The Screengrab : julie & julia

Trailer Review: Julie & Julia

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The “food movie” has been around for years, but it seems like Hollywood has been making more and more of them ever since the Food Network’s popularity went through the roof. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that we can’t all be gourmet chefs, but the great majority of us have put in time in the kitchen, and we all know the feeling that comes from cooking and/or eating a good meal. Food is a kind of common cultural currency, and that seems to be the central theme of Julie and Julia, which despite my general lack of interest in Nora Ephron films has me intrigued. Sure, there’s plenty of Ephron-style girl talk, but the central idea of the film- that struggling career woman Julie Powell (Amy Adams) forms a bond with the late, great Julia Child (Meryl Streep, staking her claim for nomination #16) by cooking her way through her famous cookbook- is a fairly unconventional idea for a film, especially since it’s impossible that the two will meet. I’m not exactly expecting this to be Big Night or Babette’s Feast in the food movie department, but as long as it’s better than No Reservations that’ll be good enough for me.

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: Honorable Mention (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT

In Parts One & Two of this list, we presented The Screengrab’s consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009.

Herewith, our individual picks and honorable mentions...

Andrew:

Top 5

1. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince
2. Star Trek
3. Angels & Demons
4. ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS (July 1)

C’mon, now...who don’t like Scrat? You’re telling me that, given the choice between a tried and true animated franchise and Ed Asner, kids aren’t going to choose dinosaurs?

5. JULIE & JULIA (August 7)

I can’t think of a better film to fill this summer’s Meryl Streep niche than an actual Meryl Streep film...especially one that fulfills that other great summer blockbuster counter-programming niche: foodie films. All that plus Amy Adams, and I’m about 1000 times more likely to see this than Transformers...and I’m a dude. Add my wife, her mother, my mother, my Dad getting dragged along and all the other wives, mothers, mothers-in-law, dudes getting dragged along and PBS geeks out there, and we’re talking serious sleeper hit potential.

Scott:
1. Star Trek
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
4. Up
5. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (May 1)

Oddly enough, that leaked online release and the accompanying early reviews may have been the best thing that could have happened to Ol’ Razor Fingers. (That’s what the kids are calling him these days, right?) All the hubbub generated by that kerfuffle qualifies as what we in the business call “free publicity.”

Nick:

1. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Star Trek
4. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN (May 22)

Audiences loved the 2006 original, and this sequel retains the core conceit while adding Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart. As the first family film of the summer, and one that – unlike the following week’s Up – comes with a built-in audience, it should be huge.

5. (500) DAYS OF SUMMER (July 17)

A buzzed-about festival hit, this indie rom-com starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel will likely garner glowing reviews on its way to becoming the Little Date Film That Could for the under-30 crowd.

Paul:

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
3. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (May 1)

Sure, there’s the incomplete pirated version that’s floating around on the Web as we speak, but how many people have actually watched it? Wolverine should be one of the summer’s biggest hits for two reasons. For one thing, there’s the enduring popularity of the X-Men films (each has become one of the top five grossers of its respective summer), and the fact that if any X-Men character could open his own adventure, it’s Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. But don’t overlook the film’s release date either -- by opening on May 1, Wolverine is the first blockbuster of the summer, which virtually guarantees it a monster opening weekend, with solid weekends to follow if it catches on like Iron Man did last year. Add in the fact that this weekend has been especially kind to comic book movies, and how can it possibly lose?
4. Angels & Demons
5. Up

Bubbling under:

Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian and Ice Age- in an attempt to add a few tentpole releases to their slate, Fox has moved two of their more bankable franchises to the summer. It’s a risky move for them considering the greater competition during the summer season, but both movies (particularly Ice Age) should do good business in the often lucrative family market before getting shoved aside by higher-profile youth-oriented blockbusters (Up and Harry Potter, respectively).

The Hangover- summer comedies have a hit-and-miss record, but the ones that tend to do the most business are guy-friendly movies like Wedding Crashers and Talladega Nights. Based on the crowd reaction to the trailer that played before my screening of Observe and Report, The Hangover should play well with this crowd, and could prove to be the summer’s biggest sleeper.

The Ugly Truth- last year’s Sex and the City movie took the wind out of the wisdom that “chick flicks” can’t compete in the male-centric summer movie market. With only a handful of female-friendly releases in the pipeline, look for this Katharine Heigl/Gerard Butler romantic comedy to stand the best chance of becoming a hit.

G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra- two years ago, Transformers, another toy/cartoon franchise from the eighties, became a blockbuster. G.I. Joe may not scare up Transformers business, but it should do well with that same crowd.

Julie and Julia- after a summer full of movies that skew younger, older audiences should eat up Nora Ephron’s latest, with Meryl Streep as the late, great Julia Child.

Inglourious Basterds- if Brad Pitt can bring in a $130 million gross for a three-hour movie in which he ages backwards, he should be able to do at least that much business for a WWII action movie, especially one from Quentin Tarantino.

The Limits of Control- I don’t honestly believe that Jim Jarmusch’s latest will do much business. I’m just stoked that he’s got a new movie coming out, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be awesome.

Click Here For The Hits (Part One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Part Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: The Toss-Ups (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

So, now that you’ve seen our consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits & the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009, here are the films that we didn’t know quite what to do with...

Andrew:

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (August 21)

This one hits theaters closer to Labor Day (and the start of the “quality” awards-bait season) than Memorial Day -- assuming QT actually finishes his grindhouse WW2 epic on time -- and the theaters it hits will probably be art houses rather than multiplexes, where nobody will be expecting the confusingly titled Basterds to rack up Pulp Fiction-esque "national sensation" numbers...but Tarantino’s latest seems like quite the odd duck nonetheless, with a promised ultra-violence sensibility that may have trouble finding its artsy splatter audience even WITH all the ass-kicking Jews and Brad Pitt’s funny southern accent.

BRÜNO (June 10)

Oh, sure...Borat was a national sensation, and the annoying guy in your office still says, “Niiice!” on a daily basis. But I’m guessing it was a lot easier for most Americans to feel “in” on the joke when Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of them funny furriners than it will be to laugh at their own homophobic prejudices or their own knee-jerk PC responses to the heterosexual Cohen’s flouncing, mincing gay character. But then again, you know what they say about that whole “no such thing as bad publicity” thing...

Nick:

1) Public Enemies, because Michael Mann has yet to make an out-and-out summer blockbuster.

2) UP, because eagerness for Pixar’s latest has been especially muted.

3) Angels & Demons, because The Da Vinci Code craze seems to have subsided.

4) Julie & Julia, because its August release date implies that the studio thinks it has more limited appeal than Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada or Mamma Mia!

5) The Ugly Truth, because even though it’s the summer’s chief rom-com, it’s hard to imagine Katherine Heigl continuing to be a serious box-office draw.

Paul:

Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi fans are pumped for his return to horror, but will anyone else care? Will this be the film that finally lifts the box-office curse on summer horror movies?

Terminator Salvation- is there life for Terminator after Arnold? Will people pay to see the movie when they can just as easily watch the Terminator TV series at home? And can Christian Bale still reel in audiences now that his profanity-filled tirade has been heard by millions?

The Taking of Pelham 123- in a summer full of epic effects-driven movies, can audiences be bothered with an old-school hostage-negotiation thriller? And will MGM release a super-sweet new DVD edition of the original film just in time for the remake? Because they really should.

Year One- will a high-concept caveman comedy, even one starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, play in this age of improvisational laffers? And will there be zug-zug like in Caveman?

Public Enemies- is Johnny Depp really the box office draw Hollywood thinks he is after the Pirates trilogy? Can Michael Mann become bankable again after the subpar returns for Miami Vice? And in this era of Grand Theft Auto, will ticket buyers get excited for a fedoras-and-tommy-guns gangster shoot’em’up?

Bruno- can the least funny character from Da Ali G Show actually carry a film? Will people flock to laugh at the strange misadventures of a flamingly gay Austrian, or will they be scared off by the homosexuality factor?

Bandslam- is Vanessa Anne Hudgens still a draw even when she isn’t starring in High School Musicals? Will tween-friendly fare still do solid box office even during the summer movie season?

Taking Woodstock- is the August 14 release date occasioned by the 40th anniversary of Woodstock simply a symbolic gesture, or will nostalgia for the Summer of Love turn this into an unexpected late-summer hit?

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."