
Lizriz --
My admittedly cynical response to your comments is that, more often than not, a film's success has less to do with the quality of the film and more to do with the success of the marketing. Good movies get steamrolled every day.
would you say it was a modest proposal? har har har
Damn! "Immodest Proposal" would have been a better headline!