ThenSheFoundMe Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Some of cinema's most iconic shots of Chicago appear in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the film is certainly Matthew Broderick's most iconic role. So, it's hard to watch the actor in the Chicago-set Diminished Capacity and not ask yourself, "is this what's happened to Ferris?" He is now relatively passive, paunchy and pitiful in the role of Cooper, a newspaper editor who has recently suffered a mildly debilitating concussion. And the character could be classified as yet another sad sack, one of three such parts he can be seen playing at present (Then She Found Me opened in April and is still in theaters; Finding Amanda debuted last week).

But is it fair that we most associate Broderick with Ferris, thereby continuing our disappointment in seeing him play one nebbish nobody after another? Couldn't we redirect our memories and accept that Broderick's modern roles are more like grown-up versions of Eugene Jerome, of Neil Simon's plays Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, who he portrayed on Broadway as well as in the film adaptation of Biloxi? Were Eugene not the fictional incarnation of Simon and had he not therefore become a famous writer (and were he not from an earlier time period), the character surely could have gone on to be the pathetic teacher of Election or Then She Found Me or the absentminded editor of Diminished Capacity.

Two new indie releases fared well, while two others struggled. Hailing from Norway, Reprise (Miramax) earned a very good $15,500 per-screen average at three theaters, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Our own James Rocchi gushed in his review: "Directed by Joachim Trier, Reprise is one of the most brilliant, heartfelt, exciting and exuberant feature film debuts in recent memory."

Mexican film Sangre de mi Sangre (AKA Padre Nuestro) (IFC Films) nestled into the #2 spot, earning $8,500 at one theater in Manhattan. The film follows two teenagers, one honest, one dishonest, trying to reach their disparate goals (reuniting with family, making money). Eric D. Snider noted: "The trouble is that the film is so bleak as to be almost hopeless ... Its grimness is not matched by its excellence."

Cinematical's Erik Davis raved about German director Christian Petzold's Yella (Cinema Guild) when he saw it at the Berlin film festival last year: "Like a drug, Yella slowly creeps on you long after the end credits roll, takes hold of your body and doesn't let go until you're convinced it was one of the best films this year's Berlinale had to offer." Opening at two theaters, the film made $3,450 per screen.

Despite good reviews (82% positive at Rotten Tomatoes), Georgina Garcia Riedel's How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer (Maya Releasing) failed to make an impact, opening at 84 theaters and marshaling just $1,040 per screen, per Mr. Klady's estimate.

If you had a slow Mother's Day weekend and were lurking around the net, you might have heard that David O. Russell's upcoming comedy Nailed hit another snag; this one much bigger than just an actor walking off set (a snag that was NOT because of Russell!). They were shut down by the Screen Actors Guild because they didn't have enough money to pay their actors.

You can check out the story, as it unfolded, at Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. Luckily, any of you who are itching to see Nailed needn't worry. Variety reports that ThinkFilm (part of Capitol Films) has resumed shooting (and will hopefully have enough cash to finish it).

But this is part of a bigger problem: Nailed wasn't the only film hit with funding issues. A number of Capitol projects have been stopped or delayed due to lack of funds. ThinkFilm failed to pay Alex Gibney his owed fees for Taxi to the Dark Side. Flicks like Bad Meat were shut down. Then She Found Me's paper ad campaign hit a snag when there was no money for ads. You know you have serious money issues when you can't even get enough for your ad campaigns.

And now they're heading to Cannes with films from The Edge of Love to The Oxford Murders. There's a lot of interesting films attached to this company, but my head has got "Another One Bites the Dust" playing for ThinkFilm and Capitol.

Thoughts?

A French master topped an American actress' directorial debut this weekend. Claude Lelouch's Roman de Gare (Samuel Goldwyn) opened at two theaters in Manhattan and grossed $25,500, for a very nice $12,750 per-screen average, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. The French-language thriller scored 73% positive at Rotten Tomatoes, though a number of critics had reservations about its twisty, playful nature.

Helen Hunt's comedy/drama Then She Found Me (ThinkFilm) hauled in $8,266 per-screen at nine locations. Hunt plays a teacher who must deal with an unlikely fiancee (Matthew Broderick), a volatile love interest (Colin Firth), and the unexpected appearance of her mother (Bette Midler). Ryan Stewart felt that the story is "as old as the hills," but that it was "still executed with style."

Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics), the latest doc by Errol Morris, has generated controversy not only because of its subject matter -- the story behind the notorious Abu Gharib prison photos -- but because Morris has admitted to paying some of the interviewees. Reviews were mostly positive (79%, according to Rotten Tomatoes). Opening at two theaters in Manhattan, the film averaged $7,450 per screen.

Two holdovers continued to perform well. Tom McCarthy's excellent The Visitor (Overture) expanded into 76 theaters nationwide and averaged $6,684 per screen in its third week of release. Stephen Walker's heartwarming music doc Young @ Heart (Fox Searchlight) expanded from 23 to 56 locations and grossed an average of $4,017 per screen.

Battle in Seattle has nothing to do with the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrilla in Manila. It's also not connected to the fictional "siege of Seattle" mentioned in Children of Men. No, Battle in Seattle refers to the real-life riots that occurred in 1999 when protesters sought to stop a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Irish actor Stuart Townsend wrote and directed a dramatization of the events, it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival -- and now Variety reports that ThinkFilm has bought the film for a cool $2 million.

Battle in Seattle stars Charlize Theron (Townsend's girlfriend), Woody Harrelson, and Ray Liotta, among quite a few others, and takes a documentary-style approach, with multiple points of view from multiple characters. We've been following the film for some time: Here are some details from a year ago; here's more casting and plot details.

ThinkFilm proved to be the big spender of this year's TIFF. I told you a few days ago about the distributor's acquisition of Helen Hunt's Then She Found Me for somewhere between $2.5 million and $3 million. Coincidentally, both films are the directorial debuts of well-known actors. Will Hunt or Townsend turn out to be the next Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford? Time will tell.

The directing debut of Helen Hunt gets a passing grade, barely -- the story she's telling is as old as the hills, but Then She Found Me is still executed with style. Sometimes charming, occasionally funny, it never draws attention to itself as the work of a director with training wheels on. The film follows the journey of April Epner (Helen Hunt) a 39 year-old woman who is inexplicably marrying a man named Ben (Matthew Broderick) who is so inconsiderate and self-absorbed that no woman could find him to be primo marriage material. Just as they begin to realize their mistake, April gets the shock of a lifetime: her birth mother shows up and informs her that her real father was Steve McQueen. I kind of liked that premise and hoped the movie would go with it, but it turns out to be just a gag. April's mother, played well by Bette Midler, has a couple of screws loose. More to the point, she has a couple of screws loose when it's convenient, and provides sage and sound advice at other times.

Colin Firth co-stars as April's love interest, an emotionally volatile man with a kid who happens to be in the same school where April teaches, which leads to the kind of scene where the teacher is red-faced by having the kid notice that she is having a 'sleep over' with the father. Firth's character, Frank, tries hard to start up a relationship with April and aggressively pushes her onto his kids, but naturally he isn't very understanding of the fact that she's still seeing her almost-husband on the side, here and there. Usually, a romantic comedy of this type would set up the love triangle but make it more or less clear from the start who is going to win out and who isn't, so Then She Found Me deserves some credit for going a more complicated route and portraying all of these characters as seriously flawed. Frank, for instance, is prone to yelling and storming around in an absolute rage, which is never a good sign. Ben is worse, having nothing whatsoever going on in his life.

We've already told you about the first couple of deals to come out of the Toronto International Film Festival, but here's the first one with enough money changing hands for the trade publications to cite the figures.

ThinkFilm has bought U.S. rights to Then She Found Me, starring Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick, with Equinoxe Films taking Canadian rights. The total price tag, according to The Hollywood Reporter, is between $2.5 and $3 million.

Hunt directed the romantic comedy-drama, her first time in that capacity except for a few Mad About You episodes. Based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, Then She Found Me is about a woman (Hunt) who is contacted by her birth mother (Midler) just as her adoptive mother has died, her husband (Broderick) has left her, and she's met a new man (Firth).

After Mad About You ended in 1999, Hunt did a quick series of movies -- four in 2000 alone -- before taking a break. Since then, she's appeared only in Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), A Good Woman (2004), HBO movie Empire Falls (2005), and last year's Bobby. And it's too bad, because I really like her. I mean, who doesn't? Who doesn't like Helen Hunt?!

For that matter, we haven't seen much of Bette Midler in movies lately, either. Apart from The Stepford Wives in 2004, she hasn't been on film since 2000. That, I'm not complaining so much about.

Anyway, of course we'll keep you posted on release dates and other news as it becomes available.

If there is one thing that always makes the TIFF season a little bit sweeter, it is John Sayles. Since I started going to the fest in 2003, I've seen his adoption drama Casa de los babys and then his Dubya-metaphor political mystery -- Silver City. The film gave Danny Huston some excellent screen-time (while robbing him appropriate props on the DVD), and had an ironic screening at TIFF, when a horde of gold and platinum card-holding patrons gained advanced entry.

Now the festival is sharing its latest batch of films to be screened, and Sayles' next film, Honeydripper, leads the pack. (We last mentioned the film when Jessica Barnes posted about the its production wrap.) Always managing to keep things fresh, this latest film is about a "down-on-his-luck Southern juke joint owner who recruits a talented drifter to help revive his club." It stars Danny Glover, and has other big names in the cast like Lisa Gay Hamilton, Charles S. Dutton and Stacy Keach.

The other films on the list aren't too shabby either. There's The Girl in the Park, David Auburn's drama starring Sigourney Weaver and Kate Bosworth, which is about a woman who never gets over the disappearance of her three-year-old daughter, and the young woman she comes across years later, who she hopes is her daughter. On a lighter note, there's Ryan Gosling's latest film -- Lars and the Real Girl, which is a film about a strange man who falls for a life-size doll. (will doll shenanigans be next in the wave of boundary-breaking cinematic sex?!)

Then we can jump back into drama with Helen Hunt's directorial debut -- Then She Found Me -- about an adopted woman in crisis. While trying to have a baby, the woman's marriage crumbles, her adoptive mom dies and then her birth mom pops up -- and it has a rather interesting cast of Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler and Matthew Broderick. Lastly, there's Richard Roxburgh's Romulus, My Father -- the Nick Drake-adapted Raimond Gaita memoir starring Eric Bana and Franka Potente. I think it's time to invest in some No-Doze or get some Clockwork eye-openers if the rest of the film list is half as tasty as what they've already listed.

Though it's taken forever to get off the ground, Helen Hunt is finally gearing up for production on her directorial debut, Then She Found Me. Pic, which is just about to start shooting in Brooklyn, New York has added Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick and Bette Midler to its cast. Not bad for her first feature, huh?

Based on the novel by Elinor Lipman, Hunt has been working on adapting the script (a role she took on herself) for the past eight years. In the film, Hunt will play a schoolteacher whose birth mother (Midler) pops into her life at the worst possible time. Broderick will play Hunt's husband, while Firth takes on the role of a man she meets through one of her students.

Personally, I'm not keen on first-time directors placing themselves in their film as a main character. Often, I find it takes something away from the role and, with so much going on behind the scenes, the flick might suffer. However, in this case, Hunt has been working on the damn thing for so long, I imagine she has every detail memorized by heart. Here's to wishing her good luck.