16 Blocks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Disney will be trying hard this summer to get Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End into Chinese cinemas despite the fact that the last installment of the franchise was banned by the country's censors. Obviously the studio is aware that many of China's movie fans at least got to see Dead Man's Chest via bootleg, and it understandably wants to profit from those fans' desire to see part three. But this isn't just about exploiting the expectant audiences, and it isn't exactly about fighting piracy. All of Hollywood wants to succeed in the Chinese market because it is a growing source of income for the studios.

What this means for the rest of the world may be nothing. Hollywood studios and distribs will likely start censoring for easy approval by China the same way they censor for the rest of the international markets. As I mentioned recently when The Departed failed with Chinese censors, the best way for a film to meet approval is for it to have no mention of China. However, the Chinese aren't only concerned with references to themselves; Dead Man's Chest was banned because it featured cannibals.

The Chinese version of our holiday season is coming up soon, and the titles looking for big box office are Night at the Museum, which has been performing brilliantly all over the world, 16 Blocks and South Korea's Joong Cheon (The Restless). These will be taking up three of the 20 quota slots that China allows to be filled by imported titles, and the last of these fills one slot that Hollywood missed out on. Following this month's big movie-going time, Hollywood will continue trying to fill in the rest of these slots, and so Chinese audiences may or may not get proper releases of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Pursuit of Happyness, Transformers and At World's End.

The box office as a whole was be up an estimated 10% from last weekend, led by a trio of new releases that filled the top spots. Easily topping the list was Failure to Launch, which took in $24.6 million - not bad for a movie that, after having its release delayed, got mostly bad reviews from critics. Filling the second and third spots this weekend were two remakes: Disney's The Shaggy Dog made $16 million, while The Hills Have Eyes came it at just under that number, with $15.5 million. As the AP report points out, the fact that this weekend's three new releases are so different means they appeal to different viewers, so they tended to take audiences from older films, rather than from one another.

Filling the fourth spot was 16 Blocks which, in only its second week of release, was down to just over $7 million. Madea's Family Reunion, meanwhile, earned nearly $6 million, thus bringing its three week total to $55.8 million, or nearly 10 times its budget. Who thinks we'll be seeing another movie about the life of Miss Madea? Of the other top earning films this weekend, only Eight Below made more than $5 million - ah, the power of puppies. (The complete numbers are after the jump.)

It's cold and rainy here in blustery Seattle, so why not go catch a movie? Here's a roundup of some of the film offerings around the Emerald City:

FREE MOVIES IN SEATTLE! 

Sure, you can listen to your fave radio station to find out about those nifty free preview screenings.  But if you're really a movie buff, you might want to check out Janet's Film Club at Janet Wainwright PR. They'll send you passes to get in free to lots of preview screenings! The only catch? Use 'em or lose 'em.

UW Film Club 

Japenese Film Series - Supermarket Woman (1996, Itami Juzo). Japanese comedy about a woman (Miyamoto Nobuko) hired to remake a small grocery store to compete against a large chain. Thursday, March 9 @ 7:30PM, UW Savery 239

A Moveable Feast  - Check out a rough cut of this film, by a former UW student. And it's free! At the Ethnic Cultural Center, 3940 Brooklyn Ave NE.

Seattle Jewish Film Festival March 5-19 - This year marks the 11th year of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, and they have a fantastic lineup. This year's fest runs at three venues: Seattle's Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), AMC Pacific Place, and Majestic Bay Theaters in Ballard. The festival really kicks into high gear this week, with an interesting lineup of films:

March 11 - The opening night film is Live and Become, which you can have with dessert at the 7PM showing (for passholders special ticket holders only), or without at 9:50PM. The film, which won the audience award at the 2005 Berlinale, tells the story of a young Ethiopian boy in the 1980s whose mother places him with a group of Ethiopian Jewish refugees to save him from the famine. As he grows from a boy into a man under his assumed identity, the lie under which he has lived begins to take its toll.

Check out the full lineup to see when other films are playing.

 

For the second week in a row, Madea's Family Reunion topped the weekend box office, earning an estimated $13 million. While that's less than half what the movie made last weekend, it nevertheless was more than enough to out distance all four of this week's debuts. The most successful of the four was 16 Blocks, Bruce Willis' latest actioner - apparently the old dude still has it, because the movie took in a little over $11.5 million, putting it just beyond Eight Below which, in its third week of release, was still the third biggest earner in the country with about $10 million.

Ultraviolet, meanwhile, despite no early reviews and an explosion of terrible ones the moment it was released, finished fourth with a respectable $9 million. (I sure as hell hope Milla's getting percentages on this one, because about $8.75 million of that is all about her.) Rounding out the weekend's top five was Aquamarine, also making its debut, which made $7.5 million. Block Party, meanwhile, finished seventh (just behind The Pink Panther, which just keeps holding on) with a very respectable $10 million on roughly half as many screens as Aquamarine and Ultraviolet. The complete list is after the jump.

Four movies open wide this weekend and, shock of shocks, one of them wasn't screened for critics. Surprisingly, it wasn't the one about the teenage mermaid - instead, they were denied Ultraviolet, the futuristic, shiny, violence-fest. Columbia probably isn't too worried about it, though, because Milla Jovovich is hot enough to rule the box office on the strength of posters alone (Seriously, have you seen those posters?). Critics did have their say, however, on 16 Blocks (derivative, but alright), Block Party (awesome), and Aquamarine (so totally cute, OMG!). The details are below.

• Block Party: The critics have spoken, friends, and they freaking love Dave Chappelle and his partay. Even the few hardened souls who mustered the strength to resist the movie's considerable charms nevertheless found themselves drawn to Chapelle and his easy-going persona. (Also, every single damn review mentioned his appearance on Oprah. We've heard enough about that by now, thanks.)

• 16 Blocks: No, the Fugees aren't in this one, sadly enough. It does, however, feature Bruce Willis and Mos Def, both of whom earn praise from most critics, though said critics don't all feel as positively about the film. Those who do like it freely acknowledge the debt the film owes to the zillions of cop/perp/action flicks that came before, but at least it's fairly accomplished in its derivative-ness. Which means, essentially, that our standards have fallen pathetically low.

• Aquamarine: Basically, if you've got a pre-teen or barely teenage daughter (or, even better, are one), Aquamarine is for you. It's actually pretty good - again, if you're twelve. If you're not, however, go see something else. And parents, keep in mind this bit from the most entertaining review of the whole weekend, written in the voice of the movie's target audience: "When the mermaid and her human friends gawked at the lifeguard...and [he] shook water off his abs and the movie went all slow motion, dad leaned over and said: 'Brokeback Mountain didn't make me this uncomfortable.'"
  

Of all the pleasures that movies can offer us, none may be as simple or as pure as watching characters we like run for their lives. 16 Blocks, the latest film from longtime action-hack director Richard Donner, has that kind of elemental grace to it – even if it doesn't have much else. Burnt-out, alcoholic, pot-bellied, limping and wheezing, New York Police Department Detective Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis) is finishing up a night shift that was uneventful at best and, at worst, just another 8-hour span of time in his ongoing slow-motion suicide. Desperate to get out of the building, get a drink and get some sleep at the end of his shift, Jack instead is handed the last-minute short-straw gig of escorting a witness over to the courthouse.

The witness is Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), a nervy chatterbox who's spent half his life in jail – you'd call him a career criminal, but the fact is he hasn't made much of a career out of it. Eddie speaks nonstop in a wheedling, agitated, nasal singsong that makes you kinda want to kill him; the fact that Eddie's testimony this morning will put a ring of crooked high-ranking cops in jail for a long time makes them definitely want to kill him. The grand jury stands down at 10:00 am, less than two hours from now. The courthouse is – you guessed it – 16 blocks away. And Jack Mosely's simple task is going to get a lot more complicated, especially when his partner of 20 years, Frank Nugent (David Morse), is revealed as the top man of the corrupt cops.

Director Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon, Superman) returns this spring, after another lenghy hiatus, with a film that forces Bruce Willis to navigate his way through the streets of New York City...again. After watching Willis team up with Samuel Jackson in Die Hard 3, this time it's with the underrated Mos Def in a "How can we get from point A to point B without being killed" type of film.

Willis plays an aging cop who's given the boring assignment of transporting a witness 16 blocks to a courthouse. However, this isn't just some regular old witness. Soon after they leave, it becomes apparent that cross-town traffic will be the least of their problems. The trailer for 16 blocks in now online and hit theaters on March 3rd. I think it looks pretty good, what do you think?