BurnAfterReading Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Nominations for the 61st annual Writers Guild of America awards are in, with a lot of names that will probably come up again in two weeks, when the Oscar nominations are announced.

In the original screenplay category, the films and their authors are Burn After Reading (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen), Milk (Dustin Lance Black), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen), The Visitor (Tom McCarthy), and The Wrestler (Robert Siegel). The Coens won WGA awards for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and Allen has won four times, most recently for 1990's Crimes & Misdemeanors.

For adapted screenplay, the nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Eric Roth), The Dark Knight (Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan), Doubt (John Patrick Shanley), Frost/Nixon (Peter Morgan), and Slumdog Millionaire (Simon Beaufoy). Roth previously won this award for Forrest Gump, and Shanley won for Moonstruck. If you're wondering, The Dark Knight counts as "adapted" because it uses pre-existing characters. (The Oscars have the same rule.)

What does this mean for Oscar-watchers? In the adapted category, of the 120 nominees since 1984 (prior to that the WGA had separate categories for drama and comedy), 90 of them -- 75% -- have also been nominated for Oscars. But 11 of those WGA-but-not-Oscar nominees have happened in the last eight years alone, and some folks think the WGA-omitted Revolutionary Road and/or The Reader might get some Oscar love.

The original screenplay category is almost exactly the same story, with 31 WGA nominees not getting Oscar nods, 14 of those in the last eight years. Among the much-praised original screenplays that might get Oscar attention despite being overlooked by the WGA are Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York.

The WGA awards will be announced Feb. 7. You can see the entire list of nominees, including documentaries and TV shows (yay 30 Rock!), here.

Note release dates, which are spaced from today through next Sunday.

Burn After Reading (12/21)
The Coen Brothers shine a bright light on Washington spy silliness, and then, by extension, all of the silly extremes we indulge in, producing a very funny comic fable that should reward multiple viewings. With George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Available on DVD and Blu-ray. Buy it.

The House Bunny (12/19)
Anna Farris' comic brilliance transcends the shopworn material. As Erik Davis suggested, "enjoy the movie for what it is: A simple, seductive slice of late-summer sunshine." Available on DVD and Blu-ray. Rent it.

Mamma Mia! The Movie (12/16)
I think you'd do better to spend your money on another album by Abba; this musical has bewildering choreography and a wandering camera that doesn't know where it should be. Still, Meryl Streep has a lot of fun with it, and her presence covers a multitude of sins. Available on DVD and Blu-ray. Rent it.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (12/16)
Big budget, big battle scenes, and big nothing when all is said and done. A huge waste of talent and time that fails to entertain on the most basic of levels. (But I still like Maria Bello!) Available on DVD (wide screen and full screen) and Blu-ray. Skip it.

Death Race (12/21)
Jason Statham I can understand, but how did Joan Allen keep a straight face? A monstrous disappointment for action fans, with its hyped-up CGI'd incomprehensible racing scenes. Available on DVD and Blu-ray "unrated," though you'd do better to leave it "unwatched." Skip it.

Also out: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (Amazon.com Exclusive) (12/19), The Women (2008) (12/19), Traitor (12/19), We Are Wizards (Amazon VOD).

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

I'm thankful for Rachel Getting Married (300 screens), for making me feel as if I were at an excruciating wedding without actually having to be there, and for making me feel as if I knew the extraordinarily wounded lead character, Kym (Anne Hathaway), no matter how monstrous she acts sometimes. But most of all for making me feel something.

I'm thankful for The Dark Knight (345 screens), for being like a 1940s film noir, reflecting the utter despair we feel about the world in 2008, but for making it entertaining and making us feel as if there's still a tiny scrap of hope left. Mainly, I'm thankful for movies that took on despair as a theme, but didn't show it.

I'm thankful for smart villains, like Heath Ledger's Joker. But I'm also thankful for quiet villains, like Ralph Fiennes in The Duchess (154 screens), who does all those terrible things for what he thinks are pretty good reasons, not simply because he's hateful or evil. I'm especially thankful for no moustache-twisting (and no moustaches).

Eric D. Snider tried his best to trick me into watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua this week. It didn't work on me, but it worked on millions of Snider acolytes all over North America, who joined forces to give the talking-animals kidflick a strong $29 million, first-place debut. I didn't see it, as I say, so it would be wrong for me to bemoan the decline of civilization that this surely (if unsurprisingly) represents. Feel free to do so in the comments.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist opened to $12 million and third place, which I'd have to say is okay for the low-profile, borderline-niche film. That number, though not terribly impressive, is actually a fair testament to Michael Cera's star power, since his presence was literally the only mass-marketable aspect of the movie. So the debut is at least a draw for Sony.

It was an interesting weekend in that there were several films opening in, or expanding into, semi-wide release. The biggest winner of that bunch has to be Religulous, Bill Maher's aggressively anti-faith documentary, which did $3.5 million on around 500 screens for $6,972 per screen. Given the preaching-to-the-relatively-small-choir quality of the film, I don't expect it to hold up too well in the weeks ahead, but this level of interest is a mild surprise. Facing off against Religulous ideologically was David Zucker's conservative spoof An American Carol which, according to the estimates, edged out Religulous with $3.8 million on over 1,600 screens.

Ed Harris's lightweight western Appaloosa expanded to roughly 1,000 screens and took in $5 million -- which is okay, but seems like a missed opportunity. Faring worse were Flash of Genius (1100 screens) and Blindness (1700), with $2.3 and $2 million respectively, both landing outside the top 10. The grim Blindness was a no-sale from the beginning, especially since the critics never got on board, but the unabashedly populist Flash of Genius underperformed. Maybe the ads emphasized windshield wipers too much.

A bit more plus the weekend's top 12 after the jump.

"Well, you tried it just for once, found it all right for kicks.
But now you found out that it's a habit that sticks,
and you're an orgasm addict." – The Buzzcocks

The new movie Choke, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, is about a sex addict (Sam Rockwell) who, in one element of the plot, hooks up with other sex addicts who attend the same Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings as him. Ah, the irony. The same thing happened to Sam Malone on Cheers, if I'm not mistaken, which makes the joke around 20 years old. Yet, despite that fact, sexual addiction as a term and a (non-DSM-recognized) medical problem seem fairly new to cinema.

Sure, there have been sex addicts in films for many decades, but they were more likely to be described as nymphomaniacs, lechers or typical men. Think of Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind, a number of the female characters created by Tennessee Williams and certainly the locked up nymphos in Shock Corridor. In the past few years, however, there have been a slew of actual "sexaholics," both male and female, though some aren't exactly referred to in such a manner.

Was it the controversy over the title? Or the controversy over the bloody tampon scene? Either way, Alan Ball's Towelhead finished the weekend with the best per-screen average of all films, earning $13,250 at four engagements in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Neither this flick, first unveiled at Toronto last year, nor Ball's recent return to HBO, Southern Gothic vampire drama True Blood, have drawn unanimous critical praise, but specialty audiences still seem interested in whatever the American Beauty scribe / Six Feet Under creator is doing.

Speaking of directors with a strong following, Takeshi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django expanded to Los Angeles and maintained a healthy $4,200 per-screen average in its third week of release. Also in its third week, comedy I Served the King of England expanded into 37 locations but hasn't picked up much steam ($2,262 per screen), while steady earners Tell No One ($2,263 per screen; 11th week), Frozen River ($2,011 per screen; 7th week), Elegy ($1,948 per screen; 6th week), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona ($1,724; 5th week) all saw somewhat predictable declines in business. After all, sex and thrills only go so far among indie filmgoers.

Our criteria for inclusion in the Indie Weekend Box Office report hinges on the distributor, so here's another shout out to the #1 overall earner, Burn After Reading, from Focus Features. Likewise, soon-to-shutter Picturehouse released Diane English's The Women on the largest number of of screens they've ever handled -- 2,962 -- resulting in a per-screen average of $3,405. The picture earned more than $10 million total.

It would be nice to be able to say that the Coens are finally getting some drawing power, but I suspect the insane cast of Burn After Reading -- Pitt, Clooney, Malkovich, Swinton, McDormand -- had something to do with its exceptionally strong $19.4 million bow, the Coens' strongest ever. It barely beat out The Family That Preys, which opened to $18.02 -- slightly below par for Tyler Perry, though still nabbing the highest per-screen average in the top 10 on just over 2000 screens.

The third-place, $16.5 million take for Righteous Kill seems about right: a compromise between the draw of De Niro and Pacino, and the toxic buzz surrounding the film. As for The Women, $10 million isn't exactly gangbusters, but probably more than Picturehouse had any right to expect given that the movie came out of nowhere.

Anna Faris's The House Bunny has turned into a minor hit; it took a 22% drop from last weekend, and has passed the $40 million mark. Not bad for a late-August release with no real star power. Bangkok Dangerous is dead in the water, dropping from 4th to 8th place; it will top out at around $15 million.

And I can't resist noting what happened to Proud American, the patriotic half-doc that was dumped into 750 screens this weekend by Slowhand Cinema. It landed below the top 25, with $135,000 and a $180 per-screen average. That's for the whole weekend. If you take $6.50 as an average ticket price (a bit below the actual average, but probably reasonable given that the interest for this film was probably not in major metropolitan markets), that's comes out to an awesome 28 people per theater, and around 2 people per show. Whoo!

The full estimates after the jump.

Welcome to another edition of Insert Caption -- where your comments are righteous and the prizes are, indeed, killer. Last week we asked you to have a laugh with George Clooney and Frances McDormand, and then leave a caption for a photo from their new movie Burn After Reading. Warning: The only thing the following winning captions are burning is a giant hole in your funny bone. (Okay, that was lame ...)

1. "Frannie's reaction to George's "stretch move" was one for which he was totally unprepared." Charles P.

2. "While the general consensus was that Syriana was a somber geopolitical thriller about the unintended consequences of the U.S.'s dependence on foreign oil, those who actually "got" it found the movie to be quite funny..." Matt S.

3. "Although Frances was enjoying the movie, George's good time was tempered by the realization that he shouldn't have put butter on the popcorn and still utilized the old "cut a hole in the bottom of the bucket" trick." -- Ray R.

See full image and all captions

This week we're ready to rumble with a coupla goodfellas from the neighborhood, if you know what I mean. These guys ... these are good guys, and you may know them by their street names: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Both star as two tough New York City detectives in Righteous Kill (in theaters today), and the one lucky sonuvagun behind our favorite caption will sneak away with one Righteous Kill DVD gift pack containing The Godfather, Scarface & Heat and one Righteous Kill movie poster. Talk about an offer you can't refuse. Sound off below!



Read the official rules for this contest

The Coen Brothers are smart. While the critical community has been arguing about the merits of Burn After Reading, which opens wide tomorrow, Joel and Ethan are already knee deep in their next production. A Serious Man started filming in their home state of Minnesota on Monday.

The project was announced in the spring of 2007, just before No Country for Old Men debuted at Cannes. Last month we learned that relatively little-known Michael Stuhlberg and Richard Kind had been cast in the lead roles in the black comedy set in 1967, with Stuhlberg playing a professor whose wife is leaving him, and Kind playing his sofa sleeping brother. While Christopher expressed his hope that Frances McDormand would be playing the wife, that role has gone to Sari Wagner (identified as Sari Lennick by IMDb), one of a trio of seriously unknown Minnesota actors cast in the film, according to an official statement released by Focus Features. The statement also says that the wife has fallen for one of her husband's "more pompous colleagues," who will be played by Fred Melamed.

The other two Minnesota thespians are Aaron Wolf and Jessica McManus, who will be Kind's son ("a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school") and daughter ("filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job"), respectively. I think it's refreshing that the Coens have chosen to go with actors who don't have any previous, sometimes distracting baggage.

As to Burn After Reading, I agree with the quite positive views of Kim and James; I think it's a frequently hilarious and surprisingly insightful "must see." If you still need convincing, listen to the Coens talk about it over at Moviefone. Here's hoping A Serious Man will provoke the same type of response next year.

Box office numbers were way down this week, letting Bangkok Dangerous take the top spot with a figure that is frankly nothing to brag about. Here's the rundown:

1. Bangkok Dangerous: $7.8 million
2. Tropic Thunder: $7.2 million
3. The Dark Knight: $5.5 million
4. The House Bunny: $5.5 million
5. Traitor: $4.2 million

We've got five new releases this week. Will any of these be able to bolster a sagging box office? Let's see.

Burn After Reading
What's It All About: In the newest film from Ethan and Joel Coen, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand star as health club employees who find a CD full of classified information left behind by a CIA agent played by John Malkovich. George Clooney also stars.
Why It Might Do Well: This is an awesome cast and those are the No Country For Old Men guys behind the camera. The film also scored a 75% Fresh rating at Rottentomatoes.com.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Jennifer Aniston's followers may not have forgiven Brad yet.
Number of Theaters: 2,300
Prediction: $12 million