the brothers bloom Tagged Articles at Cinematical

A few movies out there, specifically Easy Virtue (255 screens), The Brothers Bloom (209 screens) and the new Cheri (opening this week on 80 screens), have taken it upon themselves to try and re-capture something of the style of old movies. Easy Virtue is based on a 1926 Noel Coward play, which was previously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1928. Cheri comes from a 1920 novel written by the creator of Gigi (1958). And The Brothers Bloom is a new, original screenplay but it comes with some of the sensibilities of old films, namely snappy dialogue and hats.

I'm all for this, since many of today's movie fans who name their "all time favorite" films rarely list anything made before 1999. Aside from that at least half the cinema buffs out there is generally aware of a short list of classic films, which includes things like The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, maybe some Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Casablanca, etc. And those are, of course, great places to start for those interested in looking at something beyond the IMAX screen. But there's a danger in labeling all that stuff "old movies." Not all of them come with country estates, or hats, or even dialogue.

I succumbed to the obvious sort-of-pun this week. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry.

$68.2 million for Up is pretty close to the highest opening weekend gross for any Pixar film in history -- just about $2 million off the numbers for both Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. It beats last year's Wall-E opening weekend by about $5 million, and since it's probably a bit less challenging than that film, it may hold up a little bit better. $250 million probably isn't out of reach, but we'll see.

The numbers for fan and critical favorite Drag Me to Hell -- $16.6 million -- will be a hot topic for discussion this week. It is not a particularly strong horror opening; this year, it finds a rough analogue in The Last House on the Left. The hope is that good reviews and word-of-mouth keep it afloat in the weeks to come, whereas most horror flicks open big and sink quickly.

After opening second-banana to Night at a Museum last week, Terminator Salvation took the expected big hit its second weekend -- 62%. It's likely to top out around $130 million domestically which, I feel safe in saying, is below expectations. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is running a little bit behind its predecessor, though the first film had the benefit of opening at Christmastime. And The Brothers Bloom quietly expanded onto 150 screens, winding up in 11th place with a decent per-screen average.

Star Trek passed $200 million and now holds the #1 spot for the year.

The full top 10 after the jump.

Deals. Michel Gondry's doc The Thorn in the Heart may not have generated much positive buzz when it premiered at Cannes last week, but it impressed the folks at Oscilloscope Laboratories. They acquired North American rights to the film and are planning a theatrical release, according to indieWIRE. Thorn examines the life of Gondry's aunt, a schoolteacher for more than 30 years in rural France. David Hudson at IFC's The Daily gathered links to the coverage, in which one critic calls Thorn a "glorified home movie" and another predicts that "normal people will simply walk out of it," while others defend it as "a lovely, minor-key ode" and "mildly diverting."

Box Office. Stephen Elliott's Easy Virtue led the way, earning a very tidy $110,443, according to Box Office Mojo, which averages out to $11,044 per screen. Jessica Biel gives her best performance so far as an American race car driver who marries a young British man (Ben Barnes) after a whirlwind romance, and then must deal with his stuffy mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), curiously distanced father (Colin Firth), and flighty sisters. It's a romantic comedy with dramatic depth, light on its feet yet unafraid to stand still and contemplate fate and mortality.

Expanding into 52 theaters in its second week of release, Rian Johnson's con man comedy The Brothers Bloom rode a wave of appreciative reviews to a per-screen average of $7,394, just a little ahead of Olivier Assayas' critically-acclaimed family drama Summer Hours, starring Juliette Binoche. (We've embedded the lively trailer for the latter title below.) The highly-praised doc Burma VJ opened on one theater with a modest take of $5,554 -- not bad on a crowded weekend.

After the jump: The festival beat goes on in Seattle and at Silverdocs.

By: James Rocchi (originally published 9/4/08)

Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.

Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrian Brody) have grown up on the make, in a world of, as Jay's stage-setting narration puts it, "... grifters, ropers, faro fixers, tales drawn long and tall. ..." Stephen builds cons; Bloom gets close to the marks. Stephen's work on their scams is a weird, lucrative form of self-expression; as Bloom puts it, "My brother writes cons the way Russians write novels. ..." Bloom's work on their schemes is a weird, lucrative form of self-loathing; Bloom learns early on that playing a part means never having to be yourself, that he, when " ... being as he wasn't, could be as he wished to be." Stephen wants more. Bloom wants out.

There's a caveat or two with which I submit this list of our favorite con artists on film, to correspond with tomorrow's NY/LA bow of The Brothers Bloom (our review from Toronto is here; our interview with director Rian Johnson, there).

One: I have not seen the following -- David Mamet's House of Games, David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, and David Mamet's Frank Oz's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I know, for shame, boo and hiss and so on and so forth.

Two: I've seen but don't fully recollect either The Grifters or Nine Queens enough to feel comfortable including them as if I had (I also missed the English-language remake of the latter, Criminal, though I've been told that's for the best). If I were a slier man, then maybe I could fittingly deceive the lot of you, but I'm not, so I won't.

While I don't doubt that the characters in those films would be worthy of a slot on our list, there are still at least seven other con (wo)men in the movies worth shining the spotlight on, and I do hope that you do think that may make do when all's said and done.

Writer-director Rian Johnson burst onto the scene when his high school-set noir riff, Brick, took home the Originality of Vision prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Now, after bouncing around Summit's release slate like the proverbial beach ball, his follow-up -- the romantic, romanticized con man caper, The Brothers Bloom -- is finally receiving a NY/LA bow this Friday before rolling out to more markets in the weeks to come.

Johnson obliged us to do a follow-up interview this week to complement our original chat from last November, and between the two, the filmmaker discusses everything from making the festival rounds and absorbing critical response to the glory of talking monkeys and just where he likes to stick his tea kettle...



Download Part 1 (31 mins.) by clicking here



Download Part 2 (12 mins.) by clicking here

-Score samples by Nathan Johnson, the film's composer and the director's cousin.-

This year it's Summer Appreciation at Cinematical, but summer doesn't just mean one lumbering tentpole blockbuster after another. In fact, smaller distributors and indie studio arms often use summertime to offer some great low-key alternatives -- not big Oscar contenders, but smaller-profile festival favorites. And this summer is particularly rife with other options if and when you tire of all the sequels and franchises. Here are seven small films -- most but not all of which I've seen -- that you might consider supporting in the next three or four months.

1. The Brothers Bloom (May 15) - Rian Johnson's sophomore feature -- a character-driven fairy tale masquerading as a con man flick -- debuted at Toronto last year to muted acclaim. It's no Brick, but it's actually a fantastic summer offering: sunny, whimsical and bittersweet. Summit was originally set to release the film last fall, then last winter, before finally bumping it to May. It's legitimately funny and whip-smart, which should make it an attractive option in mid-May.

The Brothers Bloom is one of the best movies I've seen in quite a while. I actually dreamed that at one of the press days, instead of DVDs with assets they were giving out copies of the movie, and I was really disappointed when I woke up. Seriously.

It's being marketed as a globe-trotting con man movie, which is true, but it's also got some romantic comedy action going on, and it's very funny. Rachel Weisz's character Penelope is one of the coolest and most three-dimensional "quirky female" characters I've seen in so long. Rinko Kikuchi steals every scene she's in as Bang Bang, their explosions expert. It's why The Brothers Bloom ranked with Happy-Go-Lucky as one of my faves of last year. The costumes are stylish and cool, the locations are glamorous and romantic, and the script is smart and well written -- just what you'd expect from Rian Johnson, who wrote Brick. (Fortunately, I didn't need subtitles to get all the nuances of Johnson's script, as I did with Brick -- which is, by the way, totally worth it.)

Okay, so now that I've slobbered all over The Brothers Bloom, go watch the first seven minutes on Hulu, introduced by Rian Johnson. Voila! The rest of the film hits theaters on May 15.

Okay, for those of you who haven't been keeping track at home, here's a quick recap of the most recent release date changes:

• The Ugly Truth moves TO July
• 2012 moves FROM July
• and now Bruno moves TO July,
  if BOM is to be believed
  

This leaves the tepid-seeming Truth firmly wedged between the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen's R-rated comedic drawing power and Judd Apatow's (both Universal titles, to boot), so if Sony did indeed tuck tail and return to the April safe spot, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the Bruno move was made for any of the following three reasons: to give the film a longer lead with which to promote itself (Borat popped up at Cannes in May of that year and proceeded to be screened excessively for its eventually successful word-of-mouth campaign), to give the filmmakers more time to shoot, and to give them more time to cut what they already have (again, Borat had something like 400 hours of footage to whittle down to feature length).

In silver lining news, this takes a wee bit of pressure off of Summit's May-scheduled bow of The Brothers Bloom, but that's a whole other story...

When we here at Cinematical harp on about a particular movie, it's usually because it deserves the attention, whether or not it's a genuinely Great Movie. Every so often, several of us on the staff will share the same wavelength for a film and insists on flogging it through its release, and we do so because we care so, so very much. Now, I personally won't go on about The Brothers Bloom at as great a length as we have with, say, The Promotion or Dear Zachary...; earlier today, when a colleague asked me (in wording that doesn't quite merit repeating here) if I had an overwhelming affection for the film, I couldn't say it was any stronger than I felt for either of those films.

I should know why I'm supporting any film, though, and I do know that I would like to see Bloom fare well in the marketplace whenever it does open -- which is why I hope that Summit changes its release date just one last time.