StateOfPlay Tagged Articles at Cinematical

State of Play
A Russell Crowe-starring thriller that entangles 3 deaths, Washington politics, old-school journalism, and new wave blogging, State of Play is by far your best mainstream choice this week. In his review, Jeffrey M. Anderson said: "it's probably the best newspaper/journalism movie in years," and "State of Play moves well, with grace and intelligence as well as a measure of scrappiness and a sense of working by the seat of one's pants." Buy it. Also on Blu-ray.

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Tennessee
A movie co-starring Mariah Carrey might not seem like a noteworthy piece of cinema, but it's more than meets the eye. The film focuses on woman and her brothers who set out to find their estranged father in hopes that he will help save their leukemia-suffering sibling. In his review, Joel Keller said: "Tennessee isn't action-packed, but it has a story that should keep you engaged from start to finish." Rent it.

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Unwigged & Unplugged Live Concert DVD
This isn't exactly a film, but seeing that Unwigged and Unplugged was the costume-free tour of Spinal Tap, mixing the band's hits with the musical numbers from A Mighty Wind, it's definitely worth mentioning here. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer sound great with nothing more than their voices and guitars, and add a lot of anecdotes in for good measure. Buy it.

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Also out: Impact, Methodic, Bring it On: Fight to the Finish

The presence of Beyoncé Knowles plus appropriately sultry/trashy advertising scored a big hit for Screen Gems this weekend, with Obsessed raking in a cool $28.5 million between black audiences and thriller audiences. Depending on how it holds up, the airport novel of a film could compete with The Exorcism of Emily Rose for the title of highest-grossing Screen Gems release ($75 million). It's a marketing triumph and a minor April surprise.

Three more films debuted in wide release and all posted comparatively strong numbers. That's a somewhat controversial claim for The Soloist, whose $9.7 million, fourth-place finish doesn't seem too robust. It's certainly not overwhelming, but for an arty, detached film that was moved from awards season to April, it's not awful. Rogue's Fighting finished slightly ahead with $11.4 milion, beating last spring's street-brawling movie, Never Back Down. And Earth, the DisneyNature documentary that opened Wednesday, picked up $8.5 million for the weekend -- the second biggest all-time opening for a documentary -- and $14.2 million for the five days. Good for them.

Out of the top ten, the critically panned The Informers -- Senator Entertainment's first attempt at a theatrical release -- floundered with $300,000 in semi-wide release. Senator, you will recall, is the distributor that has kept All the Boys Love Mandy Lane on the shelf for approximately forever. Make of that what you will.

Last weekend's main holdovers, 17 Again and State of Play each fell around 50%. The latter is a bit of a disappointment, as I had hoped that the exceedingly entertaining film would coast at least slightly on good word-of-mouth.

The full top 10 after the jump.

Each time I close my eyes I hear the faraway beating of drums and see the visions -- those visions of phantasms older than time itself that penetrate through my conscious mind and to the very core of my soul. It began three years ago, when the Ancient Ones emerged from the darkest depths of the sea to reclaim dominion over this world, which is older and more terrifying than the mind could theretofore comprehend. One of them called itself "Za'c Efron" -- but that was a crude approximation, for the human tongue cannot hope to speak the dread language of the Ancient Ones.

It was the children who first saw the visions. The dreams' cheerful, musical exterior obscured their sinister, unspeakable true nature, driving thousands to insanity and some to death. Toward the end, the children congregated in Temples -- perversely called "Theaters" by their bedeviled constructors -- to worship Za'c Efron, and 90 million dollars was spent. Even now, millions of children play and replay these awful sights in their very homes, paying further tribute. And still, having slumbered for untold millenia, Za'c Efron hungers for more. Always more.

Even now, restless crowds -- the children who remain, yes, but now adults and the old, too -- clamor through the dark streets to behold Za'c Efron's latest writhing triumph, an alien horror called 17 Again. In a mere three days, $24.1 million of tribute was collected, and all fell before Za'c Efron. Russell Crowe and State of Play were content with $14.1 million, and Crank: High Voltage received only $6.5 million, $4 million less than even the Crank that came three years ago. Such was the terrible power of the Ancient Ones -- the detestable gargoyles from the black sea of the cosmos who grip us and carry us, inexorably, toward madness.

With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft, check out the weekend top 10 after the jump.

Newspapermen occupy that movie middle ground between detectives and action heroes. They dig up clues, but the clues are hard-won, based on experience and the building up of contacts and sources. The clues are rarely left at the scene of the crime. Newspapermen rarely get into danger, but when they do it's not something they're really prepared or trained for. Coming face-to-face with a deadly killer, Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) can barely make eye contact. Cal doesn't fight or outwit the bad guy; he just runs and hides. It's not important that he try to be a hero. It's more important that he survive to write the story.

Of course, real reporters don't get to solve murders and uncover international corporate conspiracies every day, and that's where Hollywood comes in. The new film State of Play is based on a six-hour BBC mini-series from 2003. I haven't seen the original, but I'd bet that it's much distilled and sped up, and no one is going to argue that the new film is any kind of improvement. But taken on its own, it's probably the best newspaper/journalism movie in years -- perhaps since Shattered Glass (2003) -- even if it falls far short of the purity of All the President's Men (1976). It's also the first movie of its kind to address the inherent feud between sturdy, superior, old-fashioned print reporting, and reckless, inexperienced, sloppy blogging. (Guess which side the movie is on?)

Thirty years ago, a political crisis and two movie stars inspired thousands of young people to pursue a career in journalism. Now that the profession may be dying, is it foolish to hope that an economic crisis and three movie stars could revive interest?

Opening tomorrow, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play stars Russell Crowe as a world-weary reporter investigating a murder in which his old friend, politician Ben Affleck, may have been involved. Rachel McAdams also stars as an up-and-coming blogger. Obviously, that's a very different kind of movie than Alan Pakula's All the President's Men, which starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who helped uncover the full extent of the Watergate conspiracy in the 1970s. In the wake of that movie, The Atlantic commented: "Today's generation of young Americans is flocking to journalism schools in unprecedented numbers ... the extraordinary popularity of 'communications' has been attributed to 'the Woodstein Phenomenon,' the effect of the Woodward and Bernstein feat of exposing and unseating the Nixon gang in the White House."

Ever since, there has been no shortage of qualified journalists; the problem is that jobs for journalists are drying up faster than a water hole in the Sahara. Without getting into a discussion of why the newspaper and magazine industries are dying, my questions are:

• Will anyone look beyond the murder thriller trappings of State of Play?
• Will it cause anyone to think about why good, solid investigative journalism is still so important -- in part, to hold elected officials, government workers, and corporate executives accountable for their actions?
• Will anyone be prompted to come up with viable solutions to sustain and support a valuable profession before it's gone forever?

Errol Morris is probably the highest-profile working documentarian after Michael Moore -- and since Moore is more of a video essayist than a documentarian, Morris is, in truth, number one. He's also one of the rare documentary filmmakers who embraces the genre as cinema rather than mere journalism. His movies are always visually interesting, and never straightforward.

That bodes well for Morris's upcoming maiden voyage into narrative cinema: a yet-untitled dark comedy about the good old days when people thought that cryonics was our best bet to cheat death. The movie, focusing on 1960s efforts to freeze people for later reanimation by future scientists armed with incredible technology, will be written by Zach Helm, who wrote Stranger than Fiction and wrote and directed the lovely Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

Documentary filmmakers transitioning to narrative features isn't anything new of course. This weekend's State of Play, for example, was very competently directed by Kevin MacDonald, who not only began his career making documentaries, but actually made one about Errol Morris. And of course we all remember Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon.

While MacDonald seems to be focusing on fiction these days, I can't imagine Morris will ever abandon documentaries altogether. But if his narrative effort is half as formally original and visually exciting as most of his docs, I won't complain if he does.

[UPDATE! Our old friend Christopher Campbell reminds me in the comments that Morris has already made one narrative feature, that I forgot about and now need to run out and see. So this will be his second.]

[Variety]

Hanna Montana surprised no one by taking the top spot for the Easter weekend and Fast and Furious and Monsters Vs. Aliens in their second and third weeks respectively still outdistanced Seth Rogen's Observe and Report. Here's the top five:

1. Hannah Montana The Movie: $32.3 million
2. Fast and Furious: $27.2 million
3. Monsters Vs. Aliens: $21.8 million
4. Observe and Report: $11 million
5. Knowing: $6.4 million

Three new ones this week:

17 Again
What's It All About: Matthew Perry plays a man whose dreams were put on hold years ago because he got his girlfriend pregnant. Now, magically transformed into the teenager he once was (now played by Zac Efron) he has a chance to relive what he thinks were the best days of his life.
Why It Might Do Well: Sooner or later pretty much everybody wonders about what might have been. 68% at Rottentomatoes.com isn't earth shattering but it's still in the plus column.
Why It Might Not Do Well: The contrived premise is far from original and seems like just an excuse for fish-out-of-water humor.
Number of Theaters: 3,000
Prediction: $24 million

Crank: High Voltage
What's It All About: Ludicrously over the top but fun looking action sequel with Jason Statham returning to the role of hitman Chev Chelios. This time his heart has literally been stolen and replaced with a mechanical one that needs periodic jolts of electricity to keep going.
Why It Might Do Well: The red band trailer must be seen to be believed.
Why It Might Not Do Well: It's hitting fewer screens than any of this week's other releases.
Number of Theaters: 2,200
Prediction: $14 million

While catching up with the BBC miniseries State of Play (terrific stuff so far), I was discussing with a friend the only particularly troubling casting choice in the entire ensemble of the forthcoming American version: Russell Crowe. Though he was a last-minute replacement for Brad Pitt's role, that didn't prove nearly as bothersome as his street-smart Washington reporter persona and Farrah Fawcett 'do as evidenced in a recent trailer.

All kidding aside, my friend brought up a good point about Crowe's recent work -- she wished that he had stayed lean and hungry. It was a striking phrase, because I knew exactly what she meant and that it had nothing to do with his remaining Body of Lies body mass.

And so I turn the question to you lovely people -- what recent break-outs do you feel have already failed to live up to their promise, or have instead been a little less striking in their performances than one might've thought this time a year or two or ten ago? (Ryan Gosling's name keeps popping up in my head, but having just re-watched Lars and the Real Girl, I can't really knock him yet.)