There are Top 10s galore this time of the year, but no doubt Ben Affleck is taking a bit of extra notice on this one. Uber critic Roger Ebert gave Argo his choice for the Best of 2012.
He called the year “one of the best recent years in cinema,” noting that he wrote over 300 reviews over the year, which is a personal record. He also noted that it was “unusually difficult” to leave out films in the top ten.
Picking Argo, Ebert noted that the feature had the “classic values of a Hollywood thriller” and noted the story, based on true events, “reveals surprises about a story we all lived through. It is told with classic comedy and tension.”
Oscar power-house Lincoln placed third on Ebert’s list after Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. He called Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance “powerful,” while describing Pi as a “miraculous achievement.”
Also making the list was Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild and perhaps surprisingly considering the momentum of the Oscar race, End of Watch Oslo, August 31 and A Simple Life.
Notables not making the cut in the top ten at least include Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, Les Misérables and Silver Linings Playbook.
Ebert has long taken a course of his own. You can see his comments on his Top 10 here.
Roger Ebert’s Top 10:
1. Argo by Ben Affleck
2. Life Of Pi by Ang Lee
3. Lincoln by Steven Spielberg
4. End Of Watch by David Ayer
5. Arbitrage by Nicholas Jarecki
6. Flight by Robert Zemeckis
7. The Sessions by Ben Lewin
8. Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin
9. Oslo, August 31st by Joachim Trier
10. A Simple Life by Ann Hui
If you read World War Z, your favorite chapter might be the one where a bunch of insufferable celebrities move into a heavily fortified compound together to ride out the zombie apocalypse in high style. Given that they’re all basically awful people, things don’t go so well and they all die. Alas, Mark Forster’s movie version probably won’t include that moment, but Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and Pineapple Express team is giving us the next best thing, with This Is The End, a raunchy comedy that asks ‘what would happen if almost everyone who works with Judd Apatow survived a worldwide apocalypse?’ Well, not everyone (alas, poor Michael Cera,), but enough people to populate the next ten years of dude-oriented R-rated comedies.
The newly released red band trailer is gosh darned hilarious, especially Danny McBride critiquing his friends’ ability to convincingly sell the end of the world to him. It’s kind of like if every moment in Zombieland was the section with Bill Murray, or better yet, given the likelihood of an insane amount of cameos, more like the Cannonball Run of apocalypse movies. Yeah, in fact, the foreign language title needs to be Cannonball Apocalypse.
This trailer alone is funnier than every single FB update about the world ending that we’re going to read tomorrow, guaranteed. This is the End will roll into theaters summer 2013 — that is, if we’re all still here.
[via Yahoo!]
Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow him on twitter (@rossalincoln).
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James Cameron will return to Pandora next year. The Avatar director, who attended the premiere of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in Wellington, New Zealand on Wednesday, told the West Australian (via Total Film) that he hoped to have the scripts to Avatar 2 and 3 completed by February, and to begin shooting by the end of 2013.
Cameron, who owns a farm in New Zealand, said he was working on the scripts there, but complained that the beauty of his surroundings was “too damn distracting.”
Nonetheless, the filmmaker said, “I want to get these scripts nailed down, I don’t want to be writing the movie in post-production.” He added: “We kind of did that on the first picture, I ended up cutting out a lot of scenes and so on and I don’t want to do that again.”
The blockbuster director behind Titanic, Terminator and Aliens has said that he’s writing Avatar 2 and 3 together and plans to shoot them back-to-back to complete one long story arc. (He’s also suggested that an Avatar 4 could happen and the sequels could conceivably be populated with Chinese Na’vi.
Cameron also predicted that Jackson’s decision to shoot The Hobbit at 48 frames per second — 24 is the standard — would do for high-definition filmmaking what Avatar did for 3D movies.
“We charged out ahead on 3D with Avatar, now Peter’s doing it with The Hobbit. It takes that kind of bold move to make change.”
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Don Coscarelli and Ridley Scott don’t have a helluva lot in common as filmmakers, but watching the new trailer for the former director’s long-gestating movie John Dies at the End put me in mind of Scott’s Prometheus. Coscarelli’s film, which is based on a David Wong novel, has to do with a drug called “Soy Sauce” that gives its users access to another dimension.
Check out the trailer at the 55-second mark where a drop of the soy sauce hangs from the needle of the syringe. Now tell me that its spiky black appearance doesn’t remind you of the scene in Prometheus where Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) — the morning after having unwittingly been fed some of that creepy black goo from the Engineers’ship by the android David — looks in the mirror and sees some scary weird tendrils projecting from his eyeball.
As you might expect from the director of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep, the trailer also has jumping Tarantulas, pills that turn into fly-like creatures and a monster that consists of various cuts of raw meat.
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Three new titles essentially scored the number one spot, but they topped a very anemic box office that did not have any titles score anything above $13 million. The top 10 added up to almost $73.5 million, a bit of an improvement over last week’s $65.36 million, but still slow. End of Watch grossed $13 million, on par for director David Ayer’s previous effort. House at the End of the Street also grossed $13 million, but in more theaters than Watch. And Clint Eastwood’s latest Trouble with the Curve bowed with just over $12.7 million.
1. End of Watch
Gross: $13 million
Screens: 2,730 (PSA: $4,762)
Week: 1
The cop drama by David Ayer topped an otherwise unimpressive overall box office over the weekend, with a slow $4,762 average. The feature grossed a comparable amount to Ayer’s previous effort, Street Kings, which bowed in 2,467 theaters back in ‘08, grossing just under $12.5 million.
2. House at the End of the Street
Gross: $13 million
Screens: 3,083 (PSA: $4,217)
Week 1
The feature essentially tied with End of Watch as the weekend’s number one film, though its per screen average was slightly lower due to its larger screen number. Though atop the box office, it was nevertheless a rather anemic triumph.
3. Trouble with the Curve
Gross: $12,720,000
Screens: 3,212 (PSA: $3,960)
Week: 1
Clint Eastwood’s previous efforts, Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby were limited release roll outs. His last wide release debut, Blood Work (2002) opened with just over $7.31 million in 2,525 theaters (not adjusted for inflation), so this latest turn appears to be a slight improvement. Still, it may be tight for this one to score the $100 million-plus lifetime theatrical gross of Million…
Full Story »It says something about how the LAPD tends to get portrayed in the movies that when Officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) are introduced on screen at the beginning of the surprising cop drama End of Watch, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before they plant evidence on someone, steal drugs or money, beat or kill someone without warrant or let loose with something terribly racist.
The film is, after, the latest from David Ayer, who wrote and directed Street Kings and scripted Training Day, two features that portrayed Los Angeles law enforcement as morally compromised at best and violently corrupt at worst. That sense of apprehension carries through an opening scene in which Taylor and Zavala shoot two suspects down in what appears to be legitimate self-defense. (They’re cleared of any wrongdoing and roll back onto the street on patrol.) The two cops are cocky and funny and young, and it still takes a good half hour to accept that they may be as forthright and dedicated to their jobs as they appear to be.
End of Watch is a Millennial police drama. It’s a generation or two removed from Rodney King and the Rampart scandal, and Ayer manages to give a startling sense of a changing of the LAPD guard as well as the forces they’re up against. Its main characters are tough but not yet jaded cops who bicker with affectionate familiarity about race and make obligatory gay jokes that lack the sting of homophobia. The longstanding L.A. battle against gang violence is ongoing, but lurking behind it is a new and more frightening enemy: the Sinaloa Cartel, onto whose ominous dealings Taylor and Zavala stumble more times than is good for their health.
The film’s found footage aesthetic also speaks to its refreshing next-gen spirit. Taylor and Zavala blithely…
Full Story »Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña spent months developing the brotherly rapport they share as LAPD officers under fire in End of Watch, out Friday from director David Ayer. Channel a fraction of that effort in composing your best haiku ode to the Gyllen-Peña cop drama and you could win a T-shirt and signed poster from the film. Unholster those typing fingers!
In order to be eligible, entries must follow these guidelines:
- Haiku entries must follow the 5-7-5 syllable format (otherwise that ain’t a haiku, duh).
- Entries must be original compositions.
- Entrants must register with their email address in order to be contacted if selected.
- Only one entry per person.
- Winner must be in the U.S.
-Submit your entries in the comments section, on Movieline’s Facebook page, or tweet them @movieline.
Contest will end Monday, September 24 at 12pm PT/3pm ET.
Actor Michael Peña is set for what is likely his biggest starring role to date in director David Ayer’s End of Watch. In the pic opening this weekend, he plays opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as a pair of good-guy but rough-and-tumble L.A. cops who face the complicated mean streets of the city’s gang-ridden South Central neighborhood. At the Toronto International Film Festival where the film debuted earlier this month, Peña recalled his life growing up in a similarly rough are of Chicago, crediting sports and a former girlfriend who landed him a job at a bank for keeping the lure of gangs at bay. And, he hinted that his ego may have also played into his decision for a different life, which quickly took him to Hollywood.
“I never wanted to be in a gang,” said Peña. “I didn’t want to follow anybody’s orders. I thought of myself as an individual ever since I was little.” He said that growing up in what he described as “the ghetto” was different than what his co-star Jake Gyllenhaal or others were used to, though taking on this role brought back memories of certain defense mechanisms.
[Related: Jake Gyllenhaal's Life-Changing End Of Watch Prep: 'Someone Was Murdered In Front Of Me']
“I grew up in the ghetto, and the thing is when there were problems, I knew when to get away. But police go to the problems,” he said. “I didn’t do that growing up. Seeing it through Jake’s eyes, it re-ignited what I always knew, but I guess I had buried it. I’ve been living in Hollywood for the past 15 years. And reality just smacks you in the face – that feeling of potential danger…
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