precious Tagged Articles at Cinematical

For the past two years in a row, the National Board of Review (aka NBR) and the Academy Awards have each honored the same film as their top pick of the year. Will that streak now continue with Jason Reitman's Up in the Air? Paramount couldn't have picked a better release date for Up in the Air because 24 hours after the film was named best of the year by NBR, it will arrive in theaters in limited release. Aside from taking top honors, Reitman's film about a corporate downsizer who can't seem to connect with anything (or anyone) also won Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner) and Best Supporting Actress (Anna Kendrick).

Other big winners include Clint Eastwood for Best Director (Invictus), Morgan Freeman for Best Actor (Invictus), Carey Mulligan for Best Actress (An Education) and Woody Harrelson for Best Supporting Actor (The Messenger). The Cove, which is a film we've been heavily championing all year long, won for Best Documentary, while Pixar's Up took home Best Animated Feature. The biggest and most talked-about surprise so far is that top awards contender Precious was nowhere to be found, and wasn't even listed among the year's top ten list, though as a fan of both films it was nice to see District 9 and Moon make the top ten independent films list (along with a special mention for Moon director Duncan Jones in NBR's Spotlight Award for Best Directorial Debut).

Check out all the winners after the jump.

Indie Roundup gathers a selection of indie film news from the past seven days and offers a peek ahead to what's coming.

Deal. Do not despair that the first month of the new year will be filled solely with the expansion of award contenders. Distribution rights in the US for Sweetgrass have been acquired by The Cinema Guild, according to indieWIRE, and the documentary will open at Film Forum in Manhattan on January 6, followed by a rollout across the country.

Directed by Ilisa Barbasch and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Sweetgrass "follows the last sheepherders to trail their flocks up into Montana's Beartooth mountains for summer pasture," per its official synopsis. After debuting at the Berlin Film Festival last year, the doc played the festival circuit quite successfully, picking up positive critical notices. Check out the splendid trailer in all its quiet, chud-chewing glory after the jump.

Online / On-Demand Viewing. Debuting on demand next Sunday, Clarkworld paints a portrait of filmmaker Bob Clark. Best known for his perennial holiday favorite A Christmas Story, Clark also made the groundbreaking Porky's, which set the tone for all raunchy teen comedies to come, and the significant slasher pic Black Christmas, another flick that was a trendsetter (or at least ripped off at will). Director Deren P. Abram talked with Peter Billingsley (former child star turned filmmaker), Kim Cattrall, Jon Voight, Denise Richards, Mary Steenburgen, John Saxon, Scott Baio, and other people who weren't even in any of his movies! We have the trailer for this one after the jump, too, which makes for an interesting contrast with the one for Sweetgrass. Look for the movie on cable systems via Cinetic FilmBuff.

After the jump: box office talk; trailers for Sweetgrass and Clarkworld.

Sometimes a movie will consume the internet for weeks before its release, and then turn out to be Snakes on a Plane. This is not one of those times. New Moon didn't set the all time opening weekend box office record, but it came uncomfortably close, and -- holy crap -- it now owns the record for the highest single-day gross ever, a $72 million Friday. Twilight opened to almost precisely half of New Moon's $140 million number, and went on to gross $192 million. The sequel should pass that mark by next weekend.

New Moon's staying power is a bit difficult to forecast. On one hand, its grosses may be frontloaded, as is typical when rabid fans of the source material rush out to pack midnight and opening-day showings. On the other, this might just be the kind of film that, even more so than its predecessor, generates repeat business. (Along these lines, I wonder if the egregious objectification of men in New Moon's marketing campaign is a victory for feminism. I vote yes.)

Getting somewhat lost in all the New Moon hoopla is the slightly less dramatic victory scored by the earnest, good-natured tearjerker The Blind Side, which took second place with nearly $35 million, which I suspect is another testament to the enduring box office draw of Sandra Bullock. (As a side note, the enduring box office draw of Sandra Bullock must be a testament to the awfulness of All About Steve, which topped out at $33 million despite her prominent presence.) It was also smart of Warner Bros. to deemphasize the sports angle -- a "football movie" would not have done this well.

More, and the top 10, after the jump.

Occasionally you'll hear a movie branded as "criticproof," which I take to be a derisive term implying that the masses will flock even though the movie in question is garbage If there's an entire genre that may now get described as "criticproof" it's the disaster movie. No amount of bad reviews could keep people away from watching Roland Emmerich destroy the world anew in 2012, which made $65 million domestically and $225 million worldwide. The domestic numbers are comparable to The Day After Tomorrow which, among other things, ran 40 minutes shorter. The foreign numbers are even stronger. Those who've seen the movie shouldn't be surprised. Think of it what you will (it's probably my favorite Emmerich film, which is not saying a lot), but it's pretty incomparable as special effects spectacle.

2012 had the box office pretty well to itself this weekend. Its only new competition in even semi-wide release was Pirate Radio, which largely flopped despite the enthusiastic pimping of the Love Actually connection -- under $3 million on 880 screens. Faring better was Precious, which expanded to just under 200 screens and earned $6 million. With Precious and Paranormal Activity, this is proving to be a good season for slow roll-out platform releases; Precious seems to be doing a nice job of building awards buzz, too.

As expected, A Christmas Carol turned out to be durable, still running way ahead of The Polar Express, and looking to get a bump from the Thanksgiving holiday in a couple weeks. Look for this one to stick around the top 5 for a little while. On the other hand, the reign of 2012 meant big hits for the holdover genre films, including The Fourth Kind, The Box, and Paranormal Activity.

The box office chart after the jump.

Oprah is pushing both Precious and the book it's based on, Push by Sapphire, on her show, and I'm seriously curious to know what her audience will think about it. How many people will be able to watch a film told from the point of view of an illiterate high schooler who is raped by her father, physically (and, in the book, sexually) abused by her mother, hates herself for not being white, has given birth to one child with Down's Syndrome who's nicknamed Mongo (short for Mongoloid), and is pregnant for a second time with her father's child?

Let's assume that Oprah's reach is strong enough and far enough to get her demographic to plunk down their eight to 12 dollars to see Precious – the Oprah Effect in full effect. (You can find out where and when Precious is playing near you on the official movie website.)

I'm not talking about critics and journalists or the people in big cities who like to participate in a friendly Oscar pool or want to be up on what was in the New York Times. They're already seeing the movie in droves; it made $1.8M in limited release its opening weekend. The latest numbers I could find on her demographic are from 2007, back when people were wondering if Oprah could help get a president elected. (Answer: Yes, she can.)

According to Nielsen via MSNBC, "Oprah's audience is predominantly female, white, and over the age of 55. Nationally 7.4 million people watch Oprah daily -- about 2.6% of American households. Four percent of American women (about 5.7 million) watch her daily, compared with 1.2% of men (1.7 million people). Overall, 2% of all 18- to 49-year-olds watch Oprah."

The final numbers are in, and the estimated $1.8 million earned by Precious in its limited-release opening weekend wasn't an exaggeration. In fact, it was a little short: The Sundance-prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed indie drama actually made $1,872,458 between Friday and Sunday. (Numbers courtesy of Box Office Mojo.) The reason that's so impressive is that it was only playing in 18 theaters, for an average of $104,025 per theater. For comparison's sake, A Christmas Carol made $8,159 per theater.

So let's put on our nerd hats and break down those Precious numbers. While it's only in 18 theaters, it played on 35 screens, because most cineplexes, anticipating the demand, booked two prints. (The per-screen average, therefore, was $53,499.) I looked at each theater's listings and added up how many showings the movie had over the weekend. That number was 507.

Then the math: It made $1,872,458 in 507 showings, for an average of $3,693 per showing. The average ticket price at the theaters in question is $11 (disregarding things like senior discounts and slightly cheaper prices for Friday matinees). That means each screening sold an average of about 335 tickets, which is surely the capacity for a lot of those theaters. That means a sell-out crowd for almost every screening. I guess I could have found out how many people each theater seats and determined exactly how many sell-outs there were, but that would be silly.

Box Office Mojo says the $104,025 per-theater average is the 12th highest ever -- but the 11 films ahead of it were all playing in no more than six locations. Precious played in 18 and still had a huge per-theater average. Any way you slice it, the delightful feel-good romp of the year opened with a splash.

I was considering a title pun on Richard Kelly getting Box-ed out -- which works on multiple levels!! -- but I couldn't pull the trigger. That, though, is my main concern this weekend, to be honest: I am heartbroken (though not surprised) that Kelly's wonderful, hugely ambitious sci-fi flick couldn't get a foothold at the box office. People at my Thursday night screening thought they had seen one of the worst movies ever, which I guess is what happens when you're led to expect harmless PG-13 horror and get something so radically different. I also suspect that Donnie Darko would have been similarly received had it opened on 2,600 screens instead of building its cult cred in mini-release and on DVD.

Anyway, The Boxearned $7.9 million -- not a total disaster for a $25 million movie, but not exactly a resume-builder for Kelly to the extent he has commercial ambitions. It was roundly defeated by the rest of the weekend's newcomers, most notably A Christmas Carol, which took first place with $31 million. That may not seem like a lot, but note that Zemeckis's The Polar Express opened to even less on its way to $180 million. I predict that A Christmas Carol, which looks wonderful on IMAX 3-D, will hold up well.

The weekend's other big winner was Precious, which Lionsgate pushed to an impressive $100,000 per-screen average on 18 screens. Even accounting for the very limited release, that's pretty strong; Brokeback Mountain-like numbers ($80-90 million) are probably within reach.

More, and the weekend top 10, after the jump.

There is no denying that Precious has got critics and audiences in a lather, with audiences at Sundance, Cannes, and TIFF lauding the harrowing adaptation of Sapphire's first novel. Mo'Nique's performance as Precious' horrendously abusive mother monster Mary has also gotten folks humming about an Oscar nomination for the comedian, who readily acknowledges the dark places she had to go for this role. She told Eric Kohn in an interview at last year's Sundance that she herself was sexually abused and "The person who molested me was a monster. So I had to go to that person, because I know what it was like for me. [Daniels] said action, and be that monster." And wow, what a monster she became; each scene she was in cut closer to the bone. I covered my eyes in at least one scene and left the screening room slack-jawed.

But Roger Friedman at the Hollywood Reporter writes that Mo'Nique skipped press for the film at Cannes, TIFF, and the New York Film Festival, and that her newest publicist of just two weeks quit. Friedman writes "that Mo'Nique has gotten herself a reputation for demanding money for showing up to promote Precious. It's a first in Oscar history."

Click image below to view full poster

Cinematical has just received this exclusive teaser poster for the film Precious (previously known as Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire), which will enjoy a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this month after walking away with several awards (including the double whammy of Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award) at this year's Sundance Film Festival. It's a hard, tough, nasty film -- the kind that knocks the wind out of you with more than a few punches to the gut -- but, as our own Eric D. Snider pointed out in his Sundance review, it's also "compelling and artistic, punctuated with warm humor and masterful performances, and ultimately triumphant and hopeful."

I could easily see an Oscar nod or two shelled out for this film -- which follows an overweight, pregnant, illiterate teen from Harlem who enrolls in an alternative school with plans to give herself and her child a better life. For one, Mo'Nique gives one of the coldest, harshest performances I've ever seen on screen, and now that both Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry (talk about another double whammy) have lent their names and support to Precious, that -- along with a slew of awesome buzz -- should help it do well when it finally hits theaters later this year on November 6th. Check out the full poster by clicking the image below.